Crisis? What crisis? This one, matey, this one!

We here in Britain are stuck in a truly bizarre age: for once the observation that ‘the country is split’ isn’t actually just a silly, self-important middle-class exaggeration describing, for example, the fact that Wilf next door really thinks English rugby is in for a golden age and can look forward to great things whereas John and William down at the club think that’s nonsense. It is far more serious than that: the country is well and truly split down the middle and it’s not going to end well because there is no way it can end well. And that worries me.

I’m not just talking about Brexit, either, although that is the root cause.

At the moment the government wants to call a general election, and the Opposition is buggered if it is going to commit suicide on national scale. The government is having a lot of trouble getting its ‘deal’ through Parliament (the initial withdrawal agreement between it and the EU outlining what is what, for example how much Britain should contribute to the EU budget to help pay for items agree upon when it was still a member).

Part of it problem is that before Johnson became PM it had a small majority, essentially because under the premiership of his predecessor, Theresa May, the Tory government had bought off the DUP with a £3 billion bung and the Northern Irish party agreed to support it in the Commons. Recently, Johnson took way the whip from 21 MPs because they voted against him on a Commons motion, thereby flushing his small majority down the pan. Whether that was plain incompetence or real stupidity doesn’t even matter any more.

The fact is that Johnson cannot and will not command a majority in the Commons on any motion except perhaps one granting all MPs a huge pay rise. His government is, at present quite impotent and he believes if held an election, he might get a working majority in the Commons. But getting that election is proving very tricky indeed. And he is trying to come up with various ruses to get his election, not least ensuring his government loses a vote of no confidence.

If some gifted satirist were to dream up a plot for a novel in which a government considers calling such a motion of no confidence in itself (and urges supporting MPs to vote in favour of the motion in a tacit admission that they and the government are useless twats), the resulting novel might, if well-written, prove to be quite amusing. In essence such a plot would recall all those Ealing comedies of the 1950s when Britain was assured it had ‘never had it so good’.

Fleshing out that plot to have the main Opposition party voting against the motion (that ‘this House has no confidence that Her Majesty’s Government could even organise an orgy in a brothel’ — essentially that it has every confidence in Her Majesty’s Governments and wishes it only well) would add a great deal more spice.

In fact, that is exactly the situation our House of Commons finds itself in: the Tories, under Boris Johnson’s leadership are aching to go to the country in the hope they will be voted back into power, and Labour, under the leadership — I use the word as loosely as I am able to without it becoming thoroughly meaningless — of Jeremy Corbyn are desperate to avoid a general election.

But the government can no longer simply call an election. Complicating it all is what is known as the ‘fixed-term parliament legislation: whereas until 2015 when the Tories had to form a coalition with the Lib Dems if they

wanted to retain power, the sitting government could call an election when it damn well wanted — usually, and quite obviously when it thought it had the best chance of winning (as it now does), now an election can only be called if two-thirds of the MPs in the House of Commons want one. Well, the Tories want one, and the SNP want one and the Lib Dems want one but Labour is buggered if it wants to go to the country to get on its way to oblivion sooner than most expect. The latest opinion poll figures will explain why:

According to them, the Tories have the highest support among British voters (around 35% tell all those from the polling firms who knock on the door or ring up to ask that they would vote for the Tories). Labour, on the other hand are preferred by far fewer (around 25%). The Lib Dems aren’t doing badly, though, up to around 18% from their very low (although not historically low) 8%.

What is so odd about these figures is that usually the incumbent government (whether Tory or Labour) is not at all popular with the electorate and the Opposition will be rather well off in the polling figures. Not this time — Jeremy Bernard Corbyn is the fly in Labour’s ointment: apart from a few scruffy herberts of all ages and genders who consider themselves to be ‘socialists’, no one, but no one likes him. And apart from the scrappy band of Dave Sparts, they would rather go blind than vote him into office and see him as Prime Minister.

But all that is not even half the story.

Both parties are split — although neither is split exactly down the middle — into those who support Brexit (or, at least, support the implementation of the result of the 2016 Brexit referendum) and those who want Britain to remain as a member of the European Union.

Broadly, the Tories are split into two-thirds who support Leave and one third (those Tories Mrs Thatcher would have regarded as ‘wet’) who think Britain’s best interests are served by remaining an EU member. Labour is some kind of mirror image: two-thirds support Remain and one-third support Leave. But it’s not even that simple: a great many of those in Labour-voting constituencies in the North of England voted Leave. So their MP, who most probably is a Remainer, is fearful she or he might be out of a job if they don’t go against their own convictions and support Leave in House of Commons motions.

The Tories have a slightly different problem: now that Ukip has gone the way of all flesh and is rotting on the bone and about as relevant as a four-year-old bus ticket, their one-time leader Nigel Farage has come up with a new party, the Brexit Party. And rather too many Tory voters, terminally pissed off that more than three years after the Brexit referendum Britain still hasn’t left the EU, are more than mindful to give the Brexit Party their support. Thus Tory high command has decided that to see off the electoral threat from the Brexit Party it must be more hardline on Brexit than even Farage. The strategy has worked to a certain extent, except that it has alienated the minority of ‘wet’ Tories who believe Britain’s future would be better served if it remained a member of the EU.

I don’t doubt that thus outlined the situation isn’t quite as troublesome as I seem to have made out. Anyone familiar with Italy, even superficially, will insists that many of the political dilemmas it faces are just as bad and often worse. Then there is Belgium which for many years didn’t even have a government and was run by its civil service. But I suggest this is different.

For better of worse Britain is a undramatic country. Certainly of all the European countries you might associate, were you asked, with the concept of ‘compromise’, ‘working things out’, ‘settling things amicably’ Britain would most probably top the list. Quite simply we British are essentially too lazy and comfortable to get worked up about much. Yes, we get angry and, yes, we sometimes take to the streets, but we only march in protest and cause disruption if the weather outlook is reasonably good, and even then the prospects of heavy showers on the day in question is more than enough to dampen most revolutionary moods. But this is different.

My knowledge of history is quite patchy and mainly garnered from the back of cereal packets, but I do know of several instances in the past 110 years when Britain faced a crisis. One was in 1910 when the Liberals abolished the veto the House of Lords had on the Budget. Then came the Abdication Crisis in 1936 although however ‘critical’

it seemed at the time, I can’t think it posed much of a threat to the stability of the United Kingdom. Far, far more serious and far closer in spirit to the current crisis we are facing was the situation in England in the 1640s which eventually led to our bloody civil war.

I am not suggesting that a civil war will break out in 2019/20, the situation we have now, as then, seems to suggest no immediate solution which might be acceptable all round.

Say there were an election. My view is — and I am often quite wrong — that the Tories would not get the majority they are hoping for. Although they are doing better in the polls since Johnson took over as prime minister, many will not forgive him for his rash pledge to ‘leave they EU by October 31 no if, no buts’ and, disillusioned, vote for the Brexit Party.

That doesn’t mean the Brexit Party will get any seats at all (we still have an ante-deluvian ‘first-past-the-post electoral system here in Britain), but losing votes to the Brexit might mean the Tories losing seats to the Lib Dems. There are six seats where the Tory majority is under 10% and the Lib Dems are in second place. This last suggests that Tory electorate there is composed of quite a few ‘wets’ who might well go over to the Lib Dems.

There seem to be fewer Labour seats at risk to the Lib Dems, but I do think many Leave-supporting Labour voters will opt to vote Brexit rather than Labour to register their irritation.

My main point is that the result of the coming general election need only be a ‘hung parliament’, that is one in which no party has a majority for this chaos to continue. Brexit supporters can only get down on their knees and pray that the Tories will get a majority and will get be able to get their deal through the Commons, but even if that were to happen our current crisis would be far from over.



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The Brexit farce continues and it’s not going to end well . . .

I am conscious that I haven’t posted here for a while and there’s reason: the only thing I would like to write about at present (not having bought a new laptop for a week or two, or come up with any more trivia about my father’s life — possibly — as 007 both of which topics usually make for scintillating blog posts) is the sheer farce that Brexit has become. And for many reasons it is quite pointless making any comments.

For one thing what is happening is changing daily, but for another this is one of those issues in which you are firmly on one side or that other, with both sides becoming more polarised by the hour. And in the nature of things in such punch-ups the one side will never listen to the other: but more pertinently they don’t want to listen. The name of the game is not seeing whether you might persuade the other side that they are wrong and you are right. It is seeing who can shout loudest and drown out the other. Well, I’m not interested in that at all.

(As it was I voted Remain that ‘on balance’ remaining a member of the EU was by far not just in Britain’s best interests but better for Europe as a whole. I do feel the EU must be careful how it evolves and, vitally, must ensure it carries the vast majority of those who live in EU member states with it when it does make changes. Not doing that, proceeding on a de haut en bas basis, will cause a great deal of trouble in the future.

It would be pointless to write much more about the Brexit debacle and the state it is in, if I’m honest, because whatever is recorded here will be out of date within hours. But there’s one aspect of all this which I do think is worth commenting on but which in nothing I have read I have seen commented on. It is simply that there is something going on — in Britain, in Europe, in the US, in the world — of which Brexit, the continual bizarre behaviour and decisions of Donald Trump, the situation in both Russia and China where ‘a hard man’, and the protests in Hong Kong, are just aspects and symptoms.

I think I have alluded to it before (and can’t be arsed to go and check) but it is as though the force of enlightenment which has been growing over the past 70 years is now encountering resistance. I don’t want to come across as some semi-illiterate part-time autodidact, but from the intellectual bits and bobs I have scavenged over the years there seems to me to be a distant echo in the developments of the past ten to 15 years (and I would really not want to push this one too far) of Hegel’s notion of ‘thesis, antithesis and synthesis’, later adopted and adapted by Marx.

In fact, it is quite possible to sidestep any heavy philosophical notions and not quote Hegel (useful if you haven’t read a word of Hegel and don’t want to look like a prize prune by misrepresenting him) and simply mention the Chinese notion of yin and yang the (that night follows day as day follows night) and the Tao, or the long-acknowledged realisation that ‘everything carries the seed of its own destruction’.

In order to give a little more detail on that last idea, I’ve just looked up quotes to see ‘who said that’ and it would be faster to list all those who didn’t say something along those lines, but here’s one from Mark Twain with which you’ll have to make do:

‘Every civilisation carries the seeds of its own destruction, and the same cycle shows in them all. The Republic is born, flourishes, decays into plutocracy, and is captured by the shoemaker whom the mercenaries and millionaires make into a king. The people invent their oppressors, and the oppressors serve the function for which they are invented.’

Yes, there have been problems but looking back over the past 70 years in Europe, one might be forgiven for thinking that overall the general direction of social and political sensibility was towards greater liberalism — in the non-political sense — and, for want of a better word, enlightenment. Certainly, it might seem to be two steps forward, then one back, but ‘progress’ was made. But using that word ‘progress’ draws attention to the essence of one problem: that one man or woman’s ‘progress’ is another man or woman’s ‘abomination’. And it is not a question here of deciding who is right and who is wrong — a debate as futile as trying to agree which is the better football club, United or City? — but of the attitude of each side to the other.

Sometimes part of the difficulty is as basic as that the one side does not even care to acknowledge that however abhorrent it might think the attitude of the other is, it is — because in a democracy it must be regarded as — equally valid.

But ironically that attitude — my attitude — is essentially a liberal one and others (though not necessarily you) might say ‘stuff and nonsense, you lily-livered pinko!’ (followed by, possibly, ‘no surrender!’)

. . .

As for Brexit, well, it is not looking good, not for Britain, Ireland or the EU. Everyone will be a loser unless Britain leaving the EU can be sensibly managed and it is not looking as though that will happen. Well, that at least is my view.

Part of the problem is that on the Brexit side there are those who want Britain to leave the EU, but to do so in a managed and orderly way. And there are those gung-ho individuals (many of whom haunt the comment pages of

the Daily Telegraph where I trade insults with them) who take the attitude of ‘let’s have a clean break and make Britain great again’. So even on the Brexit side there is disagreement.

There has been all kinds of shenanigans in Parliament and our Prime Minister — our current Prime Minister, one Boris Johnson — has painted himself into a corner from which there would seem to be no escape. He has vociferously vowed that Britain will leave the EU by October 31 ‘do or die’, i.e. whether a withdrawal agreement has been made with the EU; on the other hand Parliament has made it law (after through his own incomprehensible stupidity Johnson lost his very slim majority in the House of Commons) that Britain cannot leave the EU unless a withdrawal agreement is in place.

Furthermore, Johnson is fighting a rearguard action against a new party founded by Nigel Farage, the Brexit Party, which will hoover up support from the Tories if we don’t leave by October 31 and Britain is forced to ask for ‘an extension’. Everyone expects a general election to be held in November if we have not left the Tories (in my view) are toast. Ironically, given just how unpopular Jeremy Corbyn, the equally hamfisted Labour leader is in the opinion polls, the Conservatives are ahead by, I think, an average six points.

I am pretty certain that Johnson will not manage to get deal by October 31 (in fact, for technical reasons it must be struck by October 19) and that the coming general election, many voters who previously voted Tory will back Farage’s gang of wankers, other ‘one-nation’ Tories — well, some of them — might throw in their lot with the Lib Dems (who will make it a manifesto pledge that they will revoke ‘Article 50’, the clause in the EU constitution (?) which allowed Britain to announce its withdrawal from the EU).

Then because of that manifesto pledge and in view of Corbyn’s half-baked policy on what to do about Brexit, quite a few Labour voters will pitch in with the Lib Dems and the result of the election will be a hung parliament. What happens then is anyone’s guess. And I’m not going to guess because I have to drive into Bodmin for various reasons and time is getting short. And I’m sure I haven’t told you anything much you didn’t already know. But I wanted to get this post entry finished and posted.

On the road . . .

Travelodge - Retford Markham Moor

Off on my travels for a day or two, this time to visit the Jorvik Vikin Centre in York which I did yesterday. I’ve always wanted to. Interesting experience, and the whatever you call them - animatronic’ figures were novel, semi-lifelike humans and animals moving – slightly, doing various things and ‘talking to each’ other – sitting outside reproductions of what their houses must have looked like were useful to covey they kind of life they will have led. Can’t say I learned much, but that wasn’t the point. If I want to learn shite like that, I’ll simply renew my subscription to Look And Learn (not to be mocked - bet I know more about how tyres are made - from the collection of sap from the rubber tree to fitting them to your Ford Consul! - than you do, so take your mockery . . .

It’s also good to get up and about. I was on the point of using the phrase ‘on the road’ but it does sound a little portentous, implying I’ve got a stash of dexies in the glove comparment, a fistful of hot dollars, a small handgun and have just picked up a mysterious brunette. Sadly I’ve done none of these things. But I do like getting away on my own, even though I’m not doing an awful much.

Set off on Tuesday to get to this Travelodge, chosed because it is near Lincoln (where I shall take off to a little later) and York (where the Jorvik Centre is), though at 52 miles away, York was a little further than I thought it might be. When booking a Travelodge - exactly what I want from a hotel, clean sheets and hot water - I had looked for one inbetween Lincoln and York, and came up with Doncaster. Then I noticed this one was about £15 cheaper for two nights but kept thinking is was ‘between Lincoln and York’. (A dull piece of info? Well, pity me not yourselves, I’ve had to think it.)

Went off to a superstore in Retford - eleven miles away - to ‘get something to eat, stocked up on olives, hummus, crackers, tangerines, cheese, a bowl, a tumbler and a ‘pairing knife for my supper but then stayed in Retford anyway for two glasses of red and a bowl of penne arrabiata.

Trying to get out of Retford to get back here was a hoot. Since I had driven in and was now attempting to drive out again, workmen had closed ‘the London Road’ and no amount of following their diversion signs would let me escape sodding Retford town centre. It did get beyond a joke, I kept driving past the same bloody temporary traffic light again and again and again and didn’t have a clue why. The Google Maps directions didn’t help either cos they didn’t know London Road was closed.

It must have taken me almost an hour to get out and the only reason I did that was by setting my Google Maps for York - 50 miles due north - then following the road until I got to the A1. Then it was turn around and drive down the A1 till I reached the Travelodge.

After the Jorvik centre stopped off at a tapas bar and enjoyed three plates of tapas and three different cherries before tasking the ‘Richar III Experience in whatever gate tower (complete with portcullis) it is. Wait, I’ll take a look. Back again: the Monk Bar gatehouse, the tallest of the medieval city’s four gatehouses.

Today, it’s off to Lincoln for a mooch around. The Lincoln Chronicle - long since dead (and the then evening paper the Lincolnshire Echo is now ‘the local weekly’, things ain’t great in the wacky world of hackdom) - was my first paper so I’m off to look at 15 Kirkby St where I lived for about 15 months and the site where the old office was.

I was going to drive straight home tonight but I have since booked a oom at the Travelodge in Devizes (£44 for one night, just £3 cheaper than what I am paying here for two, but fuck it), to break the journey. The drive up from Cornwall was about six hours - though I was going slowly, I mean what’s the rush? More later.

Olivares Tapas Bar, corner of Drury Lane and Castle Hill, Lincoln – Lunch

As luck would have it my trek up Steep Hill took me to this tapas bar, and although I was – and still am – planning another Italian meal tonight in Devizes, I couldn’t resist it. Tapas and Continental food are gorgeous, we Brits – pretty much all of us – love it, bang on about it, can’t wait to go abroad to eat it, yet stick to the kind of shite we are accustomed to when we cook. OK, obviously not all of us and a great many Brits, both men and women can cook and can cook well. And there are some great British dishes and I would be dishonest if I didn’t admit it. Yet if the there is no rocketc science to preparing tapas, your average Brit could do it with his or her eyes closed, yet you rarely come across tapas bars – I have struck lucky twice. Still.

Went to 15 Kirkby St in ‘downhill’ Lincoln where I lived for about 15 months, and it and the area looked drabber and drearier than I could remember. This was, of course, 45 years ago and time is never kind, but haven’t they heard of ‘gentrification’? Really not.

The irony is that when folk think of Lincoln, they probably think of the medieval streets and houses (now shops, of course) up Steep Hill (called Steep Hill – why? Why, Joseph. Correct, because it’s fucking steep). Well, all that, as well as the nice middle-class house in the surrounding area are ‘uphil’. Downhill, meanwhile, are the rows and rows of two-up, two-down terrace houses where those not lucky enough to be related to or to have gone to school with the Bishop of Lincoln are obliged to live. In June 1974, when I moved in as a lodger to Gwynn (I think his name was) I wasn’t.

From Kirkby St to Riverside North where Lincoln Chronicle (not Lincolnshire Chronicle as I have so far been calling it) office and presses were it’s just a short walk, one I undertook every day. Sadly the presses and offices have disappeared, to be replaced by an NCP car park (watch out Buck House!) but as far as I know there are so far no plans to kill the Queen and bury her in the car park, though after listening to the lunchtime news about David Cameron’s interview on Today this morning when he admitted Liz (Brenda) had tipped him the wink and given him to understand in no uncertain terms that she was against ‘all this Scottish independence nonsense’ there might be informal talks about giving ‘that dick Cameron’ a seeing to and ‘he should seriously consider taking Samantha and their brood to the South Island in New Zealand while the going is good’.

The Green Dragon, the up on the other side of the bridge (or the end of the bridge) where the office was is now shut and the building for let and my short stroll up from Waterside North to here, near the cathedral, has made it pretty plain Lincoln has its own contingent of Baltic state EU citizens and asylum seekers as anywhere else.

The flat, horribly flat Lincolnshire drone has also lingered – well, it would – and is just as dull as it always was.

Off to Devizes in a while where I have decided to stay that night and not rush back to St Breward. It’s not that I am an old fart whose energy levels dictate that he is now obliged to interrupt his trip to the downstairs loo and do it in stages, just that I’ve got this travelling bit in my blood and although it’s not quite Maine to New Mexico, it’s still there. The only drawback about doing some more travelling is the cost of staying somewhere and it occurs to me that if I got a small camper van in which I could get my head down, the only other cost would be petrol. Look into that. See you a bit later when I had some more from Devizes.

Travelodge – Devizes.

All together now: who’s a complete prat? Why, I am. I arrived here about 30 minutes ago (now settled in) to discover that when I booked my room here last night, I bloody booked for next week. Dick! So that’s £25 up the swannee or to put it in my terms, just over three bottles of the Rioja I like and buy at whichever supermarket has it on offer. Bollocks. Now I’m off for another does of penne arrabiata. .

Bon nuit. Don’t stay up, I’ll only whinge.

Rose Tremain's The Colour: less than the sum of its - many - parts

I’ve just finished reading a novel which I didn’t much enjoy, but which I forced myself to finish because I wanted to leave a review of it on GoodReads. I haven’t posted here for while, so just to keep the pot simmering, here it is. OK, that might be cheating but . . .

Whether you intend to read Rose Tremain’s 2003 novel The Colour and have come here searching the views of others, or whether you have, like me, logged on to submit your own rating and review, you will be struck that far more readers who have finished reading the novel — I shall be unkind and describe that as ‘ploughed their way through the novel’ — thought it very good and thoroughly enjoyed it.

It was also a hit with many of the critics: the blurb on the back of my paperback version quotes Britain’s Daily Telegraph as describing Ms Tremain as ‘one of the finest writers in English’, and the Britain’s Independent gushes ‘a fabulous work, bravely imaginative, deeply moving, surprising, invigorating and satisfying’.

The New York Times is a little more sober and warns that the novel can be, and often is, a little ‘windy’. I know what the paper’s critic means and intend to be less kind. And I have to say that I was not moved, surprised, invigorated or satisfied by The Colour. Sadly not a bit.

Yet I cannot deny that the overall majority of those who rated it were impressed — 26pc of the almost 5,000 awarded this novel five stars and 41pc gave it four stars. Only 23pc gave it, like me, three stars. So I must be candid: this might well be your kind of thing and you might well enjoy it, but it certainly wasn’t mine.

In my view The Colour is often horribly overwritten: Tremain cannot resist a simile or two or even 2,000, which all too often are forced, stick out like a sore thumb and illuminate nothing. She is also quite addicted to longwinded, inappropriate and often contradictory metaphors which serve no purpose except, I suspect, because Ms Tremain wants to give her work a literary flavour.

They don’t — all they give this work is a faux-literary flavour (faux as in ‘fake’), though I wouldn’t doubt that some readers — those who made this a five-star read — will often often have paused and reflected ‘God, she can write!’

Ms Tremain is obviously very much at home with words but there is more to writing than that, and her flood of metaphors jar and confuse and are usually entirely superfluous. Her descriptions sometimes just don’t ring

true, can be confusing and convey — for this reader at least — far less than they might have done or should do.

A few years ago I came upon a similar word to the now quite well-known term ’journalese’, which well describes the style of this kind of writing — ‘novelese’. You might know what I am talking about. To my mind The Colour is ‘novelese’.

I forced myself to finish the novel because I intended writing this review and thought it only fair to Ms Tremain to do so. But it was no pleasure — The Colour is 363 pages long and remorseless.

Ironically, it might well have successfully been boiled down to a quarter its size, and far more tautly written, concentrated to make whatever Ms Tremain hoped to convey more telling, it could have been a greater success.

What, though, she hoped to convey is not apparent. I often felt, in fact, that there might be material for four, five or six quite good and quite distinct short stories. But yoked together as the different themes and characters’ back stories were, it is too amorphous and at times turgid.

Somehow it didn’t hang together: the separate strands of the novel remained stubbornly separate and did not gel as I think Ms Tremain intended them to gel. Certainly there was ‘story’ enough, but the strands and their stories might well have made up separate books with no loss to each other.

The quasi-mystical account of an outcast middle-aged Maori women — I think — looking for some kind of redemption had essentially very little to do with the account of the English immigrant who becomes obsessed with finding gold (it all takes place in New Zealand’s mid-19th century gold rush).

This man, escaping in shame from the death of a young girl in a botched abortion, is married to a woman in her mid-30s who is also escaping, in her case from sterile future as a governess. The marriage, on both sides was one of convenience, but — crucially — the reader (well, this reader) fails to become engaged.

The former governess’ musings on freedom and all the rest read more like the yearnings of an adolescent girl confided to her diary than anything we might reasonably be expected to take seriously. Then there’s fourth central character, a Chinese market gardener who also stumbles into a fair amount of quasi-mysticism which had me more than baffled once or twice.

Those  yearnings of an adolescent girl highlight one aspect of Ms Tremain’s writing which I found particularly irritating. From the first page to the last Ms Tremain, whose presence as ‘the author’ is apparent throughout, gives us the thoughts and ‘insights’ of pretty much every character at every turn, and all — even a preternaturally articulate eight-year-old boy and the outcast middle-aged Maori women — express themselves as they might were they (much like Ms Tremain) writing a novel. It is incessant, interminable and wearying, especially when such insights come loaded with all those bloody similes.

Pretty much everything the characters see, hear, feel or ‘understand’ — they are much given to ‘understanding’ and getting insight into their lives, their pasts and their futures — has some kind of significance, and they examine and reflect their thoughts and feelings at pretty much every turn. It’s more like eavesdropping on a university creative writing class than being in the windy wilds and open country of New Zealand’s South Island.

Despite that, all the characters, with the possible exception the Englishman’s widowed mother (who emigrated with her son and his wife) and a 15-year-old male prostitute, remain distinctly two-dimensional. We don’t — well, at least I didn’t — care much about any of them and what fate might have in store for them at all.

This might, though, be your thing: after all 67pc of those who rated it gave it four stars or more. You might well enjoy a spuriously literary immersion in a sea of feelings, thoughts, insights. Yes, there is ‘action’ of kind and, yes, ‘things happen’ — quite a bit, in fact — but it is all so remorselessly swamped and our involvement struggles to survive. It really wasn’t my bag at all.

At first I was going to give The Colour just two stars, but I felt that was possibly unfair. It is not ‘bad’ at all. It’s just it doesn’t achieve what I suspect Ms Tremain set out to achieve or, more unkindly, it doesn’t live up to its pretensions. On the other hand there are far worse such novels out there, so I’ve finally settled on three stars.

You do realise, of course, that reading this blog marks you out as — well, how do I put this without being too effusive? — a little more refined, a cut above the rabble and someone whose intellect and lively mind one can only admire. Elite? Yes, and then some

Over the years like many, many people the world over, I had bought ‘the Sunday papers’. Being — apparently — less intellectually and politically developed than my peers I suspect I regarded doing so as an aspect of being grown-up. It’s what ‘grown-ups’ around me did. Or perhaps I’m being too hard on myself. Anyway until I was in my mid-30s I spent several hours reading them like every other good middle-class chap.

Then one Sunday lunchtime sitting in a pub in Birmingham with my girlfriend, a pint of cider, The Sunday Times and The Observer the penny dropped. I suppose I might even call it ‘an epiphany’ if that didn’t sound too daft and if it had a more religious dimension to it, but it didn’t. It was quite straightforward in fact. I had just finished

reading some ‘important’ news story or other, written at length and taking up the best part of two broadsheet pages, when it occurred to me that I had not learnt a single new fact. Not one. Everything I had read I was already familiar with, and it dawned on me that all I had read was simply a rehashed round-up of the various stories and accounts of a particular matter that had been carried by the dailies throughout the previous week.

Well, if that occurred to me, why hadn’t it occurred to many others over the years? After all then — this was in the early 1980s when I was working for the Birmingham Evening Mail — the circulation figures for the Sundays were still very healthy, so the Sundays then had a great many more readers than they do now. Yet everyone was still at it and many, a great many, thought that their Sunday broadsheet pretty much had the inside track on everything. Actually, they were just, to a large extent, skilled re-write jobs.

Circulation figures these days are discouraging: according to the ABC figures for July 2019 (I got these from the Press Gazette, the Sunday Telegraph annual figure was 257,034 a week (down by 12% on the previous year), the Sunday Times was 649,908 (down 11%, but of that figure 51,445 were ‘bulks’, the trade term for simply giving the paper away free for various purposes) and The Observer a very piddly — in fact an embarrassingly bad — 157,4553 (down 7%).

By comparison, at the beginning of January 1980 when I joined the Evening Mail, its circulation was a healthy — if I have got this right — 240,000 or thereabouts, but, to its extreme annoyance, it had fallen some from the papers’ heyday and had recently been outshone by the Wolverhampton-based evening paper, the Express & Star. Regarded by the Evening Mail as something of an upstart, by January 1980, the Express & Star was selling about 20,000 copies more a night.

In the early-1980s there was no internet and so no ‘social media’, just four TV channels (and the newest, Channel 4 had only just been launched) and most households bought a Sunday paper. The tabloids sold better, but even the circulation figures for the three main broadsheets — the Independent wasn’t found until 1986 and its sister Independent on Sunday not for another few years and both went to the wall as printed papers three years ago — were good, though already declining from their heyday but still making a great deal of moolah for their owners. Apart from the broadsheets, there was The News of the World (‘the Screws’ as in The News of the Screws), The People, The Sunday Mirror, and in those days several regional Sunday papers. In Birmingham we had the Sunday Mercury, though I never read it.

. . .

The trick used by (here in Britain, but you will have your own ’Sundays’) the Sunday Telegraph, the ST and the ‘Obs’ was - and still is - a good one and, like all good tricks, a simple one: to write your news stories in a pseudo-authoritative manner which seems to wink at the reader ’WE know what’s REALLY going on, and as YOU are reading this, YOU do to’ (with the tacit message ‘so, well done, join us, The Intelligent Informed People’).

That’s outrageous flattery, of course, but it’s one of only true keys to success in this world. Flatter someone well and consistently — and so that they don’t notice — and you will have whatever is your wicked way before you can say ‘sucker!’ It beats brute force every time, and no one is immune to it — well, perhaps YOU are, my dear: but then you always did strike me as being just a little too sharp to fall for that kind of schtick and I doubt I could sucker you successfully, but as for everyone else . . . (yes, you know who, that’s it him/her).

Grateful to be acknowledged, however spuriously, as something of ‘an insider’, Sunday Telegraph, ST and ‘Obs’ readers (and, until it was put out of its misery, ’Indy’ readers) would then spend the early part of the following week when at work, in the gym changing room or down the pub, pontificating with equal pseudo-authority on a subject they barely understood and whose essential details were becoming harder to remember by the hour:

‘Well, that Dominic Cummings is a complete menace, of course/the only one of that sorry gang who seems to have any kind of grip . . . The Queen is furious, apparently, but she can’t say or do anything at all/serves her right, I’m sure she’s a secret remoaner . . . Come on, Boris might have pulled a fast one, but its genius, for God’s sake, and anyway, what’s the fuss about, Parliament is prorogued every year/he’s really gone too far and it’ll end he career with a bit of luck . . .

But never mind. By Thursday and Friday when their increasingly threadbare comprehension of ‘an issue’ courtesy of two hours spent ‘with the Sundays’ is so hazy most folk wisely keep schtumm on the matter, there is a new edition of the Sunday Telegraph, the ST and the ‘Obs’ to look forward to the following Sunday.

Try it yourselves: if you are one of the fast-diminishing gang who still spend a few hours every Sunday ‘with the Sundays’, ask yourself after reading a story — like the one I’ve linked to, but any of the others — the demos and protests in Hong Kong, the US/China trader war, Salvini shooting himself in the foot in Italy — what have you exactly learned from reading that latest story that you didn’t already know?

To be fair, Sunday papers have a tough time: unless ‘a story breaks early on the day before publication, it will be picked up by one of its daily rivals and no longer ‘news’ by the time they add their two ha’porth worth. That’s why, I suppose, they have to give it that ‘authoritative’ spin. They have somehow to give the impression ‘the story’ has moved on.

. . .

A vaguely related practice, one often adopted by the Guardian, it to cover what they call ‘a running story’, giving ‘live updates’ on an EU meeting, a huge train crash, or whatever ‘the story’ is. It is equally spurious (in my view). Take the ‘EU meeting’: its a hoary old cliche that we, the public, are not only entitled to learn what those who govern us are up to but should know. Fair enough, although that rather ignores the problem that most of us interpret events to suit our own bias.

Thus the recent ‘prorogation of Parliament’ is either a sneaky way of denying those opposed to a ‘no-deal’ Brexit as much parliamentary time as possible to get their ducks in a row to make sure a deal is struck; or it is — this is the official line — something that happens every year in September before the three weeks of party conferences (the period often referred to as the ‘conference recess’) and always happens before a Queen’s Speech is due.

That Parliament will be suspended (the common or garden word for ‘prorogued’) for longer than is normal is a coincident say its supporters: it is just how the ‘conference season’ and the usual prorogation of Parliament before a Queen’s Speech have panned out, and that it does rather stymy ‘no-deal’ opponents hoping to scupper the Prime Minister’s plans to sell Britain down the river (No commenting! Ed.) is neither here nor there.

For these past few minutes or so Radio 4’s the World This Weekend news programme has been playing. OK, often — another problem faced by hacks when there has been no new development in a story — news editors will think up some angle or other to give the story legs and this is certainly what happened on the World This Weekend. But they got some historian or other in, an expert on the English Civil War — note the English Civil War, not the Scottish, Welsh or British Civil War — to compare the situations.

It all kicked off, she said, when the the Parliamentarians found there seemed way forward in their negotiations with Charles II over his high-handed handling of Parliament. The point of comparison is, I suppose, not just the stalemate reached between the no ‘no-deal’ Brexit camp and the ‘we leave by October 31 come what may’ wallahs, but the stark and unreconcilable positions of the Remainers and Brexiteers: ne’re the twain will meet.

On the bright side, of course, is the fact that in Britain, unlike in the US where apparently every child over seven is by law obliged to own and know how to use at least two different kinds of gun, few households have a stock of weapons. When we are angry we prefer to right strong letters to someone rather than take a number of semi-automatic weapons to the nearest school and kill as many kids as possible. So if this matter does turn into a civil war (and, to be frank the last one was more than 360 years ago, so we might well be due one), at least most combatants will be armed with nothing more lethal than a few obscenities.

Should I be joking? Of course, I should. The whole matter, from the Brexit vote on three years ago, is a farce. Pip, pip.