With all my love, Cassandra. See you in the next world

I once came across a comparison (in the Economist, though that is not important) which might at first blush seem obvious, but the essence of it is something we often tend to forget.A great many of our attitudes are large sub-conscious: we take so much for granted that we rarely question what to use seems beyond question. The comparison in the Economist was made in a piece about the – rather swift – demise of the Soviet Union.

If like me you had grown up in the 1950s (my first decade), the 1960s and the 1970s, the notion of the United States as ‘the leader of the free world’ (as ridiculous a claim as that the Rolling Stones are ‘the world’s best rock band’) pitted against the essentially evil Soviet bloc in ‘the Cold War’ was a mainstay of our lives.

Because both sides had a huge arsenal of nuclear weapons and because both were intimately involved in proxy wars around the world, there was the constant fear that a wrong move by either could lead to ‘global destruction’.

More to the point that particular geo-political fact of life seemed to be a part of all our futures for infinity and beyond. This inability to conceive of any other arrangement was summed up by the comparison made in the Economist.

Imagine, it said, that you lived at the bottom of a very large soup bowl with very high sides. You cannot see over the top and into the world beyond and if you have been living there for a very long time, you cannot even begin to think what life might be like outside the soup bowl.

Many had lived with the reality of the ‘evil’ USSR for so long that they couldn’t conceive of a world in which there no longer was a powerful USSR. Then, it seems almost over night, there wasn’t.

The point of this entry is not to discuss what led to the demise of the Soviet bloc, but to record the surprise of all those living in that deep, high-sided soup bowl that there is an end to everything. That is a comfort to all those suffering when times are bad, but in good times a reminder to all of us not to take the east, the prosperity for granted.

That, too, might seem obvious, but the trouble is we do: we have very short memories. Fourteen years ago (at the time of writing), the world’s banking system was in crisis (though ‘the West’ being rather self-important might not necessarily constitute all of ‘the world’, and I don’t know how the banking crisis affected countries in, say South America). And it was serious.

Essentially, because of the prevalence of bad debts incurred by some banks and other financial institutions, no one felt able to ‘trust’ anyone else. The financial system froze up, banking business came to an abrupt halt and there was a very real danger of many national economies simply collapsing in on themselves.

As it happens swift action — action which was both brave and potentially very dangerous — managed to avert the worst and what might have been long-term disaster was averted. (The ‘dangers’ of the measures taken include what was euphemistically called ‘quantitive easing’ which — I’m more then willing to be corrected — in practice consisted of what amounted to printing money. 

And in the long term such a practice devalues the money we have and cause inflation. However, it doesn’t seem to have done so at the time.

I don’t want to come across as some poundshop cassandra, however. I am not suggesting that ‘we are all doomed’ (©Pte Frazer), but events in the past 30 months, mainly the global covid-19 pandemic and, more recently the bizarre decision by Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, have upset the apple cart in a very grand way. Neither event might have been foreseen and both, in different ways, have led to a leap in inflation in the West.

Most European economies seem to have rebounded from the damage created by ‘covid lockdowns’ surprisingly quickly. But it would is wiser to be less sanguine about the war in Ukraine (which, by the way, I ‘predicted’ would not happen. Shows what I know.

I insisted that the build-up of Russian troops on the northern and eastern borders of Ukraine were just a ham-fisted ‘show of strength’ by Putin. I was wrong, sadly). The conventional wisdom seems to be that Putin is physically and possibly mentally ill and is no longer acting rationally. Mind given that our various newspaper ‘commentators’ are obliged to trot out an opinion at least once a day, all week, it is difficult to know just how seriously we should take ‘conventional wisdom’.

My view is that the intelligence services of the countries making up ‘the West’ which are supporting Ukraine will keep well to themselves what they discover in this way and that and what their analysts forecast simply because it is by far wisest for the ‘the enemy’ (i.e. Putin and Russia) not to know what we know or think we know.

With that in mind, there will be no chance of MI6 and their foreign mates to call a daily Press conference to keep the ‘commentators’ up-to-date. And although said ‘commentators’ might speak of — boast about would be a better description — ‘their sources in the security services’, neither they nor we, their readers, will or can know whether they aren’t being fed a lot of hooey by ‘their sources’, for whatever reason.

I stress: if you cannot know whether what you are being told is ‘the truth’ or just a load old bollocks, it’s best to assume it is complete cobblers.

By all accounts — Russia and its armed forces are making complete tits of themselves in Ukraine, and the persistent fear of ‘the mighty Russian bear’ has been shown to be little more than a nursery nightmare. But what is not a groundless fear is that Putin is able and just might use nuclear weapons.

In view of the underlying philosophy of ‘mutually assured destruction’ which in demotic language boils down to ‘you might be able to fuck us, but we will fuck you in retaliation, so you will gain nothing’, we — the West — hope

 

that Putin, irrational as his decision to invade might now seem, is still not irrational enough to launch his nuclear weapons. But: who bloody knows?

I like to think — that is ‘I’ who confidently predicted that massing more than 100,000 troops on the borders of Ukraine was just a macho ‘show of strength’ — that there is a sufficient number of saner, more rational Russians in the Kremlin who are thinking ‘enough is enough, this bloody loon is damaging our country for no reason at all’.

Certainly, there are a great many nutters and fanatics about, in Northern Ireland, in ISIS, in the US bible belt, among the ultra-orthodox Jews in Israel (who, believe it or not refuse to serve in their country’s armed forces, but don’t at all mind being protected by them), but there is also a substantial number who want little more than a quiet, peaceful and trouble-free life. And I don’t doubt there are as many such Russians as there are Brits, Germans, French, Brazilians and Yanks. 

They will understand that although Russia is not perfect — and no country is — things were running just fine for them and their countrymen before Putin decided to invade Ukraine. That has turned into a disaster, so let’s not compound that disaster by allowing the loon to nuke the West. But: who knows?

Like the guys at the bottom of that soup bowl, until December 2019 when we got our first reports of the covid outbreak in Wuhan, China, much was going quite well for most of us. Yes, we had our niggles, and some more than many, but . . .

We did not think that might change. It did, though. So perhaps it might now be best to fear the worst and look forward to being pleasantly surprised, not to say very relieved, when it doesn’t happen. But: who knows?

Love, Cassandra.

PS It’s worth remembering the advice given to Brits in the 1950s as to what to do if your area is targeted by a nuclear warhead: get under a table. It might not do much, but surely it is better than nothing? Surely.

First post in ages, but a trip to France makes its presence felt

Langon, SW France, May 9.

I haven’t posted here for some time, and I am conscious of it. There’s no reason at all, except that I have nothing much to record here, and as all too often my posts lately have been nothing more than a round-up on current affairs on what I have been reading in the more ‘serious’ newspapers and journals (all things are comparative so ‘serious’ means ‘not quite as fucking daft’), I felt it was a tad artificial and pretentious to post here - though saying nothing - simply because I hadn’t posted here for a while. I have been posting on my ‘secret’ blog, but the entries are far shorter and where I can let my hair down.

I am on a ten-day visit to see my aunt in Illats, with whom you might be familiar from previous entries over these past few years. For about seven or eight year, I would visit in July to accompany her to several of the concerts put on at that time as part of a series of three. The last time was, I think, in 2017, the year before I retired, but the visits stopped when she became too frail to go out much, and not at all in the evenings when the concerts were being held.

She has been in even poorer health this past year. She is now 91, the sight in one eye has gone (though it still itches and irritates irrespective of that), she has one (or possibly even two) new knees, and has fallen badly several times. We kept in touch by email and I was going to visit here in the autumn, but my wife suggested I should make it earlier than that in case - well, in case. So here I am.

. . . 

I arrived last Wednesday, and as always it takes a day or two of acclimatising. I was going to be staying for a little over two weeks, but of her older son announced that he and his wife would be coming this Saturday for the weekend and could not make it at any other time, so I had to re-arrange my flight. So far the routine has been the same - breakfast, lunch (nothing grand but far longer than the usual 13 minutes most Brits or, I suppose, Yanks give over for that meal) and supper.

Well, my routine at home is vastly different: a mug of tea at 9.30 for breakfast, two mugs of cafe au lait (or call it what you will, at 11.20/12, then nothing to eat until supper (tea in rural North Cornwall, but we middle-class lads are addicted to ‘standards’ so it’s ‘supper’ as far as this blog is concerned) which could be at between 5.30 and 7 if not a little later.

The upshot is that I, who eats not a great deal at the best of times, although I love food, felt bloated, fat and just didn’t want so much booze. The crunch came yesterday: we were due to have a good lunch at a local very good, and not very cheap restaurant.

So I had no breakfast and later skipped the early evening aperitif - gin and tonic for me and whisky for my aunt - and then skipped supper. I also had a relatively early night. I slept for ten hours which shows just how much I needed it.

So today I took a day off and went to visit a local 13th century castle, Chateau de Roquetillaide (I think I got the spelling right) which was interesting - I like castles - but might have been even more so if the guide’s commentary had not been entirely in French.

As it happens, the guy on the ticket desk who spoke perfect English (courtesy of an English mother and and education at a Surrey private school) gave me a guide in English which pretty much covered what she was telling all the other, presumably French or French-speaking visitors, about eight of them. When I got there, I realised I had visited before, but that didn’t matte because I could remember nothing about it (except that I had been there before).

. . . 

Apart from that? Well, nothing. That murderous moron Putin is still destroying parts of south-east Ukraine and killing willy-nilly, but there is nothing I can helpfully add. I suspect this is really not the end of of something very unsettling to the ‘world order’, but the beginning, but quite how it will all work out I am not stupid enough to suggest.

The Hemingway bollocks is still on track and thank fully I can see the end of the tunnel. I still enjoy the reading, thinking and writing, but I shall be glad when I can finally get on with something else (and have long had my thoughts about that). The central irony of it all is that this is not about Hemingway at all or about ‘literature’ or writing (about which so many declare themselves to be ‘passionate’) or anything like that.

The prime reasons for undertaking what has proved to be a far greater and longer task than I anticipate were very simple: ‘to do something and complete it as best I could’ and ‘to do something and complete it as best I could’. Secondary reasons were ‘to learn to think clearly’ and ‘not to rush anything’. 

Whether it was about just how (as is the subtitle ‘how did a middling writer achieve such global literary fame’ or ‘do sqirrels dream?’ was irrelevant. It was ‘completing it and not cutting corners’ which drove me on’. And I have to say it could not have been done before I had retired which, oddly, removed an imperative to rush which had not just blighted my life but - ‘he laughed’ - my ‘careeer’.

NB Many and latterly most of those I worked with on ‘Fleet Street’ had ambitions to make a ‘good career’ (are you reading this Andrew Morrod?). I never did. Career? What the fuck are they talking about?

How to waste time completely, utterly and successfully . . .

Lord can we waste time when we shouldn’t be. For the past few weeks I’ve got to a simple place in on of the accounts of Hemingway’s life, but wanted to be sure of certain dates. (His marriage to Martha Gellhorn collapsed and one reason was that she was an independent professional who refused to play little wifey to the old fraud. He took it badly.

They were together, first in an affair, then in marriage (about which she had her doubts from the start) for a total of around years, of which about four/five were as a married couple.

In those years Gellhorn tried to do as expected by she chafed at the bit and took off on journalistic assignments several time for, in one case, about four months. It is the dates of her trips I wanted to be sure off.

Well, after reading and re-reading parts of this book and that, I am now and yesterday and again today I was going to write the few hundred words to move myself on. I did a little yesterday, but today I have been faffing around like nobody’s business. And for the past 70/80 minutes I have been producing this Guardian spoof for no reason but a laugh. Here it is:

Introducing the little-known writer Eugene Mahlzeit and wasting my time as usual and feeling a tad guilty but not too much. And anyway at least I am productive, if not in a very useful way

Here’s a thing: I am concentrating on finishing my ‘Hemingway bollocks’ and I am getting there. One advantage is, of course, that not only do I have no deadline, not even a self-imposed deadline, but it is of absolutely no consequence to anyone in this world whether or not I finish or even whether or not is is even interesting. No one, but no one, except me gives a flying fuck. That is an advantage.

One of my major failings since I was very young was to rush everything. Perhaps it had to do with having an older brother who was good to excellent — or so it seemed to me then — at whatever he turned his hand to. It seemed effortless. He was good at sports, I wasn’t. He was good at school, I wasn’t. I was always — and still am, though now I am proud of the fact — a plodder. Plod, plod, plod.

In my work as a newspaper sub-editor — I was only a reporter for six years — my tendency to rush, to cut corners, to make do and all the rest, was at times catastrophic, though purely in the sense, as George Bernard Shaw pointed out, that newspapers are ‘A device unable to distinguish between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilisation’.

So take ‘catastrophic’ with a pinch of salt, as for many leaving for work without their smartphone is ‘a disaster’. Oh, and (a sub writes) note to Mr Shaw: in the generally accepted sense of the word a newspaper is not a ‘device’. ‘Institution’ might have done the trick, but we take your point.

As for my point, it is that since I retired (four years ago come Monday, April 4) I have simply stopped rushing, simply because there is really no need to rush, none at all. There are no deadlines whatsoever. And that means I give myself all the time in the world to do whatever I am doing to ensure it is just as I want it.

It would be different if, say, I had a publisher who was hassling me for ‘your second novel’. But I don’t, and the chances of that happening are rather slimmer than the Pope taking advantage of new same-sex laws and making an honest man out of Donald Trump.

This is not to say that there is no slight pressure, but it is self-imposed. Why, I have no idea, but concluding this ‘Hemingway bollocks’ so I can get on with other writing and making sure it is not embarrassing is a form of pressure, and I find I feel oddly ‘guilty’ at the end of the day if I ‘have done’ nothing, i.e. not written a bit more (or rewritten and edited with a view to improving it, on it).

I have been very good these past few months and though progress has been slow, it has been steady. Then came yesterday.

. . .

Yesterday I decided to prepare my Sony digital 8 camcorder for sale on eBay. The model is a DCR-TRV 460e. and I bought it about 20-odd years ago because it in that particular range it was one of only two that could also read analogue tapes. And I had a lot of those from my children’s childhood. 

The trouble was it had developed a fault — and I seem to remember somewhere that is was a design fault — whereby on playback there would be three thick horizontal lines of distortion across the picture. By pressing down on top of the camera this could be temporarily remedied and at the time it worked.

However, as everyone and their pussy cat can now take video on their smartphone — and I can (though the quality is not as good) I hadn’t used it in years. I recently took it out with a view to transferring some short clips to my laptop to burn on a DVD, but found that the remedy to ‘cure’ the fault didn’t work. So I decided to sell it on eBay and yesterday set about getting it ready. But this time the remedy did work.

I had only three of the many tapes I recorded to hand and went through parts of them and came across about ten minutes worth of utterly pointless shots of the lane outside our cottage. I could not and still cannot think why I recorded them.

Then at some point I decided to use them with a simple soundtrack I knocked together into a short video about little known American modernist novelist Eugene Mahlzeit (look him up though you won’t find a lot because mainstream he ain’t, but his three novels are worth it).

And this again I didn’t do any work on the ‘bollocks’ and felt guilty. No matter that I enjoyed every second of knocking together the video (below) and no matter that I succeeded in doing what I wanted to do, I still felt and feel guilty. So if you don’t enjoy it, I shall be very annoyed. Here it is:

Something else which interests, no, fascinates me is how much a soundtrack can influence or reactions to a film or video. As far as I am concerned the soundtrack, whatever it is, is crucial to eliciting the reaction the director/producer (I never know who is ultimately in charge) wants to get.

Watch a horror film with the sound off, and it very soon becomes not ‘horrible’ at all. And that soundtrack can be very, very subtle. The ‘piece of music’ I constructed — a more honest word than ‘composed’ — for my video about consists of just four notes and a recording of a clock ticking I found on Freesound.org.

It was made using Mac’s free Garageband software and consists of three tracks, each doubled up and the instrument changed and reverb. Thirteen years ago (I know that because I have just downloaded these two videos from You Tube to which I uploaded them 13 years ago) are a case in point: the exact same video but it creates a different effect merely because of the music chosen for each.

Take a look.

It is the almost identical video (I made one or two slight changes for the second, upbeat version, but nothing of relevance here) but the music used is wholly different. The first is the song Orik Gullaganda by the Azerbaijani singer Sevara Nazarkhan, and the second is (and I had to look this up using Soundhound because I couldn’t remember) Cotton Tail by duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong. The first is doomy and the images are vaguely sinister. The second is upbeat but the — same — are just images.

‘Ah’ (I think) I said, ‘Putin won’t invade. He’s not THAT stupid’. Guess what? As for that nice Mr Xi, what is he to make of the antics of his new best friend?

Well, I got it wrong. I think — I really can’t be arsed to read through my last blog entry, but I’m pretty sure I remember correctly — that I suggested it was all some big bluff on Putin’s part, that all he wanted was to scare the shit out of the West and to remind them that he was still around and that in the event he wouldn’t invade, because what would be the point?

Well, to be frank from what we know now there is no point: Putin seems to have shot himself in the foot badly and there seem to be no advantage of any kind he can gain from his ‘special operation’, the phrase the Russians are using in to avoid calling it a war.

I feel oddly uncomfortable referring to ‘the Russians’ in that way as if the bear some of the responsibility for the invasion. They don’t. This is Putin’s war, Putin’s doing, not Russia’s. ‘The Russians’ weren’t consulted, not least the parents and women who have already had a son or partner killed.

And given that, as is the way of dictators, Putin has now shut down every media outlet he does not control, the only ‘news’ a great many Russians are getting, especially those in the back of beyond, about what is going on in Ukraine is what Putin wants them to hear: that the ‘special operation’ was necessary to rid Ukraine of a cabal of Nazis who were perpetuating genocide (on whom is never made clear) and that Ukraine can be returned to the bosom of Mother Russia.

It is also all ‘going to plan’. So please, let’s not lump in ‘the Russians’ as being in any way to blame for the killing and bombing. This solely down to Putin and those around him supporting and facilitating him.

. . .

As for the ‘facts’ of the case, I would not deny that the West is also inclined to put a suitable spin on what is happening, but given the nature of our media it is very unlikely we are being spun a crock of lies simply because to do so is nigh-on impossible.

I shall, though, reiterate that all I can do in these blog entries as far as the ‘facts’ are concerned is repeat — parrot? — what I hear on the news and, to a lesser extent, read in the papers (though I am inclined to give more credence to reports in the Financial Times and The Economist than in the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail).

Apart from those facts, there is also the central mystery: why is Putin doing this? Why has a man who hitherto was regarded as supreme pragmatism and rational to a fault undertaken such a stupid operation.

One popular explanation is that he is ill, possibly with cancer or Parkinson’s and being treated with steroids. That, ‘they’ say, would explain his puffy face and, ‘they’ say, it could be the cause of what the tabloids call ‘roid rage’, personality change which makes you more aggressive.

Bodybuilders who use a steroids a lot are known to suffer from ‘roid rage’ (two words which for the tabloids has the useful virtue of being just four letters each and which will fit very nicely in 200pt Franklin Gothic in a splash headline. What would fit was also a consideration when the tabloids arbitrarily renamed (‘dubbed’) Prince William as ‘Wills’ — shorter and more suited to a snappy headline).

We are also being told here in the West, and it is a very plausible explanation, that the pitiful nature of Putin’s invasion is because is intelligence service are so scared of him now that they tell him what they think he wants to hear. The same was true of Hitler.

So he seems sincerely to have believed that his invading troops would be welcomed by the Ukrainians with open arms and there would be very little resistance. That is one reason for his opening strategy, to send in light vehicles in an intended swift operation rather than rumble in with heavy and slower tanks. He seems to have expected to have taken over Kiev in a matter of days.

We are told he was also badly informed about the state of his armed forces. Supposedly a great deal of money has been spent over the past decade modernising his army, but we now believe a lot of the money was syphoned off to pay for baubles and yachts for those able to syphon it off.

One example given is that the original tyres (US 'tires' though I don't know why) on one state-of-the-art military vehicle were substituted with cheap Chinese retreads which would and did not last at all long.

But in a sense all this is just me whistling in the wind. What is going to happen? Will Putin behave in some way which gives the West, as in Nato, not choice but to get involved, (and so far they have been keeping their noses very clean because of the likely consequences)? Could the war in Ukraine spread to other parts of Europe? Will nuclear weapons at some point be launched? Will other states hostile to the West — Iran and North Korea — use the problems the US and the West have on their plate to cause them trouble elsewhere?

One of the tunes we are, perhaps, whistling is that Xi Jinping, China's president (a kind of more upmarkat Vladimir Putin) is getting very worried about the effect the Ukraine war will have on the global economy. It seems that China's wheat harvest this year will be terrible and it will have to import wheat whose price is soaring because Ukraine will not be able to produce as much.

China imports 70% of its oil and 40% of its gas. So it will pay a hell of a lot more than most on oil it uses. Russia will, of course be able to offload some of the oil and gas the West will no longer be getting on China — but, China is not sentimental and given that beggars can't be choosers it will be able to push down the price considerably. It certainly won’t be paying top rouble, besties with Russia or not.

Another dilemma is that in world trade, China does far more business with the US and the EU than with Russia: just $147bn with Russia last year but $828bn with the EU and $756bn with the US. What with sanctions flying around, China will really not want trade with the EU and the US to collapse - and the comparatviely piddly Russian trade wouldn't help.

A related embarrassment for Xi is that at the launch ceremony for the Winter Olympics, his Vlad the Lad came along and Xi proclaimed him to be his best mate. All fine and dandy but . . . Did Putin tell him that he was

 

planning to invade Ukraine? If he did, Xi will look very bad indeed, especially in view of all the problems it might cause China. And bearing that in mind, it we might speculate that tried to talk Putin out of it.

If he did not? If he knew but kept schtumm? Well, it makes the image he likes to portray as the wise, farsighted, all-knowing leader China needs look very silly. Farsighted? Not quite. Xi Will not be a happy bunny and might no longer want to be besties with Vladimir.

So how's it all going to end? Who knows?

On March 9, Russians forces shelled a maternity hospital in Mariupol, in the south of Ukraine, Mr Xi. Several women were giving birth when the shells struck, but they survived because they were sheltering in the basement. Is this really the kind of thing you want the world to see you associated with, Mr Xi?