Come back Terence Rattigan

Long,long ago I was walking down Kings Parade when I met an amusing friend.  It was so long ago that he was called a "queer" but that helped to make him even more amusing.  He grabbed my arm.  "My dear, I've had a wonderful week end with Terence Rattigan, the smart suburban playwright."

Recent revivals of plays by Rattigan, Coward and Somerset Maugham have sought to suggest that there was something more to them than they appeared at the time to be.  One thing that they all had in common was their homosexuality, carefully concealed at the time from the Great British Public.  None of them dared come out without risking a prison sentence and the middle class to whom they appealed certainly did not know this.  All the same I feel that they were all nothing more than good entertainment although possibly Coward had hidden depths, only now revealed.

They helped the British drama to stand still until the post war years and Harold Pinter broke the mould with "The Birthday Party".  I was lucky enough to see it before it was savaged by the critics in London and rapidly closed.  Rattigan and the others wrote as if time had stood still since about 1914 and the modern movement in literature had never taken place.  Pinter was the first to acknowledge and reflect the fact that Eliot and Auden had existed.  I don't think Pinter ever recovered from the mauling and adopted enigmatic solemnity when comedy was his real metier.  What a shame.

Migrant Labour

It is good to know that migrants are to receive the same benefits as the inhabitants who got here first.  They will stop seeking work and make it easier for our own people to get jobs.  They will walk straight into the poverty trap which is still a refuge for those who want to supplement their income with working in the black economy.  I have had a letter from Ian Duncan Smith congratulating himself on having reformed benefit payments.  He is a fraud and has only tinkered with the existing system.   The real problem lies with Income Tax and the pursuit of Social Justice. I must work up the energy to reply to him.  Meanwhile mentally challenged Dave makes bellicose noises about sending troops to Libya while disbanding our own forces to the extent of leaving our own country defenceless.  It is no use appealing to little Cleggy who goes skiing when he ought to be "running the country". Should we laugh or should we cry?

Make our troops redundant by all means but set them to work by training them as teachers or joining the anti-terorist police forces where they have skills that we need. This will not happen as it is a sensible thing to do.