Travelodge - Retford Markham Moor
Off on my travels for a day or two, this time to visit the Jorvik Vikin Centre in York which I did yesterday. I’ve always wanted to. Interesting experience, and the whatever you call them - animatronic’ figures were novel, semi-lifelike humans and animals moving – slightly, doing various things and ‘talking to each’ other – sitting outside reproductions of what their houses must have looked like were useful to covey they kind of life they will have led. Can’t say I learned much, but that wasn’t the point. If I want to learn shite like that, I’ll simply renew my subscription to Look And Learn (not to be mocked - bet I know more about how tyres are made - from the collection of sap from the rubber tree to fitting them to your Ford Consul! - than you do, so take your mockery . . .
It’s also good to get up and about. I was on the point of using the phrase ‘on the road’ but it does sound a little portentous, implying I’ve got a stash of dexies in the glove comparment, a fistful of hot dollars, a small handgun and have just picked up a mysterious brunette. Sadly I’ve done none of these things. But I do like getting away on my own, even though I’m not doing an awful much.
Set off on Tuesday to get to this Travelodge, chosed because it is near Lincoln (where I shall take off to a little later) and York (where the Jorvik Centre is), though at 52 miles away, York was a little further than I thought it might be. When booking a Travelodge - exactly what I want from a hotel, clean sheets and hot water - I had looked for one inbetween Lincoln and York, and came up with Doncaster. Then I noticed this one was about £15 cheaper for two nights but kept thinking is was ‘between Lincoln and York’. (A dull piece of info? Well, pity me not yourselves, I’ve had to think it.)
Went off to a superstore in Retford - eleven miles away - to ‘get something to eat, stocked up on olives, hummus, crackers, tangerines, cheese, a bowl, a tumbler and a ‘pairing knife for my supper but then stayed in Retford anyway for two glasses of red and a bowl of penne arrabiata.
Trying to get out of Retford to get back here was a hoot. Since I had driven in and was now attempting to drive out again, workmen had closed ‘the London Road’ and no amount of following their diversion signs would let me escape sodding Retford town centre. It did get beyond a joke, I kept driving past the same bloody temporary traffic light again and again and again and didn’t have a clue why. The Google Maps directions didn’t help either cos they didn’t know London Road was closed.
It must have taken me almost an hour to get out and the only reason I did that was by setting my Google Maps for York - 50 miles due north - then following the road until I got to the A1. Then it was turn around and drive down the A1 till I reached the Travelodge.
After the Jorvik centre stopped off at a tapas bar and enjoyed three plates of tapas and three different cherries before tasking the ‘Richar III Experience in whatever gate tower (complete with portcullis) it is. Wait, I’ll take a look. Back again: the Monk Bar gatehouse, the tallest of the medieval city’s four gatehouses.
Today, it’s off to Lincoln for a mooch around. The Lincoln Chronicle - long since dead (and the then evening paper the Lincolnshire Echo is now ‘the local weekly’, things ain’t great in the wacky world of hackdom) - was my first paper so I’m off to look at 15 Kirkby St where I lived for about 15 months and the site where the old office was.
I was going to drive straight home tonight but I have since booked a oom at the Travelodge in Devizes (£44 for one night, just £3 cheaper than what I am paying here for two, but fuck it), to break the journey. The drive up from Cornwall was about six hours - though I was going slowly, I mean what’s the rush? More later.
Olivares Tapas Bar, corner of Drury Lane and Castle Hill, Lincoln – Lunch
As luck would have it my trek up Steep Hill took me to this tapas bar, and although I was – and still am – planning another Italian meal tonight in Devizes, I couldn’t resist it. Tapas and Continental food are gorgeous, we Brits – pretty much all of us – love it, bang on about it, can’t wait to go abroad to eat it, yet stick to the kind of shite we are accustomed to when we cook. OK, obviously not all of us and a great many Brits, both men and women can cook and can cook well. And there are some great British dishes and I would be dishonest if I didn’t admit it. Yet if the there is no rocketc science to preparing tapas, your average Brit could do it with his or her eyes closed, yet you rarely come across tapas bars – I have struck lucky twice. Still.
Went to 15 Kirkby St in ‘downhill’ Lincoln where I lived for about 15 months, and it and the area looked drabber and drearier than I could remember. This was, of course, 45 years ago and time is never kind, but haven’t they heard of ‘gentrification’? Really not.
The irony is that when folk think of Lincoln, they probably think of the medieval streets and houses (now shops, of course) up Steep Hill (called Steep Hill – why? Why, Joseph. Correct, because it’s fucking steep). Well, all that, as well as the nice middle-class house in the surrounding area are ‘uphil’. Downhill, meanwhile, are the rows and rows of two-up, two-down terrace houses where those not lucky enough to be related to or to have gone to school with the Bishop of Lincoln are obliged to live. In June 1974, when I moved in as a lodger to Gwynn (I think his name was) I wasn’t.
From Kirkby St to Riverside North where Lincoln Chronicle (not Lincolnshire Chronicle as I have so far been calling it) office and presses were it’s just a short walk, one I undertook every day. Sadly the presses and offices have disappeared, to be replaced by an NCP car park (watch out Buck House!) but as far as I know there are so far no plans to kill the Queen and bury her in the car park, though after listening to the lunchtime news about David Cameron’s interview on Today this morning when he admitted Liz (Brenda) had tipped him the wink and given him to understand in no uncertain terms that she was against ‘all this Scottish independence nonsense’ there might be informal talks about giving ‘that dick Cameron’ a seeing to and ‘he should seriously consider taking Samantha and their brood to the South Island in New Zealand while the going is good’.
The Green Dragon, the up on the other side of the bridge (or the end of the bridge) where the office was is now shut and the building for let and my short stroll up from Waterside North to here, near the cathedral, has made it pretty plain Lincoln has its own contingent of Baltic state EU citizens and asylum seekers as anywhere else.
The flat, horribly flat Lincolnshire drone has also lingered – well, it would – and is just as dull as it always was.
Off to Devizes in a while where I have decided to stay that night and not rush back to St Breward. It’s not that I am an old fart whose energy levels dictate that he is now obliged to interrupt his trip to the downstairs loo and do it in stages, just that I’ve got this travelling bit in my blood and although it’s not quite Maine to New Mexico, it’s still there. The only drawback about doing some more travelling is the cost of staying somewhere and it occurs to me that if I got a small camper van in which I could get my head down, the only other cost would be petrol. Look into that. See you a bit later when I had some more from Devizes.
Travelodge – Devizes.
All together now: who’s a complete prat? Why, I am. I arrived here about 30 minutes ago (now settled in) to discover that when I booked my room here last night, I bloody booked for next week. Dick! So that’s £25 up the swannee or to put it in my terms, just over three bottles of the Rioja I like and buy at whichever supermarket has it on offer. Bollocks. Now I’m off for another does of penne arrabiata. .
Bon nuit. Don’t stay up, I’ll only whinge.
Thursday, 19 September 2019
Friday, 13 September 2019
Rose Tremain's The Colour: less than the sum of its - many - parts
I’ve just finished reading a novel which I didn’t much enjoy, but which I forced myself to finish because I wanted to leave a review of it on GoodReads. I haven’t posted here for while, so just to keep the pot simmering, here it is. OK, that might be cheating but . . .
Whether you intend to read Rose Tremain’s 2003 novel The Colour and have come here searching the views of others, or whether you have, like me, logged on to submit your own rating and review, you will be struck that far more readers who have finished reading the novel — I shall be unkind and describe that as ‘ploughed their way through the novel’ — thought it very good and thoroughly enjoyed it.
It was also a hit with many of the critics: the blurb on the back of my paperback version quotes Britain’s Daily Telegraph as describing Ms Tremain as ‘one of the finest writers in English’, and the Britain’s Independent gushes ‘a fabulous work, bravely imaginative, deeply moving, surprising, invigorating and satisfying’.
The New York Times is a little more sober and warns that the novel can be, and often is, a little ‘windy’. I know what the paper’s critic means and intend to be less kind. And I have to say that I was not moved, surprised, invigorated or satisfied by The Colour. Sadly not a bit.
Yet I cannot deny that the overall majority of those who rated it were impressed — 26pc of the almost 5,000 awarded this novel five stars and 41pc gave it four stars. Only 23pc gave it, like me, three stars. So I must be candid: this might well be your kind of thing and you might well enjoy it, but it certainly wasn’t mine.
In my view The Colour is often horribly overwritten: Tremain cannot resist a simile or two or even 2,000, which all too often are forced, stick out like a sore thumb and illuminate nothing. She is also quite addicted to longwinded, inappropriate and often contradictory metaphors which serve no purpose except, I suspect, because Ms Tremain wants to give her work a literary flavour.
They don’t — all they give this work is a faux-literary flavour (faux as in ‘fake’), though I wouldn’t doubt that some readers — those who made this a five-star read — will often often have paused and reflected ‘God, she can write!’
Ms Tremain is obviously very much at home with words but there is more to writing than that, and her flood of metaphors jar and confuse and are usually entirely superfluous. Her descriptions sometimes just don’t ring
true, can be confusing and convey — for this reader at least — far less than they might have done or should do.
A few years ago I came upon a similar word to the now quite well-known term ’journalese’, which well describes the style of this kind of writing — ‘novelese’. You might know what I am talking about. To my mind The Colour is ‘novelese’.
I forced myself to finish the novel because I intended writing this review and thought it only fair to Ms Tremain to do so. But it was no pleasure — The Colour is 363 pages long and remorseless.
Ironically, it might well have successfully been boiled down to a quarter its size, and far more tautly written, concentrated to make whatever Ms Tremain hoped to convey more telling, it could have been a greater success.
What, though, she hoped to convey is not apparent. I often felt, in fact, that there might be material for four, five or six quite good and quite distinct short stories. But yoked together as the different themes and characters’ back stories were, it is too amorphous and at times turgid.
Somehow it didn’t hang together: the separate strands of the novel remained stubbornly separate and did not gel as I think Ms Tremain intended them to gel. Certainly there was ‘story’ enough, but the strands and their stories might well have made up separate books with no loss to each other.
The quasi-mystical account of an outcast middle-aged Maori women — I think — looking for some kind of redemption had essentially very little to do with the account of the English immigrant who becomes obsessed with finding gold (it all takes place in New Zealand’s mid-19th century gold rush).
This man, escaping in shame from the death of a young girl in a botched abortion, is married to a woman in her mid-30s who is also escaping, in her case from sterile future as a governess. The marriage, on both sides was one of convenience, but — crucially — the reader (well, this reader) fails to become engaged.
The former governess’ musings on freedom and all the rest read more like the yearnings of an adolescent girl confided to her diary than anything we might reasonably be expected to take seriously. Then there’s fourth central character, a Chinese market gardener who also stumbles into a fair amount of quasi-mysticism which had me more than baffled once or twice.
Those yearnings of an adolescent girl highlight one aspect of Ms Tremain’s writing which I found particularly irritating. From the first page to the last Ms Tremain, whose presence as ‘the author’ is apparent throughout, gives us the thoughts and ‘insights’ of pretty much every character at every turn, and all — even a preternaturally articulate eight-year-old boy and the outcast middle-aged Maori women — express themselves as they might were they (much like Ms Tremain) writing a novel. It is incessant, interminable and wearying, especially when such insights come loaded with all those bloody similes.
Pretty much everything the characters see, hear, feel or ‘understand’ — they are much given to ‘understanding’ and getting insight into their lives, their pasts and their futures — has some kind of significance, and they examine and reflect their thoughts and feelings at pretty much every turn. It’s more like eavesdropping on a university creative writing class than being in the windy wilds and open country of New Zealand’s South Island.
Despite that, all the characters, with the possible exception the Englishman’s widowed mother (who emigrated with her son and his wife) and a 15-year-old male prostitute, remain distinctly two-dimensional. We don’t — well, at least I didn’t — care much about any of them and what fate might have in store for them at all.
This might, though, be your thing: after all 67pc of those who rated it gave it four stars or more. You might well enjoy a spuriously literary immersion in a sea of feelings, thoughts, insights. Yes, there is ‘action’ of kind and, yes, ‘things happen’ — quite a bit, in fact — but it is all so remorselessly swamped and our involvement struggles to survive. It really wasn’t my bag at all.
At first I was going to give The Colour just two stars, but I felt that was possibly unfair. It is not ‘bad’ at all. It’s just it doesn’t achieve what I suspect Ms Tremain set out to achieve or, more unkindly, it doesn’t live up to its pretensions. On the other hand there are far worse such novels out there, so I’ve finally settled on three stars.
Whether you intend to read Rose Tremain’s 2003 novel The Colour and have come here searching the views of others, or whether you have, like me, logged on to submit your own rating and review, you will be struck that far more readers who have finished reading the novel — I shall be unkind and describe that as ‘ploughed their way through the novel’ — thought it very good and thoroughly enjoyed it.
It was also a hit with many of the critics: the blurb on the back of my paperback version quotes Britain’s Daily Telegraph as describing Ms Tremain as ‘one of the finest writers in English’, and the Britain’s Independent gushes ‘a fabulous work, bravely imaginative, deeply moving, surprising, invigorating and satisfying’.
The New York Times is a little more sober and warns that the novel can be, and often is, a little ‘windy’. I know what the paper’s critic means and intend to be less kind. And I have to say that I was not moved, surprised, invigorated or satisfied by The Colour. Sadly not a bit.
Yet I cannot deny that the overall majority of those who rated it were impressed — 26pc of the almost 5,000 awarded this novel five stars and 41pc gave it four stars. Only 23pc gave it, like me, three stars. So I must be candid: this might well be your kind of thing and you might well enjoy it, but it certainly wasn’t mine.
In my view The Colour is often horribly overwritten: Tremain cannot resist a simile or two or even 2,000, which all too often are forced, stick out like a sore thumb and illuminate nothing. She is also quite addicted to longwinded, inappropriate and often contradictory metaphors which serve no purpose except, I suspect, because Ms Tremain wants to give her work a literary flavour.
They don’t — all they give this work is a faux-literary flavour (faux as in ‘fake’), though I wouldn’t doubt that some readers — those who made this a five-star read — will often often have paused and reflected ‘God, she can write!’
Ms Tremain is obviously very much at home with words but there is more to writing than that, and her flood of metaphors jar and confuse and are usually entirely superfluous. Her descriptions sometimes just don’t ring
A few years ago I came upon a similar word to the now quite well-known term ’journalese’, which well describes the style of this kind of writing — ‘novelese’. You might know what I am talking about. To my mind The Colour is ‘novelese’.
I forced myself to finish the novel because I intended writing this review and thought it only fair to Ms Tremain to do so. But it was no pleasure — The Colour is 363 pages long and remorseless.
Ironically, it might well have successfully been boiled down to a quarter its size, and far more tautly written, concentrated to make whatever Ms Tremain hoped to convey more telling, it could have been a greater success.
What, though, she hoped to convey is not apparent. I often felt, in fact, that there might be material for four, five or six quite good and quite distinct short stories. But yoked together as the different themes and characters’ back stories were, it is too amorphous and at times turgid.
Somehow it didn’t hang together: the separate strands of the novel remained stubbornly separate and did not gel as I think Ms Tremain intended them to gel. Certainly there was ‘story’ enough, but the strands and their stories might well have made up separate books with no loss to each other.
The quasi-mystical account of an outcast middle-aged Maori women — I think — looking for some kind of redemption had essentially very little to do with the account of the English immigrant who becomes obsessed with finding gold (it all takes place in New Zealand’s mid-19th century gold rush).
This man, escaping in shame from the death of a young girl in a botched abortion, is married to a woman in her mid-30s who is also escaping, in her case from sterile future as a governess. The marriage, on both sides was one of convenience, but — crucially — the reader (well, this reader) fails to become engaged.
The former governess’ musings on freedom and all the rest read more like the yearnings of an adolescent girl confided to her diary than anything we might reasonably be expected to take seriously. Then there’s fourth central character, a Chinese market gardener who also stumbles into a fair amount of quasi-mysticism which had me more than baffled once or twice.
Those yearnings of an adolescent girl highlight one aspect of Ms Tremain’s writing which I found particularly irritating. From the first page to the last Ms Tremain, whose presence as ‘the author’ is apparent throughout, gives us the thoughts and ‘insights’ of pretty much every character at every turn, and all — even a preternaturally articulate eight-year-old boy and the outcast middle-aged Maori women — express themselves as they might were they (much like Ms Tremain) writing a novel. It is incessant, interminable and wearying, especially when such insights come loaded with all those bloody similes.
Pretty much everything the characters see, hear, feel or ‘understand’ — they are much given to ‘understanding’ and getting insight into their lives, their pasts and their futures — has some kind of significance, and they examine and reflect their thoughts and feelings at pretty much every turn. It’s more like eavesdropping on a university creative writing class than being in the windy wilds and open country of New Zealand’s South Island.
Despite that, all the characters, with the possible exception the Englishman’s widowed mother (who emigrated with her son and his wife) and a 15-year-old male prostitute, remain distinctly two-dimensional. We don’t — well, at least I didn’t — care much about any of them and what fate might have in store for them at all.
This might, though, be your thing: after all 67pc of those who rated it gave it four stars or more. You might well enjoy a spuriously literary immersion in a sea of feelings, thoughts, insights. Yes, there is ‘action’ of kind and, yes, ‘things happen’ — quite a bit, in fact — but it is all so remorselessly swamped and our involvement struggles to survive. It really wasn’t my bag at all.
At first I was going to give The Colour just two stars, but I felt that was possibly unfair. It is not ‘bad’ at all. It’s just it doesn’t achieve what I suspect Ms Tremain set out to achieve or, more unkindly, it doesn’t live up to its pretensions. On the other hand there are far worse such novels out there, so I’ve finally settled on three stars.
Sunday, 1 September 2019
You do realise, of course, that reading this blog marks you out as — well, how do I put this without being too effusive? — a little more refined, a cut above the rabble and someone whose intellect and lively mind one can only admire. Elite? Yes, and then some
Over the years like many, many people the world over, I had bought ‘the Sunday papers’. Being — apparently — less intellectually and politically developed than my peers I suspect I regarded doing so as an aspect of being grown-up. It’s what ‘grown-ups’ around me did. Or perhaps I’m being too hard on myself. Anyway until I was in my mid-30s I spent several hours reading them like every other good middle-class chap.
Then one Sunday lunchtime sitting in a pub in Birmingham with my girlfriend, a pint of cider, The Sunday Times and The Observer the penny dropped. I suppose I might even call it ‘an epiphany’ if that didn’t sound too daft and if it had a more religious dimension to it, but it didn’t. It was quite straightforward in fact. I had just finished
reading some ‘important’ news story or other, written at length and taking up the best part of two broadsheet pages, when it occurred to me that I had not learnt a single new fact. Not one. Everything I had read I was already familiar with, and it dawned on me that all I had read was simply a rehashed round-up of the various stories and accounts of a particular matter that had been carried by the dailies throughout the previous week.
Well, if that occurred to me, why hadn’t it occurred to many others over the years? After all then — this was in the early 1980s when I was working for the Birmingham Evening Mail — the circulation figures for the Sundays were still very healthy, so the Sundays then had a great many more readers than they do now. Yet everyone was still at it and many, a great many, thought that their Sunday broadsheet pretty much had the inside track on everything. Actually, they were just, to a large extent, skilled re-write jobs.
Circulation figures these days are discouraging: according to the ABC figures for July 2019 (I got these from the Press Gazette, the Sunday Telegraph annual figure was 257,034 a week (down by 12% on the previous year), the Sunday Times was 649,908 (down 11%, but of that figure 51,445 were ‘bulks’, the trade term for simply giving the paper away free for various purposes) and The Observer a very piddly — in fact an embarrassingly bad — 157,4553 (down 7%).
By comparison, at the beginning of January 1980 when I joined the Evening Mail, its circulation was a healthy — if I have got this right — 240,000 or thereabouts, but, to its extreme annoyance, it had fallen some from the papers’ heyday and had recently been outshone by the Wolverhampton-based evening paper, the Express & Star. Regarded by the Evening Mail as something of an upstart, by January 1980, the Express & Star was selling about 20,000 copies more a night.
In the early-1980s there was no internet and so no ‘social media’, just four TV channels (and the newest, Channel 4 had only just been launched) and most households bought a Sunday paper. The tabloids sold better, but even the circulation figures for the three main broadsheets — the Independent wasn’t found until 1986 and its sister Independent on Sunday not for another few years and both went to the wall as printed papers three years ago — were good, though already declining from their heyday but still making a great deal of moolah for their owners. Apart from the broadsheets, there was The News of the World (‘the Screws’ as in The News of the Screws), The People, The Sunday Mirror, and in those days several regional Sunday papers. In Birmingham we had the Sunday Mercury, though I never read it.
. . .
The trick used by (here in Britain, but you will have your own ’Sundays’) the Sunday Telegraph, the ST and the ‘Obs’ was - and still is - a good one and, like all good tricks, a simple one: to write your news stories in a pseudo-authoritative manner which seems to wink at the reader ’WE know what’s REALLY going on, and as YOU are reading this, YOU do to’ (with the tacit message ‘so, well done, join us, The Intelligent Informed People’).
That’s outrageous flattery, of course, but it’s one of only true keys to success in this world. Flatter someone well and consistently — and so that they don’t notice — and you will have whatever is your wicked way before you can say ‘sucker!’ It beats brute force every time, and no one is immune to it — well, perhaps YOU are, my dear: but then you always did strike me as being just a little too sharp to fall for that kind of schtick and I doubt I could sucker you successfully, but as for everyone else . . . (yes, you know who, that’s it him/her).
Grateful to be acknowledged, however spuriously, as something of ‘an insider’, Sunday Telegraph, ST and ‘Obs’ readers (and, until it was put out of its misery, ’Indy’ readers) would then spend the early part of the following week when at work, in the gym changing room or down the pub, pontificating with equal pseudo-authority on a subject they barely understood and whose essential details were becoming harder to remember by the hour:
‘Well, that Dominic Cummings is a complete menace, of course/the only one of that sorry gang who seems to have any kind of grip . . . The Queen is furious, apparently, but she can’t say or do anything at all/serves her right, I’m sure she’s a secret remoaner . . . Come on, Boris might have pulled a fast one, but its genius, for God’s sake, and anyway, what’s the fuss about, Parliament is prorogued every year/he’s really gone too far and it’ll end he career with a bit of luck . . .
But never mind. By Thursday and Friday when their increasingly threadbare comprehension of ‘an issue’ courtesy of two hours spent ‘with the Sundays’ is so hazy most folk wisely keep schtumm on the matter, there is a new edition of the Sunday Telegraph, the ST and the ‘Obs’ to look forward to the following Sunday.
Try it yourselves: if you are one of the fast-diminishing gang who still spend a few hours every Sunday ‘with the Sundays’, ask yourself after reading a story — like the one I’ve linked to, but any of the others — the demos and protests in Hong Kong, the US/China trader war, Salvini shooting himself in the foot in Italy — what have you exactly learned from reading that latest story that you didn’t already know?
To be fair, Sunday papers have a tough time: unless ‘a story breaks early on the day before publication, it will be picked up by one of its daily rivals and no longer ‘news’ by the time they add their two ha’porth worth. That’s why, I suppose, they have to give it that ‘authoritative’ spin. They have somehow to give the impression ‘the story’ has moved on.
. . .
A vaguely related practice, one often adopted by the Guardian, it to cover what they call ‘a running story’, giving ‘live updates’ on an EU meeting, a huge train crash, or whatever ‘the story’ is. It is equally spurious (in my view). Take the ‘EU meeting’: its a hoary old cliche that we, the public, are not only entitled to learn what those who govern us are up to but should know. Fair enough, although that rather ignores the problem that most of us interpret events to suit our own bias.
Thus the recent ‘prorogation of Parliament’ is either a sneaky way of denying those opposed to a ‘no-deal’ Brexit as much parliamentary time as possible to get their ducks in a row to make sure a deal is struck; or it is — this is the official line — something that happens every year in September before the three weeks of party conferences (the period often referred to as the ‘conference recess’) and always happens before a Queen’s Speech is due.
That Parliament will be suspended (the common or garden word for ‘prorogued’) for longer than is normal is a coincident say its supporters: it is just how the ‘conference season’ and the usual prorogation of Parliament before a Queen’s Speech have panned out, and that it does rather stymy ‘no-deal’ opponents hoping to scupper the Prime Minister’s plans to sell Britain down the river (No commenting! Ed.) is neither here nor there.
For these past few minutes or so Radio 4’s the World This Weekend news programme has been playing. OK, often — another problem faced by hacks when there has been no new development in a story — news editors will think up some angle or other to give the story legs and this is certainly what happened on the World This Weekend. But they got some historian or other in, an expert on the English Civil War — note the English Civil War, not the Scottish, Welsh or British Civil War — to compare the situations.
It all kicked off, she said, when the the Parliamentarians found there seemed way forward in their negotiations with Charles II over his high-handed handling of Parliament. The point of comparison is, I suppose, not just the stalemate reached between the no ‘no-deal’ Brexit camp and the ‘we leave by October 31 come what may’ wallahs, but the stark and unreconcilable positions of the Remainers and Brexiteers: ne’re the twain will meet.
On the bright side, of course, is the fact that in Britain, unlike in the US where apparently every child over seven is by law obliged to own and know how to use at least two different kinds of gun, few households have a stock of weapons. When we are angry we prefer to right strong letters to someone rather than take a number of semi-automatic weapons to the nearest school and kill as many kids as possible. So if this matter does turn into a civil war (and, to be frank the last one was more than 360 years ago, so we might well be due one), at least most combatants will be armed with nothing more lethal than a few obscenities.
Should I be joking? Of course, I should. The whole matter, from the Brexit vote on three years ago, is a farce. Pip, pip.
Then one Sunday lunchtime sitting in a pub in Birmingham with my girlfriend, a pint of cider, The Sunday Times and The Observer the penny dropped. I suppose I might even call it ‘an epiphany’ if that didn’t sound too daft and if it had a more religious dimension to it, but it didn’t. It was quite straightforward in fact. I had just finished
Well, if that occurred to me, why hadn’t it occurred to many others over the years? After all then — this was in the early 1980s when I was working for the Birmingham Evening Mail — the circulation figures for the Sundays were still very healthy, so the Sundays then had a great many more readers than they do now. Yet everyone was still at it and many, a great many, thought that their Sunday broadsheet pretty much had the inside track on everything. Actually, they were just, to a large extent, skilled re-write jobs.
Circulation figures these days are discouraging: according to the ABC figures for July 2019 (I got these from the Press Gazette, the Sunday Telegraph annual figure was 257,034 a week (down by 12% on the previous year), the Sunday Times was 649,908 (down 11%, but of that figure 51,445 were ‘bulks’, the trade term for simply giving the paper away free for various purposes) and The Observer a very piddly — in fact an embarrassingly bad — 157,4553 (down 7%).
By comparison, at the beginning of January 1980 when I joined the Evening Mail, its circulation was a healthy — if I have got this right — 240,000 or thereabouts, but, to its extreme annoyance, it had fallen some from the papers’ heyday and had recently been outshone by the Wolverhampton-based evening paper, the Express & Star. Regarded by the Evening Mail as something of an upstart, by January 1980, the Express & Star was selling about 20,000 copies more a night.
In the early-1980s there was no internet and so no ‘social media’, just four TV channels (and the newest, Channel 4 had only just been launched) and most households bought a Sunday paper. The tabloids sold better, but even the circulation figures for the three main broadsheets — the Independent wasn’t found until 1986 and its sister Independent on Sunday not for another few years and both went to the wall as printed papers three years ago — were good, though already declining from their heyday but still making a great deal of moolah for their owners. Apart from the broadsheets, there was The News of the World (‘the Screws’ as in The News of the Screws), The People, The Sunday Mirror, and in those days several regional Sunday papers. In Birmingham we had the Sunday Mercury, though I never read it.
. . .
The trick used by (here in Britain, but you will have your own ’Sundays’) the Sunday Telegraph, the ST and the ‘Obs’ was - and still is - a good one and, like all good tricks, a simple one: to write your news stories in a pseudo-authoritative manner which seems to wink at the reader ’WE know what’s REALLY going on, and as YOU are reading this, YOU do to’ (with the tacit message ‘so, well done, join us, The Intelligent Informed People’).
That’s outrageous flattery, of course, but it’s one of only true keys to success in this world. Flatter someone well and consistently — and so that they don’t notice — and you will have whatever is your wicked way before you can say ‘sucker!’ It beats brute force every time, and no one is immune to it — well, perhaps YOU are, my dear: but then you always did strike me as being just a little too sharp to fall for that kind of schtick and I doubt I could sucker you successfully, but as for everyone else . . . (yes, you know who, that’s it him/her).
Grateful to be acknowledged, however spuriously, as something of ‘an insider’, Sunday Telegraph, ST and ‘Obs’ readers (and, until it was put out of its misery, ’Indy’ readers) would then spend the early part of the following week when at work, in the gym changing room or down the pub, pontificating with equal pseudo-authority on a subject they barely understood and whose essential details were becoming harder to remember by the hour:
‘Well, that Dominic Cummings is a complete menace, of course/the only one of that sorry gang who seems to have any kind of grip . . . The Queen is furious, apparently, but she can’t say or do anything at all/serves her right, I’m sure she’s a secret remoaner . . . Come on, Boris might have pulled a fast one, but its genius, for God’s sake, and anyway, what’s the fuss about, Parliament is prorogued every year/he’s really gone too far and it’ll end he career with a bit of luck . . .
But never mind. By Thursday and Friday when their increasingly threadbare comprehension of ‘an issue’ courtesy of two hours spent ‘with the Sundays’ is so hazy most folk wisely keep schtumm on the matter, there is a new edition of the Sunday Telegraph, the ST and the ‘Obs’ to look forward to the following Sunday.
Try it yourselves: if you are one of the fast-diminishing gang who still spend a few hours every Sunday ‘with the Sundays’, ask yourself after reading a story — like the one I’ve linked to, but any of the others — the demos and protests in Hong Kong, the US/China trader war, Salvini shooting himself in the foot in Italy — what have you exactly learned from reading that latest story that you didn’t already know?
To be fair, Sunday papers have a tough time: unless ‘a story breaks early on the day before publication, it will be picked up by one of its daily rivals and no longer ‘news’ by the time they add their two ha’porth worth. That’s why, I suppose, they have to give it that ‘authoritative’ spin. They have somehow to give the impression ‘the story’ has moved on.
. . .
A vaguely related practice, one often adopted by the Guardian, it to cover what they call ‘a running story’, giving ‘live updates’ on an EU meeting, a huge train crash, or whatever ‘the story’ is. It is equally spurious (in my view). Take the ‘EU meeting’: its a hoary old cliche that we, the public, are not only entitled to learn what those who govern us are up to but should know. Fair enough, although that rather ignores the problem that most of us interpret events to suit our own bias.
Thus the recent ‘prorogation of Parliament’ is either a sneaky way of denying those opposed to a ‘no-deal’ Brexit as much parliamentary time as possible to get their ducks in a row to make sure a deal is struck; or it is — this is the official line — something that happens every year in September before the three weeks of party conferences (the period often referred to as the ‘conference recess’) and always happens before a Queen’s Speech is due.
That Parliament will be suspended (the common or garden word for ‘prorogued’) for longer than is normal is a coincident say its supporters: it is just how the ‘conference season’ and the usual prorogation of Parliament before a Queen’s Speech have panned out, and that it does rather stymy ‘no-deal’ opponents hoping to scupper the Prime Minister’s plans to sell Britain down the river (No commenting! Ed.) is neither here nor there.
For these past few minutes or so Radio 4’s the World This Weekend news programme has been playing. OK, often — another problem faced by hacks when there has been no new development in a story — news editors will think up some angle or other to give the story legs and this is certainly what happened on the World This Weekend. But they got some historian or other in, an expert on the English Civil War — note the English Civil War, not the Scottish, Welsh or British Civil War — to compare the situations.
It all kicked off, she said, when the the Parliamentarians found there seemed way forward in their negotiations with Charles II over his high-handed handling of Parliament. The point of comparison is, I suppose, not just the stalemate reached between the no ‘no-deal’ Brexit camp and the ‘we leave by October 31 come what may’ wallahs, but the stark and unreconcilable positions of the Remainers and Brexiteers: ne’re the twain will meet.
On the bright side, of course, is the fact that in Britain, unlike in the US where apparently every child over seven is by law obliged to own and know how to use at least two different kinds of gun, few households have a stock of weapons. When we are angry we prefer to right strong letters to someone rather than take a number of semi-automatic weapons to the nearest school and kill as many kids as possible. So if this matter does turn into a civil war (and, to be frank the last one was more than 360 years ago, so we might well be due one), at least most combatants will be armed with nothing more lethal than a few obscenities.
Should I be joking? Of course, I should. The whole matter, from the Brexit vote on three years ago, is a farce. Pip, pip.
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