As the shit gets ever closer to the fan in Greece . . .

When I was still a young lad, I, like many other young girls and boys, imagined that ‘grown-ups’ were more intelligent and knew what they were doing. I am no longer young and growing older by the hour and learned long ago that the only real difference intellectually and morally between children and adults is that adults are older. In all other respects - in the tendency to dissumulate, to tell lies, to feign ignorance, to regard themselves as the centre of the world - they are more or less identical. Of course, we adults like to think we have matured emotionally, but when push comes to shove, it is the exception who doesn't resort to outright childish behaviour and there is no other difference. It is something I have taught my own two children, who are now 12 and 15, from a young age: don’t (I urge them) imagine ‘grown-ups’ always know what they are talking about. Grown-ups (I have told them) lie just as much as children and it is worse than when children lie, because adults should know better.
This is all a rather roundabout way of approaching the coming calamity that is the default of Greece, it’s exit from the euro, and – possibly – even real trouble in the streets. But what I write above is pertinent because too many of us, despite our habitual cynicism, assume governments and bankers know what they are doing and that governments, in theory beholden to a fickle electorate, always act in what they feel is their country’s best interest. But, of course, they don’t.
Everyone – every EU functionary in Brussels, every minister and civil servant in the treasuries of EU member states, every economist and every financial journalist – knows that the only solution to Greece economic problems is for it to leave the euro and rebuild its economy on a revitalised drachma. But you have more chance of finding a virgin in a brothel than an EU functionary willing to admit it. For once they do admit it, they also admit that the whole euro project and, almost by implication, the EU project as envisaged by its starry-eyed adherents, is just so much cobblers. That is not to write off the EU as once was, just the EU as now is and as many in Brussels would like it to be. They insist – ironically quite rightly – that only greater political integration will make the euro work, but are in denial that in the current situation of Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Spain and soon Italy (and, if my Bordeaux-based aunt is to be believed, soon France) going bust, bust, bust, achieving ‘greater EU political integration’ is about as likely as a woman regaining her virginity.
What it all partly boils down to is that they are saving face. And that is why taxpayers in the Northern EU states are being asked to cough up £110 billion pounds to stop Greece and – they fear – the other states at risk going down the pan.
The other aspect to this is, of course, that a great many French and German banks are owed a great deal of money by Greece and are desperate to get their money back. So the ‘bailout’ to Greece is nothing but a mechanism to pay them back as much of the money they are owed before the shit hits the fan. And that money, of course, will come from the taxpayer. Already the Finns are thoroughly disillusioned and have voted in great numbers for their country’s only Eurosceptic party. Elections are also due over the next 12 months in Germany, France and Austria, and you can bet your shirt that those seeking election or re-election will not do so by insisting the voters should pay ‘those feckless Greeks’ even more of their money. Interesting times.

. . .

The really irritating thing is that is happening – Greece is unable to devalue or, at least, manipulate it interest rates – was predicted quite precisely by those nasty, cynical old eurosceptics. It is madness they said, but times were great, credit was easy, everyone felt prosperous and they jeered at the doomsayers as tired old farts. Whose jeering now?

Why we might forego a silly season this year as the world heats up, but don’t East Anglian dwile flonkers and the Duke of Portland’ shyness can step up (courtesy of Ben le Vay).

Traditionally, for newspapers August is the ‘silly season’ when news becomes so thin on the ground that they - or the skeleton staff who hold the fort - are reduced to reporting incidents of ducks taking to skateboarding (‘skateboarding ducks’) and that kind of nonsense. Admittedly, such reports might appear indistinguishable to the naked eye to what appears in the rest of the year, but as a rule, when you get into detail, they are far sillier. For example, any duck found skateboarding in any month which is not August will be found, on further investigation, to be nothing but a common or garden duck. A duck caught skateboarding in August (and newspapers are adept at catching that kind of thing on camera) will, on further investigation, be found to be fluent in French and one of Princess Margaret’s former lovers.

This August, I suspect, will not be a silly season. It might today seem like a long way off, but August 1, as of today, is just 44 days away. And there is enough bubbling under to make August not just not silly, but downright interesting. For example, in Argentina the country’s president Cristina Kirchner is stirring the pot marvellously over the ‘disputed Falklands’. Why? Well, there’s an election coming up and Kirchner wants to be re-elected. More to the point, my sources in the Ministry of Defence (Ships and Rum) complain that the recent defences cuts mean that should the Argentineans decided to invade the Falklands again, not only could Britain not get a fleet together to defend the islands, it would be hard pushed even to send a strongly worded telegram. An Argentinean writer memorably described the Falklands war in the early Eighties as ‘two bald men fighting over a comb’, but sadly that neck of the woods is now a little more important what with various oil companies drilling for oil they suspect might lie just offshore.

Then there are the bloody Greeks who, creative as ever, are coming up with ever more exciting and innovative ways of going bust in the certain knowledge that no one will let them until their own plans are in place to avoid as much of the flak as possible. Germany (quite rightly in my view) wants the money markets to share the pain, but the rest of Europe is fighting shy of that rather as one fights shy of standing up to a bully. This morning, it seems, the appeasers have finally persuaded Germany to stand down and accept that Greece should get another dollop of moolah just to keep the show on the road. At this point I might be inclined to advise everyone to bite on the bullet, face the music and stop dithering, but unfortunately the fall out from doing that would be so horrendous for Joe, Jose, Johan, Jacoma and Giorgio public that it isn’t worth contemplating. There’s the old joke about the traveller in Ireland who asked for directions and was told: ‘Well, I wouldn’t start from here.’ But that is exactly what we have to do. We are here and there’s nothing we can do about it. But given all the euro crap that’s been flying around, you do wonder why Croatia, or rather, the Croatian government is still so keen to join ‘the club’.
Or how about Syria. How long can that go on? Something's got give, either way. They say Turkey, which does a hell of a lot of trade with Syria, is both trying to persuade Assad to go a little easier (kill fewer people?) as well as keep on good terms with the Syrian regime. One commentator remarked that it is very possible that Bashir al-Assad is not quite the man in charge he is assumed to be, but being manipulated by the army and security forces, who have rather too much to lose if the regime collapses. The Assad Jnr we have now was not the Assad Jnr his dad had marked out as his successor. The old dictator had groomed his oldest son Basil to take over, but he was killed in a car crash in 1994, so there had to be a change of plan. The second son - and current president - Bashar was living in London studying ophthalmology (well, makes a difference to chicken farming which was Heinrich SS Himmler’s vocation) when his brother was killed and was recalled to base to become a trainee dictator.
Then there’s the question of whether the Syrian army really stay together. There have been reports on the radio that enlisted men and officers are defecting, but there are comparatively few of them. That one will run and run, too.

In view of all that, so much for a silly season this August.

. . .

Talking of silliness, I can’t resist the opportunity to plug a very amusing and comprehensive book by my friend and colleague Ben le Vay called Eccentric Britain. The title say is tall. If you have ever wondered whether dwile flonking (attempting to hit a member of the opposing team with a dishcloth soaked in beer) really does go on in rural pubs in East Anglia, if you would like to visit a museum of cornflake packets, if you want to read all about the fifth Duke of Portland who was so shy, no one but no one was allowed to look him in the face, if you want to visit a memorial to British pigeons who are regarded as heroes of World War II - if, to come to the point, you want to find out a lot more about true Brit eccentricity, get the book. It is published by Bradt Travel Guides and you can get hold of a copy here at Amazon.

This is Ben’s most comprehensive guide to eccentricity hereabouts, but he has previously written books on eccentric London, eccentric Cambridge and eccentric Edinburgh. It’s also available at (as they say) all good bookshops and, undoubtedly quite a few bad ones. Do get a copy. Not only will you keep yourself amused for hours but Ben would get a bit more money.

. . .

The major news this morning was that ‘the Americans are in talks with the Taliban’, presumably to end the war and get the hell out of Aghanistan. That would be no bad thing, of course, but who is asking for the talks and who is agreeing to them? That should give us a fair idea as to who thinks they are losing and who doesn’t think they are losing. That won’t be lost on the Taliban.

Incidentally, as far as I know the name ‘Taliban’ is perfectly useless, being used, as it is, to describe such a disparate group of people. The one thing they have in common is their desire to get U.S., British and other Nato troops the hell out of their country. But apart from that the different groups have nothing in common. They range from journeymen fighters who just want to earn a living and will fight anyone if the money is right, to would-be warlords who know a great route to power when they see one, to out-and-out radical Islamists to the kind of opportunist you’ll find the world over.

One new element in the equation might be, though, the hope and courage would-be Afghan reformists get from the so-called Arab Spring (as we are now obliged to call it - those damn sub-editors), who might not feel inclined to buckle under if and when the Taliban demand all women return home and stay there and reinstate all those vile, supposedly Islamist, punishments for a variety of offences.

. . .

Courtesy of Spotify, I’m listening to a few tracks from my salad days. While listening to She’s Gone by Hall & Oates my daughter - who is 15 at the beginning of August - asked me - who is 62 in November - what’s that? I told her it was pop. She was probably asking because as a rule if I play music in is usually baroque, jazz or Dave Fiuczynski. That’s not pop, she informed me. It is, I said. It’s not, she replied. I gave up.

One of the tracks on my playlist is Money’s Too Tight To mention - not by that ginger-haired twat Mick Hucknall, but by The Valentine Brothers, compared to whose version drinking shampoo is more preferable to Hucknall’s version. Anaemic, fake, soulless, plastic - that’s Hucknall and his bloody band.

Ah, now another of my favourites is on - Joy And Pain by Maze. There’s a great alternative version by Frankie Beverley and Kurtis Blow.

What's happened to saving the planet? And Smack and Chet, or, if you like, Chet and Smack (his funny valentine)

What with Libya, the atrocities in Syria, the Milibands pledging each other eternal loyalty (for which read ‘I’ll get that bastard brother of mine just as soon as I can’), Kate buying her dresses at Oxfam, drought being declared throughout the country despite the very heavy rain everywhere and widespread flooding, ‘climate change’ has had rather a poor Press these past few months. All together now: well, there’s a shame. But the debate is still going on, and canny businessmen throughout the land are still making a mint by building ‘wind farms’ everywhere, usually where no one wants them, on the back of government subsidies. It’s not really the government, of course, that is providing the money – we are.

I’m not going to go into the pros and cons of ‘climate change’ and whether it’s ‘man-made’, down to sunspots, just natural change or some mad scheme by the Teletubbies to take over the world. Life is simply too short for that. Either you believe that unless we do something now! we’re all off to Hell in a handcart, or you are thoroughly convinced it’s all stuff and nonsense dreamed up by damned lefties, I mean, look, it’s on record that the Vikings not only grew grapes on Greenland, but regularly used to sunbathe on the beach, and yes, I would love another G&T, but could you go a little easier on the tonic, please?

Me? I just note that we all love a disaster as long as it doesn’t involve us, and happens elsewhere.
There is a strong ‘apocalyptarian’ streak in all of us. A few years ago The Economist ran a feature detailing the various doomsday scenarios which had frightened the living daylights out of mankind for these past few hundred years, of which the Second Coming was always a favourite. The various Christian denominations learned very early on the best way to keep the faithful in line was to scare the living shit out of them.
In my lifetime the various coming disasters which were relied upon to put an end to humanity have ranged from ‘overpopulation’ (there won’t be enough food to got around / the Red Chinese – remember them? – will burst through their frontiers in search of Lebensraum), nuclear annihilation (which meant every earnest young man and woman and their beards and duffel coats were obliged to march to Aldermaston at least once a week calling for disarmament), acid rain (which was going to see off our forests for ever and always and leave Europe an arid wastleand), Aids (which was going to decimate humanity within months unless we all stopped shagging once and for all) and now global warming (there’s only 24 hours left to save the planet!)

That’s all changed now, of course. For one thing, no one refers to ‘Red China’ anymore, least of all the comrades in Peking / Beijing (it’s apparently racist to refer to Peking and Ceylon it’s got to be Beijing and Sri Lank, so that’s my goose cooked) because they are all – well, there’s no point in sugaring the pill – capitalists now. And anyway there’s even more of them (several hundreds of millions living on the poverty line by the way – so much for the ‘revolution’) but they still haven’t the stomach to invade Surrey in search of Lebensraum.

The fairweather bleeding hearts have also stood down on the Aids disaster (remember all those natty little red Aids badges they attached to their lapels. Can’t get one for love or money now). Granted it loome large in the late Eighties, but it has mainly peaked here in the ‘civilised’ West and we are, more or less safe (at least those of us who don’t own an extensive Judy Garland record collection). That Aids is still causing havoc in Africa and Asia (especially Russia) where in some countries infection rates are horrendous is, of course, neither here nor there, apparently. We in the West are OK now, so what is all the fuss about? Come on, get a grip.

As for ‘nuclear annihilation’, well gone are the good old days when only the Yanks, the Brits, the Frogs and the Ruskies had the Bomb. Now, it seems, everyone does, not least, India and Pakistan, who aren’t particularly inclined for a bit of peaceful negotiation when they fall out and from where I sit look more likely to pick a fight at the drop of a hat than not. But where are all the earnest folk in their duffel coats urging Britain to disarm? Well, a few years ago, they were all attending Aids benefits, but now the West is off the hook on that score, they have moved on to saving the planet. Unfortunately, first the Egyptians, then the Bahrainis, then the Libyans and now the Syrians have shown us they have other preoccupations.

. . .

Here are before and after pics of the great jazz trumpeter and occasional singer Chet Atkins. I dug out these two photos a few days ago specifically to post on this blog, but now I can't for the life of me remember why. Chet was once a good-looking young man described as having matinee idol looks. When he died (falling out of his Amsterdam hotel bedroom it seems while high on heroin and coke) he had lost those good looks and then some.

So all I will say is that they should be a warning to young folk everywhere: stay off the jazz!

One book and one film about the shooting of JFK. One is well-researched and fascinating, the other is a piece of cack. Sorry, Oliver.

I have just finished reading The Kennedy Conspiracy by Anthony Summers, and boy it is some read. Halfway through reading it, I sent off for a DVD of Oliver Stone’s JFK and sat through that, too. The two are like chalk and cheese. Summers is a journalist and former television producer, who worked on Granada TV’s World In Action (which, in its day, was highly respected) and he approaches the subject of Kennedy’s murder methodically and with a marked lack of drama. He states that his aim was not to reach a conclusion as to who was responsible for bumping of JFK or to ‘solve’ the case, but to marshal as much as possible of what we know so far. And he manages to marshal a great deal.

Oliver Stone had a completely different agenda and one which is true to what seems to me to be something of a champagne socialist outlook. I can’t deny that he can make very entertaining films, but the thesis of his film strikes me as being 24-carat bollocks and then some. Sorry, Oliver, but it does. (There is also the rather irritating fact that JFK was made in Hollywood, whose producers are not known for their interest in history and the truth, rather bums on seats and the cash to be made from getting those bums onto the seats.) According to Stone at the core of the conspirators was America’s military industrial complex who were rather alarmed by Kennedy’s intention to pull out of Vietnam. Stone postulates that the heads of the FBI, the CIA and the US armed forces were involved and that the ‘conspiracy’ went to the highest level with Kennedy’s deputy and successor Lyndon Johnson being in it up to his neck.

Naturally, I have no way of knowing what really happened more than anyone else, but Stone’s thesis does strike me as just so much steaming cack. He doesn’t help his case by inventing characters and scenes, including a ludicrous gay orgy involving two of the central villians on the ground. Some pretentious git might, at this point and in Stone’s defence, begin to talk about ‘dramatic truth’, but I’m not buying that either. In fact, the more I think about the film, the less it hangs together. If the security establishment really wanted to ensure Kennedy was bumped off, would they really have left organising it to two wacky gays, one of whom used to walk around in an orange wig and false eyebrows? There is also a welter of 'fact' - the rather neat and clean looking hobos who were rounded up, but who then disappeared who Stone would have us believe are CIA agents.

Although Summers doesn’t reach a conclusion — I repeat that he is at pains simply to present what we know and to allow the reader to reach his or her own conclusion — what emerges from his account of the assassination is that Kennedy was probably bumped off in a conspiracy between anti-Castro exiles and Mafia who were aided and abetted to a certain extent by rogue elements in the FBI, the CIA, the intelligence services of the armed forces and the Dallas police department. The central character, Lee Harvey Oswald, was almost certainly — as he realised within hours of the assassination and announced to the world before he, too, was murdered — a patsy set up to take the wrap.

. . .

I’m not claiming, never would claim, that I, too, could never be hoodwinked, but everything about Summers book rings true. Despite the often outlandish incidents he relates and his often bizarre protagonists, the tone of his book is utterly unsensational. I mention that the possibility that Summers’ book might be just another in a long line of flawed accounts of an enduring mystery because by chance when I had just started reading the book, I received an email in response to one I had sent warning me off Summers in no uncertain terms. Summers, the email’s writer suggested, was all ‘this might have happened’, and then, within a few pages putting forward his postulations as accepted fact.

Well, I am familiar with that technique, and very effective it is, too. Eric von Daniken (the author of Was God A Gooner?) and a certain Graham Hancock (who writes pseudo-intellectual volumes suggesting that the Bible is full of encoded references to next year’s Premier League results written four thousand years ago!) and many others put it to use with great effect. (‘As I showed several pages ago, when the angels arrived on Earth, they were wearing Arsenal shirts. Could it be that they made their way straight to the Emirates Stadium, or rather to that part of Europe which 30,000 years later would be chosen as the site of the Emirates Stadium? We can’t say for sure, but ...’ ‘As I demonstrated earlier, the angels who arrived on Earth as the emissaries of God and were wearing the Arsenal strip immediately made their way to what would later become North London. Were they looking for the birthplace of Arsene Wenger? Or if not his birthplace, the place on Earth which would forever be associated with his work on this planet? We can’t say for sure, but ...’). It’s a technique you can also spot a mile off and it is not one Summers employs.

I suppose one problem he does face, which is certainly not his fault, is that a great deal of what his cast of characters do often makes no sense or is contradictory. And in his account

an awful lot of people seemed to have some kind of direct or indirect connection with the security services, which is invariably held against them. Another hurdle he must overcome is to get us, the reader, to accept that, according to his account, there was a great deal of disloyalty verging on treason in the CIA and FBI. And one small problem I had with his book was that an acquaintance with a guilty party most certainly doesn’t imply guilt all round. So we are told that so and so was ‘an associate’ of so and so. Fair enough, but in truth a mere association doesn’t prove anything either way.
But, on balance, Summers more than gets my vote.

. . .


Stone’s work is another kettle of fish entirely. I mentioned the entirely fictional characters he comes up with (‘Willie O’Keeffe’, a gay prostitute, and ‘Bill Bruissard’, an assistant district attorney), but the character who really takes the biscuit is a Mr X. Stone’s film is based on a book by the former New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison in which he recounts how he tried to solve the Kennedy assassination. I haven’t read it, so I don’t know whether Mr X appears in Garrison’s book or is an invention by Stone. That character, who Garrison travels to Washington to meet in a cloak and dagger encounter in a park near the White House, is key to the whole military industrial complex, CIA, FBI and White House ‘conspiracy’.

Stone shows him as a retired army man who once headed a ‘black ops’ department who was not ‘in on the conspiracy’ and was conveniently sent on a mission to Antarctica at the time Kennedy was killed. And Stone has Mr X confirm to Garrison that the bad guys are those in charge. It is all rather to pat and convenient for my taste. And Stone makes no mention whatsoever of the murky Cuban exiles and mafia men (not least Jack Ruby, who murdered Oswald and thus silenced him) for which there is overwhelming evidence that they were heavily involved in all kinds of skullduggery to do with Kennedy’s murder. But look at Stone’s film and it is all apparently an open and shut case. Well, up to a point, Mr Stone.

. . .

Finally, I suppose, there is the question of whether there even was a conspiracy at all and whether Lee Harvey Oswald didn’t actually work entirely alone, as the Warren Commission concluded. Well, all I can say is that once I had seen the short snippet of film shot by Abraham Zapruder (which is available on You Tube), it seemed pretty obvious to me that Kennedy was hit twice. The first bullet came from behind in an area from where Oswald was allegedly shooting, but the second, fatal shot, came from in front of Kennedy (from somewhere on the now notorious grassy knoll).

So whether or not Oswald was one of the assassins, he most certainly wasn’t working alone.

Well, that’s all right then: Blatter reassures the world ‘it’s just a family tiff’

good news from Zurich where Fifa’s owner (or is that king, I can never remember) has reassured the world that the world football organisation is not in crisis after all. Well, that really is quite some relief, because I was under the impression that dollars, euros, roubles, pounds and Swiss francs were sloshing around with abandon and that Blatter was a crook. Well, apparently not, it seems. In view of his upcoming coronation on Wednesday to renew his kingship (or would that be ownership – please, someone, set me straight on this one), he thought that it might help that the allegations that

Very he and his cronies were stuffing their pockets and those of others with bribes and backhanders simply wasn’t true. On the other hand two chaps called Jack Warner, up until now his deputy king, and Mohamed Bin Hammamm, who was rather hoping he would be crowned on Wednesday, are most definitely wrong ’uns, according to Blatter, and should not be tolerated in polite society. Or not as the case may be. Fifa’s secretary general (or is that Blatter’s accomplice) insists that comments he had previously made about Bin Hammamm – that the man was a complete scoundrel who had bought the 2022 World Cup final for Qatar – had been ‘taken out of context’. What he meant was that Bin Hammamm was a nice chap, but sometimes he didn’t seem to know how to hold a sherry glass. All very innocent, you see. Nothing to worry about. No, sir. The problem is that Fifa’s main sponsors, Coca Cola and Adidas are beginning to get just the teensiest bit worried. And if there is any stuffing of money by some into the back pockets of others going on, at the end of the day it is their money. So, well, you know, let’s not overstate this, but business is business, and Coke and Adidas would, all things being equal, not want to have their brands associated with what is essentially a gang of crooks. Allegedly. Better get that in. I’m not daft, you know.

What’s cooking (Pt 2): a load of bollocks on TV served with hype and desperation. And thank you, Mr Dylan

If you want to make cheap television, go down the ‘reality show’ route. If you want to make cheap television which has the spurious aura of class make a ‘chefs/cooks competition’ show. Time was when we had simple cookery programmes (and boy did the British need them). I can’t actually remember seeing them, but the granny and grandaddy of them all here in the UK were Fanny and Johnny Craddock. Then there was someone called The Galloping Gourmet, but I can’t even be arsed googling the name to find out who he was. More recently we had Delia Smith, whose career followed the usual trajectory of the Press building her up to be the hero of our times, then to take great delight in knocking her down again as old hat. Though Delia (you only have to use her first name because everyone in Britain knows who you’re talking about) ruled the roost, there was competition — that is they all had their own TV series — from Antony Worrall-Thompson, Rick Stein, some fat Italian bloke, Keith Floyd and briefly Ainsley Harriot (who is stilled billed as a ‘celebrity chef’, although I don’t know why. Incidentally, the very term ‘celebrity chef’ indicates how bloody daft it has all become. For some reason it doesn’t actually sound quite as daft as ‘celebrity accountant’, ‘celebrity manager’ or ‘celebrity bus driver’ but it should. But as we also have celebrity gardeners’ — as in ‘my nan used to go out with Alan Titchmarsh’, I suppose celebrity I’m on a sticky wicket).
Of the younger generation there is Jamie Oliver, and then there was a whole raft of chefs who took part in Ready, Steady Cook, who were all working chefs and whose names gained greater currency because of the show, including Nick Nairn, Ross Burden, James Martin, Tony Tobin and Paul Rankin. So given the popularity of these TV shows you might conclude that the standard of food in Britain has risen. Well, don’t. It’s still usually reheated pigswill. It’s one thing watching a cookery programme and ‘gaining tips’, quite another to put them in practice. For example, despite all the good advice, the method of choice for preparing vegetables in Britain is still to boil them for half-an-hour until they show no sign of life whatsoever. And if even that is too challenging for your soap-hungry family, you can get a full meal — meat and two veg — and your local supermarket for less than the price of a pint. Of why not get something ready-prepared and stick it in the microwave for five minutes?
The irony is that meals don’t have to be prepared in under five minutes, that cooking from scratch is not difficult, and that buying fresh ingredients is not only makes for more enjoyable and healthier meals (all that ready-made stuff has to have all kinds of preservatives in it to ensure it stays ‘fresh’ until it is bought, not to mention the vast amount of salt, sugar and fat included to boost ‘taste’) but cheaper. The meal I described a few days ago — breast of lamb, leeks and new potatoes — cost around £4.50 for four.

. . .

The era of the ‘cookery show’ a la Delia and the others came to an end when they all more or less ran out of dishes to show us. I mean there are only so many times you can demonstrate how to prepare choux pastry, so the next move was to send them all abroad or give them some gimmick. Rick Stein buggered off to cook on French canals, Keith Floyd prepared soufflés on a primus stove in the Serengeti and Ainsley Harriot went back to his roots in the West Indies to bake cakes in an oil drum.
The gimmicks with which ever more desperate broadcasters tried to make their show stand out were several and each even dafter than the last: Two Fat Ladies was presented by two fat ladies who used to travel around on a motor bike and only came to and end when one of the fat ladies died. ‘One Fat Lady’ doesn’t have quite the same appeal. That seems to have led to The Hairy Bikers whose sole qualifications for having their own cookery show is that they are both hairy, bearded and fat. But neither is

The Hairy Bikers: redefining cooking for the modern world
a cook or has had any cookery experience at all, although what is in their favour is that they are ‘northern’, which, in the whacky world of TV, spells ‘sincerity’ and ‘lovability’. They also have the common touch (which always goes down well in Britain. It usually means that neither they nor their audience is in the least bit embarrassed when they wipe their noses on their sleeves and fart loudly. In fact, it shows they are ‘down to earth’. ‘My mam always used to say “Better out than in”, pet. Shall I do it again?’ Loud laughs and cheers all round.
Once the broadcasters had run out of countries to visit, and I don’t doubt they will have some pillock preparing a three-course meal on Mars just as soon as it becomes technically feasible to get him or her there, the next move was to introduce the element of competition. So now we have Masterchef, in which amateur cooks engage in a cook-off, with the prize being a job with some well-known chef or other, and, of course, the very, very inevitable celebrity version of the show called Celebrity Masterchef (now there’s a surprise). In Hell’s Kitchen, a chap called Gordon Ramsay makes life a misery for those taking part, the rationale being that there is tremendous pressure on chefs when they are working in anger (so to speak) so they had better get used to it. That show led on to another Gordon Ramsay vehicle called The F-word, because apparently Ramsay says ‘fuck’ a lot and for TV execs that kind of thing is important, darling. Typical of this latest trend is the Great British Menu, which pitches professional chefs from around Britain against each other, with the winner being asked to cook a four-course meal for — in the past — The Queen, the British ambassador to France and the Prince of Wales.
What I find so irritating about these shows is the spurious ‘excitement’ and ‘drama’ they all try to introduce into the format. Everything is against the clock and a collapsed soufflé is a tragedy. Then there’s the hype: every single fucking cook taking part is ‘passionate’ about cooking, ‘passionate’ about using fresh vegetables, ‘passionate’ about making sure they use the right size pan, ‘desperate’ to get it right, ‘unbelievably thrilled’ to have reached the third stage of the preliminary rounds and ‘completely and utterly gutted’ when they don’t. And it’s always, always, always ‘amazing’ when they beat their competitors. Oh for a modest ‘yes, I’m rather pleased I won’, ‘well, I do like to get it right if possible’ and ‘oh, well, I’ll try again next year’.
I can’t deny that were I a broadcaster and was charged with coming up with new ideas for programmes, I would also be clutching at straws, so in a sense my gentle rant is rather unfair, but has no one thought to cut back on quantity and aim for quality?

. . .

Next Tuesday, on May 24, Bob Dylan will be 70 years old, and already a round of the usual brouhaha is being published, with everything adding their usual schtick, so get ready for a welter of nauseating saccharine hagiography - ‘voice of a generation’, ‘he spoke for us all’, ‘protest came of age’, ‘redefined cooking for the modern world’ (no sorry, that’s the Hairy Bikers), ‘an earthquake in modern music’, ‘protestor, poet, propet – all the usual bollocks. The Daily Telegraph here in England, which makes it a condition that readers are over 50 and/or have served in the Armed Forces, ran a piece along the lines of ‘doesn’t matter if you have one foot in the grave – so do Dylan, the Stones, The Who and everyone else you wet your knickers/pants over 170 years ago’. Well, bugger all that. I just think he is a great songwriter, had – has – a – though admittedly unusual – voice and in a world where everyone tries so desperately to be a one-off, he is one without even trying.
To this day I get a chill up my spine whenever I hear the first chord of Like A Rolling Stone. (Another song that does that for me is Aretha Franklin’s version of Say A Little Prayer.) People often say about someone great ‘there’ll never be anyone like him’, but that’s nonsense. Of course there’ll sooner or later be someone of similar, perhaps even greater, stature, but I reckon we’ll be waiting some time.
Below are a few photos of the man himself, taken at different stages of his life are below. Incidentally, I could have written in the title to this blog entry ‘Thank you, Mr Zimmerman’, as that was his real name. But that strikes me as pretentious way beyond the call of duty.
Happy birthday, Mr Dylan.

Sex-mad naked Frenchman chases chambermaid down hotel corridor! And British politician forgets his manners! A comparative analysis of the rationalist and empirical approach to scandal with especial emphasis on the tawdry and the dull

In view of the latest scandal involving a French politician, or in this case, a would-be French politician, no one could claim that life is always far less interesting than art. And it also goes to show that life can be just as outrageously clichéd as art: a naked Frenchman chases a chambermaid down the corridor to give her one. As one of our homegrown male Glenda Slaggs would put it: you couldn’t make it up. Incidentally, foreign readers who are rather baffled by my second reference in as many days to Glenda Slagg can go here to find out who she is.
By comparison with the latest Gallic misdemeanour, our current British scandal is pretty small beer. In fact, I feel honour-bound to describe it as a ‘scandal’ it is so pathetically unexciting: several years ago a leading Lib Dem politician got someone else to take the rap when he was caught speeding so he could avoid being banned from driving for six months. Shocked? No, I didn’t think so, but to be on the safe side, I’d best stick in an ‘allegedly’ – he ‘allegedly’ asked someone else to take the rap – Lord, I think I’m going to sleep. (Slightly off-topic – Q: Why did New York get all the crooks and Washington all the lawyers? A: New York had first choice. Having said that, if I had my time all over again, I think I should have tried for the law. But back to my comparative analysis of scandal and how French rationalist scandals beat our British empirical scandals into a cocked hat.)
Depending on how po-faced you are, the French scandal tends to make you smile and eager for further details, while the British ‘scandal’ simply makes you yawn and turn the page of your newspaper in search of last year’s shipping forecast. Certainly, for the chambermaid involved, who is claiming the randy Frenchman actually tried to rape her, it cannot at all have been amusing, but the rest of us are such salacious beasts who are only too delighted to read of the misfortune’s of others that I’m sure we can square it with our sensitivities when we burst out laughing reading the details.
Both scandals – i.e. the one scandal and the other ‘scandal’ – are shot through with the irony that what did or did not happen is way less important than the implications of possible consequences. For the randy Frenchman, who I gather is described as a chaud lapin

by those pretentious enough to drop in French phrases in an otherwise impeccably English piece of prose, was a chap called Dominique Strauss-Kahn (left) who is – or by now perhaps that should be ‘was’ – the managing director of the International Monetary Fund and who intended throwing his hat into the ring to become the Left’s candidate at the next French presidential election. Well, he can stick that ambition in the file marked ‘if only’. More to the point, the IMF is currently working with the EU to help cough up the readies to haul Greece, Portugal and Ireland out of the financial shit. As we know, Greece is already holding out its hand for a second bite of the cherry and given that, not putting too fine a point on it, the future of the euro and quite possibly the EU itself in its present form are at stake, the EU was rather hoping it would all go very smoothly. Well, the bureaucratic side of it all has every chance of going smoothly – it’s those damn money markets everyone is worried about. For if it doesn’t go smoothly and Greece, as I suspect, decides to hold two fingers up to the EU (on which it has form: it more or less did the same when it told lies about its finances to join the euro in the first place) and revive the drachma, it could certainly meadn the end for the euro and, quite possibly, the EU ‘project’.
A second complication which could also have rather more far-reaching consequences than is at first apparent is the question of who will be Strauss-Kahn’s successor. For Dominique had already handed in his notice and was due to leave the MD’s job at the IMF in four weeks in order to start preparing for the big one. And his deputy is also due to leave. Given the delicate nature of the various bailouts, it would suit Europe if the IMF, which is coughing up some of the money, were led by a European. This one is always a ticklish problem as many non-Europeans get rather shirty about the job invariably going to a white honky. Now those who demand the new MD should not be a European have a far stronger hand. Trouble is, Nicolas Sarkozy, who is due to host the next G45 meeting (or is it G7, no G8? No, of course G20), thinks he will look rather foolish if the IMF doesn’t have a European in charge when everyone gathers for drinks and canapés at the Elysee Palace. And French presidents don’t like looking foolish, especially if they are only 5ft tall and are invariably towered over by everyone else except North Africans.
This blog’s France correspondents haven’t yet been in touch to inform me of the mood in the street, but I think the days are over when a Frenchman who is caught with his trousers down

is awarded treble brownie points. Strauss-Kahn has form on that front, having previously faced an attempted rape claim (though, note, no charge) and another scandal a while ago when he was shagging one of his subordinates. But feminism has quite a foothold in France and I reckon even quite a few guys will read of the man’s latest exploits and tell themselves he’s a bit of a plonker. Things still haven’t reached that stage in Italy where Silvio Berlusconi gets ever better poll ratings among men every time he is caught out servicing one of his many ‘nieces’. Italian women, of course, have long thought of him as just another sad old tart.
Pictured is a chambermaid much like the kind Dominique Strauss-Kahn apparently finds quite irresistible

. . .

There are rather dire implications in our very own ‘scandal’. No one actually gives a flying fuck whether or not the politician involved, a rather oily chap called Christopher Huhne (pictured below with his wife Vicky) did or did not ask someone else to

take the rap for allegedly speeding, especially as the story came from the wife he ditched in favour of his new squeeze, a lesbian pole dancer (or bus conductor, I still haven’t been able to establish which it is). She, quite naturally, can’t be at all happy about being ditched, so no one is surprised she blew the gaff. At first she said Chris had asked ‘someone’ to take the rap but wouldn’t reveal who the ‘someone’ was. Now we know she was the ‘someone’, so Vicky is either telling the truth or a very stupid liar. If Chris did actually do what she claims he did (and, yes, I think I falling asleep again, too), he would be guilty of a criminal offence which can carry a jail term. But none of that is what makes it interesting. What makes it rather juicy – OK, as juicy as these things can get in Old Blighty – is the background of the Coalition government, Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg’s growing unpopularity and the suspicion among Lib Dems that he is a bit of a pushover, and the ambitions of the ballroom dancer and part-time politician Vince Cable as well as our very own Chris Huhne to oust young Nick (who I understand had his first shave two weeks ago) and take over. And they, they promise their disaffected Lib Dems will be a damn sight tougher on the bloody Tories than Nick. Oh yes!
Well, what with this ‘scandal’, that would seem to leave Chris out of the running to oust Cleggy, and I just can’t see the faithful taking tippy-toes Cable seriously as an assassin (who reputedly never get the crown anyway), which would leave Cleggy pretty much still in place.
There is one more Lib Dem troublemaker doing the rounds with both eyes on the leadership, one Simon Hughes, who also long ago had ambitions to head up the party, but nothing ever seemed to go right for him on that score. For one thing, for a while he denied being gay, which didn’t go down well with the Lib Dems who don’t mind a gay one little bit, but then came clean and said that although he wasn’t actually gay, he did bat for both sides if and when. That went down even less well, not because the Lib Dems mind a chap or chappess batting for both sides, but they were rather miffed that he didn’t come clean from the outset. There is also a very horrible story I was told about Simon Hughes, but it is so disgusting that I have decided not to believe it and shan’t recount it here.
I should imagine that the only one laughing his socks off at Chris Huhne’s discomfiture is David Cameron, who really is getting a lucky ride. Things were getting a little hairy for David before the speeding ‘scandal’ blew up in as far as Huhne, a Cabinet minister, was causing all sorts of trouble in Cabinet and generally gaining brownie points with the disaffected Lib Dems who want to see the fucking Tories get a fucking bloody nose. (‘Bloody toff scum! Bastards!) Now, he is utterly neutralised, and it looks as though he will stay that way. So David can stick with young Cleggy who despite promising to ‘get tough’ with the Tories (‘I’m going to bloody well start swearing and banging my fist on the table and that kind of thing! You just wait! I’m not nice, I’m really not!) and put into practice something he calls ‘muscular liberalism’ (which sounds so phoney, I can’t even think of a joke. Well, I can but I’m not going to waste it on crap like that).
The Lib Dems are, of course, a goldmine for the Cameron. Without them, he couldn’t have formed a government and that keeps his right-wing in place for the time being. But it also means that all the crap that’s going down over the cuts can be shared with the Lib Dems. In fact, the Lib Dems can be made to carry more than their fair share in such underhand behaviour — bloody Tory toffs roaming the country snatching the bread from the mouths of babes in arms — is quite naturally only to be expected from the Conservatives but not from theose nice fluffy Lib Dems. So when the Lib Dems are guilty of that kind of behaviour, it is twice as bad. (At this point it is worth repeating a comment overheard by one political commentator at last September’s Lib Dem annual conference six months in to the Coalition government. My Lib Dems were very unhappy indeed about their party jumping into bed with those nasty Tory toffs, and one delegate was heard to complain bitterly: ‘I didn’t vote Liberal Democrat to form the government.’ That says it all, really.) So Cameron doesn’t have to do half of all the things the Tory right want him today, excusing himself by saying the Lib Dems won’t stand for it. And he can more or less dictate to the Lib Dems what he does want to do because they know that this is their first sniff at real power in more than 80 years and they don’t want to blow it. In fact, they already have: at the local government elections two weeks ago they were utterly hammered. So as far as they are concerned let the Coalition continue, because if it collapsed and there were a general election, they would no longer have 50/60 seats as they have been accustomed to, but would be back down into almost single figures as they once were when they were nothing but a joke. Actually, from where I sit, they still are a joke, but that’s another entry. Right, I’m off to chase a chambermaid or two.

. . .

And so it goes on, with the euro lurching from dire straits to outright danger, all brought about because the rescuers can’t agree on the right thing to do. They are all agreed that those feckless Greeks most definitely need another several billions in handouts to ensure the country doesn’t grind to a halt. The problem is that the Germans (and I must declare I find them a rather more practical folk when it comes to economic efficiency than some of the other wallies abroad in Europe) who will be coughin up most of the rescue cash are insisting that the ‘plan’ - the Greeks must pull in their belts, cut wages and generally ensure everyone has a miserable existence while their debt is paid off - must be fine-tuned, or even tuned and not so finely. They are in favour of changing the terms of the debt repayment and allowing the Greeks a greater latitude in how they get the money as long as in time the debt is paid off. No sir! say the hardliners from the European Central Bank: forget about debt restructuring, just pull in your belts even more! This alarms the Germans who believe that it will simply piss off the Greeks who will get to the point where they simply say ‘sod this for a game of soldiers, we’re off’, leave the euro and revive the drachma. And they have a point. For one thing, the Greeks could solve their economic problems at a stroke by devaluing the drachma (which would mean loads of cheap Greek island holidays for the hard-pressed Brits who like nothing better than getting takned up on ouzo and shagging a couple of slags from Nottingham), and relaxing once more. It’s at this point, of course, that the ideal of a universal brotherhood of right-thinking Europeans will be put to the test. And, I am rather certain, fail. Institutions can count themselves to be a success when they weather the bad times. The EU was hunky-dory when times were good (an illusion, we now know, built on excessive consumer borrowing and unrealistic cheap Chinese imports, but now the seas have got considerably rougher, the good ship is leaking like a sieve. Now there’s a surprise.

Wives, or a more personal take on this blog. Time to get in touch with my inner whinger

Bit of slightly dramatic time here at home today (and only an Englishman could diminish drama in that way, but there you go, rather that than try to big everything up as some do and lose touch with reality - © US of A - I’ll keep it low-key). And that got me thinking, yet again, that this blog has rather lost touch with what ‘a personal blog’ of the kind I set out to write – part diary, part commonplace book – could be accepted to be. The trouble is that I’m battling against myself: I have long thought that writing is always rather – if not entirely - pointless if, at some point, what is written is not read by at least one other person. And a corollary of that is the more you are read, the more ‘successful’ your writing. Just ask any novelist or Glenda Slagg (©Private Eye, would-be satirist to this parish).

Yet the more you are read and the more relatives, friends and acquaintances read your ramblings, the more circumspect you are obliged to be, or rather, the more circumspect I have become. I mean, to put it bluntly, no one shits in public however great the temptation to slag people off while they have no means of replying.

A diary is utterly different to this kind of thing, this blog – ‘weblog’ - because, a diary is only read if you become famous and are vain enough to publish it; were once famous and some bloody publishers reckons there are a few pennies to be made from publishing it; your diary is happened upon and secretly read; or you are vain enough to circulate it while it is being written. Incidentally, many people claim they write their diary ‘only for themselves’. Well, perhaps it’s the cynic in me which is inclined to jeer, but: pull the other one, sunshine.

According to the statistics, this blog is being accessed in countries around the world and I am being read by several in the UK, the U.S., Germany, Indonesia, Australia, Russia, Slovenia, Italy and the Lord knows where else. (No one, it seems, in South America has bothered to linger which means that this kind of thing is not really for them or I am not writing enough about salsa, women, inflation drugs and – well, inflation). I am almost quite certain that none of those who does read this and perhaps returns gives a rat’s arse about my life or any of its details because, naturally, they are far more concerned with their own lives and its details. But the more I am read, the more, being an English sort of chap, don’t you know, with at least four ready furled umbrellas just waiting to be hauled out at the first sign of pleasant weather, I get ever more reticent about writing personally and, specifically, my feelings. Yet, as it happens, that is exactly what, on occasion, I want to do.

. . .

The picture below is Harriet Harman, satirised by those on the right who think their comment is funny, as ‘Harriet Harpson’. I don’t know her from Eve, though I did once

bump into her in Westminster as she was pushing her way out of the door of (I think) Portcullis House, a then new block of offices built for MPs in the early Nineties. I have no idea at all what kind of wife sweet Harriet is or whether or not her marriage is happy, but googling for a ‘cartoon harridan’, I came across this, and it will do.

Harriet, the scion of ‘a good family’ (she's the eldest daughter of Earl Moneybags of Gresham - motto No Bribe To Great To Pay) who went to private school and is generally rather well off, fights bitterly to improve the lot of her sisters. I’ve always thought she was something of a pain in the arse so perhaps the photo is apt. Complaints, please, to the usual address.

. . .

When I first started this blog, I mentioned that is was in direct line to a written diary I had kept from around 1980 to 1995. I got the idea for that after reading that the editor of novelist John Steinbeck had come up with an solution after Steinbeck complained of ‘writer’s block’. He bought him an A4 ledger and urged him to write him a letter on the left hand pages of that letter by way of warming up his writing muscles and then, when he felt able to, to write his novels on the right hand pages.

Steinbeck says the ruse worked. So I, who had always been a ‘writer manque’ (see entries passim) but who was ashamedly conscious (and still is) of having written embarrassingly little, thought that might be the solution. I bought an hardback A4 lined ledger and began keeping a ‘diary’ which was also as much a commonplace book. I don’t think it was especially personal until about 1983/4 when I split with a girlfriend called Sian who was the only woman I should ever have married. I can’t for the life of me understand why I split from her except to suggest it might have been some kind of commitment phobia but, more relevantly, a delayed grief ove the death of my mother in 1980. (I thought I had come to turns with that remarkably well, but looking back all I had done was to suppress emotions which, as they always will, will escape in some other way.)

In the years which followed that split I wasn’t short of girlfriends or bedmates, but I always, always, always hankered after Sian and recorded my feelings in that diary. Similarly today I wanted to record my thoughts about marriage in general and my marriage in particular, but, so far, have held back. I shall sleep on it and decide whether I might record my feelings after all. As a possible taster – remember, I might not write a word – any entry will run along the lines of

1) If you are being treated like a piece of shit, isn’t it, in the long run your fault, in as far as you could really put a stop to it? (For the slow-witted): that is a rhetorical question to which the answer is Yes.
2) My suspicion that of all marriages something like one in five is generally rather overall happy, one in five is hell overall and the rest are nothing special at all. One a scale of 0 to 100, where 0 is Hell On Earth and 100 is Pure Heaven, I would give mine about a 28. I shan’t go into the background of how it all happened but it certainly wasn’t any of that ‘Moon in June’ stuff. I was 45 when I married and if at the age you still believe in true love, you are either bonkers or dead. A subsidiary blog entry to those thoughts might be to ask how culpable are all those Hollywood (and, I suspose Bollywood) films we all watch while growing up in giving us a wholly, completely and utterly unrealistic notion of what love is? As far as they are concerned you meet ‘the right one’ and after that it’s heaven on earth. Well, bollocks to that, especially if the one you marry is not and never could have been ‘the right one’ and it turns out that she has a personality which might possibly be affected by mild Asperger’s. (Keep up you slowcoaches there in the back: yes, my wife, my first and, so far, only wife.)

What’s cooking? Well, tonight, breast of lamb with leeks and new potatoes and a dash of rebellion, another car crash (my 19th and I’ll soon have the set) and a warning to Old Farts the world over, irrespective of colour, creed, politics or gender

I am not a bad cook. I shan’t be immodest and claim to be a good cook, but I shall claim to be able to produce tasty meals if and when I have to. And I am a better cook than some, perhaps even many. But I have had my fair share of - I won’t call them disasters, but failures, most recently when I tried to prepare a Spanish prawn and chilli dish which is served as tapas in Spain. It is essentially a simple dish which it is virtually impossible to cock up, but, friends, that did not deter me and what I served up to my stepmother and, crucially, my sister, was ‘a failure’. It didn’t taste awful or anything like that, it just wasn’t immediately identifiable as anything much.
There are many ‘recipes’ for this particular prawn dish - that is there are many ways of preparing it - and I followed one which I had seen on BBC TV which involved tomato puree. Not many of the others do, actually. In fact hardly any others do, but this one did, and sadly what I ended up with was more or less a rather thick and spicy tomato soup with prawns. That is, what I ended up with was nothing special at all. Please believe me that it did not taste bad at all (I mention that because some disasters can taste bloody awful), but after the build-up of ‘preparing a meal for you two’ - my stepmother and sister - I did feel very foolish.
But even though I say so myself, as a general rule, I have far more successes than failures. I mention this because although I enjoy cooking and I enjoy eating, I have not been allowed to cook since I was married 15 years ago, and furthermore I haven’t yet enjoyed any of the home-cooked food my wife has produced. Were you to ask her why she doesn’t allow me to cook her at home, she would give you any number of reasons - ‘he makes a mess’, ‘he cooks things the children don’t like’, ‘he takes too long’ - all of which are, I have to say, nonsense. The simple fact is that she want to be in charge most of the time, and especially in charge in the kitchen. Fair enough, and anything for a quite life, but the price I pay is being served up food which is about bad canteen standard in a good day. And having been brought up by a mother who could cook and cook rather well, that is something of a sore point. When I retire, there will be wholesale changes in the household and budgeting for food and cooking will be one of them.
That was all a rather long preamble to the announcement that I am cooking tonight and, for obvious reasons, I hope to bloody God it isn’t ‘a disaster’ of any kind. I happened like this: there are many parts of pigs, lambs and cattle which are just as tasty as the bits we usually eat, but, for one reason of another, are ignored. I like liver and kidney, I like belly pork and I like breast of lamb. Recently I spotted a tray of ready-prepared breast of lamb in the supermarket and bought four. Not only is it tasty, it is also cheap. But my wife didn’t roast them, she braised them and they were pretty much pretty awful, and, as usual, in that obscure way these things happen, I took the blame for a meal no one enjoyed. I didn’t tell her that what she had cooked was awful - I can be  tactful sometimes - but I did tell her that she should not have braised the lamb but roasted it. She insisted that ‘roasting’ and ‘braising’ are the same and it is her habit - her extremely annoying habit - to argue her case until she is blue in the face whether or not she knows she is talking complete bollocks, which in this case she was. I was determined to show her that ‘roasting’ is not the same as ‘braising’ and that breast of lamb can be very tasty indeed. So the lamb is roasting away nicely sprinkled with rosemary, pepper and olive oil, and will be served with roasted onions, new potatoes

and flash-fried leeks. (Right, and still uncooked. I like leeks to be just done, still al dente. I don’t like bits of sad, floppy looking generic vegetable knocking around aimlessly in a stew not knowing what they are supposed to be doing and caring even less.)

. . .

UPDATE: Well, we finished supper about an hour ago (taking just over 15 minutes to do so, another of my gripes - I rather like spending quite some time over a meal, talking, eating, talking, eating, in any order. This mad dash to eat up ‘because Corrie/EastEnders/Britain’s Got Talent/Celebrity Shagging is on in a minute’ pisses me off more than I can say) and the response was as I feared.

I am not talking here about my children’s response as I feel they are still developing (by which I mean they can still be salvaged), but my wife’s. But first things first, and you must accept that I am being entirely truthful. Given that all I had prepared was breast of lamb (ready-rolled and stuffed), new potatoes and leeks braised in butter and given that it isn’t actually haut cuisine, it was 100 per cent successful. No ‘failure’ this time. I had roasted onions with the lamb and they were just right: sweetly carmelised without being at all burnt. The leeks, too, were just right (they have to be done at the last moment as everyone is sitting down - leave it too long and they are just floppy bits of vegetable, nice enough, but not as nice as they can be). The potatoes, well, they were just new boiled new potatoes. I did nothing special with them at all except to wish them God speed and to promise to remember them in my will (one of the easiest compliments to pay anyone. Once you have died, the will is published and you are shown to have lied through your teeth, well, you’re dead. What can they do?) I might also have made a simply gravy, but my wife is a coeliac (‘gluten-intolerant’ for those who aren’t addicted to the newspapers health pages), and apart from possibly using creme fraiche, which I had forgotten to buy today, I was stuck.

The response: well, it seems my children and my wife are far, far too grand for a cut as modest as breast of lamb. My daughter made great play of ‘cutting off the fat’ and apparently discovering that once she had done so, there was no meat. That was odd, because rather than let it be thrown away, I took what she had discarded and found some rather nicely roasted pieces of lamb. My son, on the other hand, finished all his meat (and had commented earlier while the lamb was still roasting that it ‘smelled nice’) but left his potatoes and most of his leeks.
It pains me to say so, but at 11 going on 12 (on May 25) and 14 going on 15 (on August 7), my two glorious children have been rather badly brought up, in this case by my wife. I accept none of the blame. Indulgence is not necessarily a bad thing, but the child being indulged must be made fully aware that he or she is being indulged and must not be allowed to forget the fact or else they are simply spoilt beyond reason. But I suspect as far as that is concerned those who know what I am talking about agree with me completely and those who haven’t a clue are asking themselves ‘who is this ante-deluvian moron?’ So I’ll leave it there. But as I say, I am an optimist and believe that despite, in this respect, an unfortunate start in life, my children, who are both essentially good-hearted and - I’ll put it this way - not completely stupid, can I believe still be salvaged. It might take some hard knocks later on in life, but that, too, isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

As for my wife, well what didn’t she criticise? I should count myself lucky that she had nothing to say about a possible inadequate percentage of carbon in the stainless steel cutlery, but apart from that it was a massacre. It is remarkable how much can be conveyed silently, but with the faintest of gestures and facial ticks. You’d think she suspected I was trying to poison her. Still, believe me or don’t, it was a very tasty meal, far, far tastier than anything I have eaten in this household since last I cooked. The secret, I think, is to develop an even thicker skin. That Bin Laden, he doesn’t know how lucky he was. But I am not going to be put off. You bet I’m not. When it comes to eating, I prefer food, not swill. My one mistake tonight, perhaps, was telling my wife as much.

. . .

The most exciting news from yesterday (I am writing this the day after my gala meal featuring breast of lamb, new potatoes and leeks) is that I ran into the back of some idiot on Wentford Bridge while I was on my way to pick up my children from the school bus. The stupid woman suddenly braked to avoid running over a stoat or a weasel (which safely made it to the other side of the road, you’ll be pleased to hear - I saw it scamper away yelling ‘nothing to do with me, nothing to do with me’), I immediately braked, too, but still went into the back of her mini Chelsea tractor. She had the spare tyre stuck to the back of her car, which is the practice with these bloody vehicles and strikes me as nothing more than unashamed showing off, lending the car a spurious ruggedness which screams ‘I’m tough!’ (The Worshipful Company of Car Dealers And Other Assorted Crooks commissioned a survey last year to find out how many of these very popular - very, very popular with people who live in nice, well-ordered, middle-class suburbs - off-road 4x4s were actually driven off-road. The answer was: none at all. Not one. The closest they come to being driven off-road is when they move to the verge to make way for the Queen.) I will grant that her bloody vehicle was tough enough to escape any damage whatsoever, whereas my effete Rover received a right battering.

The police refused point blank to get involved, which was a blow, because I’m sure they could have testified that the whole incident was her bloody fault. Apparently, it is now ‘policy’ not to ‘attend’ ‘road traffic accidents’ unless the road is blocked, there is an injury, or Lord Lucan was spotted on the scene riding Shergar. Bastards.
What is most irritating about it all is that in this instance I was wholly blameless in that I wasn’t speeding, I wasn’t drunk and I wasn’t in a rush and none of this would have happened unless this bloody woman had not braked suddenly. But I am bound to admit that I have something of a reputation in my family for crashing cars, and this episode will do nothing to persuade anyone that that reputation is unwarranted.
The only slight silver lining to all this is that I am taking a week off work next week and so will have enough time to get myself a new set off wheels.

I’m assuming that repairing what has been done - the radiator is also badly damaged - will top the £55 the car cost me in the first place, so strictly speaking she is a right-off. The second silver lining is that I because of the puzzles work I do on the side for the Mail, I have a couple of pounds put by and so won’t have to go into debt getting another car. And the third silver lining is that hereabouts in rural Nowheresville, any middle-class sort of chap with the right accent and who knows how to hold a gin and tonic correctly is invited for drinks with the Lord Lieutenant of the county if he is involved in more than three crashes (‘RTAs’ in police speak) in two years. I’m pleased to say I qualify on all counts and look forward to receiving my invitation.

. . .

The usual refrain of Old Farts here in Britain, but, I should imagine, also the world over – why should black, brown, red or yellow Old Farts be any different to the white variety? – is that ‘ah, they good days are over, they – comedians,/divas/clever politicians/sportsmen and women/actors – just aren’t what they used to be. Well, might this Old Fart (62 in November, can’t get a hard on, and would prefer to go to bed at 8pm than 12pm) register a note of dissent. And if your answer is ‘no, you can’t’, all I can say is ‘fuck you, I’m going to anyway.
I can confidently predict that there is any number of comedians/divas/clever politicians/fabulour sportsmen and women/actors who might well be, at this point in time (that was once a cliché, but in this instance I rather think it isn’t) unborn. They don’t yet exist. The twinkle in their dad’s eye which signals that he might well like to shag their mother and conceive the chap/chappess is not yet apparent.
I write all this as a Manchester United supporter, a club which is managed by a great, great manager called Alex Ferguson. But I also write after having watched just a few hours ago the English FA Cup final between Manchester City and Stoke. From the off, City were the better side, classier, more elegant, more tighter, but as can often be the case their sophisticated game was up to a point neutralised by Stoke’s rough and ready, muscular approach. At half-time the score was 0-0, and it wasn’t until well into the second half that Yaya Toure scored what was to prove the winning goal. But, I hear the clamour around the world, what has this to do with Old Farts and their penchant for dissing everything not at least 30 years old. Well, friends, I shall tell you.
City are and have been for many, many years one of United’s arch-rivals. As a rule United were invariably way in front with City being one of those Premier Leagues/First Division teams which tagged along. Chelsea were once also such a team, as are – are, I’m afraid – Aston Villa, and West Ham.
But given that City beat United in the FA Cup semi-final this year and did United out of a possible second treble United won the League, the Cup and the Champions League all in the same year 12 years ago) and given that City have qualified of the Champions League next year and given that the riches of whoever owns them – some bloody sultan or other with more money than sense and most definitely more money than any love or knowledge of football – football in England is shaping up rather well.
After he game and before setting fingers to keyboard to write this particular instalment of waffle, I googled City’s manager Roberto Mancini to find out more about the chap. And he has some history. After a rather glorious playing career when he also played for Italy, he went into management and did very well, particularly with Inter Milan, but the buggers sacked him after four years, reputedly for not winning the Champions League.

We are now at the end of the season. United, under Sir Alex Ferguson, have won the League (for a record 19th time), and in two weeks take on Barcelona in the Champion’s League final. City, under Roberto Mancini, have now won the silverware they have craved since 1976 (statistic courtesy of whoever was commentating in ITV – don’t ever think I know what I am talking about), have, it would seem, finally escaped their also-ran status and are contenders in a way which is not brave, alcohol-fuelled braggadocio. Spurs didn’t get to the Champion’s League next season, but by no means disgraced themselves this season and are back where they belong. Liverpool also seem to finally have shrugged off all the bad times, will be competing in the Champion’s League next season and are once again realistic contenders for the League title. And Kenny Dalglish is now managing them. Chelsea? Well, Chelsea were always rather fragranted wide-boys – would that be ‘narrow boys with rather nice hips – but have achieve prominence because their owner had the billions necessary to buy good players. Yet despite that they are well managed, and they, too, despite the dubious provenance of their reputation, are contenders. And all that means that next year should be one hell of a season, though given the nature of money, power and ego, perhaps Carlo Ancelloti will not be leading them next year. Shame, and I’m sure he will be crying all the way to the bank to deposit his £6 million pay-off (as in the rest of his contract, though, as of today he hasn’t yet been sacked).

So what has this to do with Old Farts (of whatever colour, creed, race, sexual orientation or, I suppose, gender)? Simpy this: fuck off and go bore someone else. The future is where it will always be.

Admit it: the the dream is over, the euro is on its last legs and so, sooner or later, is the whole EU ‘project’ RIP? I don’t think so. There will be one almighty blame game

The old adage runs that the secret of comedy is timing, and that is surely something the big brains in Brussels will be taking to heart when they contemplate the latest news from Greece. And that is bad. It seems the billions that were lent a while ago to help the Greeks pay the paper and electricity bills and generally sort themselves out was not enough. They now need even more euro moolah. That, of course, is bad enough for politicians Europe-wide who have to square things with the voter. I know we get the impression that politicians exist in a world of their own, making decisions about our lives without apparently a thought about consulting us, but that’s not quite true. Every few years, they are obliged to get the voter to validate their existence, and every few years the voter gives many of them a resounding raspberry.

That could well be the case, for example, in Germany, which has its next federal election in October 2013. And after losing control of the state of North-Rhine Westphalia last year, most probably because its voters were annoyed to be bailing out what the regard as feckless Greeks, Angela Merkel will not want to take any more such risks. The same will be true in other countries as politicians in all member states will balance doing the right thing for our European cousins in Greece with how best not to fuck off the electorate even more. And if push came to shove, guess who would win? But all that is merely the sideshow.

A respected German economics commentator, a chap called Peter Bofinger, has spoken for the first time about the possibility – he regards it as a probability – that the Greeks will abandon the euro and revive the drachma. You can find an account here or, for those of you who prefer to live life with rather fewer subjunctives and subordinate clauses, there is an account here from Der Spiegel which first reported Bofinger’s observation. (Incidentally, we hacks always use that trick, calling the guy or we are about to quote or write about a ‘respected’ or an ‘eminent’ or something along those lines – it is intended to reflect on us, the writer and convey just how well-read, well-informed and well-connected we are. It’s even better if the reader has never, ever heard of the guy or gal being quoted, because it makes them feel the fault is theirs and we, be default, rise even further in their estimation. And, no, I’ve never before heard of Bofinger, either.) Now that has really put the cat among the pigeons. It’s not that it has so far never occurred to anyone that the Greeks would do such a thing, it’s just that everyone believed that if the possibility remained unacknowledged, it would somehow go away.

We’ve all been there, of course. That moment when you know for certain that your girl (or boy) has had enough and is going to jack you in. You just know. But as long as you don’t acknowledge the possibility, all seems to be well. Or the time when your car misbehaves so badly that you just know the problem is just an untidy back seat but something serious. But you manage to persuade yourself, generally by not thinking or, heaven forbid, talking about it, that there isn’t really a problem, or if there is, it will sort itself out sooner or later. And that is what Brussels is doing: in their hears, or rather, in their stomachs, they know the game is up, that the dream is over. First it will be the Greeks, then perhaps the Irish, then there will be a mad dash for the exit – led by the Germans, who aren’t half as daft as many think – as everyone tries to salvage what they can. And then, well, then the dream is over.

But there is another way, although it is a long shot. And this is where timing comes in: if somehow – somehow, though the Lord knows how – the worst elements of the Eurozone could be expelled – OK, call them the Greeks – then there might just be hope for the rest. That’s what the wise ones are considering in Brussels, quietly, privately, streng unter uns, and woe-betide anyone who speaks out of turn.

It’s nonsense, of course. It’s still all going to go pear-shaped. I know it, you know, my sister knows it, my brother-in-law (who has a background in finance) knows it, the Germans know it, the Brits know it, every last significant and insignificant ‘member’ state knows it, the Yanks know it, and the Chinese know it. What we don’t know is the how and when. And that is the crucial information. Some Eurozone members will come out of it all smelling of roses (the Germans, I should think), some will be pauperised for years to come (the Irish, Spanish and Portuguese?) and others still will just be glad that it’s business as usual. The Greeks have long moaned that their tourist industry is lagging far behind that of Turkey because they are tied to the euro and its interest rates and the Turkish aren’t and, moreover, can devalue just when the hell they like. We want some of that, too, please, the Greeks are telling each other. Well, they won’t have to wait too long.

. . .

Another rather ominous development which might indicate all is not well in the EU and that its demise might come rather sooner than it inclusion in Heaven to sit at the right hand side of God the Father was all the fannying about with the Schengen agreement. This allowed the citizens of signatories to the agreement – the United Kingdom and one or two other countries wisely passed on the opportunity to open their borders to all and sundry – free passage to another signatory state with no hindrance or checks of any kind. But things got hairy recently when Italy was inundated with refugees from North Africa and, under the agreement, allowed them to cross into France with no checks at all. (Because of France’s colonial past and former ties, they felt a stronger kinship with France and many also speak French.)

France immediately called foul and said the refugees should be looked after by the first country they come to, in this case Italy. There then came a few days of inter-governmental argy-bargy until it was finally announced that the Schengen agreement would temporarily be suspended. I can see why, of course, but I am obliged to point out that suspending something like that when the going gets tough doesn’t actually inspired much confidence in all the other treaties and agreements in place. Are these also to be ignored by anyone as soon as it suits them to do so?

A further irony is France’s position: they weren’t quite as sensitive to the niceties of refugee protocol when many passed through France on their way to the United Kingdom and hurried them on their way just as soon as they could. That sounds like a reasonably good example of hypocrisy to me.

. . .

When the euro goes, the whole EU ‘project’ will be fatally damaged. The idea was always to build a political union which was so tightly bound together that any thought of going to war would be very quickly abandoned. And the currency union was the cornerstone of what was to become that political union. It all went well, of course, as long as it was just the six, then the 12, members, who were all – more or less – gentlemen and might be expected to play by the rules. When the obituary is written, I think historians will realised that the rot set in when, flushed with the success of how well it had gone so far, the EU pushed for greater integration ever faster. Certainly, there were apparently good reasons for that course of action, and certainly ‘expert’ after ‘expert’ could be wheeled out to provide the necessary hi-falutin’ pseudo-intellectual justification for ever faster expansion. It all became especially important, they convinced themselves at the time, when the Soviet bloc collapsed.


But in order to do what they persuaded themselves was the right thing, they turned a blind eye to so much. And that is all coming back to haunt them. Brussels knew full well that the Greeks were telling porkies and had massaged their figures when the joined the euro. They knew full well that billions were being skimmed off by the various mafias in Italy from all kinds of projects. They knew full well that far from being a fledgling democracy Bulgaria was still run by the same gangsters who had called the shots when, nominally, the Soviets were in charge. But it was the big picture, you see, which they looked to, a European brotherhood of man, a kind of left-liberal nirvana in which the wrong ’uns had to be tolerated because sooner or later they would see the error of their ways, repent and join the fold.

What this means for all those still queuing up to join the EU is anyone’s guess. I should imagine that a large number of Croat farmers will be mightily relieved if the attempt by their government to join the EU fails because by then there will no longer be a viable EU to join. Those farmers have been rubbing along quite nicely and really do not want to be inundated with a welter of regulation with which they had to comply in order to stay in business.

. . .

Incidentally, one of the many facets of euro thinking which borders on the bizarre was the insistence that member states should be fined for various transgressions, especially when those involved them trying to extricate themselves out of some financial mess. So, for example, a while ago, every one in the euro promised that its deficit would be no greater than 3 per cent. If they went over the limit, they were fined. It strikes me as ineffably odd to add to the financial woes of someone by fining them if they find themselves in that kind of situation. Naturally, though, it wasn’t all that straightforward: it is Dick and Dora economics to pretend that any nation’s budget is a straightforward matter of having or owing money. For one thing, many of the figues with which they work are estimates, some are assumptions, many are out of date by the time they are used and often several figures simply do not relate to each other.