A schlepp and a half to a wedding in Hamburg, one which some might take in their stride. Me, I’d rather not too often, thank you very much. Too many early mornings

It was off to Germany last Wednesday, for my youngest nephew’s wedding, and here are a few of the piccies I took. The journey was a tad tortuous: after waking at 1.30am and not sleeping any more till I got up, it was off to Newquay – ‘Cornwall’ Airport’ and I don’t know why I’m sneering so forgive me please, Cornwall, but it is tiny, tiny, tiny – for a flight to Manchester – bigger by a factor of about 1,000 if not more – then a three-hour wait, before catching a plane to Amsterdam in The Netherlands – bigger by a factor of about 10,000 if not more.

Then after queueing for well over an hour to get through passport control – thanks, Brexit – caught a train for a three and a half hour journey to the Dutch-German border where my sister lives. Arrived at just for 11pm knackered (a good old British expression which intends to convey ‘totally fucked’).

At least I got a day off travelling, except that from the Dutch border we were due in Hamburg for 8.3oam so it was up at 5.30am and yet again I hardly slept. What is it with me and travelling. Following the register office ceremony, I slipped off as soon as I decently could from a small gathering for a glass or ten of Sekt in my nephew’s flat to get to a bed as soon as possible, if not sooner.

The wedding itself was the following afternoon at 2am, though one of those new non-religious ceremonies, followed by more Sekt before we all took off by ferry – Hamburg is, I’m sure you know a port, so ships, boats and ferries are a part of daily life – for the wedding feast. Pretty knackered by this time, I like my Sekt, but at least I had only one glass of wine that night.

As luck would have it, the venue was just a five-minute walk where I and my other nephew and nieces were staying with their families, so I was back in bed by 8.30pm in time for the Ireland v Scotland game.

Slept rather better that night, but it was another early start, up at 6.15am to catch a ferry ride to the nearest S-Bahn station to get to Hamburg Airport, not quite as big but still about 1,000 bigger than Newquay.

From Hamburg it was off to Dublin, got there by 11am, then another five-hour wait for the last leg back to Newquay. Home by 5.30pm, and a good night’s sleep. A hell of a schlepp altogether and not one I want to repeat for some time. Mind, my son (based in Bolivia) is knocking around the Middle East at the moment, but then he is bloody 49 years younger than me.

Oh, and a few photos, the last one taken on Sunday morning while I was waiting for my ferry to town.

Pip, pip.

PS The seven little ones, I suppose they might be called my grand-nephews and grand-nieces (though, frankly, I am not really in the picture) had the time of their lives, running riot everywhere, as children should always do. The oldest is five and the youngest two just two.

Me, the complete bastard (and that is not intended as some kind of ironic joke)

Today, on August 29, 1976, thus 47 years ago, I did one of the most selfish things I’ve ever done and about which to this day I feel ashamed.

I was working in the Lincolnshire Chronicle, based in Lincoln – I mention that because its owners, the then Lincolnshire Standard Group, had several papers in different towns and cities in Lincolnshire, including the Lincolnshire Standard which I think became the Boston Standard, the Louth Chronicle, the Sleaford Standard, the Skegness Standard, the Grantham Journal and the Horncastle News; I might be wrong on these, but none now exist.

I had got to know a young girl of 17 – was then 26 – and I got her pregnant. I can’t remember us ‘going out’ for long or even for more than one date. But I got her pregnant. I remember two things when she told me she was pregant: in more or less one and the same breath she said ‘I’m pregnant’ and ‘I’m going to have an abortion’.

The first thing I remembered was being immensely grateful that she had decided to have an abortion and that, crucially, brave old me would not be called upon to make a decision about anything either way.

Secondly, I became aware of a vague feeling that I wasn’t all that keen on abortion. In a sense I’m still not, but I shall say straight out that on the question of ‘pro-choice/pro-life’ I am firmly in the pro-choice camp. This had nothing to do with being brought up a Roman Catholic or anything of that kind for I had long been ‘lapsed’ (or as I see it no longer in thrall). It was just that I did not feel comfortable with the ending of life.

I’m familiar with the arguments pro and con, and frankly I can find fault with both lines of argument. But for me, at the end of the day, a woman has responsibility for and control over her body and thus it is and must always be her choice as to how to proceed.

Incidentally, I also believe that contraception should be available to all and rather dislike the idea a few women seem to have that they can ignore conventional methods of contraception because, hey, there’s always the get-out of having an abortion. However, here is not the place to debate it all.

At the time I was ‘going out with a girl’ from near Henley-on-Thames where I had grown up and where my parents lived. And her birthday was on August 29. The girl I got pregnant had arranged having the abortion herself.

It was to be in Leamington Spa where the British Pregnancy Advisory Service undertook them (I suppose rather giving the lie to being an ‘advisory service’). The operation was also to be on August 29.

Before she had made the arrangement, Annette and I had agreed that I should travel south from Lincoln to Henley to take her out for her birthday. The girl I had made pregnant – whose name I was once able to remember, but can no longer do so – was due to take a train to Leamington, have the pregnancy terminated, then take a train back to Lincoln.

She asked only one thing: would I meet her at Lincoln station when she came back. I said, no I wouldn’t.

I can’t remember whether or not I told here what my plans for that weekend were and being an unthinking, callous cunt I wouldn’t be surprised if I did. But it must have been awful for her.

And to this day every day since, on August 29, I remember my selfishness and callousness, and shudder.

NB That was in 1976. Ten years later I was working as a sub-editor on the South Wales Echo in Cardiff and doing a lot of photography. Relevant to what I write above is this picture of pro-choice protesters and pro-life arrivees at an anti-abortion meeting.

Also relevant is a remark made a few months ago on the radio when the US Republican-heavy Supreme Court made is updated ruling on Roe v Wade allowing states to decide for themselves whether abortion should be legal or not:

They won’t be banning abortion, they will only be banning legal abortion.

That sums it up: women in need – or for whatever reason – who have no recourse to a safe abortion will simply be forced to got to a ‘backstreet’ abortionist, with all the dangers that brings

OFFICIAL Private Eye is slowing dying of respectability: a nation mourns. A warning to all – never, but never, become ‘respectable’

WARNING! THIS ENTRY MIGHT DISTRESS READERS WHO
PRIDE THEMSELVES ON ‘BEING ENLIGHTENED’, ‘HAVING
A SENSE OF HUMOUR’ AND FOR WHOM ‘BEING PART OF
THE CROWD’ IS IMPORTANT.

THIS entry might, and most probably will, mean very little to nothing to most readers from outside the United Kingdom. But - well, OK, fair enough. It’s not my probably but yours, frankly.

Anyone interested in what ‘Private Eye’ might is very welcome pull their finger out (as we say in Britain) and do a bit of digging. Hint: it’s not published by the Vatican.

My reason for publishing it on my blog? I’ve published so very little, many of you might be forgetting what a fabulous guy I am. I really can’t think of a better reason.

Anyone agree with me that under Ian Hislop the Eye had become increasingly dreary, unfunny and rather prim and - whisper it - fucking bloody boring? Hislop’s been there now since 1774 and it shows.

The cartoons rarely raise a laugh (unlike one of my favourites from some years ago: picture a young mustachioed German squaddie standing to attention in a WWI trench while his superior officer informs and even high-ranking officer ‘Sir, the corporal here has a great idea for a sequel’).

Now? Well, as I pointed out a few weeks ago one cartoon about a supposed foreign football player coming to the Premier League had been recycled - I suspect inadvertently - from an earlier PE cartoon whose caption then ran: ‘Ebola coming to Europe? Who’s signed him then?’

I wrote to Lord Gnome about it, but there were, it seemed, too many other and better letters that demanded to be published and mine didn’t make the cut. Nor have several letters I’ve written to the good Lord to tell us in his

‘Number Crunching’ feature how much he rakes in every year - PE salary, HIGNFY, BBC TV documentaries and Radio 4 programmes. His lordship is a tad shy about telling us.

OK, there’s no denying the Eye does a lot of reporting on and uncovering skullduggery in government, in our local authorities, in the City etc, but it’s all a little earnest, all a little too worthy, all a little too ‘well done, Hislop! You’ve won the Founder’s Prize for Zeal, Integrity and Hard Work! Keep it up, lad!’

The Street of Shame was once somewhere where you - we - read about the drunken and appalling (and often funny) shenanigans of folk you knew, almost knew, had heard of, or who were known by people you knew - Fleet Street was and - now metaphorically - is quite narrow These days The Street of Shame is all about ‘how awful and hypocritical and horrid our press barons are!’

Fair enough, but being reminded very fortnight that water is wet doesn’t much do it for me. I know it’s wet, as do all other Eye readers - they were told two weeks ago, and two weeks before that, and a fortnight before that.

Ironically, given that a vital member of ‘the Establishment’ is the anti-Establishment figure, the Eye is very much ‘the Establishment’. I told Lord Gnome that in my letter and reminded him that Punch, once the scourge of the nation in 19th-century Britain eventually died of respectability.

Arise, Sir Ian for ‘services to satire’. The trouble is that in cosy Old Blighty ‘satire’ is nothing more dangerous than being rude to folk. The worst Hislop will face is being snubbed in the Groucho. In Russia, China, Singapore, Zimbabwe, Iran and rather too many other countries engaging in satire can cost earn you a decade or more in jail and if you are unlucky lose you your life.

OK, PE was founded but a gang of privileged public school boys but frankly (though I’m sure we all now realise that ‘background’, ‘heritage’, colour, class, religion and to which side you dress have no bearing on you a person *).

And going by the ads at the front and rear of the mag in some ways not much has changed - ‘No Ordinary Reading Light’ - ergonomically designed on the outside, inside it’s one of the most advance reading lights in the world’ And yours for just £249.99 for the HD Table Light or £299.99 for the Floor Light!

What’s wrong with Argos’ Home Morlie Floor Lamp - Matt Black , yours for just £30? Nothing, except it doesn’t impress Jules and Simon next door half as much as telling them you’ve blown £249.99 on an ergonomically designed most advance light.

Now I feel a headache coming on and must go and lie down with a soothing glass of Campari and tonic.

* I shall though, admit, that I am still defeated by the undeniably true statistic that a disproportionately high number of men and women in our ‘top jobs’ were privately educated compared to the number who were not. And there has to be a reason (though it was fuck all use for me, I have to add).

Well, hello Singapore, so unexpected!

Hello Singapore!

Someone there – or perhaps 3,590 odd people there – like me. At at least that’s what the stats tell me. It could of course be just one person visiting my blog 3,590 in the past seven days, in which case seek help.

 

Or it could be a bot of some kind, though why a bot would think it worthwhile to visit my blog I cannot think.

Oh, well.

If the visitors are individuals and you are reading this, the latest instalment of my bollocks: Hi, and have a nice day. And maybe get in touch and tell me how and why you found this blog, why you are coming back (that is assuming you are not a bot. Bots, don’t bother).

Oh, and if you have come across references to ‘My Hemingway bollocks’, I am just giving the print version one last read-through before getting Amazon KDP to print it up. Here’s the cover, front (left in image) and back.

Bugger Trump, he is now in many ways the sideshow. It is the dangers to US democracy which must now be considered (though Trump set the ball rolling)

In the past I have often joked about my age, ‘humorously’ exaggerating it. I suspect that was more a kind of double-bluff, in some ways feeling a little uncomfortable with growing older – turning 60, then 65, then 70 – but trying to make out I wasn’t. Or that, at least might be an armchair trick cyclist’s analysis.

I am, in fact, 73 – and shall turn 74 on November 21 later in the year – and I can confirm that getting older is not all downside. You do, oddly, feel a little happier with yourself, you seem to worry a little less, at least you worry less about trivialities.

Those downsides are there, though: your body slowly gives way, it aches more, your hearing goes, for a guy peeing takes longer (every night the very last thing I do is have a pee, even if I don’t feel I need one, and I rarely wake in the night and never to have a pee). Woman could list their own downsides – the menopause, bones becoming brittle and so on.

But both men and women will confirm that one facet of getting older is that it becomes ever rarer that you come across a novelty, are told something you had never heard before, find yourself in a situation which is new to you (in which the advantage is that you are not quite at a loss as to how to handle it as once you might have been). Oh, and my son assures me that I am a lot ‘calmer’ since I retired five years ago.

In short, I do believe that the phrase plus ça change, c’est plus la même chose (the more things change, the more they stay the same). But I am, obviously, speaking from the perspective of a man looking back over the past 73 years (or rather over the last 50 years.

I doubt I very much took an interest in ‘life’ and her manifestations when I was still attached to my mother’s breast or later at college where this dilettante was far, far, far more concerned with growing his hair long, chasing still all-too-elusive nookie and scoring dope (which in those days was cannabis not heroin).

Thus as I was born in 1949, I had no ‘direct’ experience of the rise of fascism in Germany, Italy and Spain in the early decades of the 20th century, the consequences of the Russian revolution, the General Strike in Britain and the Great Depression in the US. If there were again to be a rise of fascism – a real one, not a development putting assorted readers of the West’s liberal press into a tizzy – it would be one of the few things I had not before experienced.

Getting older, as it is I get rather bored when I hear trotted out on the radio (I am more of a radio listener than a TV viewer) yet again phrases such as ‘today’s ever faster lifestyle’, ‘an unprecedented rise in house prices’, ‘the ever-greater pressures of modern life’, ‘the increasing pressures on today’s young people’ and so on.

I have heard those and similar phrases trotted out for the past 50 years, and I do wonder how ‘fast’ a lifestyle must be by now as it has been ‘ever faster’ for so long, at what point the ‘pressures of modern life’ will become so intolerable that en masse throw ourselves off Beachy Head (or wherever good Americans go to top themselves). My point is that at the end of the day ‘very little changes’.

However, I am now experiencing a novel situation which is not trivial and might become a worry.

It is taking place in both the US and the UK, where one Donald Trump and ‘Boris’ Johnson are behaving in a way which could – I’ll say ‘could’ because I dislike hyperbole and sensationalism – have quite a deep effect on the democracies of those two countries. Both men are, ironically perhaps almost inadvertently, doing quite a bit of damage to the ‘trust’ of ‘the people’ in their democratic institutions.

In the US – and this is certainly not news – Trump has claimed and still is claiming that the 2020 presidential election was rigged to ensure he would not be re-elected as US president. It was, he says, ‘stolen’ from him.

I shan’t and don’t want here go into the details of his claims and the details of why they are denied, because for what I am writing here the claims and denials are not relevant. What is relevant is that a substantial number of US voters – and I am talking of several million US voters – who believe him and convinced that what he says is true.

Over the past few months Trump has found himself in legal trouble of different kinds and most recently faces federal charges which carry a jail sentence if he is found guilty of them. But he is insisting – and those millions also believe him on this claim – that it is all simply an establishment plot to neutralise him and ensure he cannot regain the US presidency.

Yet Trump is actually irrelevant; and equally irrelevant is whether what he is claiming is true or not. If it were true it would be very, very serious but for any number of reasons, not least that a conspiracy of that scale would be impossible to organise, I think we can be certain it is not true.

What is relevant – and potentially very worrying – is those several million Americans who now believe that their system has become corrupted, quite possibly beyond repair. And if that is the case, they will conclude that all bets are off: if the other side is not playing by the rules, why should they?

If the other side can drive a coach and four through the conventions which govern their democracy, why shouldn’t they? In sum, they no longer trust their democracy, and thinking along those lines will have encouraged many to invade Congress on January 6, 2021.

This development is new in my life, in the 50-odd years I have been aware of ‘grown-ups’ and the shenanigans they can get up to. And as the global financial crisis of 2008 reminded us ’trust’ is not only a crucial part of our dealings with one another, but very, very fragile. Once it has been damaged and lost, it is very hard to re-establish.

Here in Britain our own Trump lite, Boris Johnson, is now involving himself in similar matters, though at the outset I must concede that he does not pose ‘a danger’. In fact, although both Trump and Johnson are buffoons, Trump is a dangerous buffoon, but Johnson is pretty much a joke.

Yet again he is in a sense also irrelevant: it is the effect and consequence of his buffoonery which are relevant, though democracy and its institutions are in no danger of breaking down here in cosy Old Blighty (so cosy, in fact, where a copper will run off and fetch you a glass of water if you ask nicely).

Things don’t look quite as rosy in the US. For one thing consider the numbers: those who might decide, if and when, to think ‘to hell with our democracy’ are in their millions. And many of them are not averse to resorting to violence and, legitimately, carry weapons.

I am not being alarmist and declaring ‘woe is us!’ I am merely pointing out that the US might – might – find itself in very uncharted waters in 2024 at the next presidential election.

If Trump is the GOP candidate and loses, how will those millions react if he again insists he had won but ‘they’, the establishment, have again stolen the election? And if he wins and is re-elected US president – and given his previous very high-handed behaviour exercising ‘his presidential powers’ – how will the his opponents react?

That last point is also worth considering: so far it has been Trump supporters and those ‘on the right’ who have declared themselves ready to give democracy and its institutions the finger (in Britain ‘two fingers’ shaped like a V).

But what if a sizeable number of Democrats, dismayed that Trump is back as president, decide that what is good for the goose is good for the gander and also embark on measures they would previously have believed to be beyond the pale?

That is merely a question, and I concede again to straying just a little too close to alarmism. But my central point stands: the US might find itself in a situation it has rarely found itself in. One of the last times one side was at odds with the other, they went to war for four years.

Thus mentioning ‘civil war’ is again, perhaps, straying too close to alarmism. But on many issues the various US states are now further apart than they have been for many years, and that is something novel in my 73 years.

Two songs, and apology and and another explanation . . . (You surely can't get enough of those)

First of all there these, two short videos accompanying tunes I’ve produced (‘composed’ sounds just a tad too hi-falutin’).

Here’s the first . . .

They Want My Money (And Soon They’ll Want My Soul)

And here’s the second, though no vocals this time because I’m still not as confident about my singing as I might be.

I’ve Had Enough (So Let’s Live)

I’ve produced quite a more few tunes over these past three or four years, some with vocals, most not, and if you want to listen to more you can do so here on Soundcloud (there are now bloody 96 tracks – I checked while getting the URL and that surprised me, I have to say).

Just dip in anywhere if you fancy it, they are in a variety of different styles and, frankly, it is nice for a song to be heard (or a book to be read or a video or photograph to be viewed, none of which much goes on with the stuff I produced, though that does give me the chance yet again – hope never dies – to plug not just my ‘Hemingway bollocks’, but a novel (Love: A Fiction – and if you do check it out, please remember the wise advice never to judge a book by it’s cover) and three volumes each of short stories (Vol One, Vol Two, Vol Three and Vol Four) and and three volumes of verse (Vol One, Vol Two and Vol Three).

. . .

When I started keeping this blog more than 14 years ago, I was reasonably regular in posting entries. The first entry was on February 6, 2009, although, in fact, I had already started a blog a week or two earlier, then somehow fucked it up technically and lost it trying to sort it out, so I had to start again.

I wrote about everything that took my fancy, past girlfriends, cars I’ve owned, this, that and t’other and, er, my take on ‘world affairs’.

The quote marks are necessary as I basically know as little about ‘world affairs’ as you and your dog (possibly even less than your dog, in fact), but by the time I started this blog, I had by then adopted my brother’s ruse of appearing ‘well-informed’.

This is far, far simpler than you might think and demands very little: it consists of reading the Economist regularly. Then – before I forget it all again – that I garner is recycled into a ‘commentary’ on [whatever].

Try it – it works a treat, though tread carefully: the degree of intellectual showing off you indulge in must be carefully gauged to impress whoever it is you are talking to.

Too much such showing off will have you marked down as an arrogant know-all, quite the opposite impression you would be hoping to leave.

As almost always, less means more: if you simply hint at being rather well-informed, the other party will do most of the work and imagine you are simply being modest and, crucially, know far more than you are letting on.

. . .

I eventually rumbled my brother and decided to adopt the ruse after for many year being quietly impressed by, and not a little envious about, his admirably wide knowledge of world affairs.

One day he might announce, apropos nothing very obvious: ‘Keep an eye on Ecuador – it might well get very sticky there politically.’

So far so – well, not all that extraordinary. But then he would flesh out his knowledge: ‘And it could all get very, very silly – it began with indigenous people protesting about new bicycle laws.’

Me: ‘What?’

My brother: ‘Yes, very silly indeed. So far 120 people have died and it looks like it might get worse.’

And thus one older brother – by nine years – was in impressed.

This went on for several years until one day – I rather felt that as middle-class chap in his mid-30s who was nominally ‘a journalist’ I really should be ‘better informed’ – I started reading the Economist, too. And it became quite clear exactly why my brother was so ‘well-informed’.

‘I see Iceland has got some very interesting ideas on what to do with glaciers. Apparently . . .’ Yes, I knew, because I had also read the story in the Economist. And being the honest sort . . .

NB NEVER trust anyone who declares he or she is ‘honest’ – it’s the surest sign they are anything but

. . . I can here admit that my ‘knowledge of world affairs’, my ‘analyses’ are simply a judicious rehashing I what I have scavenged over the past few weeks when it came to writing an entry.

. . .

Entries have been getting fewer and farther apart [‘further’? – subs please check] in recent months and for a very good reason: there are several topics I should like to write about, but they need rather more careful thought before I put pen to paper (i.e. fingers to keyboard). And, frankly, I have neither sufficient care, nor am I sufficiently thoughtful to do those topics justice.

Here’s an example: ‘women’, the role ‘of women’, the shit that women are still subjected to (in the past not least by me) and so on.

My problem is that I shan’t be writing anything extraordinary or new: I would merely be repeating what in recent years has been written and said many times, given that finally the world is becoming more alert to the shit deal women can still get. For example, believe it or not quite often women are still paid less for doing the same job as a man.

So what’s the dilemma, sunny Jim? Well, it’s this: I do not – ever – want to be accused of ‘virtue signalling’ or even in some sense ‘trendy’.

As it is I’ve found, oddly for a man within complaining distance of his dotage, that I’m drifting ever so slowly more to the left: the convention / cliche / tradition / expectation / insistence – take your pick of those and any others that occur to you as they all, in a sense, are aspects of the same thing – is that we old farts (or the term I came across some years ago which I like, although it is distinctly unkind, ‘coffin dodgers) are supposed to become more reactionary and by the age of 70 certainly well into ‘bah humbug’ country.

The thing is I’m not (or at least I don’t seem to be). On the contrary, I seem for some reason or another to be becoming what Daily Telegraph coffin dodgers regard as ‘more pinko’ by the month. And of the many inequities and unfair arrangements, I’ve been becoming more and more aware over these past ten years, the ‘lot’ of women is most certainly one.

Most reading this are – and bloody well should be – aware of the #MeToo movement.

. . .

I began writing this entry eight days ago sitting in the cafeteria of the Billi extension of Bordeaux-Merignac airport, and I haven’t exactly lost my thread – I remember quite well the points I wanted to make – but I have somehow in this occasion lost some of the steam necessary to write it. And without that steam it might begin to sound a little forced.

So I shall sign off here and expect you all this instant to hare off to Soundcloud to admire the ‘toons’ and songs I have posted there.

Pip, pip.

An explanation . . . and let’s hear it for the Sun wot woz

For two days I had adapted my main blog title pic to wish everyone a Happy New Year for 2023. Well, I wish I hadn’t, although it’s not as grave as it was an hour or two ago.

This morning I decided to replace the adapted picture with the original. The trouble was I couldn’t find the original. I seemed think I knew where it was, but . . .

What the hell, I thought, just stick another piccy there instead. Well, that’s what I have done, and in the 13 years since I have been running this blog, it will be perhaps the fourth or fifth time I have replaced the picture. But the trouble is I do it so rarely, I have to learn afresh how to do it.

I still don’t really know, but I have finally managed it and pretty much replicated what was there before. That doesn’t matter very much, except that somehow I had introduced elements which were bloody awful – for example, the dateline at the top and the ‘labels’ at the bottom suddenly had a black background, as in tabloid speak a WOB – white on black.

And I didn’t want it. (Actually, for some reason it was not black but a very, very, very dark blue, so more or less black. But who’s counting?)

For example, here’s headline which actually appeared in the Sun (the ‘soaraway Sun!’) a decade or two ago when the Sun was still a cracking tabloid which made you laugh and smile every day, not the piss-poor imitation of a tabloid it has become.

The story was about ‘research’ which had come the Sun’s way – it’s amazing the kind of research newspapers can dig up – that drinking alcohol has a deleterious effect on the size of your todger. Who knows, it might even be true.

But anyway, panic now over and the appearance of this blog is pretty much back to acceptable.

Pip, pip.

NB I have texted a former colleague who used to work for the Sun about the the headline and whether the spelling is correct, but the message is taking and age to go (I am on an iPhone, he’s seems to be on Android) so I’ll go with the spelling above for now.

Welcome to the Age of Dunces (and hold on to your hats!) Note to both Putin and Xi: remember this from Talleyrand – C’est pire qu’un crime, c’est une faute

A few years ago, I posted my ‘New Year’s Message’. Well, if it’s good enough for the sodding Pope, the then Queen (she croaked last year), our Presidents, Prime Ministers, CEOs and the chap in charge of the car pool at the depot, it’s good enough for me. So I shall do it again, but I shan’t give you the usual blather (well, try not to) as there will be enough of that for the next 365 days.

Yes, ‘things will be tough’, but then when weren’t they? And let’s face it, not only will they be far tougher for some than others but, crucially, one man’s ‘tough’ is another man’s ‘well, aren’t some the lucky ones?’

Years ago when lived in London, I went to the theatre once or twice, and at Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square I saw Six Degrees Of Separation, an entertaining enough play. I mention it because I seemed to remember one line which sums up well the discrepancy in our many different lives.

But as it turns out, I don’t. I’ve just looked up the script of the play and can’t find the line or variations of it anywhere. But it’s still a good line, and my memory of it runs like this: a character complains of ‘living on the breadline’, to which another character replies

We’re all on the breadline but start from a different base.

Quite.

Just as for some ‘a tragedy’ is leaving the house without their smartphone - horror! - or possibly even worse, discovering just as they are leaving that they have forgotten to charge it overnight!, for others tragedy is rather closer to what might be described as ‘true tragedy’.

For many in Ukraine, their lives are in some ways tragic: they were attacked without cause by Russia and the onslaught continues, and there seems no end to it. What makes it all the worse is that if - if - Putin’s spurious ‘justification’ - that he is ‘protecting’ Russia and that, anyway, Ukraine is an ‘artificial state’ and, in fact, part of Russia - held any water, he is still on a hiding to nothing.

At present his ‘military operation’ has been so piss-poor that tens of thousands of Russian troops have been killed, he has not gained any territory and what support he might have had from men and women living in the Donetsk area will vanishing as they see their homes and communities reduced to rubble and many have been murdered.

Even if by some fluke his troops do manage to ‘conquer’ Ukraine, how on earth does Putin think Russia can hold on to it? That he knows he is on to a loser is obvious from the hints he’s making about ‘peace’ talks. He is trying to spin the situation into it seeming that the Ukrainians are unwilling to negotiate and a barrier to a ceasefire and ‘peace’. Well, not quite, Vlad laddie.

Definite demands from Ukraine, the sine qua non of all negotiation, will be that all Russian troops are withdrawn from all Ukrainian territory and that Russia makes full reparation for the damage it has caused and - though quite who do you make ‘reparation’ for human life? - for the deaths it has been responsible for.

There will certainly be pressure on Ukraine and her president Volodymyr Zelenskyy to ‘compromise’ to ensure the war ends as soon as possible, but it is almost impossible to see how Ukraine might ‘compromise’: the demands outlined above are surely the very, very least Russia must comply with.

But this is politics: the West has been surprisingly supportive of Ukraine and after Putin shut off supplies of the gas Russia supplies Europe with, energy bills have shot up. So far there has been little dissent, but there is some dissent.

Why, some right-wing politicos in Europe and, crucially, the US are asking, are we making this sacrifice? Well, actually the answer is obvious but, ironically, cannot be articulated: we are doing our very best to limit Russia’s power and influence and given the thuggish nature of its leaders in the past, both immediate and distant, that seems like a sensible objective.

The problem is we can’t spell out that objective because that would play right into Putin’s hands: he contends that the US and the West are ‘out to get Russia, to destroy the country’.

That his contention doesn’t hold water for a second is neither here nor there: all he need to is convince the Russian people those are the West’s intentions and they will gather behind him to support him. Perception is all.

‘His contention doesn’t hold water?’ I hear you asking. How do you work that out? Well, it is remarkably straightforward. The age of empires has long passed.

And even in that age the objective was not to hold land and ‘be boss’ just to hold land and ‘be boss’: the whole point was to ensure access to the resources of those lands - cheaply - and, latterly, to turn them into ‘markets’ for goods produced by the relevant imperial power.

Certainly, there were some imperialists who were dazzled by the ‘prestige’ of ‘being the boss’, but such folk were - in the eyes of business and commerce - simpletons. A comparatively recent example would be Germany Kaiser Wilhelm II: arguably he had both a chip on his shoulder and wasn’t very bright.

He was certainly thought by some to have a certain ‘quick’ intelligence but in may book he is a prime example of how ‘intelligent’ people are often quite stupid.

When evaluating someone’s ‘intelligence’ - at the end of the day a concept so vague as to mean little - it might help if we took a far broader view of their personality and behaviour and the results of their actions. Seen that way Wilhelm II was rather thick.

Envious of the British empire ‘ruled’ by his grandmother Queen Victoria and then his cousin King Edward VII, he believed Germany should also have an empire and set about trying to acquire one in East Africa and South-West Africa. He didn’t get very far.

One of Germany’s main strengths was its deeply cynical but very effective chancellor Otto von Bismarck. Yet Bismarck was also a pragmatist: he certainly wanted Germany to thrive and sit at the top table but only if the price was right. He was against starting wars simply for the sake of starting wars and gaining ‘prestige’. Wilhelm II was.

Bismarck lasted for 12 years after Wilhelm II’s accession as Kaiser, but was finally forced to resign. Arguably, that’s when - in 1890 - the process leading to World War I (‘The Great War’) which began 24 years later began. Bismarck would not have let it happen (though by then he would have been 99 and most probably would long have been dead).

. . .

Humankind has been said to be distinguished not by its ability to ‘be rational’ but by its tendency often to ‘behave irrationally’. Putin has certainly behaved irrationally by invading Ukraine (and is now paying the price). And his contention that the West is out to destroy Russia - which I’m not too sure he even believes himself - is also irrational.

The US and the West want stability and that is what the people of its nations want it to provide. I would bet my bottom rouble that is also what the vast majority of Russians want: a quiet, peaceful life.

The US and the West are not interested in acquiring territory. All they want to acquire is more markets and the various missteps of history have shown us that in the 21st century peace and stability ensure that markets grow. Wars don't (except for the Daddy Warbucks of all nationalities).

Ideally we would want a Russia that is prosperous enough to buy all the shite we want to sell it. And frankly who cares whether Russia is a ‘liberal democracy’ with ‘free and fair elections’ or run by a corrupt thug? However, what business does care about is ‘the rule of law’, but this is purely of pragmatic reasons not ethical ones.

‘The rule of law’ and a decent justice system (though there is more to the rule of law than just its justice system) will make it safer to invest in Russia and do business there. And if there is contractual disagreement, a civil court system business can trust is worth its weight in gold. And Russia most certainly does not have that.

But what Russia did have, however flawed it seems in the eyes of the West (which, er, is certainly not perfect) is preferable to the situation there is now. Frankly, Putin doesn’t need to fear the US and the West are out to ‘destroy Russia’. He is doing a fine job all on his own.

As for his gripe that Nato is expanding, well by invading Ukraine and tacitly threatening its other neighbouring countries, the bright little spark has ensured exactly that is now happening with several previously neutral countries knocking on the door and asking to be let in. Clever Putin, once suspected of being ‘a master strategist’, is another example how ‘intelligent’ people can often be remarkably stupid. The first Dunce’s Cap to you, Mr Putin.

. . .

Another candidate for the Dunce’s Cap is one Xi Jinping. And he, too, is proving he has, to the surprise of many, feet of clay. Perhaps he first piece of stupidity was to get himself to be declared - more or less - ‘boss of China for life’ last October.

I have just spent a few minutes trying to establish what his official ‘job’ is now, but didn’t get far. Whether he is ‘boss of China’ by being head honcho of the Chinese Communist Party, as China’s president or chairman of the Central Military Commission is neither here nor there: Xi now calls the shots.

And China is not like, say, Britain where a ‘vote of no confidence’ might trigger the Prime Minister’s resignation. More so than before - and it might be argued that in the decades leading to Xi’s accession China has seen ‘a more liberal’ totalitarian state - Xi rules by fear. But 2023 might see him come unstuck, though I for one am not keeping my fingers crossed given the disruption that might cause.

Like pretty much everywhere else, if the people are content they are apt to give you no trouble. The students and idealists and revolutionaries might bang on about principles and free elections and I don’t know what else, but all other things being equal of folk have a reasonably trouble-free life - even if their neighbours don’t - they are apt not to rock the boat.

Xi’s stupidity consists of seemingly to ignore that simple truth. Whether or not covid originated in a laboratory in Wuhan, China, or not is also neither here nor there. Xi’s immediate response was for ‘zero-covid’ - a total lockdown.

What is crucial is that it wasn’t, for a while, the discontent of the locked-down people that was damaging but the impact it had on the economy. Some factories were either forced to shut or their workers were locked in at the factory and both worked and lived there.

The impact on the economy gradually became apparent, and then so did the people’s discontent so that a few weeks ago there were street protests. There are, it seems, quite a few street protests in Chinese and we in the West don’t much hear of them.

They were almost all a bout local issues and thus of little impact nationwide. But these protests were different: there were calls for Xi to go, and such public lèse-majesté was new. More than that, despite the stranglehold on the internet in China word got around fast.

What did stupid Xi do? Overnight he abolished all lockdown restrictions - and covid is now spreading like wildfire. The danger to the rest of the world, which broadly has conquered the pandemic, is that covid, and possibly new strains, will go global and we shall be back to square one. Yippee!

Stupid Xi is also demonstrating quite how inept - and irrational - he is by ratcheting up the tensions with Taiwan. This is a throwback to the ‘age of empires’. China has long insisted that Taiwan is not an independent state but a rogue province. Fair enough, and who cares, as long was the situation remains peaceful.

Xi, though, has a bee in his bonnet - think silly old Kaiser Wilhelm II - that Taiwan must be re-incorporated into China. And he has indicated that he intends doing so sooner rather than later. Why? Well, ask Xi. Who knows?

This is bad news all round, not just for that neck of the Far Eastern world (obviously seen from a narrow Western perspective - for China Europe is the Far Western world) but for all of us. If we think covid has damaged the global economy, consider what war between China and Taiwan will mean. And it might - or might not - involve the US.

Welcome to 2023 and what might be called the Age of Dunces.

Dreams (and dreaming, one of my favourite pastimes)

Several years ago, in December 2017 I think, my brother and I joined my sister and German brother-in-law and about 90 other Germans – well, at least three coachloads, although the coaches were all independent – for a week-long tour of Morocco.

It was very cheap, about €120 including flights from German (though I had to fly to Düsseldorf from London which added to my cost) and halfway through the trip it dawned on me why it was so cheap, though I should stress it was ‘cheap’ only in terms of the overall cost. The hotels we stayed in were certainly not cheap in any way. and breakfast and supper were included at every hotel.

It wasn’t quite what I was expecting, however. First of all we spent in inordinate amount of time on the sodding coach, being driven – I can’t remember in which order – from Marrakesh to Rabat to Fes to Casablanca and these cities are quite a distance away.

Yes, we were shown the sights but the purpose of the trip, which I suspect was subsidised by the Moroccan Tourist Board, was for us to buy stuff. So along the way we visited silversmiths and other metal workers, a tanning factory and shop, some kind of herbal chemist’s shop and that kind of thing. 

Not a bad commercial idea, of course, and although I didn’t buy a sausage, I’m sure one or two Germans did. (I wrote several blog entries about it at the time which you can look up if you are interested.)

I mention it because on one night during the trip I had a very vivid dream which I realised would, could and, one day I hope will, become a long story. I dream pretty much every night and look forward to dreaming. Every now and then, although not at all regularly, I get an ‘anxiety dream’, which usually involves me being back at work and meeting all kinds of complications that I can never sort out or facing some kind of deadline which I know I cannot meet. But they are rare and almost always my dreams are entertaining, to me at least.

They are always lucid and vivid, but equally almost always they dissipate like smoke from a fire very, very soon. One moment after waking up you can remember the dream, then in a matter of milliseconds just parts of it, then snippets of it, then almost nothing at all and within a minute it is almost all gone. All I have left is one or possibly two mental images which, if I am lucky (though that is rare), are associated with some kind of ‘theme’ or idea which can help me at least try to piece the dream back together. I never can.

There are exceptions, however, and one night on that trip to Morocco I had a dream of which I could remember, if not all of the dream, the ‘salient’ point, the ‘theme’ or the idea underlying it which held it all together. And once you have that, well, you can – of could – at a later date simply build on it, making up stuff to ‘fit’ which is in keeping with the overall theme.

Last night I had another, and with a bit of luck I can remember the ‘theme’ of that as well.

. . .

In the past few years my reading has mainly been non-fiction and, because of this Hemingway bollocks I’ve become entangled with, about the old fraud himself. Note to purists and po-faced folk: I am not seriously suggesting Hemingway was a complete fraud and certainly not consciously. But he did break the Twelfth Commandment by believing his own bullshit. (‘Thou Shalt Not Believeth Thine Own Bullshit. And the Eleventh Commandment? ‘Thou Shalt Not Get Caught. Ever.’)

But having now completed all that I intend to write, the slog carries. The reason is that I realised I must now pretty much rewrite it all if I’m going to get it printed up to get rid of duplication – unavoidable if you are compiling a website of many pages in that no one will read the lot and certainly not in sequence.

I have read several other books, however, including some fiction, but I also read book reviews in the Sunday papers, or did at last when I still bought the rags, now I read them online.

It seems, to me at least, that the range of ‘subject matter’ considered suitable for ‘serious literature’ is very narrow indeed: if it’s not eco-dystopia warning about the disaster which awaits humanity if we don’t all immediately turn our radiators down a notch or two, or growing up Gay in The Gorbals (pretty much a genre in its own right, though it need not necessarily be the Gorbals but can be anywhere) there seems little else to write about or rather little else those who are ‘passionate about literature’ are prepared to take seriously.

Also getting a look-in, however, are by virtue of that condescending way we Brits have made our own – and apparently still unable to forget our ‘imperial past’ – are novels by ‘our ethnics’, that is men and women who are native to the many countries in the once ‘British Empire’ and which many Brits still feel are beholden to us. That they have always been able to stand on their own two feet and could teach us more than just a thing or two doesn’t occur to many in Old Blighty.

The trouble is that I am neither gay nor grew up in the Gorbals, and I find the continual agonising over ‘global warming’ and warnings that ‘we must do something now’ faintly ridiculous and oddly patronising – if you are not by now aware of what is happening to global climate patterns and the alleged reasons for it, you are either brain-dead or physically dead.

So any stories I might write will most certainly not be choosing to follow the well-trod paths of so many other bloody writers. And – though I shall no here be outlining how – some time ago I decided that the writing I want to do will essentially be of a different kind to stories.

I would find it difficult to outline it (and would be riding for a fall if I did try) but it is less along the lines of what you are writing about and more how you are writing. That seems – granted, in my exceptionally limited experience – to be oddly neglected. I suppose in some ways the principle echoes the knowledge that ‘nothing dates faster than this year’s fashion’.

. . .

Anyway, I had another such useful dream (and it was two nights ago now as I have only just returned to writing this entry. And I think I can remember the ‘theme’. Next thing: sodding get done! The best and only advice to give a would-be writer

As I was saying (or not at the case might be*)

First things first: that asterisk above (*). You might think the phrase is ‘as the case may be’ but from what I know of English - and I don’t claim it to be an awful lot - the phrase is conditional as in ‘it might be or there again it might not’. At least that’s how I read it, so I suggest it should be ‘might’. But as I’ve already confessed, my knowledge of English grammar/syntax or whatever it is - and not even knowing the right word is a case in point - is limited to such and extent that I have no choice but to be humble. Also, I’m not too fond of pedants.

Now on to more trivial matters. This blog entry must be classed under ‘non-specific inconsequential shite’ in that I am killing time. And one way of killing time might be to wow you guys and gals with a little bollocks. ‘Why am I killing time’ do I hear you ask? Well, it’s a longish story but as I am killing time, that might be no bad thing. Obviously, YOU might not be killing time and have better things to do than read these ramblings. In that case maybe you should scoot of an do those ‘more important’ things and come back here to read this rubbish when you are more inclined not to get irritated by inconsequential shite. That’s clear enough, surely?

It’s like this: I’ve just come back from a month in Germany at my sister’s (see blog entries passim). I took with me my Macbooks - or better one of my Macbooks, but I shan’t elucidate at this point - because I wanted to get on and get finished my Hemingway bollocks, but also because I wanted to watch English Premier League and Champions League football on NowTV (Sky) and BT Sports, which courtesy of a VPN is possible when you are abroad. However, the bloody think conked out on me with a few days to go.

So what did I do? Why, I went to the local Mediamarkt and bought a notebook, though I should stress that it was to get on with my writing more than watching the football as I can do that on my iPad. I wasn’t being quite as extravagant as it might seem because I bought a small, 11in Lenovo notebook, and Ideapad 1 which pretty much fitted the bill: it came (as I discovered) with a full year’s subscription to Microsoft 365.

More than that, I only paid €119, and the price was apparently reduced from €279. Well, I’ve since learned I should take that ‘reduction’ with a pinch of sale. Those €199 worked out at £178, but when I later looked up what that model would have cost me at PCWorld, it was sodding £99. That didn’t much cheer me up, except of course that buying it there and then in Germany meant that I had the use of it there and then.

Had I waited to buy it at PCWorld I wouldn’t have had it ‘there and then’ which would have defeated the whole point of getting one. Also, I wouldn’t have bought one once I was back in Britain, anyway, because I’ve got a sufficient number of laptops knocking around I can use. But ‘sshh’ on the point.

Obviously the keyboard is German by my initial plan was to bluetooth up the small keyboard I use with my iPad (and I’m writing this entry on that iPad with that keyboard now). However, while setting it up, I discovered that the keyboard and be programmed for different languages. Thus although the physical layout is German (thus with Ä, Ö and Ü keys and, unhelpfullyt the Z key where the Y key should be etc, once I had got the notebook to ‘be’ and English keyboard an, crucially, because I’ve taught myself to touch-type, it all worked out quite well. 

Well, not quite. The system can also be programmed to be English, but no all of it. Then I discovered, looking up Lenovo Recovery Media on the Lenovo support website that I can download a fully English version of Windows 11, install it and except for the bloody Kraut physical layout, the notebook is British.

The only thing is that downloading what I need, then creating a USB recovery stick is taking a LOT of time. I signed up and downloaded all I needed this morning, only to find that the USB stick I intended to use, at 14Gb, was too small. So off I went to buy a 32Gb stick (and did not opt for one at £34 one shop offered but went to a Robert Dyas and found a very good one for just £7.99 - these things matter). Back at my notebook I then discovered that there was no longer a trace of what I had downloaded.

After an abortive ‘help’ chat with some jerk at Lenovo, I then went to download it again, only to find there was no longer enough room on the notebook’s 64Gb SSD - because although I couldn’t find it, what I had downloaded was still there. To cut a very long and increasingly very tedious story as short as possible, I finally sorted out the space problem, download it all again, and am no in the process of ‘creating the USB recovery stick. THAT involves the notebook transferring al the files it needs - around sodding 30Gb! - to the stick. 

So, here I am in a Starbucks round the corner from my brother’s flat killing time.

Happy?