This lad falls in love (her name's Romola) while the euro farce continues

This might not be the place for a review of a television drama series, but I shall give you one anyway. My sole justification is that it starred an actress called Romola Garai who made me wish I was 30 years older and consider taking up stalking. I am not and I shan’t, but a boy can dream.
The series was produced by the BBC and was doomed from the outset by comparing itself to America’s Mad Men. The only point the have in common is that both were set several decades ago – Mad Men in the late Fifties, early Sixties and this turkey, called The Hour, in the mid-Fifties. But where Mad Men was stylish, innovative – it took its time always – well directed, subtle, nuanced, well-acted and interesting, The Hour was just another six hours of BBC drama by numbers of which there is more than enough to last us all a lifetime and then some. I always imagine that when a drama is commissioned by the BBC, the script will not be considered for production until it was been put through the BBC editorial sausage machine whose purpose is to get rid of anything which might prove to be original and to add all the latest stylistic fads and trends. One criticism was that too many of the lines were anachronistic, but quite honestly, that was the least of its troubles.
The Hour deals with what we are asked to assume is an innovative BBC current affairs programme (called The Hour), launched just before the Suez Crisis. Also thrown into the mix are two murders by MI6, a traitor, an MI6 baddie who turns out to be a goodie (neat that, they will have thought, that will keep the punters guessing0, a suicide (I think - it wasn’t very clear whether or not it was that or an accident), a Soviet mole in the BBC, a Soviet list of possible agents, and affair between the attractive producer of the innovative current affairs programme and its well-connected presenter, a convoluted MI6 plot to persuade Gamal Nasser’s dentist to assassinate the Egyptian leader, a debutante engaged to a gay actor, a closet gay Downing Street press officer, a Lord and Lady of the Realm (we can be fined here in Britain if we don’t cap up those three words - who said the age of deference is dead) and it is all played out against the Suez crisis. Furthermore, all these rather lurid plot strands involved a total of - if I’ve got my figures right - about 16 characters, many of them minor.
If you think all that amounts to a F minus of a dog’s dinner, you would be charitable. On so many different fronts it failed and failed badly. I shan’t go into detail here (i.e. I really can’t be bothered), but, as usual, the BBC set itself up for a pratfall by trailing it as something like the Second Coming.
But then there’s Romola Garai: swoon. Then, swoon again. At first I thought she was a newcomer and this BBC dog’s dinner was her debut, but it turns out she’s a well-established trouper and even got most of her kit off playing a prostitute in some other piece of BBC drama. I shall do my utmost to track down a DVD if one is available. One more time: swoon.

. . .

I have just been googling for images of la Garai and have found, rather pleasingly, that she has one of those faces which can change rather dramatically. Here is a selection:

I've just realised that she reminds me of Annette, a woman I went out with years ago. Oh well. That's enough swooning, you'll all think I'm twp.

. . .

The eurozone car crash is working out quite nicely. On any reading the Germans are damned if they do and damned if they don’t: if they pull the plug on Greece, their banks are in the shit, and if they don’t the government is on the shit. Already, it seems, leading CDU politicians, with no doubt an eye on the elections in 2013, are burnishing their eurosceptic credentials and drafting a future script along the lines of: ‘I warned about it from the outset, but no one would listen.’
Germany’s Constitutional Court is due to rule on September 7 on whether what has been going on with the bailouts is legal according to German law, and they don’t ever pull their punches. Everyone, especially the Brits, are reverting to type. Given that one mooted solution would be a ‘fiscal union’ with Germany in charge, the sillier newspapers, of which unfortunately the Mail is one, have been claiming - not seriously, of course, but . . . - that this is the ‘rise of the Fourth Reich’ and that Germany is about to achieve economically what it failed to achieve militarily. The French, of course, are playing along, but I don’t doubt they have one or two nasty surprises up their sleeve, and there is outrage from the bailed out states that over the suggestion that it would only be right and proper if the offered their gold reserves as collateral for the bailout dosh.
Which ever way you stack this up, it is not going to end nicely.

Lord save me from bureaucrats

I’ve spent the past 24 hours nursing bad toothaches and coming to terms with the fact that the dictum ‘better means worse’ is, unfortunately, true. I’m referring to the increasing bureaucracy which permeates much modern life and whose function is ostensibly to ‘facilitate’ but, in fact does anything but. (Incidentally, I can claim to be the author of the above dictum, which I came up with after I read another - ‘more means less’ - in the Daily Telegraph. Here’s another, which I also feel sums up aspects of aspects of the 21st century: ‘bullshit is the new bollocks’).

I had my tooth looked at a week ago by my very attractive 27-year-old Spanish NHS dentist (and, Maria, if you are reading this, I can tell you I wish to God I were 30 years younger). In fact, I don’t think it is the same tooth which is giving my gyp, but

the one behind it, probably playing up out of pique that it got no attention last Friday.

Anyhow, my wife told me that my niece had been taken to Bodmin Hospital which has an emergency dental service, so at 8.30 this morning I rang the hospital and asked to be put through to the service. I was told I had to ring my dentist. But they are not open on a Saturday morning, I told them, which I why I am ringing you.

Do you have the emergency dentist at the hospital? Yes, the woman said. Well, can’t you put me through? No, she said, you must ring your dentist. But all I get is a message telling me to ring back on Monday morning, so would you please put me through.

At this point, the woman claimed she was physically unable to do so, though I flatly refuse to believe that a part of the hospital is telephonically completely isolated from the rest of it. She told me to ring the NHS dental helpline. I did this and was given the number of the emergency dental service at Bodmin. I rang it, and was told by another woman to ‘ring your dentist’.

I told her I had and that the surgery was shut. Well, take paracetamol and ibrufen, she said. Can’t I see someone, I asked. We only see emergencies, she replied, people with an abscess and chronic pain. Chronic pain? That’s me, I told her. Well, take ibrufen. But can’t I see someone. It’s not protocol, she replied. (Great word ‘protocol’, it makes whatever is being talked about sound far, far more important.) Have you got anyone coming in now, I asked. Yes, she said (and I thought she sounded rather triumphant - that most certainly put persistent old me in my place.)

Well, can I ring back later? And she agreed, I thought pretty reluctantly, so the arrangement is that I am due to ring at 12 to see whether they can fit me in, although the unspoken threat - quite obvious from the tone of her voice - was that the chances were that I would once again be sent off with a flea in my ear for even daring to suggest I should receive treatment. Fuckwits.

I agree that my difficulties with NHS bureaucracies is as nothing compared to what several million Somalis are currently having to put up with in Northern Kenya and what millions of Indians have to put up with daily year in, year out in India, but then this is my blog not theirs and I am a lily-livered Westerner for whom ‘tragedy’ is if the car battery’s flat on a nippy winter’s morning.

U.S. woman aims to become the World's Biggest Moron and is well on her way. Then there's young Mariam who is, perhaps, more worthy of our attention, while the Angela and Nicolas show rolls on. And on and on and on

Great news reaches me from Arizona in the United States where a woman called Susanne Eman intends to become the fattest woman in the world. Susanne, who has two son and is 32, already tips the scales at 52st (that’s just under 330kg for all luddites who slavishly use metric measurements and wilfully ignore are marvellous imperial set), says she is eating 20,000 calories a day and plans to hit 112st (711kg) by the time she is 42. Her ambition, she says, is to see whether it is possible that a human could reach weighing a ton. It’s easy to scoff at such people, so I’ll do so: what the bloody hell are you thinking off? Ms Eman (below) claims she has never felt better and feels

‘confident and sexy’, and undoubtedly there will be many who will defend her right to behave like a total moron. But I’m not one of them. By way of contrast (in a sense) I offer you a picture of three-year-old Mariam Jele who is having her hair washed by her father. Nothing particularly startling about that, you might say, and there isn’t. But Mariam and her father are Somalis living in a camp for refugees displaced by drought and famine

in Mogadishu. And for me there is something very touchingr about the picture. It’s a shame that young Miriam is having such a brutal introduction to life.
LATER: It has occurred to me that the above two stories will be especially interesting to students of irony: we here in the West spend all our time eating as much as we can and compete to be the fattest person alive, while several millions – and millions is no exaggeration – have nothing to eat at all. On the other hand we here in the West, who take an interest in all things native, can console ourselves that at least those starving millions are authentic and it reflects rather well on our liberal consciences that we feel really, really terrible about what is happening at the moment in Somalia.

. . .

As for the shenanigans about the euro (as I sense you are all clamouring to ask), well I’ll I can report is that there is no change there i.e. it is going from bad to worse. One of the first pieces of news I heard this morning was that the European Central Bank has lent an unnamed European bank $500 million. What’s significant about that? you might ask. Well, it could mean that given the shit which is on its way towards the fan here in Europe, U.S. banks are reluctant to lend money to European banks for the very understnandable reason that if things to do tits up, they might not get it back. So in order to stay liquid, the unnamed European bank has had to go cap in hand to the ECB. It’s not looking good, although one encouraging sign is that Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy are on the case. They had a meeting a day or two ago and subsequently urged eurozone members to ‘show a little pluck. We can get over this thing’.

Looting: just another excuse for a left/right dust-up - that’s the real problem. And years ago, a workmate had a problem providing an alibi

I’m sure the news of the rioting and looting which took place in Britain last week is common knowledge in most parts of the world. It isn’t that rioting and looting is unknown in other parts, it is that is is quite rare - though not unknown - in Britain. My first reaction when I say the live coverage on television was bafflement. Being a well brought-up, middle-class chap, it has never occurred to me to go looting just as it has never occurred to me to smash up a telephone kiosk or bus shelter for the hell of it. But in the days after the looting, it became obvious that being well brought-up and middle-class had nothing to do with it: quite a few of those who have already been brought before court were patently not the dispossessed, disaffected, jobless black youths the left would so dearly have loved them to be in order for their theories and ideologies to be confirmed. There were as many whites as blacks (and, it has to be said, given the amount of interracial coupling that has taken place over these past 40 years the description ‘black’ is used pretty loosely), there were apparently as many employed as unemployed among the looters and by no stretch of the imagination were they all ‘dispossessed’. Take a look at the six mugshots below (of men who have appeared in court these past few days): these guys look more like

white career criminals than dispossessed and angry blacks. The most bizarre revelation was the identity of one of the looters: she was a 20-year-old foreign languages student at Exeter University, the daughter of a millionaire who grew up in some comfort in Orpington, Kent. She cannot, of course, be regarded as typical of the rioters, but her presence does suggest one motivation for many of the younger rioters to take part. In the words of one, excessively stupid girl interviewed in Birmingham by the BBC, the looting ‘was great’ and she and her friend had a ‘brilliant time’. Others, of course, went on the rampage as soon as they heard what was going on because they fancied acquiring goods without having to pay for them: plasme TVs, cothes, booze, shoes, anything really. It didn’t matter.
That attitude initially made it all rather inconvenient for the left to shoehorn the event into their ideological explanations, until a day or two later they came up with a quasi Marxist explanation: consumerism is to blame. There, they had managed it. Now, counterintuitively, I shall partially agree: consumerist attitudes were part of the make-up of the psychology of the looters. But it is 24-carat bullshit to suggest the they were the cause. What about all those with a consumerist attitude who chose not to go looting?
Sadly, both the left and the right have very quickly adopted their fall-back positions: for the left society is to blame; for the right it is a breakdown in law and order. And by quickly adopting those positions, any analysis of why it all happened and what could be done to cure what is undoubtedly a chronic social problem here in Britain, becomes ever less likely. Ironically, of course, the kneejerk reactions of both political wings are equally symptomatic of the social problem. There is a suspicion that neither side is particularly interested in sorting out what went wrong: they are more interested in winning the debate of what happened and why it went wrong.
As far as I am concerned the canker which lies at the heart of society and which led to the scenes we saw in London, Manchester, Nottingham, Bristol and Birmingham was a long time in the making, and it will take equally as long to get rid of it, if we ever manage to. (It should also be pointed out that such rioting and looting is nothing new in Britain; it’s just that we have not had a lot of it for the past 60/70 years, but the Victorians were quite accustomed to it.) But at the end of the day, I am inclined to agree with the right’s analysis: the moral compass of too many in Britain has gone awol. The benefits the state pays have gone from being help we give those in a fix to see them through while they get back on their feet to an ‘entitlement’, a ‘lifestyle’ choice. It is also my view that the left as adopted the payment of generous benefits no questions asked as a useful means of buying popularity. For example, recent government figures have shown the three of every four jobs created in Britain over the past few years have been taken up by EU migrants from Eastern Europe. So it’s not as though there has been no work available and that people were obliged to live on benefits.

. . .

When I left university, I spent five months living at home, then went to Italy to teach English for five months. When I returned, I went up to Dundee, where I had studied, to visit friends. What was to be a two-week visit eventually lasted ten months stay. For the first eight of those ten months I worked as a barman. Then, courtesy of the schizophrenic girl I had ‘fallen in love with’, I was bust for possession of dope (er, cannabis, not heroin, which I understand is also called dope). It’s a rather involved story which I shan’t recount here. But a previous boyfriend had been a dealer and she had on her an ounce block of Morrocan. She, her flatmate and I went to the cinema and she purposely dropped the cannabis. (Why? She wasn’t playing with the full set.) A copper on the beat was in the foyer at the time, saw the ounce on the floor, came over and told me I had dropped something. I quickly picked it up and put it in my pocket. Then, when he searched me, I didn’t - as I should have done - explain it wasn’t mine, but being a green-behind-the-ears idiot, I took the rap for ‘the girl I loved’. We were, of course, taken to court, but one upshot was that becasue, coincidentally, Mick, the barman I worked with in the public bar of The Galleon, had gone sick, the cops stuck in an ‘undercover’ officer to work with me and pump me for information. They assumed that because the dope had been an ounce block, no more, no less, that I was dealing. Anyway, this idiot was hopeless. Within five minutes of him starting a chatty conversation, I cottoned on to what was going on - it didn’t help that at the time when everyone was wearing very long hair, this idiot, who claimed he had just graduated from art school, had a regulation short-back-and-side - I said as much - my exact words were: ‘You’re asking a load of fucking questions, aren’t you?’ - and I walked out. My next job was working for a landscape gardener, and one of the guys I worked with was a very friendly, very rough and tough, ginger-haired chap. We got on well, then one day at the end of the day he said goodbye. I asked him where was he going. He said he was due in court the following day on burglary charges, he was pleading guilty and he was bound to be jailed. Oh, I said, did he do it? No, he told me, he was innocent of the charge brought against him. So why plead guilty, I asked. Well, he said, he would not be able to give an alibi. Why not? I asked. Because he was burgling another house at the time, he said.

Are all twitterers nutters or do I just attract them? And anyone still fond of modern consensual policing?

A few months ago and against my better judgment, I signed up with Twitter. And that’s about where I left it until yesterday. I have never been able to see the point of Twitter (of Facebook for that matter), but then there’s no denying that I am not ‘the demographic’ for whom these things are, apparently, vital. Twitterettes and Facebookers don’t feel the need to stretch every limb in their body for five minutes just after getting up and before doing anything else: they simply spring out of bed in one bound and switch on their computer or smartphone to check whether or not perchance their cyber-friends have just taken a dump or are about to buy a bus ticket to go to work, that fascinating information being passed on to all and sundry courtesy of Twitter and Facebook. But it ain’t me, I’m afraid, not by a country mile. Some of you might reasonably point out that there is precious little difference between twittering and pontificating in a blog such as this, to which I can only reply: don’t get technical on me. Or to put it another way – fuck off.
But what with the riots, a colleague persuaded me to re-energise my cyber life a little and get back to Twittering. She is pretty and thus had little trouble convincing me. This morning I posted my first tweet re the rioting which has been taking place up and down the land these past few days here in Britain. I wrote (in just under 142 words, which is all part of this arcane cyber nonsense): ‘Would it be tactless to recall Enoch Powell' 'like the Roman' speech? Given that many of the scum were white, I suppose it would be, yes.’ It was a tad contentious, I admit, but needs must.
Ten minutes ago, I checked my email and was informed that I now have two Twitter followers: there’s AncientAlienTech who believes that ‘studies of Ancient earth ruins such as the Mayan and Egyptian Pyramids, suggest that humans were assisted by ancient alien technology’ and Rukma Vimana who is located ‘Deep Inside Planet Earth’ and who believes ‘flying machines from the ancient future landed in India in 6000BC’.
Oh Lord.

. . .

As for the rioting itself, the various liberal apologists who are apt to add their two ha’porth worth on these occasions have been strangely quite as have The Thin Blue Line, our splendid police. Actually, I feel very sorry for our rozzers: they’re damned if they do and they’re damned if they don’t. As one pointed out on the radio, if, after last Saturday night’s looting and arson in Tottenham they had deployed several thousand men, ready in willing, in Transit vans just around the corner from where trouble was expected, they would have been accused of ‘provocation’. So, tactfully, they didn’t, so when the rioting did start, they weren't around. Well, there was one, a community police officer with a bag of mints and a book of bedtime stories. He was part of an initiative to test a new softly, softly policing approach. Added to that the imperative of ‘modern consensual policing’ to ‘engage in dialogue’, and the thousands of black and white thugs who fancied acquiring a new plasma TV with a five-finger discount had a free pass. But that is not to say the cops were happy just looking on. The problem with the liberal approach to policing is that it assumes the other side is rational and prepared ‘to engage in dialogue’. When they show themselves more willing to stick up two fingers to ‘modern consensual policing’ than sit down and discuss ‘issues’, you’re way, way further up shit-creek than you ever imagined. In essence, it’s the liberal dilemma.
To have a fair society, everyone must play fair. And, of course, there are always more than enough out there who who don’t choose to play fair and will take advantage of all the fair play to grab what they want, whenever they want it. Lenin once spoke of ‘useful idiots’ and although he applied it in a different context, the phrase in pertinent here. So what to do? Suggestions, please, on the usual postcard.

Disaffected youths engage in dialogue in support of modern consensual policing