Hold on to your hats, times are getting more interesting

If one can take a dispassionate view of something, not be swayed by emotion but examine it as a doctor might examine a broken leg, now is the time to take another look at two things: the euro and Nato. Now is the time because both could well be facing the ultimate stress test, and if they fail they will, among other things, be consigned to history. I say ‘among other things’ because of different consequences of them failing, being consigned to history will be the least interesting and least important consequence. We will be worrying about other things.

The stress test Nato might soon be facing will be brought about by one Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia who has, to put it mildly, been in the news recently. As usual, I can only go on what I read in the media and hear on TV and radio, but by those accounts Putin wants to re-establish Russian pride and the pre-eminence it once had in world affair. Nothing much wrong with that, of course, but it is the means by which he seems to be doing it which is causing concern in the West (which is again putting it mildly). I am not one for taking very seriously pub bores and wholesale merchants of instant opinion, but I am inclined to listen carefully to the view of former British ambassadors to Moscow, and one of those in Tony Brenton (as he cares to sign his newspaper articles) aka Sir Antony Brenton, who was ‘our man in Moscow’ from 2004 to 2008. Brenton says he first came across Putin when he was mayor of St Petersburg and where he was a man who ‘got things done’.

A potted history of Putin from Brenton is that after a somewhat misspent early youth when by his own account he behaved like a hooligan, Putin, whom Brenton credits with ‘iron self-discipline’, took an interest in judo and went on to study law. After graduating he joined the KGB with whom he served until the KGB-backed attempted putsch on Mikhail Gorbachev. Brenton and others also say Putin plays things very close to his chest and can be alarmingly laconic. He also stands out in that he is a teetotaller (as we all know drinking doesn’t exactly keep the mind clear), keeps himself very fit for a man of his age and is always impeccably turned out, which, Brenton, records rather sets him apart from the men who surround him.

Elsewhere I have read that Putin, despite the belief in the West that he has some kind of masterplan, is actually more someone who reacts to situations. So, for example, when the West more or less did nothing over what can only be regarded as Russia’s acquisition of the Crimea (and many Russians would describe it as a ‘re-acquisition), Putin was emboldened to push his luck a little further. So now Russia is, apparently, actively supporting the ‘rebels in Eastern Ukraine’. One suggestion is that Russia would like to have control of a sizeable strip of Eastern Ukraine in order to have a land link to the Crimea which it doesn’t, at present, have.

There is also the suggestion, however, that despite its support for the insurrectionists, Russia doesn’t have as much ‘control’ over them as the West believes. Most recently, Germany’s Angela Merkel and France’s Francois Hollande flew off to Moscow for what turned out to be abortive talks with Putin in view of the deteriorating situation in Eastern Ukraine. (Incidentally, I’ll leave the questions as just

                                                           As some see it . . .                                               ©ft.com
how popular the insurrection is and just how much support the rebels command among the general population for others to answer. As usual with such questions, you reads the papers, you pays your price and you makes your choice, which is to say most of us give the most credence to those reports which seem to substantiate the view we already hold. Me, I have no idea and no means of establishing ‘the truth’.)

After that visit, from which Merkel and Hollande returned ‘empty-handed’ and which was compared by some to Neville Chamberlains’ flight to Munich for a chat with ‘Herr Hitler’, rather alarming talk began of an incipient World War III. Here, I’ll succumb to the temptation to give the most credence to those reports which seem to substantiate our views, in my case my hope: Brenton – I think it was Brenton in a piece for the Daily Telegraph, but it might well have been someone else – suggested that Putin will not try to take on Nato, by for example invading one of the Baltic states, its newer members, because he knows that in the long run he will be the loser. The trouble is, of course, that even if that is true and Putin and Russia do come off second best in a dust-up with Nato, a great many lives will have been lost and a great deal of disruption will have been caused in the meantime.

While Merkel and Hollande opt for the jaw-jaw approach to defusing this crisis, Barack Obama yesterday declared that he would not rule out arming the Ukrainian government as it battles to defeat the insurrection in the east of its country. Many see that as the worse possible thing to do in that it can only help escalate the situation. Others, and this is the view I subscribe to, see it was the West playing good cop/bad cop with Putin, though if they are doing that, it will not be lost on Russian president and so, in a sense, is all rather pointless. If Putin does decide to test the West’s mettle and makes some kind of move into any of the Baltic states, that is when Nato’s stress test will start: under its treaty obligations and attack on any member is to be seen as an attack on all its members and to be dealt with accordingly.

I personally can’t see China sitting quietly by if the situation does escalate badly. As far as I know China is most certainly intent on world domination but only in an economic sense. Any military aggression it decides to engage in will be pretty local. I think that is also true of Russia: whatever else one might think of Putin (and the German in me is rather attracted to his reputed self-discipline), he is most certainly not daft and it would seem very unlikely that he would make a move which could result in real damage to his country despite what real damage he could cause elsewhere. He does not strike me as the kind of man who would cut off his nose to spite his face.

How all this will play out remains to be seen. (There was a claim on the radio last night that Putin and Russia are financially supporting various right-wing and extreme right groups such as France’s Front National, but that is the first I’ve heard, so all I can do here is – rather lamely – to report that some are claiming it to be the case.)

NB Britain’s Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond was on the radio the other night warning along the lines that the West could not stand by while a nation deployed troops in another country and violated that country’s sovereignty. My first thought was ‘didn’t the bloody Foreign Office have someone to hand to go through what someone like Hammond intends to say and edit it accordingly? And if they did and she or he let this though they should be sacked immediately.’ For wasn’t that a very succinct summation of what the U.S. and the UK did in Iraq? And wouldn’t Putin and Russia quite legitimately be able to claim ‘what’s sauce for the goose…’ Yes, of course they could and can, which is why Hammond shouldn’t have said it in the first place. But he has and I don’t doubt it will all come back to haunt him at some point.

For an interesting take on the situation try this from the Financial Times. (You might have to register to read it, but registration is free and you won't be inundated emails and offers. High quality global journalism requires investment.) He concludes:

A collapsing oil price and the impact of sanctions have made [Putin] more dangerous: without oil and gas revenues, his domestic support now rests on his capacity to mobilise nationalist anger against the alleged attempt by Nato and the EU to subjugate ‘mother Russia’. The west’s options are limited, but the beginning of wisdom is to understand that this is not just about Ukraine.

. . .

How the growing euro crisis plays out will, on the other hand, be known a lot sooner. Greece, under is new ‘extreme left’ government – I put the description in inverted commas because I think it is complete cobblers – has announced that it wants a very large proportion of its debts written off and and end put the austerity programme imposed on it. The crunch point will be reached within the next three weeks when another tranche of the money it is being loaned is due. If that is withheld, and it at the moment it seems likely it will be. If that happens, the Greek government run out of money and go bust. And if that happens it seems likely that it will leave the euro, either by being kicked out or leaving voluntarily.

The EU is caught between a rock and a hard place: if it gives into Greece’s demands for some of its debts to be written off and the austerity programme to end, it will attract not just the ire of Ireland which gamely played the game and submitted to austerity, but also face demands from Spain (which now has it’s own anti-austerity party) and Portugal (which, like Ireland, also gamely played the game) of similar favours. If it doesn’t give in, Greece defaults and is forced out of the euro, it is possible that the whole currency will in time collapse. Britain is already said to be making contingency plans for such a collapse, as, I’m sure, everyone else is too.

So what with all that, the onward march of ISIS in the Middle East and the ongoing civil war in Syria it looks very much as though we are increasingly living in the ‘interesting times’ the Chinese were apt to which on their enemies.

America Russia, Russia America – I’d like to explore both, but Russia does have an added morbid fascination. Oh, and let me introduce you to one Vitali Dyomochka, who has a lot going for him (not least, I suspect, a good brain)

It’s odd how you come across people and facts which interest you. I have long considered – once I retire and have saved enough money to do so – to take an extended break in the U.S. – that is, one longer than the customary two weeks most folk take to learn about the country and its people from the side of a pool in Florida – to travel the country. We hear so much about the U.S. and see so much about it on TV and in the films that I thought it might be worth taking a look at the real country.

So much of it resonates: New England, the ‘Deep South’, California, the Appalachian Mountains, the Great Plains, Montana, Utah, Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, LA and New York – you get the picture. For one thing, however much I dislike the behaviour of successive governments and their attitudes and am shocked at many instances of their hypocrisy, when I have come across ‘ordinary’ Americans, they have invariably been extremely pleasant folk (though as someone once pointed out, the ‘ordinary’ Americans one comes across in Britain are those who have bothered venture out of their country and visit abroad, so perhaps they might not be quite as ‘ordinary’ and representative. Who knows. I was once bemused when I was asked for advice while on London’s Tube by an American. He asked me how safe it was to walk around London. Where are you heading to, I ask. Holland Park, he told me. Oh, I assured him, you will perfectly safe, and only allowed myself to laugh out aloud once he had got off at his station.)

. . .

I have only spent a week in the U.S. and that week was spent in New York. And what struck me quite forcefully was that although Britain and the U.S. have a language in common, it is as much a ‘foreign country’ for us Brits as are Spain, Bulgaria, Greece and Sweden. It is that shared use of English which is misleading. What I was also struck by was how far more polite were the folk I met than your average snotty-nosed Brit, but, on the downside, how unexpectedly regimented life seemed to be. It began with the excessively officious border control lady at the airport who treated me as a criminal merely for daring to visit the US of A, and continued a few days later on the subway. I was heavily into photography at the time and taking a lot of pictures.

I had just taken a picture of a train arriving and was just about to take another when a cop – a short-statured female cop but with enough weaponry hanging around her body to equip the army of a small nation – approached and told me photography wasn’t allowed on the subway. Fair enough, I thought, and began to put all my gear away. That’s when a passer-by intervened and instructed me to ignore the cop and carry on taking pictures. No, I said, that’s fine, I’ll do as she says. No go, on take your pictures, she said (it was another woman) and began arguing with the cop. Very quickly the situation got out of hand, and although I didn’t say a word, in the ensuing argument the cop almost arrested the woman and me. It was surreal.

It isn’t however, just the U.S. which has a certain fascination for me: I should also like to spend more than the usual touristy two weeks travelling around Russia. That, of course, would prove to be far more difficult as I don’t speak a work of Russian. But, just as with the U.S. you pick up this and that, here and there, snippets, half-facts, which intrigue you and which, in my case, decide you to find out a little more. Where could I start listing the bits and pieces I ‘know’ about Russia which make that country interesting? Its composers, its writers, its history (the little I know), its language (when I hear Russian women talking to each other, as one often does outside the office here in High St. Kensington, they always, always, always sound as though they are complaining, but the men don’t), its various political systems, from the ruthless autocracy of the czars, to the tyranny of that secular czar Josef Stalin, to the growing and apparently also quite ruthless autocracy of one Vladimir Putin (and I gather life wasn’t fun if you got the wrong side of that autocracy and it still isn’t) Then there’s the drinking – no one, it seems, can drink quite like the Russians, though given how cold it gets, that is really no surprise.

Doesn’t sound like much fun, but Russians seem to have one thing which in America, as far as I can tell, only its blacks possess: soul. Where the Americans have Coca Cola, the Russians have vodka; where the Americans have football (with the whole helmets, padded look – British rugby players always laugh themselves sick), Russia has chess.

Then there is an anecdote, sadly wholly apocryphal but it makes a point well, that when returning American astronauts complained that their ballpoint pens were useless in space, drying up, refusing to write when held upside down and generally a pain, Nasa scientists spend a great deal of time and money coming up with a ballpoint pen which would solve those problems. Russians astronauts had reported the same problems: they were issued with pencils. It does tend to describe something. OK, there might well be other interesting countries, but somehow Russia grabs my interest.

. . .

It was because that interest that last week I tuned into the BBC Radio 4’s Book Of The Week which it broadcasts every day from 9.45am to 10am, and repeats it 12 hours later from 12.30am to 12.45am. Last week the chosen book from which five 15-minute excerpts were broadcast was by Peter Pomerantsev called Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart Of The New Russia, and boy did Russia sound surreal. Pomerantsev is a Ukrainian who was brought up in London and who went to work in as a producer for Russian television.

The stories he had to tell about Russia in the Putin which he feels illuminate life there at the beginning of the 21st century included that of one of the girls who make a career of being the mistress of a rich man, a woman who suddenly found herself in court on drugs changes when the industrial solvent she was selling was reclassified by corrupt officials as a substance used to make drugs; and, for me most fascinating of all, the story of a gangster from the Russian Far East.

. . .

Vitali Dyomochka (pictured below right) sounds like an extraordinary man. His story, as recounted in Pomerantsev’s book, was that after shining at school, he drifted into crime as the Soviet era came

to a close and the country was run by Boris Yeltsin and did well for himself. He served several spells in jail for various offences, including murder, apparently, and when he was released from the last sentence came to lead a gang called Postava which specialised in rigging car crashes and forcing the other drivers to pay extortionately for repairs. This went well for several years until the Putin ear began. Bit by bit as more authority was taken into the hands of the KGB successor the FSB and the freebooting became harder, Dyomochka decided enough was enough and instead of a life of crime he would become a filmmaker. He felt that the series and kind of films shown on Russian TV and in cinemas were ludicrously inaccurate and misleading, so using his own gang (and its victims) he would make a series showing what real gang life was like. And the series Spets was made and screen on local TV.

There was no script, Dyomochka’s gang played themselves (and many were jailed during filming and one was murdered), the characters being beaten up were men who owed Dyomochka a debt and agreed to be beaten up for real in front of the camera if that debt was reduced. Real bullets were used and the ‘staged’ car crashes were real car crashes. There was even a claim that local police agreed to play ‘local police’, with one quote as saying ‘we work for gangsters anyway, so why not work for a different set for a change’. To be fair, this is disputed and many local police were very unhappy with Dyomochka’s film career, turning up on set to arrest him first thing in the morning and holding him to dusk so that there wasn’t enough light to film. Believe what you will – most probably both versions are true (in keeping with the theme of Pomerantsev’s book where ‘nothing is true and everything is possible’.

I say, and truly believe, that Dyomochka is an intelligent and very capable man, because he has now apparently knocked gangsterism and crime on the head – so to speak, and am apt metaphor given his previous life – and has become a novelist, writing comic crime novels. And by all accounts they sell. And I suspect that he didn’t end his life of crime for any moralistic reasons but because he’s bright – given the far more powerful gangsters who now seem to run the country, he probably reasoned that it was wisest to get out while the going was good. A man after my own heart; never push your luck.

I don’t really drink a lot anymore – I am thoroughly sick of hangovers these days – and when I do drink, I tend to stick to wine, port, sherry, Campari – anything, in fact, except spirits. But were I obliged to drink a spirit, I would make it vodka and would like to do so in the company of Vitali Dyomochka. Dyomochka’s resemblance to Vladimir Putin was commented on in Pomerantsev’s book, but I know who I would prefer to drink with and it isn’t Putin. За твоё здоровье, жизненный!

Beware The Euro In Your Wheelbarrow, or an idiot’s guide to big words

Quantitative easing? Isn’t that where a central bank tries to create just a little inflation to get the economy moving again while pretending it isn’t creating just a little inflation? Or is it where a central bank tries to create just a little inflation to get the economy moving again while pretending it isn’t creating just a little inflation, but creates a whole lot of inflation and fucks things up even worse? Nice term though, reassuring, as though they know what they are doing. Many of you will have come across the definition of an economist as someone who is able to explain convincingly to today why what he convincingly predicted yesterday didn’t happen. And if you haven’t come across it before you have now. The term ‘quantitative easing’ is related to that: sounds great, sophisticated, intelligent, reassuringly complex and if and when things go tits up, no one really knows why and it can all be explained away in a jiffy.

Economists are rather like ad agencies - those who resort to their services don’t really have any idea whether or not they are worth the money spent hiring them, but dare not do without them in case they do know what they are talking about. I am fascinated by economics, but at one remove.

Years ago I was one of many who was baffled by all the talk of us selling chairs to America and America paying us in bread, but got lost soon afterwards. Similarly with the ways of the City and the stock markets - I was suitably impressed by all the waffle until - in my case rather late in the day - I realised that all the jargon used was not primarily a means of fellow practitioners being able to talk to each other in their own shorthand, but was primarily intended to make sure the rest of us didn’t have a clue as to what was going on.

A good example is when talk turns to a highly leveraged company: well, you think, highly leveraged! Well! Must be a success! Then you find out that what it actually means is that the company has either

borrowed a lot of money or, at the very least, the money it owes is considerably larger than the financial value of its assets (many of which will be illiquid i.e. it would take a while to turn them into ready cash to meet your debts if you had to and, anyway, by turning them into cash you could well put yourself out of business - in Dick and Dora terms if a company’s main asset is the factory in which it produces goods, selling that factory for ready cash in order to see off creditors would pretty much mean the end of that company as it would be unable to produce any more goods (unless it leased back the factory).

It’s my contention that essentially economics is just another way of observing and describing human behaviour. But even on that simple, some would claim simplistic, basis, it will pretty soon fail as a discipline in that it assumes that in any given situation we will all more or less behave in the same way. The trouble is we don’t. Some might well settle for selling what they produce at the market price, but others, who are greedier, might well settle for trying to manipulate the market in order to push up the price they can charge.

That goes on in the diamond market where producers make damn sure supply is kept to certain limits in order to keep prices high. It is also going on in the oil industry where several oil producers have boosted supply to bring down prices - the price of a barrel has halved over these past months - to make shale gas a less attractive alternative and, they hope, in time to put shale gas producers out of business. Once they are, supply will again be limited, prices will once again go up and, the oil producers hope, life will get back to being grand again.

Economists are well able to describe what is going on - falling back on jargon, no doubt - but I can’t remember any economist predicting such a massive boost in oil supply and the resulting collapse in prices when shale gas as an alternative energy supply first came onto the scene. Then, if I remember, there was grand talk of the ‘decline of the oil industry’. Some bloody decline, as it turns out.

At this point, no doubt, some reading this will sneer that what I am writing is indeed Dick and Dora stuff, that it is all a lot more complex. To which I say: of course it’s a lot more complex - if you want it to be. But it needn’t be so complex. Years ago I did a lot of photography and dealt with shutter speeds, film speeds, f stops, depth of field and all the rest, and I contend it is perfectly possibly to explain to a six-year-old what goes on when a camera takes a picture without resorting to a single piece of jargon.

Children understand ideas such as ‘the bigger the hole, the more can fall into it. The smaller the hole, the less can get through’. That’s exactly what happens with the amount of light going through the camera aperture and hitting the ‘film’, only I would call the aperture a ‘hole’ not an aperture when describing it all to a seven-year-old.

A few years ago, I was explaining to my then nine-year-old son how the stock market functioned in similarly easy-to-understand terms. I even got onto futures, why they were created and how they are now abused. I think he understood. Which brings me to ‘quantitative easing’, a great, complicated name for a simple economic ploy.

Ironically despite all the denials that it most certainly does not risk stoking inflation, that is exactly what it is intended to do - just not too much. Put better, it is not intended exactly to stoke inflation, merely to create a little inflation. Folk fear, of course, that although it might work in the short term - actually, we know it does work - the danger is that in the long term we will be saddled with rampant inflation of the kind which brought the Weimar Republic to its knees and allowed the conditions to be created in which Adolf Hitler was able to seize power.

The European Central Bank has decided to introduce a programme of ‘quantitative easing’ in the euro zone and will be ‘creating’ €1 trillion with which - well, to create a little inflation. The idea is that if there is more money in the eurozone, banks will feel more inclined to lend it and the eurozone economy will take off again. Hm. And once again, hm. It seems - so far - to have worked in the US and here in Britain, so will it work in the eurozone? That remains to be seen.

One large caveat is that the US and British economies are single entities, whereas the eurozone economy, although ostensibly one economy, is seen from a different angle, made up of 25 economies which might resemble each other in some ways, but do not resemble each other in other ways. But isn’t that also true of the US, you might ask? And don’t individual US states have a say over how their own state economy should be run?

Well, up to a point: states, as far as I know (always a useful admission to make) can to a certain extent set their own taxes, but I don’t think they have any say over the Federal Bank interest rates. And despite the US economy now being ‘on the move’ - as, of course, it is obliged to be with a presidential election getting ever closer - individual states might be prospering or not as the case may be. Certainly a state such as Rhode Island or Maine will usually always be doing far better than Mississippi or Louisiana, yet nominally as equal constituents of the US they are all economically ‘on the move’. The eurozone, however, still doesn’t enjoy the kind of indentification with the whole of its individual members as the US does.

Of course, the governments of each eurozone state wants their country to pull through and get out of the economic shit, but just what to ‘the people’ feel? And what with the general election in Greece due in three days, the ECB’s grand plan to save the eurozone with a programme of quantitative easing might be defeated before it has even got underway if a new Left-wing government does what it says it will do - and, crucially, what those expected to vote for it will insist they do, which is to tell the country’s creditors to go stick their credit notes where the sun don’t shine.

Oh, to live in interesting times.

Don’t worry, pet, it'll all soon be over — the ECB has decided to introduce a programme of quantitative easing

Cigars, The Sopranos, port, more cigars, Berlin, Lincoln, newspapers and two drunks (a father and his sadder son)

What with my daughter turning 19 next August and my son turning 16 in May, and me having turned 65 last November, and many of the items I hear about on the news being just retreads of items I heard on the news 30 or 40 years ago, with just the names being changed to protect the innocent as they used to declare as Dragnet started more than 50 years ago; and with most of the films I see being films I have seen before many times, with again just the names being changed to protect the innocents, I find I look back quite a bit more than once I did.

This afternoon, apropos coming across an short obit of someone I knew in the 1970s when I worked for a weekly newspaper in Lincoln, I found myself recalling life and work on a small weekly newspaper, the Lincolnshire Chronicle, where I was employed as a reporter. Later on, tonight in fact, after I had watched four episodes of The Sopranos back to back, polished off half a bottle of Graham’s port - over more than four and a half hours I must add, so the AA won’t be claiming me quite yet (and as the bottle cost £11.99, so half a bottle cost only half that, it’s cheaper than swilling beer or spirits) - and smoked four La Paz Wilde Cigarillos (available online from the Continent, and you would be sucker as well as being well out of pocket to buy cigars of any kind in Britain - those cheap enough to buy are crap, horrible cigars and those worth smoking are, at British prices well out of my price range) I got to be thinking, as one does, of the past.

This particular bit of the past was in the early 1960s when we lived in Berlin where my father was the BBC representative for four years (and, as I now believed, also provided whatever valuable help he could provide to Her Majesty’s foreign intelligence agency). We live in the Heerstraße, in Berlin-Charlottenburg. For our first year in Berlin, when I was ten, I attended Die Steuben-Schule in Charlottenburg, a Volkschule (primary school), while my older brother Ian, who died three weeks ago tonight, was already attending Das Canisius Kolleg in Berlin-Tiergarten, where I joined him in Easter 1960 (the German school year runs from Easter to Easter, not, as here in Britain from September to the following July). It was the cigars which brought back that particular memory.

From home we caught the tram which ran along the Heerstraße to what was then the Reichskanzlerplatz (now, I think, called Theodor-Heuss Platz after a former German President) where we caught the U-Bahn. We travelled as far as Nollendorfplatz and caught a bus to the Tiergartenstraße where our school was. (The pic below was taken before the war, but that is more or less what it looked like when we were there in the Sixties.) We always tried to make sure we caught

the U-Bahn before 8am as any later train would make us late for school. First thing in the morning the trains always stank of stale cigar smoke. That’s the link with cigars. Because of the cost of cigars in Britain, smoking them still seems to be a rich man’s pastime, but as they are considerably cheaper on the Continent many more men smoked them (and as this was Berlin, I don’t doubt a few women smoked them, too). So every time I light one up, I often have a similar sensation to Proust in his famous novel. Christ, I loved Berlin. And if I wasn’t firmly convinced of the wisdom of the advice ‘never go back’, I would go back like a shot to live there. But, of course, it  would never be the same. It never is.

PS When we first moved to Berlin in June 1959, we lived in a fourth (or fifth) floor flat in the

Olympischer Straβe in Berlin-Charlottenburg. This (pictured above) was the ‘smaller’ exit to the Neu-Westend U-Bahn station. It was just opposite our flat. Maybe it doesn’t mean a lot to you . . .

. . .

Earlier today, after googling the name ‘Robert House’ for no very good reason I can now recall, I discovered that the Robert House I had known in Lincoln, where he was the news editor of the Lincolnshire Echo, the local evening paper, had died in January 2011 at 83. I later came to know his son, also a Robert House, who, like his father, was something of a slave to alcohol and who topped himself in 2008 by jumping off a cliff. I worked with Robert House, the son, on the South Wales Echo, where I found him to be good company and where he kept telling me he wished he could introduce me to ‘his special friends’.

At first I had no idea what he meant until one night after a lot of boozing and as it was so late and my flatmate was away I agreed that he could doss down in my flat. He was very drunk and when I decided I wanted to go to bed, he tried to follow me into my bedroom telling me he wanted to sleep with me. I had other ideas and finally the cryptic remarks about ‘his special friends’ suddenly made sense. I had taken him to a ‘club’ in Cardiff called The Casablanca where I scored my dope and where he cut a horribly forlorn figure in his tweed jacket among the whores and black folk who, apart from me, patronised the place.

The Casablanca was actually nothing but an old disused church where usually there were fewer than 20 at the bar except when whoever ran ‘the club’ hired a sound system from Bristol to play reggae and when the place would be packed. It has since been demolished to make way for the gentrification of the Cardiff Bay area, which I have, however, not yet visited. I first came across Robert House, the father, when I by chance dropped in at the pub (I can’t remember what it was called) where he and other Lincolnshire Echo hacks went for after work beer.

Bob House was delightful and highly entertaining company when in his cups, but something of a bastard when sober. However, I rarely saw him sober. Sitting in the pub he was full of stories from his time working for the Daily Mirror in Fleet Street (though it wasn’t actually in Fleet Street, but

nearby), and I quickly developed a technique to extend his swift pint after work into a drinking session which went on until closing time. I waited until he had finished his pint an was on the point of going home and insisted I should buy him another. Once that was finished he then insisted, as I had stood him a pint, on buying me one. And so on. And on.

On one occasion he had bought and had with him in the pub a brand-new set of crockery acquired especially because he and his wife were having friends from France to stay. When I joined him in the pub and had bought him a pint, he then bought me one. This made him liable to be late and risk the wrath of his wife. So to calm his nerves I bought him another pint. Then he bought me one. Eventually he was so late, he knew he was in for it and kept postponing his departure hom because he knew he would get an almighty row from his wife for being late.

Finally, the pub wanted to close, so I suggested that if I came back home with him and helped him carry the new crockery his wife would find it impossible to rip him off several strips if I was there. It didn’t quite work out that way: when we arrived at the front door, with me carrying most of the boxes of crockery, she assumed I was the taxi driver, gruffly ordered me where to put down the boxes of crockery and began to give him hell. He explained I wasn’t the taxi driver, and then she became sweetness and light and after he went to bed to sleep off his laters binge, she and I sat up till two in the morning talking about I don’t know what and getting one well.

Not much of an anecdote, I know, but it’s the only one I have about Bob House, the father.

As for Robert House, the son, he really was a sad case. By the time he joined the South Wales Echo subs’ desk he was already an alcoholic, and it just got worse and worse. After our friendship had

cooled - I was rather embarrassed in his company after the night of his failed seduction - it seemed to get even worse, although I wasn’t the cause. I think he was ever more trouble with his partner - he was already divorced and had an ex-wife and two children in Windsor - and he would go on benders, turning up for work in a terrible state.

Again, not much of an anecdote, but it is only January. Pip, pip.

In case you missed it ... (and by the way, there's still loads more room on the bandwagon, but hurry – a new one will be along shortly)

The twisted cynic in me felt that the huge demonstration in Paris on Sunday in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo office murders and taking part in it was – and is – rather the cool thing to do and the in-place to be on the afternoon of January 11. And that nasty, nasty, twisted, unhappy cynic also suspects it will only be matter of time before some astute businessman realises there will be quite market for Je Suis Charlie brooches, pendants, necklaces, earstuds, cufflinks, fridge stickers, car stickers, but it will be important to strike while the iron is still hot. I fear the horrible murders and the subsequent outrage will be a question of Charlie who within months. Hope I’m wrong, but …

Something along those lines was also expressed the other day by Bernard Holtrop, a Dutch cartoonist with Charlie Hebdo who wasn’t at the offices at the time of the lethal attack because ‘he hates meetings’. Take a look here (and I’m surprised the story wasn’t also carried by the Daily Telegraph and the Guardian). Holtrop is rather taken aback by all the new ‘friends’ Charlie Hebdo has suddenly acquired. Well, Bernard, bandwagons are like that.

Years ago, I remember all those little red Aids ribbons which everyone and their grandma insisted on wearing ‘in solidarity’ with sufferers and gays generally. You don’t see too many of those these days, the caravan has moved on. At the time you couldn’t move for hearing and reading news of the latest Aids benefit in New York, London, Paris, Los Angeles and Berlin, naturally attended by the great and good of showbiz and anyone else who could spot a passing bandwagon when she or he saw one. So where are they now? Who today sports a little red Aids ribbon? Arguably the Aids problem is just as bad as it was then, so where are the ‘campaigners’?

Well, largely they have jumped off the Aids bandwagon and jumped onto the global warming ‘we must save the planet’ bandwagon. Oh, and what with ‘advances in medicine’ and the development of new drugs, Aids is no longer the problem it was. Come again? Oh, OK, it is no longer the problem it was in the Western world.

It is, however, just as bad, perhaps even worse, in Africa and Asia. According to the worldwide Aids statistics from Avert.org there are 23.5 million adults and children living with Aids in Sub-Saharan Africa – one in 20 of the populations are affected -, 4 million in South and South-East Asia but just 1.4 million in North America and Eastern Europe and Central Asia and 900,000 Western and Central Europe.  So there we have it: what’s the point of holding Aids benefits if we more or less have the problem licked in the Western world? I suppose that attitude does make a certain sense. I mean, if we here in the West don’t give a flying fuck that that three-quarters of a billion folk in the poorer parts of the world don’t have access to clean water – their water source is often the same as where they defecate – and 2.5 billion (check the figures here), what’s a million more Aids sufferers or two? Life’s a struggle, man, didn’t you know that? I mean just how much bleeding do you want this heart to do? Well, I’m a realist and neither expect more blood from those already heavily bleeding hearts nor attitudes to change. But what I can very much do without is the bullshit.

There are many wholly admirable organisations working to try to help Aids sufferers in Africa and Asia (which is a damn sight more than I do), but as a whole folk in the Western world, in their smug hypocrisy, are merely interested in the brownie points to be gained from – well, then its was ‘raising awareness about Aids’. Now it is ‘raising awareness about global warming’ and ‘saving the planet’ and crowding onto the streets of Paris shoulder to shoulder with the great and good to show solidarity with a satirical rag until last week those great and good loathed.

I think that’s what gets up Charlie Hebdo cartoonist Bernard Heltrop’s nose so much.