Life, death, football, Moyes, Manchester United, money, tears, second-hand opinion and anything else I can throw into mix. Plus why – why! – all this bloody interest in Francoise Hollande? And a quite fascinating royal tale!

I had for some time been toying with the idea of a post about Manchester United, their new manager David Moyes and how to all our dismay – that is to the dismay of all the club’s supporters – they have been a mediocre to bad side this season. But as anyone with two ears and a radio or TV will know events have overtaken me. Moyes is no longer the ‘new manager’. He is now a ‘past manager’, sacked after just ten months into a six-year contract.

Analysis – the technical term for interminable waffle – has been abundant about what, why, where, when, who, to whom, with whom, to whom it should have been and did the Glazers use a condom when they shafted Moyes, and I am only repeating various things I have heard on the radio this morning. My view is that Moyes should have been given more time, at least another season, if not two, to show his mettle, and then been shafted if United proved unable to regain the glory they achieved under Alex Ferguson. But I am old-fashioned. It has often been pointed out that Ferguson got several years grace when he was appointed 28 years ago, but the world of football was very different then. Certainly, it was already about money, but to my mind, what with the fabulous sums available for one reason or another for clubs who win the Premier League title and/or make it into the Champions League, it is now far, far more about money than ever before.

Incidentally, I am not one of those – in fact, I am the complete opposite of those – who bang on, usually in the pub with a pint in their hands, about how ‘our modern players are overpaid, overgrown big girls’ blouses who should cut their hair and get a proper job’ – elaborate in your own time, if you so wish, but before that get the fuck out of my blog. Yes, they are paid

enormous sums, certainly more than you and I could hope to see in a lifetime, but they are the one asset the club which employs and pays them have. Not one penny (cent, centime, pfennig) of all the fabulous sums being made by clubs through TV rights and coverage and the sale of all the tat which is generally known as ‘merchandise’ would be made if it were not for those players.

The players make it all possible. They are the source of all the money, and long go are the days where a man would play professional football in the winter and work as a painter and decorator in the summer to feed his family. Oh, and when George Clooney or Leonard DiCaprio or Jennifer Lawrence are paid $5 million for a part in film, you don’t hear the wiseacres sounding off in the pub (pint in hand) and opining in unison: ‘It’s a farce, I wouldn’t pay him/her in washers! All that bloody money just for standing before a camera and speaking words someone has written? It complete bloody, total lunacy! My two year-old could act/play football/paint/compose music/run the country better – and he’s even more of a narrow-minded, bigoted halfwit than I am! Only goes show doesn’t it?’

But back to Moyes. The Manchester United fans seem to be split pretty evenly down the middle between those who are saying ‘thank God, about time, now get someone in who can really do the job’ and those, like me, who think this is really not the way to go about things and that if patience were ever a virtue, now is the time to find out.

The villains of the piece are, and have been for some time, Malcolm Glazer and his sons Joel and Avram who own the club (and have several sporting interests in the US). And they are unashamed businessmen who will readily admit they are in it for the money. And when times are good there is a lot of money to be made. They have never been particularly popular, but then with the exception of some clubs, owners rarely are. They got off to a bad start with the fans when they bought Manchester United in 2005, but highlighting their talkover would be very disingenuous: there has been trouble at United long before and, like Liverpool for the past 20 years - until now - they have also had their time in the wilderness, especially after Matt Busby retired (and like Alex Ferguson wouldn't bugger off and let his successor get on with it).

One of the many interesting and, I think, pertinent points made this morning is that when Alex Ferguson finally retired at the end of last season, he wasn’t the only one to leave. There was something like a wholesale changing of the guard from the chairman David Gill down (and someone mentioned their lawyer who was apparently a very smart cookie but who also retired last year). When Moyes moved in from Everton, he brought with him his own staff and got rid of much of the previous infrastructure. It’s been said that the players didn’t happily adapt to his style, which is very hands on and tough, and that he lost the confidence of some players early on. It’s also been said – and this is my view – that the playing squad he inherited from Ferguson was not all that good and that United had been quite lucky to win the title last season.

As someone pointed out on the radio this morning it was a question of the opposition underperforming – all three contenders, Manchester City, Chelsea and Liverpool were going through their own managerial upheavals and not playing to the best of their abilities. I must say, I was surprised

when United won the Premier League, and they were most certainly not playing well and winning until Robin Van Persie joined them from Arsenal after Christmas (NB I am told it was before Christmas). It would be no exaggeration to claim that Van Persie salvaged their season last year.

That things were not all rosy in the garden might be gauged from the fact that Ferguson even hauled Paul Scholes out of retirement to bolster his midfield, which is a pretty unusual move. I was puzzled that Moyes didn’t play Ferdinand more often. And it has to be said that all the dithering over buying players just before the season started last August didn’t look good as the only player he did land was one Marouane Fellaini who – in my view, at least – was rather less effective in midfield than had Moyes played a peanut butter sandwich.

But what do I know? As Liverpool’s great Bill Shankly once said about football: ‘Some people believe football is a matter of life and death, I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.’

(Note to American readers: When I and Shankly refer to ‘football’, we mean what you know as ‘soccer’. It has always puzzled us in the rest of the world why you couldn’t also refer ‘football’ as ‘football’ – because that is what is it is – and find some other name for your ‘football’, which we call ‘American football’.)

But there you go – as Moyes has now – and it all history now. I feel that United are now in for a few rough years, that they will, as they have in the past in similar circumstances, go through quite a few managers before they hit upon a new Matt Busby or Alex Ferguson, and that the time has come to acknowledge as much. I can’t see the Glazer family selling up yet or even for some time because there is still money to be made from the club. But it’s not going to look very pretty for a few years now.

PS Just been considering what I wrote earlier on and I thought I might add that it is, perhaps, possible that Moyes’s style was wrong for the kind of side Manchester United are when they are at their best. But even then the man should have been given at least another season to prove himself either way.

. . .

I am still baffled by the interest shown around the world – now even Brazil – about bloody Francoise Hollande and his wandering dick. The blooger statistics tell me that he is still the most visited post in the ’ere collection and has been for several months now. So what give? Folk dying by the hundreds in Syria, a new dictator is slowly easing himself into place in Egypt, the Ukraine could or could not spark a new war in Europe, David Moyes gets the push, but all folk seem to want to know is: who is France’s president Francoise Hollande shafting this week? Odd.

. . .

A fascinating story has come my way courtesy of a friend on the Mail’s gossip column, who – whisper it quietly! – gets to hear these things! It seems David Moyes’ maternal great-grandfather was, by his third marriage, related to the daughter of the Silver-Stick-In-Attendance to Prince Heinrich-Wilhem Graf von Anschluss zu Lubeck-Treppenwitz, Queen Victoria’s, second nephew three times removed who in his younger days was something of a card!

As a young man and chafing a little at the inconsistencies and incongruities of life in late 19th-century Schleswig-Holstein at the court of his father, Prince Heinrich-Wilhem upped sticks and sailed to the Spice Islands where he landed a job training the local Sawab of Molucca’s racing elephants! Unfortunately, he did not show the prowess in that profession as he had at hockey – he captained the Lichtenstein national side at the 1749 Brussels Olympics – and was unceremoniously shown the door when two of his elephants died of alcohol poisoining! As they say, it’s a small world!

The Price Of Shoddy (cont.) with another rather lengthy preamble. And the latest on Hollande: nothing at all. Then a little bit on diaries v blogging (and if it doesn’t make too much sense, blame the several glasses of wine I have supped writing this entry)

I promised in my last entry to continue it, and I shall try to outline the link between me, my life attendance at the OS, the ‘middle class’ and Gilbert and Sullivan.

I didn’t speak any German when I started at Die Steubenschule, but I understood if very well, as our mother always spoke to us in German from the off. So German has never sounded like a ‘foreign language’ to me as do French, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Serb, Iranian, Arabic and all the other tongues you will get to here if you walk the few short yards from where I work in Kensington High Street (West London) to, say Robert Dyas at the other end. I think because I understood it (though I was nine and a half and so much of it, especially the convoluted concepts the Germans just love coming up with) will have passed me by) I picked it up rather quickly as children do and as my younger brother and sister picked up French several years later. More to the point I also soaked up German culture, German ways of thinking.

I remember that in order to learn German more quickly, I would read Kasperle books. Kasperle was a character who got up to mischief and his escapades were recorded in stories. Later, I read Karl May who, although he didn’t visit the United States until he had grown rich and famous, wrote volume upon volume of Wild West stories based on a German who went there and was known as Old Shatterhand and was big friends with an Indian chief called Winnetou. (Karl May was in his way a quite extraordinary man, and his life and work is worth a blog entry of its own.) I doubt whether young Germans between the ages of seven and 13 read Karl May anymore, but for at least two generations he, his stories and his characters were an intricate part of their early lives. So what has this got to do with the OS, the ‘middle class’ and Gilbert and Sullivan.

Well here’s the thing (©Siobhan of Perfect Curve in TwentyTwelve and more recently W1A): when I arrived at the Oratory in early September 1963 (one of just two ‘new boys’ who hadn’t gone to prep school), I had no idea who Gilbert and Sullivan were. I had never heard of Father Brown, G K Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc (and an OS old boy), the Just So stories, Kim, Rudyard Kipling, Belloc’s Cautionary Tales and the rest, all an intricate part of the early years of a certain kind of middle class child (in our case Roman Catholic middle class boys) as Karl May was of that of a young German lad. And I felt totally out of it, and in a way have felt totally out of it ever since.

We – that is the others but not me – were expected to be totally au fait with the songs and lyrics of Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic operas. Snippets and lines would be thrown into conversation (as would snippets from other writers). I wasn’t. And I felt it keenly. I felt like a complete outsider. And because I felt it keenly, I rather took – I’m ashamed to admit – against many aspects of the kind of cultural references I was expected to understand but didn’t.

Then, more recently – far more recently – for this reason and that I have come to understand the writings of W.S. Gilbert more (Arthur Sullivan only provided the music, whereas Gilbert didn’t just write the libretto and lyrics, but took on direction, costume design and pretty much every other job involved in staging the comic operas.

Gilbert was a perfectionist: he had a vision of what he wanted and wanted to get it right. Ironically, and it is an irony which would not have been lost on Gilbert, the adoption of the comic operas he and Sullivan produced into the canon of British middle class life is, in a sense, completely opposed to what motivated Gilbert. Gilbert was a satirist, and in his lyrics he lampooned and sent up the attitudes he saw all around him. And as people don’t like being laughed at, especially the kind of self-important people Gilbert was laughing at, he sometimes got into trouble.

To this day I am unfamiliar with Gilbert and Sullivan’s works. I like their tunes, or at least the few I know, but to this day hearing someone rave about them and repeat how ‘marvellous they are’ immediately recalls my homesickness, unhappiness and feeling out of the loop, so much the German fish out of English waters of my early years at the Oratory.

I once heard some of Gilbert’s short stories read on Radio 4, and it was perhaps then that I realised there was rather more to him and his work than just being just another of the totems a certain kind of British middle class values. (I say ‘a certain kind of British middle class because, to be frank – and I have said so before – there is not one British middle class, but several and, more to the point, although they might get on quite well in public, in private, when amongst their own, they want nothing to do with the others. To say that often they dislike the other ‘middle classes’ intently would be no exaggeration. It is a peculiarly British failing, but one which must be acknowledged. Sorry, but there it is.)

The other night, a friend I drink with when I take a break in my trek homewards on a Wednesday night from civilized Kensington to the wilds of North Cornwall at the Brewers Arms, South Petherton, was trying to recall certain Gilbert and Sullivan lyrics. We – he, an avowed left-winger with a grudging admiration for the anti-EU rhetoric of Nigel Farage and UKIP, not an avowed left-winger (in fact, an avowed independent who dislikes ideologies of any stripe) and with no particular enthusiasm for Mr Farage and is gang of golf-playing gin-swiggers – were talking about education in Britain and the perpetual problem that one the one hand it seems obvious to encourage skills, particularly academic ability and on the other so many folk were in the past condemned to a life of drudgery because on one given afternoon they did not perform and failed their 11-plus.

These days, of course, we have comprehensive schools, and, in my view, a good thing they are, too. But further up the academic ladder, at what some called ‘tertiary education’ but what you and I know as ‘going to university and getting a degree’ the situation in Britain has, in our view, gone rather awry.

It was then Paul, for that is his name, tried to recall the lyrics of a certain song from Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Gondoliers. I published the lyrics of the whole song yesterday, but here are the relevant lines:

When every blessed thing you hold
Is made of silver, or of gold,
You long for simple pewter.
When you have nothing else to wear
But cloth of gold and satins rare,
For cloth of gold you cease to care
Up goes the price of shoddy.

The dilemma is, of course – and it is reflected in the dilemma at the heart of the debate as to whether private education is morally acceptable or not, in that it is generally believed that having a private education brings you certain advantages – can you really have too much of a ‘good thing’? I can already think of several points which could be made here, but I shan’t make them, for the sake of brevity. But let me repeat:

When you have nothing else to wear
But cloth of gold and satins rare,
For cloth of gold you cease to care
Up goes the price of shoddy.

As they say in those tawdry and, at the end of the day fundamentally trivial and thoroughly pointless debates they have on the late-night radio: think about it.

. . .

I mentioned in my last post that I was rather puzzled by the intense interest my post about the shaggin history of one Francois Hollande found and the amount of attention it received. So, always willing to live up to the motto of this ’ere blog (Ever Keen To Please – and not, as some suspect, No Joke Too Weak To Be Included) I have been frantically been googling ‘Hollande’, ‘shagging’ and ‘does he have a big willy’ for the past few minutes, but can come up with nothing about the man except that he recently re-shuffled his Cabinet, has appointed his old squeeze (and mother of his several children) Seglene Royale as his Minister for the Environment to that new Cabinet and held its first meeting. Well – and please don’t blame me – as excting news and inflammatory revelation goes that particular snippet is still-born, as in ‘who give a fuck’.

Various Radio 4 commentaries have heard these past few months all agree that France Is In The Shit and economically going to hell in a handcart rather faster than others – Angela Merkel, for one – would like. Hollande has had exactly zilch to say about the situation in the Ukraines, Egypt, Syria or North Cornwall. Not quite the statesman I’m sure he would like to be. The trouble with a blog such as this is that sooner or later you paint yourself into a corner.

. . .

Years ago I used to keep a ‘diary’. In fact, it was more than that. It was also what I later came to understand as a commonplace book, something in which you write down quotes you had come across and which you like and wanted to remember; or pieces of prose you wanted to record because they struck you at the time as particularly interesting, wise or otherwise memorable.

I say ‘at the time’ because what in the past I might once have thought ‘wise’ and an ‘insight’ almost always became, later one, once my skin began to sag and I began to prefer nights in to nights out, as pretty banal and obvious. That doesn’t mean, of course, that they were necessarily banal and obvious. What is obvious to an old fart might not at all be obvious to a young fart. It is always far to easy to write off our youthful idealism once we have become tired and resourceless.

The ‘diary’, which I shall now refer to as my diary (without the ‘ironic’ quote marks) was written in A4 hardback ledgers. I still have them, although I have never once bothered to read them. But that was also the point: not only have I never bothered to read them and never intended to read them, so absolutely no one else will read them. For why should they? But that complete privacy meant I could let my hair down and say and record things and thoughts I cannot do here. This is public.

This is read by at least three people I know, one of whom (my sister) who knows me well. Can I really dare to write things which are so personal or which might reflect on me in such as way that she would think badly of me? Of course not. Most people who happen across these scribblings have

Me (in a mellow mood)
no idea who I am and care even less. If some refer to this blog regularly, for whatever reason, they might have some kind of notion as to my character, but as none of use, at the end of the day, really knows anyone else in his or her entirety, surely that doesn’t matter. But it does.

But by going public and using Google’s blogger facilities and posting these scribblings and ramblings online, I have chosen to go public and must thust edit myself. I could, of course, start another utterly anonymous blog, but what would be the point of posting online – for the attention of the world, or why else post online – what I want to keep quiet. Use an alias, I hear you say. Well, no. Why not? Because. It’s strikes me as too much of the cowards way out. Just as a traitor is never completely trusted by those he serves by his betrayals, so publishing anonymously strikes me as a no-no. Just a thought.

The reason I don’t go back to ‘writing a diary’ (it was written by hand) is simply that I find typing 10,000 times easier than writing. My and begins to hurt even after a few lines. So there you have it: you get the story, but not the full story.

Discuss.

The Price Of Shoddy (with a rather long preamble on why I never quite got the ‘middle class’ thing, and even then I don’t actually yet get to the point. More, as they say, follows). And then there’s the mystery of Ukrainian interest in one Francois Hollande’s sex life

I can’t deny that I have been ‘middle class’ all my life, although I can think of some who wish I weren’t and that I would disappear without trace and stop embarrassing them and the rest of their tribe. But I can insist, in all honesty, that I regard ‘what class someone belongs to’ - a perennial preoccupation, not to say an utterly bizarre hang-up, of the Brits from the dawn of time and until the world ends - as important in the grand scheme of things as whether they stir their tea clockwise or anti-clockwise.

What I can’t deny is that my younger self, my younger far more insecure self, a self who wanted to fit in, was, at times, greatly uncomfortable that all too often he didn’t fit in. Now I really don’t give a shit (believe me, in fact, I often make a virtue of it), but it was not always like that.


At nine, at the beginning of June in 1959 this little British kid - British because his father was English - was whisked away with his older brother, and his younger sister and brother to live in Berlin, where their father had been appointed the BBC’s representative. (Quite why the BBC needed a representative in Berlin at the time when it also had a correspondent, one Charles Wheeler and quite how much my father’s work dictated by the needs and demands of Her Majesty’s security services is for another blog entry.)

We - my mother was part of the party - were met at Templehof airport by my father, and there exists somewhere are rather touching photo of the six of us walking throught the arrivals hall, taken, I should imagine, by some photographer of other who made his living taking pictures of groups such as our in the hope that we would be a copy or two of his picture. I can’t think where it is, but suspect my sister might have it. (Please advise me on this, Marianne.)

My father took his newly arrived family to the flat the BBC had rented for us in the Olympischer Straße, in Berlin-Charlottenburg, that was just opposite the ‘minor’ exit of the Neu-Westend U-Bahn station. We lived there for a few months before we moved to a house on the Heerstraße (no 115). We arrived at the beginning of June and as the German term didn’t end until several weeks later, I was enrolled at Die Steubenschule down the road, a German Grundschule (primary school) after I had attended just one day at an English school set up for Army and diplomats’ children and didn’t like it.

A few months later, we moved from the flat to a house in the Heerstraße (number 115), where we lived for the next four years. In April 1960 I was enrolled in the Jesuit Das Canisius Kolleg in Berlin-Tiergarten where my older brother had been since the year before. But this entry is not about Berlin, me or my family’s time there. I only mention Berlin because when four years later my father went back to work in London and we all move back to Henley-on-Thames, I was to all intent and purposes a young German lad who happened to speak English without an accent.

As (as I believe) the years of our late childhood and early adolescence have a particularly important bearing on our psychological make-up, I believe those four years in Berlin from when I was nine and a half until I was 13 and a half have formed my personality ever since. And crucially, being a German lad, and the Germans, whatever else their faults and hang-ups, being rather less - make that a lot less - concerned with bloody ‘class’ than the British cousins, I, too, had very vague notions, if any at all, about what ‘class’ was, and cared even less.

I did, however, like all children at that delicate age between outright childhood and the first squalls of puberty, want to fit in. The trouble was that I didn’t. I didn’t fit in in the slightest. From the relative innocence of live at my German Jesuit college, where the emphasis had been on what I now realise were the positives in life, I was enrolled at The Oratory School, where, if I remember, the emphasis, at least among us boys, was on rebellion, disruption, confusion.

The Oratory, which now likes to style itself, after a chance remark by its founder Cardinal John Newman, as ‘the Catholic Eton’, was in September 1963 when I washed up at its doors a rather down-at-heel place. As I was very, very unhappy there in my first term and ran away three times (although as my family lived just eight miles away in Henley, it wasn’t too difficult, so my comments should, perhaps, be viewed in that light.

At the time, the Sixties, there were, I think, six Roman Catholic boarding schools in England (and all of them public schools - I make the distinction because the two are not synonymous, and, anyway, if I don’t, I am liable to wake up in a few days time to find a dog turd pushed through my letterbox). They were Stoneyhurst, Ampleforth, Downside, Douai, Beaumont and The Oratory School. If I remember, the conventional wisdom was that you put your son down for Stoneyhurst, Ampleforth or Downside, and if they didn’t cut the mustard - that is they were too thick - they would be soaked up by the Oratory. How true or not that is I don’t know. But I do know that many boys at the Oratory had older brothers at the other three schools and were also meant to go there but, for some reason, didn’t.

Quite how Douai and Beaumont fitted into this picture I don’t know, but I do know that Beaumont closed in 1967 and Douai in 1999, but the Oratory didn’t just survive but is now thriving (and now purveying the ‘Catholic Eton’ bullshit). It was at the Oratory that I first came into contact with a certain kind of English middle class life, its values, its pretensions and hagiographies. And that is where Gilbert and Sullivan come in.

To be continued.

But, as a taster, what gave this entry impetus was a friend, a Wednesday night drinking companion at the Brewers Arms, South Petherton, Somerset, bring to my attention the lyrics of a song from The Gondoliers. We were talking about education in Britain, the most recent drive to make sure everyone - and that is everyone - has ‘a degree’ and the very odd way that the admirable drive to ensure no one is disadvantaged in Britain has developed in rather odd ways.

Here are the full lyrics, and below that the parts of them I find particularly telling. It is sung (I think, I’ve never seen the operetta):

DON ALHAMBRA
There lived a King, as I've been told,
In the wonder-working days of old,
When hearts were twice as good as gold,
And twenty times as mellow.
Good-temper triumphed in his face,
And in his heart he found a place
For all the erring human race
And every wretched fellow. 
When he had Rhenish wine to drink
It made him very sad to think
That some, at junket or at jink,
Must be content with toddy. 

MARCOS. and GIUSEPPE
With toddy, must be content with toddy.

DON ALHAMBRA
He wished all men as rich as he
(And he was rich as rich could be),
So to the top of every tree
Promoted everybody.

MARCOS. and GIUSEPPE
Now, that's the kind of King for me.
He wished all men as rich as he,
So to the top of every tree
Promoted everybody!

DON ALHAMBRA
Lord Chancellors were cheap as sprats,
And Bishops in their shovel hats
Were plentiful as tabby cats
In point of fact, too many.
Ambassadors cropped up like hay,
Prime Ministers and such as they
Grew like asparagus in May, 
And Dukes were three a penny.
On every side Field-Marshals gleamed,
Small beer were Lords-Lieutenant deemed,
With Admirals the ocean teemed
All round his wide dominions.

MARCOS and GIUSEPPE
All round his wide dominions.

DON ALHAMBRA
And Party Leaders you might meet
In twos and threes in every street
Maintaining, with no little heat,
Their various opinions.

MARCOS. and GIUSEPPE
Now that's a sight you couldn't beat
Two Party Leaders in each street
Maintaining, with no little heat,
Their various opinions.

DON ALHAMBRA
That King, although no one denies
His heart was of abnormal size,
Yet he'd have acted otherwise
If he had been acuter.
The end is easily foretold,
When every blessed thing you hold
Is made of silver, or of gold,
You long for simple pewter.
When you have nothing else to wear
But cloth of gold and satins rare,
For cloth of gold you cease to care
Up goes the price of shoddy.

MARCOS. and GIUSEPPE
Up goes the price of shoddy.

DON ALHAMBRA
In short, whoever you may be
To this conclusion you'll agree
When every one is somebodee,
Then no one's anybody!

MARCOS and GIUSEPPE
Now that's as plain as plain can be,
To this conclusion we agree.

ALL
When every one is somebodee,
Then no one's anybody!

. . .

I shall, as promised, carry on with the above an eventually link up Gilbert and Sullivan and this rather sad lad who was totally at sea in the English ‘middle class’ with all its arcane customs and tribal values. But before I leave you tonight I must, I really must ask: what is the fascination with Francois Hollande?

The statistics detailing who has been reading this blog, where they are based and what in particular has interested them show that this post has been attracting the most attention by far. But why? The man is something of a joke, will never be remembered as a great French president and his most notable distinction is having an over-active dick. But is that really enough to generate such interest, especially as, according to the interest, most of it is coming from the United States, the Ukraine and China.

A daughter’s future gets slowly underway, pub food and English salad, that curious M. Hollande and did Bin Laden have a case? Discuss (or simply kill innocents, whichever comes easiest)

No self-respecting blogger, or even a blogger like me, can resist posting an up-to-date, state-of-the-art, 24/7, no-holds barred, no stone unturned and no cliché ignored entry. So that is what I shall do now. The occasion is, I admit, of no great import: I am merely killing time. About two hours ago, my daughter and I arrived at the University of the West of England (the former Frenchay polytechnic and secretarial college, but UWE is apparently wha they like to call themselves) where she is due for interview for a place in its filing and office and tearound management course.

The world has moved on since I spent several years analyising Aristotle’s, Sartre’s, Kierkegaard and Heidigger and Jasper’s bowel movement and in modern Britain you are no longer allowd to apply for any job at all unless you have a university degree. Not that it makes our superstore checkout till persons (they are no longer all women and many of them aren’t even all woman – Lord, those were the days when you could buy two pounds of sugar and a pint of milk, then hurry home and have a wank) any more educated, whatever Labour had in mind when they introduced their ‘all working people must have a degree’ laws. It just means that the range of possible degrees, which once encompassed law, engineering, medicine, languages and ‘the arts’ has over these past 20 years been hugely expanded to include a remarkable number of imaginative degrees.

Would you believe you can now get a degree in ‘toyshop management’ (at the University of Tring), in ‘seaside tourism’ (at more or less all of our landbound universities most notably at the Unversity of Consett – a Commons select committee is investigating why our seaside universities aren’t interested in offering that option) and, for those of a more practical bent, shepherding? I didn’t, either, but, as I say the world has moved on since I used to visit my local supermarket several times a day and always use Jackie’s checkout till in Kings Heath.

I dropped off my daughter (hereafter referred to ‘my daughter’ to avoid confusion) and then head for the nearest coffee bar offering wifi to scout out possible lunch eating opportunities. Infortunately, this neck of the woods, Hambrook, nestling between the M4 and the M32, is pretty much a post-seventies built-up wasteland where gastro-pubs offering haunch of pheasant lightly sauteed in Grand Marnier and served on a bed of teriyake mushrooms in a raspberry jus are thin on the ground.

So I eventually washed up at the Crown Inn, which, for what it is, is fine. I had deep-fried brie in breadcrumbs followed by strips of chicken breast fried in garlic butter and potato wedges, coleslaw and ‘salad’. (It is always worth writing the word salad in inverted commas when describing and English ‘salad’ so as not to confuse foreigners from countries where food is taken a little more seriously and might think the ‘salad’ served is rather more than a few gratings of carrot, a slice of tomato, one and a half red

onion rings, two slices of cucumber and two lettuce leaves.) But I am being unfair: it was fine for what it was and I would have chosen Eton mess as a pudding if my daughter and I weren’t planning to visit a Pizza Express later tonight on the trip home to Cornwall.

. . .

More or less every morning – OK, every morning, I do two things: I check my emails (99.9pc of which are offers, deals, opportunities and bargains to be had and never personal messages from anyone) and look at the ‘statistics’ for this blog. These, as I have remarked before, are quite informative. And for at least the past month or so, the most visited entry by far has been what I had to say about M. Francois Hollande and his various shags. But I can’t think why he still arouses such interests. These days he is notable only for the low profile he is keeping and his complete silence on the ‘crisis in Crimea’.

The last time I saw a reference to him in a newspaper was a story – more a suggestion than a story – that he had jacked in his latest squeeze and was cosying up again to Segolene Royal, the mother of his four children and, if she has anything further to do with the twat, a total idiot to boot. Hollande’s silence is all the more remarkable because he has achieved the impossible: his approval ratings are in minus figures, and judging by the results of the first round of the French local and municipal elections, a great many of our cheese-eating cousins prefer Marianne Neo-Nazi of the Front National to any of the socialists and left parties.

Where the Front National stood, and they restricted themselves to only some of the cities and towns, mainly in the North, they did rather too well for the comfort of those who pride themselves on being intelligent (as in that weasel phrase ‘intelligent people like us’ – if anyone here has ever used the phrase with any degree of serious intent, you are officially banned from ever reading this blog again). Here in Britain, I think we, too, might be in for a surprise at our local elections: the usual wisdom is that at our upcoming council elections the Tories will see many of their traditional supporters desert them for UKIP (Motto: The gins are on me).

I suspect, based on chit-chat here and there, most recently last night in the Brewers Arms in South Petherton where I stop off on my way home, that many who have usually opted for voting Labour might well give UKIP a chance. Not that UKIP can, on the face of it, be directly compared to the Front National, but I do think that it has become a quiet refuge for some who could see themselves supporting our own British National Party if they didn’t think their neighbours would stop talking to them.

Me, I think, to use that Cameron quote (which he has since regretted, but which I still thinks holds true) that UKIP are largely ‘fruitcakes and looneys’. Or, to quote myself in my resignation letter of several years ago when I informed the vice-president of the North Cornwall Conservative Association that I would not be renewing my membership, as far as I am concerned the vast majority of UKIP supporters are just British National Party sympathisers in clean underwear. One of UKIP’s main gripes is ‘the number of immigrants coming to Britain: ironically, as the Economist established a few years ago in a survey, ‘concern’ about the number of immigrants is inexplicably higher where the proportion of immigrants is lowest. Odd that.
. . .

OK, I’ll come clean: my daughter is not vying for a much-coveted place on a course teaching file and tearound management, but wants to become a primary school teacher. I didn’t know this until I was dragooned into ferrying her around the country to various open days, that these days our universities don’t all offer a full range of courses, but choose to speicalise. And UWE, the University of South Wales, Oxford Brookes, Plymouth University and ‘Marjon’ in Plymouth, all to which she applied, heve departments specialising in teacher training.

Like me, my daughter likes children. Trouble is that what with all the paedophile scum who are now being flushed out of every cranny imaginable, you have to be very careful making such an admission. But I’ll make it any: I like children and think each and every one of them is a treasure to which nothing else comes close, and that they should be cherished and protected more than our own lives. And I would like to see far, far tougher penalties on what are colloquially known as ‘kiddy fiddlers’. Rant over.

. . .

Anyone reading his or her newspaper in these past few days, one which gives less prominence to what Kim Kardashian had for lunch yesterday and more to what is happening in the world, might have come across the astounding, though not at all unsurprising news under the circumstances, that 529 Egyptians, all supporters of the ousted Egyptian president Morsi, have been sentenced to death, all for the murder of ONE policeman.

Heard anything from your local democracy friendly Western government in condemnation and protest about it? No, nor have I. The mystery of why one Osama Bin Laden and many others came to hate the US and the West over the years and why their cause continues to gather support becomes less and less of a mystery as the years go by. There, I’ve said it.

A few nights ago I watched a very, very silly film called Zero Dark Thirty which portrayed – in a highly fictionalised form – the hunt for Bin Laden and his subsequent cold-blooded murder and that of members of his family

(I think ‘cold-blooded murder’ is a pretty good description).  I became so angry that I almost turned the film off after just a few minutes, but knowing I was going to write about it, watched it all. Quite apart from the fact that the film was facile in the nth degree, it seemed to accept the notion that torture is unacceptable as a rule, but acceptable if it is done in a ‘good cause’.

Actually, I shall save my outrage for another blog entry because I am already getting angry and that will only make what I write incoherent. A happy Rule Of Law to all my readers in the West.

A plague on all sides in this pointless, futile, utterly daft latest bout of East and West willy waving

Naturally I worked today – of course I did, they don’t pay me to sit around doing nothing - but I also found a time to read and contribute to the comments on the respective Daily Telegraph and Guardian news stories about the referendum in the Crimea and the Ukrainian crisis in general. And, unusually, if you read either website blind, you would be hard-pushed to know which was the Telegraph site and which the Guardian.

Even more unusually, contributors to both seem pretty much split down the middle either in support or against what Russia has done in the Crimea, it being an accepted truth that Russia is more or less pulling the strings. (Reading through the different sites, it would in time become a little more obvious that you are reading the Telegraph site rather than the Guardian’s because every so often some stupid herbert manages to take what is being discussed and bringing it around to the issue of whether or not Britain should leave the EU, ending is contribution – rant would sometimes be a better word – with an exhortation to all to Vote UKIP!!!.

But gin-soaked little Englanders notwithstanding, opinion is evenly divided on who is the Great Satan: Putin and Russia or Obama, the US and the EU. You pays your money and you takes your choice. Me, firmly believe a plague on both their houses. Taking sides on this one is a mug’s game, but our esteemed leaders, who are never above doing the stupid thing, have, of course, and in the interests of ‘democracy’, the ‘rule of law’ and the rest of the phoney hooey they are apt to trot out on such occasions plumped firmly on the side of – in my view – a gang of snarks and thugs no less unsavoury than the gang they were opposing in Maidan Square a few weeks ago.

As for ‘the other side’, I’m less inclined to pour scorn on them although, Putin, too, is not above playing fast and loose with the truth. It’s a bit rich of Vlad the Lad to complain that neo-nazis and fascists have taken over the government in Kiev, but Russia is no slouch in producing its own neo-nazi and fascist thugs and, it has to be said, in some numbers (as does Poland and Hungary, both members of the EU, which might well be a problem in the making. But here is not the time to discuss it).

I don’t doubt that Russians in the Crimea are overjoyed to be part of the motherland again, figures produced overnight showing that on a 123pc of voter turnout, 109pc who voted in the referendum plumped for re-unification should be enough to silence any mealy-mouthed gainsayers. It will also have been a comfort to the Crimean parliament which organised the referendum that as the two options the voters faced – ‘Do you want immediate re-unification with the Russian motherland?’ and ‘Do you want to wait until next week for reunification with the Russian motherland?’ – didn’t give any Ukrainian spoilsport the chance to say ‘Well, as it happens, no I don’t want Crimea reunified with the Russian motherland’ and spoil Putin’s parade. Loudmouths and wiseacres on the Telegraph and Guardian sites, of which naturally I was one, saying exactly what I am saying here, could all cite apparently overwhelming reasons why they were right and the others wrong (and in the case of the Telegraph why we should Vote UKIP!!!).

There were Russians staunchly defending reunification with the motherland, Ukrainians staunchly condemning it and one or two folk such as me staunchly advising caution, don’t get involved and don’t blame me if it all goes tits up. Will it go tits up? Does Putin now have his sights on taking over all of the Ukraine and then heading for the Baltic states before turning south and making for Czechoslovakia as some are seriously

suggesting? Will the West (for which, of course, read the US, some in the EU and the UK – voices from France, Italy, Spain, Ireland and the rest have been so quiet you could hear a pin drop) really risk damaging their exports by imposing real sanctions? Or will be see a blanket ban on the import of Russian nesting dolls and serious cuts on the import of Caspian Sea caviar, but little else? We’ve already had stern words and I fear they could yet get sterner – that should learn the Ruskies: never trust a man in a fur hat carrying a bottle of vodka.

As always, then, it’s all as clear as mud. If you want ‘international law’, you can have ‘international law’ until it is coming out of your arse. If you want ‘the people’s will’, ‘kinship’, ‘natural ties’, ‘democratic standards’, ‘serious reprisals’, ‘consequences’ and the rest, you can have those, too. For free. I’m one of those sneaky types that the West is on pretty shaky ground when it lectures other nations about the ‘international law’ and the rest: where, please tell me, were these hi’falutin notions when the US and the tagalong UK introduced ‘shock and awe’ to Iraq – around 136,000 innocents killed since 2003? Where in ‘international law’ is it laid down just how many drones you can send across the world to kill whoever you please as well as several hundred you didn’t actually meant to kill but, hey, these things happen?

All this might sound as though I am taking sides. I’m not. A plague on both their houses, I say. But it so happens I live in the West and whatever stupid ideas the leaders of ‘my side’ come up with might well have an impact on my life and, more importantly, my children’s lives. So a plague on both your houses is my position, admittedly not a useful one but at least, I hope and honest one.