A CHILD IS BORN

THE MIRACLE OF THE MYSTERY OF CHRISTMAS never ends. Around two thousand years ago there was the greatest miracle in the annals of Judaeo-Christian faith when Mary, albeit a virgin, was pronounced pregnant with baby Jesus. The scriptures do not give us a great deal of information about how this pregnancy was taken by friends of the family, as, after all, in the year dot in the Middle East adultery was an offence punishable by stoning. As indeed it is today.

YET TO SHOW HOW PROGRESS has been achieved over the two millennia since we welcomed the Christ child into our midst, we now have the miracle of popular comedian Elton John and his Canadian wife David Furnish becoming parents of a child born, no less, on Christmas Day itself. Once again there is not a great deal of news about what the locals are thinking in the John’s home state of Georgia, USA, but I imagine a bit of a desire for stoning those engaging in untoward sexual behaviour in the good ‘ole deep south Bible Belt is in the air.

THUS ONE IMAGINES THAT young Zachary Jackson Levon Furnish-John, will be kept in the closet for some time after he comes out of his swaddling gold and silver lamé clothes. The magazine US Weekly does not report on how the mother is doing, but the father, “overwhelmed with happiness and joy at this very special moment” says that it was David who convinced him into becoming a father. We share in their joy and in this new sign of liberalism and freedom and the miraculous in the modern age.

HO, HO, HO!

NOW THAT MOST OF THE FAT, SPOTTY HARRIDANS who were the driving force behind the political correctness movement of the late seventies and early eighties have become thin, spotty grandmothers, it is once again perfectly safe to state that I am dreaming of a white Christmas without running the risk of being clapped in irons for being a racist.

YET, EVEN SO, ONE STILL HAS TO BE CAREFUL in what one states at this time of the year. We have the unfortunate case of the gentleman dressed as Father Christmas (or I suppose it should be Santa Claus) outside Macy’s department store in New York City, in America, who was arrested when he uttered the expression “Ho, ho, ho!” and a passing lady took offence. In court she alleged he said the words with “rather too much relish” as he looked at her, “ringing his little bell”. As I was not present, I am unable to pass comment, but I do concede that there is a temptation involved in the miserable profession of standing in the biting cold dressed in a smelly outfit and watching upper class tottie trot into the perfume department in their gladrags.

HOWEVER, I WAS NOT DREAMING of quite so much white as to have my flight to London and then on to Manchester cancelled by British Airways, forcing me to mix with the so-called “working” classes and come by train to the stinking hell-hole that is called the Algarve and take an EasyJet flight directly to Liverpool. We shall see how this all functions in the fullness of time. In the meantime things seem to be all systems go. But it is, in fact, “mean” time. The Algarve is bad enough as it is; sitting almost on my own for three hours in the ghostly silent golf-themed Portakabin they call an airport is depressing beyond belief.

EARLIER THIS YEAR I WAS “VOLCANOED” twice, and on one occasion had to put up with the horrors, for an Englishman, of having to travel through France; this year I am at least once putting up with the nightmare, for a gentleman, of coming to the Algarve. I on occasion wonder why I put up with these tribulations, but at the end of the journey I am also quickly reminded why.

TIDINGS OF COMFORT AND JOY

“FORTIFIED IN THEIR FRONT PARLOURS,” wrote Geoffrey Hill, the most important living English poet, “at Yuletide men are the more murderous. Drunk, they defy battle-axes.” Hill was writing this in the Mercian Hymns, his famous collective “prose poem” which combines some elements of the history of England with his own personal life. One day he will be seen as the most intelligent and interesting English language poet of the last couple of centuries; for the moment I am content to tell a wider world his poetic view of getting “bladdered” at Christmas in Britain.

WHILST AGREEING WHOLEHEARTEDLY WITH HILL as to the murderous aspect of getting out of one’s skin at Yuletide, I would like to add that it is also the time when men, rather than being merry and thus courageous, become more suicidal than at any time of the year except in Nordic countries, when suicide can be happily practised at any time of the year under the supervision of the government, or in Switzerland, where suicide is becoming a verb; as in, “Hello. I’ve come to this clinic to suicide my mother, who is very ill.”

BESIDES GOOD OLD FASHIONED SUICIDE, there is also a dramatic increase in domestic violence. Women, according to many campaigning websites and agencies, are five times more likely to take a beating from their husbands during the twelve days of Christmas than at any other time. Over fifty percent of women who become battered wives suffer their first beating at this time, and most of them will, in the spirit of the season, forgive their husbands, boyfriends or “civil partners” after the latter have promised resolutions for the New Year.

HOPELESS RESOLUTIONS, IT SEEMS, as January is by far the record month for divorce applications in the United Kingdom. All of this suggests the extreme dangers of a society putting about the ideals of goodwill, solidarity, kindness, comfort, joy and peace to all men while cutting jobs, reducing benefits and increasing prices and taxes; anyone who is not exactly experiencing comfort and/or joy will either get wrecked on cheap booze from the local three-for-two supermarket, hang themselves/put their heads in the oven where the turkey ought to be, or become criminally violent. Or all three, although naturally not in this order.

MOST LIKELY NONE OF THESE THINGS will befall me. At the moment I am in Portugal again, in my mountain retreat, where I have come to distribute small but significant gifts to some of the villagers and to fraternize with the local political leaders. And then on again, despite the frightening news of a shutting down of airports, home to England, where what awaits me is the picture above. Christmas greetings to everyone!

SOME CAME RUNNING

MUCH CHATTER THIS WEEK HAS REVOLVED AROUND the prankish behaviour of some students who came to London on Tuesday to protest about a measly increase in the “fees” they pay to their universities for putting up with their ignorance and attempting to teach them. The government had little choice over this matter: universities have been whingeing and whining about being penniless for years, and one of the methods of answering this is to allow them to increase the money they receive from miscreants. This is obviously better than making all of us pay.

YET MANY PEOPLE WONDER WHY universities need money at all. The scandal, for the general public, is the salaries academics receive for working one or two days a week for between sixteen to twenty weeks a year. What the common man does not understand, of course, is that when we are not teaching, we are hard at work thinking, sometimes even when we are asleep. Thus the number of working hours is far in excess of those punched on the clock. (One may wonder, however, what some of us are thinking about.)

OUR STUDENTS WERE SOMEWHAT EXUBERANT this time, and it appears that some of them managed to give the peelers the slip and go on a jaunt about London, spraying shop windows with foul language, frightening Christmas shoppers and, most alarmingly, attacking the vehicle carrying Prince Charles and Camilla Duchess of Cornwall. It is reported that there were cries of “Off with their heads!”, and, indeed, Charles III will have to be on his best behaviour if he does not wish to go the way of his namesakes when he becomes monarch.

ON A MORE PERSONAL NOTE: questions are being asked of Home Secretary Theresa May on all of the Sunday political talk shows as to whether Camilla was “poked with a stick” on Tuesday. I suppose the only person who knows whether she was poked, besides Camilla herself, is Prince Charles.

WEEWILLYWONKALEAKS

I AM NOT PERSONALLY PARTICULARLY ENAMOURED of the glum Australian whistleblower Julian Paul Assange, and, frankly, neither are you. One of the reasons for this is that I feel such a childish idiot when using the slightly smutty name of his website organisation. However, it is impossible to ignore the enormous benefits to the wider world of his journalistic activity. Since 2006 he has quite rightly been the recipient of fame, notoriety and the occasional international award for his brave stance unmasking illegal killings in Kenya, illegal nuclear waste dumping in Africa, the ludicrous scam known as the Church of Scientology (Misellus Fantasiatomcruisensis to give it its medical name), international bank robberies (by international banks) and misuse of power by the Western Alliance government in two wars and in its dealing with the prisoners thereof.

TO SUGGEST HE HAS AN AGENDA against the United States in particular would thus be paranoia; to suggest that anyone can rape a Swedish woman in her house in her own bed, at three in the morning, after having had sex with her once “just after midnight”, and while she was asleep, seems, at least on a cursory reading, far-fetched, although I would plump for the term “impossible” if I were forced into coming up with an adjective.

I HAVE NO WISH TO INDULGE in national stereotypes, so I will resist the temptation to here cite one of the many “What happened when the Australian man met the Swedish girl?” jokes, which usually end with the punch line of the girl saying things like “I do now, you smooth-talking bastard” or “nine is my lucky number”, jokes which are as unfunny as they are insulting to Swedish women everywhere, but I can think of at least five reasons why this woman’s allegation smells fishy.

A FIDDLE WRAPPED IN A MYSTERY INSIDE AN ENIGMA

NOT SINCE WINSTON CHURCHILL’S original quotation has there been so much chattering hatred and distrust about what really goes on inside the collective mind game we in the West call Russia. We were perfectly happy during the Cold War, when we understood the rules of the game, and remained so for a few years after the Glasnost and Perestroika experiences slowly led to Russia being coaxed into returning to what it used to be – a hidebound, poverty-stricken hell-hole full of peasants, drunks, a very small liberal aristocracy and a tiny (i.e. one person) ruling class. Through all this we still kept and put up with Red Square’s dealings.

NOW, HOWEVER, WE SEE THAT “RAS” PUTIN and his henchmen “oiligarchy” millionaires who own football in Russia are even more devious than anything seen until now. In buying the 2018 World Cup, in the process taking it away from its rightful home forever, we have been left miffed. “What can they be up to now?” senior politicians ask themselves. But in merely being confused, there is a risk that our leaders may miss the real danger: an alliance between Russian money and corruption with FIFA’s money and corruption will result in the most dangerous superpower the world has ever seen. Our politicians must get real as soon as possible, withdraw from Afghanistan and send our boys to Switzerland to occupy the FIFA offices.

THE OSBORNE ASCENDENCY

“EVERYONE’S A COMEDIAN IN IRELAND”, we often hear on the Liverpool side of the water, “but the real jokers are in London.” This indeed may well be the case as seen through emerald-coloured glasses, but the ominous meeting being held today in Brussels, involving the usual suspects – the inglorious battalions of European Union grey-faced and grey-suited dismal failed and unelected ‘politicians’ – and our very own financially clueless George “Boy” Osborne – can only mean bad news for all involved, but particularly for those who have relied on Paddy McGinty’s goat for economic sustenance over the last ten years.

MOST SENSIBLE IRISH PEOPLE over recent years have realised what side their bread is buttered on (with their own butter, mind you) and have firmly set their allegiances with their fellow English speakers, this involving either going to live and work and/or settle in the UK or in the USA. If we asked any of the successful Irish people of the last fifty years whether they would prefer or have preferred to commit their all to Europe, and we just included Mischa Barton, Pierce Brosnan, Gabriel Byrne, The Corrs, Conan O’Brien, Robert Downey Jr., Val Doonican, Megan Fox, Bob Geldof, any Kennedy, Lindsay Lohan, Liam Neeson, Sean Penn, Ronald Reagan, Terry Wogan or U2 (and I am just referring off the top of my head to those I know through music and film) then I imagine that everyone except Lindsay Lohan is happy where they are now. Where Lohan would like to be is anyone’s guess.

NO DOUBT INSPIRED BY EAMON DE VALERA, the Irish government jumped at the chance to abandon the pound when the European Union was set up. It was the first of the Eurozone countries to issue commemorative Euros and its currency now includes the one boring symbol of Eire on every denomination: the Irish harp. Thus it was clear that the Fianna Fáil party simply saw the European Union as a way of putting two fingers up to the government of the United Kingdom

BUT THEIR NEW-FOUND FRIENDS were of little help when, during the “mad cow” crisis of the Margaret Thatcher years in the UK, the European Union also banned Irish beef, as most Irish beef, like most Irish people who are looking for money and success, used to get the ferry from Dún Laoghaire to Holyhead or Liverpool, and so this beef was seen as British when it was loaded, lowing, onto the stinking cattle boats to the equally stinking French and Belgian ports, and was also refused entry into Europe.

THEN, AS NOW, IRELAND TURNED TO LONDON for compensation. Then, as now, it was given. George Osborne, our Chancellor of the Exchequer, is a member of the Irish An Chinsealacht Phrotastúnach ruling aristocracy, and also the heir to the Osborne Baronetcy of Ballentaylor in County Tipperary and Ballylemon in County Waterford, both of which mean he has an interest in the ways things go. Perhaps this is why he is so keen to help Ireland after they showed two fingers to us and now come to us with two hands open.

(My picture shows Mr Osborne helping Sky News with their enquiries.)

FORTY SHADES OF GREENBACKS

MY FATHER NEVER REALLY GAVE OUT MUCH ADVICE to me when I was a boy, but his occasional dry quips about events and my capacity to deal with them have stuck in my mind as if set in stone. When he was entrusted to teaching me how to lace my shoes, he showed me his already laced shoes, gave me my shoes and told me to “work it out”. I was four. I remember asking him what ill results would befall if I didn’t learn this skill, and his response was; “Nothing. People will just go about saying that David can’t tie his laces.” I was distraught at this thought, and immediately set about the task.

HE ALSO TOLD ME, THIS BEING IN LIVERPOOL, never to go into Chinatown late at night with any money in my pocket, never to kill any animal for sport or amusement, never to make fun of anyone afflicted with an illness or deficiency, never, ever, to raise my hand against a woman, never to swear in front of my mother or any domestic servants, never to judge people on the basis of the colour of their skin, never to let success be my God and never, under any circumstances, to lend money to an Irishman. “Always give them the money”, he used to say. "Everyone feels better and the result is the same in the end."

MOST OF THESE TEACHINGS MADE PERFECT SENSE to me as I was a young man, although it is only now that the last of them is starting to ring true, and, happily, it does not involve me. Due to an anomaly of legislation, while I may be resident in Britain at the moment I do not pay taxes there; thus, unlike the rest of the population of the UK – each of whom will be “lending” the Irish seven hundred pounds in 2010 – I will not have to contribute towards the Irish crash.

NO IRISHMAN OWES ME MONEY, but, unfortunately, as I have lived in Portugal for a large number of years, the same cannot be stated of the Portuguese. Several people have asked me for some money in the past, and no one has made any attempt at paying it back. On the one occasion when I accosted the miscreant who was in debt to me he stated (I translate), “If you lent me the money it is because you have money”, meaning, I imagine, that it is the duty of those who have money to give it to the snotty unwashed who do not have any. Ireland has now been forced to admit its shame; if Portugal, Spain and Italy have to follow suit one wonders what will happen to the Euro project. Why shouldn’t we just make all of these people unemployed, give them all a guaranteed minimum wage of 400 Euros per month (which is more than most of them earn anyway) and just leave Britain, Germany, Finland, Sweden, Holland and Denmark to work? Isn’t this more or less what happens now?

HABEMUS CONDOM

JUST WHEN I THOUGHT IT WAS SAFE to get back to more important issues this Sunday, now that I have completed the oppression of marking students’ work, the cleaning girls have more or less cleaned the house and I have had luncheon in a Middle-Eastern restaurant a brisk walk from my house, I am assailed by abhorrent news from the Vatican City involving Pope Benedict XVI.

I HAD COME IN RELAXED FASHION TO MY STUDY to complete my latest painting, a nude study that will look fetching above my desk, when I turned on Sky News and saw our good Catholic leader informing the planet, according to the lady on the programme, that wearing condoms was acceptable now.

LATIN IS A TRICKY LANGUAGE at the best of times, and I am not sure what language Joseph Ratzinger might have been speaking when he gave his interview to L’Ossatore Romano, but one hopes there is a misquotation of some sort involved in these most ominous of tidings.

NVAGDA WAS HOW WE WERE TAUGHT LATIN nouns at school: nominative, vocative, accusative, genitive, dative and ablative (and in some cases, locative). This was not too difficult to follow, except when one got down to the dative and ablative forms, which were regularly translated, in the case of a noun like Mensa, a table, as “to, at, through or for a table” and “by, through, with or from a table”.

THUS I HOPE THAT WHEN JOURNALISTS TELL US that the Pope has stated that condoms can be used “by men” when having sex “with men”, or “by male prostitutes with diseases” “for the prevention of disease”, that the whole thing is more of a translation mistake than my Oxford entrance examination in Latin was. But if the Roman Catholic Church is now suggesting that “if one has to have sex with a male prostitute then one should use a condom”, then my comment can only be one: unicuique suum.

WE OWE A ROOSTER TO ASCLEPIUS. DON'T FORGET TO PAY THE DEBT

JOSÉ SÓCRATES CARVALHO PINTO DE SOUSA, the Portuguese Prime Minister, is obviously riding on a high this week after the “success” of the NATO summit in Lisbon showed that Portugal is capable of throwing a good party for guests who possess nuclear weapons and lend Portugal large amounts of money.

PINTO DE SOUSA, BETTER KNOWN TO HIS SUPPORTERS as “Socrates”, perhaps due to the prestige involved in being associated with one of the most intelligent, liberal, humanist and courageous thinkers of all time, obviously deserves a bit of a break, as he has been doing his best dealing with the collapsing Portuguese economy for the last two years – or, more specifically, he, an engineer by profession, has been struggling with trying to explain what is going wrong to the Portuguese people, most of whom seem to believe that money, when it doesn’t grow on trees or turn up during the night underneath a mattress, comes from Brussels.

IN AN ATTITUDE SOMEWHAT THE REVERSE of Lord Young’s (see Sunday Morning last), but the same as that of the Republic of Ireland, Socrates spends a large part of his increasingly rare public appearances (once it was twice a day on the news, but now there is a tendency to lay low) telling everyone that things are fine. The mere fact that Portugal owes untold billions of Euros to a large group of investors and the debt is increasing daily seems neither here nor there.

(My title states the reported last words of the “real” Socrates, mortified more by owing someone something than by the hemlock creeping up his legs to his heart. When most of our politicians come to an end I imagine they will owe someone much more than a cock.)

WHEN WE WERE YOUNG

SO MANY “IMPORTANT” THINGS HAVE HAPPENED this week that it is difficult to decide upon the “highlight”; the favourites include Education Secretary Michael Gove’s absurd decision to try to make young people in England and Wales write grammatically correct English, the wasteful NATO summit including Georgia and Russia, Prince Charles’ return to form in suggesting to an American journalist that he thought that Camilla should become queen of England and Scotland “when I become king” (sic), and a similar harking back to the good old days of predictable politics when a Conservative grandee put his foot in it over lunch.

LORD DAVID IVOR YOUNG, BARON YOUNG OF GRAFFHAM, Privy Counsellor and Deputy Lieutenant to the Crown, was generally thought to be the real person behind the imaginary figure known to readers of Private Eye magazine as “Lord Suit”, a Conservative millionaire who was completely out of touch with life in modern Britain.

THIS MAY HAVE BEEN MY OWN OPINION in the past, but Lord Young’s statement to the Daily Telegraph on Tuesday, in which he said that British people “have never had it so good”, shows that there is not a jot or scintilla of truth in the allegation that Lord Young is an outdated political figure who should retire to his country house and keep his mouth shut except when he is putting his Davidoff cigars in it.

PROOF THAT LORD YOUNG is one of us is his choice of restaurant for luncheon, a modest Georgian building a stone’s thrown from the Houses of Parliament. Young does not go for fancy foreign food, as many rich people do, but instead, like most of us, enjoyed simple, traditional British pub grub, on this occasion being a deeply flavoured starter of asparagus in a morel butter sauce, followed by a silky slice of confit salmon with samphire and zingy baby nasturtium flowers, quail with hazelnut, pomegranate and tiny pickled radishes, and a lemon tart. His only extravagance might have been the Bordeaux, but so many of us in England (and perhaps even some Celts) now drink foreign wine that it is hardly a luxury. And £12 a glass is cheap by anyone’s standards.

ERRATA

IT SEEMS LIKE ONLY MINUTES since I published my piece about the latest good news, yet I have received several comments about the mistakes it contained. I of course realise that there was a problem with the photographs. By mistake I stated that the lower photograph was of Herman Van Rompuy, but it is in fact one of Herman Goering. The other photograph does not in fact refer to reaction to the news that this young couple were "in love", but reaction to the news that the Duke of Edinburgh had told all three of these young people to "stop shagging for a while". My apologies.

UNBOUNDED JOY TO THE NATION

AS AN ENGLISHMAN I CANNOT HELP but share in the unbounded joy felt by not only all my compatriots and all good-thinking, kind people everywhere, but particularly for all those of us who enjoy a happy resolution for a union which on occasion has seen troubled times and doubts but now is leading to the inevitable and desired outcome.

THIS IS THE NEWS THAT HERMAN ACHILLE VAN ROMPUY, President of Europe and pictured above thinking about the future, has finally announced that the Eurozone – and indeed the European project itself – is almost certainly doomed to failure due to utter mismanagement of the hare-brained idea to unite Europe financially, economically and politically against all common sense. The best part of the news, of course, is that this collapse is taking place before the slimy Van Rompuy could produce his hideous plans for a “common European income tax”, although it may be too late to stop his equally sleazy buddy José “No way” Barroso to ask hard-working northern European citizens to cough up their cash to allow Irish, Portuguese and Greek politicians and citizens to sit around doing nothing.

ALSO OF NOTE IN THE PRESS TODAY is the news that Prince William of Wales is about to marry commoner Catherine Elizabeth “Kate” Middleton on a date to be announced in the spring or summer of next year. We all naturally wish them well. It will be extremely refreshing for the royal family to welcome Kate’s parents into their bosom. Given the fact that Kate’s mother was an air hostess and her father a luggage controller at Heathrow, one hopes that her mother does not forget herself at the banquet at the palace and start pushing trolleys around and asking “Are you paying in Pounds or Euros?” Particularly as (hopefully) the Euro will be dead before the marriage is dead.

(My picture shows Prince William’s and Kate’s joy when the Duke of Edinburgh phoned them earlier this year and told them they were in love. Prince Harry expresses his emotions in a rather more subdued manner.)

BURMA SHAVE

and the spider web crack and the mustang screamed
smoke from the tires and the twisted machine
just a nickel's worth of dreams and every wishbone that they saved
lie swindled from them on the way to
burma shave


and the sun hit the derrick and cast a bat wing shadow
up against the car door on the shot gun side
and when they pulled her from the wreck you know she
still had on her shades
they say that dreams are growing wild just this side of
burma shave

THE POPULAR ENTERTAINER TOM WAITS wrote this moving song partially quoted above in 1996, about a lady condemned to live in a dead-end town she describes as a prison who then seizes a chance at freedom and betterment in taking a ride from a stranger. Her attempt at liberty and happiness ends in disaster and death for herself and her wayward lover, but, as we can see from the above lyric, she dies in some style, and looking pretty. For some reason I have been thinking about this song this morning.

SPORTS UPDATE

ONE MAY DETECT A CERTAIN SYMMETRY in the British press at the moment due to its perhaps natural obsession with things Eastern, given that our good leader is at present being fêted in South Korea at the latest waste of money that is known as the G20 meeting. Nothing has ever come out of these meetings in terms of economic development or financial reform, and since Gordon Brown has retired to Scotland no one even bothers to talk about the absurd global warming issue that was at the top of the agenda for the last six meetings. This proves that governments have decided that it is more important to save banks than it is to save the planet.

THE SYMMETRY, HOWEVER, INVOLVES products made in China. On the one hand some of the more hard-line British journalists have become outraged at the fact that most of the official souvenirs for the 2012 Olympics in London are being made in China, tainted with a reputation for shoddiness; on the other hand we have the shock sale of a piece of XVIII Chinese porcelain being sold yesterday for a record amount of fifty-one million pounds, shoddy by no means.

IF PEOPLE ARE PREPARED to pay enormous amounts of money for a gaudy piece of kitsch which serves no purpose then that is obviously no one’s business other than their own, but the fact that most of the money being invested in the London Olympics is going to Chinese companies is clearly a scandal. And one that returns to play my idea that the Olympic Games should have a permanent home, rather like the Oscars.

IT MAKES NO SENSE TO INVEST SO MUCH MONEY in shifting these games from one place to another and it is utterly pointless to have athletic sports being played in Britain, where most young people have no interest in energetic physical action. We should allow our teenagers the right to benefit from their youth, giving them the chance to do what they really enjoy, such as hanging around wearing hoods and smoking cigarettes outside closed supermarkets, drinking beer from cans, spitting on the floor, listening to “rap” music on “headphones”, and lying to each other about their sexual conquests. Their only activity is when they occasionally have to run away from a police car and jump over a fence into someone’s garden.

(My picture shows the Great Britain 4 x 100 metres relay team in training before an international event in France.)

ANARCHY IN THE UK

IN COMMON WITH A LARGE NUMBER of like-minded political commentators, I must condemn in the strongest terms the mindless violence and destruction of property perpetrated by “students” at the head offices of the Conservative and Unionist Party this afternoon in Millbank in London. This is simply not British behaviour, and I suspect that the “anarchists” involved in breaking the windows are probably foreigners, possibly from one of those Eastern nations where political violence is a tradition.

THE TRADITIONALLY BRITISH FORM of violence is silence – the cold, silent treatment. This is the best way to irritate all and sundry. Husbands and wives do this to great effect, eating three-course meals in restaurants on wedding anniversaries without exchanging a syllable. So perhaps “British anarchists” – if it is not a contradiction in terms – should follow our historically-proven pattern. They should all go down to the House of Commons and tell David Cameron and Nick Clegg that they are not on speaking terms with them. This would be most appropriate; after all, Clegg and Cameron are not listening to us.

DAVID THE CAMERA ON

BEING AN INTERNATIONALLY FAMOUS CELEBRITY, people often come up to me and ask “David. Can I take a photograph of you?” My short and polite response to this solicitation is the same as the one I give to mendicants: No. This, I believe, is the sensible approach that anyone who is less than extremely photogenic should adopt.

NOT SO, APPARENTLY, FOR OUR GOOD LEADER, David “Davy Boy” Cameron, who has been discovered to have a “personal, private, family photographer” (sic) gainfully employed by our happy Prime Minister to take photographs of himself and his close family as a personal record “for posterity”.

LIKE SO MANY PEOPLE, I AM PLEASED to see that Mr Cameron loves his family so much that he wishes to see them captured forever on digital impressions which he no doubt has printed at the local chemists and then puts in albums that no one will ever see except when they are all drunk after dinner.

YET UNLIKE MANY PEOPLE, DAVID, since he became Prime Minister, has decided that his photographers (now plural) should be paid for by the taxpayer. Thus it is that Andrew Parsons, a former Tory party employee who is described as Mr Cameron’s “vanity photographer” became paid by our state. On an equal footing is Nicky Woodhouse, a filmmaker who has made hundreds of the 'web Cameron' films for the Conservative Party.

NONE OF THIS; OF COURSE, IS EXCEPTIONAL. Indeed, one expects politicians to be vain. But what is extraordinary is Cameron’s reaction to this fact when challenged on the issue in parliament by “Mr Ed” Miliband. In stating “ (…) it is not a lot of money. They only earn thirty five thousand pounds”, Davy has shown that he has no idea at all about life in modern Britain. But why should we expect him to be any different to most multi-millionaires?

MEAT THE PRESS

WHILE OSCAR WILDE, THE FAMOUS LOVER OF YOUTH, was happy to be imitated as he considered it to be a form of flattery, it is with mixed feelings that I note that not only The Sun newspaper but also Private Eye magazine – upstanding, august and noble organs both – have filched headlines of mine over the last two weeks. These are “All the Way to the Banksy” and “Dive, Dive, Dave”. I can fully understand why this happened with the newspaper, as I was somewhat foolish in sending details of the address of this my journal to its “chat room” in the hope of recruiting thousands of undiscerning readers so as to then monetise my writing and retire from public life.

THESE EVENTS DO, HOWEVER, FORCE ONE to look more closely at what is going on in the British press at the moment, and I suspect that from the point of view of a visitor to, or admirer of, or – as is the case in hand when I teach students about the British press – a student of our society, our newspapers are, to paraphrase Churchill, a nipple, wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.

HAVING SPENT A GOODLY AMOUNT OF TIME looking carefully at the issue, I have come to the conclusion that four of our newspapers seem to believe that The X Factor is news; two of them seem to believe that female breasts are news; all of them think that horse racing (the most difficult one for foreigners to understand) is news; two think house prices is news; one thinks socialism is about to destroy our society; and a final newspaper wonders whether we are dressed suitably for our day-to-day engagements, be they death in Afghanistan or taking tea in the morning room. Given, to paraphrase Wilde again, the dull nature of modern life, our newspapers flesh things out the way they see fit according to their “readership”. The style of the flesh varies from open topless to soft, back-lit art photos in the Sunday supplement. But in the end tits all the same.

(My picture shows a topless topless car wash. This is a car wash carried out by topless ladies, and in this case the car is also topless. The service was recently set up in an Eastern country. I thought this might be interesting; but is it news?)

DIVE, DIVE, DAVE

SOMEWHAT AS A METAPHOR FOR BRITAIN ITSELF, we have the interesting spectacle of our “top” nuclear submarine stuck on a shingle bank off the Isle of Skye and being filmed and photographed by holidaymakers and other persons jollying about while enjoying themselves in the miserable Celtic sea-water-drenched air that is often called the late Scottish summer.

THERE MUST BE SOME REASON FOR SPENDING ONE’S money on holiday in Scotland, of course, and, as I discovered as a youngster, it is not the weather, and certainly not the heritage, most of which is crumbling around us. Yet there is always the chance, in Loch Ness at least, of seeing the emerging of a megalithic behemoth bubbling to the surface in a photographers’ heaven.

THOSE WHO MAY HAVE BELIEVED THEIR LUCK had turned yesterday were – alas! – sadly informed of the contrary as the day and the wee drams of whisky went on. This behemoth was in fact HMS Astute, the 7,800 tonne nuclear submarine that is longer than the average football pitch (and is pictured above). It weighs more than 1,000 London (double-decker) buses and is capable of spending 25 years under the water without any need for refuelling, thus being able to go around the earth six times without any Russians seeing it. Neither does it need to touch the surface to take on oxygen, as it has the capacity to “de-oxydate” sea water and make its own oxygen for its crew of happy chaps and ladies who have presumably volunteered to spend the rest of their lives playing computer games and having sex in cramped spaces with people who do not wash often, like an extending of their student days.

UNFORTUNATELY, YESTERDAY, it seems that a shrimp managed to get itself entwined around the 32 billion pound engine, and the submarine, which “would be totally invisible” to the enemy, had to be dragged into port by the tug boat owned by Mr Jock “Galore” McGuffin and his twin sons Jock Jr. and Cain McGuffin. Afterwards, so I am told, a pleasant evening was spent in “The Kilted Clot”, the local pub in Kyle of Lochalsh, where there were trebles all round.

KANGA AND ROO

I WENT TO DE LA SALLE SCHOOL in Liverpool, the same school as Wayne Rooney, now apparently the darling of all English football after remaining in the spotlight in his argument with Sir Alex Ferguson for the last week. By a strange coincidence, just before this “spat” between the two (as the press call it) I was visited here in Lisbon by a former schoolteacher of mine, a gentleman who had been Wayne’s teacher besides mine, who came here along with his two charming daughters. Adding to the coincidence is the fact that he is also called Rooney. But "Mr" Rooney.

IN MY DAY, AS I POINTED OUT to this pedagogue, despite my being the Captain of the School Football First XI and Head of House for Sports, Games and Entertainment Events, I was always told by my headmaster, and by anyone else who could get my ear for a while, that these frivolous and flippant activities would amount to nothing, and thus I was dissuaded from spending time playing football. If I wished to “become someone” in life, and find “true happiness”, I would, so they told me, have to knuckle down and learn my Latin, apply myself to studies and not be distracted.

BEING A ROMAN CATHOLIC SCHOOL, in Croxteth, an extremely underprivileged area of Liverpool (although I was not from that area), we were constantly aware of the pressure from the De La Salle brothers to make sure that first and foremost in our outlook on life was moral propriety, goodness and charity.

THE MOTTO OF THE SCHOOL WAS, and still is, “SEMPER FIDELIS” – “always faithful”, or “ever loyal” as was preferred by our headmaster, Brother Alban. I, out of a mixture of fear and blind obedience, kept within the lines drawn out by the school most of the time; I learnt my Latin, studied hard and turned out to be perhaps one of the most successful academics De La Salle Liverpool had or has ever seen.

AND TODAY I LEARN THAT WAYNE ROONEY, who was only not expelled from school because there was nowhere to send him, who learned absolutely no Latin whatsoever, and by no stretch of the imagination can be called “faithful” or “loyal” neither to wife Colleen nor to Everton nor to Manchester United, who pay his wages, has signed a contract that will pay him more money in six weeks than I will ever have earned in my entire life. What has happened to our education system?

RUE BRITANNIA

AMONG THE EXTREMELY LIMITED group of people who imagine that they can call themselves my friends there are even fewer who would equally term themselves as Conservatives, and these do not spend a great deal of time in my company. So I am unable to gauge at first hand the howling, wailing and gnashing of teeth that must surely be following on from the fact that Davy-Dave “Boy Dave” Cameron* has just ended the British armed forces (unless we get French chaps to fly our helicopters and airplanes).

THIS IS NOT THE RESULT OF INTELLIGENT allocation of the money available, nor of assessment of the true threats being posed to Britain by the world at large, but rather due to the fact that when clots like David Cameron and Georgy-George “Boy George” Osborne* are running the country, one gets what one pays or votes for; and what we have voted for is a bunch of rich country chaps – 18 millionaires and multi-millionaires in the cabinet – who really don’t know anything about life other than checking on whether the ponies have been fed when they go the estate at the weekend, whether nanny has combed Rupert the teddy-bear and whether the twins have been enrolled in lacrosse practice for the upcoming school term.

EACH TIME BRITAIN’S SECURITY HAS BEEN attacked by foreign johnnies it has been while Conservative chappies have been in charge. It may not be cricket to pounce upon one while one is putting a cucumber on one’s sandwich – an expression I once heard at Henley – but these foreigners will surely realise that stripping our armed forces down to their underwear might be a tad tempting and will not respect a gentleman’s right to reload his tank; and tanks, for this bunch of Bullingdon dickheads (all pictured above on the cover of their debut single), probably never gets beyond Thomas the Tank Engine.

*As homage to Cordozar Calvin Broadus, aka Snoop “Doggy” Dogg, I will from now on be referring to Conservative Party and occasionally Liberal Party leaders using the same snappy nomination, perhaps suggesting that they are as equally out of touch, spaced out and drugged away from reality as he is.

BELLEND, BOOK AND SWINDLE

FIFA PRESIDENT SEPP “BELLEND” BLATTER may well be worrying about what is going on in the real world nowadays that is getting him and his band of corrupt followers into trouble. Bellend may rue the fact that in the free western world, unlike the universe into which he was shoed as a follower of the most bribable individual in the history of sport, João Havelange, television, recording devices and digital technology – indeed all those advances that are bringing him and his smutty group of yes men the millions and millions of non-taxable Swiss Francs with which he feeds his fat face – are exposing him as a swindler.

IT IS LITTLE WONDER, THEREFORE that he does not want cameras behind the goal. For Bellend Blatter, the best situation would be to see cameras banned altogether – behind the goal, in front of the goal and particularly in the hotel rooms of the members of the committee which decides which country should host the World Cup.

ONCE AGAIN, THE USA HAS WISELY DECIDED to step aside in the competition to hold the event; everyone knows that corruption is rife whenever there is a great deal of money to be made, but should we in the UK get involved in an event of this kind? It would be considered racist of me to ask why members from Tahiti and Nigeria (as seen above) have more of a vote on deciding the venue for the competition than those from Britain, so I will not ask this question. But if you slip these two members a few dollars then you have one twelfth of the vote. Surely the best process would be to cut out the middle man, take the money from where it is made and declare Saudi Arabia, the UA Emirates, Kuwait and Bahrain the semi-finalists in a knock-out competition. If Iran isn’t too happy about this they can send a protest to Bellend Blatter.

REDCOAT RETREAT

WHEN I WAS A YOUNG BOY in the nineteen sixties, America must have seemed like a different universe for most people in Britain. Yet for those of us who were brought up in Liverpool it seemed to be closer than Manchester, and certainly nearer than London, or “England”. Most of the people I knew at school had dads or uncles who “worked on the boats”, and for a lot of us these “boats” meant the regular shipping lines that went from the port of Liverpool to New York or other ports of call in the USA.

IT WAS DUE TO THIS RELATIONSHIP that so many of those in my generation in Liverpool were able to receive DC and Marvel Comics brought back by our family members far before British comics like the Beano or Dandy became part of our existence. Other people have written at length about how merchant sailors brought back pop music records in the late fifties, stimulating the rise of pop groups in Liverpool that ended up in a music scene in Merseyside that was far in advance of anything else in Britain.

THERE WERE THE OCCASIONAL LINGUISTIC difficulties, of course: whenever Batman went into a city centre I would, at the tender age of five, be confused by “malls”, “malteds”, “sidewalks” and the like, and, watching Top Cat on ITV, I could never understand what a “Pizza Pie” was. I could also never understand what a “Zip Code” was on those adverts for “See thru glasses”.

NEVERTHELESS, IT IS FAIR TO IMAGINE that the commercial relationships between the wider USA and the UK in general were, in the sixties, more or less the beginning of what they ended up being much later on. This was the time when Fords and Vauxhall were saving the UK economy by granting it the status of a new offshore 51st state, something that was hated by the Conservatives with both a capital and small c in Britain.

NOWADAYS THAT DEPENDENCE returns in the hands of the Conservatives and their “big society”. David Cameron and his scissor-handed Tories announce cuts of a swingeing nature on Wednesday; bug-eyed Hillary Clinton makes a speech on Thursday saying that she is worried about Britain reducing its military capability; on Friday Cameron cancels most of the cuts.

IN COMPARISON TO THIS, the fact that Liverpool Football Club, the most successful football club in the history of the game, formerly owned by a consortium from Texas, was sold on Friday to a consortium from Massachusetts, must mean very little. Most Liverpool FC fans would find it difficult to state where New England is, and very few of the most intelligent of their fans might be able to name perhaps one state that belongs to New England other than Massachusetts (but probably not the state capitals). The nice thing is that today Liverpool were beaten by Everton, a team owned, as has always been the case, by a gentleman from Liverpool, and the fans of whom are those whose grandfathers, dads, uncles and older brothers were those who worked on those ships in the old days.

MAKE MINE A TREBLE

CONFLICTING FIGURES ABOUT MINING DISASTERS around the world allow me to believe the ones that meet my purposes most snugly at the moment, and these are that over 3,000 miners have died in China over the last ten years, a number unknown in Russia and its satellite friends and a similar unknown number in South America. Only today, another 30 were entombed in China, with 17 of them being pronounced dead, 4 more “lost” in another mine in Chile and there was a collapse in a gold mine this evening in Ecuador. The figures for South Africa are equally not available, but if I had to hazard a guess I would imagine there had been the occasional subsiding now and again.

ALL OF WHICH MAKES THE “CELEBRATION” over Chile doing its duty by keeping its citizens alive while they toil underground and haul up 50% of its national wealth seem rather ignorant and hypocritical.

YET NONE OF THIS MUST MAKE MUCH SENSE to United States- and Europe-educated multi-millionaire and media magnate Chilean President Miguel Juan Sebastián Piñera Echenique, Ph.D., one of the richest men in the southern hemisphere, who is now wending his way around Europe – today in Portugal and London – drumming up support for his country after himself and two of his cabinet ministers have shown that Chile is a “first world” country because they used Canadian manpower and United States money to save some people from a mining disaster. He seemed little concerned on the BBC this evening when informed that there had been another mine collapse in his country.

HYPOCRISY WITHOUT END IS SEEN in his visit to Davy Cameron in Downing Street. Yesterday’s lavish party in the same house, to celebrate the 1,000th birthday of Lady Margaret Thatcher, had to be held without her, as she is somewhat under the weather. An ironic coincidence is that Margaret Thatcher, David Cameron’s darling, managed to close down almost all the mines in Britain and put thousands upon thousands of mine workers into unemployment, forcing so many families into poverty. But, perhaps, at least they were safe.

CHINA, MY CHINA

IN ANSWER TO THOSE FEW PEOPLE who have mailed me asking why I did not include China in my last essay as one of those countries which have turned their military on their own citizens, I would like to state something which, although seeming obvious to me, needs clarification for some: to my knowledge China has never been cruel to its people. It is a haven of happiness and personal fulfilment, as can be proven by the speeches made by the members of its Communist Party at the conferences they organise on a regular basis and which are pictured above in an image of felicity unbounded. Any information to the contrary is right-wing propaganda and hoo-hah.

CHINESE LEADERS, AS FAR AS I CAN SEE, have worked miracles in bringing about individual economic success to a population that was formerly scraping a meagre existence in rice fields, eating days’ old, re-heated scraps of food and living in hovels. Now many of them are as rich as any Westerner, are confident in their status in the world and have the freedom of movement to fart anywhere.

CHILE CON CARNAGE

I HAVE NOT BEEN PAYING a great deal of attention to the debates in the British parliament over Prime Minister’s Questions of late, perhaps because I cannot imagine that the spectacle of watching Ed “Mr” Miliband debating with Nick Camelegg could be in any way edifying.

SINCE THE EARLY AFTERNOON, however, I have been watching bizarre rolling news coverage of Chilean miners (and one Bolivian) being pulled up to the surface after the disaster at the San José mine in northern Chile, when we all thought these poor chaps would have to tough it out until Christmas. In general these hardy workers seem to be coming back into daylight in good health, except for “Johnny” Barrios, the gentleman whose imprisonment underground led to his wife finding out he had been having an affair for the last twenty years or so. According to his sister he may “be in a bit of trouble” now.

THE WHOLE WORLD REJOICES at the manner in which Chile, a country which doesn’t exactly have a glowing record as far as looking after its citizens is concerned, has rescued its workers – after all, apart from the Soviet Union, Argentina and South Africa, Chile is one of the very few “civilised” countries which has on occasion turned its military on its own people. The tragedy is that the Chilean government is using the plight of these underpaid miners as a propaganda exercise.

YET IT COULD BE WORSE. When a similar number of Russian citizens were trapped under the water in a “non-nuclear” submarine a few years ago they tapped and tapped at the sides using Morse code to see whether Vladimir “Ras” Putin would come to their rescue, but – alas! – Putin was unable to help them, despite offers from NASA to bring in the clever boys with the big wheels and drills.

ALL OF THIS SHOWS HOW ANY COUNTRY – as long as the TV cameras are turned on it – can become democratic and responsible and care about its citizens. If anyone has anything negative to say about the role of television in modern life then they should say it to one of these miners in Chile. Thirty years ago they would have been left to rot; nowadays, as soon as Reuters and CNN get hold of the story, the respective governments have to shape up and play decent for the cameras.

MY PICTURE SHOWS A SIMILAR DISASTER. This is the slag heap left over in Britain after years of mismanagement of the economy and the collapse of our mining industry. Beneath this pile of rubble, hundreds and hundreds of feet from contact with civilisation, is the Labour party. Who is going to get a shuttle down there and bring them out?

ALL IN THE FAMILY: LABOUR’S LOVES LOST

NOW THAT BRITAIN’S EXPERIMENT WITH DEMOCRACY is over, with the Condems declaring themselves elected for the next five years, the Labour party, now more lost than ever, has settled back into the business of behaving like political parties used to do in the good old days when the common people were not allowed to choose their representatives and there was no such thing as the Labour party other than in the minds of drunken Scots on a Friday night at the local pub.

ELIMINATING PROTESTANT CELTS, THERFORE, HAS BEEN step one in avoiding any return to democracy; the next step was to get shot of anyone who showed any sign of intelligence, clarity of expression or interest in personal grooming. A further step towards hatred from the populace would be to increase the number of prominent females at top table.

WITH SUCCESS UNUSUAL FOR SOCIALISM, Labour’s chief officers have achieved all of this and more, rendering them not only unelectable in the long term, but also unintelligible in the short term as far as many of the “Eastenders”, Brummies and assorted Northerners might be concerned.

BUT PROGRESS INTO THE PAST is most clearly seen in the return to family ties being a dominant factor in how Labour chooses its big wigs. Every decent politician loves a bit of nepotism, as we all know, of course; and it can only be good for the Parliamentary Labour party to have loving brothers in arms and loving husbands and wives in the shadow cabinet. What we really need – although I believe a plethora of them is on the way – is a little more father-in-law/son-in-law love. Then we might see who the meatheads and dopes are.

NEW GLEE LABOUR

OUR GOOD SCIENTISTS ARE OVERJOYED, as only science-type people can be, with the findings promoted by research into the planet Gliese 581g, discovered orbiting a nearby star, and upon which one scientist, a Professor Vogt (I kid you not) of the Carnegie Institution in Washington, has stated, in no uncertain terms, that he believes that life will undoubtedly have begun there.

ALBEIT TWENTY LIGHT YEARS AWAY from his object of certain desire, Professor Vogt is confident enough to state, “Personally, given the ubiquity and propensity of life to flourish wherever it can, I would say, my own personal feeling is that the chances of life on this planet are 100 percent. I have almost no doubt about it.”

THE ANCIENTS USED TO SET GREAT STORE by signs such as these from the heavens, and the fact that this momentous event coincides almost absolutely with the election of Ed Miliband as leader of the Socialist and Labour Party must surely mean that the chances of success on planet Labour are also 100 percent. I also have almost no doubt about this. Or perhaps not.

TWENTY LIGHT YEARS OF DISTANCE AND THE CHANCE of too much hot air frazzling up the atmosphere on Gliese 581g are, after all, long shots, somewhat like those of Mr Ed Miliband himself, pictured above (seated), smiling alongside other alien life forms in the Labour Congress. More serious views of the chances of life in the Labour galaxy would take into account the fact that poisonous gases, extreme cold, no atmosphere and complete lack of inertia may not be factors conducive to life. At least not as we know it.

SO AS OCEAN-GOING DEAD DUCK ED MILIBAND sets off on the shortest honeymoon period ever afforded to a new leader of a party he will be happy if he can manage to take the dead duck of his party and at least make it waddle, wag its tail and bob about a bit on the waves before it chokes on a heavier crust and sinks like a brick.



MISTER ED: LABOUR OFF TO THE KNACKER’S YARD

THE CBS TV COMEDY SERIES MISTER ED began its remarkable run of success on US TV from 1961 to 1966 and then was repeated from 1986 to 1993, 1996 to 1998, again from 2003 to 2006 and finally from 2007 until the present day, although now it is only shown on bizarre channels in the USA or the wider world in countries which do not have much television of their own. This achievement is particularly of note when one takes into account that the “plot line” is that of an intelligent horse, “played” by Bamboo Harvester, talking to a less than intelligent human architect called Wilbur Post, involving “Mr Ed” getting Post into trouble with chaotic comic results.

ALL OF THIS INVOLVED FAME for the actor Alan Young, who played Wilbur Post. Young was otherwise successful on radio and in some movies, but these conquests will always be second to his role as the straight man to a horse. When asked why Young was cast in this curious role, the producer, Arthur Lubin, stated that Young "just seemed like the sort of guy a horse would talk to."

EDWARD SAMUEL “MISTER ED” MILIBAND, MATHS GEEK, in his own words, also seems to have the attributes that Young appeared to possess: dumb, quick to get into odd situations and apt to mutter nonsense to himself while trying to get out of them. Having now been elected the leader of the Socialist and Labour Party, one wonders whether the horses are talking to him and what they may be saying. “Get off my back,” perhaps?

YET THOSE WHO ENJOY A GOOD LABOUR GOVERNMENT will probably have to wait some time to see a return of Labour’s success in the polls in the UK. Like Mr Ed itself, after several brief spurts of success, Labour will mainly be playing in theatres in small towns and third world countries for quite a considerable number of years. The burning question is, of course, not whether a horse is a horse, of course, but whether the brains of Labour, Mr Ed’s brother David, will hang around and play second fiddle to a vaudeville act or go off on a different course and make some proper money. Bets are on.

BELLAHOUSTON, WE HAVE A PROBLEM

THE FORM BOOK SUGGESTED THAT A FIELD DAY would be had by those who wished to diss Pope Benedict XVI; a gruff, grumbling, intellectual, stand-offish leader surrounded by a general staff of brass-hearts, one of whom had likened England to a “third world country” on the night before arrival (not, in fact, in England – but some ignorant foreigners call the whole nation England, when not ‘London’).

THUS AND AS PERMITTED OUR KNOXISTS and Wesleyans may have dusted off their kilts and beards, waxed their knees and perhaps even brushed their teeth to be prepared to repeat the howling at the Pope as was dished out to the Catholic sovereigns afore their banning from Scottish field, furrow, plain and strand. Benedict, the general feeling went, would crumple under the weight of the importance of this visit.

YET OUR NOW FAVOURITE GERMAN has surpassed anything ever seen by the dour Scots on St Ninian’s day. Pope Benedict waltzed smoothly into British life in his Edinburgh reception, he toned down his accent, went on walkabout without protection, spoke in Alban and kissed babies. The effect of all this, preceded by apologies made onboard as he flew into Scots skies about the fact that he was unable to stop or even report widespread buggery between and among priests, raping of choir-boys and young girls, child abuse on a scale never seen in any civilised society since Rome under Nero, was endearing. What a wonderful man. And what a lovely mass in Bellahouston. Now what will the papers say?

PRIMUS INTER PADRES

NAZI RATSY IS A PUFF DADDY! howled the front page of The Sun newspaper on the 19th of April 2005 when Dean of Cardinals and Primus Inter Pares Joseph Alois Ratzinger was elected Pope, and white smoke billowed out of the chimney above the Sistine Chapel. For those who do not understand the “joke” in the headline, the best idea would be never to read The Sun and to try to keep away from British humour altogether. Or you can write to me and I'll explain it.


POPES HAVE NEVER HAD A GOOD PRESS in Britain, something one could equally say about most overseas politicians who “talk foreign”, and if we add the fact that the current leader of all Catholics is German, then Pope Benedict XVI, the 265th Bishop of Rome and Sovereign of the Vatican City State, will need all the Teutonic thick skin he can muster inside his bullet-proof popemobile to keep from being upset by the big print bound to come his way later this week.


THE PREDOMINANTLY PROTESTANT PRESS has seen a bit of bubbling under of anti-Catholic sentiment of late; while this is not, perhaps, news, it is a surprising reaction from a world that generally manages to avoid religious feeling except when there is an opportunity to ridicule the Archbishop of Canterbury. The scandal of paedophilia in the Catholic Church does not even seem to be the major issue on the agenda by those who wish to protest against the first ever state visit by a Pope to Britain.


BUT WHAT SEEMS TO BE THE PROBLEM is suspicion of the old-fashioned Holy Apostolic Roman Catholic arrogance that is exuded every time a Pope comes over a little ex-cathedral. Despite the nice noises being made by the Pontiff, it is hard to put aside the fact that they are delivered in an accent that sounds like it comes out of the mouth of a Schutz-Staffel Commander in a bad Second World War movie. And no matter how learned and pious Benedict may be, the fact remains that in the wrong light he can look a little shifty.

BURN THE BOOK, BURN THE MAN

FOR THOSE OF US WHO BELIEVE THAT NOTHING beats curling up with a good book, the recent events in Gainesville, Florida, more specifically at the Dove World Outreach Centre, are rather confusing. As I write, Pastor “Doctor” Terry Jones, a second-hand furniture salesman who preaches from a church which is an extension of his garage and is a dead-ringer for Yosemite Sam in the Bugs Bunny cartoons, is confused about whether he has really heard from God or not telling him that he should not burn any Korans tomorrow. (Or Qur’ans as we increasingly see them written)

I AM NO EXPERT ON RELIGION, and thus am unable to give my own opinion as to whether the Koran deserves burning, but I have no intention to burn my own copy, which nestles on a shelf alongside my several Bibles, Torahs, Book of Mormon and Gospel of Zarathustra. Most of these were bought in second-hand or charity shops, and that is probably where they will end up in the future. I confess that none of them has been read from cover to cover.

OF BURNING BOOKS, MANY PEOPLE HAVE WRITTEN, and befitting his name, Francis Bacon (the serious one) uses a food comparison: “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed and some few to be chewed and digested.” (Of Studies) Bacon happily then goes on to explain how his aphorism helps us understand which books are “goodly” as he terms it in his essay. One could continue the food metaphor into this Floridian penchant for burning books, and anyone who has tasted Floridian cuisine will know that, like a lot of Southern so-called “finger-lickin’” fayre, there is a tendency to put a tad too much spice on the hog or chicken or burger and leave it a tad too long on the coals.

STATESMEN OF VARYING IMPORTANCE have apparently been in contact with the good pastor in an attempt to avoid tomorrow’s “event”, including decent Roman Catholic Tony Blair, but not including the Imam responsible for New York City and the building of the Muslim Cultural Centre close to Ground Zero. None of this intervention has been useful, and so I suggest another: Tony Blair could provide a sign from God himself by offering Dr Jones an alternative book for him to burn, the destruction of which would also be a service to mankind. Surely Blair’s publishers must have hundreds of thousands of spare copies of the useless “Tony Blair: A Journey”?

CHRIS GETTING OUT OF BILL’S GOVERNMENT

OTHER THAN IRRITATING US with his accent, absurd phrasing and dubious pronunciation of the definite article, hapless William Hague has not made much of a mark on British politics despite serving as the leader of the Conservative and Unionist Party for a short while. Indeed, I must confess I had dismissed him as a possible candidate for news interest as soon as he resigned from his leadership post after a dismal period trying to show Conservatives that he was a youthful future leader rather than a balding, middle-aged, has-been whose brightest days were when he was a teenage Thatcherite.

HOW WRONG I WAS. Just when we all thought we had seen the end of the mispronounced “the” (as in “Thee future of thee world in thee next century will be…” etc.), it returned with a vengeance in the mouth of the current Condem Foreign Secretary. And just when we all thought it would be kept to the occasional speeches on matters of business abroad, Mr Hague has shown how fully committed to being a ConDem with a capital CD he is by doing what so many of his fellows seem to do and getting himself involved in a smutty, sex-based scandal.

OF COURSE, IN THE XXI CENTURY no one in their right mind (which one should not automatically extend to people who vote Liberal Democrat) would ever dream of criticising a government minister for being homosexual, but fingers and tongues will always wag if a minister is doing something which even he or she finds shameful. And if this is paid for by the tax-payer then the knives will be sharpened at the Telegraph, the Express and the Mail.

THUS BOYISH CHRISTOPHER MYERS, Mr Hague’s travelling companion and aide-de-camp in hotels on three continents over recent months, had to be sacrificed and leave his job in order to save Hague’s political future. Which even today looked in doubt again after the drivel he has been writing on his “twitter” machine about the “big lie” told about him. He has “nailed the gay rumours”, he tells us. All of us at Sunday Morning wish him well when he is soon shuffled off for medical attention.

VINTAGE CHARLES

NOT A GREAT DEAL HAS BEEN HEARD from our future leader Prince Charles of late, perhaps, many people may have thought, because his ludicrous efforts to make us save the planet by such bizarre ideas as not washing our Port wine glasses, chewing our muesli more slowly or reading our “bedtime books” by candlelight have been forgotten after political interest in climate change dwindled when an Icelandic volcano emitted more carbon in three months than the entire Western world in 20 years (counting back as from today).

NOT SO FOR OUR INTREPID PLANET-SAVER! We now know that he has been hatching his latest cunning plan to enable the average person to make a small but significant contribution towards a healthier future.

THOSE WHO HAVE NOT READ this month’s edition of Vogue USA magazine (in honour of which I am adding a link to my Spartan set of further reading material) will imagine I am inventing Charles’ suggestions. I suggest one should buy the print edition to get the full force of the foolishness up with which we will be putting when Charles becomes king of England.

CHARLES TELLS US HE IS A KEEN UPCYCLER, and suggests we all follow his example. His pointers to greater sustainability and responsibility are as absurd as his grandmother’s suggestions to East Enders in London who were suffering from the Blitz bombing of their slums to grow their own vegetables to make sure they got enough vitamins each day.

SETS OF CUFFLINKS CAN BE MADE, as indeed his are, from the engines of our old cars. He has had someone do this with his old Aston Martin engine. Savings can also be made with shoes, like his shoes, “made from bales of leather salvaged from an eighteenth-century wreck off the Southwest of Britain. They are totally indestructible and will see me out."

EVEN OUTER GARMENTS can show our care for our planet, claims Charles, such as his “winter coat, modelled on one owned by his great-uncle, King Edward VIII. It was made for him by Les Bergquist, a tailor at the Savile Row firm Anderson & Sheppard.”

IGNORANT CRITICS OF PRINCE CHARLES will suggest that he is completely out of touch with today’s reality, that very few working-class people wear cufflinks nowadays and that making them out of a Honda engine does not have the same panache as cufflinks from an Aston Martin.

WHAT THESE PEOPLE ARE MISSING is that Prince Charles, in accepting this interview with Vogue Magazine, is finally settling into his position as a trend-setter rather than trend follower. No doubt everyone who is anyone will soon be flocking to Savile Row with photos of their grandfather’s clothes to have them copied.

ONE HOPES WE WILL SOON SEE VINTAGE REMAKES of mid- XX century mining helmets, donkey jackets, boiler suits, overalls, tanner’s leathers and prison outfits being worn by today’s young men as they go about their business in city centre offices.