Meanwhile, back on dry land I reflect on whether or not too substantial breakfasts should be subject to an EU directive: Jack Tar's diet might have been abysmal, but it did mean Britannia ruled the waves for several millennia (though I’m told the Dutch take a rather contrary view on the matter). Then there’s the matter of snapped photos and an accusation of insanity from my daughter (so to speak)

First the good news I wasn’t seasick, not even a little. But then you don’t get too many storms in the Markenmeer north of Amsterdam, and when you do, I’m sure some EU directive or other comes into play ensuring that not only do certified landlubbers stay well and truly on land, but that we take the time allowed us by the enforced period ashore as an opportunity to mug up the texts of various EU directives with which we might not yet be familiar. Such high-handed nonsense was one of the many reasons why in June Britain voted by an overwhelming majority of 0.05 per cent to tell the EU it could stick itself, its constitutions, its directives and it ‘open borders’ where the sun don’t shine. This nation of seafarers (©Daily Mail, Daily Express, The Sun, The Times and the Daily Telegraph) refuses to be told when, where, with whom and why it can go to sea: enough is enough, Johnny Foreigner!

I must say I enjoyed my two days on the high seas (we put into harbour during the night). Thirty of us set out from Enkhuizen on the Friday afternoon in the Novel, a

converted flat boat of the kind which before the days of mass tourism and pretty much unlimited leisure time (i.e. in the days when we all still worked) would sail along the north coast of Holland and Germany, delivering stuff to Hamburg and bring stuff back from Hamburg, the stuff being pretty much anything which it was easier to transport in bulk by sea rather than by land, clogs, edam cheese, dirndl dresses, that kind of thing.

Anyone who has heard of Erskine Childers famous novel The Riddle Of The Sands but hasn’t read it will know what I am talking about. Incidentally, I did briefly try to start a discussion with some of my sister’s German friends about the feasibility of Germany and England jointly invading Scotland by sea in the event of an independence vote but was smartly sent away with a flea in my ear. Make no mistake: today’s German is a sound democrat who has put his country’s past well behind him and her. If there is to be any invading, it can only be done under the auspices of the EU and by the EU invasion force Jean-Claude Juncker is putting together as I write. (Oh, and by the way, Juncker is not an out-of-control boozer as some malcontents are suggesting. If and when he falls over, it is merely because he has had a gammy leg after a car crash in the late 19th century and often finds it difficult to keep his balance with a glass of brandy in his hand. I think we should be clear on that.)

All those flatboats, and there must have been several hundred of them at Enkhuizen from where we set out and at Monnickendam where we spent the night, have since been converted for accommodation, and ours had 15 cabins. The Novel was a three-master with six sails (I am not speaking with any greater nautical authority, it’s just

that I can count quite well up to 100 and there were certainly not 100 masts and sails on our boat) with a crew of three - the owner, his wife and a crewman, Mick. Mick, by the way, a lad from The Hague with Indonesian heritage, had a degree in economics, one in infomatics - I don’t know what that is either - but then worked as a roofer before deciding his destiny lay in a life on the high seas, or at least on seas that get as high as they do on the Markenmeer.

Once everyone had arrived by 8pm on the Friday, we were shown how to secure the many, many ropes which seem to make up most of such a ship and told the names of the different sails. When I say the Novel had a crew of three, I should add that we were also part of the crew in that when directed to we, en masse, would pull on whatever rope we had to to hoist sails or lower them as necessary. And there was quite a bit of that. The rest of the time, though was ours, in which to do nothing but relax, eat and drink.

I sure there is a proper nautical term for food and booze brought on board to feed passengers - ‘provisions’ and ‘victuals’ sound far to land-based to my ears - but whatever it is there was a hell of a lot of it. Everyone contributed - wine, champagne, Sekt and beer, in particular - but there was more than enough for three square meals a day over two days with a lot of it brought back home again. My brother-in-law, who is a rather good cook, prepared a supper for the Saturday night (with help) of fillet steak, courgettes and risotto, with a very nice Rioja followed by pudding and cheese. It was very good indeed. In the morning everyone (except me - I don’t like to eat at all before noon) sat down to a substantial German breakfast (Brötchen and Schwarzbrot, Schinken, Käse, Konfitüre and Marmelade, and Kaffee) and the snack lunch consisted of bacon and eggs.

This all took a great deal of organisation, and I fell to wondering just what a similar group of Brits would come up. Years ago, at the beginning of term at university we were four in a flat and as nothing had yet been bought, we sent one of our number out to get ‘essentials’. He returned several packets of crisps, a jar of marmalade and a bottle of orange squash. I rather think had this been a Brit excursion, we would all have mucked in and survived on any number of Batchelor’s Cup-a-Soup Extras (‘A big hug in a mug’ apparently), loads of crisps, Morrisons ready meals and Angel Delights. Or perhaps the German in me is coming out and I am just being nasty.

I’ve got to say as far as food is concerned, give me the German way of life any day. I should add, though, that the Brit in me doesn’t take to well to some aspects of German organisation: it was regarded as slightly odd of me to skip breakfast and lunch on both days. (One helpful soul even tried counselling me and remained unconvinced, though diplomatically silent on the matter, when I explained that I simply prefer to eat when I am hungry, not according to some timetable. She definitely thought I was now just a few steps from the funny farm and gave my arm a charitable, knowing squeeze when we all said goodbye to each other on the Sunday afternoon. It assured me she would be there for me if, you know, if . . .).

I’ve got to say I enjoyed it. The only downside was that whereas I once spoke German as fluently as I speak English and was always taken for a German, that complete fluency has, not to make too fine a point, has gone, and I found I couldn’t converse as freely as I would have liked. Certainly all Germans and most of their pets can speak English (although not always as perfectly as the imagine), and like to do so, but, oddly, it just felt wrong to me to be speaking English to a German. That’s as best as I can describe. Although I know, or at least tell myself, that were I to live in Germany among Germans for several weeks I would regain that fluency - the German is most certainly there, but deep down - that seems unlikely to happen. Oh well. Now I must be off to pore over my charts of the North Sea. There surely must be some way to get the fleet up the Tay without causing too much fuss.

. . .

I have long like taking photographs, and now that everyone one of us carries a smartphone (or even two or three) and each has a camera, it is easy to take a snap of this or that when and if. What particular catches my eye are patterns in our surroundings. They might not be obvious at all, but I will see something and in a matter of moments take a picture (and usually then dicking around with it a little, usually giving it a judicious crop. Here is one such picture, taken at work a day or two ago:

I pasted it on Facebook and it immediately drew the following comment from my daughter: You are so strange wtf have you taken pictures of stairs for (sic).

My repy was ‘Elsie, it is not ‘a picture of stairs’. It is a picture of light and shadow and lines and curves. Try to look at it that way. Try to look at it as thought it were an abstract picture, not a picture of something you can recognise.’

My question is simple: am I getting soft-headed? I like the picture, as I like this one

and the same applies to each: don’t look at it as an object you might recognise, but try to look at it somehow in abstract. I suppose rotating a particular picture might help, to break that link between what we see and what we think we know. Like this

Here’s another question: am I losing it? I don’t think so, and for me all three pictures hold a certain, though it has to be said trivial, interest? But I do like the ‘light and shade and lines and curves’. Is there a lot wrong with that?

Just killing time with a rant about tattoos . . . and then I get to hear John Scofield again

I'm sitting in the Wetherspoon's in Heathrow's terminal 5 waiting for my flight which is not for another hour, and I find the best way to get the time to pass fastest is by writing entries for my blog. I don’t have anything in particular to say, but don’t worry, I’ll say it anyway. (That remeinds me of the observation of committee life I heard years ago: when all is said and done, some cunt will get up and say it, delaying everyone’s departure by another 20 minutes.)

I’m off to Germany for a week to help my sister and her family and friends celebrate her 60th birthday. My, don’t we all get older fast. I can still remember when she was very young taking her for walks in the country near our home. This will have been in the winter of 1958. She was born on September 2

The plan is very German (though I don’t doubt it will also be very entertaining): it seems there is some kind of small coastal cruiser with cabins for about 30 which you can hire in Holland, just over the border from where she lives in the far, far North-West of Germany, so my sister Marianne, her family, my brother Mark and I, and many of her friends are taking to the high seas for three days. There isn’t really far to sail so I should imagine we shall be going around pretty much in circles, but then when you have a glass of Sekt in one hand and a Laz Paz Wilde Cigarros whatever in the other and, crucially, fuck all to do for the next ten days – I’m not due back at work until Sunday, September 11 – who cares. If going round in circles it must be, going around in circles it will be.

. . .

I saw something yesterday which to me looked thoroughly ridiculous. But first, o give it context, I must admit that as I m now undoubtedly over 30 – oh, OK, over 65 – I am most certainly a candidate for hating change of any kind, at least on paper. In fact – and you can believe me or not – I am not really like that, and if in some small ways I am, I can assure all that there are far, far worse cases.

One change in life which has occurred in the past ten years is the proliferation of tattoos. Now, being the character who, at the age of 29 and challenged to do so by my girlfriend, got himself a single ear stud and wore one for several years after, my aversion to tattoos – yes, I do have one – might strike some as hypocritical. All I will say is that you can take an ear stud out in a matter of seconds, but getting rid of a tattoo will take a lot longer and also set you back quite a few shekels. I shall also admit that until they became popular, tattoos were only sported by those who went to sea, hard-as-nails whores and criminals. Oh, and the occasional plumber though, it has to be said, plumbers who cared little about making their way in the world much further than the station they had already reached.

Then, courtesy of rock stars and other trendsetters, getting a tattoo caught on and before you knew it everyone under 30 and their sodding dog had a tattoo. And it was not a single anchor they sported or ‘Love’ and ‘Hate’ tattooed over their knuckles. Most people go the whole hog and get some scene from The Hobbit tattooed all over them, that or some piece of cod Chinese philosophy they don't understand but like the sound of, something 'The butterfly is to life what the butter never knows'. But what I find most ridiculous is the claim made by many that their tattoo somehow highlights their individuality at, that somehow they are marked out from everyone else.

Well, not as far as I am concerned, they’re not: they just look like every other crud with a fucking tattoo all up their arm, on the back of their neck and (as I noticed just yesterday while getting changed in the gym) on one buttock cheek: superficially it looked like a football club crest, but I didn’t particularly want to linger much trying to make it out. It’s not that I don’t like the sight of butt cheeks, it just that I would have had some difficulty explaining what I was doing had the chap sporting it turned around. ‘Just admiring your arse’ doesn’t go down too well as a rule.)

The tattoo I saw yesterday which caught my eye was on the right leg of a young lass just outside the office in Derry St., Kensington. Picture it if you can: there were no other tattoos there, just the one. It was face, about three or four inches across and about five inches above the lass’s knee. She was wearing a skirt (it’s summer her in Britain for a day or two) so you could only see the bottom three-quarters of the face. It looked very, very daft.

But I must now go to my gate so I shall post what I have written and carry on later…

Later

Arrived a few hours ago in this back of beyond, though I have to say I very much like being in the back of beyond, especially as in these modern times most back of beyond, if they aren’t in Patagonia, have broadband internet. Which is why I can continue this account.

Picked up a car, which went super-smoothly, it being a mid-week pick-up, then high-tailed it off to the German frontier from Schiphol airport and finding out what I did once I arrived, I wish I hadn’t been in such a rush to get the journey over with. I was given a small Citroen C1 which is a fine enough car and even though it has a small engine, you can still crack on at a fine speed. The trouble is, as my sister told me once I had arrived rather sooner than anyone expected, is that the Dutch police are very hot on speeding. The rule is ‘don’t go above 130kph. And guess why I arrived so soon? It was – well, you are way ahead of me: I has driving at – despite the small engine a smart 150kph whenever possible.

There was a small delay when the cops had cordoned off one lane of the motorway (probably because some twat had been speeding at over the limit and got himself into a crash) and we were all obliged to crawl along at around 10kph for several miles – at least ten – but apart from that the road was clear for me to zoom along and, as it will turn out, attract several stiff fines for speeding. Fuck. That’s about the only word for it. Still I got here about 19 minutes earlier than expected, so thank the Lord for small mercies.

Everyone else has gone to bed, but I have stayed up listening to John Scofield playing with Miles Davis (on Spotify), and Daryl Jones playing with Miles Davis (on Spotify) and John Scofield playing with Daryl Jones (on Spotify). I have already, on the strength of what I’ve heard bout one CD by John Scofield, such is the ease – the nasty ease I should say, ‘cos I ain’t rich – to buy CDs on a whim on Amazon. Still, I like the music, so what the fuck.

I should already have gone to bed and I know that I shall have a thick head tomorrow after drinking several bottles of Krombacher (Lidl’s finest lager, I think), but what the hell. It will still be another nine days to do absolutely fuck all except schmooze with friends and family and go goo-goo over my nieces/god-daughters four-month-old son. Pip, pip.

Recommended (for a second time): Howard Zinn’s A People’s History Of The United States. And I give Michelle a copy of it

I’ve always been sceptical when folk talk of something changing their lives, a book, an encounter or whatever it might be, and I am not about to make a similar claim. But a few years ago, I did come across a book which slightly shifted my views on some things. It was A People’s History Of The United States by US historian Howard Zinn.

I have mentioned it before, in a blog post I wrote around six years ago when I first came across the book, but it is worth writing about again because it is a rather different kind of history. Zinn was avowedly and unapologetically left-wing. You can read up a potted biography of him here, but in brief he was a Jew from Brooklyn, the son of two immigrants who had a limited education but for whom Howard’s education was important. When he left school he became an apprentice in a shipyard and because of low pay and conditions there he became active in union politics. But it was World War II which gave him his chance of a good education and to make his way.

He served as a bombardier in the US army air force and after the war got a place at Columbia University through the GI Bill. He gained an MA and then a Phd and began teaching history. And it his take on history which makes him interesting. In his People’s History Of The United States, he criticises histories which view the progress of history from the points of view of kings and those at the top while ignoring the unnamed masses (and I have to say he puts the point far more elegantly).

So he tells the history of the US from the point of view of the indigenous people of the Americas massacred in their millions from the time of Christopher Columbus, of the millions of blacks brought over from Africa to work the land for the whites and the thousands of dirt-poor indentured whites who signed up for a number of years to work in ‘the New World’ in the hope of escaping poverty back home, only to find themselves once again at the bottom of the pile.

Like almost all revolution, the American Revolution which began in 1765 was pretty much a middle/upper class movement of those who resented having to send back much of the money they made ‘in the colony’ back to Britain. And unsurprisingly the great unwashed, the slum-dwellers of the new American cities – for conditions and overcrowding had become as bad in ‘the New World’ – were pretty lukewarm about supporting a revolt in which there was bugger all for them: it simply meant replacing one set of uncaring overlords with another, so why bother?

Now that is not the received view given – as far as I know – to US school children about the genesis of the United States. They – as far as I know – are instructed that the American Revolution was a blow for freedom and intended to throw of the yoke of British tyranny. Zinn disagrees. And I must say I find his interpretation far more convincing, given what I have so far learned of life and seen in my 66 years.

I would not want to give the impression that Zinn’s history of the US is some kind of leftie diatribe, because it is anything but: he writes well and clearly, cites contemporary source material, acknowledges that there are other historians who do not agree with him and, in my view at least, comes across as a man of integrity.

I mention it again (here is my first mention) because circumstance the other night reminded me of it. I have mentioned before that when I drive home to Cornwall from my four days of work in London, I stop of for a drink, a break and a smoke, so far usually at the Brewers Arms in South Petherton, but occasionally at the Taw River Inn in Sticklepath in Devon (which is only 40 miles from home). Because I have been stopping off for some time at both pubs, I have made the acquaintance of several regulars and will pretty much chat to anyone.

I was the Sticklepath pub the other night when I got talking to Michelle, a local probably in her late thirties. We talked this and that for a while before I ventured to ask her something specific. For Michelle is white but has unmistakable Afro-Caribbean features and I was curious. I asked her as tactfully as I could whether she had any Afro-Caribbean heritage. She did: her grandfather, who she never knew, was an black US serviceman who had been stationed locally on the edge of Dartmoor in the run-up to D Day. Her grandmother was a local Devon girl. I can’t now remember whether it was her father or mother who was the offspring of that coupling. Once the serviceman left Devon he never came back. Her other parent was a local.

I stress that I tried, and I hope succeeded, in being as sensitive as possible when I broached the subject and I’m glad I was because Michelle then went on to tell me how, as a young girl she had been teased about her looks at school and although there was nothing of complaint in the way she spoke, it soon became apparent that the teasing and being a little bit different had hurt her when she was growing up.

That is when I thought of Zinn’s book, and I told her about it, and especially of his account of the despicable way ‘freed’ black slaves were treated one the American Civil War ended until – well, as far as I am concerned, until the present day. It

You might perhaps subscribe to the view that all is now sweetness and light for blacks since they were ‘freed’ after the American Civil War. Here’s a reminder from the Fifties that you might well be very wrong indeed
seems to me no coincidence that a disproportionate number of blacks (and now men and women of Latino and Hispanic origin) in the US are in jail, suffer mental health problems and are unemployed. And as Michelle was interested in reading it, I asked her for her address and that night, once I was home, I logged into my Amazon account and bought a copy, to be delivered to her home.

You reading this might have heard of Zinn’s book and you might even have read my previous entry. Either way, if you haven’t read it, I would urge you to do so, as it might change the way you view history as it changed mine.

. . .

I’ve been trying to track down my original post about how I came across Zinn’s book, but I can’t yet find it and it would be simply just to recount the how here again. I was on holiday on Ibiza (which is not all a drug den as many assume) and the weather was terrible: of the two weeks I was there we had innumerable thunderstorms and gallons of rain came pouring down. But I have to say that I didn’t really mind. For one thing I am not the kind who likes to lie gormlessly in the sun, getting red and hot, but also a break is a break is a break and you take it as it comes. If you start getting uptight about things, you’ve pretty much wasted your money taking a break.

The trouble was I had brought nothing to read with me. Wandering around the hotel I noticed a bookshelf in the communal area and went over to investigate it. All I could, at first see, as any number of bodice rippers, historical fictions by women called ‘Amber’ and the usual Jack Higgins crap. But then I noticed a volume which looked thicker than the rest. I pulled it out and took a look: it was Zinn’s A People’s History Of The United States. And I began to read it. I have since re-read it once and ever since sending Michelle a copy I am re-reading it yet again.

Oh, and let me reassure you, I don’t think anyone who knows me has marked me down as some bleeding-heart lefty liberal.

Gomorrah, a few necessary comments. Very necessary comments

After my last entry recommending Gomorrah as a great series to watch, and having watched two more episodes of the first series, I thought it was perhaps a good idea if I added a few comments. OK, Gomorrah is Sky entertainment and I still think it is good. But it is a million miles away from your Sopranos, Goodfellas and the rest where, however ‘brutal’ the guys we are watching are, there is still oddly apparently a modicum of sympathy for them, although a sympathy of a strange kind. Gomorrah is very different indeed. The gangsters portrayed here are not nice, not nice at all. They are scum, each one of them and do not give a tuppenny fuck about others. None is in the slightest bit admirable.

Series of this kind are often described in the TV columns of our national press as ‘gritty’ and so we are able to sit back in the comfort of our own homes to ‘enjoy’ the grit, safe – very, very safe – in the knowledge just how unlike it all is in the home life of our dear queen. But Gomorrah is portraying real misery, real despair, and real unmitigated brutality. Moreover, as far as I know I is a misery and despair and a brutality with which thousands of blameless folk living in the ‘projects’ of Naples have to put up with.

In the episode I have just watched, a rather pleasant though impressionable young lad is suckered by one superficially charming gangster into shooting dead a high up gangster in a rival gang. He is told lies in order to persuade him to do it. Eventually, once he has cottoned on and realises he is about to be bumped off, too, he hides. So the superficially charming gangster then gets hold of his girlfriend, an innocent teenage schoolgirl who also works in a hairdressers and beats her to reveal his whereabouts. She doesn’t know. So our superficially charming gangster beats her to death. When the young lad discovers this and realises he has nowhere to turn, he uses the automatic given him to shoot himself.

None of this is shown in anyway in some kind of TV glamour way. It happens in slums and derelict warehouses. Of glamour there is none. And although it might be fiction it is more documentary. But there is no encouragement whatsoever to feel even the slightest admiration or sympathy with the lowlife scum. That is probably which marks it out so much and makes it so different to US fare. Just thought I’d add that. It shows a truly horrible life.

  PS The lad doesn't kill himsekf. He is murderdd inbtge next episode.

Introducing Gomorrah, the TV series which has taken its place in my heart and which stands head and shoulders with Deadwood, The Sopranos and Damages. And I venture a slightly more personal entry, although I still don’t have the courage to go the whole hog

After I’d seen all six series of the Sopranos twice (and bizarrely the sixth series was in two parts, so maybe there were seven series) as well seeing several of the episodes several times, I’ve long been on the lookout for something to watch on TV which reached its high standards. Sadly, in my view very little of hour homegrown thrillers and series make the mark or get even close, with the very, very notable exception of Peaky Blinders which somehow shook of its Brit roots and was able to challenge other world-class production.

Naturally, I haven’t seen everything on TV (and nor would I want to as I’m firmly of the view that TV rots your brain but am a reasonable chap and accept that a little brain-rotting is not the end of the world) and there are several notable series which I have yet to attempt. A friend as well as my teenage son keep urging me to watch Breaking Bad, and I shall eventually. But much else which his hawked as ‘brilliant’ just hasn’t hit the spot for me.

My brother was a big fan of The Good Wife, and tried it, but I could never quite get into it. Then there was Justified which he also recommended. I tried that, too, but again couldn’t quite catch the bug. One of the things I didn’t particularly like (and admittedly I only saw three or four episodes of each) was how each episode had ‘a story’ as well as the various themes running through like a thread. It reminded me too much of the series we were fed in the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties, each with the then obligatory end scene in which loose ends were neatly tied up, to be followed by some joke and all the main good guy characters having a laugh together (‘Ah, Cisco.’ ‘Ah, Pancho’ ho, ho, ho.)

In fact. before I go on to mention – I won’t say list because there isn’t that many of them – the series which all in their own original way managed to reach the bar set by The Sopranos, it might help to illuminate exactly what I thought was and is good by listing some of the real losers and also-rans. Of what I have seen and the real losers most certainly Blue Bloods comes top of the list. It is absolutely dire and then some, a real throwback to Seventies productions with all its lack of subtlety, though I won’t, mainly because I can’t be bothered, list the elements which make me think it is total shite.

Then I tried Scandal with the very pretty Kerry Washington (who I first saw in the excrable Django Unchained – it redefined bloody awful in my view as did Tarantino’s earlier Inglourious Basterds) and that, too, was just TV by numbers although I’m bound to admit the clichés have been updated, but they are clichés nonetheless. I seem to remember trying Suits, although looking it up just now in imdb.com it doesn’t sound very familiar. Then there was House Of Lies, which sounded passable on the face of it, but which I really couldn’t warm to.

But rather than make this one long whinge, let me list the series I have thought worthwhile and whose standards were well above average. First off, there has to be Boardwalk Empire about – well, I suppose it has to be gangsters in Prohibition America. As far as I am concerned it oozed from every pore. It did though come to a relatively abrupt end with all the stories needing to be tied up. That final series was eight episodes long instead of 13 and in a curious way did seem rushed.

I read somewhere that Martin Scorsese, one of the executive producers – or simply one of the producers, whichever comes higher up the foodchain, assuming ‘executive’ in this case means ‘the guys and gals who actually do the work’ rather than schmooze around at award ceremonies basking in the glory – lost a bit of interest once he and a certain Mick Jagger (we are now obliged to call him Sir Michael Jagger and genuflect every time we hear Under My Thumb on the radio) managed to get their series Vinyl in production. It purports to portray the early Seventies record label life in New York, but in my view is very curate’s egg, not all bad but not all good, either.

My list of great series can’t, of course, ignore Deadwood, which had all the aces and then some. But that too came to an early end after just three series and no one actually seems to know why. I can’t forget Ray Donovan, either, are at least the first three

series. It stars Liev Schreiber, Paula Malcolmson (who is from Northern Ireland and played a memorable tart in Deadwood) and the inimitable Jon Voight as Mickey, Ray’s utterly incorrigible father who pretty much steals the show every time he appears. It also has Britain’s own Eddie Marsan who proves once again what a great actor he is.

. . .

I think you get the picture: TV might have progressed a little since the days of I Love Lucy and Hawaii Five-O, not least in terms of greater production values, not doubt reflecting the evergrowing mountains of moolah to be made from putting stuff on the googlebox, but it is still pretty much cliché-ridden and pretty much still plays it safe.

As far as I know it was the entry into the market of subscriber services such as HBO and Showtime which partly rewrote the rules of the game, allowing far, far more profane language (and allowing the shows to be far more lifelike), and more open on other fronts.Crucially it also gave writers and directors their heads and they could develop character and plot in a far more relaxed way. This development was further extended by the more recent involvement of Amazon and Netflix, although it has to be said that both tend to play it a lot safer still, no doubt realising that kiddiwinks have pretty much unlimited access to the net.

But all this is leading up to something rather simple: my rave about my latest fave series, the Italian-made Gomorrah. This really is something else. It’s available on Sky and although I quite obviously have no first-hand knowledge of gangs, crime

and Mafioso – or in this case the Camorra – in its depiction of gangsters not as heroes who play by the rules, albeit their own rules, but as thuggish and greedy folk you would never want to meet out on a dark night alone and without a gun rings pretty true. If you have Sky I urge you to watch it. If you don’t, go around to the house of a friend who does.

Since writing the above and then posting it after choosing the piccies, several more great TV series have occurred to me which I rate just as highly as The Sopranos and Deadwood. Well, two more, both from the same stable of writers. They are Damages with the, again inimitable Glenn Close, and Bloodline. If you ever get the chance to see both or either, don’t miss it.

. . .

Incidentally, Ray Donovan has provided me with one of my favourite TV/film quotes. It’s from the teenaged and very impressionable son of Ray Donovan, a fixer in Los Angeles, who is in awe of his dad’s assistant Avi, an Israeli who is said to have learned his tricks when he worked for Mossad. ‘When I grow up,’ the lad tells Avi after witnessing another piece of ‘cool’ action, ‘I want to be a Jew.’ There’s something which rather irritates me about writing this blog. Years ago, many years ago, far more than it seems to me now except that when I do the sums I can work it out – about 36 years ago – I began writing a diary. Well, it wasn’t quite a diary in the usual sense of me detailing what had happened to me during the day or the previous days, but more of a commonplace book in which I would record or comment on whatever I wanted to record or commentate on. I started it off after I read that John Steinbeck wrote to his publisher’s editor that he often found it difficult to get writing in the morning. So his editor suggested that he buy himself a ledger and in that ledger wrote, on the left hand page, pretty much anything he wanted to, and that once he had got into his stride, he could then, on the right hand page carry on writing the novel or the story on which he was engaged. Well, in those days I still thought of myself as a novelist/writer manqué. That I wasn’t writing much, if anything, in the way of fiction are reasoned away as me not being in the habit of writing. (I know it sounds silly, but . . . ) So, I thought to myself, all I had to do was to follow Steinbeck’s publisher’s editor’s advice, buy myself a ledger and, well, start writing. It didn’t, as I’m sure you have gathered, work.

I certainly did keep up the ledger but of ‘real writing work’ there was subsequently an infinitesimally small amount. I did, though, carry on the habit of recording in the ledger whatever I wanted to record or commentate on. I also recorded quotes I came across which amused me. And when the first ledger was full, I bought another. I carried on the practice for the following 14 years, until the year I married, in fact.

I still wasn’t a diary, of course, for who is but one thing I did do was to imagine that one day, some day, it might be read. Why it should be read, I had no idea, but I carried on.

The point was that as there was virtually no likelihood of it ever being read by anyone I could record highly personal matters, and this I did. Fast forward to February 6, 2009, and I began this blog, courtesy of the internet and the concept of blogging. http://pfgpowell-1.blogspot.co.uk/2009/02/new-start-unfortunately-after-semi.html (If you read that entry, however, you will see that it was not actually my first blog, but because of a technical hitch I had lost the first few entries of my first blog.

There was, though, a difference between a ‘private’ diary, which, though I hoped would one day be read by those writing the biography of one of Britain’s most famous recent novelists, and my blog. That putative biography I imagined would be written after I had died. the blog, on the other hand, could be read almost immediately, and, more to the point, almost immediately by family and friends. And so I had to be a little circumspect in that I didn’t want to publish in this blog anything which might upset them. It’s called ‘self-censorship’. Thus the whole point or, at least, one of the whole points of ‘keeping a diary’ was lost.

I must admit there are times when I want to write far more personal stuff: reflections on my Roman Catholic upbringing and how it utterly skewed my relations with women (and more to the point meant I had rather fewer shags than I might of done because of that skewed relationship). It meant that I couldn’t record my thoughts about my marriage (I haven’t had sex in almost 18 years), or my children (my daughter eats all kind of crap and is well on the way to getting rather fat and my son’s diet is equally bad), or my friends (one or two of them can be rather irritating on occasion, and I bet that’s got them thinking. Me? No, not you, other friends.). And that is something I rather regret in an odd way. ‘Why not start another blog and don’t make it public’? I hear one or two of you possibly ask. Well, there’s the rub. I can’t see the reason why I should write a blog and not make it public. It’s a conundrum. But I should sometimes like to record rather more personal stuff than I might even now have done. Perhaps I will, and perhaps I shall have the courage to brave the wrath of those closer to me than the strangers who happen upon these scribblings. Pip, pip.

Merkel for the chop? Well, for about five minutes or at last as long as it took you to read a recent Daily Mail story. And ‘the will of the people’: just how bloody inconvenient is it going to become?

Browsing as one does — OK, ‘as I do’ — browsing as one does the Daily Mail online website, I came across this story and it occurred to me I should, perhaps, try to put it into context.

(Incidentally, ‘One does/I do’: I’m still hoping to persuade the many doubters that I do, indeed, have a college degree, though an ordinary MA awarded by Dundee University in 1972, not the Honours degree in English and philosophy I sat for, I did so appallingly badly in English, but (I’m told) so reasonably well in philosophy that when the English department insisted I would get an Honours degree over their combined dead body, the philosophy department countered that insisting that I should get a degree of sorts as I had, at least, done them proud. So the compromise was an ordinary degree. Oh, and the Scottish MA is the equivalent of the English BA.)

On the face of it and going by the Mail’s story you wouldn’t be surprised to hear that one Angela Merkel can expect her P45 in the post any day now and will have to reconcile herself to taking up a supply teaching post in chemistry in Baden-Baden or whatever it is sacked German chancellors do. The truth is most certainly a little different and tells us more about the working practices of our esteemed Fourth Estate than the mood of the German electorate. (Later: here is a more recent story. Obviously the newsdesk apparatchik responsible is getting into his/her stride.)

OK Germany, too, has its nutters in the form of Pegida (Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes) and, latterly, the AfD which has become far more right-wing and rapid since its original coterie of rather more restrained

academics and sensible businessmen and journalists was ousted several years, but they still form a rather tinier proportion of Germany’s movers and shakers than the Mail’s headline and story might seem to indicate.

The story goes on to cite the ostensibly startling statistic that 83 per cent of all Germans would like to see duskier fellow citizens shown the door with a flea in their ear and the stern admonition not ever to be seen again on European soil peddling their tales of famine and genocide, but even that, apparently copper-bottomed fact should be taken with a pinch of salt.

For example, if I had the money to commission a survey on, I don’t know, the abuse of toothbrushes, and consulted the usual random sample of 1,100 folk willing to be approached by a stranger with a clipboard, I reckon I could prove at least 25 per cent – a 'startling one in five' sounds more dramatic - believe that ‘toothbrushes get a raw deal and it's time the government did something about it’.

The modus operandi from here to the outer reaches of the solar system is simple: as a rule news is inconveniently erratic and makes the job of a paper’s news editor and his staff a trial. It is, for example, only now and again that some nutter drives an artic through innocent holidaymakers on a Nice seafront promenade or takes a Glock pistol to the nearest Munch McDonald's and tries to kill everyone in sight. On those days when nutters around the world haven’t obliged, news has to be ‘developed’ and this is what I suspect went on at Mail Online.

The word went out to some stringer or other in Germany to go out onto the street and ask as many folk as you can whether they think in view of her more charitable attitude to refugees and Merkel is a total loser shitbag and should be shot. Oh, Mr Stringer will be told, and take your camera and ask the prettier ones whether you can take their picture. Assuring them - the prettier ones - that their photo will be displayed on a leading newspaper website accessible from anywhere in the world and you're in there with a chance.

Hence the story: ‘Angela, your time is up’. That should keep the readers in ready-made opinions for at least a day, and don’t be surprised if when you mosey down to your local tomorrow and are buttonholed by the leading pub bore he – it’s always a he, sadly – assures you that ‚‘that Merkel, she’ll be gone by next week’. Then with a sage wink, he’ll tell you why Ian Botham was the greatest cricketer ever to play for England, and, yes, he will have another pint, thank you very much.

So what is ‘the truth?’ Well, I don’t know and nor do you. The fact is that in a matter of about four months the western world and its certainties has been turned well and truly upside-down, and things are really not looking very grand at all.

To put things in perspective, a little common sense is necessary: about one million folk have arrived in Europe from the Middle East and North Africa over the past 16 months and, putting aside whether you think they are entitled to come or not, whether they are genuine refugees or merely folk doing what the rest of us are continually being exhorted to do, namely to make the best of things and to get on in life. In our case — for us white honkeys, that is, all, no doubt, descended from a long line of stout-hearted folk from Devon/the Black Country/Northumberland/Derbyshire or wherever, getting on as a rule comes down to kissing the right arse or schmoozing the right town hall functionary. (Some also get on in life through intelligence, hard work and natural ability, of course, but let’s not cloud the issue unnecessarily.)

In the case of the refugees it has meant uprooting yourself, your and your family several thousands dollars to pay some scumbag for a place in an overloaded lilo, then heading off into the unknown many thousand miles away in the hope of a better life, one where you aren’t periodically hit by famine and hunted down by genocidal idiots. But at the end of the day they are just doing what countless folk have done throughout recorded history and earlier. And I for one can’t blame them.

Undoubtedly quite a number, maybe 500, maybe 1,000, maybe 3,000 wrong ’uns joined the trek to Europe with evil on their minds, but a as proportion of the total number of migrants their number is infinitessimal (i.e. ridiculously small. I thought I’d better add that because I’m not too sure how to spell infinitessimal).

Then there’s the pertinent point that not the Nice murderer, not the lone gunman in Munich and not the two teenagers in Normandy who stabbed to death a priest were ‚‘immigrants’. But that will not mean very much to the several thousands who are just waiting for an excuse to vote, for example in France, for Marine Le Pen. That will mean very little to the millions in the US who are just itching to vote for Trump ‚‘because he’s not a politician‘. The will point to the goings on in Europe and how a million folk have arrived from the Middle East and North Africa and tell themselves ‚‘Yes, of course, we should build a wall to keep those bloody Mexicans out‘.

. . .

The big dilemma for us wet liberal types is, of course, the ‘will of the people’. It makes sense for we wet liberal types to applaud democracy as the will of the people when ‘the people’ do the right thing according to our wet liberal principles, but we find ourselves in an awful pickle when the will of the people contradicts them.

Turkey is a case in point: the nutter Erdogan (who is, of course, not a nutter at all but a very astute bastard) has substantial popular support. Sadly, that support is not among the metropolitan elite in the smarter westernised suburbs of Istanbul and Ankara where wet liberal principles feel well at home, but in the poor rural districts and the poorer parts of Turkey’s cities.

The comparison has been made, not least by me in a previous post, of the democratic rise to power of Erdogan and the – more or less – democratic rise to power of one Adolf ‚‘Moustache of the Month’ Hitler. It was the will of the people who put them both in power. It might well be the will of the people who put Trump in power and next year Marine Le Pen. It was the will of the people which decided that Britain should get the bloody hell out of the EU.

Is there a moral get-out clause which says the ‘will of the people’ should always be paramount, but only until it decides to do something which we wet liberals disagree with and must then be discounted? Is an immutable principle only an immutable principle while it suits us? To put it anotehr way: can a women really, in some circumstances, only be a little bit pregnant?

OK, so which of the current stooges (one’s now dead) will cause the most havoc for us before breakfast? My money’s on Erdogan – Trump hasn’t yet grown a moustache

This blogger likes to think he is not much given to hyperbole. Perhaps he is wrong. But watching Donald Trump strut the stage in Cleveland at the Republican convention at which he was nominated (if, of course, any man alive an actually aurally strut a stage) and hearing about Recep Tayyip Erdogan declaring a state of emergency in Turkey, allowing himself and his cabinet (though I think we can safely assume it will at the end of the day be himself) pass laws without the say-so of the Turkish parliament, one does wonder whether comparisons with the rise of Hitler are all that fanciful.

Yes, any hack worth his salt has already pointed out that Hitler also came to power – more or less – democratically. I say more or less because a little skulduggery and bending of the rules did go on. And every hack worth his salt has quoted Erdogan’s ominous description of democracy of (I paraphrase, of course) a train from which one can get off once one has got to where one wants to get to. Erdogan most certainly came to power democratically and if – a long shot, of course, but it is possible – Trump is elected president of the United States, it, too, will be with a democratic mandate. But comparing the two, I think we have more to fear from Erdogan than Trump.

Trump is, in my book at least, a buffoon, a kind of American Boris Johnson without the Latin. Neither, I suspect, has had an original thought in their lives. Erdogan, on the other hand is not, stupid (and I don’t think Johnson is stupid, either, just a buffoon whose one idea is how to make Boris Johnson a figure of history. The man, apparently, already thinks of himself as a latter-day Churchill.) But Trump, if he is elected, will still have to contend with a Congress which will not necessarily be inclined to do his bidding if his bidding is patently utterly daft. And more to the point, I don’t doubt the US has a fully functioning civil service, the lads and lasses who do all the donkey work, who will gladly stick a spanner in the works if needs be by they simple expedient, in true civil service style, of slowing everything down. (I must, though, admit here that I know bugger all about the US civil service and maybe I am just whistling in the wind.)

Where Trump could do a lot of damage is by creating uncertainty, and he has already taken a step or two along that path by suggesting the the US would not necessarily come to the aid of a Nato ally when threatened (by the Soviet Union – sorry, Russia) if it feels that ally hasn’t been pulling its weight in the organisation. Putin and China must have cheered when they heard that and I don’t doubt there is and will be any number of Russian and Chinese spooks patriolling the highways and byways of the US urging its citizens to vote for Donal J Trump and make America great again.

The man’s speech to the convention was a textbook case of vacuous political bombast: apparently he’s going to put and end to crime and violence in the US. That does make me wonder what America’s law enforcement agencies have been trying to do all these years when they found themselves with a little time on their hands while not roaming the streets hunting down blacks to shoot dead. (Cheap shot, I know, but I couldn’t resist it.) And I do wonder how a man who doesn’t believe in gun control feels ‘ending violence’ will be such a cinch.

In the event, of course, few expect Trump to be beat Hillary Rodham Clinton to the White House. But then few expected the British people in the ‘should we, shouldn’t stick it to the EU?’ referendum to vote to return to the Fifties and the era when the ordinary man in the street could hate foreigners with pride. But they did. (Incidentally, what does the ‘ordinary man in the street’ actually look like? Am I one? Is he bald? Is he a little bit gay? Is he a fan of Cliff Richard?

We do know, thanks to the referendum of four weeks ago exactly today, that he – the British man in the street that is – isn’t fussed whether his food tastes of shit, talks about shagging more than he actually does it, thinks the safest place to keep your money in France is underneath the soap and that all Germans go to bed in their jackboots. Oh, and central heating is for wimps: if keeping out the cold be slavering goose fat all over his body of a morning was good enough for his great-grandfather, by jingo it’s good enough for him.)

As for Clinton, well from where I sit she has the one advantage over Trump in not being quite as stupid. But watch she makes up in intelligence, she squanders wholly in dishonesty: from where I sit the choice between Trump and Clinton is pretty much analogous to choosing between bowel cancer or stomach cancer.

Erdogan, of course, is very much a different threat. Quite what the man wants I really can’t fathom. Is it just power? Does he have a vision for the future of Turkey which is so difficult to achieve that it necessitates him having dictatorial powers unencumbered by a parliament. I really don’t know and I suspect you don’t, either.

To get to the point of this ramble (which for originality must compare favourably with our Sunday newspapers which do very little by precis the previous six days daily newspapers, then advise on what aftershave to wear when you are off to the timeshare in the Dordogne - readers of the more downmarket Sunday papers must

look elsewhere for relevant persiflage – what, exactly, do the next 30 years hold for our young? I have a 20-year-old daughter and a 17-year-old son for whom what happens in the coming 30 and 40 years is rather important. And if Trump fucks things up for the rest of the world by making America great again, and if Erdogan pretty much screws up the Middle East for the next 100 years, their prospects of peaceful prosperity will be rather curtailed.

Actually, I don’t know what to think. To be honest, I’m wondering whether I’m simply beginning to suffer from the condition with seems to affect everyone getting on in years that ‘the world is going to the dogs’. I’ve been trying to recall world situations from when I was 20, 30, 40 and 50 and just how bloggers (or their steam age equivalents) reacted to ‘world events’. The trouble is I can’t. To put it succinctly, am I just more pessimistic because I am simply more aware of world events or are things really going rather worse than they were in recent memory? And to be honest I don’t actually think they are worse: in a certain mood they always are awful, so, dear reader, look on the bright side. Like me you might well be dead be 2030. Which brings me onto global warming, but fuck it, I’m to tired to ramble on anymore. Pip, pip

A few last words for no very good reason at all...

I am writing this in the couryard - the 'smoking' couryard of The Horse in Moretonhampstead, pretty much the back of beyond on Darmoor, though certainly not in its bleakest parts. I had planned to stop off at my regular going home haunt, the Brewers Arms, in South Petherton, but when I got there at just 4.25pm, it was shut and wasn't, so the girl in the knick-knack shop opposite told me, due to open until 6pm. Well, it seemed a bit daft hanging on for 90 minutes, so I took off again to home in Cornwall, consulting as I drove - dangerous, don't try this at home, kiddiwinks - the Sky Cloud wifi finder app on my iPad. It assured me that the Union Inn in Ford Street, Moretonhampstead, had Sky wifi, so I set my sat-nav for all points Moretonhampstead.

I've never been here before and imagined some modest clutch of mud huts (though, I hear you remark, the Sky wifi might have been some indicator), but instead found a smallish town in which driving anywhere in its small streets consists of reversing a great deal to let pass yet another Chelsea tractor. Moretonhampstead, on Dartmoor, is that kind of town. Just how much I found out when after one pint of Thatchers at the Union Inn and not really fancying a bowl of the industrial sized chips it serves, I wandered off and found The Horse.

This 'inn' - well, I suppose they would call themselves a gastro-pub - is a very different establishment entirely. Going out to get another laptop mouse, I noticed more folk have arrived since I did about 30 minutes ago, and they all seemed to be the very nubile daughters of the local gentry and their brothers. One indication of

how I am ageing, if any more indications were needed, is just how bloody young 18/19 lasses are these days. They certainly weren't that young when I was 18 and praying to get my end away at least once before I died. (I did, as you ask, and I had just turned 19. I know, a little older than some and a lot older than some others, but there you go, that's life. I blame a Roman Catholic upbringing and a fat early adolescence persuaing me - to this day, in fact - that I am not particularly attractive.)

The schlepp here was just that. We have plenty of very narrow lanes in Cornwall but none I have yet come across meanders for more than five miles and which have to be explored at a very safe 20mph as you have no idea what might be around the corner. As it happens I met only one car and one tractor coming the other way in all

those five miles. I just hope I can find what we here in Old Blighty call 'an A road' which isn't something out of Enid Blyton and her Famous Five. As it is I shan't be back home for some time yet and most of that journey will be taken up getting the hell off Dartmoor again.

I semi-enjoyed the past week in Bordeaux, but my aunt really is now getting old and doddery, and unfortunately deaf and set in her ways. That wouldn't matter if I didn't inadvertently seem to do everything, but everything in a way she didn't like, which didn't conform to her ways, with the result that my head was chewed off pretty regularly. But I should add that she is not in the best of health and I don't think I should be any the more genial if and when I reach 86.

Last night we went to a concert of more or less Latin music and I enjoyed some if not all of it. Several pieces I did enjoy were played on harp and flute, but I'm buggered if I can track down what they were, because even before they musicians tuned up, they informed us that the programme had been changed in some ways, but then didn't actually tell us which ways. One thing I did't like were three piece by Villa Lobos (is that how it's spelled?), I just didn't. I know that's heresy of a certain kind, but, well there you go.

Got to say one thing in favour of The Horse (and I shall chase up a write-up once I have written this last piece): I've just bought a final half-pint of Simmonds cider (not Thatchers, unfortunately) and it was only - only - £1.70. Bloody hell. That did surprise me. Now here's a link to a write-up  and the place's own website

. . .

The crap going on in Turkey will have taken most of us by surprise but only for coming so soon. My sister and brother-in-law lived in Istanbul for several years and even then, she tells, me Erdogan dictatorial tendencies were well to the fore. The coup was in his words 'a gift from God' and will get many in the foreign ministries of Europe and the US scratching their heads as to what to do. But seeing as they did bugger all when Sisi took over Egypt, I suggest it won't be very much.

Spielberg gets just two cheers from me for his Berlin Wall epic, but klezmer music gets all three. A shtik naches

It’s odd how, when and why thoughts come to you. Last night was the second in our concerts this time around, and we were at a wine chateau called Domaine de Chevalier near Leognan to listen to klezmer music played by Meshouge Klezmer Band I don’t know why, but Steven Spielberg’s film Bridge Of Spies came to mind and I realised why I was a tad underwhelmed.

OK, the film won three Oscars and was also nominated in three further categories. Well, leaving aside that the Oscars are arguably as much to do with drumming up business in and for Tinseltown, they are not necessarily the best guide to quality as many all too often assume. Where, for example are the nominations for the innumerable independent productions made each year. Heart on heart this the Oscar ceremony is very much an mainstream industry smoochfest. But that doesn’t get close to why I was a tad underwhelmed, and it wasn’t until last night, apropos nothing I can think of, that I realised why.

Bridge Of Spies is very much a Spielberg film and the guy knows how to make films. It had all Spielberg’s hallmarks, quality oozed from almost every shot and, thankfully another of his hallmarks – a large dose of schmaltz – was less in evidence. That particular quality, for example, ruined his much-vaunted ‘America is the land of the free irrespective of creed or colour’ epic Amistad, and when I heard Spielberg quoted as saying that when he filmed his biopic Lincoln, he felt he almost had to wear a suit and tie while doing so, I decided the film would not be for me. As a pretentious and sycophantic comment it surely takes some beating.

Bridge Of Spies did have some schmaltz, of course, notably the end scene when James Donovan is seen riding the subway on his way back to work, but largely Spielberg kept it in check. What he didn’t keep in check was his penchant for over-egging the pudding. . And ‘the building of the Berlin Wall’ was nothing as it was portrayed by Spielberg. I should say that I was living in West Berlin in the years the Wall went up and with my brother was even taken on the S-Bahn to Berlin-Friederichstraβe by our father (the BBC Berlin representative from June 1959 until July 1963 and possibly working for MI6, in some capacity or other).

First off, there is a comment from, I think, some CIA spook or other, that the agency had word that the Soviets were planning to build a wall to stem the flow of refugees to from the East to the West. Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. In fact ‘the Wall’, which wasn’t even a wall for many months, was a panic measure by the East Germans on the night of August 12/13. It consisted initially of the East Germans – with no Soviet involvement – sealing of the East from the West simply by pulling barbed wire across every street and road connecting the two parts of the city. Until then folk could travel between both parts at will, and did, visiting family at weekends, for example. And it is not surpising that there appears to have been no planning whatsoever.

Walter Ulbricht (pictured), chairman of the SED (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands) and, since the previous year the German Democratic Republic’s head

of state, had admittedly, in an interview two months earlier, declared ‘no one intends building a wall’, but the sudden sealing of off East Berlin appears to have been an ad hoc decision in view of the thousands of East German citizens who were seeking refuge in West Berlin throughout the very hot summer of 1961. It would seems his declaration

The Germans, for good reason, are known for efficiency and planning and there was no efficiency or planning when they sealed the East off from the West. But Spielberg’s Bridge Of Spies gives a wholly different picture. The exchange of Abel for Gary Powers, the U2 pilot shot down over Soviet Russia, took place seven months later in February 1962 and the scene depicted of stout-hearted East Berliners making their bid from freedom while the wall was being built – with tanks and soldiers looking on – is simply very silly. Nor was there anyway the American student, Frederic Pryor, could have crossed over to the East to visit his sweetheart. As for the final putting in place of the last bricks shown in the film, well, that, too, is risible. Yet, it is admittedly still a film, and Spielberg might plead he was portraying an ‘artistic truth’.

What occurred to me during last night’s concert was that the overall production of the film was somehow too sumptuous and oddly out of keeping with the subject matter. The rich colours, even when depicting drab East Germany, the substantial sets, all of it was somehow out of kilter. Even the style of filmmaking – the set pieces, the ‘good acting’, even in scenes between Abel and Donovan in the prison and the court scenes were first and foremost filmmaking, and fine filmmaking at that. And that was exactly what seemed and seems to be inappropriate.

The world of spies and the whole business of cynical East/West relations was shabby, on both sides. We told lies to our people, they told lies to their people. I grew up in that Cold War era and until I began to think for myself was wholly convinced we, the West, were the Good Guys in White Hats, and the Commies, the Russkies were the Bad Guys in Black Hats. If only life were so simple. But that is still the mentality of Spielberg’s film: Good v Evil. It’s as though he also word a suit and tie in homage to the Goodness Of The West when he made Bridge Of Spies. Shame, really. As the Sixties thriller The Spy Who Came In From The Cold showed us, it is possible to give a more realistic and more honest account of the times – and their breathtaking cynicism – without resorting to fairy tales. .
. . .

As for the klezmer music, I have to say I enjoyed it immensely. If I were to be cruel, I could claim that one or two klezmer tunes go a long way, consisting, as they seem to, of about three chords, but there is a definite joi de vivre about them which could cheer up a corpse and makes up for everything. And it is not the kind of music to sit

listening to in rows of ten – I was dying to get up and move, though I couldn’t tell you how. But this was a French music festival and although I shan’t claim it is in anyway po-faced, it was a shame we heard the music in what was to all intents and purposes a concert hall (albeit a makeshift one) and weren’t part of a wedding party of some kind, any kind of party, in fact. Then there are the slow, sad klezmer tunes. They too grab you and don’t let go.

No, this honkey believes that blue men can’t always sing the whites and sometimes shouldn’t even try (but no, I’ve not crossed over to the LibDems, no sir, life’s far too short). As for Turkey – well, what did we expect from an apprentice dictator such as Erdogan? That last remark will pretty much mark my card. If he staged his own coup, he wouldn’t be the first, but then, if…

There was a jokey question years ago, originally posed, I think, by Vivian Stanshall of the Bonzo Dog Do-Dah Band – and, no, I wasn’t a regular fan or thought they were the best thing since sliced bread – was ‘can blue men sing the whites’. I suppose, in the interests of clarity, I should deconstruct that but if you have already heard it or know what Stanshall was getting at, please don’t be offended. What with the rediscovery of ‘the blues’ in its various incarnations by British rock artists in the Sixties (much to the delight of America’s blues artists who were pretty much universally ignored in their home country), and given the provenance of the blues, it was asked, not necessarily stupidly, whether it was not just a little daft, not to say, insulting for nice white chaps and chappesses to sing the blues. In short, were we white honkeys entitled to sing the blues?

Well, that is a question I won’t get into here, mainly because life is too short. But again in short, I understand why some black folk might be offended, although I suspect the claim that whiteys shouldn’t sing the blues was first made by whitey liberals, many of whom tend to think those on whose behalf they fight the good fight aren’t really up to fighting their own corner and can do with a bit of whitey liberal help. (It’s pretty much a fact that no one is more appalled by ‘racism’ in Britain than white twentysomething middle-class Labour supporters in Hackney and LibDems in the rural Quantocks just outside Bristol).

If when you are singing the blues, you are singing about the goddam-awful life of your own, your parents, your grandparents, their parents and their grandparents, in what seemed like perpetual servitude with no hope of escape and betrayal by your government again and again and again, you do wonder quite how skinny white chaps from Dartford, Edgware, Macclesfield and Cardiff could really identify with the feeling of hopelessness or even the gallows humour which engendered many blues songs. As I say, it’s debatable and, wisely, not a debate you will find me involved in at any time soon. I mention this because last night my aunt and I drove the few miles to the parish Church of St Vincent (Eglise Saint Vincent for the sticklers) in Preignac to hear five singers who call themselves Concert Studio Gospel de La Bordeaux Gospel Academy singing a number of gospel songs. And I have to say, their technical abilities notwithstanding, I found the whole experience a tad dispiriting (ironically, pretty much the opposite of what gospel singing was intended to do).

First, my less contentious objections, in no particular order. The five of them – all white, needless to say - sang at the front of the church about 20 feet in front of the altar and were amplified, with their amps pointing towards them so, presumably, they could monitor themselves. But that meant that the sound was thrown into the rear of the church and up to the cupola, where it was reflected back into the church (and no doubt partly re-amplified when it was caught by the five microphones) and was generally a noisy mush of noise.

The five themselves did not have a range of voices necessary for and interesting choral sound: there was no bass, for one thing; and although they sang together well, there were no arrangements as such (for example not attempt at counterpoint to give a piece more texture). Had I not been in France in the Church of St Vincent in Preignac, Acquitaine, but somewhere in the West Midlands where I was told I was listening to a concert by the Evesham WI Singers (runners-up in the 2013 WI Sing Britain, Sing finals in the Albert Hall), I would have been none the wiser. And equally as unimpressed.

My more contentious point comes back to the satirical question ‘can blue men sing the whites’. And my response would be ‘no, not really your Honour’. Yes, I know I am on sticky ground here, and I know that there have been several white honkeys with exceptional voices – Treforest’s very own Tom Jones or Janice Joplin, for example - who might just pull of singing a blues or a spiritual. Just. But surely to goodness the provenance of gospel songs and spirituals make it difficult territory for us whiteys to trek on, some might say walk all over.

From what I know (and pedants are very welcome to write in and set me straight) when a congregation of slaves gathered on a Sunday in their makeshift church in South Carolina or Louisiana or Alamaba and encouraged each other somehow to find the strength to get through another week of the abject and hopeless misery by singing Wade In The Water or Praise Him or Everybody Sing Freedom or Swing Low Sweet Chariot (some of the songs sung last night), they really felt it. They felt it in their hearts and souls. They didn’t just sing those songs ‘because they liked the melodies’, they sang those songs out of desperation.

On my iPhone I have 24 songs by Marion Williams (I just put one on now, This Train) and listening to her and other black singers there is an almost indefinable essence which is wholly absent when the songs and music is played by whiteys. OK, I know I am laying myself wide open to criticism here, I would be very interested to hear contrary arguments (some hope – no one, but no one ever responds to my invitations to get in touch), but all I shall say ignore my possibly ham-fisted way of saying it, just try to listen to what I am trying to say. So they answer to the satirical question I quoted above – ‘can blue men sing the whites’ – is, as far as I am concerned, ‘no, not always by any means’.

.  . .

Then there’s Turkey. That fine example of democratic practice – 3,000 judges locked up overnight – Recip Tayyip Erdogan is at it again. He blames his would-be nemesis Fethullah Gűlen and for all I – we – know Gűlen might well be behind it all. He, on the other hand, suggests Erdogan is behind it all and staged ‘a coup’ as part of some Machiavellian strategy to neutralise his opponents. Neither claim is verifiable, but from where I sit that second claim would seem to be just a little more

plausible. It was, for example, odd how small the coup was and how easily the military involved in the coup threw in the towel. But I doubt whether you and I will even know the the truth of this mukey affair for many a year. I might well be dead by the time one or the other comes clean and announces to the world: ‘Ok, it’s a fair cop, it was me, guv.’

The US, of course, is stuffed because they need Turkey as somewhere to base their aircraft. And as Erdogan has been making things up with Israel – quite possibly, the thought occurs to me, in the run-up to staging his own ‘coup’ – the US is pretty much between a rock and a hard place. I don’t doubt the commentariat are full of opinions and in a minute – it is now 14.37 (2.37pm for my Brexiteer readers) and I shall have to wait another 10/15 – I shall listen to The World This Weekend on Radio 4 to collect my newest set of opinions. The EU is stuffed because they need some they can sell their immigrants to. But I can’t see EU members lining up soon to welcome Turkey into the brotherhood, not after this. Why buy in trouble.

Consternation in France when I turn down lunch (yes, really), but if that’s too boring (it is a bit), an odd response to Turkey’s military coup (in that we’re all supposed to cheer along democrats even when they are nothing of the kind) and the ‘Brexit was the right move’ line gets a sound analysis

Illats - Day Three

I am in my third full day down here in the south-west of France, but we have not yet attended any concerts. We have three, three nights in a row, from Monday on, and then I fly off again on Thursday. My aunt had various medical problems and two operations, so it wasn’t certain I would come this year, and when she did decide she would be up to it, I had to persuade my boss to allow me this week off as she is already short-staffed. Next week was out of the question.

So far I have done next to nothing if not exactly nothing, and that is how I like it. I caused some consternation today by asking to be excused lunch. The fact is that although each meal is by no means substantial (and always very tasty), I am no longer accustomed to eating a great deal. At home I can start the day off with half a

big tub of unsweetened Greek youghurt (i.e. the creamy one) and some kind of fruite, perhaps three satsumas chopped up. Then I might not eat again until supper. Or if I have lunch, usually some kind of salad - Greek salad, or one of my own devising (it’s not difficult - just chop up, in any order or combination, an onion/some spring onions, leek, tomatoes, celery, orange, apple or some other fruit and a little chopped up garlic and the lost seasoned with fresh pepper and drowned in olive oil). With that I’ll eat a tin of smoked herring or a hunk of cheese or a pork pie - Christ, this is getting dull writing it all, let alone reading it, so I’ll stop here as I’m sure you get the picture...

As I said, I don’t really eat a great deal these days, and for no reason other than I like to eat only when I am hungry. But that doesn’t mean I don’t like food - I do, a great deal. It’s just that I don’t like feeling full. I more or less stopped eating bread or wheat products some years ago, although I’m by no means anal about it, and will certainly eat, for example, a piece of cake if some were offered, and the result is that the spare tyre almost all of us carry has been substantially reduced, I don’t feel as hungry so often and generally a little more alert. Ironically, I do eat bread when I come to stay here because the ‘something compagne’ bread is a tasty as hell when toasted and a fresh baguette is also very, very nice. So here it the exception.

But as I don’t get up very early while I am here (and this time round I have strictly been turning the light off at 11pm rather than reading throught to gone 2am/3am as in past years) so I’m getting loads of sleep (which I like as I dream a great deal), I don’t eat my breakfast - three small pieces of that very tasty ‘something compagne’ and a mug of tea - until way after 11am. Then, in the course of things comes lunch at around 1.30pm and I’m just not hungry. The trouble is that I do like food and don’t stint myself.

My aunt (step-aunt) if essentially Irish although she grew up in Britain until her early twenties (just under 60 years ago) since when she has been living in France (and, for a short time, Algeria when it was still France) and she doesn’t count herself as ‘a good cook’. That’s mainly because she isn’t, on her own admission, particularly interested in cooking. But in those 60 odd years of living here in France, she has picked up one or two good tips which can make an ordinary dish punch above its weight.

So, for example, the other night for supper we had fish pie. It was very straightforward: a mish-mash of salmon, tuna and sardines covered in mashed potato (‘pomme mashe’ I should imagine it is called hereabouts). But what made it stand out a little were the herbs my aunt added: fresh dill, for one, and one other I can’t yet remember.

As I say, lunch in this household is still traditional: several courses eaten over the best part of an hour and a half (but then that’s also because we talk to each other). My aunt claims the French way of eating, eating protein, vegetables and starch separately, is healthier than having everyhing on one plate, and for all I know she’s right. So we start with some very simple salady thing – grated carrots or sliced tomatoes with dressing – then pate, then a meat course, then a vegetable course, then cheese. And then my aunt has a cup of Nescafe and ‘something sweet’. I don’t drink the coffee because although I like freshly ground coffee, I’m not that bothered about Nescafe.

In addition to all this is the wine. Neither of use drinks a lot and her husband, a Frenchman from Corsica, can’t drink any alcohol for health reasons. The thing is that long gone are the days when I could drink at lunchtime and not feel like sleeping for the rest of the afternoon. And even the modest amount I do drink with lunch these days make me so sleeping, doing anything else but sleep is a bloody chore.

So there you have it: for the most honourable reasons imaginable I asked today to be excused lunch. And as I skipped supper last night, the consternation I caused was rather large. Oh well.

. . .

There will be plenty of ‘oh, well’ going on in Turkey now after the failed coup. You will know as much or as little as I do, but although military coups against democratically elected heads of state and prime minister are not usually a cause for rejoicing, I was disappointed to hear this morning that the coup against president Erdogan had failed. For however ‘democratically elected’ he is, he is increasingly showing dictatorial tendencies and, for example, is giving those parts of the Turkish media not yet controlled by the government a very hard time.

x My sister lived in Istanbul for several years until five years ago, and long before she left she was telling me how her Turkish friends and neighbours, admittedly professional middle-class secular folk of a liberal beng, were becoming worried by how Erdogan was turning the country into ever more of a police state. So, as I say, I was a tad disappointed that this coup had gone off half-cock. It remains to be seen what will happen next (and it doesn’t quite help Britain that our new Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson a few years ago lampooned Erdogan in a limerick, describing him as ‘the wankerer from Ankara’. I can’t imagine Erdogan laughed much when he heard that.

Overall, we are living in interesting times. I was listening to British news yesterday and it seems in some quarters Theresa May’s appointment of Johnson and two other ‘leading Brexiteers’, David Davis and Liam Fox as, respectively chief Brexit negotiator is regarded as a move that would have made Machiavelli blush. Well, put last description down to journalistic hyperbole and one too many gins, but it is most certainly a very canny move. As the Financial Times puts it ‘Johnson, Davis and Fox to pursue EU divorce and take blame if it goes wrong’. That’s not Machiavellian in my book, that’s a class move: the wanted Brexit, so they can shoulder the burden of getting a good deal for Britain outside the EU. And if they fuck it up, or even if they deals they strike are poor, one Theresa May – who didn’t want to move anyway – is in the clear. Nothing underhand about that, m’lud.

. . .

A few days ago, I heard a commentary on the EU referendum and its result, one of five as part of a series by the BBC’s Radio 4 by academics. It was by someone called Professor John Gray, who teaches philosophy at Exeter College, Oxford. He didn’t actually identify himself as either a Leaver or a Remainer, but what he had to say did make me think a little (and if you have access to Radio 4’s iPlayer, you can ‘listen again’. It was on Tuesday last, July 12).

Essentially he was saying that the EU is an inward-looking, failing and isolationist organisation on a road to nowhere and which will be left behind by the rest of the world. And given that in several Mediterranean member states the rate of unemployment for folk under 25 is over 50pc and has been for some time, he might well have a point. What struck me was the reasoned way he argued: there was none of this

to my mind hysterical and phoney, ‘take back control and seize your destiny’ and ‘bring back the groat’ rhetoric which helped to make the referendum debate such an intellectual embarrassment (the Remainers were no better, by the way).

Instead he laid out the circumstances as he saw them: with the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the EU decided it wanted to be a force in the world and set out along that course. The trouble was that it was already being left behind by the rest of the world where economic growth made the EU’s economic growth embarrassingly piddly. But listen yourselves if you want the real thing rather than my potted and probably simplistic summing up.

The irony, of course, is that the gang of Brexiteers stomping around the country yelling out their jinogistic slogans will have bee wholly unaware of any of that. Of post-Brexit planning there seems to have been nothing, and if things do work out economically for Britain and Old Blighty doesn’t go down the tubes as prominent Leavers predict (and no doubt secretly hope so they can crow ‘we told you so!’), it will be nothing more than a stroke of luck. Fancy!

Tonight we’re off to a concert of gospel music. It isn’t strictly part of the series of concert put on here by the good, middle-class folk of Acquitaine, but I’m looking forward to it as I like a bit of gospel music, me.

Boris (hereafter and in view of his unprecedented, not to say bizarre, coronation as Britain’s New Foreign Secretary to be referred to as ‘Johnson’) and a tale of woe, woe, woe when there was no room at the inn for this traveller and, bugger me, if not one Wise Man turned up. As for surly, unhelpful French bastards, I present a prime example

Illats – July 15 (Bastille Day plus 1)

The baffling, baffling, utterly baffling appointment of Boris Johnson as Britain’s new Foreign Secretary must be left for another time as I’m still tired, though I slept

well last night and am not as tired as I was yesterday. Any non-British readers wash up at this blog and don’t know who ‘Boris Johnson’ is, you’ll find extensive details of the man and his crass stupidity on the Wikipedia page on clowns and their role in responsible government. But for those who do not know what he looks like, here, left, is his official appointment portrait, taken two days ago at the Foreign Office.

. . .

I should, of course, have written and posted this entry yesterday when unkind Brit gibes at the French would have carried more weight and been even more gratuitously tactless, but as I spent more or less all day asleep – I’ll explain later – there was not really time and I wasn’t really in the mood. As it is, and while I was asleep, the annual parade of military might by which modern nations like to demonstrate national pride took place along the Champs Elysee in Paris, no doubt frightening the hell out of Isis and giving them second thoughts about whether to poke out their tougues again at Marianne and make suggestive comments about her virtue.

(Why when the French march all their troops and transport all their tanks and other armoury up to Paris to send it through the centre of the capital it is a ‘demonstration of national pride’, but when the Russians and Chinese do the same outside the Kremlin and Red Square it is an ‘unprecedented display of militarism designed to frighten the world’ I have yet to fathom. I do know it is something to do with democracy, but I have yet to make the link.)

The reason I spent more or less all Bastille Day lying on my bed asleep was because I had had barely three hours kip in the previous 48 hours (give or take an hour for dramatic representation but really no more than one). I had for some reason I am still trying to work out booked a 6.50am flight from Gatwick to Bordeaux with BA instead of the usual 9.50am flight with easyjet I have been catching every year when I fly out to Bordeaux for my annual concert-going with my elderly aunt. I can only think it was because at the time of booking BA were £2.35 cheaper than easyjet and – well, we all know that post-Brexit times are hard or will become so and that every penny must be made to count. (That I booked the flight on June 18, four days before the EU referendum, and so could not have known the outcome is a point which would only be made by a pedant and if that is you, you are officially banned from reading this blog for six months.) The upshot was that I was faced with getting up at just after 4am to drive to Gatwick from my brother’s flat in Earls Court, West London. It was that or find a hotel near the airport and drive down the night before.

Courtesy of an offer from APH parking with whom I have dealt before to leave my car near the airport, I was able to book a bed at the Gatwick Europa Hotel in Crawly for just £11 more than the cost of parking my car for eight days. However, somewhere along the line there was a cock-up. I got to the hotel at around 11.40pm and very much looking forward to a quick shower and wank before getting my head down only to be told there was no record of a booking in my name. I insisted there must be (and it didn’t help that the night staff were a surly middle-aged Frenchman who gave a new dimension to the concept of unhelpfulness and a slightly young, very tubby Brit who was that night’s nominal night manager. It is obvious the Europa Hotel chain don’t care very much who the appoint for night shift duty).

I returned to the car to get my laptop and was able to show them the email I’d been sent from APH confirming a room had been booked in my name, but that cut no ice at all. There was no record of a booking made in my name and, anyway, the hotel was full up (apparently of 1,000 Japanese juveniles all playing Pokemon on their phones and tablets to judge from the racket coming from the adjacent lobby.) Once midnight had long come and gone and it was obvious I was getting nowhere, I decided to cut my losses and try to find a room in a nearby hotel – any nearby hotel. I asked the surly Frenchman what were the hotels nearby. ‘How should I know,’ he

replied, ‘I’m from France.’ That, dear friends, is verbatim. Idiot. Brexit is looking ever more attractive.

After looking up hotels on the net, I tried the Crawley Holiday Inn, but had no luck, and then the Holiday Inn Express – yes, I know, what’s the difference, but there is, it seems – and was told I could have their last room which I booked for £99. So with the customary ‘fuck off you unhelpful French bastard’, I was off in search of the Holiday Inn Express my satnav informed me was just over a mile away.

That finding the bloody place took me the best part of 20 minutes I put down to the fact that like black cats in the night commuter towns like Crawley all look the bloody same at any time of day and are riddled with roundabouts every 200 yards or so – you take the wrong turn-off at one and you are onto the next roundabout before you realise your mistake. Or perhaps I’m just thick as shit.

As it was I found the hotel just before 1am and booked in, given the electronic key to room 135 with a cheery ‘you are lucky, sir, it’s our last room, and that will be £7 for parking’. In fact, it wasn’t, and for that I am very grateful, because when I slid in the electronic key and let myself in, I found it was already occupied by a foreign family of four. Back to the reception desk who pronounced themselves flummoxed and immediately found another ‘very last room’, this time 301. And so it was to bed where in all the excitement and praying I didn’t sleep through my alarm I didn’t get off to sleep until about 2.30am. I know because I kept looking at my watch. Two hours 20 minutes later my iPhone alarm went off.

There were more fun and games at Bordeaux airport (where I found myself at 9.35am that morning). I wasn’t due at Cerons railway station, 20 minutes south of Bordeaux and where I was to be picked up, for another five and a half hours, but I cared not one bit. I had already planned sitting in the sun at a café I know opposite Bordeaux Gare St Jean, supping a beer and enjoying a cigar, but as it was still early I decided to treat myself to a café au lait and a croissant at the airport. Which is what I did, only ten minutes after settling down for the whole area to be invaded – very slowly, it has to be said – by a policeman, a soldier with a very lethal looking automatic rifle and various typists with ‘Police’ armbands who told us to get our things together and leave. The area was then taped off. We who had been removed sat on metal benches about 20 feet away waiting for the café to be re-opened, but we were then told to make ourselves even scarcer and we withdrew to the further part of the airport. There, settling down again we heard a loud (or loudish) bang and that was that. I can only think they found a suspicious discarded Dunkin’ Donuts box and were not prepared to take any chances.

So there you have it: although I arrived at my aunts at about 5pm (she wanted to go shopping in the local Intermarche and, at 81, is no longer the fastest shopper) I didn’t get to bed until about 10.30pm because – well, I was being polite and thought disappearing into my bedroom for the next 24 hours might be a little rude. I got up at 11.30am yesterday, had a substantial lunch of lamb cutlets – I mention that because these days I find I eat less and less meat – and just a few glasses of wine. And it was the wine at midday which did it, because I again had to crash and slept for another four hours. The bonus was, of course, that I missed all the Bastille Day excitement.

. . .

Our concerts, only three in my stay here although there are, of course, more on other dates, don’t start until Monday night and I am off again on Thursday. My aunt, who is feeling her age a lot these days and has had two operations over these past 12 months, doesn’t like to go out on her own after dark, so she isn’t able to attend any of the concerts if I am not here to accompany her. (Incidentally: no Liszt or Chopin. Yippee! All that banging around on the keyboard – Liszt – and silly showing off up and down the keyboard while we, the audience, play Hunt The Melody.)