Night Thoughts

Football Fangs

2012-02-06T12:48:00.000Z

What is all this fuss about one footballer insulting another footballer?

Sticks and stones can break my bones

But words will never hurt me.

Apparently they can hurt these sensitive little flowers who are millionaires and who help to fill acres of newsprint with their doings and their boring sex lives, not to mention their secret injunctions in courts to which we have no access.

And that raises another question i.e. why are there any courts which are closed to the general public? Everything that happens in court ought to be availsble to anyone who has an interest inm it even if it is only inquisitive curiosity. This is especially so for courts which deal with the custody of children who are often pawns in a game played by social workers and the police. An explanation is needed by me if not by anyone else. Open up Clarke! I want to know what is going on behind closed doors.

That's enough thinking for one night.

Stately Homes

2012-01-31T14:53:00.000Z

Thanks to Google I now know that the phrase "The Stately Homes of England" was first used by a hitherto unknown poet called Felicia Hemans (d. 1835).
(Judged by this effort she was not much good. No need for further study of her work I am glad to say).
This was brought on by thinking about how there was really no one in Parliament who had any ideas or experience of business and thus to Dave's background which may be okay for economising but not for the practical affairs of life:

But still we won't be beaten;

We'll scrimp and scrape and save;

The playing fields of Eton

Have made us frightfully brave.

We know how Caesar conquered Gaul

And how to whack a cricket ball;

Apart from this our education

Lacks co-ordination.....

Quite so. With this in mind I get really scared when Dave goes off to yet another summit meeting and does not know what he is talking about, though I am sure that he tries to stick to the brief his aides have given him. Please come back without having given everything away.

Message to Boy George

2012-01-26T13:26:00.000Z

Okay, boy George, this could be your finest hour as a blanket of pessimism falls over the western world.
You've had your cuts and now you want growth. Here's how. First raise the threshold of income tax to £10,000 - that will shut up little Cleggy. Then abolish that silly tax rate of fifty per cent which it makes it more profitable to save on tax than to earn more money. (And incidentally deters people from coming here to do business.) The minimum earnings rule must go. If we raise the bottom rung on the ladder of opportunity how how can the young unemployed climb to the deck of that great ship of state which is sailing to the broad sunlit uplands? Thirdly, abolish differential rates of income tax and replace it with a flat rate - say 25% with the aim of reducing it to 20%. Then everyone would work for the state for one day a week and could keep all the money earned in the next four days. There's fairness for you. Now let's get on with it,
This will not happen in our sclerotic country where change is anathema to our politicians and most other people. How sad.

Tears are round; the sea is deep;

Roll them overboard and sleep.

A Three Pipe Problem

2012-01-20T17:22:00.000Z

The moment I saw the thick white envelope I knew that it was from the Diogenes Club. Inside was a plain sheet of the very best paper on which, in a hand that I knew so well, were the words "Come at Once". The signature too was not unknown to me. There it was in the strong male hand of a man - and what a man! "Sherlock" As ever the word sent an agreeable frisson down the back of my neck. The man I had admired for so many years was back. Did I write "admired"? Nay you might almost say "loved" for so closely had I lived with him under Mrs. Hudson's hospitable roof - perhaps so much as to make my wife forget my first name. Sometimes she called me "James" and at other times I was "John". (Such forgetfulness is common among the fair sex)
Fog swirled about me as I knocked on the door of 221b in Baker Street. I hurried up the stairs and there I saw him - my oldest and best friend - Sherlock Holmes. We exchanged greetings and then he said "We have a problem,Watson. The game's afoot." "But Holmes, how can this be? You were last scene lying on the pavement with blood streaming from your lifeless body after falling from a very tall building."
"Precisely, Watson. That is the problem and a three pipe one at that."
Then he lit his pipe and vanished in a puff of smoke.......

Now I find that Yvette Cooper got a first in PPE at Oxford. That makes four of them - Cameron, Osborne and Milliband - now it's Mrs Balls as well. Hmmm......

Scotland the not very Brave?

2012-01-14T17:46:00.000Z

After decades of neglect G K Chesterton has come back into favour and his words come back to me from schooldays:

Smile at us, pay us, pass us but do not quite forget;

For we are the people of England, that never has spoken yet.

Well we are not to be given a chance to speak and are most likely to see Scotland sail away from the United Kingdom with a compromise of partial independance - we are good at compromise - as we retain some powers that are too expensive for a small country. Defence springs to mind and this has become specially expensive for us since Tony invaded Iraq and Dave and the schoolboys carried on the bad work of strutting around on the world stage instead of staying at home to save ourselves from financial ruin. But then Foreign affairs have always been more fun than Home affairs where people keep on asking awkward questions. The Scots' position is quite simple - they want to eat their haggis and have it too. Let's hope they don't get away with it. A|nd so to sleep

Playing Trains

2012-01-10T12:33:00.000Z

What fun . it is for the Government to be playing trains. Such a diversion from hearing about austerity all the time. So we are to have a new high speed train from London to Birmingham on a new high speed track. It will only cost £32 billion pounds (make that £64 billion to go on the record of past rail improvements) and work will start very very soon i.e. in 2016 after we have awarded the contract to build it to the Chinese who are ever so good at building railways.
Max Beerbohm left Zuleika Dobson looking at Bradshaw's to get a train to Cambridge. It was then and probably still is a notoriously difficult journey from Oxford. She may be still stuck in a siding in Bletchley.
If we must have a really fast rail link we ought to have it from Oxford to Cambridge even though we can now exchange ideas without getting on a train at all. It will show how keen we are on science and technology.Never mind - boys will be boys.

Hamlet

2012-01-04T11:59:00.000Z

"To be or not to be; that is the question." No dear that is not the question. The question is "How am I going to avenge the murder of my father and secure the revenge against my uncle the murderer?" Nevertheless the great author has stuck this soliloquy - splendid though it is - into the play on which it has no bearing. But that is just one of the problems which make the tragedy so endlessly fascinating and gives employment to scholars. The Shakespeare industry shall never die.

Dave and the schoolboys are not doing very well and only the weakness of the opposition makes them look good. The plan if you remember was to follow the "Cuts" with growth fuelled by the export of manufactured goods. But the goods we have developed are being made abroad while we have let a flood of immigrants into the country. We have imported lots of workers and exported lots of work. Well done, boys. Keep up the good work.

Hogmanay

2011-12-31T12:56:00.000Z

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

2011-12-23T17:21:00.000Z

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

2011-12-20T16:27:00.000Z

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

2011-12-15T15:55:00.000Z

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

2011-12-13T16:21:00.000Z

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

2011-12-08T13:13:00.000Z

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

2011-12-05T11:57:00.000Z

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.

Devonshire

2011-11-30T12:24:00.000Z

I decided that I wanted to read Brian Sewell's autobiography when it occurred to me that he must be one of the last among those who started life as a "queer" (Oh, dear) and became eventually "gay" (Hooray). Besides I enjoy his columns. As I was seated at my laptop I checked with Amazon and found that they were selling at £15 as opposed to the published price of £25. These are hard times so I wrote in our password ("Bollocks") clicked the mouse three times and behold the book is now winging its way towards me.
I really wanted to buy it from my local bookshop to help it keep going, but laziness and cupidity won me over. I note also that Heywood, Hill are selling it at £25 and this set me to thinking about the current Duke of Devonshire who owns the shop and where his aunt, Nancy Mitford, worked during the war. It used to be run by a most charming and erudite man called John Samurez Smith who made browsing a priviliged pleasure and who suddenly left after many years of service to the top people who all received hand written bills which were only paid after long delays.
This raises the question, "Is Devonshire a shit?" He certainly has odd ideas about the House of Lords and has spoken of renouncing his title as the days of the aristocracy are over. Does anyone on the list know him? Dropping in on the bookshop in Curzon Street used to be a delight. It was an oasis of calm away from the bustle of the rest of London. It is still selling books there but it is not the same without John.

Right Again

2011-11-25T17:18:00.000Z

For some reason one is not supposed to say "I told you so." I don't know why but I don't mind it a bit. So here we go:
I told you that the Euro would be bound to break up and everybody else really knew this as well, because monetary union really has to be supported by political union. The pushers of this narcotic idea really wanted political union all along and even now they are pressing for fiscal union on the way to the dustbin of history. Anything is better than being part of the United States of Europe governed from Brussels by technocrats.
I told you that the press were getting hysterical with enthusiasm about 'The Arab Spring' as it was really just another revolution which would all end in tears. Now the press are talking about 'The Arab Winter' as the rebels start fighting among themselves. Teach more history in schools especially for those who just read PPE at Oxford. That will do for the moment.

I feel really sorry for those young people who are unemployed. Perhaps one of the reasons is that they have not been taught to do any thing useful that they can offer an employer while immegration has allowed another 250,000 people to be added to the population. 'Education, education, education', said Tony Blair but he did not say what it was for.

What a good letter that burglar wrote refusing to apologise to his victims. Neat handwriting, commas and full stops. He must be an educated thief or is it a hoax? Watch this space.

How strange that the showbiz people giving evidence of press harassment to Lord Leveson haven't appeared in anything recently.

Strawberries

2011-11-22T15:54:00.000Z

Another piece of tinkering from Dave and the Schoolboys. This time they are going to make the taxpayer cough up for money owing on mortgages which should never have been granted in the first place. We are asked to believe that this will kick start the economy. They're all getting sillier and sillier so lets talk about strawberries which I really did think about last night.

What happened to allthose lovely wild stawberries which used to be so plentiful in the bistros on the Left Bank in Paris shortly after the war when a huge helping of these small slightly bitter fruits could be afforded by even the poor English tourist trying to eke out his allowance of fifty pounds in sterling to spend abroad. But that was in another country. Now that France has more or less recovered from the war (which war? Some say she never recovered from Napoleon) they have become harder and harder to find. And more expensive. Those who picked them are probably picking grapes in Burgundy where the pickers arrive in expensive cars. The wild strawberies are left like damsons in England to "wither on the bough." That doesn't sound right. Oh yes, I remember it is nothing to do with fruit; it should go "The garlands wither on thy brow."
But that was an altogether different quote about the evanescent fruits of victory. "So boast no more thy mighty deeds/ Upon death's purple altar now/ See how the victim - victor bleeds...." and so on. And so to sleep.

Sclerosis

2011-11-19T11:05:00.000Z

Politics keep intruding in the wee small hours of the morning.
What a sclerotic nation we are. Nothing really changes as we tinker with existing institutions, then congratulate ourselves for doing sometning radical. But we nee radical changes now as Boy George finds his plan for reducing the deficit in tatters. He wanted 'cuts' followed by 'growth' only we have not got growth. |So here is a radical plane for growth. Pay attention, Chancellor.
1. Abolish the fifty per cent top rate of income tax.
2. Abolish the rules about minimum earnings levels.
3. Raise the income tax threshold to £10,000
4. Introduce a flat rate of tax of 25%.
There. That should get things moving by doing away with the poverty trap, half the personnel of the Inland Revenue and many many accountants. (Actually the Chancellor was very enthusiastic about the flat tax but that was before he was nobbled by treasury officials.)
It will not happen because nothing much ever does happen. Sclerosis sets in again. How sad.

I only heard half of it but what was the Today programme doing to play Billie Holiday singing "Strange Fruit" yesterday? "Southern trees bear a strange fruit; Blood on the leaves and blood on the root". It is difficult to believe that there was once a fuss about it being disparaging of the Deep South of America. There at least is something that has changed. Bravo!

Changes for the Worse

2011-11-15T18:08:00.000Z

"How are you?" I said. "I'm good," he answered. "I did not ask about your morals. I asked about your health. People used to say that they were well and then get on with the conversation. " "Not any more," he replied. "That's all changed now. I'm good and that's that. "
So I was left behind again tho I don't much mind not swimming with the tide. But most changes of this sort are not for the better and often smell of political correctness. For instance "actresses" suddenly have become "actors". Why? Actresses used to look like women and actors like men (more or less.) Perhaps they thought that it gives them more status. And another thing; "mistresses" have suddenly become "lovers". What on earth for? With "mistress" one knew who was who but now a lover can be of any sex. Besides there was a nice ambiguity about the word "mistress", implying submission and domination at the same time. Now we don't know where we are.

I don't know about you but that Mrs Merkel scares the pants off me. She keeps on talking about war though unless she is well over sixty five she can't know much about it. She seems to think that anything would be better than that Europe should revert to its natural position in the world - a polyglot collection of nation states who will live in peace unless they are forced into a union which their people don't want. Perhaps Mrs Merkel will be struck by lightning and we can breath again.

Armistice Day

2011-11-11T17:10:00.000Z

Someone - I think it was Arthur Koestler - once remarked that homo sapiens was the only species that gathered together and then fought other members of the same species. Recent observations have proved him wrong but all the same we are pretty odd. What a truly insane thing it is to do to leave your home, put on a uniform, obey orders and try to kill complete strangers with whom you have no personal quarrel. And yet when ordered thousands upon thousands of human beings do just that.
Reading about the two world wars of the last cezntury, I find I can only take in small doses the tales of death and destruction before I have had enough for the day. And how soon we forget. At Passchandale in 1917 the British suffered 300,000 casualities. Never mind because the Germans lost 400,000 men. Victory does not come cheap. There is obviously something wrong with our make-up. Perhaps it is nature's way of population control. If so we are due for another big one soon.

In lighter vein I see that the horrible Huhn, who loves wind farms and pooh-poohs shale gas, is still being investigagted by the Essex police about his ex-wife's allegations of perverting the course of justice. I also discover, thanks to google, that he is worth £3.5 million and got a first at Oxford in PPE. Does everybody get a first in this subject? Oh well, he cheated on his wife so he may be cheating on us too.

Downhill Abbey

2011-11-07T12:42:00.000Z

What? Bates in handcuffs escorted to prison by a couple of bowler hatted officials! You should have not done it, Julian. Well we must have another series just to see him reprieved from the gallows when Carson confesses to being the real culprit. The nation holds its breath and does not believe in capital punishment any way.
And that brings me on to memories of school when I had in my study a scum called Blakely. I never liked him. He had a pasty round face and floppy black hair. All the same he was admired by some of the older boys who called on him from time to time for sexual services. Some years later I met him in the Eight Bells in Chelsea. He was full of himself. "I'm in terrible trouble," he said with glee. "Women!" I expressed my surprise. A few weeks later he was shot dead by his ex-mistress, Ruth Ellis. She was the last woman to be hanged in England and has become famous for this rather negative act.
But Bates' crime was committed when people were frequently left dangling from the end of a rope as an example to others. It did not make much difference to the murderers but it took much of the excitement out of murder trials and worthy of less newsprint.

And wretches hang that jurymen must dine.... Not any more, Pope.

Mann-Booker gets it right

2011-11-03T12:36:00.000Z

Jukian Barnes' 'A Sense of an Ending' is at last a worthy winner. Brief and well written it tells of an old man suddenly recalling events that happened when he was young decades ago. It has of course a denoument which surprises the reader as much as the narrator who tells the story. Most of the prizewinners are forgotten in spite of the fulsome comments at the presentation. As John Wain put it, "Where does that leave Tolstoy?" The book started my own reminisences of coming to London with various Oxbridge contemporaries and our first stumbling steps in the real world. It was the time when "La Ronde" was playing at the Curzon Cinema and I must have seen it at least twice. Anton Wallbrook plays the master of the merry-go-round as the various characters - all beautiful go from one partner to another until the last man meets the first woman. French film stars of the time were all fascinating and none more so than Danielle Darrieux when the merry-go-round breaks down to the dismay of the young man who performed so well with his previous conquest - the luscious maid Simone Simon. He talks at the time of Stendhal's treaty on love. That brings me to the most entertaining of all the great nineteenth century novelists. For those who are interested the NY Review has just republished "The Life of Henry Brulard" - one of the author's many pseudonyms. It contains the account of an infortunate experience in a plush London brothel wnth a dissertation on fiascos. I shall buy the book as well as the DVD of "La Ronde" for an orgy of escapist pleasure.

Coming down to earth we can see Dave having his very first experience of negotiating with unions. He will of course be backed up by inexhaustable supplies of taxpayers money so he is bound to give in. It will end with a triumph for UNISON with beer and sandwiches at No. 10. As the other John Wain might have put it, "Don't send a boy to do a man's job."

Death and Disaster

2011-10-31T16:29:00.000Z

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

2011-10-27T12:27:00.000+01:00

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.

2011-10-21T16:50:00.000+01:00

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

2011-10-13T18:12:00.000+01:00

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

2011-10-11T11:45:00.000+01:00

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

2011-10-06T12:33:00.000+01:00

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

2011-10-04T17:26:00.000+01:00

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)

2011-10-01T12:36:00.000+01:00

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."

Guilty Men

2011-09-28T12:28:00.000+01:00

The Centre for Policy Studies which was Maggie's favourite think tank has just published a booklet castigating the "Guilty Men" who have taken us ever closer to the European Union without any regard to the wishes of the public. A cross party alliance of the arrogant elite who have happily given away so much of our sovereignity, they have consistently lied to achieve their ends. So the booklet becomes a sort of Rogues' Gallery from Edward Heath of dreadful memory to John Major who just wanted to appear nice. This was when the idea of us having closer and closer ties to Europe gave the Europhiles a warm feeling of self satisfaction to show that they had overcome their feelings of patriotism in an effort to form in the end a United States of Europe.
Poppy Day is coming and I wonder how many of those who fought and died for our country did so because they wanted us to take orders from Brussels.
The easiest way to get a copy of "Guilty Men" is to telephone 020 7222 4488 and ask for Kate Jones who will be happy to oblige.

Following as much as I can bear of the party conferences, I have heard nothing about Europe or the Eurozone. Thus do we drift ever further from our own ability to make our own laws. Dave is so busy these days, poncing around on the world stage, that he has almost disappeared from view. He might have something to say at the Tory conference next week but I doubt it. This is the time to put the boot in to the Lib-Dems in his cockeyed cabinet and start fulfilling some of his promises on loosening our ties to Europe. Come on, Dave I'm right behind you.

Party Party

2011-09-24T11:56:00.000+01:00

What a miserable lot the Lib-Dem coalition partners have turned out to be. Vince Vicious the Business Secretary whose speech was designed to discourage all inward investment, horrible Huhn who is spending billions on useless wind farms and dangerous Danny Alexander who is right behind Vince in his ludicrous belief that we shall get out of our economic mess by soaking the rich all came together to display their incompetence and naivety. That was before little Cleggy made a long boring speech which was just a lot of platitudes and cliches strung together for the benefit of an audience of sycophants who gave him a standing ovation. After that I quite look forward to the Labour Party conference. (Watch for the telltale cloud of tobacco smoke over the Trade Unionists' section)

How wonderfully relaxed on TV was the Russian billionaire who owns the Independent. So rich that money is of no concern to him. How lucky are those who work for this innocuous paper. All togther now to the tune of "The Continental" by Irving Berlin:

The Independent, the Independent;

It,s full of bullshit that masquerades as news.

The Independent, the Independent;

It's for people without any views.

War on the Rich

2011-09-20T11:38:00.000+01:00

So Dangerous Danny Alexander is recruiting 2,250 tax inspectors to inspect the incomes of the rich. What a good idea. But Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? must apply. He will have to pay them handsomely unless they become corrupted by the riches they encounter in their work. Clearly he will have to recruit another 2,250 to inspect the inspectors, who should only be allowed to work in pairs. But due to the high rate of sickness absentees in the Civil Service there will have to be another backup group of 2,250 insepectors so that on any day two can do the actual work wile the third one calls in sick from the high living necessary to his calling. Well done, Danny Boy. You have created employment and spent tasxpayers money that you have not got in any case. But soaking the rich comes first.

"Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" turned out out to be two hours of baffling boredom. Everything was brilliant because we have been told that it is. When the mole was dug up he said that he fled to Russia for aesthetic reasons. (Think of Anthony Blunt). But why oh, why cannot anyone in a spy film who enters a room at night time turn on the fucking lights? Answers to this question can be given to me during my morning dip in the Serpentine.

Health and Safety

2011-09-19T12:34:00.000+01:00

I can't stop thinking about those miners trapped two hundred feet underground and knowing that they were going to die. What a dreadful fate. But why do we still have to send men down mines to bring the coal in the ground to the surface? Surely we have the technology to devise some sort of robot that will do the job for us. This is just the sort of research and development that the Government should be sponsoring. The fact is that no one cares about coal any more now that we are all excited by the prospect of scattering useless wind farms all over the country. And where do the Health and Safety busybodies come into this? They are the organisation that has stopped firemen from climbing up ladders and a policeman from going to the rescue of a drowning boy. From their point of view no one should ever go down a mine again and that is all right by me. We should leave it to machinery and start at once to develop anything we want.
Nobody wants to go down a mine and I remember my friends in the army - especially the Welsh ones who would sign on forever rather that be demobilized and go home to the villages where the only work was underground. I hope they all lived to a ripe old age.

Come Home Dave

2011-09-14T12:30:00.000+01:00

Back home to blogging after what Edith Wharton called, "A Dip in the Country" to find all NATO's weapons and Dave launching cruise missiles which we can't afford to replace have not yet killed that nice Colonel Gaddafi. Perhaps he has gone to stay with his very dear friend, Nelson Mandela, of whom nil nisi sed bonum (even Dave could translate that). We need the Colonel alive, forever flitting around the African continent, to keep the Libyans together. We should find him and supply him with the necessities of life - food, water and kalashnikovs. He could hold out for years.

The "season of mists and mellow fruitfulnes" is truly upon us but I am still looking for plums - there is supposed to be a surplus of them. Waitrose? No. I want a kindly old farmer by the roadside to sell them to me (he might have damsons as well). Perhaps the old farmer is waiting for a subsidy. Meanwhile Keats' poem sticks in the mind. I only hope that his use of the word 'twitter' has not been spoiled.

Hedge crickets sing and now with treble soft

The redbreast whistles from a garden croft

And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Dave Marches On

2011-09-01T12:42:00.000+01:00

Dave is actually chairing some sort of conference in Paris to sort out the Libyan problem. (We must do our best to keep that nice Colonel Gaddafi alive and free to frighten the people of Libya who are only united by hatred of him. If he is killed Libya might go the way of Tito's Yugoslavia.) It would be a good idea if Dave came back to sort out some of the problems that he has at home. The "cuts" have had no effect on the mounting deficit and he is still borrowing three billion pounds a week to add to the burden of debt we are leaving behind. The Lib-Dems in the cabinet are out of his control and Vince Vicious keeps on popping up with new ideas about taxing the so-called rich. The really rich will always escape his clutches and any extra burdens will fall on the hard pressed middle earners.

No more blogging for a time while I go away for a couple of weeks. I leave you with this quotation: "The Erewhonians are a meek and gentle people, easily led by the nose and ready to offer up common sense to the shrine of logic if any philosopher should rise up and convince them that their
institutions are not based on the strictest principles of morality." (I must pass this on to Iain Duncan Smith whose mad pursuift of social justice will cost us dear. There is no natural justice (why don't I look like George Clooney?) so why should we need social justice?

Food for thought while I am away.

Triumph for the West

2011-08-26T15:53:00.000+01:00

I really cannot let them get away with this - the idea that NATO and the western world have defeated that nice Colonel Gaddafi with air power which would have achieved nothing without thousands of rebels on the ground all firing off their kalashnikovs into the air. (Where do they get all that ammunition so that they can waste so much of it? When I was out there I only had ten rounds for my rifle and they were often inspected in case I had been selling them.) But what riles me is the idea that we are making Libya safe for freedom and demuckracy just as we did in Iraq and Afghanistan. They might get a little demuckracy by being able to change their governments without bloodshed but they will be subject to the tyranny of the majority who are enslaved by magical superstition - in their case the Islamic religion which allows very little freedom. Bad luck to the rebels. I hope that Dave does not get praised for this as he was on holiday during most of the action.

Peaches are still good:

Gals around here are just like leaches

Play in your orchard and steal your peaches.

I dressed him all up so he could look good,

Now he flirts with all the gals in my neighbourhood;

And now I'm tired of fattening frogs for snakes.

I think Rosetta Howard sang this song. Does anyone know?

Au Revoir to Gaddafi

2011-08-24T11:46:00.000+01:00

Oh dear, that nice Colonel Gaddafi seems to have been overwhelmed by a mob of rioting rebels with some air support given by the British taxpayer at a cost of a billion pounds. ( I wonder if this includes depreciation as our poor old airplanes will have to be replaced soon.) I wonder where the Colonel can be. Perhaps he is staying as a guest with his old friend Tony Blair in one of his houses. We have not tried to capitalise on his misfortune but allowed the French, Germans and Italians to do oil deals with the rebels while we wait our turn. How generous we are when we are broke. Never mind. We do not need oil because all our energy will soon be produced by those handsome wind farms even if we cannot afford it.

I think that I am going to give Leonardo (coming soon) a miss. Somehow he has never excited me and the last time I saw "The Last Supper" it was almost invisible. All the same he is admired by the critical few. Actually I much prefer Veronese's version of the same subject covering a whole wall in a room at the Accademia in Venice. Complete with feasting disciples and monkeys there is also a portrait of the artist leaning against a pillar. When told by the Inquisition that it was impious and had to be altered he simply changed the name to "The Supper At Emeaus". What a man.

Google Comes

2011-08-19T16:58:00.000+01:00

I once asked Google how I could make an atomic bomb. Google after all knows everything. But all I got was a recipe for a cocktail. Nevertheless Google does know almost everything. There is no need for reference books of any sort - dictionaries, biographies, geography and any other -ography. All of them are stored in this search engine that has pulverised the opposition and come out on top. Now all the knowledge that anyone needs is stored in a small computer. The next step is to develop an implant so that we can all have one and carry it about as a spare brain. This is not pie in the sky or science fiction; it is almost here. In this way it will be possible for people to know nothing about anything but at the touch of a button know everything about everything. "Oh brave new world that has such wonders in it"

Dave is watching the Test Match at the Oval. What a shame that he and the schoolboys are not doing as well as the England team which is building up a big total. Instead he has troubles abroad - Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya - and at home - riots, unemployment, no growth - that he has not got the guts to tackle. One thing he is is sure to regret is the recognition of the rebels in Libya. When that nice Colonel Gaddafi has gone the country will dissolve into anarchy for a time to emerge as yet another Islamic state. I feel a letter to him is due - after all it is only two years ago that I told him to abjure the fifty per cent rate of income tax and now he is hinking of doing it. This would require action and Dave does not do action. So it is bad luck for us all.

Gangways

2011-08-16T16:29:00.000+01:00

I am surprised that we have not heard much about Anthony Burgess' book "The Clockwork Orange". It is now forty years ago that he wrote it, telling of a future when gangs of drugged teenagers roamed the streets indulging in GBH, rape and murder. Stanley Kubrik made it into a film and then had it withdrawn because he thought it might influence idle youths. The book itself is brilliantly written in a sort of private language that the central character has invented. But it was repulsive and I am not sure that I ever finished it.
However we have made a society in which it is impossible not to have gangs of young men in the streets which are much pleasanter than their overpopulated homes - homes that are made horrid because the politicians pay people to have children. And the more they reproduce the more money they get. So it is much more fun for testerone-charged teenagers to be outside with compatible friends, frightening pedestrians and taunting the police force which we are now beginning to believe is corrupt as well as no good at controlling riots. Further thoughts will follow.

Mentioned in Despatches:
I am greatly pleased to see that the little town of Garyan - forty miles south of Tripoli - is still holding out against the rebels who are trying to kill that nice Colonel Gaddafi. There it was that I once mixed drinks as barman in the officers' mess. (The drinks were served by Sudanese waiters.) I was excused boots and parades and lived rather well. Surely it was one of the cushiest skives in the Middle East Command.

A Riotous Time

2011-08-12T16:27:00.000+01:00

This is no country for old men/ The young all up in arms....or something like that. Anyway I am too old to bang on about the prevalence of moral relativity or the materialistic society or any other excuse the left can dig up for what is really just deliberate bad behaviour. But I would likke to say something about the police who are coming in for some flak now. Whatever that fat fool Prescott might say we do not want more police. We could actually do with fewer police, more intelligent police, better trained police who will get on with their job which is to protect the public and maintain the rule of law. Do they spend their time doing too much paperwork? That is because they are no good at doing paperwork. They should be given secretaries. The last time I made a statement to a policeman he took it all down in pencil on a small notebook. Perhaps things have changed a bit. I certainly hope so. There is after all nothing to worry about as Dave has promised to start squirting water out of cannons with only twenty four hours notice. Luckily he is battle hardened and his experience of almost defeating Gaddaffi with expensive bombs will be useful to him. And now I must stop thinking about civil unrest and find something else to brood about.

Downloading CDs onto my trusty laptop I come across a turrific song called "Barrel House Bessie from Basin Street" What fun Jazz used to be! Now you can study it at one of our so-called Universities.
Oh, my Gawd!

Cary Grant

2011-08-08T14:47:00.000+01:00

Betsy Drake was once married to Cary Grant. When she was asked if he was gay she replied,"I don't know. We were too busy fucking for me ever to ask him." This from the NY Review of Books.

The Interpretation of a Dream:
A strange dream: A parcel was delivered and when I opened it I found only a small square photograph frame. What can it mean? Perhaps it is I meant for me to tell me that I am a square with nothing inside me. Surely not. What about Sigmund himself? He certainly had nothing inside him except a load of rubbish, but with his obsession about sex he was probably not square. I know! It must be Dave. He is certainly square as his efforts to appear trendy are just embarassing. And there is nothing inside him except the next speech on soon forgotten policies. (I have not heard him banging on about the Big Society for ages) And why is he lolling by a pool in Tuscany? This is an ideal time for him to tell the members of the Eurozone that they are all mad and they should listen to him. It has all been an obvious mistake from the start. But he won't because he is a square with nothing inside him.

Barbara Pym

2011-08-06T13:00:00.000+01:00

The re-issued Barbara Pym novel, "Civil to Strangers" is a delight. Do not read it unless you like a beautifully written English comedy of manners seen from a special slant viewing a world full of ineffectual men controlled by capable and charming women. Her reputation declined during her lifetime when she could not find a publisher until she was rediscovered by Philip Larkin and Lord David Sizzle. But I expect you know all this. If you don't then you will find all her books on Amazon.

This is a work of welcome escapism from thinking about the follies of our lords and masters who are now all on holiday after their latest attempt to paper over the cracks in the eurozone. Another dismal failure. Dave and Boy George and little Cleggy are all out of the country. Does it matter? They are no good at anything except projecting images of themselves as "statesmen". They might as well stay on hols while the financial world crashes around the idiots who voted for them. Help! I am one of them. Back to sleep, perchance not to dream.

Rain in the Night

2011-08-04T13:05:00.000+01:00

Woken by rain which we ought to welcome so will do my best. Fed up with politics as everything is going wrong and will get worse. Is this a sympton of old age? But my grandhildren will live to be a hundred with pensions destroyed by inflation. What a dismal legacy. We must take short views and think happy thoughts.
Virago have reissued an early Barbara Pym novel, 'Civil to Strangers' and it is winging its way towards me while I lie in bed thanks to Amazon. (I have more or less given up Heywood Hill since the new Duke was so nasty to John Saumerez Smith). Elegant comedy of English middle class life, I hope. (I am not doing well with the Kindle and will be happy to have a book in my lap again)
A good summer for fruit. Raspberries and strawberries and now really luscious peaches.

The nectarine and curious peach

Into my hands themselves do reach;

Stumbling on melons as I pass,

Ensnared by flowers, I fall on grass.

There. Now I feel better.

Tuscany again

2011-08-03T11:53:00.000+01:00

Small delay in blogging due to computer glitch. Meanwhile poor Dave can't even get an Italian waitress to carry three cups pf capuccino to his table. No wonder he can't control his cabinet. As he is nothing but a slick PR man he seeks popularity at all times when if he had any sense he would realise that this the time to get tough with the Lib-Dems who dare not face a General Election. I should have gone into politics. It such an easy job with no qualifications required, no medical checks and only the occasional interview to impede progress to the top. Anyone can do it.

Tune in to Sky Arts 2 tonight to hear Barenboim playing Beethoven. He is doing this every evening this week ending with the Emperor Concerto on Friday. I suppose we should thank Rupert M for this marvellous series of programmes. He must have done something good.

Happy Holidays.

2011-07-29T15:38:00.000+01:00

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

2011-07-26T13:10:00.000+01:00

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

2011-07-23T15:28:00.000+01:00

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

2011-07-19T12:02:00.000+01:00

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

2011-07-16T12:34:00.000+01:00

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

2011-07-14T11:54:00.000+01:00

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.

2011-07-12T11:35:00.000+01:00

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

2011-07-07T16:46:00.000+01:00

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.

Movement of Shipping

2011-06-23T17:16:00.000+01:00

This will be the last blog for a couple of weeks as we are making a tour by boat around what is still the United Kingdom. It will give us a chance to see the coast of Scotland before it breaks away to a life not plagued by debts nor deluded into thinking that they still have a role to play in the world. Once the Scots have their independence we can grant the same boon to the Welsh and the Conservative party can then govern England forever. As such we shall no longer have to spend our time and money propritiating the Celts and will have no need for a trimming Premier like Dave. Incidentally should not the English have something to say about the matter? As usual it is all being done over our heads and we are being ignored. Chesterton comes to mind (there is a vogue for him at the moment):

Smile at us, pay us pass us,

But do not quite forget

For we are the people of England

That never have spoken yet.

Dave's latest gaffe is his message to his generals, "I'll do the talking; they can do the fighting." He has forgotten that thanks to his defence cuts they no longer have the weapons they need to fight wars that nobody anticipated. Anyway he is going to go on bombing Gadhaffi's stronghold for "as long as it takes". Is it now the government's intention to kill Gadhaffi or do we just want him to surrender? Why can't we stop meddling?
The kindle is being charged up for the holiday and tho I don't yet like reading without holding a book I am building up a small library of books out of copyright which are free. I shall watch nothing but tennis on TV to be free of reminders of the folly and stupidity of our lords and masters to which I shall return with my usual disgust.
Wimbledon is full of grunting women this year, But they look pretty good so we shall have to forgive the noises they make. Sharapova started it all a few years ago and she has now gone on to greater things, earns eighteen million dollars a year and is now promoting a new range of chocolates called Sugarpova. Good luck to her.

Mainly Politics

2011-06-21T16:07:00.000+01:00

Christopher Isherwood wrote about Sally Bowles in "Goodbye to Berlin." Others turned it into "I am a Camera" a stage play then a film. After that it was turned into the musical, "Cabaret" on stage and then in the cinema. Isherwood only wrote once about this sad promiscuous night club performer but collected royalties all his life. How nice for him. The winner of the competition has donated his prize to "Homes for Heroes".

Sad news last week. Our last aircraft carrier is being broken up in Turkey - we used to build ships now we can't even dismantle them - and a huge order for railway rolling stock has gone from our wonderful government to Germany. On the bright side I am sure that Dave is going to defeat Gadaffi in a few months time when we shall have fired off all our missiles. Happily we can afford to replace them though we can't keep libraries open. Dave wrote a very nice article in suitably sloppy prose with split infinitives and prepositions at the end of sentences to convince us that all families would benefit from having a father as well as a mother. What a novel idea. Is this a part of the 'Big Society'? I think we should be told.

Cabaret

2011-06-16T15:12:00.000+01:00

Where on earth did this come from at 3.00 a.m?

Sally was very good to Christopher;

She kept him going all his life.

It's just as well he wrote a book of her;

She would have been disaster as a wife.

A prize of £5.00 will be sent to the first recipient of this blog to identify the characters and the book.

The world of politics has clearly gone mad. The two Eds (Milliband and Balls) want tax cuts while Boy George and Vince Vicious want to retain the high levels of tax imposed by Balls when he was Gordon Brown's puppet master. Let us scrap the coalition and leave the country to Labour who will soon clear up their own mess.

Cantuar

2011-06-13T11:29:00.000+01:00

Suddenly everybody hates the Archbishop of Canterbury. We are treated to a lot of stuff about "this turbulent priest" and how he should not interfere in politics. Why not? One thing he is right about is that no one elected the coalition government. What happened bwas that Dave and little Cleggy got together after an inconclusive election and did a deal so that Dave could go to live at No.10 and some Lib Dems would suddenly find themselves in government. A shabby compromise which will stick because the Lib Dems know that they would lose their seats in a snap election. So Dave could get tough and do what he likes but he wont because he is a big soft pudding. And nothing will change at the NHS.

Saturday TV is total crap apart from repeats of Dad's Army. What a shame we do not still have bank managers like Capt. Mainwaring. He may have been pompous and self satisfied but he was honest conscientious and hard working. We used to have one like him and gave him lunch once a year. But about ten years ago he was swept aside and put out to grass to be replaced by a succession of anonymous young people who aspired to higher things. We never got to know them. When I see the sort of crooks who get to the top as bankers nowadays I often think of our nice Mr Philips and regret his passing.

George and the Gragon

2011-06-08T13:03:00.000+01:00

Boy George has stuck his head over the parapet and told us that all is well with the economy and the government is well on its way to meet its targets. But they are far too modest and we now need growth as well as cuts. One simple way to stimulate growth would be to abolish the fifty per cent top rate of income tax. But he won't do this because he is scared of Vince "Soak the Rich" Cable. And little Cleggy wants even more people brought into it. What a shame we have not got a truly Conservative government. We could have one if Dave was strong enough to ignore the Lib Dems who will never break up the coalition because their members are all frightened of losing their seats. So we blunder on with a government which nobody voted for. I hope our Apache helicopters are all right. They weren't meant for protecting civilians, which is the only reason for us to be in Libya.

Summer is really upon us when the tennis courts turn from red to a luscious green. What a relief. And make the men wear whites and even long trousers again. The women too should be soberly attired except for the divine Sharapova who can wear what she wants as long as she keeps on grunting. And how good the strawberries are. It must be due to global warming.

Roses, Roses, all the Way

2011-06-03T18:40:00.000+01:00

Ask me no more where Jove bestows

When June is past, the fading rose......

but June has only just begun and the roses are fading already. It must be the warm weather and the drought brought on by that and the lack of rain. I blame Global Warming even though they have had plenty of rain in the north of England and it has not been all that hot there. The answer is simple. Global Warming is taking place in the south of the country but not in the north. Without this belief the whole Climate Change conspiracy would fail. And what would we do with all those billions of pounds we are going to spend in meeting this phantom challenge? I suggest that we use them to buy more bombs to drop on Tripoli. After all, if we keep on long enough, one of them must finally hit Gadaffi and Dave can take all the credit for what will be his first experience of warfare. I am glad I am not one of those Libyan civilians who are being protected by NATO.

Tears are round, the sea is deep;

Roll them overboard and sleep.

Second Rate Blues

2011-05-31T11:32:00.000+01:00

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

2011-05-28T15:49:00.000+01:00

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

2011-05-23T15:53:00.000+01:00

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

2011-05-19T18:41:00.000+01:00

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?

2011-05-16T12:17:00.000+01:00

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

2011-05-12T12:23:00.000+01:00

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

2011-05-10T12:33:00.000+01:00

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

2011-05-05T12:32:00.000+01:00

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

2011-05-03T13:04:00.000+01:00

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.

The Bells were Ringing

2011-04-30T12:04:00.000+01:00

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

2011-04-27T11:25:00.000+01:00

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

2011-04-26T15:35:00.000+01:00

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

2011-04-25T11:35:00.000+01:00

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

2011-04-21T14:54:00.000+01:00

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

2011-04-18T18:14:00.000+01:00

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

2011-04-15T16:46:00.000+01:00

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

2011-04-13T12:45:00.000+01:00

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

2011-04-12T12:23:00.000+01:00

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

2011-04-07T11:34:00.000+01:00

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

2011-04-04T15:02:00.000+01:00

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.

Click on Blue Link "Night Thoughts" for proper display of this blog

Foreign Adventures

2011-03-31T16:51:00.000+01:00

I knew it! We've backed the wrong side. The best we can hope for now is that a genuine civil war will break out ending with Libya breaking up into what it always was - Tripolitania and Cyrenaica. We should never have got involved as I said at the time - not least because we cannot afford to pretend anymore that we are a major world power. Thanks to Blair, Brown and Balls we are virtually bankrupt, yet at the moment we sem to prefer spending on bombs rather than books. "Whom the Gods wish to destroy they first drive mad." The Palace of Westminster is becoming a loony bin.

A lovely letter arrives addressed to 'Dear Robin' from a number of people I have never met. They all seem to be show biz celebs among them Joanna Lumley and that man who was Darcy in a wet shirt. They all want me to vote in favour of the Alternative Vote. I shall take no notice of them. Actors have been always been distrous politically - look at Vanessa Redgrave. If we have AV, Clegg and Vince will have the balance of power forever. What a thought!

Please click on the Blue "Night Thoughts" link below to see the complete blog

Bombs are Good for You

2011-03-29T17:56:00.000+01:00

In the wee small hours of the morning it occurred to me that the last time the French and the British ganged up on a country in North Africa - also ruled by a Colonel - it all ended in tears. I hope it won't happen again but I am frightened of all those untrained undisciplined rebels firing off their kalashnikovs. They are sure to kill some civilians and we only went to Tripoli to protect the ordinary people many of whom must be neutral. Never mind. I am sure that Dave and the Dwarf know what they are doing.

I keep looking on the map for the village sixty miles south of Tripoli where I spent some time mixing drinks for the officers of the 52nd Observation Regiment R A. But that was many years ago when it only had one shop and one brothel. It must have grown since then. The name was Garyhan. Let me know if you see it.

Budget Blues

2011-03-27T16:33:00.000+01:00

Summer time and the living is easy.......No its not. We have to put up with Boy George's budget full of tax increases - direct and indirect - and talk of "cuts". We shall not succeed in achieving the "cuts" because as soon as enough people protest Dave and the schoolboys will back down. Even if by some miracle we do what we say we are going to do we shall only be back we were in 2008 when government borrowing was already out of control. Meanwhile we go on adding to our deficit by £1 billion a week. Never mind. Dave is taking charge of the military operations above the skies in Libya so all will be well there and we can go ahead with scrapping warships.

Rear of the Year
Last year's winner was Fiona Bruce whom you may have seen introducing the "Antiques Roadshow". This was in spite of my championing Harriet Harman who was also in the running. No short list is yet available for this year but I am thinking of proposing Kate Middleton. Her bum is well spoken of, but perhaps we should wait until the wedding is over before making a final decision.

Janet Daley in the Sunday Telegraph on taxation is worth reading. Boy George will ignore her because he thinks he is soooooo clever.

Spring thoughts

2011-03-25T15:37:00.000Z

Spring is a time to cleanse one's mind and rid it of thoughts of the world, peopled by those who rule our nations and ourselves and spend their time thinking of new ways to tax us so that they can play with their missiles and bombs and strut around the world making it worse than it was before. What are we doing in Libya? How do we get out?

For the time being I shall ignore them while flowers are blooming and there is warmth in the sun. Tomorrow I shall have to think again of the morons, idiots and nincompoops who hold sway over the impotent masses of the world. In this weather it can easily be put aside even in a patio garden in London.

Meanwhile the mind from pleasures less

Withdraws into its happiness;

The mind, that ocean where each kind

Does straight its own resemblance find,

Annihilating all that's made

To a green thought in a green shade.

Unpleasant comments must wait until tomorrow.

Undeserved Praise

2011-03-24T15:08:00.000Z

I suppose you have to admit that Boy George did quite a good job of reading out the speech that someone else had prepared for him. The worst thing that anybody has said so far is that it is a neutral budget and that his forecasts for growth will be wrong again. How kind everyone is to someone who is going to collect £589 billion from the long suffering taxpayers of our country and then spend £710 billion. That will mean that our debts will increase by £10 billion a month. The only good thing about it is that he proposes to scrap the 50% higher income tax rate in accordance with my representation to Dave when the ridiculous idea was first put forward brought in. But everybody knew that it was a non-starter when Brown (remember him?) brought it in.

Such were the dark thoughts of my mind in the early hours of this morning. I don't want to go on being depressing but Elizabeth Taylor was not "The First and Last Great Hollywood Star" as the Times would have it . I am sory that she is dead but she was not Garbo, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis or some others I could think of. She was more admired by women than by men and never exuded the sex appeal of Marilyn Monroe. Disagreement with this view would be welcome.

I will be more jolly next time with a special note on how well we are doing in Libya. Our troops will be landing there soon for another great triumph of meddling about in the Middle East.

On Cameron On

2011-03-21T16:17:00.000Z

It is impossible not to be reminded of the Iron Duke's comment, "I don't know if they'll frighten the enemy, but by God, they frighten me." I refer of course to the triumvirate who are running our latest entanglement in the Middle East - Obama, Cameron and Sarkozy. The first two are disappointing and I never had any hope for the third.

After the first excitement of dropping bombs and firing missiles which will please the Generals and other armchair warriors (they love playing with their toys) we can only hope that Gaddafi comes out with his hands up. The Times today is quite disgusting in its enthusiasm for more lovely pictures of explosions, death and destruction. It may be that they have got it all wrong and Gaddafi will tough it out. In that case we will have made another enemy and see many people die for no advantage to our poor country. And can we afford to do what we are doing? How can we afford to open another front when we can't afford libraries?

The BBC made quite a good stab at showing the world of Isherwood and Auden in the 1930's in Christopher and his Kind. Period details are so good. Auden got it right seventy five years ago:

It's farewell to the drawing room's civilised cry;

The professor's sensible whereto and why;

The frock-coated diplomat's social aplomb

Now matters are settled with missile and bomb.

We don't seem to have come very far.

HMS Tripolitania

2011-03-18T12:02:00.000Z

The last time that I visited Tripoli I arrived by boat on the troopship Tripolitania. It had been a German cargo boat when it was sunk in Port Said only to be refloated and done up sparsely to accomodate several hundred sea sick soldiers in hammocks. It was not noted for its speed and took ten days to go from Port Said to Tripoli. I was glad to get off it.

That is the obvious way to get into the town. So to put an end to Gaddafi's rein we should send a warship or two stuffed with marines who could land easily, storm the town and capture it and the colonel as well. With our typical genius for getting things wrong we are going to follow everything but this simple plan. We shall soon be dropping bombs on civilians who want to play no part in the rebellion while encouraging the insurgents in Benghazi to think that we are actually helping them. Another disastrous adventure in the Middle East. What with this and the catastrophe in Japan I had quite forgotten about the earthquake in New Zealand. Gloom everywhere. "Give me some civet good apothecary to sweeten my imagination."

So let's think about the Royal Wedding. This will be a heartwarming diversion from the ills of the world and give middle earners something to enjoy while the government is taking more and more money away from them. Two good looking but very ordinary people are marrying while the world looks on. Something for everyone to enjoy if they are not being bombed or threatened by earthquakes.

Poet Laureate

2011-03-17T14:12:00.000Z

Three o'clock in the morning is a good time for remembering that our current poet laureate has declared a lack of interest in the coming Royal Wedding. I have since discovered that she is called Carol Duffy and has impeccable working class origins being born in the Gorbals of Glasgow. Never having read her I turn to Google who has reams of her outpourings and give them a cursory glance. Laureates are not usually much good but this is the first time that I have found a poet who has been influenced by both Auden and William McGonnagle: A sample couplet strikes the eye:
It somehow does not just seem right

That over our beliefs we fight.

A banal thought in clumsy words. It is obvious that she publishes too much as there must be something better than this. Of course Spenser set the standard for verse celebrating a wedding:

Against the bridal day which is not long,

Sweet Thames run softly till I end my song.

"To be a poet is indeed very difficult ," as Dr Johnson remarked.

It has struck me that the ideal place for a millionaire to live in is London. There he can live in a fine apartment or possible a hotel (the Ritz) stroll down Piccadilly to have a shave at Trumper's, browse for books at Heywood Hill and follow this by lunch at on of the best restaurants that he will find anywhere. The evening provides more world class entertainment as London has the best theatres to be found. After that another restaurant then a night club with a lady of surpassing beauty from an escort agency. This will leave him plenty of time in the afternoon to make even more money so that he can carry on his enviable lifestyle. When he is tired of all this he can go into the country for hunting shooting and fishing. (Only in Scotland will he be able to shoot the grouse who come silently and very fast over the butts) . But why should we want millionaires? Watch this space.

Poor Dave

2011-03-15T12:18:00.001Z

Dave does not listen to me, which is all part of his defective mental equipment. I said that PPE was a useless subject before when the obvious subject for a potential Prime Minister is "History". If he had read that he would have surely known that it is not wise to tangle with a despot who is coping with an insurrection. To do this you need immense fire power and determination otherwise you are bound to get hurt and harm the unfortunate rebels who think that you are going to help them out of their troubles. When Hitler was faced with an insurrection in Warsaw in 1944 he killed 200,000 Poles. If Gaddafi does not finish off the rebels quickly he is quite capable of doing something like it to his own people and then turn on the people who kept on urging him to step down without the power to make him do so. What a sorry mess. Dave should stop poncing around on the world stage and stay at home to sort out the terrible problems that the Blair-Brown government left behind them.

Yesterday was the anniversary of Karl Marx's death. How kind of us to give him sanctuary in the British Museum where he could write the work that has done so much harm in the world. I have not read his work and am too old to do so now. Courage. There is a good overview of socialist thought in the 19th century in "To the Finland Station" by Edmund Wilson. When Marx was living in London he took pains to avoid another exiled revolutionary, Alexander Herzen, the author of a wonderful autobiography "My Past and Thoughts" available in paperback. Herzen was working for a peaceful revolution which was not what Marx wanted at all. What a shame that Marx won the race for the hearts and minds of so many.

Rich Food

2011-03-10T14:27:00.000Z

To Pierre Koffman's at the Berkeley Hotel with two much travelled friends just back from the Middle East keeping one jump ahead of rioting mobs and noticing only the beauty of the artefacts and the surprisingly good food. But Koffman's is seriously excellent tho rich rich. (I don't know much about Gascony whence he comes but I once went there to a town called Condom - a dreary French provincial town. I hurried on to the fleshpots of the Dordogne).

Rich - such is the nature of drowsiness - reminds me of the famous exchange between Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. Scott: The rich are different from us. Ernest: Yes they have more money. It is generally thgought of as a putdown - Hemingway putting Fitzgerald down for the count. But I think they've got it all wrong. Scott was not talking about plain rich people - he meant rich rich people, so cocooned in their wealth that ordinary experiences passed them by. They were the ones that fascinated him and Gatsby had to get as rich as them to be worthy of Daisy. I am glad to say that John Updike is on my side. Comments welcome.

Oh dear back to politics. Someone ought to tell Dave that when a major supplier of oil finds that he has a rebellion on his hands he (Dave) should wait and see who wins and then cuddle up to the victorious side instead of sending good will messages to the insurgents. We usually let the people we are backing down because we have not got enough guns and tanks and warships and now we are going to have still fewer of them thanks to the "Cuts" which will start any day now. As for Hague and his disaster with a helicopter raid or mission or diplomatic initiative, I don't know whether to weep or cry. The emissaries left behind their weapons as well as the helicopter so they will all be court martialed of course or they might get the MBE. Watch this space.

Jeepers Creepers and all that Jazz

2011-03-07T12:04:00.000Z

This blog is getting too like a piece of journalism. Blogs should be served raw and not cooked. OK. Let's go.

What has happened to America? It used to produce men of stature to run their country. I'm thinking of FDR, Truman even Nixon had some apparent ability. Now all they put up is men like Clinton and Bush who are there to represent all that is worst in the huge country whose middle west seems to be full of c inward looking and religious morons.

What has happened to the USA which has given me such pleasure from Henry James and Edith Wharton to John Updike and Philip Roth to mention only a fragment of its literature? Not forgetting all those wonderful Hollywood films, the hot dog, the hamburger, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. And this leads me on to jazz - the great contribution to happy music making from the American Blacks.

I was lucky enough to catch those little jazz bars on 52nd Street. Very late one night I was at Jimmy Ryan's listening to Vic Dickenson playing the trumpet when Ruby Braff was playing his cornet next door at Eddy Condon's. I got them both together and they obliged me by playing Jeepers Creepers for me. One was black and the other white - who gives a damn? (They are playing it to me now thanks to modern technology.)

Of course the blacks played with other blacks and the whites had to have their own bands. So the whites tidied up the black man's music and it was played at proms and other dances by people like Glenn Miller, Sammy Kaye and Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians. Yuk! It was left to Artie Shaw (white clarinet player once married to Lana Turner the sweater girl) to break the taboo and the black trumpeter, Hot Lips Page sat in with him as did Roy Little Jazz Eldridge. Tommy Dorsey pinched Sy Oliver (trumpet and composer) from the big black swinging band of Jimmie Lunceford. There Oliver did some of his best work - opus number one, Yes Indeed etc...He could not sit with the other trumpets but could sing with Jo Stafford. Wow. A black man singing with a white girl. (Can you believe it? But I speak as one who has ridden in a bus in the Deep South when the blacks were sent to the back of the bus.) Thank goodness the prescription did not last and by the time New York became the centre of the jazz world nobody cared who was black and who was white. Then Charlie Parker came along and spoiled most of the fun and jazz fell into the hands of academics and smart arse Frenchmen who sat around in the Blue Note in Paris wearing berets and taking notes. Jazz shoulld be listened to while strolling around with a drink. Aspirations towards respectability are fatal. It was a sad day when Duke Ellington gave a "concert" at Carnegie Hall. (How do I get to Carnegie Hall said the pedestrian? Practice practice practice.) I shall return to the subject later but now I am listening to Sidney Bechet playing the clarinet with such vibrato. I sat next to Kingsley Amis at a very prolonged lunch and said I had not got a good CD of Bechet. "Try Blackstick" "Is that good?" I asked naively. He threw back his head and shouted, "No. It's fucking marvellous!"

Cameron at Bay

2011-03-06T13:09:00.000Z

Those dark forces which hover over every computer-led enterprise attacked last week and were partially successful until driven away by my computer magician, Denise. This accounts for the rather eccentric delivery of blogs recently. The error has now been erased from memory and should not happen again.

What is Cameron doing? He is messing about in the Middle East when he ought to be at home overseeing the cuts he has proposed. He reminds me more and more of Anthony Eden. Here is another four letter word he may not know: "Suez". (Don't they teach modern history at Eton?). He funks carrying out the "cuts" while strangling growth with the top rate of income tax at 50%. We shall end up by getting the worst of both worlds i.e. inadequate cuts of irrevelant items and low growth dependant on the rest of the world growing. A neighbour is going back to her home town - New York. Taxation was the last straw for her so Boy George will get 50% of nothing instead of 40% of quite a lot. Well that will please Vince "Soak the Rich" Cable who has learned nothing from the last fifty years of differential rates of income tax. It will please Duncan Smith as well, as a step towards "Social Justice".

The Sunday papers are far too big and the articles far too long. No wonder they can't collect enough money from advertising.

It is now nearly a hundred years since Marcel Duchamp dipped a baguette in blue paint and called it a work of art approved by Tristan Tzara and the rest of the DaDa movement. Now we have a shark floating in formaldehyde. So much for progress in the arts.

Come back Terence Rattigan

2011-03-04T11:11:00.000Z

Long,long ago I was walking down Kings Parade when I met an amusing friend. It was so long ago that he was called a "queer" but that helped to make him even more amusing. He grabbed my arm. "My dear, I've had a wonderful week end with Terence Rattigan, the smart suburban playwright."

Recent revivals of plays by Rattigan, Coward and Somerset Maugham have sought to suggest that there was something more to them than they appeared at the time to be. One thing that they all had in common was their homosexuality, carefully concealed at the time from the Great British Public. None of them dared come out without risking a prison sentence and the middle class to whom they appealed certainly did not know this. All the same I feel that they were all nothing more than good entertainment although possibly Coward had hidden depths, only now revealed.

They helped the British drama to stand still until the post war years and Harold Pinter broke the mould with "The Birthday Party". I was lucky enough to see it before it was savaged by the critics in London and rapidly closed. Rattigan and the others wrote as if time had stood still since about 1914 and the modern movement in literature had never taken place. Pinter was the first to acknowledge and reflect the fact that Eliot and Auden had existed. I don't think Pinter ever recovered from the mauling and adopted enigmatic solemnity when comedy was his real metier. What a shame.

Migrant Labour

It is good to know that migrants are to receive the same benefits as the inhabitants who got here first. They will stop seeking work and make it easier for our own people to get jobs. They will walk straight into the poverty trap which is still a refuge for those who want to supplement their income with working in the black economy. I have had a letter from Ian Duncan Smith congratulating himself on having reformed benefit payments. He is a fraud and has only tinkered with the existing system. The real problem lies with Income Tax and the pursuit of Social Justice. I must work up the energy to reply to him. Meanwhile mentally challenged Dave makes bellicose noises about sending troops to Libya while disbanding our own forces to the extent of leaving our own country defenceless. It is no use appealing to little Cleggy who goes skiing when he ought to be "running the country". Should we laugh or should we cry?

Make our troops redundant by all means but set them to work by training them as teachers or joining the anti-terorist police forces where they have skills that we need. This will not happen as it is a sensible thing to do.

Theatrical musing

2011-03-03T10:47:00.000Z

Oscars and others

2011-03-01T10:45:00.000Z

OSCARS

Wasn't it exciting even if we all knew who was going to win? The usual display of some of the most beautiful people in the world led to the usual boring speeches of thanks. Did anyone actually say "and thank you to my little dog"? I am waiting for a recipient to say, "Thank you for this small hideous statuette but I want to complain about the food...." I was told years ago that Oscar was the name of the head waiter at the Algonquil Hotel where Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley and friends had their lunches. (When Anita Loos who wrote the Great American Novel ate there she was unimpressed by the talk.)

That leads naturally to the death of Jane Russell who starred in "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes". I well remember all the fuss that was engineered by the producer about the amount of cleavage they could show in their posters. What an excitement. The Puritanical but lustful public flocked to see her in a specially designed bra to support and reveal her splendid bosom. What innocence.

But the Oscars again. What a shame that one of our greatest actors was not even nominated although his photograph adorned the front page of "The Times" yesterday. There he was a little older and obviously wiser displaying a furrowed brow and hair greying at the temples projecting his deep concern for the troubles of the world while recalling at the same time the youthful exuberance of his brilliant youth at the start of thirteen years of New Labour Government which pauperised the country. I refer of course to Tony Blair the millionaire international statesman. From Tony the Boy Wonder to distinguished international statesman his career has just been one marvellous performance and I only envy him that small Queen Ann house that was once John Gielgud's. We must start campaigning for him at once.

And now the mad politicians are at it again hoping to settle internal warfare overseas with guns and bombs. But we cannot bomb them in case we kill too many innocent civilians. And we can't shoot them because we cannot tell friend from foe. (In any case all our troops abroad have got the wrong sort of gun. Nothing can beat the Kalashnikov as Max Hastings pointed out in a recent article in the NY Review of Books. The Middle East is bristling with them.) And the country is broke. We cannot afford in men money or materials any more. We probably can't even defend ourselves. All the same John Major was on the radio this a.m. talking about "military action" against Gadaffi. The Palace of Westminster is a mad house. Come back Guy Fawkes - all is forgiven.

Books etc in large font

2011-02-27T13:47:00.000Z

My letter on the Big Society published this week in the Spectator. Not worth reading if you have my previous blogs.

Gielgud's letters: Well written theatrical gossip from one who was always performing when he was not cruising the streets looking for beautiful young men. In New York his eyes were "out on stalks". Well edited with footnotes only when needed. Noel Coward on the other hand is a disappointing letter writer He has a tendency to drop into baby talk and the editor takes up as much space as the text. My favourite letters are those of Lord Byron edited by Marchant. Fifteen volumes all in their dust covers are in my shelves. They were presented to me by the M.A. as they came out.

Embarked on Tony Judt's book on Europe since 1945, written in the best American style of journalism in the U.S. I think it came from the founding fathers and later writers like Hawthorne and Emerson and the New Yorker. (I saw the New Yorker a few months ago and was not impressed. I started reading it at the end of the war when it was passed around like a samizdat(?). It had James Thurber, A J Liebling, E B White, Edmund Wilson et al plus all those wonderful cartoons. Things aint what they used to be.)
Anyway I had forgotten, if I ever knew, just how bad things were in Europe in 1945 with cities reduced to rubble, the people starving and diseased, the corpses piled up in the camps while the occupying troops indulged in their usual habits of looting and raping and becoming criminals. Some good books on the matter are coming out. The worst excesses of the "brutal and licentious soldiery" were kept hidden fron from the Great British Public who were too busy licking their wounds and trying to mend their almost destroyed country. The eighteen months when we stood alone may have been forgotten by David Cameron but perhaps Churchill was right when he said that this was our finest hour. By the end of hostilities it seemed far away.

Victory seemed almost as bad as defeat in some areas after the latter part of the war, when the crusade against fascism had become what Evelyn Waugh called "a sweaty tug of war between indistinguishable louts". Warfare demeans everyone, victors and victims alike.  Yet we go on with it and until recently had a Prime Minister who actually declared war without asking Parliament. We must have been mad to let him get away with it.

This is all terribly gloomy so I leave you with something that made me laugh out loud. Said by Ricky Gervaise when he concluding one of those award ceremonies, after he had thanked everyone he could think of, "And thank you, God, for making me an atheist." The Americans were not amused.

Books etc current affairs

2011-02-26T10:44:00.000Z

My letter on the Big Society published this week in the Spectator. Not worth reading if you have my previous blogs.

Gielgud's letters: Well written theatrical gossip from one who was always performing when he was not cruising the streets looking for beautiful young men. In New York his eyes were "out on stalks". Well edited with footnotes only when needed. Noel Coward on the other hand is a disappointing letter writer He has a tendency to drop into baby talk and the editor takes up as much space as the text. My favourite letters are those of Lord Byron edited by Marchant. Fifteen volumes all in their dust covers are in my shelves. They were presented to me by the M.A. as they came out.

Embarked on Tony Judt's book on Europe since 1945, written in the best American style of journalism in the U.S. I think it came from the founding fathers and later writers like Hawthorne and Emerson and the New Yorker. (I saw the New Yorker a few months ago and was not impressed. I started reading it at the end of the war when it was passed around like a samizdat(?). It had James Thurber, A J Liebling, E B White, Edmund Wilson et al plus all those wonderful cartoons. Things aint what they used to be.)
Anyway I had forgotten, if I ever knew, just how bad things were in Europe in 1945 with cities reduced to rubble, the people starving and diseased, the corpses piled up in the camps while the occupying troops indulged in their usual habits of looting and raping and becoming criminals. Some good books on the matter are coming out. The worst excesses of the "brutal and licentious soldiery" were kept hidden fron from the Great British Public who were too busy licking their wounds and trying to mend their almost destroyed country. The eighteen months when we stood alone may have been forgotten by David Cameron but perhaps Churchill was right when he said that this was our finest hour. By the end of hostilities it seemed far away.

Victory seemed almost as bad as defeat in some areas after the latter part of the war, when the crusade against fascism had become what Evelyn Waugh called "a sweaty tug of war between indistinguishable louts". Warfare demeans everyone, victors and victims alike. Yet we go on with it and until recently had a Prime Minister who actually declared war without asking Parliament. We must have been mad to let him get away with it.

This is all terribly gloomy so I leave you with something that made me laugh out loud. Said by Ricky Gervaise when he concluding one of those award ceremonies, after he had thanked everyone he could think of, "And thank you, God, for making me an atheist." The Americans were not amused.

More Memories of Tripoli

2011-02-24T13:10:00.001Z

It was 1946 when I found myself with the rank of Gunner on the edge of the desert, with a battalion of men waiting to be demobbed in a barracks sixty miles south of Tripoli. It was there that I became the barman in the officers' mess.
We had nothing to do except parade and polish some big guns that had been left behind. I was the lucky one and was "excused boots" as I mixed Tom Collins and G & Ts for the officers who at midday toiled up the hill for a relaxing afternoon of doing nothing. Like much of war service it was stupifyingly dull.
We had a library with several books. Fed up with answering the question, "Why can't you speak fucking English?" I borrowed a copy of Fowler's "Modern English Usage." It is still on loan but now in a bookshelf at home. It fitted in very well with the Faber Book of Modern Verse and selected works of Oscar Wilde and was carried around in my kit bag. We had an open air cinema with two films, "State Fair" and "Show Boat" the last with Paul Robeson. We also had records - 78 rpm 12". The only complete sets we had were Brahms' 2nd Symphony and Rachmaninov's Pagannini Variations. A General came to inspect us and was so appalled by our slackness that he took away our guns (big ones left behind by a proper artillery regiment). It is supposed to be the ultimate disgrace but we were delighted. I sailed home in a troop ship. On landing I was given some back pay - I was now earning 5/6 a day - and a badly fitting grey double breasted pin stripe suit which was given away by my mother to some passing tramp. That was the end of my military career and I was not even "mentioned in despatches".

Fragments ar 3 a.m.

I know nothing about economics but nor do economists. It is a pseudo -science which has no laws but only possibilities that sometimes work and sometimes do not. With Maggie we went through a phase of adulation for Hayek and Milton Friedman. Now it was all Keynes and it was his followers that got us into this mess. "Spend your way out of depression" was the cry but that led to our monumental debts. A "two fisted" policy is what we have got from Boy George. He lights a fire with low interest rates and then pisses on it with ill-considered and irrelevant "cuts". "Backwoodsman, spare that tree!"

The council have planted a tree outside our house, but it is the wrong sort of tree and will die soon. Now that is the sort of thing for the Big Society. Where are the volunteers who will dig up the tree and replace with the right sort. I have a spade which I will lend them.

Really the Blues

2011-02-23T12:01:00.000Z

I can't say how much pleasure I have had from the music played by big black men in New Orleans in the early years of the twentieth century. From the Deep South it found its way up the Mississippi to Chicago where it picked up some white musicians and carried on to New York, changing but remaining faithful to Count Basie's dictum, "I want four good beats to the bar and no cheating." After that it got hi-jacked by clever men who brought their intellect to bear on music that should come from the heart and not from the head. See Philip Larkin's essay on this, "Pound, Picasso, Parker". But that attacked the entire modern movement in the arts. More anon.

Mr Jelly Roll

I aint gonnan give nobody none of this jelly roll.....

Gonna wear out both ma shoes

When they play that Jelly Roll Blues........

That Bessie Brown so brazen and bol'

Laft in ma face and stole ma jelly roll

So now, I'm tired of fattening frogs for snakes.......

In the 1930's Lord Reith at the BBC, where Jelly Roll Morton, whose music was sometimes played on the wireless, was told of the origin of the great man's nickname. From thereon he had to be called J. R. Morton. How things have changed.

Dave's Problem

The answer is that Dave is not really very bright. He is lacking in intellect even tho he got a first at Oxford. Such a distinction is easy to obtain for anyone who works hard enough and can sit through an exam. In spite of this he has made some ghastly mistakes like forgetting the history of World War 2 and not knowing the meaning of the word "twat". This leads him into making appalling choices of advisors who he believes will do his thinking for him. They in turn have by the time he gets to them done all their useful work so he lurches from one catch phrase to another like a drunk man in the street lurching from one lamp post to another. How else can we explain, "we're all in this together" which is manifest nonsense as he and the Boy George will always be able to afford taxation however high it becomes. As it is he lays all the burden on middle earners who see their spending power whittled away day by day.

And this leads to "The Big Society" which neither he nor anyone else truly understands but he repeats it and repeats it like a chant sung by an impotent alchemist hoping to turn base metal into gold.

English Public Schools have always been very good at turning out dummies who come to occupy high positions. They have negative virtues like "A safe pair of hands" and look the part of a gentleman interrupted from doing something more important than running the country. This was deceptive when applied to McMillan who was much cleverer than he seemed but not to poor Dave who will make us all poorer without meaning to. These cheering words shoulbe enough on a foul February morning.

Update

2011-02-21T14:18:00.000Z

Blogging has been recently suspended due to battery failure on the laptop. A new one is winging its way towards me.

I am very lucky at my age in life to be so well looked after by Hilary who is quite simply a "Ministering Angel" and will henceforth be known as the M.A. This in spite of her own problems which cause permanent pain and may be compared to what Henry James called "my obscure pain" (This got him out of the American Civil War in spite of two younger brothers going out to fight. This is going to be literary name dropping week.)

Orwell's book about the Spanish Civil War is now finished leaving me with the problem of why is it that people will leave their own firesides, put on uniforms and find themselves lying in a ditch with rats running over them trying to kill a complete stranger against whom they have no personal animosity? It was this that so intrigued Tolstoy as Isaiah Berlin pointed out in "The Hedgehog and the Fox" and led him to write "War and Peace".   No answers to this but to recall that many people behaved bravely and thought they were doing their bit in the fight against Fascism - a very real threat at the time. Moving on to Tony Judt's book of European History since 1945. 800 plus pages will keep me quiet for a time. (Incidentally, Churchill once invited Berlin to lunch during the War and ended up with the wrong man and found himself drinking brandy with the composer of Alexander's Ragtime Band, Irving Berlin. I wish I had been a fly on the wall.)

Aaaaaaaaagh! Here is a horrible name to drop - Chris Patten, who is to become Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the BBC. Rod Liddle did quite a good hatchet job in the Sunday Times but failed to remark that Patten nearly scuppered the General Agreement on Hong Kong when he was governer. A special envoy from the Foreign Office had to fly out to Peking and reassure them that Patten was a paper tiger. Actually more like a paper pussy cat. The worst sort of Tory always trying to placate the left while publicising his own trendy views. He flew out to Hong Kong with two dogs - one called whisky, the other soda - and two leggy teenage daughters in mini-skirts. Once there he did a new broom act which only infuriated the Chinese on the mainland and soon disillusioned those in Hong Kong. He is supposed to be able to stand up to those already at the BBC. But I could do that and would have no trouble in sacking the Depouty Controller of Light Entertainment (Fishguard division) and any other administrator who just got in the way of better programmes. Perhaps I should start with the man who gave 15 million pounds to a foul mouthed slob whose name will not sully this blog.

Medical bulletin:
                          Head: Just about OK
                          Body: Mostly functioning
                          Legs: In need of complete replacement

I have discovered what is wrong with Dave but this will have to wait until the next exciting instalment.

Foreign Affairs

2011-02-18T12:35:00.000Z

It's farewell to the drawing room's civilised cry

The professor's sensible wherefore and why;

The frock coated diplomat's social aplomb

Now matters are settled with riot and mob.

The Middle East is in turmoil. What must we do? Nothing nothing nothing. Let's hope this is the end of our meddling in other countries' affairs. The trouble is that once the schoolboys get into those grand Victorian buildings in Whitehall they think we ruled the world again. We should send nothing abroad but good advice instead of money and troops. We have experience and are prepared to share our views with the rest of the world. How grateful they should be.

Duncan Smith has unveiled his "radical" plan to reform benefits and cut out the poverty trap. Will they work? The sole object of taxation should be to raise money and do nothing else. It should be divorced from morality and we should stop hunting the chimera of "Social Justice". The new method of payment will probably not cover the cost - ever increasing - of travelling to and from work. And I still don't know what legitimate income you need to compare with benefits plus £300.00 a week (net cash) earned in the black economy by doing a little light gardening (for three days work) in a leafy suburb. I asked Smith but he did not answer my letter.

The solution of course is to abandon diferential rates of income tax and have one flat rate of say 20%.
It does not do any harm in Hong Kong and has actually been reduced recently. My son Simon lives there and can't afford to come home to our ruined country.