I wrote the other day about how poetry passes me by, and then added a poem. Well, here’s another.
It’s that itch to write again, to blather on
about it matters not what, to till the word
that comes before it comes until it comes,
then hasten on with no regrets, no backward glance,
no pride, no superficial care, just on and on and on,
a notion here, a joke there, a seeming wisdom
here and there and here again,
and there, then on and on
(and what is this irritating odd and wasteful pause?)
To pass the moment, kill the moment
until the moment’s gone as none,
with not a thought, not one,
for who might already be bewildered
by this rush of nothing,
absolutely nothing, but words, words
rush, rush, rush, words, words,
nothing but sound and nonsense.
Then on, on, on again and on until I die.
. . .
Look, chaps and chappesses, buy the bloody book, I need more cigars. And, yes, the novel is better than you might assume, and the cigars are, too, mild, but very satisfying, just the kind of thing to help you relax in a quiet corner while you ponder upon other ways to persuade the world to buy the bloody book. I’m no artist, you know, I work for money.
. . .
As I blather the West seems to be on the brink of another disaster. Here in Old Blighty or members of parliament have been recalled to debate whether the government should allow Britain to join the air campaign to bomb the fuck out of Isis (or IS or Isil or whatever we are supposed to be calling them). The modish watchword is - given the fuck-ups that Iraq and more recently Afghanistan were - ‘no “boots on the ground” ’, by which we mean no troops will be involved.
Well, fair enough. But the second proviso, that we should only stick to killing those fighting for IS (etc - see above) if they are in Iraq (whose government has invited us to do the killing) but should steer well clear of any action in Syria seems to me so daft I can’t even think of a dismissive joke. But aren’t the Yanks already bombing IS in Syria (and being quietly applauded for doing so by the Assad regime because we are getting rid of their enemies)?
Yes, I’m fully aware of the political niceties of it all, that, officially, Assad and his henchmen is still a bastard and the rest. But were anyone to set out to create a situation of such nonsensical delusion, they would struggle to create what is actually happening.
I thought the power struggle in the Middle East was broadly based on a tussle between Saudi Arabia - Sunni - and Iran - Shi’ite? And because Assad is officially still that bastard Assad, the West in its wisdom - and I do use the word as loosely as possible - has decline to work with him (though I suspect there is a lot more going on behind the scenes).
But why do we hate Assad so much if we are perfectly happy to pal up with Egypt’s Sisi and his gang of henchmen? And whose coup d’etat ousting a democratically elected presidnet was somehow an acceptable coup d’etat because, not putting to fine a point, we didn’t really like the cut of the jib of the chap Sisi ousted.
As we are on the subject of cuts of jibs, surely to goodness Morsi - for he is the guy Sisi toppled - has a far more acceptable jib than the cutthroats from IS? Or am I missing something? Morsi, I gather, was an inept chap who rather hoped to make Egypt more Islamic. He didn’t lock people up, he didn’t torture folk, and he most certainly didn’t execut those he didn’t take a shine to.
But then I don’t get poetry, so how the hell am I supposed to make head or tail of the tooing and froing of my political betters? And it is well beyond my bedtime. And the two or three small glasses of Rioja I was going to drink have, once again, become the whole bloody bottle. Hick!
Thursday, 25 September 2014
Friday, 19 September 2014
Poetry: what is it? Buggered if I know. Then there is a sad, sad tale: my comments on the Scottish referendum are lost forever. And a cheap solution to an eternally pressing problem
For a man of my pretensions, it is hugely embarrassing to admit that ‘poetry’, or at least, modern poetry, not only passes me by, but leaves me pretty much stone-cold. It is to me a closed book, and going on what I hear on the radio not one I exactly want to open at any time soon.
Admittedly, I haven’t read that much poetry. In fact, even that apparently candid admission rather overstates the case. I have, actually, read very, very, very little. Of what I have read, I am more attracted to the ‘verse’ of, for example, Shakespeare, the Metaphysical Poets, Alexander Pope and one or two other, all those who wrote several centuries ago who knew what to do with rhythm and metre more than some of the stuff I’ve heard on the radio. But this is a difficult topic and I am I really danger of making myself look very ridiculous. And even what I have just written might give the impression that I am just being modest. I’m not. I’m just very badly read.
Of more modern poetry, what I have heard by Dylan Thomas I like very much. But then Dylan was fascinated by words, their sound and their import. Then there were the poems I have come across - more or less by chance, which is a shaming admission for a chap who ‘read’ English at university - by Philip Larkin and several others. A few years ago I bought a volume of poems by Seamus Heaney and got a slight inkling of what poetry just might be. But still it passed and passes me by.
But what about the ‘Great War Poets, Ted Hughes, and various other names with which I am so familiar and can’t remember one? Well, I’m sorry to say they, too, just pass me by, especially Ted Hughes. I hear them, am told the are ‘good’, and then quietly wonder exactly why they are good as opposed to ordinary. Dear reader, I don’t have a clue.
Then there’s the recent, as in the past 30 years, tendency to accept that a ‘poem’ is ‘good’ if the ‘poet’ is speaking from the heart. End of story. Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. All too often is strikes me as nothing but ineffably trite sentiment written in prose, then chopped up into lines and verses. The trouble is that we can no longer say so.
These days we are supposed to genuflect before such work merely because it is ‘personal’. For some very, very odd reason a ‘poem’ is supposed to be special, and we are somehow expected to revere a ‘poem’ because it is someone ‘baring their soul’. Well, crap on me, sunshine. Not in my neck of the woods. I’ll give everyone - everyone - the respect and space they deserve, but I’m not about to bullshit myself for the sake of ‘form’. Come one, poems aren’t ‘special’ just because they are ‘poems’ however much the folk on radio want to tell you they are. And almost always the ‘modern’ poetry I hear is nothing but horribly trite shite.
However, all that notwithstanding, I have thought and wondered about ‘poetry’ quite a bit and decided that what attracts me is the sound of it. When I hear ‘poems’ read, it always seems to be in a pseudo reverential tone. (Incidentally, actors, who are nothing more than paid hands hired to read something, always make a far better fist of reading a poem than the bloody poet themselves, who read it in an irritating monotone and don’t for a moment seem to understand their own work.)
It’s as though the ‘poetry’ which does attract me is more that which gets closer to music and is less of the ‘me, me, me’ which so pisses me off. Face it: there are now several billions ‘me’s in the world and each of them is interested in the one ‘me’ - themselves - and not in you. At the heart of it your ‘me’ can get to fuck because it rather crowds the ground for my ‘me’. So as far as I can see making poetry more attractive to the majority by emphasising its musical qualities seems, to me at least, a way forward.
Below is my first - as in most recent since the days when I was a callow 19-year-old fuckwit - poem. Driving home from London on a Wednesday night after supping, usually, two and a half pints of cider, I have come to wonder whether I, too, my not try my hand at this ‘ere poetry lark. But it is most certainly about me (although, in a sense, it is in that it describes my bias).
To be honest I have no idea
what poetry might be
unless good music plays its part.
And those of us who know that rhythm,
rhythmic excellence,
the omega and alpha of all
that sound might hold,
feel and sense that meaning
is but nothing
but the trite and boring
subterfuge lesser muses,
(keen to hold their own)
enrol to tarn their modesty,
and lose for it all love, respect and interest.
By all means tell me all your secrets,
and by all means join in the noise
and banality of life.
But don’t, don’t ever, don’t,
don’t ever try to persuade me
that they are any more vital and important than
the noise and banality of the secrets
of one, ten, twenty billion other souls
with whom you share this world.
But by all means try.
. . .
Before posting the above I spent about an hour writing an entry about yesterday’s independence referendum in Scotland. But, in all the technical shenanigans of posting these entries I bloody deleted it all. It is now unrecoverable. So: either breathe again or reflect that several pearls of wisdom have been lost forever, because I really can’t be arsed re-writing it. I might be at some point in the future, but don’t hold your breath.
. . .
One last thing: I have now got to the age where I can’t even fart without wearing a pair of reading glasses, and there’s the rub. I could go to an optician and be tested for a bespoke pair. Or I can, and have been, buying two for £2.50 at Asda.
Actually, because I keep losing them I have been buying many pairs, and keep at least one pair everywhere - in the car, in each of my jackets, in my computer bag, in my other computer bag, upstairs in our bedroom, downstairs in the kitchen, in the living room next to the computer, everywhere, in fact, where fate and my life might take me. It is a simple solution to a bloody irritating problem: where are my reading glasses? Doesn’t matter, cos there’s another pair here.
The good news is that Tesco, who are going downhill fast have been up to all kinds of tricks to get the punters back through their doors. And one of those is to offer selected items at just £1. So the other day I bought a bottle of HP Sauce, usual price £19.99, for just £1, ditto a jar of Hellman’s Mayonnaise and, joy of joys, three pairs of reading glasses, again at just £1 each. I thought I’d share that with you.
Admittedly, I haven’t read that much poetry. In fact, even that apparently candid admission rather overstates the case. I have, actually, read very, very, very little. Of what I have read, I am more attracted to the ‘verse’ of, for example, Shakespeare, the Metaphysical Poets, Alexander Pope and one or two other, all those who wrote several centuries ago who knew what to do with rhythm and metre more than some of the stuff I’ve heard on the radio. But this is a difficult topic and I am I really danger of making myself look very ridiculous. And even what I have just written might give the impression that I am just being modest. I’m not. I’m just very badly read.
Of more modern poetry, what I have heard by Dylan Thomas I like very much. But then Dylan was fascinated by words, their sound and their import. Then there were the poems I have come across - more or less by chance, which is a shaming admission for a chap who ‘read’ English at university - by Philip Larkin and several others. A few years ago I bought a volume of poems by Seamus Heaney and got a slight inkling of what poetry just might be. But still it passed and passes me by.
But what about the ‘Great War Poets, Ted Hughes, and various other names with which I am so familiar and can’t remember one? Well, I’m sorry to say they, too, just pass me by, especially Ted Hughes. I hear them, am told the are ‘good’, and then quietly wonder exactly why they are good as opposed to ordinary. Dear reader, I don’t have a clue.
Then there’s the recent, as in the past 30 years, tendency to accept that a ‘poem’ is ‘good’ if the ‘poet’ is speaking from the heart. End of story. Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. All too often is strikes me as nothing but ineffably trite sentiment written in prose, then chopped up into lines and verses. The trouble is that we can no longer say so.
These days we are supposed to genuflect before such work merely because it is ‘personal’. For some very, very odd reason a ‘poem’ is supposed to be special, and we are somehow expected to revere a ‘poem’ because it is someone ‘baring their soul’. Well, crap on me, sunshine. Not in my neck of the woods. I’ll give everyone - everyone - the respect and space they deserve, but I’m not about to bullshit myself for the sake of ‘form’. Come one, poems aren’t ‘special’ just because they are ‘poems’ however much the folk on radio want to tell you they are. And almost always the ‘modern’ poetry I hear is nothing but horribly trite shite.
However, all that notwithstanding, I have thought and wondered about ‘poetry’ quite a bit and decided that what attracts me is the sound of it. When I hear ‘poems’ read, it always seems to be in a pseudo reverential tone. (Incidentally, actors, who are nothing more than paid hands hired to read something, always make a far better fist of reading a poem than the bloody poet themselves, who read it in an irritating monotone and don’t for a moment seem to understand their own work.)
It’s as though the ‘poetry’ which does attract me is more that which gets closer to music and is less of the ‘me, me, me’ which so pisses me off. Face it: there are now several billions ‘me’s in the world and each of them is interested in the one ‘me’ - themselves - and not in you. At the heart of it your ‘me’ can get to fuck because it rather crowds the ground for my ‘me’. So as far as I can see making poetry more attractive to the majority by emphasising its musical qualities seems, to me at least, a way forward.
Below is my first - as in most recent since the days when I was a callow 19-year-old fuckwit - poem. Driving home from London on a Wednesday night after supping, usually, two and a half pints of cider, I have come to wonder whether I, too, my not try my hand at this ‘ere poetry lark. But it is most certainly about me (although, in a sense, it is in that it describes my bias).
To be honest I have no idea
what poetry might be
unless good music plays its part.
And those of us who know that rhythm,
rhythmic excellence,
the omega and alpha of all
that sound might hold,
feel and sense that meaning
is but nothing
but the trite and boring
subterfuge lesser muses,
(keen to hold their own)
enrol to tarn their modesty,
and lose for it all love, respect and interest.
By all means tell me all your secrets,
and by all means join in the noise
and banality of life.
But don’t, don’t ever, don’t,
don’t ever try to persuade me
that they are any more vital and important than
the noise and banality of the secrets
of one, ten, twenty billion other souls
with whom you share this world.
But by all means try.
. . .
Before posting the above I spent about an hour writing an entry about yesterday’s independence referendum in Scotland. But, in all the technical shenanigans of posting these entries I bloody deleted it all. It is now unrecoverable. So: either breathe again or reflect that several pearls of wisdom have been lost forever, because I really can’t be arsed re-writing it. I might be at some point in the future, but don’t hold your breath.
. . .
One last thing: I have now got to the age where I can’t even fart without wearing a pair of reading glasses, and there’s the rub. I could go to an optician and be tested for a bespoke pair. Or I can, and have been, buying two for £2.50 at Asda.
Actually, because I keep losing them I have been buying many pairs, and keep at least one pair everywhere - in the car, in each of my jackets, in my computer bag, in my other computer bag, upstairs in our bedroom, downstairs in the kitchen, in the living room next to the computer, everywhere, in fact, where fate and my life might take me. It is a simple solution to a bloody irritating problem: where are my reading glasses? Doesn’t matter, cos there’s another pair here.
The good news is that Tesco, who are going downhill fast have been up to all kinds of tricks to get the punters back through their doors. And one of those is to offer selected items at just £1. So the other day I bought a bottle of HP Sauce, usual price £19.99, for just £1, ditto a jar of Hellman’s Mayonnaise and, joy of joys, three pairs of reading glasses, again at just £1 each. I thought I’d share that with you.
Thursday, 18 September 2014
The taxman, as always, cometh (though, I notice, dragging his knuckles along the ground). Trouble is I don’t have the dosh to buy Dave Hartnett a spiffing lunch*
OK, so I might be going on 92 - oh, all right then, 103 - but I still cross my fingers that I have not yet become one of those irritating jeremiahs who blight all our lives and have done so since Adam and Eve first bonked.
For the record, I don’t think the world is now going to Hell in a handcart and haven’t done so since I was 14. I think, most probably, it always has been going to Hell in a handcart since man first crawled out of the primordial swamp and invented television. Nor do I think there was ever a golden age of anything (except
perhaps a Golden Age of Golden Ages - golden ages just aren’t what they used to be. Which doesn’t actually make sense, but it is well past 6.30am and I’ve been up for several hours.) I’m always accused of having a loud laugh, and I do laugh quite a bit, mainly because I am alive. And I laughed again very loudly this morning courtesy of the office of Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, more commonly known as ‘the taxman’.
The ‘taxman’ (and the ‘taxwoman’, of course) doesn’t enjoy much of a reputation in Britain these days, or rather its reputation which was already very low - no one likes paying taxes - has sunk a good deal lower over these past few years.
Given that every single vast and wealthy corporation - for example Vodafone, eBay, PayPal, Google, Starbucks and all manner of outfits with really dodgy names to fit really dodgy business practices - can afford to hire clever tax accountants and run rings around the taxman several times before breakfast, the taxman is in a perpetual bad mood. It doesn’t help that anyone with any nous who works for the taxman very soon ups sticks once he or she knows enough about the workings of HMRC, goes freelance and starts earning ten times the pitiful wage paid by HMRC by helping those vast corporations keeping their tax liability to a bare minimum.
That means that there is a steady flow of the very good brains leaving HMRC and, not to put too fine a point, those who stay have a great deal less nous. And they are the ones you and I - or you and I here in Old Blighty - are obliged to deal with when we contact the taxman.
The ruses the good brains who jump ship to assist the wealthy corporations come up with are beautifully simple. For example, the BBC reported in October 2012 that eBay paid just £1.2 million in tax on UK business of £800 million (for the thickos out there, that’s just £200 million short of £1 billion). The same report claims that Starbucks paid just £8.6 million in corporation tax over 14 years. The kind of ploy they use is, for example, to set up wholly owned, but autonomous, companies with which they do business and can thus write off various ‘business expenses’.
For example, I understand that Starbucks rents all its coffee mugs from Starbucks Coffee Mugs Gmbh which is based in Lichtenstein. The tables in its empire of stores are all leased from Starbucks Tables Gmbh of Vaduz. And so on, and every transaction is a tax write-off. It’s all perfectly legal, I am bound to acknowledge, but from where I sit these ruses and ploys are as close to con tricks as it is possible for me to claim they are without getting some lawyer up my arse serving me a writ for tortuous malfeasance and libellous promalgamation under the Let’s Nail All Smartase Bloggers Acts of 1991, 1993 and 2007.
Naturally, HMRC is very put out that it it obliged to start every week of the year holding its dick and looking like a prize prune. And equally as naturally it seeks out every way to get revenge. But as the numbskulls which staff the agency know they can’t lay a finger on the real culprits, week in week out they come down very heavily on what socialists like to call the ‘little man’. And HMRC isn’t above coming up with would-be smart ruses of its own.
Knowing that daily several billion pounds are slipping through its fingers, it most recently announced that, in order to claw back some of that cash, it has granted itself powers to dip into each and every bank account in the land to claim tax it think it might be owed, all without our say-so. Obviously that has led to an enormous row, but to date the British government has done nothing to stop the practice except to get awfully huffy about it, officially declare that ‘look, it isn’t on’ and set up various parliamentary committees to look into the possibility of writing to HMRC to tell it in no uncertain terms that ‘look, it isn’t on.’ ‘He’s making it up’ I hear you declare. Well, no he isn’t: take a look at this BBC report.
. . .
My encounter with HMRC this morning which had me laughing out loud and reflecting for the umpteenth time this week that the world is indeed totally bonkers came about thus.
At the ripe old age of 122 I have become rather better at managing my money than I ever was when I was younger. I learned the hard way. So now I pay several of my bills upfront: as soon as my wage hits my bank account, a substantial portion of it goes off to the electricity company, the water company, the folks we buy our oil from and HMRC.
This means that when the bills eventually arrive they are - depending upon the time of year - often already paid. And once I have paid upfront I can happily live on my overdraft limit without the fear of getting yet another bill which will push me beyond what I and my several banks have agreed is my overdraft limit. Because cross that ‘agreed overdraft’ line and they really hammer you. (Oh, and I have several banks accounts because that is the only way this financial ingenue can keep an overview of what is going on. One for car-related expenses, one for utility-related expenses and the last for spending money.
It also means that if one is getting horribly close to going over the top, I can top it up from another. And let me stress I don’t regard myself as clever. I do it this way because, in all honesty, I regard myself as rather stupid.)
Years ago, I bought a very modest house in Birmingham. I only lived there for four years before life took me elsewhere, but I kept it on and eventually paid off the mortgage. It is now rented out and the meagre rent - it hasn’t gone up in 24 years because the house is so modest, anything higher than what the agent thinks I can charge would mean I wouldn’t get any tenants at all. I don’t mind giving figures: after the agent has taken his cut, I receive £377 a month, which works out at £87 a week.
Lucky sod, you might think, but in fact that just about covers my petrol bill for getting to London and back from Cornwall every week. So not such a lucky sod, really. And because I like to sleep at nights and in the past have always come unstuck whenever I tried to pull a fast one, I declare that rental income to the taxman every year.
Then there’s the dosh I make a month from my sideline of placing the puzzles on the quiz pages of the paper I work for. I have done that for more than four years now and it has helped pay the bills. But I am not paid an enormous sum for doing the work, and I also declare that income. The tax I owe for both income streams comes to just under £2,500. But I have got into the habit of paying upfront so I am not embarrassed by a tax bill I can’t pay.
In fact, I pay more upfront than I need to so that I am always in credit. It’s a form of saving, and not such a daft one when currently the interest paid on savings is around 0.5pc - if you are lucky - while inflation is around 2pc. So I am building up, slowly, a small surplus which might come in handy if I faced with a very unexpected bill.
To add a little more context, I am not a big spender and have only twice paid more than £800 for a car. And I only did that on those two occasions because I was nagged into doing so (by you know who).
When I got home last night and looked through my post, I was very surprised to find a letter from HMRC. I shall give some it verbatim. It was dated 10 September, 2014:
Dear Mr Powell,
Thank you for your repayment claim dated 8 August and the 2014 self assessment tax return.
I cannot make a repayment now because you are making regular monthly payments to your Self Assessment account. So that I can deal with your claim, you will need to stop your payments. You can do this by:
Once you have stopped your regular payments and your last one has cleared, I will be able to deal with your repayment claim. You can restart your regular payments again one your have received your repayment.
Yours sincerely,
M E Parker,
Assistant officer.
I was baffled. I was thoroughly baffled. I was completely and utterly baffled because I had made no such claim. And as no letter from the taxman is ever good news, I rang HMRC the first thing this morning to find out what the bloody hell was going on.
Why, I asked, were they thanking me for making a repayment claim when I hadn’t made any such claim?
Because, the dimwit I spoke to at HMRC replied, that’s how our letters are written.
But it doesn’t make sense, I said. I haven’t made any such claim.
But, she repeated, that’s how our letters are written.
But why, I asked, why do you write them like that?
Because we do, she replied, implying that I was being completely unreasonable.
Well, you should rewrite them, I told her.
We can’t afford to, she replied. Nonsense, I told her, it would take less than ten seconds to rewrite the letter.
But we can’t afford to, she repeated. And that was that.
The rest of the conversation wasn’t very long, and I have to confess it descended into argy-bargy. (I am not proud of the fact that I am rather good at argy-bargy, especially if I am in the right. The trouble is I am not always in the right, although on this occasion I was.)
Argy, in fact, became so much bargy that she finally informed me that she was inclined to ‘terminate this phone call’. That means you are going to hang up, I told her, so I’ll save you the trouble, I added, and hung up.
We little men who do not have the apparently unlimited resources to hire clever-clever tax gurus to ensure we screw the state as legally as possible have no option but to trust the taxman and trust that he gets things right. We like to think, the rings vast and wealthy corporations run around them notwithstanding, that they do know their arse from their elbow. But, dear reader, I really, really, really have my doubts. For example, a week earlier I had received a letter saying my tax code had
been changed, with the result that my annual tax-free allowance was being reduced by £2,750, from £10,000 to £7,250. So, my dear employers would be taking more tax from me. When I got the letter, I rang to ask HMRC exactly why my tax code had been changed (and my tax-free allowance reduced). I was told that the taxman calculated that that would be the amount I owed in tax on my extra earnings next near.
But, I protested, why are you doing that? I have always paid my tax bill on the button because I already pay upfront and am in credit. Just look at my account and you will see that there’s more than enough to pay what I shall be owing. Ah, said the HMRC wiseacre, but that’s what we have decided to do. On that occasion, having very little stomach to charge head-first into a brick wall, I gave up. I reasoned that at least I would have fully paid my tax bill even before it was due and that as the tax bill would have been paid, I would have saved up that much more to fall back on if and when I unexpectedly found myself on my uppers.
Dealing with the taxman is an act of faith. We like to think that despite the sage advice we are given, in this case, to ‘check our tax code if you think we have got it wrong’, they haven’t actually got it wrong. Because unless you are some boring nerd who has chosen to follow an accountant’s path to Nirvana, all tax speak, all tax affairs and everything to do with tax are about as comprehensible to 99pc of us as are the ramblings of a mawkish alcoholic in confessional mode after a four-day bender. They are goobledegook.
So getting a letter thanking me for a claim for repayment I never made from the folk who have granted themselves the powers to dip into my bank account whenever they choose to do so is, to put it mildly, not at all reassuring.
Mind there are worse things at sea: Chelsea only managed a draw in the season’s first Champions League fixture, against, out-and-out no-hopers Schalke 04 after leading 1-0, and after holding Bayern Munich to 0-0 for 89 minutes, thanks to several spectacular Joy Hart saves, Manchester City were pipped at the post 1-0. To put that last comment into perspective: I support Manchester United. (And I bet they have a few clever-clever tax gurus on the books.)
*This reference will be very obscure. And I’d be well advised to leave it that way. Hint: under Dave’s watch Vodafone really took the tax piss.
For the record, I don’t think the world is now going to Hell in a handcart and haven’t done so since I was 14. I think, most probably, it always has been going to Hell in a handcart since man first crawled out of the primordial swamp and invented television. Nor do I think there was ever a golden age of anything (except
perhaps a Golden Age of Golden Ages - golden ages just aren’t what they used to be. Which doesn’t actually make sense, but it is well past 6.30am and I’ve been up for several hours.) I’m always accused of having a loud laugh, and I do laugh quite a bit, mainly because I am alive. And I laughed again very loudly this morning courtesy of the office of Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, more commonly known as ‘the taxman’.
The ‘taxman’ (and the ‘taxwoman’, of course) doesn’t enjoy much of a reputation in Britain these days, or rather its reputation which was already very low - no one likes paying taxes - has sunk a good deal lower over these past few years.
Given that every single vast and wealthy corporation - for example Vodafone, eBay, PayPal, Google, Starbucks and all manner of outfits with really dodgy names to fit really dodgy business practices - can afford to hire clever tax accountants and run rings around the taxman several times before breakfast, the taxman is in a perpetual bad mood. It doesn’t help that anyone with any nous who works for the taxman very soon ups sticks once he or she knows enough about the workings of HMRC, goes freelance and starts earning ten times the pitiful wage paid by HMRC by helping those vast corporations keeping their tax liability to a bare minimum.
That means that there is a steady flow of the very good brains leaving HMRC and, not to put too fine a point, those who stay have a great deal less nous. And they are the ones you and I - or you and I here in Old Blighty - are obliged to deal with when we contact the taxman.
The ruses the good brains who jump ship to assist the wealthy corporations come up with are beautifully simple. For example, the BBC reported in October 2012 that eBay paid just £1.2 million in tax on UK business of £800 million (for the thickos out there, that’s just £200 million short of £1 billion). The same report claims that Starbucks paid just £8.6 million in corporation tax over 14 years. The kind of ploy they use is, for example, to set up wholly owned, but autonomous, companies with which they do business and can thus write off various ‘business expenses’.
For example, I understand that Starbucks rents all its coffee mugs from Starbucks Coffee Mugs Gmbh which is based in Lichtenstein. The tables in its empire of stores are all leased from Starbucks Tables Gmbh of Vaduz. And so on, and every transaction is a tax write-off. It’s all perfectly legal, I am bound to acknowledge, but from where I sit these ruses and ploys are as close to con tricks as it is possible for me to claim they are without getting some lawyer up my arse serving me a writ for tortuous malfeasance and libellous promalgamation under the Let’s Nail All Smartase Bloggers Acts of 1991, 1993 and 2007.
Naturally, HMRC is very put out that it it obliged to start every week of the year holding its dick and looking like a prize prune. And equally as naturally it seeks out every way to get revenge. But as the numbskulls which staff the agency know they can’t lay a finger on the real culprits, week in week out they come down very heavily on what socialists like to call the ‘little man’. And HMRC isn’t above coming up with would-be smart ruses of its own.
Knowing that daily several billion pounds are slipping through its fingers, it most recently announced that, in order to claw back some of that cash, it has granted itself powers to dip into each and every bank account in the land to claim tax it think it might be owed, all without our say-so. Obviously that has led to an enormous row, but to date the British government has done nothing to stop the practice except to get awfully huffy about it, officially declare that ‘look, it isn’t on’ and set up various parliamentary committees to look into the possibility of writing to HMRC to tell it in no uncertain terms that ‘look, it isn’t on.’ ‘He’s making it up’ I hear you declare. Well, no he isn’t: take a look at this BBC report.
. . .
My encounter with HMRC this morning which had me laughing out loud and reflecting for the umpteenth time this week that the world is indeed totally bonkers came about thus.
At the ripe old age of 122 I have become rather better at managing my money than I ever was when I was younger. I learned the hard way. So now I pay several of my bills upfront: as soon as my wage hits my bank account, a substantial portion of it goes off to the electricity company, the water company, the folks we buy our oil from and HMRC.
This means that when the bills eventually arrive they are - depending upon the time of year - often already paid. And once I have paid upfront I can happily live on my overdraft limit without the fear of getting yet another bill which will push me beyond what I and my several banks have agreed is my overdraft limit. Because cross that ‘agreed overdraft’ line and they really hammer you. (Oh, and I have several banks accounts because that is the only way this financial ingenue can keep an overview of what is going on. One for car-related expenses, one for utility-related expenses and the last for spending money.
It also means that if one is getting horribly close to going over the top, I can top it up from another. And let me stress I don’t regard myself as clever. I do it this way because, in all honesty, I regard myself as rather stupid.)
Years ago, I bought a very modest house in Birmingham. I only lived there for four years before life took me elsewhere, but I kept it on and eventually paid off the mortgage. It is now rented out and the meagre rent - it hasn’t gone up in 24 years because the house is so modest, anything higher than what the agent thinks I can charge would mean I wouldn’t get any tenants at all. I don’t mind giving figures: after the agent has taken his cut, I receive £377 a month, which works out at £87 a week.
Lucky sod, you might think, but in fact that just about covers my petrol bill for getting to London and back from Cornwall every week. So not such a lucky sod, really. And because I like to sleep at nights and in the past have always come unstuck whenever I tried to pull a fast one, I declare that rental income to the taxman every year.
Then there’s the dosh I make a month from my sideline of placing the puzzles on the quiz pages of the paper I work for. I have done that for more than four years now and it has helped pay the bills. But I am not paid an enormous sum for doing the work, and I also declare that income. The tax I owe for both income streams comes to just under £2,500. But I have got into the habit of paying upfront so I am not embarrassed by a tax bill I can’t pay.
In fact, I pay more upfront than I need to so that I am always in credit. It’s a form of saving, and not such a daft one when currently the interest paid on savings is around 0.5pc - if you are lucky - while inflation is around 2pc. So I am building up, slowly, a small surplus which might come in handy if I faced with a very unexpected bill.
To add a little more context, I am not a big spender and have only twice paid more than £800 for a car. And I only did that on those two occasions because I was nagged into doing so (by you know who).
When I got home last night and looked through my post, I was very surprised to find a letter from HMRC. I shall give some it verbatim. It was dated 10 September, 2014:
Dear Mr Powell,
Thank you for your repayment claim dated 8 August and the 2014 self assessment tax return.
I cannot make a repayment now because you are making regular monthly payments to your Self Assessment account. So that I can deal with your claim, you will need to stop your payments. You can do this by:
- going to our website at hmrc.gov.uk if you have registered to use our online services
- phoning our Payment Helpline on 0300 200 3822
- contacting your bank.
Once you have stopped your regular payments and your last one has cleared, I will be able to deal with your repayment claim. You can restart your regular payments again one your have received your repayment.
Yours sincerely,
M E Parker,
Assistant officer.
I was baffled. I was thoroughly baffled. I was completely and utterly baffled because I had made no such claim. And as no letter from the taxman is ever good news, I rang HMRC the first thing this morning to find out what the bloody hell was going on.
Why, I asked, were they thanking me for making a repayment claim when I hadn’t made any such claim?
Because, the dimwit I spoke to at HMRC replied, that’s how our letters are written.
But it doesn’t make sense, I said. I haven’t made any such claim.
But, she repeated, that’s how our letters are written.
But why, I asked, why do you write them like that?
Because we do, she replied, implying that I was being completely unreasonable.
Well, you should rewrite them, I told her.
We can’t afford to, she replied. Nonsense, I told her, it would take less than ten seconds to rewrite the letter.
But we can’t afford to, she repeated. And that was that.
The rest of the conversation wasn’t very long, and I have to confess it descended into argy-bargy. (I am not proud of the fact that I am rather good at argy-bargy, especially if I am in the right. The trouble is I am not always in the right, although on this occasion I was.)
Argy, in fact, became so much bargy that she finally informed me that she was inclined to ‘terminate this phone call’. That means you are going to hang up, I told her, so I’ll save you the trouble, I added, and hung up.
We little men who do not have the apparently unlimited resources to hire clever-clever tax gurus to ensure we screw the state as legally as possible have no option but to trust the taxman and trust that he gets things right. We like to think, the rings vast and wealthy corporations run around them notwithstanding, that they do know their arse from their elbow. But, dear reader, I really, really, really have my doubts. For example, a week earlier I had received a letter saying my tax code had
But, I protested, why are you doing that? I have always paid my tax bill on the button because I already pay upfront and am in credit. Just look at my account and you will see that there’s more than enough to pay what I shall be owing. Ah, said the HMRC wiseacre, but that’s what we have decided to do. On that occasion, having very little stomach to charge head-first into a brick wall, I gave up. I reasoned that at least I would have fully paid my tax bill even before it was due and that as the tax bill would have been paid, I would have saved up that much more to fall back on if and when I unexpectedly found myself on my uppers.
Dealing with the taxman is an act of faith. We like to think that despite the sage advice we are given, in this case, to ‘check our tax code if you think we have got it wrong’, they haven’t actually got it wrong. Because unless you are some boring nerd who has chosen to follow an accountant’s path to Nirvana, all tax speak, all tax affairs and everything to do with tax are about as comprehensible to 99pc of us as are the ramblings of a mawkish alcoholic in confessional mode after a four-day bender. They are goobledegook.
So getting a letter thanking me for a claim for repayment I never made from the folk who have granted themselves the powers to dip into my bank account whenever they choose to do so is, to put it mildly, not at all reassuring.
Mind there are worse things at sea: Chelsea only managed a draw in the season’s first Champions League fixture, against, out-and-out no-hopers Schalke 04 after leading 1-0, and after holding Bayern Munich to 0-0 for 89 minutes, thanks to several spectacular Joy Hart saves, Manchester City were pipped at the post 1-0. To put that last comment into perspective: I support Manchester United. (And I bet they have a few clever-clever tax gurus on the books.)
*This reference will be very obscure. And I’d be well advised to leave it that way. Hint: under Dave’s watch Vodafone really took the tax piss.
Tuesday, 16 September 2014
The Scots go for broke – makes sense. The English discover they ‘love the United Kingdom’. Really? But what the hell: it’s the middle of the fence for me
Will they, won’t they? Well, apparently, according to Radio 4’s ‘flagship’ programme Today, even the Chinese are holding their breath about the outcome of the referendum on independence for Scotland due to be held on Thursday.
It has long been known that the Catalans are interested to see what the outcome will be, because, they might be reckoning, if the Scots can do it, so can we. So the government in Madrid is keeping its fingers crossed that the Scots Nats will not get the magic 50pc plus one which will be necessary to stick two fingers at the English and depart to cock up their affairs without any ‘foreign English’ interference. The Chinese, of course, who are as sympathetic to the expression of separatist sentiments as Count Dracula was to holy water are also as keen as Madrid that it will all end in tears for Alex Salmond.
Me? Well, a year or two ago sympathised with the sentiment of Scots who are fed up with centuries of condescension by England, or, more specifically the ‘Home Counties’ and are now within a midge’s dick of achieving that longed-for independence. But at the time I thought the wisest course of action would be to stick with the Union. I could not write that I’m no longer all that sure, but the truth is I really don’t care either way. On the one hand the desire for independence comes from the heart and, in a way, it makes no sense at all to listen to your head on the matter and, despite profound misgivings, vote to keep the Union.
If you want something that badly, and the SNP and its supporters do, I would have thought you just go for it and carry whatever consequences there might be.
As for those consequences, a great, great many financiers, businessmen, economists and the rest of every stripe have trotted out utterly convincing reasons why Yes/No is the way to go. As in most such matters at the end of the day you pays your money and you makes your choice. So the SNP has a legion of financiers, businessmen, economists and the rest who say ‘it will be fine, what with this that and t’other assets blah-di-blah…’ And the ‘Better Together’ gang has trotted out any number of financiers, businessmen, economists and the rest who insist it will all end in disaster, Scotland will go bankrupt, there will several outbreaks of the Black Death within minutes of the Yes victory being confirmed and more likely than not global warming will hit Scotland especially hard.’ And to both sides I say ‘pull the other one’.
Given that these pronouncements have come from the impassioned supporters of the one side or the other, I really don’t believe any of it is objective. Which, of course, make the warnings worse than useless.
The Nationalists have overall had the easier ride: they can afford to promise the earth, a golden dawn and jam tomorrow. Those who want to keep the status quo, on the other hand, are thrown back into the unenviable position of pointing out all the bad things they claim will happen if Scotland throws off the English yoke (which in Scot Nats’ minds is basically what it all comes down to).
So the Better Together gang have come across as a remarkably negative lot and I shall not be the first to observe that surely it would have made more sense to point out the advantages of sticking with the Union. But, no, that doesn’t seem to have occurred to them (and, to be honest, I can only think of one which is that bound together in a United Kingdom, Scotland and England are economically stronger than fighting the good fight alone).
Then there’s the odd sensation that although the referendum has been more than a year coming, England – that is the ‘Home Counties’ - don’t seem to have been taking it seriously whatsoever until the last month. Then they panicked. I can think of no better word. As for all the ‘concessions’ they have belatedly been making it strikes me as being about as useful as a homeowner who has discovered burglars trying to buy them off by informing them they can take half of what he’s got if they will leave the rest. Stupid or what?
As for the remarkably large amount of mawkish guff on the Better Together side along the lines of Cameron’s ‘I love the United Kingdom’ and ‘the Scots are our brothers’, forgive me if it doesn’t, from where I sit, all stink of rotting fish.
Anyone who wants you to believe that he or she ‘loves the United Kingdom’ is most certainly a nine-bob note and you would be well-advised to count the silver spoons before he or she departs the house. It’s bollocks. I love my two children above all else, then my family, both immediate and extended. That’s it. And if I
have any knowledge of the Scots psyche (and I believe I have at least a small insight) the reaction of those the Union bods want to win over with their Love The Union crap will most certainly be: Get to fuck you pretentious git!
Yes, there are many Unionist Scots all over Scotland, but I suspect that if Thursday’s vote shows us that they are in a majority, the only thing it will confirm is that when push came to shove, more Scots follow their head than their hearts. Money does matter to them, you know, and who can blame them. The notion of the ‘skinflint Scotsman’ is a myth. In fact I have met a great many remarkably generous Scots, more perhaps, than in England, and most certainly more than in the bloody ‘Home Counties’. But the notion that your average Scot is not quite as foolish with his money than your average English is not myth. As a rule they believe there are better things to do with our money than throw it away.
My brother and I were discussing all this the other night and we both agreed, however, that a genie is out of the bottle. There has been some violence in parts of Scotland and it was not pleasant. Sectarian violence is by no means unknown in Scotland and I do wonder just how well the losing side, whoever it is, whether Yes or No, will take to defeat.
As for what the outcome will be: I haven’t a clue.
. . .
If the Scots Nats win, the political fallout will be fascinating. The majority of the SNP is, I suspect, inclined to the Left. But there is a marked right-wing number of them two, united with the lefties only in the desire of independence. And it would be a mistake to write of ‘Tory’ Scots: the Conservative Party has been doing badly in general elections these past 30 years not because there is no conservative support or sentiment in Scotland, but because it is so unassailably identified with ‘the fucking English’.
In an independent Scotland I don’t doubt that the fortunes of a right-of-centre party would perk up quite a bit, though drawing its support mainly from the country areas. Then there’s the question of the 45 or so Labour MPs with Scottish constituencies whose days in the Commons would most certainly be numbered but upon whose membership of the Commons the British Labour party relies heavily to form a majority government. Seen in that light, it no-brainer to understand why, ironically, Labour have found themselves in the Unionist camp.
Another question which will have to be tackled is, given a Yes to independence vote on Thursday, which would mean the loss of all those constituencies (some of which are Lib Dem, by the way) in Scotland, what should be done about the British general election due in May 2015. Some have even suggested that it should be postponed until after Scotland is fully independent.
They fear a silly scenario such as: Labour, as some suspect, get a majority and form the government. Then, with independence, at a stroke they lose 45 of their MPs and perhaps even lose their majority. Would that mean another election. Certainly, because a minority government could carry in with a deficit of two or three, but 45 would prove to be impossible. Because of the possibility of this conundrum, there is even a suggestion – I think from the Tories – that next May’s election should be postponed in the event of the Scots voting for independence.
And they would certainly like that: faced with an Opposition which is, a stroke 45 MPs short, it would seem the Conservatives would be shoo-in to form proper government, crucially without those bloody awful Lib Dems. Tory heaven if the Scots vote to tell bloody English to piss off. Trouble is they can’t go for it, because they all ‘love the United Kingdom’ so much. Damn!
. . .
I find it very, very creepy that my movement around the web is so completely followed. This morning I was trying to sort out a mobile phone problem for my daughter. Her Sony Experia SP keeps freezing, even though he was apparently ‘repaired’ by her provider, O2, so I have lost faith in their ability to ‘repair’.
The solution I came up with was to by an unlocked phone on eBay (or one locked to O2) and she can use that until the contract (which I am paying for comes to an end). I was alerted to the fact that iPhone 4s are still available brand-new, but I also looked at other phones. And bugger me if not every page I look at which carries ads – news pages etc – has bloody ads for the very phones I was investigating. Yes, I knew it went on, but I don’t like it.
Ironically, Google, who provide this blogging service for free, are one of the worst offenders. You can’t take a dump these days without returning to your desktop or laptop to find you have inadvertently installed the bloody Google toolbar.
It has long been known that the Catalans are interested to see what the outcome will be, because, they might be reckoning, if the Scots can do it, so can we. So the government in Madrid is keeping its fingers crossed that the Scots Nats will not get the magic 50pc plus one which will be necessary to stick two fingers at the English and depart to cock up their affairs without any ‘foreign English’ interference. The Chinese, of course, who are as sympathetic to the expression of separatist sentiments as Count Dracula was to holy water are also as keen as Madrid that it will all end in tears for Alex Salmond.
Me? Well, a year or two ago sympathised with the sentiment of Scots who are fed up with centuries of condescension by England, or, more specifically the ‘Home Counties’ and are now within a midge’s dick of achieving that longed-for independence. But at the time I thought the wisest course of action would be to stick with the Union. I could not write that I’m no longer all that sure, but the truth is I really don’t care either way. On the one hand the desire for independence comes from the heart and, in a way, it makes no sense at all to listen to your head on the matter and, despite profound misgivings, vote to keep the Union.
If you want something that badly, and the SNP and its supporters do, I would have thought you just go for it and carry whatever consequences there might be.
As for those consequences, a great, great many financiers, businessmen, economists and the rest of every stripe have trotted out utterly convincing reasons why Yes/No is the way to go. As in most such matters at the end of the day you pays your money and you makes your choice. So the SNP has a legion of financiers, businessmen, economists and the rest who say ‘it will be fine, what with this that and t’other assets blah-di-blah…’ And the ‘Better Together’ gang has trotted out any number of financiers, businessmen, economists and the rest who insist it will all end in disaster, Scotland will go bankrupt, there will several outbreaks of the Black Death within minutes of the Yes victory being confirmed and more likely than not global warming will hit Scotland especially hard.’ And to both sides I say ‘pull the other one’.
Given that these pronouncements have come from the impassioned supporters of the one side or the other, I really don’t believe any of it is objective. Which, of course, make the warnings worse than useless.
The Nationalists have overall had the easier ride: they can afford to promise the earth, a golden dawn and jam tomorrow. Those who want to keep the status quo, on the other hand, are thrown back into the unenviable position of pointing out all the bad things they claim will happen if Scotland throws off the English yoke (which in Scot Nats’ minds is basically what it all comes down to).
So the Better Together gang have come across as a remarkably negative lot and I shall not be the first to observe that surely it would have made more sense to point out the advantages of sticking with the Union. But, no, that doesn’t seem to have occurred to them (and, to be honest, I can only think of one which is that bound together in a United Kingdom, Scotland and England are economically stronger than fighting the good fight alone).
Then there’s the odd sensation that although the referendum has been more than a year coming, England – that is the ‘Home Counties’ - don’t seem to have been taking it seriously whatsoever until the last month. Then they panicked. I can think of no better word. As for all the ‘concessions’ they have belatedly been making it strikes me as being about as useful as a homeowner who has discovered burglars trying to buy them off by informing them they can take half of what he’s got if they will leave the rest. Stupid or what?
As for the remarkably large amount of mawkish guff on the Better Together side along the lines of Cameron’s ‘I love the United Kingdom’ and ‘the Scots are our brothers’, forgive me if it doesn’t, from where I sit, all stink of rotting fish.
Anyone who wants you to believe that he or she ‘loves the United Kingdom’ is most certainly a nine-bob note and you would be well-advised to count the silver spoons before he or she departs the house. It’s bollocks. I love my two children above all else, then my family, both immediate and extended. That’s it. And if I
 |
And unbiased view from the Home Counties. Or, perhaps, not. Who knows, who cares. As long as the exempt haggis from import duty, I'm happy |
Yes, there are many Unionist Scots all over Scotland, but I suspect that if Thursday’s vote shows us that they are in a majority, the only thing it will confirm is that when push came to shove, more Scots follow their head than their hearts. Money does matter to them, you know, and who can blame them. The notion of the ‘skinflint Scotsman’ is a myth. In fact I have met a great many remarkably generous Scots, more perhaps, than in England, and most certainly more than in the bloody ‘Home Counties’. But the notion that your average Scot is not quite as foolish with his money than your average English is not myth. As a rule they believe there are better things to do with our money than throw it away.
My brother and I were discussing all this the other night and we both agreed, however, that a genie is out of the bottle. There has been some violence in parts of Scotland and it was not pleasant. Sectarian violence is by no means unknown in Scotland and I do wonder just how well the losing side, whoever it is, whether Yes or No, will take to defeat.
As for what the outcome will be: I haven’t a clue.
. . .
If the Scots Nats win, the political fallout will be fascinating. The majority of the SNP is, I suspect, inclined to the Left. But there is a marked right-wing number of them two, united with the lefties only in the desire of independence. And it would be a mistake to write of ‘Tory’ Scots: the Conservative Party has been doing badly in general elections these past 30 years not because there is no conservative support or sentiment in Scotland, but because it is so unassailably identified with ‘the fucking English’.
In an independent Scotland I don’t doubt that the fortunes of a right-of-centre party would perk up quite a bit, though drawing its support mainly from the country areas. Then there’s the question of the 45 or so Labour MPs with Scottish constituencies whose days in the Commons would most certainly be numbered but upon whose membership of the Commons the British Labour party relies heavily to form a majority government. Seen in that light, it no-brainer to understand why, ironically, Labour have found themselves in the Unionist camp.
Another question which will have to be tackled is, given a Yes to independence vote on Thursday, which would mean the loss of all those constituencies (some of which are Lib Dem, by the way) in Scotland, what should be done about the British general election due in May 2015. Some have even suggested that it should be postponed until after Scotland is fully independent.
They fear a silly scenario such as: Labour, as some suspect, get a majority and form the government. Then, with independence, at a stroke they lose 45 of their MPs and perhaps even lose their majority. Would that mean another election. Certainly, because a minority government could carry in with a deficit of two or three, but 45 would prove to be impossible. Because of the possibility of this conundrum, there is even a suggestion – I think from the Tories – that next May’s election should be postponed in the event of the Scots voting for independence.
And they would certainly like that: faced with an Opposition which is, a stroke 45 MPs short, it would seem the Conservatives would be shoo-in to form proper government, crucially without those bloody awful Lib Dems. Tory heaven if the Scots vote to tell bloody English to piss off. Trouble is they can’t go for it, because they all ‘love the United Kingdom’ so much. Damn!
. . .
I find it very, very creepy that my movement around the web is so completely followed. This morning I was trying to sort out a mobile phone problem for my daughter. Her Sony Experia SP keeps freezing, even though he was apparently ‘repaired’ by her provider, O2, so I have lost faith in their ability to ‘repair’.
The solution I came up with was to by an unlocked phone on eBay (or one locked to O2) and she can use that until the contract (which I am paying for comes to an end). I was alerted to the fact that iPhone 4s are still available brand-new, but I also looked at other phones. And bugger me if not every page I look at which carries ads – news pages etc – has bloody ads for the very phones I was investigating. Yes, I knew it went on, but I don’t like it.
Ironically, Google, who provide this blogging service for free, are one of the worst offenders. You can’t take a dump these days without returning to your desktop or laptop to find you have inadvertently installed the bloody Google toolbar.
Saturday, 13 September 2014
More on John O’Hara: a critique from someone or other and my response to it
Tonight I was just about to sit down with the end of a bottle of Pernod (a great drink if you like aniseed and don’t believe all the guff that it has to be drunk in sunshine. It doesn’t, and you can get as pissed or not as you like depending upon the amount of water you add. As I get older, I find myself adding more and more) and finish off my second reading of the novel. As it happened I set down the full glass next to the sofa and as I went to put away my guitar, I kicked it over. Damn.
So instead I have decided to post my response to a critique of the novel by one Henry Gonshak who is, apparently ‘the Rose and Anna Busch Endowed Professor of English at Montana Tech’. I found it when I was looking up websites to do with the novel. You can read what Mr Gonshak had to say here. I wanted to leave a comment on the blog, but for some reason I couldn’t so I have emailed it to him. But, after kicking over my glass of Pernod, I decided - what the hell - to post my response here, too. Since emailing it and then deciding to post it here, I have slightly rewritten and expanded it, although not a lot.
I recently finished Appointment In Samara - and I can’t remember how I came across the novel and then bought it - and was so impressed, I bought a collection of John O’Hara’s New York short stories and Butterfield 8. The name of that second novel was familiar to me, because I’d heard about the Elizabeth Taylor film years ago and remembered that it was in some way ‘shocking’. But I only saw it recently and, at the time, I rather liked it.
Last week, I read the Butterfield 8 the novel, and once I had finished it, I immediately, as has sometimes become my habit with books which impress me, began again. That others don’t do so, or at least I’ve never heard of others doing so, baffles me a little. We will listen to recordings of music and watch films again, often very soon after we have just heard or read them, but no one seems to grant a novel the same respect.
I’ve done the same with films (watched on DVD or the internet) and all I can say is that the practice of reading a novel (or watching a film) like that pays off in spades. I have to say I disagree with you almost completely on your evaluation of the novel Butterfield 8, and must agree with you about the film. Having now read the novel my estimation of the Taylor film has plummeted.
It is, at the end of the day, just another piece of Hollywood melodrama, and although there are, as in most things, degrees of worth or otherwise - there can be ‘good’, well-made melodrama and there can be total crap - it was nonetheless nothing more than a piece of melodramatic schlock which might have done good business at the box office and garnered Taylor her Oscar, but in no way whatsover approached the subtlety of O’Hara’s novel.
In that sense it has nothing to do with the novel except sharing a title and vaguely, ever so vaguely, echoing its story. The novel is much, much, much more, and I can understand why when it was first published, and coming soon after Appointment In Samara, it made O’Hara’s name. But
you [Henry Gonshak, the guy whose take on the novel I am responding to] don’t seem to rate it highly at all. And that, too, baffles me.
You supply the quote, quite possibly well-known, from (Wright State University English professor) Martin Kirch that ‘O’Hara’s achievements have been so long and thoroughly denigrated that he is now considered a novelist of the second, or even the third, rank’, and on the face of it that would seem game, set and match: it seems to say ‘O’Hara was once good, but not that good and certainly no longer as good as other novelists’. You say something similar (’In our era O’Hara comes across as a dated and minor writer who should not be classed with such brilliant’). But read Professor Kirch’s quote again: he says the ‘achievements’ have been ‘denigrated’.
Now that is an odd word to use if he means ‘re-evaluated’. But he doesn’t say ‘re-evaluated’: he uses the word ‘denigrated’, and when someone is ‘denigrated’, the implication is that he has been unfairly treated. And that’s how I read Kirch’s judgment: that O’Hara is still as good as he was, but taste has moved on to such an extent that he is seen as no longer cutting the artistic mustard. And so although you say you agree with Kirch, he does not seem to be saying what you are saying.
In your evaluation of the novel you make several factual errors, and I think these are important: you say Gloria Wandrous was 18 when the novel takes place. She wasn’t, she was 22. You also say the Weston Liggett, the man who picked her up - or was picked up by her - was divorced. He wasn’t: once he had confessed to taking Gloria to bed in the family home, he fully expected his wife Emily to divorce him, and offered to make it easy for her. But he wasn’t divorced - how could he be if the essential story at the centre of the novel takes place between a Friday night and the following Wednesday?
There is also more than a suspicion that, with Gloria now dead - and Liggett’s reaction being pretty callous in that all he thinks about in the aftermath of her death is retrieving the mink coat to avoid being implicated in any way - he will not be divorced and that he and Emily will evntually continue in their conventional, by now dull, marriage and both will continue to enjoy the life of an ‘upper-class’ wealthy American as before (possible recriminations notwithstanding - after all she is well-aware that he has had several affairs).
It is these two errors, and your judgment of Gloria as just another ‘spoiled rich girl, pampered by her indulgent parents’ make me suspect that you simply haven’t understood the novel and, pertinently, its endless subtleties. (Another error: Gloria didn’t have parents, she had a mother and William Vandamm, her uncle, though undoubtedly they did indulge her pitilessly and she was pretty spoiled.)
You don’t seem to take on board that Gloria was not just another good-time girl out for what she could get, and that the key to the tragedy of her life and death - if tragedy is, under the circumstances not a tad hi’falutin - and her unbridled promiscuity and virtually alcoholic drinking is most probably because she was sexually assaulted at the age of 11 by Major Boam and, crucially, felt she was unable to tell anyone. She did not feel able to tell the black maid who was in the house at the time, partly because of the casual and rampant racism abroad at the time of which she was equally as guilty as her peers.
When she did bring herself to tell her mother and uncle, her mother dismissed the story out of hand and, although, he didn’t react as his sister did, Vandamm also let Gloria down. Far more seriously, she was later thoroughly corrupted at the age of 15 by Reddington, a man who was ostensibly a pillar of his community (a detail which he brutally used to brush off similar incidents with a young girl in his hometown).
Now, however, already disillusioned by the disbelief she encountered when she was first violated, she seems to enjoy the sex, the drinking, the sniffing ether and the year-long abuse by Reddington. But, of course, deep down she didn’t, and it was the cause of the despair to which she woke up every morning. She seems to have lost all hope and decided just to go for it. It’s as though if she doesn’t feel valued, she can see no reason to value the world.
O’Hara - in my view - doesn’t create as you put it ‘a stick figure, and a rather tedious one at that’. Quite the contrary: Gloria is intelligent, sensitive, alert, on the ball and witty and, even at 22, no one’s fool. And she is an appealing figure, although you don’t think so. You seem not to have been on her side. I was. She is far more attractive than the gallery of shallow, boozy young men who use her and who are her daily companions. And she is very aware that her life is going nowhere. At the end of the novel she has some kind of epiphany and realises life doesn’t have to be like the life she is leading, and O’Hara suggests that she might, just might, be turning a corner.
Yes, she is still young and immature and believes she ‘loves’ Liggett. But, I suggest, even she, deep down, knows that is nonsense and that the affair - if it can even be called an affair, consisting as it does of two nights of sex and a lot of drinking - will go nowhere. Her death is wholly ambiguous: was it an accident or did she jump off the boat?
The encounter on that boat with Liggett in his cramped cabin is nothing but a sordid and embarrasing interlude, and she knows it. All he wants is sex with her, despite his middle-aged fantasy about being in love with her. She, after the pleasant afternoon she had spent with her mother and her surprising realisation that a marriage and love can, perhaps, be good after all, wants more. She doesn’t sleep with Liggett. She leaves him. And when they are due to meet upstairs, she comes towards him, but then ‘turns’ away and runs off. Did she trip over the low railing? Or had she decided to end it all. The ending is by no means ‘shaky’ or one intended to add spice to an otherwise ‘meandering’ novel.
There is nothing ‘meandering’ about the novel. O’Hara was rigidly disciplined in his build-up, from the scenes in speakeasies where Gloria’s crowd are nothing but a bunch of well-off, but stupid and vacuous halfwits, to the portrayals of the empty relationships of the Liggett’s, the Farleys - the wife casually decides she wants an affair with the actor, but can’t even be resolute enough to go through with it - Jimmy Malloy and Isabel’s on-off relationship, and that between Eddie Brunner and Norma Day, where Eddie reconciles himself to marriage to a ‘safe’ woman for all the wrong reasons, are all small pieces of a jigsaw which O’Hara quietly but deftly puts in place to give the overall picture of what choices a girl like Gloria - a girl with a history of being demeaned and abused - thinks she has.
Perhaps the back stories of the characters make the reader - you, perhaps - think that the novel meanders, but in truth nothing O’Hara writes is superfluous however it might at first seem. And, again I have to say, in my view, the final sentence in the novel is perfect and sums up the whole corrupted, perverted morality of the time and age he is describing: ‘The Reddingtons always went to a hotel where the women guests were not permitted so smoke.’ So as long as the trivial niceties of ‘good’ society are observed - for example that women guests were not permitted to smoke - everyone can pretend all is well in the world even though it damn well most certainly is not and they damn well know it.
At first blush O’Hara’s portrayal of a small part of New York society on just six days in 1930 would seem to be something of a miniature. But it isn’t. What he writes about - hypocrisy and a selfish, callous disregard for others - is universal and most certainly not restricted by being ‘of its time’. And that hypocrisy is just as shocking now was it was then. And that is why O’Hara’s novel is a great novel.
I understand Butterfield 8, only his second novel, was the high-water mark of his writing career and although her wrote several more novels, none was quiet as good and reached its class. Well, as I haven’t read any other them (but I intend to do so) I can’t comment. But I do know that O’Hara is a great writer - his turn of phrase, his dialogue, his insight, his seemingly casual way of writing, the looseness of it, his ability to portray depth when none is apparent - prove it for me.
So, I disagree with you. Completely.
So instead I have decided to post my response to a critique of the novel by one Henry Gonshak who is, apparently ‘the Rose and Anna Busch Endowed Professor of English at Montana Tech’. I found it when I was looking up websites to do with the novel. You can read what Mr Gonshak had to say here. I wanted to leave a comment on the blog, but for some reason I couldn’t so I have emailed it to him. But, after kicking over my glass of Pernod, I decided - what the hell - to post my response here, too. Since emailing it and then deciding to post it here, I have slightly rewritten and expanded it, although not a lot.
I recently finished Appointment In Samara - and I can’t remember how I came across the novel and then bought it - and was so impressed, I bought a collection of John O’Hara’s New York short stories and Butterfield 8. The name of that second novel was familiar to me, because I’d heard about the Elizabeth Taylor film years ago and remembered that it was in some way ‘shocking’. But I only saw it recently and, at the time, I rather liked it.
Last week, I read the Butterfield 8 the novel, and once I had finished it, I immediately, as has sometimes become my habit with books which impress me, began again. That others don’t do so, or at least I’ve never heard of others doing so, baffles me a little. We will listen to recordings of music and watch films again, often very soon after we have just heard or read them, but no one seems to grant a novel the same respect.
I’ve done the same with films (watched on DVD or the internet) and all I can say is that the practice of reading a novel (or watching a film) like that pays off in spades. I have to say I disagree with you almost completely on your evaluation of the novel Butterfield 8, and must agree with you about the film. Having now read the novel my estimation of the Taylor film has plummeted.
It is, at the end of the day, just another piece of Hollywood melodrama, and although there are, as in most things, degrees of worth or otherwise - there can be ‘good’, well-made melodrama and there can be total crap - it was nonetheless nothing more than a piece of melodramatic schlock which might have done good business at the box office and garnered Taylor her Oscar, but in no way whatsover approached the subtlety of O’Hara’s novel.
In that sense it has nothing to do with the novel except sharing a title and vaguely, ever so vaguely, echoing its story. The novel is much, much, much more, and I can understand why when it was first published, and coming soon after Appointment In Samara, it made O’Hara’s name. But
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John O'Hara |
You supply the quote, quite possibly well-known, from (Wright State University English professor) Martin Kirch that ‘O’Hara’s achievements have been so long and thoroughly denigrated that he is now considered a novelist of the second, or even the third, rank’, and on the face of it that would seem game, set and match: it seems to say ‘O’Hara was once good, but not that good and certainly no longer as good as other novelists’. You say something similar (’In our era O’Hara comes across as a dated and minor writer who should not be classed with such brilliant’). But read Professor Kirch’s quote again: he says the ‘achievements’ have been ‘denigrated’.
Now that is an odd word to use if he means ‘re-evaluated’. But he doesn’t say ‘re-evaluated’: he uses the word ‘denigrated’, and when someone is ‘denigrated’, the implication is that he has been unfairly treated. And that’s how I read Kirch’s judgment: that O’Hara is still as good as he was, but taste has moved on to such an extent that he is seen as no longer cutting the artistic mustard. And so although you say you agree with Kirch, he does not seem to be saying what you are saying.
In your evaluation of the novel you make several factual errors, and I think these are important: you say Gloria Wandrous was 18 when the novel takes place. She wasn’t, she was 22. You also say the Weston Liggett, the man who picked her up - or was picked up by her - was divorced. He wasn’t: once he had confessed to taking Gloria to bed in the family home, he fully expected his wife Emily to divorce him, and offered to make it easy for her. But he wasn’t divorced - how could he be if the essential story at the centre of the novel takes place between a Friday night and the following Wednesday?
There is also more than a suspicion that, with Gloria now dead - and Liggett’s reaction being pretty callous in that all he thinks about in the aftermath of her death is retrieving the mink coat to avoid being implicated in any way - he will not be divorced and that he and Emily will evntually continue in their conventional, by now dull, marriage and both will continue to enjoy the life of an ‘upper-class’ wealthy American as before (possible recriminations notwithstanding - after all she is well-aware that he has had several affairs).
It is these two errors, and your judgment of Gloria as just another ‘spoiled rich girl, pampered by her indulgent parents’ make me suspect that you simply haven’t understood the novel and, pertinently, its endless subtleties. (Another error: Gloria didn’t have parents, she had a mother and William Vandamm, her uncle, though undoubtedly they did indulge her pitilessly and she was pretty spoiled.)
You don’t seem to take on board that Gloria was not just another good-time girl out for what she could get, and that the key to the tragedy of her life and death - if tragedy is, under the circumstances not a tad hi’falutin - and her unbridled promiscuity and virtually alcoholic drinking is most probably because she was sexually assaulted at the age of 11 by Major Boam and, crucially, felt she was unable to tell anyone. She did not feel able to tell the black maid who was in the house at the time, partly because of the casual and rampant racism abroad at the time of which she was equally as guilty as her peers.
When she did bring herself to tell her mother and uncle, her mother dismissed the story out of hand and, although, he didn’t react as his sister did, Vandamm also let Gloria down. Far more seriously, she was later thoroughly corrupted at the age of 15 by Reddington, a man who was ostensibly a pillar of his community (a detail which he brutally used to brush off similar incidents with a young girl in his hometown).
Now, however, already disillusioned by the disbelief she encountered when she was first violated, she seems to enjoy the sex, the drinking, the sniffing ether and the year-long abuse by Reddington. But, of course, deep down she didn’t, and it was the cause of the despair to which she woke up every morning. She seems to have lost all hope and decided just to go for it. It’s as though if she doesn’t feel valued, she can see no reason to value the world.
O’Hara - in my view - doesn’t create as you put it ‘a stick figure, and a rather tedious one at that’. Quite the contrary: Gloria is intelligent, sensitive, alert, on the ball and witty and, even at 22, no one’s fool. And she is an appealing figure, although you don’t think so. You seem not to have been on her side. I was. She is far more attractive than the gallery of shallow, boozy young men who use her and who are her daily companions. And she is very aware that her life is going nowhere. At the end of the novel she has some kind of epiphany and realises life doesn’t have to be like the life she is leading, and O’Hara suggests that she might, just might, be turning a corner.
Yes, she is still young and immature and believes she ‘loves’ Liggett. But, I suggest, even she, deep down, knows that is nonsense and that the affair - if it can even be called an affair, consisting as it does of two nights of sex and a lot of drinking - will go nowhere. Her death is wholly ambiguous: was it an accident or did she jump off the boat?
The encounter on that boat with Liggett in his cramped cabin is nothing but a sordid and embarrasing interlude, and she knows it. All he wants is sex with her, despite his middle-aged fantasy about being in love with her. She, after the pleasant afternoon she had spent with her mother and her surprising realisation that a marriage and love can, perhaps, be good after all, wants more. She doesn’t sleep with Liggett. She leaves him. And when they are due to meet upstairs, she comes towards him, but then ‘turns’ away and runs off. Did she trip over the low railing? Or had she decided to end it all. The ending is by no means ‘shaky’ or one intended to add spice to an otherwise ‘meandering’ novel.
There is nothing ‘meandering’ about the novel. O’Hara was rigidly disciplined in his build-up, from the scenes in speakeasies where Gloria’s crowd are nothing but a bunch of well-off, but stupid and vacuous halfwits, to the portrayals of the empty relationships of the Liggett’s, the Farleys - the wife casually decides she wants an affair with the actor, but can’t even be resolute enough to go through with it - Jimmy Malloy and Isabel’s on-off relationship, and that between Eddie Brunner and Norma Day, where Eddie reconciles himself to marriage to a ‘safe’ woman for all the wrong reasons, are all small pieces of a jigsaw which O’Hara quietly but deftly puts in place to give the overall picture of what choices a girl like Gloria - a girl with a history of being demeaned and abused - thinks she has.
Perhaps the back stories of the characters make the reader - you, perhaps - think that the novel meanders, but in truth nothing O’Hara writes is superfluous however it might at first seem. And, again I have to say, in my view, the final sentence in the novel is perfect and sums up the whole corrupted, perverted morality of the time and age he is describing: ‘The Reddingtons always went to a hotel where the women guests were not permitted so smoke.’ So as long as the trivial niceties of ‘good’ society are observed - for example that women guests were not permitted to smoke - everyone can pretend all is well in the world even though it damn well most certainly is not and they damn well know it.
At first blush O’Hara’s portrayal of a small part of New York society on just six days in 1930 would seem to be something of a miniature. But it isn’t. What he writes about - hypocrisy and a selfish, callous disregard for others - is universal and most certainly not restricted by being ‘of its time’. And that hypocrisy is just as shocking now was it was then. And that is why O’Hara’s novel is a great novel.
I understand Butterfield 8, only his second novel, was the high-water mark of his writing career and although her wrote several more novels, none was quiet as good and reached its class. Well, as I haven’t read any other them (but I intend to do so) I can’t comment. But I do know that O’Hara is a great writer - his turn of phrase, his dialogue, his insight, his seemingly casual way of writing, the looseness of it, his ability to portray depth when none is apparent - prove it for me.
So, I disagree with you. Completely.
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