THIS BLASTED HEATH

My thoughts keep being drawn, rather unexpectedly, to the poignant death of the film actor Heath Ledger on Tuesday. Many public figures die every month, including (lately) some whom I have admired enormously (Karlheinz Stockhausen, Michelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman), some I didn’t care much for (Alan Coren, Boris Yeltsin, Bernard Manning), some whom I personally encountered (Ned Sherrin, George Melly, Sheridan Morley) and some whom I knew quite well when I was in the business (Verity Lambert, Tony Holland, Claude Whatham). But I suppose there is a particular sadness about the loss of someone so young, so full of promise and with so clear a path to achievement beckoning him.

Ledger appeared in his full share of execrable movies. Actors don’t set out to perpetrate twaddle, any more than writers, producers or directors do, though they no doubt accept some roles knowing that the rewards therein offered are not primarily those of artistic satisfaction. Ledger gave two performances that will have stretched and matured him and that demonstrated his seriousness, ambition and daring as an actor. In Monster’s Ball he took a relatively small role in a small movie, a decision that many an agent would have advised against but that he clearly (and rightly) saw as a gesture that would speak of his determination to do good work and that might bring him more nourishing offers. That nourishment came in Brokeback Mountain and he painted himself into cinema iconography. With his career abruptly terminated, this last will forever stand as his defining role.

Most people interested in cinema as art rather than candyfloss will have recognized the quality of Ledger’s performance as Ennis del Mar in Ang Lee’s movie of the Annie Proulx short story about two cowboys who fall into a love affair. It has been suggested in some quarters that old-school Hollywood homophobia denied the Academy Award to both actor and film (director and adapted screenplay did both win, however). The argument may hold for the best film award (which went to the relatively meretricious Crash – and I certainly don’t mean the remarkable David Cronenberg movie of that name). But the actor award that year was justly won by Philip Seymour Hoffman for his no less gay and certainly no less achieved assumption of the role of Truman Capote.

Perhaps it is only for a gay man like me that Ledger’s achievement in Brokeback can hold such resonance. I am acutely reminded of another premature death in American cinema, more than 14 years ago now, that of the hauntingly beautiful and unknowable River Phoenix. That shocking departure inevitably played second fiddle to the death, on the same day, of Federico Fellini but in time it came to be seen as a major loss.

Five years younger than Ledger at his death, Phoenix had already established a range and depth – in Stand By Me, The Mosquito Coast and Running on Empty especially – that spoke of a thoughtfulness beyond his years. But his signature role was that of Mike Waters, the narcoleptic rent boy in Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho. Like Ledger’s Ennis, this performance was wholly authentic and intensely moving. Both actors, it seems clear, understood the overarching socio-political significance of the material.

So we gay men are grateful – pathetically so, because we don’t get all that much to celebrate in (relatively) mainstream cinema (and by roadshow standards these of course were minority projects) – to these actors for taking us so seriously and going in to bat for us. I could have done without Ledger’s callow performance at the 2005 Oscar ceremony when, in introducing the nomination of Brokeback as best film in tandem with his much better behaved co-star Jake Gyllenhall, he lapsed into giggling and squirming more befitting a 12 year-old. But you can’t have everything. Ledger did the full promotional circus on the movie’s behalf and was properly short with the more stupid questions.

To leave a lasting mark on the world before you are 30, let alone a mark that does you credit, is some achievement and Ledger’s family in Australia, stoically insisting that his death was an accident, are understandably determined not to let that achievement be tarnished by rumour and speculation. The immediate autopsy has proved inconclusive. Whatever cause of death is finally determined – if indeed one can be – is of far less true interest than the actor’s small body of work. It will be Ledger’s fate, like Eddie Cochran, Arthur Rimbaud, Franz Schubert, Joe Orton, Keith Haring and so many others, to be defined, at least in part, by living for a short time. But at least they all got the chance to leave something by which they are remembered.

HOMING IN ON MOBILES

There is, to be sure, a sufficiency of candidates for the title Most Baleful Development of the Last Half Century: the marketing culture; the revival of religious fanaticism; the death of modesty, kindness and respect for oneself and others; the worship of convenience; the spread of noise and light pollution; television advertising; the decline of literary culture; the despoiling of the countryside; the power of celebrity; global tourism; the rise of the supermarket and the retail chain; climate change; and that which promotes and underpins all those horrors: the triumph of capitalism.

If I cite the ubiquity of the mobile phone as an especial bête noire of mine, it is in no way to discount or downgrade the egregiousness of the other candidates. But the mobile is in so many ways the type of what is so unhealthy in modern society. Far from bringing people together more easily, it in practice drives them further apart. From the vanishingly few occasions when I have talked into a mobile while, say, walking along the street or sitting on a bus, I know that one is immediately cocooned in a virtually impenetrable void. One’s awareness of the world beyond one’s nose and inner ear declines almost to nothing. People yakking on mobiles bump into each other, step off the curb in front of traffic, fall down open manholes and generally are as cut off from their immediate surroundings as if they were sealed in a time machine.

When you consider that we have been using telephones for more than a century, it seems extraordinary that people generally still find them mysterious. We have all undergone the experience of having someone else in the room trying to talk to us while we are on the telephone. They – and we too when we in turn do it ourselves – seem incapable of remembering that it is physically impossible simultaneously to attune one ear to a voice coming down an optic fibre and the other ear to a voice in the wholly different aural ambience of a room. Yet there is probably more domestic unpleasantness deriving from just such insensitivity than, say, arguments over child rearing and housework combined.

The voice in one’s ear fundamentally erodes one’s awareness of everything else, even what one sees. Listening to such a voice requires a high level of concentration and focus that, say, listening to the wireless does not emulate. That is certainly why using a mobile while driving, whether hands-free or not, is a truly criminal example of irresponsibility. New penalties for this offence come into force in the spring in Britain. Anyone who causes a fatality while simultaneously driving and using a hand-held mobile will be liable to a jail term of between four and seven years, or between two and five years if they were “briefly distracted”, whatever that may mean. Nothing like enough punishment, of course, and I never understand why anyone who has been responsible for killing or maiming in any circumstance while driving is ever allowed a licence again.

Mobile phones bring out the insensitivity in people. If, in the middle of a conversation with a friend, I suddenly picked up the newspaper and started reading it, my friend would be justly aggrieved. I, though, am expected to countenance as perfectly acceptable behaviour my friend breaking off in mid-sentence to take a mobile phone call. What’s more, my friend will, as like as not, raise her voice considerably above the decibel level at which she had hitherto been addressing me. This is another of the abiding mysteries of the phone, that it seems to require – although it doesn’t really, of course – much greater projection in order that the voice travels the distance, maybe of hundreds of miles, between the speakers.

My partner pointed out this quote, used to recommend a book on Amazon: “You become absorbed in the plot within seconds of opening the book … It will make you think twice before using your mobile phone!!!!” He found this an appalling criterion to apply to the appeal of a book and I would agree if I didn’t already suspect that the use of four exclamation marks indicates a poverty-stricken mind. But the psychological dependence on the mobile that so many have developed is an earnest of the poverty of imagination and character that is eroding the human race. We are certainly breeding a generation of teenagers who cannot sit still or walk along for five minutes without reaching for the mobile and swapping cries of “whatever” with a friend. Being interested in their surroundings or – I am about to employ a blasphemy – reading a book is too daunting a project. So I suppose the anonymous Amazon customer was onto something.

Some train services – First Direct, which serves the west of England, is one such – have understood that the mobile phone is as noisome an intruder as the leaking iPod and have designated one carriage per train as “quiet”, which means that the use of phones is barred. For having the temerity to wish to sit in such a carriage, you are duly punished by being obliged to walk the length of the platform because the quiet carriage is always at the extremity of the train.

This arrangement would, you might think, work tolerably well but it is rare in my experience that such a journey passes without some breach. On the train home from Cheltenham last week, my reading was interrupted by the ringing of a mobile across the aisle. The mousy, mature and respectable-looking woman who took the call was entirely and even somewhat abashedly apologetic afterwards when I pointed out to her (in my customary formula) that the sign forbidding the use of mobiles applied to her as well to everyone else. “I’m afraid I forgot to switch it off,” she said. “I will do now”. I didn’t pursue it but I could reasonably have suggested that she either switch off the mobile directly it rang and determine later who had made the call that she missed or get up off her arse and walk to the next carriage to pursue her conversation. I also didn’t observe drily: “I take it you won’t now object if I smoke just the one cigarette?”

The trouble with these provisions and their abuse is that one is obscurely made to feel in some way in the wrong when one speaks up, as if I’m making a fuss about nothing. As David, who frequently catches a doze on a train, points out, if a ringing phone or a voice raised in conversation has roused you, the damage is already done so you’re then trying to put down a marker for the next time. But as I observe frequently in my book Common Sense (see link in right margin), NOBODY COMPLAINS ENOUGH and it is left to the civic- (if bloody-)minded like me and David to make a stand.

Do not, I beg, misconstrue me. I do indeed own a mobile. So does my partner. When we added a large dog to our household, David pointed out that we ought to be able to call each other if, say, one of us were in our field with this dog that neither of us could lift on his own and the dog – perish the thought – were to collapse.

For that reason and none other we went into Bath one day in 2001 or 2002 to purchase a brace of mobile phones. We chose our moment carefully, timing our quest to coincide with an “important” football match involving the national team. Bath was not exactly deserted but it was striking that all the young men out shopping were paired with wives or girlfriends (or boyfriends). Our plan paid off inasmuch as we were able to have the undivided attention of a mobile phone saleswoman for above an hour. I did have to return my phone quite soon, however. I couldn’t stand it that every time I switched it on I got a display on the screen that read “How are you?” To eliminate this absurdity, I had to settle for an older and less capacious Sim card but that was no great hardship.

We elected to go with a plan that rolled over unused time and charged a monthly fee. I recently changed the arrangement to pay-as-you-go. In practice, my mobile is usually switched off from one month’s end to the next, aside from an occasional switch-on to send or look for a text. David gets more from his mobile but neither of us finds much use for it. The only time I have mine in hand with any frequency is when I am in London where having it avoids the need to look for a phone box. Even then, the mobile is switched off a lot because I spend so much time in cinemas and theatres and I won’t have it switched on if I’m lunching with a friend.

To change the phone plan was not straightforward. I telephoned – always an elaborate business these days, involving punching in numbers in response to options none of which quite fits your case – and finally thought I had secured a change of plan. But the next bill repeated the previous formula so I telephoned again. It emerged that my instructions should have been put in writing (rather undermining the point of an arrangement about a phone) although I had not been told this. I was excused the task (out of compassion, perhaps, for what was perceived as my great age) and assured that the next bill would reflect the new arrangement. That bill arrived today and is indeed lower by some 65 percent. We have been paying through the nose until now.

People say “I don’t know how I managed before I had a mobile” without recalling that once people managed without computers, central heating, television, the motor car, flushing lavatories, reading glasses, credit, separate dwellings, the wheel or even a spoken language. We didn’t have a dishwasher until we moved to our current house less than ten years ago but now that it has broken down I find (as washer-upper to the household) that I cannot imagine we ever did anything else all day but wash up. The dishwasher, though, is a far less destructive intruder than the mobile. Indeed, it makes time for one to do more useful things, rather than filling such time with useless chitchat.

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A word about Gordon Brown in China: the PM has been criticized in some quarters for not attacking his hosts ferociously for their appalling record on human rights. I find this criticism unrealistic. It would be at best uncomfortable to find fault with a regime with which one is seeking to establish at least a rapport. Far better to develop a strong relationship with the Chinese government and then, from the vantage point of being seen as a candid friend, seek to influence the Chinese to do better. At the present stage of relations, such a criticism would merely be discounted in Beijing as posturing for the domestic audience. And not without reason.

FIVE DAYS ARE A LONG TIME IN POLITICS

The United States has enjoyed some striking names among its presidents – Millard Fillmore, Ulysses S Grant, Grover Cleveland, Calvin Coolidge – and perhaps even more among its vice-presidents – Aaron Burr, Eldridge Gerry, Hannibal Hamlin, Schuyler Colfax, John Nance Garner, along with two recent ones we’d all rather forget: Spiro Agnew and J Danforth Quayle. But though the world’s media and the political chattering classes had all but crowned Barack Obama as the 43rd president 24 hours ago, the absurd presumption of that éclat has suddenly been tempered by reality. Between now and the Nevada primary (for complex reasons, Hillary Clinton is the only candidate at the intervening vote in Michigan where the Democratic Party has ruled that no delegates will count towards the national total), Mr Obama may find himself no longer expected to be the next chief executive with a funny name. His campaign will perhaps be dismissed as having “peaked too soon”. Like Senator Clinton, he should be patient. The convention, which will finally endorse the official candidate, is all of seven months away.

It’s odd how the media and the chatterers never learn anything. Today’s lead story on the front page of The Guardian and the cover of the new issue of Private Eye were already as dead in the water before they reached the shops as they thought Mrs Clinton was. Perhaps the letters editor of The Daily Telegraph (to whom I wrote because The Guardian seems no longer prepared to run my letters) will regret that he did not publish this on Monday:

Dear Sir,

Two observations on the Iowa caucuses: first, the results may well have no significance in the long term. In 1988, Vice-President Bush got 19% of the Republican vote to Bob Dole's 34%. Mr Bush went on to be President, Mr Dole to be the defeated presidential candidate eight years later. Even more strikingly (and resonantly), Bill Clinton won only 3% of the Democrat vote, as against Tom Harkin's 76% in 1992. Mr Clinton became President, Mr Harkin a mere footnote in presidential history.

Furthermore, I note that commentators were united in their pre-caucus view that both parties' races were "wide open", "too close to call" and so on. Had Dennis Kucinich or Duncan Hunter won their respective caucus votes, the exclamations that the results produced might be justified. But in a "wide open" race, it seems curious that either actual result should be thought so earth-shattering.

Yours faithfully,

W Stephen Gilbert

The paper might have been unique (come on, I couldn’t check them all) in having a view dissenting from a consensus that proved wide of the mark. Indeed, the consensus had been so clamorous that the Clintons had begun to believe it themselves (if – and it’s a big if – those same media outlets are to be credited at all). And who could blame the Clintons for feeling written off when the BBC Washington correspondent is yelling at you “Will you withdraw if you lose New Hampshire, Senator?”?

I adore elections in the US, precisely because they offer such a switchback ride. I’ve watched fascinated some astonishing campaigns: Jack Kennedy’s white-knight charge to a White House that became Camelot; Barry Goldwater’s campaign, the most right wing in American history and easily shrugged off by Lyndon Johnson, though we now know that Goldwater was in favour of gay rights before more than a handful of people knew they might want them; Eugene McCarthy’s thrilling student crusade of 1968; the strange and disruptive interventions of George Wallace, Ross Perot and Ralph Nader; the inevitable disaster of the most liberal candidate ever, George McGovern, still serving at 85 as the United Nations’ global ambassador on hunger; the bitter humiliation for those would-be second-termers thrown out of office by the electorate (Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George Bush); the serial runners who didn’t make it – George Romney (the father of Mitt), Robert Dole, Jesse Jackson; the candidates who, though clearly not up to the job, still reached the White House (Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George W Bush, the last two twice).

The one thing I feel sure of this time is that there is no Republican candidate, even the standing-by and credible Michael Bloomberg, who can win the presidency. There may be Democrats who can lose it and they may include Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. But, as former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright astutely observed in a World at One interview the other day, all candidates have negatives but Senator Clinton has the undoubted advantage that hers are already all known. Senator Obama may bristle at the questions that Mrs Clinton has asked of him but they are very small beer compared with what the Republican attack machine would unleash, were he to win or to be drawing near to winning the nomination.

There is no doubt, however, that Mr Obama has caught a wave. In states as virtually all-white as both Iowa and New Hampshire, it is wonderfully reassuring that a man of colour can draw such levels of support right across the electorate. The respective races for the nomination – but especially the Democratic race – have attracted unprecedented numbers going out to vote in the snow that traditionally accompanies these primaries and caucuses.

Whether Obama’s wave will peter out cannot be predicted. If it doesn’t (or even if it does), Mrs Clinton would be smart to invite him to be her running mate. He would then be in a very good position to run as the Democrat candidate in 2016 (as Vice-President Obama) when he would still only be 55. That way the Democrats could be looking at a healthy prospect of providing the administrations until 2024, by which time no doubt Jeb Bush’s half-Hispanic son John will be ready to carry the Republicans back to the White House. As he will no doubt be known officially by his current nickname of Jebby, he will be able to extend the run both of previously unrepresented demographics in the Oval Office and of unusual names on the presidential roll.

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This blog is not the only task (or friend) neglected by me since yule. The internet of course is the greatest time-waster and displacement activity since the spread of television and I have lately been much exercised by debate and discussion on the richarddawkins.net site wherein those who know that there are no supernatural powers, beings or states of being hammer out their differences. Furthermore, I have (rather late in the day, characteristically) discovered the enormous pleasure of repairing errors and omissions on Wikipedia. I shall endeavour to do better. (After all, I have a play that I’m supposed to be writing).

The SEASON TO BE JOLLY

I spent a merry hour yesterday evening searching for and downloading Christmas carols. Not that we lack for piles of CDs and indeed LPs of traditional favourites in this house, but the beauty of iTunes and other sites is that you can cherry-pick what you want; you don’t have to acquire the whole album and hence a bunch of duplications.

I had been especially missing ‘Adam Lay Ybounden’, an anonymous 15th century madrigal most widely known these days in its 20th century setting by Boris Ord. We used to sing this one when I was in the school choir and I was always moved by the way Ord caught its medieval spirit without being either unduly pious about its age or unsympathetic in his own modernity.

A second favourite unaccountably missing from the CD compilations was ‘The Boar’s Head Carol’, another 15th century lyric that was later published in the collection of Christmasse Carolles by Wynkyn de Worde, great ally of William Caxton in the fledgling business of The Print and possessor of one of the most enviably distinctive names in fame’s history. ‘The Boar’s Head’ is so rumbustious a crowd-pleaser that it warms up the most perishing congregation, even in the bleak mid-winter.

Despite my knowledge that there are no supernatural powers, beings or states of being, I have absolutely no difficulty in appreciating carols or, come to that, hymns from all through the calendar of ‘Ancient and Modern’. Music is music and poetry is poetry and one doesn’t need to be put off by the illusory nature of its inspiration. A huge proportion of art of all kinds is expressive of fantasy and none the worse for that. What’s more, low-church music is very redolent of my childhood and so has a powerful claim on my emotions.

Brought up in the Anglican tradition – by which of course I mean a calm, benign and very nearly agnostic approach to worship – I was well able to distinguish between the theatre and the propaganda from an early age. Had I been a Catholic, a Hindu, a Buddhist, a Muslim, a Jainist, a Jew, a Parsee, a Zoroastrian, a Mennonite, a Sikh, an Amish or a member of any of the other faiths, I would doubtless have had a bloodier battle to escape. As it was, once I was confirmed by the then Bishop of Peterborough, I rapidly moved from being a daily reader of selected passages of the Bible (“that boy’s going to be a vicar” said my Dad, who never possessed the gift of prophesy) to the warm embrace of apostasy. In my book Common Sense (see the link in the right column), I wrote about my rationalism, but it wasn’t until this year, when I started to read Richard Dawkins and then Sam Harris (the latter of whom is nearer to my own position), that I discovered that the battle against the dangerous power of religion is at last being joined in earnest. The site richarddawkins.net has been the year’s best discovery for me and I have been greatly stimulated by the range of (often heated) discussions among people who are, at the level that counts, like-minded.

In an unusual declaration, Nick Clegg answered the question of whether he believed in god, posed on Radio Five Live yesterday, with the word “no” (at least that’s what The Guardian says; I listened to the entire phone-in on the BBC iPlayer and the matter never came up). It is rare indeed for party leaders anywhere in the capitalist world to reveal such things and Clegg was instantly transformed from being the least promising-looking Liberal Party leader since Clement Davies to a bold and interesting chap. Alas, as politicians are apt to do, he blew it immediately. “I have enormous respect for people who have religious faith,” he ‘clarified’ later in the day. “I’m married to a Catholic and am committed to bringing my children up as Catholics”. So, rather as his website cites “Jonny [sic] Cash” as his favourite singer, Clegg looks like another disingenuous opportunist saying what he hopes is the ingratiating thing rather than what he knows is the true thing.

In another part of the (same) forest, year’s end is the conventional time for the computation based upon the names given to the year’s new-born (not, one assumes, that there will have been no more over the remaining twelve days before January 1st). The Office of National Statistics – whose data, you imagine, could hardly be expected to extend beyond, say, June (say, 1994) – reckons there were 6,772 Jacks joining us this year. Thomas was the next most popular name with 5,803 votes; that is unless you count together those christened – to use entirely the wrong word – Mohammad, Mohamad, Muhamet and Muhammed, in which case Thomas is relegated to third, the M guys registering 6,368 hits.

What this demonstrates is the alarming penetration of Islam into British society. Will our children or our children’s children find themselves constrained under Sharia law in Britain? It will surely occur sooner in France, where more than five million Muslims have settled and where they are widely expected to become a majority before 2030. That’s France, our nearest neighbour on mainland Europe. In due course, Nick Clegg may find himself saying that he is “committed” to his grandchildren being brought up as Muslims. And, by the way, Islam is a faith that promises suicide bombers the attentions of the curiously precise number of 72 virgins in paradise (I don’t think the Qur'an specifies that they should be attractive or female or even indeed human virgins) and that routinely countenances murder for the 'sins' of adultery, homosexuality and being an infidel, which is to say not being a Muslim. By the time the first Muslim government is sworn in at Westminster – and don’t doubt that it will assuredly be an all-Muslim government – Adam will certainly lie ybounden.

ENDGAME

The Bali summit is a waste of time. Maybe some accommodations will be made between China and India, Europe and the US, but even unprecedented, unimaginable concessions will be vastly too little, years too late. Face it: we can’t now save the planet from its fate. Probably not in my lifetime, perhaps not in the lifetime of my friends’ children but surely in the time of my friends’ children’s children, all life will be obliterated on the planet. The seas will rise sufficiently to displace millions of people, not just on the islands of the Indian and Pacific oceans but first along the coasts of all countries and the flood plains of all continents, then penetrating quickly and deeply inland. The refugees will overwhelm those on higher ground, all government and administration will break down and terminal anarchy will spread across the earth. With national boundaries gone and law and order forgotten, the rule of the jungle will obtain, except that we have lost the skills to be self-sufficient. Indeed, there won’t be any actual jungle to learn from by then. The planet will have lost its capacity to feed its inhabitants because climate change will have destroyed the world’s agriculture. Disease and strife, starvation and despair will finish off the last survivors.

Does this seem too apocalyptic, too Cassandra-like? I don’t think so. Climate change is already irreversible. Since the end of World War II, this catastrophe has been growing and shaping and there has been no power to stop it. Our will has been wholly sapped by the relentless rise of capitalism, a philosophy that cements the rich into place and protects their investments to the detriment of all else. Communism could not resist it. Keynsian economics could not hold it back. Now liberal democracy has been fatally undermined everywhere. No government is as strong as the leading multi-national corporations that can act independently of all national and international legal frameworks. Except in a few no-account South American and African countries, it is no longer possible for anyone to get within a popular vote of office without the approval of world capital. These multi-nationals have promoted the twin deities by which we all live and which will prove fatal to us: expediency and short-termism.

The capitalists are behind the flat-earther-like reaction to climate change, which is to pretend that it isn’t happening. But even if the predictions of disaster were exaggerated, which position do you want to go with: a pessimism that turns out to be wrong and costs a few billions in safeguards that prove unnecessary or an optimism that turns out to be wrong and condemns all life to oblivion? Is it a difficult one?

Every new declaration by the thousands of scientists across the globe who are monitoring this crisis amounts to the same short message: it’s worse than we thought. The political leaders, all controlled by their capitalist paymasters, play a game of dare with each other about who can hold out longest against doing anything meaningful but they’re all to blame and they’re not even the first generation of political leaders to blame. They, however, have been given the facts, the data, the projections and the worst-case scenarios that were not available to their predecessors. They squabble about reducing carbon emissions by 0.001% by the year 2150 as if that makes a ha’p’orth of difference. Not one of them is willing to give a decisive lead on the matter by making profound change mandatory at home and calling on all others to do the same, even though what is at stake is not the outcome of their next domestic election or their “place in history” but the very survival of life on earth.

The States ought to have been the nation to take a lead, of course, but it has been humanity’s misfortune to have at the helm of that most powerful nation for these eight crucial years the most vacuous waste of space ever to occupy the oval office. It’s not a matter of whom Bush listens to. Bush doesn’t listen to anybody. He has no intellectual capacity to discriminate between subtle or even wide divergences among his advisors. So he takes his line – his “orders”, you might say – from the global oil interests who have funded his whole public career and whose mouthpiece in government is Vice-President Cheney, the most influential man ever to hold that office. It isn’t in the interests of these oil barons to make sacrifices during their years of preposterous wealth so that their own great-grandchildren can hope to have any life at all. They don’t care if the next generation but one is the last.

It would be encouraging to hope that the next US president would be astute enough to figure that something fundamental might be called for. Don’t bother to hope. The cockamamie American electoral system is infinitely manipulable and capitalism has myriad options available to ensure that somebody it can live with is elected.

In any case, nothing any politician can do now will save us. What the Bali summit ought to be addressing is the increasingly urgent matter of meltdown management. Plans should be in development now for handling the crisis when it begins to unfold in earnest. We have seen enough post-apocalypse books, movies and plays to know that there is an instinctive consensus about how humans will behave when they know that the game is up. Global agencies need to be constructing models of the various ways in which the rising seas will overwhelm us and plan accordingly. Perhaps they are indeed doing that. If so, the futile and farcical “negotiations” over minuscule pointless gestures are even more cynical than I thought.

STILL AUDITIONING

On Tuesday, I went to Golders Green crematorium for the funeral of the television producer, Verity Lambert, whom I had known and adored for nearly 40 years. It was the starriest affair I have attended for a long time. Not just the whole of the old school teledrama world but many women in public life (like Helena Kennedy and – looking fabulous – Katherine Whitehorn: Verity had been due to receive a Women of Merit Award next week).

The service was presented by a woman from the British Humanist Association and that's just what I would want. She had done a huge amount of diligent work on getting an authoritative account of Verity's life and style together and it was fine except a bit heavy on the generalized grief counselling – her congregation was hardly callow enough for that – and rather too long (we could all hear V in our heads shouting for a script editor).

Lots of good friends told sweet and funny stories. Somebody enumerating the things she loved began "1: friends, 2: cooking, 3: dogs ... " so I knew why I liked her so. In fact I'd already remembered that the first Great Dane that David and I both fell in love with was Verity's some 25 years ago. He was called Arthur after Arthur Daley and he was just adorable. Now we have our own Great Dane, a daily (Daley?) reminder of Verity in our lives. At Golders Green, Alan Davies told a lovely story about Arthur (I think V had a succession of Danes called Arthur) and another about a Jack Russell who was supposed to savage Jonathan Creek and who simply refused until V stormed onto the set and the Jack Russell immediately knew, as Davies put it, "whose pack he wanted to join".

The most moving tribute was given last by Dame Eileen Atkins. She also told us that V had originally wanted the filing-out music played as we all passed the coffin to be ‘My Way’ on a 30-minute loop. Thankfully, she'd been persuaded that this was a terrible idea so she elected instead to have a piece of music that would make her feel that we all embraced her: it took us a moment to recognize because there was an unfamiliar twiddly bit of introduction but then it was unmistakably the theme tune to The Archers to which, we'd learned, V was devoted. After that came the Dr Who theme (her first hit) and then all her other theme tunes.

Later at The Groucho I caught up with some old friends I hadn't seen for years and managed to avoid several more I didn't need to be reacquainted with. The trouble was that there was so little finger food – and it was an hour appearing – and, as we'd been standing at the crematorium from 12.00 until 2.00, and then made our way into town, I for one was ravenous so I finally fled in search of sustenance. Verity certainly wouldn't have approved of that. She always kept a full table.

What struck me forcibly was that, while almost all of these people were in their 50s, 60s, 70s and indeed 80s, hardly any of them had had an on-screen credit in years. The best they can do now is lecture and teach on some fantasy-orientated “media course”. Of course they all talked of “projects in development”, the purgatory through which programme-makers have to suffer these days before they are consigned to the flames of damnation. Yet here was the cream of British television drama of the last 50 years. Apart from the mysteriously all-licensed Stephen Poliakoff (who wasn’t there; his sponsors in television are people who know almost nothing of drama), there are no questers after originality in teledrama any more. When any of these people puts up an idea, they get no special hearing because none of the commissioners has any knowledge of anything broadcast earlier than last Easter.

But of course nobody in any field wants experience, coherence or cogently argued points of view. I wrote the following letter to The Guardian at the weekend:

Dear Sir,

I am often asked why I no longer write letters to The Guardian. Would you be kind enough to publish this explanation: I indeed still do write to The Guardian with my accustomed alacrity but my efforts are no longer favoured to the extent that they were favoured by the present letters editor's predecessors, as may be gleaned from the new edition of the collected letters to the paper.

Yours faithfully

W Stephen Gilbert

Needless to add that they haven’t published it.

LET MISS GIBBONS GO OR THE BEAR GETS IT

The urgent need for all courageous and determined people to band together and rid the world of the scourge of religion has been heavily underlined this week. If you have yet to hear of it, here is the grotesque situation: a 54 year-old teacher from Liverpool, Gillian Gibbons by name, volunteered out of the goodness of her heart to teach in a primary school in Khartoum, Sudan. The school was founded a century ago, when The Sudan (as it was apt to be called then) was a condominium jointly administered by Egypt and Britain. Its catchment is comparatively wealthy but I dare say a British teacher is still an asset and the school and its pupils can consider themselves lucky to have her.

One of the children brought a teddy bear to class and Miss Gibbons suggested that the children might like to think of a name for the toy. With a commendable – if perhaps unwarranted – regard for democracy, the teacher accepted the children’s choice of a name. It was Muhammad. There are two things to note about this moniker. First, it is the name of the prophet of Islam. Second, it is commonly given to Muslim boys or assumed by Muslim men (the world famous boxer Cassius Clay converted to Islam and renamed himself Muhammad Ali).

Now accounts diverge. Some say fellow teachers raised objection, others that parents protested to the school authorities. What is not in doubt is that offence was taken, the prophet had been “insulted” and Miss Gibbons was detained by the authorities and held in jail where, at the time of writing, she waits to discover her fate. She may be released in the unlikely event that common sense prevails or if the British embassy makes a sufficiently cogent case. Or she may be incarcerated for up to six months. Or she may be assaulted by forty lashes. Here we see the full wisdom, might, compassion and (above all) righteousness of Sharia Law in action. And – hoorah for the thoughtful pastoral care of the little children – the school has been closed down until next year. Everyone’s a winner, baby!

You might wonder, as I do, about Islam’s confidence in its own prophet if he can be “insulted” by a harmless teddy bear being given his name. Isn’t he just a bit bigger than that? Just a touch more untouchable? Doesn’t this touchiness on the part of his advocates make him seem something of a wuss?

Fundamentalist Muslims think nothing of threatening to kill infidels and anyone else to whom they take a gratuitous dislike. The charmingly preferred method is beheading, a suitably medieval method. We infidels might find such menaces a bit offensive. What about our sensibilities? For my part, apart from being scorned as an infidel, I am condemned as a homosexual. There isn’t any religion in the world that respects me, yet I am expected – indeed obliged by law – to respect them. The miserable, hypocritical bastards.

Who are these Imams who make their self-important, posturing, anti-human, po-faced pronouncements? It’s a teddy bear, for Pete’s sake. Grow up. And what about the seven year-olds who decided to call the teddy bear Muhammad? Are they to be flogged? Or their parents who didn’t teach them any better? Or their religious instructors who didn’t teach them any better – more at fault, surely, than a foreign non-Muslim teacher of secular subjects. And what about the prophet’s name being given to mere mortal boys? Doesn’t this insult the prophet? If a boy called Muhammad turns out to be laggardly in his studies of the Qur’an or parsimonious in the payment of zakat or progressive in the licence he gives to his wife or a butterfingers in goal, does he not dishonour the prophet more than a boy named Muhafiz or Mujaddid or Muharrem? Isn’t his name (to coin a phrase) a cross to bear?

Whatever the fate that awaits Gillian Gibbons, I hope that, when she’s safely back in Liverpool, she will have the gumption to take the Sudanese government before the International Court of Human Rights. I hope that the United Nations will have the gumption to take an effective stand on the issue. Most of all, I hope that others, apart from me and Professor Dawkins, will stick their heads above the parapet, even if the result is that those heads are swiftly separated from their bodies. And anyway, Muhammad: it’s a crap name, isn’t it?

A FINE SAVE

Wild claims are swilling around that the four national football teams’ wholly predictable failure to qualify for the next “major” international tournament will cost the United Kingdom anything up to £2 billion in lost revenue. What utter drivel.

In the first place, the drunks who follow these teams to their matches (the so-called “fans”) will be purchasing their liquor at home instead of in some hitherto blameless European town. The amount of alcohol needed to sing as badly as these “fans” do is obviously prodigious, so already the home economy is quids in.

Much of the estimated loss is accounted for by pub sales: apparently thousands of people take themselves off to public houses to watch these football matches. Why they would want to stand for the duration on a carpet that is sticking to their footwear, barely able to see the screen of the pub’s television or hear anything above the hubbub beats me, but then I rarely go to pubs, even for a quiet half. Is this the legendary “atmosphere”? You can so keep it. Anyway, the only “atmosphere” really worth savouring would be at the ground where the match is being played. Even I can understand that.

What is certain is that this combination of drink and football, frequently at a point in the day far from the mid-evening because of the time difference between the venue and the viewer, is responsible for a vast amount of absenteeism, both during the match and thereafter. Assuredly, many (perhaps most) employers and supervisors take a liberal view of such lax practices at work – after all, they will be drunk and shouting along with the rest. It would be instructive to determine how many workers who have no interest in football and who hence stay back and toil diligently during the long hours of euphoria and/or self-pity and subsequent recovery are allowed comparable time off of their own choosing, to attend an opera at Glyndebourne or an exhibition at Tate Modern, for instance, or just to kick back.

But my larger point is that this mass absenteeism must also go into the calculation of lost revenue. It would be fascinating to have an authoritative and persuasive estimate of the revenue that would be lost to the nation if it ever happened again that one of the national football teams got within a match of actually winning one of these oh-so-important trophies. Perhaps, like the 1966 World Cup final, it would take place on a Saturday, thereby considerably diminishing the impact on absenteeism (Sunday for millions is a day of rest, i.e. sleeping it off). This would not be the case, however, if a British team were to reach a final played in, for instance, Israel.

Apart from absenteeism (surely the biggest single cost of national success or near-success at football), there would be many smaller hidden costs: police and bar-staff overtime; the repair of damage caused by drunks; the comparative losses sustained by all manner of enterprises that would have enjoyed a regular day’s business but which will have lost takings because so many customers are detained elsewhere; the immediate pressure on the health service caused by exploding bladders and other binge-drinking damage and the long-term pressure on the health and other public services caused by the hastening of the effects (physical, mental, social) of alcoholism – all these should be factored in.

Finally, there is the unquantifiable cost of the embarrassing behaviour that premature celebration engenders. At the outset of the knockout stage of the last World Cup, Radio Times published a graphic of Beckham and his team-mates holding aloft the Jules Rimet trophy that they were to get nowhere near winning in practice. Such infantile hubris erodes still further the dwindling, vestigial regard in which Radio Times is held by those who remember a time when it had some status (not since the 1970s). Put into the calculation, then, the declining market value of Radio Times.

After the qualifying match wherein Israel’s team (vainly) eased the pressure on England with an unexpected win, the still callow Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, who was in Telaviv, appeared before news cameras to “thank” Israel’s foreign minister on behalf of “all Englishmen”. It was hard to gauge what was most embarrassing, the assumption that “all” Englishmen are as soft-brained as Miliband evidently is, the assumption that only men are interested in football or the assumption that anyone in Israel or anywhere else in the world gives a flying fuck about England’s bloody football team. So Miliband’s stock in the next-leader race declines and the bookies notice a falling off. At any rate, the Israeli foreign minister’s face seemed to suggest so; and who can blame her?

SECURE in the KNOWLEDGE THAT the KNOWLEDGE is SECURE

My principal objection to ID cards has always been that, while of course I accept that the present government will not sell or release the data that has been collected about me, I have no confidence that future governments will not see this data as a useful source of revenue. Indeed, if this country ever elects a prime minister comparable to, for instance, Robert Mugabe, the ID data bank will be of great use to him in establishing absolute power and suppressing democrats.

But the absurd security breach at HM Revenue and Customs, whereby discs containing bank and tax details of some 25 million people have been mislaid, adds a further dimension to my objection. Along with the possibility of greed and expediency, breath-taking incompetence must form the basis for a strong objection to allowing the authorities access to my private information.

At least this glitch is out in the open. You could understand a government seeking to bury such bad news as this. In the Commons, Chancellor Alistair Darling and the PM appear to have made a clean breast of it on successive days. The Tories are presently stopping short of demanding any ministers’ heads on platters, perhaps mindful that no future Tory minister is going to be able to invigilate every civil servant’s daily caseload. If HMRC and other departments make a concerted effort to blame staff cutbacks and/or government targets and other methodologies on ministerial fiats, Gordon Brown himself, after ten long years as Chancellor, will inevitably come into the frame. Government managers must be braced for this crisis to get worse before it gets better.

Over the next few days, Darling will be praying that another wave of panic among customers does not sweep through the already jittery banking market. On the other hand, customers are entitled to be sceptical. Only because of this much more serious security breach have I learned that records went missing as long ago as September from a finance company with which I have an arrangement. The company has not seen fit to alert me of this breach. ‘Caveat emptor’ cannot be allowed to apply when the data holder has failed to protect its customers’ confidence.

We need a clear statutory obligation on all data collectors wholly and in perpetuity to protect the security of that data, on pain of a fixed and punitive scale of compensation to anyone whose data has been accessed by an unauthorised party, whatever the outcome of that access. It’s not good enough for HMRC blithely to advise all those parents who have received child benefit – the sector of society directly affected by the security breach – that any passwords they have used that reflect their child’s name or date of birth should be changed. As a basic security precaution, such advice should have been given when the parent first registered for child benefit. Putting out a public statement now that may be heard by those who happen to watch or listen to the news or read the more public-spirited newspapers is not going to reach all the recipients of child benefit.

Whenever some sudden crisis engulfs an administration, the best tactic is to ensure that ministers do nothing to exacerbate an already regrettable situation. Tested thoroughly by a succession of unlooked-for events in the first weeks of his premiership, Gordon Brown won great credit for establishing his authoritative grip and being steady under fire. He will need to invoke that heady honeymoon period if his government is not to be stuck with a lingering appearance of incompetence, especially if that incompetence can be characterised as a failure to implement its own measures.

A WISE FATHER KNOWS HIS OWN CHILD

The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill is passing through the House of Lords. Among its provisions is one that grants the full legality of parenthood to both partners of a relationship that generates a child by IVF treatment. Needless to say, that fiercest of lobbies, the sanctity-of-marriage brigade, is back up on its high horse. A lesbian couple, they shriek, will be able to co-parent without benefit of a father figure.

The reigning father figure of the Catholic church in Britain, Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, leads the charge. His letter to The Times on Monday raised a number of disputed areas upon which the bill touches, but none is more clearly in his sights than the family that does not conform to scriptural teaching or rather (to be scrupulous about it, given the lousy deal that women receive throughout The Bible) to contemporary theology. The Cardinal is most famous, of course, for his history of giving succour to pederast priests who operated in his see when he was a mere bishop. Despite being an unmarried virgin, he reckons to know more about the morality of parenthood than anyone else in Britain. We should listen to him carefully, though only because he wields power and influence out of all proportion to his experience of parenthood and family life.

On Monday’s World at One on Radio 4, M-O’C declared that “children need a known father and this bill seems to me to be saying that children don’t need a known father and I oppose – I think the majority of people in this country oppose – the deliberate creation of a situation where there’s no father”. Later, he said: “It’s not just about rights, about legislation even, it’s about the fundamental understanding of our country about marriage”.

A number of elements are at work here. The religious lobby – particularly in the United States – has been squaring up for a long time to grow a movement that aims to overthrow the legislature by irresistible force or to seize power by electoral means and control the legislature or (the least preferable option for them but the most likely to occur) to begin a campaign of civil disobedience. You see a nod to that development in the Cardinal’s sly downgrading of rights and legislation.

Meanwhile, the fear among the religious that the church’s control of the notion of family has been seriously weakened since World War II has persuaded even moderate church-goers to start to sound more fundamentalist on the differing family models that now obtain, even in religiously influenced nations like the States. Marriage and family have become interchangeable concepts for these people since co-habiting (as opposed to “living in sin”) became widely accepted and civil partnerships between same-sex couples were enshrined in law. M-O’C and his kind desperately wish to turn the clock back. Preferably a couple of thousand years.

I want to ask the Cardinal: “which is more desirable: for a child to have a quelled mother who works in vain to bring in money and a wastrel father who fritters the money away on drink and/or drugs and abuses (mentally, physically or both, take your pick) both the mother and the child; or for a child to have two loving, well-adjusted mothers?” It’s what is now called “a no-brainer”, isn’t it?

It is odd that Catholics prelates, who themselves foreswear conventional family life, fight so hard to uphold the conventional family model. Today, Elizabeth Windsor and her Greek husband mark 60 years of supposed wedded bliss. There is no need for me to air any of the rumours, some of them going back almost 60 years, of the Duke’s many and sustained infidelities. Conceivably they are all groundless. Your guess is at least as good as mine.

But the royal couple, whose durable arrangement was celebrated in the Abbey on Monday, head a family considerably more dysfunctional than the families of many of her subjects (and probably most of her church-going subjects). The Queen’s late sister and three of her four children went through the divorce courts. To the generation of Her Majesty’s mother, such a thing would have been unthinkable. After all, her own brother-in-law was obliged to abdicate because he insisted on marrying a divorcee.

To Catholics of the generation of Murphy-O’Connor’s parents, divorce was simply not permitted. Yet you don’t hear this leader of British Catholics condemning the royal divorcees. Perhaps the simple truth is that unnamed lesbian couples make a safer target.

TAKING DICTATION, MISS RICE?

The present crisis in Pakistan is far more dangerous for global stability than the now-forgotten crisis a few weeks ago in Burma/Myanmar. Western governments will, in my estimation, come to rue their failure to react immediately and decisively. Announcing that they "may" have to “review” their aid to the Musharraf regime is pusillanimous and evasive.

Pervez Musharraf has taken draconian powers, putting the whole superstructure of the justice system, the opposition parties and the independent media under house arrest or worse, casting aside any undertaking to hold free elections and to divest the government of its military cloak. His prime minister, Shaukat Aziz, announced that these powers were “to ensure the writ of the government”. If the writ of the government can only be ensured by the suspension of civil rights, then it is not the government’s writ that runs but the government’s oppression.

At a stroke, General Musharraf has transformed himself from a benevolent despot who was inching towards free elections into an old-fashioned dictator. The west will rationalize its continuing (if now more conditional) support by claiming that Pakistan remains withal a key bulwark against the Islamic fundamentalism that expresses itself in terrorism. This is a false reading. Musharraf’s state of emergency is the best news that either al-Qaida or the Taliban have heard from Pakistan in years. It is the most effective recruiting sergeant that those organizations could have dared hope for and any possibility of characterizing the west as a continuing ally of a man who is now seen to be a ruthless dictator will be seized upon as more evidence of the west’s infidel credentials.

This is where Condoleeza Rice can play a role that transforms her from one of the least effective Secretaries of State since World War II to one who really makes a difference. I doubt that Gordon Brown can do this because he has no clout with the Bush regime. Rice does. She needs to square up to Bush (with Cheney safely shut out of the oval office) and make it clear to him that all his prating about loving democracy and freedom means diddly-shit if he doesn’t pull on his cowboy boots and ride into the east to save Pakistani democracy and freedom from the world’s latest absolute ruler. Washington needs to make it crystal clear to Islamabad that the state of emergency is to be suspended forthwith or Pakistan will no longer be supported politically, financially, economically, militarily or diplomatically. The US embassy will be closed, the UN security council will be summoned to declare Pakistan a pariah nation and – yes, it may come to this – American troops are standing by and ready to invade Pakistan and remove Musharraf (“the General” as Bush famously called him in a pre-presidential interview when he had no idea of the leader’s name or, come to that, the whereabouts of his nation) from power. And Rice needs to do this today. Every hour of delay is an hour closer to an unprecedentedly horrific outrage against western individuals and interests in the name of revenge upon our perceived support for Musharraf.

WEARING YOUR HEART on YOUR LAPEL

It’s poppy time again. Spot the parliamentarian, business executive or home-based television presenter, especially in news and current affairs, who isn’t already wearing the symbol of the fallen soldier in his lapel or on her blouse. Oh, right, there isn’t one. And now that Mr Blair is out of the spotlight, who was the first public figure to be spotted poppying this year? Oh, I think it was the Wootton Bassett council spokesman talking to reporters about the local people who drowned off the Portuguese coast when their children (subsequently saved) got into difficulties. Gordon Brown was a day or two later.

They’re all wrong of course, as is anyone sporting a poppy before Friday. The poppy’s run should be from All Souls’ Day (November 2nd) until Remembrance Sunday (which this year happens to fall on the 11th). Proper people who respect tradition know that and keep to it. I’ll bet Her Majesty didn’t wear a poppy to Matins yesterday, nor any of the royal household. Politicians of course have their electorate to impress and it’s a rash backbencher who doesn’t grab a poppy at the earliest opportunity (one Labour chap was the other day accused of saving his emblem from last year so that he could be first in the House). Braver still would be the (as yet unseen) MP who forswears the poppy or – worse yet, though widely misunderstood – counters with a white poppy. The Women’s Cooperative Guild devised the white poppy in the 1930s to memorialise the non-combatants who died in the First World War and to stand as a symbol of peace. Red poppyists are apt to blackguard the white poppy as a symbol of cowardice, appeasement, pacificism and every other unspeakable sin attributable to commies, lefties and subversives. Harrumph. It’s academic anyway. Where could you buy one?

You don’t see many poppy-wearers in the street these days because, quite frankly, you don’t see many poppy-sellers in the street. No doubt if you popped into a branch of the British Legion, you’d be able to pick one up. In my childhood, as October turned to November, there’d be a poppy-seller on every street corner, vying with the penny-for-the-guy kids, but both figures have melted away. Bonfire Night, Firework Night or Guy Fawkes Night (as November 5th was variously known) has been displaced by Halloween, an American device imperfectly grasped by British children. Those who fought in the Second World War are too old to stand on draughty street corners and their children and grandchildren aren’t interested in Remembrance. So wearing the poppy has become a phenomenon that you see on television, something public figures do.

The BBC always protests that poppy-wearing is voluntary among newsreaders, weather forecasters and other studio-visiting pundits but it seems most unlikely that anybody fronting for the Beeb who declined to pin on the symbol would hold onto their job for long. Some pretext would be found for the change but it would be for defying what is clearly an unwritten house rule. The BBC regards the poppy as politically neutral, which of course it isn’t. No reporter or presenter would be allowed to wear a breast cancer ribbon or a gay pride badge. These symbols would be thought to compromise the BBC’s neutrality. But the BBC is not neutral about national remembrance.

I have several objections to the poppy. First, I dislike ostentatious displays of charitable donation. I think a sandwich board that shouts “I gave” is vulgar and self-serving and that is what the poppy is, even if BBC people or MPs are “issued” with poppies without any actual donation being made. The fact that I don’t wear a poppy doesn’t mean that I don’t make a donation to the British Legion. You don’t need to know whether I do or not. It’s my business.

Second, I don’t see why one has to conform to someone else’s timetable. When I was a student, I bought a poppy in November, put it away and then got it out again and wore it in April. I told those who enquired that if the fallen were worth remembering in November, they were just as worth remembering in April. People got surprisingly cross. They thought I was taking the piss. Perhaps I was, I don’t remember. Mostly, I think I was making a valid point.

Thirdly, there isn’t just a poppy. There’s a single poppy, a poppy with leaf trim, a poppy with double leaf trim, a double poppy with double leaf trim and, doubtless, a poppy corsage. This brings in an element of competition, particularly among MPs, over who appears more generous or supportive or ingratiating or pretentious. So the poppy is not an affectless gesture, a simple show of respect, as BBC managers would have us believe. It is a surprisingly complex symbol of establishmentarianism. It identifies the wearers as part of a tribe, the tribe that, had it been of age then, would have been proud to join up and fight the Kaiser and the Hun or the Führer and the Nazis, even without all the benefits that hindsight brings.

If it weren’t for the fact that all factions of the Commons sports the poppy, from the unreconstructed Thatcherites and Paisleyites to those Liberal Democrats who opposed the invasion of Iraq even before it happened, we could accuse MPs of, in their own quaint expression, “playing politics” with the war dead. As it is, we are faced with a solid wall of convention, the poppy-wearing class. It is odd that such a tiny proportion of the general public now identifies with that class by the most direct and simple means, themselves wearing a poppy. Perhaps there are the beginnings here of a genuine, popular, anti-establishment movement.

NICE GUYS FINISH LASTING WORK

“For when the One Great Scorer comes/To write against your name,/He marks – not that you won or lost,/But – how you played the game” (Grantland Rice, Alumnus Football).

I cannot but wonder why anyone follows – let alone pursues – sport. Save for a very, very few practitioners and punters, sport means recurrent disappointment or (in media histrionics) heartbreak, tears, tragedy, a shattered dream, the end of the world, etc. Even for Tiger Woods, even for Roger Federer, there is occasional “defeat” to weather along with the regular “victories” to be savoured. Dominating sportsmen like these inevitably begin to aim higher and then, if they do not manage to surpass some ancient record of achievement, they feel obscurely that they too have failed. Oh please. Take up gardening.

This weekend, apparently, Christine Hamilton (whose talent I have evidently underestimated) failed at the last to win some driving contest, having led the race all season. (I hadn’t known one race could go on so long). I guess she’s still a shoo-in for BBC Sports Personality of the Year, a title that I have always thought to be the most extreme contradiction of the multimedia age. Good grief, it’s been won in the past by a woman wholly devoid of personality, Princess Anne’s numbskull daughter, who proudly boasts that she’s never picked up a book in her life. (Sports Bore of the Year would be a much more close-run contest).

Before Christine’s shame, some bunch of rugger buggers was seen off in Paris by a team from a nation that surely needed the psychological boost of victory more than England did. I read that the English players had been so written off at the contest’s outset that, had they won, many bookmakers would have been bankrupted (aha, one tangible reason to have wished the English team good fortune). To have done as well as they did was apparently a remarkable achievement and “they can hold their heads up high” unless, like me, you think they should have grown out of such a schoolboy activity long ago. (I saw the English rugby captain on a news bulletin. He sports one of those so-called cauliflower ears that boxers always had in the comics of my childhood. Not attractive).

To pursue or follow any sport is to elect to spend almost all of your time sunk in dismay. After all, “there can only be one winner” (sport is of course rife with cliché). This means that trailing behind the winner is a crowded field of losers and also-rans, all of them disheartened, self-disgusted or proclaiming forlornly “we wuz robbed”. Most of them anyway are on steroids and other performance-enhancing (i.e. cheating) drugs. Why would any sentient human being want to subject his leisure hours – or worse, his (inevitably short-lived) career – to recurrent frustration?

I suppose the only comparable field is politics. J Enoch Powell, a shrewder observer than he was political operator, once declared that “all political careers end in failure” and with very few exceptions he must be deemed right on the money. Most politicians want to get their hands on one or two of the levers of power and, once having done so, begin to fancy their chances in the top job, be it president, prime minister or dictator-for-life. Consequently, almost all of them fail as the number that reaches what is sometimes called “the top of the greasy pole” is of course a vanishingly small proportion of those who think they might like a shot at it. Of those who do get to perform the top job, even fewer leave office with enhanced reputation and the enduring love of the people. There are barely any winners in politics, only better or worse losers.

Sport is not dissimilar. Even those who rise to be champions again and again inevitably continue to compete when their skills are waning and so at last fall to younger, fitter, hungrier contestants who want to become even more famous champions than those they supplant.

The arts offer so much more satisfying a field of endeavour. Of course there are meretricious awards and lists of supposed “greats” so that the media and, to a lesser extent, followers and consumers of the arts can feel that they have tamed the artists by providing a framework of competition and struggle and so a spurious sense of triumph and loss. That shrewd old bird, the Irish playwright Brian Friel, graciously accepting an Olivier award for his magical play Dancing at Lughnasa in 1991, declared to the assembled dignitaries: “Success is merely the postponement of failure”.

But happily the arts are not measured by the mechanistic standards of sport: score lines, worth totted up in points. In art, in self-expression, “success” and “failure” are far more complex and subtle notions than the winning of a tennis game “to love” or a golf match “four and three” or a cricket match “by an innings and 17 runs” or a wrestling bout by "two falls, two submissions or a knockout". Accordingly, books and paintings, movies and musical compositions, verses and dances, plays and programmes have a more lasting and mature relationship with their audiences than a sports event ever can. Of course sports fans mistily recall a George Best dribble, a Len Hutton cover drive, an Arnold Palmer sand chip, a Muhammad Ali upper cut and in such images lies the poetry – all the poetry – of sporting prowess. But who would prefer a whole season of flat racing to a single bar of Bach or a stanza of Shelley? Plenty of people, you reply, and I counter: “but they’re all STUPID people”.

And of course there are far more stupid people than the other kind, so sport is perceived to be more popular and newsworthy than the arts and therefore Doris Lessing, Nobel literature laureate (not in competition with anybody for that award), gets considerably less media coverage than the aforementioned Christine Hamilton. It seems to me, however, that Lessing brings far more credit to this country for the recognition of her extensive body of work over many years than does the failure of various journeymen in the objectively judged struggles of this week's sporting event. No motorcade to Trafalgar Square for Lessing. No special stamp issue. I hope there was a message from the Queen and a statement by the Prime Minister but I heard tell of neither. Lessing at least has this consolation: if there are humans still extant a hundred years from now, her work will still be read when all trace of Johnny Wilkinson – is that his name? – is forgotten.

SCHWANENGESANG of DEAR LEADER?

Five minutes ago, David Cameron’s position as leader of the Conservative Party was under some pressure. Now Gordon Brown’s in the Labour Party is reportedly being questioned by so-called Blairites (I suppose we should be calling them counter-counter-revisionists). And always, always, the press is out for the head of Sir Menzies Campbell served up on a silver charger.

I am not a Liberal Democrat. I was never a Liberal when the party was called The Liberal Party and I wasn’t a supporter of the short-lived breakaway from the Labour Party that called itself The Social Democratic Party and that went on to merge with the Liberals to form the present Liberal Democrats. The critics of Sir Ming who have actually put their heads over the parapet – apart from the ever perverse Simon Hughes – are former Social Democrats like William Rodgers who, in his dotage as Lord Rodgers, has come facially to evoke Ken Dodd, a resemblance that doesn’t assist his (never very deep) credibility.

I voted Liberal Democrat in the general elections of 2001 and 2005, however. As I have written before, there were particular reasons in 2001 to vote against the Blair government and against its representative who was our MP at the time. By 2005, we were domiciled in a constituency that is represented by a Conservative – one who has become personally controversial since the last election and who certainly will lose some of his base when the next election comes – but that is never going to elect a Labour MP. The best hope of unseating the sitting tenant is to vote Lib Dem which is what I did last time and, no doubt, what I shall do next time. Ideology tempered by practicality seems to me the most civically responsible as well as the most efficacious spirit in which to cast one’s ballot. In any case, I feel I can vote Lib Dem in good conscious as a democratic socialist. On almost every issue in recent years, the Lib Dems have been well to the left of New Labour. Come to that, so has David Cameron. If you had told Nye Bevan that there would one day be a Labour government that was actually the most right wing grouping in the Commons, he would have said … well, he would probably have said “I wouldn’t be a bit surprised, boyo, but don’t ask me to support it”.

How should Ming Campbell deal with the continuous undermining of his leadership in the media? It is, as I have observed before, a measure of how shallow and trivial the media has become but, as Orson Welles used to declare, it’s no good moaning about the unfairness of the system, you have to play the hand you’re dealt.

I think, if I were Sir Ming, I would make a speech specifically aimed at his own party. I should make the point I just made, that the media is crap but you have to get used to it. I should add, however, that the most pernicious collaborator in this crap is the MP who gives off-the-record briefings. It may be – indeed, in these base and unprincipled times, it is a certainty – that political correspondents are often making it up when they claim that they have been told “privately” that this or that is happening or should happen. Because it’s an unattributed claim, it can’t be verified or tested. How convenient. On the other hand, Westminster is a seething nest of gossip and speculation and it would be unthinkable that all backbenchers – or even ministers and shadow ministers – could resist the temptation to spread some occasional mischief and thereby imagine that they are influencing events in a way that their official status does not permit.

Campbell should point out that the opinion polls, taken between elections when attention on third parties is characteristically confined to reports of supposed trouble, do not reflect the support the party actually wins in by-elections at either parliamentary or council level. He should denounce anyone who briefs anonymously, calling them cowards and fools who are undermining not just his leadership but the credibility of and prospects for the whole party, and propose that they should make their comments openly or hold their tongues or stand down and resign the whip. He should further note that the pot-stirrers who conduct a whispering campaign (if there actually are any such) make a number of rash assumptions: that he, Ming, will voluntarily step aside; that the gossip in Westminster and Fleet Street accurately reflects sentiment among the party’s grassroots and indeed among the wider electorate; that a change of leadership, either by his stepping down or by some kind of coup, will automatically improve the party’s standing; that any likely successor has sufficient recognition among the public to raise the party’s profile, the named candidates being obscure and not exactly charismatic (he could well risk such a jibe); that a leadership election will not precipitate a policy argument, even an ideological struggle; that a week in politics is not a long time. Ming could say that he doesn’t know, any more than anyone does, whether any of those assumptions is correct, save for the first and last. And he can tell them the answer to the first one: he isn’t going to step down.

Politics is a tough trade. Public opinion is volatile and shallow: if the England rugby players win whatever the tournament is that is presently going on and, shortly thereafter, the England football players qualify (or whatever it is they have to do) to play in whatever the next big thing is in their sport, the resultant euphoria among volatile and shallow people might boost Gordon Brown’s standing back to its summer level. That in turn might make Ming look stronger in contrast to Cameron. Stranger things have happened. An MP could die, precipitating a by-election at which the Lib Dems do much better than their opinion poll rating suggests. That would ease the pressure on Sir Ming, at least for a while. A week is still a long time in politics.

SMALL EARTHQUAKE in WESTMINSTER – NOT MANY DEAD

As sensible people expected, there will be no general election in 2007. It may come as a surprise to those who spend their lives turning over stones in Westminster but I can confidently inform them that the vast majority of people who do not go picking through the entrails of “sources” did not give a rat’s arse whether the Prime Minister called a “snap” election or not. Only journos, backbenchers, political wonks and men with very small willies worried their silly little heads about this matter.

Unfortunately that same cast of ne’er-do-wells has a disproportionate influence on what the chattering classes chatter about and what is imagined by those chattering classes to be News (with a capital ‘N’). Consequently, the last three weeks – what is known in the trade as “the conference season” – have been hijacked by endless, empty speculation about The Election That Never Was.

The claim that this was all an exercise in what politicians like to call, in their lofty way, “playing politics” would have some merit if the media didn’t so energetically and obediently pick up the ball and run with it repeatedly to the same corner of the field. Thus every news bulletin during the Liberal Democrats’ conference focussed on whether the party might dump Sir Menzies Campbell and every bulletin during the successive Labour and Tory conferences was concerned primarily with whether there would be an election on an imminent date, gradually narrowing to November 1st. Consequently, it was something of a triumph on the Tories’ part – and one rapidly reflected in the way-too-influential public opinion soundings – that within the hubbub they managed to get heard the notion that they would slash inheritance tax if elected.

A most revealing account of this media madness was offered on the Radio 4 programme Feedback yesterday by the producer in charge of BBC Radio’s coverage of the conferences – though, as his name was given as Jamie Donald, he sounded more likely to have been in charge of entertaining the tots in the conference crèches. Jimjams, as I think of him, was quizzed well and persistently by Roger Bolton (who happily is not credited as Rog) and his answers (with my annotations) to the extensive grumbles conveyed from Feedback listeners who, like me, wanted some substance and less froth in the news from the conference halls are worth quoting at length:

“It may well be that the listeners and viewers aren’t looking at the totality of what the BBC offers …” (oh, right, so it’s our own fault then, we shouldn’t expect, say, The News to tell us the news, we need to distil the news from a 24-hour watch on the whole output, bearing in mind that Farming Today, The Archers and The Most Annoying TV Moments might all be germane) “… I do accept that as part of our coverage we have looked in detail at issues like the election, the presentation, the branding and the leadership …” (well, excuse me but “the election” wasn’t an actual issue because no election had been called, so it was merely a subject of gossip. As for “the presentation, the branding”, did you know that these were “issues” because I certainly didn’t? Does Jimjams come from a career in Marketing by any chance?)

On the subject of news bulletins, Jimjams got himself into something of a pickle “… you have to remember that they have 15/20 minutes to cover the world … When you’ve got crises like Northern Rock, Burma and other things going on, are you seriously saying that they should chuck out international and major national stories to cover policy in detail when other parts of the BBC … are covering that policy in detail? …” (No, but we are saying that repetitive and pointless speculation about Ming’s chances of survival and Gordon’s election strategy is even less appropriate and more time-wasting on the news than detailed policy discussion. In any case, nobody expects the bulletins to “cover the world” and if we did we’d be sorely disappointed),

“An election is one of the most important moments in our political life. This idea that we might have an election has burst upon us over the last two or three weeks. It’s a time when the entire country needs to be mobilised to understand that this is the high point of our democratic system. If it turns out on Monday that’s what the country will have to do, our last three weeks will be extremely well spent”.

This, in its turn, is the high point of Jimjams’ delusion so I propose to look at it in some detail. As it turned out, we didn’t even get to Monday before we knew that that was not what the country would have to do, so Jimjams’ messianic fervour was not only misplaced but misplaced by a whole weekend. In the absence of an election, does he still think that the BBC’s last three weeks were well spent? What is he planning to do to prevent the country’s excited state of mobilisation – orchestrated (he would claim) by the BBC’s news coverage – turning into the kind of behaviour that occasions the mass issuing of ASBOs? Does he really think that we are so stupid, so overawed by the so much more significant doings of Paris Hilton, Amy Winehouse, Britney Spears, Jade Goody, the Beckhams and the rest of the sideshow freaks that we don’t understand what an election means? And how does it get to be the job of BBC News to remind us? Just give us the facts, ma’am, we’ll interpret them for ourselves. Moreover, this idea “bursting” over us: wasn’t it the BBC and the other news media that pricked the balloon that unleashed the fine spray of blather over us all the last two or three weeks?

Jimjams now returns to the Lib Dem conference, seeming so long ago already (do remember, as Gordon Brown certainly does this weekend, the truest thing – perhaps the only wholly true thing – that Harold Wilson ever said: “a week is a long time in politics”): “Ming Campbell’s age isn’t the issue but to suggest for example that there wasn’t a great deal of discussion behind the scenes, that members of his party weren’t discussing among themselves and briefing journalists privately about the issue of the leadership would be to misunderstand the nature of that conference. We have a duty to report both what the parties want us to and what’s really going on there …”

This raises the matter of “private briefing”, a source of great irritation to viewers of and listeners to news bulletins, whether the news editors like it or not. Phrases like “sources indicate”, “a frontbencher let it be known to the BBC privately” and “off-the-record, I was told that” make the viewer feel excluded from some masonic process and, more significantly, undermine everything that is said publicly and for attributable consumption. Moreover, while the correspondents doubtless believe themselves to be sophisticates who wholly comprehend “what’s really going on” in the Machiavellian game of power politics, you do wonder about the motives of anyone in the political battle who briefs anonymously. How can the correspondent be sure he himself is not being played for a sucker? It’s incredibly likely that, if a cabinet minister or shadow spokesperson lowered his voice and told you, out of the corner of his mouth, that “I shouldn’t be telling you this and it must never be known that it came from me but …”, you’d feel a tad flattered and “important” and you’d want to share with your viewers this conviction that you’re at the cutting edge. Indeed, you’d need to be a very canny old hack indeed to put it through your internal shit-detector and come up with the foolproof conclusion that your secret-teller is just using you as a conduit through which to fly a kite. That of course is what most of the unattributable stuff is surely about, however.

What’s more, the story is changed by the reporters themselves as the days roll by. I saw the snatch of interview on the news with Chris Huhne, the Liberal Democrat MP who is unsurprisingly spoken of as potentially the next leader of his party – after all, he did stand for the leadership last time when Ming Campbell won it. Huhne was asked about his present intentions and answered, reasonably and straightforwardly enough, that it was “premature” to talk in such terms. There was no reason to believe that he had heard Nick Clegg, another MP spoken of as a potential leader, answer to a similar question – in an equally reasonable and straightforward way, if differently but why would it be a significant difference? – that he would indeed stand “if there was a vacancy”.

This innocent, straight-bat stuff is parlayed in today’s Daily Telegraph into “a thinly-veiled swipe at Mr Clegg” on the part of Mr Huhne. Until the day comes when MPs answer every media question with the formula “no comment” – and it would go hard against the grain for a profession that lives to talk at length – it will be an unusually twinkled-toed politician who can ensure that no passing remark he makes is ever left unexamined for resonance, subtext, insincerity and spin or, if free of all four, is not then misreported by some enemy newspaper or, unlike the Queen’s invented huff with Annie Leibovitz, not moved to some timeframe that makes it seem rather more hurtful than it naturally is.

Insofar as Gordon Brown’s team was, as many reporters indicate, slipping out nods and winks; insofar as there was tangible evidence of the option of a November election being kept open (the government let it be known that certain hirings and arrangements were being put in place); and insofar as Brown could have talked more openly about the exercise he was undertaking with his advisors if only his every sinew wasn’t bursting to do David Cameron a piece of no good, the PM could be said to have done himself and his party some harm – probably not lasting harm – over the last weeks. Brown does know what the media’s interest is like and his people clearly do go in for playing trusted reporters off against less trusted editors. By not stamping on the rising tide of hysterical excitement, he has allowed the Tories (in particular among opposition parties) to panic themselves into pulling the party together and settling for the leader that they’ve got rather than some mythical alternative no more capable, in practice, of offering credible opposition to Labour. By electing to wait until 2008 or 2009, Brown has given himself time to build an irresistible electoral juggernaut. Of course, he has given his rivals the same amount of time. If a week is a long time in politics, eighteen months is an aeon.

Meanwhile, we could hardly have hoped for a more eloquent argument for fixed-term parliaments than that provided by this cheesy episode. I would advocate a 54-month term so that general elections alternate between, say, the third Sunday in March and the third Sunday in September four-and-a-half years later. That way, whatever advantages or disadvantages are imagined to lie in the spring are balanced by the counter-arguments concerning the autumn. The earliest Easter Sunday ever falls is March 23rd – it does so next year in fact – and that is the fourth Sunday of the month. The clocks would still be on Greenwich Mean Time but the lengthening of the days is very evident by mid-March. By the third week of September, schools are back but not universities and that might make a difference in college constituencies. But at least knowing the date of the election would allow for the kind of planning – by electoral officers, MPs and voters alike – not now possible.

It is often said that determining the date of the general election is one of the most powerful advantages in a prime minister’s armoury but, as Gordon Brown has found, it needs to be deployed with masterly subtlety, otherwise that power becomes a stick with which your opponents may beat you. He would leave an important legacy if he were to be the premier who changed electoral law and, as Ming Campbell has consistently argued, gives us fixed-term government.

STUDIO PORTRAIT

The most interesting thing on television at present is Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. I’m sure the endgame of The Sopranos on E4 is really the high point of current British transmission but I wasn’t able to tape the first episode of the renewed screenings – it was bizarre of Channel 4 and its satellite channels to break the last series into two chunks – and when I tried to set Sky+ to catch the same-week repeat there was a mysterious block on recording that particular slot on the hard drive. So I let it go. I can wait; I’ll catch it on its C4 screening (in the spring perhaps) and that anyway will be without the disfiguring channel ID in the top left corner of the screen.

Aaron Sorkin’s successor to The West Wing shares that legend’s sensibility. It assumes an unusually literate, educated, liberally-minded and well-informed audience. There are far more allusions in the scripts than on any other programme, often to really quite abstruse matters and people, with a special concentration on British subjects, beginning with Gilbert and Sullivan in the pilot episode.

The milieu of the drama serial is a late-night satire show, televised live across the US from Los Angeles. I worked in and around British television for a quarter of a century, so this of course has a powerful interest for me. There isn’t really much reason to expect it to have wide appeal, however, insofar as viewers on both sides of the Atlantic have never been encouraged by television to take much interest in the background of the medium itself, whereas the behind-camera personalities, industry workings, history and techniques of cinema-making have been meat and drink to television for decades. Accordingly, Studio 60 never did well in the US ratings and seems not to have been inked in for a second series. It picked up five Emmy nominations, an impressive haul, but only won with John Goodman as guest actor.

Studio 60 is, I think, a failure but a most interesting one. Its failings are surprisingly large. By far the least convincing aspect of the show is the show-within-a-show. I know a lot of topical comedy doesn’t travel too well but the glimpses we get of the show that everyone is working on so earnestly are lame in the extreme. I suspect that the writing team – I mean Sorkin’s writing team, not the one depicted in Studio 60 – lacks any old pros from the television comedy game. The young drama-scripting turks, along with Sorkin himself, think they know how to mimic another genre but one of the things television drama gets most wrong is the true smell and feel of non-drama television, whether it’s news, chat shows, game shows or comedy. This is a pity and it undermines Studio 60’s credibility.

The next yawning hole in the show is the lack of a really persuasive or well-realised female character. Amanda Peet is impossibly glamorous and exquisitely clad as the station’s director of programmes. This is not the main reason why she doesn’t begin to convince as a big player in television but it doesn’t help. Sarah Poulson has to try to bring alive a gratingly flaky character as the still-smarting ex of the show’s co-resident genius. This latter is played by top-billed Matthew Perry, not my favourite actor. (One of the reasons I was never attracted to Friends was that, of the six leads, only Lisa Kudrow held any appeal for me).

Another problem is structural. Sorkin clearly made an early and surely a correct decision that he couldn’t have every episode constructed as a filleted week, climaxing with the weekend transmission of the satire show. But he hasn’t found a satisfactory substitute. The episode most recently broadcast here (#9, entitled ‘B-12’ after a virus, the role of which was not at all clear in the plot) suffered badly from what I took to be deliberate continuity shifts back and forth between different days. I say that I took them to be deliberate. More4, which shows Studio 60 here, managed after an ad break to rewind and play a second time several minutes of one segment the other week. It really is time More4 solved its problems in its presentation suite, not least the one that continually mangles its own transmitted sound. That wouldn’t matter if the linkpeople would shut up during the programmes but when they talk over the end credits the music always starts to break up because the sound is now being augmented by the permanent glitch in the presentation suite sound.

Much of Studio 60’s appeal lies in seeing how its inherent problems will be addressed in each episode. Snatches of music by guests, some of them as famous as Sting, seem a little desperate. On the other hand, a running discussion on product placement had me looking for the advertising deals that Sorkin himself has done and one just knew that the fruits of this were being flourished in a spirit of post-modern irony-and-realism mix. In a way, that is the main thing that floors Studio 60. It’s just too self-aware for its own good. Its gestures are there because they’re smart, rather than because they’re germane to story or character. That’s why in the end it’s not as successful as Ugly Betty or Desperate Housewives. But hey, like those invigorating imports, it beats anything home-grown that British television can offer since the end of Green Wing. Unless I am to except The IT Crowd. And I’m not quite sure that I am to …

BOOKS DO FURNISH A ROOM

Having admired her earlier book, Jack, I meant ages ago to buy the novel This Book Will Save Your Life by AM Homes but I neglected to do so. Then I picked up a copy in a branch of Waterstone’s, our local independent bookseller having run through his quota. The copy I bought had in its top right hand corner one of those “3 for the price of 2” stickers: they never have any influence whatsoever on my purchases but Waterstone’s use them to favour books that are already selling well – you’d think it would make more sense to use the ploy on underselling titles. When I got it home, I peeled off the sticker and found beneath it a circular promotion for something called “Richard & Judy”. This was not a sticker but an overprint on the cover.

Upon enquiry, I established that this mysterious couple are a daytime television programme. The presenters are clearly so famous that they don’t need surnames, like Bill and Ben. It (the programme) promotes various books that come its way and, it seems, a mention on the programme can have its effect on sales. This is a deplorable development. In the States, apparently, no book sells any copies at all unless it has been blessed by the Oprah Winfrey programme. At a time when corruption in television is a daily news story, the broadcasters will need to be especially vigilant that the money to be made out of such television exposure is not tempting publishers to attempt to influence the producers of the programme. There might well be a case for suggesting that the use of a book cover to promote Richard & Judy – a piece of reciprocal product placement, if you like – is itself a corrupt practice.

On three separate counts, I did not want to own a copy of this book defaced by this piece of cover advertising. First of all, I am a proper grown-up book reader. I don’t need to be told what to read by the presenters of some daytime television programme. They are not, I take it, professors of semiotics or critics from the intellectually reputable journals. As a rule, I only allow myself to be guided to a hitherto unfamiliar writer by reading a combination of reviews by critics with whose tastes I am already comfortable in the better newspapers and magazines.

Not even friends are necessarily reputable guides when it comes to books. Over many years, one particular friend has strongly recommended just two novels to me. I read one and thought it a piece of derivative twaddle. I have never read the other although it sits pristine on the bookshelves. Quite recently, my friend’s partner revealed that my old friend almost never reads fiction at all. It would be putting it too strongly to suggest that I felt a sort of betrayal on the part of my friend in perhaps only ever having read two novels and then presuming to recommend both of them to me; but I was sorely aggrieved. For myself, I can think of hardly any book that I would commend wholeheartedly to everybody. Just occasionally I will tell a friend about a particular book that I fancy might appeal to her. This is a gambit used very sparingly.

But I digress. My second objection to the publisher’s despoiling of the cover of Ms Homes’ novel concerns the slither down into the murky world of marketing that has been imposed upon literary fiction. These days it’s hard to find a paperback edition of a novel that is not festooned with promotion. Either there is a quote from some such goon as Nick Hornby, Tony Parsons or Stephen Fry on the cover, as if their approbation is any kind of commendation: after all, Fry will be revealing on a television programme tomorrow night that among his pleasures are Countdown, darts and Led Zeppelin. And I am meant to be encouraged by his sensibility? Otherwise we must be assured that the novel in question was “shortlisted for the Booker Prize” or even, dear god, “longlisted for the Booker Prize”. Any day now I expect to pick up a paperback that proclaims it was “overlooked for the Booker Prize”.

Writers who have yet to join Valhalla routinely have their Nobel laureateships emblazoned on the covers of their books: see Coetzee, Grass, Morrison, Saramago, Mahfouz and so on. Happily, the old masters who received the same recognition – Tagore, Kipling, Mann, Mauriac, Steinbeck, Shaw, O’Neill, Sartre and so on – are evidently sufficiently classified as “classics” for their Nobels to be omitted from the marketing.

Finally, I have an aesthetic objection to the promo on the cover of the Homes. Its paperback cover design is a symmetrical arrangement of six doughnuts, quite a cute image. The promo obliterates one of the doughnuts, ruining the look of the book. What is the point of a publisher paying good money for a jacket design if he’s then going to spoil it with trash?

I visited a great many bookshops in the dwindling hope that an overlooked copy of the Homes with an unsullied cover might lurk but bookshops are less musty and disorganised that they used to be, sadly for the customers. Evidently the publisher had recalled the pre-Richard & Judy copies and replaced them.

There was nothing for it but to contact the publisher direct. I emailed the Sales & Marketing Department of Granta. A gentleman called Julio Ferrandis replied, saying that he had “a hard copy of this book sitting on my desk (it’s a new copy!) for you”. Well of course I didn’t want a hardback copy. I could buy one of those at a bookshop and save the postage. What I wanted, as I had explained carefully, was a paperback without the Richard & Judy promo. Had they really pulped all the early editions? It seemed so wasteful. I wrote again, in self-deprecatory terms (“grateful for … your patience with what I am sure you will see as my unnecessary pickiness”). Sr Ferrandis wrote back saying they had no “pb copies without the sticker at the present. What I can send you however is a picture of the pb cover without the sticker! Hehe”. That “hehe” seems calculated to be offensive. I feel disinclined to believe Sr Ferrandis on the lack of copies but I shall not pursue the matter with Granta. I shall look for a decent copy of the book in a second-hand shop.

Even if I eventually find an acceptable copy of the Homes, I shall probably never get to read it. The American novelist Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections, which I have read) once declared that he had calculated his life expectancy, reckoned up how many books he read in an average year and realized that he already, in his mid-30s, owned more books than he could possibly read. I too probably passed that point in my mid-30s but I continue to amass books at a rate that, by true bibliophile standards, is very modest. There is something blissful about the home none of whose internal walls can be seen for the mass covering of bookshelves. We do not go that far, we have pictures too. And a few empty spaces. Oh, and videotapes (thousands of those).

There is a quotation from Cicero on display in one of our guest rooms: “If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need”. I think I might add a kitchen and a means of listening to music but I like his thrust. People sometimes find a display of books a bit overwhelming, especially perhaps if they never read a book from one month’s end to the next.

Occasionally, some visitor (usually a woman, perhaps because men are less likely to notice such things) will exclaim “Look at all your books!” and you rejoin, with a tiny touch of asperity, “oh, this is but the tip of the iceberg” while you wonder “did you never enter a cultivated home before?” And then comes the inevitable corollary, as predictable as it is dull: “have you read them all?” “And where,” you ask yourself pityingly, “would be the pleasure in that?” To have a myriad of masterpieces – and diversions too, let’s not be precious – from which to choose is to be alive and engaged.

I know that there are copies of books on our shelves that will remain virgin until after I am gone. There are, as a New York teeshirt often worn by my partner declares, “too many books, too little time”. But that is the condition of our short passage through this vale of tears. We can never see all the places, meet all the people, indulge all the joys, sample all the flavours. Rousseau complained that “the mountain of books is making us ignorant” and that was 250 years ago, even before Barbara Cartland added several small hills of books to the range. Maybe I can do without This Book Will Save Your Life altogether.