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.