Hogmanay

Evelyn Waugh defined Hogmanay as 'People being sick in the streets in Glasgow.'  Good enough for me as I find it the most dismal event of the year.

When I consider life 'tis all a cheat;

Yet fooled with hope men favour the deceit;

Trust on and hope tomorrow will repay;

Tomorrow's falser that the former day..

 Dryden  at his most despondent  put it well.          

I think is the compulsory nature of the celebration that depresses me.  That and the insincerity of finding oneself singing Auld Lang Syne - sometimes with people one has just met.  The only thing to do is to retire to bed with a bottle of champagne.  Oh dear, I think I am going to cry.

Let me leave you this - a quote from a headline in "The Times" some years ago - "Gandhi Comes in his Loincloth."   This at least swims into my mind as the last blog of the year. 

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Santa Claws

Once upon a time there were two songwriters in Tin Pan Alley.  One was called Haven Gillespie and the other went by the name of J Fred Coots.  (I think of them mainly because I like the conjunction of their names.)  Haven was a Harvard man backed up by loads of old money and Fred came up from the gutter but was gay, promiscuous and pretty enough to be accepted everywhere.  They sat in their seedy office on Forty Second Street celebrating with bourbon the success of the song they had recently written.  It was called "You Go to my Head" and contains some of the best lyrics ever written.  Then they wrote the song that ended their collaboration in spite of its success as it was so awful.  This one had nothing to do with the elegant sophistication of their other effusion but it was called "Santa Claus is Coming to Town." That partly explains why I am thinking about it in the middle of the night and although it is a ridiculous jingle it helps to shut out all thoughts of the horrors that are being perpetrated all over the world - at least for the next few days of goodwill and gluttony.

Happy Christmas to you all.

Waiting for the End

Waiting for the end, boys, waiting for the end.

What is there to be or do?

What's to become of me or you?

Are we kind or are we true?

Sitting two by two, boys, waiting for the end.

Things get worse and worse. so I thought that Empson's take on Auden would be appropriate now that an eighteen year old boy has become the head of a hostile state with nuclear arms.  Luckily it is a long way away so we might be spared.

On top of this that clever clever Frenchwoman has been warning us of how badly off we would all be if we did not have the euro.  She must be wrong because a whole lot of top top businessmen have written to the Telegraph saying that we must save this wonderful currency because millions of jobs depend on it.

But this last is a ray of hope because collections of leading business people always turn out to be wrong. What did Dennis Healey call them?  "The Silly Billies of the CBI" ( a   socialist can occasionally be right) But do these signatories really think that they can only sell their products to the EU if all their customers are locked in to one big unhappy family?  What a sad confession.

   

Christmas Box

Answer the door to find two scruffians there. "We are your bin men and we have come to wish you a happy Christmas on behalf of the General, Municipal and Boilermakers Union by thirteen votes to twelve."  Money changed hands, good wishes were exchanged and our dustbins are safe for another year.  I once knew that union well and am still amused by the apellation "Boilermakers".  It must refer to the bad old days when boilers were rivetted together and constantly exploding.  But now they are automatically welded.  Old habits die hard especially when a union is involved.

The Leonardo show is wonderful though all the tickets are sold for what is an absurdly short run.  After taking years to organise it should be on for more than three months but I suppose it is too late to change. The Mona Lisa is missing as is the Last Supper in spite of an impressive copy of it.  When Wilson Mizener - the American con man - opened a gallery on Fifth Avenue he soon had the original "Last Supper"for sale.  When asked the price he said,"Five dollars a plate". What a bargain! 

God Comes Good

Well done, God and well done Dave. You did what I wanted.  Thank you both.  Now all we need is for the coalition to collapse before a general election sweeps the Conservatives into power and then we can set about governing ourselves instead of being subject to Brussels with its endless flow of  directives, and shall be standing well back when the Eurozone explodes. According to Niall Ferguson in The Times and Janet Dayley in the Sunday Telegraph the end is nigh for the Euro and soon we shall be able to go back to those happy days when Europe was a playground where we changed francs for pesetas and crossing borders was fun.  We might even get our passports stamped.
On  the other hand, dipping into Max Hastings' book about the last war, I can understand why the French and the Germans wanted to make it impossible for them to take up arms against each other ever again. ( I think that in the end the German people suffered more hardships than any of the others except possibly the Poles who were  assaulted by Hitler and occupied by Stalin at the same time.)   Once started the plan took on a life of its own and was heading towards a United States of Europe with the plans for fiscal harmony.  Government after all is taxation. 
I hope to resume flippancy next time.


  

Prayers

Dear God
Please give Cameron the strength and courage to stand up to those frogs and huns who want to crush us into poverty.
Amen
I don't usually have much contact with God mainly because I don't believe in him but on this occasion when we all feel powerless to influence events and all decisions are made over our long suffering heads anything is worth a try. (I see that we are having a record crop of Brussels Sprouts. Nothing to do with the foregoing but the sort of thing that floats into the mind at 3.a.m. as does the following piece.)

Every now and then I have the bad luck to hear a pop star singing one of his/hers boring songs and I cannot make out a word.  I have had no trouble with the blues singers like Bessie Smith, Ida Cox, Mahalia Jackson et al but when it comes to the sort of thing that people will go to camp out in a crowded muddy field to hear, I might as well be listening to a foreign language of which I know nothing.
Queue for verse: 

Will no one tell me what she sings?

Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow

For old unhappy far off things

And battles long ago.

Delayed Action

This should have been done at the end of last week but I got pre-occupied by reading the Sewell autobiography (highly recommended in spite of being very frank about his sex life).  Also diverted by playing Ella singing Gershwin through my new Bose loudspeakers which transform the sound coming out of the laptop.
I may owe an apology to the Duke of Devonshire a.k.a. "Stoker".  His piece in the Spectator was a surprising co-incidence and may have done something to suggest that he is quite a decent chap - or that may just be the persona he is trying to project.  "Frankly my dear I don't give a damn ".

Has Mervyn King gone mad?  I ask because it should be obvious to anyone that his warnings of impending doom can only make matters worse. (He was one of the 364 economists who wrote to the Times condemning Maggie's economic policy.)  But everybody else seems to be jumping on the band wagon to tell us how unspeakably dreadful things are going to be for the next five years or seven years or seventy years.  I am fed up with it and therefore predict that everything will soon be coming up roses and after a downward blip we shall soon return to growth, peace and prosperity.  Nobody knows what is going to happen in the next five minutes so my guess about the future is as good as anybody's. 'Only seven days to save the Euro'.  How often have we heard that?  We shall hear it again later on this week.  Don't watch this space as I refuse to think about it in the middle of the night.