Depression - what it is not

I thought I would, for a change, give one of my blog posts a succinct and straightforward title, and one which entirely sums up part of what I want to say. It is a commonplace to bemoan that ‘depression’ and ‘mental illness’ are not spoken of and discussed as much as they should be and that there is still stigma attached to being ‘depressed’ or ‘mentally ill’, but that complaint and social attitudes to ‘depression’ isn’t at all what I want to write about, or rather not at all directly.

I have previously mentioned in this blog that I have over my past 65 years suffered bouts of ‘depression’, both mild episodes and, far more rarely, quite severe ones. And in those 65 years I believe I have come to understand a little better what is going on, and the very first thing I should like to say is that ‘depression’, or at least the ‘depression’ I have on occasion suffered is a wholly physical not a mental affliction. And the second thing I should like to point out that it has, in my experience at least, nothing at all to do with being ‘sad’ or ‘unhappy’. Absolutely nothing.

On the first point I suggest that ‘depression’ (and I keep writing it in quote marks to highlight how much, in my view, we are mistaken about its nature and to try to distance what I am writing here from hitherto accepted notions of what it is) came to be regarded as a ‘mental’ illness simply because there are few, if any, physical symptoms. It doesn’t make you sweat, you don’t change colour, you don’t run a fever and you are almost always capable of functioning as ‘normal’ (another word I would prefer to leave in quotes). In fact, the rest of the world might well be unaware that someone is suffering from ‘depression’, unless and until that sufferer volunteers information about themselves.

As for depression having little to do with ‘sadness’ or ‘unhappiness’, well, I know that at first hand. I do admit to being, if I allow myself to be, a little to rather irritable when it comes over me, but that has nothing to do with sadness or unhappiness.

My symptoms are quite straightforward: I always have a perpetual ‘thick head’, one which I liken to the headache you have when you are hung over. This can be mild or severe, but it is continuous and

Fuck, they’re going to think I’m sad!

ever-present. It is at its worst in the morning when I wake up and lifts bit by bit as the day goes on. Another symptom is an almost crippling lassitude a marked reluctance to do anything at all. I just don’t want to do anything, but oddly when I do do something, I get very impatient to get on to ‘the next thing’, however trivial or unimportant that next thing is.

This lassitude goes hand in hand with frittering the day away, finding it very difficult to concentrate on anything - reading, watching TV, writing (I am writing this at 3.30 in the afternoon, but twice tried to write it before lunch and just couldn’t get my thoughts together), conversation or whatever work I should be engaged on. Related to that lassitude is outright boredom, completely boredom with everything and everyone. I just want to be alone and count the hours until I can go to bed and go to sleep (and dream - I always look forward to dreaming).

In the past, when things got very bad (I had a very bad bout when I started my first newspaper job in Lincoln in June 1974) my neck and shoulders locked tight and that in conjunction with an appalling and perpetual ‘thick head’ headache is enough to bring anyone down. But note: ‘feeling down’ is a consequence of physical symptoms and should be understood as ‘feeling bloody fed up with this never-ending bloody headache and aching shoulders’.

The first rather severe bout I remember was when I began my first term at boarding school. and I think it developed as a result of a rather drastic change in my life, from being a happy-go-lucky, possibly rather smug, 13-year-old German kid attending a Jesuit college in Berlin where the emphasis was on positivity and doing your best to being a rather plump, very naive and outspoken 13-year-old who didn’t take well to being teased about his shape - I was still only about 5ft 5in - and still hated the glasses I had had to wear for the past year or so. Home was warm and comfortable and my mother was a good cook. School was cold and uncomfortable and the food was rather worse than pigswill or so it seemed to me. And I was very homesick (I was one of only two boys in my year’s intake of 49 who had not already spent several years boarding a prep school).

My second bout came in my second year at college when I was possessed by what I can only describe as an ‘existential’ crisis which, I think, much to do with the final transition from childhood to adulthood and I truly felt all at sea.

But I must stress that although, as it seems to me, circumstances, or rather a change in circumstances, brought on these bouts, the affliction on each occasion was physical not mental - the thumping thick head to which I awoke and the rigidi shoulders and neck which, if nothing, else was almost painful.

As for not being ‘sad’ or ‘unhappy’, I am by nature a chatterbox and cheerful, both a day person and night person, as likely to talk ten to the dozen at 6am in the morning as 1am at night. And that doesn’t change when I am suffering from a, usually mild, bout of depression, except that often I would prefer to be on my own and that bloody thick head can make me quite irritable and short with people.

So there you have it. It is now 4.20 (I had to interrupt writing this to pick my son up from where his school bus drops him) and, having taken - just the one - paracetamol, my head isn’t too bad. But I can’t deny that I can think of nothing else at the moment than getting undressed, brushing my teeth, getting into bed, turning out the light and falling asleep. And dreaming. I always dream.

Oh, and as for the oft-made claim that ‘depressives’ are often ‘creative’, I have to say I don’t buy it and never have. For one thing both terms are far to vague to allow for any sensible discussion, ‘creative’ being even vaguer than ‘depressives’.

Pip, pip.

Labour turns left as it elects as leader The Devil Incarnate/A True Socialist (delete as applicable)

A quick look at the viewing figures for this blog shows that, for example in the past four weeks, less than one in five lives in Old Blighty. So the name ‘Jeremy Corbyn’ (right) will quite possibly mean very little to four out of five bods who happen my way. Yet if you listen to the hype surrounding that name, the man is either the Devil re-incarnate or a latter-day - and secular Jesus Christ come to save Britain from all that is evil in this overwhelmingly capitalist world.

As Britain has been only too aware in the months since we held our last general election and the ‘left’ party was beaten soundly and it’s leader resigned (quite possibly to his quiet relief despite leading his party to defeat), Labour has been in the process of electing a new leader.

There were initially three runners, all to a man and woman pretty much clones of what contemporary politics thinks is great and good, albeit with the obligatory, and entirely understable, left slant. They could all three have come from central casting and had all in one capacity or another served in previous Labour governments (although not necessarily in a senior capacity).

Labour, which sees itself - and, and more to the point, markets itself as the very essence of fairness, realised that all three were pretty much from the right of the party (that’s right, the right of a left-of-centre party - it does make sense if you read it slowly), and that, you know, let’s be even-keeled here, we really should have a bod from the left of the party just to show how fair we are. Jeremy Corbyn has been the MP for Islington North for the past 32 years and from the outset was ‘a man of the left’. At first he was reluctant to stand, but was persuaded to do so in the interests of fairness and so the voters should have a real choice of candidates. He almost didn’t make it onto the list of candidates because his supporters couldn’t drum up sufficient nominees. Eventually, again in the interests of fairness, several MPs agree to nominate him even though they didn’t want him as candidate and wouldn’t vote for him and said so publicly.

From the outset Corbyn was given less than a snowball’s chance in Hell of being elected Labour leader - it was argued that he was too far out on the left to be the man (or woman) to lead Labour and persuade Britain’s electors to put the party back in power. But then something very odd happened. Under the outgoing leader, Ed Miliband, a new protocol for electing Labour’s leader had been introduced: for £3 anyone could sign up as a member of the Labour Party and would then have the right to vote in the leadership election.

Various Tory wiseacres suggested that Tory voters should do exactly that — join up and vote in the ‘unelectable’ Corbyn to ensure the Conservatives held power until Labour ditched him for someone with a better chance success. Perhaps some did, but most certainly a lot more folk on the left also signed up, folk who, it is now assumed, were of a decidedly socialist persuasion and had given up the current Labour Party as more or less being Tory-lite. And bit by bit Corbyn’s chances of winning the leadership contest improved. And as they improved, Labour gained even more members.

Finally, two weeks ago, Corbyn was voted in as leader by a whacking 56pc. The Tories crowed, reasoning that that was Labour’s goose well and truly cooked for the forseeable future, and Labour ‘grandees’ despaired, also reasoning that that was Labour’s goose well and truly cooked for the forseeable future.

. . .

Corbyn is marketed - indeed markets himself (if ‘marketing’ isn’t too insulting a word to describe the behaviour of a devote anti-capitalist) - as a straight-talking, sincere and honest politician, and that might well be true. He makes no secret of his politics which can be summed up as ‘all them cornfields and ballet in the evening’. Whether or not he is the right leader to help Labour back to power is highly debatable. Straight-talking, sincerity and honesty are not three virtues which usually come to mind as the key to political success.

He was long at odds with the majority of the Labour party and voted against it in Parliament many times. He opposed the invasion of Iraq (which, admittedly, wasn’t billed as ‘an invasion’ although that’s exactly what it was) and is a convinced nuclear disarmer. More controversially, he had nice things to say about the IRA while the IRA was setting of bombs on the British mainland and in the longstanding Israel/Hamas stand-off is not just an unashamed champion of Hamas but has previously had close links with one Paul Eisen, a controversial character made out by many to be a ‘holocaust denier’. (Odd how just adding the word ‘denier’ immediately seems to prove your guilty and establish beyond all doubt that you are wrong ’un.) I mention Mr Eisen, of whom I know little, because a great deal has been made of Corbyn’s acquaintance with him and suggestions that Corbyn is a crypto anti-semite.

What has been hugely entertaining has been the buckets of bile several papers have been pouring over Corbyn. Britain’s press are quite distinctly split down the middle: the Guardian and the Mirror are his champion, whereas the rest, most notably the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph, are daily printing stories demonstrating just how evil the man is. Guess what? He had an affair in the 1970s (though after his wife had left him); he refused to sing the national anthem at a ceremony honouring Britain’s fallen servicemen but sang the Red Flag at a meeting not days later; he has been invited to join the Privy Council but there are doubts as to whether he will agree to bow before the Queen! It all begs the question: just how shameless can a man! To put those last two into context, Corbyn is a longstanding republican who would like to see the end of the monarchy, and as for the former - single young man goes to bed with single young woman? Shocking or what?

The Daily Mail attacked him for being a misogynist because he didn’t appoint any women as shadow spokespeople for the ‘top four offices of state’. It overlooked that of his shadow cabinet of 32, 15 appointees are women. Both the Mail and the Telegraph are making much of the fact that Corbyn is ‘the most unpopular party leader in history’. Well! And with very new horror story about the man from the Mail and the Telegraph I find myself asking again and again: exactly what are those two papers afraid of? If, as contemporary wisdom has it, Labour under Corbyn will never be voted into office, why all the angst?

All the above might make it sound as though I am a Corbyn supporter. I’m not, but neither am I a Corbyn opponent. I must admit I find it refreshing how he has to an extent shaken up the increasingly cosy political consensus prevalent in Britain at the moment, but I think it is highly unlikely we would ever seem Corbyn as Prime Minister, which, in my book, is no bad thing. The man is certainly an idealist, but he is an idealist the rest of the world’s politicians would eat from breakfast. I am, however, vastly entertained by it all and am curious to see how it will pan out.

Has the rot finally set in for the EU? Who knows, but it ain’t looking great, but why is Ukip so quiet these days? And I come clean though details, I trust, are admirably vague

Here in Britain our ‘swivel-eyed, looney, United Kingdom Independence Party (Ukip) has gone rather quiet of late. Granted no general election is imminent, but I do seem to remember them adding their two ha’porth on more or less everything. Where have they gone? It’s not as though I miss, them, however. For better or worse - and they insist it would be for better - they insist that the Great Britain should leave the European Union, a body which, they further insist, is directly or indirectly responsible for more or less every ill known to mankind, or least every such here in Britain.

They did quite well in the general election held her last May, with one in eight of all those who voted supporting their local candidate, but because of our electoral ‘first past the post’ electoral system, they won only one seat (and that seat in the Commons was ‘held’ rather than won). Ukip got 3,881,099 votes, 12.6pc of those cast. By comparison, the Liberal Democrats got 3,881,099 votes (7.9pc), but won eight seats, and the Scottish National Party got 1,454,436 votes (4.7pc), but won an astonishing 56 seats, exclusively at the Labour Party’s expense. You can look at the figures here.

This is not, however, a piece about how hard done-by Ukip are. The description of Ukip and its supporters as ‘swivel-eyed loons’ is attributed to our esteemed Prime Minister, who immediately denied saying it, or claimed that the description was now ‘inoperative’ or that he ‘misspoke’ or whatever his excuse was, but I happen to agree with him. I have met several Ukip supporters and none struck me as being an Einstein in the making with a cute political nose to boot, although, of course, that doesn’t mean they are not entitled to their political views. (I like to think I was one of the first to point out that, counter to then contemporary wisdom, it would not be the Tories who would lose the most votes to Ukip but Labour, and that’s apparently what happened. The fatal blow Labour suffered last May was losing more than 50 of its seats to the SNP, but they also lost several English seats to the Tories and I suspect that was because some of their support in those seats went to Ukip. After all, it was her large ‘working class’ support which had switched its allegiance from Labour which kept brought Margaret Thatcher to power and kept here there (she never lost an election) and Labour are completely in denial whenever they believe there’s nothing ‘the workers’ want more than ‘all them cornfields and ballet in the evening’. Given the apparent unfairness of getting several million votes more than the Lib Dems nationwide but ending up with seven MPs fewer, you’d think Ukip would be up there on the barricades demanding electoral reform. Well, you would, wouldn’t you, but so far I haven’t heard a peep from them on that score. But that’s as maybe.

What I now find so surprising is just how quiet Ukip seems to have become, especially now. As far as the EU is concerned and Britain’s membership of it, I hold the, by now distinctly unfashionable, view that Britain should carry on in the club, notwithstanding that the EU needs root and branch reform. Both the pros and antis on British membership like to portray people who hold that view as a mandate short of an issue, but that happens to be what I feel.

The EU (I would tell you at length given half the chance) is a good idea gone increasingly wrong, but essentially a very good idea, though, I see it as more of a trading community and fight just as shy as Ukip of any move towards ‘greater political union’, the ostensive objective of many. But in view of the crisis over the migrants arriving in southern Europe hoping to make their home in the EU, that objective is rapidly losing support.

Many thought that the ongoing shilly-shallying over Greece and the euro was the test of the EU’s resilience and many, pointing out that the EU seemed as rock-solid as ever once the dust had settled (not that it has settled, but that’s what they think), smugly thought the EU had come through with flying colours. Well, the recent response by EU members to how to handle the ‘migrant crisis’ should really make them think again.

A test of anything is how well it does in bad times as well as good times and for all its pseudo-socialist talk of ‘one for all and all for one’, the EU seems to be faring rather badly. From where I sit any talk of unanimity is in very poor taste and the faultlines in the EU are - as in time they always would - becoming very apparent. It doesn’t help that in Hungary’s Viktor Orban the EU is dealing with someone who might well have felt at home in the Nazi party and is not shy about doing just as he pleases, especially when it comes to demonstrating his anti-semitism.

I’m sure all the EU queens in Brussels will find some way to smoothe over the cracks, but cracks there are between the East and West of the EU - between some countries who were in the old Soviet bloc and those who weren’t. (I suspect that after being under the Soviet heel for well on 50 years, those new members are not yet quite in the mood to be dragooned again, this time by Brussels. I’m curious as to how all this will pan out. And why is Ukip so quiet about it all. As it happens I don’t actually care, but I am a tad puzzled. Until May and for the past few years you couldn’t keep them quiet.

. . .

For the past two weeks I have been conscious of not posting here and there was a reason for that. This blog is a mishmash of this, that and t’other, and not the least of its charms are my longwinded and boring accounts of trips abroad. The trouble is - or, rather, was as I have now got around to mentioning it - I didn’t enjoy my last trip very much at all, but felt - feel - that as I went to stay with someone, it would have been churlish to say so.

‘Well, you don’t have to mention it, do you’ you might remark, and, of course, I don’t. But somehow, in a way I don’t even myself understand, I do have to mention it, in that in a sense it would be dishonest not to. Savvy? Well, if you do, I still don’t, but I shall mention it and hope that my comments will not find their way back to my host (and I shall be as vague as possible to boot - no names, no pack drill. It didn’t help that the weather was pretty awful.

The country in which I was staying is usually regarded as one of Europe’s sunny countries but for the seven days I was there - at the beginning of September, no less - there was precious little sun. Instead, we got quite a bit of rain and when we didn’t get rain the weather was generally overcast and dull. Then there are the conditions in which my host lives. In previous visits I didn’t seem to mind them too much, but this time that state of the place just got to me, especially the state of the kitchen.

My bedroom was clean as were my bedsheets, and there was a small bathroom with a hot shower, but the rest of the place is a tip. That wouldn’t necessarily matter too much were it not for the fact that because of the rain and the generally cool and overcast weather we were indoors most of the time. And even when the sun did shine - it never actually got hot and there was the persistent threat that the weather would change - sitting outside was no fun, either, what with broken-down chairs and tables, a discarded this and a discarded that.

There was the fact that on my second or third day I must have eaten something which disagreed with me and I felt off-colour for a day or two. Then there was what I feel most ashamed about: that I felt my host had become rather boring. The anecdotes were the same as was the conversation. So overall, I didn’t enjoy my break very much at all and was pleased to get home.

I don’t know why I should feel guilty about writing that, but I do. However, as I said, I somehow felt it would have been dishonest to carry on writing this blog without mentioning it, so I’m glad I have. Odd, but true.

Pip, pip.

In which I introduce you to an unexpected – quite possibly unsuspected – facet of my character: discretion

Discretion, as all my friends will tell you if you were to ask them, is my middle name, so several details in this entry will be vague to the point of non-existence. I must explain why.

I am staying with a friend in Spain for a week and, and this will be my fourth year here. He is a potter of some renown, although his father was the famous one and whose name is spoken with hushed reverence by potters everywhere who are apt to speak with hushed reverence. Not all, of course, are and although that is no reflection on the man’s expertise, artistry and status in the world of potters, it does indicate that many potters are down-to-earth folk not given to pretension).

My friend, who I got to know when he was still living and working in Cornwall, takes in students who arrive from all over the world for a week or a two-week live-in course on pottery, and when I was here several years ago one such student who was staying at the same time as me was a complete pain in the arse. Fair enough, but my mistake and my then indiscretion was to record the fact and a description of the student in several uncomplimentary blog entries.

For good measure I was also very indiscreet about another woman who was staying at the time, who was, however, not a student but another of the potter’s friends. She, too, had remarkable ability to get on one’s nerves very quickly indeed. (Ah, I hear some of you think, and you don’t? You are Mr Interestingly Pleasant all the time? Well, of course I’m not, but this is my blog you are reading and I trust in this matter you are on my side.)

As I assured you earlier, I am keeping details as vague as possible, but I can’t resist giving a taster of just why I, who is at heart essentially affable and good-natured, was driven to the extremes of irritation within minutes of arriving and introducing myself to the second woman I have mentioned:

For my stay here in Spain that year I had bought what its advertising had assured me to be a mobile phone sim card that would afford me bargain basement calls home to Britain and, crucially, data rates so low that access to the internet would more or less be free. All I had to do was to insert it into my phone once I had arrived in Spain and that, I was promised, would bring me as close to heaven on earth as one can be brought in the magical world of mobile phones. (That, by the way, was a very good example of ‘if is sounds to good to be true, it is’, although obviously I had already disregarded that piece of invaluable wisdom.)

So, after arriving, saying hello and exchanging the usual pleasantries one does with a stranger who is also a guest, I immediately set about taking the back cover off my smartphone and installing the sim card to test it out. The woman, the other guest, sitting nearby, was intrigued.

‘What are you doing?’ she asked.

So I explained what I was doing.

‘What is a sim card?’ she asked.

I told her it was the necessary part of the phone which did all the work. Without one, I added, the phone wouldn’t work.

‘Yes, but what does it do?’

I told her I wasn’t an expert on mobile phones generally and sim cards in particular and couldn’t really elaborate much further. It was just . . .

‘But you must know,’ she interrupted, ‘or you wouldn’t be doing what you are doing.’

That, quite literally within four minutes of meeting the woman, was when the first alarm bell rang. Christ, a bloody irritating old crone alert, I thought, but I repeated that ‘a sim card is the essential part of every mobile phone and it includes, for example, all the necessary, hardware, software and every other ware necessary to allow you to use the phone as a mobile phone rather than as, oh I don’t know, just another fucking expensive paperweight’, although I didn’t swear and I wasn’t sarcastic. I do remember saying it all in a tone intended to discourage any further questions. But some hope.

‘What’s software?’ she asked.

‘You really don’t know?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘and I like to know these things.’ And on it went, and on and on, for I don’t know how long.

I am, when I need to be, polite, and I’m sure I remained polite on that occasion, but believe me I didn’t want to be. She was there for the rest of my week, as was the student I mentioned above – but as I’ve warned no more details will be provided, I’m afraid, although, she, too was, such a pain in the arse that I would dearly love to repeat the indiscretions and outrageous insults of several earlier blog entries and, to boot, add several more. Here’s why.

A friend of my friend’s who lives locally came across my blog – which gave far greater detail of who my host was and where he lived and worked, so there’s no mystery as to how he might have chanced upon it – and became alarmed that potential pottery students reading it might be put off applying to come to stay for a course. He alerted my friend who, in turn, asked me to remove the entries, which I did. So, dear reader, all I can tell you is that ‘I am in Spain’.

As to whether it’s north, south, east or west, you’ll have to guess.

. . .

I’ve been here now for three days and have just under a week left. As usual I’ve been doing nothing except, in no particular order, read, sleep - The Razor’s Edge by Somerstet Maugham, and well worth it - drink (beer, wine or gin), smoke, listen to jazz and play guitar. My friend, the potter, is an accomplished musician, although by no means an outstanding one, who plays, each after a fashion, classical guitar, piano trumpet and, I believe, even the clarinet. But for this week I have commandeered his guitar (a gut-stringed Spanish guitar) and have been learning to play some of the songs I like.

These, I’m sorry to tell any younger folk coming across this blog, are not Taylor Swift or One Direction or anything of that kind, but what are for me timeless tunes – As Time Goes By, These Foolish Things and others of that ilk. Boring for some, maybe, but musically most satisfying. Furthermore, the chords you use to play them are, if you want to play them without sounding like a girl guide sitting with friends around her first campfire, the rather less usual ones – C7/9- for example, Em9/7 and F#m13/sus4 (I made that one up) – which are, at first, more difficult to get your fingers around, but which are well worth it once you can (and I’m glad to say that, after spending the past few years practising scales on the guitar, my fingers are agile and flexible enough to achieve).

If you are interested, here is the best website I have come across giving you the chords to many, many songs. There are others, of course, but I like this one best. Try it.

. . .

Here is the one clue you will get:

You want silliness in this silly season? How about the silliness of denying the fruits of life to several more merely because we would have to put up with just a little less?

They call it the silly season, the month when ‘nothing happens’ and our newspapers are required to resort to printing all kinds of nonsensical rubbish just to fill their pages and justify the ad rates they charge. Well, from where I sit if the guiding criterion is being prepared to print all kinds of nonsensical rubbish, the newspaper silly season here in Britain runs from January 1 to December 31.

The month of August, at least not for the past ten years has been any sillier. It depends, of course, on which newspaper you read. Those here in Britain – I should say those self-regarding types here in Britain – who like to think they have a conscience and regard themselves as ‘thinkers’ head for the Guardian and the Independent. But neither could yield an inch to those papers popularly seen as being rather further down the food-chain when it comes to silliness.

In the Guardian, for instance – and I will grant that it does in part still cling on to being a newspaper of record rather than sensation – you’re as likely to find bizarre items in its lifestyle section on how to make the perfect something or other as you will find high-minded agonising about global warming (yes, that’s still around, although apparently temperatures have stopped creeping up now for the past 15 years).

The latest installment is How To Make The Perfect Porchetta and I don’t mind admitting that until I came across the piece for the purposes of digging up an example, I had no idea what porchetta was. Several weeks ago, I spoofed that uniquely Guardianista piece with How To Pour The Perfect Glass Of Water on Facebook (below) and got just one like. That probably says more about the limits to my

circle of Facebook friends than anything else, but I was surprised it got just one, especially as I had

gone to some trouble to spoor what looked like a bona fide link to the story in the Guardian.

As for real silliness, in season or out of it, you really can do no better than what is popularly known as the Mail Online’s Column Of Shame. These are ineffably fluffy pieces recording such important events such as Kim Kardashian appearing in public wearing the same dress for the second time or Orland Bloom popping into his nearest Starbucks for a coffee. I shan’t bother with a specific link as Mail Online manages to outdo itself in complete silliness every day, seven days a week the year round.

More intriguing in the silliness stakes is the story of how the once quite mighty Daily Telegraph is dying on its feet before our eyes. Ten years ago, that paper, regarded for decades as the voice of Conservatism in Britain, was still selling well over one and a half million copies a day, and no other of its British broadsheet competitors – the Guardian, the Independent and that most middlebrow of middlebrow pretensions, The Times, came anywhere close in terms of circulation. Now it is knocking along at the bottom along with its competitors, selling a great deal less than half a million copies a day and striving to stay afloat by indulging itself in the most futile of all futile survival strategies, laying off staff.

Where once it had a comparable editorial team to, well my gang, the Daily Mail, it has rid itself of anyone able to hold a pen and allows gangs of whoever it can scoop up for the day from the alleyways of Victoria to sub-edit its pages. And it shows. Christ does it show. These folk are given a bottle of stout and a pack of cheese and onion sandwiches plus ten Senior Service and told not to let any word longer than eight letters into the paper. Obviously, being the roughest of the rough and ill-educated to boot, they usually fail and quite substantial words of 12/13 letters or more are still creeping into the paper, though always used in an inappropriate way.

By way of being a ‘paper of record’, the Telegraph has espoused that most obvious of standbys, the list: the ten/twenty Premier League players managers most want to get rid of; the twenty best pubs in Britain; twenty comments you just can’t be without when you are at a cocktail party; twenty ways of definitely upsetting royalty. Anyone at all interested in that once mighty paper’s decline should consult Britain’s Private Eye (still described as a ‘satirical journal’, although I can’t for the life of me see why) which is taking a great delight in chronicling the abject decline into irrelevance of the Daily Telegraph.

. . .

Exactly how silly the season isn’t can be gauged by two stories in the headlines here in Britain (and Europe): there’s the desperate attempts by tens of thousands of migrants from various parts of North Africa to get into the EU in search of a better life; and there’s the unsettling decline of share prices on the Chinese stock market (though not the Hong Kong Stock Exchange which has so far avoided whatever virus is going aroung). As for the migrants, well despite the nasty traits of my character, they have my best wishes.

For decades we here in the West (the ‘civilised West) have been encouraged to make the most of ourselves, to strive to raise our standard of living, to ensure we take care of our families and the rest, yet when folk fleeing often certain death in Syria, Libya, Ethiopia and Eritrea try to do the same we clutch our skirts in horror. Why exactly?

Well, I’ll tell you why: if we did do the decent thing and give refuge to as many of them as we could it would – to be very blunt – cost us. The good folk of Western Europe might have to do without getting a new car every few years, taking a foreign holiday every year, eating out at some expense whenever they chose: it is one thing expressing apparently heartfelt fellow feeling, but quite another doing something about it. I know that I am about to sound like some dickhead socialist and that I am not – I might be a dickhead, but I am no lefty. But here goes: there is more than enough to go around here in Western Europe for several million additional folk. Yes, it would take some readjusting and, yes, it would be difficult, but it would be quite possible with thought and sense to re-organise life and for all of us already established here to make slight sacrifices.

Who says we are obliged to raise our standard of living in perpetuity? Why those flogging us stuff, of course. Here in Britain the average household has at least two TV sets and two cars. Today I went to the local council recycling facility to drop off a guitar amp which had long given up the ghost and was simply gathering dust. And what did I see: at least 40 or 50 perfectly reasonable TV sets, some of them of the new plasma flatscreen kind, tossed out to make way for a newer, more expensive model. (Incidentally, despite the fact that thousands of more TV sets are shifted every day, the crap on TV remains the same: does EastEnders (or whatever your soap is) improve simply because you are watching it one a 40/50in wide plasma TV?)

The wobble, and it could become far more than a wobble, of the Chinese stock exchange, is potentially more serious. Although I am advocating a restructuring of our Western economies to spread the goodies a little more with a lot more people, it is the kind of thing which has to be done slowly and carefully. But a worldwide collapse in stock markets and doubtlessly a resultant imploding of economies is not the way to do it. But the danger is the suddenness of it, not the fact that share prices are falling. So much for silliness.

. . .

Next week I am off to Spain again for what has become an annual trip. Four holidays in five months? And you preach to us about a fat living? Well, it’s a little less complicated than that (of course). I get 20 paid holiday days a year, but for the past few years I have ended up at the end of the holiday year with ‘days owed’ and was obliged to take a week of in October doing nothing just to take them.

Well, this year, possibly my last in work, I decided to organies myself a little more. Eh, that’s it. I am not taking more holiday, just ensuring what I take is spent in slightly warmer parts than were hereto fore. I am off to see one Seth Cardew, the potter, in his bolthole a few miles north of Els Inbarsos in Castellon, and I shall keep you posted. As always – I really can’t pass up any opportunity to pontificate.