Beware of what you wish for (or is that the wrong cliche?) Whichever is appropriate, don’t take the Good Times for granted

Pretty much the first thing I do every morning when I wake up is to reach for my iPad and call up the websites of the saintly Guardian and the down ’n dirty Daily Mail to see what has happened overnight while I was asleep. Yes, I also listen to radio news, but that is real news - of the two the Guardian comes closest to providing a similar service, but unlike BBC Radio 4 news, it does have it’s left-of-centre agenda, so its editorial and opinion piece choices will invariably provide yet more utterly compelling ‘evidence’ that the world is going to hell in a handcart at ever-faster speed.

As, according to our newspapers - right-of-centre publications make the same dire prognostication of doom, disaster, destruction and disintegration, although they provide different ‘evidence’ and, oddly, the ‘hell’ we are approaching in a handcart is not quite the same one as feared by the left - this has been going on since I was young (I was nine years old 60 years ago) I often either wonder why 1) we haven’t yet arrived but are still on our way to hell; or 2) if we are travelling downhill ever faster, surely too goodness after 60 years we are approaching the speed of light?

Actually, in truth whenever Fleet Street’s cassandras take to their typewriters - make that keyboards - what is actually at play is nothing more serious than the old newspaper practice of Scaring The Living Shit out of the readers. It helps to sustain circulation. The standard observation is that the headline ‘Boy Scout does good deed’ never helped sell a single edition, and nothing is truer. Folk want - they demand disaster - and they want it now, but crucially they want it elsewhere, not here at home, thank you very much.

Thus Britain has been regaled, possibly even amused, by the news that a single drone - you can pick up a decent one for as little as £34.99 at Dronesdirect although sinking your hand deeper in your pocket might buy you one less inclined to disintegrate before the end of the week in which case take a look at the range on offer at Currys/PC World where the DJI Mavic 2 Pro Drone with Controller is surely a snip at just £1,349 - shut down its second largest airport for more than 24 hours - although the laughter came far easier if you were not one of the several tens of thousands of passengers stranded at Gatwick.

Down here in deepest, darkest North Cornwall as, I’m sure in deepest, darkest Edinburgh, Norwich, Torbay and Blackpool as well as most British homes, grand and humble, we were sympathetic, of course we were, but we also relished the situation and the many opportunities it gave us to resort to platitudes. (My wife has a particularly interesting set: ‘They are paying the price for not banning these bloody drones long ago’ and ’See what happens when you don’t ban drones’. Then there’s the one I overheard in Asda two days ago: ‘You’d think that in this day and age with all their sophisticated military technology they could protect an airport, wouldn’t you? Obviously not.’ He didn’t actually add ‘makes you sick!’ but I’m sure that was the subtext.) As for parts of the world not painted pink on maps most recently there has been a tsunami in Indonesia and in South-East Australia’s Gold Coast Christmas has been cancelled after that neck of the woods was battered by a storm. In South America, Caracas is dying a slow death as ‘hyperinflation, crime and poverty’ are rampant.

Taking note of all this doom and disaster, and I could come up with many more examples from the past 48 hours if only I could be arsed to find them, I have again reminded myself of the danger we are all prone to as we pass 30, then 40, then 50 and as we approach 80: we no longer need to read a newspaper to be persuaded that the world is going to hell in a handcart, we are already convinced. I have to say - or rather I have to claim - that I might, though, be the exception that proves the rule. (NB to pedants: yes, I know how that phrase came about and that the ‘proves’ in it means ‘test’ rather than ‘giving proof’ but, dear pedant, join the modern world.)

I am by nature far more inclined to the wisdom of plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, and although I believe that in many ways the world is a shitty place, I don’t believe it has become any shittier. If anything things have improved for a great many, although that is no reason to be complacent. Yet bearing my proviso in mind that the greyer we get and the less inclined we are to like change, the more pessimistic we are about the future, I must say that there are clouds gathering on the horizon which don’t look too welcoming.

. . .

A few years ago I came across a useful analogy outlining why it is often almost impossible to envisage that a bad situation could get any better – or that a good situation got get a lot worse. It was in an article in the Economist and it likened the predicament of those living in the Soviet Union or one of its satellite dictatorships to someone sitting at the bottom of a deep china bowl, sitting so deep in fact that they can’t see over the rim.

Their reality is simply all they can see, and they have sat there for so long they can’t even conceive of the world outside the bowl. It must, said the Economist, have been like that for Soviet citizens. More to the point if, at Christmas 1986 they had been assured that within five years the Soviet Union would have collapsed and they would be free, they would have laughed in your face. If in 1986 East Berliners had been assured that within five years they would be as free as a bird to cross into the western half of the city, they, too, would have laughed in your face.

Similarly, we in the Western Hemisphere all pretty much enjoy a reasonably tranquil life. Certainly, there can be individual tragedies and unhappiness, and yes there have been crises, not least the global financial crisis of 2008, but across Western Europe and in the United States life has been comparatively sweet for the past 73 years (since the end of World War II). Could it really all got tits up? Surely not? Well, what with this political development and that political development, I am beginning to wonder whether we are all sitting at the bottom of a very comfortable soup bowl and taking just a little too much for granted.

This entry is not about Brexit, but Brexit must be mentioned, or rather the possible economic consequences of a hard Brexit. And it would not just be the British economy which could take a very severe battering – companies in European countries who do a lot of business with Britain will also take a hit and that means the economies of those countries would also suffer. That, however, is actually a pretty commonplace observation.

This blog has mentioned Donald Trump before and what a grade A full-time idiot he is. What distinguishes him from the many other grade A full-time idiots knocking about is that his decisions count and can have grave consequences. His most recent is to announce – unilaterally – that the US will withdraw its troops from Afghanistan and Syria.

The decision to withdraw US troops from Syria, where they have been jointly fighting a still substantially large ISIS contingent with Kurdish forces is said to have come after Trump had a phone conversation with Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish president who might justifiably be described as a dictator in the making. Erdogan, it seems, is amassing his own troops on Turkey’s border with Syria with a view to attacking the Kurds once the Yanks are out of the way.

Other of Trump’s inane decisions are to engineer a partial shutdown of the US government, to hint that he might sack the chairman of the US Federal Reserve, causing a great deal of unrest in the markets, and to initiate a trade war with China. It is not surprising that the outgoing US Defence Secretary Jim Mathis (who is said to have persuaded Trump not to have North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un assassinated) was reported to have claimed Trump had the understanding of foreign affairs of a ten-year-old.

Things aren’t quite going to well for the EU quite apart from Brexit (the main EU issue for Britain, certainly, but just one important matter for the EU). Rather stupidly, it seems to have assumed that all of its member states were now enlightened liberals. Developments in Hungary, where the prime minister Viktor Orban is showing rather to much distain for democratic practice for the EU’s liking, are not making it easy for the touchy-feely liberals in Brussels. Things have taken a bit of a downturn for Orban after he won elections with a large majority in the spring.

What with several million young people taking off to work elsewhere in the EU for wages four times as high as they can earn at home, his government has raised the limit on overtime people can work to make up for the depleted workforce. The thing is working overtime is not exactly voluntary and under the new limit people could find themselves working the equivalent of 50 extra days a week in overtime. This is not going down well, and Orban has faced large demonstrations in Budapest and elsewhere.

Problems with a not-very-liberal-government-at-all in Poland which has just manoeuvred itself into being able to appoint all judges, thus rather putting paid to the notion of an ‘independent judiciary’, have shown that the ‘I love my EU’ assumption of all for one and one for all working towards the common good have been more than a little naïve. EU-wide parliamentary elections are due in exactly five months and it will be interesting to see whether the rise of the right/far-right across the EU was just a blip or not.

As for Italy, it is no joke when part of the government is run by a former clown, and its oddly formed government - half right-wingers (some with a tacit fondness for a ‘strong man’ like Mussolini, the other half vaguely disillusioned lefties - which wants both to cut taxes and raise public spending - good luck with that one - things might get interesting when - not if, but when - the euro comes under pressure around the time in 2019 when Brexit-induced economic uncertainty kicks in.

. . .

My point is that individually these and other crises could be managed, but they all seem to be coming together at once. Sitting at the bottom of our soup bowl, we might think that talk of bad times to come – far worse times than anything we have experienced in the past 70 years – is just stuff and nonsense. We would do well not to be quite as smug.

Update: It’s spreading. Thanks, Mr Trump.

“Stephen Innes, head of APAC trading at OANDA, said Trump’s spat with the Fed and Mnuchin’s call with the banks had ‘markets running for cover’. Investors ‘have no confidence in the administration. Markets are driven by perception and it is flat-out bad,’ he said.”

Off for a Yule piss-up, although this newly wise Jack, recently saved from his second brush with death (©Lazarus), will not be knocking back the Camparis, cheap red wine and expensive vintage port with quite the same ruthless abandon as in previous years. No, sir – he’s grown up and now has a mental age of at least 15 if not 16

Well, I told you all about my second heart attack (just before the piece slagging off the Nobel Prize Laureate Ernest Pinkerton Rutherford de Salle Hemingway a.k.a. ‘Papa’ Hemingway), and this is just a codicil. As I write this, I am sitting downstairs at La Pappardella (see previous blog posts) near my brother’s flat in Earls Court (‘flat’ might well be overegging the pudding, but you surely know what I mean where I have just had my supper (in keeping with the heart attack – did you really think I wouldn’t give in to the temptation of milking that for all it’s worth?) of – it is billed on the menu as a starter but I had it as a main course – roasted peppers with goats’ cheese and I am not dying to go outside onto the narrow terrace they have for a cigar or five.

I suspect it was the ‘or five’ which did for me, so the now resolute not to say chap-who-wants-to-live-long-enough-to-see his granddaughter-Olivia-at-at-least 12 has successfully resisted the temptation and will demurely sit indoors down here and banish all thoughts of a La Paz Wilde Cigarros. (Cigar snobs take note: they are not by any means the most expensive cigar, but they are – were – nice). Damn.

I am in town – I suppose I should write ‘in town’ – for the Daily Mail Letters lunch tomorrow. As the ‘puzzles pages compiler’ though, mark, not the ‘puzzles compiler’ – I just put the bloody puzzles on the pages - I am part of the party as in that odd, not to say irrational, way in which newspapers operate, ‘the puzzle pages’ are part of the Letters fiefdom, and in the case of the Daily Mail, ‘fiefdom’ is not in the least bit anachronistic, although I gather under the rule of the new editor, one Geordie Greig, the atmosphere has lightened up a little. In my day – less than nine months ago, but given recent developments a bygone era – we were expected to fall to our knees and keep totally silent whenever an executive above assistant deputy editor passed by. Lord, it must now be a relief.

I have been doing the puzzles, and earning a useful sum annually, for a little over nine years. I don’t mind admitting that the work could be done by a half-witted donkey, but the extra I bank each month makes the abject humility of it all more than worthwhile. It won’t go on for ever, of course, and I am sure I shall in time become the victim of a management coup (as in ‘Patrick, as far as the puzzles are concerned you have done an outstanding job which must surely be a shining example to anyone attempting a similar task and quite honestly we really don’t know what we would do without you, but from Monday on we are going to try. Shut the door quietly on your way out, old chap’).

The lunch itself is the usual Christmas piss-up surely renown the world over (and ours is always made far more lively by the attendance of one Phil Argent, a very pleasant and entertaining guy, gay as the day is long, though not in a silly camp, way who is a very gifted cartoonist and does works for Letters) and for the past eight years has for some reason which eludes me been held at a place called Maggie Jones just around the corner from the office.

I say the reason eludes me because the first Letters lunch I attended was held at a rather smarter, though smaller restaurant just up the road called Kitchen W8, which I liked. Take a look for yourselves. But the following year, the then Letters editor, since retired, settled on Maggie Jones, a – to my mind – strange place given over to such a faux-rustic (‘faux’ as I’m sure you know is the French word for ‘fake’ but doesn’t sound quite naff) that it comes across more as an acid trip than anything else.

OK, so décor is décor and we don’t go to a restaurant to look at the décor but to eat. And at the first outing Maggie Jones, although it was never going to win any awards, did what is was supposed: provide basic grub – the only honest word in this context – for folk who would be quite prepared to eat steaming shit at Christmas if it had a

sprig of holly stuck in it and they were pissed enough. The thing is that in the subsequent seven years we have been going there the menu has not change one iota. Not once. It’s still the same. But mustn’t grumble, the paper picks up the tab, though whereas in past years I have used that to my advantage – starting my meal with a double Campari and tonic and ending it with several glasses of the best vintage port they have, tomorrow will be different for this second heart-attack victim (and I trust, bearing that in mind, you are still sending love, kisses and sympathy over the ether in my direction).

. . .

I have or rather had been coming to La Pappardella for quite a few years, every Sunday after my shift on the Mail. Before I retired it was where I had my supper and I would also drop in – basically for a cigar or three with a glass of wine or a brandy – after I knocked off at 10. What I like about it is that it is Italian, but in that way that Italians think so to such an extent that they come here. Every time I come in there are as many Italians as Brits (or tourists in the summer) and they don’t do it just to fly the flag, they do it ‘cos they like their food.

Before I started coming here, I used to go to a branch of one of the several Italian chains we have in this country – Ask, Zizzi, Pizza Express – and usually had a chicken salad. Well, in the chains the food was still tasty but mainly it consisted of bit of this, bit of that and, crucially, about six small cubes of chicken. Here at La Pappardella the chicken in the chicken salad consists of several – four or five – substantial pieces of grilled chicken. Don’t, please, be fooled by the ‘substantial’ – I’m not one for ‘ the portions are brilliant’ – but I am one for objecting to being ripped off. Now there, I’m sure, is a surprise. Pip, pip.

Hemingway: a writer of genius or a 24-carat twat who had the luck of Old Nick? Well, I suspect you already know what I think

For the past few months I have been writing a critique of Ernest Hemingway’s debut novel and, at the time, runaway bestseller The Sun Also Rises. I decided to write it because according to the blurb on the back of my paperback the novel is ‘a masterpiece’ and Hemingway is ‘a writer of genius’. Well, in my view it is not and he isn’t, not even by a long chalk, and I decided I couldn’t just let it go.

There were, however, also practical reasons for sitting down and writing something of some length which demanded more than just a little thought, but I shan’t go into them now because they aren’t relevant. Oh, and to my ears ‘critique’ does sound distressingly hi-falutin’, but I can’t at this point think of another word to use.

I’ve been writing that critique - can I now ditch my false modesty and dispense with the quotation marks? - ‘for the past few months’ for several reasons, not the least of which is that I don’t work on it daily (although I should and, rather more pertinently, could) but because I keep coming up with more sources of info on the man and the novel that are relevant and which info I want somehow to incorporate. And finally - there’s no other way of saying this - I want to do it well.

That last reason is especially important to me given that, on the one hand, Ernest Hemingway, novelist, big-game hunter, legendary toper and - supposed - all round macho man is still thought of as ‘a great writer’ who was very influential and who (note this well, Patrick Powell, I hear many cry you cynical, snivelling little jumped-up toad) in 1954 was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. I, on the other hand, think the man can’t write for toffee, had the luck of Old Nick and then some and is almost the very definition of a nine-bob note (US nine-dollar bill) who committed one of Life’s cardinal sins: he believed his own bullshit.

The piece will eventually appear in this blog, and I don’t want to say much more and pre-empt what I shall be writing, but I can say this: given my initial reaction to the novel, in the course of my quest for info on the man and the novel (popularly and sometimes rather pompously known as ‘research’) I came across this quote from the writer Raymond Carver (in a piece he wrote for The New York Times in 1985. It runs:

In the years since 1961 Hemingway's reputation as ‘the outstanding author since the death of Shakespeare’ (John O'Hara's wildly extravagant assessment in praise of ‘Across The River And Into the Trees’) shrank to the extent that many critics, as well as some fellow writers, felt obliged to go on record that they, and the literary world at large, had been bamboozled somehow: Hemingway was not nearly as good as had been originally thought. They agreed that at least one, maybe two, of the novels (‘The Sun Also Rises’ and, possibly, ‘A Farewell to Arms’) might make it into the 21st century, along with a handful, five or six, perhaps, of his short stories. Death had finally removed the author from center (sic) stage and deadly ‘reappraisals’ began taking place.

(NB The ‘sic’ is, a little redundant, but what the hell. I added it because I am English and use English spellings — and to this day I am pulled up short when I see a reference to the colour ‘gray’ — and Carver is a Yank who uses American spelling. Oh, and ‘bamboozled’ is a strong word but as far as I can see apt.)

I was more than relieved to come across that quote from Carver, especially as during my ‘research’ I had previously come across John O’Hara’s claim that Hemingway was ‘the outstanding author since the death of Shakespeare’. Happening upon O’Hara’s judgment was all the more uncomfortable because I have read two of the writer’s novels and several of his short stories, and as far as I am concerned he can write the pants off Hemingway on any day of the week including Sundays and Holy Days of Obligation. So here was a writer whose worked I liked and respected praising the work of a writer I thought was a certain kind of rubbish. Now whose view would have more credibility if and when push came to shove? Ah, but you’re way ahead of me.

. . .

I can’t for the life of me remember why I decided to read The Sun Also Rises after all these years. It was one of my set texts when I was studying for an English degree at Dundee University in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and I’m sure I didn’t read it then, but when I read it again last summer, I was so baffled by the claim on the back of the paperback (and elsewhere) that it is ‘a masterpiece’, I immediately - and I mean immediately - turned to page one and re-read it to see if I had missed something. I hadn’t and that second reading didn’t change my view.

One point I make in my critique (which at one point in the past few months grew to an unwieldy length of more than 10,000 words, but has since been cut back to about 6,000 by getting rid of as much of the shit as I can spot and several repetitions) is that - as far as I am concerned - all judgments of a ‘work of art’ are subjective, but that there is one very important proviso: given the greater experience some have, drawn from reading far more than the rest of us (and, obviously, in other fields, looking at far more paintings and drawings, and listening to far more music) it is fair to assume that they have a greater, more varied and nuanced context in which to set the literature, art and music they are commenting on. In short, their judgments and opinions might well regarded as better informed.

Certainly, and despite my claim that such judgements are essentially subjective, there can be and very often is a consensus that so and so ‘is a great writer’ and we, the great unwashed, would be foolish to dismiss the judgments of those who appear to know more about a certain area. Yet I still insist that at the end of the day each judgment is subjective for the simple reason that no judgment can be objective. If nothing else, how could we explain when the judgments of several critics and commentators on the same piece of work differ markedly?

Bearing in mind what Raymond Carver says above that ‘many critics, as well as some fellow writers, felt obliged to go on record that they, and the literary world at large, had been bamboozled somehow: Hemingway was not nearly as good as had been originally thought’, how can be explain why for several decades academics and writers thought Hemingway and his work was the zenith of literary achievement and celebrated the man because of it? Discuss if you like, but the main thing that interests me is that I can be a little reassured that my apostasy on the matter of the ‘writer of genius’ Ernest Hemingway is not quite as insane as it might seem to some.

. . .

As part of my ‘research’ (those quote marks again, must stop trying to pretend I’m the modest sort) I came across and read two very entertaining books. The first is by the writer and Vanity Fair journalist Lesley M M Blume and is called Everybody Behaves Badly, The True Story Behind Hemingway’s Masterpiece The Sun Also Rises. I can recommend it to everyone, even those who have no interest in Hemingway at all. Then recently, chasing up this link and that, I came across an equally entertaining book by Amanda Vaill called Hotel Florida: Truth, Love And Death In The Spanish Civil War. It was what Ms Vaill records in book as much as Ms Blume’s account of the genesis of Hemingway’s ‘masterpiece which persuaded me that my scepticism about ‘Papa’ Hemingway (and nickname he liked and encouraged, a detail about him which, to me at least, speaks volumes) was not entirely misplaced.

By 1936 and on the back of his first two novels The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell To Arms, both bestsellers, Hemingway was able to cut something of a figure in the United States and beyond, and he loved it. He seems to have taken himself very seriously indeed and thought himself an important man of letters. Given the man-of-action persona he had developed - all that huntin’ and marlin fishin’ and big game huntin’ - his bombastic,

somewhat bossy personality and his not particularly liberal instincts, it was something of a toss-up whether he would support the legitimate Spanish republican government or the nationalist rebels led by General Franco when the nationalists set out to topple the fledgling government.

The matter was especially delicate as the only foreign support the Spanish government was getting came from Stalin and Soviet Russia - Britain, the US and France and pledged non-intervention (which also meant they would not supply any arms). The nationalist were not only supported by Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy, but Italy sent several thousand troops to fight alongside Franco’s forces and Germany used the civil war as a testing ground for its air force as well as for new military techniques it was developing.

Hemingway was not very keen on communists (a bone of contention between him and the actively left-wing novelist John Dos Passos, who had nominally been a ‘friend’ since their Paris days, with whom, though, Hemingway was often arguing and falling out) but the only people supporting and fighting for the republic were socialists, anarchists and the myriad strains of communists - Leninists, Marxists and Trotskyists.

Hemingway had several reasons for going to Spain, not the least of which was seeking ‘material’ for a new novel. His latest literary triumph, A Farewell To Arms, had been published seven years earlier and since then he had only published two collections of short stories. Even his novel To Have And Have Not on which he had been working

intermittently and which appeared after he had returned from his first Spanish trip, was essentially the cobbling together of several stories. As it turned out the civil war sightseeing - for that was what more or less it was - did give him material for his 1940 novel For Whom The Bell Tolls.

The Hotel Florida, from which Ms Vaill got the title for her book, was a luxury hotel in the plaza del Callao in Madrid in which many of the journalists covering the Spanish civil war lived while the capital city, under siege by General Franco’s forces, was still in the hands of the republican government. In her book, Ms Vaill chronicles three years in the lives of five other individuals who briefly lived at the Hotel Madrid, including Hemingway’s lover and later wife Martha Gelhorn, the Hungarian photographer Endre Friedman, who was later known as Robert Capa, Friedman’s professional and romantic partner Gerda Taro, as well as the Spaniard Arturo Barea and his future wife, the Austrian Ilsa Kulcsar, who together ran the governments censorship office. By Vaill’s account these last two are perhaps the most sympathetic, although there is also something attractive about Capa and Taro. Both Hemingway and Gelhorn, in their own ways, come across as pains in the arse.

. . .

I had previously known little about Gelhorn except that she is celebrated today by bien pensant journalists as ‘probably the best war correspondent there has ever been’ or something like that. Perhaps her reputation is based on her subsequent career and perhaps she was a great war correspondent, but what Ms Vaill has established about her isn’t particularly admirable.

She came from a well-to-do St Louis family and attended Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania for a while before leaving without graduating to become a journalist. One notable detail about her career which is not much touted - and oddly, given its significance, it doesn’t rate a mention in her Wikipedia entry - was that an essay called Justice At Night in which she recounts being an eye-witness at the lynching in America’s Deep South, was pure fiction. That is all the more extraordinary because publishing the essay, at the behest of H G Wells, in whose London house she was lodging at the time (our Martha was well-connected - she was also besties with Eleanor Roosevelt) helped to make her reputation.

Yet even today the essay Justice At Night - or better the piece of fiction Justice At Night - is held up as an ‘inspirational piece of journalism’. Here is a good example, written in 2014, how Gelhorn’s ‘eye-witness account’. And here’s another example, from the founder and writer of Popbitch https://popbitch.com/ no less, who still hasn’t heard the news that Gelhorn’s piece was made up.

To be fair to Gelhorn I suspect the whole matter of her fictional ‘eyewitness’ account was more a case of a situation getting out of hand than any attempt on her part at outright fraud. The piece was written to impress H G Wells who thought her rather lazy for a supposedly working journalist and to prove she wasn’t just a silly blonde with silly ambitions. Wells was so impressed with it that he urged Gelhorn to get it published and she contacted her London agent. (She had one because she had previously published a memoir of the time she spent in Germany as the Nazis came to power and later an account of her travels through disadvantaged America).

Her agent sold it to the London magazine, The Spectator, and it was then picked up - and thus widely circulated - when Readers Digest and later The Living Age published it in the United States. By now she had reached a point of no return and coming clean would have seemed to her to be impossible. But she finally did come clean when several months later she was invited to talk about the incident she had written about in Justice At Night before Congress. She bit the bullet and fessed up.

She and Hemingway were very much tourists in Spain on their civil war sojourn, but persuaded themselves they were somehow doing something worthwhile by ‘reporting on the front’. Gelhorn was in Spain as a correspondent for Colliers Weekly and Hemingway was sending home dispatches for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA). It was a lucrative gig for him: he was paid $500 for a cabled report and $1,000 for a typed dispatch sent back to the US.

Ms Vaill has established that in his first few trip to Spain, reporting for NANA, Hemingway made $120,000 - just over $2 million dollars in today’s money. Ironically, the pieces he was filing - political analyses and prognostications - were not what NANA wanted and when he filed his last piece (from Paris on his way back to the US) he was politely and pointedly asked not to file any more pieces: NANA obviously did not feel they were getting enough bangs for their bucks (in this case literally).

. . .

Pretty much everything I have read so far about Hemingway gives me the impression that he was a just a very, very lucky sod with ambitions and an infinite capacity for self-delusion. He certainly had several gifts, of which self-promotion and making the right friends were two, but as far as I can see none was a literary gift. Years ago I read A Farewell To Arms and several of the short stories, and I am well aware that to justify my sweeping statements about ‘Papa’ Hemingway, I really should read all of the man’s work. The trouble is I really don’t feel like it, and there is most certainly a great deal of stuff out there I know I would find more rewarding.

Although Hemingway always denied it, The Sun Also Rises was largely autobiographical and the characters in it readily identifiable. ‘Bill Gorton’ the old friend of the novel’ main character, Jake Barnes, was a composite based on two friends who had accompanied Hemingway and his first wife Hadley to Pamplona. One, Donald Ogden-Stewart, a writer and screenwriter - he wrote The Philadelphia Story and The Barretts Of Wimpole Street among other films - was one of Hemingway’s friends remarked that the novel ‘was so absolutely accurate [as to their 1925 stay in Pamplona] that it seemed little more than a skilfully done travelogue’. How’s that for a ‘writer of genius’?

Oh, and as for Hemingway’s much-vaunted dedication to the truth - his advice to writers is ‘All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know’, I’ve yet to understand what that means. Sounds just dandy, doesn’t it, but what the fuck does it mean?

But about one of the saddest incidents in the Spanish Civil War, when between May 3 and May 8 in Catalonia the various factions of the left - the anarchists, the socialists, the Stalin-supporting communists, the Trotskyists and the Marxists - turned on each other and fought their own civil war within the civil war Hemingway had nothing to say. No one knows why, but I suspect that for all his posturing about ‘the truth’, Hemingway just wasn’t interested.

I pay the price of being remarkably stupid (but get away with it)

Royal Cornwall Hospital, Treliske, Truro

I can’t quite work out why, but I have been fighting very shy of writing this particular blog entry for several days, but given the event I am about to record – a significant one in its way by any standard – and given that this blog evolved from my writing a diary by hand more than 30 years ago, it might strike some as odd if I didn’t write. It would certainly strike me as odd if I didn’t.

Just over 12 years and six months ago, on May 2, 2006, I suffered a heart attack. Just over five days and five and a half hours ago, I suffered another. And I think the reason I was for some time reluctant to write about it here is that, oddly, having that second heart attack makes me feel rather foolish. I am, in fact, still in hospital, though all treatment has finished and I am sitting in the Friends of the Royal Cornwall Hospital café in Treliske, Truro, waiting to bugger off home again. The delay is that I am to be given a month supply of medications, and, I’m told, that can be a slow process.

The very odd thing about this heart attack is that unlike the first, it came out of the blue. OK, to a certain extent the other also came out of the blue in that I hadn’t been suffering chest pains or anything like that, but I had been feeling very exhausted - I mean really knackered. I would get up from a good night’s sleep and go downstairs for a cup of tea, but within minutes feel completely shattered. I remember once at work, a month or two before that first one happened, feeling so exhausted at lunchtime, that I simply went to a church next door (St Mary Abbots in Church Street, Kensington, the quietest place I could think of) and merely sat for 30 minutes. At the time I simply thought I was very tired and working to many long hours, and I didn’t further question the exhaustion.

That first attack began at about 10.45am while I was on the rowing machine desk in the works’ gym at the Daily Mail: I was pushing myself, but not overdoing it, when suddenly something seem to ‘give’ in my chest and I developed a small, persistent ache. I also began to feel quite a little off colour, grotty enough to decide to knock that gym session on the head for the day and return to my desk. Over the next 20 minutes the persistent ache got worse and I felt ever grottier, so I went upstairs to see the nurse (12 years on no longer there, the victim of ‘economy measures’), collapsed as soon as she saw me, came to 20 minutes later with an oxygen mask on and an ambulance on its way. By 1.10pm (13.10 for our European friends) a stent had been inserted after a procedure which seemed take just minutes at Hammersmith Hospital. I remember the time because I made a point of looking at my watch.

This second attack was almost nothing like that. Over the past 12 years, I have carried on going to the gym regularly, although less regularly since I retired in April, swimming and walking quite a bit taking our Jack Russell out to do his sniffing and leg-cocking. In fact, I was in the gym a week last Sunday and the following Wednesday, the day before that second attack happened. Again I didn’t stupidly go hell for leather, but I didn’t stint myself either.

I went to bed at 10pm (22.00, see above), and just before 4am I woke up, as I have occasionally been doing during the night, and there was an ache right in the centre of my chest, right in the centre of my breastplate. I beleived it might be acid and took an indigestion pill, but thought no more about it. About ten minutes later I began to feel a bit clammy. The clamminess then got worse and within minutes I began sweating, only a little at first, then increasingly more. There was no pain as such – and certainly no ‘elephant sitting on my chest’, pains down my arm, pain in my back or pain extending up to the jaw as we are told can be symptoms – and although the dull chest ache increased a little in intensity, it was certainly not unbearable.

I decided to have a pee, and the next thing I remember was wondering why the light was on in the bedroom. Next I began to wonder why I was lying on the floor with my head next to the lavatory bowl. I eventually and gingerly got up. However, the sweating increased and increased and increased, and it eventually it reached the point where the sweat was quite literally flowing off me and dripping to the floor. And that, dear reader, was the point when it first occurred to me that I was having a heart attack. It was also, I have to say, when I first began to feel rather foolish about having one because if truth be told this second attack was arguably eminently avoidable.

Eventually an ambulance arrived and I was taken the 40 miles from St Breward to The Royal Cornwall Hospital, Treliske Truro. An emergency cardio team had already been alerted and had already been sent the relevant medical details and by 4.45am last Thursday morning I was having a stent inserted to widen an almost closed artery. The surgeon also found, however, that another artery feeding the heart was also dangerously narrow and I second operation was scheduled for yesterday for a second stent to be inserted.

While working on me he came across a third narrowed artery, so I had two stents inserted yesterday. It couldn’t be done on the Friday because the ‘list’ as already full, so I was left metaphorically kicking my heels over the weekend, ironically feeling as right as rain.

. . .

I find I clarify my thoughts best in debate or when I write, and writing the above has made it very clear to me why I feel so foolish about having the second heart attack, and to be frank I suspect having it was wholly my fault. Not only did I become increasingly lax about taking my medications, but I carried on smoking.

In my case it was cigars and I believed that ‘because I didn’t inhale the smoke as one does with cigarettes, it isn’t half as dangerous’. Well, that is rubbish – nicotine, which thickens the blood enters your blood stream even if the smoke is in your mouth and nasal cavity, and talking to cardiac surgeon afterwards he told me that ‘smoking and blood never go together well’.

As for the medication, 12 years ago I was put on a blood thinner, a statin and one to lower blood so that if I ever suffered from high blood pressure, it would be kept lower. Well, the blood thinner was a complete pain in the arse because, clumsy oaf that I am (‘oaf’ somehow implying that I am over 6ft and with a big build when in fact I am the opposite, but I’m sure you know what I mean) I am prone to cutting myself shaving, cutting myself preparing food, cutting myself by banging against a doorframe, scratching myself on any available protruding nail and otherwise giving my body every conceivable excuse to bleed. The thing is when you are on a blood thinner, you don’t just bleed a little for a few minutes until the clotting process starts, it bloody goes on for bloody hours. Well, I can’t remember what case I presented to my family doctor to stop taking that drug, but he agreed to allow me to come off it.

Statins were the next problem. They did not seem to have any immediate effect on me, but after a few years I realised that bit by bloody bit my joints and limbs were seizing up. As it was happening only imperceptibly, I was adapting to it. I knew something was up when a colleague (I won’t say ‘friend’ because he is what we hacks and former hacks technically call ‘a evil cunt’ who seems to delight in causing discord and upset – Pete, you know who) remarked that I, then still only 57/58, was walking like a 70-year-old. I was also concerned that getting out of the car was had become something of a struggle and that it took me several minutes to walk without pain in my feet and legs when I got up in the morning.

So I eventually knocked the statins on the head, too. I did so after seeing my GP (family doctor) who referred me to a consultant who judged (at the time) that my cholesterol count wasn’t excessively high, so it wasn’t as reckless and irresponsible as it might sound. The only drug I nominally carried on taking was blood pressure one and, as I have admitted, if I remembered to take it more than four times a month, that would be a lot. Yes, I know it sounds incredible that you can forget to take a medication prescribed for daily use but, well, I did. I lulled myself into a false sense of security: I had had my heart attack, survived, so that was that. Well, the other morning told me differently.

The following day, (my 69th birthday as it happens) and back at home

So I feel foolish in bringing on this second heart attack, and I have resolved to be less reckless and more responsible. The cigars – sadly – will have to go from however many I was smoking a week - and my use pretty much doubled when I retired and the spring, summer and early autumn good weather allowed my to sit outside of an evening with a drink and a cigar - to none at all. Sadly because I did enjoy them and, unlike with cigarettes, there was no craving for them at all (a craving cigarette smokers will all know and dislike intensely, as well as that fretting verging on panic to make sure when you are going out that you have enough fags with you. I least I’ve been shot of that for many years). As for the medication, I must put a lot more effort into remembering to take the as prescribed.

What does puzzle me, though, is my cholesterol level: compared to most reading this blog entry I venture to claim my diet is healthier. I eat loads of fruit (’cos I like it), I eat very little meat, I eat a salad of some kind – tomatoes/onions/red pepper etc in olive oil – with most meals, I don’t eat to much and I’m not overweight (according to the discharge nurse two days ago my body mass index is what it should be), I don’t eat bread, and I eat cake and biscuits so rarely that I could even claim that I ‘don’t eat cake or biscuits’, and I have been physically active. So why did it happen?

It has to be the smoking. I really can’t think of anything else. But what worries me now – which didn’t worry me after my first heart attack – was that this time there was absolutely no warning. Damn! Does that mean that now – because there are no obvious warning signs – I must expect to suffer a third attack pretty much at any time? Bloody hope not.

I am really not one of those inclined to bouts of sentimental gushing about Britain’s welfare state and especially our National Health Service, but I really can’t leave this blog without recording just how remarkably lucky we (and other countries with a comparable health service) are. That is not to say that the care I was given could not and would not be matched in a country in which citizens are expected to pay for the health care, but there is one very crucial difference: my surgery and overall treatment, my ambulance ride to Treliske, my after-op care and the medications I shall have to take until the day I die were all absolutely free.

The mean-spirited might point out that technically I am ‘paying’ for ‘the service’ through my taxes and National Insurance contributions, but as far as I am concerned such views are wilfully ignorant. The level of care I would have got in, say the United States, would have depended on my level of insurance, and had I been on welfare, I suspect that would have been the bare minimum and that I would have been out on my arse as soon as possible. Well, a millionaire on the best medical his money could buy would not have been given any better care than I.

Yes, there would have been perhaps flowers in his private room whereas I shared a recovery ward with five other old farts, and yes he might have been shown the degree of obsequious deference it was assumed his millions warranted whereas I had to share and put up with the ever cheerful, ever attentive, ever pleasant, ever irreverent banter of the NHS nurses and auxiliaries and the other patients, but I do know which system prefer.

I can’t help but add that taking (as I just have done) five tablets every morning and two every night, and knowing that I shall have to take some for the rest of my life does piss me off a little. Yes, I know they were prescribed to help me avoid a third heart attack, but - especially today on my 69th birthday and as a guy - they are something of a blow to my ego. It makes me feel a little ‘older’ and none of us likes that.

I can honestly say that in myself I feel as fit as a fiddle - seeing the physical state of the other five in my ward, all my age or just a bit older, was a revelation - but obviously I wasn’t and am not, and it would be conceitedly dangerous to try to kid myself I am in better shape. And the discharging nurse did warn me that such feelings of fitness and self-confidence can misleading.

NB I was recently in Germany, less than a mile from The Netherlands as the crow flies, but eight miles by car, and on my last day I nipped over to Bad Nieuweschans just on the other side of the border to stock up on cigars. I brought back 50. Well, I am reluctant to throw them out, so a friend as agreed to take over ownership.

Just a few songs to be getting on with, two of them new to me. Shalom/salaam ‘alaykum

I’m sure the rest of the world realised long ago that you can now post YouTubes videos directly onto a Blogger blog, but I’m rather slow on the uptake. However.

Here are three videos we were playing last night at a now usual weekly piss-up with my guitar teacher and friends of his in Padstow. The first, Stupid Blues, is a favourite of his, and I can see why: Junior Brown is a phenomenal guitarist, ranging seamlessly from blues to jazz to blues to jazz and back. Stick with it, there is a song eventually.



The there’s a now song on me by a new ‘band’ on me, The Correspondents, which stands up very well, whether you know Soho or not. If you don’t know its one-time reputation, it was the sleazy red-light district of central London just a stone’s throw from Piccadilly circus (in past eras known for its Dilly Boys - I’m sure you can guess what services they provided).



Here is Etta James version of James Brown’s It’s A Man’s World, which in my view is as good as the original, though a new take. I have loads of songs by Etta James on my iPhone and can’t get enough of here. Below that is Christina Aguilera’s version of the same song, equally as good and evidence that it is a real shame she is still somehow grouped with ‘pop’ singers such as Tay-Tay Swift, previously Britney Spears and the rest. This gal has more than a voice and a half.

I call on all philistines to come and join me (it’s getting a little lonely in my neck of the woods). We can discuss ‘meaning’ and ‘creativity’ and even try to establish what exactly is the point of Gilbert & George’s work, shit and all

Heinitzpolder - Dollard, Germany

My sister, who lived in the Philippines for several years, a country which has a large ethnic Chinese community, was remarking about what one of her servants there told her. She said that one of here Filipono maids told her that before applying for a job in my sister’s household, she was due to start work in the household of an ex-pat Englishman but changed her mind when she heard the Englishman was married to a Hong Kong Chinese woman. What difference did that make? my sister asked her.

Well, said her maid, she far preferred working for Europeans - which is why she had applied to work for the businessman in the first place – but all Filipinos hated working for the Chinese. Why? my sister asked her. Well, said her maid, the Europeans treat them well, almost as equals who just happen to be fulfilling a certain role [that of the maid, the driver, the gardener etc]. The Chinese on the other hand generally treated them as though they were sub-human.

That, naturally, is surely something of a generalisation, and there must certainly be some Chinese who behave in a way we enlightened and oh-so liberal Europeans find more acceptable; and I am certainly not making any grand claims on it, but bear with me because it does lead on to a point.

My sister’s anecdote followed on from something else she told me. Staying with us for a week – I am staying with her for two weeks, one more week to go, here in the far north-west of Germany less than a mile from the Dutch border – is one of her grandchildren, and as she was chatting, she was wrapping a couple of small gifts for the lass for his first birthday tomorrow. Then she told me of a huge celebration she had witnessed in the Philippines: a local ethnic Chinese family had hired the ballroom of one of Manila’s biggest and grandest hotel, and had invited several hundred guests to help celebrate their son’s birthday – his first birthday.

I remarked that – which is what I feel – that kind of ostentation has pretty much everything to do with trying to impress one’s friends and neighbours by demonstrating just how rich and wealthy one is, and such boasting and showing off is certainly universal. Nevertheless, many cultural differences are marked, and some cultural traits in an ‘alien’ environment can lead to misunderstanding. But this entry is not intended to be – and I hope it doesn’t become – just another platitudinous commentary on ‘Lord, we are all so different!’, a comment all too often followed among the enlightened and liberal classes in Britain by ‘and isn’t that really, really marvellous?’, a statement with which you disagree in the company of some at great cost.

. . .

I have noted before that as the half-breed child of an English father and a German mother, I have both English and German traits in my personality. And given that I attended German schools — from the the point of view of a child’s development crucial — ages of nine to 13, some German traits are possibly more prominent than some English traits. And one German trait I like is that generally if you ask a German for her or his opinion, you will get it, warts and all. You might care to observe that being, by my own admission, in some ways more German than English, I am bound to appreciate that kind of kind of plain-speaking, but you might also agree that directness of that kind is certainly not a trait which is widely appreciated in Britain – far from it.

In fact, it is generally why the British often describe the Germans as ‘tactless’ and ‘arrogant’, something which naturally bewilders Germans. Their attitude is — and it is one which this semi-German fully understands and agrees with completely— ‘well, you did ask me what I thought, you asked me what my views were, so I told you. Now you are upset by what I said, so what’s going on? If you didn’t want me to answer honestly, why did you ask me in the first place?’ Quite. It is a fair point.

The Brits, though, at least some Brits and especially those who pride themselves on being ‘middle-class’ (and it is that pride which I find so baffling, though it undoubtedly undoubtedly exists) are apt to be what they regard as ‘polite’ and believe any response which falls even a little short of that kind of ‘politeness’ is nothing but outright rudeness; and, if the responder is both direct and German, it is very good evidence – if evidence were even needed for something so self-evidently true – that the Germans are irredeemably ‘tactless’ and ‘arrogant’.

Here is a good example: for over year while I still lived in London 25 years, I shared a flat with three others in Elgin Avenue, Maid Vale. Although I say ‘shared’, the flat was more a collection of bedsits for four folk who shared the same bathroom and kitchen. And although Maida Vale is a in London terms a ‘good address’, the flat itself was nothing special and, being occupied by a succession of renters, rather shabby. (I took it upon myself every so often to clean the kitchen from top to bottom as no one else could be bothered to do their own washing-up and I dislike preparing food in a dirty kitchen. Maybe that’s another of my ‘German’ traits or maybe I am just one of odd bods who doesn’t much enjoy living in squalor.)

If someone left, the protocol was – in theory, but usually not in practice – that all the other ‘flatmates’ would meet and evaluate every whoever applied to take over the free room, and one day, after someone did announce he or she was leaving one flatmate - Kelly – and I met a young German student who wanted to move in. Once he had seen the room and the other facilities, we sat in the kitchen to ‘get to know’ the applicant and what followed was the usual routine of ‘tell us a bit about yourself’.

Eventually Kelly asked the lad what he thought of the room. ‘Well,’ he said in English in his unmistakably German accent, ‘I’ve seen better’, and undoubtedly had – like all the other bedrooms, it too was shabby and had it been a pleasant, airy room, I’m certain he would have said so. But that was his goosed cooked was far as Kelly was concerned.

As soon as he had left she told me: ‘Well, we’re not having him!’ Why not, I asked, he seemed very nice. ‘Did you hear what he said about the room?’ she said. But, I told her, you asked him and he told you. What is wrong with that. But it was no use, he was out: he hadn’t followed standard protocol in such situations by telling us – quite dishonestly, of course, but honesty wasn’t the point – that the room was ‘lovely, really, really lovely’, and just how ‘marvellous’ all the other facilities were and how he would ‘really, really’ love to share the flat with us, and so on.

I told her that I knew Germans quite well and that he was not being rude but simply being honest: she had asked him what he thought of the room and he had told her. What was wrong with that? But she wouldn’t be assuaged and that was that, and the student was not invited to take the room.

. . .

I am reminded of the British obsession with ‘being polite’ and the nation preferring such ‘politeness’ to being honest pretty much every time I switch on BBC Radio 4 (the main talk radio station here in Britain). If, on some discussion programme such as Start The Week, a book one of the contributors has written is mentioned, it is invariably a ‘marvellous’ book, one which the speaker ‘absolutely loved’. If, as happens all too often, the station broadcasts a programme of poetry or short stories or music by either professional writers or artists or amateurs , each poem, story or piece of music is inevitably ‘amazing’, ‘quite amazing’, ‘simply marvellous’ or ‘stupendous’ whether or not it actually is or not. And more often than not it isn’t.

I understand the dilemma faced by presenter: if a poem or a book or a piece of music is mediocre, it can be difficult to say so without sounding overly harsh. But might I suggest that praising it to high heaven as though had been reinvented is not the only alternative. Surely to goodness it is not beyond the wit of most of us to find some way to be polite and acknowledge that at least an effort has been made without resorting to tell outright lies?

A similar and related bafflement for me is much that is said about ‘works of art’ by their creators and commentators, and I was reminded of this yesterday while listening to Afternoon Concert on the BBC’s Radio 3 (one of Radio 4’ sister stations – though I suspect you guessed that – and dedicated to music, mainly ‘classical’ but which has an admirably catholic coverage of pieces). For some reason which eluded me yesterday and still eludes me, yesterday’s concert was given over to piece by Estonian composers and very enjoyable and interesting they were, too.

At this point I have to quote Sir Thomas Beecham who observed (or is said to have observed) that ‘it is quite untrue that British people don't appreciate music. They may not understand it, but they absolutely love the noise it makes’. Well, that sums me up: I don’t just appreciate music, I love it (all kinds of music, I should add, as a rebuff to my stepmother’s aunt who gets very sniffy indeed about jazz and always trots out some dismissive quote by someone or other about jazz), but I can’t even begin to claim I can ‘understand’ it.

Yes, I know – as one can know that one doesn’t know something known by others – that for those with an in-depth knowledge of music different keys can relate to each other, that, for example, a symphony or concerto can have an ‘architecture, but sadly I have no such musical knowledge. That certainly doesn’t detract from my enjoyment and appreciation, but where I do markedly depart from others is when talk turns to matters such as ‘what a piece of music means’. I don’t mean to sound completely daft but as far as I am concerned music is just sound and nothing more. And crucially is has no intrinsic meaning.

Naturally, a composer or performer can give a piece meaning: he or she might hope to try to celebrate his nation’s existence by using echoes of his nation’s folk songs in a piece, but I contend that whatever ‘meaning’ a piece of music has has been superimposed on it later (possibly by the composer him or herself). And let me repeat: as far as I am concerned ‘music’ is absolutely nothing more than pure sound. Yes, the sounds made by the various instruments used to produce it might have been planned to be played in a certain sequence or they it might not: I get equal enjoyment from free jazz as from a Haydn piano sonata. But neither piece has intrinsic meaning.

. . .

I am writing this entry (after what became a typically circuitous introduction) because of two things I have heard on the radio in recent days. The first was a claim (claim? It was delivered more as an absolute instruction than a claim and one which will brook no contradiction, which always rubs me up the wrong way) that ‘art’ need no necessarily be beautiful, but that ‘it must carry a message’. To that my response is an unequivocal ‘bollocks!’

Quite apart from my personal conviction that ‘art’ is in itself nothing special or indeed at all rare and that just as much ‘art’ is produced in a council evening class of enthusiastic amateur painters as in the studios of the – largely self-appointed – great and good, I do get very jacked off with the insistence that ‘art’ should have ‘meaning’ or ‘a message’. Says who? As far as I am concerned nothing in this world whatsoever has intrinsic meaning. Whatever ‘meaning’ we, individually or collectively choose to see in anything is wholly arbitrary. For example, the small, by now very grubby, toy bunny I might have bought for my child when she was a toddler and which she took to bed and to sleep with her every night until she reached puberty might certainly have ‘meaning’ to me on the eve of her wedding 25 years later when I come across it by chance; but it most certainly has no ‘meaning’ to you and I wouldn’t expect it do.

Just by sheer chance as I write this in mid-afternoon listening to Radio 3’s Afternoon Concert, an arrangement by some bod called Fritz Kreisler of the second movement of Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto is being played. Now that piece most definitely has meaning for me – it is a piece I played a lot as in a great deal at one point in my life, getting drunk on cheap and warm white wine feeling very sorry for myself now that another girl had thrown me over and whenever I hear it or any of its other movements, I am taken straight back to those days. But that ‘meaning’ is personal and subjective – if you know and like the piece, it might well have its own ‘meaning’ to you. Does that make my point?

Something similar happens when the latest novels are discussed on radio: to listen to such discussions, you get the distinct impression that if a new novel doesn’t ‘deal with’ a certain, rather limited range of ‘issues’, it can lay no claim – in Britain at least - to being taken seriously. So a hero or heroine might well be an eco warrior battling to halt global warming, a trans man or woman battling to come to terms with his or her identity, a gay man or woman battling to come to terms with his or her sexuality and so on. If, on the other hand, a new novel does no such thing, it is seemingly ruled offside as a piece which cannot be taken seriously.

Something similar goes on with the notion of ‘creativity’, and it, too, like ‘meaning’ is put on a pedestal to be worshipped. Once again I hold to the, no doubt hugely unfashionable, view that not only is ‘creativity’ very common indeed and thus nothing special at all and that it will be found equally in that council-run evening class as in more hi-falutin salons, but essentially the word is quite meaningless. Listening to the introduction of a piece on yesterday’s concert, Prophecy by the Estonian composer Erkki-Sven Tuur, he was quoted as saying that his main aim is to ask ‘existential questions with music’ and one of his goals ‘is to reach the creative energy of the listener’. But what is he talking about? Exactly how do you ask an ‘existential question with music’? And what, exactly is ‘the creative energy of the listener’.

My dilemma is that I might be the patsy, I might be the philistine who is blind to such matters. And being blind I wouldn’t even know I was blind to them. With the best will in the world I cannot even begin to understand what ‘creative energy’ might be. And although I can think of several existential questions which might be asked – such as this one posed by a Palestinian refugee who was born and has lived in a permanently temporary camp for the past 30 years: ‘What the fuck is going on? Am I really going to be living hand to mouth until I die’ – I cannot for the life of me see how such questions can be asked by music.

It does occur to me that perhaps I should throw in the towel and become like folk in Britain for whom everything is ‘amazing’ perhaps that will save me from my incipient philistinism – become part of the gang while I still can.

. . .

I can’t find anyway to lead into this although the artist ‘entity’ Gilbert & George did come to mind while I was writing the above. Sadly, I found I couldn’t trace the immediate connection. However, I think they are a good example of what we philistines regard as bollocks and that how once you are part of the inner circle in art, pretty much anything you do is ‘art’ and ‘amazing’. Well judge for yourselves.

Below is a reproduction of a piece made by Gilbert & George in 1996 called Spunk Blood Piss Shit Spit. To be frank it as an illustration it is perfectly acceptable, though were it produced by a second year art student at college and entitled something innocuous such as Full English Breakfast, I very much doubt it would get any attention at all.

As it is . . . I did seem to remember that Gilbert & George claimed to have used some of their own faeces (the posh word for shit) as part of the materials for their piece, but I can’t find any reference after an in-depth 30-second search, so just accept that as hearsay.

Beneath the piece (lifted from the Tate Gallery’s website about a ‘Major Gilbert & George Exhibition and you can check it out here) is a piece of puffery, by an art critic and by Gilbert & George themselves. Quite how what they write about the genesis of their piece makes that piece any better – or even any more interesting – I couldn’t tell you, but then I am just a philistine who cannot be expected to understand these things. I am, however, not too philistine to realise that if I could get hold of a good agent and a great marketing department, I could make a mint! Here is an excerpt from the accompanying puffery:

At the same time, the pictures [in the Tate exhibition] explore ideas of mortality in its rawest form. ‘It’s like our pictures of cemeteries, all that dead matter. Shit is also the end of a life, a left over’, they explain. The nakedness of the artists is deliberately exposed, an image of humanity reduced to its essentials, without shelter, status or dignity. As the critic David Sylvester commented, while many twentieth-century artists tried to break out of the prettifying conventions of depicting the body as ‘nude’, only Gilbert & George truly succeeded in portraying it as ‘naked’.

Their investigation into the body led Gilbert & George to look in detail at all of its fluids and excretions. They bought a microscope to study samples of piss, and were astonished to discover complex patterns forming and dispersing on the slide. They found they could even pick out recognisable images. ‘Out of these drops of blood come stained-glass windows from fourteenth-century cathedrals, or Islamic writing’ they explained. ‘To see daggers and medieval swords in sweat: that’s our aim. In piss you find pistols, flowers, crucifixes. Spunk amazes us… it really does look like a crown of thorns.

Here is another piece which gives me at least the impression that if you play your cards right, this art game can well be money for old rope.

On the website it is accompanied by this piece of puffery:

We were trying to do something that was absolutely hopeless, dead, grey, lost’, Gilbert & George have said of the Dead Boards pictures. Like the Dusty Cornwers which preceded them, these interior studies of decaying empty rooms and isolated individuals are marked by melancholia. Even when the figures change positions, the same walls and the same boards are repeated, adding to their claustrophobic intensity.

. . .

Later

Just for the craic (or, as I am now told is correct, despite what I thought crack) a photo I took yesterday, reduced to B&W (as is only proper).

Just a few pics . . .

Heinitzpolder - Dollard, Germany

I’m in North-West Germany for two weeks, arriving last Tuesday, visiting my sister who lives in the back beyond in Ostfriesland (East Frisia) right on the Dutch frontier. She and my brother-in-law, who retired last year, live in a concerted farmhouse typical of North Germany.

I brought my ‘new camera’ with me, a DSLR (digitial single lens reflex), and have been taking pictures of pretty much everything I want to take pictures of, but mainly stock photographs of the area and towns to submit to Alamy. I am now an accredited contributor (though, to be honest, anyone can become one if your three initial and subsequent submissions pass their quality control.

I call it my ‘new camera’ because although I’ve owned it for more than a year, I still haven’t quite got to grips with the innumerable variation of settings. In the 1980s, in Birmingham and Cardiff, I did a lot of photography, but this was in the pre-digital age of developing film and printing pictures. I had two cameras, but almost always used the simplest of the two, a Pentax K1000. The settings were simple: aperture, shutter speed and ASA (now called ISO, though I understand it is in some way a bit different as in the maths involved are different). That was it, but now . . .?

Here are a few I took yesterday in Papenburg, a town about 15 miles away where my grandmother was born and grew up. They are in B&W simply because I prefer B&W. They are not very interesting simply because they are just stock piccies of the town I want to submit to Alamy. The major employer in the town is a large shipyard, Jos. L Meyer, which shifted from town to a huge site on the outskirts. Where the old shipyard was has been covered and landscaped and now houses hotels and stores. The crane is from the old shipyard and, well, has been there to look nice. The others were taken a few days ago, hereabouts and thereabouts.

What will be in Santa’s Brexit sack next March? Well, I’m buggered if I know

Remember what it was like looking forward to Christmas when you were young? Remember the excitement, anticipation and wondering what Santa - or later your parents - would bring you? You had no idea, none whatsoever. You might have dropped a great many hints about what you wanted, but you still had no idea as to whether they had been picked up and would be acted upon. The outcome come Christmas would be a complete surprise. OK, that was when you were still a child. Later as an adult - the cynical phrase as a ‘grown-up’ - you would often request something and get it.

Well, switch December 24/25 for March 29 and in one respect Brexit is very much like a child’s Christmas: none of us, not convinced Remainer nor convinced Brexiteer, has the faintest clue what the outcome will be. Certainly the sky won’t fall in overnight from March 29 to 30, and nor will Britain again be in a position to rule the waves. The result of Britain leaving the EU will only become apparent over the coming months and years.

There is, of course, any amount of prognostication from all sides. For example, British biscuit manufacturers who are banking on imported foreign biscuits becoming too expensive for most consumers and a substantial rise in sales of their products have predicted, are rubbing their hands in glee. I understand the Daily Mail has already

composed its front page to reveal - exclusively no doubt - the news to a grateful public, and apparently if you can prove your are middle-class and own your own home, their will be a biscuit premium for six month - buy one packet, get another at half-price!

. . .

I happen to have voted Remain, but with one important reservations (and I’m sure I’ve said this before): the EU is essentially a great idea, but of late has sometimes been trotting up an alley I didn’t always much like and regard as more than a little misguided.

Migration into the UK from EU member states - or immigration as purists choose to call it - doesn’t bother me in the slightest, and this country can thank the Lord for the extra work being done by the many Baltic states citizens and the French, Italians, Poles, Bulgarians and all the rest which our homegrown workforce is often unwilling to do. But I’ve always been wary of (and usually downright disliked) ostentatious zeal, which is simply the more polite word for zealotry, whether it is for the latest diet (don’t eat any carbs at all, just protein/eat nothing but diary products for five days, then drink nothing but tomato soup/always stand up when you are eating, only eat in short five-minute bursts, then take a laxative) or for those bores among us who claim to be ‘convinced Europeans’ and profess that they ‘love the EU’.

Well, I am neither a ‘convinced European nor an ‘unconvinced European’ and I neither ‘love the EU nor do I ‘hate the EU’. What I like and shall always support is co-operation, simplicity and pragmatism, and but for a few glitches - remember all those wine lakes and mountains of butter we were supposed to pretend didn’t exist to the EU could keep French farmers happy? - the EU is, as far as I am concerned, far more often than not a useful and essentially admirable institution. But what does leave me at the door and wringing my hands in despair is this ongoing zeal in Brussels for ‘ever-closer political union’.

On paper it makes perfect sense: were there - eventually - one European state with one European parliament which could bring in Europe-wide laws and, crucially for the long-term health of the Euro, impose a Europe-wide tax system and set a Europe-wide budget, the world - well Europe - would be a simpler place, at least on paper. As it is . . .

Anyone naive enough to believe that in a matter of years the vastly disparate nations in the EU will willingly sign up to resigning their sovereignty in an ‘all-for-one, and one-for-all’ gesture of solidarity is a directive short of a paragraph. That doesn’t mean it will never happen or even that it couldn’t ever happen, but it will not be for several centuries. Yet the notion of ‘ever-closer political union’ leading up to one de fact ‘United States of Europe’ is still one apparently at the top of the wish list for the EU’s top brass. Why? Can’t they see just how unrealistic it all is?

Often trotted out is the ‘fact’ that ‘the EU has preserved peace in Europe for the past 73 years. Well, put aside for the moment that ‘the EU’ has not existed as such for more than 25 years (the ‘EU’ was established by the Maastricht Treaty but let me be generous and say that the notion of a potential European Union has existed since our very own Winston Churchill called for a ‘United States of Europe’ in 1946 and the idea was started to be given tangible form with the formation with the Treaty of Paris in 1951), it is a bit of a stretch to claim that the absence of war in Europe since the end of World War II is down to the fledgling EEC/EC/EU. I think it is more down to the fact that after the horrors of World War II - horrors experienced not just by those who fought in that war but by every European born before 1939 who in some way or other was affected by it and its aftermath, no one had much stomach for any form of warmongering. The undoubted prosperity ushered in by increasingly tariff-free trade in Europe also helped, but it is not in the slightest churlish to add, for example, that the UK’s membership of the then EEC crippled the economy of New Zealand (whose trade links with Britain were more or less cut overnight). Once again the truism was demonstrated that for every winner, there’s a loser.

(Incidentally, if you’re the kind of idealistic lad or lass who likes world peace with your cornflakes, bring it on, though whenever I hear the phrase ‘world peace’, I am reminded of the toe-curling anecdote trotted out by President Jimmy Carter in the 1970s. What do you want for Christmas? he informed the world he had asked his then eight-year-old daughter Amy. No doubt through teeth braces and a winsome smile the little Carter replied: ‘World peace, daddy.’ Me, I’m very much looking forward to the day when rain is far less wet.)

It is the unflinching zeal for pushing through notion of ever-closer political union’ in the EU which in part helped persuade a majority - actually a small majority at that majority, so it wasn’t as though Britain is wholeheartedly behind it - to vote for Brexit, although I suspect only a small minority of the Leave voters did so for that reason. The rest - well, the rest voted Brexit for any number of reasons, some quite rational, others batshit crazy. Many of them are on record for voting Leave ‘because there are to many foreigners in Britain’. That, as I pointed out above, most of those foreigners do sterling service for their adopted country - i.e. Britain - seems to have passed them by.

Having said that, when I listen to why many chose to vote Remain, I’m equally unimpressed with their thinking and dislike equally in too many of them a supercilious ‘we, the intelligent ones, voted to Remain’ tone.

. . .

This has all been a bit of a ramble, so let me rein myself in and try to get to what brought me to write this entry in the first place: no one, but no one, not Remainer nor Leaver, has the faintest clue what the state of Britain will be come March 2020, March 2022 and March 2025. I’m not sanguine, but . . .

More to the point I don’t think anyone bar a few pointy-headed civil servants in Whitehall and Brussels has the fainted understanding of ‘the options on offer’. None. ‘Canada-plus, Chequers, backstop, the Norway solution, the Swiss relationship - they could all be arcane sexual practices for all we understand about what they mean and what they entail. Every news bulletin brings ‘the latest develpments’ but I doubt I am the only one who can make neither head or tail about their significance.

But there is one detail we are all aware of and which I think we here in Britain all understand, one debate which pretty much symbolises just how dangerous this whole exercise is (apart from the fact that if Britain is a loser through Brexit, so is the rest of the EU, which is why they, too, want a reasonable deal). And this one detail is the nub of it all: will there, can there, should there be a ‘hard border’ between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. That is the nut no one has so far been able to crack.

After 30 years of murder and misery, jointly caused by the Irish Republican Army and the various Loyalist paramilitaries, the island of Ireland has enjoyed a well-deserved few decades of peace. All that could - and might - well be lost if the EU and Britain don’t get it right.

I have sympathy with both sides: the EU is completely right that once the UK is out of the EU, its ‘customs union’ must be properly defined and that can only be with some kind of ‘hard border’. Its compromise more or less amounts to Northern Ireland still being in the ‘customs union’ while the rest of Britain is not, and customs checks being made on goods travelling between the mainland and Northern Ireland.

On the other hand Britain says simply ‘that’s not on, because it can’t be on’: Northern Ireland is a part of Britain and cannot be separated. And it, too, for very practical reasons - that it doesn’t want to see a resurgence of fighting in Northern Ireland - knows that the current arrangement of a ‘soft border’ between the two parts of Ireland is essential. But do the Remainers and the Brexiteers give a shit about that (and the majority in Northern Ireland voted for Brexit, without thinking through the consequences. In fact, when it came to the Brexit referendum, I don’t think anyone thought through the consequences - not David Cameron who called hoping it would calm matters in the Conservative Party, and not the voters with all their ‘fuck foreigners/I love the EU’ posturing.

So: Happy Christmas (if you know what I mean).

As for the EU ‘having ensured peace in Europe for the past 70 years, if - if - they have ensured nations won’t go to war in Europa, ‘ever-closer union’ will simply - in my cynical view - merely ensure that there will sooner or later by rather more civil wars than we have experienced in the past 70 years.

In which I learn that blog entries like lemonade can also go flat. Still. . .

Three Queens Hotel, Burton-on-Trent – Sunday, September 16.

NB This post was begun five days ago, an irony given what I write. Oh, well, you can’t win them all (and even winning some would be a bonus).

The saintly Guardian, always in the vanguard of modern journalism (motto ‘No trend too obscure’, although I would prefer it if they were more honest and adoped the motto ‘We’ll be in Heaven before you, don’t kid yourself’), has in recent years taken to, and made a great deal of, a new ‘style of reporting. I don’t think it has a name, but it might be named ‘Live’ after the prominent word at the top of each such report. And it is exactly that, ‘live’ reporting, though whether you take the view that this is yet another step in the progress of mankind or, like me, that it’s a spurious excuse to make reporting more ‘relevant and authentic’, is up to you. But if you do side with the Grauniad (and thus disagree with me) be warned: not only are you henceforth banned from reading this blog and be forced to forgo keeping up to date with my increasinlgy dyspeptic ramblings, but crucially I know (where you live). Funny old world, eh?

I was about to write that I suspect recent modern technology has made the Guardian’s proud ‘live’ reporting possible, but on reflection that can’t be true because reporters have been able to use, and have used, telephones for decades. What is perhaps new is the internet and the various devices and gadgets and practices it has enabled. So, for example, as soon as Pope Francis (to use just one example) reaches for the butter at breakfast of a day – and assuming he is not eating alone – the world can know about it almost immediately: someone or other sitting nearby can tweet or post on Facebook ‘Pope Francis has just reached for the butter on his breakfast table after pouring himself another cup of coffee’.

Just how significant it is that the Pope – and I know of no cholesterol concerns his doctors might have, or at least none which have been made public – should reach for the butter at breakfast or, more pertinently, just how vital it is that the rest of the world should know, I can’t say, though I imagine you can guess my thoughts on the matter. But however silly my example is, and it is a silly example, it is not so outrageous an example when I come to mention the Guardian’s new ‘live’ reporting practice.

. . .

When there is an important development in the news – or even when a new trivial item of gossip becomes known – I far prefer to wait for a full account once the dust has settled, the facts are in place and an informed analysis of those facts can give us a better understanding of what has happened and its possible significance. As for many folk claiming that as functioning, responsible and self-aware democrats in a functioning, responsible and self-aware democracy proud of fits free, functioning, responsible and self-aware press and the functioning, responsible and self-aware role it plays in supporting the rule of law, ‘having to know what has happened as soon as it has happened’ is essential.

I, on the other hand, regard it largely as a form of neurosis – one related to fashion as it happens – and one possible reason why I was not cut out to be a reporter. Despite not being a bad reporter and technically better than some, the rush and nonsense of having to get ‘the latest development’ struck me as ineffably silly, and even I am must admit that that is something of a fatal flaw in my profession. So the Guardian-style ‘live’ reporting does nothing for me.

There are, of course, some news stories where the practice – at a pinch – might make sense. The attack on the Twin Towers on 9/11 (11/9 for British readers) was such a huge story that . . . (well, fill in the rest yourself, because although I happened to see it live on TV, by chance, and was as aghast by it all as the next I can’t still can’t claim it was crucial that I should know everything about the incident just as soon as possible.).

Knowing what we know now about the attack (apparently it was masterminded by a gang of disaffected cleaning ladies in the Pentagon, although others rubbish the idea and point out that when you see the size of the hole in the Pentagon wall that just has to be nonsense) and knowing what subsequently happened – the invasion by The Forces Of Good if Iraq and subsequent (and I would add consequent) developments in Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and Turkey you might agree that a comprehensive view of the tragedy gradually formed over the following months and years is more useful than a blow by blow up-to-the-second account.

Quite possibly some wiseacre, in the hours after the Twin Towers attack, confided in his mates down the pub (US bar) ‘this isn’t looking good for the Middle East, I fear the worst’ but I somehow doubt it. At a pinch, I concede Guardian style ‘live’ reporting might be worthwhile - look, I’m trying! - but many other news ‘stories’, I suggest, don’t benefit one iota.

A regular outing of the Guardian’s ‘live’ reporting over these past two years has been ‘live’ reporting of the latest round of negotiations in Brussels between the EU’s Michel Barnier and whichever British politico ego has got the job this week of talking nonsense on our behalf. And when I say ‘live’ it will most certainly be a minute-by-minute blow of what is going on, or rather what is not going on. Given the delicate nature of these negotiations both sides like to play it close their chest, so of real substance we get nothing, but we will and do get breathless accounts of ‘Jeremy Somebody, the Brexit secretary’s junior deputy bag carrier, has just come out of the meeting and has headed off to the gents (US restroom). No one knows why he is doing this and EU officials are staying tight-lipped’.

. . .

Travelodge, Newmarket Road, Cambridge – Monday, September 17 (but not by much).

The reason for that rather longwinded intro about the Guardian’s ‘live’ reporting is that if it’s OK for the bloody Guardian, surely to goodness it is OK for yours truly, so a ‘live’ blog entry was on the cards. Sadly, it didn’t quite work out that way in that although the above was written in the breakfast room of the Three Queens Hotel, Bridge St., Burton-on-Trent, it is being continued here, in the breakfast room cum bar of Cambridge’s Travelodge at just after 1am after boozy night at The Pickerel Inn, Magdalene St., Cambridge).

I arrived here after a leisurely drive from Burton-on-Trent to Cambridge through, as far as I can tell, five counties – Staffordshire, Derbyshire, Leicestershire, Northamptonshire and Cambridgeshire, something which might make our American friends a tad jealous given that it was a trip of only 105 miles which would probably not even take them to the nearest petrol station in some parts of the Midwest – at about 2pm and immediately took off to mosey around downtown, as in ‘central’ Cambridge which is made up almost exclusively of its university colleges.

I got in touch with one Paul S., a school friend of my niece Hannah, who is here doing a Phd in Engineering, but who, more to the point, knows a lot more about Cambridge University and who took me on a tour of the various colleges. Being a registered student meant he was able to take me into various chapels and colleges for free, saving me, I calculate at least £40 in entry charges. But that was not the reason I met up with him.

Our tour, which included Kings College Chapel, Trinity College, St John’s College and I don’t know where else, concluded with a long five-hour examination of just how much cheap pub red wine we could drink and still stay lucid.

Starbucks, High Street Kensington, London – Monday, September 17, a little later (just after 2pm in fact)..

Conversation was, as is often the case on such occasions very broad indeed. I have to say that as a conversation partner I find Paul very congenial in as far as he takes a broad interest in all kinds of topics. The conversation itself, by no means deep, included such sure-fire hits as ‘the point of philosophy’, ‘how language might well covertly define (and thus even perhaps) limit thought’, ‘how satire can be and should be very dangerous’ (and I made my standard point that given that in Turkey, Russia, China and Iran you can find yourself banged up for many years or even risk death if you dare satirise those in power, what is called and regarded as ‘satire’ in Britain is anything but. Poking fun and make jokes about our politicos, however funny the jokes, is not ‘satire’ and the worst that can happen to you is that you are snubbed in The Groucho or wherever (I wouldn’t know). And there’s also the point that satire doesn’t even have to be funny.

Our conversation was conducted in both English and German, both of us resorting to one or other of the languages when using that language made it easier to make a point using a certain word. And words which might seem to mean the same thing often to not quite: ‘ironisch’ in German is not the same as ‘ironic’ in English, and nor is ‘Zynismus’ quite the same as cynical. The German word carries more than just a hint of bitterness among other things.

I was staying in a Travelodge in the Newmarker Road and my walk hope lasted 30 minutes, useful if you are not quite sober. On the way I came across two Russians, the man, as I was, carrying a digital SLR, but unlike me he also had a tripod. He spoke some English but his femals companion spoke a little more. They had been to the wedding of a friend, also Russian, who had married – I presume – and Englishman living in Cambridge. Oh, and we joked about Salisbury. He even showed me a spoof short video he had made of a couple skulking around a house, then smearing something on the door handle.

. . .

The fun has slightly gone out of sending up the Gurdian’s ‘live’ reporting style in as far as I feel it has fallen a little flat, but what the hell. In a minute I shall set off for my brother Mark’s flat in Earls Court and take him out to lunch, but I wanted to finish this entry first.

St Breward, Friday, September 21.

I should have told you a lot earlier that the reason I was driving around the country and had washed up in Burton on September 15, was that I had taken my son to Liverpool where he is beginning a university course. We drove up last Saturday, unpacked, went for a coffee then I said goodbye and took off for Burton. Why Burton? Well, I was heading for Cambridge, but I didn’t know what time I would be leaving Liverpool and decided Burton was a convenient halfway spot. Makes sense, really, if you think about it. as for my son starting college and more or less leaving home, that, I think is worth and entry in its own right, so I shan’t say more here. Right, it’s now finished. Bit longwinded, eh, but what the hell, I’ve got to do something until it’s time to suck my next Werther’s Original (pictured).

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