And what do the Men With A Conscience do about Erdogan? Ponder that while we all prepare for World War III and Obama and Cameron opt for equal-opportunity slaughter. And purely in the interests of universal prurience, I pass on a rumour. I stress ‘rumour’ (I know which side my bread is buttered on)

Given that one of this blog’s many self-imposed tasks it to test to the limit the integrity of all those who think of themselves as Having A Conscience and Knowing What’s Best For The World (even if the world disagrees), here’s a cracker: what should be the official Man With A Conscience line on Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s prime minister, he of the OTT response to the protesters in Istanbul’s Taksim Square?

By all accounts he’s a bit of a tough nut and shows every sign of getting tougher. Universally acclaimed by all Men With Conscience’s (aka Thinking Men) when he was first elected, he strengthened the economy, improved the living standards of many in rural areas whose living standards were in dire need of improvement and pledged that, although he had islamist inclinations and his was a kind of vanilla islamist, soft and cuddly, that kind of thing, he would demonstrate that islamist bods such as himself could be just as democratic as non-islamist bods. He set about neutering The Generals (sorry, that’s Greece - I mean the Army) whose democratic credentials weren’t half as well-defined as his apparently were and who were far to fond of grabbing power ‘in the interests of the country’ (isn’t it always?).

(NB - ‘?).’ - without the quote marks, of course, they are just intended to isolate the ‘?).’ - is that allowed? Looks horrible, but strictly I think it’s correct. One for the pedants. Back to Mr Erdogan.)

These were thought to be Good Things, and another Good Thing he undertook was to come to some kind of arrangement with the Kurds, who until then had been imprisoned. Erdogan decided there must be a more fruitful way of dealing with the issue. He had also been imprisoned himself under a previous regime, so that, too, helped to burnish his credentials among those Men With A Conscience for whom that kind of thing is important.

Over the years, however, Erdogan has become something of a headache for his liberal champions. He was first elected in 2003 with a rather attractive majority, and has since been re-elected twice, each time with an increased majority. That, surely, is a Good Thing. The people have spoken and what they said was ‘Erdogan’s the man’. The trouble is that over the past ten years our hero - well, not mine - has grown rather fond of being in charge. I’ve read that more journalists are languishing in jail in Turkey than in China and that you have to be rather careful in public with what you say if it isn’t something along the lines of ‘that Recep Tayyip Erdogan, he’s the man, isn’t he, aren’t we lucky to have him!’

In the past few weeks it has all come to a head: as far as I know there were two catalysts for the unrest in Turkey. The first was when folk heard that the government planned to build a shopping mall in one of Istanbul’s parks, and the second was when the government brought in restrictions on the sale of alcohol (and Erdogan declared rather loftily that people who drank were ‘alcoholics’). You wouldn’t think either issue was great enough to spark off the protests and, of course, it wasn’t. Not only were there protest rallies in Istanbul and Ankara but in several other cities, and it would seem reasonable to assume that it was Erdogan’s autocratic approach to power which they were protesting about.

Now here’s the rub for all those who like to think they are on the side of the angels: there was never a suggestion during any of Turkey’s previous general elections that they were in any way fixed. And at those elections, Erdogan was returned each time with an increased majority. In other words more Turkish voters thought he was a good egg than didn’t. And what’s the liberal line on elections: why, the people must be heard. The dilemma, of course, is what does the Man With A Conscience do when he doesn’t like what the people have to say?

 . . .

From my small and insignificant corner of the world here in rural, rustic, delightful and today rather chilly North Cornwall, the arrangements for staging World War III seem to be progressing rather well. Today’s news that America Is Going To Get Involved in the civil war in Syria is surely a turning point. Given that the forces of president Assad are now known almost certainly to have used chemical weapons in attacks on the rebels, they have crossed ‘a red line’ and president Barack Obama is finding it nigh-on impossible to resist calls for the US to assist them.

The official line is that the US (and Britain, because our homegrown Good Guy, one David William Donald Cameron) are keen that the slaughter now underway in Syria should take place evenly and fairly: we

 

Just a reminder of what dead children look like, in this case Syrian children (though whether they are victims of the Good Guys or the Bad Guys I really can't tell you)

can’t have Assad chalking up all the deaths. Putin and Russia (in Putin’s eyes the same thing these days) are broadly backing Assad, though they are under no illusions as to what a nice chap he is. It’s the naval base they have in the Med, courtesy of Assad, which might be a factor. I have to say that, Putin notwithstanding, I’m rather more in favour of the Russian insistence that the only way to settle the Syrian civil war is by diplomacy rather than giving the rebels enough weapons and assistance to ensure they can kill as many people as Assad’s forces. But then holed away in my small corner of rural, rustic, delightful and today rather chilly North Cornwall as I am, no one has yet seen fit to consult me.
 
There were two interesting and rather depressing items on BBC 2’s Newsnight last night, which each have a bearing on the war in Syria. The first, and by far the most serious, was how Lebanon is being sucked into the conflict, with the Shi’ite Hezbollah ensuring Assad’s forces could get

 

More dead children

off what was increasingly looking like the back foot and the backlash from Sunnis to this involvement. And that, really, highlights, a crucial element of it all: the continuing - since just a few years after The Prophet died - clash between Sunnis and Shi’ites.

The second was the vote in Iran - today - for a new president. The choices seem pretty narrow: a moderate hardliner, a hardline moderate and a hardline hardliner, although who eventually is given the rosette and gets to take home the cake is pretty irrelevant because the Supreme Leader has the final say on almost most things.

Now there’s a thing: a world war yet not a German in sight. Marvellous. And at least they are off the hook for a change.

. . .

Here is a rumour I really can’t resist passing on. I have no idea at all whether or not it’s true and must stress - with one eye on Britain’s libel laws and the other on my balls - that it is only a rumour I have come across (prominently publicised variously, for example here). But it it this: Mr Murdoch, who some of you know as Rupert and others merely as Mr Murdoch, but who all of us know is a leading light in the publication of our esteemed parish magazine The Truth, is reported to be about to divorce his third wife Wendi, known to many of us as that exotic bird who runs the local Chinese takeaway.

That, so far, is common knowledge. Now for the rumour. It is this that: Mr Blair, who some of you know as Tony and others as a former chairman of our parish council, has not just been swapping recipes for sweet and sour chicken with the delectable Wendi. Oh no. Far, far more. Pork is reputed to have been involved, too. But, as I say, it’s just a rumour.

Doom, doom, doom, that’s what I predict, doom, damnation, pestilence, grief, death and more doom. And if I’m wrong this time, who knows? I might be right the next

There’re really no secret to being a successful prophet of doom: all you have to do is to stick with it for as long as it takes, and sooner or later you’ll be proved farsighted. After all, a broken clock is right twice a day. And the public being the brain-dead set of cruds who will remember nothing whatsoever for more than a minute or two except what they saw on TV last night soon forget all the prophesies of disease and pestilence – or what in our modern world passes for disease and pestilence - which come to nothing. Eventually, of course, one will. And then one can jump on one’s high horse and speed through the massed ranks of dimwits boasting ‘I told you so! I told you so! Now see who was right!’

I mentioned once before watching a BBC documentary called The Great War – narrated by Laurence Olivier no less, so it must have been important – which was an in-depth, not to say interminable account and analysis of that terrible conflict, what led up to it – vanity mainly in Germany, conceit in France and pique in Britain – and what then happened. And what has stayed with me all those years was a shot of a crowded Brighton beach (Brighton beach in Sussex, England, not New York) taken in August 1914 when the country apparently did not have a care in the world. Then, when the first shots were fired – and the French cavalry went to war in full, colourful dress uniform – there was a general feeling that it would all be over within months if not weeks.

I’m not suggesting that we here in the West are in the same kind of insouciant devil-may-care state, but for a period when we are being persuaded that ‘times is ‘ard’, times are patently not all that hard. (Moral:

 

Don't forget, you read it here first! 

 

don’t believe everything you read in the newspapers.) But then we here in the West are a rather mollycoddled bunch and times is most certainly hard in Syria. But then, you say, that conflict has been running for almost two years. Well, it has, but what strikes me as very ominous is the trouble in Turkey.

News programmes tell us that it was all sparked either by government plans to build a shopping mall in a site which until now had been a green park or government plans to stop people drinking. Well, to be honest neither explanation strikes me as good enough to account for five days of vicious rioting and an extremely brutal police response. And nor does it explain why rioting has taken place in three major Turkish cities. There are quite obviously far deeper feelings at play here which have now been given an outlet.

A Turkish commentator on the radio pointed out yesterday that when Recep Tayyip Erdogan was first elected, he was regarded, or at least, marketed as the democratic face of Muslimism (I won’t say Islam because that would be misleading). He was praised for neutralising the political instincts of the army and generally regarded as a Good Egg. The turning point came when it was made very clear to him by the EU that Turkey wasn’t really wanted as a member, and, says the commentator, he took this personally and gradually became more autocratic. Those who support the prime minister point out that he has been re-elected in what are accepted to be democratic elections three times. Would a reputed ‘dictator’ manage that? they ask.

The rioters respond by criticising him for an increasingly autocratic style of government, though I, of course, am in no position to comment on either claim. So far it’s all more or less a domestic affair in Turkey. What strikes me as dangerous, however, is that to the south of Turkey is Syria and that Turkey, which once had good relations with Syria, is now growing increasingly hostile.

In the past Turkey has stressed that it rules out no action at all if it wants to retaliate to Syrian aggression (this was after a few ‘mystery explosions’ in a Turkish village on the border with Syria. Should matters threaten to get a little out of hand in his cities, Erdogan might well consider taking Caesar’s sage advice to deal with domestic troubles by creating trouble abroad and taking the plebians’ minds off matters.

Then there’s Hezbollah’s increasing involvement in Syria, and for Hezbollah read Iran. Russia has already broaden the conflict rather by giving its support to Assad, and the fact that Syria hosts a Russian naval base will have something to do with the matter. Britain is getting all very gung-ho and is apparently champing at the bit to fight the good fight, but the U.S. – thank goodness - is very, very reluctant to get involved, not least because any involvement will clash with the coming presidential election the Democrats would rather not be at war when the country goes to the polls. Good to see Uncle Sam doing the right thing for a change, even if it is for the wrong reasons.

So there you have it: I predict doom. (Of, course, if you live in Somalia or the Congo, you probably don’t give two hoots what happens in Syria, you’ve got troubles enough of your own.)

Bowie, buggery, plastic soul, ones-off and the rest - this blog takes a trip down memory lane (not that I, you know...)

The other night I had an idea for an entry – about David Bowie – and in order to post a few songs on this blog, I prepared several videos (which can be posted on YouTube, then linked to this blog). The trouble is that at the time – last Friday night leading into yesterday morning - I cracked open a bottle of wine while I was working, drank rather a lot of it and then got sidetracked into the Julie London version of Cry Me A River which I subsequently posted with a few words to try to make the whole thing a little less incomprehensible. So I’ve now completely forgotten what I wanted to say. It was going to be a little more than ‘Bowie’s fab man, the biz!’ (mainly because I don’t think he’s necessarily always fab and there’s quite a bit of his music which doesn’t do a lot for me. On the other hand, there’s quite a bit I do like) but what point I was hoping to make I really cannot recall. But what the hell.

I have to admit that Bowie is a one-off who has always ploughed his own furrow – which I always admire in anyone - and who gives the impression that he regards himself as the sole arbiter of the worth of his songs. I first came across him when his fourth album, Hunky Dory, was all the rage in



1971 while I was at college in Dundee, Scotland. But it was more than just the music which caught our attention: just 14 years after gays were no longer thrown in jail for shagging, Bowie – who is apparently not gay and never was – made a point of coming on as the wildest swinger in town. There was just no one like him and no act like his. Forget Marc Bolan, who always struck me as more of a clever opportunist than in any way original.

Like him or loathe him Bowie was utterly different to anything which had gone before. These days, and for many years now, getting dragged up, wearing make-up, coming on gay and the rest of that schtick is just another, increasingly more than hackneyed, weapon in the music industry armoury, especially since MTV made the music vid centre stage. But Bowie was something else: he was a first. Anyone hearing about Led Zeppelin these days might be equally unaware of just how much of a first they were. The same was true of, musically, of Wagner and Stravinsky. Before Led Zeppelin released their first album (‘LP’), we had not heard anything like the music they were producing. Afterwards, of course, everyone ripped off every trick Jimmy Page came up with (although, it has to be said, I’ve still never heard anyone play his kind of music quite like he does. Listen to Since I’ve Been Loving You, for example).

There is not a single weak track on Bowie’s Hunky Dory, though ironically one aspect of it I like – it’s artificiality – is an aspect of many of his songs I don’t much like, for example Wild Is The Wind. But then Bowie has always trodden a fine line, though even when he doesn’t pull it off, as he didn’t with Tin Machine, you can’t but applaud him for not resting on his laurels and developing a fine pair of clay feet.

A few years later, I was working as a reporter in South Wales and a young girl working on a local weekly sold me Young Americans. This young lass and her husband (people did still get married at 23 in those days) were

I’ve not gone for an old – to my mind pretty hackneyed – piccy of Bowie, but prefer this one, as his two children and wife will know him

both folkies and lived the complete knitting with youghurt lifestyle. It seemed she had bought Bowie’s Young Americans thinking it was a folk album, though it took just a few seconds of the first track for her to realise she had got something very wrong, although quite how she could have made the mistake in the first place is pretty odd. So I bought it from her. Bowie refers to Young Americans as ‘plastic soul’ and that’s a pretty good description.

The track I am posting here, Right, is one of my favourites and which I am convinced, for no very good reason, is about buggery, though that’s not why I like it (nothing queer about me, old bean, though the reference



to Julie London in the post before this one might have made one or two of you pause for just a moment). It’s just a gut feeling and I think so every time I hear it. Maybe it's just a simple description of various music biz practices, sexual and financial.

I must admit here that I was once an enthusiastic whacky-baccy smoker and Win, another track posted here, is one hell of a track to get high to. Even now, in my non-whacky-baccy days, it makes me feel like I am high, high, high up in some luxurious Manhattan apartment looking across



New York at night. Don’t know why, it just does. The guitar is just gorgeous, though that sound is these days very non-U.

After all that praise, I have to admit that a lot of Bowie’s later work leaves me cold. Early on in his career, with songs such as Life On Mars and Space Oddity, he showed such a melodic gift. That seems to have gone by the board in later years. Obviously, given his continued popularity, a great many still like the later music. I happen not to.

Bowie once said that Life On Mars was based on the chord sequence of Sinatra’s My Way, but the other day I found out there’s more to it. It seems a French singer brought out a song called Comme d'habitude which had the same melody as My Way and Bowie’s publisher wanted to release an English version and asked Bowie to write some English lyrics. He did, but admits they were awful. His publisher thought so, too, and rejected Bowie’s lyrics and instead asked a certain Paul Anka to write some lyrics. He did, these were accepted, and made a great deal of money from them. That, at least, is Bowie’s version. I’ve just looked up My Way on Wikipedia and Anka gives a completely different account. So who knows which is true. Christ, nothing’s simple, is it.

Just to keep you going (with a special mention to all Broken Hearts. Weep, weep, weep - it won't do you any good at all, but at least you'll enjoy it) To come: David Bowie and Prince

Not written a thing here for a week or two, and tonight I was engaged in preparing an entry. But it involves recording some songs, and then some, and is taking a while, I can’t do it now and I know how much you all pant for my latest pontifications and whimsies. The entry I was preparing involves songs by David Bowie and Prince, but if you can’t wait till then (just a few days, though) here’s a beautiful song to be getting on with. OK, it doesn’t have much to do with their kind of music, though Bowie might be inclined to raise his hand, but who’s testing?

Actually, this song, Cry Me A River, can be rather ordinary, but sung, as it is here, by Julie London, it’s bloody great. Just listen to those gorgeous, though simple, guitar chord changes (Barney Kessel playing guitar) and her voice. If it doesn’t want to make you scr*w her - well!

When you think of it don’t just think of all those who have broken your heart, give a little thought to the hearts you have broken. In my case I like




to think it’s fifty-fifty, though with a special mention going to Mary Slocombe in Dundee, who not only loved me to high heaven, but was also one of the nicest girls I ever met. It’s a shame I didn’t realise it at the time (and if you read this, Mary, get in touch because I’d like to say sorry.)

There are, of course, loads of other versions of this song, notably by Ella Fitzgerald, for whom it was written, and Diane Krall. But I think Ella Fitzgerald’s version is too elaborate for such a simple song and too much of ‘a song’ given the subject matter, and Diane Krall’s just a tad too slow.

Then there is - believe it or not - a version by Sheffield’s one and only Joe Cocker, which is, believe it or not, uptempo and complete bollocks. A special mention must go to a completely and utterly fucking ludicrous version by that arch dick Michael Buble which is beyond belief it is so bad and misjudged. It is like a Bond theme in a nightmare. Get Spotify and listen to it, if only to gag. It is unbelievably awful. And if you disagree with me on the last point, you’re officially banned from this blog. You are really not the kind of guy or gal I want to have reading this blog.

Roll up, roll up and watch the butchered soldier’s family weep uncontrollably. Thrill as they hold back nothing. Enjoy, quite vicariously, having a close family member murdered in cold blood.

The beheading of a young soldier in Woolwich is appalling, and seems all the more so for happening in open daylight in a suburban street in London. But would it be churlish to ask why it is any the less appalling than similar atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan. And is it any less appalling than the deaths of innocents - the euphemism is ‘collateral’ - in U.S. drone attacks in Yemen and Pakistan?

The young soldier was innocent, and I don’t accept that he was even in the slightest culpable because he had served in Afghanistan - if you want to blame anyone for the invasion of Iraq and what’s going on in Afghanistan, blame the politicians - such as that prat Tony Blair - for all the bloodletting, not the soldiers they send out there to do the work. Equally innocent are those who are killed in U.S. drone attacks. I have been looking up figures for those killed and am conscious that many of the websites giving them are very critical of the policy (as am I).

I shan’t suggest that the figures they give are in any way exaggerated - generally at least 700 adults and children are thought to have died and it could well be far more - because I am in no position to verify any claims made, but even one or ten or one hundred ‘collateral’ victims is one or ten or one hundred too many. In the past few days President Barack Obama has been defending the policy, and the general U.S. line is that the drone attacks are being used ‘defensively’. Well, as someone pointed out on radio a month or two ago, the interpretation of ‘defence’ is very broad indeed.

Let me put it this way: I wonder just how happy the U.S. would be if some foreign country pursued a policy of drone attacks on its enemies in the U.S. and innocent U.S. citizens were killed. I suspect it would throw the diplomatic equivalent of a hissy fit. In fact, it would be the mother of all hissy fits. Seems like there’s one rule for some, one rule for others. But then what’s new?

. . .

Naturally, the machete attack in Woolwich is still top of the news here in Britain, but there are two aspects about the coverage which I find discouraging, to say the least. It has long been a police practice to stage a press conference - especially if a child has disappeared or been murdered - in which parents or relatives appeal for a safe return or for anyone with any information to contact the police. There might well an element of voyeurism in it all when the public switches on the TV news and watches these appeals, but such conferences are defended by the police on the grounds that they are often very useful and do help to turn up more information from the public. But on TV all day today has been a press conference of the wife, parents and family of the butchered soldier in floods of tears, and at no point are we, the viewing public, being urged to come forward with information.

I can’t for the life of me think of any reason why this public exhibition of grief was staged. Well, perhaps one: if, in any small way, being able to share their grief in public somehow helps the soldier’s family deal with it, then one might argue that there is some justification. But to be honest, I’m playing Devil’s Advocate: I don’t for a moment think that was why this press conference was organised. In fact, I can’t think for a moment that there could be some reasonable explanation for staging it.

Call me a cynical old cunt, but I can’t help but feel it was just a very, very, very morbid manifestation of keeping the customer satisfied. I have seen the same clip on TV news about five times today, and at no point are we told exactly why we are given public access to this family’s grief, longlasting shots of the dead soldier’s widow weeping, longlasting takes of his stepfather reading out a statement and barely being able to keep his emotions under control.

Why was this shown? Can there really be any ‘news value’ in it? Perhaps. Or perhaps someone, somewhere, or many people everywhere decided it was ‘good television’, which it undoubtedly is depending on your moral values. For me it was nothing more than first cousin to the exhibition of freaks which is part of Britain’s Got Talent or, going back several hundred years, the public executions held at Tyburn Gate (now Hyde Park Corner) where Londoners in their thousands would turn out to watch some poor sap being topped, with a plentiful supply of beer and pies on hand.

I suppose that was the difference: London’s boys in blue did not arrange for a temporary bar and fast food outlets. Well, they missed a trick there.

Well, what do I call it: Alma Mater, Borstal, Personal Prison, Privileged Background (as in Key to Lifelong Success In Life) take your pick, none is appropriate

Earlier tonight I replied to a correspondent whom I should like to call a friend but can’t really as I have never actually met him. He had emailed to point out that he was somewhat puzzled by an aspect of a previous entry. Well, I don’t really want to go into that entry as in my reply I was more candid than I can be here. But I should like to mention one of the things he and I have in common is that we both went to the same school. It was (fanfare, please) the Oratory School which now likes - spuriously - to style itself the ‘Catholic Eton’, but that tells you nothing more than that even boarding schools are now resorting to marketing men who will come up with any kind of bullshit to pull in the custom.

Apparently, Cardinal Newman, who founded the school in Edgbaston, Birmingham, hoped he could start and run a school which was as good as Eton, but that is a long, long way off actually being a ‘Catholic Eton‘, and when I was there, from 1963 to 1968, it seemed to me to have more in common with Dotheboys Hall, than Eton. (And by the way, given that Eton has something like 1,000 pupils, what exactly is so special about being an ‘old Etonian’? There must be several million of them by now which rather dents any claim to exclusivity. Just a thought.)
The OS, as we referred to the school when I was there, has undoubtedly improved in the intervening years, but then it had to. It was generally accepted that if your son was too thick to get into one of the other ‘leading’ RC public schools - Stoneyhurst, Ampleforth or Downside - you tried your luck at the Oratory, which always needed the dosh and would take virtually anyone, especially the rejects.

I don‘t know where all the money was going, apart from ‘missing’, but it was a very hand-to-mouth existence if I recall. The food was between bloody awful and almost inedible, the heating - what there was of it - was turned on on November the 1 and turned off again on March 31, whether or not it was cold - and it usually was -, there was hardly any hot water and we were still ‘beaten’.
Some wiseacre or other once observed, and it has become some kind of wisdom, that living in such conditions ‘develops character‘. No, it doesn’t. And the claim is only made to defend the utterly indefensible. We had the usual gamut of characters, from a second master called ‘Dr’ Williams, a Welshman who claimed to have played rugby for Wales and cricket for Glamorgan, but had done nothing of the kind, as was easily established by my housemaster (Fitzalan), a Tony Tinkel, and the other housemasters. Then they found a correspondence course in economics in the boot of his car - he ‘taught‘economics - and realised he was just keeping one step ahead of the class. They confronted him with all his bullshit - I got all this from Tony Tinkel himself - and that was it: he was off.

Another character was some bogus major who turned up every Tuesday to run the school CCF (I think it stands for Combined Cadet Force) and who suddenly disappeared with as much petty cash as he could lay his hands. Other masters were a Mr Cornwell, who taught Latin and seemed as batty as a fruitcake, a maths teacher who was barely over 5ft tall - or was it barely under 5ft tall? - and who was teased incessantly, so much so that several years after I left he topped himself (though there might have been other problems, too, I don‘t know). There were some good teachers - I particularly enjoyed chemistry taught by Tony Mallet - and liked Mr McCowan, who taught us physics. It wasn’t all Decline And Fall stuff.

The headmaster for my first four years was a Dom Adrian Morey, who was also housemaster of Junior House, which was a mile away and to which all first-year boys belonged, and Christ could he beat hard. It was his practice in the summer to take all the Junior House boys swimming after supper and on our way to Junior House, and we all had to swim nude. And with the best will in the world I cannot give an innocent explanation for that. But this was 50 years ago.

The chaplain, a Father Norman Millard, also apparently had sex with some of the boys, but I only found out later. I think he was eventually defrocked, but I can‘t be certain on that. Yes, some got a good education there - the outgoing Lord Chief Justice was at the OS a few years before me, and Edward Leigh, MP for Higher Loamshire or somewhere, was in the year below me. But don’t believe anyone who insists that having had a ‘public school education’ ‘gives you an unfair advantage’. It does nothing of the kind. The best you can hope for is to be a little more nicely spoken, but even that is now going by the board.

Anyway, The Bat, a Lancashire lass born and bred is proof that anyone can sound ‘posh’ and have airs and graces if they want to and try hard enough. I ran away three times in my first term, but it wasn’t difficult as we only lived eight miles away. Then my brother and I were day boys for the rest of the year and the following year (which was a pain, because lessons didn’t end until 7pm - there were only about six day boys, but around 250 boarders - and we even had to go to school on Saturdays, though as we did prep (homework) at school there was none of that at home. But then my father was posted to Paris and I became a boarder. I was dreading it, but as it turned out it wasn’t too bad - awful food, cold water and no heating notwithstanding - and I had quite a laugh, though admittedly an education is supposed to consist of something just a little more than ‘having quite a laugh’.

Everyone - everyone! - in my year became a prefect of some kind - house or school - in their fourth or fifth year, but I wasn’t considered responsible enough. But that didn’t bother me: I got three A-levels at the end of my fourth year, but returned for a fifth year to ‘improve’ them (I didn’t), but being the only guy at school in my fifth year with A-levels (there were quite a few thickos in my year who hadn’t been farmed out to work in some estate agent’s office who had failed their A-levels and returned for a fifth year to try to bloody get some), I invented ‘sixth-form privileges’, and it never occurred to anyone to call my bluff. So I would swan around having hijacked all the prefect’s privileges - leaving your jacket undone and using stairs and corridors forbidden to others - with none of the responsibilities. Not bad. Perhaps the other chap who went there and reads this would like to comment and possibly put right some of the bollocks I have undoubtedly talked and even add a few reminiscences of his own. Any chance, Barry?

If you are desperate to find out more about the Oratory, here is it’s Wikipedia entry. My advice is to reject half of what is written there out-of-hand and treat the rest with a large pinch of salt. In fact that would be true of any claims made by any public school as well as more or less everything which appears in Wikipedia. More about the OS (from me) on request.

Las Albadas Day 6,729 - In which rural Spain in high summer gives the Antarctic a run for its money. And my splendid literary career starts here: meet Morag McTwee

NB (Written May 31, 2014) Given some concerns expressed to me about the contents of a previous version of this entry, I would very much like to point out that the extraordinary weather I experienced, described below, was wholly exceptional and unusual for the time of year. That, you will gather, is why I described it in the first place. So please don’t be put off visiting Albados, Els Ibarsos, or anyone or anything else connected with those two places. I thought the concerns were wholly valid and accordingly I re-wrote the piece to, I hope, allay those concerns and get rid of any part of it which might, perhaps, have been distressing. I thank you.

This is ridiculous. I’ve just driven four miles back from Els Ibarsos to get in a little shopping and happened to notice on the in-car outside temperature thermometer (aren’t modern cars marvellous, no wonder a new one costs a bloody fortune - you’ll gather that I have never owned, let alone bought, a new car) that it was a wonderful, holiday-making, reassuring bloody 8.5c. And this over halfway through May, with just one month to go till mid-summer when the ‘days get shorter’. Heavens be praised, when I got back here to Seth’s, the temperature was higher - 9c - according to the fabulous in-car outside thermometer. However, I am assured weather such as this is a once in a century occurrence.

. . .

A not very well-kept secret is that I have literary pretensions and intend to try my hand at fiction writing once I can no longer have to earn my crust through honest work and am reduced to existing on the pitiful amount the state will pay me by way of a pension. All things being equal (i.e. if I am not shown the door earlier by Lord Rothermere and his henchmen) that will be from November 21, 2014. Why not do it now, you delusional phoney? I hear some of you ask. Well, the answer is quite simple: that kind of thing needs time and application, and scooting between London and Cornwall, four days in The Smoke and three day ‘down in the country’ (I think that’s what some people call it, though for the record: I go up to London and return to Cornwall, not the other way around) affords neither the time nor the application necessary to do the kind of thing I intend doing properly.

I have in the past written two novels, one of which, in hindsight, was bollocks, the other, however ‘good’ or ‘bad’ it is, I am reasonably proud of (even if to date no one has actually ‘got it’). The one lesson I have learnt producing those two, a crucial lesson, is that writing is a full-time occupation. Writing each, even the bad one, I treated as ‘work’, regularly sitting down to write in six-hour stints. Others might be able to do that kind of thing in ‘creative’ bursts, but I can’t. I have to treat it as a task, as work to be taken seriously. And you have to be completely ruthless in saying: right, that’s it, leave me completely alone for six/seven hours. And that isn’t possible at the moment.

Naturally, I will look like a complete tit if, when I do retire, I do absolutely bugger all despite noble intentions but at least I shall not make - or even be able to make - lame excuses. Incidentally, one of the reasons I write this blog is simply because I like writing. In my case it’s a substitute for talking, yapping, call it what you will. For many years, from about 1980 until 1995, I kept what is conventionally called ‘a diary’, but it wasn’t a diary at all, more something like this (except for a few years of highly personal stuff when I split from a girl I’d been going out with and immediately regretted it. Trouble was, she didn’t).

I started it after reading East Of Eden by John Steinbeck and in the introduction he described (if I remember correctly) that for a while he suffered a form of writer’s block and that his editor or agent, I don’t remember which, gave him a hardback A4 lined ledger and suggested that at the start of each day he should spend a little time writing on a left-hand page by way of limbering up and then proceed to write his novel on the right-hand page. Ah ha, I thought for a writer (as, delusionally, I thought of myself) who doesn’t yet write, that might be a way in.

It wasn’t, of course, or wasn’t for quite some time, but do now have, tucked away somewhere (in Guy’s house next to Paddy’s in St Breward) about 10 or 12 A4 ledgers full of my scibble and scribblings. To date I haven’t attempted to read any of them which means that they never will be read by anyone). Which is all a very long-winded way of introducing you to Morag McTwee. The link is that The Bat could well be a good model for Morag.

Here’s a thing: every week The Doctor saves the world in 45 minutes. No more, no less. Marvellous. And whatever happened to Norries?

Here’s a paradox: when you’re 10, 12, 13 or 15, you watch Doctor Who and it all makes perfect sense. Well, he’s a clever one! you think. Then you don’t watch it for many years - school, college, trying to hustle women into bed and, occasionally, work all get in the way - until a little later in life you start watching it again. And that’s what I did and still do (when I can) with my daughter who is now 16, 17 in August, and my son who is 13, 14 in May.

When they were younger we had a routine on Saturday nights: have supper, then settle down in front of the TV at about 6.30/6.45 to watch ‘the Doctor’ get out of another seemingly impossible situation (he always does, you know). If I were a spy, or an explorer or anything like that, the kind of chap who quite often finds himself in sticky situations, I would most certainly make sure I had a television scriptwriter team, because these guys and gals are incredible: they always find a way out. It’s a mystery to me why the Foreign Office has seconded several of the brightest of them finally to sort out the Israel/Palestine situation or how things can end peacefully in Syria. Anyway, Saturday night was the same, except that my daughter had gone shopping in Truro with the Girl Guides - she’s aiming at her Shopping Badge - and then had to be collected from Bodmin Parkway to be taken straight to her part-time job at the Kings Head in St Kew Highway where she earns a little on the side - actually, rather a lot on the side - as a waitress cum barmaid cum washer-upper cum whatever else they ask her to do.

So she wasn’t there. But I sat down at whenever last Saturday to watch the latest Doctor Who episode and my son sat behind me, ostensibly in front of the computer because he ‘wasn’t interested in watching Doctor Who’. Soon, however, I felt his feet settle on the arm of the sofa behind me and he was as engrossed as I was. I must be honest, but I doubt I would watch on my own, and watching it with young Elsie and young Wesley is not just part of what I like, it’s pretty much the reason for doing it. Anyway, we watched it together.

This week the episode featured, naturally, the Doctor and his new assistant (played by Jenna Louise Coleman, my favourite by far so far and were this not a family blog but one which is, for a change getting a family entry, I would record as unequivocally as possible just how much I should like to give her one, or, being the very definition of a modern man, how much I should enjoy her giving me one. I’ll admit, Freema Agyeman came close, but for me she didn’t convey the raw ‘shag me and shag me now’ desirability of young Jenna Louise.) There were also three black guys, kind of interstellar scrap metal merchants, and - well, it’s funny: I’m not the world’s most obvious liberal, but it still warms the cockles of my heart to see black actors on TV in roles in which they are simply characters not ‘black’ characters. Maybe I’ll explain that in another blog.

Tonight they were just that. Being ‘black’ had fuck all to do with it. Zombies, or what appeared to be zombies, turned up aboard the Tardis - at first there was just one, then a whole gang of them, and were, in fact - I think - the black characters and Jenna Louise - swoon - ‘in the future’ who were burned to a crisp but then, in fact, weren’t at all because the Doctor had ‘turned back time’(he’s a card, that Doctor, and make no mistake, guv). Anyway, it was all sorted within 45 minutes - does the Doctor know he as only 45 minutes to save it all? So Wez and I watch the episode, and at the end of it I turned to Wez and admitted that I didn’t have a bloody clue what was going on and how it was all resolved.

Wez, though, was right on the ball and managed to convey quite succinctly and without being nasty, as only young teens can convey quite succinctly without actually being nasty to us elderly folk just how bloody stupid and slow on the uptake I was. ‘It’s obvious,’ he snorted, and if he didn’t actually snort, he might well have done. Well, obvious to some. Tomorrow, I might get him to explain to me - and even resolve, because I still don’t think it’s been yet done - the Schleswig Holstein Question, because that, too, has me baffled, but I’m pretty sure it’s already pretty obvious to him. All we need is for the Tardis to materialise just outside Lübeck and the Doctor to become firm friends with Bismarck and that’s Syria sorted.

. . .

It would be difficult, not to say odd, to try to explain how I reached this last thought but here’s my question: how many of you know someone called ‘Norrie’? To be fair anyone who had tuned in from the U.S., Russia, Canada, The Emirates, China or other place not yet touched the genius of British imperialism gets a pass. It would not surprise me if you didn’t know what the hell I’m talkng about (quite possibly, not for the first time, either). But folk here in England, Wales, Ireland and - natch - Scotland do not. And to that I shall add anyone tuning in from Canada, New Zealand or that island just to the west of New Zealand (I think it’s called Australia): if you don’t know anyone called ‘Norrie’, or don’t even have a clue about what I’m talking about, your are officially banned from this blog. ‘Norrie’ is a Scottish short form for Norman (as far as I know. Perhaps it’s also a short form on Tyneside and the far North West. But for some reason I find it quite evocative. I personally have only ever once come across someone called Norrie.

He was one of the other guys (of five of us, and I had by far the worst room) who shared a house in Gosforth, Newcastle (pronounced ‘Gossforth’). This was in 1978 when I was working as a reporter for the Journal in Newcastle. Norrie was, if I recall, a salesman/trainee executive for a paint manufacturer, but as that last seems so unlikely, not to say almost gratuitous, I’m quite prepared to accept that I’m quite wrong and won’t in the slightest be offended if you say so. The house was owned by I can’t remember who, but she had, apparently, taken a shine to me, because around Christmas 1978 she returned in high spirits - i.e. three sheets to the wind - from a works Christmas party, came into my room and got quite amorous. A shag was on if I had wanted it, but I didn’t want it, at least not with her. She didn’t take it well. Anyway, that was the first Norrie I’ve personally come across.

Another was the uncle of a former flatmate of mine. His name was Norrie Drummond, and the flatmate was Alan Drummond. Norrie was a young music journalist in the Sixties, but then, by the late Seventies, early Eighties discovered that his bird had flown. He was, according to Alan, a raging woofter (I’ve drunk a little too much port while composing these, my latest words of wisdom to be in any position to pay much attention to our modern politically correct niceties, so all I can do is apologise to raging woofters worldwide if I have offended you). But while he was working (for the South Wales Argus, as I was) in the late Seventies, he was living with a woman, who according to Alan was a dyke (and please accept a similar apology - see above). They were, it would seem, each other’s beards, and in those days, sadly, you still needed a beard. I can’t actually substantiate the claim, although when Norrie once rang and ask for Alan, he was not only very pissed but did sound very camp.

. . .

You’ll find 800 odd words here as I ramble on about why those who want to ‘get rid of politicians’ and ‘get rid of bankers’ aren’t playing with a full deck. How about ‘getting rid of time’? I’ve decided to run two blogs as the same time, but can’t yet work out how to label them.

Germany’s ditch-the-euro Afd more popular than God! Scores 113pc in global survey! Watch out Angela! And the Government finally takes action on the growing epidemic of self-importance

The trouble with surveys is that at one and the same time they can be enormously misleading, highly informative, hugely subjective and generally a jack-of-all trades in that their results can be used in all kinds of ways. If I conducted a survey and found that of 1,000 people who responded a massive 76 per cent of them were in favour of toast being available on the NHS, I might well go ahead and claim: ‘More than three-quarters of all Brits want your GP to make you breakfast’. That would most certainly strike us all as complete nonsense, although, interestingly, if there were a faint - very, very faint, about one in a trillion trillion trillion - chance of that statement, in fact, being true, basing that claim on the results of my survey would still be bollocks, for a great many reasons. The only legitimate conclusion one can draw from the results of my survey is that of 1,000 people questioned by me, 760 were in favour of toast being available, which tells you nothing very much except that 1,000 people were feeling exceptionally bored when I approached the with my clipboard.

Faced with such a bizarre statistic (‘Never in the history of surveys has toast been more popular. World In Action finds out why’) sceptics would most certainly ask all sorts of questions: how were those surveyed chosen? Do they have a vested interest in the making of toast (father’s a baker/mother sells toasters)? Were they drunk at the time? Were they all Brits? How many people approached over and beyond the 1,000 who responded told me (who was conducting the survey) to fuck off and stop wasting their time? There are endless questions, and if you really are interested in the science, practice and protocol of when, where, how and why to conduct surveys, what different kind of surveys can be conducted, for what purpose and what can be done with results thus obtained this blog really isn’t for you.

I’ve been rattling on about surveys and what a load of cack their results can be if we don’t handle them with extreme care because I’ve come across a survey conducted in Germany which makes interesting reading (if you are interested in the things that interest me, that is - when, at work, we get letters from readers who begin by telling us ‘Reading about so and so, I was reminded of an amusing incident that happened...’ you can be absolutely bloody certain that there is nothing at all in what follows that will tickle the funny bone of any reasonably sane man or women in the slightest). It appeared in the Bild, usually trailed as ‘Germany’s Sun’, but, in fact, modeled by its original publisher Axel Springer on what was then the Daily Mirror long before the Sun started up. But calling it ‘Germany’s Sun’ will give you a fair idea of who its readership are. (And Bild is a broadsheet, by the way, not a tabloid, and oddly it works rather well.)

What Bild did was to mimic a general election - one is due in Germany this September - in view of the founding of a new ‘political party’ (though I like to think of it - and, whatever they say, UKIP - as pressure groups). That party is Alternative Für Deutschland, which, broadly, wants an end

Bloody hell! Now look at the kind of thing that’s appearing from nowhere!
put to all the German taxpayer-funded bailouts for the Med countries (they have started calling them Rotweinländer - red wine countries) and for Germany to return to the D Mark. It is still, however, in favour of Germany remaining in the EU and would even countenance a small eurozone made up of ‘more responsible’ countries. Phonelines were opened at 8am and closed at 6pm and readers were asked to phone in an register who they would vote for if there were a general election.

Here are the results:

• Union (CDU/CSU): 42pc

• Alternative für Deutschland (AfD): 19pc

• SPD: 17pc

• Bündnis 90/Die Grünen: 7pc

• FDP: 6pc (Incidentally, the FDP - more or less the Lib Dems in trendier specs - almost always - like the Lib Dems - do badly both in surveys and at elections and it is always touch and go as to whether they will cross the 5pc threshold. They always do, of course, because the Germans can be quite kind and like to help a man when he’s down)

• Die Linke: 5pc (generally communists who can’t or don’t want to call themselves communists/spotty students who can’t get a shag)

• Eine andere Partei (Sonstige): 2pc (any other party - Ostfriesenwitz Gemeinschaft/Freibier Gesellen/Die Klo Partei, that kind of thing)

• Piratenpartei: 2pc (The previous disaffected lot, now superseded by the Afd)

A previous survey had established the the AfD was likely cross the 5pc threshold necessary to win seats in parliament, but Bild’s 19pc for the party - 2pc more than for the SPD, broadly Germany’s Labour Party, is of a different order entirely.

So my first caveats: that 19pc is strictly of all those Bild readers who could be bothered to ring in to take part. So, for example, it does not include those who might have thought the whole exercise something of a gimmick and so did not take part (an obvious point, of course, but still worth explicitly making). Then it would be worth knowing the political and cultural views of those who responded, which, of course, we can’t and don’t. That, too, is relevant. If in a survey of Wogs Out! members a whopping 89pc were in favour of everyone who was not of the purest white skin tones being kicked out of Britain, we wouldn’t be at all surprised and the only worthwhile question to ask is: why were 11pc not in favour? But the survey would tell us absolutely nothing about the general attitude in Britain to immigration over the past 100 years. I don’t mean to get hoity-toity about Bild, but you are unlikely to find its readers discussing the finer points of psephology of a night in the pub.

Is there anything Bild’s survey can tell us. Well, to state the bleeding obvious, more of those readers to took part (see above) say they would vote for the ‘let’s leave the euro’ Afd than would vote for the ‘let’s keep the euro’ Opposition SPD. One might venture to suggest that a head of steam is most certainly building up in Germany over the taxpayer funded bailing out of the red wine countries, but, well, it really is difficult to quantify.

The only sensible observation is the one our politicians always make when they do badly in an opinion poll: ‘Look, as far as I’m concerned the only poll that matters is the one of our electorate on polling day’. Afd is thought to draw its support from across the board, and it is fair to assume that all three main parties - actually, in Germany, it should now be all four as Die Grünen do quite well these days - would see some of their supporters deserting them and expressing their anti-euro frustrations. If more established pollsters come up with results suggesting that AfD support is growing, the most likely effect would be for the CDU/CSU, the SDP and the FDP to consider amending their euro policies accordingly. Whether they would do so, of course, is another matter entirely. Because for all their efficiency, the Germans do have the occasional blind spot.

. . .

The Home Office was in touch late last night and has asked me to perform a public service. And I agreed. It seems there has been some concern in recent months that one John Ward aka The Slog and a self-styled debunker of more or less everything which takes his fancy is in danger of becoming far too self-important. ‘Self-importance’ (which doctors know as loquens bolloccitis) is not, in itself, dangerous and is quite a common affliction. Extreme cases, however, can cause concern

and might need treatment. Symptoms of this condition include a puffed-up chest, a bigger head than normal, a degree of paranoia (which can vary in intensity) and a pronounced choleric temperament, although sufferers are not usually violent. Those afflicted also tend to surround themselves with mirrors and also talk a lot about ‘their sources’, which research has shown are largely delusional.

Knowing my slight acquaintance with Mr Ward and that of late I have had dealings with him, and that I regularly publish a blog on the net, the Home Office has asked me whether I would, on its behalf, agree to carry regular bulletins on the state of Mr Ward’s condition and his blog. I am, of course, only to glad to do so, and if there’s a knighthood in it for me at the end of the day, so much the better.

So I shall do my best to keep an eye on Mr Ward and his witterings on his blog and keep you all posted.

Don't ever think you're clever, ever. Ever.

I don’t think I have self-esteem problems (but nor am I, I hope, conceited) but one ‘moral’ lesson I have tried to teach my children is that ‘there’s always someone cleverer than you. Always’. Others are that ‘there’s no such thing as a free lunch’ i.e. you get nowt for nowt, ‘if it sounds too good to be true, you can bet your bottom dollar it is’ and ‘try to keep an open mind’. I know full well that it’s futile and that, like me, they will learn their lessons the hard way, but every parent likes to protect his ‘young ones’ as long as possible, not realising that they are a lot older in many ways than we think.

The lessons above I told them when they really were still young: I always prefaced it by saying that they might not yet know what the bloody hell I was talking about but to remember it anyway. Perhaps it is only me who seems to bump into people who are by far cleverer than me, but these days I try to anticipate and mitigate any disadvantage by trying never to underestimate anyone.

For example, years ago I lived in Milan for five months and one day, while leaving the (I think Loretto) underground station - the system only had two lines in 1973, now it has four - I spotted a small crowd near an exit. I went to see what was going on and found it was the old three-card trick, sometimes the three thimble trick. In this case the chap doing it had three small pieces of wood, one with a stamp on the underside and each had a rubber band around it. I watched for a while.

At one point one guy shouted ‘stop’ (in Italian, of course) and then took my hand and planted it firmly on the piece of wood he reckoned had the stamp on it so that it could not be changed. Then he went through his pockets and bet something like 20,000 lire (which was around £20 I think.) And - of course - he won. And - of course, as I was supposed to by being psychologically involved in it all by having my hand clamped down on the ‘winning’ piece of wood, I thought I could win, too.

I had noticed that the the rubber band around the piece of wood with the stamp on its underside was crooked, whereas the rubber bands on the other two pieces of wood were straight. ‘Easy,’ I thought in the way complete fools think, ‘I’ve sussed it. I don’t have to even try to follow the chap as he shuffles the pieces of wood around to keep an eye on the one with the stamp. All I have to do,’ I thought in that way complete fools think, ‘is look shout stop and then look for the piece of wood on which the rubber band is crooked. And that will be the one.’ Immensely pleased with my cleverness I let the chap shuffle the pieces of wood around, paying no attention at all to which might be the one with the stamp. Then I shouted ‘stop’. And then he said ‘OK, give us your money’.

By the way he said it, the contempt in his voice that another sucker had been hooked, told me that I was just another sucker who thought he was cleverer. Rrealising this, I didn’t wager nearly as much as I planned to wager. I just pulled out 5,000 lire, handed it over, pointed to the piece of wood on which the rubber band was crooked, but I already knew it wasn’t the one. And of course it wasn’t.

The guy didn’t even look at me. I felt about six inches tall. Why did I even bother handing over money? Well, all I can say is that it didn’t occur to me not to, and that I thought I had slightly saved the day by handing over far less than I was going to. But I now realise that had I not, I would probably have been taken to one side, given a good kicking and then had everything of value on me stolen. That’s when I first decided not to underestimate anyone, but of course it takes years to learn such a lesson completely. And I’m not even too sure I have even learnt it yet.

 . . .

This is all a long-winded way of getting round to my SIPP (self-invested pension plan) and the shares I chose for it. Or rather one share.

Until about 2006 my private pension - my pitifully small private pension - was with a completely useless company called Abbey Life. I had taken out the pension with one company, but as is the way of these things, they are sold on, then sold on again, and then again until total no-hopers like Abbey Life are in charge of the money which is supposed to keep the wolf from the door when you are in your dotage. (And, by the way, Mr Ward, I can’t afford to buy and sell gold. Admitting you had ‘sold all your gold’ as you did a week or two ago was a novel way of shooting yourself in the foot, but you carried it off no bother.) I heard about SIPPs and decided I couldn’t do worse than bloody Abbey Life. So I withdrew all the money I had with them I was able to withdraw and opened a SIPP.

That’s when I did a little thinking. This was towards the end of the boom years (a boom wholly based on people borrowing money to spend on the back of ‘ever-rising house prices’ and a feeling of affluence created by China selling a great many goods at ridiculously low prices in order to get a toe-hold in the market), and I felt in my bones that the good times were going to come to an end. They always do (and incidentally, before someone writes me off as a dour pain-in-the arse pessimist the same is true of bad times: they always eventually come to an end). So I asked myself: if times are hard, many business quoted on the stock exchange will do badly and their share price won’t grow. But what kind of business actually does better than it usually does in a downturn. And then it hit me: pawnbrokers do.

I did a little ‘research’ (a hi’falutin word which can mean anything from tracking down the Higgs Bosun to looking up a bus timetable) and found that a pawnbrokers called Albermarle &; Bond were quote on the stock exchange. So I bought in, at about 157p a share. And boy was that good - for which read lucky - timing. Over the next few years they doubled in price and were at over 300p just a few months ago. And all the analysts, or most of them, at least, said ‘strong buy’. Boy did I feel smug. There’s was me a rather clever stock picker. But not quite clever enough. Had I really been clever, I would have sold at 3oop. But I didn’t. They would carry on climbing, I thought.

They didn’t. They started coming down again, inexorably. I kept an eye on the price and kept telling myself that wise investors - yes, I even thought of myself as ‘an investor’ which strictly speaking I was but... Wise investors are in it for the long haul. That’s true enough but no one actually ever know how long a long haul should be. So I held off selling as the prices kept falling, from 250p to 220p and then to 211p.

That’s when I cracked. I was still ahead, so why not. I sold the lot. I then googled news reports on Albermarle &; Bond to find out just why their price had fallen again so much. And the answer was simple. In 2006, when I discovered them and bought shares in the company, there were only three largish pawnbrokers, so they all had a healthy slice of the business. After 2009, when the bad times started, others realised there was good money to be made from the misery of others and pawnbroking outlets sprung up everywhere. So there was less business to go round and Ablermarle & Bond’s profits suffered. Simple, really.

And the price of ABM’s shares at close of business today, April 26, 2013? Fucking 230p. Oh, well, c’est la vie (he said through very gritted teeth).