Are Apple now really just a gang of hypocritical, greedy wankers without a new idea in their bones or is that just malicious hearsay? You decide. Me, I decided long ago – read on

Here’s a notable development – remember ‘Apple, Think Different’? Apple at the forefront of innovation, in the avant garde of a brave new world, Apple [add your own hyperbole]? Well, Apple is failing, slowly but surely.

It is not that since the death of Jobs and the departure of Jonathan Ive Apple have lost something essential that made Apple Apple. It’s also that with the rise to leadership of one Tim Cook - whose Apple background was not in any way technical but always commercial - making money seems to be the raison d’etre of Apple.

Bugger Apple’s previous reputation for making imaginative products with user-friendly software, now it has become recycling old ideas, the challenge always to be how to disguise the fact that recycling is going on.

But let me be fair: I don’t have an Apple computer but apparently its M Series of chips are a winner. That, though, is the sum of the winning. Apple glasses are not being bought simply because they are a gimmick.

The iPhone is simply recycled year in, year out with small cosmetic changes to give the impression of being a ‘new model’. The same is true of its Mac OS and IoS operating systems: changes are minimal and, frankly, pointless.

Two days ago I upgraded from IoS v18.6 to v26 on my iPad. I immediately noticed a difference in that it began to lag. My iPad is only four years old so not ‘old’ or ‘obsolete’, but it is now lagging. This morning I tried to downgrade to the previous IoS, v186, but as it is no longer ‘signed’, that is impossible.

So I am no stuck with an iPad which is no longer as much use to me as it was. Somewhat miffed, I went to the Apple Community forum and - headlinong my contribution clearly as ‘Not a question but a complaint’ asked why we could not longer downgrade and what the reasoning was.

In my post I went on to criticise Apple in similar terms as I have above. Several hours later I was informed my post had been deleted. Apple might argue that its community forum is not the place for such criticism, but I would suggest the opposite is true. I immediately posted again twice in response, but each post was gain deleted, notably within minutes.

Here is the text of my original comment

Here is my second comment, this time being pretty straight about what spineless wankers Apple are, though, er, not expressing myself in such plain English

OK, I’m not kidding myself on that this signifies the slow collapse of the Western World. But anyone here who can still remember the Apple glory days – how using an Apple compared to a Windows machine was straightforward and how the slogan ‘It’s an Apple’ did somehow convey quality and reliability.

Looking back, I don’t at all mind conceding that we were all a little naive and overexcited by the ‘possibilities’ of the – then new – technical age. And that naivety – I bought my second computer in 1999, sadly only an Apple clone because I couldn’t afford the real thing (I had very briefly owned a desktop which was still running DOS but it was stolen within weeks when my house in Groton Road, Earlsfield, was burgled over Christmas.)

This was in the days when the internet masqueraded as ‘the information superhighway’ and that astonishing institution was about to usher in a new age of democracy when totalitarianism had no hiding place.

The giveaway was Apple’s little puppy rushing around wagging its tail and Windows had – wait for it! – a fucking talking paper clip which passed on wise advice and warned you if you were using non-PC language. And Lord weren’t we all charmed and excited!

Me, working in newspaper production as a sub-editor – I had given up on reporting after six years as my heart wasn’t in it but more on that another time if the demand is there – was excited by ‘desktop publishing’ with Quark Xpress.

That software was then the only game in town and took users to the cleaners when I first started using it (in a newspaper office, so I wasn’t paying for it) 35 years ago, those shysters took everyone to the cleaners and charged about £800 for it! By my reckoning that would now, in 2025, be about £1,560. But newspapers – at least those that didn’t operate a mainframe had no choice.

Now, ‘the net’ is useful, certainly – I do all my shopping and banking online – but it has also thrown up any amount of nastiness, not least access to child porn for those who want it.

In brief, we have come a long, long way since Apple and Google – fucking ‘Don’t be evil’ for fuck’s sake! – posed as the future in which we were all going to be better people.

OK, I’ve come off-topic now, but it is sobering to find that Apple is now aping one Donal Taco Trump in denying the reality of anything or everything that puts it in a bad light.

So, all together now

In which, inadvertently, I create my very own mob

Many years ago, I organised a disruptive political protest and learned something about an odd aspect of human behaviour. Perhaps I should tread carefully and write that I learned something about an aspect of human behaviour in the ‘civilised’ West and in Western cultures (there are several, though all are related and they are distinguished by ‘local’ cultural variations).

On the face of it I was the most unlikely bod to engage ‘politically’, or better, to seem to engage politically. And I must confess that my motive was ‘fun’ and my tongue was firmly in my cheek.

It was in about 1969 or 1970, and I was about 20 or 21 and knew little about politics and understood less and was even less interested. As a Roman Catholic-born – cradle-Catholic – product of the English public school system – ‘public’ as in ‘private’ in that wacky way we Brits like to confuse the world – I was expected to, or better it was assumed I would, cleave to soft-centred small C conservatism.

I didn’t, however (and as I’ve ‘grown up’ and seen a little more of the world, I find, despite what is expected of ageing gents, to be drifting to the left, though to social democracy not to all out communist fascism).

For some reason, as the child of a German mother and British father who attended German schools for four of his formative years and was in many ways more German than British, I didn’t feel particularly British when we returned to live in Britain from West Berlin in July 1963 and the whole ‘public schoolboy’ schtick just didn’t catch with me.

For three of the previous four years I had attended Das Canisius Kolleg, a Jesuit college in Berlin-Tiergarten (just over a mile through the park to the Brandenburger Tor) whose ethos was one of positivity and ‘doing your best’.

Then in September of 1963, I began life as a boarder at the Roman Catholic Oratory School in Woodcote, Oxfordshire, where it seemed to me the ethos – that is the true ethos of the boys who made up the school rather than the ‘official’ ethos the school might have thought it was inculcating – was almost nihilistic.

I must stress, though, my line about ‘it seemed to me’, as now, in later life, I am far more aware how perception is far more potent than what what might, ludicrously, be called ‘the reality’. I am not denying ‘reality’, as such I am suggesting that there is no one ‘reality’ but pretty much as many ‘realities’ as there are men, women and children on this world.

So to speak of ‘reality’ is in one sense a little pointless.

I had been looking forward to ‘going to boarding school’ because after spending my boyhood reading Billy Bunter (below) books, I anticipated it to be an enjoyable romp of jolly japes, but it was anything but. Of my year’s intake 

49 boys, 47 had attended a ‘prep school’ for at least four or five years and, to be blunt, they had already developed the shell which protects our inner selves from the world. I had not and I was miserable and homesick for what seemed like and extraordinarily long first term of fifteen weeks.

I now know that many boys and girls, men and women have a sense of alienation in one way or another. Perhaps, depending upon the situation and circumstances, such alienation is quite common.

But for me it was partly ‘not feeling English or British’ and not relating to a great deal of what the others seemed – that word again – to have in common. I hadn’t had The Wind In The Willows read to me, I had never played ‘pooh sticks’. Much, perhaps all, of my childhood had been German what with even before moving to Berlin my mother read stories to me in German.

So although when I arrived at Dundee University at the beginning of October 1968, with an impeccable ‘boarding school’ accent and no doubt many ‘public school’ behavioural tics, I did not quite fit the bill, especially in the political role into which folk were ready to give me.

. . .

Until just a year earlier, Dundee University had existed as Queen’s College, St Andrews, but then gained its independent status as part of the then Labour government’s determined expansion of university education.

This expansion meant – in fact, to achieve this was its prime reason – that the intake of colleges and universities was from a far broader social spectrum, notably of young men and women who not ten to fifteen years earlier might never have considered attending university.

Anno domini 2025, modern Britain, rather smugly, likes to see itself – perception and ‘reality’ again, you’ll notice – as classless; but as far as I am concerned, the only difference is that more than 60 years ago ‘class’ distinctions were simply more obvious (and let’s face it snobbery will never go out of fashion).

Pertinently, the 1960s – the ‘Swinging Sixties’ and always remember that these silly, though catchy, descriptions are all invented by national newspaper sub-editors (US copy editors) – became an apparent sea-change in social attitudes, though it didn’t really take off until the Labour Party under Harold Wilson won the 1964 general election.

In fact, there had previously been several such broad, though slow, changes from the mid-1950s on. I suggest they occurred as boys and girls – though it was still very much a male-dominated society – born just before World War II came into their own, found their voice and made themselves heard.

In other words, it was the same old story of a new generation demanding that the previous generation made way!

‘Deference’ went out of the window, it was the heyday of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, it was reported that ‘the working class has found a voice’ and novels, plays and films became ‘gritty’ observations of ‘how the other half lived’. That, not uncommon phrase then used, is very, very telling.

One such change was that the new young generation – who I suspect were not quite doing any more shagging then in earlier years but were certainly talking more about – also found their voice, especially those on the left.

This was 1968, the age of ‘student politics’, though if any of that gang had more than a fleeting knowledge of history, they would have known that ‘student politics’ were as old as the hills, as old as greed, altruism, incest and gullibility.

Britain’s young might, with Labour in charge, believe it had it’s ‘left-wing’ government, decried by those on the right as ‘socialists’ (which description was enough to frighten the horses in many a shire parlour), but it was not very left-wing at all and certainly not at all left-wing enough for many of the protesting firebrands.

It wasn’t that many of Labours MPs were more than nominally middle-class, many were not actually socialist but social-democrats who broadly aimed to achieve the same improvements for those at the bottom of the pile. They certainly did not sign up for the hard ideology of ‘all means of production must be nationalised and in the hands of the working man’.

That phrase gives me occasion to trot out an old joke of mine when politicians pledge to take care of the ‘hard-working’ man: ‘So what about the rest of us?

This, then politically naive, young man was well aware of the iniquity of America’s Vietnam war but couldn’t really see what all the fuss was about.

Then there were the protests about the apartheid regime in South Africa and how that nation’s, then all white, cricket team should not be allowed to come take part in a Test series in Britain. The various protests even involved

 

The Oval cricket pitch in Kennington, South London, was surrounded by barbed wire in March 1970 to try to protect it from anti-apartheid protesters intent in disrupting the South African tour by digging up the pitch

digging up a cricket pitch and grounds being defended by strands of barbed wire. But, I wondered, why couldn’t they just sit down and sort it all out. Surely to goodness, was it really that hard?

. . .

The ‘protest’ I organised was against Tony Benn, then still Anthony Wedgwood Benn, who at the time was Labour’s – if my googling is correct – minister for technology, but despite his slow drift leftwards from a ‘soft-left’ stance, he was something of a hate figure for the hard left.

For the non-lefty young he was also disliked because previously as Labour’s ‘postmaster general’ he had begun the government process of outlawing the ‘pirate radio stations’ swimming in the English channel, though by the time

the relevant bill outlawing the stations became law, he had just been promoted to technology minister.

In my book Tony Benn (right) is something of a good egg. He was born and brought up in a ‘progressive’ household (in brackets because I don’t much like the word, but I use it because most will know what I mean).

Both his grandfather and his father were Liberal MPs, but his father crossed the floor and joined the Labour government of Ramsay McDonald in 1928 (when Tony Benn was just three).

When Tony Benn was seventeen, his father was created Viscount Stansgate and when he died in 1960, Tony inherited the title, although he had previously several times, unsuccessfully, tried to renounce his succession and as a peer could not longer sit in the Commons

Finally, in 1963 because it, too, had useful MPs who were due to inherit titles and would thus have to leave the Commons, the Conservative government passed an act allowing peers to renounce their titles. Benn did so and won a seat in a by-election the same year and remained a sitting MP for the next 38 years.

Benn’s drift to the left and to becoming something of a saint of the left began after Labour lost power to Margaret Thatcher in 1979, although he claimed it had started more than a decade earlier when he was in Wilson’s 1960s governments, partly with his impatience by how the civil service was frustrating many attempts at reform.

When I organised my ‘protest’, Benn was still regarded as just another Labour minister, and few if any thought of him as the figure of the left he would become.

. . .

My ‘protest’ began in the students’ union coffee bar on the morning when Benn was duet to give a speech in the, then still new, lecture hall of Dundee’s social science building. And I have no idea why I thought of ‘organising’.

But for some reason I suggested to those I was sitting with that we should go to the meeting and disrupt it. It was certainly not a political gesture on my part.

As I say, Benn was not a figure of the left and on the face of it, this seemed to many a good idea, so a gaggle of us, I should think about six or eight of us, possibly more, took ourselves off to the social science lecture hall and sat up far at the back.

We began, again I should imagine at my instigation, to chant ‘give peace a chance’ and bang our fists in the desks in front of us. And that, dear friends, is all I remember of the ‘protest’ itself.

Whether Benn was forced to abandon his speech, whether we finally gave up and departed and left him to it I have no idea and no recollections at all. As I say as far as I was concerned it was simply a hoot and while it went on it was certainly good-natured.

When we left, we retired to the coffee bar and sat down, talk began of staging another protest, although there was no obvious reason to do so or cause to protest. And it was then I noticed something odd and, for me, quite disturbing.

The small, good-natured group who had returned to the coffee bar had been joined by several others who had somehow heard all about it and before my eyes in a matter of minutes that small good-natured group was evolving into a small mob. It was uncanny and I was not imagining it.

As we can walk into a room and sense joy or sorrow or whatever is the mood of the room. Well, the mood of the group I as sitting with definitely changed and not for the better: it turned dark and nasty.

It was no longer a case of ‘what fun can we have doing something similar’ but more, far more, what ‘damage’ can we do now? And there was a very definite desire to cause ‘damage’ of some kind.

I had inadvertently and innocently created a mindless mob. Or better, the mob had created itself, drawing on the darker elements which, to a small or greater extent, are a part of our psyche.

It was at that point I wanted nothing more to do with whatever they were hoping to do and I never heard reports later that they had done anything. But I could not deny that I had witnessed something which I did not like at all but for which is was, though indirectly, responsible.

I am not suggesting that I don’t, in one way or another, also have a darker side and I could give several examples – but shan’t – of my behaviour of which I am not proud and would condemn. But there and then in the coffee bar, I wanted nothing to do with the small mob I had created.

It did, though, give me an insight as to how, on both the left and right violence can become almost natural, evolve from nowhere and almost seem legitimate. Very odd.

How Donny's 'big, beautiful bill' could help finance his very own 'secret police'. Paranoia? Let's hope so, but perhaps Ernst Röhm and his SA pals might have been a little more paranoid when they took off for a relaxing mid-summer weekend break in Bavaria 91 years ago . . .

Here’s a scenario which might well be filed under ‘conspiracy theory’ by all sane and decent people, and probably should be, but is actually more than a little plausible given what has occurred since January 20 this year (2025).

Donny’s bill going through the US Congress at present, and as I write it has not yet passed, but with come amendments I’m sure will, includes giving ICE another $45 billion to expand its operations and hire another 10,000 agents by 2029.

So that got me thinking . . .

ICE already has many agents who go around in masks and never identify themselves. By the beginning of November 2026 - over the next 17 months - their number will be swelled significantly and their activities widened.

The simple ICE protocol is to grab folk from the street – and they are legally allowed to do exactly that with no immediate explanation if they claim the people they are grabbing are ‘suspected illegal aliens’. There is no fuss, no bother and no comeback, except for the poor saps thus grabbed.

There are already many documented cases where ICE agents have grabbed someone who was not an ‘illegal alien’ and who they subsequently released. Others, though, were initially flown out of the country and there was no recourse to the courts as should be the case: they were out of the country in just a few short hours with very few questions asked (‘You look suspiciously dusky, pal, so come with us!’)

The ICE agents were and are legally covered at all times: they simply have to swear, on oath if need be, that at the time they grabbed someone, they sincerely believed the men, women and children they were arresting and

 detaining were ‘illegal aliens’. That’s it, and pretty much a carte blanche to do what the hell they like.

Those who do not believe ICE and think that claim is just a convenient fig-leaf – there is no way on God’s earth that they can prove that ‘I sincerely believed the dude as an illegal alien and I was simply doing my duty’ is a lot of hooey. They are stymied.

Store that particular dilemma in the file which also contains many, many instances in which a witness up before a Congressional committee has pleaded ‘sorry, I do not recall saying that’. Go on, legal superman, prove said witness is lying and that they do recall it. Go on, score a first. Then be off and drown your defeat and sorrows with a stiff drink.

That all brings me to this: we might like to consider a possible tactic by Donny on November 3, 2026, as voters gather to elect a new representative, a new senator or a new state governor, one in which ICE agents attend a polling stations and ‘arrest’ those they ‘suspect’ of being illegal aliens. And best do it while they are waiting to vote.

This might well take place mainly in purple states and red states where the GOP believes it is in danger to losing to Democratic candidates, on the assumption that all those lining up to vote who look vaguely ‘foreign’ and are thus legally ‘detainable’ in some way are likely to vote Democrat.

All the ICE agents need to do is simple: prevent them from voting by detaining them until voting has closed, then release them with a ‘sorry, but we had good grounds to believe . . .’

If ICE agents are subsequently taken to task about their actions – though that is not very likely it has to be said – they can fall back on their useful standby that ‘I was acting in good faith and simply doing my job because I sincerely did believe I was detaining someone I suspected of being an illegal alien’ with the subtext ‘so fuck off you libtard’.

This line can be passed up the chain of command: ‘All we did was to instruct our agents to attend gatherings where we suspect illegal aliens might congregate. That was their sworn duty and that is all they did.’

Game, set, match and any number of potential Democratic supporters are prevented from voting.

Donny, of course, has the ultimate Get Out Of Jail Card if – again it is possibly not very likely but . . . – the flak reaches the Oval Office: why, hasn’t SCOTUS ruled that a president cannot be accountable for any criminal acts he might have committed while acting as president? It certainly has, and that is luck Donny’s arse well and truly covered.

. . .

I am as a rule not interested in conspiracy theories and in the eternal debate of ‘Conspiracy or Cock-up’, I am a ‘Cock-up’ champion at every turn. But we should remind ourselves that what hitherto in recent history has been regarded as impossible has shown itself as often nothing of the kind.

Had anyone before January 6, 2021, suggested that an incumbent US president would resort to organising what to all intents and purposes was an insurrection when he summoned thousands of MAGA wackos to DC to prevent certification of the presidential election vote, he might well have been carted off by the men in white coats.

Had anyone suggested that an incumbent president agreed to take part in a suggested conspiracy to rig the presidential election in a US state, he, too, would have been locked up for her or his safety.

Whether or not you accept that Donny tried to rig the election in Georgia, remind yourself that three of his former attorneys – Kenneth Chesebro, Sidney Powell and Jenna Ellis – pleaded guilty to being a part of that conspiracy, so one did exist.

There is also overwhelming proof that Donny himself agreed to be a part of the conspiracy, although admittedly none could legally be produced in court, because Donny’s – successful – tactic was to delay as long as possible his own appearance in court in Georgia.

Oh, and consider this: if anyone suggested that a German vice-chancellor would organise the mass murder of 85 of his own supporters, they would be dismissed as being away with the fairies.

Those dismissing might, however, care to consult accounts of what happened at Bad Wiessee in Bavaria, Germany, between June 30 and. July 2, 1934, just over 91 years ago. Oh, and apart from those 85 who were murdered in the course of three days, another 700 odd Nazis and other politicians – including many on the right – were ‘liquidated’ in the subsequent weeks.

As one ostensible reason for eliminating the leadership of the SA (Sturmabteilung), led by Hitler’s former best buddy Ernst Röhm, an out-and-proud gay man (below with Hitler), was the ‘moral turpitude’ of

rampant homosexuality in the SA, any closeted MAGA men and women reading this might care take more care than they usually do.

You can be certain Donny knows all about it as he claims to have read Hitler’s Mein Kampf, although as the man is a lazy cunt who doesn’t much like reading, he probably listened to the audiobook or had Karoline Leavitt rustle up a four-minute powerpoint presentation.

All that is an extended way of saying ‘never say never’. The US is living in unprecedented times and no one can take anything for granted. For example, economic indications are that little by little the US economy is going tits up.

I really don’t think it occurred to Donny that the tariffs he imposed on imports would be paid for by American businesses big and small and that these were almost certain to pass on the extra costs to their customers.

Finally, as we are here dealing with conspiracy theories, let me mention one which is also plausible and which has been mentioned by more than one respectable economists who, one might assume, wants nothing to do with wacky conspiracy theories and who one might care to take a little more seriously than all the Q-Anon nutters with their pizza parlour paedophiles.

The claim is that Donny is not averse to crashing the US economy because he believes it would bring down the dollar and makes American goods cheaper abroad – and the US would then sell more – and also make imported goods more expensive so America would start buying fewer imported goods and start buying more domestic products.

On the face of it, that makes sense – except that, as was pointed out in Congress by representative Madeleine Dean when she was questioning secretary of commerce Howard Lutnick on June 5, 2025: why, she asked quite

reasonably, has Donny slapped a tariff on imporing bananas when American doesn’t grow bananas and imports them for that reason?
Lutnick (right), ever the sycophant, gave no answer and simply waffled about this and that.

Given that Donny gives every impression of having limited and short-term peasant cunning than involve himself in anything that might make more intellectual sense, suspecting him of ‘hoping to make the dollar cheaper by crashing the economy’ is not necessarily unlikely.

And I’ll repeat that not a few respected economists, men and women decidedly brighter than the lad from the Jamaica Estates, Queens, have suggested that might well be Donny’s intention.

There is an even more unlikely, though not at all implausible, corollary: that Donny intends to bring civil disobedience to America amid the growing economic upheaval and can use it as a justification for marshalling the national guard in various states to ‘preserve order’.

But, you might be asking, isn’t ordering in the national guard the prerogative of the state governor? Well, yes it is, and Donny knows that is the law. But he drove a coach and four through the law when he ordered the national guard into Los Angeles a few weeks ago and did so without consulting California’s governor Gavin Newsom.

In the event, there was a lot of liberal huffing and puffing and outrage and more huffing and puffing and no-holds-barred condemnation of Donny’s blatant act to undermine the constitution and then even more huffing and puffing and outrage, before the ‘news cycle’ moved on and sexier fresher outrage by Donny could be reported by the media.

But Donny got away with it.

Yes, there was court action and even for legal huffing and puffing, and Newsom is now suing Fox News for defamation for repeating Donny’s claim that he had telephoned Newsom to ask for his consent because the only call he had from Donny was three days before the national guard was (were? subs please check) and, anyway, there was no mention of the national guard at all, but . . .

. . . Donny got a way with it. I’ll repeat: Donny got a way with it.

. . .

Yer actual dyed-in-the-wool conspiracy theorist might then argue that sending in the national guard on that occasion was a dry run for what Donny hopes will be the real thing. And if – if – a ‘real thing’ occurs and civil  

disobedience does break in many states, patsy GOP governors will mobilise the national guard on Donny’s behalf and in blue states Donny might simply do what he did in Los Angeles a few weeks ago.

He will also be able to call upon his growing army of ICE agents, described by one commentator in all seriousness as ‘Trump’s secret police’ and who will be ready to do whatever dirty work is required of them.

Donny is adept at simply making up stuff, for example claiming against all possible evidence that his actions on deporting as many folk as he feels like deporting is legal under the ‘Alien Enemies Act’. That act is actually 227 years old and was passed while America was at war with the British. Ah, but Donny insists, America is again ‘at war’ because has been ‘invaded’ by Central and South Americans.

Complete bollocks and total shite? Yes, of course it is, but the US in 2025 is in such an odd pickle that no one, but no one knows how to deal with Donny’s lunacies. The opposition are almost like rabbits frozen in the headlights of an oncoming car that is about to run them over. In the meantime, Donny carries on rampaging like a manic toddler.

If any of this comes about, it will not be until autumn (‘fall’) by which time most economists think store prices in the US will have risen sharply, many farmers bereft of their labour force of mainly illegals will be going out of business, unemployment will be rising and folk might well be in the mood to make their feelings felt.

But will those feelings be opposed to Donny, or will many again be convinced it is all the result of ‘deep state’ machinations as ‘stealing the election in 2020’ was also engineered by the ‘deep state’?

I have been mixing with several of MAGA drones on Truthsocial who all argue that the ‘the election was stolen’ and that anyway democracy is not necessarily what it is cracked up to be. None is the brightest by any means and several make it very plain that they rather like possessing weapons of all kinds.

Unfortunately, irrationality is certainly not reserved for the right and there is any number of ‘anti-GOPs’ who might be up for a fight and who are equally enthralled by possessing and using lethal weaponry.

Pie-in-the-sky? Almost certainly, but it does sound horribly plausible.

Is Donny insane? I very much doubt it. Was Hitler insane, was Stalin insane, were or are Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, the Iranian supreme leaders, Viktor Orban, Mussolini, Franco, Lukashenko insane? I very much doubt it.

What might be Donny’s objectives? That’s hard to say, but easy to guess: it has been long accepted that he is terminally narcissistic, has no conscience or scruples and demonstrates many sociopathic symptoms, has the attention span of a bored gnat, has to be the centre of attention and has a certain peasant cunning but is really not very bright.

My personal addition to that list of characteristics is that he suffers from a huge inferiority complex and that would explain a lot: the lying about his ‘achievements’, the apparent conviction that he is an expert in a great many areas and the vindictiveness to which he resorts when he feels he has been slighted.

One final point: what I have here outline is fantastical: America eventually engaging in another civil war? Is this ’ere himself sane?

Well, I like to think I am and as evidence I shall again concede that all suggested above is fantastical.

Another, for me, encouraging point is that when fantastical, unprecedented, impossible situations are predicted and subsequently come true, the predictor – here that would be me – is hailed as a true visionary, someone with an uncanny foresight etc.

When none of it comes true, the prediction is very much forgotten. Let’s hope we can all forget all that I have outlined above.

Happy birthday, Donny!

 

A little more inconsequential bollocks and a one-off in as far as it is semi-personal, about writing and disguising art (and I trust that won’t put you off)

A while ago, I started a second blog so that I could keep it private and where I could post stuff I would not want to make public, such as my wife’s - - - - - - - when she - - - - - during the - - - -, and my brother’s - - - - - - - -, my sister’s - - - - - -, that kind of thing.

It was to be ‘my space’ for letting my hair down – the quote marks indicate that ‘my space’ is a ‘new’ expression for us over 70 in that it evolved and became current in the past twenty years rather than last week, and that I’m not overly fond of it as in I’m not accustomed to it.

It wasn’t to be: somehow it was also listed on ‘my other blogs’ with this one, so it was not at all private. Worse the ‘stats’ indicated that he had been read several times.

Well, I couldn’t have that, could I! How would I be able to call my best friend a - - - - - who doesn’t - - - - - - - - - - - - on a good day when he’s sober in a month of Sundays knowing that he might well, solely by chance, come across my second blog and realise that I am not the nice, affable guy he first met in - - - - when we were both working on the - - - - - - but essentially just another two-faced - - - -?

You see my dilemma, but then in a way it got worse: I realised it was my fault that the third ‘private’ blog had been listed and thus accessible to all and not in the lightest bit ‘private’.

So I de-listed it, but, in a sense, that created another problem: as an ‘aspiring writer’ – yes, even at 75 – 76 on November 21 next, sadly – and like all other ‘aspiring writers’ I am more or less convinced that Fate will be kind and that my genius will, it time, be acknowledged and that legions or PhD students and ambitious academics and – well, why not! – biographers will be trawling for details of my life, my work and my thoughts. And where else to trawl, now that writing long letters is a thing of the past, than in a blog.

Yet by keeping my thoughts and all the other crap that sustains biographies private in their own separate blog would – will not only would their job be far harder, but I will be running the risk that would-be biographers finding the tasks of digging out ‘telling details’ so tiresome that they might conclude ‘what the fuck, think I’ll biographise someone else’.

To cut to the chase: I’ve decided to get a little cute and post the occasional ‘private’ blog here in public and in full view of the word, which, of course, will not make it in the slightest ‘private’.

NB I’ve long known that I sharpen my ideas best in conversation and by getting them down in words. Mere ‘thinking’ doesn’t cut it for me. Of those two, in conversation is best as whoever you are talking with will, as an outsider, spot flaws in your thinking which were not apparent to your.

As for writing down my thoughts, I worked as a newspaper sub for 37 years and I’m accustomed to re-writing in order to clarify what I’m writing. That doesn’t necessarily mean it is perfect, but in the reading and rephrasing I, myself, do get more clarity.

It is always quite surprising how badly phrased a passage might be when you read it the first time around. I don’t know where I first came across this observation, but it is most certainly true: ‘Confused writing betrays confused thought’. Remember that the next time you read something and ask yourself ‘what the fuck is he / she / it on about!’ It might not be your fault.

Sorting through my ideas, in this case by writing this blog entry it the purpose of this and previous and subsequent posts on my private blog. I hope all that isn’t too longwinded and that your are still with me.

. . .

Those who have dipped into this blog before might know that I am shameless enough to plug what I have previously written. Those books – a novel, five volumes of short stories, three volumes of verse and a non-fiction opus looking at why Ernest Hemingway, in my opinion really not a great writer at all got to be so bloody famous. But rather than clog up this bit of the post, I have listed them and links on Amazon at the end.

I conceived of what I am obliged to call ‘my second novel’ quite a few years ago and have been thinking about it ever since, but that thinking was not ‘what the story would be’. Ironically although there is ‘a story’ of sorts – and I have now written just under 45,000 words – telling that story is not at all the purpose of this new work.

As far as I can see ‘telling a story’ as in ‘things happening’ is useful in as far as it might serve to hold the reader’s interest while you – that is I in this case – gets on with attempting something else.

I shan’t say what the ‘something else’ I have in mind and will eventually be – or better am – attempting is because if I don’t pull it off, I shall look a little silly, not to say a tad big-headed. But it does relate to the notion, which I find attractive of ‘art that conceals art’. To sound a little more impressive, not to say pretentious, here is the original Latin – ars est celare artem.

I’ve been beavering away at it for a few months now and although progress has been slow in as far as I, like all other would-be writers, will pretty much do anything rather than sit down and fucking writer, though not that I find writing difficulty.

Frankly, I now regard what I am doing as a learning process and I am learning a little more about writing as I go along. And talking of ‘writing’, as far as I can see there are as many different kinds of ‘writing’ as there are writers. Then there’s the fact that different writers will be trying to do different things.

At its most basic some might be hoping to write romance, other murder mystery, others still might be hoping to ‘save the planet’ by pointing out the dangers of ‘global warming’. Some might hope for money and fame, some might purport not to give a fig about money and fame, some might be persuading themselves that they want ‘to create literature’ and so on and on an on (and I have read some real guff from supposedly ‘serious writers’ but no names, no pack drill.

Me, I’m doing it for only two reasons: that I enjoy it and because ever since I was sixteen I’ve persuaded myself that I was ‘a writer’. I shan’t tell the story here as to why I came to believe that, but I shall confess that I more or less did fuck all writing until I sat down and wrote what became Love: A fiction. Essentially, I want to prove to myself that I am not just another of life’s bullshitters, though now it does go just a little deeper than that.

One thing I keep in mind is that nothing, but nothing is perfect from the off and ‘my plan’ is to get it all down, then ‘shape’. The trouble is every time I sit down to write – and see above about procrastination – I am for ever doing a little re-writing when strictly I should not bother with that until the first draft is finished.

NB (the second so far) The other day I looked up the history of pens, mainly those used in the 16th, 17th, 18th and early 19th century.

For much of that time writers of every kind were using quill pens, dipping them in ink. ‘Re-writing’, composing drafts was all done by hand and it must have been a bloody pain like no other.

For example, Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published in six volumes between 1776 and 1789, is estimated to be about 1,105,000 words long. And I am certain that Gibbon made many changes to what he was writing as he went along.

Apart from juvenilia, Jane Austen wrote six novels before she died at the age of 42 in 1817 and all were written with a quill pen.

Later came the metal nib pen but writing was still only done by hand, and although typewriters became common in the last decades of the 19th century, I have no idea how many writers used them in preference to writing by hand. Finally, word processing software such as Microsoft Word (and Bean which I use on my Macs) took over from typewriters.

To get to the point, because of all the re-writing I do, I would find it a real pain to write on a typewriter. Yes, it’s possible, what with crossings out and such, and I did write stories in the early 1990s on a little portable typewriter (and still have them somewhere, though I doubt any would shake much fruit from the trees).

Originally a word processor was a kind of digital typewriter and in 1993 I bought one made by Panasonic, a WL50 or a WL55 according to the picture of one I have just found in the net. This was a halfway house

and certainly not as good as a laptop as it had a limited memory and once you got to a certain point, you had to save what you have written to a floppy disk (look them up, kids) which as a pain. But I am now vastly off track by writing all the semi-irrelevant bullshit.

In fact, I’m going to end this post here. Sorry. I’m sure you are all panting for more, but . . . (I’m tired, so nothing more today, not even another NB).

. . .

Here is the work I have so far had printed – I put it that way because although, strictly, they have been published, it was me who published them, and claiming ‘they are published’ might be a tad misleading. In fairness to myself, I haven’t even tried to interest a publisher (and getting one interested in publishing short stories is just a little harder these days than squeezing blood from a stone.

Although all these are available to be bought, I am not interested in ‘making money’ (and would be deluded if I thought I might, frankly), but I would just like the different works to be read. I mean surely that’s at heart all that most writers want? No? OK, I did try.

Short stories:

Stories – Volume one

Short stories – Volume 2,

Once upon a time: Stories – Volume 3

Arte? È solo un’abile fregatura. Sempre: Stories – Volume 4

Chess avenna’ laff: Stories – Volume 5

Verse:

Oh muse! Where the fuck are you! 

My life, the early years – Poems volume 2 

I know where you live – Poems volume 3

Novel:

Love: A fiction – A romantic mystery in five parts 

Non-fiction:

The Hemingway enigma: How did a middling writer achieve such global literary fame?