Might a new American civil war break out – irrespective of who wins on Novmeber 5, 2024? Guess who's the wild card? What the Orange Jesus himeself, Donald John Trump

Over the years I have joked about my age, pretending to be over 90 or even over 100. Were someone else to do that, this cynic would suggest it was essentially some kind of rather sad displacement measure by someone who was not quite as happy about growing older as he or she (but more probably he) might care to admit. However, here I shall come clean.

In twenty days, on November 21, I shall turn 75. But as this blog entry is not about me and shall explain why I mention my age: in my 75 years – or better about 60 as like most people did was not much aware of the wider world until I was in my early teens – I have seen many changes and heard about many more which occurred before I was born.

Over those years I also became accustomed to the standard media hyperbole which assures us that this gadget / this event / this revolutionary loo roll / this new leader in Somewhere or Other / this groundbreaking new law / this new what-fuck-ever is ‘probably the most significant in the past fifty years. And, of course, it was and is not, not by a long chalk.

I’m a great believer in the French notion of plus ça change, c’est plus la même chose or as Prince Tancredi had it in Tomasi di Lampedusa novel The Leopard Everything must change for everything to remain the same. That last doesn’t quite imply the same thing, but it is related.

So pretty much in for us pampered paps in the Western World, pretty much everything has remained the same, despite ‘changes’.

I have lived through the Kennedy assassination, the Vietnam War, the Nixon Watergate scandal – which, by the way, I’m now beginning to believe was by far not quite what it seemed to be and that, ironically, Tricky Dicky himself might have been taken for a ride – and much else.

Then there was more than thirty years ago the collapse of the Soviet Union and its attendant satellite client states, the evolution of the internet and so on. You get the picture.

Certainly, many of these developments seemed significant at the time but in retrospect – and as we have become more accustomed to a new dimension to reality as in ‘going online’ and using a mobile / cell phone is now standard for pretty much all of us – that ‘significance’ has somewhat faded and much ‘remained the same’.

Over the past two centuries, however, there has been much which has not just remained the same, but which few saw coming or even suspected was on the horizon. One example might be the First World War or as was at the time The Great War, so-called because no one expected another ‘great war’ to follow on its heels just over twenty years later.

And, I suggest, the coming US presidential election next Tuesday, November 2024, might prove to be an exception to the rule that all ‘significant’ changes become less significant as time passes. Could America slowly then quite quickly fall into civil war? And outlandish suggestion, of course: don’t be so bloody mad, you lunatic – of course not! And I agree (but . . .)

. . .

The choice America faces in four days is between electing former President Donald Trump and the current US Vice-president Kamala Harris as its new president. Trump is – I have to say nominally – ‘a Republican’ and is standing for the Republican party (or what is left of it now). Harris a Democrat. According to ‘the polls’, the candidates are neck-and-neck and frankly who will be inaugurated in January next is anyone’s guess.

In my 75 years there have been sixteen presidential elections and the first I was aware of was the campaign fought between John F Kennedy and Richard Nixon in 1960 when I was almost ten years aold. All US presidential elections have been fought hard and dirty and each side of the battle has predicted dire consequences if its man (and in 2016 woman, Hillary Clinton, its woman) was not elected. But this 2024 election is in a different league entirely, in many ways.

For one thing in the 2020 election between the then incumbent president Donald Trump and Joe Biden, Barack Obama’s VP when Obama was in the White House, had very curious outcome: Biden won by a tiny margin in that he won the votes of the most delegates to the electoral college, although Trump won more voes nationally.

But that isn’t what was notable (and by 2020 is was not unique, either). What distinguished that election from every preceding US election was that Trump point-blank refused to accept the result.

Instead he declared that ‘the election had been stolen’ and that there had been ‘widespread voter fraud’ which had rigged the result against him.

This was unprecedented: despite previous electoral confusion, notably in the fight between George W Bush and Al Gore in 2020, one of the closest in American history when the issue of contention was whether votes in Florida which had fallen foul of a mechanical voting machine (the ‘hanging chads’ controversy) but also allegations that some votes intended for Gore were misdirected to a third candidate.

In the event the issue went to the Supreme Court which considered the various issues involced and decided 5-4 that Bush had won the election, even though Gore had, nationally, won more of the popular vote. And Gore graciously accepted the decision. ‘Grace’ is certainly not a trait in the Trump personality make-up.

. . .

I shan’t get into the US Electoral College system, but frankly it is now wholly outdated and has in recent years has caused ever more problems and is in dire need of reform. But given how it came about and evolved and the deep-seated political antagonisms which have riven the US such reform is less likely than the Pope entering into a civil partnership with one of his cardinals. So like it or not America is still obliged to live with its inane nature.

Who gets how many Electoral College votes is crucial. Each state is allocated as many Electoral College votes as it has senators. And even more crucial is that about five or six so-called ‘swing states’ and who is awarded their electoral college votes determines who will enter the White House.

Some states are either solid Republican or Democrat, but the ‘swing states’ to and fro, their ultimate result depending on the outcome of the vote in just three or four of of their counties.

Traditionally, and however bitter an election campaign was fought, at some point the losing candidate will ring his opponent and concede. This did not happen in 2020.

As I point out the crux of the danger here – and if you accept my outrageous suggestion that if things get really bad, the US could find itself in a civil war – Trump simply does not play by the rules. This, too, was unprecedented, but it got even worse.

Here I should declare my partisanship: I think Donald Trump is a nine-dollar bill to whom I would not even give the time of day. The man is what we Brits call ‘a toe-rag’. He has been convicted of fraud and in a separate fraud case has been ordered to pay more than half a billion dollars in ‘disgorgement’. He has been adjudged guilty of rape by ‘finger-fucking’ a woman in a department store changing room, and in my book he is not only a crook but a despicable human being.

Others in the US reading this might well take the opposite view, and I accept that they entitled to it. Others still might even agree with me about Trump’s very dodgy character and morals, but, for a number of reasons, not least issues on which the 2024 election is being fought, they might still choose to vote for him not Harris because he is the Republican candidate.

And whether or not Trump is elected the US’s 47th president and what it’s consequences might be is what this blog entry is all about: from where I stand a new Trump presidency would be a disaster, not just for the US but for much of the world given the economic role the US economy plays in global affairs. Trump strikes me as a man who understands as much about economics as I do Han Chinese, which is nothing at all.

. . .

The 50 odd days after the 202o election were frankly very unsettling and confusing, not least because despite America’s smug boast of being ‘the leader of the free world’ it did not know how to deal with development. Then there was the problem that Trump’s behaviour was downright bizarre, and none of it in a good way.

Even before the November 2020 election, perhaps suspecting he might lose or simply as a precaution, he began insisting that if he did not win, it could only be because of fraud by the authorities. Pertinently, he never specified which authorities, just the ‘they are were to get him’.

In that way he was already – and not so subtly – laying the ground for what in the event became his post-election strategy: that fraud lay behind Biden’s victory and that he election was stolen from him.

He did not produce any solid evidence at all, and what ‘evidence’ he did produce was investigated and dismissed by the courts. All 60-odd cases he brought before the courts were dismissed, every last one of them.

But curiously that did not matter: his cry that the election was stolen was enthusiastically taken up by his supporters, and when he made a metaphorical call to arms to congregate in Washington to ‘stop the steal, several thousand turned up, their ‘protest’ got out of hand and they smashed their way in to Congress to attempt to delay certification of the election result by VP Mike Pence.

Shamefully, yet again ‘the leader of the free world’ was had no idea as to how to handle it and in practice did fuck-all.

All this has been well-documented, and it is redundant to repeat chapter and verse here. What is pertinent is that Trump is once again insisting that if he is not elected next Tuesday, it can only be because of fraud and that the election had been rigged. Yet it gets even worse.

Trump has repeatedly been asked to confirm that he will acknowledge the result of the election, and he has repeatedly refused to do so. This is unprecedented – as far as I know – in US history and worryingly America seems paralysed by Trump’s tactics and strategy: they do not know what to do. To be blunt, they are clueless.

This is where – whatever the outcome of the election – America could find itself in a dire constitutional crisis, and despite the outlandish theme of what I write, it would be better if I were completely wrong than that there should be any traction at all in what I suggets.

The Republican dominated US Supreme Court has already ruled that a US president would be immune from criminal prosecution for any ‘presidential’ acts and decisions.

In the legal preamble to the Supreme Court’s ruling, the question was broached – in all seriousness – as to whether the US President would be liable for criminal prosecution if he ordered the assassination – for which, let’s again be blunt, read ‘murder’ – of a political opponent. The answer seemed to be ‘no, he would not, he would have immunity’.

In that one Supreme Court decision America degenerated in an instant from the – supposed – fount of all democracy to the status of a totalitarian state. So far the court’s decision has not had to be tested. If Trump’s becomes the 47th president, he will have criminal immunity for ‘presidential acts’.

At that point all the subseqent arguing about what might be, or better have been, a ‘presidential act’ would be crucial but de facto redundant. We have seen in the past, in 1930s Germany and later elsewhere and most recently in Viktor Orban’s Hungary how democratic institutions and their attendant support structures – a free media and an independent judiciary – can every swiftly be neutralised then demolished unless they are constantly sustained.

One might argue as some do that Trump and his backers have already destroyed the neutrality of the Supreme Court. The only sanction the legislature and thus ‘the people’ have over the Supreme Court is financial: funds could be stopped.

But however ‘serious’ in theory, that is no sanction whatsoever in practice. Like it or not, rather too many pieces are now in place for Trump – and I’ll repeat ‘his backers’, because I think they are the brains behind all this, not Trump – to behave dictatorially.

. . .

The outcome of the 2024 can be only one of two possibilities: eventually either Trump or Harris is inaugurated as the US’s 47th President.

If Trump is ruled to have lost, it is more than likely that he will simply again refuse to accept the result and again call on his supporters to ‘rise up’. He is already reported to laying his plans to cry foul if he loses.

And judging by the response on January 6, 2021, thousands will respond. And what happens then?

If, on the other hand, Trump is eventually declared to have won the election, he will be free to act precisely as he likes.

Here we should remind ourselves that the number of military personnel, law agents and police who might have voted for Trump will be unknown. Of these many might feel as did General Mark Milley that his loyalty is to the US constitution not to the president, in this case Trump.

Others might not agree and when, say, called upon by Trump not to oppose any violent actions by his supporters, they might well decide that their loyalty is to the man they voted for. We simply do not know. Furthermore such a scenario has never been tested.

If Trump wins, what might be the reaction of the losers? We should remind ourselves that gun ownership is as widespread among those who identify as Democrats as Republicans. Will they peacefully accept the transfer of power to Trump?

Or might they declare that what was sauce for the goose should also be sauce for the gander and themselves now join the protests, many of which could turn violent?

If those protests did turn violent and if – as Trump has suggested he would be entitled to do and as he would not shy away from doing – he called on the US Army to repress them and those being repressed then shot back, it would all get seriously out of hand, and a new civil war could not be ruled out.

That is, of course, fanciful, but what is not fanciful is that the likelihood can be completely ruled out.

And American friend of mine, rather bemused by my then patchier knowledge of the US, once advised me, broadly, to view the 50 US states as ‘different countries’. They are, of course, not different countries: what he meant was that they all have their own traditions, often their own version of particular laws, their distinct cultures and so on.

It is this, for example, how jealously the different states guard their difference, which would be one of the many stumbling blocks in any attempt to reform the electoral colleges system.

So we might ask: do all the inhabitants of each unique state feel loyalty more to their state than the union? Or is it the other way round?

What if a staunchly ‘liberal’ as in Democrat state – California, say – felt it had been outplayed, especially given what it regarded as the partisan nature of the Supreme Court, and decided slowly to loosen its federal ties. What if a now powerful Trump administration retaliated by declaring martial law in that state? What if then the national guard of that state took up arms again the federal forces?

One so far accepted law is that in extremis federal law is always superior to state law. What if a state declared it now longer intended abiding by that agreement?

OK, we could carry on the ‘what ifs’ till kingdom come, but the point is that given the pronouncements, the publicly declared intentions by Donald Trump and the, it seems, real hatred between the MAGA republicans and the Democrats, such what ifs are not longer quite as fanciful.

. . .

Russia will be hoping for a Trump victory given his vow to withdraw military support and funding from Ukraine, and it seems Putin is getting a tad desperate.

The conventional wisdom holds, is more hopeful that Harris will prevail: for trade reasons it would far prefer a calm relationship with the US, steady as you go, despite the sanctions imposed by Biden, and given Trump’s wacky promise to impose severe sanctions on all US imports (although not just Chinese, it seems China would rather not have Trump as prezzy thank you very much.

This ‘cradle-Catholic’ sounds off about dreary, dreary ‘good news’

I’m sitting here in the kitchen at my aunt’s in deepest, darkest Gascony just about to have my second bowel of milky coffee, having risen from my sick bed briefly after three days of a bad cold. But that isn’t the point of this ramble (or as Donny Trump would have it this ‘weave’).

My aunt, 93 and not in the best of health, is sitting across from me waiting for her daily late-morning visit from a nurse. At breakfast and until just now she was listening to a Sunday morning mass being broadcast on the radio (or as I am now slowly obliged to call it, ‘the wireless’).

This surprised me, as although she is, like me, a ‘cradle-Catholic’ and was educated by nuns, she had - again like me - long, long ago escaped the snares of the left-foot establishment and declared herself an atheist.

But that isn’t the point of this ‘weave’, either.

The point is this: WHY are christian hymns and songs - well, let me be fair, WHITE christian hymns and songs - of every denomination, from RCs to Plymouth Maniacs to bells ‘n smells Anglicans, so sodding DREARY? It’s always like walking in the rain with no coat and nowhere to go. Yes, that cheerful.

On a related note, why does preaching the ‘good news’, ostensibly intended to cheer folk up, rely so heavily on doom, inducing fear and dread, restrictions, taboos, frightening young children and a kind of incomprehensible voodoo bollocks?

My favourite piece of bollocks ‘The Trinity’, explained to uncomprehending seven-year-olds as ‘three persons in one god’ ( and NO, it’s NOT three gods, just three persons in one god), is a case in point.

Of course, little ones are not supposed to understand, just accept, repeat and believe and shut the fuck up (as I was when young and now and then I queried this ‘n that). Once - when I was 17 - I queried the ‘virgin birth’.

My headmaster at the time who also gave us sixth-formers religious instruction, an Irishman called Webster Wilson (who sadly was a figure of fun at the OS, but who took me for German and I rather liked him and with whom I got on well), asked me:

‘Do you believe God created the world and the laws of nature, Powell?’ Yes, I told him, tho even by then I didn’t. ‘Well,’ said Mr Wilson, ‘he can also break em then, can’t he!’

As I say total bollocks. Yes, there are certainly more sophisticated christian apologists, but if you are apologising and defending bollocks, it’s still bollocks.

NB the piccy is of my second bowl of coffee. I was delayed posting the piccy and one or two ‘readers’ have arrived early. Forgive me, you are not going off your head – leave that to me – but my shortcoming.

Shysters anonymous, or how in just over three decades the ‘information superhighway’, the ‘democratising force to end all ‘democratising force’ has succumbed to simply parting you from your money. Greed – as always – regains the throne

I have been very lax about posting to this blog and intend to try to do so more regularly. There is much I want to comment on, not least the narcissistic and rather stupid crook Donald Trump and the real danger he poses to the democracy we know as the United States. However, that is a large topic and needs a great deal of thought, so to kick off my resurrection of my blog, here is an open letter to eBay . . .

Like pretty much every other online retailer - though the bigger and richer the company, the worse this problem is (so you, too, Amazon, Meta, Apple, Microsoft etc, who are now so big, one pissed-off customer more or less, who fucking cares).

I want to get in touch with eBay about an issue, but it is nigh-on impossible to do so. Instead I (and others, too) am cycled through the same routine: what is it about? If it is not about any of the topics listed - selling, payments, feedback etc - it’s pretty much ‘go fuck yourself, we don’t want to talk to you.

It is literally going round in a circle, and I don’t doubt many just give up - after all they are ‘just customers’ so why should eBay give a flying fuck.

Yes, listing topics is often more efficient and saves both time and money, both for eBay and the ‘customer’. But that is not always the case. Yet though eBay will also know that, the last thing they want is to be bothered by us poor schmucks who are are worth just one thing to eBay: money. Once they have our money, it’s ‘go fuck yourself’.

Above I have listed other offenders, but there is no ‘safety in numbers’. Just because many ‘big’ tech firms behave like that and essentially treat their customers ‘sheep to be sheared’ doesn’t excuse any of them.

My issue today is ‘Complete savings’: every time I buy something on eBay, I am offered ‘money back’, in this case £20.97 ‘back’ on a £281 purchase.

But this is a con and as close to a legal scam as eBay’ and Complete Savings’ lawyers will allow.

You don’t get any money back unless you buy more stuff: so to ‘save’ money you have to spend even more money. Neat, though just for shysters like Complete Savings, not for us, the customer.

But even worse, Complete Savings charge you £18 a month, directly debited from your credit card account, simply to be ‘on its books’ whether you choose to use its service or not.

So I wanted to get myself removed from that programme which pops up every time I buy something, hence why I wanted to get in touch with eBay.

But among their list of topics is there listed ‘Get yourself off hooks of one or our legally crooked partners’? What do you think? Is there listed ‘How to stop yourself being targeted by greedy shysters with whom we do business? What do you think.

Yes, you can opt not to join up, but I wonder how many elderly or rather inattentive shoppers sign up thinking ‘this might be a good thing’? But it is not ‘a good thing’ - wwell only for Complete Savings.

Remember, eBay, we ARE your income: without us you are nowhere. So take your finger out and stop dealing with crooks.

NB And even when you raise an issue - challenging feedback, say - no thinking human is ever involved. Matters are ‘decided’ by an algorithm. I came up against that problems when some shyster, nasty seller decided in revenge to leave me negative feedback, destroying my 100% excellent status. The algorithm decided not to remove it, but I pushed the issue and finally got to speak to someone on the phone, though it took several calls and it was removed. However this was at least ten years ago when there was still human contact apparently. Now . . .

Introducing one Murray Sayle, war correspondent and in newspaper terms very much the real deal. Sadly, Sayle was not quite as good as a novelist. Still . . . Then there's when he quit his job on the Sunday Times for telling the truth but the paper taking the easy way out and spiking his story

One of this world’s many clichés is that ‘everyone has a book in them’, although unhelpfully that observation can be understood in two, rather distinct, ways.

It might be thought to imply the charitable, humanist-lite and rather cosy view that ‘we are all valuable, all of us, we are all interesting and we all have a story to tell’. Sigh.

Though I like to think that I am neither charitable nor cosy, I do confess that there seems to me to be a small degree of truth in that interpretation: get anyone to talk about themselves and their lives, and you will sooner or

later be presented with often quite startling and unexpected details. I learnt that fact of life when I worked as a reporter for a few years before retreating into the comforts of the subs’ table.

On the other hand, as far as that first interpretation is concerned, we would be wise to remember that real writers are few and far between, and that there are even fewer ‘good’ writers.

That point might well be summed up in the observation that ‘it’s not the joke, it’s the way you tell it’. 

To extrapolate, in other words, it’s not the story, but ‘how you tell it’ or ‘how you write it’. I have met folk who could make an account of Judgment Day sound decidedly dull.

If someone, he or she – though it’s more likely to be a very boring ‘he’ – prepares to recount an ‘amusing’ incident, make your excuses and leave! If you don’t, you will have no one but yourself to blame.

The second interpretation is less kind: that everyone wants to ‘write a novel’ or possibly ‘my book’ and thinks they have one to produce. Actually, not ‘everyone’ does, and of those who do, it would be truer to observe that ‘they think they do’.

The writer and journalist Christopher Hitchens nailed it, though here I must paraphrase as I have not been able to find a definitive quote; but Hitchens (right) observed, more or less, ‘Everyone has a book inside them, which is exactly where it should, I think, in most cases, remain’. Quite.

. . .

Perhaps one of the more useful lessons we can learn as we grow up – and many folk never learn that lesson – is that we are really not as interesting to others as we like to think we are. You might be the centre of your world, but you are most certainly not at the centre of their world – they are.

As for ‘that book inside me’, hacks – my preferred word for ‘journalists’ – are no exception and equally as frail and self-deluding in thinking they have ‘a novel to write’.

I should add that in my world the use of the description ‘hacks’ is not pejorative but far more admiring: as far as I’m concerned, ‘hacks’ are the real professionals, men and women able to turn their hand to all journalistic tasks required of them without a moment’s thought. They might be rough journeymen, but a true hack will always deliver and do the job.

Quite a few hacks, although most certainly not all, regard themselves as essentially writers who happen to be forced by cruel life and practical circumstance to earn their daily crust and rather than sell insurance or repair plumbing, they choose to do so by serving the Press (or, in these digital days, the media).

If only, their thinking goes, they could break free of the necessity to make a living, they could finally write The Great American Novel or The Great German / French / Australian / Russian – you get the drift – novel.

To get to the novel in hand, A Crooked Sixpence was Australian journalist Murray Sayle’s ‘book inside me’, written in his early thirties, and it is telling that it is the only novel he wrote.

Sayle had arrived in London from Sydney, Australia, in 1952, at the age of 26 and found himself a reporter’s job on the Sunday People, a British Sunday ‘red-top’. He had already trained as a reporter in Australia and was certainly no beginner, however. It seems he had schlepped across the world to Old Blighty in pursuit of a girlfriend who was relocating there (and who dumped him).

The Sunday People is still published today, although in common with all other British print media, it has fallen on very hard times and its circulation has declined alarmingly to almost nothing since the digital age began. 

At its height, pretty much when Sayle was working at the Sunday People, it was selling five million copies every Sunday. Its circulation is now said to be down to around 125,000 copies.

While the News Of The World still existed – it ceased publication in 2011 in the midst of the ‘phone hacking’ scandal – its main rivals at that bottom end of the market were the Sunday People and the Sunday Mirror (which in Sayle’s days on the Sunday People was the Sunday Pictorial).

All three papers dealt in the same subject matter: sex scandals, showbiz and celebrity news, ‘human interest’ stories and more sex scandals. Sayle’s novel is an account of his time on the Sunday People and we’re informed by all who were also active in the 1950s and 1960s, it is a very thinly disguised account indeed.

. . . 

The hero of Sayle’s novel is his alter ego, James O’Toole, who begins to get pangs of conscience about the work he does – it requires him to do behave pretty shabbily – and who eventually resigns his job, unable to take any more heaping shit on otherwise harmless and innocent people.

One can only assume that by 1956, Sayle was suffering the same pangs because after four years toiling at the Sunday People he, too, collected his cards and took off for Europe, living in Paris and Germany – accounts vary, in keeping with dealing with newspapers and their often elastic relationship with the truth).

Sustaining himself – we read on Wikipedia and in pieces which will also have relied on Wikipedia – by selling encyclopaedias door to door and flogging dodgy savings products to US serviceman, he wrote his novel in his time off. A Crooked Sixpence was published in 1961 by Doubleday, but was only briefly available because it soon ran into trouble.

Those who worked in Fleet Street in at the same time as Sayle say they are able readily to identify the – rather small – number of characters in A Crooked Sixpence: the editor, his features editor, his news editor, its crime reporters, his head of the art department and a photographer. All, it seems, were based on real-life journalists (the crime reporter was the, I’m told ‘famous’, Duncan Webb).

But it was not the ready identification of those men that lead to trouble. Also based on someone Sayle encountered was his friend Michael Alexander with whom he lodged in South Kensington and who, like his fictional counterpart in the novel, Michael Macedon, was for ever stony broke. So when A Crooked Sixpence was published Alexander decided to make himself a few bob by suing Doubleday for libel.

Sayle was not particularly happy about this apparent and, it will have seemed briefly, ‘foolproof’ ruse to acquire some cash, but was persuaded by Alexander that his libel suit would cost neither Sayle nor the publishers a penny as Doubleday’s insurance company would cough up.

That was the theory, but it didn’t work out that way: instead of claiming from its insurers, Doubleday pragmatically decided simply to junk publication and it pulped all the copies it had so far printed. And that was it for Sayle’s first and only novel for the next 47 years.

. . . 

Alexander died in 2004, and as the dead cannot sue for libel, the novel was again published in 2008, by Revel Barker, a former Daily Mirror and Sunday Mirror reporter who also writes thrillers. By then Murray Sayle (left), 

suffering Parkinsons, had returned to see out his life in Australia with his third wife, but as he did not die until 2010, he did eventually see his novel back in print and on sale to the public. That might have been some comfort.

Sayle was and is spoken of as something of a one-off, an intelligent, engaging man with a sardonic wit and conversation who had a keen nose for sniffing out the real essence of a story, and going just that little bit further than many of his colleagues.

After he had realised that scandal-mongering for a red-top was not how he wanted to spend his life and had finished writing his novel, he began to work in France for a news agency and then, in 1964, found a berth on the Sunday Times.

Under its then new editor Harold Evans (below), the Sunday Times was being turned into a true newspaper of record and gained a great deal of respect. Evans left in 1981 when Rupert Murdoch bought the paper, and since then the Sunday Times has, shamefully, lived off the reputation for investigative reporting it achieved under Evans.

It is now an embarrassing shadow of its former self, more given to plugging ‘must-have’ aftershaves and perfumes and ‘lifestyle’ features and still essentially dealing in gossip, though of the ‘top-drawer’ kind. While working 

for Evans, Sayle filed some remarkable stories, including finding the Soviet spy Kim Philby in Moscow and tracking down Che Guevera, reporting from Vietnam and from Prague during the Soviet invasion. 

However, he called it a day with the Sunday Times in 1972 after his – we now know very accurate – report about the January ‘Bloody Sunday’ shootings of Irish civilians in Derry/Londonderry was spiked.

Sayle reported that the British Army had fired first and without warning, which would make the deaths of the 14 civilians who died plain murder. Some were shot in the back as they ran away, others were shot trying to help wounded.

The British government was insisting – wholly untruthfully – that the Army had merely ‘returned fire’ and the Sunday Times bosses, for whatever reason, chose to toe the government’s line. Sayle resigned.

In short, Sayle in journalistic terms was the real deal. What he was not, this reviewer believes, was a very good novelist.

. . . 

For all the praise heaped on A Crooked Sixpence as, for example – notably by Sayle’s pal and fellow Australian reporter Phillip Knightley – ‘the best book about journalism, ever’ – A Crooked Sixpence is something of an amorphous muddle.

Sayle relies heavily on dialogue, and although there is nowt wrong with that in itself, it all becomes wholly unconvincing in longer passages when the main protagonist O’Toole begins to philosophise. Perhaps I’m not the sharpest blade in the box, but more than once this reader was wondering what the hell O’Toole was talking about.

Worse – far, far worse, though – for ‘the best book about journalism, ever’ which centres on the vastly popular and best-selling Sunday Sun, the newspaper, its newsroom and its whole operation remains flat, two-dimensional and remarkably – make that unforgivably – dull: nothing but nothing comes alive, not the characters, the newsroom, or very much about the paper.

I’ve worked for Sunday newspapers (though as a sub-editor) and the newsroom is quite a quiet place from Tuesday to Friday. But even then it is far livelier than what comes across as an empty shell of a place in Sayle’s novel.

Sayle’s candour about the mucky work the Sun’s reporters and executives get up to is admirable, but is wholly lost and almost irrelevant.

That dull two-dimensionality extends to what occurs outside the Sun’s offices: here again nothing comes alive. A natural fiction writer Sayle most certainly was not. I suspect he realised as much in that he does not seem to have attempted any more novels and certainly published none.

A Crooked Sixpence was the book Sayle had in him, and at the end of the day, Knightley’s praise and other kudos notwithstanding, Sayle might have been best advised to have heeded Christopher Hitchens advice and let the book remain inside him.

There are other novels about newspapers – Michael Frayn’s Till The End Of The Morning, Michael Green’s two volumes of autobiography, The Boy Who Shot Down An Airship and Nobody Hurt In Small Earthquake and Monica Dickens ‘memoir/novel’ My Turn To Make The Tea are the ones I’ve read – and there will certainly be one or two others.

In a sense, the ‘gold standard’ is Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop. But Waugh, Frayn, Green and Dickens were first and foremost writers and – though not so much the Dickens – they carry it off. Sadly, Sayle does not.

. . .

While preparing for this post, I was digging around for more info on Sayle and 1950s / 1960s newspapers when I came across the following anecdote. As almost always it is attributed to many folk and sorting out is really true is a dull task I shall leave to others.

Several years ago, in a healthier, less moralistic age when boozing was not infra dig and reporters enjoyed refreshing themselves, one Daily Mirror reporter (when it was still the Daily Mirror not, as today The Mirror and also a pale shadow of itself) got so pissed while out on a job that he was incapable of doing anything.

A mate, a Daily Mail reporter on the same job, realised the guy would be in trouble as he would be in no fit state to write a story of any kind.

So after writing and filing his own story, he re-wrote it and phoned it in to the Mirror copy-takers under his Mirror mate’s name.

The next day, the story appeared under the Mirror man’s byline and later that day when he bumped into his Daily Mail mate, he proudly flaunted the Mirror with his bylined story and crowed ‘See, I can write a story even when I’m completely pissed!’

Thing is, he was so completely pissed the day before, he could not remember a bloody thing at all.

. . . 

LEST WE FORGET:

On January 30, 1972, Catholics in Derry/Londonderry organised and launched a protest march.

The British Army stood by in case of trouble, as undoubtedly did members of the Provisional IRA (the Irish Republican Army, first formed in 1917, then reformed in 1922, but largely inactive until the early 1970s).

At some point shooting broke out: the Army insisted its men were simply returning fire, the IRA insisted the Army had fired first and it had then returned fire.

The official Army line was taken up by the British government and repeated again and again until it finally 38 years later it finally came clean.

At first, within days of the massacre, the British government set up the Widgery Tribunal into what went on and – in hindsight predictably perhaps – it absolved the Army of any guilt and found that the Army had been responding to gunfire and bomb-throwing.

Twenty-six years later, in 1998, the Savile Inquiry was established and – after 12 years – found that the Army had ‘lost control’ and was responsible for the deaths. This completely contradicted Widgery Tribunal’s findings.

In June 2010, David Cameron, the then prime minister, made a public apology in the House of Commons for the murders.

In case you forgot – he’s still on the loose and roaming free. Last spotted in Iowa and police are warning the public to steer clear. Make sure he goes nowhere near your children and, most important, your wallet.

 

That ‘gathering’ at Congress, Washington, three years ago on January 6: peaceful protest by law-abiding patriots? Or armed riot by thugs and morons? You decide. And beware the back-room and rather bright cynics who know Trump is a moron but could prove to be a very useful moron

I am neither a Democrat nor a Republican. For one thing I am Brit and our own political divide is between the Conservative Party and the Labour Party. But even here in Britain, despite my strong views on many matters, I prefer to remain unaligned.

One reason is that I am thus not beholden to espouse views with which I might not fully agree or on which I have a more nuanced opinion.

A second, perhaps the more important, reason is that I can then call out folk and policies and behaviour when and if: I like to be able to speak my mind. And find the attitude of ‘my party right or wrong’ not just abhorrent and pernicious, but simplistic and, worst of all stupid. I shall not spell out my views on many matters, but if I have not already given them, where I stand should be apparent from what I write.

. . .

This entry is not intended to be read by MAGA supporters (or as I like to view them, MAGA buffoons). Like folk who still insist that ‘the world is flat’ or that ‘the Illuminati control the world’ or that ‘they are out there’ – ‘they’ being the operators of those many UFOs that seem to whizz about our skies and have either come to Earth to ‘warn us’, ‘bring peace’ or perhaps ‘invade us’, they are not to be shaken in their beliefs.

They ‘know’ what they ‘know’ and that’s the end of it. If you disagree with them, you have obviously fallen for all the ‘mainstream media’s “fake news” and so you are the enemy.

Thus MAGA supporters ‘know’ that ‘the election was stolen from Donald Trump in November 2020, that ‘crooked Joe Biden’ is the head of a crime family, that ‘immigrants from Mexico are being covertly brought into the United States so that they can vote Democrat’ and so on.

It is as pointless trying to debate or even discuss anything with such folk as it would be to try to teach a five-year-old calculus.

Nor is this entry intended for convinced Democrats. They, too, have long made up their minds and, frankly, some of them – I stress ‘some’ of them – can verge on a certain kind of zealous lunacy as much as the MAGA morons.

That broadly I happen to agree with them on many matters is neither here nor there. And there are plenty of bent – in the criminal and moral sense, not the sexual sense – Democrats out there, too.

For example, I was shocked when I first heard of the de facto ‘legal’ insider trading in stocks that takes place in Congress, and that one Nancy Pelosi with her husband is a leading insider trading offender. My jaw dropped, but that would have to be for another entry (if at all).

Here I shall merely record – it’s as true in Britain and Europe and I don’t doubt all over the world as in the US – that folk who like to come across as ‘on the side of the angels’, often quite ostentatiously, must be given even greater scrutiny. Note to young readers: never trust anyone ever who tells you how honest they are. And you will come across more than you think.

This entry is mainly aimed at the ‘don’t knows’, those folk who say ‘well, perhaps there is something in the claim that Trump was cheated out of the election’, the fence-sitters and the ‘I like to hear both sides’ pseudo-moralists.

Yes, it is true to keep an open mind. But when a man like Trump who braggs of ‘grabbing women by the pussy’, who objected to disabled and limbless US armed forces veterans taking part in a national parade because ‘it wasn’t a good look for [him]’, who at their graveside in Europe described World War One dead as ‘suckers and losers’ because they had died, who was described by his own Secretary of State Rex Tillerson as ‘a fucking moron’, who has destroyed the trust of several million US citizens in their judiciary, their constitution, their democratic systems, perhaps the time has come to close that open mind, take a more sober look at Trump and to take him for what he is.

. . .

Today is January 6, 2024, the third anniversary of ‘the events outside and later inside Congress in Washington in 2021. On January 6, 2021, many of Trump’s supporters, some with firearms, attended, summoned there by the man himself ‘to protest against “the steal” ‘.

The gathering, Trump still declares, was a ‘peaceful protest’. And when things turned ugly, he declares, he urged the protesters ‘to go home’.

There are, as you are aware, many different interpretations of what happened that day and what Trump did and, crucially, did not do.

Trump insists that the purpose of the ‘peaceful protest’ was to delay certification of the election result by vice-president Mike Pence while alleged electoral fraud was investigated.

Many believe him. A great many do not believe him one little bit and chose to regard that ‘peaceful protest’ as an act of insurrection intended to ensure that the election of Joe Biden as the new president could and would not be certified and that Trump would carry on as president.

Those doubters who think Trump might be right and that the gathering in Washington four years ago was merely a peaceful protest might care to look at the following photographs taken of that ‘peaceful protest’ at the time.

Whether it was or was not an ‘insurrection’, I’ll not address at this point. I’ll merely note that to my eyes – I also saw the event live on TV at the time – Trump’s alleged ‘peaceful protest’ was very much an armed and notably violent riot. But make up your own eyes, you ‘don’t knows’.

. . .

Another of Trump’s claims is that he had and has absolute ‘presidential immunity’ for anything he did that over the months of November, December and in early January. He says that he was duty-bound to investigate ‘allegations’ of fraud in his capacity as president.

This is another of his increasingly desperate attempts to get himself off the hook: the point was he was the only one alleging fraud – no one else was. All 62 of the suits he brought before court throughout the US alleging election interference were thrown out.

As for presidential immunity and Trump’s claim that he did nothing wrong, here is a very straightforward question which become ever more obvious once you hear it: if Trump ‘did nothing wrong’, why is he claiming ‘presidential immunity’? And as he is claiming ‘presidential immunity’, is he conceding that he did engage in criminal behaviour?

. . .

Whether or not Trump survives his four criminal prosecutions and whether or not he is able to stand for election is, frankly, neither here nor there. What is far more important and worrying is that he does have several millions of folk who believe his bullshit, who now no longer trust their courts and their democratic system. He has convinced them the courts and the Department of Justice are corrupt and that ‘democracy is being attacked’.

OK, so many of these folk are frankly stupid: they have to be stupid because there is no evidence at all to back up Trumps claims and he has produced none, and when they protest that ‘yes, there is evidence’, they can never produce it.

The point is that they and their sons and daughters who might inherit their stupidity and beliefs are not going away. When Trump is just another jokey footnote in US history, they will still be around to succumb to the blandishments of the lates Trump-shaped snake oil salesman.

But they are not the real danger: there are a great many quite bright and intelligent men and women who have no scruples about enabling Trump. Publicly and vociferously they repeat and amplify Trump’s claims. Privately they know it is all a load of horse shit.

Yet they also know that a second term Trump presidency will be ‘good for business’ whatever that business is. And they know that it is in their interests to boost Trump and his claims. It’s the ultimate cynicism.

You reading this should remember – or be told if you haven’t already known – that the rise to power of Adolf Hitler was also enabled by ‘big money’ who believed with him in charge they had a freer hand to make even more money.

That Hitler was in some respects off the wall (though he was cunning as Trump is cunning) didn’t bother them – they thought they could control the Austrian corporal. But they couldn’t: how wrong they were.

Who knows whether Trump will stand in November’s election. The polling shows that among Republican wannabe candidates he is way ahead. The polling also shows that in the few, very crucial, US states which matter, Trump is also ahead of Biden.

It doesn’t and would not matter whether Biden got a majority of the popular vote: both Al Gore and Hillary Clinton won the majority of the popular vote when they stood. The US suffers under a very crappy and unfair ‘electoral college system’ which determines the outcome of the presidential election.

That it is scrappy, illogical and in 2024 wholly archaic is pretty much a fluke of American history, the electoral system evolving in this and that direction as more states joined the Union. What matters is that is how the president is chosen. Furthermore, any attempt – peacefully – to reform it, although there are many, many American voices calling for such reform, would be futile.

So Trump might well be the next US president: and then, America, watch out! He was ironically, quite restrained in his first term in office as he had one eye on being re-elected. A second term would also be his last term and he has made very clear what he would like to do. And it would not be pretty.

Why, perhaps, we have rather less to fear from Diaper Don than many so far suggest – he's yesterday's man

Harold Macmillan described the greatest challenge to a politician as ‘Events, dear boy, events’ and Joseph Chamberlain warned that ‘In politics, there is no use in looking beyond the next fortnight’.

So with that in mind we should be cautious about the apparent trend of more US states considering banning Donald Trump from standing in their Republican primaries. But at the end of the day, I suspect, Trump really is on to a loser.

It all kicked off in Colorado a few weeks ago where the state’s Supreme Court ruled 4-3 that as Trump had not just cajoled but had encouraged his – armed – supporters to ensure Congress could not certify the November 2020 election result, this amounted to insurrection.

This decided it that under Section 3 of the US Constitution’s 14th Amendment it should rule that thus Trump should and would not be eligible to stand for election to state or federal office.

That relevant section runs:

‘No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.'

This amendment was brought in after America’s Civil War to ensure no secessionist politicians could stand for election.

Naturally, as this involved ‘law’ and ‘the law’, there has been, and certainly will be, more argy-bargy about how that section of the 14th Amendment should be interpreted. For example, Trump supporters have argued that the office of President is not mentioned in the section and is thus not included.

They also insist that what I can only describe as ‘the invasion of Congress’ was not an ‘insurrection’ at all but merely a protest meeting. Furthermore, they claim that whatever the ‘protest meeting / insurrection’ was, Trump did not encourage anyone to do anything illegal.

So what is what? You will see why answering such questions is a field day for lawyers on a substantial hourly fee and a grand opportunity for them all to make a great deal of moolah (i.e. ‘. . . but what do we mean by “meaning” and “interpretation”? We cannot proceed, your honours, until the court is entirely clear as to what we are talking about. I contend that . . .’)

Colorado’s decision has now gone to the US Supreme Court, and how the court will rule or whether it will even agree to give a ruling is anyone’s guess. Scooting around the web looking up stuff on this whole matter, I have come across the suggestion that the US Supreme Court might simply take the view that it is not its business to get involved with what is ‘a state matter’.

Given how jealous US states are of what they have of independence that view makes sense. But, note, it is simply just another view. The court might, on the other hand, rule – and thereby echo one of the claims made by Trump – that what Colorado has decided is essentially ‘election interference’ and rule that Trump should be allowed to stand in Colorado’s Republican primary and the US cannot condone ‘election interference’.

And thus more scope for the briefs: ‘What, your honours, do we mean by “interference”. It could be that on the one hand, all things considered and trying to keep a clear head about the matter, that . . .’

. . .

What I find pertinent and telling is that similar lawsuits to have Trump barred from standing in their state’s Republican primary have now also been filed in Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Rhode Island, Alaska, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, South Carolina, Texas, West Virginia, Wisconsin, Wyoming, Vermont and Virginia.

However, let’s be clear: this only means that ‘lawsuits have been filed’. It does not mean that Trump will not stand in a state’s primary or even that Trump will not be allowed to stand for election in November 2024 in that state. Lawsuits can fail and often do. And even where they succeed, they go to appeal, as it has happened in Colorado, and on appeal it might be thrown out. Thus end of lawsuit.

Now for a second ‘however’: Trump’s camp, which keeps yelping ‘election interference’ and seems blind to what Trump and his team got up to after November 2020 – in my book a textbook case of ‘election interference’ – will be rather more worried than they let on.

They might chunder, that this is all a Democrat conspiracy which has, if they are to be believed, corrupted pretty much the whole US justice system and point out that Colorado is a Democrat state and that all seven of its supreme court judges are Democrat appointees. One-nil to the Trumpists?

No, not quite – MAGA morons, don’t pop the champagne corks yet or, more probably, don’t grab a can of beer quite yet.

The lawsuit was brought not by Colorado Democrats but by Republicans in the state. These are men and women who would most certainly prefer to see a conservative, Republican president but who most certainly do not want to see mendacious rapist and fraud like Trump sitting in the White House. So they are doing their very best to ensure it doesn’t happen.

What the overwhelming political character is of the other 17 states I have listed above, whether Democrat or Republican, I don’t know. But something tells me that whatever lawsuits are brought, they are more likely to be brought by Republicans who will feel just as their fellow Republicans did in Colorado: they want a Republican president but do not want him or her – don’t rule out Nikki Haley – to be that piece of disgraceful dreck Donald J. Trump.

Argentina now has a $9 dollar bill as its president, Brazil had one (and he still has supporters), Hungary has the – democratically elected! – moron Viktor Orban as its prime minster. Poland had a gang of pseudo-democrats in charge until recently, and in The Netherlands one Geert Wilders, a far-right winger to his fingertips came out top in a recent election (but is having a very difficult time finding any other party willing to form a coaltion government with him).

But the US is different: it, its size and its economic clout are enormous. Uniquely in the world, although China might be coming up fast, the US and its political developments affect the rest of the world deeply.

. . .

If, as a neutral, you were to try to evaluate Trump’s achievements when first in office, they are not much. And I stress that such a judgment must be made impartially.

Employment in the US is lower than it was, by quite a bit, than when he left office. He added several trillions to the national debt, and although he tries to make out that he boosted the American economy by referring to the rise in stock prices, his measures were decidedly short-term, and there is always a price to pay by employing such short-term measures.

To make an analogy, I could be a semi-billionaire tomorrow and appear to be very rich indeed if I found banks stupid enough to lend me £500,000 / $500,000. But I would also have an enormous debt around my neck and you can bet the interest rates I would be charged by the lenders would be huge. So how rich would I really be? That is the stunt Trump pulled.

I began this entry with the warnings of Macmillan and Chamberlain. They say of Scotland’s Outer Hebrides that you can experience 18 seasons in 24 hours. Politics might not move as fast, but you might see what I am getting at.

On the face of it Trump is toast: he faces several criminal trials and one civil trial (which will cost him, perhaps $1bn in ‘disgorgement’, i.e. paying back the amount his fraudulent behaviour made him by inflating is worth when applying for loans and getting better rates and tax advantages).

His main tactic is to try to delay all the trials until after the November 2024 election when – he believes – he will be president-designate again and once inaugurated can order – apparently legally – the US Department of Justice to drop all the charges.

Furthermore, if he is found guilty in any of the federal court cases, he can, as president, ‘pardon himself’. To this Brit such a development sounds outlandish and mad, but from what I know that is how the American governmental system is stacked.

The one exception will be the trial he faces in Georgia: as I point out above, US states retain a modicum of independence and they live in a voluntary federal system, and a US president has no power at all to pardon anyone found guilty of a state crime. Only that state’s governor can do that (and once again I must plead that I am astonished that I regard as potential corruption – at a state level – is tolerated).

There was a very good piece in the Washington Post recently by a Robert Kagan (you can find it here) in which he warned that at present, in the lead-up to next November’s election rather too many people are rather too supine about the threat Trump presents to the US.

Pertinently, Kagan is not as Trumpist might care to have it some wishy-washy quasi-socialist Democrat lickspittle but a self-declared neo-conservative and as such his fears echo those of Colorado’s Republicans who brought the lawsuit to get Trump banned from the state’s Republican primary.

Kagan warns that although many might at present be concerned about a ‘Trump dictatorship’, if and when he wins the election and returns to the White House what happened in 1930s Nazi Germany would well take place in the US.

So Kagan, suggests the time to act is now, though he doesn’t suggest quite what to do.

Many in positions of power, he warns, might care to ‘cooperate’ with the new regime and argue that personal survival – Trump has publicly declared he will purge the federal civil service of those who opposed him – is more attractive than being cast into the wilderness.

Kagan also suggests that ‘ordinary’ people will, metaphorically, bend the knee and not make waves as, arguing that is what many Germans did in the 1930s, that however distasteful or even bad the new Trump regime is, it largely leaves their own lives untouched.

Those at present vocal Republicans who proclaim what a disaster Trump would be might, Kagan suggests, pull in their horns after he is elected and, pragmatically also opting for survival over oblivion, begin to keep their mouths tightly shut.

. . .

I can’t deny that I, too, have been fearing the worst: hoping that either Trump doesn’t make it to become the Republican presidential election candidate or, if he does, is beaten at the polls (and that despite the US wacky, wacky, wacky electoral college system).

But then, very recently, I began to see it very differently.

It began when I came across first a claim by the former Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger . In it, he says, quite a few people who deal with Trump report that, er, ‘he smells’.

Initially, I just put this down to another piece of ‘ad hominem’ criticism of Trump, although there was something oddly compelling about the piece, given the somewhat unusual claim it made.

Then, more recently, I came across an even more, superficially unlikely, claim that Donald Trump as a matter of course has to wear nappies (US diapers) 24/7.

The explanation given is that since the late 1990s, because of his addiction to Adderall (the ADHAD drug), his consumption of speed and cocaine and not least his full-time diet of junk food – Coke, burgers and French fries – all of which have a laxative effect, especially in conjunction, he has been incontinent.

Hence the smell, which Kinzinger says is combined with various deodorants to try to mask it.

OK, this might strike many as simple malicious gossip. But, oddly, malicious gossip is often true. And I can’t help feeling this claim is also wholly true.

Because of that, I cannot in any way take Trump seriously: basically he is a man in his late 70s who shits in his pants, stinks and talks complete shite around the clock. To describe Trump as ‘not a serious man’ is to do a grave in justice to morons around the world.

So it struck me: Trump will eventually not make it to become the Republican’s presidential candidate, for one reason or another. So, hugely piqued, he will stand as an independent candidate. And at the poll he will fail badly.

Yes, nationally he will get several million votes but he will die a miserable electoral death. And that, dear friends, is what I truly think will happen. Then, finally, I suspect he will die of heart failure, all those burger and fries calories claming their due.

PS Why Trump insists on painting he face orange – and making it so obvious what he is doing – baffles me. 

He looks very silly indeed. I assume he believes that by ‘bronzing’ his face he would look quite as old but, Donny, it ain’t working.

Why his staff don’t diplomatically warn him what a complete prat he looks is also a puzzle.

 Oh well. Do I care? What do you think?

Roast cygnet, guffawing farmers, a lodge dinner, thwarted evasion and three main courses – my night rubbing shoulders with the great and good of the City of Lincoln (before later retreating downhill to my rented room in a two-up, two-down)

While ‘researching’ – the posh word for ‘googling’ – all and any info I can get on the Lincolnshire Standard Group (in Britain), I came across a newspaper archive. I was working as a reporter on one of its papers, the Lincolnshire Chronicle in Lincoln, from June (the 10th, I think) of 1974 until mid-October 1975 and wanted to remind myself of several things.

Specifying that I was working ‘in Lincoln’ is not a bit of stupidity – the owners, the LSG (which no longer exists), published several papers in Lincolnshire of which one, the Lincolnshire Standard, was published in Boston, a town which the more astute among you will realise is not Lincoln.

Sadly, the archive had nothing on the Lincolnshire Chronicle, but they had these cuttings from the Lincolnshire Echo, which was the local evening paper when I was in Lincoln. The Chron has long since vanished and the Echo is now the local weekly. I doubt either of these stories would have made the nationals, not even at the time.

The Lincolnshire Standard Group (LSG) was taken over several times, thought the name was retained, but according to the UK Government’s Companies House was wound up in 2016.

. . . 

I was ‘researching’ in connection with a new project I am preparing for, and while doing so, I recalled one night getting an evening job which on the face of it would not seem to be the most onerous assignment. In the event I did find it oddly challenging.

Lincoln had a ‘lodge’. It probably also had – and still has – a Freemasons’ Lodge, but this lodge was purely local, and sadly I can’t remember what it was called.

Like all such outfits, its membership consisted of the great and good and the powerful of the city – Lincoln, though not very big – it has a population of just under 104,000 – is a ‘city’ because it has a cathedral – as well as many local farmer and landowners from the county.

Lincolnshire is largely agricultural and in some ways it is something of a mirror image of The Netherlands around 120 miles across the English channel to East-South-East. It is just as flat and featureless, though the county is split in two by the ‘Lincoln ridge’ and the whole county is on two levels.

The Lincoln ridge runs right through the city, dividing it into ‘Uphill’ and ‘Downhill’ with a very steep climb from ‘Downhill’ to the castle and cathedral. Pictured on the right is Steep Hill, named for obvious reasons which 

pedestrians have to climb from the commercial city centre if they want to visit the cathedral.

The medieval – and thus picturesque parts of the city – are ranged around the cathedral ‘uphill’, so this is largely middle-class territory. Downhill, where I lodged, is made up of street upon street of terrace of ‘two-up, two-down’ terrace house, which are a feature of most English towns over the past 100 years.

. . .

One day I was told that I would be ‘reporting’ on the annual dinner of this particular lodge and on the face of it, that sounded like quite a nice number – who doesn’t like a free meal. All it would entail would be to go along, eat a pleasant – though English – dinner, then write about 500 words the following day, pretty much about nothing in particular except who was there and what we were served.

This lodge’s annual dinner was notable in that it was just one of, I’m told three, such events in all of Britain at which roast cygnet – young swan – could legally be eaten. The then ‘Queen’ of England (so now the ‘King’ of England) owned all the country’s swans, and catching, killing and eating one was in times past a capital offence. That is if you were caught, you were executed.

One suggestion I’ve just come across is that centuries ago they were hunted almost to extinction and to preserved them, they were made the property of the ‘crown’, although somehow I don’t buy that explanation.

It casts England’s ‘royalty’ in the role of conservationist and although Brian, our current ‘king’ is something of a green freak, I doubt even 100 years ago a family and their mates which took, and still takes, great delight in massacring grouse and other ‘game birds’ in their thousands very autumn (fall) are much bothered.

The only way they would agree to ‘preserve’ an animal is to ensure it was still available for killing in perpetuity. There is also some scepticism about the claim that all the swans belong to the ‘crown’.

I can’t remember where the annual dinner was being held – possibly the Guildhall, but I am just speculating and really have no idea. But I can still picture the inside of the venue in my mind’s eye.

There were rows and rows of long tables at which members sat with a ‘top table’ on a dais – this was not a classy event where guests sat six or eight to a table around a nicely decked spread with fine china.

The top table guests included the Dean of Lincoln Cathedral but as to the other guests I can only speculate that the Lord Lieutenant of Lincolnshire as well as the Lord Mayor of Lincoln will have washed up for their supper .

The ‘hoi polloi’, as it were, seemed to me to consist, apart from me, of most of Lincolnshire’s farmers. Ruddy-face, large and jovial and increasingly drunk, they were all gratifyingly coarse. I add ‘gratifyingly’ because otherwise you, dear reader, might assume I was rather disparaging of their behaviour. I wasn’t at all.

My first mistake, being then still something of a ‘southern jessie’ despite the four years I had spent at university in Dundee, was once to refer to Lincolnshire as ‘northern’. The first time I did this – long before that lodge dinner, I should add – I caused outrage: ‘Do you mind! We’re the East Midlands!’ And, of course, Linconshire was, but my knowledge of my rather small home country – ‘Old Blighty’ (and I have no idea where that name originated) – was then very limited.

Yet to my then untutored ears the Lincolnshire accent was distinctly ’northern’. It does, in fact resemble the South and East Yorkshire accents, unsurprisingly as South and East Yorkshire border Lincolnshire to the North-West and North, but it is a distinctly ‘Midlands’ way of speaking. Like the Lincolnshire countryside, the accent is very, very, very flat, and, as in most rural areas, from where my fellow guests at the dinner came, it is very, very, very broad.

I don’t mean it as a snooty gibe but as a compliment when I say that rural Lincolnshire folk, like most farmers, are also distinctly unsophisticated. I long ago discovered I prefer the company of men and women who call a spade a bloody shovel.

There were no women guests – this was in the mid-1970s, after all – and once my guests found out that ‘the Chronicle’s reporter’ had never before attended one of their lodge annual dinners, they were very amused and looked forward to what I would make of it all.

England (and Lincolnshire) are not renown for their culinary expertise, despite what many now claim – you certainly can eat very well in Britain if you can spare something like £150 a head with wine, but if you cannot, your options are very limited. My tastes do incline more to French, Italian and Spanish food, but having said that, I do like a good, un-fancy steak and kidney pie with chips.

So on our menu that night was to a standard English dinner – roasted meat with roasted potatoes and ‘two veg’. And, I assumed, that the roast of the first course would be the swan.

After, I suppose, a soup of some kind as our first course, we were served our main course and my new farming friends were very generous, piling my plate high and encouraging me to take ‘seconds’, which I, of course, I did.

Then once the main course plates had been cleared away and I anticipated pudding came the shock: my friends announced that we would now be enjoying or second ‘main course’ – another roast with potatoes and two veg.

But I was full. I could not eat any more. I tried to excuse myself and announced that I would be sitting out this second main course, but they – guffawing with delight, I realised, at some private joke – would have none of it and again piled my plate high. This course, too, I managed to finish, though quite how I did I really don’t know.

Then our plates were again cleared away and my farming friends revealed what had been amusing them so much: there was a third ‘main course’. I said I could not eat another morsel. Nonsense, they said, but I informed them I was going outside for a cigarette.

Well, smoking that cigarette would normally have taken no more than six or seven minutes, but I made sure it took far, far longer, and I lingered outside to allow my friends each to finish their third ‘main course’ and for the dishes to be cleared away before I re-joined them. But when I did . . .

‘Ah, there you are,’ they said, ‘you weren’t here when the food was served, so we filled your plate for you.’

And they had: there in front of me was my third main course. Somehow I managed to finish it, but how?

Then came speeches from the toffs at the top table, with the Dean of Lincoln making a surprisingly filthy speech, and it is a measure of my then unworldliness – I might even already have been 25 – that I was mildly shocked by it. What, a man of the cloth! Good Lord. I suppose it takes all sorts.

I only wish I could find out which ‘lodge’ that was.

Er, more writing (to prove I am as good as my word)

Well, there you are, a man as good as his word and you can’t often say that. As I am sitting in the Costa Coffee branch on the Old Brompton Road, Earls Court, London (the A3218 for those who need to know these things, though I can’t think why) and killing time, I might as well make good on my intention to ‘write every day’ to ‘keep my hand in’.

I’m killing time because I’m waiting to go to London Paddington to catch my train home to North Cornwall. That is at 12.03 and it is now 9.58. I stayed the night at my brother’s just around the corner, the nearest Tube station – Earls Court for those who need to know these things (and I use the entrance on the Warwick Road, A3220) – is just a few minutes walk away from his flat (US apartment) and if I leave there at just after 11am, I should get to Paddington in very good time (and shall, in fact, be obliged to kill a little more time).

Then it is a trip of just under four hours – quite long by British standards a mere trippette for those of you living in the US or Brazil, India, Russia or China, of course – and then from tomorrow it will be back to the old routine, which, though, no longer exists now that I have pretty much dotted every I and crossed every T of my ‘Hemingway bollocks’ and must now set about establishing a new routine. And that might not be easy.

I have long had something else in mind to attempt. In fact, I have long had several things in mind to attempt, but its best to do things one at a time or risk doing none of them as well as they might deserve.

I shan’t say what it is because for some time I’ve believed that the more you talk about ‘what you are going to do’, the less ‘you are likely to do it’. And frankly – to my certain knowledge to my late father’s increasing irritation – I spent rather to much of my life talking about what I was going to do and doing absolutely fuck all about it.

OK, I know why I did fuck all about it (though I shan’t bother explaining here because it is not only irrelevant but rather uninteresting), but the salient fact is that I did fuck all. I still have, somewhere, pretty much every short story I’ve written, an attempted novel and a novella, but it really does not amount to very much at all.

That I have kept them is for one reason only: I had no very good reason to get rid of it all. If I did, if someone did come up with a good reason which convinced me, into the trash it would all go (and no tears shed by me or anyone else).

The thing I have planned is superficially quite straightforward, but what I should like to try to do is a little more subtle. And there’s the rub. Because I have now – at 74 – got to the stage that I am just writing to ‘amuse’ myself and the chances that any of it will ever be published are as close to non-existent as they might ever be, I want to take the more difficult route, and that requires quite a bit of thinking.

Well, actually not that much thinking, just thinking of the right kind, and frankly I’m not much of a thinker. I can bullshit as well as the best of them and better than many. But thinking?

I keep plugging ‘my novel’, the only one I have so far written, and I might as well admit that it is a good example that we should never judge a book by its cover. Here’s the cover, back and front. Don’t judge.

It, too, is not – or rather, I hope it is not – as straightforward as it might appear to be and I do believe I have succeeded in doing what I tried to do. Whether anyone else will agree – would agree (the will/would are crucial here) is another matter.

But what I attempted with that gave me the idea for what I might attempt with the next one. I’ve had ‘the story’, ‘what it’s about’, for some time, but I came to realise that if it was to be worthwhile in any way, it will need an added dimension. I know what that dimension is – a safer way to put it is ‘might be’ – but what I don’t yet know is how to create it. Hence the thinking.

Savvy?

Two and a half hours later . . .

I should have published these links, US Amazon and UK Amazon. Happy reading (as if).

Ten days in France, now back home again

Illats, SW France

Not so long ago, I reported that I had finally finished ‘My Hemingway bollocks’, officially ‘The Hemingway enigma’, and that at present not having anything to get on with and thus be able to stick to what had become my routine of writing for four or five hours every afternoon, I would do a little writing about whatever occurred to me every day, just to keep my hand in.

Well, one of the cliches with which we are all acquainted is ‘the road to Hell is paved with good intentions’, and so I’ve discovered: I’ve got fuck-all writing done as in ‘fuck-all keeping my had in’.

I did start what was to be an entry for this blog – where all the other ‘daily writing’ was to be placed – but after about 30 minutes of totally inconsequential scribbling (that is, tapping away on my laptop keyboard) I realised just how tediously dull what I had so far written was and that I was thoroughly bored with it.

As it is a universal truth that ‘if the writer is bored with what she or he has written, you can bet the reader was doubly bored and had long given up’, I junked what I had.

By the way, have any of you read – or, better, attempted to read – ‘a classic’ and become so utterly uninterested that you would to anything else just for a good excuse to stop reading? Yet all the time there lurks in the back of 

your mind the admonition ‘don’t be such a hopeless, dumb and simple sod – this is “a classic” and although you think it is as dull as ditchwater, that is your fault, sonny. Get on with it’.

You do, however, throw in the towel, and such a spineless capitulation is inevitably followed by hours and often days of guilt when you castigate yourself for being that hopeless, dumb and simple sod who doesn’t even have the wherewithal to ‘read a classic’.

Along those lines, though, I have to add that there are some classics which have I haver read (or am reading) and which do repay that effort. One such is George Eliot’s Middlemarch. I’d already over the years read several of her, shorter, novels and I like her slightly ironic take on most things.

‘Oh’, write all the bods ‘passionate about literature’, ‘but you must, must, must read Middlemarch! It’s probably the best English novel ever written!’ And they thereby confirm that shameless hyperbole is not restricted to ads for Hollywood films and weekend book section reviews. In the latter my favourite piece of bollocks is when a novel is described as ‘an important new work from . . .’.

To cut a long story a short, I have written fuck all of anything since I completed My Hemingway bollocks, not even a shopping list (although I have not doubt at all it would have been a rattling good shopping list). Well, at least now I am.

. . .

I am on my way back to rainy, cold and miserable North Cornwall from rainy, not quite as cold but just as miserable, south-west France where I have been keeping my aunt company. She turned 93 a few weeks ago and her husband died several years ago and lives on her own in a rather large, in part a little decrepit house where the wiring is the very definition of ‘death trap’.

She is now quite infirm, although she can very slowly get about with a zimmer frame, but does so only when necessary.

Our routine has been very simple: I appear downstairs at 10am where she has just finished her breakfast and I drink a bowl or two of milky coffee. In recent years she has taken to eating ready-made meals from the supermarket, so for the past ten days I have cooked her lunch, partly because I enjoy cooking and get no chance to do so at home. What I cooked has included roast chicken (though this time not as successful as the last time, because I didn’t roast it enough – time was getting on and my aunt likes to eat by 1.30pm and it was by then already gone 2pm), pan-fried salmon, home-made burgers (a lot nicer than any ready-made burgers I have ever eaten), mushroom omelette (simple, but a nice one is very tasty).

Our lunches are always last for at least two hours, what with crudite – which my aunt insists should be eaten ‘for health reasons’ –, terrine, main course, cheese and coffee, and also because there really is no rush. Although my aunt is Irish, although born in Bodmin, she married a Corsican Frenchman – not contradiction there, I trust – and spent the past 65 years living in French culture, including Algeria before the war there.

Her wine cellar (established by her husband who, though, had to give up alcohol in the last 15 years of his life, had continued buying wine) is large, and we had wine at lunch for every meal, I followed that with a glass or three of calvados, then poire William when the calvados was finished with my coffee.

Sadly, drinking at lunchtime these days knocks me semi-sideways, so while my aunt had her nap I settled down aimlessly to surf the net and catch up on YouTube what that moron Trump is up to. Does anyone think he won’t go to jail? I’m curious.

It is jaw-dropping that anyone in the US is able to take him and his silly claims seriously. But some – rather too many – do, although those I’ve seen interviewed do not seem to be the brightest by a long chalk.

On this visit as well as my last visit I have skipped supper at 8pm, to the consternation of my aunt, but I really prefer having an empty stomach to be filled at lunch the following day rather than eat because ‘it is what one does’. My aunt is perpetually baffled that I don’t eat breakfast or supper, which, she says, is unhealthy.

. . .

In 40 minutes as I write – though this entry will probably not be posted until I am in Merignac airport – a taxi is arriving to take me to Bordeaux’s airport. So far I have always simply taken a taxi to Cerons station, about six kilometres away, but for some very odd reason all the local taxi companies are on strike (and I have no idea why *).

Finally, we managed to scare up a firm on the net – I don’t know where they are based or why they are not on strike, perhaps the strike is purely local – which could have taken me to Cerons but as the cab is coming all the way from somewhere, he suggested taking me straight to the airport. Pricey, but fuck it, I was just glad to find a cab.

Now I must stop and can carry on once I am safely in the cafeteria at Merignac’s Billi terminal, having passed through security (which is always such colossal fun).

Later, Merignac Airport, Bordeaux

Two hours later and €105 down I am now sitting with a cappuccino at the airport thinking of ways to kill the next three hours. Finishing this blog entry will soak up some of that time but there is not a great deal to do at an airport and there is only a certain number of coffees you can drink.

My aunt and I only went for one meal out this time, but it was a great meal, in Sauternes. Sadly, my aunt is now in the age where ‘everything has come down a bit’ or its soulmate ‘nothing is quite as it was’.

So the restaurant itself (which I have previously visited many years ago but was then not paying, either) had been shut for a year or two, renovated then reopened, but sadly, according to my aunt it wasn’t what it had been. Well, to my, admittedly untutored Anglo-Saxon, eyes it was find. We began, as we always do, with foie gras and a glass of Sauternes and this, too, was not quite has good was it might have been, and – well, you are way ahead of me, no doubt – to my, admittedly untutored Anglo-Saxon taste – was more than fine.

Then I had chicken breast, which might not sound very special but it as. I’ve managed to track down the menu for the restaurant, Le Cercle Guirard (Le Saprien before it closed for renovation) and I had Volaille fermière étuvée au vin jaune, champignons sauvages, sauce suprême perlée à l’huile de piment fumé. One for the French speakers who cannot count me in their number. I was very nice indeed. Oh, and with it I had a second glass of Sauternes which the restaurant patron assured me was traditional.

I hope to visit my aunt again in the new year at some point, but that will depend on her health. It is not the best.

* Taxi strike: my driver who was on strike a little earlier today but wasn’t now – I’m sure he explained why, but I didn’t quite cotton on – told me it was a result of new rules laid down by the insurance companies.

I can only repeat what he told me, but it seems one of the income streams for taxis is to take bods to hospital for appointments. The insurance companies are now insisting that unless unless a taxi conveys more than one passenger, it will only pay 50% of any claim.

They say it is in the interests of ecologie (being more green) but he and his fellow drivers are certain they just want to make more moolah by saving themselves a little. I suspect he’s right, too. When companies explain an innovation – which invariably costs the punters more – is in favour of ‘saving the planet’, scepticism is not just warranted by wholly advisable.