I WANNA MARRY HARRY

THE END OF ANY YEAR is always a good time for us to look back at previous events and consider what effect the past may have on our future. In the past -- and today in some -- it is considered that only by "exorcising our demons" from the past may we push forward and become better human beings from now on.

I OF COURSE SUBSCRIBE to this view of life, and I am pleased to see that young Prince Harry Windsor has now decided to put his own past chasing women behind him and settle down with a wholesome lady who has the ability to make him happy, to complete him as a man and to act as a friend to Duchess Catherine when her workload becomes heavier than it is now.

THAT, I BELIEVE, IS THE GENERAL position taken by the English press, and nowhere have I read of snide remarks likening their engagement to the vulgar American television game show in which aspiring young actresses fought each other in what the children today call a "structured reality vote-off" in order to become engaged to a young man they believed to be British royalty. Some evil people would say that the producers of the show, involving these women having sex with the pretender "to see who he liked best" are now sitting on a goldmine, even though the show was considered controversial and "far-fetched" at the time.

YET MY CHRISTIAN CHARITY towards others means that I believe it impossible that anyone would do such underhand things for financial gain. I am convinced that these producers will never allow the show to be seen again, and will instruct the owners of something called the "Youtube" to "take it down" as my youngest terms it.

AT THE TIME OF THE SHOW, the Royal Family, as usual, made no comment.

My pictures show the winning contestant (top picture) and Harry with Meghan (bottom picture, second from left) with her future ladies-in-waiting.

ANOTHER KETTLE OF FISH

FANS OF THE GREAT LAUREL AND HARDY will remember the famous line spoken by Oliver Hardy after the unfortunate end to another particularly distressing comic episode during which the duo would have managed to mess up whatever task they had set themselves at the beginning of their marvellous, short knockabout routines.

"ANOTHER FINE KETTLE OF FISH you have pickled me in," Hardy would say, while Stan Laurel would look distraught and scratch at his dishevelled hair.

WHILE THERE HAVE BEEN many comedy duos over the years who have tried to emulate these two masters, it has been apparent that when they retired they seem to have broken the mould; hardly anyone, as humorous as many may be, has come close to achieving their dizzy heights of comedy.

UNTIL YESTERDAY THAT IS, when Boris Johnson met Sergei Lavrov for talks about the relationship between Russia and the United Kingdom at a "high level" encounter intended to "clear the air" and have a one-on-one talk about the issues that are bothering the British government.

SOME PEOPLE MAY BE OF THE OPINION that it is not a good idea to entrust such a mission to Mr Johnson, particularly given the fact that he gives HRH the Prince Philip Duke of Edinburgh a run for his offshore assets in terms of insulting foreigners, but I was confident that he would come up with the goods.

THE COMEDY BEGAN WHEN Johnson stated with delight that economic relations between the two countries were excellent after news that Russia had increased its purchases of Kettle Crisps and had bought 300 Bentleys, although he did leave it open as to whether they were all intended for Russian government officials.

LAVROV WAS NOT TO BE LEFT behind in the comic stakes: when asked whether the Russian government was involved in espionage activity against the United Kingdom, he stated that they had only spent "a few Kopecks" on Internet interference activity -- which is good to know.

THE FINAL GAG BY THE DUO was when gathered journalists asked Mr Johnson whether he trusted Mr Lavrov. "I did hand him my coat when I came in," he stated. To which Lavrov replied, bringing the house down, "Yes, but there was nothing in the pockets!"

LIKE SLAPSTICK OR NOT, it is diplomacy of this character that in the end will manage to create good relations between countries which could so easily be at war; and the sombre, humbug-loving antiquated grey-suited politicians of the past may well scoff at a generation of Putins, Lavrovs, Berlusconis, Johnsons and Trumps, but we all know that whatever will happen will happen, and we might as well have a little fun while we watch it happening.

My top photo shows the two great diplomats in action, with the famous comedy duo on stage in the middle snap.

PRETTY VACANT

WHEN I DECIDED SOME TIME AGO that I would stop writing this chronicle it was mainly due to the fact that I considered that international politics were in good hands. With Donald Trump as the president of the USA and Boris Johnson on the cusp of taking over the United Kingdom, political commentary would be at best redundant.

THE ROLE OF THE POLITICAL analyst is that of pointing out what is wrong in the activities of our leaders, and as I increasingly saw that Trump, Johnson and even the schoolmarmish Theresa May were doing what they were supposed to be doing it seemed to be churlish to comment on detail and foolish to approve.

EVEN WHEN TRUMP went to France to meet Macron and, on returning, stated "They showed us a deal. We'll have a look at it and if we like it we'll do it. If not we'll get back in touch" I thought that I would refrain from commenting on this perfect piece of proper common sense politics. Trump's liberal, horn-rimmed glasses critics will never understand what this language means to people who are scraping out a living in a difficult America, and so I have to put up with their smarmy, smug, sneaky and snide comments against someone who will probably go down in history as at least a game-changer.

SO WHEN DONALD TRUMP STATED yesterday that the USA gives "millions, and sometimes billions" of taxpayers' dollars to countries around the world and then they vote against the USA at the UN Assembly I thought he had come to some kind of laudable pinnacle. "We'll be watching those votes," he said. "Vote against us, and we'll save money. We don't care."

IT IS THIS "WE DON'T CARE" that ought to send shivers down the spines of the corrupt, heartless, evil despots and nabobs who run the third world. But it doesn't, of course, because they don't care about their own people either.

My photo shows Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols, at the time of singing "Pretty Vacant", heavily criticised by the establishment for lyrics stating "We don't care".

WE'LL ALWAYS HAVE PARIS

(Cast of Casablanca: l-r, a waiter, Ilsa Lund, Rick, Victor Laszlo, Captain Louis Renault)

TRUMP BASHERS ARE ONCE AGAIN merrily finding ways to point the finger at the President of the USA for being true to his word. The decision to refuse to advance any further for the moment into the rather curious Paris Accord on Global Warming is seen by some as the equivalent to him personally blowing up the planet and forcing future generations to live in a world where the average temperature will increase by nearly 2º Centigrade every hundred years.

NOT WISHING IMMEDIATELY to put forward any view of my own on why this might not actually be a bad idea, given the savings on the use of heating devices in the colder northern hemisphere it will imply, I would nonetheless wish to point out that there still remains no hard evidence whatsoever that these measures will do any more than modify whatever changes are taking place in the world's climate, a factor that has been a constant over time.

WE HAVE REPEATEDLY BEEN TOLD that 195 countries have signed and/or ratified the agreement, but a look at the numbers will tell a slightly different tale. About 180 of these countries do not exactly produce even a fifth of 1 percent of the overall emissions, and were perfectly happy to sign up to an agreement that basically limits car ownership to one per household and calls for restrictions on 24-hour use of air conditioning in offices. Four things which a large percentage of them do not possess anyway.

OF COURSE, DELEGATIONS FROM ALL of these countries have been flying back and forth between United Nations' meetings in New York, Durban, Kyoto, Copenhagen and Paris (and next year Marrakesh) in order to discuss these grave issues, probably making a larger carbon footprint than their entire populations would normally do in a lifetime.

OF THE 'BIG FOUR' POLLUTERS, the USA, China, Russia and India, three of them have solemnly sworn to keep to the agreement's terms and even go further, thus doing their bit to help produce a better world for everyone in the future, and thus having rich praise heaped upon them by some young ladies from one of the "green" parties on television yesterday evening. I do hope, however, that whatever "better world" India, Russia and China might manage to cobble together as the standard for the future of planet earth involves not only the clean air they are promising, but the ability for all to breathe it.

AS FOR THE MOMENT AT LEAST, in the America that these green ladies hate it is still possible to protest on the streets, still possible to be a Christian without being put in prison and tortured, possible to paint and write without censorship, possible for widows to mourn their husbands without fear of being burnt alive, for women to walk in the streets without fear of gang rape simply because no man is with them and possible to live a childhood without later finding out your father sold you to your uncle as a bride or to a businessman as a slave.

SOME MAY EVEN REACT WITH DOUBTS about whether Russia, China and India are actually telling us the truth about how they are reducing their emissions, particularly as even in the so-called "second division" of polluters, headed by Germany, with its strict laws on motor vehicle emissions, it has come to light that the good people at Volkswagen actually lied about the testing of their cars, making the whole statistical analysis issue little more than a joke.

WHAT THE POLITICAL WORLD and its media friends really do not like about Donald Trump's position is that it is real and honest. There is actually no point in doing any of this if it just serves to send politicians around the world for freebies for a few nights in expensive hotels, signing agreements that mean nothing to most of the people who sign them, and having people promise things that they not only are incapable of doing but have no intention of doing anyway. 

BUSINESSMEN LIKE TRUMP MUST SEE this as a massive waste of time. And, as they sometimes say, time is money. Like the $10 billion of United Nations money raised for the "Green Climate Fund". The final destination of which has yet to be defined.

PUSHING THE ENVELOPE

THE OSCARS ACADEMY AWARDS CEREMONY, despite being considered as a game show by many, has always seemed to be a very self-consciously correct performance, running like clockwork and always on cue, with its protagonists keeping to their lines even when drunk, drugged, bored, angry or any mix of these things. Thus, albeit, remarkably, never in its eighty-nine years of history has there been what my friends in the more popular newspapers are calling a "cock-up". Until this year, that is.

I WAS THEREFORE SOMEWHAT SURPRISED to see the two auditors from Price Waterhouse Cooper giving an interview to the Huffington Post on the 24th of February, discussing this very issue. Brian Cullinan and Martha Ruiz, the auditors in question, were asked what would happen if the wrong winner were announced, and replied: "the exact procedure is unknown because no mistake of that kind has been made in the Oscars’ 88-year history." But added, “We would make sure that the correct person was known very quickly,” Cullinan said. “Whether that entails stopping the show, us walking onstage, us signalling to the stage manager — that’s really a game-time decision, if something like that were to happen. Again, it’s so unlikely.”

NO INTERVIEW OF THIS KIND HAS EVER BEEN given to, nor sought by the press in the 83 years of Price Waterhouse auditing the Oscar votes. So the rumours doing the rounds, to use the language that the children adopt nowadays, were that "something major" was about to "go down" at the event. As any film buff knows, there can be no foreshadowing without payoff.

A GLANCE AT THE NOMINEES -- therefore those invited to sit in special seats so as to be seen in extreme close up when needed -- showed that the Academy was doing everything to make up for disappointing people last year when it was deemed that "not enough" people of minorities were selected for awards. Some might have thought that the "something big" would be an astonishing clean sweep of awards for black actors, directors and producers -- an event in itself. And all of this was despite the fact that the runaway favourite had been so heavily hyped into pole position that only a fool would bet against it.

AND THUS, AFTER THE FRACAS at the end of this year's ceremony, there may be people so cynical as to believe that the considerably large percentage of older, white men among the members of the Academy who voted for the Oscar awards this year might have felt somewhat miffed and sulky about having been bullied into having to give a prize to a movie by and about black or gay people instead of the movie that they thought was the best picture.

THESE CYNICAL PEOPLE -- whoever they may be -- might also consider that by engineering a situation in which La La Land was announced as Best Picture, and by allowing the mistake to go uncorrected for long enough for the entire production team and many of the actors to get onto the stage, and by letting the executives make their speeches of gratitude before everything was sorted out these Academy members were making their real feelings felt before reluctantly allowing the PC in America to get the better of the PwC in the la la land that is Hollywood.

FAKE OR FALSE

MUCH IN VOGUE NOWADAYS is "fake news", suggesting that the newly-household expression may make it onto the Collins Online Dictionary list of the most overused terms of 2017, and inspiring me to have a brief look at what this linguistic item really means.

AS ANY SENSIBLE LINGUISTIC PHILOSOPHER knows, two words or expressions must have different meanings in at least one situation to justify the fact that they exist separately, as demonstrated by the example given by the great Wilfred Hodges in his book Logic, in order to explain the difference between saying (after one person has shot another person's cow) "I'm afraid I shot your cow by accident", rather than "I shot your cow by mistake".

SUCH SUBTLE DIFFERENCES ARE KNOWN to anyone who went to school in the days before the subjects of Latin and Greek were abandoned in favour of lessons about how to look after a Tamagotchi, which themselves are part of the ancient history syllabus for many of the children at school nowadays, preferring lessons in YouTube and killing people in "online real-life-like situations" on their phones.

THUS 'FAKE NEWS' MUST be different to 'false news', particularly as even in the United States of America politicians cannot get away with calling people liars. I detect a clue in the rather bizarre new "panel show" The Fake News Show, which recently started on Channel 4 in the United Kingdom. This comedy treat started out by having the members of the panel "tweet" false news (aka "lies") about themselves, and then wait to see how long it would be before a reputable newspaper or other communications medium took the bait and published it as "real" news, a process through which it would become "fake news". 

CONFUSED? DO NOT BE. Newspapers have been publishing lies ever since newspapers have existed, and there are various good reasons and acceptable situations in which one may tolerate this: while Prince Harry was serving in Afghanistan newspapers were asked by Buckingham Palace to keep this fact secret and to occasionally slip in little "white lies" about his whereabouts in order for the curious not to twig the truth due to Harry's absence from official royal duties such as playing pool naked.

THUS DONALD J TRUMP HAS EVERY REASON to haul the media over the coals in the way he does without having his own feet held to the fire. We appear to have come -- finally -- to an age where someone in power is deciding to state what a great many people have known for a long time: politicians and written press journalists cannot be trusted.

INDEED MANY POLLS PLACE their credibility lower than real estate agents or used car salesmen. And it is in some way fitting that the owner of a real estate emporium should be the current leader of the free world, having criticised his opponents, all of whom are "career politicians", threatening his main rival with the hoosegow, and now turning his attention to the media.

TRUMP'S RECEPTION AND PERFORMANCE in Florida last night shows that he has great support among the very people who do not trust these politicians and who probably spend little time or attention on the mainstream media. President Trump again comes over as a communicator and his wife as a charmer. However, the same issue pops up when I see Trump as when I hear or read what he says, leaving me in a quandary: Is that fake tan? Or false tan?

ПРЕЗИДЕНТСКИЙ KOMПPOMAT

QUITE CORRECTLY, THE RUSSIAN EMBASSY in London has recently pointed out that intelligence agents, or “spooks”, as the newspapers are calling them, are never “ex”. However, why the Russians should see fit to make this clear is astonishing to those of us in the know, and merely serves to reinforce my opinion that, sadly, the majority of the population seem to believe that espionage is about as real as an episode of Scooby-Doo.

WHEN JOHN LE CARRÉ published The Spy Who Came in from the Cold in 1963 it was heralded as a novel that brought realism to the spy genre, showing spymasters as rather tedious, ordinary men and women who would be more at home playing with model trains than in hotels playing with supermodels.

THUS THE SCANDAL LEADING up to the inauguration of Mr Donald J. Trump as the 45th president of the United States of America appears merely to be something thrown in by bitter losers in America in order to muddy the waters and leave doubts in the minds of fools as to the true nature of Trump's intentions and desires.

HAPPILY, TO THE RESCUE in this unfortunate affair over Russian spying on the USA, we have the always trusted opinion of Vladimir "Ras" Putin, someone who himself has risen to the highest heights per aspera rather than per Iovem. Christopher Steele, the British "ex" spy who revealed the latest calumny about Trump has produced "an obvious fake", according to Putin, with his foreign minister calling Steele a "swindler".

SWINDLER OR NOT, we know very little about Steele, or even the document mysteriously slipped to Senator John McCain, except that Steele went to Cambridge, was President of the Cambridge Union Debating Society, was recruited by MI6 on leaving university, speaks Russian, and now resides abroad, all of which seem to confirm his untrustworthiness and probable nature as a double agent, or at least a shady character, given his education.

PUTIN FURTHER EXPLAINS that Mr Trump would never have fallen for a honey trap, as he was used to being in the company of beautiful women, having been the organiser of beauty contests for many years. Thus, continues Putin "I can hardly imagine he rushed to the hotel to meet our girls of lower social responsibility (sometimes translated as "loose morals") -- even though they (our prostitutes) are the best in the world, of course."

ONE MUST ADMIRE PUTIN'S PATRIOTISM, as well as the extremely liberal nature of the Russian people and the institutions in which they trust. In my opinion it will be many years before a president of the United States of America will feel confident enough in the open-mindedness of his people to state to the gathered international press that American prostitutes are the best in the world. 

HOWEVER, TRUMP'S SILENCE ON THE MATTER has sparked some discomfort among some of the sex workers (sic) of America, in particular Dennis Huff, owner of the Moonlite Bunny Ranch in the state of Nevada, where prostitution is legal. According to Huff, “Comparing our girls to Russian girls is ridiculous because American prostitutes take pride in their work." In not defending American escort girls, Trump may be reminded of the "Hookers for Hillary" campaign that probably explained his poor result in Nevada.

NEW YEAR RESOLUTION

MY NEW YEAR'S MESSAGE for 2017 is being written in the unlikely location of the Blue Hotel, in Nove Mesto, Bratislava, where I have come to spend a few days experiencing what my younger son calls “proper snow” and my good lady wife calls a “nightmare”, albeit an opportunity to invest in hats and boots.

PRIOR TO BRATISLAVA were several days spent in Austria, including Christmas in a blizzard at the Alpenlounge in Seebruge on the Nordkette Mountain, Innsbruck, and a few days in Vienna, where we were able to compare how Viennese imperial opulence stands up to Parisian republican decadence nowadays.

AS FAR AS BEING IMPRESSIVE goes, Vienna comes out on top every time, with the Julius Meinl gourmet coffee store being perhaps the jewel in the crown of its tasteful demonstration of wealth, and this was our last experience of Vienna before retiring to bed and then coming to Bratislava by train the following day.

THE ENSUING STARK CONTRAST was deliberately engineered in order for us to be able to compare the height of free-capitalist imperialist overkill, shown most famously in the racist tones of the logo of the Julius Meinl store, with the presumed grim poverty of probably the poorest capital city of the old Soviet bloc, vestiges of the influence of which I expected to find here and there.

THE RAILWAY STATION was the first evidence of what I was expecting, showing that you can bring a country in out of the cold, but you can’t bring the cold out of the country. Brutalism and reinforced concrete were still an ever-present on the skyline, competing with absurd mushroomings of blingy building complexes. All in all, however, downtown Bratislava was extremely pleasant, hip and efficient. Hot and cold running water and Dyson dryers everywhere.

THE TV SOUNDTRACK TO THIS SHORT BREAK was the America v Russia affair over Obama’s foolhardy decision to expel thirty-five Russian diplomats whom US intelligence had decided were responsible for cyber hacking and altering the result of the recent US presidential elections, followed by Vladimir Putin’s equally foolish decision to invite all of the children of American diplomats in Moscow to a New Year’s Eve party at the Kremlin. One of them will regret their actions forever, when the Kremlin staff have to smack some precocious brat about the face for “doing a wedgy” or whatever it is that American children find amusing during the ten minutes per day away from their gadgets.

MOST OBSERVERS ARE AWARE of the particular nasty game being played by the spiteful outgoing president, yet I am intrigued by the language used to justify this mass expulsion. These ladies and gentlemen have been accused of, and are being punished for “getting involved in American democracy”.

MY OWN ADVICE HAS ALWAYS BEEN that democracy should be avoided at all costs, so no doubt Obama has a point, but if the Democrats are so keen to revert to Cold War tactics to punish Russia for “getting involved in democracy” then it will be somewhat curious to see how 2017 plays out in the USA. The many people who claim that Donald Trump has no regard for democratic rights will surely be pleased.