Well, I think I’ve emerged from my dust-up with the goods folks who haunt The Archers messageboard reasonably unscathed. I’m not too sure what happened, what went wrong and why it all escalated in such an extraordinary way, but it most certainly got very silly indeed.
It all started quite innocently when, to help out a colleague who was subbing a piece about The Archers and was having trouble checking when one particular character was introduced, I volunteered to post a message on The Archers site asking for help. My message was headed ‘Urgent reply needed’ (and the fact that I had written it all in capital letters seems to have moved many Archers fans to fury) and I asked:
‘When Usha Gupta/Franks first join The Archers [sic]. A speed and accurate reply would be greatly appreciated.’
The first response (from Dusty Substances) came within minutes and though it wasn’t helpful, I can see the guy’s point:
‘No idea but I’m guessing you are post from a pub quiz? Dx
I replied that I wasn’t, but that a piece was going in the paper and we wanted to get things right. That was when there came the squall in what became a rather minor, though entirely redundant storm. Ermintrude wrote:
‘So the DM are doing a piece about a character who hasn’t been heard of for six months?’
I suspect even non-aligned readers of this blog will detect Ermintrude’s somewhat censorious tone and might accept my contention that had I said the Guardian, The Independent or even the Daily Telegraph was the paper involved, that tone would not have been adopted.
Dusty Substances returned with the answer we wanted:
‘1991 – according to The Archers Encyclopedia’,
but after that it all went downhill pretty quickly, although I must confess that my response to Ermintrude was not particularly diplomatic (but then why should it have been?)
‘Thanks for the 1991. As for the cleverclogs reply about an article concerning a character who hasn’t been heard for several months, it is a round-up of what has been happening over the years. Doh!’
But I sense that even without my reply, the mere mention of the Daily Mail made it open season for all the Mail haters out there: for this came from Dr Toad Leg:
‘High profile investigative journalism about how immigrants are taking British jobs perhaps?’
And on it went. Within a few messages the various sins of the Mail were raised such as its alleged obsession with house prices and the causes of cancer, until by Message 17, from some idiot who calls himself Marjorclanger, we get the usual prejudiced bullshit by people who are not quite as bright as they believe themselves to be:
‘Acerbic and to the point, not a fluffy poster then? Probably not a wind up IMO now. I stand illuminated and confirmed in my prejudice about most journos. Long live campaingner and debunkers, eg the child abuse in the Scottish Islands that wasn’t. As for all the other stuff written on the back of press releases or last night celebrities, well it fills the pages and passes the time.’
What?
After I was accused of being snide and had responded that a quick visit to the Guardian messageboard would illuminate posters what real hatred is all about, Majorclanger came back with:
‘A pity the Mail doesn’t go into such rough places!!! Lord Snooty and his pals from the La La Dem land would perhaps be STTC if the worm ever turned.’
What was – is – the guy talking about? But one thing one can conclude from his entry is that he is most certainly no Conservative or Labour supporter.
That was Message 21, and by Message 27, my sordid past finally caught up with me when BorchesterBolshevik, also not an ardent supporter of either the Tories or the Lib Dems, I should think, judging from his moniker, informed the other posters:
‘All the previous posts across the various BBC message boards seem to suggest a Daily Mail reader rather than a writer.’
After Auntie Rednosed Clockwise had accused me of being either ‘a fantasist or a troll’, miladou also went on the attack:
‘On the other hand, the poster is running true to journalistic type demanding that other people provide him/her with information IMMEDIATELY, rather than doing some actual research.’
In reply I pointed out that posting my query on The Archers messageboard was ‘research’, but as I had also addressed Auntie Rednosed Clockwise as ‘dumbo’, the post (Message 36) was subsequently removed by the ‘moderators’ at the Beeb for breaking house rules.
And so it went on and on and on, interminably, rather fruitlessly and utterly pointlessly, a booing and baaing of which Tweedledum and Tweedledee would have been proud. Whether I was Tweedledum or Tweedledee I shall leave it to the reader to decide. In Message 46 saffronlilly posted a link to this blog, which meant my reading figures went up tenfold in a matter of hours, which rather pleased me. (Such small things do.)
In Message 51, Chris-mas Kettle of Ghoti even suggested I didn’t exist (or something). He/she wrote:
‘For some reason, a person wanting information after seven in the evening for a piece that was purportedly going into a daily paper the following day struck me a high quality end-product of male bovine. Therefore I assumed that this poster was not being quite accurate in his assertions. However, if someone can be bothered to look through the rag in question tomorrow and find out whether it has anything about TA in it, that is up to whoever wants to do it.’
That struck me as a pretty lame ending to a rather grand ticking off, although the poster managed to establish his/her bona fides in that he/she didn’t read the Mail!
The whole thread meandered on until the current Message 151 (in which Organoleptic Icon wrote: ‘I think vegans run more towards “bloodless” ’ which only goes to show how nonsensical these threads can become.
. . .
What strikes me from these and other entries on the board, as well as the names posters give themselves, is how ineffably twee it all is. And I don’t like twee very much. I’m more a vinegar man than candyfloss.
The of-so-funny names of posters, all presumably self-imposed, are always a fair guide to how people regard themself, and it would seem this bunch think of themselves as rather a humorous lot. Oh well.
The other remarkable thing is the almost atavistic loathing many of the posters have for the Mail. Why exactly? It makes no sense. Surely to goodness they know – being the bright, intelligent and well-informed people they are or, at least like to think they are – that all the Mail does is to tell its readers what it thinks its readers want to hear?
All the papers do that, even the saintly Guardian (which this year surprisingly didn’t indulge in a seasonal bout of redundancy of its staff). Independent readers want to be reassured in their conviction that because we are all burning fossil fuels as though there were no tomorrow, the world will go to Hell in a handcart unless we do something! Now! The Guardian readers want to be reassured that the Tories are still the scum they always were. Times readers like to be reassured that being horribly middle-brow isn’t half as bad as they fear. Telegraph readers want to know that most certainly there will be further wars. And so on.
One final point: it might have struck some of you that my view of hacks is pretty similar to that expressed by many on the messageboard. But there are two important provisos. 1) I come at it from a completely different direction, and my general complaint is that hacks, with one or two honourable exceptions, are self-centred fuckwits. And, more crucially, 2) it’s all very well for me, a hack of almost 37 years standing, to slag off my colleagues and compadres, but I won’t stand for having some fucking civilians do it. Ever.
. . .
My best wishes for the New Year to all who don’t have the good fortune to live in Blighty. A look at the stats for this blog show that one or two people in New Zealand, The Netherlands, Ireland, the U.S., Canada, France, South Korea, Slovenia, Turkey, Russia, Japan, Germany, Poland, the Czech Repulic and China have all dropped in at some point or other, so you know who you are. I like to think they all stopped off for more than a brief time, but there’s no way of knowing that. Oddly, so far no one from South America has dropped by, but I don’t think there is anything sinister in that.
Courtesy of one particular reader – and because this reader values ‘comfort’, I shall only say he/she lives and works ‘abroad’ – the scope of this blog might broaden. For this reader informed me that were they (‘they’ being the modern way of getting around the ‘he/she’ dilemma) to recount some of their experiences in the country they at present call home, no one would believe them. So I invited them to send me accounts of those experiences which, if suitable – this blog operates a ‘no one over 18 policy’ as it does not want to risk being taken seriously – I shall publish. That particular reader can be reassured that I shall treat all their submissions with discretion and that, if they wish, they can cast their eye over what I plan to publish to avoid any indiscretions.
I should like to extend that invitation to everyone else who lives abroad. We Brits are always only to happy to learn what is going on in foreign parts, especially how much they envy our way of life. If you want to take up the invitation, please get in touch with me via this blog, I shall reply from a different email address to ensure communications can remain private.
As for the reader I was initially addressing, I trust that sofa will not prove to be too lumpy, and I should be interested in hearing whatever you have to recount, however outlandish it might seem. Remember, we here in Britain have to put up with people such as Richard Branson and Jeremy Clarkson, so outlandish really doesn’t bother us.
Wednesday, 29 December 2010
Monday, 27 December 2010
The Archers: urban fantasy or just pie in the sky? Baby give birth to Elton John, plus the joy of self-delusion
Through an odd quirk of fate, one or two fans of The Archers might find their way to this blog to check up on whether I really do exist. Earlier tonight I was trying to help a colleague who was subbing what is referred to as ‘page eight’ (why page eight I really don’t know). In it, A.N. ‘Andrew’ Wilson did the business Mail style about The Archers and how it should be exciting but not too exciting, should contain ‘drama’ but no ‘melodrama’, and how, unfortunately, it had become a little too right-on for words. I was trying to find out when one of the characters (a Hindu solicitor called Usha Gupta who went on to marry the local Anglican vicar as our indigenous Hindus so often do in deepest rural Brtiain) first joined the list of folk in Ambridge engaged in their daily battle with a bad script.
My colleague said she had tried the BBC Archers website but couldn’t find the relevant page on the character (she should have tried a little harder) so as I already have an account with which to log onto BBC messageboards, I volunteered to post a question asking for an urgent reply. Well, for some reason that was a red rag to a bull (or rather a lot of them) and an excuse for a general slagging off of the Mail, newspapers, journalists and Uncle Tom Cobley and all. Many, if not most, of the messages were pretty illiterate, many faux clever and almost all confirmed my suspicion that a great many Archers fans are a self-regarding bollockheads who are only too pleased to subscribe to an urban fantasy of rural life.
Although I work in London for four days a week, my home is in North Cornwall in a part of the country which could not get more rural, and believe me the rural life portrayed in The Archers is a kind of fantasy. It’s not that we don’t have gays – we had a gay publican – and it’s not that we don’t have drugs or any of the other problems portrayed in The Archers. But it's that we simply don’t have the sheer concentration of ‘issues’ aired in the soap. My brother-in-law is a beef farmer and another brother-in-law is a dairy farmer and both, although unlike in their interests (one is in the process of teaching himself the accordion) are pretty typical of farmers in our neck of the woods, and they are not interested in ‘cutting their carbon footprint’ and discovering ways of recycling. On the other hand this is exactly what libs up and down the country would like them to be interested in. What is so galling about The Archers is that quite apart from indulging itself and its listeners in a fantasy world, it runs a mile from the real world of rural life.
So, unfortunately, almost everyone I know is in favour of foxhunting whether they admit to having voted Tory or Lib Dem in the last election (and ironically I am not and also do wonder why so many people get their jollies by blasting shotguns at birds in the sky). But you do not hear that particular aspect of rural life aired in The Archers. So, dear Archers, fans in your urban towers, dream on.
In fact, given the recent spat with several Yanks on the IMDB message board, I am making something of a habit of upsetting idiots. It's all rather encouraging.
. . .
The breaking news of the day is that a baby in California has given birth to two men and that the three of them are destined to live happily ever after. The science of it all is still a
bit vague as there is no previous evidence of a baby giving birth to anything. (Strictly speaking, I should say previous reliable evidence as there is evidence that a baby born 2,000 years apparently ago gave birth to what, in time, became an overweening corporation worth billions of pounds which sold punters around the world the promise of everlasting life. That promise should not be mistaken for the pledges made by numerous lotions which claim to cure male pattern baldness, make your dick twice as long, or to make you irresistible to women – or men if that’s your bag – as they are apparently just a tad more respectable.)
The baby has announced it will call its offspring ‘Sir’ Elton John and David Furnish. There has already been a great deal of controversy over the news – quite apart from the unprecedented science involved – not least because the baby is denying completely that it was merely gaining two fashion
First picture of the baby's offspring (© Getty Images)
My colleague said she had tried the BBC Archers website but couldn’t find the relevant page on the character (she should have tried a little harder) so as I already have an account with which to log onto BBC messageboards, I volunteered to post a question asking for an urgent reply. Well, for some reason that was a red rag to a bull (or rather a lot of them) and an excuse for a general slagging off of the Mail, newspapers, journalists and Uncle Tom Cobley and all. Many, if not most, of the messages were pretty illiterate, many faux clever and almost all confirmed my suspicion that a great many Archers fans are a self-regarding bollockheads who are only too pleased to subscribe to an urban fantasy of rural life.
Although I work in London for four days a week, my home is in North Cornwall in a part of the country which could not get more rural, and believe me the rural life portrayed in The Archers is a kind of fantasy. It’s not that we don’t have gays – we had a gay publican – and it’s not that we don’t have drugs or any of the other problems portrayed in The Archers. But it's that we simply don’t have the sheer concentration of ‘issues’ aired in the soap. My brother-in-law is a beef farmer and another brother-in-law is a dairy farmer and both, although unlike in their interests (one is in the process of teaching himself the accordion) are pretty typical of farmers in our neck of the woods, and they are not interested in ‘cutting their carbon footprint’ and discovering ways of recycling. On the other hand this is exactly what libs up and down the country would like them to be interested in. What is so galling about The Archers is that quite apart from indulging itself and its listeners in a fantasy world, it runs a mile from the real world of rural life.
So, unfortunately, almost everyone I know is in favour of foxhunting whether they admit to having voted Tory or Lib Dem in the last election (and ironically I am not and also do wonder why so many people get their jollies by blasting shotguns at birds in the sky). But you do not hear that particular aspect of rural life aired in The Archers. So, dear Archers, fans in your urban towers, dream on.
In fact, given the recent spat with several Yanks on the IMDB message board, I am making something of a habit of upsetting idiots. It's all rather encouraging.
. . .
The breaking news of the day is that a baby in California has given birth to two men and that the three of them are destined to live happily ever after. The science of it all is still a
bit vague as there is no previous evidence of a baby giving birth to anything. (Strictly speaking, I should say previous reliable evidence as there is evidence that a baby born 2,000 years apparently ago gave birth to what, in time, became an overweening corporation worth billions of pounds which sold punters around the world the promise of everlasting life. That promise should not be mistaken for the pledges made by numerous lotions which claim to cure male pattern baldness, make your dick twice as long, or to make you irresistible to women – or men if that’s your bag – as they are apparently just a tad more respectable.)
The baby has announced it will call its offspring ‘Sir’ Elton John and David Furnish. There has already been a great deal of controversy over the news – quite apart from the unprecedented science involved – not least because the baby is denying completely that it was merely gaining two fashion
accessories which will be trotted out at showbiz parties and premieres. The three of them, the baby insists, will live as a ‘normal family’ and any suggestions to the contrary will be referred to its lawyers who will threaten such a legalistic shit storm if the allegations are not withdrawn that suicide by the guilty party would be the lesser evil.
In response to the news, forward-thinking organisations around the world (but not Nick Clegg apparently, who claims he has other things on his plate) insist it is every baby’s human right to give birth to two men if it so chooses and suggestions that it is merely an combination of consumerism and an unhealthy vanity which has taken a step too far belong in the Dark Ages.
. . .
The mutual shilly-shallying on The Archers messageboard reminded me once again how innocently prejudiced are many people who wouldn’t think of themselves as prejudiced in a million years. Many people bang on about the Mail being ‘full of hate’ and ‘racist’, yet, as I pointed out in one of my post on the messageboard, if you want the full Monty of hate-filled splenetic fury, just visit the Guardian messageboards where you will get more than you can handle. I remember once coming across a post hoping that ‘Thatcher will die of cancer’ and various observations along the lines of ‘Tories? Hanging’s too good for them. They should be dragged through the streets bollock naked, then hung drawn and quartered’. Yet I suspect that, if questioned, those who post such drivel would regard themselves are rather intelligent liberal types who see themselves as ‘broadminded’ and who ‘care’, though about what is rather vague. I suspect that, at the end of the day what they really care about is being thought well off by their peers.
If I were to write – and I think I have recently – that our capacity for self-delusion is infinite, the obvious riposte is ‘your capacity, too?’ and I would be obliged to agree. The trouble is that by its very nature quite in what ways I am deluding myself will always be rather hard for me to spot. To others it might be blindingly obvious from one hundred paces, but were they to tell me, I should imagine I would find it hard to believe I am guilty of what they suggest. If I had more integrity, I would undoubtedly spend the next ten to fifteen minutes reflecting on in what possible ways I am deluding myself. But, to be honest, I can’t be arsed. And I suppose admitting as much is a kind of integrity in itself. An example of self-delusion might well be how all the self-appointed great and good in Britain have, as one, united behind the cause of Julian Assange. Yet to my knowledge none of them has said a dicky bird about Bradley Manning, the young U.S. Army squaddie who made it all possible, but is now looking at 200 years in chokey for daring to upset the American establishment.
Sunday, 26 December 2010
The only thing merrily ringing out are the shop tills
Why is it that I can get irritated by how Christmas is regarded as just another ‘business opportunity’ by manufacturers and our shops, and as an excuse for a consumerist orgy by everyone else and his dog, yet consider the story behind Christmas - the birth of a chap called Jesus - as just so much claptrap? It puzzles me. I should say, here and now, that if someone has a faith, whether they call themselves Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist or even Devil worshippers, I leave them to it, because with one or two irritating exceptions (ever been smugly told by someone or other ‘I’m a Christian’ with the implication being ‘I’m better than you because you don’t share the faith’? I have, rather more than once) I consider those who have a faith to be rather luckier in many ways than those who don’t and studies have shown that, in general, they enjoy better health than the faithless - I should say ‘studies are said to show’ as I can’t find any examples off-hand), but I believe it is ‘having a faith’ which does the trick rather than the specific faith. (Incidentally, six years ago, a British sailor insisted on his right as a Devil worshipper to while onboard a Royal Navy frigate on got his way. For further accounts try here and here.)
Were anyone to ask me whether I believed in God, I would honestly reply that I did, but I would leave it there and excuse myself from any subsequent discussion. As for Christianity and Roman Catholicism, well, we went our separate ways years ago, and I somehow doubt we shall ever be re-united. But there is no denying that celebrating Christmas was initially based on the Christian religious festival which marked the anniversary of the birth of the chap Christians believe to be the son of God, though you’d be hard pushed to be reminded of that in Britain at least (officially utterly godless). I know Christmas in Germany is rather more of a religious festival, and I suspect the same is true of the U.S. where a far greater proportion of its citizens attend church every Sunday. But even in those two countries the overarching imperative is to buy, buy, buy and bugger the consequences. But why, given my views on Christianity, do I find that so offensive.
I really can’t tell you. I was, admittedly, brought up a church-going RC (and wanted to be ‘a priest’ until puberty came and I discovered ‘girls’. I remember often sitting in church, spotting a rather pretty girl, imagining her naked, immediately praying to God to forgive me, but even while I was praying, doing a little more imaging, so praying even harder - the whole thing is just thoroughly ridiculous) and for us Christmas was more a religious festival than for others. So perhaps echoes of that upbringing are the basis for my irritation. But irritated I most certainly am. The whole shooting match of Christmas advertising starts in mid-October, which spoils the whole run-up and when you come across Christmas puddings on sale at that time, you do wonder what the bloody hell is going on. Oh, well. I don’t for a moment imagine this is a new phenomenon. I think historians and archaeologist have long established that greed is millennia old. Certainly, the Victorians were pretty acquisitive, especially at Christmas. Just look at Charles Dickens’s novella Scrooge. (Great name, by the way.)
. . .
Christmas Day went off rather well in the Powell household. As I said, the extra money I have been earning putting together the Mails’ puzzle pages allowed my to push the boat out a little this year, so Wes got his Xbox and Elsie a - titchy - iPod Nano. Lord is it small, but she is happy with it. I went round to my stepmother’s to cook her lunch (she had fillet steak with chips and salad) and later we went up to see my father-in-law who chose to spend Christmas on his own. He is now a widower, although I can’t remember whether my mother-in-law died one year or two years ago. My wife’s family are rather an emotionally stunted bunch (my wife’s grandfather was something of a Methodist religious fanatic who would even allow alcohol in the house and who lived until he was 96 in his son’s household, which couldn’t have been easy for his son. It’s pretty much the case that mean don’t really come into their own until their fathers die - it was most certainly true in my case), so I stayed on for an hour after everyone else had left and he seemed to relax a little bit. Poor chap, he does miss his wife a great deal and doesn’t enjoy being on his own.
We didn’t stuff ourselves or fall over drunk, so in that sense it wasn’t a traditional British Christmas, although Elsie did make a point of watching the hour-long EastEnders Christmas special, which, as usual, was full of loads of shouting, crying, tears, unhappiness, recrimination, accusations and I don’t know what else. Why do people enjoy such garbage? I know I have admitted that The Wire, The Sopranos and Mad Men are soaps by another name, but none is filled with the unremitting misery which is fucking EastEnders. I just hope Elsie doesn’t grow up thinking that kind of lifestyle is normal or even usual.
Were anyone to ask me whether I believed in God, I would honestly reply that I did, but I would leave it there and excuse myself from any subsequent discussion. As for Christianity and Roman Catholicism, well, we went our separate ways years ago, and I somehow doubt we shall ever be re-united. But there is no denying that celebrating Christmas was initially based on the Christian religious festival which marked the anniversary of the birth of the chap Christians believe to be the son of God, though you’d be hard pushed to be reminded of that in Britain at least (officially utterly godless). I know Christmas in Germany is rather more of a religious festival, and I suspect the same is true of the U.S. where a far greater proportion of its citizens attend church every Sunday. But even in those two countries the overarching imperative is to buy, buy, buy and bugger the consequences. But why, given my views on Christianity, do I find that so offensive.
I really can’t tell you. I was, admittedly, brought up a church-going RC (and wanted to be ‘a priest’ until puberty came and I discovered ‘girls’. I remember often sitting in church, spotting a rather pretty girl, imagining her naked, immediately praying to God to forgive me, but even while I was praying, doing a little more imaging, so praying even harder - the whole thing is just thoroughly ridiculous) and for us Christmas was more a religious festival than for others. So perhaps echoes of that upbringing are the basis for my irritation. But irritated I most certainly am. The whole shooting match of Christmas advertising starts in mid-October, which spoils the whole run-up and when you come across Christmas puddings on sale at that time, you do wonder what the bloody hell is going on. Oh, well. I don’t for a moment imagine this is a new phenomenon. I think historians and archaeologist have long established that greed is millennia old. Certainly, the Victorians were pretty acquisitive, especially at Christmas. Just look at Charles Dickens’s novella Scrooge. (Great name, by the way.)
. . .
Christmas Day went off rather well in the Powell household. As I said, the extra money I have been earning putting together the Mails’ puzzle pages allowed my to push the boat out a little this year, so Wes got his Xbox and Elsie a - titchy - iPod Nano. Lord is it small, but she is happy with it. I went round to my stepmother’s to cook her lunch (she had fillet steak with chips and salad) and later we went up to see my father-in-law who chose to spend Christmas on his own. He is now a widower, although I can’t remember whether my mother-in-law died one year or two years ago. My wife’s family are rather an emotionally stunted bunch (my wife’s grandfather was something of a Methodist religious fanatic who would even allow alcohol in the house and who lived until he was 96 in his son’s household, which couldn’t have been easy for his son. It’s pretty much the case that mean don’t really come into their own until their fathers die - it was most certainly true in my case), so I stayed on for an hour after everyone else had left and he seemed to relax a little bit. Poor chap, he does miss his wife a great deal and doesn’t enjoy being on his own.
We didn’t stuff ourselves or fall over drunk, so in that sense it wasn’t a traditional British Christmas, although Elsie did make a point of watching the hour-long EastEnders Christmas special, which, as usual, was full of loads of shouting, crying, tears, unhappiness, recrimination, accusations and I don’t know what else. Why do people enjoy such garbage? I know I have admitted that The Wire, The Sopranos and Mad Men are soaps by another name, but none is filled with the unremitting misery which is fucking EastEnders. I just hope Elsie doesn’t grow up thinking that kind of lifestyle is normal or even usual.
Wednesday, 22 December 2010
Pretentious? Moi? Or so some believe. And a Lib Dem safe pair of hands fall flat on his keister
You’ll hear it here first: I am narcissistic, pompous, arrogant, pretentious, condescending and stupid, or, at least, that is what some members of an IMDB message board would have the world believe. We have been batting insults back and forth for a few days now, but our feud is getting nowhere. My transgression was to post a new thread on the message board in response to seeing the latest Scorsese film Shutter Island, in which I suggested that at every level the film is purposely ambiguous and that Scorsese had eschewed a conventional resolution to the film where loose ends are tied up and ‘this is the explanation’ and had intended it to remain thoroughly ambiguous. Boy did that seem to irritate a lot of people. No, they said, you have got the wrong end of the stick entirely, there is no ambiguity and you really don’t know what you are talking about. It would be tedious to try to summarise the film. I just started trying, but after a few minutes decided I couldn’t be arsed, but I should tell you (he wrote in a way extremely similar to summarising) that the film turns on whether a US marshall who arrives at a bleak mental facility on an island off Boston to investigate an apparent mysterious disappearance is being stitched up because he believes he has discovered evidence of brain experiments being undertaken on prisoner or whether he is an inmate of the facility on whom doctors are trying an innovative treatment.
If I am right, and Scorsese did intend to leave everything completely ambiguous, then Shutter Island is a great film which pulls off a remarkable trick. If I am wrong – and my oppos on the message board are right and the whole film falls neatly into place at the end, it is merely quite an ordinary, not to say rather clichéd film, nicely filmed, well acted and so on, but, sorry, no cigar.
Well, both sides have been tooing and froing for several days arguing the toss. What I found so frustrating was the apparent inability of the other side (no one was on mine) to see my central point: I wasn’t arguing for one interpretation of the film over another, I was arguing that Scorsese had deliberately left everything unresolved, and not only that, but had constructed his film so that both interpretations held up completely at every point, although they are mutually exclusive. Well, they weren’t having any of that. And things got a little out of hand when I wrote, rather provocatively, that I wasn’t surprised they couldn’t quite cotton onto what I was trying to saying because – well, not to be overly delicate – subtlety was not a great American virtue. And I did add one or three more or less equally rude points along similar lines.
Well, none of this cut any ice at all, and my apparently gratuitous attack on the great U.S. aroused the other side to ever greater fury. That they expressed their anger in badly written, illiterate, badly spelled and often incomprehensible English should, of course, be neither here nor there, but I do find it pertinent. Years ago, I came across a dictum that ‘muddled writing betrays muddled thought’ and, mainly from my own attempts to write something, I find it to hold true almost every time.
All of us involved in this utterly pointless ‘debate’ are guys - or I am pretty certain we are guys - so this thing will run and run until one side or the other will fall off his horse utterly exhausted. Between you and me (and I hope to God none of the other side comes across this blog), were I to be totally honest, I think I am onto a loser, but I’m buggered if I’m going to give up quite yet without a fight. It’s just that I find I loathe anyone these days who uses that non word ‘awesome’, and although, to be fair, none of the other side has done so yet, they strike me as being exactly the kind who would and it can only be a matter of time.
. . .
Here in Britain we have a coalition government, unsurprisingly referred to as the Coalition Government (not the capital letters), which is made up of the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. It seemed to go well for a while, although one of the Lib Dem stars who landed a job in Cabinet, a guy called David Laws, and was hailed as being ‘brilliant’ - our newspapers are apt to do that kind of thing - came cropper within days after it was discovered that the man he was paying rent to (rent can be claimed on expenses) was his boyfriend. He resigned, although I suspect he was also rather glad his secret was out as it appeared he still hadn’t come out to his elderly parents.
Next came a scandal with Christopher Huhne who was discovered by the papers to be cheating on his wife with a bisexual feminist. Nothing much could be made of that, because Huhne came clean, left his wife immediately and, I think, moved in with the lady of his dreams.
Most recently, and in some ways most entertaining of the three although there is no sex involved, is the humiliation by the Daily Telegraph of Vince Cable. While still in Opposition - the Lib Dems never had a snowball’s chance in Hell of forming the government after Labour was ousted, but strictly, they, too were the Opposition - Cable was something of a darling of the Press. He was a former chief economist for BP and so could be said to know something about both economics and business, and was regarded as a safe pair of hands. That last virtue should be understood in the way that it is laudable that I have not once yet crashed a plane and have have a completely clean record in aviation. Oh, but I have also never flown a plane.
Just how ‘Cable’s’ hands proved to be was demonstrated a few weeks ago in the run-up to a vote in the House of Commons on
whether the fees students will be charged to attend university should go up to a maximum £9,000. The was government policy introduced by Cable himself, but that didn’t stop him revealing in a local newspaper which circulates in his constituency that he would be voting against the rise. (The Lib Dems had been against such a rise in fees while in Opposition, and were now being asked to go against their manifesto pledge to oppose it.) That made him look thoroughly ridiculous. But, extraordinarily, he has now managed to make himself look even more ridiculous. Two Daily Telegraph reporters (two young women, as it happens, chosen, I’m sure purely for their journalistic ability) attended Cable’s constituency surgery posing as two of his constituents. In the conversation which followed, Cable was excessively candid, boasting that he could bring the government down if he wanted to.
The following day, the Telegraph printed further candid comments by this former ‘safe pair of hands’ who, in his daytime job a Business Secretary was the chap in government set to rule on whether Rupert Murdoch should be allowed to buy up the parts of Sky TV he doesn’t yet own. After Cable pledged that he ‘would declare war on Murdoch’, his impartiality in the matter was, surprise, suprise, called into question. David Cameron didn’t sack Cable, and attracted the ire of his more right-wing MPs for not doing so, but removed the issue of the sale of Sky TV from Cable’s remit. In political terms that is more or less like removing Charlie Chaplin’s bowler, cane and moustache from all future performances.
The Telegraph pulled the same stunt on four other Lib Dems who are part of the Coalition governmnet, and naturally, all four were as candid and naive as only Lib Dems can be. One commented on Chancellor George Osborne’s capacity ‘for getting up one’s nose’, another ventured to suggest that David Cameron cannot be trusted (which will, ironically, go down rather well with the right-wing Tory doubters), a third compared the Tories with the South African government under apartheid, and the fourth doubted whether Cameron was sincere, another issue which I suspedt won’t greatly upset the shire Tories.
None of this, though, will rock the Coalition. In my view the Lib Dems need the Tories more than they need the Lib Dems. This is the first sniff the Lib Dems have had of power in almost 95, and were the whole arrangement to go up in smoke over the coming few months, the Lib Dems would not be looking forward to a general election: they opinion poll rating has slumped dramatically and is now scraping along at something like 9pc. Anyway, they want to get voting by proportional representation accepted before they depart the stage for without it they will be in the wilderness for another century.
. . .
When stood for the local district council a few years ago and went out on the stump, I came across a few hardcore Lib Dems and they were not nice people. Middle-class to a fault, the ones I met were self-righteous and intolerant of any other view as only the smug self-righteous can be. Despite their cuddly liberal image, they are said to be the dirtiest of the dirty during elections. Their big faultline splits them into right-of-centre Lib Dems and left-of-centre Lib Dems. At present the left-of-centre lot are rushing off in the direction of the Labour party, where they will be greeted with false smiles, used, then abandoned.
During the party conference season, I heard a radio report from the Lid Dem conference (held in Sepember when the Lib Dems had been part of the Coalition for four months) in which one activist was heard to say in all seriousness: ‘I didn’t vote Lib Dem to form the government.’
I often get the feeling that for most Lib Dems holding onto their principled purity is more important to them than being in power with at least the chance to put their ideas into practice. In that way they can always hold the moral high ground and condescend to the rest of us.
. . .
Apropos nothing, I was reminded the other day of two very colourful English expressions. I’ll ‘share’ them with you:
Wedding tackle: a man’s genitalia, his meat and two veg.
Five-finger discount: shoplifting.
If I am right, and Scorsese did intend to leave everything completely ambiguous, then Shutter Island is a great film which pulls off a remarkable trick. If I am wrong – and my oppos on the message board are right and the whole film falls neatly into place at the end, it is merely quite an ordinary, not to say rather clichéd film, nicely filmed, well acted and so on, but, sorry, no cigar.
Well, both sides have been tooing and froing for several days arguing the toss. What I found so frustrating was the apparent inability of the other side (no one was on mine) to see my central point: I wasn’t arguing for one interpretation of the film over another, I was arguing that Scorsese had deliberately left everything unresolved, and not only that, but had constructed his film so that both interpretations held up completely at every point, although they are mutually exclusive. Well, they weren’t having any of that. And things got a little out of hand when I wrote, rather provocatively, that I wasn’t surprised they couldn’t quite cotton onto what I was trying to saying because – well, not to be overly delicate – subtlety was not a great American virtue. And I did add one or three more or less equally rude points along similar lines.
Well, none of this cut any ice at all, and my apparently gratuitous attack on the great U.S. aroused the other side to ever greater fury. That they expressed their anger in badly written, illiterate, badly spelled and often incomprehensible English should, of course, be neither here nor there, but I do find it pertinent. Years ago, I came across a dictum that ‘muddled writing betrays muddled thought’ and, mainly from my own attempts to write something, I find it to hold true almost every time.
All of us involved in this utterly pointless ‘debate’ are guys - or I am pretty certain we are guys - so this thing will run and run until one side or the other will fall off his horse utterly exhausted. Between you and me (and I hope to God none of the other side comes across this blog), were I to be totally honest, I think I am onto a loser, but I’m buggered if I’m going to give up quite yet without a fight. It’s just that I find I loathe anyone these days who uses that non word ‘awesome’, and although, to be fair, none of the other side has done so yet, they strike me as being exactly the kind who would and it can only be a matter of time.
. . .
Here in Britain we have a coalition government, unsurprisingly referred to as the Coalition Government (not the capital letters), which is made up of the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. It seemed to go well for a while, although one of the Lib Dem stars who landed a job in Cabinet, a guy called David Laws, and was hailed as being ‘brilliant’ - our newspapers are apt to do that kind of thing - came cropper within days after it was discovered that the man he was paying rent to (rent can be claimed on expenses) was his boyfriend. He resigned, although I suspect he was also rather glad his secret was out as it appeared he still hadn’t come out to his elderly parents.
Next came a scandal with Christopher Huhne who was discovered by the papers to be cheating on his wife with a bisexual feminist. Nothing much could be made of that, because Huhne came clean, left his wife immediately and, I think, moved in with the lady of his dreams.
Most recently, and in some ways most entertaining of the three although there is no sex involved, is the humiliation by the Daily Telegraph of Vince Cable. While still in Opposition - the Lib Dems never had a snowball’s chance in Hell of forming the government after Labour was ousted, but strictly, they, too were the Opposition - Cable was something of a darling of the Press. He was a former chief economist for BP and so could be said to know something about both economics and business, and was regarded as a safe pair of hands. That last virtue should be understood in the way that it is laudable that I have not once yet crashed a plane and have have a completely clean record in aviation. Oh, but I have also never flown a plane.
Just how ‘Cable’s’ hands proved to be was demonstrated a few weeks ago in the run-up to a vote in the House of Commons on
whether the fees students will be charged to attend university should go up to a maximum £9,000. The was government policy introduced by Cable himself, but that didn’t stop him revealing in a local newspaper which circulates in his constituency that he would be voting against the rise. (The Lib Dems had been against such a rise in fees while in Opposition, and were now being asked to go against their manifesto pledge to oppose it.) That made him look thoroughly ridiculous. But, extraordinarily, he has now managed to make himself look even more ridiculous. Two Daily Telegraph reporters (two young women, as it happens, chosen, I’m sure purely for their journalistic ability) attended Cable’s constituency surgery posing as two of his constituents. In the conversation which followed, Cable was excessively candid, boasting that he could bring the government down if he wanted to.
The following day, the Telegraph printed further candid comments by this former ‘safe pair of hands’ who, in his daytime job a Business Secretary was the chap in government set to rule on whether Rupert Murdoch should be allowed to buy up the parts of Sky TV he doesn’t yet own. After Cable pledged that he ‘would declare war on Murdoch’, his impartiality in the matter was, surprise, suprise, called into question. David Cameron didn’t sack Cable, and attracted the ire of his more right-wing MPs for not doing so, but removed the issue of the sale of Sky TV from Cable’s remit. In political terms that is more or less like removing Charlie Chaplin’s bowler, cane and moustache from all future performances.
The Telegraph pulled the same stunt on four other Lib Dems who are part of the Coalition governmnet, and naturally, all four were as candid and naive as only Lib Dems can be. One commented on Chancellor George Osborne’s capacity ‘for getting up one’s nose’, another ventured to suggest that David Cameron cannot be trusted (which will, ironically, go down rather well with the right-wing Tory doubters), a third compared the Tories with the South African government under apartheid, and the fourth doubted whether Cameron was sincere, another issue which I suspedt won’t greatly upset the shire Tories.
None of this, though, will rock the Coalition. In my view the Lib Dems need the Tories more than they need the Lib Dems. This is the first sniff the Lib Dems have had of power in almost 95, and were the whole arrangement to go up in smoke over the coming few months, the Lib Dems would not be looking forward to a general election: they opinion poll rating has slumped dramatically and is now scraping along at something like 9pc. Anyway, they want to get voting by proportional representation accepted before they depart the stage for without it they will be in the wilderness for another century.
. . .
When stood for the local district council a few years ago and went out on the stump, I came across a few hardcore Lib Dems and they were not nice people. Middle-class to a fault, the ones I met were self-righteous and intolerant of any other view as only the smug self-righteous can be. Despite their cuddly liberal image, they are said to be the dirtiest of the dirty during elections. Their big faultline splits them into right-of-centre Lib Dems and left-of-centre Lib Dems. At present the left-of-centre lot are rushing off in the direction of the Labour party, where they will be greeted with false smiles, used, then abandoned.
During the party conference season, I heard a radio report from the Lid Dem conference (held in Sepember when the Lib Dems had been part of the Coalition for four months) in which one activist was heard to say in all seriousness: ‘I didn’t vote Lib Dem to form the government.’
I often get the feeling that for most Lib Dems holding onto their principled purity is more important to them than being in power with at least the chance to put their ideas into practice. In that way they can always hold the moral high ground and condescend to the rest of us.
. . .
Apropos nothing, I was reminded the other day of two very colourful English expressions. I’ll ‘share’ them with you:
Wedding tackle: a man’s genitalia, his meat and two veg.
Five-finger discount: shoplifting.
Saturday, 18 December 2010
An unlikely stitch-up, but Assange gets all the glory while young Bradley is held out to dry
The Wikileaks/arrest of Julian Assange saga rumbles on. Assange has now been granted bail after well-wishers stumped up £250,000 surety and on condition that he lives at the house of one well-wisher and doesn’t leave. Although I am less than convinced by all the claims that Wikileaks is striking a blow for freedom, I still suspect that somehow Assange is being stitched up, or is in the initial stages of being stitched up by the U.S., which never takes too kindly to being made to look stupid. But having said that, just how they want to do it is not very straightforward. All the ingredients are there, but it somehow doesn’t quite hang together.
The ingredients: Assange is accused of rape and sexual assault in Sweden, but the charges are later dropped. He had reportedly asked to see the evidence against him, but none was provided. He reportedly asked the Swedish authorities whether he could
leave the country for Britain and they agreed. One alleged rape claim is being made by a campaigning feminist who had previously published on the web polemics urging women to ‘get even’ with men. She was the first woman Assange slept with in Sweden on a trip there. A few days later, Assange slept with another, who then contacted the first, and I must admit that the thought has crossed my mind that the first, the campaigning feminist was rather angry that Assange should have turned to a second woman so quickly. As to the rape allegations, here is an interesting article:
The new round of rape and sexual assault claims followed one Assange was in Britain, and Sweden then applied for his extradition and issued a warrant for his arrest. He has, I don’t think, yet been formally charged, but then I don’t think he can be until he is in the custody of the Swedes. Then, so the conspiracy theory would go, Assagne is extradited to the U.S. for a severe judicial bollocking before he is locked away forever.
There are reports from the U.S. that some congressmen are urging for the drafting of a law under which Assange can be charged. This seems to me rather arse-about-tip: it strikes me that revenge would be the prime motivation for doing that, which is understandly. However, revenge was never a principle in law.
Now for how it doesn’t really hand together: if the U.S. feels Assange has a case to answer, why not applied to have him extradited directly from Britain? They are seeking, in a ludicrous case, the extradition of a Gary McKinnon, another chap who upset them by hacking into the Pentagon website and thus demonstrating how poor its cyber defence was. In fact, hurt pride seems to play a major part in both cases, and it might easily be possible to show that America’s dented ego more or less drives its foreign policy.
Then there is also the fact that of all the European countries which might, in some theoretical conspiracy, be amenable to doing the U.S.’s bidding, Sweden, a liberal-democratic country with tendencies to left-of-centrism, comes rather low on the list. It is also quite unlikely that a campaigning feminist in that liberal-democratic country would feel inclined to help out the U.S. All in all, Sweden and the U.S. are unlikely bedfellows, and it does seem rather unlikely that they have entered into some unholy alliance.
Other aspects about the whole affair which strike me as rather odd are that Assange was held in solitary confinement while he was in custody in Wandsworth prison. Why exactly? Then there is also the angle that a certain Bradley Manning, the chap suspected of having provided Wikileaks with almost all of the batch of confidential cables, is in deep shit, far deeper at the moment than la Assange, but rather fewer people are getting their knickers in a twists about him.
On Radio 4’s Today this morning we had John Pilger, a prominent left-wing commentator of this parish and cheerleader of all things left, and Janet Daley, a prominent right-wing commentator and cheerleader of all things right. I’ve always thought of Pilger as something of a self-seeking prat who rather enjoys his status as journalism’s lefty. But on this occasion I am inclined with some of the points he made. But, damn it, I also feel obliged, in all honesty, to agree with some of the points Janet Daley made, although the piece on Today and the joint interview with both was rather spoiled in that two issues — Assange’s arrest and possible extradition to Sweden and then possibly the U.S., and the whole Wikileaks leaking were conflated, which didn’t lead to much clarity. For example, Daley made the point, one which on the face of it is quite reasonable, that just as journalists such as herself and Pilger are entitled to keep their sources confidential — and (although she didn’t say so this morning) just as Wikileaks is entitled to keep its sources confidential — so the assorted diplomats whose candid comments were published by Wikileaks are also entitled to some confidentiality.
I must admit that I have a gut feeling that Assange is being stitched up, although exactly how I really couldn’t tell you. And to put that feeling into perspective, I regard the guy as something of a pillock and Wikileaks, as far as some of its claims are concerned to be fighting the good fight, as a little more dodgy than they angels they profess to be should be. This one will run and run.
. . .
And what of Bradley Manning? Well, apart from knowing the guy’s name, I have just had to search the net for more details about him — apparently he is something of a computer whizz — which must speak volumes about the relative importance these two characters, Assange and Manning, have. One is ‘sexy news’,
the other isn’t. Why not? Perhaps Manning is better covered in the States — one report I found says that the ‘city of Berkeley (would that be the same Berkeley which has the famous university?) wants to proclaim him a war hero. Manning’s problem is that the U.S. really is the country where 99 year sentences for laughing at the president are commonplace — well, you know what I mean — so the future looks very bleak for him indeed. There was an interesting item on Radio 4’ PM programme last night claiming that a substantial amount of money Wikileaks had promised to donate to Manning’s defence fund had still not been paid. That, if true, only goes to show how much they value him.
. . .
I had included two pictures with this entry, one of Assange and one of Manning. From the picture I have found, Assange looks rather like an unpleasant sleazeball, and Manning looks like a naive idealist. We all know how photos such as these can be horribly misleading — there is any number of pictures of Adolf Hitler being nice to his Alsation dogs — so I merely make those comments in passing. But I know who I would prefer to spend a night in the pub with and it ain’t Assange. I really wish I didn’t feel he is being stitched up. But . . .
. . .
Finally, it is with a great deal of sadness that I have to report that Britain is back where it was last year, in snow hell, also ‘dubbed’ ‘by the nation’ Snowmageddon. But, do not despair, the world is heeding us in our hour of need: there have been food parcels from Siberia, several tons of socks from the good folk of Switzerland, the Austrians are saying special Masses and as I write there are very reliable reports that womenfolk the length and breadth of Scandanavia have formed knitskalga, the traditional knitting groups so beloved by the Swedes, Finns and Norwegians (though not, apparently, by the Dane who are far more concerned with writing petitions to the Vatican pleading for the immediate canonisation of Julian Assange), to turn out around-the-clock woolly sweaters in a variety of colours and sizes which will then be flown into Britain by the Red Cross (the Red Crescent will be making the deliveries of special halal sweaters to Bradford, Blackburn, Leicester and other towns where our Muslims brothers have taken up residence). It’s at moments like this that it is a joy to be alive.
The ingredients: Assange is accused of rape and sexual assault in Sweden, but the charges are later dropped. He had reportedly asked to see the evidence against him, but none was provided. He reportedly asked the Swedish authorities whether he could
leave the country for Britain and they agreed. One alleged rape claim is being made by a campaigning feminist who had previously published on the web polemics urging women to ‘get even’ with men. She was the first woman Assange slept with in Sweden on a trip there. A few days later, Assange slept with another, who then contacted the first, and I must admit that the thought has crossed my mind that the first, the campaigning feminist was rather angry that Assange should have turned to a second woman so quickly. As to the rape allegations, here is an interesting article:
The new round of rape and sexual assault claims followed one Assange was in Britain, and Sweden then applied for his extradition and issued a warrant for his arrest. He has, I don’t think, yet been formally charged, but then I don’t think he can be until he is in the custody of the Swedes. Then, so the conspiracy theory would go, Assagne is extradited to the U.S. for a severe judicial bollocking before he is locked away forever.
There are reports from the U.S. that some congressmen are urging for the drafting of a law under which Assange can be charged. This seems to me rather arse-about-tip: it strikes me that revenge would be the prime motivation for doing that, which is understandly. However, revenge was never a principle in law.
Now for how it doesn’t really hand together: if the U.S. feels Assange has a case to answer, why not applied to have him extradited directly from Britain? They are seeking, in a ludicrous case, the extradition of a Gary McKinnon, another chap who upset them by hacking into the Pentagon website and thus demonstrating how poor its cyber defence was. In fact, hurt pride seems to play a major part in both cases, and it might easily be possible to show that America’s dented ego more or less drives its foreign policy.
Then there is also the fact that of all the European countries which might, in some theoretical conspiracy, be amenable to doing the U.S.’s bidding, Sweden, a liberal-democratic country with tendencies to left-of-centrism, comes rather low on the list. It is also quite unlikely that a campaigning feminist in that liberal-democratic country would feel inclined to help out the U.S. All in all, Sweden and the U.S. are unlikely bedfellows, and it does seem rather unlikely that they have entered into some unholy alliance.
Other aspects about the whole affair which strike me as rather odd are that Assange was held in solitary confinement while he was in custody in Wandsworth prison. Why exactly? Then there is also the angle that a certain Bradley Manning, the chap suspected of having provided Wikileaks with almost all of the batch of confidential cables, is in deep shit, far deeper at the moment than la Assange, but rather fewer people are getting their knickers in a twists about him.
On Radio 4’s Today this morning we had John Pilger, a prominent left-wing commentator of this parish and cheerleader of all things left, and Janet Daley, a prominent right-wing commentator and cheerleader of all things right. I’ve always thought of Pilger as something of a self-seeking prat who rather enjoys his status as journalism’s lefty. But on this occasion I am inclined with some of the points he made. But, damn it, I also feel obliged, in all honesty, to agree with some of the points Janet Daley made, although the piece on Today and the joint interview with both was rather spoiled in that two issues — Assange’s arrest and possible extradition to Sweden and then possibly the U.S., and the whole Wikileaks leaking were conflated, which didn’t lead to much clarity. For example, Daley made the point, one which on the face of it is quite reasonable, that just as journalists such as herself and Pilger are entitled to keep their sources confidential — and (although she didn’t say so this morning) just as Wikileaks is entitled to keep its sources confidential — so the assorted diplomats whose candid comments were published by Wikileaks are also entitled to some confidentiality.
I must admit that I have a gut feeling that Assange is being stitched up, although exactly how I really couldn’t tell you. And to put that feeling into perspective, I regard the guy as something of a pillock and Wikileaks, as far as some of its claims are concerned to be fighting the good fight, as a little more dodgy than they angels they profess to be should be. This one will run and run.
. . .
And what of Bradley Manning? Well, apart from knowing the guy’s name, I have just had to search the net for more details about him — apparently he is something of a computer whizz — which must speak volumes about the relative importance these two characters, Assange and Manning, have. One is ‘sexy news’,
the other isn’t. Why not? Perhaps Manning is better covered in the States — one report I found says that the ‘city of Berkeley (would that be the same Berkeley which has the famous university?) wants to proclaim him a war hero. Manning’s problem is that the U.S. really is the country where 99 year sentences for laughing at the president are commonplace — well, you know what I mean — so the future looks very bleak for him indeed. There was an interesting item on Radio 4’ PM programme last night claiming that a substantial amount of money Wikileaks had promised to donate to Manning’s defence fund had still not been paid. That, if true, only goes to show how much they value him.
. . .
I had included two pictures with this entry, one of Assange and one of Manning. From the picture I have found, Assange looks rather like an unpleasant sleazeball, and Manning looks like a naive idealist. We all know how photos such as these can be horribly misleading — there is any number of pictures of Adolf Hitler being nice to his Alsation dogs — so I merely make those comments in passing. But I know who I would prefer to spend a night in the pub with and it ain’t Assange. I really wish I didn’t feel he is being stitched up. But . . .
. . .
Finally, it is with a great deal of sadness that I have to report that Britain is back where it was last year, in snow hell, also ‘dubbed’ ‘by the nation’ Snowmageddon. But, do not despair, the world is heeding us in our hour of need: there have been food parcels from Siberia, several tons of socks from the good folk of Switzerland, the Austrians are saying special Masses and as I write there are very reliable reports that womenfolk the length and breadth of Scandanavia have formed knitskalga, the traditional knitting groups so beloved by the Swedes, Finns and Norwegians (though not, apparently, by the Dane who are far more concerned with writing petitions to the Vatican pleading for the immediate canonisation of Julian Assange), to turn out around-the-clock woolly sweaters in a variety of colours and sizes which will then be flown into Britain by the Red Cross (the Red Crescent will be making the deliveries of special halal sweaters to Bradford, Blackburn, Leicester and other towns where our Muslims brothers have taken up residence). It’s at moments like this that it is a joy to be alive.
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