Belgium next for the EU chop, strong-arming Croatia and why Hungarian pseudo-Fascists could be Brussel's next headache

Now that the dust has settled on Ireland’s bond crisis and the feelgood sentiment of Christmas and New Year have lulled us all into think the worst was over, those nasty money markets fire another shot across the bow of the good ship Complacency. It is more or less a done deal that Portugal is next in line for a euro bailout, but the surprise comes that Belgium could well be far closer to the brink than we have all thought. Belgium? One of the original Benelux countries? (The clue’s in the name). Boring Belgium, merely known for huge portions and a Flemish right-wing which is as close to being Nazi as makes no odds? Yes, that Belgium. It hasn’t had a government for the past ten months and an emergency budget passed to try to get to grips with the country’s debts is thought to be too wishy-washy by half. So now King Albert II has ‘urged’ the politicians to come up with a rather tougher budget to see the country through to better times. Quite why he thinks they will does as he bids and reach some agreement, given that both sides – the Flemish and the Walloons – are so at daggers drawn that they can’t even agree on forming a government is a mystery. But even the fact that the king – who as far as I know has no constitutional role to speak of – has decided to get involved should reassure as that this is no minor crisis.
The Germans, as brave and steady as the next man until they decide they have had enough and will look after number one with a ruthlessness which always takes one’s breath away (and that, by the way, is not mean as criticism – I rather admire how they have so far remained on the sinking ship), will feel the crisis getting ever closer. And they will not like it, although they might feel easier about bailing out fellow Northern Europeans than they did about rescuing the Greeks. I read or heard (or possibly dreamed) that China is considering buying up euro debt and could thus be part of the lifeline, but at this point, I can’t be arsed trying to source that particular titbit of news. It would, however, make sense: China can produce as much as it likes, but until Africa is ready to buy its goods – which will not be for many more years – it needs a healthy Eurozone and a healthy America to soak up those goods. No buyers could cause an slump in production at home and the result of that would be even more domestic unrest.

. . .


Croatia is on the brink of probably becoming the EU’s newest member, although most polls show markedly lukewarm sentiment among the Croatian in the street towards membership. The government’s in favour (of course), and its polls are rather more positive. But all the independent polls have support in the mid-30s, which is not exactly a ringing form of endorsement. One reason given is that after Bulgaria and Romania were allowed to join on quite favourable terms and have now done nothing to fulfil their promises of cracking down on corruption, the terms of Croatian membership are likely to be tougher. All the accounts I have read spell out harshly that the same criminals who ran Bulgaria before it became an EU member are still running the country. And if similar sums of EU money being syphoned off by the Mafia in Italy are going missing in Romania and Bulgaria, the poor German taxpayer has one more thing to worry about.
The basis logical flaw in the argument for being a member of the EU is that we can’t all be ‘exceptional’. To be an ‘exception’ (i.e. to be economically better off than your neighbours) you must, by definition, be in the minority. But if everyone and his dogs joins up, what’s the point?
What is bothering many in Croatia is that ‘stringent’ EU rules mean that farmers must either drastically improve their operation at great cost or go out of business. In practice, that means the big farmers – for which read those ‘farmers’ who are, in fact, part of some multinational conglomerate, will have the resources to re-tool according to EU rules, but your small to medium-size farmer will not. And so your small to medium-sized farmer is destined to go out of business. And in view of that fate, your small to medium-sized farmer is asking him or herself: why should be join the EU and go out of business if we could not join the EU and stay in business?

. . .

The real trouble, of course – to use a cliché, the elephant in the room – is that Western European countries, which formed the EU until a dozen or so years ago, have, by and large, a history of democratic institutions. On the other hand too many of the new ‘member states’ haven’t. And it is a moot point as to what would happen if things really got out of hand and there was widespread unrest in the streets. We Brits reckon our cops can behave ‘brutally’ but, in truth, they are models of discretion compared to how the police in other countries behave. Then there is the ticklish question of what the EU establishment would do were an outright authoritarian regime to be established in one of its member states? I’ll be blunt: I’m thinking of Hungary where the rather nasty Fidesz Party has just enacted a series of media laws which are more reminiscent of the regime run by the Communists less than 22 years ago. Just how happy is the, avowedly libertal elite, in Brussels with this development, which is even more embarrassing given that Hungary has just taken over the rolling six-month presidency of the EU? If it behaves in the way it has been reacting to all the EU money going missing into the deep, deep pockets of crims Europe-wide, it will simply employ the ostrich strategy, stick its head in the ground and pretend it isn’t happening. The government under Viktor Orban, who founded the Fidesz Party, says it also plans to rewrite the constitution. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but judgment should be withheld until one can read what the new constitution spells out. And it doesn’t look particularly encouraging.

. . .

Incidentally, it is more than just amusing when governments get precious about their prime ministers. It is also rather odd, although quite what this oddness can signify is not easy to tell. After I had written the above part of my entry, I was idly looking through other pieces which have appeared in the Economist recently and came across a recent spat that newspaper had with Hir-TV, Hungary’s state TV. The Economist had printed a picture of Viktor Orban and, in order to make it look neater in its page layout, it had cropped the left and right sides of the picture. I include both (taken from the Economist website to demonstrate what was done.) Hir-TV rang the Economist and accused it of ‘manipulating’ the picture, although, according to the Economist, it would not specify how it believed the picture had been manipulated. After that phone call, it broadcast its claim without pointing out the the newspaper had denied it had done what Hir-TV claimed. This is all very odd. Most politicians are robust and can take gentle ribbing, but here there was not even anything as gentle as that: there was nothing. So what was going on? Here are the pictures: below left is the original supplied by AFP, and right is the same picture cropped by the Economist.

Democracy Russian-style or why bullshit reigns supreme and Putin's indisputably the man. And a picture in Lederhosen

I’m sure we’ll all familiar with the habit of ignoring a bad symptom and hoping it is just a passing glitch and will, in time, right itself. An example might be when your car occasionally, but briefly, cuts out as you are accelerating or the engine takes at least 20 seconds to catch on a fine spring morning. It’s nothing, you tell yourself. Or there’s that persistent ache, a pain almost, at the bottom of your back to the side which you tell yourself ‘is nothing’ and keep telling yourself ‘is nothing’ until an X-ray confirms the worst. Or there’s that patch of damp which you persuade yourself isn’t growing just as you manage quite well to persuade yourself that your bald spot ‘isn’t growing’, that your debts are still manageable, that your partner isn’t losing interest in you, that you’re still regarded well at work, that it’s still light enough to carry on painting the gutter - our ability to bullshit ourselves is infinite and, it has to be said, nine times out of ten quite harmless. But that ability is not just confined to people. Countries and continents suffer from it, too. So we are still persuading ourselves that Russia ‘is now a democracy’, although admittedly ‘a developing democracy’ which has had and is still having its teething troubles, but that’s just the way of things and bit by bit things are improving politically since that bad old days of Soviet dictatorship (‘exploitation of the people by the people’). It has ‘an elected’ parliament, ‘opposition parties’, the one-time president Vladimir Putin stood down at the end of his term of office as the constitution demanded and agreed to serve as a prime minister under the new president Dmitri Medvedev. Furthermore, we persuaded ourselves, it’s not as though Medvedev is Putin’s placeman. Not at all - there’s a rivalry between the two and Dmitri doesn’t just do Putin’s bidding. Oh, no! ‘Look,’ we tell ourselves, ‘Russia has just emerged from 70 years of dictatorship and before that many centuries of autocratic Tsarist rule! So it’s unreasonable to expect everything to work as it should straight off! It’s a gradual process!’ Well, pull the other one, dear hearts.
The trouble is that the West has invested a great deal of money in Russia and the West depends a great deal on Russia for its energy. So we have to be on reasonably good terms with Russia (or so goes the thinking).
Well, from where I sit, Russia is anything but a fledgling
democracy, with teething troubles or otherwise. Most recently Mikhail Khodorkovsky (right), who was already serving an eight-year jail sentence imposed for alleged tax crimes, has been sentenced to a further 14 years for other alleged offences. Many observers claim his misfortune started when he had the gall to oppose Putin in Parliament. A few days ago, Boris Nemtsov was arrested (below) after he addressed a rally supporting the freedom of assembly. Nemtsov, who served as

a deputy prime minister under Boris Yeltsin, is regarded as one politician who still has clean hands. He was sentenced to 15 days in jail.
As far as I know, it would be a mistake to regard Khodorkovsky and all of the other oligarchs - Chelsea’s very own Roman Abramovich among them - as supergifted businessmen who deserve every penny they own. Khodorkovsky is said to be something of a bright spark, but those oligarchs made their billions by acquiring, in a variety of ways of which some were not very nice at all, at dirt cheap prices the former Soviet Union’s assets. Khodorkovsky’s mistake was to get involved in politics. Another oligarch who crossed Putin was Boris Berezovski, but he remains free purely because he got the hell out of Russia and now lives in Britain (heavily guarded by his own henchmen).
It would seem that if you play the game in Russia - Putin’s game - and keep your now clean, life can remain sweet. If you choose to oppose Putin, life becomes anything but sweet. In the past I have already alluded to the dangers of working as a serious journalist in Russia, and it would seem the rule of law us just so much fiction. Naturally, that doesn’t stop investors piling in hoping to make a fast buck and when you sit in Western Europe several thousand miles away from where the dirty work is being done, it is quite easy to persuade yourself that what is happening there daily are just symptoms of teething troubles in a developing democracy. If only.


. . .

At the end of the beginning of the Nineties, it will have been about 1990 or 1991 and could not have been any later because my father died in that year, I came across a book at work which caught my eye. Newspaper books departments are sent many books by publishers to review and review less than a tenth, if that (which is why the promises by vanity publishers that they will publish your book and get it reviewed in the national press are just so much bullshit. Anyone, you, me and the dog pissing against the lamppost, can send anything he, she or it likes to a newspaper books department and many, many publishers do. But newspapers will review what they damn well choose, and it is highly unlikely to be some junior civil servant’s badly written memoir.) This means, of course, that all books departments end up with loads of books they don’t want, and these are usually dumped on a desk somewhere with an open invitation to all to take what they like. One glance at the titles will tell you why they weren’t reviewed. Obscure subject matter doesn’t even begin to describe what can be found. And, of course, those who scavenge the pile first will carry off the halfway decent titles. My bookshelves were once jammed with books I looked through on such piles, decided I would thoroughly enjoy reading, took home and never once glanced at again. Biographies of Carl Jung, Hogarth, the psychology of the stock market, cosmology made simple, Lithuanian recipes for the summer months - that kind of thing. (They are now all in ‘Elsie’s House’, the granite-walled playhouse in the garden which was once a pigsty. The plan is ‘to read them’ after I retire. Oh yes.)
One such book I came across - and, unusually did read, was an account by a former KGB officer who had defected to Britain about the dying days of the Soviet regime. What stood out like a sore thumb was that, for some reason, it had been rushed into print. I inferred that because about halfway through it was obvious that proofreading had been completely abandoned. The book was very well printed and the first half was impeccable - not a literal to bee seen. Then they were everywhere.
The thesis of the book was simple: that for several years it had been obvious to the KGB that the Soviet regime was, in its present form, dying on its knees and that the service had set about re-organising itself and Russia to ensure that the country could go through whatever changes were on their way, but that those who held the reins of real power would survive and carry on as before.
I have indicated - well, more than indicated - that my father had some kind of relationship with our British secret services, though I’m buggered if I know what it really was, and I showed him the book and told him what the author was claiming. He pooh-poohed it all, and at the time, him knowing what he did, and me not knowing much at all, I accepted his verdict. I now feel he was wrong. I think that is exactly what happened. Why? Because it’s exactly what any sane, intelligent, functioning secret service would do. What was that line in Lampedusa’s The Leopard? ‘Things must change so that they can stay the same.’ Quite.
We're all the same at heart, I mean we all shit from the same hole. Even Putin.

NB To the lads and lasses from the KGB/FSB: click on the above and Happy New Year.

. . .

There was one memorable consequence of my speedy trip to Hamburg in December to attend the funeral of my aunt (Tante Nanny). After the requiem service and burial, we all adjourned to a nearby cafe for a drink of some kind (my sister and I had wine, the more sober North Germans stuck to coffee), sandwhiches and dessert. ‘Sandwiches’, a word which to my mind conjures up mean triangles of tasteless white bread with cucumber and tuna, does really describe the German version, which is Aufschnitt on a variety of bead, and, again to my mind, a damn sight nicer. While I was there, a man introduced himself to me and told me we hadn’t met in more or less 56 years. It was Hans-Ulrich Mose (Ully), my uncle’s brother. It seems he and a friend visited us in Lower Assendon in - well it must have been about 1955/6. He told me he still had a photography of my in Lederhosen with a rucksack on my back, and promised he would send a copy of the picture. He did. In fact, he sent three pictures, and (below) is one of them. The peopl shown are (from left) my father, then about 33 years old, my German grandmother, who will have been about 65, and my mother who will have been 36. (She was three years older than my father, which rather irritated her, though I get the impression that, given that her marriage was up and down, most things would have irritated her about him given half the chance. I’m afraid I have the same problem with my wife, but there you go, me and, I should imagine, most of the world.) Standing in front of the adult are, to the right with blond hair, my brother Ian, who will have been about seven or eight and then me, a few years younger. We are both wearing Lederhosen and were even sent to school in them, which was quite something barely nine, ten years after the end of the war. There you have it: definite proof that I was once young.

You can never have too many mobile phones or laptops: discuss. And why I dislike bad losers

I am the proud owner of three laptops. In fact, I have a fourth laptop in the house, but that belongs to work and is set up for me to be able to access the feature pages so I can set about slapping the puzzles on their pages. (Incidentally, during the spat I had with all the bright sparks from The Archers, it was suggested that I ‘set the puzzles’ which is why they were so dull. Quite apart from that being rather a lame insult, it’s not true. Not for me the glory of ‘setting’ the puzzles – by which I understand ‘making them up’ – but my role is about as mundane as could be. I call up the pages, and from a store of puzzles which are submitted by their various compilers I simply place the puzzles on the pages. It is quite repetitive work, but I do it on a freelance basis and am paid reasonably well for doing it. So I don’t care. It means that when bills arrive, I don’t fret quite as much as did. But back to laptops and other gadgetry.) Our household also has a total of, I think – I’ve just made a quick tally – 15 mobile phones, several of which are years old and quite inert and of no use to anyone except, perhaps, a design museum desperate for exhibits of any kind. That collection is something of a standing joke at work, but in all honesty there is full set of completely rational explanations as to why we – which should read ‘I’ – have accumulated that many, and furthermore I am quite prepared to outline them. Almost all of them cost less than £10, so it’s not as though I were wasting money. It is, perhaps, ironic that none of us uses our mobile phones very much. My daughter who is off the texting age, does a lot of textin, or rather did, for I’ve noticed her phone has been sitting in the same place in the kitchen for several days. My son, I now owns two of my old phones, doesn’t use either. My wife and I only use them briefly to ring from or to the supermarket with last-minute request. All are pay-as-you-go phones, so it’s not as though £50 is being spent each month for no very good reason. In fact, I am often amazed at how people with spend that amount each month on a phone contract but when you hear them talking to each other, it is invariably such inconsequential crap that it is hardly worth the bother of eavesdropping. I am even tempted to go as far as to say that I regard people who take out such contracts merely to waste money as certifiable idiots, but as I have just admitted to being the owner of 15 mobile phones of which just three are occasionally used, I am on rather thin ice, so on this occasion I shall withhold judgment. There is a similar set of rational explanations for my three laptops. In fact, as I am in confessional mode, I should come clean and tell you that until about three months ago, I actually owned four laptops, but I sold the oldest and least reliable because – well, what was the point. I have been a Mac man all my computing life, which started in March 1998 when I bought a Mac clone. But I am writing this on a Windows 7 laptop, a Samsung, which is my latest acquisition. I still think Windows are horribly round the houses, utterly unintuitive – or better, even more unintuitive than Mac – and I dislike them almost as much as I dislike the ‘Mac community’, that self-regarding bunch of conceited fuckwits who really do think they are a cut above everyone else. I should also admit that Windows 7, visually, is now halfway decent and a 100pc improvement on XP, which was itself a 100pc improvement on whatever abortion Microsoft was flogging before. Buying this particular laptop was almost a mistake. I don’t mean that it’s a bad laptop – it’s rather a nice one. What I mean is that I wasn’t really going to buy one, but . . . What with the extra dosh I had in my pocket every month, my mind had turned to considering buying a Windows laptop for a while, for two reasons. First, I knew from using my brother’s Windows laptop that BBC iPlayer seemed to play more smoothly on Windows than on any of my G4 laptops (at the time I had two iBooks and a Powerbook). Perhaps it has to do with the fact that the iPlayer code is more suited to Windows. And perhaps more recent Intel chip-driven Macs play iPlayer more smoothly. I don’t know. Then there is the small matter of internet backgammon which you can play online courtesy of Microsoft from XP on. And I must admit I do enjoy playing backgammon a great deal. So with the idea of possibly buying yet another laptop became a half idea in my head and I began to haunt eBay with a view to seeing what was there. That was, of course, the kiss of death, because a small, but very dangerous part of me is a shopaholic. So within weeks of adding several possible purchases to my watch list, I spotted a possible bargain. It was a new Samsung 540 with an Intel dual-core chip. What made it particularly attractive was that no one seemed to be taking an interest, but, more important, the auction was set to end at an ‘unfashionable hour’, by which I mean something like 9am when fewer people can be bothered to get their act together to bid online. So courtesy of one of the ‘we bid for you’ website – I shan’t say which one because for some reason or other it still hasn’t charged me a penny for using its service even though I’ve been doing so for almost two years – I put in my, comparatively low bid, being more or less certain that I would be outbid. But, dear reader, I wasn’t. And I bought that brand, spanking new Samsung 540 with a 500gb hard drive for around £120 less than they were commanding elsewhere on eBay. There was, of course, they ticklish task of obliquely acquainting my wife with the fact that our household was now the proud owner of a third laptop (she didn’t know about the fourth, ever) but I did that sooner rather than later just to get it over with.

. . .

I seem to have rambled on rather more than usual, and I began merely to record how odd it is that so many people on the Microsoft internet backgammon site are bad losers. Of so I assume, because more often than not, if, in a best of five games match, the opponent realises he or she – though I should imagine it is invariably he – is going to lose, they simply bow out with even the courtesy of resigning. When you play, you can set your standard as beginner, intermediate or expert. Well, for the past few months I have set myself as expert in the hope I would get some more challenging games, but the only difference I have seen between expert and intermediate status is that more people who class themselves as expert players bow out early without even resigning if it’s pretty certain they are going to lose. I have many, many faults, but I can, at least, honestly claim to be a good loser. I know that cuts no ice in the US, but her in Blighty we good losers are thought of as the salt of the earth.

Synchronicity, or another way of talking bollocks. What, you were just thinking that, too? Spooky!

There are many out there who are in thrall to coincidence and ‘synchronicity’, which is a kind of coincidence for new age freaks. If I have got it right – a big if, as I regard it as just so much claptrap – ‘synchronicity’ is coincidence with a kind of added significance. So someone will say something along the lines of: ‘I was just thinking of my twin sister in Sydney and how I had called her for a while for a chat, when the phone rang – and it was my twin sister in Sydney! Spooky! What do you think of that!’ Well, not a lot, really. In fact, nothing. It’s just a coincidence and there’s no significance at all.

In fact, researchers (who seem to be everywhere – if you want to make a tidy living doing very little, just find yourself a topic to research and sooner or later you’ll find some fool to finance your work) have delved into ‘coincidence’ and concluded that to establish whether there is any significance in ‘coincidence’, one would have to establish on how many occasions no coincidence was involved. So, in the example I give, one would have to compare how often twin one was thinking about twin two and at that moment twin two decides to ring twin one with how often twin one was thinking of twin two but twin two didn’t ring and how often twin two rang but at that point twin one had not been thinking about twin two. If you get my drift. And the conclusion was that that there is no cosmic significance in coincidence.
Coincidence is simply, well, coincidence and chance.

Being an honest sort of chap, I have to admit when I was younger – I am now 112 years old, so that was some time ago – I was a little more prepared to believe in bollocks such as synchronicity. But then something happened which rather sobered my up.

Like many hacks, I suffered a kind of professional mid-life crisis when I was in my 30s. It happens to many, if not all (interestingly never the ones destined for high office). Some fuck off to a Greek island ‘to write my novel’, others ‘retrain’ as something of other. One hack I knew, a half-Polish chap who would get very drunk indeed given half a chance but who was always excellent company, jacked it all in an started an antique stall.

It failed after just a few months - how could it not? - but buggered that he would give in, he soldiered on for a while, getting further and further into debt until he finally saw sense and came back to earning his daily crust working for newspapers. Life was much as it had been before, except that now he owed the banks several thousands pounds, on which, nice chaps that they always have been, they also imposed a swingeing interest rate.

When I was in my early 30s, I had developed an interest in photography, so I eventually left the extremely boring, job subbing on the CEGB staff newspaper I had at the time and started a full-time photography course at West Bromwich College in Wednesbury. We all – I stress all – eventually drift back into a life on a newspaper, slinking back with our tales between our legs, chastened, possibly a little wiser, but most definitely far more jaundiced than we were before.

I am still interested in photography, but started in the days before Photoshop and then digital cameras, when doing it properly involved not just taking pictures and then dropping off the film at Boots, but developing the film and printing the pictures, and a lot of skill was needed for both. It was element of hands-on practicality combining with the more creative side which I enjoyed.

So off I went to college, on the strength of the promise of working regular subbing shifts on the Birmingham Post to see me through and lump sum our father gave all of us. I lasted two terms of a two-year course before I ran out of money and had to leave to find work. I did, as an assistant in an advertising studio in Harborne, Birmingham, one of reasonably big ones outside London, but the truth was I was too old for that kind of existence and left after two months.

My next job was a subbing job in South Wales, but after dropping one too many bollocks (subbing in the provinces it as close to shovelling shit as any job can get and boring just isn’t the word. Subbing on the nationals is far more enjoyable, not least because the standards are far, far higher), I was sacked. That was in September 1989 and I decided that the time had come to try my luck as a ‘freelance photographer’. I also did whatever other jobs I could find, working subbing shifts on the local morning paper and writing feautures. And it didn’t go badly. Then, come the turn of the financial year at the beginning of April 1990, everyone, but everyone battened down the hatches and I simply wasn’t getting enough work to exist. But I am getting ahead of myself.

On November 21 the previous year, I turned 40 and went off to Paris to spend a few days with my then girlfriend. On my way back, via the boat train, there was some sort of storm and I and an elderly couple were told that if we hurried, we could get on the last Hovercraft to be crossing the channel that day. It was either that or wait until the following morning. So the three of us agreed to share a taxi to travel the 10 miles or so to the port where the Hovercraft would be leaving. During the journey, naturally, we chatted, and I discovered that the chap, who was well into his 80s was one of the founder members of the world-famous photography co-operative Magnum Photos. Unfortunately, I can’t remember his name, but he was either David Seymour or George Rodger.

So there was I who intended forging a new career for himself as a photographer in a chance meeting with one of the greats of photography! God, how significant is that! I told myself. Just think how interesting it will be when, as an old man, I come to look back on my career in my memoirs! Or when someone else comes to write my biography tracing my illustrious career as a photographer! Coincidence, synchronicity? Yes, and then some.

Or not, as the case may be. For, as I pointed out about, my illustrious career as a photographer came to an abrupt end five months later, and like all the other hacks, I found myself slinking back to the second oldest profession, in my case working shifts on the nationals in London.
The moral of this story? Stuff significance and synchronicity.

. . .

I have to admit that I don’t think there is any intrinsic significance in life. Or, to put it another way, life is intrinsically meaningless. The God squad will, of course, disagree, but I am inclined to see us humans as just another life-form which evolved into what it is, and that’s the end of the matter. We are a life-form more complex than some, and I don’t know of too many crustaceans who get there knickers in a twist debating the basis of morality (or writing blogs, for that matter), but I do believe it is hubris of the worst kind to think that we humans are in some way marked out as being special. (For one thing, if we were so special, would be really treat each other so badly?)

Having said that, there is much in our lives that does have meaning or which gives our lives meaning. And I hasten to add that, not only because that is what I sincerely believe and because it is the necessary second half to my opening statement, but because otherwise, as a species, we would undoubtedly behave even worse than we do now.

So, for example, my two children, the love I feel for them, their company, the love they show me and the care I am glad to give them until they are old enough to take care of themselves form, as far as I am concerned, the meaning of my life. I am aware of the irony that, just as you and I did when we got older, they will grow apart from me as they become ever more self-aware of their own existence, and that I will probably mean a lot less to them in times to come than they mean to me, but then (to use a cliché) that’s life. Once they have flown the nest I shall have to cast around for other ‘meanings’ with which to sustain my spirit until the time comes for me to pop my clogs.

It doesn’t just have to be family which gives a man or woman meaning. For many, a kind of their life gains a kind of ‘meaning’ from their ability to lord it over others, or their capacity to get ever richer, or, to give a less horrible example, an altruistic capacity they have to spend their lives helping others. But I stick by my central point, that life has no intrinsic meaning or significance.

...

I am writing this while lying in bed with the ‘flu, though whether it is bird flu, swine flu, man flu or common or garden flu, I couldn’t really tell you. All I know is that I feel very grotty indeed and only perk up for an hour or two (in which time I can lie here bending your ear with my inconsequential bullshit) after swallowing doses of Day Nurse (available at all good chemists and many bad ones, too). But the point of this entry is that I should like your prayers for a speedy recovery, or, if you are not the praying kind, at least your best wishes.

Emails from you assuring me that I am constantly in your thoughts during this difficult time (for me) would be more than welcome. And a private message to the chap with the lumpy sofa about whose comfort the police are especially concerned: tell me some of your almost unbelievable stories. I need something to cheer me up.

Ah, the joy of a free Press: which can (apparently) hang, draw and quarter us at will; Estonia goes for broke - it would seem literally

Like most countries, England, Wales and Northern Ireland (Scotland has its own legal system) try to ensure that those who come before its courts get a fair trial. And one way they do so is to enforce an aspect of the ‘contempt of court’legislation: once someone has been charged with a crime, the media can only report that fact and his or her name and address. This rule was once very strictly observed. and anyone straying beyond those bounds was severely bollocked and could even be jailed for contempt of court.
In the U.S., and for all I know other countries, they have a different tradition and even before a trial has started, the public can be assailed from all sides with lurid accounts of why the accused did it, how he did it, when he did it and what sentence he can expect when, as the media fully expect, he is found bang to rights. Furthermore, those same media feel no shame whatsoever when their lurid prognostications are found by a jury to be just so much bollocks. But as I don’t know too much about the legal system in the U.S. and other countries, I shall leave it at that.
I was a reporter for six years and attended a great deal of magistrate and Crown Court hearings, and the one rule we had to observe was that, in the phrase which we all know, the accused, who was only ever ‘the accused’, was ‘innocent until proven guilty’. So we had to be very careful what we wrote. One way of keeping to the straight and narrow was to stick that very useful word ‘alleged’ in front of everything.
That all changed, or rather I personally noticed that that had all changed, when The Yorkshire Ripper was caught. Peter Sutcliffe had murdered more than ten prostitutes in a number of years, and had slipped through the police’s hands more than once after being questioned. When he was finally arrested, the police said – whether informally or not – that ‘they were not looking for anyone else in connection with the murders’.
The message was broadcast loud and clear well before any possible jury would be allowed to consider the evidence: Sutcliffe did it. The irony is that had Sutcliffe chosen to plead not guilty at his subsequent trial, his lawyers might well have been able to claim the publicity ensured he would not get a free trial. In the event, he pleaded guilty. (One conspiracy theory claims the deal he cut with the police was that – as he was going down for life, anyway – he would be ensured to be sent to the far cushier Broadmoor, our hospital for the criminally insane, rather than a common or garden prison if he admitted to murdering several prostitutes he hadn’t actually done in. This, so the conspiracists claim, because the cops wanted to clear a couple of other murders from their books they knew Sutcliffe had not committed. The theory goes on the claim that there was not one but two ‘Rippers’, the second simply copying what Sutcliffe started.)
I was reminded of this by The Sun’s coverage in these past few days of a woman called Jo Yeates, who disappeared a few days before Christmas and whose body was found just over a week later. Jo and her boyfriend rented a flat from a retired English teacher who, it seems, was something of an eccentric. And within a day of telling police that he recalled hearing three people leaving her flat on the day she disappeared, Chris Jefferies, who is 65 and unmarried, was arrested ‘on suspicion of murder’. Crucially, he was only arrested for questioning. He was not charged. The Press, of course went to town: on December 31, The Sun had him bang to rights, not actually claiming he was Jo’s killer, but hinting broadly in that former pupils described him as ‘weird, posh, lewd and creepy’. It didn’t help matters that he ‘blue-rinsed’ his hair. (To be fair, other papers also pushed out the boat. The fact that I am only giving examples form The Sun doesn’t mean all the other papers behaved impeccably in this matter. It was also a stroke of luck that Jefferies had taught English at the nearby public school Clifton Colleger. Red top readers always like a ‘posh’ angle.)
A day later, The Sun produced further proof fingering Jefferies (pictured). It seemed he had ‘followed a woman’
who was a former acquaintance of the murder victim. Well! (was the implication), he’s your man! What sort of murdering weirdo does that! Except that perhaps he isn’t. He might be of course, but the police have now released him and warned that whoever killed Jo is ‘still on the streets’. That could, of course, also included Jefferies, but The Sun was careful not to make that connection. Jefferies, it admitted, had been released without charge, and it went on to quote a police chief superintendent: ‘Jo's killer is still out there somewhere. We will find them and bring them to justice. At the moment we don't know who killed her but we are determined to find out.’ Determined, eh? That’s good news, but it if very unfair to be snide about the cops who are doing their best and don’t give up. It would be far fairer to be snide about The Sun and The Mirror and all the other papers, the ‘serious’ papers included, who are only too prepared to hang, draw and quarter a man because he is odd, unmarried and blue-rinses his hair.
Naturally, I have no idea who killed Jo. It is as likely to be Jefferies as anyone else, and we could see him re-arrested and charged with Jo’s murder. And we could equally see someone entirely different arrested and charged. My point is this: why are the Press being allowed to drive a coach and four through established contempt of court legislation? In a way, the courts only have themselves to blame, in that they didn’t crack down on it sooner. Give them a yard and they will take a mile. I am not at all in favour of any legislation to curtail the Press (as many MPs who have been caught with their pants down or their fingers in the till are), but equally important as Press freedom – in which we take the rough with the smooth – is that our media should not act as judge, jury and hangman when it suits them, for which read when it is likely to boost sales of their rags.

. . .

I, for one, always admire courage, even of the foolhardy kind. There’s something noble about the knight who shoulders his lance, waves farewell to his damsel, then urges on his steed to gallop ever faster into certain death. So, I think we should raise a glass to plucky Estonia which on New Year’s Day ditched its old currency, the kroon, and embraced the future which is the euro. Not for them the safer waters of ‘well, given what’s been going on, wouldn’t it be wiser to slow down and see what happens?’ Apparently not.
I am obliged to be a little fairer, however, and concede that not all of Estonia is happy with the move. Just, it seems, the politicians. Those opposed to ditching the kroon in favour of the euro plastering Tallin with posters proclaiming: ‘Estonia. Welcome to the Titanic. Whether or not the hoi polloi are happy with the move depends on whose survey you read. The Estonian government reckons around half of the population support adopting the euro, while a survey commissioned by opponents claims only 34.3pc favoured the move, while 52.8pc opposed it.
This morning, the news from Estonia was gloomy. Estonians are finding it hard to come to grips with the new currency. Oh, well. You can't say they weren't warned.

. . .

The big news of the week – well, for some perhaps, although not me – is that Agnetha Whatever (the blonde one) would ‘not say no’ to an Abba reunion. To which the only sane response is: don’t do it. If there is one thing I have learnt, it is that one of the few principles worth a candle is: Never Go Back. Don’t go back to girl or boyfriends, don’t go back to an old company, don’t go back to live where you were once glad to get away and, particularly relevant for bands, don’t reform. Certainly, there will be more than enough old fans who will make it worth your while financially, but unless you are on your uppers and the taxman is breathing down your neck, stick to the principle and Don’t Do It. Ever. There is no sadder sight than some bunch of old farts, both men and women, bald, jowly, fat, paunchy, reliving their past glories and making a complete hash of it. Yes, they might be persuaded that ‘the return’ was a triumph, but that is usually by the promoter who makes a tidy bob or two and the manager who has had enough and wants to build up a nest egg.
There is a line in The Who’s song My Generation which runs: ‘Hope I die before I get old’. Well, two of them did – Keith Moon and John Entwhistle, but Daltrey and Townshend are now respected elder statesman and there is no sadder sight. Well, there is: the bloody Rolling Stones, still inexplicably billing themselves as the greatest rock band in the world, parading as though they can still cut it.

Sicily, The Leopard, food, Burt Lancaster, Visconti and was Dirk Bogarde merely ham or just a very bad actor?

There was an interesting programme on TV the other night (and I watched it on iPlayer) by the Italian food bod Antonio Carlucci about the novel The Leopard (Il Gattopardo) by (Prince) Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, the author, the novel’s emphasis on food and the meals eaten in the novel.
The novel is about the passing of the old order in Sicily with the invasion of the island by Guiseppe Garibaldi and the slow decline of a noble family, personified by the central character, Don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina. One of the points made in the novel (which I haven’t read) was that the way of life carries on as before in Sicily with the middle class and gentry taking over the leading role of the nobility. Despite Garibaldi’s invasion to make the island part of a greater Italy, nothing changes. The Prince opposes Garibaldi, but his nephew supports him, although cynically observes that ‘there has to be change in order for things to stay the same. Lampedusa (left) was also a scion of the Sicilian nobility, which also declined and whose various palazzi were destroyed or partially destroyed in the war. He wrote the novel, his one work, in the years before he died in 1955 and lived only to see two publishers reject it for publication. It was finally published in 1958 and became a sensation in Italy and has not been out of print since. As I say, I haven’t read the novel, but I have seen seen Luchino Visconti’s film starring Burt Lancaster, which I enjoyed. The casting was odd in the Lancaster, who didn’t speak Italian well enough to act in the language, spoke his lines in English and was then dubbed. The producers wanted a star name to justify the budget and when Visconti’s suggestion proved unavailable, Hollywood cast Lancaster (below) without consulting Visconti,
who was rather pissed off about it. Alain Delon, though, who played Tancredi, does speak Italian (I think). It’s rather a good film, though very long and not one for action fans. The only other two films by Visconti I’ve seen are Death In Venice and The Damned. I also rather liked Death In Venice, but - well The Damned? What on earth was that? A charitable but honest judgment could go no further than observing that it, and everything about it, is complete bollocks.
I thought it was perhaps the worst or, at best, one of the worst films I’ve ever seen. It is - and I’m obliged to add, in my opinion - simply terrible, terrible, terrible. I suppose it underlines the danger of reputation: Visconti had an excellent reputation as a filmmaker and, I should imagine, no one had the heart to tell him his new filmd The Damned (in Italian La Caduta Degli Dei) was complete crap. It must have been something like the Emperor's New Clothes.
Everything is wrong about it, the story, the acting, the direction. In its depiction of the Nazis, it struck me as being like one of those really hammy TV movies which are churned out on a budge to fit around the adverts.
. . .

Then there was Dirk Bogarde: why he is generally thought to be a good actor is beyond me. He was OK in all those light ‘n frothy Doctor films, but then he decided he wanted to be taken seriously (nothing wrong in that, though) and went for ‘serious’ roles. But as far as I am concerned the man couldn’t act his way out of a paper bag. There is a publicity
still from the film The Singer Not The Song in which Bogarde stars as a cowboy kitted out in black leather which sums up that man and his talent for me. Ham isn’t the word.
I have just searched on the net for it, but all I can come across are the one above and the one below. The shot of him lying down on the ground - why lying down on the ground? - is particularly ludicrous and gives a further dimension to the word ‘camp’. He seems to be truly unaware of just how ridiculous he looks. What was the man thinking?

. . .
Since writing the above, I did a bit more hunting and have come up with a third still from the film, which is quite possibly even more ludicruous than the one above.
 In most careers, the manage, who is generally thought to be a little more grounded, not to say saner, than the artiste he or she represents, warns about the possibility to looking ridiculous. But as in Bogarde's case his manager Tony
Forward was also his partner, perhaps he wasn't as alert as he might have been to the possibility that the film, from which these stills are taken, could kill Bogarde's Hollywood career stone dead. Which it did.
 I don't have a down on Bogarde, it's just that I don't think he was half as good an actor as he apparently did - he and several famous directors it has to be said. In the second half of his career - the 'serious' half - he did seem to make a pointt of acting in films with a gay theme, for example as the lawyer about to be outed as gay in Victim, of The Servant, which has marked gay undertone.
 I find him especially ludicrous as Julie Christie's lover in Darling, a film which has definitely not stood the test of time. What makes it all the sillier is that his character leaves his wife and family for Christie, who then does the dirty on him, and, in some way, we are supposed to feel sorry for him.
 The screenwriter was Frederic Raphael, who thought - thinks, he's still alive - awfully clever and tried to make every second line a quotable quote. (I've heard some things by him on the radio, and in them he did the same thing.) Unfortunately, all those lines did was to make Bogarde out to be something of a hissy queen. Mind, my stepmother use to fancy him like fury when he was younger. Shame he batted for the other side.
But that's enough Borgarde for the day.

Stay interested to live for ever: the man who disagreed but the Guardian thinks it's worth a punt

The big news of the week is that, quite apart from not being able to retire at 65, the government is now insisting that we all live to be at least 100. I can’t see the point myself. Reporting the news on Radio 4 yesterday, some hack managed to dig up an 108-year-old woman who said being over 100 wasn’t at all bad as long as you still managed to ‘take an interest in life’. To my ears, that sounds rather like establishing that staying alive is not particularly difficult ‘as long as you keep eating food and drinking water’. I once knew an old codger (I should write ‘older codger’ because the young things at work regard me as an ‘old codger’ these days) who lived to be 92. You can say he ‘still kept an interest in life’ because he carried on writing a newspaper column until more of less the week he died. It had appeared four days a week for the first 33 he worked on it (he didn’t actually establish it, although he took over were soon after it was established), and then weekly for the last 15 years. I shan’t say who it was, because that might strike some as name-dropping (and over these past few days I am becoming very sensitive and have become aware that my every jot and tittle might well be minutely scrutinised for any sign of flawed humanity - see below), but I include a cartoon from the chap’s column (tho’ as it’s in colour, I wonder whether it actually appeared, because
columnar illustrations were always in black and white) which, as it happens - I think be design - bears a marked resemblance to the chap himself. This guy was extremely well-read, known for his dislike of cant of any kind, sharp and very, very funny. I only knew him in the last 20 years of his life and towards the end he did rather lose interest in what went on. This puzzled me at first until I realised that by the time you have reached your 90s you will most certainly not have heard it all, but you will most certainly have heard a great deal of it. And as many of us have a very bad habit of repeating - regurgitating would be more accurate - what we have read and largely misunderstood, hearing some piece of mangled wisdom or a misquoted mangled witticism for the umpteenth time must get more than a little tedious. So he did get a little morose in his final years, although he and his wife managed two annual trips go Cornwall until the year he died.

. . .

Most certainly there are enough lively and quote-worthy centenarians to go around - more than enough for most industrious hacks to track down to obtain the necessary quote - but I feel that does put a rather phoney gloss on the issue. For example, almost four years ago, my stepmother suffered a very severe stroke and is now housebound. It happened when she had just turned 70, and the irony of it all is that compared to many her age, she was extremely active, spending all day gardening in the gardening seasons and taking her two dogs for a walk twice a day - one walk always being a long one, usually on the moor. She didn’t smoke, she didn’t drink a lot and she eat healthily, but suddenly had a stroke.

. . .

I’m sure we all know ‘old Jim’ or ‘old Susan’ who put man and women half their age to shame, they’re so active. But then I’m sure, if we’re honest, also know among our acquaintance many who, in attitude and outlook, have rather more than one metaphorical foot in the grave. I personally get thoroughly fed up with those around my age, and even younger, who wallow in nostalgia and bemoan how it’s all gone to the dogs and why, oh why, can’t they right a good tune these days! More acerbic - for which read wilfully critical readers - might now ask in that case, what on earth am I doing earning my daily shekel in the employ of a certain newspaper, to which I would reply: it’s very simple - I’m earning my daily shekel, and their shekel is as good as any one else’s shekel. And anyway, all that ‘golden age’ bullshit is nothing but an extremely successful marketing strategy. (Incidentally, it has occurred to me more than one: was there ever a golden age of golden ages? Is so that must have been a hell of a time.) As for successful marketing strategies, isn’t it about time the Guardian came up with one. I read the other day that it had sold off the Manchester Evening News to the Trinity Group, which strikes me as extremely daft beyond the call of duty, given that the Guardian hasn’t turned a profit in over 300 years and was wholly subsidised by the MEN and other local papers in GMG Regional Media. I have just looked it up and note the sale last March was for ‘£7.4m in cash and £37.4m in the value of a printing contract from which Trinity Mirror’, which I, who admittedly knows nothing about these matters, would have thought was pretty cheap. The remaining part of the Guardian Media Group is said to have ‘a strong portfolio which has to be in the right shape to achieve’ the goal ‘of securing the future of the Guardian in perpetuity’.
By the way, many cite ‘the Scott Trust’ as proof that at the heart of the Guardian beats a liberal conscience which eschews turning a profit as its prime motivating principle. The Trust itself claims the Trust was set up to safeguard the journalistic freedom and liberal values of the Guardian’. Well, not quite: it seems the Trust was established as a means of avoiding pay death duties which the then owner of the MEN felt could cripple the company. It has since been wound up and a limited company, The Scott Trust Limited, is now in charge. So bullshit isn’t just the sole preserve of the right-wing press.

Tweedledum and Tweedledee - note the ‘twee’ - gather on The Archers messageboard. And an invitation to all living ‘abroad’

Well, I think I’ve emerged from my dust-up with the goods folks who haunt The Archers messageboard reasonably unscathed. I’m not too sure what happened, what went wrong and why it all escalated in such an extraordinary way, but it most certainly got very silly indeed.
It all started quite innocently when, to help out a colleague who was subbing a piece about The Archers and was having trouble checking when one particular character was introduced, I volunteered to post a message on The Archers site asking for help. My message was headed ‘Urgent reply needed’ (and the fact that I had written it all in capital letters seems to have moved many Archers fans to fury) and I asked:
‘When Usha Gupta/Franks first join The Archers [sic]. A speed and accurate reply would be greatly appreciated.’
The first response (from Dusty Substances) came within minutes and though it wasn’t helpful, I can see the guy’s point:
‘No idea but I’m guessing you are post from a pub quiz? Dx
I replied that I wasn’t, but that a piece was going in the paper and we wanted to get things right. That was when there came the squall in what became a rather minor, though entirely redundant storm. Ermintrude wrote:
‘So the DM are doing a piece about a character who hasn’t been heard of for six months?’
I suspect even non-aligned readers of this blog will detect Ermintrude’s somewhat censorious tone and might accept my contention that had I said the Guardian, The Independent or even the Daily Telegraph was the paper involved, that tone would not have been adopted.
Dusty Substances returned with the answer we wanted:
‘1991 – according to The Archers Encyclopedia’,
but after that it all went downhill pretty quickly, although I must confess that my response to Ermintrude was not particularly diplomatic (but then why should it have been?)
‘Thanks for the 1991. As for the cleverclogs reply about an article concerning a character who hasn’t been heard for several months, it is a round-up of what has been happening over the years. Doh!’
But I sense that even without my reply, the mere mention of the Daily Mail made it open season for all the Mail haters out there: for this came from Dr Toad Leg:
‘High profile investigative journalism about how immigrants are taking British jobs perhaps?’
And on it went. Within a few messages the various sins of the Mail were raised such as its alleged obsession with house prices and the causes of cancer, until by Message 17, from some idiot who calls himself Marjorclanger, we get the usual prejudiced bullshit by people who are not quite as bright as they believe themselves to be:
‘Acerbic and to the point, not a fluffy poster then? Probably not a wind up IMO now. I stand illuminated and confirmed in my prejudice about most journos. Long live campaingner and debunkers, eg the child abuse in the Scottish Islands that wasn’t. As for all the other stuff written on the back of press releases or last night celebrities, well it fills the pages and passes the time.’
What?
After I was accused of being snide and had responded that a quick visit to the Guardian messageboard would illuminate posters what real hatred is all about, Majorclanger came back with:
‘A pity the Mail doesn’t go into such rough places!!! Lord Snooty and his pals from the La La Dem land would perhaps be STTC if the worm ever turned.’
What was – is – the guy talking about? But one thing one can conclude from his entry is that he is most certainly no Conservative or Labour supporter.
That was Message 21, and by Message 27, my sordid past finally caught up with me when BorchesterBolshevik, also not an ardent supporter of either the Tories or the Lib Dems, I should think, judging from his moniker, informed the other posters:
‘All the previous posts across the various BBC message boards seem to suggest a Daily Mail reader rather than a writer.’
After Auntie Rednosed Clockwise had accused me of being either ‘a fantasist or a troll’, miladou also went on the attack:
‘On the other hand, the poster is running true to journalistic type demanding that other people provide him/her with information IMMEDIATELY, rather than doing some actual research.’
In reply I pointed out that posting my query on The Archers messageboard was ‘research’, but as I had also addressed Auntie Rednosed Clockwise as ‘dumbo’, the post (Message 36) was subsequently removed by the ‘moderators’ at the Beeb for breaking house rules.
And so it went on and on and on, interminably, rather fruitlessly and utterly pointlessly, a booing and baaing of which Tweedledum and Tweedledee would have been proud. Whether I was Tweedledum or Tweedledee I shall leave it to the reader to decide. In Message 46 saffronlilly posted a link to this blog, which meant my reading figures went up tenfold in a matter of hours, which rather pleased me. (Such small things do.)
In Message 51, Chris-mas Kettle of Ghoti even suggested I didn’t exist (or something). He/she wrote:
‘For some reason, a person wanting information after seven in the evening for a piece that was purportedly going into a daily paper the following day struck me a high quality end-product of male bovine. Therefore I assumed that this poster was not being quite accurate in his assertions. However, if someone can be bothered to look through the rag in question tomorrow and find out whether it has anything about TA in it, that is up to whoever wants to do it.’
That struck me as a pretty lame ending to a rather grand ticking off, although the poster managed to establish his/her bona fides in that he/she didn’t read the Mail!
The whole thread meandered on until the current Message 151 (in which Organoleptic Icon wrote: ‘I think vegans run more towards “bloodless” ’ which only goes to show how nonsensical these threads can become.

. . .

What strikes me from these and other entries on the board, as well as the names posters give themselves, is how ineffably twee it all is. And I don’t like twee very much. I’m more a vinegar man than candyfloss.
The of-so-funny names of posters, all presumably self-imposed, are always a fair guide to how people regard themself, and it would seem this bunch think of themselves as rather a humorous lot. Oh well.
The other remarkable thing is the almost atavistic loathing many of the posters have for the Mail. Why exactly? It makes no sense. Surely to goodness they know – being the bright, intelligent and well-informed people they are or, at least like to think they are – that all the Mail does is to tell its readers what it thinks its readers want to hear?
All the papers do that, even the saintly Guardian (which this year surprisingly didn’t indulge in a seasonal bout of redundancy of its staff). Independent readers want to be reassured in their conviction that because we are all burning fossil fuels as though there were no tomorrow, the world will go to Hell in a handcart unless we do something! Now! The Guardian readers want to be reassured that the Tories are still the scum they always were. Times readers like to be reassured that being horribly middle-brow isn’t half as bad as they fear. Telegraph readers want to know that most certainly there will be further wars. And so on.
One final point: it might have struck some of you that my view of hacks is pretty similar to that expressed by many on the messageboard. But there are two important provisos. 1) I come at it from a completely different direction, and my general complaint is that hacks, with one or two honourable exceptions, are self-centred fuckwits. And, more crucially, 2) it’s all very well for me, a hack of almost 37 years standing, to slag off my colleagues and compadres, but I won’t stand for having some fucking civilians do it. Ever.

. . .

My best wishes for the New Year to all who don’t have the good fortune to live in Blighty. A look at the stats for this blog show that one or two people in New Zealand, The Netherlands, Ireland, the U.S., Canada, France, South Korea, Slovenia, Turkey, Russia, Japan, Germany, Poland, the Czech Repulic and China have all dropped in at some point or other, so you know who you are. I like to think they all stopped off for more than a brief time, but there’s no way of knowing that. Oddly, so far no one from South America has dropped by, but I don’t think there is anything sinister in that.
Courtesy of one particular reader – and because this reader values ‘comfort’, I shall only say he/she lives and works ‘abroad’ – the scope of this blog might broaden. For this reader informed me that were they (‘they’ being the modern way of getting around the ‘he/she’ dilemma) to recount some of their experiences in the country they at present call home, no one would believe them. So I invited them to send me accounts of those experiences which, if suitable – this blog operates a ‘no one over 18 policy’ as it does not want to risk being taken seriously – I shall publish. That particular reader can be reassured that I shall treat all their submissions with discretion and that, if they wish, they can cast their eye over what I plan to publish to avoid any indiscretions.
I should like to extend that invitation to everyone else who lives abroad. We Brits are always only to happy to learn what is going on in foreign parts, especially how much they envy our way of life. If you want to take up the invitation, please get in touch with me via this blog, I shall reply from a different email address to ensure communications can remain private.
As for the reader I was initially addressing, I trust that sofa will not prove to be too lumpy, and I should be interested in hearing whatever you have to recount, however outlandish it might seem. Remember, we here in Britain have to put up with people such as Richard Branson and Jeremy Clarkson, so outlandish really doesn’t bother us.

The Archers: urban fantasy or just pie in the sky? Baby give birth to Elton John, plus the joy of self-delusion

Through an odd quirk of fate, one or two fans of The Archers might find their way to this blog to check up on whether I really do exist. Earlier tonight I was trying to help a colleague who was subbing what is referred to as ‘page eight’ (why page eight I really don’t know). In it, A.N. ‘Andrew’ Wilson did the business Mail style about The Archers and how it should be exciting but not too exciting, should contain ‘drama’ but no ‘melodrama’, and how, unfortunately, it had become a little too right-on for words. I was trying to find out when one of the characters (a Hindu solicitor called Usha Gupta who went on to marry the local Anglican vicar as our indigenous Hindus so often do in deepest rural Brtiain) first joined the list of folk in Ambridge engaged in their daily battle with a bad script.
My colleague said she had tried the BBC Archers website but couldn’t find the relevant page on the character (she should have tried a little harder) so as I already have an account with which to log onto BBC messageboards, I volunteered to post a question asking for an urgent reply. Well, for some reason that was a red rag to a bull (or rather a lot of them) and an excuse for a general slagging off of the Mail, newspapers, journalists and Uncle Tom Cobley and all. Many, if not most, of the messages were pretty illiterate, many faux clever and almost all confirmed my suspicion that a great many Archers fans are a self-regarding bollockheads who are only too pleased to subscribe to an urban fantasy of rural life.
Although I work in London for four days a week, my home is in North Cornwall in a part of the country which could not get more rural, and believe me the rural life portrayed in The Archers is a kind of fantasy. It’s not that we don’t have gays – we had a gay publican – and it’s not that we don’t have drugs or any of the other problems portrayed in The Archers. But it's that we simply don’t have the sheer concentration of ‘issues’ aired in the soap. My brother-in-law is a beef farmer and another brother-in-law is a dairy farmer and both, although unlike in their interests (one is in the process of teaching himself the accordion) are pretty typical of farmers in our neck of the woods, and they are not interested in ‘cutting their carbon footprint’ and discovering ways of recycling. On the other hand this is exactly what libs up and down the country would like them to be interested in. What is so galling about The Archers is that quite apart from indulging itself and its listeners in a fantasy world, it runs a mile from the real world of rural life.
So, unfortunately, almost everyone I know is in favour of foxhunting whether they admit to having voted Tory or Lib Dem in the last election (and ironically I am not and also do wonder why so many people get their jollies by blasting shotguns at birds in the sky). But you do not hear that particular aspect of rural life aired in The Archers. So, dear Archers, fans in your urban towers, dream on.
In fact, given the recent spat with several Yanks on the IMDB message board, I am making something of a habit of upsetting idiots. It's all rather encouraging.

. . .

The breaking news of the day is that a baby in California has given birth to two men and that the three of them are destined to live happily ever after. The science of it all is still a
bit vague as there is no previous evidence of a baby giving birth to anything. (Strictly speaking, I should say previous reliable evidence as there is evidence that a baby born 2,000 years apparently ago gave birth to what, in time, became an overweening corporation worth billions of pounds which sold punters around the world the promise of everlasting life. That promise should not be mistaken for the pledges made by numerous lotions which claim to cure male pattern baldness, make your dick twice as long, or to make you irresistible to women – or men if that’s your bag – as they are apparently just a tad more respectable.)
The baby has announced it will call its offspring ‘Sir’ Elton John and David Furnish. There has already been a great deal of controversy over the news – quite apart from the unprecedented science involved – not least because the baby is denying completely that it was merely gaining two fashion

First picture of the baby's offspring (© Getty Images)

accessories which will be trotted out at showbiz parties and premieres. The three of them, the baby insists, will live as a ‘normal family’ and any suggestions to the contrary will be referred to its lawyers who will threaten such a legalistic shit storm if the allegations are not withdrawn that suicide by the guilty party would be the lesser evil.
In response to the news, forward-thinking organisations around the world (but not Nick Clegg apparently, who claims he has other things on his plate) insist it is every baby’s human right to give birth to two men if it so chooses and suggestions that it is merely an combination of consumerism and an unhealthy vanity which has taken a step too far belong in the Dark Ages.

. . .

The mutual shilly-shallying on The Archers messageboard reminded me once again how innocently prejudiced are many people who wouldn’t think of themselves as prejudiced in a million years. Many people bang on about the Mail being ‘full of hate’ and ‘racist’, yet, as I pointed out in one of my post on the messageboard, if you want the full Monty of hate-filled splenetic fury, just visit the Guardian messageboards where you will get more than you can handle. I remember once coming across a post hoping that ‘Thatcher will die of cancer’ and various observations along the lines of ‘Tories? Hanging’s too good for them. They should be dragged through the streets bollock naked, then hung drawn and quartered’. Yet I suspect that, if questioned, those who post such drivel would regard themselves are rather intelligent liberal types who see themselves as ‘broadminded’ and who ‘care’, though about what is rather vague. I suspect that, at the end of the day what they really care about is being thought well off by their peers.
If I were to write – and I think I have recently – that our capacity for self-delusion is infinite, the obvious riposte is ‘your capacity, too?’ and I would be obliged to agree. The trouble is that by its very nature quite in what ways I am deluding myself will always be rather hard for me to spot. To others it might be blindingly obvious from one hundred paces, but were they to tell me, I should imagine I would find it hard to believe I am guilty of what they suggest. If I had more integrity, I would undoubtedly spend the next ten to fifteen minutes reflecting on in what possible ways I am deluding myself. But, to be honest, I can’t be arsed. And I suppose admitting as much is a kind of integrity in itself. An example of self-delusion might well be how all the self-appointed great and good in Britain have, as one, united behind the cause of Julian Assange. Yet to my knowledge none of them has said a dicky bird about Bradley Manning, the young U.S. Army squaddie who made it all possible, but is now looking at 200 years in chokey for daring to upset the American establishment.

The only thing merrily ringing out are the shop tills

Why is it that I can get irritated by how Christmas is regarded as just another ‘business opportunity’ by manufacturers and our shops, and as an excuse for a consumerist orgy by everyone else and his dog, yet consider the story behind Christmas - the birth of a chap called Jesus - as just so much claptrap? It puzzles me. I should say, here and now, that if someone has a faith, whether they call themselves Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist or even Devil worshippers, I leave them to it, because with one or two irritating exceptions (ever been smugly told by someone or other ‘I’m a Christian’ with the implication being ‘I’m better than you because you don’t share the faith’? I have, rather more than once) I consider those who have a faith to be rather luckier in many ways than those who don’t and studies have shown that, in general, they enjoy better health than the faithless - I should say ‘studies are said to show’ as I can’t find any examples off-hand), but I believe it is ‘having a faith’ which does the trick rather than the specific faith. (Incidentally, six years ago, a British sailor insisted on his right as a Devil worshipper to while onboard a Royal Navy frigate on got his way. For further accounts try here and here.)
Were anyone to ask me whether I believed in God, I would honestly reply that I did, but I would leave it there and excuse myself from any subsequent discussion. As for Christianity and Roman Catholicism, well, we went our separate ways years ago, and I somehow doubt we shall ever be re-united. But there is no denying that celebrating Christmas was initially based on the Christian religious festival which marked the anniversary of the birth of the chap Christians believe to be the son of God, though you’d be hard pushed to be reminded of that in Britain at least (officially utterly godless). I know Christmas in Germany is rather more of a religious festival, and I suspect the same is true of the U.S. where a far greater proportion of its citizens attend church every Sunday. But even in those two countries the overarching imperative is to buy, buy, buy and bugger the consequences. But why, given my views on Christianity, do I find that so offensive.
I really can’t tell you. I was, admittedly, brought up a church-going RC (and wanted to be ‘a priest’ until puberty came and I discovered ‘girls’. I remember often sitting in church, spotting a rather pretty girl, imagining her naked, immediately praying to God to forgive me, but even while I was praying, doing a little more imaging, so praying even harder - the whole thing is just thoroughly ridiculous) and for us Christmas was more a religious festival than for others. So perhaps echoes of that upbringing are the basis for my irritation. But irritated I most certainly am. The whole shooting match of Christmas advertising starts in mid-October, which spoils the whole run-up and when you come across Christmas puddings on sale at that time, you do wonder what the bloody hell is going on. Oh, well. I don’t for a moment imagine this is a new phenomenon. I think historians and archaeologist have long established that greed is millennia old. Certainly, the Victorians were pretty acquisitive, especially at Christmas. Just look at Charles Dickens’s novella Scrooge. (Great name, by the way.)

. . .

Christmas Day went off rather well in the Powell household. As I said, the extra money I have been earning putting together the Mails’ puzzle pages allowed my to push the boat out a little this year, so Wes got his Xbox and Elsie a - titchy - iPod Nano. Lord is it small, but she is happy with it. I went round to my stepmother’s to cook her lunch (she had fillet steak with chips and salad) and later we went up to see my father-in-law who chose to spend Christmas on his own. He is now a widower, although I can’t remember whether my mother-in-law died one year or two years ago. My wife’s family are rather an emotionally stunted bunch (my wife’s grandfather was something of a Methodist religious fanatic who would even allow alcohol in the house and who lived until he was 96 in his son’s household, which couldn’t have been easy for his son. It’s pretty much the case that mean don’t really come into their own until their fathers die - it was most certainly true in my case), so I stayed on for an hour after everyone else had left and he seemed to relax a little bit. Poor chap, he does miss his wife a great deal and doesn’t enjoy being on his own.
We didn’t stuff ourselves or fall over drunk, so in that sense it wasn’t a traditional British Christmas, although Elsie did make a point of watching the hour-long EastEnders Christmas special, which, as usual, was full of loads of shouting, crying, tears, unhappiness, recrimination, accusations and I don’t know what else. Why do people enjoy such garbage? I know I have admitted that The Wire, The Sopranos and Mad Men are soaps by another name, but none is filled with the unremitting misery which is fucking EastEnders. I just hope Elsie doesn’t grow up thinking that kind of lifestyle is normal or even usual.