Seems like the Greeks will soon be making that drachma out of a crisis - finally. But hold onto your seat belts, it could be a very bumpy ride

You might well have heard the anecdote about a visitor to Ireland asking his way to somewhere. ‘Well,’ declares the Irishman he consults, ‘first of all, I wouldn’t have started here.’ Chortles all round and quasi-racist reflections on the ‘thick Mick’. Er, not quite.

Like many such stories, the boot is, actually, very much on the other foot, and the joke isn’t on the ‘Oirishman’, but on the visitor. Furthermore, there is a great deal more sense in that reply than in much of the WASP logic it might seem to offend. Similarly, 40 years ago a friend and colleague of my father’s who was working in Northern Ireland and had taken a weekend off to visit Galway, stopped at a local newsagent’s to buy his copy of the English Daily Telegraph, only to find that all they had on sale was the edition from the previous day. ‘Do you have today’s Telegraph?’ he asked politely. Sorry, sir, he was told, if you want today’s edition, you’ll have to come back tomorrow. Again there were chortles all round when he told the story and when it was repeated - in those days chortles from me, too, and repeat tellings of the tale by me.

But hold on: there is a seam of impeccable logic in that supposedly quaint ‘Oirishman’s’ response. If, as in those pre-internet, pre-motorway and more or less pre-anything else days, it took more than a day for a consignment of the ‘London papers’ (which many an Englishman could not do without, it would seem) there was no earthly way any newsagent in Galway would be able to stock and sell today’s papers today.

If, as quite possibly the newsagent assumed, my father’s friend was keen, for whatever reason, on having that particular day’s paper, he was best advised to return the following day to pick one up once it had arrived. I am no longer chortling; it makes perfect sense to me. The advice to the visitor seeking directions is similarly sage: well, if that’s your destination (it says), you have made the task even harder for yourself by starting from this point.

The two stories - the second after the first - occur to me regularly when I hear the latest news about ‘possible Grexit’, ‘the Greek government defaulting on its debts’, the ever-growing likelihood of Greece

eventually leaving or being pushed out of the eurozone (and, today, even the suggestion from one Greek minister, that Greece might even eventually leave the European Union). There was another meeting of EU finance ministers today and it is scheduled to carry on tomorrow if needs be, but, dear readers, it is now obvious to all and everyone except a deaf, dumb and blind sow, that it will all end in tears one way or another. The Greeks can’t stand down and what is fancifully and rather heroically called ‘the Troika’ can’t do so, either. Both sides have their - very good reasons for standing their ground, but crucially both sets of reasons are in no way congruent. In other words: if you want to end up with a solution which is equitable for, and acceptable to, both sides, the situation as it stands now is no where to start from.

There are of course, at least on the side of the Troika, many brave declarations that a solution can still be found, but who are they kidding? And it’s not the money they - the IMF and the European Central Bank, as well as assorted ‘investors’ - will lose if the debt is written off, which irks them, it is the precedent: if Greece can be cut that much slack other countries will ask who weren’t cut so much slack and buckled down - notably Ireland which has come out of its own financial crisis smelling or roses and which can hold its head high - we weren’t we? We were we made to bow and scrape and beg and made to look like vassal states to the EU?

Another, equally as serious, danger is that those sitting on piles of cash who are in the business of lending to governments will think not twice or three but a great many more times about who they lend to. That means that those countries who most need loans are the least liable to get them. Perhaps a brief resume of the whole farcical situation is useful (this one courtesy, as always, of course, ’cos I really am no sage in these matters, from the several radio, TV and newspaper reports that have come my way): the present argy-bargy - the Troika demanding that pensions must be cut even more, that public assets must be privatised and the rest if Greece is to get any more money - is itself quite farcical. That money, if the Greeks get it, will only be used to pay off previous loans, which themselves were only granted to pay off even earlier loans.

The essential problem, a great debt of gigantic proportions, one I hear which now stands at almost double - 180pc - of Greece’s total annual income, still remains untouched and is in no danger of being reduced. So if you’re looking for a route to reach a happy and peaceful resolution to the present crisis - ouzo, schnapps, grappa and cognacs all round to celebrate a job well done - here is most certainly not the spot you want to start from.

. . .

All that makes it sound as thought the EU, the ECB, the Toika and the rest of that sorry bunch are on the back foot. Nonsense. The Greek government is also between a rock and a hard place: it cannot and dare not give in. The Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras, who leads the ‘left-wing’ Syriza party is buggered, snookered, up shit creek and then some.

(NB I leave ‘left-wing’ in quotes not because I suspect Tsipras is nothing of the kind, but because calling someone or a party ‘left-wing’ is usually intended as an insult and it is an insult I don’t want to deliver. So quoting ‘left-wing’ has allowed me to make that point clear.)

Tsipras and his party were elected because they vowed to stand up for Greece and her people, unlike previous governments who seem to have allowed themselves to bend over and be fucked as often as it suited the Troika, on the understanding that their personal circumstances remained unaffected - I doubt whether many of the previous government are yet going hungry, but unfortunately it seems an increasing number of the poorer Greeks are.

Europe’s pollyanas are decrying the doom merchants roundly. Greek can default, they declare, re-introduce the drachma, boost their economy, holidays would be cheap for the rest of us, it might not end all that badly at all, and why, who knows, pigs might indeed fly. To which I can only add that if they do, it will be for the very first time in recorded history

According to the bod whose report I heard on Radio 4’s PM news programme an hour or two ago, defaulting on the repayment due to the IMF is not quite the real danger. Many countries, Zambia, Cuba and Cyprus to name just three, have done so and the seven horsemen still failed to turn up. What would really do damage all round is if Greece, a month later, also defaulted on a repayment due to the European Central Bank.

As part of its statutes, it seems, that action would mean it would simply have to close down Greece, with no more cash from ATMS and the rest. And that would spell real trouble. It wouldn’t mean that Tsipras would no longer be welcomed at the chancelleries of EU member states. He could live with that. The real danger is that Greece might descend into civil unrest and then civil war. And the country has a history of political instability.

Quite apart from the rule by a military junta from 1967, when it seized power in a coup, until 1974, there was also what we understated Brits call a ‘spot of bother’ in 1935 when there was another attempted coup. It wasn’t successful, but eventually led to what many regard as a thoroughly rigged referendum to reinstate the monarchy.

There’s no suggestion that history will repeat itself. For one thing the world has changed. But in recent years we seem to have heard very little of those nasty thugs from Golden Dawn who, unlike our Northern European crypto-fascists, publicly admire and hanker after the kind of fascism which took over Germany, Spain, Portugal and Italy in the 1930s. It is not too fanciful to suggest that in a country bearing its unfair share of taking care of people fleeing Ethiopia, Libya and Syria (as is Italy), Golden Dawn might well find a great deal of popular support among a poor Greek population at its wits end. Could there be civil war? Who knows? But it is not at all unikely.

Into this mix add the murky ambitions of Recep Erdogan, Turkey’s far from democratically-minded president who is still smarting from humiliation in recent elections when his party lost a substantial number of seats in parliament (and the Kurds gained a great many more) and who might not be averse to stirring matters a little in the affairs of Turkey’s arch foe Greece. And then, of course, there is Putin. Ah, Putin, what a transparent man he is.

It is fashionable to insist that Putin hasn’t the resources, least of all the spare moolah, to help the Greeks out of a hole. But that is beside the point. In saying that, those who insist Putin is no real factor in this whole stupid situation are making the classic mistake of applying their very own standards to a man and country who dance to their own tune. Russia has already a rather useful foothold in Cyprus, acquired by a loan here and there, and the developing crisis in Greece, especially if it did experience civil unrest, might well strike Putin as an opportunity to do whatever might embarrass the EU most. Well, I would, too. Wouldn’t you?

All that - I have added thoughts of my own to what the Radio 4 bod was explaining - is still in the future. It would seem the real test will come when Greece is due to pay back what it is due to pay back to the ECB. Will they default on the IMF loan due more or less now to have more of the readies to pay back the ECB? That’s possible. But it still goes nowhere near tackling the real problem of is core debt. Not for the first time I am obliged to resort to what is now a cliche, the old Chinese curse on someone that they might ‘live in interesting times’. Times are certainly interesting and a likely to become even more interesting.

. . .

I’m sorry that none of this here is in the slightest bit original, and I apologise for that. I have no better sources of information than you who is reading this. I run this blog for many reasons, by no

means the least of which is that I enjoy writing, and so far this is the only writing I do despite my high-flown pretensions. I am, however, trying to write not one but two radio plays, so maybe the time will come where I finally do put my money where my mouth is. There’s a great Texan phrase - I think it’s Texan, perhaps it’s from Arizona - which does describe a certain kind of person. That person is said to be ‘all hat and no cattle’. Well, so far, dear reader, I have an enviable collection of metaphorical hats, but so far not one metaphorical cattle. None. Wish me luck.

There is, of course, ‘my novel’, but despite several naked appeals to you all to buy a copy, read it and admire it, no one has yet done me the honour. (I would know because I would get notice of a sale from Amazon). So let me repeat it: you can find out more about it and buy it if you are so inclined here. And it really is not at all bad. On a scale of 1 to 10 I would give it a 6. Modest enough for you? Oh, and if you do check it out, I do urge you to remember the very good advice ‘never to judge a book by its cover’. Speaking of which, here is the cover (above left).

Pip, pip.

Q: When is a loan shark not a loan shark? A: Never. They are always scum even when they come in a suit and expensive aftershave and don’t carry a stilletto. And that is what Greece now knows: you want credit? We’ve got credit — but it will cost ya

We must all know that feeling, especially when we are younger and have less experience of life (by which I mean we have so far been in fewer scrapes, not that oldies are in some way wiser) that ‘things are just awful and there is no way out. None’. As it turns out, there is a way out, though quite often not the one we want.

Many years ago my bank talked me into - although it didn’t take much talking, they know a sucker when they see one - opening a kind of ‘credit account’, much like a credit card is now. There was no card, and I simply wrote cheques, but either way I maxed out my £3,000 limit within months, buying up all kinds of photographic gear mainly but also helping to pay the fees for a college photographic course I started.

To clarify a little, that £3,000 would today be worth between £9,000 and £18,000, depending upon which measure you are using. Stupid or what? Of course, bloody stupid, but the bank didn’t care - they knew they would get their money - the principal - back one way or another, but they also knew they would get more - the vig as gangsters like to call it - and probably far more, in interest over the years as I and others similarly suckered into borrowing the money paid back.

At times that £3,000 - actually, I’ve since discovered a relatively small sum compared to what others have owed and others still owe in credit card debt - seemed overwhelming and life was shitty. I ran out of money after two terms of my course and had to leave, and I was then unemployed for the following ten months.

The bank ‘kindly’ agreed that I could leave off paying off my debt while I was unemployed, although it would ‘of course’ continue to attract interest. And so the debt grew and grew. When I finally found a job, I began to pay it off, at £30 a week. And boy was that frustrating: we were paid weekly in cash in those days (I was working as a sub-editor on the South Wales Echo in Cardiff) and as soon as that small brown envelope was handed to me, it was down to the nearest branch of Lloyds, about three minutes away from Thomson House, near the rail station to pay in that week’s £30.

Every months I received my statement and would almost literally howl with fury: of the £120 I had paid in over the past four weeks, around £80 would go to pay of the interest, the vig. Jesus, I hated those guys, and ever since then I spit on banks and money men generally. Yes, we need them, but we most certainly don’t have to respect them or like them.

I was determined to pay off that debt, and I did. Over the years - it took about seven years - the principal came down and so did the vig, and boy was it a sense of achievement to pay it off and be
done with it. (I was by then living in London, but made a special trip to Birmingham to pay off that final £100 to the manager personally and to tell him exactly what I thought of banks and their invidious practice of inveigling customers to borrow ever more money. I was polite, but I didn’t hold back. But did he care? Did he fuck. I was just another schmuck and although I was now out of the bank’s debt and clutches, he knew there would - and will - more schmucks. I have no way of working out exactly how much Lloyds made out of me and my debt while it was still outstanding, but a rough guess would be about the same as I owed. You might say, of course, that ‘Patrick, me old mucker, you didn’t have to borrow the £3,000 in the first place. So, Patrick, old fruit, it was your own bloody fault’. And I can’t disagree with that. Of course, I didn’t have to borrow it, and no one, but no one forced me to fritter it away.

But that isn’t quite the point: lenders, from ‘respectable’ banks to loan sharks with a scar from ear to ear and a stiletto up their sleeve, know full well that they don’t have to force anyone to borrow money (except, of course, when they suggest we borrow a little more to pay off our interest, something my ‘respectable’ Lloyds manager in Birmingham suggested. I turned him down and instead embarked seven-year schlepp to pay off my debt). They know that to a man and woman we are pig-stupid enough to borrow what is on offer. And boy are they keen - for the very obvious reasons outlined above - to lend us money.

. . .

In the scheme of things, mine is a tiny, tiny story with a belated happy ending, and I am aware that there are far worse stories, many of which do not and will not have a happy ending (and please believe me that I am not feeling smug or complacent, just relieved that I managed  to emerge 

unscathed). But in a sense my story demonstrates what has happened to Greece, and there will decidedly not be a happy ending to this one. It is often commented that the Greeks didn’t have to borrow the sums they did to build their better roads and the rest.

It is often remarked that if successive governments had been far more diligent in collecting the taxes owed to the state, they might not have ended up in the utterly miserable situation they now find themselves in. Furthermore, we are told, Greece has a thriving tradition of corruption and bribery. But all three points miss the point by a country mile and do so wilfully.

Essentially, it is the same story with Greece and its lenders as it was with me and the ‘respectable’ bank manager of Lloyds’s Colmore Circus branch: they are not in the slightest bit concerned whether Greece or I should borrow to such an extent, because they know full well, one way or the other, that they will get their money back and make an additional healthy packet on top. Were Greece and I being irresponsible? Their attitude is: whatever. Because we don’t give a fuck. If the schmuck stupid enough to borrow from a loan shark announces he can’t pay up this week, he gets a severe beating to teach him a lesson. Make no mistake: Greece is also being given a severe beating and is being taught a lesson.

Oh, it might be couched in the oh-so-respectable terms and assurances that ‘we feel your pain’, but that is pantomime stuff. And ironically, it is no longer the Greeks who are now paying the vig but more or less the German taxpayer. The lenders don’t care, of course, they don’t care two hoots who

coughs up as long as they get their lucre. Yes, of course, it is more complex than that, but in a sense it is no more complex at all: Greece was and is just another schmuck who has been taken for a ride by the moneylenders.

Certainly, there are other dimensions to this problem: if Greece is let off the hook, the moneylenders say, it would ‘send the wrong message’ to the other eurozone members - Spain, Ireland and Portugal - who have been ‘financially imprudent’. Well, that’s what loan sharks always say: you’ll never catch a fully-qualified loan shark letting any of his clients off the hook - slitting his own throat would be a quicker way to get to where such an action would take him.

. . .

I started writing this entry after reading a good piece in the The Guardian by one Seamus Milne. It is not directly about the Greek austerity and euro crisis, but about the need for reform in the EU, but I recommend it. One of his main suggestions is that bit by bit the EU is being hijacked by the corporate world and used for its own means.

What with that alarming Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) being steamrollered through by the EU and the US (here’s another good piece, admittedly pretty anti-TTIP, but then I can’t see anything good about it) it does seem that the EU, which might even have seemed an old idealistic hippy dream when it was first established, is slowly but inexorably being turned into quite a different animal, and one in which ‘democracy’, by which I simply understand your and my right to stipulate how we are governed and by whom has little place, if any.

The irony of what I have just written is that it might make me sound like some unreconstructed Lefty, when, in fact, I am anything but that. But you don’t need to be a Lefty to use your nose and announce that something stinks if you sincerely think it stinks.

Howl! Those old hippy buffers still think they were relevant. Oh, well, but never trust folk who believe their own bullshit. And then there’s Ginsberg’s Howl: a milestone in poetry or just a long late-adolsescent rant? You decide, I’m off to watch the Cup Final

I was born in 1949 so I might legitimately be regarded as part of the ‘Sixties generation’, although for one or two reasons I was not. First of all, I was only ten in 1960 and although I was 20 by the end of the decade, the whole ‘movement’ had more or less played itself out. It was already being taken over by the sharp minds who always know how to turn pretty much everything into hard cash and who almost always thereby destroy the essence of what has caught their interest and made it notable.

A second reason as to why I was never really part of the Sixties generation was that my family lived on Berlin until the middle of 1963, and that when we moved back to Britain, I was shunted off into a boarding school where there was precious little chance to join the Sixties counterculture. I was a boarder for the first term, then a day boy until 1965, then a boarder again for the final three years. But even as a day boy I had little time for rebellion as I had school SIX days a week and the school day ran from 9am until 7pm. The reason for those unusual hours was that the the timetable was organised to suit the boarders, not us day boys, of whom at the time there were only six. Another reason, though, was that I was something of a prig and was there was not much of a countercultural spirit flowing through me.

When, at 18, I got to college - Dundee University - my ambitions were simple: to grow my hair as long as I could, smoke some of that cannabis I had heard so much about and to lose my cherry (U.S. - get bloody laid). I had little interest or time for the ostensible philosophy of the Sixties generation which I regarded then, and still do now, as largely phoney. Certainly, I can quite understand the rebellious nature of that generation: as every other young generation since the dawn of time, it was kicking against its parents’ generation.

What distinguished it was an insistence that it was in some odd way far more important and significant than other rebellious generations, a quaint view held even to today by bald old buffers in

their 70s - rarely women, you might notice, but then all that Sixties ‘liberating women’ schtick was a load of old hooey and the comparatively easier freedoms women in the West now have didn’t come until many, many years later. But back to those old buffers: I wouldn’t be surprised to hear any one of them proclaim ‘we freed the world’ and believe their own bullshit. I was reminded of all this when, earlier this morning on the radio, there was mention that today such old buffers are gathering to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the International Poetry Incarnation which was held at London’s Albert Hall on June 11, 1965.

What actually sparked me and this entry off was a recording, part of a documentary being made about the event, of Allen Ginsberg reading some of his poetry. And by no means for the first time was I reminded how self-delusional, self-regarding and self-important a great deal of that vaunted ‘Sixties generation’ was and just how shallow were the philosophies and ‘insights’ it trumpeted. The piece Ginsbeg read out - actually, it concluded with him shouting it out - would now not even find space in the most desperate poetry magazine seeking material. But such was the fervor of the times, such was self-delusion, that it was seen as a step forward. In a piece I came across on the web while looking up dates for this entry, I found an account of a moment from the Albert Hall event:

Big, bald and bearded, [Ginsberg] like a Jewish bear stuffed in a suit, the beat poet stands tall in the Royal Albert Hall, London’s sacred haven of the high arts, and proclaims to 7,000 fellow thinkers: 'I want God to fuck me up the ass.' In the crowd was Heathcote Williams, the future poet, playwright and artist. Williams recounts what happened next: “A man with a bowler hat, beside himself with anger, shouted out: ‘We want poetry. This is not poetry’, and Ginsberg retorted, looking up towards the gods: ‘I want you to fuck me up the ass.’

Pertinent points here are that in 1965 Ginsberg was already 39 and cannot by any stretch of the imagination be regarded as part of 'the younger generation'. Quite possibly he wasn't and, like others from the Beat generation which, one could argue, the Sixties' counterculture drew on considerably, he was seen more as a father figurehead. And Ginsberg was gay and had grown up in an America where to be gay was not, I should imagine, easy.

Yet although I can both sympathise and empathise with his frustrations and anger as a gay outsider, they might act as a catalyst for poetry but they most certainly in themselves don't even come close to

 creating anything which we might regard as 'poetry' (admittedly almost impossible to define, anyway.) But that is what we are asked to accept.

I have long realised that poetry and I are on different trains. I don't read a lot of it, but I have read some and appreciated some, and even had an inkling of what real poetry might be. But real poetry is rare, very, very rare. And 99 per cent of what I hear on the radio or come across in magazines is total shite (though I must obviously repeat how it is almost impossible to define what poetry is or even might be). As a lad at college I do remember getting hold of some Beat poetry and reading it (I thought I ought to, having my pretensions to wanting to be ‘a writer’ and attempting the occasional poem), and I was pretty underwhelmed, though at the time, being rather less confident in my intellectual and aesthetic abilities than I am now (there is always the danger, of course, of going to far in the opposite direction and suffering from overwheening overconfidence, not to say conceit) I thought I was at fault for somehow ‘not getting it'.

Yes, there is virtue, there is always virtue, in breaking free, challenging the orthodoxies, trying to establish an identity independent of your parents and their generation, finding new ways, keeping an open mind and not sinking, as sadly we all do and must into a smug pit of self-regard and self-congratulation. But none of that necessarily makes 'good poetry'. And another irony is that for all their previous avant garde zeal far, far too many of the former Sixties generation buffers have long ago sunk into that pit of self-regard and self-congratulation.

To paraphrase Göring (and, it would seem, several others who also claim to have said it first): ‘When I hear the word counterculture, I reach for the TV remote’.So let them gather today and slap each other on the back and reminisce and continue to persuade themselves that they 'changed the world'. Me? I'll be watching the FA Cup Final on the telly and hoping Aston Villa will win (so that Aresenal lose).

PS Anyone who wants to read Ginsberg’s poem Howl can read it here. . . .

After looking up Ginsberg’s Howl and adding a link here for those who feel they can’t live without it (thought they can, if only they knew), I had a few more thoughts about ‘poetry’ and ‘what is poetry’, which might also apply to ‘art’ and ‘what is art’. Rather less flippantly than might at first seem, I might well choose to observe that, as the saying is, ‘one man’s meat is another man’s’.

(NB One of my first ever journalistic puns was composed when I was a reporter on the Lincolnshire Chronicle in about 1975. It was a piece about horse-riding and horse clubs and, after a little consultation, of course, because often these matters are joint efforts, I came up with the observation that ‘one man’s meet is another man’s pussiance’. Oh, well, seemed good at the time.)

That - the reference to taste, obviously, not to horses and riding them - means, of course, that one might argue that in the real world any workable and universally acceptable definition of what ‘poetry’ and ‘art’ are just isn’t possible. Not that many folk don’t try, especially those, such as academics who are paid vast sums to come up with a definition and aren’t about to cut their own throat by turn admitting ‘well, to be honest, there isn’t one.

Other folk all too ready to lay down the law on ‘what art is’ are gallery owners and curators who in one way or another make a very good living indeed by being the ‘expert’ to whom those with less confidence in their own judgment turn. I mean, if you are about the shell out several million dollars on what to your untutored eye looks very much like a heap of old shit with pain on it, you would mo

st certainly first want to be assured that, despite appearances, it most certainly is ‘art’ and you are very lucky indeed soon to be its owner. Believe it or not, folk have parted with good cash for ‘works of art’ by a couple called Gilbert & George which consisted partly of their own shit spread on canvas. Takes all sort, I suppose.

I think a possible workaround is that we accept that everything and anything - any poem, any play, any picture, any sculpture and, of course, any poem - put forward as ‘art’ (or, in the case of poems) ‘poetry’ is what it claims to be. Then we can make distinction between ‘good art’ and ‘bad art’ and ‘good poetry’ and ‘bad poetry’. Makes sense to me. A longwinded and usually thoroughly tedious and boring ‘debate’ is avoided and we can all settle in to watch the FA Cup Final on telly. Oh, and if my solution is accepted, Ginsberg’s Howl is most certainly poetry, though in my view fucking awful poetry.

One last thing: presented with a ‘poem’ - of which all too many simply seem like several hundred words of prose randomly broken into lines - our first question might be: what does this poem bring to us over and above what a piece of prose would. The answer, all too often, is ‘fuck all, dear heart’. And Howl, by Mr Ginsberg, strikes me as nothing more than a silly rant, though one with which young folk kicking over the traces (of which Mr Ginsberg was not, however, one) can ‘identify’, given that they are invariably against everything their parents stand for and support everything their parents loathe. And why not? But that still doesn’t make Howl a ‘good poem’.

(Incidentally, there really was once a time when to include the word ‘fuck’ in a piece of prose, poetry or journalism really was groundbreaking stuff, a blow for freedom. Yes, my young ones, it was. But as that was when life was still in black and white and we Brits could only get two TV channel, you are quite right to dismiss it. And a mark of just how fucking usual it now is, not to saying how fucking using the word ‘fuck’ is pretty much boring bollocks is that in this ’ere blog I use it quite a lot. Pip, pip.

Newspaper journalism a ‘vocation’? Up to a point, Lord Copper. Or: Myths I should like to bust: Part 1 in an series of I don’t know how many more.

A few years ago, before the days my criminal son initiated me in the criminal ways of criminally downloading films with uTorrtent, I used to by DVDs, though having been voted St Breward Tightarse of the Year, seven years on the trot, I always keep an eye out for a bargain. One I bought was the complete first series of Mad Men, and as is usual with such DVDs there were ‘extras’, in this case a 15-minute spoken memoir of a veteran of Fifties Madison Avenue, when the whole advertising spiel really took off and came off age, i.e. no more of the ‘Buy our washing powder, because it’s the Best!’

In it he admitted that as far as he was concerned, the most successful ad campaign of all time was this: the advertising industry selling itself to commerce, other industries and business as being utterly essential to their business; that if you didn’t invest millions in advertising you were not only a total loser and your business would crash, but your dick was incredibly short.

He was right: everyone, but everyone in business would these days considering it complete madness not to advertise. And the thinking has become so daft that advertising budgets are now stratospheric. Then there’s the saying, attributed to many – because it’s a smart quote that many wish they had said – but usually attributed to a merchant, politician and ‘religious leader (the US seems to have a lot of those) called John Wannamaker.

He is said to have been asked: ‘How much of the money you spend on advertising is well spent?’ to which he replied ‘About half of it, but the trouble is I don’t know which half.’ Like many such quips what is apparently just a throwaway line actually sums up rather well the dilemma faced by businesses: are we wasting our money on advertising? Are we wasting our money on the wrong advertising? Dare we spend less and invest in the business in other ways? Should we spend more? And if a business starts doing a lot worse than a rival, there is always the suspicion, verging on paranoia that ‘we are not spending enough on advertising’.

The other side of the coin is, though, that the ad industry, the Mad Men (‘mad’ but also from MADison Avenue) are laughing all the way to the bank, making millions – well, these days billions – in the certain knowledge that businesses of all kinds have bought into the myth that ‘they can’t do without advertising’. I wasn’t going to blether on about advertising, though, but newspaper journalism. But before that I might add that if I knew then what I know now,

I might well have gone for a job as a copywriter, knowing that copywriters move on to do a lot more than simply write copy. And as I’m on that tack – and given my utterly contrary views as to what ‘art’ is (not the hi falutin’ activity before which far too many these days insist we should genuflect and another area for examining the myths we swallow – I have no trouble at all in suggesting that more real art is produced by the advertising industry than by any number of pure artists. But you will have to wait until another blog entry for me to explain myself and my views.

Now to newspaper journalism, an industry which his so shot through with myths that Peter Jackson should seriously consider shooting a three-part blockbuster about it in New Zealand (where the air is fresher and thus the bull and sheep shit more concentrated. I should add that, I think we no exception, were any of my colleagues on newspapers, past and present, to read what I am writing, they would in one voice chorus ‘Pat’s talking shite again’. Well, I don’t think so. Where do I start?

Well, how’s about here: that working as a newspaper journalist is ‘a vocation’ to which we are somehow ‘called’ and that as ‘a vocation’ we are only too happy to work on until God knows when without thought or complaint. ‘Up,’ as Evelyn Waugh had one of his characters (as it happens a newspaper managing editor) say ‘to a point, Lord Copper’, which in the novel in which it appeared – Scoop – meant that Lord Copper, the owner of the Daily Beast (Daily Mail in real life) was talking complete ball, but that his managing editor was far too tactful to say so. (Lord Copper’s rival in the novel was Lord Zinc, who owned the Daily Brute. In real life they were Lord Rothermere and Lord Beaverbrook.)

My reason for launching into this, my latest dyspeptic pontification, is that tonight is a Wednesday evening. I work in London from Sunday noon until, nominally 6pm on Wednesday nights, at which point, given that I am then faced with a four-hour drive back home to Cornwall, I am keen to get off as sharpish as possible. Yet my attitude is looked at askance: where’s your professional dedication? that look says. The job isn’t yet done, and you should be hanging on until we think you should be able to leave. Well, balls to that.

It’s not as though I am engaged and employed at the sharp end of journalism. My daily routine is, and has been for many years, looking after the production of the quiz pages, the Answers To Correspondents page, the Letters page and, on different days one or two other pages. For these past few years I have been banned from similarly looking after the Travel page because I had several unfortunate run-ins with an otherwise very pleasant young woman who commissions them and is one of two travel editors. More of that, perhaps, another time. Related to the myth that newspaper journalism is ‘a vocation’ is the myth that it is an difficult industry in which to get a job when starting out – hence the silly saying ‘breaking into journalism’. That phrase, that ineffably silly phrase is nothing but self-aggrandising.

Yes, there are possibly fewer jobs to find in on newspapers, and ever fewer as the print industry dies, partly a victim of the internet and social media, but if you are looking for one, believe me you will find one. However, a beginner’s wage is tiny. Why? Well, newspaper owners like to stress that as the job is ‘a vocation’, you are quite prepared to work for peanuts.

An example: a friend came across a letter offering a job to a graduate. He was offered just £20,000 to live and work in London. Well, man years ago when I was still working for the South Wales Echo, a friend landed himself a job on the Daily Star at the then, for a new arrival, very handsome annual whack of £22,000. But that was in 1987. Those values today: £20,000 in 2015 is £20,000. That

£22,000 of 28 years ago would be the equivalent of, depending on whether you are looking at the ‘historic standard of living’, ‘economic wealth’ or ‘economic power’ between £55,270 and £88,440, and probably closer to the higher figure. But don’t complain: it’s a fucking ‘vocation’, see.

Then there’s a second myth: ‘be first with the story’. It’s an imperative beaten into young reporters. But where it was once true – for solidly commercial reasons, it is even more bollocks. It’s quite simple: newspapers, in their heyday of between 1850 and, say, 1980, made quite fabulous sums selling ad space. And selling ad space, despite what they myth-makers would have you believe was – for the proprietor - the papers sole raison d’etre. There was no other. And that was why circulation was and is so important: if you are selling 100,000 copies a day you can charge the advertisers a certain amount for the space they buy. If you sell 200,000, you can charge more. If, however, circulation falls, as it has been and the obvous conclusion is that fewer folk are reading your paper, the advertisers have the whip hand: the simply insist that rates should be cut.

Until the slow decline of newspapers began after World War II, each city had at least two and often three rival papers, all vying to sell as many copies as possible and thus be in a position to up their ad rates. So in order to attract the reader – to news of the latest murder in Whitechapel, the election or football results, the latest gossip – you simply had to be first with the news. The paper that was first with the news sold out. If its rivals were on the street later than you, they sold fewer. QED. So reporters and their poor cousins, the sub-editors (copy editors) were urged to work faster, faster, faster to hit print deadlines to get that bloody paper out.

Now, of course, no evening papers have a rival, and the morning papers have such a well-defined constituency that they are not really rivals at all. But the myth carried on: work fast, get the news, and get it out – bugger how little (in the provinces) you were being paid.

How about this myth: ‘the public’s right to know’? Well, dear reader, that’s another piece of 24 carat bullshit. Take a look at the contents of your paper: diets, gossip, fashion, more gossip, a bit of stale news, ‘opinion’ – does the public really have ‘a right to know’ that? Is it really vital that the reader should know exactly where bloody Kim Kardashian had lunch yesterday, with whom and what she was wearing? Or that Taylor Swift is now higher up the ‘power list’ the the Queen of England. You decide. I know what I think.

Certainly the public has ‘the right to know’ what its government is decided on its behalf, what its local authority plans to spend local taxes on. The trouble is that, as a rule, the public isn’t in the least bit interested. Or rather the public is only interested in hearing that political news which reinforced its prejudices. Don’t believe me? Do you think that if the Daily Mail, the Daily Telegraph and the Sun suddenly started suggesting that ‘immigrants’ – in truth such a vague word as to be almost meaningless – were not, after all, the scrounging fuckwits its readers like to believe them to be, it would carry one selling the number of copies is does? Do you? I don’t.

One of the first rules of a certain kind of journalism is: establish what your readers ill-informed prejudices are, then pander to them until you retire or until your dying day, whichever comes first. It is all a little more complex than that. In some parts of the world, in authoritarian states, for example, there really are some print journalists for whom their profession is a vocation, and of whom many lose their lives for embracing that vocation. But hey, don’t let a couple of facts ruin a good story, now.

If, however, you are interested, take a look at the latest figures of hacks, good men and women, who have lost their lives because of their job. Then, of course, retreat into your own prejudices, whatever they might be.

But I’ll be back (©Schwarzenegger et al). And a little more on Somerset Maugham, a rather better man and nicer chap (and better writer) than many

I’m sitting here in the right-on-the-sea restaurant on my very last day, with just just hours to do before I head back to Palma airport, via the hotel where I’ll pick up someone for a lift to the airport. I was right about making it a little longer than just a week, though by just a few days. And I’m glad I did. I’m also glad I pushed out the boat and hired a car for all that time. I’m not really one for hanging about in bars getting rat-arsed (which isn’t to say I never was), and got to see a bit of Mallorca. I shall certainly come back, though possibly later in the year when it is a tad warmer.

The weather has certainly been better than the crap I understand folk in Old Blighty have suffered, but three/four/five degrees hotter wouldn’t have gone amiss. I shall also try to find somewhere inexpensive to stay here in Colonia de Sant Pere, where I am sitting at the moment. Inexpensive because all you need is a clean bed and hot water. Everything else is optional. OK, it’s not ‘exciting’ for a late teen, early twenties style dickhead or dickheadess, but as I am not of that age (whether or not I am a dickhead is for you to decide – I don’t think so, but I’m liberal enough to hear alternative views), but for what I want from a holiday it hits the spot.

As it is, I’m off to the Fatherland for four days in July for my brother-in-law’s 60th birthday party, then, most probably, off to Bordeaux in late July to accompany my stepmother’s sister to a series of concerts as well as enjoying them myself. Then later this year it is off to Seth Cardew’s in wherever 70 miles north of Valencia (see below, where the small brown block is) for a week (or a few more days perhaps). As this is my first

week off from work, I probably have enough paid holidays left, but also as I past the magic 65 last November (ignore all previous jokes about being just 32 – I bullshit quite a lot, you do realise that, don’t you?) and income naturally notwithstanding, my time is now more my own than it ever has been.

In theory, I can tell my bosses to fuck off now, given that if the shit hits the fan, I am, at least guaranteed my £113 a week (tax-deductible, of course) and although I most certainly shan’t do that – for one thing I like them and the paper I work for – it’s a good feeling that, again in theory, I am no longer a wage slave. I have now been promoted to pension slave.

Just for the craic, I’m listening to Lisa Ekdahl as I write, who is a great and interesting singer. Great, well, just listen; interesting because as far as I know she started out as a Swedish pop star – she’s Swedish – but also sings in English with a great ‘backing band’, pianist, bass guitarist and drums and both a great voice and a feel for the kind of jazz she sings in English. That’s just by the by. I’ll post a track or two at some point in the future. You can find out more about her here. If you like jazz singing, but don’t like all that rather silly forced rhyming of the 1950s and 1960s, give her a whirl. (If, of course, you don’t, don’t bother. QED.)

Don’t really know what else to write. It’s curious: I love writing. The real problem is I don’t have much to write about and, more to the point, I still haven’t tried my hand at fiction (or hardly, to be fair). Why? Well, I’m scared of failing, of others thinking what I write is 24-carat bollocks and why, but why, does he bother? Who’s he kidding but himself?

I’ve already thought of several stories while I’ve been here. I find my imagination comes alive when I am away from home/my routine. Before I married, I went off to Sicily by myself for two weeks and at the time warned Celie, my wife to beat the times, that I would always want to travel. Well, I still do, though naturally the main, only, consideration will be money – being able to pay the household bills and council tax, plus some for Celie and my son while I am away, but paying for somewhere to stay. In that respect I am glad I’m not demanding. A clean bed and hot water really is enough for me, and I don’t eat a lot. But all that is then, so see what happens.

As for writing, well, I’ve been reading a biography of William Somerset Maugham, and a more fascinating and, in some ways more admirable, figure I think it might be hard to find. What is interesting is that while in his later life he was thought – and was – a predatory homosexual and not particularly much more, he was also when he was younger and until well into his forties something of a predatory heterosexual. He swung both ways, and quite possibly a lot further than many of us, certainly further than me, although I have yet to bat for my own side, mainly because I’ve not yet felt the inclination.

What I like most about Maugham – of what I know, that is – was his self-discipline: wherever he was – in London leading the social high life once he had the money to do so as an moneyed Edwardian, serving as a volunteer - I stress volunteer - Red Cross orderly in the First World War (called by some the ‘Great War’, why exactly, except that it had been bigger than man a war beforehand), on Capri, in France, in the Far East – he sat down for several hours in the morning, whether he had anything to write or not, and wrote.

The first and only principle any would-be writer should possess: Get It Done! Maugham knew that, and stuck to it all his life. He described himself as in the first rank of the second rate, but that is just his usual self-deprecatory pose: he can write better than many, but there is none, but none, of the showing off, the self-indulgent ‘I must be an artist’ bollocks about him.

He was often described as ‘cynical’. No, he wasn’t, he was merely – ‘merely, what a description, damn already! – honest with himself and down-to-earth. He had, or from my reading seems to have had, very few illusions about himself or the world. And I’ll drink to that. If that makes me cynical, too, well, so be it and fuck you. It’s your problem, bro’ not mine.

. . .

One story that has occurred to me was sparked by Maugham. He live until he was into his 90s, and had as a ‘companion’ one Alan Searle who, we are told, inveigled Maugham to disinherit his daughter Liza in favour of him, Alan Searle. Well, who knows?

Undoubtedly, Maugham, as I say well into his 90s was slowly losing it and had, for example, lost a lot of sympathy - in the 1960s, for Christ sake, a more hypocritical age it is hard to imagine - by writing a rather vicious memoir of his marriage to Syrie Wellcome, who, as far as I can gather, was something of a nightmare – mare, for you young folk.

My story is simply a long letter to a daughter or even son, by someone like Maugham, ensconced – imprisoned at 90 one might conjecture – in somewhere like, well here, Colonia de Sant Pere, trying to describe, honestly, his relationship with her mother, someone like Syrie, while a snake in the grass, someone like Alan Searle, perhaps,  is wafting around with very much his own agenda, of which the main character is at times aware, at times not.

There would have to be a topping and tailing device for the letter – discovered in the archives of his publisher’s perhaps, though for many years ignored because the writer, though rich and once famous and bankable, was no longer dans la vent (‘in the wind’ – please keep up!). It could well be made ‘modern’ for ‘modern’ tastes, with a little clever, clever tooing and froing in time and perspective blah, blah – you can always pay off self-appointed moderns if you try hard enough – but would have to be well-written enough to be worth the effort for the reader. And that, dear friends, is what I shall do.

I have before tried extremely hard, some might even claim excessively hard, to plug my ‘first novel’, which, though I say so myself is not half bad, and better than some, but so far with no luck. None. Zilch. Philistines, the lot of you. Ashamed? You don’t know the meaning of the word. If – if, a huge fucking ‘if’ anyone is interested, you can still find it here. But I’m not holding my breath. Pip, pip. Philistines.

Pearls before swine. Ever really understood what that means? No, thought not! Think William ‘Willie’ Somerset Maugham (portrayed, I understand by a writer friend as ‘Gilbert Hereford Vaughan’) is cynical? Give me a break. He merely informed the world that, do you know what, shit stinks, while everyone else for a variety of reasons pretended it didn’t, especially when crapped by royalty, nobility and money. Thank you, Mr Maugham. I’m your fan, if now no one else is . Oh, and I have read some of your stories recently, and you can write, very well. For those unconvinced try P&O, a touching account of a woman who finds a kind of peace, though an unexpected kind.

So, that’s the world sorted: Somerset Mauagham wasn’t quite the cunt the modern world – quote marks for ‘modern’ cos, face it, nothing really changes – and Lisa Ekdahl is a fucking good jazz singer.

PS 1,606 words: if I could write this much crap every day for one month and 15 days, then find a publisher, fortune, respect, fame and the acquaintance of any number of art-fags of both sexes would be mine. Though, dear friends, gays need not trust in any success. Better make that clear, before there are tears before bedtime.

Christ, this is a nice spot. Colonia de Sant Pere (Colinia St Pere for some), though if you tell anyone, I'll kill you, if you do! What is best: no cunt there except me (more or less).