Just paying a visit to the Petwood Hotel (see below) and found several airmen manouvering a Spitfire into place in the hotel grounds. I asked the Warrant Officer in charge if it was ok to take pictures and if there were any security issues, to which one airman replied "not unless you are German". The plane, which is in fact a life-size replica, was being wheeled into place as part of the RAF Battle of Britain Memorial Flight annual dinner, as part of the 70th anniversary of the commencement of the battle. I was cautioned not to mention that until after the event, and the location, which of course I complied. I mentioned that Lincolnshire is peppered with old airfields, but on this visit, even I was surprised at the number and how even now, the RAF regularly take to the skies over the county.
Next came a walk down memory lane. Deep in the heart of the wolds lies this delightful chocolate box thatched cottage that I first saw over 40 years ago. I happen to have a lovely watercolour of it, dated 1910, and it really has not changed in one hundred years. The owner has lovingly kept it in good shape for some decades. Here, the Weasel, more or less replicates the POV of the picture. In the original, a man is carrying a gun and is accompanied by his dog.
Another nostalgic trip to Woody's Top, a simple and remote YHA hostel. In my day you had to collect a water bowser from the bottom of the hill and haul it up, and then cut your wood for the pot-boiler. There was a tin porta-potti in a shed. Today's hostelers are spoilt with running water and central heating. Pah!
We stayed at a delightful B&B which I can recommend if you are a visitor to Lincoln and the Wolds. Chaplin House is a lot more to my taste than the Petwood Hotel, which has the air of an institution for people with lots of money and no discernment or imagination. I prefer self-catering, because that way, you don't have to be nice to strangers at breakfast, but if you want Bed and Breakfast, Chaplin House cannot be faulted.
I went to see a member of the Mustela family, who happens to run a pub in Fosdyke, called the Ship Inn. Of course, since a Weasel is in charge, it is well run, friendly, and the food is excellent.
The rest of our little sojourn is personal and private and was the best bit! I am already looking to return in the spring and miss my home county, and those close to me, very much.
Weasel is going into hibernation until next week. Comments remain open and I will read and moderate if necessary, but blogging will not happen for a few days. Feel free to use this platform.
I shall be attending a conference next month run by Slugger O'Tool. More about that next week, but check out, http://www.politicalinnovation.org/ and you can find out what it is about. They want new ideas to change politics. Over to you. I shall endeavour to present your ideas to the conference if they appeal to me and there is an opportunity to do so.
the spreading of false beliefs – without the evidence to support them – is bad for all of us, as is the displacement of informed argument by mere rhetoric..
We need a solution that allows writers to write and thinkers to get their thoughts into print, but that gives the ultimate power of scrutiny over blogs, online newspapers, and think-tanks – whether they like it or not – to their millions of readers..
It is still illegal to fail to answer National Census questions in the UK, though in practice, only 38 in the entire country were fined for this. In Russia, so untrusting are they of visitors, and the government, that the majority refuse to even open the door to census takers. Untrusting of the Government? Whatever next. What unlucky people they must be not to have a government they can trust with their information, as we can. (nb for Russians reading this. That last sentence was what we call "ironic")
A national census is planned in the UK for 2011, and may be the last for some time, due to the horrendous cost. Nevermind, they know who you are and what you do, so why bother to duplicate effort?
VIDEO COURTESY OF http://english.aljazeera.net/
I recommend you bookmark Al Jaz. They consistently come up with the kind of stories that British journalists used to do before they were nobbled by the ruling elite. There is another story on the site about Greenland being the suicide capital of the world, and you didn't know that, did you?
As you know, I prefer not to court controversy, but there is no getting away from it, women are shite at low-level customer service. This only applies to those at the lowest positions - the receptionists, call-centre workers and clerks. The higher you get, the more likely you are to get a woman who is clever enough and confident enough to do a better job than a man.
This is based entirely on anecdotal. Women at the coalface have a default position of "computer says no". Any questioning, any argument, and the defensive shutters come up and you may as well hang up. Ask a man in the same, shitty job, and to make his day a better one he will rise to the challenge and take ownership, indeed he will see it as a challenge.
This morning, we were trying to change GPs as a result of a move (last year). Two female receptionists and two practices said "No, not in our catchment area", and of course, had no interest in helping us find the right one. You do not get male GP receptionists, but if you did, they would be the Carlsberg.
Recently, I had to put young Weasel through the NHS, right up to an overnight stay and an operation. The weak link was the hospital receptionist, who did not read, or disregarded the doctor's instruction that Weasel was to be admitted and seen instantly (a nurse later told me that he should not have been put in the queue and that it was the receptionist's fault)
Please don't waste your time arguing me out of this one. It is a fact. Most not very bright women lack confidence, regard any kind of mild challenge as a threat and have no concept of why they are in the job.
I nearly caused an oestrogen explosion in one social services department (entirely populated by women) when I sought to help a female who I was doing advocacy work for. They put me in a windowless room for 20 minutes and then called in a bumptious hag, hyped up like an SAS soldier about to storm the embassy. She could not believe I meant well.
It makes me want to puke. Women should all be forced to learn why they are in the job in the first place. Men don't need that lesson, for they are happy to do their best. If not, please get back to bringing up weans and cooking the dinner.
It is possible, given the right connections, to check you out. Anybody can find out where I live. You know my name, look up the number. For a fee of two or three quid, you can go to the register of electors and do a search on anybody who is on it. There are many more search streams, legal and shady, available to those who wish, such as journalists, double-glazing call centres and anybody who wants a piece of you. I did this recently, in order to check if my entry was correct and up to date.
I am subjected to regular calls from sales people, despite being on the TPS and despite having my number as ex-directory. This is not unusual. It happens to everybody. But why do we accept it?
Bear with me for a bit.
25 years ago, I was in regular contact with senior police officers. It gave me a lifelong insight into the mindset of the Police, and in particular, the Met. If you understand that police officers do not do discretion (they are not allowed to have any), that they obey orders to the letter and that recruitment and progression through the ranks is most certainly not predicated on a fine intellect and a working knowledge of French Wine classification, then you go some way to understanding why they do what they do. Many cops are cynical, of course they are, wouldn't you be if you had to deal with the daily saga of life in the Naked City? Some are on the take; I well remember my late Stepfather telling me (he was a bookmaker) how the local plod took bribes from bookies in the days when off-track betting was illegal. One regular recipient of the wages of sin rose to become a Chief Constable. Some cops are plain sadistic. One of my school chums, who delighted in seeing others suffer as a child, did very well at the Met. Some cops are kind and dedicated and brave capable of thinking for themselves. Sadly, this latter class of cop does not do very well professionally. Please correct me if you think I am adrift here.
Anyway, I had a friend in the Met who gave me details on somone in our circle who I suspected of being a fraud. It turned out, this woman, from Jamaica, had a string of convictions for fraud and theft, had been imprisoned and had worked as a nanny. After finding out where her previous employers lived (she came to us asking for help because the man of the house had "raped" her) her entire story collapsed. She had been sacked as nanny due to the kids being traumatised by some unspecified behaviour while in her care. She had stolen items from those who tried to help her - she had a convincing sob story - and had been briefly taken into our home as she claimed to be homeless. This woman had managed to convince 20 or 30 people who we knew that she was a victim of all sorts of terrible things. None of them were true.
In the above case, the rules were bent in order to put a stop to someone who was not only dishonest, but possibly dangerous to children too.
Yes, we live in a surveillance society, and official reports put the UK alongside China and Russia in the invasion of privacy stakes, right at the top of the naughty list.
But sometimes, privacy is a front for deception and worse. A Fleet Street journalist recently said that public figures who complain most loudly about invasion of privacy, have, in his decades of experience, always had something to hide without exception.
So the question is, do the benefits of surveillance in the UK outweigh the disadvantages? Should it be more controlled? Should there be less?
Is our security predicated on the free flow of data?
I don't know the answer to that, but what I do think is that we are going through an evolutionary period, where data handling is as new to us as the Spinning Jenny was to cottage weavers. I believe we must learn to live with it and work out ways to deliver a society that respects freedom and upholds the rights of privacy. So far, the new government shows no signs of giving that one to the people.
In my post office today and they were busy stacking the Christmas cards. That is because there are only sixty days to Christmas - only eight weeks!
What is it about this festival that gets people so excited, so early? It cannot be Google, because despite commemorating everything up to and including Laika, the first dog in space, it refuses to acknowledge the commemoration of the birth of Jesus Christ.
Regardless of our views about what Christmas actually is, it is difficult to understand why we are locked into this ever-extending period beforehand.
Anyhow, since Alex Salmond's official Christmas card last year was so popular, as was my photo montage to show its true antecendents (at least one MSM copied it and failed to give me credit)
Here it is once more, along with the inspiration behind it. Happy Christmas. Aren't you just feeling Christmassy already? Or do you just want to join a uniformed youth movement for white aryans?
I have just watched Dambusters Declassified, a BBC documentary on Guy Gibson's 617 Squadron. It is an affectionate and informative piece on the real story behind the Richard Todd film of 1955. For those interested in this sort of thing, it is recommended.
617 Squadron moved its officer's mess from their base in Scampton, South, to the quite luxurious Petwood Hotel in Woodhall Spa. The documentary shows aerial shots of Scampton, The Petwood Hotel and much of the Lincolnshire landscape. I shall be staying a few miles from Woodhall, towards Lincoln, later in the week. The journey from the airbase to the hotel is some 23 miles, so I expect it was something of a trek in the 1940s.
My part in their history? As a young man I worked for a couple of periods at the hotel. In those days, little had changed - thirty or so years since Guy Gibson and his officers sipped gin in the oak panelled bar. The hotel lies just outside the village, surrounded by woodland, a perfect place to unwind, had you been a young flyer in 1943.
Most of the Kitchen and Restaurant staff were retired NCOs, and ran the place like a military operation. The Head chef was a massive man who roared like a lion, but his staff seemed happy enough. The dining room had a fluffed up maitre d' adorned in a penguin suit. Under him were numerous waiting staff and me, the stillroom boy. Two of the waiters were characters from one of those wartime comdies; all fags behind their backs, talking out the sides of their mouths like spivs. They were dressed in fine white starched linen coats and had slicked back, brylcreemed hair. They hated each other and moaned incessantly about the customers. Sometimes, I was on shoe-cleaning duty. Sometimes I carried bags - anything that the lowliest of the low ended up doing. The vegetable chef was an ex-con. When I asked him what he had been in for, he told me he was "in trouble over young boys". What appalled me most about him, bearing in mind he worked in a kitchen, was his long, dirty fingernails. They must have been an inch long. I got my first real introduction to a nymphomaniac - she worked there. She was at it with customers, the owner/manager, the staff and she tried her charms on me too. Somehow, something deep inside repelled me and I never fully complied. I have no really bad memories of the Petwood, at least as a plongeur, but I gather its former glory days are a fond memory.
Gibson was a Wing Commander held the DSO at the age of 24. By the end of the Dambusters affair he had been awarded the VC at 25. He moved to East Kirkby, one of many now deserted bases that criss-cross the Lincolnshire landscape to this day. As I drive around these flat lands with their distant horizons, I shall think of all the boys who flew out during the dark days of the 40's, and came back men and perhaps, pay a nostalgic visit to the Petwood.
I don't do celebrity gossip. There are a few reasons for this, the main one being that I live in a farm cottage in Scotland, and celebs are few and far between. Apart from Sophie Winkleman aka Lady Frederick Windsor aka Big Suze of course, my long-term stalker. Tap, tap, tap on the window, almost every night. "Leave me alone, Sophie" I plead. "Go back to Freddie".
Also, I no longer work in the kind of places where you bump into them. Other Weasels do, but I betray confidences at their peril. And thirdly, celebrity gossip is, for the most part, of no interest whatsoever.
However, I was interested to note that an actress called Cary Mulligan has been seen slumming it in a $110 a night Best Western after a break-up with her partner, having left a "mansion", and allegedly being worth several million US Dollars per movie.
'She prefers to blend in. She eats here, but she also shops at the Gelson’s supermarket down the street and brings food back to eat in her room.’ A friend said: ‘She doesn’t have a lot of things and lives out of a suitcase. She doesn’t have too many friends in LA – her closest friends are her publicists.
Why am I interested? Well, once, when I was very much in the loop, I had a friend who worked as a showbiz publicist. Apparently, many of these stars have no real friends and have to be taken out to restaurants, and for drinks with paid functionaries. Over drinks, she told me she was having dinner with a Big International Star. "Why is that?" "Because she has been in London, at Claridges for three days and hasn't seen anybody, and is a bit lonely". I had always fancied this particular BIS and kind of wished I could go along and befriend her. But I didn't. What on earth would I have said, apart from, "You were good in that film.."?
These people live in a cocoon of their own making, where civilians are excluded. It is alright to start talking to other BIS's, even if you do not know them. Unless you are Madonna, of course, who famously affects not to know anybody except Elton, and everybody knows Elton.
What a lonely planet.
The first ever South Korean Formula One Grand Prix was a wash out, and ensured that only fools will take a guess on who will emerge as the World Champion. I have had my money on Mark Webber for some time, but that was due to his sheer likeability as much as anything else. Obviously, Bernie Ecclestone has had a word with God the Almighty, to make sure that the appalling rain at the track would add to a nailbiting finish to the season. During practice, 7-times world champion Michael Schumacher could be seen grinning from ear-to-ear. Schumacher is having the time of his life; he has nothing to prove and he has one of the most expensive toys on the planet. That did not stop him shafting his old rival, Rubens Barrichello, though. Jenson Button reminds me of young master Weasel. The combination of skill, personality and guts, and best of all, an ability not to get carried away with success, has been a gift to the man himself, due in part to the support of a doting dad.
And now, a bit of nice music to warm the cockles of your heart, if you have one. It's Schubert, the Allegro from Symphonie No 5, performed by the Wiener Phil, with Karl Bohm. A perfect, beautiful piece for a winter's day by the fire.
The Weasel likes a bit of prog. This is more rock though, than prog. What I like about the Album/Band, Captain Beyond, is that it is one of those that you can listen to from start to finish, without skipping the crap tracks, because there aren't any.
I suppose it is not wide of the mark to call Captain Beyond a supergroup. Members had played with Johnny Winter, Iron Butterfly and Deep Purple. Like many bands of the time, members had to go through a few hoops to get themselves out of existing contracts. That was the least of their worries; one member walked out during the recording of the second album and was never seen again, and the band blamed poor management for their eventual demise, having been reduced to working elsewhere to make ends meet and the lack of a proper tour schedule.
There were various reunions, but the Captain finally handed in his super suit when founder-member Larry Rhino Reinhardt was diagnosed with cancer, in 2003, although Rhino has defied expectations and is alive and well.
Bastards have terminated the video. Ah well, their loss, not mine. (update: oops! they have put it back! yippee!)
This is a vid of the latest Bryan Ferry release. Bryan Ferry is and always has been one of the coolest people on the planet. Years ago when that nutter hijacked the commercial airliner he was on and sent it spiralling to certain death, Ferry was calmly sifting through his Ipod for some Oscar Peterson and sipping a Dry Martini. When it was all over and they were clearing up the urine and sick, Ferry cheered everyone up with an acapella rendition of "Do the Strand", after glancing at his Panerai Luminor 1950 Flyback Regatta and doing up a button on the cuff of his Anderson and Shepperd suit.
This video - a retro take on the Bond title sequence. Fab!
Sorry about this, but, there's no money. It's a bugger, I know, but you remember when the Government told us there was free money to spend on anything and everything, and you believed them, and voted for it, and decided that everlasting free money and free everything and council houses for life and cheap hospitals and disability allowances for your sore thumb and equality consultancies and quangos to help unfettered immigration and it all made you feel so good that we were one of the most liberal countries in Europe?
It turns out, the money was not free after all. You have to pay it back, which I think goes against your human rights, but there you go.
Sooner or later, voters must take responsibility for their little black crosses. (Those who ticked the box marked "free money forever" appear to be whining loudest right now.)
- At the end of 2009-10 the real national debt stood at £7.9 trillion, over £300,000 for every single household in Britain (Tax Payer's Alliance)
The true cost of Labour's lies and spin is going to hit every one of us. I can see it in the astronomical rise in bills for the last year. It is going to get a lot worse before it gets better. People are going to lose jobs. Lifestyles will change. Families will come under enormous stress. It is not going to be nice.
Firstly, I have never traveled Ryanair, or caused young Weasels to do so, on their dozens of flights to see me. Once upon a time, you could more or less rely upon Easyjet to get you there on time - I am talking about three or four years ago, but not anymore. Easyjet flights to and from Edinburgh seem to be late leaving and late arriving. Has this something to do with the departure of the face of the Brand, Stelios Howsyarfather in whose mouth moussaka would not melt? Easyjet will suffer in the long term, whether or not it sues its rival, Ryanair for taking the piss out of it. (Easyjet really is less reliable than Air Zimbabwe.)
And this brings me to Michael O'Leary, the CEO of Ryanair. Is he the man you love to hate, or just drop the love?
Michael O'Leary has a unique line in publicity. He regularly comes up with outrageous public announcements that gobble up column inches and elbow rivals off the front pages. Recent announcements have included; charging £1 to use the loo, getting rid of seats and making passengers stand to save space, and getting rid of the second pilot and training a stewardess to fly in an emergency. I rather liked my own invention, which was that Ryanair were going to get you to pre-book lifejackets and oxygen masks at a discount in the event of an aircraft ditch in the sea or other emergency, or make them available at a premium price just before the crash.
All these are quite believable, none are remotely true. O'Leary does it for publicity. The question is, does this work?
there are an incredible 20,400,000 global monthly searches for Ryanair. Compare that to Virgin Atlantic’s mere 1,500,000 and you can instantly see that there’s a huge amount of brand awareness being generated.
Of course, some of this is negative. Sites like http://www.ihateryanair.org/ and many others, contribute to this. Many of the negative comments reveal disgruntled punters who simply never read the Terms and Conditions of carriage. The fact is, of course, that Ryanair is successful. Bloody successful. http://www.avoidryanairfees.co.uk/ declared:
Budget airline Ryanair annouced on Wednesday, that it carried 7.61m passengers in July 2010. Is is a significant increase from July 2009, when the airline served 6.73m passengers. That means that despite a credit crunch, rouge Icelandic volcano and a general slowdown in the airline industry, Ryanair managed to increase its traffic by 13%. In the last 12 rolling months ending on 31 July 2010, Ryanair carried a total of 70.1m passengers.
Not only that, the company has an optimistic forecast on the stock markets.
And so, what can go possibly wrong? Michael O'Leary can go wrong? Kevin Gibbons is pessimistic:
So the airline is actively pursuing negative publicity with spurious stories. Clearly it hopes that the brand you love to hate will be the first brand you think of when you want to fly. Will it work? At the moment, the airline must be seeing success from this weird anti-promotion, or you assume it would change tactics. However, there’s a huge amount of debate over whether this will cause the brand to crash and burn in the long run, or if it will continue to work. We marketers will be watching with interest but, personally, I wouldn’t recommend trying this kind of approach with your own brand. While it may be working wonders for Ryanair, I can’t help but think it would kill off most brands within 12 months.
Gerald Ratner, famously killed of a multi-million pound high street jewellery chain with a single, flippant remark. I tend to agree with Gibbons. O'Leary is heading for a catastrophic decompression.
Today I went to the corner shop and was handed a very dodgy fiver in my change. It appears to have gone through a 60 degree washing cycle and is faded and raggy. Any suggestions as to what to do with it?
UPDATE: Thank you for the kind and helpful comments. I got rid of it in a coffee shop. I pointed out what had happened to the note and he was fine about it. Honesty is usually the best policy.
At a certain age, one needs a day-time nap. It is a privilege of being older; you can do this anywhere and garner no social opprobrium. And so I was tickled by a clip, shown on HIGNFY (now in its 20th, lacklustre year) of Tony Benn at the Labour Party conference, who fell asleep whilst being harangued by Gillian Duffy. If there is still such a thing as the Order of Lenin, Gillian Duffy should get it, for services to Socialism. For those Alpha Centaurians and Vulcans who read this blog, Gillian Duffy is a contender for the honour of single-handedly causing the downfall of Gordon Brown.
For me, Gillian Duffy's services to humanity have a much wider symbolism. She symbolises the rift between the real working classes and the absurd caricature of socialism that Labour has become. Gillian Duffy didn't defraud the taxpayer. Gillian Duffy didn't take us to a war on the pre-text of a lie. Gillian Duffy didn't agree that we should incur so much national debt that her grandchildren will be paying for it. And then of course, there is Walter Wolfgang. When he was ejected from an earlier Labour Party Conference, and charged with offenses under the Terrorism act, merely for heckling Jack Straw, once again you see a symbol of the vast chasm between the values of socialism and the values of Stalinism.
The left-wing media narrative is currently one that depicts the Tories as greedy, champagne swilling toffs, who are there to service only the captains of industry and people with offshore bank accounts. On top of that, the nasty Tories are the party of CUTS - so the narrative would have us believe.
What does all this show? It shows that the visible manifestation of what is really going on in this country is so distorted, so perverted and so viscerally propagandistic, that you can hardly know where the truth lies.
The Lefties, once again, are trying to play up the Champagne Tory card. They are moaning because the Government has spent £18,000 on topping up the State Wine Cellar. That nasty piece of hate-filled carbohydrate known as Tom Watson has been asking "awkward" questions in the Commons about it. He should have the sense to keep his mouth shut, for the money spent on wine whilst he enjoyed power was far higher.
One of the sad aspects of the Bonfire of the Quangos is the demise of the Government Hospitality Advisory Committee for the purchase of Wine. Manned by several Masters of Wine at a paltry cost of about £10,000 a year, plus the services of a fith of one civil servant. The group, who are custodians and advisors on the £2.5 million wine stockpile owned by the State is to be disbanded. I think this is a bad idea. Who, but Masters of Wine are going to determine whether we get value for money? They do the job for free. Their collective annual expenses amounts to rather less than the BBC top executives claim per month. (The latest expenses claims and salary details for senior BBC executives were published on Friday. The figures showed 114 senior executives claiming a total of £50,752 a month.)
Labour spent more on wine, year on year during their term of office.
recorded the following expenditure on new stock for the Government cellar in the previous five years:
£
2003-04
93,503
2004-05
60,059
2005-06
95,264
2006-07
108,715
2007-08
137,460
These sums include approximately £33,310 spent on purchasing champagnes over the five year period.
And yet, the Guardian and the Indy and the BBC are all trying to make out it's the wicked old Tory Toffs. Res Ipsa Loquitor.
I am about three-quarters the way through Apsley Cherry-Garrard's book, The Worst Journey in the World, a journal of the ill-fated, 1910 -1913 polar expedition of the Antarctic.
How long, do you think it took Scott and his party to travel to the South Pole and back, only to die of Exhaustion, malnutrition and hypothermia, 70 miles from base camp? How far do you think they walked? Well, you are probably wrong. I was. (Answers below)
Apsley Cherry-Garrard was one of the youngest of the Polar team, being just 24 when he set out for Antarctica. Myopic, and beset by serious health problems that resulted in his mental and physical collapse later in life, Cherry, as he was known, was born to be part of the fabulously rich and aristocratic landed gentry, three quarters of whom would die in the First World War. He did not accompany Scott to the Pole, but he took part with two others who did, Bowers and Wilson, on an earlier journey to Cape Crozier, to find Penguin Eggs. They had pulled their sledges, like dogs, for five weeks, suffering in temperatures of up to -70 degrees F.(-56C), enduring frostbite, shattered teeth, burns, severe heartburn and a diet of biscuit, butter and pemmican ( a 50/50 mixture of dried meat and fat). The results of their quest, in scientific terms, proved fairly useless.
They are pictured here on their return. (ACG on right).
Later on, an abortive 130 dog sled journey that Cherry undertook, in order to lay a supply depot, may or may not have contributed to the deaths of the Scott party. Whatever the truth, Cherry could not forget his part in the tragedy. He had laid a supply depot less than 13 miles from where the Scott tent was finally found, before turning back, due to the lack of food for the dogs. (He was under Scott's orders to take great care of them, and the alternative would have meant killing some to feed the others) Whatever, the "what ifs" tortured Cherry-Garrard until the end of his life.
The book is a thorough, well-written, quite comprehensive journal of the entire three years. Such things as the progress and demise of the motor-sledges goes into several pages. The minutiae of their daily lives, both at the hut and while journeying is described. And out of this meticulous account of the lives of early polar explorers, you begin to understand why once, England was the greatest nation on Earth.
Answers:
From Hut point, to the South Pole and back is 1766 statute miles. Scott and his party got to the Pole in 75 days, and back to his last camp in 147, a total of five months. It was not a walk in the park.
Baroness Uddin, a Labour peer and the first Muslim woman to be appointed to the upper house, is set to be suspended from the Lords for between a year and 18 months, and has agreed to pay back £125,000 in wrongly claimed expenses.
Lord Paul, another Labour peer and a major party donor, has been recommended for a suspension of between four and six months and has agreed to pay back £40,000.
Lord Bhatia, who sits as a cross-bencher but has also donated money to Labour, faces a ban of between six and 12 months and is to repay voluntarily £27,000.
According to Google today, it is Oscar's birthday. I mention this, not only because he was born almost exactly one hundred years before me, but because I like him. For those who do not already know, I did the dissertation for my honours degree on Oscar Wilde and it nearly got me a Damien. The picture is a drawing I did some years ago.
I have probably seen as much Oscariana as Shakespeare - quite a bit - and the reasons are complicated to say the least. If you try and disassociate an artist from their context, you get problems. It is not that their art is not free-standing, it is that life imitates art and vice versa and in Oscar's case he was a paradigm of that. His work is almost inseparable from his life. Merely take Earnest or Dorian, and you can tell at a glance that it was Oscar, in another room. In that context he was clever, but when he did drop the poses and the flam he was a genius. Homos love writing about themselves, but Oscar was able to suspend narcissism at times to deliver works which will stand forever as timeless and for everyman. Here is Requiescat. He wrote it as a homage to his sister Isolda, who died in childhood. For me, there never was anything so pure and so devoid of authorial greed and so heartfelt. And so right.
Tread lightly, she is near
Under the snow,
Speak gently, she can hear
The daisies grow.
All her bright golden hair
Tarnished with rust,
She that was young and fair
Fallen to dust.
Lily-like, white as snow,
She hardly knew
She was a woman, so
Sweetly she grew.
Coffin-board, heavy stone,
Lie on her breast,
I vex my heart alone,
She is at rest.
Peace, Peace, she cannot hear
Lyre or sonnet,
All my life's buried here,
Heap earth upon it.
Alix Dobkin's seminal album, Living with Lesbians, feat. The Lesbian Power Authority is a lost gem. Alix is still touring and promoting MY RED BLOOD, A Memoir of Growing Up Communist, Coming Onto the Greenwich Village Folk Scene, & Coming Out in the Feminist Movement, a catchy title that really puts you in the picture about Growing Up Communist, Coming Onto the Greenwich Village Folk Scene, & Coming Out in the Feminist Movement, which will certainly strike a chord with many of the Weasel's regular contributors.
"Alix Dobkin...pioneered lesbian music with uncompromising, intimate songs"
— The New York Times Magazine
And so it behoves me to pay tribute to the pioneer of lesbian music with an unpublished lesbian genre demo cassette I found in my favourite womyn's bookstore. Sadly, it it only a really bad cover version of the original Dobkin song, done by Duane Bundy and Earl Biedermeyer from their cell in the Louisiana State Penitentiary.
Before becoming CEO of British Airways, Willie Walsh was involved in early Photofit trials, the successor to Identikit, used by the police to catch criminals. He then went on to become a model for trainee criminal "artists impression" artists. The trouble is, most photofits and artists impressions of crims look like Willie Walsh. He must get a lot of aggravation over it.
Here is a piece that typifies BBC bias by omission. They do it all the time.
On the13th October, BBC "environment"correspondent, Jeremy Cooke wrote a scaremongering piece (Rural Britain fears severe spending cuts) about the Bonfire of the Quangos, in particular the British Waterways Board.
"British Waterways, which is responsible for the upkeep of the canal network, is apparently on the hit-list" bleated Cooke.
Well yes it was, but totally absent from the piece is that BWB was being strangled to death by stealth, by the last government, and not only does the solution to its future finally divest the taxpayer of the burden, but it has been welcomed with open arms by the board themselves, for the solution in question is that the BWB shall become a charity similar to the National Trust. The drip by drip removal of year on year funding, quietly arranged by Labour with no initiative for alternative funding streams, will now be a thing of the past, ensuring a secure future for the Waterways.
This is what the BWB think:
Welcoming the announcement, British Waterways’ chairman Tony Hales, said: "This is excellent news and something we have been urging all political parties to support since last year". (Waterscape)
The Government is reducing funding, year on year, to BWB (via Defra) by £60 million over five years and by £20 million last year, shaved off the Environment Agency contribution with the aim of making BWB self-sufficient. It precipitated an online petition at number ten, because waterways users were outraged. I don't call that an extravagance, I call it a bonfire.
So yes, the BBC slant is that it is all the fault of this vicious nasty Tory/Lib coalition. And they wonder why we so wish that the BBC was first on the bonfire.
NB. My special interest in this is that I owned a narrowboat, and lived on it for two years. Here it is. And for the anoraks, it was a (approximate) 57' trad stern, built by Sagar Marine and extended by Dobson's of Shardlow.
Oh, Jim, how could you treat me this way. (Lou Reed, Berlin)
I never expected the last post to be welcomed with a pat on the back, but a kick in the nadgers is going too far. (received stupidity, says Jim Baxter, of my last piece) But as if by magic, I read today of an exemplar of the kind of thing I was getting at, albeit crudely, I admit.
In February, a Labour Minister, yes you read that right, a Labour Minister complained that his local party was being infiltrated by a fanatical Muslim organisation whose sole aim was to gain the balance of power in one of the London Boroughs. How they did this is a paradigm of the way our democracy can be used to destroy itself.
The Islamic Forum of Europe (IFE) — which believes in jihad and sharia law, and wants to turn Britain and Europe into an Islamic state — has placed sympathisers in elected office and claims, correctly, to be able to achieve “mass mobilisation” of voters.
Speaking to The Sunday Telegraph, Jim Fitzpatrick, the Environment Minister, said the IFE had become, in effect, a secret party within Labour and other political parties.
“They are acting almost as an entryist organisation, placing people within the political parties, recruiting members to those political parties, trying to get individuals selected and elected so they can exercise political influence and power, whether it’s at local government level or national level,” he said.
“They are completely at odds with Labour’s programme, with our support for secularism.”
Of course there is nothing wrong with the above, is there? Trying to get people elected is not a crime. But clearly, Jim Fitzpatrick was concerned. He likened the threat by the attempts of the Militant Tendency to infiltrate Labour in the 80s. You have to make your own mind up about the true aims of the IFE, but it is fair to say that if they have their way, we would see the lives of women, gays, Christians, Jews,etc., and non-Muslims become those of second class citizens at best and at worst...well at worst.. just don't go there. By the way, Jim, name me a Muslim country that enjoys the freedoms and protection of minorities that we give to British citizens. Name one. And yet, democracy is always open to subversion, since it is self-evidently open to all.
And finally, I shall allow Abjol Miah to have his say, and you, Jim, can decide if you want to live in his version of Great Britain. I don't.
It is Miah's dream to see his faith extended; to see the Palestinian flag floating above Tower Hamlets HQ; to twin the borough with the West Bank town of Jenin. 'I think Muslims have the perfect role, a massive role, in shaping the moral fabric of politics,' he says. 'People in the western world have a great misunderstanding of an Islamic system. What is it? It's a system where people feel comfortable to live, they're able to worship freely ... We're the biggest political threat. Not just to the current administration - but to the whole system at the moment.'
Thank you Abjol. And thank you Jim for your comment (last post). I disagree with you both.
When hard won freedom is under attack, it would be nice if we were all singing from the same hymn sheet.
There have been very conflicting views about the decision of the Swiss, for example, to ban the expansion of Islamic culture. The same applies to the French, who recently decided that they would deport the thousands of Roma people from makeshift camps in France.
I have to be careful what I say here; it would take a little slip of the qwerty to put me in handcuffs. Such is the hysteria surrounding what is a fairly clear case of national expediency over the so called rights of unwanted minorities.
We are now used to the fact that the political standards of Asian minorities in Britain falls below even the very low bar of propriety that our home-grown politicos have. We now hear that gangs of Romanian Gypsies have been traficking children into this country in order to turn them into thieves and sex toys. One twelve year old girl was found to be pregnant in the most recent round of raids on London addresses.
People who argue against the deportation of unwanted guests argue that it targets a particular race. Well, tell me, how many people have died in the last few years at the hands of white, Christian suicide bombers? How many gangs of white people have been arrested for perpetrating abuses of children, whether it is for crime or for specious cultural reasons? How many "honour" killings have been initiated by whites? How many white politicians have been convicted of forging postal votes? The list of serious assaults, not only on individuals, but on our culture and our values, by those who do not belong to this country in any meaningful sense, is endless.
And yet, as I said, I risk arrest for even broaching the subject. The debate is almost impossible to be had; shut down by linguistic hegemony, press control, government spin and mass indoctrination, not to mention the pathetic appeasement of these minorities by the very people who should be protecting our society - the Police.
It is entirely conceivable that if the suspects in this latest case are convicted, they will, via some technicality, be allowed to stay and poison our society until the day they die.
I risk being called a racist of course. Well, yes I am. I believe in the supremacy and hegemony of those who inhabit this Isle by right of birth and antecedents. I have no problem with those who come here, as long as they understand that this is our country and we run it our way, by reason of hundreds of years of struggle and democracy. We fought hard for our freedom and way of life, and we are fair people who de facto welcome people of other cultures, but now, they are taking the piss.
Those who come to this country expecting to live as they do in theirs, must understand that we have a very profound investment in our way of life, and, imperfect as it is, we consider child abuse by ethnic minorities, or the persecution of any minority, to be abhorrent, unacceptable and worthy of their deportaion to whatever shithole they came from.
I had a bad start to the day. Later, things got brighter. I connected myself once again with things around me and another element of humanity, quite fortuitously. I walked along the beach, feeling deeply sorry for myself and came upon another, a fellow traveller if you like. We walked and talked for a bit.
This song is not about the beach.Sorry to sound wistful and dippy, but there you go. It's been one of those days.
I have decided to start a "Be nice to a harmless fruitcake day". Crazy, eccentric and mad people provide the icing on the cake of life. And the fruit. Often they are unaware of how nutty they are, but that doesn't matter. What does matter is that they are just as needy, if not more, of understanding and kindness.
In order to get things going, I shall cite a few well-known harmless fruitcakes (Gordon Brown is most certainly not harmless) and invite readers to provide their own nominations. Failure to take part will result in me posting more obscure, egregious tracks from crap musicals.
First up is Criswell. Criswell almost defies description. He was a sort of psychic who never got any prediction right. Correction, he made so many predictions that, statistically, some of them probably were right. Criswell sang, wrote, appeared in films, usually by Ed Wood (Plan Nine From Outer Space.) Here he is, with his trademark kiss curl and stentorian delivery. A real gem.
(the last few seconds are spoiled by the addition of some irrelevant promotion)
Next Vivienne Westwood. Some of her high-end fashion is obviously only for the catwalk, but Viv has stood the test of time. Even the Weasel owns one of her Red Label Items. She is obviously mad as Hamish McMad of Madison County, but where would we be without Vivienne Westwood and the revolution she was a central player in.
Next up, and again, sadly, recently deceased, is Frank Sidebottom. Frank's trademark eyeball head was a proto-post modernist deconstruction of marxist dialectic over foucaultian paradigm. And other total bollocks. In fact Frank just deconstructed everything, including himself, but you could not help but stare at that outrageous, endearing head of his.
And then there is Viv Stanshall. I really hope someone remembers Viv Stanshall. Together with a bunch of other fruitcakes he formed the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band. Collectively, they reminded us not to take the Sixties too seriously. The Bonzo's "Doughnut in Granny's Greenhouse" had a piss-take cover. Any guesses for getting the one it took the micky out of?
Anyway, here is a Stanshall solo effort, from Men Opening Umbrellas ahead. It has more or less disappeared without trace, which is probably for the best, but as John Peel said of him: I could never really think of anything to say when I'd played one of his pieces on the radio, and would end up, rather feebly, with something along the lines of 'I fear that a single one of Viv's thoughts would blow my damn brains out.
We need harmless fruitcakes. Let's make November 1st, Be Kind to a Harmless Fruitcake Day. Tally Ho! Your nominations, please.
Most citizen journalism strikes me as nothing to do with journalism at all. A lot of bloggers seem to be socially inadequate, pimpled, single, slightly seedy, bald, cauliflower-nosed, young men sitting in their mother's basements and ranting. They are very angry people. OK - the country is full of very angry people. Many of us are angry people at times. Some of us are angry and drunk. But the so-called citizen journalism is the spewings and rantings of very drunk people late at night. (Andrew Marr)
Me? I was mildly upset too and so was Tapestry, one of the long-serving and credible regulars in my orbit. Also germane to the issue:
Tapestry writes:
It seems like bloggers keep moving ahead, and are getting yet more confident while the main stream media are unsure how to move to catch up. In fact they can't.
They have lived in a world where they themselves were almost invisible, where the powerful decided what was and wasn't true, and as long as they behaved and didn't challenge what they were given, they were kept on as trusted courtiers with privileged access to big events.
Bloggers are on completely the opposite basis. They say what makes sense to them , or doesn't make sense, regardless of the wishes of the powerful. They have no desire to become courtiers or have privileged access.
The MSM does not want to acknowledge that audience feedback via blogs has cut away their privileged position. Yet that is what is happening.
Perfect cultured images such as that of Blair, once protected and nurtured by every MSM courtier in the land, at least any of those who desired promotion, can now be smashed to pieces just for kicks by Guido to a similar delight and to the cheers that once attended the public dismembering of the French aristocracy. Untruth or corruptness, previously carefully disguised or defended, can now instantly send a political career reeling off the edge of an increasingly precarious cliff.
The MSM are left standing, clinging like limpets to the traditionally powerful, and yet unable to stop the power of exposure and open discussion in blogs from daily eroding ever bigger chunks of cliff face. The power that Blair could exercise in 2003, sending the country to war against the opinion of his own party, against public opinion and against the advice of his own intelligence experts, could never have held sway without the assured sycophancy of the MSM.
The Blair/Campbell level of totalitarian media control is now dead, not because the MSM is no longer willing to continue with the corruption of their role as it was at its lowpoint under Blair in 2003, but because the instant feedback of the blogosphere now enables ordinary people to connect to the truth another way, without even bothering to refer to the previous assumed cultural lines of authority, which were, prior to the blogosphere, firstly our elected representatives, who we no longer trust, and secondly their media associates and stooges, who propped them up regardless of what they did or said.
Once known as the fourth estate, the MSM are becoming as moribund as the horse drawn plough when the diesel engine arrived in the countryside, or the cavalry after the invention of the tank and the machine gun. From being at the very pinnacle and assumed to carry an authority equivalent to that of once respected government representatives, overnight they have lost all respect and value and have literally nowhere to go, except down.
They are as despised as the elected representatives whose bidding they have slavishly carried out, all the while that our country has wrecked itself in useless unjustifiable unwinnable wars, and while our economy is wrecked with massive unjustifiable debts, to which they didn't even say boo for over a decade.
Blogs give people hope and carry the authority that once pertained to such institutions as The Times or The Telegraph of the BBC. The change has been so fast that few have taken on board what is happening.
Blogs are trusted. Newspapers and TV are not. People only want to read and watch where they trust the source. That is now the MSM's problem. How can they match the growing trust that people have in blogs and other internet based communication channels? It's a fundamental problem with no easy solution. How will the powerful close the gap and try to recapture their previous trusted status? It took hundreds of years to achieve, but Blair and Campbell burned it all in about five short years.
Maybe in the approach taken by Iain Duncan Smith you can see a politician who instinctively knows that trust is the basis of all communication, and also with Michael Gove. They are not slick but you can see they believe what they are saying.
Too many others still admire the Blair/Campbell methods, which win short term by looking and sounding good, but long term sacrifice the basis of all good human relationships - trust. The MSM has to rush headlong to a format of trusted communication, if it is to survive the current communications revolution. They have to first look into their own souls, before they open their mouths, and decide which kind of communicator they are. People can smell phoney with ease now, where ten years ago, they still automatically trusted any public communication.
Each communicator has to decide - am I a phoney, or do I speak only from my heart as of now? That will be the test of success from hereon. Professional detachment is not enough. Only communicate what you personally believe. That requires a revelation of what's inside, not just a polished and stylish veneer. That is the only acceptable standard for an audience that is sick of being taken for granted, and which now delights in seeing heads being lopped off by the modern equivalent of the guillotine, the blog. People are rightly angry at having been sold a false set of non-existent values by Blair and Campbell, aided and abetted by a a supine media. There is only one way all this can go.
It does not take an opera buff to sense the power and authority that Joan Sutherland had over the role of Lucia, in Donizetti's eponymous opera. Sutherland died at the weekend at her home near Geneva, and it is for her portrayal of Lucia in Lucia di Lammermoor that she achieved international status.
Here is the aria, Quando, rapito in estasi. Joan Sutherland 1926-2010.
..art is the expression of man's pleasure in labour; that it is possible for man to rejoice in his work, for, strange as it may seem to us to-day, there have been times when he did rejoice in it; and lastly, that unless man's work once again becomes a pleasure to him, the token of which change will be that beauty is once again a natural and necessary accompaniment of productive labour, all but the worthless must toil in pain, and therefore live in pain. So that the result of the thousands of years of man's effort on the earth must be general unhappiness and universal degradation; unhappiness and degradation, the conscious burden of which will grow in proportion to the growth of man's intelligence, knowledge, and power over material nature.
To generalise heavily, what Ruskin and Morris were about was to re-affirm man's aesthetic and spiritual authority over things, at a time when the Industrial Revolution had changed things out of all recognition. They advocated, for instance, the making of books that were beautiful to look at, as well as being informative.
Several of my regular readers will understand this; the idea that in a highly mechanised, electronic society, we feel the need, indeed we must, assert ourselves as people in control of our physical surroundings. Not only that, we crave aesthetic pleasure, whether it be in the garden or the studio or the study. I have recently taken to corresponding with others in pen, ink and paper. I grow my own vegetables, I keep chickens, I make things. None of this I really need to do, since it is not only inefficient but it is quite unnecessary. So, why do I do it? My son collects vinyl records - and he was born after cds hit the market, so it is not just a certain generation. Everyone wants to re-connect with the kind of tactile pleasures that have been made ostensibly redundant by electronic media and its attendant impact on everything we do. It is to take pleasure in labour.
As a child I imagined an future world, quite impoverished, of protein pills and clean walls, stripped of any semblance of humanity. I imagined going to the moon in a rocket, not buying rocket and fifty different kinds of olive oil in a massive shop. We have more choice, and seemingly, the choice is to look at the past and grab it, before it disappears.
I just went up to my dusty CD collection and pulled this one out. I bought the album at a live gig at the Fleece in Bristol, about 15 years ago. On that night, they were full of energy and the place was packed out. Sadly EB disbanded long ago. They say:
Not that we were the best band there’s ever been. But we must have had something. Because – from our first gig in Cheltenham’s Café Tabac on a wet and windy Burns Night in 1990 to that last gig in 1996 – there were always lots of people to see us. And they really enjoyed what we did.
So why end it? Well, it was better than burning out, I guess. Better than just doing things for the sake of doing them. We’d had seven years of Eden Burning being our lives. And we felt the tug of a Spirit who always wants to make all things new. And it was satisfying to go out on a high. (from their website)
They came and they went, leaving a handful of pretty good songs. But that is for you to decide. If you like it, they have a number of free downloads on offer.
The best and most coruscating analysis of the new Shadow Cabinet is provided by Toby Young. He declares that its members are overwhelmingly White, Priviledged and Heterosexual. It's true. I have said this before but Ed Balls went to the same school as Ken Clarke. The only difference is, Ken got in on a scholarship for people from poor backgrounds, and Balls was paid for by his parents. If Labour had been around in Clarke's schooldays, Ken would never have had that advantage.
Still on Educayshun, I notice that Katherine Birbalsingh, aka Miss Snuffy of the now offline To Miss with Love blog, has been suspended by her school for speaking at the Tory Party Conference. The good Archbishop Cranmer is incandescent about it. Katharine has played cat and mouse with her various employers for sometime over her blog, even though she has been consistently fair and reasonable in her blogging. This is not the first time she has had problems. And all because she dares to point up the fairly obvious flaws in the education system.
Before everyone gets too excited about the Hutton report on pensions and the predictable Union reaction, may I say that for workers in the public sector who really make a difference, that is, doctors, scientists, key civil servants etc, people who work hard to deal with the consequences of your lifestyle choices, professionals in the public sector work for less and get lower salaries than their commercial counterparts. It is not unusual for pay reviews to go on for three or four years, only to decide you were not getting a penny more. Labour introduced the concept of later retirement, and for sometime now, NHS workers have been through a process that favours elective retirement at 65. This chilling excerpt from the Telegraph makes it clear that people who have worked in the public sector for decades may have their pensions plundered:
Retiring at 60 will rapidly become a thing of the past; final salary schemes will go; and public sector workers will have to meet more of the cost of their own pensions. And these changes will affect not only new entrants but those already in pension schemes, too.
The final salary pension was just about the only perk public sector workers get. There are no cars, laptops, phones or free porcelain fillings. Most even have to fund esssential travel in one way or another. If the value of public sector work is degraded any further, all those who are left will be the wasters and idiots and awkward types who hate you. The rest will have taken the banana boat out of here.
We areconstantly being told that we are in a heightened state of alert over the Terrorist threat. Sorry to be blunt, but you stand more chance of being poisoned by botox than blown apart by a callow young Muzzie with peroxide in his pants. Terrorism only works because people get scared of it. We should be more scared of the dim women and fat slobby men (I have encountered several this week) who drive in the outside lane on dual carriageways talking on their phones, totally oblivious to the rest of us. When I am ruler of the universe, talking on the phone and driving will carry a mandatory public flogging. Sharia law, bring it on.
I am giving the quizzes a break for a while. They are a lot of effort to do and the last one was about as popular as hemorrhoids.
But cheer you up, here is a piece of music. It's cheesy and horrible, and that's your punishment for not playing with me.
