Know an Irish gay? Wish him or her luck

Eix Hotel Alcudia, Port d’Alcudia, Mallorca – Day eight/nine?

It’s ‘let our gays get married’ day tomorrow in Ireland, so I thought I might add my two ha’porth worth. At my age, newish ideas are difficult to get used to (I’m still struggling to get my head around income tax and still do a mental double-take when a woman speaks of her wife or a guy speaks of his husband), but I must say - and Britain went through the same process a year or two ago - I have yet to hear one single good and persuasive argument as to why gays shouldn’t get married.

Most of the arguments I have heard strike me as phoney and threadbare, and as for all those who insist gays ‘can’t get married because marriage is all about the procreation of children’, I suggest they spend a few minutes acquainting themselves with the history of marriage – in Britain children, because of the high child mortality rate, weren’t valued very much and didn’t figure very much in people’s lives at all until they got to the age of eight or nine and could be put to work or, if you were noble or had pretentions, married off (to consolidate whatever wealth you had).

As for procreating children, I suspect it was the initial procreation of having children Aelfraed and Haranfot were by far more interested in. And before the church muscled in, couples simply used to pledge themselves to each other in public before disappearing behind a bush for a little more procreation. There was none of this ‘in the eyes of God/Allah/Jehovah/Ron L Hubbard/’ which became part of the muscling in.

As far as I know the notion ‘marrying the one you love’ and fixing him a steak was invented by Hollywood to plug their Judy Garland and Rita Hayworth extravaganzas which I suspect is behind all this ‘we want to get married’ schtick from gays. (Oooh, isn’t she homophobic!) Doesn’t actually explain why lesbians also insist they should be able to marry, but give me time, and I’ll try to come up with another joke in extremely poor taste to cover them. On a slight down note, there have been reports that domestic violence is statistically a little higher in same-sex relationships (try here – the Beeb tends to be objective in such matters).

. . .

Back on more mundane matters, headed back for the hills yesterday, and I would advise anyone coming to Mallorca who wants to explore the island to ignore the plains and head for the hills. I consulted a map before I set off and settled on visiting a small community called Fornaluxt, which is just a mile or two up the hill from Soller, and very glad I am, too. Plenty of tourists, of course, and it is especially tidy and well-maintained for that reason, but not too many at all. Today, I thought I might explore a ruined castle at a place called Capdepera, which is off to the south-east. But the sun has now come out rather nicely and I am in two minds. Hmm.

Another day in paradise (of a kind, well, not really, too many f*cking tourists) in which I manage the impossible: go around in circles in squares – read on, read on! – and am obliged to be fatherly and strict with my daughter

Eix Hotel Alcudia, Port d’Alcudia, Mallorca – Day six? Seven?

In some ways yesterday was a bit of a washout, although no rain was involved (or hardly, but by then I was back in the car returning to my hotel here in Port d’Alcudia). I was keen to see more of the island and less of the tourists, tat shops, cheap booze shops (see piccy) and the rest of the detritus which makes most low and middle market seaside towns the world over such a delight for

some. So as I was assured a few days ago by one of the ladies on the desk that there are hardly any tourists in the centre of the island, I looked at a map of Mallorca for the smallest community I could find in the centre of the island and decided to head off there, reasoning that I would surely pass through and by several other sights worth investigating on the way.

The town/village/community – you can’t really tell from the map – I chose was Sant Joan. Well, I didn’t really. I’ve discovered that not only is Port d’Alcudia bigger than Port de Pollencia down the road, but it is rather bigger than I thought. I was admittedly driving down the coast and the built-up area is something of a conurbation and is not all Port d’Alcudia, but it took about 15 minutes before I got away from the villas, supermarket, even more tat shops, restaurants, pizza parlours and, for God’s sake, even a bloody Lidl (‘No country safe from our planned world domination’, they are vying with Starbucks for being the most intrusive retail outfit on the planet. Guess what you will find when you take your first steps through the Peraly Gates? But at least you’ll be able to get Black Forest smoked ham and all number of the cheap and practical gadgets which make a trip to Lidl’s, Bodmin, a must every Thursday).

After that and following my satnav I was able to head inland in search of Sant Joan. The countryside is undoubtedly Spanish (well, generic Mediterranean) and you wouldn’t mistake it for Northamptonshire, but it was equally as bland and uninteresting, and what I saw of Mallorca on my trip into the hills was far more satisfying. At one point the satnav, as satnavs often do, took me through a small town of that boring grid pattern sort where all the streets are at right angles and look identical and you soon lose your bearings, and having just once taken a wrong turning and deviating from the route Mr Satnav insisted I should take, I then spent at least ten minutes driving around – is ‘around’ the right word if all you can do is keep turning sharp right or sharp left? – trying to get back on track. I did eventually and after another few miles reached Sant Joan.

It was, in the event, sadly one of the world’s more boring settlements, with no sight of a café terrace where I might, wifi access permitting, have settled down and generally wiled away several hours with lager and cigars and posting all kinds of inconsequential shite on Facebook. (If you’re interested take a look, but don’t hold your breath). So the decision to abandon Sant Joan to the attention of other, probably lost, tourists was easily made and I took another look at the map to see where to go to next.

A nearby town called Petra attracted me, so after inputting the name I my satnav I took off. As satnavs demand an street name and number, and I didn’t know any, I simply plumped for ‘Aires’ from the list I was offered. Ten minutes and about six miles later I discovered that ‘Aires’ is Spanish for ‘motorway service station’ and that is where I was taken, still three miles from Petra proper. So off I went again, across country, one what seemed an interminable three miles, but only because the road was so winding, until I arrived at Petra. And that’s when I discovered the name of the town where earlier I had spent ten ever-more frustrating minutes going round in the equivalent of square circles: Petra. I had gone in full circles.

Quite apart from being boringly symmetrical – well, that what it seemed like – Petra is another staging post for the hordes of cyclists who descend on Mallorca in the cooler months, and there must have been about 50 in the town square I came across, that served by about nine café/restaurant/bars. I settled into one – with wifi access, no modern man or woman can do without wifi access, if folk all start to realise that neither Heaven nor Hell has wifi access, they will all refuse to die until the situation has improved.

. . .

This is when I was contacted by my daughter (courtesy of wifi access) for help to fill out a form confirming that she wanted to change her course. I did my bit, but the solution wasn’t quite what she had hoped for then demonstrated an aspect of her character which I have tried to pretend doesn’t exist but which, in truth, does irritate me. She can sometimes be markedly offhand and, though I hate to say this, I have sometimes suspected that she might occasionally be the sort who is only interested in you if you can be of use to her.

These things are rarely, if ever, apparent when our children are young or in their early teens and when they are in their late teens they might well be put down to adolescent solipsism. And that, I hope, is what it is in my daughter – she’s still only 18, 19 at the beginning of August. But given the time I have put in over these past few weeks when she has contacted me down I the dumps and dithering about this, that and t’other, I did rather lose patience and in two long texts read her the riot act (fairly, I think I can say, or at least I hope I can say). And don’t anyone reading this think that I am wholly the genial sort for whom you would eagerly and gladly like to buy a drink or three and chat for hours: I have my rabid side, which, in conjunction with a overly sharp tongue, I am now at pains to rein in for fear the damage I might do. So my texts to my daugher, dear reader, were considered and restrained, but I didn’t pull any punches.

While all this was going on, an overcast day with not a hint of sun, became a markedly windy, not to say chilly, day, and there were even spits of rain. So overall yesterday gets a 2/10 Today is also overcast, but I shall head out again. I shall, in a minute and once I have posted this entry, consult the internet about ‘castle ruins in Mallorca’ and seek some out.

. . .

Tonight, if I can be bothered it’s Arsenal against Sunderland on Sky Sports, but even if I don’t watch the game, I shall lay a bet: Sunderland, who might well be safe from relegation if they beat Arsenal tonight, are only 10/1 to win, so that makes a five – or even a tenner – worthwhile, especially as it is only money I have previously won, so I shan’t be out of pocket if, as I imagine, Arsenal take them. But then they might not. Who knows? There are still several mysteries left, you know, though most aren’t quite as mundane as that one. Pip, pip!

There’s no sun! Who do we sue!

There’s no sun! Who do we sue!

[For those born before 1960]

Day Something or Other in Alcudia, in which news of my cars makes a surprise reprise, my knowledge of cycling and its quirks is expanded drastically (from nothing to a little more than just nothing) and I discover a smaller, pleasant resort just down the calla.

Eix Hotel Alcudia, Port d’Alcudia, Mallorca – Day whatever (five, I think).

I managed to shake of the lure of O’Malley’s yesterday – no football until last night – and saddled up old Trumpet for a trip into the Mallorcan hills. (Strange name for a horse, I know, be he does oddly resemble my neighbour’s father’s second wife, who has a loud voice and an even louder laugh and goes by the name of Horne. Tenuous, I know, but we must make the effort). Trumpet lasted less then half a mile, before he stopped and refused to budge any further, so I had to return to pick up the car Mr Hertz of Palma Airport had so kindly lent me.

It is when I drive a car as young as this one, a Hundai with about 4,000km on the clock, that I fully realise quite what a heap of shit my V reg 1600cc Rover 45 is. Forget for a minute the loose wings, front and back, one the result of driving into the back of another car at no more than 2mph while my attention was fully engaged on getting Radio 4 on my iPhone, the second time reversing at a slightly higher speed into one of the few low walls we have in Cornwall – i.e. had it been higher, I would have bloody seen it – it is, as Alan, of Atlantic Garage who MoTs it and applies other surgery, ‘getting tired’. (Atlantic Garages in Camelford were recommended to me a a little pricey, but good. They are, but do the job immediately and well. There's no hanging round for often two or three weeks as there was with Rob Gibbons up in Davidstow. He's a nice guy, but Alan now gets my vote and custom.

That was the first time I had ever heard that word used to describe a car, but he is spot on. I bought her with 80,000-odd on the clock, and she has since done another 120,000. Not bad going. But I keep her on, patching this and patching that because I am often in a dilemma: about a year ago, I had work her MoTed and little bits and bobs done for about £500 (I should tell you that she only cost £800 when I bought her about eight years), when, bugger me, the undoubtedly rather tired cooling fan went up the swannee while I has stuck in a two-mile jam outside London where the M4 narrows from three lanes to two (which explains the jam).

The subsequent overheating wrecked the head gasket, so what was I to do: kiss goodbye to the £500 I had just spent or spend more to keep the bloody thing on the road? On that and on other similar occasions I choose to cough up and keep her on the road. There is another very good reason for keeping her on the road and I should add a rather important point: the car is not exactly mine. She is in the name of my brother who lives in London, so that he could apply for a parking permit for the borough in which he stays. Useful, especially as until we came to that arrangement,

I had parked the car unofficially in the Daily Mail building car park, where the Mail pays thousands a year for parking spots for its ad reps and others – but not for the likes of me. All went well for many years till I was rumbled by some bloody anally-retentive jobsworth who will have had to have spent hours comparing the reg numbers of all the cars parked there at one particular time against a list of legitimate reg numbers before establishing I was a foreigner. (I have had a run-in with him since – he is one of life’s paid-up pains in the arse.) But rather than break one of my moral principles – ‘don’t push your luck’ – I had to come to some other parking arrangement.

. . .

I took off, heading for a small community called Caimari, intending when I got there to find some quite bar terrace and spend the next few hours there. But when I got to Caimari, I wasn’t particularly inspired – in my experience, due to the summer heat, very few Spanish villages or smaller towns in the country are particularly inspiring and usually pretty dead. You hardly see anyone except the odd man or woman shuffling along. So I carried on up the hill, climbing ever higher, just following my nose. And it was then that I started passing an inordinately large number of cyclists.

It is no exaggeration to say I must have, in the course of my drive passed, individually and in groups of two or three, more than 100 cyclists. At first I thought the Spanish obviously share the French passion for cycling, except in France you rarely see a lone cyclist and they speed along in one great pack. It was when I finally found my café (after turning down the chance to spend €4.50 to park in the back of beyond in a dead-end place call Lluc) that I found out what was going on. Mallorca, it seems is something of a Mecca for cyclists, and visited in the thousands every year by amateurs. The professionals move here in the colder months to practice and I was assured by the chap who told me all this that Bradley Wiggins lived just down the road in Pollenca.

The café at which I stopped was some kind of staging point, and when I arrived there must have been about 40 lycra-clad stalwarts, both women and mean, filling themselves with carbs or whatever it is they do for the return trek. Here is a picture of Donna, from Louth, in Lincolnshire,

and her putative son-in-law Stuart, from Market Rasen. They arrived long after the general horde had left and by the time they got to the café it was gone 3pm and the proprietor had shut for lunch (below).

On my way home, I took at detour and dropped in on Port de Pollenca to have a mooch, and discovered it to be rather pleasant, far smaller the Port d’Alcudia where I am staying and thus not quite as attractive to those who’s holiday heaven is lager and lime and Sky Sports (which might

seem to included me, I must admit, though I’m now too old to qualify as a tearaway). There is another pleasant marina, but here the hotels and villas are right on the beach. I heard folk from all over Europe, but it seemed especially popular with couples with babies, toddlers and young children. Today, I’m off again. Yesterday is was the hills on the western side of the island, today I think I’ll head into the central plain and see what I can’t dig up. Cyclists, probably.

. . .

I was late home and missed the beginning of the match between West Bromwich and Chelsea. Following my winning bets on Crystal Palace against Liverpool, I was going to lay a fiver on West Brom, calculating that the odds would be good, but in the event, by the time I got to the match and was able to lay a bet, they had already scored and were 1-0 up, with the odds shortening to a pitiful 1/2 (which does no one any favours).

So I decided to do nought and was glad I hadn’t backed West Brom because they soon went two up. At that point I got clever, which is always a mistake: ah ha! I thought, Chelsea being the best side in the Premier League this year are bound to bounce back and make it 2-3. I looked at the odds which were impressive: 28/1, so I put a fiver on Chelsea to bounce back. They lost 3-0. Bastards.

Day Three: A day and a half spent in a fake Irish pub watching football. Well, why not?

Eix Hotel Alcudia, Port d’Alcudia, Mallorca – Day three.

No overcast sky today, just bright sunshine from the off, although there is still quite a breeze. As usual I am still in the initials stages of ‘going on holiday’, which is marked by a ongoing drive ‘to do something’. And ‘doing something’ is, as far as I am concerned, the essence of a non-holiday, especially if it is backed up by that drive. But it’s early days yet, just day three.

As it was I did nothing yesterday, just spent many hours in a pub called O’Malleys watching the football on Sky Sports 1, and won myself £67 with three bets on Crystal Palace getting the better of Liverpool. For scousers, their defeat was even more heartbreaking because it was Steven Gerrard’s last-ever home game for Liverpool, and there is little else scousers like than a sentimental ending. To use a current cliché, sentimentality is ‘in their DNA’, which is one reason, quite possibly the only reason, why in the centuries old Liverpool (the city) v Manchester (the city) why I am firmly in the Manchester camp. As far as scousers are concerned, the ending they wanted was Liverpool coming out top, with Gerrard not only scoring, but preferably scoring the winning goal.

Well, he didn’t, so boo sucks to all you scousers. I did try to sunbathe today, but not only have I not yet shaken off that ‘drive to do something’, but I burn easily and have been badly sunburnt in the past, so 15/20 minutes is all I shall allow myself. And if I go home with a body a rather paler shade of whipped cream, tough. So it is back in O’Malleys, after a glass of Rioja and a bit of tapas across the road (O’Malleys with its Sky Sports is almost exclusively patronised by Brits and the odd Scandanavians wisely stick to egg and chips, sausage and chips, bacon, egg and chips and baguettes every kind, of which chip baguette, I’m assured, is by far the best-seller.)

At the moment, while I write, it is half-time between Swansea and Manchester City. After the first few minutes, when the odds became worth it, I put a fiver on Swansea to win, so, of course, Manchester City were 2-0 up within minutes. But all is not lost: Swansea pulled one back on the brink of halftime and the way the are playing could well go on to take the match. If it hadn’t been for two great saves by Hart, it might already be 3-2 to Swansea.

The next match is The One: Manchester City v Arsenal, with United fourth in the table and Arsenal third. No bets on this one, I’ll just lose, but anyway the odds don’t really make it worthwhile. I spent some of yesterday tracking down some remote parts of Mallorca, and if the weather is more overcast than not, I shall take off and do some exploring.

. . .

Later.

The hotel I’m staying in is fine. Not exorbitant luxury, but then I wouldn’t want that, three floors close to the seaside in Port d’Alcudia. I was going to go to Alcudia old town the other day to have a mooch around, but being stupid, I set off just before lunch and the traffic was awful. So in stead I set off for the centre of the island, changed my mind after a few minutes and drove several miles down a rural road to Pollenca. The guests are mainly British and German, with a few French and Swedes (I think, could be Norwegian and Danish) as well as some Spanish. Oddly, the Brits all seem to be about 20 to 30 years older than the others. Why, I could not even start to speculate.

Port d’Alcudia obviously started life as a small port serving Alcudia, but is now pretty much built-up and if you have been to any seaside resort, you’ll know what it looks like – tat shops, supermarkets which seem to sell spirits by the acre (and that’s no much of an exaggeration. When I am out tomorrow, I’ll take a piccy of one of them), bars, bars, cafes, tapas restaurants and a marina with hundreds of yachts, bit and small. It is quite busy, but I’m told not half as bad – by which I mean busy – as other resorts. Nor does there seem to be a ‘get pissed at all costs’ element roaming the streets.

I haven’t been out at night, but I would most certainly hear any yobs from Cardiff, Derby, London, Driffield, Lincoln if there were. But it’s now only May, perhaps they turn up later in the summer. I’ve looked at a map and jotted down the names of small towns and villages in the centre of the island, and shall take off when the mood takes me – rule No 1 for my holidays, plan nothing. The weather started well today and stayed that way, but might be a little cloudier tomorrow and Tuesday, so if it is, and my mood is taking me, that’s when I shall head off.

. . .

The biography of Somerset Maugham is a great read. I wish other writers could write with the same straightforward fluency as Selina Hastings (aka daughter of the 16th Earl of Huntingdon – for all the snobs who are reading this who might like to know). I have previously read her biography of Evelyn Waugh, although I can’t remember much about her book – as opposed to Waugh’s life (I’ve read several biographies of the man), but that, too, was immensely readable.

Actually, in some circles ‘immensely readable’ might be something of a putdown, but I don’t mean it like that at all. I knew very little about Maugham until I heard this biography serialised a few years ago as Radio 4’s Book of the Week, but since then I have read several of his short stories (and have many more to go – in a fit of enthusiasm I bought all four volumes of his collected short stories, a novel, The Magician, and his A Writer’s Notebook).

So far I find him rather likeable. But as I am only 86 pages into a 549-page book, perhaps that will change, although from what I remember of the serialisation, I don’t believe it will. I have written about Maugham before in this blog, but one of the main things I remember from the broadcasts was just what an industrious man he was, how disciplined he was, sitting down to write every day, and how despite his more recent reputation for being a nasty, cruel piece of work, he was probably more sinned against than sinning. But enough of that here. I might write more later.

Day One, drizzle (or almost), but hey, I'm Mr Relaxed and anyway I can still get Sky Sports

Eix Hotel Alcudia, Port d’Alcudia, Mallorca – Day one.

Shame about the weather. Arrived at Palma airport just after midnight and after the standard hire car ‘do you want to take out extra insurance for just €98, which we strongly advise?’, ‘no’, ‘but we really do advise it, sir, because…’, ‘no,’ ‘but sir, if you have any accident of any kind whatsoever…’, ‘I took out extra insurance in England,’ ‘well, that’s as maybe, sir, but there are several things which aren’t…’, ‘no, thanks, really,’ ‘but, sir, under Spanish law, you could well end up in jail for several years even if a fly even shits on the car, but with our extra cover…’, ‘no, I’ll risk, it’, ‘but are you sure, sir, because we do strongly advise it, sir, and figures show, sir, that almost 90pc of renters who don’t take out our extra cover…’, ‘no, now can I have the keys?’, ‘of course, sir, immediately, but can I urge you to think again, because?’, ‘no, thanks, really,’ (cont P92). Shame about the weather.

. . .

But actually, I don’t care, not one bit. I am on holiday, and if you start getting pissed off because the ashtray in your room rattles if you get up quickly and go into the bathroom and is there any chance they might supply you with a different one? you might as well stay at home and watch archive programmes of The One Show. Me, I’m relaxed. So it’s overcast and there is just a hintette of drizzle in the air, and it’s not quite the 26c promised on Accuweather, closer to 18c, but what the hell. The wifi works perfectly in my room if you stand on a chair and hold it your phone up to the corner just above your window, and a lukewarm shower is far, far better for you in the Mediterranean climate so ignore all those Brit whingers who ‘didn’t pay top dollar for a four-star hotel just to spend ten minutes running around in a shower just to get wet! Wait till I tell Tripadvisor!’ Holidays are for relaxing, going with the flow, taking one day at a time, being honest with yourself, keeping in touch with your sponsor – sorry, wrong blog.

. . .

The really good news is that not only is the wifi fine, except in my room where it can be a tad flaky, but then I didn’t fly 1,500 miles to Spain just to sit in my room surfing the net, but the magic browser extension recommended to me which fools your laptop into thinking you are still in Old Blighty means tonight I shall be able to watch the second leg of Brentford v Middlesbrough on Sky Sports. But it gets better, far, far better: on Sunday I can watch live the match between Manchester United and Arsenal. Yes sirree, and here’s hoping United don’t fuck it up as they did a couple of weeks ago against West Brom. (Technical note: you can’t watch Sky Sports or BBC iPlayer on a laptop or tablet if you are abroad. Name of magic extension on application.)

. . .

I asked my friend on reception where to go for a little more peace and quiet and she says the centre of Mallorca is the place for that, the tourists don’t bother. But first it’s off for the mandatory trip to the local hypermarket (©Mark Powell) to find some cheap trainers. My open-toed, Greek athlete

A pair of open-toed, Greek style sandals very much like the pair which might not be quite so good to wear if the weather does take a turn for the worse. In fact, the open-toed Greek athlete style sandals I am wearing (though I took them off to take the picure, naturally, Doh!)
style, brown leather sandals are fine, but I forgot to bring the trainers I bought especially for this trip (at Sports Direct online, £79.99, reduced to £24.99 – yeah, right) and just in case – just in case, I’m really not expecting the worst – it does start drizzling, trainers might be better than sandals (though nothing as uncool as ‘sandals’, mind, these are those far more acceptable Greek athlete style brown leather ones. (Oh, and note to self: as my daughter keeps telling me, socks and sandals are something of a no-no, the kind of thing male librarians with OCD wear). Right, that’s it. I’m off.

. . .

Later.

Well, after my pessimistic description of the weather, admittedly larded rather a lot with hyperbole, in the event it turned out rather nice. Took off in the centre of Mallorca where, I was assured it isn’t quite as touristy as the coast, but just a few miles down the road, decided I was too knackered for a longer drive, and instead headed back to a town called Pollenca (no, not Pollenta, keep up at the back there) which on its outskirts is more or less Anywheresville, Mediterranea, what with half-built blocks which look like a health and safety nightmare until they are eventually covered in plaster and paint, by which time they look half-decent but are still a health and safety nightmare, but the town itself is medieval, so there’s the relief. Populated by British and German tourists, of whom the Krauts are all, oddly, at least 20 years younger than the Brits.

On the main square there are any number of eating places, almost identikit, with terrace, but it was crowed when I arrived and walked through, and even more so when I walked back. Not what I wanted. I finally found a pleasant place with an inside terrace where I and a couple on the other side of the terrace were the only patrons (only because the mob were happy to put up with sitting cheek by jowl with other members of their mob. Do I sound snobbish? Hope so). There I had a smoked ham and goat’s cheese bruschetta with a couple of glasses of lager and, courtesy of my magic browser extension which kids the world on I am still in Old Blighty.

Tonight, now, in fact, again courtesy of the magic extension (which surely by now deserves caps – Magic Extension) it’s Middlesbrough v Brentford playing for the Championship third promotion spot final. I’m with Brentford, who ‘have a mountain to climb’ (©Gary Commentator), but only because Chris and Richard at work are diehard supporters.

Incidentally, I’m glad I blew another £2,000 on hiring a car, because although the hotel and facitilities are fine, the area is another bit of Anywheresville, Mediterranea, with added Thai, Chinese and Indian restaurants. Who on earth comes to Spain, only to stuff themselves on Thai, Chinese and Indian food beats me. Would you go to Bangkok and demand tapas? No, nor would I. Pip, pip.

Just a little more of our British election bollocks, then rather unexpectedly I talk about myself and sex - yes sex, the one topic no one can resist

Well, it’s all over bar the shouting, as they say, by which we mean, of course, the interminable analysis. Yes, I listen to it, and yes it is halfway interesting, but what is the point? Only Labour and, I suppose, the Lib Dems will benefit from analysing just how they managed to fuck things up so comprehensively, but for the rest of us it is back to football and gossip.

Given that one or two folk abroad read this blog, I should add the Britain, the United Kingdom, call it what you will (and mere good manners stop me from adopting some of the choice language used by one Jean-Claude Juncker, head of the EU parish council, uses when he is in his cups) has just suffered another of its general elections, but I should imagine that there is not great interest abroad in our political comings and goings.

For the record while all the pundits – who like to pass themselves off as experts – predicted a very close-run race, with the Conservatives being neck and neck with Labour (i.e. Tweedledum being neck and neck with Tweedledee – or is it the other way around?), and neither would be in a position to command a majority in the House of Commons and would have to strike all kinds of sordid deals with a motley crew of wacky Greens, wacky little Englanders, and, in Labour’s case, rather frightening Scottish nationalists to do so, the outcome was a true surprise. Not only did the Conservatives (the True Patriots/Complete Bastards depending on your political prejudice) manage to get rather more seats than expected, they even managed to get enough seats to gain an overall majority in the Commons.

Well, from me just two cheers, and only because having reached the ripe old age of 97 and sooner or later having to depend on my pension, I trust the blue set of bastard deadbeats to be just a little more competent running the economy than the red set of bastard deadbeats (my brief 14-month flirtation of several years ago as a signed up member of the local Conservative Association notwithstanding).

Once the celebrations are over and the Conservative leader and once again our Prime Minister David Cameron wakes up to the day job, it will not be a bed of roses. For one thing he has promised us good people a referendum, after a period of negotiating with Mr Juncker as to changing the terms of Britain’s membership of the EU, a vote on whether we want to remain a member of that by now rather threadbare organisation. His position, and mine, is that the EU must be reformed and that many arrangement, not least the totally free movement of labour, should be amended as part of reform, but that EU membership – under newer arrangements – is a good thing rather than not.

But that will be a hard sell, and I’m not yet too convinced that David Cameron has the necessary political skills to pull it off. He’s good at some things, winning elections perhaps now being added to his skill set, but not quite as good at others. But more than a fair amount of political nous will be necessary to satisfy both wings of his party, those who want to stay in the EU at all costs, and those who want to leave and bugger the costs. Being contrary, I subscribe to neither view.

The EU is a great idea on paper, but in practice is going wronger and wronger. But here and now are not the place and time for me to outline why I think that is the case. The big sell for Labour was ‘far less austerity’: the Tories, faced with a huge hole in their bank account have taken to the ‘welfare budget’ with gusto, cutting this and chopping that. You might argue, as the Tories, of course, to, that the figures, the falling employment figures to name but one set, bear them out. Their opponents, Labour but now far more seriously the Scottish Nationalists who have – this is no exaggeration – destroyed Labour in Scotland, argue that the cuts the Tories have made in the welfare budget have lead to a great deal of misery among some.

The problem for Labour was, though, that they did not lead to a great deal of misery for a sufficiently large number to persuade them to ditch the Tories and vote them into power. For many, who took stock of their lives and financial position, it came down to the simple question: austerity? What austerity? If you like it came down to the fact that more folk than not were able to proclaim ‘I’m all right, Jack’. I’m well aware how callous that attitude sounds and can be, but the majority were persuaded by the argument that if the books aren’t in order and if we are spending more than we are bringing in, you ain’t going to do very much good very anyone for very long.

So it’s another five years of Heaven On Earth/Tory Misrule. All of which will be of little to no interest to the good folk who flatter me by visiting and reading my blog living in Russia, China, Germany, France, South America and the United States. The U.S. has its own bunfight coming up, anyway, but I should imagine it will in essence be very like the rather tedious hell we her in Old Blighty have been through.

. . .

I am off to Spain in five days though it won’t be what has become my annual pilgrimage to visit Senor Seth Cardew in Alabdos (which will come later in the year). This time I just want a bit of time to be all on my own. And this time I am making it ten days rather than the usual seven, because I find you don’t really begin to chill until five or six days and usually by then you are on your way back home.

I am off to a place called Port d’Alcudia in the north of Mallorca, the north of the island, I’m assured being rather quieter than the south – Palma and Magaluf – and which experiences rather less volatile puking in the streets by adolescent Brits between the ages of 18 and 40. No, I hope, ‘all-day English breakfasts, no pubs run by retired crims showing football on Sky, and, I hope, quiet and peace. OK, I am no longer 40, 50 or 60, and all I want to do for the first few days is fuck all. Nothing. Get up, have a shower, have a light breakfast, them find a sunny corner somewhere and do fuck all.

I am taking with me Selina Hastings’s biography of Somerset Maugham and having now read several of his stories quite apart from reading up on him, I am intrigued by the man. He described himself as something like ‘foremost in the second rank of English writers’, but I don’t know whether that is quite true. As a rule we English tend to a certain insincere modesty, hoping though that others will disagree with our judgment and insist we are not doing ourselves justice. I know I do it.

Maugham’s writing style is straightforward and simple, and as far as I am concerned there is nothing wrong with that. It is far better than many I have read, though I must confess – and I am not being insincerely modest here, simply honest, that I really haven’t read enough, especially not enough of ‘modern’ writers to be in a position to make that call. And also bear in mind that I was, so to speak, brought up in journalism, particularly on the sub-editing side of it, so my judgment might well be limited by that.

I have previously read Selina Hastings’s biography of Evelyn Waugh, another who can write the pants off most, and know that she hits the right balance between being dryly academic – not for my, m’lud, I’m sorry – and superficially sensationalist. Yes, I want the dirt – and I understand there is a great deal of that in Maugham’s life, living as he did as predominantly homosexual man all his life at a time when all homosexual acts would most certainly result in imprisonment if you pissed off enough of your friends to warrant them denouncing you.

I am not homosexual, but I suspect that if I were, I would have been very, very unhappy to life in such an era. I can’t speak for what is it like these days to be gay, but I’m sure many more men and women who prefer to shag their own sex rather than the opposition are rather happier and more content. And amen to that.

. . .

Speaking of sex here might well be the occasion to mention that my sex life is probably well and truly over. Maugham and others might well have been able to carry on shagging well into their seventies and eighties, but age and a heart attack nine years ago, have all rather put paid to that, I’m sorry to say. I last had sex a month or two after my second child was conceived and he will be 16 on May 25. Work it out for yourselves.

I once, more as an exercise than anything else, counted up the number of women I had ‘known’. I most certainly couldn’t remember all their names, but at the time I could remember the occasion or where I was. That was in the mid-1980s and I am grateful that I was able to add to that tall in the years that followed. But at the time – and I shan’t give the number I arrived at – and hearing what number of lovers other men claimed to have had, I was rather surprised that is was higher. I was surprised because I didn’t and don’t’ regard myself as a swordsman of any kind. I suspect that in the bedroom I was rather more vanilla than some, but on the other hand I simply can’t get my head around that some men and women, for example, like to beat each other senseless before they feel their sex instinct has been gratified.

. . .

As I am speaking, rarely for this blog, rather personally, I should add that I have never got off on pure sex, a quick shag, that kind of thing. I really do – well, did – like to make a night of it, and that night would include, apart from the sex, of course, conversation and laughter. I like – make that liked – to make a personal connection, and the idea of going to a brothel or even picking up a prostitute had no appeal to me at all. So I never did it.

That isn’t to say that I haven’t shagged, then realised that the act once concluded I simply wanted to get away, that is, the woman was of very little other interest to me, but what once came as a surprise to me is that many women feel and felt exactly the same. For example, I can recall one woman I slept with a few times who, it quickly became apparent, thought of me as nothing more than a shag where not other was available. And I didn’t much like it, though I couldn’t deny it was true.

Enough of that here, but having finally admitted all that, I might revisit the topic in some future blog. I can’t even think why and how I have reached this point. Perhaps it was some primeval suspicion that all politicians want to do is shag the voter and leave it at that. But, of course, that isn’t true, either. Cynicism is easy, far, far too easy. What is far more difficult and thus far, far more worthwhile is trust and trusting someone.

But I am sitting outside in the garden writing this, it is almost 8.30 on an English May evening, it is getting rather chilly – it is almost 8.30 on an English May evening – and the laptop is running out of battery power, so I shall have to stop. Pip, pip.

If there were ever a good argument for not living too long, it might well be William Somerset Maugham

My reading for the next few months seems to be settled. Amazon’s Buy With 1-Click facility is lethal: a brief second’s enthusiasm for a book or a CD can ensure that within days you have books and CDs coming out of your arse, though I am pleased to say I haven’t yet regretted a single purchase, though I do have quite a few books still to be read.

The most recent arrivals from Amazon are four volumes of Somerset Maugham short stories, the biography of the man by Selina Hastings and, most recently - obviously courtesy of Buy With 1-Click one of his novel’s, The Magician. I had previously bought The Painted Veil after watching the film with Edward Norton and Naomi Watts, but I never finished it.

At the time I thought the writing rather flat and that although Maugham undoubtedly had a gift for dialogue - a greater gift than many writers I’ve so far read - other facets of his novel writing weren’t on par and seemed merely to serve the purpose of getting the story and the reader from one piece of

dialogue to another. Perhaps he was a better short story writer than novelist. So far I’ve read only six or seven of his many stories, and it does seem to me that his style is more suited to short fiction than novels (although The Painted Veil is so far the only one of his novels I’ve attempted).

Earlier today, I read on someone’s else blog his prose style described as ‘simplistic’ (although whether the writer in fact meant merely ‘simple’ or indeed wanted to call it ‘simplistic’ I don’t know, as all too often people do upgrade ‘simple’ to ‘simplistic’, obviously oblivious to the fact that they mean rather different things). His style most certainly straightforward, too straightforward for many these days when we are said to now to have become so accustomed to ‘modern’ writing and ‘experimentation’ that and ordinary, unadorned, straightforward style is regarded as a little second-rate. Perhaps.

But even though the style is in no way astounding, it is effective, and it is, perhaps, because that style is so unassuming and doesn’t draw attention to itself that his observations and depiction of character are so telling. And they do contain some real gems, of which, in my view, this is one. It is from one of his Malay stories, The Back Of Beyond:

Oh, my dear boy, one mustn’t expect gratitude. It’s a thing that no one has a right to. After all, you do good because it gives you pleasure. It’s the purest form of happiness there is. To expect thanks for it is really asking too much. If you get it, well, it’s like a bonus on shares on which you have already received a dividend; it’s grand, but you mustn’t look upon it as your due.’

I haven’t yet started the Selina Hastings biography yet, but I did hear an adaptation of it for Radio 4’s Book Of The Week, and it mentioned a certain irony about Maugham. Oddly, and because he was a big name in the early to middle part of the 20th century but went on to live well into late 80s, he was something of a curio in his latter years, apparently a wizened, unpleasant old man living in the South of France.(I have previously blogged about him here and here.)

He was nicknamed The Lizard, because many thought he looked like one in his dotage, and his vast body of work, though still respected and bought, was regarded as a tad old hat and from an earlier

age by more ‘modern’ writers and the literary parasites who make their living commenting on and deciding these things.

He, who once regarded himself as three-quarters heterosexual and a quarter ‘queer’ - his description - but later revised that and said it was the other way around - had also gained an unenviable reputation as being a louche old lecher in whose company no good-looking young man was safe (though many, admittedly, didn’t want to be safe and were quite happy to trade sexual favours for a place at the great, and rich’ man’s table in the South of France).

All in all he doesn’t sound to pleasant. And yet, according to Hastings, he could be extraordinarily kind and generous. Are both - being a gay old lecher and being kind - mutually exclusive, you might now be asking. Well, of course, not. My point is that being regarded as rather passé in the last two decades of his life - and quite possibly rather gaga - and having been encouraged by his unscrupulous lover, one Alan Searle, to disinherit his daughter and make him, Searle, his sole heir, he did not, as we say, have a very good press at all. But that, it would seem, is a shame in that his undoubted good qualities were and are simply overlooked.

I am here merely repeating what I remember of the radio version of Hastings’ biography (and which I described here in an earlier entry), and I look forward to reading the book proper. But it does seem to me that there was a good deal more to Maugham than we now seem to accept, especially if the above quotation is anything to go by. Because it does strike very much as Maugham dropping the writer’s pose and speaking from his heart.

Ruthenia? Where’s that then? Well, it’s not in North Cornwall, but apparently TASS insists the persecuted locals would very much like it to be a part of Mother Russia. Closer to home, the Daily Express has another savvy piece of health advice and how we might still save ourselves from diabetes

The clocks have gone back, the evenings are drawing out and so it is back to my Sunday evening routine of going to the Scarsdale for a drink and a smoke. It’s not warm, it never really gets particularly warm in Britain, especially not now at the beginning of April. But it’s warm enough for my fingers not to lock up with frostbite while I type. And I thought I might add yet another entry to this blog.

As usual when I start an entry, I take a look at the ‘stats’ which tell me which posts have recently been read and who is reading them. And that has brought up something quite curious: this week, my blog has had 131 visitors from the United States and 60 from the United Kingdom. Fair enough, but what is puzzling is that it has also had 65 visitors from Russia (I was about to write the USSR – I wonder why?) and 33 from Ukrained (which I am now careful not to call The Ukraine as I understand it is something of an insult).

What, I ask myself, can interest any Russian or Ukrainian reading this blog? Admittedly, I have written several entries about Putin, Peter Pomerantsov’s book, Ukraine, Crimea and related topics, but I am the first to record that I have absolutely nothing original to report or write about, and that what I do write about is more or less stuff I have read elsewhere and reproduced, perhaps adding my not to informed observations. But they keep coming. Why. Do the folk coming here do the rounds of many blogs? Surely they must, and there are a great deal to choose from. And as I am interested, I would very much appreciate any Russian or Ukrainian visitor to email me and tell me what brought them here (and perhaps add a little about themselves).

. . .

Coincidentally, I came across a report in The Economist which piqued my interest. It is about the ‘Ruthenes’ in Transcarpathia. And, yes, I did have to consulte a map to find out where the hell Transcarpathia. Sorry, but perhaps you have to do the same when I mention North Cornwall. Nor had I before heard of the Ruthenes, but it seems they are an established ethnic Slavic group which has lived in Transcarpathia – mainly in Ukraine, but also in Poland and Slovakia.

That area of Ukaine is also home to a few hundred thousands ethnic Hungarians, and it was about a report by the Russian news agency TASS the The Economist was writing. It said that TASS had publicised supposed Ruthenian ethnic tensions, and so far, so unsurprising. What was surprising is that, according to The Economist, TASS’s report is complete fiction, that whatever problems the region does has, ethinic tensions is not one of them. So why did TASS make them up (if, as I am obliged to do, you believe The Economist rather than TASS)?

Well, given Ukraine’s past and present troubles, the answer might not be that difficult to suggest. When Russia made its grab for Crimea, it also cited tensions between Russians and Ukrainians as a reason to move in. In fact, according to Russia it didn’t actually move in at all: ethnic Russians made the first move, but the upshot is that Crimea is now once again a part of Russia. Something similar happened in Eastern Ukraine where some folk – I stress some – felt they wanted to be part of Russia than Ukraine and started shooting to make their point.

The obvious question, one which undoubtedly The Economist is posing is: are the Russians not trying to do the same in Transcarpathia? The second strand to the TASS report was that local ethnic

No, that isn’t North Cornwall, but apparently TASS would like it to be

Hungarians, though with Ukrainian nationality, ‘are also unhappy’, and that Hungary’s, in my view very unsavoury Viktor Orban (my judgment is based on the many unsavoury things he has done and said – he is, for example, stressingly anti-semitic) of the ruling Fiedesz party, who seems never to miss a trick when it comes to misechief-making - is doing the same. (The Economist piece adds that Orban is one of the few friends Vlad the Lad Putin has in among the EU members, which to my mind figures.)

In fact Orban is said to have called for autonomy for Hungarian Ukrainians. Worse, Hungary’s Jobbik party, by far to the right of Orban’s gang, has called a resolution of ‘the situation of the Transcarpathian Hungarians’. It isn’t looking good. I suppose the first question to ask is why did TASS publicise its report in the first place? Answers, please, from anyone with an idea, but not on the ususal postcard but as an email to me.

PS It doesn’t, of course, help that Ruthenia, as the area is known, sounds horribly like Ruritania to my cloth ears. 

. . .

The thing about the Scarsdale here in leafy Kensington is that were a foreigner to sit here and eavesdrop on the clientele in the hope of improving their English, they would be very disappointed. I’ve been sitting here for almost 90 minutes and only one other group out here in the ‘smoking area’ is speaking English. French, yes, German, yes, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian, certainly, but no English. What would they think of it all at The Old Inn in St Breward (where I live) and where a great many folk are well on their way to speaking quite good English?

. . .

I commented in a recent post on the unnerving drive our press in Britain have for ensuring everything, but everything, they print is true. Doubters would be astounded at the lengths Fleet Street (the old collective name for our national papers) goes to in order to ensure that every fact is checked, checked and checked again before it is allowed in its pages.

There’s the story (perhaps apocryphal, but it certainly has the ring of truth, knowing as I do the sheer bloodyminded dedication of generations of hacks and hackesses to print the truth, all of the truth and nothing but the truth) that a well-known writer commissioned to write an Easter homily was told he could not refer to ‘God’ in his piece as there was no way the paper could establish whether God actually existed. Sounds daft, of course, but that is what real professionalism is.

And speaking of professionalism, here is the front page splash of last Thursday’s Daily Express with the lowdown on that awful, awful disease diabetes and one of the ways we can try to avoid developing it. I understand that when they got wind of it, Sky TV, the BBC, Channel Four, ITV and CBeebies even resorted to the High Court and applied for an injunction to stop publication, but to no avail: in the tradition which makes me so proud to be just one more who follows our calling the Express invoked the time-honoured principle of ‘Publish and be damned’.

Here is that front page.

You have been warned. Turn it off!

Britain’s coming election — the wiseacres are weighing in, so why shouldn’t this wiseacre weigh in, too, to announce: they’re all wrong about everything! As for that Terry Pratchett, he ensured I got one of my many, many bollockings

The first part of this - rather long entry - was written before the ‘leaders’ debate’ on TV last night. I didn’t watch it as I could see no point in spending two hours listening to seven stooges mouthing the platitudes they think their supporters would want to hear. Come May 7 I shall be voting – or not - in my 11th general election.

It will not actually be the 11th of which I was aware – the first was in 1963 when Britain was doing well enough economically to venture another term of Labour. Broadly – very broadly – Britain votes Labour when things are going well, people feel their pockets are full and life is sweet; and then they vote in the Tories again (the ‘Tory bastards’, according to some, but I am well beyond the age of taking all such slurs, whether aimed left, right or centre in the slightest bit seriously – if you don’t sooner or later work out for yourself that life is just a tad more complex and nuanced than such barroom gibes allow, God help you) when they feel the pinch.

As a general rule – again, I stress a general rule, Labour fuck it up, Tories clean up the mess afterwards. Or put another way, the Tories create an efficient working economy, then Labour come in and fritter it all away. But it is worth also recording that while Labour are fucking it up, those with rather less to rub together than you are I, tend to do a little better; and while the Tories are repairing the damage, those at the bottom of the pile are re-acquainted with what misery is and just how awful misery can be. It is usually at their expense that ‘the economy is repaired’. And, of course, a great many shysters take every opportunity to make hay while all the repairing is going on.

That last observations might make me sound like some unreconstructed pinko. Or, if you like, my claim that as a rule Labour fuck it up again marks me down as an unreconstructed reactionary. Well, I like to think I’m neither, but I do like to call a spade a bloody shovel, and sadly the
Tweedledum/Tweedledee routine is the way things are stacked. In 1963 at the first election of which I became aware Labour were elected after, in the buzzphrase used by the incoming Prime Minister Harold Wilson (left), ‘13 years of Tory misrule’. The ‘Swinging Sixties’ were getting underway, Britain was loosening up, young chaps were slightly growing their hair and it was the years of the coming of age of young folk who couldn’t actually remember the war. That was important: if you were born up to around 1938/9, you might still, in the Sixties, have distant memories of ‘the war’, ‘dad not being around’ and general deprivation. For those born in the years after, your first memories would probably have been of the years after the war. By 1963 these young were in the late teens and early twenties, hormones were raging as only hormones can range and none of them was in a mood dutifully to take the high road to Dullsville, a place which had been such a comfort to their parents once the war years had ended. I became aware of the 1963 election because my father - ‘Der Spion’ of previous blog entries and man by then of increasingly right-wing views - mournfully declared one night and, I now know in retrospect, more than just a little theatrically, ‘this country will be Communist within six months’.

Well, it wasn’t. In fact, and as I found out five years later when as a very wet-behind-the ears public school boy I washed up at Dundee University, for many idealistic young folk Labour weren’t red enough. No, sirree! But by the time I was released from school and ventured forth into grown-up land to grow my hair, find out what this ‘pot’ thing was and, most crucially, lose my cherry, it was 1968, the year of ‘student revolution’ - remember when students were still idealistic? By then perfectly middle-class chaps and chappesses were affecting a kitchen-sink, working-class accent to prove their credentials (while, perfectly working-class chaps and chappesses who didn’t manage to crash out of their ‘class’ by virtue of acting and taking fashion photographs were encouraged to carry on watching their Ps and Qs when in the company of their ‘betters’.

. . .

Since then elections have had the usual mixed result - Labour in, Labour out, Tories in, Tories out - and the fortunes of the country have risen and fallen and changed for the better or worse much like the weather. In fact, it might be worth the time of some smartarse PhD student to make an in-depth study of how the economic health of a country correlates to its weather patterns over several decades, because the weather seems to have as much or as little bearing on the matter as whoever is in government.

This year, we are told, promises to be different. This year is the year ‘when the voter no longer trusts their politicians’. This year ‘the voter is more informed’. This year ‘will see an upset’. Oh, yeah? Why? Well, this year, in Scotland, the Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP) seems well on its way to ousting Labour as ‘the party of conscience’; further south in England the anti-EU UKIP (United Kingdom Independence Party) seems - or seemed - to be well in reach of making dangerous inroads

By jiminy if you want jam tomorrow, you’ll get jam tomorrow — I promise!
into the Tory vote; the Greens are - or were - claiming more and more support, and the Democratic Unionist Party in Northern Ireland, who are never afraid of making mischief, have declared that in the event of a ‘hung’ parliament (one in which no party gains an overall majority in the House of Commons) says it is prepared to do a deal with anyone - even Labour! Well! What a state of affairs! Plenty to waffle about there!

Given this mixed bag (tonight on TV seven political parties are holding a ‘debate’ - fun for someone, no doubt, but I will make damn sure I have something else to do) it is ‘pretty certain’ no party will have an overall majority - i.e. neither Labour nor the Conservatives will - and the incoming government will most certainly, once the dust has settled by some kind of coalition.

Actually, it isn’t even that simple: Labour has been forced to deny that it would be prepared to form a government with SNP and - I hope I’ve got this right - UKIP have unequivocally declared that it will not form a coalition with anyone who has even a hint of foreign blood (except, of course, for those neo-British Asian carpetbaggers who are UKIP members and living proof that UKIP ‘isn’t racist’. To be honest, Labour had no choice but to rule out a coalition with the SNP given that all the political wiseacres are predicting that its vote in Scotland will be wiped out by the nationalist and that the number of seats it has in Hibernia will be reduced from 756 to 3.5. But will Labour be wiped out? Possibly. Possibly not.

The Liberal Democrats, we are told, will also be decimated, being reduced from their current 54 seats to their - more usual - 11/12 (15 in a good year. Incidentally, the Lib Dems, then just the Liberals when it all happened, are the only party we know of which in modern times had a leader who took out a murder contract on a former lover).

The Tories, those same wiseacres assure us, will feel the wrath of the shire little Englanders who are fed up to the back teeth with them for ‘deserting Conservative values’ - last year they brought in legislation to all homosexual couples to marry, which didn’t go down at all well, not least with Conversative-identifying gays and lesbians up and down the land - and ‘sucking up to Brussels, and will desert en masse to UKIP. Or, of course, not.

Me, I don’t think any of that will happen. I think the whole ‘we’re going to shake up the whole system ‘cos you really can’t trust any politician’ election will turn out to be a damp squib. Under the circumstances I think the Tories will, much to everyone’s surprise, scrape home and get a small overall majority, Labour will lose some seats to the SNP, but not as many as the wiseacres predict, so the SNP will not, as expected, be in the position to call the shots, and Labour won’t look as bloody daft as the fear they might. I think that because the SNP is becoming rather smug lately and already its eminence grise Alex Salmond, who recently retired as party leader, is somewhat at odds with his successor, Nicola Sturgeon - it’s always difficult to take second place when you have been top dog for so long - it will not do quite as well as it hopes to; UKIP are oddly and suprisingly peaking well before the event; and I suspect there will be the usual rush to ‘safety’ - the Tories.

One thing I think the wiseacres will get right is that after their high-flying of recent years, gaining a number of seats they could once only dream of, the Lib Dems will crash and burn and be reduced to those seats on the out fringes of Scotland and the far South-West which don’t really matter to anyone. But see what happens. Mystic Meg has spoken.

PS This might sum it all up well:

Britannia between Death and the Doctors . . .


The world no doubt weeped deep and bitter tears over the recent death of one Sir Terry Pratchett, comic fantasy novelist of these lands. I didn’t, because his schtick of whimsical bollocks has never appealed to me. For example, everyone raves, but raves, about The Hitchiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, but I don’t get it one little bit. And that isn’t even a pose adopted to be different. I really don’t get it. But back to Sir Terry.

Sir Terry once, when he was still Terry, unknighted, unknown and not at all rich, dropped me in it. At the beginning of the Eighties I left the Birmingham Evening Mail and took a job as a sub-editor on ‘Power News’, the in-house staff newspaper of the ‘Central Electricity Generating Board’ (CEGB). I was seduced by the money - my salary went up by 30 per cent, from £8,500 to just over £11,000 - and didn’t know at the time just how extraordinarily dull life is on a staff newspaper. That taught me a very valuable lesson: never do anything just for the money. The paper came out monthly and preparing it every month involved as much work as was done daily on the Evening Mail. It was excruciatingly boring. There really was very, very little to do.

The reason we were paid so well was that as the national electricity generating board, the CEGB was at the heart of a vital industry and no government dare allow any of its employees even to consider strike action. And the best way to buy them off was, to use Nye Bevan’s phrase about buying off the possibly troublesome consultant doctors when the National Health Service was being set up, to stuff their mouths with gold. Admittedly the paper had only five staff - the editor, his deputy and three of us sub-editors - but we were staff and so were equally well rewarded. The paper had eight editions and I was allocated the Midlands and South-West editions, which meant that I liaised with the area’s press officer who provided copy and laid out and subbed the my two editions.

Within hours of starting my job there, I realised that working there would no be plain sailing, though there was little chance we would be overoworked. On the Mail you would be promised copy on something or other and it could turn up between ten minutes and 3o minutes later. On Power News you would be promised copy ‘next week’ sometime. Until then - well, there was all too often quite literally nothing at all to do.

The CEGB worked flexitime and we clocked in very morning and out every night. We could clock in at any time between 7.3o in the morning and 6 at night. Naturally, there being so bloody little to do and work being so ineffably (I suppose I should say ‘effably’ - geddit?) boring, I took to turning up as late as possible and fucking off as early as possible.

The trouble was that as we were contracted to work a certain number of hours every month, towards the end of the month I was always ‘short’ and so had to start turning up at 7.30 in the morning and staying till 6 at night and being thoroughly bored for far longer every day. The company was based in Shirley, Solihull, and I lived just a short few miles away in the Maypole (the area was named after a huge pub there, since demolished) in the south of Kings Heath, Birmingham, so is it any wonder I drove home most lunchtimes for a cup of tea and a joint? No, it isn’t.

In addition to the very generous wages we were paid, we also got an extremely generous mileage allowance, so the number was to arrange whatever trips we could to ‘our areas’ simply to run up mileage and make a mint in expenses. For example, the paper was printed at Goodhead Press in Bicester, near Banbury, and we three subs and the deputy editor would spend a two days there every month reading proofs etc. The deputy editor lived in Cheltenham, but we subs all lived in the Birmingham conurbation area, and it would have been simple to arrange to meet up and go in one car - simple, but then none of us would have been able to coin it in expenses, so we all went in our own cars.

When I joined, one of my trips out was to meet the press officer of the South-West region in Bristol, and this was on Terry Pratchett. The press officer for the Midlands region was in the office next door, so sadly there was no huge sum in mileage to be claimed by seeing him. Terry was a year and a bit older than me, but we were both in our early thirties. He was already bald but in that young man way some men lose their hair very early on so their baldness doesn’t make them look old. The hat he always affected later as a well-known novelist would, I suspect, have been suggested by his publisher’s PR department to hide the baldness a little but also to give him some kind of ‘brand’ trademark, and if that was the case they certainly succeeded.

Terry and I were different types, from different molds. I thought him at the time something of a company man, a bit of a geek, the kind you wouldn’t be surprised had a wank every night playing his electric train set. I’ve never read one of his novels but I have gathered what they are about and it is no surprise.

In a way, while still working and before he took up writing full-time, he was born to be a press officer, and this hack doesn’t mean that much of a complimentary way. But he seemed decent enough at the first of our two meetings, though what he made of me I really don’t know. He was already writing on the side, but was not yet well-known and had only had two or three novels published by some small outfit.

About a year later (I was only with Power News for about 18 months, and couldn’t get out fast enough) we carried a story about how ‘the CEGB’s press officer in the South-West region has signed a big book deal with a bigger publisher and although he didn’t leave the CEGB until a few years later, that was the beginning of his career. I said Terry ‘dropped me in it’, though I’m sure it wasn’t malicious. It’s just that we lived on different planets. It happened like this.

Around that time one of the smaller old-fashioned power generating plants the CEGB owned was in Mary Tavy on the edge of Dartmoor in West Devon. It celebrated its 50th birthday in 1982, so there was a lunch for staff, retired and current. Terry, as the local press officer went along, of course, as did I, although there was no reason at all for me to go except to cream up in mileage expenses on the 396-mile round trip - I can’t remember the mileage rate, but if it was, say, 20p a mile, that trip

A good lunch

would have made me £80, a very respectable sum in 1982. (Christ, was I really ever that bloody venal? Yes, I believe I was.) There was also the lunch and I am one of those chaps - not at all fat, mark you, that must be established - who really can’t resist a free lunch. I can’t remember what we had for lunch, though I’m sure it was good and it went on for some time and, pertinently, the wine flowed very freely. And where there’s a free flow of reasonable wine you’ll always find me with an empty glass handy.

I didn’t get roaring drunk, that I can assure you, dear reader, but I most certainly didn’t stint myself, either. And that was it really, until the following week when I was called to the editor’s office to face him (he was called Dick someone or other, who drove an Austin Princess - well, someone had to - and preferred living in ‘new towns’ - again, someone has to) and his deputy (John Shaw a nice chap who was very heavily into rugby and highly suspicious of me - often arriving back at work after lunch quite obviously stoned wouldn’t have helped). They asked about ‘my behaviour’ at the Mary Tavy lunch and had been told ‘I had drunk quite a good deal’.

Well, yes to the second claim, but I really can’t at all remember doing anything out of order and pride myself on being quite polite when, as occasionally they do, needs must. In fact, I was rather baffled by what amounted to a bollocking because I didn’t feel I had done anything amiss. And for some reason it was only many years later that it dawned on me that Terry, later Sir Terry, Pratchett, was the source of the editor and his deputy’s ‘concern’. Had I attended that lunch working for and on behalf of a regular newspaper, any ‘behaviour’ I might have exhibited would never have merited comment. But it wasn’t bad, honest.

A pleasant meal, then a ‘right-wing’ revelation: just how meaningless are such political labels? Totally meaningless, a complete waste of time and space or just more bloody twaddle??

Another meal. A triumph? Well, as I was the cook, I don’t know. It’s not for me to say. I enjoyed it, but then I can enjoy a nicely peeled orange, so I’m not the go-to guy an matters haute cuisine. I enjoy cooking - and given that I always stick to simple dishes rather than fancy shmancy stuff where the chances of coming unstuck increase exponentially, I really should describe my cooking more honestly as ‘preparing a meal’. And as ‘a meal’ is, as far as I am concerned as much about entertaining people (and I never entertain more than two others, three at a push, but never any more), chit-chat - some people call it conversation, others just call it chit-chat - and general enjoyment in the company of those whose company you enjoy as food, even going wrong - which I didn’t do today - doesn’t matter that much.

We had, to start, prawns gently heated in very thinly sliced garlic, a little tomato paste, smoked paprika and olive oil, accompanied by a small dish each of little gem lettuce, very thinly sliced onion and very thinly sliced radishes with a drizzle of olive oil. No great expense there, and no great culinary adventure - it’s just my take on ‘gambas al ajilo’ (prawns in garlic for those who, like me don’t ‘have’ Spanish) which is a bog-standard tapas dish. I substituted smoked paprika for the very chopped up red chillies which I use when I do it for myself because my stepmother, 78 the other day, can’t really take chillies to well. After that it was ‘fried herring with tartar sauce and roast potatoes’. Well, it seems now is not the time of year for herring so I got fresh sardines instead and I loved them. My stepmother wasn’t too fussed on them, but I don’t know why.

I chose that dish because I have never before attempted to make tartar sauce from scratch or, for that matter, mayonnaise on which it is based and I wanted to try. It isn’t rocket science as long as you don’t rush it. And I didn’t. Finally, we had meringue with whipped cream and fresh raspberries, something I chose because I have always wanted to try making meringue. Sadly I came unstuck Pflümli - the German version of slivovitz) and a raspberry liqueur which I found knocking around my stepmother’s kitchen, or in my case a glass or two of all three.

and my meringue wasn’t quite what you are usually served, but it tasted great. I don’t know where i went wrong, probably because the oven I put the meringue into was too hot. I don’t know. I’ll try again. After that black coffee and, in my case, double cream, there was a choice of Cointreau, plum brandy (in this case

Before the comrades all yell ‘you fucking plutocrat wanker’ and ‘it’s all right for some, you rich bloody bastard’, the only expensive ingredients of the meal were, arguably, the liqueurs though each bottle should last at least two years or more (seeing as booze doesn’t go off). But that’s the thing. I haven’t actually costed the meal but it most certainly didn’t break the bank.

My big bugbear and I speak as a guy who loves food (but is by no means a glutton or overweight) is that simple, home-prepared meals are not only tastier and better for you than almost all the pre-prepared, pre-cooked crap people buy, but at the end of the day a lot cheaper. I had to buy a kilo of fresh sardines, which set me back £7.50, but we only eat half of them, and the rest are in the fridge to be eaten another day. The tartar sauce consisted of four egg yolks, olive oil, a tablespoon of capers and two small gherkins. The meringue was made from the egg whites of the four eggs and a little sugar. The fresh raspberries were £3.

My stepmother’s guest was the potter Seth Cardew who I have gone to visit in Spain these past three years and who has invited me again to visit this summer. He used to have his pottery - Wenfordbridge pottery - just down the road. It was started by his father Michael Cardew. Seth is always good company, though he surprised me this afternoon by declaring he was ‘right-wing’. Well,

I for one would never have guessed, not in a million years, given that I, and I’m sure many reading this, tend to associate - rightly or wrongly, though I suspect rightly - ‘right-wingers’ as thick shits who don’t know the time of day. But that’s what he said, so I can only take him by his word.

His announcement led into a long discussion over ‘right-wingism’ and ‘left-wingism’ which I shan’t reproduce here except to repeat the assertion I made - and which I truly believe - that the terms ‘right-wing’ and ‘left-wing’ are about as useful as a chocolate teapot. They describe nothing, they are utterly vacuous. They are about as useful in describing people as dividing folk up into ‘left-handers’ and ‘right-handers’ and treating the one group as ‘good’ and the other group as ‘bad’.

The two terms are, at the end of the day, meaningless (and I have not once in the years I have known Seth heard him make any off-colour pronouncement about anyone, not gays, Jews, foreigners, the ‘working class’ or morris dancers. Writing this - and smoking one of my cigars, while drinking a last coffee and one more glass of plum brandy - I am rather conscious of what some might think. OK, for some, might be the reaction. Well, you are dead wrong: for example the cigars - La Paz Wilde Cigarros - are bought on the net from a tobacconist in Holland at €13 - £9.50/$14.61 at today’s exchange rate - for 20. I smoke about four a week and a tin of 20 lasts me for over a month.

Compare that to the cost of 20 cigarettes: around £7/8 for 20 and some folk are on 40 a day. So let’s knock that one on the head. As for the liqueurs, the Cointreau - a half-litre bottle - cost me £12 and should last for more than two years: someone might go down the pub and spend around that on just over three pints. If he goes down the pub twice a week and is a cigarette smoker, who’s the moneybags, me or him?

I  cannot rid myself of a niggling feeling I am protesting too much, and some might even accuse me of that. But am I? Am I really? Britain, unfortunately, is still totally hung up on ‘them and us’. ‘We’ are appalled at the fact that the country now has food banks. ‘They’ don’t care about that. ‘We’ are apt to condemn ‘privilege’ and cite the fact the David Cameron ‘went to Eton’ as ‘proof’ that the man

is a completely unfeeling twat who doesn’t know how ‘the working man’ lives. ‘They’ - well, I don’t know what ‘they’ would say about that because I am neither ‘they’ nor ‘us’ (or, if you like and you have that kind of dull, logical brain which usually make conversation with you something of a chore, I am neither ‘us’ nor ‘they’).

One of the reasons I am glad that in many ways I am more German than British is that, for all their faults, and I’m sure some are queuing up to slag off ‘the Krauts’, the Germans don’t have these daft, boring, unproductive and essentially utterly meaningless class hang-up.

In Germany some smoke cigars, some don’t. Some like liqueurs, some don’t. Some would prefer their SDP to run the country, some are happier with the CDU or FDP. But an attitude they all share, even though they might disagree fundamentally on ‘how the country is run’, who ‘the bastards’ are and all the rest is that your ‘background’, ‘what school you went to’, ‘what your accent is’ and all the boring bloody rest of it is as important as whether or not flies fart too much and what to do about it.

This whole entry, apart from wanting to write about the - though I say so myself - very tasty meal we all enjoyed this afternoon - was essentially sparked off by Seth Cardew’s claim to be ‘right-wing’ and the subsequent discussion on what exactly being ‘right-wing’ and ‘left-wing’ actually mean. You might have gathered: in my view fuck all. They are meaningless terms.

Yes, we can disagree on various matters: whether or not Britain’s benefits system could be fairer or is being abused; whether there are ‘far too many immigrants’ (and in my view that is again a totally spurious concern, though anyone in the U.S. reading this might have definite views about whether the country’s five million odd ‘illegal immigrants’ should be granted citizenship - I’ll keep quiet on that one because I don’t live there and don’t know that much about it all, though I do know which way my heart beats and you might possibly even guess what I might say).

We might disagree on just how much should be spent on Britain’s ‘nuclear deterrent’, given that, with a bit of luck our nuclear weapons will never be used; we might disagree on whether

or not Britain should remain a member of the EU (and I think it should, though that EU is long overdue for a root and branch reform). But basing our evaluation of the other on whether they are ‘right-wing’, left-wing’, ‘centre’ or simply a ‘don’t know’ is a pointless waste of time. But the meal was good. There, I, the cook, said it. Modesty? I spit on modesty!

PS In my humble opinion, Seth, bless his cotton socks and whatever he might think, is about as ‘right-wing’ as the boot of my car. Furthermore, he’s a bloody good potter.