Saturday 14 July 2012

Back in France for a week for some great music

Illats, sout-west France.
In France for a week which, as this is the third year running, I might well now call my annual visit to eat well and listen to some baroque and renaissance music at several of the many concerts being staged as part of at least two summer festivals at various Bordeaus wine chateaux. Last night was my first this year, an enjoyable, if a little odd, performance of pieces by Pergolesi (he of the Stabat Mater, but he did a lot more besides. Samuel Barber used to say he got very ticked off indeed when people kept asking to hear his Adagio for Strings and assumed that was more or less the sum total of his output).

Performed were various arias from several Pergolesi opera (incidentally, I didn’t know until Thursday night that Pergolesi died when he was 26). The performers were a soprano, a women on various recorders, a chap playing a theorbe (look it up, I had to, but basically it is a stringed instrument with between 12 and 15 strings with an extra long neck), a chap on harpsicord and a third chap on a viola de gamba (which is not an stringed instrument covered in prawn - good pub quiz question that: which musical instrument is intricately related to prawns? Answer: none of them).

The oddness came from - and I am still finding it very hard working out why - various intermission and interruptions by a Punch and Judy show. Made me laugh a great deal, but: why. The programme notes (in French, a language I have no mastery of whatsoever, but I can laboriously read some of it and get the gist) point out that Pergolesi was intricately related to the city of Naples as was the commedia del’arte and its main character Pulcinella (from which we get our Mr Punch, a derivation of the anglicised Pulcinello),  but as far as explanations go, that’s a non-starter. Pergolesi was well-known for his comic operas (or so Wikipedia tells me - I don’t actually just happen to know that kind of thing) and there was interaction between the soprano singing her songs and Mr Punch. Perhaps, this being France, it was sophisticated, something which always leaves us Brits standing out in the rain. Still, the music was good. It was held at the Chateau Smith Haut Laffite.

Last night at the Chateau Caronnieux it was the turn of a certain Maxim Vengerov, performing a Handel sonata for violin and piano, a solo Bach partita and then Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata. His accompanist was a certain Itamar Golan, and looking up the chap and whatever relevant details I could find, it seems the programme we got, as well as two of the encore pieces, were exactly the same they performed at London’s Wigmore Hall at the beginning of April. My aunt an I saw Vengerov last year at the Chateau Smith Haut Lafitte, but he didn’t really perform a great deal, but gave a masterclass. Itamar Golan is a handsome chap, but to my eyes didn’t look anything like a concert pianist and more like a hard man in the French securite - stocky and square-jawed. Shows what I know.

On Monday we are off to Chateau Gravas, which I dont’ think I know, for an evening of South American piece played on guitar and, I think, saxophone. Not very baroque or renaissance, but what the hell.

Thursday 12 July 2012

Will someone please save me from all this London 2012 bollocks? A shot in the back of the neck would do the trick

I hope I am not the only one utterly underwhelmed by the coming Olympic Games 2012 in London. Perhaps I’m now just a grizzled old whingeing cunt, but everything about it manages to piss me off. I’m not going to noodle on about ‘the Olympic ideal’ but for God’s sake where is even one ideal? From where I sit, the 2012 Games are simply about money and how to make fabulous amounts of it. Long gone are the days when the athletes and sportsmen and women taking part were gifted people doing something for the love of it and for the challenge to be the best in the world at whatever they were attempting. The athletes are now all professionals keen to win because it ups their value in the sponsorship and advertising market and gets them on the world’s talkshow circuit.

Elsewhere we witness the piss-awful spectacle of sponsors cutting up rough in order to protect ‘their investment’ and suing the fuck out of anyone who dares even to come near encroaching on their territory. I can’t remember which credit card company it is who has ‘won the franchise’ to do whatever they were bidding to do (piss in everyone’s cup of tea, I should imagine), but is seems if you are unfortunate enough not to have one of their cards, you will be unable to pay for anything using your credit card and I read somewhere that you will also be unable to use one of the many cash machines which are being installed on the Olympic site.

One measure of the dishonesty which pervades the whole sorry exercise - which, incidentally is costing the country a cool £12 billion, several billion more than we were told it would cost - is that the 2012 Games are being billed as ‘great for Britain’. Bollocks. No one outside London is going to benefit in the slightest economically, and a great many people in London will be at a disadvantage - I read the other day that tourists not interested in the Games are giving London a miss this year and hotel room bookings are down, although that might also have something to do with several greedy hotel chains upping their room prices substantially to make extra moolah from the number of Games visitors expected. You can find more info on that particular piece of heartening news here.

Here in Britain, we are being entertained by a number of Games-related cock-ups ranging from outrage that the British Army is insisting of parking tanks on the top of residential tower blocks beside the Olympic stadium in order to deal with a terrorist attack, to looming chaos on London’s streets with attendant misery for commuters as all roads leading into to London will be partially blocked to non-Olympic traffic (overnight many roads have had the seven Olympic rings painted on them to reserve them for Olympic traffic along with the warning ‘Fuck off this lane if you know what’s good for you, squire’).

There was talk (and a debate in the Commons) on whether capital punishment should be temporarily introduced to deal with all and sundry convicted in Her Majesty’s law courts of not showing due and sufficient deference to ‘Olympic traffic, athletes, officials and all others connected, however loosely, with the 2012 Games’, but the idea was knocked on the head when the authorities realised that they would be unable to have made, test and commission the necessary number of gallows before the end of October, by which time all Olympic-related hoo-hah would have died down and by then popular support for the measure could be expected to have fallen. (Incidentally, Britain abolished the death penalty more than 40 years ago for murder, but you could still be hung, drawn and quartered for treason as late as 1999.)

The good news is that rather late in the day Transport for London (aka London Transport) has discovered that parts of the elevated section of the M4 leading into London are crumbling and has had to shut the motorway from Junction 3 all the way to Junction 1. They promise the work will be sorted out by July 29 when the Games start but, fingers-crossed, that’s just so much whistling in the wind and just so much hooey.

Adding to the irritation of the closure of almost all the roads leading into London is that whereas every January and February colleagues come in and bore me rigid with their war stories about how they they were caught up in traffic chaos because of

Thousands of London commuters struggle to work

snowfall (or what passes for snowfall in this gentle island nation), they are also coming in and boring me solid with their war stories about how Olympic road closures are causing chaos and a commute which usually doesn’t take them more than an hour is now taking them up do two days, that although they might be here and now, they are, in fact, only just staring last Monday’s shift.

There was a great deal of fun and games over the allocation of tickets which was due to be done by lottery. Absolutely no one is pleased with the outcome, especially as some ticket prices for the less popular sports are being slashed to drum up the numbers and, for example, those who paid several hundred pounds for a ticket to the ballroom dancing quarter-finals are very put out to find that similar tickets are now being flogged off at a fiver a piece to avoid the embarrassment of rows and rows of empty seats. Adding insult to injury, loads of freebie tickets are doing the rounds and can be obtained depending on who you know. A friend has obtained ten tickets for the opening ceremony simply because the chap down the pub he got them from has a gay brother who recently gave Lord Coe’s hairdresser a blow-job. It simply isn’t funny any more. Give me a break, please.

Tuesday 10 July 2012

Continuing my romantic history: introducing SH, various shenanigans and I admit to being just a tad embarrassed

I threatened – I think that’s the right word – gradually to give a rundown of my former girlfriends and lovers as I have previously given a rundown of all the cars I owned. I must admit, and said so here, that I felt the exercise is slightly tacky, or even more than just slightly, but what the hell: I get about 20 readers a day, 19 of whom are apparently only interested in seeing a pic of Mandy Rice-Davies (info I have gleaned from the stats page of the blog) and apart from my sister, a good lady in Carolina and a chap who went to my old school (although before I went, or after – I can’t off-hand remember) I know none of you good folk out there who happen upon this blog. So here goes.


My first was WR. She returned to Edinburgh and by chance be hooked up again in those glorious weeks of freedom when I was knocking around after my finals had ended but before graduation and I could simply do as I pleased. She took me to her bed again, and paid me the compliment – a rather left-handed compliment, mind – of telling me I was a better shag than I had been four years earlier. I have no doubt she was right. She had previously trained as a nurse and taken herself off to Australia. She had now returned and eventually took herself off to Canada.

Term started in October and I was now in my second year. I can’t remember where and how I met SH, but I do remember we got it together when we went to a party at a farm where a group of my friends lived. They were all in a band called Fat Grapple (a silly name, though by no means any sillier than other names thought up by bands then and since). SH was young for someone in her first year of university – her birthday was in October – October 16, in fact , so it had either been a question of going just before her 17th birthday or waiting a year. I, as the saying is ‘fell in love’ with SH and – this is the embarrassing bit – more or less followed her around like a puppy dog. She didn’t actually discourage me, but looking back I must have been a pain in the arse. Guys can be like that – the accepted wisdom is that the mature later than girls (if at all I hear some of you women say).

Trying to recall that year now, in order to write this account, I find I can’t really remember that much, simply isolated incidents. But I do remember coming back to start a new term and one of her friends gleefully telling me she had been seeing some other guy. I was devastated, though I now realise it had more to do with feeling rejected – my apparent self-confidence was no more than skin-deep – than any worth she might have had.

We had planned to move into a small cottage together in Tait’s Lane off Hawkhill close to where Hawkhill merges with the Perth Road. I’ve just taken a peek at Google maps and find that cottage has long been pulled down and Tait’s Lane is now looking rather respectable with loads of yuppie houses down the side where our cottage was. Despite the fact that we were no longer ‘going out’, we did move in. She took the upstairs bedroom (it was a small cottage and upstairs there was only the bathroom and the bedroom) and I took one of the bedrooms downstairs. The third bedroom was taken by Arthur MacDonald, who became a good friend but with whom, sadly, I have lost touch.

Arthur was one of the leading lights of Dundee University’s ‘revolutionary’ movement and prominent in a group called International Socialists. Either that one of one called Solidarity, I can’t remember which. The two groups, as is the way of such movements, were at daggers drawn on ideological grounds, although I doubt even they, if pressed, would be able to tell us what those difference were. Arthur was a humourless cunt for about a year, then suddenly rediscovered his sense of humour and after that was very good company. More of Arthur later, perhaps, in a tale which involves another girlfriend, coincidentally another SH, her promiscuous nature – although if would only be fair to add that it turned out she was schizophrenic – and a dose of the clap she passed on to me, having caught it from Arthur. It should tell you something of my affection for him and how much I valued our friendship that I soon forgave him, especially as I have no doubt my schizophrenic girlfriend had made all the running and Arthur was not the kind to turn down a shag (as they call it, I’m told).

I eventually moved out of the cottage after SH – the first one now, not the schizophrenic medical student – began shagging not only a trendy psychology lecturer about town, but also his wife. And as the guy was – and still will be if he’s still alive – a shit of the first order, I shall name him: Martin Skelton-Robinson. Two-faced cunt. By this time I had overcome the worst of my love-pain, but I didn’t want to hang around.

SH went on to live with the drug dealer, one Ian Hunter, now dead, I knocked around with for a few days in that period between the end of finals and graduation. In fact, it was because of him that I hooked up with WR again: Ian and I had gone to Edinburgh – although I can’t remember why and, anyway, we were more acquaintances than friends – and come the evening had nowhere to stay. He was all for dossing down in the park. I wasn’t (never have been) and it occurred to me to get in touch with the only people I then knew in Edinburgh, WR sisters. They told me she had returned from Australia, gave me her phone number, Ian and I went around there and dossed down in her living room – better than the fucking park, you’ll agree – and the following day Ian buggered off somewhere (probably to try to score more drugs as it was all he was interested in) and WR took me to her bed.

While she was living with Ian SH was both dropping a lot of acid and got herself pregnant, carrying on dropping acid during her pregnancy. To this day I’ve wondered how it will have affected her child who, being born around 1972, will now be around 40. SH was quite bright and from Dundee, she went on to do a masters at Lancaster University.

I hooked up with her many years later in the early 1980s when I was back in Scotland visiting my uncle Pat and aunt Lou, who were living south of Dalkeith where my uncle was the bursar at a girl’s boarding school. I had driven into Edinburgh and as in some pub or other near The Scotsman offices where Arthur was now working as a reporter. He like his drink, did Arthur, but eventually had to go back to the office. But he told me SH now lived in Edinburgh. I rang her and went around to her flat. We chatted and had several glasses of whisky (for me on top of however many pints of cider I had drunk in the pub with Arthur) and at the end of the evening I drove home the the 20 miles to my uncle’s house. And that I didn’t kill myself is a miracle: usually when we have had too much we realise we have had to much. But I was so drunk, I decided to see how fast I could drive all the way to Pat’s place. I was touching 80mph on roads not made for more than 40. Some angel just must have been watching over me.

That’s the last I heard of SH. Writing this, I seem to have a dim memory that she was due to get married at the time we had our drink at her flat, but it really is nothing more than a dim memory.

Saturday 7 July 2012

So let me get this straight: Bob Diamond has discovered the God particle, but he’s a shit, so Newton was right all along? No? OK, how about this: the banks and those lovely people at Cern are costing us all an arm and a leg, but - sorry I’m lost. Completely. And for all those who like to eBay, a few home truths and how to try to ensure you get what you want without paying through the nose. (No secrets, just common sense)

My Economist arrived this morning, on time for a change, and this evening - just about 45 minutes ago, in fact - I sat myself outside in the fresh air (it’s finally stopped raining) with the magazine, two cigars and a glass of ice and white port (which I can highly recommend - far more macho and far classier than mere sherry, although that, too, is very pleasant with a cube or five of ice).

As usual, I start by reading what those dear fellows at the Economist like to call their ‘leaders’. First off was one about the Libor scandal (and its first cousin the Eurobor - bloody euro freaks never miss a trick, do they), Barclays and Bob Diamond. The thrust of the piece was that this is just the tip of the iceberg and if the Libor baffles you, be prepared to be even more baffled



God’s particle (apparently)
over the coming months and years. What with Fanny Mae, Fanny Mac, sweet Fanny Adams,  Northern Rock going tits up, the demise of Lehman Brothers, RBS almost but for the financial genius - or should that be stupidity - of Gordon Brown and, I suppose, various European banks being bailed out, it would seem that the writing is on the wall for our banks. But of course it isn’t.

There will be a lot of outrage, some exceptionally incisive and quite often witty soundbites, various inquiries, perhaps even a Royal Commission or two before it is back to business as usual. The only change will be, to use a saying quite prevalent in the media, same shit, new broom. Why? Because governments worldwide need those with money more than those with money need governments.

Then it was onto the next leader, one all about the ‘discovery’ of something called the Higgs Bosun. This discovery, the dear Economist informed us, was a ‘triumphant elucidation of the laws of physics’. They now know, we were told, that the Higgs Bosun exists, because all those clever chaps at the Large Hadron Collider in Cern, Switzerland, finally came across ‘deviation’ in ‘particle behaviour’ they weren’t expecting.

OK, I am playing a little dumb here and in broad - very broad - outline I do know what the Economist is getting at, but I am finding it a tad difficult, if not to say a tad impossible to get even a little bit excited. The Higgs Bosun ‘discovery’, apparently, is so stupendous because it confirms the ‘Standard Model’ of reality. Without the Higgs (as we in the know like to call it to distinguish our more superior intellects from those who refer to it as the Higgs Bosun) that Standard Model would fall apart. With it - well...

What bothers me is this: first there were the Greeks who referred to the ‘atom’ as such because it was the ‘smallest possible’ and crucially ‘indivisible’ particle. So far, so good until physicists quite soon went on to divide that ‘indivisible’ particle into electrons and protons. Meanwhile, Newton (who everyone now thinks was gay, but not only is that another entry, but one which isn’t, thank goodness, even interesting) did all his stuff (which I shall quickly gloss over, mainly because I don’t really know that much about it). Then there was Albert Einstein (of whose work I do know a little more) but even though he demonstrated that there is a lot more to it all than Newton realised, he was merely skirting around the problem of what is what. That’s where the Standard Model, various bosuns, quarks and suchlike come in and where I and I should think you, too, bow out. But you see where I’m going to: Einstein trumped Newton, Newton trumped the Greeks and now the Standard Model trumps Einstein.

Being, in my more pompous moments, an empiricist - as opposed to all those whacky, mainly French, Descartian rationalist - I can’t help feeling ineffably cynical. It won’t be in my lifetime, but at some point in the future various bods and bodesses, all of them far, far cleverer than I could even dream of being, will snort in derision: those Standard Modellers, eh, what a joke! And they thought they had cracked it! Well, listen to this!

What has this to do with the bankers, wankers, hankers, chancers and and deadbeats upon whose greed we all rely to keep our democracies afloat? Well for one thing this: both they and the marvellous folk at Cern are costing you, me and Mrs Trellis in North Wales a shedload of money. And then some.

However, please console yourselves when next your pension can no longer buy you warmth and food: it’s all for the best, both what those wonderful Cern people and those marvellous bankers are doing. You might not realise it but, well, if you do actually accept that Christ was divine, Allah is merciful, God was an elephant and the only way to be happy is to want absolutely nothing at all, my advice is simple: believe. As they say, ignorance is bliss.

PS I haven’t resorted to referring to the Higgs (see above, saddos) as ‘the God Particle’ because even for this blog that really would be a cliche too far. And the obvious crack is to try a joke or two about the ‘Li-bore’ and ‘Euro-bore’. But do you know, dear reader, it’s so fucking obvious that even this tart can’t be tempted to attempt it.

. . .

This is apropos nothing whatsoever, but I thought I might add my two ha’porth worth. I regularly buy stuff on the eBay (usually computer stuff I really don’t need, but read on anyway) and I am continually amazed that so many people don’t understand the two simple principles of bidding and buying on eBay. I’m not saying I always get what I want, but I can say that when I do get what I want, I never pay more than I want to.

First off, when to bid: leave your bid until the very last moment. It is foolish to alert others interested in the item you want that you, too, are interested.

All you will do by bidding early is push the price up even higher, possibly higher than you want to pay, as others try to discourage you and get the item for themselves. All you will do is - human psychology being what it is and all of us all too often being our worst enemy - carry on bidding for the item for no better reason than YOU want it and you’ll be buggered to be bested by some other, faceless, creature out there in cyberspace. Yes, you will get what you wanted, but you will pay far too much. I know this from experience. Believe it or not, I am just as stupid as you are, perhaps even more stupid, but at least I now know that and try to do something about it.

The problem with leaving your bidding until the last moment is, of course, that you can’t always be at a computer at the time the auction ends in order to put in your final - and, you hope, winning - bid. The answer is to use one of the several services available which will place your bid for you, at the last moment. I use ezsniper - you can find it here. Sign up to one of these - it costs almost nothing but is very much worth it.

The second, and most possibly more important principle, is to decide just how much you want to pay for a particular item. If others want, and are prepared, to pay more, so be it. Just decide for yourself how much that item is worth to you and don’t be suckered into paying more. So when you use one of the bidding services, as I use ezsniper, put in your top bid. I’ll repeat: if others are prepared to pay more, so be it.

Keep in mind that you did not want to pay more - it was not worth more to YOU - and if they outbid you, what the hell: they are paying - as far as YOU are concerned - over the odds. Never forget that the world is not going to end tomorrow (although for some poor saps it will, but you could bet your bottom dollar it won’t be you) and there will be other ‘opportunities’ along in due course. Remember: NEVER pay more for anything than you want to. Yes, sometimes you won’t get what you thought you wanted, but that’s the price you pay for peace of mind. In other word, that’s life.

Amen.

. . .

I’m in the writing mood (several thousand glasses of white port, of course, have nothing to do with it) so I thought I might bring my most loyal readers up to speed on my holiday/travel arrangements. Non-loyal readers have my dispensation to bugger off and do something else.

Tonight is Saturday, and I am off tomorrow for my usual schlepp up the A303 to London to work my shifts which, apparently, justify the huge sum the Daily Mail pay me every week for sitting at one of its desks and doing as little as possible.

This week, however, I shall not work on the Wednesday but make my way to Gatwick airport to catch a flight to Bordeaux to visit my favourite aunt Ann (in fact a step-aunt) and attend a serious of Renaissance music concerts. These are being held out and about in Bordeaux (the area not the city) and I always enjoy them. Plus it is nice to have a week off, do even less than I do at work, pretend I am a man of the world and sleep a lot more. The great thing about being on holiday is that you can wake up, turn over and go back to sleep again. For some reason I can never go back to sleep when I am not on holiday. I lie awake (having woken at about 7am) telling myself that I don’t have to get up, but I can never drop off again as I can when I am on holiday.

Writing of holidays, my brother Mark and I are planning another joint two weeks away in some gite or other in France. As I know he never reads this, I can reveal (as in ‘reveal’) that of the many reasons I have for going away with him - he’s very good company and my favourite brother for two - I also like to get him away as otherwise he leads a very solitary life. At the beginning of last year, he suffered from a very bad bout of shingles and I decided that a holiday would do him good. So I was pleased that this year he has again agreed to come off with me for two weeks because I feel that two weeks away will do him good.

Why, some of you might be asking, don’t you go off on holiday with your family. Well, the short answer is that I would very much like to. The long answer - well, you’ll have to wait a while for that. We can’t always have what we want. In too many ways my wife and I life on different planets.

Sunday 1 July 2012

Ironically enough . . .

And the agonising goes on. And on. And on. We're in the shit, Europe is in the shit, the US is in the shit and, with a bit of bad luck, the rest of the world which relies on us buying their crap, their not so crap and their most certainly not crap goods, will also be in the shit if we stalwarts in the Western World (capital Ws to be discarded, perhaps, when our economies cut us down to size) can no longer afford to buy their goods.

I've long believed, and when in my cups proclaimed, that the only really universal theme is 'irony'. I don't by that mean the pseudo-cynical attitude in the West of disbelieving everything and everyone however sincere they are, but the original meaning of the word. That, funnily enough for an irritating modern habit, is a direct descendant of the (cribbed from the Ancient Greek εἰρωνεία eirōneía
- I 'have' no Greek so like everyone else these days I am obliged to crib from Wikipedia, an irony in itself,- meaning dissimulation or feigned ignorance. But I don't mean that. These days, irony means, for example, a man who has staunchly proselytised about the sanctity of marriage being cuckoled by his wife; or perhaps, and this I do know, the blind prophet Teiresias being the only one who realises - sees - what is really going on.

The irony of the Western philosophy - the zeal to establish 'democracy', 'capitalism', 'growth', 'liberalism' and although it is, of course, no philosophy whatsoever - is that at the end of the day it is just a prolix justification for what in our heart of heart we all suspect is simply bad, self-interested, greedy behaviour. Or if we don't suspect as much, we still, again in our hear of hearts, feel a little queasy about.

Take 'economic growth'. It seems to be an economic truism that 'economies must grow'. I once asked my brother why. He told me that 'economies' must 'grow' because the global population is growing and that we must ensure that - well what? That everyone is taken care of? That everyone gets a slice of the cake? Well, that isn't happening, is it? It is almost impossible to collate 'figures', but we do know that an extraordinary number of people, more or less in every continent, are living extremely shitty lives. I don't have the figures to hand but an extremely large number of people do not have access to clean water and suffer because they don't. An extremely large number of people toil and sweat for no reward at all except dying next year instead of this year. An extremely large number of people have no say whatsoever in how they are 'governed' at all. But, we are told, economies 'must grow. Must they? I rather doubt it. In a sense 'economies must grow' rather as a man in debt must keep borrowing in order to pay off his debtors. And the essence of that is irony. And that is exactly what we are seeing in the 'euro crisis.

Curiously enough I don't any more want to write about 'the euro crisis'. At the end of the day the 'euro crisis', for all the misery it will bring will, in time, be just another historical event, one to be analysed and dissected by future historians and economists, but one which, in time, 'will be in the past'. But will future nations, economies, societies and communities learn from all that analysis and dissection. No they bloody won't.

It's at this point that I am obliged to bring in another aspect of irony: many reading this (of which there are not very many at all) might feel inclined to demand 'change'. 'We must change things' they will shout, 'the system must be changed, and if necessary, violently. But change to what? Do you really manage to change how we, all of us, behave? Has any revolution anywhere, in the long term, actually change anything? Well, yes they have. The French revolution brought about, after a while, universal suffrage. The October revolution - which, 'ironically, depending upon which calendar you use, took place in November - meant that a substantial number of Russians were no longer serfs, were no longer 'owned' by land owners. And is are the lives of modern-day French and Russians any better? Well, in man respects they have improved beyond recognition. But 'ironically, in many other ways they are more or less the same. Russia once had a dictatorial czar. Now it has, arguably, another dictator called Putin.

Granted he can no longer, because of changing circumstances, rule willy-nilly over the lives of Russians but, in my analysis, that is only because Russia has a thriving middle class who will keep him in power because they are doing OK, thank you very much. France is, of course, very different. Only a madman would claiim that the lives of ordinary French folk have not in many, many ways improved enormously since 1789. But what is France facing today? At the very worse an economic crisis the like of which they have not faced for many years. Granted, it hasn't yet happened, and might nor even happen. But the way things are going, the best advice this pundit can give is: keep your fingers crosses and buy gold. But I have somehow slivered a long way from my initial diatribe.

Let me give you another example of irony: here in Britain while our NHS pays for women who cannot conceive normally to get IVF treatment so they can have children, elsewhere private companies abort several hundred foetuses by the day. While modern medicine beavers away tirelessly to find ever more effective ways to prolong life, our Western society has also started debating the 'morality' of euthanasia, which can be seen - can, I don't say is - seen as an efficient way of getting rid of old folk whose continued existence could present a heavy cost to society. That might well be seen as an 'irony'.

Here's another 'irony': while half the world (I say 'half' but let's not quibble about figures) still does not have enough to eat, the other half is suffering from an obesity crisis. And throws away food because it is 'beyond the sell-by date' and might therefore pose a threat to health.

So where is this all taking me? Well, I don't know. Were I 40 years younger I might well advocate a global revolution. But as I am not, all I can say, bathically (look it up) is: try to be just a little more honest with yourselves. I'm not saying don't tell lies, just don't pretend to yourselves, whoever else you pretend to, that you are not telling lies. Unfortunately, that's exactly what most of us do. Every time EU finance ministers hold a summit conference to 'sort out the euro crisis' and come up with 'a solution', they are all telling themselves lies. They know it's crap and we know it's crap. Time to read again Hans Christian Andersen's tale of The Emporer's New Clothes.

PS The ultimate 'irony' might well be that I am completely wrong. Oh well.