Second Rate Blues

Bob Dylan has been back in town and many people are trying to give him the adulation that he thinks he deserves. I don't like a singer who gains his effects with a nasty nasal voice and platitudinous lyrics.  "The Times they are a'changing".  Oh really?  All he has done is steal the music played by itinerant black musicians from the deep south of the USA who never - as my American friend says - "had a dollar to piss on", and then sanitise it for commercial gain.  Naive academics pretend to like him as a poet  as well.  As a poet he fails miserably and I shan't pay him any more of my attention.

Dave is now in complete charge of operations against Colonel Gadaffi and is sending in even more helicopters in the mistaken assumption that a war can be won without treading on the ground.  Having no experience of military matters he believes whatever he is told by Generals and Air Marshalls who just want to play withn their toys. Bad luck for innocent civilians who happen to be living in Tripoli. 

The anxiety mongers have been busy again.  Not only have the climate change lobbyists been shouting more loudly than ever but we must all look out for dangerous Spanish cucumbers.  And what about Spanish onions?  They might be a health hazard too.  On top of all this the Germans are going to abandon nuclear energy.  They must be mad.

Dave and Aid

So that idiot Dave goes abroad and boasts about our policy on so-called "aid" to other countries. What he means by "aid" is actually money. The countries receiving it can't be trusted with it and it always ends up in the wrong hands. If they want tractors let us send them tractors. If they need a desalinisation plant, let us send them that. But anyway we cannot afford it. The money is needed at home because, as we keep on forgetting, Blair and Brown have made us bankrupt.  It is so much easier to go poncing about the world than staying at home to solve our own problems.  

When Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin wrote to each other they finished every letter with the word "bum".  What a delightful word it is. The Americans have found a different use for it  but they have debased it and the English know much better.  Bum.

Jottings

Poor old Dave is banging on again about the "Big Society"  I don't know what it means
and I don't think that he does either.  Apparently it all has something to do with everybody living in happy families and then you add them all together and you get a big happy society.  It still seems to me to be absolute bollocks and the more I hear about it the worse it seems.  Does it mean that everybody has got to do unpaid work when they come home at night from doing paid work in their day jobs?  But that would be the ethos of the Boy Scout movement.  Nothing wrong with that only it does not solve our problems - the financial deficit, unemployment and the "cuts" which are not "cuts" and will not be achieved.  In spite of all this we have the time and money to go on pretending that we are major players on the world stage and are dropping bombs on Libya.
I must catch up with "twitter".  Bloggers should be bang up to date with all techniques of communication.  The only time I ever came across the word was in Keats' musings about autumn, "And gathering swallows twitter in the skies" . I don't suppose it is any use asking the swallows but if they've got any sense they'll get out before autumn. BUT I DO KNOW THE FOOTBALLER'S NAME. 
  

The Rapes of Roth

What a lot of fuss about rape.  Poor old Ken was just trying to point out that a teenage girl of fifteen was the victim of rape even if she and her eighteen year old  lover were just both having a good time.  On this basis Romeo raped the thirteen year old Juliet.  And what shame has fallen on the French nation who admire the technique of a skilled seducer like Valmont in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, but deplore the act of a man who can jump naked from the bathroom of his hotel suite and pounce on a chambermaid.  But what fun for the Press.
Arising from all this we now hear that Ms Callil the founder of Virago publishers resigned from the Man Booker prize judges because she declared that the winner, Philip Roth, is a misogynist who can't write for toffee.  Nobody has taken much notice of her recently so this is clearly her bid for notoriety. I gave a copy of American Pastoral to an erudite friend who admitted that it was a powerful novel but disliked it because he said it was like listening to an old testament prophet on a cracked gramophone record. (Some of you may have to explain to your offspring what a gramophone was.  It derives from the Greek: gramos, I speak ;  phono, through a tin tube.)

Why am I thinking about Hamlet in the Middle of the Night?

Hamlet:  I did love you once.
Ophelia: Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so.
Let's face it, Hamlet was a shit.  He was only pretending to be mad, so we must assume that he knew what he was doing.  He drove Ophelia to suicide and killed her father - thou wretched rash intruding fool farewell - insulted him when he was alive and fought with her brother over her open grave.  And how can we forget that nasty scene with his mother - Oh, Hamlet thou hast cleft my heart in twain.?  Yet he was admired by his peers as the very glass of fashion, a sort of  James Dean character.  And admired by most of his audiences.  And that is where we must salute the genius of our greatest poet whose work here has been so aptly summed up:

A Ghost and a Prince meet

And everyone ends in mincemeat.

Peter Oborne in the Sunday Telegraph has claimed that Dave is a great P.M. I have written to complain. 





Bring on the Millionaires

Richard Branson's father died recently when he was well into his nineties.  I met him once at a gathering of opinion formers when his son was being awarded some trophy or other.  A cheerful friendly man, he said, "I'm just hanging on to Richard's coat tails and enjoying the ride."  I congratulated him on having sired such a successful son and  - as I had had a few drinks - I advised him to put some of his sperm into a sperm bank so that we could have more people like Richard Branson.  I don't know if he followed my advice - probably not as the whole idea of IVF is disgusting - but I hope he did.
                                                      A million million spermatazoa

All of them alive;

Out of this cataclysm but one poor Noah

Dare hope to survive.....

 From this billion minus one we might have at least one more rich rich entrepreneur who would provide jobs in the private sector.  We are told that this what is needed so it seems odd to tax the rich at 50% so keeping them away from this country while we let the poor in and pay them for having children.  Keynes put it like this:"If the Labour Party wants to help the working man it should provide bodyguards for millionaires."  I must look that up in the morning. 

Libya Revisited

So much has been happening - the referendum, death of bin Laden etc. -  that I have quite forgotten what it was that I was thinking about in the early hours of this morning.  Oh yes, Libya.  We seem to have forgotten that Dave has taken the lead in bombing Tripoli.  Please stop it.  You promised the rebels that we were on their side and then got a permit from the United Nations only to use air power to do this in case we killed civilians.  This has only made matters worse.  Civilians continue to die on both sides and now there is talk of stalemate.  Perhaps it will all end in partition for Libya as I suggested some time ago.  What a shame that Dave does not understand that war nowadays means total war and the killing of civilians.
It used to be otherwise in the eighteenth century.  When Sterne went to Paris (A Sentimental Journey) he was delayed by officials who pointed out that their two countries were at war with each other and that he ought to have a passport.  When he explained that he had forgotten it they all had a good laugh and carried on eating and drinking.  War was for soldiers to fight  while civilians got on with their own lives.  How things have changed. And can we afford to replace the bombs we are dropping?  Let's cut those down too. 

Who are these judges who keep on issuing injunctions against the Press?  I must read more about it  but I think that some of our best judges are no longer with us.

Pippa is now favourite for the title of  "Rear of the Year".  It is not too late to vote for her to make sure that she wins.

BBC

So the last and worst Governor of Hong Kong is  now in charge of the BBC.  What a nice kindly man he appears tho he does not watch East Enders nor listen to the Archers and knows nothing about broadcasting.  It is a typically English appointment and will bring no benefit.  In a recent interview he said that he would not reveal the wages of entertainers in case the rivals of the BBC heard of them.  Nowhere was the licence fee for TV mentioned.  At £145.50 it is a lot of money for those who need it most. (Never mind there is a fifty per cent reduction for the blind!!  Who thought of that? ) What we need to do is halve the fee and tell the BBC to live within its income.  It is not supposed to compete with the independent sector.  That is what it is all about even if everyone has forgotten that in the mad dash for expansion and ridiculous wages.  All the same they did the Wedding well, thanks to the technicians and commentators who should not be replaced.  I am gunning for the bloated management. 

Why are we so secretive about people's wages?  We know what an Archbishop, Prime Minister or General has so why not publish everybody's wages especially for those who are paid with taxpayers money?  What is the secret about?  Certainly we ought to publish the earnings of anyone who goes on strike.  Strikers always lie about their wages and they might think a bit more before they break their contracts of employment.

Don't forget to vote "No" today.  What will poor Cleggie do then?

Death comes to a Mass Murderer

The Times has obligingly published all the names of those bin Laden is known to have killed. It makes depressing reading.  His own followers are amongst them as suicide bombers but one must expect this if you give homo sapiens poverty, fecundity, religious belief and kalashnikovs. It is a recipe for disaster.  We must be more alert than ever.
Was it really necessary to dispose of his body with such care and attention to Islamic precepts?  It is good to know that we shall not have to keep him alive for a trial.  But burial at sea?  The sea itself might become sanctified |and people sloshing about in it might think that they were performing some sacred act.  I would have preferred him to have been cremated and his ashes scattered in an unknown place.  A more bizarre thought occurred to me of building a tomb for him at the North Pole and popping his body inside it.  It could become a place of pilgrimage.  All his supporters would have to go there, many of them dying of cold and starvation on the way.  But it would be the way to paradise.

The dreaded thought  of AV is upon us.  If there is a "yes" vote it will finish off the Tory party. We are only having this vote because Dave and Cleggie did a deal behind everyone's back, so that he, Dave, could clock in at Number Ten.