A pleasant meal, then a ‘right-wing’ revelation: just how meaningless are such political labels? Totally meaningless, a complete waste of time and space or just more bloody twaddle??

Another meal. A triumph? Well, as I was the cook, I don’t know. It’s not for me to say. I enjoyed it, but then I can enjoy a nicely peeled orange, so I’m not the go-to guy an matters haute cuisine. I enjoy cooking - and given that I always stick to simple dishes rather than fancy shmancy stuff where the chances of coming unstuck increase exponentially, I really should describe my cooking more honestly as ‘preparing a meal’. And as ‘a meal’ is, as far as I am concerned as much about entertaining people (and I never entertain more than two others, three at a push, but never any more), chit-chat - some people call it conversation, others just call it chit-chat - and general enjoyment in the company of those whose company you enjoy as food, even going wrong - which I didn’t do today - doesn’t matter that much.

We had, to start, prawns gently heated in very thinly sliced garlic, a little tomato paste, smoked paprika and olive oil, accompanied by a small dish each of little gem lettuce, very thinly sliced onion and very thinly sliced radishes with a drizzle of olive oil. No great expense there, and no great culinary adventure - it’s just my take on ‘gambas al ajilo’ (prawns in garlic for those who, like me don’t ‘have’ Spanish) which is a bog-standard tapas dish. I substituted smoked paprika for the very chopped up red chillies which I use when I do it for myself because my stepmother, 78 the other day, can’t really take chillies to well. After that it was ‘fried herring with tartar sauce and roast potatoes’. Well, it seems now is not the time of year for herring so I got fresh sardines instead and I loved them. My stepmother wasn’t too fussed on them, but I don’t know why.

I chose that dish because I have never before attempted to make tartar sauce from scratch or, for that matter, mayonnaise on which it is based and I wanted to try. It isn’t rocket science as long as you don’t rush it. And I didn’t. Finally, we had meringue with whipped cream and fresh raspberries, something I chose because I have always wanted to try making meringue. Sadly I came unstuck Pflümli - the German version of slivovitz) and a raspberry liqueur which I found knocking around my stepmother’s kitchen, or in my case a glass or two of all three.

and my meringue wasn’t quite what you are usually served, but it tasted great. I don’t know where i went wrong, probably because the oven I put the meringue into was too hot. I don’t know. I’ll try again. After that black coffee and, in my case, double cream, there was a choice of Cointreau, plum brandy (in this case

Before the comrades all yell ‘you fucking plutocrat wanker’ and ‘it’s all right for some, you rich bloody bastard’, the only expensive ingredients of the meal were, arguably, the liqueurs though each bottle should last at least two years or more (seeing as booze doesn’t go off). But that’s the thing. I haven’t actually costed the meal but it most certainly didn’t break the bank.

My big bugbear and I speak as a guy who loves food (but is by no means a glutton or overweight) is that simple, home-prepared meals are not only tastier and better for you than almost all the pre-prepared, pre-cooked crap people buy, but at the end of the day a lot cheaper. I had to buy a kilo of fresh sardines, which set me back £7.50, but we only eat half of them, and the rest are in the fridge to be eaten another day. The tartar sauce consisted of four egg yolks, olive oil, a tablespoon of capers and two small gherkins. The meringue was made from the egg whites of the four eggs and a little sugar. The fresh raspberries were £3.

My stepmother’s guest was the potter Seth Cardew who I have gone to visit in Spain these past three years and who has invited me again to visit this summer. He used to have his pottery - Wenfordbridge pottery - just down the road. It was started by his father Michael Cardew. Seth is always good company, though he surprised me this afternoon by declaring he was ‘right-wing’. Well,

I for one would never have guessed, not in a million years, given that I, and I’m sure many reading this, tend to associate - rightly or wrongly, though I suspect rightly - ‘right-wingers’ as thick shits who don’t know the time of day. But that’s what he said, so I can only take him by his word.

His announcement led into a long discussion over ‘right-wingism’ and ‘left-wingism’ which I shan’t reproduce here except to repeat the assertion I made - and which I truly believe - that the terms ‘right-wing’ and ‘left-wing’ are about as useful as a chocolate teapot. They describe nothing, they are utterly vacuous. They are about as useful in describing people as dividing folk up into ‘left-handers’ and ‘right-handers’ and treating the one group as ‘good’ and the other group as ‘bad’.

The two terms are, at the end of the day, meaningless (and I have not once in the years I have known Seth heard him make any off-colour pronouncement about anyone, not gays, Jews, foreigners, the ‘working class’ or morris dancers. Writing this - and smoking one of my cigars, while drinking a last coffee and one more glass of plum brandy - I am rather conscious of what some might think. OK, for some, might be the reaction. Well, you are dead wrong: for example the cigars - La Paz Wilde Cigarros - are bought on the net from a tobacconist in Holland at €13 - £9.50/$14.61 at today’s exchange rate - for 20. I smoke about four a week and a tin of 20 lasts me for over a month.

Compare that to the cost of 20 cigarettes: around £7/8 for 20 and some folk are on 40 a day. So let’s knock that one on the head. As for the liqueurs, the Cointreau - a half-litre bottle - cost me £12 and should last for more than two years: someone might go down the pub and spend around that on just over three pints. If he goes down the pub twice a week and is a cigarette smoker, who’s the moneybags, me or him?

I  cannot rid myself of a niggling feeling I am protesting too much, and some might even accuse me of that. But am I? Am I really? Britain, unfortunately, is still totally hung up on ‘them and us’. ‘We’ are appalled at the fact that the country now has food banks. ‘They’ don’t care about that. ‘We’ are apt to condemn ‘privilege’ and cite the fact the David Cameron ‘went to Eton’ as ‘proof’ that the man

is a completely unfeeling twat who doesn’t know how ‘the working man’ lives. ‘They’ - well, I don’t know what ‘they’ would say about that because I am neither ‘they’ nor ‘us’ (or, if you like and you have that kind of dull, logical brain which usually make conversation with you something of a chore, I am neither ‘us’ nor ‘they’).

One of the reasons I am glad that in many ways I am more German than British is that, for all their faults, and I’m sure some are queuing up to slag off ‘the Krauts’, the Germans don’t have these daft, boring, unproductive and essentially utterly meaningless class hang-up.

In Germany some smoke cigars, some don’t. Some like liqueurs, some don’t. Some would prefer their SDP to run the country, some are happier with the CDU or FDP. But an attitude they all share, even though they might disagree fundamentally on ‘how the country is run’, who ‘the bastards’ are and all the rest is that your ‘background’, ‘what school you went to’, ‘what your accent is’ and all the boring bloody rest of it is as important as whether or not flies fart too much and what to do about it.

This whole entry, apart from wanting to write about the - though I say so myself - very tasty meal we all enjoyed this afternoon - was essentially sparked off by Seth Cardew’s claim to be ‘right-wing’ and the subsequent discussion on what exactly being ‘right-wing’ and ‘left-wing’ actually mean. You might have gathered: in my view fuck all. They are meaningless terms.

Yes, we can disagree on various matters: whether or not Britain’s benefits system could be fairer or is being abused; whether there are ‘far too many immigrants’ (and in my view that is again a totally spurious concern, though anyone in the U.S. reading this might have definite views about whether the country’s five million odd ‘illegal immigrants’ should be granted citizenship - I’ll keep quiet on that one because I don’t live there and don’t know that much about it all, though I do know which way my heart beats and you might possibly even guess what I might say).

We might disagree on just how much should be spent on Britain’s ‘nuclear deterrent’, given that, with a bit of luck our nuclear weapons will never be used; we might disagree on whether

or not Britain should remain a member of the EU (and I think it should, though that EU is long overdue for a root and branch reform). But basing our evaluation of the other on whether they are ‘right-wing’, left-wing’, ‘centre’ or simply a ‘don’t know’ is a pointless waste of time. But the meal was good. There, I, the cook, said it. Modesty? I spit on modesty!

PS In my humble opinion, Seth, bless his cotton socks and whatever he might think, is about as ‘right-wing’ as the boot of my car. Furthermore, he’s a bloody good potter.

Just a couple more to keep you going. If you like this sort of schlock, you’ll love these. If not . . .

This first is Nobody’a Supposed To Be Here by Deborah Cox from her album One Wish.
Deborah Cox - Nobody’s Supposed To Be Here


Then there’s another from Lina, Smooth, from her album The Inner Beauty Movement.
Lina - Smooth

Both are dedicated to every lass up and down the lands, young and old who has just been ditched by, or has just ditched, a lover. If that’s you, weep, weep, weep. If you’re a guy, just get back to chewing pebbles or whatever it is you do.

And as usual browsers are playing up. Oh, well.

Come on, fair’s fair – if Jerry Seinfeld can own 46 Porsches, why am I a nutter for owning six Mac laptops? Well, I’m not, of course, I’m ‘a collector’. So there!

Let me first of all tell you how many laptops I have, most used by me, two used by my children, and one provided by the paper I work for (and which I have long forgotten about as have they): ten. Sounds mad, doesn’t it? And it is mad. And however much I rationalise the situation, however much a protest that ‘if you understand why each was acquired, it would not seem half as mad’, I must admit that any sane person might think me stark, staring bonkers. Which is not comfortable to know – but a few days ago, when considering how I might write this blog entry but saving at least a modicum of credibility, I hit upon it. And my solution is so breathtakingly neat and simple, there’s real beauty to it. It is this: I am not some idiot who cannot stop buying laptops he doesn’t need, many of which he hardly uses and one of which he hasn’t used at all except to set it up - I am a collector. That’s it. Some people collect Chinese vases, some people collect Elvis memorabilia (and will spend a fortune on the most insignificant piece of Elvis crap), some people collect vintage cars (Jerry Seinfeld apparently owns 46 Porsche cars, which are stored in an rented hangar at Santo Monica airport), I collect Apple Mac laptop, and am thus, m’lud. fully acquitted of any charge of being a total nutter.

. . .

But if only it were, of course, that simple. In fact, I know myself quite well and have always had a tendency for getting at least one more of an item. The theory was that I ‘have a spare’ in case the first one, unaccountably, went up the Swannee.

In practice, of course, I simply have some kind of – admittedly harmless – quirk of character which delights in multiplicity. I have previously written about my collection of mobiles phones, since reduced to just four but which at its height was a collection of, it seemed, almost 20, and I have three personal internet radios (although I can no longer use them to listen to BBC Radio 4 as bloody Aunty, in her wisdom, no longer broadcast in the WMA format used by whatever service the radio is tuned to – too expensive, it seems, although bloody Aunty seems to have more than enough money washing around to pay various execs fabulous sums for both an annual salary and expenses). I deployed the excuse that it was a good idea to ‘have a spare’ several times when buying a new – new to me, that is, all but two of the laptops were bought secondhand on eBay – but now that I have found sanctuary in the role of a being ‘a collector of laptops’, I need no longer resort to that rather threadbare excuse. In fact, at least three of the laptops I now own were bought when another seemed on the brink of dying.

One day my 13in 2008 Macbook, one I keep in the kitchen at home and on which I get all my emails, simply refused to boot up. To this day I don’t know why, but to all intents and purposes it had breathed its last. So it was straight onto eBay where I bought a replacement. And what with the simplicity of swapping hard drives in the particular model – a child can do it in under ten minutes – getting one which was more or less the same seemed the obvious thing to do. So I did, and bugger me the supposedly dead Macbook sprang back to life within hours (and never again gave me a moment’s worry until I sold it recently on eBay.)

That second replacement Macbook then took up residence at my stepmother’s house just down the lane where I could use it whenever daily I dropped in to see her and where it was safely away from my wife, who has a nasty complaining streak I don’t appreciate and get on well with. At my stepmother’s house at the time was another laptop, a 15in Macbook Pro. This, too, had been bought when the more or less identical model I kept at home in our bedroom to use in bed also seemed to have developed a fatal fault. And this to suddenly became ‘the spare’ when the laptop it was to replace inexplicably didn’t go tits up.

Actually, most recently it has: the screen went black and although it booted up no bother, it was pretty useless without a working screen. I had twice had it repaired by a very good Apple service near Guildford – it was a design fault with that model, but the Apple repair guy had invested in a machine which put in place a ‘new chip’. He has explained it to me, but I am none the wiser, and any when the screen went blank again and I took it off to his workshop, this time it wasn’t the same fault and he couldn’t identify the new fault. That was when its ‘replacement’, bought several years earlier, came into its own. The knackered Macbook Pro was packed up and sold as ‘for spares and repairs’ on eBay – bought for £93 by someone in Spain of all places – and its replacement was moved into the house to sit where the old one was. They have ever-so-slight design changes but to the untutored eye – and in matters computer my wife’s eye is as untutored as they come – you really couldn’t tell the difference.

As the late Sir James Goldsmith observed ‘When you marry your mistress, you create a vacancy’, the transfer of the replacement from my stepmum’s to mine created a vacancy, and one, dear reader, which I duly filled: where the replacement once sat, there now sits another, more modern 15in Macbook Pro. Something similar happened with my Lenovo x121e: it is the laptop, a very neat little laptop I should add, which I carry around with me and take to the pub in South Petherton in Somerset, where I can outside with my pint of cider, light a Wilde Cigarros and watch the Wednesday Champions League football on Sky Go.

One day, I switched it on and the screen was somehow obviously knackered. That first time I immediately rebooted and the screen was then fine, but the problem cropped up again every so often. So I decided to get a replacement and found – this was a stroke of luck – a more or less new Lenovo x131e on eBay which I got for a very good price indeed. Ah, but there was the rub: it was brand-new and – well, do you know that feeling where something is so nice and pristine you don’t want to use it and spoil it? That’s what I felt. So once I had set it up, I put it back in its box and instead, after consulting YouTube as to how simple the job would be, ordered a replacement screen for the x121e which I fully intended to install the next time the fault manifested itself and then sell the machine on eBay. And, of course, it didn’t manifest itself ever again. The x121e, which is obviously fully acquainted with Sod’s Law, has worked flawlessly ever since I bought its replacement.

At this point I should like to remind the reader that I am not, as might seem, a total wastrel of a nutter who wastes good cash on laptops he hardly uses if ever, but a ‘collector of laptops’ who has every right to own a collection of laptops he hardly every uses. I am keen to remind the reader because a week or two ago I gave into that itch which befalls me from time to time and bought a rather neat – and in perfect condition – 11.6in Macbook Air. I had first considered buying one to replace the x121e, but eventually opted for the x131e. But – well, I liked them. They really are neat. So I bought one and added it to my collection. And there you have it, an honest account of my rather large collection of laptops – and note the word ‘collection’ is here highly appropriate as it saves me from all and every charge of being off my head.

By the way, my other laptops are an 11in Acer I had bought to replace and 11in Acer I had bought in France because I didn’t realise – as I bloody should have done – that the keyboard was the French layout, but which I passed onto my son to make way for the x121e because I really didn’t like typing on its keyboard; and a 15in Medion I bought in Asda for my daughter after the Samsung she had been using went up the Swannee for use at college. Then there’s the works Lenovo T440 I never use. Oh, and the first white Macbook I had in my collection made £90.50 on eBay. It had to go, because I had set my heart on getting a more recent 13in Macbook Pro, ‘hewn from one block of aluminium’ model (yeah, right) and its replacement was brought into the house to take its place.

If at some point in the future you are feeling really bored, remind me to tell you all about the many other laptop in my collection I have had in addition to those listed abover: off the top of my head two Mac Powerbooks, two Mac 1400s, three 13in Mac G4s and for my daughter’s use two (I think it was just two) Dells.
But, please note, they were all part of my ‘collection’ of laptops: anyone here laughing at Jerry Seinfeld owning 46 Posches he doesn’t use or need. Not, I thought not. Let’s keep this square and even, shall we?

Something to be getting on with while I get my act together and tell you about my THREE new Mac laptops (bought secondhand, but in great condition) and desperately try to convince you that I am not a nutter. No, sirree, me a nutter who can’t stop buy laptops he doesn’t really need? She’s called Lina and writes and sings great songs

If these don’t play, load for you or even appear, try a different browser. They certainly work in Chrome, sometimes in Firefox and Safari, rarely in Opera. I’ve just installed ‘Maxthon’ on a Mac laptop, and it isn’t working. In Windows on Explorer they didn’t work, but did in Firefox. All very confusing. Beginning to wonder why I posted them in the first place. Sorry, but, you know, it’s an unfair world. Chrome does work, though. 

I’ve been coming across some great music recently. I was going to say ‘by chance’, but if you think about it more or less everything is ‘by chance’. You bump into a friend (say called, I don’t know, Peter Bailey or something like that, why not?) and you get to talk about music, and he says: ‘Pat, I heard this great track the other day, immediately went online to Amazon and bought it, and you’ll love it, I’ll email you an MP3.’ Well, it arrives and you do love it, but it was still ‘by chance’.

OK, so it was a ‘recommendation by a friend’ — but actually you just happened to bump into him that day; or you just happened to text him or ring him or email him and say ‘why don’t we meet up again, it’s been a while’. And that bumping into, happening to text, ring or email — when you could well at that moment have decided to do something else, I don’t know, not watch EastEnders ’cos it’s complete shite, or not watched Big Brother or Celebrity or Britain’s Got Talent ’cos they are complete pants, you get the drift — is still really ‘by chance’. So there you go: by chance.

Glad we got that out of the way, could well have made this entry a tad labourious.

So ‘by chance’ — the track below opens a film called High Crimes by Carl Franklin I was about to watch and still haven’t what with all the pfaffing around of recording this song from Spotify (I know, I know, shouldn’t and all that, but then I shouldn’t drink and drive but I do that all the time, I shouldn’t swear like a fucking trooper but I do that all the time, so, you know, get a life), editing it — you get extraneous bits fore and aft when you record songs illicitly from Spotify (and OK, so I have done it before, all right, so shop me) — then concerting it into an MP3, uploading it to a Google site where you can copy the location address, pasting that address (or part of it) into a piece of code I came across which bypasses the total hassle of creating a video for YouTube (cont p94).

So here it is, give it a listen and love it. I like it a lot, in fact so much that I have already ordered the singer’s first and third albums (after checking out the tracks on Spotify and each one I listened to is great). Listen to the track, then I’ll tell you a bit more about the little I know.



I’m Not The Enemy

BTW It seems this code doesn’t work on the Opera browser.

She’s called Lina and it seems she’s from Denver, Colorado. But rather than me simply repeat what I’ve read on Wikipedia, take a look yourself. And here’s her MySpace page. She doesn’t seem to have her own website. In fact, it’s all a bit of a mystery: she has recorded and released six albums but her ‘career’ seems to be going nowhere. Which is odd, because as a singer/songwriter she seems to have more talent in her little finger than any number of plastic Taylor Swifts. By the way, it seems her music is ‘neo-soul’. Oh well, it has to be called something.

Oh, well. If you like the track I’ve posted her, check out the rest of her stuff, some of which you can hear on MySpace, and if you like that, too, do that gal a favour and part with a few of your shekels and buy several of her albums. Of course, you might me more into that goddam awful country crap sung by very gay looking chaps in cowboy hats. Well, if that’s your bag, Lina most certainly isn’t. Which is your loss not her’s.

The kind of country singer dickhead who gives gays a bad name. His name is Dustin Lynch (should be Lunch), but he can’t be blamed for that.

Here’s one of Lina. Much more like it, isn’t it?

If you liked Lina, you might also like this track, Party Wit Me by Brownstone. OK, a bit old hat now and they aren’t half as sodding plastic as Taylor Swift, which will distress some of you, but it’s good
stuff. With love and kisses from your favourite blogger xxx



Party Wit Me

And as I’m on a roll, here are two from Johnny Guitar Watson. If you like guitar playing, you’ll like it on this one, I Wanna Ta Ta You:



I Wanna Ta Ta You

Then there’s this great little track, the man rapping around 15 years before everyone else invented rapping, it’s called Telephone Bill:



Telephone Bill

A picture of the lad:

And just for good measure, here’s a little Prince (literally in his case, of course), Do Me Baby:



Do Me Baby

The art of marketing: forget Leonardo and Joe Bach - our Jasmine and Piet have just had a wizard wheeze! And a few comments. Also latest on Putin: he’s back (but won't say where he was)

In the course of pursuing an honest living engaged in my day job and ensuring there will be bread on the table of my nearest and dearest (checking that the answers to the Masterquiz questions which will appear in the paper a page along from the questions are the correct ones – can life get any more exciting?) I came across the fact that Wu-Tang Clan has released a new album of which only one copy has been pressed and whose sale will come on condition it will not be played in public for 88 years. Well!

‘Wu-Tang Clan, m’lud? Well, they’re a sort of kind of “hip-hop” combo. They produce music which, I’m informed, is popular with many of the younger generation, m’lud, especially those youngsters who like to think they are “street”, a bit like, if I might venture to attempt to guess what might have been m’lud’s taste in popular music when m’lud was rather younger than he is now, a kind of Beach Boys or Supertramp or Brotherhood Of Man or Stevie Wonder, but a more insistent beat and ghetto lyrics.

“Ghetto” m’lud? Well, it’s where many of the young men who appear in m’lud’s court come from. “Street”, m’lud? Well, from what I can gather from my son, it has to do with using a certain kind of modern slang and pretending you are black, although I understand Wu-Tang Clan are black, so they don’t have to pretend. Yes, of course, m’lud, there is perhaps more to it than that, but perhaps m’lud will forgive me that I am not as au fait with the notion as, say, my son is.’)

That question and answer intrigued me, but I must admit that although the name Wu-Tang Clan did ring a bell, I really wasn’t too sure who they were and initially confused them with Bombay Bicycle Club (of whom I know equally as little and, after googling them now know they have even less in common than with me.

My first reaction was some rich oil sheikh with more money than sense had made an offer that Wu-Tang Clan couldn’t refuse and had bought the album for a sum similar to what it might be expected eventually to make on condition that they didn’t release it to the public. Why? Well, I assumed, it was some kind of novel one-upmanship: when the sheikh and his fellow too-rich-to-be-sane pals got together in his penthouse apartment in London or Paris or New York and were vying with each other as to who was the richest fuckwit of them all, he could whip out Wu-Tang Clan’s latest – it’s called The Wu - Once Upon A Time In Shaolin, for what it’s worth, which isn’t a lot because you’re never going to hear it – as his trump card. Makes a certain kind of sense, doesn’t it?

Then I googled Wu-Tang Clan and found there website (here) and got the full story. Here’s an excerpt: ‘Wu-Tang’s aim is to use the album as a springboard for the reconsideration of music as art, hoping the approach will help restore it to a place alongside the great visual works – and create a shift in the music business, not to mention earn some cash in the process.’ The album will go on

tour in galleries, but those attending will be searched for illicit recording equipment and to further ensure that no recordings will be made, they will only be able to hear it on headphones. Apparently, only one copy of the album has been pressed and this now sits in a custom-made ‘silver and nickel engraved box’ in a vault in the shadow of the Atlas Mountains.

The album’s main producer is someone called Tairk ‘Clivaringz’ Azzougarh (his quote marks, not mine), a chap – a rather pushy chap I would have thought according to the account on the website – who more or less wangled his way into producing the album, then wanted to come up with some novel way of ensuring it had as long a lifespan as possible. And that, m’lud, is, I suggest, the nub of it all. Read the Wu-Tang Clan website blurb and it all makes a certain sense: any number of singers and dancers seem desperate to attain the – to my mind rather spurious – status of ‘artist’ and so, it would seem, do Wu-Tang Clan (. . . use the album as a springboard for the reconsideration of music as art, hoping the approach will help restore it to a place alongside the great visual works . . .). And good luck to them.

But then putting on my cynical hat – which, admittedly, I choose rarely to remove – it struck me: essentially this is just a novel piece of marketing schtick. I mean record label marketing departments the world over must be more than desperate for their label’s clients to stand out from 1,001 other wannabes hoping to launch a career, but there really are only so many tricks. I should imagine that bog roll and washing powder manufacturers are perpetually faced with the same dilemma. And what better way to announce: this is our new album but none of you’se is gonna hear it, bro.

Well, actually, they will, though having it ‘appear’ in art galleries and the like the world over would pretty much ensure that at least half of their fans won’t come along, and that they will, presumably, instead simply attract any number of arty-farty groupies just dying, darling, to brag that they got a ticket to the Tate’s presentation of Wu-Tang Clan’s latest.

There is just one flaw in the whole manoeuvre: so they tour the album in art galleries, then sell off the only copy to the highest bidder who is, apparently, contracted not to allow it to be played in public for 88 years. But isn’t the whole point of buying or downloading the music you like that you can play it again and again and again and again and again (rather like my daughter has played again and again and again and again and again Let It Go, the theme song from Frozen)? I know it’s what I did when I had bought a single or album I liked. You might argue that they’ve got their money so what the hell, but I wouldn’t: I think it is just one more marketing ploy with a rather fatal flaw. . . .

After writing the above piece, I thought I might as well check out Wu-Tang Clan to see what all the fuss is about, and I have to report that I still don’t know what all the fuss is about. I should say that I am one of those poor saps for whom one hip-hop R&B track goes a very long way (rather like the blues, it has to be said), so perhaps I’m not one to judge. But the tracks I heard sounded rather cheesy and predictable. Sorry, lads.

As for this desire – call it an obsession if you like – to be regarded as ‘artists’ and what you produce as ‘art’, well, I don’t really get that, either. For one thing I am of the distinctly minority view that in the sense that most people talk of ‘art’ there is no such thing as ‘art’ – that ‘art has a moral purpose’, that ‘art has a social purpose’ etc ad nauseam (you probably watched the same TV programmes), well count me out. In this case it is probably quite apt to use the cliché ‘follow the money’ and take a close look at who exactly benefits from bigging up ‘art’: why gallery owners, curators, arts journalists and ‘experts’ of every stripe. And if some chappie appers on the gogglebox declaring that, say, what Gilbert & George produce is ‘art’ but that what Alma Tadema produce wasn’t (or at least is ‘bad art’), who are we to contradict. After all, he is ‘the expert’ and we are not.

Bring art back down to earth, I say, stop using is as some failsafe to gain spurious respect and/or pull the birds.

‘Putin ill’ shock. What can that mean for house prices?

There seems to be quite a crowded agenda of things which are about go belly up and disrupt our lives accordingly. Many, if not most, need not concern us here in Tellytubby land (aka Great Britain, the UK and Old Blighty), but the aftershock of some might well upset our teatime regimes and ensure that the good folk at the Foreign Office don’t knock off at lunchtime on a Friday, but hang around to sort matters out. Where can one begin?

The whole business with Greece - will they, won’t they fuck up the European part of the Western World by telling their creditors to piss off and re-introduce a glass of ouzo as their preferred unit of currency - might for some take centre stage. But let’s be honest, there’s enough shit going on in the world (at least in the Northern Hemisphere - South America, African nations, Asia have enough troubles of their own and aren’t necessarily inclined to spend their time worrying about us however much we might feel put out by their disinterest).

Elsewhere there’s the battle to kick ISIS (IS or ISIL, never trust anyone with more than two names) out of Mosul, then Tikrit (or Tikrit, then Mosul - subs please check), which might superficially sound encouraging until you hear of the concerns of those familiar with that neck of the woods that the Shia militias - which make up a substantial part of the forces fighting IS (ISIS or ISIL, never trust anyone with more than two names - same joke, but I go along with Sam Goldwyn who believed that ‘if they liked it once, they’ll love it twice’) - might well not stick to the more or less admirable plan to neutralise IS, but carry on and kill each and every Sunni they come across.

This, the worriers concede, might well irritate the Saudis - Sunnis to a man (forget about the woman there I’m told). Given that conventional wisdom insists that almost all the trouble in the Middle East is at heart a proxy war between the Sunni Saudis and the Shi’ite Iranians, any ‘peace envoys’ from anywhere are quite simply wasting their time. But that’s not quite it: there’s also the ongoing bollocks in Eastern Ukraine. And that is where the latest piece of news I have come across fits in.

. . .

I have almost finished reading Petet Pomerantsev’s very interesting and very readable book Nothing Is True And Everything Is Possible, and it gave me a fascinating insight into - well, it has to be said - metropolitan Russia, i.e. Moscow. Then, last night, I watched a BBC 2 Newsnight report about the gunning down of Boris Nemtsov which suggested that Vladimir Putin is perhaps not quite as in control of Russia as many, probably Putin himself, like to think. And then I came across these two accounts in the Guardian and the Telegraph, both suggesting that Putin might be ill.

The first thing I noticed was that his age was given as 62. Well, I thought, he’s as healthy as a rat in shit - I’m 65, three years older and have never felt fitter, so why the bloody hell should he be ill? Nonsense, of course - my mother died of a massive heart attack at 60.

No one actually knows whether Putin is ill. They only know that ‘he hasn’t be seen in public’ since March 5. First question: so what? I have just spent three days in bed with a bad cold (for my feminist readers who like to have a good laugh: man flu) and I wasn’t ‘seen in public’ for three days. But there’s the rub: first of all it is now March 12, so Putin ‘hasn’t been seen in public’ for seven days.

Then there’s the obvious point - good of you to point it out - that in the context of world peace I am not half as important or even as influential as Putin. So what can it mean? Well, I don’t know, to be honest. And I must admit that feeling, as one does, quite low when one is afflicted by a bout of man flu, it is a relief not to be obliged to release hourly bulletins as to how you are getting one, with additional piccies to substantiate the veracity of the bulletins.

Folk like Putin, apparently, are obliged to. Or else we must Fear The Worst! Putin is, after all, the man of iron who is apt to wrestle two tigers solo before breakfast. I have noted before in my many ramblings about the former Soviet Union - for I think it is healthier to see it in those terms rather than Russia - that what is most worrying about what is happening there and what might affect us here in the West is the question of succession. It isn’t as though there is some respected and trusted mechanism for the passing on of power.

It seems that there are two distinct factions in the Kremlin as regards the Ukraine: the Peace faction and the War faction. And the names speak for themselves. So - if they exist and it is not all some figment of some journalist’s imagination - to which faction does Putin belong?

Just for the craic, to keep you occupied while I think up my next inconsequential, derivative, faux relevant entry.

I was looking for some piccies I once used in this blog - the entry was about personal internet radios - and searching Google images I came across a lot of others I have used over the years. So here are several, with value added.

OK, so I lied, but look at the bigger picture: I'm now fucking rich, really, really rich. And a lot bloody richer than you.

Well, it was odd, you know: at first I thought 'Me, a gorilla, get a mortgage? It doesn't make sense!' And then, of course, it made complete bloody sense. 

Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck! Did I switch the fucking gas off? Did I? Did I? Oh no! Fuck, fuck!

I don't care if you're gay, just tell my friends that you fuck me stupid every night. Please! Please!

Philosophy? Philosophy? Who gives a flying fuck about philosophy? I've got wine! Get a life!

Jesus, if only I'd started a pension plan when my dad advised me to!

‘. . . and she really, honestly thought we would be impressed! I ask you!’

. . .

Incidentally, while I am compiling this entry (sitting at the kitchen table), my wife, in the living room, is watching something on TV going through ‘hits of the past’, you know that kind of crap, the kind of thing TV puts on to keep its older viewers sweet by letting them pretend they are not yet dying of old age. There were quite a few songs wafting through to where I am sitting which I like. And one or two I don’t like at all, and never have. And what kicked of this addendum to the above post was Wuthering Heights by Kate Bush. Well, make that ‘sodding Kate Bush’, because I don’t mind going public on the fact that I loathe her and her music (except for one song, Babooshka). Who in their right minds likes to listen to a banshee shrieking with lots of faux profound lyrics?

As I am on a roll, I also loathe sodding Nick Drake and don’t particularly care for Tim Buckley or his son Jeff. There, I’ve said it!

PS As I write, there’s another song that has just startd playing that I also I loathe: Bridge Over sodding Troubled bloody Water. I otherwise quite like many things by Simon and Garfunkel and later on just Paul Simn (50 Ways To Leave Your Lover is a great song). But not that one, not Bridge Over sodding Troubled bloody Water. Then there’s sodding John Lennon’s Give Peace A Chance (yeah, right - the irony, the real irony, is that you have to fight for peace. If you want to ponder on the nature and essence of irony, ponder on that one, rather pertinent given all the recent furore about Britain’s Bomber Command bombing Dresden. Wake up, John. Oh, I forgot, he’s dead).

Principles? I have several, though not quite the kind you are thinking off. And who is this Vladislav Surkov? Answers on the usual postcard, please. As for ‘media studies’ degrees, well, stick ‘em up your jacksie (Prof Peter Cole and Prof Roy Greenslade, once, in a saner life when they didn’t take themselves quite so seriously, Pete and Roy from the Pig and Whistle)

It would be misleading – ironically, given who we are dealing with – to claim the print industry – that’s ‘newspapers’ in words we can all understand – and those who work in it don’t have principles. Of course they do. It’s just that their principles are not wholly admirable, but as we generally assume that ‘principles’ are noble beasts, a hack usually keeps his principles to him or herself.

One very useful principle in the life of a hack is: ‘Simplify, then exaggerate’. In that way you don’t confuse the poor reader with detail which they won’t understand – and which you don’t understand, either – but once you have reduced it to primary colours, then given it the necessary spin, well, you have a story. I came across a great example of the principle of ‘simplify, then exaggerate’ the other day when I passed a desk here at work on which a copy of the Daily Express was lying. A day or two earlier, writing in the British Medical Journal Aseem Malhotra, an ‘interventional cardiology specialist registrar at Croydon University hospital, London’ (impressed? I am) said that butter, cheese, red meat and the rest weren’t necessarily the fast track to a quick and early death we have been told they were for the past 30-odd years.

In fact, the data on which that claim had been based was potentially misleading in that it did not cover women. Furthermore, all the substitute ‘spreads’ we had been urged to used instead of butter – I call it crap, and have never given up butter, but that is neither here nor there – might well be more harmful than what they were intended to replace. So far, so interesting and for someone like me who loves butter and cheese, rather reassuring.

 The story was, of course, covered by all the British national newspapers to with varying degrees of responsibility: the Guardian played it straight, the Daily Telegraph – here and here - gave it only the slightest of spin, the Daily Mail managed to sound outraged (but then the Mail is easily outraged on behalf of its readers - outraged readers always come back for more), and the Mirror (formerly the Daily Mirror, and why did they change the title?) also played it straight. What the hell, not much of a story really. But it was the Daily Express which won the cigar in tabloid terms: what was that principle – ‘simplify, then exaggerate’? That is what the Express did, and here’s it’s front page – it’s a classic

Er, not quite. And if you want another a further taste of the Daily Express’s exemplary journalism, try this (at the bottom of the post).

 . . .

Before I took up the life of a sub-editor, ensuring commas were in the right place and that any names mentioned in a news story or feature weren’t misspelled more than once, I was a reporter for six years, first for two weekly papers, then an evening paper, then a morning paper. I mention the papers I worked for because the industry has changed to such an extent here that the usual route to working for one of ‘the nationals’ here in Britain has changed a great deal.

Once you started ‘your career’ – of maybe it’s only mine which deserves the inverted commas – on a weekly paper reporting on flower shows and interviewing crashing bores who own the county’s largest collection of antique beer mats, eventually moved on to the local evening, then a regional morning paper before trying your luck in The Smoke – having made all your awful mistakes by then and learned never to repeat them. These days ‘the nationals’ now seem to take on graduate trainees who are given a brief guide to telling one end of a sentence from the other before joining up and being paid a pittance. Actually, that is probably truer of trainee sub-editors on the nationals. The reporters given shifts by the newsdesk must be reasonably clued up to warrant getting the work so they probably did spend some time as a local newspaper reporter.

I joined the Lincolnshire Chronicle on June 4, 1974, and got fuck-all official training until the following spring when I was sent on a two-month course to learn shorthand and ‘law for journalism’ at Richmond College, Sheffield. Before then I picked up a little on the job, though to be frank that is not necessarily the worst way to go about it. I can’t speak for others, but as far as I am concerned being a newspaper journalist – and I far prefer the term ‘hack’ which doesn’t, as far as I am concerned, carry any negative connotation – is essentially practical, and you can do it or you can’t.

So the bright girls and boys will pick up what they are supposed to be doing in hours, the rest of us took several months to get the lay of the land, and the thickos won’t pick up much at all (and, as a rule, will become the big ‘bastard management’ ‘join the union’ tub-thumpers and full of stories such as ‘they offered me a job on Fleet Street, but we like it round here’ to justify why in career terms they never even left the starting block. Years ago, the thickos who really couldn’t cut it used to drift off into a press officers’ job, public relations and dead-end jobs on trade papers where they would usually die in harness 30 years later. Latterly, PR and press officering has become a damn sight slicker and a great money-spinner if you are any good at it, mainly because the aim is no longer to assist hacks as once it was, but to obstruct them and make sure their pay masters’ arses are covered.

The bright, ambitious ones, on the other hand, were quick on the uptake, seemed to have been around for ages within two days of starting, knew everything that was going on before it had even happened and then were gone and on their way up the ladder within months: bugger if they broke a contract of employment which articled them to a paper for two or three years – the sharper they were, the more contracts they broke: and the news editors they now worked for were glad to get a good operator - good news editors want stories, are never too fussy how they are obtained and if your bright new reporter has fewer scruples than Liberace had wives, who cares?

NB While I was working on the Lincolnshire Chronicle, I got friendly with a hack on the Lincolnshire Echo, the local evening paper, called Peter Kraft. He – I saw them all – had five different driving licences (OK, it was four, but that is gen), all in slight variations of his name. All had penalty points and endorsements.

Then there was the Guardian reporter who arrived in Lincoln in October 1974 to do a piece on the local constituency battle between the sitting MP Dick Taverne and then Margaret Jackson (later the Cabinet minister Margaret Beckett). Taverne had been kicked out of the Labour party the previous year over his enthusiasm for the then European Community – Labour weren’t at all keen in those days. 

Taverne had then formed an independent Labour party in Lincoln and held onto his seat in the February 1974 election, but that October he was defeated by Margaret Jackson/Beckett). The Guardian reporter was Peter Cole, now ‘Emeritus Professor’ in the Department of Journalism Studies at the University of Sheffield, who went on to be editor of the extremely short-lived Sunday Correspondent (September 1989 to November 1990 – will they ever learn?). We both attended a Press conference along with one or two other hacks and I, the trainee scruff from the local weekly was rather in awe of the Guardian journalist from The Smoke and chatted with him.

During the Press conference I noticed that he didn’t have shorthand (and neither did I at that point). So I asked him how he could record what people said – get quotes? ‘Oh,’ he told me loftily. ‘I give a flavour of what they say.’ Well, I now know what he means – and very, very few folk can remember the exact words they used ten minutes ago and if you write a quote they can't remember, well, they can’t remember, see, and that’s what you tell them – but I did, at the time, think – remember, I was still quite a keen young thing then and had high hopes of making my way – ‘that’s a bit iffy, isn’t it? How can you get quotes if you don’t record exactly what people say?’

Incidentally, others might disagree, but this hack has always felt that turning journalism into an academic subject is grade A bullshit – take note 'Professor' Roy Greenslade, who seems to be forever living off the fact that he once got a tearound in while working at The Sun. (Actually, he was deputy editor for a while, but I make my comments in the spirit of this blog post.) As for a ‘media studies’ degree, the best place for it is as far up your arse as you can stick it without killing yourself.

Notwithstanding that any and every degree course - whether media studies, PPE, history, English Literature, languages or tourism - is most certainly valuable if it trains you brain, mind and intellect to think and gives you the means to tackle almost any job successfully after learning a little bit more about it, you’ll learn as much about reporting, feature writing, dealing with the public and all the rest of what makes up a hack’s professional life from a media studies course as you will be able to learn to drive by reading the Highway Code. Doing it will teach you.

More to the point, they would often rather not know what’s been going on: deniability is worth its weight in gold and not to be sneered at, and as long as you don’t fuck them over. These bright young things used to scare the shit out of me: me sharp? Not in a million years. (I’ve since discovered there’s a lot to be gained by being thought sharp, but that’s another story. The secret is to keep schtumm: if someone thinks you’re a sharp, bright cookie, don’t open your mouth and prove them wrong.)

. . .

One of the first journalistic principles most young reporters hear about – though not all of them seem to adopt it given some of the badly written news stories I occasionally spot in local papers – is quite simple: ‘Don’t let a couple of facts spoil a good story.’ Speaks for itself really: if you have a good tale to tell – and, let’s face it, despite all the hi’falutin talk of the public’s right to know and how the job of the Press is to keep authority in check, all that phoney Lou Grant crap – don’t ruin it.

If a 90-year-old widow has been robbed blind by the local council but the whole matter was at first swept under the carpet but was then eventually sorted out amicably, leave the bit about the happy end until a very short final paragraph, if ‘Council screws widow, 90, rotten!’ is the story you want. OK, you might on the other hand want a hearts and flowers story, because it’s already got out and other papers are carrying it, so that happy ending does go further up the story, but not too far up. The rule is: misery, heartbreak, disaster, grief and all their brothers, sisters and first cousins are hot. Always remember that wise advice: ‘Boy Scout does good deed’ doesn’t sell too many copies and it isn't truth newspapers are after, but big bucks whatever they might tell you.

A reporter for only six years? I hear you ask. Not very long, is it? No, it isn’t. Dear reader, even though I say so myself, I wasn’t a bad reporter, but I wasn’t destined for the top, either. I’ve already admitted that each of the bright, keen-as-mustard young things I worked side-by-side with before they were on their way again before you could even catch your breath scared the shit out of me, and in my heart I knew I wasn’t one of them. Certainly, there are other avenues for a reporter to make her or his way – education correspondent, health correspondent, local authority correspondent – but the truth is I wasn’t interested.

I don’t – and was slowly realising it then – give a flying fuck about ‘news’. My attitude is if it’s important, I’ll hear about it sooner or later, and I consider the standard obsession with ‘hearing the latest development’ a sign of neurosis. So you can see why bit by bit I came to realise that whatever my future was to be in newspapers, it wasn’t going to be as a reporter. There's also the small matter that the public - civilians call them ‘the general public’ - are as a rule dull as ditchwater, never finish their sentences when you need that quote (so you are obliged to make it up), and broadly go on and on an on for hours after you have got what you want and no longer need to talk to them.

Then, of course, there was the little matter of closing down Newcastle airport and grounding all flights all on my own which helped to persuade me that reporting was not to be my long-term future and that I should seek out another avenue - did someone say career path? - in this glorious industry of ours, But that, too, is for another day. But I will say this: that embarrassing matter with Newcastle airport did help me acquire another of my principles, and an invaluable on even though I learned about the hard way, is: Never come clean - ever!

Incidentally, I might perhaps be painting too rosy a picture of our glorious industry. But if you are still intent on making a name for yourself by indulging in all that ‘Lou Grant crap’, don’t bother doing so in, among other countries, Syria, Iraq, Ukraine, Somalia, Pakistan, Paraguay and Brazil – you might well end up dead long before the fags and booze claim you. So far in 2015 – not even two months old – 16 journalists have died in one way or another. In 2014 it was 61. Take a look here for more information.
. . .

I  mentioned a certain Peter Pomerantsev and his new book Nothing Is True And Everything Is Possible the other day. (Here is a review of it which appeared in the Guardian.) He was on the radio this morning on a programme called Start The Week (unfortunately this morning presented by Andrew Marr, but that was just a one-off) and he was giving further details of his take on life in Putin’s Russia. Naturally, this is just his views of the situation there, but whether they reflect the reality or not – and, well, I’m going to go for ‘they do’ – Russia seems like a wackier version of Alice In Wonderland. Pomerantsev mentioned a character called ‘Surkov’ upon whom, it’s claimed, Putin relies quite a bit.

Vladislav Surkov is billed here as more or less the author of Putinism and is said to pull many of the strings. According to Pomerantsev even the opposition parties are Kremlin-sponsored to give the appearance of – well, democracy. Who knows? Could be true, Pomerantsev could be just another stooge putting out a set of lies to counteract another set of lies. After all, ‘nothing is true and everything is possible’. There was even the claim on the programme that Putin’s anti-gay drive at the time of the Sochi Winter Olympics was all a sham, a pose, though I can’t off-hand now remember what – if that is true – it was intended to achieve.

I’ve ordered the book from Amazon and it should arrive tomorrow. I look forward to reading it.

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!