Eurovision, kitsch and queer popes, some of whom might now be saints, wifi radios and showing the Tudors a thing or two: as I promised it’s time to get EDGY (if only I knew what that bloody meant). As for the words queer or nigger or spic or kike or greaseball – me, looking for trouble? – Lenny Bruce sums it up rather well

As I write, the kitschfest known as Eurovision (the ‘Eurovision Song Contest’) is being broadcast (and has been for what really does seem like the past five days), and if there are ‘them’ out there ‘watching us’ and hoping to save Earth from destruction (i.e. ourselves), they are undoubtedly beyond horror. I would like to write that it is quite beyond belief how a reputed ‘civilisation’ can stage this kind of nonsense, but after the opening ceremonies for the 2012 London Olympics and, more recently, the 2014 Winter Olympics I’ve concluded it is wisest to be prepared for the worst always. We must never drop our guard: kitsch is on the rampage, people, and to those intent on surviving its evil intent I can only counsel eternal vigilance: make no mistake, it’s out to get us (©Loons The World Over).

OK, I’m as liberal and broadminded as the next prig, and I do accept that some folk (sadly, my wife and daughter for two) do enjoy this kind of cack, but if any more proof were ever needed that, to paraphrase H. L. Mencken, no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the public (some sources say ‘taste’ but I really can’t be arsed to discover which it is), Eurovision and those opening ceremonies must be it.

But it wasn’t TV’s latest kitschfest which has brought on my latest bout of dyspepsia: it was noticing, while surfing the net and coming across a report on the BBC News website, that the present pope is casting around for a reason to turn a former pope, Paul XI, into a saint. This comes just weeks after he canonised Pope John XXIII, Paul’s predecessor, and John Paul II (who, incidentally, reputedly had second thoughts about accepting the papacy when he was voted in because as a Pole he wasn’t too sure he wanted to live in an Italian neighbourhood). As John XXIII died just over 51 years ago, Paul XI 36 years ago, and John Paul II just nine years ago, this all seems to be happening with indecent haste. So for the connections between Eurovision and the Vatican: few do kitsch better than those two.

I am, by the way, one of those who refuses to accept that John Paul’s predecessor John Paul I died a natural death and firmly believe he was bumped off by an unholy alliance of the Mafia, unsavoury figures surrounding Archbishop Marcinkus and the reputed ‘gay mafia’ which took root in the Vatican while Paul XI was pope. Paul was apparently also gay whose boyfriend was a well-known actor. If he was, there is, of course, nothing wrong with that except that the Roman Catholic church’s hypocrisy in giving gays a rough deal over the sexuality they were born with does make it all a little hard to swallow.

There are also claims (there are ‘claims’ about most things, by the way, and although it is always very entertaining listening to them, it is also wisest, at least initially, to take them with a large grain of salt) that John Paul I was gay, but they are based on the fact that while Patriarch of Venice he was remarkably openminded and liberal about homosexuality. In fact while checking one or two dates while writing this blog, I came across the following quote which rather endears John Paul I to me. It was contained in a speech he made to cardinals while Paul VI was still pope:

The day is not far off when we will have to answer to these people who through the years have been humiliated, whose rights have been ignored, whose human dignity has been offended, their identity denied and their liberty oppressed. What is more we will have to answer to the God who created them.
And, yes, he was speaking about gay men and women.

But back to kitschfests and the canonisation of three popes in what seems like the past ten minutes. Why the rush? Doesn’t the Catholic church have enough saints? And if the intention is to honour these three men, couldn’t some other way have been found? I think (that is I might be wrong and am prepared to be corrected by whatever pedant cares to email me to set me straight) that in order for a man or woman to be canonised two miracles must be attributed to them, miracles which took place when their ‘intercession with God’ was prayed for.

Well, I am one of the uncouth types who believes the definition of a ‘miracle’ is what cannot yet be explained, but which will at some point in the future be perfectly explicable. I mean, were I to travel back in time with my dinky little personal wifi radio (and were the internet available, which, of course, it wasn’t) and were I to turn it on and play to some Tudor folk broadcasts from Russia, Australia, Cuba,

South Africa, Armenia or Iran, what was taking place would most certainly be regarded as a miracle. And if, while I was showing off just what a cool character I was, what with my personal wifi radio and my quite marvellous collection of laptops - seven at the last count, but not all used by me - a plane were to fly overhead - you know the kind we see quite a few off these days, especially if we have the misfortune to live in Hounslow - and I explained to my Tudor audience what it was and where it was going, not only would I be viewed as a source of fabulous miracles, but I would be lucky not to be burned alive as a witch. But this - Tudors spotting jet planes in the sky and me showing off my latest gadget - is a long way from what I was speaking about.

As what is quaintly called a ‘cradle Catholic’, that is one who was born and baptised into the church and not one who ‘converted’ because he fancied the Duke of Norfolk’s youngest daughter and realised he would have to marry her before he could legitimately shag her, I feel I am entitled to my views about the RC church (although I have a very close relative who is rather more attached to it than I am and who reads this blog, so I shall be a little more circumspect in my scorn than I usually am). But this latest bout of saint making is, as far as I am concerned, par for the course.

Incidentally, why do we rule out any suggestion that Pope John Paul I might well have been murdered because we now live in the ‘modern world’ where that kind of thing doesn’t happen and when the Vatican and the papacy has, throughout the ages, at times been a cesspit of vice and murder? Is there really something ‘more respectable’ about the mid-20th century - he died in 1978 - which precludes criminals with a great deal to lose from resorting to that measure? I rather think criminals, whether of the Renaissance or of a more modern era, are eminently pragmatic. The only rule they tend to observe is one often known as the Eleventh Commandment: Thou shalt not be caught.

So there we have it: from one kitschfest to another. The real puzzle is why the Vatican doesn’t have its own entry in the Eurovision song contest. But I’m sure that will come at some point now that I have mentioned it and the Vatican secret service - Gianni and Carmello, as it happens, I once shared a flat with the two of them in Milan in 1973 - have noted my suggestion. Ciao ragazzi!

Oh, and if some of this strikes you, my dear, dear, dear reader as a little more incoherent than usual, yes, wine was involved and drunk during its composition, but I can assure you that no animals were harmed, though mainly because I couldn’t find the bloody cat.

. . .

No one, of course, refers to gays as ‘queers’ anymore, except gays themselves, and when they do it, it’s because they want to make a point. The same goes for the word ‘nigger’: it is now a complete no-no for us all except for blacks themselves, and again they want to make a point. And when they use it, there is absolutely none of the baggage in the word that would be there if it were used by a white. When a black uses the word, there is none – how could there be? – of the hatred, fear and sheer contempt in it which would be central to its use by a white. And I can think of no circumstances where its use by a white would be acceptable.

Yet it really is not as straightforward as that, a point made by Lenny Bruce (a ‘yid’, a ‘jewboy’ to those who still care to use those terms) in one of his funniest routines. On paper, it wouldn’t be funny at all. In fact, at best it would get him banned from the BBC for life, and if his luck were really on a downturn, he might even find himself in court where he still alive today to perform it.

The routine (and I shall spend a few moments in a minute seeing whether a recording of it is available on You Tube) is excellent proof the the adage is true that it ‘ain’t the joke, it’s the way you tell it’. Now, amuse yourself for a minute or two while I head off to You Tube. Think I’ve found it.

Watch (or rather, listen to) this:

 

It is, in fact a clip from the film Lenny, with Dustin Hoffman as Lenny Bruce, but the script is word for word Bruce’s routine. But even so I think the point is well made.

Today, a special ‘dangerously liberal’ blog posted specifically for morons who are nothing of the kind (liberal that is, or even dangerously liberal). In fact, one would be hard-pressed to discern any kind of attitude except ‘what’s on next?’

(If, by the way, you don’t get the allusion to ‘dangerously liberal’ here might be a good starting point. Or, for all I know, a good ending point. Depends on you, of course, I’m nothing if not dangerously liberal.)

As far as I know the slaughter is going on in Syria and has carried on - well, ever since it really started several years ago. But you wouldn’t know it from our media here in Britain, not even from the pages of the saintly, caring Guardian or the sober, responsible BBC. What with the growing violence in the Ukraine - I heard today that between 40,000 and 48,000 Russian combat troops are camped on the border, plus a similar number of support troops (drivers, medics, sappers, borscht cooks and vodka distillers) - Syria is no longer, as we say in the trade, ‘sexy’ and the media and its expense account have moved on to more recent savagery.

Unlike Syria, the problems that our unfolding in the Ukraine, are still being reported. The US and the EU are, apparently, threatening to consider getting ‘really tough (‘Look, Vladimir, whatever you might think, we’re really, really, really not joking, and if you don’t shape up and, you know, start behaving responsibly, we’ll make sure none of your cronies’ wives will be able to shop at Harrods anymore. So watch it, matey!’) ’ if Russia doesn’t stop ‘interfering’ in the Ukraine’s domestic affairs.

This ‘dangerously liberal’ chap (that’s me, dear hearts, the chap whose blog you are reading) does wonder quite how while taking such a principled stand on Russia’s interference in the Ukrainian domestic affairs the US and the EU can justify its own interference in the Ukraine’s domestic affairs, but maybe I’m being a tad tactless to mention it. But, as I say, unlike Syria, the unfolding events in the Ukraine are still getting the odd report on TV

I like watching TV, I do

news and in our papers, but, to be honest, it’s all getting a little boring, what with the same kind of reports every night, so thank goodness that for folk who like to spend an evening glued to what my grandfather used to call the ‘idiot’s lantern’, there is other, more ‘accessible’ fare if you find the occasional news bulletin from the world’s trouble spots a little too hard to take after a hard day in the office.

If you are one of those who, you know, likes to relax a little in the evening before going to bed and not screwing your other half, you are well catered for. Take, for example, Parking Mad, a ‘documentary’ which was broadcast last night at 9pm on BBC 1.

Parking Mad spent a full 60 minutes looking at the world of parking a car or a van and getting it wrong to such an extent that drivers attracted the attention of a traffic warden who would then usually present the idiot driver with a parking ticket. And that was it. I didn’t actually watch it, my my desktop computer on which on a Thursday night I am obliged to do a bit of extra-curricular work for my employer in order to earn an extra shekel or two every week, shares the living room with our TV set. And - I am so ashamed, I can only whisper this quietly, ‘my wife watched it. Sssh.’

So I did catch the occasional glimpse and was treated to such fascinating snippets as a Nigerian getting absolutely furious because he was given a parking ticket, the chap visiting an ‘independent adjudicator’ because he felt he had been unfairly given a parking ticket (good on him! You really must stand up to the tyrannies of modern life, as our cousins in Syria are now discovering or you’ll be walked all over!), and the driving instructor who was given a parking ticket halfway through a lesson and whose pupil subsequently missed her driving test (poor lamb. Lord, was she upset).

I’ve got to come clean here and admit I find the problems caused by not finding anywhere legal to park and the tribulations our doughty traffic wardens face daily less interesting than last Tuesday’s weather forecast. And I am equally immune to the delights of hearing all about work in a South Wales call centre, but apparently I’m in a minority because the programmes detailing what shenanigans occur is well into its second series.

For those of you unlucky enough not to live in the good old U of K and who think I am making this up, the fourth instalment in the second series was broadcast on BBC 3 on Tuesday, April 29, at 9pm and if those who are entertained by that kind of mindless crap missed it, it was repeated just over three hours later.

Other gems Britain’s TV services have treated viewers to over these past few years is several series about people with dirty houses, a six-part series on the lives and loves of a number of town planners, several series detailing the lives of men who drive Eddie Stobart trucks for a living (‘Dave was getting increasingly worried that the traffic jam would delay him to such an extent that he would be late delivering his load of bacon offcuts. Would he make it?’) and a series all about working as an estate agent in the Outer Hebrides.

As they say, if you really, really want in television, you’ve got to be passionate about it. That’s one reason why I have never tried for a job in television. And I wonder how much TV the good folk of Syria are enjoying at the moment.

To be fair, you will find several news reports of the latest events in Syria on the Daily Telegraph and Guardian website (and, I don’t doubt, on The Times website, but as it is now behind a paywall and our family motto is Don’t Part With A Penny If It Is At All Possible Not To Part With A Penny, I don’t bother with The Times). But the charge still stands that even the editors of those two papers seem to have deemed the Syrian conflict no longer sexy, so it the war there has inexorably slid down the news list. As the TV services, if you can entertain morons with stories about parking disasters and wacky folk in call centres, why risk boring them with stuff they might well find upsetting. I mean, you can see their point, can’t you?

, , ,

It was eight years today that I had my heart attack. (I won’t describe it as ‘my first’ for fear of tempting fate.) I was glad I was in London at the time, because very soon after going to see the nurse at work because I ‘wasn’t

feeling at all well’ - none of the ‘crushing pain’ for me for some reason - I fell unconscious, was given oxygen, bundled into an ambulance about 30 minutes later and had a stent inserted within about ten minutes of arriving at hospital. Incidentally, we no longer have a nurse at work, but then that’s ‘innovation’ for you. Might well be a ‘pilot scheme’.

The question (from a possibly dangerously liberal useful idiot): So what IS going on in the Ukraine? Just more willy-waving or it is rather less serious? Discuss

Many years ago, when I was about 35 and my father was 62, he described me as ‘dangerously liberal’. I laughed my socks off. How on earth, I thought, can one be ‘dangerously’ liberal. Could one be ‘dangerously’ enlightened or ‘dangerously’ considerate? Wasn’t to be called ‘dangerously’ liberal just as nonsensical?

Well, dear reader, I still think it is, or would be, nonsense to describe someone as ‘dangerously’ enlightened or ‘dangerously’ kind, but I now see my father’s point about the dangers of being overly liberal. Unfortunately, he is now dead these past 21 years, so I can’t tell him. I suspect it was folk who were ‘dangerously liberal’ who were regarded by the Soviets as ‘useful idiots’. (I thought it was Lenin who first used the term, but according to Mr Wikipedia, so far no one has found the phrase used in his published work of transcripts of his speeches. Anyway, it doesn’t actually matter who first said it: we all know what it means, and if you don’t, you probably are one.)

My father was of the generation who fought in the war. Although he was born in 1923 and under 17 when war was declared in September 1939, after two years at Cambridge (where he gained a ‘wartime degree’ which he never converted into a full degree by spending one more year at college after the war), he enlisted (or was called up – I don’t know which, but it isn’t relevant) and after serving in the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry, he took part in D-Day.

Then, at some point, he joined Army Intelligence, I think because he had a gift for languages and spoke excellent French and German. His link with ‘intelligence’ lasted in one form or another until he retired, although I am hazy about details to the point of knowing more or less nothing specific. And exactly how those links gelled with something that I do know about him – that he campaigned for the then Liberals in either the 1950 general election or the one held the following year (perhaps he was asked to keep tabs on them, but I suspect that at 27 he was still something of an idealist) - I really don’t know. At some point in the early 1950s he went to work for the ‘BBC Monitoring Service’ in Caversham (and coincidentally in the building my old school, The Oratory School, had been turfed out of during the war to make way for whatever government agency thought it needed it) and I think it is now generally agreed that that organisation had more to do with Her Majesty’s secret intelligence services than Aunty (as we once knew the BBC cod affectionately.

As a kid I once asked him what he did there, and he told me that staff listened to foreign radio stations to pick up news which might be broadcast in bulletins by the BBC. And perhaps they did, or perhaps some of them did. I really don’t know. I once, many years later, asked my father what his politics were, and he, rather proudly I felt at the time, described himself as a ‘right-wing radical’, whatever that can mean, which is everything and nothing. In 1959 he was posted to Berlin as the ‘BBC’s Representative’ where he had an office and three staff in Savigny Platz.

The office also had its own studio from which my father weekly broadcast a short talk beamed into East Germany (Die Deutsche Demokratische Republik) and which I know think, knowing just a little more about his role in Berlin, that were used to pass on message to whoever MI6 wanted to pass on messages. His boss in the BBC was head of what was known as the German Service. Why, I have often since asked myself, would the BBC want a German Service although it didn’t want, need or have a French Service, an Italian Service or, to labour the point, an Austrian Service. The BBC also had a correspondent in Berlin, and he never used the studio. Why not I wonder?

After we had been in Berlin for a year or two, a certain Charles Wheeler became the BBC’s correspondent in Berlin. (It must have been his second posting there if his Wikipedia entry is right, because it says he served as the Berlin correspondent for three years from 1950. Well, he would have been 33 at the time, so it’s very possible. All I know is that he served there as correspondent in the Sixties. I know because we went around to his house several times and I met him and his wife Dip. However, I simply think the Wiki entry is just wrong, and that his stint as correspondent in the Sixties was his only one. Furthermore, the entry makes no mention of his first wife — I don’t know her name — who, I understand, had an affair with one John Freeman, who she married after divorcing Wheeler.)

Wheeler, who was undoubtedly a very good journalist, was, I think avowedly, liberal, although not in the political sense. I suspect he knew or at, the very least, suspected my father had links — whether extra-curricular or not — with the security services and disapproved. I do know, partly from comments my father made later in life, that the two didn’t really get on and rather disapproved of each other. Perhaps Daddy (I always called him that, even though as I grew older I felt it did sound rather daft, but could think of no reason not to) also thought Wheeler to be ‘dangerously liberal’.

Later in life, just a few years before he died, I asked my father about his links with the security services and he did tell me a little, although the story was consistently that he ‘helped out a little’. What the truth is, I really don’t know, and I’m not inclined to speculate, mainly because I’ll probably get it wrong and there’s very little indeed to be gained from doing so.

I’ve been rattling about my father — as preambles go the above must surely take some beating — because although I don’t share what I think must have been his politics, I now fully understand what he meant by ‘dangerously liberal’ and why he called me that at the time. (It is, perhaps, also quite pertinent that I am said to look rather like him, have inherited several of his mannerisms and traits, can get very short with people on the phone as he did and in many other ways take after him. But it would also be fair to say that in many other ways we are quite different.

I do feel that he, like many of his generation, had his salad days cruelly cut short by World War II, and where I was free to indulge myself, grow my hair long, smoke dope and take acid and generally postpone maturation and adulthood for many years, he and his generation had to grow up very fast indeed. I think it is something which is sadly rather forgotten these days.

For example, he once told me that by the age of about 22 he was a captain and in charge of many men whose lives depended on him making the right decision on the spot. At 22 I was doing very little but feeling sorry for myself, falling in love, having as much sex as I could — though by no means enough — and wondering what the hell to do with my life. I was, of course, as I have detailed in previous blog entries, entirely convinced that I was ‘a writer’ but did absolutely nothing about it at the time which only shows the degree to which we can all con ourselves thoroughly if we really put our minds to it. But to conclude this preamble: my father described me as ‘dangerously liberal’ and ever since then I have been very conscious of the dangers of possibly being a ‘useful idiot’. And that, on a route perhaps for more circuitous than is necessary, brings me to the question of: what the bloody hell is going on in the Ukraine?

Here are supplementary questions: are the Russians really intent on, as some fool Ukrainian politician suggested a few days ago, ‘starting World War II? What are the U.S. objectives in this whole sorry saga? Does Putin have some strategy or is he just busking? Just why is the EU getting involved and does it have any strategic interest? There are many, many more questions, but of which the final question must be: when, as I intend to, I write what I am about to write, am I still being, in my father’s rather succinct accusation, being ‘dangerously liberal’?

. . .

You and I, though not John Kerry, Sergei Lavrov, our very own William Hague and whatever prat the EU has in place to fulfil the role those three perform, can only go on what our media tell us. I like to think — and a report from Kiev on the World Tonight reinforced in me the impression — that ‘Aunty’ BBC does do its very best to be objective. Kerry, Lavrov and Hague (and, of course, the EU Prat) are privy to intelligence reports which you and I will never get to hear. The problem is that, courtesy of that old favourite conspiracy theorists the world over, ‘wheels within wheels’, their own intelligence services might well have an agenda of their own.

But even bearing that in mind (i.e. ‘news is what doesn’t appear in our newspapers’) they undoubtedly have a fuller picture of what is going on than we poor saps do. One thing which has remained in my mind was a commentary from a Russian (most probably on BBC Radio 4’s The World Tonight) who, I gathered, was reasonably independent, who insisted that both sides, the Russians and the West, have miscalculated and fundamentally misunderstand each other and the situation on the ground. Perhaps from him, perhaps from elsewhere — I really don’t remember where — I got and get the impression that Russia’s main motivation is to re-establish a national Russian pride. And, perhaps in a ‘dangerously liberal’ way, I find I have a certain sympathy with that. It’s as though it feels — note ‘it feels’ not necessarily ‘it has been’ — pushed a little too far, to have lost a little too much face since the demise of its Soviet empire and has decided enough is enough.

We can argue until we are blue in the face the ‘rights and wrongs’ of whether or not, for example, Crimea is an ‘intrinsic part of Greater Russia’. At the end of the day all we get is a cacophony of opposing views. And at the end of the day the question is irrelevant. Putin (whose popularity, incidentally, is said to be soaring in Russia, although there are also a great many who don’t want to give him the time of day) says that Russians in other counties must be protected.

One observation trotted out time and again is that Hitler said something very similar about Germans in foreign countries, and look how that ended. But whatever his objectives, I don’t for a moment think Putin has any of the wacky ideas which drove Hitler. And I think — this quite possibly ‘dangerously liberal’ commentator thinks — that it would be very silly indeed to write off such nationalistic sentiments, however much they strike us Westerners as irrational. We here in the West are apt and dismally unimaginative enough to insist that ‘our’ values are the only worthwhile values and that values which deviate from those are, at best, noth worth taking seriously, and, at worst, must be actively opposed.

What are the facts? What is the sentiment in Eastern Ukraine? For every report I have heard that many there feel a kinship with Mother Russia, I have heard other reports that suggests that many Eastern Ukrainians, despite feeling a kinship and valuing their Russian heritage, want to keep a distance from Moscow and retain their independence. What is, or better, what might be the purpose of massing Russian troops just the other side of the border with Eastern Ukraine as we know they have been? I find it incredible to accept that Putin is planning some kind of invasion to annex Eastern Ukraine, because what would be the purpose?

At the end of the say he would gain very little but lose a great deal. And are there, perhaps, a great many Russian ‘businessmen’ who are doing rather nicely, thank you very much, and would prefer stability rather than instability because the suspect they would have too much to lose? I would find it far easier to believe that the 70,000 Russian troops are there ‘just in case’ they are needed ‘to protect the lives of Russians’, even though any such action would be driven by sentiment rather than rationality. Another commentator suggested that Putin has rather painted himself into a corner.

Taking over Crimea was one thing. Trying to take over Eastern Ukraine would be quite another and, at the end of the day, more trouble than it is worth. Yet if such an action were driven more by nationalistic sentiment than rational thinking, would if even matter that Russia had a great deal to lose? I heard, years ago, a suggestion that what distinguishes humankind from all other forms of animal life (because for better or worse we are merely just another form of animal life on the planet) was not the ability to act rationally, but the ability and propensity to act irrationally.

Then there is the very odd and worrying question: just what does the U.S. have to gain from all this? Why is the U.S. getting involved? I’d best immediately make clear that I refuse to accept at all that it is acting in the interests of ‘democracy’, of ‘what’s right’, of protecting freedom? In my eyes the U.S. lost all such credibility when it invaded Iraq for no reason I can make out, and had previously made a complete fool of itself by starting, then losing, the Vietnam War (and, it has to be said, the U.S. has form in these matters: the Spanish/American war was a pretty cynical debacle, too, even if the U.S. apparently ‘won’). So what has it to gain by ratcheting up that tension in the Ukraine?

There is a good case to be made out that it was U.S. meddling in the first place which kicked off the whole sorry saga. And why is it so content to pal up with a whole range of unsavoury neo-fascists in Ukraine, many of whom are members of the ‘interim government’. OK, the previous president was a kleptomaniac and corruption was rife. But although that president has now gone, corruption is apparently just as bad and getting worse.

So what is the U.S. game plan? Does it even have one? Closer to home, why it Britain getting involved? Wouldn’t it have been a lot more sensible to have remained strictly neutral and perhaps later been in a position to act as an honest broker. But no, we had to jump in with both feet and are now hitched to the American bandwagon from which it will prove impossible to unhitch ourselves. (The former Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson, by the way, when invited to join in the bunfight which was Vietnam, was wise enough to reply ‘thanks, but no thanks’. It didn’t make him any friends in Washington, but thank you, Harold.)

Then there’s the EU, that great political irrelevancy of our time: what on earth makes all the politicos — men and women who give the distinct impression of having hightailed it to Brussels to make a career for themselves because they simply didn’t have the nous to make it in their home countries — in Brussels think? What does the EU have to gain? Does it have some arcane strategy by which the EU will benefit in the long run? Perhaps it does, but I can’t think of any.

Then there is us, you and I, here in the West. And then there are the Ukrainians themselves, without a working government and living in a failing economy. What do we and they have to gain from it all? Or better how much exactly do we have to lose from all these shenanigans, the conduct of which we have no control over whatsoever. Am I being ‘dangerously liberal’?

My father, were he still alive, might say so. I rather think I’m not. My view in this as in many other matters is that it’s pointless to do something for no very good reason whatsoever. And that is what seems to be happening here.

Kissing and making up? Or do Val’s claws go in rather deeper than we thought? Meanwhile, Segolene shows she really is Royal. And we can now all be ethical - all you need is self-regard and a smattering of narcissism

Quick look at the viewing statistics of this blog and yet again the saga of French President Francois Hollande, his dick and the women in his life is its main attraction. At the time of writing this particular entry has 33 ‘daily’ views (I am using quote marks because I don’t know how ‘daily’ is measured, as if, though, it mattered), 107 weekly views, and 452 monthly views. So that entry is attracting substantially more interest than most others and the obvious question is: why.

What is is it about Flamby and his sex life which attracts so much interest. Well, I don’t know and care even less. But as the First Rule Of Blogging is to ‘give the suckers what they want’, I spent a good ten minutes earlier today to bring you the latest on Frances’ latest sex machine and related matters. First off is the claim, made in a book about Flamby, that he and Valerie Rottweiler are still an item. According to a journalist Elise Karlin

The most recent official portrait of the French president

(motto: No Rumour Too Trivial) in a book called The President Who Wanted to Live His Lives, the affair never really ended. The Daily Telegraph, from which I filched this particular snippet, quotes the book as saying that he recently met her for a meal at their favourite restaurant and brought her a bunch of flowers. (See, the French know how to do these things. And you can bet he didn’t buy them a few minutes earlier as an afterthought when he filled his car with petrol and spotted them next to the newspapers when he went to pay.)

That’s all fine and dandy, but the piece also goes on to give another reason which, if true, would go some way to explaining why Flamby wants to keep the Rottweiler onside. It seems she knows quite a bit about a meeting — a ‘compromising meeting’ no less — he had with Jérôme Cahuzac. This is the chap who sat in the French cabinet tasked with ensuring all French men and women were playing fair and paying the taxed they owed but who came unstuck when the press found out he had a secret Swiss bank account (is there any other kind and, for the record, I don’t). Well!

What exactly was ‘compromising’ about the meeting Hollande had with Cahuzac we don’t know but what is certain is that Hollande wants to make damn sure we won’t, and if that means taking the Rottweiler out to supper (and perhaps getting his end away later on), it’s a price worth paying.

What of Segolene Royal, the mother of his four children Hollande jilted to take up with Valerie Rottweiler, before telling her to sling her hook so he could start squiring the actress Julie Gayet? Well, I have to admit she had a great deal of my sympathy to start with — I mean four children does seem to speak of come kind of commitment and she did very much seem to be the wronged woman.

But if another story I have traced down is true, we should, perhaps, cut back a little on the sympathy and ask ourselves whether she is not just as big a cow as the woman who replaced her in Flamby’s bed. Segolene, it seems, has been living up to her surname. There were claims that she has ordered all her female staff ‘not to show cleavage’ and that all her staff should stand up when she passes them in the office. In fact, it was said that her approach is now announced before she enters a room so her staff can do exactly that. Furthermore, when she has lunch, no one is allowed into adjacent rooms because the cause to much noise.

Curiously, her spokesman has denied that she had ordered her female staff not to show cleavage, but did not deny the other claims. That doesn’t of course, make them true, but a nasty little tick like — well, like me — might suggest that they could well be true. Well! Further details here.


As if this weren’t all French enough — it has the two essential elements: sex (Royal, Trierweiler and Gayet) and food (Flamby), here’s another story which threatens to transform the whole business into a cliche. Another Telegraph story claims that one Nicolas Sarkozy, another gentleman who finds it supremely difficult to keep his dick in his trousers tried to seduce La Rottweiler. It’s all so very different from the kind of scandal we are accustomed to here in Old Blighty where a Cabinet minister can be hounded out of office for not renewing his or her library card. And when sex is involved, 99pc of the time the politico in question has been secretly batting for his own side.

. . .

You probably think self-indulgence is more or less eating too much chocolate or sleeping in when you could be getting up. But there are interesting variations, depending upon your pretensions. Here is a form of self-indulgence I came across a few minutes ago. To my mind it’s not far

We’re ethical, so there!

from the sentiment behind a nauseating phrase you might have had the misfortunte to come across: ‘Intelligent people like us.’ It is a phrase sometimes used by a couple you might well be hearing more about, Sian and Simon Smugg.

For the record, I’m not ethical and hope to Christ I never shall be. I’d never live it down.

Life, death, football, Moyes, Manchester United, money, tears, second-hand opinion and anything else I can throw into mix. Plus why – why! – all this bloody interest in Francoise Hollande? And a quite fascinating royal tale!

I had for some time been toying with the idea of a post about Manchester United, their new manager David Moyes and how to all our dismay – that is to the dismay of all the club’s supporters – they have been a mediocre to bad side this season. But as anyone with two ears and a radio or TV will know events have overtaken me. Moyes is no longer the ‘new manager’. He is now a ‘past manager’, sacked after just ten months into a six-year contract.

Analysis – the technical term for interminable waffle – has been abundant about what, why, where, when, who, to whom, with whom, to whom it should have been and did the Glazers use a condom when they shafted Moyes, and I am only repeating various things I have heard on the radio this morning. My view is that Moyes should have been given more time, at least another season, if not two, to show his mettle, and then been shafted if United proved unable to regain the glory they achieved under Alex Ferguson. But I am old-fashioned. It has often been pointed out that Ferguson got several years grace when he was appointed 28 years ago, but the world of football was very different then. Certainly, it was already about money, but to my mind, what with the fabulous sums available for one reason or another for clubs who win the Premier League title and/or make it into the Champions League, it is now far, far more about money than ever before.

Incidentally, I am not one of those – in fact, I am the complete opposite of those – who bang on, usually in the pub with a pint in their hands, about how ‘our modern players are overpaid, overgrown big girls’ blouses who should cut their hair and get a proper job’ – elaborate in your own time, if you so wish, but before that get the fuck out of my blog. Yes, they are paid

enormous sums, certainly more than you and I could hope to see in a lifetime, but they are the one asset the club which employs and pays them have. Not one penny (cent, centime, pfennig) of all the fabulous sums being made by clubs through TV rights and coverage and the sale of all the tat which is generally known as ‘merchandise’ would be made if it were not for those players.

The players make it all possible. They are the source of all the money, and long go are the days where a man would play professional football in the winter and work as a painter and decorator in the summer to feed his family. Oh, and when George Clooney or Leonard DiCaprio or Jennifer Lawrence are paid $5 million for a part in film, you don’t hear the wiseacres sounding off in the pub (pint in hand) and opining in unison: ‘It’s a farce, I wouldn’t pay him/her in washers! All that bloody money just for standing before a camera and speaking words someone has written? It complete bloody, total lunacy! My two year-old could act/play football/paint/compose music/run the country better – and he’s even more of a narrow-minded, bigoted halfwit than I am! Only goes show doesn’t it?’

But back to Moyes. The Manchester United fans seem to be split pretty evenly down the middle between those who are saying ‘thank God, about time, now get someone in who can really do the job’ and those, like me, who think this is really not the way to go about things and that if patience were ever a virtue, now is the time to find out.

The villains of the piece are, and have been for some time, Malcolm Glazer and his sons Joel and Avram who own the club (and have several sporting interests in the US). And they are unashamed businessmen who will readily admit they are in it for the money. And when times are good there is a lot of money to be made. They have never been particularly popular, but then with the exception of some clubs, owners rarely are. They got off to a bad start with the fans when they bought Manchester United in 2005, but highlighting their talkover would be very disingenuous: there has been trouble at United long before and, like Liverpool for the past 20 years - until now - they have also had their time in the wilderness, especially after Matt Busby retired (and like Alex Ferguson wouldn't bugger off and let his successor get on with it).

One of the many interesting and, I think, pertinent points made this morning is that when Alex Ferguson finally retired at the end of last season, he wasn’t the only one to leave. There was something like a wholesale changing of the guard from the chairman David Gill down (and someone mentioned their lawyer who was apparently a very smart cookie but who also retired last year). When Moyes moved in from Everton, he brought with him his own staff and got rid of much of the previous infrastructure. It’s been said that the players didn’t happily adapt to his style, which is very hands on and tough, and that he lost the confidence of some players early on. It’s also been said – and this is my view – that the playing squad he inherited from Ferguson was not all that good and that United had been quite lucky to win the title last season.

As someone pointed out on the radio this morning it was a question of the opposition underperforming – all three contenders, Manchester City, Chelsea and Liverpool were going through their own managerial upheavals and not playing to the best of their abilities. I must say, I was surprised

when United won the Premier League, and they were most certainly not playing well and winning until Robin Van Persie joined them from Arsenal after Christmas (NB I am told it was before Christmas). It would be no exaggeration to claim that Van Persie salvaged their season last year.

That things were not all rosy in the garden might be gauged from the fact that Ferguson even hauled Paul Scholes out of retirement to bolster his midfield, which is a pretty unusual move. I was puzzled that Moyes didn’t play Ferdinand more often. And it has to be said that all the dithering over buying players just before the season started last August didn’t look good as the only player he did land was one Marouane Fellaini who – in my view, at least – was rather less effective in midfield than had Moyes played a peanut butter sandwich.

But what do I know? As Liverpool’s great Bill Shankly once said about football: ‘Some people believe football is a matter of life and death, I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.’

(Note to American readers: When I and Shankly refer to ‘football’, we mean what you know as ‘soccer’. It has always puzzled us in the rest of the world why you couldn’t also refer ‘football’ as ‘football’ – because that is what is it is – and find some other name for your ‘football’, which we call ‘American football’.)

But there you go – as Moyes has now – and it all history now. I feel that United are now in for a few rough years, that they will, as they have in the past in similar circumstances, go through quite a few managers before they hit upon a new Matt Busby or Alex Ferguson, and that the time has come to acknowledge as much. I can’t see the Glazer family selling up yet or even for some time because there is still money to be made from the club. But it’s not going to look very pretty for a few years now.

PS Just been considering what I wrote earlier on and I thought I might add that it is, perhaps, possible that Moyes’s style was wrong for the kind of side Manchester United are when they are at their best. But even then the man should have been given at least another season to prove himself either way.

. . .

I am still baffled by the interest shown around the world – now even Brazil – about bloody Francoise Hollande and his wandering dick. The blooger statistics tell me that he is still the most visited post in the ’ere collection and has been for several months now. So what give? Folk dying by the hundreds in Syria, a new dictator is slowly easing himself into place in Egypt, the Ukraine could or could not spark a new war in Europe, David Moyes gets the push, but all folk seem to want to know is: who is France’s president Francoise Hollande shafting this week? Odd.

. . .

A fascinating story has come my way courtesy of a friend on the Mail’s gossip column, who – whisper it quietly! – gets to hear these things! It seems David Moyes’ maternal great-grandfather was, by his third marriage, related to the daughter of the Silver-Stick-In-Attendance to Prince Heinrich-Wilhem Graf von Anschluss zu Lubeck-Treppenwitz, Queen Victoria’s, second nephew three times removed who in his younger days was something of a card!

As a young man and chafing a little at the inconsistencies and incongruities of life in late 19th-century Schleswig-Holstein at the court of his father, Prince Heinrich-Wilhem upped sticks and sailed to the Spice Islands where he landed a job training the local Sawab of Molucca’s racing elephants! Unfortunately, he did not show the prowess in that profession as he had at hockey – he captained the Lichtenstein national side at the 1749 Brussels Olympics – and was unceremoniously shown the door when two of his elephants died of alcohol poisoining! As they say, it’s a small world!