In which I introduce you to an unexpected – quite possibly unsuspected – facet of my character: discretion

Discretion, as all my friends will tell you if you were to ask them, is my middle name, so several details in this entry will be vague to the point of non-existence. I must explain why.

I am staying with a friend in Spain for a week and, and this will be my fourth year here. He is a potter of some renown, although his father was the famous one and whose name is spoken with hushed reverence by potters everywhere who are apt to speak with hushed reverence. Not all, of course, are and although that is no reflection on the man’s expertise, artistry and status in the world of potters, it does indicate that many potters are down-to-earth folk not given to pretension).

My friend, who I got to know when he was still living and working in Cornwall, takes in students who arrive from all over the world for a week or a two-week live-in course on pottery, and when I was here several years ago one such student who was staying at the same time as me was a complete pain in the arse. Fair enough, but my mistake and my then indiscretion was to record the fact and a description of the student in several uncomplimentary blog entries.

For good measure I was also very indiscreet about another woman who was staying at the time, who was, however, not a student but another of the potter’s friends. She, too, had remarkable ability to get on one’s nerves very quickly indeed. (Ah, I hear some of you think, and you don’t? You are Mr Interestingly Pleasant all the time? Well, of course I’m not, but this is my blog you are reading and I trust in this matter you are on my side.)

As I assured you earlier, I am keeping details as vague as possible, but I can’t resist giving a taster of just why I, who is at heart essentially affable and good-natured, was driven to the extremes of irritation within minutes of arriving and introducing myself to the second woman I have mentioned:

For my stay here in Spain that year I had bought what its advertising had assured me to be a mobile phone sim card that would afford me bargain basement calls home to Britain and, crucially, data rates so low that access to the internet would more or less be free. All I had to do was to insert it into my phone once I had arrived in Spain and that, I was promised, would bring me as close to heaven on earth as one can be brought in the magical world of mobile phones. (That, by the way, was a very good example of ‘if is sounds to good to be true, it is’, although obviously I had already disregarded that piece of invaluable wisdom.)

So, after arriving, saying hello and exchanging the usual pleasantries one does with a stranger who is also a guest, I immediately set about taking the back cover off my smartphone and installing the sim card to test it out. The woman, the other guest, sitting nearby, was intrigued.

‘What are you doing?’ she asked.

So I explained what I was doing.

‘What is a sim card?’ she asked.

I told her it was the necessary part of the phone which did all the work. Without one, I added, the phone wouldn’t work.

‘Yes, but what does it do?’

I told her I wasn’t an expert on mobile phones generally and sim cards in particular and couldn’t really elaborate much further. It was just . . .

‘But you must know,’ she interrupted, ‘or you wouldn’t be doing what you are doing.’

That, quite literally within four minutes of meeting the woman, was when the first alarm bell rang. Christ, a bloody irritating old crone alert, I thought, but I repeated that ‘a sim card is the essential part of every mobile phone and it includes, for example, all the necessary, hardware, software and every other ware necessary to allow you to use the phone as a mobile phone rather than as, oh I don’t know, just another fucking expensive paperweight’, although I didn’t swear and I wasn’t sarcastic. I do remember saying it all in a tone intended to discourage any further questions. But some hope.

‘What’s software?’ she asked.

‘You really don’t know?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘and I like to know these things.’ And on it went, and on and on, for I don’t know how long.

I am, when I need to be, polite, and I’m sure I remained polite on that occasion, but believe me I didn’t want to be. She was there for the rest of my week, as was the student I mentioned above – but as I’ve warned no more details will be provided, I’m afraid, although, she, too was, such a pain in the arse that I would dearly love to repeat the indiscretions and outrageous insults of several earlier blog entries and, to boot, add several more. Here’s why.

A friend of my friend’s who lives locally came across my blog – which gave far greater detail of who my host was and where he lived and worked, so there’s no mystery as to how he might have chanced upon it – and became alarmed that potential pottery students reading it might be put off applying to come to stay for a course. He alerted my friend who, in turn, asked me to remove the entries, which I did. So, dear reader, all I can tell you is that ‘I am in Spain’.

As to whether it’s north, south, east or west, you’ll have to guess.

. . .

I’ve been here now for three days and have just under a week left. As usual I’ve been doing nothing except, in no particular order, read, sleep - The Razor’s Edge by Somerstet Maugham, and well worth it - drink (beer, wine or gin), smoke, listen to jazz and play guitar. My friend, the potter, is an accomplished musician, although by no means an outstanding one, who plays, each after a fashion, classical guitar, piano trumpet and, I believe, even the clarinet. But for this week I have commandeered his guitar (a gut-stringed Spanish guitar) and have been learning to play some of the songs I like.

These, I’m sorry to tell any younger folk coming across this blog, are not Taylor Swift or One Direction or anything of that kind, but what are for me timeless tunes – As Time Goes By, These Foolish Things and others of that ilk. Boring for some, maybe, but musically most satisfying. Furthermore, the chords you use to play them are, if you want to play them without sounding like a girl guide sitting with friends around her first campfire, the rather less usual ones – C7/9- for example, Em9/7 and F#m13/sus4 (I made that one up) – which are, at first, more difficult to get your fingers around, but which are well worth it once you can (and I’m glad to say that, after spending the past few years practising scales on the guitar, my fingers are agile and flexible enough to achieve).

If you are interested, here is the best website I have come across giving you the chords to many, many songs. There are others, of course, but I like this one best. Try it.

. . .

Here is the one clue you will get:

You want silliness in this silly season? How about the silliness of denying the fruits of life to several more merely because we would have to put up with just a little less?

They call it the silly season, the month when ‘nothing happens’ and our newspapers are required to resort to printing all kinds of nonsensical rubbish just to fill their pages and justify the ad rates they charge. Well, from where I sit if the guiding criterion is being prepared to print all kinds of nonsensical rubbish, the newspaper silly season here in Britain runs from January 1 to December 31.

The month of August, at least not for the past ten years has been any sillier. It depends, of course, on which newspaper you read. Those here in Britain – I should say those self-regarding types here in Britain – who like to think they have a conscience and regard themselves as ‘thinkers’ head for the Guardian and the Independent. But neither could yield an inch to those papers popularly seen as being rather further down the food-chain when it comes to silliness.

In the Guardian, for instance – and I will grant that it does in part still cling on to being a newspaper of record rather than sensation – you’re as likely to find bizarre items in its lifestyle section on how to make the perfect something or other as you will find high-minded agonising about global warming (yes, that’s still around, although apparently temperatures have stopped creeping up now for the past 15 years).

The latest installment is How To Make The Perfect Porchetta and I don’t mind admitting that until I came across the piece for the purposes of digging up an example, I had no idea what porchetta was. Several weeks ago, I spoofed that uniquely Guardianista piece with How To Pour The Perfect Glass Of Water on Facebook (below) and got just one like. That probably says more about the limits to my

circle of Facebook friends than anything else, but I was surprised it got just one, especially as I had

gone to some trouble to spoor what looked like a bona fide link to the story in the Guardian.

As for real silliness, in season or out of it, you really can do no better than what is popularly known as the Mail Online’s Column Of Shame. These are ineffably fluffy pieces recording such important events such as Kim Kardashian appearing in public wearing the same dress for the second time or Orland Bloom popping into his nearest Starbucks for a coffee. I shan’t bother with a specific link as Mail Online manages to outdo itself in complete silliness every day, seven days a week the year round.

More intriguing in the silliness stakes is the story of how the once quite mighty Daily Telegraph is dying on its feet before our eyes. Ten years ago, that paper, regarded for decades as the voice of Conservatism in Britain, was still selling well over one and a half million copies a day, and no other of its British broadsheet competitors – the Guardian, the Independent and that most middlebrow of middlebrow pretensions, The Times, came anywhere close in terms of circulation. Now it is knocking along at the bottom along with its competitors, selling a great deal less than half a million copies a day and striving to stay afloat by indulging itself in the most futile of all futile survival strategies, laying off staff.

Where once it had a comparable editorial team to, well my gang, the Daily Mail, it has rid itself of anyone able to hold a pen and allows gangs of whoever it can scoop up for the day from the alleyways of Victoria to sub-edit its pages. And it shows. Christ does it show. These folk are given a bottle of stout and a pack of cheese and onion sandwiches plus ten Senior Service and told not to let any word longer than eight letters into the paper. Obviously, being the roughest of the rough and ill-educated to boot, they usually fail and quite substantial words of 12/13 letters or more are still creeping into the paper, though always used in an inappropriate way.

By way of being a ‘paper of record’, the Telegraph has espoused that most obvious of standbys, the list: the ten/twenty Premier League players managers most want to get rid of; the twenty best pubs in Britain; twenty comments you just can’t be without when you are at a cocktail party; twenty ways of definitely upsetting royalty. Anyone at all interested in that once mighty paper’s decline should consult Britain’s Private Eye (still described as a ‘satirical journal’, although I can’t for the life of me see why) which is taking a great delight in chronicling the abject decline into irrelevance of the Daily Telegraph.

. . .

Exactly how silly the season isn’t can be gauged by two stories in the headlines here in Britain (and Europe): there’s the desperate attempts by tens of thousands of migrants from various parts of North Africa to get into the EU in search of a better life; and there’s the unsettling decline of share prices on the Chinese stock market (though not the Hong Kong Stock Exchange which has so far avoided whatever virus is going aroung). As for the migrants, well despite the nasty traits of my character, they have my best wishes.

For decades we here in the West (the ‘civilised West) have been encouraged to make the most of ourselves, to strive to raise our standard of living, to ensure we take care of our families and the rest, yet when folk fleeing often certain death in Syria, Libya, Ethiopia and Eritrea try to do the same we clutch our skirts in horror. Why exactly?

Well, I’ll tell you why: if we did do the decent thing and give refuge to as many of them as we could it would – to be very blunt – cost us. The good folk of Western Europe might have to do without getting a new car every few years, taking a foreign holiday every year, eating out at some expense whenever they chose: it is one thing expressing apparently heartfelt fellow feeling, but quite another doing something about it. I know that I am about to sound like some dickhead socialist and that I am not – I might be a dickhead, but I am no lefty. But here goes: there is more than enough to go around here in Western Europe for several million additional folk. Yes, it would take some readjusting and, yes, it would be difficult, but it would be quite possible with thought and sense to re-organise life and for all of us already established here to make slight sacrifices.

Who says we are obliged to raise our standard of living in perpetuity? Why those flogging us stuff, of course. Here in Britain the average household has at least two TV sets and two cars. Today I went to the local council recycling facility to drop off a guitar amp which had long given up the ghost and was simply gathering dust. And what did I see: at least 40 or 50 perfectly reasonable TV sets, some of them of the new plasma flatscreen kind, tossed out to make way for a newer, more expensive model. (Incidentally, despite the fact that thousands of more TV sets are shifted every day, the crap on TV remains the same: does EastEnders (or whatever your soap is) improve simply because you are watching it one a 40/50in wide plasma TV?)

The wobble, and it could become far more than a wobble, of the Chinese stock exchange, is potentially more serious. Although I am advocating a restructuring of our Western economies to spread the goodies a little more with a lot more people, it is the kind of thing which has to be done slowly and carefully. But a worldwide collapse in stock markets and doubtlessly a resultant imploding of economies is not the way to do it. But the danger is the suddenness of it, not the fact that share prices are falling. So much for silliness.

. . .

Next week I am off to Spain again for what has become an annual trip. Four holidays in five months? And you preach to us about a fat living? Well, it’s a little less complicated than that (of course). I get 20 paid holiday days a year, but for the past few years I have ended up at the end of the holiday year with ‘days owed’ and was obliged to take a week of in October doing nothing just to take them.

Well, this year, possibly my last in work, I decided to organies myself a little more. Eh, that’s it. I am not taking more holiday, just ensuring what I take is spent in slightly warmer parts than were hereto fore. I am off to see one Seth Cardew, the potter, in his bolthole a few miles north of Els Inbarsos in Castellon, and I shall keep you posted. As always – I really can’t pass up any opportunity to pontificate.

A week on the German/Dutch border in the back of beyond in Ostfriesland. And I confess to a very, very silly cock-up

It’s that itch write again and sooner or later one of us is going to succumb. Quite how I can imagine. Either I give in and write, write, write with no thought or concern for what the reader might want, be interested in or even choose to avoid, or I don’t give in and suffer for ever - or until my death, whichever is sooner - the self-laceration that I am just one more of the several million of bullshitters who have not only walked this world but while doing so have bored to oblivion and beyond their fellow men and women. At the moment, it seems, pointless and inconsequential writing - as here - might seem to be winning the day. . . .

For once, I think, this entry won’t be about one thing but will be split into several short - shortish, for whenever was brevity my virtue? - sections just as and when they must occur. I have been at my sister’s ‘place’ in the more or less back of beyond in Ostfriesland in the North-west of Germany. I and my son, very lovable lad called Wesley, who is 16, have come here for a week as has my younger brother.

When I refer to this former farm, now putative retirement home of my brother-in-law, as her ‘place’, it is only to due it credit: she and my brother-in-law had an immense stroke of luck when, casting around for somewhere to move to when he retires, they happened upon 18, Heinitzpolder, Bunde. You might think that as the property as a number and what might seem to be a street name it is not remote. You would be wrong. It is quite remote, though surrounded by a farm here and a farm there. Whatever. As the crow flies we are less than a quarter of a mile from the Dutch frontier. In fact, you must drive seven miles to get to Holland because the road from Bunde, the nearest very small town to here, runs for six miles parallel to the frontier. And I love it.

. . .

It is now 10.30pm, but unlike at home where it tends to get clammy and thus chilly even in August, I can sit outside and compose this entry. Earlier we had a barbecue but one by one they all, the others, that is my brother-in-law and my son, retired to bed, until a short while ago it was just my younger brother, my younger sister and myself sitting outside and chewing the fat. We talked of our parents, our older brother, who died last December, and this, that and t’other. And not for the first time, and most certainly not the last, I was struck by how individual reminiscences of the same occurrence and event can vary a great deal. And obviously that means that mine, too, could very well be amiss. All of this was to the background of my choice of music on my iPhone.

What is playing was as shuffled collection of all the pieces I have collected in a playlist usefully names ‘Jazz’. It is an eclectic miscellany - aren’t all collections miscellaneous? Must look it up, but don’t be shy to rap me over the knuckles. Quite possibly they are - and for some one of a certain age, which unfortunately I have become, it is good listening: Roy Eldridge, Ella Fitzgerald, Chet Baker, Art Farmer, Duke Ellington, Earl Hines, Steely Dan (yes, iTunes also calls them ‘jazz’, and who am I to argue?), and many, many more. Stick it all on shuffle and you get a hell of a programme.

. . .

My German grandparents came this area (though they were Roman Catholics - Ostfriesland was divided into strict Lutherans and Calvinists, and Roman Catholics), she from Papenburg, a town created by an RC bishop who was non-too-happy at the dominance of the Protestants, and he from Strücklingen in the Saterland, an area so remote until a century or two ago that (according to Wikipedia, the usual caveat) the people living there, the Saterfriesen, are recognised by the German government as a ‘minority’ and had their own language. It was remote because the Saterland was a strip of sandy land ten miles long and just under two miles wide completely surrounded by marshland, not the easiest of terrain to cross.

So people simply didn’t bother coming or going. I should think - though this is only speculation - that there was a fair number of the six-fingered folk you tend to come across in remote areas. Certainly there is a streak of mild lunacy in our family, though I suspect there’s a streak of mild lunacy in every family. We’ve been visiting ever since and as my brother-in-law is also from Papenburg there’s a lot of extended family. When I was young and we came to visit and stay, I was forever being introduced to folk and informed ‘this is your uncle/aunt/cousin’ and the tenuous relationship between us.

. . .

Later (three days later, as it happens, that first entry was curtailed after one beers on top of one too many gins and tonics) Went off to Winschoten today, just across the border in Holland (which I’m told I should call The Netherlands and that Holland is just one province, but . . .) looking for tourist tat for us to take home to Wez’s sister and my daughter, Elsie, and Wez’s mum and my wife.

There wasn’t a lot, mainly because Winschoten isn’t much of a tourist town and, however pleasant it is and but for the Dutchness of this, that and t’other, it is pretty much one of several thousand euro-towns which are evolving throughout the EU Empire. Everything is pleasant enough but half close your eyes you could be anywhere, even bloody Redditch (and anyone who has been to Redditch knows I don’t mean the comparison as much of a compliment.

We’re back off to Old Blighty tomorrow, leaving here at 8.30 in good time for me to fuck up the drive to Schiphol airport and our flight at 13.50. The drive should only take two and a half hours but on the fuck-up front I am rapidly gaining form. Yesterday, checking on this, that and t’other, I realized that when I first booked my flight - my son coming along was a later development - I made my return flight on August 19, today. But when I booked my son’s flight it was for August, 20, tomorrow. Sadly, because this cheapskate had booked the cheapest flights available, there was no way I could change the departure date for less than £133 - £73 for the new flight and a £60 ‘fee’. So then it was onto Skyscanner, which came up with a flight for just £72 on my son’s flight, though actually getting it to be booked proved impossible for some reason. Finally, I found one for £110.

It is stupidity like that which makes me feel doubly guilty because for many pensioners and unemployed people, £110 would be very welcome indeed and mean the difference between misery and abject misery when a bill falls due. Don’t carp, it’s true, and I am very lucky that, although I am by no means wealthy, I am able to drum up that kind of money without going into debt.

Pip, pip

The East Friesian Ponderosa

That itch to write (Part 2): Again about dogs, but also diaries, emotional defecation, the ‘information superhighway’ (what’s that in Chinese?) and why I think dogs should be allowed to roam

When I started this blog five years and seven months ago it was to be some kind of hybrid between a diary, a commonplace book and what I can only describe as an exercise in writing. It had a precedent. From the late 1970s on, although I don’t remember when exactly I started, I kept a written diary, although that, too, was occasionally something of a commonplace book.

The 1970s were, as, of course, everyone reading this - online - a decade in pre-history: there was no internet and so no such blog as this could exist. I have little knowledge of the genesis of the internet and even less interest. It is now so much part of our lives that there not being an internet will be as alien to some - those, I assume of my daughter’s generation who are 19 and younger - as to many of the world’s population as there not being any cars or, to narrow that population down somewhat to the ‘civilised world’, there not being any hot water on tap and flushing lavatories.

But, dear young ones, there was such a time, and although it might seem incredible to you who is apt and accustomed to recording his or her every thought, ‘life event’ and enthusiasm on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instathis and Instathat, there was such a time, and although admittedly it was on occasion a real struggle, we coped. In those days ‘a diary’ was handwritten. I wrote mine in A4 hardback ledgers (which I still have somewhere) and it was a laborious task. I am left-handed and my writing is pretty much illegible, though I must add not in a cramped, spidery, sinister way, but more in a grandiose, attractive way.

From afar my handwriting looks rather nice, artistic even in an undisciplined kind of way; but up close - and we tend to read unclose when we try to read a handwritten document - it is pretty much unintelligible. That doesn’t, of course, matter, because not only has no one else tried to read it, I haven’t even tried to read it. In a sense - scatological alert! - writing a diary is pretty much for most of us like having an emotional dump.

There are, of course, those, to my mind excessively self-important people who keep a diary ‘for posterity’: politicians, theatre directors, snobs, those kind of people. I regard them as excessively self-important because from the off they have persuaded themselves that their future lives will be of such brilliance and of such interest that at some time in the years to come the world and its poodles will be queuing up to by their diaries once published. (Which snob? Try James Lees-Milne.)

To date I have been not a politician, theatre director or, I hope, a snob, and I at my age I am unlikely to go down those paths, so the diaries I kept were personal, nominally ‘for my eyes only’. And there’s the rub: I could and can simply not get my head around the point of recording your thought, feelings and emotions by hand, in my case laboriously, if no budger will ever catch sight of what you have put down on paper. And I still can’t, so when along came the internet (in the very, very early days romantically dubbed ‘the world wide net’ and quite fatuously ‘the information superhighway’ - try telling that to those net users in totalitarian countries where access to the net is strictly controlled), it seemed a godsend: not only could I drivel on about whatever I liked at some length, I could do so in a blog and quite possibly it would be read! Well!

There, however is the second rub: by whom could and would it be read? I know that two friends occasionally drop in to give my blog a read and I know my sister once did regularly, and it is not at all unlikely, given colleague and other friends might happen by, so I would be better advised to be more circumspect in what I recorded in my blog than I had been obliged to be when I was still having that regular emotional dump by hand in several A4 hardback ledgers. And what would it be like if I let rip about this, that and t’other - which was the inspiration for this entry - and my wife happened upon this blog.

That would be pretty unlikely, but less unlikely would be my daughter now 19 - where did the years go?- and my son, 16, finding their way here to find out what Dad does when he’s tapping away. (I must reassure both friends and my sister that there is, in fact, nothing I want to record about them which I would not be quite happy to tell them to their faces. But if there were - well, you see the dilemma.)

. . .

My last entry was partly about our Jack Russell, Russell, and he again, and his position in the Powell household, has brought me to my keyboard again tonight. Here’s a question: who gets a dog and keeps it in a cage in the hall and, when the dog needs a dump, takes him out on a lead?

To put matters into context, we live as much of a rural environment as you could hope for in Britain, possibly even more so. We live in a granite cottage which, although it is not large and was renovated as much by my wife’s own hard work as by builders - a few years before we married - and which would be every Brit’s wet dream. To the front we have a large expanse of green as we do to the back. There is a second expanse of green in what might be called the ‘top garden’ and then there’s a piece of land on which my wife gardens.

We don’t live in a city, a town, a small town, a village or even a small village. There is a road nearby but it is not busy. So all that makes it my instinct to ‘let the dog out’. OK, he will roam, but why shouldn’t he. I mentioned as much to my son earlier today and he, the nominal ‘owner’ of the dog - my ever-so-slightly left-wing side, though admirably kept in check by my ever-so-slightly right-wing side, balks at the notion of animals being ‘owned’ and I hope you get my meaning - commented that Russell ‘could be run over’.

Well, yes, he could. But then so could I, so could he and so could the rest of the household. I have often, probably too often, commented to my wife that given her attitude to Russell, she should get herself a zoo if she enjoys, as she apparently does, seeing animals caged up. I don’t. When, as now (’cos I smoke cigars and have to do so outside) I am sitting outside (at present composing this latest entry to my blog), I want young Russell to be enjoying himself in the fresh air, sniffing this and sniffing that. And I know he shares my point of view: every time the front door is opened, he is out like a shot. What is a man to do? For the purpose of illuminating the spaces where young Russell might be able to roam were he allowed by others, here are a few photos.

These are the ‘top’ garden and the ‘back’ garden’. The ‘front’ garden picture was somehow to green, as in bloody awful viridian green, to use. Since taking these, it has occurred to me that 1) some folk might think that I am ‘showing off’; and 2) I am bloody well showing off. That second charge would be far more serious, so let me try to put things into context. Yes, I live in a very nice part of Britain, but it was a sheer stroke of luck which brought me what I regard as my good fortune (of which by far the main element it two children.)

Until I was 45, I was knocking around from newspaper to newspaper, growing older, growing more lined and getting more and more fed up. Then fate - and details of which might follow, or might not - took me into matrimony with a woman from North Cornwall whose family run a beef farm and, pertinently, was given this cottage by her father. It was until she renovated it - and did a great deal of the physical work herself - a ruin. It had not been inhabited for nigh-on 50 years and then most recently by cows. It was used as a cow shed.

That she took a fancy to me was a matter of sheer luck (though I suspect that fancy as rather dimmed over the years - again details, possibly, to follow. Whether they do depends upon whether this blog can revert in part to being ‘a diary’ and, crucially, whether I can be assure not she nor my children ever get to read what must under the circumstances be reasonably candid comments and thoughts. We’ll see. . . .

PS Most of what my wife tells me these days begins with ‘Don’t...’ Sorry to be cynical, but my advice to all young men in the throes of love is: get over it. They way that most women take after their mothers. In my wife’s case that isn’t true. Her mother, my mother-in-law, now dead and who I knew but briefly before illness rather curtailed her life was a darling and as open to the world as my wife is closed. Sadly (he says, risking his daughter happening upon this blog) I suspect it is true of her and my wife. Oh well. As for sons taking after fathers, it’s also partly true. And my son - what a charmer! (Elsie, dear heart, you do know my tongue is invariably in my cheek.) . . .

PPS On the CD notes of many recordings are listed the various and different piece of kit use by the recorded band. Capital idea, and in that spirit might I record that this blog was composed on a Macbook Pro (silver old school) using the very good Bean word processor and uploaded on Firefox.

More pertinently it this entry was facilitated by several tall glasses of Lidl Mojito cocktail (£3.99 for 70cl, bloody good value by anyone’s standard’s, and the Tesco and Asda equivalents are 51p more expensive) and latterly my third La Paz Wilde Cigarros. Think I’ve got more money than sense to be smoking those (admittedly only 13.99 euros if you buy them online rather than pay the cynically exorbitant prices demanded for the very same cigars in Britain).

If you want to have a reasonable whack to be spraying around to afford Lidl Mojito and La Pax cigars, my advice is to find yourself a job in the bullshit industry. If, as I have you can survive 41 years before the mast talking and writing bollocks, the pay ain’t half bad, even if, like me, you are still a casual amazed you have made it thus far.

That itch to write: Today, dogs, two weeks spent in Corfu almost 30 years ago, irate taxi drivers and how it might, I hope, all hang together, including the important revelation that I am not bisexual, despite what I now suspect were the hopes of one young man and one young woman, if possibly not another young woman (but who knows?)

When is a dog more than a dog? A fair enough question, of course, but don’t expect any grandiosely sentimental bull from me. A dog is always a dog. It’s never a cat or an ironing board or, heaven help us, a politician (though . . . )

Years ago, I had the misfortune to end up in some sort-of resort in the north of Corfu. It was the second week of my holiday and I had ended up there by pure chance. Wanting a break and not really knowing where to go, I had simply booked a flight to Corfu aboard I don’t know which budget airline and arrive at Corfu airport at about 9pm.

When I got my ticket - this was in the mid-eighties and nothing was done online - I was surprised to find that included in the price was one night’s stay at a hotel. At the time I had no idea why, but I later found out that Greece was getting so fed up with smelly hippy types - they did exist, you know - simply flying out to ‘the islands’, then dossing about here and there that it insisted every traveller should have at least one night’s accommodation booked. As usual the airlines found a way around that ‘difficulty’ without spending a penny.

So I arrived at the airport, picked up my luggage, found a taxi and asked him to take me to --- hotel. It turned out the hotel was miles and miles and miles away at the very south of the island and why didn’t he take me to a local bed and breakfast for the night.

‘But,’ I told him, ‘I already have a room booked there and [this was important to me] already paid for.’

‘Oh, never mind that,’ he said, ‘there are plenty of cheap places you can stay tonight and go there tomorrow.’

But I couldn’t see the point. A room had been booked for me and I had already paid for it. Why not got there? So we did.


Corfu is not a big island, but it took us an immensely long time to get there. Eventually we left the roads and drove ever further down this track and that, deeper and deeper into deepest Corfu until we found the hotel. I have no idea when we got there, but it was dark and empty and very much closed. I had no idea what was going on. But I paid my fare, the taxi took off again and I was left wondering what to do next.

Somehow, and at this point, at least 27 years later I really can’t remember all that much but I do remember banging on very door I could find did arouse someone. He was a caretaker and had no idea who I was. No room had been reserved for me, we established, but I could have one. The following morning, after an awful night plagued by mosquitoes, I came ‘down to breakfast’ to find out that this quite big hotel was not completely closed, despite what appeared to be the case halfway through the night before.

A woman ‘booked me in’ for a week and I discovered that the hotel had just one other guest. He, too, was English, I discovered over the next few days. He was what we Brits called ‘a twitcher’, a bird-watcher and had come to this most remote part of South Corfu to watch birds. He was also an alcoholic. I don’t mean that in any judgmental, and I most certainly am not being judgmental. I am merely describing him as the kind of person I had until then never really encountered.

The hotel was in woods not far up a hill and at the bottom of the hill was a bar/cafe. There might well have been one or two other houses around but I didn’t notice them. I must say that that spot was what I would now cherish, sheer peace and quiet and thus bliss. But for me then, a younger man with a desire for ‘action’ it really was a no-no.

For one week I fell into a certain pattern of sleeping late, getting up, trotting down the hill to the bar, staying there all day doing but reading - it was, I remember well, Richard Ellman’s biography of Oscar Wilde, drinking beer and otherise doing nothing (‘chilling’). I had lunch at the bar, then later in the afternoon the alcoholic twitcher turned up, we had supper together, drank more, he got a little drunk and bought himself - I remember this distinctly - a litre bottle of white Cinzano to be finished off later that night, then we both staggered up the hill again to our hotel.

In that week there was never one other guest although the hotel had at least 50 rooms. And this was in June. The twitcher, who had polished off his litre of white Cinzano throughout the night after polishing off as many cans of Carlsberg as I had, was always - or appeared to be always - as sober as a judge the following morning when we met up for a late breakfast. And one day we both went on a minor tourist trip on what was probably a small shrimp fishing boat, although in that matter - do they fish for shrimps off the coast of Corfu? - I am fully prepared to stand corrected.

But for this youngish card who desired ‘more action’ that spot was too quiet, and pissed off with the legerdemain of fictiously booking me into a hotel in the back of beyond I decided to return to Old Blighty (Britain) a week early. I checked out, paid up and got a taxi back to the airport.

There I discovered that I was booked on a flight due to leave the following week and that I couldn’t change that booking, so I headed back into town. (I had, by the way found out from some holiday rep or other at the airport what the usual price was for a taxi ride back into Corfu town, so when my driver tried to charge me four times as much I challenged him and said it should be a lot less. He became furious and in is proud fury declared OK, I would pay NOTHING. I took him by his word. That’s the Greeks for for you, fully prepared, it would seem to cut off their noses to spite their faces and anyone aware of the recent euro difficulties might care to bear his behaviour in mind.

So I had another week to spend in Corfu, and when I asked around where I might visit, I was given the name of a resort in the extreme north of the island. (I have been onto Google maps to try to find its name, but - literally - all the names are Greek to me so I can’t help you out. I went to the bus station, found the relevant bus and took it north. When I got there I asked around - in English, of course - and rented a room for a week, a bedroom with an adjacent shower.

Where to do dogs come into all this? Well, I shall tell you, but I’ve determined to take the long way around.

The resort was just that: it wasn’t a fishing village which had been expanded or anything like that, it was a purpose-built small resort. And small is the word. It had one main drag along which were the usual restaurants and bars and here and there were hotels, guest houses and apartments. I remember it stank of shit to the nth degree (as, by the way did Corfu Town; I should imagine that its sewerage system was designed and built in the late 19th century and completely unprepared for the masses of tourists which descended upon it from the second half of the 20th century on when those on lower pay were more able to afford foreign travel).

For that week I did very little but follow the pattern of my first week. There were several what we then called ‘discos’, and I remember hooking up with two Brit women, fancying one but being manouevred into bed at my place by the second. It must have been the worst shag of my life, but - I’m nothing if not honest - it was probably ten times as bad for her.

Her friend, the one I had fancied, had instead copped off with a travel rep and, I can’t remember how, we all met the following day when he offered to take us on a tour of the island in his car. We stopped off at a taverna for lunch and at one point in a pretty wide-ranging conversation his woman suddenly asked us both - the male rep and me - whether we were bisexual. I can’t think why. I told her I wasn’t, he said nothing. And writing about it here, almost 30 years later, I’m wondering whether she and he and perhaps her friend with whom I had spent a rather boring night, had put two and two together, arrived at five and were hoping for a rather less conventional sexual encounter. I don’t know. I’ll leave that one with you. If they were, I will have disappointed them.

Anyway. As I say, my week there consisted of sleeping late, finding a bar for lunch, drinking beer and reading and writing letters describing it all. Bearing in mind that the whole of this small, rather dysfunctional resort smelled of shit, I remember opining that the reason the Brits were so keen on going to Greece was that they they felt unchallenged by the sanitation. (At one point exploring this bloody awful place, I came across a small stream by which quite a few Brits were sunbathing just yards away. The water of this stream was a quite awful opaque light grey and smelled overwhelmingly of shit. Yet none of those sunbathing nearby seem to notice and if they did notice, even worse, were wholly unconcerned.)

But now to dogs. Like most dead and alive places in the sun this resort had a rather large population of stray dogs. These were, without exception, mangy, thin and appeared disease-ridden. So I was very surprised one evening when sitting in the forecourt of one ‘restaurant’ along the main drag (with two women, that I remember, though I can’t remember who they were or whether they were the two from earlier) to be asked by a passing elderly Brit: ‘Have you seen a dog.’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked him. ‘I’ve seen loads.’

‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘but he’s a lovely dog, you must have seen him.’ He then explained that he and his wife, both dog lovers, had taken a shine to one of the what seemed like several hundreds of stray dog up and down that main drag and were in the habit of feeding it. This dog was, to them, special.

. . .

What brought me to the topic of dogs is our dog, a Jack Russell, rather unimaginatively named by our son Russell. I’ve mentioned him before. Briefly, I was against getting a dog, though not because I don’t like dogs, but because dogs are a responsibility and are, as they say, ‘for life’. My son, who is the nominal ‘owner’, was very enthusiastic and, up to a point, still is. But I dogs, especially Jack Russells, need daily exercise and attention and I wonder just how enthusiastic he will be come the cold, rainy winter days when the dog still needs a walk. That remains to be seen.

I was, as I say and for that reason against our household acquiring a dog, but as I was overruled and as we now have him, I do love him. He is, admittedly, not at all bright and is only interested in being cuddled, running for tennis balls and hanging around at your feet whenever you are eating, to be given whatever scraps might find their way to him, but I am now very fond of him. As is, no doubt, my wife. But she and I have very different views on how a dog should be treated and what freedoms he should have.

I subscribe to what I think is the mainstream view that dogs are outdoor animals who should be allowed out of doors whenever possible. She, on the other hand and to put it both ungallantly and bluntly, would have made a great jailer. We live in the depths of the North Cornwall countryside next to her brother’s beef farm and are surrounded by fields. More pertinently although we are by no means ‘rich’, we are lucky to live in a cottage with, on three sides, reasonably large areas of grassland. But when he is taken out be her ‘to relieve himself’, she always puts him on a lead. I can’t get my head around that.

When I go outside to sit and read and take Russell with me, every few minutes she is shouting out of the window: ‘Where’s Russell, what’s he doing? You’ve got to keep an eye on him!’

Why? He’s a bloody dog. He’s mooching around. That’s what dog’s do. He was born about seven months ago and so, in human terms, is now a young lad. And that would explain why every time the front door is opened he is out like a shot. He’s not some old fart like me, he’s young and wants to explore. But no, when I’m not around he is kept indoors and watched over. And I can’t stand it. I can’t stand zoos and I can’t stand any animal caged up, whether in fact or metaphorically.

Yes, I think that old codger looking for ‘his dog’ among several thousand mangy straw dogs was a tad twp, but part of me completely understands his affection. And it is that part which sighs every time our Russell is treated like the inmate of a concentration camp (though, as always, I exaggerate a little). But it seems I am waging a losing battle.

Cruise control? Who needs cruise control? Well, I don’t, but I got it anyway, for several long, boring miles. And arguing the toss with an 80-year-old Irishwoman while lost in France didn’t help much

I promised more ‘ironies’, but in fact what I am about to retail is not quite ‘an irony’, more a ridiculous situation which had me baffled for nigh-on half an hour.

We were on our way back from a concert at a chateau we had not visited before but which coincidentally was very close to a convalescent home in the country south of Bordeaux where my aunt had stayed for a few weeks after having a knee operation. This made her think she was a little familiar with the area and knew how to get back home again. She didn’t.

Instead of following the way we had come, which would have involved turning left at the chateau entrance, we turned right and - of this I’m quite certain - we were heading south and in the right direction. Then several minutes later something very odd happened: the car seemed to lose power and try as I might I could not get it to go faster than 25mph (the speedometer showed just under 45kph).

I thought there was some kind of blockage in the petrol system, so slowed down, changed down and accelerated into something rather like what is called an ‘Italian tune-up’. That seem to do the trick because in second from about 10mph acceleration was fine. Then at around 25mph everything just seemed to shut down and I just couldn’t go any faster.

My aunt who knows as much about cars as I do about the finer points of French grammar was for reconciling us to travelling that slowly. I wasn’t and got more and more frustrated by not knowing what was going on.

‘Does this car have some kind of cruise control?’ I asked her.

‘What’s cruise control?’ she replied.

‘It’s a way of setting your car to travel no more than a certain speed.’

‘Why would you want to do that?’ she asked.

‘Well, in some ways it can be a useful facility, if, for example, you don’t want to break the speed limit and are afraid of being caught by a speed camera.


‘All you have to do is stick to the speed limit,’ she pointed out.

‘But sometimes you go over it a little by accident.’

‘Well, you should just be more careful.’

‘Of course, you should,’ I agreed (trying to keep the frustration with the turn of conversation out of my voice. She is 81 and I was her guest, after all, and I couldn’t very well tell her to get a grip). ‘But it does sometimes happen. You don’t mean to, but you are driving a little too fast and you are caught speeding.’

‘Well, then you’ve got no excuse, you should just be more careful.’

‘But even though some people are more careful, it can happen, so setting a cruise control to a certain speed to ensure you don’t go over that speed can be very useful.’

‘I don’t think it’s at all useful and I can’t see why anyone would need one.’

I tried a different tack. ‘OK, but aside from that, have you heard Pierre [her husband] mention that this car has cruise control?’

‘Why would it have cruise control?’

‘I don’t know, but if it did, have you heard him refer to it?’

‘But I can’t see the point?’

And so on. And on and on and on for many more minutes and, as we were tootling along at just 25mph, for many more miles. In all this time I was touching this, pressing that, pulling this to see if I could find where the cruise control - if indeed the car had one - was located.

The road was very straight (Napoleon had many very straight roads built along which he could march his armies) and we passed several signposts, including one for Saucats, which prompted my aunt to inform me we were on the right road. But we weren’t, and soon we had no idea where we were which frustrated me as much as tootling along at a snail’s pace.

Then, for no very good reason could think of I took out my iPhone and launched the compass to find that instead of travelling south as we should have been doing, we were travelling due north. I told my aunt and suggested we about-turn.

‘We’ll get somewhere soon,’ she told me.

‘But we’re driving in the wrong direction.’

‘But we’ll get somewhere soon.’

‘Yes, but somewhere in the opposite direction we want to go. If we turn around, we’ll also get somewhere soon, but at least we know we are heading in the right direction.’

She was having none of it, and knowing myself well and knowing that, frustrated I am apt to be a little more direct than some people can handle, I decided to keep schtumm and do what she asked. And it was at this point that I discovered - I had been fiddling around discovering what I could while we proceeded - that the car did indeed have cruise control and, even better, how to switch it off. So finally we were able to get up to a reasonable speed but by this point we were on the outskirts of Bordeaux, about 20 miles due north from where we wanted to be.

We carried on, still due north, until we spotted a sign for the Arcachon to Bordeaux motorway. (Arcachon is on the Atlantic coast due west of where we were, Bordeaux was due east. Where ideally we wanted to be was due south. And that be at least 45 minutes ago.) We eventually arrived home about an hour later than we should have done but at least I had established that that particular model of Peugeot did have cruise control even though my elderly Irish aunt considered it a facitilty worse than useless.

. . .

It wasn’t that night, but the following night at somewhere called the Chateau de France that I came across Les Tromano, made up of brothers Yorrick and Daniel Troman, on violin and accordion, and double bass player Yann Dubost, and boy were they a find. They play everything from Prokoviev, Shostakovich and Stravinsky to kletzmer and if you like that kind of musis - I DO - you would like Les Tromano. I’ve bought a CD and upload some tracks in the next few days.

An irony and there will be more once I get my act together and survive easyjet flight 5020 from Bordeaux to Londres

If I were not acquainted with irony – and I am, we are good friends of long standing – what has been going on today would have been a good introduction.

This was my fourth, possibly even my fifth, stay in Illats accompanying my elderly step-aunt to various concerts held in chateaux hereabouts and departing and flying home has always followed the same routine: train from Cerons, a few miles from where she lives, then the Navette bus from the Gare de St Jean to Bordeaux airport, then the flight home with Easyjet. Today’s journey should have been no different except that when I checked the rail timetable to make sure I hadn’t ‘misremembered’ (©Hillary Rodham Clinton) what time my train was and checked the timetable of the Navette, I realised that if I caught the 9.50 from Cerons as planned, I would get to the airport to make my way through security just in time to miss the plane by about ten minutes. And the rail timetable listed no earlier train except one leaving Cerons at 6.50 (far, far to early for anyone to do anyting remotely useful).

When I told my aunt, she said she would drive me to the airport. As she has, in the past nine months, had a knee operation and surgery to cure ‘a woman’s problem’, I was reluctant but could see no alternative. Then it struck me that I might be able to catch a train from Lango, several miles further away than Cerons, but a far better option of my aunt.

There a train departed for Bordeaux at 8.44. We set off on the 20 minute journey to Langon from Illats just before 8pm and arrived with ample time to spare and I caught the train (which was a little late) and that should have been that. But I was very surprised when the very next stop, barely five minutes down the line to Bordeaux was bloody Cerons. So I could have caught the same train and spared my aunt a little hassle. I have since re-checked the timetable I originally looked at and that departure is not listed. But I have also checked the official SNCF timetable and it is.

Not much of an irony, you might now be telling yourselves, and what is this crud banging on about? Well, it is this: not only did I, unlike previously when ‘security’ was jam-packed with Brits in shorts with red legs and their breeds and the whole experience took what seemed like hours – not, only did I breeze through this time, but the bloody flight, due to leave at 12.05 is fucking ‘delayed’. And no one knows until when. So I could have stuck to the original plan with ease.

Who was Alroy Kear? Well, while you’re finding out, let me tell you about my fourth culture vulture visit to south-west France

Who was Alroy Kear? Well, if I’m not 100pc certain, I’m at least 99.9pc certain that no one knows what they hell I’m on about. But I do, and in this case that’s all that matters.

. . .

‘Who’s paying for this lunch?’

‘Well, if we don’t publish you, we are. If we do, you will be.’

I had been warned and I appreciated my companion’s candour. I told her that I wasn’t very hungry and ordered the pasta tuna. It had a rather more impressive name on the menu but I know pasta tuna when pasta tuna is offered.

‘Red or white?’

‘Well, as I’m having tuna I suppose it should be the white. And just a glass, please.’

She smiled, the smile of a professional who had eaten many such lunches.

‘Don’t stint yourself. I’ve got little on this afternoon and I’m off tomorrow and who knows, we’ll probably not publish you, so go for it. We might as well have a bottle. I could do with more than a glass. Are you going to have a starter? I am.

 I wasn’t persuaded, but all in all this wasn’t my shout. I ordered a starter. Of every book published, nine out of ten are non-fiction. Of every book of fiction published nine out of ten make no money. Of every book of fiction considered for publication another nine or ninety or nine hundred or quite possibly nine thousand submitted are ignored as just so much dreck. So, whether I would be footing the bill for lunch or not, I had so far got just a little further than most. A little. Not much. My companion, a woman in her forties who had her charms once I had finished my first glass and was well into my second, knew her job.

‘You’ve called your novel Who Was Alroy Kear? Why, exactly?’

‘Are you familiar with the name?’

‘No.’

I began to explain. ‘He’s a fictional character invented by. . .’

‘Well, I don’t suppose it matters much, and be ready for marketing to insist on another title if they don’t like it. I should tell you that it’s a hard market and it’s getting harder every year, and what they say goes. What’s your story about?’

‘Have you read it’

‘I’m afraid I haven’t, no, but don’t let that bother you, we have some very good editors and they have, and if they think there’s something in it for us, if they think it has possibilities . . .’

She trailed off. ‘Who do you read?’

‘All sorts,’ I told her.

‘Well, all sorts doesn’t help much, does it? Have you read any Ooja Kanago or Paul Moore?’

‘No.’

‘Well, they’re selling very well at the moment and it’s the kind of thing we’re looking for. Are you gay?’

‘No. Should I be?’

‘No, not really, but it does seem to help, though marketing won’t insist, of course.’

Her mobile rang.

‘Sorry, I’ve got to take this.’ She answered. ‘Where are you? Well, don’t bother with that now, I’m quite busy. What is it?’ The other party spoke. She replied. ‘Well, she has got one down at the cottage and apparently the broadband is on again. And if it isn’t she’ll just have to live with it. Is Julian coming or staying up in London with Sasha?’ The other party spoke. ‘Well, tell him to make his mind up. Anyway, can we do this another time, I’m in a meeting. I’ll ring you at four. Oh, and I wouldn’t mind getting away at five.’ She ended her call.

‘Sorry about that. What was I saying?’

‘You asked me if I was gay.’

‘And are you?’

‘No. But my brother is.’

‘Well, that’s neither here nor there, is it.’

. . .

Illats, day three.

This is, I think, my fourth annual trek to this neck of the woods in what is sometimes called Aquitane, sometimes Les Landes and sometimes just Bordeaux, by which folk who call it that (as I do when people ask ‘where are you going to in France) mean the area south of the city which is also called Bordeaux. I come to accompany my aunt – my stepmother’s sister, but I think of here as my aunt – to a series of concerts put on by various chateaux as part of the Rencontres Musicales Internationales des Graves (which means Very Serious Musical Encounters, though as I don’t speak any French – as I ‘have no French’ – I might well have got that a little wrong).

Regular readers of this ‘ere blog might be familiar with my annual excursions to this part of France at this time of year, and I must add that I enjoy them a lot in as far as although I’m a really, really cool cat who doesn’t only like jazz but J Blackfoot, Alexander O’Neal, Lisa Ekdahl, Pink and Pretty Reckless (none too contemporary, I’m afraid), I also like almost all kinds of classical music except sodding German romantic stuff from the mid to late 19th century, which, as I get older makes me feel like puking rather quicker than a pound of full-cream fudge.

The first concert was on Thursday at the Chateau Latour-Martillac, and on the bill – is it OK to use the phrase ‘on the bill’ when talking about classical music? – a sonata for violin and piano by a Russian call Anton Tanonov, Brahms second string quintet and finally the ‘concert’ for piano and string quartet by Ernest Chausson, a chap who is apparently very well-known except by me. The Tanonov piece, very modern and very squeaky, was fair enough and although I have a strange liking for what I was once told is often called ‘squeaky gate music’, it didn’t do a great deal for me, though I didn’t hate it either. The Brahms, a new one on me, I liked. And I also like the Chausson. (Incidentally, he died rather young, at 44, in a bicycle accident – he rode into a wall. True – look it up.)

Last night’s concert, though was something else. It was at the Chateau Doms, just down the road in Portets, and all three pieces were memorable. The first, by a Uri Brener was the kind of squeaky gate music I can’t get enough of (as opposed to Mr Tanonov’s and don’t ask me what I preferred the one to the other, but I did).

Then came Shostakovich’s Piano Quintet in G Minor, opus 57, and that, dear friends, was spot-on. It sounds daft to put it that way, and again I’m told it’s very ‘well-known’ but not by me, but I’m

glad I came across it and have already bought it from Amazon. Finally, we got Schubert’s string quartet Death And the Maiden, which I have heard before several times but don’t ever mind hearing again. (Sad, sad note: just looked it up on Wikipedia and it seems he wrote it after he came out of a serious illness and realised he was dying so, you know, blah, blah. Altogether now: aahh!, though I trust folk won’t be quite as viciously flippant when the time comes for me to knock, knock, knock on Heaven’s door.)

Apart from that I’m enjoying good food and pleasant weather. Whereas, it seems Old Blighty has already had its two and a half days of fine weather this summer, here in the South-West of France the temperature is warm, in the mid-twenties, and sunny. They had just emerged from a heatwave the day before I arrived and we’re told another heatwave is on its way, but I’ll cope with that as and when. Pip, pip.

Oh, I hope you enjoy the snippet I started this entry off with. With a bit of luck – i.e. hard work – there’s another 69,410 words to go. And I do actually plan to call it Who Was Alroy Kear?, though marketing might well have other ideas. (Alroy Kear? Look it up. It is obscurely relevant, though you will never guess how and why.)

The day Britain awoke to hear the shocking news that the Queen likes to goose-step of an evening. Or not as the case may be. Meanwhile, sadly not for the first time, I sail a little close to the wind

In that magic way we hacks have of skittering from topic to topic (and my innate modesty prevents me from excluding myself from that sorry bunch) rather as a butterfly will set off in one direction for a few seconds, change its mind and head of at a 90 degree tangent, before, seconds later, following an entirely new course, the most recent crises de nos jours have swiftly been abandoned in favour of the latest outrage. And that, of course, is as it should be: experience has taught us that the newspaper-reading public has an attention span rather shorter than that of my butterfly and becomes swiftly bored. And no paper dare take. Lord no!

(The honourable exception here in Britain is, possibly, the saintly Guardian which does seem to take its duty of informing the public just a little more seriously, but as, according to May’s circulation figures, it is these days informing as few as 178,758 readers in a nation of more than 64.6 million – not that a large proportion of them can actually read - a shift in strategy is arguable long overdue.) So whereas for a short while the abject horrors perpetuated by IS (ISIL, Islamic State or Daesh – the choice is yours) were the latest disaster to threaten humankind, the obduracy of the left-wing Greek government in refusing to execute a is pensioners in the face of overwhelming European Union demands and how it was increasingly likely to lead to global collapse soon proved to be a sexier story.

That one lasted the best part of a week, before it, too, was shown the door and a new topic likely to outrage the Great British Public was adopted. And what an outrage that has turned out to be! Apparently, as a seven-year-old our dear, dear Queen and her younger sister Margaret gave the Nazi salute! Well! And to add to the calumny their mother, for many, many years the nation’s favourite granny, did the same! Well! Could it get worse!

Well, not according to the Sun which ‘broke the story’. Further details of just how treacherous our royal family, in fact, were and, obviously, still are, included not just that not a single drop of English blood flows through their veins (though we all knew that), but the Queen has long hidden a secret passion for Sauerkraut and Charles, her son and heir apparent has all 17 verses of the Horst Wessel Lied tattooed on his bum! No wonder Princess Di got shot of the Nazi swine toot sweet.

Sadly for the Sun its scoop, trailed by the paper as ‘of genuine historic significance) lasted barely 90 minutes before the public got bored and the other papers immediately scented blood. Within two hours the story was no longer just on earth has the Queen managed to hide her National Socialists sympathies for so long – at least for all the papers that weren’t the Sun – but just what complete plonkers the Sun were. That was the fluff. Rather more interesting as far as I am concerned was that the photograph of Brenda, Maggie and Cookie raising their arms to give the salute was taken after they were coaxed to do so by their uncle, the then King of England, one Edward VIII (pictured).

David’s fascist sympathies had long been suspected by Stanley Baldwin, who a few years later became Britain’s Prime Minister. And when the hullabaloo over David marrying Wallis Simpson erupted, it is more than tempting to assume that when he engineered Edward VIII’s abdication, he had rather more delicate matters in mind rather than whether or not the King should marry his best shag yet. (Incidentally, it was Simpson who nicknamed Cookie Cookie, and thereby earned herself the Cookie’s lifelong enmity, an enmity which ensured David and Wallis, by then the Duke and Duchess of Windsor would never be allowed to touch British soil ever again.)

To ensure Edward VIII, by then the Duke of Windsor, who with Wallis had made a pilgrimage to Berchtesgarden to meet Hitler in 1937, would never be able even to try to influence Britain’s attitude

to Hitler and Nazi Germany, in 1940 he and Wallis dispatched to the Bahamas where the Duke became its governor for the duration of World War II.

As for the Sun somehow coming across the picy of the Queen, Margaret and their mother giving the Nazi salute, I suggest that it is a measure of how, in this instance, the Sun simply lost the plot by publishing them as it did. A different treatment with an appropriate story would still have allowed publication, but the paper would have avoided the pile of shit currently being poured all over it. Such a story might well have been something along the lines of how ‘evil Uncle David even managed to pervert the minds of his innocent young nieces by conning them into giving the Nazi salute’ but thank goodness ‘clever Mr Baldwin was aware of his devilish tricks and got rid of him as King!’ Job done: pics could have been published and the Sun would possibly have remained on the Queen’s Christmas card list. As it is . . .

The little tinkers, eh?

. . .

Me, I’m off on my travels again. Now that the dreaded 65 has passed and I can call it a day just as soon as I like – well could, as I have a 19-year-old at college and a 16-year-old who, I trust will also go to college – I am taking it just a little bit easier than I have so far been taking it easy. Next Wednesday, it’s off to Bordeaux again to act as my aunt’s walker to various concerts for a week.

Then it’s back to work, before on August 12 I – and my son – are off to the back of beyond in Ostfriesland for a week to see whether German lager really is better than the panther piss served up in Old Bligty. (OK, I know it is, but I just want to reassure myself.) Then at the beginning of September it’s off to the back of beyond in Castellon to visit my old potter friend. I shall, of course, be filing regular updates and reports of my sojourns, so you can all breathe again.

I should, however, in the interest of balance, report that I sailed a little close to the wind last week at work when, a little more under the cosh than usual (though as an excuse that cuts no ice at all on a newspaper) I was – well, the word used was ‘abrasive’ with a young female colleague in a separate department. Sadly, over the years this was not the first time, so this time it was not just a bollocking from my chief sub (who I do actually both like and rate – I want to make that clear should she ever happen upon this ‘ere blog) but a short interview with one of our two managing editors.

He was, as it turned out, as nice as pie about it all and told me that although he and his fellow managing editor are regularly roasted – abrased? – by our esteemed editor a Mr Paul D. (who can teach the world a thing or two about being abrasive, I should in future restrict my abrasion to more senior hacks and leave the younger ones who might not yet be as acclimatised to ‘the working environment’ – not his words, however – in peace. Point taken, especially as I suspect he would not be quite as nice as pie were my abrasion to resurface. I might be stupid, but I’m not daft.

Incidentally, Mr Paul D. and I are both Scorpios. In fact, he is just a year and a week older than me. But as he earns well north of £1 million a year, has an estate in Scotland, a villa somewhere in the West Indies, is over 6ft tall and regularly dines with the Prime Minister, there, sadly the resemblance ends. Also I suspect at the end of the day he is a better journalist than I could ever hope to be. Here endeth the lesson (and, I trust, a lesson I have finally learned – see above for notes on the two younger members of the Powell family who are yet to be fully educated and who still rely on my bringing in the shekels.)

Your truth? My truth? At the end of the day truth doesn’t matter when the house is burning down. And will the euro and the EU survive? (Who said ‘who cares’?)

There are a great many slippery concepts in philosophy, whether your philosophical discoursing is taking place in a university seminar from undergraduate to PhD level or whether you choose instead to operate at pub bore level. By the phrase ‘slippery concept’ I mean those words, notions and ideas which we all think we understand but which, when we home in on them, when, for example we are asked ‘to define’ them seem to disappear before our eyes.

One of those words ideas is ‘the truth’. We all think we know what the truth is but I suggest we can’t, none of us, because ‘the truth’ doesn’t actually exist. That is not to say that some things – by no means all – cannot be ‘true’ or ‘false’. If I turn the light on in my living room, it is certainly ‘true’ that the light has been turned on. But ‘being true’ and ‘being false’ are pretty far removed from any notion of what ‘the truth’ might essentially be.

I must admit that I wasn’t the most diligent student and that most of my ‘philosophical knowledge’ is pretty threadbare – although that doesn’t necessarily mean I am unqualified to deal with some questions, mainly because the questions themselves if not the answers are very simple indeed.

The body of my ‘knowledge’ consists of half-remembered ‘facts’ from my college tutorials and seminars and scraps I’ve scavenged listening to folk far brighter than me. But that isn’t necessarily a drawback. Even if you happen to have overheard that it is very unwise to put diesel into the tank of a petrol engine and weren’t actually party to the discussion, not putting diesel into the tank of a petrol engine is certainly very wise.

One of the scraps I scavenged was Soren Kierkegaard’s notion of ‘subjective truth’. It was his attempt to get a little closer to the conundrum that at the end of the day ‘the truth’ doesn’t actually exist. Kierkegaard (if I got it right) suggested that ‘subjective truth’ was what was ‘true for me or you personally’. So, in a political discussion one side, on the Left, might claim that the truth was that the bankers and capitalist classes were intent on destroying the ‘ordinary working man’. Not so, his opponent, on the Right, might declare: the real truth is that socialism is always bound to fail because of human nature.

Whichever side you agree with will define which of those statements is ‘the truth’ for you. Both would seem to be mutually exclusive (and admittedly my example is not the best) in that if one is ‘true’, the other isn’t, irrespective of your preferred truth. (It has just occurred to me that I might even question ‘the truth’ of the statement that ‘both are mutually exclusive, but here is neither the time nor the place to get overly complicated. My brain is beginning to ache as it is.)

. . .

So what is the ‘truth’ about the situation in Greece? Did ‘the feckless Greeks bring it down on themselves and only have themselves to blame’? Or is the ‘truth’ of the matter – or rather one ‘truth’ of the matter – that the bigger countries in the Eurozone have used the Greek debt crisis simply as a means to restore the health of their big banks which took a blast after the financial crash of six years ago? Is it, as one Syriza MP has claimed, at heart a battle ‘over democracy in the EU being waged between Europe’s middle class and its working class? [Syriza is a left-wing party]? You pays your money and takes your choice.

My attitude is that when a house is on fire, you don’t sit around working out why the house is now burning to the ground and who might be responsible for the blaze, you concentrate all your efforts on damping down and extinguishing the fire or, if that is impossible, salvaging what you can from the burning house before it collapses in on itself. So with the situation in Greece. And that situation is dire, awful, terrible.

For anyone who might not be up to speed on what is going on: after Greece joined the Eurozone, it took adavantage of the low interest rate charged throughout the zone to borrow as though there were no tomorrow. (One of the claims made – someone’s truth – is that although the European Central Bank, which administers the euro, is charged with being fair to all member states, it quietly fixed the interest rate at a low level to help out Germany which at the time was having a rather torrid time economically after the re-unification of East and West. The claim is that other Eurozone economies, ones suffering from higher inflation, for example, might well have benefited from a higher rate.

The fact is that interest rates were low and on the strength of that Greece borrowed like there was no tomorrow. And furthermore it didn’t use the money it was getting to fund infrastructure, but simply to pay its day-to-day bills. The crunch came when the world found itself in the middle of the 2009 financial crash and Greece and her banks needed to be bailed out. That’s really when it all kicked off. Since then ‘the Greek situation’ has lurched from bad to worse, culminating in the total fuck-up we Europe is now in. Here is today’s front-page online headline from the Telegraph. For

 once a newspaper isn’t particularly over-egging the pudding. Greece’s former finance minister Yani Farouvakis (who resigned before the latest round of ‘negotiations’ last Sunday – my quote marks might give you a hint at which particular truth about them I subscribe to – has warned of the resurgence of Golden Dawn, Greece’s exceptionally nasty extreme right-wing party of thugs and morons.

Incidentally, Britain is not a member of the euro for the very trivial reason that our former prime minster Tony Blair wanted us to join, so his chancellor Gordon Brown, who my then loathed Blair, vetoed the move. That’s it. That insignificant piece of petty spite has been Britain’s saving grace in this whole disaster. Where France would have been liable to lose a whopping €65 billion had Greece reneged on its debts and left the Eurozone, Britain would have been given a pass.

As I write (at 8.25 on the morning of Tuesday, July 14) the Greek parliament is due to meet and pass laws which are necessary for ‘more talks on a further bailout’ to begins. And passing those laws would mean accepting the EU’s conditions, one of which is that a substantial amount of its public assets would be sold off and the money used to help pay off its debts. To be blunt, Greece is being dictated to like an errant fifth-former and that, if nothing, else would seem to make it pretty likely that it’s all going to end in tears and civil unrest.

. . .

That, as I see it is the situation now, and for the time being the ‘truth’ of who is responsible for the EU arriving at this point is irrelevant. Quite apart from the situation in Greece, what does all this mean for the euro and the future of the Eurozone?

Well, once again, you pays your money and you makes your choice. There are some, the euro zealots who still insist that it will all come good in the end, that the current ongoing crisis – ongoing, that is, for the past six years, but there you go – are simply the growing pains of a new system. It all had to happen in time and the faith the Eurozone members have in the system will eventually see it through. Then there are people like me who think the zealots are whistling in the wind and kidding on no one but themselves.

Right from the outset I – most certainly no trained economist – was more persuaded by the idea that the euro system was badly thought out, badly constructed and would eventually burn and crash. The argument was that until and unless all members were part of one fiscal system with their economies guided by one central authority (which would imply ‘ever closer political union’) which would set an optimal interest rate for the whole Eurozone, it would all end in tears. The doubters were derided. Now, it seems, they have been proved correct.

So as far as I’m concerned the Eurozone, in its present form, is a dead duck. It cannot be resurrected. Too much trust has been lost. And what of the EU itself? Will that survive unscathed? Good question. And the answer is ‘yes, it will survive’, but it will bear the scars of the current crisis and can never be the same again. For we have seen, for better or worse – and (see above) which it is depends on your particular ‘truth’ – Germany wield its power. And that makes many uncomfortable, although not me. I have longed tired of all the bollocks spoken that ‘the EU is just another attempt by Germany to dominate Europe’ and other such crap and as I am half-German and know Germany and its people to a certain extent, I can assure any undecided that continental domination is not on Germany’s agenda.

I shall make this point, however: two of Germany’s national failings is a stubborn inflexibility and a somewhat two-dimensional imagination (which might explain why they make great cars but don’t actually design great cars). They happen, in my view (i.e. my ‘truth’) to be quiet right on practical housekeeping matters and the very idea of ‘muddling through’ is anathema to them. The trouble is that when, as here in the handling of the euro crisis they are wrong, it is bloody difficult to impossible to shift them from their position. And that rather two-dimensional imagination stops them from seeing the virtues of alternative solutions.

As it is the original notion of a ‘European Union of equals’ has already gone out of the window in many ways. Once each member state more or less had an equal say in all matters. Now their say is tailored to how big they are, which most certainly gives the big beasts an adavantage. Where one decisions had to be unanimous, they now need only an 85pc majority. And I would be very surprised if, despite all the talk of equality, some of the original members didn’t rather look down on new members as Johnny Come Latelys who don’t quite cut the mustard I am all in favour of an EU as a trading bloc and then some, but really do draw the line at ‘ever closer political union’.

It’s not that I don’t like the idea in theory, I think that given just how different are the cultures of EU member states – well demonstrated with this business over Greece – it really is all pie in the sky. Britain is at present in the process of renegotiating the terms of its membership. Before the current phase of the Greek crisis that looked like a rather soulless and fruitless experience and the likelihood that Britain would vote to leave not at all small. Britain now has a far stronger hand with many other members, shocked by the goings on of this last week, agreeing with Old Blighty that reform is very much needed. The question is: will the EU functionaries – the unelected EU functionaries – in Brussels play fair or not? I doubt it.