The road to salvation if you want to provide astonishing party small talk, impress those dumb enough to be impressed and want to cut a dash: read The Economist. (NB You won’t find it in doctors’ or dentists’ waiting rooms and you’ll have to buy it but there’s a downside to most things, eh?)

For several years in the 1980s and 1990s I was rather impressed by my younger brother’s knowledge - and not just his general knowledge, but his sometimes quite specific knowledge of business, politics, world affairs and I don’t know what else. If you mentioned something, he had to hand the facts and figures, the latest development, a general prognosis of how things might well develop and quite often details of a minority view, why the accepted view of matters was possibly too pessimistic or too optimistic or something. The things he knew, the obscure snippets he could - and would - come out with with startling ease was often quite astonishing. How can he know that? I would wonder, and often felt very thick.

Strictly he - Mark - was only my ‘younger brother’ until December 22 of a few years ago, but our older brother Ian died that day, so now my younger brother has been bumped up to ‘my brother’. And please don’t think me heartless for making such a quip in bad taste. My older brother would have rather enjoyed it, so as far as I’m concerned that’s me off the hook.

To be frank if that’s the kind of comment which makes you shudder and consider looking for your smelling salts, you don’t belong in this blog anyway. I like to think that my small blog readership is made of sterner stuff and can take a little rough-round-the-edges humour.

Oh, and speaking of my brother - the one who died a few years ago - remind me one day to recount the tale of the theft of my brother Ian’s ashes from a car in Kensington, how they were recovered within minutes of the theft and delivered to me at work, and how the legend has grown that I subsequently covered a friend and colleague sitting next to me with those ashes. I didn’t, in fact, do anything of the kind and that, in microcosm, is just one example of the kind of torrid and irresponsible exaggeration which hacks indulge in which in the past has led to war.

Yes, I did inadvertently manage to spill just a little of Ian’s ashes onto my desk, but that is not the story now told. So if you ever do get to hear the story about how I recklessly and quite bizarrely covered most Daily Mail editorial third floor with the ashes of a dead man, don’t believe a word of it. And don’t even settle for ‘there’s no smoke without fire and that Pat Powell has done some odd things in the past - just look at his collection of nine laptops’. It’s simply not true (later: well, the bit about the nine laptops is true, but don’t be too quick to rush to judgment, there is an explanation of sorts), and this is all quite some distance from my younger brother Mark’s - sorry, my brother Mark’s - quite startling general knowledge of this, that and I don’t know what else.

. . .

One day I discovered what was going on, how my brother was so startlingly well-informed. For years, especially when I was younger and had an older brother (the one who died a few years ago) who seemed to be able to excel at whatever he turned his hand to, I regarded myself as rather thick. I’m not suggesting I was entirely wrong, of course, and I have no idea how thick or bright I am, and I truly suspect that, like most people, I am somewhere right in the middle (I’ve found almost all of us are miserable at evaluating ourselves, our abilities and such).

But over the years I’ve learned that any such binary distinction - in this case between being bright and being thick - is so broadbrush as to be totally pointless. Life is a lot more subtle than that and, again in this case, there is an

infinite variety of different kinds of intelligence. The point is highlighted when someone regarded as very bright does something completely stupid, yet despite doing something very stupid is otherwise still very bright.

I, as far as I was concerned, belonged pretty much with the thickos and so, for example - and pertinently - magazines such as The Economist were ‘not for the likes of me’. And then I read the magazine (which likes to call itself ‘a newspaper) and discovered I had been missing out on a very useful and very interesting source of information and news.

Crucially - and this is important - the Economist is very well written as in written in straightforward, unpretentious and clear English and that, too, is pertinent point. It took me many years to realise that I didn’t quite understand or often did not have a clue,what a writer was trying to convey because the piece was so badly written (Observer and Independent feature writers please note). Until that penny dropped, I assumed it was my fault because I was ‘thick’ (and I wonder how many others have suffered from the same feeling of guilt).

I hold to the traditional view that the purpose of communication is to communicate successfully and that it is not to show off what superficially fancy English you can write. It’s also true that a piece is more than a tad incomprehensible not just because it is badly written but because the writer simply hasn’t thought through what he or she wants to say or simply doesn’t understand what they are attempting to write about. In fact, a very good test of whether you understand a concept, idea, political situation etc is trying to explain it to someone. If you find doing so increasingly heavy going, you will now know why.

In all these respects The Economist is a virtuous example, and I appreciate that. Certainly, it does have one or two flaws, but these pale beside its worth. It is, for example, remorselessly upbeat and positive. There’s nothing wrong with being upbeat and positive, of course, with with The Economist that is relentless. I once asked my brother, the

‘younger’ one, how he thought the first Economist leader would read after Armageddon. What he came out with does sum up up the magazine/newspaper: ‘Well, the worst is over. What lessons can now be learnt from it all?’

The Economist, I discovered, when I started reading it regularly, was pretty much the course of my brother Mark’s apparently impressive and often quite obscured general knowledge. Where once I was baffled by how he knew about the difficulties facing suburban commuters in Indonesia or how he could confidently assert that so-and-so will face an uphill struggle to retain power in local elections in Peru, I now knew: he had read about it all in that week’s edition of The Economist.

So, for example, a quick glance at this week’s edition of The Economist (date May 11) will tell, as you might expect, you all about the Trump-inspired trade war between the US and China and the danger of war in the Middle East involving the US duking it out with Iran, as well as the latest development in Britain’s Brexit fiasco, but also that taking their lead from free public transport in Tallinn, Estonia (introduced six years ago) other European countries, impressed by the success of the scheme, are considering introducing it in their cities.

There’s also an account of how Sara Duterte-Carpio, the daughter of Indonesia’s ‘strongman’ president Rodrigo Duterte is being groomed to succeed her father and that in France the decline of the Roman Catholic church has meant that more and more children are being given less traditional first names. From the US comes the most disturbing news that the nation’s pay-TV companies are facing an ever tougher time, recently losing a fifth of their customers, although somehow managing to make a third more profit (by the simple expedient of bunging up prices which would probably explain why one in five customers has called it a day and is turning to web-streaming services).

In Switzerland the country’s finance industry is somehow under threat. I haven’t yet read the story and so I can’t give you chapter and verse, but I can say with almost absolute certainty that the news will profoundly disturb those who are disturbed by such news.

So guess what I shall be talking about, casually dropping these and other matters into the conversation, when I next chat to someone whose horizons don’t begin and end at the village boundary? And guess who, with a bit of luck, will think - while staying resolutely schtumm to avoid betraying a growing sense of inferiority mixed with awe - will marvel at just how well-informed that Patrick Powell is? Unless, of course, whoever I’m talking to also reads The Economist every week. In that case I shall be rumbled, just as I eventually rumbled my brother (the ‘younger’ one, not the other one - he’s now dead and beyond rumbling).

. . .

After posting this, I seemed to remember a recent Economist TV advert which rubbed me up the wrong way. It ran along the lines of ‘Intelligent people like you and us have to be informed and read The Economist’. So I searched the web for it to post it here with a few catty comments, but I couldn’t find it anywhere. YouTube has a few Economist TV ads and the recent is dated January 2019. Here it is. If I do find the one I didn’t like, I’ll post it here.

I have to say I rather like the injunction to ‘question everything’ and I don’t find it in any way offensive. I am though pissed off that I didn’t find the ad I didn’t like just to post it here and ask whether others agree or disagree with me (not that any of you buggers apart from P. and B. ever bother to respond to posts, but - well, that’s life and I’ll have to live with it. At least I’ve still got my original two kidneys and fully functioning liver, so thank the Lord for small mercies.

PS On a completely different tack, finding out as I have just how easy it is to post videos here, I shall start posting a few more. I mean, why not?

NB The bloody video doesn’t yet work. Went to try it and no dice. It’s MP4 and sometimes there is trouble with that format, so I shall dick around a little and see if I can’t save the day by posting it in a different format. Tough, I know, but there you go.

. . . 

 As I have just discovered how easy it is to post videos, here are three I did a few years ago, now languishing unseen and unappreciated in dank depths of YouTube. I hope they entertain you. Sadly, I haven’t yet found out how to make them bigger.

Finally, this one . . .

Well, crims in the family! I knew about the spy - well, the sort of spy - but crims eh! An everyday folk of country folk, one of whom apparently was not above skinning turds

That, of course, is a huge exaggeration, but what would one of my posts be without a least one bucketful of bullshit. The question is rhetorical, of course, because going by the number of comments left here - as in none to hardly any - no one will answer it anyway, so in a swift face-saving exercise I am downgrading that question with immediate effect to ‘rhetorical’. There is though a bit of truth in it, and I found out like this.

A few posts ago I recorded by my 96-year-old very ill father-in-law had come to live with us after spending the past seven or eight months across the lane at the farm. As my sister-in-law runs a ‘farm holidays for families with young children’ business and as the season has now started, Roy couldn’t stay on (he was living downstairs in a part of the farmhouse guests and their children use), but my wife didn’t like the idea of him going into a home and offered to take him in.

My son’s bedroom (he is now at university in Liverpool), once the a big utility room behind the kitchen, was adapted, getting a wall-to-wall carpet where my son had made do with rugs on the granite floor (and I wasn’t the first to observe - in my case to the carpet fitter and his mate - what a shame it was that the kind of granite floor assorted middle-class folk would kill for was being hidden by a wall-to-wall carpet) and various hand rails on the walls.

My father-in-law then moved in. But it turned out what with one thing an another that he really does need 24-hour care and my wife found that increasingly she couldn’t cope. So now he has been found a home in Bodmin (and seems to have settled in quite well). His cottage up the road has since been sorted out to make way for letting it out to raise funds to pay for the home and the other night my wife found herself sorting through old photographs. She also came across this newspaper cutting from the Cornish Guardian for 1956. Give it a read:

MADE TO “MISTRUST MY OWN MAKER,” SAYS FARMER

ST BREWARD MAN’S PLEA OF “CONSCIENCE” IN INSURANCE CASE

A father and son, farmers at St. Breward, summoned at Bodmin Magistrates Court on Friday for not paying a National Insurance contribution for the week commencing November 5, were said to have taken no part in the health scheme since it started in July 1948.

They were Frederick Roy Finnemore and Arthur Wesley Finnemore, of Higher De Lank Farm, St Breward. Each was find £1 and ordered to pay 6s. 10d. costs.

Both defendants, decribed [sic] as self-employed farmers, pleaded guilty, and Mr. C. E. Williams, Regional Inspector, pointed out that although they had not paid any contributions, nor held insurance cards, in the eight years the scheme had been in force, they were only summoned for failing to pay one week’s contribution.

Mr. Williams said that when a Ministry inspector called at the farm on a routine check to see insurance cards, the Finnemores agreed that they had not any. The son said they were not going to do “anything about it” unless they had to.

“Flagrant Disregard of Law”  
Commenting that the Ministry regarded the case as a “flagrant disregard of the law,” Mr. Williams said there was no suggestion of financial difficulty so far as the defendants were concerned. He added that he was not asking for an order for the arrears as in view of the period involved the Ministry would take other steps to recover what was due — if necessary through the County Court.

The father, Arthur Wesley Finnemore, told the magistrates: “During the 1914-18 war I was told I was fighting for freedom. I should like to have a little of that.”
He claimed that he was being denied the right of his own conscience and made to “mistrust my own maker.” That was why he had not applied for National Insurance cards.

. . .


Arthur Wesley Finnemore, known as Wesley and after whom my son is named, is bullshitting in my view. He most certainly was a bit of a god-squadder but that wasn’t the reason he didn’t pay his national insurance for eight years. Shortly after I married, a neighbour said of my father-in-law (Wesely’s son) that he ‘would skin a turd to save a penny’ and I don’t doubt that a certain parsimonious streak ran (and runs) through some of the family.

For example, the cottage in which I live was once ‘the farmhouse of the manor’. That makes it sound quite big but it isn’t. Apparently it dates from around the 14th/15th and predates the manor house which as ‘first renovated’ in the 16th. Old Wesley had been a tenant farmer on Bodmin Moor when, at the beginning of the 1930s, the farmhouse, our cottage, the cottage he moved into when he retired in the mid 1990s and another farm several miles away near St Kew came up for sale as a job lot, apparently as a very good price - £3,000, around £200,000 now (for which you can’t today buy a rabbit hutch in London).

At the price there would have been some interest, and quite how old Wesley pipped everyone else to the post I don’t know, but he did. The trouble was that neither he nor his son ever liked spending even the slightest amount on maintaining the farmhouse, so bit by bit it deteriorated, until my sister-in-law (who had married into the family and was not inflicted by the parsimony gene) decided to renovate a great deal of it so she could start her ‘farm holidays for families for young children business’. Incidentally, I am certainly not talking out of school but the family would kill me if they ever read this, but the chances of them ever happening upon this blog are slight to non-existent. And if they do, I shall probably have long been pushing up the daisies.

So Wesley’s plea from the heart that he was being forced ‘to mistrust his own maker’ is bullshit as far as I am concerned (quite apart from the fact that it doesn’t actually make any sense at all - in what way?). He just didn’t like spending any money.

I met him in the late 1980s once or twice before he died, but what I know of him is what I have been told. He was a strong Methodist - a very strong and very manic Methodist by all accounts who would not tolerate alcohol in the house and, I heard just this last Christmas, at Christmas lunch went around smelling everyone’s Coca Cola to make sure there was no booze in it.

Another story I heard was that the last tenants to live in our cottage before were a family of whom the wife was apparently a bit of a goer and sought out the company of the US servicemen who were stationed locally at Hengar Manor in the run-up to D Day. Quite possibly money changed hands. When Wesley found out, he evicted the whole family. Our cottage then slowly became derelict and was used as a cowshed until it was given to my wife who renovated it (doing much of the work herself - she was said to be the only young woman for many miles around to have her own concrete mixer).

So there you have it. Crims? No, not really? Forced to distrust their own maker? Again, no, not really. It was just the usual silly cant said in court by folk who don’t have a leg to stand upon. I remember when I was a district reporter for the South Wales Argus in Ebbw Vale, I attended a magistrates court hearing of a guy up for drink-driving. He swore blind - again and again - that he hadn’t touched a drop. All he had done was polish off a bag of wine gums. Honest, your honours, it must have been those wine gums!

A few more piccies for the entertainment of those who like eating but don’t spend an inordinate amount of time agonising over ‘what that meal just meant’

If you like the pictures I published in my previous post, here are a few more. They are again chosen at random, and I repeat that there is no underlying theme, they don’t represent an exposition of any ideology or theory and I make no great claims for them. They are simply offered in the hope that you might linger over them just a little longer than you might otherwise.

I also occasionally enjoy manipulating a picture so that it is almost but not quite abstract and quite often like a rather ‘artificial look’. But pretty much it comes down to what final result I end up with. If I like where I have arrived, the dicking around stops.

Oh, and none has any ‘meaning’ whatsoever. You don’t eat a well-cooked, well-prepared and well-presented meal (as in ‘the art of cooking’) then spend days and weeks agonising over what exactly that meal ‘meant’. With a bit of luck you simply enjoyed and appreciated eating it. 

A few piccies to help you keep your pecker up. No mention of Brexit in this entry, by they way, and I am probably even more relieved than you are

A friend, B (and, yes, B you are B) commented just the other day that he wished I would publish my blog entries ‘by topic’. Well, the more I think about his suggestion, the less I understand it. For one thing although I am ‘serious’ about my blog, publishing entries, as suggested, by topic, strikes me as taking it - the blog - and but also myself just a tad too seriously.

I am ‘serious’ about it in several ways, none of which, though, are very important. Let’s face it: it is just one of several hundreds of thousands blogs published throughout the world and at the end of the day is indistinguishable from all the rest. So, B, publishing entries ‘by topic’ kind of implies that I have something rather worthwhile to pass on, but to save all the busy ‘time-poor’ readers the hassle of ploughing through unnecessary stuff, here’s what I have to say ‘by topic’. Lord preserve me from any such self-importance.

I write this blog for several reasons: in no particular order because I like writing, because I find getting something down on paper helps me sort out my thoughts on some issue or other, because I like making people laugh (or perhaps that should be ‘trying to make people laugh’ - I do hope you have noticed that my tongue is occasionally in my cheek), because I like posting pictures.

Talking of which here are several more. These have gone up on my Facebook page (which you can inspect here) but as they on Facebook they only get to be seen by about 20 ‘friends’, I thought I might post them here, too.

There is no rhyme or reason to them, no ‘theme’, no underlying theory, nothing. I simply enjoy taking pictures - most of these were with my iPhone - then using a particular app, Camera +2, to manipulate them this way and that. Because I am now familiar with the app there is less experimentation, but I still carry on until I get to the point when, for whatever reason, I like the result and stop dicking around any further.

The one thing I shall admit to is that I do like taking pictures of ‘real’ things - pretty much anything - then manipulating the image to the point where it is almost - but not quite - abstract.

I could go on (Christ, can I go on, I was always told to stop talking when I was a child) but it is now almost 7.20pm and I want to see Brighton beat the living shit out of Spurs to ensure my team, Manchester United still have a lifeline to playing Champions League football next season. Well, a boy can dream. Here are some pics, selected at random. These - I shall be posting some more in due course - were all taken comparatively recently.

Wednesday, April 24: There are a few more pics here.

Two developments at home and the Brexit farce goes on (although it might conclude a week today)

For a blog which has its roots in a diary I kept for about 15 years - handwritten at that - I’ve surprised myself by not mentioning two developments, one of which is surely a big moment in any father’s life. Four weeks ago today my daughter married her boyfriend and the father of her young daughter (who is the sweetest little thing - well, I’m biased, of course, but decide for yourselves from the photograph below. I must admit that in keeping with modern trends I didn’t expect her to marry so soon - she will be 23 at the beginning of August - because as a rule women have been getting married later in life than ever before. I imagine this has a lot to do with the fact that over the past

40 years attitudes to women and the roles assigned to them in Western society has changed a great deal.

Then there’s also the fact that the introduction of reliable contraception in the form of the pill (strictly the ‘Pill’, though I can’t for the life of me understand why it should be given an initial capital) has gradually given women more independence. I know - as a semi-regular listener to Woman’s Hour in Radio 4 for at least 20 minutes every day while I have my bath in the morning - that women still feel hard done by and given that in many sectors they are still not paid as much as a man doing exactly the same job, they certainly have a point.

But where we are today is a million miles from the set-up that they were regarded as just so much chattel, had no rights, could not own property and where being forced to have sex by their husband was not seen as rape. However, she has been to university and has graduated and is slowly setting up a childminding and babysitting business so it’s not as though ‘early motherhood’ - early compared to previous generations - and married life will, as happened so often in the past, close down her life.

. . .

The second development is that my very old and very frail father-in-law has moved in with us. He needs constant care and my wife has given herself over to that (although her dedication and conscientiousness notwithstanding, her brusque attentions and constant scolding often make me squirm. I don’t think I am talking out of school (and if I am, what the fuck, but then no one in my immediate family reads this blog) when I say that in some respects the Cornish can be quite singular, but that in the context of being Cornish her family might be regarded as more singular than others, and finally in the context of her family my wife might well be regarded as more singular than her siblings. I hope I have put it delicately enough. But to her credit she is, as I say, conscientious and hardworking.

My father-in-law is now in a very poor way. His father lived until he was 100 hundred - quite possibly because he was a farmer who didn’t drink or smoke - and my father-in-law is now within a few years of hitting his century. His wife died about 15 years ago and he subsequently lived on his own up the road (he had long retired and one of his sons took over the farm just a stone’s throw from where I now live). About 10 years ago - these figures are very approximate - I was diagnosed with prostate cancer but it was not the aggressive kind and he opted to have not treatment for it.

Over the past few years the cancer has spread and about last autumn, after falling several times, he left his cottage and moved into the farm. However, my sister-in-law runs a B&B for families with toddlers business as well as three holiday cottages, and with the holiday season soon to start she is unable to tend to him.

His family decided to put him in a care home, but my wife didn’t like the idea of it, so he has moved in with us, living in the room downstairs behind the kitchen my son has left vacant now that he has gone to university. He is, as I say very frail, and gets increasingly confused, but at least he isn’t wilting away in come home several miles away.

. . .

This whole Brexit farce is still not settled and the next deadline is the middle of the week when our gracious and noble Prime Minister Mrs Theresa May must get a rabble of MPs to back some deal which will govern Britain’s departure from the European Union if we the country is not most certainly to leave in seven days on April 12. That was already a delayed deadline, and if Mrs May can get backing for an agreement - as far as I can see any agreement, Britain’s departure will again be delayed until - I think June 30. it was to be May 22, but for some reason everyone and their cat is now talking about June 30.

I don’t mind admitting I that what with Canada Plus, Canada Plus Plus, Norway, Common Market 2.0, calls for a second referendum, calls for the Leader of the Opposition to wear his pants inside out and calls for I don’t know what else, I am utterly at sea on the detail of it all. I voted Remain in the referendum almost three years ago, but that was on pragmatic grounds, believing that of the two options - staying as a member of the EU or leaving the EU - it was overall in the best interests of the country. And I still do, despite bizarre and unjustified suspicions by my sister and brother that I am some kind of ‘secret Brexiteer’ who simply doesn’t have the courage to come clean about it all. What I am not, however, and I think this might be the foundation for their suspicions is an out-an-out cheerleader for the EU. And because I have explained why to them in the past, I think they think that I am some kind of Brexiteer fifth columnist.

I have to say that Britain is now wholly, not to say dangerously, divided between Brexiteers and Remainers, and that doesn’t bode well for the future. What irritates me a lot is that both sides - and the Remainers are just as bad

as the Leavers, giving the impression as many do that they are on the side of the angels - insist that ‘if you are not with us, you are agin’ us’, so when I do try to explain my position on the EU to either side, I am condemned out of hand by both. I think I have in the past done so here in this blog but I’m not going to do so again and can’t even be arsed to go back and check whether I have done so.

Broadly I think the notion of a European Community - note I do not say European Union, but I’ll explain why in a minute - with wholeheartedly co-operation in as many ways as possible, common health and trade standards and all the rest is a very good one and ought to be pursued. I think it all began to go a little wrong with the Lisbon Treaty of which one core element was to try to achieve ‘ever closer political union’. In fact, I don’t think there is anything wrong with that goal in theory, but that in practice it is pie in the sky. Yet even that is not important: what was and is foolish is how the EU has been going about it, insisting that such political union must happen, no ifs or buts.

To demonstrate why I think that is a rather foolish and cack-handed approach I will cite the rise of the populist right in several EU member states, and bearing that in mind the results of the imminent EU parliamentary election in May should prove very informative. I suggest that a wiser EU would have trod rather more carefully in pursuance of is political goal and might, pragmatically, have been prepared to adapt its plans if necessary when it realised there as small but growing opposition to them.

What for me typifies what I regard as a somewhat arrogant triumphalism on the part of some of the European Commission was the hoopla and jollies which attended the introduction of the euro in January 1999. It was rather like celebrating winning Olympic gold before the race was won. Many ‘convinced Europeans’ insist the euro ‘has been a success’. Well, it has if you live in some EU countries, and it hasn’t if you live in others. In several EU countries more than half of those under 25 have been chronically unemployed. Success?

It is often been pointed out - and quite rightly - that the euro would be far more successful if the EU could overall take charge of the national budgets of member states - in fact, there would no longer be ‘national budgets’ - and set taxes for the whole of the EU. This would, in theory, stabilise the euro and allow the EU central bank to impose the control on the currency it needs to. And that is what ‘political union’ would facilitate. But in practice? Really? I suggest those who advocate the measure spend some time reading up on their European history.

That, however, is all irrelevant as far is Britain is concerned. I sincerely believe we shall be out by a week today, and I also am pretty convinced it will lead to deep economic problems for Britain. I think leaving is daft, daft, daft as does the rest of the EU. Given that Britain was the third largest net contributor to the EU budget it looks as though it might also mean problems for the EU. And I rather fear that for one reason or another the future for the EU isn’t half as rosy as all those swilling champagne and slapping each other on the back when the euro was introduced 20 years ago though it would be.

When things do go tits up in many EU countries, I also fear that Britain’s Brexit madness will get the blame. That would be unfair: it certainly won’t help, but if the EU is honest it has other problems wholly of its own making.