Killing time with a gratuitous kick at vino-loving francophiles

Bordeaux airport, Merignac

More time to kill, so as I am increasingly doing and lacking anyone to talk at, I have decided to post yet another blog entry, which would be my third in just a week. There’s not a great deal to write about, but as my prime intention is to pass the time, that might worry you rather more than it would worry me. Traffic on the motorway and Bordeaux ring road (rocade, my French is coming along nicely, and it isn’t an encouragement to play music as loud as possible) was average, so there’s nothing to report there, and I shan’t do so.

There was the usual rigmarole here at the airport in security checks, but I seem to be getting more used to it. Maybe it’s the wisdom of age. Maybe it’s just that I can no longer even be arsed getting uptight about something I can do nothing about. I should have discovered that years ago.

On the last two full days staying with my aunt I have taken off in the household car (and managing to scrape the left wind on the garage wall parking it last night). I set off on Tuesday to see a photographic exhibition in Langon, but contrary to promises that it was open from every day until the end of September, it wasn’t. It was shut. So I took off into town after I spotted a poster for another exhibition – water and places/towns in South Bordeaux – and eventually found it. It was as exciting as its title promised, i.e. not much, and furthermore everything was in French.

Now just as waiting for a bus or a train not due for another 30 minutes you are apt to read pretty much any and every poster available, from admonishments to keep the platform clean to suggestions about what to do if you ever find yourself at a loose end in Paignton or Blackpool or Chester or pretty much anywhere, I set about trying to decipher the exhibition. I can follow some written French to a certain extent, but after about ten minutes ‘reading’ the first exhibit, I gave up. Had I carried on in that manner throughout the whole exhibition, I would still be there next Tuesday (and on a practical note, would have missed my flight).

Earls Court, later

Back in Old Blighty after a relatively painless journey from Bordeaux airport (I started this entry in the Billi terminal café). There was something akin to controlled chaose at the airport, when for whatever reason, and with three flights setting off at the same time, passengers for all three flights were channelled into the same two passport control booths.

At 12.40 and with just ten minutes to go before our scheduled departure, there was a crowd of at least 250 people queuing up to show their passports and I did wonder whether the flight would leave without us. As it was it left just under 20 minutes late, which is pretty much par for the course for any short haul flight leaving later than 10am from pretty much anywhere. As it was we flew out to Bordeaux from Gatwick about 20 minutes late and boarding had seemed to go completely smoothly. Ah, the tribulations we jet-setters have to put up with.

. . .

Over the past 52 years I reckon I have visited about 20/25, perhaps a few times more, but can honestly say I don’t know the country at all well. My father was stationed in Paris for five years from 1968 on, but in those five years I probably only went home about eight times, every Christmas and then once or twice at Easter. My parents marriage was disintegrating (and my father had a mistress on the side back in London whom he married when my mother died suddenly at 60 after suffering a huge heart attack) and the atmosphere wasn’t very nice.

After that it was once or twice on holiday in the early 1980s (quite recent for me, the distant past for anyone under 30 (I often remind myself that 1986 to me, the year I joined the South Wales Echo, would have been 1959 to my father, the year he and his family went to live in Berlin, but anyone of my age and a little younger will know exactly what I am talking about). Ironically, with one exception when by brother and I spent two weeks in an out-of-season sky chalet apartment near Morzine in the Haut-Something or other Alps, every other visit, including to with my then girlfriend, Sian, was to the same area, Gironde. And to be frank the countryside there is nothing special.

So I know very little of France and unlike my brother and sister, who both attended a French school for five years while my father was working there, don’t speak any French. I mention the countryside because a little later today I shall be leaving La Pappardella here in Earls Court, where I am enjoying a class of wine, I shall be jumping into my car and schlepping all the way home for the next four and a half hours. And in doing so I shall be passing through some very lovely countryside. I know parts of Germany and I know a small part of France, yet – and I don’t think I am at all biased – English countryside, Wiltshire, Somerset, Devon and then Cornwall – knocks it into a cocked hat.

It’s not just all the bloody rain we get here, but there seems more variation. I really no claiming that France, Germany and the rest don’t also have nice countryside, just that vast swathes of those two countries – Niedersachsen (Lower Saxony) in Germany, for example – are awfully flat and dull.

. . .

Many Brits have a peculiar dog-in-the-manger attitude to France. I am not talking of all Brits, but those, for example, who might refer to wine as vino and sniff the cork when opening a bottle. Question their patriotism and they might be apt to reply that they ‘love the Queen’ and would certainly ‘die for their country’, but in many ways they seem to regard France as simply a better place, a leader in so many areas where, in their view, Britain lags well behind. ‘The French,’ they will announce, ‘know how to live,’ to which you would be quite entitled to respond ‘what the hell are you talking about?’ But your response will be met by an air of queit disdain that you don’t know what you are talking about.

The French ‘know wine’, ‘eat well’, are ‘superbly chic’ they will tell you, and although such men - it is always men - would be the first, if the occasion arose, to resort to that hoary old cliche that ‘to be born English is to win the first prize in the lottery of life’ (with Scots and Welsh men substituting ‘British’ for English), their gushing over France and all things French would make it seem they actually believe otherwise.

I, who likes food a great deal, am the first to admit that I prefer the French attitude to food and drink and would disagree fundamentally with such self-decribed francophiles. A visit to any supermarket or a stroll in any city, town

and village in France will inform you that your average Frenchman and woman know as little about fashion and chic as our average Brit. As for the conviction of the French that they are ‘a nation of thinkers’, I also beg to differ. Certainly, they seem to argue a lot more with each other and certainly they will discuss pretty much anything at length and then some, but that falls well short of somehow being intellectually in the avant garde.

As for food and drink, the French do seem to value quality more than the Brits, but I as someone who likes cooking, know that it is the attitude to food which differs, not the food itself. (I wish to God many of the items available in French supermarkets were available to us here in Britain. That they are not merely means that there is no call for it. If the Brits wanted it, you can bet your bottom dollar Asda, Morrison, Tesco, and Sainsbury would supply a far wider selection of cheeses and pate far, far better than the slush they offer at the moment. But, as I say, the Brits just aren’t interested.)

A meal is not something to be wolfed down in three or four minutes, but something to be enjoyed. Any meal eaten on any day in France is essentially as simple as one eaten in Britain. It is most certainly not all haut cuisine, but it is also most certainly not the unhealthy stodge that passes for food in Britain.

As for wine, well, there is plenty of the cheap rotgut stuff available in France and there are plenty of takers for it. If you like wine, and I do, you can get perfectly good wine in any supermarket in Britain, just don’t go for the very cheap stuff, bearing in mind that with with the production costs and tax imposed on it, it will be very cheap stuff indeed. Still, if you are one of those ‘j’aime le vin’ Brits who beetles off to France every year to enjoy life as the French do, you’ll still be thinking I haven’t a bloody clue what I am talking about.

An afternoon in Langon drinking pastis, smoking a cigar and chasing down a viable wifi connection (as you do)

I am sitting outside a café in Place J. David (and I have no idea who he is was) in a town called Langon in the Gironde, South-West Frace, doing what we all seem to do in such a situation, apart from refreshing ourselves and possibly lighting up. I’m looking for wifi. Why, of course, I don’t know and, more to the point, well, why? Theoretically, my 3G connection should be enough (I am on my iPad), but of course Sod’s Law is kicking in and it isn’t. But why should I need or even want wifi.

Well, of course, I don’t, but that is obviously beside the point. I could try to justify it, but I shan’t. I shall simply offer an explanation. I have just taken a picture, then cropped it, then tinkered with it, and it seems to me a reasonably good picture typical of provincial France at pretty much any time. I wanted to post it on Facebook (look me up if you want, Patrick Powell, one of several Patrick Powells, but I’m sure you will sooner or later be able to choose the right one) but I can’t because the … scrub all that, solved it.

I’ve got to say that for one reason or another I prefer to be completely alone on holiday. It’s not that I don’t like staying with people (Marianne), but that when I go on holiday, I feel completely free. There’s no supper to get back to, no timetable of any kind. I can just suit myself. There are, of course, slight drawbacks if, like me, you are the sociable sort and, for example, enjoy eating a good meal or visiting a good concert or exhibition in company, so as to compare notes.

Well, despite that drawback, I just love having no deadline whatsoever. None. And I love, just love mooching about aimlessly, going where my nose takes me. And in company that usually doesn’t work if, for example, your companion doesn’t like mooching about aimlessly and there’s the sense in the back of your head that you don’t want to be boring. And one thing I like doing is finding a pleasant outdoor café like this one and just sitting (or, as is the case here, blogging.

About 30 minutes ago I took a picture, this picture, where the guy was what I was taking the picture of. But because I didn’t want to make him uncomfortable, I made out that I was simply taking a picture of the street and he happened to be in it. Then I cropped it to what you can see here. Deadline, a deadline, looms. Langon is about a

30-minute drive from where I am staying and I am taking my aunt out to supper tonight. And I have to shave and get changed, so it is off with me quite soon. Damn.

So, a short blog entry for a change. More’s the pity because I do so like rambling on about absolutely nothing. Trump is now threatening to destroy North Korea, but I have no time to pontificate on that (and Lord could I pontificate!), so au revoir ici (j’espere). Hope that is right and not bloody awful French.

And an entry pretty much in keeping with the title of this blog, in which I fly in a plane, wonder what planet Jean Claude Juncker is on as yet again he bangs on about ‘ever closer political union in the EU’, remember once more why it’s lethal for me to drink at lunchtimes and – well, nothing more really – BUT DON’T GIVE UP

Illats, France.

This is a late addition to this blog entry, but I am putting it here upfront, because the rest of this entry is so stupendously dull that I doubt anyone would carry on reading and get to it. Earlier on today, my aunt (see below) announced that Francis Coppola’s (or to give him his full name Francis Ford Coppola, though I really can’t see what the ‘Ford’ is necessary, I mean it’s not as though his last name is a boring old Smith or even Powell) recut version of his classic Apocalypse Now, usefully re-titled Apocalypse Now Redux (which makes it sound related to an anti-vomiting medication) would be showing on French/German channel ARTE. The reason she told me was that it was a ‘VO’ screening, original version.

Well, we all sat down at 8.5pm (20.55 for fucking Eurohphiles) and the film started. In bloody French. My aunt (see below) expressed her disappointment, and I thought ‘sod, it, I was looking forward to this’. Finally, after about 45 minutes of French dialogue – er, I don’t speak French – I gave up and announced I was going to bed.

But I knew that a few months ago I had downloaded the film – in English – and promised myself that when I got back to Old Blighty, I would scour my 17 laptops looking for which one it had been downloaded to. But, dear friends, there is a god: it was downloaded to this one, the trusty small, 11in Lenovo x121e I take on my travels. So guess what I am going to do once I have added this to my blog entry? Watch the film? Well, why not?

This blog entry was started several thousands of feet up in the air, for no very good reason than that I have never done that before. In fact, I can see a series coming on, a series of blogs written in unusual places or circumstances: a blog written (obviously at some considerable risk) in Russian president Vladimir Putin’s private lavatory, one written while simultaneously trying to break the record for eating the most doughnuts (US ‘donuts’) in an hour while typing with one hand.

Well, this blog entry is being written, though by necessity will not be posted while flying easyjet EZY8019 from Gatwick to Bordeaux, mainly because I am bored, don’t really want to read the Economist and watching a film on my iPad (on which this entry is being written) is not as easy as it seems because I find the noise of the engine tends to come through and dialogue is surprisingly difficult to understand.

But first things first: I, as everyone else who came to Gatwick to fly off somewhere (as opposed to all the staff in the many shops, bars and cafes selling tat, drinks and grub at hugely inflated prices – I had a Tony Powell moment when I was asked to pay £3.55 for a regular, i.e. ‘small’, cappuccino and made my feelings plain) had more or less to strip naked to pass through security.

Now I obviously fully understand the reasons for the whole rigmarole, but it always puts me in a bad mood and makes travel by plane such a pain. I like the flying, it’s the stripping off and hanging around that pisses me off. Today our flight – and not one towards the end of the day, but the 9.40pm to Bordeaux – didn’t leave until 10.25pm.

It did, though, make me realise that I would make a rubbish refugee or economic migrant. And for once that isn’t some cheap, silly joke: given that their lot doesn’t involve mere 40-minute delays and that they are treated like shit by pretty much everyone they come across, they have my wholehearted respect. If I were a refugee, there would be not one but a great many Tony Powell moments, until they come to an end when I am shot through the head by some thug who got fed up with all the whingeing.

. . .

The big news this week, or rather the 17th biggest news this week given that the wee chappie in North Korea has sent another rocket off across Japan which arguably is rather bigger news, is that one Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European made his ‘state of the union’ address to a gathering of the few who can still find it in themselves to be interested and in which he banged on about chasing forward ever faster towards ever greater political union, an EU army, EU-wide this and EU-wide that. ‘Europe, he declared, ‘has the wind in its sails again. Well, perhaps, perhaps not. As usual we would have to wait for at least 50 years and preferably far more to get a balanced, reasonably objective account of how the EU fared once Britain had upped sticks and buggered off in a huff and few if any of us reading this will be around then.

I read the report of his speech in the Guardian, a paper which is not known for its Brexit tendencies, but even it was remarkably sniffy about Juncker and his speech. It pointed out that the contents of the speech were more fantasy than anything else, given that not a small number of EU members who might well be keen on most aspects of the union are – for any number of reasons – not at all hot on ‘ever closer political union’. This is something Juncker is apparently still big on.

As for Brexit and Juncker’s take on it, you pays your money and you makes your choice as to how important the great man thinks it is. The Guardian reported that he spent less than two minutes addressing the issue. You can read more details here.

The Daily Mail on the other hand made a big thing of Juncker’s references to Brexit, which is no great surprise, of course, reporting that the great man insisted Britain would regret leaving the EU and a second account here.

There, in a nutshell, is the problem for anyone trying to find out objective accounts of this another matters. The Mail says one thing, the Guardian another. And given the choice of two interpretations most of us accept the one which best reflects our views. But then it was ever thus.

 . .

I have now been here in Illats for a few days, days which are following their usual pattern. My aunt, who is basically Irish but who has lived in France for more than 50 years does things the French way. So lunch is the big meal of the day. It’s not that the French treat themselves to several haut cuisine dishes at every meal, so by ‘big meal’ I mean main meal, even though it does always – in her household and even though it is essentially a simple meal – consist of hors d’oeuvres (pate, cruditie, that kind of thing, then the main course, then cheese, then fruit. And it is not all gulped down in four minutes. I should though point out that my aunt (strictly speaking my stepmother’s sister, but I regard here as an aunt and her two sons as cousins) and her husband are both over 80 and grew up in a different age. Supper is something simpler, often just salad with dressing, bread and a bit of cheese. But wine is drunk at both meals, and it is the wine which does for me.

I can’t say I drink a great deal, but even a glass of wine at lunchtime can knock me out for the afternoon, and it is usually two or three glasses rather than just the one. Obviously, I am not being forced to drink, but I do like a leisurely meal and nothing makes a meal more leisurely than a glass or three of wine. I can’t say I know a great deal about wine (at home I stick to one of two brands of Spanish Rioja and although neither is the cheapest in the supermarkets, buying them most certainly doesn’t risk me breaking the bank), but my aunt’s husband – who may no longer drink alcohol for health reasons – does, like many French of his age know a bit and buys in good wines, which are always a pleasure to drink. So after lunch, I retire to my room, try to read, but very soon give in and nap on and off for an hour or two and finally end up feeling like death. Some people are refreshed by an afternoon snooze, some are not. I am not.

In the past few years I have been coming to Illats in July to take in several concerts at chateaux in the region, but it wasn’t possible this year, so I am here in September. There are, sadly, no concerts at the moment (in July there is are there different series of them) but last night we did catch a nine-strong group of Georgians singing their lusty hearts out at the Cite du Vin in Bordeaux (a very futuristic-looking building). Apparently, it was all part of a marketing drive to push Georgian wines and there was any number of brochures about Georgia’s wine industry, one claiming – not doubt truthfully – that the cultivation of grapes and wine-making began in Georgia around 6,000BC.

The singers (who each carried a foot-long dagger) had great voices and they harmonised as I have so far only heard the Welsh do.

Becker dead already? Good Lord, why didn’t anyone tell me? Oh, that Becker, not the Venezuelan basketball player. Really. Well, I suppose it’s got to happen to us all at some point. How old was he?

Here’s a surprise: I and my peers, friends and colleagues are all reaching our four score and ten – or getting damn close - and one by one ‘names’ we grew up with, especially musos, are falling off their respective perches. And the surprise? Well, the surprise is that they are all rather surpised that even though in the past folk have tended to kick the bucket pretty much at any time on from the age of 60, they (and their peers, friends and colleagues) expect somehow to buck the trend, to live on for ever if not longer.

Earlier this year it was Prince, and now Walter Becker has gone to meet his maker. I mention those two because I went a bundle over their music, and then some. In Prince’s case I have to admit that I was surprised by his death in that he was still only 57, but also that his death came as the result of a drug overdose. It was not, however, a ‘drug overdose’ as in ‘injecting too much heroin’ or suffering a heart attack after years of cocaine use and abuse  – Prince was, in fact, rather sniffy about using drugs in that way - but a ‘drug overdose’ in that to cope with pain from a damaged hip and to carry on working for days on end without any sleep, Prince had become addicted to painkillers and had been taking them in ever greater amounts. So it wasn’t actually ‘for the pleasure’ of taking drugs or, to use the ludicrous phrase which is often used by folk to try to demonstrate how broadminded they are, he was not taking the pain killers ‘recreationally’.

Becker, on the other hand, was at one point hooked on heroin, though I don’t know when the habit was formed and he did not die of an overdose. Nor do I – or anyone else apparently judging from the obits – know a great deal about the man. Each obit I have heard recites and recycles the same ‘facts’ as though they are cribbing their copy from each other: of his childhood we are told that he ‘was born in Queens in New York’ and that ‘he had rather a rough time of it’. What his parents were called, whether he had siblings and what became of them, what his ‘rough time during childhood’ consisted of we don’t know. I mention that because such details are known and repeated about his songwriting partner and the guy he formed Steely Dan with, Donald Fagen.

Then we are told that Becker ‘attended Bard College ‘a private liberal arts college in Annandale-on-Hudson, a small hamlet in New York’. Such an education at ‘a private liberal arts college’ does not come cheap, so it might be safe to assume that Becker’s miserable childhood was not due to poverty or race. At Bard he met Fagen and both found they had a lot in common – they liked the same jazz, they were into sci-fi and shared the same sense of humour. They formed a band or two (and, a usual factoid often included, comedian and actor Chevy Chase was once a drummer in one of those bands). And on it goes.

My point is that nothing much new is known about Becker apart from the details always trotted out. So: once he was addicted to heroin, his then girlfriend, a Karen Stanley, died of an overdose in his flat. A few months later, he was hit by a taxi in the street and spent a long time in a wheelchair and was confined to the wheelchair while helping to produce the album Gaucho. Except by then his habit made him inconsistent and unreliable (heroin does that kind of thing) and more often than not Fagen was obliged to do most of the work.

Final facts: both decided to put their partnership on ice and Becker took himself off to Hawaii where he beat the habit, married and became an avocado farmer (and I still can’t decide whether that last ‘fact’ is indeed a ‘fact’ or just another in-joke for the two). Either way it is now appearing in Becker’s bios and his obits.

Yes, there’s a bit more which is trotted out, but not much. You will now see him lauded as ‘a great guitarist and bass player’, but it is legitimate to ask why if he was so great did he and Fagen hire so many other guitarists and bass players? He could certainly play, but, for example, his guitar playing has - had I suppose - that noodling quality which can often give the impression of being great without actually being great.

. . .

The friend mentioned in the following (below) informed me a few hours ago that an incident at a Steely Dan concert he and I attended in London was referred to in the comments from readers which are appended to the obit which was published in The Guardian. Here it is. I took a look but couldn’t find it the reference to the incident. So I then googled ‘hotel california “steely dan” “wembley arena” to see if I could track it down. I couldn’t but reached the following, rather breathless, piece about Steely Dan. And here is the comment I left there. I have simply copied it and reproduced it here quite simply because it makes points I would go on to make here and – call me lazy if you like – it saves time.

I avoided listening to Steely Dan during the Seventies because it was trendy to do so. Then one day, in 1977/8 in a god-forsaken down-at-heel steel town in South Wales called Ebbw Vale where I was working as a reporter, I was going through the bargain bin in a newsagent’s chain — of all places, not even a record shop — and came across Aja. It was on sale for 50p (half of £1, about £2.71 in 2015), and at that price I bought it. Even if it was complete shite, at least it was cheap. [But] I loved it immediately and over the next few months I bought all the other albums, which I also loved. Then Gaucho came out, and I bought that and loved that, too.

I still like the music, though I only play intermittent tracks, and went on to buy Fagen’s first solo album — great — then his second, not at all so great, Becker’s first — great and even his weedy voice somehow works, and then SD’s comeback albums, in turn. I like those tunes, too, but something had gone missing.

I think it was their age and possibly because by then they were pretty much at the centre of New York’s art establishment, which whenever I’ve come across it, almost always on TV — I have no personal experience of it one little bit — strikes me as far to self-regarding for comfort, as in ‘Christ, aren’t we cool.’ A good example is David Byrne and his band who are fine as popsters but who seemed to think they and their acolytes are somehow ‘art’. No, you’re not kids, you were just another generation of popsters.

Becker and Fagen strike me as the same: pop/rock dies when some pretentious fuckwit wants to promote it to the status of art and all that ‘art’ brings with it: significance, importance, morality and loads of other crap. And Becker and Fagen seem to have bought into the whole pop as art notion completely.

In the early 1980s I heard an interview with them on Radio 1. I had tuned in eagerly, but was left distinctly disappointed: my then heroes came over as such self-conscious clever dicks that I wanted to puke.

More recently I and a friend went to see them play the Wembley Arena. It was (I’ve just looked it up) in 1996. And once again my one-time heroes showed themselves to have feet of clay: Becker, to his eternal shame, supposedly cool as shit Becker began with that corny old standby ‘hello, London, we love your fish and chips’ and received, as I suppose he expected and wanted, whoops and cheers from the faithful. I felt ill.

A little later — we were in about row three right at the front of the stage — I mischievously shouted to Fagen ‘why don’t you play Hotel California’, and boy did he hate it. This was right just as another song was going to start and it must have preyed on his mind throughout cos when it finished he — rather lamely, I thought — came out with ‘bad things happen to people who say that’.

But oh well, there’s still the music, especially the early music, and nothing can detract from that: music is music is music. But as for ‘the Dan’ and ‘cool’ and arty Becker and Fagen, er, I’ll happily leave the adulation to someone else.

. . .


Don’t get me wrong: I still love Steely Dan’s songs and music, Fagen’s voice and their individual solo albums (though Fagen’s Kamakiriad is, in my view, a little weak). It’s just (and I think I’ve said this before) the usual adulation makes me feel a little queasy. And when someone dies, it becomes intensified. My comment in the Guardian appended with the rest to the obit it was carrying of Becker and where everyone and his dogs was recording just what a sheer genius he was, that we would never see his like again (cont p94) consisted of asking whether ‘Anyone been down to Kensington Palace yet to dump flowers at the gate? It's got to happen, to honour ‘the People's Guitarist’.’ It was not a popular comment. The responses were:

It seems you can’t please all of the people all of the time.

It’s just that I really, really don’t go a bundle on all the canonisation and beatification, and boy does it go on. I’m praying that a certain Bob Dylan is in great health and will wait until I have popped my clogs before he, too, goes. I really don’t think I could survive the hoopla about him.

. . .

PS I was chasing around the ‘information superhighway’ – sorry, the web – looking a picture of Walt and found myself deciding whether to use one of him young or old, until I decided not to use one at all, when I came across this: a woman who claims she was married to Becker, but has been written out of all the bios. Well, you decide. . .

A sigh of relief as we witness the political suicide Jacob Rees-Moog’s way – same-sex marriage and abortion are wrong. It’s not what the country feels, cos we are a little more (what?)

Stopped off at my usual Wednesday evening haunt, The Brewers Arms, South Petherton, on my way home after quite literally working my bollocks off trying to avoid real work these past few days in London. It ain’t easy. Bosses are getting smarter and can spot a wrong ‘un like me far more easily than when I started in this racket in June 1974.

NB I always thought it was Monday, June 14, 1974, and smugly congratulated myself on having a ‘good head for dates’. Thing is, for no very good reason, I recently looked up June 1974 on my iPhone calendar and it turned out June 14 was a Thursday. And as I joined the Lincolnshire Chronicle (which at some point in the past 43 joined all the other dead newspaper in Heaven, when I don’t know) on a Monday, it must have been June 10 or 17.

Then there’s the date I started with the Evening Mail in Birmingham – January 4, 1980. Except it cannot have been – that was a Friday. And as January 1 was New Year’s Day, when no one works (or rather does even less work than usual), it must have been January 7. So much for having a ‘good head for dates’.

. . .

I began stopping off here because it has a comfortable outdoor smoking area, but more to the point, I can usually watch the second half of a game of football, often a Champions League match or, if not, a Premier League game. But, dear friends, there’s no football tonight, no rugby and no cricket. There might well be Formula 1, tennis, basketball or something else, but those sports really don’t grab me as much. So I decided to scratch that itch and write, and so here I am, posting. And boy is there much to sound off about – hurricane’s, the possible run-up to World War III, Brexit negotiations and various riffs thereon, and more domestically, the announcement by one Jacob Rees-Mogg that he doesn’t agree with same-sex marriage and is against abortion under any circumstances, even if a woman becomes pregnant after being raped. And who is Jacob Rees-Mogg?

Well, briefly, he is a Tory MP, though one who stands out rather a lot because for many in Britain he is the very definition of ‘posh’. Now, I don’t much hold with ‘posh’ (allegedly derived from the letters POSH appended to names on cruise ship passenger list of those who were well-heeled and could afford to pay for a cabin which was ‘Portside Outbound, Starboard Home’ and thus always had a view of the sea rather than less fortunate and less well-heeled folk whose cabin was ‘Starboard Outbound, Portside Home’ and who were obliged to put up with the less picturesque view of the coast).

‘Posh’ only impresses those, or rather is taken seriously only by those who don’t know what real ‘class’ is. And the beautiful thing about ‘class’ is that it is as equitably distributed among the different social ‘classes’ in Britain as are, say, long noses and not taking sugar in your tea. Real ‘class’ knows no ‘class’ distinction: you’re as likely to find real ‘class’ on the Coedcae estate in Ebbw Vale and darkest East London as among the ‘middle’ classes (and its ludicrously insisted upon sub-classes and variations - the ‘upper-middle class’, the lower-middle class) as that mythical entity ‘the upper class’. And pertinently you can find any number of folk who distinctly lack ‘class’ among those who oddly assume it is somehow related to income and wealth. And in my book anyone, but anyone, who pays any attention to what might be ‘posh’ demonstrates nothing at all except that she/he doesn’t have the faintest clue as to what ‘class’ is.

Here is young Jacob’s his Wikipedia entry but if you can’t be arsed to look it up, briefly he is the son of one William Rees-Mogg, former editor of The Times, was educated at Eton, went on to Oxford, then made his moolah in the City of London before starting his own money-making firm and who entered Parliament as the member for North East Somerset in 2010, a constituency which probably suits him more than Central Fife in Scotland, a strong Labour seat, were he went down like a lead balloon and reportedly simply couldn’t understand the locals. Most probably they couldn’t understand him, either.

Given his pronouncement today about gay marriage and abortion – Rees-Mogg is a practising Roman Catholic – it is ironic that as editor of The Times, his father William, although quite obviously a member of the Establishment, was rather broadminded and liberal in his views, although he was undoubtedly a Tory.

. . .

I should be a little bit more honest about my attitude to abortion. I am staunchly pro-choice, yet I am also, privately a little queasy about the idea. For me – 68 next birthday, for God’s sake – it is essentially the ending of human life, however immature that human life is. But there is a little more to it than that.

When I was 25 and working as a reporter in Lincoln on the Chronicle, I got a young 18-year-old girl pregnant. And when she told me, she also announced, in the same breath and in the same sentence, that she was going to have an abortion.

My immediate feeling was one of relief: but not relief that she was having an abortion, that my life would not become complicated and that I had dodged a bullet, but that I would not be called upon to help her decide whether or not she should have one. She had decided and that was that. She was due to start a university course and undoubtedly that was part of her thinking.

In a moment I was brought face to face, quite practically, not in some academic seminar of debate on the rights or wrongs of abortion, with the fact: and I realised, not intellectually, but in some more fundamental way, that I wasn’t as at easy with the idea as were others. Nevertheless, and I want to stress that, mine is a personal view and I do staunchly believe in pro-choice and that it is a woman’s sole right to decide whether or not she wants the foetus in her womb to grow and be born or not.

The girl’s termination was on August 29. And there are one or two details to do with the matter which I shan’t record here, but only because I don’t not just come out of the matter not at all well, but rather shabbily. But ever since, every August 29, I think of it all.

. . .

Rees-Mogg Junior (henceforth simply referred to as Rees-Mogg) has, over these past few weeks been touted as a ‘possible future Conservative Party leader’. This all has to do with the fact that the Tories are hopelessly split over Brexit (as in the United Kingdom relinquishing its membership of the European Union), and that is an irony in

itself. That is because the bloody stupid referendum called by the former Tory leader, David Cameron, was at heart just a shabby attempt to ‘see of the UK Independence Party’ whose gains in the pools and in the 2015 election had put the wind up the Tories.

Another irony was that UKIP’s gains were also far more at the expense of the Labour Party than most people expected. The referendum was thus called – in my view – for purely party political reasons, but now we have the mess. And an even bigger mess it will undoubtedly become.

Our current Prime Minister, Theresa May (Cameron resigned after the referendum result went against him, although I suspect he was rather relieved to jack it all in and be able to spend more time with the family money as he never struck me as what could be called a conviction politician) made a complete fool of herself by first announcing that she would not be calling an election before the next was due in 2020 before about-turning and then calling an election.

This was mainly because the Labour leader, one Jeremy Vladimir Josef Corbyn, popularly regarded as being on the far Left, was regarded as a dead duck, and May will have imagined that turning her slim House of Commons majority into a rather fatter Commons was a cert. Was it fuck. She ended up with a ‘hung Parliament’ (and made me £150 after my bet that she would came good).

So it is no longer Corbyn who is the dead duck, but Theresa May, and crucially it is her own party who see her as such. Furthermore, the Tories are still horribly divided over Brexit, half being staunch ‘Eurosceptics’ who imagine Britain leaving the EU will be pretty much Heaven on Earth, the other half – in my view the far saner half – believing (I would like to say ‘understanding’) that it is a sure road to economic chaos.

I shan’t recite the pros and cons about Brexit here, not just because they are as much a matter of opinion and hugely subjective, but because I really don’t want to bore you, the reader. But in practical terms the it means that May is holding onto her job by a very slim thread.

The one thing delaying any ‘leadership challenge’ is that it can only lead to even more chaos and if the worst comes to the worst, the Conservative Party splitting, but also because in one way or another it might finally result in Jeremy ‘the Red’ Corbyn being the winner in any future election, one which might have to be called sooner rather than later.

This has all been bubbling under for several weeks and the upcoming Tory Party conference in, I think Newquay on the North Cornwall coast, will be a damn sight more interesting than such occasions are usually. Will there be a leadership challenge or not? Who knows? Who cares?

Well, quite obviously everyone in what we hacks now call ‘the Westminster Bubble’ care, but more than that any dissension in the Tory ranks will make the already utterly impossible task of reaching a ‘good’ Brexit deal even harder.

. . .

So back to Jacob Rees-Mogg. The man is no dumbo, but he is most certainly not the face of modern Britain. I have to admit that I have rather liked him: he has a pleasantly quiet and ironic sense of humour, just the kind I like. He is most certainly no grandstander. When he has spoken out on things – and I don’t agree with his Euroscepticism – I tended to think he was on the side of the angels. Sadly, no longer. To recap: he has unquivocably denounced same-sex marriage and abortion. But even there I will insist that just as I have my views and would like them to be respected, so must he, however much I think him utterly wrong.

What occurred to me when I heard those views this morning that however much they might find an echo in Britain, it will be a very quiet echo. And if he were to be elected as the next leader of the Tory Party – and, as always the possibility is scoffed at as so much media froth – most certainly the Tories will lose the next election.

The Brits are an equitably lot, broadly, and are rather tolerant. Maybe some, the elderly Tory voters in particular, don’t much take to the idea of ‘queers and lezzies getting married’ and maybe some, rather fewer I should think, have older views on abortion. But ‘modern Britain’ – the quote marks are necessary because in a sense it doesn’t really exist except in newspaper articles and blogs – simply doesn’t care. The Brit attitude is pretty much ‘oh, what the hell, good luck the them’. So as far as I am concerned, whatever leadership ambitions Jacob Rees-Moog had, however quietly he has been harbouring them, he can now kiss the farewell and goodbye.

. . .

Just found out a guy I have been calling Chris for the past four or five years is called Simon. Oh, well.