You want humility? Here’s real humility (well, sort of) and the sad tale of how I came to realised I am not the world’s greatest stock picker

Every so often I take a look at ‘the stats’ to see which of my previous posts have been read. There are a few evergreen favourites - the travails of M. Hollande, of 4, Factory Close, Versaille, France, are a perpetual favourite, as is more or less a post on what a bloody little shit T. Blair, of Duncheatin Palace, 1 Moneybags Avenue, George Town, Cayman Islands, is. My musings on Somerset Maugham also prove more popular than other posts, although I can’t suggest why.

Yesterday I noticed that an entry published on December 3, 2009, entitled ‘A share tip from a certified sucker who is otherwise highly sceptical of ‘a sure thing’ ’ had had two visitors. Intrigued about what I could possibly have to say, I went along and subsequently almost blushed with shame.

The first thing that struck me was how the qualifying ‘from a certified sucker who is otherwise highly sceptical of a “sure thing” ’ of the post’s title, apparently an innocent and modest disclaimer, is nothing of the kind. And in view of what I am about to tell you, you will realise just how conceited I was to write that entry in the first place.

You can follow the link above and go and skim through the post, but if you can’t be arsed - and I wouldn’t be offended if you can’t - I’ll sum it up: when, in about 2006 when I heard of SIPPs (self-invested pension plans), I decided that the very modest sum I had stashed away with some mickey-mouse company based in Bournemouth and which was growing at the astounding rate of 0pc per annum wouldn’t do any worse in a SIPP. (I had taken out the pension about 18 years earlier with Hill Samuel, but it was then sold on several times - they are actually allowed to do these things, believe it or not - until it ended up with the losers in Bournemouth.)

Most of the sum I transferred was invested in three funds which went on to do rather well - one doubled the amount invested in nine years - but I had a little left over. In 2006, we were still living in an age of ever-greater credit and the stock market was booming. But I suspected, given that we were still living in an age of ever-greater credit, that at some point the music would stop and the party would be over.

That’s exactly what happened a few years later, although I can’t claim any credibility as a soothsayer, because I didn’t know exactly when it would happen. I mean you wouldn’t hand the keys to the Meteorological Office over to some herbert who assured you that as sure as eggs were eggs,

it was bound to rain at some point in the next two months. I just suspected that it would happen, and knowing that when the economy got into the doldrums and people were very much feeling the pinch, shares would undoubtedly be hit, I asked myself what kind of business might be expected to thrive in a recession. Of course: pawnbrokers.

I did ‘a bit of research’, i.e. I googled ‘UK pawnbrokers share price’, and discovered only one was a limited company quoted on the London Stock Exchange, a company called Albemarle & Bond.

If I remember, I bought the shares when they cost about 62p each - and watched in delight as the price rose and rose and rose. By the end of 2009, when I wrote my entry giving my ‘share tip’ and faux-modestly explained that otherwise I knew nothing about picking great shares (but, of course, hinting the exact opposite) the share price had more than doubled. And better than that, it went on to hit £3 - a startling rise.

Well, if I really was that smart an alec and if I really did have the faintest clue as to what I was doing, I should have sold the lot at the point. I don’t know how much I had invested in Albemarle & Bond, but whatever it was would have grown to almost five times the amount. But I didn’t. Patrick, me lad, (I told myself) you are onto a winner! Just hang on in there and Albemarle & Bond shares will grow and grow and grow (and I don’t doubt that privately I reflected on just what a financial genius I was).

Well, as I don’t doubt you have already guessed (and wondered when they hell I will not just get on with it!), the fall which inevitably follows unwarranted pride came along in good time. Albemarle & Bond’s share price ended its starospheric rise and began what would eventually be a calamitous fall.

There were several reasons for this, as you can read here. But briefly, it made much of its money buying up the gold of men and women who, in the bad times which followed the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy had sold it all to help make ends meet. For a while the price of gold increased. Then it stopped increasing and fell again by over a quarter of its price. Then there was a second factor putting the break on all the good times and denting my imagined expertise as a stock picker: the competition Albemarle & Bond faced increasingly.

As it had not occurred to me that the price of its shares would not carry on rising for ever and a day, it didn’t seem to have occurrd to Mr Albermarle and Mr Bond that as their pawnbroking business thrived, others would take not of the moolah to be made and also move into pawnbroking to get a piece of the action. Which, of course, other firms did. Albemarle & Bond also made much of their money by giving short-term loans. And again other sharks weren’t slow to spot a winner, and the number of shyster firms also lending money in short-term loans at exorbitant prices exploded.

Finally, thinking they were onto a good thing Albemarle & Bond decided to expand. They announced that they were opening loads more branches throughout Britain and, crucially, borrowed a great deal of money to fund that expansion. Sadly, that was what is universally known as a Bad Move.

As business got a lot tougher, the new branches didn’t thrive, profits suffered and the share price went into reverse. I was - thank the bloody Lord - in the habit of keeping an eye on how the shares and funds in my SIPP were doing, and I noticed the decline in share price. Within months it was dropping from £3 to £2.50 to £2 and further. At first I wasn’t alarmed. ‘These things happen,’ this wise old owl of a financial wizard told himself. ‘Just hang on and it will go up again.’ But it didn’t, and finally realising just how unwise it would be to hang on in there, I sold up when the price hit £1.32.

Now that, admittedly, is not half as good as getting £3 per share, but at least I hadn’t lost the lot - as I would have done if I had hung on much longer in the hope the price would rise again: the share price dropped and dropped and dropped until Albemarle & Bond asked for trading to be suspended when it hit just 6p (£0.06).

Given the smug tone I managed to hit in the title of the original post - ‘A share tip from a certified sucker who is otherwise highly sceptical of ‘a sure thing’ - which implied that I was, of course, anything but a sucker, I shall admit quite clearly: I was lucky, very, very lucky. I would like to conclude by ‘well, that’s taught me a lesson’, but it hasn’t, of course. I - you, too, if you are honest, shall carry on believing my own bullshit, sadly. But at least I can recognise the odd occasion when Lady Luck as the good grace to suck my dick once in a while.

Things went from bad to worse for Albemarle & Bond without my help and the company is now once again a humble pawnbroker, all its dreams of grandeur and cutting a dash in the pawnbroking world in pieces. Here are two more pieces you can read about how fate caught up with Albemarle & Bond, one from the Guardian and one from its administrators PriceWaterhouseCooper.

Panama papers leaked: the Guardian fingers Putin (though why just him?). Then there’s another few nights at the St Endellion festival and I wonder why I can’t simply settle for being middle-class. But sadly I can’t

I must immediately be honest about this entry and state that it has less to do with what I am writing and posting a blog entry and a little more to do with the fact that I acquired a Bluetooth keyboard a while ago when I bought my iPad Air and have never used it. So now I am using it to write this. I am sitting outside La Pappardella restaurant in London’s Earls Court (or, as some would have it, Earl’s Court - no one know which is correct, so that’s both or neither) where I have been coming for my Sunday supper - I only work a single shift on Sunday’s after getting up at the crack of dawn to drive to London and am thus the other side of fresh - and where I then go outside to enjoy a cigar and another glass of wine or a sambuca.

I was sitting here just now when my son messaged me and asked me whether I had heard of the ‘Panama paper leaks’. I hadn’t, so I looked them up, first on the BBC News website and then on the Guardian website. The saintly Guardian’s story is centred on Vladimir Putin, although the BBC states that many other former and current heads of state and prime minister are involved. Briefly, a law firm in Panama called Mossack Fonseca has been helping various folk fleece their countries and build up fortunes. Putin is, for example, said to be in it for $2 billion dollars.

Well, I’m sure we’ll be hearing more of that over the coming days and weeks, so I shan’t blather on too much. But one thing I did tell my son was to look at the leak of the Mossack Fonseca documents in the round. By that I mean he should ask himself, as I’m sure are many other people: who was doing the leaking and, more pertinently, why these documents were leaked? The explanation could be anything from downright banal - a disaffected employee taking his chances - to something far more complicated. My bet is on the latter, although what is really going on we - Joe Ordinary like you and me - won’t find out for a long time or, to be honest, ever.

For me the first question was, I suppotes quite oddley: what is it that makes people want ever more money? I really, honestly, don’t understand. Certainly, most of us could do with a little more dosh as and when, and I shall in a few months’ time when I finally call it a day at the Daily Mail and retire. When I do that, my income will more than halve, but the bills will stay the same. But I can honestly say I really don’t want more.

Yes, I want enough to pay my bills and a little more to save for a rainy day as we say in Britain, but an extra $2 billion? What the fuck use is that? Does a nice gin and tonic really taste so much better because you are drinking it on some rich cunt’s yacht off the coast of Sicily? That is a rhetorical question, of course, but if you hadn’t grasped that, the answer - or at least my answer - is ‘of course it doesn’t’.  I have many faults, of course I do, as do you reading this, but in my case greed is really not one of them. But then I am not 20, 30, 40, 50 or even 60. And I am now closer to 70 than 60. Getting back to the Panama papers leak, well, let’s see what comes of it.

NB. This morning I came across these comments which might be of interest to you if you want to know more about the Panama Papers' leak.

. . .

I spent the past two evenings in the company of Michael ’Peter Simple’ Wharton’s widow Susan listening to some very fine music at the 2016 St Endellion Festival. I have written about it before and shall decline my usual imperative to make the same rather snide jokes about how the whole set-up is quite remorselessly English middle-class.

Yes, there were one or two younger folk there, but I bet the average age of attendees is around 50. Susan, who I like a lot and who is very good company, will be 90 next year (and, sadly, feeling it). I know, because she has told me, that their first few years after her husband died were hard and she felt very lonely.

She and Michael Wharton had no children, although he had four (of which two were really his, and two were born to his wife by another man). She was a working artist and art teacher when she was working and has a workshop but she feels (this she hasn’t told me, but I know this to be true because I am gradually feeling something similar myself) on the periphery. It is a young person’s world - think back to when you were young if you are my or even her age - and young people, as a rule, take rather less notice of their older compatriots than is comfortable for their older compatriots. So she knocks about the cottage she lives in in Buckinghamshire, I should think trying to come up with ways of filling and passing the time.

Susan is by no means wealthy but I’m sure she isn’t on her uppers, but loneliness is loneliness even for an emperor. The music we heard was, on the Friday night, Bach’s Mass in B minor, which if you like Bach, you will like very much indeed. I have the piece on my iPhone and was not completely unfamiliar with it, but - well, I like Bach and am continually fascinated at how he just kept writing such sublime music week in, week out.

On the Saturday were a piece by Beethoven for violin, cello, piano and orchestra (I can’t be more specific because I haven’t the programme to hand), a piece by Brahms in which he set a poem by Goethe to music, a piece by a Judith Weir and a James MacMillan and it ended with Mendelssohn’s Scottish Symphony.

That last - well, I haven’t heard it for about 40 years, but when I heard it last night, I realised it was one of the six or eight pieces I had on my three or four classical music LPs at college in the late

1960s and which I listened to again and again and again. So there was the odd and very welcome added pleasure of listening to a piece with which you are - in my case last night surprisingly - very familiar.  We were unable to attend any of the other concerts - on Sunday to Wednesday - because I was still up here in London, but I have promised her that by next year’s Easter festival I shall most certainly be retired and she must come for the whole week.

. . .

The odd thing about the St Endellion festival - and you might be able to tell this from my past and present snide remarks - is that, for better or worse - I simply do not and cannot identify with the rest of the gang who attend. For example, walking in we got chatting to one or two folk we - or rather I - was vaguely acquainted with, and without exception they all declared the previous night’s performance of the B minor mass ‘stupendous’ and ‘magnificent’ etc. Really?

Me, I have not heard the piece before performed live and, quite apart from the fact that my appreciation of classical music is merely that of an untutored listener, I have no way of knowing whether last Friday’s performance was good, OK, mediocre, bad, stupendous or awful. Yet it seems to be de rigueur for folk such as go along to such festivals as St Endellion to enthuse in superlatives. But I can’t do it. Sorry, but I can’t even if it is expected of me.

I suspect that is where I am more German than English. Ask a German his or her opinion and, as a rule, they will give you and honest answer, one which might even come across as blunt. Ask a middle-middle-middle type of English man or woman (though I’m sure the same applies to their Welsh, Irish and Scottish peers) and they seem obliged to enthuse beyond all reason.

Me, I enjoyed the performance because of the music. Certainly that music could and can be performed well or badly but, as I’ve pointed out, I am really in no position to judge. I suspect I would have enjoyed it had the performance been bad. Who knows? 

Like a bore at a party ‘Brexit’ is the bane of our lives. Roll on June 23 after which we will know whether it’ll be terminal cancer or a debilitating stroke

It’s fair to say we’ve all met a boring person or, indeed, several. I always recall one in particular, a reporter on the Birmingham Evening Mail called Barry P, a Brummie, who was responsible for property stories. He was immensely dull, but the trouble I had was that he was a nice guy and I always felt hellishly guilty when speaking to him of actively trying to find some way of ending the conversation a lot sooner than later. A quote I came across years ago, by one Samuel Foote, originally of Bodmin - yes - but who went to London and made his name in the theatre: ‘He is not only dull himself, but the cause of dullness in others’. Many a time I’ve escaped a conversation with Barry (who was our National Union of Journalists rep for while) after realising with horror that I was beginning sound equally dull.

That is not, of course, to say that Brummies are necessarily boring, despite the jokes about their accent. They’re not. I should imagine that if such an exercise were possible you would find the proportion of Brummies who are boring identical to the proportion of Yorkshiremen, Scots, Devonians, Muslims, men who sell and repair bicycles, journalists and gays. None of these, and none of every other category you might care to come up with (except, of course, the category of boring people) is intrinsically more or less boring than anyone else. In fact, I’m prepared to go out on a limb and suggest that you might well, if your luck’s in, come across some quite interesting - as in not-at-all boring - trainspotters, country and western fans and passionate environmentalists.

You might yourself be on the boring side, although you would, of course, pretty much be the last to know it. If you really want to know, finally to establish the truth of whether or not you actually are quite boring – and my advice is to let well alone and on your head be it - have a word with friends and ask them directly: ‘Am I boring?’. If the honest ones take more than even a millisecond to respond with a thoroughly convincing ‘you, boring? Of course, not, old chap, whatever gives you that idea?’ and if there’s even the slightest hesitation, you know the honest answer they would like to give but most certainly dare not is ‘well, er, you know, er, sometimes, er, you can, er, rattle on a bit. But you know, I’m pretty sure I’m boring too, well, possibly sometimes, so don’t feel too bad about it.’

. . .

What of all this talk of ‘boring folk’? Why bring it up? Simple: just as you will at some point most certainly been cornered by someone who assumes you are just as fascinated as they are in the long and laborious process of selling their house which a surveyor has just confirmed is threatened by subsidence, along come the various Brexit campaigners trumpeting at every opportunity why it would be a tragic folly to leave/remain in the EU. Every day now some jackanapes with some kind of alleged expertise in some field or other joins the fray of bores warning us that to leave/remain in the EU is unthinkable.

Most recently it was one Sir Richard Dearlove who for five years was head of MI6 (in newspaper speak ‘Britain’t top spy’). He announced a few days ago in a magazine called Prospect that leaving the EU would mean Britain would be safer from terrorism. Perhaps, perhaps not. He should know, you might think, he’s ‘Britain’s top spy’, and, you know, spies sort of, you know, know that kind of thing, like they have information the rest of us don’t ’cos their spies and we’re not, if you see what I mean’. Well, in Sir Richard’s case, perhaps not.

A year and a half ago he also had something to say about how safe we are from terrorism: jihadists, he said, were more concerned with affairs in the Middle East and the threat they posed to the West was overstated. (The media were making monsters of ‘misguided young men, rather pathetic figures’ who were getting coverage ‘more than their wildest dreams’, said Dearlove, adding: ‘It is surely better to ignore them.’) That was in July 2014. Sixteen months later just under 100 people were massacred by jihadists in Paris, and three days ago around 30 died in Brussels.

Prospect makes a point of not being ideological and has also published a piece which claims the opposite of Sir Richard’s view, that leaving the EU would make it more difficult for Britain to fight terrorism. So there you have it: you pays your money and you makes your choice. You want Britain to leave the EU, then here, from the mouth of Britain’s top spy (‘Look, he’s got to know what he’s talking about, of course he does and it would be silly to pretend otherwise’) is the proof that ‘Britain would be safer out of the EU’. If you want Britain to remain a member, then here David Anderson’s piece in Prospect supplies your proof that it would be sheer folly from the point of view of Britain’s security to leave the EU. David Anderson is billed as an ‘independent QC [i.e a barrister] tasked with reviewing the UK’s anti-terrorism laws’. It seems that he was appointed by the government, but don’t get too cynical about that - it’s often useful in important matters to point out where you are going wrong. Well, the ‘we must remain in the EU at all costs’ folk will say ‘Look, he’s got to know what he’s talking about, of course he does and it would be silly to pretend otherwise’.

So what’s the upshot? Simple: we are up shit creek, but not yet a lot further.

. . .

Being the chopsy sort who is not afraid to talk to strangers (about my only one gift which made me suitable to work as a reporter all those years ago) I conducted an ad-hoc vox pop the other night. For reasons which are far to dull - that word again - to go into, last week and for the next two weeks I shall not be driving to work in London, but taking the train. And that means that rather than stopping off at the Brewer’s Arms in South Petherton, I stopped off at the Tor Valley Inn, in Sticklepath, Devon, on my way home last Wednesday. And as I was chatting to a couple of guys, I asked one what he thought about ‘Brexit’.

His name was Paul, he was about mid-forties and had a wife and two teenage children. He said he was sitting on the fence on the matter, but thought when push came to shove (it will do in the voting booth on June 23) he will vote to stay, mainly because he feels it would be safer. Not much of a ringing endorsement, you’ll have to admit. He went on to say that he felt overall the majority of those casting their vote in the referendum would feel the same way.

Then there was Keith (pictured). Originally from West London, he moved to Sticklepath many years ago and eventually started a drainage business. He recently sold this to a firm in Wales (who, according to Keith, haven’t a clue) and plans to retire next year when he will be 70. I don’t know

how he sees himself politically, but I should imagine he’s a Tory, though like most Brits, whether nominally Tory or Labour, thinks ‘the government’ is pretty much ‘fucking it up’, whatever ‘it’ might be. I have been friendly with Keith and his wife, who are more or less permanent fixtures at the Tor Valley Inn, since I started dropping in several years ago. I asked him how he intended to vote: he is pretty unequivocably for getting out.

So was Roger, another punter that night who was there for the darts (the pub has thriving darts team, and more often than not when I drop in of a Wednesday a match is on against some team from another pub, for which the landlord, another Keith, always lays on sandwiches, crisps and nuts. Very friendly pub is the Tor Valley Inn). I don’t know how old Roger is, but should guess in his early seventies. He has a very florid face and a boozer’s now, not just florid but lined with thin purple veins. Before he retired, he did something in technology and travelled throughout Europe quite a bit, so I shouldn’t mark him down as some kind of little Englander.

Unsurprisingly, when I asked him whether he was for Leave or Remain, he unequivocally said get the hell out of Europe and, like Keith, cited the fact that ‘we can control our own borders again. Surprisingly, both Roger and Keith’s views are most certainly not rigid: when I gently put the opposite case for the sake of argument, they agreed that there might also be good reasons for staying. So the Lord knows what they will eventually vote.

None of the three was or is boring, though Keith’s rather robust somewhat blokeish humour wouldn’t go down to well among bien pensant folk. And I don’t say that the question of whether or not we should leave the EU or remain is necessarily dull. But I do, however, object to is the sheer zealotry of both sides and how in the media they take you by the lapels and shake you, shake you, shake you until you see sense!

And my attitude? Well, I’ve said before that as far as I am concerned we are on a hiding to nothing whether we leave or remain. Whatever the leave goons say, economically it could get very rough indeed for several years as Britain has to go about the very laborious business of negotiating new trade agreements.

On the other hand to me it seems pretty obvious that unless major reform takes place and the EU draws in its horns on several fronts, not least its obsession with ‘ever closer union’, it will pretty much collapse in on itself under the weight of its contradictions, not the least of which is its paper-thin claim to unity among members.

As for the future of Britain whether in or out of the EU: well, can anyone reading this care to tell me what the weather will be like on the weekend of, say, October 15/16? No? Didn’t think so.

. . .

A couple of snaps which I took last May in Mallorca, just for the craic.

Cars, especially first cars, and chips off the old block: I hope my daughter isn’t as stupid as me

About six or seven years in this blog when it was still a thing of fresh, juvenile enthusiasm and I hadn’t resorted to writing potted resumés of the most recent Economist analysis I had come across, I included an account of all the cars I have owned. Not in itself a topic of unbridled fascination you might think, but please bear in mind that this blog is as much a diary and a compendium as it is anything else, and quite probably more for my benefit than it is for yours.

Yesterday, I jotted down a list of all the cars I have bought and owned since I passed my driving test and bought my first and the number came to, er, 28. And I don’t say that by way of bragging, for the sad fact is that although some were fine and dandy and did the biz, several were, at best, not fit for purpose, and one was a complete lethal wreck.

. . .

I was 25 at the time and working as a reporter in North Gwent, which in those days given what is always euphemistically called an ’industrial downturn’ was pretty much in many ways the Wild West of South Wales. Rough doesn’t even begin to describe the area. The steelworks at Ebbw Vale, which had employed the vast majority of everyone locally, was within a year of being closed completely as were various coal mines in the area. And, of course, an area hit by widespread unemployment suffers as much because shops and businesses are also affected.

As a district reporter for a local weekly paper, The News, I was eligible to claim mileage expenses, so not only was I as keen as every other young lad to get my first car, having one also meant I could try to boost my wages. Later, once I had moved on to the local evening paper, the South Wales Argus, I went on to boost my weekly wage rather well: newsdesk insisted by made our police calls in person, so short trips to do them from the office in Ebbw Vale to nearby Tredegar (3 miles away), Brynmawr (4 miles) and Abertillery (10 miles) went down on expenses as a total of around 80 miles, with trip assuming I returned to base before starting off on the next.

As soon as I passed my driving test - on November 25, 1975 I remember, I happen to remember one or two odd dates when I had just move from the Lincolnshire Chronicle in Lincoln to work for The News in South Wales - I set about saving up for my first car. That first car was a wreck of a Triumph Herald (and, dear reader when I say ‘wreck’ I am going easy on the bloody thing). Until I was able to boost my pitiful wages with expenses, I did not earn a lot, but was saving as much as I could for ‘my car’ and finally had £65. This was in 1976, and today that would be worth around £600.

I scoured the the cars for sale columns of the South Wales Argus for something I could buy locally for that price but there was nothing. Then, one day, going by bus from Abertillery north to Brynmawr, I passed through Nantyglo and there the narrow valley spreads out into a plain. And there, off to my right I could see, in the distance a row of three cars for sale. I got off and walked down side-road towards them. They were on offer at what I would now realise was a scrapyard. Still. I wistfully looked at all three, but they all cost more than I had. Then the owner approached me and asked me if I was interested in buying one of them. Yes, this one, I said, pointing at the Triumph Herald which was offered for £95, but I haven’t got enough money. ‘How much have you got?’ he asked. £65, I told him. ‘That’ll do,’ he said.

His ‘that’ll do’ should - and these days would - set off an array of very noisy alarm bells in any man less green behind the ears than I was then. His ‘that’ll do’ meant nothing more than ‘well, I’ve got a right one here’, and he was only too pleased to relieve me of my pot of gold for the heap of shit which shouldn’t, in a more just world, even be allowed to call itself ‘a car’. He explained that as the

As I saw it . . .

car was quite old there, were one or two things amiss with it, mainly that in order to get a circuit going between the battery, alternator and distributor, you had to run a wire from here to there - but, he warned, you should disconnect the wire every time you turned the engine off or else the battery would be drained and go flat. More alarm bells? Not for me, as just about to be the proud owner of my first car, I was in seventh heaven.

I had that car for just a week or two before it was written off (which was rather easily done). It wasn’t a particularly fast car and one annoying and very tiring aspect of it was that the spring which is attached to the accelerator pedal to return it ‘to neutral’ when you stop pushing it down to accelerate had long been lost and had been replaced with another spring, a very heavy duty, industrial affair which surely started life as part of an articulated lorry. This spring was so powerful, that after only ten minutes of driving your poor right foot would ache and ache and ache merely because you had been pressing down on the accelerator pedal.

That weekend I drove the 140 miles home to my parents home in Henley-on-Thames to show the car to my younger brother. It was the first time I had driven and the route I took was substantially longer than it need have been, and Christ did my right foot ache once I got there. The car would go no faster than 50mph and if I remember the journey took just under five hours. It should have taken just over two.

On the Monday morning I got up early to drive back to work in South Wales only to find the battery as flat as a pancake. I had forgotten to disconnect the thin wire which ran from somewhere in the engine to somewhere else to put the whole show on the road. I roused my brother, and we pushed the car a quarter of a mile to the nearest hill (Gillott’s Land down to Harpsden on the outskirts of Henley, on the road to Rotherfield Greys and Peppard Common if you know the area) before I could roll down it and bump start the car.

A week or two later, I parked the car in a street in Abertillery to dodge into a cornershop to get some cigarettes. When I got back a minute or two later, the car had gone. My first thought was ‘shit, my car’s been stolen!’, followed immediately by my second thought ‘but no one in their right mind would steal that car!’ In fact, what had happened was that almost as soon as I had parked the car and

. . .  as it really was

dodged into the shop, it had started rolling forward down the street - like all Valley towns, Abertillery is very hilly indeed - and then, coming to a T-junction to a road which was even steeper, had turned right and rolled some distance further down before crashing into the back of a parked car. I discovered what had happened just moment later. The owner of the other car (which wasn’t much damaged at all) had called the police who, once they had arrived examined my car and established that it didn’t have a handbrake.

So, dear reader, within just a few weeks of owning my first car, I earned my first motoring conviction and got the standard three penalty points on my licence. Worse still, I no longer had the means to legitimately claim mileage expenses to raise my wage from ‘pitifully small’ to ‘very poor’.

There is a postscript to that, it has to be said very minor, crash, and one which could only have occurred in South Wales: as I, the owner of the car my Triumph Herald and the copper were getting through the necessary business, who should walk by but the local representative of the Co-operative Insurance Society who I had seen just a few days earlier to insure myself and my car. He asked me what was up, and I explained.

So the business of starting to settle the other man’s claim for damages, whatever they were, got underway rather more swiftly than might have been the case but more to the point, when I moaned that I didn’t have a car any more, he advised me to get the bus to Newport and go to Brown’s (I really don’t know why I can remember that) who often had cheap cars for sale. I did, a few days later, and came home with a Hillman Superminx which cost me £100 (though on reflection how and why I suddenly had £100 available to buy it, whereas just weeks earlier I only had £65 and had already spent that on the Triumph I really don’t know and can’t recall. Perhaps this is a point where this blog sidesteps in magic realism. Who knows, and, more to the point who cares? You have to remember that this all occurred 30 years ago).

. . .

This stroll down Memory Lane, which, to be honest has become more of a trek than a stroll, has a point. My daughter, who will be 20 on August 7, passed her driving test last October and is equally as keen to get ‘her first car’. I recalling my excitement, I can’t blame her. I have been echoing my father telling her that running a car is the fastest way to lose money yet invented by man, that it isn’t just a question of buying one, but that every year it has to be insured, taxed and weekly filled with petrol, that there are the unexpected incidentals to pay for and the rest, but nothing, nothing, nothing will dampen her enthusiasm.

This summer she is due to have a holiday job managing a local pub/restaurant (and not one of those ‘big plate/small portions nouvelle cusine gastro-pub outfits’, but a local pub/restaurant, and so far - she has been working there for several years - we have been running her over there and picking her up, but she now insists she ‘needs her own car’.

My wife, who runs a tiny Daewo Matiz (a runt of a car) has told her that we can insure her for that car and she can have the use of it whenever she likes, but no, ‘she needs her own car’ - she would sometimes like to stay overnight with her boyfriend’s family (about 20 miles away) and it would be inconvenient for my wife if the car weren’t there. ‘Don’t worry,’ we say, ‘no big deal, we still have my Vauxhall Astra available’, but no, she really does need her own car. And so on. And to be honest, recalling own desperation to ‘have my own car’, I’m finding it difficult not agreeing with her.

My attitude is that yes, her ‘own car’ will be a terrible drain on her resources - resources she doesn’t much have - but that no amount of telling her will make the slightest difference. She will have to learn the hard way so that when the time comes she can tell her own children that the car they ‘need’ will be an unaffordable drain on their resources and they can then, in turn, ignore her. We’ve told her - or it somehow came about, I can’t quite remember - that the cost of her insurance can come out of the children’s benefit we have (at my insistence) been saving since she was born and which is intended for college fees and such. I suppose covering the cost of insurance for the care ‘she needs’ can, at a pinch, but thus justified.

She has only around £800 to spend and has been keeping a keen eye on the Autotrader website for anything available at that price. And she has been bombarding me with links to cars for sale on Autotrader and wondering what I thought about this one and that one. I tell her that cars are ten a penny, that most at that price are shit and not worth the asking price, and that the best way of going about it is to look at loads of cars until she gets an eye for what is complete crap and what might be worthwhile and can then grab a reasonable one when she comes across it. Which is all in through one of her ears and out through the other.

I am reasonably certain that my involvement in helping her find a car will inevitably mean that I shall get all the blame when that car breaks down within three weeks, but then I’ve been married for 20 years now and you get used to that sort of thing (rather as Russian servants in Tsarist Russia got used to being beaten - they most certainly didn’t like it and it hurt each time, but each beating no longer came as a bolt from the blue). I am also certain that my daughter will hint more than once that, sigh, she’s got to fill the car again and . . . and that I shall slip her £20 with the stern instruction that ‘this is really the very last time.

What’s new in this world?

Will the last hack to leave the industry please put out the lights? And Germany’s AfD might be making strides, but I shouldn’t fear the jackboot quite yet

I watched Spotlight the other night and liked it. So did the Oscars committee and awarded it Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay. It is an unlikely winner, to be honest, in that not a lot happens: four intrepid journalists in the investigations department of a big morning newspaper uncover what amounts to corruption in the Roman Catholic church in Boston and do the business.

The film was especially gratifying for me, a still working hack (though possibly the word ‘working’ is used rather loosely these days), in that there was none of the spurious grandstanding you get in far too many films about newspapers and hacks, except possibly for one scene, but even that is debatable. The film gave a sober account of the unexciting work which must often be done when you want to uncover what others want to hide.

So, for example, the hacks spent days searching through annual diocesan directories trying to spot priests who might have been moved on from a parish or put on sick leave because they had been caught kiddie-fiddling. And that kind of work is not glamorous. It’s a slog, and although, if I recall, there were one or two of eureka moments when something turned up, the film conveyed them in a low-key way. Even the one scene which might have been more ‘filmic’ than true to life, when one of the investigating reporters loses it and has a go at his boss for not publishing now, but holding on for more evidence and, then his rant over, storms out of the office, was, at pinch, quite possible.

But this post isn’t about Spotlight, the film, nor the Boston Globe. For the odd thing was that throughout watching the film, one thought kept going through my mind: were the Boston Globe’s circulation figures holding up? Or were they, like the circulation figures for newspapers here in Britain, both the national and regional ones, heading south at an alarming rate?

I’ve just looked up the Boston Globe circulation figure for 2015 and it seems to be hovering around the quarter of a million mark and seems reasonable steady. (There was a blip a few years ago when the Globe switched its companies delivering the paper every morning to subscribers and the new company cocked up to such and extent that 10pc of all subscribers complained they weren’t regularly getting their Globe every morning. But that now seems to have been sorted out.)

Here in Britain, however, the story is different: newspapers are dying on their feet. I’ve previously noted how the circulation of the UK’s national newspapers is crashing - the Sun which at one point topped four million circulation is down to around 1.5 million and the Daily Telegraph (the ‘Buffer’s Own’ as it is known fondly in care and nursing homes up and down the country), once a standout for broadsheet papers, shifting an average 1.5 million a day, is now down to a more than pitiful 450,000. But yesterday I took a look at the circulation figures for our regional morning and evening newspaper and I was astounded. Things aren’t simply bad, they are catastrophic.

Take the Doncaster Press (which says it serves Doncaster, Barnsley, Chesterfield, Rotherham and Sheffield, a sizeable area): it’s latest ABC circulation figure is - 686. My first evening paper was the South Wales Argus, which then served and probably still serves Newport and the county of Gwent (or Monmouthshire if it has yet again changed it’s name). I worked for it as the North Gwent reporter based in Ebbw Vale (‘Jewel of The Vallies’) from October 1976 until July 1978 and at the time the paper had a circulation of around 55,000 a day. Now? 11,475.

The next evening paper I worked for, though not as a reporter but a sub-editor, was the Birmingham Evening Mail. When I joined, it still regarded itself as a player and operated a London office whose reporter was often sent abroad on stories. It’s circulation was around a quarter of a million (250,000). Now? 24,260 - a tenth of the previous figure.

Many regional morning and evening papers have converted themselves into weekly papers. And many, quite obviously, still make money for the owners or else they would long have been put out of their misery. But what is going on? It can’t just be ‘social media’ which is driving this decline in circulation, although that is what is usually cited by the pundits as the cause. And it can’t just be TV and radio news because Britain had TV and radio news when circulation were still reasonably healthy.

Answers, please, on the usual postcard which you can email to me at hellinahandcart@wevelosttheplot.com

NB By chance I came across another, pertinent blog which you can find here.

. . . 

Just over two years ago, I wrote about the new ‘anti-euro, but pro-EU party, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) which several economists and academics had set up in Germany. I made the point that broadly it didn’t much resemble Britain’s UKIP (to which is was often being compared here in Britain) at all in as far as it didn’t seem to be made up of assorted pub bores and boring chaps with too much to say, but – well, economists and academics who were quite prepared to settle into a reasoned, intelligent discussion about why Germany should ditch the euro. Oh, and they didn’t want to leave the EU, they just wanted to see it reformed. Well, that was then and this is now.

Now, AfD is labelled as a ‘far-right’ party which is apparently put the shits up one Angela Merkel. It seems Afd is no longer the respectable party of reasonable chaps who had a distaste for the euro, but an increasingly rabid bunch who are dead against any immigrants from North Africa and the

Middle East being settled in Germany and have gained a fair degree of support. I already knew that Bernd Lucke, one of the co-founders of the party, was ousted from the leadership of the party last summer by Frauke Petry, but I was rather taken aback (i.e. I hadn’t gone to the trouble of keeping myself informed about developments in AfD) by the new ‘far-right’ tag. And to be honest, it is, as yet (as the Germans say) etwas übertrieben. Certainly Afd is further right-of-centre than the CDU and CSU, but the problem Germany always has after experiencing Hitler’s 12-year Nazi rule (the shortest 1,000 years in history, by the way) is that whenever – whenever there’s any mention of anything remotely ‘right-wing’, it first becomes ‘far-right’ and non-Germans are already inclined to hear the march of jackboots in the distance. Bugger that Hungary, Slovakia, Greece, Norway, Denmark and several other countries are home to far more unsavoury and truly ‘far-right’ parties, as soon as Germany becomes associated with it . . .

In truth, AfD’s antipathy to immigrants is shared by any number of Tories in Britain, but no one has yet decided they are ‘far-right’. I know that rather makes me sound like an apologist for the Afd (as it has now become) and I don’t want to be anything of the kind. But a sense of balance never goes amiss. The party was in the news over these past few days because it did rather well in elections in three German states. It is, however, nowhere near being in a position to ‘take power’ or anything of that sort, so perhaps the order should go out to Dad’s Army here in Britain to stand down for the time being.

Ignore this, if you like, just having a general whinge about this sodding itching which has beset me for these past five months

I’ve got to say very little has been on my mind except looking forward to the day when this perpetual torso itching goes away. Writing it here is intended to help my see the situation more clearly, and if you decided you really don’t want to carry on reading, I shan’t be offended. (In fact, I shan’t even know, shall I?)

Some days are worse than others, but none is better than pretty damn uncomfortable. My GP did blood tests and I was hoping something might be found to be amiss so that some kind of treatment could start, but Sod’s Law, I passed all tests with flying colours. That would normally be good news but it wasn’t. That consultation, at the end of last week, ended with him saying ‘well, there’s nothing more I can do for you. I could send you to see a dermatologists’. I was rather taken aback that he should give up so quickly and that his offer of ‘seeing a dermatologist’ should be made almost as a favour. I said yes, of course, and was hoping the system would have moved so fast that when I got back from London last night waiting for me would be an appointment. Well, what do you think? Nothing.

Last night wasn’t just uncomfortable but downright unpleasant. I woke as some point and itched all over, although as you are half-asleep and probably still dreaming, and as I am starting a cold and as my wife has already put away the heavy duvet for the winter and I was freezing - though still half-asleep - and as, for some very odd reason an iPad and a task I had to get done with the iPad was all a part of it - I spent a few miserable hours until daybreak, half-awak, half-asleep and wholly not knowing what the hell was going on.

I have, naturally, scoured the internet for causes, but nothing I have come across seems to fit what I am getting. Oh, and there’s the usual trick of using a medical word for the condition - pruritis - which spuriously seems to persuade you that, now it has ‘a name’, you are some way along the road

to recovery. Well, you are not. I shall try to describe the symptoms, by way of trying to get my head around them and in the hope that they might ring a bell with someone out there who found treatment: at different times, I can itch all over my torso, neck, forehead and scalp, though not beneath the waste. Although I have irregular red marks, some tiny, some a little bigger, some of the itching areas show no marks at all. While I was in Rome two weeks ago, the red marks I had became quite prominent, but although still in evidence have faded somewhat. When it is really bad, as it was in Rome, my whole back feels raw and it’s it as though I am wearing a hair shirt. As a rule I cover my upper torso with cream everywhere (except a spot above the small of my back which I can’t reach) and that sometimes soothes the skin and banishes the itching and sometimes doesn’t (Last night it bloody didn’t!).

My doctor initially prescribed anti-histamine tablets and I regularly take those, though whether or not they are effective I really don’t know. From my trawl through the net I am pretty certain it is not exczema or anything like that. The closest I have come is hives, except that hives are supposed to come and go in a matter of days, whereas I have had this sodding itching for at least five months now (Christ, that long?).

As I told my GP, I feel rather silly in that many of his patients come to him with rather nastier ailments (my nearest neighbour here up the road was diagnosed with prostate cancer a few years ago after successfully overcoming another ailment, and, of course, my stepmother suffered her second stroke just before Christmas) but on the other hand it seems rather silly to put up with something which you might be able to do something about.

Pip, pip.

You want a hero, look elsewhere

I’ve long suspected that I would never have made hero (the past transitional conjunctive tense or whatever it is is appropriate here because at my age I doubt I’ll see many opportunities to prove my mettle), but these past few days in Rome have pretty much convinced me when it comes to cowards I am fully qualified to go for gold.

This bloody itching has continued non-stop and to be honest the last thing I wanted was to be more than 1,000 miles from home in a hotel which had allocated me a shower so tiny, if you bent over to pick up the soap, your arse was already in the room next door (though the rest of the room was fine, I’ll add, to be fair). It was – is – incessant and on top associated red blotches – or I hope they are associated or my GP will most certainly be working for his next pay rise when I see him on Friday – plus areas of dry skin which makes it seem as though I am wearing a hair shirt (though despite being brought up mainstream RC, I never have and I can’t conceive of how folk to it for pleasure) which make every movement unpleasant have pretty much ruined the trip.

Once here, of course, it seemed daft not to go and watch the Six Nations game at the Stadio Olympico, but I wasn’t really in the mood (though in the event several plastic beakers of Peroni did help). My flight – I am writing this an hour and a bit before take-off – isn’t until five minutes to ten (i.e. 21.55) and I had originally planned a trip down to Ostia, the old port of Rome, and have lunch there somewhere. Well, dear reader, I really wasn’t in the mood. All I did was to walk the ten minutes from my hotel to the Termini rail station, jump on the bus to Fiumicino airport and sit out the rest of the day, trying to keep as still as possible. I got here just after noon and it is now just before 9pm (21.00 for all you eurofreaks). Knowing that I had the best part of a day to kill, the first ten minutes dragged as no time has ever dragged before.

Once they were out of the way, I set about getting through the next twenty, then the next thirty. Each minute lasted a lifetime – well, actually a little longer. After an eternity that first hour was out of the way – 1pm, yippee, just under another nine hours to kill, sitting in an airport several thousands miles away from comfort. My mood was for most of that time foul, and it was then that I fully realised, although I have long suspected it, that I would make a completely shitty Arctic explorer, the kind of stout fellow, usually British, Norwegian and Italian who thrive on totally bloody discomfort. (Incidentally, given how cold it is up there and down there at both poles and given that they are swaddled like I don’t know what to keep our the cold, what exactly do they do if when they need a dump?)

Matters looked up a little once I was able to get onto the free airport wifi, free, that is, if you are prepared to give them five euros, and then courtesy of a useful browser plugin, watch the League Cup final between Manchester City and Liverpool. (It went to penalties and turned out to be quite a match after a boring first half).

After that, of course, it was down in the dumps again, and that is where you find me now. In fact the only reason I am writing this bollocks is to give me something to do to take my mind off it.

What makes a short break in Rome not the pleasure it should be? Sodding chronic hives. At least Italy might win today’s Six Nations match against Scotland

Rome

I’m here nominally for tomorrow’s Italy v Scotland Six Nations match at the Olympic Stadium, but actually the game, although I am looking forward to watching it – and hope that Italy beat Scotland – is pretty much just an excuse to do something different. Really, it was just an excuse to do something different, in this case to ‘have a weekend in Rome, although there is one not quite so small drawback, which I shall come to later. It kicked off 13 months ago when I was discussing the Six Nations with the landlord of the Brewers Arms (no apostrophe, I gather, so I don’t know how many of them there are) and talking about the price of Six Nations games tickets. He remarked that the prices for the lesser games, i.e. those featuring Italy and Scotland, who in most people’s univers must surely with the best will in the world qualify as lesser nations (each of them sets itself the task of not getting that seasons’ Wooden Spoon) would undoubtedly be cheaper, so there and then I decided to treat myself to a trip to Rome to watch Italy in one of its home games.

I looked up the prices of flights, hotels and tickets and they weren’t too bad. But I let it slide and by the time I got around to trying to book they had risen to such an extent that I really wasn’t prepared to cough up for something which was pretty close to a whim. But I resolved to keep an eye on the fixture dates for the 2016 Six Nations games and book as soon as possible. o last September I booked a flight, hotel for three nights and a ticket for a game. It was a toss up between Italy v England and Italy v Scotland, but as the latter game came later in the month, and I reckoned the weather would be that less colder, I opted for that one.

The drawback is that for the past six, seven, eight, if not nine weeks, I have been suffering from a curious affliction which consists of my upper torse itching everywhere like fuck. A tripe to my GP two months ago concluded with being given a large tub of cream to smear on my front and back whenever and a course of anti-histamines. That didn’t help at all. A second trip a few weeks later (and this time I consulted his locum, a Chinese GP called, I suppose nevitably, Dr Lee) concluded with being prescribed another tub of cream, a different brand. That hasn’t helped, either.

Two weeks ago I was at the surgery again and this time was told I shall have some blood tests. Meanwhile, the itching continues and continues and continues and it is not pleasant. Some nights I can’t get to sleep, and on other nights (as last night) I get to sleep, only to wake up and having to scratch myself mercilessly. And, of course, that doesn’t help. It doesn’t help that I am of the species home hypochondus, which means I always fear the worst.

Then, in the Daily Mail’s Good Health pages last week came across the case of a woman who had a similar itching problem and was eventually diagnosed, far too late to save her life, with liver cancer. It seems her minute bile ducts had become blocked with cancer and the bile, not having anywhere else to go, for some reason travels to just under the skin where it causes the itching. The upshot is that I am not quite enjoying my break as I might because I have got to the age where when things are amiss all I want to do is be ‘at home’. Well, I’m not, I’m in fucking Rome. But being the – reasonably cheerful sort – I am trying to make the best of it.

This morning just after ten I took off and headed for the Colloseum. I found it – it’s not easy to miss, being quite big – and then carried on with a view to walking to St Peter’s. However, my sense of direction rather let me down and I ended up walking pretty much in circles, or rather as Rome’s streets are pretty straight, though often at a diagonal, in squares. I like walking, but after about two and bit hours I got thirsty and spotted and ‘Irish pub’ – they are everywhere – so I stopped off. For a coke. I really didn’t feel like drinking (apparently another sign of liver cancer, as well as losing your appetite – check – but that is the last ‘joke’ I shall make about liver cancer in case Life takes me to task about it and says, right, sunshine.

. . .

After a great deal more walking, I got back to my hotel, the Hotel Napoleon in the Piazza Vittorio Emmanuelle II, and crashed. That was because the walking and the fact that I hadn’t been able to get to sleep until about 2am meant I was bloody tired. Tonight I had planned to find one of the many ‘British pubs’ to watch the Wales v France game, and took myself off to the nearest, the Druids’ Den in Piazza Esquilino, but when I got there it just wasn’t what I wanted, loads of Brits, many in kilts, standing shoulder to shoulder downing pints of Guinness and being very noisy. So it was back to the hotel, except on the way back I came across a small Roman bar up the square which was also showing the game. There I stopped, discovered Vecchia Romana brandy, and watch Wales beat the shit out of France. And I didn’t really notice the itching.

 . . .

I am now sitting on the terrace on the sixth floor, the only spot where you can smoke. It is mild. The game tomorrow is at around 3pm. I’ve decided to get to the are early, have a lunch beforehand and get along to the stadium. Sunday, well, Sunday I must leave the hotel by whenever, but my flight isn’t until after 9pm, so I thought I might go to Ostia, the old Roman port, for a late lunch and make my way to Fiumicino airport a little later. Whether there is an direct transport from Ostia to the airport I don’t know, but as I shall have finished lunch by 3/4pm, there’s still plenty of time to cock things up, then salvage the day. Pip, pip.

Later

Had good night’s sleep – who wouldn’t after several glasses of what I had and despite the coffees – but this morning this sodding itching is back with a vengeance and really pissing me off. Does did a quick self-diagnosis on the net and it might be chronic hives. No real treatment except anti-histamines and cream. Doing that already.

The thing is that I’m not really enjoying these few days in Rome at all and am just counting the hours until I can get back to Britain and my usual home/work routine as it’s just a question of getting your head down and biting the bullet. Biting the bullet ain’t too easy when you are in a strange city with time on your hand. Oh, and although the hotel is fine, the shower is tiny, about two and a half feet by two and a half feet. Bend over to pick up the soap and you stick your arse through the Perspex doors.

Should we stay or should we go? Who knows and, to be frank, who cares? The way things are there might in time no longer be an EU to leave

My apologies to anyone who happens to come across this blog - or even makes a point of visiting it - and who is from South Korea, Australia, Ukraine, Canada, Vietnam, India or Brazil: this blog post will probably interest you even less than last year’s weather forecast. It’s about the European Union, you see. I mention those countries because according to the statistics (‘stats’) visitors from the countries listed have somehow or other washed up here in the past four weeks. They are, of course, perfectly welcome to carry on reading, or they might spend the time considering an issue of their own. Even those visitors from EU countries might find themselves stifling a yawn, as are most of us here in Britain.

Will we or won’t we? would seem to be the issue dividing the country if our homegrown media are anything to go by, leave the EU that is. The trouble is that no one has told the country which remains resolutely undivided. ‘Brexit’, the catchy phrase thought up by the scruffier members of the Press as a useful short term for ‘Britain resigning its EU membership’ - they tend to think in headlines, see - might well elicit a response from many if you directly ask them their opinion, but crucially you have to ask first: it’s not a conversation which will naturally arise. ‘Should Louis Van Gal get the boot from United?’, ‘What on earth is the Government thinking asking Google to cough up just £180 million in taxes?’ ‘That Julian Assange - is he really still stuck in the bloody embassy? Lord, what a wanker! Thought he had died’ - these are topics you might hear touched upon in the friendly banter down the Pig and Whistle of a Friday night. ‘Should we leave the EU or stay?’ rarely, if ever, gets a look-in.

That’s very odd, because if you read our newspaper and listen to our broadcast news, you would think there was no hotter topic. This state of affairs is causing both the We Must Stay In and We Must Get Out camps to tear their hair out. Both would like us to see the question of Britain’s continued membership as the defining question of the early 21st century and can’t understand why your ordinary Brit apparently doesn’t give a monkey’s either way (much as, it has to be said, your ordinary Brit doesn’t really give a monkey’s about most things).

Yes, there are voices decrying that ‘the country is being swamped by fucking immigrant benefit scrounging bastards because of the EU’, and yelling that ‘we can no longer let ourselves be ruled by fucking Brussels bureaucrats’; and there are other voices - notably a tad more ethereal - who insist

‘Britain’s destiny lies in Europe’ and ‘we must embrace the European ideal’. Both sides warn that leaving/staying in is absolutely vital for the future of Britain’s economy and staying in/leaving will have dire consequences. But at the end of the day it is all for naught: most of us just can’t get excited about the issue.

As it stands, our Prime Minister David Cameron has spent the past five years or so touring the capital cities of EU member states trying to drum up support for a ‘deal’ which would redefine Britain’s membership and persuade the majority of the country to vote to remain in the EU when the referendum is held (now said to be due in June). A day or two ago the terms of the ‘deal’ were announced. ‘Is that it, is that really it?’ the We Must Leave camp snorted in derision, ‘are these the only concession we’re going to get?’. Conversely: ‘Cameron’s done it! He’s won marvellous terms from the EU and there’s no question whatsoever that we can now stay in on our terms. It’s a tremendous achievement!’ (For some reason the We Must Say in gang are far more likely to use the word ‘tremendous’ than the We Must Leave side.)

All of this leaves the ordinary Jill and Joe bemused and baffled. So what was decided? they ask. Well, they can keep asking, for not only is no one going to tell them, but no one can tell them: whether you agree that Cameron has won the day is pretty much down to whether you want to agree or not. And in providing you with a rundown of the details of Cameron’s success/Cameron’s failure all commentators are doing his highlighting their own particular bias.

. . .

Until recently I was all in favour is Britain remaining a member provided the EU was sorted out, it dropped all this ‘ever closer union bollocks’ and it kept far better track of where its money was going (apparently the Italian Mafia has been doing exceptionally well from all the EU projects over the years, though it would be unfair to single out Italian crims as I understand Spanish, Portuguese and Balkan gangsters are no slouches either). Oh, and as a bonus I was hoping it might be persuaded to drop all the posturing that the EU was by far the best thing to happen to Europe since the Renaissance.

Well, that is not my position now, but nor have I gone over to the ‘we must leave’ camp. It’s just I think whether or not Britain stays or leaves is now pretty much irrelevant in that in about five years time there won’t really be much of a functioning EU left. That’s a big claim, I know, but suddenly it’s not looking at all rosy. And it all seem to start coming unstuck when the financial shit hit the fan in 2008.

For many years I used to organise a weekly five-a-side football game. I did so because I, who was the very definition of ‘crap player’, was thus always guaranteed a game as I always got in touch with myself to see whether I could come along. I always could. And organising that game taught me a lot about team playing, and by extension it taught me a lot about who can be relied on to pull their weight (e.g. actually turn up on time so) and who could not. The EU seems to be a similar test of character. The EU and belonging was all fine and dandy while the sun was shining and the EU built marvellous new roads, leisure centres, bridges and I don’t know what else in your country (usually at the expense of ‘net contributors’ - Germany is by far the largest, followed by France, Italy and the UK).

Then when the 2008 crisis erupted (can a crisis erupt?), it all slowly began going pear-shaped when Greece’s euro crisis was discussed. But even then the cracks could pretty much all be papered over - we got lots of rousing EU speeches and pious homilies that ‘there are rows in every family’, the implication being that when push came to shove the ‘EU family’ would once again pull together. Except it didn’t and doesn’t in the slightest look like ever doing so. But the real divisions showed themselves and national interest reared its ugly head again when migrants from the Middle East and Afghanistan began pitching up on Europe’s southern border in search of a better life (and who can blame them?).

With quite frightening speed the EU fell into factions, broadly along the lines of the ‘old EU members’ and the ‘new EU members’, who just happened to all to be former Soviet bloc members. It is relevant that at least three of them - Poland, Hungary and Slovakia - have distinctly right-wing governments who don’t go in for all the liberal lovey-dovey crap and are apt to call a migrant, whether a genuine asylum seeker or not, a bloody nusiance. Of course I could well be proved wrong and the EU will gain even more strength from the ongoing euro crisis - don’t ever think that has yet been solved - and the migrant crisis. But I’m not holding my breath.

It was good while it lasted, I suppose, but I’ve long learned that the great thing about being a cynic is that you are rarely disappointed. As for Britain’s, by now rather sweet ‘should we leave or should we go’ (a bit like a virgin decided whether or not now is the time to give her all), it is becoming pretty damn irrelevant.

All good things come in threes, and as this post is about harmony - well, roughly - here is a third collection of tracks you might like, all vaguely related

As I’ve said before, these soundfiles should play fine on your Mac using Safari, Chrome and Firefox, and on a Windows PC using Internet Explorer, Chrome and Firefox. They don't seem to work on a Mac using Opera. I haven't tried them on Opera on a Windows machine cos I can't be buggered downloading and installing it. There are several other browsers out there - e.g. Maxthon for Mac - but at the moment is usually use an elderly Macbook running Snow Leopard and many of them demand a more up-to-date OS. But I feel I’ve done a my bit and if your browser doesn't play these tracks, it's up to you to sort it out. With the slightly longer last piece, give it a little time - not more than ten seconds, but a little time - to load.

I was thinking about the last but one post and how I discovered new music, and more to the point, new music I liked when I remembered how I came across The Boswell Sisters. The were huge in their time, the Thirties, and it’s fair to say that although spotting their success, many other ‘sisters’ (and I don’t doubt ‘brothers’) formed themselves, but The Boswell Sisters - Vet, Connie (later Connee because, apparently it was easier and faster to write as an autograph) and Martha - stood out.

They were musicians in their own right. Vet played they banjo, Connie (who had to perform and sing sitting down, often in a wheelchair) played the sax and Martha the piano. And all this after a straightforward classical music eduation. But they were born and grew up in New Orleans, and soon

came to hear blues and then jazz, and were smitten by it. I mention them because of how I came across them. Donald Fagen, of Steely Dan, grew up in New Jersey to parents Jerry, an accountant, and Elinor, a ‘homemaker’ (I think ‘homemaker’ is the modern term I am obliged to use). But before she married and had a family, Elinor had worked as a singer in hotels in the Catskills, and Fagen - Donald, that is - remembers as he was growing up in the Fifties his mother singing Boswell Sisters songs around the house. So I checked them out and immediately liked them a lot.

I can’t say I have a deep knowledge of the Thirties popular music scene, but I should imagine The Boswell Sisters (left) stood out because their arrangements were quite complex. I don’t know whether they played their respective instruments one stage - I doubt it - but their harmony singing is great, and I have always loved harmony singing. So here’s a track, a well-known song covered by many, but for me they give it something special.

The Boswell Sisters/I’m Gonna To Sit Right Down And Write Myself A Letter

 

Fagen, it has to be said has what might be described as a ‘singular’ voice. It isn’t one of your common or garden pop or jazz voices by any means. (Other singers I like with ‘singular’ voices are Bob Dylan and The Kinks’s Ray Davies.) But Fagen can sing and sing well, and obviously inherited his mother’s talent. More to the point of this blog is his performance of Maxine, a song on The Nightfly, and one of my all-time favourite songs.

I haven’t yet come across a cover except Justin Morell’s instrumental version, but I doubt few can come close to singing it as sublimely as Fagen. The reason it is included here is because of his breathtaking harmonising with himself. I had read somewhere that he sang all the parts on Maxine, but I double-checked and sure enough although other singers add background vocals on other tracks on The Nightfly, only he is credited on Maxine.

I once bought The Nightfly songbook and tried to teach myself the song on guitar, but I never got further than the first 16 bars. It’s got some great chords, but as usual I give up - I’m an awful weak giver-upper - and then mislaid the songbook. About 20 years later (i.e. in the last few years) I decided to try again, but as I couldn’t find mysongbook I thought I would buy another. Some hope: on Amazon you’ll have to shell out at least £201 for a used copy (though very good - what a relief) and if you want a new one it’ll cost you at least £402. So, do you know what, I decided against it and still hope to find my own copy. Here’s Maxine:

Donald Fagen/Maxine

 

I know The Eagles are regarded as uncool by some - some few idiots, I should say - but more fool them. They might not write complex tunes like Steely Dan (who famously put them down in their song their song Everything You Did on their album The Royal Scam, but even though I like their music a great deal those two cool Noo Yorkers Fagen and Becker can slightly get up my noise as can quite a few of the Noo York ‘art’ scene, who seem perpetually to carry on a great love affair with themselves - David Byrne and Talking Heads to exactly nothing for me. Maybe I’ve got cloth ears. And maybe not), but - what a digression, eh - The Eagles did what they did bloody well and I still many of their songs. But then that’s me, uncool. And in their first incarnation they harmonised superbly. Seven Bridges Road was a standard at their concerts:

The Eagles/Seven Bridges Road

 

Before I come on to Take 6, a black soul, jazz, gospel a cappella group (though they don’t sing this one below a cappella), here’s a bit of harmonising you might also like (if you like harmonising). I could have chosen anything from Palestrina and Victoria, but I have chosen this piece by England’s very own William Byrd, merely because he was the most recent of these three I came across. This is the Gloria from his Mass for Five Voices:

William Byrd/Gloria from Mass for five voices

 

Then there’s Take 6. I can’t for the life of me remember how I came across them, but I am very glad I did. This one, Grandma’s Hands, has been covered by loads of singers, some well, some not so well, but - racism alert - I really think it’s only fair that black singers should sing it. With anyone else it seems to become, as I pointed out a few days ago, just another song in their repertoire. But when Take 6 sing it is seems to grow.

Take 6/Grandma’s Hands

 

Finally, here’s a piece which has got nothing to do with harmony. An hour or two ago (it’s Saturday night and I am off to work in London tomorrow morning and thought I might have a shave now to have just a few more minutes of a lie-in) I was listening in the bathroom to Lullaby Of Leaves by sax player Illinois Jacquette. (I posted two guitar version of the song in my last post). And them, because my iPhone was on ‘songs’, next up came this: the first movement of Alban Berg’s Lulu Suite. And while listening to it, it suddenly struck me just how much, in some ways, jazz and more recent - good - classical music have in common. I mean, were you told this was a jazz piece and didn’t know any better, you would most probably accept it as such. It’s 14 minutes long, so have that shit first, but then spend 14 minutes listening to a rather beautiful piece. I think if you like jazz, you’ll probably like this.

Alban Berg/Lulu-Suite: I. Rondo: Andante Und Hymne



PS If this kind of music sounds vaguely familiar, it’s because a great many German and Austrian composers, not all of them Jewish, fled Germany and Austria and headed for the US when the Nazis came to power and some found work in the Hollywood film studios. There is some great music in those Thirties and Forties films, especially in film noir like Double Indemndity and Build My Gallows High which is partially ignored because it is just ‘the soundtrack’.