Happy Holidays.

Most of our lords and masters are taking a welcome break.  I hope they all come back refreshed to do the bad work they do.  Dave is going to Tuscany and little Cleggy is going to Spain. (Two countries whose finances are even worse than ours.)  This leaves Hague in charge and should stop him from swanning around the Middle East pretending that we still have an effective say in foreign affairs.  This will save us all a lot of money.  I believe that the real reason that Dave is in Italy is that it will better enable him to conduct his bombing operations against that nice Colonel Gadaffi who was so friendly with Tony Blair.  Bombing does not work and besides we cannot afford to replace the bombs we are dropping because we are broke.  Never mind, Boy George is still here and presiding over deficit reduction which is rapidly becoming a bad joke.  But why should I bother with such obvious comments in the middle of the night?  Let's hear it from Joe Turner:

You can take me, baby

Put me in your big brass bed;

Eagle rock me, baby

Till my face turns cherry red. 

There, that's better than some moralist whining to a guitar.  

Deaths Galore

So many people have died recently that I had almost forgotten about Lucian Freud.  I think I actually like his work when he is not just trying to be outrageous.  The Queen? No No.  Kate Moss?  Yes.  Do they look better when reproduced than they do in the flesh of which there is so much to be seen?

All this brings me back to thoughts of his grandfather, Sigmund who has done so much harm in the world.  Sir Peter Medawar put it aptly when he said that psychoanalysis was the most stupendous confidence trick of the twentieth century.  After that came the deluge of books against Freud - probably the best is "Why Freud was Wrong" by Richard Webster.  Devastating. Yet still there are people all over the world lying on couches, indulging in free association while their bills mount. (The treatment was never supposed to be cheap.)
If so many could be taken in by this fraud there may be another stupendous con trick, this time for the twenty first century.  I refer of course to Global Warming which may be a load of rubbish and there are plenty of people who think it is.  But anything we do is bound to be useless as we cause (if we do) so little of it. Answers would be welcome.

We have won a Test Match, so nothing else matters much.   

Mr Justice Loosen

I suppose we shall have to get used to pronouncing Leveson wrongly, after all Dave has already done it and it is does not matter what you know about someone as long as you can pronounce his name.  One thing that I do know about him is that as a QC he failed to get a conviction when he prosecuted Ken Dodd for tax evasion.  Oh, he is well liked by his colleagues which means that they don't regard him as a threat.  Mediocrity wins again!  And if Dave has chosen him to conduct the latest inquiry then he must be the wrong man.  But we all know what will happen.  The inquiry will last for much longer than the advertised twelve months, be applauded for being 'even handed', put on a shelf  and forgotten. 
In any case we surely must know that hacking is rife in Fleet Street.  Reporters have to get the story and the sleaziest papers don't care how it is done.
Fats Waller almost got it right in his song, 'Trucking':

There had to be some new way

To get the news about the screws

So everybody's hacking....



But perhaps 'Fats' was just using the title as a euphemism.

Give me your Telephone Number

How often people forget all about technology.  I suppose it is this that makes us backward in engineering.  Murdoch may have beaten off the unions - the printing unions who asked for wage increases for Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse - but he could not have won without the new technology which did away with all the old practices.  Others bravely fought the same battle but they were not widely known.  Anyway the computer and the micro-chip are part of our lives.  Come in Ira Gershwin:

It's very clear hacking is here to stay

Not for a year but ever and a day

Hypocrite moralisers will no more surprise us;

We know their feet are clay

But hacking is here to stay. 

 Must dash off to see the latest inquisition conducted by Vaz who made a false claim of  £75,500 in expenses from the taxpayer.  Just the man for the job.  

Murdoch Free Blog

Alhonse Daudet, the author of  'Lettres de mon Moulin' lost his virginity when he was twelve. He went to a brothel and stayed there for a week with a girl who had the softest skin that he had ever touched.  It probably was not the last brothel he visited as he died in his fifties of syphilis.  Many writers died of this disease when it was a killer, among them Baudelaire, de Maupassant and one of the Goncourt brothers.  Bad luck.  'The Gods are just and of our pleasant vices make instruments to plague us'  The Bard was as usual right.
While we are on the subject it is worth while recording that not only did the greatest Englishman of the twentieth century have an American mother but his father, Lord Randolph Churchill died of the pox.  For some reason I can recall the night I spent guarding prisoners in a military hospital.  They had gone out and got a dose of pox as they were about to be sent to the glass house for various crimes they had committed and time spent recovering from their illness counted against their sentences. I was told to detest them and stop them from suicide .  I had no trouble luckily.

Oh Dave how can it be that the little town in Libya where I mixed drinks for the officers of the 52nd Observation Regiment R.A. is still in Gadaffi's hands?  More bombs please.

Murdoch Rides Again

But a different Murdoch this time.  I write of Richard "Stinker" Murdoch the comedian and actor who was the first to adopt a gay persona to get laughs.  In real life he was staunchly heterosexual with a wife and three children in a semi in a leafy suburb, but on the Radio (we called it 'wireless' then) he pretended to be gay. (We called that 'queer' then.)  He did a successful show with Arthur Askey throughout the war, entertained the troops and generally cheered everyone up.  So you see there are or were some good Murdochs unlike the power-mad barbarians who are so successfully diverting attention from the MPs expenses scandal.  Now we see that the House of Commons is full of moralising seekers after the truth.  There used to be a rule about coming to justice with clean hands but that is now forgotten.  And whatever happened to Huhne and the little matter of his wife's driving licence?  Now they are all united and baying for blood.

We need a new political group of those who are ready to admit defeat like we should in a number of countries where we have intervened.  Only pride keeps us there and fear that we were wrong all the time.  Rochester put it neatly, "All men would be cowards if they dar'st".  It is time to be daring. 
  

On, Murtdoch, On.

About twenty five years ago I was reading The Times in a pub in the Gray's Inn Road when I was surrounded by evil looking thugs.  "Ere's someone reading a Murdoch paper" said one of the thugs - pickets from the nearby Sunday Times whose offices they were besieging.  With one mighty bound I leapt to my feet, grabbed two of them, banged their heads together and they slumped to the floor.  Their pals knew that they had met their match and they all fled from the saloon bar.  Like most bullies they were cowards at heart. (Ogden Nash put it rather well with "If none but the good were brave / How well would the bad behave.")  In the real world I put down the paper meekly and explained that I found it there when I came in and they turned back to swallowing their beer.

Murdoch won in the end with the help of the micro-chip and the new technology which abolished the malpractices of Fleet Street.  I hope not to have to mention his name again except to remark that we shall next be surprised by the amounts of money that changed hands between journalists, politicians and policemen.  Murdoch's money has corrupted everyone who came in contact with him.

The Nightingales are sobbing in the orchards of our mothers

And hearts that we broke long ago have long been breaking others.

Tears are round; the sea is deep;

Roll them overboard and sleep. 

Safely Home

We actually sailed right round the United Kingdom in sunny weather and with calm calm seas.  Is this a record?  It was so uneventful that I do not even think about it at nights so you will hear no more.

Back to lots of lovely rain and verses at night:

And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?

Come to my arms my beamish boy!

The boy Dave has surely not slain his Jabberwock aka Colonel Gadaffi. I told him it was no use bombing the Colonel - see my previous comments on "Victory through Air Power". Nothing has changed except that we should face what we've known all along that NATO without huge American involvement is totally useless.  The stalemate goes on but I am prepared to offer my services to negotiate the partition of Libya into Tripolitania on the west and Cyrenaica on the East.  It was good enough for Julius Caesar and it should be good enough for us and the rebels who must be getting pissed off with our half baked support. The little town of Garryhan where I was stationed and achieved my highest rank of barman in the officers' mess is still not in rebel hands.  I doubt if there is much left of it.

I can't resist another dig at poor Dave who is now consulting with little Cleggy and Ed  whether or not the police should conduct the inquiry into the fuss about phone tapping.  HE HAS NO LEADERSHIP QUALITIES.  He must grow up, make up his own mind and not be surprised when we all discover that the police themselves are deep in the mire.  What an excess of moral rage has been unleashed.  I only hope that it does not lead to hasty legislation for a muzzle on the press.