Shower of Scotland

The Scotland vs. New Zealand match last Sunday, part of the rugby world cup, was an occasion to miss by all accounts.

The host nation for the competition is France, a major rugby playing country with ample good stadiums. So why was the match played at Murrayfield? Two pool match were also played in Cardiff, as will be one of the quarter finals. This deal was clearly arrived at as part of ‘negotiation’ to obtain host status for France. This is a disgrace and has been made worse by giving, or selling, the 2011 world cup to New Zealand when it should have gone to Japan. Playing matches outside the host country spoils the homogeneity of the competition and is an unreasonable inconvenience and expense to the teams and fans of the countries that have to go there and play what amounts to a home match for their opponents.

Having arrived at Murrayfield there was the problem of what each team should wear, the dark blue and black of the primary ‘strips’ (stupid word) being too similar. Normally in such cases it is a courtesy to the visiting team to allow them to use their own colours and for the home side to choose some other clearly different colour. This is often white, presumably because it is clearly distinguishable from most others and is readily available – I imagine most teams have a white strip in stock for training purposes. Here I speculate but I bet that the Scots would not wear white because it is England’s colour and did not want to observe the usual courtesies because it was not a home game, being played in ‘virtual France’. So the two sides turned out in outfits that were muddled variations on their standard colours and remarkably similar to each other. Whether this confusion contributed to an unusually large number of handling errors on the part of the less than All Blacks has been debated by several reporters. Maybe that dirge of an anthem got to them.

Finally Scotland put out their second team so as to rest the first team for the crucial match with Italy that was always going to decide the second place in the softest pool in the competition. At least that one is being played in France.

There are at last some signs that rugby is developing outside the tri-nations and the original five nations groups and with England clearly a basket case for the moment I am supporting anyone from outside those groups, with France as the only northern hemisphere country with a hope of winning, as the exception. So away with my natural support for England and Ireland and let’s see Argentina, Tonga, Fiji and Italy in the last eight. For the final, at least Australia and New Zealand can’t both get there, leaving a great opportunity open for South Africa.

The equation of life

I have long seen the only problem with retirement as being able to afford it. All that time to do what you want must not be constrained by lack of money to get on with it. Sadly, in Britain the state treats all retired people as incipient spongers itching to soak up what little tax revenue the NHS has left for other purposes. You are not allowed to cash in your pension pot except in miserable slices dictated by the prevailing annuity rates and when you reach 75 you are compelled to hand it all over to an insurance company in return for an annuity at a rate that in any half way robust economy will pay out little more than the annual return on the capital, thus leaving said insurance company with a handy lump sum for themselves when you die.

For those of modest means, that is excluding people with golden handshakes in seven figures and most public sector employees, this means that a reasonable standard of living can be maintained only by eating into one’s capital. Capital in this context is very much liquid assets and not one’s house, since you still need somewhere to live. First you have to warn your children that you are unlikely to leave them anything of value other than the house and second you have to work out how long you can survive, financially rather than biologically speaking. To quantify this I have drawn up the Equation of Life.

The equation is a simple one. It is

Y = (C + D)/ P

where C is current capital, cash in the bank, ISAs or funds you are free to liquidate (therefore not your pension pot), D is what could be added to C by ‘downsizing’ your house and P is the amount per year by which you overspend your pension and any other income. Y then gives the number of years you can afford to live at your present rate of extravagance. I call this the FLE or Financial Life Expectancy. Of course if your P is zero or trivial you can afford to live for ever and have no problem, to which I would say either get a life and take up some expensive hobby or think about who or what else could benefit from your surplus. The worst possible thing to do would be to leave it to be taxed at 40% and have the government fritter it away on health and safety police and new road signs.

I have just worked it out. I half expected the answer to be 42 but no such luck – a mere 28. Since this would allow me to carry on until I reach 96 it doesn’t sound too bad. But one must beware of the variables. P can change even if your spending doesn’t – either because of inflation (there should be a separate measure of inflation for the retired, reflecting their different necessities and priorities and used to revise the state pension; council tax would feature more heavily than in the standard calculation) or, if you have a drawdown pension, because of the performance of the stock market and changes in annuity rates. D depends on timing, the state of the housing market and how far you are prepared to reduce the amount and quality of space you live in. Then there is the effect of once off capital expenditure, like replacing your car. In this light the new kitchen SWMBO wants has its cost not in cash but in years off our lives.

Here perhaps we have the makings of a new victim class for those whose medical life expectancy exceeds their FLE. We need government recognition of the problem, followed by action - though sinister thoughts creep in when one contemplates which end of the problem action might be taken on.

Life is full of disappointments

I mentioned once before that the Irish have started to show signs of betraying their traditionally admirable attitude to life and its stuffier aspects. One such is the building of a golf course on the spit of land leading up to the Old Head of Kinsale. You used to be able to walk (or drive for that matter, but I preferred to walk) along the path to the lighthouse unhindered, admire the view and reflect on the events of May 1915 when the Cunard liner Luisitania was torpedoed off the head and sank within 18 minutes with the loss of nearly 1200 lives. In 1997 a golf course was built here and despite claims that the planning permission guaranteed continuing public access you can no longer enjoy the walk. A somewhat belligerent notice at the entrance points out that the claim has been tested in court and dismissed. Since the lighthouse is unmanned it seems that the only people to get past the gate now are the golfers, the club staff and the man who goes to change the bulb from time to time. As a golfer I mostly welcome the expansion of the game, but not the modern resort clubs at a thousand euro a group for players arriving by helicopter. And this in Ireland, where there are probably more good courses per head of population even than in Scotland.

Meanwhile in Kinsale itself, known without complete justification as the gourmet capital of the south coast, I have been having a long fantasy ‘relationship’, as they coyly say these days, with the tall, blonde, slender, charming, delightfully Irish patronne of the classiest coffee bar cum bistro in town. On my latest visit I noticed that she was wearing a t-shirt with the logo of the Old Head Golf Club on one sleeve and asked if she played there. No, she said, she walked there. To my surprise that she was able to she revealed the devastating news: ‘my boyfriend is the manager’.

We are the people of England and we have not spoken yet

I didn’t watch it and I’m glad I didn’t. The TV coverage of Tony Blair’s final Commons appearance and his handover to Gordon Brown was by all accounts nauseating. Boris Johnson’s amusing piece in the Telegraph summed it up, concentrating mainly on the scenes in the House, (full of de mortuis nil rubbishem or whatever it is) but it was the BBC’s report on its website that convinced me I was right to have been mending the phone line to the study instead. It had links like ‘Blair goes to Palace’, ‘Blair with the Queen’, ‘Blair off to Sedgefield’, ‘Brown goes to Palace’, ‘Brown meets Queen’ – you get the drift. A multi-episode sycophantic memorial edition to someone most people were glad to see gone, including many of his own party, as Boris pointed out.

But should we be so glad? Boris himself confessed to a dawning unease, born in his case out of fear that Brown will be dull and will regulate and curtail freedom and debate even more than Blair did. I agreed but was nevertheless left thinking that after ten years of having the answer to everything, of matey familiarity with the voters, of consorting with celebrities and of follies like the millennium dome and the olympics a little dullness in our prime minister might be welcome. It’s a fairly serious job after all.

I think the reason Blair jumped in first at that famous Granita meeting was that, like the boy who sticks his hand up before the teacher has finished the question, he was afraid that Brown knew the answer better than he did and he might never get his chance. He suspected that in the long run Brown would be the more acceptable to the Labour party, who could be relied on to pick Brown after the Blair years but not the other way around. If Brown went first and chose his own ministers and policies, then either Blair’s cover would be blown by the time his turn came or the electoral mood would have swung back to the Tories and it would be too late.

As for renewed new Labour under Brown, he has been upstaged so far by the terrorist plots and arrests of several immigrant doctors in connection with them – and he thought the NHS just needed more money. So far he has appointed a home secretary from England (good move) whose response to the failed bombs - in marked contrast to recent predecessors - has been an almost Thatcher-like message of business as usual (good move again). It seems he also proposes to remove the prime minister’s right to choose Church of England bishops (quite right, now remove them from the House of Lords), to move elections to weekends (fine, but unlikely to improve turnout I suspect), to hold hearings on big public appointments (what – adopt something the Americans do?), perhaps lower the voting age to 16 (why not 12 – or 10?), and to have parliamentary committees for each English region. And here I sense a Blair moment, the promise to make a change only to later enact a mess.

It is distinctly probable that a majority of English people are unaware of the existence of English regions. They were set up sneakily, at dead of night, without publicity and are unelected bodies. They are staffed by people appointed from the various councils of each region, a bit like a mini EU in our midst. Now they will get a formal link with central government, presumably to give them a pseudo legitimacy and as an attempt to answer the West Lothian question, for he has already rejected the idea of allowing only MPs with seats in England to vote on English matters. One can see why, of course, with his own seat (and those of three others in his cabinet) being in Scotland, but it is no answer. Indeed we should welcome this proposal for it will inevitably bring forward the day when the question has to be answered properly and the English have to be given their right to their own say in their own affairs.

Only the grin was left

So now we know: it’s to be June 27.

For certainly more than half of the last ten years I have wished Tony Blair were not prime minister. I cannot pinpoint the moment I turned, for though I voted for him in 1997, I certainly didn’t in 2001 so it must have been in the first half of his tenure. Was it the millennium dome? Was it his failure to stamp down on the fuel protesters? Was it the repayment of £1 million to Bernie Ecclestone? Was it the reinstatement of Peter Mandelson? Or was it that I just couldn’t take that disingenuous, smug, ‘I’ve got a huge majority and there’s nothing you can do to shift me’ grin any longer?

Blair is highly unusual, perhaps unique, among British prime ministers for being in office for over ten years and leaving it at a time (more or less) of his own choosing. On top of that he has (more or less) nominated his successor, though whether that is a considered decision, the keeping of a promise or simply faute de mieux we shall probably never know. Indeed, it is Brown’s accession and its implications that is a far more intriguing question than what immediate history will make of Blair.

For we know what immediate history will make of Blair. It will see him as a huge let-down, a leaking helium balloon that floated high and cheerfully at first, deflated until it could barely support its own weight and finally sagged limply as the elevating gas dispersed into the atmosphere of public disillusionment. A dot-com bubble of a premiership. Northern Ireland apart, his legacy is unfinished business, a vast extension of the nanny state and the surveillance society, and government that is further from being by the people and for the people than ever before. He gave us three different forms of devolution, with involvement of the peoples concerned, while imposing unelected regional assemblies on England without consultation (a referendum in the north-east after they had been set up was hardly democracy) and without answering the West Lothian question. He emasculated the House of Lords but we still don’t know what we will get instead. He ignored valid concerns over council tax while centralising control over local government. He allowed swathes of parliamentary time to be taken up over the harmful and sterile debate on foxhunting, basically as a Pontius Pilate like sop to his backbenchers. He was prepared to employ a director of communications with the qualities of Alastair Campbell and a deputy with the qualities of John Prescott. His relationship with George W Bush has led millions of Britons to a cynical, jaundiced view of our best friend and a country that still has a better grasp of democracy than ours. He wanted to join the euro and adopt the EU constitution (how about one of our own?), was saved from the first by Gordon Brown and from the humiliation of a certain referendum defeat over the second by the French and Dutch but now wants to sneak in a modified form of constitution that he will claim is not enough of a change to need to be put to the vote. He held off honouring the commitment to a Freedom of Information Act for as long as possible and has presided over attempts to emasculate it ever since. He seems prepared to let our electricity generating capacity fall behind demand by prevaricating and dissembling on the nuclear power debate while time runs out. He answers all criticism with a litany of how things have supposedly improved since 1997, delivered with that smug grin that says he knows he can’t be contradicted because he controls the rules under which the data is gathered.

But ten years of this has left the public more cynical and distrustful of politicians and government than for many years. They are coming to realise that there has been no achievement, there is no substance, just the grin.

As to what more distant history will say, that’s easy too. In twenty years time we will simply look back and wonder how we were ever seduced into taking him seriously. At least by then the grin will have gone.

Let us now praise famous men

When you get to my age you start taking an interest in the obituary pages that would have been pointless when you were 25. Politicians one vaguely remembers, probably more for their failures or misdeeds than any lasting achievements, sportsmen from the days when there were still genuine amateurs and footballers were actually underpaid, and lately a fascinating and humbling collection of war veterans who survived exploits that would these days have their commanders court-martialled for inadequate risk assessment. The other day the Times featured one from the near extinct category of British industrial giants who rose from apprentice to senior rank and made a significant contribution to our manufacturing industry.

Harry Webster was technical director of Standard Triumph when it produced its best cars, now nearly all classics. My son has one, a 1974 TR6 that I am sometimes allowed to drive, though the first time he let me go solo he had left the tank empty and it would only go downhill. The cars pioneered all-independent suspension and fuel injection, at least on reasonably priced cars, and are kept going in enthusiasts’ clubs all over the world. His CBE would be given for a lot less today.

Next day it transpired that Webster, whose wife and daughter predeceased him, had been found dead at the foot of the stairs in his own house, where, at the age of 89, he presumably lived alone. I was deeply saddened. I would not go so far as to liken him to an artist who died penniless and whose pictures now fetch millions but it did set me thinking on the modern nature of fame and its relation to worth.

It seems we don’t really have fame nowadays. We have infamy and we have celebrity. Infamy goes with things like murdering a hundred-plus elderly women and issuing false death certificates or being a politician caught once too often with your trousers down. Celebrity can go with almost anything, from running a vicious criminal empire to having large breasts to flaunting a minority sexual preference for public entertainment to mere exhibitionism or even simple rudeness to those not in a position to respond. Those famous for their industrial or commercial careers are respected more for what they have done for themselves or their shareholders than for their customers or posterity. Harry Webster, justly respected in the widespread and lasting affection for and appreciation of his cars, was one of the old sort, a spiritual descendant of Brunel and Telford.

The people will tell of their wisdom, and the congregation will show forth their praise.

Questionable votes

Could a football tournament change the British constitution? Or at least, since we do not have the Americans’ privilege of a written constitution, could it lead to a new interpretation?

The question has its roots in the late seventies, when Jim Callaghan was trying to shore up his crumbling government with a sop to Scottish nationalism by proposing a form of devolution for Scotland. Tam Dalyell, then MP for West Lothian and an opponent of devolution, wanted to know whether, in the event the Bill was passed, a Scottish MP at Westminster would still be able to vote on matters that post devolution would affect only England. This innocent time bomb, known then and since as the West Lothian question, was dodged, the bill failed (partly thanks to some dodgy work on the rules for counting the votes) and there the matter rested until New Labour had another go. The new Bill passed and the Scottish parliament was created, housed in a boondoggle new building, and given powers in Scotland over matters that include education, health and transport. Tam Daylell retired with his question unanswered.

It is one of the defining characteristics of Tony Blair’s government that it makes policy in apparently simple terms and then enacts a mess. He promised reform of the House of Lords but still has not decided how to finish the job. He offered Scottish devolution but failed to answer the West Lothian question, either before or since the deed was done. Initially this was not critical: the government had a majority even without its 41 Scottish MPs and although few failed to notice the number of Scots in high office they had not achieved the influence they have now.

With the suddenness that can take even the most astute politicians by surprise the situation has changed. Blair is out of favour with his backbenchers, most of all with old Labour. He is trying to push through legislation on health and education that is unpopular with sections of his own party and he now has a home secretary, and secretaries for defence, transport and trade and industry, as well as his long standing chancellor, whose seats are in Scotland. Five out of 41 Scottish Labour MPs have cabinet posts. The other 16 cabinet members from the Commons come from the 353 Labour MPs representing England and Wales. Clearly preferment lies North of the border. Last and crucially Mr Blair is being urged to bring forward the day Gordon Brown moves geographically sideways and hierarchically upwards into Number 10. A Scottish premier, from a Scottish seat, is a prospect an increasing number of English seem likely to resent.

At the same time a Commons committee, with strong Labour representation, has reported that the question must be resolved, offering four options but no recommendation: a reduction in the number of Scottish MPs at Westminster, an equivalent English assembly, Scottish MPs to be barred from voting in Westminster on matters that for Scotland are decided in Edinburgh, and full independence. The first is a fudge, a palliative that would only delay a proper solution and was done anyway when devolution came in. The second would require each part of the United Kingdom to have exactly the same powers for its own assembly or the central, federal, government would have four separate West Lothian questions hanging over its deliberations. This quite apart from having English affairs run by an even more second rate bunch of politicians than is the case now. The third is the correct answer, at least in the short term. It would also be simple to enact and has been used before, for Stormont. The last is the final solution, and tempting, with consequences and implications fascinating to speculate on. Would the immediate solution lead to the final one?

Now the World Cup is nearly over, England having qualified and Scotland not. Nothing is better calculated to bring out the traditional Scottish meanness of spirit towards a fellow member of the United Kingdom. Scottish but not British, they have been busily and ostentatiously supporting England’s opponents. Violence has been done to some who had the temerity to wear an England shirt and there is even a pub that offered a free round of drinks when England conceded a goal. For Mr Brown, recently anxious to stress his Britishness, since he cannot remotely claim to be in any way English, this poses a teasing variation of the question. Asked if he would be supporting England he gulped hard and said he would, doubtless alienating many Scots in the process. He even went to one of the matches. Nobody believed a word of it. The West Lothian question has achieved a new level of awareness to the man on the Clapham omnibus.

Now England are out and the respective fans either laughing or mourning. The Conservatives in England, increasing in numbers and confidence, will resent being held back by old Labour in Scotland and being defeated by them in the Commons on English affairs and are starting to push for an answer while Tony Blair talks illogically of second class MPs, hoping people won't notice that England already has them. In time, Scottish Labour will resent Prime Minister Brown continuing to pursue New Labour policies. It could be a defining moment.

Lies of the times

It’s time to update those well practised and well known mantras of officialdom and the untrustworthy: the cheque is in the post; a government spokesman said there was no cause for alarm; of course I’ll still respect you in the morning. The modern state and business practice have given us a rich new set to choose from.

Your call is important to us. Then why not answer the bloody phone and talk to me? This one is just an insult. Similarly,

Every little helps. Then how about opening another checkout?

For your own safety and security . . . Rubbish. It’s not you we care about, but if we put out inane announcements like this often enough we hope to have a defence when a negligence case comes to court.

Thank you for your co-operation. This is usually in company with a terse request to desist from some generally acceptable activity that mildly inconveniences the management. Often used in places where ‘we reserve the right to refuse admission’ and is thus really a threat not a thanks.

The prime minister said he had complete confidence in his minister. The prime minister might say this but the hapless minister hears the guillotine blade being hoisted. A token defence will be made, but only for as long as the embarrassment of the minister exceeds that of the premier. After that point, the chop, the pearl handled revolver or whatever New Labour uses instead – something messy for sure. The first to be subjected to this death by reassurance was Humphrey, number 10’s chief mouser, whom no-one could accuse of incompetence, but was retired, supposedly on health grounds, in 1997 and died at 18 the day before yesterday. Brought in as a stray during Margaret Thatcher’s tenure (I like to think it was she who named him), he did his job night and day right through John Major’s time only to be accused of causing an allergic reaction in the incoming chatelaine as New Labour took over our lives. A publicly posed photo of the two together tried to reassure the public but was the cuddle of dismissal for Humphrey.

This is about improving parent/patient/consumer choice. So just how many hospitals are there within a reasonable distance that I can visit, even by private transport, as an out-patient or be visited in if I have to stay there? On what basis other than government data or local gossip, a toss-up choice for reliability, would I choose between them? If the school I’m in the catchment area of is no good my child will certainly be low down the list in another area, whose school, if good, will inevitably be over subscribed. Can’t they see it’s not a matter of choice, but options. The only choice in many of these cases is whether to accept one’s fate or pay heavily to buy out of the state option – and thus acquire real choice.

The green, green grass of home

The Englishman has a strange relationship with his lawn and after years of studying it I have had to conclude I am not, in this respect at least, a typical Englishman.

You only have to look at the summer advertisements for lawn growth products, weed killer, and the rival types of mower (it’s a lot less bovver with a hover) to realise that we are dealing not with a chore but an obsession. My neighbour uses a cylinder mower and has cut little channels around the edges, between the lawn and his drive, so that the mower is not obstructed by any paving and can cut right up to the edge. The flower beds are sunk below the lawn for the same reason. My lawn merges seamlessly with the part of the garden in which things other than grass grow (actually, things other than grass grow freely on the lawn too) and the edge is defined by either how tough they are or how much of a bollocking I will get from SWMBO if I scythe too far off the main track. I use the word scythe figuratively here but there is a full size haymaker’s scythe in my garage that is brought out most years in the spring when a combination of wet weather, rapid growth and procrastination takes the grass to a height the mower can’t handle. From the scythed state I use the mower, blades set high, to reduce the grass to a level that on a golf course would count as light rough – short enough to find the ball but needing a solid stroke to get out of. My neighbour takes his down to a height that, as a putting green, would rate about twelve on the Stimp meter. My cuttings go in a pile in a corner and over time degenerate into first class compost and get recycled. His go into a black bag and are put out with the rest of the trash, adding to my council tax. This last is a habit of modern suburban man that I despise as much as car washing with chemicals in the street. The water and soap go into the storm drain, thence to the river and are pumped back onto the fields and thus into our cereals, vegetables and milk. And do Friends of the Earth care? Not that I have ever heard of. They are more interested in fatuous schemes for generating electricity by covering the landscape in 100 metre high rotating aerofoils that are a danger to low flying aircraft and likely to be unproductive when most needed. But I digress, as usual.

The obsession with neatness of lawn is undoubtedly a bourgeois thing. It seems to infect those who have not enough grass to justify a self-propelled, sit-on mower, a trapping that those who have one, whether justified by much lawn or not, are only too happy to boast about, and is part of a strange compulsion to keep the garden tidy, along with tidying up the leaves in autumn, should trees that shed leaves be allowed to grow. The aristocracy, if Nancy Mitford is to be believed, are free of such chores, as modern politicians are of so many of life’s little obligations and petty problems, such as paying council tax or where to park at work. In The Pursuit of Love she observes: ‘gardens . . . a topic which was unknown at Alconleigh. The gardener saw to the garden and that was that. It was quite half a mile from the house, and nobody went near it, except as a little walk sometimes in the summer’.

I fall between the two. I have no enthusiasm for gardening and don’t have enough lawn to justify a sit-on mower but I can’t stop a sneaking admiration for someone like the Manchester City FC groundsman and his crop circle-like patterns. He must be from another planet though. That sort of enthusiasm for mowing ain't natural.

Self-loading cargo
If you’re ashamed to care, go by air
Is there an industry that cares less about its customers than the airlines? Car clampers and back street loan sharks come to mind, perhaps because the three have features in common.
You don’t go to a loan shark unless you have no option. As a client towards the posh end of the business once said to me ‘only the rich are in a position to borrow money cheaply’. You borrow at exorbitant rates because you are desperate or greedy to spend and you travel cattle class because you can’t afford the holiday if you pay for a decent seat and are too greedy to go without a holiday you can’t really afford. Once in the clutches of the airline you are effectively a prisoner and do as you are told because they make the rules, car clamper style, and will make your life even more miserable if you try to stick up for your rights to civilised treatment.
Yet it’s our own fault. In much the same way that we let the processed food companies ruin our health for the sake of convenience and cheapness, so we let ourselves be bullied, crushed, herded around, deprived of sleep and exposed to a high risk of DVT for the sake of short transit times and cheap fares. It’s summed up in the airline term for economy class passengers: they call us self-loading cargo.
In other areas of the economy suppliers compete on price, quality and service. A ticket for a long haul flight is nearly indistinguishable between one carrier and another: they go at the same speed, on some routes at much the same time of day, and offer service that in economy class is uniformly minimal, leaving us to buy on the basis of price alone. In fact the airlines have devised a form of inverse competition. The least service means the lowest costs and the biggest profits so they reduce service to the lowest level the customer will tolerate and keep on reducing it, trying to find the point of rebellion. They have not found it yet and we who buy on price alone are their lawful prey. And if you think things could get no worse, think again.
Today I read that Flybe, a ‘budget’ airline (it’s their budget they worry about, not ours) are to introduce a charge for baggage. The disingenuous rationalisation for this is that those with baggage will pay the handling fee the airport charges Flybe, instead of it being ‘unfairly spread across all the people on the aircraft’. Has the Flybe board thought this one through? You bet they have. They will make a huge saving on airport charges and in return will reduce fares by just one pound. The fact that passengers will try to take their holiday luggage as cabin baggage, that there will be fights (literally, sooner or later) over the space in the overhead lockers, boarding and disembarking will take even longer, passengers will have to carry, or wheel, their luggage across miles of corridor and the imposition of discomfort and inconvenience on the paying customer will have been taken to a new low is of no concern to them. Cargo is not fully self-loading until it loads its own baggage or pays for the service. They can chalk up another first in the dehumanising race and move on to the next stage – a charge to use the lavatories perhaps, with a ‘complementary’ catheter if you agree to stay in your seat for the entire flight.
There is a deep malaise here. We put up with call centres whose operators are always fewer than the number of people trying to get through, banks that treat you as a mere number, innumerable firms that refuse to put their telephone numbers on their website lest you should call and try to speak to someone like in the bad old days, hospitals that buy their food pre-cooked from a hundred miles away and airlines that cannot be bothered to pre-book seats, try to kid you that they don’t know how many babies will be on board (families with babies turning up on the off chance of a few spare seats?), expect you to accept a 31 inch seat pitch for twelve hours and demand you turn up three hours before the flight because they won’t organise themselves to do the job any quicker. And we put up with it. We come close to asking for more because we always want the next improvement to be in price, not quality or service. It seems that at the same time as we expand our respect for others, become more tolerant of what was once unaccepted, so we lose our respect for ourselves. Has PC made us so concerned not to give offence that we no longer recognise when we are being insulted, belittled, scorned, used and humiliated?
The judge who recently said that there were circumstances in which women who were raped carried some of the responsibility themselves was much criticised, but he had a point. The whole trend is a variation on the law of the jungle that says that the animal that shows itself to be weak, sick or not looking out for itself is the first to attract the attentions of the predator. We have stopped caring and we have only ourselves to blame for the consequences.
The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars but in ourselves that we are underlings.
Bring on the Ides of March!

Are you feeling lucky Jean Charles?
Being white, middle class and from a respectable family, whatever that may mean, I grew up with a middle class relationship with the British police: I didn’t trouble them and they didn’t trouble me. The bobby walked the streets, normally alone and always unarmed, cheerfully providing directions to a particular street or local landmark when asked and one never felt remotely threatened.
No longer. Anyone who has been to a British airport in the last few years will have seen the police, always in pairs, patrolling with their automatic weapons. Some of them look about eighteen. And now they have acted. Last Friday a man from a suspect residence and wearing an unseasonably bulky jacket on a warm day – there was no more than that to arouse suspicion – was allowed to board a bus, apparently in the hope he would lead the police to others, but was challenged as soon as he transferred to the tube. When he fled in alarm, tripped and fell, he was shot an incredible five times in the head by a ‘marksman’ at very short range.
The policy that is claimed to justify this summary justice goes under the infantile title of ‘shoot to kill to protect’. It has been adopted by the Metropolitan Police on Israeli advice, not exactly the role model one might hope for, and is presumably endorsed by the Home Office. The head of the Met, who goes by the unfortunate name of Blair, has defended his officers as might a football manager praising a team still only three-nil down at half time against opponents from a higher league. ‘They are playing out of their socks’ he said and went on to warn that since the policy will not change further ‘regrettable’ mistakes could not be ruled out. In this at least he is right. It is a prediction firmly in the category of the bleeding obvious. To suggest, if this policy is to be continued, that Signor de Menezes’s death will be an isolated case would be like saying it will not rain in Manchester for a year or no pigeon will crap on Nelson’s statue before the Olympics get under way.
‘Shoot to kill to protect’ recognises the danger posed by a human bomb and the difficulty of stopping such a person from detonating it other than by total, instantaneous disablement. This means shooting the suspect in the head (ideally severing the spinal cord with the first shot). So what if Signor de Menezes had stopped when challenged? What would have convinced the police that he posed no threat? If a man who is still alive might somehow be able to set off his bomb despite being under arrest and no doubt manacled how is he to be dealt with, searched, taken to a safe place and the bomb, if any, made harmless? Would he be granted his death wish via one of those controlled explosions that seem to be needed in such numbers on these occasions?
I cannot help wondering how the rules of engagement for this policy were drawn up. Is the high command of the Met in a state of panic? Is it the puppet of a Home Office that has never been more draconian and uncaring of the normal democratic niceties? Are the officers who were instructed in the policy so in awe of their superiors that they dared not ask any questions from the point of view of those who would have to apply it, are they so gung-ho they welcomed the freedom of action it gives them or are they so supremely confident of their abilities and the training they have been given that they were unconcerned at taking on the ghastly responsibilities the policy imposes on them? How are the members of the armed units chosen? Are there any psychological or temperamental bars to membership? It is disturbing that more armed officers are now being deployed with authority to shoot in a unit that, in mostly less tense situations, already has a poor history for its decision making.
On Monday it was revealed at the inquest that Signor de Menezes had been shot not five times, but eight, seven times in the head and once in the shoulder. Whether one gun or more was used has not been revealed, though eye-witness accounts have suggested only one. One of the officers involved has been sent on holiday at public expense. He deserves it, for I do not primarily blame the officers at the fatal end of the decision making chain. It has transpired that the squad that was following Signor de Menezes made more than one radio call to a higher command for instructions. It was when the suspect entered the tube station that the authority to shoot to kill was given. Did the officer not already have that authority? If so, why was confirmation needed? If not, what was he supposed to do if a critical situation arose in which he had no time to seek it? So we have the classic situation of action being ordered by someone who was not present to assess the situation at the front, the same process that led to the charge of the Light Brigade. Is this the sort of ‘protection’ we want as we try to go about our normal business in our capital city? It will be interesting to see how this split responsibility will be resolved in the inquiry that is to follow.
As the Duke of Wellington supposedly said of his own troops, ‘I don’t know what effect they have on the enemy, but by God they frighten me’.

Ferry tales
I have an enduring childhood memory of a trip to Scotland in the days before the Firth of Forth had a road bridge next to the railway one. Returning from dinner with friends, we ran out of petrol as we approached the ferry on the north side of the firth, the car stopping about fifty yards short of the summit of the hill beyond which was the slope down to the ferry – the last of the evening. It must have been a gentle incline for my sister and I pushed the car to the summit before jumping back inside to enable my father to freewheel all the way down and on to the waiting ferry, the last car to make it.
The few minutes crossing gave us time to consider our predicament. The road on the south side was inevitably uphill again. There was no way we would get back to base, or even off the ferry, without fuel and few if any petrol stations would be open once the ferry had closed, even if we had been able to get to them.
The problem was solved by a casual conversation with another passenger. Ignoring his wife’s repeated warnings that they were themselves low on fuel (as my father had ignored my mother’s at each open petrol station we passed on the outward journey) he was so anxious to show off his newly acquired spare can, complete with retracting spout and non-drip pouring arrangement, that he sold us its contents and we drove gingerly home. It could be that trip that gave me a lifelong fondness for the idiosyncrasies and occasional dangers of ferries.
We made three trips to Ireland last year, using three different ferry services across St. George’s channel, an odd name for the stretch of water that further North becomes the Irish sea. The advantage of the ferry is that you can take your car, avoiding the preposterous charges levied by the car rental companies (it won’t be long before they lend you the car for nothing so long as you buy the insurance), and you can take your dog without all that nonsense about rabies inoculations and microchips. Our dog thinks Ireland is the best place in the world because she can swim in the sea at the bottom of my sister’s garden, surf in the breakers on Garretstown strand and get lost at low tide on Inchydony beach. We open the car window as we arrive and she jumps straight out and is gone.
But what is a ferry? The three services across St. George’s channel are a standard one (roll on, roll off and hope it doesn’t roll over), a fast twin hull powered by huge diesels that leave a spectacular double wake you could probably surf on and that I once clocked at 35 knots on my GPS, and the overnight one from Swansea. This last has its advantages, though the food is not one of them, giving you a scenic ride into Cork harbour in the morning as it passes the floodlit church at Cobh and the Titanic’s last mooring place at Queenstown, before docking conveniently at Ringaskiddy, twenty minutes from the unspoilt, if expensive, delights of Kinsale. But somehow none of these meets my sense of a real ferry.
In Scandinavia, where the coastline probably travels fifty or more miles for a direct route of ten, there are ferries of the traditional sort by the dozen. A traditional ferry is a simple device, certainly incapable of 35 knots, and offering an alternative to a longer or more dangerous journey without it. The fee does not reflect the cost of operation but is set to be marginally less than the incidental costs and time value of the alternative. It should need no booking and involve no queuing, or the time and convenience advantage is lost. The best ones have something idiosyncratic or even mildly risky about them, or an unusual system of propulsion, such as being rowed across by the owner. Many are driven by an engine that engages the links of a chain and drags the boat across, briefly raising the chain from the river bed as it passes. I pass the time speculating about other traffic having to avoid sailing too near the ferry for fear of fouling the chain, or imagine the chain breaking and the ferry drifting helplessly out to sea on the ebb tide. No doubt the health and safety people have provided for all eventualities.
To sample a real ferry, go to Ireland via Rosslare, and head for Cork, or anywhere on the south coast. About ten miles out of Rosslare divert along the south coastal route through real Irish countryside to Ballyhak where you board a flat bottomed boat that transfers you smoothly to Passage East in about five minutes, following a curved route that is different every time, adapted to the wind and tide of the moment. It runs from early morning to late evening and has a simple, irresistible old fashioned charm. When we arrived a fraction late one evening we were amazed to see it stop and reverse from some hundred yards out just to save us the wait for the next trip. Whether it actually saves time on the full Rosslare-Cork journey is debatable, probably even more so when the Waterford bypass is opened. But this is Ireland, so that’s not the point. It’s the quality of the journey that counts. There is a counterpart to this ferry at Passage West, providing a pleasanter route from Kinsale to Cobh, though whether the two are formally connected I do not know.
We should savour the delights of the earthly ferries before we take our inevitable final ride across the Styx, Charon’s toll in our hand.

The publican and the peanuts – a modern parable
Working for that non-profit voluntary organisation I referred to a while back has been giving me some hassle recently. A bunch of us have been trying to sort out its finances, how much to sting the members for which services and so on. Everyone has their favourite aspect of the thing that they think should be supplied to the members at a cost to be subsidised by one of the parts that they don't specially care for. It all brought to mind a story I heard long ago - and not at business school I hasten to add.
Once upon a time there was a publican. He was one of the traditional sort and kept a good pub, with a friendly atmosphere, a choice of cask beers and locally grown food that was cooked without a microwave. He allowed dogs in the pub so long as they didn’t go in the kitchen, made parents keep their children in order and employed barmaids that men would travel miles to see. He also kept a bowl of free peanuts on the bar counter, reasoning that a) this was hospitable and b) the salt encouraged people to drink more beer. He carried on his trade happily and prosperously for many years, his only anxiety being the annual audit visit from his accountant.
His accountant was another of the old school and after they had worked through the books one year he said to the publican: ‘ I notice you keep a bowl of free peanuts on the bar. How do you account for the costs?’
‘Oh, it’s small beer really’, said the publican ‘ I just write it off to overheads’.
‘Quite right. Keep life simple I say’, said the auditor and they passed on to more important things.
The next year a different accountant turned up for the audit. He had a smart suit, expensive shoes and was quick to drop into the conversation that he had just finished his MBA. He spotted the peanuts straight away and made a note on his clipboard. When they sat down to discuss details he came straight to the point. ‘ I notice you keep a bowl of free peanuts on the bar. How do you account for the costs?’
‘Oh, it’s small beer really’, said the publican ‘ I just write it off to overheads’. The accountant looked shocked. ‘I don’t think you should do that’, he said ‘ you’ve an uncosted subsidy there, you need to apportion it to stock, beer sales, marketing . . . and then there’s the labour cost of someone keeping an eye on it to fetch more and refill the bowl when it’s getting empty.’
The publican was troubled. This sounded much too much like hard work for no reward – and what would his customers say if he stopped their little perk?
The accountant had the answer. ‘If I were you’, he said ‘I would just stop giving away the peanuts altogether. Apparently the average bowl of peanuts on a bar counter has traces of at least a dozen different people’s urine in it. If Health and Safety come round and take a sample they’ll close you down. Just blame it on them.’
Moral: the do-gooders and rule-sticklers usually manage to harm more people than they help. If you see them coming set the dog on them.

Casus belli
Last night the Commons allowed the 1949 Parliament Act to be invoked in order to force the Hunting Bill into law.
The trouble with this bill is the misconceived argument on both sides, for it has precious little to do with either vermin control or cruelty to animals. These are simply veneers of logic and reason applied to try to disguise an argument that is largely emotional but also something much more basic and much more sinister (in both English and Latin senses).
A farmer friend once told me that there are seven mammals and four birds officially classed as vermin, which I assume to mean they are neither protected species nor have a close season. Historically they were no doubt unwelcome because they fed on crops, livestock, or young game. The mammals include rats, grey squirrels, rabbits and foxes. The best way of dealing with the last three is by competent shooting; for rats, a pair of good Jack Russells is effective, as is my father in law’s weapon of choice, the pressure hose. A colourful, choreographed pursuit on horseback with a pack of hounds is simply not cost-effective.
But if you think you have a rational approach to animal cruelty go to the supermarket, look at the pre-packed meats and ask yourself how did those tidy, neatly packed, near bloodless, often boneless, oh so reasonably priced pieces of protein get there? Some people are probably only subconsciously aware that the various parts were once a whole with a head, skin, blood and four legs and a tail. They used to eat, drink, defecate, urinate, copulate (if they were lucky and it wasn’t done for them) and give birth. What they almost certainly didn’t do was associate, find or choose their own food, exercise or in some cases even see daylight, smell fresh air or feel the sun or the rain on their backs. It is a monstrous hypocrisy to put the ‘suffering’ of the wild fox, entirely in keeping with its way of life and habitat, above what we do to domestic livestock to satisfy our ultimately unsustainable craving to eat cheap meat while avoiding any knowledge of, let alone respect for, its origin.
So if you want to make war on vermin get a gun; if you want to make war on animal cruelty either go vegetarian, buy meat of known provenance or be as honest as Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and be a part of the process with your animals. If you want to make class war join the Labour party and pretend your nimby instinct to stop other people enjoying themselves in ways you don’t like has a moral, logical or ethical justification. For a nimby is what you are – a modern puritan who feels any activity, sport or recreation that he does not personally care for or cannot see the point of or finds ‘elitist’ or condemns because he thinks it expensive (this alone often grounds for scorn), should be banned.
The movement to get hunting made illegal has been widely presented as a blatant act of class war, but the government does not seem to have considered more than the opening skirmishes. This one will most certainly not be over by Christmas because it is not just, or even primarily, a class war, another misconception in the debate. It is about choice, freedom, individuality and tolerance and ultimately about democracy. It has exposed this government for the shameful, weak, unprincipled coalition of small minds, parochial interests and feeble intellects that it is. The government will now try to blame the Lords for the uproar and chaos that will follow, cynically pretending that it has given the upper house every chance to reach a reasonable compromise. That is another hypocrisy that I hope comes back to haunt it. For the Lords, in what will now almost certainly be its last significant stand against prime ministerial patronage and final emasculation, has done what it is there to do, what the constitution requires of it and what the people have a right to expect. It has fought a pernicious piece of ill-conceived, undemocratically motivated legislation to the only final honourable conclusion: the ‘kamikaze’ option. As the campaign of civil disobedience and legal challenges unfolds, peaceably I hope, it is probably too much to hope that New Labour’s puritans will come to realise that there is a difference between a majority and a mandate on a single issue, or that they are put in the Commons to govern not to dictate, but I fervently hope that they will reap the whirlwind of their arrogance from an electorate that is surely wiser and more democratic than they.

‘If a book is worth reading it’s worth buying’
I have been trying to find a copy of Michael Young’s book The Rise of the Meritocracy. He called it an essay on education and equality and is accepted as the first to use the word, though its currently accepted meaning is far from his. If I remember the synopsis correctly he developed a thesis on the likely consequence of a society operating as a true meritocracy and the book ends in social revolution by the masses because the elite have become too arrogant and detached. Having got to the top on merit they feel justified in treating anyone below them as of no merit and therefore contemptible. In the book this does not happen until 2033: Young evidently did not foresee the rapid acceleration of the effect under a Labour government with an unhealthily large majority. But it is interesting that he did foresee the trend, for he was a member of Atlee’s government and indeed credited with a strong influence on the 1945 manifesto that brought it to power.
I went to my local public library to find a copy. After a fruitless search of the shelves I approached the librarian, who asked when it was published. I guessed about forty years ago.
‘Oh, then it won’t be in stock now’, she said. ‘We only keep books about five years.’
‘What happens to them after that?’
‘They disintegrate.’ I was taken aback. I had thought this only happened to the most heavily thumbed pages of forbidden texts like Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
‘Don’t you replace them?’, I asked hopefully.
‘Not if they’re not popular’. She seemed quite unconcerned at the monstrous non sequitur in this policy, so pausing only to enquire about a complete works of Roger Woddis, also not in stock, perhaps censored, I left for Waterstones, shaken. They didn't have it either.
When I got home I tried Amazon and bought a paperback copy, their last, for £2.49 plus £2.75 for delivery. A very few hardbacks were on offer for fifteen quid or so, so if you have one you don’t want you might get a good price.
I hope it proves worth reading.

Here’s to the last time
There is a neat television ad around just now that asks ‘when was the last time you did something for the first time?’ Somehow (it must be my age) it made me think of doing things for the last time. This is different, apart from the obvious, because when it’s the first time, you know. Last times can be planned and intentional or unconscious and not recognised as such for perhaps years afterwards; breaking off a relationship or quitting a job on the one hand, the final meeting with a friend or the last time you break 90 on the other.
Cecil Lewis was to my mind one of the great airmen and one of the most interesting figures of the twentieth century, though The Daily Telegraph Book of Airmen's Obituaries condemns him of having ‘accomplished rather less than he promised’. Some failure. Aged five when the Wright brother first flew, he was a true pilot, in soul as well as in skill. He flew and fought with the Royal Flying Corps in the First World War, having left school at sixteen to join up, won the MC and then went to Peking, as it was, as a flying instructor to the Chinese government. As his contract came to its end he unconsciously made his last flight, in a Vimy bomber of all things, beautifully described in Sagittarius Rising. He landed and went home ‘untrained for any other career’ to become, among other things, an author, notable playwright and one of the first three employees of the BBC. In 1966 he wrote, presciently and sadly, that ‘Computers steer the pioneer . . . Reliability is on the Altar and Risk is in the Crypt’. What would he have made of the Health and Safety Executive, the cotton-wool culture and the modern TV ‘adventurers’ with their backup teams and cameras going on ahead to film their arrival?
I empathise because flying is my passion too and I learned to fly, at nineteen, on gliders. In a glider you never know when you will have to land and in the machines of those days the answer was usually soon. The sport was exciting, cavalier and intellectually testing. We experimented, without formal instruction, in cloud flying and aerobatics and frequently made forced landings away from base. All very character forming but a passion that had its inevitable effect on my exam results. Many years later I bought a share in a powered aircraft and, as befits a responsible husband and father, confined myself to visiting France, Ireland, Belgium and Germany, always in clear air and the right way up. It’s a wonderful way to tour because you see all the scenery and the journey is part of the holiday, indeed the point of it. I could reach the south of France in a day, or cross from Germany to Wiltshire in less than four hours, stress-free.
Now I have had to accept that this freedom and therapy cannot continue into retirement. As free time goes up, so disposable income comes down. My log-book shows that I last flew over nine months ago and my medical and currency have both expired. If I suspected it then I’m forced to recognise it now.
Lewis made his last flight on a perfect autumn day over the Great Wall, the Ming tombs and the royal palaces of Peking. Mine was in January, in haze, confined within a few miles of base by the task in hand, for it was a test flight following renewal of the certificate of airworthiness and in one of those quirks of the Air Navigation Order the aircraft was not oficially airworthy until someone had flown it and found nothing wrong with it. There was a set of tests to do, results to record and no time to admire the scenery. At least I made a decent landing.

Action semi-directe

Noon, Saturday October 2nd 2004, Whitehall Place, London. Be there. We are marching, us oldies, against the iniquities of the council tax and I have decided to go along and see what a protest march is like. I have a mild regret that it is unlikely to turn violent (nothing like a good riot to make you feel horny, they say). The idea of a few thousand pensioners being bombarded with rubber bullets, or beaten up from horseback by the cavalry of the Metropolitan Police, is appealing from the point of view of its publicity value for our cause but not realistic. We are, after all, the mostly silent, law-abiding, soft touch majority who are the fall guys of New Labour politics. We pay our television licences even if we never watch BBC programmes, tax and insure our cars and keep them roadworthy, we accept the lottery of the National Health Service (chance of getting MRSA one in twenty and rising), accept that pensions are linked to prices not earnings, put up with the culture of yoof, accept the rule and ubiquitous influence of the Scots - we will surely pay for their boondoggle new parliament building as well - but we draw the line at paying the wealth tax.
Long ago local taxes were called rates. ‘What do we pay the rates for?’ was the familiar cry from anyone who found that council services did not deliver what they thought they should. Rates were based, for no good reason that anyone could ever discover, on the notional value of your house expressed as what you could let it for, should you for some again unexplained reason not need to live in it. It was clear to everyone that this was a tax on wealth, notional wealth at that, theoretical wealth until you had paid off your mortgage, wealth that was unrealisable unless you sold up and emigrated, and that it bore no relation to ability to pay or to the number of people in a household who might contribute. Given that a Tory government had ruled for most of the time since World War 2, one had to ask: since when did the Conservatives favour a wealth tax?
The only politician who could see sense on the issue was Margaret Thatcher, who introduced the Community Charge, payable by everyone on the electoral roll. You could dodge it only by disenfranchising yourself, so it became known as the poll tax. Sadly, it was the one reform she failed to make stick. Her mistake was to try it out on the Scots, long over-represented at Westminster and subsidised by England, at a time of resurgent Scottish nationalism. The result was some of the most violent riots seen in Britain for many years and the replacement of the poll tax with the council tax. This differs from rates only in name and in the more formal valuation of your house, and it has been going up recently at an average nine percent a year, more in the more profligate councils. Unless something is done the council tax will, within some people’s lifetimes, absorb their entire state pension.
Noon, Saturday October 2nd 2004, Whitehall Place, London. Be there.

The British volunteer

Three posts so far and readers (the few – two to date outside the family) might wonder why ‘reward in heaven’. It’s all to do with expectations – blessed are they that expect nothing and all that.
One of the things that happens when you retire is that you find out what your other half has been up to while you were out at work. You might also discover aspects of her character (it is mostly her for my generation) that you never suspected or didn’t realise were being put to use.
My wife (aka M or SWMBO) is beautiful, intelligent and the best cook in the Three Counties. I have basked in my friends’ envy of these qualities for nearly forty years. I only now find out that she is organised, efficient and ruthless in the conduct of the other interest she took up some years ago, when the boys grew out of needing full time TLC. She became a volunteer with a global, and very worthy, charity I shall call Cuddle Our World. Cash COW it could be called, seeming as it does to absorb a hefty part of my pension in petrol, phone calls and donations to every event it organises. She says she gets the petrol and phone calls back as expenses, which is true, but quietly forgets that the payments go out from my account and the expenses back into hers. Meanwhile the house is full of collecting tins and buckets and of stuff on its way from the public to the COW shop. The charity shop is a feature of the British high street nowadays, almost outnumbering estate agents. Since they pay much reduced business rates I assume the deficit has to be retrieved from somewhere and it doesn’t take many guesses to home in on the overburdened middle class homeowner as the likely sucker who unknowingly obliges. Yet another flaw in that particular system, of which more another time no doubt.
M works in the shop an afternoon a week and has many ideas about improving its effectiveness. Some are adopted (she’s not actually in charge), some ignored and some go through an apparently weekly cycle of adoption, cancellation by one of the regulars working on a different day and reintroduction on M’s next watch. It must be a hive of intrigue, with the window being redressed while someone is taking the money to the bank or the goods being repriced while the miscreant who put the designer-label cardigan out on the rack at £1.50 is occupied at the till, only to have it all reversed when the shift changes.
But the shop is really a hobby compared with the serious work - the politics of the organisation. As with BT, Tesco or Barclays Bank there are departments, sections, areas and regions and of course managers to go with them. Many of these posts are held by paid COW employees. These are reportedly, and unsurprisingly, subject to all the normal human traits, weaknesses and sins of omission and commission that you would expect to find in the managers of BT, Tesco or Barclays Bank. But with a charity it’s worse. A charity has to keep its costs down, its ratio of income to expenses being both a measure of its performance and its defence against criticism for paying anyone. It also needs a widespread network of people to keep plugging the message, staff the shops and collect the five pound notes and small denomination foreign coins in the tins and buckets outside the supermarkets. This mostly unskilled work is unloaded onto volunteers, organised by a smaller band of still volunteer organisers and leaders. These have some characteristics (cheerfulness, persistence, persuasiveness, dedication or high boredom threshold according to which way you look at it) in common with the Gentils Organisateurs of Club Med but are mostly about thirty years older and all fully dressed. These in turn work through the paid district or area managers appointed by the COW hierarchy. Because the volunteer organisers are mostly competent and organised (they would be on the fast track to the funny farm if they weren’t) while the employed ones are subject to the usual operation of the Peter Principle, clashes of ideas, policy and personality are inevitable. M has this taped. When a district manager failed to perform to her standards recently she filled in one of my blank P45s and sent it to the offender’s boss. The boss was not amused but had no redress against a volunteer and could not afford to lose one who was doing good skilled work in a different area. The new district manager is much better. It is such ruthlessness that now dictates my life. A Christmas present of an A4 filofax a few years ago (lots of room for recipes I thought) has backfired into the schedule that rules my life. COW commitments go straight in, in ink, usually well in advance. The affairs of my relatively casual, disorganised and impromptu life mostly have to be fitted around them, with severe penalties in marital discord if she has to resort to the correcting fluid. I now understand the angst of the suburban housewife, confined to the house to answer the phone (mostly from COW), pay the window cleaner and fend off people wanting to resurface our drive, while the dog paws at the study window demanding to be exercised.
I have to confess here that I’m not immune to this volunteering lark myself, having been heavily involved over a decade or so in the affairs of a national sport association, a not for profit organisation, ruled though not run by volunteers (the difference is critical and can be fatal to the organisation) that I have discovered has many parallels with a charity. I’ll have to come back to this one but it disturbs me that each of us has got ourself into a variation of the same fundamental situation: work disguised as play, for no material reward and precious little of the other sort this side of the pearly gates.

Goodbye, thankyou and RIP

An example of the law of unforeseen consequences. On Saturday I called our newsagent to change our order from The Times to The Daily Telegraph. I am starting to find The Times bland, in particular its wishy-washy offend-nobody editorials and the letters below the fold, as if the ones higher up weren’t bad enough. The best bits are ex-editor Simon Jenkins’s column and the Thunderer, appropriately using the paper’s old nickname for some of the more forthright comment. I hope The Telegraph will at least have an opinion. To my mild surprise SWMBO concurred with the change.
The same day Bernard Levin died. Perhaps, for the first time, he missed a deadline (sorry) and was too late (sorry again) for the early editions of the Sundays but I knew nothing of it. On Monday and again on Tuesday our newsagent failed to make the change in our order and so it was in The Times, for which he wrote for over 25 years, that I read both the announcement and his obituary. I bought The Telegraph at the garage and read theirs too.
Levin has long been one of my heroes – for his clarity, his variety, his choice of targets and most of all for his craftsmanship with the English language. I didn’t know he invented the phrase ‘the nanny state’ but it does not surprise me. When he left the Daily Mail in 1971, perhaps because his 600 word ration was too confining, he had to choose between offers from the Guardian and Times. He had once before worked for the then Manchester Guardian but chose the Times because he preferred to write slightly ‘against the grain’ of his paper. I cancelled my Mail and took up the Times. Levin made the right choice and it is hard to imagine now that someone of his originality, independence and libertarian principles could possibly have had his insistence on his copy never being altered without his express permission accepted by the paper the Guardian has become. He was to acknowledge this himself some years later. If only we had him today, perhaps to update his piece on the futility of euphemisms, in which he took British Rail to task for replacing second class with standard class and thus announcing to the world that henceforth it would operate to second class standards. He demolished both the Walrus and the Carpenter in his time. Teflon Tony would surely have succumbed too.
But I think his best work was his history of Britain in the sixties, The Pendulum Years. In four consecutive chapters, O say have you heard?, A moral issue [sic], Standing room only, and Thoroughly filthy fellow, he gives us the best, most lucid, most comprehensive and most entertaining account you will find anywhere of the Profumo scandal, its origins, unfolding, climax and postscripts from the first naked frolicking of Christine Keeler in the Cliveden swimming pool to the trial and suicide of Stephen Ward. Someone too young to have been around at the time could read it and think how lucky we were to have such a delicious folly unfolding day by day for the price of a newspaper. True, but there is renewed and new delight in Levin’s summary, highlights and analysis, like watching the taped replay of a particularly good sporting event, when knowing the result adds to the pleasure of seeing and reliving the way it all worked out. Another chapter, Wives and servants, does much the same for the Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Fanny Hill trials. He covers domestic and foreign politics, the arts, popular music, crime, the strange phenomenon of Malcolm Muggeridge and many other topics, ending with a moving account of Sir Winston Churchill’s funeral. Only sport, no surprise this to his fans, is ignored. If you think you remember the sixties, read it and see what you missed.
Someone once expressed surprise when I remarked that I often re-read a book. Why not? At least you know you will enjoy it. I shall rediscover The Pendulum Years.

If you know a better hole . . .

Off to ZA to see son one and family. Depressed at way England has become uncouth. Will consider emigrating, but where to? New homeland would have to be couth (strictly personal and subjective definition, variable with time and mood), warm and meet basic tests of being civilised – see remarks on couth. Limited choice as all dictatorships, one party states and ones with a state-backed religion ineligible. This makes UK ineligible on grounds of being cold (in winter) and a one party state for foreseeable future. Also object to craven attitude to anything bearing remotest possible risk of injury, mishap or causing offence to innumerable ethnic, religious or cultural minorities. Only people it’s safe to insult are poor, unemployed, undereducated whites (no CRE to defend them); to satirise, just the native, middle class white and educated. Pros: decent beer available, thanks to Camra, cricket still widely played at true amateur level, including on our village green, can still fly (privately that is) with reasonable lack of restrictions, can still laugh at ourselves, great cheeses as even my French friends admit, general decency and sense of humour of vast majority of people, healthy distrust of government. Cons: in fact few, but multiplying under current government (distrusting them does nothing to change their ways) and its policy of simultaneously pushing on with ill thought through, basically Tory policies and pandering to left and fringe groups over e.g. hunting, wind farms, protection of slugs. Mused through a few possibilities.

France. Obvious first choice as a) near, b) I speak the language. This close to essential as anathema to be part of uncouth Brit ex-pat enclave on e.g. Costa Plonka. Pros: civilised attitude to food and language, low population density cf. most of UK, good climate and scenery. Cons: part of EU (though attitude to it is a pro), beer poor, driving standards poor (though again sympathise with attitude). Couth Index, out of five, probably 4 except in Paris.

Belgium. Just to get it out of the way. Close to ineligible on account of being fount of all EU nonsense and therefore nearly a sort of pan-national dictatorship. Couth index 2 urban, higher in the south-east they say. Cons: beer overrated, driving standards abysmal, two languages. Pros: easily bypassed. . .

Netherlands. Pros: civilised attitude to drugs, prostitution, pornography, also to speed cameras. Good trains, endurable airport. Cons: much bureaucracy I’m told, despite pros, impenetrable language, crowded, at risk from global warming as mostly below sea level, rubber cheese. Couth Index 4+ for the good guys.

Germany. Pros: best lager in Europe and therefore by definition in the world, trains run on time one assumes. Cons: language with three genders, not always readily apparent which applies, and strange word order. EU main player with France. Love of bureaucracy.

Ireland. Civilised attitude to food, drink, conversation, rush. Climate better than reputation. Cons: inflation, competition for EU grants increasing, signs of losing sight of principles, e.g. allowing golf course on Old Head of Kinsale. Pros: food, drink, company, generous to pensioners. CI currently 4++, fear on the wane.

Norway. Pros: one of two European countries not in EU and therefore civilised by definition (but see Switzerland), people friendly, girls beautiful and friendly. Don’t panic like UK when it snows. Cons: food, liquor laws, too cold and dark in winter.

Sweden. Much as Norway except is in EU. Betrayed us many years ago when they switched to driving on the right. Switching over at border crossings was a small price to pay and think of the advantage it would bring now as excuse to stop and search every vehicle. CI probably has distinct seasonal variation with relaxation in long summer days but generally good, as exemplified by Sven-Goran Eriksson.

Switzerland. OK, not in EU but outdoes it for petty regulations, e.g. no loo flushing at night, switch off engine at red lights. Even currency not what it used to be. As once described by a friend who lives there, it’s a police state because the inhabitants want it that way. CI unknown, unobservable, like the far side of the moon.

Italy. All that culture and they seem to take it in their stride. Pros: food, wine, scenery, hospitality, art, architecture, climate. Cons: Venice overrated, corruption. Couth index 4+, at least in the North.

Spain. Different from all of above in that I’ve never been there but let that not be a barrier to having strong views about it. Information mainly from one of the brightest clients I worked with, who married a Spanish woman. After he had endured traditional ritual of assessment by her five brothers, mother, grandmother etc., he was accepted and loves it. Pros: climate, food, wine, strength of family unit, general idea that life is to enjoy unhurriedly, that super bridge in Seville. Cons: attitude to animal welfare still a bit dodgy, too many Brits, lack of extradition treaty, or have they sorted that out now? I’m with them on Gibraltar though. Couth index probably close to 5 so long as you are talking about Espana, not Spain as an extension of Essex.