Cigars, The Sopranos, port, more cigars, Berlin, Lincoln, newspapers and two drunks (a father and his sadder son)

What with my daughter turning 19 next August and my son turning 16 in May, and me having turned 65 last November, and many of the items I hear about on the news being just retreads of items I heard on the news 30 or 40 years ago, with just the names being changed to protect the innocent as they used to declare as Dragnet started more than 50 years ago; and with most of the films I see being films I have seen before many times, with again just the names being changed to protect the innocents, I find I look back quite a bit more than once I did.

This afternoon, apropos coming across an short obit of someone I knew in the 1970s when I worked for a weekly newspaper in Lincoln, I found myself recalling life and work on a small weekly newspaper, the Lincolnshire Chronicle, where I was employed as a reporter. Later on, tonight in fact, after I had watched four episodes of The Sopranos back to back, polished off half a bottle of Graham’s port - over more than four and a half hours I must add, so the AA won’t be claiming me quite yet (and as the bottle cost £11.99, so half a bottle cost only half that, it’s cheaper than swilling beer or spirits) - and smoked four La Paz Wilde Cigarillos (available online from the Continent, and you would be sucker as well as being well out of pocket to buy cigars of any kind in Britain - those cheap enough to buy are crap, horrible cigars and those worth smoking are, at British prices well out of my price range) I got to be thinking, as one does, of the past.

This particular bit of the past was in the early 1960s when we lived in Berlin where my father was the BBC representative for four years (and, as I now believed, also provided whatever valuable help he could provide to Her Majesty’s foreign intelligence agency). We live in the Heerstraße, in Berlin-Charlottenburg. For our first year in Berlin, when I was ten, I attended Die Steuben-Schule in Charlottenburg, a Volkschule (primary school), while my older brother Ian, who died three weeks ago tonight, was already attending Das Canisius Kolleg in Berlin-Tiergarten, where I joined him in Easter 1960 (the German school year runs from Easter to Easter, not, as here in Britain from September to the following July). It was the cigars which brought back that particular memory.

From home we caught the tram which ran along the Heerstraße to what was then the Reichskanzlerplatz (now, I think, called Theodor-Heuss Platz after a former German President) where we caught the U-Bahn. We travelled as far as Nollendorfplatz and caught a bus to the Tiergartenstraße where our school was. (The pic below was taken before the war, but that is more or less what it looked like when we were there in the Sixties.) We always tried to make sure we caught

the U-Bahn before 8am as any later train would make us late for school. First thing in the morning the trains always stank of stale cigar smoke. That’s the link with cigars. Because of the cost of cigars in Britain, smoking them still seems to be a rich man’s pastime, but as they are considerably cheaper on the Continent many more men smoked them (and as this was Berlin, I don’t doubt a few women smoked them, too). So every time I light one up, I often have a similar sensation to Proust in his famous novel. Christ, I loved Berlin. And if I wasn’t firmly convinced of the wisdom of the advice ‘never go back’, I would go back like a shot to live there. But, of course, it  would never be the same. It never is.

PS When we first moved to Berlin in June 1959, we lived in a fourth (or fifth) floor flat in the

Olympischer Straβe in Berlin-Charlottenburg. This (pictured above) was the ‘smaller’ exit to the Neu-Westend U-Bahn station. It was just opposite our flat. Maybe it doesn’t mean a lot to you . . .

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Earlier today, after googling the name ‘Robert House’ for no very good reason I can now recall, I discovered that the Robert House I had known in Lincoln, where he was the news editor of the Lincolnshire Echo, the local evening paper, had died in January 2011 at 83. I later came to know his son, also a Robert House, who, like his father, was something of a slave to alcohol and who topped himself in 2008 by jumping off a cliff. I worked with Robert House, the son, on the South Wales Echo, where I found him to be good company and where he kept telling me he wished he could introduce me to ‘his special friends’.

At first I had no idea what he meant until one night after a lot of boozing and as it was so late and my flatmate was away I agreed that he could doss down in my flat. He was very drunk and when I decided I wanted to go to bed, he tried to follow me into my bedroom telling me he wanted to sleep with me. I had other ideas and finally the cryptic remarks about ‘his special friends’ suddenly made sense. I had taken him to a ‘club’ in Cardiff called The Casablanca where I scored my dope and where he cut a horribly forlorn figure in his tweed jacket among the whores and black folk who, apart from me, patronised the place.

The Casablanca was actually nothing but an old disused church where usually there were fewer than 20 at the bar except when whoever ran ‘the club’ hired a sound system from Bristol to play reggae and when the place would be packed. It has since been demolished to make way for the gentrification of the Cardiff Bay area, which I have, however, not yet visited. I first came across Robert House, the father, when I by chance dropped in at the pub (I can’t remember what it was called) where he and other Lincolnshire Echo hacks went for after work beer.

Bob House was delightful and highly entertaining company when in his cups, but something of a bastard when sober. However, I rarely saw him sober. Sitting in the pub he was full of stories from his time working for the Daily Mirror in Fleet Street (though it wasn’t actually in Fleet Street, but

nearby), and I quickly developed a technique to extend his swift pint after work into a drinking session which went on until closing time. I waited until he had finished his pint an was on the point of going home and insisted I should buy him another. Once that was finished he then insisted, as I had stood him a pint, on buying me one. And so on. And on.

On one occasion he had bought and had with him in the pub a brand-new set of crockery acquired especially because he and his wife were having friends from France to stay. When I joined him in the pub and had bought him a pint, he then bought me one. This made him liable to be late and risk the wrath of his wife. So to calm his nerves I bought him another pint. Then he bought me one. Eventually he was so late, he knew he was in for it and kept postponing his departure hom because he knew he would get an almighty row from his wife for being late.

Finally, the pub wanted to close, so I suggested that if I came back home with him and helped him carry the new crockery his wife would find it impossible to rip him off several strips if I was there. It didn’t quite work out that way: when we arrived at the front door, with me carrying most of the boxes of crockery, she assumed I was the taxi driver, gruffly ordered me where to put down the boxes of crockery and began to give him hell. He explained I wasn’t the taxi driver, and then she became sweetness and light and after he went to bed to sleep off his laters binge, she and I sat up till two in the morning talking about I don’t know what and getting one well.

Not much of an anecdote, I know, but it’s the only one I have about Bob House, the father.

As for Robert House, the son, he really was a sad case. By the time he joined the South Wales Echo subs’ desk he was already an alcoholic, and it just got worse and worse. After our friendship had

cooled - I was rather embarrassed in his company after the night of his failed seduction - it seemed to get even worse, although I wasn’t the cause. I think he was ever more trouble with his partner - he was already divorced and had an ex-wife and two children in Windsor - and he would go on benders, turning up for work in a terrible state.

Again, not much of an anecdote, but it is only January. Pip, pip.

In case you missed it ... (and by the way, there's still loads more room on the bandwagon, but hurry – a new one will be along shortly)

The twisted cynic in me felt that the huge demonstration in Paris on Sunday in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo office murders and taking part in it was – and is – rather the cool thing to do and the in-place to be on the afternoon of January 11. And that nasty, nasty, twisted, unhappy cynic also suspects it will only be matter of time before some astute businessman realises there will be quite market for Je Suis Charlie brooches, pendants, necklaces, earstuds, cufflinks, fridge stickers, car stickers, but it will be important to strike while the iron is still hot. I fear the horrible murders and the subsequent outrage will be a question of Charlie who within months. Hope I’m wrong, but …

Something along those lines was also expressed the other day by Bernard Holtrop, a Dutch cartoonist with Charlie Hebdo who wasn’t at the offices at the time of the lethal attack because ‘he hates meetings’. Take a look here (and I’m surprised the story wasn’t also carried by the Daily Telegraph and the Guardian). Holtrop is rather taken aback by all the new ‘friends’ Charlie Hebdo has suddenly acquired. Well, Bernard, bandwagons are like that.

Years ago, I remember all those little red Aids ribbons which everyone and their grandma insisted on wearing ‘in solidarity’ with sufferers and gays generally. You don’t see too many of those these days, the caravan has moved on. At the time you couldn’t move for hearing and reading news of the latest Aids benefit in New York, London, Paris, Los Angeles and Berlin, naturally attended by the great and good of showbiz and anyone else who could spot a passing bandwagon when she or he saw one. So where are they now? Who today sports a little red Aids ribbon? Arguably the Aids problem is just as bad as it was then, so where are the ‘campaigners’?

Well, largely they have jumped off the Aids bandwagon and jumped onto the global warming ‘we must save the planet’ bandwagon. Oh, and what with ‘advances in medicine’ and the development of new drugs, Aids is no longer the problem it was. Come again? Oh, OK, it is no longer the problem it was in the Western world.

It is, however, just as bad, perhaps even worse, in Africa and Asia. According to the worldwide Aids statistics from Avert.org there are 23.5 million adults and children living with Aids in Sub-Saharan Africa – one in 20 of the populations are affected -, 4 million in South and South-East Asia but just 1.4 million in North America and Eastern Europe and Central Asia and 900,000 Western and Central Europe.  So there we have it: what’s the point of holding Aids benefits if we more or less have the problem licked in the Western world? I suppose that attitude does make a certain sense. I mean, if we here in the West don’t give a flying fuck that that three-quarters of a billion folk in the poorer parts of the world don’t have access to clean water – their water source is often the same as where they defecate – and 2.5 billion (check the figures here), what’s a million more Aids sufferers or two? Life’s a struggle, man, didn’t you know that? I mean just how much bleeding do you want this heart to do? Well, I’m a realist and neither expect more blood from those already heavily bleeding hearts nor attitudes to change. But what I can very much do without is the bullshit.

There are many wholly admirable organisations working to try to help Aids sufferers in Africa and Asia (which is a damn sight more than I do), but as a whole folk in the Western world, in their smug hypocrisy, are merely interested in the brownie points to be gained from – well, then its was ‘raising awareness about Aids’. Now it is ‘raising awareness about global warming’ and ‘saving the planet’ and crowding onto the streets of Paris shoulder to shoulder with the great and good to show solidarity with a satirical rag until last week those great and good loathed.

I think that’s what gets up Charlie Hebdo cartoonist Bernard Heltrop’s nose so much.

What do ‘habeas corpus’ and ‘hypocrisy’ have in common? They both begin with an ‘h’. Or why in ‘the land of the free’ Shaker Aamer still doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of being released after 13 years however many general elections David Cameron wants to win (though I’d dearly love to be proved wrong)

All last week one of our media saints, Melvyn Bragg, broadcast a daily 30-minute programme examining Magna Carta, which English barons presented to King John in 1215 and made him sign. By every account John was a rotten king - two-faced, inefficient, inept and unjust - and the barons had had enough. But it would not just be wrong but utterly ridiculous to interpret the insistence of the barons that John’s powers should be curtailed as ‘a blow for the common man’.

It was nothing of the kind, although ‘the common man’ did over the centuries come to benefit from various demands in the Magna Carta. (Incidentally, we are all, unfortunately, today members of the genus homo communis, despite eye-wateringly expensive private education, ‘posh’ accents and a superior manner - in fact, I have a rule of thumb: the ‘posher’ the accent, the more likely you are to be dealing with a nine-bob note (US nine-dollar bill, though I’m sure you guessed that).

As far as the barons were concerned they were doing nothing but strike a blow for ‘the common baron’ and protecting their own interests. For example, one of their demands was that there should be far fewer ‘fish weirs’ along the Thames. Come again? Well, it seems those operating those fish weirs were actually using them to halt Thames river traffic - goods being shipped to the markets in London - and charge a toll.

These days, I should imagine no one gives a stuff about ‘fish weirs’. In fact, I don’t doubt that there exists a heritage society which cares ‘passionately’ about fish weirs and is working tirelessly to protect for posterity and future generations whatever ‘fish weirs’ still operate. (Expect a full-blown rant from me in this ’ere blog about our heritage industry in the coming months. I always think it is a symptom of the decline of a civilisation when instead of looking to the future, it almost neurotically looks back to the past and is desperate to preserve as much of that pas as possible.)

There were other demands made by the barons at Runymede 1215 which are similarly irrelevant to today’s 2015 digitally aware folk, but there is one demand which is always trotted out which is still relevant to us today and is the cornerstone of any half-decent legal system: that the king - for which read the ‘authorities’ - should always observe the principle of habeas corpus.

If the Magna Carta (and I suspect it is more correctly not ‘the’ Magna Carta but simply Magna Carta - would some pedant or other reading this confirm?) is remembered for anything, it is remembered for its insistence that the principle of habeas corpus should be observed. Actually, as far as I know it is remembered for very little else. Habeas corpus was spelled out in Magna Carta (‘the’ optional): no one could be imprisoned or otherwise detained against his will be the king. If someone is held, a charge must be laid against him and in due course he must face trial before a jury of his peers.

Well, ‘his peers’ were in those days his fellow barons - to be honest and to the dismay of idealists the world over, they gave as much of a flying fuck for the welfare of the ‘common man’ as did King John, which is to say none whatsoever. They were simply concerned with their own welfare and making sure that none of their number ended up in the dungeons operated by John’s henchmen. But over

 the years the principle of habeas corpus was established, and broadly the democratic health (though why do I feel the need to put quote marks around the word ‘democratic’?) of states the world over can be gauged by how well they observe the principle.

The Brits, rather smugly it has to be said, often point out that its parliament became the template of parliaments around the world and its justice system was also widely adopted, not least in the United States. Certainly the US also likes to feel it conscientiously observes the principle of habeas corpus and if forever banging the drum about being ‘the land of the free’.

Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. It would, for example, be both interesting and enlightening to hear the views of those banged up in the Guantanamo Bay facility what their views are just how well the US adheres to the principle of habeas corpus. I’m sure their views would make interesting reading. As it is, of course, we won’t even get to hear their views: to all intents and purposes they have been locked up and the key to their cells has - metaphorically - been thrown away.

But I am retreading old ground. What I have just written has been said and written 1,000 before and much good it has done the Guantanamo inmates, though that notwithstanding, I cannot resist the temptation to add that unless and until each inmate there is charged and given a fair trial, the United States can stick its proud ‘land of the free’ ‘we want to introduce democracy to Middle Eastern nations’ bollocks right up its arse.

I am often inclined to believe that of all the sins mankind is capable of committing, the sin of hypocrisy is pretty much down there with the very worst. (Incidentally, a measure of just how cynical the Yankee administrations are - including that of St Barack Obama - the reason the inmates are held at Guantanamo Bay and not on sovereign US soil so that the administrations can ‘legitimately’ claim they are not a covered by the US legal system. Fuckwits, eh?

This entry is not, however, a general rant about Guantanamo - you might as well petition the Sun to rise in the West for a change for all the good protesting about Guantanamo would achieve. I want to be more specific: one of those held is a certain Shaker Aamer, and he has been banged up now for the past 13 years. Now, Aamer is not actually a British citizen but a Saudi citizen. But he is classed as a British resident and has a wife and four children living in Britain.

Naturally, the fact that he is ‘not British’ has been jumped upon by all the wiseacres who innocently ask ‘so why should Britain get so uptight about him?’ To that I would reply that although he is not de jure British, he is most certainly de facto British.

The news this morning is that David Cameron, who is off to schmooze with St Barack in the next few days (er, we have a General Election coming up which Cameron naturally would like to win being seen swanning around the White House is apt to impress the more impressionable and might be worth a vote or two).

While there he will be pleading Aamer’s case with the president - or, better his press wallahs have let it be known that he will be pleading with St Barack to have Aamer released. Although the two words ‘habeas corpus’ won’t necessarily be used - using them might embarrass St Barack too much and prove to be counterproductive - they are at the basis of what the matter of Aamer and the rest of the inmates is all about: shouldn’t both he and the rest of them be charged and face a fair trial if they are thought to be guilty of some crime?

So will Cameron return to these shores with the news that St Barack, who has the power, has granted Aamer a presidential pardon and released him? Don’t hold your breath. Or to reflect the mood I am in when considering the hypocrisy involved in the whole Guantanamo saga: don’t hold your fucking breath.

It does occur to me that St Barack, who would certainly prefer to see a Conservative-led government in Britain than one led by Labour, might do actually do the deed and Cameron could return to Britain with a trophy: one freed Shaker Aamer. I doubt it will happen, but if it were to it would have

very little indeed to do with insisting upon the principle of habeas corpus - that no man should be imprisoned at the whim of the king - and everything do with the snivelling hypocrisy with which the whole affair is shot through.

By the way, some relative figures: in China 172 adults are incarcerated per 100,000 of the population. In the United States it is 707, more than four times as many. In Iran it is 284 per 100,000 people, in Saudi Arabia it’s 162, in Russia 470. Oh, and by race the figures for the US are that per 100,000 of the population 380 of them are white, 966 Latino - and 2,207 black.

Read into those figures what you will. I know what I do.

‘I abhor clichés, but will defend to the death your right to use them’ Appropriately, much ink has already been spilled in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo murders. And as far as the self-righteous jacks are concerned who have bullied clubs into not hiring a convicted rapist, there ain’t nothing like a hypocrite - they have threatened staff

I learned something today: Voltaire didn’t say ‘I disagree/disapprove with what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it’. Apparently, one of his biographers, a Evelyn Beatrice Hall, coined the phrase and suggested it as the attitude Voltaire had.

But he did describe the Prophet in his tragedy Le Fanatisme ou Mahomet, as an ‘impostor’, a ‘false prophet’, a ‘fanatic’ and a ‘hypocrite’. Strong stuff, eh, and from the little I know of Mohammed not something I would claim, but then I’m not - as you might have gathered - a French intellectual polymath.

I doubt it go down well with the lads at the Al Qaeda Arms where they are apt to gather of an evening to knock back a few sarsaparillas and elderflower cordials. Good Muslim boys these: you might catch them slaughtering a defenceless cartoonist in cold blood and beheading hostages live on A Question Of Sport, but you won’t catch a drop of the strong stuff passing their lips, no sirree!

It’s a tad tactless of me to rattle on about clichés and the indiscriminate use of them after what happened a yesterday in Paris at the Charlie Hebdo offices, but there you go: tact is for wimps. That hoary old Voltaire quote, which, of course, isn’t a Voltaire quote, was trotted out on at least three occasions in the radio coverage I was listening to on my journey back from Work In London to Home In Cornwall and when clichés are used in anger, they always bring me out in a rash.

Here are a few other favourites ‘clichés are the first casualty of war’, ‘no cliché survives the first encounter the enemy’, ‘he who doesn’t understand clichés is doomed to use them’, and ‘clichés corrupt and absolute clichés corrupt absolutely’. Expect a few more over the coming days.

As for the murders themselves, might I trot out a few rather hackneyed observations of my own? Just as it would be ridiculous to blame Roman Catholicism for murders committed by the IRA, so it is ineffably stupid to blame Islam for this slaughtering of 12 at the Charlie Hebdo office or the kind of shit the lads from Islamic State get up to. But that’s what some are doing. In Germany several thousand folk have been turning out in street protests against ‘the Islamification of Europe’. Shame they can’t find the energy to protest against, say, the ‘rampant commercialisation of everyday life’ or ‘the adulteration of our food in the interest of making ever greater profits’.

(NB There was also talk on the radio about the development of a new pill to ‘counteract obesity’. The obvious solution would seem to be for people not to stuff themselves full of food every time they stop moving, but actually there’s a far better solution: pass legislation to stop food manufacturers stuffing corn syrup, sugar and hydrogenated fat into everything they produce. But don’t hold your breath on that one: you might as well ask governments to cut their own throats.)

There can be no better response to what the Charlie Hebdo killers did than that of several cartoonists in the past 24 hours. Here is a selection:

PS One Andrew Windsor, aka His Royal Highness Prince Andrew, will be mightily relieved by this turn of events as it has wiped his name and suggestions that he has been shagging one of his mate Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged ‘sex slaves’ right off the front pages.

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You always know those who see themselves on the side of the angels as they are usually the biggest hypocrites.

The other day I wrote about the only mob - ‘cybermob’ to the geeks - who are ganging up and signing petitions left, right and centre to ensure Ched Evans, the convicted rapist who has served half of his sentence and has been released on licence, isn’t signed by another club and will no longer be able to earn his money playing professionally.

First they bullied Sheffield United into withdrawing its offer to take him back, and now they have bullied Oldham Athletic into about-turning on the issue and deciding not to sign him.

According to the BBC sport website threats were made against Oldham staff and their families. Ain’t nothing like two-faced hypocrites eh: moral enough to insist that a convicted rapist shouldn’t be allowed to play professional football but not above getting down and dirty themselves to the level of a rapist by threatening the lives of other folk.

Anyone want to join a mob, burn someone and quench their bloodlust? Ched Evans is available. But be quick before you forget what it’s all about and Corrie starts

When most of us hear the phrase ‘mob rule’ or ‘mob violence’, I suppose we think of bygone centuries when folk rioted over the price of bread. In more modern times we’ll reflect on crowds threading through the suburbs of Arabian city streets, burning flags – usually the Stars and Stripes – and calling for death to this or that Satan.

But our modern times have also brought us more modern ways in which the mob can express itself fury and wreak as much damage as possible. I don’t much like mobs, although ironically – and inadvertently – I more or less organised one singlehanded (you can find and account of what happened here). And it was after

I witnessed how a bunch of otherwise rational, even decent, folk can turn almost in an instant and demand blood in their self-righteous fury that gained a very healthy distrust of mobs of any kind.

Courtesy of the net – the ‘information superhighway’ of yesteryear which, its proselytisers pledged, would democratise the world – the mob has now taken to ‘cyberspace’ – another buzzphrase we hear rather less these day now that it isn’t just the cool geeks but all of us who boot up, sign in, and check our email even before we have our daily morning piss. So if you want to organise a rabble of any sort, you don’t even have to leave the comfort of your own living room.

Here in Britain there is an ongoing campaign to ensure one Ched Evans, a professional footballer (soccer player – keep up you Yanks), one-time Wales international and convicted rapist never again is signed up by any club to earn his daily crust hoofing a ball from here to there. If you want a little background, you can choose the following sites: his trial and his release from jail two years later after serving half of his sentence (don’t ask, it’s one of the quirks of British life, in this case our justice system, which so delights foreign tourists, that and our bloody beefeaters, which has them arriving here in their thousands every month. Quite a few of them leave again, too).

Evans had played for Sheffield United and his club indicated that it would be prepared to take him back. And that’s when the mob gathered. ‘You can’t have a convicted rapist playing for your club’ the screamed, and when various ‘celebrities’ joined in and added their two ha’porth the bandwagon really got going. Sheffield caved in, so Evans was forced to try to find a berth elsewhere. Most recently he was lined up to play for Oldham Athletic, but the mob was having none of it and so Oldham, too, caved in and withdrew their job offer to Evans.

Evans and a fellow footballer Clayton McDonald were charged with rape after a very drunk 19-year-old woman had sex with them. They the act was consensual. The jury returned its verdict on McDonald first and found him not guilty. They then found Evans guilty and he was sentenced to serve five years in prison. He still insists he was not guilty and it is partly that continued insistence which has infuriated some.

In his sentencing at Caernafon Crown Court, Judge Merfyn Hughes told Evans: ‘The complainant was 19 years of age and was extremely intoxicated. CCTV footage shows, in my view, the extent of her intoxication when she stumbled into your friend. As the jury have found, she was in no condition to have sexual intercourse. When you [Evans] arrived at the hotel, you must have realised that.

The BBC’s report of the case goes on to record that Judge Hughes said the sentence took into account that there had been no force involved and the complainant received no injuries. He also said the complainant was not ‘targeted’ and the attack had not been ‘premeditated’. All in all the rape was not quite as nasty as some we have heard of. That doesn’t, of course, excuse Evans’s actions,

This is what members of a mob look like when they wear ties

but it does put them on some kind of context. I like to think that I would have – or rather as my shagging days now seem well and truly behind me make that ‘would then have’ – made sure the girl arrived home safely so that she could sober up at home. I wouldn’t have wanted to have had sex with her.

On the other hand I have also been in situations where sex was clearly there for the asking (I am thinking of one quite specific instance involving the extremely drunk Icelandic wife of a Time news editor who somehow ended up in my taxi home after a Christmas party, somehow came into my flat with me and made it very clear that she was mine for the asking. But she was so drunk – and I wasn’t exactly sober – that I left her in the sitting room to sleep off her torpor and I went to bed alone. That didn’t, however, stop her husband from putting two and two together and making five and that was the end of my run of subbing shifts on The Times.) I don’t doubt that other men (and woman) would be rather less scrupulous.

. . .

The case broadly elicits two main lines of argument: the one side is saying that for a club to employ Evans again would be wrong as he would be ‘a role model’ for young boys and having him play again would send the wrong message.

Others retort that Evans was subject to the due process of law, was convicted, served time and has now been released. Certainly he will always be a convicted rapist but he should be allowed to move on. At this point I should admit that I subscribe to the second point of view, but this entry is not about the rape, Evans’s conviction, and not even about whether he should or should not be signed professionally by any other club. Coincidentally, as I write this – in a slack period at work – the very topic came up with everyone chiming in and adding their two ha’porth. One colleague pointed out that a convicted rapist wouldn’t be re-employed by as a teacher and would certainly not get his job back here at the Mail.) This piece is about the mob mentality which can take over and which, in my view, is nothing short of mob justice.

When in the past few days it emerged that Oldham Athletic was considering signing Evans, the mob was revitalised and a blogger who uses the online pseudonym Jean Hatchet has organised a petition to send to Oldham Athletic urging the club to change its mind. You can find it here. Jean Hatchet had previously organised and petition urging Sheffield United to drop its plans to take Evans back. There is a certain self-righteousness about mobs, whether

they operate in the street or online, which I find nauseating. And there is a certain self-righteousness about Jean Hatchet’s petition which I find equally nauseating.

So far, according to the BBC, she has attracted 45,000 signatures. I urge you to read some of the comments appended to the petition page: in my experience a great many people do think about what they feel. Unfortunately, and equal number spend more than a second reflecting on an issue. (There was a celebrated survey reported in The Economist in which people were asked whether or not they agreed with a certain US foreign policy. Then those who said they did agree were asked what that policy was. Sadly, very, very few of them knew.)

So here’s my rule of thumb: if a mob is in favour, I’m agin it.

Several centuries ago mobs were often inclined to burn people, stone them to death, lynch them or, if they were feeling a little more benevolent, merely tar and feather them. And I’m sure that everyone of that mob would have regarded him or herself as upstanding and moral. I’m not a Christian by any means, but I think Jesus Christ hit the nail on the head when he urged those ‘without sin’ to ‘cast the first stone’. There is another very interesting piece on the BBC website which examines the legal issues in this whole affair. You can read it here.

My New Year’s message: stay young. But that means in spirit, not tighter pants, medallions, boob jobs and botox!

Well, after finding myself back to this ‘ere blog after some time away, I thought I might at least wish you all a Happy New Year, though having just passed my 65 birthday, I am bound to add that 2015 will most probably be no worse or no better than 2014.

A few months ago I somehow - I can’t remember how or even why - found myself watching a German TV drama doc about the 30 years war between almost everyone in northern Europe. During that time life was for almost everyone in the war zone bloody horrific. And the war zone was very large and it all went on for 30 years. Tonight I heard about the Republic of Congo where a similar state of affairs exists: there is no actual war, but the widespread lawlessness in a very, very large part of Africa means that rape and death are daily dangers most everyone faces.

So here’s a thought for folk reading this in France, the US, Germany, Spain, Greece and even, surprisingly, Russia, Ukraine, Argentina, Australia, New Zealand and China: count your bloody blessings. We all have problems, but compared to those who might be raped tomorrow or even killed, they are comparatively minor. In a great many parts of the civilised world - make that ‘civilised’ world - a ‘tragedy’ is when the TV repairman doesn’t show after you stayed in all day!

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One reason, I suspect, that I haven’t blogged as regularly as I once did over this past month or two is because I passed 65 and didn’t want anyone reading this to say ‘well, he would say that, wouldn’t he, because he’s just another old fart’ (or as my son - 15 - put it so gracelessly when I texted him a Happy New Year, ‘happy new year you old twat’. What surprised me most was that he knew the word ‘twat’, though he most probably doesn’t know what it means.)

You see it’s like this. As you get older - and as those among you who are ‘older’ will confirm - you get to see and get to get very sick of rather too many repeats: rather too many politicians promising ‘a better tomorrow; rather too many occasions when Britain grinds to a halt after a flurry of snow despite there having been a flurry of snow ‘since records’ began; rather too much conspicuous outrage of widespread paedophilia among the British establishment and rather too little being done to find out what went wrong despite the outrage.

It’s the same in music: too many ‘fabulously original artists’ playing the same old shitty chord sequences you have known for at least 40 years. In short: you’ve seen it all before one too many times. So you get jaundiced and rancid. But which ‘young one’ wants to hear the complaints of - to quote my darling teenage son - and old twat? I certainly didn’t when I was the same age as young Wesley is now and why should he be expected to be any different?

But that hackneyed old phrase ‘‪plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose‬’ is distressingly true: the establishment - any establishment - will always look after its own whether in Europe, Africa, Asia or America, whether black, white, yellow or brown. The odd thing is that I who as a young shaver fresh out of an English public school knew fuck all about everything and thought ‘socialism’ was all idealistic stuff and nonsense would now, if not in his dotage a damn sight closer than he was then, dearly like to take up a Kalashnikov and man the barricades. (The only reason he doesn’t is because he knows just how futile it would be: ever wondered what makes a cynic? Being alive.) But do you really want to hear all that? If you are young, you most certainly don’t.

So I am stymied in writing this ‘ere blog. How often do you hear me pointing out the sheer hypocrisy of the West cheering on the fucking ‘Arab spring’ when all the fucking ‘Arab spring’ has done in Egypt is to replace one set of repressive army dictators with another set of repressive army dictators? How often to you try to tread the fine line between swallowing Western bullshit about Ukraine and Russian bullshit about Ukraine and trying to swallow no bullshit?

Finally, there is the sheer despair at the limits of one’s own intellect. I wrote above ‘ever wondered what makes a cynic? Being alive’: but I don’t want to settle for being an increasingly grouchy, boring, dispomaniac cynic. The most attractive thing about young folk is their idealism. OK, when we are really dyspeptic we might thing they are pissing in the wind and then some. But I don’t want to leave it at that: I want them to be more right and I am. I want the to prove me wrong. I want them to show me up for a sad old cynical fuck who can’t be arsed to have faith in anything anymore. So bloody do it!

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Along similar lines I have - I think - realised why I find it difficult to let go when I write, why I stick to pastiche and satire and keep everything at arm’s length: I can’t let go. So that is this year’s project: fucking let go a little, show a little passion

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One of our former prime ministers, John Major, once insisted he wanted to build a Britain in which the British were ‘at ease with themselves’. This took me a bit by surprise because I’ve always thought the British are at ease with themselves, although most usually once they’ve had a sherbet or five. Below are four pics which show several Brits completely at ease with themselves.

We might not lead the world in many ways, but we are world beaters when it comes to losing our dignity. The excuse was that they were celebrating the New Year. Actually, the Brits never need an excuse to get rat-arsed (U.S readers: ‘rat-arsed’ is a quaint piece of slang for ‘bladdered’, ‘completely pissed’, ‘out of your head’, ‘arseholed’, ‘loaded’, ‘shitfaced’, ‘sloshed’. Only elderly middle-class folk get ’squiffy’, usually around 1955).

RIP my brother Ian (1948-2014)

I can’t start an entry without reporting the most serious news since I last blogged: my older brother has died. I say it is serious news not sad news, because in a way some might understand – and to use that old, even hackneyed phrase – he’s gone to a better place. He and I were both brought up as practising Roman Catholics, and although I have since gone my separate way, he returned to that faith and in RC terms he is now in a happier place: all the shit in this world has now been and gone for him.

For almost all his life he suffered increasingly from poor to bad mental health, and the medication he was prescribed to help him cope also caused him eventually to suffer from dyspraxia (or so I think it’s called – I’ve just looked it up and it doesn’t seem to be the right name). This embarrassed him a great deal.

Most recently he was hospitalised twice for malnutrition and that was the last time I saw him when I went to visit him. It wasn’t that he didn’t have the funds to eat, it was just that he had simply stopped eating. When I asked him why, he just replied ‘why should I’.

On the first visit he also insisted that our German-born mother who had grown up in Osnabrück was in fact Dutch-born and had grown up in Holland. I told him this was nonsense but he was adamant (‘I know where my mother was born!’) and I then decided he had perhaps lost something. He certainly wasn’t at all happy these past few years and I could have done something, perhaps, to make him happier. I was close to him throughout most of his illness, which last more or less 40 years, but then something happened which decided me to withdraw a little.

He often stopped taking his medication – usually he simply forgot – and his mental state always deteriorated fast from then on. I could always tell when he was in that state: he was like a different person – arrogant, feeling superior intellectually to everyone else, mocking, and there was also a distinct feeling – increasingly – that he could become violent. I stress that this was in his later years when whatever illness he suffered – no doctor ever put a name to it – grew worse and worse.

One day I got arrived home (in Cornwall) to find he had left three extremely unpleasant answerphone messages. In all three he promised to get a butcher’s knife and ‘stab, stab, stab’ me to death. He had before travelled all the way from London to Cornwall, about 250 miles, and arrived unexpectedly and as my children were still around ten and 12, I decided to cut him off. I now wish I hadn’t, although at the time it seemed the wisest thing to day. (Incidentally, I had previously had a meal with him and noticed he was obviously not taking his medication and alerted his consultant psychiatrist. But he simply pooh-poohed it all.

A month later he left those messages, obviously by then in a far worse state, and was, for the umpteenth time, sectioned. When he was well, he could be witty and quite good company. I say quite good, because we were different characters. He – this might well be a small part of his illness – seemed to be time-warped in the 1960s when we were both still young, and there was in some ways a distinct childlike quality about him. He was also intellectually far more gifted than I am, and could turn his hand to anything if he wanted. The trouble was all too often he didn’t want to.

My brother and sister and I often discussed what was his essential character and what was his illness, and I eventually came to the conclusion that both were the same. Pour milk into a cup of tea and stir it: what is the milk and what is the tea? It’s not a conclusion I like because with illness we all cling to the illusion that ‘there is a cure’. In my brother’s case there doesn’t seem to have been. He and I were born only 21 months apart and in many ways brought up a pair.

Our sister was eight years younger than him and our younger brother ten years. Neither has particularly happy memories of him when they were children. But there again I must ask the same question: was that early bullying already part of the illness from which he later increasingly suffered? What’s the milk and what’s the tea? Who knows?

Since he was last hospitalised he has had carers calling in four times a day to ensure he was eating. Sadly, they couldn’t persuade him to keep himself a little cleaner and a neighbour I talked to this week told me he would often join her on the bus to town stinking of urine.

At 9pm on December 21 a carer called in and found him watching television. She called in again an hour and a half later and he was no longer breathing. A post mortem was held and the cause of death was natural, broncopneumonia and chronic pulmonary respiratory something-of-other.

His current psychiatrist rang me and told me he had been trying to persuade my brother to give up smoking, but Ian simply refused point blank. When I went to see him in hospital he persuaded me to buy him some more cigarettes. I half-heartedly tried to get him to ‘give them up’ but it would have been futile. RIP my brother Ian.

Zero Dark Thirty’s Maya: in real life she is apparently an Alfreda Frances Bikowsky

If anyone has seen that complete farce of a film Zero Dark Thirty in which a tenacious female CIA analyst more or less works out singlehandedly where Osama Bin Laden was, they will have read the film’s legend that the analyst, called Maya in the film, was based on one particular woman, although also partly on the work of others.

That woman has now been named, despite CIA pleas - I suppose they were pleas, though knowing the CIA’s penchant for torture perhaps their demand was a little more forceful than a regular ‘plea’ - not to. She is Alfreda Frances Bikowsky.

I got that name from The Intercept which ignored the CIA’s pleas. I came across the reference to The Intercept when I read a piece in today’s Telegraph outlining how Ms Bikowsky was not quite the bright young button the CIA made her out to be. Apparently, she chose to witness torture personally although as an analyst there was no reason for her to do so, she misinterpreted information to such an extent that the CIA launched a massive hunt for a spurious African-American Al Qaeda cell in Montana, and she lied to the US senate, claiming that ‘torture got result’.

Take a look at the Telegraph piece yourselves for further evidence that Ms Bikowsky was in many ways a disaster waiting to happen. I keep asking myself why the revelations about the fact that the CIA tortured a great many of its detainees rile me so much. After all, I am not an American, Muslim, they didn’t torture me and I’m not otherwise particularly principled.

But they have and they do. I think, as I pointed out in the last entry touching upon this, it is the ‘holier than thou’ attitude of some Americans which so gets up my nose (but once again I shall be at pains to point out that I am not about to indulge in a bout of gratuitous America bashing: there are as many in the country, both Republicans and Democrats, who are equally appalled at what one of their security services has been getting up to).

One thing that does irritate me a great deal is the insistence of many Americans not just that it is most certainly the best country in the world bar none but that the rest of the world us morally obliged to join in the self-adoration. I should imagine every country in the world likes to think it is up there with the best, but none goes on to insist - it seems almost at gunpoint - that everyone else should agree.

Well, might I point out that the U.S. is most certainly not the best country in the world if you are black and/or poor. Certainly, blacks get a raw deal in other countries and every country has its poor underclass. But those other countries don’t trumpet themselves as ‘the land of the free’ and the ‘land of opportunity’.

It is quite bizarre that proportionately more men and women are locked up in jail in the U.S. than in China. Bizarre, but unfortunately true. I doubt whether any of those locked up, whether white, black, hispanic or of any other hue and colour are inclined to join in a chorus in praise of ‘the land of the free’.

What name do we use to describe hypocritical f***s like Uncle Sam and good old Johnny Bull who don’t torture, but do? And why are they so suprised when it becomes obvious many, many people in large parts of the world hate them?

Just finished watching Ridley Scott’s Body Of Lies. A week or two ago I watched Green Zone and In The Valley Of Elah. All three, in slightly different ways deal with the ‘war on terror’, the second Iraq War and related jihadi attacks.

None of the three is particularly complimentary about the U.S. actions in the Middle East and all three have been criticised by folk leaving their own reviews on IMDB for being something along the lines of ‘liberal propaganda’. Oh, and all three are Hollywood feature films produced by those who stomped up the money for their production to turn a few million cool bucks or so. Then there’s the slight matter that recently I and the rest of the world have been informed that the CIA - the ‘we never use torture CIA’, yes that bunch - has been torturing its prisoners.

The torture - let’s not get into any mealy-mouthed euphemisms such as ‘enhanced interrogation’, let’s stick to calling it by its real name, torture - was sanctioned by George ‘Dubya’ Bush and his deputy Dick Cheney, and it is very, very likely that Tony Blair and his various foreign secretaries knew it was going on. In what I can only assume to be damage limitation, much noise is being made here in the West that the U.S. is the kind of democratic country where the government can force one of its intelligence agencies to come clean about what it is up to and publish a report on the matter. The smug, though unstated, subtext is: try doing that in Kazakhstan, pal. Well, yippee! That’s fine then, democracy wins again. In that case tell that to those who were tortured.

Actually, that’s not fine, at all, but I am not about to go off on some knuckleheaded anti-American rant, because there are more than enough American citizens who are equally sickened by what the CIA - the ‘we never use torture CIA, yes that bunch - got up to.

Wiser heads have long pointed out that information apparently obtained by torture is rarely of any use because in the end those being tortured will tell you whatever they think will persuade you to stop torturing them.

Then there’s Guantanamo Bay and the poor fucking saps still incarcerated there for no better reason than the U.S administration would like to keep them incarcerated there.

Several British citizens, including Shayer Aamer, have been locked up Guantanamo Bay for many years, despite all the hoo-haa Britain indulges in about the principle of habeas corpus incorporated in our Magna Carta (in six months time exactly 900 years ago). The British government keeps telling us it is insisting that the U.S. should release those British citizens incarcerated there or charge them and bring them to trial, but they are getting nowhere.

Perhaps they would get a little further if they insisted a little more strongly. I don’t know. What strikes me as blindingly obvious is that no one should be in the least bit surprised at the outright hatred felt for the U.S. and Britain by many in the Middle East and, it seems increasingly here in Britain by many hotheads. Here we are preaching ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’ one minute and then torture and kill those to whom we are preaching those values the next.

Yes, I know the situation is not simple, yet in a sense it is very simple: Western behaviour has been obscenely hypocritical for decades and that behaviour shows no sign of abating. Of the three films - the fact that at the end of the day it was made as entertainment to make money for the producers notwithstanding - Body Of Lies was decent enough to portray the deceit, double standards, hypocrisy and the consequent outright stupidity of some in the U.S. in the character played by Russell Crowe, and even the nominal ‘hero’, played by Leonardo Di Caprio is no one to write home about, although by the end of the film he quits because he is too disillusioned. And yet it’s still only a fucking film.

There was no director to shout ‘cut’ to end the torture a great may went through at the hands of the CIA, no one to tell whoever was in charge that the chap they were keeping awake for nights and days on end - I think in the case cited it was 172 hours - should be allowed to get a decent night’s sleep. This wasn’t Hollywood make believe, this was real, real torture. But what’s going to happen? Nothing. Absolutely fucking nothing.

The West will go on preaching its stupid message that it wants to bring democracy and human rights to the Middle East, they will still not be believed, hotheads will still travel to Syria where they are likley to get themselves killed, and Hollywood will still go on making ‘entertainment’ out of real evil. Oh, and people like me will carry on writing, almost inarticulately because they feel so much anger at their impotence to do anything about what is nominally being done in their name, about the disgusting practice their governments get up to. And others will carry on reading what we are writing and dismissing it all as liberal codswallop. Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.

I have an 18-year-old daughter and a 15-year-old son. I like to hope that when they get to my age these things will not be happening any more. But I know they will. That’s the worst part of it.

I’m back and so is The French Stud

I’ve not written here for several weeks, and I’ve been wondering why. I know it has something to do with reaching a certain age at my last birthday, but it wasn’t that completely, either. But has spurred me on again to put fingers to keyboard is a comment my son has just made. Very often we will watch a film together on a Saturday night, and usually I watch something he will like rather than something I will like which could very well bore him. For example, I watched Killing Them Softly with Brad Pitt several times and think it’s a very good film.

Trouble is it isn’t actually what folk think it will be: just another shoot ‘em up flick with a few punch-ups and car chases (a la Miami Vice). I recommended it and we sat down to watch it (actually lay down, because my wife will have commandeered the TV set - we are a one-set household - so we watch it lying on my bed on my laptop with a earphone splitter. But that’s by the by. I recommended it and it started and I soon sensed he was getting bored (he’s 15/16). So after about 15 I asked him and he admitted he wasn’t enjoying it. From then on if I suggest a film or he asks me to suggest one, I’ll make sure it’s something he might be expected to enjoy.

Tonight I suggested David Fincher’s The Game. I saw it the other night - after having caught the last ten minutes several years ago, so I knew the ending, dammit - and enjoyed it. OK, it’s nothing but a Hollywood shaggy dog story, but it’s done with panache and if you haven’t seen it, i.e. don’t know the ending, it’s very intriguing.

Anyway, I suggested it and he asked ‘is it an old film’. No, I told him, it’s not. When was it made, he asked. I told him ‘1997’. Then it is an old film. I asked him how he worked that out. ‘It was made before I was born,’ he told me. Well, I sort of understand it. The trouble is that the early 1980s still, in some ways, seem like yesterday to me. But anyone born in, say, 1983, would today be 31. So they aren’t ‘like yesterday’.

Here are two more films which I rate a great deal but I’m sure would bore the pants off my son. The both star Tommy Lee Jones, who’s a cracking actor: The Three Burials Of Melquiades Estrada (which he also directed) and In The Valley Of Elah, which is a good take on the pressures which men and women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan had to suffer, although it isn’t a war film as such, but a thriller. Anyway, I’m back.

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The blogger stats tell me that the majority of visitors to this blog are interested in one Francois Hollande (aka The French Stud). I’m not, but the rule is to give your public what they want, so here is the latest pic of Hollande. This time he allows himself to be photograph looking a complete dick in a

 

full traditional Kazakh costume. Next to him is his dealer, one Nursultan Nazarbayev, who likes to be known as The President locally. But as Kazakhstan as an appalling human rights record and isn’t averse to locking up lazy bloggers and throwing away the key, I’d better keep my head down. Except to tell you that Nursultan Nazarbayev is a lovely, lovely man.

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It seems the euro is about to enter a new phase in its slow, but inexorable, journey down the pan, but that’s for another entry.