NB Have a bit of patience when loading this page. These soundfiles seem to load and play in Safari (on a Mac laptop) , Firefox and Chrome (on Macs and PCs) but don’t seem to on Opera on either platform. After spending a lot of time trying to find out how I can post soundfiles directly to the blog rather than create a video, use the soundfile as the soundtrack, upload it to YouTube, embed then embed the bloody video in the blog (around the houses or what?), I have now discovered that browsers which ‘know’ HTML5 (and, no, I haven’t a clue either, but there you go) can use a simply code. Opera obviously doesn’t. Also works on Internet Explorer on a PC, and also on my Android smartphone.
I’m sure every parent is apt to magnify what they regard as the talents of their children, while at the same time being rather blind to their faults and shortcomings. My daughter, 18 in just over two months, listen to a lot of music on her phone and the radio, but it is the usual crap played on phones and radios. Furthermore, and by her own admission, she can’t, as we say kindly ‘hold a tune’. She once put it to me with admirable candour that she ‘couldn’t sing for toffee’.
Actually, I don’t necessarily think she has tested her potential musical abilities as much as she might and, who knows, she might be a late developer. Her brother is rather different, and although he has now given up on the drums and hasn’t been near ukulele he asked to have for Christmas in what seems like eight years, I rather suspect that he does have a certain musical ability which might be worth nurturing. I first thought so several years ago when he quite astounded me in la-la-la-in to me two quite intricate theme tunes to two drama series which were showing on TV at the time.
My father showed no interest in music, and I can’t remember him ever listening to it. He reminded me of the anecdote of some US president or other who was said to know only two tunes: Yankee Doodle Dandy and all the tunes which weren’t Yankee Doodle Dandy. On the other hand my mother did like music and when I was younger went to concerts with her when we lived in Berlin because my father refused to. I even saw the late Otto Klemperer conduct, sitting in some kind of high chair because he was pretty incapacitated.
My older brother (the schizophrenic) had a certain musical ability, playing piano and guitar reasonably well, but as far as I know my sister (sorry, M.) (Later, May 29: Apparently I have been a tad unkind to my sister. She has been happily singing in a choir for these past 15 years, which, now I think about it she has told me about quite often. So, sorry, M, but for a different reason) and my younger brother lost out on those particular genes.
I can’t claim to have much musical ability and my guitar playing is basic. I could, at a pinch, bamboozle someone who knew little about guitar playing into thinking I ‘wasn’t bad’, but a good guitar player would quite rightly have me down as a nine-bob note with 30 seconds.
But I do love music and listen to a lot of it. And it occurred to me that were I to try a little, coax a little, drew out a little, I might somehow be able to spark a similar interest in my son.
I suspect our tastes become a little more sophisticated as we grow older: young children go a bundle on sweets and such which would disgust the palate of an older man or women. But young children don’t as a rule go for olives, or chicory, garlic, the foods which are known as something of an acquired taste.
When I was my son’s age – he is 15 in five days – I went a bundle on The Beatles, The Kinks and other groups, but whose music, when I listen to it now, seems to me rather thin gruel. As I have got older, I have grown to like ‘classical music’ and jazz more and more. Both seem to offer more substance, more body. But to try to spark an interest in my son (which, I’m sure, just needs elucidating) needs a little tact and guile. I think it would be counterproductive to introduce him at this point to, say, a Shostakovich symphony or Shoenberg or Vaughan Williams.
When I was ten, I began to attend a Jesuit college in Berlin. School was, as they do in Germany, six days a week from 8.30am until 1pm. I would be home at just before two, have my lunch, then dawdle around for a while before sitting down to going my homework. And every afternoon while doing my homework I would be tuned into AFN (the American Forces Network) to listen to the Don Ameche Pop concert. I can’t remember a single tune or song I heard except one, his signature tune, Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto.
I now gather that among snobby types, you know, the sophisticated sort for whom it is as important to be seen at a concert as well as hear the music, Tchaikovsky is a tad infra dig, rather too ‘accessible’ for polite society. Well, more fools them. And that piece, with its striking opening bars is surely one of the best ways to be quietly introduced to the beauty of some classical pieces.
My idea was to buy a small MP3 player and load it with ten shortish pieces which I think might interest my son. And, yes, they are ‘accessible’, but at this stage that would be no bad strategy. And for the sake of writing this post I have also added nine of those pieces below. I couldn’t unfortunately include the Tchaikovsky because the method I used to post MP3s of the pieces so you can listen to them didn’t allow me to upload it.
All the pieces are, in my view, very beautiful, although, of course, beauty is by no means a prerequisite of interesting, satisfying music. But I’ve chosen them because I think – I hope they might appeal to my son and encourage him in later years to do some exploring. There is no Bach, because ironically Bach needs listening and is not as ‘accessible’ – what an awful word, but I am obliged to use it – as other pieces. There is a predominance of second movements merely because a great number of them have a melody with a certain immediate attraction.
So go on, listen to them. Don’t bother listening to all at once. Listen to one, possibly two, then come back another time.
PS I was planning a post on why I think the distinction between ‘classical’ music, ‘modern’ music and jazz is essentially phoney and snobbish, but that will have to wait.
Stabat Mater - Pergolesi Giovanni Battista
Second movement of Beethoven's Piano Concert No 5
Second movement of Mozart's Piano Concerto No 21
Scarlatti Keyboard Sonata In F Minor, K 466
Claire de lune - Claude Debussy
Second movement Symphony No 7 - Beethoven
Second movement Piano Sonata No 14 - Beethoven
Requiem In D Minor, K 626 - 8. Sequentia, Lacrimosa - Mozart
Second movement String Quartet in C - Josef Haydn
Monday 19 May 2014
Friday 16 May 2014
In which my son asks for a dog for his birthday and I say No, and my name is now mud
Going through a slight ‘Dad is a bastard’ phase here in Powell Towers, because I have vetoed the suggestion that my son should be allowed to have a dog for his 15th birthday. I am, when push comes to shove, pretty much of a softy when it comes to my children, but in this instance I think I’ll be standing my just don’t think it would be a very good idea at all, even though I rather like dogs.
Previously, about four years ago, my son developed an enthusiasm for playing the drums. So he had drum lessons and got a secondhand set from his cousin, which though not cheap at £70 was a damn sight cheaper than getting a new set. Carried
on with his lessons, and would often call me through to his room to admire the latest technique he had mastered (although at the still simple level he was playing I wonder whether the word ‘technique’ is rather overstating it).
But bit by bit I noticed his playing sessions were shorter and shorter and shorter until he wasn’t playing at all. I did mention this to him and he admitted he had lost interest. I told him that many a lad (or even lass) who was still enthusiastic but without a drum set would give his or her eye teeth (‘eyeteeth’, ‘eye-teeth’? Suggestions, please, on the usual postcard addressed to: Pedant’s Corner, Powell Towers, Middle of Nowhere, Cornwall, Great Britain) for a set like his and why didn’t he sell them on? But he wasn’t keen. And, to be honest, nor was I because I was hoping, and still rather forlornly hope, that his enthusiasm will be rekindled.
The acid test is quite simple: if you are interested, you play, if you aren’t you don’t. I have played guitar, not outstandingly well, it has to be said, although lately I am finally - finally - putting a bit more effort in by learning different scales, since I was about his age. I bought my first guitar when I was 22. Until then I would, at school,
play whatever guitar was knocking around in someone’s study, and then at college, the flat I lived in for several years had a - bloody awful - guitar. That did me fine for many years. Then I bought an electric guitar, and when that was stolen in a burglary, another.
More recently I bought myself what I’ve discovered is called a ‘parlour’ guitar, and I also have a bass guitar. My point is that I have willingly and enthusiastically played guitar for close on 150 years, and never had to force my self to pick one up. Indeed, I can be one of those bores who will pick up and play a guitar if I ever come across one in someone’s house, although in more recent years I have curtailed that, rather bad, habit, as not everyone is that keen.
The there was my son’s enthusiasm for playing the ukulele. He got it into his head that he wanted to learn and asked for one for Christmas and I also went to the effort of googling ukulele chords, printing some out and laminating them. And he did play it, for about a week and a half. Since then he hasn’t touched it. He says he has wanted a dog for years, and that is true, but I have pointed out to him that a dog is a living being, not just another possession. His cousins who live in the farm on the other side of the lane have a small mutt called Oscar and he and his cousin regularly take Oscar for a walk. I tell him he should try to satisfy his ‘love of dogs’ or whatever it is with Oscar.
As we live in the depths of the countryside, there would be no danger of the mutt being cooped up in the house for hours on end, only to be let out to have a crap, the results of which are then carefully scooped up and slipped into a pocket (which is
what folk have to do in towns and cities). Here, he or she would be able to shit where the bloody hell he likes, though quite how my wife would square that with her rancid dislike of local cats who have the temerity to beard her and shit in our garden I really don’t know.
The think is that I actually like dogs.
Our cottage is not big and my wife is - was - talking about getting a puppy, but I don’t think she realises quite how boisterous and destructive puppies can be until they grow up, mature and settle into dull complacency like the rest of us. Nor do I want to get lumbered with a daily duty of taking the dog for a walk.
My daughter is 18 in August and off to college in September, and my son will, I trust, be off to college in three years. But dogs tend to live a lot longer than that. When the idea was first mooted a few years ago, I suggested we could compromise and get a cat.
Cats are far less hassle. Cats don’t have to be taken for walks. Cats don’t mooch around sulking if you don’t ‘play’ with them’. Cats need to be fed and have access to the outside world for pooing and peeing and that kind of thing. Cats really are a lot less hassle. But my wife doesn’t like cats, although why I don’t know.
So there you have it. Yesterday I put my foot down and said there would be no dog in this house and ever since my name has been mud and my presence barely tolerated.
My suspicion is that I shall be overruled and that either next Wednesday night or the following Wednesday night when I roll in home from London (his birthday is on Sunday, May 25), I shall find some bloody cute bundle of puppiness lying in a basket next to the Rayburn. If so I shall take it like a man. I shan’t make a fuss and accept a fait accompli. But what I shall not be doing is taking the bloody think for walks or paying a penny in vets’ bills. Forgot to mention those, didn’t I. Ever wondered why vets drive around in spanking new sports cars with gold bumpers and seats covered in calfskin while you and I have to put up with a secondhand bicycle? So have I.
Previously, about four years ago, my son developed an enthusiasm for playing the drums. So he had drum lessons and got a secondhand set from his cousin, which though not cheap at £70 was a damn sight cheaper than getting a new set. Carried
But bit by bit I noticed his playing sessions were shorter and shorter and shorter until he wasn’t playing at all. I did mention this to him and he admitted he had lost interest. I told him that many a lad (or even lass) who was still enthusiastic but without a drum set would give his or her eye teeth (‘eyeteeth’, ‘eye-teeth’? Suggestions, please, on the usual postcard addressed to: Pedant’s Corner, Powell Towers, Middle of Nowhere, Cornwall, Great Britain) for a set like his and why didn’t he sell them on? But he wasn’t keen. And, to be honest, nor was I because I was hoping, and still rather forlornly hope, that his enthusiasm will be rekindled.
The acid test is quite simple: if you are interested, you play, if you aren’t you don’t. I have played guitar, not outstandingly well, it has to be said, although lately I am finally - finally - putting a bit more effort in by learning different scales, since I was about his age. I bought my first guitar when I was 22. Until then I would, at school,
 |
| You wish. Yeah, for about ten minutes |
More recently I bought myself what I’ve discovered is called a ‘parlour’ guitar, and I also have a bass guitar. My point is that I have willingly and enthusiastically played guitar for close on 150 years, and never had to force my self to pick one up. Indeed, I can be one of those bores who will pick up and play a guitar if I ever come across one in someone’s house, although in more recent years I have curtailed that, rather bad, habit, as not everyone is that keen.
The there was my son’s enthusiasm for playing the ukulele. He got it into his head that he wanted to learn and asked for one for Christmas and I also went to the effort of googling ukulele chords, printing some out and laminating them. And he did play it, for about a week and a half. Since then he hasn’t touched it. He says he has wanted a dog for years, and that is true, but I have pointed out to him that a dog is a living being, not just another possession. His cousins who live in the farm on the other side of the lane have a small mutt called Oscar and he and his cousin regularly take Oscar for a walk. I tell him he should try to satisfy his ‘love of dogs’ or whatever it is with Oscar.
As we live in the depths of the countryside, there would be no danger of the mutt being cooped up in the house for hours on end, only to be let out to have a crap, the results of which are then carefully scooped up and slipped into a pocket (which is
 |
| What happens after about ten minutes - and goes on for the next 12 years |
Our cottage is not big and my wife is - was - talking about getting a puppy, but I don’t think she realises quite how boisterous and destructive puppies can be until they grow up, mature and settle into dull complacency like the rest of us. Nor do I want to get lumbered with a daily duty of taking the dog for a walk.
My daughter is 18 in August and off to college in September, and my son will, I trust, be off to college in three years. But dogs tend to live a lot longer than that. When the idea was first mooted a few years ago, I suggested we could compromise and get a cat.
Cats are far less hassle. Cats don’t have to be taken for walks. Cats don’t mooch around sulking if you don’t ‘play’ with them’. Cats need to be fed and have access to the outside world for pooing and peeing and that kind of thing. Cats really are a lot less hassle. But my wife doesn’t like cats, although why I don’t know.
So there you have it. Yesterday I put my foot down and said there would be no dog in this house and ever since my name has been mud and my presence barely tolerated.
My suspicion is that I shall be overruled and that either next Wednesday night or the following Wednesday night when I roll in home from London (his birthday is on Sunday, May 25), I shall find some bloody cute bundle of puppiness lying in a basket next to the Rayburn. If so I shall take it like a man. I shan’t make a fuss and accept a fait accompli. But what I shall not be doing is taking the bloody think for walks or paying a penny in vets’ bills. Forgot to mention those, didn’t I. Ever wondered why vets drive around in spanking new sports cars with gold bumpers and seats covered in calfskin while you and I have to put up with a secondhand bicycle? So have I.
Saturday 10 May 2014
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.
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.
Friday 2 May 2014
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
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’.
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’.
Wednesday 30 April 2014
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.
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.
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