Why the Daily Mail always scores so well: ignore the wiseacres — nostalgia is still what it used to be. Big bucks

I shall be hated for saying this by every last progressive in the land - and if such admirable folk living further afield also know or know of the Daily Mail, they will most certainly join in the howls of condemnation - but here I go: the Daily Mail is a superb newspaper, or rather, with a nod to those who loathe it with every fibre of their being, the Daily Mail is a superb newspaper in the field it chooses to operate. It knows how, when and where to push the right buttons and does so again this morning with this set of pictures. (Admittedly, knowing how, when and where to push the right buttons might also be said of Adolf Hitler, but I'll let that pass rather than risk this entry becoming ever more arcane.)
Every paper has its constituents, of course, and does its best to pander to their varied prejudices and foibles - doing so successfully keeps circulation healthy. Even the saintly Guardian plays the game, though satisfying its readers' unshakeable conviction that they're 'on the side of the angels' does get exceptionally wearing. But when it comes to nostalgia, the Mail more or less corners the market. (It also helps, no doubt, that people have pretty short memories).
Loosely themed around the fact that years ago the country didn't give a stuff for health and safety ('elf 'n safety is the phrase usually employed by the paper), its spread of pictures is merely an exercise in showing images of 'yesteryear' to elicit from every Mail reader a heartfelt 'aaaahhh'. These pictures don't actually show fluffy white kittens, but they more or less get the same result. Even guys might find themselves suppressing a slight sigh. The first (right) shows two girls enjoying themselves in the street. Note the lack of a safety harness, the wearing of which 24 hours a day is apparently a legal obligation these days.
Then (below) we have this picture of a lad out fishing. That the lad is barely four years old and might tumble into the water at

any minute is neither here nor there. He's perfectly safe because the photographer taking the picture would simply jump in to rescue him. Or perhaps, more truthfully the photographer would probably not think twice about jumping in and getting thoroughly soaked.
Ensuring our youngsters can swim is admirably sensible. They might, after all, from a very early age, choose to go fishing when there is no photographer around to record the

event and, crucially, to jump in the water after them should the fall in. So it is understandable that such instruction is vital, even though, as in this picture, the training method chosen is somewhat arcane.
This row of eight toddlers (below) are very young and undoubtedly have not yet tasted their first cigarette, although

that will only be a matter of time. (NB pedants: I really am not sure whether that should be 'is' or 'are' - strictly as I am referring to the row, it should be 'is', but that sounds plain daft. This might be a topic I can raise again at the next meeting of the Feature Sub-Editors Hyphen Committee. Might even be worth and extraordinary meeting. Addendum: Word from up high: it is 'is'.) What is remarkable is that despite their young age, they have all already developed a very good head for heights and seem perfectly happy to be perched on such a high wall. Should there be some kind of mishap, the photographer is again on hand to sort things out and hand the poor child who has just fallen off and broken its neck a consolation lollipop.
Quite what is going on here (below) I really don't know, and I can't even attempt a sensible guess, except to suggest that these four lads are being slowly broken into the joys of English cooking. Or perhaps they are unfortunate enough to attend an English boarding school and are still a little peckish after lunch. It's also quite possible that they have just enjoyed an English lunch and are now engaged in getting rid of it again. One often has to.

I've just found the book from which these pictures came: it is called When I Were A Lad and was compiled by Andrew Davies and published by Portico. Just for an extra plug, similar books can be found at http://www.anovabooks.com/.

To keep this straight, and even though this page is in no way intended as profitmaking, I must point out that all the pictures I have published on this page are the copyright of Corbis.

Wise words not to be ignored. From those who know...

After publishing my last entry, I did a bit of hunting around on the net to come up with these quotations. I hope they amuse you. But more than amuse you, they should also be taken seriously. There is more than a grain of truth in each

The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.

Thomas Jefferson

I am unable to understand how a man of honour could take a newspaper in his hands without a shudder of disgust.

Charles Baudelaire

Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists.

Norman Mailer

Newspapers are unable, seemingly, to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilisation.

George Bernard Shaw

Editor: a person employed on a newspaper whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed.

Elbert Hubbard

I fear three newspapers more than a hundred thousand bayonets.

Napoleon

I've always said there's a place for the press but they haven't dug it yet.

Tommy Docherty

Journalism - a profession whose business it is to explain to others what it personally does not understand.

Lord Northcliffe

Northcliffe was in many ways something of a genius. He was born Alfred Harmsworth, the son - if I am getting this right - of a rather useless and impoverished barrister, and, if I remember, he was a cycling enthusiast. I don't think that was in any way significant except that because of his enthusiasm, he met an awful lot of people from different backgrounds and, I think, came to realise that people who might not usually mix socially (as was far more the case at the end of the 19th century) could and would do so if they had a common interest. Perhaps he realised that that approach might be successful in newspapers.

To this day, the Mail is read by members of the many middle classes which exist in Britain. (There are far more middle classes than the simple distinction between, lower-middle, middle and upper-middle might suggest. And before American readers pat themselves on the back and tell themselves their society is classless, it is, in fact, nothing of the kind. If anything, it is even more class-ridden than Old Blighty.)

Norhtcliffe's first venture was a magazine called Answers To Correspondents in which people wrote in with queries and other readers answered them. Northclifee had a great empathy with the little man and his greatest creation, the Daily Mail, for whom I work, was built on that empathy. Furthermore, pandering - I’m afraid to say there is no better word for describing what the Mail does - to the middlebrow prejudices of the little man has ensured the Mail remains one of the world’s most successful newspapers.

Northcliffe had no children and reputedly died insane, keeping a revolver under his pillow. His brother, ennobled as Rothermere, was the business brains whose expertise made Northdliffe's dreams pay, and he took over the group when Alfred died. Rothermere’s great-grandson Jonathan is the current owner of the fabulous group known as Associated Newspapers.

I once found myself alone in a lift with Jonathan and I was buggered if I was going to stand there like some bloody serf. So I said the first thing which came into my head:

“You’re Lord Rothermere, aren’t you.”

“Yes,” said Lord Rothermere. It was all horribly flat and I did not want to leave it at that. So I said the next thing which came into my head:

“What’s your job like, then?”

“Oh,” said Lord Rothermere, “pretty much like every other job. Some good days, some bad days.”

And with that the lift reached his floor, the doors opened and he left the lift. He probably thought I was the biggest pillock he had ever met.

Incidentally, the Daily Mail was once referred to by a certain Robert Cecil as 'written by office boys for office boys'. This sneer is better put in context when you know that Robert Cecil, briefly a Prime Minister, was better known as Lord Salisbury.

The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything. Except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands.

Oscar Wilde

Freedom of the press in Britain is freedom to print such of the proprietor's prejudices as the advertisers won't object to.

Hannen Swaffer

Journalism largely consists of saying ‘Lord Jones is dead’ to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.’

G.K.Chesterton

You cannot hope to bribe or twist (thank God!) the British journalist. But, seeing what the man will do unbribed, there's no occasion to.

Humbert Wolfe

Journalists aren't supposed to praise things. It's a violation of work rules almost as serious as buying drinks with our own money or absolving the CIA of something.

PJ O’Rourke

And from my favourite author:
If, for instance, they have heard something from the postman, they attribute it to a semi-official statement; if they have fallen into conversation with a stranger at a bar, they can conscientiously describe him as a source that has hitherto proved unimpeachable. It is only when the journalist is reporting a whim of his own, and one to which he attaches minor importance, that he defines it as the opinion of well-informed circles.

Evelyn Waugh

Just days after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, I went along to Waterstone's in High St. Kensington and found a copy of Waugh's Scoop. I flicked through the pages and found the passage I was looking for. It was when Lord Copper briefs young William Boot before Boot takes off to cover the war in Ishmaelia, the country based on Abyssinia. I shall dig out the copy and reprint it word for word. It so suited 2003 gungho attitude to the invasion of Iraq. Incidentally, there is still no word of WMDs. I fear they were so well hidden, they will never be found.

Everything you read in newspapers is absolutely true, except for that rare story of which you happen to have first-hand knowledge.

Erwin Knoll

I can illuminate that: a year or two ago, I met a neighbour in a local petrol station and he told me that his son, on holiday in Australia, had gone snorkelling and lost his credit cards (which he stupidly had in the back pocket of his shorts). He was very upset, rang his dad etc, and my neighbour set about getting money to him. At the end of the day, the son was sitting with friends in a bar, when a stranger walked up and laid his credit cards on the table. It turned out that snorkelling in the same spot an hour or two later, had spotted the credit card wallet on the seabed, rescued it, come across a picture of Daniel on a pass among the credit cards, spotted Daniel on the other side of the bar and returned the cards.
"Great story," I said to Paddy, the father. "Do you mind if I tell the Western Morning News?" He didn't, so I rang the paper, told them the details, it rang Paddy and then printed the story.
Of course, being rather slow on the uptake, I should have thought of selling the story to the nationals who pay good money instead of merely alerting the WMN. (I story I had once heard about and tipped off the Mail newsdesk earned my £300 and all I did was to alert newsdesk.) Hoevery, one of the local news agencies did spot the story in the WMN and flogged it to the nationals and one paper it appeared in was the Mail, the paper I work for. They, or the news agency - I don't know who - got one or two details very wrong indeed: they said Daniel was a student at Manchester University. He wasn't, he was a student at a college in Cheltenham. And they said he was studying town planning or something. He wasn't, he was studying geography. Oh, and the Mail had several direct quotes from Daniel all the way over there in Australia. That was news to Daniel and his father as Daniel didn't speak to anyone, and his father had only spoken to the WMN.
Once, while still working as a reporter in Newcastle on The Journal, I was asked to cover the anniversary of the death of a local man, a soldier who had been shot dead in Northern Ireland. As usual, coming to a story cold like that, I went to the cuttings library and looked up previous stories we had printed about the man's death. Then I wrote my story, using details which had previously appeared in The Journal, describing as background how the man was out on patril when he had 'died in a hail of bullets'. Except that he hadn't. The following day, a relative of his rang the paper to point out the man had been killed by a single sniper's bullet, and could we please get it straight the next time we mentioned his death. I'm sure the relative was assured by newsdesk that, yes, we would certainly get it right, but I am equally sure that the next time we mentioned his death, no, we most certainly did not get it right. Why should we? A hail of bullets if far more dramatic than a mere single shot from a sniper, and, anyway, there is a certain dramatic truth* in what we wrote (or some such bullshit). *©The Guardian
Beware hacks. Always.

Apropos bullshit: Now comfortably settled in the Lords, Shirley Williams, once a Labour Cabinet Minister who grew disillusioned with the drift leftwards by Labour in their Eighties' wilderness years and threw in her lot with the Social Democrats, commented, after the Social Democrats suffered a sound drubbing in a general election and barely reached 10 per cent of the votes cast (rather than a hoped-for reaching out by the electorate to this new party of reason, hope and compassion): "It was a moral victory."
Well, that's all right then, Mrs Williams. There really aren't enough of those. And I am a moral millionaire.
Just how toe-curlingly embarrassing the Social Democrats were at their worst can be typified by a description of them in a speech by the then David Owen, a Labour Foreign Secretary before he, too, jumped ship. He referred to the Social Democrats as: 'The caring and the daring, the tough and the tender.'

To this list of admonition from many who have fallen foul of the Press, I’ll add the very useful advice given to all young reporters and heeded by those who are serious about making a good career for themselves:
‘Never let a couple of facts stand in the way of a good story’

Misspelling, literals, sense, smoky and noisy newsrooms, and a shameful theft

I don’t know whether other bloggers do so, but once I have posted an entry, I revisit it several times in the following days and weeks to sort it out a little. There are always - always - misspellings and literals to be put right and awkward phrasing which can be improved. An inelegant phrasing can be forgiven and doesn’t signify that the world is about to end. But although some might castigate me for being a buttoned-up Brit going on anal for being bothered by such trivialities, I do like to try to ensure that what I write is clear, straightforward and comprehensible. If one has to read a sentence several times to establish what the bloody hell is going on, the writer has rather missed the point of writing. A good example of incomprehensible prose which verges on obscurantist claptrap is what is often written by the High Priests of Self-Regard who are employed by the Independent (‘the Indy’ as they like to call it) in that paper’s arts pages. All too often it is anything but clear, straightforward and comprehensible, and there’s a suspicion that the whole point of the piece we are reading is to get us to reflect on what a clever young thing the writer is. Making sure that what you write can be understood and is understood as you want it to be understood is, as far as I can see, the only reason for getting punctuation right. But though is might be the only reason, it is a very, very good one. Commas slow you down where you should be slowed down. That is why we use commas. If anyone tells you to use a comma in a certain way because ‘that is the rule’, you in turn should tell them where to get off. Rules are descriptive, not prescriptive (although an in-depth discussion on the whys, whens and wheres is for another time when we’re both exceptionally bored and have little enthusiasm for much else. And it has just occurred to me that in pontificating, as I have just done, on the correct use of commas, I am also laying down the law. Well, you can’t win, so perhaps we shouldn’t even try.)
The beauty of computers and word-processors is that when it comes to correcting a piece you have written, they make any re-writing involved a doddle. When I was still a reporter in the late Seventies, we wrote on typewriters and on ‘copy paper’ and always had to make at least one carbon copy. (It was called ‘a black’, but in these more enlightened times, I’m sure there is a term more acceptable to sensitive souls. I was once told off for ordering a ‘black’ coffee. What should I have ordered, I asked. A coffee with ‘no milk’ I was told. Oh well, you live and learn). In those days re-writing meant scoring out a word or sentence with a row of ‘xs’ and adding the correction. Because the ‘intro’ - the first paragraph - and possibly the second par were to be printed in a point size greater than the rest of the story, they had to be written on separate sheets of copy paper because it went to the typesetter who was setting type in 10pt or 9pt, whereas the body of the story was dispatched to the typesetter who was setting type in 8pt or 7pt. My particular quirk was that however scruffy and scored-out the rest of the story was, that first sheet of copy paper had to be pristine. If I made just one slightly typing error - and I invariably made lots - I would rip the paper from my typewriter and start afresh and keep doing so until that first sheet was spotless. I have enormous respect for 19th-century novelists who wrote by hand and even later writers who used a typewriter. Re-writing - and I can’t think they did it any less than we do - must have been an unbearable chore, yet they did it.
Misspellings and literals are another matter. Literals are understandable and can easily be forgiven. Even though I have now taught myself to touch-type, which has helped writing enormously and allows me to write almost as fast as I think, I still mistype, although far less than I once did. But misspellings, where the fault lies with the brain, not the fingers, are unacceptable if they are left uncorrected. The irony is, of course, that the spell-checkers we all now use will pick up on literals, but will ignore misspellings. So, for example, in a previous entry I wrote about hacks coming back to the profession after taking time off return ‘with their tales between their legs’. Er, not quite, and that entry had since been changed to the correct ‘tails’ (although in the context in which that error found itself, it might well, ironically, have been taken to be a clever pun, although a pun so obvious I doubt I would choose to make it.) There is any number of words which lend themselves to pretending to be another and unobtrusively insinuating themselves into an otherwise upright and respectable piece of prose of unimpeachable character: there/their, bare/bear, tail/tale, discrete/discreet, piece/peace, to/too - the list is so endless that off-hand I can’t think of any more.
This is all a very long-winded way of saying: if you come across a howler in any of these blog entries, please don’t immediately write me off as an illiterate wastrel. Wait a few days, go back and check, and if the howler is still there, then by all means damn me to hell and damnation. But wait a little after first spotting it. Who knows, I might have gone back to correct it.
By the way, I can’t leave the mention of my early days as a hack without embellishing the account a little. Just a few days ago, a guy at work and I were recalling what it was then like to walk into a newsroom before we all became modern and liberal. Today, no one is allowed to smoke and we all use computers. Then, almost everyone smoked, so the atmosphere was often rather cloudy, and as we all used typewriters, it was also very, very noisy, especially as phones still had bells. There is a grand old tradition in newspapers - perhaps I should specify in British newspapers - of making do and living in squalor. So, even today after the ‘paperless revolution’, every reporter and writer’s desk is piled high with reports and agendas which were skimmed through once and will never be looked through again until they are finally thrown out when the paper, as it does periodically, re-arranges the desks on the newsroom floor. And I am really not exaggerating when I say that these piles of paper spilling here, there and everywhere, can be at least two or three foot high. MoWhen we were still using typewriters, every morning there would always be a scramble to find and commandeer one on which every key actually worked. More often than not, we would have to put up with one on which one key or another didn’t register at all or which jammed every so often. Another daily task was finding a chair which was not - quite literally - falling apart. Why did we put up with this? Why were we expected to put up with this. But we did put. It was, and still is, a mystery to me why folk who at home live like ordinary, tidy people in ordinary, tidy homes think nothing of existing like savages once they enter a newsroom. Very often we eat meals at our desks, and very often a plate, the meal half-eaten and then abandoned, will be simplyh pushed aside where the plate will remain for the next few weeks, the congealing food looking ever more unappetising and in the old smoking days all too often being joined by stubbed-out cigarettes. I have already mentioned before that most items found in newsrooms, unless their ownership is very obvious and cannot be ignored, are conveniently regarded as common property and can be taken at will. To this day I feel very guilty about an incident which happened about 15 years ago. Walking past the desk, I spotted a £10 note lying on the floor behind a colleague’s chair. Rather than pick it up and ask whether she or anyone else had lost a £10, I picked it up and put it in my pocket, even though it was very obvious that it had probably somehow fallen from her coat. I little later she did, indeed, realise that she had lost £10 note and asked of the table generally whether anyone had found one. Dear reader, to my eternal shame, I said nothing. I kept schtumm. My lips were sealed. For a brief moment I did consider coming clean and doing the right thing, but I managed to overcome that temptation without too much trouble.
So now you might understand why, older and more mature and now with at least a modicum of a moral sense, I am so intent on ensuring my entries in this blog are correctly spelled and that they make sense. It is, in fact, a kind of penance, though, thank goodness, not one I find particularly onerous. It is a way in which I hope to persuade myself that, in many ways and despite some past abysmal behaviour, I’m not a bad old stick and really do know right from wrong. Making sure that my commas are all in the right place might seem a trivial way of demonstrating my essentially moral character, but don’t knock it.

A birthday lunch at Mr Stein’s of Padstow.

I am 60 tomorrow, and as a treat, our stepmother took myself and my sister to Rick Stein’s seafood restaurant in Padstow. (My sister has flown in from Istanbul for my birthday - it's not every day you are 60, in fact, it's only once in a lifetime.) The restaurant is every bit as good as it’s reputation. I had squid sauteed in chilli with something or other to start with bean shoot and coriander, then an Indonesian fish curry with various seafood and a green bean and something salad, passon fruit Pavlova and cheese. It was the second time I’ve been and it will most certainly not be the last. I’ve discovered that until March it is doing a special three-course lunch for £28.50 so I am considering treating myself again. (My wife isn’t all that bothered about food). If anyone reading this (Barry) wants to investigate the winter lunch special, the phone number is 01841 532 700. From From January 25 to February 12, the restaurant is also doing winter charity lunches in aid of Save The Children. This year it will only be £17.50. You can get more information here
My stepmother’s sister, who has lived in France for most of here life and my cousin are coming over for a few days before Christmas and we might have a meal at 15, Jamie Oliver’s restaurant, which is also supposed to be very good.

Hacks, hackery, a deluded public and why we are the scum of the Earth

It would be technically true to say that I have worked as a journalist for the past 35 years. I started my first job, working for the Lincolnshire Chronicle as a reporter, on January 24, 1974, and except for the almost obligatory sabbatical many hacks take in their 30s - I decided to retrain as a photographer; others go off to run an antique store or take off to the Greek islands to write ‘my novel’; all, sooner or later, return to the fold with their tails between their legs, sadder if not wiser and with considerably more debt - I have only ever worked as a reporter and sub-editor. Yet in one important and widespread understanding of what a ‘journalist’ is, to say that I have worked as ‘a journalist’ is complete nonsense.

To those who never actually get to meet the species, we journalist are noble fellows whose role is to expose the corrupt, root out the truth, protect the little man and generally fight on the side of the angels. We are those for whom facts are sacred. Those who have never met a journalist imagine that he and she dines daily at the top tables of the great and good, that we invariably have an in everywhere, that we know what is really going on, that our counsel is sought, that we are not only intelligent and quick-witted, but charming and cunning.

Those who have never met one of my kind are only to happy to mythologise the journalist, and will gladly forgive him and her their peccadilloes because they suspect we are, somehow, other. They are only too ready to believe that we are at once at home in the sleaziest brothels as in the loftiest chancelleries of the world, that we are on intimate terms with statesmen and artists, courtesans and billionaires. That we can drink the best of them under the table and still turn out 1,000 words of crisp, scintillating, informed, informative and entertaining copy by dawn. And it is, of course, all complete rot. Yet, somehow, the myth survives.

People will regale each other with tales of the most horrific behaviour by journalists and still, in a corner of their hearts, acknowledge a grudging, secret respect bordering on admiration for such cavalier behaviour. The profession - and it is only a profession in the most literal meaning of the word - is still seen as glamorous.

Yes, there are journalists who are, in every sense, as professional as barristers, surgeons and economists and who, metaphorically share private dinners with presidents and prime ministers and are privy, or partly privy, to secrets of state. And, yes, there are members of the public who become millionaires after spending £1 on a Lottery ticket.

But the man or woman who writes captions for the tit and bum pictures in the Daily Star, those who compile surveys of bras in the women’s pages, those employed by Trout And Salmon, Tunnels And Tunneller, Floor Covering And Carpet review - and those last two do exist - are also entitled to call themselves ‘journalists’, and characters who are as far from the popular view of what a journalist is and what he or she is engaged in could be hard to imagine.

Every tinpot polytechnic turned university in the country offers a ‘media studies’ course, and these are always oversubscribed. But tell would-be media students that not one editor in the country gives a flying fuck for a media studies qualification, they will refuse to believe you.

In the 35 years I have worked as a ‘journalist’, the broadcasting media have expanded enormously, and it is now misleading to talk of ‘the Press’. Weekly papers and regional morning and evening papers are having a very tough time indeed, most recently because the internet has devastated their classified ad revenue, and getting a job ‘in television’ or ‘on the radio’ is now seen as the goal. But in essence those who choose to earn their living working as a ‘journalist’ have not changed a jot. Many of them, especially those who are not too bright, also believe in the myth of the journalist fighting the good fight, and do not see their behaviour as impertinent intrusion into private lives, but as a sacred duty they have to uphold the public’s ‘right to know’. But the truth is not just far simpler, it is unbearably more banal.

It is an irony that having a free Press is most cherished in countries which do not have one. In these countries - Burma, the former Soviet Union and other former Eastern Bloc states and in other countries caught up in a totalitarian system - exceptionally brave men and women do risk their lives by following their profession.

Here in the Western world we do, nominally, have a free Press, but you wouldn’t know it. (I say ‘nominally, by the way, because increasingly the courts can be used by anyone with enough money to pay the fees to muzzle a journalist and shut down a story, and the most sinister recent development as been the ‘super injunction’ which prohibits a journalist from even reporting that an injunction has been taken out. Such ‘prior restraint’ is not possible in the U.S. whose courts take the view that redress, if needed, is available a posteriori through the libel laws.)

My work at the Daily Mail involves ‘early revision’, the early referring to the time of day we turn up, not the ‘first’ revision. Once pages have been laid out and sub-edited, I and colleagues read the proofs, make changes, re-scheme pages if the ad shapes change and generally prepare the pages for the printers.

On Sundays I am the only ‘early reviser’ and my first task when I turn up - invariably late - is to read the puzzle pages for errors, check that the answers are right, check that the right cartoons are going in and ensure that the enjoyment of those readers for whom the puzzle pages are the most important pages in the Daily Mail is in no danger of being spoiled.

My next task is to do the same on the ‘promotions’ pages, where readers can snap for a bargain price of £5.99 (PLUS ten of the tokens printed daily, is the whole point of the exercise - the public must somehow be induced to buy the bloody paper) a perfume by Princess Di’s favourite designer which is ‘usually for sale at £99’. And don’t believe the ‘serious papers’ don’t do the same: what is on offer will vary and be tailored to the pretensions of a particular paper’s readers, but the schtick is identical. Sun readers can to to France ‘for £1’. Telegraph readers can get ‘fine wines’ with a 50% discount. Guardian readers can get a good deal on the latest trendy novel.

When do I - a ‘journalist’ for the past 35 years - ever engage in serious journalism? Never.

. . .

To round off, here are a few quotations from people who have come into contact with journalists and who might thus be thought to know what they are talking about:

‘Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.’ - Ben Hecht

Ben Hecht became a famous playwright and screen writer and wrote The Front Page. But before that he spent several years as a crime reporter in Twenties Chicago and most certainly knew what he was talking about. More quotes tomorrow.

Oh, and by the way, I hope I don’t sound outraged. Journalism? I love it. And if that sounds hypocritical after all I have written here about hacks, there’s another useful insight for you.

My cars: a short guide. Part VIII - a third 2CV, two Volvos, two Austins and more Rovers than you could shake a stick at

Working and living in London I didn’t need a car, so once I had rid myself of my very awful Vauxhall Chevette - and discovered that since I had last got rid of a car, I now had to pay someone to scrap it - that was it for a while, no more cars, and I can’t say I missed them. Finally, in 1995 once I had become engaged and knew I would be moving to Cornwall, I agreed to buy a former flatmate’s 2CV, a white Charleston with blue stripesm, which was still in good condition, both mechanically and cosmetically.
There was something attractive but deeply daft about how Citroen released the same car over and over again with each model being identical in every detail except that it had differently themed paintwork. I think the last techinical change made was when the engine capacity was doubled from 300cc to 600cc, and that was at some time towards the end of the 19th century.
The 2CV you got was still a great car to drive - if you like that quirky sort of thing and didn’t mind slowing down considerably when driving up hills - but it was a dog to deal with when something went wrong. So ‘theming’ them in the hope that this would somehow make the car different was, frankly, quite daffy. In essence the design hadn’t changed in years. Furthermore, Citroen desperately wanted to stop making them - they had, after all, been designed as a farm vehicle in for post-war use and didn’t fit Cirtoen’s new high-tech innovative company image - but just as they were on the brink of being retired, hippies of all shades, German greens, French revolutionaries, British Liberals and vegetarians, and assorted Dutch and Danes suddenly decided it was cool to drive one and that it made ‘a statement’ about their individuality. And, incidentally, no one - except cynical ad men - seems to have cottoned on that more than one person being ‘individual’ in a certain specific way, such as driving a 2CV, makes it impressively less of an ‘individual’ act, and that ‘being alternative’ can quite rapidly become a mainstream activity. There are few sillier sights than a whole gang of more or less identically dressed and styled alternatives all convinced that they are a one-off. But then the world seems to abound in silliness. But what the hell, it’s been going on now for several thousand years.
Certainly, Citroen must, at first, have been rather pleased that an old design had a new lease of life and that it would be reflected in the sales figure, and they even designed a ‘new’ 2CV, the Dyanne, to cash in. The Dyanne got a new shape and superficial makeover, but it was otherwise the old 2CV with a new name.
I had agreed to buy Andy Penman’s old 2CV - he only wanted £100 for it, but I insisted on giving him £200 because it was worth more than £100 and I didn’t want there to be any bad blood later on. As it happened, I needed it sooner than we had planned because my wife-to-be had had a miscarriage and I had to get to Cornwall very quickly, so I picked it up from outside his house in Kennington and drove down to Cornwall in it, getting lost around Southampton looking for a petrol station.
That 2CV was a good little car and I drove down to Cornwall and back several times before I finally left London. It was still nice looking and drove well. Later, it developed a habit of not starting in the damp cold of Exeter St Davids, but I got a great deal of good mileage out of it.
However, my wife insisted, when our daughter was born, that we needed a safer car, and she also insisted that a Volvo like the one her father had, a 340, was what she wanted. So we looked at two or three, but none was worth the asking price. Then we discovered that a dealer in Summercourt on the Truro road was selling one, and that it had belonged to the dealership manager, no less. Our thinking was that if the manager had driven it, it most certainly would have been kept in tip-top condition. But that was rubbish. I paid way over the odds for it - £2,000, £1,000 more than I had ever before spent on a car - and as soon as we got it, we realised the electrics were all to cock. Yes, it was fast - it was the 360 GTE (whatever that means) and, yes, it looked quite nice, but it needed a lot of work to be done before I was happy with it. Celie, my wife, used it as her car, and I carried on with the 2CV to drive to Exeter to get the train to London.
By 1999 it was giving me far too much trouble. I had discovered a garage at Wainhouse Corner on the road to Bude which ‘specialised’ in 2CV, but all that meant was that they had a yard full of wrecks in various states of degeneration which were useful for picking up parts (such as a rear indicator lens which I needed after I had reversed my car into a gate). The garage was run by three old brothers who all seemed a bit daffy. The final days of my 2CV came when I had dropped it off for a service. When I picked it up, it was obvious something was serious wrong: the driver’s door would not shut properly, the steering was all to cock and the car was simply assumetrically out of alignment. Then I realised: it had been on the ramp and fallen off. The brothers, of course, denied any such thing but they would, wouldn’t they. There was no way I could prove that the negligence was to blame, so I had to lump it and sold the car for a pittance to a 2CV enthusiast.
I should add that a year or two early, I had twice crashed the Volvo, first demolishing one wing, and once it came back repaired, on the very same day, demolishing the other wing. There was a joke between my father and my brother Mark that as far as cars are concerned I am accident-prone, and I am bound to admit that there is a great degree of truth in the claim.
But now it is past midnight, I am tired and I am going to sleep. I shall continue this - rivetting is the only word I can use - account another time.

Idle time at work . . .

Apropos nothing at all, a few definitions which have been bandied about these past few minutes here at work:

"A pessimist sees his glass half-empty. An optimist drains it, then hands it over for a refill."

"A pessimist is a man who puts All Bran on his prunes."

And my favourite:
"Definition of a pessimist: a well-informed optimist."

And just for the craic, here's a quote from Gore Vidal in which there is more than an element of truth:
"It's not enough to win - others must lose."

LATER: Well, that is what I thought it was, but it isn't. An hour or so after writing the above, I had a vague memory of giving the above quote, only to be told I was wrong. A minute ago, I got around to looking it up. The correct quote is:
"It's not enought to succeed. Others must fail", which is even better.
Vidal is also quoted as saying "No good deed goes unpunished", though whether he actually came up with it or was just passing it on, I don't know.

The big ask: keeping up with how language insists on changing (dammit)

Are you managing to stay abreast with how our language keeps changing? If you’re not, I fully understand. It’s a big ask (as people quite apart from sportsmen and women are increasingly saying), and the use of the word 'ask' is just one way language is changing.
In fact, 'ask' is not another rather pointless neologism but has a distinct meaning. It carries elements of 'demand', 'challenge' and 'request', but is distinct from all three. It seems to have started life, for a change, in Britain rather than being an American import as is usually the case, and was first used specifially by sportsmen and women. I suspect 'Big' Ron Atkinson first came up with it, as he often came out with words or phrases which were adopted by others ('early doors' for a player who has to leave the field early, and another very good one which is on the tip of my tongue but which I can't for the life of me recall offhand.)
You never come across a simple 'ask'. It is always a 'big ask'. And although the word and concept started life in sports, you will increasingly come across it elsewhere, for example on Radio 4's Today programme, most probably used by a politician, a breed always very keen to demonstrate how on the ball they are and how modern and aware and how they deserve every penny of their ill-gotten 'expenses'.
When I was young, my family still sat down together to Sunday lunch (something which, I believe is happening less and less - it was more German middle-class than British, and it is not the only thing I miss from the German part of my upbringing) and almost every Sunday the following conversation took place:
Me to my father: ‘Can you pass the salt, please?’
My father: ‘Of course, I can.’ But he wouldn’t pass the salt.
The point was that I should have asked ‘would you please pass the salt’. Once I had done so, I would get the salt, but also the same lecture on speaking correct English. And I would respond by telling my father that language was always changing and that what was once ‘wrong’ might now well be ‘right’.
Generally, it was pointless to try to take on my father at that level, because he knew more than I did and in such a debate could run rings around his son. But I still insist that what I was saying is true: language and its use are always changing and what was yesterday correct might well today slightly affected and old-fashioned. Those such as my father who insist that one usage is ‘correct’ implicitly feel that there was one age whose use of language provided the yardstick for correct usage, a kind of golden age. If there was such a time, it follows that not only is all subsequent use of language which doesn’t match up to that yardstick ‘wrong’, but, nonsensically, all previous use in the centuries leading up to that golden age was also wrong.
As we get older and as younger folk adopt the use of language which, to our ears, sounds alien, inelegant and ‘wrong’, some of us, like my father, are apt to get crusty and make fools of themselves. But unfortunately - some might say unfairly - it is us who must ‘raise our game’ and get use to the changes or risk sounding like old farts. It's a big ‘ask’, I know, but we have no choice.
Usages I don’t like, but no longer claim are ‘wrong’ include how people these days will say something along the lines of ‘there’s cars in the street’, whereas, if there is more than one car, it should be ‘there are ...’. Similarly, and in imitation of the characters from Friends, ask someone under 40 how they are, they will probably respond with ‘good’. This baffles someone like me who will say, and all his life heard other people say, ‘well’ or ‘quite well’. These changes are distinct from contemporary and more ephemeral usages such as beginning a sentence with the word ‘basically’, as in, for example, ‘basically, we are not aware of how language has changed until others laugh at us’, where the ‘basically’ is basically utterly redundant. It does perform a function - it gives the speaker a spurious authority as though he or she knows more than others what they are talking about, that they ‘have an in’. But that will not last. Another fashionable word whose use is more fashionable than marking any real change in language is the use of ‘absolutely’: ‘Did you enjoy your night out?’ ‘Absolutely’. I don’t like it, but then increasingly I belong to a world which is of less consequence, so my likes and dislikes are more and more unimportant. If you, like me, don’t like these changes, all I can say is: ‘Get used to it.’
Incidentally, I was going to record how much I dislike some Americanisms which, so far, have not been adopted in Britain. ‘Awesome’ is one. But then it occurred to me that referring to something as ‘a big ask’ might mean nothing to Americans and that, furthermore, they might feel aggrieved over certain British uses which they feel debases the English language. So I shan't.

My cars: a short guide. Part VII - the Cardiff years, my second 2CV, two Austin Allegros and a bloody awful Vauxhall Chevette

My second 2CV gave very good service and saw me through my bleak months of unemployment and landing a job as a sub on the South Wales Echo in Cardiff. When I first bought her, she was in very good condition, despite the bargain price which I paid to make her mine. She first lost a little of her glamour (and why the bloody hell am I referring to her as ‘she’?) on November 1985. I had been unemployed since being forced by a lack of funds to abandon my photography course at the end of the Easter term. I set about applying for jobs as a newspaper photographer, which was not as daft as it sounds. The only major factor not in my favour was my age. Newspapers far prefer paying their staff peanuts and would rather take on an absolute beginner in his or her late teens or early twenties. I was 35, and employers, nor unrealistically, believe that a 35-year-old might be more inclined eventually to complain about low wages and working long hours than an apprentice smudger or reporter in his or her late teens or her early twenties keen to make his or her mark. (One of the scams used by newspapers to justify paying journalistic staff extremely low wages is to claim that working as a journalist is ‘a vocation’ and that anyone who has managed to ‘break into journalism’ should count themselves lucky to be working in such a rarefied profession. It’s complete cobblers, of course, but journalism is one of those profession, like working in the film industry or working for a circus, that has a certain, though utterly spurious, glamour.)
I did, however, get two interviews. One was for a job with a photo agency in Loughborough. I went along, had a chat, showed my ‘portfolio’ and was offered the job. The wage was, however, rather low and as I had also saddled myself with a considerable debt in the CEGB years buying up every last piece of photographic equipment going - such is the expensive nature of most enthusiasms - I decided it simply wasn’t worth it and that if I took it, I would still be in debt by the time I died. So I turned it down. In retrospect, the wage wasn’t all that low at all, just lower than would have been comfortable. Perhaps in my heart I knew that I wasn’t cut out to be a photographer. At about that time I also had an interview with the weekly paper in Yeovil, but was not offered a job.
Apart from applying for jobs as a news photographer, I was also applying for jobs as a reporter, but here I had less luck. I did so because working as a sub on a regional paper is pretty much a question of shovelling as much shit as you can stand - or so it seemed to me - and I didn’t really want to do that again. I got very few interviews - editors understandably ask themselves ‘who is this fly-by-night who is already 35 and hasn’t reported for five years? Do we really want to employ yet another bloody dipso who will probably have his hand in the till the minute he gets here?’ To which the answer is, of course, invariably no: editors might usually be complete shits, but not all of them are stupid. (Incidentally, describing them as ‘complete shits’ might seem gratuitously offensive, but the fact is that the nature of the job demands that the holder is capable of a unpleasantness and duplicity, and, as a rule, certain kinds of people - call them ‘shits’ if you will - are invariably more qualified than others to perform that role successfully.)
The only interview I can actually remember was with the Ox & Bucks news agency which was run by an ex Sun reporter. I went for a day’s trial and was asked to stay on for a second day with the ex Sun reporter offering to put me up for the night. Before we drove to his house we stopped off at a pub for an evening meal and a drink. He told me any number of amusing stories about his time on Fleet Street. One, in particular, amused me a lot: he and a gang of other hacks, both print and television, were in some part of the world or other where the climate was hot. Part of the group was Michael Cole, who was working for BBC television and pissing everyone off with his pretensions and superior manner. While the rest of them were drinking beers and spirits, Cole insisted on drinking white wine and making out he was something of a connoisseur. So they got the waiter to give them a glass, one of the party pissed into it, then it was placed in a fridge for a while until it was chilled. When Cole was due to get his next glass of wine, he was, instead, served up the chilled piss. He took a sip. ‘What’s this one like, Michael?’ they asked. Cole took a second sip and then pronounced it ‘rather dry’.
I remember the ex Sun reporter asking me as we drove to his house, both of us no longer sober: ‘What’s it like driving home with a strange man?’ Hmm, I thought and decided that he was probably a woofter and not in the slightest bit interested in my abilities as a reporter, but rather my attractions as, like him, a member of the male sex. When we got home, I met his wife, stayed the night, worked another day and went back home to Norlan Drive, Birmingham, where I lived. I can’t for the life of me remember whether of not I was offered a job. Perhaps he realised I wasn’t interested in batting for the other side.
I have gone off on something of a tangent here, but this was the life I was leading while I was unemployed between leaving college in April 1985 and starting work on the South Wales Echo in on February 16, 1986. In November 1985, I was in touch with some small cable TV station based in Coventry who were looking for someone to cover for the news producer while he was on holiday. The woman who interviewed heard a tape I had made while on my course (I can no longer remember why), showed me the programme being broadcast live, accepted my assurance that I reckoned I could handle what was involved and me more or less told me I had the job. I knew nothing about that kind of work, but I have to say that it is the kind of thing any reasonably intelligent person should be able to learn quite fast, especially on the job. The woman told me that she just had to have the appointment cleared by the board and would be in touch again in a week’s time. On the strength of that promise I decided I could do with a break and I drove to Edinburgh to spend a few days with a friend. While there I rather spoilt my 2CVs looks. We were driving somewhere in The Meadows near where he lived when in the road ahead of me I saw two 3ft high concrete bollards. I gauged that they were just far enough apart for me to drive in between them. I was wrong. On a 2CV the wheel arches covering the back wheels form a rather pleasing kind of cupola. Driving through the narrow gap between those two bollards, the cupola over each rear wheel was stoved in and thoroughly dented. The best gloss I can put on such a silly incident is that at least the damage to each wheel arch was identical and that the overall impression was, at least, pleasingly symmetrical. When I returned to Birmingham, there was still no word from the woman or the TV station. I waited a few days, fearing the worst, though puzzled as to what might have gone wrong, and then rang up. The woman, I was told, was not longer there and had left rather suddenly. Why, I wasn’t told. But that was the end of that particular opportunity.
Finally, realising that I would probably have no luck at all getting a job as either a photographer or reporter, I applied for a job as a sub on the South Wales Echo, got it on the spot - newspapers find it difficult to get subs and my experience on the Evening Mail in Birmingham helped. So I packed my bags, loaded up my 2CV and moved to Cardiff.
I can’t really remember what happened next, but I finally got rid of the 2CV. I think it needed quite a bit of work done to it to pass its MoT, and what with paying off my debts, I was rather on my uppers in the early days in Cardiff.
For a while I did without a car and I can’t say it made much difference to my life. But eventually I bought an Austin Allegro, although I can’t, offhand, remember why I decided to buy another car. I certainly didn’t need one. Allegros are widely, and
I think justifiably, regarded by most British drivers as ‘naff’. The word is in common parlance these days but was said to have originated as an gay acronym to describe someone who was not gay and would no be interested in a spot of rumpy-pumpy: not available for fucking. Whether that is true or not, I don’t know, but it is plausible. These days, in British English, it is used to describe something which is the opposite of cool. And Allegros were remorselessly uncool, and therefore not too expensive.
They were produced by British Leyland (or whatever the firm was calling itself in that year. Leyland was in terminable decline, but took a very long time to go bust and in the process kept changing its name as though to stave off its destiny). To indicate just how desperate the firm was, here’s a snippet about the Allegro: when it was launched, its unique selling point was that it had a square steering wheel. Now if the best your designers can come up with to make your new car more attractive to the public is to make the steering wheel square, it really is time to shut up shop and take early retirement. In fact, Leyland stumbled on for another 20 years.
The Allegro served my purpose (whatever that was - I didn’t need a car and can’t for the life of me remember why I bought one) but it had one very niggling fault. The cylinder head gasket went at some point, so the cylinders filled with water. So every morning before I drove to work and every evening before I drove home again, I had to unscrew all four plug and dry them. This was always very inconvenient, but I did it - had to do it - every morning.
In September 1989, I was sacked by the Echo for dropping one bollock too many and decided to set myself up as a freelance photographer. I did get enough work here and there to survive - a local newspaper group was setting up a string of freesheets and I took their pictures and I also took pictures in South Wales for one of the Catholic papers. I also wrote features for the Wales on Sunday and for a while even worked subbing shifts. It was at this time that the Allegro became an ex Allegro when I had a crash with a speeding driver in the backstreets of Roath (a part of Cardiff). I was looking for the address of the woman I was seeing and was not looking where I was driving. A car, driving far to fast came out of nowhere and I went into the side of him. If anything the crash was my fault: I had been looking over my shoulder to try to read street signs and did not see him because I was not paying any attention whatsoever to my driving. But I had a stroke of luck. When the police arrived, he pleaded that as a Muslim he had not been drinking but he had and was over the limit. I got off scot-free. In fact, it never occurred to the coppers that I might have contributed to the accident. I simply made a statement saying that ‘he had come from nowhere, driving too fast, and that, and the fact that he was over the limit, cooked his goose and saved my bacon. The Allegro, however, was a write-off.
I bought another, but that one too, wasn’t in very good condition and a few months later, while on my way to visit a friend in the Valleys, the chassis snapped so that driving became more or less impossible. It was possible, just, by tugging very hard on the steering wheel because the left side of the car was where the chassis had gone was lower than the right, but in truth the car was undrivable, and after a week or so, I admitted as much to myself and got rid of it.
My problem now was that I was working as a freelance photographer and still needed wheels. My landlady put me onto her son-in-law who ‘did up cars and sold them’. He had a light-blue Vauxhall Chevette for sale. I bought it. It was a complete wreck and the MoT, as I discovered, was fake. The
particular trouble was twofold. First, was starting the bloody thing. There were no problems starting it in the morning. Problems only started when the engine was hot. Then it wouldn’t start at all until the engine was a little cooler. So every time I stopped, I had to wait for around 20 minutes before I could move on. The other, more serious, problem was that the whole left front wing more or less didn’t exist. It was completely rusted through. In my eagerness to get a car to get around in, I had given it only a cursory examination and had not even bothered to lift the bonnet.
My relationship with the Chevette lasted only a few months, for come the turn of the financial year, everyone had battened down the hatches and work dried up. So I rang up the Daily Express and landed myself four subbing shifts. That was in June 1990. For the first few weeks, I travelled to London from Cardiff, stayed for several nights, returned to South Wales to doing my washing and pick up some fresh clothes, then returned to London. By this time the differential on the Chevette had gone and - this is no exaggeration - it sounded like a tank. The noise it made was deafening, and driving the 120 miles or so between Cardiff and London was no fun. There was also the problem of finding somewhere to park in London, and once, while parked on single yellow lines outside the Times offices at Wapping, my Chevette was towed away to a police pound in Kings Cross. Getting it back cost me £120 plus £70 for the parking fine, so getting rid of it was the obvious thing to do. To add insult to injury I actually had to pay a scrap merchant £20 to pick it up. That bloody Chevette marked the nadir of my driving career. I didn’t have another car for several years, but from then on, however, ratty subsequent cars were, the only way was up.
Still to come, if I haven’t bored you rigid, is my third 2CV, two Austin Maestros, two Volvos and four Rovers. Once that account is out of the way, you’re dismissed and your time is your own.

PS to 'Isn't noise great?'

Yesterday, I heard a Radio 4 programme by Alastair Campbell waxing lyrical about Jacques Brel. I don't speak French, and although I know Brel's songs are something of an institution in France, it is one form of 'noise' which has never really rattled my cage. There were contributions from a range of French folk who had known Brel, man of whom had worked with him, and they all remembered him with affection. Many commented on his double life: rather conservative and upright paterfamilias in Belgium, where his wife and children lived, and principal shagger about town when living and working in Paris. Fair enough, and it was his many affairs which fueled his romantic songs. But one observation, repeated by several contributors, rather struck me: for all his charm and 'niceness' - 'nice' was one word used to describe Brel - he was 'harsh with his kids'. And that, curiously, makes it very easy for me almost to rule the chap out of court. I say 'almost' because I really can't know the ins and outs of his relationship with his wife and there might be circumstances which justify his 'harshness' although I can't imagine what they might be. But on the face of it, I am not a fan of anyone who is 'harsh' with his or her children, especially when they are young and especially when, otherwise, he finds he makes an effort to charm the pants off the world. Sounds a bit like a self-centred cunt to me.