Today’s dare: patronise a Scotsman, then run for your life. As for the Union: keep it – better the devil you know. And it’s official: winter can sometimes be a bit chilly and we might even get a bit of snow (but probably only on high ground)

I am an Englishman who spent four happy years at Dundee University in the late Sixties and early Seventies and who came to like, admire and respect much about Scotland and the Scottish. More to the point, I came to understand how completely bloody irritating it is for Scots when they are patronised by the English, and, as Canadians, Americans, Indians, Pakistanis, Australians and New Zealanders know only too well, no one can patronise quite as well as the English. It is almost an art form. So the rise and rise of the Scottish National Party does not surprise me and that popular support for the party has managed to get Scotland within a referendum’s vote of independence.

As for Scottish independence, I am neither for nor against ‘preserving the Union’ ‘on principle’. (In fact, I am a man of few principles and find that one or two of them go a long way. Broadly speaking, be doubly wary of anyone or everyone who loudly proclaims his or her principles. Principles are essentially a private matter and when they are noticed, it is best in how someone does or does not behave. Someone who thinks the rest of the world is just dying to hear all about his or her principles is usually very boring and most certainly bad news.)

One the question of the Union (the British one not the American one), one can take the view that all things must pass, that the time of the Union has gone and that, all things being equal, if a nation would prefer independence over the status quo, they are fully entitled to it. To clarify my view a little more: I regard it as a certain kind of nonsense to speak of any nation ‘asking’ for independence. As far as I am concerned true independence is declared and that’s the end of the matter. But, sadly, I don’t think all things are equal, and, purely on pragmatic grounds, I feel the two countries should stick together.

My reservation is that I feel Scotland as well as England would be a loser if the union between the two countries came to an end. An end to the Union would, I suspect, diminish and impoverish both. Furthermore, I rather fear that gaining independence would not leave Scotland as a promised land it might seem to some at present.

For one thing, the SNP, until now united in its common objective of gaining independence, would slowly, but surely, split into left, right and centre factions with all the petty politicking that would entail – a multitude of largely pointless skirmishes between rabid lefties, rapacious righties and treacherous centrists would still be the order of the day.
Any Scot craving independence shouldn’t imagine it will all

be sweetness and light once the nation is shot of perfidious Albion and has reached the promised land. As one famous Scot once observed, to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.

I should also point out that from where I sit south of the border the SNP’s leader Alex Salmond stands head and shoulders above the rest in his party and I doubt the Nationalists will benefit from the same decisive and dynamic leadership once he decides to spend more time with his slippers. If I remember, he had previously retired, but had to come back to head the party again because those who took over made such a dog’s dinner of everything. Can Scotland really be sure that might not happen again?

There is also the small, though embarrassing, point that not all Scots have have each others' interests at heart. We shouldn’t forget that Sir William Wallace was finally brought

down by other Scots who felt their own interests were best served by sucking up to Edward I of England, and that at Culloden more Scots fought under the Duke of Cumberland’s colours than fought under the Jacobite banner of Charles Edward Stuart.
These are, admittedly, two examples from the past and not necessarily representative of modern Scottish manners, but the treachery of some Scots at their fellow countrymen’s expense cannot be ignored.

I suspect that if only the English could be relied upon not to be so patronising, Alex Salmond would be on shakier ground, and his suggestion of ‘devo max’ as a fall-back position persuades me that he is already several moves ahead of the pack. Out-and-out nationalists must, of course, pray that the English continue to lord it over everyone else until it’s too late. Me, I’ll repeat: united we stand, divided we fall, even though union with those sassenach ejits does try the patience of even the most patient of Scots.

. . .

Now there’s a funny thing: it’s winter, so it gets cold and it snows. Well, bugger me! Who’d have thought it? Yet every year the Brits greet the news (December and January were mild this year, but that was exceptional. Usually temperatures are average for this time of year - low) with the kind of surprise and dismay a 12-year-old might show when it dawns on him that Santa doesn’t exist. The headlines scream (even in the ‘broadsheets’ these days, which are also known by some as the ‘serious papers’ although I really don’t know why) ‘Winter wipeout!’ ‘Country blanketed by 3in of snow!’ ‘Santa just a myth: official!’ ‘Temperatures plummet to -5c!’ Well, Lordy me. And there was me hoping that it would be so mild this weekend that I could strip off, lie on the grass in the garden and get a tan. Better shelve that idea, pronto - the might be a flurry of snow!

Amazing! Or not. And the latest wheeze ‘to save the euro’ is launched to universal derision

Two weeks ago tomorrow (and try translating that into Italian. I could never get the hang of the future past, or whatever boring grammarians call it, when I spent five months teaching English in Milan in the early Seventies and was slowly learning to get by in Italian - ‘non sono tedesco ma inglese, mia madre est tedesca et mio padre est inglese’ I kept having to tell people because apparently I spoke Italian with a pronounced German accent. Which is all by the by) and on a whim - that sentence while make a lot more sense if you start again at the beginning and ignore what I have written in parentheses (OK, brackets) i.e. go straight from ‘tomorrow’ to ‘and on a whim’ and cut out the crap in the middle which is pretty bloody irrelevant at the best of times and - don’t we know it - these are not the best of times. Still with me? Probably not, because if the truth be told, I’ve even lost myself.

Start again: two weeks ago tomorrow and on a whim I decided to stop eating all wheat products - bread, cakes and biscuits. I really can’t remember why, but I am already noticing a marked difference. I feel more energetic and less tired, my body feels ‘tighter’ and generally I feel a tad brighter all round. I am not gluten allergic or anything like that, it’s just that I decided to give up wheat and feel all the better for it. Admittedly, I am now eating more fruit and salads, which has got to be a good thing, but I’m not stinting myself in any way and haven’t, for example, given up other carbohydrates, alcohol and sugar.

I should stress that I am no faddist - in fact, faddists piss me off big-time (‘You know when you have that first pee of the day, you know, first thing in the morning, out of bed and into the loo and just let it all out, well apparently, according to researchers in Brazil, there are an unbelievable number of nutrients in that first batch which we are all getting rid of because, you know, overnight your body does some sort of housekeeping operation but very often overdoes it, so, according to these Brazilian researchers, we are actually not just getting rid of waste matter but proteins and vitamins and stuff which our bodies actually need, you know, we’re literally just pissing it all away which can’t be a good thing, can it? Mind it’s that very first piss of the day, not the rest that follow them, that’s just waste matter. Anyway, they say that we should catch it all, after what you piss in the first few seconds, your don’t bother with that, you know, like you do when you have to give the doctor a sample, you don’t bother with what comes out first, but then you catch it all in a cup and drink it. Yes, I know it sounds awful and the Brazilians say it’s quite OK to flavour it a little with a small measure of tequila or rum or something just to get rid of the piss taste, but anyway I’ve been doing it for a few weeks now and I feel totally different, I mean totally, it’s as though I’ve been reborn. Yes, it sounds daft but, you know, loads of things sound daft at first but they’re not, I mean if you told someone about nanotubes even five years ago they would have called out the men in the white coats pronto, but, you know, it’s the future, and we would be silly to turn our backs on stuff just because it sounds totally off the wall. So give it a go, there’s only one way to persuade yourself and that’s by trying it yourself. As I say, the researchers recommend a slug of something or other to tone it down a bit, although wasn’t there that Indian prime minister or president or something who used to drink his piss every day and he lived to a ripe old age, so - well, it can’t be that stupid, and now the Brazilians have done some science on it and it seems it’s all pretty kosher. I know I feel totally different, and I’ve only been doing it for a few weeks.’

But let me reassure you, dear, dear bloggees, I have only gone down the wheat-free road. I shall leave the ‘drink your own piss’ salvation to hardier souls. I'll keep you posted on the wheat-free thing.

. . .

The other thing I wanted to mention was how totally - and I mean totally - fucked off I get with the use of superlatives on TV these days. Everything is amazing, and you and I all know that hardly anything is amazing, so why do they keep using that attitude. I used to enjoy TV documentaries about more or less anything, from Anglo-Saxon to dolphins mating to new solar system being born to how the Mesopotamians first invented surgery to how medieval kings used to use shorthand to pass on cookery tips - anything - and in the olden days they just got on with it. They told you what was what, it all lasted half and hour, then it was on to something else. Now? Now everything is bloody ‘amazing, with the presenter claiming he or she feels ‘humbled’ just to be able to open a 700-year-old book. Why ‘humbled’?

I used to think that there was something wrong with me, that a small part of me had some kind of sociopathic tendency because I didn’t faint when I saw an original da Vinci, that I wasn’t moved to tears when I was fed some concoction cooked the way the Aztecs used to cook it. Now I know I need not worry: it’s just the latest fashion in documentary-making. Roll on the next, although going by past developments it will probably be even more insufferable, although at this point I can’t quite imagine how.

. . .

How anyone can hope that the eurozone crisis will end in peace and harmony and rueful smiles and promises that ‘we mustn’t let that happen again’ is beyond. I have no idea exactly when the shit will hit the fan - no one does - but hit the fan it most certainly will, and it will be ugly, ugly, ugly for everyone the world over. But there still are many benighted souls (my sister is one, sorry M.) who think ‘it can all be sorted out, if only we pull together’. Yet the latest ‘proposal’ to sort out the mess should tell any one that the whole exercise is doomed to fail. And you don’t need to know anything about finance: you just need to have a passing acquaintance with European history and human psychology.

According to the Financial Times, the latest EU wheeze to pull the bacon out of the fire is for a Brussels-appointed commissioner to take control of Greek’s budget. It is a measure of how deep we have already ventured into la-la-land that not quite as many jaws are dropping as should. To make matters worse, the wheeze was dreamed up by the Germans. Need anyone be reminded that the Germans are best advised to make discretion their watchword in view of, er, their not so distant past? I yield to no one in my admiration of the country and its people, but they do have a tendency to precede with a total lack of nuance. Put it this way: if the idea was going to be mooted, was it not beyond the wit of someone in the candy store known as the EU HQ in Brussels at least to ensure it came from the French, the Dutch - anyone but the Germans? Well, yes it was. Oh, well.

How to alienate people. Simple: praise one Margaret Thatcher

Off to see The Iron Lady some tomorrow or Friday with my stepmother, who rarely gets out. There have been mixed reactions to the film, including the comment that releasing it before the good lady has passed on is rather odd. My theory is that is was conceived, approved and planned several years ago, and the, somewhat cynical, expectation was that Maggie would have popped her clogs long before the film was released. Those who have seen it say both that it is a tour de force by Meryl Streep as the lady herself (or The Devil Incarnate as those even ever-so-slightly on the left like to call her) but that there is something a little out of kilter about it all, as well as one or two bizarre in accuracies. I understand the film takes the form of a woman with dementia looking back on her life in her more lucid moments, including the Falklands War and the Brighton IRA bombing, so it is a little odd not decently to wait until she had shuffled off her mortal coil.
I am neither ‘of the Left’ or ‘of the Right’ and most certainly try not to belong to any kind of glee club shouting the virtues of this, that or t’other politician. But I must come out and say quite unequivocably that Maggie, Mrs Thatcher, Mrs T or however you want to refer to her stood head and shoulders above the other politicians of her generation and that she and her achievements will be remembered not just in years to come but in centuries to come. She will, I believe, be numbered among the great Prime Ministers alongside William Pitt the Younger, Sir Robert Peel, Palmerston, Disraeli, Gladstone, Lloyd-George, Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee. (Incidentally, I looked up a list of PMs to familiarise myself with who was actually a Prime Minister, and I was astounded at how many come from the ‘aristocracy’. It seems that it wasn’t until the beginning of the last century – strictly the last century: for me that still seems to mean the 19th century – that ‘commoners’ became Prime Minister.) Our recent PMs, Harold Wilson, Edward Heath, James Callaghan, John Major, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown will, I’m afraid to say, be mere footnotes in history textbooks, if they are lucky.
I realise that Mrs Thatcher can divide Britain almost like no other political figure and that what I have referred to as her achievements are anything but to many others. For example, she emasculated the trade unions and brought them into line, she revitalised the economy by introducing a more modern way of looking at business and the role of the state (there would never have been Tony Blair and the revival of Labour were it not for Thatcher and Blair cannily building on attitudes she had established) and she managed to keep Britain out of much of the lunacy which passes for the ‘European Project’. One of her few failings was not realising that the best time to quit is when you are ahead, and so her fall from power was in many ways pathetic.
But she had real conviction: none of this phoney litany of ‘I’m passionate about…’ and ‘I’m committed to…’ which is intended to pass for principle and conviction these days. She believe in ‘sound money’ as everyone else should do. In the great Keynes v Hayek debate, she was most definitely in Hayek’s camp and her economic princples, like his, like his, was simple: if you spend more than you earn, you will eventually pay the price. Nothing wrong with that. (Yes, certainly there is virtue in Keynes’ view of the virtue of spending to create work and grow the economy, but it can always only be part of a solution, not the solution. Sooner or later the bills have to be paid, and if not by you, then by your children and grandchildren.)
As for seeing off the unions, you had to remember the shambles that Britain had become after the Sixties to understand why that was so necessary. I am a firm supporter of trade unions – the Law Society and the British Medical Association are nothing but unions by another name – and someone must most certainly protect the interests and wellbeing of those who are for whatever reason to weak to do so themselves. But by the Seventies, our British unions were reacting to a bygone age: they had been born of the era of heavy industry, the factory fortnight, wages delivered weekly in little brown envelopes, a true ‘working class’ and the country was moving one. It had no heavy industry to speak of, coal was cheaper when imported, and the unions themselves were beginning to behave like the industrial fatcats they purported to despise. They were, almost to a man – there were one or two outstanding unionists such as Brenda Dean, but it was still a man’s world – almost old-style Leninists who, at heart, were campaigning for a proletarian state. This at a time when the Left in other European countries had long since jettisoned such old-fashioned ideology and were firm Social Democrats. And, ironically, young Margaret Roberts, as she was, of Grantham, had, despite her father’s ownership of two grocery stores, far, far more in common with ‘the working class’ – for which read aspirant working class – and the ‘ordinary man and woman’ than her rich and titled predecessors at No 10 Downing St. That is probably why so many identified with her, accepted her and supported her. And because she was, while leading the party its backbone, that is why the Tories simply collapsed into a sorry heap once regicide had been committed and – John Major’s frankly bizarre election victory in 1992 notwithstanding (Major didn’t win, Neil Kinnock lost) that is why they didn’t get even a sniff of power for another 13 years. And even then they could only manage it by forming a coalition with the Lib Dems. (That, ironically, was, I am prepared to argue, an incredible stroke of luck in that the more outrageous Conservative dinosaurs were forced to keep quiet if they wanted their party to form the government. I doubt there would have been stable government in in Britain had David Davis become Tory leader: although he is a much different man to Edward Heath, Britain would now be going through a similar nonsense as it did in the Heath/Wilson years. I’ll maybe argue that another time.)
Love her or loathe her – and I do neither – only a dishonest fool would deny that Margaret Thatcher was a one-off and did more for the country while leader than many a PM before or since. Now for the hate mail.

The Mitt, Newt, Rick and Ron Show - the current Yankee response to good old English cricket

For certain kind of Englishman (of which, obviously, I am one) one of the better spectator sports around is the quadrennial hoopla the United States goes through as it elects a new president or re-elects the old one. I recently wrote about cricket and indicated that it wasn’t the most intuitive sport to get your head around, and much the same is true of the apparently ramschackle process the U.S. has adopted to elect a president. The vote itself is in November and the winner is inaugurated in January. But the race itself starts several years earlier when various would-be contenders to be nominated as their parties candidate begin to test the water to see whether they have a realistic chance of gaining the nomination or whether they are vainly – in this case in two senses – pissing in the wind. As the current president (and I’m sorry, but I refuse to dignify the post with a capital p – the Yanks are too self-important as it is) is a Democrat and is seeking re-election, it is a line-up of Republican hopefuls are who doing all the baby-kissing and God-fearing and hoping to persuade all wings of the party that they are the man – the two women would-be candidates have already dropped out – who can take on the incumbent and win.
Once would-be contenders have convinced themselves – or been convinced by others that by putting themselves forward they won’t necessarily make a complete arse of themselves by coming last; and once they have assured themselves that they a sufficient number of rich fuckers are prepared to part with the necessary moolah to pay for the whole shooting match, it’s on to the next round when all 50 states decide who should be the one man or woman to stand for their party. I think.
What makes the whole process so thoroughly entertaining is that by the time you think you have got the hand of the whole primaries system, something occurs to demonstrate that you are not even off the starting block and haven’t a clue as to what is going on. In some states only registered Republicans can vote for whoever they think will make the best candidate, in others any registered voter – whether

Republican or Democrat – can vote. In yet others, interested parties get together in smaller caucuses to discuss who they think it should and then nominate one of their number to pass on that decision to a higher caucus. And, undoubtedly, every last word I have just written by way of explanation is complete nonsense and doesn’t even begin to describe the process. That’s what makes it all so highly entertaining.
The origins of such a convoluted process – that should be of such convoluted processes – lie in the evolution of the United States, with each state becoming part of the Union at a different time and having, in the meantime, evolved it’s own method. Seen in that light, the complications of the process are understandable if not comprehensible, i.e. blame the mists of time. The U.S. citizen’s right to ‘bear arms’ and keep as much lethal weaponry in his house as his psychopathy will allow is similarly understandable, although to use lily-livered Europeans utterly incomprehensible.
In those far-off days when ‘obesity’ was still a purely medical term, in many of the less populated states those eligible to vote didn’t see their neighbours from one month to the next, so getting together to decided who should pursue their interests in the coming presidential election was something of an occasion. Given that everyone and their four-year-old now drives a car – it goes with the collection of handguns one is obliged to own, apparently – and that hardly anyone lives more than a few hundred yards from their neighbour, it all makes rather less senses, but as a Brit I am on thin ice here, and would be well-advised to exercise discretion when it comes to discussing the full range of Yankee foibles.
. . .

Since the round of primaries started two weeks ago – a fortnight ago in Brit parlance – several would-be contenders, including the women, have thrown in the towel. That means by the time Super Tuesday arrives – on March 6 this year – and primaries are held in a number of states, it should be a lot clearer who the viable candidates are. I think it will boil down to a Mitt Romney and a Newt Gingrich - American names also provide us supercilious Brits with no end of amusement – we prefer our politicians to be called David, Nicholas and Edward, although now that our colonial past is rapidly catching up with us, there are already several Tariqs in the Commons and fine, upstanding chaps they are, too (he said carefully, with one eye on the jungle of equality laws now in place which make discussion in Britain something of a parlour game, ideally played only by lawyers). I think a chap called Rick Santorum – another silly name – is still in the running, but as he would like to see all homosexuals boiled in oil once all their limbs have been torn off, I suggest that his long-term prospects are limited. There is also a certain Ron Paul – decent name, decent chap as far as I can tell, but a Michelle Bachman and a Rick Perry have called it off, as has Sarah Palin, who as far as I am concerned gave loopiness a bad name, was weeded out long ago, apparently to almost universal sighs of relief among the more serious-minded Republicans.
My money is on Mitt Romney. He strikes me as not the flaky sort and comes over as presidential, which is undoubtedly

down to some very intense coaching be whatever bods are paid enormous sums to undertake such intense coaching. He might be a Mormon and I might think that Mormon theology is just too deep in la-la-land for comfort, but as I was born and brought up as a practising (the ‘s’ is correct in UK English, by the way, it’s just another of the spellings which distinguish us sophisticates from our colonial cousins) Roman Catholic, I would be well-advised to keep quiet on matters of loppy theology. Furthermore, Mitt looks to be the one who could take on Barack Obama and beat him. Most recently crawling out of the woodwork is said to be some scandal to do with taxes, but I know no detail on that so I shall let it pass.
A great deal less to my tastes is the other main contender, a Newt Gingrich. From what I have heard Newt is something of a hypocritical little shit who was actively pursuing an

adulterous affair at exactly the time he was trying to hound Bill Clinton out of office for his philandering. Actually, I think ‘hypocritical little shit’ is putting it a little too mildly. After the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries Mitt seemed to be in poll position, but then the hypocritical little shit known as Newt took South Carolina, which through everything into disarray. At some point I heard that in that past the candidate who took South Carolina invariably went on to become his party’s candidate, but perhaps it is now yet a universal rule. Roll on Super Tuesday.
Incidentally, I read somewhere that with several of his mistresses, Newt would only engage in oral sex because he felt he could then argue that he hadn’t ‘committed adultery’. My dear friends in America, you don’t want a cunt like Newt running your country (although under Bill Clinton it seems you did).

. . .

An interesting and well-made four-part documentary about Vladimir Putin started on BBC 2 a few days, which has the virtue of being informative. I’m looking forward to the next three parts. More once I’ve seen them.

And old fart writes: ‘Euthanasia? Over my dead body!’ And sweet Mandy gets yet another look in. If you’re reading this, Mandy, ask me out

Having reached the venerable age of 114, I’m bound to meet the truth halfway and admit that I am - my good looks notwithstanding - no spring chicken. But physical age apart - I would say ‘temporal’ age if it didn’t sound a little fatuous - there are one or two things which distinguish us 114-year-olds from one another. That is to say some 114 could be well over 160 given their asinine grumpy, complaining outlook on life, whereas others, if the light is right, could well pass for 85, given that they have, somehow, retained a sunnier, younger, more optimistic outlook (though if they live in California, all bets are off). And I like to think - and here I am obliged to take a deep breath - that I belong to the second group, that I am not the oldest old fart on the block, that I have, somehow, retained that sunnier, younger, more optimistic outlook on life which so eludes some my fellow travellers on the train of life.

Take my wife, for example: it might not be particularly gallant to say so, but she is not just a glass-half-empty type of women, she is so bloody negative about everything that she gives pessimism a bad name. Matters are so bad, in fact, that any number of dyed-in-the-wool local pessimists, people who wouldn’t have a good word to say about the Devil, will cross the lane rather than cross swords with her. It brings them down too much. Why is he telling us this, you ask, why is he being so open about it all? Simple. Not only does she not read this blog - as part of a broader strategy of not taking the blindest interest in any aspect of my life - but she wouldn’t even know how to turn on a computer. So the chances of her finding out that I am blackening her name with abandon and without ruth are closer to zero than the chances of Iran’s President Amadinejad being guest of honour at a bris. Am I exaggerating? Ask my sister, late of Istanbul, now resident in Warsaw. (I managed to convince her of the usefulness of staying one step ahead of the law.)

So being a - rather good-looking, quite charming, if somewhat raffish - 114-year-old but of a younger persuasion, I am concerned that I don’t develop that awful and awfully boring habit of complaining about everything, because complainers piss me off. At this point my wife might feel inclined to make another guest appearance, but I feel you already have the picture and if there’s one thing worse than perpetual complaining, it is banging on a little too long. (The danger is that people might start to ask themselves: who’s the problem, her or you?)

I know you will be familiar with the type: they insist that not only do trains run half as efficiently and punctually as once they did, but people have forgotten the importance of manners (especially on trains, apparently), progress - ‘so-called progress’ - is anything but, why do they insist on

©Heath

printing everything far smaller than they used to, time was once when a pint of beer/glass of wine/quick shag in the local brothel didn’t cost an arm and a leg and - a favourite of gentlemen of a certain age - pissing used to be so much easier (and you were able to empty your bladder in one go - there was none of this getting up and going to the john every 30 minutes. Bloody progress!

The gentler sex - and whoever thought up that phrase had a bone-dry sense of humour - have nothing to be smug about: one old bat of my circle who is way into her 90s complained to me the other night that she had not been propositioned in over 40 years. What was becoming of the male sex? she wondered.

The thought occurred to me that given the amount some of us less-than-young folk complain, there might well be something in this euthanasia malarkey. I mean it is the latest thing. Once folk use to show off to each other about where they were spending the summer or the winter. Then they hoped to impress those more gullible than themselves by apparently having far more ‘disposable income’. Now, given that quite a few are of ‘advance years’, they hope that espousing modern thought and being au fait with the a latest thinking might demonstrate that although they quite often look it, they are not wholly dead. And in the Year Of Our Lord 2012 there is surely no more modern thought than that we should kill off all our old folk before they become a burden and start to cost us some serious money.

Naturally, there are quite a few who are not quite as gung-ho about this ‘euthanasia’ (and will it be long before some bright PR spark attempts to popularise the doctrine by launching an ad campaign promoting ‘youthanasia’?). But there are more than enough folk who like to think of themselves as ‘quite bright’ and listen to Radio 4 far more often than is good for them who are rather taken with the idea. ‘Why,’ they ask rhetorically, ‘should I not die when and how I wish if I am suffering from incurable cancer?’

Now I don’t doubt that for some very ill people life can being unbearable. But nor do I doubt that in many cases a compassionate GP (that’s your doctor) has done what he or she felt was the kindest thing to do. But what is new about all this talk of ‘mercy killing’ is not that we are debating the morality of it, but that we are seriously debating whether it should be codified. And that, seemingly arcane point, is what I find most disturbing. On the one hand we bang the drum about ‘the right to life’ and our ‘human rights’, on the other we are quite prepared to sanctify abortion as a means of birth control rather than any of any number of perfectly rational and acceptable alternatives, and we are seriously debating the pros and cons of killing off our old people.

I can already hear the objections to my argument: euthanasia will and must be voluntary, its proponents will proclaim. To which I respond: that is your ideal now, but once you have conceded a little ground, you will, sooner or later, be obliged to concede a little more. What will ‘current moral thinking’ be 50 and 60 years down the line?
Yes, I know that what I have just written is one of

We know, we know, but it really is
what he would have wantedthe mainstays of almost every reactionary argument, but that doesn’t mean there might not be a grain of truth in it (and I dare not even start discussing the biggest of all in moral philosophy which can be described in many fashions but will I shall here describe by way of a question: just how seriously can we take our moral code if it can be reformulated almost at whim given what the current ‘current thinking’ might be?)

I didn’t set out to rumble on about euthanasia when I started this entry (and I am rather taken with my own joke about ‘youthanasia’), but it is a question we should settle sooner rather than later. The obvious objection is that unscrupulous beneficiaries might well hold off from outright murder - our modern caring police officers are rather good at tracking down that kind of thing. But they might feel less dainty about trying to persuade Mum or Dad that they should ‘consider others’ and see whether or not dying sooner rather than later would not be such a bad thing. And, who knows, if the aches and pains are playing up rather more one day, Mum or Dad might well thing they have a point and sign on the dotted line where in previous days they felt less inclined to do so.

But I should like to raise the more refined point: just how much can we claim to respect life, as we all too often claim to do, if we are seriously considering whether euthanasia ain’t all that bad?

NB I am not against abortion at all. But I am against the wholesale and unthinking demand for ‘abortion on demand’. In many case abortion can and is wholly justified. But killing a foetus just because ‘having a child now’, for example, is financially inconvenient, does strike me as pretty bloody repulsive. But those who think I am something of a pious prick might like to read this previous entry.

. . .

Like any modern man/woman/person with a link to ‘the public’, I keep an eye on my statistics. In my case the link is this blog. In other cases the man/women/person involved (and how soon will it be before we are obliged, on threat of several years in jail, to refer to the other as ‘the entity’?) might be an actor, a writer, a politician or a snake oil salesman. What we all have in common is, when we are feeling grand and on top of the world, is a desperate desire to know whether ‘they’ are amused, convinced, persuaded, ready to buy or simply ready. And when, on those rare, but all too dreadful occasions when we don’t feel on top of the world, we are equally desperate, but on these occasions demand any proof or even evidence that they haven’t sussed us, that they haven’t realised that we are total and utter charlatans, have defrauded them and that we are no more, and often far less, than they are. (That last is something they must never come to know.)

So being as just as egomaniac as you are, although with, perhaps, rather less justification, I look at my stats once and often twice a day. They tell me how many times my blog has been read, where readers live and what particular entries they are reading. And top of the list is this one. WThe title might not seem obviously attractive, and what exactly those who seek out this particular entry want to know is not immediately apparent, but when you realise that the entry also includes a picture of one Mandy Rice-Davies, the universal (well, sort of) interest becomes a little more understandable.

Young Mandy (I am going by the picture below of a very attractive young women, but as she was born on October 21, 1944, she is approaching 70, so ‘young’, though a gallant word to use, is rather pushing it) gained ‘notoriety’ (as in she was found

out) in the ‘Profumo Affair’, but as she is subsequently quoted as observing that her life since those heady days has been ‘one slow descent into respectability’, she is forgiven everything, although even the notion that we should ‘forgive’ her is curiously offensive. I like to think that a young woman as attractive and witty as she was then (many South Walian women have a certain kind of wit which I find attractive, although in truth I am attracted to many women who have that kind of wit and not all of them come from South Wales. In fact, they often come from everywhere – it is that particular spark I like) grow into attractive and witty middle-aged, then older women. Well, that isn’t necessarily true, but a boy can dream. Here for all the Mandy Rice-Davies addicts is that picture again as well as one or two others I have been able to track down. And, Mandy, if you ever get to read this, why don’t you buy me lunch? Or me buy you lunch? Whatever.

Cameron starts latest England v. Scotland cricket Test with a googly, Salmond blocks. Surely it's now time for tea? As for those damn, nasty Yankees/Ruskies . . . (delete as applicable and where your prejudice takes you)

I am now way into my 90th decade but it is only in the past three or four years that I can claim even to have started understanding the game of cricket. When I was younger, it used to bore me rigid, and I mean bore with a B. But with the technical advances in TV coverage I began to see the action from several different angles and in slow motion and little by little I started to get just the vaguest inkling of what might be going on and so I began to watch it a bit more. It was now no longer a case of sitting in front of the TV (or, on one occasion, in Sophia Gardens, Cardiff, where a gang of us had sloped of work early to take advantage of the post-4pm free entry and to down a pint of beer or three) watching a game in which apparently nothing happened at all for what seemed like days on end. You found yourself wondering whether to give it up as a lost cause and switch to the other channel - in those days there were only two - when suddenly there was a split-second flurry of action as a wicket fell. This excitement was then followed by several minutes of watching a group of men in white shirts and white trousers standing around talking to each other as the dismissed batsmen left the field and was replaced by a new batsman, before we were obliged to put up with several more days of nothing happening.

Modern TV coverage changed all that and once I was able to see what was taking place on the pitch, I was able to try to understand the game more and more. And slowly I did. But I have every sympathy with every ‘foreigner’ (and as every Brit will assure you, the world is full of foreigners) to whom the game is incomprehensible nonsense. Let me qualify that: by ‘every foreigner’ I mean ‘every foreigner’ whose country didn’t at some point in the past have the great good fortune to be ruled by the British. There are some ‘foreigners’ who have more than taken a shine to cricket and because of this love of the game might well qualify as ‘honorary British’. I mean, of course, the Indians, the Pakistanis, the Bangladeshis, the Sri Lankans, the New Zealander, the Australians, the South Africans and the Zimbabweans. But generally speaking the other ‘non-British foreigners’, such as the Yanks, are utterly, utterly baffled by cricket and appalled that, for example, a game which at Test level is usually played over five days can end in ‘a draw’.

Quite apart from being thoroughly entertaining – that is once you know what the bloody hell is actually going on - the game of cricket is useful as it gives the outsider an insight – or rather can give the outsider and insight – into how the English mind works and how they like to go about doing things. And I must stress that I am talking about the English mind, not the Irish, Welsh or the Scottish minds, which are anything but English and to a large extent far more rational. (Yes, and the Irish – don’t believe any of that shite about the Irish being away with the fairies. It’s just another piece of disinformation put about by the English who in many ways can teach the Irish a thing or two about being away with the fairies. Proof? Just two words: Morris dancing.

That insight occurred to me two days ago when our esteemed Prime Minister and former Etonian David Cameron made the first move in the battle ‘to save the Union of Great Britain and Northern Ireland’ for which read ‘preserve England’s hegemony over these British Isles. Cameron and other unionists, of which there are more than makes me comfortable, claim it is threatened by the stated intention of the Scottish National Party and is leader Alex Salmond to hold a referendum to ask the Scottish whether they would like to declare independence. Cameron’s move came three days ago when he suggested that it might be ‘unconstitutional’ and ‘unlawful’ for the Scots to hold a referendum. To which the answer of this disinterested – although far from uninterested – observer is ‘Hmm’. Really?

Given that Britain doesn’t actually have a written constitution, any ruling on ‘constitutionality’ would consist, at best, of the opinion of several High Court judges who might or might not be to the liking of the Scottish Parliament and who might or might not (although very probably might or else they would not have been chosen to give their opinion) be in favour of ‘preserving the Union ‘. Alex Salmond is anyway, and unsurprisingly, having none of it: he has declared that whether or not Scotland decides to hold referendum is only Scotland’s business and doesn’t in any way rely on the say-so of the British government. And oor’ Alex also gave short shrift to Cameron’s other demand that if

a referendum is held, it should consist of one simple question to which the Scottish voters should give their yea or nay: do you or do you not want Scotland. He wasn’t falling for that one, either, because as the SNP knows well, there are those in Scotland who support outright independence and those don’t. There is also a substantial minority who don’t actually support outright independence but who most certainly want a greater devolution of power. So if the question is a bald: do you want outright independence?, the SNP fears, probably quite rightly, that it would not get a majority. But, dear reader, this is where I must bring the good old, utterly baffling, game of cricket back into the matter. Because at the end of the day our Dear Leader doesn’t give a flying fuck either way whether or not Scotland holding a referendum on the matter is ‘constitutional’ and whether or not a putative referendum consists of just one question or ten. What our Dear Leader really wants to do is simple: he merely wants to muddy the waters to such an extent and as early as possible so that quite soon no one knows what is going on. And if, unlikely as it might be, someone does know what is going on, he or she is utterly stymied in any debate on the matter because the opposite party will most certainly have another view entirely of what exactly is being debated. In that respect it is very, very much like a game of cricket: utterly baffling to the uninitiated and so arcane it takes well over 40 years even to begin to understand what it is all about. But it is most certainly very entertaining.

Incidentally, it is also worth bearing in mind the French have long regarded England as Perfidious Albion and, as a rule, choose never, ever to trust us. Forget all that brave talk of the ‘English sense of fair play’, the British preference for compromise and how our empire was, at heart, a force for good. Forget it and hit hard the next Englishman who tries to oblige you to believe it. The English are as two-faced as the next man, but their good manners and courteous manner has fooled many. And that is where cricket comes in.

. . .

Talking of national ‘sports’ – you’ll understand why I use quote marks in a minute - one way of looking at the former global spat between the Yankee Dog and the Soviet Devil (the Evil Empire ©Ronald Reagan) was to consider that the Yanks preferred baseball and the Russians had a penchant for chess. This is not to say that the Yankees didn’t have their fair share of intellectuals with a gift for long-term strategy or that the Russian Soviets weren’t above indulging in solutions which demanded the application of brawn rather than brain power, but broadly I’ll ask you to let my description stand. So where Uncle Sam would delight in throwing money, manpower and the latest latest at a problem, Uncle Vanya was more inclined to think it all through and consider where this, that and t’other course of action was likely to lead him. I have to admit that neither approach was foolproof, and both the Yankee Dog and the Soviet Devil ended up on the losing side from time to time. And what makes the analogy of a Great Game even more fatuous is that it was never time-limited, so there was no point at which one could definitively say: Well, the Yanks/Ruskies won. Pedants might point out that the Yanks did win because the Soviet Union no longer exists and that Ronnie Reagan strategy of outspending them paid dividends, to which I will respond, rather inscrutably: Well, perhaps. And perhaps they didn’t.

There is a theory that the lads at the KGB were aware that the things in the Workers’ Paradise weren’t quite working out, that it was not so slowly going bust and that Change Was Afoot. Their solution was to be part of that change, and it has to be admitted that in many ways nothing much has changed in Russia. Well, some things have in that Mother Russia can now boast of ‘having a middle class’ – glory be! – and that car ownership is now more widespread, the queues outside the grocery shops no longer exist (as far as I know) and you have a real choice of which state-regulated TV stations you watch. On the debit side, of course, the country is still ruled by a self-interested, self-perpetuating oligarchy with close links to both big business and the KGB’s successors, the FSB , there is apparently no rule of law, the police are said to be pretty bloody corrupt and, the clincher, it still gets very bloody cold in winter and not very warm in the summer. Does it really matter whether the gang of hatchet-faced gents are now far better dressed and don’t belong to the Communist Party. No, it doesn’t.

Not that the U.S. has that much more to crow about. A wet little liberal like me still finds it hard to cheer on the Land of the Free when it means in practice that it is a land in which you are free to starve if that is the fate life has in store for you, be denied medical help if you are not insured and free to be just as ripped off as any middle-class chappie in the former Evil Empire. Yes, I’ll admit that analysis is pretty broadbrush – everyone will be given emergency healthcare and the Americans are enormously community spirited loathe to see a neighbour helpless and the vast majority of them will really put themselves out to help even a stranger – but I do get fed up with all the claims that the U.S. is God’s own country which the rest of the world should damn well learn to emulate. If the U.S. is so keen on sharing its capitalist wisdom, why all the millions spent on keeping out illegal immigrants who simply want their moment in the Yankee sun? I happened to be looking up statistics the other day and was not surprised to see that the proportion of blacks in prison or without a job is far higher than the proportion they form of the U.S. population. All things being equal, the two proportions should be the same. And I still get fed up with all the Land of the Free posturing when to this day the U.S. will not admit to being responsible for the genocide of several million Native Americans. But before the Russians start crowing ‘why, the bugger is on our side after all’, they might care to reflect on their own, more recent, genocide which was the great Ukrainian famine. Several million Ukrainians are thought to have starved to death in that episode of the making of the Socialist Dream.

NB. I am on no one’s side.

My New Year message: Smile (you really have no other choice)

It was only by chance that I came across the three pictures below, but I do feel we should take a hint and see in the New Year with a smile. I mean why not? Things are going tits up in the Middle East, things are going tits up in the EU, things

might well go tits up in China, things might also well go tits up in India and about the only place I can’t think of where, as far as I know, things are not going tits up is South America. However, the ‘as far as I know should give you a clue’ in as far as I know more about the normative import of sociologically qualified quantum mechanics than I do about what is going on in South America. And, needless to say (although I’ll say it anyway, which everyone

always does when they use the phrase ‘needless to say’) I know bugger all about the normative import of sociologically qualified quantum mechanics (which I have, anyway, invented).

So several countries in South America could well be on the brink of civil war or have recently been invaded by alien lifeforms but there’s very little chance we here in the smug West will ever get to hear about it. The only reason we Brits mention Argentina, for example, is when they announce yet again that they want to get their hands on the Falkland Islands. Making such an announcement is down to the county’s president adopting Julius

Caesar’s sage advice on how to deal with domestic troubles: cause troubles overseas. I do happen to know (which rather undermines what I said earlier, but I am nothing if not

shamelessly inconsistent) that Argentine’s current president, Cristina Kirchner (pictured), is a bit of a troublemaker and is having something of a battle with the country’s various media groups. As for the other South American country’s, they rarely, if ever, feature in our broadcast news bulletins and even less often in our newspapers. We Brits are nothing if not proudly parochial. But as for the rest of the world, things, er, are looking glum. Very glum. I can’t see the problems in Syria being settled by a heart-to-heart between the secret service sadists and those the torture and kill, and Iran also want to flex its muscles more, which is bad news for Saudi Arabia, as it likes to be seen as top dog in that neck of the woods. What is also bad news for the Saudis is all this stuff and nonsense with ‘being free’ and ‘self-determination’ and, heavens forbid, ‘women’s rights’. They can’t be having any of that, but what with the events this year in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya, they might well be a tad worried that some in their own country could be getting ideas. The one good thing as that what with all the oil, they don’t have a disaffected minority on the breadline. One of many bad things is that if you are a teenage girl who wants to drive round to her friends to listen to a bit of pop, try out a few lipsticks and check out the boys (which I understand is what all teenage girls want to do), well, Saudi Arabia isn’t the country to be living in.

One thing which rather bothers the democrats in the west is that when - when folk in the Middle East do get the chance to ‘exercise their democratic right to self-determination’, the thankless buggers stick two fingers up at us and decide they would like the affairs of the country run by islamists. That is not something we want, but being ‘democrats’, there is rather little we can do about it without revealing ourselves as dyed-in-the-wool hypocrites.
As for the problems in the EU, see blog entries passim. Nothing I have read in the past few days leads me to believe that ‘the crisis is over’ and that we can all breathe again. It’s just that what with Christmas and New Year boozing preoccupying us (and all those nasty financier types taking a week or two off to count last year’s bonus - it takes a while), there has been no scope, it’s all very quiet. Deceptively quiet, I should add.

So in a spirit of goodwill I wish you all, wherever you live, whatever gender you are, whatever colour or creed, whatever your sexual orientation a Happy New Year and my sincere best wishes. Now check out my novel and BUY it. I need the money and the encouragement to write another.

. . .

Me, I shall be going to bed at my usual time tonight (most probably). I have seen in the New Year in Scotland, Germany and France and I far prefer the way they celebrate it than our pissed-up English way. Here in England it is just another excuse to get rat-arsed and try to shag your neighbour’s wife/husband. Not that the English usually need an excuse to trot down to the nearest Asda, buy up as much cheap booze as the car will carry, take the opportunity to load up with as many cheap and cheerful sausages rolls, ‘party bits and turkey twizzlers as they can then get back home to get the party going. There is one school of thought that the Brits get drunk so easily and so often because sober they are so emotionally constipated that the use of a stimulant of some kind or another - cannabis and cocaine are just as popular as booze, and, if possible, all three together - is an absolute necessity. It is a school of thought I subscribe. One euphemism used when Brits get rat-arsed is that they are ‘letting their hair down’. So, below, I offer two pictures of typical Brits ‘letting their hair down’.

Don’t ignore life’s modest glories: let’s hear it for toast!

It isn’t often that I can report encouraging developments in my life given that a regular pastime at my age is deciding what hymns I should like sung at my funeral, the order of service, that kind of thing. But there has been one which has cheered my up enormously. Incidentally, don’t laugh at my preoccupation with my funeral – these things are important. The thought that Abide With Me might be sung when they put me to rest/burn me up – I haven’t yet decided – sends a shiver down my spine. Broadly, it will run something like this: Lacrimosa from Mozart Requiem in D minor once they have taken their places, followed by whoever is in charge telling everyone what a lovely, darling, darling chap I was (although, of course, remorselessly heterosexual), then Scarlatti’s sonata in F minor, and then as the coffin disappears to the furnace or everyone files out the last movement of Mozart’s very last symphony, No 41. After that everyone can bugger off and get pissed at my expense.


As for the latest, most marvelous development in my life, it started like this. For several months now, I’ve noticed that sitting on the fridge next to the desk where Suzie, the features execs’ secretary, works is a toaster. And I had always assumed it was for the sole use of the execs, although to be honest I had never actually see any of them eating a piece of toast. But one day, chancing my arm (or so I thought, as the execs are a clannish bunch and, for example are very proprietorial about their TV so that it is wisest and most certainly diplomatic to ‘ask permission’ when I want to switch it onto a Champions League match. Even if it is switched on, the set is often turned towards their desk so that I can’t see it, and to add injury to insult, the execs will not even glance at the screen for the whole match) I asked Suzie whether there were any restrictions on the use of the toaster or whether it was subject to an open access policy. Oh, she said, use it if you like. And then she added something which strengthened my arm a great deal. ‘It’s not very fast, anyway.’ And there was my chance: I told her that in that case I would donate a new toaster to the department, and there and then I scooted of to Robert Dyas just up the road and bought one.

Don’t run away with the idea that I was in some way being rather generous and community spirited. None of it. As it is, in a sense, ‘my toaster’, I can use it whenever I like and avoid any silly scenes about access had I been using they former toaster ‘as a favour’. But the beauty of it is that had I decided that I should like to eat buttered toast whenever I wanted to and had brought the toaster into work, I would have been regarded as rather eccentric. But now I can eat buttered toast whenever I want. Why doesn’t the chap simply go down to the canteen in the morning and get his toast there? I hear you ask. Simple: the bread they use is bloody awful sliced bread which tastes of nothing very much, and if the ‘butter’ available is actually butter, I’m a Dutchman. Not only does it taste bloody awful but it has an odd artificial yellow colour which would put you off even if the taste hadn’t previously put you off.

So I now go downstairs to the Health Food shop in the former Barker’s building (where most things are ridiculously overpriced, although not everything is), and invest in a loaf of bread. Then it is off to Tesco for a quarter pound of REAL butter (I prefer unsalted) and a jar of ginger preserve. And this bunny is very happy indeed. It is the small things in life which can make it all so pleasant. And a slice or four of hot buttered toast with ginger preserve hits the button every time.

Two pieces of buttered toast rather like the toast I am now regularly enjoying eating at my desk at work. Aren’t some people very, very lucky

Irony’s dead? Yeah, right! Actually, do yourself a favour and admit to yourself you’re just another clone

Well actually, I rather think that irony is very dead. And that is in itself an irony. Because these days everyone seems to take a ‘yeah, right’ attitude to life, they’ve seen it all before, are impressed by nothing and no one. If only they knew it, the joke is well and truly on them and, at best, the vast majority of us are utterly oblivious to the ironies which permeate all our lives.

Take, for example, Apple’s celebrated ‘Think different’ slogan with which it began it’s celebrated march to becoming one of the world’s biggest and richest companies. (By December 2011, its stock has risen 9,000pc since Steve Jobs returned to lead the company in 1997. Not bad for a company which likes to portray itself as the ‘outsider’). Yet to this day there are hundreds of thousands of bright young things worldwide who think they are somehow striking a blow for the counter-culture, the left-field, the individual when they buy an Apple laptop or desktop. (I specify those two because it is only in recent years that Apple has, for many, become more synonymous with other products.) They are, of course, doing nothing of the kind. They are, of course, just one more insignificant member of a particular herd. That their particular herd is smaller than the Microsoft herd is neither here nor there. They honestly believe that buying and using an Apple ‘says’ something about them, that it ‘makes a statement’. Well, actually it does ‘make a statement’, but not one I thik they would very much like to hear.

Then there’s the injunction, beloved by many a disaffected youth, to ‘challenge everything’ (you’ll find many people urged the world to do that, from Karl Marx to George Bernard Shaw). Well, that’s all fine and dandy, but the difficulties start for the bien pensant of this world when we decide to do exactly that and challenge what could be called the new orthodoxies. So I do wonder just how welcome I would be in liberal and freethinking circles if I did decide to challenge everything and challenged the new orthodoxies that ‘man-made carbon dioxide is causing global warming’, that ‘women and men are equal’ or that ‘homosexuals do not deserve equal rights with heterosexuals’ because ‘homosexuality is a mental aberration’. I suspect - no, I don’t suspect at all, I know full well - that I would be seen off pretty sharpish with a flea in my ear. Or what if I challenged the notion that we ‘all have human rights’, that the very idea of ‘human rights’ is just so much bollocks? That, too, would do down like a lead balloon at a Guardian drinks party. But why? All I would be doing was to be following the exhortation to ‘accept nothing, challenge everything’.

At this point a liberal might choose to argue - though he or she would most certainly be ill-advised to do so - that I have missed the point, that, for example, the ‘human rights’ we all possess are in some way unalienable, that they are something very close to a fixed point in the world. And because of their more sanctified status, they are an exception to the rule that ‘everything should be challenged’. They might argue along those lines in defence of the ‘rights of homosexuals’, the ‘equality between men and women’ and even ‘that man-made carbon dioxide is causing global warming’. Really? But didn’t the best thinkers of the 20th century in all kinds of disciplines establish, apparently beyond all doubt, that ‘everything is relative’? That there are no fixed points? And that because there are no ‘fixed points’, there can be no such certainties. Or am I missing something?

It could, I think, be successfully argued that from Soren Kierkegaard, who came up with the notion of ‘subjective truth’, to Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity that the 20th century was the age of relativity. In art this notion that everything is relative and nothing is fixed was given graphic expression by Picasso, in music it led to the abandonment of form, in ethics it led the concept of ‘personal morality’ and the downgrading of ‘social norms’. Well actually, it didn’t: even though the 20th century’s modern mind disliked being bound by convention, it knew that rules, norms, laws, call them what you like kept society intact, that without them society would implode into anarchy. So what we did was talk about it all rather than live it, and - ironically - the one social experiment - the Soviet Union - which purported to be doing most to ‘free mankind’ very, very soon developed into a very nasty totalitarian dictatorship. So what does this all have to do with irony? Well, where do I start?

I once argued - and it became a pretty futile argument, something which I should have realised a lot sooner and thus saved myself a great deal of time - that every age is ‘modern’. The chap (or chappess, I don’t remember who it was any more) disagreed vehemently and even suggested that folk in, say, the Dark Ages knew that they were still in some kind of ‘dark age’ and that better was to come and that the ‘better that was to come’ had now arrived. He or she (or quite possibly it) refused to accept my point that every age regards itself as ‘modern’. Granted, perhaps, that the very notion of ‘modernity’ is reasonably ‘modern’, but that would still have no bearing on how each society, whether in Europe, Asia, Africa or the Americas, saw itself. I don’t even accept that we, here and now in the dying days of 2011, are in any way more ‘self-conscious’. Yet we do seem to believe - I would suggest against all evidence - that the Western world is somehow more enlightened than it was ten, twenty, thirty or 100 years ago. And as part of that new ‘self-awareness’ is the rise of a kind of pseudo irony: these days, it seems, we in the Western world greet a great deal in our lives with a pseudo cynical ‘yeah, right’. We regard ourselves these days as far to clued up, far to sassy, far too ‘aware’ to fall for any of the old hooey which so blighted society in the past.

I would suggest that we are, in fact, anything but clued up, sassy and aware. I shall not suggest that our age is in any way more stupid than all previous ages, but I shall suggest that I firmly believe it is just as bloody stupid as we always were.

We in the West pride ourselves, for example, on being more caring, on ‘valuing community’, in ‘worrying about the environment’, ‘preserving endangered species’. But are we really more caring when almost by the week we are shocked by revelations on the scale of child pornography? Are we really more caring when all we can think of doing with our old folk is stuffing them away in homes and if they show signs of protesting drugging them up to keep them quiet? Do we really ‘value community’ if, as a recent survey highlighted ever fewer of us actually know our neighbours?

Are we really taking to heart the interests of wildlife when we are highly selective in which species we choose to preserve? Ugly species, it would seem, have a far lesser chance of preservation than fucking photogenic snow leopards and cutie pandas. Are we really more enlightened when we fulminate against the dangers to health of smoking and castigate all those who still smoke, but refuse to outlaw smoking completely because we realised we can’t do without the tax we raise on the sale of tobacco and, anyway, the premature deaths of smokers has the benefit of keeping in check what we have to pay in state pensions? Yeah, right.

A few years ago a very entertaining cartoon hit the screens. It was called The Incredibles. In it, a mother consoles her child, who is a bit down in the dumps, by telling him: Everyone is special. To which the lad replies, rather pertinently: That means no one is. Exactly. We can’t have it both ways, but that won’t stop us trying. I am continually amazed at mankind’s ability to bullshit itself.

Who’s going to win: Vlad or the people? Or will it be neither? And don’t bother making plans beyond December 21, 2012 - the Mayans tell us it’s just not worth it

From where I am now sitting in deepest, most peaceful North Cornwall, Lord knows how the problems in Russia are going to be resolved. According to the authorities, 28,000 people turned up for a rally to protest against Vladimir Putin and demanding that he doesn’t stand for election for president next year.

According to the protesters themselves, over 100,000 turned out. According to the BBC, there were also protest rallies in other cities, including as far east as Vladivostok. Some have pointed out that, as in Egypt, the number protesting rather dwindles into insignificance when seen as a proportion of Russia’s total population. Quite possibly, but it can also be pointed with that we don’t know how many of Russia’s total population support the protesters. If each protester on the street represented, say, 20 who stayed at home but support what is going on, the proportion of those opposed to Putin is rather larger. But note the ‘if’. The truth is that we simply don’t know.

What we can be reasonably certain about is that it is not necessarily going to end in peace and harmony: not only are the protesteres demanding a re-run of the parliamentary elections held at the beginning of the month, but they are also demanding that Putin doesn’t stand. The problem is that for all his prominence, Putin is not quite as secure as many would believe. He is there because it is useful to have him there. And if the powers behind the throne believe their cause - which is quite simply making sure it is their fingers in the till rather than anyone else’s - would be better served by offering Putin up as a sacrificial lamb and coming up with a new ‘face’, well it’s bye, bye Vladimir. This is, of course, all speculation.

It will not surprise anyone that the hotline running from Lanke Cottage, Higher Lank, St Breward, North Cornwall to the Kremlin, Moscow, Russia has yet to be installed. But what, it seems, is quite beyond doubt is that a great many people in Russia are getting thoroughly fed up with the corruption which, I understand, permeates every strata of Russian society from the Polish border to the Chinese border. Pertinently, the number protesting is approaching a critical mass and no amount of replacing Tweedledum with Tweedledee will be of any use if the corruption doesn’t end. But who is there who will end the corruption? It will most certainly not be those who are benefiting from it. And given the imprisonment of the former oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky and - more seriously, the death in custody of the lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who was active in fighting corruption, it would seem pretty obvious that whoever is in power is more prepared to play hardball than hold up his hands and say: ‘OK, chaps, you win, we’ll go quietly.’

. . .

Well, who’d have thought it! There’s me worrying that I might not make it to 95 - another heart attack, cancer, diabetes, that kind of thing - when in fact there is definite proof that I shall only make it to 63 years and one month exactly! Why? Well, apparently every 25,800 years, all the planets in our solar system align in one straight line to the Sun and a resulting massive solar flare will incinerate everything man, I mean totally! Like the end of everything as we know it. And if that weren’t enough, the planet Niburu, which has a huge ellipitical cycle, comes close to the Earth every 3,600 years and that is also going to cause shit, man, I mean totally! It’s all there in Sumerian and Mayan history, dude, and these ancient people knew what they were about!

Actually, we don’t have to look to ever so wise ancient folk to know that, if not about to end, the world is going to go through something of a sticky patch and that things might very well look just a tad iffy on December 21, 2012. Well, I say ‘world’, but let’s leave South America and rather large parts of the Far East out of this, because it would seem all the crap that’s going down has more to do with the Middle East, Europe and the U.S. Of all the worrying trends, it would seem that what is developing in the Middle East has the greatest potential for nonsense we could well do without.

After all the whistling and cheering which heralded the ‘Arab Spring’ in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, it isn’t quite going to plan. It was long known that the Egyptian army had substantial business interests and it should have come as no surprise that they weren’t going to relinquish them without a fight. It was far easier to throw President Mubarak to the wolves, promise elections and then carry on with business usual. And the several thousands demonstrating in Tahrir Square shouldn’t, apparently, cheer up us liberally minded folk too much. In a country of more than 80 million, many of whom are devout muslims, they are an insignificant number, and the vast majority of Egyptians, I read, are by nature quite conservative and simply want peace and a stable life. And that is something many believe the Muslim Brotherhood will bring them.

So until the elections, the Brothers are wisely keeping their heads down, associating themselves with neither the army strongmen nor the libertarian Tahrir Square rabble, and when the time is ripe, they can portray themselves as ‘the alternative to it all’. Further south is all the pushing and pulling which is going on in Syria and now Iraq. Actually, I feel rather ashamed of myself for adopting such a flippant tone - it isn’t quite as silly if you actually live there. I’m not expert on Middle Eastern affairs (to put it mildly) but I do wonder whether at heart there won’t eventually be a stand-off between Sunni and Shiite muslims.

Most certainly the major rivalry in the Middle East is between Shiite Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia, and both have their client states, not least Iraq whose Nouri Al Maliki many believe is Iran’s placeman. He denies it. But then he would, wouldn’t he. Iraq’s fugitive vice President Tareq Al-Hashimi claims that a recent car bombing in Iraq were, in fact, the work of the country’s own security forces and designed to discredit Iraq’s Sunnis. A similar claim is made by the opposition in Syria about two recent car bombings in Damascus.
So what with young Vlad’s problems in Russia - or is that Russia’s problems with young Vlad? - it should be a fascinating New Year. As the old Chinese curse runs: May you live in interesting times.