A silly season? Anything but, my sweethearts. And God rot these aches and pains

Whatever happened to the silly season. Traditionally, hacks and the media obliged to employ them are so hard up for hard news stories in August that they resort to all sorts of crap to fill their newslists. It’s where we get the phrase ‘skateboarding ducks’ from, although I have no doubt at all that somewhere in Tarahoma, Iowa, some idiot is as I write (or you read) fine-tuning his programme to get a troupe of ducks to dance the

Dance Of The Sugar Plum Fairies from The Nutcracker Suite. He, or in these post-feminist days even she, was probably spurred on by happening upon this blog and resolving to outdo in wackiness the moron I described a few entries ago who intends to die the fattest person alive. Incidentally, by describing that particular idiot as a moron, I am, make no mistake, skating on thin ice. Here in the Western World in which we lay great stress on ‘individuality’ and ‘expressing yourself’ and the outright insistence that whatever bollocks I write is in no way more important than the bollocks you write, however much it is 24-carat bollocks, it is not just in poor taste publicly to question someone’s intelligence, we are in very real danger of contravening human rights legislation. While many in Libya and Syria are giving their lives in order that their fellow man and woman might in future live in freedom, all we in the West can think of doing with the freedom we take for granted is to see how much more stupid we can be than the next man.
But, as usual, I have digressed. I began by asking whatever had happened to the silly season, and I did so because August has been anything but news-free: there is the ongoing trouble in Libya and Syria, the discomfort of America’s East Coast who were forcefully taught that not being poor and black doesn’t save you from the ravages of a hurricane, the tragedy become farce but now again become tragedy of the imminent collapse of Europe’s economy what with all the tippy-toeing around the problems of the euro, the widespread looting here in Britain, the shock to the U.S. that as far as the ‘credit ratings agencies’ are concerned, that country’s government and how it runs the economy is no more trustworthy than your average Mid-West snake oil salesman. And finally, as it were to add insult to injury, there’s the fact that for the fourth year running summer here in Britain has been a complete washout. So take your talk of silly seasons and shoved it where the sun don’t shine. We should, of course, look on the bright side: after Channel 4 finally canned Big Brother, reasoning that the programme has run its course, served its purpose and that the station was in danger of flogging a dead horse, up popped Five to buy up the rights and carry on regardless. And, I’m happy to report (though I must admit when I tested the waters, I could stand no more then seven minutes of it) it is even worse than it ever was.

. . .

OK, so as I’m not even 62 and shan’t even reach that oh-so-glorious milestone for more than two months, I am being a bit previous as we say here in England (though my father will be turning in his grave to hear me adopt the phrase, once the slang of uneducated ruffians, then a knowing number adopted by educated ruffians, and now not far off what you might well hear in a BBC Radio 4 commentary, still every-so-slightly jokey, but with overtones that the speaker might be a tad dull but he’s most definitely also a tad street. Christ, the petty nuances of modern life. But I was going to rattle on a little about began ‘old age’ and so I’d better get to the point sharpish for fear of being prematurely diagnosed with the onset of dementia. Now why would I consider pontificating about old age. Well, for one, the increasing number of vague and not so vague aches and pains my body suffers daily. And what’s all that about? Lord, there was a time, it seems no many years ago, but was most surely at least 20 when, if needs be, I could shag all night and still go to work after just two hours sleep. I was - this is, I think important - still unmarried and would, admittedly, spend the rest of the day feeling like a rag doll, but that isn’t the point. But now? Now the first steps downstairs for my morning cup of tea are tentative, to say the least, with my heels feeling as though I had spent the previous ten hours running non-stop. Then there is my growing stoop. What’s all that about then? It has got to the point where my son, still only 12 but sadly just as facetious and heartless as I was at that age, feels the way I get up from a chair and walk is worth at least five minutes of remorseless ribbing. And what makes it all the less bearable is that no amount of loving advice along the lines of ‘don’t laugh to much, my lad, you’ll get there, too, one day, mark my words’ makes the not a blind bit of difference. He is just a young lad enjoying the last few months of life pre-puberty when everything is a hoot, and I can’t see him paying any attention at all to my wise advice for at least an other 30 years, by which time I shall be dead, or if not dead, in no state do do much except slobber over my soup and repeat myself till even the most charitable of my nurses loses patients.
So what is it all about? I go to the gym three times a week

and have done for many years, and I don’t just go through the motions but make sure I really do get a sweat up, but still I have been unable to avoid any of that pissy set of aches and pains which will afflict us all. Laugh if you will, but a few years ago I really thought that if I did, as I now do, go to the gym conscientiously, I might somehow avoid them. Some bloody hope. I would like to end this entry on something positive, but, you know, I really can’t off-hand think of anything. Good night and God bless.

And one more, just for the craic, why the misery of others cheers us up and filthy, filthy Brits

It’s Saturday morning, I’m off to London a little earlier this week, I always miss my children so here’s another short, this one for parents and sentimental saps everywhere.

Actually, I could quite get into posting a short video or two on this blog lark. See what I can come up with.

. . .

I'm sure we have all been glued to the television screen these past few days what with the mounting misery taking place in the world. And there's nothing like the misery of others to cheer us up as we realise that however dull, frustrating, uninspired and essentially lifeless our existence is it could be a lot worse. The two major stories for the past few days have been Libya and the threat of mass destruction to the good Yankee folk who have the misfortune to live on the East Coast. Granted there has been untold misery in Northern Kenya and Southern Somalia as millions - I believe it is now millions - have nothing to eat, but for us in the West Somalia and Kenya are just a tad too far away to elicit more than just a resigned 'God, isn't life bloody! Makes you think, doesn't it'. Then there were the dramatic events in Egypt, but Egypt, too, seems rather distant. And anyway, despite the limited viollence earlier this year, their dictator was got rid of apparently quite easily with no incidents of wholesale massacre. But it's a whole different matter in Libya which arouses our interest rather more in that it is actually 'quite close'. Sitting just south of Sicily and even closer to Malta (which ran a ferry service to Benghazi until recently) we can relate to Libya. And many Brits of a certain age - those who are now between 65 and 85 - might well have a certain sentimental affection for Libya as the place where they got roaring drunk for the first time and might even have lost their cherry while serving in the forces during the war and its aftermath. ('Ah, Tobruk Tessa, what she couldn't do with a ... well, better leave it there.') Those feeling a little argumentative might argue that in that case Tunisia is almost 'closer', to which I would retort that that country's revolution also passed off comparatively peacefully and, anyway, the French had and have their fingers all over Tunisia which rather spoils it for us Brits.
But for the horror of revolution, Libya fits the bill neatly, and it's a comfort that we are able to see it all on our TV screens, which is as close to all the misery as we will get, which is just the way we like it. Which brings me to Hurricane Irene and the havoc it is wreaking on America's East Coast. We Brits know a thing or two about rain but this is ridiculous. And rather as the horror in Libya oddly afffects us more than the human misery in Somalia, the scenes of destruction in North Carolina and - heavens! - New York seem curiously more appalling than when we see virtually identical footage shot in Florida and Lousiana. I mean those Southern States have several hurricanes every year and they are geared up for it. But the East Coast? New York? Hurricanes? Surely not? Isn't that where America's intellectuals live? Can't have that can we? Granted that the mainstream news media are apt to exaggerate these days - in fact, I believe it is written into their contracts that everything is bigged up and then some - but I recall hearing the astounding snippet that one million New Yorkers are fleeing their homes for safer parts. But where are those safer parts? All I know is that beyond New York and to the west lie New Jersey, where no New Yorker would care to be seen dead, and the Catskills where - I think I've got this right - numerous Jewish comedians and playwrights honed their talent. Is that where they have gone?
. . .
I have strayed from the path. What brought on this particular sermon/rant/diatribe/delete as applicable is that I am sitting on a train bound for Bristol where I am due to pick up my car and carry on to London. (Long story, but briefly, my brother has inherited all the property, goods and chattels of an elderly bachelor friend of the family who died last year and having no use for a rather smart Vauxhall Astra automatic which was part of the package has given it to me. Yes, that's right, he gave it to me. Lovely chap, my brother. So I now have three cars to my name, and must now decide what to do with one of them. But that's all for another time.)
My journey didn't get off to a good start in that my wife dropped me off at the station one hour and 15 minutes before my train was due to leave for what she regards as 'good reasons' but which I regard as nothing but provocation. In the even it turned out an earlier train was leaving Bodmin Parkway for Bristol and although my ticket specifies that I can only catch the train I am booked for, I decided to chance my arm. When the ticket collector came - officially train manager - came along, a bottle blonde Mancunian, I immediately fessed up and asked humbly that as my wife had dropped me at the station earlier, would it be all right ... Yes, she said, but she was only travelling as far as Plymouth and I would have to ask the next ticket collector/train manager. And, she added, he was new and stuck to the rules, so good luck. And so he did, and so I got off the train at Plymouth (the station is as dreary as the town) and waited for the 18.23 for Leeds, which, as usually happens on these occasions when one detail becomes out of kilter arrived 35 minutes late.
What got me thinking about Libya was the state of the lavatory at the end of my carriage. There was no water, so it couldn't be flushed and it had been used by quite a few others by the time I got around to using it. And its state was not a one-off. I have been driving to London to work for these past few years but for many, many years I used to catch the train at Exeter. And all too often the loo was somehow out of order. But the Brits don't seem to care. How can I make that claim? Because if they did care, the train companies would ensure that their lavatories were always clean, and if they didn't, the public would put pressure on them to do so. But the public doesn't. At the end of the day, the British public would far rather have a good old moan about the state of the loos on the train - and Lord it was late! And Lord the state of the carriage - than actually get someting done.
How did I get to Libya from there? Well, simple really: whenever I've seen coverage of the war, the country seems to consist of God-awful scrubland and desert and the towns seem so down-at-heel that they, too, could be described as scrubland. Certainly, the country, thanks to its oil wealth, had modern hospitals and certainly Gaddafi and his sons and daughter lived very high on the hog. But it would seem the Abdul Public wasn't quite as fortunate.
Years ago, I went to Greece, to Corfu, in September, and it seemed to me that because it was getting towards the end of the season and because its 19th-century sewage system couldn't cope with the 20th-century hordes of, mainly British, tourists, the whole place stank of shit. I spent the second week in a small more or less purpose-built resort on the north of the island - pupose-built several decades earlier, I should add - and running to the sea was a small stream. This stream was thick and grey and stank atrociously, yet not feet away Brit tourists were sunbathing on the grass. Sadly, the Brits don't seem to care.

Steve Jobs steps down: a good excuse to rant about the smug, smug, smug ‘Mac community’ (Lord, I loathe them). Meanwhile, we stick two fingers up at the UN, more or less. And a short film from nowhere

I have preferred Apple Macs ever since I knew about computers, and although my first PC was a Mac clone, I bought it only because I couldn’t afford an authentic Mac. What I do not like, however, is the ‘Mac community’ as they style themselves with typical self-regard and importance. I mention this because Steve Jobs - I’m inclined to be particularly bitchy and write St Eve Jobs - is now so ill that he has stepped down as CEO of Apple. Predictably, the share price fell and Apple lost $15bn of its stock market value when the news was released. That’s how important Jobs was to the company. As far as the man himself is concerned, I simply wish him well and as much good health as a

man who has survived a liver transplant and pancreatic cancer can expect. There is no doubt that he was Apple, that it was his personality which drove the company and sustained its success, and that it was his vision of what might be which made Appe products innovative and unique. But there is also no doubting that the whole smug, self-satisfied ‘Mac community’ thing also derived from Jobs. The essence of the ‘Mac community’ - such is my loathing for it and its attitudes that I can’t bring myself to drop the inverted commas - is that ‘we are the best, we know we are the best, we are special because we are the best, if you are not one of us, you are not worth bothering with, but the chances are that if you are not one of us, you won’t even understand why we look down on you and don’t bother with you’. Admittedly, the Windows operating system is to the Mac OS what a haycart is to a Porsche and also admittedly Apple’s insistence on quality pays off in spades. So its products might be more expensive at the outset, almost double the price of equivalent non-Apple products, but they do tend to last longer, although that is not to say the Apple hasn’t also produced some clunkers. But none of that, in my eyes, can in the slightest justify the smug self-regard of the ‘Mac community’ and its unshakeable conviction that it is the Chosen Few. Dear soul,

members of the ‘Mac community’ are insufferable and their existence comes dangerously close to justifying murder. In that respect they are rather like Observer and Guardian readers who appear to regard themselves intellectually and morally as several cuts above the rest of us mere mortals, and one’s failure to acknowledge as much is all the evidence needed that they are right and we are wrong. And I’ll repeat that I can’t shake off my suspicion that the whole ‘Mac community’ ethos stems from St Eve himself.
As for the company, I have no doubt that it will survive for many years. Ford survived superbly after Henry Ford’s death. But I doubt whether it will reach the heights it did under Jobs, however much it pains me to say so.

. . .

As for Apple products, I have always bought second-hand (and, incidentally, a mark of the rather nauseating streak which dislike in Apple is that it is responsible for coming up with that horribly twee euphemism for second-hand: ‘pre-loved’. Yuk). There is only one reason for that: they are just so much cheaper, and if you use your nous when buying, you can get a computer (or iPod or whatever you’re buying) in pretty good nick. And as nothing seems to date faster than new technology, you are still getting something very useful. For example, I recently got rid of my two G4 laptops and have bought Intel machines. And one of the laptops was a top-of-the-range Powerbook when it appeared (I bought a refurbished model from Cancom i.e. more or less news but quite a bit cheaper). But when it comes to doing what the vast majority of us do on a desktop or laptop - write letters and surf the web - a G4 or even a G3 will do the job just as well. Yes, I know there are people out there who record music and edit video on their computer, but I think the vast majority don’t - they just surf the net and word process for which any eight-year-old computer will do just as well. One of the more remarkable marketing coups of recent years has been to persuade us saps to part with oodles of moolah and buy a tip-top computing machine hardly any of us needs. And as a chap who has recently bought a neat little eMachines 10in netbook I don’t need and will rarely, if ever use, to add to my line-up of two Intel Macs - a Macbook and a Macbook Pro - a Samsung Windows 7 laptop and a works Lenovo which can log into the the network in London, I must step forward and identify myself as one of those suckers with a great deal more money than sense (which does not acutally mean I am weatlhy. Just stupid). Now how’s that for humiliating honesty?

. . .

The hunt for Col Gaddafi goes on and the latest I have heard is that British jets are bombing the lad’s bunker compound in Sirte, his hometown. Well, I would like to see that back of him as much as everyone else and there’s no doubt that his supporters will carry on fighting until there is firm news that he is dead or has been captured. But wasn’t the UN mandate specific on what Britain and France should be doing and, more to the point, should not be doing in Libya. I seem to remember it was something about doing what it could to protect the ordinary Libyan population. Well, bombing the lad’s bunker compound in Sirte seems to me well beyond that remit and then some. Or have I got it all wrong. Are we, perhaps, defending Gaddafi's human rights?

. . . 

A throwaway something:

This lad falls in love (her name's Romola) while the euro farce continues

This might not be the place for a review of a television drama series, but I shall give you one anyway. My sole justification is that it starred an actress called Romola Garai who made me wish I was 30 years older and consider taking up stalking. I am not and I shan’t, but a boy can dream.
The series was produced by the BBC and was doomed from the outset by comparing itself to America’s Mad Men. The only point the have in common is that both were set several decades ago – Mad Men in the late Fifties, early Sixties and this turkey, called The Hour, in the mid-Fifties. But where Mad Men was stylish, innovative – it took its time always – well directed, subtle, nuanced, well-acted and interesting, The Hour was just another six hours of BBC drama by numbers of which there is more than enough to last us all a lifetime and then some. I always imagine that when a drama is commissioned by the BBC, the script will not be considered for production until it was been put through the BBC editorial sausage machine whose purpose is to get rid of anything which might prove to be original and to add all the latest stylistic fads and trends. One criticism was that too many of the lines were anachronistic, but quite honestly, that was the least of its troubles.
The Hour deals with what we are asked to assume is an innovative BBC current affairs programme (called The Hour), launched just before the Suez Crisis. Also thrown into the mix are two murders by MI6, a traitor, an MI6 baddie who turns out to be a goodie (neat that, they will have thought, that will keep the punters guessing0, a suicide (I think - it wasn’t very clear whether or not it was that or an accident), a Soviet mole in the BBC, a Soviet list of possible agents, and affair between the attractive producer of the innovative current affairs programme and its well-connected presenter, a convoluted MI6 plot to persuade Gamal Nasser’s dentist to assassinate the Egyptian leader, a debutante engaged to a gay actor, a closet gay Downing Street press officer, a Lord and Lady of the Realm (we can be fined here in Britain if we don’t cap up those three words - who said the age of deference is dead) and it is all played out against the Suez crisis. Furthermore, all these rather lurid plot strands involved a total of - if I’ve got my figures right - about 16 characters, many of them minor.
If you think all that amounts to a F minus of a dog’s dinner, you would be charitable. On so many different fronts it failed and failed badly. I shan’t go into detail here (i.e. I really can’t be bothered), but, as usual, the BBC set itself up for a pratfall by trailing it as something like the Second Coming.
But then there’s Romola Garai: swoon. Then, swoon again. At first I thought she was a newcomer and this BBC dog’s dinner was her debut, but it turns out she’s a well-established trouper and even got most of her kit off playing a prostitute in some other piece of BBC drama. I shall do my utmost to track down a DVD if one is available. One more time: swoon.

. . .

I have just been googling for images of la Garai and have found, rather pleasingly, that she has one of those faces which can change rather dramatically. Here is a selection:

I've just realised that she reminds me of Annette, a woman I went out with years ago. Oh well. That's enough swooning, you'll all think I'm twp.

. . .

The eurozone car crash is working out quite nicely. On any reading the Germans are damned if they do and damned if they don’t: if they pull the plug on Greece, their banks are in the shit, and if they don’t the government is on the shit. Already, it seems, leading CDU politicians, with no doubt an eye on the elections in 2013, are burnishing their eurosceptic credentials and drafting a future script along the lines of: ‘I warned about it from the outset, but no one would listen.’
Germany’s Constitutional Court is due to rule on September 7 on whether what has been going on with the bailouts is legal according to German law, and they don’t ever pull their punches. Everyone, especially the Brits, are reverting to type. Given that one mooted solution would be a ‘fiscal union’ with Germany in charge, the sillier newspapers, of which unfortunately the Mail is one, have been claiming - not seriously, of course, but . . . - that this is the ‘rise of the Fourth Reich’ and that Germany is about to achieve economically what it failed to achieve militarily. The French, of course, are playing along, but I don’t doubt they have one or two nasty surprises up their sleeve, and there is outrage from the bailed out states that over the suggestion that it would only be right and proper if the offered their gold reserves as collateral for the bailout dosh.
Which ever way you stack this up, it is not going to end nicely.

Lord save me from bureaucrats

I’ve spent the past 24 hours nursing bad toothaches and coming to terms with the fact that the dictum ‘better means worse’ is, unfortunately, true. I’m referring to the increasing bureaucracy which permeates much modern life and whose function is ostensibly to ‘facilitate’ but, in fact does anything but. (Incidentally, I can claim to be the author of the above dictum, which I came up with after I read another - ‘more means less’ - in the Daily Telegraph. Here’s another, which I also feel sums up aspects of aspects of the 21st century: ‘bullshit is the new bollocks’).

I had my tooth looked at a week ago by my very attractive 27-year-old Spanish NHS dentist (and, Maria, if you are reading this, I can tell you I wish to God I were 30 years younger). In fact, I don’t think it is the same tooth which is giving my gyp, but

the one behind it, probably playing up out of pique that it got no attention last Friday.

Anyhow, my wife told me that my niece had been taken to Bodmin Hospital which has an emergency dental service, so at 8.30 this morning I rang the hospital and asked to be put through to the service. I was told I had to ring my dentist. But they are not open on a Saturday morning, I told them, which I why I am ringing you.

Do you have the emergency dentist at the hospital? Yes, the woman said. Well, can’t you put me through? No, she said, you must ring your dentist. But all I get is a message telling me to ring back on Monday morning, so would you please put me through.

At this point, the woman claimed she was physically unable to do so, though I flatly refuse to believe that a part of the hospital is telephonically completely isolated from the rest of it. She told me to ring the NHS dental helpline. I did this and was given the number of the emergency dental service at Bodmin. I rang it, and was told by another woman to ‘ring your dentist’.

I told her I had and that the surgery was shut. Well, take paracetamol and ibrufen, she said. Can’t I see someone, I asked. We only see emergencies, she replied, people with an abscess and chronic pain. Chronic pain? That’s me, I told her. Well, take ibrufen. But can’t I see someone. It’s not protocol, she replied. (Great word ‘protocol’, it makes whatever is being talked about sound far, far more important.) Have you got anyone coming in now, I asked. Yes, she said (and I thought she sounded rather triumphant - that most certainly put persistent old me in my place.)

Well, can I ring back later? And she agreed, I thought pretty reluctantly, so the arrangement is that I am due to ring at 12 to see whether they can fit me in, although the unspoken threat - quite obvious from the tone of her voice - was that the chances were that I would once again be sent off with a flea in my ear for even daring to suggest I should receive treatment. Fuckwits.

I agree that my difficulties with NHS bureaucracies is as nothing compared to what several million Somalis are currently having to put up with in Northern Kenya and what millions of Indians have to put up with daily year in, year out in India, but then this is my blog not theirs and I am a lily-livered Westerner for whom ‘tragedy’ is if the car battery’s flat on a nippy winter’s morning.