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?)