Welcome to the new look, as unexpected for you as it was for me — but needs must and I’m making the best of a bad job. Then there’s Disney’s take on a Cathar castle

First things first: You might think ‘oh, what a nice chap, he’s redesigned his blog to make us feel more welcome, more valued, to show us that our ease and comfort is his dearest wish’, but you’d be bloody wrong. It’s all down to my terrible habit of dicking around, and in this instance I noticed that Google are touting some new all-singing, all-dancing ‘dynamic’ template and decided to investigate.

Well, I did investigate, decided I didn’t like it and have spent the best part of an hour trying to get my blog back to what it was. This is the result. Given that I couldn’t totally recreate it, I’ve given it a few tweeks to try and improve things but basically I’m a tad pissed off with Google and a tad more pissed off with myself for again dicking around when a lifetime of coming a cropper dicking around should have taught me to leave well alone.

. . .

Today (yesterday - Ed), the last day of our two weeks, it was off to Carcassonne to visit what at first sight seems a rather spectacular ‘Cathar’ castle. I say seems because although it is truly magnificent to see as you cross the bridge at Carcassonne heading south, then wind your way up through the town up to the visitors’ car park, you get a closer view and bugger me if it doesn’t vaguely and rather disconcertingly remind you of Disneyland.

This was, in fact, our second visit to Carcassonne. The first time it was getting a little late after we had wandered through the narrow alleyways surrounding the castle and we decided to come again. This we did today and went straight to the castle. Quite soon it became quite obvious what had gone wrong and why you expect Mickey Mouse himself suddenly to loom large over the turrets and give you a cheery wave. For although the Romans had built a fort here (and one or two of their towers are still standing) and although some dude called Count Raimond Bernard Trencavel expanded it because he was top dog in the area and needed a court (that was in the 11th century, several centuries before this part of France came under the control of the French throne and even longer before it was actually a part of the French kingdom, and although when he finally got his mitts on the castle the French king had it substantially expanded, what is standing today is, in fact and in my view, a rather failed attempt at renovation by a chap called Viollet-le-Duc in the 19th century.

He initially called in to renovate the nearby St Nazaire cathedral, but then decided to have a go at the castle itself. The trouble was that many parts of it had largely fallen into ruin (as castles do) and what was left was a hotch-potch of different styles from different ages. But Viollet-le-Duc was not to be thwarted. He spent a great deal of time trying to work out what had been what and eventually decided to rebuild most of the castle on what it might have looked like in the 16th century. The trouble for us is that when Walt Disney decided to design castles to feature in his various cartoons, he looked to the same age, which explains the rather baffling resemblance Carcassonne castle has to something dreamed up in Hollywood.

It doesn’t help that the alleyways of the ‘village’ within the outside curtain walls (I hope I’ve got the jargon right and if I haven’t, I’m sure some smartarse will email in with a comment setting me straight) are wall-to-wall tat emporiums, ice-cream parlours, overpriced restaurants, twee memoribilia shops and bars, all designed with the same Disney dedication to taste and crammed with tourists.

Two days ago, we went to see the Chateau de Termes, which was something else entirely. This is now wholly in ruins, but must have been truly spectacular in its heyday. It was also held my the Trencavel family, and when the then Pope took against the Cathars who were more or less declaring UDI from Rome (the usual story: they reckoned the Roman Church was corrupt - Lord, what a cheek! - and wanted to live purer lives), the Trencavels protected them and they thrived for a while.

Finally, the word went out that anyone who put down the heresy and its protectors could keep the land won from the protectors, which was an offer far too good for a certain Simon de Montfort to refuse (he is the grandfather of our Simon de Montfort). He besieged that castle and it finally surrendered after many months. Here are two pictures: one is as the ruins look today, and below it is an impression of what it would have looked at when it was still intact.

. . .

That was written yesterday, and this is today, written at my kitchen table at home. To emulate The Economist, ‘so the worst is over. What lessons have we learnt?’ Well, we have learned that despite the British middle-class infatuation with all things French (‘Lord, we could learn a thing or two from them about how to live. And their women - so elegant!), they have just as many chavs as we do; McDonald’s are devastating their country at an alarming rate just as in Britain; yes, on the whole their women are a tad more elegant, mainly because they just try a little harder and have an innate sense of something which apparently eludes British women (except the very rich, but they tend to shop in Paris anyway), and on the whole the French drive more like lunatics than we do, and their womenfolk are especially bad. Can everyone really be in so late over there? I rather doubt it.

But I’m back, can’t say I had two glorious weeks off, for one reason and another, but I did have two weeks off work with a change of scenery, so whose complaining. As I got up at 6.45am to get to Toulouse airport (that’s 5.45am in pounds, shillings and pence) I am bushed so I shall wish you all a bonne nuit (French for good night) and climb the wooden hill.

It’s over far too soon, but at least I can get outraged by greedy opticians, who don’t just want my money, but, apparently, my blood. And a crucial decision must be made: do I move with the times and apply super-duper whizz-bang 3D dynamic styles to this ’ere blog?

Caunes-Minervois, Languedoc (last day but one)

Well, the truth is out: brother Mark, who had his early upbringing and education until the age of 13 in France, has uttered the words I would never have thought I would hear from him: ‘I can’t wait to get back to Britain.’ For one thing the house we are staying, dating back at least 450 years and which us undoubtedly pokey, is built all wrong and he keeps banging his head everywhere and finds it difficult to negotiate the steps, of which there are far too many anyway. Furthermore, ‘France is too big’, this after he looked up the Cathar Chateau de Mauriac and found it was at least a two-hour drive away but is still in the same department!

Me? Granted the house is rather pokey in that it is undoubtedly very cosy in the winter and a haven of cool in the very hot summer months – cool as in temperature, not as in New York artsy-fartsy attitude – and granted that ideally I should have liked a terrace or a courtyard to go and sit in, for me our departure on Thursday, the day after tomorrow, has come around far, far too soon.

One thing I have learnt these past few weeks is that I both like being on my own and like having company. In the past, I have gone on holiday on my own and enjoyed my own company, although I am one of those kinds who, when enjoying something, seems to enjoy it more if I can share the experience (and no – stop sniggering at the back – I am not talking about sex). That goes for food, music, visits to galleries, films and a lot more. On the other hand, there is a certain joy in solitude once you have overcome the novelty of relying on yourself for company, and I do suspect many reading this will be familiar with the occasional quiet desire to be alone. But to do so here might well have come across as unfriendly, so I didn’t do it.

There are indeed rather a great deal of tourists hereabouts, and not just in Caunes-Minervois. Now, I know that I am on thin ice complaining about tourists, especially British tourists, when I am one myself, but when I go abroad, I do like to be with the people of the country I am visiting. Many other Brits, indeed, I suspect most other Brits don’t. They get a little uneasy. What has been very disconcerting is to visit the local Intermarche, Carrefour, Auchon or Spar and find a substantial section of one of the food aisles devoted to Marmite, Bovril, Gale’s honey, golden syrup and various other abominations (or at least I shall deem them abominations for the duration of my stay here) without which your average Brit really cannot face life. This in a supermarket where even the cheapest pates are 1,000 better than the slop sold in British supermarkets and in a country where in a race of cooks it would have completed the course where the Brit contender was still pulling on his running shoes. (NB Note the topical allusion there, running? Not too out of day, given that the Olympic Games finished less than a month ago. Neat, eh?)

. . .

My brother and I visited the nearby Canal Midi lock at Homps the other day, and then drove on to adjacent Olonzac for a beer. (Mark has developed a thing about canal locks and likes to watch them in operation. Or if he hasn’t newly developed it, he has revealed a side to himself with which I was unfamiliar. I don’t mind watching one or two being opened and closed, but after that it all rather loses the element of surprise.) And was the place crawling with Brits? Does the Pope shit in the forest? There were more Brits knocking around (it would be unfair to single them out as the local paunch-carriers as you do get to see one or two fat Frenchmen and women) than on any given day in High St Kensington. Unfortunately, I don’t speak French (‘have French’ I think they say if they are trying to impress each other), so I keep my mouth well and truly shut when out and about locally, and get Mark to do all the talking as he speaks French (‘has French’)

. . .

I was somehow careless when taking out my contact lenses and putting them in their little barrel cannister last night and dropped one before shutting its relevant compartment. I am usually super careful as I have lost them in that way in the past, but it nevertheless happened, although I didn’t find out until this morning when I went to put them in again.

When packing for my trip to Bordeaux in July, I found I had somehow mislaid my spare spectacles for use in just such an emergency, but was lackadaisical in getting a replacement pair and went, the week before leaving for France for this holiday I went to my optician’s to get them to make up a spare set, they refused to do so point-blank on the grounds that it had been more than two years since my last sight-check and that it was ‘illegal’ to provide a set without a new sight-check. As far as that is concerned, that is so much bollocks and I even downloaded and read the relevant paragraph in their professional body’s ‘code of conduct’, but I have to say what they say is as clear as mud and one could equally interpret the body’s guidance as legally binding as mere guidance.

But all that is irrelevant in the optician’s refused to order me another pair using the more than two-year-old prescription. The upshot was that I don’t have spare spectacle with me, but because of the possibility of just such and emergency as has now happened, I dug out three old lenses left over from when I had previously lost a lens or it was damaged and  - glory be! – one was an exact match. I then rang my optician’s in Bodmin to order a new pair. ‘No problem,’ they said, ‘that will be £130 for the replacement lens.’ My jaw must have dropped audibly because the very helpful chap at the other end of the phone added: ‘It’s £260 for the pair’ (thus demonstrating that in matters mathematical he is most certainly no slouch).

I protested that the last pair I had bought – and I stressed ‘pair’ – had only cost me £120. ‘Ah,’ said the very helpful chap at other end of the phone, ‘that was because you were then still in our customer care scheme. But your membership has since lapsed (and to be fair they did bombard me with junk mail at the time warning me to renew it).  ‘But I can renew your annual membership for £45 and then the replacement lens will only cost £75.’

So renew I did. But it all left a very bad taste in my mouth, and the most definite suspicion that someone is taking the ‘valued customer’ for a very long ride. Given the original developmental costs involved when coming up with the ‘latest technology in gas permeable hard lenses’ was underway and given that the cost has to be reflected in the price a little, and given the production costs involved for each lens even though physically each lens is just a then circular piece of bloody plastic about 5mm in diameter, we, the punters, can’t, of course, expect to get our contact lenses for next to nothing. If we were, it would surely undermine the very notion of modern capitalism and bring our Western democracies, for whom it is an essential building block crashing to the ground, though no doubt one or two entrerprising businessmen would find ways of making a welcome bob or two out of the ensuing chaos. But here’s the thing (©Siobhan in Twenty Twelve): whatever I pay for my lenses, those  developmental and production costs will be identical in either case.

So when, not in the ‘customer care scheme’ I am to be charged £130 for the replacement lens, but only £75 as part of it, someone somewhere is making a fuck of a profit and taking the piss in spades. And given that the development and production costs will surely and most certainly be no more than a fifth of the £75 – around £15, although even that figure is surely far higher than the real cost – ‘a fuck of a profit’ is certainly a crude but quite exact description of what is going on.

I feel several letters coming on: one to Boots, one each to the Telegraph and the Mail, and to the ruling council of this breed of bloodsuckers and one to the Minister for Health. Oh yes! Never underestimate the outrage and letter-writing ability of an Englishman when he feels he is being made to pay through the nose! Oh no! I know, of course, that my various letters will achieve absolutely nothing at all, but that isn’t the point is it? It’s something along the lines of ‘not playing the game to win but just to play the game’ (which might explain why when we win the football and rugby world cups, the element of fluke should never be discounted.) Now I think I should move to Tunbridge Wells, (a joke no doubt completely wasted on 99pc of people reading this, but in my present mood of seething outrage all I can say is: what the hell!

. . .

Thanks to those clever dicks at Google, I am faced with a dilemma: they have come up with exceptionally, almost obscenely, snazzy new and dynamic - their word, not mine - blog layouts which will allow the reader to decide exactly how they want to view a blog. I’m not too sure any of them really add to a blog, and if a blog is crap, it will still be crap, although in now and modern new clothes.

On the other hand, I tell myself, if I don’t move with the times I am very much in danger of becoming an old buffer for whom any innovation is at best suspicious and at worst the work of the Devil. So I shall investigate further and see what it what. I know, I’ll set up a committee to look into the matter, which should kick any decision either way into the long grass for a while.

LATER: Well, I tried it out and fucked it up. I have tried to revert to what I had before but because Google’s fuckwits can out fuckwit any other fuckwit on the planet - and that would be me - I can’t quite get it back to what it was. Oh well, maybe it was time for a change anyway. I’ll see what I can do overt he next few days. Love and kisses ...

If the truth be told, I feel a little out of sorts…

Caunes-Minervois, Languedoc
Day whatever it is in the heaven that is the South of France (© the various travel supplements of the Sunday Times, the Observer, the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, The Spectator (‘the Speccy’ to various right-of-centre fuckwits) and, perhaps, the News Statesmen on those days when the revolution is on hold and they feel guilt-free enough to acknowledge their middle-class or aspirational middle-class roots (‘I’m working class and proud of it’, a statement which, on only the most superficial analysis, proves itself to be complete bollocks). Day whatever it is and I am curiously out-of–sorts. I don’t really know why. I think it is the result of a number of things which are all conspiring to ensure I am not quite my usual jovial, devil-may-care self.

For one thing, where we are staying – it is a renovated house in a narrow alleyway of the medieval part of Caunes-Minervois – as, for me who is on holiday, one flaw. If it can be made sufficiently warm in the winter, and I imagine the temperature can drop quite a lot in these parts, it would be superbly cosy. But in the summer it is perhaps a little poky and, crucially, there is nowhere to go and sit in comfort, no terrace or courtyard or anything of that sort. And sometimes I should like to do just that, sit outside, perhaps with a drink, perhaps without one, and read or even just sit outside and do nothing. But there is nowhere, and nor is there anywhere nearby which might do the trick.

Then there is my brother who is curiously inert and, to my sheer surprise, tonight announced that he is ‘old’. I have two brothers and as I have never been close to my older brother, I have always felt close to this younger one. We both share an ironical outlook on many things, but whereas my cynicism is to a large extent a pose and at heart I’m just another sweet little pussy cat, his seems to have taken hold rather alarmingly over the past few years and especially this last year. He is an interesting chap and a fount of information – I won’t say knowledge as he, too, can be rather brimful of prejudices – but there is a lack of something there which I have long been aware of, but this year seems to have become more marked. I’ve noticed that he has no small talk, no chat. He can talk at length about many things but I’ve realised he never initiates a conversation of any kind, never asks questions, never talks unless he can talk about something.

Years ago, he told me that as far as he was concerned ‘life is just a question of filling in time’. A day or two ago, I reminded him of that and asked him whether he still thought so. Yes, he said, he did. He’s always been a solitary sort, and that was one reason why I persuaded him to come on holiday with me last year and why I suggested we should go away again together this year. Quite simply I wanted to get him out and about a bit, out of his rut, and I thought I had succeeded last year. But in a strange kind of way this year is different.

There was, for example, his rather startling claim an hour or so ago that he is ‘old’. While we are here and because of the lack of a terrace or courtyard in which we can sit, it has become our habit to prepare two very large gins and sit in the alleyway outside on two concrete bollards (pic to come). This isn’t quite as public as it might sound and is well in keeping with the Mediterranean practice of living more in the open, and as local French pass by as well as a variety of tourists, we wish each other bon soir as is the French habit. Each large gin will be followed by another large gin while whatever meal I am preparing (going on holiday like this is a chance for me to cook which I enjoy very much). Some of time he will scrutinise preloaded tweets on his iPod Touch. Then we might talk a little about this and that. Tonight, I don’t know how or why, he announced that he is ‘old’.

The point is that he is only 54, whereas I am 62, and although I don’t regard myself as a spring chicken, I honestly don’t yet regard myself as ‘old’. But he does regard himself as ‘old’. And this, as well as his otherwise almost totally solitary life, is disconcerting. I told him he should socialise a bit more, but in insists he has socialised in the past and has had enough. I suppose it comes down to how one socialises and with whom one socialises, but how, for heaven’s sake can, one be fed up with socialising.

. . .

The other odd thing is that increasingly I just feel like spending a bit of time on my own. I could happily sit in the sun somewhere for hours on end doing nothing at all but day-dreaming, but I would feel a heel informing him that I want to get away for a day to be on my own. So, of course, I don’t. The trouble is, I still want to. Incidentally, he doesn’t read this blog (as far as I know), and although my sister does, I don’t think there is anything personal I have written here which would upset her.

. . .

 There are two other things which have rather unsettled me, one of which has now been resolved, but I shall come to that in a minute. The first was the other night: I drink rather less than I once did, but the other night, my brother Mark and I had three large gins each, then I finished off a rest of the white wine I had used for cooking, and then – it was while writing the blog entry before this one – I had two glasses of pastis. And while we were drinking outside and then while I was writing, I must have smoked at least five, if not six, cigars. It became a very long night and I didn’t get to bed until very late, much later than usual here.

I knew I was not sober when I went to bed, but nor did I feel in any way drunk, although I was aware I had drunk to much. Then, at about, 3am, I woke up. I found I had been waking up at that point every night, but this night was different. I did not feel any chest pain, but I felt a growing, and physical, feeling of unease working it’s way up towards my neck. And my pulse was racing. This is it, I thought, the second heart attack. Sod’s Law, well, at least the French health service is efficient and - thank the Lord - I remembered to bring my NHS health card.

I talked to myself rationally and reminded myself that I was not feeling any chest pain and that a heart attack usually involved chest pain, but it all continued for several minutes until the sensation encroaching my neck abated. I lay quiely in bed for a few minutes, wondering what to do. I knew I had drunk rather too much and smoking cigars does no one any favours (though they do taste good), and then it started all over again. I took my pulse, and registered that it was about 120 beats per minute. I have gone far above that in the gym, but it shouldn’t usually be that when one is lying in bed quietly and then waking up halfway through the night.

Several years ago, in the early 1990s, I suffered rather badly from panic attacks (which can be extraordinarily unpleasant and which, before I actually had a heart attack, always convinced me that one was in progress or, at least, imminent). Bit by bit I persuaded myself that I was not, as I feared, about to suffer a second heart attack, but that is was somehow akin to those earlier panic attacks.

The trouble was that at the same time I was quite aware that I was – and possibly am – rationalising it all. The following evening I didn’t have a cigar and did not drink gin but just one can of lager, and I slept better than I have slept since we arrived. I have not had any gin or pastis since, though I have been back on the cigars. The bottom line is that it all very disconcerted me.

. . .

The third thing which managed to get me out-of-sorts was a text from my 16-year-old daughter asking whether she could go on a ski trip sponsored by her sixth-form college. She said that she would contribute from the money she is earning from her newly started waitressing job, but could the rest be as her Christmas present? The killer was the price: £899 for, what I later discovered, was just a one-week trip. We have funded other school trips for her, but none was anywhere near as expensive.

I spent the night mulling it over and decided that no, she couldn’t and that I would have to tell her. I wrote her an email saying as much, but in the course of it I also told her a few home truths: that she is in the habit of taking just a little too much for granted and that, for example, she has, despite my repeated requests, never bothered to haul herself off her sofa, where she half-watches TV, half-texts her friends and dabbles in a little Facebooking if she has the time, to walk the few hundred feet down the lane to drop in on my stepmother, who is an invalid and very much cherishes little visits. I told her that it might be no skin off her nose, but that old folk are touched by such attention, that even a short 20-minute visit can cheer them up enormously.

I was not unpleasant but not did I pull my punches. I then sent her the email, asking her to text me as soon as she had read it. The trouble was that I felt awful. When she was born, a friend who then had two slightly older children remarked to me that ‘we need our children just as much as they need us’, and boy don’t I know it. Life would be unbearable if I knew my children disliked me. So I feared that my email laying it out straight would achieve something but not least that she would hate me. And until I spoke to her this afternoon on the phone, that has been at the back of my mind ever since. Happily, it seems she has not taken that point of view (and happily my wife agreed with me that £899 for a one-week trip was far too much).

. . .

In some ways the purpose of this entry, mentioning my unexpected thoughts about my brother, my fears of suffering a second heart attack and my fear that I might lose my daughter’s affections, is a strategy of sorts to allay those fears a little more if possible. I’m sure most of you reading this have been there, too. But there again, there’s nothing much wrong with that and very little to loose except readers deeply disappointed that I haven’t rattled on again for the umpteenth time about what a dog’s dinner the euro has become. And on that note . . .

Beethoven, Scarlatti, Chet Baker, Miles Davis, S.O.S. Band, Purcell, Alexander, Pink gay and straight, belly port (roasted with onions, white wine and crème fraiche, and leeks), pastis, gin and surprising tourists everywhere – it’s all here. Oh, and I might play a little early Prince, just to round of the cultural experience. Read on (and get in touch, especially those of you in the more obscure parts of the world like Leicestershire or Durham. White trash is especially welcome – I’m nothing if not modern, liberal and enlightened)

Caunes-Minervois, Languedoc
Day whatever it is in the back-of-beyond-but-tourist-stricken Languedoc parish of Caunes-Minervois – ‘Minervois’ to distinguish it from the 1,001 other Caunes parishes here in the French Quarter of the glorious European Union – and in one or two odd ways I am relaxing a little more and wishing I – we, as I am here with my brother – had rather more than just another six days on holiday.

But last things last, as they say: my brother Mark has one of those little gadgets which are speakers for an iPod Touch, and we – lately I as he, at the time of writing, has now gone upstairs to watch German TV - have just listened, in order played, to the fourth, choral movement, of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, then Bill Evans playing his own composition Young And Foolish (which I can recommend to anyone dying rather slowly – that’s everyone over 40 – who wants to recapture the emotion of being young but doesn’t want any of the concomitant hassles), followed by Scarlatti’s piano sonata K466 in F minor (and that would be Domenico Scarlatti – there was a whole tribe of them but I am not familiar with the music of any of the others), followed by Purcell’s Dido’s Lament from – I think his opera – Dido and Aeneas, then Ry Cooder with Earl Hines playing Diddy Wa Diddy (or however it’s spelled and I don’t actually think there’s a definitive version of the spelling), then Chet Baker’s version of Autumn Leaves, followed by one of Miles Davis’s versions of the same tune and (now brother Mark has fucked off upstairs) the glorious S.O.S Band with Just Be Good To Me.

That finished several minutes ago and the album is still playing. And how, I hear some of you asking – though most certainly not all of you – can anyone who thinks Beethoven composed some of the best music ever, with his Ninth Symphony being some of the very best even bear to listen to the S.O.S Band? Well, sweethearts, I’ll tell you: it’s just as glorious, though in a very different way (apropos which Weekend Love is now playing and just to spite all the snobs, once it has finished I’ll play Alexander O’Neal’s track Innocent which is just as glorious. Then to persuade you innocent doubters that I haven’t totally lost my marbles, it will be Bach, Mozart or something entirely different – if I feel like it.

Which all gets to tell you: absolutely nothing. Great music to listen to is great to listen to whatever it is. I do so dislike snobs. As my brother has just come down to the kitchen, I thought I would play him Wicked Soul by Kubb. The rest of the album it’s on isn’t much cop, but this track is ace.

. . .

It’s a little late and tonight I’ve had three gins and a glass or two of Chardonnay. Unfortunately, there’s no wine left, so it might have to be a weak glass of pastis and possibly regrets tomorrow. I’ve now put on Karen Tweed, who I’m sure is not well known, but she is a superb accordion player. More great music, as much in keep with Mr Beethoven, Mr Scarlatti, Mr Miles Davis, Mr Chet Baker and the S.O.S. Band as anything else.

. . .

In keeping with previous nights, I did the cooking tonight (as I love cooking) and I roasted on of the most underrated pieces of meat known to man: belly pork. It is not difficult, though a damn sight cheaper than many other cuts. I made a sauce from the juices, a little of the Chardonnay and some crème freche, using the onions I roasted at the same time. The crackling was a little – er – burned, but tasty just the same. Served with roasted par-boiled potatoes i.e. not too roasted, and leeks sautéed in butter. And if the whole shebang cost more than a couple of pence for two, I shall be very surprised. Still holding off from the pastis – a spirit, which is not good news after gin and wine – but I don’t think I can hold off much longer. A cup of tea would do the trick, but what’s tea when there is a glass of – albeit weak – pastis to be enjoyed.

. . .

Mark rather surprised me tonight by something he said as we were sitting outside. It has become our habit, for want of a terrace to use for a pre-dinner drink, to sit outside in the very narrow alleyway on two bollards to enjoy our gin and me a cigar. And sitting there, in the alleyway, we are passed, every few minutes, but all kinds of folk, mainly locals who live hereabouts but also tourists, but French and Brist, but, as far as I can tell, every other nationality under the sun, to whom we both always say a polite and friendly bon soir.

We were sitting there when Mark announced that they all, the locals and tourists, probably think we are a couple of woofters (his word, not mine). And it was that which surprised me. Mark is both gay and my favourite brother with whom I get on, 99pc of the time, extremely well. I’m not gay (or at least not the last time I looked, but I do rather think these things are settled. I have never felt like a touch of rumpy-bumpy with a guy and I really do doubt that life has any surprised in store for me on that score). What surprised me was that Mark, who is now 54, should worry about such stuff. I should better add that the only member of my immediate family who reads this blog is my sister, who knows the score, and, as far as I know – with two exceptions – no one else who knows me reads it, either, and both of them – one a former colleague and friend, the other a guy who went to my school but who I have so far never met (hello, both) has never met Mark. So there is little chance that by writing what I am I am in in danger of embarrassing him, which I wouldn’t want to do, anway. The odd thing is that he makes loads of camp, gay jokes, yet doesn’t seem keen on anyone thinking he is gay. Any suggestions as to why?

LATER: Actually, perhaps I can make my own suggestion: I fell asleep last night with the radio on and woke at about 3.15 our time to a documentary about how gays are simply being murdered in Iraq. It was quite horrific. One guy told of being held at a checkpoint, then raped by nine policemen before being set free again. Sounds contradictory, but according to Iraqis interviewed, the blame for being gay attaches wholly to what they regarded as the ‘feminine’ partner. The police do nothing because, according to the documentary, many of them are in the various religious militias when they are off-duty. Generally  speaking , life for gay men and women in Iraq is utterly miserable from the point of view of the state. Ironically, gays were freer and less hassled in Iraq under Saddam Hussein and in Syria Assad dad and lad.

Things have progressed by several centuries in Britain and Western Europe, but it was only 50 years ago (these timespans don’t seem quite as large when you are, as I am, 102) when any kind of sexual relations between men were illegal. So maybe I should accept my brother’s point of view on this one and not see things quite so much through my own eyes. And my apologies to anyone reading what I originally wrote who felt offended. At first, I was going to remove it, but then I thought that not doing so and adding these few paragraphs might have more point, especially as many will not know quite how nasty and brutish life can be in some parts of the world for gay men and women. Africa is especially intolerant of lesbians some believe a rape or two will help them see the error of their ways. I don’t mean to be po-faced, but perhaps we in the West should count our blessings just a little bit more.

.  .  .

Talking of any suggestions, I always look at the Google blog stats to see how often the most recent entry has been read and where they are. So here’s a request: why don’t you – that is those three (see above) who haven’t already done so – make yourselves known and tell me a bit about yourselves. That request goes out to several readers in the U.S., several in the UK, and as far afield as Australia, Indonesia, Chine, the Ukraines and Russia. Come on, lad and lasses, get in touch.
One last statistic for our American cousins: Mark told me yesterday that he came across an interesting statistic: Mitt Romney and his backers are keen to do well in Ohio in the coming presidential election. Well, it seems that a survey of Republican voters there established that almost one in five of those surveyed are astonished that Mitt isn’t getting the credit he deserves for the assassination of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan.

On that note, I’ll raise my glass of pastis and drink a toast to all those glorious folk keen on introducing democracy to the rest of the benighted, undemocratic world: we’re glad we are safe in your hands. Perhaps bin Laden will do you a favour and have himself resurrected so that Romney can have another shot and this time get the recognition he deserves. Bon nuit (as they say in the more pretentious parts of North London.)

PS A late plea for all and sundry to listen to Alexander O’Neal and his numerous cracking good tracks. OK, so I’m an 80s freak but... Hearsay, Criticise, A Broken Heart, Never Knew Love Like This - fucking classic. What first got me hooked? If You Were Here Tonight - 24-carat bollocks, lovers’ rock crap. I love it. And I’m really not joking. Yes, Beethoven's Ninth, Bach's St John Passion, squeaky gate music and If You Were Here Tonight. It all fits. Somehow. And don’t get me started on Freddie Jackson. Fuck the 90s.

. . .

I posted the above and then read it through and started amending it. And then I thought it really did need a little more: Freddie Jackson? Alexander O’Neal? Beethoven, Scarlatti – and, I might add, Hildegard von Bingen, Schuman, Schubert, Haydn (especially Haydn, who was born to early in an odd sort of way), Mozart, Steely Dan, Teleman, Purcell, Vaughan-Williams, Dave Fiuczynski, Kid Creole, Johnny Winter, Dylan, Elgar, Delius, Shostakovish Pink et al – is the guy serious? Well, of course I am: music is music is music is music. And if you disagree and start coming the cunt about ‘serious’ music or any such nonsense I hereby officially ban you and your kind from ever reading this blog again. Ever.

. . .

Finally, a public service announcement: Is your partner missing? Has your bed been cold these past few hours? If you recognize the character below, please get in touch and we might be able to re-unite you.

Do I know how to be a person? Well, yes, I do, but it’s not thanks to Radio 4

Caunes-Minervois, Langudoc
The great thing about the internet, quite apart from giving me the chance to bore people the world over and not just in my immediate surroundings and social circle, is that when you are abroad you are able to continue listening to Radio 4. Wherever there is a wifi signal, whether here in Caunes-Minervois or the back of beyond in the Australian outback – I’m assuming broadband has reached those parts because the reference is completely hypothetical – all I need do is fire up my internet radio app (I use Tunein Radio on both my smartphone and iPod touch, but, as they say with one eye on the lawsuit, other apps are available) and within half a minute I can listen to the News At One, Just A Minute, Great Lives or, if I’m really bored and really have nothing better to do, the fucking Archers.

Here comes the first bucket of cold water: there is a certain British type – it’s insisted that we are all ‘individuals’ and that there is no such thing as types, to which I say nonsense, the world is full of ‘types’ – who will describe – usually herself, but not exclusively – as ‘addicted to Radio 4’ or some such nonsense. In fact, it is part of their self-image, and for the aspirants among them listening to Radio 4 is de rigueur if they are to have any chance of being taken seriously by the social circle to which they would like to belong. Well, I am not ‘addicted to Radio 4’.

(A few months ago, Radio 4 ran a series of utterly nauseating ads along those lines with all kinds of celebrities informing the world just why they ‘loved’ Radio 4 and why it was ‘essential listening’ and such an ‘intricate part of their life’. I describe the ads as nauseating because I would want to vomit each time I heard one. In fact, I did once, although to be fair the ad wasn’t the cause of my bout of vomiting but merely the catalyst. The cause was far too much cheap red wine).

I listen to the programmes which interest me and avoid those which don’t, of which there is quite a long list, very prominent among the being The Write Stuff, which has middle-class smuggery oozing from its pores and Saving The Planet (of Costing The Earth as they insist on calling is). But why, I hear you all asking yourselves, from the West Coast of the U.S. to the East Coast of the former USSR and all points north and south, is today’s rant about Radio 4 when the chap is sitting in the Languedoc and surely has far more French aspects of life to rant about? Well, I shall tell you.

Yesterday, I was listening to one of the Radio 4 programmes I do like, Great Lives, and it was about the film director Karel Reisz. The host was Mathew Parris, everyone’s favourite public gay (or one of them, the list is now growing ever since the Western World was finally persuaded that gays aren’t (a late edit: aren’t instead of are. Thank Christ for late edits. I might well have ended up in court) necessarily the Devil Incarnate) and one of his guests was Stephen Frears, one of our very own British directors who might be known beyond North London and BBC White City. And Mr Frears came out with a line which ultimately led up to this rant. Karel Reisz, Mr Frears informed Radio 4 land and its people, had ‘taught him how to be a person’. Do you understand what he meant? No, I didn’t, either, so I’ll repeat it in case your attention wandered there for a moment: Karel Reisz taught Mr Frears ‘how to be a person’.

For the rather more slow-witted among you, of which there are surely one or two, I should point out that ‘taught him’ is not meant literally. It’s more along the lines of ‘Frears learnt how to be a person from Mr Reisz’. And I’ll repeat the question: what the fuck does it mean? What can it mean? Of course, there’s the possibility that I am simply too thick to understand what Frears was trying to say. And, to be honest, I can vaguely glimpse what he might be trying to say, but that doesn’t make it any the less pretentious. Yet Radio 4 in particular and our broadsheets and many folk in general are apt to applaud such sentiments as ‘so human’.

Well, not me, squire. Perhaps I’m lucky, perhaps I’m one of the saved, but when it comes to knowing ‘how to be a person’, I find I have no problems whatsoever and need no lessons from anyone. I might indeed need lessons in other respects, for example, in ‘knowing how to be a bit more tolerant’ and ‘knowing how to be a little less irascible’, but not knowing how to ‘be a person’. No, dear hearts, it’s rather like falling off a log, and anyone who needs to be taught ‘how to fall off a log’ really is in trouble. Tune into Radio 4 is my advice.

. . .

Yesterday it was off to the Chateau Lastours just down the road, which is rather spectacular. It is, in fact made up of three castles, all of which were built on top of rather steep hills in the

The Chateau Lastours in Languedoc. Jewson's had a terrible time getting all the necessary up there, but they managed it   11th century, although they were demolished a century or two later and rebuilt on more or less the same spot when Languedoc finally became part of the kingdom for France and they were used to guard the kindgom’s southern frontier. This is ‘Cathar’ country (as big signs everywhere inform us), and there are a great many castles hereabout, of which I intend to see a few more.

My brother is a little less enthusiastic – ‘is it another bloody castle? We’ve already seen one, they’re all the same!’ – but if necessary I shall take off on my own. There is one particularly spectacular one about 50 miles south of us. Then, of course, there’s still Carcassonne castle to investigate, except that the hordes of tourists does the tourist trap surrounding it, which is horribly reminiscent of a slightly – but only slightly – upmarket Disneyland. Once expects a giant Mickey Mouse to appear above the castles, waving frantically and urging us all to buy as much tourist tat as we are physically able to carry off.

Day Three at Caunes-Minervois and not yet much to report, except that the wife of a former German president is trying to cope with rumours that she once earned her living doing tricks in a brothel

Caunes-Minervois, Languedoc
Day three of our two weeks here in the tourist-infested back of southern French beyond. I say tourist-infested, but in fact now - children back at school and Jez and Jess plus the little and not so little ones back on the treadmill (Jez works in IT and Jess is a part-time counsellor and homemaker) - the only sign of tourists is when Brit and Australian voices drift into the house as they walk past in the narrow alleyway outside. In high season, late June, July and August, I’m certain Caunes-Minervois is a certain kind of hell (unless, of course, you like going abroad and mixing almost exclusively with your fellow countrymen discussing exchange rates and where to get the best). There is, surprisingly, quite a number of Aussies her, though, of course, they are invariably retired and, coming from so far off, are here for three or four months rather than the mere two weeks I can allow myself.

All that sounds rather dyspeptic and, if so, it gives the wrong impression. I find I can’t help but send up Brits abroad because they are so send-up-able, but all the time I have to remind myself that I am Specimen No One: The Brit Abroad. Maybe there is subcategory: The Brit Abroad, genus Smartarse, sub-genus Conceited. Along those lines four lines by Jonathan Swift might be appropriate:
‘Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.’

What I am trying to say might not be obvious, so I shall add that I also take it to mean that the purveyor of satire all too often thinks that he is one of the redeemed few, that as he is able to spot and send up the foibles of others, he is in some curious way never guilty of any of them. Well, if that’s your view, dream on: we are all, or can all be, equally ridiculous.

None of which has included a description of the house, the town and the area. As for the area, I haven’t a great deal to say as both of our excursions have been in search, first of an Intermarche (my brother and I both like mooching around hypermarkets, although why I really don’t know) and the following day in search of a Spar. I can say that Caunes-Minervois is on the edge of a range of hills and so a little more interesting than its sister town Peyrac-Minervois which is well and truly on the plain which stretches as far as Carcassonne and beyond, a good 70 miles probably, to the sea.

The town is more or less in two parts: our house is in the medieval part and then there is more to its, straight streets rather than narrow winding alleyways, which will have been built in the 19th century. The house was renovated by a Dutch-born German who has lived here in France since he was two. He and his wife, who is German and grew up near where my German relatives lived, are hoping to sell it and renovate another. She is very nice, has a 16-month-old son and another child is on the way.

The house is narrow but four three stories high, with the ground floor being on two levels and the second bedroom in a kind of attic alcove above the third storey. There is a lot of climbing up and down stairs so it is always good to think ahead and take with you what you want when you move between floors or else you are in for another trip up or down to fetch something else. That probably doesn’t sound particular onerous, but believe me it can be irritating when you climb and descend the narrow, steep stairs several times in just a few minutes merely because you are going senile and your memory, to use the quaint euphemistic phrase, ‘isn’t what it once was’.

(Actually, I’ve noticed it’s become some kind of strategy of mine to claim to be far more feeble and ancient than I am. I suspect it is a kind of superstitious device to outwit life and to stave off the inevitable process, perhaps to defeat it forever. Some hope, so on that note I shall come clean: I am not old and feeble, my memory is still what is was (whether good or bad is thus quite another matter), I am fitter than many my age, despite the increasing number of cigars I smoke, and an enviable bonus is that I am quite, quite charming. You doubt it? Well, if you are between 30 and 60 and a woman, get in touch and buy me lunch and I shall persuade you within minutes. Charm? I wrote the book.

Well, so far that is it. Mark (my brother) and I are planning a walk somewhere or other today

A terrine au poivre like the one some of which I just had as part of my lunch now that we have finished lunch for me a salad of raw, thinly sliced leek and apple and olive oil, terrine au poivre, brie and fromage de moulis - what ever that is, but it was nice) to get a little exercise. Be back later.
. . .

By chance I’ve just come across a rather mysterious story and claims. It is that a certain Bettina Wulff née Körner worked as a prostitute in a brothel in Osnabrück called Chateau-Club and earlier Chateau 71. Now I’m sure there are many respectable women in their 30s, 40s and 50s who when younger earned their daily crust by opening their legs and providing other services. What makes the claims about Bettina Wulff more interesting is that she is the First Lady of Germany (although the Germans don’t use that term), i.e. the wife of the former German president Christain Wullf. Frau Wulff, who is said to be taking legal action again Google to try to stop it conducting searches using the terms ‘Bettina Wulff’, ‘escort’ and ‘prostitute’, has a star tattooed on her right shoulder.

Although this doesn’t condemn her in any way, it is a tad unusual (and in my books tacky). Her hubby is also not without controversy. He was elected president at the end of June 2010, but had to resign in February 2012 after coming clean about a €500,000 loan from the wife of a millionaire businessman. Not only did he initially deny accepting the loan, but at one point he left a message on the answerphone of the editor of the Bild, the leading German tabloid (which is, confusingly, a broadsheet) threatening to wreck his career if he published any details. That didn’t go down at all well. Now there is all this business with his wife possible past as a paid whore.

My initial reaction was ‘leave the woman be’. None of us is kitchen clean, although my past is a pure as the driven snow compared to those who sold their bodies for money, but we all have done things in the past of which we are ashamed. Then I looked up the biography of Christian Wulff and noted that he had been married before, in 1988, and fathered a daughter in 1993. He divorced his wife in 2006 and married his second wife, Bettina, two years later (when she was seventh months pregnant with their child).

None of us is entitled to judge others, but we are entitled to have our thoughts, and mine is that I never respect fathers and mothers who more or less abandon children when they divorce their spouse. Naturally, there will be individual circumstances and doubtlessly life with the soon-to-be divorced spouse became impossible (and I mean objectively impossible). But divorcing a spouse is one thing, divorcing a child - which is what it amounts to - is quite another. Whatever we say - or in our guilt choose to believe - about ‘how resilient’ children are, in my book it is total cobblers. A child 15 will find it very hard to be rejected, which is what it will seem like to him or her, and one does have to ask just what role Bettina Wulff née Körner played in the disintegration of her husband’s first marriage.

Given Christian Wullf’s political background - at one point he was even about to be considered as a the Christian Democrat’s possible candidate to become Chancellor of Germany - it is also not unlikely that his political enemies are doing their damndest to fan the flame of rumour of his wife’s alleged murky past. What truth there is in the claims remains to be seen. 

We’re here, but with a couple of irritating hick-ups

Caunes-Minervois, Languedoc, South of France.
First news from the holiday front in Caunes-Minervois somewhere in the glorious French quarter of the European Union, where even the dogs in the street are more charming and have more chic than our mangy old British dogs. My brother and I arrived here rather later than expected, but the house we are renting is very pleasant. Newly-renovated with imagination, the only drawback is that it doesn’t have a terrace of any kind, but as it is narrow, but on five floors, sandwiched in a very old part of town, there isn’t very much room for a terrace.

The journey was, unfortunately, rather fraught, partly due to an excessively zealous ticket inspector on the train to Gatwick Airport from London, partly due to my brother playing a prank which rather went awry and partly due to my satnav proving to be totally bloody useless in this neck of the woods.

We climbed aboard the Gatwick train at Clapham Junction to find that it was jam-packed with bright young things on their way to the Isle of Wight festival, all with bulky backpacks. We happened to have entered the train in a first-class compartment and started to make our way through to second-class (also euphemistcally known as ‘standard class’ - do euphemism fool anyone? And if they don’t, and I suspect they don’t, why do we bother using them?).

The train was so packed that I suggested we sit down and wait for the passageway to clear, but we were barely out of the station when what appeared to be the ticket inspector appeared with a sidekick and when he discovered we had second-class (i.e. standard-class) tickets, he immediately told us we had to upgrade. I pointed out that we were on our way to find space in a second-class compartment and that at that point it was impossible to move but he was having none of it and insisted that we would have to pay up. I refused and he said in that case he would have to call the police. I told him I would look forward to meeting them. At that point my brother, who dislikes confrontation, caved in and agreed to pay for an upgrade.

Later, I the real ticket inspector turned up and revealed that the chap we had encountered was in fact a Southern Railways ‘revenue protection’ officer who are overzealous bastards. If he had had his way, he would have declared the train ‘class-free’ given the crowds in it everywhere. The fact that the first chap was not a ticket inspector but a ‘revenue protection’ officer clarified something which had earlier puzzled me: I told him what had happened was ridiculous and that I would be getting in touch with his commanding officer or whatever they call them in the railways. What, I asked him was his name. He told me willingly and helpfully pointed out that I should also have ‘his number’ which was printed on his name tag.

This struck me as a little odd because he hadn’t otherwise been overly keen to assist me, but when I told him I would write to Southern Railways to tell them what an officious little cunt he had been, he was eager to make it as easy for me as possible. Why? I’ll tell you why: because he wanted his commanding officer to know what an officious little cunt he had been and would probably be praised for so assiduously protecting Southern Railways revenue. Well, fuck that: I shall now make a point of not complaining to Southern Railways and not telling them what an officious bastard he was. See how he likes that! Thinks he can get clever with me!

When we got to Gatwick, I happened to be in the corridor between two coaches talking to the real ticket inspector. So my brother collected our bags and my laptop and got off without alerting me we had arrived. He thought it would be a wheeze for me to have to carry on to the next station, which I had to. The trouble was that once, 20 minutes later, I had got back to Gatwick, I could see no sign of him or our bags anywhere on the platform. Thinking he must already have gone into the South Terminal, I went there too, and could still see no sign of him. Up and down I walked, closely scrutinising the queue lining up to check in to their easyjet flight, back to the other end in case he was looking for me, off to the information desk to get them to give out a Mayday announcement asking the little creep to make himself known, but none of it was of any use, and time was running out before we were due to board our plance.

Finally, I realised he might still be somewhere in the station part of the terminal and went back and got the railway information desk to ask him to make himself known. Sure enough, he had been waiting we me on the platform all the time and we simply missed each other when arrived for the second time. He was all excuses and explanations, telling me this and that and why he hadn’t told me to get off at Gatwick, but it was all bollocks. He knew it, I knew it, he knew that I knew it, and I knew that he knew that I knew he knew it. I’m just glad we get along well, because for about ten minutes I was bloody furious.

My mood was not improved, either, when we eventually did get around to dropping off our bags. I had checked in online but - apparently - forgotten to check in our two bags. That would have cost £16 had I done so earlier. As it was easyjet took me for a cool £50.

This, that and t’other (in no particular order)

I’ve rather lost track of what’s going on, for several reasons. First, August is always a bit of a dead month, although this year Fleet Street’s fabled silly season stories were swamped by more ‘real’ news stories, that’s if any story which appears in our mainstream media is ever ‘real’. There was a glimmer of hope last week, when every member of Essex’s finest was mobilised to find a lion which might – or, crucially, might not – have been on the loose. The Mail did itself proud as usual, accompanying the front page story (it wasn’t strictly the front page ‘lead’ story because there is rarely room for any more stories on the Mail’s front page now that is has a tabloid format) with totally gratuitous picture of a gloriously aggressive looking lion in full attack mode. It was not, of course, the ‘lion’ apparently spotted prowling around the Essex countryside, merely that the ferocious beast spotted in a Billericay nail salon was a ‘lion like this one’. Anyway the story was dead on its feet the following day when it was decided that the ‘lion’ was most probably a rather large, rather fat, ginger cat, and Essex’s finest were recalled to barracks where, no doubt, to a man and woman they set about calculating how much overtime they had earned themselves trying to track down a non-existent lion.

As for the troubles the euro has been finding itself in, there was very little development on that front, too, it being the August holiday season and the various fuckwits delegated to sort out the mess had all buggered off on holiday. Things should at least brighten up – from my point of view – or darken – from the point of view of others – nicely over the coming weeks. The one conspiracy theory I have come across is that Greece will not be allowed to go bust by the U.S. because (so the thinking seems to be) a bust Greece will lead quite soon to a bust Spain and a bust Italy, which will lead to a bust Eurozone and – this is the important point – and already horribly sluggish U.S. economy will also face even harder times. The point is that in November America goes to the polls to elect it’s new president, and Obama, the sitting duck (is that the right phrase?) would rather like to be re-elected, so he doesn’t really want his country’s economy to go tits up until after the election. Well, actually, as a patriot he doesn’t want the economy to go tits up at all – who does? – but it probably will at some point so the disaster should at least be postponed till the end of November.

But that is, after all, just another conspiracy theory, as is the one which claims Greece, Israel and Cyprus have entered into some kind of informal alliance, but what it’s purpose might be, I really don’t know. I think – I think – it has something to do with vast oil reserves under the eastern Mediterranean, but there again I might have got that very wrong.

. . .

 I am sitting in the outside smoking area of the Scarsdale Tavern in Kensington for my usual post-Sunday shift drink and cigar, but not a lot is happening. This place is either heaving with loads of young American bankers who seem to live locally (probably in company rented houses) or it is quiet, as tonight. The only people of interest are sitting directly behind me and the only interesting thing about them is that they are alternately conversing in English and French. They are speaking impeccable English, but as I don’t have French, I can’t gauge how impeccable their French is, if at all, but it does sound very fluent and they both, a young man and a young woman, seem to be very at home in the language. They don’t seem to be a couple (I can’t look, because they are behind my back and turning round would seem very odd), and I think they are either good friends from college or from work. But they way they are dressed I suspect college.

They are making me rather envious, because long ago I was not just fluent in German but bi-lingual in English and German. Trouble is, I’m no longer bi-lingual (stop the sniggering in the back), largely because I don’t ever speak German very much any more – no call for it. I console myself that were I to go to Germany and live there for a week or two, it would all come flooding back and I would one again be bi-lingual, but … who knows. Am I kidding myself?

Just solved the ‘mystery’: both were at French schools and both have spent a long time living in France.

. . .

Speaking of French, the French and France, my brother Mark and I are off to France again for two weeks this Thursday, this time to a little town called Caunes-Minervois the far south. I am just looking forward to doing absolutely nothing whatsoever. The routine normally consists of relaxing for the first few days, then once one feels a little more refreshed and enthused, doing whatever one feels like doing. The secret is to make no plans at all, none whatsoever. Another reason I enjoy going with my brother (apart from the fact that he is good company) is that he is still – me at 62, he now 54 ‘my little brother’ who I can still feel a little concerned about. He is very solitary and doesn’t really make an effort to socialise at all. Never has done, for that matter. So I try, as I managed to do last year, to get him out of his pit, if only for two weeks.

We both think that September will see huge developments in the euro crisis and are both looking forward to two weeks of political entertainment. I did, a few months ago, suggest to him – not quite seriously, but more seriously than jokingly – a trip to the Middle East to see for ourselves what is going on, but he wasn’t having any of that. Would I have gone? Yes, I think I might have done. Experience has taught me that not a great deal of organization is needed for that kind of trip and you always meet interesting people.

. . .

I’ve been in touch with an old girlfriend who I tracked down in order to see whether I might not interest her in reading my novel. I say ‘old girlfriend’ but there wasn’t really a great deal to it: I met her in Roscoff at something called the Celtic Film Festival and asked her whether I might see her again. Yes, she said, and then told me she lived in New York. A few months later I flew off to New York for a week, then didn’t see her again until the following October when she was relocating to Europe and used my flat in Cardiff as a dumping off site for her goods and chattels. She is French and from Britanny, and speaks very good English, although not quite as good as she imagines. She also speaks Breton and Welsh. That was all more than 22 years ago. It came to nothing for a number of reasons, two of which are my rather parochial outlook, at least parochial compared to hers, and the fact that, unfortunately, she has (in rather too large a dose for my liking) that certain kind of French intellectual arrogance and conceit.

She is holding off reading my novel, and to be honest I don’t really care either way. As it is, it was written quite some time ago, is so far the only thing I have written which I think might – might – be regarded as halfway decent, but makes me ashamed that I have not yet attempted anything else. In mitigation I could plead that it was written before I had children and that I was fully able to sit down once or twice a week and write in eight-hour stints. That would, at the momeht, be impossible, but I still cannot rid myself of the sneaky feeling that I am conning myself. Oh, well. I did imagine that her opinion would be interesting and worthwhile and that because of her background and interest she might finally be someone to understand what I was trying to do. But what with the questions she asks me about it by way of finding out whether reading it would be worth her while, I rather think she will eventually decline. Again, oh well.

South Wales Echo, Lincolnshire Chronicle, sex, life of Riley, expenses and spurious vocations and first-class bullshit - a short ramble down memory lane

On June 24, I shall have served in Her Majesty’s Press for 40 years, assuming of course, that I don’t die earlier than I plan to or find myself unemployed. The odd thing is that 40 years sounds like an awful long time, but as anyone roughly my age will tell you, it doesn’t feel that long at all.

I am always utterly disconcerted when people refer to ‘the Eighties’ - as in ‘the Eighties’s disco boom’ or something - as though it were a particularly distant part of the Dark Ages, when, to me, it feels like, if not exactly yesterday, then at least as recent as last week. The explanation is, I think, that time seems to run extremely slowly when you are young - remember looking forward to something when you were a child and it was ‘ages and ages and ages’ away? - because you haven’t really got that many years under your belt to compare them to, whereas for us old farts one August  (in, for me so far, 62 Augusts) seems very much like any other bloody August (though this year, in Britain, with a damn sight fewer hot and sunny days). The upshot is that with so many Augusts to choose from, they all become pretty much indistinguishable.

I started my first job in newspapers on June 24, 1974, and I really can’t tell you why I seem to remember certain dates so well. For example, I started my job as a reporter on The Journal in Newcastle on July 10, 1978, my first job as sub-editor (copy editor to you Yanks) on the Birmingham Evening Mail on January 7, 1980, and I joined the South Wales Echo in Cardiff, again as a sub, on February 24, 1986. (However, I doubled-checked all four dates to make sure they were all a Monday, and it turns out I had remembered two correctly, so maybe I’m not quite Amazo, The Memory Man after all.)

I’ve always felt that working as a hack, whether as a reporter or as a sub, is essentially a practical job, the finer and most salient points of which you learn as you go along, but a modicum of training, even initially merely being shown how to hold a biro (that’s Biro, actually - one for the subs reading this) does help rather a lot. So that my career as a hack has not been as dazzling as it might, perhaps, have been can be blamed on the fact that neither starting out as a reporter nor as a sub did I get any training at all.

My first job was working in the head office of the Lincolnshire Chronicle, a weekly paper in Lincoln. The irony is that hacks - and especially those pompous farts who like to refer to themselves as ‘journalist’ - try very hard to make out that joining their profession is ‘a vocation’, one up there with finding a cure for cancer or running an orphanage in Somalia. These types are all too often apt to use the phrase ‘to break into journalism’ as though jobs in the media business are at a premium and only the very best are able to scale the high wall surrounding the elite from you ordinary mortals. Like a great deal in journalism, of course, it’s complete bollocks, I’m afraid.

‘Management’, as we all learned to call them, are especially keen to push the ‘it’s a vocation, lad and count yourself lucky you’ve been chosen’ line as it enables them to pay staff peanuts and make them work far longer hours for nothing. The really cynical bit is that those handing out the jobs know full well that when you are young, you will fall for the whole ‘it’s a vocation’ schtick hook, line and sinker and will gladly beaver away for a pittance in the sad belief that somehow, in some obscure though vital way, you are making the world a better, better, better place. Invariably, of course, the penny drops, usually after a year or two of re-writing handouts submitted to your local rag by PR companies which courtesy as your skill as a ‘wordsmith’ then appear in print as news stories. You don’t believe me? Sucker.

There’s no overtime in the world of hacks, though there are still, occasionally, ‘days off in lieu’, and when I started, there was still a reasonably lucrative and gratifyingly vague system of ‘expenses’ which, if you had the necessary and were able to cover your tracks, you could use to supplement your rather pitifully small wage. Expenses, have, I’m told rather gone the way of the dodo (or is that dildo? No, probably not). For many years, the exception to ‘it’s a vocation, lad, so you won’t mind being paid peanuts, will you?’ was once the world of Fleet Street - that is the national papers in Britain who were almost all based on Fleet Street - who until about 20 years ago could be remarkably generous. But, they, too, have since discovered the financial benefits of paying your junior staff as little as possible and persuading those junior staff that they are doing them an immense favour by employing them.

As for working the expenses system, I was once in the glorious position when working as a district reporter in South Wales of making just as much by claiming totally fictitious expenses and, more legitimate, lineage payments I was being paid weekly. To this day I am baffled as to how and why I was able to get away with it, but get away with it I did and for quite some time. Even better was that although I was a North Gwent district reporter - where ‘North Gwent’ probably sounds rather pleasant to foreign ear but doesn’t at all do justice to the post-industrial horror that the South Wales Valleys were in those days, I lived in a rather pretty part of Powys, in a hamlet called Llangattock. This was just the other side of ‘the Heads of the Valleys road’ from North Gwent whose towns - Ebbw Vale, Brynmawr, Tredegar and Abertillery were as grim as Llangattock and nearby Crickhowell were chocolate-box pretty. Yet ‘work’ - the inverted commas are in this case not meant ironically as it can hardly have been called work - was only a 15-minute drive away over the moor.

I lived with a girl who worked for the sister weekly paper and it was a life of Riley. I never got up before 1oam and never in any kind of a rush. Once I had bathed and shave, I made my way up the Llangyndir back road into Ebbw Vale for a magistrates court hearing. This was followed by lunch in a pub or cafe and then a short district council meeting at 2am, before it was off home again at around 3.30am. This rather pleasant existence lasted, roughly, from early 1975 to July 1978.

The girl I lived with - her initials were JD, and she will surely make another appearance in this blog at some point in my occasional series of Romance And Why It’s Not All It’s Cracked Up To Be - was quite a good, though English, cook and liked sex just as much as I did. The one drawback was that I didn’t love her, that she had her mind set on marriage and I didn’t, and that she wanted to change me in virtually every way imaginable. But what the hell. Push came to shove in about 1977 when she realised nothing much between us was going to come of anything and found herself a job in Staffordshire.

However, we carried on ‘seeing each other’ for another year or so, she travelling down to South Wales one weekend, me travelling up to Staffordshire the next, so nothing much changed except that we were both paying rather more for petrol each week. I still didn’t love her, but she was still a good cook and still liked sex as much as I did and she had a very nice and very comfortable cottag in a little village called Stone. Why she carried on with the arrangement I really don’t know - you’ll have to ask her yourself: he initials are JD and she was living in Staffordshire in 1978. The only other detail I have about her is that she eventually married a butcher.

. . .

It’s at this point I am bound to admit that I have completely lost the thread of what I was going to write about, so I shall just carry on  rambling, a task made just a tad easier as I have just opened another bottle of wine, a Morrison’s bottle of 2008 ‘Chianti Classico’. My two principles when choosing a supermarket wine is that I refuse to buy anything which is less than four years old and I refuse to buy anything offered at ‘half-price’. Wines more than four years old can, of course, most certainly be equally as undrinkable as a wine bottle barely four weeks ago, but the chances are that one chosen at random is rather less likely to be complete piss, mainly becasue there are rather fewer of them in your average supermarket. And when supermarkets decide to offer a wine ‘at half-price’, it’s usually because it’s cheap crap they have to get rid before anyone realises just what cheap crap it is.

. . .

I turned up at the offices of the Lincolnshire Chronicle which were at the far end of the printing works next to the canal at Waterside South. It was a small office which consisted of an editor, a sub-editor, a news editor, a sports editor, a long-time columnist of the old school and about five or six reporters. The editor, sub-editor - whose name was Linda, I recall - the columnist and the sports editor all had their own, very pokey, offices. The news editor and we reporters all shared a slightly bigger office, with the reporters all siting round one big table. We each had a typewriter, but there were only two phones between the five/six of us. Just off our ‘newsroom’, which cannot have been larger than 15ft by 20ft, was the photographers’ darkroom. That was even smaller.

This was in 1974 which, if your maths is any good, was closer to the Fifties than today, and the whole operation was more a hangover from what local weekly papers were in their heyday than what the few which remain are now. So the columnist, who to the 24-year-old I was then seemed ancient, but couldn’t really have been more than the age I am now, will have started his career on the Lincolnshire Chronicle in the Thirties and will have ended it there, too, and wrote stuff which will have interested no one except those his age and older. I do remember that at some point I fell foul of him, though I really can’t remember any details.

The sports editor was a young chap called Max, and as this blog is this evening in revelatory more, I can reveal that I screwed both his wife and her sister, though not at the same time. It’s not as bad as it sounds in that the marriage was, as I found out, already falling apart. That it was all over between them was quite obvious when I went out with his wife on a Saturday evening and she stayed with me that night and he then picked her up the following morning. He knew exactly where to find her and I had most certainly not given him  my address. And he didn’t seem to mind a bit.

The news editor was a rather bouncy chap called Digby Scott. We got along well enough and I should imagine he got along well enough with most people. There are really only two things I remember about him, apart from what he looked like then as I can still picture him and conjure up his manner in my mind’s eye. One was that he was newly married and that in order to supplement his income and save up for a mortgage - this was, after all 1974/5 in the days before smartarse salesmen would hand loans and debts to anyone and his dog - he used to go from door to door in the evenings trying to sell insurance. (The deputy news editor of the local evening paper, the Lincolnshire Echo, was in the same position, and he and his wife were also saving up for a mortgage. Their ruse to make a little extra money was to have a knife-throwing act which, I assume, performed in local clubs. His name was Peter Brown and his wife was called Anne. Their act was called Petana. He once showed me a publicity still they used: he was clutching a fistful of knives and wearing tight trousers and a faux-gypsy shirt with balloon sleeves and she was in bodice and fishnet stockings.)

I got on well enough with Digby - in fact, I get on well enough with many of my colleagues and have always done so, and am always a little surprised when I find out, always obliquely, that they don’t quite get on as well with me as I do with them. But the other thing I remember about him was a memo he sent me about a month after I started with the Lincolnshire Chronicle.

I should explain that many young of the young folk who for several centuries had managed to ‘break into journalism’ were keen as mustard and since they had first set eyes on a newspaper at the age of nine had wanted nothing else but to be what was always described in Press Gazette job ads as ‘a newshound’. They used to frighten the shit out of me when I came across them. They had purpose, they had zeal, they were bastards and they were here today and gone tomorrow. They didn’t hang about. But, dear reader, that wasn’t me.

I had sent off letters to a number of newspapers asking to be taken on as a reporter because in those days I was convinced I was a literary genius who would make his name writing brilliant short stories and novels and, more to the point, felt that if I worked for a paper, at least I would be taking a step in the right direction as I would be ‘writing’. Actually sitting down to justify my status as a literary genius by making the effort to write brilliant short stories and novels didn’t occur to me for quite a few years. In fact, I’m not too sure it has even yet occurred to me. News, as such, didn’t interest me at all (and most of it still doesn’t - I take the view that if it’s really important - and, to be honest, nothing is that much - I’ll find out about it sooner or later. And if I miss it the first time around, I’ll be able to catch up on it in a history book.).

My lack of interest must have been very apparent to Digby Scott, as must have been my lack of ambition. The idea was that keen, would-be ‘newshounds’ should be straining at the leash to get out there to report. I, on the other hand, turned up at 9am and just sat idly reading the paper and waited to be given something to do. This wasn’t quite the attitude expected of a would-be Sir Jocelyn Hitchcock. Eventually, I got my first memo: Digby chastised me for not being more - well, these days it would be called ‘proactive’, but I can’t remember how he put it. But I also remember that he bollocked me because all too often my copy was bad ‘splet’ (sic). This did amuse me, though I don’t think it changed my attitude much.

. . .

Look, chaps, I’m on a roll her, but it is getting late. So I shall continue this rambling melange another time. You’ve got to admit, it’s better than me banging on about the fucking euro.

To be continued.

Assagne ‘hounding’: it’s all about ‘freedom of speech’? Pull the other one

Here’s a suggestion: go onto Google and search for ‘Bradley Manning’. Make a note of how many pages are thrown up. Then do a search for ‘Julian Assange’ and record how many web pages mention him. The results are interesting. According to my two searches a minute or two ago, young Bradley, a mixed-up kid if ever there was one, is mentioned on 4,130,000 webpages. Today’s modern hero, Julian Assange, gets almost nine times as many mentions at 28,000,000. Why?

Julian likes to portray himself as a campaigner of free speech and led the Wikileaks website. As far as I know, the site was, in global net terms, pretty insignificant until young Bradley decided to leak an enormous number of confidential cables and emails sent by embassies and other Western government agencies back home. Why Bradley decided to do it, I don’t know and have so far not come across any explanation. But he did leak the stuff, Wikileaks soaked it up, published it and then Assange began basking in the – to my mind utterly spurious – glow of fighting the good fight for free speech.

The point about ‘being confidential’ is that ambassadors, for example, can let their hair down for a minute or two and speak their minds. That is an important facility, whether you are an American, British, Chinese, Russian or French ambassador or whoever you go abroad for to ‘lie for your country’. Because those emails and cables allow you the opportunity to stop lying and to give your country what you think is good, candid advice and information about the country to which you have been posted. That is one of the main reasons why you are there.

You might, for example, last night have had dinner with that country’s foreign minister. It was all smiles and toasts and good food, but the following morning – knowing you are speaking confidentially – you can tell your bosses: ‘I really don’t trust the bastard, he’s on the make and he’s not on our side,’

We all know that the emails and cables which were leaked to Wikileaks and which Assange published online, have been horribly embarrassing. Ironically, it was not just the West who were embarrassed, but many other countries, including Russia (although, apparently not Ecuador) and Assagne achieved quite a coup: many, many, many people loathe him for the embarrassment they caused him and it is rather unsurprising that he has rather few friends in high places. What is equally unsurprising that the cause – the apparent hounding of Assange – has attracted the support of what can only be described as the usual suspects. . I just wish if all his supporters would lend their energies to ensure the fate of young Bradley Manning is not as awful as it seems likely to be: the charges, at best, will see him banged up for life if he is found guilty, and, at worst, he will lose his life for treason.

In his rather desperate attempt to avoid the outraged vengeance of those he has made to look rather stupid, Assange is playing the ‘freedom of speech’ card. From where I sit this has absolutely nothing to do with ‘freedom of speech’. What has Assange acutally ‘revealed’? That ambassadors, generals and diplomat worldwide are a duplicitous bunch? Well, Lordy me, what a surprise. And there was me thinking everything was rosy in the garden. Here’s another revelation, courtesy of me: water is wet. Deal with it.

I made the point in an earlier post that at the basis of Assange’s anxiety is that if he is extradited to Swede, initially only to be interviewed by the police let it be said, but possibly also to face charges of sexual assault, the Swedes will do a deal with the U.S. and extradite him on to Uncle Sam.

Well, first things, first: if Assange is guilty of sexual assault (and the charges are more along the lines of having sex without consent rather than hiding in the bushes and grabbing some woman to rape her), why on earth are the right-thinkers of this world defending him?

Are they telling themselves that, yes, he might be a teensy bit guilty, but look at the bigger picture: he made a fool of Uncle Sam, and isn’t that a Good Thing? Or are they even suggesting that the deal is done, the Swedes only want to get him into their clutches in order to ship him out to the U.S. on the next plane Stateside.

And what if he is not guilty? Well, that does present a problem for him: he might well finally agree to be interviewed and possibly face trial, but then be acquitted. But he would then still be liable for further extradition to the U.S.

But let me ask this: the UK and America already have a – quite controversial for some – extradition treaty. Wouldn’t the Yanks already have made their move? Wouldn’t they have gone for the jugular? Would they really be content to play a long game and wait till he is out of the UK and then strike. It does seem a tad implausible.

As for the ‘freedom of speech’ line, as far as I am concerned that is almost obscene. If Assange supporters really do feel strongly on the issue, there are more than enough rather straightforward case of skullduggery going on which they could make a noise about. But they aren’t. This is all bullshit which stinks to high heaven.

And none more time: where is the support for Bradley Manning? Where is the outrage on his behalf?