Bullshit, blogs and backgammon: a truly heartwarming account of one man's love and how his soul is redeemed by honesty.

When anyone sets up a blog on this site, they are asked to list their ‘interests’. Well, I don’t know how honest others are when they jot down their lists, but I most certainly had half an eye on listing ‘interests’ which might possibly do something to attract the attention of others and persuade them to visit this blog. So although I can honestly say that I do have an interest in each subject and topic listed in my profile, it would be dishonest to claim that it is an active interest. The list is: people, sex, gossip, politics, music, writing, painting, backgammon, philosophy, art, money, greed, altruism, the past, the present, the future, love, hate, hacks, fleet street, newspaper, hypocrisy and — which on reflection is surely the giveaway — anything else you can think of. Take the first on the list, ‘people’: the first thing you can say about anyone who sincerely believes they are interested in ‘people’ is that if they are being sincere, they are most certainly under 22. And if they are not under 22 — though being sincere — they suffer from a severe case of retarded adolescence. ‘Being
interested in people’ is one of those things we think we should be interested in when, in our salad days, we are rather prone to a kind of socialistic idealism, not to say a jejune tendency to kid ourselves. (NB I have just looked up the dictionary meaning of ‘jejune’ to make sure I was using it correctly, and according to the definition given by whatever dictionary Apple Macs use, the sentence ‘jejune tendency to kid ourselves’ is somewhere in the no man’s land of between being tautologous and almost meaningless. But fuck it: it sounds good, so it stands. Any complaints must be written out in longhand an an A4 sheet of paper, which you must then screw into a tight ball and shove up your arse.)
Also on the list are ‘the past’, ‘the present’ and ‘the future’. These again, if someone were to suggest that they are seriously his or her ‘interest’ would tell you more about that person, specifically that they are in danger of being pretty self-regarding and most definitely pretentious. Ditto ‘altruism’. As for ‘art’, ‘painting’, ‘music’, ‘politics’ etc, these, when they appear in my list, are pretty much in bullshit territory in that, although I do occasionally go to art galleries, listen to music, watch and listen to the news etc, to claim I take an active interest in them, as is implied by listing them in my profile, is bollocks. I am on firmer ground with ‘Fleet Street’, ‘hacks’, ‘newspapers’ and their eternal companion ‘hypocrisy’. In these I do take an active interest, although being a fully signed up and very active member of Her Majesty's Press, it isn't difficult.
This morning I added another keyword to my list of ‘interests’ and it is quite possibly the only honest ‘interest’ in the list: backgammon. I learnt to play backgammon about 25 years ago (and writing that last bit made me realise just how bloody old I’m getting: it seems like yesterday). Exactly when and by whom I really can’t remember. ‘Backgammon’ was for me, before I learnt to play, something of a pastime for rakes and generally the louche. I knew there were backgammon tournaments and I knew many people played and play it for, often quite high, stakes. I also assumed it was a rather difficult game to learn and play. Well, I was wrong. It is very easy indeed to learn, though like many good games it is not at all easy to be a good player. Because what move you can make depend on the roll of dice, it is a mixture of chance and luck (and I’ve both won and lost games dramatically merely on the throw of the dice). But it is fair to say that a good and experienced player will, over time, always beat a worse player. Each match consist of three, five or seven games, or, I suppose, however many you want it to consist of. Then you can, of course, go on to play as many matches as you like. And, as I say, in the long run, the better player will always come out top.
After I learnt to play, I have played against everyone and anyone with enthusiasm. When I bought a secondhand PC with Windows XP as the OS, I was pleased to discover that it allowed me to play backgammon at any time of the day or night for however long I wanted to. Most recently I have bought a laptop which has Windows 7 as its OS (which has the same facility as XP) and I have played at least an hour of backgammon every day ever since. In fact, being able to do so was one of the main reasons I bought that laptop. (I didn’t and don’t need another laptop as I had, at the time I bought it, two Mac iBooks and a Mac Powerbook. I have since sold one of the iBooks).
I am no good at chess and have hardly played it, and although I occasionally play card games, particularly Irish Snap with my two children, I can’t say I do so regularly. But there is something about backgammon I truly love. The essence of the game is simplicity, yet it is not simplistic and is most certainly no a simple game.
So there you have it: an interest listed on my list of interests which really is an ‘interest’ and not blog bullshit.

Huey Long, a socialist in a country which loathes socialists. He was gunned down at 42, though there's no suggestion the two are somehow linked

Over these past few days, I have watched, virtually back to back, both film versions of All The Kings Men. The first, written and directed by Robert Rossen in 1949 and starring Broderick Crawford, is usually described as ‘a masterpiece’. Well, it’s certainly very good and very entertaining but, in my view, it isn’t ‘a masterpiece’. Incidentally, believe it or not before Crawford was cast, John Wayne was approached to portray the demagogic Louisiana governor Willie Stark. What Wayne would have made of the role, I really don’t know. For one thing it required acting and as far as I’m concerned acting wasn’t in Wayne’s repertoire of abilities.

The second version, written and directed by Stephen Zaillian, was released in 2006 and starred Sean Penn (below)
and Jude Law. This was not hailed as a masterpiece, but, instead, universally panned by the critics. My view is again contrary. It has its faults, but I don’t at all think it was as bad as it was made out to be. Yes, Sean Penn has a tendency to chew the carpet, but he does it so well, that I would prefer to see him chewing the carpet any day. (Other great roles he has played were the coke-up, paranoid shyster lawyer in Carlito’s Way and the rapist/murderer in Dead Man Walking.) The second is not a remake of the first, as is so often – and inexplicably – claimed, and in many ways they are different films. The


1949 version with Broderick Crawford (above) concentrates more on the rise and increasing corruption of Willie Stark, whereas the later film seems to concentrate more on the Jack Burden character, the idealist turned cynic beholden to the bottle who does Stark’s dirty work for him. Jude Law – this is again my view – does a good job. (A lot of people seem to have it in for Law. I don’t know why.) Both fall down in that motivation is never fully explored and analysed.

Why did Stark become such a monster, especially in the first film? And exactly why was Jack Burden (in both films) so disillusioned that nothing seems to have been too dirty for him? What was the back story of Anne and Adam Stanton? They are more ciphers than characters.

Huey Long on the stump
Robert Penn Warren, who wrote the original novel All The Kings Men, admitted he had based the character of Willie Stark on Huey P Long, the populist politician and governor, like Stark, was gunned down in the Lousiana senate building. I had previously heard of Long as one scavenges information here and their and files it away and seemed to remember he was a wrong ’un, a man in league with the Devil who was nothing better than a crook. But out of interest, and in preparation for watching the two film versions, I looked up a potted bio of the man. And boy was I wrong.

Granted that there can be many versions of a man’s life and granted almost all of us are apt to believe what we want to believe, the worst that can be said of Huey Long – the worst – was that he behaved like a great many of his fellow politicians and gave jobs to his supporters. And what cannot be doubted was that Long did a lot of good, a lot more than many other politicians. But Long came unstuck because he was, in all but name, a socialist, a man who believed that those who had a great deal should share their great deal with those who had next to nothing and even nothing. And if there is one thing the U.S. apparently hates above all things, it is ‘a socialist’. Long taxed big business in order to pay for the hospitals, schools, roads and bridges he built and he was outspoken in his criticism of FDR’s reforms. He did not think they went far enough.

Long was an exceptionally gifted man (and should not be mistaken with the quasi crook created by Robert Penn Warren). He completed his three-year law course in eight months and was called to the bar. He had ambitions to the presidency and he most certainly had the drive to achieve it. He would undoubtedly have had the support of the nation’s underdog on whose behalf he worked. But he was assassinated in 1935 a few months after he had announced his candidacy for the presidency in the following year’s election. He was still only 42.

The story is that in order to discredit a political opponent, he had two of the man’s daughters dismissed from their teaching jobs and threatened to spread a rumour, already in circulation, that the man’s family had ‘coffee blood’. His opponent’s son-in-law was upset by the suggestion that his wife had Afro-American blood, went to the state capital and shot Long. At first Long’s wounds from a bullet in the abdomen and in the spine did not seem fatal. But his doctors had missed a bullet he had taken in one of his kidneys, and by the time this was discovered, Long was too weak to survive more surgery.

There is also a theory that the son-in-law didn't have a gun at the time of the shooting. Long was waiting in the senate building waiting to see whether a certain bill would be passed and he was approached by the son-on-law, a Dr Carl Weiss, about some matter or other. Long is said to have brushed Weiss off, saying he was too busy to talk. After the third brush-off by Long, Weiss is said to have got angry and punched Long on the mouth. Immediately, his bodyguards opened fire on Weiss and several bullets are said to have ricoched off marble pillars and struck Long. In order to cover-up the death, the gun Weiss kept in his car was planted on his corpse. He was shot 60 times.

As you can imagine there are several conspiracy theories. In the months leading up to his death, Long often alleged that there were plots to kill him. He and his family were the victims of a drive-by shooting at his New Orleans home, although no one was hurt. It was as a result of his fears of being assassinated that Long surrounded himself with bodyguards.

The whackiest conspiracy theory I have found on the net is by an anti-semitic group called Jew Watch (no link provided - if you're really interested, you can find it for yourself. I don't want to put traffic the way of those cruds). The website alleges that Dr Carl Jacob Weiss - they spell it Karl Jakob Weiss - was a Mossad agent paid to kill Long. The major flaw in that particular piece of nonsense is that Mossad wasn't founded until at least 13 years later when the state of Israel was established. That detail notwithstanding, it otherwise makes perfect sense and I'm surprised it has been adopted in all official histories of Lousianna, Huey Long and political assassinations.

Adolf Busch, an honest musician, and Tully Potter's biography of the man

To room VG10 of the School of Oriental and African Studies in Vernon Sq., London, for the launch party for Tully Potter’s rather massive two-volume biography of the German violinist Adolf Busch (pictured). I was invited because for the
past 20 years, ever since I have known Tully, in fact, I have been helping him out by translating German letters, memoirs, concert reviews and any other pieces he came across and which he wanted to use. Why the School of Oriental and African Studies? I don’t know, but the publisher, Toccata Press, is small and perhaps it was all it could afford.
I was rather looking forward to the evening, especially as a few short pieces were being played which Busch had written, but in the event, I wasn’t able to get away from work before 7.30 – I only worked a single shift and should have left at 6, but clock-watching is frowned upon and casuals such as myself had better believe it – and then I had to get from Kensington to Kings Cross where the excessively convoluted layout of the St Pancras/Kings Cross Tube station delayed me even further. Then I had to find the place, so I didn’t arrive until almost 8.30, by which time the music-making was over. I consoled myself with several handfuls of sushi (which I thought were based on fish, but these weren’t) and several glasses of 2010 Chilean Sauvignon Cabernet, which tasted like alcoholic fruit juice. The cardinal rule of gatherings such as book launches and exhibition openings (of which I attended a few while I was a reporter on The Journal in Newcastle in the late Seventies and also wrote its weekly art column – you didn’t know that, did you?) is to stick to the red wine. It might be bloody awful, it usually is bloody awful, but it is never as bad as the white wine served on these occasions, which is always extremely acidic and which will always give you very bad heartburn.
There were a good few men there with paunches, many of them rather younger than me. It is always quite odd to see a youngish man with a paunch, but otherwise no other signs of obesity. I assume that they were all musicians and that growing a paunch is a concomitant hazard of spending your professional life sitting down. That explanation makes sense, anyway.
‘Martin’, the owner of Toccata Press, was spectacularly fat, dressed in a blue Hawaiian shirt and waddled. I said hello to Tully but didn’t linger speaking to him, because he had to sign copies of his two books – two volumes, remember – and there were plenty of others who wanted to talk to him. If you are interested, you can find out more about Tully’s book here.

Hague gay? Who gives a toss. I just hope he knows what he is doing

It’s a truism in journalism that it isn’t the scandal which does the damage, but the subsequent cover-up. So it might be with William Hague, Her Majesty’s Secretary and all things Foreign, and, as far as I’m concerned, an all-round good egg. And because I like and respect the guy, I am rather disappointed by the ham-fisted way he appears to be handling the situation.
I was first told that he was gay — or rather was thought to be gay — several years ago by a colleague and friend who — I hope I get this straight (absolutely no silly joke intended there) — heard it from a friend of the ex-boyfriend of his sister, or the brother of the ex-girlfriend of his brother, or something or other (doesn’t inspire much confidence, does it, but there you go, that’s the problem with unsubstantiated rumours which might not have a leg to stand on). Apparently, whoever it was knew him well and said so. (I repeat my aside about tittle-tattle not inspiring much confidence.) At the time, I thought it was nonsense. But then all this business came up and I heard rather more credible info, including the comment, made after Hague released his PA statement, ‘well, that’s a hell of a hostage to fortune. What will he do when one of his ex-lovers comes forward?’
I gather that there is 100 certainty that Hague is gay, that he was at the centre of a Tory gay mafia while at Oxford (note to foreign readers: while a student of one of the colleges there, not just visiting the town) and that Ffion is his beard (and if that is the case, I like to believe — remember, I am a fan of Hague’s and like to think he is an honourable man — that she was squared from the off and wasn’t just cynically used). So I come back to be original point: it is not the ‘scandal’, but the refutations and rebuttals which cause the damage.
Furthermore, the true irony is that for the first time for many, many years in Britian, no one gives a fuck whether or not a politician is gay, although what does upset Joe Public is apparent hypocrisy, i.e. someone attacking gays is subsequently revealed himself to be gay. I cannot say so for certain, but being gay is really not regarded as even being remarkable these days, except, again ironically, by the worthy left-of-centre broadsheets who
insist on publishing tacky Pink Lists of the ‘most influential’ and richest gays to demonstrate how liberal, broadminded and tolerant they are. (My picture is of a generic influential and wealthy gay, quite possibly the editor of the Guardian dressed for work.) From Peter Mandelson, Nick Brown and Chris Bryant on the Left to Alan Duncan and Nick Herbert on the Right — and not forgetting David Laws — from Graham Norton and John Barrowman to Lord Browne (once of BP) and Andrew Pierce of the Mail, all are now mainstream and their sexuality is the least interesting thing about them. There was a ‘scandal’ of a sort over Lord Browne, but it didn’t centre on his homosexuality but that he told a lie to hide that fact he got to know his then partner through a gay dating website. Then there are the legions of gays who seem to be able to lead perfectly open lives these days with no one giving a fuck. And thank God for that.
So if what I have heard is right, what on earth is Hague playing at? Good Lord, if the worst comes to the worst and the News of the Screws carries loads of ‘reports’ from all sorts of men about ‘spending nights of passion with William’, he is going to look like a complete pillock. One explanation could be that he has been closeted for so long that he calculates coming out would do more damage than staying in; or that, as was the case with David Laws, his family don’t know and he would prefer they didn’t.
I cannot say exactly why I like Hague, although it is partly his wit which, as far as I know, is unmatched in the Commons, and his intelligence, but I do like him and wish him well. And I hope for his sake that this whole business is concluded without damage. Today the papers carry reports that he has been soured with the political scene and might jack it all in, reports which, as far as I’m concerned, are simply exercises in journalistic kite-flying; and that he is independently wealthy and doesn’t need the money (or something like that), but I think that is unlikely. The world first came across Hague when as a 16-year-old and with a full head of hair he made a speech at a Conservative Party conference. I think that politics is in his DNA and is Foreign Secretary. I really cannot see him packing it in. So, I wish him the best. And I do so hope I am wrong. Use your loaf, William.

Want a successful career (and not just on a newspaper)? Just say Yes

This picture (below) appears on page 27 of the Daily Mail on Monday, August 30, 2010. When a similar picture was lying around the picture desk here at the Mail several years ago, I was tempted to stick it on one of the columns here in the office and add a particular caption. Wisely, I thought better of it. Although many individuals at the Mail have a very good sense of humour, there comes a point where that sense of humour tends to fail, and given the caption I planned to add to the picture, such a failure was a racing certainty. (In fact, more than a racing certainty, because many such ‘certainties’ in racing are nothing of the kind.)

When the picture below appeared this morning, the opportunity is proving to great to miss given that I can publish it here in my blog where the chances of discovery and a consequent sense of humour failure in Northcliffe House are pretty low.



'Yes, Paul'
My caption will be rather obscure to many, but my sense of self-preservation obliges me not to elucidate, even though few, if any, read this blog. For greater impact, the reader would be best advised to substitute the name of his or her boss.

I should add that I hold a minority view of the chap in question. Those higher up the food chain are often subjected by him to frequent and profane invective, whereas I am of such sheer insignificance here in Northcliffe House that such bollockings blow right over my head. On such occasions it is reassuring to belong to the rank and file.

Understandably, senior and junior execs are inclined to be less than charitable about their boss, and no one can be quite as bitchy as male journalist. On the other hand, I think this guy, who is a tall chap, is essentiallty rather shy, and very private who does not like the limelight. Furthermore, I suspect that he is a very good and loyal friend to those he regards as his true friends. And from where I sit - i.e. as someone not exactly in the loop - there doesn't seem to be any side to him, which, for a newspaperman is nigh-on unique. If, on occasion, he stamps his foot - once quite literally - to get things as he wants, it has to be said that his insistence on getting things spot on in the way he thinks is spot on most certainly plays a significant role in the Mail's undoubted success.)

There’s one born every minute (more or less)

I’ve just been reading that ‘a star with two Saturn-sized planets’ has been spotted by the US planet-hunting’ Kepler telescope and that scientists are seeing whether there might be a third ‘earth-sized’ planet also in orbit. (The Kepler telescope, incidentally, was named after the Southend-on-Sea turf accountant (‘bookie’) Jeremy Kepler, who put up most of the money for its development, and not, as you might have thought Johannes Kepler, the 16th-century German mathematician and astronomer, an account of whose life you will find here.)
Fair enough. As a lad now in his late 90s who was brought up on Dan Dare and the Mekons, the mere mention of extraterrestial life is enough to get my pulse racing. But it also reminds me of several oddities which always occur when we discuss ‘intelligent life elsewhere in the universe’. But before I launch into tonight’s diatribe (or this morning’s if, like Olly, you live in New Zealand), I must confess that I find it inconceivable that life, in some form or another, has not also evolved elsewhere in the universe.
This afternoon, on Radio 4’s Material World in a piece about black holes and magnetic stars, I heard that there are something like 100 million stars in every galaxy (with most stars having about it several planets) and that there are several billion galaxies in the universe. Well, do the maths and tell me that ‘life on Earth is unique’. If it is, then in 1966 I was the only teenage alive who thought that existence was shit and unfair, and that all I wanted to do with my life was to make fun of it so that it retreated into its cave red-faced, defeated and full of shame. Such was the scorn of my anger.
When there is talk of ‘intelligent life elsewhere in the universe’ — and future generations will fervently hope that whatever ‘life’ they do come across is ‘intelligent’, because there will otherwise be precious little opportunity to engage in trade with ‘unintelligent’ algae or what an Alpha Censorius takes the place of algae — we always seem to make the same assumptions. On the one hand that we assume that when extraterrestrials do finally spot Earth and decide it might be worth a stopover, they will always ‘come in peace’ (‘We come in peace’). And if peace is rather further from their minds than is laid down by some UN charter or other, that they are always unbelievably ferocious bastards who merely want to rape our women, steal our cattle and then destroy what’s left of Earth’s ‘civilisation’.
Now why do why think either must be the case? Why do we think that the ‘aliens’, the ‘extraterrestrials’, who make it to Earth — and who have presumably survived the vicious interrogation all aliens are subjected to by US Immigration when they arrive — are the sole representatives of their civilisations? When, finally, the US and, a little later, Russia, land four or five of their chaps on Mars (and sorry, girls, but you know as well as I do that it will initially be chaps), did they really consult Sri Lank and Venezuela and Canada and Georgia and Mongolia and Namibia before launch as to what the best approach might be if and when ‘natives’ are encountered? And what exactly will the US’s/Russia’s Mars visitors do if and when they are regarded by that planet’s suspicious natives as invaders and treated accordingly? Will they loudly proclaim in one voice and with renewed vigour repeat the declaration that ‘we come in peace’? Or will they shoot back when they are attacked? For if it is the US rather than Russia which first gets to set its foot on alien soil and which, subsequently, is the first to be made aware that it is not quite as welcome as it thought it might be, will it treat the indigenous populations of Mars and the other distant planets it visits as it treated the indigenous population if America when it first set its dainty foot on the sands of Cape Cod? Most recent reckonings estimate and accept that more than two million Native Americans succumbed as the ‘white man’ who ‘came in peace’ chose to impose his authority on ‘the savage’ in the 200 years which followed his arrival.
And why do we assume that ‘alien’ civilisations aren’t equally as riven by rivalries and paralysed by bureaucracies as the Earth’s ‘civilisation’ is? Why do we assume that the spacecraft which has recently arrived on Earth from Alpha Zeta Beta Phito II (and if it has arrived on British soil, preferably not on a weekend) speaks with one voice for the peoples of Alpha Zeta Beta Phito II? And if the ‘civilisation’ which lands its fleet of UFOs at Cape Cod at some point in the future does speak with one voice, it would be safe to assume that that one voice speaks uniquely for an authoritarian system which will brook no dissent. And thus it is unlikely ‘to come in peace’. Earlier today I read an account of the problem India and China face over deciding on the line of their mutual frontier (although they both might not regard it as a ‘problem’ but, at best, more as an ‘irritation’.) That rather puts our future concerns of how to treat visiting aliens into perspective. Will, it be: ‘OK, your Zorgon bastards, you can have Solihull and Kings Heath, but that’s it, OK, understand? You step one foot — one foot! — north of Mosley and it’s curtains. Savvy?’ I think it was something like that the Patuxet told the Pilgrim Fathers in 1622. Something like that. For all the good it did them.
Alien invasion? Bring it on! We’ll show the bastards.

Hate mail in the shires or why it’s wisest to take nothing for granted, not even good manners among the self-regarding middle-class great and good

The following is a true story. I don’t know whether it’s funny or sad, and I hope it doesn’t embarrass the chap involved. I work with him, and although I don’t know him well — he is an acquaintance from work rather than a friend — he is a nice, decent guy, the sort you (or, at least, I) always wish well rather than not.
This chap, Mark, is unusual among national newspaper journalists because although he is a freelance, he works in several executive capacities on different newspapers, and he does so on the Mail, where I got to know him. Most ‘freelancers’ are writers who are in the loop and can make a reasonably good living from their work. Other ‘freelancers’ are, like me, casuals who (in my view) only call themselves ‘freelancers’ because they think it might impress others a little. In fact, they are, like me, ‘hacks’ in the truest sense of the word, i.e. subs or writers hired by the day, journeymen. But Mark is in a rather more rarefied league, that of the true freelancers. I believe there is family money in the background, and I’m pretty certain he was educated privately. That family money might account for the fact that although he lives in London, he also owns a weekend cottage in Wiltshire. On the other hand, and knowing the range of his work and where it pops up, it is perfectly possible that Mark makes a very, very good living from his freelance journalism and that it is his sole income.
As I say, I know him from the Mail, but a month or two ago when I was staying with my aunt in Bordeaux, I came across a copy of The Spectator in which Mark had written a piece. The Spectator (‘The Speccy’ to those who like to indicate that they are somehow in the know) is not a magazine I ever buy and not one I read at all regularly. Ann, my aunt, a retired university teacher, gets it from a friend and former colleague who passes it on once she has read it. For me the trouble with The Specator is that it is eternally preaching to the converted, it always seems to be bemoaning ‘modern life’, it’s politics are always wholly predictable, and it has about it a rather stand-offish air which says ‘if you’re not one of us, you’re not worth bothering with’. (On the other hand, that might be my hang-up. Discuss.)
However, one evening, I picked up a recent copy and, flicking through it, came across a piece by a ‘Mark Palmer’. ‘Is that the same Mark Palmer I know,’ I wondered. The piece was headlined Social Pariah In The Shires and you can read the piece here, but briefly it is about how he and his family bought a weekend cottage in Wiltshire and where he hoped lead a pleasant weekend existence and build up a circle of friends, but for some reason was never accepted. He was invited to early evening drinks where he was introduced to the rest of that village’s great and good, where, a friend later assured him, he will have been given the once over but that village’s leading lights. Appartently, he didn’t pass muster, because no more invitations followed.
It is a readable, amusing and entertaining piece, though rather wistful. But after I read it, I did think to myself that Mark was making of himself something of a hostage to fortune by publicising the goings on, or rather lack of them, in that Wiltshire village.
Once back at work and when I was in (he only works at the Mail for three days a week, and our working weeks only coincide on Wednesdays), I asked him whether he was the same Mark Palmer. He said he was. So I told him what I have recorded above, that surely he was making of himself a hostage to fortune and that given their rather unwelcoming nature, some in the village would have been none to pleased to see it publicised in the oh-so-middle-class ‘Speccy’ which, even if they don’t actually read it, many in the village will have lying around the living room hoping friends and visitors will notice it and be impressed. What had been the reaction? I asked him. Oh, he said, they weren’t very pleased at all. In fact, he added, he had even had hate mail.
I started this piece by stating that I didn’t know whether the conclusion to this anecdote was funny or sad. I now know: it is not in the slightest bit funny, and it is more than sad. I am certain that the authors of that hate mail would be the first to lecture others on courtesy, manners, the ‘kind of thing one doesn’t do’ and generally how a well-brought up chap should behave. So not only are they pretentious, they are also nauseatingly hypocritical.
It makes me think that the plots of Midsomer Murders aren’t quite as far-fetched as I thought.

God, no more, no less. Though there's rather less here than you might expect

I live around ten miles from St Endellion church (I don’t think there is a village) which, for the past 30 years or so has held two music festivals a year, one at Easter and on at the end of July and beginning of August. For the past few years I have attended many concerts and enjoyed all of them. The standard is very high indeed and the musicians and singers who take part are all professionals who perform unpaid for the sheer pleasure of taking part. (Or that, at least, is the official line, though I have no reason to doubt it.) The whole event, from the higgledy-piggledy arrangement of chairs to the long queues which form during the intervals outside the portable loos, one for men, one for women, is, as you’ll have no difficulty at all in accepting, irredeemably middle-class. Of the concert-goers, as opposed to the performers, none is obviously under 40 and the majority are at least over 60. Everyone dressess badly, or if not badly, then dowdily in the way the English middle-class has made its own. Many of the men turn up in cream-coloured trousers and a navy-blue top of some kind - a blazer, Guernsey sweater or shirt - and are more often than not white-haired. If they are not white-haired, they are bald. Other men will appear in a variety of tweedy materials and old pullovers, but however shabby they are, they are usually better dressed than the women who have apparently all given some thought to what outfit they will wear. (I enjoy the music, but it is always something of a downer to find myself in the company of other ageing middle-class folk and be reminded that I, too, have white hair and will never in a million years dress elegantly.)
Over the years I have heard the St Matthew Passion, a piece by Ravel which I liked so much that I immediately bought it on CD, Walton, Vivaldi, Vaughan-Williams — in fact all the composers whose work usually features on such occasions. Composers such as Stravinsky, Barber, Rachmaninov and Scriabin, for example, would not have a snowball’s chance in hell of being performed. At the end of the festival, there is always a mass celebrated by a variety of clergy led by the Bishop of Truro and it is as high church as it is possible to be without being arrested. (I was brought up an RC, and until that gang began holding their services in English, this was the kind of service I attended: loads of incense.) There is always a liberal abundance of female clergy (and the joke is intended), and the whole affair has about it that air of cosiness which I abhor. I have attended the end-of-festival mass twice, last year and again yesterday morning, and I shan’t be doing so again. On both occasions I went for ‘the music’ and on both occasions ‘the music’ was nothing special at all. As for the ‘worship’, well yesterday I realised yet again that it is as much a load of mumbo-jumbo as any voodoo ceremony in Haiti. But having said that, I shall say something unexpected: as far as I can tell, it is mumbo-jumbo which is very necessary to a great many people.
Despite all the pious seriousness and never-ending series of clerical intonations, there is no denying that those who took part in the ceremony and the very many who took communion are completely sincere. And it reminded me again that it is not what is believed which is vital, but the believing itself.
Beliefs vary widely. Christians believe that their saviour, Jesus Christ is divine and was born of a virgin. I think that both beliefs are complete cobblers. Shi-ite Muslims, or, at least, a vast majority of them, believe that the 12th Imam didn’t die, but is still alive (which would make the chap more than 1,000 years old) and on Judgment Day (their capitals, not mine) will reappear rather as Christians believe Christ will reappear. I think that, too, is cobblers. Yet if someone were to ask me the simple question: do you believe in God, I would answer immediately and truthfully ‘yes, I do’. But I would leave it at that. I would avoid all and every attempt to get me to elucidate and do my best to change the subject. I believe with David Hume that ‘man created God in his own image’, and I am reminded of that every time some bloody sky-pilot begins a sentence with ‘God wants us to . . .’
The God I believe in — and to give you some idea of the complexity of my belief, I think it is outright nonsense even to debate ‘the existence of God’ — has more to do with what I believe is humanism than any religion I know of, and the Christians, Muslims, Hindus and Uncle Tom Cobley and all would have none of that. Furthermore, I suspect belief, faith, call it what you like, is more a psychological facet of humankind than it is intellectual. I suspect we need to believe just as much as we need to eat and drink, although a lack of belief will not actually kill you. There are those, who ironically regard themselves as atheist, who have an all-consuming belief, a faith even, in some ideology. To me they don't seem very different to the 'believers' they decry.
The Anglican Church and the Roman Church are, I believe, going through their death throes, tearing themselves apart over, for the Anglicans, the wholly irrelevant question of whether or not women should be consecrated as bishops, for the Romans exactly what was going on when for years and years and years the activities of various paedophile priests was simply ignored as the the most convenient way of ‘solving the problem’. But those are institutional issues, difficulties facing those churches as bureaucratic entities. They have nothing to do with the 'faith' those churches have nominated themselves to purvey.
I suspect that in 200, 500 and 1,000 time people will ‘believe in God’, have ‘faith’ and ‘worship’, for the very simple reason that they need to. When we are suffering we like to hope that at some point it will end and we ‘pray’ that it will end. As far as I can see, that does not imply a ‘loving God’, a God who has ordained that women should not be/should be priests or bishops. Every Sunday morning, driving either to Exeter station or all the way to work in London, I tune in to a Radio 4 programme called Sunday. And usually there will be some cleric pronoucning that ‘God would want us to do this’, ‘God would want us to do that’, ‘God says this’, ‘God says that’, and each time I think: how the bloody hell do you know?
Yes, I ‘believe in God’, but what do I think ‘God is’? I think it is all the good things around us, the kindnesses people show each other, I think it is hope, altruism, co-operation. It (note not ‘he’ or ‘she’) is selflessness, modesty, consideration for others — you get the drift. Incidentally, I am always utterly bemused by the zealotry of some ‘atheists’ who will not rest until they have proved ‘a believer’ wrong. Surely if God doesn’t exist, they are simply wasting their time? As Oscar Wilde once said, although admittedly in a different context: ‘Violent antipathy betrays secret affinity.’

Alfred Duggan, Evelyn Waugh and Bohemond, and why I should, perhaps, keep my mouth shut: a meditation on wisdom and stupidity

I came across a claim today that in mid-life our brains undergo some kind of expansion and that is why we are, in our dotage, rather wiser than we were in our salad days. Well, I take that with a pinch of salt, and I advise you to do so, too. I’m not suggesting we are do not become ‘wiser’ — I suspect we do. But I rather feel 'wisdom' is overblown, that in a sense it is sailing under false clours and has done so for quite some time.

As far as I am concerned, ‘wisdom’ is nothing special and we should stop bowing and scraping and worshipping at its altar. ‘Wisdom’ vaguely implies a greater intelligence, better judgment, and to call someone wise is, in some way, to praise them. Well, might I piss on this particular parade and suggest that were we to call each other ‘rather less stupid’ than ‘rather wise’, we are getting a little closer to what wisdom is?

Let me offer some examples of ‘wise’ behaviour: not picking a fight with someone who is stronger than you and, if he — or even
she — were so inclined, could beat the living shit out of you. I’ll put that a little more genteelly for our ‘civilised’ age: not taking someone to court who would be able to hire better lawyers. It would be regarded as ‘wise’ not to spend more money than you actually have, or not to take out a loan you have no chance of paying off. (Pictured: man who has done just that.) It would be regarded as ‘wise’ not to start an affair with a neurotic woman who can’t keep her mouth shut.

But let me put all those another way, and you might see what I am getting at: it would be regarded as ‘downright stupid’ to pick a fight with someone stronger than you, to take to court someone who can afford far better lawyers, to spend money you don’t have and will never have, and to nob the local loudmouth lush. So if I think that, on balance, I am a little wiser at 60 than I was at 20, 30, 40 or even 50, please understand it to mean that I do consciously try to learn from my many mistakes and like to think I’m not quite as bloody stupid as all too often I proved myself to be. (Anyone who doesn’t learn from his or her mistakes deserves all the misery which will undoubtedly come his or her way.)

All that is a rather long-winded preamble to the point of this entry: when a writer is largely regarded as ‘good’, ‘wonderful’, ‘magnificent’, ‘magical’ or ‘inspired’ and is generally showered with any of the many luvvie phrases without which no self-respecting literary discussion can dare be without, it would seem ‘unwise’ — I use the term instead of its synonym ‘stupid’ — to disagree. Well, I am forced to disagree: there are quite a few writers who aren’t what they are cracked up to be. At this point, others are fully entitled to ask ‘and what makes you qualified to make that claim?’ Well, I do make that claim: I think D H Lawrence has his moments, but he eventually went off the boil. And the writer who sparked this particular entry is a chap called Alfred Duggan.

Duggan was a contemporary of Evelyn Waugh’s at Oxford and, like Waugh, was something of a waster. Unlike Waugh, his family had money and he could afford to be a waster. He is thought to be one of Waugh’s louche Oxford friends on whom Sebastian Flyte was based. Duggan did very little with his life except spend his wealthy stepfather’s money until there was none left. He then turned to writing and wrote a number of novels based in the medieval era for which he did a lot of background reading and which are thus said to be quite accurate.

I came across Duggan at school when his Knight With Armour about the Crusades was a set text. I remember enjoying it, but apart from remembering that its protagonist died a miserable death long before reaching the Holy Land, nothing at all remains with me. But while on holiday in France recently, I read The First Crusade by Thomas Asbridge. I can wholly recommend that book for its straightforward and clear prose and Asbridge’s gift for explaining complex motivation. Subsequently, I became more interested in the Crusades (of which, I was very surprised to find out, there were nine in total) and googled for more books on the subject. And that is how I came across Duggan’s Count Bohemond, the story of an Italian Norman warlord and a major player in the First Crusade who laid claim to the fortress of Antioch and whose descendants held if for almost another 200 years.

I bought the book and am now reading it. Before I started reading it, I was encouraged by the forward by no less than Evelyn Waugh himself, a hero of mine, an honour he shares with Ray Davies, of the Kinks, and Homer Simpson. Waugh is hugely taken by the book and wrote that it is ‘lucid and masterly, absolutely free of affectation or ostentation’. That, as far as it goes, is true, but unfortunately it doesn’t go very far. What Waugh doesn’t say is that the novel lacks atmosphere and excitement, and if writing is more than jostling together a series of words grammatically and elegantly — which it undoubtedly is — the novel is simply not very well written.

The reader, or rather this reader, gets absolutely no sense at all of the First Crusade — there were something like 200,000 or more knights, pilgrims, foot soldiers and on or more underway — or the life they led. What Duggan has produced is a series of rather stilted, though informative, conversations between two men, one of whom is always our eponymous hero. And the novel is nothing but a progression from one conversation to the next. Some writers can convey sight, smells and sounds. Duggan can’t. His novel is simply badly written.

So what does this have to do with being wise? That’s quite simple: I have written little and published nothing, and whatever I do write in the future could well turn out to be utter garbage. So wouldn’t is be wiser for me to keep quiet rather than shoot my mouth off? Answers, please, on a postcard or in an email.

Hypochondriac*, nutter or neither? (*Wish someone had told me I'd spelled it wrong the first time round)

I have acquired my own digital blood pressure monitor, and the answer to the question in the title to this blog entry – hypochondriac, nutter or neither? – is ‘neither’. After my experience with statins, I am now trying to do something about avoiding the side effects of a blood-thinning, blood pressure lowering, all-singing and all-dancing drug called Ramipril.
Incidentally, after coming off – taking myself off – statins last September, my body recovered very quickly and quite dramatically. I no longer needed advance warning of having to bend down (and that is only a slight exaggeration), my limbs were no longer weak and I generally stopped feeling like some eightysomething on his death-bed. However, about six weeks ago, my GP (‘doctor’ for American readers) persuaded me that as there was ‘evidence for’ secondary benefits of taking statins, I should try again. I finally agreed only on condition I would be on the lowest possible dose. So he put me on one at 5mg. I later discovered it was a new version and regarded as a super-statin. And anyway, the same happened and my body reacted as it had done before. So I’ve come off them again – it’s been almost two weeks – and feel a lot better.
The purpose of getting a blood pressure monitor is to allow me, perhaps, to come off Ramipril, one of whose side-effects is eternal tiredness. The plan is to monitor my blood pressure for a few weeks by taking it every morning at the same time, then come off the drug and see whether my blood pressure goes up. If it doesn’t, I’ll stay off Ramipril. If it does, well . . . I’ll do the sensible thing and go back on and put up with this bloody tiredness.
The daft thing is, of course, that if I do have a second heart attack and it comes out that I stopped taking the ‘preventative medication’, it will be my fault. But were I to continue to take the medication but still suffer a second heart attack, it would be a case of ‘well, nothing's guaranteed’.