COSTA PACKET DISCORDIA

AN UNUSUALLY FULL SCHEDULE of work over the Christmas vacation, coupled with an episode of enforced absence during which I had to deal with issues involving my property in the United Kingdom, have meant that it is over a month since I have been able to claim what I believe is now called “down time” (although in my student days this expression had a different meaning) and set out some of my thoughts about the state of the world as I see it at present.

IF ONE SENSIBLY IGNORES the hoo-hah over who will be the next Republican Party candidate for elections in the USA against hapless, doomed President Barack Hussein Obama, then it is clear that the only two newsworthy issues at the moment are the fate of the Euro currency and the mysterious sinking of the cruise ship Costa Concordia, which by all accounts was set to take its passengers from many countries into a wonderful world of enjoyment based on their sound economic and financial situation and consumer confidence.

INDEED IT WOULD NOT BE UNFAIR to detect a certain symmetry between the two news stories: the “Costa” took a cast of frivolous, carefree folks into a supposedly bright future; little attention was paid to thinking about the course charted ahead; the “captain” of the enterprise was an irresponsible socialite; the whole shebang soon revealed it was on the rocks before it had gathered a proper head of steam; and as soon as everything “listed”, no one accepted responsibility.

BUT THE GREATEST OF PARALLELS among these events of an uncannily similar bent has to do with the underhand activities of some of the people involved in this disaster. Whilst those in charge may by nature be corrupt and mendacious, one does not expect to hear of situations such as that of Father Massimo Donghi, an Italian priest who informed his parish of devoted old ladies that he was heading off for a week of contemplation and prayer, but instead joined the luxury liner for fun not usually found at Catholic retreats. Damning is his statement after he found out that his parishioners knew of his deceit: “I will talk to my parishioners in church. The judgment of others is not important to me.” This is the difference between the Protestant north of Europe and the Catholic south.

YULETIDE CHEER

MY TRADITIONAL END OF YEAR wishes of health and happiness to all men and women is being written this year in the poker room of the Inatel Palace Hotel in Termas de São Pedro do Sul, a charming little natural hot water spa town in the northwest of Portugal. For the interregnum between Christmas and New Year I have decided to spend a few days here in the company of my good lady wife, enabling us to lazy about the town during the day, eating in excellent restaurants where two people can eat a three course meal with wine for less than thirty of the dreaded Euros.

OTHERWISE WE SPEND OUR TIME standing about near the geysers and bubbling waterholes that abound, sniffing at the sulphur-choked fumes and drinking the rotten-egg tasting water which forces its way up through solid rock from miles below the ground. All of this in the name of health.

AND UPON WHICH MATTER I imagine I should rectify my initial statement. When I wrote “all men and women” I did not, naturally mean all of them. We may eliminate practically all of the European Parliament, most politicians as a whole, bankers, insurance brokers and salespeople, estate agents, ecologists, global warming bores and the devil’s own triumvirate of Humpty Rumpuy, Joseph Stalin Barroso and the hideous Merkozy couple.

INDEED, BEING WHERE I AM NOW, surrounded by the smell of the scalding lava of the underworld and the fire and brimstone that produces these curing waters (although, admittedly, the smell does not reach the games room of the hotel) reminds me of where these fiendish criminals all belong.

PASSOS HIS SELL BY DATE

THE FACT THAT a Prime Minister feels that he can come on television and advise his people to emigrate might appear unreal for most people in the civilised world. Yet it was this that Portuguese Prime Minister Passos Coelho, the charming, soft-spoken and unaccountably inept leader of the governing coalition made up of previously proven incompetents, felt he could do yesterday. In advising 15,000 unemployed teachers to go abroad he admitted that he, his government, and his country, was rubbish.

GET OUT OF PORTUGAL, was not exactly the statement made by Pedro Passos Coelho, but one can easily see how this could solve his worrisome economic issues. Portugal owes enormous amounts of money to abroad; most people are buying houses made of cardboard at 30-year mortgages; hardly any of the young people can find a “proper” job; and we wait and watch while the plughole sucks the Euro into the bubbling mire of a future in which there are more beggars sitting on the streets outside the sliding doors to supermarkets than teachers. Perhaps Portugal could send them to foreign parts.

CLEGG’S REVISED HISTORY OF ENGLAND

“History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake”, we hear from Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses, the very long novel by James Joyce, Ireland’s favourite writer and sexual pervert. The sentiment, however, may be better situated in the mouths and minds of Nick Clegg’s political advisers. Our leaders usually make horrendous mistakes when they attempt to square today’s events with those in history; this is because they – Boris Johnson excepted – have little or no knowledge of the matter.

WHEN I WAS AT SCHOOL one took history and geography lessons, although I believe there has been an attempt to “fuse” these subjects into one, a government policy which I imagine to have been disastrous, and of which I see that Mr Clegg must be a result.

IN STATING THAT DAVID CAMERON’S recent bit of harmless badinage with “Fifi” Sarkozy over the signing or not of some useless bits of paper involving Germans and the lebensraum countries has brought Anglo-French relations to “their lowest point in history”, I am afraid that Mr Clegg more than reveals his educational lacking.

THE LOWEST POINT IN ANGLO-FRENCH history is a tad difficult to point out on a chart. One may start by stating that over the last 1,000 years in which we both have been recognisable as nations we have mainly been at war of one sort or another. For six hundred years after 1066 (and all that) this war was about what was de facto England and de facto France; this medieval discussion continues in the halls of St Pancras Station in London and in every seaside ferry port at this moment.

BUT SURELY CLEGG must know of Waterloo? If only from listening to the ABBA vinyl records that he surely must have in his living room, half a dozen classics nestling against the little table upon which rests his TV “set”, including records by Phil Collins, Pink Floyd, Kate Bush, Julio Iglesias and Shirley Bassey, all standing against the non-offensive, “light cream with flecks of brown” wallpaper which was on offer at the local DIY store.

OR ABOUT AGINCOURT, TRAFALGAR, POITIERS and Calais? La Corunna, Vigo or Grijó. Perhaps, being a victim of the new form of combining geography and history, Clegg only sees the fact that Belgium is linked to Holland, is linked to Germany, is linked to Poland, et caetera, in the same way that the toe-bone is linked to the foot-bone, is linked to the leg bone, is linked to the arse-bone, presumably.

SAVE THE WORLD

NOT A GREAT DEAL HAS BEEN HEARD of late from the good people who make it their business to trot the globe and tell us that we are doing untold ill to our planet by merely being here and depositing what they call our “carbon footprint” on whatever it is that they deem should not be carbon-footprinted.

INDEED, GIVEN THAT OUR VERY OWN Prince Charles, darling spokesperson of the “speak to your vegetables and they will be good to you” brigade, has had myriad things to do of late and thus has not been forcing his vegetable philosophy down our necks too much, the eco-warriors have had little to do in the light of the press being more concerned with the fact that the world economy is about to be deflated up its own anal cavity.

THIS IS DISTRESSING NEWS for yoga “teachers”, vegetable “healers”, sparkling stone “readers” – all of whom discover that their clients were really-not-what-you-might-call-a-hundred-percent convinced of the curative powers of the “let’s all face the sun and say ‘Hello’” approach to health, now that money for sending Jeremy and Jemimah to private school is at the top of the list.

BUT OUR STOLID AND SOLID defenders dither not. And such determination has resulted, as we all now know, in the “ten minutes that saved the planet”, recently voted at the United Nations summit on climate change in Durban. The event had taken place over six days, involving delegates from 194 countries, all of them, as well as their wives, mistresses and sundry children and hangers-on (in the case of some of the Asian and African and Arabian delegates) struggling to come up with a way to save the world from utter destruction, which they did in the countdown of mere minutes to the end of the conference before a positive vote was agreed upon, saving my life and your lives.

WE ARE NOW ASSURED, after this summer meeting in South Africa, that the agreements suggested at the last meeting in Bali, as well as the one in Cancun, Mexico, may be carried forward to the next meeting in some other splendid resort capable of housing 977 delegates as well as their entourages so that they may discuss how to reduce our carbon footprints even more.

YET WHAT, PEOPLE MAY ASK, are the resolutions that will save us so? What is it that will make me feel safe about my grandchildren’s futures? What will 190-odd world leaders sign to make sure we don’t end up a burnt ruin like those things we see on the Discovery Channel.

NEVER FEAR: HERE is that resolution which, so I am told – and for which you are paying – will guarantee the future “on this planet” for eons to come: “All United Nations parties commit to a protocol, another legal instrument or an agreed outcome with legal force that will be decided in 2015 and come into force in 2020.”

Photo: Delegates at Durban celebrating the fact they have saved the world

LAST MIND STANDING

“PARTING”, JULIET INFORMS US in Shakespeare’s The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedie of Romeo, and Juliet, “is such sweet sorrow.” The meaning behind this pithy remark by a love struck Juliet, perched on her little balcony and watching Romeo slipping down the ivy to land on his arse among the rhododendrons, was that when parting we know that we will come back together soon – “the morrow”, claims Juliet – and be happily reunited.

I AM NOT SURE THAT this was forefront in David “Bulldog” Cameron’s mind when he came back from a meeting with the leaders of our brothers and sisters in the European Union with a smirk on his face, as, like many others, I suspect that this is not simply the beginning of the United Kingdom leaving the hated European Union for good (as Cameron would secretly adore to see happen), but – and before this – the start of a partial break up of the Union itself.

CAMERON’S ACTION WAS A SCANDAL on Friday in the eyes of most of the European press, and was violently condemned today in the European Parliament by Joseph Stalin Barroso and a few other members, notably the French and Belgians. Nicolas “Fifi” Sarkozy was, of course, the first person to issue outright condemnation, early on Friday afternoon.

SINCE THEN, HOWEVER, WISE analysts may have noticed certain changes in tone in the statements being issued by other European countries. All of the 26 member states besides Britain immediately agreed to everything on the table on Friday afternoon and so all appeared to be hunky-dory in Euroland. Yet subsequent developments have included Merkel suggesting on Friday evening that she “perfectly understood” Cameron’s position, and Ireland (yesterday) stating that, thinking matters over since the weekend, any change in the treaty would probably have to go to a referendum. This was followed by both Holland and the Czech Republic stating the same thing.

SWEETNESS AND LIGHT, then, is perhaps best not the best way to describe the “union” part of the European Union. More cold water has been brought to the bath by the bizarrely-named French presidential candidate François Hollande, who, despite his European-friendly name, has stated that if he is elected next year instead of Fifi he will not respect the treaty. Basically the only keen countries to have the treaty accepted by all are the three countries who have gone down the toilet already.

SO THERE WE HAVE IT. Everyone understands that the details of the treaty make it impossible to effect and the proposed “sanctions” are not even explained; and even the apparently most diehard defenders of its principles seem to be “only joking”. Cameron was thus wise to steer clear of it if only to avoid having to call a referendum. Everyone in Britain knows what the result would be, so it was better for him to make the decision himself and at least look like he has stomach for a fight and is not the “plonker” he was called in parliament yesterday.

FRÈRE JACQUES

NOW THAT JACQUES DELORS, the fiendish individual responsible for “masterminding” the whole unimaginably disastrous shebang that is the European Union and the single currency, has, at the wise old age of 86, admitted that the Euro project (and I quote ipsissima verba) was “doomed from the start”, we can perhaps start looking forward to Europe breaking up into the original countries with their own cute little customs and habits and strange currencies like the Schilling, the Florin, the Peseta and the Liebfraumilch, among others.

DELORS, LIKE MANY LEADERS before him, obviously decided to get the troubling matters off his conscience before dying, certain in the knowledge that if there is a heaven, and if French people are allowed into it, its dwellers will not be happy about his European financial policy.

M DELORS’ FAILINGS HOWEVER pale into insignificance when compared with the outrageous proposals put forward this very hour by Europe’s top comic duo, Mr and Mrs Merkozy.

GAME-CHANGING EVENTS OVER my own lifetime, moments that significantly altered the way we live our lives, have been few and far between, as most of the meaty stuff of the XX century took place before 1959, when I was only a glimmer in my father’s eye, and even the landing on the moon, ten years later (if we believe that it really took place) turned out to be as dull as dishwater.

IT MAY REMAIN TO BE SEEN whether the joint statement by cuddly Merkel and toothless Sarkozy this afternoon can be turned into law and policy; and whether this foreshadows, as many have stated, the European super-state run by Germany. Merkel’s threat that there will be “punishment” for Euroland states that do not keep their budget deficits below 3%, and Sarkozy’s suggestion that everyone will have to “work harder” and “pull together” is obviously just a load of Euroblather.

THE NEW EUROPEAN TREATY VOICED at today’s conference, however, may be a completely different kettle of fish if Germany and France ever elect anyone who is prepared to show some teeth. What they are promoting with this “Fiskalunion” is the right of Germany, with its French poodle following behind, to move into a country and take over its economic, fiscal and financial matters whenever they deem this fit. Dictators do not even need tanks and jackboots nowadays. Dormez vous, Jacques? Sonnez les matines.