MUSIC MAKES HIM WANNA TRY

The Neil Sedaka gig last night was absolutely fascinating. The audience in Colston Hall Bristol was not young. Even taking dye into account, I’d say the dominance of grey hair over not grey was three or even four to one. On this evidence, Sedaka’s constituency below 50 is negligible, below 30 virtually non-existent. There was a youngish-looking claque in the front row who were first on their feet at the end and who were rewarded with hand shakes from the man. Another youngish woman presented him with an inexpensive bunch of flowers and got a mouth-to-mouth kiss. But they were atypical. Generally we were sedate, though we certainly clapped and cheered our weight.

Now, let’s not beat about the bush. With obvious exceptions (my friends, for instance), men of East European Jewish origin are apt not to age well. And Sedaka looks like shit. He’s finally given up the piece, which is good in principle, but a bald run through the crown fringed by oiled hair that goes white where it’s too long at the back is not a good look. His distinct jowliness gives his head the shape of an inverted pear. I didn’t mind a bit sitting fairly far back.


Sedaka doesn't look like this
(from last.fm.com)

A passing comparison he claimed with Cary Grant was the most preposterous moment of the evening. Even when young, Sedaka may have been glittery glamorous in his Brilliantined, slightly exotic appearance but he was never, even remotely, sexy. (He actually dances better now than he did back then). Otherwise, though modesty, false or the other kind, is not one of Sedaka’s traits, he doesn’t pretend that longevity is not his strong suit. The second half began with a priceless Scopitone video of Calendar Girl from 1961. Sedaka says it was the first ever pop promo and if he wants to believe that I ain’t gonna argue. Each month is illustrated by a “girl” (as they of course were characterised then) parading in a supposedly appropriate outfit; this was a movie gambit for at least the fifteen years before that time. Neil himself has four (four!) changes of clothes in two-and-a-half minutes. It was shot in Rome in gloriously garish ‘60s colour. You can watch it here

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BITaKu5Pm1g

but the print doesn’t begin to do the hues justice. Sedaka reports that he and his wife were sitting outside a Rome café when a woman came up and said “I was in your video. I was January”. Sedaka says “I didn’t believe her …” [perfect pause] “… she was old, old, old”.



Sedaka does look like this (from iCelebZ.com)

But here’s the thing. His voice is simply miraculous. It was always exceptional: those pristine top notes, as true as a bell, and the perfect taste with which it was deployed. His material could be icky but his delivery never was. And it’s still exquisite. No man of 70 should be able to sing like that. My partner David was at a gig by Crosby, Stills and Nash in mid-week and he reported that their voices took three or four numbers to warm up and get into their stride (and Stephen Stills looked at death’s door). At Bristol, I concentrated on Sedaka’s tone when the initial impact had passed (and my short hairs had lain down again) but the wear on it, even on sustained notes, was minimal. And the truth of his pitch never faltered through a two-hour set. When we were encouraged to sing along, I noticed that those early hits had been transposed down quite a few semi-tones. Fair enough. I also noted that not so many of us knew the lyrics to the verses as well as the choruses. He only did Oh Carol!, Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen and Breaking Up is Hard to Do, interspersed with recent stuff, but I could have joined him on at least a dozen others of nearer 50 than 40 years’ vintage, word-perfect. Was I alone? (At one point in a more recent song he introduces a piano riff from an early B-side called One-Way Ticket. I hoped he might ask if anybody knew it but of course he didn’t. He never leaves such things to chance).

That’s one of his great strengths. His back catalogue is really vast. He’s recorded a few standards by other songwriters in his time – astutely chosen, beautifully done, even the tricky ones – but his stage act is all self-penned material and I swear he could play three or four weeks of gigs and never repeat himself. He’s one of those songwriters who is simply full of music. The baroque composers – Vivaldi, JS Bach, Mozart, Handel, Haydn, Telemann, the Scarlattis – were like that. In our time, Leroy Anderson, Stevie Wonder and Elton John are others, perhaps McCartney (you don’t have to like their stuff to acknowledge the fecundity).

But musical composition is his thing. Howard Greenfield was his lyricist for twenty years and he had a marvellous gift for the succinct, telling line. Greenfield only gets one look-in among the copious programme illustrations and an elegant tribute to him came quite late in the proceedings, followed by an emotionally restrained version of Our Last Song Together. Sedaka has worked with other writers since but now does his own words. These are typically somewhat bloodless and generalised. If he has a story to tell he can do so smartly but most of his own lyrics are nearer the quality of Tim Rice or Don Black than Stephen Sondheim. There’s no arresting phrase, only banalities.

It doesn’t matter. The creamy, easy but fresh melodies are what carry him forward. Sedaka has never extended the form or created a masterpiece, a truly original song. He works within his comfort zone. His control – of the shape of a song and, just as surely, of the contours of his stage act – is absolute. And within that compass, he achieves a kind of perfection again and again. His early hits were perfect pop songs of the kind known as bubblegum. His mature works are completely crafted, wholly successful pieces of very palatable vin ordinaire. Some – Solitaire, Laughter in the Rain (“Michael Jackson’s favourite of my songs”), I Found My World in You, Standing on the Inside, That’s When the Music Takes Me – are rather more than that.

And just as surely Sedaka knows his audience. The selection of numbers was exactly right, the balance and contrasts unerringly plotted. His last encore took the roof off. Of course it did: it was Amarillo. Every face leaving the hall was shining with pleasure.

LABOUR PAINS

The Right Hon the Baron Mandelson of Foy in the County of Herefordshire and of Hartlepool in the County of Durham, First Secretary of State, Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills and Lord President of the Council, has got lost in the post. As my regular readers will know, I am no fan of the way Royal Mail is presently run – my dispute with its managers about “guaranteed delivery” continues – but I am even less a fan of privatisation, either in part or whole. Mandelson blamed “market conditions” for the government’s withdrawal of its attempt to sell off about a third of the national postal operation but that is clearly not the whole of the story.

The unpopularity of (part-)privatisation within the Labour Party clearly played its part. The government may well only have managed to get the legislation through the Commons with opposition support. Peter Mandelson knows how damaging that would have been. He may come off as a meritocrat and pragmatist, inured from the electoral battle by his unelected membership of the upper house, but his roots are firmly in the party. Herbert Morrison, a legendary figure to anyone over 60 with any feel for British politics, was Mandelson’s maternal grandfather. Young Peter left the party for a time over the Vietnam War and, more than thirty years ago, was part of a Labour movement delegation to Cuba along with Arthur Scargill. The Blairite fixer who played such a central role in making Labour look electable again is a man whose nose for both strategy and tactics is still sensitive.

But it’s a pity that the government isn’t better at pre-empting the charge, levelled by both opposition and media, of a climb-down. The new Home Secretary Alan Johnson, another minister with an astute sense of what the party will wear, has effectively killed off the long campaign for mandatory ID cards. But this too is widely seen as a defeat for Labour in general and Gordon Brown in particular. Why is it not within the wit of Downing Street spin doctors to present these adjustments as a response to a different charge routinely made against this government: that it doesn’t listen?

It is at such levels of impression made upon the voters that elections are won and lost. On both these matters, the government is made to look weak. Mandelson’s shadow in the Commons, Kenneth Clarke, will certainly not become First Secretary of State if David Cameron gives him a cabinet post in any Tory administration, but Clarke easily and confidently dismissed the whole government in his scorn for the bitter pill that Mandelson was swallowing. Clarke has a great facility for appearing on top of his brief and yet affable and clubbable at the same time. He scores his points in the same way that any chap would while standing in the bar at the local cricket match. Brown’s advisors ought to pay attention.

The frontman of choice for Brown since his reshuffle has been Liam Byrne, Chief Secretary to the Treasury. Byrne is the sort of man the cut of whose jib would, if you took a free newspaper from him, make you still check your change. Ken Clarke may very well lie as comprehensively as Byrne appears to do but it never occurs to me that Clarke is lying whereas I wouldn’t believe Byrne even if he told me that the economy was in a worse state than the government had anticipated. With spokesmen like this, Brown doesn’t need enemies.

I’m not entirely persuaded that the Lord Mandelson is much of a vote-winner either. I’m very willing to believe that he deserves his high reputation for competence in management, diplomacy, administration, foresight and the black arts. But that doesn’t translate into the common touch. I suspect he does have one skill that, in the cliché, characterises gay men: that he’s good with old ladies. I dare say Baroness Thatcher rather likes him, as she liked Norman St John Stevas, whom Mandelson somewhat resembles in manner. But I doubt it plays well on the council estates where everyone believes Neil Kinnock’s shameless joke that Mandelson, while in a Hartlepool chip shop, pointed to the mushy peas and said he’d have some of that guacamole. A story like that doesn’t have to be true; the truth lies in the fact that it is told at all.

Mandelson’s elevation to the position of First Secretary of State was widely derided and the title scorned as if it were some kind of nasty unconstitutional innovation. In fact the title has been bestowed on a number of senior cabinet ministers as far back as Rab Butler and as recently as John Prescott. Having been elected deputy leader of the party by the party, Harriet Harman might have reason to feel peeved that Mandelson has been elevated to the position prima facie of deputy prime minister. But as neither of them is likely ever to rise to the top job, it hardly signifies. What they should all be concentrating on is doing everything to ensure that Gordon Brown is still prime minister in twelve months’ time. Getting rid of unpopular policies is a start. Finding ways to make a virtue of a U-turn would be better. Not introducing hard-to-sell policies in the first place would be best of all.

OVER the RAINBOW

The news media goes into overkill mode when faced with a story like the death of Michael Jackson. Editors evidently imagine that it’s impossible for them to run too much stuff about the deceased, especially if they can make use of that well tried and much loved soubriquet “the troubled star”. Jackson allows that in spades, of course. Given the gravity of some of the allegations that have surrounded him, it is thought appropriate to haul in the weightiest commentators to cover this aspect of his life. And out come the other superstars to make utterances quite as banal, hyperbolic, tacky and indeed incoherent as the maunderings of the fans, both on mic and on line, which are now considered an essential part of the mix.

from BBC website


This morning’s Guardian carried a front-page think-cum-reminisce piece to which I couldn’t resist emailing a rejoinder: “According to Richard Williams, Michael Jackson had a ‘terminal vibrato’ and was ‘terminally sentimental’. That’s what killed him then, right?” I know they won’t publish that. But even a distinguished scribe like Williams can fall into cliché under pressure of deadlines. That’s the trouble with news: they want it considered but they want it yesterday.

Commentators and fans alike – the one influencing the other and it’s chicken and egg -– have been drawing parallels with the deaths of Kennedy, Diana, Elvis. A better comparison, I suggest, is with Judy Garland, the fortieth anniversary of whose death Jackson survived by just three days. Both were child stars, ruthlessly exploited by their respective businesses. Both were vastly popular at their peak and attracted especially devoted (some might say demented) followers. Both were insecure in their sexuality and about their appearance, both of which they tried to adapt. Both were at their most dynamic when seen live, as the greatest performers always are. Both ran into colossal financial difficulties and could not keep their personal lives on track. Both became addicted to prescription drugs, which destroyed their health and certainly contributed to their deaths, Garland’s at three years younger than Jackson.


I don’t know if I think Jackson was very smart. Too unworldly ever to have a very shrewd take on things, I figure. I particularly think of his absurd, wide-eyed remark when he and Lisa Marie Presley met the press some three months into their mind-boggling marriage: “And they said it wouldn’t last!” Well, children, it lasted about two years, which, out here in the real world, is called “not lasting”.
from Answers.com website

Garland, on the other hand, had a brilliant brain. There’s an extant recording of a television interview she gave to Jack Paar that sets you back on your heels at the quickness and astuteness of her responses to the hackneyed probings of conventional showbiz. She doesn’t miss a nuance or an undertone and her answers are detailed, unconventional and lickety-spit. It’s a stunning turn. If the whole thing was scripted and rehearsed (often true in those days as more often true now than you want to think), she carries it off with complete conviction.

Next week, I’m going to a gig by Neil Sedaka. He’s never been a star to rival Jackson and it’s certainly never been at all hip to like him, as I have done for fifty years – Sedaka had his first hit the year Jackson was born. Even so, he wrote the best-selling song (in the UK) so far this millennium: none other than (Is This the Way to) Amarillo?

There are aspects of his shtik that I’m not keen on: those Liberace/Richard Clayderman touches of classique pretension, for instance. But Sedaka always had an exquisite singing voice, surprisingly little worn at 70, and with his writing partner Howard Greenfield (who died of Aids more than twenty years ago) composed a string of numbers that were, one after another, simply perfectly crafted pop songs. I’m sure there’ll be some dedicated fans there: women in their 60s and 70s still with beehive hair-dos. I suspect there’ll be much less of a gay contingent than you would get at a Jackson concert or (overwhelmingly) at a Garland show but I can live with that.

When Sedaka goes, especially if it’s not for two or three more decades, he perhaps won’t even make the news bulletins (though he certainly should; Gene Pitney did). And for those of us who liked him, that will actually be a mercy.

The WORLD is YOUR LOBSTER, MY SON

“Going somewhere nice this year?” barbers and other occasional acquaintances are apt to ask as summer gets into its stride.

I mean to return to “going somewhere” but for a moment permit me to dilate upon occasional conversations. Many quite like, even relish such time-passing. Not me. Being obliged to discuss immigration with a cab driver is, as far as I am concerned, the seventh circle of hell. Trapped in the barber’s chair, I find myself hoping that a light snooze will quickly overtake me or that I can dissemble one so that the transaction may be completed to the sound merely of clacking scissors and whirring clippers.

At my local barbers, there are two women who do a tolerable job with my hair and whom I have, over the years, sufficiently trained to meet my social needs. One is happy to be quiet. The first few times, she essayed: “Got the day off work?” How far do I need to feel required to voyage into an account of my working situation before she wishes she hadn’t asked? Do I really care whether she knows what my arrangements are? The other crimper is livelier but she is perfectly happy to swap anecdotes about dogs (or rather my dog tales for her grandchildren vignettes), even though most of both contributions are somewhat dog-eared. At least she does me the kindness of remembering that one of our dogs is a Great Dane.

There are two chaps there who cut hair too (including the new proprietor – needless to say a lot newer than either of the women because no barber is going to hand on his business to a woman) and I wouldn’t object to either of them looking after me, save that their only conversational topic is the one that bores me almost as much as reality television: football.

Going somewhere nice this year? Well, no we’re not. And thanks so much for asking because it reminds me that we haven’t actually “been away” since spring 2006 when we did a swing around the moors, the peaks, the dales and the lakes (not necessarily in that order) as a sort of honeymoon after our civil partnership ceremony. And it’s four-and-a-quarter years since we were abroad anywhere.

Are we extremely atypical? We are both at home all day most days. I have occasional forays to London, Oxford, Bath, Cheltenham, Bristol. David’s outings are even fewer and almost never more than a single over-night. I keep urging him to take off in the car for a week or ten days and he blows hot and cold about the idea but doesn’t take the plunge. I ponder setting off on a succession of buses (with my free pass) in the autumn and seeing where I get to. But we never talk of having a real holiday.

The first problem is the fact that we have the dogs. I always say that dogs are a much larger responsibility than children. When there was just the Dane, we took him two or three times to Landmark Trust properties and, although he found it a bit perplexing, he liked new scents and walks and soon settled. As he’s got older, he cleaves to the familiarity of home and is fussed by going further than our field. Twenty minutes away from base and he’s more than ready to retreat. We never took both of them to stay in a strange property though we have left them both with trusted house sitters. But now that the younger one is a special needs dog, taking them anywhere new is fraught with difficulty and imposing Tati’s medication and supervision regime on anyone else seems a lot to ask. Then of course house sitters add substantially to the cost of the holiday.

That’s the other thing. Like most people, we’ve been pulling in our horns lately. Provisions and utilities and … um … books and CDs are necessities. Jetting or even driving somewhere unfamiliar with no guarantee that you’ll have a good time seems a less sensible way to spend dwindling capital. On the other hand, we have numbers of friends in much more parlous financial straits than us who determinedly continue to take three or four foreign trips a year. I’m a little bemused by this but then none of them has such a comfortable and restorative place to spend every day as we do.

Am I rationalising in some way? My grandparents’ generation thought going to London was about as exotic an experience as the world had to offer. (Having said that, though, I remember the extraordinary adventure of my maternal grandmother, Fanny Allsop from Belper in Derbyshire, who, before she was married, got a job as personal assistant to Mrs John Jacob Astor when that lady was divorcing her legendary husband. Fanny accompanied Mrs Astor across the Atlantic on the Olympic just a hundred years ago and lived with her in a suite at the Waldorf Astoria. Mr Astor later perished on the Olympic’s sister ship, the Titanic). None of my other three grandparents, I think, ever strayed beyond these shores.

To my parents’ generation, “abroad” was still an almost unimaginable place. However, World War II took my father to Europe – he was in the D-Day landings and eventually got as far as Italy – and so the mystique began to dissipate. As a child, I was taken by my mother for a day in Paris and then a fortnight in Switzerland. Dad stayed home grumbling but he never wanted to go anywhere anyway. Our family never did anything unless Mum initiated it, organised it and oversaw it. Dad was a stay-at-home, only really happy in familiar surroundings, much like Fargo our Great Dane. He liked to quote that line from the World War I trenches: “If I knew a better ‘ole, I’d go to it”. Though we had seaside holidays in Britain, we never went abroad as a family. After I left home, Mum had a trip to Kenya with friends, Dad went to a bierfest in Germany (dragged there by friends) and the two of them once holidayed, most unexpectedly, in Tunisia. But that was it.

I have been considerably more relaxed about travel than either of my parents but it is not a compulsion or even a requirement for me. Of the places I have yet to visit, I would be sorry if I thought I would never get to Vienna or St Petersburg, the Amazon or Yosemite. And I would be positively distraught to learn that I had already enjoyed my last trip to New York or Rome, the Caribbean or the Far East.

I am not wholly persuaded that travel broadens the mind. My most-travelled friend (former friend nowadays) may be the most closed-minded person I ever knew (which is how he comes to be a former friend). And, as Sammy Cahn wrote: “It’s very nice to go travellin’/ But it’s so much nicer, yes it’s so much nicer to come home”.

By the by, that line I used as the title for this posting: it comes from Arthur Daley. It wasn’t written by Leon Griffiths or any other of the regular writers on Minder. George Cole’s son dreamt up the line and Cole paid him £5 for it and deployed it in an episode. I know this because, much to my surprise, I found myself acting as script executive for one series of Minder nearly twenty years ago. But that’s a story for another occasion …

STILL STANDING

As the smoke begins to clear after days on end of noise and confusion, stifling heat but precious little light, Gordon Brown has come through his backbenchers’ meeting and remains in Downing Street, horribly bloodied but remarkably unbowed. If the media are to be believed, this has been June’s only important story and yet there doesn’t need to be a general election until next May. A sense of proportion appears conspicuous by its absence from this saga.

If a week is a long time in politics – probably the only entirely true thing that Harold Wilson ever said – then eleven months is an eternity. The political climate and the electoral context will be different by next May, perhaps markedly different. None of us can know what the intervening months will bring. Few of us had any inkling a month ago that the overriding media story about politics through the second half of May would concern MPs’ expenses. Events, dear boy, events will occur and balances will shift. Although psephologists love to project the results of one completed election onto another still to be held, the exercise is wholly idle. The next election will be held in an unpredictable future.

The commentariat decided long ago that the Tories would win a general election in 2009 or 2010 and this conclusion brooks no discussion. Shorter memories than mine ignore that Labour was supposed to win the general election of 1992; even on the night, the BBC “called” it for them. Sir Robert Worcester of MORI, no less, “called” the 2004 US election for John Kerry after the polls closed and we went to bed happy that Bush was out. The Tories won the European elections handsomely in 2004 but lost the general election in 2005. Politics does not stand still, even overnight.

The media’s obsession with individual politicians – Westminster’s equivalent of celebrities – rather than policies seriously distorts the way that the electorate understands what is at stake in elections. I would like to have heard or read some debate on European issues ahead of the Euro-elections and some more on local issues ahead of the council elections but the media have neither time nor space for such matters, being swallowed up by speculation and the mad joy of crisis coverage.

Reporters will object that they are only reflecting the perfervid atmosphere in Westminster but this is disingenuous. Parliamentarians conduct a great deal of debate and evolve a great deal of policy that is never covered at all or only covered en passant in the media. Correspondents are much more interested in plotters and loudmouths in the Westminster village than mature, steady and reliable members who are, as the prime minister likes to put it, “getting on with the job”. And politicians are by nature liable to be attention-seekers. Those whose off-the-record gossip or on-the-record outspokenness makes them favourites of the media will inevitably enjoy the limelight. But they are not necessarily any more representative than the random vox pops that now pass for public comment on television news bulletins.

What’s more, politicians are inevitably influenced by the media. When headlines and broadcast packages are whipping up a frenzy, it is hardly surprising if MPs let it get to them. The frantic pace of the rumour mill is bound to turn heads but you take it seriously at your peril. The so-called “sources” that are credited with so much Westminster gossip are impossible for the reader or viewer to judge precisely because their opinions are unattributed. Given that there is no identifiable source, what is to stop the reporter making it up?

That the media are obsessed with who is up and who down rather than anything more substantial is simply demonstrated. Here are June’s successive main headlines from The Guardian and The Observer in the editions that reach us in the west country: “Brown insists he won’t step down as election rout looms” (June 1st); “Beleaguered Darling faces reshuffle axe” (2nd); “Labour’s day of resignation” (3rd); “Brown hangs on, for now” (4th); “The smooth assassin” (refers to James Purnell, 5th); “Bloodied Brown vows: ‘I will not walk away’” (6th); “Labour fears EU poll disaster will spark fresh crisis for PM” (7th); “Judgment day for Brown” (8th).

It’s noticeable how little in these headlines is genuine news and how much idle – and sometimes plain wrong, like the Darling line – speculation. It is hardly to be wondered at if a prime minister turns away from such febrile stuff and ignores it altogether – at which point, of course, the gossipmongers will say he is in denial.

I do not deny that Brown is a highly political animal with a taste for plots and black propaganda and low cunning. Of all the resignation statements to come out of this saga, the one that is perhaps most damaging for thoughtful observers is that of Jane Kennedy today, saying that she was repelled by the negative briefing and attempts to destabilize that emanate from Downing Street. The Damian McBride affair confirms that there is substance to this charge.

The prime minister would do well to rise above this game. One of his strengths has been that he is not Blair in the sense that he is not a snake oil salesman devoted to spin and gesture politics, something that also handily distinguished him from Cameron. But lately he has allowed himself to be persuaded to make some gestures that sit on him so awkwardly. It’s not merely the rictus smile on You Tube. It’s also the wholly unpersuasive pretence of being concerned about Jade Goody and Susan Boyle. Brown should leave this kind of thing to the more simpering breed of populist.

Meanwhile, the daily issue is: can he survive? Absurd question. Of course he can. He doesn’t, as far as we are aware, suffer from a terminal illness. He is relatively young and evidently has enormous reservoirs of resilience. So then: will he survive? Time will tell. Why bother with predictions no more well-founded than punts on the Grand National?

But look at the next general election from another perspective. If Labour does lose, no one will be able to account it a shock. Indeed, it will need to be a defeat of much greater resonance than those we have seen for the pundits to make much of it. From a moderately bloody defeat, Labour will recover and renew itself.

But if Labour wins it will be one of the greatest reversals of fortune in modern politics. The European elections have inured us to the unprecedented so we ought to understand that something extreme could happen again. Who is to say that David Cameron’s luck will not turn soon? He has set off on a course that could do his party great damage in his decision to ally himself with a rogues’ gallery of right wing and neo-fascist groupings in the European parliament. What will he do if the two new BNP MEPs apply to join?

For the Conservatives to lose the next election would be much more disastrous for them than it would be for Labour. It would mark a fourth defeat running and taint Cameron as the fifth failed leader in succession. And it would be against the most propitious set of circumstances an opposition party has faced at least since 1997. The challenger will not have the government quite so on the ropes as this for a long time to come. No wonder they are baying continuously for an election now. They may already sense that things could get better for Labour. To use the inflated language of contemporary political coverage, if the Tories lost they would be “finished”: the party would implode and there would need to be a realignment on the right. With the BNP and UKIP dug in at the European parliament, here would be a truly dangerous situation. Perhaps for all our sakes we should hope that Labour does indeed lose the next election.

Meanwhile a summer break lies ahead. The hysteria will wane. The government may get good news on the economic front. Mandelson might be persuaded from his reckless determination to sell off parts of the Royal Mail. The new cabinet could prove to be less ham-fisted than the last one. James Purnell, Hazel Blears and Caroline Flint will soon disappear from the public memory whereas moats and gardening expenses may linger longer. And things will happen. As far as Gordon Brown is concerned, there is still everything to play for, especially if he can steer the public’s attention towards policy where, it should note, there is still a resounding vacuum in the Tory’s programme for government. As the BBC's Nick Robinson is apt to observe, though more with an eye on prolonging the supposed “leadership crisis”, it’s not over yet.

The MUSIC GOES ROUND and ROUND

The prefects are moving in on illegal downloaders. Research revealed by something called the Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property calculates that some 4.73bn (yes, billion) items are ripped off each year by illicit filesharers in Britain, let alone the rest of the world. For its part, the International Federation of the Phonograph Industry reckons that for every paid-for download to a British computer, there are six items that are stashed in collections without payment. These statistics, by the way, were stolen from an on-line article in The Guardian. As I have been buying the paper since before most of its New Media correspondents were born, I feel that I have already paid handsomely to make use of this info.



As one who certainly wishes to protect his own intellectual property rights, I don’t for a moment condone naked piracy. At the same time, I daily download material without paying for it and I do so with no compunction whatsoever. Permit me to explain.

I have never sought to watch a movie on-line or in any other circumstance on my iMac because I doubt that my screen (even at 17 x 11 inches) or my sound system will do it justice. I have picked up a couple of torrented episodes of American television drama serials that, for one reason or another, I missed on transmission but, believe me, that isn’t denying anybody any income because I am not about to buy the DVD of the whole of, say, season four of The West Wing just to bag one episode. In fact, if there had been no other way of accessing the missed episode, I would have been more likely to give up on the whole enterprise.



But I do download a lot of music. In the last year or two, I have certainly taken many more copies off filesharers’ sites than the “songs” (as they call each track) that I have paid for on iTunes or, lately, Amazon. Downloading is not anyway my preferred manner of collecting music. I will never love any recording medium the way that I – and those of my generation – loved vinyl but, even with the lack of tactile pleasure and vastly reduced user-friendliness of so-called jewel-cases and their booklets as opposed to album sleeves, I am reconciled to CDs (though I was a very late convert). And I will go out and buy CDs far sooner than download them, paid for or not.



But the music retail trade is in full retreat. It’s of course a chicken-and-egg situation but the fact is that I find it easier and easier to find what I want on-line and harder and harder in shops. Last Tuesday, I asked after classical CDs in the central Bristol branch of HMV and was told that they were to be found as “a sub-section of Easy Listening”. How grotesquely shaming. Mind, as the meagre selection on offer appeared to be dominated by the likes of Katherine Jenkins, Russell Watson and violin-scraping glam group Bond, it was perhaps not an inappropriate arrangement.

HMV originally built its business on selling recordings of classical music. When I first shopped at HMV in the 1960s – what was then its sole outlet, situated on the south side of Oxford Street – classical LPs were what greeted you as you entered the store on the ground floor. “Pop” and other vulgar stuff was relegated to the basement. In their day, I bet HMV made more relative income from the sale of 78s of Richard Tauber, Kathleen Ferrier or Dame Myra Hess than they ever have from CDs by Girls Aloud, Sonic Youth and Eminem.



There are now two branches of HMV on Oxford Street – both of them on the north side – and each does actually carry a very useful if (necessarily) not all that comprehensive range of both recent and standard-repertoire recordings, though not of course on the ground floor. I never leave either branch with fewer than a dozen purchases. London also boasts the legendary Harold Moores Records on Great Marlborough Street (where I rarely find what I’m looking for but discover all manner of other treasures while looking), the specialist Opera Shop on St Martin’s Lane and, in a different part of the forest, the fabulous Dress Circle on Upper St Martin’s Lane. The Virgin stores (which became Zavvi), that often had good selections for those who didn’t just want pop/pap, are gone now.

Down our way, we are pretty lucky with Bath Compact Discs and the timeless Duck, Son & Pinker, also in Bath; Sounds Good in Cheltenham; and Blackwells Music Shop in Oxford. But the internet has really opened up the retail of CDs and indeed LPs for the discriminating, largely because local storage is not an issue if your business is mail order or commercial downloading. These days, on-line shopping has made deleted recordings available in greater profusion than ever before.

And this brings me back to the matter of “pirated” acquisitions. While I am a steady purchaser of current recordings as mp3 downloads from iTunes – and I never dream of seeking free access to new or recent releases – the music I download for nothing is, in the first place, very largely by people (composers, songwriters, arrangers, performers) who are dead, frequently quite a long while dead. I am not denying residuals to these artists and if I am denying income to their descendants and other exploiters of their back catalogues (reissuers, repackagers) then I cannot feel badly about it.



Next, even among those artists who are alive, the examples of their work that I am most apt to download are long deleted. The only way I am likely to encounter this material otherwise is through high-priced specialist dealers or via the serendipity of charity and other junk-type shops. Either way, none of the profit is going to anyone associated with making the music. For the customer, getting what one wants by such means is considerably more of a lottery than is finding a like-minded filesharer on the net and gratefully copying the collection that he – let’s face it, it is always a ‘he’ – uploads to his blog. For the sites I am accessing without money changing hands are those set up by enthusiasts who take pleasure in sharing their interests. And there are hundreds of them.



Now I could go to, for instance, the incomparable Footlight Records store in New York City and spend a fortune on well-preserved long-players of show scores and standards singers but, again, only the store would make any money from it, not the songwriters or performers or musicians. And while I will assuredly always visit the store when I am in Manhattan, I wasn’t there yesterday when I was able, without leaving my study, to download for free a Dinah Washington 10-inch LP that the store might – or of course might not – have had in stock for (you can be sure) a pretty fancy price.

And here’s the crucial point. I am downloading the stuff because I can. It’s a resource that I am availing myself of. Take this treasure trove away and it will benefit the music industry nothing. Because it is there and for free, I am, on the one hand, filling a few gaps in my huge and ancient collection, from Scherchen conducting Mahler or Eleanor Steber singing Samuel Barber to long-deleted LPs of the likes of Lee Wiley and Moondog. On the other hand and much more significantly, I am greatly expanding my knowledge of areas of music on which I have previously had a much slenderer grasp – for example, jazz and blues – as well as widening my view of areas that hitherto I have always cherished – classical music, show tunes and standards. Thanks to the uploading enthusiasts, I have increased my store of stylists of the past, from Mabel Mercer to Johnny Mercer, by way of Carmen McRae, Gordon MacRae, Connee Boswell, Eve Boswell, Judy Holliday, Billie Holiday and all the rest. I have further investigated the music of Bernard Herrmann and Woody Herman, Bill Evans and Gil Evans and so on.



Now, I would never have bought these things, either because finding them would be too much trouble, too fraught with disappointment – imagine rushing home with a precious vinyl recording of Pablo Casals, say, or Luisa Tetrazzini and finding the surface noise was intolerable – or because I knew too little about the work and/or artist and would be reluctant to spend money on spec. I don’t mind a bit downloading for nothing and then investigating an artist whose work I am not familiar with – recently, for instance, Cannonball Adderley, Jane Froman, Charlie Patton – but I’m never going to hand over folding money for them, sight unseen.

So what I’m saying is this: the downloads that I am taking for free are having no effect whatsoever on the economy of the music business. Indeed, by widening the compass of my interests, this “illicit” activity is making it more, not less, likely that I will expand the number and scope of items on my shopping list. So the authorities should beware of jumping to the conclusion that by shutting down the filesharing market they would be righting a wrong. As with most issues, it just isn’t as easy as that. Unless of course the Department of Culture can ensure that CDs at competitive prices by, say, Blind Willie McTell, Sylvia Syms, Lotte Lehmann and Ellis Larkins will be generally available in perpetuity, it seems to me that it would be better all round if that true free market – the internet – were left alone.

A WORD from the WISE

The recent death of the writer and editor Anne Scott-James at 96 brought back vivid memories of one of the delights of my adolescence. My Word! was a panel game broadcast on the Home Service and its subject was words. Devised by Edward J Mason and Tony Shryane (who also dreamt up The Archers), it was, needless to say, literate and non-condescending, as indeed was most wireless output in those kinder times. It also had a theme tune, written by the great Vivien Ellis, that was a true call to arms with its first fifteen notes being persistently sounded thirds.

When I first “listened in” (as we used to say) to My Word!, the regular teams were Frank Muir and Dilys Powell against Denis Norden and Nancy Spain. Scott-James joined when Spain died. Muir and Norden were then the eminences grises of broadcast comedy, having penned the imperishable radio sitcom Take It from Here and the raucous prep school comedy for television, Whack-O!, which starred ‘Professor’ Jimmy Edwards. Dilys Powell was the very doyenne of film critics, reviewing for The Sunday Times for nearly forty years and living, like Scott-James, into her nineties. Scott-James was less known to me aside from the programme, working as she then did for The Daily Mail.

The regular chairman of the quiz, at least in my time, was Jack Longland. Sir Jack, as he became, was an educationalist by profession and the sometime intrusion of a stuffed shirt into his manner rather illustrated the teaching cliché of the time. I remember one occasion when Longland carefully explained some reference, ending his discourse with the – no doubt rhetorical – question “d’you see?” “Yes, Jack” replied Norden with exquisitely understated waspishness. “I see”.

As a burgeoning wordsmith, I found the whole thrust of the quiz utterly absorbing. But the climax of the programme, in which the women took an unavoidable back seat, was the delightful indulgence of the taste for whimsy that Muir and Norden shared. At the start of the programme, Longland would announce a pair of sayings, quotes or other variety of construct that, at the end, would be subjected to an elaborately cod explanation of its derivation by the respective comedy writers. The pleasant fiction was maintained that the clever chaps would dream up these monologues during the course of the quiz.

One such that stays with me was “If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?” Scott-James having identified it as a line from Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind, Norden then launched into his own account. This involved a disquisition upon the unreliability of seasonal underwear and the need for applying animal skin to the nether regions, thus leading to Shelley’s indispensable advice: “if winter coms can spring, be fur behind”. The use of the term ‘coms’ – popular shorthand for the pre-central-heating one-piece woollen undergarment known as ‘combinations’ – unerringly dates the yarn.

For myself, I always favoured Norden’s fantasies, perhaps because Longland outrageously favoured Frank Muir: “by the extent and volume of your applause, Frank Muir wins that round and he and Dilys Powell win the contest”. Anybody not partisan could hear that the response of the studio audience showed no such regular favour.

Norden is now the only survivor of the programme. A friend who works in advertising says that he was the most charming, affable and punctilious person to work with. I always rather deplored Norden’s voice-overs, largely on grounds of the products he chose to support. I always hoped to meet him – never have – so that I could point out that I would be unable to accept an invitation to dine chez Norden for fear of being served Wimpyburgers washed down with Hirondelle.

By contrast, I would gladly have eaten anything at the table of Anne Scott-James who, after all, was an early commissioner of the columns of Elizabeth David. And I expect that I would have enjoyed fierce arguments with her husband (they divorced in the early 1960s) Macdonald Hastings who, though very right wing, was certainly charming and interesting if I recall accurately his regular reports for the BBC nightly magazine Tonight. Sir Max Hastings is their son.

****************************************************************

A parting note on this year’s magical May that ended yesterday. I happened to be using the binoculars in the garden that morning when I noticed a little face inside the entrance to the nesting box up in the ash. It was a nuthatch fledgling. He kept popping his head out, then withdrawing, sometimes disappearing but then returning to his vantage point. Suddenly he leaned right out of the box and then toppled in an ungainly fashion onto the perch strategically placed at right angles to the entrance. He tottered there a moment or two and then launched himself recklessly at the trunk opposite, landing safely, recovering from his sense of shock and then, with increasing confidence, hopping up the tree in the manner so characteristic of his species. After a few moments, I lost track of him among the leaves. No other face appeared at the nestbox entrance, at least not in the next few minutes. I don’t know whether nuthatches raise a single chick or whether he was the last to venture forth. But I felt that I had witnessed a sublime moment of nature’s everyday evolution. I hope he (or she) chooses to nest in our garden next year and bless us with the next nuthatch generation.




Nuthatch by Jiri Bohdal on Naturfoto website

POSTICHE GUARANTEES

My vast international readership will be viewing with growing concern the lack of any update on the dispute raging between me and Royal Mail as first illustrated in the posting 'Satisfaction Guaranteed' of April 26th last.

Royal Mail did indeed reply to my letter and there have been further exchanges since. Here is the correspondence that followed during this month:

Royal Mail Headquarters
5th Floor
148 Old Street
LONDON EC1V 9HQ

12 May 2009
[punctuation throughout sic]

Dear Mr Gilbert

Thank you for your letter of 26 April addressed to Donald Brydon. I have been asked to investigate your complaint and reply to you on his behalf.

May I begin by saying how sorry I am to hear that you have found our Special Delivery Service so disappointing. I fully appreciate the fact that you used this service specifically for the purpose of being able to confirm the item had been delivered the next working day unfortunately, we were unable to achieve this on this occasion.

I appreciate your definition of the term “guarantee” however, I should point out that we did in fact carry out the action you asked us to, by attempting to deliver the item by 1pm. At this point I should also explain that we offer a guaranteed delivery time, it would be impracticable to offer a guaranteed delivery, as there will always be occasions when we cannot accomplish this. The terms and conditions of the Special Delivery service state that if we fail to deliver your item by the delivery deadline, we will refund the postage in full. However, the guarantee cannot apply if no one is available or willing to sign for the item. On the reverse of the Special Delivery receipt customers are advised to check these terms and conditions. This can be done by means of our Special Delivery leaflet, which is available from any Post Office Counter.

Regarding the “While you were out card”, the postman responsible for the attempted delivery is confident that a card was left. Whilst, I accept that people make mistakes, there is no evidence to suggest that the correct procedure was not followed in this instance.

Turning if I may to the problems you experienced with our Customer Service representatives. All our staff are trained to a very high standard and should be able to deal with a customer enquiry in a polite and professional manner, consequently, it is extremely disappointing to hear that this has not been a customer’s perception. Under the circumstances I can only apologise unreservedly for the inadequacies you identified. Particularly with regard to the failure of a supervisor to leave a message on your answer phone. I fully appreciate the fact that this will have done little to restore your confidence in our services. However, I can assure you that we take such reports of failure very seriously as they may identify a need for further staff training.

Perhaps I should take this opportunity to explain that very few members of our staff have direct telephone lines. Whilst, some people do not like the use of automated telephone systems, they do save both our customers and staff a great deal of time routing the caller to the person best equipped to deal with their enquiry. However, I am sorry to hear that you find the system unsatisfactory.

I have enclosed a cheque for £7.00 to cover the cost of bringing this matter to our attention. Whilst, the Special Delivery Service was performed to a satisfactory standard, it appears that your subsequent enquiries were not dealt with to the very high standard our customers have every right to expect.

I trust you will accept this gesture of our goodwill along with my sincere apologies for any trouble and inconvenience we have caused you. Thank you for bringing this matter to our attention and if I can offer any help or advice in the future please do not hesitate to contact me again.

Yours sincerely

Joan Siddron
Assistant to Board Members

*************************************
May 16th 2009


Dear Ms Siddron,

Thank you for your very comprehensive response of 12th inst to my letter to the Chairman of 26th ultimo regarding my experience of the Special Delivery service.

I am grateful for the cheque, though it ought not to have been withheld until the matter was escalated to the Chairman’s office. Moreover, you will perhaps understand if I suggest that the sound of it entering my account was reminiscent of a stable door being shut etc. You cannot know the discomfort caused to several individuals by the ramifications of Royal Mail’s failure to deliver the letter in question and no price can be placed upon that.

But the tenor of your argument suggests that this compensation is more in recognition of my treatment at the hands of Customer Services than of any sense that I might have been grievously misled by the claims made for the Special Delivery service. I demur.

Your third paragraph concludes: “On the reverse of the Special Delivery receipt customers are advised to check [the] terms and conditions. This can be done by means of our Special Delivery leaflet, which is available from any Post Office Counter”. On the first point, I was given no Special Delivery receipt. I was merely handed a regular till receipt that bears nothing on its reverse. Examining the till receipt, I see that it says towards the bottom “Please refer to separate terms and conditions”. It also says “Guaranteed Delivery Date: 31/03/2009”.

On the second point, I asked at the local post office yesterday morning for a copy of the Special Delivery leaflet. What I was given was a leaflet called ‘pricing made easy’ (your lower case) and a 44-page booklet, ‘mail made easy: A guide to our UK and International postal services and Code of Practice’. Having been specific in my request, I did not enquire further about the leaflet you mention. Had I asked for such a leaflet on the day I posted the letter, I would not have thought to query being handed such literature as this.

Regarding what is available in practice at branches of the Post Office, it often transpires that what is advocated from – and therefore assumed to happen by – head office does not actually prevail at ground level. Might I suggest (if I may put it this way) that you and your colleagues get out more.

The pricing leaflet that I was given includes prices for Special Delivery. The notes twice use the phrase “guarantees delivery” in regard to this service. It makes no mention of any circumstances in which delivery cannot be guaranteed. Page 5 of the more substantial guide lists features of the various delivery services. The first of these is Special Delivery. Under a heading ‘Product features’, this service is characterised as “Guaranteed next day delivery” against which is an asterisk. The footnote to which one is thus directed states: “Guaranteed definition: delivered by 9.00am or 1.00pm or your money back”. You were perhaps a little irritated by my rehearsal of OED definitions of “guarantee” in my original letter. Now we have Royal Mail’s own definition. In this as in all other references, the guarantee is attached to the concept of delivery, not of attempted delivery, good intentions or wishful thinking.

Pages 6 and 7 provide further details of the Special Delivery service including a repetition of the words “This service guarantees delivery”. Neither here nor elsewhere in the booklet (which I have read thoroughly) is there any mention of any circumstance in which delivery cannot be guaranteed. So the only source for terms and conditions containing the get-out clause concerning attempted delivery that I have so far happened upon is the Royal Mail website. I hardly think that customers who approach a postal counter in good faith for information can acceptably be sent home to go on-line. This is not good Post Office Counters business practice.

The fact remains that the great weight of promotion to the public of Special Delivery obscures any possibility that the vaunted guarantee is no such thing. If you and your colleagues cannot directly spot the discrepancy between the repeated mantra “guarantees/guaranteed delivery” and your own statement that “it would be impracticable to offer a guaranteed delivery”, I certainly do not possess the linguistic or dialectical skills to make you conscious of it. There is a curious parallel between Royal Mail’s after-the-event invocations of a let-out clause that proves elusive – is it on a leaflet that may or may not be available at “any” Post Office Counter? – and those MPs who will not accept any responsibility for dubious practices over their expense claims because of a system of rules that they now discover to be inadequate. In both cases, I am certainly entitled to argue that good faith has not been the first consideration of best practice.

Because Royal Mail appears to be in corporate denial about this matter, it is now my intention to copy the entire correspondence to the Postal Review Panel.

Thank you for your time,


Yours sincerely,


W Stephen Gilbert

**************************************

20 May 2009
[punctuation throughout sic]

Dear Mr Gilbert

Thank you for your letter of 16 May, from which I was sorry to hear that you found my earlier reply unacceptable.

Having considered the matter most carefully I feel there is very little I can add to what I have said previously except, perhaps to apologise for the fact that the leaflet dedicated to the Special Delivery Service is no longer in print. However, I was concerned to hear from your letter that some Post Office Counters are frequently without certain items of stationary [sic] and simply refer customers to the website. Should you wish me to take this matter further, perhaps you would kindly send me details of the Post Offices in question.

It is of course always disappointing to hear that a customer has cause for complaint and even more so when we have been unable to offer an acceptable solution. I realise you will be disappointed with my reply, however, I feel I have clarified our position on this matter.

Thank you, once again for your letter and may I assure you of our best intentions at all times.

Yours sincerely

Joan Siddron

***************************************

May 27th 2009

Dear Ms Siddron,

Thank you for your further letter to me of 20th inst concerning the Royal Mail service flagged as “guaranteed delivery”.

Just for the record, when I wrote that “I hardly think that customers who approach a postal counter in good faith for information can acceptably be sent home to go on-line”, I did not intend to suggest that this is in fact the practice in post offices, rather that sending customers on-line would appear to be the only alternative if copies of the terms and conditions are not available in post office outlets. As I reported, I did not find in my local post office the leaflet to which you directed me.

But this is beside the point, which remains the one that you decline to address: that of Royal Mail offering a false guarantee. Depending upon the finding of the Postal Review Panel, I must tell you that my next action will be to explore with my lawyers whether there is a case against Royal Mail under the UCPD.

Yours sincerely*,


W Stephen Gilbert

* Please note: the sincerity of this letter cannot of course be guaranteed; I am only obliged to make an attempt to be sincere. For the small print, see my website.

***************************************

A couple of notes for my blog readers. The Postal Review Panel is an independent body that reviews complaints when the complainant is unsatisfied with Royal Mail's own investigation. I copied the correspondence (up to the end of the letter that announces my intention of approaching the PRP) and sent it with a brief (really!) covering note. I would not have known of the PRP's existence without mention of it appearing in standing copy at the bottom of each of Ms Siddron's letters. The PRP's acknowledgment informed me that a response would take up to 30 days.

I have also copied the correspondence (up to the same point) to my MP. He has necessarily been preoccupied with explaining a number of sleazy items from his parliamentary expenses but he has properly acknowledged receipt of my material and asked if there is anything specific I want him to do. I have resisted the temptation to tell him to stand down at the next election.

The UCPD is the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive, issued by the European parliament, which subsumes some of the provisions of the old Trades Descriptions Act. In short, I am telling Royal Mail that I believe that describing their Special Delivery Service as one which "guarantees delivery" is an unfair practice because they can, by their own admission, make no such guarantee.

FARAGO and FARAGE

Mr Cameron calls confidently for a general election. Opposition leaders do that, you may remark, only when they are comfortably ahead in the opinion polls. They also demand that the national leader debate with them on television. If Gordon Brown had the wit, he would offer to debate with Mr Cameron only on condition that Mr Cameron, to whom the extreme right wing parties are the greater threat, undertake to debate on television with the leaders of UKIP and the BNP. You may rest assured that Mr Cameron would not agree to do so. Such an offer would expose the essential emptiness of Mr Cameron’s challenge.

But Mr Cameron should be careful what he wishes for. There is much evidence of the electorate being in a mood of “a plague on both your houses, including your second homes and those you have flipped”. The Sunday Times hazards that more than half of the sitting members will have been replaced (“swept away” is how it is characterised) when we know the results of the next general election: 325 is the curiously precise figure. Labour currently has 349 members taking the whip and there is no suggestion that all of those “swept away” will number among them: far from it.

Long before that election, on June 4th to be precise, there will be elections for the European parliament and for many local councils. The commentariat is increasingly convinced that these elections will hit Labour very hard – though Labour cannot proportionately fall a great deal further – but will also deplete the Conservatives and to a degree the Liberal Democrats (who, remember, were overtaken by UKIP in the popular vote last time round).

This is a dangerous moment. The liberal intentions of the Weimar Republic were swept away on popular sentiment for a break with the past that the National Socialists seemed to represent for Germans in 1933. Thereby, Adolf Hitler came to power and Europe was in the grip of cataclysm from which it would not begin to recover for a quarter of a century. It must be contemplated that UKIP or an unholy alliance of UKIP and the BNP may be in a strong position after the June elections, perhaps holding the balance of power on – or even (unthinkably) running – councils. Stranger things happen.

So Mr Cameron’s summer 2009 election would not necessarily produce the unassailable Tory majority that he fondly imagines. Perhaps the Commons intake of BNP and/or UKIP members would be so great that the Tories could only take a ruling role by going into coalition with either or both of these parties. In such a case, the Tories might need to ditch Cameron in favour of some leader more amenable to the extreme right: Eric Pickles, for instance. There’s your nightmare scenario, then: Pickles as Prime Minister, Nigel Farage as Foreign Secretary, Nick Griffin as Home Secretary and – oh, let’s see – Sir Fred Goodwin as Chancellor. Bring it on, Dave.

If it is because he is mindful of these possibilities that Mr Cameron has re-opened the Conservative candidates list and invited political greenhorns (not his phrase) to offer themselves, he is making a terrible mistake. We have seen how carefully-vetted, long-term members of the Tory party – and the other established parties -– have nonetheless treated the rules with cavalier disregard. How much more unmanageable the Tories would be if their big tent were to embrace a whole new self-chosen band of delegates with nothing undisclosed beyond their outsized egos. That way madness lies.

For an alternative script is being written: Get Me into Office – I'm a Celebrity. In this one, the likes of Esther Rantzen, Richard Branson, Joanna Lumley, Simon Cowell and Susan Boyle sit in a cabinet of National Government and solve all our problems by the application of star-power common sense. Don’t imagine that this is any less horrifying than the prospect of the BNP hosting – rather than merely being invited to – Buckingham Palace garden parties.

Celebrities entertaining political delusions are nothing new. Back in the 1960s, the crimper Raymond (said Raymonde) Bessone, known to one and all as Teazy-Weazy, decided he was going to stand as a Liberal candidate in the general election of 1964. Bernard Levin cordially invited him onto That Was the Week That Was to give a political account of himself and proceeded to destroy him with a ruthless despatch that took the breath away. Teazy withdrew from the candidates list the next day, understanding (as modern celebs may not do) that discretion is always the better part of valour.

In these days, celebrities are actively encouraged on all sides to imagine that they are omnipotent and all-knowing. They are not these things. Politicians – at least in this country – are moderately able to acquit themselves with a certain conviction because they toil long and hard in the foothills of political fame before becoming recognisable politicians. If celebrities don’t understand that, they should be made to do so. Jeremy Paxman should submit them to the Levin treatment: “So, Ms Rantzen, do you favour the structural, the well-specified or the reduced-form model of macroeconomics?”

What’s more, the bona fides of these arrivistes should be scrutinized at least as closely as are those of the parliamentarians to whom they consider themselves so morally superior. I’d like to hear, for instance, Sir Alan Sugar and Carol Vorderman harried into full disclosure of their financial arrangements before they get to put themselves forward as candidates. If the electorate are willing to allow themselves to be bedazzled into elevating people “off the telly”, they should have the opportunity to see all the feet of clay that lurk beneath the red-carpet gowns of celebs just as surely as in the publicly subsidized footbaths of MPs.

Meanwhile, the right wing parties are no whited sepulchres either. Nigel Farage, the UKIP leader, has been unguardedly bragging of how he has got through £2million of expenses and allowances while sitting as an MEP in the Union from which he campaigns to withdraw the UK. This money has been spent, he reckons, on “the best of causes”. Meanwhile, members of his party who sit in the European parliament have a juicy record of dipping their hands in the till, including one jailed and another soon to be tried for money laundering. The BNP have had their collective collars felt too. Their elevation would be so constructive for relations with nations where young fanatics go to be trained as suicide bombers, wouldn’t you say?

The two embarrassments caused this last week by the BNP member who sits in the London Assembly ought to give people pause. At a moment when the committee charged with securing England as the venue for the football World Cup was discovering the thinness of its non-white composition, the BNP assemblyman turned up, perfectly legitimately, at the launch. His presence obscured the message that the committee wanted to send to the world. The same tribune of the people was given to understand that an invitation to a Buckingham Palace garden party would shortly follow and he made it known that he would be taking his leader, Nick Griffin, as his guest. More outrage and diplomatic discomfort. But this is the price of democracy. If the people are going to elect undesirables to represent them, those means by which they have traditionally carried out such representation cannot now be denied to them just because the establishment doesn’t find their participation comme il faut. The electorate need to have made clear to them all the implications of the way they vote. It’s no good using your ballot paper to make a protest and then regretting the result of your gesture. If you want to punish Labour or the Tories or the Lib Dems by voting Green or Workers Revolutionary Party, you may well find that your effective abstention from the important question has only succeeded in putting into the Commons a bunch of airheads and fascists.

MAY DAYS BE MERRY and BRIGHT

I’ve always said that autumn is the time of year that I like best, followed by spring, winter and – very much last – summer. I can’t stand heat. (Not that heat has been a summer characteristic lately; we certainly never guessed that we might have log fires burning in successive Augusts). But high summer is horticulturally the dullest time of year, in my view. And slapping on sun cream is a chore that ranks with ironing shirts.

Now I am beginning to feel that May is the most glorious month of all. Of course living surrounded by a satisfyingly unkempt garden and lots of trees and a field that is slowly being turned into a meadow means that May is more noticeable than it used to be when we lived in the city. It’s a dirty job, gracious living, but someone’s got to do it. And rather us than Tory grandees claiming public funds to have the wisteria removed from the garage roof and pipes re-laid under the tennis court.

As I slide into my dotage, it is the transience of May’s delights that tugs at the heartstrings too: the “blossomingest blossom” that the dying Dennis Potter could see from his bedroom window. Blossom doesn’t survive long, especially when it’s wet and windy. Today, like the weekend just past, is blustery between the showers but much holds on with gritted teeth, both flora and fauna. As I write, our lilacs are coming to the end of their brief span of glory. We have all three shades – dark, pale and white – vying with each other and with an ancient laburnum that is also in its full pomp, sharply contrasting with its brilliant yellow flowers (so much more arresting than the common-as-muck forsythia of early spring).

The apple and cherry blossom are done now and the magnolia so long gone it’s almost forgotten. But the late flowerers stand proud against the gale, especially the hawthorn which of course is also known as may. The old rhyme “Here we go gathering nuts in May” is really a rewrite of the notion of the nuts of the may tree – so it should be “nuts of may” – because of course there are no native plants that produce nuts in the spring. Our hedgerows – two sides of the field have full hedges – are full of white hawthorn, while square on to our conservatory is a red hawthorn, its carmine flowers just this side of full vulgarity. Its covering is at its height now. Next to the red hawthorn is an old and doubtless doomed pear tree into which David has allowed a pale pink Clematis Montana to climb. The clematis is in its best fig now. Another one, clean white, climbs along the house under the window of the shower room so that you dry yourself while gazing on the vista of the three lilacs and the laburnum with the white clematis framing the view. Elsewhere the honeysuckle has kicked in so that twilight invites a heady stroll through the garden, reeling from one outrageous perfume to the next.

Also close to the conservatory is an ash. Ashes are the property’s most numerous trees – we have not flinched to have one or two taken down for they seed promiscuously – and they are always the last to come into leaf. So while the fruit bearers and our gorgeous tulip tree – my favourite; we planted it to mark the millennium – are in full leaf, the acers are not far behind and even the tardy oaks are now well covered, the ashes still have the look of winter about them. Nothing undaunted, a pair of nuthatches are raising a brood in the long-established nesting box in the ash, despite having so little cover for their duties. We keep an eye out for magpies, crows, woodpeckers, squirrels and other predators of fledglings but we can’t manage a guard right through the hours of daylight. I feel protective towards them yet when we lived in town I wouldn’t have recognised a nuthatch if it jumped up and pecked me on the leg. Now I can tell one just from its flight, never mind needing to see one still and in repose and relative close-up.

The robins seem to have finished their child-rearing duties for the time being. They build against an outbuilding wall under the aforementioned Clematis Montana. We’ve seen fewer wrens obviously foraging this year. Maybe they nest later. Last spring we installed a so-called sparrow parade near the eaves in a roof gully. Sparrows prefer communal living. But I think we started too late and this year, at the crucial time, we had roofers up there, enough to put off any would-be nester. But sparrows have been as noticeable by their absence here as anywhere else. Does putting up a dedicated nesting box bring them in? Or do they need to be here first before the box is going to be spotted? It’s perhaps instructive that we put up a box specifically designed for nuthatches and tree creepers on the old oak, further away from our busy bird-feeders, yet the nuthatches opted for a generalised box that is on the main strip and not well protected. You can take a horse to water, you might say, but you can’t make it drink.

“What potent blood hath modest May” Emerson wrote. It is indeed a time of energy and promise. Wild deer sometimes venture into our field, despite the menace of our dogs. The fish are at last rising in the pond, having passed half a year in suspended animation near the bottom – and that’s twelve feet down. Already Ron the heron has visited several times, planning where he’ll stand to have the best chance of spearing something. I don’t rate his chances though we shall remain vigilant. But if last year’s kingfisher returns, I shall not begrudge him anything small that he can manage. He’s much too magical to resent.

THEY’RE ALL AT IT

Performing the onerous task of owning The Daily Telegraph from their tax haven in Monaco, the multi-millionaire Barclay Brothers must contemplate their organ's continuing revelations of footling expenses-fiddling by parliamentarians with an air of comfortable superiority.

I sent the above paragraph as a letter to The Guardian on Monday but it wasn’t used. I can hardly complain: the paper has given me a good run lately. But it’s interesting that the suggestion that dubious morality about money is not confined to Westminster is unwelcome in the press. Having worked as a journalist for many years, I know well enough that expenses on what used to be known as Fleet Street have always been a source of abuse. Media people will respond that it’s the misuse of public funds that signifies here but misuse is misuse and money is money whatever its source and the media were no less disdainful of the way bankers rewarded themselves before they received support from the government.

The press barons have never been slow to avoid paying their dues. Rupert Murdoch contributes no tax to the British government and employs an army of accountants to minimise doing so elsewhere. Lord Rothermere, owner of The Daily Mail, contrives to live in tax exile even though his main residence is in Wiltshire, a remarkable piece of juggling (his newspapers are registered in Bermuda and the wealth he inherited from his father was not subject to British penalties because Rothermere Sr lived under the rather less draconian tax regime in force in Paris).

Nevertheless, the mother of parliaments has had good reason to cluck over her unruly children lately. And the way that the story has played has been instructive and rather unexpected. Public anger has seemed to grow and spread in response more to the stories about Tory misuse of public funds than to those featuring ministers and Labour backbenchers. As some have noted, it is more the nature of the claims – for swimming pool maintenance, cleaning Douglas Hogg’s moat, garden landscaping and other instances of gracious living in the shires – than the sums involved that has got up the noses of voters.

Worse for the politicians (and especially Tory ones), the party activists are up in arms. There is a suspicion taking root that the minority parties – by which is meant UKIP and even the BNP – will pick up support among the disaffected, perhaps significant support. Lord Tebbit, no less, has all but advised Tory voters to switch to UKIP, specifically urging them to “boycott” the three main parties in the European elections, as a protest against “misbehaving”. Tebbit is being disingenuous. Everyone knows that all three main parties are a good deal more communitaire than is he; he is merely using the present scandal as a pretext for not toeing the party line.

To his credit, David Cameron dealt swiftly and toughly with Tebbit, making it clear that any more overt disloyalty would lose him the party whip. Indeed, faced with a dangerously developing situation at a time when his party’s opinion poll lead was beginning to look unassailable, Cameron has been decisive and clear. In contrast, Gordon Brown has been elusive and ambiguous. Once more he has let Cameron pre-empt him so that any prime ministerial response of equal force and conviction looks what it is: tardy and derivative. At a moment when the Tories seemed suddenly vulnerable, Brown ought to have come on swift and deadly. This may have been his last moment to seize the initiative before the local and European elections. Vincent Cable’s devastating joke from eighteen months ago – “the House has watched transfixed the transformation of the Prime Minister from Stalin to Mr Bean” – produced at the time the blackest scowl ever seen on Gordon Brown’s face in the Commons. As the months have passed, the thrust has only seemed more apt and more earned. This gives no pleasure to someone like me who doesn’t want a Tory government. Why can’t we instead have a rapidly insurgent anti-Capitalist party like the one in France that is threatening to overtake the ineffectual Socialist opposition and destabilise the authority of President Sarkozy?

PIGS WILL FLY

We have received our government leaflet Important Information About Swine Flu. So that’s all right, then. I am finding that I can resist the temptation – it might be irresistible were I a few decades younger – to order extra copies (to a permitted maximum of five) in, say, Braille, Welsh, Gujarati, something called “simplified form Chinese” and “Farsi/Dari”.

I am not sure, however, whether I swallow an important part of the premise of this leaflet. That is indeed the word “important”. I have sought the “important” information supposedly contained therein in vain. A rather “important” question – you might surmise – is only posed (rhetorically, for immediate answering like an FAQ) on page 9 of the 10-page leaflet. This is “What Are the Symptoms?”

Given the customary hysteria generated by the media, this question might properly be posed, I would suggest, at the outset of the leaflet. But we toil through until the penultimate page and then read that the symptoms are these: “sudden onset of fever, cough or shortness of breath. Other symptoms can include headache, sore throat, tiredness, aching muscles, chills, sneezing, runny nose or loss of appetite” [the leaflet’s own bold]. It seems to me that people suffering from regular ’flu, asthma, period pain, hay fever, bronchitis, myocardial infarction, post traumatic stress disorder, tonsillitis, ME, the common cold, malaria, HIV, pregnancy or a panic attack could present some or all of these symptoms without having been within sneezing distance of anyone who’d ever been to Mexico. In sum, I wouldn’t feel at all comfortable seeing my doctor in the expectation that he would diagnose swine flu. The declared symptoms are way too symptomatic of fifty other conditions.

So what about pre-emptive action? Here the leaflet betrays evidence of having been penned by an academic or equally remote dweller within an ivory tower. Page 6 asks “What can I do to protect myself and others against flu?” Actually, nothing in the responses beneath directly addresses the first part of that question. Obviously, the most effective method of protecting oneself against swine fever is to give the widest possible berth to anyone who has been to Mexico or consorted with its pig-farming population in the last year or so. But I guess it would be ideologically unsound to print that.

The leaflet has a catch-all remedy for protecting oneself – “follow good hygiene practices” – but the said practices then listed all pertain to “prevent[ing] the spread of germs”; in other words, to protecting others rather than oneself: “Always carry tissues. Use clean tissues to cover your mouth and nose when you cough and sneeze. Bin the tissues after one use. Wash your hands with soap and hot water or a sanitiser gel often”.

The author of this advice has a bright and simple picture of each of us as we go about our lives. We are bowling along the street, hands free of impedimenta. We recognise with plenty of warning that a cough or sneeze is imminent. We reach into our pocket or purse to extract a tissue in good time to entrap the trauma’s effluvia. By happy chance, we are just passing a corporation bin into which we cast the now offending tissue, smiling benignly around us the while.

Oh, would it were thus. I have just begun the third week of my second cold in two months, the first having lasted three weeks, this second being worse. Both colds have been the severest I have suffered in forty years. Had I employed a fresh tissue very time I coughed, sneezed or blew my nose, I would have run through two large boxes of them each day. If we all did that, the world’s rain forests would be gone by the middle of October.

If I am out for the day, I am not going to lug two large boxes of tissues everywhere I go. What’s more, I am not going to be in a position to dispose of a soiled tissue every time I use one. If I am in the middle of a meal, a play, a bath, a round of golf, a concert, a shop, a dog walk across fields, a football match, sex, it just ain’t practical to bin a tissue straight after use. What’s more, many places – train and tube stations, shopping malls – long ago disposed of their rubbish bins for security reasons. Because it’s an almost invisible means of saving money, many councils have reduced the number of bins on streets and cut the frequency of garbage collection. It’s easy to advise “bin the tissues” if you don’t appreciate the reality of the scarcity of binning receptacles.


Your country needs you to use a tissue

Then comes the matter of washing one’s hands. Again, this is not a practical proposition if one is out and about. Public conveniences are many fewer in number than they were twenty years ago. Those that are available frequently do not provide the requisite hot water and maintenance is not so diligent that there is always some kind of soap dispenser filled and ready to dispense. The people who compile these leaflets simply have no idea what the real world is like.

The suspicion remains that the authorities are determined to demonstrate regularly that they are on top of this “crisis” because they can. That’s because they know that a pandemic of swine flu is really a very unlikely outcome. By behaving in a manner that seems diligent and comprehensive, they hope to gain credit when the concern blows over. Other crises that have materialised in the past and may do again in the future – floods, prison unrest, knife crime, a run on the banks, leaks about parliamentarians’ expenses – were not and will not be so containable. The government wants to be seen to be in control even though the forces it is pretending to manage are really rather overstated by the media.

I don’t think my friend who refers to the threatened plague as “whine flu” is very far off the mark.

PATSY for the OPPOSITION

It was a surprise to learn that Joanna Lumley is not allowed to live in this country. She is, after all, accounted “a good egg” by Dominic Lawson in his column in today’s Sunday Times, than which, to his class of commentator, there is no greater compliment. Miss Lumley has served Britain bravely through countless episodes of The New Avengers and Absolutely Fabulous, not to mention her roles in a great many advertisements and such socially important British films as The Satanic Rites of Dracula and Don't Just Lie There, Say Something!. All this, you would have thought, ought to have prompted the government to welcome her with open arms.

Perhaps the problem has been what appears to be her very large retinue, entirely made up, it would seem, of small gentlemen of a certain age originating from Nepal. These men could occasionally be glimpsed mutely in the background as Miss Lumley, sometimes waving what looked to be a distinctly offensive weapon, celebrated the achievement of embarrassing the Prime Minister, flanked by David Cameron and Nick Clegg. Never let it be said that the leaders of the opposition parties shirk an opportunity to be photographed with a glamorous celebrity.

It has become a truism that nothing is true unless it be spoken by a famous person. By the same token, everything done, said, acted out or imagined by a famous person is significant, powerful and worthy of our rapt attention. As a consequence, Joanna Lumley has not only provided what an otherwise obscure campaign required to capture the limelight, she has also entirely eclipsed the people who are the subject of the campaign.

Other causes will not be slow to learn the lesson. Brendan Barber, the General Secretary of the Trades Union Congress, is, I learn, to step down, acknowledging that the union movement has lost ground over recent years. He will be replaced by Paris Hilton. There are already moves afoot, apparently, to have the Labour Party’s re-election campaign fronted by somebody off the telly, apparently a favourite of ITV on Saturday nights, called, I think, Anton Dick. For the equivalent role in their own campaign, the Tories have, as I understand, unveiled people known as Katie and Peter. Don’t ask.


The Officer Class (pic from Guardian website)

SATISFACTION GUARANTEED

For my readers' edification and diversion, here is a letter I intend to post tomorrow to the Chairman of Royal Mail, with a copy to my MP:

Dear Mr Brydon,

I was referred to your office by a member of the Royal Mail Customer Services team, from whom I have received no satisfaction whatsoever in pursuit of a complaint.

This is the burden of my experience. On March 30th last, I took a letter to the local post office. I wished to ensure that the letter reached its London destination the next day and was advised that the so-called Special Delivery Next Day service was the appropriate route. I duly paid £4.60 and was assured that the letter would be delivered the following day before 1.00 pm.

The letter was to a man working in a London pub as a barman. He owes me rather a large sum of money. The letter set out my final terms for the repayment and enclosed a stamped envelope addressed to me so that he could have no excuse for not replying (in confirmation of his understanding of the terms) by the deadline that I stipulated: the end of business on the following Friday. Hence the full amount I had spent on the exercise was £4.96.

When no reply from him was forthcoming, I began to set in train a number of sanctions against him. This produced from him a flurry of pained emails, in one of which (sent on the evening of April 15th), he swore that he had never received my letter of March 30th.

Though I felt disinclined to believe him, I went to the website indicated on the receipt I had received for my “guaranteed delivery” – so described on the receipt. I entered the code for the item – ZW119511162GB – and read that the Chiswick Delivery Office had tried to deliver the item “before 12.34” on March 31st and had left a while-you-were-out card. (This information has since been changed to read that the item is being returned to the sender. It has yet to arrive).

I mused on the meaning of the phrase “guaranteed delivery”. It seemed to be succinct and clear and to allow of no controversy over its interpretation. If the language is to have any meaning at all, then being “guaranteed” is an absolute, not a matter of degree. The Oxford English Dictionary gives these four definitions for the verb guarantee:
“1. trans. To be a guarantee, warrant, or surety for; spec. to undertake with respect to (a contract, the performance of a legal act, etc.) that it shall be duly carried out; to make oneself responsible for the genuineness of (an article); hence, to assure the existence or persistence of; to set on a secure basis.
b. with inf. or obj. clause: To engage to do something; to warrant or ensure that something will happen or has happened.
2. To secure the possession of (something) to a person, etc.
3. To secure (a person or thing) against or from (risk, injury, etc.); to secure in (the possession of anything)”.

Not much wriggle room there, I feel.

Next morning, I telephoned 0845 272100, the number given on the receipt. I will not divert myself here with a disquisition on the prerecorded hoops through which a caller must navigate to reach a human voice: you must be tired of hearing customer complaints about that particular aspect of trying to contact Royal Mail. When I did get to speak to somebody and put it to her that I had not received a service that, according to my receipt, was “guaranteed”, she began to argue with me, seeming to suggest that no such guarantee was possible and that the attempt to deliver which had been made constituted a guarantee of service and therefore fulfilled the company’s obligation.

She had a little more intelligence than I had gleaned from the website, namely that an attempted delivery had been made some time after 10.00 am (I forget the precise time) and another at 12.34. I told her that, as it happened, I had been in the pub to which my letter was addressed the Friday before it was sent. I observed then that the pub opened at noon. I also saw a postman enter the pub and place a bundle of mail on the pub bar some time between 12.20 and 12.30. This would seem to be in accordance with the delivery time of 12.34 given on the website. There seemed to be no reason why the Special Delivery Next Day letter could not have been delivered and signed for at 12.34. She argued with me again about the guarantee in exactly the same terms as before, at which point I understood that she must be reading from a prepared script. I asked to be put through to Customer Services. She agreed to do this. As soon as Customer Services replied, I was cut off.

I took some time to collect myself and then called again and, when I reached a point in the process where I was permitted to speak to someone, I asked to be put through to Customer Services. This time I got through and described my case to a woman whose job, I imagined, was to listen to my case and to help. On the contrary, she argued with me quite as vehemently as her predecessor had done. I was careful to keep my temper, knowing from previous experience that sweet reason plays better than undisguised frustration. If, as your recorded voice informs us, my call was recorded “for training purposes”, you will be able to confirm this.

I did note an interesting variation on the previous conversation, however. When the Customer Services woman consulted the file on my case, she said that only one attempt was made to deliver the letter – the earlier of those mentioned before – and that 12.34 pm referred to the time that the postman/woman had signed off the round. A card would therefore have been left on the mid-morning delivery and the onus was thereafter on someone at the pub to collect the letter. This timetable did not of course square with what I had observed myself on the Friday. I once again argued that “guaranteed delivery” did not so much imply as state categorically that delivery was guaranteed. If, as I now understood it, delivery was not guaranteed, the service should, at the very least level of candour, be called “guaranteed attempted delivery”.

When it seemed to me that the Customer Services woman was repeating herself to the extent that she too was reading from a script, I asked to speak to her supervisor. She agreed to put me through and I was promptly cut off again. To be cut off once is unfortunate, twice looked malicious.

I walked the dogs round the field to give myself an opportunity to prepare for a further attempt to get the Royal Mail to admit that some fault in this case must attach to itself, then called Customer Services and asked to speak to a supervisor. The man to whom I was put through gave his name as Ben Ferguson. He was the first person I spoke to who did not argue with me and who took my complaint seriously, which I appreciated. After listening to my account and examining the entry on the website, he told me that the postman/woman whose round was in question would be interviewed and that he would call me back within 48 hours. I told him that, because we both work from home, our answering machine is permanently switched on and that he would need to leave a message – if I were in a position to hear him speak, I would pick up immediately. I understood that he had made a note of this on the file. He also gave me what he said was a direct line number (08457 740740).

Having heard nothing after eight days, I called the number. It proved to be very far from a direct line and I had to wade through the usual lists of options, none of which applies to one’s case. When I eventually got through, the woman I spoke to said that Mr Ferguson was away. She called up the file and reported that Mr Ferguson had telephoned but we had not picked up. I pointed out that he had noted our use of the answering machine, the message of which immediately declares that it is always switched on. There was a curious parallel here with my undelivered letter: Mr Ferguson clearly felt that he had tried and need not do so again. His note said that the postman had been interviewed and claimed to have left a “we-called-but-you-were-out” card. I told her that I had since spoken to the person to whom the letter was addressed and he had said that nobody else who worked at the pub knew anything of such a card. I again argued for a different title for a service that could not in reality “guarantee” delivery and in response she uttered the line that no Customer Services representative should dream of uttering: “No one’s ever complained about it before”.

I said that at the very least I would be applying for a refund and she said that I was not entitled to a refund because an attempt to deliver the envelope had been made. I was taken aback at this. I remarked that this would seem to depend entirely on the word of the postman as no such card was known to exist. At this point, I observed that I would be taking up the matter with my MP and she volunteered the chairman's office as a suitable target for my complaint.

The barman duly sent me a cheque for £5,000, which, however, is only a first instalment of his debt to me. I paid this cheque into my bank along with another for £1. As it happens, this second cheque was from the Royal Mail. As a philatelist of several decades’ standing, I have occasion to order items from Tallents House. Recently, Royal Mail sent me two unitemised invoices, the sums involved differing by £1. I wrote several times enquiring as to the discrepancy but received no reply that resolved the matter. Eventually, a little exasperated, I sent Royal Mail a cheque for the higher amount. With no accompanying explanation, I received the cheque for a £1 refund some weeks later. When I paid in the two cheques, the bank teller was amused by the contrast in the two amounts. I decided not to bother to explain to her how the cheques were in fact united in their respective relationship to Royal Mail incompetence.

In sum, there are two aspects of the matter of the guaranteed delivery item that ought to merit your attention. The first is the shadowy nature of the system’s operation at ground level, where the details of the story change according to what must seem most expedient in fending off a dissatisfied customer and Customer Services interpret their role not as a soothing balm for such a customer but as a first line of defence against complaint.

The wider point concerns the face that Royal Mail shows to the public. Calling a service “guaranteed” is a large and clear statement that does not admit of failure. The promotional material on your website urges customers to “take advantage of Special Delivery Next Day for guaranteed delivery of your urgent or valuable items before 1.00pm the next working day” and also undertakes that “if your item is not delivered on time we’ll refund your money providing you have proof of posting and claim within 14 days of posting”.

By searching around the site, I eventually found what even the site accounts “the small print”: “Attempted delivery shall constitute delivery for purposes of our guarantee”. To post there a piece of careful legalese that in effect entirely negates the claim made in the promotion of the service is to act wholly in bad faith. That small print was not available to me when I walked into my local post office with my letter and, in good faith, accepted the assurance of the woman behind the counter that Special Delivery Next Day would achieve what I wanted to achieve, guaranteed.

And here is the final absurdity of this whole sorry experience: had I simply posted the letter at the normal first class rate, it would certainly have been delivered to the pub, even if only by means of being dropped through the letterbox, and the recipient would have received it. Instead, I spent nearly fourteen times as much as the first class letter rate and the letter never arrived. A cynic would suggest that the service be renamed “guaranteed non-delivery”. I am no cynic. But some indication that you intend to rectify this poor service would be very acceptable.

I have always been a fierce opponent of the privatization of any part of Royal Mail and/or the Post Office. At the very least, this experience has made me think again.

Yours sincerely,

W Stephen Gilbert

SMALL SCREEN

An old friend was recently describing to me how, in his view, one of the delights of having a tiny iPod video is that he can sit on the tube and watch programmes he’s “nicked” (as he put it) from the BBC iPlayer. Apart from the deplorable illegality of his actions, I can think of few prospects more uninviting than the notion of watching anything on a screen the size of a postage stamp and presumably listening through those tiny earphones that no one under 30 can move without wearing, while surrounded by fellow travellers some of whom will certainly be attempting to peer over your shoulder to see what it might be that you are squinting at. Why doesn’t he read a book?

It is very curious that while the size of the cinema screen has grown until it has reached IMAX proportions, a high proportion of viewers has settled for a more and more restricted view. I don’t suppose it would rob Newsnight of much of its visual appeal if one were to watch it on a screen rather smaller than most of Elizabeth Taylor’s diamonds (and indeed the smaller the image of Mark Lawson on Newsnight Review the better). But I certainly wouldn’t want to watch, say, Abel Gance’s Napoléon in any conditions other than its three-projector Polyvision version which is the width of three academy-frame screens.

As a boy I was taken to see the first commercial movie made in a new process: This Is Cinerama. We all duly ducked as the train hurtled towards us and generally were bowled over by … well, by the sheer size of the images. Sadly, very little worthwhile work is ever executed in these mammoth aspect ratios. Several features were released in Cinerama; only How the West Was Won and of course 2001: A Space Odyssey have much merit. But modern movies are routinely released in widescreen dimensions and compromises must be made if these are to be televised or shown anywhere where the screen’s aspect ratio differs from that of the movie.

When I lived in London, I endeavoured to see the great majority of films that I wanted to see on the big screen first. This was especially true of large-scale roadshows like Pirates of the Caribbean where the scale of the cinema screen dictates the look of the entertainment. Subsequent viewings on television would be referable in my memory to the earlier ‘proper’ cinema-going experience. Since we moved to the country and my visits to the city have dwindled in regularity, I have drifted more and more out of touch with contemporary film-making. This year was the first since I originally came to London to attend university that I had not seen a single one of the Oscar-nominated movies or performances by the time of the ceremony. There is no cinema within easy striking distance of where we live.

I record a great many movies from television but I get around to watching dishearteningly few of them (I claim to possess the largest collection of unseen movies in the world; I know – it’s a form of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder). As I write I am downloading a commercially released documentary saved on Sky + last night, removing the adverts as I store it. Despite the fact that I may never watch this or most of the rest of my collection, I am acutely aware of the treatment that television metes out to film.

When we moved to our present home, there was a Sky aerial already in place. As it was remarkably discreet – on so many dwellings the satellite dish is the first feature you notice – and as we quite fancied the movie package that was then one of the main options for Sky customers, we decided to ignore our dislike of all things Murdochian and go with it.

To my great surprise, Sky Movies has proved to be the best source for films on the box, not least because so very many movies from all levels of commerciality come onto Sky eighteen months or so after their theatrical release. Already movies dated 2008 are beginning to air. On Sky’s ‘free’ channels – which is to say those that make up the package which we pay for monthly rather than those so-called Box Office movies for which a premium must be paid at each viewing – most of the boxes that I require get ticked. There are no ad breaks during the film. There is no channel ID in the corner of the screen. With very few exceptions, movies made in widescreen ratio are broadcast in letterbox format. (Most channels both satellite and terrestrial now respect the aspect ratio, though not Five which transmits all its movies panned and scanned).

Subsequent Sky transmissions are never given on-screen trails while the movie is still playing. End credits are always shown complete and at the correct speed and, while it sometimes happens that a linkperson speaks briefly over them and very occasionally that the dimensions of the movie image are squeezed to allow a visual trail, these intrusions are very much the exception rather than the rule. In the great majority of cases, the print of the movie is the longest available (an exception is Sky’s version of the Tarantino-scripted True Romance of which Channel 4 has a fuller print). It sometimes happens that venerable British movies are shown by Sky in US television prints that have either been savaged to fill programme slots or copied from release prints that were shortened to serve as supporting features in movie houses. Sky Movies is not apt to screen signed versions of films or dubbed versions of foreign works.

The one drawback to Sky’s policy is that it assumes that all viewing households are largely peopled by small children who do nothing but stare at the domestic screen all day. Consequently, most of the movies I want to see (or record) first have to be accessed using my PIN number, a dull undertaking. One day when I was tired I confused the PIN number with a similar code for a channel I often use and entered the code wrongly three times. As a consequence, I was “locked out” of the movie for ten minutes so that by the time I could access it again it was already under way. Grown-up households ought not to have to put up with this. (It is a measure of the extraordinary over-sensitivity of Sky to parental controls that the movie title The Bitch appears in all Sky promotional material as The B***h). Generally, though, this is about as good as movies on television get.

By contrast, the BBC long ago gave up being scrupulous about screening movies. Unless a picture is so old that its ending amounts to little more than the words ‘The End’, end credits are routinely interfered with, even on BBC4, and always rendered illegible for the duration of an on-screen programme promotion. Either all the craft credits are simply excised or the roller is dizzyingly speeded up or, often enough, both forms of butchery are employed simultaneously. The result is that it becomes impossible to know whether any other violence has been done to the print.

Let me explain. Film traditionally projects at the rate of 24 frames per second. For some reason too arcane for me to go into (even were I to understand it), film transferred to tape for showing on television (or selling on DVD) runs at 25 frames per second. This means that a movie timed at 100 minutes in the cinema will play for 96 minutes (4 percent faster) on the box. When planning to copy movies from transmission, I check the official length and then subtract 4 percent so that I know what to expect. But once the broadcasters have edited the end credits, the calculation is thrown out and then the integrity of the movie cannot be relied upon.

A certain discrepancy may be anticipated for a film shown on the BBC or ITV (Channel 4 and its satellite channels are usually more reliable for film timings though they perpetrate other impositions) but there are times when the difference between what length a movie should broadcast at and what it does broadcast at cannot be explained simply by credit cutting. Not long ago, the BBC showed a feature that it had made itself – Starter for 10 – and, even though this appeared to have a complete credit roller (perhaps because of the very fact that it was a BBC-financed production), the broadcast version was still light by three minutes. Another of its own features, A Cock and Bull Story, ran four minutes short, too much to be spoken for by trimming the end credits. This cutting does happen on C4 channels from time to time. Zoo, the documentary I recorded on More4 last night played six minutes shorter than it should (and anyway its release print was only 80 minutes long).

The same documentary revealed a problem that continues to bug More4 three-and-a-half years after its launch. Whenever the presentation microphone is switched on, the broadcast sound breaks up so, if the duty announcer’s mike is not switched off immediately a programme starts, the introductory music becomes unstable – this happened to last night’s documentary. Why nobody at the channel appears to be aware of this is peculiar: doesn’t anyone monitor the output off air?

Meanwhile, there was a curious incident on More4’s sister channel Film4 this afternoon. A vintage British movie, A Cottage to Let, was going out for the umpteenth time in recent years but in an “audio described” version, so that, fitfully, a woman’s disembodied voice chimed in to describe physical action on screen. I have no idea how often such versions are transmitted, never knowingly having encountered one before. The Sky on-screen guide indeed has the code AD against the broadcast but one rarely notices such detail and there is nothing about it in Radio Times. It surely ought to be possible to confine such intrusions to the coloured buttons on the remote and spare those who are able to see all the action for themselves.

Signed screenings are another bugbear. Given the development of interactive television services, the signer ought also to be consigned to a place from which he or she may be summoned by those that require them. I would have no complaint if C4 in particular did not pursue a curious policy of broadcasting its signed movies late at night and frequently using for the purpose films that are rarely screened. I have several times been caught out setting Sky + for a long hoped-for movie transmitted while I sleep, only to discover next day that it is unwatchable because some over-actor in the corner of the screen is gesticulating for the hearing-impaired. One such screening neglected to slot in the signer until the movie was more than an hour into its duration.

A satellite movie channel I discovered a few months ago is Simply Movies. The channel belongs to a DVD marketing outfit, called Simply, which promotes itself on the channel and transmits there a package of movies acquired from the Sony Corporation, which means that all the movies were first made and/or released by Columbia Pictures. Many of the films are long unseen -– there is a preponderance of titles from the 1960s – and some are pretty obscure. But all without exception are shown distorted out of their true ratio so that faces are elongated. It is bewildering that no one at the channel attends to this yet they must be aware of it. One of the channel’s true plums – Von Sternberg’s dazzling and perverse 1935 traversal of Crime and Punishment with Peter Lorre sliming along as Rashkolnikov – even went out with every ad break caption card bearing the movie’s title superimposed on the phrase “wrong format”. How weird is that?

Of course there is no real substitute for settling down in a proper cinema to see a film on the big screen. Not that this experience is always unalloyed pleasure. Ignorant people will talk through the screening, as if watching at home. The last feature that I saw in a movie house was Gus Van Sant’s wholly admirable Milk. But the print was severely scratched for a considerable portion of the opening reel and that ought not to be the case when one is being charged a West End price. Nowadays, when cinema staff have been rationalised to a minimum squad, you go off to look for someone to complain to and miss twenty minutes of the movie because, especially in a multiplex, there is no one to be found. The projectionists tend to be unaware if the sound has dropped out or the focus has slipped because they’re simultaneously dealing with projectors feeding several different screens. The cinema’s greatest effort now goes into the most lucrative part of its business: the sale of popcorn, snacks and hot and soft drinks.

The only answer is clearly to make a lot of money, build you own private screening facility, employ a seasoned projectionist, have pristine prints of new movies flown in and watch at your leisure with whatever guests and libations suit your taste. Better by far than an iPod on the tube.

EMAIL of the SPECIOUS

The Prime Minister appears wholly to have mislaid his hitherto well-attuned political instincts over the affair of the smear-mails. It has been an object lesson in how to make a bad situation much worse. The danger is that people like me who are naturally well-disposed towards Gordon Brown begin to suspect that he has lost his appetite for the fight as well as his tactical acumen. A kind of death wish seems to be settling over Downing Street, much as it did in the dog days of the Major, Callaghan and Macmillan/Douglas Home premierships.

When Brown delayed a much-demanded decision about an early election, David Cameron tried to tar him as a “ditherer”, for no better reason than that it worked for Blair against John Major – of course, it worked against Major because it was a well-landed punch. Now the opposition has a much better founded claim: that the PM is behaving like a loser.

The conventional wisdom, established now for more than eighteen months, is that the Tories will easily carry the next general election and David Cameron will be prime minister. JK Galbraith, who coined the term, noted inter alia that conventional wisdom “reserves its scorn for what it is likely to term a purely destructive or negative position”. And he went on: “In this, as so often, it manifests a sound instinct for self-preservation” [The Affluent Society 1958]. It’s hard to imagine anything more destructive or negative than the emailed falsehoods that Brown’s close associate Damian McBride proposed to circulate in the hope of undermining Cameron and his front bench (with the possible exception of those newspapers, led by Murdoch’s Sunday Times, that condemned the tactic while gleefully reproducing the gist of the smears).

The Tories’ outrage at this disclosure indeed manifests self-preservation. They have plenty of black propagandists of their own who could be unmasked in dastardly deeds. There but for the grace of political bloggers, Cameron will be muttering, goes my close team of advisors (one of whom, who bears the unlikely name of Stephen Gilbert, is obviously a wrong ’un).

Brown has made two obvious mistakes, one reactive the other systematic. The former was to let the opposition seize the initiative. As soon as McBride’s emails were in the public domain, the PM should have taken responsibility. It may stick in his craw as much as it would in mine to indulge the gesture politics of apologising, but it would have been obvious to the Number 10 advisors that those libelled in the emails would be demanding a full apology and that fair-minded people would perfectly well understand why they would do so. Brown ought to have had the nous to anticipate such a demand by pre-empting it, not painting himself into a corner wherein to apologise late looks weak and to continue to refuse to apologise looks churlish and ungracious. Brown doesn’t do gracious, even at the best of times. All the more important, then, that he avoid situations in which good grace is naturally called for.


Damian Omen 2 or McBride of Frankenstein?
pic courtesy of BBC News website

The broader mistake lies in both Brown’s and Tony Blair’s historic reliance on advisors who appear to have emerged from the mulm at the bottom of a particularly stagnant aquarium. Looking at Damian McBride, you feel that no one with any sense would trust him with the care of a boiled sweet, let alone far-reaching matters at the heart of government. Many of the others have been little better: Derek Draper, Charlie Whelan, Wilf Stevenson, Lord Levy, Benjamin Wegg-Prosser (this last also famous for ill-advised emails) – you would have thought giving any of them positions of trust was something of a gamble. It becomes increasingly clear that people like these have persistently briefed against the imagined rivals of Blair/Brown within the Labour Party quite as extensively as against the official opposition. Apologists for Blair and Brown argue – with no great conviction – that these attack dogs were not licensed by their masters and hence those masters should not be blamed for their dogs’ bad behaviour. As a dog owner, I know full well that any breach of law, peace or etiquette committed by a dog of mine is my own responsibility. This whole sorry/not sorry business does raise vexing questions about both Blair and Brown and their skill at reading character and at understanding what is appropriate.

In Gordon Brown’s case, another resonance comes into play. Not since Aneurin Bevan, who once described the Tory front bench as “scum”, has a senior Labour politician evinced such gut distaste for the party opposite. This tends to breed the suspicion that Brown will not desist from low tactics if they will do Mr Cameron a piece of no-good, even just for the hell of it. This is a perilous instinct. The British still have a finely tuned nose for fair play and recoil from politicians, however exulted, who appear to be stooping to try to conquer. Only a few days ago, the Prime Minister was justly basking in the glow of a good G20. If he has frittered away that good will in a gruesome and demeaning domestic disaster, he really has only himself to blame.

CHRONICLES of WASTED TIME

A young friend whose opinion I usually trust and respect reckons that I should persevere with Charlie Brooker. I watched most of one of his programmes once and feel no inclination to submit myself to a similar ordeal. Brooker is just another of those snidey types who, as his “celebrity” grows, will modulate his asperity to accommodate a broader following: I’m not wrong, am I? I don’t disagree with the thrust of his assaults on the media, just the tenor of them. He does it for notoriety, the sake of the joke and amour propre. I hold my own view because I believe that the media is a significant force in the world and needs to be regulated and curbed. He wants to be embraced by the media itself; I don’t. I am the true maverick; he’s just feinting. (Guess which of us is in work).

The commentocracy is stuffed with snidey types. Here is the two-pennyworth of Dominic Sandbrook – not an economist himself – uttered at the invitation of The Guardian on the G20 summit in London: “Somehow I doubt that the G20 will take its place among the great summits of history. Yes, it represents a personal high point for Gordon Brown, whose seriousness and statesmanship are never less than impressive – although it was not exactly hard to shine beside Silvio Berlusconi, Nicolas Sarkozy and the increasingly empty pieties of St Barack. But will it make a difference to the worldwide recession? I don’t think so. A million dollars sounds like a lot, but in global terms it’s not nearly enough to make a difference. Despite all the hype, my gut feeling is that governments have far less influence over the business cycle than they like to think. I do wish though that Gordon had done away with the razzamatazz that accompanies these events. Did we really need the spectacle of the WAGs having dinner with Naomi Campbell?”

Sandbrook is allegedly a 35 year-old historian (though he looks fifteen years older). If his books are rated by future academics (rather than newspaper reviewers) alongside those of, say, GM Trevelyan, JH Plumb and AJP Taylor, I will eat my hat. In fact I will eat his hat. What irresistible solution to the global recession, I wonder, would Sandbrook offer the leaders of the world? Would he even have a coherent question to put to the Prime Minister? Oh, and wasn’t it a trillion dollars? Perhaps he wasn’t paying attention.

Meanwhile, the significant activities pursued by Mrs Sandbrook – if there is a Mrs Sandbrook – are not disclosed. Presumably Mr Sandbrook would prefer wives to sit quietly at the back and foreswear meals.

You can knock politicians all you like – and most of us do – but you can’t pretend that they don’t work hard. I don’t imagine Gordon Brown spent much of last week catching up with The Wire on BBC2 or even playing with his young children. In the week before the G20 began, he visited more countries than many of us do in a lifetime but I doubt he did much sightseeing or sampling the local cuisine. People like Brown and Obama have their lives mapped out for them by officials and only get time to kick back if they throw a wobbly and insist. In any case, you can’t powwow with all these world leaders and chair all these high-powered meetings without doing your homework and if you screw it up, you screw it up big time. The pressure is unimaginable. Then opposition members, most of whom have nothing more important to do than nurse their seats, jib because Brown wasn’t there for some vote that they thought important. I don’t suggest for one moment that government should not be accountable to parliament, but running the country, especially in a long-drawn-out crisis, really is a full-time job. No wonder ministers frequently make do on four or five hours’ sleep per night.

Most of us – journalists especially (and Brooker and Sandbrook are just jumped-up journalists) – don’t work all that hard. I know from thirty years on and off of being a journalist that most of them would never get anything done if they weren’t given deadlines to meet. I do not except myself. A friend and I, spending far too much time emailing each other, josh ourselves about “displacement activities”, anything rather than buckle down to the task in hand. This very blog is a sort of displacement activity, something to do instead of getting on. I have lists of things to do, some of them dating from last year, that still do not bear a single check mark. Then I find myself wondering what the hell I managed to get done last week. Where does the time go?

Chronicles of Wasted Time was the title of Malcolm Muggeridge’s autobiography. “St Mug”, as he was known to Private Eye magazine, was a founder member of the modern commentocracy, becoming a pundit on the box at a time when members of his class still found it difficult to take the medium seriously and reckoned that they only had a television “for the children”. At the time he published it, I thought the title a harsh and rather jaundiced self-criticism, especially coming from a man whose religious belief was in the process of becoming positively missionary. Now that I am only seven years shy of the age at which he wrote it, I sympathize more readily with what he felt. “The days dwindle down to a precious few”, as Maxwell Anderson hauntingly wrote in that most poignant of American standards September Song and the sense of options closing out becomes more palpable as one’s 60s advance. Let’s face it, at my age, I simply don’t have time to try again with Charlie Brooker.

The DREAMY GAME

Four days in London can have quite an effect on you. I hadn’t been home twelve hours before I knew that I’d picked up a bug. This nearly always happens now when I go to town. There came a point when the return visits to the city where I lived for nigh on 40 years became far enough spaced out that I lost my immunity to it. I’m sure that the source of this vulnerability is public transport, particularly the underground. So many germs get trapped down there in the carriages where they multiply and seek new victims. Residents are immune; visitors are not.

My generation was taught to “put your hand in front when you cough”. There was even a lyric, sung to the tune of Deutschland über Alles: “Coughs and sneezes/Spread diseases;/Catch them in your hand-ker-chief”. Nobody bothers now. A man passed me in the street, respectable enough in suit and tie and carrying a briefcase, and just before he drew level he sent an explosive, unstifled cough into the air all around both of us. Maybe he was the one who infected me.

I rose into semi-consciousness while it was still dark this morning. My throat was fiercely sore but I wasn’t awake enough to do anything about it. I had a half-awake dream about Sol Campbell. This is pretty odd. I know three things about Mr Campbell: he is a footballer though I couldn’t guess for which club he plays; he is of Afro-Caribbean appearance though, had I walked into my London hostess’s living room and he had been sitting on the sofa, I would not have known who he was; there have been persistent rumours, strongly denied, concerning his sexual orientation. Probably this third element prompted the dream.

Why did I dream of a footballer? I mock my football-following friends of whom there are rather few though the friend with whom I stayed is certainly the most devoted: she and her daughter support Fulham (evidence of true devotion, I believe). So I guess football was more in my head than usual. But I do take more of an academic interest in the game than I usually pretend. I never actually watch it on television and the last time I went to a match was at Upton Park at the end of the 1960s when – I guess, though I don’t really remember – West Ham would have been playing host to Manchester United, among whose most enthusiastic fans was a fellow member of the student group with whom I was then sharing a flat. At that time I developed a temporary interest in football managers and their psychology, so I know who the likes of Bill Shankly, Joe Mercer, Malcolm Allison and Brian Clough were. Shankly, a fascinating character and a legendary manager of Liverpool when it was the dominant team in England, famously declared in his deep Scottish brogue that “football isn’t a matter of life and death – it’s more important than that”. Of course it wasn’t meant as a joke.

Apart from unavoidably seeing snatches of matches on television news (BBC News is little less than obsessed with English football), I often watch Final Score on BBC1 on a Saturday afternoon, largely to catch the results for the teams that are based in the part of the world where I grew up, namely Northampton Town, Kettering and Rushden & Diamonds, the latter persistently mispronounced by presenter Ray Stubbs and results reader Tim Gudgeon: it’s Ruzhden, not Rushton. I have no feeling for the teams that represent the area where we now live. On Sunday, I look at the sports pages to see the tables and upcoming fixtures for the Northants teams and take a mild interest in other clubs for arbitrary resonances or ancient associations: Liverpool, West Ham, Stoke City, Ipswich, Reading, Southampton, Nottingham Forest, Accrington Stanley. Though I lived for more than twenty years in the catchment area of Arsenal, I never had any curiosity about that particular club which anyway now lives further off; after all, its origins lie on the far side of the Thames.

On Friday, I went to a pub on the Great West Road to see a man about a debt. I got there on the stroke of noon and found the pub closed. Two men were outside at one of the pub tables, one seated, the other standing. I asked the seated one if he knew when the pub opened. “It should open at twelve” he said. “Oh,” said I, “any minute now, then”. “I certainly hope so” said the man who was standing. I looked at him for the first time. It was John Motson. I betrayed no flicker of reaction. I know enough people in the public eye to understand that having a quiet drink is an important oasis.

Then the pub opened and I followed them in. ‘Motty’, as I understand the BBC’s chief football commentator is known, ordered a cider shandy, a suitably abstemious beverage. My debtor was late. I looked over at the pair I’d earlier addressed, the only other people in the bar. Their conversation was just a burble within which “BBC” was occasionally discernible. I decided that, after all, I did want to approach Mr Motson. I would wait until his colleague went to the bar, then nip across and say: “Excuse me for being presumptuous. I know nothing of football, but your fame and the great affection in which you are held extends far beyond the realms of football and I do hope you know that”. That would be all, it wouldn’t be an opening gambit. He could hardly be other than gratified. And I meant it. I avoid the word “icon” like the plague but if it must be used in its contemporary meaning it could hardly apply more properly to anyone else. However, the pair had the one drink and left. It was perhaps just as well because, on both occasions that I retailed this anecdote, I found myself unaccountably filling up. Why?

Does football run deeper than I know in the national – indeed global – consciousness? I hope not. From my detached perspective – though it is clearly far less detached than I imagine – football represents much of what I deplore: blokes, grotesque overpayment, naked marketing and exploitation, gratuitous competitiveness, continuously unsporting behaviour, the elevation of something wholly trivial into something that grown-ups imagine is more “important” than their own lives (and deaths), a culture that is violent, drunken, exclusive, self-important, grasping, frequently racist and xenophobic, always misogynistic and homophobic. What can football possibly mean to me?

Well, something clearly. Not enough to make me want the World Cup to come to Britain, any more than I welcome the 2012 Olympics which, as I predicted long before London “won” the struggle to stage it, will cost us dear – primarily financially but in other ways too – for decades to come. Certainly, I hope not to dream about any more footballers, particularly ones of whom I have no more than a sketchy image. Let’s hope it was just the effect of London germs.

DOWN HERE on a VISIT

Tomorrow, March 21st, is the first day of Spring. Actually, some argue that today, being the Vernal Equinox this year, is the first day of Spring. I was always taught that the seasons begin on the 21st of the month irrespective of the small changes in the dates of the equinoxes (equinoces? – on the analogy with index and indices?); one tends to cleave to early teachings.

At any rate, spring certainly didn’t begin on March 1st. The political parties, ever spinning reality to make it seem more attractive, each call their opening gathering of the year The Spring Conference, even when it takes place in February. But it’s no good putting your faith in politicians.

A few years ago, the weather forecaster Penny Tranter mentioned in passing that it was the first day of spring. I checked the calendar. It was March 1st. I wrote to inform Ms Tranter that I had been taught that the first day of spring was the 21st. When and why had she changed it? Ms Tranter wrote back, very promptly and fully. She reckoned that meteorologists measure the seasons by quarters beginning on the 1st of the month, rather than from the equinox. I found this rather unconvincing. Meanwhile, Michael Fish had explained much the same thing on air. Every viewer but me must have wondered why he suddenly felt the need to launch into this subject. Nevertheless, my letter has changed the thinking at the Met Office in a way I could not have anticipated. On March 21st the following year, Helen Willetts announced; “It’s officially the start of spring today”. On March 21st the year after that, Daniel Corbett was saying the same when I switched him off (I can’t watch Corbett and still keep my sense either of humour or of proportion). Nevertheless, I suspect I am fighting a losing battle over the ”official” First Day of Spring. Another gallant but doubtless doomed fight is to keep the designation of this coming Sunday what it has been historically – Mothering Sunday – rather than what the transatlantic media calls it – Mother’s Day.

Spring heralds the houseguest season. Indeed, the season has already begun at our gaff. Having friends to stay is an almost wholly unmixed blessing. Apart from the particular pleasures associated with particular visitors, the generality of these visits suggests far more to raise the spirits than to lower them. First of all, it means we have to do some cleaning. This is a necessity from which we gain as much as do our guests. I confess that, while my partner and I are in many ways opposites (a lark and an owl, for instance; a nurse and a patient), we share an almost limitless capacity for squalor. If no one ever came to the door, we might well succumb to a sea of paper, discarded clothes and dust. Actually, the dust is under rather tighter control since our little dog Tati, the one who has suffered a major sight loss recently, was diagnosed last year as atopic, which means that among his twenty-odd allergies are dust mites. So we need to pay attention to the level of dust.

Something David and I also share is a tendency to solitude. It is no hardship for either of us to be confined to our shared company or – often even better – the company of none, not even each other. Happily, our house is large enough for this to be practicable. For David to pass the day in the garden while I fill the same time in my study makes us both as happy as pigs in muck. Neither of us wants such days to be unavoidably the norm but to have the choice is very heaven. To have this complaisant peace shattered is of course a most welcome change. We genuinely relish visitors.

Solitude can make you cranky, isolated, wary and inured to matters that you ought not to neglect to tend. Visitors bring important input: the direct or vicarious perspective of different generations, different circumstances, different geographies, different cultural textures. Sometimes, they even bring political and other challenges to one’s settled views. This is essential stimulus. And just as it is patently good for our dogs to have socialising with people reinforced by a steady traffic of intruders upon their territory, so it is equally good – nourishing, challenging, expanding – for us.

I think, hope and believe that we show our guests a good time. With few exceptions, they are temporarily escaping life in the city (usually but not always London) and are taken aback all over again by the restorative powers to be found even within spitting distance of the A4. It helps a lot: a) that our house was long ago re-orientated away from the road and towards open fields (and the guest bedrooms are on that side of the house); b) that the journey from London by road or rail is a snip while psychologically the distance is vast; c) that our guestrooms and especially the beds are very comfortable; d) that David is a fabulous (trained) cook; e) that we are, I think I can claim, in no way proscriptive.

Needless to say, we have made mistakes. An early guest, whom we dearly wanted to make welcome, insisted on coming at a time when there were builders here, not merely at but in the house. Our guest – let’s call him Andrew – is himself a noted and fastidious cook. We weren’t up to speed yet with the kitchen and even found ourselves offering Andrew a takeaway one evening. When he complained about a splash mark he’d noticed on the bathroom mirror (which is the full length of the wall), David lost sympathy and has little regret that he has steadfastly never returned.

Another guest – Ruth, say – came with her husband (Robert) and child. We had already got off slightly on a wrong foot over some footling misunderstanding about what the child was prepared to eat. On the second day, Ruth couldn’t stop herself, over Robert’s objections, asking David why we didn’t use liners under the pillowcases. David dealt with the query civilly enough but he was furious because he had spent more than the issue deserved looking for the missing items the morning before. After that, things flew downhill. I handed Ruth a glass of sherry that she promptly handed back because the glass was clearly cracked. How had that happened? At lunch, I was mortified to spot a flake of some previous morning’s cereal still attached to the bowl from which she was about to attack her pudding. The visit’s sense of being doomed has been reinforced by Ruth’s kind but firm refusal of a repetition of the experience. The innocent child would, I swear, come like a shot if allowed, though more to see the dogs than us.

Other visitors have been less than well attended. In David’s absence I served to guests from the Americas a bowl of home grown raspberries that, had I been more attentive, I might have noted were more mouldy than good. On another occasion, my culinary innocence was revealed by the offering of a dish – “the Aga is perfect for this” – that inadvertently lacked one of its major ingredients; a little short of perfection on that occasion and no fault of the Aga.

On the other hand, there have been guests who have fallen short of our own expectations. The most tenacious of guest faults is the (no doubt earnest) desire to “help”. As we sometimes bark at strangers who stray into the kitchen: “no passengers in the engine room, thank you – please return to the sundeck”. Stopping them clearing the table requires eternal vigilance because it’s the kind of gesture that they can slip past you without you registering that it has begun: the major alert usually comes with the question “where shall I put this?” to which the only sensible rejoinder is of course: “back on the table”.

“Helping” to clear the table is the thin end of the wedge. Once they’ve persuaded you to let them “help” with the washing up, the peace of the house is doomed. I learned this long ago. In my childhood, when Christmas Day was hosted turn and turn about by different households within the extended family, there was a lame-brained “uncle” (by marriage not blood, I hasten to add) who always took it upon himself to “do” the washing up and who, without fail, broke at least one item every year, to my mother’s white fury when it was one of hers. Before we hardened our own hearts against those who would take over the sink, we did permit one or two minor washings-up to be conducted by guests. I think it was the six weeks it took us afterwards to find the potato peeler that finished that foolish weakness.

Guests have other traits that do them no credit, from commandeering the television (particularly for some seemingly endless sports event) to misunderstanding the function of the bidet to making off with the toothpaste or a book that was in the process of being read by one of us. But no one has yet come close to the nightmare of one of our first guests. Admittedly, we had already been warned by mutual friends that ‘Miles’ was “the houseguest from hell” so we should have known better than to admit him. Like many who have lived alone for years, he has lost all notion of consideration for others.

As it happened, he and I travelled down from London on the train together. I had asked him (as we always do) if he had any particular dietary requirements and he announced that he was indeed on a special diet at that time. I no longer recall the details, save that potatoes were not permitted. This did not prevent him from consuming an entire 150-gram bag of kettle chips, which he declared to be “not the same”. Aside from the diet, he claimed to be easy to feed, so long as he was able to have his daily Marmite. I couldn’t remember if we had this item in the cupboard and couldn’t raise David to ask him (this was before either of us had a mobile phone) so I purchased a jar ahead of the train journey, only being able to put my hand on the largest size. Needless to say, it turned out that we had an almost full jar in the cupboard (the new one eventually had to be thrown out); that was irritating enough, though not quite as irritating as the fact that Miles never once touched the Marmite during the endless week of his visit.

What else did he do? He was forever leaving ajar the door of the fridge (which he visited often and without a by-your-leave), justifying the laxity by claiming that his cats were always opening his own fridge and failing to close it. After he had taken a bath, I found he had trampled under the bathmat my own towel, which he dismissed as “some old thing”. He complained because on one or two occasions he was down before me in the morning (though never before David) as if somehow I had an obligation to be up and ready to wait on him each day. I pointed out that, unlike him, I did not take a lengthy siesta after lunch, an irrelevant point as far as he was concerned.

None of this, I am sure, seems much of a trial but it all came wrapped in a loud and insistent expectation that he deserved all the consideration that the white colonialist would demand of his coolies. We were profoundly glad to see the back of him, as we indeed have done definitively because a few years later we came to the realisation that, living abroad as he now does, he had dropped us from his contact list without a word of explanation. Perhaps he was afraid that we might want to visit him as we did once long ago when he lived in another foreign land. On that occasion, we arrived laden with the comestibles and other items he missed from Britain and found ourselves sleeping each on one of the two foam mattresses that served as his regular bed, while he slept on a rather comfortable-looking futon that he had borrowed for the duration of our stay. I wish we had had the foresight to leave his fridge door open.

Next week I shall be in London, staying as the houseguest of someone else. I hope I shall manage to comport myself with proper but modest deference.

PS: This week's was a fabulous episode of Desperate Housewives. For the benefit of my international readers, it was episode 13 of season 4, a self-contained story entitled The Best Thing That Ever Could Have Happened which, like many of the best episodes, is named after a Stephen Sondheim number, the kind of allusion that alerts those viewers likely to know that they will share a sensibility with this show. Beau Bridges played a handyman who had come to know the various housewives professionally but also as something of a confidant. It was a finely-turned portrait of a good man, neat and economical, sentimental but not superficial and it also shed passing light on each of the regular characters. What a terrific piece of bread-and-butter television, as nourishing as it was delicious.

The FACE that LAUNCHED a THOUSAND PROFESSORSHIPS

The facial image of Shakespeare has been a matter of intense conjecture since his very lifetime, when of course there was no television and no press daily to convey his presence to a curious populace. The latest claimant to the role of authentic, definitive likeness of the great man is the shining morning face of the portrait known as The Cobbe. Until now it has been in private hands, those of the Cobbe family (hence its identification). Now, after extensive further research, it emerges to offer itself to the public gaze. It’s a lovely image, almost as seductive as the fabulous portrait of John Donne by an equally unknown hand, to the saving-for-the-nation of which I contributed rather recklessly three years ago when we had more money to throw around.


But is it the real thing? Professor Stanley Wells believes so but he does have a vested interest in the portrait being a major draw for he chairs the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, which august body will, from Shakespeare’s next birthday onwards, host an exhibition of which the Cobbe will be the centrepiece. Other experts are less sanguine, not least those based at the National Portrait Gallery where a really beguiling show entitled 'Searching for Shakespeare' was mounted some seven years ago.

Naturally enough, the playwright anticipated all this. “I have heard of your paintings too, well enough” Hamlet tells Ophelia. “God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another” (III.i.150). The prince was of course speaking of women’s makeup but the remark will, with only gentle distortion, serve to suggest its author’s abiding prescience.

The simultaneous unveiling of the foundations of the first playhouse to have staged Shakespeare’s work is less controversial and more objectively significant if lacking the romantic appeal of the portrait issue. Known simply as The Theatre, the site is in Shoreditch. The playhouse that stood on the site was constructed by James Burbage, father of Shakespeare’s close associate Richard. Perhaps the major dig that will start twelve months hence and close Blackfriars station (which is to be rebuilt and its Thameslink connection upgraded) will yield some trace of the long sought theatre built over the grounds of the Dominican monastery that gave the area its name. This was another construction of Burbage Sr. Shakespeare was a founding shareholder in that project but its repertoire was largely devoted to the younger Jacobean playwrights.

All this is bracing stuff but what we really need is the supreme playwright here among us now, plying his trade. What a subject he would find in Zimbabwe. The power struggle between ZANU-PF and the MDC-T yields nothing in drama and blood to the ancient British history that Shakespeare found in Holinshed’s Chronicles. In Macbeth, Duncan says of the original Thane of Cawdor, discovered at the play’s outset to be traitorous: “There’s no art/To find the mind’s construction in the face./He was a gentleman on whom I built/An absolute trust” (I.iv.12). The next stage direction is the favourite in the canon of my old English master James Hasler: “Enter Macbeth”. He’s right: it should be a wonderful moment of theatrical irony and premonition but I have never seen a production – and I have seen tens if not dozens – that made anything much of it.

Those who supported Robert Mugabe’s assumption of the premiership of what was then still Southern Rhodesia in 1980 might well feel that they failed to find his mind’s construction. The last ten years of Mugabe’s presidency have provided a textbook demonstration of absolute power corrupting absolutely. But the last twelve months have seen a change, though it is still too early to be sure whether it presages an unravelling of Mugabe’s power. And how far is Mugabe engaged in a deep game of quadruple bluff? He is, after all, one of the great Machiavels on the modern world stage.

This week has provided fantastic material. What playwright wouldn’t surrender a limb to write that scene when the Mugabes visited Morgan Tsvangirai in hospital after the apparent accident that killed Susan Tsvangirai. The president uttered various pious sentiments – he is, of course, a devout Catholic as could be guessed from his taste for conspicuous consumption and his hobby of having people killed – and Grace Mugabe wept gracious tears of a crocodile nature. The first lady, though not the intellectual equal of Lady Macbeth, makes a terrific study in hypocritical harpiedom. Then yesterday there was Mrs Tsvangirai’s funeral at which the president spoke, striking a note that the innocent might hear as conciliatory, even fraternal. For his part, the bereaved prime minister has stamped on speculation that the supposed accident was suspicious, despite the number of road collisions that have conveniently eliminated enemies of ZANU-PF over the years. What’s he up to? The MDC-T has nonetheless commissioned an independent enquiry into the incident.

There is terrific scope for Shakespearean drama in these events. One is bound to imagine that the end of Mugabe’s rule will be occasioned by his death of natural causes rather than by some Zimbabwean equivalent of Birnan Wood being come to Dunsinane (and I have not heard any suggestion that Mr Tsvangirai was from his mother's womb untimely ripped). Even so, the monologues, duologues, crowd scenes and set pieces would flow thick and fast. The Tragicall Historie of Mugabeth: who’s going to write it if not Shakespeare?

A SORRY BUSINESS

What is it with this incessant clamour for Gordon Brown to say “sorry” for some nebulously all-embracing omission he is claimed by his political opponents to have made while Chancellor of the Exchequer? A member of the audience on this week’s Any Questions? asked “What part of the word ‘sorry’ does the Prime Minister not understand?” I would counter: “What part of that question could not be deemed snide and which opposition party planted it?”

I thought Westminster was united in deploring what is known as “gesture politics” but evidently, as with so many other matters, if it suits then it serves. It has served to the extent that Mr Brown has been slow to pre-empt the clamour and shifty in dealing with it when it is raised. “When” he might ask in reply “may we expect the Tories to apologise for the poll tax? Isn’t it rather long overdue for the Liberals to say sorry for their suicidal divisions over free trade in the early 1930s?”

Being sorry signifies in personal relationships but not on the public stage. On Monday, it was revealed that the Vale of Glamorgan council had placed in foster care a teenager with a five-year history of child abuse. The couple who took him on were not apprised of the teenager’s proclivities, even though they had two young children of their own. The council has admitted “a serious error of judgment” and expressed its “deep regret” for the “distress and harm caused to the family”. For the nine year-old daughter who has been sexually assaulted and the toddler-age son who was anally raped, I doubt that an apology, however “deep”, suffices. I hope that the family will be suing the council for several million pounds. In such a case, the social services officers on the council payroll are surely far more at fault than those excoriated over several weeks by the press and driven from their posts in Haringey in the so-called Baby P affair.

This requirement for public figures to “put their hands up” – one hand used to be thought sufficient – is a relatively new phenomenon but frequently refers to events of long ago. Pope John Paul II, a great one for rhetorical gestures, apologised for the crusades, the Spanish Inquisition and “sins and accidents of omission” against non-Catholic Christians, women and ethnic groups. Why? How does it put anything right if the US President apologises for the extermination of the native Americans: “Red Indians”, as they were called when they still constituted a force in the land, even though named in an ideologically unacceptable manner? What good does it do if the Emperor of Japan apologises for his country’s part in World War II? What manner of fence is mended if the Queen says sorry to the peoples of various countries that Britain plundered and dominated during the building of the Empire?

All well and good if reparations are made. Military spokesmen routinely express their condolences to the relatives of personnel killed by that fearful failure of intelligence known by the horrible euphemism of “friendly fire”. We might think them sincere if they could also report that those families were to receive handsome payments to buttress them against the loss of the breadwinner; that the officer commanding the exercise that led to the deaths had been stripped of his rank; that new strategies were already in place to ensure that such horrors never recur. This they do not do. Who thinks that saying "sorry" is enough? Only those who elect to say it, especially when (as often) that "sorry" anyway sticks in the craw.

But many expressions of regret and apology, like similar ones of welcome and gratitude, are no more than scripted and calculated pieces of public relations waffle. Why should one place any faith in a printed or recorded gesture: “welcome to our website”, “thank you for not smoking”, “we’re sorry to keep you on hold – all our agents are dealing with other customers at present”? What good are these statements? Those who laid them down in the first place have no knowledge of the circumstances of their use. How much mileage is there in my arguing that a website that has refused to recognise my legitimate password or disputes my correct credit card details is in no discernible way making me welcome and is therefore liable under the Trades Descriptions Act?

Nowhere is the apology – routine, anonymous and unanswerable – more prevalent than on Britain’s railways. Older readers who foreswore public transport long ago may be unaware that live announcements, one of the thrills of visiting a big terminus in a ’50s childhood (“Attention, please!”), are a thing of the past. On platform PA systems today, recorded phrases are segued by computer so that details of particular journeys and their fates are constructed like Lego buildings from given materials.

Three of these recorded phrases go as follows: “I am sorry”, “I am very sorry” and “I am extremely sorry”. According to my own observations while attempting to fill the yawning wait as my train slides further and further down the timetable, these formulations are played in conjunction with the phrase “for the delay”, followed by details of the particular missing train. The extent of delay is graduated and seems to comprise, respectively, up to ten minutes, between ten and twenty, thereafter anything over twenty minutes. It may amuse the bored customer to track how accurately timed is the switchover from “sorry” to “very sorry” to “extremely sorry”.

What is not in doubt, however, is that nobody associated with the network is experiencing actual regret on our behalf. To the (usually invisible) station staff, the workings of the trains seem as impenetrable a mystery as they are to us. The distinction between them and us is that, to them, it is a matter of profound indifference. Perhaps it is only the drone operating the computer program who is even aware that there is a delay and that it has been acknowledged publicly at any level of the railway operation. So, is this recorded apology of any value? Not to me.

How different it is on the train itself. There one is treated to a live running commentary by someone termed ‘the train manager’, giving more information than even a congenital train spotter might desire. These commentaries, evidently issued as scripts from head office, use curious constructs about “arriving into the next station stop” and “on behalf of myself and the on-board crew”. Some time thereafter comes a bulletin from the buffet car, lovingly listing all today’s items of an allegedly comestible nature. Needless to say, the rather good full silver service cuisine served without fanfare on trains in my childhood (not least the legendary British Railways breakfast) has long been swept away, to be replaced by pre-packaged, under-microwaved bacon rolls and other such undesirable matter. Nothing, you would think, for a public service announcement to crow about.

If not already scuppered by a choral symphony of shouting into mobile phones, the tinny buzz of personal stereos and the full-volume persistence of toddlers’ observations (one could have escaped all this in the old compartmentalised carriages), any chance of catching a doze or reading a book is thwarted by the eagerness with which every detail of the journey’s geographic and gastronomic progress must be imparted after every ‘station stop’ has been ‘arrived into’, along with urgings to read the safety drill as if we’re all virgin (as against Virgin) travellers. If this is not too much information, I don’t know what is.

All such affectless public postures are the spawn of the marketing culture that we have enthusiastically embraced for a century and more. A prime ministerial apology is only of import if it is in some sense “saleable”: “look,” the government can say, “our man is big enough to admit when he is wrong and move on”; “look,” the opposition will be able to smirk, “we’ve got him to climb down which only shows him to be spineless”. I don’t want the Prime Minister to be diverted by fruitless considerations of what meaningless form of words will play best with the electorate while surrendering nothing to those who would bring him down. I want him to devote himself to the considerably more urgent business of steering the nation through the present economic mess.

Tati, summer 2007
photo: Barbra Flinder

The ONE-EYED DOG is KING

An update on Tati (further to the previous entry, Dog Days, immediately below): our PBGV is half-way through an enforced period of wearing one of those inverted lampshade affairs that prevent him scratching the delicate areas (in his case, the eyes) and, in practice, pretty much anywhere else. This of course is frustrating and uncomfortable for him. He is not supposed to get excited or to bark much or to go tearing off round our field so he is often walked on the lead (which is attached to a harness so as not to interfere with the lampshade) and, because he is naturally ebullient even in his reduced circumstances, he finds this stressful.

The worst part – perhaps even more for us than for him – is that he has suffered significant sight loss. His right eye, which underwent the operation, is now permanently longsighted so that he can see what he is aiming at but not necessarily what is along the route. And that is his good eye. His left eye has a partially detached front lens that is being held in place by the iris, which is functioning normally. The right iris was unable to do this job, which was why he had to lose the lens. But it means that effectively he has no useful sight in his left eye. So he finds himself much like Gordon Brown: blind in one eye and partially sighted in the other. Perhaps he too can raise 17 standing ovations in Congress.

On Monday he will again see the specialist and we shall learn where we go from here. It may be necessary at some juncture to operate similarly on the left eye or we may have to continue to medicate and monitor it, perhaps for the rest of his life. Currently, he is taking an extensive regime of medication, most but not all in the form of eye drops. He accepts all this with what, in a human, you would call good grace. In canine terms, he has certainly not lost his wag and, when distracted from his condition, he is still capable of getting excited about the prospect of a game or a walk, though of course we have to damp down any such excitement.

It is all most distressing but, as I say, more distressing for us who discuss and fear and speculate and question than for the dog who finds himself perplexed and quelled but, to pick up my refrain from Dog Days, living in the moment and adjusting and coping.

PS: What an outstanding episode of Shameless on Channel 4 this week, written by Jack Lothian and directed by Paul Norton Waller. Even though it was part of an on-going serial dreamt up by someone else (the mighty Paul Abbott), it still managed to shift some telling material and fashion some powerful individual scenes. British teledrama is still – just – alive and kicking.

DOG DAYS

The last ten days have reinforced my conviction that humans can learn a good deal from animals. I am thinking in particular of dogs, but creatures at almost any stratum of evolution have something of value to tell us.

I am not unaware of my capacity to be a dog bore but I defend my frequent bending of my friends’ ears on the subject of our dogs by pointing out that we have listened patiently to their reports about their children for more than two decades without (much) complaint (at least, not to them). You might argue that dogs are not as “important” as children and I decline to engage the point. I will say, though, that dogs are assuredly a rather larger responsibility than children. There is not much mileage in packing dogs off to school or sending them to the high street with a shopping list and an injunction that they are to bring back the change (and not eat all the sausages on the way home). In the unfortunate circumstance that he attacked somebody, it is unlikely that your child would be, as they say, “put down”.

You expect that your children will grow up and leave you and you hope that they will duly outlive you, whereas a dog is for life, its span being something most likely to be subsumed within yours. While it might at a pinch survive ferally (quite a few do), a dog is entirely dependent on you, while in your charge, for its shelter, sustenance and general welfare. You can’t teach it to make itself an omelette or take its worming tablets on the due date.

Both my partner David and I were brought up with dogs and we have known many mutts belonging to others over the years. In his various domestic posts, David (who worked as “char to the stars”) often performed dog-sitting and dog–exercising duties and necessarily but easily bonded with his charges. As responsible and sensitive people, we manfully held off through many years of keen broodiness for a dog because we knew that our circumstances did not lend themselves. I have no doubt that many – perhaps most – dogs lead the “lives of quiet desperation” that Thoreau said were the lot of men. We wanted no dog of ours to enjoy less than a safe, stimulating and contented existence. Only in the last decade have we found ourselves able to make such provision.

The first and most defining aspect of dogs is that they are pack animals. Even if the pack consists of no more than the dog and a single owner, the dog nonetheless has its pack therein and needs to feel sure that the pack endures. Separation anxiety is one of the most common and most powerful stresses that a dog experiences. It follows then that a dog left on its own all day at home while the family – its pack – scatters is a dog that is profoundly miserable on a continuous basis. If the dog then tries to assuage its misery – veering from boredom through frustration and even to terror – with behaviour that a senior member of the pack (its master or mistress) deems to be destructive, it will perhaps be “punished” without gaining any sense of why this further misery is visited upon it.

Both of us are at home most of the time. Four hours is our limit for going out and leaving the dogs in the house, where they at least have the company of each other. Longer and we arrange for the neighbours to visit and let them out and, if necessary, to feed them. When we go away, we have house-sitters who know and happily look after the dogs.

We have our own field adjacent to our property in which the dogs are exercised. They are fed natural raw foods according to the BARF diet (see www.barfworld.com). They do not suffer the indignity of being dressed in dog versions of human clothes and are not treated as if they are somehow “little people”. They are, by any standard, lucky dogs. None of this – nor can it – guarantees that they will lead trouble-free lives.

The senior of our dogs, at seven-and-a-half, is a Great Dane, named Fargo after a movie we both love. His likeness provides the avatar on this blog. More than any dog I have ever known, Fargo has been a supreme ambassador for his species. When we first took him to training class (which he still attends, if fitfully), he was alluded to by certain of the more nervous owners as “the beast”, but before long even the most reluctant had begun to dote on him. Now, when there is an exercise that obliges us to handle a dog other than our own, people clamour for his leash. Among our houseguests, he ranks with David’s cooking and the comfort of our guest rooms as one of the chief lures. Even those indifferent to dogs – it seems odd that we should know such people – are comparatively won over. He is that walking cliché, a gentle giant. People anyway do take him for a giant at some ten-and-a-half stone. In fact, he was the runt of an unthinkably large litter of 11 and, though sturdily knit, often stands a little below other Danes we meet. But I would gratefully accept a tenner from everyone who has, however “subtly”, ascribed to him some equine quality (“if you saddled him up, my little daughter would love to ride him, ho-ho-ho”). Fargo takes it all with better grace than do I.

Our Dane is in the twilight of his years. Decades – indeed, centuries – of selective breeding have produced many strains of dog that are much bigger than the animals from which they originated, but their organs have not grown apace. Big dogs have small dogs’ hearts and inevitably they fail sooner. If we get Fargo to ten – and, with his healthy lifestyle, we hope to do so – we shall have achieved something admirable. Meanwhile, he has this year undergone a sad little operation. Variously afflicted by anal polyps and occasional traces of blood in his water, he was thoroughly examined by our superb vet who determined that his issues were hormonal and that a complete and speedy remedy was castration. Most reluctantly we acceded and the unkindest cut was made. I shall ever recall the two little boys – perhaps eight years old – whom we and Fargo passed at the village fête some years ago, only to overhear the stage whisper “cor, did you see the balls on him”. David and I both knew to whom the remark referred.

It must be said that the dog has been unmanned – or undogged – with remarkably little effect that one might call deplorable. His attempts to make love to his favourite chair have declined and his enthusiastic (and noisy) autofellating in response to the protein rush of his supper of raw chicken wings has ceased entirely. There is no evidence of regret about this on his part, hence none on ours. The junior dog made a few half-hearted attempts to renew his bid to be top dog but soon abandoned the mission. Fargo seems perfectly reconciled to his new state and, happily for all of us, is no longer inclined to spend long sessions in licking his poorly bum for the simple reason that it is no longer poorly.

The younger dog is a little over five and he is a Petit Basset Griffon Vendéen. That is quite a rare breed in this country, rather more common in France – the Vendée is the region on the Atlantic coast immediately to the south of Normandy. The breed name indicates that he is a small (about the size of a Cocker Spaniel), low-slung, rough-coated hound. There is also a Grand version: we have surprisingly seen one in our town. He has a beard and moustache, Denis Healey eyebrows and a sunburst of hair between his eyes. Like Fargo, he is a scent hound but he has a much more cultivated nose. He is tricolore – white, black and tan – and carries his tail very erect and ever ready to wag. We call him Tati, after the great French comic and director Jacques Tati, in part because, while he is certainly blithe and drôle, he will never be lanky but he can always aspire to be so. Unfortunately, some people who are not cinéaste think his name is a girl’s and so, being pretty, he must be a bitch. Very properly, he barks at this nonsense.

We first clapped eyes on a member of his breed in Central Park and, polite Englishmen that we are, asked his off-hand Manhattan mistress if we might say hello to him. When we asked of what breed he was, she shrugged “PBGV” as if only out-of-towners like us would not know this. It isn’t the easiest breed name to remember but I recommend to friends that they think of him as Stevie’s PBGV.

Tati is a most energetic dog, full of enthusiasm for every next move. He has learned shrewdly how to handle the much larger Fargo and pays court to him, cleaning his ears and eyes regularly and smartly leaping out of the way when Fargo goes on one of his mad tazzes round the field, less frequently these days. I am acutely aware of the need to avoid anthropomorphising the dogs and so I write this with due thought. But I think Tati is a very kind little dog. That kindness, though, is not an intention; it is a result.

For all our dedication to a healthy regime, both of them have suffered dermatological problems. Such afflictions are anyway almost universal among dogs, especially those who, like ours, live in an environment that is also visited by foxes, deer, badgers, hedgehogs and all manner of other infection- and parasite-bearing wildlife.

Both dogs are regularly medicated in their exposed regions – ears, pits – but Tati’s troubles of this nature, harder to detect under his dense coat, are the more resistant to treatment and, following a battery of tests, the vet has now determined that he is atopic. This means that he is allergic to a wide variety of phenomena – pollen, grass seeds, dust mites, storage mites – and needs more regular treatment. A dedicated vaccination is being prepared for him, designed to alleviate the worst aspects of the condition, and we currently await the insurers’ decision as to whether to pick up the tab for this ambitious treatment.

Last year, Fargo injured his eye. This is not uncommon among dogs who are apt to stick their noses into things without much caution. The eye didn’t heal as fast as it should and, somewhat alarmingly, the vet decided to injure the eye again, following a well-established procedure, the result of which was that the eye soon healed completely. Early this year, Tati suffered a similar injury. His eye also failed to heal immediately; indeed the cornea became disturbingly cloudy. Then he began to misjudge distances and objects at night. Further examination suggested that there might be a deeper-seated problem and he was referred to a specialist. Then his condition rapidly worsened. At this point, we understood that his cloudy eye was his “good” eye and that the more serious matter concerned the lens in his other eye. The complication of a fierce infection in the affected eye now arose. By this time, the dog was visiting the vet daily and undergoing a regime of medication daily adjusted to meet the latest development in his condition. Like his atopic status, the problem with his lens appears to be hereditary.

The crisis has now, we believe, peaked. As I write, Tati is some 100 miles away, kept overnight at a seaside veterinary surgery where, this afternoon, he underwent an operation to remove the front lens of his right eye. This lens was in grave danger of becoming wholly detached and causing more extensive damage than would the operation. The result, we are assured, is that he will be no worse than long-sighted, a condition shared by David. With his unrivalled nose, he should be able to adjust very happily.

And what have I learned from this peculiarly harrowing ten days wherein, pretty much by the by, workmen have daily clattered above us removing and restoring about a third of the area of our roof? Well, it has been instructive to see how the dog adjusted to each development of his condition and attempted to compensate. There is no doubt that he was brought low – indeed, all but overwhelmed – by the complication of the infection, the pain of which needed to be addressed by painkillers. I choose my descriptions with care. I think it would be anthropomorphic to call him depressed but he was certainly, objectively subdued.

I have thought before – and these days have reinforced the thought – that dogs live wholly in the moment. They of course have memories but these might be properly characterised as sense memories: retrieving the appearance and especially the scent of someone who once petted them; retaining a few words of command; recognising the route to a place where they have been carefree; feeling that a meal is due. Tati has had to cope with a changing degree of sight. There was a day or two when he was effectively almost blind, particularly at night, and had to be led round the field. But he works at it, adjusting and compensating. When he returns home with impaired vision tomorrow, he will work with what he has rather than moping because of what he has not. Now that the antibiotics and soothing ointments have done their work and the pain and discomfort that afflicted him are lifted, he will soon get his mojo back. He will learn how to steer around the close hazards in the field and the house and how to cope with differing light levels.

The experience of watching a dog play the hand he is dealt makes one reflective. I have been thinking how the gifts that we humans have (and animals do not have) complicate as well as deepen our experience of existence. Because we have language, we have the means to articulate worry and anticipation, sympathy and intent. I have troubles of my own with my eyesight. Because I have language, I may learn about my condition and my prospects, my treatment and my options. Because I can describe my experiences, I retain them as narratives and so can assess and compare them in quite a detailed way. Unlike animals, humans do not live in the moment. Arguably we live far more in the past and future – I mean, simultaneously – than in the present.

To the question “What is mankind’s greatest invention or discovery?”, I have often thought the answer is not the conventional notion of fire or the wheel or the combustion engine or penicillin or reality television (joke) but the twofold skills that must be learned anew in every generation and by which we break free of nature and become humans: walking upright and talking. With these means, having made the wheel, we can stroll over to the next valley and tell the people there about it. By walking upright, we learn to ride upright and we free our forearms for tasks other than walking (making calls on our mobile phones, for instance). By using language, we create concepts and find the means of exploring and accounting for the world around us. These accomplishments are what Tati cannot do. Because he cannot stand and use his front paws and understand the notions of illness, disability, treatment and cure, he cannot medicate himself nor know to do so. I can do all these things but I cannot, like Tati, discard my known past or imagined future experiences and avoid speculation, calculation, hope and dread.

We are at once liberated and oppressed by our evolution. We have fashioned the world to fit with our upright stance so that most activities suit our facing forwards at head height, the hands free to perform tasks, the legs able to convey us or to execute manoeuvres. One price is that about a third of the human race suffers some degree of back pain or damage because it is not natural for us to walk, sit and do things upright; another is that many of us suffer from too much pressure on our legs and/or feet; and we fret about our armpits made sweaty because they are “unnaturally” kept less aerated than if we proceeded on all fours.

Because we have language, we have invented the notions of dismay, hope, resentment, loyalty, blame, admiration, mendacity, courage, love, hate and all the rest. These complications may have enriched but they have not necessarily lightened man’s short span. John Stuart Mill asked whether it was better to be a happy pig or an unhappy Socrates. The irony in the question is that only the unhappy Socrates would think to ask.

CRASH and BURN

I was never one of those boys who couldn’t get his hands on a toy without taking it to pieces. I found myself to be mildly diverted by gadgets but only by what they could achieve, not by how they achieved it. In adulthood, I have never been seen as a pair of legs emerging from under a motorcar, feet pointing upwards. Indeed, I never even learned to drive. I have signally failed to attest to my manhood by stripping down a motorbike or dismantling a circular saw, two implements wholly alien to me. Changing the bulb in a torch is challenge enough. Sometimes I can’t even get the house keys to work.

So computers hold little intrinsic delight for me. By temperament and aptitude, I am a quill and vellum man. A computer is my friend if it does what I want it to do – indeed, does what I have been led to expect it can do for me – but beyond that I don’t care to know what goes on under the bonnet. Nor am I much given to taking delight in wrestling with – with a view to besting – a dumb but fiendishly clever object such as a programmed computer appears to be.

In a related matter, I derive little sustenance from the instruction books that come with modern electronic appliances. Time was, manuals were booklets of modest length, illustrated with colour photographs and expressed in simple, step-by-step directions. Now they are vast tomes hung about with line drawings and daunting diagrams, translated from the Japanese into unidiomatic English (and several other languages too, presumably with equal lack of feel and ear) and stupefyingly banal in their scope. For instance, they usually begin with tens of pages warning you against such unlikely behaviour as throwing the appliance into the bath while plugged into the mains, using it as a surface on which to stand a Bunsen burner or cut flowers in a vase of water, and allowing your gerbils to fornicate within its workings. Frankly, there ought to be graded electrical goods, some sold to geeks, some to grown-ups who eschew jargon but don’t need to be told the facts of life, and some to idiots. Naturally, I gravitate to Group B.

By now, my smarter readers will have intuited that my recent silence in these environs has been occasioned by PC purgatory. Actually, very specifically not PC. I am a Mac man, entranced around a decade ago by the newly launched iMac that seemed so cool and sleek and desirable. The thing served me well for a few years and was succeeded by a more recent model some three years ago. Perhaps because there is so much that is pleasing about the iMac, perhaps also because as I get older I get more sedentary, I surely spend the larger part of my waking hours in front of its screen, destroying my posture, worsening my RSI and further eroding my already compromised eyesight. My work and much of my communication, information and leisure activity resides in the iMac.

So being cut off from it is a big deal. The problem arose from a failure of the machine to accept or be able to read DVDs. This was a peripheral annoyance but I had stuff I wanted to burn onto DVD and I wanted my pound of flesh from my gizmo. So I bought a different brand of blank DVD, one that I was assured should be readily embraced by an iMac, but the problem persisted. A succession of friends now volunteered their services. Though of differing ages, they were united in being, to a degree, instinctive techies and/or mackies, able immediately upon being confronted with a computing problem to switch into that lateral thinking mode that utterly escapes me.

Not that they have yet been able to prevail. Acting on some strong advocacy, I bought a new external hard drive and loaded everything portable that lived in my iMac onto it, prior to conducting a reinstall of my system. The whole process anyway filled me with gloom, but the gloom turned to despair when the iMac started to react to the external hard drive as if it were a corrupted DVD and refused to recognise it. So I was cut off from all my stuff: it was inaccessible on an external hard drive that my iMac reckoned did not exist. Franz Kafka, thou shouldst be living at this hour.

Well, the successive pals wrestled. Eventually the external HD and the iMac began talking to each other again, sufficiently for me to be able to reload at least the important stuff onto the iMac whose restored operating system was, the while, taking on all the software updates that had been lost in the reinstall. During the course of this, one of my teacher-pals enunciated a rule for wrestling with one’s home computer: “try everything, especially when you know you’re completely right. Then try the opposite”.

Of course “try everything” can be a dangerous philosophy. I know enough to know that, when the iMac again refuses to recognise the external HD, as it is now again so refusing, I should not click on the button that allow me to “initialise” the HD because if I do I will lose everything on it. Meanwhile, my system is crashing and freezing rather more frequently than hitherto, and some programs have been tricky to reactivate – getting the desktop mailer to communicate fully with my mail server was a work of many hours – and others just require a lot of dull repetition to bring them back up to speed – for instance, while all the music stored on iTunes appears to be safely retained, none of my playlists that organise the material has survived, so I am having to rebuild those, track by track. And the original problem – the refusal to read DVDs – remains.

It is the sheer volume of time that all this consumes that is the most frustrating aspect, only bearable of course if at the end of it all I have a computer that bends to my will: we’re a ways off yet (if I may use an American expression). And of course I have not attempted since disaster struck to post a new blog entry until now. Only if you are reading this can you know that this part at least of my computing life still functions. If you are not reading this, it perhaps means that the issues remain and are still worse that I feared. Or, of course, you may be doing something altogether more nourishing. How could you ...

The INTEREST in DISINTEREST

The story of the BBC and the appeal by the Disasters Emergency Committee for humanitarian aid to be distributed in Gaza has had a good run – almost a fortnight. My devoted readers, who naturally hold off from forming an opinion on such matters until I have instructed them as to what to think, may have grown impatient for my finding. I have stayed my hand because it seemed to me that the point I would make was so painfully obvious as to be superfluous. But no. No one, at least in my hearing or sight, has advanced my argument and so, if only out of compassion for my devotees, I unburden myself here.

The broad lines of the issue are readily sketched. Medication, surgical supplies and indeed safe places in which to tend wounds and save or amputate limbs; food; shelter; clothing and bedding; sanctuary; the basic infrastructure of trade and agriculture: all these and more are urgently required by the populace in Gaza. The DEC, a federation of 13 aid charities including Oxfam, the Red Cross, Save the Children and Christian Aid, readied a television appeal that, at the draft and shooting script stages, the BBC agreed to broadcast. Then the Corporation decided that, “to avoid any risk of compromising public confidence in the BBC’s impartiality in the context of a news story”, it would not after all record and carry the appeal. ITV cameras shot it instead and the short programme was carried by ITV, Channel 4 and Five. Sky followed suit with the BBC.

The DEC has been putting together these packages for years and the BBC has always been happy to transmit them. The first refusal to carry an appeal based on an objection concerning impartiality came from the BBC over the invasion of Lebanon by Israel in 2006, though it had broadcast the appeal for the Lebanese citizens whose homes were destroyed in the Israeli invasion of 1982. You can be sure that, both through official channels and by more informal means, various Jewish, pro-Israeli and Zionist interests will have worked on the BBC between 1982 and 2006.

Authoritative figures in politics and the Anglican church have weighed in to criticise the BBC’s decision. The Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, declared that “this is not an appeal by Hamas asking for arms but by the Disasters Emergency Committee asking for relief. By declining their request, the BBC has already taken sides and forsaken impartiality”. The former BBC foreign correspondent and former independent MP, Martin Bell, wrote that “the coverage of the 22-day conflict was flawed by a misconstruction of the concept of balance – as if a war were a general election and the main protagonists entitled to equal airtime”. The DEC chief executive, Brendan Gormley, had made a similar point: “The BBC seems to be confusing impartiality with equal airtime”. But even the Board of Deputies of British Jews noted that “there is no doubt that any appeal which simply seeks to raise money for innocent civilians should be applauded”.

Sir Michael Lyons, chairman of the BBC Trust, makes a fair point when he says that “the level and tone of some of the political comment is coming close to constituting undue interference in the editorial independence of the BBC”. Ministers such as Douglas Alexander and Hazel Blears would have done better to decline to be drawn into this matter.

The BBC rulebook states that “impartiality is and should remain the hallmark of the BBC … It is a legal requirement and should also be a source of pride”. It is with this text at his back that the Director-General, Mark Thompson, has led the BBC’s counter-attack and refused to budge.

But here’s my take on this. By what criteria is the BBC’s coverage of Gaza – or of any other issue where different factions contend – to be read as impartial? Most of us got most of our information about the Israeli assault from television and print news coverage. That there was widespread revulsion towards that assault among people with no tribal axe to grind is evident. By a week ago, the BBC had received 15,500 complaints about its stance. That is fewer than the number of complaints engendered by the Ross/Brand farrago, which says a good deal about contemporary public concerns (and indeed the mobilising power of The Daily Mail). But it is still an impressive response. Public confidence in the BBC’s editorial judgment has clearly eroded.

Is the conviction that the BBC has been over-zealous in applying its own rules in fact a result of sympathies among the public fostered by the BBC coverage that is supposed to be impartial? It was clear to me, as a regular viewer of BBC Television News, that a great deal more emphasis was placed day-by-day on the impact of missiles and then ground weapons fired into and in Gaza than on the impact of rockets sent into southern Israel by Hamas. But then that is only right and proper. The casualties in Gaza were a hundred times those among Israelis and many of the latter were invading military (some were victims of “friendly fire”). Had the BBC angled its coverage to favour Palestinians in the ratio 100:1, it would have been remarkable but would it have been merely just? Had the BBC made as much of the Israeli casualties as of the Palestinian, that indeed would have been a travesty of the facts.

But what are facts in these stories? In the first place, the facts that are presented by the reporters and their crews are necessarily selective. The information gleaned on the ground and passed on by reporters may be polluted by propaganda or may in subterranean ways of which the reporter is not even aware be skewed by the reporter’s own inclinations and prejudices. Furthermore, in recent years, very much more comment and “interpretation” has been permitted to – indeed, encouraged from – location reporters. These days, to-camera pieces in particular, narrated footage in general, often carry very little objective information. News reports tend to be largely a mishmash of rumour, conjecture, prophesy and received opinion.

How scrupulous, would you say, is the BBC on the matter of, for instance, Robert Mugabe’s government in Zimbabwe? President Mugabe himself would dismiss the BBC’s coverage as “all lies”. Indeed, because of these “lies”, the BBC is banished from the country. Our own feelings about Mugabe are substantially created by impressions formed on the basis of a very few verifiable facts – the rip-roaring inflation, the evidence of refugees leaving for South Africa – and a lot of subjective allegations and images – claims of repression, descriptions by Mugabe’s enemies of the continuing inability to agree on the composition of the new government, Mugabe’s own lofty disdain, anecdotal evidence of hardship and disease. But the “crisis” in Zimbabwe, you could argue, is a construct fashioned by BBC reporters. We want to think badly of Mugabe and the BBC plays to that prejudice. And what else do we have to go on?

What of other issues? Is the BBC impartial about racism, the fall of the Berlin Wall, gang culture, Andy Murray, climate change, Holocaust denial, paedophiles, the Queen? The BBC would no doubt wish to unbundle these matters and would then argue that it cannot be expected to stand neutral on illegality and that stances subsumable under notions of patriotism do not require disinterest. It ought, though, to accept that philosophical debate would be appropriate about each element, and that satisfying no one on anything is not exactly the highest common denominator to aim for.

What the BBC cannot be allowed to offer as an acceptable method is the one alluded to by Martin Bell, treating war – and by extension every issue – as though it were a general election. This is the philosophy of the man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Nor, as I have argued, does the BBC anyway uphold this kind of balance, however vaunted its fastidiousness. Even its coverage of parliamentary and party politics – the stuff that is most nearly like a general election and is most readily policed according to notions of equal or proportionate airtime – is plainly moulded by such subjective and highly partial notions as whether the government (or indeed each of the opposition parties) is “in trouble”. I am convinced that some wonk at, say, the Glasgow Media Centre, could soon come up with a chart that showed that by far the majority of news bulletin mentions of any figure in British politics could be listed under the general heading “in trouble”. After all, it is trouble – whether prime ministers up against it or children being killed or the south of England evidently paralysed by a heavily predicted snowfall – that gets the news editors’ cheeks up. In that sense, the row about the BBC’s refusal to broadcast the Gaza appeal was actually nothing more than a thundering good news story.

PEOPLE’s PRESIDENT

I have been reading Dreams from My Father. It seemed the right time to do it. Apart from the evidence that he could have carved a major career as a writer if he had decided against politics, what the book reveals is that Barack Obama is that rare thing in politics: a real human being who has led a useful life among ordinary people. I cannot think that, in the fourteen years since the book was first published when he was 33, he has wholly forgotten the ideals that fired him then or the practical lessons that he learned. I feel sure that the White House is in the keeping of a man who will know how to stay in touch with his roots for much of, if not for all of, his first term in office.

President Obama has begun well in many ways. He of course understands that everything about him is now different, while at the same time the Obama who toiled earnestly in obscurity still walks with him. He wears the dignity of office lightly yet with suitable solemnity. Compare and contrast with his immediate predecessor. His stony face when the garrulous Vice-President Biden attempted a risky wisecrack told its own story. He is not afraid to tackle head-on the grave crises that beset his nation and the world. We can continue to hope that, as a rule, he will be bold and creative, progressive and empathetic.

Yet he already has blood on his hands, in his first week. American jets have, at his order, attacked targets in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Civilians on either side of the border have died in these raids. The new American president immediately loses the moral advantage that he could have taken with him to meet Ehud Olmert. He too has killed children of a foreign land and he cannot even plead that he was defending his own borders. This is a pity. Was it avoidable? Yes, I rather think so.

No doubt during the campaign the then Senator Obama sounded an aggressive note in the matter of Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaida because he felt the need to do so. These are enemies that every American can agree on. To let Senator McCain run with the suggestion that a President Obama would be “soft” on these enemies might have been fatal to his chances. It was ever thus for candidates from the left and, as a result, governments from the left on both sides of the Atlantic have tended to be even more likely to become embroiled in war than governments from the right, as though anxious to show that, expectations to the contrary, they are not an easy touch.

But if President Obama is going to prove just as ready as Former President Bush to launch missiles without consulting other governments – in this case, either in Islamabad or in Kabul – we shall not feel that the change of government in Washington has been all gain.

Meanwhile, there has been plenty of speculation, much of it somewhat wild, about the future of the so-called special relationship between Washington and London. In some quarters, it has been mooted that Obama might downgrade Britain’s status because of the abominations of colonial rule that were visited upon his father’s homeland of Kenya during colonial rule, as described in Dreams from My Father. I think this is fanciful. Obama is nothing if not a realist. Every nation’s history is littered with atrocities and, if diplomacy were conducted always with one eye on past events, nothing would ever be achieved.

Then of course the press, ever ready to sneer at Gordon Brown, has been setting up the Prime Minister for what the papers will declare is “a snub” if he is not the first European leader to be welcomed to the Obama White House. Again, this is unrealistic. Of course Brown will want to feel that he is privy to Obama’s thinking on a regular basis and indeed Brown’s long experience of international affairs will not be superfluous to the new president. Brown has been on familiar terms with the evolving Washington scene all his adult life and it’s probably no exaggeration to suggest that he knows more key people in the American capital – certainly has known them for longer – than does Obama, if not Biden and Secretary Clinton.

What is more, Obama’s perspective is different from that of George W Bush and indeed that of Washington veterans. He is bound to put out feelers to a much wider range of nations than any president before him and with a different order of priorities. Brown need not feel overlooked – and, I suggest, nor will he – if Obama’s focus is more immediately on the middle and far east and then on Africa, Asia generally and Latin and South America, rather less on old alliances with Europe that perhaps do not require too much restating. In any case, Brown was the first European leader granted a phone conversation with the new president. That should suffice. I know – indeed, I say it often – that how it looks is often more important in politics than how it is but it’s also important to judge by results and, in that case, appearances sometimes have to go hang.

If Brown has a really useful function in the transatlantic relationship at present, it is to warn Obama that deepening the engagement in Afghanistan, even though he promised it during the campaign, is fraught with unanticipated danger. I have advocated it before and I will advocate it again. Keeping the peace in countries like Afghanistan and Iraq is much better done by UN forces than by the forces of nations that have vested interests in the outcome.

AS FAR BACK AS I CAN REMEMBER

Rewind thirty years and a few more. I was then working as television editor at Time Out, the London listings magazine. TO was at the absolute zenith of its success and the magazine had considerable influence in the corridors of television power because it was virtually out on its own – the boom in press coverage of the medium was still in the future. I was working alongside Patricia Williams who was on the section before my return to the magazine to take up the television post. By rights she should have become section editor but Tony Elliott, the proprietor and sometime magazine editor, was notably leery of politically articulate women.

Happily, Pattie and I hit it off and, with complementary qualities, quickly became a successful team. We built up the amount of insider information that the section ran. A BBC producer told me that each week Television Centre went silent for half the morning while everybody digested the new Time Out television section. Someone at the mag cut out a headline from The Guardian about Bruce Forsyth – “the most important man in television” – and pinned it over my pigeonhole in the mail rack. Heady times.

It got headier. After barely a year, I was invited to join The Observer, which was greatly expanding its coverage of broadcasting. All the national newspapers were looking at TO’s success and learning the lessons. I was, I believe, the first TO journalist to “graduate” to Fleet Street, as the industry was still called in those days – by no means all the national newspapers were located on Fleet Street even then; indeed The Observer was on St Andrew’s Hill at Blackfriars.

The obvious succession was for Tony to pick Pattie, but once again he flinched at the thought of an editor who, as he saw it, talked a different language from him. Pattie sportingly suggested that seeing her as “too political” was a slight upon me. At any rate, Tony made a totally unexpected move. He appointed a beanpole newly graduated from Oxford as the next television editor. His name was John Wyver. Pattie was rapidly scooped up elsewhere: she was offered the editorship of the trade magazine Broadcast, which she gladly accepted and of which she made a fine fist. We all felt that this was one in the eye for Tony Elliott.

In my own role at The Observer, I inevitably came across young Wyver immediately and then regularly. It was natural to me to treat him with decency – after all, he wasn’t the cause of Pattie being passed over and anyway he was a fait accompli. He was well aware that his appointment was controversial and handled it and himself with grace and poise. I gave him all the help I could to find his feet.

Now fast forward to rather more than a decade ago. I was about to publish my critical biography of the television playwright Dennis Potter. It seemed to me that a television programme off the back of publication would be a good idea, both for the book and for, say, Channel 4. I had appeared on television in a few fleeting capacities but had never fronted a programme. Still, I considered myself wholly capable of doing so. During the intervening years, I had worked as a television producer for the BBC and some independent production companies – I had hardly been at The Observer a year before I was headhunted by the BBC as a producer, surely the least qualified person (as I observed at the time) to be a producer since the pioneering days of some 25 years earlier.

Meanwhile, there had been a fracture at Time Out, the political contradictions at its heart inevitably coming to the surface. Many of the staff, including Wyver, had left to found a rival publication, City Limits. It lasted a while but was never distinctive enough and eventually folded. In the new television world after the birth of C4, Wyver had formed a production company, Illuminations, which carved itself a useful and evidently pretty lucrative niche in arts programming. So it was Wyver whom I approached with the notion of a programme about Potter.

We did lunch. I hadn’t seen him in a long time and I was astonished. The beanpole had turned into Robert Maxwell. A vast expense-account stomach sloped away from his still bony shoulders. Underneath this weird disguise, John remained the same slightly bashful, rueful boy I remembered, still looking slightly shocked to be having his career. We chewed over the proposal and John told me to put it down on a sheet of paper and drop it in. Then he took me back to his suite of offices and, less boyish now, showed me round with a proprietorial air. At one point, he introduced me to a woman working at a computer screen and murmured “Truly my mentor”. “Oh,” I said to her, “then I’m very pleased to meet you”. “No,” snapped John, rather irritated as he evidently suspected that I was sending him up. “You are”. It was a wholly genuine misunderstanding on my part. I hadn’t seen it coming and it’s often hard to tell if people hold you in high regard, even when they do. We all know those occasions when everyone is celebrating someone newly dead and we wish the departed could hear this and wonder if she or he would credit it.

I posted off my proposal the next day (the time had yet to come when all communication was by email). John called me to acknowledge receipt and said he’d look it over and call me by the end of the week. After a fortnight, I phoned to enquire if he’d had a look at it yet and he said he was really sorry, he’d been very busy and he’d be sure to get back to me by the end of the following week. That was fourteen years ago. I have neither heard from him nor seen him since. Just occasionally, when I’m feeling a little bruised, I wonder how, if that’s how he looks after his mentor, he behaves towards his enemies.

Now let’s come into this century. My partner and I had moved out of London and I had set about the task of attracting some income by writing what I wanted to write rather than what an editor – in journalism or book publishing – wanted. One day I got a letter from a chap called Simon Farquhar who was writing a book about television drama. He said he had read my play Circle Line and loved it. This play began my professional career. I was at university when the BBC announced a playwriting competition open solely to college students. I had been going to write the play anyway and it was about a student: what could be more suitable? The play won the competition, was put into production and, after a delay while the BBC decided to fret about certain of its content, was broadcast in the first season of Play for Today in January 1971.

Simon could only read the script because that is all that survives of it. About three months after its sole transmission, the annual list came round to BBC heads of department from which they were obliged to choose which of their output from the year should be archived. The Head of Plays, Gerald Savory (back in the 1930s the white hope of drawing-room comedy with his one stage success George and Margaret), looked down the list and didn’t check Circle Line. So the master tape was duly wiped. A friend had made an audiotape of the broadcast – characteristically he’d missed the first few seconds – and I had the copy of that … somewhere … in a box.

I found that Simon had an astonishing encyclopaedic knowledge of vintage teledrama, all of it broadcast before his time: he was in his early 30s. We took to swapping anecdotes, firm opinions, memories on my side for research findings on his. I had always intended to write a book of my own on teledrama, a field on which I reckoned myself a bit of an expert. Simon both drew on and bolstered my own knowledge. And he was clearly in earnest about his book and the place of Circle Line. Though he’s never completed the book and so of course never published it, he showed me the chapter that treats of the play and it was extremely gratifying, not least because it was such an intelligent assessment.

Meanwhile, Simon’s own writing career was blossoming. He had a couple of radio plays produced and then the Royal Court bought his play Rainbow Kiss and gave it a run at the Theatre Upstairs. He was in his element. Knowing that I had an unproduced stage musical kicking around, he persuaded his leading man, who had some track record in the field, to make off with a copy of the show. This was clearly a mutually beneficial friendship (though, not too surprisingly, nothing has come of the actor having my musical).

A different thread comes into my story here, but it will interweave, so be patient. Some eighteen months ago, I was beginning to feel that there might be a television programme in my own burgeoning disenchantment with the medium that I had championed so keenly in my youth. I alighted on the title British Television: A Dim View. After all, every programme title these days has to feature a colon. It would be what is called in the biz an authored piece, which to say a report that is shaped by the reporter’s opinion rather than a (supposedly) impartial documentary with voice-over by an actor. I kicked the idea around for a while and then tried it out on my old compadre Pattie Williams.

During the intervening years, Pattie and I had drifted a little but had connected up again in the 1990s when I sketched out an idea for a series about the history of television drama. By this time, Pattie had her own production company, Case Television, which was very effective across a wide range of programming. The series was offered to BBC Knowledge, the forerunner of BBC4, but eventually declined. Now Pattie had just wound up her company but that, it seemed to me, was an asset in my quest to make a really hard-hitting programme about the parlous state of British television. I had no ambitions of my own in the medium, Pattie now had none either, so we could both offend anyone we wished without fear of career damage.

Dealing with Pattie over the proposal became a long drawn-out business and it took me fully a year finally to get her to admit that her heart wasn’t really in it. While I was waiting for her to come to this realisation, I wrote a new stage play, a four-hander revisiting the student life of the late 1960s that had informed Circle Line. It was called Observations from a Hill, after a number by a rock group that we adored at the time, Family. I was pleased with it and the few people I allowed to read it (including Simon Farquhar) were complimentary and supportive of it. But I couldn’t get any theatre to take it on.

Finally, Simon told me of a friend of his who was stretching his wings as a director. He had an in at the King’s Head Theatre in Islington and if he liked the play he might be able to persuade the artistic director to take it on. His name was Jason Lawson. I duly met up with Simon and Jason at the King’s Head where we watched the current production together. Jason was charming and very polite. He was about to start work on a new production but as soon as that was put to bed he would take a look at mine. At the end of the evening, he made off with a copy of my play. Meanwhile, Simon had told me a tale about how he owed a large sum of money and had been faced with threats of violence. He seemed truly scared. I immediately promised to pay off the debt for him but gave him to understand that he would have to repay me by the end of that year, 2008.

Jason duly read the play, said he liked it and thought it was very doable. I had hoped to see the production that he had been working on but he had never given me the details and it finally emerged that he was only the assistant director so seeing it would have taught me little. But we had a meeting to talk it over and I felt very bucked up. He asked all the right questions and he put his finger precisely on what was needed to improve the play. I came home and did some more work on it and posted off the rewrites. I was not alone in believing that I’d made an important difference to the play but Jason was not very forthcoming about what I sent him. However, he said that he would set up a reading with some actor friends.

That was last June. Since then all communication between us has been at my initiative and at greater and greater intervals. Jason remains elusive and nothing happens concerning the play. I sent him a Christmas card, which he did not reciprocate, and now I have given up on him.

Through the summer, the subject upon which Jason was most forthcoming was that of Simon Farquhar. I had not seen him since that evening at the King’s Head in March. His emails, at one time arriving almost daily, dried up. It turned out that he had moved house, though this had always been a regular occurrence. Jason, to whom it seemed he also owed money, tracked him down to a pub on the Hammersmith Embankment where he was said to be working. After many attempts to reach him by email, phone and text, I finally had a phone conversation with Simon in the summer, during which he enthused about his new job as a barman and reckoned the publican had taken to him, was appointing him assistant manager and was about to install him in the pub flat. Pub life, he maintained, was terrific grist to the mill of his writing, which he intended to resume before long. We didn’t speak of his debt to me.

Since then nothing. The deadline for his repayment to me has passed. A friend familiar with Rainbow Kiss reminded me that the main character in that play had unpaid debts and was threatened. Was Simon perhaps testing me to see if I was paying attention? Were he and Jason in cahoots to rob me? Well, tomorrow I go to town for a social event at the weekend and I shall take the opportunity to trawl the pubs of Hammersmith Embankment and find this ne’er-do-well. He will not find me sympathetic on this occasion.

After Pattie passed on British Television: A Dim View, I sought out an old chum from television days, Paul Kerr. I knew that, like so many of our generation, he was teaching media to university students – or, as he put it, teaching them to read and write – but he still took a bit of raising. We finally made contact and then met up. To no surprise on my part, we were of one mind on the state of British television. I was also glad to learn that his college was keen for him to continue to make occasional programmes. We agreed that I should set out some more of the proposal on paper and that he would look it over. I sent it off on October 7th and, after some chiding from me, he promised to read it in the first week of November. At the end of the week after that, I wrote to him expressing my disappointment at his silence. There was a distinct snappiness in his reply and since then he’s gone completely silent. I feel as if I am being punished.

In the summer, as the prospects for Observations from a Hilll dwindled, I came to the conclusion that I was going to retire from trying to make a living as a writer. Nothing since then has done other than reinforce that conclusion. The fact is that there is really nobody in the business in a position to determine that I get work whom I trust or on whom I feel that I can rely. Those very few organisations that are willing to consider unsolicited work, be it prose or drama, do not have readers who know how to read. In the early 1970s, I was trained to read scripts in the BBC Script Unit, a whole department set up to process unsolicited submissions. But of course that department was closed years ago and nobody now learns how to read, they just cast an unpractised eye over the work and guess at a response. I know from the rejection letters I receive – those few that risk any sort of assessment – that the reader has really no idea what a script assessment is. And frankly what is the point of trying to forge alliances with like-minded people in the business who then don’t have the time to deal with you, the kindness or courtesy to tell you where you stand or the conscience that would stop them treating you shabbily.

It was a hard and a quite emotional decision to give it all up. After all, to paraphrase Ray Liotta’s character at the outset of Scorsese’s Goodfellas: “As far back as I can remember, I wanted to be a writer”. I started to write my first novel when I was seven and I must have completed two whole, if rather short, chapters. That my first income from writing came from a play that I wrote at 21 was no surprise to me or to my parents. The surprise, I think, has been at how difficult it has been to sustain a career as a writer.

The rebuffs and disappointments over the 40 years since I was 21 are too long to rehearse in a blog posting and at present too painful as well. I have contemplated a book about failing as a writer – that’s not something I’ve read so I’m hoping it would have some prospect of at least being an original idea. I have its title – it’s from Stephen Sondheim’s wonderful song 'I’m Still Here', which the character Carlotta sings in Follies: “Then You Career from Career to Career”. But of course nobody will publish such a book. I’m not a comedian or a footballer or a graduate of the Big Brother house. And although such a book would be written out of my ever-sunny disposition, editors will reason that people don’t want to read about failure and the business doesn’t want books that suggest that those who run the business are less than brilliant. So I don’t suppose I will write it, even if I could afford to do so.

You see, I do have to earn. I am retraining, something that doesn’t come easy at my age but needs must. More about that can wait for a future posting. Meanwhile, I won’t stop writing the blog because it keeps my hand in. It’s just that the novels and plays and scripts and non-fiction books that are at various stages in my head will stay there, unwritten. I still have the pleasure of them and, if no one else ever does, that sure as hell ain’t my fault.

ISRAEL’s FINAL SOLUTION

What in hell does the Jerusalem government imagine itself to be achieving in Gaza? When it first began its aerial bombardment of the densely packed towns and cities where the Palestinians live, it reckoned it was “applying pressure” to Hamas, a mealy-mouthed kind of word-spinning. Now it says it means to “destroy” Hamas, but, it adds carefully, only militarily. Hamas, after all, is the legitimately elected government in Gaza. Matters of sovereignty of course arise in considering Israel’s ten days of relentless attack on its tiny neighbour but nobody is about to invoke the law in this matter, nobody anyway who has any clout in the corridors of power.

Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s thoughtful Middle East editor, has daily asked what Jerusalem will consider “a victory”. It’s a good question. In the year before Israeli fighters began attacking Gaza on December 27th, Hamas had been periodically firing rockets into Israel. Jerusalem says that it was to stop this rocketing that it attacked Gaza. So it must be assumed that Jerusalem will consider victory achieved when the rockets cease. In the ten days since Israel stirred, four Israeli civilians have died from Hamas rocket attacks. And that compares with how many in the preceding twelve months? Precisely one. On that basis, then, Israel’s assault has been a four-fold catastrophe for Israel itself. Up until now, in all conscience, Hamas rockets have been but an irritant, at least compared with a full-scale air and ground invasion.

Now I don’t know whether Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, is an intelligent man or not. It isn’t very easy to tell. But he must have anticipated that Hamas would not just lie down and let the Israeli tanks roll over them. He must have had it pointed out to him that the likelihood was that, as far as they possibly could, Hamas would continue to fire rockets into Israel because every rocket sent is a message declaring that Hamas is still there. So he went into this knowing that civilian casualties in Israel must rise. And he must have gone in with a pretty good idea that, if he really wished to destroy Hamas as a military force, this would not be the way in which such an aim could be achieved. Did he learn nothing from the Lebanon debacle two and a half years ago?

For Israel has spent ten days ensuring that thousands upon thousands of Arabs right across the Middle East now have a new and fiercely burning desire to destroy Israel. Olmert has cut Israel’s security off at the knees for generations to come. You can be sure that terrorist attacks will return in full measure to the streets of Israel, that hundreds of new suicide bombers are already signing up to be trained to inflict mayhem on public transport and in the streets and markets and meeting places of towns and cities from Haifa to Elat.

And what has Israel done for its own standing in the world? At best, you can say that it has tested to breaking point the remarkable international support it has enjoyed for 60 years. The retiring regime in Washington has predictably washed its hands of the matter, ostensibly blaming Hamas. The incoming president has very properly cleaved to the mantra that, as far as international affairs go, there can only be one president at a time. It is be hoped, however, that his representatives are making clear to the Jerusalem authorities that the blank cheque Israel has been scribbling upon for so long is no longer to be mistaken for the support of naked aggression. Gordon Brown’s remark today, that this is “the darkest moment yet for the Middle East”, strikes a wholly different note from that of Bush. David Miliband and Condoleeza Rice will have conferred. Washington will have known that London’s stance would differ from Bush’s. And Obama had better be ready to take a constructive and firm position, otherwise his first crisis will set a bad precedent for the rest of his term.

For, in one of history’s bitterest ironies, Israel is in serious danger of committing genocide in Gaza. When it talks of destroying Hamas, it may intend to draw a distinction between movement and people. But its actions, which it describes as “targeted”, are comprehensive. Today, Olmert has reportedly agreed to cooperate in allowing some food and medical supplies into Gaza. This, says his office, is “to prevent a humanitarian crisis”. Does he not hear the contradictions in that statement? Whence does he imagine the humanitarian crisis arises? From the wickedness of Hamas governance of the territory?

Since Israel attacked Gaza, there have been five military deaths among the Israeli military. Three of those, the majority, were as a result of what is known as friendly fire. So Israel has lost a total of six citizens at the hands of Palestinian aggression, none of them (if you think this important) women or children. This is an agreed figure. No two people are going to agree about Palestinian deaths. The Israeli assessment will be on the low side inevitably, just as Hamas will put it high. But by any objective count, it must be 600. A lot more than six. A hundred times more.

Hamas accuses Israel of indiscriminately attacking homes, mosques, refugee camps and shops. Today, three schools were bombarded by Israeli tanks and so inevitably many of the casualties were children. Jerusalem says that Hamas is responsible for this because it locates its rocket launchers in residential areas. It says that it drops leaflets warning civilians to leave. This is cruelly disingenuous. If an armed bank robber grabs a baby and tries to flee the bank, does the police marksman calculatedly shoot the baby? And where would Jerusalem have the rocket launchers sited? On open ground? It is unusual for any participants in conflict to go out of their way to make things more clear-cut for the enemy. Hamas might say in response: bring the Knesset nearer to Gaza’s border and dismantle the security around ministers so that we can kill them, then we will not need to spray rockets around Israel. No less fanciful, I venture.

Israel has a choice here. It could forbear bombing and shooting up civilians. There is no imperative in its relations with Hamas that says Israel must murder hundreds of people in order to hit at a few dozen militants. Israel could resort to diplomacy. It does not do so because the government imagines that its credit with the nations that matter is bottomless. I hope President Obama stands ready to disabuse them.

And those three schools attacked today: all were UN-administered schools, flying the UN flag. Does Israel have no regard for any authority other than its own? I hope the general assembly votes to throw Israel out of the UN and institutes war crime proceedings in the international courts of justice. But no such thing will occur unless Obama proposes a very different approach within the security council.

When you take a position about an issue, you are apt to be accused of bias. I write what I do from this perspective: I have friends in Israel about whom I care very much and many more friends who have family and friends of their own in Israel. I have none in any Arab country. I have visited Israel, Egypt and Iran. Anybody who has read much on this blog or who cares to trawl back will know that I am Islam’s foe and would dearly wish to see that barbarous bigotry banished from the face of the earth. None of that persuades me that what Israel is now doing is right. Or – perhaps more importantly – is wise.

FREEDOM from INQUISITION

Today’s report that the Home Secretary is prepared to consider outsourcing the national database is one of the most alarming developments so far in the shaming story of New Labour’s flight from its own base, both in terms of its increasing instincts to control every damned thing and of its growing love affair with the private sector. As The Guardian put it, such a move “would be accompanied by tougher legal safeguards to guarantee against leaks and accidental data losses”, but of course there can be no such guarantee, however “tough” the safeguards.

We know already that the security applied to supposedly encrypted and/or confidential data is close to non-existent and that those who behave in a cavalier manner with sensitive material are almost never in practice subjected to penalty, either through the courts or even in their career paths.

I would like to make a modest proposal. Let Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, build into the premise of the operation of the national database’s security a provision that, in the event of a leak or a data loss, the then holder of the office of Home Secretary along with Ms Smith herself (whatever her then status) be obliged to serve a term of not less than two years’ detention in a maximum security prison. Such a provision would offer a rather more reliable “guarantee” against leaks and data loss and, moreover, would furnish both the then Home Secretary and Ms Smith with useful first-hand experience of “tough” security.

It never ceases to astonish me that politicians cannot envisage situations in which the powers that they wish to arrogate to themselves might be considerably more oppressive, for instance in the hands of some as-yet unforeseeable successor. In my lifetime, several European nations, not so unlike Britain, have laboured under dictatorships, usually of a military stripe. It is sadly not beyond the power of imagination to picture Britain too being governed by a regime even less concerned to protect the freedom of the individual than is New Labour. In fifty years from now, Britain will doubtless be a Muslim state. How much more effective will it be to inflict upon the nation the extremes of Sharia law when the Blair and Brown governments have created the infrastructure of surveillance that will allow a future mullah-turned-Interior-Minister to enforce orthodoxy on a British people who once rejoiced in their non-conformist traditions.

Rather more urgent – because the present economic climate makes it unavoidable – is the certainty that forms of access to the national database will be sold for profit to commercial organisations. Once the control of the data moves out of the hands of central government and into the hands of entrepreneurs who are answerable first to shareholders, the rush to cash in will become a stampede and government, having acceded to the thin edge of the wedge, will be powerless to prevent, say, your insurance company having total access to every financial transaction you conduct, every email you send or receive and details of every visit you make to a website. Is that what you voted for?

Sir Ken Macdonald, lately Director of Public Prosecutions, told The Guardian: “The tendency of the state to seek ever more powers of surveillance over its citizens may be driven by protective zeal. But the notion of total security is a paranoid fantasy which would destroy everything that makes living worthwhile. We must avoid surrendering our freedom as autonomous human beings to such an ugly future. We should make judgments that are compatible with our status as free people”. I couldn’t put it better.

Regulation is a perfectly honourable instinct in the make-up of the left. The current catastrophe of capitalism makes the case for regulation of the markets as no politician, however eloquent, ever could. But there is regulation and there is oppression. I do not say that the present government has turned to oppression … yet. But we are on a worrying path. Already more CCTV cameras gaze upon Britons than the residents of any other nation if measured by head of population. The suspicion that most of the cameras do not actually function properly helps to make the Brits relaxed about this chronic level of surveillance. After all, as a nation we are – we have always been – hopeless at maintenance. Count the clocks in public places that have stopped, the great majority of them not during the past month either.

If the level of surveillance actually delivered what it promised, there would be no shooting, no arresting and no convicting of innocent civilians. There would be much less theft, shoplifting, criminal damage and breaking in; much less speeding, hitting and running, dangerous driving and illegal parking; much less rape, kidnap, assault and child molestation; much less gang culture and fewer sink estates. The cost of this vast network of surveillance is nowhere near justified by its results.

So what the hell does the government want of this love affair with data-collecting? The knee-jerk response – that it is a crucial weapon in the front line of “the war against terror” – is a busted flush. The government could enact all manner of targeted controls on the community from which terrorism emerges if it were not so squeamish about giving offence to Islam. Faced by the loss of confidence in Labour among the non-Muslim population, part of it fuelled by the resentment at the imposition of oppressive regulation on communities that do nothing to justify it, you might think that Mr Brown’s advisors would suggest that he cut his losses and pursue a more broadly popular agenda.

STILL HERE

My thousands of regular readers may have wondered whether this blog, like many other enterprises over the last few weeks, has gone into receivership. The answer is no. I have been preoccupied elsewhere. I was away in London for several days and had intended to report on the shows and movies that I saw. Since then, however, we have been throwing into the air most everything in our home. It is a home stuffed with ... well, stuff, and said stuff has needed to be thoroughly rearranged ahead of an invasion. It is our turn to play host over at least part of the holiday – not before time, some family members will reasonably grumble – and we have to plan for up to seven, including two widowed aunts either side of 90, staying overnight. There has been such a to-and-fro of stuff – piles of things moved from room to room and back again – that for some days I was unable actually to reach my keyboard. Emailers have gone unanswered and junk mail undeleted. Only by dint of perching on a precarious pile and tapping with one finger was I able to get off a two-line letter to The Guardian (which the paper entirely rewrote before publication).

Anyway, normal service will be resumed as soon as possible, at which time I will have some momentous decisions (for me, anyway) to impart and expound. In the mean time, assuming as I do that the hiatus will continue at least until that curiously deflated gap between Boxing Day and New Year's Eve, I bid you all a cool Yule.