The Bells were Ringing

3.30 a.m.  Wasn't it all wonderful? Don't we do these things well?  Didn't you love the dress?  Not over the top like that other wedding dress which looked like a newly landed parachute but one with clearly defined classical lines.  In fact that was the antithesis between the two weddings.  One was a romantic overstated mess and the other was an example of all that is best in classicism.  The wearer of the first came to the usual romantic end - a sad one - while we must hope that the latest dress will bring peace and happiness to the wearer and her subjects.

How brave of the bride who has married into this strange defective family.  With Graeco-German origins it has been going steadily down hill but happily is now being fished up to the middle class which Miss Middleton - although now a duchess - adorned.  The Great British Public have failed to notice this as they read about the exploits of the Royals who became what is surely the number one soap opera of our time.  With rumours about their infidelities, divorces, falls from horseback, car crashes and fires they have served up what the soap watcher wants.  And they are all headed up by a wonderful old woman whose silent determination to get on with the job has preserved the institution we obviously all want.  But it is time to change and this is where Kate comes in as a breath of fresh air from a family which can boast coal miners among its antecedents.  (Can one believe that we once valued coal owners more than the miners who did the work for them?)  To be honest they were getting rather dull as they recovered from the Diana crisis.  But it is time to begin anew and this is were the latest Duchess must come in.  We are right behind her.
And what abour her sister? Wow!

Interns

I had never heard of an intern until the news of what happened when Bill met Monica came out.  Then I realised that I had been an intern too.  After three years at Cambridge I wanted to extend the illusion and live in London where all my friends were going to seek their fortunes.  My father had a word with the manager of a factory in Battersea and soon I was enrolled there for work experience.  That was my cover but what I really wanted was a flat, a silk dressing gown and an affair with an actress.  The flat should have been in Mayfair but was a basement in Holland Park and the dressing gown, made of post war silk, soon showed signs of wear becoming almost translucent.

Why can't the English write about love?  'They order these things better in France' where the tradition of  the art of fiction flows strongly from Stendhal and Balzac to Flaubert and Proust and that is without stopping at other stations on the way.  I believe it is due to the fact that English novelists have been too much concerned with social reform whereas their foreign competitors in fiction were concerned with producing works of art.  Dickens was the most conspicuous of them, constantly falling into a swamp of sentimentality.  Perhaps Lawrence came close to hitting the target.  He certainly tried.  But sadly the English remain in the second division, outpaced by the French, the Russians and the Americans.  How lucky we are to be able to read them in translation.  But the English have always excelled at poetry and that is their greatest achievement. 

Another Forgotten Birthday

Ouch!!  I completely forgot that April 23rd was also Winston Churchill's birthday as one of you has been kind enough to remind me.  I agree of course that he was the greatest Englishman of the twentieth century even if his mother was American.  (The Churchills have ben in the habit of marrying rich American women usually to keep up with the cost of running Blenheim.  Consuela Vanderbilt was led to the altar in tears to become a Duchess when she wanted to marry someone else.)

Anyone who has not read "Five Days in London, May 1940" by John Lukacs (available from Amazon) should do so at once.  It would certainly do Dave some good and stop him from making ignorant remarks about our partnership with the USA during WWII.  Churchill needed to rally the troops in his cabinet after the fall of France had left Hitler in charge of almost all of Europe.  Lord Halifax and R A Butler at the Foreign Office completely lost their heads and offered to give Italy Gibralter, Malta and the Suez Canal if they (the Italians) would persuade Hitler to give us peace on generous terms.  What a hope.  Churchill ignored them and was backed by his cabinet and then the House of Commons.  This surely was his finest hour.  Apologies to those of you who know all this but our Prime Minister certainly did not, even with a first at Oxford.

Excitement mounts for the wedding day and I may not be calm enough to send out any more blogs until it is all over.  Pray for good weather.

Forgotten Dates

Badly left over the last two days, I completely forgot St George's Day.  I suppose I can be excused as there was so much going on - the Queen's birthday and preparations for the Royal Wedding.  But even worse was forgetting Skaepeare's putative birthday also celebrated on April 23rd.  "Amazing" is an overworked word these days but it will have to do when we consider his achievement.  Celebrations of this event were thin on the ground but in Illinois it was "Speaketh like Shakespeare" day.  I wonder how they got on.    

 Old men forget

                   The birthday of the bard is quite ignored

                       While wedding celebrations are prepared...

 and so on.  I expect they did better in Chicago.  

I recently read the great man's sonnets in sequence.  They tell a remarkable story of a triangular love affair between a man, a boy and a woman.  If this had been all that he left behind he would still be a major poet.  Was he gay?  I think he was everything and besotted by human loveliness however it was packaged.  I promise not to forget his birthday again.

What has happened to William Hague?  It seems only yesterday that he was a teenager haranguing the Tory party conference.  Now he is our Foreign Secretary wrongly assuming that we must play a major role in the world even though we cannot afford to do anything but give advice.  We should have plenty of that even if we hae no money.  There is something wrong about those huge Victorian buildings in Whitehall.  They induce delusions of grandeur and cause their occupants to think that we still rule a quarter of the world.  We should be happy about that.     

Kings and Classes

MIDDLE CLASS GIRL MARRYING INTO MIDDLE CLASS FAMILY

A recent TV programme gave details of the family of Miss Kate Middleton who will soon be marrying Prince William.  This shows a totally normal though boring family and on the female side goes from coal miner to Princess in four generations.  (This is surely a proof of "Social Mobility" - a non-problem if ever there was one.)  But the Royals?  How dare I call them middle class?  Alors mes enfants.  Un peu d'histoire.  (Pay attention, Dave.)

The last King of England to be English was Richard III.  After that we had the Welsh who were hard working expansionists and ended in a burst of glory from a woman.  She was childless so we had to have the Scots.  The first one gave us the Bible tho he believed in witches while the second one collected paintings and had his head chopped off.  The third Scottish king was much more fun, had many mistresses and presided over a sudden burst of scientific enlightenment.  Next we had a very disappointing Roman Catholic who was succeeded by a Dutchman.  Then came the Germans and they have ocupied the position of sovereign ever since.

The Hanoverians were eccentric in a kingly sort of way and one succeeded in going mad, another was very fat and collected paintings, a third spent a happy time in the Navy and was a patron of every brothel in the Carribean.  After this we had another woman who married a German with a enthusiasm for the modern industrial world.  Up to this time they had all been fairly aristocratic but in Victorian times they started to slip and were sneered at by the oldest families in the land.  We still have the Hanoverian court but they have been steadily going down in the class struggle. One of them had a beard and collected stamps while another married an American divorcee but their interests are now straightforward middle class.  They engage in outdoor sports, shun the arts and are devoted to dogs and horses.  None of them is wildly eccentric so they go down well with populace as a whole who are either middle class themselves or aspire to be middle class.

When George Orwell remarked that he was lower upper middle class, he was of course making a joke.  As a friend of mine remarked, "There are more classes in England than there are in India."  At least we don't have 'untouchables'; we just waste a lot of time brooding about our own position. I wish the young couple well and hope she has a boy.

Parliament and Kindle

What boring lot they are in this parliament.  You would be forgiven for expecting the members to be in a state of turmoil after the coalition was formed and nobody voted for that.  Where is the awkward squad?  Where is the militant tendency?  Where is your Enoch Powell?  Where is your Beast of Bolsover?  Why is there not uproar when anything cooked up between Dave and Nick skates through the House?

My guess is that they were all living on expenses in the past and are now crushed to silence when they realise that they have to live on half the salary of a G.P. It was always a silly idea to keep their wages down.  A shop steward once told me that I did not pay myself enough. "If you paid yourself  more you could afford to get better managers and that would increase our job security."  What to do about M.P.s?  Double their salaries and halve their number. We might get a better sort of  representative.

Pick up your kindle

And 'Gone with the Wind''ll

Be ready for you to peruse.

It's the latest device

To keep boredom on ice

And hold back 'The Birth of the Blues'.   

Where the hell is it?     

The Three Stooges

The front page of The Times and there are the three men who will solve all our problems for us - the President, the schoolboy and the French dwarf.  None of them are what they seem.  The President is not really black.  Louis Armstrong was black and so was Ella Fitzgerald and moreover they were outstandingly good in their own field, whereas the coffee coloured President keeps on bungling.  For the schoolboy read my previous blogs and the French dwarf is chiefly famous for his wife.  The words of the Duke of Wellington reviewing his troops on the eve of Waterloo come irresistably to mind,  "I don't know if they'll frighten the enemy but by God they frighten me".  Byron had something to say on that same evening, "On with the dance; let joy be unconfined..." 
And why are they taking on so against Gadaffi just because he threatened to masacre the people of Benghazi?  He was putting the frighteners on them but the all-wise Western world seemed to believe him.  Besides he was fighting for his life. "Cet animal est mechant; quand on l'attaque il se defend."
Now we are even deeper in the mire and will soon have troops on the ground.  Never mind we already have a helicopter there, left behind by the SAS, so the three wise men can descend in it over Tripoli with a banner saying "Mission Accomplished".  Remember that?

I am warming to my Kindle thanks to expert guidance by one of taste and discernment.  "The Hare with Amber Eyes" is now on the pad.  By the way it is no use for reading in bed as it is not lit up. 
I think that Kate is very pretty in an outdoor sort of way.  Good luck to them both.

Kenya and Ratigan

The Times is carrying on with its vendetta against the Foreign Office and its part in what they call atrocities in Kenya in fighting the Mau Mau.  My uncle spent most of his life in East Africa where he built bridges and mined micah which was used for airplane making during the war.  He could not hurt a fly and was the kindest of men.  This is Murdoch's way of throwing up a smoke screen because he knew all about the hacking of Sienna Miller's phone - nothing happens in his empire without him knowing.  Also he is frightfully cross about the possible blocking of his purchase of BskyB.  Hell knows no fury like an ozzie spurned.

Overcome by the plaudits for Cause Celebre we aren off to the Old Vic.

Drama Queens

We're going in to bat again

For dear Terence Ratigan;

Though we might prefer Maugham

When he's really in form;

And I fear that poor Noel

May have scored an own goal.

Yet this trio of gays

Are most worthy of praise;

They never made us think

And gave way to the kitchen sink.

Dave Does It Again

Dave should have known that the information was suspect when he got it all wrong about the number of black students entering Oxford.  If he had been in journalism instead of public relations before entering the hothouse of politics he would have checked such odd information before shooting off his mouth.  He might have noticed that there were quite a lot of black faces in the University.  Balliol used to be full of them. And I don't want him to go on holiday again by RyanAir so that he can be photographed in the departure lounge with his wife like anyone else who might have come from Sheffield.  Where are the other passengers? He is of course trying to recall Diana in front of the Taj Mahal.  But she was much smarter than he is.  "If a fool persists in his folly he becomes wise."  We shall see.  Blake was not right about everything.

A family gathering. A bright spring day in a leafy garden with three generations of my family. The youngest bounce about on a trampoline in the centre of the lawn while their elders tuck in to a lavish buffet.  All are doing well and among them we have a semi-retired banker, a solicitor, a fashion photographer, a journalist and a couple of old buffers.  The show is stolen by young Garth at the age of five dancing to a nickelodeon, like Billy Elliot.  They face the future with hope in spite of the follies of their predecessors.  "Youth is a wonderful thing.  It's wasted on kids." 

Dave and History

Oh dear!  Dave has boobed again.  He does not seem to know about the history of the Kashmir question and on top of this he is apologising for all the terrible things we did in departing from our colonies.  This is almost like Tony Blair apologising for the Irish potato famine which was not his fault at all.  Were we responsible for the Black Death?  Of  course we were. If we had not sought to expand our trade we should have never imported those rats.

The collapse of the Eurozone comes closer.  Why is it taking such a long time? Only the pride of its proponents - politicians, journalists, economists, opinion formers etc.  Their stiffnecked stubborness will cost us all dear. Portugal pleads for money while the Greeks are gearing up to get another bite at what was from the start a Franco-German confection.
An anniversary and presents include a kindle for reading in bed and a pair of neat loudspeakers to plug in to my laptop and listen better to lovely Ludwig and early Satchmo.  I can't work either of them and so must wait for my lovely instructress to reveal all tomorrow.

At the moment I am like Keats waiting for Fanny, Shakespeare waiting for his "lovely boy", Alf  waiting for Maud, Marcel waiting for Albertine or Bertie waiting for Jeeves to shimmer in.

Shimmer, shimmer, shimmer, as my eyes grow dimmer;

Shimmer unto me.

I want money, I want leisure,

I want a cup of tea.

Shimmer, shimmer, shimmer; I shall get no slimmer,

But shimmer unto me.

Yet I want every kind of blessing,

And I want a cup of tea

Conifer County

A drive through Betjeman's "Conifer county of Surrey, approached/ Through remarkable wrought iron gates" reveals the fact that leaves are already out in the leafy suburbs, which take us to a hitherto unknown hill with a free carpark and parkland with distant views of the urban sprawl punctuated by grotesque towers which is what London has become. Such pleasures should give rise to wholesome thoughts at three in the morning. But it was not to be.

Late night news on TV showed a remorseless sequence of death, destruction and catastrophe both man-made and also part of Nature's revenge on Homo Sapiens for digging and plundering its wealth. I won't elaborate.  You will all have seen the pictures and the extra bonus of the pictures of what men can do to other men.  Are we really the only species that forms itself into groups and goes to war with each other? Well, that's what I have been told and so the hymnist was right when he said,  Every prospect pleases and only man is vile. I think that that's enough complaining. But "Nobody Knows the Way that I Feel This Morning" according to Sidney Bechet whose soprano sax sounds better than ever through my new loudspeakers.  The blues will chase the blues away.  Good news next time.

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