Something to be getting on with while I get my act together and tell you about my THREE new Mac laptops (bought secondhand, but in great condition) and desperately try to convince you that I am not a nutter. No, sirree, me a nutter who can’t stop buy laptops he doesn’t really need? She’s called Lina and writes and sings great songs

If these don’t play, load for you or even appear, try a different browser. They certainly work in Chrome, sometimes in Firefox and Safari, rarely in Opera. I’ve just installed ‘Maxthon’ on a Mac laptop, and it isn’t working. In Windows on Explorer they didn’t work, but did in Firefox. All very confusing. Beginning to wonder why I posted them in the first place. Sorry, but, you know, it’s an unfair world. Chrome does work, though. 

I’ve been coming across some great music recently. I was going to say ‘by chance’, but if you think about it more or less everything is ‘by chance’. You bump into a friend (say called, I don’t know, Peter Bailey or something like that, why not?) and you get to talk about music, and he says: ‘Pat, I heard this great track the other day, immediately went online to Amazon and bought it, and you’ll love it, I’ll email you an MP3.’ Well, it arrives and you do love it, but it was still ‘by chance’.

OK, so it was a ‘recommendation by a friend’ — but actually you just happened to bump into him that day; or you just happened to text him or ring him or email him and say ‘why don’t we meet up again, it’s been a while’. And that bumping into, happening to text, ring or email — when you could well at that moment have decided to do something else, I don’t know, not watch EastEnders ’cos it’s complete shite, or not watched Big Brother or Celebrity or Britain’s Got Talent ’cos they are complete pants, you get the drift — is still really ‘by chance’. So there you go: by chance.

Glad we got that out of the way, could well have made this entry a tad labourious.

So ‘by chance’ — the track below opens a film called High Crimes by Carl Franklin I was about to watch and still haven’t what with all the pfaffing around of recording this song from Spotify (I know, I know, shouldn’t and all that, but then I shouldn’t drink and drive but I do that all the time, I shouldn’t swear like a fucking trooper but I do that all the time, so, you know, get a life), editing it — you get extraneous bits fore and aft when you record songs illicitly from Spotify (and OK, so I have done it before, all right, so shop me) — then concerting it into an MP3, uploading it to a Google site where you can copy the location address, pasting that address (or part of it) into a piece of code I came across which bypasses the total hassle of creating a video for YouTube (cont p94).

So here it is, give it a listen and love it. I like it a lot, in fact so much that I have already ordered the singer’s first and third albums (after checking out the tracks on Spotify and each one I listened to is great). Listen to the track, then I’ll tell you a bit more about the little I know.



I’m Not The Enemy

BTW It seems this code doesn’t work on the Opera browser.

She’s called Lina and it seems she’s from Denver, Colorado. But rather than me simply repeat what I’ve read on Wikipedia, take a look yourself. And here’s her MySpace page. She doesn’t seem to have her own website. In fact, it’s all a bit of a mystery: she has recorded and released six albums but her ‘career’ seems to be going nowhere. Which is odd, because as a singer/songwriter she seems to have more talent in her little finger than any number of plastic Taylor Swifts. By the way, it seems her music is ‘neo-soul’. Oh well, it has to be called something.

Oh, well. If you like the track I’ve posted her, check out the rest of her stuff, some of which you can hear on MySpace, and if you like that, too, do that gal a favour and part with a few of your shekels and buy several of her albums. Of course, you might me more into that goddam awful country crap sung by very gay looking chaps in cowboy hats. Well, if that’s your bag, Lina most certainly isn’t. Which is your loss not her’s.

The kind of country singer dickhead who gives gays a bad name. His name is Dustin Lynch (should be Lunch), but he can’t be blamed for that.

Here’s one of Lina. Much more like it, isn’t it?

If you liked Lina, you might also like this track, Party Wit Me by Brownstone. OK, a bit old hat now and they aren’t half as sodding plastic as Taylor Swift, which will distress some of you, but it’s good
stuff. With love and kisses from your favourite blogger xxx



Party Wit Me

And as I’m on a roll, here are two from Johnny Guitar Watson. If you like guitar playing, you’ll like it on this one, I Wanna Ta Ta You:



I Wanna Ta Ta You

Then there’s this great little track, the man rapping around 15 years before everyone else invented rapping, it’s called Telephone Bill:



Telephone Bill

A picture of the lad:

And just for good measure, here’s a little Prince (literally in his case, of course), Do Me Baby:



Do Me Baby

The art of marketing: forget Leonardo and Joe Bach - our Jasmine and Piet have just had a wizard wheeze! And a few comments. Also latest on Putin: he’s back (but won't say where he was)

In the course of pursuing an honest living engaged in my day job and ensuring there will be bread on the table of my nearest and dearest (checking that the answers to the Masterquiz questions which will appear in the paper a page along from the questions are the correct ones – can life get any more exciting?) I came across the fact that Wu-Tang Clan has released a new album of which only one copy has been pressed and whose sale will come on condition it will not be played in public for 88 years. Well!

‘Wu-Tang Clan, m’lud? Well, they’re a sort of kind of “hip-hop” combo. They produce music which, I’m informed, is popular with many of the younger generation, m’lud, especially those youngsters who like to think they are “street”, a bit like, if I might venture to attempt to guess what might have been m’lud’s taste in popular music when m’lud was rather younger than he is now, a kind of Beach Boys or Supertramp or Brotherhood Of Man or Stevie Wonder, but a more insistent beat and ghetto lyrics.

“Ghetto” m’lud? Well, it’s where many of the young men who appear in m’lud’s court come from. “Street”, m’lud? Well, from what I can gather from my son, it has to do with using a certain kind of modern slang and pretending you are black, although I understand Wu-Tang Clan are black, so they don’t have to pretend. Yes, of course, m’lud, there is perhaps more to it than that, but perhaps m’lud will forgive me that I am not as au fait with the notion as, say, my son is.’)

That question and answer intrigued me, but I must admit that although the name Wu-Tang Clan did ring a bell, I really wasn’t too sure who they were and initially confused them with Bombay Bicycle Club (of whom I know equally as little and, after googling them now know they have even less in common than with me.

My first reaction was some rich oil sheikh with more money than sense had made an offer that Wu-Tang Clan couldn’t refuse and had bought the album for a sum similar to what it might be expected eventually to make on condition that they didn’t release it to the public. Why? Well, I assumed, it was some kind of novel one-upmanship: when the sheikh and his fellow too-rich-to-be-sane pals got together in his penthouse apartment in London or Paris or New York and were vying with each other as to who was the richest fuckwit of them all, he could whip out Wu-Tang Clan’s latest – it’s called The Wu - Once Upon A Time In Shaolin, for what it’s worth, which isn’t a lot because you’re never going to hear it – as his trump card. Makes a certain kind of sense, doesn’t it?

Then I googled Wu-Tang Clan and found there website (here) and got the full story. Here’s an excerpt: ‘Wu-Tang’s aim is to use the album as a springboard for the reconsideration of music as art, hoping the approach will help restore it to a place alongside the great visual works – and create a shift in the music business, not to mention earn some cash in the process.’ The album will go on

tour in galleries, but those attending will be searched for illicit recording equipment and to further ensure that no recordings will be made, they will only be able to hear it on headphones. Apparently, only one copy of the album has been pressed and this now sits in a custom-made ‘silver and nickel engraved box’ in a vault in the shadow of the Atlas Mountains.

The album’s main producer is someone called Tairk ‘Clivaringz’ Azzougarh (his quote marks, not mine), a chap – a rather pushy chap I would have thought according to the account on the website – who more or less wangled his way into producing the album, then wanted to come up with some novel way of ensuring it had as long a lifespan as possible. And that, m’lud, is, I suggest, the nub of it all. Read the Wu-Tang Clan website blurb and it all makes a certain sense: any number of singers and dancers seem desperate to attain the – to my mind rather spurious – status of ‘artist’ and so, it would seem, do Wu-Tang Clan (. . . use the album as a springboard for the reconsideration of music as art, hoping the approach will help restore it to a place alongside the great visual works . . .). And good luck to them.

But then putting on my cynical hat – which, admittedly, I choose rarely to remove – it struck me: essentially this is just a novel piece of marketing schtick. I mean record label marketing departments the world over must be more than desperate for their label’s clients to stand out from 1,001 other wannabes hoping to launch a career, but there really are only so many tricks. I should imagine that bog roll and washing powder manufacturers are perpetually faced with the same dilemma. And what better way to announce: this is our new album but none of you’se is gonna hear it, bro.

Well, actually, they will, though having it ‘appear’ in art galleries and the like the world over would pretty much ensure that at least half of their fans won’t come along, and that they will, presumably, instead simply attract any number of arty-farty groupies just dying, darling, to brag that they got a ticket to the Tate’s presentation of Wu-Tang Clan’s latest.

There is just one flaw in the whole manoeuvre: so they tour the album in art galleries, then sell off the only copy to the highest bidder who is, apparently, contracted not to allow it to be played in public for 88 years. But isn’t the whole point of buying or downloading the music you like that you can play it again and again and again and again and again (rather like my daughter has played again and again and again and again and again Let It Go, the theme song from Frozen)? I know it’s what I did when I had bought a single or album I liked. You might argue that they’ve got their money so what the hell, but I wouldn’t: I think it is just one more marketing ploy with a rather fatal flaw. . . .

After writing the above piece, I thought I might as well check out Wu-Tang Clan to see what all the fuss is about, and I have to report that I still don’t know what all the fuss is about. I should say that I am one of those poor saps for whom one hip-hop R&B track goes a very long way (rather like the blues, it has to be said), so perhaps I’m not one to judge. But the tracks I heard sounded rather cheesy and predictable. Sorry, lads.

As for this desire – call it an obsession if you like – to be regarded as ‘artists’ and what you produce as ‘art’, well, I don’t really get that, either. For one thing I am of the distinctly minority view that in the sense that most people talk of ‘art’ there is no such thing as ‘art’ – that ‘art has a moral purpose’, that ‘art has a social purpose’ etc ad nauseam (you probably watched the same TV programmes), well count me out. In this case it is probably quite apt to use the cliché ‘follow the money’ and take a close look at who exactly benefits from bigging up ‘art’: why gallery owners, curators, arts journalists and ‘experts’ of every stripe. And if some chappie appers on the gogglebox declaring that, say, what Gilbert & George produce is ‘art’ but that what Alma Tadema produce wasn’t (or at least is ‘bad art’), who are we to contradict. After all, he is ‘the expert’ and we are not.

Bring art back down to earth, I say, stop using is as some failsafe to gain spurious respect and/or pull the birds.

‘Putin ill’ shock. What can that mean for house prices?

There seems to be quite a crowded agenda of things which are about go belly up and disrupt our lives accordingly. Many, if not most, need not concern us here in Tellytubby land (aka Great Britain, the UK and Old Blighty), but the aftershock of some might well upset our teatime regimes and ensure that the good folk at the Foreign Office don’t knock off at lunchtime on a Friday, but hang around to sort matters out. Where can one begin?

The whole business with Greece - will they, won’t they fuck up the European part of the Western World by telling their creditors to piss off and re-introduce a glass of ouzo as their preferred unit of currency - might for some take centre stage. But let’s be honest, there’s enough shit going on in the world (at least in the Northern Hemisphere - South America, African nations, Asia have enough troubles of their own and aren’t necessarily inclined to spend their time worrying about us however much we might feel put out by their disinterest).

Elsewhere there’s the battle to kick ISIS (IS or ISIL, never trust anyone with more than two names) out of Mosul, then Tikrit (or Tikrit, then Mosul - subs please check), which might superficially sound encouraging until you hear of the concerns of those familiar with that neck of the woods that the Shia militias - which make up a substantial part of the forces fighting IS (ISIS or ISIL, never trust anyone with more than two names - same joke, but I go along with Sam Goldwyn who believed that ‘if they liked it once, they’ll love it twice’) - might well not stick to the more or less admirable plan to neutralise IS, but carry on and kill each and every Sunni they come across.

This, the worriers concede, might well irritate the Saudis - Sunnis to a man (forget about the woman there I’m told). Given that conventional wisdom insists that almost all the trouble in the Middle East is at heart a proxy war between the Sunni Saudis and the Shi’ite Iranians, any ‘peace envoys’ from anywhere are quite simply wasting their time. But that’s not quite it: there’s also the ongoing bollocks in Eastern Ukraine. And that is where the latest piece of news I have come across fits in.

. . .

I have almost finished reading Petet Pomerantsev’s very interesting and very readable book Nothing Is True And Everything Is Possible, and it gave me a fascinating insight into - well, it has to be said - metropolitan Russia, i.e. Moscow. Then, last night, I watched a BBC 2 Newsnight report about the gunning down of Boris Nemtsov which suggested that Vladimir Putin is perhaps not quite as in control of Russia as many, probably Putin himself, like to think. And then I came across these two accounts in the Guardian and the Telegraph, both suggesting that Putin might be ill.

The first thing I noticed was that his age was given as 62. Well, I thought, he’s as healthy as a rat in shit - I’m 65, three years older and have never felt fitter, so why the bloody hell should he be ill? Nonsense, of course - my mother died of a massive heart attack at 60.

No one actually knows whether Putin is ill. They only know that ‘he hasn’t be seen in public’ since March 5. First question: so what? I have just spent three days in bed with a bad cold (for my feminist readers who like to have a good laugh: man flu) and I wasn’t ‘seen in public’ for three days. But there’s the rub: first of all it is now March 12, so Putin ‘hasn’t been seen in public’ for seven days.

Then there’s the obvious point - good of you to point it out - that in the context of world peace I am not half as important or even as influential as Putin. So what can it mean? Well, I don’t know, to be honest. And I must admit that feeling, as one does, quite low when one is afflicted by a bout of man flu, it is a relief not to be obliged to release hourly bulletins as to how you are getting one, with additional piccies to substantiate the veracity of the bulletins.

Folk like Putin, apparently, are obliged to. Or else we must Fear The Worst! Putin is, after all, the man of iron who is apt to wrestle two tigers solo before breakfast. I have noted before in my many ramblings about the former Soviet Union - for I think it is healthier to see it in those terms rather than Russia - that what is most worrying about what is happening there and what might affect us here in the West is the question of succession. It isn’t as though there is some respected and trusted mechanism for the passing on of power.

It seems that there are two distinct factions in the Kremlin as regards the Ukraine: the Peace faction and the War faction. And the names speak for themselves. So - if they exist and it is not all some figment of some journalist’s imagination - to which faction does Putin belong?

Just for the craic, to keep you occupied while I think up my next inconsequential, derivative, faux relevant entry.

I was looking for some piccies I once used in this blog - the entry was about personal internet radios - and searching Google images I came across a lot of others I have used over the years. So here are several, with value added.

OK, so I lied, but look at the bigger picture: I'm now fucking rich, really, really rich. And a lot bloody richer than you.

Well, it was odd, you know: at first I thought 'Me, a gorilla, get a mortgage? It doesn't make sense!' And then, of course, it made complete bloody sense. 

Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck! Did I switch the fucking gas off? Did I? Did I? Oh no! Fuck, fuck!

I don't care if you're gay, just tell my friends that you fuck me stupid every night. Please! Please!

Philosophy? Philosophy? Who gives a flying fuck about philosophy? I've got wine! Get a life!

Jesus, if only I'd started a pension plan when my dad advised me to!

‘. . . and she really, honestly thought we would be impressed! I ask you!’

. . .

Incidentally, while I am compiling this entry (sitting at the kitchen table), my wife, in the living room, is watching something on TV going through ‘hits of the past’, you know that kind of crap, the kind of thing TV puts on to keep its older viewers sweet by letting them pretend they are not yet dying of old age. There were quite a few songs wafting through to where I am sitting which I like. And one or two I don’t like at all, and never have. And what kicked of this addendum to the above post was Wuthering Heights by Kate Bush. Well, make that ‘sodding Kate Bush’, because I don’t mind going public on the fact that I loathe her and her music (except for one song, Babooshka). Who in their right minds likes to listen to a banshee shrieking with lots of faux profound lyrics?

As I am on a roll, I also loathe sodding Nick Drake and don’t particularly care for Tim Buckley or his son Jeff. There, I’ve said it!

PS As I write, there’s another song that has just startd playing that I also I loathe: Bridge Over sodding Troubled bloody Water. I otherwise quite like many things by Simon and Garfunkel and later on just Paul Simn (50 Ways To Leave Your Lover is a great song). But not that one, not Bridge Over sodding Troubled bloody Water. Then there’s sodding John Lennon’s Give Peace A Chance (yeah, right - the irony, the real irony, is that you have to fight for peace. If you want to ponder on the nature and essence of irony, ponder on that one, rather pertinent given all the recent furore about Britain’s Bomber Command bombing Dresden. Wake up, John. Oh, I forgot, he’s dead).

Principles? I have several, though not quite the kind you are thinking off. And who is this Vladislav Surkov? Answers on the usual postcard, please. As for ‘media studies’ degrees, well, stick ‘em up your jacksie (Prof Peter Cole and Prof Roy Greenslade, once, in a saner life when they didn’t take themselves quite so seriously, Pete and Roy from the Pig and Whistle)

It would be misleading – ironically, given who we are dealing with – to claim the print industry – that’s ‘newspapers’ in words we can all understand – and those who work in it don’t have principles. Of course they do. It’s just that their principles are not wholly admirable, but as we generally assume that ‘principles’ are noble beasts, a hack usually keeps his principles to him or herself.

One very useful principle in the life of a hack is: ‘Simplify, then exaggerate’. In that way you don’t confuse the poor reader with detail which they won’t understand – and which you don’t understand, either – but once you have reduced it to primary colours, then given it the necessary spin, well, you have a story. I came across a great example of the principle of ‘simplify, then exaggerate’ the other day when I passed a desk here at work on which a copy of the Daily Express was lying. A day or two earlier, writing in the British Medical Journal Aseem Malhotra, an ‘interventional cardiology specialist registrar at Croydon University hospital, London’ (impressed? I am) said that butter, cheese, red meat and the rest weren’t necessarily the fast track to a quick and early death we have been told they were for the past 30-odd years.

In fact, the data on which that claim had been based was potentially misleading in that it did not cover women. Furthermore, all the substitute ‘spreads’ we had been urged to used instead of butter – I call it crap, and have never given up butter, but that is neither here nor there – might well be more harmful than what they were intended to replace. So far, so interesting and for someone like me who loves butter and cheese, rather reassuring.

 The story was, of course, covered by all the British national newspapers to with varying degrees of responsibility: the Guardian played it straight, the Daily Telegraph – here and here - gave it only the slightest of spin, the Daily Mail managed to sound outraged (but then the Mail is easily outraged on behalf of its readers - outraged readers always come back for more), and the Mirror (formerly the Daily Mirror, and why did they change the title?) also played it straight. What the hell, not much of a story really. But it was the Daily Express which won the cigar in tabloid terms: what was that principle – ‘simplify, then exaggerate’? That is what the Express did, and here’s it’s front page – it’s a classic

Er, not quite. And if you want another a further taste of the Daily Express’s exemplary journalism, try this (at the bottom of the post).

 . . .

Before I took up the life of a sub-editor, ensuring commas were in the right place and that any names mentioned in a news story or feature weren’t misspelled more than once, I was a reporter for six years, first for two weekly papers, then an evening paper, then a morning paper. I mention the papers I worked for because the industry has changed to such an extent here that the usual route to working for one of ‘the nationals’ here in Britain has changed a great deal.

Once you started ‘your career’ – of maybe it’s only mine which deserves the inverted commas – on a weekly paper reporting on flower shows and interviewing crashing bores who own the county’s largest collection of antique beer mats, eventually moved on to the local evening, then a regional morning paper before trying your luck in The Smoke – having made all your awful mistakes by then and learned never to repeat them. These days ‘the nationals’ now seem to take on graduate trainees who are given a brief guide to telling one end of a sentence from the other before joining up and being paid a pittance. Actually, that is probably truer of trainee sub-editors on the nationals. The reporters given shifts by the newsdesk must be reasonably clued up to warrant getting the work so they probably did spend some time as a local newspaper reporter.

I joined the Lincolnshire Chronicle on June 4, 1974, and got fuck-all official training until the following spring when I was sent on a two-month course to learn shorthand and ‘law for journalism’ at Richmond College, Sheffield. Before then I picked up a little on the job, though to be frank that is not necessarily the worst way to go about it. I can’t speak for others, but as far as I am concerned being a newspaper journalist – and I far prefer the term ‘hack’ which doesn’t, as far as I am concerned, carry any negative connotation – is essentially practical, and you can do it or you can’t.

So the bright girls and boys will pick up what they are supposed to be doing in hours, the rest of us took several months to get the lay of the land, and the thickos won’t pick up much at all (and, as a rule, will become the big ‘bastard management’ ‘join the union’ tub-thumpers and full of stories such as ‘they offered me a job on Fleet Street, but we like it round here’ to justify why in career terms they never even left the starting block. Years ago, the thickos who really couldn’t cut it used to drift off into a press officers’ job, public relations and dead-end jobs on trade papers where they would usually die in harness 30 years later. Latterly, PR and press officering has become a damn sight slicker and a great money-spinner if you are any good at it, mainly because the aim is no longer to assist hacks as once it was, but to obstruct them and make sure their pay masters’ arses are covered.

The bright, ambitious ones, on the other hand, were quick on the uptake, seemed to have been around for ages within two days of starting, knew everything that was going on before it had even happened and then were gone and on their way up the ladder within months: bugger if they broke a contract of employment which articled them to a paper for two or three years – the sharper they were, the more contracts they broke: and the news editors they now worked for were glad to get a good operator - good news editors want stories, are never too fussy how they are obtained and if your bright new reporter has fewer scruples than Liberace had wives, who cares?

NB While I was working on the Lincolnshire Chronicle, I got friendly with a hack on the Lincolnshire Echo, the local evening paper, called Peter Kraft. He – I saw them all – had five different driving licences (OK, it was four, but that is gen), all in slight variations of his name. All had penalty points and endorsements.

Then there was the Guardian reporter who arrived in Lincoln in October 1974 to do a piece on the local constituency battle between the sitting MP Dick Taverne and then Margaret Jackson (later the Cabinet minister Margaret Beckett). Taverne had been kicked out of the Labour party the previous year over his enthusiasm for the then European Community – Labour weren’t at all keen in those days. 

Taverne had then formed an independent Labour party in Lincoln and held onto his seat in the February 1974 election, but that October he was defeated by Margaret Jackson/Beckett). The Guardian reporter was Peter Cole, now ‘Emeritus Professor’ in the Department of Journalism Studies at the University of Sheffield, who went on to be editor of the extremely short-lived Sunday Correspondent (September 1989 to November 1990 – will they ever learn?). We both attended a Press conference along with one or two other hacks and I, the trainee scruff from the local weekly was rather in awe of the Guardian journalist from The Smoke and chatted with him.

During the Press conference I noticed that he didn’t have shorthand (and neither did I at that point). So I asked him how he could record what people said – get quotes? ‘Oh,’ he told me loftily. ‘I give a flavour of what they say.’ Well, I now know what he means – and very, very few folk can remember the exact words they used ten minutes ago and if you write a quote they can't remember, well, they can’t remember, see, and that’s what you tell them – but I did, at the time, think – remember, I was still quite a keen young thing then and had high hopes of making my way – ‘that’s a bit iffy, isn’t it? How can you get quotes if you don’t record exactly what people say?’

Incidentally, others might disagree, but this hack has always felt that turning journalism into an academic subject is grade A bullshit – take note 'Professor' Roy Greenslade, who seems to be forever living off the fact that he once got a tearound in while working at The Sun. (Actually, he was deputy editor for a while, but I make my comments in the spirit of this blog post.) As for a ‘media studies’ degree, the best place for it is as far up your arse as you can stick it without killing yourself.

Notwithstanding that any and every degree course - whether media studies, PPE, history, English Literature, languages or tourism - is most certainly valuable if it trains you brain, mind and intellect to think and gives you the means to tackle almost any job successfully after learning a little bit more about it, you’ll learn as much about reporting, feature writing, dealing with the public and all the rest of what makes up a hack’s professional life from a media studies course as you will be able to learn to drive by reading the Highway Code. Doing it will teach you.

More to the point, they would often rather not know what’s been going on: deniability is worth its weight in gold and not to be sneered at, and as long as you don’t fuck them over. These bright young things used to scare the shit out of me: me sharp? Not in a million years. (I’ve since discovered there’s a lot to be gained by being thought sharp, but that’s another story. The secret is to keep schtumm: if someone thinks you’re a sharp, bright cookie, don’t open your mouth and prove them wrong.)

. . .

One of the first journalistic principles most young reporters hear about – though not all of them seem to adopt it given some of the badly written news stories I occasionally spot in local papers – is quite simple: ‘Don’t let a couple of facts spoil a good story.’ Speaks for itself really: if you have a good tale to tell – and, let’s face it, despite all the hi’falutin talk of the public’s right to know and how the job of the Press is to keep authority in check, all that phoney Lou Grant crap – don’t ruin it.

If a 90-year-old widow has been robbed blind by the local council but the whole matter was at first swept under the carpet but was then eventually sorted out amicably, leave the bit about the happy end until a very short final paragraph, if ‘Council screws widow, 90, rotten!’ is the story you want. OK, you might on the other hand want a hearts and flowers story, because it’s already got out and other papers are carrying it, so that happy ending does go further up the story, but not too far up. The rule is: misery, heartbreak, disaster, grief and all their brothers, sisters and first cousins are hot. Always remember that wise advice: ‘Boy Scout does good deed’ doesn’t sell too many copies and it isn't truth newspapers are after, but big bucks whatever they might tell you.

A reporter for only six years? I hear you ask. Not very long, is it? No, it isn’t. Dear reader, even though I say so myself, I wasn’t a bad reporter, but I wasn’t destined for the top, either. I’ve already admitted that each of the bright, keen-as-mustard young things I worked side-by-side with before they were on their way again before you could even catch your breath scared the shit out of me, and in my heart I knew I wasn’t one of them. Certainly, there are other avenues for a reporter to make her or his way – education correspondent, health correspondent, local authority correspondent – but the truth is I wasn’t interested.

I don’t – and was slowly realising it then – give a flying fuck about ‘news’. My attitude is if it’s important, I’ll hear about it sooner or later, and I consider the standard obsession with ‘hearing the latest development’ a sign of neurosis. So you can see why bit by bit I came to realise that whatever my future was to be in newspapers, it wasn’t going to be as a reporter. There's also the small matter that the public - civilians call them ‘the general public’ - are as a rule dull as ditchwater, never finish their sentences when you need that quote (so you are obliged to make it up), and broadly go on and on an on for hours after you have got what you want and no longer need to talk to them.

Then, of course, there was the little matter of closing down Newcastle airport and grounding all flights all on my own which helped to persuade me that reporting was not to be my long-term future and that I should seek out another avenue - did someone say career path? - in this glorious industry of ours, But that, too, is for another day. But I will say this: that embarrassing matter with Newcastle airport did help me acquire another of my principles, and an invaluable on even though I learned about the hard way, is: Never come clean - ever!

Incidentally, I might perhaps be painting too rosy a picture of our glorious industry. But if you are still intent on making a name for yourself by indulging in all that ‘Lou Grant crap’, don’t bother doing so in, among other countries, Syria, Iraq, Ukraine, Somalia, Pakistan, Paraguay and Brazil – you might well end up dead long before the fags and booze claim you. So far in 2015 – not even two months old – 16 journalists have died in one way or another. In 2014 it was 61. Take a look here for more information.
. . .

I  mentioned a certain Peter Pomerantsev and his new book Nothing Is True And Everything Is Possible the other day. (Here is a review of it which appeared in the Guardian.) He was on the radio this morning on a programme called Start The Week (unfortunately this morning presented by Andrew Marr, but that was just a one-off) and he was giving further details of his take on life in Putin’s Russia. Naturally, this is just his views of the situation there, but whether they reflect the reality or not – and, well, I’m going to go for ‘they do’ – Russia seems like a wackier version of Alice In Wonderland. Pomerantsev mentioned a character called ‘Surkov’ upon whom, it’s claimed, Putin relies quite a bit.

Vladislav Surkov is billed here as more or less the author of Putinism and is said to pull many of the strings. According to Pomerantsev even the opposition parties are Kremlin-sponsored to give the appearance of – well, democracy. Who knows? Could be true, Pomerantsev could be just another stooge putting out a set of lies to counteract another set of lies. After all, ‘nothing is true and everything is possible’. There was even the claim on the programme that Putin’s anti-gay drive at the time of the Sochi Winter Olympics was all a sham, a pose, though I can’t off-hand now remember what – if that is true – it was intended to achieve.

I’ve ordered the book from Amazon and it should arrive tomorrow. I look forward to reading it.

Hold on to your hats, times are getting more interesting

If one can take a dispassionate view of something, not be swayed by emotion but examine it as a doctor might examine a broken leg, now is the time to take another look at two things: the euro and Nato. Now is the time because both could well be facing the ultimate stress test, and if they fail they will, among other things, be consigned to history. I say ‘among other things’ because of different consequences of them failing, being consigned to history will be the least interesting and least important consequence. We will be worrying about other things.

The stress test Nato might soon be facing will be brought about by one Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia who has, to put it mildly, been in the news recently. As usual, I can only go on what I read in the media and hear on TV and radio, but by those accounts Putin wants to re-establish Russian pride and the pre-eminence it once had in world affair. Nothing much wrong with that, of course, but it is the means by which he seems to be doing it which is causing concern in the West (which is again putting it mildly). I am not one for taking very seriously pub bores and wholesale merchants of instant opinion, but I am inclined to listen carefully to the view of former British ambassadors to Moscow, and one of those in Tony Brenton (as he cares to sign his newspaper articles) aka Sir Antony Brenton, who was ‘our man in Moscow’ from 2004 to 2008. Brenton says he first came across Putin when he was mayor of St Petersburg and where he was a man who ‘got things done’.

A potted history of Putin from Brenton is that after a somewhat misspent early youth when by his own account he behaved like a hooligan, Putin, whom Brenton credits with ‘iron self-discipline’, took an interest in judo and went on to study law. After graduating he joined the KGB with whom he served until the KGB-backed attempted putsch on Mikhail Gorbachev. Brenton and others also say Putin plays things very close to his chest and can be alarmingly laconic. He also stands out in that he is a teetotaller (as we all know drinking doesn’t exactly keep the mind clear), keeps himself very fit for a man of his age and is always impeccably turned out, which, Brenton, records rather sets him apart from the men who surround him.

Elsewhere I have read that Putin, despite the belief in the West that he has some kind of masterplan, is actually more someone who reacts to situations. So, for example, when the West more or less did nothing over what can only be regarded as Russia’s acquisition of the Crimea (and many Russians would describe it as a ‘re-acquisition), Putin was emboldened to push his luck a little further. So now Russia is, apparently, actively supporting the ‘rebels in Eastern Ukraine’. One suggestion is that Russia would like to have control of a sizeable strip of Eastern Ukraine in order to have a land link to the Crimea which it doesn’t, at present, have.

There is also the suggestion, however, that despite its support for the insurrectionists, Russia doesn’t have as much ‘control’ over them as the West believes. Most recently, Germany’s Angela Merkel and France’s Francois Hollande flew off to Moscow for what turned out to be abortive talks with Putin in view of the deteriorating situation in Eastern Ukraine. (Incidentally, I’ll leave the questions as just

                                                           As some see it . . .                                               ©ft.com
how popular the insurrection is and just how much support the rebels command among the general population for others to answer. As usual with such questions, you reads the papers, you pays your price and you makes your choice, which is to say most of us give the most credence to those reports which seem to substantiate the view we already hold. Me, I have no idea and no means of establishing ‘the truth’.)

After that visit, from which Merkel and Hollande returned ‘empty-handed’ and which was compared by some to Neville Chamberlains’ flight to Munich for a chat with ‘Herr Hitler’, rather alarming talk began of an incipient World War III. Here, I’ll succumb to the temptation to give the most credence to those reports which seem to substantiate our views, in my case my hope: Brenton – I think it was Brenton in a piece for the Daily Telegraph, but it might well have been someone else – suggested that Putin will not try to take on Nato, by for example invading one of the Baltic states, its newer members, because he knows that in the long run he will be the loser. The trouble is, of course, that even if that is true and Putin and Russia do come off second best in a dust-up with Nato, a great many lives will have been lost and a great deal of disruption will have been caused in the meantime.

While Merkel and Hollande opt for the jaw-jaw approach to defusing this crisis, Barack Obama yesterday declared that he would not rule out arming the Ukrainian government as it battles to defeat the insurrection in the east of its country. Many see that as the worse possible thing to do in that it can only help escalate the situation. Others, and this is the view I subscribe to, see it was the West playing good cop/bad cop with Putin, though if they are doing that, it will not be lost on Russian president and so, in a sense, is all rather pointless. If Putin does decide to test the West’s mettle and makes some kind of move into any of the Baltic states, that is when Nato’s stress test will start: under its treaty obligations and attack on any member is to be seen as an attack on all its members and to be dealt with accordingly.

I personally can’t see China sitting quietly by if the situation does escalate badly. As far as I know China is most certainly intent on world domination but only in an economic sense. Any military aggression it decides to engage in will be pretty local. I think that is also true of Russia: whatever else one might think of Putin (and the German in me is rather attracted to his reputed self-discipline), he is most certainly not daft and it would seem very unlikely that he would make a move which could result in real damage to his country despite what real damage he could cause elsewhere. He does not strike me as the kind of man who would cut off his nose to spite his face.

How all this will play out remains to be seen. (There was a claim on the radio last night that Putin and Russia are financially supporting various right-wing and extreme right groups such as France’s Front National, but that is the first I’ve heard, so all I can do here is – rather lamely – to report that some are claiming it to be the case.)

NB Britain’s Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond was on the radio the other night warning along the lines that the West could not stand by while a nation deployed troops in another country and violated that country’s sovereignty. My first thought was ‘didn’t the bloody Foreign Office have someone to hand to go through what someone like Hammond intends to say and edit it accordingly? And if they did and she or he let this though they should be sacked immediately.’ For wasn’t that a very succinct summation of what the U.S. and the UK did in Iraq? And wouldn’t Putin and Russia quite legitimately be able to claim ‘what’s sauce for the goose…’ Yes, of course they could and can, which is why Hammond shouldn’t have said it in the first place. But he has and I don’t doubt it will all come back to haunt him at some point.

For an interesting take on the situation try this from the Financial Times. (You might have to register to read it, but registration is free and you won't be inundated emails and offers. High quality global journalism requires investment.) He concludes:

A collapsing oil price and the impact of sanctions have made [Putin] more dangerous: without oil and gas revenues, his domestic support now rests on his capacity to mobilise nationalist anger against the alleged attempt by Nato and the EU to subjugate ‘mother Russia’. The west’s options are limited, but the beginning of wisdom is to understand that this is not just about Ukraine.

. . .

How the growing euro crisis plays out will, on the other hand, be known a lot sooner. Greece, under is new ‘extreme left’ government – I put the description in inverted commas because I think it is complete cobblers – has announced that it wants a very large proportion of its debts written off and and end put the austerity programme imposed on it. The crunch point will be reached within the next three weeks when another tranche of the money it is being loaned is due. If that is withheld, and it at the moment it seems likely it will be. If that happens, the Greek government run out of money and go bust. And if that happens it seems likely that it will leave the euro, either by being kicked out or leaving voluntarily.

The EU is caught between a rock and a hard place: if it gives into Greece’s demands for some of its debts to be written off and the austerity programme to end, it will attract not just the ire of Ireland which gamely played the game and submitted to austerity, but also face demands from Spain (which now has it’s own anti-austerity party) and Portugal (which, like Ireland, also gamely played the game) of similar favours. If it doesn’t give in, Greece defaults and is forced out of the euro, it is possible that the whole currency will in time collapse. Britain is already said to be making contingency plans for such a collapse, as, I’m sure, everyone else is too.

So what with all that, the onward march of ISIS in the Middle East and the ongoing civil war in Syria it looks very much as though we are increasingly living in the ‘interesting times’ the Chinese were apt to which on their enemies.

America Russia, Russia America – I’d like to explore both, but Russia does have an added morbid fascination. Oh, and let me introduce you to one Vitali Dyomochka, who has a lot going for him (not least, I suspect, a good brain)

It’s odd how you come across people and facts which interest you. I have long considered – once I retire and have saved enough money to do so – to take an extended break in the U.S. – that is, one longer than the customary two weeks most folk take to learn about the country and its people from the side of a pool in Florida – to travel the country. We hear so much about the U.S. and see so much about it on TV and in the films that I thought it might be worth taking a look at the real country.

So much of it resonates: New England, the ‘Deep South’, California, the Appalachian Mountains, the Great Plains, Montana, Utah, Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, LA and New York – you get the picture. For one thing, however much I dislike the behaviour of successive governments and their attitudes and am shocked at many instances of their hypocrisy, when I have come across ‘ordinary’ Americans, they have invariably been extremely pleasant folk (though as someone once pointed out, the ‘ordinary’ Americans one comes across in Britain are those who have bothered venture out of their country and visit abroad, so perhaps they might not be quite as ‘ordinary’ and representative. Who knows. I was once bemused when I was asked for advice while on London’s Tube by an American. He asked me how safe it was to walk around London. Where are you heading to, I ask. Holland Park, he told me. Oh, I assured him, you will perfectly safe, and only allowed myself to laugh out aloud once he had got off at his station.)

. . .

I have only spent a week in the U.S. and that week was spent in New York. And what struck me quite forcefully was that although Britain and the U.S. have a language in common, it is as much a ‘foreign country’ for us Brits as are Spain, Bulgaria, Greece and Sweden. It is that shared use of English which is misleading. What I was also struck by was how far more polite were the folk I met than your average snotty-nosed Brit, but, on the downside, how unexpectedly regimented life seemed to be. It began with the excessively officious border control lady at the airport who treated me as a criminal merely for daring to visit the US of A, and continued a few days later on the subway. I was heavily into photography at the time and taking a lot of pictures.

I had just taken a picture of a train arriving and was just about to take another when a cop – a short-statured female cop but with enough weaponry hanging around her body to equip the army of a small nation – approached and told me photography wasn’t allowed on the subway. Fair enough, I thought, and began to put all my gear away. That’s when a passer-by intervened and instructed me to ignore the cop and carry on taking pictures. No, I said, that’s fine, I’ll do as she says. No go, on take your pictures, she said (it was another woman) and began arguing with the cop. Very quickly the situation got out of hand, and although I didn’t say a word, in the ensuing argument the cop almost arrested the woman and me. It was surreal.

It isn’t however, just the U.S. which has a certain fascination for me: I should also like to spend more than the usual touristy two weeks travelling around Russia. That, of course, would prove to be far more difficult as I don’t speak a work of Russian. But, just as with the U.S. you pick up this and that, here and there, snippets, half-facts, which intrigue you and which, in my case, decide you to find out a little more. Where could I start listing the bits and pieces I ‘know’ about Russia which make that country interesting? Its composers, its writers, its history (the little I know), its language (when I hear Russian women talking to each other, as one often does outside the office here in High St. Kensington, they always, always, always sound as though they are complaining, but the men don’t), its various political systems, from the ruthless autocracy of the czars, to the tyranny of that secular czar Josef Stalin, to the growing and apparently also quite ruthless autocracy of one Vladimir Putin (and I gather life wasn’t fun if you got the wrong side of that autocracy and it still isn’t) Then there’s the drinking – no one, it seems, can drink quite like the Russians, though given how cold it gets, that is really no surprise.

Doesn’t sound like much fun, but Russians seem to have one thing which in America, as far as I can tell, only its blacks possess: soul. Where the Americans have Coca Cola, the Russians have vodka; where the Americans have football (with the whole helmets, padded look – British rugby players always laugh themselves sick), Russia has chess.

Then there is an anecdote, sadly wholly apocryphal but it makes a point well, that when returning American astronauts complained that their ballpoint pens were useless in space, drying up, refusing to write when held upside down and generally a pain, Nasa scientists spend a great deal of time and money coming up with a ballpoint pen which would solve those problems. Russians astronauts had reported the same problems: they were issued with pencils. It does tend to describe something. OK, there might well be other interesting countries, but somehow Russia grabs my interest.

. . .

It was because that interest that last week I tuned into the BBC Radio 4’s Book Of The Week which it broadcasts every day from 9.45am to 10am, and repeats it 12 hours later from 12.30am to 12.45am. Last week the chosen book from which five 15-minute excerpts were broadcast was by Peter Pomerantsev called Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart Of The New Russia, and boy did Russia sound surreal. Pomerantsev is a Ukrainian who was brought up in London and who went to work in as a producer for Russian television.

The stories he had to tell about Russia in the Putin which he feels illuminate life there at the beginning of the 21st century included that of one of the girls who make a career of being the mistress of a rich man, a woman who suddenly found herself in court on drugs changes when the industrial solvent she was selling was reclassified by corrupt officials as a substance used to make drugs; and, for me most fascinating of all, the story of a gangster from the Russian Far East.

. . .

Vitali Dyomochka (pictured below right) sounds like an extraordinary man. His story, as recounted in Pomerantsev’s book, was that after shining at school, he drifted into crime as the Soviet era came

to a close and the country was run by Boris Yeltsin and did well for himself. He served several spells in jail for various offences, including murder, apparently, and when he was released from the last sentence came to lead a gang called Postava which specialised in rigging car crashes and forcing the other drivers to pay extortionately for repairs. This went well for several years until the Putin ear began. Bit by bit as more authority was taken into the hands of the KGB successor the FSB and the freebooting became harder, Dyomochka decided enough was enough and instead of a life of crime he would become a filmmaker. He felt that the series and kind of films shown on Russian TV and in cinemas were ludicrously inaccurate and misleading, so using his own gang (and its victims) he would make a series showing what real gang life was like. And the series Spets was made and screen on local TV.

There was no script, Dyomochka’s gang played themselves (and many were jailed during filming and one was murdered), the characters being beaten up were men who owed Dyomochka a debt and agreed to be beaten up for real in front of the camera if that debt was reduced. Real bullets were used and the ‘staged’ car crashes were real car crashes. There was even a claim that local police agreed to play ‘local police’, with one quote as saying ‘we work for gangsters anyway, so why not work for a different set for a change’. To be fair, this is disputed and many local police were very unhappy with Dyomochka’s film career, turning up on set to arrest him first thing in the morning and holding him to dusk so that there wasn’t enough light to film. Believe what you will – most probably both versions are true (in keeping with the theme of Pomerantsev’s book where ‘nothing is true and everything is possible’.

I say, and truly believe, that Dyomochka is an intelligent and very capable man, because he has now apparently knocked gangsterism and crime on the head – so to speak, and am apt metaphor given his previous life – and has become a novelist, writing comic crime novels. And by all accounts they sell. And I suspect that he didn’t end his life of crime for any moralistic reasons but because he’s bright – given the far more powerful gangsters who now seem to run the country, he probably reasoned that it was wisest to get out while the going was good. A man after my own heart; never push your luck.

I don’t really drink a lot anymore – I am thoroughly sick of hangovers these days – and when I do drink, I tend to stick to wine, port, sherry, Campari – anything, in fact, except spirits. But were I obliged to drink a spirit, I would make it vodka and would like to do so in the company of Vitali Dyomochka. Dyomochka’s resemblance to Vladimir Putin was commented on in Pomerantsev’s book, but I know who I would prefer to drink with and it isn’t Putin. За твоё здоровье, жизненный!

Beware The Euro In Your Wheelbarrow, or an idiot’s guide to big words

Quantitative easing? Isn’t that where a central bank tries to create just a little inflation to get the economy moving again while pretending it isn’t creating just a little inflation? Or is it where a central bank tries to create just a little inflation to get the economy moving again while pretending it isn’t creating just a little inflation, but creates a whole lot of inflation and fucks things up even worse? Nice term though, reassuring, as though they know what they are doing. Many of you will have come across the definition of an economist as someone who is able to explain convincingly to today why what he convincingly predicted yesterday didn’t happen. And if you haven’t come across it before you have now. The term ‘quantitative easing’ is related to that: sounds great, sophisticated, intelligent, reassuringly complex and if and when things go tits up, no one really knows why and it can all be explained away in a jiffy.

Economists are rather like ad agencies - those who resort to their services don’t really have any idea whether or not they are worth the money spent hiring them, but dare not do without them in case they do know what they are talking about. I am fascinated by economics, but at one remove.

Years ago I was one of many who was baffled by all the talk of us selling chairs to America and America paying us in bread, but got lost soon afterwards. Similarly with the ways of the City and the stock markets - I was suitably impressed by all the waffle until - in my case rather late in the day - I realised that all the jargon used was not primarily a means of fellow practitioners being able to talk to each other in their own shorthand, but was primarily intended to make sure the rest of us didn’t have a clue as to what was going on.

A good example is when talk turns to a highly leveraged company: well, you think, highly leveraged! Well! Must be a success! Then you find out that what it actually means is that the company has either

borrowed a lot of money or, at the very least, the money it owes is considerably larger than the financial value of its assets (many of which will be illiquid i.e. it would take a while to turn them into ready cash to meet your debts if you had to and, anyway, by turning them into cash you could well put yourself out of business - in Dick and Dora terms if a company’s main asset is the factory in which it produces goods, selling that factory for ready cash in order to see off creditors would pretty much mean the end of that company as it would be unable to produce any more goods (unless it leased back the factory).

It’s my contention that essentially economics is just another way of observing and describing human behaviour. But even on that simple, some would claim simplistic, basis, it will pretty soon fail as a discipline in that it assumes that in any given situation we will all more or less behave in the same way. The trouble is we don’t. Some might well settle for selling what they produce at the market price, but others, who are greedier, might well settle for trying to manipulate the market in order to push up the price they can charge.

That goes on in the diamond market where producers make damn sure supply is kept to certain limits in order to keep prices high. It is also going on in the oil industry where several oil producers have boosted supply to bring down prices - the price of a barrel has halved over these past months - to make shale gas a less attractive alternative and, they hope, in time to put shale gas producers out of business. Once they are, supply will again be limited, prices will once again go up and, the oil producers hope, life will get back to being grand again.

Economists are well able to describe what is going on - falling back on jargon, no doubt - but I can’t remember any economist predicting such a massive boost in oil supply and the resulting collapse in prices when shale gas as an alternative energy supply first came onto the scene. Then, if I remember, there was grand talk of the ‘decline of the oil industry’. Some bloody decline, as it turns out.

At this point, no doubt, some reading this will sneer that what I am writing is indeed Dick and Dora stuff, that it is all a lot more complex. To which I say: of course it’s a lot more complex - if you want it to be. But it needn’t be so complex. Years ago I did a lot of photography and dealt with shutter speeds, film speeds, f stops, depth of field and all the rest, and I contend it is perfectly possibly to explain to a six-year-old what goes on when a camera takes a picture without resorting to a single piece of jargon.

Children understand ideas such as ‘the bigger the hole, the more can fall into it. The smaller the hole, the less can get through’. That’s exactly what happens with the amount of light going through the camera aperture and hitting the ‘film’, only I would call the aperture a ‘hole’ not an aperture when describing it all to a seven-year-old.

A few years ago, I was explaining to my then nine-year-old son how the stock market functioned in similarly easy-to-understand terms. I even got onto futures, why they were created and how they are now abused. I think he understood. Which brings me to ‘quantitative easing’, a great, complicated name for a simple economic ploy.

Ironically despite all the denials that it most certainly does not risk stoking inflation, that is exactly what it is intended to do - just not too much. Put better, it is not intended exactly to stoke inflation, merely to create a little inflation. Folk fear, of course, that although it might work in the short term - actually, we know it does work - the danger is that in the long term we will be saddled with rampant inflation of the kind which brought the Weimar Republic to its knees and allowed the conditions to be created in which Adolf Hitler was able to seize power.

The European Central Bank has decided to introduce a programme of ‘quantitative easing’ in the euro zone and will be ‘creating’ €1 trillion with which - well, to create a little inflation. The idea is that if there is more money in the eurozone, banks will feel more inclined to lend it and the eurozone economy will take off again. Hm. And once again, hm. It seems - so far - to have worked in the US and here in Britain, so will it work in the eurozone? That remains to be seen.

One large caveat is that the US and British economies are single entities, whereas the eurozone economy, although ostensibly one economy, is seen from a different angle, made up of 25 economies which might resemble each other in some ways, but do not resemble each other in other ways. But isn’t that also true of the US, you might ask? And don’t individual US states have a say over how their own state economy should be run?

Well, up to a point: states, as far as I know (always a useful admission to make) can to a certain extent set their own taxes, but I don’t think they have any say over the Federal Bank interest rates. And despite the US economy now being ‘on the move’ - as, of course, it is obliged to be with a presidential election getting ever closer - individual states might be prospering or not as the case may be. Certainly a state such as Rhode Island or Maine will usually always be doing far better than Mississippi or Louisiana, yet nominally as equal constituents of the US they are all economically ‘on the move’. The eurozone, however, still doesn’t enjoy the kind of indentification with the whole of its individual members as the US does.

Of course, the governments of each eurozone state wants their country to pull through and get out of the economic shit, but just what to ‘the people’ feel? And what with the general election in Greece due in three days, the ECB’s grand plan to save the eurozone with a programme of quantitative easing might be defeated before it has even got underway if a new Left-wing government does what it says it will do - and, crucially, what those expected to vote for it will insist they do, which is to tell the country’s creditors to go stick their credit notes where the sun don’t shine.

Oh, to live in interesting times.

Don’t worry, pet, it'll all soon be over — the ECB has decided to introduce a programme of quantitative easing

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 . . .

. . .

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.