A Foolish Interruption

Newsflash - Paisley not a Catholic

2010-09-09T21:03:00.007+01:00

I believe we have a contender for the scoop of the year.

Sky News has discovered that Ian Paisley is not enthused by the prospect of Pope Benedict visiting Britain.

Or, if you are stickler for protocol, the Rev Lord Bannside is not entirely delighted that Josef Ratzinger will be welcomed by the British state. As Sky puts it:

It is not the first time that the Free Presbyterian preacher has protested at the presence of the Pontiff - You don't say.

If that surprises you, it may be as well to sit down before the additional disclosure in this story: his Lordship attempted to dissuade Tony Blair from joining the Roman Catholic church.

There has been much speculation about why Catholicism so appealed to Blair; I have yet to read his memoir (I'm waiting for it to appear in charity shops; I'll send the cover price to the Royal British Legion) but I am led to believe that he does not fully explain this in his book.

In the interim, the question as to why an institution that has colluded in some monstrous errors and crimes (many of which appear in direct conflict with its founding principles) and managed to make a mess of all manner of basic administrative tasks, all the while maintaining an utter faith in its own righteousness and entitlement to power and wealth, should have such an appeal for one of the architects of New Labour must, sadly, remain a mystery.

I do so hope that Lord Bannside and Prof Dawkins will find themselves standing side by side when barracking that silly old German fellow next week.

Trollied Tuesday: Rejoice

2010-08-31T14:55:00.004+01:00

Heavy drinkers outlive non-drinkers.

So there.

Perhaps that old jibe – you won't live longer, it'll just feel like longer – has some validity. I'm no expert (on medical matters, I mean, I think I can claim some expertise in drink-related topics) but surely a sense of general well-being, stimulation and all the other positive qualities associated with drink have some health benefits?

Perhaps Byron expresses it best:

Man, being reasonable, must get drunk;
The best of life is but intoxication:
Glory, the grape, love, gold, in these are sunk
The hopes of all men, and of every nation;
Without their sap, how branchless were the trunk
Of life's strange tree, so fruitful on occasion:
But to return,—Get very drunk; and when
You wake with headache, you shall see what then.

Ring for your valet—bid him quickly bring
Some hock and soda-water, then you'll know
A pleasure worthy Xerxes the great king;
For not the bless'd sherbet, sublimed with snow,
Nor the first sparkle of the desert-spring,
Nor Burgundy in all its sunset glow,
After long travel, ennui, love, or slaughter,
Vie with that draught of hock and soda-water.

(from Don Juan)

Oh, and the Duke of Hamilton is still with us.

A song, a dance, a polemic about corruption in the Niger delta

2010-07-21T14:49:00.005+01:00

There are many people whose lives do not make an ideal subject for a musical. Archbishop McQuaid, Baruch Spinoza, Steve Biko, Jean-Paul Satre, Norman Lamont or Geoffrey Boycott, would not be transformed into colourful and entertaining figures simply by adding an exclamation mark to their name. After all, one of the central jokes in the Producers was the sheer preposterousness of making a musical about Hitler.

Even allowing for the modern trend of making musicals about popular music (presumably to save the hassle of actually writing new songs) I would have put Fela Kuti in that list.

It seems I would have been wrong.

Since this is the internet, I don't think we need let the fact that I haven't seen Fela! (I'm afraid that is the name) stop me from commenting. I would not have thought that 20-minute songs that fuse jazz, funk and traditional African music with scathing political and religious commentaries would be the ideal format for an all-singing, all dancing extravaganza.

But really the concept is so ludicrous that it is impossible not to warm to it. (After all, opera doesn't have any problems with utterly ridiculous plotlines or subjects - Nixon in China? Why that's just the thing to write songs about). One also loves the attempt to sanitise some of his less, shall we say, progressive views.

His wives, or "queens", as he refers to them, are depicted as regal, dignified companions. Others, however, have criticised the play for this. Fela, in fact, married 27 women in 1978 before he adopted a rotating system of 12 wives. In the play, he is able to explain his life choices, but the women are silent.

Aye, good luck with that. One of Fela's finest songs, let us not forget, was Lady; a lengthy plea to women to learn their place and do whatever men tell them. It's not necessarily a view I'd endorse (though the sound of Harriet Harman's voice inevitably prompts me to put it on); but I don't think it matters. The musical merits are, I'd say, pretty indisputable; and it really doesn't need repackaging for a Broadway audience to demonstrate that.
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However, there is an even more unlikely subject for a musical. Proving that life once again mirrors Father Ted (with a nod to I, Keano), Italian audiences have been treated to a musical based on the life of the late pope John Paul II.

Non Abbiate Paura, or Don't Be Scared, this show, like the others, is bustling with show-stopping songs, dance routines and drama. It is an attempt to cram the 84 years of his life into two hours. The musical was written by two priests, one who wrote the script, the other who crafted the songs.

Unfortunately, the best song ever written about Catholicism is not, so far as I can tell, part of the show. So here it is.

First you get down on your knees, and fiddle with your rosaries...

Trollied Tuesday: a class that is pure class

2010-07-20T14:18:00.001+01:00

It is rare that you will find an advertisement as on the money as this. A wine glass that holds a complete bottle: it is perfectly pitched to its likely audience, is accurate and amusing. Advertisers take note - this is how you do it.

Trollied Tuesday: the Duke of Hamilton

2010-07-13T23:30:00.003+01:00

Back to blogging then, with a spot of public service thrown in. Those of you who are familiar with Hampstead, in particular the delights of its pubs, will doubtless be saddened to learn that one of the finest of these pubs - the Duke of Hamilton - is under threat.

It seems there is a property developer who has decided that what this distinctive area needs is more yuppified housing. I would disagree with this proposition on principle - Hampstead's charms are being watered down by the fact that its becoming a sanitised haven for the blandly wealthy - but when it comes at the cost of a distinctive local amenity then the very prospect seems intolerable.

It is one of the finest examples of a community pub one could hope to encounter: it offers a range of good beers (Meantime stout rather than Guinness is a good indication this is something beyond the run of the mill) and a decent cross section of local society. There is no food served, making it more a venue for thinkers and talkers (a recent visit yielded some splendidly lurid - and quite unrepeatable - anecdotes about Lord Mandelson); its closure would see something unique and distinctive, replaced with something that brings little benefit to the world at large.

I must confess, slightly shame-facedly, that I only learned about this threat to the pub last week (via Facebook, in fact) and having decided to wait until Tuesday to post this, the deadline for objections to Camden council has just passed. We can only wait and hope for a proper review. In the meantime, if you are ever in NW3 you would be well advised to visit the pub - either to pay your last respects or, hopefully, to contribute to its long-term survival.

'Could the minister tell the house who ate all the pie?'

2010-06-07T10:55:00.004+01:00

I worry sometimes that this blog does not carry enough stories from the Scottish Parliament. To remedy this state of affairs, here's one: the subsidised restaurant may shut because MSPs prefer pie, chips and beans from the canteen.

Holyrood chiefs are considering closing the restaurant, which is subsidised by the taxpayer, because too few MSPs eat there to make it a going concern.

The eatery offers healthy dishes sourced from the finest Scottish produce, but most MSPs prefer the more calorific, mass-produced dishes on offer in the staff canteen.

Happy the land, you may think, that has politicians that closely represent the populace. I remember working in Dundee a decade or so ago. There was a large Asda store nearby: the small deli counter offering olives, cheeses and so on was dwarfed by pie counter – or 'peh coonter' if you want to get a reasonable approximation of the local accent – that was several metres in length.

When the history of Holyrood comes to be written, there could well be a chapter on pies. A few years ago the arts minister lost his job after he told MSPs he had been late for question time because he was at an Arts Council meeting; in fact he had been eating a pie in the canteen.

There is the wider questions of whether the powers that be at Holyrood have tried to make MSPs something they are not. Before the gourment restaurant that no one uses, there was the issue of the "think pods". These are, effectively, window seats built into MSPs' offices. The idea was that MSPs would sit in them, looking out across the city of Edinburgh and and the people of Scotland.

The intention was that this vista would inspire them to think about how they could best serve the nation. The problem was that the pods were too narrow for many of the pie-loving parliamentarians.

Trollied Tuesday: on not being a saloon bar bore

2010-05-25T10:47:00.004+01:00

Here's some advice on that on avoiding that fate (or the worse one of people feeling sorry for you): don't make bluff jokes about rules for drinkings; and don't come up with a silly catchphrase when it comes to ordering a refill.

Once noon arrives, though, he brightens up, proposing the first scotch of the day with one of those bluff jokes about rules for drinking so dear to saloon bar bores the world over.

There's more of that in an (unintentionally) entertaining encounter between Decca Aitkenhead and Christopher Hitchens.

One school of thought has it that that "inside Hitchens the revolutionary, a home counties golf club bore is wildly signalling to be let out." Andrew M Brown goes on to argue that Hitchens's family background, naval, conservative and - damningly - minor public school is too heavily engrained on the character.

There's a danger of turning this into a nature vs nurture argument, isn't there? Still it is just as reasonable to argue that a full awareness of the horrors of a minor public school background would be enough to drive anyone into the arms of Bacchus.

Let's get back to that Guardian interview, shall we?, for there are a couple of other details worth noting. One the prissy, self righteous, perpetually disapproving tone adopted throughout by the interviewer that surely says as much about her as Hitchens's inner home counties bore says about him. (One notes also the tone is especially jarring from one who wrote a book about slumming it around the world while taking ecstasy).

One might argue that in the face of such purse-lipped prigishness one has a positive duty to make a drunken disgrace of oneself. In doing so, Hitchens manages a purely Gainsbourgian moment.

Poetry, he does volunteer, always played an important part in his impressive sexual success. "You're disarming yourself in an important struggle if you can't produce a fucking sonnet. What if I had to try on my own merits? You've got to have some sort of reserve arsenal." He looks incredulous when the photographer, a very beautiful young woman, expresses doubt about the efficacy of this seduction technique.

"Oh no, not if it's done right," he says knowingly. Go on then, I say. Give us a demonstration. "Maybe at lunch?" he suggests, cheering up immediately. "Let's have lunch, and make a day of it." And so, inevitably, we adjourn to the pub.

------

We pass a highly enjoyable few hours in a pub garden, during which he tries out successive renditions of a Shakespearean sonnet, Being Your Slave, What Should I Do But Tend, on the photographer.

"Well?", I ask her.

"Give her time to let it sink in!" he objects.

"Um," she ventures. "I'm feeling something like blind panic."

"Really? No!" And he's off again. "Being your slave what should I do but tend/Upon the hours and times of your desire?"

"My feeling," she reports kindly after he finishes, "is that I would be more seduced by argument."

It's not easy combining tragedy and comedy: if it requires a lifetime's drinking to do that, then pour the man another one.

Oh and as for the jokey attitude towards rules for drinking being the hallmark of the saloon bar bore; it's simpler than that. It's the having the rules themselves that are the problem.

Bullshit's coming home

2010-05-19T22:51:00.006+01:00

Reasons to believe England will not win the World Cup (part 99). A bunch of geeks employed by a load of chancers predict they will.

Analysts Matthew Burgess and Marco Dion took data on Fifa rankings, previous football results and bookmakers' odds, then used them in a quantitative analysis model - or Quant Model - designed for assessing the value of stocks.

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The JP Morgan pair freely admit that their predictions should be taken "with a pinch of salt", but viewed the World Cup as "an ideal opportunity to light-heartedly explain quantitative techniques and demystify the typical Quant framework".

Now I am not really qualified to discuss JP Morgan's quantative model in any great detail; it may well be an excellent predictive tool and not at all something that has filtered out the fact that England are a one-man team with no goalkeeper worth speaking of in order to pander to a the national propensity towards over-optimism for the sake of a bit of cheap publicity.

Then again, my instincts may well be justified.

A serious point lurks here, however: the belief that you can construct a mathematical model that can account for the vagaries and falibilities that govern human behaviour was one of the causes of the recent financial crisis. Whether some banks' quantitative models ignored, or chose to ignore, the fact that lending money to people who couldn't pay it back to buy overpriced houses was a bad idea doesn't matter in this context. It went wrong. So it will be with the football.

Besides, you just know the Germans are going to win.

Still no government then

2010-05-11T14:03:00.004+01:00

This suspense is terrible. I hope it will last -

Oscar Wilde

And so it came to pass that all three parties managed to lose the election (some of the smaller parties too, if it comes to that). Good news for journalists, of course, no worse than anything else for the public. Frankly, who needs PR when you can get this sort of instability and uncertainty under good old first-past-the-post?

Anyone who thinks there is some automatic rule that we will go back to the days of big majorities after the next election (in less than 12 months, I suppose) is kidding themselves. When the country is divided, elections often reflect that. Between 1910 and 1950 single party majorities were very much the exception rather than the rule.

While we're waiting to see which party manages to play a weak hand the least badly, I would like to highlight one option no one is considering: a Labour-Conservative coalition. After all, the two parties have as much in common with each other as they do with the Lib Dems; they could unite against their common enemies, defend first past the post, continue to grease up to their super-rich friends and give full vent to their shared authoritarian streak.

Better still, given the widely held belief that the next government will be obliged to take deeply unpopular decisions, both parties have plenty of suitable personnel for a government of national disunity. Harriet Harman as PM, George Osborne as Chancellor, Ed Balls in a sort of Peter Mandelson role as all round lightening rod for public odium, and so forth. Given no one is going to be satisfied with what emerges, this could well prove satisfactory all round.

Here we go again

2010-05-06T12:10:00.003+01:00

Election day. Just think, that in 24 hours' time Ed Balls could be prime minister and trying to think of a plausible way of explaining all the cuts he's only just realised he has to make to public services. Or the news channels may be replaying images of him standing blinking in front of a jeering mob as the obsequies for his political career are read out by the returning officer. I am not sure which would be better.

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A chaotic, uncertain result, one that disappoints all the main parties, is to be preferred for all sorts of reasons. A painful and humiliating loss for Labour (including, of course, by the sacking of Mr Balls); coupled with no majority as punishment for the Tories' belief that they somehow are entitled to power this time round. As for the Lib Dems, it may be best for the voters not to take them too seriously this time. (Maybe then they will take the opportunity to come up with a credible programme for government).

That said, there is one advantage to the Lib Dems doing far better than expected (apart from the obvious chance of getting a better voting system). It would catapult a whole bunch of people who had no particular wish or expectation of becoming MPs into Westminster. Imagine for instance Anna Arrowsmith, porn director turned politician, becoming the MP for Gravesham; I cannot think of a better successor to Harriet Harman as minister for women and equality.

Tough on grannies, tough on the causes of grannies

2010-04-29T11:53:00.006+01:00

If there is a small crumb of comfort for Gordon Brown as he prepares for an evening of two posh boys trashing his cherished self-image as a towering economic genius... actually, scratch that. There isn't a crumb of comfort. Let's start again.

If there is one thing that might raise Gordon Brown's mood from the blackest soul-crushing despair to a state of mere doom-laden, unremittingly hopelessness it is the though that the he is not alone in having a less than favourable impression of the sort of people who vote for him. Here is one of his predecessors, Lord Salisbury, on campaigning

... days and weeks of screwed up smiles and laboured courtesy, the mock geniality, the hearty shake of the filthy hand, the chuckling reply to the coarse joke, the loathsome choking compliment that must be paid to the grimy wife and sluttish daughter, the indispensable flattery of the vilest religious prejudices, the wholesale deglutition of hypocritical pledges.

Admittedly, Salisbury is not directly comparable to Brown. He was not the sort of person to cling to office at all costs (after being ousted for the first time his son sent him a telegram reading: "I hear you are turned out. Many congratulations"); more to the point, he led his party to victory.

Nonetheless, it does suggest that saying what you really think might not be the worse thing for a politician to do. If only Brown promised to be tough on grannies and tough on the causes of grannies, if only he had promised to free the land from the menace of elderly ladies with their poorly articulated failure to grasp the nature of socio-economic change in a globalised economy - well, he'd hardly be worse off, would he? It would probably win back a few Guardian readers from the Lib Dem camp.

Never be rude to an Arab

2010-04-27T12:02:00.004+01:00

The Nigerian slang term for an idiot is Dundee United.

As The Sun puts it:

According to legend, the term came about after the Terrors played several friendlies in Nigeria in 1972.

The tour was a disaster - and the term 'Dundee United' had been used ever since to describe someone of low intelligence among Lagos's Yoruba-speaking population.

I guess it's another distinction for a rather curious club. The club started life as Dundee Hibernians and now plays in orange; it's two nicknames are the Arabs* and the Terrors (an unfortunate juxtaposition that).

I once lived in Dundee; ghastly place, give me Lagos any day.

* For rather mundane reasons; they used to put sand on the pitch in winter.

Dished by the Whigs

2010-04-26T14:35:00.004+01:00

We live in a land of weather forecasts and breakfasts that set in... shat on by Labour, shovelled up by Tories.

Oh go on then, let's talk about the general election. There is something genuinely interesting afoot here. And it's not simply the delightful unpredictability that the rise of the Liberal Democrats brings. Frankly anything is possible - so don't expect predictions here. (Although I stand by my earlier forecast that things will end very badly for Gordon).

The big thing here is the blank incomprehension displayed by many on the Tory and Labour sides as the yellow tide starts to rise above their heads. Admittedly the less delusional elements of the Labour party have just about accepted that their leader is not terribly popular and that spurning the repeated chances to jettison the Jonah before the good ship Labour glug-glug-glugs into the deepest recesses of the ocean may not have been the wisest course of action.
But there's an obvious point that many people on both sides are missing.

A great many people dislike - with varying degrees of intensity - both the Labour and Conservative parties.

You might call this Morrissey syndrome - I've been dreaming of a time/When the English/Are sick to death /Of Labour and Tories - or you may prefer the more elegant line for Withnail & I at the top of this post.

You hear supporters of both parties complaining the leaders' debates have reduced politics to a sort of X Factor in which the poor, stupid deluded voters are falling for the empty charms of Nick Clegg. (Translation, they are losing and they don't like it). I would suggest that underestimating both the electorate and your opponents at the same time is a rather foolish way of looking at things.

There is a pretty deep well of Liberal Democrat-leaning people - remember there are liberals in all three parties - who have always been deterred from voting for the party because they couldn't see the point. The discrediting of the old way of doing politics, the debates and the resultant Lib Dem bounce might, just might, have unlocked this potential. At the very least there is a strong possibility that the public wants to give Labour the most enormous kick where it hurts but does not trust the Tories sufficiently to give them free rein.

The Tories don't seem to have grasped this yet, nor can they quite shed the assumption that they have a divine right to govern simply because Labour has made such a royal balls up of things. If their biggest selling point is being lead by a man who is Not Gordon Brown then they can hardly complain if someone who is better at being Not Gordon Brown than the spivvy, moon-faced gobshite they are offering as the next prime minister emerges.

As for Labour, oh dear. It is not simply that they are led by a man with all the appeal of a leper's clammy embrace, it is that his coronation as Labour leader is a symptom of how badly they've gone wrong. In part, it because Brown encapsulates the uniquely unappealing mixture of rank incompetence, self-righteous authoritarianism and over-bearing desire to meddle in every aspect of people's lives. But there's more to it than that.

In the Nineties Tony Blair realised that if Labour kept losing election after election to a widely disliked, if not hated, Tory party then maybe, just maybe, the problem was with Labour and not the electorate. Large chunks of the Labour party never forgave Blair for this insight, and by repudiating him in favour a more traditionally minded party figure showed that this old delusion - that Labour is the political wing of the British people - will not die.

British hacks: no better than a Frenchman

2010-04-26T13:59:00.005+01:00

Once again France outdoes England. Whereas England's footballers' sex scandals are rather tawdry and vulgar affairs, the French manage a genuine level of scandal, sleaze and, well what you would expect of the French.

The teenage call girl accused of sleeping with at least three French football stars when she was underage broke her silence over the scandal announcing: "I loved them all".

Zahia Dehar, now 18, said she was "shocked" that the players were facing up to three years in prison for the crime.

You may well have read about it already, of course. It's a good story and the English press has reacted with predictable glee. But there is one interesting aspect to this reporting; the journalistic mind works in a rather predictable fashion - when reporting a scandal of this nature there is an immediate desire to dig up similar examples. Virtually every report I have read - be it the Times, Telegraph, Mail, , (not the Guardian, admittedly) has a similar example of moral turpitude to hand.

As the Times put it

The public, whose morale often seems linked to the fortunes of the national side, has reacted with hilarity, annoyance and dismay to the prospect of the side being dragged through the mud by footballers’ libidos. It happens just as the international furore over a Thierry Henry handball against Ireland — allowing les bleus to qualify for the World Cup — has begun to subside.

One might get the idea that your average journalist believes that cheating the Irish out of a place in the World Cup is really comparable to paying a 17-year-old for sex. I can assure you this is not the case: most of them believe Henry's offence was far worse.

The last refuge of the scoundrel

2010-04-21T09:14:00.001+01:00

England is the least patriotic country in Europe, according to a study.

It's things like this that make me proud to be English.

Literal of the week

2010-04-18T15:04:00.003+01:00

Election? Volcanic ash? These matters interest me not. (Oh, okay the election is getting kinda interesting now). But this is more my sort of thing.

An Australian publisher has had to pulp and reprint a cook-book after one recipe listed "salt and freshly ground black people" instead of black pepper.

Anyone who has ever edited anything will recognise that sinking feeling when an obvious, silly and embarrassing error makes its way into print - there is a natural tendency when reading something to see what ought to be there rather than what is actually there and it can never be entirely eradicated. (And there seems to be an iron law of nature than any attempt to highlight or laugh at spelling or grammatical errors made by others means your own post will contain at least one howler).

In any case, I like to thing this sense of "there but for the grace of God go I" is why cock ups of this nature are so enjoyable when somebody else makes them. It also explains why the splendid Regret the Error website, which points out the worst press cock-ups, is especially popular amongst production journalists.

Nor is this cookbook by any means the worst example of this sort of error. In the 17th version of the Bible was published in which the "not" was missing from the "Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery" part of the 10 Commandments; inevitably it became known as the Adulterer's Bible or the Wicked Bible. Reassuringly for students of human nature the Archbishop of Canterbury responded to this with the age-old lament that standards were slipping and this could never have happened back in the day.

I knew the tyme when great care was had about printing, the Bibles especially, good compositors and the best correctors were gotten being grave and learned men, the paper and the letter rare, and faire every way of the beste, but now the paper is nought, the composers boyes, and the correctors unlearned.

One would like to think that copies of this Wicked Bible were carefully guarded and used by societies like the Hell Fire Clubs and the like a couple of generations later. The few surviving copies are certainly highly desireable collectors' items today. One doubts the cookbook will ever have quite the same value; but those who have a copy would be well advised to hang on to it.

Life imitates racing

2010-03-17T09:41:00.003Z

Never mind boozenomics, there is a especially piquantly named horse running at Cheltenham today. Quantitative Easing is, at the time of writing, the 7/1 favourite for the Coral Cup. Lots of punters will be hoping for a cash injection to stave off disaster, but failure will certainly bring about widespread deflation and maybe even a depression.

Unlike real life (I hope), in this race if Quantitative Easing fails, Deutschland could be ready to step into the breach. Beware Wishfull (sic) Thinking, however.

Trollied Tuesday: here we go again

2010-03-16T14:14:00.005Z

It's that time of year of again, when one's thoughts turn to the equine Elysium, the punters' Valhalla that is the Cheltenham festival.

And, among the other bets on offer, Paddy Power has the customary novelty market on how many pints of Guinness will be consumed over the four days (last year it was a shade under 200,000, which is only a couple of pints per person over the four days - I blame the difficulty getting served there). While in betting terms this is just a bit of fun there is an interesting bit of boozenomics at play here. The number of Irish visitors this year could well be a factor; higher consumption could well indicate that people are feeling that they're over the worst economically speaking.

Interestingly, I heard one of the racecourse people on Radio Five Live last night saying that attendances were up this year, and said this was because at least now people knew where they stood financially. Of course, this doesn't mean either the British or Irish economies are out of the woods (they aren't), so increased consumption of Guinness at this year's event should not be taken as proof of economic health.

There are other factors that might affect the number of pints downed. Unlike last year, St Patrick's day falls during the festival (you can bet on the pints consumed on that day alone); which should raise the level somewhat. I will also be going to the festival this year, and shall try to get the level into the 250,001-220,000 band. (Then again, I've just watched an odds-on Irish " "banker" lose in the Supreme Novices Hurdle so the drinking might be somewhat subdued).

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Me? I've backed the winners in the first two races so I will doubtless lose money solidly for the remainder of the festival. However, there is a horse called New Alco which looks to be decently handicapped for the William Hill Handicap. I'm not sure it will win, but it should make an appropriate Trollied Tuesday each way bet at 18/1.

UPDATE: Predictably enough, New Alco staggered home in last place, reeling like a tramp wondering why Kilburn High Road keeps moving. (My Champion Hurdle punts failed dismally too. Thankfully a winner in the last saved the day for me).

Quote of the day

2010-03-03T15:39:00.003Z

This is something I wish I had said.

Politicians who are obsessed by our waistlines, hospital targets, school exam results, health and safety legislation and rationing our fun should beware. This is what Gordon Brown has missed in his quest to woo Middle England. He assumes that we are all Dursleys, desperate for drab uniformity; that no one minds living in a bossy, finger-wagging, repressive, restrictive country if we think it will be a tiny bit safer; that we feel reassured by signs over hot water taps saying “Danger” and we want to be lectured on eating five bits of fruit a day and breast feeding because we cannot be trusted to get it right ourselves.

Bravo Alice Thomson (though the idea that little Cameron will seize this argument strikes me as insanely optimistic). Really, we need more Charlie Wilsons and fewer Charlie Whelans. Should I ever stand for election, I will pledge to do all I can for wastrels, reprobrobrates and deviants.

Question of the day

2010-03-03T15:22:00.004Z

Via one of Roy Greenslade's stand-ins: Why on earth would any newspaper, especially a tabloid, be interested in mystery involving the police being called to the house of a major Tory donor after being contacted by an escort girl who claimed she had been cheated and assaulted?

Perhaps I am being a little unfair to Stephen Brooks, and he is merely expressing his disappointment that there is not a proper, full-on Tory sleaze story here. Perhaps.

If we are to have a Tory government - which I strongly suspect we will - one does at least hope for a better class of scandal than Labour has managed. Complicated tax affairs don't really cut it. Although the old rule that Tory scandals are about sex and Labour ones about money doesn't really hold in an era when the other dividing lines between the parties have become blurred, one thing is clear: if you really want proper scandals bring back the Liberals.

Trollied Tuesday: more puritans

2010-03-02T23:32:00.006Z

One hears some extremely distressing news:

Alistair Darling, the Chancellor, is under strong pressure from 10 Downing Street to "make an example" of whisky, gin and vodka drinkers when he makes his Commons statement next month.
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Under the "nuclear option" plan for increasing duty – designed to appease the health lobby and show that ministers are serious about tackling the problems caused by binge drinking – the cost of a bottle of spirits would rocket, along with the cost of spirit-based alcopops favoured by young drinkers.

A bottle of Bells whisky could rise from £14.79 to £23.73 while Gordon's gin, another favourite of middle-class drinkers, would increase from £12.79 to £21.17.

In other words, a pointless gesture designed to be seen to do something, at the risk of annoying large numbers of people. Let's ignore the obsession with what "middle class" drinkers like; we might even overlook the detrimental effect upon those with slighter more discerning tastes - though one shudders to think how much Laphroaig would cost if little Darling caves in.

Making booze more expensive is the least annoying aspect to this proposal; the utter pointless is what really grates. It's not just that gin and whisky are not generally assumed to be the main cause of drinks related problems; nor is it the fact that the recourse to this type of puritanical gesture is generally the last recourse of the political scoundrel.

Gin makers and - even more so - whisky distillers are small but significant business in which Britain is a world leader. (And one notes that this sector does employ quite a lot of people in the one part of Britain where the Prime Minister is not utterly despised).To jeopardise hundreds of jobs in this area for the sake of a gesture does not add to the aura of statesmanlike competence that generally surrounds the doings of Numbers 10 and 11 Downing Street. One trusts this story was leaked by the chancellor precisely to give him an excuse to ostentatiously not go along with Mr Brown's lunatic plan; were he to do otherwise he would deserve to suffer the full wrath of the forces from hell.

One does realise that the government has to raise some more money somehow, but the fact that there is no effort to spin this story as a money-raiser does lead one to suspect that the sums involved are paltry in comparison to the totals needed to get the deficit down to... you're not going to carry on reading now are you? Have a drink instead.

------

Never mind contributing to the Exchequer. There is something drinkers can do to help lift the country. According to Time Magazine the recent Winter Olympics in Vancouver have been the booziest ever.

(Well the writer couldn't find anyone with first-hand knowledge of the Moscow games - being Yanks they couldn't attend, after all; but it's hardly likely that the Russians would have been habitual drunkards, is it?)

Still there we have it. London's challenge for 2012 is to make sure the Brits outdrink the British Columbians. And if our female Olympians can outdo Canada's women ice hockey players, so much the better.

The art of invenctive

2010-02-24T10:30:00.005Z

Alistair Darling: Brown's minions unleashed forces of hell on me... yes, yes, but it's hardly news to anyone who cares about these matters. To those that don't, it'll make little difference (bar another dimming of the prospects of them voting for Brown and co).

Still, it's not a bad line in invective - a seemingly dead sheep baring his fangs. But it falls a long way short of a truly magisterial denunciation of an utterly despised and discredited regime. Shelly's Masque of Anarchy is something of a gold standard in this regard. It was written in the wake of the Peterloo Massacre .

Authoritarian and nasty as the current shower are, really they had nothing on Lord Liverpool's regime which, in the midst of the economic and social distress that followed the Napoleonic wars, viewed the majority of the population as the enemy within. (Although it did run up a fairly ruinous deficit and was pretty keen on detaining people without trial. I bet Sidmouth would have loved ID cards too).

Whelan, Prescott and Balls visit the Observer's offices yesterday.

Still, the two aren't really comparable and, yes, Liverpool and co were Tories (that party has a repressive streak embedded deep in its DNA). It's the diabolic invective which that government provoked that really interests me. I doubt any of today's politicos or hacks could manage anything like this.

I met Murder on the way -
He had a mask like Castlereagh -
Very smooth he looked, yet grim;
Seven blood-hounds followed him:

All were fat; and well they might
Be in admirable plight,
For one by one, and two by two,
He tossed the human hearts to chew
Which from his wide cloak he drew.

Next came Fraud, and he had on,
Like Eldon, an ermined gown;
His big tears, for he wept well,
Turned to mill-stones as they fell.

And the little children, who
Round his feet played to and fro,
Thinking every tear a gem,
Had their brains knocked out by them.

Clothed with the Bible, as with light,
And the shadows of the night,
Like Sidmouth, next, Hypocrisy
On a crocodile rode by.

Castlereagh was so unpopular that when he died (after cutting his throat because he feared being implicated in a gay sex scandal), his funeral was interspersed by frequent cheers and jeers from the mob. I doubt that even G Brown could manage that. Balls might, I suppose.

Other political news: 7% swing to Gang of Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Jacqui Smith projected to lose seat to Whore of Babylon. New Jerusalem cancelled due to budget cuts. British public again fail to rise like lions after slumber. Hades Central: Con gain.

Raging against the dying of the light

2010-02-23T01:18:00.004Z

With those kind souls at the Guardian Media Group spending £100,000 a day so that I can read the fruits of their hacks' labours for free, I rarely buy their products anymore. But I was happy to make an exception for the newly launched Observer on Sunday to read extracts of Andrew Rawnsley's book on Gordon Brown.

One might detect a delightful hint of subversion in Nick Cohen's Twittering (yes, I know) on the subject:

Daring media business model:You must got to a shop and buy an Observer WITH MONEY to read @andrewrawnsley's revelations abt mad Gordie Brown

Admittedly the rest of the (relaunched) Observer seemed rather thin - a shadow of its former self - due to the paper being gutted to fund the Guardian's grandiose online ambitions. Still one cannot but applaud the dying of the light style in making people pay to read a proper, old-school scoop.

As for Rawnsley's story, you've probably noticed the story is still making waves. Labour's attempts to quash any suggestion of bullying by crushing anyone who attacks the leader is helping to give it legs. The habit of denying specific things - often not things Brown has been accused of - are probably helping this along. One gets the sense that large sections of the print and broadcast media believe they can detect a whiff of dissimulation emanating from Number 10 and will continue to push at this.

For all that, I'm not sure it will make that much difference. A fairly large number of people have already made up their minds about the man from Kirkcaldy. That said if the debate is now being framed in terms of whether the Prime Minister is a bully, or simply boorish and rude to his staff because he cannot cope with the pressure, then it's not the best way to enhance his standing among those voters who haven't made their minds up about him one way or another.

True, there are some who admire, or affect to admire a bit of bullying. It's no secret that the shouting and throwing things at people school of man management is pretty popular in some parts of Fleet Street (look at Andy Coulson's track record); but when you see - to a take a not wholly random example - Paul Dacre's Daily Mail defending this sort of behaviour, it is probably worth remembering this context. And the fact that writers of newspaper opinion pieces of not really representative of most hacks, let alone most ordinary people.

Right, that's enough about the bullies. The Rawnsley stuff won't have surprised that many people who take a keen interest in Westminster village gossip. I was far more interested (and amused) by this snippet:

At one point, the French President said: "You know, Gordon, I should not like you. You are Scottish, we have nothing in common and you are an economist. But somehow, Gordon, I love you." Just in case Brown got the wrong idea, the Frenchman quickly added: 'But not in a sexual way.'

What does Sarko have against the Scots?

Is Bono a Catholic?

2010-02-15T15:14:00.002Z

Say what you like about the Roman Catholic church, of which I am by no means a whole-hearted admirer, it has left a magnificent cultural legacy.

But until now Devil's Music has not really fallen within its purview. Until now, when the Vatican's official newspaper has opted for one of those easy space fillers all newspapers reach for from time to time with its list of its top ten rock and pop milestones.

It is as predictably wrong-headed as you would expect from the Vatican. While some of the press commentary has focused upon the marginally interesting fact that the church has "endorsed" a bunch of hell-raisers and drug takers - it has done no such thing of course, no more than my admiration for Dante means I share his religious views - the more interesting is that one could see why many of the artists would appeal to the Roman Catholic church.

The Beatles/Oasis - not nearly as good as their admirers like to think.
Fleetwood Mac/Pink Floyd - have amassed an undue amount of wealth and influence through peddling the most preposterous overblown nonsense to the misguided and gullible.
U2 - same as above but fronted by a man who appears to believe he is in direct contact with God.
Michael Jackson - I cannot think of anything he may have in common with the Catholic Church.

You want a good song about Catholicism? Here's the best.

Get in line in that processional
Step into that small confessional
There, the guy who's got religion'll
Tell you if your sin's original

If it is, try playin' it safer
Drink the wine and chew the wafer
Two, four, six, eight
Time to transubstantiate.

More on headlines

2010-02-09T22:01:00.005Z

Via the BBC I learn that 10 years ago, Inverness Caledonian Thistle beat Celtic in a cup match. What is remarkable about the BBC's report is that it omits the one truly interesting and memorable fact about that game.

The Scottish Sun reported it the next day with a true headline of genius:

Super Caley Go Ballistic Celtic Are Atrocious.

Never mind some Scottish cup match, that fully deserves to be remembered.

It has been claimed that the headline might have been a little more pre-planned that you might think, and had been originally written in the anticipation that "Super" Ally McCoist would score a hat-trick in an Old Firm Game - he never did, of course. Even if this slightly unromantic version should be the truth , the thinking that the idea was too good not to see the light of day was surely correct.

Trollied Tuesday: Whisky on ice

2010-02-09T12:18:00.005Z

Good news from the expedition to find Shackleton's lost supplies of Scotch. They've found it.

I don't think anyone would have begrudge the expedition team opening one bottle to celebrate. Of course it would be pretty well chilled, which would not meet with the approval of the purists.

Balls to the purists, frankly. They manage to suck the joy out of things. The sort of mindset the insists whisky must be drunk with a set amount of water and frowns on the use of ice is a classic example of that.

Of course you don't want so much ice that it dilutes the drink when it melts, but I find the combination of fiery spirit and ice to be a pleasant combination, with the cold sharpening and intensifying the warming qualities of the whisky (in much the same way the vodka is so much better out of the freezer). It doesn't work with all whiskies of course, but I reckon whisky and ice would be ideal for the South Pole.

Possibly accompanied by a few songs from Shackleton's native land.

Some men take delight in their carriages and rolling
Others take delight in the hurling and the bowling,
But I take delight in the juice of the barley
And courting pretty fair maids in the morning bright and early.

Red Tape Holds Up New Bridge, and other classics of the genre

2010-02-07T23:23:00.003Z

More journalism, this time an appreciation (for want of a better term) of ambiguous newspaper headlines.

Strangely the Times (unlike its New York namesake) omits my favourite. It's from the Second World War and read: "Eighth Army Push Bottles Up Germans". (Often quoted in the even better form of "British Push Bottles Up German Rear"). It may even have the merit of being genuine.

There are lists of this sort of thing floating around on the internet. One would like to think that classics of the genre such as "Prostitutes Appeal To Pope" or "Reagan Wins On Budget, But More Lies Ahead" are genuine. Certainly I recall a local newspaper (can't remember which one) reporting the case of a person who stole a minibus after a night in the pub with the headline "Man, 23, Took Bus Home".

Of course, I would never admit to having produced anything like that myself. But I have managed to prevent classics such as "Sinn Féin Councillor 'Had Links To IRA'" and "Drivers To Feel Ring Sting From Tunnel Toll" making it in to print. I had to fight very hard to fight the urge to turn a blind eye for the sheer devilment of the thing.

I've seen the future of journalism, brother, and it's murder

2010-02-07T22:14:00.008Z

There's a new newspaper in the capital: the London Weekly. It is so bad that the Guardian's blog on the subject includes much speculation as to whether the thing is a spoof.

Apart from the horrible design, the splash has been lifted verbatim from a sub-literate press release (and it's a monumentally tedious story) while the blurb below the masthead includes howlers such as mis-spelling Phil Tufnell's name. It does not get much better on subsequent pages. Nor does the website appear to much of an improvement. ("The London Weekly kept to it's deadline by launching successfully today").

Anyway, the question as to whether or not the thing is an elaborate hoax is almost beside the point. What the London Weekly is is the ne plus ultra of the way journalism has been developing in the internet age: getting your "reporters" to cut and paste and lift things second or third hand; dispensing with production staff (subs everywhere should give thanks for the London Weekly; it is the best possible refutation of the argument that they are an expensive anachronism that must be phased out in the new internet age*) and concentrating on lifestyle tat - and all because it's cheap and allows you to offer the product to a large number of people who won't pay for their news. As such, if it is a spoof it is a very clever and well-executed one.

It may have occurred to many people that it is a little rich for the Grauniad to be mocking others for their typos and literals; but the strategy behind the London Weekly is also something for a warning for those who, like Alan Rushbridger, are systematically destroying the Observer to fund a free content strategy that is costing his organisation £100,000 a day for the pleasure of "engaging" with millions of readers who won't even bring in ad revenue because they are such a diffuse, atomised bunch.

Not that I want to beat up on the Guardian solely: large number of media groups are trying to cut costs and corners while offering a increasingly shoddy cut-price product. I am also prepared to concede that those who believe that trying to charge people to read things online - or getting them to buy newspapers again - is doomed to fail may have a point. (I'd like the opposite to be the case, but that doesn't necessarily mean it will be).

The thing is that if those who argue that the only way you'll get readers is to give your journalism away to them are right; I'm not sure that they'll be able to afford to produce anything much better than the London Weekly.

[Then again, the new free Evening Standard is certainly getting the readers even if the quality is not such that one would imagine many people would pay for it now. Let's see how that pans out].

* I'm resigned to the fact that this post is likely to contain at least one glaring typo or literal as usually happens when you start criticising others' errors.

Turn on, tune in and throw up

2010-02-04T15:40:00.004Z

I know that many of you turn to this blog for invaluable advice on love and romance, so allow me to suggest the perfect way to spend Valentine's Day this year.

Smuggle up on the sofa with your significant other and enjoy an hour-long special featuring Piers Morgan chatting to Gordon Brown. It is bound to change your relationship for good.

------

As an aside, there was a nice line in the last series of The Thick Of It when Malcolm Tucker was told (more or less) "You've gone from being someone people love to hate to someone people just hate. You've gone from being Simon Cowell to being Piers Morgan".

A harsh, but accurate assessment of the straits into which Gordon Brown has lead his party. (And the weary acquiesance which many show towards Cowell's continued existence neatly prefigures that shown towards David Cameron's progress towards Number 10).

How not to look ridiculous

2010-01-28T13:29:00.002Z

If you are thinking about a career in professional football, don't decide to call yourself Pele. Especially if you end up playing (or not) for Falkirk.

The Tragic Muse

2010-01-26T22:57:00.003Z

This year's Costa Prize has been won by Christopher Reid for A Scattering, a volume of poems in memory of his late wife.

He is only the sixth poet to have won the prize (Seamus Heaney was the last, back in the days when it was still the Whitbread Prize). Here's a curious thing, two other winning volumes have also been about the poets' late wives (Douglas Dunn with Elegies in 1985 and Ted Hughes with The Birthday Letters in 1998). Moreover, two of the other winning volumes have been translations - Hughes with Tales from Ovid and Heaney's Beowulf. (Heaney has also won it for The Spirit Level).

I'm not sure whether this says something about the type of poetry that resonates with a wider audience (or at least the judges of literary awards ceremonies) - big, universal themes, be it bereavement or the classics - or is pure coincidence.

Know Thyself

2010-01-25T23:39:00.005Z

It's hardly a trade secret that a successful newspaper (or any sort of publication) is one that has a clear idea of who reads and gives them suitable fare. So what are we to make of the Guardian's view of its readers judging from its lowdown on tax returns?

Questions include:

I'm a teacher on PAYE. I earned about £1,000 in additional income last year from private tuition. About half was in cash. If I "forget" about that money, what are the chances I'll be caught?

A very Guardian-readery scenario that, I'll grant you, if not wholly complimentary about its reader's ethical standards. But what about?

How many tax returns are looked into or audited? I don't imagine more than one in 100, so the risk of being caught must be low.

Surely they wouldn't even think it? Not that bastion of right-thinking liberalism.

I've just started renting out my buy-to-let property. The tenant pays cash. Surely we'll never be found out?

Bloody hell, they think the Graun is read by a bunch of swindlers. No wonder they don't think there's any chance of getting people to pay for it in future.

Questions do not include: Why is this so bloody complicated? Am I right in thinking Gordon Brown is to blame? If I overpay, will these bloody bits of paper go away? Why do I leave this until the last minute every year? Where the hell did I put last year's stuff? and Sod this for a game of soldiers, can I get someone to do it for me and claim it on expenses?*

Poor show, Guardian.

* A: Only if you're the sodding Chancellor of the bloody buggering Exchequer.

Sins of the father

2010-01-22T12:09:00.004Z

Hugo Rifkind's column in the Times made me laugh out loud today. Unfortunately for him, this was the bit that did it.

Apologies to readers who read this article before 8am GMT which incorrectly had the byline Malcolm Rifkind, former Foreign Secretary, instead of Hugo Rifkind.

Trollied Tuesday: Method Acting

2010-01-19T22:20:00.004Z

I had been wondering whether or not to write something about the latest distressing outbreak in which Labour and the Tories compete to find ways to make life disagreeable for drinkers, the drinks industry in the folorn hope that it would somehow pursuade a hardcore bolus of yobboes to change their ways. I did not feel inspired, so imagine my delight when the following story dropped into my lap. (Thanks, Dominic).

Briefly, it concerns a group of German actors who found a way of performing one of the greatest literary works of the last century in the proper fashion.

Actors at a Frankfurt theater in Germany have had their “15 minutes of fame” after they fell off the stage in the middle of a performance based on Venedikt Erofeyev's “Moscow-Petushki” postmodern Soviet masterpiece.

According to Bild, authentic vodka was used as a stage set and the four German actors got progressively drunk as the performance continued.

.. The public was unaware of what was really going on applauding the drunk actors, thinking their behavior was all part of the act.

The true reason became clear only after one of the actors fell off the stage and another found himself under the table.

(NB: news source is Russian, so the linguistic quirks idiomatic infelicities can be put down to that. Or vodka. Or both.)

Anyway, a purist might complain that vodka is put a small part of the full Venichka retinue of booze. Why no Zighuli beer? Why, indeed no Sadko the Wealthy Guest Shampoo or indeed the full Dog's Giblets? But these are small quibbles. I can only say bravo. And encore. What price a stage version of Withnail & I in which the actors match the characters' consumption? It would annoy all the right people. Or even a dramatisation of some of Michel Houellebecq's works. It could even be enlivened further with the introduction of real-life [stop right there].

----

A brief note on attempts to enforce clean living. The most ludicrous scare story concerns that claim that the average Scot drinks 46 bottle of vodka a year. A 75cl bottle of vodka contains 26.5 units of alcohol. At a rate of less than one bottle a week, I calculate the average Scots man is under the safe limit and women only a little over. As ever, it's the ones drinking lots and lots that are the problem. Not the average drinker who is, unfortunately, far easier to bash when politicians or the health authorities seek a convenient scapegoat in lieu of effective action.

A little more more sensible is this report on Buckfast, perceived source of so many of central Scotland's woes. At least it accepts that the alcohol content per se is not the problem (albeit it ignores the telling fact that the Scottish "government's" minimum pricing policies do not affect Buckie); rather it's the mix of caffeine and alcohol seems to have such an unfortunate effect on the people who drink it.

That may be the case, although I am not aware of any major problems caused by the excessive consumption of rum and cokes or Irish coffees (bar nausea, perhaps); as ever it is how people drink and how they respond to it that is the problem, not the drink itself. In other words, is Buckfast bad, or is it the people who drink it that are to blame?

The other figure from the Buckfast report is that the drink is responsible for three crimes a day.
It's worth thinking about that. Drink-fuelled violence is disagreeable to be sure. I've been on the receiving end myself (always in Scotland, perhaps not coincidentally); but it is not as big a problem as some like to make out.

Is it a problem on such a scale to justify the constant attempts at petty harassment aimed at drinkers and the drinks trade? I think not.

I was against Iraq war before I backed it to the hilt, says Straw

2010-01-18T22:49:00.005Z

That is pretty much the import of a letter - leaked by whom one wonders? - in which it emerges that he told Tony Blair about all sorts of misgivings about the venture that he somehow managed to still in public.

Of course, the bare Sunday Times report does not really convey the full extent of the legalistic arse-covering and evasive circumlocutions involved; it is language contorted in an attempt to make sure his arse is covered at all times. You can read it in full, if you can bear it. Otherwise here's a taster:

(i) regime change per se is no justification for military action; it could form part of the method of any strategy, but not a goal. Of course, we may want credibly to assert that regime change is an essential part of the strategy by which we have to achieve our ends — that of the elimination of Iraq’s WMD capacity; but the latter has to be the goal;

Yes, Jack. But what do you think? Is it a good idea or not to attack? Right or wrong? A noble cause or a squalid piece of aggression? You're foreign secretary after all, surely you wouldn't want your name associated with something that you fear is illegal and could backfire disastrously? No?

I should say at this point that if any of you feel like launching into a passionate screed about the rights or wrongs of the invasion of Iraq nearly seven years ago, please don't do it here. There's no shortage of places on the web where you can do that.

However, one would like to think that whoever leaked this letter did so to make Straw look bad; the idea that he (or his "friends") might have done so in the expectation that he might get credit for weakly, evasively opposing something he later actively supported would be an insult to the intelligence.

Still, let's wait and see whether Gordon Brown tries the "I had no idea this was going to happen and if I had done I would have stopped it even though I wrote the cheques for it" defence when he eventually gives evidence to the Chilcot inquiry. It would not wholly surprise were he to do so.

A playground spat

2010-01-14T12:31:00.003Z

For the new year, a new hero. He is the, as yet, unnamed 12-year-old neighbour of Giles Coren. Coren, 40, has been driven to this young fellow who has, thanks to the help of his parents, has been tormenting the Times hack with a constant onslaught of tedious, repetitious banging – finally giving him some insight into the effect his columns have on so many of us.

Anyhow, after this promising start one hopes this young fellow will not be deterred by any slight unpleasantness that may ensue. To this end may I urge all readers of this blog to dig deep and send the boy more instruments; whistles, gongs, flugelhorns, kazoos – anything loud and irritating. In World Cup year a vuvuzela would be perfect. Thousands of Times readers are counting on you.

Note: left over instruments will be dispatched to Tanya Gold's neighbours.

Ulster says 'whooah'

2010-01-09T10:36:00.014Z

A request from a reader materialises, asking that I share my views on the Iris Robinson scandal. To be honest, I am not certain that I have much original to contribute. One might paraphrase Dr Johnson and say that it is not so much that the Democratic Unionist Party needs be embroiled in a first-rate scandal, but that it should be done at all. And yet, what a scandal. It meets all the criteria laid out by Conor Cruise O'Brien in that it is Grotesque, Unbelievable, Bizarre and Unprecedented (for more on the phrase Gubu, see here).

By tradition, scandals in Britain were neatly divvied up between the main parties: Tory ones were about sex, Labour ones were about money, Liberal ones were about both. That distinction no longer holds, at least since the era of Aitken and Hamilton (one might see this as evidence of the dilution of the parties' respective identities) - but here is an affair that combines both these elements. It might not quite be on a scale of the Profumo Affair or, my favourite scandal of all, the Jeremy Thorpe Affair (gay sex, a suggestion of blackmail, allegations of attempted murder, chequebook journalism, suspicions of a judicial fix and - most damningly of all in the eyes of the public - a dead dog).

The DUP might feel reassured that Iris is being thoroughly British in combining both sex and money in the scandal. (In the Republic political scandals are almost invariably about money; sex is generally left to the Roman Catholic Church) - and yet there is so much more to this scandal - the fact that we have a 59-year-old woman sleeping with a 19-year-old man, attempted suicide, the strong whiff of religious hypocrisy, even the limitless possibility of Mrs Robinson gags.

And yet, it should really come as no surprise. Preposterousness and the DUP have long been bedfellows. The Robinsons themselves have previous in this area, whether it was their baroquely greedy expenses, or hubby Peter's "invasion" of the Irish Republic in the Eighties. Moreover, the party has already had its own rather tawdry scandals involving, separately, gay sex and, thanks to Baby Doc Paisley, money. But what makes Mrs Robinson's doings so very special is the religious dimension.

It is not simply the flagrant double standard of quoting the Bible to attack homosexuality whilst engaging in something that is condemned in equally strong terms by the Mosaic Laws. Rather, and again the DUP's bedrock of Bible-thumping bigots should take pride in this, it is a triumph of the Calvinistic temperament. Catholics have long liked to kid themselves that they have a monopoly on understanding such matters as sin, guilt, redemption and so on (they've long kidded themselves about other things too, but we'll let that pass for now); and yet if you really want to thoroughly explore the moral complexity and uncertainty of the human condition, nothing beats a Calvinist who has experienced the great and terrible liberation of throwing away their self-imposed (or are they God-given?) moral constraints.

One need only compare Calvinist writers like Byron and Hogg (even Walter Scott, who did a nice line in religiously conflicted villains) with the likes of Waugh and Greene to see what I mean. These lines might apply nicely to Iris's predicament:

to thee the strife was given
Between the suffering and the will,
Which torture where they cannot kill;
And the inexorable Heaven,
And the deaf tyranny of Fate,
The ruling principle of Hate,
Which for its pleasure doth create
The things it may annihilate,
Refus'd thee even the boon to die:
[from Prometheus]

The thing that fascinates is that Iris has managed to encapsulate two great cultural archetypes - the Mrs Robinson type, the religious zealot exposed as a hypocrite, the crooked politician - and behind these lies a greater archetype: the justified sinner who has strayed far from the path of righteousness into the abyss of sensuality. I suggest that only a Calvinist could manage it quite so rigorously or so well.

How will it play out? I'd counsel against the easy assumption that Peter Robinson is done for and that this will see the DUP losing seats. This may well happen, of course, but the Calvinist sense of righteousness is a funny thing. (Actually this should not be a surprise to anyone on this side of the Irish Sea; just look at Gordon Brown in full on self-justifying mode).

UPDATE: [I've changed the ending of this in light of the latest information.] Any suggestion that the repentant sinner might be easily forgiven seem wide of the mark, though. Iris is anathematised, expelled from the body of ~~the kirk~~ DUP. Peter Robinson may well be knifed in the back, all for the good of the party of course. That's politics, of course, with an added layer of religious fervour.

----

Since I mentioned the Thorpe Affair earlier, I should note an intriguing coda from couple of weeks ago. When the last wodge of official files from 1979 were released under the 30-year rule (mainly showing that Margaret Thatcher was, well, Margaret Thatcher); by far the most interesting detail was the files that were still withheld. These included those pertaining to Airey Neave, Sir Anthony Blunt and Jeremy Thorpe. No reason was given, of course, but one wonders if the decision with relation to Rinkagate might have something to do with this:

In 2002, questions were asked on the BBC programme Newsnight about Jack Straw's involvement in "Rinkagate", after a tape-recording surfaced of Harold Wilson discussing the scandal and saying: "Look, I saw Jack Straw, he's very worried if he were mentioned in this context, he thinks he'll be finished". According to the diary of Barbara Castle, Secretary of State for Social Security, Wilson had asked her to examine Norman Scott's security file to see if it contained any indications that he was working as part of a conspiracy against Thorpe. Straw informed Castle that when he went to examine Scott's file, he found it was missing. The journalist Barrie Penrose has alleged that Straw subsequently leaked information from the file to the media. Straw remains silent on that matter but has denied accusations from Joe Haines, that Wilson asked him to read the files in order to gather information that could be used to smear Thorpe.

Your only man

2010-01-07T10:08:00.001Z

Night Nurse is truly the drink of the gods: Asclepius, Morpheus, bright Apollo.

They should build a statue to whoever invented it.

Spurious comparisons

2010-01-06T00:47:00.005Z

For Caesar and Circero, read Ed Balls and Peter Mandelson.

It is no coincidence that Robert Harris’s latest novel Lustrum is dedicated “to Peter”. The historic battle between Cicero and Caesar, portrayed in the book, is remarkably similar to the present struggle between Lord Mandelson and Ed Balls.

On one side is a brilliant political strategist whose greatest weapon is words, a new Labour patrician who loves the company of wealthy men. On the other is a ruthless political fighter, a populist class warrior who wants to redistribute resources from rich to poor. High politics, low guile, personal ambition, ideological clashes — in modern Westminster, as in Ancient Rome, they are all there.

Rachel Sylvester, The Times

Erm no. They might just about be like the characters in a novel, but I'm not sure that the conquest of Gaul, the defeat of Pompey, shagging Cleopatra and the attainment of supreme power in the Republic quite compare with setting up New Labour, trying to sort out the squabbling tribes in Ulster for a bit (okay, that is sort of Roman), doing something or other in Brussels and then propping up Brown as a sort of grand vizier. (In any case, the comparison with Caesar doesn't really work if Mandelson is only the power behind the throne. I'd be tempted to say he's much more like Crassus.)

The showbiz for ugly people
jibe worked 2000 years ago too

As for Balls as Cicero; well Brown's henchman might have an even more over-inflated sense of his own abilities than old chickpea. Having to translate his bleeding letters put me off Latin for good; that's Cicero's letters, obviously, but Balls may possibly have a similar effect on me with regard to the Labour party. But although he was from humbler origins than the Nottingham High School boy, Cicero, and almost all the Roman elite would have thought the idea of redistributing wealth from rich to poor was preposterous, and rousing the lower orders unthinkable. The idea of Roman politics was to become rich, powerful and part of the elite who kept the plebs in their place.

After working through all those letters to Atticus, one bit of Latin translation I did enjoy doing was the account of the death of Cicero. You may recall they cut his tongue out, and stuck it up on display with his head and the hand he'd used to write the Philippics against Antony. I doubt Ed Balls will suffer a similar fate - although I suspect that should his influence on the Labour party endure, it will end in a similarly brutal retribution at the polls.

In any case, if you want to use classical comparisons to discuss the politics of the day, you will struggle to top Georges Clemenceau's magnificent quip after President Faure died, so rumour had it, whilst receiving a blowjob from his mistress:

Il voulait être César, il ne fut que Pompée.

[He wanted to be Caesar, he ended up being Pompey/pumped - oh you work it out]

Trollied Tuesday: A Brief History of Handwringing

2010-01-05T22:17:00.004Z

I am indebted to my friend Ross for drawing my attention to this article, which also features on the front cover of History Today, Drink: The British Disease?

The standfirst pretty much sums up the subject matter.

Britain has had a long and sometimes problematic relationship with alcohol. James Nicholls looks back over five centuries to examine the many, often unsuccessful, attempts to reform the nation's drinking habits.

Sure enough, the article gives a trawl through five centuries' worth of people complaining about the British love of boozing and how we are far worse than other countries. It should, perhaps, be little surprise that puritans and sundry other tiresome moralisers were especially prone to making these complaints. They are also, and again this should be little surprise, prone to talking utter tosh.

Consider the following:

In 1635 the playwright Thomas Heywood blamed the Danes for first bringing their ‘elbow-deep healths into this land’, but ruefully observed that while north Europeans all seemed ‘addicted to strong and toxing drinks’, it was the English who were ‘most forward to commit this grievous and abominable sin of drunkenness’.

The idea that the Brits (or the English, people elide these two still, which is foolish given that the Scots are also involved) are the worst drunkards of the lot has a long tradition; but Heywood's comments about the Danes almost give the game away. Have none of the people spouting off in this fashion ever met a Norwegian or a Russian? Have they even been to Ireland?

If I have one criticism of Nicholls's articles it is that it only stretches back five centuries. As early as Anglo-Saxon times the authorities were taking measures (literally) to control people's drinking by putting pegs in shared drinking vessels with the hope that people would only drink down to the next one. (I've mentioned this before, but it's worth reminding ourselves that it was completely counterproductive.) Although the evidence is scant, it's probably a reasonable assumption that the ancient Britons were also hopeless dipsomaniacs (certainly their Gaullish cousins were – at least if you believe the Romans).

Doubtless as long as there is drink there will be tiresome prigs moralising about people who drink too much of it, and fantasising about ways they can ensure their fellow citizens behave in a manner of which they approve. I can not say for sure whether the British are particularly afflicted with such people, it strikes me as a valuable area of historical inquiry, however.

One can almost see the standfirst:

Britain has had a long and sometimes problematic relationship with puritanism. Some academic or other looks back over five centuries to examine the many, often unsuccessful, attempts to reform the nation's love of self-righteous meddling.

There is one other striking fact in the History Today article. Consumption of strong drink dropped dramatically in the wake of the First World War. The cause might have been the severe economic recession that followed the war, the heavy loss of life in the conflict or the government's measures to suppress heavy drinking.*

The message, however, should be clear: it's when people aren't drinking that you really want to start worrying.

* Lloyd George, the prime minister of the day, may have been a lecher and deeply corrupt, and he may have destroyed his own party and made things far worse than they had to be in Ireland; but let no one accuse him of underestimating the perils of alcohol. To quote History Today, again:

In March, after meeting a deputation of shipyard owners calling for national prohibition, he stated that not only was Britain fighting Germany, Austria and drink, but that ‘the greatest of these deadly foes is drink’ (after which a Times leader writer was moved to observe that things were ‘getting a little out of perspective’).

Trollied Tuesday: Festive Cheer

2009-12-29T11:59:00.006Z

By now many of you will be feeling sated, bloated and generally over-indulged. Some of us will still be working away when everyone else is over-indulging (NB: I am not fishing for for sympathy here, I don't mind it in the slightest - albeit I would rather like to balance it out by idling throughly when everyone else is hard at it).

Whatever your circumstances, at this time of year there is a greater than normal need for a proper pick-me-up. Here's one I have shamelessly lifted from Kingsley Amis's invaluable Everyday Drinking. It has an even more illustrious literary pedigree - it is, Amis claims, Evelyn Waugh's own noonday reviver.

What you do is the following:

Pour a strong shot of gin into a pewter pint pot. (The pewter improves the taste, maybe, it certainly improves the sensation of drinking the thing - the combination of coolness and solidity is important).

Add a half pint of Guinness.

Top up to the brim with ginger ale.

Try one of these on New Year's Day. You will no longer mourn the passing of time, nor lament the waste and indulgence of the past. What better way to greet a new decade?

PS: Amis's own warning bears repeating. "I should think two doses is the limit."

PPS: If anyone wishes to try this with Foreign Extra Guinness (the strong stuff they make for the Nigerian market, I can hardly stop you. Do let me know what it's like.)

In which Facebook users put the LA police department firmly in its place

2009-12-20T23:00:00.005Z

You hear that sound of cash registers ringing? That's the sound of cash registers ringing at Sony HQ after half a million people who didn't want whatever it was from the X Factor to be number one at Christmas decided to buy some mediocre rock-rap from a subsidiary of the same major record label instead.

And so it came to pass that Rage Against the Machine reached number one; Simon Cowell and the LA Police Department have doubtless been put firmly in their places and the man has had it well and truly stuck to him. It is not clear whether all those who bought the record celebrated by slamming their bedroom doors shut, turning up the volume and refusing to do the washing up and indulging in other forms of adolescent rebellion.

Much as one applauds the desire to kick out against the particular brand of simpering vacuity that Cowell peddles so effectively, one does wish the people leading the campaign against him had put a bit more thought into the effort. Ignoring the blighter rather than ensuring he got even more damned publicity would have been ideal; failing that a better choice of record would have been ideal. Not only can Rage Against the Machine be blamed for abominations like Limp Biscuit (as they would be called if they could damned well spell), their music was used by the CIA to torture terrorist suspects, which rather serves them right.

If one feels the need to indulge in noisy, Californian, teenage rebelliousness it might be best to go back to the source of that sort of thing with the Dead Kennedys. Kill the Poor, would have a nicely festive feel to it; while Too Drunk To Fuck would be perfect for the party season.

However, had the anti-Cowellites asked me, and you may well question why they did not, I would have suggested the song posted above: Wreck A Buddy by the Soul Sisters. A fine example of the innuendo (and obscenity)-laden Slack genre of reggae, set to the tune of The Little Drummer Boy. Happy bleeding Christmas.

----------

This really has nothing to do with the above except a vaguely musical theme. But the following Washington Post cock-up has, quite rightly, been chosen as correction of the year.

A Nov. 26 article in the District edition of Local Living incorrectly said a Public Enemy song declared 9/11 a joke. The song refers to 911, the emergency phone number.

Santa Claus is coming to Thomastown

2009-12-14T23:04:00.004Z

Here's something from Ireland that it is even more preposterous than its politicians: the claim that Santa Claus is buried in Kilkenny.

[St Nicholas] was buried in the cathedral church in Myra, which became a pilgrimage site, but Irish historians claim the early crusaders brought his remains back to Jerpoint Abbey.

Riight. Medieval Europeans were, as anyone with even a cursory knowledge of the era knows, mad keen on relics. As such religious institutions and individuals were often making extremely fortunate discoveries of particularly prestigious (and lucrative) relics. So it was that when St Regulus, so the legend has it, landed in Fife with what he claimed were the bones of the apostle St Andrew, the hitherto undistinguished settlement of Kinrymont became St Andrews, later the ecclesiastical capital of Scotland, on the strength of these bones.

A more famous example was Santiago de Compostella, which became one of Europe's leading centres of pilgrimage, a status it still enjoys today, when in 800 a local bishop suddenly discovered - through some miracle or other - that a previously obscure grave was, in fact, the last resting place of another apostle, St James. (There are cynics who have suggested the grave was, in fact, that of a heretic named Priscillian who was executed for sorcery in the fourth century; but where's the fun in that?)

Europe is full of charming antiquarian legends of this sort. The idea that the bones of St Nicholas, after they were looted during the fourth crusade, ended up in Ireland for safekeeping is a great story. But the chances of it being true are somewhat remote.

Another, even more portentous legend, was revived recently: that Jesus had indeed visited Britain in the company of Joseph of Arimathea. This old story is, of course, the inspiration for Blake's poem (And did those feet, in ancient times/Walk upon England's pasture green)?

I think the same rule applies for both hymns and headlines. If it's a question the answer is no. But not according to Dr Gordon Strachan who finds it a 'plausible' theory.

Coming this far wasn't in fact that far in the olden days," Dr Strachan told BBC Radio 4's The World At One. "The Romans came here at the same time and they found it quite easy."

Dr Strachan added that Jesus had "plenty of time" to do the journey, as little was known about his life before the age of 30.

We do know the Phoenicians had made it to Cornwall, so it is just about possible that the young Jesus hitched a lift on a tin-trading ship and used the opportunity to visit Glastonbury (it's just the sort of place one could imagine a long-haired drop-out and troublemaker like Jesus visiting).

Set against that is the fact that the Romans, as you might recall, found themselves doing quite a bit of fighting with the heavily armed and savage natives. They regarded Britain (we''ll ignore the anachronistic habit of talking about England at a time the Angles et al had never set foot in the place) as the furthest ends of the earth; a barbarous and sinister place, that was notorious for the savage mysteries of the druidic religion - most notoriously the practice of human sacrifice. Not, in other words, the sort of place an impoverished Jewish carpenter from the other end of the Roman world would chose to visit for a lark.

However, the story would explain the pagan and sacrificial elements to Christianity - and the cannibalistic aspects of the ritual of the Eucharist – I suppose (others have put this in the context of the cult of Adonis or the dying god; but I am not sure if this is quite Dr Strachan's intention.

Most unparliamentary language

2009-12-14T23:02:00.004Z

Various Irish journalistic connections have drawn my attention to this elevated exchange so, for those of you who have not seen it, I draw it to yours. Sadly it is not quite on a par with the John O'Donoghue masterclass in statesmanship that many readers of this blog so enjoyed, but then the Bull himself as moved on from the Ceann Comhairle's chair (something to do with his unfortunate expense claims). It does give the unfortunate impression that the TD in question, Paul Gogarty, is channeling the spirit of Father Damo from Father Ted.

A curious fact emerges from Paul Gogarty's possibly premeditated stunt: under the rules of Dáil Éireann, 'fuck you' may not explicitly fall into the category of unparliamentary language. There is a blue book that covers banned insults. It is forbidden to refer to a deputy as a fascist or communist (quite how this works in the case of Trotskyists like the the once and, probably, future TD Joe Higgins is unclear); terms such as brat, buffoon, chancer, corner boy, coward, gurrier, yahoo and guttersnipe are banned, but four-letter words are not.

Declining Standards

2009-12-11T01:30:00.005Z

Here's a way to put an optimistic slant on something. Roy Greenslade, writing in the Guardian about the Evening Standard (for which he also writes a column)

The fact that newsagents are willing to pay to ensure they receive supplies of the London Evening Standard is heartening...

Several people who used to be regular Standard readers have been frustrated by not being to get hold of copies since it went free. They tell me: "I'd pay for it if only I could find it."

An alternative view is that the Standard has managed to become the only newspaper in the world that has managed to find people who would pay to a read a newspaper and then ensure they cannot even get a free copy. (And then there's the question of how many news agents are willing to pay to give the paper away).

When out and about in areas of the capital outwith the major transport hubs I've found it hard to track down a copy; a few people I've spoken to have made the same complaint. If you can't get a copy of what is now London's only evening paper in Bloomsbury, of all places, it does rather suggest that Standard has managed to blast its own feet to pieces rather spectacularly.

But then I'm somewhat sceptical that free journalism is a good way to make money (which can then fund some proper journalistic digging). The old maxim - if you're giving it away for free, it's worth nothing - might apply here.

Trollied Tuesday: 1788 and all that

2009-12-08T11:23:00.004Z

Reason, if reason were needed to visit Paris.

In an auction that has wine-lovers around the world salivating, La Tour d’Argent will sell off part of its cellar under a plan to restore its declining reputation.

David Ridgway, the restaurant’s British head sommelier, will put up 18,000 bottles under the hammer in an attempt to create space for new wines and to raise at least €1 million (£900,000). It is the first time that the restaurant has sold its cellar since opening in 1582.

Among the items going on sale are a "1788 Clos du Griffier cognac, estimated to be worth €2,500, and an 1895 Corton, a red burgundy, estimated at €1,000". That almost sounds like a bargain. The idea of sipping a cognac that dates back to the era of the fall of the Bastille is - even before one considers such factors as taste - particularly appealing: a form of sensory time travel if you will. There are tasting notes, though, according to Ridgway: "The cognac's still very 'young' in the sense of being almost fiery – at least when I last tried one 15 years ago."

Sad as it is for the restaurant to be clearing its cellars in this way, though, there is another problem with all this. Its the suspicion I have that some of the rarest vintages will be bought as "investments" by someone who understands money but does not appreciate life. (It's similar to people who buy expensive artworks and then lock them in a bank vault. I don't really object to rich show-offs who buy the things to put them on display).

Admittedly, keeping a rare vintage locked away in the cellar will see it increase in value; but come on. These things are meant to be drunk. You might as well give the bottles away to some tramps rather than lock them away for ever.

I'll let David Ridgway have the last word here:

"Wines for me are meant to be drunk with people you love preferably. There are too many hoarders."

Quite.

Trollied Tuesday: boozenomics

2009-12-01T14:03:00.004Z

I've long been an advocate of the science of boozenomics: understanding society and economy through the prism of a beer glass. In that spirit the following news report fills me with horror.

Pub operator JD Wetherspoon has announced it will open 250 pubs over the next five years, creating 10,000 jobs in the process.

The new pubs represent a slight increase in the group's current rate of expansion.

Apart from the average Wetherspoons being a bloody awful place, what this announcement tells me is we can expect to see many more long-term unemployed people, drained of all dignity and self-respect, seeking nothing more than cheap booze and oblivion.

Never mind Dubai's woes; the advance of the cheap booze barn is a portent of economic doom.

EU president: smart boy wanted; not too smart

2009-11-20T15:38:00.002Z

Step forward Herman van Rompuy. He might seem like the archetypical boring, bespectacled Benelux bureaucrat who always end up running these things. However, the new EU president is, apparently, an accomplished writer of haikus.

I think all comments on European matters ought to be made through this medium. In that spirit, here's mine:

Baroness Ashton.
Come on, who the fuck is she?
Please say it's a joke.

Henry, quelle con

2009-11-19T14:32:00.003Z

One cannot help but have a certain regard for the French - jammy, cheating bastards they may be. Which other country, having sneaked into the World Cup through a blatant bit of robbery would turn to their philosophers to make sense of it all?

They hauled a star philosopher onto the radio this morning to expound on the implications for the national soul. "There was cheating," said Alain Finkielkraut, a specialist in moral matters. "We are faced with a real matter of conscience," he said on Europe1. "From the moral point of view I would almost have preferred a defeat to a victory in these conditions. We certainly have nothing to be proud of." The key word there is "almost".

Quite. At least the Irish know how to respond when on the receiving end of a blatant injustice. If the roles were reversed I'm not certain they would know how to cope. Just as if, to give a prediction now, England go out on penalties in the quarter finals and the Germans go on to the final, we'll all know how to behave. For it to happen the other way round would be strange indeed.

Curious fact about this World Cup - of all the nations that lie on the Eurasian land mass between Korea (both bits) and Greece, not a single one has qualified.

Trollied Tuesday: Shackleton's stash of scotch

2009-11-17T00:32:00.006Z

This is one of the most worthwhile pieces of scientific research I have heard of in a long while:

A whisky that sustained explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton's ill-fated expedition to the South Pole a century ago is to be brought back to life by drilling a bottle out of the Antarctic ice.

Whisky giant Whyte & Mackay has asked a team of New Zealand explorers to bring back a long-lost sample of McKinlay and Co whisky during a January polar expedition.

Two crates of the long- defunct "Rare Old" brand are frozen in the ice 97 miles from the pole, discarded by Shackleton and his men when they abandoned their 1909 polar mission.

It is possible, of course, that had they decided to drink the stuff rather than burying it under ice, they might have reached the Pole. No matter. The blend is described as "heavy and peaty" in accordance with tastes a hundred years ago. I must say, it sounds just the job for the Antarctic climate.

A pity too that people lost the taste for that type of drink - it makes contemporary blended whiskies sound rather bland in comparison. But a note of a caution here: there are a great many whiskies that have died out - if you consider some of the ones that survived there is no reason to assume that the ones that didn't were any good.

One should consider the wise words of Al Fastier, who is leading the expedition. He insisted he had no wish to taste the whisky, saying: "It's better to imagine it than to taste it. That way it keeps its mystery."

The romance attached to this worthwhile venture transcends mere curiosity about how the Scotch might taste. Rather, it is the possibility that tasting it will perform a sort of osmotic time travel that will transport you back to last great age of exploration, an era of undiscovered frontiers when no self respecting explorer would set off without a stock of tweeds and a crate of whisky to sustain him. An age, moreover, when the (now-defunct) Dublin Evening Telegraph could greet Shackleton's return with the wonderful headline "South Pole Almost Reached By An Irishman".

Imagine how disappointing it would be if his drinks cabinet turned out to have been filled with cheap rot gut.

Apparently sex is quite a good way of grabbing people's attention

2009-11-16T23:28:00.006Z

Of all the various dribblings about the news that Call Girl/Blogger Belle de Jour is really a research scientist one comment stands out in this piece by Rowan Pelling:

She was very smart indeed – always the mark of the born courtesan – and a gifted, witty writer.

Quite. Of all the bits of conventional wisdom one hears (don't have red wine with fish, no invading force has ever won a war in Afghanistan - really?) by far the most infuriating is the argument that men aren't interested in a woman who is as bright or brighter than them.

Now doubtless there are a great many men who are indeed insecure enough to be put off by intelligence in a woman - and a great number of women insecure enough to convince themselves that such creatures are entirely representative as an excuse for their own romantic failures or shortcomings. But this isn't remotely true.

Quite apart from the fact that if there is anything clandestine, furtive (even sordid, if you like) about a relationship, the smarter the other party the better - properly (or even improperly) speaking, one wants the mind as well as the body stimulated. And to do that you want a girl with a bit of imagination, after all.

----

Another interesting thing, quite apart from the fact that most condemnatory reactions to the story have come from self-styled feminists who resent the fact that Dr Brooke Magnanti hasn't had a rough enough time of it, is her rationale for becoming a prostitute.

When she could no longer afford her rent, she started to think: “What can I do that I can start doing straightaway, that doesn’t require a great deal of training or investment to get started, that’s cash in hand and that leaves me spare time to do my work in?”

It may be coincidence, but this is echoes the arguments of Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner in Superfreakonomics, who explore how in prostitution, like any other business, people make similar calculations and respond to incentives.

One can also see this phenomenon in publishing and journalism. I'm afraid this next observation really is going to be a variant on the sex sells theme, but media organisations know the high class hooker/writer unmasked as research scientist story is a godsend because people love a little salaciousness. An even better example is the Freakonomics crew themselves. Their book is studded (if that's the right word) with facts that pander to the reader's endless curiosity about the seamier sides of life (Eg: hookers in Chicago are more likely to sleep with a cop than to be arrested by one, pimps are far more useful to society than estate agents - that one probably isn't much of a surprise really). It's one way of flogging a book about economics, after all.

Any way, so much for the supply. As for the demand, there is the argument that one reason why people (well, men mainly) are willing to fork out vast sums to call girls (£300 an hour in Belle de Jour's case) is that they get something they can't get from their other halves. This might come down to willingness to perform certain sexual acts, of course, but - to return to the Pelling argument - it would strongly suggest that in many cases intelligence, wit and imagination would all be highly desirable too.

It would be nice to think you can't put a price on these attributes. But, of course, that often isn't the case at all.

[Amusing, but distracting typo now corrected]

Sometimes it really isn't the the thought that counts

2009-11-09T22:46:00.006Z

There are those who are wondering why the press is making such a big deal about Gordon Brown's error strewn letter of condolence to the mother of a dead soldier. One angle worth considering this: it's something that is drummed into all journalists very early on (in some cases by bitter experience)

Getting someone's name wrong is one of the worst errors you can commit.

Put it this way, I know people who've been threatened with the sack for less; people understandably take that sort of thing very personally because it is, well, personal. More generally, it does look - at the very least - somewhat graceless and unempathetic to send such a shocking scrawl as a letter of condolence. (Realising you've misspelled the name, scrawling it out and then carrying on with the letter is thoughtlessness taken to a quite breathtaking level).

Still, given that Brown will be getting his P45 in a few months anyway, it would be best all round to accept this a dreadful, albeit unintentional blunder. That Brown somehow managed to compound the inadvertent insult by the more calculated refusal to apologise is sadly all to typical.

As someone with a fair amount of experience in editing other people's work, there's a rather obvious comment I could make about the importance here of getting other pairs of eyes to look over what's been written. I'm not entirely sure why this isn't the case at Number 10. I might, however, observe that it is always the prima donnas, louts, ego maniacs and bullies who kick up the most almighty fuss if anyone dares alter a single character they have written, and who take even the gentlest correction as a personal slight, that generally produce the most dangerous errors. I have no idea whether or not this applies in this instant.

UPDATE: What was it I was saying about getting names wrong? I'm told The Sun website's gone and done it. (No idea if it's genuine). Blood on the carpet at Wapping, I fear. (via Harry's Place).

Trollied Tuesday: The Colton Arms

2009-11-03T13:05:00.006Z

As vaguely promised, this week's Trollied Tuesday is in honour of Fancyapint's Best London Pub of the Past 10 Years.

Can pubs be understood in terms of music? I do hope so. If that is the case, then The Colton Arms may be compared to the best of Morrissey's work. (Now My Heart is Full, seems to sum it up ideally) It will not be to everybody's taste, for sure; but to those who appreciate it, there is nothing else quite like it.* That the pub is rather hard to find (I've managed to get lost in the back streets of Barons Court while trying to find it) adds to this hermetic feel.

Note this is not actually a trip back in time - just as well, the past could only disappoint. However, to step into this pub is to enter an imagined past, one in which civility, gentility and understated grace dominate, and to lament the more disagreeable aspects of modernity (loud music and. It's a pub for real ale, barmen in ties, dimpled pint pots and an almost vanished London - really it could be a black and white movie; some of the clientele appear to be extras in an Ealing comedy.

A session in a pub may have many characteristics; but to become elegaic takes something remarkable indeed.

Picture shamelessly borrowed from Fancyapint.

* Although the Churchill Arms, a pub that manages to be both English and Irish at the same time, may be even more Morrissean.

Crime of the day

2009-11-01T18:05:00.001Z

Who ever would have guessed that dressing up as a sheep in the company of a group of Aberdeen football fans could go badly wrong?

A 24-year-old football fan dressed as a sheep suffered serious burns to his arms and legs when his suit caught fire on a train in Fife.

Further comment would be superfluous.

Saddle sores and drug wars

2009-10-31T16:56:00.005Z

One of the least appealing aspects of Gordon Brown's government has been the pusillanimous pandering to puritanism. The sacking of the government's drugs adviser for daring to advice ministers that scientific evidence and what the Daily Mail would like to be true are not the same thing is a classic example of this failing.

Admittedly, there is a counter argument that David Nutt's job was to advise rather than criticise ministers who failed to take his advice. In any case, he might have expected the flack that his observation that horse riding was more dangerous than taking ecstasy would attract.

That said, I am not aware that anyone has actually refuted his comments about horse riding, which does rather suggest he was correct. Not that drug policy should be based on bare statistics like that. If we are to have a mature and sensible debate about drugs we need to know how enjoyable each activity is so that we can evaluate the risks and rewards attached to each. I would also like to know whether anyone has ever died after riding a horse under the influence of ecstasy. If not, it might be worth trying.

Dear Sir, I wish to protest in the strongest possible terms

2009-10-30T00:16:00.006Z

SIR – I find it intensely humiliating to be asked by airport security staff if I have packed my own bag. This forces one to admit, usually within earshot of others, that I no longer have a manservant to do the chore for me. Gentlemen should be able to answer such questions with a disdainful: "Of course not! Do I look like that sort of person?"

Arthur W. J. G. Ord-Hume, Guildford, Surrey

This letter was even good enough to make it into the Telegraph's letters page; but fear not. There's a book out of unpublished letters to the editor.

The thing I like about letters to the editor is that they are an early example of what is know called "user generated content" - a phrase beloved of the spivs, charlatans and bullshitters who distressingly dominate the debate about how the media can adapt to new technology. It's also a good way of building a community and enhancing the value of your brand and all the rest of it.

There's a paradox at the heart of the letters page: one the one hand the wit and intellect of the readers can vastly surpass that of the journalists. On the other hand, the enormous number of cranks, nutters, bigots, bores and weirdos there are out there: you need to ruthlessly filter them all out; which is why the letters editors' job is such an interesting one. To use Private Eye shorthand, the Guardian needs to dilute the Dave Sparts and Mike Gigglers to a palatable level; ditto the Sir Herbert Gussets and Thatcher worshippers in the Telegraph.

It's a good example of why you need people to edit stuff, even online. You'd have thought that some of these skill can be brought to bear on internet journalism; they probably will be as soon as people learn to ignore the utopians who believe the internet will change everything. You don't want everything to be like Twitter, after all.

Getting it right

2009-10-28T22:46:00.003Z

Reading a news story about the JFS, formerly the Jews' Free School, it struck me that the institution's original name is the perfect indication of the vital importance of correct punctuation. It is also a good example as to why you should think carefully about word order, but still.

Trollied Tuesday: Fancy a pint?

2009-10-27T11:38:00.004Z

This is as good a time as any to wish a happy 10th birthday to Fancyapint. If you wish to know what it is that makes the London pub great, look around.

I am not an unbiased source, of course, since I write the odd review for the site. And it is in this capacity that I shall be attending its annual awards bash tonight. Winners to be put up here when I get home/sober up sufficiently.

I might mark this auspicious event in a suitable fashion: visiting and reviewing the Lucky 7 in Cricklewood perhaps. (As the adage as it, anyone can get banned from a pub, to get banned from the Lucky 7 takes something special).

In the meantime, let me urge you again to help save the Great British pub by going to one.

UPDATE: A full list of the winners on Londonist. May I especially commend a couple of long-term personal favourites: the Jerusalem Tavern and the special award winner, the Colton Arms. The latter is not for everyone, but in a wholly good way. I might elaborate in a future Trollied Tuesday.

Over-vexed and over there

2009-10-16T09:48:00.005+01:00

I am back in Britain; you don't want me to bore you with I did on my holidays stories, do you? So I will not tell you about the bizarre roadside encounter with a Bangkok lady boy in what appeared a simple case of sexual battery turned out to be a an attempted robbery (luckily I was able to convince the little bugger to return my wallet forthwith); nor will I relate how, owing to a misplaced sense of politeness, I became complicit in the ongoing corruption of Cambodia's state institutions and saw a graphic illustration of the shambolic state of that country's military.

But permit me one observation that I think has immense geopolitical implications: as American power and influence wanes, the Chinese appear to effortlessly taken on the role as chief provider of coachloads full of overweight, overbearing, loud, badly dressed and unsympathetic tourists.*

* I am aware that other countries provide badly behaved tourists; luckily for me Britain's lager louts steer clear of the sort of places I was visiting.

No smiling

2009-10-04T18:32:00.005+01:00

It's as well my posting here is usually erratic, otherwise I might have to explain the latest radio silences. As it is, I have been off to places where you can see signs like this.

The sign isn't as silly as you might think, nor is it really neccesary. For it comes from Tuol Sleng, Phnom Penh's museum of genocide. The tens of thousands who died there were a tiny fraction of those killed by the Khmer Rouge in what is, I think, one of the very few examples of a group committing genocide against their own people. (Queen Ranavalona of Madagascar was worse, killing half of her population albeit over a much longer period.)

Anyhow, even a snapshot of what Pol Pot and co got up to in that one corner of their Khmer agrarian socialist paradise gives the strong impression that - despite some pretty strong competition - they were the most inhuman of all the many despotic regimes that disfigured the last century (I mean, even Kim Jong Il lets people watch the odd sports match or artistic performance; there was nothing except subsistence farming under Pol Pot.) On the other hand, they've just started the trial of the chap who was in charge of Tuol Sleng, it might even finish before he dies of old age; I think that sends out a firm message to anyone contemplating something similar.

Trollied Tuesday: Southwold Jack

2009-09-29T22:49:00.004+01:00

This fellow is the chap you will find on the front of bottles of Adnams. He is Southwold Jack dressed, if you should be concerned with such matters, in the uniform of Yorkist soldier.

The pictured statue stands guard over an Adnams building in the Suffolk town (I was there last week and, while I'm sure it is intolerable in the height of the summer when half the tossers in north London descend on the place, in late September it isn't half bad - for one thing Adnams is so much to the fore that the whole place smells like a freshly poured pint.)

Anyhow, you probably no more need me to convince you of the charms of the Suffolk coast than you need convincing of the merits of Adnams ales. However, should you find yourself in that area, do pay a visit to the handsome church of St Edmund. There you will see an earlier (the original?) statute of Southwold Jack; note his unshaven and red-eyed appearance. He makes a gratifyingly honest - and convincing - mascot for a brewery. The pie-eyed look of the fellow above does a similar job too.

The letter I

2009-09-24T23:36:00.005+01:00

Here's a story that has virtually all the elements you could want: gambling, hookers, the mafia, royalty and – that rarest of things – an Italian sex and bribery scandal that does not involve Silvio Berlusconi. All that's missing is a few Nazis and you'd have the perfect newspaper story.

The son of Italy's last king is to stand trial on charges connected to the alleged recruitment of prostitutes for a casino and the rigging of slot machines.

The House of Savoy might well be equipped to lead Italy in the modern era, after all.

But here's the curious thing; every country that has a name that starts with the letter "i" has its banana-republic elements (at least, Iran and Iraq are worse). There's Ireland, the land of Haughey, a wide assortment of gombeens, sleveens, cute hoors and, well, Fianna Fáil (itself founded by a chap who managed to rip off a group of Irish Americans and the plain people of Ireland in setting up the family business). India's survival as democracy is something of a triumph - but one in four members of parliament is facing criminal charges.

Then there is Israel. A couple of former cabinet ministers were jailed last month, the former president is accused of rape, the foreign minister is under investigation for suspected tax evasion and money laundering. Oh, and the former PM is going on trial for fraud tomorrow.

This detail struck me.

Among charities [Ehud Olmert] is accused of double-billing were the Simon Weisenthal Centre, the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum and the World Jewish Congress, according to the Ha'aretz newspaper.

Now, I don't claim to be an expert in Israeli society and politics, but I would have thought that defrauding the national Holocaust memorial charity was thought of thing Israeli society would take an especially dim view of, especially if you are PM.

Anyway, what it is about countries beginning with "i"? In all these cases it's hard to avoid the view that the Scandinavians might have managed things in a better (if less flamboyantly entertaining) manner. Expect some stonking great scandal from the Isle of Man some day.

Trollied Tuesday: in defence of the drunkard

2009-09-22T23:15:00.004+01:00

The growing pursed lipped and priggish tendency in public life is one that frowns on any displays of public intoxication. A great pity as a truly spectacular display of pie-eyed incoherence or shambolic hopelessness is one of the great joys of life.

In standing up for those who put themselves in a state where standing up is difficult that's not to say I endorse the more oafish forms of drunkenness: aggression, vomit and broken glass aren't especially interesting after all. But for all that, even a boorish and tiresome drunk - of the Ollie Reed variety, for instance - provides a rich vein of comedy for all those who don't have to deal with them directly. (Reed's chat show appearances will show you what I mean).

Two news stories from the past week illustrate the point nicely. There was the court appearance of Clare Irby, a distant cousin of the Guinness family that has done so much to bring civility of joy to the Irish nation, who was accused a drunkenly cavorting (a fine word, I wish we had cause to use it more often) with a man she had met on a plane. Rather splendidly, she was cleared of being drunk on a plane because the court ruled that the prosecutors had to prove she was still half cut when the flight had entered British airspace. Since the cavorting had happened earlier in the flight, she was cleared. It's the least she deserved for the joy she had brought to newsrooms across Fleet Street. (Helped, as Rowan Pelling astutely observes, by our love of posh totty behaving badly).

Then there was the story of Boris Yeltsin's trip to Washington. The mental image of the President of Russia "a few hundred feet from the White House clad only in his underwear and trying to hail a cab — because, he explained, he wanted a pizza" is the fable of the emperor's new clothes for grown-ups with a proper sense of the absurd.

Even the fact that this was a man who controlled nuclear weapons (I'm sure they gave him a placebo red button to press in his cups) is much less alarming than the fact that his successor was such a whey faced little puritan. The new president even is trying to get the Russians to stop drinking vodka altogether. No good will come of it.

Old school ties

2009-09-21T23:25:00.004+01:00

There was a time when the public school ethos was rather dismissive of "trade" and the institutions themselves would have hautily rejected any idea that they were businesses. No more; now the places are busily turning themselves into franchises and opening branches — in many places replicating the full public school experience down to the silly uniforms and school songs across the Far East.

Since Harrow first took the plunge back in 1998 by opening a branch in Thailand, other English public schools have either followed suit or been seriously tempted. The famous Harrovian boaters may have looked out of place in downtown Bangkok but, educationally, the model worked.

Many East Asian countries are, rather like the schools themselves, endlessly fascinating to outsiders, but much stereotyped - in some cases even rather unfairly. So in that spirit, one might observe that it is unclear whether that part of the world really needs more institutions that love hierarchies, deference, arcane and bizarre rituals, cruelty and recherché sexual habits.

But there is another curious aspect to it; as the Telegraph article linked to notes, that while these institutions might be widely admired by the super-wealthy, the English education system as a whole is not widely regarded as a great model for everyone else to follow.

In this there is a curious parallel with the American health care system. I can't claim to have followed every twist in the current debate there, but I have noted that many defenders of the status quo in the US cite the fact that wealthy foreigners are often willing to pay for the best facilities America can offer proves the superiority of their own system.

I'm not sure many people in Britain would use a similar logic to resist changes to the educational system - we can all the absurdity of that logic, right? And yet a great many people who can spot the unfairness in the American health system from their vantage point on the other side of the Atlantic are quite happy to encourage a divisive and inequitable education system back home.

Trollied Tuesday: In memoriam the two Keiths

2009-09-15T19:56:00.008+01:00

To cook well is good; to do so in way that others can learn to follow is better; to do so while getting progressively more sloshed on red wine is best of all.

It is thanks to Keith Floyd that I learned this best way to cook: with a glass of wine to hand to progressively enhance the senses as the dish is prepared. In this style of cookery, the journey itself is as important as the destination.

If you care about these matters, and you should, there's a rather neat journalistic distinction between a bon viveur (it is short-hand for raging pisshead) and a bon vivant. It is a rare, and impressive feat, to combine the two qualities. As the Telegraph obit puts it:

With craggy good looks, slightly askew bow tie and upper class tones gravelled by a prodigious smoking habit, Floyd had something of the roguish charm of a 1950s chancer about him. This was not an altogether misleading image as his four wives, most several decades his junior, might attest.

Note too the rather sad irony that Floyd died of a heart attack shortly after being treated for cancer. There was also an ill-timed, but amusing vignette in the Sun:

Docs opened him up for surgery after a lifetime of drunken mayhem and his liver was perfect despite having seen enough booze to float an air-craft carrier.

UPDATE: On this theme, it would be quite wrong of me to overlook Keith Waterhouse - a man who would have appreciated the bon viveur/vivant distinction. An archetype of the old Fleet Street hack; a man whose whole oeuvre was boozy conversation.

Despite listing "lunch" as his only recreation in Who's Who, Waterhouse's output was staggering. As well as the columns, there was his novel and film Billy Liar, and Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell, the play based on the excuse for the non-appearance in print of an equally heroic luncher. He also wrote scores more novels and scripts, and speeches for politicians including Hugh Gaitskell and Harold Wilson.

That's what Labour needs: a leader who while appreciate a bit of literate louche style, none of this management speak and censorious hectoring in future. Please.

Making a mountain out of a Mo-hill

2009-09-11T12:31:00.003+01:00

The news that the name Mohammed is now one of the most popular boys names in England and Wales - if you include all the variant spellings as one - has been greeted with predictable shrieks of alarm in some quarters.

Max Hastings in the Mail being as good an example of predictability as any I suppose, fulminates against a "shabby conspiracy" to compile statistics one way rather than another. But then we get to the meat of the argument:

The Muslim population is now close to two million, over 3 per cent, and rising fast because Muslim families have more children than most of the rest of us, many of them named Mohammed or Muhammed.

I think he's alarmed. You know what is alarming about all this? It does suggest an astonishing lack of imagination on the part of one small subsection of British society. As for Muslims having more children than me, that is far less of a problem than the fact they may be having more sex than me.

If one were to be consistent, then all the Jacks (still the most popular boys' name) and Johns should really be counted as the same thing. But that would just push it further up the chart.

Life imitates art

2009-09-04T23:38:00.004+01:00

One of the best gags from The Thick of It came from a harassed Daily Mail night editor being messed around by the source of his front page splash: "It's not like we're the Independent. We can't just stick a headline saying 'Cruelty', and then stick a picture of a dolphin or a whale underneath. That's just cheating... it's rubbish".*

This is the front page of the Indie on Saturday September 5.

*NB: That scene wasn't a strictly accurate representation of how newspapers are put together. But it damn well got to the heart of what life is like in the engine room of journalism.

Behold the future of journalism

2009-08-28T10:27:00.008+01:00

One day all ~~reporting~~ content generation will be like this. It meets all the Greenslade criteria: online, multi-platform, bigging yourself up, gratuitous twittering etc.

Small fire in London, no one hurt.

Yay for the future.

Update: Another triumph: Mayor of Baltimore surprisingly well-informed about British politics and Midsomer Murders – it's on the net so it must be true. Still, the ease of correcting stuff (and being laughed at if you get it wrong) is quite handy.

Trollied Tuesday: Won't Somebody Think of the Publicans

2009-08-25T23:05:00.004+01:00

This is a story from the Irish Independent: Vintners seek govt action to boost pub trade.

If you were thinking that the fact Irish pub owners need government help to survive it's one of the signs of the apocalypse, you'd be right. Economically speaking at least.

Partly it's just the fact that the publicans' lobby is a pretty powerful and influential one (something to do with Ireland being a small country where much politicking is conducted at a local level and the fact that publicans have lots of dosh and local sway). But the figures quoted don't look good.

The Vintners Federation of Ireland... says 4,800 pub workers have been laid off in the past year.

It says 80% of pubs experienced a fall in profits of at least 10% this summer and half have had to let staff go.

The thing is the loss of the pubs is not going to have much effect on people's drinking habits, but it's damn well going to have a detrimental effect on people's well-being.

Unfortunately the current Irish government is the sort of shower that almost defines the phrase couldn't run a piss-up in a brewery (worse than Brown? I very much fear it is that bad), so I doubt state intervention of the sort they want will really work. The current big economic policy, the National Asset Management Agency, is basically an excuse to dig out the charlatans, chancers, gombeens, spivs and sleveens who colluded in a disastrous debt-fuelled property bubble. As such it is not very popular.

It's not really my business, but a truly courageous policy would be to nationalise the banks, let the developers go bust (and prosecute fraud effectively). Then spend some of the money saved on a giant piss up.

At the very least, the government could try convince people that the patriotic thing to do for the Irish to do would be to embrace the old fashioned image of being always in the pub. Some might feel uncomfortable returning to old, not always wholly complimentary stereotypes, but it would surely be preferable to the crass consumerism of the Celtic Tiger years. Possibly some sort of advertising campaign, with a poster of, some suitably iconic and respected Irish figure (Gay Byrne, say, or Roy Keane or Brian O'Driscoll or Father Jack or anyone really as long as it isn't that utter tosser Bono. Or Michael fucking O'Leary) urging people: I want YOU to go the pub. What do you reckon the chances of success would be?

* You could nick this famous picture of a Kerryman (really), but it might rake up a few of the less pleasant aspects of nationalism.

You know The Wire...

2009-08-25T12:11:00.002+01:00

is no longer cool when the Tories start using it to score cheap political points.

On the downside: few things are more depressing that a Conservative politician trying to be fashionable. If there is one political conclusion that the Wire suggests to me it's that the "war on drugs" and ever tougher sentencing policies are a hopeless, irredeemable failure.

On the plus side: fewer articles in the Guardian banging on about the Wire.

Turning offence into pretence

2009-08-23T23:42:00.005+01:00

Sometimes you know you've seen something exceptional, something that surpasses what you had thought possible. For many, Usain Bolt's performances in the World Athletics Championships will have done that.

For me, though, this article on the Guardian's website tops it. It's Brit getting irate, on the behalf of his Ukrainian girlfriend, that a slightly silly advert features a meerkat doing a parody of Russian accent.

Really.

The advertisement centres on the word "market" – a word that eastern Europeans/Russians pronounce "meerkat" – using talking CGI-animated meerkats. The sole point of this African animal's appearance is, it seems, to highlight the idea that east Europeans cannot pronounce the word market properly when they speak English. It struck me how racist it was to parody what is now a significant part of the British population in this way. It also occurred to me that were the ad to use stereotypical Indian or Caribbean accents in the same way it would never be allowed on TV.

It is, I think, the Platonic ideal of Guardian style idiocy: the whiny grievance-mongering, the humourless and the overwhelming self-righteousness: all over something that is really rather trivial and harmless.

(I should put in the disclaimer at this point that it could all be a send up of the Graun at its most intolerable. If so, it is so well executed I confess it completely took me in.)

The thing that makes me suspect it is not a spoof, however, is that at a time when there are quite a lot of things people could be getting bothered about, this peculiarly British brand of pompous, right-on censoriousness seems to be enjoying something of a revival.

I blame, well, not one particular group but that vast coalition of the prissy, the self-righteous, self-important – many of them religious and/or a certain type of left-winger it has to be said – who regard their right to not be "offended" as trumping all others. If it does nothing else, the meerkat piece exposes the vacuous and self-regarding nature of that particular argument.

The slightly worrying thing is that this brand of nonsense appears to be gaining traction. You remember all those stories from the Eighties about councils banning songs like Baa Baa Black Sheep because they were racist? And how this turned out to be something of a tabloid exaggeration? Yup. Well, we now have quangos telling their staff not to use phrases like "black sheep" and "right-hand man".

Note there is no evidence of anyone actually being offended. But with the perfect combination of bureaucratic arse-covering and grievance-mongering we get this mildly sinister attempt to enforce correctness in every aspect of the language. Frankly, they'd be far better off tackling the acres of jargon that infect public service literature. There really is no excuse for that.

Trollied Tuesday: Côtes du Clyde

2009-08-17T22:28:00.008+01:00

And I'm back. I haven't been on holiday or anything, just a combination of having a lot to do and being bone idle has kept me quiet for a while.

But this is a story that is too good not to share. T he world's best wines will one day be made in Scotland.

It's an intriguing prospect. Not just for the thought that the one day a drink that combines wine and whisky might be more than just something you give to friends in Essex as house-warming gifts. Would becoming the centre of the wine-producing world change Scotland profoundly? Rather than seeing its wine industry as yet another opportunity to get pished on the cheap, would it become more like a Mediterranean country?

After all, with the significantly higher temperatures needed for this prediction to come true, there would be ample chances for a passeggiata in the balmy streets of Dundee, to sip a chilled, locally grown rosé in the streets of Coatbridge late at night. It may even induce people in the west of Scotland to stop necking Buckfast in favour of the odd glass of Côtes du Spey, or Château Urquhart. What do you reckon the chances are? Not great, I'd have to say. Unless they come up with a wine that goes well with a deep-fried Mars bar and Scotch pie. Now there's a challenge for even the most talented wine maker.

Not that British wine is itself a joke; so there's no reason why the Scots should not get in on the act. Even the French are starting to concede that some sparkling English wines - such as Nyetimber and Chapel Down – have something going for them. Recently I was introduced to the delights of Cornish wine, Camel Valley Brut, and I shall soon be sampling another English one.

Someone on Mersea Island off the Essex coast has had the splendid idea of having a combined brewery and vineyard. On a recent visit there I took the opportunity to pick up a keg of their oyster ale - fine stuff, though I suspect it will be even better when drunk in autumnal conditions. I also picked up a bottle of their white wine; I shall let you know if it's any good. I suspect, however, that Colchester and environs will remain immune to continental influences for a while longer.

Rain stopped blogging

2009-07-17T11:44:00.005+01:00

Sorry about the lack of posts here; various things conspiring to keep me unable to do much. In the meantime have some music, and what could be more suited to an English summer than a couple of Irishmen singing about one of Australia's Ashes moments?

In case you didn't know already, it's the Duckworth Lewis Method, probably the only band devoted entirely to cricketing songs.

What more could you want? In my case, a few British artists repaying the compliment by singing about the GAA. Imagine for instance Radiohead on the Ulster SFC; Amy Winehouse paying tribute to Kilkenny's hurlers; Belle & Sebastian on Kerry vs Dublin or Dizzee Rascal imagining himself as Seán Óg Ó hAilpín. That would be good.

Trollied Tuesday: My Dark Places

2009-06-30T09:26:00.005+01:00

Summer heat and the British drop the stoicism the better to display their collective inability to cope with this unexpected weather, a failure typified in attitudes to pub going.

The ideal summer pub, you see, is a darkened place where sheltered from the heat and the light and the frenzy you can transcend the physical here and now of summer. It should be calm and quiet too - at least all the silly sods will be out in the open air.

The problem is that soon as it gets warmish, the newspapers love to produce guides on the best places to drink in the summer; here is one from the Guardian, for example. I don't mean to pick on the Graun, much, because the publication doesn't really matter; you can pretty much guarantee that anywhere named in a newspaper as the ideal summer drinking spot will soon come to resemble no such thing.

Leaving aside the question as to whether you really want dozens of Guardian readers over-running an agreeable riverside boozer (of course not), these things are written under a flawed premise: that what you really want to do is spend hours out in the sun drinking.

A bit of sun's okay - fine if you're out for a swim or a stroll, and it's good that it draws out the young ladies flushed radiantly in their flimsy summer dresses; but for every one of those there will be a good half dozen lobster-red men who should know better in flip flops and shorts or women displaying acres of flesh that should be discreetly covered. People become fractious and loud. And as for dogs and children in the heat, words fail me.

For reasons that should be obvious to anyone with a modicum of self-awareness Britons, booze and hours of sunshine are a bad combination. Partly because it's so many people overdo the wrong stuff - strong, chemically enhanced lagers, white wine with the taste chilled out of it, or cheap cider. Mostly though it's a failure to understand that the pub is a shelter.

So just as in winter the sensible thing to do is hunt down somewhere with a fire, in summer the drinker's natural instinct is to find somewhere cavernous, dark and calm. Ideally you want a place of marbled stillness, or else a pub with dark wooden walls and high windows that only allow the odd sunbeam to pierce the still air. An old Victorian gin palace would be ideal (perhaps something like the Crown Liquor Salon in Belfast). The walls should have the patina and nicotine stains acquired through decades of serious drinking. (Alas that the smoking ban prevents one shrouding oneself in smoke the better to provide a barrier between the pub and the summer heat).

In other words, you want a place in which time is temporarily suspended, in which you can contemplate the graver mysteries of life, love and drinking. Naturally, you want the company to be small and select (not least because you do not want the busy, foolish clamour of the silly sods who will be spending hours out in the sunny swilling booze). If you cannot find anyone like minded, look for a place where the clientele understand the value of silence or who, through their dedication to the drinker's craft, have been temporarily rendered speechless. (These will at least be roused into life should any affected Guardian-reading tossers enter).

As for what to drink. First a practical note, any fool can serve beer in the winter, the summer heat will winnow out the pubs that can't keep a pint of beer in good cask condition. You could do worse than go for a summer special ale (Adnam's Regatta for instance), but why not follow the example of those who live in places like Africa and the Caribbean and drink stout? Guinness is great in the summer, just don't bother with that extra cool shite. You can't glug it, true, but that's probably a good thing, and its sweet, refreshing taste will restore your energy and enthusiasm when you feel sapped an enervated in the heat. It's dark and cool qualities encapsulate the attributes of the ideal summer pub.

I could tell you a few places that meet the criteria; but I'm not going to list them here. Don't want them over-run after all.

This again

2009-06-25T23:26:00.004+01:00

Really that is enough enough about Twitter now. Something that is not an original idea (and which I have moaned about before) has become a vitally important piece of ~~news~~ content.

They identified high literature as a crucial pillar for any generation.

But they also latched on to Twitter, the website where users compress all of human experience into 140 characters. Twitter, they thought to themselves, epitomised the short attention span and info-deluge that defined the contemporary age.

So what if you put the two together? If great literature and Twitter were combined into one new form - Twitterature.

Oh sweet mother of fuck, protect us from these charlatans and bullshitters. If this is a cynical cash-in then fair play to them, I just don't see why it warrants free advertising. If it is in anyway serious then things are worse that I feared. To repeat myself, this is not an original idea, it is a fun parlour game that should not be repackaged and foisted upon the gullible nor used to appeal to the worst qualities of the verbally incontinent, the vapid and the self-obsessed.

One thing that worries is the fashionable delusion in all sorts of media circles that words, language and literature must now be reduced to mere "content" – a thing that has no intrinsic merit in itself, but which can be packaged, marketed and judged on its ad-generating powers. In other words, a triumph of the bullshitters which will seriously degrade culture, literature and thought.

------

Add journalism to that list too. There are some people who give every impression that the most important thing about the Iranian revolution is that it's on Twitter. Well no it isn't actually, though it's one faddish way of getting some people's voices heard; after all, there are multiple ways in which the net has allowed information to leak out - Facebook and Fark (of all things) have got in on the act, so too YouTube.

The trouble with the tweets from Tehran is that the stew of rumour and misinformation can obscure as much as it can enlighten. (As illustrated here - note too the claim that Moldova's authorities used Twitter to sew confusion and misinformation among the protesters there). Oh and the fact that the death of the People's Pederast has overwhelmed Twitter (sorry Iranians, you're already last week's news). There is no substitute for having proper journalists, who know the territory and the people, on the ground trying to sift through the mass of claim and counter-claim and give an accurate reflection of what is really going on. (An impossible task, of course, but one can make a decent stab at it).

I wonder if this confusion between the means and ends doesn't date back to the Reformation and the role of the printing presses in spreading Protestant ideas. Without denying the importance of technology in spreading ideas, I don't think the existence of the printing press itself explains why the Lutherans succeeded where the Hussites or the Lollards (for example) failed.

In revolutions the means in which the message has been spread was never as important as the message itself. In other words, a printing press is no substitute for having a Luther, a Milton or a Jefferson to hand; or a Lenin for that matter. If the Iranian revolution doesn't have a clearer message that a random sequence of 140-character comments, I very much fear it will not succeed.

PS: The following rather illustrates the point.

British homewares retailer Habitat apologized on Wednesday after ads for the store appeared on Twitter tagged with words linked to the Iranian election crisis.

Some Twitter users became angry after the upmarket store's messages turned up in searches for topics such as "Iran" and "Mousavi," the name of Iranian presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi.

Events, hijacked by bullshit merchants online.

Hair of the dog bites man

2009-06-25T23:11:00.003+01:00

Two subjects close to my heart and other vital organs: pubs and newspaper journalism. I've long thought that a study ought to be done into the effect a paper moving its offices has on the local pub trade. In the absence of that, I was delighted to stumble across the following vignette (from the Guardian's Wimbledon coverage of all things):

"All Guardian hacks are alcoholics!" That's the friendly and super-libellous-though-I-wouldn't-put-my-mortgage-on-it-in-court title of an email I've just been sent by Andy Underwood. "I was on a corporate induction yesterday and the afternoon session was a rather nice guided coach journey around the local area, taking in Farringdon. The only interesting fact that our guide had about Farringdon was that since the Guardian moved offices, three pubs have been forced to shut. Comments, please."

It would perhaps be too delicious were one of those pubs the notorious Griffin "Gentleman's Bar And Club" (as if gentlemen worked at the Guardian anyway). By contrast I have it from a highly reliable source (an Irish hack in the pub, if you must know) that a number of boozers in Victoria were facing the axe until the Telegraph moved in nearby.

But this is anecdotal. As I said, a proper study is needed. I am not sure that my A-level in economics would be quite sufficient to get funding (then again, it was a few years ago. It's probably on a par with a degree now) but I feel I should look into this matter further.

Trollied Tuesday: Ghost Pubs

2009-06-23T22:53:00.007+01:00

There is a certain melancholy attached to a boarded up, derelict pub. It's not universal, admittedly, some places really deserve to close; but in general the ghosts of conversations, laughter, friendships and good times past linger forlornly around them.

One of the saddest such pubs can be found in Maida Vale, close to the Regents Canal on Aberdeen Place. Its name is Crockers Folly and there is a genuinely tragic tale attached to it. The Victorian grandeur of the place - its moulded plaster and ornate windows and the vast marble interiors, add to the sense of desolation now that it is closed, but its sheer size, its gaudyness and ambition, seem incongruous for such a quiet secluded street.

The story goes that its founder, a man called Frank Crocker, had believed that it would sit opposite the new Marylebone station, which was eventually built half a mile away. The pub was a white elephant from the start and Crocker killed himself by throwing himself from an upstairs window in the pub. Okay, like most such stories it is probably untrue; but as a myth it does nicely illustrate the overweening ambition that would put such a pub in such a place.

To the best of my knowledge it has been closed for several years. I have no idea who owns it nor what plans exist for its future. (A quick Google search leaves me little the wiser, it could be yours for £4.25 million, apparently). The estate agents ominously talk about its potential for conversion into flats (don't they know there's a property slump on?) - even though its a Grade II listed building. I hope these recent photographs convey something of its potential to be a prime drinking location.

As I said at the start of this post, the loss of a pub is something generally to be deplored; the loss of this seems sadder than most.

Cyclists' eye view of London

2009-06-21T23:16:00.004+01:00

My Sunday morning cycle ride into Victoria would have been ideal, only I was delayed at Buckingham Palace by the crowds gawping at the changing of the guard or some such flummery. An officious little police community support officer forced me to take a detour.

On the way back two delays: the crowds at Speakers' Corner (please reassure me that most people go there to laugh at the cranks and fanatics) and then the gridlocked roads around Lord's in the wake of the world Twenty20 final. Jubilant Pakistan fans mingled with the eternal jackass in a large car doing his damnedest to knock me off my bike.

These little vignettes of London life doubtless reveal something about the nature of the country today. It is damnably inconvenient.

Trollied Tuesday on the telly

2009-06-16T22:47:00.005+01:00

Spectacular drunkenness, like all vocations, requires a certain artistry. One could say the same about broadcasting, I suppose. In any case, broadcasting while blootered is one of those things that, when done properly, enters the realm of the sublime.

The Guardian's Organ Grinder has a run-down with some fine anecdotes and footage (the audio of Lt Cmdr Thomas Woodroofe's glorious "the fleet's lit up" broadcast is well worth a listen if you haven't heard it before.)

Here's a personal favourite that was missed from the Organ Grinder list: Serge Gainsbourg meeting the young Whitney Houston on French television. ("Sometimes ee's a beet drunk you know.") It has everything you could want from the human drama: comedy, farce, passion, romance and the tragedy of his eventual rejection.

You see, for the public drunkard going on telly while trollied is the ultimate performance; one that subverts the established order of things reveals profound truths about the artist and life itself. As the following vignette about Brendan Behan following one especially paralytic appearance demonstrates:

Meanwhile the writer was congratulated on the street for his performance long after the event. "Good on yer, you was properly pissed on TV last night," opined one literary buff, while another claimed he had understood every mumble Behan had made, but "hadn't a clue what that bugger Muggeridge was on about".

Sackville Street regained

2009-06-15T12:56:00.006+01:00

Tomorrow is Bloomsday in which scores of silly sods descend on Dublin dressed in Edwardian costume to reenact various scenes from Ulysses. To make the sorry business worse they don't even do the thing whole-heartedly: a proper reconstruction would see them jerking themselves off on the beach while leering at a sexually precocious young floozy, getting into a fight in a pub with a GAA fan about anti-Semtism and finishing the whole thing off in a brothel somewhere in the northside of Dublin.

Admittedly there might be logisitical problems with some of these (the days in which Monto was Europe's largest red-light district are long gone) and the gardaí might try and spoil the fun; but I reckon they are not insurmountable. And surely if a thing is worth doing, it's worth doing properly.

For one thing it might help rescue Joyce's novel from the poseurs and academics. Becuse no amount of fannying about in Edwardian dress in modern-day Dublin will get you to the heart of the place Joyce was trying to recreate. A new book by Declan Kiberd, Ulysses and Us, surely has a right idea; to offer us a guide to a half-familiar place the better to uncover its hidden byways and mysteries. Kiberd himself notes the supreme irony that:

The book has become a notoriously incomprehensible bore, almost wholly the property of academic Joyceans, and is seldom if ever read by anyone not forced to the task. (Surely an exaggeration?) As he sums up: “A book which set out to celebrate the common man and woman endured the sad fate of never being read by most of them.”

The only solution is to read the damn thing: just because it requires a bit of effort doesn't mean it won't be enjoyable. Admittedly as an experimental novel, some parts of the experiment are more successful than others; but I would endorse Kiberd's approach. It's explained more fully in a piece in The Times here.

It is time to reconnect Ulysses to the everyday lives of real people. The more snobbish modernists resorted to difficult techniques in order to protect their ideas against appropriation by the newly literate masses; but Joyce foresaw that the real need would be to defend his book and those masses against the newly illiterate specialists and technocratic elites.

If you haven't visited the Dublin of 1904 before, give it a chance. Best of all, like Joyce himself, there is no need to be physically present in the modern Irish capital.

Trollied Tuesday: More pink

2009-06-09T14:49:00.003+01:00

A couple of months ago I was bemoaning the difficulty in finding decent rosé. One reason for that might be the following story.

The war of the rosés is over. The European Commission announced today that it had abandoned its plans to allow European winemakers to make cheap rosé wine by mixing red and white wines together.

The announcement follows a rearguard action by traditional producers in France and Italy who feared that their growing market for pink wine would be flooded by cheap imitations.

The point is, of course, that cheap imitations from outside the EU are already being produced and are flooding the market. (There's plenty of cheap French rosé too, of course, but at least it's not an excuse to flog off two seperate wines that no one wants to buy).

Another indication of where the problem lies is a market that seems to reward idiocy.

When rosé producers in Provence and the Loire valley complained, Paris pressed for a compromise which would allow real rosé wines to be labelled as “traditional” or “authentic”.

This also infuriated the rosé producers. The booming new market for chilled rosé wine is largely a market amongst young people, they said. Labelling their wine “traditional” would give them a fuddy-duddy image.

God forbid we should upset the young ones. Surely in the case of wine – a product for which age is a positive virtue – tradition and authenticity are greatly to be valued? It's really not that difficult a concept to grasp: if you're buying electronics newness is a virtue, if you're buying booze it isn't. For most other things it all depends on context.

----

In other why is this news?: American tourists in London visit tourist pub. Had Michelle Obama asked me I could have recommended some alternatives. That's irrelevant really, one gets the distinct impression that what appealed to her was the old school pub aspects of the place, hand-pulled ales and traditional pub food. Sadly we don't know whether or not she enjoyed a pint but, in broadly booze-related context, I think we can say she get the point. Authenticiy and tradition can be virtues.

More voting

2009-06-04T12:16:00.002+01:00

A pleasant and sunny day here in Cricklewood. One shabby and bored looking little Lib Dem loitering outside the polling station, whom I ignored on my way in. Alas, I could not use my favourite method of deciding for whom to vote in that there were no attractive young ladies attempting to boost the fortunes of their party.

So which bunch of nonentities should I send to that temple of tedium and venality, then? I scanned the ballot paper and noted to my disgust that the Whigs had again failed to put up a slate; it’s as if they had given up hope of ever returning to power.

As a gentleman it would, of course, be impossible for me to vote for either Labour or the Conservatives. Which means it’ll have to be… but, wait. Here is one name I recognise: Arthur Scargill and the Socialist Labour Party.

For one delicious moment my pencil hovered over the box. And then I thought of the other people who might vote for them: the pathetic, the deluded, the washed-up and downright insane.

Sanity returned and applying the usual no nutters rule there was only one choice left. As I left I occurred to me that the party who won my support might do even better if they were honest and renamed themselves Go On, I Suppose It’ll Have To Be The Liberal Democrats.

----

Meanwhile, pleasant confirmation of what we always suspected. Ukip supporters are not very bright.

All that is neccessary for banality to triumph is for men with better things to do to go and do them

2009-06-04T08:30:00.003+01:00

Many of you will be familiar with the old anarcho-wisdom: don't vote, it only encourages them.

Today, as millions of Europeans across the continent don't bother to vote, I think we can all see the wisdom of that slogan for what it is. Of course, if you want a European parliament full of nutters, ne'er do wells and expense gougers (that means you, Ukip) then it makes perfect sense.

Personally, my primary concern is that I am working the late shift on Sunday night, so if you could all vote in accordance with the polls that would be most welcome, thank you.

------

'Aaaaaaarold

It's a sunny day here in London. By some theories this will depress turn out as people find better things to do. By contrast, some would argue that cold, wet weather would also depress turnout.

Personally, I think it means that if you are a politician and your supporters can't be arsed to turn out and vote for you, then you'd probably better find some new ones. Or give them a reason to vote for you. (See p99 How to succeed at politics: don't be Gordon Brown).

Apparently Harold Wilson once convinced the BBC to delay an episode of Steptoe and Son because he was worried that his supporters would rather watch that than vote for him. "And whose fault is that?" the BBC did not reply.

Beauty is truth etc

2009-06-03T10:36:00.002+01:00

To the BFI over the weekend for the last in the Nouvelle Vague season. There is much that could be said about the movement – plenty of technical stuff about the art of film-making for those who enjoy making beautiful things tedious – but I like the winning simplicity of Adam Thirlwell's argument that it is about youthful joie de vivre.

As an illustration here's an equally winning scene, Anna Karina (any excuse) and Jean-Paul Belmondo in Pierrot Le Fou. (Female readers please note, I'm afraid you really do have to look like that to hope to get away with being so irritating. Even then, it'll eventually drive most chaps to a state where they want to shoot you and then wrap sticks of dynamite round their heads).

Because for all that joyful exuberance, many of the greatest Nouevelle Vague films end up with a girl dead in her prime (not always at the hands of men, either, in Jules et Jim it is the femme who proves fatale). That's the thing about youthful exuberance, it cannot last. But ars longa, vita brevis; this cinematic movement's real achievement was, in the manner of a cinematic freeze frame, to capture a sense of it for eternity. There's something purely Keatsian about it:

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearièd,
For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd,
For ever panting, and for ever young.

EDITED: Finally got the actual video up now

No member is a hero to his valet

2009-06-02T10:58:00.004+01:00

MPs' expenses part whatever it is now. A second Tory MP claims for his servants (sorry, staff).

Charles Hendry, a shadow minister, claimed more than £7,300 in taxpayer-funded expenses to pay for domestic staff at his second home.

Amusing, certainly. Bad for the Tories, sure. But should he (and Sir John Butterfill) not have tried to claim these as a legitimate political expense? Remember Balfour's wise words that he would sooner take political advice from his valet than the Tory Party Conference.

The worst thing about the political parties - all of them* - is their rank and file membership.

* Okay, Ed Balls for Labour then.

Trollied Tuesday: Connemara Whiskey

2009-05-26T19:56:00.012+01:00

Since I was in the relevant part of the world last week, what better time to honour a drink that parallels a location? Connemara Whiskey, can be seen as a sort of genius loci – spirit of the place – if you like. Peaty, rugged and uncompromising, the taste has a desolate beauty about it, somewhat like an Islay malt, but much more rugged.

There are caveats, mind. Tourists love the region for rugged beauty, the sense of being far from the world and at one with nature, and its this that the drink is playing on. But this only works because, in the age of electricity, heating and relative affluence we are sheltered from its worst excesses of nature untrammelled.

O Lady ! we receive but what we give,
And in our life alone does Nature live :
Ours is her wedding-garment, ours her shroud !; And would we aught behold, of higher worth,
Than that inanimate cold world allowed To the poor loveless ever-anxious crowd,

For there in the country's isolation there is true desolation: the ghosts of the poor loveless ever-anxious crowds of Irish history. When Cromwell offered those driven from the more fertile lands of Ireland the choice between hell and Connaught he wasn't - and this was pretty much true to form - joking. In the scrabby, peaty, poor lands of Connemara those with a few barren acres struggled to scratch a living. Potatoes were pretty much all that could be grown in sufficient quantities and, come the famine… quite.

The area's population collapsed after the famine and then, decades of poverty, emigration and the slow death of Gaelic Ireland took their toll. It's enough to turn one to drink and, if no drink is to hand, start writing maudlin and cloying ballads. So let us drink, then.

Only look at the place, bleak and beautiful, but a void into which the wind will ever blow over nothingness. If Galway city weren't within striking distance you wouldn't wish to be stuck there forever. There's nothing there – and bear in mind this was a picture taken on the first sunny day in those parts since Daniel O'Connell was a boy.

Along with the emptiness, of course, comes the unfortunate fact that there is no distillery in Connemara. For the whiskey is made in Co Louth – a proper old hole on the other side of Ireland into which tourists never venture.

You see, the drink is a distillation of a romantic Ireland that never existed. To use the marketing speak:

Named after one of the most famous regions in Ireland, Connemara is one of nature's masterpieces. The rugged Atlantic coastline and majestic mountains blend with the rain-soaked peated bog lands to create a landscape of unique natural beauty. Connemara Peated Single Malt Irish Whiskey captures the beauty of this region while reviving its traditions.

If the otherwordly romanticisation of harsh reality and the creation of of myths for a place revive its traditions, then this drink does it. Consume enough and your imagination will be peopled with the demons - historic and otherworldly - of Irish history and culture. The Connemara is just the drink if you want to take a bellyful of it and then spill your guts out in the emotional sense (and possibly the literal one too).

I'm not saying this is a bad thing (albeit I prefer Laphroaig which is better tasting and lacks the misty eyed stuff; what do you expect? It's made by Scots who only want you to like it enough to hand over your cash, which is a good way of ensuring a better taste).

Still, we need myths and I should prefer them to be in liquid form rather than in the more troubling forms in which nations, cultures and histories have been been too often packaged. It's easier to sober up eventually, just so long as you always remember the danger of
looking for a genius loci – a spirit of the place – is that you'll start seeing things that you wish had been there.

View from Grand Parade, Cork

2009-05-24T22:41:00.002+01:00

You may wish to take this as a symbol of the state of the Irish economy.

There's always someone, somewhere with a big nose who knows

2009-05-22T22:08:00.005+01:00

For some reason the Telegraph website decided to mark Morrissey's 50th birthday with a piece that includes the following howlers.

Dr Gavin Hopps of St Andrew's University said the former lead singer of the band The Smiths was not truly appreciated for his literary abilities, despite his fame.

Best known for such songs as 'Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now' and 'Kill the DJ', Morrissey was actually a "bookish" singer-songwriter and a fan of Oscar Wilde, said Dr Hopps.

I could make an obvious and rather boring point about why its a good idea to get people to edit things before they are published; I might even add in passing that Smiths fans are one of those groups that will turn on you if you display a less than reverential - and accurate - attitude towards the object of their affection.

But let me make a more subtle and interesting point. The type of journalist who would be concerned with getting the title of Smiths songs right would be the type to end up as a sub (or actual) editor, of course. However - in my experience - this sort would also be far more likely to be someone who likes The Smiths.

I do not think the media would be improved by getting rid of people who like The Smiths. That it is all.

There's a reason why there are so many Kerry jokes

2009-05-14T23:16:00.006+01:00

Off to Ireland for a few days tomorrow. In the interim, here is a superb story from over there.

A man recently voted the most romantic in Ireland had been suffering from “severe strain” when he followed young women and committed lewd acts two years ago, the Galway District Court heard this week.

Celebrations were in full swing for Aidan Clifford and his fiancee last month when they won a prize of €46,000 after Ireland’s Wedding Journal voted them the most romantic couple in the country. However the champagne bubbles quickly fizzled out when it was revealed that Clifford had been involved in indecent acts.

The 29-year-old who is a native of 10 Ballyoughtragh Heights, Milltown, Kerry, but who now lives and works in Co Clare, had first appeared before Galway District Court in May 2008 where he pleaded guilty to masturbating in such a way as to offend the modesty of the community at Williamgate Street, Galway, on March 20, 2007, and again at Eyre Street, Galway, on July 26, 2007.

The court had heard at the time that Clifford used to work in Co Clare and would come to Galway on his days off, follow women in his car, and masturbate in view of them. The case was adjourned for a year by Judge Mary Fahy for a Garda Behaviour Report and to ensure that he attends therapy.

Remember: in Ireland a gay is someone who prefers women to drink, so I don't think the competition was especially fierce.

(Hat tip: Locker)

Lincolnshire, so much to answer for

2009-05-14T11:39:00.007+01:00

Baroness Thatcher's home county is a rather strange and sinister place: the flatness, the ditches on the roadside that seem to have the express purposes of drawing in motorists who have become hypnotised by the monotonous landscape so that the in-bred locals can slit their throats and take their valuables. You might see it as Wales without the redeeming features.

But when you consider its politicians an Irish friend of mine suggested an even better comparison: the Tipperary of England. It is perhaps not entirely a coincidence that the most shameful examples of troughing MPs have come from Lincolnshire.

Viscount Hailsham, aka Douglas Hogg, aka the man with the moat seems determined to destroy his own career in a manner designed to make David Cameron look good in comparison.

Then there are his Labour counterparts, foremost among them Elliot Morley, who will spend the rest of life longing for obscurity after claiming for the mortgage that never was - oh while renting out his other home to a fellow Lincolnshire Labour MP.

Another representative of that country is Austin Mitchell, a man whom no one has taken seriously since about 1979. Even the Commons Fees Office questioned some of his claims. At least, he doesn't appear to have done anything too outrageous and, to give the man his due, his response to the Telegraph is far more enjoyable that the standard "it was all within the rules" shtick.

However, this is also the county that sent to Parliament Quentin Davis, the man who was once prosecuted for cruelty to sheep and who - in possibly the gravest misjudgment since Paris whispered in Helen's ear "come over the weekend, no one will miss you" - decided to leave the Tories to join Labour because of his admiration for Gordon Brown's "sound judgment" and "great competence".

Going back further, this was also the county that sent the young Jeffrey Archer to Parliament.

What the hell is wrong with the place? Great cheese, though.

Waiting for the Balls to drop

2009-05-13T14:31:00.004+01:00

Politically there's very little to comment on at the moment. While we wait for Gordon Brown to be put out of our misery, it's becoming dull to point out how Majorishly hapless he is.

(For all that, this is pure cones hotline stuff; if I were planning to rob a bank - or some such crime - I'd make damned sure my accomplices were busy getting the cops to walk them home. On the other hand it might be a master stroke; think of all the lonely women or homosexuals who would love to be escorted home by a chap in uniform.)

As for MPs' expenses, there is nothing to be said that it is not a statement of the crashingly obvious: nothing can really top the comic perfection of claiming to get one's moat cleaned. It will be interesting to see what venality remains: the married couples have yet to been gone over. Until such time, may I urge you to consider this iron rule of politics:

If two Members of Parliament are married to each other, they will embody the most unspeakably ghastly aspects of their party.

Could everyone shut about Twitter now please?

2009-05-13T12:42:00.005+01:00

A few weeks ago I remember saying (this was in real life, there's no mention of it on the blog) that it was only a matter of time before some cretin tried to rewrite Ulysses via Twitter (possibly as life on Bloomsday). Sure enough:

"Maybe we are only just beginning to appreciate the potential of Twitter as an art form," he said.

[Tim] Collins, whose The Little Book of Twitter is published this week, said it was ironic that the novel he had most trouble shortening was Finnegan's Wake by James Joyce, which is written in a stream-of-consciousness style that has much in common with many Twitter updates.

Some examples:

Ulysses

jamesjoyce: Man walks around Dublin. We follow every minute detail of his day. He’s probably overtweeting.

How stunningly banal. In a way, though, it's quite an achievement to miss the point of both Twitter and literature. Of the two I far prefer the latter - obviously - whereas the former seems to have passed its high watermark. Not that I object to the idea of laconic literary summaries - some of you may remember my six-word game. The point is that it's a fun parlour game that tells about the reader and how they perceive a book. And to try and condense everything into an ultra-laconic form, all the damned time, rapidly becomes intolerable.

In the case of Twitter: it's a great example of how just because you can do something, it doesn't mean you should. The compulsion to reduce everything, to simplify and to always be instantaneous is going too far. Those who wish to reduce everything to series of tweets are either reducing their own capacity for profound thought, or were incapable of it in the first place.

There has to mental space for longueurs; for slow, considered thought, silence and reflection. You may regard my intermittent silences on this blog as a service in that regard. (You may also regard it as bone idleness, of course, but I like to demonstrate how idleness can be a virtue).

More generally I am coming round to the view that a lot of the contemporary technological fads have passed their high watermark. Far too much stuff out there: far too little worth bothering with. Most of its free, of course, but that's pretty much what its worth. (I include supposedly commercial operations in this; self too of course).

When critics disagree, the blogger is in accord with himself.
We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.
All blogging is quite useless.

Measuring out life in coffee spoons

2009-05-01T09:11:00.008+01:00

Can Gordon Brown's stint at Number 10 be explained entirely through the medium of the poetry of TS Eliot? The Macavity jibe has long been a popular way of describing his habit of vanishing from view when there's rough work to be done and, of course, for many hacks the poems about cats are about the extent of their knowledge of Eliot's work.

But Andrew Grice in the Indie today makes a manful extent at extending this modernist approach to political commentary with a piece on the theme of April as Brown's cruellest month; albeit he - or his editors - resist the obvious and crass course of directly comparing the economy with the waste land itself. Still, it is something of the nature of that poem and its endlessly allusive nature which ensures there is no shortage of passages one could apply to the present day. However, since Eliot's source material itself is so rich, rather than re-echoing Dante, Baudelaire or Petronius, say, I should prefer to quote them directly.

I confess that nothing in the first two strike me as immediately apposite (except perhaps the section in Purgatorio where failed rulers are sent to do penance); but the epigram taken from the Satyricon has some resonance. In political terms Brown is the withered, shrivelled Sybil suspended in a bottle longing for death.

Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: Σίβυλλα τί θέλεις; respondebat illa: ἀποθανεῖν θέλω.

But as for Brown and his diminishing band of "loyal" followers (caveat: I would not be surprised were Ed Balls to deliver the final blow to his old mentor - "et tu fatty?"), there is a much more obvious choice of poem: The Hollow Men.

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
...
                                
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

Bonus random and entirely irrelevant fact: as part of his final exams at Oxford WH Auden was asked to write about one contemporary poet. He chose TS Eliot. Unfortunately for Auden none of the dons were familiar with Eliot's work; and when one of them spotted that his name was an anagram of "toilets" they concluded it was some undergraduate prank. Auden received a third.

Taboos

2009-04-30T12:52:00.002+01:00

The news that a couple was arrested for getting drunk and shagging in front of Windsor Castle (and an audience of camera clicking Japanese tourists) prompts more amusement rather than disgust. I was struck though by this:

Witness Mark Robinson, 44, said: “One window from the guardroom opened up and when a soldier saw what was going on he told his mates — and lots of windows opened.

“The couple did not care who was looking and just kept going as if they were in their own bedroom.

“They even ignored the Please Keep Off The Grass signs. [Italics as published]

Could there be a more damning indictment of their behaviour?

Archduke Found Alive: World War a Hoax

2009-04-22T13:29:00.007+01:00

What's the secret of a good headline? It's both art and craft you see; the craft comes in telling you what the story's about, but there's poetry too. (I've lazily stolen a famous spoof from the 1920s that nicely illustrates the way it works, largely because I can't think of a suitable one to go at the top of this piece).

Don't believe me? Why not have a read of Prof Stanley Fish on the matter. In his praise of New York Post style headlines (eg Headless Body Found in Topless Bar), he observes that beneath a pithy gag there can be layers of meaning expressed with an economy and precision equal to the best of modern poetry.

How ironic, though, that it appeared on the New York Times website. If there is one thing the NYT is bad at it's writing headlines: leaden, pompous, portentous and dull, dull, dull.

It says something that the most memorable one produced by the Gray Lady was a comical howler (which, incidentally, highlights the gratuitous use of commas to add needless sub-clauses.)

The headline announced that US soccer captain John Harkes was joining what was, at the time, one of England's top teams:

Harkes To Sign For Sheffield, Wednesday.

Some of laconic wit and brevity that you will find even at the higher end of the British media would go down well in the headlines of America's most august journals. A little art to make the functional task of telling the reader what a story is about does, in a small and subtle way, enhance the readers' appreciation.

On the other hand: the tabloid need for constant gags and puns can become wearing and somewhat infantile. Or, in the case of this effort, you end up with a contender for worst headline of the year.

Desperate times

2009-04-20T10:00:00.003+01:00

Ed Balls as next Labour leader? While something that would unite Labour and Tory supporters in horror might have something to commend it, it won't happen. Let me suggest the following law.

For Labour to even contemplate doing such a thing, it would have to have suffered such an electoral drubbing that Balls himself would have lost his seat.

A poor man's Portillo.

PS: With Mike Smithson bragging about getting 3/1 on Balls losing in Morley, may I just state I got the even better odds of 7/2. Albeit with a somewhat smaller stake than Mr Smithson's £100.

Cultural cringe

2009-04-17T11:55:00.005+01:00

When looking for the world's worst pundit, it's so easy to be parochial and stick to all the obvious British candidates. But it's a salutary and sobering thought that Her Majesty's Press is often forced to look across the Atlantic should it wish to provide its readers with a truly magisterial dose of wrongness.

One newspaper even employs on a regular basis a barkingly mad American woman who somehow manages to out-crazy its stable of homegrown eccentrics and nutjobs. But the Guardian now surpasses itself with the latest offering by the Canadian Naomi Klein

In it she employs her remarkable talent for stating the bleeding obvious, affecting shock at it and then drawing precisely the wrong conclusions to observe that the presidency is a difficult job that often involves messy compromises and the current president will not, in fact, stick it to The Man.

Klein is one of the most valuable intellectual figures of age. I am not sure that she doesn't deserve to be regarded in the same light as figures like Noam Chomsky or Ayn Rand, with whom you know infallibly that you can disregard the opinions of anyone who cites them in support of their views.

At the risk of developing a cultural cringe, why is it that our own homegrown pundits don't achieve the same level of ineffable error?

Solidity and Transcendence

2009-04-13T11:17:00.006+01:00

Tomorrow marks the 250th anniversary of Handel's death. To explain his appeal I really cannot do better than Beethoven's formulation about great effects by simple means.

However, by way of a tribute here is a superb anecdote about Fela Kuti:

In January 1984, when I first met Fela, at the Russell Hotel in Bloomsbury, central London, I asked him which musician he most respected. The answer was unexpected. 'Handel. George Frederick Handel.' I told him my father was a Handel freak and we discussed, amid the dope smoke, Dixit Dominus and the Concerto Grossi.

Thinking about it, I decided a comparison wasn't improbable. In Fela's music there is the same mix of solidity and transcendence, and I thought I could detect echoes of the composer in Fela's organ lines. He told me he thought he was writing 'African classical music'.

Quite. Let's have a bit of Dixit Dominus then. If you have a joint to hand, now's the time to light it; the version I've linked to is pure skunk.

Worse than a crime, a mistake

2009-04-12T11:07:00.007+01:00

There is one thing to be said for smear tactics, spin and the other political black arts: they can be extremely effective. What Derek Draper and Damian McBride were plotting was straight out of the Lee Atwater/Karl Rove play book. (Especially the stuff about Frances Osborne's mental health and the suggestion that the Cameron family would be targeted).

The downside is, of course, that people will hate you for using these tactics. And they only work if you're smart enough not to get caught. As it is: I refer you to my comments about there being nothing worse than looking sleazy and ridiculous. I was not quite right: looking malevolently vile and simultaneously displaying the astuteness of Frs Ted and Dougal takes quite a lot of beating.

But while Draper and McBride receive a richly deserved ordeal by media I don't think it changes much. It does reinforce the impression that Brown and his acolytes are not best suited to lead the country, but I think most people had come to that conclusion already, including the smarter and more principled elements of the Labour party. (For the avoidance of doubt I would include Blair and co in the 'more principled' list; you can decide for yourself how well that reflects on Brown).

However, there is one aspect to this story that has caught my eye. Damian McBride is only 34.

What? He looks about 50, like the sleaziest, clapped out, most corrupt, thuggish and self-important, third-rate west coast of Scotland Labour councillor. A cardiac in need of arrest.

How to do you get to look so seedy, dissipated and unhealthy in such a space of time? God knows, I'm a similar age and I've tried but clearly I have led a life of comparative virtue and clean-living. (I now feel much better about myself for seeing his bloated, bloodshot mug across the papers).

For lovers of literature it has always been fun to imagine how the picture of Dorian Gray would have looked. I think I have an idea now.

Seasonal Booze Ups

2009-04-09T22:03:00.007+01:00

It is testament to how far Fleet Street as fallen from its inglory days that I was until now only dimly aware of the old journalistic tradition of Wayzgoosing. In those days newspapers did not publish on Good Friday, allowing printers and, when they cottoned on to the idea, the hacks, to indulge in spectacular piss ups.

Roy Greenslade has a fine overview of the tradition, and also links to some splendid anecdotes from the Gentlemen Ranters (this one is worth a read, not least for the picture). His own stories aren't too shabby either.

I also recall a Sun/Daily Mirror subeditorial wayzgoose that did make it to France, with embarrassing consequences. The good burghers (of Dieppe, I think) had been wrongly informed that a group of important British journalists were due to arrive and duly turned out the mayor and the town band to greet them off the ferry.

Sadly, by the time the wayzgoosers arrived, they had been drinking non-stop for many hours since leaving London and were only able to walk by leaning against each other.

Pity today's hacks – sorry, make that "content providers" – hard at work as usual today and often unaware of this custom.

It's Good Friday tomorrow, when another Easter drinking spectacular is in the offing across the water. You see, it is the one day (bar Christmas) when every pub in Ireland is forced to close. It is one of the last reflexive genuflections made towards the Catholic Church in the country; a ritual devoid of any real meaning or purpose (you may wish to develop this metaphor) and naturally, treated by all right-thinking people as the chance for a monstrous piss-up.

The greater availability of off-sales (closed on the day, of course) has helped greatly. Maundy Thursday is a boom day for retailers; as for their customers, I still recall one Good Friday party in Cork which left me feeling far worse than anyone who partakes of that curious bit of Filipino piety whereby they nail themselves to a cross would. However, in the days before off licences were so common, there were several ingenious ways by which people could get a drink.

Ferries were exempt, so trips to Wales or the Isle of Man were popular. Some people even went to the North, because if ever there was a fun place to be it was Belfast circa 1922-97. Train journeys, too, had no constraints, so many people would spend the day in a diurnal course of journeys with no end in sight and a constant stream of booze (shades of the great Moskva-Petushki there).

But the most curious exemption was the dog show held on Good Friday in the Royal Dublin Society. The bar there was the one place allowed to serve alcohol (one suspects the powers that be thought that only irredeemable West Brits would go to a dog show on that day, a similar mindset to the people who bombed the La Mon, you might note). The event was a great favourite of the likes of Brendan Beehan, Patrick Kavanagh and various other riffish and raffish sorts.

If only the Irish hacks had gone in for wayzgoosing.