If I were not acquainted with irony – and I am, we are good friends of long standing – what has been going on today would have been a good introduction.
This was my fourth, possibly even my fifth, stay in Illats accompanying my elderly step-aunt to various concerts held in chateaux hereabouts and departing and flying home has always followed the same routine: train from Cerons, a few miles from where she lives, then the Navette bus from the Gare de St Jean to Bordeaux airport, then the flight home with Easyjet.
Today’s journey should have been no different except that when I checked the rail timetable to make sure I hadn’t ‘misremembered’ (©Hillary Rodham Clinton) what time my train was and checked the timetable of the Navette, I realised that if I caught the 9.50 from Cerons as planned, I would get to the airport to make my way through security just in time to miss the plane by about ten minutes. And the rail timetable listed no earlier train except one leaving Cerons at 6.50 (far, far to early for anyone to do anyting remotely useful).
When I told my aunt, she said she would drive me to the airport. As she has, in the past nine months, had a knee operation and surgery to cure ‘a woman’s problem’, I was reluctant but could see no alternative. Then it struck me that I might be able to catch a train from Lango, several miles further away than Cerons, but a far better option of my aunt.
There a train departed for Bordeaux at 8.44.
We set off on the 20 minute journey to Langon from Illats just before 8pm and arrived with ample time to spare and I caught the train (which was a little late) and that should have been that. But I was very surprised when the very next stop, barely five minutes down the line to Bordeaux was bloody Cerons. So I could have caught the same train and spared my aunt a little hassle.
I have since re-checked the timetable I originally looked at and that departure is not listed. But I have also checked the official SNCF timetable and it is.
Not much of an irony, you might now be telling yourselves, and what is this crud banging on about? Well, it is this: not only did I, unlike previously when ‘security’ was jam-packed with Brits in shorts with red legs and their breeds and the whole experience took what seemed like hours – not, only did I breeze through this time, but the bloody flight, due to leave at 12.05 is fucking ‘delayed’. And no one knows until when. So I could have stuck to the original plan with ease.
Friday 31 July 2015
Saturday 25 July 2015
Who was Alroy Kear? Well, while you’re finding out, let me tell you about my fourth culture vulture visit to south-west France
Who was Alroy Kear?
Well, if I’m not 100pc certain, I’m at least 99.9pc certain that no one knows what they hell I’m on about. But I do, and in this case that’s all that matters.
. . .
‘Who’s paying for this lunch?’
‘Well, if we don’t publish you, we are. If we do, you will be.’
I had been warned and I appreciated my companion’s candour. I told her that I wasn’t very hungry and ordered the pasta tuna. It had a rather more impressive name on the menu but I know pasta tuna when pasta tuna is offered.
‘Red or white?’
‘Well, as I’m having tuna I suppose it should be the white. And just a glass, please.’
She smiled, the smile of a professional who had eaten many such lunches.
‘Don’t stint yourself. I’ve got little on this afternoon and I’m off tomorrow and who knows, we’ll probably not publish you, so go for it. We might as well have a bottle. I could do with more than a glass. Are you going to have a starter? I am.
I wasn’t persuaded, but all in all this wasn’t my shout. I ordered a starter. Of every book published, nine out of ten are non-fiction. Of every book of fiction published nine out of ten make no money. Of every book of fiction considered for publication another nine or ninety or nine hundred or quite possibly nine thousand submitted are ignored as just so much dreck. So, whether I would be footing the bill for lunch or not, I had so far got just a little further than most. A little. Not much. My companion, a woman in her forties who had her charms once I had finished my first glass and was well into my second, knew her job.
‘You’ve called your novel Who Was Alroy Kear? Why, exactly?’
‘Are you familiar with the name?’
‘No.’
I began to explain. ‘He’s a fictional character invented by. . .’
‘Well, I don’t suppose it matters much, and be ready for marketing to insist on another title if they don’t like it. I should tell you that it’s a hard market and it’s getting harder every year, and what they say goes. What’s your story about?’
‘Have you read it’
‘I’m afraid I haven’t, no, but don’t let that bother you, we have some very good editors and they have, and if they think there’s something in it for us, if they think it has possibilities . . .’
She trailed off. ‘Who do you read?’
‘All sorts,’ I told her.
‘Well, all sorts doesn’t help much, does it? Have you read any Ooja Kanago or Paul Moore?’
‘No.’
‘Well, they’re selling very well at the moment and it’s the kind of thing we’re looking for. Are you gay?’
‘No. Should I be?’
‘No, not really, but it does seem to help, though marketing won’t insist, of course.’
Her mobile rang.
‘Sorry, I’ve got to take this.’ She answered. ‘Where are you? Well, don’t bother with that now, I’m quite busy. What is it?’ The other party spoke. She replied. ‘Well, she has got one down at the cottage and apparently the broadband is on again. And if it isn’t she’ll just have to live with it. Is Julian coming or staying up in London with Sasha?’ The other party spoke. ‘Well, tell him to make his mind up. Anyway, can we do this another time, I’m in a meeting. I’ll ring you at four. Oh, and I wouldn’t mind getting away at five.’ She ended her call.
‘Sorry about that. What was I saying?’
‘You asked me if I was gay.’
‘And are you?’
‘No. But my brother is.’
‘Well, that’s neither here nor there, is it.’
. . .
Illats, day three.
This is, I think, my fourth annual trek to this neck of the woods in what is sometimes called Aquitane, sometimes Les Landes and sometimes just Bordeaux, by which folk who call it that (as I do when people ask ‘where are you going to in France) mean the area south of the city which is also called Bordeaux. I come to accompany my aunt – my stepmother’s sister, but I think of here as my aunt – to a series of concerts put on by various chateaux as part of the Rencontres Musicales Internationales des Graves (which means Very Serious Musical Encounters, though as I don’t speak any French – as I ‘have no French’ – I might well have got that a little wrong).
Regular readers of this ‘ere blog might be familiar with my annual excursions to this part of France at this time of year, and I must add that I enjoy them a lot in as far as although I’m a really, really cool cat who doesn’t only like jazz but J Blackfoot, Alexander O’Neal, Lisa Ekdahl, Pink and Pretty Reckless (none too contemporary, I’m afraid), I also like almost all kinds of classical music except sodding German romantic stuff from the mid to late 19th century, which, as I get older makes me feel like puking rather quicker than a pound of full-cream fudge.
The first concert was on Thursday at the Chateau Latour-Martillac, and on the bill – is it OK to use the phrase ‘on the bill’ when talking about classical music? – a sonata for violin and piano by a Russian call Anton Tanonov, Brahms second string quintet and finally the ‘concert’ for piano and string quartet by Ernest Chausson, a chap who is apparently very well-known except by me. The Tanonov piece, very modern and very squeaky, was fair enough and although I have a strange liking for what I was once told is often called ‘squeaky gate music’, it didn’t do a great deal for me, though I didn’t hate it either. The Brahms, a new one on me, I liked. And I also like the Chausson. (Incidentally, he died rather young, at 44, in a bicycle accident – he rode into a wall. True – look it up.)
Last night’s concert, though was something else. It was at the Chateau Doms, just down the road in Portets, and all three pieces were memorable. The first, by a Uri Brener was the kind of squeaky gate music I can’t get enough of (as opposed to Mr Tanonov’s and don’t ask me what I preferred the one to the other, but I did).
Then came Shostakovich’s Piano Quintet in G Minor, opus 57, and that, dear friends, was spot-on. It sounds daft to put it that way, and again I’m told it’s very ‘well-known’ but not by me, but I’m
glad I came across it and have already bought it from Amazon. Finally, we got Schubert’s string quartet Death And the Maiden, which I have heard before several times but don’t ever mind hearing again. (Sad, sad note: just looked it up on Wikipedia and it seems he wrote it after he came out of a serious illness and realised he was dying so, you know, blah, blah. Altogether now: aahh!, though I trust folk won’t be quite as viciously flippant when the time comes for me to knock, knock, knock on Heaven’s door.)
Apart from that I’m enjoying good food and pleasant weather. Whereas, it seems Old Blighty has already had its two and a half days of fine weather this summer, here in the South-West of France the temperature is warm, in the mid-twenties, and sunny. They had just emerged from a heatwave the day before I arrived and we’re told another heatwave is on its way, but I’ll cope with that as and when. Pip, pip.
Oh, I hope you enjoy the snippet I started this entry off with. With a bit of luck – i.e. hard work – there’s another 69,410 words to go. And I do actually plan to call it Who Was Alroy Kear?, though marketing might well have other ideas. (Alroy Kear? Look it up. It is obscurely relevant, though you will never guess how and why.)
. . .
‘Who’s paying for this lunch?’
‘Well, if we don’t publish you, we are. If we do, you will be.’
I had been warned and I appreciated my companion’s candour. I told her that I wasn’t very hungry and ordered the pasta tuna. It had a rather more impressive name on the menu but I know pasta tuna when pasta tuna is offered.
‘Red or white?’
‘Well, as I’m having tuna I suppose it should be the white. And just a glass, please.’
She smiled, the smile of a professional who had eaten many such lunches.
‘Don’t stint yourself. I’ve got little on this afternoon and I’m off tomorrow and who knows, we’ll probably not publish you, so go for it. We might as well have a bottle. I could do with more than a glass. Are you going to have a starter? I am.
I wasn’t persuaded, but all in all this wasn’t my shout. I ordered a starter. Of every book published, nine out of ten are non-fiction. Of every book of fiction published nine out of ten make no money. Of every book of fiction considered for publication another nine or ninety or nine hundred or quite possibly nine thousand submitted are ignored as just so much dreck. So, whether I would be footing the bill for lunch or not, I had so far got just a little further than most. A little. Not much. My companion, a woman in her forties who had her charms once I had finished my first glass and was well into my second, knew her job.
‘You’ve called your novel Who Was Alroy Kear? Why, exactly?’
‘Are you familiar with the name?’
‘No.’
I began to explain. ‘He’s a fictional character invented by. . .’
‘Well, I don’t suppose it matters much, and be ready for marketing to insist on another title if they don’t like it. I should tell you that it’s a hard market and it’s getting harder every year, and what they say goes. What’s your story about?’
‘Have you read it’
‘I’m afraid I haven’t, no, but don’t let that bother you, we have some very good editors and they have, and if they think there’s something in it for us, if they think it has possibilities . . .’
She trailed off. ‘Who do you read?’
‘All sorts,’ I told her.
‘Well, all sorts doesn’t help much, does it? Have you read any Ooja Kanago or Paul Moore?’
‘No.’
‘Well, they’re selling very well at the moment and it’s the kind of thing we’re looking for. Are you gay?’
‘No. Should I be?’
‘No, not really, but it does seem to help, though marketing won’t insist, of course.’
Her mobile rang.
‘Sorry, I’ve got to take this.’ She answered. ‘Where are you? Well, don’t bother with that now, I’m quite busy. What is it?’ The other party spoke. She replied. ‘Well, she has got one down at the cottage and apparently the broadband is on again. And if it isn’t she’ll just have to live with it. Is Julian coming or staying up in London with Sasha?’ The other party spoke. ‘Well, tell him to make his mind up. Anyway, can we do this another time, I’m in a meeting. I’ll ring you at four. Oh, and I wouldn’t mind getting away at five.’ She ended her call.
‘Sorry about that. What was I saying?’
‘You asked me if I was gay.’
‘And are you?’
‘No. But my brother is.’
‘Well, that’s neither here nor there, is it.’
. . .
Illats, day three.
This is, I think, my fourth annual trek to this neck of the woods in what is sometimes called Aquitane, sometimes Les Landes and sometimes just Bordeaux, by which folk who call it that (as I do when people ask ‘where are you going to in France) mean the area south of the city which is also called Bordeaux. I come to accompany my aunt – my stepmother’s sister, but I think of here as my aunt – to a series of concerts put on by various chateaux as part of the Rencontres Musicales Internationales des Graves (which means Very Serious Musical Encounters, though as I don’t speak any French – as I ‘have no French’ – I might well have got that a little wrong).
Regular readers of this ‘ere blog might be familiar with my annual excursions to this part of France at this time of year, and I must add that I enjoy them a lot in as far as although I’m a really, really cool cat who doesn’t only like jazz but J Blackfoot, Alexander O’Neal, Lisa Ekdahl, Pink and Pretty Reckless (none too contemporary, I’m afraid), I also like almost all kinds of classical music except sodding German romantic stuff from the mid to late 19th century, which, as I get older makes me feel like puking rather quicker than a pound of full-cream fudge.
The first concert was on Thursday at the Chateau Latour-Martillac, and on the bill – is it OK to use the phrase ‘on the bill’ when talking about classical music? – a sonata for violin and piano by a Russian call Anton Tanonov, Brahms second string quintet and finally the ‘concert’ for piano and string quartet by Ernest Chausson, a chap who is apparently very well-known except by me. The Tanonov piece, very modern and very squeaky, was fair enough and although I have a strange liking for what I was once told is often called ‘squeaky gate music’, it didn’t do a great deal for me, though I didn’t hate it either. The Brahms, a new one on me, I liked. And I also like the Chausson. (Incidentally, he died rather young, at 44, in a bicycle accident – he rode into a wall. True – look it up.)
Last night’s concert, though was something else. It was at the Chateau Doms, just down the road in Portets, and all three pieces were memorable. The first, by a Uri Brener was the kind of squeaky gate music I can’t get enough of (as opposed to Mr Tanonov’s and don’t ask me what I preferred the one to the other, but I did).
Then came Shostakovich’s Piano Quintet in G Minor, opus 57, and that, dear friends, was spot-on. It sounds daft to put it that way, and again I’m told it’s very ‘well-known’ but not by me, but I’m
Apart from that I’m enjoying good food and pleasant weather. Whereas, it seems Old Blighty has already had its two and a half days of fine weather this summer, here in the South-West of France the temperature is warm, in the mid-twenties, and sunny. They had just emerged from a heatwave the day before I arrived and we’re told another heatwave is on its way, but I’ll cope with that as and when. Pip, pip.
Oh, I hope you enjoy the snippet I started this entry off with. With a bit of luck – i.e. hard work – there’s another 69,410 words to go. And I do actually plan to call it Who Was Alroy Kear?, though marketing might well have other ideas. (Alroy Kear? Look it up. It is obscurely relevant, though you will never guess how and why.)
Saturday 18 July 2015
The day Britain awoke to hear the shocking news that the Queen likes to goose-step of an evening. Or not as the case may be. Meanwhile, sadly not for the first time, I sail a little close to the wind
In that magic way we hacks have of skittering from topic to topic (and my innate modesty prevents me from excluding myself from that sorry bunch) rather as a butterfly will set off in one direction for a few seconds, change its mind and head of at a 90 degree tangent, before, seconds later, following an entirely new course, the most recent crises de nos jours have swiftly been abandoned in favour of the latest outrage. And that, of course, is as it should be: experience has taught us that the newspaper-reading public has an attention span rather shorter than that of my butterfly and becomes swiftly bored. And no paper dare take. Lord no!
(The honourable exception here in Britain is, possibly, the saintly Guardian which does seem to take its duty of informing the public just a little more seriously, but as, according to May’s circulation figures, it is these days informing as few as 178,758 readers in a nation of more than 64.6 million – not that a large proportion of them can actually read - a shift in strategy is arguable long overdue.) So whereas for a short while the abject horrors perpetuated by IS (ISIL, Islamic State or Daesh – the choice is yours) were the latest disaster to threaten humankind, the obduracy of the left-wing Greek government in refusing to execute a is pensioners in the face of overwhelming European Union demands and how it was increasingly likely to lead to global collapse soon proved to be a sexier story.
That one lasted the best part of a week, before it, too, was shown the door and a new topic likely to outrage the Great British Public was adopted. And what an outrage that has turned out to be! Apparently, as a seven-year-old our dear, dear Queen and her younger sister Margaret gave the Nazi salute! Well! And to add to the calumny their mother, for many, many years the nation’s favourite granny, did the same! Well! Could it get worse!
Well, not according to the Sun which ‘broke the story’. Further details of just how treacherous our royal family, in fact, were and, obviously, still are, included not just that not a single drop of English blood flows through their veins (though we all knew that), but the Queen has long hidden a secret passion for Sauerkraut and Charles, her son and heir apparent has all 17 verses of the Horst Wessel Lied tattooed on his bum! No wonder Princess Di got shot of the Nazi swine toot sweet.
Sadly for the Sun its scoop, trailed by the paper as ‘of genuine historic significance) lasted barely 90 minutes before the public got bored and the other papers immediately scented blood. Within two hours the story was no longer just on earth has the Queen managed to hide her National Socialists sympathies for so long – at least for all the papers that weren’t the Sun – but just what complete plonkers the Sun were. That was the fluff. Rather more interesting as far as I am concerned was that the photograph of Brenda, Maggie and Cookie raising their arms to give the salute was taken after they were coaxed to do so by their uncle, the then King of England, one Edward VIII (pictured).
David’s fascist sympathies had long been suspected by Stanley Baldwin, who a few years later became Britain’s Prime Minister. And when the hullabaloo over David marrying Wallis Simpson erupted, it is more than tempting to assume that when he engineered Edward VIII’s abdication, he had rather more delicate matters in mind rather than whether or not the King should marry his best shag yet. (Incidentally, it was Simpson who nicknamed Cookie Cookie, and thereby earned herself the Cookie’s lifelong enmity, an enmity which ensured David and Wallis, by then the Duke and Duchess of Windsor would never be allowed to touch British soil ever again.)
To ensure Edward VIII, by then the Duke of Windsor, who with Wallis had made a pilgrimage to Berchtesgarden to meet Hitler in 1937, would never be able even to try to influence Britain’s attitude
to Hitler and Nazi Germany, in 1940 he and Wallis dispatched to the Bahamas where the Duke became its governor for the duration of World War II.
As for the Sun somehow coming across the picy of the Queen, Margaret and their mother giving the Nazi salute, I suggest that it is a measure of how, in this instance, the Sun simply lost the plot by publishing them as it did. A different treatment with an appropriate story would still have allowed publication, but the paper would have avoided the pile of shit currently being poured all over it. Such a story might well have been something along the lines of how ‘evil Uncle David even managed to pervert the minds of his innocent young nieces by conning them into giving the Nazi salute’ but thank goodness ‘clever Mr Baldwin was aware of his devilish tricks and got rid of him as King!’ Job done: pics could have been published and the Sun would possibly have remained on the Queen’s Christmas card list. As it is . . .
The little tinkers, eh?
. . .
Me, I’m off on my travels again. Now that the dreaded 65 has passed and I can call it a day just as soon as I like – well could, as I have a 19-year-old at college and a 16-year-old who, I trust will also go to college – I am taking it just a little bit easier than I have so far been taking it easy. Next Wednesday, it’s off to Bordeaux again to act as my aunt’s walker to various concerts for a week.
Then it’s back to work, before on August 12 I – and my son – are off to the back of beyond in Ostfriesland for a week to see whether German lager really is better than the panther piss served up in Old Bligty. (OK, I know it is, but I just want to reassure myself.) Then at the beginning of September it’s off to the back of beyond in Castellon to visit my old potter friend. I shall, of course, be filing regular updates and reports of my sojourns, so you can all breathe again.
I should, however, in the interest of balance, report that I sailed a little close to the wind last week at work when, a little more under the cosh than usual (though as an excuse that cuts no ice at all on a newspaper) I was – well, the word used was ‘abrasive’ with a young female colleague in a separate department. Sadly, over the years this was not the first time, so this time it was not just a bollocking from my chief sub (who I do actually both like and rate – I want to make that clear should she ever happen upon this ‘ere blog) but a short interview with one of our two managing editors.
He was, as it turned out, as nice as pie about it all and told me that although he and his fellow managing editor are regularly roasted – abrased? – by our esteemed editor a Mr Paul D. (who can teach the world a thing or two about being abrasive, I should in future restrict my abrasion to more senior hacks and leave the younger ones who might not yet be as acclimatised to ‘the working environment’ – not his words, however – in peace. Point taken, especially as I suspect he would not be quite as nice as pie were my abrasion to resurface. I might be stupid, but I’m not daft.
Incidentally, Mr Paul D. and I are both Scorpios. In fact, he is just a year and a week older than me. But as he earns well north of £1 million a year, has an estate in Scotland, a villa somewhere in the West Indies, is over 6ft tall and regularly dines with the Prime Minister, there, sadly the resemblance ends. Also I suspect at the end of the day he is a better journalist than I could ever hope to be. Here endeth the lesson (and, I trust, a lesson I have finally learned – see above for notes on the two younger members of the Powell family who are yet to be fully educated and who still rely on my bringing in the shekels.)
(The honourable exception here in Britain is, possibly, the saintly Guardian which does seem to take its duty of informing the public just a little more seriously, but as, according to May’s circulation figures, it is these days informing as few as 178,758 readers in a nation of more than 64.6 million – not that a large proportion of them can actually read - a shift in strategy is arguable long overdue.) So whereas for a short while the abject horrors perpetuated by IS (ISIL, Islamic State or Daesh – the choice is yours) were the latest disaster to threaten humankind, the obduracy of the left-wing Greek government in refusing to execute a is pensioners in the face of overwhelming European Union demands and how it was increasingly likely to lead to global collapse soon proved to be a sexier story.
That one lasted the best part of a week, before it, too, was shown the door and a new topic likely to outrage the Great British Public was adopted. And what an outrage that has turned out to be! Apparently, as a seven-year-old our dear, dear Queen and her younger sister Margaret gave the Nazi salute! Well! And to add to the calumny their mother, for many, many years the nation’s favourite granny, did the same! Well! Could it get worse!
Well, not according to the Sun which ‘broke the story’. Further details of just how treacherous our royal family, in fact, were and, obviously, still are, included not just that not a single drop of English blood flows through their veins (though we all knew that), but the Queen has long hidden a secret passion for Sauerkraut and Charles, her son and heir apparent has all 17 verses of the Horst Wessel Lied tattooed on his bum! No wonder Princess Di got shot of the Nazi swine toot sweet.
Sadly for the Sun its scoop, trailed by the paper as ‘of genuine historic significance) lasted barely 90 minutes before the public got bored and the other papers immediately scented blood. Within two hours the story was no longer just on earth has the Queen managed to hide her National Socialists sympathies for so long – at least for all the papers that weren’t the Sun – but just what complete plonkers the Sun were. That was the fluff. Rather more interesting as far as I am concerned was that the photograph of Brenda, Maggie and Cookie raising their arms to give the salute was taken after they were coaxed to do so by their uncle, the then King of England, one Edward VIII (pictured).
David’s fascist sympathies had long been suspected by Stanley Baldwin, who a few years later became Britain’s Prime Minister. And when the hullabaloo over David marrying Wallis Simpson erupted, it is more than tempting to assume that when he engineered Edward VIII’s abdication, he had rather more delicate matters in mind rather than whether or not the King should marry his best shag yet. (Incidentally, it was Simpson who nicknamed Cookie Cookie, and thereby earned herself the Cookie’s lifelong enmity, an enmity which ensured David and Wallis, by then the Duke and Duchess of Windsor would never be allowed to touch British soil ever again.)
To ensure Edward VIII, by then the Duke of Windsor, who with Wallis had made a pilgrimage to Berchtesgarden to meet Hitler in 1937, would never be able even to try to influence Britain’s attitude
As for the Sun somehow coming across the picy of the Queen, Margaret and their mother giving the Nazi salute, I suggest that it is a measure of how, in this instance, the Sun simply lost the plot by publishing them as it did. A different treatment with an appropriate story would still have allowed publication, but the paper would have avoided the pile of shit currently being poured all over it. Such a story might well have been something along the lines of how ‘evil Uncle David even managed to pervert the minds of his innocent young nieces by conning them into giving the Nazi salute’ but thank goodness ‘clever Mr Baldwin was aware of his devilish tricks and got rid of him as King!’ Job done: pics could have been published and the Sun would possibly have remained on the Queen’s Christmas card list. As it is . . .
Me, I’m off on my travels again. Now that the dreaded 65 has passed and I can call it a day just as soon as I like – well could, as I have a 19-year-old at college and a 16-year-old who, I trust will also go to college – I am taking it just a little bit easier than I have so far been taking it easy. Next Wednesday, it’s off to Bordeaux again to act as my aunt’s walker to various concerts for a week.
Then it’s back to work, before on August 12 I – and my son – are off to the back of beyond in Ostfriesland for a week to see whether German lager really is better than the panther piss served up in Old Bligty. (OK, I know it is, but I just want to reassure myself.) Then at the beginning of September it’s off to the back of beyond in Castellon to visit my old potter friend. I shall, of course, be filing regular updates and reports of my sojourns, so you can all breathe again.
I should, however, in the interest of balance, report that I sailed a little close to the wind last week at work when, a little more under the cosh than usual (though as an excuse that cuts no ice at all on a newspaper) I was – well, the word used was ‘abrasive’ with a young female colleague in a separate department. Sadly, over the years this was not the first time, so this time it was not just a bollocking from my chief sub (who I do actually both like and rate – I want to make that clear should she ever happen upon this ‘ere blog) but a short interview with one of our two managing editors.
He was, as it turned out, as nice as pie about it all and told me that although he and his fellow managing editor are regularly roasted – abrased? – by our esteemed editor a Mr Paul D. (who can teach the world a thing or two about being abrasive, I should in future restrict my abrasion to more senior hacks and leave the younger ones who might not yet be as acclimatised to ‘the working environment’ – not his words, however – in peace. Point taken, especially as I suspect he would not be quite as nice as pie were my abrasion to resurface. I might be stupid, but I’m not daft.
Incidentally, Mr Paul D. and I are both Scorpios. In fact, he is just a year and a week older than me. But as he earns well north of £1 million a year, has an estate in Scotland, a villa somewhere in the West Indies, is over 6ft tall and regularly dines with the Prime Minister, there, sadly the resemblance ends. Also I suspect at the end of the day he is a better journalist than I could ever hope to be. Here endeth the lesson (and, I trust, a lesson I have finally learned – see above for notes on the two younger members of the Powell family who are yet to be fully educated and who still rely on my bringing in the shekels.)
Tuesday 14 July 2015
Your truth? My truth? At the end of the day truth doesn’t matter when the house is burning down. And will the euro and the EU survive? (Who said ‘who cares’?)
There are a great many slippery concepts in philosophy, whether your philosophical discoursing is taking place in a university seminar from undergraduate to PhD level or whether you choose instead to operate at pub bore level. By the phrase ‘slippery concept’ I mean those words, notions and ideas which we all think we understand but which, when we home in on them, when, for example we are asked ‘to define’ them seem to disappear before our eyes.
One of those words ideas is ‘the truth’. We all think we know what the truth is but I suggest we can’t, none of us, because ‘the truth’ doesn’t actually exist. That is not to say that some things – by no means all – cannot be ‘true’ or ‘false’. If I turn the light on in my living room, it is certainly ‘true’ that the light has been turned on. But ‘being true’ and ‘being false’ are pretty far removed from any notion of what ‘the truth’ might essentially be.
I must admit that I wasn’t the most diligent student and that most of my ‘philosophical knowledge’ is pretty threadbare – although that doesn’t necessarily mean I am unqualified to deal with some questions, mainly because the questions themselves if not the answers are very simple indeed.
The body of my ‘knowledge’ consists of half-remembered ‘facts’ from my college tutorials and seminars and scraps I’ve scavenged listening to folk far brighter than me. But that isn’t necessarily a drawback. Even if you happen to have overheard that it is very unwise to put diesel into the tank of a petrol engine and weren’t actually party to the discussion, not putting diesel into the tank of a petrol engine is certainly very wise.
One of the scraps I scavenged was Soren Kierkegaard’s notion of ‘subjective truth’. It was his attempt to get a little closer to the conundrum that at the end of the day ‘the truth’ doesn’t actually exist. Kierkegaard (if I got it right) suggested that ‘subjective truth’ was what was ‘true for me or you personally’. So, in a political discussion one side, on the Left, might claim that the truth was that the bankers and capitalist classes were intent on destroying the ‘ordinary working man’. Not so, his opponent, on the Right, might declare: the real truth is that socialism is always bound to fail because of human nature.
Whichever side you agree with will define which of those statements is ‘the truth’ for you. Both would seem to be mutually exclusive (and admittedly my example is not the best) in that if one is ‘true’, the other isn’t, irrespective of your preferred truth. (It has just occurred to me that I might even question ‘the truth’ of the statement that ‘both are mutually exclusive, but here is neither the time nor the place to get overly complicated. My brain is beginning to ache as it is.)
. . .
So what is the ‘truth’ about the situation in Greece? Did ‘the feckless Greeks bring it down on themselves and only have themselves to blame’? Or is the ‘truth’ of the matter – or rather one ‘truth’ of the matter – that the bigger countries in the Eurozone have used the Greek debt crisis simply as a means to restore the health of their big banks which took a blast after the financial crash of six years ago? Is it, as one Syriza MP has claimed, at heart a battle ‘over democracy in the EU being waged between Europe’s middle class and its working class? [Syriza is a left-wing party]? You pays your money and takes your choice.
My attitude is that when a house is on fire, you don’t sit around working out why the house is now burning to the ground and who might be responsible for the blaze, you concentrate all your efforts on damping down and extinguishing the fire or, if that is impossible, salvaging what you can from the burning house before it collapses in on itself. So with the situation in Greece. And that situation is dire, awful, terrible.
For anyone who might not be up to speed on what is going on: after Greece joined the Eurozone, it took adavantage of the low interest rate charged throughout the zone to borrow as though there were no tomorrow. (One of the claims made – someone’s truth – is that although the European Central Bank, which administers the euro, is charged with being fair to all member states, it quietly fixed the interest rate at a low level to help out Germany which at the time was having a rather torrid time economically after the re-unification of East and West. The claim is that other Eurozone economies, ones suffering from higher inflation, for example, might well have benefited from a higher rate.
The fact is that interest rates were low and on the strength of that Greece borrowed like there was no tomorrow. And furthermore it didn’t use the money it was getting to fund infrastructure, but simply to pay its day-to-day bills. The crunch came when the world found itself in the middle of the 2009 financial crash and Greece and her banks needed to be bailed out. That’s really when it all kicked off. Since then ‘the Greek situation’ has lurched from bad to worse, culminating in the total fuck-up we Europe is now in. Here is today’s front-page online headline from the Telegraph. For
once a newspaper isn’t particularly over-egging the pudding. Greece’s former finance minister Yani Farouvakis (who resigned before the latest round of ‘negotiations’ last Sunday – my quote marks might give you a hint at which particular truth about them I subscribe to – has warned of the resurgence of Golden Dawn, Greece’s exceptionally nasty extreme right-wing party of thugs and morons.
Incidentally, Britain is not a member of the euro for the very trivial reason that our former prime minster Tony Blair wanted us to join, so his chancellor Gordon Brown, who my then loathed Blair, vetoed the move. That’s it. That insignificant piece of petty spite has been Britain’s saving grace in this whole disaster. Where France would have been liable to lose a whopping €65 billion had Greece reneged on its debts and left the Eurozone, Britain would have been given a pass.
As I write (at 8.25 on the morning of Tuesday, July 14) the Greek parliament is due to meet and pass laws which are necessary for ‘more talks on a further bailout’ to begins. And passing those laws would mean accepting the EU’s conditions, one of which is that a substantial amount of its public assets would be sold off and the money used to help pay off its debts. To be blunt, Greece is being dictated to like an errant fifth-former and that, if nothing, else would seem to make it pretty likely that it’s all going to end in tears and civil unrest.
. . .
That, as I see it is the situation now, and for the time being the ‘truth’ of who is responsible for the EU arriving at this point is irrelevant. Quite apart from the situation in Greece, what does all this mean for the euro and the future of the Eurozone?
Well, once again, you pays your money and you makes your choice. There are some, the euro zealots who still insist that it will all come good in the end, that the current ongoing crisis – ongoing, that is, for the past six years, but there you go – are simply the growing pains of a new system. It all had to happen in time and the faith the Eurozone members have in the system will eventually see it through. Then there are people like me who think the zealots are whistling in the wind and kidding on no one but themselves.
Right from the outset I – most certainly no trained economist – was more persuaded by the idea that the euro system was badly thought out, badly constructed and would eventually burn and crash. The argument was that until and unless all members were part of one fiscal system with their economies guided by one central authority (which would imply ‘ever closer political union’) which would set an optimal interest rate for the whole Eurozone, it would all end in tears. The doubters were derided. Now, it seems, they have been proved correct.
So as far as I’m concerned the Eurozone, in its present form, is a dead duck. It cannot be resurrected. Too much trust has been lost. And what of the EU itself? Will that survive unscathed? Good question. And the answer is ‘yes, it will survive’, but it will bear the scars of the current crisis and can never be the same again. For we have seen, for better or worse – and (see above) which it is depends on your particular ‘truth’ – Germany wield its power. And that makes many uncomfortable, although not me. I have longed tired of all the bollocks spoken that ‘the EU is just another attempt by Germany to dominate Europe’ and other such crap and as I am half-German and know Germany and its people to a certain extent, I can assure any undecided that continental domination is not on Germany’s agenda.
I shall make this point, however: two of Germany’s national failings is a stubborn inflexibility and a somewhat two-dimensional imagination (which might explain why they make great cars but don’t actually design great cars). They happen, in my view (i.e. my ‘truth’) to be quiet right on practical housekeeping matters and the very idea of ‘muddling through’ is anathema to them. The trouble is that when, as here in the handling of the euro crisis they are wrong, it is bloody difficult to impossible to shift them from their position. And that rather two-dimensional imagination stops them from seeing the virtues of alternative solutions.
As it is the original notion of a ‘European Union of equals’ has already gone out of the window in many ways. Once each member state more or less had an equal say in all matters. Now their say is tailored to how big they are, which most certainly gives the big beasts an adavantage. Where one decisions had to be unanimous, they now need only an 85pc majority. And I would be very surprised if, despite all the talk of equality, some of the original members didn’t rather look down on new members as Johnny Come Latelys who don’t quite cut the mustard I am all in favour of an EU as a trading bloc and then some, but really do draw the line at ‘ever closer political union’.
It’s not that I don’t like the idea in theory, I think that given just how different are the cultures of EU member states – well demonstrated with this business over Greece – it really is all pie in the sky. Britain is at present in the process of renegotiating the terms of its membership. Before the current phase of the Greek crisis that looked like a rather soulless and fruitless experience and the likelihood that Britain would vote to leave not at all small. Britain now has a far stronger hand with many other members, shocked by the goings on of this last week, agreeing with Old Blighty that reform is very much needed. The question is: will the EU functionaries – the unelected EU functionaries – in Brussels play fair or not? I doubt it.
One of those words ideas is ‘the truth’. We all think we know what the truth is but I suggest we can’t, none of us, because ‘the truth’ doesn’t actually exist. That is not to say that some things – by no means all – cannot be ‘true’ or ‘false’. If I turn the light on in my living room, it is certainly ‘true’ that the light has been turned on. But ‘being true’ and ‘being false’ are pretty far removed from any notion of what ‘the truth’ might essentially be.
I must admit that I wasn’t the most diligent student and that most of my ‘philosophical knowledge’ is pretty threadbare – although that doesn’t necessarily mean I am unqualified to deal with some questions, mainly because the questions themselves if not the answers are very simple indeed.
The body of my ‘knowledge’ consists of half-remembered ‘facts’ from my college tutorials and seminars and scraps I’ve scavenged listening to folk far brighter than me. But that isn’t necessarily a drawback. Even if you happen to have overheard that it is very unwise to put diesel into the tank of a petrol engine and weren’t actually party to the discussion, not putting diesel into the tank of a petrol engine is certainly very wise.
One of the scraps I scavenged was Soren Kierkegaard’s notion of ‘subjective truth’. It was his attempt to get a little closer to the conundrum that at the end of the day ‘the truth’ doesn’t actually exist. Kierkegaard (if I got it right) suggested that ‘subjective truth’ was what was ‘true for me or you personally’. So, in a political discussion one side, on the Left, might claim that the truth was that the bankers and capitalist classes were intent on destroying the ‘ordinary working man’. Not so, his opponent, on the Right, might declare: the real truth is that socialism is always bound to fail because of human nature.
Whichever side you agree with will define which of those statements is ‘the truth’ for you. Both would seem to be mutually exclusive (and admittedly my example is not the best) in that if one is ‘true’, the other isn’t, irrespective of your preferred truth. (It has just occurred to me that I might even question ‘the truth’ of the statement that ‘both are mutually exclusive, but here is neither the time nor the place to get overly complicated. My brain is beginning to ache as it is.)
. . .
So what is the ‘truth’ about the situation in Greece? Did ‘the feckless Greeks bring it down on themselves and only have themselves to blame’? Or is the ‘truth’ of the matter – or rather one ‘truth’ of the matter – that the bigger countries in the Eurozone have used the Greek debt crisis simply as a means to restore the health of their big banks which took a blast after the financial crash of six years ago? Is it, as one Syriza MP has claimed, at heart a battle ‘over democracy in the EU being waged between Europe’s middle class and its working class? [Syriza is a left-wing party]? You pays your money and takes your choice.
My attitude is that when a house is on fire, you don’t sit around working out why the house is now burning to the ground and who might be responsible for the blaze, you concentrate all your efforts on damping down and extinguishing the fire or, if that is impossible, salvaging what you can from the burning house before it collapses in on itself. So with the situation in Greece. And that situation is dire, awful, terrible.
For anyone who might not be up to speed on what is going on: after Greece joined the Eurozone, it took adavantage of the low interest rate charged throughout the zone to borrow as though there were no tomorrow. (One of the claims made – someone’s truth – is that although the European Central Bank, which administers the euro, is charged with being fair to all member states, it quietly fixed the interest rate at a low level to help out Germany which at the time was having a rather torrid time economically after the re-unification of East and West. The claim is that other Eurozone economies, ones suffering from higher inflation, for example, might well have benefited from a higher rate.
The fact is that interest rates were low and on the strength of that Greece borrowed like there was no tomorrow. And furthermore it didn’t use the money it was getting to fund infrastructure, but simply to pay its day-to-day bills. The crunch came when the world found itself in the middle of the 2009 financial crash and Greece and her banks needed to be bailed out. That’s really when it all kicked off. Since then ‘the Greek situation’ has lurched from bad to worse, culminating in the total fuck-up we Europe is now in. Here is today’s front-page online headline from the Telegraph. For
once a newspaper isn’t particularly over-egging the pudding. Greece’s former finance minister Yani Farouvakis (who resigned before the latest round of ‘negotiations’ last Sunday – my quote marks might give you a hint at which particular truth about them I subscribe to – has warned of the resurgence of Golden Dawn, Greece’s exceptionally nasty extreme right-wing party of thugs and morons.
Incidentally, Britain is not a member of the euro for the very trivial reason that our former prime minster Tony Blair wanted us to join, so his chancellor Gordon Brown, who my then loathed Blair, vetoed the move. That’s it. That insignificant piece of petty spite has been Britain’s saving grace in this whole disaster. Where France would have been liable to lose a whopping €65 billion had Greece reneged on its debts and left the Eurozone, Britain would have been given a pass.
As I write (at 8.25 on the morning of Tuesday, July 14) the Greek parliament is due to meet and pass laws which are necessary for ‘more talks on a further bailout’ to begins. And passing those laws would mean accepting the EU’s conditions, one of which is that a substantial amount of its public assets would be sold off and the money used to help pay off its debts. To be blunt, Greece is being dictated to like an errant fifth-former and that, if nothing, else would seem to make it pretty likely that it’s all going to end in tears and civil unrest.
. . .
That, as I see it is the situation now, and for the time being the ‘truth’ of who is responsible for the EU arriving at this point is irrelevant. Quite apart from the situation in Greece, what does all this mean for the euro and the future of the Eurozone?
Well, once again, you pays your money and you makes your choice. There are some, the euro zealots who still insist that it will all come good in the end, that the current ongoing crisis – ongoing, that is, for the past six years, but there you go – are simply the growing pains of a new system. It all had to happen in time and the faith the Eurozone members have in the system will eventually see it through. Then there are people like me who think the zealots are whistling in the wind and kidding on no one but themselves.
Right from the outset I – most certainly no trained economist – was more persuaded by the idea that the euro system was badly thought out, badly constructed and would eventually burn and crash. The argument was that until and unless all members were part of one fiscal system with their economies guided by one central authority (which would imply ‘ever closer political union’) which would set an optimal interest rate for the whole Eurozone, it would all end in tears. The doubters were derided. Now, it seems, they have been proved correct.
So as far as I’m concerned the Eurozone, in its present form, is a dead duck. It cannot be resurrected. Too much trust has been lost. And what of the EU itself? Will that survive unscathed? Good question. And the answer is ‘yes, it will survive’, but it will bear the scars of the current crisis and can never be the same again. For we have seen, for better or worse – and (see above) which it is depends on your particular ‘truth’ – Germany wield its power. And that makes many uncomfortable, although not me. I have longed tired of all the bollocks spoken that ‘the EU is just another attempt by Germany to dominate Europe’ and other such crap and as I am half-German and know Germany and its people to a certain extent, I can assure any undecided that continental domination is not on Germany’s agenda.
I shall make this point, however: two of Germany’s national failings is a stubborn inflexibility and a somewhat two-dimensional imagination (which might explain why they make great cars but don’t actually design great cars). They happen, in my view (i.e. my ‘truth’) to be quiet right on practical housekeeping matters and the very idea of ‘muddling through’ is anathema to them. The trouble is that when, as here in the handling of the euro crisis they are wrong, it is bloody difficult to impossible to shift them from their position. And that rather two-dimensional imagination stops them from seeing the virtues of alternative solutions.
As it is the original notion of a ‘European Union of equals’ has already gone out of the window in many ways. Once each member state more or less had an equal say in all matters. Now their say is tailored to how big they are, which most certainly gives the big beasts an adavantage. Where one decisions had to be unanimous, they now need only an 85pc majority. And I would be very surprised if, despite all the talk of equality, some of the original members didn’t rather look down on new members as Johnny Come Latelys who don’t quite cut the mustard I am all in favour of an EU as a trading bloc and then some, but really do draw the line at ‘ever closer political union’.
It’s not that I don’t like the idea in theory, I think that given just how different are the cultures of EU member states – well demonstrated with this business over Greece – it really is all pie in the sky. Britain is at present in the process of renegotiating the terms of its membership. Before the current phase of the Greek crisis that looked like a rather soulless and fruitless experience and the likelihood that Britain would vote to leave not at all small. Britain now has a far stronger hand with many other members, shocked by the goings on of this last week, agreeing with Old Blighty that reform is very much needed. The question is: will the EU functionaries – the unelected EU functionaries – in Brussels play fair or not? I doubt it.
Monday 6 July 2015
Thin-skinned or what? I join Taylor Swift in being removed from the Cupertino Christmas card list. As for the euro, what next? It sure ain’t going to end in laughter, a song and a kiss
Now here’s a rather telling story.
Apple (Apple - remember Apple? Apparently before he died Steve Jobs was reputed by many Apple queens to be able to walk on water) have introduced ‘Apple Music’ to take on Spotify. It was launched last week, but even before its launch it got itself into a spot of bother in what I am beginning to regard as typical high-handed Apple fashion.
To make its putative Spotify-killer app as attractive as possible, punters who sign up get a ‘three-month free trial’, i.e. they get the service for free for three months. What we, the public, didn’t know until one Taylor Swift (‘a popular singing artist, m’lud, rather like Dorothy Squires, whose tunes I’m sure m’lud would have whistled in his younger days, except that Taylor Swift is still alive’) said she wasn’t playing along was that Apple had decided to have its cake and eat it: while punters were enjoying their free trial (and would, presumably, carry on using the service, swelling Apple’s coffers by another few million every few hours), the artists whose music they were enjoying would not be paid royalties. That was the law as laid down by St Steven Jobs’s spirtual successor at Cupertino.
You don’t believe! St Steve speaks
So, the admirable Ms Swift told Apple to stick that one up their kilt: if you don’t pay me, you don’t get to use my music. And it seems Ms Swift was not alone in being pretty pissed off with Apple’s arrogance: other artists supported her and Apple backed down (for more or less the first time since records began). On the day Apple Music was launched, Apple also released an IoS update for iPhones and iPads and alerted by a small red ‘1’ on the settings button, I downloaded it. That was a big mistake. The Apple Music facility is to be accessed through the IoS’s new Music app, you know, they one which allows you to listen to all the music on your iPhone or iPad. And that, my dear’s is a hell of a step backward.
When you first launch it, you are asked to sign up to Apple Music. I declined. But that is not what has irritated me: quite simply where the Music app it replaced was organised to that you could use it’s facilities in several way, the new app has lost almost all of those.
You could once list your music by composer, artist, song, genre and playlist. Now you can only look at playlists. Before it was easy to switch call up one of those categories and get the app to shuffle all while playing. Now that shuffle all facility is so unintuitive and hidden it is more or less absent. I was so put out that I went to the Apple Forums on the Apple website and said so: the new Music app, I declared, is shite. That was yesterday.
I did get a reply, but I can’t tell you what was in it, because Apple have removed my criticism and the reply. Apple, it seems, don’t like criticism. Nor, apparently did Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot and Idi Amin. The only difference between those four and Apple, as far as I can see, is that unlike Apple they weren’t in the computer and smartphone business. Fuckwits.
NB With the email I received from Apple telling me it had removed my comment was a note saying that if I disagreed with the decision, I should get in touch. I decided I would. But back at the forum you can hunt high and low, but you’ll not find out how to get in touch. Figures. You don’t slag off Jesus Christ and expect to get a lollipop. Doesn’t work that way.
. . .
As I have before added my two ha’porth to comments about Greece’s troubles over its debts, I suppose I should add a few more now that the referendum vote has been held and a rather big majority of those who voted gave a rather prominent V sign to the eurocrats. But with things moving so fast now, that would be pointless. I can’t say I’m not pleased, although not necessarily because I am ‘on the Greek’s side’.
In fact, I am on no one’s ‘side’. It would be odd if the Greeks, who admit they lied and cheated their way into the euro and then, benefiting from the eurozone’s cheap interest rates - on the back of the strong economies of the north of the EU - borrowed like there was no tomorrow were simply let off their debts scot-free. On the other hand the terms imposed by those who lent them the money to lend the some more in order to pay off their debts - yes, it really is now that daft - were ludicrously unrealistic and in their own way are just as reprehensible as Greece’s demand to have its cake and eat it.
This is, to use the technical term favoured by hack bloggers, a total fuck-up and furthermore one of gigantic proportions and what will come of it no one can guess. I have cheerfully been predicting civil unrest, possibly leading to civil war, in Greece but to be honest that looks unlikely. But it isn’t going to end with a laughter, a song and a kiss like in some Doris Day film. So best leave off the commenting until at least some of the dust has settled.
I shall add one thing, however: irrespective of who is ‘to blame’ in this matter and sadly it is pretty much nothing more than a question of you pays your money and you makes your choice (it’s not exactly 2 + 2 = 4) consider this: the euro was introduced - gradually - in the early 2000s and was consciously a step on the road to ‘ever closer union’.
All went well to begin with. Then it all went tits up. Any roof will do in fine weather, but you know just how good yours is when it pours with rain and boy did it piss down on the euro in 2009/2010. And that was when the corruption and cheating which went on in some quarters became very obvious.
My point is this: roughly 14/15 after the single currency was introduced, the economies of every single eurozone member state is stagnating badly at best. And at worst one in four of the adults of work age in some countries is unemployed, rising to every second adult if under the age of 25. Does that sound like the euro is a roaring success?
Apple (Apple - remember Apple? Apparently before he died Steve Jobs was reputed by many Apple queens to be able to walk on water) have introduced ‘Apple Music’ to take on Spotify. It was launched last week, but even before its launch it got itself into a spot of bother in what I am beginning to regard as typical high-handed Apple fashion.
To make its putative Spotify-killer app as attractive as possible, punters who sign up get a ‘three-month free trial’, i.e. they get the service for free for three months. What we, the public, didn’t know until one Taylor Swift (‘a popular singing artist, m’lud, rather like Dorothy Squires, whose tunes I’m sure m’lud would have whistled in his younger days, except that Taylor Swift is still alive’) said she wasn’t playing along was that Apple had decided to have its cake and eat it: while punters were enjoying their free trial (and would, presumably, carry on using the service, swelling Apple’s coffers by another few million every few hours), the artists whose music they were enjoying would not be paid royalties. That was the law as laid down by St Steven Jobs’s spirtual successor at Cupertino.
So, the admirable Ms Swift told Apple to stick that one up their kilt: if you don’t pay me, you don’t get to use my music. And it seems Ms Swift was not alone in being pretty pissed off with Apple’s arrogance: other artists supported her and Apple backed down (for more or less the first time since records began). On the day Apple Music was launched, Apple also released an IoS update for iPhones and iPads and alerted by a small red ‘1’ on the settings button, I downloaded it. That was a big mistake. The Apple Music facility is to be accessed through the IoS’s new Music app, you know, they one which allows you to listen to all the music on your iPhone or iPad. And that, my dear’s is a hell of a step backward.
When you first launch it, you are asked to sign up to Apple Music. I declined. But that is not what has irritated me: quite simply where the Music app it replaced was organised to that you could use it’s facilities in several way, the new app has lost almost all of those.
You could once list your music by composer, artist, song, genre and playlist. Now you can only look at playlists. Before it was easy to switch call up one of those categories and get the app to shuffle all while playing. Now that shuffle all facility is so unintuitive and hidden it is more or less absent. I was so put out that I went to the Apple Forums on the Apple website and said so: the new Music app, I declared, is shite. That was yesterday.
I did get a reply, but I can’t tell you what was in it, because Apple have removed my criticism and the reply. Apple, it seems, don’t like criticism. Nor, apparently did Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot and Idi Amin. The only difference between those four and Apple, as far as I can see, is that unlike Apple they weren’t in the computer and smartphone business. Fuckwits.
NB With the email I received from Apple telling me it had removed my comment was a note saying that if I disagreed with the decision, I should get in touch. I decided I would. But back at the forum you can hunt high and low, but you’ll not find out how to get in touch. Figures. You don’t slag off Jesus Christ and expect to get a lollipop. Doesn’t work that way.
. . .
As I have before added my two ha’porth to comments about Greece’s troubles over its debts, I suppose I should add a few more now that the referendum vote has been held and a rather big majority of those who voted gave a rather prominent V sign to the eurocrats. But with things moving so fast now, that would be pointless. I can’t say I’m not pleased, although not necessarily because I am ‘on the Greek’s side’.
In fact, I am on no one’s ‘side’. It would be odd if the Greeks, who admit they lied and cheated their way into the euro and then, benefiting from the eurozone’s cheap interest rates - on the back of the strong economies of the north of the EU - borrowed like there was no tomorrow were simply let off their debts scot-free. On the other hand the terms imposed by those who lent them the money to lend the some more in order to pay off their debts - yes, it really is now that daft - were ludicrously unrealistic and in their own way are just as reprehensible as Greece’s demand to have its cake and eat it.
This is, to use the technical term favoured by hack bloggers, a total fuck-up and furthermore one of gigantic proportions and what will come of it no one can guess. I have cheerfully been predicting civil unrest, possibly leading to civil war, in Greece but to be honest that looks unlikely. But it isn’t going to end with a laughter, a song and a kiss like in some Doris Day film. So best leave off the commenting until at least some of the dust has settled.
I shall add one thing, however: irrespective of who is ‘to blame’ in this matter and sadly it is pretty much nothing more than a question of you pays your money and you makes your choice (it’s not exactly 2 + 2 = 4) consider this: the euro was introduced - gradually - in the early 2000s and was consciously a step on the road to ‘ever closer union’.
All went well to begin with. Then it all went tits up. Any roof will do in fine weather, but you know just how good yours is when it pours with rain and boy did it piss down on the euro in 2009/2010. And that was when the corruption and cheating which went on in some quarters became very obvious.
My point is this: roughly 14/15 after the single currency was introduced, the economies of every single eurozone member state is stagnating badly at best. And at worst one in four of the adults of work age in some countries is unemployed, rising to every second adult if under the age of 25. Does that sound like the euro is a roaring success?
Thursday 25 June 2015
Why morons are morons are morons are morons the world over, irrespective of gender — but somehow the male of the species has a head-start. Why?
We all have to pass the time somehow (and don’t give me any of that ‘I’m to busy to worry about how to pass the time’ bullshit - show me someone who has no time to breathe, and I’ll show you the very definition of disorganisation, a liar or a stiff), and one way I wile away many a precious minute granted me by God (or my humanist principles, I can never remember which) is to add my two ha’porth to the comment section appended to almost every story in our online newspapers.
My comment sections of choice are those in the Daily Telegraph and the Guardian, mainly because there’s always someone to disagree with. For your Telegraph reader I’m apparently so far to the left on a clear day you can see Vladivostok, but for most Guardian readers I’m a snivelling little Tory-supporting crypto-fascist who should have been strangled at birth if not even earlier. I, of course, like to think I am neither, but now that life is in colour and perception is everything and truth is subjective, who knows, perhaps I am both.
On both papers I find I am almost always in a minority on whatever topic is under discussion. Both papers have their share of nutters. Here are, satirised at first, then the real thing, the kind of comment you can find daily among The Chosen of both moron wings. First The Guardian: ‘That fucking bitch Thatcher, she should have been raped, then burnt, then hung. I’m GLAD SHE’S DEAD!!!’ Although I invented that, it is pretty damn close to what various idiots did come out with when Margaret Thatcher died a few years ago.
Then there’s the kind of garbage which very often appears in the Daily Telegraph comments sections (and this is pertinent to the rest of this entry and all three are direct quotes): ‘Newsflash: Why would any sane man with a life and a career want to become "involved" with a feminist. We have much better options. There doesn't exist an attractive feminist who is height/weight appropriate (not fat)’, ‘Feminists don't have boyfriends. They just have pet chimps’, and ‘Quite. What sort of man would ever want a relationship with a “feminist”? To paraphrase a feminist adage — mankind needs feminism like a fish needs a typewriter.’
At our most recent election here in Britain, I was roundly abused in the Guardian comments section for suggesting that Labour would not win an outright majority and that Ed Miliband — leader at the time of the election — would be soundly beaten in the polls, one way or another, and would no longer be leader 24 hours after the polls had closed. (When I suggested to a friend and colleague a week or two before the May 7 poll that not only would the Tories not lose, but they would, for one reason or another, gain an overall majority of about four or five seats — I used the phrase ‘grease through’ — he bet me £5 I would be proved wrong. Well, up to a point I was — the Tories greased through with an overall majority of 12, not four or five, but I still collected my £5.)
My most recent comment section spat was yesterday and today, responding, as were others, to a very silly piece in the Daily Telegraph by a women writer who admitted that although she overcame the loneliness which besieged her when she first move to London by eventually finding a boyfriend, she felt she had betrayed feminism by ‘depending’ on him for company.
Writers, unless they are ‘celebrity writers’ such as the Daily Mail’s Richard Littlejohn who are paid fabulous sums for merely farting on paper and have final say on everything that appears under their byline, are staff writers or minor freelancers, and they have no control at ll over what headline is given to their piece.
So the writer of this very silly piece had to put up with the headline ‘Finding a boyfriend cured my crippling loneliness, but left me feeling a bad feminist’ to which was added the sub-head ‘Actress Rachel Weisz has revealed that she spent much of her twenties feeling “lonely”. Rebecca Reid applauds her for exposing the isolation that hits so many women in Britain’.
In this case I doubt whether she objected to the headline as it pretty much summed up what she saying, but often it doesn’t and a ‘good’ headline will be used, deemed ‘good’ not because it encapsulates and sums up the feature it heads succinctly, but because whoever is top of the editorial food chain either thought it up and/or thinks it is good.
My reaction and the substance of my first comment was to berate Reid and her piece for implicitly suggesting they should, at best, keep their feelings to themselves and, at worst, in the interests of feminism and the sisterhood utterly deny that they are lonely. But — an important ‘but’ — I went
on to point out that such an obtuse attitude was only symptomatic of the whackier (and usually Western) feminists and that they did their cause of promoting greater gender equality a bad disservice by saying such silly things.
Here is my first entry in full:
‘ “Initially I was irked by Weisz’s confession. How could she say that she wasn’t a full and complete person before she was in a relationship? (She’s now married to Daniel Craig). What message does that send to independent young women?” In a nutshell, the writer manages to sum up the insidious seam of corruption which runs through our feminist commentariat.
The subtext is: 'Even if you are feeling dogshit and utterly bereft, lie through your teeth and deny any such feelings because we want young women to be empowered'. OK, Ms Reid, goes on to say she moved away from that position, but it still doesn't mask the feminist rulebook which is blighting the lives of so many women, young and old, who feel they are somehow 'letting their sisters down' by feeling - for God's sake! - vulnerable and weak.
Well, quite apart from the fact that every man reading this will - if he is honest - admit that at some point in his life and perhaps quite often, have felt 'vulnerable, lonely and weak' - I know I have especially when I was younger - every woman is entitled to feel whatever she feels without some feminist stasi breathing down her neck and reminding her she should feel 'empowered'. I am a regularly listener to Woman's Hour (it can be very interesting and informative) but there is a consistent pseudo-feminist theme running through many items which lays down the law on what women can and should feel or else they are letting down their gender. But honesty, unadulterated honesty should be at the heart of every belief, and that is all-too-often absent in some - I stress only some - “feminist” preaching.’
My comment apparently seemed to sum an broadside against feminism in general, and I was applauded by ‘Misandry’ who replied: ‘Hardly “some’... As you said, it's pretty much consistent no matter what flavour of feminism you listen to.’ (NB You might be familiar with the word ‘misandry’, but I wasn’t and had to look it up and discovered it meant — in some dictionaries
— ‘man-hating’, in others ‘dislike of, contempt for or ingrained prejudice against men’, the implication being that ‘feminists’ are wholesale ‘man-haters’.) It was then I realised that my views of ‘feminism’ and ‘feminist’s who are campaigning for a far better deal for women had been and were being wholly misinterpreted.
So I replied: No, I shall stick with ‘some’, because as far as I am concerned a rebalancing of the relationship between the genders is long overdue. Get a little further away from the comfort zone we call The West i.e. Africa and Asia, and the lot of a great number of women is appalling. Don’t think me a wuss when I mention female genital mutilation, the SOLE purpose of which is to ensure women do not enjoy sexual intercourse.
Here in the West, of course, in Britain and other European countries women are still paid less for doing an identical job to their male workmates, and I can think of no rational explanation for that. So there is a great deal of scope for “feminism” at [sic] there are a great many of feminist activists who have my whole-hearted support and best wishes.
Their task is, however, made a great deal harder, not least because of the male antagonism they often elicit, [by a kind] of feminist lite, one which has all the trappings of ‘the struggle’ but is essential vacuous, the kind I describe in my first post. It lays down the law on women, chastises them if they don't follow the feminist rules, and - ironically - in many of its demands seems to want to transform women into some kind of alternative guy.’
That was when it — the shitstorm (© Angela Merkel, Germany’s Federal Chancellor, Bundeskanzler) — all started and I found myself in a minority of one, valiantly trying to defend my position against what seemed like a horde — though in the event there were no more than four or five — berating me for supporting what they viewed as a ‘vile doctrine’ and described me as a ‘mangina’ and ‘neckbeard virgin’ (that’s another one I had to look up).
One in particular, his moniker was ‘Dogglebird’, told me as part of his university teaching he instructed a ‘critical discourse analysis (CDA)’ and went ‘It’s not my main specialism, but it covers such as poststructuralist feminist Julia Kristeva, as well as some other contemporary feminist writers. From that, I have had to read quite a bit of feminist writing as background to teaching CDA and supervising extended essays and MA dissertations.’
Sounds grand, though when you put it together with some of the other bollocks he was coming out with, you have to wonder. For the record, I would never describe myself as ‘a feministç or a ‘new man’, though only because I think labels are pretty counter-productive, are essentially meaningless and are apt to derail most discussions. (‘Well, it depends what you mean by “feminist” ’, someone might respond, but once any discussion is sidetracked into establishing definitions, we are already heading up a blind alley.) What I would and shall confess to is my horror at some of the lives many — it will be many millions — of people are forced to live merely because they were born as women.
What muddies the ‘feminist’ debate considerably is that the iniquities some women still suffer in the ‘civilised’ West — being paid less for doing exactly the same job as a male colleague, being ‘touched up’ by male strangers, being, as a matter of course, expected to do all housework as a ‘duty’ almost pale into insignificance with the horrors other women face: being denied schooling in Taliban Afghanistan and having no social life outside the home unless accompanied by their husband or a close male relative, risking gang rape in India where the authorities, always male, choose to turn a blind eye because the victim was ‘just a woman’ or rape victims being stoned to death for ‘adultery’.
I pointed out such examples in my many entries and responses to other posters commenting on Ms Reid’s story, and in reward got ever more abuse. And I was given example after example of supposedly ‘feminist’ whackiness: it really doesn’t help the feminist cause one iota when ‘radical feminist’ come out with such claims as ‘all men are rapists’. Or, as quoted by Dogglebird, ‘I feel that
“man-hating” is an honourable and viable political act, that the oppressed have a right to class-hatred against the class that is oppressing them’ and attributed by him to Robin Morgan, editor of Ms. Magazine.
Then there’s this, again quoted by Dogglebird, this time from a Valerie Solanas: ‘To call a man an animal is to flatter him; he’s a machine, a walking dildo.’ (Valerie Solanas, as I’m sure you all know, but I didn’t, is or rather was an American radical feminist writer who is best known for the SCUM Manifesto as well as the attempted murder of artist Andy Warhol (Wikipedia’s entry).
That last, the fact that she tried to bump of Warhol rather dates her and, more to the point, means Mr Dogglebird is rather scrabbling around for examples to discredit feminism, i.e. he strikes me as a tad desperate for ‘evidence’ to substantiate his outlandish prejudices (yet he claims he teaches ‘aspects of feminism’. I wonder just how even-keeled is the information he passes on to his eager students.) From where I sit, women the world over are fighting an uphill battle to get a rather better deal out of life after many, many centuries, if not millennia of eating shit.
Yes, I’m sure if you disagree, you could come up with chapter and verse about why the current dispensation is as it should be and all is well in the world. But if that’s the case, don’t bother me with your views unless you can come up with a copper-bottomed case. Which I doubt you can because I doubt to the point of complete conviction that anyone can.
My comment sections of choice are those in the Daily Telegraph and the Guardian, mainly because there’s always someone to disagree with. For your Telegraph reader I’m apparently so far to the left on a clear day you can see Vladivostok, but for most Guardian readers I’m a snivelling little Tory-supporting crypto-fascist who should have been strangled at birth if not even earlier. I, of course, like to think I am neither, but now that life is in colour and perception is everything and truth is subjective, who knows, perhaps I am both.
On both papers I find I am almost always in a minority on whatever topic is under discussion. Both papers have their share of nutters. Here are, satirised at first, then the real thing, the kind of comment you can find daily among The Chosen of both moron wings. First The Guardian: ‘That fucking bitch Thatcher, she should have been raped, then burnt, then hung. I’m GLAD SHE’S DEAD!!!’ Although I invented that, it is pretty damn close to what various idiots did come out with when Margaret Thatcher died a few years ago.
Then there’s the kind of garbage which very often appears in the Daily Telegraph comments sections (and this is pertinent to the rest of this entry and all three are direct quotes): ‘Newsflash: Why would any sane man with a life and a career want to become "involved" with a feminist. We have much better options. There doesn't exist an attractive feminist who is height/weight appropriate (not fat)’, ‘Feminists don't have boyfriends. They just have pet chimps’, and ‘Quite. What sort of man would ever want a relationship with a “feminist”? To paraphrase a feminist adage — mankind needs feminism like a fish needs a typewriter.’
At our most recent election here in Britain, I was roundly abused in the Guardian comments section for suggesting that Labour would not win an outright majority and that Ed Miliband — leader at the time of the election — would be soundly beaten in the polls, one way or another, and would no longer be leader 24 hours after the polls had closed. (When I suggested to a friend and colleague a week or two before the May 7 poll that not only would the Tories not lose, but they would, for one reason or another, gain an overall majority of about four or five seats — I used the phrase ‘grease through’ — he bet me £5 I would be proved wrong. Well, up to a point I was — the Tories greased through with an overall majority of 12, not four or five, but I still collected my £5.)
My most recent comment section spat was yesterday and today, responding, as were others, to a very silly piece in the Daily Telegraph by a women writer who admitted that although she overcame the loneliness which besieged her when she first move to London by eventually finding a boyfriend, she felt she had betrayed feminism by ‘depending’ on him for company.
Writers, unless they are ‘celebrity writers’ such as the Daily Mail’s Richard Littlejohn who are paid fabulous sums for merely farting on paper and have final say on everything that appears under their byline, are staff writers or minor freelancers, and they have no control at ll over what headline is given to their piece.
So the writer of this very silly piece had to put up with the headline ‘Finding a boyfriend cured my crippling loneliness, but left me feeling a bad feminist’ to which was added the sub-head ‘Actress Rachel Weisz has revealed that she spent much of her twenties feeling “lonely”. Rebecca Reid applauds her for exposing the isolation that hits so many women in Britain’.
In this case I doubt whether she objected to the headline as it pretty much summed up what she saying, but often it doesn’t and a ‘good’ headline will be used, deemed ‘good’ not because it encapsulates and sums up the feature it heads succinctly, but because whoever is top of the editorial food chain either thought it up and/or thinks it is good.
My reaction and the substance of my first comment was to berate Reid and her piece for implicitly suggesting they should, at best, keep their feelings to themselves and, at worst, in the interests of feminism and the sisterhood utterly deny that they are lonely. But — an important ‘but’ — I went
on to point out that such an obtuse attitude was only symptomatic of the whackier (and usually Western) feminists and that they did their cause of promoting greater gender equality a bad disservice by saying such silly things.
Here is my first entry in full:‘ “Initially I was irked by Weisz’s confession. How could she say that she wasn’t a full and complete person before she was in a relationship? (She’s now married to Daniel Craig). What message does that send to independent young women?” In a nutshell, the writer manages to sum up the insidious seam of corruption which runs through our feminist commentariat.
The subtext is: 'Even if you are feeling dogshit and utterly bereft, lie through your teeth and deny any such feelings because we want young women to be empowered'. OK, Ms Reid, goes on to say she moved away from that position, but it still doesn't mask the feminist rulebook which is blighting the lives of so many women, young and old, who feel they are somehow 'letting their sisters down' by feeling - for God's sake! - vulnerable and weak.
Well, quite apart from the fact that every man reading this will - if he is honest - admit that at some point in his life and perhaps quite often, have felt 'vulnerable, lonely and weak' - I know I have especially when I was younger - every woman is entitled to feel whatever she feels without some feminist stasi breathing down her neck and reminding her she should feel 'empowered'. I am a regularly listener to Woman's Hour (it can be very interesting and informative) but there is a consistent pseudo-feminist theme running through many items which lays down the law on what women can and should feel or else they are letting down their gender. But honesty, unadulterated honesty should be at the heart of every belief, and that is all-too-often absent in some - I stress only some - “feminist” preaching.’
My comment apparently seemed to sum an broadside against feminism in general, and I was applauded by ‘Misandry’ who replied: ‘Hardly “some’... As you said, it's pretty much consistent no matter what flavour of feminism you listen to.’ (NB You might be familiar with the word ‘misandry’, but I wasn’t and had to look it up and discovered it meant — in some dictionaries
— ‘man-hating’, in others ‘dislike of, contempt for or ingrained prejudice against men’, the implication being that ‘feminists’ are wholesale ‘man-haters’.) It was then I realised that my views of ‘feminism’ and ‘feminist’s who are campaigning for a far better deal for women had been and were being wholly misinterpreted.
So I replied: No, I shall stick with ‘some’, because as far as I am concerned a rebalancing of the relationship between the genders is long overdue. Get a little further away from the comfort zone we call The West i.e. Africa and Asia, and the lot of a great number of women is appalling. Don’t think me a wuss when I mention female genital mutilation, the SOLE purpose of which is to ensure women do not enjoy sexual intercourse.
Here in the West, of course, in Britain and other European countries women are still paid less for doing an identical job to their male workmates, and I can think of no rational explanation for that. So there is a great deal of scope for “feminism” at [sic] there are a great many of feminist activists who have my whole-hearted support and best wishes.
Their task is, however, made a great deal harder, not least because of the male antagonism they often elicit, [by a kind] of feminist lite, one which has all the trappings of ‘the struggle’ but is essential vacuous, the kind I describe in my first post. It lays down the law on women, chastises them if they don't follow the feminist rules, and - ironically - in many of its demands seems to want to transform women into some kind of alternative guy.’
That was when it — the shitstorm (© Angela Merkel, Germany’s Federal Chancellor, Bundeskanzler) — all started and I found myself in a minority of one, valiantly trying to defend my position against what seemed like a horde — though in the event there were no more than four or five — berating me for supporting what they viewed as a ‘vile doctrine’ and described me as a ‘mangina’ and ‘neckbeard virgin’ (that’s another one I had to look up).
One in particular, his moniker was ‘Dogglebird’, told me as part of his university teaching he instructed a ‘critical discourse analysis (CDA)’ and went ‘It’s not my main specialism, but it covers such as poststructuralist feminist Julia Kristeva, as well as some other contemporary feminist writers. From that, I have had to read quite a bit of feminist writing as background to teaching CDA and supervising extended essays and MA dissertations.’
Sounds grand, though when you put it together with some of the other bollocks he was coming out with, you have to wonder. For the record, I would never describe myself as ‘a feministç or a ‘new man’, though only because I think labels are pretty counter-productive, are essentially meaningless and are apt to derail most discussions. (‘Well, it depends what you mean by “feminist” ’, someone might respond, but once any discussion is sidetracked into establishing definitions, we are already heading up a blind alley.) What I would and shall confess to is my horror at some of the lives many — it will be many millions — of people are forced to live merely because they were born as women.
What muddies the ‘feminist’ debate considerably is that the iniquities some women still suffer in the ‘civilised’ West — being paid less for doing exactly the same job as a male colleague, being ‘touched up’ by male strangers, being, as a matter of course, expected to do all housework as a ‘duty’ almost pale into insignificance with the horrors other women face: being denied schooling in Taliban Afghanistan and having no social life outside the home unless accompanied by their husband or a close male relative, risking gang rape in India where the authorities, always male, choose to turn a blind eye because the victim was ‘just a woman’ or rape victims being stoned to death for ‘adultery’.
I pointed out such examples in my many entries and responses to other posters commenting on Ms Reid’s story, and in reward got ever more abuse. And I was given example after example of supposedly ‘feminist’ whackiness: it really doesn’t help the feminist cause one iota when ‘radical feminist’ come out with such claims as ‘all men are rapists’. Or, as quoted by Dogglebird, ‘I feel that
“man-hating” is an honourable and viable political act, that the oppressed have a right to class-hatred against the class that is oppressing them’ and attributed by him to Robin Morgan, editor of Ms. Magazine.
Then there’s this, again quoted by Dogglebird, this time from a Valerie Solanas: ‘To call a man an animal is to flatter him; he’s a machine, a walking dildo.’ (Valerie Solanas, as I’m sure you all know, but I didn’t, is or rather was an American radical feminist writer who is best known for the SCUM Manifesto as well as the attempted murder of artist Andy Warhol (Wikipedia’s entry).
That last, the fact that she tried to bump of Warhol rather dates her and, more to the point, means Mr Dogglebird is rather scrabbling around for examples to discredit feminism, i.e. he strikes me as a tad desperate for ‘evidence’ to substantiate his outlandish prejudices (yet he claims he teaches ‘aspects of feminism’. I wonder just how even-keeled is the information he passes on to his eager students.) From where I sit, women the world over are fighting an uphill battle to get a rather better deal out of life after many, many centuries, if not millennia of eating shit.
Yes, I’m sure if you disagree, you could come up with chapter and verse about why the current dispensation is as it should be and all is well in the world. But if that’s the case, don’t bother me with your views unless you can come up with a copper-bottomed case. Which I doubt you can because I doubt to the point of complete conviction that anyone can.
Sunday 21 June 2015
I hate to say this, but this is nothing but a 1,104-word whinge, so unless you have nothing better to do, best ignore it
Oh, to go on holiday again, and soon. I’ve only been back from my nine/ten days in Mallorca, but I can already feel the yearn for a certain kind of freedom which only a holiday brings. (I say nine/ten days because it was nominally a ten-day break - and ten nights at the hotel), but because I didn’t fly out until the Thursday evening and didn’t arrive at the hotel until gone 1am, that was one ‘day’ already out of the window. I shan’t make that mistake again.)
The first thing I noticed when I got back about three weeks ago was just how silly our British weather essentially is. Since then we have had one or two ‘fine’ days, but even though the weather in Port d’Alcudia, Mallorca, wasn’t hot, at least it was consistently warmer.
Here in Britain it is pretty much hit or miss, and the TV forecaster warning, even in June, of the threat of a slight ground frost on higher ground is rather too often for my liking. The other thing I miss is a lack what I mean by freedom, and when using that word I am very conscious that a great many folk around the world would envy me my apparent ‘lack of freedom’.
I don’t mean to come across as some bleeding heart liberal, but I as I get older, the more I am conscious of how bloody lucky we are in the ‘civilised world’ and just how much we take for granted - food, the ability to speak our minds however critical we are, within limits more or less doing what we like irrespective of gender or religion. Try being a woman in Saudi Arabia who still isn’t allowed to
drive a car. Consider being gay, of either sex, in Iran where it can all too often result in enforce ‘gender reassignment’ - a sex change to you and me - as a ‘solution’ to the fact you were born gay.
But that wasn’t the tack I was going to go on, so having made my point, I shall move on. The one thing I enjoy about being away alone is the lack of obligation: I can do as I please. I don’t indulge myself in any particular way, it’s just that here at home or going away and staying with someone, there is still some kind of timetable to be adhered to. It irks me, and it was feeling that irksomeness just a few minutes ago which brought be back to a laptop and the posting of another blog entry.
I work from Sundays to Wednesdays and I am then nominally ‘off’ on Thursdays to Saturdays. I never really quite relax on the Saturday as know the following day I have to be up early and off on a four-hour drive from Cornwall to London.
Once at work, there’s the usual routine and Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays each have their own routine. Back home in Cornwall, after another four-hour drive on the Wednesday night - the routine being getting away as soon as possible after my nominal shift end at 6pm to get the bloody journey over and done with, with a two-hour stop off at the Brewers Arms in South Petherton for two pints of cider and a few La Pax cigars - I wake early, cos my wife wakes at 6.30 and although she is not in the slightest bit noisy or disruptive, and once awake I am one of those who might try to get back to sleep again, but can’t. So it is up and about.
On Thursdays I call in on my stepmother just down the road who is more or less housebound after her stroke eight years ago to pick up her shopping list to do her shopping. After the shopping it is back to do ‘the puzzles’, drop in on her again to drop off the shopping and sit with her for a while, and then it is just counting down till bedtime because after my commute home and late night - I don’t get in till 1am on the Thursday morning and stay away surfing the net or listening to the radio till gone 2 - I am knackered.
Fridays are given over to doing very little but it is one of those days when I am conscious I could - and should - be using my time far more constructively, for example getting on with the two radio plays I have started writing and reading. I do a little, but feeling constrained by some kind of harness - the week’s routine feels like that - I don’t do a great deal at all. Then it’s Saturday again.
On holiday, though, and I am talking about being away somewhere all on my own I find I do write, quite substantially, and do read. Oh well, whinge over. Time I should remind myself that despite it all I am a comparatively bloody lucky guy. I do have time off planned, though.
On July 9, I am off to Germany for three days for my brother-in-laws 60th birthday party - and as the Germans are a sociable bunch it should be an enjoyable time. Then, on July 23, I am off to Bordeaux for a week’s worth of classical concerts, the same routine I have followed for the past four years. My aunt, with whom I stay is having quite a serious ‘woman’s’ operation and as she is now over 80, I have offered to do all the donkey work in the kitchen which she would normally do.
Then, on September 3, it is off to see my potter friend in the back of beyond north of Valencia for a week. That, too, should be enjoyable. So don’t pity me too much, but I do look forward to getting away on my own again. As I turned 65 last November, I can ‘retire’ at any time I like, but I have decided to carry on working for a while to build up my pension a little more. What with one child in her second year of university and a son starting uni in two years time, money might still be a little tight.
For the second time, whinge over.
The first thing I noticed when I got back about three weeks ago was just how silly our British weather essentially is. Since then we have had one or two ‘fine’ days, but even though the weather in Port d’Alcudia, Mallorca, wasn’t hot, at least it was consistently warmer.
Here in Britain it is pretty much hit or miss, and the TV forecaster warning, even in June, of the threat of a slight ground frost on higher ground is rather too often for my liking. The other thing I miss is a lack what I mean by freedom, and when using that word I am very conscious that a great many folk around the world would envy me my apparent ‘lack of freedom’.
I don’t mean to come across as some bleeding heart liberal, but I as I get older, the more I am conscious of how bloody lucky we are in the ‘civilised world’ and just how much we take for granted - food, the ability to speak our minds however critical we are, within limits more or less doing what we like irrespective of gender or religion. Try being a woman in Saudi Arabia who still isn’t allowed to
But that wasn’t the tack I was going to go on, so having made my point, I shall move on. The one thing I enjoy about being away alone is the lack of obligation: I can do as I please. I don’t indulge myself in any particular way, it’s just that here at home or going away and staying with someone, there is still some kind of timetable to be adhered to. It irks me, and it was feeling that irksomeness just a few minutes ago which brought be back to a laptop and the posting of another blog entry.
I work from Sundays to Wednesdays and I am then nominally ‘off’ on Thursdays to Saturdays. I never really quite relax on the Saturday as know the following day I have to be up early and off on a four-hour drive from Cornwall to London.
Once at work, there’s the usual routine and Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays each have their own routine. Back home in Cornwall, after another four-hour drive on the Wednesday night - the routine being getting away as soon as possible after my nominal shift end at 6pm to get the bloody journey over and done with, with a two-hour stop off at the Brewers Arms in South Petherton for two pints of cider and a few La Pax cigars - I wake early, cos my wife wakes at 6.30 and although she is not in the slightest bit noisy or disruptive, and once awake I am one of those who might try to get back to sleep again, but can’t. So it is up and about.
On Thursdays I call in on my stepmother just down the road who is more or less housebound after her stroke eight years ago to pick up her shopping list to do her shopping. After the shopping it is back to do ‘the puzzles’, drop in on her again to drop off the shopping and sit with her for a while, and then it is just counting down till bedtime because after my commute home and late night - I don’t get in till 1am on the Thursday morning and stay away surfing the net or listening to the radio till gone 2 - I am knackered.
Fridays are given over to doing very little but it is one of those days when I am conscious I could - and should - be using my time far more constructively, for example getting on with the two radio plays I have started writing and reading. I do a little, but feeling constrained by some kind of harness - the week’s routine feels like that - I don’t do a great deal at all. Then it’s Saturday again.
On holiday, though, and I am talking about being away somewhere all on my own I find I do write, quite substantially, and do read. Oh well, whinge over. Time I should remind myself that despite it all I am a comparatively bloody lucky guy. I do have time off planned, though.
On July 9, I am off to Germany for three days for my brother-in-laws 60th birthday party - and as the Germans are a sociable bunch it should be an enjoyable time. Then, on July 23, I am off to Bordeaux for a week’s worth of classical concerts, the same routine I have followed for the past four years. My aunt, with whom I stay is having quite a serious ‘woman’s’ operation and as she is now over 80, I have offered to do all the donkey work in the kitchen which she would normally do.
Then, on September 3, it is off to see my potter friend in the back of beyond north of Valencia for a week. That, too, should be enjoyable. So don’t pity me too much, but I do look forward to getting away on my own again. As I turned 65 last November, I can ‘retire’ at any time I like, but I have decided to carry on working for a while to build up my pension a little more. What with one child in her second year of university and a son starting uni in two years time, money might still be a little tight.
For the second time, whinge over.
Thursday 18 June 2015
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.
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
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
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.
Thursday 11 June 2015
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.
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
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
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.
Saturday 30 May 2015
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.
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
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
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.
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