1960 No Surrender

Lehman Bros, HBOS etc. - A Nation Mourns

2008-09-18T10:14:00.000-07:00

Yes, we were right all along. The whole Thatcherite thang - cutting taxes on the rich, allowing banks to do what the hell they bloody well liked, pretending the government had no legitimate role in the economy - it was all bollocks. Those of us who voted Callaghan in 1979 and Foot in 1983, who have been leant on for decades to admit we'd got it all wrong - well, as we now know, WE HADN'T. The 40% top tax rate was a disaster from the start, bringing in the massive boom/bust cycle which kept the Tories out of power for more than a decade - though sadly not convincing NotLabour governments to reverse it. Given enough rope to hang themselves the banks duly did - though of course those who were really responsible never paid the price, which is being paid as always by ordinary working people. Given that these guys have fucked up our economy while still remaining filthy rich themselves, what are we going to do? They should either give up their ill-gotten gains, or DIE. As they're clearly not going to do the former, how about the latter?

Class War demonstration outside the Stock Exchange, Monday 22nd, 12 noon, Paternoster Square EC4, nearest tube St. Pauls - don't precisely know what this will achieve, but may just prove a starting point and we'll take it from there. But the physical security of the rich now has to be threatened, as they've threatened ours. Let's see some DEAD BANKERS! The forthcoming Winter of Discontent is going to eclipse anything that happened thirty years ago.

The invisible hand gets the shakes....

2008-09-08T11:45:00.000-07:00

We're told that government doesn't need to interfere in matters economic. The market is great and will prevail (or something like that). That is, of course, until it might mean important people losing money.

The US government has found it necessary to take over the two big mortgage guarantors, which bear the cute, homely names "Fannie Mae" and "Freddie Mac", which are normally not glossed even in the British press. Now, it could be argued that this doesn't make much difference; in both unlovely acronyms (FNMA and FHMC, since you don't ask) the F stands for "Federal". But, apparently, they weren't Federal until yesterday. What does this mean? That the people who run them were paying themselves enormous salaries on the grounds that they were commercial enterprises while not actually bearing any of the risk, perhaps? Perish the thought. And of course now they are government-run the bosses will go back to public-sector salaries? Well, of course they will.

Sounds rather like our own dear Northern Rock. Its bosses were lending stupidly, knowing that everybody else was risking their neck but that they themselves were risking bugger all, but they knew that the government couldn't let them swing in the wind as an electorally significant number of people would otherwise suffer. Well, any justification capitalism could possibly have rests on the risk-taking of entrepreneurs. This must mean that if things go tits up these people are on their bikes and living in a two-up-two-down terrace. Otherwise we'd be better off having everybody working for the State, drawing shit wages but doing sod all work for them. Less opportunity for disaster, and less hassle all round.

And no-one should ever forget; everyone on a high salary has got it by blagging and status-mongering, rather than by any conceivable version of market forces. And so no harm could ever be done to the wider economy by taxing them to buggery and beyond.

Apologies to the blogosphere for absence

2008-09-08T11:35:00.000-07:00

Another long hiatus, in this case caused by the CELTA English-teaching course I’ve just completed.

They warned us at the beginning that the course we were taking was pretty intensive. I took this with a pinch of salt, but discovered soon enough that they weren’t bloody kidding. Haven’t worked so hard for quite a while; it ain’t an easy option, and for people without experience of academic study it may be a bridge too far. One guy dropped out after three days, and I damn nearly dropped out halfway through, but was persuaded back on board. The main problem for me was that, there being no CELTA course in my home town despite its two universities, I had to travel 120 miles every day, and due to unforeseen engineering works (aren’t they all unforeseen?) this meant five hours’ commuting on top of the eight-hour day. Alarm set for 5.45 a.m., and by the time I got home and had had a bite to eat it was getting on for 9. Now some people may be able to get on with written work and lesson planning at that sort of time, but I sure ain’t one of them; too much of a piss-artist for a start. So it was scraping by from start to finish.

Interesting lot of people on the course. I expected them (on the evidence of a mate who’s been in the biz 20 years) to be largely female; in fact blokes had a 10-8 majority. I wasn’t even the oldest on the course – there was a splendidly barmy woman who was pushing sixty. As a seasoned Islamophobe, it was probably salutary for me to be paired with one hijab-wearing Muslim lady for class work, and with another one as my teaching partner. (Both of them were training to teach English to women in the Greater Manchester Muslim community, and one can’t have any objection to that.) In fact one of them I fancied the jilbab off, but it wouldn’t do to mention any such thing.

The students were delightful. As they can’t charge people for practice lessons given by the likes of Muggins, these lessons were offered free, and quite a mixed bag they attracted. Not as many Asians as I’d expected and rather hoped; just a few orientals, and rather more strong silent North Africans, with the odd Hispanic. There was also an ancient Russian woman – God only knows what she was doing there; the first time she attended our class she sat on her own giving off the occasional impassioned diatribe in Russian and frightening the daylights out of the young students sitting around her. But both we and the tutors were jolly kind to her – personally I’m prepared to cut a lot of slack for someone who grew up in Russia in the early days of Stalin – and she settled down and became quite amenable.

The organisation of the course was a bit chaotic, but after enough of us had complained they got their act together and made sure we all got through. On balance I’m glad I did it, but wouldn’t want to do it again. Nor have I the first idea where I’m going to use it.

Islamophobia reasserted itself at the end, reassuringly. After the last day of the course the Christian and secular majority wanted to go out on the piss, but we thoughtfully changed this into a Chinese meal to try to be nice and inclusive for our Muslim colleagues. Even so we only managed to bring one of them along, and only after we’d repeatedly assured him that we were going to a restaurant and not a pub. It was one of those buffet restaurants, and once he’d got his plate filled he went to sit down at another table, presumably because it was not on to share a table with people consuming pork and beer. We wouldn’t have even minded that if he hadn’t then scarpered without contributing anything to the bill….Sod ‘em, sod ‘em, SOD ’EM! I’ve no objection to people who don’t eat and drink certain things; but I know dozens of people who don’t drink and will still come to the pub and have an orange juice. If you have to make such a bloody arse of yourself then you shouldn’t complain if we start getting prejudiced against you.

Those who can, do; those who can't, teach

2008-08-02T13:03:00.000-07:00

A while back I gave high praise to the late Ian Dury for discarding that glib phrase in favour of "If you can, teach; if you can't, FUCK OFF!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!". Quite right, too.

But now I've been doing a CELTA course in teaching English to foreigners. It's a damn good thing to do; there are lots of TEFL courses, but not all of them are recognised anywhere. CELTA is a seriously good one, and will get you a job more or less anywhere. You can do it part-time over several months, if you've got that long; alternatively you can do it intensively, in a month. It costs about a thousand quid.

It's bloody hard work though. Especially if you're doing it in Britain in the summer when none of the transport works; it's taking me 5 hours a day to do the commute, on top of the very intensive 8 hours' coursework. The trainers are real slave-drivers, in the best sense; switch off for five minutes, and you'll find yourself utterly clueless half an hour later. Now we've started teaching practice, anyone who asks a question is told "Well, we did that last Thursday - weren't you listening?"

Still, it has a real flavour of being worthwhile. I'd recommend it to anyone; what you need is not a job or a career - those just convey you into the hands of some management arsehole - but a skillset, and this is a good part of one.

Crete

2008-08-02T12:41:00.000-07:00

Spent a week in a part of the world where a bit of sun could be relied on.
I will always remember the most paradoxical verse of the New Testament, probably put in there to show witless evangelicals that you can’t just treat it all as the literal truth. St Paul quotes a Cretan as saying that “all Cretans are liars”, and claims the Cretan is telling the truth. Well, given that most of them are now in the business of fleecing tourists, I suppose the principle of biblical inerrancy has been given a bit of a boost.

In any case, don’t listen to any of these wise saws. On the second evening I went to a beach restaurant offering fresh whitebait. When the sea is about 50 yards away one tends to assume this is all right. But somehow a large part of the next morning was spent hughing my guts up.

On only one morning I went out without my sun cream - ten days later the skin is still peeling off my sunburnt forearm.

Also took with me Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy, which contains a fictionalisation of Waugh’s own experiences in the Battle of Crete in May 1941. I hired a car to drive over the mountains from Chania to Sphakia in the tracks of Waugh and Guy Crouchback, whose transport had been less reliable, though not, as it turned out, much less. As it happened, on the way back from Sphakia a tyre burst on us while in the mountains miles from anywhere. I couldn’t reliably find my way much further, so tried to get back down the mountain road to Sphakia. Fortunately I managed to flag down a car full of practical Bulgarians who changed our tyre for us. I should add that by this time it was 7.30 p.m. or so and it gets dark early in those parts. And I’d almost rather be stuck in a hair-raising transport crisis with Corporal-Major Ludovic than with the Iron Buddha.

But you can’t deny that an inhabitant of the North of England needs the odd Vitamin D boost every now and then. And I certainly got that.

Musings on the cricket

2008-07-21T12:13:00.000-07:00

Having just moved house and not got my satellite up yet, I have had to go back to the old warhorse of Test Match Special to wallow in cricket as is my wont.
It is in the opening moments of TMS that one realises what Old Etonians are for. As cricket commentators they rule the world. What would English cricket be without Brian Johnston and Henry Blofeld? (Although it must be conceded that Southampton policeman John Arlott was the daddy of them all.)

It has to be said that “Sir” Geoffrey Boycott is also a delight, if only for depth of self-absorption and utter lack of self-awareness. It’s great when one of the other commentators winds him up to an outburst of quite incredible pomposity; once the mechanism is set in motion it will rattle on with eye-popping absurdities, which are lovably rather than irritatingly amusing as one realises there is no malice behind them. (My father met him once and found him absolutely charming.)

A grossly predictable defeat at the hands of South Africa. I don’t think our players are any worse, especially as their star all-rounder Jacques Kallis didn’t do very much, but we have no idea of tactics or strategy.

Start with the selection. No complaints in principle about Darren Pattinson, although he may turn out to be one of those bowlers we always seemed to have in the Nineties, who would roar in full of sound and fury and never even look like taking a wicket. The idea that there were other people ahead of him in the queue is ridiculous; a place in the team is nobody’s right – next thing you know they’ll be taking it to an industrial tribunal when they get dropped. The silliest thing was saying he shouldn’t have been picked because he grew up in Australia – where do they think Kevin Pietersen grew up? We’re going to have to rely more and more on English-qualified players who grew up somewhere else; how can you develop cricketers in a country where every green space has been sold off to developers and it rains all bloody summer?

Tim Ambrose battled gamely this afternoon, but he isn’t a Test No. 6. Surely the wicketkeeper issue should relate to the bowling strategy. If you play four bowlers, then you play six batsmen and the best wicketkeeper you can find; if you need five bowlers then you need a No. 6 batsman who can keep wicket competently, i.e. the nearest you can get to Alec Stewart. Right now that means Matt Prior or just possibly Colonel Mustard.

Anyway, the South Africans have far worse problems. Makhaya Ntini bowled OK in this game, but he wasn’t much cop at Lord’s. Boycott, looking for trouble, tried to put Shaun Pollock on the spot on whether Ntini should have been dropped; Pollock, to his credit, made no evasions. The dropping of Ntini would have precipitated an official enquiry, and would have taken a lot of justifying, as he is the only real black guy in the team. (Actually I think Makhaya should be investigated for discrimination himself: left-handers, like myself, are a persecuted minority when he is bowling. He bunnified Trescothick on his last visit and got Strauss with a real bastard yesterday.)

Anyway, we were rubbish. A Test captain batting at 3 should not get himself out in the penultimate over of the day. James Anderson played brilliantly as night-watchman, and then got hit on the head. Often medical and tactical imperatives clash, but in this case they pointed in the same direction; he should have gone off and got his head together. He’d done his job, holding out for nearly two hours, and should have come back in his real No 9 position to bat with the sublime Stuart Broad. Anyone could have predicted that Anderson would be out in no time if he stayed on the field. Full marks for courage, but discretion is the better part of valour.

Pietersen was a disgrace. There are times (Twenty20 springs to mind) when a five-ball 13 is just the ticket. When the task is to bat for two days to save the match it’s just silly. No doubt it felt good to get to 13 in four balls. But Fred Flintoff, who’s also not normally one to hang about, did more good by taking 68 balls to reach the same score. KP ought to get dropped for that, like Boycott once was for scoring 246 in about six months. Except we don’t have the depth of batting to make that feasible...

Maybe Broad will make a No. 6 one day – after all he now averages 41 in Tests, and that was only his second not out. The only problem is that his recent bowling has been nothing to write home about.

The one glimmer of light it that I was expecting to miss the last day of the match as I’m flying to Crete tomorrow, and now I won’t.

Faith in Humanity?

2008-07-19T13:15:00.000-07:00

I have devoted more time than I’m really happy with to the subject of utter bastards – occasionally one needs to remind oneself that there is another sort of human being and one meets them now and then – but it can’t be denied that bastards do tend to thrust themselves on one’s attention.

We’ve all had horrible disappointments in love, and there’s no point in telling your children to expect anything else – but I have to say that Enormous Oaf 2’s first great fuck-up broke some sort of record (unless it’s always like that for the younger generation – in which case God help them).

EO2 is nineteen, and got into his first proper relationship four months ago. He was very happy, but also sensible and realistic; he knew, and had discussed it with his partner, that it might be better to cool things when he goes to university in October, as who knew what might happen after that. So that the relationship might end did not come as a shock; what did come as a shock was that, after his boyfriend rang to tell him he’d found someone else, the “someone else” was then given the phone to tell EO2 that he could fuck off. Asking to talk to his hitherto boyfriend to ask why, he was told by the new bloke that he ever got in touch again he’d get battered, the guy knew where he lived etc. etc.

Now EO2 is getting phone calls from his ex’s number, but isn’t answering them, partly because he doesn’t know whether it’s the ex or the ex’s new bloke, partly because even if it is the ex he’s got nothing to say to the cowardly bastard.

We all know relationships break up, but if that’s how the younger generation are splitting up, God help them, as I said before.

A new word for a new concept

2008-07-19T12:12:00.000-07:00

Though new words are being thrust on us all the time, by though who fancy seeming cool, it isn't every day that you get a genuinely new concept which requires one.

Here I must, with some reluctance, give a hat tip to Mark Leonard. I was always a bit disdainful of him, as an early New Labour spin-doctor. I was even more so when opening this week's Spectator and seeing him described as "Britain's pre-eminent analyst of modern China", whereas that title belongs rightfully to none other than - well that is neither here nor there. Be that as it may, Mark referred to a couple of American academics who have pointed out that the Beijing Olympics might provide an opportunity to turn the surveillance state against itself, simply because so many people will be there with digital cameras. Monroe Price and Daniel Dayan (in Leonard's words) "use the phrase "Sousveillance" to capture a new phenomenon where the powerful can be filmed and held to account for their actions in the court of public opinion". Sousveillance - what a word. We use the technology at our disposal to put on record anything that the bastards don't want to see put on record. What other people choose to do about it is not our responsibility. I'm not a great photo and video expert, so I'll probably limit it to names and addresses.

Well, I happen to be listening to "Götterdämmerung" at the moment, and I swear a Wagnerian oath to dedicate myself to "sousveillance" at all times. Members of the ruling class that want their foul deeds covered up had better cover them up pretty damn well.

Surrender retracted

2008-07-19T11:59:00.000-07:00

I have received various requests for information on what my posting on child-rapist Roger Took and his haut bourgeois friends actually said. Given that it has now been suggested that its excesses might simply have involved the law of the land rather than certain dark forces, I will repost it, suitably amended (Cipriano does not openly advocate breaches of the law, but simply invites people to draw their own conclusions).

Nonce of the Year?
This week’s Spectator contained a real eye-opener of an article. It reported a really horrible case of child abuse which no-one had ever reported before. The article, by Charlotte Metcalf, stated (not alleged; there had been a conviction and sentence) that Roger Took, apparently a well-known art historian and curator, had been found guilty of serious sexual abuse of his step-granddaughters, and had boasted of far worse things online, including helping to gang-rape a five-year-old girl to death, though he was to claim that this was just a fantasy. The line the article took was that, both before and after his arrest and conviction, he had been protected by his high-society connections, living as he did in Chelsea, on money originally belonging to his wife, the grandmother of the proven victims. Bear in mind that this is the Spectator, not Dave Spart. Here’s the piece: http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-magazine/features/826056/the-establishment-paedophile-how-a-monster-hid-in-high-society.thtml. Do read it, in case you think I’m talking about mere bagatelles.
One’s first reaction to reading something unexpected in a British paper is that it must be bullshit. But names – i.e. those who helped in the cover-up - are firmly named, and we are looking at seven-figure libel if this is not true. Either way, it hasn’t got into the rest of the press, as it didn’t at the time of the trial. So either the press know the case is bullshit, in which case why hasn’t somebody sued? Or the Chelsea mafia cover-up has its tentacles all over what used to be Fleet Street. It can’t be that no-one sees a story in it.
Anyway, it’s reported that the nonce Took gets the Speccie in his cell. Let’s hope that the whole prison reads it, screws and inmates. The silly, over-law-abiding Speccie didn’t tell us which nick he was in, but there are ways of finding these things out. He’s only got three and a half years to serve, so even if he survives those he’ll be on the outside soon.
Meanwhile, what of the “establishment cover-up”? Nobody’s sued yet, and it’s nearly a week, so let’s assume it’s gen up. It took me 15 minutes on Google to place two of Took’s friends:
“Ute Chatterjee, a woman who had been helping Took with research, was the Membership and Meeting Secretary of the Great Britain–Russia Society. When Took failed to arrive in Russia as planned to begin his expedition [because ‘d been arrested], she took it upon herself to lie on his behalf, even phoning the other people involved to tell them he had had an accident. Later she began asking Pat’s [i.e. Mrs Took’s] friends in England and Ireland if they would receive letters or calls from Took. Pat wrote to the president of the Society in an attempt to stop her. Like others, Chatterjee found Took’s charm and academic reputation so plausible that she was happy to continue helping him.” (Speccie)
Ute Chatterjee lives at 43 Kenilworth Court, Lower Richmond Road, London SW15 1EN. Phone: 0788 4464 461 – and works at the Department for Education and Science, though hopefully not for much longer. ute.chatterjee@dfes.gsi.gov.uk., telephone + 44 207 340 4488.
Another nasty piece of work is Mischa Naimark, a Russian academic of some sort:
“Judge Blacksell deemed Took to be enough of a danger to the public to give him an indeterminate sentence but, because the case was hardly reported, it was up to Pat to tell many of Took’s acquaintances and friends about what had happened. Mischa Naimark, a former colleague in Russia, who was collaborating on Took’s next expedition, told Pat she should not go round publicising his arrest. Instead she should be a ‘good, tactful wife’ and suggested she was ‘jealous’ of her ‘younger rivals’. It was as if Naimark was ticking her off for exaggerating while Took’s impeccable social credentials and high-flying academic career served to cushion him from condemnation.”
Mischa hangs out at Miklukho-Maklaya str., 57 - 1 - 115 , 117279 Moscow, Russia. Phone number: (095) 334 83 20 (in Moscow). E-mail: mikanaimark@onego.ru. No doubt Russians will also draw their own conclusions.

In the meantime, having taken note of the total silence of the rest of the press on this subject, I was eagerly awaiting the new Spectator, replete as I imagined it would be with readers' letters on the subject. Not a sausage. I find it diffiult to believe that they hadn't received any. Lost your bottle, Mr Editor d'Ancona?

"1960 No Surrender" surrenders

2008-07-17T16:01:00.000-07:00

This is rather sad. But good may come of it.

A couple of days ago I posted a piece on a Chelsea-domiciled convicted kiddie-fiddler (and I'm talking serious rape, torture and abuse of very small children) who had been covered for by various elements of the arty-farty London establishment, and whose case had very mysteriously been kept out of the press. Friends of mine who are maybe less naive than I am about the sort of country we are living in got on to me and suggested that I ought to take the posting down for my own safety. With great regret I have done so, this not being my style at all. But it would be most inconvenient just at the moment to get myself taken out; dependent children, clueless Chinese wife, aged mother etc. Once I get the six-months-to-live chitty from the medico, then there'll be fireworks.

But interesting to know that the sort of offences which get your throat slit with a blunt knife by the kind of guys who occupy H.M. Prisons still elicit limitless support and solidarity from the London bourgeoisie (hereinafter to be known in this blog exclusively as "the kiddie-fiddler's friends"). But stupid of me - I've got a sodding history degree. Do not the names Mussolini, Hitler and Franco demonstrate just how far the rich will go to guard each other's arses? Were not the same things that happened to these poor little girls at the hands of a Chelsea scumbag done by Franco's Moors in 1936 with the blessing of the Roman Catholic Church? (The answer, if you're a benighted Papist idiot, is "Yes".)

Anyway, from now on no more fairness. I will admit at a pinch that there may be a few people in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea who have not actually raped a five-year-old to death. But I regard them all as basically complicit. (In fact my sons will probably reprimand me for the language used in this posting. I have used the word "Chelsea" three times (now four) despite a firm agreement between us that the word must always be pronounced and spelt "Scum". This is a football rather than a political issue, but I think the point stands. Sorry, lads.)

In future I will confine what knowledge I have concerning the kiddie-fiddlers' friends, their names, addresses and weaknesses, to a confined circle (the activists of Class War) and simply point out that if it is not safe for me to tell the truth about rich bastards, then the level of their own security should fall just a tad. Fair's fair. And given the present state of the financial markets, it is clear that a) if it was all right for bankers to be owning mansions in Belgravia in the good times, they now ought to be in two-bed flats in Peckham and going to work on the bus, and b) that isn't happening. Well, if there aren't any legal ways to reduce these people to the penury they deserve, we'll have to go for the illegal ones.

Kiddie-fiddlers' friends, your time will come!

Japanese Condoms

2008-07-17T07:29:00.000-07:00

Good story on the BBC today, about Korean commuters insisting that advertisements for Japanese condoms are removed from the Seoul underground. This is of course all to do with one of these bouts of pointless nationalism that bedevil East Asia, over territorial claims to a couple of guano-covered islands, and ultimately comes down to the fact that East Asia hates the Japanese like poison because of World War II, and always will. (I sympathise: I always have a drink to celebrate Hiroshima Day - but then I have a drink to celebrate something or other every day of my life.)

The Koreans are missing a trick here. What they should be saying is that they won’t buy Japanese condoms because they don’t fit. I wouldn’t know first-hand, but apparently the Japs are well adrift at the bottom of the table in the international cock-size league. (No prizes for guessing who’s top.) According to my more promiscuous female and gay friends, we’re talking first-joint-of-your-pinky-finger here. Banzai!

Not an Effing Thickie

2008-07-16T15:43:00.000-07:00

Greatest English lyricist of modern times? Anybody who says anything other than Ian Dury is full of shit. No contest.

It’s not just the well-known rollicking ones – Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll, Blockheads or Billericay Dickie, bloody good though those are. It’s the more thoughtful ones, which make a point without getting preachy.

Just reintroduced myself to this one, which says more or less everything that can sensibly be said about the present educational malaise:

What did you learn in school today?
- Jack shit
The minute the teacher turns away -
- That's it
How many times were you truly intrigued?
- Not any
Is boredom a symptom of mental fatigue?
- Not many
When have you ever been top of the class?
- Not once
What will you be when you're out on your arse?
- A dunce
What are your prospects of doing quite well?
- Too small
And what will you have at the very last bell?
- Fuck all

You can't bear another's beauty, you can't emulate a grace
You can't filch another's mystery, occupy another's space
You can't do another's duty, or take a special place
In another person's history when they've sunk without a trace

What's the reward for being a berk?
- A blank
Thick as a plank and looking for work?
- What a wank
What do you think of the Welfare State?
- It's a fake
What have they handed you on a plate?
- The ache
Have you considered how lucky you are?
- Well shucks
What do you think of the system so far?
- It sucks
Aren't you endowed with the patience of Job?
- I wish
And don't you feel ready to conquer the globe?
- I’ll fish

You can't steal another's thunder, you can't fill the great divide
You can't steer another's fancy, you can't change another's side
Not undo another's blunder nor pretend another's pride
You can't offer necromancy till the final hope has died

I'm a second-class person citizen-wise,
This is something I must recognise.
It's not my place to make complaint,
But am I happy? No, I ain't.
I missed my chance when I was young,
Now I live below the bottom rung.
I was put on earth to discover my niche;
Oh Lord, won't you make me Nouveau Riche?

Dury’s line was always that it’s perfectly all right for the ordinary bloke to despise outward sophistication, what he’d probably call ponciness; but not to despise education, knowledge and ability. He spoke for a working class that wasn’t interested in being upwardly mobile, but was not satisfied to sit on its arse mindlessly consuming Murdoch prolefeed. His “reasons to be cheerful” included “something nice to study”; Billericay Dickie placed importance on not being thought of as an “effing thickie”, and a selection of artists, scientists and musicians are praised in “Ain’t Half Been Some Clever Bastards”. Not for him the modern celebration of pig ignorance. Confronted once with the glib dismissal of teachers “Those that can, do; those that can’t, teach”, he is quoted as replying. “No, it should be ‘Those that can, teach; those that can’t, FUCK OFF!’” He’d have been well brassed off at today’s portrayal of the working class as knifing each other at worst and shouting mindlessly and taking their clothes off on “reality television” at best: now it’s only the despairing last line of “Jack Shit George” that has any resonance at all.

Ian Dury 1942-2000 RIP: not to be forgotten (even my son’s girlfriend knows all the lyrics).

Sanctions

2008-07-11T15:39:00.000-07:00

So Tyranny International - or, as some people call it, the United Nations - has refused to place sanctions on Mugabe and his cronies.

Good news. What the hell is the point on travel bans on these people? Particularly when it comes to a ban on travel to the US.

What we really want to see is dictators travelling to countries where the right to bear arms is not infringed. And where is UN headquarters? Well, New York, as it happens. They all want to go somewhere where the shopping is decent. Let 'em go there! And let everyone else keep their sniper rifles loaded....

Sizzle, sizzle, sizzle

2008-07-11T15:16:00.000-07:00

I’m a fan of obituaries. Obituaries often provide a lot of food for thought, or at least tell you something about people who, let’s face it, are sometimes decent if flawed, and sometimes scumbags for whom there is no possible excuse.

Ruth Greenglass died recently. Who? The wife of David Greenglass, brother of Ethel Rosenberg, who was executed with her husband Julius in the electric chair in 1953. That just shows how young they all were.

David G. dictated the notes on the US nuclear programme for Julius Rosenberg to pass them on to the Soviet Union. That much is unchallenged. But who had typed up the notes at Greenglass’s dictation for them to be handed on to Rosenberg? His sister, or his wife? The prosecution’s case against Ethel Rosenberg, who had been repeatedly interviewed, was a flimsy one. Far more likely that Greenglass, who had already confessed to spying and agreed to testify against the Rosenbergs, would have employed his wife for the task. Indeed, he had consistently asserted his sister’s innocence under questioning.

But before the trial the prosecutors interviewed Mrs Greenglass again, reminding her that her husband had yet to be sentenced. At that point she “remembered” that in the autumn of 1945 it had been Ethel Rosenberg who had typed up the notes. Greenglass agreed that his wife had a very good memory and that her version of events that had taken place almost six years before was almost certainly the right one. The admission was to send his sister to the electric chair along with her husband. Ruth Greenglass agreed with this testimony, and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were both executed on June 19, 1953.

Ruth Greenglass died recently, and her husband David is still alive. A New York Times reporter, Sam Roberts, conducted numerous interviews with Greenglass for his book The Brother: The Untold Story of the Rosenberg Case, which appeared in 2003. Greenglass acknowledged to Roberts that he was no longer sure of the truth of what he had said on the witness stand: “I frankly think that my wife did the typing, but I don’t remember. You know, I seldom use the word ‘sister’ any more. I’ve just wiped it out of my mind.”

How jolly convenient. You murdered your sister, and then you “seldom use the word any more”. Well, your wife’s now burning in hell, and you’ll join her soon, you scabby bastard.

Moving House...

2008-07-11T12:56:00.000-07:00

...one of the most stressful activities known to man, they say, just as bad as getting divorced, though having moved twenty-four times and got divorced once I have to say that the latter was worse than all the former put together. And cost more, too.

But it was duly horrible all the same. And somehow two of my best tweed jackets disappeared in the middle of it.

Most Amusing Moving Anecdote: the Iron Buddha somehow deciding to put a tube of superglue in the back pocket of her jeans and forgetting about it. Several hours later the fact of her arse getting stuck inextricably to her clothing was very funny indeed, provided one was wearing a cricket box.

Not-so-hard Labour

2008-07-11T11:15:00.000-07:00

Well, the Government's in the brown stuff (hardly a hyper-perceptive or original observation). That they're strapped for cash is something I could work out entirely from the state of my e-mail inbox, as I'm still (and will remain) a member of the party, and they're even more assiduous about trying to tap me for cash than the Enormous Oafs.

Well, let 'em whistle for it, one might say. What the hell have New Labour ever done for me or anyone I care about? But then I saw the leader in today's Times, begging the rich bastards who utterly corrupted Tony Blair to carry on financing the party, so they can utterly corrupt the next few leaders too. After all, the alternative would be to leave the party in the hands of the trade unions (who already provide, er, 88% of its income, and we don't want it any more heavily influenced than that). Heaven forbid that the Labour Party should be overly influenced by working class organisations - much better to keep it as a lackey of bankers and non-doms, so that at each election the main parties can try to outbid each other as to which can get its tongue further up the Russian mafia's arse?

(Incidentally, that's why I don't buy the line of many left-wingers whom I otherwise respect and agree with, that we should regard Nu-Labor like Dracula regards a crucifix. If another movement rises up and gets the unions behind it, then it has my full support. Until then, whatever the ideological objections, we have to stay with what we've got. Hence my continuing receptivity for Labour blagging initiatives.)

If the rich decide they're better off with the Tories (and if they don't, it's a disgrace) we should pull out of the competition, and adapt our manifesto to however much of the union agenda we can win an election on. But we won't win anything on a platform of saying yah-boo, watered-down Islamism, and agreeing that people sitting in offices all day are doing a proper job of work and shouldn't be taxed.

Resumption of wartime situation

2008-07-07T13:54:00.000-07:00

Enormously sorry, but the truce with my ex-wife has not held. Out of sheer exhaustion with all the crap, total distrust in the family courts, and the hope of relieving the pressure on my sons, I agreed in March to a totally inequitable dispute resolution in which I paid out a large amount of money when I didn't believe I owed her a bent farthing.

For the third or fourth time in this saga, a show of friendliness by me has resulted in my getting kicked in the wotsits. I got a real one-two this week; firstly, I discovered that she was not prepared to put a penny towards the Enormous Oafs' university expenses, and secondly I discovered that she had set the Inland Revenue on me (see earlier post). One or the other might have been acceptable, but both together....I have the choice of letting the Oafs starve (or at least go short of beer) or running fast out of cash myself, with the help of the taxman. I shall of course choose the latter course, even though I can't expect either of them to recognise the truth of the situation - it would be too painful. Nor will I extend myself in imaginative invective about the woman - the Oafs wouldn't like it. All I can say - and I'll only say it once - is that if anyone calls either of them a son-of-a-bitch, they won't really be able to deny it.

2008-07-07T13:39:00.000-07:00

Been watching a Channel 4 Dispatches programme called "It Shouldn't Happen to a Muslim" about unjustified attacks on harmless Moslems after 7th July 2005. Fair enough, I thought; and when all the manufactured stories in papers like the Daily Express, showing completely bogus headlines aimed at working up anti-Moslem prejudice, I quite agreed that all the prejudice should be directed towards the complete ostracism of everyone who reads the Daily Express (and any other crap paper).

But then I thought; Yes, the vast majority of Moslems are quite OK, and should be protected from ill-directed prejudice. There are, however, a smallish minority of Moslems who are trying to pull the others into the pro-Al Qa'eda line. And a lot of moderate Moslems, who are the main targets of these people, must know who they are. And we want their heads on a plate, or at the very least their names on a list. I'm sorry, but moderate Moslems who won't grass the bastards up should not complain if they get targeted too. After all, we kill them without hesitation in Afghanistan; why do we let them get away with it in Accrington?

It smells of.....victory

2008-07-05T15:37:00.000-07:00

Some of the papers - those who are allowed by their readers to do so - are indulging in bouts of unbridled optimism concerning the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It might all be rubbish, but it's quite exhilarating, and either way it involves an awful lot of dead Islamists - the best kind. It could be that the Taliban and al-Qa'eda may be pushed back to their last redoubts. But will the Paras and the 101st Airborne be allowed to launch the final assault in Lancashire?

Ex Africa semper aliquid crappy

2008-07-05T15:16:00.000-07:00

When are we going to be allowed to say what we really think of African so-called “leaders”? We know damn well what we all thought of last weeks “African Union Summit”, starring “President” Robert Mugabe. What a revolting bunch of twats, preening around in suits that were certainly not made in the continent which competence forgot, any more than the cars they swank around in were. The whole summit reminded me of an old Foreign Office joke:

Q. Could a summit of African leaders possibly solve the problems of the continent?

A. Depends how big a bomb you planted under it.

"President" Omar Bongo of Gabon (a name no novelist would have got away with making up) then said that Mugabe had become rather a "hero" to the other wankers present for defying the white man. This is so clearly a fourteen-year-old's response. Why should we respect it just because Mr Bongo is black?

African "leaders" are slightly worse news for the continent than the HIV virus, and it is time both were eradicated.

We saw a photographer trying to get a shot of the Mugger being pushed away by an accompanying goon, who said “He’s a head of state! You can’t do that to him! Is it just ‘cos you’re a white man? I mean, you’re mad!” Of course anyone casting the slightest slight on a black mass murderer is purely motivated by racism.

The people who really are purely motivated by racism are those like the International Cricket Council, who aren’t even prepared to suspend Zim from international cricket, saying that sport should not be influenced by politics. I mean, how long are these people’s memories? Or rather, is there any limit to the racism these people are allowed to get away with you because a lot of them aren‘t white? The world of cricket actually achieved something by closing ranks against South African cricket purely on the grounds of its politics; the referendum on change in 1992 was decisively influenced by the fact that SA were then in the semi-final of the World Cup and would have been slung out if they’d rejected the changes. But Mugabe’s black, even if his victims are too, and so he’s all right. Racist scum.

And then you get the Anglican Churches of Africa, who perhaps aren’t racist but just hate homosexuals. This, of course, has nothing to do with the Bible, though some of the obscurer bits of the Good Book are cited as an excuse. African sexual culture’s rejection of gays is the flip side of a dumb macho celebration of fantastically promiscuous unprotected heterosexual screwing around, which has left the whole continent awash with AIDS. For me the leading light of the Church of Jesus Christ, Queerbasher, the Archbishop of Nigeria, will always be Bishop “AIDS” Akinola.

No doubt African culture has several good things to teach us (though just at the moment they fail to occur to me) but attitudes to sexual morality are certainly not among them.

Someone has shopped me to the tax...

2008-07-03T16:37:00.000-07:00

And I've a pretty good idea who it is - and now all bets are off.

For here on earth we have no abiding city....

2008-06-30T13:50:00.000-07:00

Have now found a new place to live...this time it was necessitated by our landlords selling the house over our heads...so different from last year when we had to move because the Iron Buddha had thrown all the glassware at my head, and next day had invited the landlord's son in to view the damage. Anyway there is a new domicile in sight. The only prob now is shifting far too much furniture, bought at rock-bottom prices from my former palatial residence at the British Consulate-General in Hamburg and conveyed more than once at sky-high prices to my subsequent domains...help!

Olympics! Let's go! China!

2008-06-29T09:58:00.000-07:00

Wonderful piece on the BBC website about some Chinese ministry having dreamed up an approved way of cheering on the Chinese athletes in the Beijing Olympics.

Officials are now being sent around the country to teach the approved cheer to schoolchildren. Apparently it is a combination of waving one’s arms about, clapping, and chanting “Olympics! Let’s go! China!” in a pre-approved rhythm.
A spokesman said that the official cheer was “in accordance with international principles on cheering”. Bet you didn’t know there were any of those.

The Iron Buddha couldn’t quite see the funny side. She insisted that we must have all this sort of thing too. Football chants, for example. Surely the Kop or the Stretford End couldn’t all sing the same song at the same time unless someone had sat them down and taught them?

I had to explain, making the point that I wasn’t saying that the Olympics would make her country look like a complete bunch of bastards (we all know that anyway, but can put it out of our minds if we so wish) but that it would make the most populous country on earth look like one enormous collective horse’s arse. And that we won’t forget.

And a warm welcome back to Tory Sleaze...

2008-06-29T09:27:00.000-07:00

MEPs on the take! (Pope Catholic!) MPs fiddling expenses and enabling their sons to hold “Fuck Off I’m Rich” parties on the taxpayer’s tab! Lord Ashcroft of Belize buying up marginal seats! Half the Shadow Cabinet deriving unearned income from propping up Mugabe! Couldn’t be better, one might have thought. OK, the present lot may be nothing to write home about, but just because the others haven’t had their bums on the seats for 11 years, we’ve no need to forget that they’re all wannabe fat-cats with a boundless sense of entitlement.

Only trouble is, it’s pretty hard to bring that argument to bear. Ever since the horrible Mandelson said that “New Labour are fairly relaxed about people getting filthy rich” prior to being a bit less relaxed about the filthy rich pricing him and his boyfriend out of chi-chi houses in Notting Hill, it’s been pretty clear that New Labour are every bit as bad. What I’d rather hoped is that, on his accession to power, the dour son of the Presbyterian manse had gathered the Parliamentary Labour Party around him and said:

“Right, lads and lasses, this is where the party stops. An MP earns around £60k a year. Bear in mind that that’s at least double what most of those you represent are earning, but don’t forget either that it doesn’t go very far here in the Smoke. Yes, there’s a glamorous world out there that you may feel you want to be part of. Sorry, but it’s not going to happen. That’s the deal. From now on you eat in greasy spoons, or the odd Indian or Chinese. Generally speaking, you don’t set foot in the Congestion Charge Zone unless you’re on parliamentary business. Anyone seen in a place of entertainment where the drinks cost more than £5 a time will receive a good kicking from the Whips. Tell your significant others they can forget about the existence of Harrods and Harvey Nicks. And if you don’t like that, don’t like the idea that the people’s elected representatives should be debarred from the fun bits of their own capital city, then perhaps you might give a thought to how the rest of the electorate feels about it.”

And then we'd be able to pick the greedy, sleazy Tories off, one by one, to great electoral advantage, as no-one likes corrupt, complacent fat-cats. Chance wasted, all for a few directorships and the odd night at Annabel's.

Anything happened this last week?

2008-06-28T14:43:00.000-07:00

Well, not a lot, in the wider scheme of things.

Mugabe seems to have won his hotly-contested election. Clever. Lots of dictators have held on to power by holding bogus elections with 99% turnouts and 100% majorities. Uncle Bob was smart; just like Chairman Mao (his mentor in so many ways) with the "let a hundred flowers bloom" campaign in 1957, where he encouraged people to come clean about opposing him so he could kick their heads in very shortly afterwards, Uncle Bob put on an election so that he could see who the opposition were and squash them; and then had the brilliant idea of staging a run-off so he could do it again. And it worked. When will we get it into our heads that, faced with nasty governments, we have only two choices: a) let them carry on and hope that is all turns into something different in the end or b) terminate them with extreme prejudice? I thought we'd gone through all these arguments in 1938-39.

And then there was a thing called Euro 2008. No, it wasn't boring because England weren't in it - England would have been out for some time in any case. It was boring because it was boring. The only saviours have been the Turks and Spaniards. I was just dreading a Germany v. Italy final. As things are - VIVA ESPAÑA, with brass knobs on.

And Wendy Alexander's got sacked from the leadership of the Scottish NotLabour party. My heart bleeds. NotLab has been asking for this ever since the greasy shiteater Mandelson said "We are extremely relaxed about people getting filthy rich". Rimming paedophile Jersey tax exiles for illegal donations! You couldn't make it up.

Wimbledung. Some American has been clattered by the harpies for making sexist comments about women players. Sorry, ladies, but most people aren't much interested in tennis per se, and are rather keen on totty, male or female. That, I'm sorry to say, is why we watch it. Yes, we welcome the new influx of Eastern European women, but almost entirely because they are fit as fuck and look as if they go like TGVs. Don't be silly.

Good old Rod Liddle

2008-06-22T05:53:00.000-07:00

One of the few habits of mine which I would whole-heartedly recommend to others is devoting the first sentient few minutes of one's Sunday morning to reading Rod Liddle's columns in the Sunday Times. There are two of them; one general and one on sport, and a guaranteed laugh-out-loud on a Sunday morning is not to be sneezed at.

Today, after some good stuff on the vile Peter Mandelson, he gives a big-up to Naomi Campbell for swearing and spitting at wankers at Heathrow Airport after they lost her baggage, and started to tell her what her "options" were, as if the whole thing were her responsibility. Rod adds: "I always say you can judge how ghastly a place is by the number of signs telling you not to lamp the staff. At Heathrow there’s one every few yards. Campbell, to her credit, ignored them."

Yes, I've recently been travelling by rail a fair bit, and I've noticed too that there are signs everywhere telling you not to kick shit out of railway employees, as if in recognition of the fact that that would be the normal impulse of any rail traveller. But I wouldn't go as far as Rod or Naomi. I'm looking into the cost of producing sheets of stickers, to be sold to commuters and plastered onto these signs, saying "ATTACK THE BOSSES INSTEAD!" Just a thought. In the same way as all these bank advertisements asking "Are you worried about poverty in old age?" and suchlike. They just cry out for stickers proclaiming "HA-HA! WE AREN'T!"

Why are we all corporate slaves?

2008-06-21T10:11:00.001-07:00

Because you more or less have to be, otherwise you face so many problems you’re going to feel bludgeoned into going back into the corporate slammer.

We all sorta kind need to live somewhere. Now, my sister is a professional musician. As tends to happen, she married a fellow-musician she’d met on the circuit. For a while they lived on the outskirts of London, because that’s where a lot of the work is, freelancing (which amounts to living by one’s own efforts, not like a battery chicken). As rents rocketed, they tried to buy a flat. Of course that wouldn’t have been cheap either, but the point was they couldn’t get a mortgage. Supported yourself freelance for three years? Doesn’t count. Haven’t got a “steady” job with a proper employer? Sorry, no mortgage. In the end my brother-in-law felt forced to jack in the double-bass and go and train as a computer bod, and has been a proper wage slave ever since. Abracadabra, here’s the money. He’s changed jobs three or four times since then, and could of course have been sacked at any moment, but he’d showed willing, and thus is allowed a roof over his head by the banking dictatorship.

I have been up against the same sort of thing. (To recapitulate: I live on regular drawdowns from a redundo payment I landed eighteen months ago, and have thus neither salary, pension or benefits. That’s freedom, and nice non-work if you can get it.) I don’t even think about getting a mortgage, as it’s a foregone conclusion that no-one will lend me a bent penny. So I have to rent. This process is slowed by the need to take a joint decision with someone who couldn’t take a decision if you stuck lighted matches between her toes, but we got there, at least I thought we had until I discovered that she’d pulled out of it while I was in London last week. So we found another place, and I went along to do the paperwork.

“Who is your employer?”
“Don’t have one. I’m retired.”
“Do you have a letter detailing your pension entitlements?”
“No. My income is paid regularly from a bank in Germany.” (In order to fool my bank into thinking I have a regular income, I pay a regular monthly amount in.) “Here are three months of bank statements, as requested, showing the regular monthly payments.”
“Can you produce a letter saying where this money is coming from?”
“No. I transfer it myself. But if you like I can show a bank statement proving I have enough money to pay the rent for ten years.”
“That’s no good. You might spend all that money on something else.”
“Well, yes. But if I had a regular income I could spend all that on beer as well, couldn’t I? And if I had a regular job I could get sacked tomorrow.”
Blah, blah, blah.
“So do you mean that if you don’t have a regular income from some corporate entity you cannot rent a house? My present rental contract runs out in three weeks. Should I go to the council and proclaim myself homeless?”
More jobsworth blah. So I simply went across the road to the other agent whose house the Iron Buddha had decided against on flimsy grounds, checked that they weren’t going to be so bloody silly, and signed up with them again.

In the meantime, I remember deciding in 1981, to the horror of various acquaintances, that a regular job is a pointless waste of life and is for arseholes only, and I wasn’t wrong, not in the slightest. Three cheers for job insecurity, and in the meantime tax the buggers to fuck.

We can find out where you live, Abu Qatada

2008-06-21T10:09:00.000-07:00

So Abu Qatada is out of jail, purely because we won’t send him back to Jordan where he comes from. Because he’d be tortured there? No, because he’d be put on trial there and the possibility can’t be ruled out that some of the evidence in that trial might have been obtained through torture. Aah. We disapprove. But to the extent of letting him go free to live in an £800,000 house in Acton? Well, that’s a free society for you.

But his neighbours have already been quoted as saying they don’t want him there. And where’s the money come from anyway? We know, don’t we, just as we know he’s guilty as hell in Jordan wherever the evidence comes from. But if it’s really a free society, why aren’t we told his exact address? Aah. It’s not as free as that. But maybe we can find it out, and plaster it all over the web. Sorry, Abu; you’re not going to live in peace in this country, old son. It won’t take too much effort.

The general principle of setting up a left-wing private investigation service to put the addresses of proven but legally immune bastards into the public domain is worth a bit of thought.

Back to the LTV?

2008-06-21T10:06:00.000-07:00

I am determined to revive this acronym, which all sorts of people don’t seem to have heard of, though it was current around the time of Thatcher’s first election. You don’t know what it means? Think Aneurin Bevan, think “lower than....” Goddit? Right.

Despite the horrors of New Labour and the smarmy grin of Cameron, LTV is no less appropriate an acronym than it was then. No, I don’t believe that open espousal of the cause of scabby rich bastards is better than pretending to care about other people while in fact being in love with s.r.b. Under a Tory government we’ll be dicked over quite shamelessly with a smug “That’s what the people wanted, old chap” rather than after a genuine fight. And a) remember what sort of government we got last time the Labour movement couldn’t be arsed to defend its own government, and b) what a sodding long time (and what a lot of fatal compromises) it takes to get them out once they’re entrenched. No, even if it takes a whole basketful of Polly Toynbee’s clothes-pegs, we can’t let the bastards back in.

Conclusion

2008-06-17T13:22:00.000-07:00

Whoops! I forgot the conclusion to the last posting. Here it is:

Why don't we just simplify matters? It's impossible to earn more than £100,000 a year (perhaps we might just about extend this to £150,000) on the open market; you need a cartel or a scam to earn more than that. Let's bring the class war down to a straight fight between those under £150,000 a year and those over. If we win we'll tax them to extinction and win our capital city back. And there are a lot more of us.

Class - what does it mean?

2008-06-17T12:06:00.000-07:00

Class isn't easy to define these days. "Middle class" has always been a term of insult, whether from the proper working class or the Evelyn Waugh/Alan Clark tendency. And yet, in most generally understood contexts, the great majority of us are middle class. Is the definition: own your own house, albeit mortgaged to the hilt? (If so, Thatcher played that brilliantly with the council house sell-off.) Work in some sort of management function? (More or less, perhaps, but lots of people get promoted into something like that without their economic position being seriously altered at all.) Don't smoke or put sugar in your tea? Take a bit of an arsey approach to colleagues or neighbours? (Again, difficult to define.) Give a shit about your children's education? (Balls - many indisputably working-class people do that.) Ever switch the telly off? (No Chinese person of any class ever does that.)

My friend The Exile has a good definition of working class: regarding work (or, as he rightly describes it, "bastard work") as something one does purely for the money. A real worker does not involve him/herself in the central problems of the organisation: employer's profits, employer's problems. The real worker will not do an extra stroke without being paid: if close of play is 5 o'clock, you are in the pub at 5.01 washing the taste of work out of your gob with a foaming pint. That is looking more appropriate than ever these days; so many people are expected to put in loads of extra unpaid hours out of fear that someone might think them "lacking in commitment", and are quite prepared to betray their friends, partners and children in order to appease their bosses. That, I suppose, is a good enough definition of "middle class" these days. But I took the "working-class" approach even when I was a senior manager in the public sector. No-one got any unpaid overtime out of me. And now I am living off my invested redundo payment and don't do a bloody stroke of work, I still maintain I'm one of Keir Hardie's paladins.

But I won't forget meeting an IWCA (Independent Working Class Association) man at a gig in London, and offering him a place to crash as he didn't have one. We went to my place in a black cab, and he was a bit taken aback to find it was a five-bedroom detached, where I was able to offer him a couple of glasses of decent malt, and even more so to accidentally wake up my Slovak au-pair while looking for the loo. But don't worry, Mark; I lost the whole bang shoot in a divorce.

David Davis: national hero or total tosser?

2008-06-17T09:24:00.000-07:00

(Incidentally, wouldn’t people called Davis normally choose another name than David for their son? Sounds like a bit of a piss-take, like Major Major in Catch-22. Actually, I’ve just remembered he was adopted, so the name David had possibly stuck to him before anyone realised that he would be adopted by people called Davis. Sorry.)

But what a tosser! If he wanted to throw down the gauntlet to the Government, surely he didn’t believe that holding an unnecessary by-election in a strongly Tory constituency would prove anything? That Labour would admit defeat on the 42-day issue if they lost the vote in a seat they couldn’t even win in 1997? And didn’t he see that all Labour would have to do was refuse to field a candidate to leave him standing there like a spare prick in a brothel?

Of course he realised that there would be a personal succès d’éstime for him, with loads of Lib Dem types and others who wouldn’t vote Tory in a thousand years praising him to the skies. Even some of the far Left blogs, the ones who hate NuLabor more than Hitler, necrotising fasciitis and the British packaging industry combined, have been having orgasms over his craggy visage.

Let’s look at this supposed hero of liberty. A principle he felt so strongly about that he was prepared to put his whole career on the line for it? Nah. He’d obviously been working bloody hard day and night on the issue, as was right and proper for a Shadow Home Secretary, and it’s given him tunnel vision, causing him to think that it’s the only game in town, despite the fact that a) whether an exception to normal procedures be granted for 28 or 42 days is hardly an issue of principle and b) the Government will have all hell getting it through the Lords anyway. Also, as David Aaronovitch has pointed out in today’s Times, Davis’ principled record on libertarian issues doesn’t really bear examination. Staunch defender of Clause 28, opponent of equality in age of consent; what have Moslem extremists got that gay people haven’t?

Anyway, I wish him a resounding victory over the windmills of Haltemprice and Howden, full of sound and fury, signifying – nothing.

Wen Again

2008-06-17T08:31:00.000-07:00

Break from blogging for a few days; in the Smoke, where getting internet access was far from straightforward. But the carnival of wooftery mentioned in the last post duly occurred, and was a lot of fun. In particular, two of my best friends now have Thai boyfriends over here (let in by some sudden inexplicable weakness in the Home Office’s iron front) and we were able to have many alcoholic seminars on the theme of oriental partners – how much we love them and how fucking difficult they are to manage – to an accompaniment of slammed doors, loud arguments, locked rooms and cancelled parties; all recounted with great glee to Enormous Oaf 2, who is still on his first boyfriend and in need of a warning of what may lie ahead, having already had an extended introduction to the horrors of marriage breakdown, courtesy of his parents. Still he seems actually to have involved listening to hours of clapped out drunks thirty or forty years older than himself arguing the toss about religion, science, ethics, history and the Rt. Hon. David Davis.

Capital Punishment

2008-06-10T16:02:00.000-07:00

...which is how Dylan Thomas described his occasional necessary trips to London. I hate the Wen as a place to live in, as my ex-wife does in my house on my tab, but it's nice to visit occasionally. I'm principally going down to see Enormous Oaf 1 do some thesping, in the major production at Royal Holloway, as he is believed (principally, though by no means exclusively, by himself) to be shit-hot. Apart from him (he has an utterly adorable petite blonde girlfriend, as bright as a laser beam and entirely capable of keeping him in some sort of order) I don't suppose I'll meet another heterosexual all the time I'm there. London for me is a carnival of wooftery - after all straight blokes my age tend to have families and thus have to work too hard to be available for wack. Even Enormous Oaf 2 is a woofter, and we shall all enjoy several evenings where the tout ensemble is as camp as the Gulag Archipelago. As appeared on a banner in Derek Jarman's film Edward II:

Liberté, Egalité, Homosexualité

Amen to that, at least temporarily.

Practical Islam

2008-06-09T17:04:00.000-07:00

Today's Independent (yes, I know, but I'll leave my criticism of the Indefensible for the time being) has a piece on a 14-year-old wannabe suicide bomber explaining how he got that way. "All I know is what the mullahs told me and kept telling me, that the British and the Americans were against God," he said with his head bowed down, his hands twisting a handkerchief.

How does this differ from what young men in Birmingham and Lancashire are being told?

"I wanted to see my mother and father but I was told that was not possible for security reasons. That upset me but I thought I will be seeing them again as soon as I got back.(Oh yes? So the poor kid clearly hadn't grasped what he was in for.) They said my family would get well paid for what I was doing."

Tolerance, always tolerance. And understanding of the reality of Islam. Well, thanks - you can't get much nearer to understanding of the reality of Islam than that. Sorry, but this is what it is about.

No Islam In Britain!

Technobollocks

2008-06-09T15:26:00.000-07:00

Have been remiss in my contributions to the blogosphere today. The fact is I have had my password rejected all over Blogger. Particular apologies are due to my friend The Exile; not only was I rendered unable to piss on his arguments (in the nicest possible way!) on his own blog, but couldn't even reply to his comment on my own! Anyway, to put it succinctly: anti-imperialism is a steaming heap of crap.

42 days.....

2008-06-09T10:27:00.000-07:00

Sounds like a film title, doesn't it? But we all know what it means and what it's a symbol of.

I ought to be amazed, though of course I'm not, that this has become such a cause celebre for the wet liberals. Yes, let's listen to all the expert advice etc., but let's not introduce any wet-lipped "moral" wabbling and vacillation into the issue. There's only a practical case here, not a moral one. Neither Magna Carta, Habeas Corpus or the Bill of Rights were ever intended to protect the rights of people who want to impose a foreign religion on Britain by terrorist violence. In the reign of Queen Elizabeth they wouldn't have held anyone for 42 days without solid evidence. Sir Francis Walsingham would have cooked some up, and they'd all have been hung by the neck unil half-dead, had their intestines drawn out and their bollocks chopped off, and subsequently had quarters of their bodies nailed up at city gates around the kingdom. Not that Cipriano would go that far - just that the bastards should feel lucky to stay alive, as the ones at Guantanamo Bay should. (Believe me, the Americans won't take any prisoners next time.)

And the idea, floated by Sam Leith in the Telegraph (!) last week, that the 42-day lock-up threatens all of us. No, Sam, it won't happen to you and it won't happen to me. And the wet policemen who claim it will "alienate the Moslem community". Well, it won't affect any normal peaceable Moslems either. Anyone who gets het up about it shows themselves to be at least ambivalent about the jihadis. Let's get this straight: I COULDN'T GIVE A MONKEY'S WHAT HAPPENS TO JIHADI MOSLEMS, AND ANYONE WHO COULD IS A BIT SUSPECT! Now, what part of that did you not understand?

Ouch!

2008-06-08T10:53:00.000-07:00

I don’t usually take much notice of the BBC when they warn me that what they are about to show me may be a bit distressing. Am I a man or a mouse? And how much of the news isn’t rather distressing, if one thinks about it? But I’ve just found myself almost wishing I’d heeded the warning.

On the BBC website there is a first-person account of a former torturer employed by the Zimbabwe secret police. “A first aid box was opened - and inside were pliers and screwdrivers. We asked the man to choose between the two. The captain then took the pliers and called us near. He got near his genitals, then got one of his balls, pressed it with the pliers, and popped it. There was a lot of blood.”

This has had me crossing my legs ever since. Good for the bloke, though – he got out of it, and has fled the country. But how did he come to get into it? “If you're me, and you don't know about the secret service, all you know is that it protects the sovereignty of your country - it's not a difficult job to do.” The sovereignty of your country. Of course. And now we know what that means: the right to have your balls “popped” by someone of the same skin colour as yourself.

Let’s Make Sovereignty History, folks. What did Mugabe call his recent political cleansing effort against the poor living in shanty towns? Operation Murambatsvina – “clear out the rubbish”. Yes – let’s clear out all the trash and vermin in the souped-up Mercs. Let Assassination Thrive.

Cruckut, Lovely Cruckut

2008-06-08T10:49:00.001-07:00

The delights of the cricket season. A couple of times I’ve had a yen to pop over and see a live Test Match, something I haven’t done for years due to living abroad. But I always end up thinking of the horribly early starts (I thought of going to Nottingham for the fourth day today; it would have been a two-and-a-half hour drive in each direction, and as things fell out there was only an hour’s play.) And you can’t see what’s happening on the close lbw shouts, it costs thirty-five quid, and you can’t even bring any booze in, only buy it at a tenner a glug.

So it’s the armchair and the remote control and the direct debit to Rupert Murdoch. Also the ancient English custom of having the radio on (in the kitchen) while the TV’s on in the living room. The reason for this is that one is always supposed to be doing domestic things while watching the cricket, to appease one’s conscience and one’s wife, assuming for the purposes of argument that the two can be distinguished. For some reason the radio commentary runs about one second ahead of the TV, which means that, if you leave the door open, you can hear of a stirring occurrence in the kitchen and be in the living room in time to see it happen. Alternatively, you can see a bowler running up to bowl while hearing that the outside edge has already been snapped up by second slip.

This being an England-New Zealand series, one is always delighted by the Kiwi commentators. New Zealanders only seem to use one vowel sound, the sort of flat “u” found in “uh-huh” and represented in Korean by a horizontal line; linguists call it a “schwa”. So people are described as taking wuckuts, getting caught in the slups and occasionally huttung the ball for sucks.

Nation of Slaves

2008-06-07T08:24:00.000-07:00

Rather distasteful news from China, that they’re now taking a leaf out of the Soviet book and bunging dissidents in the nuthouse. As usual the logic is impeccable, as I heard from a spokesman on the telly (thanks to the Iron Buddha I now have Chinese official television as a sort of 24-hour streaming media, a high price to pay for my occasional access to Sky Sports); “these people who are always protesting are obvious political maniacs – their political views are completely out of line with reality”. Well, yes. Complete domination of the Party is the reality – if you can’t accept that you must be stark staring bonkers.

And of course they all accept that – at least 99.9% of them do. Chinese apologists claim that the dissidents are only a minute fraction of the population, and this is perfectly true. The vast majority have the mentality of slaves, trembling at the frown of their employers when not kow-towing to the government. Chinese industrial relations are pre-Tolpuddle Martyrs.

Which is fair enough, I suppose, if that’s what they want. But we don’t want them bringing that attitude over here. My good lady has been chambermaiding in a hotel recently, to fill in while she gets her business set up. As the newest member of the team she of course got landed with all the shitwork, mainly cleaning the bogs with a strong chemical which gave her a persistent headache. (What price elf ‘n’ safety?) The supervisor being on holiday, she had no recourse and the senior woman on the team refused to budge. Finally having reached the stage where she had to get things changed or give up the job, she appealed to the general manager. After this she fielded a 45-minute panic phone call from a Chinese colleague in the hotel; the latter was utterly terrified that the IB’s complaint would somehow reflect on her, put her in bad with management or other colleagues, just because she was a fellow-Chinese and had recommended the IB for the job in the first place. So she is now either having to withdraw her complaint to pacify her friend, or just give up the job. And the IB still hasn’t been paid for two days work she did in Blackburn three months ago, and is showing no inclination to demand it. I shall have to go down there myself with my boots blacked.

I am reluctantly coming to the conclusion, after 20 years of fairly enjoyable involvement with them, that the Chinese won’t do. They just don’t understand the first thing about living in a free country, and so probably shouldn’t be here, at least not if they’re going to undermine 200 years of workers’ struggle.

Whittering about Mugabe

2008-06-07T08:22:00.000-07:00

Loads of predictable outrage about Mugabe going to Rome to pontificate at a UN Food Summit while his people are starving. Why the f**k do people bother. We know Mugabe will carry on until he drops off the perch, naturally or otherwise. While we concede his right to starve and kick hell out of people, and that of the Burmese generals to let people die in the Irrawaddy Delta, and the “international community” does indeed concede these rights, we may as well save our breath to cool our coffee. The point about Mugabe coming to Europe is that his security arrangements cannot be anywhere near as tight as they are in Harare. There must be millions of potential sniper nests in Rome. And with all these outrage-inspiring five course meals – dozens of waiters etc. must have had a chance to slip something in his lobster thermidor. It’s the old Roman way, after all. Where’s the Empress Livia Augusta when we need her? The disgrace is not that Mugabe went to Rome, but that he got back safely. At least Peter Tatchell had a go at him in Brussels a few years ago, and got a kicking for his pains. It wouldn’t have involved much more planning to take the man out for good.

We on the Left ought to be moving round to the idea of assassination to push the world in the right direction. The mainstream media wouldn’t print anything of this sort, so go the blogosphere! Marx queered the pitch rather by rejecting individual assassinations, but he thought that economic forces would do the job for us, and – sorry Karl – they haven’t and they won’t. And the argument that if our side start splatting baddies the baddies will start splatting “us” shouldn’t worry us lefties much. Assassination is one of the only ways I can think of of making a real impact on the ruling class, and of more or less confining that impact to the ruling class.

A new scam

2008-06-07T08:21:00.000-07:00

One has become accustomed to generous-spirited West Africans offering one amounts of money in the tens of millions in return for a little help laundering it, and one knows what to do with their e-mails. Yesterday I received a more subtle version of the same thing. This came allegedly from an impeccable source, with whom almost no computer user has not had legitimate dealings – viz. Microsoft Himself. They tell me that, in a recent promotion involving internet users, my numbers (I was not, of course, aware that I had any) had come up, and that I was due a payment of £150,000 which I only had to claim.

To do this I have to write to a man with a Hong Kong e-mail address but a UK phone number, under the reassuring moniker of Barry Coleman-Williams, giving him my name, address, phone number, nationality and gender, but nothing further (at least at the moment). The subtlety of this scam lies not just in the seeming straight dealing of Barry and his friends; it lies also in the sum held out. We all know, at least in the economic regions I inhabit, that sums like ten or twenty million simply don’t exist; but a hundred and fifty K is the sort of sum one could just do with. So well done chaps, nice try, but I don’t think so.

(P.S. I googled friend Barry, and discovered that a chap called Ameer Saeed Al-Ghani received the same e-mail, and that Ameer seems to have drawn the same lottery numbers as I have.)

Bloody Moslems again

2008-06-02T14:17:00.000-07:00

Well, actually not Moslems, but the West Midlands Police, insofar as the two groups can be meaningfully distinguished. Firstly the Channel 4 documentary, where they had to admit there wasn’t any real reason to hassle the programme for distorting what imams had been recorded as saying in the Green Lane Mosque and elsewhere. Yes, they did praise Osama bin Laden, yes, they did call for the murder of gay men, yes, they did describe the 98% of the population who are not Moslems as “filthy” and “unclean”. But in a sense it's fairly easy to follow the thought processes of the police. If these truths were to be admitted, it’s fairly clear that the police would be under pressure to close these mosques and arrest a few people. And they thought – possibly rightly – that this would lead to serious, and possibly violent, confrontation. So best, perhaps, to turn their fire on the programme-makers who had uncovered these inconvenient truths.

And then, more recently, a couple of American evangelists being told that they shouldn’t go evangelising in the Alum Rock area of Birmingham as it was a Moslem area and evangelising there counted as a “hate crime”. By a Police Community Support Officer, no less. And if the Americans came back, they were warned that they might be beaten up, with the strong implication that they should not expect any assistance from the police in that case.

Well, obviously this Keystone Kop had no authority to say anything of the sort, still less to submit the Americans to a harangue on US policy in Afghanistan and Iraq, which he did. But he had clearly worked out which way the wind was blowing in our second city.

Firstly, where Moslems predominate in an area, they want complete control, and we would be well advised to grant this. As a result, anyone trying to exercise natural British freedoms is being unreasonable and provocative, as Moslems prefer to be unchallenged in their own areas.

Well, I suppose we can still choose whether we are prepared to accept this situation or not. I’m happy to go down to Alum Rock any time. Not that there isn't enough of this sort of work to be done right here in Lancaster.

Once more unto the breachchchyechhhhyuurrgggggghhhhh....

2008-06-01T12:52:00.000-07:00

Resuming after an extended break, sadly not spent having a wonderful time but in the depths of personal horror; bipolar depressive disorder can leave you up the shit end for months at a time. Still, nil desperandum....

Was in the relative paradise of East Asia some of the time. China and Thailand.

China

It’s building up nicely for the drug- and nationalism-fest in August. Moronic security-goons everywhere telling you you can’t go here and you can’t go there. I went for a walk in a residential area where I had conducted a romance of sorts some fifteen years ago, and was told by some uniformed turd that I couldn’t go down that street. Why not? I asked in perfectly good Chinese. The guy looked at me as if I were a Martian and summoned a female assistant standing a few yards away who put up her hand and told me “No Road!”. I said it was jolly interesting that no-one would tell me why there was no entrance to this area, and that my Embassy would be most intrigued to hear about it.

The kerfuffle over the Olympic Torch Relay showed me one thing that I shouldn’t have forgotten about – how supremely important it is to the Chinese to put on a show. I can remember thinking when the Chinese first got the slot that it was utter madness putting on the Olympics in August in Beijing – for the simple reason that it rains all the time in August in Beijing, and I lived there long enough to know. However, the Chinese think they can fix the weather. By a process known as “seeding the clouds” they can send aircraft up to cause the clouds to tip out all their rain so it doesn’t fall on the desired occasion. They did this in 1999 on the 50th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic and it worked (though who knows whether it might not have been fine anyway?). But, I thought, doing it for one day is one thing; do they really think they can do it for three weeks?

No, I discovered. They don't give a shit for what the weather will be like during the actual Olympics; what they really care about is the opening ceremony (8th August). As it happens my ex-girlfriend, whom I met out there, is the senior choreographer for this performance. For anyone outside the Chinese cultural circle (and probably for a lot of people within it, who just daren’t say so) these shows go on for about five hours and are quite staggeringly boring. For the Chinese, they are the centre of the whole thing. A good five months before the Olympics start, my ex and her fellow-choreographers have been confined in a hotel outside Beijing working 18-hour days and 7-day weeks till August. She got a day off at a traditional festival in April to see her 7-year old son but was called back in the late afternoon. I was bloody lucky to get three hours to have dinner with her. There are 10,000 people involved in this opening ceremony and about 8,000 in the closing job. You can see why they get worked up about who goes to attend the thing. But we can expect beautiful summer weather for the ceremonies and filthy pissing rain for the actual athletics.

Thailand

Thailand, of course, is full of whores. Whatever people tell you about why they go there, the real reason s that it is full of whores. I had some vague plans, and so did the (English) mate I went out there to meet, to do a bit more travelling round the country. It didn’t come off, as it never does, because it’s too bloody hot to move, but also because I realised that the main reason I wanted to see more of the disease-infested and God-forsaken interior of Thailand was so that I could tell people back home that I hadn’t just hung around Bangkok and Pattaya, so that they didn’t think “Ah, just another sex tourist”.

Especially as I wasn’t being a sex tourist. I am pushing fifty, and it takes more than it used to to light my fire these days. In fact I found the whole business a bit depressing this time. I still like hanging around in the sleazy parts of town, because you meet more fun people there, but I wasn’t buying. Over the years I have come to understand the background to the unpleasantly exploitative aspects of Thailand’s main industry (goes for most of the rest of South East Asia too).

It’s clear that there’s no point in blaming the girls for being promiscuous and money-grubbing. Nor, despite the universal witness of Western political correctness, it is right to blame the punters. Some of us don’t like to have to promise all our time and all our money for the rest of our lives in order to get our legs over; and nor do I believe men who want to pay for sex should do it in their own countries, as each country perverts the business by means of illogical laws, and most prostitution in Western countries is far too deeply mixed up with the drugs trade, which a lot of us would rather avoid. No, the problem in Thailand is the local men, far too many of whom want to swan around on motorbikes and swig Sang Som whiskey without doing a stroke of work. Half the young women in Thailand have been raped and abused by fathers and brothers who then effectively pimp them out. Then they find worthless boyfriends who want money without doing anything for it, and are stuck financing these shitheads for the best years of their lives. That’s why Thailand (and the Philippines, and as far as I know Cambodia and Vietnam) are heaving with whores. It’s not out fault.

Bit of a hiatus

2008-03-17T14:26:00.000-07:00

Haven't posted for a couple of weeks. Began with having nothing in particular to say, and then progressed via general idleness.

Principal events - making the out-of-court settlement stick with my ex-wife, giving raise to huge relief and jubilation. Going to London to see Enormous Oaf 1, the aspiring actor, star in a show - and bloody good he was too. Looking likely to get Enormous Oaf 2 to study up here in the North-West in September. All this involving a fun trip to the Great Wen, which is still horrible, but it's always nice to be reminded of the thousand ways in which it is.

Staying with friends in Sudbury, in the general direction of Harrow. My friend warned me that the Piccadilly Line was buggered for the weekend, and so was the District Line, and so I'd have to get the Bakerloo and a bus from Wembley Central. OK, an extra quid on my Oyster Card, but what the hell, life's too short. On the Sunday, however, an extra ingredient was added to the mix; the Bakerloo was closed as well, due to "a person on the line". First thought: people who are selfish enough to top themselves by diving onto a Tube line should be warned that their bodies will be desecrated by having their quarters hung up at the market cross as in medieval times; second thought: how long does it take to get a sodding corpse off the line? If they really wanted they could have normal service resumed within the hour, which would be an even better deterrent to suicidal glory-hunters. But it seems that the delights of fucking London transport up reign absolutely supreme.

Meanwhile Enormous Oaf 2, meeting me in the centre to see his brother's play, dutifully bought a train ticket to find that his train wasn't running. Great.

What seriously worries me is how Londoners put up with all this. Well, given that Londoners habitually do 10 or more hours of unpaid overtime a week to please their bosses, I suppose it shouldn't surprise me. Why are we so fucking servile?

Part of the same question is, as I've asked before, why do we put up with bankers? It's clear that there's been another disaster, caused by people who have too much money to be properly regulated and still expect to be bailed out by government; are they going to come under proper control, or are we going to have to go and lynch them?

Why I am not a Catholic....

2008-03-02T12:02:00.000-08:00

Largely because of their obsession with temporal as opposed to spiritual power, complete unscrupulousness in maintaining their power and influence, as best shown by giving complete support to General Franco in 1936 with his policy of murdering everyone to the left of David Cameron, in order to secure complete control of education. Not to mention the other policies; whereas Christ on the Cross said that He could have summoned twelve legions of angels to protect Him, but didn’t, Franco brought in twelve legions of Moroccan rapists to ensure the Church’s side won. Also because of their half-baked doctrine of marriage, which serves no useful purpose except to give Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh a peg to hang plots on.

More recently, see the crap-hole a Brit in the Philippines has got himself into by fathering a child on a Filipina who was not yet free of her abusive husband: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/femail/article.html?in_article_id=517821&in_page_id=1879
The Church is falling over itself to protect the rights of the so-called husband. As Laurence Sterne wrote of a typical Catholic, “His priests have got the keeping of his conscience”, whereas the priests have a rule-book where their conscience ought to be.

Good old Iceland

2008-03-01T13:03:00.000-08:00

On the whole I think it's a good idea that Northern Rock has been nationalised. Firstly because there obviously wasn't a private buyer who wouldn't have demanded so much unchallengeable money up front as to make the whole thing unmanageable. Secondly because something needs to happen to break the taboo about nationalisation - which was the main reason the establishment, including (or especially) NuLab, was so much against it. Sorry, chaps, the idea may be here to stay now.

Thirdly, because we might be needing a nationalised bank. The existing cartel of cut-throats are currently saying that they must be allowed to charge people what they like for the occasional overdraft (illegal though the current charges are), otherwise they may have to charge everybody for having an account at all. Now this isn't on. We don't "choose" to have a bank account, we effing well have to, because employers won't pay our wages in any other way. A few years ago, when working in the public service, I enquired, not entirely seriously, whether I could have my monthly salary in cash in a brown envelope. Not that I was really on for paying my leccy and phone bills personally in cash, but still. If the bastard banks are going to charge us by the month for running our accounts, there needs to be a simple alternative, no doubt with a limited service and possibly without overdrafts, which will do what 90% of us want for free. Why can't Northern Rock be that?

George Trefgarne, writing in this week's Spectator, disagrees with me. The government bail-out of Northern Rock, he says, has created "moral hazard", which means encouraging other banks to behave just as irresponsibly in the knowledge that the government can't really let them swing in the wind. "The bosses of every high-street bank comparable to Northern Rock now know that however bad their decisions, however risky their speculations, they will be bailed out by the government. If things go wrong they can simply resign, having amassed millions in bonuses and share options over the years, as Adam Applegarth, the ex-Northern Rock chief executive, did before Christmas."

Trefgarne, though a Tory, is dead right. The cunt's got clean away with it. And we all know that the main reason for the run on the bank was that everyone assumed, no doubt rightly, that if things went tits up then Applegarth and his cronies would have grabbed all the remaining money and told the depositors "sorry, nothing left for you!"

It is here that my thoughts drift off to the ancient Icelandic legal system, whereby people who behaved like that were sentenced by a popular assembly to outlawry, i.e. anybody who had suffered at their hands could go and knock them off without legal penalty.

In the same cultural context, I am reminded of an episode in the Icelandic saga of Njàl, where the house of Njàl and his delinquent sons is surrounded by hundreds of enemies and burnt down over their heads. I think that there is a connection here to Adam Applegarth. I hope I find out his address one day.

A Centenary

2008-02-29T15:30:00.000-08:00

Today we have a surprisingly significant literary centenary. If I had prepared myself a little better for the heavier reviews, I would have cleaned up.

In Thomas Mann's "Magic Mountain", the hero Hans Castorp, who has originally gone up to the TB sanatorium in Davos to visit his cousin for three weeks and has found himself stuck there, because he has fallen in love with a Russian female inmate, finally gets to go to bed with the latter for the first and only time. He is thus symbolically condemned to seven years in the sanatorium, with an illness he cannot get rid of and, it is suggested, wouldn't even if he could. He only gets out in order to fight in World War I, which it is suggested he does not survive. Apart from the fact that poor old Hans is described as having grown up in the very street in Hamburg in which I used to live, the central seduction is described as occurring on 29th February 1908, which happened coincidentally to be Shrove Tuesday.

Nor sure what the relevance of this is, but feel it ought to be mentioed somewhere. After all, it is almost certain that this very evening someone somewhere is being seduced, to his of her eternal salvation or perdition...

February the 29th...

2008-02-29T13:46:00.000-08:00

And a very happy ninth birthday to my dear friend Cathy, a mother of two. In fact, if I had been born 13 days early instead of eight days late, I’d be celebrating my twelfth myself.

I noticed that the BBC website was promoting a harmlessly humorous debate of who owns the 29th of Feb. As an entirely gratuitous extra day, should we have the benefit of it or our employers? If the former, shouldn’t we get the day off? After all, we aren’t getting paid any more than last February, which only contained 28 days.
A BBC correspondent called “Claire” took the following view:

“Why is everyone always looking for something free? Those of us who get paid monthly get the same amount each month whether that month contains 30 or 31 days or in February just 28 days - I never hear anyone say oh aren't I lucky that I get extra pay every day in February and just one year in four this is slightly less than the others or one year in four I get slightly less pay for each day but three out of the four I could look at it as getting slightly more. It is about time people counted "their blessings" and stopped this constant moaning and joining the ME ME ME society we are developing into!”

Well, why are employers always looking for something free? And if those of us in work were to “count our blessings” might we not find them rather less than those of the bosses who get their enhanced “blessings” win, lose or draw? And is the so-called ME ME ME society any worse than the THEM THEM THEM society most of us are in fact living in?

I understand why people have to work, but why they have to be so fucking servile I will never grasp.

And, if we start thinking about who owns February 29th, perhaps we should start thinking about who owns the rest of our lives.

I always hated scrambled Egg...

2008-02-28T12:51:00.000-08:00

About a month ago, I read with some concern that the Egg Bank was peremptorily cancelling the credit cards of 161,000 of its customers, on the grounds that they represented an unacceptable credit risk, or looked likely to become one in the future. Well, that’s me buggered, I said to myself, and braced myself for an ugly letter through the mailbox (well, to be precise, looked carefully through my large pile of post which I had not yet opened as it looked too frightening). Nothing. Sigh of relief, but native wariness caused me to get on with acquiring a back-up credit card without delay.

Then, of course, came the litany of complaints from aggrieved Egg customers; hundreds of them wrote to the papers and the BBC to say that they had been ideal customers, paragons of sensible financial behaviour never missing a payment. In many cases Egg had agreed that the customer’s behaviour could not be faulted, but refused to go back on their decision. The official explanation was that “while some customers in that group may be up to date with their payments and have a good record with credit reference agencies and so on, the probability of them becoming a higher-risk customer in the future is higher than we wish to accept."

Cynics, however, suspected that it was precisely the “good” customers Egg were trying to drive away, as they are not making enough money out of them. As it happens I am in a position to provide supporting evidence for this view. Not only have many “good” customers been targeted, but the “bad” ones have not. I have heard nothing from the customer-sacking branch of Egg, although I am a disastrously imprudent manager of personal finances. I have no regular income, miss payments, max out at inappropriate times and am generally rather a naughty boy. Egg have already refused me a loan once. I get regular correspondence from them, each time thinking that the axe will now fall, but it is always to remind me to set up a Direct Debit to pay their bills. I don’t like to inform them that my bank will no longer let me do Direct Debits, such is my delinquency. My brother-in-law is also an Egg customer, and also an extremely dilatory one in most of the same respects. Neither of us have had any trouble.

So I think it can be regarded as proven that Egg is only trying to get rid of the line-toeing, regular-paying brigade while giving the feckless and imprudent the run of the place. And, as has been often pointed out, a bank is allowed to choose its customers at whim if it wants. The poor people shut out have no legal grounds for complaint. Why the insulting hypocrisy, though? Why can’t Egg just stand up and advertise itself as the bank for the irresponsible swashbuckler, and change its name to Vanity Fair or something? I might respect that.

In the meantime, why are bankers still allowed to walk our streets unmolested, without even feeling compelled to don false moustaches, burqas etc. to conceal their identity? Why do they feel so safe? I saw a Class War slogan in London recently: “The rich only sleep at night because we let them”. Why do we do that? Why?

In the meantime, let us hope that the 161,000 customers so basely excluded by Egg all default on their outstanding balances. Thing is, they’re probably not the type.

So-called benefit reforms

2008-02-27T15:04:00.000-08:00

I see the latest government initiative is all about forcing people on benefits to take jobs. I don't doubt that quite a few people have been utterly demoralised by unemployment and might be helped by being given a job to go to - trouble is it would probably be a rather pointless one. And if they try the same trick on the hundreds of thousands who find themselves in the penumbra of mental illness, what is going to happen? Most workplaces these days are totally devoted to the idea of high-pressure long-hours I've-done-more-than-you crap, and how is someone fragile going to survive in that? These vulnerable people are all going to run away or get sacked in weeks. If we had proper government and union monitoring of working hours and conditions people might survive. That means eight hours maximum (and seven for preference). If you want to keep the ultra-competitive workplace, you'll have to accept three million on benefits. And counting. A lot of us can't cope, and don't want to.

Not exactly unexpected.....

2008-02-26T15:06:00.000-08:00

We notice that the bodies of murdered children are being found, with probably more to come, in Jersey. One of their official representatives was being given a well-deserved grilling by Paxman last night for having said that the main issue was the maintenance of the international reputation of Jersey for the benefit of rich tax-evaders, implying that any murders of children had better be swept under the carpet for that reason.

Now, Jersey is all about rich bastards dodging their taxes. To keep taxes down you have to keep your costs down. Children in children's homes are a dead loss in economic terms. Getting rid of them makes obvious financial sense. Can anyone really expect anything else from the sort of people who run tax havens? After all, we're being told every day that making rich people obey the law will only drive them elsewhere....perhaps some new tax haven can provide an openly accessible child disposal service?

Equally unsurprisingly, I heard today from the friend who recently started work in a Chinese medicine shop. On her first day, she apparently mishandled the credit card processing machine, having received zero training in using it, and thus a customer's payment wasn't processed properly, costing the shop about £100. It wasn't spelt out, but it sounded like she will have this amount docked from her pay. Is this legal? Five will get you ten that it isn't. Do the non-unionised Chinese shops think it can be done? Five will get you ten they do.

Bring on the economic collapse!

2008-02-24T11:52:00.000-08:00

When the hard Left and the hard Right find themselves in agreement it is usually not a pretty sight. But today I came across a piece by one of my favourite ultra-reactionary writers, the late Simon Raven, which I thoroughly agreed with. It came in a review of Anthony Sampson’s “Anatomy of Britain”, written in 1962, a long time before the dreary Blatcherism it prefigured:

“What it amounts to, then, is that the cure Mr Sampson proposes (more and more technical efficiency, professionalism at all levels, smart sales talk for our products) is far worse than the disease he diagnoses (complacency, nepotism, charm, the amateur spirit). But, says Mr Sampson resolutely, if we don’t take the cure we shall die, i.e. we shall go broke. Myself, I am beginning to think this might be a very good thing, if only because it would mean an end of those hatchet-faced middlemen guzzling up smoked salmon in Quaglino’s. What is wanted is less industry and more Horace, who points out that the surest way of being happy is to make the best of what you’ve got. All this talk of production and competition has gone on so long and so loudly that people have forgotten what they’re competing for. The answer is six feet of earth, and that pretty quickly; once you get that into your head, it is clear that Latin verses are every bit as relevant – or irrelevant – as money-grubbing or Sputniks, and make far less noise and smell.”

Yes, bring on the banking collapses, bring on the high taxes which might drive the rich out of London – make my fucking day – bring on the plunging house prices, which promise at least to make the Daily Mail an entertaining read for once, out with the horrible non-jobs in pointless sectors like consultancy and PR, which only exist because there’s too much money sloshing around, and let’s all get back to making a living out of things which have a bit of point to them. I wouldn’t even mind slogging away at Latin verses to achieve that.

An ethnic problem, from a non-racist angle

2008-02-23T13:29:00.000-08:00

I have made no secret of it, nor am I remotely ashamed, that I have married into what HRH Prince Philip would call the slant-eyed community. It is, on the whole, a nice thing that my wife the Iron Buddha has plenty of compatriots in the North-West of England. However, there is a darker side to all this jolly multi-culturalism.

I think it is generally accepted that the main problem with multi-culturalism is the temptation to some “communities” to cling to the negative aspects of their traditions as well as the positive ones. In the case of M*sl*ms this of course involves a psychopathic obsession with making sure their womenfolk are not getting laid. Among the Chinese it tends to be an obsession with the idea that workers must know their place, and it is face down in the shit with someone’s foot in the small of your back.

We know someone who has just started a job in a Chinese herbal shop. Nothing against Chinese medicine; it has x thousand years of tradition and presumably has some evidence of success or it would have died out, notwithstanding the fact that Western science can’t work out exactly how it works. But the way it works in this country is worth a comment.

A large number of people of Chinese origin in this country are, let us gently suggest, of somewhat dubious immigration status. Most of them are quite well educated and culturally inclined to work quite hard and do what they’re told. Thus employment conditions in the Chinese restaurant and Chinese medicine sectors are less than ideal; people are employed on conditions amounting to “take what’s on offer or fuck off”. Those who, like the person I mentioned in the last para or the Iron Buddha, have perfectly regular immigration status, are expected to work on the same basis. “If you don’t want the job, there are plenty that will.” Who says the 19th century is dead?

Above all, the first law of sensible employment, that you join a trade union, has no currency among the Chinese. It might annoy the boss, you see. In China, trade unions are in cahoots with the boss and are used to put on entertainments to keep the workers docile. I know a top-class opera singer who was only discovered working in a Chinese textile factory’s trade union song-and-dance troupe. But in England you can chuck har-gau dumplings by the million in a Chinese restaurant without much danger of hitting a trade union member, or, probably, anyone working on or above the statutory minimum wage.

The cultural problem here is that there is nothing in the Chinese tradition to support standing up to your boss, or threatening union action or industrial tribunals. And they are encouraged to think that working in a Chinese environment means working to Chinese rules. Duibuqi (sorry), it doesn’t.

Our friend in the herbal shop came across this issue again and again. No, you can’t have a quarter of an hour to have your lunch. Yes, we work seven days a week. And the incredible cattiness you would expect from people competing against each other for the boss’s favour with no safety net; our friend was actually better qualified than her boss but had to hide the fact most meticulously. No, the fact that your presence happened to coincide with a sixfold increase in sales wasn’t due to you in any way. And this for £14,000 a year for a qualified doctor. Don’t like it? Soon find someone who will.

Time to put the trade union movement on to monstering the Chinese restaurant/healthcare sector. The fact that I bet the Chinese aren’t well represented there will be helpful to us.

Of course my Chinese friends aren’t keen on this, because they know who controls Chinese businesses in the UK, and they aren’t people you want to get the wrong side of, being fond of machetes and such. But it’s about time we rolled these people up. For one thing, it will enable the Iron Buddha to establish a proper business without competition from scumbags.

Petty bourgeois Nazis

2008-02-22T16:31:00.000-08:00

Bloody hell there are some horrible things going on in this world. Just for once I’m taking a break from banging on about the rich and what bastards they are, and sweating the small stuff; the horrible way in which people just off the bottom rung of society treat those they consider beneath them. That of course was how the Nazis worked; picking up all the people who had made a tiny bit of social progress and giving them full licence to dump on those below them (as P J O’Rourke said, the beauty of well-organised fascism is that it gives every piss-ant an ant-hill to piss from).

Social workers. (Or, as my friend The Exile invariably describes them, “social work filth”.) They may not be all bad – although I maintain it’s a branch of work into which only clag-brained thickoes go – but the fact that their doings are so often shrouded in darkness by order of the so-called “family courts” – bloody hell how George Orwell would have loved that name – means that they deserve every bit of shit which is thrown at them by The Exile and others. If some pig-ignorant drongo decides you are either too chavvish or too posh to look after your kids, they can be kidnapped at dead of night and disappear entirely into the murk of the secretive family court system. And these people defend all this with “the best interests of the children”, which of course only the half-educated drosswits, rather than the children’s parents, can decide on.

Sure, there are some parents who, usually due to drugs or other extreme personal inadequacies, are not in a position to raise their own children, but it certainly isn’t only junkies this happens to. Anyone who might have got themselves onto a social services computer, possibly due to inaccurate data input, is in danger of having their kids removed by force under cover of official secrecy one might think more appropriate to an anti-terrorist strike.

One of the things that set us Brits apart from most other countries is that we have a tradition of accountability; things that government agencies do tend to get reported and commented on in the press. Not so with “family court” proceedings – there we all have to keep schtum. Although it is – rightly – said that not all social workers are total kidnapping bastards, I’m afraid that until a bit of transparency is restored we will have to adopt The Exile’s view, and regard social workers as completely unfit for human company until we are allowed to know what they do and how. Until then – they’re scum. They may be able to read, but we're justified in alleging that they can't. Don’t buy one a drink. Ever.

Wharrabout the Wurkers?

2008-02-22T05:56:00.000-08:00

I know nothing ought to surprise me about this New Labour government, but every now and then something that you knew was there all along just bobs up and hits you on the nose. The Broonites are now trying to steamroller a group of Labour MPs who are trying to ensure that temporary agency workers have the same rights regarding pay and conditions as permanent ones. A no-brainer, you’d have thought. What part of “minimum wage” and “statutory paid holiday rights” don’t they understand? But no, a Labour Government is opposing this and fighting to defend the right to exploit.

It has to be said that Polly Toynbee is, as usual, spot on on this subject. Good old Polly can talk as much shite as anyone, but she’s the only journo I can think of who is prepared to grind on with the necessary persistence about poverty and low pay. Even on the Grauniad, among thousands of idiots whittering endlessly on about the Middle East, she seems pretty isolated. She wrote a book about low-pay jobs, Hard Work, which bears comparison to The Road to Wigan Pier.

She’s on good form this morning: pointing out that being “flexible”, a great Government buzzword, always means workers being flexible about their holiday entitlements, not employers being flexible about working hours; that good employers are perfectly happy with the equality proposals; and that the MPs running this campaign are not just the “usual suspects” from the hard Left. (One of the MPs involved, generally a Blairite loyalist, was once, in an earlier incarnation, my own boss, and so I can vouch for him as a decent employer, though sometimes sailing very close to the wind regarding sexual harassment and invariably three sheets to it from lunchtime onwards.)

So even in the world of Blairo-capitalism views vary widely. And who do we find holding up the bastard end of the spectrum of opinion? The usual crew of rich whingers, led by the CBI (Capitalist Bastards International), banging on about how giving some rudimentary protection to the lowest paid will “destroy jobs and damage competitiveness”, the same refrain they’ve been singing ever since someone first suggested taking eight-year-olds out of the mills and mines. Competitiveness! These people aren’t interested in effing competing. Their only argument is “Well, if I’m not allowed to win 36-0 every game, I’m going to take my ball home.” The rich don’t just want more money than us: they want it all. Every penny going into a working person’s pocket is an affront to them.

Can we have a real Labour Government, please? Polly for Prime Minister, anyone? Denis Healey back as Chancellor – let’s hear those pips squeaking again.

It could be peace....

2008-02-21T14:58:00.000-08:00

Well, I may have saved myself from total implosion by striking a deal with my ex-wife (assuming the deal comes off, no more to be called the Queen Bitch, to placate my younger son, henceforth to be referred to as Enormous Oaf II). Nobody ever wins this game, except the lawyers, so I suppose the fact that I feel that it was a bit of a shit deal is a good sign. I expect she does too. As always happens on these occasions, we were being egged on by lawyers, who know that, win, lose or draw, they'll be quids in. (The question of the appropriateness of human rights for lawyers is one which will have to be gone through at greater length elsewhere. Like bankers, I can't help believing there ought to be a season for shooting them as sport.)

Anyway, I might shortly be in a position to get my life on track again...

Once more unto the breach...

2008-02-20T12:36:00.000-08:00

This week has been spent arguing in an increasing state of desperation. Two weeks after I wrote to the Queen Bitch offering an out-of-court settlement, she then sent me a peremptory do-what-I-say-or-you're-dead e-mail, making me a counter-offer and saying I had two and a half days to accept it, otherwise her lawyers would land me with the whole costs of the subsequent court hearing. I was, at the time, in Hamburg. Fortunately on my return I had already booked a meeting with my lawyer, otherwise I'd never have been able to arrange one in the time. We discussed the thing, and I decided, with adjustments for a few disputed calculations, to accept the offer. Today I was told that the offer had been withdrawn and would only be considered if I produced certain papers which I haven't got. Otherwise I get landed with all the costs, etc., etc.

Now, obviously, in cases where children are involved, one tries to keep the open rancour under control. But, after this, not any more. My children have already suffered enough under the divorce and the fact that they have a mother who belongs in an exceptionally secure zoo. Don't ever think you can settle a divorce case amicably. The vile malice against a man who's chosen to reject her, simply because she is horrible and he only realised it too late, coupled with the almost bankeresque greed, will always come out in the end. Don't really know what the solution is - I have a friend who's doing seven years in Belmarsh for trying to hire a hitman, and I'll be interested to hear his views - except to suggest that getting married should be a thing one just doesn't do. It goes against the grain to espouse (ha! ha!) such a trendy viewpoint, but basically the state doctrine of marriage is that possession of a pair of cojones means that a) everything is your fault and b) you are not entitled to any money or freedom ever again. The girls who charge seventy quid a time, or whatever, are hugely morally superior. God bless them.

Slight Break

2008-02-18T16:50:00.000-08:00

Just got back from Hamburg. Hamburg is a seriously fun place, consisting of a thin crust of haute bourgeoisie barely covering a vast reservoir of people with actual lives. I tend to stay on the Reeperbahn, among the Polish restaurateurs and Colombian whores who make the place live, as well as a Chinese eater where I have them all trained to bring me the proper stuff from Chongqing instead of the watered-down pap they give most Westerners, and where the young Chinese waitresses are really rather special...

The Good Men of Sodom

2008-02-11T15:30:00.000-08:00

Have just been down to the ghastly money-mincer which is our capital city. Why do I do this? The answer is that I still have, besides a couple of enormous louts who carry my Y chromosome, a number of what is quaintly known to us old fogies as "friends". Remember friendship? It's what used to happen before contacts and networking and staying in the office all night. I think of them as the Good Men of Sodom, not because the majority of them belong to the woofter persuasion, though they do, but in reference to the Book of Genesis. For the ignorant pagans among you, it is reported that God decided that the city of Sodom deserved a bit of splatting (not, in fact, because it was full of gays, but because it was full of rapists) and Abraham begged God to spare it because there must be a few decent chaps there. But he couldn't even find five, so Sodom got the Hiroshima treatment. My point is that London, because of all the rich bastards who have squeezed the life out of the place, must surely be on the Almighty's to-do list, except for the fact that I maintain that there are just enough sound people there to ward off the thunderbolts. So, you chaps, and you know who you are, just remember that if enough of you move outside the M25 at the same time, you may not find anything to come home to....

More Rubbish

2008-02-05T13:32:00.000-08:00

Another attempt to tackle the "what does one do with all the domestic shit" question. Found a little card given me by the council telling me how to separate it all out. Doesn't help much, as doesn't say what you do with kitchen waste, which is the most worrying one as it a) smells to heaven and b) attracts rats, and my views on being overrun by those characters are close to Winston Smith's. Also I discover that bottles and jars have to be washed before you dump them, and that, for instance, aluminium foil must be cleaned. Now, my experience is that, when you wrap a roast up in aluminium foil, the foil a) gets cut to bits when you're carving, and b) sticks to the roasting tray, covered in gunk, and is only prised away with great difficulty. The prospect of cleaning it is a bit on the remote side. How the fuck can they seriously expect you to clean aluminium foil before throwing it away? Only in an environment where no-one dares oppose anybody who sounds "green", however much of a tosser they may be.

Won't be here on Friday when the bin-men come next, and they'll kill me if I put the bins out before Thursday evening, when I won't be here either. So nothing for it but to put it all in the car and then ho! for the dump, or recycling centre as it is of course called. That took a good half hour, as private cars are only allowed into the "household waste" bit, and the relevant bins for half the stuff can only be found in the bit you need a permit to drive into. Bugger all this. I'm thinking of taking up fly-tipping as a hobby, as well as smoking.

My friend The Exile (check link) suggests that the smoking ban is not enforced by the Plod, but only by council enforcers, and that therefore if one worked at electing councillors who refused to employ such enforcers one could render it optional and subject to local democracy, which it ought to be. He is right in principle. Trouble is, in the present climate finding people to stand on a clear platform of defying a PC Act of Parliament is simply unrealistic. If it were possible for public figures to stand up that openly against the political and media establishment and still get elected, we'd never have lost the miners' war of 1984-85.

In WH Smug's yesterday I saw a computer magazine featuring on its front cover an article on solving problems with one's Windows system, under the headline "CRUSH PC GREMLINS!" Oh how I wish we could....

Mustn't offend anyone

2008-02-04T17:32:00.000-08:00

Just heard a wonderful one from Stephen Fry on QI. “The marriage suffered a setback in 1985, when the husband was killed by the wife.” Mustn’t offend women – who knows when one might experience a perfectly understandable need to kill her husband? “Well, she had to, didn’t she?” “What do you mean?” “Well, she did, didn’t she? That proves she had to.”

Likewise, in today’s Telegraph: The Home Office has produced guidance for civil servants (I was one once) saying they mustn’t refer to Islamist terrorists; just say “criminals” instead.

Sorry. Fuck that. Some women are bitches and kill their husbands, when the latter don’t do everything they’re told to. Some Muslims think Allah tells them to blow people up. They are Islamic terrorists. And a probable majority of other Muslims support them.
Now sue me.

Bugging Scandal

2008-02-04T16:39:00.000-08:00

Who gives a flying fuddleduck whether an Al-Qaeda terrorist suspect (otherwise known as an Al-Qaeda terrorist, due to get extradited to the USA where they’re not as fricking soft as we are) gets bugged when talking to his MP? Hasn’t Sadiq Khan MP got more worthwhile constituents to talk to? Someone in Tooting needs to be asking this. It’s probably worth knowing when this bastard wants to talk to someone who’s not supposed to get bugged, because it would seem to indicate that he’s got something to say that he doesn’t want to get overheard. And that’s precisely the sort of thing we ought to be overhearing.

Why is David Davis making a fuss about this? (Well, we know the answer to that.) Why does he care?

Look, no-one gives a toddly-doss what happens to Al-Qaeda and their supporters. No, we don’t want to be a country where people get kicked to death down the cellars, but if they’re Al-Qaeda I’d be prepared to turn a blind eye. What’s the bleeding point in letting them out of prison? What do we expect them to do next? Well, I hope, get their arses bugged off until the end of their days, if we can afford that sort of thing. Otherwise, send ‘em somewhere else where they’ll get themselves strung up. See if I care.

Arseholes in Sainsbury's (well, what a surprise)

2008-02-04T14:58:00.000-08:00

It’s rather crappy to blog about things that happened in Sainsbury’s, but I promise not to make a habit of it.

This afternoon, after further lawyer/bank related pains of hell, I nipped into Sainsbo’s just for a couple of odds and sods, not a big shop. Trouble is, when you do that, your shopping basket just screams out “Sad Old Git Living On His Own”. (Madame has gone down to London.) Only two of the five items were alcoholic (I’m drinking the second one as I write). But I felt like declaring to everybody: “I’m not a middle-aged alcoholic saddo! I’m married! I can get my leg over! Look, here’s my wedding ring!”, except it wasn’t, because I threw it at the Iron Buddha during our last row, and she picked it up and Put It Somewhere, as wives will.

Anyway, one advantage of having a small, sad-bachelor shopping basket is, as I thought, that one can take it through the “10 items or less” check-out. Thither I sped, and during the roughly five minutes I was waiting, three people, one in front of me and two behind, tried to unload enormous baskets full of stuff, and had to be told by a patient-but-rapidly-growing-less-so checkout assistant that they were only allowed ten items at a time. What’s with these people? There were three large-print signs up, and all the little plastic prisms dividing one punter’s shopping from another bore the same legend. What part of “10 Items or Less” don’t they understand?

And there was light.....

2008-02-04T11:41:00.000-08:00

Just had a strange 40 minutes. I may be a sad old git sitting in front of my computer as a substitute for a life, but this time I had an excuse. At 7 p.m. all the lights went out - a good old-fashioned power cut, reminiscent of the glorious winter of 1973 when I was thirteen and at boarding school and power cuts were fun, fun, fun, not to mention leading to the miners destroying Heath's government.

I thought about inching along the corridor to the fuse box, but soon realised a) I knew where the fuse box was but, having only lived here three weeks and not having had occasion to look into the cupboard yet, I would have stood no chance whatever of finding a fuse, and b) a glance out of the window told me that every house along the street had suffered the same fate. (Torches? Candles? In a house I've just moved in to? Do me a favour.) In fact every house within sight - my first impulse, being the man I am, was to take refuge in the Fox & Goose, but they were equally blacked out. So I went to sit in the car, as the only source of light, until it occurred to me that I might as well go back into the house and switch the computer on, as the battery was charged up. At least that provided enough light to find the gin and tonic I'd been drinking....

I am in love...

2008-02-03T17:49:00.000-08:00

once more. Just discovered a Ladino singer. (What?) Ladino is the language of the Sephardi Jews axpelled from Spain at the end of the 15th century, It was the mother tongue of Elias Canetti, who won the Nobel a few years back for writing books no-one has actually managed to read, but which are, I am assured, jolly worthy. Anyway this lady is called Yasmin Levy, and hangs out in Jerusalem. I'd have gone to see her in Manchester last week, but for the fact that I was engaged in a life-or death marital struggle at the time. But the woman is gorgeous, and does the world music thing like there's no tomorrow. Besides, she's an Israeli, and thus can do no wrong in my opinion, rather like Yossi Benayoun in his Liverpool shirt.

The joys of political incorrectness...

2008-02-03T13:34:00.002-08:00

Somehow the brisk and bracing weather has had a stimulating effect on my political incorrectness glands.

Last week I went back to my old stamping ground of Hamburg, where they have just followed us in introducing a smoking ban. Being reasonably sensible people they have left all sorts of loopholes - I asked a couple of my friends who run pubs how it was affecting them, and they said it wasn't much, because they had separate smoking rooms, which I don't think is allowed over here. Another pub has reconstituted itself as an official smokers' club, members only (but I suspect membership criteria are not that rigid). But then maybe the Germans are only interested in ensuring that non-smokers can have a smoke-free environment if they want, rather than calling down the wrath of God on sinners.

Meanwhile, as the Independent reported, the first person to fall officially foul of the law was ex-Chancellor Helmut Schmidt. Schmidt (whom God preserve) is 89, smokes approximately the same number per day, and has for years made it clear that anyone inviting him and/or his wife had jolly well better provide ashtrays. A big Hamburg theatre invited the old couple (she is only a couple of months younger) to a premiere, extended the proper courtesies to a respected elder statesman, got grassed up by some arsehole, and so the old chap is facing charges.

This is the really insidious thing about the smoking ban. My new local in Lancaster after my move is utterly delightful. The place is run by a female Al Murray called Joanne. The first night I went in there it was karaoke night, fortunately for me, who has been described as "the deaf man's Pavarotti". I stepped up to the mike to sing "Delilah", telling the audience that they could throw knickers if they liked. "I'm not wearing any, luv," came back quick as a flash. Later in the evening, noticing it was past midnight, I asked Gordon what time the pub closed. "You'd better ask Joanne, she's the licensee," he replied. "What time does the pub shut, Joanne?" I asked. "It shuts when I shut it, luv."

The licence is actually till 1 a.m., but it basically shuts when Joanne wants to go to bed. There's a sign up saying "no children after 8 p.m." but I've seen them running around at half past twelve. But the smoking ban is rigidly observed. No-one is going to complain about late hours, as everyone who's there after hours has a direct interest in being there. But any arsehole can raise a complaint about someone smoking. Even Joanne daren't smoke in the pub.

Fuck them. Fuck them from a great height. Meanwhile Dawn Primarolo is saying that middle-class people are still drinking more than they should and "it's got to change". Now, I am not always aware of what I do when I'm pissed. But I'm pretty sure I never married Dawn Primarolo. That alone would give her any locus standi in how much I drink, or anything else I do within the law of the land. The woman I am married to, though in her heart her views don't differ much from Dawn's, expresses it a bit more tactfully.

But fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck them. Can I be arsed to go to all the trouble and expense of taking up smoking just to spite them?

The other pain in the fundament, following my recent house-move, is rubbish disposal. Obviously, a move generates huge volumes of stuff that needs chucking away. Chucking anything away, however, is now as difficult as a master's degree in nuclear physics. Last time the bin men came, my wife was told she'd put the wrong bins out in the wrong order (and probably with the wrong stuff in them) and so they couldn't take them. They did, however, give her a closely printed card with detailed instructions, which I have been trying to make head or tail of ever since. And woe betide you if you put any paper in with the cans, or glass with the plastic, or if you don't wash the insides of horrible plastic bags thoroughly, or anything like that. So I have been driving stuff to the local dump, knowing that no-one is actually supervising and so you can get away with chucking out almost anything. Can't people tick a box on a form, maybe involving an extra £50 on one's council tax, saying I CAN'T BE ARSED WITH ALL THIS, and just bunging it all in the wheelie like we used to? But even the mere suggestion that I might want to would make me the equivalent of a Nazi war criminal in some people's eyes.

Again, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck them.

And don't get me started on mucking Fuslims......

Women! (reprise)

2008-02-02T14:03:00.000-08:00

I mentioned a couple of posts ago how women who have landed a man tend to turn their brains off rather. Splendid example today. Iron Buddha and I were planning to go down to London in midweek, me to see various friends, sons, etc., she to meet up with a lot of Chinese people to celebrate Chinese New Year. Chinese New Year being on the 7th, she told me they'd be meeting up on the evening before. So I arranged we'd go down on the 5th.

On Thursday evening she told me, without warning, that the get-together was in fact on Sunday 3rd, so could we go down on Saturday (today) instead? (That is how good the Chinese are at forward planning. World War III will be a piece of piss.) No, I said, I've got to see my lawyer on Monday about this damned financial dispute with Queen Bitch. So, I told her, I'll get you a train ticket to London, and come myself a few days later. I had to do some fancy footwork in making arrangements with the friend we'd be staying with, but all was done and dusted.

This morning we got up and she spent hours fannying about with various articles of clothing. After a long period of time waiting at the front door fully clothed to take her to the station, she finally emerged. Once we were in the car on the way to the station, she asked: "I haven't got my passport. Does that matter?" I mentioned that it wasn't a bad idea to have some sort of ID, but it wasn't life or death. "Have you got all the details I wrote down for you about how to get to our friend's place, and the mobile number of the guy you have to get the keys off?" "No," she said, wide-eyed. "Well, how the hell do you expect to get there, then?" I promised to write down the directions for her again from memory, and call her later to give her the mobile number. We got to the station and I did all this. Then "I've forgotten my wallet and don't have any money or credit card!" Fortunately we had fifteen minutes, just enough for me to run to the bank and get some cash out.

My younger son has learning difficulties, but has been travelling on his own since age 13. He wouldn't have left the house without papers, money or clear instructions on where to go. And it's not as if she's had a pampered upbringing. This is a lass who was working construction sites at age 11 because she bloody well had to, and was single and making her own way in the world for 10 years until I came along. Since she's been here she's done fuck all except cause trouble. If I didn't love the silly woman I don't know what would happen.

A Holiday in Hell

2008-02-01T15:19:00.000-08:00

Apologies to readers (both of them) for recent absence from bloggery. The last three weeks have been utter hell, with more of the same to come. Moving house is purgatory at the best of times, and these weren’t the best. It started with pretty near the worst week of my life. Doesn’t quite make it to Number One – the seven days in August 2000 between being told I had cancer of the oesophagus and being told I hadn’t will take quite a bit of knocking off that perch – but it’s right up there. This was to be the week of the great house move, and for once I thought I’d got it organised quite neatly. Secure the new house from Monday 7th, arrange to move out of the old one on Thursday 10th, giving us three clear days to shift our stuff; arrange for our furniture to be delivered from Germany on the 16th; in the meantime, as we would be without a bed in the interim, bought one to be delivered on Friday 11th, having arranged accommodation with a friend for the night of the 10th. The whole thing required a few thousand squid, so I applied for funds to be transferred through my German bankers on 18th December. All bases covered, you might think.

Except that the money wasn’t there. No doubt the various bankers involved had “borrowed” it for a few days, to put it on the horses or something, and no doubt they’d all taken a couple of weeks off over Christmas like everyone else, but anyway it wasn’t there when I needed it. The estate agents for the new place were as nice as pie, but totally inflexible: no money, no keys, not even allowed to transport stuff to the house to await full occupation. (I suppose they’d have got sacked if anyone up the corporate hierarchy had found out they’d broken procedure.) Anyway, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday on the phone from 9 till 5, trying to find out where this damn money was, while the Iron Buddha did as much packing as she could. Trouble was, the domestic atmosphere deteriorated markedly during this period.

I can’t really blame her; we were facing actual homelessness, and the area in which a major cock-up had occurred was undoubtedly one for which I had the responsibility. It wasn’t really my fault, except that I should have made allowances for any degree of bankers’ incompetence and done the transfer about a month earlier, but I have no excuses: at an atavistic level, a man who can’t even put a roof over his woman’s head is a failure by any standard. All this burst out in a fearsome row on the Tuesday evening, where my shortcomings were read out to me in no uncertain terms. This resulted in my storming out of the house in despair, getting into the car, and heading for Scotland. I have not found it possible to maintain my alcohol reduction programme during this level of stress, and perhaps we had better draw a veil over my blood alcohol level when I hit the M6 around midnight.

However, no harm befell me or any other road user, thank God; and halfway to the border wiser counsels prevailed, and I decided to retrace my steps and return to Lancaster. Around Carnforth I was doing no more than 80 when my clutch blew out and I could do no more than to glide over to the hard shoulder and slow gently to a halt. And that, as far as my Saab 93 went, was that. It was 1.30 a.m. The full-scale storm of earlier in the evening had burnt itself out, rather like my clutch, and it had stopped raining, but the wind was about Gale Force 8. This being the middle of the night on January 9th in North Lancashire, I presumably need not play Eeyore and point out that it was neither Hot, Close or Stuffy. Just-between-ourselves-and-don’t-tell-anybody, it was Cold.

I should, everyone told me, have picked up one of the roadside phones and sought help. But I had no number for the RAC with me, and, besides, I have long since lost faith in the possibility that any public telephone will actually work. There was also the points a) that my brain was no longer in working order after the bombardments set out above and b) that I had no wish to be discovered in the neighbourhood of my car by anyone who might be furnished with a breathalyser. Anyway, I walked four miles, and had almost reached Lancaster when the Highways Agency, who had already spotted my defunct car and put two and two together, picked me up. They wouldn’t actually take me home, but gave me a lift to a hotel where a cab could be obtained, and promised to bring my car to my address in the morning. Couldn’t have been nicer.

On the Wednesday, having got to bed at five, I got up to discover that I still had no access to any money, and that the Highways Agency had not brought my car as they had promised. So the previous days’ slog of trying to chase up banks who couldn’t care less was at least varied by the task of trying to find out what the hell had become of the car. (I should at this point credit the Iron Buddha for bringing me a penitent cup of morning tea and swearing never to go for me like that again; unfortunately, I am writing this in retrospect and in the knowledge that the oath lasted two and a half days.)

By the time I had located the car it was 5.30 p.m. They had taken it to a recovery place instead, enabling them to charge a fortune for me to get it back. I rang the RAC. They said they could go and pick it up, but according to their rules I had to be there when they did so. Ah, I said, thinking of my transportless state, well, can you pick me up and give me a lift there? No, according to the rules they couldn’t. Well, the buses in this sort of area would have stopped running by then, and failing fifty quid’s worth of taxi, there was no way I could do it. I told them to commit an anatomical impossibility and went to the pub. Next day, Thursday, I could see myself having to empty the flat and become homeless by 9.30 a.m., and find shelter for a gobby wife and about fifty-three plastic bags, while simultaneously sorting the damned car out.

My “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?” moment came on my early awakening next morning when I saw it was lashing down with rain. What better conditions to complete a major logistic operation with no car? Fortunately the wife had done well in organising a man with a van, and I had done well in organising a massively supportive brother-in-law, so both we and our stuff had a place to stay. As on every day this week, I had remained sober so long as there was stuff to be done, but once that was no longer possible, had got massively rat-arsed. I had just started doing this when word came through that my money had arrived. Sadly, it was quarter to six and the estate agents were closed, but at least the end was putatively in sight.
Spent the rest of the evening in one of the best pubs I’ve found in Lancaster, full of disappointed and articulate middle-aged men so I felt right at home, before going on to the brother-in-law’s and a good night’s sleep.

Next morning the horrors continued. We went to the estate agents to do the financial biz, when I remembered we were having a bed delivered that day, the only one we had until the rest of the furniture was delivered from Germany in five days time. The buggers wouldn’t of course let us into the house till the finances were all in place, which would be around lunchtime, so I rang the bed company to find out what time the bed would be delivered. Any time between now (around 10) and 1 p.m. , they told me. I got my arse in a taxi and went to the house, sans keys, getting a where-the-hell-are-you call on my mobile en route from the bed company. Just a moment, I told them, and arrived just in time to take delivery of a bed in bits, which had to be stood against the outer wall. Fortunately, within the hour, I got the nod from the estate agents that the money had come through, and they brought the key round. So we were in, only mildly disconcerted by the fact that an alarm instantly went off which nobody had told us about. As we had as yet nothing but a bed, we decided, on invitation, to stay another night at the brother-in-law’s.

So far so good. Unfortunately the stress had proved too much for the Iron Buddha and she unleashed the row from hell, with all dirty linen waved all over the room. After an uncomfortable night on the sofa, I really thought this was the end. Besides, I had mislaid my medication in the horror, and woke up feeling like I had about six hours to live unless I found it, a feeling which may even have been soundly based. Driving back with all our crap to the new place from my brother-in-law’s, I had to pull in to let a wailing fire-engine pass. “Bet that’s our house burning down,” I said to the IB.

But it was all sorted in the end, leaving me feeling as if I’d survived the siege of Stalingrad. (I’ve always believed in reading a really harrowing book during really harrowing times, to remind me that, however bad it gets, it could always be worse. I read Robert Conquest’s “The Great Terror” while waiting for my cancer tests seven years ago. During this move I completed Antony Beevor’s two books on Stalingrad and the fall of Berlin.)

And hanging over me the whole time was the upcoming court case against the Queen Bitch, which I hadn’t had time to pay a minute’s active attention to – and even once the move was completed, how the f**k am I supposed to find the relevant financial papers in all this mess?

Live Free or Die

2008-01-08T13:55:00.000-08:00

The state motto of New Hampshire. Much in the news at the moment, as there’s some sort of presidential primary going on there today. It’s rather worked its way into my core, as I largely agree with it; I’m not frightened of death, and I am very frightened of living without freedom. Obviously not in the sense that most Americans, including those in New Hampshire, understand it; Americans live in a state of slavery to their employers which I would find rather comparable to life in Nazi Germany. I have to say, though, that (in feminist parlance) freedom is not an absolute value but a gendered preference; women don’t believe in it at all. I wonder if Hillary Clinton has the brass neck to cry “Live Free or Die!” to the voters of New Hampshire. If she does, fifty quid says she gets the horse’s laugh.

Women don’t believe in freedom for each other. Look at the whole “fashion victim” business, and the diet and thinness obsession. It isn’t caused by men, though no doubt some men see chances to make money out of it. It’s caused by women who have made the sacrifices just not being willing to accept other women not having bothered to do so. Women who are thin have suffered to be thin, and they aren’t prepared to see anyone not undergoing the same suffering. It’s all part of Cipriano’s First Law of the Perpetuation of Oppression: If you’ve eaten shit, the last thing you want to see is someone not enjoying their lovely faeces.

And, of course, once a woman gets her hooks in a man, it’s like the Red Army in Eastern Europe in 1945. There will be free elections, except everyone knows who has to win them. Any kind of objection is depicted as a typical example of outdated reactionary revanchism, and thus is usually stifled before it is expressed. You want to spend some time on your own? Sorry, that wasn’t part of the deal, and how on earth could you have possibly thought that it was? That’s really hurtful and inconsiderate. Don‘t you understand that you’re in a Relationship now? The idea that any of your time or your money is your own is the ultimate betrayal. As regards betrayal, women have completely reversed the old male double standard on infidelity. They see a huge crime in sleeping with another woman’s man, but if the man is single it’s no problem, even for married women. That’s not infidelity at all.

And the way a woman who has landed a man turns her brain off. Immediately, all responsibility for any sort of arrangement becomes yours. No address, phone number, or any other practical fact is ever remembered again. She might have been running her life successfully for ten years before she met you; all that stops instantly. Suddenly you are responsible for everything in the world, and had better accept this with a stiff upper lip; the slightest visible wavering will never be forgiven.

Work is horrible, and bears no resemblance to any sort of freedom, but is embraced by many men as the only permitted way to get out of the house. Brits and Americans, in particular, are notorious for staying impossibly long in the office; what this mainly shows is how reluctant they are to go home.

Isn’t it time we started making it clear that we dump them when they become unbearable, or even moderately difficult? And that we’re prepared to take ourselves beyond the reach of divorce courts? After all, it’s not worth any divorced guy working in the West. Thailand, for instance. Just think of it. Thirty quid a go, max. A clear improvement on "all your money and all your time, forever". And don't take any notice of people who say it's shameful to pay for it. Everybody fucking pays for it. The only question is how much.

Banks Again

2008-01-08T13:32:00.000-08:00

Spent the whole day sitting by the phone trying to get my money out of one bank into another, in order to pay the deposit on the new place I was supposed to be moving into yesterday. Endless prevarication, of course, largely based on the principle that no bank is prepared to disburse its customers' money until they have had a few days to extract some juice from it, and even then only if they feel like it. Still, I'll probably have a roof over my head by the weekend. Spent the time waiting for arseholes to ring back reading Antony Beevor's account of the fall of Berlin; as I mentioned before, this tapped into a rich vein of fantasy, with tanks approaching up the Commercial Road while the air force pounds EC3 into rubble, a last stand forming around the east end of St. Paul's while snipers pick them off one by one; meanwhile Oxshott and Chobham and Woking have been overrun by the Red Army, and bankers are being winkled out of cellars and strung up outside, while the victorious soldiers are getting pissed on all the champagne they've unearthed. As a champion of legality, I do of course hope that enough of the guilty are spared to face an enormous Nuremberg trial, after which they'll get strung up just the same. Meanwhile, in each provincial town, red and black flags are flying from the windows of each bank branch, and the managers are sweating in anticipation of a People's Court consisting of their customers, who will wield powers of life or death depending on how they have behaved and how many £60 fines for petty overdrafts they have imposed. But none of them will ever again be allowed to take any job more elevated than cleaning lavatories (possibly - though this will need further thought - equipped with nothing but their tongues).

Banks! Time Libertarian-Communists Got Nasty

2008-01-07T15:13:00.000-08:00

Stand Up! if you Hate the Banks!

How these universal oppressors are still allowed to walk the earth, without getting lynched by everyone they walk past, is a testimony to how wet we have got in the post-1945 era of European peace. I have to say I've spent the last few days reading Anthony Beevor's accounts of Stalingrad and Berlin, and been both horrified and rather impressed at how Germans and Russians treated each other, and wondered how civilised/decadent we all must be these days not to subject bank executives to similar treatment.

I arranged to move house about six weeks ago, and needed (because I don't have a regular income like a good corporate slave) to put up six months rent as deposit before moving in. Wanting to move in on 7th January (i.e. today) I gave instructions to my bank in Germany to transfer money. On December 18th. The silly sods misunderstood my instructions and I finally got them understood on 27th December. Was the money here when I needed it today? Was it fuck. After spending all day making phone calls under heavy artillery fire from all kinds of womenfolk saying it was my fault, I discovered that the bank had only activated the transfer on 2nd and 3rd January. Thus I can't move into the new place and have to move out of the old one the day after tomorrow. Meanwhile I am probably faced with another bleeding divorce. Why do we have to be so enslaved to these bloody people? None of them is ever going to encounter me again without at least a punch in the teeth, I can assure them. And once theCity of London has been levelled by the International Socialist Air Force I will be there on the outskirts shooting fugitives for certain.

Serious Lancashire II: Get Orf My Land - I spoke too soon

2008-01-05T13:11:00.000-08:00

Bought a spinky new pair of walking boots and was determined to get them well filthy. This time drove off up the Lune Valley to a little place about ten miles out of town, and yomped off along a route called "The Lunesdale Walk", tricked out with little blue plaques with arrows on them to assist with the choice of quagmires that faced one at the corner of each field. This went fine until about four stiles in, when the zeal for private property of the local farmers began to get a bit oppressive. The Lunesdale Walk could be clearly made out, but the landowners on either side had seen fit to demarcate the borders of the public right of way with some very solid barbed wire; the fences were, on average, about two feet apart. For a wide bloke wearing a lot of clothes, it being January, this was tricky, but Messrs Barbour did not let me down. I thus progressed about a quarter of a mile to the top of a hill, where things got rather more difficult. Ahead of me, I could see that the barbed wire fences to my left and right were attached to the same tall pole, barring the way. When I arrived at this pole, I could see that a gate was attached to it, parallel to the way I was going, and that at the other side of the gate was another tall pole, attached to another two barbed wire fences marking the rest of the path. This is a bit off, I thought, but nil desperandum. With some effort (at 47 and seventeen stone it is no easier to get one's leg over literally than it is figuratively) I traversed first one fence and then another, and was back on the path. But not for long. Ahead of me was the most enormous heap of shit I had ever seen. I have on many occasions described things that vexed me as enormous heaps of shit, but had not seen anything quite like this in real life before. The heap had been erected on the farmer's side of the fence, but, as is likely to happen with large piles of soggy manure, it had slid and spread out and covered the entire two-foot breadth of the path. Well, I said to myself, are you a man or a mouse? You've never let huge piles of crap defeat you in the past, have you? (I have actually, but never mind.) We can climb this, can't we? So I tried. Unfortunately it's not been any too dry in Lancs so far this year. My first step sank my left foot to the ankle. The second removed the right boot completely from sight. I could see this wasn't going to happen, and I had better let discretion be the better part of valour. I retraced my squelches back to the car.

So I didn't actually hear the words "Get orf my land!" but a ton of shit and about three Dachaus-worth of barbed wire speak louder than words. I don't actually wish a murrain on the cattle of the owner of Curwen Hall Farm, but he might be a bit more careful about blocking off public rights of way.

Worthy but Dull

2008-01-03T15:25:00.000-08:00

First bit of good news of 2008: I’ve now done three days off the booze (more than I managed in 2007) and I haven’t got the shakes or the screaming yips and have yet to espy any pink mice scuttling from the skirting-boards. That means any dependence I have on alcohol is psychological and not chemical. That figures – I haven’t been sleeping well (though I wasn’t in December either), I have been pretty darned grumpy, and more than anything I’ve been BORED; bored blue with green tea, grapefruit juice, Shloer and elderflower pressé, much though I like them all once in a while. Bored with not being able to sign off a day at a sensible time, but having to make it through the evening in full sobriety till the bitter end. Have got more work done than usual, but it’s all a bit uninspired. I just hope my bloody liver’s grateful.

Meet the new year - same as the old year

2008-01-02T10:56:00.000-08:00

Cricket commentator on Sky Sports this morning wishing everyone a good 2008 – “Let’s hope it’s a peaceful one, and one devoid of disasters”. Well, ay-men to that. Trouble is there hasn’t been a year devoid of disasters since the dawn of time. To be brutally honest, what we mean when we say that is “Let this be a year in which all the disasters are happening to somebody else”.

Early news on the rezzo front: didn’t drink a drop, ate a ton of fruit and went for a brisk walk in the Trough, this time unaccompanied by process servers. Result: fearful acid stomach, couldn’t sleep, and weighed a pound more this morning. Well, heigh-ho.

Viva la Città della Cultura!

2008-01-01T06:05:00.000-08:00

I see that Liverpool has launched its reign as European City of Culture with a performance of the unlikely patriotic opera “Emilia di Liverpool”, by Donizetti. That’s always been a favourite of mine, principally for the famous tenor aria of Geraldo*”Non Mai Piú Andrai Solo” – that wonderful swelling line “Andate, andate, con esperanza nel cuore” before the final climax. And then the gentle, lullabyish Chorus of Dockers “Dolce far niente”. The final confrontation, “Dove Son’ I Miei Hubcaps?” is also one of Donizetti’s most memorable. There is also a deeply moving scene set in “a small Alpine village near Liverpool” – probably somewhere on the Wirral – which shows the great Italian’s mastery of diversity; the contrast to the Act II quartet of Giorgio, Paolo, Giovanni and Ringo could not be greater.

Bravo, il Maestro Scousetto!

*e i Fattori di Pace

“And so the native hue of Resolution / Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought...

2007-12-31T16:16:00.000-08:00

I don’t think I’ve ever kept a New Year’s Resolution in my life. In 1995 (I think) I knocked off the booze until January 19th, and in my childhood, having fallen into the habit of using a mildly racist insult I had picked up from schoolmates, I resolved to eschew the word, only for it to slip out in a moment of vexation on 27th December.

Of course we know it’s pointless, but the effort has to be made. Without the occasional well-prepared thrust of abnormal will-power, no alterations to one’s course along the primrose path which leads to the everlasting bonfire will ever be made, and enterprises of great pith and moment in this regard their currents turn awry and lose the name of action, which is certainly what happens to all of mine. One needs a peg to hang these things on, otherwise they won't happen, and the New Year fills the bill. Otherwise, life turns into a slow and drawn-out suicide, in the sense that one is likely to have as little to show for the next twenty years as if one were to top oneself tonight.

So here goes once more for Cipriano’s 2008 rezzos. Not normally given to either self-hatred or schizophrenia, but I will wage a bitter and ruthless war of extermination against roughly one-sixth of myself. I will more than decimate myself. I will wipe the useless and parasitic minority of human cells colonising my waistline off the face of the earth. The pathetic remnants which survive will be strictly confined within the bonds of a 38 inch trouser waist, with a 36 held in reserve as a terrible warning.

And the second is linked to it; I will take action to raise the siege of my poor beleaguered liver. It will get an extended cease-fire from the massed artillery of alcohol, to allow for regeneration. Besides, that’s the only way I can think of to achieve objective 1. I’ve tried everything else, even exercise.

Then there is the usual list of books to write, money to be made, one divorce to digest, another to avoid, just like last year and most of the last forty; nothing new, though one or two things are coming into sharper focus.

For instance, I will spend this year doing more of the things I enjoy doing, and less of the ones I don't. Sounds sorta obvious, until one looks at it. We spend far too much time doing unenjoyable things because we've accepted that we've got to without properly examining the evidence for this belief, or because we can't get our arse in gear to make the necessary plans to do enjoyable stuff instead. No more of that. No doubt 2008 will have its share of unpleasant duties, but each duty will have to declare itself and prove its case against a shit-hot advocatus diaboli before it is accepted as such. And fun will become the default setting. Believe me, that will be more difficult than laying off the booze. Or tell me I'm a liar.

Nobody’s fault my arse

2007-12-30T09:06:00.000-08:00

And so another small child has been killed by the family rottweiler. How many does that make this year exactly?

Of course we are told the family pet had never shown the slightest degree of aggression before. "This wasn't expected, it's nobody's fault," said the detective superintendent in charge of the case.

Well, I give him credit for not wanting to stick the boot in to a family already suffering deeply from the consequences of a catastrophic misjudgement, but hang on a minute. The dog was a rottweiler, for heaven’s sake. I know very little about dogs, but I do know - and so does everybody else - that rottweilers are prone to turn extremely dangerous at the slightest provocation, such as an ignorant and uncoordinated baby sticking its fingers everywhere. “Wasn’t expected”? Senior police officers should be sensitive, but shouldn’t be allowed to talk complete bollocks.

Yes, you get experts on the TV saying that the breed is not intrinsically dangerous – it’s not banned by the Dangerous Dogs Act – and is perfectly harmless if handled properly. Banning more breeds would be wrong because it would apply to everybody, even the sensible dog-handlers. But not banning breeds applies to everybody too, including the sort of family which sprouts fatherless babies like this one, whose mother was 17. And the police and press aren’t allowed to ask questions like “Whose idea was it to introduce a rottweiler into this family, and why?” We all know it’s likely to have been some spotty herbert with a suet dumpling for a brain who thought it might boost his credibility as a bit of a hard man. Well, it wasn’t nobody’s fault, it was his. What we need is not so much a Dangerous Dogs Act – it’s no good blaming them – but a Dangerous Chavs Act.

Big Brother ain’t half watching you

2007-12-30T08:23:00.000-08:00

Bizarre occurrence this morning. Having woken up at a normalish time for once, I decided to go out for a brisk walk in the Trough of Bowland, as part of my no-doubt-doomed attempt to lose a bit of weight. I drove a fairly complicated route to the village of Quernmore, about six miles away, and stopped the car outside the village post office. As I got out in order to tramp up the hill, a man who had stopped behind me got out of his car and addressed me. Though not aware of having given any cause for road rage, I braced myself for it. But the man addressed me with perfect courtesy, saying “I’m sorry to disturb you, Mr Mera” – how the hell could anyone in Quernmore, where I’d never been before, know my name? “but I have to give you this.” Of course, it was a set of legal papers served on me at the behest of the Bitch. You have to hand it to these process servers, they are bloody assiduous. He had clearly arrived at my home just in time to see me driving off, and followed me. It would have been a bit of a laugh if I had driven 160 miles without stopping to my mother’s, as I had done a couple of days before. Anyway, he got his man. Ironically, the papers were just copies of papers I’d already received through the post, so it hadn’t actually been necessary to follow me out into the Trough of Bowland to serve them. But heigh-ho, I’m not paying for it. I wonder how much all this overkill is costing her, and she still hasn’t been told that one of the documents was illegally obtained and could lay her open to criminal prosecution.

English football goes Italian

2007-12-30T08:14:00.000-08:00

No, I have nothing whatsoever to say about Fabio Capello, beyond wishing him all the best with the bunch of dumb-arsed infantilised wankers at his disposal. It’s more sinister than that. A year or so ago, when it was discovered that Italian football was riddled with corruption, we no doubt first composed the odd bon mot about the Pope’s faith and the sanitary habits of bears, and then reflected that that sort of thing wouldn’t happen here. I’m not so sure.

Obviously “we wuz robbed” is the classic response of anyone who loses a football match, but I surely can’t be the first person to have noted the run of refereeing decisions which have pulled Chelsea out of the mire at various junctures this season. As a Liverpool fan I naturally called the referee all manner of opprobrious names when Chelsea equalised at Anfield from a completely fictitious penalty at the very beginning of the season (he actually apologised afterwards); but my saner self reflected that these things happen, and that referees aren’t bent and it usually evens itself out in time. But now? In the week after Christmas we saw a very dodgy penalty and sending off after a Covent-Garden-worthy dive by Micky Bollocks when Chelsea were 2-0 down, and then a last-minute Chelsea winner against Newcastle scored by Salomon Kalou when he was about half a mile offside. A pattern is emerging. Generally we have sensibly rejected any such suggestions, knowing that fair football is likely to bring in much more money in the long term than fixed stuff, and that Englishmen realise this, but these chaps aren’t English, are they? Not being racist here, just culturalist. Russians possess neither the most rudimentary sense of morality nor any tendency to take the long view – money is best grabbed quickly because the future is uncertain. I say Roman Abramovich and his cronies are bribing Premiership referees. At the very least let’s tax the non-doms out of London.

Quite Staggering Christmas Ill-will

2007-12-25T04:54:00.000-08:00

I hold no brief for Tony Blair. I voted for him twice and couldn’t stomach doing so a third time. I left his party entirely because of his leadership. I could go on for some time about the man’s failings. But I don’t think I could have worked up quite such gouts of bile as the right wing of the Catholic Church has , following his reception into the Roman Church a couple of days ago. It made me feel that Blair must be quite a saintly man. I’m sure that, even were I not inclined to do so anyway, I would have told Uncle Joe Ratzinger where he could stick his magisterium after this treatment.

There is a blog where these graceless ultramontanes congregate. I read it because it’s interesting and about interesting subjects, and even contribute to it when feeling confident enough not to mind being told I’m going to Hell. The general line – there are exceptions, but they risk fierce execration – is that it is an utter scandal that Blair has been allowed to join the church without giving public recantations of his position on abortion (natch), homosexuality, and anything else that what I call the Khartoum faction demands a recantation on. The fact that Blair has (one assumes) never performed or been responsible for an abortion or (again presumably) engaged in homosexual relations is neither here nor there. Nor has he been personally responsible for widening access to abortion – what he is being blamed for is not narrowing it, and not actually ensuring that women are put in jail for doing it. A doctrinal paper drawn up by none other than one J. Ratzinger, in a previous job, states that only politicians who persistently vote for increased abortion should be condemned by the Church. I don’t know why Blair didn’t vote for a reduction in the time limit on abortions (I mean, the man has four children – hasn’t he ever seen an ultrasound scan?) but, presumably, if he had, he’d still have voted for some legal abortions, and the ultramontanes would still have condemned him.

You'd think Catholics would be glad to have Tony Blair; not because he's an international celeb, but in the spirit of welcoming a lost sheep back to the fold. Jesus didn't go round demanding public recantations; he just said "Go and sin no more" - no doubt more in hope than confidence, the Man wasn't stupid.

It is obvious that these people simply do not like Tony Blair, which I can understand. But the main reason they don’t like him is that he is a left-of-centre politician; the same blog carries attacks on US bishops who are indulgent to the Kennedys. It would seem the only politicians with whom the Church hierarchy ought to be hobnobbing are the likes of Generals Franco and Pinochet, who got off notably lightly. Generally speaking the Catholic Church has always believed in making its accommodations with secular power, in support of its own claims to temporal as well as spiritual authority. It just prefers torturers and rapists to people who are liberal on poor women who see no alternative to abortion. What’s more, I suspect that some of these people do not actually believe in the substance of the Christian faith: the fundamentalist wing are merely a useful tool to mobilise Catholics in support of political objectives, these objectives being inimical to liberal democracy and having a stronger connection to a political philosophy beginning with F. Titus Oates, where are you now that we need you?

I know the original Cipriano Mera rejected all religion: partly because the only one on offer where he was was the utterly corrupt, decayed and politicised Spanish Catholic Church, which deserved to be wiped off the face of the earth. But I do not think I am departing much from his spirit when I say that Britain must remain, not a wholly secular country, but a Christian (C of E) country. A secular country would have to give equal status to all its religions: no. We have an established religion which places liberal tolerance very high in its list of values. It deserves to be placed higher than the homophobic abortion-fetishists; higher than the gynocidal sharia-boppers, and higher than all those who use their religion to enforce cultural norms on the unwilling. No, C of E for ever: the absurdity of the supremacy of the woolly and über-tolerant is precisely the point. Let’s hear it once more for Antidisestablishmentarianism.

2007-12-23T21:14:00.001-08:00

Been away from the blogosphere for a few days – largely because I was away visiting the city of X (sorry to sound like a 19th century novel, but I have to protect privacy) seeing two of my dearest friends. Two hugely different men moving in profoundly different circles (though they themselves are good friends) and providing two very different but equally valuable takes on life. Let’s call them Q and Z, to be very slightly original.

Q is a prosperously proportioned professional gentleman who appears outwardly to epitomise the comfortable bourgeoisie, but manages not to have internalised any of the attendant bullshit. He has a standard-size family, with two children who have real personalities and are awesomely bright, but have equally clearly not been brought up to compete with the neighbours, get into Eton or end up in an investment bank; they have simply grown up with parents who have a lot of interests and take the trouble to draw the kids into them. (I think I can modestly claim to have done the same with my own.) At Q’s house one gets a warm welcome, loads of booze and massively diverse conversation, but no sense of having to mind a preconceived set of Ps and Qs. At my age shittiness is so all-pervasive that its absence is immediately and powerfully noticeable, like the sensation of stopping banging your head against a wall.

Z is equally widely knowledgeable and diverse in his interests, but his life has taken a completely different path. Debarred from the bourgeoisie by a complete inability to fit in with its rules and practices, he moves among those who have similarly fallen off the edge, though keeping quite a tight rein on his own life; his acquaintance teaches him, after all, what awful fate attends those who let go. Our pub-crawl took us to places frequented by people who have served time for anything up to and including murder (Z, who is no sort of hard man, is known and loved there and thus as safe as if attended by an SAS phalanx) and it ended in the company of a friend of Z’s who was excellent company, but with whom I was rather glad to have been vouched for, as it were. Z’s friend had just returned from the wake of another of Z’s extended acquaintance, and was far from sober, exhorting the virtues of Saddam Hussein and Idi Amin as heroes of the 20th century.

We were joined by two ladies in early middle age who were mourning the death of yet another friend – funerals and wakes play a devastatingly large part in the lives of people in their forties in this milieu – and who were drunk, weepy and utterly charming. One of them came on to me to an extent that might have caused difficulties, especially as she evoked powerful memories of a princesse lointaine of thirty years back. In the end the ladies simply swept out in an alcoholic haze, and considerable firmness was necessary to escape from Z’s friend’s demand for a continuation of the symposium.

It was all very Irvine Welsh, and I mean that without a trace of disrespect. C S Lewis said, admiringly, of an unsuccessful friend of his that “he despised nobody”, and that is true of Z (actually it isn’t – he despises himself, with no good reason that I can see, but at least that fact prevents him from despising anybody else) and, I rather patronisingly hope, of myself.

Finally, a rather wonderful link, for which I must credit my friend The Exile (see Links): here

Yes! Victory in Sight....

2007-12-19T11:05:00.000-08:00

You know that feeling you get, in sport, politics or whatever, when you see your opponent make a mistake that leaves the goal open, the wicket undefended, the queen en prise etc.? Well, I've just come across one in my court battle with the Queen Bitch over all my money. Among the documents that she's presenting to the court in support of her case is one which I know to have been obtained illegally (i.e. stolen) - and (oh joy!) I can prove it. Silly cow - no connection with rationality at all. I rather pity her lawyers who've been told a lot of lies which will stand up in court about as well as me with a bottle of scotch inside me. Still, they're getting paid, and since when have lawyers worried about getting paid for talking a lot of shite?

No Job or Non-Job?

2007-12-17T15:13:00.001-08:00

You know how you sometimes get these strange ideas? Well, I'm perfectly happy not having a job - saves a lot of time and hassle - but it occurred to me yesterday to think about applying for one. I'd just been reading one of Richard Littlejohn's rants about all the lucrative public sector jobs offered in the Guardian, and it occurred to me to look to see if there might be a nice fat wodge of council-tax-payer's money with my name on it somewhere.

I struck lucky at once. I found a local government job which might be perfect for me, in a field I sort of know a bit about (not sure how important that is). Rather a tasty salary, too. They'd also submitted a list of the qualities they were looking for in a successful applicant. It was written, of course, in management-speak, which consists of an endless daisy-chain of abstract nouns:

"Proven success in leadership and team management and participation in the formulation of corporate objectives, policies and strategies within a large multi-disciplined organisation.

Success in giving policy and professional advice to and building effective and productive working relationships with senior managers.

Demonstrable success in the management of change, planning and organisation across a diverse range of services.

Success in building effective working relationships with a variety of communities, partner organisations, private sector providers, public agencies and statutory authorities.

Substantial experience of establishing effective performance measures and evaluating service quality through the involvement of users.

Able to provide visible and supportive leadership, empowering, enabling, motivating and developing the Council’s employees and fostering a positive organisational culture."

As far as I can see, no kind of objective meaning can be attached to any of this. Depending on interpretation, it could cover Wayne Rooney or Osama bin Laden. Seems to me what they are looking for is a consummate bullshit artist.

I must apply. I should be a shoo-in.

Coincidentally, the Iron Buddha is watching a programme on Chinese TV on recruitment to local government jobs over there. In one case it was mentioned that female applicants for some low-level clerical job "will be expected to have perfectly symmetrical breasts". Well, makes as much sense as "empowering, enabling, motivating and fostering a positive organisational culture." But I prefer the British version; after all, a year ago or so I had a minor hormone imbalance problem (no doubt down to a booze-battered liver) which left one of my moobs a bit bigger than the other. I can, however, string abstract nouns together as well as anybody.

A Fucking Merry Christmas and a Happy Fucking New Year!

2007-12-16T17:31:00.000-08:00

Well, here we are again. 'Tis the season to be jolly, if such a thing exists. If Liverpool hadn't got beaten by Man United this afternoon joy would be unconfined. Well, not quite unconfined, as last night I had dinner with the brother-in-law who grew up in India and cooks up a serious cuzza, with all the alcoholic trimmings. My hangovers don't actually give me a headache - just a catatonic paralysis which keeps me in bed for most of the day. Still, did a late-night walk, to and from the pub.....

And anyone who wishes to take the adjective beginning with F in its literal sense has my full effing blessing.

Serious Lancashire

2007-12-15T11:04:00.000-08:00

Manic day. We bipolar types know full well that this is just the flip side of something very nasty indeed, but we know equally that you must enjoy it while you've got it. For the first time for ages slept in something like a proper configuration - 2-10 a.m. Woke up feeling like death and damnation, but medication soon fixed that. Then drove out into the Trough of Bowland for a proper walk - planned, of course, to end up at a pub. Of course the Ordnance Survey maps can still leave one utterly scunnered - but if you get off the proper path and into someone's farm, they don't yell "Get off my land!" - indeed, that would not work, as in this phrase the word "off" is normally pronounced "orf" and they don't do that in Lancashire - but ask you where you're trying to get to and give you sensible directions, while politely suggesting that one ought to be wearing heavy-duty wellingtons, which I knew already, but there was nothing patronising about the comment. And looking puzzled while contemplating a map in a Lancashire village will get you a friendly enquiry as to whether or not one is lost, rather than a triumphalist splash from a gutter puddle. Why the flying fuck anyone wants to live in London is a mystery to me, except for those who seem to think it is compulsory. Listen, ladies and gents. It is possible to get laid outside the Congestion Charge zone. It really is. I know

The £64,000 question...

2007-12-13T12:28:00.000-08:00

(Unconvincing Victor Meldrew impression) "I don't BELIEVE it!"

Got a formal letter from the Queen Bitch's solicitors this morning (or rather this afternoon, when I woke up). Not quite sure what planet the woman is on. To avoid the "stress and costs" of a court hearing, at which she is trying to make me pay £64,000 over the next three and a half years, she suggests a compromise, whereby I pay the whole £64,000 all at once, and then she will leave me alone. Great deal, eh? This isn't child support, either - the kids are both grown up and I do that anyway. It's purely to keep her in the style to which she thinks she is entitled. I rather pity her lawyers, who won't be allowed to suggest any sensible compromise - no, this lady wants it ALL. I have written back to them to say no way, José, and by the way be careful about advancing any statements she might make in court, as she is clearly away with the fairies, and nothing she says will stand up if challenged, as it will be.

If someone like Dave Cameron (or Uncle Gord, for that matter) is interested in supporting marriage, I suggest he starts by legislating to make life less easy for blood-sucking ex-wives with "lifestyles". Otherwise no man will step into the lion's den ever again.

The good guys win on all fronts....

2007-12-12T18:34:00.000-08:00

Yes, we're winning! In Afghanistan we've whipped the Taliban's arse! In Iraq, we've done a lot to keep the head-hackers out! In Kosovo we're halfway to getting de facto independence through, against all the fascists in the world. And, nearer to home, I have the total support of my elder son in resisting the Queen Bitch in trying to grab all my money! Bastards don't win all the time! And there is no reason to support them just because one feels they might win. No, only support the good guys, chaps - you'll only feel like a bit of an arsehole later!

This Makes No Sense At All

2007-12-12T15:12:00.000-08:00

Almost a complete night's sleep (12.30 - 7.30). But it made no difference; by 11.30 a.m., after an exhausting morning spent watching England v. Sri Lanka on the telly, I was knackered again and went back to sleep till about 5. This is clinical depression, and that is how it works.

Why the hell can't we beat the bloody Sri Lankans? No criticism of them, they're currently sporting the world's No. 1 batsman and the most successful bowler of all time, but watching an interminable 9th wicket stand in which their tail end kept us out for hours did not do much to counteract the encroaching clouds of gloom. I spent so much of my formative years watching England bowlers trundle away without even looking like getting a wicket, and it seems that, after a brief interval of being quite good, we're now back there again. Part of the trouble, of course, is people getting injured all the time. Does any other nation have to cope with quite so many bloody injuries? Fred Trueman never spent quite so much of his time being mauled by physiotherapists. Are they wearing crap kit, or are they simply playing too much cricket? Whatever the answer, I bet money is at the bottom of it. Sod the money-men, sod, sod, sod them.

De Profundis Schizosomniae

2007-12-11T14:16:00.001-08:00

i.e. Out of the depths of a steaming sleeping disorder. Not quite insomnia, as I get around 8 hours sleep in the 24, but if those are 3-5 a.m., 10-12 a.m. and 3-7 p.m. it doesn't help a lot in getting much done. In the morning and afternoon waking sessions I'm too whacked to concentrate, and in the evening one I'm so discombobulated that alcohol is the only answer. And of course I need all my wits about me for moving house, doing all the blasted Crimbo stuff, and beating back the threat of the Queen Bitch to steal all my money with judicial help.

Anyway, can't argue with today. My late father's 76th birthday; an utter bugger that he isn't here to enjoy it. A Christmas carol concert this evening, with self on first tenor. And returning to find Liverpool have thrashed Marseilles (yes, that is how you spell it in English, and it's pronounced Mar-sails) 4-0 and made the Champions League knock-out stages. Gloria in excelsis Deo, et in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis. It always maddens me to see this translated "Peace on earth, goodwill to all men". Bollocks. It's "Peace on earth to all men (and women) of good will". And, one is surely allowed to infer, ceaseless war on men and women of the other sort.

Meanwhile the Iron Buddha has started calling me "Albert", on the grounds that my increasingly uncontrollable hair, though not necessarily what lies under it, reminds her of the great Einstein.

After Two Jags, we have Seven Houses

2007-12-08T16:33:00.000-08:00

Just discovered that would-be Lib Dim leader Chris Huhne, he who twenty-five years ago was caught on camera demonstrating with wild hair in Oxford, was forced to admit in a recent interview that he owns seven houses. "We have two that we use" (?? I personally find it difficult to be in two places as once, but then I'm not a Lib Dim superstar) "and five that I let out. It is perfectly compatible to strive for success and be ambitious and also want to help the poor, the sick, the chronically ill and the unemployed." Not normally it isn't. It is more usually compatible with thinking that the poor should just be a bit more ambitious and a bit more subservient and should pull their fucking fingers out.

"We shouldn't vilify people for being successful." Yes we fucking should, if being "successful" meant working in the City and taking a cut of every bit of honest business done and gambling with other people's money, all the while living on guaranteed salaries and bonuses, i.e. earning money for turning up. We can't vilify them enough.

It'll be "Seven Houses" Huhne for evermore. At least I hope so.

Tory hypocrisy (next: al fresco ursine defecation)

2007-12-08T12:56:00.000-08:00

Takes a lot to stagger me, but the story in today's press, relating that the Tories are asking that we be told whether the four former British residents about to be released from Guantanamo are "dangerous" or not before we accept them, makes a pretty good attempt. The very same Tories are protesting that keeping Islamic terrorist suspects - always people with a good deal of form and who have been followed for some time - in custody for more than 28 days, while the filth try to work out what they were intending to blow up, is a scandalous invasion of our (our???) civil liberties. And yet people who've been in an American military slammer without charge, for five years and more, had better convince us that they're safe before we dare let them out. Where's the logic? Well, we don't give a toss about security or terrorism, we're just looking for a stick to beat the Government with! No, Brown is not great (as Christopher Hitchens might have said) but who the hell would let the other lot run a bleeding whelk stall?

Everything's going to hell in a handcart (Cipriano argues for higher taxes on "hard-working families")

2007-12-08T12:50:00.001-08:00

Now that all capitalism’s chickens seem to be coming home to roost, and the Government is collectively cowering in the face of a shitstorm, it’s interesting to see where the blame is being laid. Of course for the Tories it’s all the Government and Brown’s “imprudence”; actually there is something in that, in that it was indeed imprudent of him not to rein the banks in. It is entirely their fault, although to say so is our equivalent of dissing Uncle Mo in Sudan.

Northern Rock obviously; it must now be nationalised pour encourager les autres. The £1.3 trillion of personal debt – all thrust at vulnerable and relatively impoverished people by the bloodsuckers. The horrors of London, with BANKERS AND LAWYERS ONLY signs going up around all the nice bits. Having told us for years that essential financial expertise would be driven away if taxes were raised above 40%, we are now being told that essential expertise like private equity sharks and the Russian mafia will be driven away if they have to pay tax at all. Tax them to buggery, I say, and reclaim the West End.

And don’t stop there. What’s with the canard that all monies subject to taxation have been earned by “hard-working families”? What’s a hard-working family when it’s at home? I am sure there are yuppie families in North London who collectively give off enough kinetic energy to power a small city, so on-the-go are all their members with swimming, violin practice, running the voluntary sector etc. But these, gentle reader, are a minority. To comment from knowledge I will have to go back five years or so, to when I was part of a normal, mum-dad-two-kids nuclear family.

I had a job in government service; quite a senior job, and so subject to occasional periods of serious pressure, but on the whole I couldn’t really complain if you were to add “’Nuff said.” My ex-wife was self-employed, which I do admit takes some doing, as there, unlike in most of the public and private sectors, no-one pays you a regular salary just for turning up. But, as her income wasn’t absolutely essential for our survival, she worked only when she wanted to and spent about four months a year on holiday. As for our then teenage sons, only in a context of sledgehammer irony could the term “hard-working” be contemplated. But for the Tories and the Daily Mail we were, I suppose, a “hard-working family”. The real family income at that time, like that of most other middle-class families, came from the appreciation in the price of our house.

No doubt it makes political sense to champion the people who “earn” money by turning up to work and otherwise watching their house prices explode, as there are an awful lot of them, enough to turn an election. But in actual economic terms they are a deadweight. It wouldn’t harm the economy to tax them off the face of the earth. And then maybe we could all afford somewhere to live.

The Just War Theory

2007-12-06T16:59:00.000-08:00

Well, it's said among those less bellicose than Cipriano that one must only wage war in self-defence. I don't always agree with that - and nor did Aristotle or St. Thomas Aquinas - but on this occasion I'll go along with it. I just got a set of legal papers from The Queen Bitch (i.e. my ex-wife) saying that I owe her a lot of money and that Sue, Grabbit and Runne are about to choke it out of me. The fact that she earns about £40k and I earn sod all, and that both our kids are over 18 and I support them, is neither here nor there. She wants money to keep her in a certain lifestyle, and of course her boyfriend, a well-known and well-off Viennese so-and-so, can't possibly be expected to provide that; it's clearly my call.

Well, one or two tricks still up the old sleeve; she's got an academic post with a bogus doctorate, for instance. How do I know this? Well, I wrote the thesis. And if I get slammed by the courts I can at least have a go at getting reimbursed by the Austrian tabloids.....

A tad churlish....

2007-12-05T16:38:00.000-08:00

How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?

How much leather and cork would a Sri Lankan off-spinner chuck if the race-crazed International Cricket Council persisted in letting him get away with it?

No, but seriously - well done Murali, you pop-eyed little bastard. And big up to baldy-bonce Jayasuriya on his retirement - probably did more to make cricket fun than anyone else in the last 15 years.

Puwar tu tha Piupla!

2007-12-04T14:13:00.000-08:00

One of the less striking aspects of the blasphemous-teddy-bear story was the extent to which the must-respect-the-nutters dhimmitude of the British people has extended even into the realm of transliteration.

In the letter which Gillian Gibbons wrote to her pupils' parents about the class teddy bear, its name was given as Mohamed. This is the normal way the name is spelt in North Africa, where Sudan happens to be. It is spelt in many different ways, partly because the Arabic-speaking world is large and varied in its speech. I am no Arabist, but I have been told by those that are that there are great differences between Gulf Arabic and that spoken in the Maghreb region. When I was younger the name was always spelt in English as Mohammed.

However, during my lifetime an edict seems to have gone out that the "proper" transliteration is Muhammad. Likewise, the followers of the desert death-cult were once always described as Moslems; now it must be Muslims. Anyone my age knows their holy book as the Koran, but it is now the height of insensitivity not to write Qu'ran. (I don't know whether that apostrophe is in the right place; but, like the greengrocer, I know there has to be one somewhere.) Basically you can now only use three vowels in Arabic transliterations; o and e are banned. The Foreign Office camel corps tries to make diplomats write Usama bin Ladin. Does that make Arabic words any easier to read for non-Arabists? No, I would say, or possibly Nu.

I believe that this is an attempt - made not by Arabs themselves, but by the PC crew in Britain - to homogenise Arabic around the sort spoken in Saudi, i.e. by unpleasant gynocidal nutcases. Certain newspapers insisted, no doubt enforcing mindless "house style" edicts, that Ms Gibbons' class had named the bear "Muhammad". They hadn't. They'd called it Mohamed. And it is Moslems, not Muslims, who can feck off out of this country if they want to live under Sharia law; and Mohammed, not Muhammad, about whom Sir Salman Rushdie can write anything he damn well likes.

Trivial but Fun

2007-12-03T14:17:00.001-08:00

Found two beautiful quotes in this week's Spectator:

Lord Canning, 19th century Foreign Secretary: "French governments have but two rules of action; to thwart us whenever they know our object, and when they know it not, to imagine one for us, and set about to thwarting that." Diplomatic Service 1986-2006: no change at all.

Most bizarre argument for the death penalty: New York Senator James Donovan, 1975. "Where would Christianity be if Jesus had got eight to fifteen years with time off for good behaviour?"

After dinner this evening the Iron Buddha challenged me to scissors-paper-stone for who was going to do the washing up. Fair enough, I thought. I won. Best of three, she said. OK, I agreed out of pure love, if only of domestic harmony. I won again. Come on, one more try. Give me one more chance. OK, call me a pussy-whipped wimp, I agreed. I won again. All right, she said, I'll do the washing up, but let's try once more. I won. Just once more. I really think I'll get the better of you this time. She didn't. I won five times in a row. This is the most effective kind of wife-beating I have ever come across, and my entire and justified confidence in my ability to outwit her will no doubt reinforce firmly my control of my domestic environment. And all legally, and morally, unexceptionable.

Two Big Wins

2007-12-02T17:34:00.000-08:00

Two victories today which I had predicted with great confidence: Liverpool beat Bolton Wanderers 4-0, and Vladimir "Poisoner" Putin won a landslide victory in the Russian elections. Liverpool had, of course, ensured that the referee and linesmen were firmly on the payroll, had sent emissaries to place polonium-210 in the tea-urn at the Reebok Stadium, and had let the Bolton back four know in no uncertain terms that Rafa Benitez' database held full information on where they lived, where their children went to school, etc. etc. Putin's United Russia party, however, though containing most of the high-profile political operators, knew that they would simply have to rely on standing up on the day, focusing on the concentration, playing for the team, giving 100 percent, doing it for the fans, concentrating on the focus, and getting a little bit of the rub of the green, Brian. Congratulations to both.

She Whose Name Cannot Be Mentioned...

2007-12-02T04:41:00.000-08:00

A highly amusing page on the Times website this morning. On Thursday one Charles Bremner ran a piece about a 41-year-old Chinese singer called Namu, who has appealed to French President Sarkozy to marry her, on the occasion of his recent visit to China. Among the comments received on the piece was one suggesting that she was only doing this to obtain a visa, a practice not unknown among Chinese women. The piece's author then pointed out that she had no need of this; she was already an American citizen, thanks to an earlier marriage. The commentator replied:

"As for Namu, she has apparently gone the typical route, i.e. get your permanent US visa by marrying an American, play the game for the requisite period time, then move on to bigger and better things. Namu should certainly get a prize for grandest ambition by a female Chinese 'gold digger.' Don't EVER say these folks don't think BIG."

Now a little light-bulb switched on in my mind. Didn't I once hear of an even more worthy recipient of the prize, who had thought even BIGGER; someone else who had married an American, dumped him when the citizenship came through, and married someone a great deal richer than President Sarkozy? But they'd hardly publish that particular name on the website of a Murdoch paper.

I was, of course, behind the game. From all sides vats of opprobrium were poured from a great height on the would-be Madame la Présidente. She was described by different commentators as a prostitute, a disgrace to Asia, and a disgrace to self-respecting prostitutes. I found it odd that publicity stunt by a previously unknown Chinese lady would come in for quite such heavy criticism, until I realised that she is standing proxy for a certain other person. Delightful. I keep checking to see whether anyone at News Corp. has twigged and taken the page down, but it hasn't happened yet.

At this point in my blogging the Iron Buddha got out of bed. Thinking it might amuse her, I told her the story. Not my brightest idea. An unquenchable tempest of vilification ensued, aimed not at me but at this woman Namu. I should have remembered that all 650 million Chinese women hate each other with passion, and that it is never safe to mention the name of one to another, but it wasn't just that. Poor old Namu finds herself standing proxy for two hate figures at once. The lady looks rather similar to, comes from the same part of China as, is in the same media/ entertainment biz as, and is in all probability a friend of, a certain execrated ex of mine, any reminder of the existence of whom can cause the ambient temperature chez nous to drop by an instantaneous twenty degrees.

So do give yourselves a laugh and look on the Times website (here) before someone catches on or, better still, Rupert finds out. Meanwhile I shall continue to secure domestic harmony by elaborating, somewhat disingenuously, on how clock-stoppingly hideous Madame Namu is.

Islamophobia - count me in

2007-11-29T21:59:00.000-08:00

Blimey. An Islamophobe’s dream/nightmare these past few days. Personally I don’t like going round feeling quite so angry all the time. But I think we Islamophobes are gradually being absolved of the need to apologise for ourselves. Perhaps it’s time to come out of the closet.

Sudan is an utter disaster. It was from the start – what might have worked as an imperial territory, with nasty white imperialists at least treating the various ethnic groups equally patronisingly, became not so much a nation state as a state of institutionalised civil war. And it ought now be possible to say, not out of racial prejudice but out of simple observation, that you can’t safely put Muslim Arabs in charge of anything. And yes, that does include Palestine. Bye-bye, Palestinian state. Just go and get yourselves assimilated among those so-called Arab brothers who’ve done fuck all for you in the past. If it had been possible to say to the poor woman “Look, there are dozens of countries where you can do some good for poor kids. Just don’t go to Arab Muslim ones, because no-one is safe." Well, now I hope it is.

What’s really irritating have been unsympathetic commentators who’ve said things like “Well, it’s their country and she broke the laws”. Broke the laws? There aren’t any laws, just what some mad fascist cleric decides on a whim. Had she behaved differently and insisted that the name be changed, I can imagine a row breaking out along the lines of “Kufr Western Bitch prevents our kids from honouring our Prophet” and pointing out that a mere woman has no right overruling males, even if they’re seven. “It’s their country and she broke the law” would then be equally appropriate. Shari’a Law is a meaningless concept. It’s just the whim of whoever’s holding the gun or the whip. My slogan for the next confrontation: SHARI’A IS SH’ITE. Just don’t go there. People who go and work in Arab countries for money are henceforth to be called Rent Boys.

And the possibility of the lash reminded us that a chap called Gavin Sherrard-Smith got 50 lashes in Qatar in 1993 for breaking the alcohol ban. (This was reported in the Mail on Sunday – exactly half the comments were sympathetic, and the other half were about how good it would be if we introduced the same punishments here for people the Mail on Sunday doesn’t like.) Qatar! Sells itself as “the acceptable face”. No, we don’t use its airline any more, do we, however cheap its flights to Thailand might be.

Rather like Dubai. A German banker friend of mine – so wholly apolitical that he hadn’t a clue of the significance of what he was saying - that he’d been involved in some big financial deal with the Maktoums, who rule Dubai. His job was to put a syndicate of banks together to raise the money for a project. When Maktoum came over he discovered that one of the banks was M. M. Warburg, and asked if the Warburgs were Jewish. This could not be denied, and he banged the table and demanded that the syndicate be reconstituted as all-Aryan. I understand, though not agreeing with, the Arab boycott of Israel, but if one is the right side of the line between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism one should be perfectly at ease with fully assimilated European Jews like the Warburgs. No, the Maktoums are straightforwardly anti-Semitic. Shit, if we don’t fly Emirates either, getting to Thailand might become a tad expensive.

Remember Hilaire Belloc, also, coincidentally, on the Sudan: “Whatever happens, we have got/ The Maxim gun, and they have not.” Now update it. L’audace, my friends, toujours l’audace. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. And if we don’t get you, the Israelis must.

A few hundred yards from where I live in Lancaster, there stands a vast Victorian Gothic building well set back from the A588. It used to be a mental hospital, called the Royal Albert or something similarly comfortingly Victorian. It would not astonish me if it were discovered that the late Mervyn Peake had been round here and a light-bulb had switched on in his head with the word “Gormenghast” above it.

Not very long ago, somebody decided they could make quite a wad of cash if they dumped the patients and sold the whole thing off. The mantra of “care in the community” was doubtless intoned, and the mental patients returned to their “communities” of origin, to be fed by the ravens. This being Lancashire, a large number of the patients were found to have a birthplace in Manchester. One shudders at the thought of them being dropped off in Moss Side with twenty quid and a couple of local authority leaflets. But that, I’m told, is what happened.

The building, meanwhile, was sold to some Islamic organisation. Now it announces itself as Jamea Al Kauthar Islamic College. It’s a girls’ school of the strict Muslim kind, no doubt there to serve the sort of people who don’t really think girls should go to school at all but have to set up something to show to the police. I’d love to see their GCSE and A level results. Perhaps I should enquire.

Anyway, there’s usually a couple of superannuated Mercs or Volvos parked up there when one drives past, but one very rarely sees signs of human life. I have to say I was rather relieved when, driving into town today at about half past four, I passed a group of girls in niqabs waiting at the bus stop opposite the school. (Since you ask, no I didn’t drive close to the kerb so as to soak them with water. It hadn’t rained today.) So it isn’t entirely an Al-Qa’eda bomb factory. OK, so I’m a bit prejudiced. (I prefer to use the term post-judiced.) But how would you like, in the aftermath of 9/11 and 7/7, to live virtually next door to a place that looks like Gormenghast and is covered with a blanket of silence except for the occasional appearance of a bird in a burqa?

So nothing sinister should be read into the fact that we’re moving house in the New Year. I just need a bigger place so as to get my stuff out of storage. Honest.