Death and Disaster

So that nice Colonel Gaddafi is dead and his friend Tony Blair will not be able to pay his last respects neither will Prince Charles who wrote so amicably to him.  But was he really sexually assaulted?  I would have thought that a piece of lead piping would lead to grievous bodily harm with only hatred behind it not lust.  But our commentators have different ideas.  The reason for such an assault was usually to show no sign of damage to the corpse of a dead leader; Edward II and a red hot poker is a noted example of this.  The Italians were the best murderers:

I learnt in Naples how to poison flowers,

  And strangle with a lawn stuffed down the throat

As Marlowe's murderer has it; so obviously qualified for killing kings.  

Of course it was a mistake to kill him; better to let him flee for ever in the Sahara desert as hatred of him when alive was the only thing that united the rebels.  Now they will have to give up shooting into the air and start shooting each other.  Anarchy is the usual end of revolution, only ending when a strong man appears like Napolean or Lenin to restore law and order and oppression.  Wait and see. 

At Last!  A Booker prize winner of real merit.  Well done Julian Barnes - and only a hundred and fifty pages as well.  Highly recommended especially for old men.



Merkel's Miracle

The Franco-German politbueau

Has saved once more the sinking Euro;

So delegates who sit all night

Can make-believe that black is white.

But what did they have for dinner when they broke off?  I think we should be told.  The latest fix must be good news for us as we shall not have to leave Europe as Europe will leave us and once again we can "stand alone in our island home" as we did during the war and was the objective of fighting the war.

Once and for all I must inform Dave that America did not come into the war to help us out.  America was forced into war when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour and four days later Hitler declared war on the U.S.A.  This was eighteen months after the fall of France. We had suffered the Blitz and fought and won the Battle of Britain.  His worst gaffe after not knowing what "twat" meant, "calm down dears" and the credit card fallacy.  He gets more and more like Anthony Eden - a weak man trying to be a strong man and thus getting tough with his supporters while cuddling up to his oponents.  When the next election comes he will be perceived as a toffee-nosed snob, out of touch with the people and safely secured against the privations of austerity.  He can then loose and let the two Eds clear up the mess that they have made.  And if they fail the IMF will do the job for them as they did for Dennis Healey.

    



Beethoven, Bix and Max.

Importing CDs into the laptop means that I listen to more music than I have for years.  Three clicks of the mouse leads me to Chopin or Bud Freeman and makes a perfect accompaniment to writing the blog.
Bored with looking for lovely Ludwig's chamber music I googled Amazon and bought the whole lot of the quartets for about twenty quid.  It was the same with Bix and this came in at a fiver for forty tracks - surely the best deal ever. The Beethovens are a revelation and all I can say is WOW!  Again I had forgotten how good Beiderbeck was.  The original "Young Man with a Horn" (A titled disallowed by Hollywood) got a lovely sound out of the cornet, only now available thanks to digital re-recording.

Turning from this to Max Hastings' new book about the Second World War, I read of almost unimaginable carnage, death, destruction and the murder of millions. What terrible things people, civilised and educated people, did to each other.  It is difficult to believe that we belong to the same species as the men who created and the men who destroyed.  But it did happen within living memory. Have we learnt nothing?  This banal question must have the answer "No".

When I let her in the big black lady with the bulging shoulder bag said,  "Hello, I'm your district nurse come to give you a 'flu jab.  My name is Count Basie."  One of the pleasures of partial deafness.   

Degas and the Ballerinas

Step on De Gaz and go to the Royal Academy to see Degas' ballerinas.  Stocky little French peasant girls transformed into lovely visions of delight by the alchemy of art.  Nothing nasty to be seen.  Then to the best Chinese restaurant in London - big and bustling with no pretensions to fine dining but good honest nosh.  On to the ballet and view from a box in Covent Garden lovely dancers in Cecil Beaton sets performing to music by Liszt and Foure.  Ballerinas are taller and thinner now and they all have lovely legs.  The foyer has a bust of Thomas Beecham and I am reminded of his lollipops.  It was a day of lollipops all round.  It is sometimes worth living in London. All that and the new Woody Allen film when an aspiring writer gets swept up in a time warp and goes back to the twenties in Paris.  Splendid impersonations of Ernest, Scott, Pablo and Gertrude oh yes and Cole Porter too. Ogden Nash occasionally hit the bull's eye:

I wish that I could get in line

And sing the praise of Gertrude Stein.

For Gertrude Stein I cannot root;

I cannot raise a single toot.......

So you can have the 'Autobiography of Alice B Toklas',

And I'll have the Complete Works of Shakespeare and a box of chocolates.

Fox on the Run

Dr Liam Fox

Is probably on the rocks;

But opportunity knocks

For that sexy Miss Knox.

She really should not have taken her dildo to Italy, where there are plenty of priapic young men only too ready to oblige. It was an insult to the Italian male. 

I have had a letter from Dave.  He starts by addressing me as "Robin".  But I have never been introduced to him and have never met him.  What is one to do in this modern age when so many rules of social conduct have been discarded? I think I shall address him as "Dear David Cameron."  If I do manage to write to him I might send a copy to anyone who wants it. Meanwhile we sleepwalk to the end of the Euro and I am happy to hear that the Slovakians are determined to block the latest  rescue plan.  I really can't think why the Greeks and the Germans put up with it.  Don't these countries ever have an election?  What is so magical about Merkel?  But it is not the first time that the entire German nation has been mesmerised by one person.

Mervyn King

Doesn't know a thing;

To him History

Is a complete mystery.

Dave Speaks Out

Dave made far the best speech of the party leaders.  That's not saying much but it was fluent, articulate and uttered with conviction.  So how was it that he made the terrible mistake about credit cards?  Was there no one of all his advisors to remind him of what he should have learnt while on the way to a first in PPE?  (Boris Johnson can say PPE to make it sound like syphilis) He is a lousy picker of people (Coulson et al) and it was of course the headline event for the anti-Tory media.  I hate this ridiculous vogue for publishing the text of a speech before it is delivered.  I don't want to know until he or she gets up and speaks.  ("Mr Churchill is going to address the nation tonight and tell them that he has not much to offer them....."). It becomes a field day for nit pickers, a hostage to fortune and a bar to making last minute changes. Desist.
Adolph Miliband's son Ed was pretty bad on the rostrum.  He avoided mention of his father who fled Belgium in 1940, changed his name to "Ralph" and became a happy Marxist at the London School of Economics.  From there he made a living by sneering at the system of government which had saved him from the gas chambers.  Now now let's not be nasty!

If Boy George wants to be pleasing

He can bung me some quantitive easing

He makes printing money

Go down just like honey

I do hope the sod isn't teasing.

About Larkin

Dave and the schoolboys can get on with their party - this is going to be a politics-free blog.

Philip Larkin's letters to the unfortunate Monica Jones who waited for decades for the proposal of marriage which never came have been recently published.  And pretty gloomy they are too.  He was the librarian of Hull University and she a lecturer at Leicester.  Larkin seems to have spent much time bicycling around the countryside in the rain while she stayed at home looking after her mother.  All the same they are entertaining enough if dipped into at random.
This led me to look up Larkin's book on jazz.  It is packed with the entertaining comments he made while reviewing records for the Telegraph and required reading for anyone who has an interest in the subject. But is the introduction which reveals his own feelings i.e. that jazz was ruined by the coming of bop and Charlie Parker.  He goes on to say that he does not like modern anything - lumping Parker together with Pound and Picasso as examples of talented and influential people who screwed up their own particular art form. "It helps us neither to endure nor enjoy. It will divert us as long as we are prepared to be mystified or outraged; but maintains its hold only be being more mystifying and more outrageous: it has no lasting power."
These words come floating back to me often when I am exposed to modern art.  I do not think that he is always right but I have come to believe that most of it is a load of crap. Comment.

Nastiness about politicians will resume shortly
 

Guilty Men (continued)

What was the "Guilty Men's" crime?  Why treachery of course.  No goverment has the right to give away sovereignty to a foreign power.  The only justification for government at all is that the rulers should protect the sovereignty of those they rule.  Yet this has all been done by a small group of people who are so convinced that they are right that they have not bothered to ask the people for their support.  The fact is that there is a breakdown between government and the people, who have to bear the brunt of the government's bad decisions.

Oh Gawd! Another party conference.  Will it end with a standing ovation for Dave?  I hope that Boy George does not get one.  His policy has failed.  We were supposed to have cuts balanced by growth to reduce the deficit.  The cuts are in place but growth has vanished so we are still piling up debt at the rate of three billion pounds a week.  There is no Plan B so we will get waffle about incentives to growth which will hardly make a scratch on the surface.

But we have an Indian Summer! It may be Global Warming but it can't be climate change.  It was just as hot in 1820 and noticed by Keats when the hot weather "set more/ And still more later flowers for the bees/ Until they think warm days shall never cease/ For summer has o'erbrimmed their clammy cells."