A bleeding heart writes. But then why not? Please don’t be put off by the rather boring preamble about smartphones . . .

For the past week I have been ‘rationalising’ the household stock of mobile phones. That means I have been selling them. And if I am honest, by ‘household’, I mean ‘my’ stock of phones, or almost all my. There are a few - well three - phones which were used by my daughter, but the other 56 - oh, all right, the other 87 - are mine, picked up along the way I don’t know why, and any further analysis of the ‘why’ will only result in sheer embarrassment for me and you will undoubtedly lower your already low opinion from ‘pretty daft’ to ‘possibly certifiable’.

I always like to claim, quite truthfully, that in context the history of the acquisition of each phone makes perfect sense, and it does. The trouble is that recounting that history - as though anyone might be interested - would take at least ten minutes. I have a rule of thumb which runs along the lines of ‘if any explanation of any kind of unusual behaviour takes lasts for longer than 20 seconds, switch off, count the silver spoons, make your excuses and leave at your earliest’. If that is my rule of thumb, quite honestly I can’t blame anyone else for adopting it and, more pertinently, applying it to me. But given the sheer volume of ancient, old and old-fashioned mobiles cluttering up the various drawers in the house, I am have now started a selling campaign on eBay.

It all started when my son, living proof that the apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree, enlisted my help - he’s not daft, though in that respect the apple must have fallen a little further than is usual - to get him an iPhone. He had set his heart on an iPhone 5s. He now has a part-time job washing dishes at a local pub/restaurant and has slowly built up a nest egg.

The puzzle for me was that he had an iPad Mini, bought on the money he had saved from the weekly allowance I give him, but had somehow lost interest in it. He dropped it a while ago, and I organised getting it fixed - by, as it turned out, a set of cowboys in the City - and was generous enough to cough up half of the £140 it cost to put right. But those cowboys did a bad job, and over time the screen became unresponsive. And then he smashed it again.

I suggested that I could organise to get it fixed again, this time at a rather good Apple repair service called Apple Bay (in Mytchett, near Farnborough, a 70-mile round trip, but well worth the effort, and who did eventually do it for £120) but he wasn’t interested. So, being a dad who, like most other dads, thinks the sun shines out of his children’s arse and who gets a kick out of spoiling them, I bought the cracked-screen iPad Mini from him for £45 and got it repaired myself. (Subsequently, my wife paid my £140 for it and gave it to your daughter who has just started college 140 miles away, but that’s another story. And for those who aren’t as good at maths (US ‘math’) as they should be, I am still £25 out of pocket, although it is charmless of me to mention it.

So when, three weeks ago, my son enlisted my help in getting an iPhone I was puzzled. For one thing, he doesn’t make any phone calls. He had counted up the money he could spare and decided he could only afford an iPhone 5c and asked me would I mind getting one for him on eBay? He then handed over £300, which was almost all the money he has earned these past few months. Well, being the dad who thinks children - not just mine, by the way, but all children - were born to be spoiled rotten, I took the £300, but bid for and won an auction for a new iPhone 5s for £360, contributing the extra £60 myself.

Then came: Chapter Two - the bloody awful Sony Experia SP my daughter has on contract from O2. A few years ago, I stopped paying my daughter her weekly £10 allowance and agreed to take out a contract with O2. The first phone she had was a Blackberry. Then - and I can’t at all remember the details, she upgraded and got another Blackberry. Then she decided that she wanted a touchscreen smarthphone - ironically, as for a couple of years up to that point in which I had outlined the benefits of touchscreen phones . . .

But, dear reader, I have got to this point and not only is this entry becoming ineffably boring, but, more to the point, I am becoming ineffably bored writing it. So can we agree that it should end there? Please? If, of course, there is a groundswell of opinion that, having marched all you saps halfway up the hill, I am morally obliged to carry on marching you to the top, I shall gracefully conclude it. But until then . . .

 . . .

I was watching Channel Four News earlier tonight and, as usual, the news was all dire. And the direst piece of news was just how fast the ebola virus outbreak is spreading. So I watched avidly, ‘feeling bad’ for all those poor folk living in shanty towns in Sierra Leone and Liberia exposed to the virus, but then, again not for the first time, I felt like a complete fraud.

Do my 320 seconds of ‘empathy’ really do the slightest bit of good? Does it change anything in the slightest? Of course, it doesn’t. For having ‘empathised’, this chap, the kind of chap who can, apparently without second thought, ‘spoil’ his kids and help buy them smartphones they really do not need, will metaphorically shed a tear for those ‘less well off’, then forget about them entirely and absolutely and spend a great deal more time worrying about his own sorry self until the next time he watches or hears some other heart-rending report when the ‘empathy’ will kick in again for a minute or two.

I don’t for a minute doubt that the lives of those folk in Sierra Leone and Liberia, and in the shanty towns of South Africa and Brazil, or in rural China and even in the sink estates of Britain aren’t always utterly miserable. I don’t doubt that for an hour or two, maybe even longer, when they are together with friends and family, they laugh and joke and do not perpetually reflect on what a poor hand life has dealt them.

For one thing humankind adapts to everything. So what if you have raw sewage running down the middle of the lane outside the shanty house you occupy in your shanty town; so what if, as a women, you yet again put up with being screwed by

Not posed by models. At least they are young enough not to know the shit that faces them later in life
your man even if you don’t feel like it because it’s simply the easier thing to do even though you might risk getting pregnant again or contracting Aids? So what if supper tonight is the same old boring bowl of boiled maize you have eaten for the past 20 years? A joke with a friend, a chat, can help you forget it for a minute or two.
But, face it, we who imagine we can insure ourselves against almost everything except death and know all about ‘our rights’ are a million times better off however sorry we feel for ourselves. A little earlier today I came across this on the BBC website.

I have no idea of the lives of those reading this (and I noticed a great deal of interest in this blog from folk in Ukraine, who have troubles of their own), but I doubt whether anyone obliged to work in that silver mine in Bolivia for eight hours from 2am on, before walking off to school in the vague hope that an education will get them out of the hell their lives have become, has the leisure to fire up that computer, connect to the net then visit this bloody blog to see what crap Patrick Powell is coming out with today. Read the piece I have linked to if you don’t understand what I am saying.

So where is this all leading to? I don’t know. But I can say that for a guy almost universally assumed to be ‘conservative’ politically I don’t half feel like throwing a few bombs sometimes.

At college I was, at least in the early days, regarded as the typical ‘public school’ boy who didn’t know shit from sausages. For example, I distinctly remember how, a week or two into the first term of my first year when we were all getting to know each other and hadn’t yet formed our circle of friends, a gang of us went down to the students’ union bar one lunchtime for a drink.

Now, at 18 I wasn’t a big drinker at all, and having tried one pint of Scottish ‘heavy’, I most certainly knew I didn’t want to try another. So there we were, five, six of us and the question went around ‘what are you having?’ And I replied ‘a schooner of sherry, please’. That will have marked my card for a month or two. Throughout my college days, all four years as it was an honours degree course (though in the event I only landed an ordinary, and that was a stroke of luck) I was regarded by ‘the Left’ as ‘on the right’ and by ‘the Right’ as ‘on the left’.

Actually, I was neither. I didn’t have one political thought in my head. But I did, even then, have a heart. And my heart told me, even then, though I would have been greatly troubled to articulate it, that the world is unfairly stacked. And nothing I have heard, seen, eaten, drunk or screwed since then will persuade me otherwise.

There, dear reader, I shall leave you, for either I do that or I go on for another 3,00o words, but it is late and I am in danger of becoming inarticulate as I have just polished off a bottle of wine - I wonder how many folk in Freetown and Monrovia have been able to polish off a bottle of wine tonight in the certain expectation that they can, switch off the light and go upstairs to a comfortable bed of clean cotton and that when they, perhaps, get up in a few hours’ time to have a slash, they can flush it away with water 1,000 times purer than they are obliged to drink?

Rest assured at my age - I joke about being 97, but the truth is that I shall be 65 on November 21 - I know it’s ‘not all that simple’. I know that a bomb thrown here, a pamphlet printed there does very little to ameliorate the lives of several billion people. But there are times, increasingly many as I grow older, when I wish I did know what I might, practically, be able to do to improve this shitty world. I am really no longer content with ‘empathising’ for a minute or two once or twice a week.

A few more piccies in case you think I’m talking through my arse:

 

 

 

Again, not a model in sight. This chap is pushing a wheelbarrow through shit for real

Ukip go for the Labour voters’ heart and we might well be in for interesting times. And to make things a little more interesting here’s a pin-up of mine, Gemma Arterton. Then there’s my abortive attempt to introduce you to the music of Reggie Washington but those bastards from Islamic State have nixed it (though quite how I don’t know)

Well, someone’s got a brain in Britain’s Ukip, and the party’s supporters must hope it isn’t just Nigel ‘No, no, no, let me speak’ Farage. The accepted wisdom is that because of the party’s obsession with showing those stinking foreigners that Johnny Bull wants to sup his ale and eat his pie when he wants, thank you very much it is Conservative parliamentary seats it has in its sight has taken — well, the only way to put it is a lurch to the left. It now says that all folk on benefits and all those being paid the minimum wage will not pay a penny in income tax if it came to power, and that will, I assume — as must Ukip — mainly attract those usually thought to vote Labour.

Certainly various interviews with ‘the man in the street’ suggest it is quite a smart move. I was, for example, very taken aback to hear one young man tell us that he used to vote Labour, but switched to the Greens, but might now perhaps vote Ukip. He could well have been a Ukip plant. And if he was genuine in his support for the Greens, it cannot have been that strong if he now feels like switching to Ukip, a party that might possibly be viewed as on the opposite extreme to the Green Party. But his conversion to Ukip might well resonate with some who privately would like to follow suit, but don’t know how well it will go down with their mates. If, however, they discover your mates feel the same way, coming out as a Ukip supporter will not be at all difficult. So Labour might well have to look out.

Actually, no one in his or her right mind, and most certainly not a capable politico like Farage, expects Ukip to gain a majority of seats and be ‘asked by the Queen’ (who, no doubt, would to it through very gritted teeth) to form her government. But — and what with Ukip’s new strategy of appealing to the left as well as the right it is not at all so fanciful — if Ukip gained a sufficient number of seats to hold the balance of power?

Don’t Lib Dems already do that? Well, yes, they did at the last election, but could Ukip, perhaps, replace the Lib Dems as ‘the third party’. Could happen. As for how to pay for its promised magniminity for those at the bottom of the pile — and it has to be said that the only interest Ukip has in them is their votes — it’s simple, see, or at least according to Farage: Britain pays billions to the Johnny Foreigners who run Europe, so when Britain is no longer a part of the EU, the billions we save on our annual contributions will make up for the dosh we lose in income tax.

So far, so Dick and Dora. If, as Ukip hopes, the party gains a sufficient number of seats to ‘hold the balance of power’ the quid pro quo will be that you - whoever ‘you’ are - must agree when in government to take Britain out of the EU. That, I suspect, is where it will all come unstuck. For both the Tories and Labour will know that the following is bound to happen: they say ‘no’, we don’t agree that we will necessarily leave the EU (both Labour and the Tories want there to be some kind of EU reform first before it will decided whether to stay in or not), Ukip says ‘right we won’t support your bid to form the government’, so after a month or three or minority government an election will follow and Ukip will do rather less well, with one or the other party doing rather better and perhaps scraping through to be able to form a government.

As for Ukip itself, well, I’m still very underwhelmed. Farage (pictured) has a useful brain and the gift of the gab. But so far, with one exception, every last Ukip spokesman I’ve heard on either the radio or TV, as been an inarticulate fool. To

underline the point, I can’t even remember the name of the chap who didn’t do badly. (I saw him on Newsnight, if that helps.) I don’t doubt that among the bunch who will stand for election - and the Tory MP Mark Reckless tonight announced he will be joining Ukip, although he hasn’t yet resigned his seat (Later: he has now), but he is the second Tory MP - Douglas Carswell was the first - to jump ship - there are some bright ones, some daft ones, some admirable folk and some downright sinister folk, exactly, in fact, the gathering you would get if you looked at a gathering of people at random. But still I remain unconvinced. In Germany, AfD, the party rather loosely described here in Britain as ‘Germany’s Ukip’, is doing well. In three recent state elections it has gained between 10 and 12pc of the vote and will have an influence in how those states operate.

It has to be said that there seems to be a growing groundswell of support for AfD. But they are not ‘Germany’s Ukip’. They are in one essential respect very different. Afd doesn’t want Germany to leave the EU, but it does want Germany to leave the euro and to stop shoring up what it - and I - regard as a dog’s dinner of a monetary arrangement. But it doesn’t want to leave the EU. Ukip does. As for the future Angela Merkel, Germany’s Chancellor is in no immediate danger from AfD. The last national elections were held last year and the next are not due for several years. And a lot can happen in several years.

What with Afd’s success locally, and the results from the last EU elections in May when, on an admittedly abysmally small turnout, anti-EU parties gained a number of seats, we’re in for interesting times. Which, of course, pace the Chinese, we don’t want. What we really want is boring, uninteresting times. Some hope.

Later: Here’s another piccy of Farage. Quite why his left arm is so big (see below) compared to the rest of his body I really have no idea. But I was so struck by the the pic when I came across it a few minutes ago, my one thought was to share it with you. After all just how many times do you see a blog featuring pictures of politicians with unusuallu big arms? Never, I suspect. Could well be a first, not only for this blog, but for blogging in general! (The guy shaking his hand has just sold him a timeshare in Frinton. It’s the kind of thing Ukip supporters go for. Bugger Tuscany. Perhaps that is why Farage is so cheery.)

. . .

Then, of course, there’s Gemma Arterton (picture below) who, I should point out has nothing to do with Ukip (as far as I know). I have only seen her in two films, a St Trinians film and one of the recent James Bond films. And boy is she gorgeous. I mention her because I am just watching the iPlayer rerun of Graham Norton (of

whom more later - he is, in my book - the very acceptable face of talk shows. Usually they are crap. Graham Norton manages to redeem them and then some. I think it’s because he has a very good sense of humour and doesn’t seem to take himself, or anyone else, seriously. But back to Gemma. Digging up the picture (above), it is obvious from the many others I found that she has many faces, and that a good make-up artist does her proud. But our Gemma also has, in my book at least, natural good looks, and I thing she is gorgeous. At my age she wouldn’t take a second look which is more the pity.

Naturally, it is horses for courses as far as ‘she’s gorgeous’ is concerned. But Gemma gets my vote every time. And if she is as natural as she was on the Graham Norton show, she is also rather a pleasant character. And that plus looks and talent means she won’t, I hope, go far wrong. (Take a look in the right eye, left as far as we are concerned: she’s no one’s fool. And that adds to her attraction.

. . .

Years ago the way to hear new music, to discover new music, would be to listen to stuff at friends’ places you hadn’t heard. But over the years, what with one thing and another, friends getting married, friends’ wives starting to rule the roost and children arriving, so that friends’ wives would make plain that it wasn’t going to be a late night again you got to hear less and less new music (and for the sub/copy editors a little joke: you got to hear fewer and fewer new artists). What ‘new’ stuff you did hear was invariably middle-of-the-road bollocks which didn’t interest you at all and what got you labelled with the tag ‘he is really desperate to be different’. No, he wasn’t, he just wanted to hear interesting music, different music, not the same old shite re-recorded by the same old farts. (It is pehaps obvious that I have been a tad revealing in that last bit.)

One of the musicians I’ve discovered ever since friends got jobs, moved away, got married, had children and I was banned from the house after 8pm was Dave Fiuczinski, of whom I have written before. Today, by way of interest, I looked up two of the musicians he played with and came up with drummer Gene Lake and bassist Reggie Washington. Then, as one does, I looked up, on Spotify, music played by the two and found a CD called A Lot Of Love, Live! It’s not a great name, granted, and musicians, especially jazz musicians for whom the music is the thing tend to come up with rather naff names. But what the hell.

I’ve said — I, who attempts to play guitar — that Dave Fiuczynski plays the kind of guitar I would play if I were good enough. Oddly enough, I’ve always been attracted to bass guitar (and have bought one which I very occasionally play. Similarly, if I played bass guitar more seriously, the way Reggie Washington plays is the kind of music I would like to play. So here’s a track. It’s called Reuben 2 Train. Why? Who cares. As I said above naming the pieces they play is not a jazz musician’s first priority, and possibly only his/her last because somewhere down the line someone is insisting.

NB I was hoping to give you the chance to listen to a track by Reggie Washington (not, of course, to be mistaken for either Ronnie Seattle or Roy Chicago) but sodding technology being what it is and what works on a Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday doesn’t, for whatever, bloody reason, work on a Wednesday. Me, I blame Islamic State and all their fucking ostentatious piety. (‘What, us, inhuman? Us? We believe in Allah, matey! And Allah wouldn’t want us to behead people on You Tube just for the sake of grabbing power and making millions by selling oil on the black market. Infidel! Watch it, sunshine, you’re next. We might be devastating Northern Iraq and Eastern Syria at the moment but don’t think bloody North Cornwall is safe! Bastard! Taking the piss out of us! Cunt!’)

Another poem.Then there’s the baffling fuck-up in the making in the Middle East: what is going on?

I wrote the other day about how poetry passes me by, and then added a poem. Well, here’s another.

It’s that itch to write again, to blather on
about it matters not what, to till the word
that comes before it comes until it comes,
then hasten on with no regrets, no backward glance,
no pride, no superficial care, just on and on and on,
a notion here, a joke there, a seeming wisdom
here and there and here again,
and there, then on and on
(and what is this irritating odd and wasteful pause?)

To pass the moment, kill the moment
until the moment’s gone as none,
with not a thought, not one,
for who might already be bewildered
by this rush of nothing,
absolutely nothing, but words, words
rush, rush, rush, words, words,
nothing but sound and nonsense.
Then on, on, on again and on until I die.

. . .

Look, chaps and chappesses, buy the bloody book, I need more cigars. And, yes, the novel is better than you might assume, and the cigars are, too, mild, but very satisfying, just the kind of thing to help you relax in a quiet corner while you ponder upon other ways to persuade the world to buy the bloody book. I’m no artist, you know, I work for money.

. . .

As I blather the West seems to be on the brink of another disaster. Here in Old Blighty or members of parliament have been recalled to debate whether the government should allow Britain to join the air campaign to bomb the fuck out of Isis (or IS or Isil or whatever we are supposed to be calling them). The modish watchword is - given the fuck-ups that Iraq and more recently Afghanistan were - ‘no “boots on the ground” ’, by which we mean no troops will be involved.

Well, fair enough. But the second proviso, that we should only stick to killing those fighting for IS (etc - see above) if they are in Iraq (whose government has invited us to do the killing) but should steer well clear of any action in Syria seems to me so daft I can’t even think of a dismissive joke. But aren’t the Yanks already bombing IS in Syria (and being quietly applauded for doing so by the Assad regime because we are getting rid of their enemies)?

Yes, I’m fully aware of the political niceties of it all, that, officially, Assad and his henchmen is still a bastard and the rest. But were anyone to set out to create a situation of such nonsensical delusion, they would struggle to create what is actually happening. I thought the power struggle in the Middle East was broadly based on a tussle between Saudi Arabia - Sunni - and Iran - Shi’ite? And because Assad is officially still that bastard Assad, the West in its wisdom - and I do use the word as loosely as possible - has decline to work with him (though I suspect there is a lot more going on behind the scenes).

But why do we hate Assad so much if we are perfectly happy to pal up with Egypt’s Sisi and his gang of henchmen? And whose coup d’etat ousting a democratically elected presidnet was somehow an acceptable coup d’etat because, not putting to fine a point, we didn’t really like the cut of the jib of the chap Sisi ousted.

As we are on the subject of cuts of jibs, surely to goodness Morsi - for he is the guy Sisi toppled - has a far more acceptable jib than the cutthroats from IS? Or am I missing something? Morsi, I gather, was an inept chap who rather hoped to make Egypt more Islamic. He didn’t lock people up, he didn’t torture folk, and he most certainly didn’t execut those he didn’t take a shine to.

But then I don’t get poetry, so how the hell am I supposed to make head or tail of the tooing and froing of my political betters? And it is well beyond my bedtime. And the two or three small glasses of Rioja I was going to drink have, once again, become the whole bloody bottle. Hick!

Poetry: what is it? Buggered if I know. Then there is a sad, sad tale: my comments on the Scottish referendum are lost forever. And a cheap solution to an eternally pressing problem

For a man of my pretensions, it is hugely embarrassing to admit that ‘poetry’, or at least, modern poetry, not only passes me by, but leaves me pretty much stone-cold. It is to me a closed book, and going on what I hear on the radio not one I exactly want to open at any time soon.

Admittedly, I haven’t read that much poetry. In fact, even that apparently candid admission rather overstates the case. I have, actually, read very, very, very little. Of what I have read, I am more attracted to the ‘verse’ of, for example, Shakespeare, the Metaphysical Poets, Alexander Pope and one or two other, all those who wrote several centuries ago who knew what to do with rhythm and metre more than some of the stuff I’ve heard on the radio. But this is a difficult topic and I am I really danger of making myself look very ridiculous. And even what I have just written might give the impression that I am just being modest. I’m not. I’m just very badly read.

Of more modern poetry, what I have heard by Dylan Thomas I like very much. But then Dylan was fascinated by words, their sound and their import. Then there were the poems I have come across - more or less by chance, which is a shaming admission for a chap who ‘read’ English at university - by Philip Larkin and several others. A few years ago I bought a volume of poems by Seamus Heaney and got a slight inkling of what poetry just might be. But still it passed and passes me by.

But what about the ‘Great War Poets, Ted Hughes, and various other names with which I am so familiar and can’t remember one? Well, I’m sorry to say they, too, just pass me by, especially Ted Hughes. I hear them, am told the are ‘good’, and then quietly wonder exactly why they are good as opposed to ordinary. Dear reader, I don’t have a clue.

Then there’s the recent, as in the past 30 years, tendency to accept that a ‘poem’ is ‘good’ if the ‘poet’ is speaking from the heart. End of story. Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. All too often is strikes me as nothing but ineffably trite sentiment written in prose, then chopped up into lines and verses. The trouble is that we can no longer say so.

These days we are supposed to genuflect before such work merely because it is ‘personal’. For some very, very odd reason a ‘poem’ is supposed to be special, and we are somehow expected to revere a ‘poem’ because it is someone ‘baring their soul’. Well, crap on me, sunshine. Not in my neck of the woods. I’ll give everyone - everyone - the respect and space they deserve, but I’m not about to bullshit myself for the sake of ‘form’. Come one, poems aren’t ‘special’ just because they are ‘poems’ however much the folk on radio want to tell you they are. And almost always the ‘modern’ poetry I hear is nothing but horribly trite shite.

However, all that notwithstanding, I have thought and wondered about ‘poetry’ quite a bit and decided that what attracts me is the sound of it. When I hear ‘poems’ read, it always seems to be in a pseudo reverential tone. (Incidentally, actors, who are nothing more than paid hands hired to read something, always make a far better fist of reading a poem than the bloody poet themselves, who read it in an irritating monotone and don’t for a moment seem to understand their own work.)

It’s as though the ‘poetry’ which does attract me is more that which gets closer to music and is less of the ‘me, me, me’ which so pisses me off. Face it: there are now several billions ‘me’s in the world and each of them is interested in the one ‘me’ - themselves - and not in you. At the heart of it your ‘me’ can get to fuck because it rather crowds the ground for my ‘me’. So as far as I can see making poetry more attractive to the majority by emphasising its musical qualities seems, to me at least, a way forward.

Below is my first - as in most recent since the days when I was a callow 19-year-old fuckwit - poem. Driving home from London on a Wednesday night after supping, usually, two and a half pints of cider, I have come to wonder whether I, too, my not try my hand at this ‘ere poetry lark. But it is most certainly about me (although, in a sense, it is in that it describes my bias).

To be honest I have no idea
what poetry might be
 unless good music plays its part.

And those of us who know that rhythm,
rhythmic excellence,
the omega and alpha of all
that sound might hold,
feel and sense that meaning
is but nothing
but the trite and boring
subterfuge lesser muses,
(keen to hold their own)
enrol to tarn their modesty,
and lose for it all love, respect and interest.

By all means tell me all your secrets,
and by all means join in the noise
and banality of life.

But don’t, don’t ever, don’t,
don’t ever try to persuade me
that they are any more vital and important than
the noise and banality of the secrets
of one, ten, twenty billion other souls
with whom you share this world.

But by all means try.

. . .

Before posting the above I spent about an hour writing an entry about yesterday’s independence referendum in Scotland. But, in all the technical shenanigans of posting these entries I bloody deleted it all. It is now unrecoverable. So: either breathe again or reflect that several pearls of wisdom have been lost forever, because I really can’t be arsed re-writing it. I might be at some point in the future, but don’t hold your breath.

. . .

One last thing: I have now got to the age where I can’t even fart without wearing a pair of reading glasses, and there’s the rub. I could go to an optician and be tested for a bespoke pair. Or I can, and have been, buying two for £2.50 at Asda.

Actually, because I keep losing them I have been buying many pairs, and keep at least one pair everywhere - in the car, in each of my jackets, in my computer bag, in my other computer bag, upstairs in our bedroom, downstairs in the kitchen, in the living room next to the computer, everywhere, in fact, where fate and my life might take me. It is a simple solution to a bloody irritating problem: where are my reading glasses? Doesn’t matter, cos there’s another pair here.

The good news is that Tesco, who are going downhill fast have been up to all kinds of tricks to get the punters back through their doors. And one of those is to offer selected items at just £1. So the other day I bought a bottle of HP Sauce, usual price £19.99, for just £1, ditto a jar of Hellman’s Mayonnaise and, joy of joys, three pairs of reading glasses, again at just £1 each. I thought I’d share that with you.

The taxman, as always, cometh (though, I notice, dragging his knuckles along the ground). Trouble is I don’t have the dosh to buy Dave Hartnett a spiffing lunch*

OK, so I might be going on 92 - oh, all right then, 103 - but I still cross my fingers that I have not yet become one of those irritating jeremiahs who blight all our lives and have done so since Adam and Eve first bonked.

For the record, I don’t think the world is now going to Hell in a handcart and haven’t done so since I was 14. I think, most probably, it always has been going to Hell in a handcart since man first crawled out of the primordial swamp and invented television. Nor do I think there was ever a golden age of anything (except

perhaps a Golden Age of Golden Ages - golden ages just aren’t what they used to be. Which doesn’t actually make sense, but it is well past 6.30am and I’ve been up for several hours.) I’m always accused of having a loud laugh, and I do laugh quite a bit, mainly because I am alive. And I laughed again very loudly this morning courtesy of the office of Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, more commonly known as ‘the taxman’.

The ‘taxman’ (and the ‘taxwoman’, of course) doesn’t enjoy much of a reputation in Britain these days, or rather its reputation which was already very low - no one likes paying taxes - has sunk a good deal lower over these past few years.

Given that every single vast and wealthy corporation - for example Vodafone, eBay, PayPal, Google, Starbucks and all manner of outfits with really dodgy names to fit really dodgy business practices - can afford to hire clever tax accountants and run rings around the taxman several times before breakfast, the taxman is in a perpetual bad mood. It doesn’t help that anyone with any nous who works for the taxman very soon ups sticks once he or she knows enough about the workings of HMRC, goes freelance and starts earning ten times the pitiful wage paid by HMRC by helping those vast corporations keeping their tax liability to a bare minimum.

That means that there is a steady flow of the very good brains leaving HMRC and, not to put too fine a point, those who stay have a great deal less nous. And they are the ones you and I - or you and I here in Old Blighty - are obliged to deal with when we contact the taxman.

The ruses the good brains who jump ship to assist the wealthy corporations come up with are beautifully simple. For example, the BBC reported in October 2012 that eBay paid just £1.2 million in tax on UK business of £800 million (for the thickos out there, that’s just £200 million short of £1 billion). The same report claims that Starbucks paid just £8.6 million in corporation tax over 14 years. The kind of ploy they use is, for example, to set up wholly owned, but autonomous, companies with which they do business and can thus write off various ‘business expenses’.

For example, I understand that Starbucks rents all its coffee mugs from Starbucks Coffee Mugs Gmbh which is based in Lichtenstein. The tables in its empire of stores are all leased from Starbucks Tables Gmbh of Vaduz. And so on, and every transaction is a tax write-off. It’s all perfectly legal, I am bound to acknowledge, but from where I sit these ruses and ploys are as close to con tricks as it is possible for me to claim they are without getting some lawyer up my arse serving me a writ for tortuous malfeasance and libellous promalgamation under the Let’s Nail All Smartase Bloggers Acts of 1991, 1993 and 2007.

Naturally, HMRC is very put out that it it obliged to start every week of the year holding its dick and looking like a prize prune. And equally as naturally it seeks out every way to get revenge. But as the numbskulls which staff the agency know they can’t lay a finger on the real culprits, week in week out they come down very heavily on what socialists like to call the ‘little man’. And HMRC isn’t above coming up with would-be smart ruses of its own.

Knowing that daily several billion pounds are slipping through its fingers, it most recently announced that, in order to claw back some of that cash, it has granted itself powers to dip into each and every bank account in the land to claim tax it think it might be owed, all without our say-so. Obviously that has led to an enormous row, but to date the British government has done nothing to stop the practice except to get awfully huffy about it, officially declare that ‘look, it isn’t on’ and set up various parliamentary committees to look into the possibility of writing to HMRC to tell it in no uncertain terms that ‘look, it isn’t on.’ ‘He’s making it up’ I hear you declare. Well, no he isn’t: take a look at this BBC report.

. . .

My encounter with HMRC this morning which had me laughing out loud and reflecting for the umpteenth time this week that the world is indeed totally bonkers came about thus.

At the ripe old age of 122 I have become rather better at managing my money than I ever was when I was younger. I learned the hard way. So now I pay several of my bills upfront: as soon as my wage hits my bank account, a substantial portion of it goes off to the electricity company, the water company, the folks we buy our oil from and HMRC.

This means that when the bills eventually arrive they are - depending upon the time of year - often already paid. And once I have paid upfront I can happily live on my overdraft limit without the fear of getting yet another bill which will push me beyond what I and my several banks have agreed is my overdraft limit. Because cross that ‘agreed overdraft’ line and they really hammer you. (Oh, and I have several banks accounts because that is the only way this financial ingenue can keep an overview of what is going on. One for car-related expenses, one for utility-related expenses and the last for spending money.

It also means that if one is getting horribly close to going over the top, I can top it up from another. And let me stress I don’t regard myself as clever. I do it this way because, in all honesty, I regard myself as rather stupid.)

Years ago, I bought a very modest house in Birmingham. I only lived there for four years before life took me elsewhere, but I kept it on and eventually paid off the mortgage. It is now rented out and the meagre rent - it hasn’t gone up in 24 years because the house is so modest, anything higher than what the agent thinks I can charge would mean I wouldn’t get any tenants at all. I don’t mind giving figures: after the agent has taken his cut, I receive £377 a month, which works out at £87 a week.

Lucky sod, you might think, but in fact that just about covers my petrol bill for getting to London and back from Cornwall every week. So not such a lucky sod, really. And because I like to sleep at nights and in the past have always come unstuck whenever I tried to pull a fast one, I declare that rental income to the taxman every year.

Then there’s the dosh I make a month from my sideline of placing the puzzles on the quiz pages of the paper I work for. I have done that for more than four years now and it has helped pay the bills. But I am not paid an enormous sum for doing the work, and I also declare that income. The tax I owe for both income streams comes to just under £2,500. But I have got into the habit of paying upfront so I am not embarrassed by a tax bill I can’t pay.

In fact, I pay more upfront than I need to so that I am always in credit. It’s a form of saving, and not such a daft one when currently the interest paid on savings is around 0.5pc - if you are lucky - while inflation is around 2pc. So I am building up, slowly, a small surplus which might come in handy if I faced with a very unexpected bill.

To add a little more context, I am not a big spender and have only twice paid more than £800 for a car. And I only did that on those two occasions because I was nagged into doing so (by you know who).

When I got home last night and looked through my post, I was very surprised to find a letter from HMRC. I shall give some it verbatim. It was dated 10 September, 2014:

Dear Mr Powell,

 Thank you for your repayment claim dated 8 August and the 2014 self assessment tax return.

I cannot make a repayment now because you are making regular monthly payments to your Self Assessment account. So that I can deal with your claim, you will need to stop your payments. You can do this by:

• going to our website at hmrc.gov.uk if you have registered to use our online services
• phoning our Payment Helpline on 0300 200 3822
• contacting your bank.

Once you have stopped your regular payments and your last one has cleared, I will be able to deal with your repayment claim. You can restart your regular payments again one your have received your repayment.

Yours sincerely,
M E Parker,
Assistant officer.

I was baffled. I was thoroughly baffled. I was completely and utterly baffled because I had made no such claim. And as no letter from the taxman is ever good news, I rang HMRC the first thing this morning to find out what the bloody hell was going on.

Why, I asked, were they thanking me for making a repayment claim when I hadn’t made any such claim? 

Because, the dimwit I spoke to at HMRC replied, that’s how our letters are written.

But it doesn’t make sense, I said. I haven’t made any such claim.

But, she repeated, that’s how our letters are written.

But why, I asked, why do you write them like that?

Because we do, she replied, implying that I was being completely unreasonable.

Well, you should rewrite them, I told her.

We can’t afford to, she replied. Nonsense, I told her, it would take less than ten seconds to rewrite the letter.

But we can’t afford to, she repeated. And that was that.

The rest of the conversation wasn’t very long, and I have to confess it descended into argy-bargy. (I am not proud of the fact that I am rather good at argy-bargy, especially if I am in the right. The trouble is I am not always in the right, although on this occasion I was.)

Argy, in fact, became so much bargy that she finally informed me that she was inclined to ‘terminate this phone call’. That means you are going to hang up, I told her, so I’ll save you the trouble, I added, and hung up.

We little men who do not have the apparently unlimited resources to hire clever-clever tax gurus to ensure we screw the state as legally as possible have no option but to trust the taxman and trust that he gets things right. We like to think, the rings vast and wealthy corporations run around them notwithstanding, that they do know their arse from their elbow. But, dear reader, I really, really, really have my doubts. For example, a week earlier I had received a letter saying my tax code had

been changed, with the result that my annual tax-free allowance was being reduced by £2,750, from £10,000 to £7,250. So, my dear employers would be taking more tax from me. When I got the letter, I rang to ask HMRC exactly why my tax code had been changed (and my tax-free allowance reduced). I was told that the taxman calculated that that would be the amount I owed in tax on my extra earnings next near.

But, I protested, why are you doing that? I have always paid my tax bill on the button because I already pay upfront and am in credit. Just look at my account and you will see that there’s more than enough to pay what I shall be owing. Ah, said the HMRC wiseacre, but that’s what we have decided to do. On that occasion, having very little stomach to charge head-first into a brick wall, I gave up. I reasoned that at least I would have fully paid my tax bill even before it was due and that as the tax bill would have been paid, I would have saved up that much more to fall back on if and when I unexpectedly found myself on my uppers.

Dealing with the taxman is an act of faith. We like to think that despite the sage advice we are given, in this case, to ‘check our tax code if you think we have got it wrong’, they haven’t actually got it wrong. Because unless you are some boring nerd who has chosen to follow an accountant’s path to Nirvana, all tax speak, all tax affairs and everything to do with tax are about as comprehensible to 99pc of us as are the ramblings of a mawkish alcoholic in confessional mode after a four-day bender. They are goobledegook.

So getting a letter thanking me for a claim for repayment I never made from the folk who have granted themselves the powers to dip into my bank account whenever they choose to do so is, to put it mildly, not at all reassuring.

Mind there are worse things at sea: Chelsea only managed a draw in the season’s first Champions League fixture, against, out-and-out no-hopers Schalke 04 after leading 1-0, and after holding Bayern Munich to 0-0 for 89 minutes, thanks to several spectacular Joy Hart saves, Manchester City were pipped at the post 1-0. To put that last comment into perspective: I support Manchester United. (And I bet they have a few clever-clever tax gurus on the books.)

*This reference will be very obscure. And I’d be well advised to leave it that way. Hint: under Dave’s watch Vodafone really took the tax piss.