ODE ON A GRECIAN EARN

“WHAT’S A GREEK URN?” WAS OFTEN the introductory line to a sequence of jokes by Eric Morcambe and Ernie Wise, the most successful comic duo in the history of British stage entertainment, with the reply and punch-line, usually given by Eric, being, “About a hundred Drachma a week.” Or thereabouts. The origin of the pun was a pastiche of a Plautus play in which a character in ancient Rome, having been plunged into the depths of poverty due to reckless overspending announces, in order to save himself from being sold into slavery, “I’ve got a Greek urn.” (i.e. something valuable). There were variations on the joke involving a “Chinese urn”.

GRECIAN 2000 was the brand name of a company which started out in the late nineteen-sixties in Britain and the USA attempting to sell hair dye for men on a market where most men were still afraid of wearing after-shave lest their male friends call them “nancy-boy”, “nonce”, “ponce”, “fruit”, “fairy”, “shirt-lifter” or “brown-hatter” to quote some of the popular slang expressions used to refer to ‘suspected’ homosexuals in the caveman days of the sixties. The TV advert involved a downcast gentleman, greying at the temples, suddenly transformed into a dapper man-about-town wearing flared trousers, seersucker shirt with elephant-ear lapels and sporting lamb-chop sideburns disco-dancing the night away under a mosaic mirror ball as if he had been given his youth back.

BOTH OF THESE ICONIC TV EPISODES that live still in the memory of those of us who truly enjoy classic TV serve to remind us of the fact that there has always been something slightly off the mark about Greekness. Shakespeare’s joke in Julius Caesar, later assimilated into the language, that “it’s all Greek to me” has stood above “double Dutch” in meaning ‘erudite or clever nonsense’. It actually means “I can’t make head nor tail out of it”, which refers to the fact that it has no value as a coin.

THE USE OF THE TERM “GRECIAN VORTEX” by The Daily Telegraph to describe the calamitous state of Portugal, spiraling into a lack of money due to the government cutting away at the finances of the middle-classes, who traditionally keep the economy alive, thus, according to the same newspaper, guaranteeing complete and utter economic and financial collapse within eighteen months, is a more recent spin on the use of adjectives referring to our Hellenic neighbours and friends. Curiously, almost all of the terms tend to be negative.

ALL OF WHICH SUGGESTS THAT letting Greece into the Euro, or even the Eypo, was something of a mistake. But at least for the moment, after the latest frivolous meeting of our glorious leaders in Brussels, the plan is to forgive half of the Greek debt not by asking tax payers, but rather ‘institutional lenders’ “to take a haircut” and write off what they are owed. I have seen some of these institutional lenders’ leaders on TV over the last couple of days, and I am not surprised to see that many of them are bald and/or grey-haired. Further haircuts might be difficult for them, and Grecian 2000 is of no use at all in the long term. I wonder how long it will be before some of them are asking “What’s a Greek earn?”

THE MODERN WORLD EXPLAINED

AS A POLITICAL COMMENTATOR of some repute, people often come up to me and ask me “David, what on earth is going on in the world?” Sometimes this takes place at dinner parties, on one occasion recently before I had even unwrapped the wine I had brought as a present for the host’s wife. On other occasions I am accosted by students in the corridors of the august institutions in which I teach, begging “Professor, please help us understand modern politics”:

THE “DINNER PARTY PEOPLE” who ask the questions are often those who have not bothered to watch television for the last thirty years and often fall asleep listening to classical music on the radio, and so missed the collapse of the Berlin Wall as well as the death of Irving Berlin; my students are often those who are floating through their student days on a sort of grey, acrid-smelling cloud.

FOR OBVIOUS REASONS I FIND it somewhat difficult to explain the rather confusing elements of the modern world to these sets of people, and so, in yet another of my spontaneous and totally cost-free services provided to the people of the world, whether they be Gin-drinking socialites or blurry-eyed students, here is the “modern world” in a nutshell.

ELECTIONS TOMORROW IN TUNISIA, coupled with tomorrow’s likely decision by the Finance Ministers of the European Union to “end financial sovereignty” by member states, along with Britain’s Conservative and LibDem Government’s refusal to allow a democratic withdrawal from the hated European Empire of Brussels suggest that the balance of power has somewhat changed since the late 80s.

MY MAP SHOWS THE CURRENT STATE OF PLAY. I hope everyone joins me in wishing all these new nations the very best and jolly good luck in getting on with whatever it is that they have been arguing over and/or fighting about getting on with for the last twenty years or so. As an Englishman I can only say, hand on heart, “God speed you, chaps!”

(My map shows Poundland, the Great European Disaster, the three Eurovision Unions (Baltic, Muslim and Balkan), the Arab-Speaking Democrats and the parts unknown.)

ZENGA ZENGA

IN A DEMOCRACY IT IS EXTREMELY rare for any of our leaders to lose control and come up with threatening rants when they feel their positions are undermined, and although one might have expected this of former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who was liable to fly off the handle at a moment’s notice, very few people must have expected such heavy-handed, ham-fisted tactics by mild-mannered model pupil David “Dave” Cameron.

ALAS! THE PRESSURES OF POWER have led Cameron to confront his back-benchers over a proposed revolt on Monday if he does not comply with his election promise to allow Parliament to have a chance to introduce legislation for a referendum on Britain’s position in Europe.

HOLDING CAMERON’S FEET TO THE FIRE are now 50 Conservative MP, involving many Parliamentary Private Secretaries who would rather resign than face up to their electors during surgery, or – more threateningly – lose their seats to one of the members of Nigel Farage’s marauding band of UKIP candidates snapping at their heels.

CAMERON HAS THREATENED to sack the rebels and has also promised that the whips will be out on Monday. In my opinion he should perhaps think about the fate of another famous former leader who only months ago told his own rebels that he would hunt them down from room to room, house to house, alley to alley.

PORTUGAL. THE MAN

PORTUGAL HAS OFT BEEN mentioned of late under the same breath as Greece in the sense that it is doomed to failure in the short and long term due to the fact over the last twenty years it has been receiving money from kindly, good-hearted Germans who thought that their goodness would be repaid by Portuguese leaders applying it in the best interests of the Portuguese people.

ALAS! THE GERMANS MUST NOW CRY, having discovered that all of this money has been frittered away on beach houses, megalomaniac projects such as the Portuguese World Exhibition of 1998, the 2004 European Soccer Nations’ Cup Finals, bridges which take no one anywhere, motorways which stop short of their destinations and have turned into pot-holed death-traps in a matter of months, and on good old-fashioned pocket-lining for the élite of the Socialist and Social Democrat parties who have taken turns in sharing out the loot among themselves and their friends in the civil engineering companies responsible for building the crumbling, mould-infested heritage of rubble that is modern Portugal.

MORE RECENTLY, OF COURSE, as the bottom has fallen out of the easy money market, those busybodies at the IMF, European Union and European Central Bank have reined in the cash and called upon the Portuguese government to tighten up controls.

THE NEW LEADER OF PORTUGAL, Mr Passos Coelho, is slightly different to the stereotype Prime Minister of recent years in that, rather than looking like an insurance salesman, sales representative for Marks and Spencer, fish, priest or minor character in a Quentin Tarantino film (to list the last five Portuguese PMs), he could easily be an understudy for Roger Moore in a James Bond movie of the 1980s. In those bits of the movie where Roger Moore got punched, kicked, soaked in water or slapped about a bit by a Russian female, Passos Coelho would step in and do the job to perfection.

ANOTHER ASPECT IN WHICH he has differed from his predecessors of the last twelve years or so is that rather than doing nothing and allowing the Portuguese economy to go down the toilet, his approach, as announced yesterday, is to do something to make the economy go even further down the toilet, with his bog-brush style economic and financial measures for 2012 guaranteed to make whatever was left of a country clinging on to hope to feel the flush of the chain and be swept into the sewers.

PORTUGAL. THE MAN, the pop group of my title, is a psychedelic trash metal group originally from Wasilla, Alaska, but who have come closer to reality by moving to Portland, Oregon. Somewhat like the Portuguese politicians of the last twenty or so years (in my experience), they know very little about the reality of Portugal.

THE FANTASTIC DR FOX

THE REISSUE OF THE 2009 movie of the same name is proving something of a success in British theatres, and is once again providing some difficulty in its interpretation. Is it suitable for children? Should it be X-rated? As a service for my readers, I have decided to provide the essential plot details and cast, and one may thus judge for oneself.

FANTASTIC DR. FOX IS A 2009 AMERICAN stop-motion animated film based on the Roald Dahl novel of the same name. The story is about a defence secretary who steals money every day from taxpayers and spends it on, among other people, his best friend, a mysterious creature who enjoys dancing with Dr Fox and using his friendship to meet wealthy farmers and foreign politicians who buy weapons from him.

THE TAXPAYERS BECOME FED UP WITH DR FOX, as do the journalists, led by Rat and Weasel, who write stories about him, but they do not try to kill him straight away, nor expose his strange behaviour with his best friend, as they are afraid they will be accused of hacking into Dr Fox’s phone or digging into his home.

DR FOX REALISES THAT HIS LIFE, WIFE and happiness are in danger, and so he outwits his enemies and goes to live with his family in a hole underground. The Foxes become accustomed to living in the sewers with others. Dr Fox gives up his old life and opens a supermarket, where he now is free to dance with his friend, and sometimes his wife.

Cast in full:

Liam Fox as Mr. F.F. Fox

Adam Werritty as “Best Friend”

The Invisible Woman as Mrs. Felicity Fox

George “Bushy Bush” Bush as David Cameron

Mickey Mouse as George Osborne

Rupert Murdoch as Rat

Kelvin McKenzie as Weasel

Yoda as William Hague (aka “Squirrel”)

OLD SPECKLED HEN

UNBELIEVABLY FOR THE BRITISH PRESS the long knives are not really out for loveable, cuddly Dr Liam Fox, our good Defence Secretary who has, we now know, been dashing about the world doing business in our interests always in the company of his “best friend” Adam Werrity, paid for by the British taxpayer. The fact that happily married Fox has taken his best friend with him on 80 trips abroad on official United Kingdom government business over the last couple of years, when Werrity has nothing to do with politics, does not even seem to warrant innuendo.

NOT ONE NEWSPAPER OR COMMENTATOR, other than the brash, outspoken Jeff Randall, who stated yesterday on Sky News, “I don’t spend that much time with my wife, and I am happily married”, seems to want to come to the conclusions that are obvious, and which are (as no one else will print them): Defence Secretary Dr Liam Fox is cheating the UK public out of money; Dr Liam Fox is unfairly giving an advantage to a friend (if Werrity actually has a vested interest in following the defence secretary about the world buying and selling arms to third world countries); and Dr Liam Fox’s wife needs to get a grip on her husband, as “my best friend” is a primary school expression.

WHEN FOX STOOD UP AND STATED IN PARLIAMENT that he goes abroad and “naturally” takes his “best friend” with him, but he won’t be doing it in the future, no one screamed at him to resign. What, I wonder, is going on?

I COULDN’T CARE LESS ABOUT Dr Fox, who is obviously about to go down the toilet politically and probably domestically, but I am intrigued as to why neither our press, always keen to sniff out a scandal, nor our opposition politicians, have delivered the goods on the doctor.