Why I wish I had never grown up a ‘cradle Catholic’: it screwed up my relationships with women for life

Over the years, I have come across news stories reporting along the lines that ‘people who have a religious faith’ are healthier and happier. Well, I suppose the immediate reaction to that claim will range from ‘told you Jesus loves you, now repent, sinner, repent!’ to ‘yeah, right, and the Moon is made of cheese’, with neither camp even considering that the other might have a point.

The news stories will detail how ‘people who profess to have a faith recuperate faster from illness and surgery’, and it is no surprise that such stories are the bread and butter of our popular press. It is, in fact, a perennial favourite of Britain’s much-loved Daily Mail - a quick google shows it carried the claim several times in the past five years - and if you want ‘definitive proof’ that it’s true, you’ll come across any number of internet sites supplying it. All - now there’s another surprise - seem to be sites fun by various religious bodies or promoting ‘family values’. And when Breitbart  also gets in on the act, many of us might agree it is high time we counted the family silver again.

In truth, as far as I am concerned the claim is too woolly to substantiate: the first difficulty would seem to be how you ‘measure’ happiness, although gauging how healthy an individual is would perhaps be a little easier. And what constitutes ‘having a faith’. One website I came across correlates church attendance with ‘happiness’ - people who said they attended church regularly reported ‘feeling happy’ with their lives more than those who didn’t. But another website posed the relevant question: could those figures simply be explained by the fact that happy people are simply more inclined to go to church? At the end of the day, and rather unhelpfully, you pays your money and you makes your choice. And yet . . .

‘And yet’ - now there, it would seem is a capitulation: after all my sneering and jeering, am I getting soft in my old age? Am I slowly coming round to the view that fairies might after all live at the bottom of the garden?

. . .

I am what is often called a ‘cradle Catholic’, someone who was born and baptised into, and raised in, the Roman Catholic church. And I really wish I hadn’t been. But here’s a conundrum: I am to all intents and purposes an atheist, yet if I were directly asked the question ‘do you believe in God’ I would do two thing - I would say ‘yes’, and then I would immediately shut down any further discussion. I would not only refuse to answer any more questions, I would refuse to take part in an subsequent talk on the matter. And I would do so for one simple reason: I don’t at all believe in the slightest in the ‘God’ of conventional faiths, the ‘God’ of christianity or islam, some ‘all-knowing, all-powerful being’ who ‘created the universe’.

My ‘God’ would be something far more mundane, though, as far as I am concerned, equally important (if not more so): optimism, hope, looking on the bright side, altruism, kindness, consideration, selflessness. And these most certainly exist - as do their counterparts: despair, greed, hate, selfishness. So to deny that ‘God’ exists would be to deny the virtue of much else that is ‘good’. From what little I know of humanism, I suppose you could call my outlook humanist (but let me stress that I know bugger all about humanism).

When, though, I meet someone who professes to ‘have a faith’, I don’t, as all too often seems to happen when they encounter ‘an atheist’, tackle their ‘silly faith’ straight on and try to show that it is all just so much hooey (although to be frank I do believe it is just so much hooey). I leave them be in their faith, because I sincerely believe they are rather better off than many who don’t have a ‘faith’.

I know that might sound contradictory, so let me try and explain: as far as I am concerned what is important the ‘having a faith’, not the ‘what’ they have faith in. Do I believe and accept that a certain Jesus Christ was ‘born of a virgin’, ‘God made man’, ‘gave his life to save mankind’, ‘ascended into Heaven’, will be resurrected on ‘Judgment Day’ and whose ‘love is all-permeating’? No, I don’t. But do I accept that others do believe it all and - crucially - it gives them comfort and succour and some kind of support in their lives? Well, yes, I do. I feel it is not the particulars of a someone’s ‘faith’ that are important, but simply that they ‘have a faith’. And if - as some studies seem to show (here is one and here is another) - those who profess to ‘have a faith’ do report being happier and do seem to enjoy better health, I am inclined to believe it is down to having a more positive outlook. I almost wrote ‘merely down to having a more positive outlook’, but I didn’t, because that rather trivialises it all.

. . .

I have meant to write the above post for several years, but never actually got around to it. I am doing so now, though, because, there has been another post I have meant to write for some time, but which I again have put off writing, and the above can lead into it.

The other day a woman at work, Sue, a Londoner but the daughter of two Irish who grew up in both Ireland and London, and crucially another ‘cradle Catholic’ happened to mention that she was bullied at her convent school. Another former pupil had tracked her down, informed her she was organising a school reunion and would she like to come. ‘No bloody way,’ said Sue. The only other pupil, she said, she would like to meet again with whom she had lost touch was another girl who always stood up for her when the bullying took place. The nuns did bugger all and just let it happen. If you met Sue today, you would be hard-pushed to imagine how anyone could bully her: she is quite tall, self-possessed and, it would seem, no one’s pushover. And yet she was. And like me she, too, wants nothing more to do with the RC church.

I suppose my major gripe is that my ‘Catholic upbringing’ completely distorted my view of women and, as far as I am concerned, affected my relationships with women rather badly, or, to put it another way, they could have been better in that I might not have reacted so badly to being dumped and might myself not have treated some woman what I now think is quite badly. Given my age, of course, my chauvinism might well be a result of the age in which I grew up. When I was young girls were still expected to take second place, have few ambitions except to become a wife and mother and whose role it was assumed to be was to make life just that much easier for the men in their lives. But I do feel my Catholic upbringing had a great deal to do with imbuing in me - and many others, of course - what is often referred to as ‘the madonna/whore complex’.

(NB. Two stories: Stephanie, a lawyer at work of about my age who was sent to a private girls boarding school when she was young told me she and the other girls were taught how to play cricket and to understand the game. Why? Well, if at some point in the future the man who became their husband wanted to talk about cricket, they would thus be well-prepared and would be able to hold their own in any discussion.

Then there’s the apparent reason why when the welfare state was established in Britain, the retirement age was set at 65 for men, but only 60 for women. Why? Well, it was reasoned that ‘most women were on average five years younger than their husband, so if they were working it would be useful for them to be able to retire at the same time as he did so look after him.)

Now, from the vantage point of a man who is closer to 70 than 60, I believe I can see much far more clearly: I would never describe myself as ‘a feminist’ because to me it always sounds so horribly arch and phoney when men do so. But I shall say that it now seems to me that in so many ways women, whether here in the affluent Western world or in ‘less developed’ societies get still get a raw deal. For example, is there any way that female genital mutilation could ever be justified? Ever? And here in the ‘developed’ Western world there are still far too many instances of a woman being paid less for doing the same job as a man. Why?

. . .

As far a my personal relations with women are concerned, I do quite explicitly blame the Roman Catholic church and the bearing it had on my upbringing and emotional development, quite specifically its institutional misogyny. It is best and neatly summed up in what is usually called the ‘madonna/whore’ attitude: on the one hand women - as in the cult of ‘Our Lady’ - are pretty much regarded as perfect beings (‘Our Lady’ as ‘the mother of Christ’ being regarded as the most perfect of all) and as such perfect beings are forgiven no transgression whatsoever. So, for example, and given the very odd christian view that sexual intercourse is sinful, Mary’s son Jesus simply could not have been created as the result of any coupling Mary might have engaged in, but just had to be born ‘of a virgin’.

(Years ago, when I was 17 and in my last year at school, I and about five six other boys were given our RI lessons by the headmaster who took over from a Dom Adrian Morey in my final year. He was an Irishman, Webster Wilson by name, who also took me for my German A level tuition and had married a German woman. I rather liked him and got on well with him, but sadly he was an object of ridicule in the school: he had somehow got off on the wrong foot and never regained the right foot.

Anyway, we all sat on his chairs and sofas in his well-appointed study on which on that day in a winter term a log fire burned gloriously. It was very soporific, and in the way that these things do, over the weeks a routine had emerged in which I or some other boy would engage Mr Wilson in conversation about something or other and keep him talking for an hour while everyone else dozed peacefully for an hour.

One day I told him that I, who was also taking sciences A levels, simply couldn’t get my head around the notion of the ‘virgin birth’. It just couldn’t be possible, I said. Mr Wilson countered with a question: ‘Do you believe in God?’ he asked me. Yes, I told him, I did. ‘Do you believe God created the laws of nature?’ he asked. Well, yes, I suppose I do, I replied. ‘Well, then he can break them, too, can’t he,’ Mr Wilson explained. And that was it.)

Naturally, women didn’t always - I should imagine ever - live up to the perfect state to which they were expected to aspire and ‘transgressed’. How could they? How can they? That state is impossible to achieve for all of us. But when they didn’t, they were regarded as jezebels, sinful beings like Eve in the Garden of Eden, who seduced Adam into eating the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. Note that the emphasis is always on Adam who is said to have been seduced, and was thus the less guilty of the two: it was Eve who - in the myth - is the transgressor.

As a lad brought up on this rubbish, when I was at university - my sex life didn’t start until I was 19 - forever trying to get woman ‘to screw’, though this being the Sixties when the pill was still not widely prescribed, it was always a challenge. But then if a woman did do so, my attitude subtly changed. Whereas before they had been on a pedestal, now they were somehow not quite worthy, regardless that I had been an active agent in making them unworthy.

This was all compounded by, at 12, becoming rather plump and shortsighted, that I did not regard myself as very attractive to girls. The upshot was that when I finally did ‘score’, I was pretty much convinced the girl who had ‘given in’ was pretty much only doing me a favour. It has taken a good many years - far, far too many years - to realise that women have a sex drive equal to that of men. My relationships all seemed to follow a pattern: I would fall desperately in love, but the girl would end it and I would be heartbroken and consequently treat the next girl badly. I don’t suppose this can be entirely blamed on the RC church’s misogyny - or, in an attempt to be evenhanded what I regard as its misogyny - and I also believe that attending single-sex boys schools from the age of 10 and simply not growing up with girls will also have a bearing.

But - and this is a hell of an admission - it is really only in the past 30 or so years that I have come to see women in the round: people who just happen to have a different gender to me.

When is censorship not censorship? Well, it would seem it’s when the saintly Guardian does the censoring. And want to pour the perfect glass of water? The Guardian tells you how

The Guardian, often described as ‘a newspaper’ and ‘the conscience of the nation’ has many faces, not all of them admirable. I am a fan of its serious journalism - Christ, ‘fan’ does trivialise it enormously and I don’t intend to, but I’m sure you know what I mean - and believe the Guardian does a job that, to my mind at least, other British papers do too little. Yes, that is a broad claim, and the other national newspapers pursue serious journalism after a fashion.

For example, the Daily Telegraph exposed the expenses scandal among many of our MPs and the Daily Mail exposed some of the crap going on in the charity industry. But the Guardian stands out because it is not primarily a profit-making enterprise, unlike its three immediate rivals, the The Times, the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail, all three of whom have several axes to grind. That doesn’t necessarily mean the Guardian doesn’t, but those axes are not - as far as I can tell - ground according to demands of the proprietor’s other interest.

The Times, the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail are all profit-driven, but we’re assured the Guardian isn’t. Well, in fact, we can accept that assurance in good faith because if it were profit-driven, whoever is driving the profit deserves a boot up his - or, this being the Guardian, possibly her - arse. The Guardian is slowly but very surely going down the pan

It is owned and run by the Scott Trust Ltd. the successor to the original Scott Trust. That the new owners are a limited company rather than a trust would seem to be irrelevant but something is going amiss. The Guardian doesn’t itself make a profit, but that didn’t matter because the media group of which it is a part did. But then just over two years ago, the media group sold its stake in a company which owns the very profitable Autotrader magazine. That did bring in a short-term £600 million, but it also ended a very useful income stream.

Just over six years ago, the group sold of all its regional papers, including the Manchester Evening News, again to raise money because it is slowly going bust.

Last year, it made a £173 million loss and the paper has now taken to holding out a begging bowl, asking readers to become ‘supporters’. Would it be too silly to suggest that it instead turned its mind to producing a newspaper more people want to buy

and made sure its online presence turned a profit? That solution doesn’t yet seemed to have occurred to the Guardian. Maybe its me and my cynical tendencies, but there seems to be something ineffably self-regarding in not just the paper touting for financial support but in those willing to cough up a fiver to ensure the future of ‘liberal thinking’ or however they want to phrase it

All of this is bad news, especially as Britain needs a paper like the Guardian to balance out what is otherwise a national press heavily biased towards the right of centre. But on other matters the Guardian does piss me off enormously, and one of the things which pisses me off is what I regard as a certain rampant hypocrisy

It is generally assumed that the Guardian holds a liberal position on censorship. Here, for example (link now inserted, it was not before), is a piece entitled Censorship is inseparable from surveillance. Broadly, if I understand it, the Guardian’s position is ‘the least censorship, the better’ and that it is up to individuals what they choose to see, read and watch or not. Well, if I am right and that is what the paper believes, it is a sad case of ‘one rule for us, another for you entirely’.

A few days ago, the paper ran a piece along the lines of ‘would you want to know whether you partner had a bisexual history’. You can find it here. The emphasis is on sexual health and so thinking about it now, I assume the question is aimed at women rather than men, because Aids and other STDs are more likely to be passed on by a bisexual man to a woman, than to a man by a woman who had previously been tipping the velvet. Certainly, a woman can infect a guy with Aids and other STDs but they will first have been acquired from a previous male lover not a female (as far as I know - I’m willing to be set straight on whether Aids and STDs can be acquired through lesbian sex)

I am something of a Guardian comment queen and enjoy adding my two ha’porth worth to man topics. And when I came across the piece, I decided to add a comment confessing something which I had long kept private: that the thought of male on male sex makes me feel rather queasy. I just don’t like the idea. I can’t remember my exact words, but it ran like something along these lines:

‘Reading piece such as this [the article in question] always make me feel a little bit guilty. I have a gay brother to whom I am close and several gay friends and colleagues but when we are together their sexuality or anything related to it is pretty much the last thing which is one our minds. Yet the idea of sex between two men turns me off and makes me feel queasy. Yet the idea of sex between two women doesn’t. I have a female friend who feels the opposite. She is turned off by the idea of sex between two women but doesn’t at all care bout sex between men’

Pretty straightforward I thought, if not admirably liberal in a way the Guardian might like - the ‘feeling guilty’ looks the part. When I leave comments, I tend to return to them a few minutes later to see whether they have elicited a response from

other readers. And I was astonished to find ‘the moderators’ had deleted it. Apparently it ‘didn’t abide’ by the Guardian’s ‘community standards’. Now I can certainly understand how comments which are downright offensive could be deleted, but my views seemed and seem so innocuous. What on earth could be offensive about those

I responded leaving another comment asking for whoever was in charge of the moderators to review my deleted comment to see what might have been unacceptable about it. That, too, was deleted

So there you have it: the Guardian which doesn’t believe in censorship isn’t above censorship when it suits

It would seem the Guardian has something of a bee in its bonnet about folk who swing both ways. Just now, going onto the Guardian website to track down that particular article by entering the word ‘bisexual’ in its search facility, I came across quite a few pieces. There’s this one from December 2016 claiming more and more people are bisexual, though I rather think it’s just that more and more people are prepared to admit it. Then there’s this one from which actually claims that half of all young folk in Britain say they swing both ways, a claim I rather take with large pinch of salt

Possibly the reason for this Guardian interest is that it feels as a ‘progressive’ newspaper it should be pushing the boundaries. And I am bound to say the such pushing the boundaries is absolutely necessary if one wants to bring in any changes one regards as for the better. But on the matter of censorship the saintly Guardian does lose several brownie point

. . .

Another rather quirky aspect of the paper, though a very revealing one, is an occasional series it carries on ‘How to make the perfect...’ Here are two examples

and

Then there is my contribution

. . .

Writing this has reminded me of a story told to me by a friend of another friend who was offered a job on The Independent before it was just a memory. The ‘Indy’ has always struck me as rather self-regarding, a paper chosen by those for whom the Guardian was a tad to ‘lefty’. My friend’s friend was a reporter on The Times and was headhunted by The Independent and invited for interview. It went well. Finally, he was offered a job. ‘But you haven’t told me how much you would be paying me,’ he said. They told him. ‘But that’s about £4,000 less than I’m getting now,’ he told them. ‘Ah,’ they said, ‘but you would be working for The Independent.’ He turned them down.

A self-indulgent moment. My excuse is that I dislike being called a liar. It's not that I don't lie - of course I do, we all do - but on this occasion I didn't

My most recent post, a reproduction of an answer I gave on the Quora website, is to be followed by this one. Thinking about it, I am rather leading with my chin by posting it here, but I’m going to do it anyway. Some dick in Florida, a hack called Paul Ivice, left a comment on my Quora post, I responded to his, and it all degenerated rather quickly. I, of course, think I come out best; he, no doubt, thinks he did.

My reason for posting it here (apart from taking another single step towards posting 1,000 blog entries before I die) is because Mr Ivice – or that pompous Yankee prick in Florida as I prefer to call him – more or less called me a liar. Possibly, being a certain kind of American, he didn’t quite cotton on that, as always when I write pretty much anything, my tongue is quite a bit in my cheek. But lie I most certainly did not.

What I am pretty sure of is that he is a card-carrying po-faced prat who, like many other po-faced prats who work as hacks, believes his own bullshit and that every traffic accident he reports, every story he files about an extension to the city council restrooms is a blow for freedom and democracy. I agree that a free press is a cornerstone of a democracy, but it’s not quite as Dick and Dora as suggesting, as Mr Ivice and his ilk seem to, that the crucial role ‘the fourth Estate’ can play in a democracy means that every cough and fart by the media is somehow sanctified.

NB I put ‘the fourth Estate’ in quotes because the phrase began life as a snide gibe, not, as some now believe, as some kind of political wisdom.

(Later: I decided I wanted to flesh out the origins of the term ‘the fourth Estate’ and googled it - the posh term is ‘researched’ it which, of course, sounds a lot finer than ‘googled it’ - and came across the Wikipedia entry.

It seems the term was first used in the late 18th century by Edmund Burke to describe the press when they were first allowed to report on the proceedings of the British parliament, the ‘allowed’ being quite pertinent, of course, when he compared them to what he regarded as the other three estates of parliament, the Lords Spiritual (the bishops), the Lord Temporal (the nobility) and the Commons (the landowners and increasingly the merchants). The press, he surmised, would now constitute a ‘fourth estate’.

Given that, in contemporary terms, Burke was something of a progressive when he began his political life although he gradually calcified into a conservative, he would at the time most likely have welcomed press scrutiny of parliament, my claim that the term started life as a gibe, holds rather less water than I should like. But in keeping with what I allude to below - the sacred hacks’ principle of ‘not letting a couple of facts get in the way of a good story’ - please ignore this last piece of uncharacteristic honesty on my part.)

The Florida dick accuses me of being verbose and long-winded. Well, my response are certainly longer than his, but I shall leave it to you, dear reader, to decide whether he was right or not. And if I were to provide and explanation as to why my contributions are not in grunt speak but a little more fleshed-out, it would be that the nature of Quora, where these comments are appearing, is that it is informative. Well, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it. (Note to self: are you not more pissed off that you were called long-winded rather than that you were accused of lying?)

Here is the first comment left by the Florida prat (and from hereon in I shall mark out his comments in itals):

Dumbest and most misleading statement of the day: ‘Essentially, a reporter’s job is to provide enough words - copy - to fill the paper, and the sub-editor’s job is to prepare that copy for printing - laying out pages, cutting the copy to fit, checking facts, choosing pictures, writing captions etc.

To which I respond:

Good Lord, an idealist! A Lou Grant fan! ‘Dumbest and most misleading statement of the day’? Up to a point, Lord Copper (and I trust you get the allusion.).

Yes, newspapers are partly rooted in a desire to pass on ‘news’, and at its purest, that news will be, for example, proceedings in parliament and the courts (‘justice must not just be done, it must be seen to be done’). They evolved from the flysheets posted anonymously by political agitators and in the pamphlets which succeeded them, but a desire to ‘get the news out there and inform the public’ was not why they evolved.

They got bigger and more extensive because canny businessmen, initially the printers, realised that there was money to be made (as canny businessmen are apt to do) by selling advertising space on such publications and adding other copy which could interest readers who might otherwise be disinclined to cough up the cover price for nothing be loads and loads of ads. So the ‘news’ was the sweetener. It is best summed up by the cynical observation of the Canadian press baron Roy Thomson, later Lord Thomson of Fleet, who will have forgotten more about producing newspapers than you are ever likely to know in the first place, that ‘news is what you stick around adverts’.

That copy - that ‘news’ - was not just, or not even mainly political. Yes, it still included accounts of the proceedings in parliament, but it was also pretty much anything which the publisher thought might interest the reader - anything. It included small ads, advice columns, cookery tips, lurid and often exaggerated accounts of crime, accounts of executions, short stories, features - pretty much the same kind of crap which fills today’s newspapers. And that ‘anything’ had to be produced by the hacks he employed to produce his newspaper.

The journalists - the name ‘journalist’ was derived from ‘anyone working on producing a journal’ - had to come up with that crap, as much as was needed to fill the empty space. NB I once in the foyer of the offices of the Northampton Chronicle in the UK came across - under glass - a copy of that paper from the late 18th century, opened at random. I took a look. The layout was just column upon column of copy, but among the news items - so and so crashed their carriage on the road just outside town, a footpad is at large so be careful after dark - there was a column of lonely hears ads and, believe it or not, an ad for a washing with ‘a blue whitener’ with which users of Persil might be familiar.

As for your Lou Grant ideals, any reporter who refused to write a story because of her or his principles would be very swiftly invited to sling their hook and take their principles elsewhere. Don’t believe the shite on TV. ‘Dumbest and most misleading statement of the day’? Think again.

PS If you’re interested in why reporters were urged to ‘get the story first’, it was merely because for purely venal reasons you wanted to beat the opposition. In those days there were usually at least two rival papers in each town, and if you got the story first with more detail etc, and you were first on sale in the street, might gradually sell more of your rag, and when you had a bigger circulation (greater sales), you could persuade advertisers to come to you with their dosh rather than to your rival on the promise that the money they paid for advertising would go further. The only ideal at play here is ‘to make more money’.

I don't have time for verbose pedants. Good luck to you.

‘Verbose’? I’m not too sure you know the meaning of the word. Ain’t nothing like a bad loser. Sad, really.

Brevity is an art you have yet to explore.

What a very, very, very silly thing to say under the circumstances. Are you suggesting all answers to questions here on Quora should restrict themselves to 140 characters to accommodate the Twitter generation? And, dear soul, a Yank journalist - I see you scrape a living writing for ‘midsized’ newspapers - banging on about ‘brevity’ is a delicious irony all of its own, though perhaps you, like rather too many Americans are unfamiliar with the notion of ‘irony’.

Briefly, what principles that journalists hold dear are based on shaky foundations?

As a rule when I hear folk bandying about the notion of ‘principles’ I resolve to count the silver well before they go. What principles held by journalists are based on shaky foundations? Pretty much all of them, including ‘it’s my round but you pay’. I do suspect that you, rather like many other American hacks I have met who work for a ‘midsized’ newspaper, are inclined to take yourselves and your ‘vocation’ rather too seriously.

Face it, we’re really not that important. Yes, there’s the philosophical argument to be made about how our industry is an intricate part of ‘the fourth estate’ and that ‘the fourth estate’ functions as a bastion of every democratic society, though most people don’t hang around long enough to hear about that argument being made and, crucially, care even less. But this is all a tad to ‘verbose’ for you, I imagine. But I do wonder what you make of all those 4,000-word New Yorker features if you don’t like ‘verbose’. Do you just look at the pictures?

I suspect that you don’t have a clue what the specific journalistic principles are,so once again you spew a lot of words without any actual meaning.

Might I suggest you read my words just a little more carefully, then? You might eventually cotton on (with a bit of luck). Just a thought. All I get from you is ad hominem abuse. That’s the easy way. As for ‘specific newspaper principles’: as I pointed out before, I always take fright when I hear folk - such as you, perhaps? - bang on about ‘principles’. It’s almost always a sure sign of a nine-bob note (U.S. - as we have to translate for the sake of our transatlantic cousins - nine-dollar bill). To be blunt, U.S. newspapers might be long on ‘principles’ but what I have seen of them they are pretty bloody short on ‘interest’. ‘Waffle’ doesn’t even start to describe their content.

Why can’t you respond in a straightforward manner, instead of piling on more BS? What journalistic principles are you referring to? I still do not believe you know what they are.

You talk of bullshit? Well, how about the bullshit of talking about ‘journalistic principles’? As I originally wrote (though you snidely and inaccurately described my outline as ‘verbose’), ‘journalism’ is pretty much a moveable feast, from the extreme of Take A Break and the National Inquirer to the FT and The Economist.

The ‘principles’ of which journalistic tradition are you talking about? Those of the men and woman engaged in ‘serious’ journalism – ‘the first draft of history’, ‘speaking power to authority’ and all that malarkey - certainly do have ‘journalistic principles’: when ‘reporting news’ ensuring they stick to what they believe are ‘the facts’ and double-checking those facts, ensuring those quoted are quoted honestly and all the rest with which dedicated viewers of Lou Grant will be familiar (the irony being, of course, that ‘Lou Grant’ was a fictional character in a TV series intended to entertain and thereby attract advertisers to the TV stations screening it).

Or are you talking about the ‘journalistic principles’ of those working for Globe and OK! Magazine, folk who, given the oh-so vague definition of ‘journalist’ are just as justified to be described as such (as I pointed out in my original ‘verbose’ contribution)? Their principles most certainly do not include ‘facts’ and accuracy, more ‘entertainment’ and ‘boosting sales’. I heard and laughed at early on in my career – and often had to follow - the useful advice given to young reporters ‘don’t let a couple of facts stand in the way of a good story’. The ‘principle’ here was not to lie, simply not to tell the full truth. Which set of ‘journalistic principles’ is it?

I most certainly do not accept the denial by some (though thankfully not all) of those engaged in ‘serious’ journalism that those others, the Grub Street gang, hack pen-for-sale men and women, are not ‘journalists’. They are, often very good ones, but they just deal in other matters. And I have a great deal of respect for them and their abilities (and you never come across any of that posturing which makes the company of some other ‘journalists’ such a chore).

Meanwhile, there is a vast in-between of publications, all employing ‘journalists’: the weeklies (my first was the Lincolnshire Chronicle), the evening papers (the South Wales Argus), the provincial morning papers (The Journal in Newcastle), then the ‘nationals’ in London (I have worked at different times on, the Sun, the Daily Express, The Times, The Independent and several others, each of which demanded of me different skills).

You work for a ‘midsized’ newspapers, and I’m certain that in your working life (whether you are a writer or copy editor) you don’t just cover the serious business of the city council, the courts or the police department, but also the report on the new fund launched to build a library extension, the kid who has just built a replica of the White House from Lego bricks, this and that couple who have just celebrated and astounding 60 years of married life (‘give and take, that’s the secret, give and take’).

This might in your eyes – in, I have to say, your distressingly pompous eyes – be a ‘verbose’ way of answering your question, so to sum up: your question is as damn close to being a non-question as is humanly possible. It is far, far too vague, which coming from a chap who advocates ‘brevity’ is a bit bloody thick. As I said before, it is safer to keep a good distance between oneself and those who bang on about ‘principles’, whether journalistic or otherwise. The chances of infection are real. I prefer the company of doers not talkers.That straightforward enough for you?

Verbose = long-winded, and it was not only accurate, but this latest unreadable reply proves it. 

Yet again all you can come up with is abuse, not reasons. Just how is my most recent response long-winded and unreadable? I truly am interested. I aimed to make several points and only a moron would try (or expect) them to be conveyed in the 140 characters of Twitter speak. Come on, laddie, a bit more beef, or else I shall assume you, too, are all talk. You probably have done some copy editing: well take my most recent contribution and sub it down. There, a true challenge. But I shan’t hold my breath. (That damn verbose Lincoln, eh? ‘Four score and seven years ago.’ Why didn’t he just say ’87 years ago’? Three words instead of six. Long-winded cunt!)

Because you still have not answered the question, and all your dancing around it indicates you are unable to answer it. If you cannot give a straightforward answer, do not bother responding with more BS. And by the way, verbose was used correctly and fairly. It was you who did not understand its meaning, not me.

Sunshine, there is no ‘question’. That was the whole point. Christ, it’s like pushing string. You are the one who uses words to say absolutely fuck all.

The question you have carefully avoided answering is what are the journalistic principles that you claim are no longer being followed. How can you say they are not being followed if you do not know what they are?

I have just spent a bit of time going through my original response to the question, then your subsequent comment, my response to you and then the rest of it. In your fourth response you ask: ‘Briefly, what principles that journalists hold dear are based on shaky foundations?’ I did so because I was puzzled: I did not remember writing that. In fact, it turns out that at no point - in all I’ve said - do I claim that ‘principles that journalists hold dear are based on shaky foundations’. I might have been mistaken, of course, so I did what you apparently haven’t yet done: I double, then treble-checked. And, dear heart, I was right: I never claimed any such thing.

So your ‘question’ really is a non-question, which says rather little for your professional skills and abilities, ‘accuracy’ - oh, another ‘journalistic principle’ - apparently not quite your strongest suit. As we say in my country ‘fur coat and no knickers’. But by all means prove me wrong - where did I make that claim? And if you can’t give me chapter and verse, do what you should have done several rounds ago: fuck off.

You are mistaken. It was in your very first comment in this thread. How you could have missed it in reviewing the thread is beyond me, unless it was a matter of convenience. I took your words almost verbatim and challenged you immediately to back it up, though you still have not.

Show me - exactly.

I got no response, so a little later:

Still waiting…

You probably have revised your comments to extract it. When I asked you to elaborate on principles, I quoted directly from your comments as they were at the time. It was too painful to read through your verbose comments once; I will not subject myself to further pain by doing it again.

It was this, the implication that I had doctored my initial response, which pissed me off and which seemed to imply that I was lying, so I was blunt. But my initial response to the Florida Dick was deemed to breach Quora’s guidelines which insist that we be nice to each other and so it was deleted. Not to be outdone, however, and in some ways being just as much of a dick as Paul Ivice, I wrote a second response:

My initial response to your accusation that I have been dishonest and deleted a part of my message so as to alter it was blunt, to the point and highly relevant, but unfortunately Quora felt it overstepped the mark. So let me leave it at simply noting that the next twice you feel inclined to accuse someone of lying, think twice before doing so. It is not appreciated, as you can imagine. I shan’t resort to using the blunt Anglo-Saxon word I used before, but I can still invite you retreat to that place where customarily the Sun doesn’t shine where you can consider both your ‘journalistic principles’ and your rather distressing pomposity.

PS You use the word ‘verbose’ so often, it’s as though you’ve just come across it and rather like it. My son used to do that with the word ‘random’ when he was 7.

Being just as vindictive as the rest of you, here is a video which might amuse you. I googled - ‘researched’ - Paul Ivice and came across this on YouTube. It helped that he has a less than usual name. Google Patrick Powell and you will never track me down. This is a rendition of Van Morrison’s Moondance. I admit isn’t too bad to start with but nosedives at 30 seconds in. However, written by Van Morrison, murdered Paul Ivice. Christ, I’m a cunt, though I must admit that his voice isn’t bad. I can’t sing either, but at least I’m not daft enough to have my singing posted on sodding YouTube.




. . .

For those of you who like or even love this song (as I do, though being the middle-class modest, retiring sort, I will admit only to liking it) and need to be reassured that it isn’t quite as bad as Mr Ivice makes it out to be, here is the original. (Sadly, it might not play in the browser you are using. If so, try another.



Moondance

And as we are on to Van Morrison, here’s is a song which I love and which gets right to the very core of me. If I’m quite candid, it sometimes makes me cry (and that is actually true, this and the opening of Beethoven’s fourth movement of his Ninth Symphony, the Ode To Joy. I’m a bit of a softee at heart, but for fuck’s sake don't tell anyone!)  Oh, and it is not a love song to a woman, man, dog or cat, but, I’m told has rather more to do with Morrison’s spiritual feelings. Mine, too, it has to be said.

 
Have I Told You Lately That I Love You

PS I’ve just been on Spotify to listen to other versions of this song, and without exception they utterly crucify it. I’m a liberal at heart, but even I am astounded that there are so many stone-hearted fuckwits out there with recording contracts.

Amazingly there is no worst offender. All cover versions, from Jim Reeves to Elvis Presley, to Michael ‘Fucking’ Buble to Bing Crosby and the rest of the sorry bunch, so fucking execrable you wouldn’t think they are trying to sing the same song. If you want a laugh, go on Spotify and listen for yourselves. But if you want to enjoy the rest of your week in peace and equanimity for God’s sake don’t do anything of the kind. Stick to Morrison’s version and . . .

PS There’s an old joke about Van Morrison that the world is split into two: those who like Van Morrison and those who have met him. Well, simply going by this song, the man can’t be all bad.

Quite a simple post: how some of the phrases we used came about (apparently - better add that bit)

This blog is the successor to a diary I used to write, in long hand and in hard-backed A4 ledgers (I’ve still got them, about nine of them, spanning about 13 years). But that diary was also occasionally used as a commonplace book. So this entry of the derivations of several phrases we all know isn’t quite as unusual as at first it might seem. I cribbed it from a link on Facebook (heard of Facebook?). 

We can learn a lot about ourselves by looking to the past. History not only provides us with a nostalgic glimpse at how things used to be — like with these classic childhood toys — but its lessons can still teach us things today. Many of us fondly refer to ‘the good old days’ when times were purer and life was simpler.

They used to use urine to tan animal skins, so families used to all pee in a pot. Once a day, it was taken and sold to the tannery. If you had to do this to survive, you were ‘piss poor’ But worse than that were the really poor folks who couldn’t even afford to buy a pot. They ‘didn’t have a pot to piss in’ and were considered the lowest of the low.

Most people got married in June because they took their yearly bath in May, and they still smelled pretty good by June. However, since they were starting to smell, brides carried a bouquet of flowers to hide the body odor. Hence the custom today of carrying a bouquet when getting married.

Baths consisted of a big tub filled with hot water. The man of the house had the privilege of the nice clean water, then all the other sons and men, then the women, and finally the children. Last of all the babies. By then the water was so dirty you could actually lose someone in it. Hence the saying, ‘Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water!’

Houses had thatched roofs with thick straw-piled high and no wood underneath. It was the only place for animals to get warm, so all the cats and other small animals (mice, bugs) lived in the roof. When it rained, it became slippery and sometimes the animals would slip and fall off the roof. Hence the saying ‘It’s raining cats and dogs’.

There was nothing to stop things from falling into the house. This posed a real problem in the bedroom where bugs and other droppings could mess up your nice clean bed. Hence, a bed with big posts and a sheet hung over the top afforded some protection. That’s how canopy beds came into existence.

The floor was dirt. Only the wealthy had something other than dirt. Hence the term, ‘dirt poor’.

The wealthy had slate floors that would get slippery in the winter when wet, so they spread thresh (straw) on the floor to help keep their footing. As the winter wore on, they added more thresh until, when you opened the door, it would all start slipping outside. A piece of wood was placed in the entrance-way. Hence, ‘a thresh hold’.

In those old days, they cooked in the kitchen with a big kettle that always hung over the fire. Every day, they lit the fire and added things to the pot. They ate mostly vegetables and did not get much meat. They would eat the stew for dinner, leaving leftovers in the pot to get cold overnight and then start over the next day. Sometimes stew had food in it that had been there for quite a while. Hence the rhyme ‘Peas porridge hot, peas porridge cold, peas porridge in the pot nine days old’.

Sometimes they could obtain pork, which made them feel quite special. When visitors came over, they would hang up their bacon to show off. It was a sign of wealth that a man could ‘bring home the bacon’. They would cut off a little to share with guests, and would all sit around and ‘chew the fat’.

Those with money had plates made of pewter. Food with high acid content caused some of the lead to leach onto the food, causing lead poisoning death. This happened most often with tomatoes, so for the next 400 years or so, tomatoes were considered poisonous.

Bread was divided according to status. Workers got the burnt bottom of the loaf, the family got the middle, and guests got the top, or the ‘upper crust’.

 Lead cups were used to drink ale or whisky. The combination would sometimes knock the imbibers out for a couple of days. Someone walking along the road would take them for dead and prepare them for burial. They were laid out on the kitchen table for a couple of days and the family would gather around and eat and drink and wait and see if they would wake up. Hence the custom of holding a ‘wake’.

In old, small villages, local folks started running out of places to bury people. So they would dig up coffins and would take the bones to a bone-house, and reuse the grave. When reopening these coffins, 1 out of 25 coffins were found to have scratch marks on the inside, and they realised they had been burying people alive. So they would tie a string on the wrist of the corpse, lead it through the coffin and up through the ground and tie it to a bell. Someone would have to sit out in the graveyard all night (‘the graveyard shift’) to listen for the bell. Thus, someone could be ‘saved by the bell,’ or was considered a ‘dead ringer’.

‘Waste not, want not’. Great motto. Great time-saver, the slacker’s delight

A few years ago, looking for more info on something or other, I came across a website called Quora. It is quite useful. Ask a question, post that question on Quora and it will be seen worldwide. (Isn’t the web just marvellous, the information superhighway? Just think where we would be if it weren’t for the web. Bloody 1996, that’s where! Lord, I really do think I’m going to cry.)

Because you get responses from folk the world over - from all kinds of folk - not only can your question cover any number of subjects, but the responses could come from anyone - from a professor of linguistics in Papua New Guinea to a washed-up hack putting away a bottle of wine and listening to some rather fine jazz (Preach Brother by Fred Jackson. A link to a video is at the end) or even someone who knows what they are talking about and responds not just because they are in love with the sound of their own voice.

Over the years (and not that many, despite what that phrase makes it sound like), mainly about newspapers and related topics. And it has got to the point where if someone posts a question which the good folk who run Quora think I might care to supply an answer to, I get and email alerting me.

I received just one such email earlier this afternoon and have just spent the past hour or so writing a response. And in keeping with the title and on the principle of making as much as possible go as far as possible, I have decided to print my response here, too. The question was ‘Do journalists have a responsibility to remain unbiased in their reporting?’ Here is what I posted:

This question is not quite as straightforward as it might seem, and I shall get that difficulty out of the way first.

The problem is that the term ‘journalist’ is quite horribly vague: at its simplest it can be regarded to be pretty much anyone professionally and editorially involved in producing - well, what? All newspapers and magazines, all broadcasting news, all internet media intended to pass on information (often called ‘news)? If so, the chief political correspondent of the New York Times (or whatever she/he calls her/himself) is a ‘journalist’, but so is the most useless reporter or sub-editor (US: copy editor) on the most obscure of weekly newspapers in the back of beyond dealing with the local flower festival and chemist’s opening times.

Even someone writing editorial copy for a pornography magazine, or for Horse And Hound, What Car and Tunnels And Tunneller (which does, or did, exist) will qualify. So here’s my question: does someone writing smutty double entendre for a porn magazine and trying to think up yet another word for ‘twat’ also count as a journalist? Er, yes, they do.

The fiftysomething bottle-blonde beauty editor (we have all met her and sometimes even shagged her) compiling ‘the best, most effective diet ever to get rid of those Christmas pounds’ for the January edition of You And Your Ego is as much a ‘journalist’ as that esteemed foreign correspondent, the late Clare Hollingsworth (who apparently invented World War II when everyone else didn’t think it was possible), and Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. But I won’t labour the point.

Even if we whittle down just what that journalist is and stick more to what I imagine the questioner and others think ‘a journalist’ should be, her/his work - if she/he is not a specialist - covers far more than, as the cliche goes, speaking ‘truth to authority’ and ‘uncovering the truth’. Essentially, a reporter’s job is to provide enough words - copy - to fill the paper, and the sub-editor’s job is to prepare that copy for printing - laying out pages, cutting the copy to fit, checking facts, choosing pictures, writing captions etc.

Yet, were one to survey a random selection of the public who do not work in the media industries or who do not have any special knowledge and glean what they imagine a ‘journalist’ is, the cliches would continue to tumble out: she/he’s a professional who will work all hours to get to ‘the truth’, a hard drinker, someone

who would gladly do the job for nothing, someone for whom ‘the story’s the thing and nothing else matters’. Many journalists, the public fondly imagines live a life of shabby glamour, with the inside track on much, oh and have a cynical seen-it-all-before sense of humour. But it isn’t Hollywood or TV, believe me, although being the bullshitters many hacks (the technical term for ‘journalist’) are, they are more than happy to perpetuate the sexy fiction and bask in the spurious glory of it all. I know I am.

OK, so I’ll play the game (something I actually dislike doing): do journalists have a responsibility to remain unbiased in their reporting? In theory, yes. If we are dealing with that kind of journalist who is a first cousin to the unicorn and the man in the Moon, yes, of course.Yes, always. Meanwhile, back in the real world . . .

Are Breitbart staff not journalists? Are Russia Today staff not journalists? Were the hacks who earned their daily crust reporting for and putting together Pravda not as much journalists as the saintly folk reporting for and putting together Britain’s Guardian or the Washington Post? What of the Breitbart, Russia Today and Pravda truths?

I shall end, however, by saying that Spotlight, the 2015 film starring Michael Keaton and others about the Boston Globe’s exposure of the cover-up of paedophiles in the Roman Catholic diocese of Boston was rather better and got a little closer to portraying the usual working life of a journalist than the usual Tinseltown schlock. But please bear in mind that in their daily working lives, nine out of ten journalists deal with far, far less vital stories. Writing up a story about the book and staff shortage at your local library or a new ticketing system in the city bus service is more usual fare. Over to you, dear questioner (and get pissed a little more often, it does help).

A more reasoned and reasonable response might follow, but I think you and others get the point I am making, so probably not.

Hope I’ve put you off. If not, I have wasted 45 minutes.

. . .

Here is the Fred Jackson track. You might enjoy it more than reading the shite above.

‘You pays your money and you makes your choice’

I think pretty much everyone reading this blog is familiar - not least because I have resorted to using it several times - with the old Chinese curse of ‘may you live in interesting times’. The implication is, of course, that there’s nothing intrinsically interesting about times of peace and stability because everything and everyone is wending their own contented way and there seems to be little trouble on the horizon.

But when things aren’t half as rosy, well, look out: the interest lies in wondering whether - in old China, at least - having fallen foul of some civil service penpusher or other you would still be alive by teatime. Admittedly, such a fate these days is hugely unlikely, although don’t get too smug: barely 80 years ago in Germany and more recently in the old Soviet Union just such a situation was still possible. And just such a situation is still possible today in countries not so far from Europe.

Well, what with Brexit and the election of Trump and coming presidential/parliamentary elections in France, Germany and The Netherlands (as well as Hungary, Albania, Armenia, Serbia, Slovenia, Norway, Liechtenstein and the Czech Republic, he writes, after a quick crib on Wikipedia), 2017 looks to be very interesting indeed, not to say unpredictable.

The various elections, many in countries which are members of the EU, are especially interesting given that Madam Guillotine herself, Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s National Front (or Front National as they care to name it - why swap the order, you wonder, but then that’s a silly question in a country which habitually eats cheese before pudding) is considered to have half a chance to become elected as the new president of France.

To those who said ‘no, she doesn’t’, I would respond ‘nor did Trump have a chance of becoming US president when the whole primary season kicked off last year’ and ‘nor did Leicester have of playing in the Champions League when they narrowly escaped relegation in 2014/5’.

The thing is that if Le Pen is elected, France might well leave the euro, and that would not be good or welcome news for le projet. The conventional wisdom is that because of the French system of voting in two rounds when they elect their president, with only the two leading candidates from the first round standing, the Left and the Right would stand behind whoever is opposing Le Pen in the second round to make sure she loses.

But I have heard several commentators claim that the mutual loathing of the Left and the Right in France is such that such a cosy arrangement wouldn’t happen and that Le Pen really could slide in. And then there’s the fact that the conventional wisdom predicted that Britain remaining in the EU was a dead cert and that Donald Trump did have a snowball’s of being elected US president.

So let’s put conventional wisdom in the corner for a moment and consider other possibilities. There seems to be less angst about the German and Dutch elections, although the question in Germany is not just how well will the Alternative für Deutschland do at the national level after doing rather well in regional elections, but will Angela Merkel (or Andrea Gerkel as my son called her recently) retain the chancellorship.

The elections in The Netherlands are interesting in that there is said to be a growing anti-EU sentiment and a certain nasty piece of work called Geert Wilders has been proving popular with some Dutch, but I think the election to watch is in France.

As for Brexit and what is to become of it - and what is to become of the EU - well, that is pretty much anyone’s guess. It really is a question of ‘you pays your money and you makes your choice’: just yesterday Mark Carney, the head of the Bank of England, declared that Brexit is no longer the main threat to the British and that it would do better than the Bank had previously forecast, while the president of Malta ominously, and rather maliciously, I should think, bearing in mind that country’s past relationship with Britain, vowed that there was no way Britain should be allowed to be better of out of the EU than had they remained a member. That last threat is disarmingly vague in substance, but it is the sentiment of it which should concern Britain. There is more than a hint of vindictiveness about it.

As for Carney, the man really has changed his tune: where before last June’s Brexit vote he predicted the birds would all fall from the sky if Britain voted to leave the EU, yesterday he claimed a ‘hard Brexit’ would harm the EU economically more than Britain. As it is the London stock market Well, which is it? As I say, you pays your money and you makes your choice. Me, I think just how Brexit will affect Britain’s economy will not become apparent for a year or two at the very least, and furthermore will depend on several other factors, including just how well the EU will survive without Britain, but also what happens in the rest of the world. In a sense it is a nonsense to use the phrase ‘and all other things being equal’ because all other things are never equal. And this, rather neatly brings me on to Trump.

. . .

The man has not yet been sworn in as president and it’s all beginning to look ever more murky. Yesterday was an entertaining day in the Trump soap, although I suspect we might soon be obliged, in matters Trump, to consider that the old Chinese curse I quoted earlier might well be rephrased ‘may you live in entertaining times’.

The allegations what The Donald was filmed by the Russian secret service getting down and dirty with a few Moscow whores and that the footage has been or can be or will be used to blackmail him into doing Vladimir Putin’s bidding are another candidate for all of us to pay our many and make our choice. Trump has naturally denied they are true and declared them to be phoney. And given that no corroborating evidence has been supplied, which is why media outlets offered the allegations several months ago decided to ignore them, they might well be complete bollocks, shockingly true or somewhere in between.

The story broken by CNN yesterday was rather oblique: it merely said that at the briefing given by the US’s security services to president-elect Trump last week, they simply told him that these allegations had been made and thought he should be aware of them. The ploy, of course, was for CNN to be able to make the allegations public without actually being thought to endorse the story - after all, there was no corroborating evidence.

As for the allegations themselves, it seems they were made by former British MI6 agent who now runs his own business spying agency (Orbis Business Intelligence - ‘Orbis is a leading corporate intelligence consultancy We provide senior decision–makers with strategic insight, intelligence and investigative services’) and named as Christopher Steele. He, or rather his business, had been hired by Clinton supporters to dig up dirt on Trump.

His report was passed on to Senator John McCain, a Republican who thinks Trump is the very definition of nine-dollar note, who passed them on to the FBI. And, of course, everyone involved has an axe to grind, though that is not to say they are not true. There again they might be complete cobblers. As I say, yet again you pays your money and you makes your choice. Interesting, eh?

Steele has been variously described as ‘reliable, meticulous and well-informed’ with one ‘source’ quoted by the Daily Mail saying he was ‘deeply expert’ on Russian affairs. There again he has also been sniffily dismissed as ‘slightly more showy and less grounded in reality than you might expect a former SIS person to be’, with another source saying he was not ‘hugely impressed’ with Steele’s expertise. So, a fair selection of opinions to choose from, and which description of Steele you believe will most likely rest on whether or not you want the allegations against Trump to be true or not.

. . .

In other news a slight flurry of snow is predicted to hit Derbyshire’s Peak District tomorrow, so we can expect the country to grind to a halt and for Fleet Street’s finest to resort to some of their more dramatic headlines when reporting matters.

Join me on my journey (or another cliche if you can think of a better one)

Just something to keep you going while I decide which of my wise thoughts I shall next share with you. . .

And here is a second version. The first has got Billy Bauer on guitar, this one has Grant Green, with Baby Face Willette on organ and Ben Dixon on drums (I’m told).

And by the way, I’m ‘Jacques Pernod’. There’s absolutely no reason why I should choose that name or masquerade as some dilletante Frenchman. It was a spur or the moment thing a few years ago when I started making short videos and posting them on You Tube and I rather like it. I suppose it could have been ‘Jacques Ricard’ or even ‘Jacques Bardouin’. Look it up. And as I am in the swing, here are two more videos for your enjoyment. The first one is obvious and should speak for itself. The second is pretty much plain nonsense masquerading as sense. The music is Thelonius Monk and the quote is from a BBC Radio 3 broadcast of H G Wells’s Time Machine. I thought (and think it) rather apt, but to be honest it was simply happenstance.

And

Save the bloody hyena? You’ve got to be joking. Ah, the tiger - well, that’s completely different. Their young are so sweet, aren’t they? And this earth belongs to all of God’s creatures doesn’t it? (Well, the cute ones at least)

One thing that has always bugged me pretty much since I can remember raised its head again a few weeks ago. As a child I was often told by my mother ‘Du musst immer anders sein’. That might translate into in English as ‘you always want/have to be different/the exception’. Or, as it was put a few weeks ago by my brother with support from my sister, ‘you’ve always been a contrarian’.

It bugs me because at best I don’t like contrarians and at worst feel something close to contempt for them. By ‘contrarians’ I don’t mean people who sincerely hold an opposing point of view but people who do so merely to stand out from the crowd - the names A.N. Wilson and Stephen Fry spring to mind (and sorry, dear Johnny Foreigner if you haven’t a clue who they are). But it also bugs me because it simply isn’t true (or better: it isn’t true as far as I am aware and I shall be mortified if, against all my expectations, I am given conclusive proof that it is true).

When I voice an opinion which goes against the tide, it is because that is my opinion. It is not because, as my brother and sister claim, because for some stupid reason I want to stand out from the crowd, want to be thought as remarkably different or quite simply I am some kind of sad attention-seeker (although let me again add, by way of figuratively touching wood, I bloody well hope not).

Now you who is reading this who must make up his or her mind as to who to believe have absolutely no other way of judging the matter: do I say things just to stand out from the crowd or do I say them because, for better or worse that’s what I believe? And I am obliged to tell you now that despite my vociferous denials, my brother and sister would not be swayed: they insist that I am quite simply a silly contrarian who disagrees with the majority simply to stand out from the crowd. Oh, well, there’s not a lot I can do about that.

Where all three of us can agree, though, is that I quite often do disagree with majority opinion. And on one matter you reading this might well conclude that my brother and sister are quite right: that I simply like to cut a dash by holding minority views. That matter is conservation and all the hoopla and rigmarole which goes with.

The problem - and, in view of the above, my difficulty - is that conservation is such an important shibboleth of the modern age and of modern liberal thinking, and championing conservation is so keenly regarded as pretty much a defining characteristic of the modern man that even to doubt that it is worthwhile would strike many as not just perverse, but quite possibly wilfully perverse. It’s as though in all seriousness someone were to question the habit and benefits of wiping your bottom after taking a crap and suggest they it is a horribly overrated practice and quite simply unnecessary. In other words anyone suggesting that conservation is not necessarily A Damn Good Thing (and I can almost here the latter-day completion of that claim ‘... To Save The Planet) is nothing but a very sad and self-regarding contrarian looking to make his or her mark.

Well, if that’s your view, fair enough. But I’ll repeat for those at the back: I still can’t quite get my head around the modern notion of conservation in the form it takes and, crucially, I dislike a great deal of the double-think which surrounds it. And, quite possibly to compound such an inexcusable moral and ethical faux pas, I have long thought that conservation is rather less about ensuring various forms of wildlife are not made extinct and a great deal more about Homo Liberalensis basking in a little more of the glory he instinctively thinks is his due.

My doubts about exactly who is kidding whom about conservation occurred to me again yesterday - for about the umpteenth time - when I happened to find myself watching on TV one of those staples of afternoon gogglebox, the wildlife show. It was one of those shows which catches your eye with exceptionally good wildlife photography and an increasingly inane and sentimental commentary, and before you know it, it’s time to pull curtains and decide how to waste the rest of the day. This one was about it five mountain lions in Wyoming who - don’t you know it - had been orphaned and were each struggling to survive.

A team of conversationists had become aware of their plight when they were still very young - they are known as ‘kittens’ and would all win an Oscar for looking cute - and decided to follow their fortunes to see how they would get on. Each was fitted with a tracking device and then released to make their way on their own. Because they had been orphaned, none of the five had been taught by their mother the kind of skills they would need to make their own way in the world, for example how to hunt, and the team of conservationists wanted to discover how they would fare.

It was all very interesting and not one cynical thought crossed my mind until there was mention that in that part of Wyoming the population of mountain lions was ‘declining alarmingly’. And why was this? Well, we were told, it was because ‘wolves

Just spotted: some bastard contrarian who thinks conservation is pretty much a load of self-deluding crap

had been re-introduced into the wild’ in that neck of the woods, and that these wolves were competing for resources - that is the smaller animals killed and eaten by the bigger animals. In the struggle for survival mountain lions were losing out. I can’t quite tell you why and I don’t think we were told except for the reference to the competition for resources, but it occurs to me that the wolves have an advantage because they hunt in packs, whereas mountain lions are solitary hunters.

And there, dear reader, was yet another example of the double-think which seems to permeate so much of our thought: wolves were re-introduced to the wild? Why? Well, because they had once been indigenous to the area but their population had ‘declined alarmingly’ because of human activity. So where’s the double-think, I hear you asking? Aren’t you getting your knickers in a twist about nothing? Well, it’s this: we are up in arms because ‘human activity’ is interfering with the ability of various wildlife to survive and impacting on their environment, leading to a ‘alarmingly decline’ in their numbers. And what is the solution? Why, even more human activity and even more interference. In this case it is the ‘re-introduction into the wild’ of wolves because their numbers have ‘declined alarmingly’. Surely, I hear you ask, this is a Good Thing? Well, is it? You tell me. Does it really make sense if the effect of this apparently saintly and caring re-introduction of wolves is an ‘alarming decline’ in the numbers of local mountain lions?

Such ‘re-introduction’ of various forms of wildlife continues everywhere: just here in Britain lynx, sea eagles, beavers and wolves have been re-introduced to Scotland - the buzzword is ‘rewilding’ which admittedly does make it sound sexier - and there’s even talk of ‘rewilding’ bears. To be fair, even those involved in widlife do have their concerns - here you can find reaction to the rewilding of sea eagles - but generally speaking ‘rewilding’ is regarded as a Good Thing, and any cunt (such as me) who dares to question it is at miserable bastard or, at worst, anti-progress.

A further aspect of what I regard as double-think by the conservation movement is that generally the cuter to animal in danger of extinction, the greater its chances of some caring herbert setting about rewilding it. Conversely, if you score rather lowly on the cutey-cute scales, you can kiss goodbye to existing anywhere except in, perhaps, a zoo (which, by they way, I loathe, but my rant against how inhumane zoos are must wait for another time).

So I haven’t yet heard mention of any plans to rewild the Tasmanian Devil, pug-ugly if ever an animal were pug-ugly. And how about hyenas? Their numbers are also declining, but I’ve have yet to see a collection tin anywhere exhorting us to Save

Save this ugly bastard? You are joking, surely!

The Hyena. Have you? Well, why not? Shall I tell you: because hyenas aren’t cute, that’s why not. The greater irony, of course, is that wolves, bears, sea eagles, lynx, beavers, tigers, lions and all the other cute animals we insist must be preserved and rewilded aren’t that cute, either.

Certainly, they look cute in photographs, and which cat lover hasn’t at some point or other seen a picture of a tiger and though ‘ah, must be so great to stroke that tiger. Ah’. Well, it would be the last time you stroked anything if you were given half the chance. And were it to enter your head to cuddle up to a bear or wolf, that would most certainly be the last thing in this world you would cuddle up to.

Furthermore, anyone who comes into proximity with any wild animal (or even, as I do, farm animals as my brother-in-law is a beef farmer and I have, on one or two occasions, helped out in some way) will know that as a rule they stink to high heaven and when stroked leave all kinds of shit on your hands. As for beavers, sea eagles and lynx...

The concern I mention - and here are more thoughts on rewilding and why it might have downsides - at least had the good grace and honesty to consider rewilding from both points of view, and for that it deserves credit. But for me the final, and darkest, irony of the whole conservation industry - and there’s certainly a great deal of money to be made producing wildlife films reminding us what complete bastards we are to all those dumb animals - is that our conviction that we must remain in control the whole time: our relationship with wildlife is utterly one-sided.

Let me try to explain: on, for example, the issue of foxhunting, I am firmly in the ‘I don’t give a fuck either way’ camp. Both sides are very much inclined to talk bollocks to push their agenda: the hunters in general claim that they are only hunting to keep fox numbers down; and the ‘sabs’ get het up because of the cruelty involved. Both claims are thoroughly dishonest: there are far greater dangers in the countryside than foxes and far more humane ways of controlling their numbers. And as for the sabs, I would be more impressed with their bona fide and concerns about cruelty if they didn’t behave in rather cruel ways towards the horses ridden by hunters and would be a little more sympathetic to their views if some of them weren’t inclined to threaten hunters with death.

Finally, of course, in the list of Evils The World Faces, foxhunting can be found at the bottom of page 29. But what I cannot deny is that pretty much all forms of hunting are utterly one-sided: if the hunter, whether some cunt in a pink jacket on a horse or some fat Yank with a high-powered shotgun, were in just as much danger as their quarry of losing their lives then the hunt would at least be equitable. But, of course, he’s not. The hunter will spend the evening boasting of his ‘courage’. The quarry will spend the evening in bits if it was a fox or being roasted on s spit. The hunter in danger of losing his life? Not a chance, unless he's a complete idiot and shoots himself or is shot by one of his hunting compadres (I think that is the jargon). And that is the crux of the debate on hunting and, more broadly, at the essence of the zeal for conservation: at every turn we, humans, mankind, call us what you will, are not only in charge, but would not countenance any situation where we weren’t in charge.

Rather like a secular god, conservationists the world over are deciding what species should or should not exist. For example, every attempt is being made to exterminate mosquitoes wherever they are found because of the diseases they are partly responsible for (partly responsible because they are carriers, not causes). And amen to that: lives are being saved. It’s a similar story with rats and rabbits: get rid of the fuckers, they are a pest and carry disease. But when we get to the ‘noble’ lion, wolves, bears, tigers, bears, lynx, sea eagles and every other we decide that it is a Good Thing that they should be rewilded, re-introduced. Why? Well, I have yet to hear an argument for rewilding which is not distressingly circular. But it rarely gets even to the stage where rewilding can be questioned in civilised society: deny that it is absolutely necessary and you are regarded as very odd indeed. Try it.

A brief glimpse into private correspondence - read it while you can because I shall delete it if asked to

______,

Upstairs brushing my teeth earlier on, it occurred to me that although I had replied to your email, I hadn’t, in fact, replied in the sense of responding in that I didn’t in any way touch upon any of the points you made about your life and tenaciously stuck to my affairs and concerns to the exclusion of the rest of the world. I didn’t for example ask you about the upsetting (I should think) and most definitely rude and self-centred behaviour of your son _______. What he said must have been hurtful Nor did I ask you any more about your diary/commonplace book.

Well, having realised yet again that I’m just as self-centred as the rest of the world, I shall do so now. My first question is - I, too, have a daughter, 20, who seems in an odd way a little more distant now than she was while growing up and until a few years ago, and a son, now 17 - what has been your relationship with ________ as he grew up, was he affected by your troubles with you wife and subsequent divorce, and why do you think he is behaving in such a dismissive way (e.g. that nasty crack about your library)?

Was he at all grateful that you gave him a roof over his head, irrespective of whether or not he was paying rent? And were there any signs in him as a lad, from 0 to 20, of this kind of behaviour? How old is he now? I was about to move onto my daughters rather distant behaviour when I remembered just how I had begun this email. So tell me about ______ (a good RC name, by the way. Was it your or your wife’s choice?).

As for your jottings, and I agree that it is difficult to give them any descriptive name which does sound arch, twee, pretentious or self-regarding, so I shall stick to ‘jottings’ which strikes me as the least offensive and most descriptive name, keep them up. I suspect you are writing them for exactly the same reason I began to write a physical diary - in hard-backed A4 ledgers bought especially for the purpose - for about 15 years (until I married, actually, in 1996, and topped because I didn’t want any private thoughts to be read by my wife and also because I no longer felt so bloody lonely as I had done in the five years I lived in London, and writing them had been an odd, though effective, escape from that loneliness.

If nothing else it was like chatting to someone, only there could never be any guarantee that those diaries would be read. In fact, the chances that anyone would come across them were tiny, and the chances that anyone who did come across them would even bother to spend more than a minute trying to decipher my grandiose, but illegible handwriting, were even smaller. By the way, I once had a friend (a fellow hack with the apt surname Penman, who had also briefly gone to the OS) with whom I had shared a flat with in Cardiff and occasionally saw for a drink in London who once, before he married, very shamefacedly admitted to feeling lonely. What struck me at the time was quite how ashamed he felt of it. Ashamed?

Well, I can understand that in a way, and perhaps it is a guy thing where we believe we must at all times be tough, resilient, heroic and sport a perpetual hard-on, and that any deviation from that behaviour was unwelcome proof that we were wimps of the first order or, for men of your and my generation who had been sentenced to five years in one of Her Majesty’s Public Schools (despite being wholly innocent of anything except being the sons of men and women with, most probably social pretensions and through some wheeze or other money to burn) quite possibly homosexual or in the now dated phrase queer. I don’t know about you, but I had never heard of ‘queers’ when I first got to the OS, but then I and Bettesworth - I still remember the name, on of three brothers at the OS - were the only ones who hadn’t gone to a prep school.

So any admission of what might be seen as something sissy, under which admitting to feeling lonely was sure to be filed, was most certainly not on. At this point it has occurred to me that this letter to you, for letter is what it is although I shall be sending it as an email, could prove to be a useful blog entry to keep my tally up. I think I have before published and email to you as a blog post, but again I shall comply with your wishes: if you don’t want it to be one, please say so and I shall take it down again asap.

You say that you are writing them to as somewhere to keep pieces of text and prose you have come across and want to keep etc (which would make it a commonplace book) but that you never write about our family. Why not? The chances of anyone somehow or other coming across your laptop and then stumbling across the now 62-page long Word document are tiny. Mention your family, let it out, that’s what I urge you to do. And I am also intrigued by your cryptic comment that whenever you do mention family in conversation it ‘invariably lowers the tone however bizarre the circumstances implied’. Care to elaborate? I would be interested. Did they all, against all expectations, drop their aitches?

Well, that is it. I shall email this and also post it if that is OK by you. By that I mean if you object to me posting this as a blog entry, I say so and I shall immediately delete it. Deleting a previous entry, one which has upset my sister, is what I shall suggest I might do if she so wishes. Even though I was surprised she didn’t realise that in my blog entries, or at least in most of them, I am essentially speaking with my tongue in my cheek, I should prefer her to be happy and that we get on as well as possible rather than insist on any higher justification along the lines that ‘a blog is sacrosanct and cannot be censored’. For that would be total bullshit and as I say I love bullshitting for fun but don’t ever want to be tempted to doing it seriously.

So sorry I didn’t actually address any of the points you made in your previous email and please fill me in on quite why any mention of your family immediately encourages folk to leave the room and cross you off their Christmas card list.

Pip, pip

They’re all bloody biting the dust (though me liking them has nothing to do with it, honest): RIP Leon Russell

I was looking up something entirely different on YouTube and came across a posting of Leon Russell’s A Song For You, one of my favourite songs and a love song which, for me at least, knocks several hundred other love songs into a cocked hat. I have previously featured it and various cover versions in a post (and here it is) in I which moaned about how a great song can be massacred in the wrong hands, but this isn’t another burst of self-publicity. But that isn’t the point: while on YouTube I noticed in a comment on Your Song a cryptic ‘RIP Leon’ and variations thereof (you know how inventive people get when they are sincere). ‘Leon Russell dead’, I thought, ‘can’t be.’

Well, yes it can. A quick Google confirmed that he died at home in his sleep ten or eleven days ago on Nov 13. Well, that's Leonard Cohen up the swannee, and there were others this year I am sure, but to be honest I can’t be arsed trawling through the net looking for examples, and I have to say Lenny Cohen popping his clogs wasn’t for me the Upset of The Decade.

But Leon Russell is - well, was now - different for me. For one thing he kind of operated in the shadows: no star, no ‘celeb’ he, but a highly respected and always interesting musician, songwriter and singer. Here are three of my favourites for you Leon if up there your rapping with God and want to be reminded of what you did and hofw some of us liked it a lot. First of all here is A Song For You: if it doesn’t persuade you that it is purely from the heart and sung for just one person (presumably the woman who was or became his wife), I shall be astounded.



His singing might not be to everyone’s taste and his voice (like that of Ray Davies, Donald Fagen and Bob Dylan, and I’m sure others you could tell me about) is distinctive. Well, better distinctive than to sound like bloody everyone else. Here’s another great song:



And a third, which might be a little more familiar. It’s been often covered, not least by George Benson and, sadly inevitably it seems, by The Carpenters who good ruin the fucking Second Coming, I’m sure. It has also been pretty much murdered by David Sanborn - too, too schmaltzy - and Kenny Rogers. One version I’ve come across by Nile Landgren - who I have never heard of - gets a little closer to doing the song justice. (PS Just looked him up: he is a trombone player. Well! Christ, they are everywhere. But at least he can sing and has taste.)



Leon Russell was special. He was never a ‘big name’, but he was highly respected by other musicians and singers and the rest of his industry.

I first came across Leon Rusell when he organised the famous Mad Dogs And Englishmen tour, but I didn’t take much interest. His was just a name I heard associated with it, I have to say one of many names I heard at the time and never gave a second thought to. Then later, again I can’t remember how, I came across his LP (as we called them then, and a damn sight easier they were to use for rolling a joint than a sodding CD, and as for trying to roll one on an MP3...) Carney, and I was hooked and have been buying his stuff ever since. Not all of it but a lot of it.

Anyway, as far as I am concerned Mr Russell was a one-off. There will be others of course, I always insist that there always will be greats many of them no yet born. But that doesn’t mean we can’t tip our hats to Mr Russell and that bloody strange voice.