HERMAN MUNSTER

AFTER YEARS OF BEING PLAGIARISED by other publications, I am happy to take advantage of The Sun’s latest epithet for the good leader of the European Union, gormless goon Herman von Rumpoy.

 

UNELECTED VON RUMPOY SEEMS TO HAVE DECIDED that, in keeping with the practice adopted by other, more legitimate, political leaders, he should produce what looks like a New Year’s message. I haven’t had the patience to study the whole content, merely the parts which seem to be of interest to right-thinking intelligent folk such as myself and possibly several people who are reading this.

 

SHOWING A SURPRISING CAPACITY for independent thought, as well as an arrogance beyond his station as a showroom dummy, “Munster” has seen fit to “warn” David Cameron about the dangers of his actions and the consequences of them for the rest of Europe. When Cameron suggested recently that the UK should begin to reclaim some of the “powers” that have inexplicably been ceded to the EU over recent years, Munster declared: "If every member state were able to cherry-pick those parts of existing policies that they most like, and opt out of those that they least like, the union in general, and the single market in particular, would soon unravel”.

 

MUNSTER RUMPOY WENT ON to state that this might result in the UK being isolated from the “rest of Europe” (sic), thus living without the benefit of the close ties established over so many years; and he naturally believes that the end of the EU would be a bad thing, as it would be the end of him. Perhaps unelected politicians like Munster and Duran Duran Barroso, as well as the majority of the second-batters on the lists of their parties throughout Europe and who never needed to listen to an electorate should be told that today’s poll in Britain showed UKIP, the United Kingdom Independence Party, at 15%, hot on the heels of Cameron himself. Unlike in Europe, our elected politicians have to respond to the will of the people, and they are clearly geared towards forcing a referendum which will hopefully end up seeing Munster and his cohorts getting sent back to their desks in municipal libraries in Belgium and tax offices in provincial villages.

 

BUT THE MOST ALARMING ASPECT of all this remains the fact that Von Rumpoy thinks he has some authority, when most people in the European Union have no idea who he is. In these texts I am read by people in every country in Europe except Lithuania and Liechtenstein, the USA, Canada and Mexico, several countries in Asia, including Mongolia, China and Japan, about six countries in Africa and four or five in South America, as well as Australia and New Zealand. I thus believe that I deserve the right to present a New Year’s message much more that Humpty von Munster. I will be writing it over the next couple of days.

SO THIS IS CHRISTMAS

FOR THE MANY PEOPLE who accept the Mayan calendar prediction about the end of life on this planet, tomorrow is basically the end of life on Earth. Of course, as I write this, at 11.38 pm GMT, I imagine that the world must have ended somewhere on the other side of the globe.

 A CLEVER PERSON MIGHT THINK that the world could end in ripples, although, having looked at our planet on a big book of stuff about the universe, I think that such an event is impossible. We all end or stay in one go, it seems. But the clever chaps might have some sort of explanation for this. I do sort of get the impression that these people who come up with these ideas do not have the same outlook on life as I do: apart from the things I have to do in my professional life, I want nothing more than to spend all my time in the company of my beautiful, loving, adorable, elegant wife, and my world will end when she does or when she is no longer part of my world. I am not sure that the Mayan calendar had taken this into their calculations.

 

BUT THEY MUST HAVE understood that love and desire and compassion and hope and the will to cherish was not something you could put down into fractions. Because it isn't.

 

SO IF THIS WORLD ENDS, then that is what it is. If not, I wish you all the best of the best for this Christmas and Holiday season. And everything you wish for in the coming year. You may not think so, but, believe me, you deserve it.

 AND I MEAN THAT from the heart.

THIS IS PLANET EARTH

AS I WRITE THIS I AM FULLY AWARE of the fact that, given my recent record of publication of this web-log, this may be my last. Unlike many of those closest to me, I am not deeply upset about the idea of the “world” coming to an “end”. Instead, being someone interested in language, I would like to know what exactly this “world” which will “end” happens to be.

 

I HAVE, INCREDUOUSLY, READ about planets that are “hiding behind the Sun”, and will attack Earth on the 21st of December. This sounds rather worrying, at first, until one starts to think about how a “planet” (according to the faithful of this belief) can “hide” behind the Sun. Nevertheless, as some very strange things have happened in the past, there is always the chance that whatever planet or asteroid that these good people believe to be lurking out in the dark matter “behind” the small star we call our Sun may in fact come hurtling out of its hiding place and attack me at some moment during the day that we now call the 21st of December.

 

HOWEVER, WHEN I THINK ABOUT THESE ISSUES on a serious level, I have a certain difficulty in understanding how a planet “knows what day it is”, as it were, given that many of the people in my immediate reach are often not totally sure of this fact. Indeed, even this very morning, I snuggled up to my good lady wife in our conjugal bed and asked her whether it was Friday or Saturday. Unfortunately, it was, and still is, Friday.

 

SO THE KNOWLEDGE CONTAINED in whatever planet that has been hanging around for five thousand years in preparation to destroy us is phenomenal.

 

(My photo shows an impression of what the people who are going to destroy the Earth might look like. They are intergalactic criminals known as Duran Duran and Rumpoy von Rumpoy Dumpty)

MOURNING SICKNESS

 

WHEN SIR MICHAEL PHILIP JAGGER, better known to his ageing fans as “Mick”, said yesterday that (and I quote, albeit perhaps not ipsa verbissima) “you get into rock ’n’ roll in order to have sex and do drugs (…) and then later on you have to do drugs so that you can still have sex and play rock ‘n’ roll”, he was probably referring to cocaine and Viagra, a drug which may be of use to a sixty-seven year old man who wishes to behave like a thirty year old.

 

SIR MICHAEL PHILIP appears to have aged relatively gracefully, and, despite having been branded as a scruffy hooligan in his earlier years, has successfully managed to blend into the establishment and behave like a good chap all round.

 

THE SAME CANNOT BE SAID OF STEVEN PATRICK MORRISSEY, formerly of The Smiths, as his outrageous comments and erratic behavior seem to suggest that the drugs he is patently still on are not doing him any good. His rant yesterday that he did not believe that Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, née Middleton, was really suffering from excessive morning sickness is supposedly meant to be in the line of previous outbursts against Britain in general and the Royal Family in particular. Yet what Morrissey believes to be true based on utterly unfounded facts should not be seen in the same light as his (in my view absurd) statements that Britain should give the Falkland Islands and islanders to Argentina immediately.

 

HIS OPINION THAT THE ROYAL FAMILY are “responsible” for the death of the unfortunate lady who received and put through the hoax call from the two Australian radio headbangers who thought that such idiocy was some sort of a jolly prank should therefore be dismissed by anyone except those who still listen to his records in their student residences. And commenting upon this at a time when the family of the lady concerned are still grieving should be seen as sick.

 

“KATE”, NÉE MIDDLETON, IS INDEED responsible for a great many evil things in our society, as, is the Royal Family. Perhaps one of these evils involves the death of a lady fifteen years ago, but most of the ill done by the Windsor clan has to do with poor fashion choices, bad haircuts, boring speeches about climate change and outrageously outdated accents.

BIZARRE LOVE PENTAGON

DAVID HOWELL “BETRAYUS” PETRAEUS, former head of what the Americans call the CIA and the Four-Star General overseeing command of US operations in Afghanistan, as well as having been a PhD lecturer teaching International Relations at the United States Military Academy and Fellow of Georgetown University, ought to know that good strategy demands that one should not shit on one’s own doorstep.

 

YET THE GOOD GENERAL APPEARS not to have been aware of the fact that the chattering classes in the press and “on the wires”, as our colonial cousins in intelligence sometimes used to term it when I was involved in counter-espionage, would “dog”, “hound” and “nail” him if he was in a “compromise situation”.

 

IN A WAY THIS SHOWS THAT TRUE LOVE is still alive. Petraeus was apparently doing the naughty with muscular Paula Broadwell, ostensibly his biographer, unbeknown to his wife, in what would perhaps be acceptable behaviour for a military man of importance, somewhat similar to our ruling classes in Britain, where either one shags a girl from among one’s female serving staff or one is considered to be a bit of a wimp by one’s wife. In short, he thought he could get away with this triangle.

 

IN AMERICA, OF COURSE, THIS IS DONE in a more open and light-filled manner, as shown by the most important officer in the American forces throwing away the most successful career in American intelligence since the days of J. Edgar Hoover by getting the occasional sexual relief from a bulging trout-pouted underling in his wood-panelled office.

 

THIS LOVE TRIANGLE AT FIRST widened when Four-Star Marine General John Allen was brought into the mix, as a suspected element knowing that something was amiss after e-mails between him and Floridian socialite Jill Kelley had been revealed, suggesting that the good general, a married man, like Petraeus, and entrusted to upholding “truth, justice and the American way”, was somehow underhand in his activities.

 

THE LOVE PENTAGON WAS MADE COMPLETE as it became five-sided when it became known that Kelley, presumably Allen’s lover, was sending e-mails to Broadwell, now known as Petraeus’s mistress, threatening her and telling her to “stay away from my man”: this presumably being Petraeus, unless we wish this to become a love hexagon. In theory, Allen would become Petraeus’s successor, but common sense suggests that at the highest levels of intelligence activity among the Washington community it would be wiser just to hand over the reins of power to a new breed of highly trained clever young women who are, without wishing to be sexist, ”attractive”. They will not be drawn into pillow talk as easily as men of a certain age whose wives look like yesterday. Who knows where this will end?

BARACK TO THE FUTURE II

WINSTON CHURCHILL MAY HAVE had a point when he stated “Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”, (although in my opinion he might have added “and wearing military uniform”), but I would perhaps have something similar to state about our former colonial cousins the United States of America. The decision to elect Barack Hussein Obama for a second term reminds me of an example given to me many years ago by a Latin teacher of mine.

 

HAVING BEEN A DOCTOR in the British Army, which was why, I presume, he knew Latin, he presented us with an interesting analogy on the US presidential elections, usually a two-way contest. Imagine, he suggested, a group of one hundred people. About seventy of them are permanently falling ill, or are chronically ill, or were born ill. These people tend to ignore the advice of their doctor (when they bother to consult a doctor) and regularly indulge in behaviour that leads to their conditions getting worse, or at least not better.

 

THE SECOND GROUP is made of super-fit, active and energetic people, of around thirty in number. They live a healthy lifestyle, avoid the things that may be damaging to their health, and are generally prepared for anything that comes at them. When they come down with something, which everyone may do, they have it under control in hours.

 

FOR SOME REASON NEVER EXPLAINED TO ME by my Latin teacher (although I have vague memories of him talking about some ancient medical system in use in Japan), the people in this community have to elect a doctor.

 

COME ELECTION TIME THERE ARE TWO candidates, both promising to “bring good health to everyone”. One of the candidates is from the “sick” group and the other is from the healthy group. The result of the election is that the “chronically sick” doctor wins by a majority of one.

 

MY TEACHER NEVER WENT on to explain the future of the health of those involved under the sick doctor; he merely left it up to us to imagine. One of the things we would have to consider, I suppose, was the number of healthy people who voted for a sick doctor. And this brings me to another famous quotation by Winston Churchill: “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”

START SPREADING THE NEWS

“IT IS AN ILL WIND”, I am told by proverbial tradition, “that blows no one any good”. And perhaps there can have been no event in history to make us more mindful of the truth contained in this statement than the lamentable destruction of a great swathe of the US Eastern Seaboard by the unfortunately-named “Sandy” hurricane that has devastated much of the tri-state coastal area and particularly the city of New York.

 

ALMOST AS IF FORESEEN IN THE LYRICS to the song “New York, New York”, by Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, “Sandy” has “done the Sinatra thing” in fulfilling “I want to be a part of it”, and “I want to stray right through the very heart of it” and “I want to wake up in that city that doesn’t sleep”. Indeed many citizens of New York City, I am now seeing, have not been sleeping for a short while. And those of Hoboken, New Jersey, which is in fact the early stomping ground of Francis Albert Sinatra, will not be sleeping in their own beds for quite a while. If they can find them. Thus their “little town blues” will not be “melting away” for a time.

 

THE ADVANTAGE OF THIS, OF COURSE, is that everyone can make a “brand new start of it”, and thus put the US economy back on track through what was always its major source of employment, sales and investment: construction in the North East.

 

THE ILL WIND, HOWEVER, brings political good news to Barack Hussein Obama. Only a week ago the polls and surveys were suggesting that he was fighting for his political life against Romney the Mormon, also a dubious choice for the populace at large, but one who was in the money enough to launch a massive final week charge to the White House based on spreading out dollar largesse.

 

THUS STYMIED, ROMNEY KNOWS NOT HOW, to use the XVII century Mormon language of his mentor Joseph Smith, who was writing in the XIX century in texts that are obviously fake, to advance. His attempt yesterday to hand out five thousand dollars of “candy” to the homeless in a shelter was filmed on live NBC, ABC and Cable stations. When one “homeless” said that candy was no use, that they wanted money, Romney started doling out cash from his own pocket. All interpretations of this on every channel I have watched have stated he was being idiotic and that he is dead in the water.

 

DEAD IN THE WATER, HOWEVER, may apply to many things after “Sandy” has swept across the East coast and been shown nation- and worldwide.

 

OBAMA SUPPORTERS OBVIOUSLY THINK that “Sandy” is a home run. I am not so sure. For 80% of American voters Sandy means nothing. Many had already voted by post. And I am minded of the great 1977 movie “New York, New York”, with Liza Minelli and Robert De Niro. According to the producers, it was “box office gold”. Then the director, Martin Scorcese, changed just one line in the final cut, and turned a cert billion grosser into a turkey. One line at the end of this campaign could do the same.

 

(My photo shows Governor Romney "pissing in the wind" according to Democrats)

CEMETERYGATE

EVEN THOSE WITH A PRURIENT interest in the events behind the scandal that has led to former BBC star and ex-philanthropist and no doubt future-ex-Sir Jimmy Savile (pictured above) will be shocked to the medulla and chilled to the bones on reading or hearing the revelations of Paul Gambaccini, one of the more lucid of the DJs who were hired by BBC radio in the nineteen seventies.

 

WE HAVE UNFORTUNATELY BECOME used to hearing about character X or Y being a paedophile; or film star W or Z having an extra-marital affair, often, as it happens, with someone of a different sex to their legally wedded partner. These press outings have been taking place with such regularity that even “right-thinking folk” – should there be any such individuals besides myself and my good lady wife – are now hardened to such news in the morning papers.

 

OUR LONG, LAZY SUNDAY MORNINGS, forgiving the plug, may often now be filled with over-the-marmalade discussions, once we get beyond the “Pass the economics supplement, sweetness” and “Have you got the Style magazine over there, David?” stage, involving such niceties as “Oh, I see that Lord Jxxxxx Hxxxx (name withheld) has finally been caught with xxxxxxxxxx (fill in, from: boys, animals, his wife’s sister, his own sister, etc.), all of which have now become as much a part of a gentleman’s breakfast as brown toast and burnt bacon.

 

WHAT NO ONE WAS EXPECTING WAS THE NEWS from Mr Gambaccini today. We may not be able to understand what makes a grown man a paedophile when we do not share their mental problems; yet trying to understand what is going on in the mind of a man who volunteers to “help” ambulance crews to bring dead people to the morgue because, as Paul Gambaccini states, Jimmy Savile was a “necrophiliac” (my inverted commas), a claim he made today live on BBC Radio 5, is beyond us.

 

ACCORDING TO SAVILE HIMSELF, he just wanted to be with dead people at the end of their lives. We all might have thought it was innocent back then, but it is one more thing that has lost its innocence in this, the age of perversion. Savile stated about the “quiet time” he liked to spend with people who died in hospital: “One of my jobs is to take away the deceased. You can look after somebody, be alone with somebody, who has lived a whole lifetime, and I’m just saying goodbye and looking after him.”

HAS HE GOT NEWS FOR YOU

IT WAS TO MY GREAT SURPRISE that on television today I saw Lord Conrad Black, aka Baron Black of Crossharbour, also known as Federal Bureau of Prisons prisoner #18330-424 of Coleman Federal Correctional Complex, Florida, ostensibly selling a book that he has recently completed.

 

FORMER TELEGRAPH OWNER BLACK, perhaps one of the few remaining “media barons” in the full sense of the term, was interviewed by "burly bully" Adam Boulton on Sky News this lunchtime.

 

AMONG THE MOMENTS OF FUN during which the Baron was visibly irritated by Boulton’s questions, bordering on the rude at times when he called Boulton a "jackass", we were given the information that this week he will be appearing on the programme Have I Got News for You, run by Ian Hislop, the editor of Private Eye, the magazine which for years headed a campaign to have Black brought to justice for what were allegedly fraudulent activities, involving, perhaps, stealing pensions from the employees of one of his companies.

 

OF COURSE WE NOW KNOW that he was innocent of all charges, and that his three-year spell in prison was all some unfortunate mistake or miscarriage of justice. It remains to be seen – as Lord Black did not appear to know any details about the programme – how he fares when faced with Hislop himself. We will see this Friday.

EUROPEAN DEMOCRACY INACTION

ALTHOUGH CURRENT CIRCUMSTANCES may not provide the best examples of the reasons leading to this sentiment, there are times when one feels somewhat proud to be English and – in a wider sense – part of the democratic tradition that has produced the institutions and attitudes forming the gleaming lights in the modern world that are the United Kingdom and the United States of America.

 

THE RECENT RESIGNATION OF ANDREW MITCHELL, perhaps the third most important member of the governing Conservative and Unionist Party, is one of some events that show the enormous gap existing between the Anglo-Saxon notion of what politicians are supposed to be doing and the notion that appears to be prevalent in the world at large, and particularly among our European brother and sister countries.

 

“PLEBGATE” AS THE POPULAR PRESS now seems to be calling the Mitchell case, is remarkable for two aspects. The first of these is that the Chief Whip to the Government travelled about by bicycle, which is increasingly a trademark of upper class political Englishness; the second is, obviously, that such a grandee in, arguably, one of the most important countries in the world can be brought to his knees due to being rude to a policeman.

 

ANOTHER EVENT INVOLVES HAPLESS George “Boy” Osborne, Chancellor of the Exchequer and millionaire, who was caught travelling on a train from Cheshire to London Euston in the first class compartment only possessing a ticket for a standard carriage. The aspect of note here is the fact that he was on a train. And that he then happily paid the £160 “fine” or “excess fee”.

 

I WAS RECENTLY STUDYING a European Union document on “expenditure” (read “waste”) by politicians in Greece, Italy and Portugal, and was alarmed to see that the norm was for ministers to have an average of six personal private political secretaries and one twenty-four hour chauffeur-driven car (three drivers over a 24-hour period) in these countries, thus drawing – at least to my mind – a direct parallel between excess in political expenditure and national bankruptcy.. Perhaps the “troika-enforced” cuts in these countries could start out by getting more politicians to go by train or – perish the thought – by bicycle. Of course they could carry on being as aloof and insulting to the plebs as they have always been, but at least they could save their countrymen some cash.

SAVILE ROW

 

IT SEEMS RATHER REDUNDANT TODAY to want to discover whether in fact Sir Jimmy Savile OBE, the former “BBC icon”, “national treasure”, “children’s saviour” and overall heart-of-gold do-gooder was really a hands-down-kids’-knickers-come-and-see-the-puppies-in-my-dressing-room paedophile or not; weight of evidence, guys and gals, seems to be gathering to make any case against this being true almost impossible.

 

ACCORDING TO SOME, MUCH-LOVED SAVILE would find it somewhat more difficult today to endear himself to the nation given the fact that he was both a heavy chain smoker and heavy chain wearer, two elements of presentation which would be frowned upon in most decent dancehalls and TV studios in these our enlightened times.

 

YET IT APPEARS THAT THE MOST PROMINENT TRAIT of his character – ie that of his “feeling up” and “touching up” (as they used to say) of female guests on his shows, of grooming girls and of – to put it bluntly – raping girls in order to get them a place on his rather pointless and bizarre TV shows – was either ignored or tolerated by everyone at the BBC, principally, and at all of the entities for whom he would put in an appearance; including, worryingly, Stoke Mandeville Hospital.

 

I CANNOT BELIEVE THAT ANYONE who came into contact with this absurd man did not think that, as my late father used to say about him, he was not “a full shilling”.

 

THE SADDEST ISSUE INVOLVED in all of this rather grim business is that now that someone has lifted the cloak on the crimes supposedly committed by Savile, everyone is now coming forward to say that they “always thought” he was “odd”, or “we always knew he was messing with youngsters”, or “most of us thought something was wrong”, or “I found him in his dressing room with a young girl, naked” – all of these quotes are taken ipsa verbissima from interviews or statements made by contemporaries of Savile over the last week.

 

WE HAVE NOT YET GOT TO THE STAGE when people who saw, and understood, that a girl was being raped and did not report it can be convicted under the law. Or have we? One tends to think of the film “The Accused”, written by Tom Topor and directed by Jonathan Kaplan.

 

THE LEGAL ARGUMENT AND THEN ROW OVER what one can do with the – if one thinks about it – hundreds and hundreds of men and women who must have known what he was doing with these poor girls may rattle on for some time. The best the BBC can do is to assure us that there are no more Saviles hanging around waiting for a break.

MAKE WAY FOR PLODDY

PC PLOD WAS, I SEEM TO REMEMBER, the name oft used to refer to the police officer in the Noddy series of television programmes and sundry spin-offs attached to it. Mr Plod ensures Noddy's taxi keeps within the speed limit and tries to keep all the Toys out of mischief. He catches the mischief-makers on his police bicycle, by blowing his whistle and shouting "Halt, in the name of Plod!" before locking the culprits up in his jail.

 

THE TERM ‘PC’, HOWEVER, HAS COME TO TAKE ON a meaning far beyond what might have been envisaged in the days when police constables used to knock on people’s doors to ask if all was well, and were on occasion invited in by housewives for a cup of tea, leading, so I have read, to a little bit of low-key shagging in flat northern accents while the husbands of these ladies in suburban streets were away labouring at the mill on the heath or in the dale. This rather fanciful image may, of course, be fostered by my having seen the wonderful TV series Life on Mars, in which Gene Hunt, the then (fictional) DCI of the Manchester and Salford Police tells us that“Plod” is seen as the normal term for foot policemen.

 

POLITICAL CORRECTNESS NOWADAYS TELLS US that even if we think we are vastly superior in our own minds to people whom we may see as “plebs”, just as all noble Conservative party members have done ever since the beginning of the system of democratic elections that they hate so much, we should keep our mouths shut. Otherwise the Conservative Party would have no chance in these tiresome elections that keep on turning up every few years and interfering with our harvest festivals or sports days.

 

WHETHER OR NOT THE ARROGANT Andrew John Bower Mitchell MP, member for Sutton Coldfield and Chief Whip to the Conservative and Liberal Democrat Government actually thinks that people below his station are there because they deserve to be so remains to be seen, but I imagine that it is not a good idea to call policemen “plebs” because of the wider implications such a statement involves. “Morons”, however, is a term that can be applied to aristocrats, the rich, the middle classes, the ‘working’ classes, the poor and the scrounging strugglers.

 

IF ANYONE WISHES TO STUDY MORON MITCHELL’s history in parliament and government they will see that his overriding principle is that there are “classes and classes”, “races and races” and that anyone who, like he did, went to Rugby School, should be allowed to tell foul-smelling, ill-bred, lower-class police officers what to do. Mitchell will never have to feel the pain of having to work hard at something one does not enjoy, nor will he ever know what it is like to ‘go without’. One wonders whether morons like him should be running our country. Hopefully the morons in his constituency will give him the heave-ho if the equally out of touch David Cameron doesn't do so before push comes to shove.

THE BIG END

AS SOMEONE FROM LIVERPOOL, I cannot help but be pleased and relieved over the final publication of what is now perceived by the authorities to be the truth about the disaster at the FA Cup semi final that led to the death of ninety-six young Liverpool FC fans, forty-one of whom, we are now officially told, were still alive and could have been saved if the South Yorkshire Police and Ambulance Service had done their jobs.

 

THE BLAME IS NOW BEING POINTED in the right direction after this final inquiry twenty-three years after the event. The report suggests the police, the ambulance service and even the coroner’s office not only did not carry out their duties correctly but then covered up their incompetent and probably prejudiced actions by falsifying their reports to make it look like the Liverpool football fans themselves were guilty of some misbehaviour that led to their own deaths and to the deaths of others.

 

MANY GULLIBLE CLOWNS LISTENED to the fabricated rantings of the (then) Conservative and Unionist Party MP for Sheffield Hallam, Sir Irvine Patnick, a hideous, neo-Fascist right-winger who was the first to spin the idea that it would be best for everyone concerned if the world believed that all Liverpool fans were drunkards (including ten year olds), were drunk at the time, and attacked the police. Those who listened to his idiotic arguments included Margaret Thatcher, who lapped up his muddled beliefs as being perfect sense, The Sun newspaper and its editor Kelvin Mackenzie, and Boris Johnson, who ought to have known better, as nothing anyone in Liverpool does on a drunken day out can rival what he used to get up to at Oxford.

 

THE SUN AND BORIS JOHNSON have now apologized, and Margaret Thatcher no longer knows who she is, and so, in a sense, is beyond reproach. Those who have not yet apologized, and  are thus in need of a good whipping, will probably die before the families of the ninety-six who died get their day in court.

 

These are: Peter Wright, (now deceased) then Chief Constable of South Yorkshire Police, who stated that details of fans' alleged misbehaviour were crucial because “if anybody should be blamed, it should be the drunken ticketless individuals”;

 

Paul Middup, (retired) then secretary of the South Yorkshire Police Federation. Source for a front-page article in The Sun newspaper accusing fans of urinating on police officers and stealing from the dead;

 

David Duckenfield, (retired on full pension due to post-traumatic distress). Chief superintendent in charge of policing at Hillsborough on the day. Lied about Liverpool fans forcing open an exit gate, when he in fact ordered that it be opened;

 

Sir Norman Bettison, (pictured above) the current Chief Constable of West Yorkshire Police. At the time he was Chief Inspector at South Yorkshire. He today continues to state that – even in the light of the new report – the Liverpool fans were to blame for the tragedy.

 

Despite howlings from all quarters that he should resign, he continues to state that no one did anything wrong on the policing side.

 

Dr Stefan Popper, the coroner for South Yorkshire West. He refused to consider events after 3.15pm when he held the inquests, suggesting that anyone who died after this time was unable to be saved. Eyewitness accounts suggest that basic CPR techniques, oxygen masks or even rubber tubes down the throat would have saved the lives of many.

 

YET THERE IS MORE TO THE CASE THAN THIS. I watched the events live on television in 1989, as the result was important to me. I believe that a small aspect that is not being mentioned here should be looked into. Besides the confusion and carnage, I distinctly remember a young lad from Liverpool coming close to the camera and the microphones and shouting and gesticulating, in great distress, “Why didn’t the FA give us the big end? Why didn’t they give us the big end?” (This is the larger end of the Sheffield Wednesday stadium, as Liverpool have more fans than Nottingham Forest). Shouldn't the FA be blamed as well? Wasn't the first mistake theirs? And why is no one talking about the FA today?

 

WHATEVER. NOW IS THE TIME TO GIVE THE BIG END of their lives to the culprits for this incredibly tragic event. We can at least strip two of them of their dubiously-awarded knighthoods, and perhaps we can at least allow the other three the chance to come forward and admit what scoundrels and villains they are before they are up for manslaughter.

DECONSTRUCTING HARRY

ALTHOUGH MANY PEOPLE DO NOT BELIEVE SO, being a successful royal prince nowadays is a difficult and sometimes tricky business, requiring intelligence, savoir faire and underhand behavior. No one epitomizes this so much as our very own Prince Henry Charles Albert David Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg, now known as Harry Wales, or Harry Windsor.

 

“HARRY” IS BOTH A HARD-WORKING member of what is sometimes termed the “most hard-working family in Britain” and also a Captain in the British Army, a position in which he has served in Afghanistan and through which he is responsible for the lives of many men in his regiment, all of whom are in Afghanistan at the moment, somehow managing to muddle on through without the help of their captain, who is, nevertheless, no doubt still thinking about them as he takes a well-earned holiday in our former American colonies, more lately in the rest and relaxation resort of Las Vegas.

 

OF LATE, HOWEVER, UNSCRUPULOUS people have found it to their advantage to publish some grainy, out of focus photographs of Prince Henry that they have taken on their new-fangled telephones which can also capture images.

 

MY PERSONAL OPINION OF THESE EVENTS is well-known. I perfectly understand why a gentleman of leisure would want to play billiards naked in the company of equally naked young ladies (but not snooker, which is a serious game), and I share his enjoyment of watching television naked, particularly in America, and so none of these photographs about which many people in the world of the media are so excited seem in any way offensive to me.

 

YET I CANNOT UNDERSTAND how the third in line to the throne of England could allow himself to be photographed wearing an “angry birds” hat. In case anyone finds this too unlikely to be believed, I am reproducing a photograph of this gauche behavior above. One can only hope that his grandfather has confiscated the offending headgear.

FULL BRAZILIAN

ALL MY FRIENDS WHO ARE SPORTS FANS, which amounts to about three people unless one includes football and/or betting on sports, in which case it includes all of my friends except for one, are already looking forward to the next Olympic Games, to be held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 2016.

MORE SCEPTICAL PEOPLE ARE WORRIED about the fact that Brazil is sometimes known as a corrupt country run by an extremely small number of ultra-rich, mutually self-appointing politicians with a tendency towards murdering those people who cannot be bribed. Only last week we discovered that the “successful parliamentary technique" used during the period of the “Lula” da Silva administration as President of Brazil was to pay members of the opposition parties to vote for government party proposals.

YET THE FIRST SCANDAL of the next Olympic Games started even before London 2012 was over. This involves the decision to name the main stadium for the games in honour of João Havelange (pictured above), the most corrupt man in sport ever, former head of FIFA and former head of the Brazilian Olympic Committee, found to have taken millions of pounds in bribes during his tenure, and – as if this were not enough – the man responsible for appointing the second most corrupt man in sport, Sepp “Bellend” Blatter, as head of FIFA, through a democratic voting process known as “centralized democracy”.

THE GOOD NEWS IS THAT THE RIO OLYMPICS will see the introduction of new sports, making the traditional games even more successful than ever.

THOSE NEW EVENTS IN FULL:

Complete Body Waxing – Brazil is favourite for this event, with Sónia Massagista Meu Bem tipped for the gold medal.

Police Helicopter Downing – This replaces the somewhat dull clay pigeon shooting, and is sure to be a crowd pleaser. Although other South American countries, as well as the Africans from Somalia, are now in training, Brazil looks a good bet for medals with their specialized team from the slum area of “Morro dos Macacos” (Monkey Hill) having honed their skills over recent years. (My picture shows a recent training session).

Murdering the Homeless – Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo will be entering strong teams in this event, although success in training, which will involve “cleaning up the streets”, may mean there will be no need for the event during the games proper.

Dog Shooting – Again likely to be an event completed before the tourists arrive to witness the games, this involves allowing anyone who possesses an illegal firearm an amnesty as long as they shoot the rabid dogs which proliferate the streets of Brazil’s major cities.

Mixed Tourist Scamming Pentathlon – A totally new event, although partially tried out in Athens, this involves five disciplines: enticing Americans or Germans into dark alleys where they are beaten up by thugs, robbed and stripped; straightforward pickpocketing; selling fake merchandising; overpricing in restaurants; and the more spectacular taxi-driver kidnapping, the blue ribbon discipline.

Women’s Combined Robbery/Prostitution/Blackmail Triathlon – This discipline was mainly a Carnival event in the past, but will now be extended to the Olympic Games proper. This involves three stages, and Brazil is by no means the favourite, as experts exist even in the USA, in Miami and San Diego, as well as in almost every South American country. Stage one is “Spiking the Tourist’s Drink”, and there then follows “Dragging him to Your Shanty” and the final “Threatening to Phone His Wife”. Gold medals are awarded for those who convince the fattest, ugliest tourist that he is sexy and/or shake him down for most money.

Drug Smuggling (Class A) – Although not a full Olympic Event strictu sensu, this involves taking advantage of the chaos surrounding the games to shift large amounts of extremely valuable drugs to Western countries. Brazil expects fierce competition from Ecuador, Venezuela, Colombia and the dark horse, Guinea-Bissau.

Let the games begin.

OLYMPIC JOUSTS

NOT BEING AN ADMIRER OF MOST “OLYMPIC SPORTS”, I had decided to avoid London during the period of these events. Following the wise statements produced by H.D.F. Kitto as to what the Greeks believed was sport, I can see no reason why anything done indoors or in teams can be deemed “Olympic”. Kitto states as to the Greeks’ ideas about athletes: “It was aretê that the games were designed to test – the aretê of the whole man… The usual events were a sprint, the long race, the race in armour, the discus, the javelin, the long jump, wrestling, boxing, and chariot racing. The great event was the pentathlon. If you won this you were a man.”

THE GREEK HERO OF THE ODYSSEY, of course, was required to learn and write poetry, to build and sail a ship, to catch, kill and cook a sheep, and to cry when hearing a sad song.

KITTO MENTIONS THAT INDOOR SPORTS, such as billiards, darts and table tennis, or even some pointless outdoor ones, such as golf, would have been greatly admired by the Greeks – as entertainments for slaves to indulge in, if one had nothing better to do with them.

YET I BECAME INVOLVED IN THE CONTAGION, and given the fact that I needed to go to London to have a pair of shoes re-soled and –heeled, I took advantage of the afternoon to watch one of the sporting events. My picture shows the Great Britain 4 x 100 metres relay team trying not to drop the baton. In my view they should have won the gold medal.

FROM THE HALLS OF MONTEZUMA

AS A SOMETIME LECTURER OF GORE VIDAL’S WORKS, many of my former students and other people I do not know have written to me of late, somewhat concerned about how we should remember him now that he has finally succumbed to the death he had more or less been expecting since 2003. I wonder whether among these people are the girls in my class who, when I announced we would be studying “Duluth”, by Gore Vidal, confused him (as did Ali G) with Vidal Sassoon, or the boy who, for some obscure reason, thought I meant Roald Dahl.

MEDIA OUTLETS HAVE BEEN DEBATING what to print about the most successful and controversial American man of letters of all time, more or less choosing what to write according to whom they believe their readership/viewers might be and what they would like to read and hear.

WE THUS HAVE HEADLINES SUCH AS: “Former Senatorial candidate Gore Vidal”; “Eminent Historian Gore Vidal”; “Prolific Novelist…”; “Gay Activist…”, “President of the American Humanist Society…”; “Writer of Ben Hur…”; et caetera. My own “headlines”, as it were, would be slightly different.

GORE VIDAL MAY NOT HAVE BEEN A MARINE in the traditional sense of the term, but, if he is to be believed, he managed to have sex with several hundred of them when he was stationed in the South Pacific in the early years of World War II, “because we had nothing else to do on our aircraft carriers”, as he stated on the BBC’s Hardtalk. If we take into account that he claimed he was not a homosexual because (I am cleaning up his statement) he had never given oral or been buggered, then this means he shagged a good portion of the US Navy.

HOWEVER WHAT I REMEMBER most clearly are two statements: one he made at a conference I attended when some fool asked him his opinion of the hated lawyer and president Abraham Lincoln and one when he was asked about the threat from the Soviet Union on some occasion on TV back in the nineteen eighties.

OF LINCOLN HE SIMPLY SAID “worse than Stalin”. About the possible threat from the Soviets, he said that he had been to Moscow on many occasions and discovered that the Russians still hadn’t managed to make a bottle of Vodka on which one could put the screw-on top back successfully, and that none of the plugs fitted the holes in the washbasins in their best hotels. Thus, he deduced, he could not imagine they could have a successful nuclear programme.

DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME

THE MEDIA JURY IS STILL out on the issue of what “happened”, or what “went wrong” in the extremely sad case of what will apparently now forever be known as the “Batman Shootings” in Denver, Colorado earlier today. The miserable ramblings of guest “experts” today on all of the rolling news channels, with their potted theories about “what could have made anyone do this” and other such banalities ignore the simple fact that Batman himself, or rather “The Dark Knight” is really the one to blame.

WARNER BROS IS SO POWERFUL that last week it shut down negative comments about the latest film in its Dark Knight franchise on www.rottentomatoes.com  (which it also owns) because of negative comments about the movie and death threats to critics who denied the film its (apparent) status as a classic.

WHEN I WAS A LITTLE BOY my friends and I used to play out in the street, with toy guns, and we used to go “bang bang” when we were supposedly firing them. Some of the more, I suppose, “sensitive” among us would pretend we had been shot and fall down and play dead, but most of us would say “you missed” and then there would be an argument, which usually led to no conclusion, and then we would go off to play something else.

IN THOSE DAYS BATMAN was on TV and everyone of my age used to watch it on Sunday afternoons, with Adam West and Burt Ward. The whole thing was camp, colourful and delightfully over the top. And no one ever got killed.

WHEN WE COMPARE THIS WITH THE WAY BATMAN movies have gone nowadays, with more killings than a video game, we have a ready-made answer as to “what could have made anyone do this”. But I have to confess that I suspect that this is a phenomenon confined to the United States of America, Finland, Norway and the two Germanies, where even people who have not finished their PhD can buy firearms. When this type of violence takes place at the Odeon in Oxford, where indeed a large number of undergraduates wear black capes already, then I will believe that the end of civilization is in sight.

DIAMOND GEEZER

THERE ARE MANY ADVANTAGES to being a senior lecturer in a liberal arts course at a university in an extremely relaxed country. The most obvious one is the fact that my teaching responsibilities are reduced to two days a week for twenty weeks a year, which is the plan set out by the absurd pan-European “Bologna” agreement, a method set up primarily to keep students at university for as long as possible in order for them not to inflate the unemployment figures.

ANOTHER ADVANTAGE IS THE FACT that I do not have to spend much time with my colleagues – or indeed with anyone – due to our timetables being mutually independent of each other.

THE NEXT STEP in this cadency is that when I do have to mix with my liberal, woolly-headed colleagues I have no need to discuss anything of any true importance with them. Most of them have no idea about, for example, the recent Euro 2012 football tournament, the Chinese programme to colonise space, the banking crisis or – the issue of the day – the first ever divorce between Thetans, as Tom Cruise prepares to be skinned by Katie “Earthling” Holmes.

INDEED, FOR THOSE COLLEAGUES of mine who teach subjects such as “Intellectual History of the Identity of Cities”, “Philosophy of Landscape”, “Culture of Analysis of Linguistics” or “Echoes of the Fox in Early English Literature”, the most important matters of the moment mean nothing. And the financial matter most discussed today would never pull them out of their ethereal complacency

“BONUS” BOB DIAMOND, head of Barclays Bank, resigned today in the wake of the Libor interest rate fixing scandal and selling of anti-interest rate fluctuation packages against rate increases. The first misdemeanor (as it is not yet a crime) probably negatively affected hundreds of thousands of people who are buying property worldwide; the second has sent at least (as far as is known) two hundred small businesses into distress and liquidation.

NOW THAT “BOB” HAS RESIGNED, he will be free, tomorrow to say whatever he thinks is true as he faces an investigation into false Libor submissions. Whatever happens during this inquest, and whatever subsequently takes place with Marcus Agius, helmsman of the bank that has “stiffed up” so many of those who rely on interest rates, this will not deflect my happy, giggling colleagues or my morose, introspective ones, from their way of looking at the world. And, as one sometimes thinks (or even says, in the right company) when visiting the zoological gardens, perhaps they are really happier than we are.

SENSE AND VINCIBILITY

ALMOST DIRECTLY ON CUE, David “Dave” Cameron and George “Boy George” Osborne seem to have come to the modicum of whatever senses they have and decided that enough is enough over Europe. Whether this has to do with events heralded in this very blog on the 28th of June – the day when the Eurozone became a centralised state awaiting pan-Eurozone taxation – remains to be seen; nevertheless, the moment has seen Cameron and his fellow Old Etonian prankster change from a softly-softly warmish approach towards Europe and the dreaded European Union to a mildly cool one.

ADDED TO THIS, THE EMERGENCE of former defence minister Liam “After the” Fox with an outright anti-Europe speech this morning, calling for a referendum about “leaving Europe without pain”, shows that the Conservatives are just about getting their act together. And they are doing so in a manner swifter than anyone might have imagined last week. Perhaps, cynics might suggest, as it is becoming clear that no other Conservative policy is going to be a winner in the next election and the anti-Europe vote is a guarantee of an extra 10 %.

NEVERTHELESS; WITH A BIT OF LUCK this sudden faith in good sense will last long enough for Britain to be able to leave the hideous European Union permanently in the near future, hopefully before the European Federal Superstate is established, something which is far, far from the “common market” that we joined in 1973 under hapless Ted “Grocer” Heath. Unfortunately, summer break is at hand, and after this our good leaders will come back and will probably have found some other “hot” issue to discuss, such as obligatory carrying reflecting jackets or triangles in our cars. Or whether killing badgers should be banned.

EUROALPHAVILLEBADSTADT

WHEN THE CURIOUS LOOK BACK at important moments and movements in history they seem to find some solace in their own ability to establish patterns, sequences and, most importantly, dates. The latter are often considered to be of paramount significance to mark the beginning of the shifts and nuances that signal the great changes that are to come.

THUS EVENTS WITH FAR-REACHING CONSEQUENCES are justified as depending on “key dates”, rather than really important matters such as the fact that Napoleon Bonaparte suffered from haemorrhoids and couldn’t bear to sit on his horse at Waterloo or the fact that Julius Caesar’s hard-on for Cleopatra led to the split in Rome that pointed to the end.

OF COURSE I AM BY NO MEANS SUGGESTING that bowel problems or other people’s erections may have any bearing on the policies followed by our good leader Angela Merkel as she guides the jolly ship of Europe onto the rocks or into the clear blue water of Euro-heaven.

BUT WHAT IS CLEAR IS THAT future nerdy historians will end up discovering that Thursday the 28th of June, 2012 was the date when the dream (or nightmare) of the European Union finally moved into fifth gear and made it impossible for any reverse shift.

EVER SINCE THE INCEPTION OF THIS HIDEOUS IDEA there has been the worry that at some time the European Union would take control of our banking system and would start to introduce taxation, “stealth” taxes at first, but in the end taxes removing power from the lesser, so-called “peripheral” countries, and putting it all in the hands of Germany.

TO BE HONEST, I AM NOT SURE whether, living in Portugal, I would rather be governed by Berlin. For the moment, despite all the warnings and lessons in the past, it seems safe to state that Angela Merkel, the ubiquitous, photogenic German Chancellor, does not present a danger to our freedom; yet to take a snippet of referential quotes from Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville (above) and then from that by the marvellous The Monochrome Set, we might say “she’s a movie star, she’s a little bit touched; (Don’t look now) She’s so wünderbar, all gears and no clutch”. And so where is she taking us?

LAGARDE THE CYNIC

THERE MAY NO DOUBT be good reasons for Greeks to be outraged and insulted by Christine Lagarde’s statement suggesting that they are less than law abiding. Indeed, the announcement by burly Evangelos Venizelos, the leader of PASOK, that Greeks are honest and that the history of Greece is one of decency, aestheticism, art and literature may ring true today even on the sidewalks of Athens, where thousands of pot-bellied, bare-chested men sit getting drunk and spitting pistachio shells all over the place every day.

YET AS A RENOWNED INTELLECTUAL and someone well versed in current and past political and social philosophy, people often come up to me and ask, “David, why is Greece doing so badly and why is that fruity French lady in charge of the IMF saying that Greeks are dishonest?”

THE SHORT ANSWER IS THAT BOTH political figures are correct. The history of Greece is indeed a source from which we may take lessons about the Greece of today and Lagarde does have a point. The issue revolves around what part of Greek history and philosophy we should cast our eye upon.

THE COUNTRY’S MOST RECENT contribution to European culture upon which I have cast my eye was the song “Aphrodisiac” by Eleftheria Eleftheriou, described by at least one commentator of the programme as the lady with the most “approachable” rear end in the competition; but Greece’s history is replete with excellent examples of figures that should be followed closely.

DIOGENES THE CYNIC (404 BC – 323 BC) was a major figure in Greek and European philosophy. His father was a minter of currency, and somehow Diogenes “debased” it, and was then punished with exile. He ended up in Athens, where he decided to set himself up as a moral leader, seeing that Athens was a corrupt society. He took it upon himself to show extreme austerity, seeing true virtue in being poor. He thus begged for his food and slept in a bathtub in the street.

THE MOST FAMOUS OF HIS MANY public actions was when he wandered around Athens for days and days on end carrying a lamp. Whenever anyone stopped him and asked what he was doing he would reply that he was looking (in vain) for an honest man.

MY TOP PICTURE SHOWS THE PAINTING “Diogenes Looking for an Honest Man” (c. 1780)(probably) by JHW Tischbein, one of the remarkable moments in Greek history that Greek philosophical historians apparently choose to ignore, and the second one, “Diogenes” by Jules Bastien-Lepage (1873), depicts what most Greek people will look like if Lagarde has her way.

HUMPTY DUMPED

“ALL THE KING’S HORSES and all the King’s men/ Couldn’t put Humpty together again” we are told in the nursery rhyme about the fact that once an egg is broken it can’t be put back together. It has an interesting parallel in the statement made by Lord Wolfson, referring to breaking up the Eurozone as “unscrambling an omelette”. He has backed up his belief that this will be impossible to do safely by offering £250,000 of his own money to anyone who can come up with a sensible plan to do so.

FURTHER, THE NEWS THAT HOME SECRETARY Theresa May is drawing up contingency plans to prevent mass migration to the United Kingdom after the collapse of the Euro, announced today in most major newspapers, coupled with the statement by the ever-tanned Christine Lagarde that Greece has “had it good for years” and now it is “payback time”, have together more or less pulled the plug on the future of the European Currency, if not on the European dream itself.

IN ADDITION, THE ADMISSION by the Spanish government yesterday that it dreads a victory in Baku in the European Song Contest tomorrow, as Spain does not have the money to stage the final next year shows that there is not really any point to Europe anymore now that the highest accolade of our culture means nothing.

FRANCE’S THREAT TO REINTRODUCE border controls on its Italian frontiers may also be a sign of the inevitable break-up of the freedom of movement within the Schengen countries, and so, all in all, unless the Germans suddenly come up with the money to pay for the southern European countries to carry on doing nothing for most of the year, turning up late for work and clocking off early when they do work, enjoying an average of 18 bank holidays with extra days taken off when these holidays fall on a Tuesday or Thursday and receiving a full month bonus in December and August I suppose that the game is up, new currencies will be brought in and the only way up will be constant devaluation.

HOW DID THIS ALL GO SO WRONG?, people may ask. How did this wonderful, romantic notion of countries united in their common aim of freedom, truth, justice and equality, based on growth and respect suddenly turn into a nightmare of bitterness, mismanagement and failure?

THERE ARE MANY LONG ANSWERS to this question, but the short one is this: when Europe decided to let itself be run by a parliament of second-rate, second hand political failures who, having been unable to cut the ice and get elected in their own countries, ended up being nominated for the European Parliament. And then the European Parliament itself, with the wisdom only possible to a bunch of useless incompetents, “nominates” two of the most representative fools among it, Humpty Dumpty von Rompuy and Joseph “Stalin” Barroso to run its policies. These two incompetent has-beens then nominate a disgraced Italian economics “expert” to run the European Central Bank, supported by a failed Portuguese finance minister, and, as one can see, the rest is history. Or rather future.

(My photo shows the President of Europe making one of his stirring, rousing speeches)

EURO 2012

LIKE A GOOD MANY PARENTS, I am indulging my younger son in his desire to collect the Panini stickers to be inserted into his album of the Association Football national teams involved in the forthcoming UEFA Nations Challenge Cup competition, this year held in the unitary state of Ukraine and the Republic of Poland.

THE MAIN REASON BEHIND my attitude is somewhat like my approach to having had him baptized; it is a matter of social insertion. The youngsters at his schools collect these badly-photographed stickers of footballers who will never play in the final competition, as well as omitting some who will, and the exchange of “swaps”, with the ensuing bargaining process, will bring him into contact with the basic rules of capitalism. Or so I had thought.

ON THE ONE OCCASION when he took a similar album to school he returned minus most of the “star” players from the teams of Everton, Liverpool and Manchester United. I, shocked, pointed out that this was not the intention of the game. “I gave them,” he told me, “to other children. Who needed them.”

IF THIS IS THE SORT OF COMMUNISM allowed to go unchecked in our schools nowadays then I can easily see why our countries are on the road to ruin, which brings me to the real “Euro 2012”.

IN THE FUTURE, when one refers to this competition, “Euro 2012”, the term will be clouded in acknowledgement to the events of 2012 which led to the debasement of and ultimate eradication from our collective shopping experience of the chirpy “Euro” as a spendable monetary issue.

IT IS MORE OR LESS COMMON knowledge now that Germany is having Deutschmarks printed in secret at mints in Switzerland, Greece is producing new Drachmae, Portugal is soon about to come forth with a totally new currency, still shrouded in secrecy, and that the Euro is doomed, but for many people the “Euro” may still be saved.

AND THE ONLY WAY THIS CAN HAPPEN is if the England team play to the best of their abilities, thrashing all those in their way and managing (I do not know the logistics of the competition) to come face to face with Germany in one of the later stages of the tournament. The toss-up before the game, which could easily be the final tie, should be over whether Germany accepts the free market economy or the United Kingdom leaves Europe altogether. And then it will probably go to penalties. (My photo shows England warming up before the European Union)

PLEASE RELEASE ME

BIZARRELY, THERE ARE MANY PEOPLE who pooh-pooh the Eurovision Song Contest, believing it to be of little or no interest culturally and much less so in musical terms. While I respect people’s opinions and understand that de gustibus non est disputandum, it is plainly beyond me that sensitive and sensible souls will not see this annual feast as ranking on the same level as the Queen’s speech on Christmas Day, the Football Association Challenge Cup Final Tie and the Grand National Steeplechase at Liverpool.

IT IS NOT THAT ON THIS OCCASION we collectively celebrate our European heritage but more the fact that British people, and more specifically English ones, can see what an unholy, corrupt, ramshackled, pasteboard and gaudy mess Europe is when one gets down to the nitty-gritty.

THERE IS NO MORE ABSURD, tacky, trashy, soulless occasion that one can see for free, on one’s own television set. Such a show of sub-vaudeville, cross-dressing, tight-satin-trousered, over-made-up bad-glam would normally cost a fortune in most major capitals in Europe, and a visitor to such an establishment would surely be risking being accosted by burly security guards, pimps, drug-pushers or people selling contraband sunglasses when one went to witness such an event.

BUT THE MAGIC OF TELEVISION brings us the wonder of the spectacle live, once a year, directly into our own homes. Although it is still five days away I have started “eyeing up the talent”, as the common folk sometimes say, in order to place a bet on the winner.

AS ALWAYS, IT IS QUALITY of the lyrics which attracts me, and I thus predict (and am betting serious money) on the following top three due to the qualities of the songs:

1. Loreen “the Vampire Donna Summer”, Euphoria, (Sweden), with the clever lyric “We’re going up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up”. A cert. Never has a song been such a guaranteed money-winner.

2. Engelbert “the” Humperdinck (UK), with Love Will Set You Free. How can anyone vote against a 76 year-old man who sings about making love to women? (Perhaps we should wait and see who actually does vote against this; but it won’t be any men)

3. “Diamond” Nina Zilli, L’ammore è Femmina (Italy): “You leave me crying at home while you play pool” (a classic lament in the Italian neo-realist style).

ANYONE WHO MAKES MAJOR MONEY betting on these three in this order will perhaps remember me and my sagacious predictions. Donations to the contacts above. (My photo shows the winner trying to look sultry)

SHIELD AND BUCKLER

Comércio de Borba aceita escudos este fim-de-semana

Os comerciantes do concelho alentejano de Borba recebem, desde esta sexta-feira e até domingo, a antiga moeda de escudo nas transacções comerciais efectuadas, numa iniciativa que pretende dinamizar o comércio local. Trata-se da "Iniciativa Escudo", promovida pelo município e pelos estabelecimentos comerciais do concelho, sendo as notas recolhidas posteriormente trocadas no Banco de Portugal.

FOR THOSE OF YOU WHO DO NOT understand Portuguese, the above little snippet was taken yesterday from the Correio da Manhã, the most popular Portuguese daily newspaper, and it is about the town of Borba in southern Portugal, hitherto most known for its wines, these being an acidic paint-stripper of a white wine and a full-bodied, dirt-smelling heavy red, usually euphemistically referred to in the sales jargon as “fruity and citric” in the first case and “oaky and noble” in the second.

BUT IT IS NOT THIS REASON that Borba is in the news this weekend. The local council has decided to make the town an “Escudo zone” in order to stimulate the area’s economy. For this weekend all the restaurants and shops will be using a currency which disappeared eleven years ago.

WHILE THIS MAY SEEM STRANGE for many sensible Europeans, the fact is that pockets of Portugal are going to try this experiment over the coming weeks, sponsored by local councils and tacitly encouraged by the hopeless and hapless government. This is in addition to the many shops which still only trade in Escudos – doing better business nowadays than ever before.

THE SIMPLE FACT IS THAT millions of Escudos still exist in private hands, held, usually, by people who refused to believe that the “new currency” would last. As much as twenty percent of the cash on the market at the time of the changeover to the Euro remained in Escudos; in the main the government and fiscal authorities ignored this phenomenon. Indeed, it was good for the economy.

THIS ATTITUDE HAS CHANGED somewhat of late, with a series of initiatives designed to mop up whatever Escudo spillage still exists in an attempt to regain the lost money. This would be a sensible policy during a high point in the economic cycle; given that Portugal is in the depths of recession, it can only mean that the government wants these Escudos off the map for other reasons.

AND THE REASON I SUGGEST is that the Portuguese government knows that as soon as Greece comes out of the Euro Portugal will follow suit within a month, returning to a “new Escudo”, and it will not be convenient to upset all these people who still harbour the notion that it will return to the old one.

THE TAKING OF EYPON

AS ANY SCHOOLBOY KNOWS, the Greek mythological story about the rape of Europe is a part of our Greco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian heritage here in the civilised Western world. The details of this corny tale may not be quite so well divulged among scholars who never got into the depths of the stories invented by old Greek men who had nothing better to do but invent things to tell to others over a glass of wine.

THE ‘FACTS’ ARE, HOWEVER, that Europe – meaning “bright-eyed” or “startled” cow in classical Greek, was led forward “forcibly from the rear” by Zeus in the 8th century BC, in the guise of a bull, from Asia Minor to somewhere corresponding to Macedonia in an attempt to subdue her and stop her interfering with the serious issues of politics in Tyre (now Lebanon).

THERE ARE THOSE WHO ENJOY proclaiming that history repeats itself or is circular. And the realities of today suggest that Greece, the country that has historically let itself be known as the “birthplace of Europe”, “the cradle of democracy” and other such bland nonsense, is now about to be butt-fucked out of Europe due to the fact that it is still, three thousand years later, full of men who have nothing better to do but invent stories to tell each other over a glass of wine, this being particularly true of the Greek government and its economics experts, yet extending down to the postman and the bootblack. The only constant in this history is the regular sodomising of each other. And the lack of any will to work as long as someone gives them money to let them take things up their Asia Minor.

SYRIAN MATTERS

THERE MAY WELL BE SUCH PEOPLE as wonder, as I do, why Syria is not quite getting the bashing that other states have been subjected to during the so-called “Arab Spring” (which is now in its second summer and has still not produced a Swallow) by our good offices in the Western World.

IT SEEMS RELATIVELY APPARENT TO ANYONE with a television set that people have been being mown down, blown up, gunned in their beds and sniped at in their tens of thousands by buffoon-faced Syrian President Bashar “Basher” al-Assad, for well over a year and that no one in the “free world” is doing anything about it other than sending unintelligible United Nations commanders and officials to make speeches on obscure channels late at night.

WHENEVER THIS HAPPENS WE KNOW that the UN is not really interested in the event or that something is standing in the way of the major powers to make them want to call a halt or cessation on proceedings.

MY GUESS IS THAT THIS IS THE CHARMING Asma al-Assad, the fruity, British-born totty who is First Lady of Syria, trophy wife to “Basher” and raised and educated in the United Kingdom. She is a good friend to our beloved Tony Blair and his wife Cherie. Were such contacts not enough to warrant a little benevolence on the part of the West in order to persuade us not to blow her mansions, swimming pools and leisure complexes to smithereens, we also have the fact that her contacts include many of the great and good in the field of medicine in London and, more importantly, the world of finance in the City.

WHILE EVERY DECENT CHAP THINKS that what is going on in Syria is jolly rum stuff, one would not want to do the dirty on one of our own, would one? Especially if one is the “special envoy” to the Middle East.