Other Men's Flowers

Lesser-known Rudyard

2012-01-25T12:48:00.008Z

Most Englishmen have no problem in meeting with with Triumph and Disaster, and are fully aware not only that the female of the species is more deadly than the male, but also that East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet. Few realise, though, that some of Kipling's seemingly high-flown pronouncements are actually ironic or even sarcastic.

A poem he wrote in 1919 is called The Gods of the Copybook Headings. Hardly anyone nowadays has any idea what the title means; you will have to look here if you want to find out what a copybook is, and even then it is not easy to understand exactly what the sly old devil is saying. It could be that he is making a plea for common sense, but perhaps he is pouring scorn on traditional values.

One verse has given us a colourful image in its third line:

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire

But there is a reason why I have been reminded of these fusty old verses. Let us, holding our noses, turn to the paranoid commentator Glenn Beck, conspiracy theorist, rabble-rouser and darling of Fox News and the loony right. He used the last two verses of the poem in a video trailer and read the entire poem except the final lines on air in his broadcast on October 7, 2010, making an attempt to explain it in terms of today's politics and his own beliefs.

If, on November 6th, one of the possibilities facing the US is realised, he will have a powerful friend: Glenn Beck is a Mormon.
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A triumph for the FSM

2012-01-20T15:12:00.003Z

Austria has long been regarded as a reactionary society, so it is splendid news than an Austrian man has, after a three-year struggle, won the right to wear a colander on his head for his passport photograph. Well done Niko Alm of Vienna, who has struck a blow for Pastafarians everywhere!

Those unfamiliar with Pastafarianism should read the note in Wikipedia which explains how its clever and effective argument underlines the absurdity of Intelligent Design and the preposterous creed of creationism.

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Still around

2012-01-15T12:00:00.001Z

Last month the Sunday Times published a two-page article in which Lord Snowdon and his son Viscount Linley paid extravagant compliments to each other. Linley noted "a certain elegance" in everything his father did, illustrated by anecdotes such as the one recounting how he turned away a workman who had come to fit a chairlift because he wasn't sporting a nice tie.

A few years ago a biography of Snowdon was published by Anne De Courcy, describing him in comparable terms. Reading a book review can often provide a better experience than its subject ever could; a perceptive and witty review of a rubbishy biography of a rubbishy person can be thoroughly enjoyable. Here are some snippets from Catherine Bennett's delicious review of Snowdon: The Biography, by Anne De Courcy, which tell you all you could possibly want to know about the book and the man:

What has worked for Lord Snowdon all his life almost works in this hagiography. In a little world populated by England's most ghastly and dim, he again appears to enormous advantage: abrim with style (of a sort), charm (if you like that kind of thing) and energy (mainly for sex). It is worth remembering, of course, that in this context the same would apply to the average tomcat.
....When, to his enormous satisfaction, the priapic photographer (then called Antony Armstrong-Jones) made it into the royal family, it was easy for this spoiled little pixie, with his extra-tight drainpipes and mesmerising bouffant, to be mistaken for a much-needed corrective to the snobbery, stupidity, and stolid sybaritism of the nation's top inbreds. Simply by being a society photographer, as opposed to a titled nothing, Snowdon was able to portray himself as an arty free spirit, almost an intellectual, under whose tonic tutelage, it was imagined, the Windsor troupe might evolve into a more acceptable, near-human subspecies.
...The most iconoclastic thing he ever did, as a royal, was to wear polo necks instead of ties, a level of democratic endeavour that proved eminently acceptable to his in-laws, who soon discovered that they preferred the dashing, yet reliably subservient, Tony to foul-tempered Princess Margaret.
...The exact nature of the qualities that captivated Princess Margaret, her family, Snowdon's legions of ill-treated lovers and, most recently, the author of this dazzled tribute, remains, even after 400 pages, obscure. Loyal De Courcy passes on reports of an extremely large penis, but that can hardly account for Snowdon's effect on Prince Philip. Or, later, on Christopher Frayling, rector of the Royal College of Art, who said Snowdon was "the best provost we ever had".
Was it wit? None is recorded here. Young Snowdon's speciality was nasty practical jokes, such as putting dead fish in girls' beds. It was the grown-up Snowdon's, too: "they would sortie out to the houses of neighbours they knew to be out or away", De Courcy hilariously reports, of the earl and his chums, "and rearrange all the furniture".
...Looks, then? As irresistible as Snowdon may have been in the 50s and 60s, and even the 70s and 80s, it hardly accounts for the posh old shagger's continuing appeal, not only to the author of this homage, but, incredibly, to an attractive young journalist, Melanie Cable-Alexander (by whom he fathered a child)
....Although De Courcy tries valiantly to generate admiration for various artistic and charitable triumphs, her efforts are continually nullified, not by her obvious partiality, but by yet more evidence of Snowdon's awfulness, as volunteered to her, exclusively, by himself. There are reasons, De Courcy shows, why Snowdon should have emerged so deceitful, manipulative and cruel; so mean, boastful and silly. His father sounds silly too. His mother more or less ignored him until he bagged Margaret. He had polio as a child, leaving him with a dodgy leg. Then again, you'd think that half a century of adulation, plus a family, experience and a bit of maturity would eventually even things out. On the contrary. It is only, one suspects, because he is using a wheelchair that Snowdon does not, even now, creep out of a night to plant dead fish or rearrange people's furniture.

I suppose I've taken rather more than snippets, but it's still worth following the link and reading the article, if only to learn about the wedding present for him and Margaret for which British servicemen's pay was docked by sixpence apiece, and why his mother was called Tugboat Annie.
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Blessed is the cheesemaker

2012-01-10T11:01:00.000Z

In a speech delivered at the LSE, Malcom Turnbull gives an Australian's view of China and refers to the assumption by Americans they will always be the strongest, richest and cleverest nation on earth. He goes on to suggest that there is evidence of a growing sense of inadequacy, and the realisation, not limited to Americans, that the rest of the world is becoming outclassed by China: "Nobody who has visited Shanghai could be unimpressed".

Well, yes. But the experiences of many of the expatriates who have lived and worked in China for some years may cause them to give a wry smile at the "cleverest nation on earth" bit, having found incompetence, mendacity, inflexibility and general stupidity and lack of sense among many—or even most—of the clients and employers they encounter. The miseries of being an expatriate trying to make a living in China are described by Froog with justifiable anger.

But there is another side to the Chinese character. In the blog of an American globetrotter called Heather I came across an account of the achievement of a young Chinese man called Liu Yang who went to France to study management, fell in love with cheese, learned all about it and became a cheese maker. Now he is single-handedly introducing cheese culture to Beijing with his artisanal cheeses, handmade in his workshop. Although most of his clients are expatriates, he is slowly winning over Beijing locals. Heather's blog has a link to a Mercedes-Benz ad in which he talks about his business.

Clearly Liu has enormous energy, initiative, determination and sheer ability. Of course he is only one out of 1.3 billion, and there must be several hundred millions in China who lack all these qualities and resemble those Froog has encountered, but there must also be tens of millions who could one day do the sort of thing that Liu Yang has done.

This is an inspiring thought. Or perhaps a frightening one.

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Streisand, Poe, Sturgeon and Arkell

2012-01-05T15:26:00.009Z

The first is an Effect, the second and third are Laws and the fourth is a Response: all these are familiar to users of the internet. They have been described by Wikipedia or the Oxford English Dictionary as follows:

The Streisand Effect: This is a primarily online phenomenon in which an attempt to hide or remove a piece of information has the unintended consequence of publicizing the information more widely. It is named after American entertainer Barbra Streisand, whose attempt in 2003 to suppress photographs of her residence inadvertently generated further publicity. Similar attempts have been made, for example, in cease-and-desist letters, to suppress numbers, files and websites. Instead of being suppressed, the information receives extensive publicity and media extensions such as videos and spoof songs, often being widely mirrored across the Internet or distributed on file-sharing networks.

...The term was coined after Streisand, citing privacy violations, unsuccessfully sued photographer Kenneth Adelman and Pictopia.com for US$50 million in an attempt to have an aerial photograph of her mansion removed from the publicly available collection of 12,000 California coastline photographs. Adelman said that he was photographing beachfront property to document coastal erosion as part of the government-commissioned California Coastal Records Project. As a result of the case, public knowledge of the picture increased substantially; more than 420,000 people visited the site over the following month.

Poe's Law: Named after its author Nathan Poe, this is an Internet adage reflecting the fact that without a clear indication of the author's intent it is difficult or impossible to tell the difference between sincere extremism and an exaggerated parody of extremism. Its core is that a parody of something is by nature extreme. That makes it impossible to differentiate from sincere extremism.

A corollary of Poe's law is the reverse phenomenon: legitimate fundamentalist beliefs being mistaken for a parody of that belief. A further corollary, the Poe Paradox, results from suspicion of the first corollary. The paradox is that any new person or idea sufficiently extreme to be accepted by the extremist group risks being rejected as a parody or parodist.

Sturgeon's Law: A humorous aphorism which maintains that most of any body of published material, knowledge, etc., (or, more generally, of everything) is worthless: based on a statement by Theodore Sturgeon, usually later cited as ‘90 per cent of everything is crap’, typically used of a specific medium, originally science fiction, and now frequently also of information to be found on the Internet.

The aphorism was apparently first formulated in 1951 or 1952 at a lecture at New York University and popularized at the 1953 WorldCon science fiction convention.

The Response of Pressdram to Arkell: An unlikely piece of British legal history occurred in what is now referred to as the "case" of Arkell v. Pressdram (1971). The plaintiff was the subject of an article [in Private Eye] relating to illicit payments, and the magazine had ample evidence to back up the article. Arkell's lawyers wrote a letter which concluded: "[My client's] attitude to damages will be governed by the nature of your reply."

The magazine's response was, in full: "We acknowledge your letter of 29th April referring to Mr J. Arkell. We note that your client's attitude to damages will be governed by the nature of our reply and would therefore be grateful if you would inform us what his attitude to damages would be, were he to learn that the nature of our reply is as follows: fuck off."

In the years following, the magazine would refer to this exchange as a euphemism for a blunt and coarse dismissal: for example, "We refer you to the reply given in the case of Arkell v. Pressdram". As with "tired and emotional" this usage has spread beyond the magazine.

(There is also Godwin's Law, but this is not so much a law, more an adage or a memetic tool.)

New Year tomorrow

2011-12-31T11:45:00.006Z

Tonight, Other Men's Flowers marches (staggers? crawls?) into its ninth year, having since January 2004 amassed (garnered? spewed?) 347,768 words in 1,213 posts, with 598 pictures, 1,290 links and 1,852 comments (not counting comment spam).

I know a dozen people who read every word of the blog, and there are perhaps a hundred more who glance at it from time to time. This is quite enough for me and the figure of 237,091 page views logged by one of my counters over the past eight years is of no interest, since the great majority of visitors will have stumbled on OMF when looking for something else, and there is no reason to suppose that more than a handful actually read any of it; I do not labour under the delusion that I am reaching out to a planet-wide community.

So why do I bother?

Well, actually, maintaining the thing is really no bother: I am committed only to publishing five or six posts a month (used to be fifteen) of any length, in any style and on any topic, and if I sometimes don't quite make it no-one will care or even notice. Also, only about 60% of the content is actually written by me: the rest is plagiarised or merely pasted wholesale from books, newspapers or elsewhere on the web, so there is no stress and little sweat involved.

The benefits to me are substantial:

First, it gives me something to do; Other Men's Flowers, a couple of websites and nine other blogs (rarely updated) keep me happily occupied and I am never bored.

Second, it brings me acquaintanceship with an extraordinary variety of people around the world: I never feel lonely.

Third,it is a modest intellectual exercise, helping to keep the mind alive.

Finally, after a few hours at the keyboard I have a sense of achievement, much more than I get from any of my other major activities such as emptying the dishwasher or watching old movies. I have done something, even if it was only drafting a paragraph of a post which I later decide is not worth publishing.

Oh, and HAPPY NEW YEAR to everybody. Fat chance, we are told.

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Twenty Questions More

2011-12-25T08:09:00.007Z

This batch is intended to provide a refuge for those who find festivities and the current news equally depressing: not one of the questions is either seasonal or topical.

61   What would I rather do than join the army?

62   What ends "Shantih, shantih, shantih"?

63   The 1814 Treaty of Ghent ended a war between which states?

64   What links: Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I, Ottoman admiral Hayreddin Pasha, German invasion of the USSR?

65   Which wireless technology is named after a Viking king of Denmark?

66   Robert Hubert was hanged for supposedly starting what?

67   What became England's 10th National Park last year?

68   Which global issue was resolved by the Washington conference of 1884?

69   Which Wimbledon finalist in 1983 became a nun?

70   Who was it said, in 1932, that "the bomber will always get through"?

71   Variations And Fugue On A Theme of Purcell is better known as what?

72   Which country has world's largest proven oil reserves, according to OPEC?

73 In 1996 the Austrian Robert Kalina won a competition to design what?

74   Which chain now has more food outlets worldwide than McDonald's?

75   The "adulterous" Bible of 1631 omitted which word from the seventh commandment?

76   Which film star became US ambassador to Ghana and Czechoslovakia?

77   The Starlight Barking was a sequel to which novel?

78   "Yes, the surface is fine and powdery" - whose words?

79   What links Liliom, Green Grow the Lilacs, Sweet Thursday?

80   Who said "Twa piggles dinna mek a thrup", on what occasion, what was he prevented from saying, and by whom?

ANSWERS ARE HERE

[Questions 41 to 60 are HERE]

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Secular Britain

2011-12-20T10:29:00.001Z

As long ago as 2004, a survey of the religious beliefs of 10,000 people in ten countries showed that the UK was among the most secular nations of the world. More recent polls have confirmed this, with the UK coming sixth, being exceeded in godlessness only by Sweden, Japan, Estonia, South Korea and the Czech Republic.

So not a lot has changed in the last few years. David Cameron apparently believes that nothing much has changed since the Reformation, except that our society has had a moral collapse this century, which could be put right if we reverted to the application of Christian values.

This month's British Humanist Association's newsletter comments on Cameron's idiotic pronouncement:

This week, in a speech celebrating the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible,the Prime Minister described Britain as 'a Christian country'. He claimed that Christian values could reverse British society's 'moral collapse', stated that he disagreed with the arguments of secularists, and argued that Britain is only welcoming of other religions because of its Christian heritage. We believe the Prime Minister is mistaken.

As a simple factual statement, what the Prime Minister said is incorrect. Only a minority of people in Britain are practising Christians, and we know from last week's British Social Attitudes survey that over half of the population sees itself as non-religious. Although Christianity has undoubtedly had a sometimes positive influence on the cultural and social development of Britain, it is far from being the only influence. Many pre-Christian, non-Christian, and post-Christian forces have shaped our society for the better, and Christianity has often had ill effects. So, on the factual level the Prime Minister’s remarks are simply bizarre.

We see two interpretations of the Prime Minister's remarks. The most hopeful reading is that Mr Cameron doesn’t really mean it. His statements may be intended as a way to pacify the increasingly strident lobbying of a minority of Christians for more influence in our public life. This interpretation is supported by the fact that the Prime Minister repeated the myth that those of non-Christian religions are best off in a Christian society – a claim unsupported by history and logic, but one of the favourite arguments of activist Christian groups against a secular state.

If this is indeed the motivation behind the speech, it would at least give us less reason to fear any future policy initiatives shaped by these destructive ideas. But the far more concerning possibility is that the Prime Minister is serious.

A politician and a government that tried to make Christianity and Christian beliefs the foundation of British values or a social morality would be building on seriously unstable foundations. All the evidence shows that religion makes no difference to a person’s social and moral behaviour – the same percentage of religious as non-religious people do volunteer work, for example. And people certainly don’t want to see it have more influence in government – in a 2006 Ipsos Mori poll, ‘religious groups and leaders’ actually topped the list of domestic groups that people said had too much influence on government.

However you look at it, whether as a sop to appease increasingly aggressive Christian lobbies, or as a serious proposition to change public policy, his remarks are deeply concerning. We value reason and evidence in public policy, and fairness and secularism in our political life. The Prime Minister's remarks show why our work is so important.

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Jan-Pehechan-Ho

2011-12-15T09:42:00.014Z

Something a bit more serious for a change; it is cold and dull here today at OMF Central, with nothing much happening, but Grumio has passed me an old clip which brightened my day. It is from Gumnaan, an Indian horror film of 1965 which according to Wikipedia was based on Agatha Christie's Ten Little Niggers (now known as And Then There Were None), though this is hard to believe.

The girl in the gold dress has really terrible legs but uses them to great effect. As for the song, its gentle, almost diffident charm makes one want to see the film from which this clip was taken, though the lyrics are a bit repetitive.

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E-cards are AWFUL

2011-12-10T09:35:00.031Z

...it's an insult to send them: it shows that you can't be bothered to select a card appropriate to the recipient, write in it, put it in an envelope, address it, put a stamp on it, and post it by Royal Mail (or mail it through the US Postal Service). And the kind you find on the web are GHASTLY: repellent cartoon figures, twee pictures, revolting sentiments, pathetic doggerel, unfunny quips and often, worst of all, a bit of unutterably vile music. Yuck! Poo! Delete it before it befouls your inbox.

Yes, but there are exceptions...

There is a British company which produces charming and witty e-cards. It was founded by artist Jacquie Lawson in 2000, and she now leads a team of talented helpers—mostly her friends and family—including animators, a watercolourist, a musician and a web designer, based in Devon, London and the US. They have a range of 196 cards for various purposes: you can see them at their excellent website, www.jacquilawson.com.

There is still time to send out some of these for Christmas, or better still their magnificent 2011 Advent Calendar, a bit more expensive but very good value. If you don't want to buy this or anything else from them, you can pass a pleasant hour previewing their stock.

Other Men's Flowers is, of course, widely known for its venality; it will happily publish a plug for any product, however tatty, overpriced or downright fraudulent, provided the fee is right. But I can make an honest declaration of disinterest in Jacquie Lawson: I have no acquaintance with her or any of her associates and no financial interest in their company. I rather regret this, for they are clearly an agreeable bunch of people and have a deservedly successful business.

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Nothing to add

2011-12-05T11:07:00.007Z

It's not surprising that very few of the posts in OMF evoke any comments. The explanation could be that its most assiduous readers are diffident about expressing fulsome praise, or are merely stunned into admiring silence by OMF's forceful arguments and subtle analyses, or the erudition and percipience of its content.

My own view, however, is that after their biweekly perusal of the latest posts these readers simply have no time to spare to set out their own viewpoints, most of them being fully occupied by such things as chairing multinationals or ecumenical conferences, running major law practices, fulfilling their ministerial responsibilities or studying for their doctorates.

However, there are exceptions, and it is interesting to note that it is the posts dealing with the least interesting topics that seem to attract the most comments. For example, a boring and facetious item I posted about an opinion poll some years ago attracted some two thousand words of comment. After a brief and relevant comment from an old friend, two other ladies joined in with lengthy dissertations on feminist issues. I felt impelled to insert some hot news about gastro-oesophageal reflux before drawing the stimulating discussion to a close.

I suppose all this happened because the word sex had cropped up in the original post; similarly, a rather feeble post in which Jehovah was mentioned inspired a bit of tedious chat. Yet what I thought was a fascinating piece - lavishly illustrated - about the theatre in North Korea evoked no comments at all.

So you really can’t tell. Perhaps there are keywords other than the two I have mentioned which are bound to elicit a reaction from readers; I might try a few.

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Again Twenty Questions

2011-11-30T11:34:00.001Z

Either the questions are getting easier or standards of erudition and culture are rising; those who say they got ten right are not necessarily lying; the mendacity threshold is raised to fifteen.

41 What has Himmler got?

42 How will I love you, always?

43   Sabrage is a: a generic term for desert scrub b: a yearling hawk  c: a rank of officer in the Indian army d: the art of opening a champagne bottle with a sabre

44   What links: larynx, flight data recorder, St Stephen's Day?

45   Which Commonwealth country is on mainland South America?

46   What is detected by the Scott test?

47   Elizabeths I and II ascended the throne at what age?

48   Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger founded which reference source?

49   Sarah Woodruff is the title character of which novel?

50   "The Monster's Mate...?" is listed in the credits of which film?

51 Which baking aid was patented by Henry Jones in 1845?

52 Who had friends called Ginger and Merrylegs?

53   Which British fortifications are named after a Corsican original?

54   Which car is named after the French founder of Detroit?

55 "It was love at first sight" begins which 1961 novel?

56   YKK is the world's largest manufacturer of what?

57   What sort of delicacy is kopi luwak?

58   Which trophy did an American club successfully defend 24 times over 132 years?

59 What is made in a chessel?

60 What do lazy jellyfish do?

Answers are HERE

And now farewell

2011-11-25T09:18:00.001Z

...to cartoonist David Langdon. I posted some of his cartoons in 2009 to wish him a happy 95th birthday and now comes the sad news that he died this week.

He contributed to the New Yorker from 1948 and to many other newspapers and perodicals during and after World War II. The bulk of his cartoons, however, were published in Punch for more than half a century, from 1937 until it folded in 1992. They include these three, which appeared in 1968, 1976, and 1982.

'No, I think he's all right to ask the way. It's the chaps in round black helmets who knock your teeth in.'

'He wants twenty-five per cent of the gross, with an agreed minimum advance guarantee, plus doing our own tidying up.'

'Sorry, madam—the chef says he cannot reveal his sauces.'

The Prizegiving

2011-11-20T09:06:00.004Z

My CV (which can be found by going HERE and scrolling down), includes one item of which I always been particularly proud. This, the second in the list of my lifetime's achievements, is perhaps the most noteworthy, though it was only a runner-up prize.

Unfortunately photography was in its infancy in those days and no pictures of the presentation of the prizes are known to exist. However, to illustrate the item I have found a lovely contemporary print of a comparable occasion, though it has to be said that this was a much more lavish affair:

Had I attended that 1885 prize-giving ceremony (at Le Palais de l’Industrie, Paris) rather than the one in 1938 at Kingsley Road Junior School, just by the Croydon gasworks, I might have been standing behind the man about to receive the first prize, though of course I would have been wearing shorts.

Incidentally, the respective Guests of Honour at the two events were Hector Berlioz in 1855 and, of course, Miss Beamish in 1938.

Comedy and drama

2011-11-15T09:19:00.000Z

There is a TV series running at the moment called Death in Paradise. It is described as a comedy drama but is in fact not in the least funny or dramatic. It has reminded me of something I once saw many years ago in Pyongyang, also with Paradise in its title; this was tremendously dramatic as well as funny, though the comedy was unintentional.

It was a sort of musical, though in The Democratic People's Republic of Korea they call them revolutionary operas. As I have noted before, the musical theatre thrives in Pyongyang as nowhere else; this production was in 1976, but there is no reason to suppose that this and similar productions are not still going on and on like a lot of mousetraps.

It was, and probably still is, called Song of Paradise, a "heightened paean for the advantages and great vitality of our socialist system... another monumental masterpiece adding radiance to the great flourishing Juche art... a high tribute to the illustrious line on literature and art enunciated by the respected and beloved leader".

The number being sung here is the first act closer, called A Love Much Deeper Than the Deepest Sea, and they sing:
Our fatherly leader's love that is warm and unlimited...
Our hearts throbbed with emotion profound
When he hugged us still damp from the sea-wind.
... though no doubt it has lost something in translation. The scene comes at the moment when "Deep-sea fishermen are moved to tears to hear the glad news that they will enjoy one-month holidays with their families in Mt Kumgang-san thanks to the Great and Respected Leader's loving care and attention."

It looks to me as if two quite separate announcements are being made simultaneously, one stage left and one stage right, and I cannot remember why this was, but anyway it was a splendid ensemble number. They all seemed very happy in their stylish deep-sea fishing uniforms.

The G and R Leader referred to here is, of course, the late Kim Il Sung whom we called Chubby-Chops when none of his subjects were listening, and it may be that by now the lyrics have been amended to transfer the credit to his son Kim Jong Il, the Dear Leader.

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The Style Invitational

2011-11-10T08:31:00.001Z

Under this title The Washington Post has offered, every week since 1993, a wordplay contest, "an irreverent mix of highbrow and lowbrow—haughty and potty—in genres ranging from neologisms to cartoon captions to elaborate song parodies".

In week 610 (June 2005), readers were asked to "mash" two movies, TV shows, etc., into a single work of art and describe it. There were over 4,000 entries; below, from The Post's archives, is a selection of the winners and runners-up:

The Wizinator: A steroid-fueled cyborg pursues Dorothy and her companions as they attempt to reach the Emerald City in time to take their court-mandated drug tests. But along the Yellow Brick Road there were some poppies ...

Please Don’t Eat Miss Daisy: Hannibal Lecter lands a job driving for a prim southern spinster.

Pollyanna Karenina: "Oh my, isn’t that the most beautiful train?”

Terminators of Endearment: At last, the perfect “compromise” date movie.

Valley Girl With a Pearl Earring: There’s this girl, Julie? She gets to be a model for, like, a famous photograph or something.

It’s a Wonderful Life Is Beautiful: A man sees how depressing a Nazi concentration camp would have been without him.

My Left Footloose: A dancer with leprosy sees the imminent end of his career.

The French Lieutenant’s a Man and a Woman: Confused sexual identity threatens morale in Napoleon’s army.

The Americanization of Amelie: The cute, quirky French girl finds herself getting a big butt.

Soylent Green Acres: Two rich urban retirees find out the real meaning of being “put out to pasture.”

The Man With the Golden Gunga Din: James Bond finally meets a better man than he.

The Lion in Winterminator 2:
Eleanor of Aquitaine can’t be bargained with. She can’t be reasoned with. She doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And she absolutely will not stop. Until you are dead.

2001 Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest: A computer attempts to get out of work by acting crazy, but things get out of hand and he ends up with a circuit-otomy.

Love Toy Story: Woody, an old favorite, feels threatened by the arrival of the new battery-powered Buzz Lightyear.

Das Booty Call: When the German sub fleet puts in to port, they’re ready for some action!

A Bullet Is Waiting for Godot: Let’s just say Vladimir and Estragon have had it up to here.

Man on Fire Down Below: An educational film about STDs and their symptoms.

Inherit the Wind in the Willows: Did Mole descend from Rat? Or was it the other way around? Let a jury decide!

Gilligan’s Island of Dr. Moreau: A mad scientist’s plans to perform experimental lobotomies on seven castaways are spoiled when he realizes that someone has already beaten him to it.

DracuLa Recherche du Temps Perdu: Memories of his past life come flooding back when a vampire bites into Madeleine.

Independence Day After Tomorrow: Aliens stupidly attack Earth right after global warming has rendered the planet uninhabitable.

Bob & Carol & Ted (Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore): After the divorce, Ted settles into a ménage à trois.

You Only Live Twice, Pussycat: The other cats gang up on Felix and say nasty things to him.

Tequila Sunrise at Campobello: Suddenly Eleanor starts looking pretty good.

The Thin Red Blue Long Grey Line: A bus company offers an extended tour of the American political landscape.

My Fair Lady Sings the Blues: “Cocaine, I’m sayin’, stays mainly in the vein.”

Die Another Day After Tomorrow: The world ends not with a stir, but with a shake.

[Every Friday there is a new contest; HERE, for anyone who wants to enter, are the Rules.]

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Bad Faith Awards

2011-11-05T15:37:00.007Z

These annual awards are a means of dishonouring each year's most outstanding enemy of reason; winners in previous years have included Sarah Palin and the Pope.

Candidates for the 2011 prize have now been nominated, and the public are invited to vote for the candidate they think would be the most deserving winner. For me, the choice was not too difficult: dismissing Rick Perry and Michelle Bachmann (why pick on two American politicians when their ranks include so many who deserve the award?), and ruling out two of the others whose idiocy has not impinged much on me, I was left with Nadine Dorries and Melanie Phillips.

From the first, Dorries looked likely to be the winner, so rather than merely adding one voice to the majority I chose the Daily Mail's deluded columnist to receive my vote. Now that over three thousand votes have been cast, Rick Perry has overtaken Phillips in second place and may well finish as runner-up.

Voting is open until 28th November. Vote for Mad Mel and help her to put the American into third place!

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Who's tops today?

2011-10-31T10:22:00.030Z

One reason for not liking Hallowe'en much is that its feeble modern version has been imported from America (never mind about Walpurgisnacht and all that) and has come to overshadow our fireworks on November 5th. This good old British anti-Catholic festival (originally a pagan celebration) is much more fun than silly trick-or-treat and pumpkins, and gives us the opportunity of burning in effigy whoever we want to stand in for the Pope or Guy Fawkes (Nadine Dorries? Bashar al-Assad? David Tredinnick? Simon Cowell?).

Another reason is that it is condemned by some Christians who consider it a satanic ritual. Catholic parents are being advised to celebrate Hallowe'en by dressing up their children as popular saints instead of witches and devils: "...they should kit out their youngsters to look like St George, St Lucy, St Francis of Assisi or St Mary Magdalene rather than let them wear costumes that celebrate evil or occult figures", according to a campaign endorsed by the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales, and at a season when people are expecting a knock on the door their accompanying parents can take the opportunity of doing some proselytising. This sounds like a splendid opportunity for a bit of fun for all the family.

But let Jesus and Satan fight it out over October 31st: a plague on both their houses, and a few days later we can commemorate the pathetic attempt of poor old Guy and his friends to replace King James 1st with a dynasty of Papists. Even those who dislike the Windsors would not maintain that we would have been better off had the plot succeeded.

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Another Twenty Questions

2011-10-30T09:44:00.002Z

The mixture as before: questions suited to people with ragbag minds. Some of the questions are dreary, some obscure and some merely silly.

Three correct answers is a good score, five is outstanding, ten is a lie.

21    What is love not?

22    What is Other Men's Flowers?

23    What did George Holliday videotape on 3rd March 1991 in LA?

24   What links: Lake Manzala, Lake Timsah, Great Bitter Lake, Little Bitter Lake?

25    Why must I wayle for Witherington?

26    What did she cry before she died, after lifting up her lovely head?

27    What are the trees where you sit going to do?

28    Whom should you not trust when you can't find your way home?

29   Which psychological condition was defined after a 1973 Swedish bank robbery?

30    Which astronomical event is depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry?

31    The King, or Kitchener?

32    Why did the Earl of Oxford leave Elizabeth I's court for seven years?

33    Magnetite, hematite and goethite are ores of which metal?

34    Fingal O'Flahertie Wills were the middle names of which writer?

35   Whose mother and sister are cured of leprosy in a biblical epic?

36    What became the largest country in Africa this year?

37    The USS Phoenix at Pearl Harbour was sunk 40 years later under what name?

38    The Parsi people practise which religion?

39    What restriction was introduced on 8 January 1940?

40    What's it all about?

Answers are HERE

[Sources: Guardian Weekend, Ask a Silly Question (Goswell Frand), New Statesman, Wikipedia, The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, The Public School Hymn Book, The OED, The Washington Post, The Bible, etc.]

Our new destroyer

2011-10-25T09:49:00.001+01:00

It used to be said that no ship, not even a warship, could be ugly....

Making a note of it

2011-10-20T08:36:00.002+01:00

I have never been plagued by superstitious obsessions: I do not feel compelled to avoid walking on lines in the pavement, or to wash my hands more often than is necessary. But there is one completely pointless thing which I have been forcing myself to do from an early age, and that is to record my activities, however uninteresting, in a succession of diaries.

Of course this can be a salutary exercise; what the great diarists wrote is fascinating to us all, and any diaries, however inept or fragmentary, can be helpful to biographers and historians, or at the very least interesting to the families or descendants of the writer. However, mine are not a bit like Tony Benn's, which he started in his adolescence and has added to every day since then, and which, full of rich insights into political events over all those years, now fill a whole room. Eight volumes of them have already been published, and they will provide nutriment for biographers and historians for years to come.

Nor are my diaries in the least like Boswell's, featuring crisp descriptions of amusing incidents such as his note on 13th April 1763 which begins: Did meet with a monstrous big whore in the Strand....

No, mine are never going to do me or anyone else any good, consisting as they do merely of curt lists of things I did or which were done to me. The only reason for my diaries' existence is the ridiculous feeling that somehow if I haven't recorded something then it never really happened. So I have been setting down no comments or observations or thoughts, just the bare facts.

The tone was set from the very beginning, with a few entries for the year during which I reached the age of eleven; these were along the lines of Went to library or Aunt L came to tea. Later in the year the entries became very sparse and after the entry for 4th May, which was Forget what did, there was a long gap.

Eventually the regular notes resumed their onward march of relentless triviality, but even in later years the entries were hardly more interesting, still with a flat, uninformative style which gave very little away. Day in Brighton with Charles R and Rosemary, for example. Why? Did we have a good time? Who were these people? No-one reading the diaries today, not even I, would be able to answer these questions, or would ever bother to ask them, and posterity certainly won't be interested.

Later on, of course, I did have some moderately interesting experiences in slightly exotic places, but reading my curt notes on them doesn't really bring them back to me: Almost spoke to Duke Ellington at Bangkok Airport is perfectly accurate but doesn't conjure up the excitement I felt during that historic non-encounter.

A few years ago I found that I was being reminded of the pointlessness of this mammoth effort every time I came across the box containing the collection of diaries of all sizes and colours, every one carelessly filled in, sometimes illegibly, and never subsequently glanced at.

I could never bring myself to throw away the scruffy old diaries, with their rotting elastic band round each decade's volumes, for I felt I ought to have all the facts at my fingertips if I suddenly needed to know when my uncle Horace had died or in which year it was that I fell off a narrowboat into the Oxford Canal.

Then, a year ago, I found that writing had become so difficult for me that I really couldn't keep on with the diaries. Happily I can still type quite well using a large-key keyboard, so I am typing them into something I grandly call a Journal. It continues with current entries, two or three a week, as boring as ever. I am also working laboriously backwards with some help from a daughter and a grand-daughter. I have now reached 1997; more than fifty or so of the old handwritten volumes still leer at me from their carton, awaiting transcription.

The thing that makes the labour almost worthwhile is that the Journal is in Excel so that I can search for names of people or places, or words like "lunch" or "film", to produce instant listings. With a couple of clicks I can find, for example, the titles of the thirteen films I saw in 1997. This is an illustration of the spectacular futility of the whole enterprise: about most of them I can recall nothing at all.

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By the mass, and 'tis like a camel, indeed

2011-10-15T09:38:00.000+01:00

Rotten of Hamlet to tease the silly old fool Polonius, getting him to cravenly correct himself and say that yes, it was like a weasel, or a whale...

Clouds are things which often look more like other things than many other things do. This is a picture of a cloud having a chat with a tree....

You can find HERE 31 pages of clouds looking like something else.

This is from the absorbing website of the Cloud Appreciation Society, of which I am proud to be member No 8,158. Our current newsletter confirms that we now have 27,827 members in 94 countries.

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Skål!

2011-10-10T15:49:00.007+01:00

Some of my friends have noted that I have several things in common with pregnant women. It is true, of course, that I have never actually been pregnant or anything of that kind, but I do feel rotten most mornings and am disinclined to take up the pole vault. Also, like many an expectant mother, I sometimes have a sudden craving for some exotic comestible or extraordinary combination of foods.

My fancies are not dramatically perverse; no dill pickles with raspberry ice cream, or hot chocolate with minced ox kidney stirred in. Nothing like that; for example, it came to me the other day that what I hankered after at that moment was a snootful of Aalborg Jubilæums.

I am speaking of Danish akvavit. Nothing exotic about that if you live in Scandinavia, but it's not easy to find in leafy rural Sussex where I live. It's years since I used to sit all evening in a café near Copenhagen harbour with an old havnearbejder and his friends, a bottle of the stuff and a bowl of herrings between us, singing many a chorus of Det Var En Lørdag Aften and then perhaps a few rude verses of Den Sag Er Aldrig I Verden until some kindly politiman told us to go home.

But I can still remember the effect as the first tiny, bitterly cold glassful is knocked back: the aaah! of delight, the instant clearing of the nasal passages, and the feeling that you had been struck violently on the back of the neck by a large soft object. It has a mere 42% of alcohol by volume, but somehow it feels like more.

I suppose I could get a bottle on the internet, to have ready for whenever I am next overcome by a fancy for it.

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It's the rich what gets the pleasure

2011-10-05T08:38:00.001+01:00

The internet – particularly the blogosphere – provides great opportunities for sociological study. One can compare and contrast the aspirations, tastes and viewpoints of people from either end of every kind of spectrum – social, political, geographical - simply by reading what they write about themselves.

Take Top People, for example: what does Hugh Massingham-Bohun in Gloucestershire have in common with Edward Cabot Ames III in Massachusetts?

Is it the fact that both have a great deal of money, as does the Non-Top Person Luke Riemenschneider of Arkansas? Other than that, nothing much, I suppose, except for the desire to tell the world about their lives in the mistaken belief that the world will find them of interest.

Actually, unlike most blogs I find these three are not particularly boring since the writers all seem to enjoy with gusto what they do; I am not envious of any of them, but some aspects of their lives sound as if they might be fun...

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Total drivel

2011-10-04T09:25:00.005+01:00

Heartwarming compliments on my post of 30th September have poured in from all over the world: such perceptive observations as "fatuous entertainment", "very silly man" and "pointless rubbish", as well as some rather critical comments, have made me realise that there is a demand for more of this sort of thing, and I shall not fail to provide further helpings, starting with Another Twenty Questions, to be published on 30th October.

Several readers were kind enough to write and tell me which of the first twenty they were able to answer correctly without googling. Top Guns among them were Grumio (London), Froog (Beijing) and dandd (Oregon), though none of these mighty intellects got into double figures. Still, congratulations; if there had been any prizes I would have awarded one to each of them.

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Twenty Questions

2011-09-30T12:10:00.001+01:00

These are suited to people with ragbag minds. Some of them are dreary, some obscure and some merely silly (I mean the questions, not the people who can answer them; well, I suppose both, really).

The first and last questions are very silly.

Three correct answers is a good score, five is outstanding, ten is a lie.

1    Who was in whose what and how many miles awhat?

2   The Watsons is an unfinished novel by which author?

3   Which feature started to appear in Mayfair streets in 1958?

4 What links David Bowie, Rod Steiger, Telly Savalas, Michael Palin?

5 Which monument lists 558 generals of the first French Empire?

6    Piedmont white and Perigord black are prized varieties of what?

7   Traditionally, who would wield an estoque?

8 Who were liberated on March 3rd 1861?

9    Where are we treading, brothers?

10 What, according to Noel Coward, are just around the corner?

11 37 in Europe, 38 in the US: what?

12 Methuselah plus Salmanazar equals what?

13 One hundred agorot make what?

14 Where was Ferran Adriá head chef?

15 What's a caret?

16 Pertussis is better known as what?

17 What afflicted London from 5-9 December 1952?

18 The dandy Eustace Tilley is the mascot of which magazine?

19 Capten, art tha sleeping there below?

20 Where, by whom and when was the game known as Ragamadolio or Tumble-cum-Trivy played?

Answers are HERE

The brilliance of engineers

2011-09-25T15:12:00.004+01:00

I consider myself fortunate to have failed dismally, twice, in my half-hearted attempt to get a degree in Mechanical Engineering, for I know I would never have been any good at it However, this has not in any way affected my admiration for engineers, which has not been shared by many of my countrymen since Victorian times when Brunel and his peers were working wonders. The Germans have always respected engineers and allowed them to distinguish themselves with an appellation, so if I had graduated and gone to live in, say, Stuttgart (where they invented the automobile), I could have called myself Herr Ing. Heinrich Fußboden, though this is not actually my name.

It was not to be. But even now, after a career in which engineering featured not at all, I still think how nice it might have been if I could have made things like this; full instructions are given so anyone who wants to can do so, though not me.

A major feat

2011-09-20T10:07:00.012+01:00

It is difficult to list groups of unpleasant people in order of detestability, classifying them from the utterly wicked to the merely sleazy. Everyone has his own idea about which are the worst: double glazing salesmen, pornographers, Tories, evangelists, bankers, homeopaths, muggers? Which of these most deserve to meet an unpleasant end?

I am not sure where I would have put rustlers; a certain romance about their crime still clings from the days when you could be hanged for it, though it's no joke for Farmer Giles, struggling to keep his farm going in difficult times, being robbed of some of his precious animals by townie gangs: a nasty surprise for him to find them gone after he has spent a long night wrestling with Defra and EU forms, but nowadays, of course, he is likely to be the CEO of a mammoth corporation with plenty of staff to do the paperwork, make the insurance claims and even look after the sheep.

I was amazed to learn that, according to the BBC and the always readable Farmers' Guardian, thieves recently stole 579 ewes and 901 lambs from a field in Lincolnshire.

Someone who knows about sheep (and rustling?) says that two articulated trucks and a number of men and dogs must have been involved, in the dark. The noise! And the people! It may have been a thinly populated area, but didn't anyone tumble to the fact that something was going on?

Then there are the crooked shepherds, slaughtermen, butchers, vets and officials who must have had a hand in the huge operation. This was a major crime, and it is to be hoped that one of the villains will grass and that the whole bunch will go inside, but one cannot help feeling some sneaking admiration for the highly competent and hardworking gang who carried it out.

Gormandising

2011-09-15T17:14:00.005+01:00

Tasting menus in restaurants, basically a lot of little bits of stuff served consecutively, apparently became increasingly popular during the recession of the late 2000s and early 2010s. It is hard to imagine why, because now they are usually aimed at the well-heeled, not at those suffering from the economic decline of those years.

In 2008 I described a couple of such menus offered in San Sebastian, and how an intrepid (or foolhardy) journalist just managed to eat them both in a single day.

Earlier this year my friend Grumio took some friends to the American equivalent in California. Here is the menu:

Often a tasting menu gives you no choice, you eat whatever turns up, but in this case you can choose one dish from most of the nine courses; in the case of the Maine Lobster Tail there is no alternative, but they probably don't get many complaints about that.

The wine list comes on an iPad which isn't a bad idea, but choosing wines by the bottle to balance nine courses would not be easy, so wise guys take the sommelier's choice by glass.

The price mentioned is in US dollars, though they don't actually say so.

Grumio tells me they didn't spurn the supplements ("Who turns down the foie gras, ever?") and the bill for four was 2000. American dollars, of course: what other currencies are there?

The New Germany

2011-09-10T15:12:00.001+01:00

No 34 in an occasional series of extracts from The Postcard Century

January 1934 From Louis Landsberg in Aachen: Thank you for your kind Christmas wishes. I read in the newspaper that these postcards are being exhibited today and tomorrow in relation to the past years work of new structure of Germany. I hope it will be of some use to your collection - there is only a small amount being issued so I think it will be a rare specimen... It was pretty hard to paste up these two stamps neatly. The one pfennig stamp was issued in December. How are you? Your girl? Everybody?
This anniversary card of Hitler's year-old chancellorship was hot off the press and Hitler makes his first appearance on a stamp. The control exercised over all the semiotics of power, masterminded by Goebbels, already marked Hitler out as in a different league of dictatorship from Mussolini who only made one philatelic appearance in Italy (and then on a stamp which also features Adolf Hitler). The Brandenburg gate in Berlin retains its symbolic appearance at the end of the century.

The skull on the mantelpiece

2011-09-05T11:34:00.007+01:00

N.F. Simpson, who recently died aged 92, wrote a play called The One Way Pendulum; I have treasured lines from it for years, including these:

"What's it for?"

"Oh, it's a memento mori. Supposed to remind you of death."

"And does it?"

"No, damn thing hasn't worked since we got it."

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The last days of homeopathy

2011-08-31T10:10:00.003+01:00

I have affectionate memories of Professor David Bellamy, OBE; he was always a bit of a clown, but his zest was endearing and his 400 TV programmes were entertaining and did much to popularise his enthusiasms, particularly botany.

Sadly, he later espoused the cause of climate change denial and more recently became the patron of the British Homeopathic Association, lobbyers for more quackery in the NHS.

This letter by Professor David Colquhoun asks Bellamy to appeal to the organisation, as one of its trustees, to take a firm and unequivocal stance against homeopaths using their products to either prevent or treat serious diseases such as HIV, malaria and to make a firm statement that they condemn this murderous use of homeopathic products.

It is indeed sad to see that dear old Bellamy (he is 78) needs to be advised not to support an organisation like the BHA. However, Colquhoun's letter gives some heartwarming comments on the increasing decline in the popularity of the absurd nostrums which they peddle:

"According to the Telegraph today, spending on homeopathic prescriptions has plummeted eightfold since 2000. If this decline continues, we can expect no prescriptions to be written with public money within a year or two....

I am not sure why homeopathy has declined so precipitously. But the very vocal campaign over the past few years against the provision of this superstitious form of medicine with public money may have played a part.

Homeopathy within the public sphere has been declining since the formation of the NHS with it almost disappearing entirely in the ‘70s. There are not any real homeopathic hospitals left at all now – just a few small clinics clinging on. Tunbridge Wells homeopathic hospital closed down a few years ago and the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital had to stop pretending it was a real homeopathic hospital in its own right and changed its name to the Royal London Hospital for Integrated Medicine. Maybe we are just seeing the tail-end of a long decline."

A jug of wine, a book of verse...

2011-08-25T11:03:00.002+01:00

I don't like poetry much but have always been a keen versifier. I set a couple of sonnet-writing competitions some years ago (this is an example) but didn't enter them myself. However, I did once enter another competition, which called for a poem about either chlamydia or some form of contraception. I wrote:

There was a young lady called Lydia
Whose sex life just couldn't be giddier.
She gave not a rap
For the pox or the clap,
But was terribly scared of chlamydia.

This got an honourable mention but at the time I published the post I did not know that my poem was going to be really published. Then the branch of the pharmacy which had sponsored the competition produced a booklet containing all the best entries, and mine was one of them.

It occurred to me when I came across my copy of the booklet the other day that I had never announced to my friends that I had been given this signal honour, so I am doing so now.

The name of the sponsoring pharmacy, by the way, was Laycock Chemists.

Actually, books don't always smell nice

2011-08-20T10:21:00.002+01:00

Monday's Guardian had a thoughtful and fairly objective article by Sam Leith about the relative virtues of books and electronic books. Most comment on this topic is special pleading of one kind or another: Ebook Sceptic, for example, is written by a bookseller (Tom Campbell) and unsurprisingly presents few arguments in favour of reading off an electronic device; Kindle-Schmindle describes Campbell's piece as "collating scientific research which adds rational support to his - our - instinctual [sic: he means instinctive] rejection of this new technology", but in fact it is cherry-picking: proper research should not merely set out to justify views already held.

I could set out the many advantages of reading devices (such as the fact that some books - and all thick paperbacks - have to be held open with both hands, which is uncomfortable) but this would be special pleading; I am biased because I love reading but a combination of arthritis and sensorimotor axonal polyneuropathy made it difficult until I discovered the iPad; now it is once again a joy.

This Sporting Life

2011-08-15T08:43:00.004+01:00

I have been taken to task by one of my nearest and dearest for having expressed mild irritation at the brouhaha over the English cricket team’s recent success. It had seemed to me that for the result of a game of cricket to feature for several days as a major item in every TV news broadcast was excessive; the spectacle of smirking newsreaders telling us over and over again how epoch-making it all was – Georgeous George Alegiah was particularly gruesome – must have palled even for some sport-lovers.

I was accused of meanly resenting the “general happiness enabling people to forget their miserable dull lives”. This is not true: I like people to be happy, and if all it takes is a sporting victory then good luck to them. What I do resent is the way in which the bullying majority assume that those who do not share their enthusiasms must be perverse, unpatriotic or effete, or all three; I do not demand that they share, say, my passion for early Assyrian stringed instruments, so why do they think I ought to enjoy listening to them wittering on about their silly games?

I suppose it is partly my fault for having nowadays stopped concealing my total lack of interest in all forms of sport. For many years, while I was making a living in a field related to sport, I had to dissemble and at times actually pretend that watching some contest or other, when I didn’t understand the rules and didn’t care much who won or lost, was my idea of fun.

But, I hear you cry, why did you ever get involved in something so unrelated to your inclinations? The answer is simple: in many jobs, the end product doesn’t really matter too much. Suppose you are the CEO of a multinational employing 4,000 people making mild steel flanges; must you be devoted to mild steel flanges? Would you necessarily want to spend your leisure time watching TV programmes about them or discussing them with your friends? Of course not, but running the company could be fulfilling work at which you were fairly competent and which you thoroughly enjoyed doing.

So it was with me, but of course all my colleagues naturally assumed that I was as fascinated by sport as they were, and it would have been churlish (and a poor career move) to have let them know how much it bored me. Sometimes the pretence was a strain.

The first time I went to Beijing (or Peking as we called it then) my interpreter told me when I got off the train from Lo Wu that my hosts had decided to honour me the next day by granting me a rare privilege. I was already excited just to be in China and I tossed about all night wondering what this surprise treat would be: a confidential talk with some of the party leaders, perhaps? A private visit to part of the Forbidden City not normally shown to foreigners? Dinner with some of their top circus stars at the biggest of the famous Roast Duck Restaurants, the one that serves 5,000 meals every day?

No. It was a seat (admittedly a good one, with arms) at a football match. The Red Army versus Albania. Three hours in a scruffy sweltering stadium with twenty thousand spectators screaming, spitting and generally carrying on, while I tried hard to pretend I was having the time of my life.

In later years I devised various stratagems for keeping up the pretence of my keen interest in all things sportive; I picked up from experts a few phrases relevant to each sport which I could trot out when at some dreary event I was woken from a light doze by someone wanting to know what I thought about it. One of those for football, I remember, was: “…well, of course, they’re keeping it very loose in midfield, aren’t they?…” Or, for cricket, something along the lines of: "...just like Gooch, really; he was always flashing at rising balls on the legside... "

I had no idea what these things meant, but neither did anyone else and I said them confidently, so they usually went down quite well.

Taken for a ride

2011-08-10T17:39:00.010+01:00

It has occurred to me that it is a long time since I have added a new titfer to my "Hats" category. This will be OMF's 50th hat and I have chosen it to contrast with all the spectacular, soppy or frightening ones in the series

Actually this one isn't new. I posted this photo of one of my grand-daughters before, as hat number 41, but so what? It's a gentle, pleasing image, and I've nothing else to post today.

Selah!

Passing likeness

2011-08-04T20:00:00.003+01:00

They both have that piercing look of hard men, as if they might have had something in common, but they probably didn't, apart from having had tough childhoods.

Yehudi Philip

At last a personal approach

2011-07-30T09:57:00.001+01:00

I get a couple of dozen spam or scam messages every month in response to one of the eleven hundred posts this blog contains, sometimes one I published five years ago or more . But they're no trouble really: they pile up in my junk folder and every few weeks I just delete the lot, though I have to glance at the headings in case a real message has somehow got wrongly identified as spam.

Today I was charmed, and not a little flattered, to receive a comment on one of my recent posts, which was about the royal visit to Canada. This is not one of those sent out at random, by the million: it has been composed with some care and is clearly for me personally:

Greetings Mr. Flowers Sir;
Do you have the address of Wills and Kate?
I am a Nigerian Princess and would very much like the banking details of the Royal Family.
Thanking you most sincerely,
Lynn from Canada

[On second thoughts, perhaps this was not an attempted scam at all but merely a bit of fun by some jokey friend. If so, please reveal yourself, fool; there is no need to be so formal, you may call me Other Men's if you wish.]

Peace in our time

2011-07-25T10:02:00.002+01:00

In September 1938 my mother wrote to my sister Audrey, who at that time was a dancer, on the stage in Scotland; she had her ninetieth birthday last March.

My mother first passed on some family news: my other sister and I were about to be evacuated (they brought us back to London later, in time for the Blitz) and my elder brother in the RAFVR had been told to report for operational training.

Then, an update on the national news: " ...trenches and dug-outs are being dug in the parks and even in the cemetery ...we have all been fitted for gas masks...".

And...

"Things certainly seem a lot brighter this morning. It seems that our Premier, the French Premier, Mussolini and Hitler are all meeting again today to discuss the situation, so perhaps war will be averted after all."

My brother died in May 1940, when his Armstrong Whitworth Whitley crashed in France after dropping its cargo of leaflets.

Bat of Burning Gold

2011-07-20T10:27:00.007+01:00

So England’s cricketers “will take the pitch to a rousing rendering of Jerusalem”.
This will disappoint those who, in a poll carried out by a digital music channel asking 2,000 people in England what song they would choose to represent their country, chose A Candle in the Wind, All You Need is Love, Vindaloo (what?), Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, Abide with Me and several other songs proclaiming England’s sporting prowess, or something.

Jerusalem got 51% of the vote. It’s odd that Blake’s poem should be thought to inspire patriotic fervour, beginning as it does with four questions to all of which the answer is a resounding no. Of course, it’s not to be taken literally, it’s just a metaphor, but surely a rather outdated one: all our dark satanic mills are now loft apartments with designer kitchens and real teak floors. But bits of England are still green and pleasant enough and the idea of building even a metaphorical Jerusalem here has some pretty unpleasant connotations.

But if you forget the ludicrous suggestions it’s a jolly good tune, and there aren’t many other choices. There’ll Always Be An England isn’t really saying very much: there’ll always be a North Pole, if it comes to that, unless we go and melt it.

Fooling around with a trout

2011-07-15T12:34:00.009+01:00

It is axiomatic that musical jokes are never funny; this may be because great composers rarely had much fun. But great musicians sometimes do, and this is nicely illustrated in a film made about the 1969 recital given in London by Daniel Barenboim, Itzhak Perlman, Zubin Mehta, Pinchas Zuckerman and Jacqueline du Pré, at which they played Schubert's Piano Quintet in A major D.667, "The Trout".

The film covers the rehearsals and the background to the event and includes their complete performance of the quintet, you will have to buy the DVD. It costs £24.95, but for this you also get a documentary about Schubert.

All five had been friends since they began their careers and had made names for themselves by the time they had the idea of meeting in London to perform together. After that all of them became world-famous and are still with us except Jacqueline du Pré, who performed very little after 1971, when she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and stopped altogether in 1973. She died in 1987, aged 42.

A new 419

2011-07-10T18:30:00.007+01:00

Emails from gentlemen offering me 10% of $3 million if I use my bank account to carry out a small service for them have not been reaching me for some time.

They are like buses,really: you can wait ages for one and then three come at once. Or rather, the same one comes three times, at two-minute intervals. But this time the approach is slightly different:

Hi, Corporal Mary Ann MacCombie(E-4) here.
I am an American soldier with Swiss background,serving in the military with the army 3rd infantry division. Please I am seeking your kind assistance to help me move the sum of Three million,two hundred thousand united states dollars to you,as far as I can be assured that my share will be safe in your care until I come out of hospital here in Germany ,where am receiving treatment on my injuries,this is no stolen money, and there are no danger involved.

I am presently in a hospital recovering from injuries sustained in a suicide bomb attack,

Please view website for confirmation: http://www.xxxxxx
Please if your willing to assist me contact me for more details at marry.ann@neo.rr.com .

Yours in Service.

Corporal Mary Ann MacCombie (E-4).

Clearly, there is some original thinking here. 419s used to involve a request from help from a senior bank official, or a fatal accident to an intestate millionaire, or perhaps a grieving widow seeking to get her inheritance out of Nigeria. Now the plot has changed: a suicide bomber, a female Swiss/American corporal? Is she really In Service, like Mrs Bridges and Rose?

And although her share would certainly be safe in my care, and it is good to know that "there are no danger involved", there do seem to be some uncertainties. How much is my share, exactly? And why doesn't she use Western Union?

These are deep waters, and I shall not offer my help until I have made further enquiries.

The Palace, Ottawa

2011-07-05T16:11:00.026+01:00

It seems that most Canadians have taken the Cambridges to their hearts, and everyone knows what warm hearts Canadians have. Some Québécois did hold up some handmade banners: "Parasite go home", "Kate go UK yourself" and so on, but most did not strongly oppose the visit, merely grumbling about its cost. And the prince got an undeserved cheer for his schoolboy French.

This raises an appealing possibility. When the time comes for the by-then ageing couple to take their thrones, why should they not become permanently resident in Canada? Presumably they will be considered King and Queen of Canada anyway, as well as of Britain, and there seems no reason why they would have to go on living over here: they could appoint a Governor-General to represent them here, and of course they could come over and make a state visit whenever they felt like it.

This scenario is rather less unlikely than the one that Nevil Shute set out in his novel In the Wet. Shute wrote it in 1953 when he had become disenchanted with socialism and such vile institutions as the National Health Service, and he describes how the Queen had become frustrated by her government's treatment of her. While she is on a visit to Ottawa the heir to the throne indicates that he will not succeed her while this situation persists and then, with the support of the "heavily royalist" Australia and Canada, leaves England. The Government falls and the Prince of Wales becomes Governor-General while the Queen confines herself to Commonwealth matters.

(Actually, the plot is much more complicated than this; Shute was strongly anti-racist, and though a naive or even simple-minded writer in some ways, had some ideas which were ahead of his time (metal fatigue in aircraft, for example) and an extraordinary ability to tell preposterous stories with conviction: in Round the Bend he describes the life and death of an aircraft engineer who founds a new religion and may indeed have been divine.)

Australia in recent years has not been strongly royalist, but Canada with a bit of encouragement might one day be persuaded to give a permanent lodging to Kate and Wills, for this would do wonders for their tourist trade and be one in the eye for the Americans, who would be green with envy.

We could still use all our experience of mounting gorgeous spectacles and pull in the tourists every year or two when the couple and their offspring make state visits, while saving ourselves the huge sums of money they cost us as long as they go on living here, and the BBC could dispense with whoever has replaced Nicholas Witchell as Royal Crawler Pursuivant.

Updated words

2011-06-30T10:11:00.003+01:00

As always, the report on the latest quarterly update to the Oxford English Dictionary is a good read:

For me, Tex-Mex food is ugh, but I enjoyed hearing about the lengthy search for the origin of "nachos".

Modern technology has some cool new words, but "digital" dates from the fifteenth century

Never forget that the original meaning of "engine" in English was ‘ingenuity, artfulness; cunning, trickery’. Google is a search engine.

Ill-assorted

2011-06-25T17:41:00.024+01:00

It does happen sometimes that dog-owners get to look like their dogs. I used to know a girl called Gill who kept a pair of Afghan hounds. As she was a hairdresser (mine, actually) their coat was always beautifully kempt; so of course was hers, and she shared with the hounds a friendly disposition, a lean, fine-drawn and slightly aristocratic appearance as well as a bouncy and cheerful mien, though unlike them her ears were not silky and long and her legs were not a bit shaggy, so far as I could tell.

I saw today an example of the opposite, a totally disparate dog-and-owner pairing.

It was at a little caff usefully sited half-way between the town and the gentle slope up to my home, where it is good to linger for a while to get psyched up for the climb (it's not the South Col exactly, but the last 500 yards make me think). The sun was shining and there were some tables on the pavement where I sat with a double espresso and a toasted tea-cake chatting with the owner who had come out for a cigarette; he has very little English, but he managed to tell me that he had to smoke because of the stress of having a wife and three children; I re-assured him that I once had a comparable family, but after puffing away for half a century was eventually able to give it up (smoking, that is).

Where was I? Oh yes, dogs and their owners. A few yards away there was a man giving water to his dog, using an interesting device consisting of a plastic container with a bottle of water inside; he opened it up and the lid formed a little trough from which the dog was happily lapping. The thing was obviously invented in America; I remember that when my wife and I visited some of her relatives there we found that they were obsessed with carrying water with them at all times. This was in Arizona where it is easy to die of thirst in the desert, so I suppose they were taking no risks even when shopping in downtown Phoenix.

I am digressing again. The point I set out to make was that the dog looked very young, handsome, intelligent and friendly, while his owner appeared to be none of these things. I do not want to traduce the man: he may well have been a kindly, good-natured fellow, fond of flowers and with a gentle, whimsical humour, but his brutish appearance gave the impression that if you annoyed him he would gie yer the heid without compunction.

I think that was what I intended this post to be about, but I can't be sure; it's been a long day. The above is rambling and muddled, without a trace of OMF's usual brisk precision, a feature of omfstyle much admired by omflovers around the world. I shall have to pull myself together, lest two or three of them chuck it in, leaving me with barely enough to make up a synchronised swimming team should the need arise.

D'you like my hips...

2011-06-20T09:16:00.006+01:00

...to hipsnotise you? Thus the great Carmen Miranda. She is better still in her native Portuguese.

She came into my mind (not that she has ever been much out of it since I first saw That Night in Rio) when Carl de Souza's picture appeared last week, since the lady at Ascot is wearing a more formal version of the sort of thing that Carmen used to wear stapled to her head.

And very nice too, both the lady and the titfer; her name is Anneka Tanaka-Svenska, which comes trippingly off the tongue. She is a well-known vegetarian Natural History presenter and writer who specialises in the Environment, Green Issues and Wolf Conservation, and has been dubbed the Green Guru; well, she would be, wouldn't she? Her website* does not mention her parentage but I suppose Swedish-Japanese would be a fair guess.

Not much doubt about Maria do Carmo Miranda da Cunha's parentage, though to me she has something reminiscent of a Teutonic Maria: Maria Magdalene Dietrich. Same facial bone structure, same way of narrowing her eyes. But the Brazilian was the better singer and better dancer, especially with the hands and the hips, and equally seductive in a different way: she smiles rather than smoulders. The German may have had better legs but we shall never know: Carmen never showed hers.

Dietrich was born in 1901, so was eight years older than Miranda; sadly, the Brazilian Bombshell died in 1955, while Marlene hung on until 1999.

* ...which states: "Anneka is experienced in studio, live, autocue and corporate". This statement seems to have a word missing to which each of these categories relates: presentations? talks? sex?

Comment from the Chair of St Augustine

2011-06-15T17:30:00.000+01:00

As a letter to The Guardian pointed out, the colon in a recent headline was misplaced. The headline should have read: The Archbishop no-one voted for: coalition policies.

No reason why His Grace should not have voiced criticism of the policies of our coalition government, of course, and few with any sense would disagree with what he said. But it is hard to see why so many objected to him saying it: he is entitled to say anything he likes, even when has no special knowledge of the subject, for no-one would take him seriously; the man is totally lacking in charisma.

The silly hat is not his fault, for that goes with the job, but he clearly cares nothing for his appearance, not even having the decency to trim his preposterous eyebrows. Lamentable!

But recent Primates of All England have been a pretty uninspiring bunch. His immediate predecessors—Coggan, Runcie and Carey—were respectively dull, hypocritical and slimy, so I suppose Williams, mad eyebrows and all, is an improvement on them. But for a bit of style you have to go back to Ramsey, a genial old person who once very nearly gave me the immense privilege of sharing a drink and a chat. If you bother to follow that link, you will find not only a report on this memorable encounter, but also a note about John Whitgift, whose stylishness has never been surpassed since he died in 1604, though his contemporary detractors said he was just a show-off and deplored his ecclesiastical bling.

The Firm

2011-06-10T12:56:00.028+01:00

With this lovely bit of Photoshopping on the cover and under the title President Windsor, Dominic Sandbrook in New Statesman last month lauded the political nous of the Queen, who has spent 60 years giving the impression that the monarchy is somehow detached from everyday political life. She is most certainly a political animal, having worked with 12 British prime ministers and 14 New Zealand prime ministers, 12 Australians and 11 Canadians. Without any training for the job, she has never, almost without exception, made a false move; we often underestimate just how much self-discipline and skill ;this must have taken.

The big problem with republicanism is that it is hard for us to imagine anyone else who could possibly make such a perfect Head of State. Sadly, although her sense of duty might induce her, in the interest of the country, to give up two or three of her residences, tell her awful family to pipe down, allow her head to be removed from our stamps and drop some of the pomp (and some of the duties) surrounding her present role, the fact that if she were to stand as a candidate in our first ever presidential election she would unquestionably get the kind of majority only previously enjoyed by leaders of totalitarian countries is irrelevant: she is too old.

It used not to be like that, usen't it not to be?

2011-06-05T10:00:00.011+01:00

There has been much huffing and puffing about the inclusion of such words as thang, blingy and tik (methamphetamine) in the latest Collins "official" list of Scrabble words, but of course this is a matter of total indifference except to those daft enough to play Scrabble with people who take the game so seriously that they will pay £16.99 for the book.

Real dictionaries have detailed criteria for the acceptance of new words rather than depending on mere editorial whim. The realest of them all, the OED, accepted for inclusion this year (for example) LOL, couch surfer, fnarr fnarr and OMG (about time too; this one's nearly a hundred years old).

But not yet innit. This, though, is only a question of time, for it is unquestionably in sufficiently wide and probably permanent currency to warrant inclusion, and certainly fills a lacuna in our language: we have no invariant tag other than the crude eh? or huh? enabling us to ask for the agreement of the listener, and have to use a huge number (pity the poor foreign student of English!) of clumsy phrases like don't you? or shouldn't we?. But innit, which is a rather neat contraction of Is it not so?, can be used in any context, being the equivalent of n'est ce pas?, ¿verdad? or nicht wahr?

So we should all start using it now, without waiting for the OED to catch up, innit?

More NS competitions

2011-05-30T09:11:00.007+01:00

Writing a post the other day about the famous New Statesman competitions, I recalled some of the prizewinning entries in (much) earlier years. Not the long ones; I imagine there have been anthologies of winning entries, though I haven't been able to find one, in which I could have looked up such things as the winning entry for An Imaginary Discussion between Oswald Mosley and Ian Paisley Written in the Style of Hemingway. (I often wondered why anyone would expend the huge effort needed to write things like this in the hope of winning a small book token.)

No, it was the one-liners that stuck in my memory, such as:

Great Boasts:
At the wedding: "Yes, charming couple, I've slept with both of them."

or
Irregular Verbs, along the lines of I am firm/ you are obstinate/ he is a pig-headed fool:
"I am Oxford/ you are Cambridge/ he is London School of Economics."
"I like boys/ you are a scoutmaster/ he is in prison."

or
Announcements which make the experienced party-goer/ diner-out wish he had stayed at home:
"This is something rather special: we trod the grapes ourselves."
"And now, who's for some mead?"
"Oh goodie, Deirdrie's brought her zither!"

I wish I had made a note of some of the others; I could have made fifty posts out of them.

True prophets

2011-05-25T08:30:00.004+01:00

My friend Grumio and I were not among the countless billions who prepared to be whisked up to Paradise last week, or alternatively to be left down here to suffer a bit and then die miserably. You see, we knew that there was no hurry, because the smart money said that these happenings were still some way off.

During a trip to the States some years ago, we had had the privilege of meeting Septimus and George, two brothers who have made much more authoritative prophesies. You can tell from a glance at their lavishly illustrated website (and check out their profiles) that they are not misguided amateurs like that Camping fellow, but the real McCoy, top-level seers whose word is to be trusted.

We are advising all our friends to take their time to prepare properly, not forgetting provision for their pets, and then cash in all their investments and have a real good time in the coming months.

Selah!

The one about three intelligent men

2011-05-20T15:58:00.002+01:00

A friend asked me the other day if I knew the riddle about three men who had to compete in working out whether a black or a white patch had been stuck on their forehead. I remembered it, vaguely, and told him I would look it up and tell him how it went.

But I then found that it was not so easy to google something that contained no distinctive words. I tried various combinations, patch+ three+ black+ intelligent and so on, and eventually found a number of variations of this old puzzle, but none of them explained it well.

Finally I remembered that I had first seen it in a marvellous book my late sister gave me for my eleventh birthday: "The Complete Home Entertainer". It has a particularly fine section called Fun with Matches, Coins and String and this kept me happily occupied for a very long time, but I finally found the puzzle I wanted under Brain Twisters. I could have scanned it and posted it as a picture but it was on more than one page so that would have been tedious. Instead I typed out a précis of the question and answer, and here it is:

The three most intelligent applicants for a job are given a test.

The interviewer tells them to shut their eyes and he will then stick either a black or a white patch on the forehead of each of them. He says "When I ask you to open your eyes, anyone who can see a black patch must raise his hand. If he can deduce whether his own patch is black or white he must lower his hand".

He then stuck a black patch on each forehead and told them to open their eyes. Three hands shot up and almost immediately one came down.

"Yes? What colour is your patch?"

"Black, sir"

"Correct! The job is yours!"

How had he worked it out?

Call the candidates X, Y and Z. X says to himself:

"Suppose my patch is white. Then Y has his hand up because he can see Z's black patch."

But also he sees Z with his hand up and, being intelligent, he asks himself: "Why is Z's hand raised? Answer: because he can also can see a black patch which must (Y will argue) be mine. IF MY PATCH WERE WHITE, the intelligent Y (and the intellgent Z) would work this out in no time. But neither has done so, since both still have their hands up. Therefore the problem is not as simple as that. Therefore my patch is black".

So X got the job.

Competitions and a raincoat

2011-05-15T17:12:00.038+01:00

It is many years since I subscribed to New Statesman—in fact, I don't think I ever did, I used to read it in the library—but for some reason they often send me a free copy. This is nice, for although I would no longer want to buy it every fortnight, I enjoy seeing an occasional copy for nostalgia's sake.

I am happy to know that their competition is still going strong: it has reached No 4174, which called for poems on the subject of any well-known proverb and attracted many entries. There were several clever and elegant ones, but my favourite among the prizewinners was short and simple:
Don't keep a dog...
I kept a dog and barked myself
And now my throat is sore.
The burglars only laughed at me
And busted in my door.
They stole my money and my jewels.
They stole my private log.
I only wish they'd thought to steal
That stupid, silent dog.

In 1949 the competition was for parodies of Graham Greene's writing style; famously, the author himself submitted an entry under the pen name "N. Wilkinson" and won second prize. In 1965 Greene again entered a similar New Statesman competition under a pseudonym, and won an honourable mention.

I too entered a few times but never got even an honourable mention. However, as with all literary competitions the prizes were miserably small book tokens (they are still only £25 and some Tesco vouchers) so I soon gave up trying and later my pride was salvaged when I did win £50, a lot of money in those days, in a newspaper competition.

This was in the Observer and was for a parody of one of their regular feature writers; I chose Pierre d'Harcourt who wrote on travel (merely a slim column—lavishly illustrated colour supplements were way in the future), aimed squarely at discriminating travellers, not the holiday-making masses. Fifty years later I recycled my entry as one of the first posts in Other Men's Flowers.

I spent my winnings on a Gannex raincoat; Harold Wilson quickly followed my example and wore one on a world tour in 1956. They became fashion icons, and were worn by Lyndon Johnson, Mao Zedong and Nikita Khrushchev, as well as the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh and the royal corgis. In addition they were worn by Arctic and Antarctic explorers, Himalayan climbers, the armed services, and police forces in Britain and Canada, and the success of the new fabric made Joseph Kagan a multi-millionaire, while Wilson made him a life peer.

He was later charged with tax evasion, though the formal charges were styled as "theft" and "false accounting", to comply with extradition treaties which did not cover tax offences. After a stay in Israel, he was arrested in Paris. On December 12, 1980, he was convicted of four counts of theft, fined £375,000 and served a ten-month sentence. He lost his knighthood, but his peerage could not be forfeited and on release from custody he returned to the House of Lords and spoke on prison reform.
[Wikipedia]

Why the Sunday Times is rubbish, Part 163

2011-05-10T12:02:00.021+01:00

Last Sunday's edition was typical. The front page was dominated by a photograph and an article on Kate McCann, and the "News" Review devoted pages 1 to 3 to an extract from her forthcoming book and six more photos.
Everyone sympathises with Mrs McCann, and no-one would blame her for keeping alive the tragic story of the disappearance of her daughter Madeleine, but it was disingenuous of the ST to push these non-revelations with the subhead: "Here she tells what really happened that terrible night". After four years it would certainly be good to know what really happened, but of course the extract, and presumably the book, contains nothing new of any importance.

Much of the rest of the paper was devoted to Bin Laden, more details of billionaires and the usual unsavoury stuff from the ST's repugnant columnists.

This week, as a bonus, there was a 104-page supplement slobbering over the achievements, or luck, of a great many very very rich people.

I buy the rag only because it comes with a handy section covering books, the arts and comprehensive TV listings. Like most people, I can get all the news I want from the dailies, the internet and television.

Selah.

A weekly shot of sense

2011-05-05T07:41:00.000+01:00

I have a PVR which enables me to record TV programmes for watching at convenient times (for example, when I am not dozing, or eating, or training for the pole-vault in 2012). Most of the time there are a couple of dozen items waiting to be watched and inevitably when starting to work through them I find that in many cases I had been unjustifiably optimistic in thinking they might be interesting. So I have watched only the first five minutes of many programmes which looked promising but turned out to be rotten; this often happens with old films which I remembered with affection but which, when viewed with a more mature (or blasé) eye, are unutterably tedious.

I said rotten, not rubbish: one of the pleasures of advanced age is being able to watch rubbish without feeling guilty; I do a lot of that. I will not, therefore, list the items of which I am currently watching a series, but there are some which I can recommend without incurring contempt.

One is Dateline London, a round table discussion between media correspondents based in London, some British but mostly foreign (12.30 on Saturdays, BBC News 24). They talk about any issues of the day in a relaxed and non-adversarial way, often disagreeing but often reaching a consensus. None of them ever expresses any opinion which makes me want to punch him, or her, in the mouth. Hard-ass journalists they may be, but they argue as if they actually like and respect each other, a refreshing thing; Gavin Essler chairs admirably

And, of course, most of them know something of which they speak, having studied and reported on it. After I watch this programme I am often still confused about the matters which have been discussed, but confused in a much better-informed way, if you see what I mean.

Their discussion on April 30th was typically rewarding. They talked with appropriate gravitas about the situation in Syria, the West's attitude to dictators, and the alternative voting system, but before that with an equally appropriate lightheartedness about the previous day's royal wedding.

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown of the Independent had spent the day in a deserted Epping Forest and then at a (very small) republican party, Brian O'Connell of the Irish RTE said that they had given it three hours on TV, up to the balcony kisses, Dr Vincent Magombe of Africa Inform International said that he doubted whether anybody in Uganda had watched it because the situation there is so dire, and the splendidly named Stryker McGuire of Newsweek said that most of his compatriots had thoroughly enjoyed the magnificent spectacle, knowing that they didn't have to pay for it.

Big Nuptials

2011-04-29T16:50:00.002+01:00

"Nuptial" can mean relating to marriage or weddings, but in zoology it refers to the characteristic breeding behaviour, coloration, or structures of some animals, e.g. nuptial plumage. There was a great deal of that on the women in the Abbey this morning and some little fellows like Rowan Atkinson and Elton John had to stand on tippy toes to find their way through the throng.

The big news of the day was, of course, Nepalese choir go missing after landing at Heathrow; immigration officials were investigating whether the group had absconded or simply decided to give the Cornwall International Male Voice Choral Festival a miss.

But I am joking. That event was momentous enough, but, except in Cornwall, of little importance compared with the royal wedding—sorry, Royal Wedding—which was going to be watched on TV, so they told us this morning, by two billion people, only half a billion less than the number who watched the funeral of a dodgy Egyptian playboy's mistress in 1997.

There were many moments and sights to treasure: the man opening the offside door of the grandparent's car when it arrived at the Abbey and holding it open while standing smartly at the salute as they both got out of the other side was a splendid bit of knockabout humour, and there was much quiet enjoyment to be had from noting the soppiness of most of the hats and some of the get-ups; those of Prince Andrew's daughters, for example, were hugely comic. It must be said, though, that the top echelon of male participants looked terrific in their military finery with gold decorative bits dangling all over them, and the Dean's golden robe was a dream, making the Primate of All England look positively dowdy.

Nuptials, 1902 state Landau, jingling escorts, kiss-kiss, surging crowds, flypast, don't we do these things well? Those Americans who have heard of Great Britain are consumed with envy. Anyway, it's all over: Nicholas Witchell, Huw Edwards and the rest of the commentators and royal correspondents—sorry, Royal Correspondents—can now get up off their knees.

The noisome Earl Spencer said afterwards that it was a jolly good show but a pity that Diana wasn't there.

Playing Mummies and Daddies

2011-04-25T12:31:00.001+01:00

Feature article on page 12 of the Sunday Times, April 10th 2011:
"...research found that 88% of parents feared that children were under pressure to grow up too quickly, with concern about adult behaviour where children do not realise what they are doing... fears about children acting older than their age have been heightened ..."

Article in the same edition of the same rubbish newspaper, page 3:
This is three-quarters of a page under the headline "Playground princes get their big day", with two photos of small children. One shows a pair in wedding dress walking down the aisle of a church, the other has a little boy in military uniform and a little girl with veil and a froth of pink and white. The article drools on about the news that "Primary schools across the country [100 of them, apparently] are ringing wedding bells, with pupils playing the roles of Prince William and Kate Middleton. The boys and girls will be blessed by local vicars, sometimes dressed as the Archbishop of Canterbury, at pretend services in parish churches...".

At a school in Staffordshire the deputy head reported that "Each of the children designed 10 top honeymoon destinations for William and Kate...", but amid all this drivel there is a refreshing note of sanity: each of the children has "... sent a letter to Kate warning her to think carefully about marrying into the royal family".

There has been no mention of pretend honeymoons to follow the pretend weddings, but the Sunday Times article thoughtfully tells us that "the ceremonies are naturally on a smaller scale than the real thing on April 29th" and presumably this will apply to the honeymoons too; behind the bike sheds would be traditional, but not many schools have these nowadays.

And I suppose they don't do pretend divorces until the sixth form.

Weasel words

2011-04-20T08:57:00.002+01:00

"I'm sorry if what I'm setting out to do hasn't communicated itself...Listening to the vote this morning, if I've not got that message across then I apologise."

Andrew Lansley's words, reported last week as "an abject apology", were nothing of the kind, for three reasons:

First, I'm sorry is rarely an apology; usually it is an expression of regret for something for which the speaker bears no trace of responsibility: I'm sorry to hear your grandmother's got piles. Second, use of the conditional if, twice, suggests that it is by no means certain that there is anything to apologise for. Finally, switching to the passive hasn't communicated itself lets the speaker out: if you didn't get it, that was your fault or the message's, not mine.

He could have made an apology which really meant something: I now realise that my proposals for the NHS were ill-considered and likely to harm the NHS irrevocably, and that I failed to explain them clearly and honestly. For these things, and my general incompetence, I apologise.

Fat chance.

Reverse crusade

2011-04-15T18:16:00.000+01:00

Interesting to see that Gbagbo and his forces of the Ivory Coast Christian south have been finally beaten by the forces of the Muslim north and the French. Apparently his only allies in the world were the American Christian evangelists, who admired him greatly and believed he had really won the election.

Nice to know, too, that the graffiti artist Banksy Moon gave his support to the right side.

Allegro ma non troppo

2011-04-10T09:37:00.047+01:00

If I have any kind of individual writing style then it is a careless blend of the highfalutin' and the demotic or even racy; in other words, people may need a dictionary for one sentence and are offended by the coarseness of the next. This means that am often taken to task for faults in my writing, being condemned either for pretentiousness or crudity.

The atmosphere during many a convivial evening at Reginald's has become ill-natured or even violent when I have been forced to defend myself against attacks by Grumio or other soi-disant linguistic experts expressing their contempt for some trivial syntactical or stylistic error in something I have published.

Nearly always these strictures are totally unjustified; a typical example is the criticism of my excessive use of "selah", on the grounds that I do not actually know what the word means. This is unfair: if we all restricted our vocabulary to words of which we fully comprehend the meaning then discourse would be stifled and politicians, for example, would have to remain permanently mumchance (a pleasing prospect).

Anyway, in the case of "selah", there is every excuse for not knowing the meaning, for no-one really does. The Oxford Dictionary has:

selah, exclamation
(in the Bible) occurring frequently at the end of a verse in Psalms and Habakkuk, probably as a musical direction.

This is not much help and is probably wrong: musical directions are not exclamations. So never mind what Habbakuk meant, I use it to mean any one of a number of things, for example: amen; what d'you think of that?; so there!; you know I'm right; QED; here endeth the lesson, or whatever.

Selah!

[The title of this post really is a musical direction and has an interesting story behind it.]

Cops and Rozzers

2011-04-05T14:26:00.010+01:00

We like naming things, so much so that a multilingual glossary of some groups of names would be a hefty volume.

Take insects, for example; in hundreds of years entomologists have already named millions of the little chaps, but there may still be many whole species which remain anonymous. Then there are our naughty bits: there are thousands of terms for these—technical, demotic or vulgar—although those in the last group are never uttered in polite society; any English translation of Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel will contain several hundred names for the items relevant to both genders.

A similar restriction applies to deities, many of whom are said to wax exceeding wrathful if their name, or one of their many names, is actually spoken. An extreme case of such divine paranoia is described by Arthur C Clarke in The Nine Billion Names of God, but I will not reveal the appalling punishment meted out if anyone lists these, for that would spoil the enjoyment of those who have never read this classic 1953 short story.

Police officers are another group bearing many names; a few are affectionate, most are insulting; Wikipedia lists two hundred of them. Inexplicably, a disproportionate number seem to originate in Turkey, such as this one:
Aynasız
The most common slang word to address a police officer in Turkish. The word literally means "mirrorless", and its attribution to a police officer suggests that a cop is perceived as someone who constantly accuses others of vice, whereas he himself has no mirror to see his own vice. It is the semi-official equivalent of the English word "pig" (only when used to refer to the police), and commonly used when translating English-spoken movies into Turkish. Pronunciation is roughly I-nuh-suzz. (Plural: Aynasızlar)

Few of the terms Wikipedia lists are as sophisticated as that. Most are rather dull:
Hot Dogs
a Chinese term referring to stationary traffic cops and guards who are standing in the sun all day.
or:
Bängen
Swedish slang term for the police. Originally an old Swedish word for devil, from Romani Beng with the same meaning.

The Blue Comes Through

2011-03-31T12:22:00.010+01:00

A few years ago I wrote a post about my first employers and their products (or, rather, one of them; I omitted to mention another of our best sellers, an ointment for piles: blind, bleeding, itching, ulcerated or protruding).

And we sold all round the world other equally effective remedies for a variety of distressing maladies. Our advertising, though perfectly honest, was colourful and convincing; inevitably, it evoked a great number of enquiries and it was one of my duties as Export Manager to respond to them.

Many were from West Africa. In those days none of them were of the kind which asked for my bank details so as to facilitate the transfer to me of huge sums of money; some were heartwarming expressions of gratitude for having relieved the writer's discomfort or worry and others asked for advice or a free sample. Most included lurid details of the writer's symptoms, and some of these had to be kept out of the sight of the junior office staff, for these were prudish times; nowadays, of course, they would be pinned up so that everyone could have a giggle.

In reply I used a number of different standard letters, all of them ethically impeccable, giving sound advice where this could do no harm and always recommending consulting a doctor. Sometimes I would add a non-committal sentence of comfort or re-assurance.

I still have a file of the most entertaining letters that I received. It was all rather a waste of time, really. It would have been easier, and perhaps kinder, to have had a few hundred standard replies ready-printed for use in most cases, simply saying:

Dear Sir
You have the pox.
Yours faithfully....

Salutations in Cochinchina

2011-03-26T10:14:00.001Z

When visiting one of the many parts of the world where they speak a language of which I have no knowledge, I always try to master a few phrases before I go. To help me with this I used to use Babel Fish but now I find Google Translate is better, and will pronounce the phrase for you as well as translate it. It is important to practise: get an intonation only slightly wrong and, with Asian languages in particular, you might ask your neighbour at dinner to pass the salt and find that you have insulted the fellow's grandmother in a most unmentionable manner.

It is useless to learn how to ask for directions, or indeed any kind of question other than rhetorical ones, for you will not understand the answer: cheery greetings and courtesies are what you need. Here, for example, are translations into Vietnamese of some phrases which might be useful when you are strolling in the vibrant market streets of Saigon:

Get out of here
Có được ra khỏi đây

Why don't you get out of here?
Tại sao bạn không nhận được ra khỏi đây?

If you don't get out of here, I will knock your block off / kick you in the mouth
Nếu bạn không nhận được ra khỏi đây, tôi sẽ rời khỏi khối / đá bạn trong miệng

[For the technically minded: Google Translate uses statistical machine translation, which has made substantial advances in recent years, while Babel Fish uses SYSTRAN rule-based technology.]

Selection No 36

2011-03-21T09:39:00.001Z

More re-cycled posts from 2005:

literature
Books that sound fascinating but probably aren't

religion
Sadly, now topical: fatuous comment on God's role in Katrina

personal
Casual observation on trivial matter evokes lively argument

Misunderstanding

2011-03-16T08:43:00.000Z

I have just discovered that several versions of this probably apocryphal story have been circulating for years. Why had I never heard it until now?

On a visit to the Elysée Palace, Dorothy Macmillan said to Mme de Gaulle: "Now that your husband has achieved so much, is there any particular wish you have for him?", to which Madame replied: "Yes, a penis."

There was a stunned silence until General De Gaulle looked up and said: "Ah yes, 'appiness is what we all want."

In Glorious Drearicolor!

2011-03-11T11:21:00.045Z

The website World of Soviet Groceries is not nearly as exciting as it sounds, though it does give an accurate if depressing picture of what life in the Soviet Union must have been like.

When I was there the USSR still had a few years of life left in it and I don't remember what I ate in Moscow so I suppose most of the dishes must have been along the same lines as those illustrated.

So indeed were the entertainments provided for us by our hosts, though I suppose they meant well: the high spot was an hour spent in a glum queue waiting to file past the embalmed corpse of Lenin, and a close second was a promised afternoon at the Bolshoi Theatre, which turned out not to be one one of the great ballets or operas but a two-hour talk on the history of the Bolshoi, in Russian.

Cab and me

2011-03-06T19:36:00.019Z

Last Thursday was an important anniversary for me, and by an extraordinary co-incidence it was also an anniversary for the great Cab Calloway, for on 3rd March in the year I was born he published Minnie the Moocher, the first million-selling jazz record.

But sadly I could not invite him to join me in celebration because he died in 1994, and I certainly wouldn't want to invite his trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, who stabbed him in the leg with a small knife in 1941 and died in 1993.

So to mark the occasion I had dinner with my immediate family, nine of us, at a restaurant in rural Sussex: no scat singing or HBTY, just a couple of hours browsing and sluicing.

As a matter of interest (my interest, that is) I ate:
Potted Herring, Slow Cooked Gloucester Old Spot Belly, Fennel Gratin, Chestnut Honey Tart, Green Walnut Ice Cream... and miscellaneous forkfuls from the plates of those who had something different: Barbary duck, onion jam potatoes, pigeon, that sort of thing. An eight-year-old grand-daughter had chosen Jacob's Ladder (illustrated below), but needed very little help from me in putting it away.

It was a splendid evening.

Welcome to Chicago

2011-02-28T13:56:00.002Z

No 33 in an occasional series of extracts from The Postcard Century

July 1933 Chicago needed good news. With Roosevelt's New Deal the end of the Great Depression seemed to be in sight and the final death of Prohibition was only months away. With Al Capone in prison and many mobsters dead times were quieter and 22 million people came to this racy fair, here announced in suitable style for the world's jazz capital. Even the pose of the bathing belle is as angular as a swastika.

Evelyn and Valentine write to the Mellons in Guildford NY: We went to the stock yards yesterday. You should see them cut ham off & pork loins. Just 2 cuts for ham and 1 for a loin.

Acupuncture’s dubious past

2011-02-22T11:14:00.001Z

KSJ Tracker is a service for science journalists, created and funded by the Knight Science Journalism Fellowship Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Last year they published this note reviewing an article in a German newspaper about the background of acupuncture. I was attracted to it by the amazing diagram, which tells you everything you need to know about this ancient Chinese art, if you are an ancient Chinese quack.

It was George Soulié de Morant, a Frenchman (1878-1955), who is considered to be the “father” of western style acupuncture. His descriptions in his books of how and where to put the needles into the skin of patients guided all his followers. Unfortunately he was a fabulist, according to an article in the Süddeutsche Zeitung. The author (Hanjo Lehmann) is a physician and head of the German Institute for Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), whose aim it is to research the scientific basis of TCM. He seems to be the first ever who really looked into the roots of the western style acupuncture and the ridiculous theories of Soulié de Morant. The article explains his fraud in detail, starting with his name – he himself added the aristocratic “de Morant”. Although he writes that he spoke Chinese, when he arrived in China in 1901 (only 23 years old!) there is no hint, that he ever studied Chinese or lived with Chinese people. Also, his rank as vice-consul and judge seems implausible, because he never visited any university or diplomatic school.

Regarding acupuncture, Soulié de Morant describes how he first saw and practised the technique himself during a cholera outbreak in Bejing in 1901. Unfortunately, no records of such an outbreak at that time exist. These and dozens of more inconsistencies are interesting, but what consequences do they have for “modern” acupuncture therapies? Well, Soulié de Morant’s fiction and misconceptions not only found their way into but are the very basis of current acupuncture. The whole philosophy of western acupuncture, with energy streams and stuff like that, is based on sloppy translations, misconceptions or even blank fantasy. As an example, the “Qi” in Chinese acupuncture tradition meant a fine substance; Soulié translated it into the disembodied, current-like “energy”, a whole different concept. One might say, “Who cares? In most cases, acupuncture doesn’t work, anyway.”

In Germany, to get official approval to offer acupuncture German physicians must pay for an expensive course, based on Soulié de Morant’s quackery. So patients are having needles stuck into them based on the fantasies of a fraud.

And bring your good lady

2011-02-17T17:55:00.004Z

A couple of years ago I published a post about the invitations which I occasionally receive from my old school. It would be hypocritical to express my regrets that I cannot attend, and ungracious to explain that that the functions they refer to are usually of a kind which are less attractive to me than the prospect of being thrown, naked, into a vat of boiling pitch. So I do not reply.

But they have not given up on me. Presumably they have a mouldering database of email addresses of old boys, many of whom have been dead for thirty years, which still includes mine. Anyway, they are still trying, and the invitation I had the other day was much more intriguing that the usual ones. It announced:

Prostate Awareness Roadshow and Social Evening

...at the Rugger Clubhouse, "...not just a venue for sportsmen: it is the spiritual home of the Old Boys and has 6 changing rooms for simultaneous blood tests". I had no idea!

Besides a talk from a consultant urological surgeon, "...the evening will also be a social affair and a chance to meet old friends over a pint and and gastronomic delights". The blood test is optional.

Difficult to turn down such an entrancing offer. But I shall, I shall.

Milestones in the history of Egypt

2011-02-12T08:49:00.003Z

In a couple of earlier posts I described the major events in Egypt in 1952 and 1953, in particular my arrival in Ismailia in February 1952, my move to Fayid in July that year and my return to England in January 1953. I am now able to add a note about contemporaneous happenings there and subsequent developments.

On 23rd July 1952 King Farouk was deposed by the Free Officers movement led by Gamel Abdel Nasser and Mohamed Naguib Yousef Qotp (Qotp?) Elkashlan, and the latter became Egypt's first Prime Minister. Eleven months later the Republic of Egypt was established and Naguib was sworn in as President. He had often been censured and as a child sometimes even whipped by his British tutors for criticizing Britain's occupation of Egypt and Sudan, but I had always felt he was a reasonable chap as army officers go and although I never actually met him I was ready to give him my full support had he asked me.

In November 1954, however, he was ousted by Nasser. By that time I was working in England as Export Manager for an American firm of proprietary medicine manufacturers, so I could play no part in what happened later: in fact, my influence on Middle Eastern affairs generally had declined for ever; Suez, the rise and fall of Saddam Hussein and the departure of the Shah all took place without my involvement, though over the years I had some happy times in Amman, Tehran, Tel Aviv, Damascus, Luxor and many other hot noisy places where people try to sell you things.

And I never gave a thought to Hosni Mubarak, or he to me, during his thirty years of brutal dictatorship, until the last eighteen days and the immensely satisfying dénouement yesterday.

Flavour of the Month

2011-02-08T14:35:00.000Z

Here's an extract from The Flavour Thesaurus by Niki Segnit:

Avocado and Lime: Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra singing ‘Some Velvet Morning'. At once beautiful together and distinctly separate, Lee the velvety note of avocado, Nancy the high-pitched lime that that cuts through the smoothness just when you’re getting too comfortable.

The association may largely be down to my having played the song over and over again, driving down Highway 1 in California on honeymoon. While others toast their future together over lightly grilled fish and flutes of champagne served on a lapping pontoon in the Indian Ocean, we stopped at striplit taquerías and ate burritos the size of shotputters’ forearms. Tender strips of grilled steak come rolled in a floury, slightly crisp tortillas packed with rice, beans, soured cream, mouth-watering, lime-laced guacamole and salsa so fiery you have to grab the sides of the little plastic service basket till your eyes stop streaming tears.

On the subject of guacamole, some say that leaving the avocado stone in will prevent discoloration. My view is that if the guacamole’s around long enough to find out, you’re not making it right.

Her rapturous description of a jumbo burrito reminds me how disgusting Tex-Mex food is. But isn't she fun to read?

Letting the French back in

2011-02-03T08:32:00.005Z

Here is a picture of the British landing from their boats before the battle of Quebec, on September 17th, 1759. The leaders on both sides, Wolfe and Montcalm, were killed. (There was another Battle of Quebec in December 1775, when the British and Canadian garrison drove off an American attack and ended the threat to the British control of Canada.)

But Canadians know all this, of course, and possibly a few Englishmen as well; that is not what this post is about.

In the English county of Kent there is a small town called Westerham (town square shown below). Winston Churchill and I used to live not far from there, though not in the same house or at the same time.

It was the birthplace of General Wolfe, so naturally local pubs, tea-rooms and, for all I know, public conveniences, proudly bear his name.

On the outskirts of the town there is a large house, converted some years ago into a very good restaurant. It was run by a large and fierce francophone Egyptian called Zarb. I like to think that it was not from chauvinism or to thumb his nose at the locals but in a spirit of respect and reconciliation that he called it Le Marquis de Montcalm.

Location, location

2011-01-29T11:20:00.005Z

Earlier this month I wrote about the incorporation of the Oxford Thesaurus into The Online Oxford Dictionary. Exciting news indeed, but I omitted to mention that one year's subscription to the combined work costs GBP205 or US$295.

But it needn't cost you anything at all. If you are a true-born, full-blooded Englishman there is no problem; if you are not true-born, or full-blooded, or English, or a man (or not even a UK resident), then you will have to go to a little trouble, but of course it will be well worth it. This is what you must do:

1. Choose a town in the UK where you could bear to live. Tastes vary so much that I cannot advise on this, but there are plenty of publications which will guide you, either negatively or positively, such as Crap Towns of Southeast England, Essex for Gourmets, We Ban Members of the Bullingdon Club, The Museums of Cumbria, No LibDems Here, The Top 100 Scottish Towns for Posh Totty, Havens in Dorset for Hedge Fund Managers, Muggers' Cumbria, and many others.

2. Log on to the website of the town you have chosen, find the telephone number of its public library and phone to find out whether it is covered by the agreement with the Oxford University Press permitting them to enable their subscribers to access OUP online publications (most UK library authorities are) from their home computers without charge.

3. If the answer is yes, move yourself (and your family if you like) to that town and join its library. You will be given a PIN.

4. Enjoy the OED and the Thesaurus for the rest of your life or until the British government closes down all the public libraries and sells the OED to Houghton Mifflin.

.

Book now to survive

2011-01-24T08:51:00.001Z

Earlier this month a reader's letter in Private Eye drew attention to an advertisement which had appeared in Eye 1279. It is a tiny ad and contains only a coloured picture of some sort of conflagration and the questions "Have you thought about the future?" and "Are you ready" (with no question mark). But it does give a link to the website http://www.arcsurvival.com/ where all is explained.

The site is well designed, though the spelling and punctuation of the text are not of the highest standard, but the welcome page advises: "If you do not have expendable liquid funds available to you, to cover as a minimum of one point five million euros for each member of your family, please do not continue". I would have to check whether I qualify, which is by no means certain, but clearly the offer is aimed at a high proportion of OMF's demographic, and in the interests of my readers I felt bound to investigate so that none of them would miss the opportunity of a profitable investment.

It is indeed a remarkable offer. Bearing in mind that "the Mayan’s predicted thousands of years ago that mankind as we know it would cease to exist at the end of December 2012" (cue lovely picture of a Mayan carving), that ..."the Knights of Malta, Knights of the Templar, Bilderburg group, Illuminati, and so on, Reptilian hybrids, shape shifters, etc, etc) have been living underground for thousands of years, feeding off the surface in terms of energy, food, etc etc....." and are about to emerge and take over the few humans who will be left after World War 3", plus "the well-known fact that an asteroid in the shape of the devil's head will pass near the Earth in 2012", we may well be concerned about the future.

It must be said that not everyone agrees with these predictions; my friends Septimus and George, for example, who look at the end-of-mankind thing from a more Jesus-oriented viewpoint, reckon that it will all happen before the end of this year, but, unlike the ArcSurvival people, have no suggestions for avoiding the unpleasantness which awaits us all.

What does the Arc (or sometimes Ark) Survival Group have to offer?

Well, this is not a flimsy plan hastily cobbled together by amateurs. For years a "highly experienced, and knowledgeable engineering team that has over 20 years average experience in all aspects of engineering, Structural, Mechanical, Advanced Engineering,... very respected and well known by their peer’s, experts in cutting edge free energy technology, of which we have perfected and have gone to great lengths to secure, in Nuclear, chemical, biological, attack survival and with advanced knowledge and expertise in natural disaster survival, including plate shifts...and with extensive knowledge in long term food and water provision and storage..." has been preparing to offer to "a handful of Elite people" a number of Ark Survival villages completely invisible to the outside world.

Each village will have some of the latest medical equipment available, and will in fact incorporate a mini hospital, while "two of the Elite members will be fully trained and qualified Doctors who can cover all aspects of health including surgical operations. Natural and homeopathic healing will play a major role, and we are already very advanced with this including treatments and cures for previously thought incurable diseases".

Security will be paramount: "We have a small number of specialists ex British SAS members who are part of our team and play a major role in member preparation, training, and state of the art security measures. This ensures that our survival village, will not only be completely stealth, but will be secure against any outside hostility".

It is good to know that "careful vetting of all who become part of this project" will be considered "of the up most importance", though presumably care will be taken not to infringe any of the provisions of the Equal Opportunities Act or relevant EU regulations. After all, being one of the Elite may involve staying underground for several years, and after paying all that money it would be distressing to find that one was expected to share accommodation with a rowdy bunch of former hedge fund managers or LibDem supporters.

We are told that: "Commissioning will commence from July 2011 through to November 2012 and planned first evacuation December 15th 2012". However, the Mayans prophesied nasty things happening at the end of December 2012 and of course the devil's head asteroid is scheduled to start upsetting everyone's arrangements in the same month, so time is getting very short.

The project sounds well thought out and attractive, though some may be doubtful about "placing funds into an irrevocable letter of credit attached to a contact agreeable to both parties, for no less than 60% of the total required amount". Still, we were warned at the outset that only those ready to contribute a minimum of one point five million euros for each member of their family should enter the website.

Fractally speaking

2011-01-19T08:41:00.000Z

Maths jokes, let alone good ones, are rare, and I am indebted to my friend Froog, eminent Sinologist, former barrister and now doyen of the Beijing Bar Society, for passing on this:

Q: The great mathematician who died last year was called Benoit B. Mandelbrot. What does the B stand for?

A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot

Having a ball in Berlin, 1930

2011-01-14T12:31:00.002Z

No 33 in an occasional series of extracts from The Postcard Century

May 1930 A scene set for any amoral tale of Berlin's cabaret years. The couple occupy one of the 'postillons d'amour with curtains' advertised on the back of the card (as is table-to-table telephone). Then mood is sophisticated, liberated, modern, everything that makes Frank write My dearest Eva, Come to Berlin for a proper holiday. You cannot find the same in England. Amusement, weather, sights and all are good & I can act as guide. Was Eva (in Hounslow) tempted? Did she enter the novel whose opening lines this message could so convincingly supply?

Anne's First Theorem

2011-01-09T11:47:00.045Z

Anne teaches mathematics, and our friend Grumio gave her this Christmas present:

He had it produced for Anne by TheoryMine, whose details are here (read the FAQs). A certificate of registry was provided guaranteeing that it is unique and provable, and that it has been recorded under her name in their database.

As most readers of OMF know, a theorem is a mathematical formula for which we have a proof. Both theorems and proofs are within a theory which consists of a set of axioms. A proof is a sequence of formulae, starting with some axioms and ending with the theorem. Each non-axiom formula in this sequence follows from the previous formulae in the sequence. All the axioms in TheoryMine theories are recursive definitions.

Recursion is a mathematical technique that is much used in computer programs. In a recursive definition, the value of a recursive function is defined in terms of values of the same function applied to smaller inputs. This sounds circular, but because the function's inputs get smaller and smaller the computation eventually stops. TheoryMine also uses recursion to define brand new types of input and output for each theory. These are called recursive data-structures.

But never mind about all that; theorems are abstract objects that are not subject to wear and tear. Even diamonds will be destroyed in the heat death of the universe; theorems won't be.

So what a splendid gift they make! No-one could doubt that they are a girl's best friend.

Les Mots Justes

2011-01-04T08:15:00.000Z

When people stumble across a blog which seems to have no obvious theme or purpose, they naturally wonder what it is about. What's the point?, they ask themselves...what's the fellow's game?

So right from the start I have made it absolutely clear what themes OMF conspicuously lacked, and exactly what range of purposes it was not intended to serve: the blog is basically a confused and confusing assortment of disparate bits and pieces, if you will pardon the cliché, and with the help of the good Dr Roget, I compiled a list of all the words which seemed to me to describe its essence. These sixteen words are listed in ABOUT.

Now, as OMF lumbers into its seventh year, it occurs to me that this brief description of it is inadequate. By a happy coincidence, there was a historic event in the publishing world last month which provided me with a wonderful tool to help me flesh it out: this was the incorporation into the mighty Oxford English Dictionary of the equally mighty Oxford Historical Thesaurus of the English Language (see note at the foot of this post) into the online version of the OED.

So it was the work of a moment to search for "medley" in the great thesaurus and get a list of thirty-two more words or phrases describing OMF. Here they are:

a mishmash 1475 A confused mixture or jumble; a muddle.
a peasemeal 1525 (figurative) A hotchpotch, a mess.
omnium gatherum 1530 A gathering or collection of all sorts of people or things.
a mingle 1548 A mingled mass, a mixture.
hotchpotch 1549 A confused mixture of disparate things; a medley, a jumble.
mingle-mangle 1549 A mixture, a mishmash; a confused medley of things, ideas, persons, etc.
a rhapsody 1574 A miscellany or medley; esp. a muddled collection of words, ideas, etc.
a sauce-medley 1579 A concoction, a mixture compounded by art.
a pell-mell 1586 An indiscriminate mingling, a confused mixture or throng.
a linsey-woolsey 1592 (figurative) A strange medley; confusion, nonsense.
a wilderness 1594 A mingled, confused, or vast assemblage or collection of persons or things.
a brewage 1599 (figurative)
a macaronic 1611 A jumble or medley.
an olla podrida 1635 A diverse mixture of things or elements
a consarcination 1640 Anything patched up, a heterogeneous combination.
a porridge 1642 A jumble, a mess; something without structure or substantial content; something dull or turgid.
an olio 1649 Any mixture of many heterogeneous elements.
a jumble 1661 A confused or disorderly mixture or assemblage
a motley 1698 An incongruous or confused mixture.
a capilotade 1705 (figurative) A cooked-up story, hash, medley.
a hash 1733 A mixture of mangled and incongruous fragments; a medley; a spoiled mixture; a mess
a salmagundi 1761 (figurative) A mixture
a pasticcio 1785 A confused mixture, a hotchpotch; a mess.
a macédoine 1820 A medley or mixture of unrelated things.
a job lot 1828 A motley assortment brought together (freq. cheaply)
a conglomerate 1837 (figurative) A mixture of various materials or elements, clustered together without assimilation.
a pot-pourri 1841 A diverse collection or assortment of people or things
a chow-chow 1850 A mixture or medley of any sort.
a jumbling 1852 What is produced by the action of the verb jumble
a haggis 1899 A mixture, hodge-podge; a mess.
a casserole 1930 (figurative) A variety of things cooked together.

Paradoxically, the forty-eight words together make up a precise and accurate specification of Other Men's Flowers, which is a perfect epitome of imprecision and inaccuracy.

Other Men's Flowers wishes a HAPPY NEW YEAR to all conglomerate fans, pasticcio buffs, chow-chow lovers, linsey-wolsey enthusiasts and peasemeal aficionados.

[The Oxford Historical Thesaurus is a taxonomic classification of the majority of senses and lemmas in OED Online. It can be thought of as a kind of semantic index to the contents of the OED, and can be used in OED Online to navigate around the dictionary by topic, find related terms, and explore the lexical history of a concept or meaning. Each class (a list of senses and lemmas sharing a particular meaning) is arranged chronologically, giving a historical overview of the concept represented by that class.]

Tidings of comfort and joy

2010-12-30T11:33:00.000Z

No, we had that one in the cookhouse a few days ago.

On a similar theme is the remarkable anagram devised for a crossword clue by that great compiler John Graham ("Araucaria"), who will be 90 in the New Year: O hark the herald angels sing the boy's descent which lifted up the world (5,9,7,5,6,2,5,3,6,2,3,6).

If you need a hint, I can tell you that you probably heard these twelve words more than once in the last week.

Yes, that's right: While shepherds watched their flocks by night all seated on the ground.

But my favourite crossword clue is this one, which is much easier to solve: "-" (1,6,3,1,4)

Truce

2010-12-25T09:37:00.001Z

Here is a rude song and then a reconstruction of what happened 97 years ago today.

Just for kissing

2010-12-22T08:30:00.001Z

By all means make the most of mistletoe over the next few days, but pay no attention to the claims of the pathetic remnant which used to call itself the Liverpool Homeopathic Hospital but is now just a "department" at the Old Swan Health Centre. On its website it states that it runs "a complementary cancer clinic offering treatment with homeopathic remedies and Iscador".

The manufacturers of Iscador assert, probably illegally and certainly without justification, that their product is a "mistletoe cancer treatment", the most frequently used of all such remedies in the world. Mistletoe, of course, has no connection with homeopathy, but quackeries generally support each other; the association of these two stems from one of the loony beliefs of the mystic quack Rudolf Steiner, who considered that mistletoe was a cancerous disease of trees, and therefore that, on the homeopathic Principal of Similars, cancer in humans could be cured by injections of a substance obtained from mistletoe.

The ancient pagan myths about mistletoe are more interesting and much more likely to be accurate than this pernicious drivel.

Selection No 35

2010-12-19T19:08:00.000Z

More re-cycled posts from 2005

personal
The idiot took me seriously

food and drink
It used to be no fun to eat at sea

society
The ex-brigadier swings a nifty foot

Brown Study

2010-12-13T10:12:00.000Z

Amazing what a top embalmer can do.

Perfect for those with a short attention span

2010-12-08T08:08:00.001Z

It is a truism that many top film-makers spend lucrative if uncredited time working on television commercials. It may be sad to think that their consummate talents are being devoted to trying to persuade people to buy one brand of toilet paper rather than another, but it is not entirely a waste: in a bad week on TV there may be more pleasure to be had from the occasional amusing commercial than from most of the dross purporting to be entertainment.

Here are three examples of advertisements currently appearing which, quite inexplicably in some cases, I have enjoyed watching:

1. A double-glazing company has a series of vignettes following the making of a commercial to promote their services; most of these are fairly feeble and become tedious with repetition, but there is one in which the director asks the cameraman "How was it for you?". The cameraman, clearly a decent if boring fellow rather like Laura's very nearly cuckolded husband in Brief Encounter, replies, with an ineffably lovely smile, "Oh yes, going really well, isn't it?".
Now, this is a very unlikely exchange between two film professionals, and I cannot explain why it makes me feel warm all over.

2. A supplier of fitted kitchens have a new version of their ad which features a male and a female dancer prancing around a fitted kitchen. This is serious high-class stuff—arabesques, glissades, fouettés, battements, pliés, tours en l'air, that sort of thing.
It is all completely pointless and tells you absolutely nothing about the ease with which their cupboards open or the quality of their worktops, but is a joy to watch.

3. This one begins with a rear-three-quarter shot of a girl's feet and ankles; she appears to be standing naked in a field. The camera moves upwards past her bare calves, knees, thighs and a pair of admirable buttocks then, as it moves further up, she turns her face towards us, gives a shy smile and, horror of horrors, we see that she has a tooth missing!
This brilliantly conceived and executed commercial has been made with a view to persuading us to buy some kind of product which stops your teeth falling out.

Has he or hasn't he?

2010-12-03T11:35:00.011Z

Sly innuendo is not something you expect to encounter when you consult the Oxford English Dictionary.

However, in announcing the publication this week of the new version of the OED Online, its editor has given this question as an example of the kind of thing it can answer: Would Prince William have 'joined giblets' with Kate?

For the benefit of those sad individuals who cannot afford the subscription and do not belong to an English library or other institution which gives you free access to the OED, I will tell you what I found in the Historical Thesaurus now incorporated with it. The answer is 'No, not yet'. (To join one's giblets means to get married.)

On second thoughts, this is probably not the only instance of impropriety to be found in the great work. I haven't looked for others, but scattered among its thousands of pages there must surely be more examples of suggestive interpretations, definitions or etymologies. If anyone can find some and pass them on to me, I shall be happy to publish a list for the gratification of the more prurient of my readers.

I am referring of course only to gentle indelicacies. Everyone knows that the OED, aiming to be comprehensive in its coverage of the English language, contains on almost every page a plethora of explicit obscenity. I won't have any of that sort of thing in OMF: if you are keen on this, you will have to take out a second mortgage or join a library so that you can subscribe to OED online and search it for filthy words.

Bustling over large balls

2010-11-28T11:05:00.000Z

For at least seven hundred years efforts have been made to stop people playing football. Sadly, this noble cause has never had much success.

In 1314 the Mayor of London issued the following proclamation on behalf of King Edward II:
For as much as there is great noise in the city caused by bustling over large balls...from which many evils might arise which God forbid: We command and forbid on behalf of the king, on pain of imprisonment, such game to be used in the city in future.

In 1349, Edward III sent a letter of complaint to the sheriffs of London declaring that "the skill of shooting with arrows was almost totally laid aside for the purpose of useless and unlawful games such as football." The danger attending the pastime occasioned King James I of England, in the rules drawn up by himself for the recreations of his son Henry Prince of Wales, to give the following instructions:
From this court I debarre all rough and violent exercises, as the foote-ball. meeter for laming than making able the users thereof; but the exercises I would have you to use, although but moderately, not making a craft of them, are running, leaping, wrestling, fencing, dancing, and playing at the caitch, or tennise, archerie, palle-malle and suchlike other fair and pleasant field-games.

Richard II in 1389 and Henry IV in 1401 tried again to little avail.

In 1424, under James I of Scotland, an Act of Parliament was passed outlawing the game:
It is statute, and the king forbiddis. that na man play at the fute-ball under the paine of fiftie schillings, to be raised to the lord of the land als oft as he be tainted. or to the scheriffe of the lands or his ministers if the lords will not punish sik trespassours.

(On the other hand, in 1526 Henry VIII ordered a pair of football boots of leather, handstitched by the Royal Cordwainer; they cost four shillings. But perhaps he was more serious about footwear than football: at the same time he ordererd seventy-seven other pairs of boots, buskins, shoes and slippers.)

It is regrettable that our later sovereigns did not attempt to continue this salutary if fruitless campaign, and it seems unlikely that the Windsors will ever renew it.

Yin, yang and qi in the workshop

2010-11-23T14:55:00.000Z

In a post headed Karma Kanic the blogger Crispian Jago gives an account of the New Age Vehicle Well-Running Centre, which applies entirely new procedures to car maintenance. It is summarised as follows:
Unlike mainstream mechanics who seem to have little time for their customers and focus on the specific faults of your car, alternative mechanics will take a holistic approach to your car's well-running by using traditional and natural repair techniques that enhance your vehicle's whole engine, body and petroleum spirit.

The technical leaflet he reprints is a little difficult to read unless you enlarge it, but here are the headings to some of the notes detailing the various procedures used:

Drive shaft Manipulation; Torsion Healing; Ayurvedic Mechanics; Tyreology; Exhaust Candling; Wax & Polish Therapy; Anti Service.

The last item refers to the fact that the regular servicing of your car simply pumps it full of toxic oil and brake fluid and feeds the profit of conventional garages. Some studies have shown a link between new car servicing and incorrect valve clearance.

When This Lousy War is Over

2010-11-18T11:10:00.003Z

This song was not sung during any of the recent remembrance ceremonies.

Soldiers of the King, Part Three

2010-11-13T11:15:00.006Z

Continued from HERE .

We stopped in Malta for a night and luxuriated in a fine drizzle, the first rain I had seen for more than a year. On landing in England we were deposited in Tottenham Court Road underground station which was being used as a rather cosy holding camp.

There we heard the news that Lilibet had replaced Bertie, which meant that I had become a Soldier of the Queen. This made me feel rather Victorian; I imagined myself and my men, bayonets fixed, red jackets with brass buttons gleaming in the African sun, advancing fearlessly under a shower of assegais, ready to give the Matabele horde a real pasting. But, of course, I would have been no use at that sort of thing.

The War Office Selection Board was not too difficult for me; my fellow candidates were mostly rather callow youths so although I lacked the aristocratic background of most of them my advanced age, deep tan and camel flashes gave me some kind of cachet which enabled me to compete. Anyway, I passed.

Then, finally, I found myself at last where I had been trying to get to for most of my military career, Mons Officer Cadet School, where I became one of the 40,000 cadets who passed through the hands of the legendary Regimental Sergeant-Major R Brittain, MBE, Coldstream Guards, a fearsome but basically kindly man. He had become the best-known soldier in the country, having appeared in a number of films, some in a character part and some as himself; he was very proud of this and if he saw eyes straying as he strolled down the ranks standing to attention he would bark "Don't look at me! If you want to see me, go to the pictures".

We spent a lot of time standing to attention and I still remember the mantra which tells you exactly how to assume the position:
HeadupChininChestoutStomachinEyestothefront*
HeelstogetherFeetatanangleoffortyfivedegrees
ThumbsinlinewiththeseamofthetrousersSTANDPUFFEKLYSTIW!

It is worrying to think that there are now two generations of young and not-so-young men who have no idea how to do this; lacking this skill and some others, they will be absolutely nonplussed if they are ever called up to defend us from Mongol hordes, or a nuclear-armed rogue state, or whoever.

I enjoyed the fourteen weeks at Mons and after it was over not only was I able at last to put on the hat I had coveted for so long (I lashed out and had one made to measure; it cost me a weeks' pay) and the little stick, and at the passing-out parade I got to carry a (blunt) sword and give the order to fix bayonets.

But my pleasure in such glories was short-lived: the only really remarkable thing about my two years' National Service was that after all the messing about on the Suez Canal only ten weeks elapsed between gaining a commission and being demobbed.

[*I have just seen in newsreel film of Cameron's visit to Beijing a shot of the Guard of Honour in their very pretty uniforms, being inspected. They do not keep their eyes to the front at all, but turn their heads Mexican-wave fashion as he passes. This is impressive but slightly creepy.]

Così Fan Tutte, or most of them

2010-11-08T15:45:00.000Z

In my last post I described a little test I made to see if it was true that women are more superstitious than men. Knowing that among my readers are a number of otherwise sensible women who would find it totally unacceptable that I should consider the suggestion valid, I fully expected that one or more of them would take issue with me.

But none have done so. On the contrary, one comment came from an irresponsible barfly friend of mine called Grumio, who treated the project with typical flippancy, and another from Outeast, one of OMF's wise and percipient regular readers who has taken the trouble to conduct some more serious research to confirm or disprove my point. He used a datafile from the American 1972-2008 General Social Survey, a very useful tool for this kind of research, though he points out that the data relates only to men and women in the USA, so it may be that any conclusion drawn from it 'reflects primarily a cultural construct rather than anything innate', and he makes a couple of other caveats.

My own conclusion seems to be well supported: Women believe in weird things more than men do.

[I know nothing of Outeast's background, as he has always refused to reveal anything at all about himself. He is probably male but for all I know may be a Harvard Professor of Philosophy or possibly a Uyghur herdsman. Anyway, I am grateful both to him and to Grumio: they have cheered me up after a week of bad news from the U.S.]

So you're a Scorpio? Wow!

2010-11-03T13:36:00.013Z

Some time ago ago I carried out a little survey to try to establish whether or not women, in general, taking it by and large, on the whole and with reservations, might be thought to be—or tend to be—more, perhaps marginally, superstitious than men. This was a frivolous exercise, and I did not imagine anyone would consider it tendentious or even take it seriously.

But I was wrong. My conclusion ("Yes, possibly") evidently festered in the mind of an acquaintance of mine until she could rein in her contempt no longer, and now, four years later, she has sent me an email expressing the view that what I had written was monstrously unreasonable, bigoted, mendacious and shameful, though supplying no evidence to support her contention that my conclusion was wrong.

This attack has hurt me deeply. While I am prepared to admit that such strictures could be applied with some truth to much of the content of OMF, I do not believe they can be levelled at the post in question, so over the past few days during which I had few major commitments (any fewer, and there would have been no need for me to get up in the mornings), I have gone to the trouble of repeating the enquiry using a larger sample.

It was based on the same premise as the earlier survey: that the desire to reveal your astrological sign to the world by noting it in your blog profile indicates a belief that this information says something interesting about you. There is no reason to believe this unless you think that there is something in astrology and that it is not just silly rubbish; in other words you have at least one superstitious belief.

So I looked at a hundred blogs which feature a personal profile, fifty written by women and fifty by men. Of these, 11 (22%) of the men and 36 (72%) of the women list their astrological sign.

This does not prove that women are more than three times as likely as men to be superstitious, of course: such a conclusion would be quite unwarranted.

Going to the loo

2010-10-28T12:51:00.001+01:00

Privy, jakes, house of easement, water-closet, lavatory, bathroom, toilet, bog..... The list is endless; supposed indelicacy is shunned, euphemisms develop, fashions come and go. Those who are scatologically minded can spend many a happy hour in research on the history of these terms, 99% of which are obsolete.

"Loo" is so common and seemingly long-established that some would be surprised to learn that the OED can find no written trace of it before 1922 (in Ulysses). And what is its origin?

The invaluable Oxford Dictionaries Online (formerly Ask Oxford) has this prim comment:

There are several theories about the origin of this common term for a familiar article of sanitary furniture. The first, and most popular, is that it is derived from the cry of "gardyloo" (from the French regardez l'eau or "watch out for the water") which was shouted by medieval servants as they emptied the chamber-pots out of the upstairs windows into the street. This is historically problematic, since by the time the term "loo" is recorded, the expression "gardyloo" was long obsolete.
A second theory is that the word derives from a polite use of the French term le lieu (the place) as a euphemism. Unfortunately, documentary evidence to support this idea is lacking. A third theory, favoured by many, refers to the trade name "Waterloo", which appeared prominently displayed on the iron cisterns in many British outhouses during the early 20th century. This is more credible in terms of dates, but corroborating evidence is still frustratingly hard to find.
Various other picturesque theories also circulate, involving references to doors numbered "00" or people called "Looe".

The OED will have none of these, and simply says "origin obscure".

Selection No 34

2010-10-23T17:57:00.004+01:00

More recycled posts from 2005:

people
Gadaffi would never have made Patrol Leader

literature
Prolific writers and a busy lecher

food
Perhaps I'll skip the veg

Theft made easy

2010-10-18T10:12:00.006+01:00

Did you know that if you want to get something for nothing you can do so quite easily? This is how:

You choose an internet retailer whom you know or suspect to be incompetent, negligent or just careless, and place an order with them for whatever you want, giving a name and address you have got from the telephone directory (or anywhere), an age, which can be your grandmother's if you like, and another address for them to send the goods to. They may well do so, though afterwards you might go to prison.

I am fairly certain that I would have little use for a Lipsy Built Up Shoulder Grecian Coral 8, even if I knew what it was, so when I received a statement from a company called Additions, of which I had never heard, telling me that they had supplied one to me, that I owed them £63.95 for it, and that late payments might incur a default charge, I guessed almost immediately that something was not right.

So I dialed the firm's premium rate number and after twenty minutes ("...Press 4 if you really really want to speak to someone..."), I spoke to someone. My news came as no surprise to them and the woman said calmly and without apologies that yes, it was clearly ID theft and they would cancel the account.

Then I had a letter from their Fraud Unit's "FPT Manager", saying: ..."after a thorough investigation, I can confirm that your name and/or address have been used fraudently by parties unknown....... I will be keeping a record of the account(s) for our own purposes to help us combat fraud. I look forward to hearing from you, Yours sincerely".

So I wrote back to them as follows:
Thank you for your letter. This raises more questions than it answers.
It could hardly have taken a “thorough investigation” to establish that fraud had taken place; that was obvious from the information I gave you. What further investigations have you undertaken? You appear to be saying that you opened an account for someone who provided nothing more than (my) name and address, a false date of birth, and an accommodation address for delivery of the goods. Can this be true? Did you take no action at all to verify the details, for example by checking with the electoral register that someone with my name lives at the delivery address, or by other means? If not, why not?
If this is your normal policy then it means that anyone can look up a name and address in the phone book and order goods from you with no further verification of his identity, but perhaps there is something I do not know, in which case please enlighten me.
Anyway, I assume you have reported the matter to the police. If you have not, I will do so myself, so please provide me with the address of your local police station (or if you prefer I can do so through my local police) .

There was no reply, so I wrote again, twice, and still had no reply. Finally, after three weeks had gone by, I telephoned their Fraud Unit. Asking by name for the "FPT Manager", I was told that the person who had signed the letter was in fact their "Operations Manager" but never wrote letters or spoke on the phone (clearly she is a PR fiction and does not exist). I resisted the temptation to ask whether their Operations Manager's responsibilities covered only the waste bins and toilets, and instead asked why they had not replied to my letters. In reply I got an obvious lie: "Ah well, we tried to phone you but couldn't get through". In three weeks? And why didn't they leave a message?: "Not allowed to: Data Protection Act".

By now I was getting a little restive, so I dropped this and asked my original question: whether it was true that they had sent off the goods without asking the thief for any proof of identity. She said yes, and that this was normal practice among internet retailers. I found this difficult to believe and said in quiet, measured tones: "Bollocks".

She took umbrage at this mild expletive and we parted with expressions of mutual distaste.

But I had asked Chelmsford Police about this and a week later, I had a phone call from a charming and able woman police officer. She told me that only the victim's local police could do anything about such an incident and since in this case it was not me who had lost any money then only the retailer could report it. And further, that this was indeed a very common occurrence: many retailers simply don't bother to make checks but reckon that if it's not a big item then it's better to suffer a small loss than get involved with an investigation.

So what the Applications woman who had last spoken to me told me was quite right and I perhaps I should apologise to her. I don't feel inclined to do so because my comment was justified; it is appalling that this is allowed to happen; besides, I had spent money on the first phone call and wasted a lot of time writing letters.

Anyway, I didn't care for her tone.

Religious war breaks out

2010-10-13T11:51:00.030+01:00

It is not surprising that the only incidence of bad feeling, arrogance and selfishness among the miners and all those involved lin the astounding rescue in Chile was on the part of the representatives of competing religions who each claimed exclusive credit for the success of their appeals to their respective deities.

A Seventh-day Adventist pastor announced "God has spoken to me clearly and guided my hand each step of the rescue; he wanted the miners to be rescued and I am his instrument".

A Catholic bishop celebrated an outdoor mass facing the TV cameras, and asserted "God has heard our prayers; I have received comments of encouragement from all over the world.."

The most modest of the claimants was an evangelical preacher who serenaded the families with a guitar and songs of praise. "He listens to the music", he said.

Work Songs

2010-10-09T13:02:00.001+01:00

Back in 2004 we had a good time singing twenty love songs , but one can tire of these. Let's have some songs about work; here are lines from a dozen of them. Do you know what the songs are?

I'm an old cowhand...

A thing of shreds and patches...

He sleeps all night and he works all day...

Ridin' out on a horse...

From the rise of sun to the set of moon...

Oh, 'tis my delight on a shiny night...

In my profession I work hard, but I'll never stop...

You can bet these don't grow on trees...

Trumpets are tearing my eardrums...

The quaint and curious costumes that we're called upon to wear...

You give me some whiskey, I'll sing you a song...

Where a million diamonds shine...

Answers are HERE

And here's one which epitomises the pride, patriotism and sheer grit of the British working man:

I am an oxy-acetylene welder
Welding the whole day through
Life's great in oxy-acetylene welding
Welders, we know that's true...

Then there follow some details of the skills deployed and the technology used, and finally a rousing paean:

Among the world's great welders, we English are the best
So give us a little bit of oxy-acetylene and we will do the rest!

This is the perhaps the most inspirational of all work songs; it is sad that the complete lyrics do not appear anywhere on the net, and no-one at the OAWU, not even the retired officials whom I questioned, seems to have heard of this great song. Does anyone out there know it?

I bambini del Duce

2010-10-06T10:18:00.001+01:00

No 32 in an occasional series of extracts from The Postcard Century
January 1928 Not waving but saluting. The two elder sons of Mussolini are already adept at the fascist salute. Bruno became a pilot and died in action in 1944. His younger brother Vittorio survived the war and went to live as an exile in South America. The third brother, Romano, was their junior. He inherited their father's musical gifts, became a popular pianist and bandleader and married the sister of Sophia Loren. Their daughter Alessandra alone continued to serve the fascist cause as an Allianza Nationale deputy in the Italian parliament. We do not know what Emilie Ascoli means when writing from Carrera to Mrs Perkins in Durban: he adds to his conventional message of greeting: I think this P.C. will interest you.

Warm Heart

2010-10-01T10:33:00.002+01:00

Winter is not yet upon us, so why am I making use of a piece of equipment designed to help Antarctic explorers type up their diaries when it's -20°?

At the moment I am totally deprived of fingerspitzengefühl (in the literal sense, not the figurative—there's nothing wrong with my strategic intuition). This is caused by peripheral neuropathy; it may not be permanent but means that at present my hands are cold and my fingers are numb. My friend Grumio (the Bruton Boulevardier) has very kindly sent me a pair of Heating Gloves; plugged into a USB port, these suffuse my hands with a pleasant warmth. This is not only comforting but enables me to achieve my normal level of clumsiness in bashing the keys.

This post must be a short one. Like Captain Oates, I have to go outside and may be some time.

The happiest days

2010-09-25T09:48:00.003+01:00

When I was at school, during the Second World War, our teachers were men who had been drafted in because they were not in the forces. Some had been dragged back from retirement and the younger ones were there because the forces wouldn't have them. Most of them were senile, exhausted, ill, drunk or just sunk so deep in Weltschmerz that nothing much, not even sadism, held any pleasure for them. Some of them had been had up for indecent exposure before the First World War.

But, my word, they were a splendid bunch of characters who enriched our lives beyond measure. Even now, the names we gave them them still conjure up affectionate remembrance: Little Man, Gloom, Daddy Parr, Uncle Tom, Golly, Hack, Stodge... Only those we really despised were not given nicknames; Holy Joe was an exception; he was despicable but we felt a bit sorry for him as he was a lone pious voice in a singularly godless establishment; as I recall, the Christian Union there had only three members, and one of these was deaf.

A few of them had been brilliant, with honorary degrees from several European universities, but they had forgotten much; one man had been fluent in a dozen languages but by the time he came to us had difficulty with expressing himself in English. But somehow they managed to impress us with the remnants of their erudition, for we knew no better.

There was only one man who really couldn't cope, and that was our PE (we called it Gym) instructor. His problem was that he could no longer do many of the things he was supposed to demonstrate to us: "Now just pull yourselves up onto the beam with a nice easy movement, in this way.... EURARGGH!!! The sweat would pour off him and the veins would bulge out on his poor old forehead. We all spent every lesson praying that he wouldn't die before it ended. But he survived until we spent a whole term in arduous rehearsal of an intricate display we were to put on at the end-of-term concert; the morning before the great occasion, he was taken very ill, and we never saw him again. The item was replaced by a sixth-form barbershop quartet harmonising "Home on the Range". Ah, they were good times; funny how trivial events like these stick in the memory, as does the occasion when a tree blew down, a large branch of it fell on the headmaster and he was away for two months.

The fact that no-one actually taught us anything much was unimportant, for wartime standards in public examinations were very low and you could pass them with little more than your name written neatly at the top of the paper and then some cheerful and confident-sounding ramblings with a vague relevance to the questions. This was one of the reasons why I later found myself trying half-heartedly to get a degree in a subject for which I had no talent and in which I had no interest.