OFFICIAL Private Eye is slowing dying of respectability: a nation mourns. A warning to all – never, but never, become ‘respectable’

WARNING! THIS ENTRY MIGHT DISTRESS READERS WHO
PRIDE THEMSELVES ON ‘BEING ENLIGHTENED’, ‘HAVING
A SENSE OF HUMOUR’ AND FOR WHOM ‘BEING PART OF
THE CROWD’ IS IMPORTANT.

THIS entry might, and most probably will, mean very little to nothing to most readers from outside the United Kingdom. But - well, OK, fair enough. It’s not my probably but yours, frankly.

Anyone interested in what ‘Private Eye’ might is very welcome pull their finger out (as we say in Britain) and do a bit of digging. Hint: it’s not published by the Vatican.

My reason for publishing it on my blog? I’ve published so very little, many of you might be forgetting what a fabulous guy I am. I really can’t think of a better reason.

Anyone agree with me that under Ian Hislop the Eye had become increasingly dreary, unfunny and rather prim and - whisper it - fucking bloody boring? Hislop’s been there now since 1774 and it shows.

The cartoons rarely raise a laugh (unlike one of my favourites from some years ago: picture a young mustachioed German squaddie standing to attention in a WWI trench while his superior officer informs and even high-ranking officer ‘Sir, the corporal here has a great idea for a sequel’).

Now? Well, as I pointed out a few weeks ago one cartoon about a supposed foreign football player coming to the Premier League had been recycled - I suspect inadvertently - from an earlier PE cartoon whose caption then ran: ‘Ebola coming to Europe? Who’s signed him then?’

I wrote to Lord Gnome about it, but there were, it seemed, too many other and better letters that demanded to be published and mine didn’t make the cut. Nor have several letters I’ve written to the good Lord to tell us in his

‘Number Crunching’ feature how much he rakes in every year - PE salary, HIGNFY, BBC TV documentaries and Radio 4 programmes. His lordship is a tad shy about telling us.

OK, there’s no denying the Eye does a lot of reporting on and uncovering skullduggery in government, in our local authorities, in the City etc, but it’s all a little earnest, all a little too worthy, all a little too ‘well done, Hislop! You’ve won the Founder’s Prize for Zeal, Integrity and Hard Work! Keep it up, lad!’

The Street of Shame was once somewhere where you - we - read about the drunken and appalling (and often funny) shenanigans of folk you knew, almost knew, had heard of, or who were known by people you knew - Fleet Street was and - now metaphorically - is quite narrow These days The Street of Shame is all about ‘how awful and hypocritical and horrid our press barons are!’

Fair enough, but being reminded very fortnight that water is wet doesn’t much do it for me. I know it’s wet, as do all other Eye readers - they were told two weeks ago, and two weeks before that, and a fortnight before that.

Ironically, given that a vital member of ‘the Establishment’ is the anti-Establishment figure, the Eye is very much ‘the Establishment’. I told Lord Gnome that in my letter and reminded him that Punch, once the scourge of the nation in 19th-century Britain eventually died of respectability.

Arise, Sir Ian for ‘services to satire’. The trouble is that in cosy Old Blighty ‘satire’ is nothing more dangerous than being rude to folk. The worst Hislop will face is being snubbed in the Groucho. In Russia, China, Singapore, Zimbabwe, Iran and rather too many other countries engaging in satire can cost earn you a decade or more in jail and if you are unlucky lose you your life.

OK, PE was founded but a gang of privileged public school boys but frankly (though I’m sure we all now realise that ‘background’, ‘heritage’, colour, class, religion and to which side you dress have no bearing on you a person *).

And going by the ads at the front and rear of the mag in some ways not much has changed - ‘No Ordinary Reading Light’ - ergonomically designed on the outside, inside it’s one of the most advance reading lights in the world’ And yours for just £249.99 for the HD Table Light or £299.99 for the Floor Light!

What’s wrong with Argos’ Home Morlie Floor Lamp - Matt Black , yours for just £30? Nothing, except it doesn’t impress Jules and Simon next door half as much as telling them you’ve blown £249.99 on an ergonomically designed most advance light.

Now I feel a headache coming on and must go and lie down with a soothing glass of Campari and tonic.

* I shall though, admit, that I am still defeated by the undeniably true statistic that a disproportionately high number of men and women in our ‘top jobs’ were privately educated compared to the number who were not. And there has to be a reason (though it was fuck all use for me, I have to add).

Well, hello Singapore, so unexpected!

Hello Singapore!

Someone there – or perhaps 3,590 odd people there – like me. At at least that’s what the stats tell me. It could of course be just one person visiting my blog 3,590 in the past seven days, in which case seek help.

 

Or it could be a bot of some kind, though why a bot would think it worthwhile to visit my blog I cannot think.

Oh, well.

If the visitors are individuals and you are reading this, the latest instalment of my bollocks: Hi, and have a nice day. And maybe get in touch and tell me how and why you found this blog, why you are coming back (that is assuming you are not a bot. Bots, don’t bother).

Oh, and if you have come across references to ‘My Hemingway bollocks’, I am just giving the print version one last read-through before getting Amazon KDP to print it up. Here’s the cover, front (left in image) and back.

Bugger Trump, he is now in many ways the sideshow. It is the dangers to US democracy which must now be considered (though Trump set the ball rolling)

In the past I have often joked about my age, ‘humorously’ exaggerating it. I suspect that was more a kind of double-bluff, in some ways feeling a little uncomfortable with growing older – turning 60, then 65, then 70 – but trying to make out I wasn’t. Or that, at least might be an armchair trick cyclist’s analysis.

I am, in fact, 73 – and shall turn 74 on November 21 later in the year – and I can confirm that getting older is not all downside. You do, oddly, feel a little happier with yourself, you seem to worry a little less, at least you worry less about trivialities.

Those downsides are there, though: your body slowly gives way, it aches more, your hearing goes, for a guy peeing takes longer (every night the very last thing I do is have a pee, even if I don’t feel I need one, and I rarely wake in the night and never to have a pee). Woman could list their own downsides – the menopause, bones becoming brittle and so on.

But both men and women will confirm that one facet of getting older is that it becomes ever rarer that you come across a novelty, are told something you had never heard before, find yourself in a situation which is new to you (in which the advantage is that you are not quite at a loss as to how to handle it as once you might have been). Oh, and my son assures me that I am a lot ‘calmer’ since I retired five years ago.

In short, I do believe that the phrase plus ça change, c’est plus la même chose (the more things change, the more they stay the same). But I am, obviously, speaking from the perspective of a man looking back over the past 73 years (or rather over the last 50 years.

I doubt I very much took an interest in ‘life’ and her manifestations when I was still attached to my mother’s breast or later at college where this dilettante was far, far, far more concerned with growing his hair long, chasing still all-too-elusive nookie and scoring dope (which in those days was cannabis not heroin).

Thus as I was born in 1949, I had no ‘direct’ experience of the rise of fascism in Germany, Italy and Spain in the early decades of the 20th century, the consequences of the Russian revolution, the General Strike in Britain and the Great Depression in the US. If there were again to be a rise of fascism – a real one, not a development putting assorted readers of the West’s liberal press into a tizzy – it would be one of the few things I had not before experienced.

Getting older, as it is I get rather bored when I hear trotted out on the radio (I am more of a radio listener than a TV viewer) yet again phrases such as ‘today’s ever faster lifestyle’, ‘an unprecedented rise in house prices’, ‘the ever-greater pressures of modern life’, ‘the increasing pressures on today’s young people’ and so on.

I have heard those and similar phrases trotted out for the past 50 years, and I do wonder how ‘fast’ a lifestyle must be by now as it has been ‘ever faster’ for so long, at what point the ‘pressures of modern life’ will become so intolerable that en masse throw ourselves off Beachy Head (or wherever good Americans go to top themselves). My point is that at the end of the day ‘very little changes’.

However, I am now experiencing a novel situation which is not trivial and might become a worry.

It is taking place in both the US and the UK, where one Donald Trump and ‘Boris’ Johnson are behaving in a way which could – I’ll say ‘could’ because I dislike hyperbole and sensationalism – have quite a deep effect on the democracies of those two countries. Both men are, ironically perhaps almost inadvertently, doing quite a bit of damage to the ‘trust’ of ‘the people’ in their democratic institutions.

In the US – and this is certainly not news – Trump has claimed and still is claiming that the 2020 presidential election was rigged to ensure he would not be re-elected as US president. It was, he says, ‘stolen’ from him.

I shan’t and don’t want here go into the details of his claims and the details of why they are denied, because for what I am writing here the claims and denials are not relevant. What is relevant is that a substantial number of US voters – and I am talking of several million US voters – who believe him and convinced that what he says is true.

Over the past few months Trump has found himself in legal trouble of different kinds and most recently faces federal charges which carry a jail sentence if he is found guilty of them. But he is insisting – and those millions also believe him on this claim – that it is all simply an establishment plot to neutralise him and ensure he cannot regain the US presidency.

Yet Trump is actually irrelevant; and equally irrelevant is whether what he is claiming is true or not. If it were true it would be very, very serious but for any number of reasons, not least that a conspiracy of that scale would be impossible to organise, I think we can be certain it is not true.

What is relevant – and potentially very worrying – is those several million Americans who now believe that their system has become corrupted, quite possibly beyond repair. And if that is the case, they will conclude that all bets are off: if the other side is not playing by the rules, why should they?

If the other side can drive a coach and four through the conventions which govern their democracy, why shouldn’t they? In sum, they no longer trust their democracy, and thinking along those lines will have encouraged many to invade Congress on January 6, 2021.

This development is new in my life, in the 50-odd years I have been aware of ‘grown-ups’ and the shenanigans they can get up to. And as the global financial crisis of 2008 reminded us ’trust’ is not only a crucial part of our dealings with one another, but very, very fragile. Once it has been damaged and lost, it is very hard to re-establish.

Here in Britain our own Trump lite, Boris Johnson, is now involving himself in similar matters, though at the outset I must concede that he does not pose ‘a danger’. In fact, although both Trump and Johnson are buffoons, Trump is a dangerous buffoon, but Johnson is pretty much a joke.

Yet again he is in a sense also irrelevant: it is the effect and consequence of his buffoonery which are relevant, though democracy and its institutions are in no danger of breaking down here in cosy Old Blighty (so cosy, in fact, where a copper will run off and fetch you a glass of water if you ask nicely).

Things don’t look quite as rosy in the US. For one thing consider the numbers: those who might decide, if and when, to think ‘to hell with our democracy’ are in their millions. And many of them are not averse to resorting to violence and, legitimately, carry weapons.

I am not being alarmist and declaring ‘woe is us!’ I am merely pointing out that the US might – might – find itself in very uncharted waters in 2024 at the next presidential election.

If Trump is the GOP candidate and loses, how will those millions react if he again insists he had won but ‘they’, the establishment, have again stolen the election? And if he wins and is re-elected US president – and given his previous very high-handed behaviour exercising ‘his presidential powers’ – how will the his opponents react?

That last point is also worth considering: so far it has been Trump supporters and those ‘on the right’ who have declared themselves ready to give democracy and its institutions the finger (in Britain ‘two fingers’ shaped like a V).

But what if a sizeable number of Democrats, dismayed that Trump is back as president, decide that what is good for the goose is good for the gander and also embark on measures they would previously have believed to be beyond the pale?

That is merely a question, and I concede again to straying just a little too close to alarmism. But my central point stands: the US might find itself in a situation it has rarely found itself in. One of the last times one side was at odds with the other, they went to war for four years.

Thus mentioning ‘civil war’ is again, perhaps, straying too close to alarmism. But on many issues the various US states are now further apart than they have been for many years, and that is something novel in my 73 years.

Two songs, and apology and and another explanation . . . (You surely can't get enough of those)

First of all there these, two short videos accompanying tunes I’ve produced (‘composed’ sounds just a tad too hi-falutin’).

Here’s the first . . .

They Want My Money (And Soon They’ll Want My Soul)

And here’s the second, though no vocals this time because I’m still not as confident about my singing as I might be.

I’ve Had Enough (So Let’s Live)

I’ve produced quite a more few tunes over these past three or four years, some with vocals, most not, and if you want to listen to more you can do so here on Soundcloud (there are now bloody 96 tracks – I checked while getting the URL and that surprised me, I have to say).

Just dip in anywhere if you fancy it, they are in a variety of different styles and, frankly, it is nice for a song to be heard (or a book to be read or a video or photograph to be viewed, none of which much goes on with the stuff I produced, though that does give me the chance yet again – hope never dies – to plug not just my ‘Hemingway bollocks’, but a novel (Love: A Fiction – and if you do check it out, please remember the wise advice never to judge a book by it’s cover) and three volumes each of short stories (Vol One, Vol Two, Vol Three and Vol Four) and and three volumes of verse (Vol One, Vol Two and Vol Three).

. . .

When I started keeping this blog more than 14 years ago, I was reasonably regular in posting entries. The first entry was on February 6, 2009, although, in fact, I had already started a blog a week or two earlier, then somehow fucked it up technically and lost it trying to sort it out, so I had to start again.

I wrote about everything that took my fancy, past girlfriends, cars I’ve owned, this, that and t’other and, er, my take on ‘world affairs’.

The quote marks are necessary as I basically know as little about ‘world affairs’ as you and your dog (possibly even less than your dog, in fact), but by the time I started this blog, I had by then adopted my brother’s ruse of appearing ‘well-informed’.

This is far, far simpler than you might think and demands very little: it consists of reading the Economist regularly. Then – before I forget it all again – that I garner is recycled into a ‘commentary’ on [whatever].

Try it – it works a treat, though tread carefully: the degree of intellectual showing off you indulge in must be carefully gauged to impress whoever it is you are talking to.

Too much such showing off will have you marked down as an arrogant know-all, quite the opposite impression you would be hoping to leave.

As almost always, less means more: if you simply hint at being rather well-informed, the other party will do most of the work and imagine you are simply being modest and, crucially, know far more than you are letting on.

. . .

I eventually rumbled my brother and decided to adopt the ruse after for many year being quietly impressed by, and not a little envious about, his admirably wide knowledge of world affairs.

One day he might announce, apropos nothing very obvious: ‘Keep an eye on Ecuador – it might well get very sticky there politically.’

So far so – well, not all that extraordinary. But then he would flesh out his knowledge: ‘And it could all get very, very silly – it began with indigenous people protesting about new bicycle laws.’

Me: ‘What?’

My brother: ‘Yes, very silly indeed. So far 120 people have died and it looks like it might get worse.’

And thus one older brother – by nine years – was in impressed.

This went on for several years until one day – I rather felt that as middle-class chap in his mid-30s who was nominally ‘a journalist’ I really should be ‘better informed’ – I started reading the Economist, too. And it became quite clear exactly why my brother was so ‘well-informed’.

‘I see Iceland has got some very interesting ideas on what to do with glaciers. Apparently . . .’ Yes, I knew, because I had also read the story in the Economist. And being the honest sort . . .

NB NEVER trust anyone who declares he or she is ‘honest’ – it’s the surest sign they are anything but

. . . I can here admit that my ‘knowledge of world affairs’, my ‘analyses’ are simply a judicious rehashing I what I have scavenged over the past few weeks when it came to writing an entry.

. . .

Entries have been getting fewer and farther apart [‘further’? – subs please check] in recent months and for a very good reason: there are several topics I should like to write about, but they need rather more careful thought before I put pen to paper (i.e. fingers to keyboard). And, frankly, I have neither sufficient care, nor am I sufficiently thoughtful to do those topics justice.

Here’s an example: ‘women’, the role ‘of women’, the shit that women are still subjected to (in the past not least by me) and so on.

My problem is that I shan’t be writing anything extraordinary or new: I would merely be repeating what in recent years has been written and said many times, given that finally the world is becoming more alert to the shit deal women can still get. For example, believe it or not quite often women are still paid less for doing the same job as a man.

So what’s the dilemma, sunny Jim? Well, it’s this: I do not – ever – want to be accused of ‘virtue signalling’ or even in some sense ‘trendy’.

As it is I’ve found, oddly for a man within complaining distance of his dotage, that I’m drifting ever so slowly more to the left: the convention / cliche / tradition / expectation / insistence – take your pick of those and any others that occur to you as they all, in a sense, are aspects of the same thing – is that we old farts (or the term I came across some years ago which I like, although it is distinctly unkind, ‘coffin dodgers) are supposed to become more reactionary and by the age of 70 certainly well into ‘bah humbug’ country.

The thing is I’m not (or at least I don’t seem to be). On the contrary, I seem for some reason or another to be becoming what Daily Telegraph coffin dodgers regard as ‘more pinko’ by the month. And of the many inequities and unfair arrangements, I’ve been becoming more and more aware over these past ten years, the ‘lot’ of women is most certainly one.

Most reading this are – and bloody well should be – aware of the #MeToo movement.

. . .

I began writing this entry eight days ago sitting in the cafeteria of the Billi extension of Bordeaux-Merignac airport, and I haven’t exactly lost my thread – I remember quite well the points I wanted to make – but I have somehow in this occasion lost some of the steam necessary to write it. And without that steam it might begin to sound a little forced.

So I shall sign off here and expect you all this instant to hare off to Soundcloud to admire the ‘toons’ and songs I have posted there.

Pip, pip.

An explanation . . . and let’s hear it for the Sun wot woz

For two days I had adapted my main blog title pic to wish everyone a Happy New Year for 2023. Well, I wish I hadn’t, although it’s not as grave as it was an hour or two ago.

This morning I decided to replace the adapted picture with the original. The trouble was I couldn’t find the original. I seemed think I knew where it was, but . . .

What the hell, I thought, just stick another piccy there instead. Well, that’s what I have done, and in the 13 years since I have been running this blog, it will be perhaps the fourth or fifth time I have replaced the picture. But the trouble is I do it so rarely, I have to learn afresh how to do it.

I still don’t really know, but I have finally managed it and pretty much replicated what was there before. That doesn’t matter very much, except that somehow I had introduced elements which were bloody awful – for example, the dateline at the top and the ‘labels’ at the bottom suddenly had a black background, as in tabloid speak a WOB – white on black.

And I didn’t want it. (Actually, for some reason it was not black but a very, very, very dark blue, so more or less black. But who’s counting?)

For example, here’s headline which actually appeared in the Sun (the ‘soaraway Sun!’) a decade or two ago when the Sun was still a cracking tabloid which made you laugh and smile every day, not the piss-poor imitation of a tabloid it has become.

The story was about ‘research’ which had come the Sun’s way – it’s amazing the kind of research newspapers can dig up – that drinking alcohol has a deleterious effect on the size of your todger. Who knows, it might even be true.

But anyway, panic now over and the appearance of this blog is pretty much back to acceptable.

Pip, pip.

NB I have texted a former colleague who used to work for the Sun about the the headline and whether the spelling is correct, but the message is taking and age to go (I am on an iPhone, he’s seems to be on Android) so I’ll go with the spelling above for now.