My trip to Jerusalem (home of the legendary Jesus Christ ©Harry Harris) and other matters. Buses, for example

Israel – Day 1: Vital Hotel, Tel Aviv

The dateline might surprise you, but it shouldn’t. As part of my welcome drive to expand my mind and discover more to life than just the sweetie counter in Denis Lusby’s shop cum post office in St Breward, North Cornwall, I have washed up in Israel with a view to seeing a bit of the country. I mean, why not? Over the years I’ve seen quite a bit of – in no particular order as folk are rather sensitive about such matters – the West Midlands, Tyne & Wear, Italy, France, Germany, Wadebridge, Kensington & Chelsea, most of what you can see from the driver’s seat of Surrey, Hampshire, Wiltshire, Somerset and Devon, and, of, of course, dear, dear London, now cleaner than it ever was thanks to a steady supply of immigrants from the newer members of the EU (so Lord knows what will happen when that tap is turned in March 2018. Can’t see too many Brits jumping in to fill the breach and doing on honest day’s work for rather pitiful pay, not in our nature). So why not Israel?

It is something I have planned for some time. Seriousness apart, we hear so much about the achievements of Israel, the Palestinian conflict, the urge of many on the country’s borders to be neighbourly (have I got that right?) that I have long thought it would be worthwhile to come to see the country for myself. A generous Christmas gift from my stepmother made it possible, although I did have to make some changes to my original plans. (‘You must stay at the American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem,’ she said, ‘Tony [my father] and I stayed there and it was wonderful.’ Well, I don't doubt it was wonderful at around £230 a night.

As it happens my stepmother, once ‘Paddy O’Keeffe’ before she married my father, used to produce BBC Radio 4’s From Our Own Correspondent and had arranged for the BBC’s Jerusalem correspondent at the time, Asher Wallfisch, to make a series of talks. So it was off to Jerusalem for a few weeks with my newly-retired father in tow at the BBC’s expense.

I duly checked out the American Colony Hotel and its price for a ten-day stay, but blanched at the cost which was well over £3,500. I then spent more time on the net looking for something cheaper in Jerusalem, but quite rapidly realised that if you wanted somewhere half-decent, that, give or take a grand, was what you must expect to pay. I would very easily have settled for a cheap, though clean B&B, but tracking one down proved surprisingly difficult. I suppose it’s because Jerusalem ‘has history’ or something like that. In the event it occurred to me that reducing my stay to one week, basing myself in Tel Aviv and hiring a car to get around might well mean that I could come in on budget. And that is what I did. Though there has been one fly in the ointment.
. . .
Everything was going swimmingly. At Luton I fell into conversation with an elderly Jewish accountant with dual British/Israeli nationality who commuted every week to and from Jerusalem, and on the flight I sat next to a Jewish couple from Tiberias on sea of Gallili and got quite a bit more information from the wife (toda is thank you), who was immediately next to me. (They had spent the week in Tredington in the Cotswold’s with Australian friends who had rented a cottage, if you are interested. ‘Quite a few older and old people in that part of the country,’ she told me. Well, I could have told her that, and wealthy to boot.) I arrived at Tel Aviv airport refreshed by three gins and tonic and two bags of nuts and once passed passport control – not the inquisition I had been warned to expect – headed off to the car rental desks to collect my car. And that’s when it all went a little less swimmingly.
. . .
I cannot explain why, but just yards from the desks, it dawned on me that I had forgotten to bring my driving licence. As one does, and knowing full-well what the outcome would be, I searched and searched again every pocket in my jacket, jeans and luggage for that bloody licence, and, of course, didn’t find it. I went ahead and – again knowing full-well what the outcome would be – tried my luck to see whether I could pick up my car anyway despite not having my licence. ‘No,’ you can’t,’ they said, ‘sorry’. I told them that I was certainly no boy racer (though I’m sure they knew that just by taking a look at me), that I drank sparingly, had often been tempted to vote Conservative (and, who knows, might well do so in the future), that I was married with children, came from good stock, had more than once thought of donating to charity and was generally an all-round regular guy. ‘Sorry,’the said, ‘not dice.’

One last possibility is that I might be able to show them a copy of my licence, so I rang home and got my son to scan it in and email me a pdf. Just now while writing the above I have been on the phone to Expedia through whom I booked the whole trip, but it seems I can’t get my meny back from the rental company. I should have cancelled 24 hours before departure.

But there is, as always pleases me, an irony here. While chatting to the old accountant from Jerusalem – we bumped into each other again after the flight – I mentioned I intended to drive to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv. ‘Don’t do that,’ he said, ‘get a bus. The bus services are exceptionally good in Israel and anyway you’ll never find anywhere to park in Jerusalem and especially nowhere near the Old City.’ That advice, dear friends, later went some way to soothing the irritation I felt about fucking up my car hire arrangements.

However, the plan – it is still only the first full day of my break – was not just about visiting Jerusalem but also seeing a bit of the country, touring around, that kind of thing. I especially wanted to visit Caesarea and the Sea of Gallili. Well, I suppose that kind of thing is still possible by bus, but a car would have been handier. There is just one small glimmer of home. I shall get the front desk here at the hotel to print out the pdf of my driving licence and see if I can’t persuade Alamo to give me the car I paid for. Fingers crossed.

Last night, I went for a stroll, a beer and a cigar along I do not know where. Here is a picture I took.

NB I couldn’t think how to work it in so I shall just tack it onto the end here: the Daily Mirror once had a football correspondent called Harry Harris. He once flew to Israel to cover a match between Israel and England in Jerusalem. And the intro to his piece is a classic of schlock journalism: ‘Jerusalem,’ he wrote, ‘home of the legendary Jesus Christ.’

Getting the lowdown on human frailty - why we are all suckers for wanting to teach the world to sing (and making Coca Cola even wealthier). But who cares: it's art

I’ve often thought that if I were to have my time all over again, I’d have tried for a job in advertising and marketing, or ‘advertising/marketing’ as I think it should be called as the two are so intricately entwined that I’ve come to the view they are just two sides to the same coin.

Obviously, none of us can have our time over again, and equally obviously I am talking as a man who, over the years, has learned much, not least about himself and who now judges a lot rather differently. (Incidentally, one of the things I like to think I have learned is that the only really stupid people are those who do not learn from their mistakes. If you don’t learn from your mistakes, you have no one to blame but yourself when yet again things go tits up.)

What I mean is if, at 18, I knew what I now know, I would have worked far harder at university and taken the whole thing a lot more seriously, and then upon graduating with a far better degree than I did get headed straight for the advertising industry to find whatever toehold I could to get started. (I sat for an MA Honours in English and philosophy, but was awarded an MA ordinary - the English department wanted to fail me after a college career of doing hardly any work, reading hardly any of my set texts and turning in essays which were at best puerile and at worst utter rubbish. That I got a degree at all is down to the philosophy department insising that as I had done reasonably well for them, I should get some kind of degree. (And thank you Neil Cooper for passing on that snippet.)

I know there are some, if not many, who regard advertising and marketing as perhaps the shallowest of all shallow professions, but I disagree profoundly or rather to some extent. That criticism of advertising, the suspicion that it is essentially venal and mucky, is neatly summed up in a description I heard recently (and I can only paraphrase) that advertising/marketing ‘delves deeply into the surface of things’. But I have come to regard it as something very.

I was reminded of all this when I came across a series of ten 15-minute talks on BBC Radio 4 recently by one Rory Sutherland called ‘Marketing: Hacking The Unconscious’, a series the BBC describes on its website as ‘Rory Sutherland explores the story, and psychology, behind the most influential marketing campaigns in history’. That very neatly sums up why I am interested, and it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say fascinated, by advertising/marketing: examining what makes people tick, getting to understand their behavior as individuals and in groups, and then applying the knowledge gained to creating advertising.

OK, using the insights gained to, as cynics might have it, sell to people crap they don’t need might not be the most noble human activity, but the ‘selling’ is not what I am interested in: I am interested in the doing, the thought and creativity that goes into marketing, as well as the oddities in human behaviour it throws up. I am bound to admit that I - although apparently not a great many others - feel that much of the creative work in advertising can often come far

closer to being ‘art’ than a great deal of what we are presented with as being ‘art’ in self-conscious ‘art’ exhibitions (although I should add that I don’t much, if at all, subscribe to the hi’ falutin descriptions of ‘art’, its purpose, its imperatives, its consequences and principles. But I shall leave that for another time.)

I am attracted to the deep thought that goes into creating an ad campaign. I am attracted to, and impressed by the subtlety, the vision of many ads, the analysis of human behavior, and I don’t restrict this to television ads, but to posters and photography. I readily acknowledge that many, a great many, might be put off by the purpose of advertising: simply to get more people to buy a certain product, and I concede that there is nothing necessarily noble in that. But it is the preceding processes involved in thinking up an ad and an ad campaign which capture me and which I cannot deny I admire and respect.

I have recorded one of those 15-minute programmes by Rory Sutherland and you can listen to it below. Perhaps they might convey just why I am fascinated by the industry and its work.
Here is the one:


Rory Sutherland on advertising, excerpt 1

. . .

It is surely no fluke that some of some of those who worked in advertising went on to become artists in a different realm: the novelists Fay Weldon, Elmore Leonard, Dr Seuss, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Salman Rushdie, the filmmakers Jonathan Glazer, John Hughes and Ridley Scott, and artists Andy Warhol – famously — and Norman Rockwell. I suspect there is something about the discipline necessary in copywriting and graphic art which is conducive to make the transition from the one ‘venal’ realm to the far more hi’ falutin world of ‘art’. Or perhaps I’m completely wrong: they would have progressed anyway and the fact that they worked as advertising industry ‘hacks’ is coincidental. But I don’t think I am wrong. That isn’t to limit art in any way and that most certainly isn’t to promote all advertising as akin to art – there is quite a bit of dross out there, too.

Obviously, as there is quite a bit of dross in about any sphere you care to look at. But the best advertising is, at least for me, quite fascinating. I have spent that past 43 working in the newspaper industry, first, comparatively briefly as a reporter and then as a sub. I wasn’t outstanding as either. I was by no means a bad reporter and, I must add modestly, possibly better than some because there really were and are some clunkers out there. But my heart wasn’t in it. I disliked the bullshitting involved and realised that to progress and get to the top you either had to really believe in ‘news’ and ‘the public’s right to know’ and ‘writing the first draft of history’, or you simply had to be a real cunt, someone who really didn’t care about trampling over others. And none of that fitted the bill.

I turned to sub-editing because I was equally interested in the whole process of producing a newspaper, and reporting was only the first step. And there I remained, not a particularly good sub-editor, though one who knew what I should be doing, but nor was I outstandingly bad either. I coasted (and I have to say coasting is pretty much the story of my life). But there is also something in the discipline of sub-editing which could give an insight into the production of ‘art’ (and sorry, but I really can’t resisit those inverted commas).

For example, for five years, from 1990 until 1995 I lived in London and ‘did shifts’ for a variety of newspapers. One day I could be working on The Times, the next on the Evening Standard, then back on The Times, then the Daily Express, or the Daily Mail, or the Sun. Some were broadsheets, some were tabloids, but each demanded a certain style. And I have to say that boiling down several hundred words of agency copy into four or five short paragraphs, or reducing a welter of rather boring copy into something reasonably interesting did teach you a lot.

As Sam Goldwyn observed ‘if they liked it once, they’ll love it twice’, so with little to entertain you with today, here’s a rerun – all the rage these days are reruns – of a previous blog entry about smut and double entendre

I’ve nothing much to say today (did someone say ‘as always?’ Quiet at the back), but earlier this evening I was chatting to a guy at La Pappardella in Earls Court, and we were talking about – or possibly I was talking about – seaside postcards (by Bamforth & Co and later Donald McGill), music hall humour and double entendre, and I said I would send him a link to one entry of this blog (posted on just under two years ago in Augist 2014).

It contains a recording by actor Arthur Bostrum who in the BBC’s sitcom ‘Allo, allo’ played an Englishman in wartime France pretending to be a French policeman but who, unfortunately, spoke French very badly. Don’t know what ‘double entendre’ is? Well, let me explain by way of a joke: a woman walks into a bar in Paris and orders a double entendre. ‘Certainly,’ says the barman, ‘I’ll give you one.’

Anyway, having nothing much to say today and given the current TV fascination with reruns and compilations and reruns of compilations and reruns of reruns, I thought why not, what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. So without further ado click here to read my entry, or re-read my entry, celebrating smut. I love smut. The recording is in four parts. Just - well, I am sure you know the drill.

. . .

PS The character I was talking to, one Jim Harman, a man with quite some experience, now 77, who was in the RAF, then worked as a telecoms engineer for an oil company in Nigeria after previously working in Angola and Portugal and who splits his year between Old Blighty and Ausatralia, had a fascinating story to tell.

It seems that last Thursday he went for a check-up with a private dentist after root canal treatment when his dentist found that there was still some infection in the wound. He injected him with bleach but forgot to dilute the bleach. Because he was in such pain, the dentist injected him with anaesthetic which calmed it for a few hours, but then it got worse again.

After a day of agony, he returned to see his dentist who immediately sent him off to A&E at the local hospital where where he was found to have renal failure: the anaesthetic had shut down his kidneys, spread the remnants of the infeciton and his lymph system had been poisoned. After a day’s worth of treatment of steroids and a saline drip to clear his kidneys, he was told by the medics that they had found odd antibodies in his blood which had countered the infection which they couldn’t explain: had he at some point ever been bitten by a snake? Yes, he said, three times, in fact, over the years he spent in Africa. Ah, they said, that has saved your life. The antibodies helped to counteract the infection.

Well, reporting it now, it seems to me that some of the story doesn’t add up, but that might have been me not getting all the details. Anyway, that was his story.

Will it snow on June 23, 2018? Who knows? I don’t and neither do you. But there might certainly be stormy weather ahead for the EU

I’ve tried, I really have. I’ve twice posted I’ve taken photos - irrelevant to current events our what? Couldn’t be more irrelevant - reported two spats with the Guardian, recycled a few videos with music tracks I like and even threatened to start a new, personal blog, which no one will have access to, anything but anyting rather than join the cacophony and add my two ha’porth in comments about Brexit - what’s best to wear in the run-up to Brexit, how Brexit might prove to be the ultimate diet, why Brexit can be blamed for the decline in bees, that kind of thing. But there is no getting away from it (which isn’t that surprising).

Brexit is everywhere, though what it will mean for Britain is still anyone’s guess, and in keeping with the fact that it is anyone’s guess, everyone with even half a deadline is predicting: in today’s Guardian the Lib Dems Vince Cable is on the side of the doomsayers and reckons it will cause an even bigger financial crash than the one in 2008.

On the other hand some think once Britain has rid itself of the shackles of the EU, the good times might come a rolling. Here the Independent (no longer a print newspaper but carrying on online like some ethereal guardian angel for the bien pensant who thinks the Guardian is too much of a lefty rag) outlines ten reasons to feel positive about Brexit.

Given my abysmal track record in predictions - I predicted Britain would vote to stay in the EU and that Trump would not be elected - I shall gracefully resist once again taking a Mystic Meg role and keep schtumm. But that doesn’t mean I can’t talk generally about what might happen to Britain and the EU over the coming years.

As for predictions, I am bemused: can anyone here tell me what wether we will have on, say, June 23, 2018? That would be exactly two years after the Brexit referendum was held. Will it rain? Will it be a day of glorious sunshine? Will it be hot, unseasonably cold? Will it be windy? Will we be in the fifth week of a drought? There are one or two things we can rule out, of course. Given the time of year, a blizzard would seem unlikely, although I did once witness snowfall in June. (It was in June 1975, and I was attending a two-month NCTJ block release course at the then Richmond College in Sheffield (now Stradbroke College). My mate Tim, a Sheffield local, and I had taken to having a lunchtime pint at the Richmond Hotel ten minutes walk away, and we were sitting (‘sat’) in the bar when I looked out and noticed it was snowing. Mind, it was not a blizzard, the snow didn’t settle and it was unseasonably cold for June.)

So we can say one or two general things about the weather on June 23, 2018, but would be wise to keep it vague. Similarly with predicting what effects Brexit will have on Britain and the rest of the EU: keep it vague and ensure the amount of egg you get on your face is kept to as little as possible.

I don’t doubt it will be an upheaval. Moving house is an upheaval of sorts, even if you move from the bleak inner city to place of bucolic bliss. Things go missing, stuff gets chipped and you don’t really settle in for a month or two after the move. The same will be true of Brexit, but how commentators and pundits can predict so certainly that it will spell doom for Britain/be a return to a golden age I really don’t know.

The fact is that before it became shackled to the tyranny of Brussels/embraced the community of European enlightenment, Britain was far from being the poster boy for prosperity and progress. All nations have their myths, and a current myth in Britain is that we were an industrial giant and a superpower on equal terms with the US and Soviet Russia. But that is not quite true.

Britain has been a member of the EU - and crucially the single market - 44 years and enjoyed many free trade benefits, but from the end of World War II until it signed up in 1973 economically Britain was often a basket case. Cheerful Brexiteers up and down the pubs and golf clubs of the nation will forecast a new golden age of trading. The thing is that the previous golden age of trading had been some 130 years earlier and the world has moved on considerably since then.

Conversely (and in my view) the EU has benefited from Britain’s membership and, arguably, needs us to be a member, and this has less to do with the financial contribution Britain makes than with the steading influence it had. Conventionally, Britain has been portrayed as something of a bolshy fly in the ointment member, complaining about this, objecting to that, but in truth Britain has been one of the steadier members, more inclined than many other members to observe the letter of EU law.

Furthermore, and given the accepted view that France and Germany are pretty much the two mainstays of the EU (and that, we are told, a desire to stop the two countries continually going to war with each other was one of the main objectives of forming a ‘European community’), the lack of Britain’s stabilising influence might be keenly felt.

We’re also told that many of the smaller member states were grateful to Britain for taking the lead in matters where they, too, had the same concerns about some aspect of the EU, but who felt that without the voice of Britain, they could not speak out.

Then there is what might now already be called ‘the problem’ of the EU of Poland and Hungary. Neither country feels much like toeing the Brussels line these days. Just a few days ago Victor Orban, Hungary’s prime minister made a speech that was heavily critical of the EU’s migration policy and in other ways has been apt to clash with Brussels of lesser matters. Mention this to keen supporters of the EU and they will get all misty-eyed and say that ‘families often have their little spats, but at they end of the day they pull together’.

Well, I shouldn’t bank on it. Just as the perceived view of many Brits was (though it was and is not mine) that EU migration and attendant matters was somehow wrecking Britain, it might not be too fanciful to suggest that migration from North Africa and the Middle East could prove to be one of several nails in the EU’s coffin, the loss of Britain’s stabilising influence being another.

As for Poland and the threat it poses to the equanimity of the EU, as far as I am concerned the Polish come in two flavours: reasonable and outright nutters. On the reasonable side one might count the former Polish prime minister Donald Tusk, who seems to strike a note of commons sense in all the Brexit bollocks and has no discernible axe to grind. As for outright nutters, look no further than Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the surviving half of the Kaczynski twins - his brother Lech, then Poland’s president died in an air crash in 2010 - and who occupies a strange position in Polish politics.

He and his twin founded the right-wing (and some say rather anti-semitic) Law and Justice party, which is now back in power in Poland under the premiership of one Beata Szydlo. Kaczynski is chairman of the Law and Justice party, and although it is power holds no government position and is just an MP, he is widely thought to be pulling all the strings. Pertinently Kaczynski is also as implacably opposed to further immigration than Orban and has clashed with Brussels on that and many other matters.

Migration is, though, just one of the problems the EU will continue to face without Britain as a member. Another is the perpetual problem of the euro for many member states and the related problem of unemployment: manageable in northern states, embarrassingly high in Med states. This map, from the European Commission itself, shows quite graphically that the differences are large. And to compound the problem these are just overall jobless figures: among those under 25 the number is far higher, with often one out of two without work.

I did start off by insisting that Mystic Pat had been banished to under his giant toadstool in the garden and vowing to make no predictions. Well, I shan’t, but that doesn’t preclude me from making one or two suggestions. Well, make that one suggestion: Brexit will be the first step in the slow, painfully slow, but certain disintegration of the EU as we now know it. And history will show that Brexit wasn’t a cause but a symptom.

If, as I suggest, the EU will prove less durable than supporters hope, I further suggest it has only iteself to blame. It worked as a small trading bloc and it worked as a European Community. But then the idealist took over from the pragmatists and developed a queer sort of megalomania: talk of ever-closer politic union became louder, there was talk of forming an EU army and for a while the EU had its own ‘foreign minister’ (for some time an ineffectual former Labour Party apparatchik of whom little is now heard).

The real problem for the EU was that it had overreached itself. Member states and their citizens were perfectly happy with getting spanking new roads and schools and hospitals over the years, all paid for by EU funds (which, let’s be frank, was the money of the EU’s major contributors, Britain and Germany), but many became rather picky when it came to the downsides of membership. Most notably they weren’t at all keen to share in the EU’s goodhearted, liberal drive to take in as many immigrants as possible.

This might make it sound as though I am agin the EU. I’m not, although my sister and my brother are both convinced I am a closet Brexiteer. As far as I am concerned the EU is essentially a great idea, but one which, for one reason or another, has gone bad. I think it might have started losing the plot when it was turned from a trading community, and economic bloc into a would-be political union (although keen ‘le projet’ supporters insist that that was always the intention: odd, then, that the rest of us were unaware of it).

In an ideal world I should like to see the wiser heads in Brussels take stock of the situation and decide that losing Britain is Not A Good Idea, and set about seeing how they might change Britain’s mind. But even I know there is no hope of that. Oh well.

Some more pics. Busy? Me?

Update 19/05/17: I thought I might add that these pictures, and many of the other pictures I take and occasionally publish here, are intended to get as close to being ‘abstract’ without actually being abstract. That is what interests me. After all what sad fuck gets off on taking pictures of bicycles, chairs and tables? Once that fuck begins dicking around and somehow ‘reducing’ the images to take them a little further away from what they ostensibly seem to show, it would be legitimate to claim that that fuck is no longer a sad fuck but a slightly (but only slightly) nutty fuck. See what I mean? Oh, you don’t. Oh, well.

Rather curious behavour from a self-appointed beacon of free speech. Make up your own minds

This might be of interest to some of you. I think it speaks for itself. You do sometimes wonder what is going on at the Guardian.

After I had posted a comment on the Guardian website apropos a piece by Hadley Freeman in which I suggested it wasn't her best and that it smacked as though she had forgotten a deadline and cobbled something together at the last minute (and queried what was she actually trying to say), I was astonished when not ten minutes later it had been deleted by the papers moderators as ‘not conforming with its community standards’.

Leaving aside the rather Orwellian catch-all nature of that explanation (and if you ask which standard you had not conformed to, you are merely sent a link to a long, long list of ‘community standards’ with the implicit invitation to go through the lot and find our for yourself), I was baffled as to what had been so offensive in what I had said. So I posted a second comment, this time about the deletion of my previous post, but that, too, disappeared into Guardian never-neverland.

This is not the first time this had happened, so before posting the comment, I took a screenshot of it and you can read what I wrote below. Anyone care to tell me what is so offensive about it?

Sadly, this is not the first time this has happened, and I can assure you on those other occasions I was not in the least bit offensive, either, but I was critical of the Guardian. I stick by what I say in the comment below, that the Guardian very often stands head and shoulders above the other matters in its serious journalism (although it, too, can be ridiculous when it comes to fashion, ‘lifestyle’, travel and food – it is often a self-parody).

I don’t for a second suggest or believe that Britain is in danger of becoming a totalitarian state with the Guardian as a gauleiter. But I do suggest it takes a hard look at some of its beliefs and behaviour, and tries to ensure they are not quite at odds this each other as this latest incidents would suggest.

The above was then also removed, so I left this comment, linking Guardian readers to this blog entry. It, too, was removed.

So I left my final comment, this one. It has since disappeared.

How is that for free speech. And can anyone tell me where the offence might lie?

PS Now you see it . . .

. . . and now you don’t. Isn’t free speech marvellous!

A few photos, just for the craic

All of these were taken on my iPhone, then subsequently dicked around with to a greater or lesser extent, mainly cropping.

PS Bearing in mind that I like to pose as a well-informed commentator on world affairs, I flatter myself often quite successfully, courtesy of The Economist (NB Re-reading that just now, it occurs to me that it will not be at all obvious at first blush that my tongue is in my cheek. Perhaps the ‘courtesy of The Economist’ hints at it, perhaps not. I now think not. So I thought of removing the comment entirely, but then I thought why not just add this note in italics which is so self-deprecatory the reader will think ‘well, he's just got to be sincere. Poor chap, us thinking he was a bighead? Poor chap’. The great thing is that by adding this note, I score several brownie points: you - I hope - think ‘well, he is modest after all’, ‘he is quite self-aware, that lad, I’ll give him that’, ‘do you know, I think he is entirely wrong about himself - he IS very well-informed’), I can’t let this entry go without a word or two about the current spat between Putin, Trump, Jim Jim King in North Korea (or whatever he calls himself), and various foreign ministers over Syria, chemical attacks, rocket attacks and the Lord knows what else: goodness, isn’t it just too awful!

Incidentally, there is great anguish in Whitehall (in London) about whether the UK is at risk of losing its influence in world affairs. To put that into context, an American chap, Someone or Other Shapiro, who once worked as a foreign affairs to Obama who appeared on BBC 2’s Newsnight commented that the question of Britain’s loss of influence might have set several politicos and mandarins quaking in their boots in the Foreign Office, but in Washington, not only are they not talking of nothing else, they haven’t even got around to talking about it.

Apparently, making sure departmental coffee rounds in State Department aren’t cocked up takes priority. And then, of course, there are several other matters to consider. Such as Russia, Syria, North Korea etc.

But here are the pictures:

A short rant about Google and Facebook, and where to have a quiet smoke and malt in peace and quite and - crucially - in public

In the spirit of modern man who will always bite the hand that feeds him (she doesn’t as she is busy elsewhere because he never lifts a finger), can I moan about the complete universality of being invited to ‘sign in with Facebook’? (NB This rant has previously appeared on my Facebook account and this blogging service is courtesy of Google.)

Wherever and whenever you want to sign into online account these days - to leave a comment on a newspaper article, leave a review on IMDB, get into your Screwfix account to buy a gross of 2in screws, log on to file your tax self-assessment on the HMRC website - you are invited to ‘sign in with Facebook’.

And if it’s not that, it’s Google - perpetually - inviting you to ‘accept its privacy policy’ (or something) which entails spending the best part of 15 minutes (if you can be bothered, which they hope you can’t) of confirming that you DON’T want your ‘activity’ to be tracked and, yes, you WOULD like to opt out of getting targeted advertising.

Of course, to you clued-up, plugged-in, digitised folk I sound just like an old fart who increasingly doesn’t ‘get it’ and should start designing his coffin now while Facebook still has a 20pc off all coffins offer, but I don’t see it that way.

If Google again and again ask you to re-enter ‘your preferences’, even though you have already registered them tens of times, you get the feeling that it hopes you will finally simply through in the towel and just click ‘yes, fuck me for now and in perpetuity, amen’ and have done with it.

I’m beginning to think those 1970s and 1980s sci-fi films with all their dodgy CGI about the world being ruled by two opposing but equally hostile global companies were spot on. I’m not about to declare ‘I have seen the future, so take me back to the past toot sweet’, but I do which Facebook and Google would stop trying to creep up my arse every five minutes.But this entry wasn’t about that.

. . .

About a month ago, I drove my son up from Cornwall to Liverpool so he could attend an interview at John Moores University (he was offered a place). I happened to mention on Facebook or something that I was there and out of the blue got a text from my German niece’s partner and husband-to-be (and father of her child — it is the 21st century so that is the order of play these days) asking to meet up. He was rather hurt.

He is in Liverpool for a year doing a Masters in, I think I’ve got this right, forensic anthropology, but I had completely forgotten about that even though I had been previously helping him find somewhere to live when he was due to study at Bournemouth University, but then was told he was going to Liverpool after Bournemouth kept playing bureaucratic silly buggers.

My son’t interview wasn’t until 2pm, so we all met up in the morning. My son and I had stayed in a hotel just around the corner from Mathew St where the famous Cavern is where The Beatles used to play, so we were right in the city centre. We looked at some landmarks, as one does, and then headed up to the university quarter. But my niece’s partner told me something about which I was very sceptical.

He said that while wandering around Liverpool city centre (which is rather higgledy-piggledy, in my view) he had happened upon a cigar shop. He doesn’t smoke, but went in to have a look - why I don’t know if he doesn’t smoke - and stayed to enjoy a cigar and a drink. That’s not possible, I said. For several years now it is illegal to smoke in pubs, bars, restaurants and public places. But he did, he said, and more than that he was served by a waiter in uniform who even provided crisps.

This puzzled me. So once I had seen my son off for his interview and dropped of my niece’s partner, I decide to check it all out: and, bugger, me if, apart from a few details, what he said was true.

The cigar shop is the Turmeaus Tobacconists and, in fact, apart from the Liverpool outlet, it has six others, four around Merseyside, on in Mayfair, London, and one — oddly — in Norfolk, according to its website in ‘the beautiful Norfolk countryside between Great Yarmouth and Norwich’ — well, why not, do townies really have to have all the cigar shops? The outlet in Liverpool was in the basement of the Albany Building in Old Hall St, and I went along to find out what was going on? And, dear reader, my niece’s partner’s account was true, well almost.

Turmeaus Tobacconists sell top-price cigars and a hell of a lot of them. To put it in context, the La Paz Wilde Cigarros smokes I buy online from Holland (and when I

am abroad, if I am abroad) though very nice and which suit me entirely, are cheap, machine-made shit compared to the Cuban and other high-end cigars Turmeaus sell. And being allowed to settle in and have a smoke? Well, yes, you can. And you can have a glass or two of whisky with your cigar if you wish. How come?

Well, I asked, and a very helpful Australian who manages the Liverpool outlet told me: they have a ‘sampling licence’ which allows prospective customers who want to buy a box of Cuban cigars (and who are, I should imagine, not short of a pound or two) to ‘sample’ the wares before they buy. Now writing that, the following occurs to me: I have long smoked cigars (though admittedly if not quite the cheap shit which in Britain are Hamlet and Castella, are still cheap shit compared to the smokes Turmeaus sells): surely ‘sampling’ implies ‘sampling’ several cigars to see which you would like to buy? But who in their right mind would smoke two, three, four cigars one after the other, not least bearing in mind that smoking one could, depending on its size, take you up to 30/40 minutes? Well, no one, I should imagine, but be that as it may.

There was quite a bit I wanted to know about cigars and so while being shown around by the manager in the cigar shop, I discovered that it isn’t true, as I had often thought and sometimes claimed, that the darker the cigar, the milder it is, and, conversely - well, I’m sure you are well ahead of me. And the ‘cheap shit’ I smoke - and thoroughly enjoy - is all machine made from tobacco sourced from several countries. And more too boot.

Having several hours to kill until my son’s interview was over, I decided to ‘sample’ a cigar and accompany it with a malt (and I know as little about malt whiskies as I do about cigars, though I do enjoy them). I told the manager that I preferred mild

cigars and asked him to recommend one, bearing in mind that I wasn’t a Rockefeller and could he point me in the direction of what I’m sure Asda (or Walmart) would call a ‘value range’. He did, and I choose a cigar — a ‘value range’ cigar — which cost just over £8. I could well have spent five times that sum on just one cigar (and perhaps bear in mind that a cappuccino at Starbucks will set you back at least £2.50, so don’t bundle me onto the tumbril and off to the guillotine quite yet).

So there you have it: my niece’s partner’s story was not cock and bull at all (though to be honest he would have no reason to spin a yarn, anyway). I sat in comfort for close an hour and enjoyed my cigar and a malt (and did get some crisps, although I didn’t eat any, a small but vital detail I’m sure you will appreciate). Pip, pip.

This entry might read like an advertorial but I can assure you it was not sponsored by Turmeaus. And just now, while concluding it, I thought I might treat myself to a trip to its shop in Shepherds Market at some point. Well, why not?

One for the guys and gals in the KGB/FSB - special for my visitors from Russia

Looking at that stats just no, I notice that there have been quite a few visits from Russia. And I mean quite a few. Quite why, I don't know. But what the hell - this is for you. Whether it is appropriate or not, I don't know, and I care even less. But: welcome. If you want to see more of my videos, go to You Tube and search for 'pfgpowell'.




Then a little Thelonius Monk and some contrived madness.



And just for the craic and to keep a little balance, First Steely Dan with Third World Man.



And one last one to lift your spirits after all that (a beautiful piece):



And, what the hell . . . (play it LOUD)



Then there is this great song

Time for a little privacy: I shall be starting a new, wholly private blog (but see crucial note in italics below), which you will not be able to read. And the photography thing goes on

I have to say that I have been a more regular blogger over the years than I have been recently, and I think I know why. When I started this blog, and I’ve said this before several times, it was intended to take the place of a ‘diary’ I kept for about 15 years. That diary was handwritten in hard-cover A4 ledgers - I still have them somewhere. It wasn’t just a record of my private thoughts, but also somewhere where I could have a good laugh and, in the manner of a ‘commonplace book’, record what I had come across.

Within what seemed like just minutes of posting this blog, I received an anguished phone call from a loyal reader pleading with me not to go private, but to carry on writing the bollocks I record here. It was then that I realised that I had inadvertently given the wrong impression.

So: this blog will carry one, fear not. It’s just that I shall be starting a new one, for my eyes only, in which I shall detail the kind of minutiae which usually blight yer’ average diary - what I had for lunch, my bowel movements, who didn’t ring but should have that kind of thing. And here I shall carry on bringing reports of the wisdom of Vic, Tim and the rest from the public bar of the Rat & Ferret about what is going on in the world and isn’t that Theresa May a right cow/simply quite, quite marvellous and aren’t the Tories lucky to have her.

In other words, this blog is still ongoing (and if one of you would care to alert Her Majesty the Queen, who - whisper it - is also a fan, that it will do so, I shall be very pleased. I could do so myself, of course, but as my English readers all know - and sadly Johnny Foreigner doesn’t, it’s not quite the done thing for me to tell her, as we haven't yet formally been introduced. It has to be someone else).

Given that I believe that much of our justification for bothering to record our thoughts in writing, whether handwriting or typed, is that it can be read by others, the internet blogs were a God-send. In one sense writing for others and communicating your thoughts is pretty much the whole raison d’etre of a blog. On the other hand, there is close to absolute zero that my A4 ledgers will be read by anyone. For one thing my handwriting is incredibly difficult to read. To show you why, I have written a few words and scanned them to produce a jpg: £10 to everyone who can tell me what I have written. Christ, all too often even I can’t read my writing.

Now here’s the problem: for many years, until quite recently, in fact, I was wholly convinced that anyone who claimed they just ‘wrote for themselves’, whether it was poetry or a diary, was being disingenuous. ‘Why’, I would think, ‘go to all the bother of actually writing it down if you don’t want anyone to be privy to your private thoughts? Surely the very act of recording those thoughts in writing indicate that you, possibly secretly or unknowingly, hope they will be read by someone else?’

Well, that was then and this is now: I have changed my mind. I do now feel that sometimes we want to record our thoughts, for one reason or another, but really don’t want them to be read by anyone else. And I have changed my mind because I want to do exactly that. Why? Because I’ve found that I can often clarify what I think and feel in words, whether in conversation or debate, or by writing them down.

On the other hand and for a variety of reasons, I don’t feel I want to share those thoughts. Because what I wanted to post was rather more private than the usual stuff I publish here, I always stopped myself writing it. So I shall be starting a new blog which will - I never thought I’d say it - really is for my eyes only.

. . .

There is another reason why I haven’t posted here as much recently. Even though in the past I have joked that at the end of the day my general observations and thoughts about current affairs I record here are of no more worth than those of your local barroom bore, it also happens to be true. When an economist or someone from the world of politics blogs (here is a good example, the blog written for the Financial Times by some bod called David Allen Green and here is a very well-known UK political blog written by ‘Guido Fawkes’, they do so with authority.

When I or any other barroom bore takes to the net to record their two ha’porth, it is pretty much pot luck, with the emphasis being more, I suspect, on the ‘pot’ than the ‘luck’. Above I point out that I find I can clarify my thoughts when I get them down on paper (and, incidentally, if you try and write something and can’t find the words, the chances are that haven’t at all thought through what you want to say. The solution is to put down your pen/shut your laptop and spend more than a few rushed moments deciding what you want to say).

. . .

Like pretty much everyone else, I take snaps and still do. Although I try and take interesting one and tend to dick around with them to crop this, improve that, they are pretty much just snaps. There was a time, however, when I was rather more serious about photography, and I must admit that interest has not gone away.

In the 1970s most people took with them on holiday a 110 camera. These were shite cameras, with shite lenses and produced more than shite pictures. But they were 

cheap, although just now looking up 110 film on Wikipedia, I’ve discovered thatseveral manufacturers did produce rather more expensive models with better lenses. Be that as it may, the 110 camera your average punter chose to take on holiday to the Costas was shite and produced shite cameras, mainly because the film strip, which came in a cartridge inserted into the camera, was tiny.

I can’t remember ever having one of those, but I did eventually by some kind of cheap camera or other and was immediately always disappointed that the picture I had taken - or rather had wanted to take - was never the picture that came back from the chemist’s. A lot of it had to do with technique, of course, and committing basic errors: taking a picture of something or someone with the light source - usually the Sun - behind the thing or person, so that what you wanted to take a picture of was underexposed.

Bit by bit I learned the hard way what to do to try to make sure you had a sporting chance of taking a good photo, and soon cottoned on that if you wanted to take half-decent photographs, you pretty much needed a half-decent camera with, crucially, a half-decent lens. And before the ‘digital age dawned’ (I have to put that in inverted commas because I simply could not take myself seriously if I didn’t) it meant using 35mm film and a 35mm film single lens reflex (SLR) camera.

My first ‘serious’ camera was a Pentax MX, though I quickly also bought a Pentax K1000 and found it, despite being less sophisticated than the MX, was the camera I

always found myself using. (It was and extremely simple camera, but very good, so good, in fact, that Pentax produced them for more than 20 years and only stopped when the market for 35mm film cameras collapsed and everyone wanted a digital camera. When I bought mine, I scoured ads for news ones and discovered a shop in Loughborough selling it for £60, at least £30 cheaper than anyone else. The useful thing was that I could use my lenses on both the MX and K1000.)

Then, for a while, I went crazy, buying myself lens upon lens, a decent flashgun, a light meter, the whole gamut of equipment needed for developing film and printing pictures, and I don’t know what else. Finally, I decided to go to photography college and this I did. But I ran out of money after just two terms and had to knock the course on the head, although I did learn quite a bit of theory in that time. I could at the time explain to you what a lens with a longer focal length gives you a shallower depth of field, though I must admit I’ve since forgotten a lot of the theory, although I’m still convinced I could explain photography to a reasonably intelligent six-year-old with once resorting to any jargon - f-stops and ‘film speeds’, that kind of thing.

Several years later, my extensive collection of photographic gear - and I did have a lot - was stolen in a burglary. I eventually bought a secondhand 35mm Canon and a useful flashgun, but there was nowhere in the house to set up a darkroom and then digital photography replaced film stock photography and there was no longer a need for a darkroom.

That is a bit of a shame because although digital photography has much expanded what you can do with a camera, there was a definite pleasure to be had from developing film and printing pictures (although for both practical and aesthetic reasons I only took B&W (‘monochrome’) pictures. And still will: because, dear hearts, in about an hour’s time I shall drive to Bodmin and collect a spanking, brand-new Nikon D3300 digital SLR. Then I shall see where it will all lead.

Pip, pip.