Susan’s funeral and her husband’s sense of humour and ‘an aesthetic approach to politics’

A funeral today and my birthday (this entry was started on November 21). There is no particular connection and most certainly no meaningful connection, but I thought I would mention my birthday anyway: 68 and never been kissed, or at least as far as I am concerned not been kissed enough. I should like to do some more kissing, and as for the other, well, however the desire is, the flesh, as other gents of my age and older will agree, gets weaker. Sod it, but there’s no pretending.

The funeral was that of Susan Wharton, nee Moller, a devout Roman Catholic and a lovely woman. I wrote of her death a week or two ago, but I shall repeat that she was one of the nicest and most interesting people I have known. RIP Sue. Her funeral mass, attended by family, friends and members of her church community, was at St Teresa’s, Princes Risborough.

Afterwards, as is customary, there was what the Irish call a wake and the rest of us call a buffet, booze and tea or coffee for those who had arrived by car and intended to depart by car and who didn’t want to risk death or, worse, being nabbed for drink/driving on the journey home. Sadly, I am not one of that wisest of wise groups and enjoyed several glasses of house red wine.

The funeral mass was pretty much as all other funeral masses are, and I can’t really add much detail. Once again as at the wedding of my nephew in Cologne several weeks ago when mass was also celebrated I didn’t – I won’t say couldn’t, just didn’t – take part in any of the liturgy. I’m afraid I and the Roman Catholic church have long since parted company. Susan’s cousin David Moller gave a eulogy, again stressing just what a kind and unassuming women Sue was, and although that kind of thing is par for the course, it was still good to hear, especially as it was so true.

Sue put herself out for others and of how many of our family, friends and acquaintances can we say that we do that? But what did strike me as remarkable (in as far as I am going to remark on it) was that her late husband Michael also featured, quite prominently in that eulogy. And ironically this entry will largely be about Michael, but also his extended family. The irony is furthered in that it must surely be a real pain for some women that they and their lives are still apparently defined by ‘the men in their lives’.

. . .

I have written about Michael Wharton before, here and here, but, briefly, he was a right-wing satirist who wrote a column called The Way Of The World for the Daily Telegraph, using the columnar nom de plume of Peter Simple. I

got to know him and Sue as they were friends of my father’s and regularly came to visit him and my stepmother, Paddy, in North Cornwall for many years.

Usually, probably because they had two Labrador dogs, they stayed in one of the two holiday cottages my stepmother had come to own which abut her own cottage in De Lank (once Lower Lank, and I really can’t remember why or when the name was changed to De Lank. I live just up the road at Higher Lank, and both – well, what do you call them, they are not even hamlets – are just over half a mile from the moorland village of St Breward).

My father, who also liked to call himself ‘right-wing’ – he even once, when I asked him what he was politically, called himself a ‘right-wing radical’ which is pretty much meaningless in as far as it can mean pretty much anything – had, in the early 1970s contacted Michael after being a fan of his Peter Simple column in the Telegraph, and the two met up and became friends. Their friendship endured until my father’s death in 1991 and Michael’s in 2006.

What concerns me a little is that the description of ‘right-wing’ is, at least, in their cases, rather misleading. I shan’t talk about my father here, but pass on what Michael’s son Nicholas said about his father’s politics.

NB I am about to write what might be regarded as ‘personal stuff’ about Michael and his family, and although none of it is in the least contentious or slanderous, I should like their family – his son Nicholas, his daughter Jane, his son Kit and his grandson’s Max and Isaac – to know that if they feel I am stepping on toes (although I don’t think I am), I apologise, as I really don’t mean to. But to be honest I don’t think any of them would object to what I am about to write.

. . .

Michael Wharton wrote two volumes of autobiography, The Missing Will and A Dubious Codicil, and both are good to read although the second is more in the way of memoirs (and if I remember correctly as I haven’t read it in years anecdotes of Fleet Street colleagues and pubs) than autobiography. He was born in Bradford to a German Jewish father and a Yorkshire woman, a gentile. And his birth name was Michael Nathan.

At some point, and this is not talking out of school, he changed his name from the Jewish ‘Nathan’ to the gentile ‘Wharton’, which, I’m told was his mother’s maiden name. Doing such a thing is not at all uncommon among Jews,

or was not earlier in the last century, because their Jewishness was often, though subtly, held against them. Thus a Goldstein might become a Goodman and a Jewish reporter I once worked with, a Pru Philips, came from a Cardiff family who were once known as Pinkas-Levi. And given the almost insufferable and as far as I am concerned inexplicable prejudice against them ‘as Jews’, I can’t say I blame them. In fact, I don’t blame them at all: why let something as ridiculous as prejudice hold you up in life and if a simple change in name takes you out of the line of fire, go for it. I know I would.

Nicholas was his son from his first marriage, ironically to a Jewish woman, born in the early 1940s and as this will have been before Michael changed his surname, he is known as Nathan. Nicholas (with whom I chatted later after the funeral) studied philosophy and then taught it at Liverpool University.

Jane (who wrote in interesting piece for he Daily Telegraph which you can find here) was his daughter by his second marriage, but Michael then went on to bring up two more children, though neither was biologically his, but the result of a long and, as I understand it, open affair his wife was having with a journalist friend and colleague. (I know his name and it would be well-known to those with knowledge of Fleet Street and its papers in the 1960/70s but there’s no very good reason to give it here.)

Michael was a one-off, journalist and satirist who could be very, very funny in a very dry way, so I asked his son Nicholas who of Michael’s children had inherited his father’s sense of humour. ‘None of us,’ he told me. Well, perhaps not, but Jane is – as she will tell you and as she has told me more than once – is very much her father’s daughter, which might well be summed up as having a keen eye for bullshit and no patience with it at all.

But when I say Michael could be – was – very, very funny, he was not one of those life and soul of the party types with a quip and a joke for every occasion and can often rather soon evolve into a distinct irritation. At least, he wasn’t when I knew him, but I am pretty certain he wasn’t either as a younger man. I’ve met several over the years, and if you and I ever meet, I can assure you I am not ‘the life and soul of the party’ and would be mortified ever to be so described. (NB Whenever I hear anyone described as ‘larger than life’ I always take it to mean ‘a complete pain in the arse’.)

As for his ‘right-wing politics’, Michael, Nicholas explained, using a very useful and thoroughly illuminating phrase, had ‘an aesthetic approach to politics’ and was not essentially right-wing at all. Michael, Nicholas told me, disliked Communists and the Left intensely and thus took up a ‘right-wing’ stance on many matters pretty much only because it was in opposition to what the Left might believe. For example, in the post-Tito disintegration of then Yugoslavia he championed Serbia not because he felt any particular sympathy for Yugoslavia but because demonising Serbia was the Left’s cause.

I think I know what Nicholas meant when he said Michael had an ‘aesthetic approach to politics’ because I suspect I do, too, although I like to think I am not in the slightest ‘right-wing’. And nor, Nicholas told me, is he, and he went on to say he had many political disagreements with his father.

And here I will end this entry. As I say above, it was started and more or less completed more than a week ago, and after going through it, dotted i’s and crossing t’s here and there and trying to ensure it isn’t complete gibberish, I can’t really build up steam to carry on. I also can’t remember the point I was hoping to make (if I indeed had one). Sorry.

Sorry, but Brexit: pretty much a fuck-up all round. Sad, but true

Sorry, but I can’t resist it any more. What with the daily, if not hourly, developments in – well, why don’t I for simplicity’s sake merely refer to everything as ‘Brexit’ and use the word as a catch-all term? – the whole shooting match is getting sillier and sillier and sillier. That wouldn’t actually matter if the possible – perhaps even probably – consequences of Brexit for Britain weren’t so dire.

I happened to have voted Remain, though I must admit through rather gritted teeth. I am not an EU cheerleader, one who thinks, as some seem to think, that the EU is the best thing to have happened to the world since the invention of lavatory paper. On the other had there was never the slightest chance that I would have voted Leave. And I don’t think I am alone in realising that on June 23, two years ago, I faced a horrible Hobson’s Choice.

It might help, although I am supremely conscious of just how boring it will be if I don’t manage to express myself succinctly, if I outlined my position. And it most certainly isn’t either ‘Remain under all costs’ or ‘Leave under all costs. Christ, no.

The concept of the EU as it was when the European Community evolved into the European Union was – as I understand it – a very good one. For me its essence can be summed up in one word: co-operation. There has, of course, been co-operation between the various European nations for some time on many matters, but the EU could be seen to provide a useful streamlining function. That included the streamlining of trade, keeping down costs which was to everyone's benefit.

I was, and most certainly still am, also in favour of one of the underlying principles of the EU at the time, that the wealthier nations are net contributors to the EU budget, and the poorer nations are beneficiaries – those who could afford to do without shelling out and helping those who needed help. Thus even a short trip to Spain, Portugal and Greece – all three were countries which had suffered under dictatorship for many a decade and whose economies had stagnated - would show to what good use those EU funds were put. That, at least, was the theory.

In practice, it was not quite as straightforward. For example, Greece, a beneficiary, would perhaps not necessarily have been quite as badly off as it purported to be and as its official figures showed it to be if it had collected its taxes more efficiently, i.e. had not allowed its rich folk to stick two fingers up to the state as far as their taxes were concerned. And we now know that in other ways it was rather wasteful, for example, allowing its men and women to retire at, I think, 55, and to draw a state pension while they then immediately carried on working, occupying jobs which those without employment could have done with.

But I don’t want to sidetrack myself, except to add that according to one Radio 4 programme I heard, a great deal of EU money was disappearing into the pockets of, in Italy the various mafia and in other countries to their criminals, but this was not publicly acknowledged - glossed over, even by the EU - in the interests of the greater good.

. . .

The point has often been made here in Britain, and I think it is a valid point, that there was little talk, and pertinently, little public talk, of the EU eventually aiming at ‘political union’. Stout-hearted europhiles will here declare that it was always the intention, right from the outset to unite politically. Well, perhaps it was, but no one was banging the drum for it then, especially not in Britain which in the 1970s held a referendum, its first, on whether to withdraw from the EEC. It chose not to. And note the institution was then still called the ‘EEC’ in that it was first and foremost an economic community, one which by gradually abolishing trade barriers and tariffs benefited all.

It all began to change when the Soviet Union collapsed and former members, all pretty much on their uppers economically, eagerly queued up to join. Was that, I ask, because they were eager for ‘ever closer political union’ with the rest of Europe? Was it hell: they wanted some of the economic action, they wanted markets for their goods and they wanted, without putting too fine a point on it, as much of the good times as they could get. I am not in the slightest bit convinced that those, all very proud nations, having just emerged from being part of political group in which they had little say as to what was to happen were thoroughly content in becoming part of another political groups in which, arguably, they would also have little say.

In 1993 the institution was changed into the European Union under the Maastricht Treaty and was already gaining members, so it once had 12 members rather rapidly increased in size to its present state of having 28 members. And now it quite openly declared that it wanted to become, though it was not called this, a United States of Europe. The purists in the EU visualised and still visualise a state with one parliament, one armed force, Europe-wide taxes and one currency.

That was when alarm bells, which had long been ringing in Britain, became even louder. ‘Do we really,’ an increasing number of folk asked, ‘really want to surrender our national sovereignty to a United State of Europe?’ No, many felt, no they did not.

But still it isn’t that simple. For in other member states there was also growing disquiet, though it was by no means as pronounced as in Britain. What makes that British disquiet all the more pertinent is that folk who, to put it mildly, didn’t and don’t have the slightest understanding of the intricacies of the EU acquire what can only be described as a visceral hatred of the EU. It is utterly irrational, certainly, but that doesn’t diminish it.

They then began to believe rather a great deal of nonsense – mainly because they wanted to believe it - about how Britain might well do far better economically if it were no longer a member of the EU and would be ‘free to forge its own trade deals with the rest of the world’. And that is where I think they are living in cloud-cuckoo-land, though, I must add, as there is just the one cloud-cuckoo-land, it is also home to those ‘I am a European’ types agitating for ‘ever closer political union’.

Well, that was then, but we are here and now and – as I keep pointing out to my sister who suspects I am a secret Brexiteer – the foregoing is neither here nor there. What is here and now is the fact that the negotiations between the EU and Britain are getting nowhere. Or perhaps they are, but both sides are keeping it all so close to their chest that we, the public, have no idea as to what is going on.

What is so thoroughly dispiriting is that both sides, Britain’s Leavers and her Remainers simply aren’t listening to one another, even though in my view both need the other rather more than either side is prepared to admit, even to itself.

Talk to a Brexiteer, and you will be bored rigid with all kinds of economic gobble-de-gook, that Britain will ‘liberate’ itself from some kind of imagined EU tyranny at 11pm on March 31, 2019, when we finally leave, but pertinently it is gobble-de-gook that is lapped up with gusto by like-minded folk. Every slight piece of economic information, if it is good – unemployment is coming down, the sale of salt has increased, this or that forum of distinguished economist (of whom the Brexit believers will never even have heard) is disingenuously corralled by them into justification for Brexit and as proof that Britain is doing the right thing. On the other hand, signs that things might not turn out as rosily is dismissed as ‘Remoaner propaganda’. As always folk believe what they want to believe, and bugger the truth.

Conversely, if you are a British ‘convinced European’ you will now be crying out in anguish and despair about the catastrophe which awaits Britain, a prediction which even I, not a convinced European in the sense usually understood, agree is far more likely to come true. And in there desperate zeal to turn back the clock, these folk, like their Brexiteer counterparts, are also largely clutching at straws.

Recently, for example, a chap who, according to the Guardian, drew up Article 50, the clause which governs a member relinquishing membership, remarked (and I am sure it was a throwaway remark) that under Article 50, and despite the ever so slight Brexit majority two years ago, Britain could still reverse its decision to leave. ‘There,’ the faithful cried as one, ‘it’s not a done deal, we can still remain a member of the EU.’ To which my immediate response was ‘yes, if you say so, but just in theory, and that in practice there would be almost, but no quite, unprecedented political chaos in Britain if a government, whether Tory, Labour or one run by the Tellytubbies, did an about-turn and declared Britain would not be leaving.

The real tragedy, the real completely unnecessary tragedy, is that here in Britain neither side, neither swivel-eyed Leavers, nor the starry-eyed Remainers is listening to the other but merely stoking up their fury at the other’s disingenuity and thinking up more ways to widen the gulf between them. Well, let them. It doesn’t mean I have to join in. And the real problem for us, the public, is that we haven’t a bloody clue as to how the ‘Brexit negotiations’ are proceeding.

. . .

The EU is insisting, and I can’t fault them on that, that the financial details of Brexit – i.e. how much money Britain is liable to cough up given its obligations under plans made years ago for this and that expenditure – must be settled before any talks can begin on what kind of trading relationship Britain will have with the rest of the EU. Britain, on the other hand, wants those talks to be held in parallel, but the EU isn’t buying that (and again, given the nickname long attributed to Britain, ‘perfidious Albion’, I can see why). So, apparently, there is stalemate.

But it is all so bloody, so frustratingly silly: as far as I am concerned whichever way you cut it, both sides will still need each other after Brexit, and not just economically, but politically: Britain, boring old, bolshy old, pragmatic Old Blighty was useful to have around when they various hotheads from different parts of the continent got into a tizzy. And given that France and Germany are seen as the pillars of the EU, Britain was useful to keep stability. There doesn’t seem much likelihood of the Krauts and the Frogs (to use the terms used in King Charles St, Westminster, London SW1A 2AH) falling out, but history does have its quirks, so having Britain around to calm matters would be no bad thing.

(NB I discovered recently that at the Congress of Vienna when the enemies of the defeated Napoleon got together to carve up the spoils, it was Britain’s representative, Viscount Castlereagh, who insisted that France, too, should attend, and so Talleyrand was of the party. Russia, Prussia and Austria weren’t at all in favour, but Britain held out, in the interests of a lasting peace.

Something similar happened after World War II when the Soviets and the US were all for destroying defeated Germany and grinding her into the dust. Certainly not, said Britain, we must build up the country and make her viable again economically as soon as possible if we want long-term peace.)

Britain was useful in other ways. For many members of the EU Britain was useful as a fig leaf, bolshy Britain saying things they agreed with but did not necessarily articulate because, Britain was saying it. And I believe among many eurocrats there is the conviction that Britain was useful in other ways, bringing a kind of stability to the whole shooting match.

For Britain, of course, the EU – for which read its markets – the EU is also needed. But can they work it out? Can they get to the point where both sides win a little, lose a little? Can they fuck. Like in a bitter divorce each side thinks it is right and the other side is being unreasonable, and it seems the twain will simply not meet to compromise.

I’ll repeat: whatever happens in the long term, by 2060 for example, 43 years hence when a great deal of water will have flowed under the bridge it might all look very different. But I do fear that in the short term – by which I mean five or ten years - Britain will suffer and will suffer badly from Brexit. Britain needs to trade, it needs to sell its goods, but trade deals are not made overnight and there is a very real risk that in the interim many industries will suffer to badly that they will go to the wall. But I also believe that has much to lose. It, too, needs and equitably trading relationship with Britain, one of its big markets.

In the short term it would seem that the EU is less under pressure. Life will go on, trade will continue elsewhere, there are, after all, another 27 members of the EU and things won’t go tits up just because Britain, in a strop, doesn’t join the party. But in the longer term the EU also must look to its future. And I believe that unless the EU rids itself of its pie-eyed obsession with ‘ever closer political union’, it is on a hiding to nothing.

Economically, the EU is still sitting quite pretty. Yes, with Britain no longer part of the customs union and no longer part of the EU economic block there will be a price to pay, but it will be a comparatively small price, and there is a lot more to the EU than just Britain. But there are other dimensions to the EU that cannot be ignored.

Certainly, they EU is still a supremely viable institution. OK, so Britain is gone, but that is not the end of the world. But that ignores something quite crucial about the whole EU shooting match, the situation of an EU with Britain as a member and a post-Brexit EU of which Britain is no longer a part. That is the political future of the EU, a future, given this obsession with ‘ever closer politca union’ which is not just part of academic discussion over coffee and cognac.

Already there are very uncomfortable rumblings of discontent which have nothing to do with Brexit. The assumption was always in Brussels that these days every member can see the virtues of the Brussels vision, that all members subscribe to the all for one and one for all. So the results of the most recent EU elections were, at best, uncomfortable, and it might have dawned on the less starry-eyed eurocrats in Brussels that the assumed harmony is not quite as copper-bottomed as they might like. They might even, after a bad meal and a bout of dyspepsia, have feared that the cherished and assumed harmony is nothing but a sham, a rancid piece of whishful thinking.

On the surface politically all might well be portrayed as sweetness and light, but problems are beginning to make themselves apparent. There is, for example, the embarrassing matter of the Brussels desired distribution of refugees and immigrants from Africa: Poland and Hungary are simply saying ‘fuck off, we don’t want them’ and there seems nothing the eurocrats in Brussels can do about it. The trouble is that one or two lesser states are more in sympathy with Poland and Hungary (not, it has to be said, at present shining examples of democratic practice) than with the wishes of Brussels and are letting those two countries do the talking for them.

For the EU, of course, it is a real dilemma: nominally they are taking those two members to court for, I don’t know how they put it in officialese, but it could be summed up as ‘not doing as they are told’. But they can’t push that lined too far, because it they do, they might well be the losers. But if they don’t crack down, they will look weak. And this bunch still want ‘ever closer political union’.

That all, of course, has nothing at all to do with Brexit. But if there are problems, the EU might well consider that having Britain as a member on the side of the angels would be rather useful. Except that they won’t: Britain wants out.

. . .

So there you have it: Brexit is, whichever way you look at it, developing into the mother of all fuck-ups. Additionally, now the sun has stopped shining the EU ALSO has to deal with other problems.

As usual all is sweetness and light when the sun IS shining, but things tend to fall apart when it doesn’t. 

What do I want? Well, I would like the EU to back down, compromise. And for Britain to back down and compromise. The EU can ditch the notion of ‘ever closer political’ and Britain can see sense that it cannot go it alone. Will any of that happen? Of course, not. Me, I am 68 in seven days times and with luck I shan’t be too discomforted. But I have a 21-year-old daugher and an 18-year-old son and I rather fear for them life will not be quite as sweet.

So there you have it: doom. But did you really expect anything else?

RIP Susan Wharton, one of life’s gentlewoman and the best company ever. As for the RCs and the rest . . .

In my last post, I reported that one Susan ‘Sue’ Wharton had died, and that I would write about her a little more at length in my next post. Well this is the post.

Susan was the widow of one Michael Wharton, a man who is perhaps better known to the world as Peter Simple. He wrote the column which appeared in the Daily Telegraph for almost 40 years. But this entry is about his widow, Susan, and if you want to know more about Michael, you will find his Wikipedia entry here and a blog entry I wrote about him here.

Susan was Michael’s third wife and even though I know it is almost de rigeur to gush about folk among the English middle classes, it is not a practice I knowingly subscribe to or even like. So when I say Susan was, in my experience at least, a delight, entertaining, always interesting and always good company and one of the nicest people I have ever known, I hope you are assured that I mean it sincerely and am not simply going through a typical middle class motion. I don’t suppose there is any more any point in me denying – although I have never done so – that I am irredeemably and remorselessly middle class, but I do like to put a lot of blue water between myself and both the English/British and German middle classes in some of their manifestations. But, again, this post is about Susan not me, so I shall shut up on the matter.

Susan, who was 91 on October 81, was found dead at home last week. She had vague heart problems – vague in that she would be the last person you would hear about them from – and, as I discovered talking to her nephew last week, has suffered a minor stroke at some point in the past few years, but nevertheless her death was unexpected, as it turns out even by her.

There is/was to be an inquest and I don’t know its result or whether it has yet been held, but Robert, her nephew and her nominated next of kin, told me that she had already been dead for a number of days when he body was found. Her death will have been sudden in that she was found in an armchair with a book and a half-drunk cup of tea by her side. I last saw her just over a year ago when she came to Cornwall to stay with my stepmother and pointedly not to celebrate her 90th birthday.

When I said goodbye on that occasion, I faithfully promised to get in touch by the following spring – that is last spring – to take her to London to visit an exhibition or two and treat her to lunch. To my shame I never got around to it.

She was born Susan Moller and her heritage was Norwegian, although by a few generations (NB Dec 01 correction: In fact it was not, it was Swedish). She studied art and then became an art teacher at Wycombe College. At some point she met Michael, I think in the 1970s, and they lived in a cottage in Naphill Common north of High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire.

I first met her at my father’s house in North Cornwall, where my stepmother still lives, at some point in the 1980s and met her many times again when she and Michael came to stay in one of the two holiday cottages my stepmother owned, often at Christmastime. Michael died in 2006 and apart from seeing her in Cornwall when she came to visit, I also used to visit her at home in Naphill Common and take her out for a meal. And as I say, she was always the best possible company.

Perhaps the most notable thing about her was that despite her increasing age she was somehow, in the best possible sense of the word ‘girlish’ – enthusiastic, fun, amused, laughing – not ‘girlish’ in that calculated way some women are which always sets my teeth on edge. And being an artist, and she drew and painted until she died, she knew a lot about art and I could always pick her brains. She and Michael never had children – perhaps she was already too old by the time they married – but I am certain she would have made a good mother.

She was a Roman Catholic, but I don’t know just how attendant she was. But rest in peace, Susan, and please forgive me for not keeping my promise to see you again earlier this year.

This is Susan in the St Tudy Inn near where I live when I took her to supper there a few years ago.

. . .

I mention that Susan was a Roman Catholic and, like me, what is known – or perhaps what was once known – as a ‘cradle Catholic (NB Dec 01 correction: In fact she was not, I have been told, but was a convert). But whereas she kept her faith, I ‘lapsed’ years. But even the notion of ‘lapsing’ irritates me.

This is, perhaps, putting it rather too brutally, but the Roman Catholic church, as opposed to the faith, could teach a thing to each and every totalitarian party, not least the communists. For the RC church will insist that my apostasy has nothing to do with reason but is just a falling away and that I might well, in time, see the light. Thus the ‘lapse’ is merely a temporary state: I shall, once I have regained my reason and am once again given grace, ‘find my way back to the church’.

To be frank, although I say I am irritated, I actually don’t give a stuff either way. If that’s they way they want to play it, good luck to them. And I must also point out that I am not one of that curious breed the zealous atheist, someone who is so consumed with ‘not believing’ that they almost make it their life’s work to persuaded each and every believer that they are horribly benighted and then some.

I take a different view: if someone has a faith, whether it is RC or that of any other christian denomination, or perhaps follows the Jewish or Muslim creeds, is, perhaps a Hindu, or a Buddhist, good luck to them. There are inestimable instances where someone’s faith has given the sucour and solace, and I am the last to deny them that or even to see anyone else try to deny them that. Good luck to them and may their God be with them. It’s just that – well, I don’t have a ‘religious faith’. That doesn’t mean I have no faith, though. I have faith in much, just not anything laid down by a creed.

At the wedding ceremony last week there was a Catholic mass with all its invocations to a ‘Lord’, a ‘saviour’ and all the rest, but it does nothing but remind me of Doctor Who on TV, with with British readers will most certainly be familiar and foreign readers might well have heard of. In Doctor Who a great deal is made of the Time Lord and all the rest. I simply cannot see any distinction whatsoever between the christian devotions to saints, its sacraments, its practices, its ceremonies and the rest and those ‘heathen’ and ‘pagan’ practices it derides so much.

But I stress again, if these give solace and comfort to anyone in need in some way, good luck to it all. It’s just that I can’t pretend for the sake of pretending. It is the organisations and institutions I abhor.

A few years ago, I visited St Peter’s in Rome and exploring the labyrinth which is the heart of the Roman Catholic church and seeing the wealth there, I felt almost physically sick at the hypocrisy of the claim that it was all ‘for the glory of God’ when it was and is so obvious to me that it is merely for the glory of those men – not women, not, no, not women in the RC church – who run that organisation. I have over the years read up a little on the history of the christian church and noted is schisms and power play.

The first schism was barely a few hundred years into the existence of christianity when the western church split from the eastern church (or vice versa, as lord knows who split from whom) and it is, to me at least, blindlingly obvious that it the battles and disagreements had nothing to do with faith and everything to do with power – who should be calling the shots. Well, count me out.

Writing this I am even conscious that someone disagreeing with me might demand that I come up with better arguments as to why I hold those beliefs. Really? Well, read again what I have to say. But none of the above should be taken to mean that I don’t believe in Good and Evil: there is most certainly Good and Evil abroad in the world and it doesn’t take much of an intellect (which is why I am able to comment on it) to see how the monotheistic faiths can come up with the notion of ‘the Devil’.

Each and every one of us will be familiar with both good and evil. We will all have come across it: the gratuitous evil which seems to have no cause. But also the gratuitous good folk do, the sacrifices they make for others. So don’t write off what I have to say as simplistic nonsense.

I find the christian churches attitude to women abhorrent and blame my RC upbringing, which although no super-strict was pretty mainline, for my own – and very private but deeply imbedded and wholly unfair – attitudes to women. Despite my intellectual condemnation of that attitude, I am still uncomfortably aware that there are faint echoes in me that ‘women are somehow second-class’, that ‘women don’t quite matter as much’ and all the rest. And without sounding too dramatic, I don’t just not like that part of me, it really does distress me. A confession.

PS Her funeral is next Tuesday, my 68th birthday, at St Teresa’s om Princes Risborough, Buckinghamshire.

A short trip to Cologne to see my nephew wed his Polish squeeze (and a good opportunity to slag off the Roman Catholics, something, though, only we 'cradle Catholics' are allowed to do)

Cologne/Köln

Here with my son, Wesley, for my nephew’s wedding. Just a brief visit, flew in today, wedding tomorrow, fly out again tomorrow, then home for him and work for me, but worth a post (I think – perhaps I should leave it to you, my reader, whether or not it is worth it).

We flew out from Bristol at 12.10 and arrived at the airport at 15.15 local time, and already there are a few ironies to report, highlighting how Germany is Germany,

The first: planeloads of visitors and Germans arrive by the minute at the airport – as you would think – and many, like us, use the train/S Bahn to get into the city. So why on earth there should only be four ticket machines as the airport train station catering for, in our case, about 100 people – if not quite a few more - is rather beyond me. And how is this an irony?

Well, the cliché is that Germany and the Germans are hugely and enviably efficient, but just how this purported efficiency has been translated in practice when it comes to allowing passengers to buy their tickets is not at all obvious. Our flight from Bristol took one hour and ten minutes – it’s not far – but once we had reached the four machines and joined one of the four very long queues to buy tickets, we had to wait at least 25 minutes to get them. Slow just wasn’t the word. Just why there are not fare more ticket machines there and perhaps even a window or two I really don’t know.

We got to our hotel, literally just a long stone’s throw from the central station and settled in. My son, who didn’t get in and to bed until (he tells me) about 5am this morning then immediately put his head down to catch up on sleep. I am not quite as tired, and fancying a quiet cigar and a glass of Kölsch, the city’s own beer, I took myself off looking for somewhere to enjoy both. And looked and looked and looked. It’s not that there weren’t enough pubs to have a drink in but as indoor smoking has been banned for I don’t know how long and as I couldn’t find a German pub/bar with and outdoors (as in tables and chairs on the street) I finally settled for the first outdoor drinking establishment I could find: a Thai restaurant which anyway deals more in takeaways than sitdown meals. And the Kölsch I ordered and am now drinking is sadly from a bottle, not on tap which is usually the nicest. Oh, well. At least it isn’t the end of civilisation.

. . . 

The wedding tomorrow is nearby, though across the rive at St Heribert’s (unlike me, my sister and her family have stayed true to the faith so it is a Roman Catholic mass and wedding ceremony. The double whammy is that my nephew’s bride-to-be is Polish, pretty much the Irish of Eastern Europe when it comes to Catholicism, although, of course, in that very sane way of theirs which is sadly still not acknowledged, Ireland has been rapidly putting as much distance as it can between itself and the RC faith (too many folk abused by priests and too many unmarried mothers in decades gone by treated like less than shit by the church and her officials and nuns for there to be much love lost).

(Just been tapped up for five euros – I’m not usually as sympathetic, especially as the guy only wants it for booze, but it seemed the quickest way to move him on and carry on writing. Shame is me.)

So although I’m not really looking forward to the ceremony – all that quasi-mystical Lamb of God stuff and saviour of the world bollocks sounds far too much like Doctor Who for me, Time Lords and the rest of it – I am looking forward to the do afterwards. In fact, there are two dos, one immediately after the ceremony at a brewery, with German beer and local tapas (it says on the invite), and then the reception afterwards. And for all their faults – as in every nation has its faults - the Germans do do a good do. I love them. Don’t know how long it will be going on for, but the following morning we shall have to be up early to catch our flight back to Old Blighty, bloody 11.10! Oh, well.

. . . 

And what else? Not written here for a while, so I’m sure there must be something to waffle on about until I have finished the second bottle of beer I have just ordered. Oh, yes, I’ve signed up to Alamy, the photo agency, though I must also tell you that anyone can do it. If pictures you submit are technically OK, have ‘context’ which of course means they want pretty bog standard pix rather than the kind of arty-farty stuff I have made my own, they will take everything.

I found out about it because a guy I work with has also been submitting pictures and told me all about it. Alamy want as many as you can supply – given the above proviso – because they more they can offer anyone coming their way, they more they will sell. Simple, really. To see what I am talking about, just visit the website – alamy.com – then type in whatever you want to type in, the name of your home town, for example, and take a look at what’s there. Bog standard piccies of everything and everywhere, and I’ve decided that when I do call it a day at work, I shall l spend a few days taking loads and loads of pix and submitting them. And I should stress that anyone can do it. It’s just that the pictures must conform to their criteria, for example, if people are in the picture and can be recognise, you must get their express consent for the picture to be submitted. Similarly, anything which might be a trademark in a picture should be avoided.

. . . 

Köln was, and probably still is a very RC city, so as I write, at 18.15 – 6.15pm in old money – pretty much every church around as well as the Dom is ringing its bells. Old habits die hard. And I don’t doubt that when the time comes and I am a breath away from death, I, too, shall throw in the towel and cry ‘I was wrong, you are right, and please don’t send me to Hell!’ And here is an occasion to record the last words of one Voltaire, a sane atheist if ever there were one. He was on his deathbed when the local priest came to see him and pleaded with him to renounce the Devil and all his works. ‘Now,’ Voltaire is reported to have replied, ‘is not the time to be making new enemies.’ Boom, boom, though quite who was around to record those last words is not quite clear.

PS Just remembered one last thing, but I shall leave it for another post as the good lady is worthy a post all of her own: Susan Wharton, the widow of Michael Wharton, known professionally as Peter Simple, has died.

I give you Jim Harman, the man who seems to know everything and will tell you about it all at great length. But be quick, he us off to Australia very, very soon

I mentioned an Italian restaurant called La Pappardella in my last entry, and that’s where I first bumped into Jim Harman. La Pappardella is on the Old Brompton Road, in Earls Court, London, and if you are ever nearby and fancy eating Italian, I can recommend it. It is not part of a chain, and because it is not a chain, you get value for your money, e.g if you like chicken salad, as I do, you don’t get just three or four small cubes of chicken as you do in the bloody fake-Italian chains which you have to hunt down amid the mounds of shredded cos lettuce, but three or four generous pieces of freshly grilled chicken breast. I’m no skinflint, but I do like value for my money. Also the staff and everything about it, including the noise, are Italian.

La Pappardella has a small narrow terrace outside on the street, about five feet wide, with about four tables, and that’s where we smokers sit and dine. I go there on a Sunday when I work only one shift, and I am usually there from about 7.30 till 10, except in the warmer weather when Luigi, the manager, slides open the restaurant glass front to allow in fresh air (as in the ‘fresh air’ you get from a reasonably busy, semi-residential street with traffic passing all day and all night) and has politely and firmly made it clear that when those doors are open, he doesn’t like me sitting outside smoking cigars. Punters smoking cigarettes are fine, but not those who like a cigar, however modest that cigar might be. Oh, well.

I should, by the way, yet again point out that I am most certainly no rich putz with money to burn on cigars, but that I get my La Paz Wilde Cigarros from a shop in Amsterdam which sells boxes of 20 for €14 (i.e. around £12.50/$16.50), though just five of them will set you back £13 here in Britain (which is why I get them when I travel abroad to see my sister or my aunt). To put that figure in perspective, anyone who smokes 20 cigarettes a day, and many smoke a damn sight more than that, will be blowing at least £70 a week or more. My modest box of 20 usually lasts me about a month. Just saying.

I was at La Pappardella one night about a year ago when Jim Harman turned up. He had recently returned to Britain from Australia to sell his flat just down the road from La Pappardella, before leaving Old Blighty for good and settling Down Under. I don’t know how we started talking but we did, and he seemed an affable, interesting guy. The terrace and its diners are shielded from the pavement by a long, four-foot high piece of plate glass, and Jim stands on the pavement side of the glass, with his bottle of lager, cup of espresso and glass of brandy on a terrace table, leaning over the glass to reach it. In all the time I have known him, I have known him, I have never seen him sit down.

Anyway, we got chatting and in our first chat he told me the long and very involved story about how he had gone to his dentist a few days earlier to have some slight work done to his teeth, but how the whole episode had ended with him in intensive care at the Kensington & Chelsea hospital on the Fulham Road because the dentist had accidentally injected him with undiluted something or other and had more or less burned out his sinuses. I do seem to remember that he said ‘bleach’, but surely to goodness injecting a patient with bleach, however dilute, is not standard dental practice, so it must have been something else. Who knows.

He was, he said, at death’s door for 48 hours and was later told by his consultant, he said, that only some fluke or other had saved his life. All this had apparently taken place over the previous weekend. I must admit I was a little dubious about it all, as he didn’t seem much the worse for wear and was knocking back the lagers and beers with gusto, not least smoking his ciggies, which, he said, the doctors had strictly forbidden, but as this was all part of a little light conversation, I gave him the benefit of doubt. And, anyway, it was an entertaining enough story.

There was even a sequel to it, which I got to hear the following Sunday: during the week he had been getting very bad headaches and sinus pain but nothing would help. Finally, noticing something ‘plastic like’ peeping from one of his nostrils, he had pulled at it, then pulled at it a little more, then a little more still until finally a load of gunge emerged. Once that was clear he felt a lot better. This was somehow the remnants of the ‘bleach’ or whatever the silly dentist had - undiluted - injected him with. I was again a little sceptical as yet again he didn’t in any way seem under the weather, but, hey, what the hell. Who knows? And did I care?

Jim would turn up at La Pappardella at around 9pm, and it wasn’t just on Sundays that he turned up. Sometimes, after ending my Monday or Tuesday double shift at 10pm, I, too, am in the habit of washing up there for a glass of wine and a smoke. And so in further conversations - I suppose I should more strictly call them recitations - I heard many more sories, how, for example, he had, while working on the telecommunications side of things for an oil company in Nigeria, witnessed rebel fighting and how a dishonest female correspondent for British TV gave a live broadcast of the action, describing the bullets flying all around her, while actually she was standing two miles away on the other side of a valley well away from the fighting and in now danger whatsoever.

On another occasion he told me how to deal with corruption in Nigeria and how he regularly outwitted various Nigerian cops looking for a bribe. There were several other stories - for several years, it seems, he was down and out in Salazar’s Portugal, could tell you a thing or two about the country, and did - but, to be frank, the details of which you always got many now elude me.

It was gradually and only later, once over the months I had heard several anecdotes several times and began getting a little peeved that for Jim ‘conversation’ means ‘listen to what I have to say on that topic’ - whatever the topic - that I began to find him just a little less interesting. Brexit is a favourite, but he has knowledge of and an opinion on pretty much everything you might care to raise and he is more than happy to share all with you. He is one of those people who talks so seamlessly and at length that there is no hope of getting a word in edgeways. Sadly, thought perhaps not unexpectedly, he is less interested - or to be fair, seems to be less interested - to hear what you might have to say.

Most recently I heard all about some Michelin-starred Italian chef who had been a big noise in London finally jacking it all in and returning to Italy where he now runs a successful restaurant on the outskirts of Rome. It is on an archaeological site, so is not permanent, but consists of a tent in which he serves only British food. Knowing how much Italians like their food, and knowing just how unlike Italian food British food is, I told him I found that hard to believe, but no, he said, it was true.

Then there was the tale of the son who took over the family’ very successful vineyard and ran it into the ground because he wanted to use his new ideas. I never knew this, but vineyards keep barrels of ‘reserve’ wine from good years which they then mix with wine from less good years to keep up the overall quality. It seems this fool, the son, that is, not Jim, thought the practice was all stuff and nonsense and refused to keep ‘reserve’ wine. End of vineyard, it seems. Or something. Once again, I got a little lost in the telling and am hazy on details.

Jim is 77 years old, but could pass for younger. He has a slight Australian edge to his accent, but is Suffolk born and bred. Come November 2, I shall never see him again, because that is when he is flying out to Australia and leaving Britain forever (and where he will apparently spend the next few months building a small domestic solar electricity generating plant for the property he owns out there. Again, I got full details but became a little confused rather quickly. It seems he will, through some quirk in Australian law actually be able to make money by not selling his power to the local Australian power company. Or something).

After what I gather was a lucrative career working first in telecoms and later for British Aerospace in electronics he appears to be not short of a penny and owns his flat in Earls Court as well as land and property in Australia. The other night, once I had decided to mention Jim in this blog (although I didn’t tell him), I pressed him for a brief rundown of his life history so I could try to get the details right. As it turned out, it that rundown wasn’t at all brief, though briefer than it might have been as I, keen to get the details for this blog entry, was rather ruthless in interrupting him and urging him to stick to the point. Going off at tangent is something Jim is very good at.

This is what I have pieced together from what he told me and had previously mentioned over the past year or so. He was born into a large Suffolk farming family of hard drinkers and fighters. His brothers were always getting into fights in the local pub, usually to protect him (or something). He left school and worked on a trawler, though for just one trip: he fell overboard and as fishermen regard that as an ill omen, no one would take him on as crew after that.

He then worked in a factory, although I can’t remember what kind, before (if I remember correctly) his foreman told him he was too bright for that kind of work and should get himself an education. So this he did, studying whatever you have to study to work for - I think - the telecommunications arm of what was then the GPO (General Post Office - this will have been in the 1950s, when life was still in black and white, policeman were the friendly sort who would give you a kindly clip ’round the ear to keep you on the straight and narrow, all women were virgins until they married and when they married all took to going to bed in hair curlers, and life was apparently better in every way).

While working there he was headhunted to work for British Aerospace (or something) and after working there, one thing led to another and he was again headhunted, this time to work for the Ministry of Defence who apparently needed someone with his background to work on some of their missiles system. Or something. I did at the time try to pin him down on dates as it was all getting a bit confusing, but apart from ‘it was in the 1990s’ (which is plausible enough, I suppose) still couldn’t get a proper timeline out of it all. And how all this ties in with Nigeria and Portugal (‘that was in the 1970s’) I can’t really work out.

But there you have him: Jim who knows pretty much everything about everything and furthermore has an opinion on pretty much everything and will pass on his knowledge at no cost but at great length. If you do want further details of him and his life, please don’t rely on my account which, as you can, see, is pretty sketchy, but get your skates on and take yourself down to La Pappardella at 253 Old Brompton Rd, Earls Court, London SW5 9HP where you can catch him on almost any night from between 9pm and midnight. But make it snappy as he’s off to Australia on November 7.

And if you want a really long chat, get him started on Brexit.

LATER Re-reading this with a view to correcting literals and making it more readable, it strikes me that you might feel I am being rather unfriendly to a man who has done me no wrong. So let me get it straight: I have nothing against Jim and don’t dislike him. It’s just I do - did, I supposed, unless I bump into him again tomorrow - increasingly get a tad irritated by the one-sided notion he has of conversation. Oh, and being lectured on Brexit.

It’s the little lad of four, sitting on a sofa trying to eat a fried egg with a knife and fork while a dog stood just feet away pissing which did my head in. Kidnapping was the best thing to do

I don’t know why this occurred to me an hour or so ago while I was leaving work and heading for here, La Pappardella in Earls Court, where I am settling in to a half-bottle of so-so to not very good house red wine, a cigar and, later perhaps, a meal, but it did. And it has nothing to do with anything which happened today, this week, this month, this year or – well, nothing to do with anything I can think of. It simply came back to me. NB This entry was actually written with the immediate bit below last, but I’ve realised that I took an age getting to it, so I have brought it to the top.

. . .

Only two stories found me while I was working as a district reporter in North Gwent, in South Wales, which were worth anything, and even one could perhaps be bullshit. But the second wasn’t.

The office phone rang, and I answered it.

‘Is this Patrick Powell?’ a low, very low and rather mysterious voice asked, one I could hardly even make out.

‘Yes, it is,’ I said, ‘why?’

Then he announced: ‘Social services have kidnapped my daughter.’

You get accustomed to nutters even when you are working for a very low-level, not very successful evening paper in the back of beyond in the South Wales valleys, but unless they are dangerous or, at worst, drunk, they help to pass the time. Oh, really I asked, give me more details. But the guy wouldn’t give any. Instead he asked me to meet him.

I went to the address he gave me. It was one of several very substantial houses in a very substantial avenue in Tredegar which had not only seen far, far better days, but which could not even remember them. There was a lot of empty housing in North Gwent and the terrace house could be snapped up for a song, but as no one had the dosh to buy the bigger ones, such as this, they were bought up by the local council and used to house those council tenants who had caused trouble everywhere else they lived.

These people were the utterly forgotten people, people who no one knew what to do with and about whom they cared even less. They existed on miserly benefits – not at all large even in 1977 – and everyone could pretend they were being taken care of. They had reached the end, an end you and I will, God willing, never meet. The house, like all the others in the row was wasted, falling down, a wreck, however grand it might once have been, almost an ex-house.

The guy who answered the door took me into his very large sitting room, and I mean the room was large. But there was nothing in it but a table and three chairs and a broken-down sofa on which sat a young child of about four. And the sight broke my heart. The child wearing very little was sitting on the sofa with a plate balanced on its knees trying, with a knife and fork, to eat a fried egg. I sat down in a chair to listen to the man’s story. But as I did so, something even more distressing occurred. A large Alsatian dog, a male, matted and ragged beyond belief, walked in, stopped, then without even cocking its leg as male dogs do, pissed, right there, not feet from the child. And then it walked on, leaving the puddle of piss behind it.

The man told me his story. It seemed that not a year or two ago, his wife had fallen pregnant and was taken to hospital to give birth. Then, once the child was born, it was whisked away by the nursing staff, never to be seen by the mother of father again.

I was astonished.

‘Are you sure?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ he told me. And he gave me the family doctor’s name, the doctor he claimed was responsible for it all.

I jotted down various details, then took off back to Ebbw Vale. I rang the doctor and explained what I had been told.

‘It’s true,’ he said. He was very matter-of-fact, as doctors who do not aim for a celebrity career on TV usually are.

‘What, you took the child away?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘But why?’ I asked.

‘Well, you’ve met the father, haven’t you.’ That, he felt was explanation enough. He then told me the child had been immediately given up for adoption.

I kind of understood. And I never got in touch with the father again. Did I do the right thing by doing nothing? I really don’t know, but I’m certain that child had a slightly better life than he or she might otherwise have had.

. . .

Now the bit which initially came first: A few years ago, I decided to read some Somerset Maugham short stories, and then read the very good biography of the man by Selina Hastings (which I have written about before here). But this has little if anything to do with Maugham. I simply mention him because many of his stories, in fact a great deal of them, were based on incidents that occurred, anecdotes he heard or, very often, anecdotes his companions and partners, Gerald Haxton and later Alan Searle, heard and would relate back to him. In fact, Maugham is said to have relied on both heavily for ‘material’. Incidentally, both were very important to him, though Maugham described Haxton as ‘vintage’ but Searle as ‘vin ordinaire’.

Haxton had ‘breeding’, but I put the word in quotation marks because although I admit it does mean something, I dislike much of the snobbery inherent in the word. Maugham and Haxton were together for a very long time, but eventually their relationship disintegrated because of Haxton’s excessive drinking and druggery. He finally died, and although Maugham was inconsolable for a time, he also admits to something akin to relief. Haxton caused him all sorts of trouble. Maugham, a man essentially of the 19th century, was at pains to keep his homosexuality (although he was bisexual and had many female conquests) quiet, whereas Haxton, usually drunk, made no secret at all of his orientation, forever picking up rough trade and getting into all kinds of scraps.

After Haxton’s death, Searle, a working-class lad from Bermondsey, was taken on, ostensibly as his ‘secretary’, and he did, indeed, function more as an employee although he was also, most probably more in the early years, a sexual partner for Maugham. One of many, apparently.

When he was still quite young, Maugham developed a bad stammer, one which caused him quite a bit of social embarrassment, so he was grateful to Haxton who could act in his stead as host and being an ebullient sort take the spotlight off Maugham. Haxton, it is said, had the easy charm of a many to whom many would open up, whereas Maugham could be quite intimidating, although he never meant to be.

My point is that Maugham worked many of the tales Haxton and later Searle brought to him into stories, and the following account, although true, could well serve the same purpose.

. . .

In October 1976, what? 41 years ago? I left the Lincolnshire Chronicle where I had worked for 16 months as a reporter and joined The News, one of two weekly papers circulating in what was then called Gwent, in South Wales, as one of two North Gwent district reporters. As a ‘career move’ moving from one weekly in Lincoln to another in South Wales served no purpose at all, but then I didn’t much have a purpose and was simply driven by a desire to move on. Anywhere, really. It was most certainly not a ‘career move’ and wasn’t intended as one.

Life was simple and easy in North Gwent. Life as a reporter on a weekly is not onerous, not even if you have ambition, and I had none. I fell in with Julie Davis, the other district reporter who had taken a shine to me, and after staying overnight with her on the night of the paper’s Christmas party in her small cottage in Llangattock, just across the River Usk from Crickhowell, within weeks I was staying overnight seven days a week and we were living together. It was not love, but it was easy: a cooked meal every night, telly, then sex. But although I was not ambitious, I was conscious of still wanting to move on, and move on I did, to become on of the local North Gwent district reporters for the local evening paper, the South Wales Argus.

Apart from working for the local evening paper instead of one of the two local weekly papers – the other was the Gwent Gazette – life carried on as it did, except that I was now based in the Argus’s Ebbw Vale office. Stories came from meetings of the local district council, Blaenau Gwent, and the magistrates courts, Ebbw Vales, Tredegar, Abertillery and, until the closed both, Nantyglo and Aberbeeg. The routine was to stay in court or at a council meeting until I had enough ‘stories’ to file, then bugger off back to the office or even home, to write them up and then call it a day.

The job was quite lucrative, too, although indirectly, in a kind of abstract way. A district reporter’s job will not keep him or her in diamonds and pearls, ever, but my weekly wage was supplemented by – at The News’s request – submitting court stories. These were the same as I had phoned over to my paper, except that they were three or four times longer, because I was being paid ‘lineage’ – the longer the story, the more moolah would be added to my wage packet (the South Wales Argus and The News were in the same stable, so the wages office was the same). Then there were ‘expenses’ and Lord was I able to milk the paper.

‘Police calls’ could well be done over the phone, ringing up to get a rundown of local petty crime and road accidents. But for some reason we were ordered to pay each police station a visit in person. My local police stations were in Abertillery, Ebbw Vale, Brynmawr and Tredegar, so that is what I did. To same time, of course, I drove to Brynmawr, about four miles down the road, then on to Abertillery, then back to Ebbw Vale and on to Tredegar, and it was all done and dusted in just over an hour. That was the reality.

For expenses, I claimed mileage from the Ebbw Vale office to Brynmawr and back; then from the Ebbw Vale office to Abertillery and back (and before they were closed to Nantyglo and Aberbeeg and back; and finally from the Ebbw Vale office to Tredegar and back. My actual round trip was about 20 miles. The way I worked it bumped that up to about 50 miles. And this was claimed every day. I really can’t remember what my weekly wage was, but I do know that I was getting as much in lineage and mileage as my weekly wage.

The very, very odd thing was my expenses were never questioned, ever. Ever. Why, I don’t know, but there seemed no reason to find out why. It has long been a principle of mine to do something first and then be told to stop rather to go, cap in hand, to authority to ask whether, you know, is it OK if I do this. To which request the answer can all too often be, no, you can’t. So the moral of the story is: don’t ask in the first place.

. . .

But to get to the nitty-gritty. I did, once in a while, come up with a non-court and non-council story, but with one exception they all seemed to fine me rather than as a result of any diligent sleuthing on my part. (The one good story I came up with was so neutered – probably for legal reasons – as not to be much of a scoop when it finally appeared in print. At one court hearing, a man was fined for importing TV sets from the Channel Islands to North Gwent without paying customs duty. He was fined.

Then, about four or five months later, I was – unusually I have to say – looking through a report of one of the many ‘land regeneration schemes’ launched, paid for by Welsh Office funds, to try to do something about the economic blight destroying North Gwent, but also, and more purposefully, to show ‘the public’ that the Welsh Office was tirelessly beavering away on its behalf. As they say, perception is nine-tenths of the game.

Looking through a report on the latest, a one-million pound scheme to do something or other (and this was in 1977/8, so your £1 million pounds would now, 40 years on, be worth about £5.7 million according to the Bank of England I came across a name which struck me as familiar. What I did next I don’t recall, except that it was to establish that the gent behind the scheme was the very same guy done in the courts a few months earlier for not paying import duty on TV sets from the Channel Islands. What, I asked myself, is going one? How come a two-bit petty crook was being paid a find sum by the Welsh Office.

I did everything by phone, ringing up the Welsh Office, ringing up the company involved and all the rest. It’s not at all difficult, and just needs a little common sense. And the great thing is that people more often than not tell you more than they want to, especially as they don’t yet know that you know what you already know. I wont’ – and can’t – go into details except for one: I spoke to the guy involved and he denied he had anything or anything to do with the company concerned. I then spoked to several other people in the company who all gave me a slightly different story. And when I told one that the man he referred to as ‘his boss’ denied outright being ‘his boss’, he came out with the following great quote: ‘If my boss says he isn’t my boss, then he isn’t my boss.’

Given that there was some kind of scam going on, but given that those involved were low-level knuckleheads (and Lord knows what was going on at the Welsh Office), that about summed it up. I was very proud of my story and wrote it up. The subs then neutered it, and nothing, but nothing at all came of it.

Killing time with a gratuitous kick at vino-loving francophiles

Bordeaux airport, Merignac

More time to kill, so as I am increasingly doing and lacking anyone to talk at, I have decided to post yet another blog entry, which would be my third in just a week. There’s not a great deal to write about, but as my prime intention is to pass the time, that might worry you rather more than it would worry me. Traffic on the motorway and Bordeaux ring road (rocade, my French is coming along nicely, and it isn’t an encouragement to play music as loud as possible) was average, so there’s nothing to report there, and I shan’t do so.

There was the usual rigmarole here at the airport in security checks, but I seem to be getting more used to it. Maybe it’s the wisdom of age. Maybe it’s just that I can no longer even be arsed getting uptight about something I can do nothing about. I should have discovered that years ago.

On the last two full days staying with my aunt I have taken off in the household car (and managing to scrape the left wind on the garage wall parking it last night). I set off on Tuesday to see a photographic exhibition in Langon, but contrary to promises that it was open from every day until the end of September, it wasn’t. It was shut. So I took off into town after I spotted a poster for another exhibition – water and places/towns in South Bordeaux – and eventually found it. It was as exciting as its title promised, i.e. not much, and furthermore everything was in French.

Now just as waiting for a bus or a train not due for another 30 minutes you are apt to read pretty much any and every poster available, from admonishments to keep the platform clean to suggestions about what to do if you ever find yourself at a loose end in Paignton or Blackpool or Chester or pretty much anywhere, I set about trying to decipher the exhibition. I can follow some written French to a certain extent, but after about ten minutes ‘reading’ the first exhibit, I gave up. Had I carried on in that manner throughout the whole exhibition, I would still be there next Tuesday (and on a practical note, would have missed my flight).

Earls Court, later

Back in Old Blighty after a relatively painless journey from Bordeaux airport (I started this entry in the Billi terminal café). There was something akin to controlled chaose at the airport, when for whatever reason, and with three flights setting off at the same time, passengers for all three flights were channelled into the same two passport control booths.

At 12.40 and with just ten minutes to go before our scheduled departure, there was a crowd of at least 250 people queuing up to show their passports and I did wonder whether the flight would leave without us. As it was it left just under 20 minutes late, which is pretty much par for the course for any short haul flight leaving later than 10am from pretty much anywhere. As it was we flew out to Bordeaux from Gatwick about 20 minutes late and boarding had seemed to go completely smoothly. Ah, the tribulations we jet-setters have to put up with.

. . .

Over the past 52 years I reckon I have visited about 20/25, perhaps a few times more, but can honestly say I don’t know the country at all well. My father was stationed in Paris for five years from 1968 on, but in those five years I probably only went home about eight times, every Christmas and then once or twice at Easter. My parents marriage was disintegrating (and my father had a mistress on the side back in London whom he married when my mother died suddenly at 60 after suffering a huge heart attack) and the atmosphere wasn’t very nice.

After that it was once or twice on holiday in the early 1980s (quite recent for me, the distant past for anyone under 30 (I often remind myself that 1986 to me, the year I joined the South Wales Echo, would have been 1959 to my father, the year he and his family went to live in Berlin, but anyone of my age and a little younger will know exactly what I am talking about). Ironically, with one exception when by brother and I spent two weeks in an out-of-season sky chalet apartment near Morzine in the Haut-Something or other Alps, every other visit, including to with my then girlfriend, Sian, was to the same area, Gironde. And to be frank the countryside there is nothing special.

So I know very little of France and unlike my brother and sister, who both attended a French school for five years while my father was working there, don’t speak any French. I mention the countryside because a little later today I shall be leaving La Pappardella here in Earls Court, where I am enjoying a class of wine, I shall be jumping into my car and schlepping all the way home for the next four and a half hours. And in doing so I shall be passing through some very lovely countryside. I know parts of Germany and I know a small part of France, yet – and I don’t think I am at all biased – English countryside, Wiltshire, Somerset, Devon and then Cornwall – knocks it into a cocked hat.

It’s not just all the bloody rain we get here, but there seems more variation. I really no claiming that France, Germany and the rest don’t also have nice countryside, just that vast swathes of those two countries – Niedersachsen (Lower Saxony) in Germany, for example – are awfully flat and dull.

. . .

Many Brits have a peculiar dog-in-the-manger attitude to France. I am not talking of all Brits, but those, for example, who might refer to wine as vino and sniff the cork when opening a bottle. Question their patriotism and they might be apt to reply that they ‘love the Queen’ and would certainly ‘die for their country’, but in many ways they seem to regard France as simply a better place, a leader in so many areas where, in their view, Britain lags well behind. ‘The French,’ they will announce, ‘know how to live,’ to which you would be quite entitled to respond ‘what the hell are you talking about?’ But your response will be met by an air of queit disdain that you don’t know what you are talking about.

The French ‘know wine’, ‘eat well’, are ‘superbly chic’ they will tell you, and although such men - it is always men - would be the first, if the occasion arose, to resort to that hoary old cliche that ‘to be born English is to win the first prize in the lottery of life’ (with Scots and Welsh men substituting ‘British’ for English), their gushing over France and all things French would make it seem they actually believe otherwise.

I, who likes food a great deal, am the first to admit that I prefer the French attitude to food and drink and would disagree fundamentally with such self-decribed francophiles. A visit to any supermarket or a stroll in any city, town

and village in France will inform you that your average Frenchman and woman know as little about fashion and chic as our average Brit. As for the conviction of the French that they are ‘a nation of thinkers’, I also beg to differ. Certainly, they seem to argue a lot more with each other and certainly they will discuss pretty much anything at length and then some, but that falls well short of somehow being intellectually in the avant garde.

As for food and drink, the French do seem to value quality more than the Brits, but I as someone who likes cooking, know that it is the attitude to food which differs, not the food itself. (I wish to God many of the items available in French supermarkets were available to us here in Britain. That they are not merely means that there is no call for it. If the Brits wanted it, you can bet your bottom dollar Asda, Morrison, Tesco, and Sainsbury would supply a far wider selection of cheeses and pate far, far better than the slush they offer at the moment. But, as I say, the Brits just aren’t interested.)

A meal is not something to be wolfed down in three or four minutes, but something to be enjoyed. Any meal eaten on any day in France is essentially as simple as one eaten in Britain. It is most certainly not all haut cuisine, but it is also most certainly not the unhealthy stodge that passes for food in Britain.

As for wine, well, there is plenty of the cheap rotgut stuff available in France and there are plenty of takers for it. If you like wine, and I do, you can get perfectly good wine in any supermarket in Britain, just don’t go for the very cheap stuff, bearing in mind that with with the production costs and tax imposed on it, it will be very cheap stuff indeed. Still, if you are one of those ‘j’aime le vin’ Brits who beetles off to France every year to enjoy life as the French do, you’ll still be thinking I haven’t a bloody clue what I am talking about.

An afternoon in Langon drinking pastis, smoking a cigar and chasing down a viable wifi connection (as you do)

I am sitting outside a café in Place J. David (and I have no idea who he is was) in a town called Langon in the Gironde, South-West Frace, doing what we all seem to do in such a situation, apart from refreshing ourselves and possibly lighting up. I’m looking for wifi. Why, of course, I don’t know and, more to the point, well, why? Theoretically, my 3G connection should be enough (I am on my iPad), but of course Sod’s Law is kicking in and it isn’t. But why should I need or even want wifi.

Well, of course, I don’t, but that is obviously beside the point. I could try to justify it, but I shan’t. I shall simply offer an explanation. I have just taken a picture, then cropped it, then tinkered with it, and it seems to me a reasonably good picture typical of provincial France at pretty much any time. I wanted to post it on Facebook (look me up if you want, Patrick Powell, one of several Patrick Powells, but I’m sure you will sooner or later be able to choose the right one) but I can’t because the … scrub all that, solved it.

I’ve got to say that for one reason or another I prefer to be completely alone on holiday. It’s not that I don’t like staying with people (Marianne), but that when I go on holiday, I feel completely free. There’s no supper to get back to, no timetable of any kind. I can just suit myself. There are, of course, slight drawbacks if, like me, you are the sociable sort and, for example, enjoy eating a good meal or visiting a good concert or exhibition in company, so as to compare notes.

Well, despite that drawback, I just love having no deadline whatsoever. None. And I love, just love mooching about aimlessly, going where my nose takes me. And in company that usually doesn’t work if, for example, your companion doesn’t like mooching about aimlessly and there’s the sense in the back of your head that you don’t want to be boring. And one thing I like doing is finding a pleasant outdoor café like this one and just sitting (or, as is the case here, blogging.

About 30 minutes ago I took a picture, this picture, where the guy was what I was taking the picture of. But because I didn’t want to make him uncomfortable, I made out that I was simply taking a picture of the street and he happened to be in it. Then I cropped it to what you can see here. Deadline, a deadline, looms. Langon is about a

30-minute drive from where I am staying and I am taking my aunt out to supper tonight. And I have to shave and get changed, so it is off with me quite soon. Damn.

So, a short blog entry for a change. More’s the pity because I do so like rambling on about absolutely nothing. Trump is now threatening to destroy North Korea, but I have no time to pontificate on that (and Lord could I pontificate!), so au revoir ici (j’espere). Hope that is right and not bloody awful French.

And an entry pretty much in keeping with the title of this blog, in which I fly in a plane, wonder what planet Jean Claude Juncker is on as yet again he bangs on about ‘ever closer political union in the EU’, remember once more why it’s lethal for me to drink at lunchtimes and – well, nothing more really – BUT DON’T GIVE UP

Illats, France.

This is a late addition to this blog entry, but I am putting it here upfront, because the rest of this entry is so stupendously dull that I doubt anyone would carry on reading and get to it. Earlier on today, my aunt (see below) announced that Francis Coppola’s (or to give him his full name Francis Ford Coppola, though I really can’t see what the ‘Ford’ is necessary, I mean it’s not as though his last name is a boring old Smith or even Powell) recut version of his classic Apocalypse Now, usefully re-titled Apocalypse Now Redux (which makes it sound related to an anti-vomiting medication) would be showing on French/German channel ARTE. The reason she told me was that it was a ‘VO’ screening, original version.

Well, we all sat down at 8.5pm (20.55 for fucking Eurohphiles) and the film started. In bloody French. My aunt (see below) expressed her disappointment, and I thought ‘sod, it, I was looking forward to this’. Finally, after about 45 minutes of French dialogue – er, I don’t speak French – I gave up and announced I was going to bed.

But I knew that a few months ago I had downloaded the film – in English – and promised myself that when I got back to Old Blighty, I would scour my 17 laptops looking for which one it had been downloaded to. But, dear friends, there is a god: it was downloaded to this one, the trusty small, 11in Lenovo x121e I take on my travels. So guess what I am going to do once I have added this to my blog entry? Watch the film? Well, why not?

This blog entry was started several thousands of feet up in the air, for no very good reason than that I have never done that before. In fact, I can see a series coming on, a series of blogs written in unusual places or circumstances: a blog written (obviously at some considerable risk) in Russian president Vladimir Putin’s private lavatory, one written while simultaneously trying to break the record for eating the most doughnuts (US ‘donuts’) in an hour while typing with one hand.

Well, this blog entry is being written, though by necessity will not be posted while flying easyjet EZY8019 from Gatwick to Bordeaux, mainly because I am bored, don’t really want to read the Economist and watching a film on my iPad (on which this entry is being written) is not as easy as it seems because I find the noise of the engine tends to come through and dialogue is surprisingly difficult to understand.

But first things first: I, as everyone else who came to Gatwick to fly off somewhere (as opposed to all the staff in the many shops, bars and cafes selling tat, drinks and grub at hugely inflated prices – I had a Tony Powell moment when I was asked to pay £3.55 for a regular, i.e. ‘small’, cappuccino and made my feelings plain) had more or less to strip naked to pass through security.

Now I obviously fully understand the reasons for the whole rigmarole, but it always puts me in a bad mood and makes travel by plane such a pain. I like the flying, it’s the stripping off and hanging around that pisses me off. Today our flight – and not one towards the end of the day, but the 9.40pm to Bordeaux – didn’t leave until 10.25pm.

It did, though, make me realise that I would make a rubbish refugee or economic migrant. And for once that isn’t some cheap, silly joke: given that their lot doesn’t involve mere 40-minute delays and that they are treated like shit by pretty much everyone they come across, they have my wholehearted respect. If I were a refugee, there would be not one but a great many Tony Powell moments, until they come to an end when I am shot through the head by some thug who got fed up with all the whingeing.

. . .

The big news this week, or rather the 17th biggest news this week given that the wee chappie in North Korea has sent another rocket off across Japan which arguably is rather bigger news, is that one Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European made his ‘state of the union’ address to a gathering of the few who can still find it in themselves to be interested and in which he banged on about chasing forward ever faster towards ever greater political union, an EU army, EU-wide this and EU-wide that. ‘Europe, he declared, ‘has the wind in its sails again. Well, perhaps, perhaps not. As usual we would have to wait for at least 50 years and preferably far more to get a balanced, reasonably objective account of how the EU fared once Britain had upped sticks and buggered off in a huff and few if any of us reading this will be around then.

I read the report of his speech in the Guardian, a paper which is not known for its Brexit tendencies, but even it was remarkably sniffy about Juncker and his speech. It pointed out that the contents of the speech were more fantasy than anything else, given that not a small number of EU members who might well be keen on most aspects of the union are – for any number of reasons – not at all hot on ‘ever closer political union’. This is something Juncker is apparently still big on.

As for Brexit and Juncker’s take on it, you pays your money and you makes your choice as to how important the great man thinks it is. The Guardian reported that he spent less than two minutes addressing the issue. You can read more details here.

The Daily Mail on the other hand made a big thing of Juncker’s references to Brexit, which is no great surprise, of course, reporting that the great man insisted Britain would regret leaving the EU and a second account here.

There, in a nutshell, is the problem for anyone trying to find out objective accounts of this another matters. The Mail says one thing, the Guardian another. And given the choice of two interpretations most of us accept the one which best reflects our views. But then it was ever thus.

 . .

I have now been here in Illats for a few days, days which are following their usual pattern. My aunt, who is basically Irish but who has lived in France for more than 50 years does things the French way. So lunch is the big meal of the day. It’s not that the French treat themselves to several haut cuisine dishes at every meal, so by ‘big meal’ I mean main meal, even though it does always – in her household and even though it is essentially a simple meal – consist of hors d’oeuvres (pate, cruditie, that kind of thing, then the main course, then cheese, then fruit. And it is not all gulped down in four minutes. I should though point out that my aunt (strictly speaking my stepmother’s sister, but I regard here as an aunt and her two sons as cousins) and her husband are both over 80 and grew up in a different age. Supper is something simpler, often just salad with dressing, bread and a bit of cheese. But wine is drunk at both meals, and it is the wine which does for me.

I can’t say I drink a great deal, but even a glass of wine at lunchtime can knock me out for the afternoon, and it is usually two or three glasses rather than just the one. Obviously, I am not being forced to drink, but I do like a leisurely meal and nothing makes a meal more leisurely than a glass or three of wine. I can’t say I know a great deal about wine (at home I stick to one of two brands of Spanish Rioja and although neither is the cheapest in the supermarkets, buying them most certainly doesn’t risk me breaking the bank), but my aunt’s husband – who may no longer drink alcohol for health reasons – does, like many French of his age know a bit and buys in good wines, which are always a pleasure to drink. So after lunch, I retire to my room, try to read, but very soon give in and nap on and off for an hour or two and finally end up feeling like death. Some people are refreshed by an afternoon snooze, some are not. I am not.

In the past few years I have been coming to Illats in July to take in several concerts at chateaux in the region, but it wasn’t possible this year, so I am here in September. There are, sadly, no concerts at the moment (in July there is are there different series of them) but last night we did catch a nine-strong group of Georgians singing their lusty hearts out at the Cite du Vin in Bordeaux (a very futuristic-looking building). Apparently, it was all part of a marketing drive to push Georgian wines and there was any number of brochures about Georgia’s wine industry, one claiming – not doubt truthfully – that the cultivation of grapes and wine-making began in Georgia around 6,000BC.

The singers (who each carried a foot-long dagger) had great voices and they harmonised as I have so far only heard the Welsh do.

Becker dead already? Good Lord, why didn’t anyone tell me? Oh, that Becker, not the Venezuelan basketball player. Really. Well, I suppose it’s got to happen to us all at some point. How old was he?

Here’s a surprise: I and my peers, friends and colleagues are all reaching our four score and ten – or getting damn close - and one by one ‘names’ we grew up with, especially musos, are falling off their respective perches. And the surprise? Well, the surprise is that they are all rather surpised that even though in the past folk have tended to kick the bucket pretty much at any time on from the age of 60, they (and their peers, friends and colleagues) expect somehow to buck the trend, to live on for ever if not longer.

Earlier this year it was Prince, and now Walter Becker has gone to meet his maker. I mention those two because I went a bundle over their music, and then some. In Prince’s case I have to admit that I was surprised by his death in that he was still only 57, but also that his death came as the result of a drug overdose. It was not, however, a ‘drug overdose’ as in ‘injecting too much heroin’ or suffering a heart attack after years of cocaine use and abuse  – Prince was, in fact, rather sniffy about using drugs in that way - but a ‘drug overdose’ in that to cope with pain from a damaged hip and to carry on working for days on end without any sleep, Prince had become addicted to painkillers and had been taking them in ever greater amounts. So it wasn’t actually ‘for the pleasure’ of taking drugs or, to use the ludicrous phrase which is often used by folk to try to demonstrate how broadminded they are, he was not taking the pain killers ‘recreationally’.

Becker, on the other hand, was at one point hooked on heroin, though I don’t know when the habit was formed and he did not die of an overdose. Nor do I – or anyone else apparently judging from the obits – know a great deal about the man. Each obit I have heard recites and recycles the same ‘facts’ as though they are cribbing their copy from each other: of his childhood we are told that he ‘was born in Queens in New York’ and that ‘he had rather a rough time of it’. What his parents were called, whether he had siblings and what became of them, what his ‘rough time during childhood’ consisted of we don’t know. I mention that because such details are known and repeated about his songwriting partner and the guy he formed Steely Dan with, Donald Fagen.

Then we are told that Becker ‘attended Bard College ‘a private liberal arts college in Annandale-on-Hudson, a small hamlet in New York’. Such an education at ‘a private liberal arts college’ does not come cheap, so it might be safe to assume that Becker’s miserable childhood was not due to poverty or race. At Bard he met Fagen and both found they had a lot in common – they liked the same jazz, they were into sci-fi and shared the same sense of humour. They formed a band or two (and, a usual factoid often included, comedian and actor Chevy Chase was once a drummer in one of those bands). And on it goes.

My point is that nothing much new is known about Becker apart from the details always trotted out. So: once he was addicted to heroin, his then girlfriend, a Karen Stanley, died of an overdose in his flat. A few months later, he was hit by a taxi in the street and spent a long time in a wheelchair and was confined to the wheelchair while helping to produce the album Gaucho. Except by then his habit made him inconsistent and unreliable (heroin does that kind of thing) and more often than not Fagen was obliged to do most of the work.

Final facts: both decided to put their partnership on ice and Becker took himself off to Hawaii where he beat the habit, married and became an avocado farmer (and I still can’t decide whether that last ‘fact’ is indeed a ‘fact’ or just another in-joke for the two). Either way it is now appearing in Becker’s bios and his obits.

Yes, there’s a bit more which is trotted out, but not much. You will now see him lauded as ‘a great guitarist and bass player’, but it is legitimate to ask why if he was so great did he and Fagen hire so many other guitarists and bass players? He could certainly play, but, for example, his guitar playing has - had I suppose - that noodling quality which can often give the impression of being great without actually being great.

. . .

The friend mentioned in the following (below) informed me a few hours ago that an incident at a Steely Dan concert he and I attended in London was referred to in the comments from readers which are appended to the obit which was published in The Guardian. Here it is. I took a look but couldn’t find it the reference to the incident. So I then googled ‘hotel california “steely dan” “wembley arena” to see if I could track it down. I couldn’t but reached the following, rather breathless, piece about Steely Dan. And here is the comment I left there. I have simply copied it and reproduced it here quite simply because it makes points I would go on to make here and – call me lazy if you like – it saves time.

I avoided listening to Steely Dan during the Seventies because it was trendy to do so. Then one day, in 1977/8 in a god-forsaken down-at-heel steel town in South Wales called Ebbw Vale where I was working as a reporter, I was going through the bargain bin in a newsagent’s chain — of all places, not even a record shop — and came across Aja. It was on sale for 50p (half of £1, about £2.71 in 2015), and at that price I bought it. Even if it was complete shite, at least it was cheap. [But] I loved it immediately and over the next few months I bought all the other albums, which I also loved. Then Gaucho came out, and I bought that and loved that, too.

I still like the music, though I only play intermittent tracks, and went on to buy Fagen’s first solo album — great — then his second, not at all so great, Becker’s first — great and even his weedy voice somehow works, and then SD’s comeback albums, in turn. I like those tunes, too, but something had gone missing.

I think it was their age and possibly because by then they were pretty much at the centre of New York’s art establishment, which whenever I’ve come across it, almost always on TV — I have no personal experience of it one little bit — strikes me as far to self-regarding for comfort, as in ‘Christ, aren’t we cool.’ A good example is David Byrne and his band who are fine as popsters but who seemed to think they and their acolytes are somehow ‘art’. No, you’re not kids, you were just another generation of popsters.

Becker and Fagen strike me as the same: pop/rock dies when some pretentious fuckwit wants to promote it to the status of art and all that ‘art’ brings with it: significance, importance, morality and loads of other crap. And Becker and Fagen seem to have bought into the whole pop as art notion completely.

In the early 1980s I heard an interview with them on Radio 1. I had tuned in eagerly, but was left distinctly disappointed: my then heroes came over as such self-conscious clever dicks that I wanted to puke.

More recently I and a friend went to see them play the Wembley Arena. It was (I’ve just looked it up) in 1996. And once again my one-time heroes showed themselves to have feet of clay: Becker, to his eternal shame, supposedly cool as shit Becker began with that corny old standby ‘hello, London, we love your fish and chips’ and received, as I suppose he expected and wanted, whoops and cheers from the faithful. I felt ill.

A little later — we were in about row three right at the front of the stage — I mischievously shouted to Fagen ‘why don’t you play Hotel California’, and boy did he hate it. This was right just as another song was going to start and it must have preyed on his mind throughout cos when it finished he — rather lamely, I thought — came out with ‘bad things happen to people who say that’.

But oh well, there’s still the music, especially the early music, and nothing can detract from that: music is music is music. But as for ‘the Dan’ and ‘cool’ and arty Becker and Fagen, er, I’ll happily leave the adulation to someone else.

. . .


Don’t get me wrong: I still love Steely Dan’s songs and music, Fagen’s voice and their individual solo albums (though Fagen’s Kamakiriad is, in my view, a little weak). It’s just (and I think I’ve said this before) the usual adulation makes me feel a little queasy. And when someone dies, it becomes intensified. My comment in the Guardian appended with the rest to the obit it was carrying of Becker and where everyone and his dogs was recording just what a sheer genius he was, that we would never see his like again (cont p94) consisted of asking whether ‘Anyone been down to Kensington Palace yet to dump flowers at the gate? It's got to happen, to honour ‘the People's Guitarist’.’ It was not a popular comment. The responses were:

It seems you can’t please all of the people all of the time.

It’s just that I really, really don’t go a bundle on all the canonisation and beatification, and boy does it go on. I’m praying that a certain Bob Dylan is in great health and will wait until I have popped my clogs before he, too, goes. I really don’t think I could survive the hoopla about him.

. . .

PS I was chasing around the ‘information superhighway’ – sorry, the web – looking a picture of Walt and found myself deciding whether to use one of him young or old, until I decided not to use one at all, when I came across this: a woman who claims she was married to Becker, but has been written out of all the bios. Well, you decide. . .