Austentation

I’ve always been a Stephen Sondheim fan. Knowing this, the Domestic Goddess booked for us to take her daughter and partner to see his Sunday in the Park with George on her birthday – that’s the daughter’s birthday not the DG’s – and tonight is the night. BUT tonight is also the night that the final of the European Champions League, which decides the best soccer club in Europe, is played in Paris. And the competing finalists – said he through gritted teeth - are Barcelona (Spain) and Arsenal (England). It had better be good show, Stephen and George.

Halleluyah! We’re back – and on broadband! More about that later.

I don’t know much about Jane Austen but I liked her alliterative titles: Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, etc. and wonder if, like Dickens, she got the idea from Tobias Smollett. Funny thing, pride: hanging on my office wall – which must mean I’m proud of it – is a framed clip of a front page from The Guardian. It has two articles on it – one by me, the other by my son. It was my first appearance in a national newspaper – he was a veteran of about 23.
So is being proud a posh word for showing off? People who boast about their past glories are usually trying to reassure themselves rather than impress others. In my first job there was an old man who told everyone he was in the British water polo team for the 1916 Olympic Games. Maybe he was, but he failed to mention that they didn’t run the Olympics in 1916 because of WWI. And surely the most ostentatious of all is to say you’re proud of your kids. After all, what right have we to be proud? What was our contribution? A bunch of genes (over which we had no control) and food, shelter and schooling for a few years. But we all do it.
When John Osborne – English writer of Look Back in Anger – died, the obituaries said what a fantastic contribution his mother had made to his success. She died aged 87, having ridiculed him all his life and belittled him at every opportunity – thus, said the writers, motivating him to prove her wrong. Lack of parental pride may have helped his career – but what did it do for him? Fellow playwright John Mortimer described him as an ‘affable, champagne-drinking, absolute shit’.
So who’s right, Nellie Beatrice Osborne or Jane Austen? Guess I’ll stay proud of them till proved wrong - it's more fun.

The best strikers of three continents are playing: Ronaldinho (South America), Henry (Europe)and Eto'o (Africa). But I don't care.

The prodigal returns

Tough luck on the fatted calf. (Actually I'm here on dial-up only - my ISP is falling short in the I and S departments.)

Talking about fatted calves recalls that much of the RI (religious instruction) we get when we are young is inappropriate - they should save it until we are old enough to understand it.
As a kid I had serious problems with the parable of the prodigal son. You know the one – a guy has two sons, one of whom gathered up all his wealth and ‘took his journey into a far country and here wasted his substance in riotous living.’ (Luke xv. 13) The sensible son stayed home and helped on the farm.
When the first son’s money runs out, he gets hungry and says to himself, ‘How many of my father’s servants have bread enough and to spare, while I perish with hunger!’ So he goes back home.
Everyone knows what happens: the father says ‘Bring hither the fatted calf and kill it.’ This seemed unfair - and not just for the calf. I could never see what right the prodigal son had to a joyous homecoming. Surely you should reward the loyal sibling, not the idler?

You have to have been a parent of adult children to realise what this is about. Compassion has to be based on need rather than equality. Looking at it as an oldie, I worry about what would have happened if the old man had died? Would the prodigal never have been received back into his family? Would the sensible son have flourished while he, the prodigal, spent the rest of his life outcast and alone?
Fairness has nothing to do with it.

Bye bye Blackbird mon pied

Exciting last night in V/franche. Thought I'd better sweep the terrace before I leave, and there he was - a very large, very dead, seagull. Thought I ought to do something - avian flu and all that, so I went to the police. (Check out the vocabulary first - is he mort [male] or morte [female]? How do you tell the gender of a seagull? And, since mouette is female, are they all morte, whatever their sex?) It doesn't matter anyway: the police don't deal with dead seagulls of any gender - you must call the Gendarmerie (Municipal Police), Monsieur. But they don't work after 5pm. Then you must call them tomorrow, Monsieur. But I'm not here tomorrow, I'm in England tomorrow. Shrug. I shrug him back. OK, then, have your bloody epidemic.
You heard it here first.

Here we are back in jolly olde – now that spring has arrived on the Cote d’Azur. What I want to know is how the blackbird knew. He's here!

No 1. son has given me this book about Liverpool – and it’s frightening. It’s autobiographical, and the author could be me, five years earlier. He was born in Walton, the same Liverpool suburb as me, went to Queens Drive Swimming Baths – as I did - and won a scholarship to go to Alsop’s High School – as I did. He remembers the same teachers as I did: Mr Preece (French) who used to bash you on the head with a book and say 'Pour encourager les autres!' The writer went to see Sir Oswald Moseley, the leader of the British Fascist Party, speak on the piece of waste ground opposite the school. I didn’t: my Dad wouldn’t let us kids go - he said there might be trouble. He was right – Moseley was hit by half a brick (we throw a mean half-brick, we scousers) and went straight to hospital (Walton Hospital, of course, where my cousins worked) before he could say ‘Heil Hitler’. That was the end of Fascism in Liverpool. Can’t write any more: No. 1 son might want to read the book and he may see this and I don’t want him to know the plot. Plus I have to go read some more - can't wait to find out what I do next.

The fool on the hill

This is a not infrequent situation here if you’re walking along a narrow pavement or sidewalk, of which there are many because the road was designed to take a column of Roman soldiers. But now it is the Route Nationale 98, and the traffic – French traffic – is rushing by. As you climb the hill towards home, you see two women ahead of you, chatting. It doesn’t have to be women but it usually is - hope that isn't interpreted as something sinister. The one nearer to you is half-turned towards you, and her body language is saying to the other woman ‘I’m in a desperate hurry and I really must go – like now’. But the other is not listening to body language although hers is saying, ‘I want to stay and chat’. This means that the one nearer you will have to keep looking at the other while she wraps up the conversation.
As you get nearer, you read the situation as follows: ‘Any second now this woman will set off in my direction – fast, to prove she’s in a hurry, while still maintaining eye contact with the other woman, thus probably knocking the bottle of Gigondas for which I just paid 15 Euros(£12, $18) from my hand’. If she does I’ll feel stupid because I knew it would happen'. You can either
1.step off the pavement, knowing that you will be killed
2.stop and make a loud noise in the hope (a vain one) that they might notice you and squeeze up to let you pass, or
3.cling tightly to your bottle and hope she won’t, at the very moment of your arrival, do a Le Mans start, head facing the other way, in your direction.
She did. They always do. The loaf broke in two – but the Gigondas survived.
Didn’t Ray Milland, in Lost Weekend, say something about a god that protects drunks - I mean oenophiles?

Rooney out, Clooney in

Another great thing about blogs is they have the same therapeutic power as writing a letter to a newspaper but without the hassle or the fear that your boss might read it. (I don't have a boss other than you know who but you get my point - you don't know who might read it.) Bryan Appleyard said in the Sunday Times (after a brief visit to NYC) that all news presentation on American television is fantastic and all Brit TV news presentation is crap. I am normally a faithful reader of Appleyard, but this time – and I hope this isn’t a latent nationalism coming out just in time for the World Cup - I think he went into territory he knows little about. NYC – though I love it - is not typical US of A.
OK, TV news has its limitations whatever its technical and artistic quality, but that’s in the nature of TV. It needs pictures: fires and wars are big because they photograph well; but many equally important things – like elections and business news – don’t get covered except for cliché pics of party leaders sticking ballot papers in a box, or over-rehearsed CEO interviews.
Now I admit that my experience of US TV news-watching could well be outdated – it pre-dates cable, satellite and 9/11 – but I remember TV News on the three major networks (I haven’t seen Fox, and CNN can’t merit serious consideration) as
1. being essentially local, with the rare traces of national and international content. (It normally took three days for a UK election result to reach US screens. Rest of Europe more, Israel less.)
2. trying to make cult personalities of the presenters.
3. frequently interrupted by commercials, and
4. continually running promos for future programmes.
The BBC is guilty on item 4, Sky and Channel 4 on 3 and 4.
Maybe I’m out of date and maybe 9/11 and wars have made Americans – and therefore the networks – more internationally concerned. In which case, news may be back to the days of people like Ed Murrow. And if so, apologies, Mr.Appleyard, and Goodnight and good luck.

Spring in the air yourself

How strange that other people’s travel screw-ups are so boring when one’s own are so fascinating. Just this one, then no more Rome:
Looking idly at our return tickets we notice that our sleeper to Monaco leaves Rome Ostiense at 11.50pm. We think ‘Ostiense’ is the name of the station, like New York’s ‘Pennsylvania station’, which doesn’t mean you have to go to Pa. to get aboard. (Even when sung by Tex Beneke.) But we find that Ostiense is a Metro ride from town - and the Metro is closed. Information office? That’s closed too. (One of the reasons I like travelling with Mrs is that she doesn’t panic. It may be pretence: she may be paddling like mad under the water, but the possibility of missing our train and sharing the streets of Ostiense with the local wine-tasters seems not to bother her.)
We find that the 11.20pm to Civitavecchia stops at Ostiense, but we don’t know how long it takes to get there, so this is the option we choose – it being the only option there is. We finally board our sleeper with two minutes to spare. Sleeper trains always remind me of Cary Grant in North by North-West. The implication is that he and Eva Marie Saint sack up together – which I submit would be a physical impossibility.
But now she’s left me. She’s in England and I’m here. It’s an eerie feeling - we won’t see each other for four days. Fortunately she’s left me enough food to permit 5,000 lumberjacks to survive a six-month siege. Anyone know how to do the miracle of the loaves and fishes in reverse?

It’s the first of May – as the refrain from Mountain Greenery goes - ‘Spring is here, so blow your job/Throw your job away’. There’s a blackbird in the Douglas fir outside the window who knows it’s spring, and sings his heart out all day long without repeating a riff – I can hear him now. (Must get that double glazing checked.)
But it’s a black, black day. It’s 40 days from the start of the World Cup and Wayne Rooney has broken his metatarsal and is unlikely to play. England’s chances have plummeted. Even the news that, in the same match, Chelsea (a London soccer team named after Bill Clinton’s daughter) humiliated Manchester United to win the Championship, is tainted, because there was a clause in Rooney’s contract when he was transferred to Man U. that said Everton would get a few million if Man U. won the Championship. Yes, a black day. Bye bye, blackbird.

Rome wins by a nose

I love Rome. But I couldn’t stay there long – the calorific diet would have got me in a week. So how come they’re all so slim? - it’s the only place in the world where I look at guys’ suits. And ties! I was almost tempted to buy one – which would have been stupid as I wear them only for weddings (the last was three years ago) and funerals. It would make more sense to use rent-a-tie.
We were sitting outside a café when a guy wearing dirty overalls and white gloves leaned out of a window across the street and shouted to someone near us. Because of the traffic noise, no one seemed to notice, so he tried again. Then, with a shrug that if you saw it in a film you'd call it over-acting, he pulled a mobile out of his pocket – and the lady at the next table said, ‘Pronto’.

In all the years (44) I’ve been coming to Rome I’ve never seen a Roman nose. Oh yes, marble ones, thousands of them – the ancient Greco-Roman sculptures are equipped with hooters like ski-jumps. Yet in this city of three million people, not one of them seemed to have a living, breathing, exponential nasal organ. I’ve seen more curvaceous conks at Everton home games. What happened to the nose gene? Do they get plastic surgery on the Social Security?
And then, as we're having dinner on our last night in Rome, there it is at the next table! Excited at my discovery, I kick wife under the table. Or to be precise I kick her foot which is under the table, and by subtle signalling manage to draw her attention to the adjacent perfectly profiled proboscis. Nero would have been proud to have it.
There were only two things were wrong with it. First, it didn’t look right on a woman. Secondly, she was Irish.
Nose Quest continues.

It wasn’t built in a day and all roads lead there.

Ah! Back in good old V/franche. Shows how addictive this thing has become – it was a fabulous trip but I was getting blog-withdrawal. But there were some proof edits waiting with a deadline of the previous day, so I had to work. We know that editors move deadlines forward to give themselves ample cushions but we all have to play the game and pretend that this really is THE ultimate deadline. (If you’re one of my editors I’m just kidding.)
I started missing the blog on April 24 as the train passed the marble quarries of Carrara. Was trying to read but the book was disappointing so decided to enjoy the sun and scenery of Chianti-shire. When we boarded the train in Genoa someone was sitting in our seats – not an unusual phenomenon as we discovered. We kicked them out and they went and sat somewhere else. Then when the rightful ticket-holders for those seats boarded, they were kicked out again and moved to other vacant seats. And so it went all the way to Rome for over seven hours, like some endless mobile game of musical chairs but without the music.
I’m not doing travelogues here – Rome has been done by experts – and anyway its main problem is the embarrassment of choice. Not a question of what to do but what are you going to leave for another time. If in doubt just get out and walk: there’ll be a surprise of some kind around the corner. Herself wants to go back and look at the ceiling - no, THAT ceiling; I've promised myself the Borghese Palace. But it’s nine o’clock and we’ve been on the train since leaving Genoa at two, so the cultural priority is a veal marsala and – as the last words of Silence of the Lambs go – ‘a fine Chianti’...

The silent George

Happy birthday, Shakespeare - he'll be 442 today if he's alive. It’s also the feast of St. George – England’s national day. You probably didn’t know that – but then neither does anyone else, including most English people. Which is significant because we all know everyone else’s national day – France’s Quatorze Juillet, the Fourth of July, (commemorating when one George unloaded a troublesome colony onto another), St. David’s and St Andrews’s days in Wales and Scotland respectively. And of course March 17, when IRA members are allowed – nay, encouraged – to strut along Fifth Avenue protected by New York’s Finest to the applause of well-meaning, shamrock-wearing pseudo-Micks getting legless on green beer while real Micks stand around embarrassed.
But no-one cares about poor old St.George – not even the English, whose patron saint he is. (He’s also the patron saint of Germany – no wonder he looks confused.)
Let’s face it, we Angles are not very patriotic. We don’t have flags in our offices –we wouldn’t even know what it looked like if it weren’t for our football hooligans. We don’t stand moist-eyed, hand on wallet singing the national anthem (what is it; ‘God save the Queen’? ‘Land of Hope and Glory’? ‘Sergeant Pepper’?) In fact the more our tax-maintained satellites sing their ‘Scotland the Braves’ and ‘Sospan Bachs’, the less inclined we are to emote. As the ultra-English Dr. Johnson said, ‘Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel’.

But enough of that kind of talk - the World Cup starts in 49 days.

Off to Rome tomorrow – seven hours on a train with Herself, the Sunday papers and a bottle of Tuscany’s Finest: bliss! And of course a few days of bliss for RR and WM readers - we’ll be offline.

I told you they were reading my blog

No sooner had I published my last post than a deep-throated roar echoed across the bay and I went to the window to see – the US Navy vessel (name obscured) leaving port. Obviously they knew I was on to their fiendish plans and legged it off to – who knows? All I know is that they turned left at the end of the bay as if heading back to base in southern Italy - defeated by a superior mind. Watch this space for more details of the great RR v Rumsfeld face-off. Who will blink first?
Got some nice pix of the grandkids yesterday. The grandson looks a little man already – it’s a well known fact that grandkids grow even faster than your own kids did. Like his dad, he likes word-games; laughs helplessly when you give him a noun with a rhyming adjective – like say wonky donkey or smelly Wellie. They don’t even have to be real words – it’s the rhyme that counts, not the word.
When his dad was a kid he used to like father/son jokes. There was one that came from a cartoon in the Funnies section: father and son get on a magic carpet. Son says, ‘Let’s go to Baghdad’. Father says, ‘Where’s bag?’ Or father and son get on a bus. As it fills up the driver says ‘Would you move farther down the bus please?’ Son says (sorry, I know this is obvious): ‘Dad, move down the bus’.
Funny that - my dad would have liked that one too.

No marks for planning

There’s a US Navy ship in the bay. Our American visitors the other day were massively impressed with the trouble we went to so that they would see the Stars and Stripes flying when they looked out. We didn’t tell them it was a coincidence. But why? What’s the Navy doing in Villefranche? When De Gaulle took France out of NATO in 1967 he banished the Fleet to Italy. But they’re back and we’re worried. What are they doing? Are they listening? Can they see what I’m writing?
A French friend is coming to lunch today and we’re wrestling with a social problem familiar to any Anglo-Saxons who live in France. It’s called tutoiement, or the process of calling someone tu – the familiar form of ‘you’. I knew this lady when I was in business here 24 years ago, when of course she was a vous. Now that she has become a family friend, she would normally be a tu – but since we’re roughly the same age no one feels they are senior enough to suggest the change. The rules are complex and ill-defined. Like what do you do when your daughter’s boy-friend becomes your son-in-law? It’s easier for the parent to change – in fact one of the rules is that the older person can invite the younger but not the other way round, but although I suggested it, he never managed to call me tu. Some may say it’s not a hell of a lot to have to worry about – but problems enlarge to fill the available worrying space, so if all you have to worry about is whom to tutoi that’s what you do.
Another worry is what’s on Hungarian television in July. I thought I’d give herself a surprise for our anniversary and booked a trip to Budapest. A nice thought – except that it means I have chosen to be out of the country for BOTH the final of the Wimbledon tennis championships and the final of the World (soccer) Cup – thus possibly missing her and my favourite sports events.
These are important times for European football. At the end of each season, the top four teams in each country in Europe go into a competition called the Champions League for the following year. Then THEY play off to see who – in theory – is the best team in Europe – or is it just to cash in on the huge television audience and potential advertising revenue? We’re half-way through the semi-finals of this year’s Champions League competition: remaining are two Spanish teams, one Italian, and one English. No French teams have survived because if French players are any good they go to English, Spanish or Italian clubs, where they make more money. This can give rise to some bizarre situations: such as the fact that the best English teams have been known to play without a single Englishman on the team – while the French national team sometimes plays without a single player who plays his football in France. (The one English team remaining in this year’s Champions League – Arsenal – has four Frenchmen and a French coach.) It’s as if every country in the world produced quarter-backs: at least once they get to the top in the USA there’s nowhere for them to go.
Thought you’d find that fascinating – more next week when we’ll know who the finalists are, giving a whole new meaning to the word ‘indifference’. Or is that what the Navy are here for?

I taught her all I know - how come she's so smart?

Our American friends from up the mountain (see Cabin in the Sky) came down to sea level today for lunch. He writes books about pre-colonial Africa with intriguing titles like ‘The Black Amazons of Dahomey’ and is great fun – they both are – and he identified a number of trees in our garden. He told us that one of them – a 'medlar' tree - had a very pleasant fruit but his wife doesn’t eat it. I just looked it up in the dictionary and it says its fruit is ‘not edible’. Is she up to something? Should I tell him?

When does coincidence lose its credibility?
Sometimes you read something in a work of fiction and say it relied too much on coincidence. But these two stories are true.
I was visiting an old friend once in Sarnia, Ontario. (You only need go to Sarnia once and you’re Sarnia-ed for life.) One day his next door neighbour popped in, and Dave said I was passing through on the way from New Zealand to UK and the neighbour said, as people do to make idle conversation, ‘I’ve got a brother in New Zealand’. And I said ‘Oh yes, you mean Don Bruce, he lives in the flat above mine.’
Some time later, I was driving south on Route 202 from Philadelphia to Washington when, feeling hungry, I stopped at a down-market restaurant - or was it an up-market diner? - called Cakes and Ale (I’m a sucker for Shakespearean titles). It was very crowded but one seat remained at the bar, and as one does when outside the UK, I started talking to the guy on the next stool. He asked where I came from. ‘Oh, I used to know an Englishman,’ he says, as people do to make idle conversation. ‘Yes’, I say, ‘Malachy MacIntyre’. He almost falls off his stool, and to this day he probably thinks everyone in England knows everyone else.

I've finally persuaded Herself to start a blog as a therapeutic exercise – thinking that this way she’d have less time to beat me at Scrabble. (It’s not that she’s better than me but she wins hands down at the pre-match mind games.) But now she’s getting better reviews than me. What do I do? I’m not telling you her link in case you agree.

Has she got the buns?

It’s nice to be just me again: merely me. But I did enjoy my time as a pseudo-This. It was fun not knowing what I was posting until after I’d posted it. (Sorry if you don’t understand that but it would take too long to explain and it’s not all that interesting anyway.)
We aren’t talking today.
We usually arrive laden with culinary emergency provisions to ensure that the table does not lack things unavailable in France – but we forgot the hot cross buns. Easter without HCBs is Christmas without turkey. It’s not religious – it’s just that the good ones taste so... Mmm... spicy. Herself says I forgot them – but there’s no doubt in my mind who forgot them. We’ve heard of a man in Antibes called Geoffrey of London who sells exotic English fare to nostalgic expats: things like OXO (meat extract made from dried blood scraped from abattoir floors), Marmite (the same with refuse from the brewing process), Heinz Salad Cream – and I’m sure, Hot Cross Buns, plus the Frank Cooper’s Thick Cut Marmalade that goes on them. But Antibes is almost an hour away on a coastal road full of Easter traffic. So Easter will be HCB-less. I’m sure it’ll be all right by the end of the day – we’ve survived worse crises than this.
(Matter of fact I’m not all that crazy about HCBs – I just wanted to make trouble.) I don’t much like turkey either.

Maybe it's the moon

There’s a full moon tonight. We get two reflections, one this side of the Cap – more about the Cap sometime – and one on the other. And I guess, since the moon itself is only a reflection, that makes four. Something to reflect on. I take out the telescope she gave me a couple of birthdays ago and marvel at the crevasses and craters and think how people must have dreamed for centuries about going there – and once someone did, the media forgot about it in 3 days and now no one dreams about it any more.

There are lots of strange features about this town. The Post Office takes two hours off for lunch - except on Thursdays (pay day), when it closes for 2½ hours. The Post Office closes at 5.30, but the last mail is collected at 5.15. Thus when you bust a gut to catch the mail, limbo-dance under the iron grill and finally get your mail franked, they say, with an exclusively French kind of glee, ‘You do know this won’t go tonight, don't you?’
Another idiosyncrasy is that at all the pedestrian crossings in this town there’s a sign saying ‘IF YOU WISH TO CROSS THE ROAD, PRESS THE RED BUTTON’, and there’s a large arrow pointing to a button. But the button is not red, it’s green. Could this be why the traffic never stops?

Cabin in the Sky

Arriving back is a strange feeling. I don’t mean driving on the wrong side of the road, or the fact that the sun is shining and the sky clear, which can be pretty disorienting if you’re not used to it. I guess that for all that I criticize France, it’s a kind of mini-homecoming. (It’s why we can criticize – the way we can complain about loved ones but won't allow anyone else to.)
We stop off at the supermarket to get what she who must be obeyed calls ‘a few essentials’ and stagger out with a Caterpillar D9-load of goodies that needs a fork-lift to transfer it to the car. We arrive here, unload the groceries (five trips up 28 steps, or 140 steps each), open the shutters, and there’s a cruise ship out in the bay, the still snow-capped mountains (40 miles inland) are almost touchable, and as the sun sets, a rising, nearly-full moon shines across the bay and we realise we’ve reached a different planet.
As part of the re-entry process, we try to spend a couple of days adjusting before people notice that our shutters are open. We probably know a more varied range of people here than we do in Jollie Olde - haven't got a collective noun for them yet: let's call them 'coasties'. There’s an American couple who live in what can only be called an ‘eagle’s nest’: a little house 4,000 feet up in the Southern Alps. They are surrounded by woodland and they look down on the mountain village of Eze, with the rust-coloured Esterel mountains to the right, Italy to the east, and Corsica to the south-east. Because of their altitude, and the blueness of the sky, the Mediterranean looks the colour my childhood paint-box called ‘cobalt’. Truly, the Côte d’Azur – the blue coast. When we saw them last autumn we came away entranced, but by the time we’d had a glass of something in our apartment in town we were asking each other if we envied them their eyrie. Could we live there? Answer: never! Their nearest bus stop is two miles away and it takes half an hour to get to the boulangerie for a loaf – and that’s in the car! But there’s obviously something there that we missed, because they’ve lived there for 28 years! The answer is simple: they have their work (he writes and she paints) and each other.
And that’s enough.

Nice is nice

I'm past commuting age, so don't have fellow-bussies to talk about. I travel on BA but not often enough to have fellow 'planies' - and would feel pretentious if I said 'This guy's always in seat 12C. He always takes the aisle, as his goal is to see how many gin-and-tonics one can order in one hour 40 minutes, because BA flight attendants are very reluctant to serve you a second alcoholic drink. (Oh sure. you can order them.) I know publicans like that.
Getting ready for a trip to my favourite place the name of which I forget, pulling the plug on the PC and stocking up on the sort of produce that is not available in the culinary centre of the universe: strong Cheddar cheese, good tea, marmalade, sesame and pumpkin seeds, sinus-clearing horse-radish, tongue-burning Norwich mustard, Tandoori, Karma and Creole sauces, Heinz baked beans and other indispensable aids to comfortable living. Also looking forward desparately to some of those 18 degrees promised by Accuweather - it snowed here yesterday.
Simone de Beauvoir said it better, as she slipped off for an adulterous rendezvous with Nelson Algren: 'I am looking forward to sun, silence, and time to work'. I can agree with that - and my rendezvous is legal.

Let me take you by the hand and lead you through the streets of London…

..and I'll show you something that'll make you change your mind.
London used to have monumental traffic jams. It still has some, but they have reduced considerably since it introduced what it calls the Congestion Charge, which means that every time you drive your car into central London you have to pay – before midnight that day - £8 ($14) per entry. If you forget – and we all do sometimes, they slap a £50 fine on you. But I don’t object: it mostly keeps the traffic moving and makes it possible to find a parking space within walking distance of Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club.
A number of foreign embassies, by some right they have dreamed up for themselves which is not in the Geneva Convention, do not pay their charges and ignore the subsequent fines. The list is made up mostly of impoverished African and eastern countries – and the USA. The embassy is not disputing the sum owing – they just haven’t agreed to pay it.
This is not about money – a few hundred thousand dollars won’t make much difference to the City of London’s coffers, and certainly wouldn’t be missed by a nation spending billions a day fighting terrorism. No, it’s about principle. Now we know that Tony B. Liar won’t ask George for the money because Tony uses the same brand of toothpaste as George, and does not like the Mayor of London, (who makes a habit of thrashing Tony’s nominees for the job), and would love to see the city in financial difficulty. So do me a favour George, pay up. It would not only be a nice gesture to your coalition partner whose troops are fighting alongside yours; it would be one in the eye for Tony – and it would also seem an inexpensive way to improve your country’s image in this city. Which is something a lot of people care about.
(The United Arab Emirates have agreed to pay their backlog - a mere $150,000.)

The Blair witch project

I’m a cause without a rebel today: I have nothing to complain about, and you’d be amazed how complaint-inducing that can be. Well there is one thing: it’s about people who make T-shirts and sew scratchy labels on the inside. Are they sadists, road-testing a new torture for the CIA, or what? Or do I just have delicate skin?
I am also an impostor: blog-sitting for my son and pretending to be him. He says I’m him without the swearing. (Didn’t know I swore all that much.) But one day he will realise that, having abjured swearing in front of your kids for their first 16 or more years, it’s hard to kick the habit. But they probably know it already - I passed a junior school yesterday where a mixed-gender basketball game was going on and the language would have made an ITV scriptwriter blush.
The worrying thing about proxy-blogging is that, since son’s posts are getting shorter, I’m wondering if I should add something of my own and pretend it’s his, so people won't think they're getting short measure. (Of course I’d have to take a couple of trips on a school bus first to brush up on my profanity.) Thought of an apt one-liner I could use but there’s probably a blog-ethic about that sort of thing. And besides, if it’s picked up by Reader’s Digest or New York Times Magazine he might claim the copyright for himself.

So I thought I might discuss our prime minister – he’s always good for a rant. His wife, like me, is a scouse (since WORD does not recognise ‘scouse’, I’ll explain that it’s a person from Liverpool - as in Liverpool, England) and we scouses never pass up a freebie. Well, according to The Week magazine, Mrs Blair – that’s not her professional name, she only calls herself that when she’s on a speaking tour of the US so they’ll know she’s a prime minister’s wife and she can raise her fees to augment her substantial lawyer’s salary. Mrs B., about to leave on a recent trip to Australia, sent a government car across London to the Sunday Times offices. An important libel case, you ask? An interview with the editor, perhaps? Well no – The Sunday Times was giving its readers a special offer on Air Miles, and the PM’s wealthy scouse spouse wanted to ensure that their taxpayer-funded trip would qualify.
When I worked with a capitalist corporation, we had a rule that freebies obtained through corporate travel had to be passed back to the company.
Why didn’t I work for the government?

April in Paris - or Nice

It’s an important day in the Brit financial year – the last one, to be exact. April 5 seems an odd day on which to end a fiscal year – especially as most organizations end theirs on December 31. The reason is lost in antiquity – something to do with Pope Gregory and his calendar, as modified by Napoleon. Or was it the other way round? Whatever – this is the day when you have to use up your capital gains allowances and start thinking about your tax return – which you can’t start work on because you have to wait until you get your bank and other statements at the end of April so you’ll know what happened in the first five days of the month. We should change it of course but it’s a Tradition, and anyway it’s more fun to complain.
There’s a Paris web site (www.ParlerParis.com) run by an American lady. She loves Paris, which she claims gives her the right to complain about it, and does, so I have a precedent.
But I’m not complaining today – not even about the French. Especially not about the French, because I’ll be there in a few days and can’t wait to sit on the balcony puffing Monte Cristo No. 4s. The picture by mate Mike (mike@words-pictures.co.uk) says it all.
There’s a new book out called That Sweet Enemy: a history of Anglo-French relations since Louis XIV. I don’t want it – it’s over 800 pages long, or about 600 pages beyond my boredom threshold. And besides, where would it live? But I’d like to browse it. The thing I’m not looking forward to is television. With the exception of Gibraltar it must be the worst TV on earth. What’s frustrating is that technically it’s good – but who wants fifty million pixels of crap? Because of the economic nationalism I may have mentioned earlier, they have laws to protect the domestic film and music industries, meaning that x% of peak programming has to be local. Thus protected, there’s no incentive to produce quality. In UK we pay a TV licence fee, in return for which our two best channels are ad-free. In France you have to buy a licence, AND you have ads on every channel. But we converse more and it does wonders for our Scrabble.
And as you know I’m not one to complain.

Am I a cynic?

There’s a news story this week about a professor of medicine whose car hit a tree. He said he had had a heart attack, which caused his heart to stop and made him run his car into a tree. Fortunately, say the reports, his chest hit the steering wheel with such force that it restarted his heart. All the papers ran the story straight, not one expressing doubt. When I remarked to the effect that you can fool all of the people some of the time, wife said I was a cynic.
My view was that the guy was legless drunk, but being a medical professor he was able to think up a plausible story. (No-one raised the question of how, if he had been wearing a seat belt, his chest could have struck the wheel.)
(I was interrupted in the process of posting the above by a call from my garage man. Sorry, he says, the parts that I told you would cost £20 - $30 - will actually cost £155 - $232 - each.)
I submit I am a sceptic – ie. I do not mistrust people or assume I am being cheated, I simply question things I am told.
When our beloved Prime Minister says that this or that cabinet minister has ‘resigned’, as has happened at least three times in the past 12 months – for reasons of either sexual shenanigans, financial skulduggery or both - I have mused ‘don’t worry, Peter – or David – or Alastair - you can come back in when the heat's off’. Again I was accused of cynicism, and again events proved me right in each case – in fact they all came back to bigger jobs. And when the said PM was telling the nation about WMDs in Iraq when all the experts said there were none, who could not have foreseen that the later justification for the mass murder would become ‘well anyway, Sadaam was not a nice chap’.
I don’t give money to blokes who wave collection boxes in my face while mumbling something about sick children, (why is it never sick oldies?) and don’t believe soccer players who roll over four times and lie dead still in the penalty area when all they’ve had is a gentle nudge - when outside the penalty area. I even have trouble with turning water into wine and feeding 5,000 people with a loaf and two small fishes.
I like to think it’s a healthy scepticism, but just sometimes, I wonder - am I a cynic?

(Footnote to the recent post about French ‘language politics’: an e-mail from a French university professor friend says proudly that she is to be presented with the Palme Académique - a state medal awarded to those who have taught French to foreign students.)

Devon rhymes with heaven

Just got back from the county of Devon in the south-west, birthplace of Sirs Walter Raleigh and Francis Drake, famous for its green undulating landscapes manicured by black-faced Merino sheep, and Jersey and other high-fat-milk producing cattle. Much of this milk ends up as Devonshire Clotted Cream, which itself ends up on buttered scones, spread on top of strawberry jam (or as some folks call it, jelly) - all key ingredients in the famous Devonshire Cream Teas that make the county the cholestrol capital of England if not the world.
(Clotted cream folk facts: in Devon you put the jam on the scone after the cream: in Cornwall, the next county, the cream goes on first, ie. before the jam. I’d hate you to commit an unconscious social blunder.)
In both counties, anyone from outside these two is a Grockle.
Devon is also very beautiful. In summer its rain is much warmer than in winter – as high as 18 degrees at times. (Ed R please note) The county is bound on two sides by the sea, and teems with wildlife. There are, at this time of the year, lambs everywhere. (And guess what, I forgot the mint sauce.) This afternoon I had to stop to let a wagtail scamper across the road in front of the car, and as I sit here three white-tailed rabbits are nibbling at the grass outside the window, a robin looks over their shoulders, and in the background a pheasant preens himself, showing off his plumage. I’ll try a photo but it will have to be through glass so may not be worth posting.
(I’m reminded of the time when, strolling in a royal park, my wife heard, then spotted, what we thought was a parrot in a tree. Someone’s parrot has escaped, we thought, but as we approached it took off, and was immediately joined by a whole gang of them – a chattering wave of apple-green breasts and red beaks. Surprised to find such an exotic bird in, not China or India, but Windsor, England, we did what normal people do – we Googled them. Sure enough, at some time in the late 60s, a couple of rose-ringed parakeets escaped from captivity. Being fortunately of different genders, they decided to breed - and there are now around 10,000 of them living unmolested in the woods and trees around Windsor Castle, their squawking surely audible in the Royal Bedchamber. Pity they weren’t there in Henry VIII’s time – they would have made great prey for the Royal falcons.
Google (I haven’t stopped using them in protest about China – I only believe in protests that don’t unduly disrupt my life-style) also provided me with the ornithological gem that in north-eastern England at this time of the year, one can see penduline tits. I thought that only happened on the French Riviera.
The only time you see that sort of thing in Devon is on Jersey cows - and they're not apple-green.

What's French for hypocrisy?

As I’m incommunicado in Glorious Devon, where it’s hard to get your mobile to work, let alone the Internet, (and where the rain has barely stopped since our arrival Friday evening – great blogging weather), I plan to continue the blog, but posting will recommence – appropriately – on April 1, at the rate of two posts a day until I catch up with myself.

This was on March 27:
President Chirac stormed out of a European Union meeting the other day. You are probably thinking that perhaps someone had served him Spanish wine, or had besmirched the blessed memory of Charles de Gaulle, his megalomaniac mentor. It was neither: what drove him fuming from the meeting was the fact that one of his own compatriots had the gall – or is that Gaul? – to address the meeting in (excellent) English.
As previously posted here, the President’s paranoia about the declining use of French is routinely demonstrated in his glad-handing of bemedalled ex-colonial leaders whose postage-stamp dictatorships may happen to speak French. But now he has managed to bring down on himself the scorn of the European community he once pledged to support – especially when he said that English was a ‘poor’ language for communication purposes. (Is there any other purpose for language?)
The next day, The Times leader was in French.
I’m sure M. le President knows that every time his presidential jet takes off, its route is controlled by an international system of air traffic control whose common language is English – using computers and communications networks designed by people using the same language, and through airports in which every take-off and landing is contolled in English.
How strange that he should trust such a ‘poor’ communications tool to get him safely to and from his taxpayer-funded vacations in Mauritius?
Tomorrow: Things I love about France.

15 things I love about France: gastronomy

March 28:
Some years ago, François Mauriac, French novelist and later minister of culture, wrote a book called Les Anglais. It was in two parts, called, respectively, ‘Why I love the English’ and ‘Why I hate the English’. He loved them because they liked novels, which is not surprising, and might even have been a cunning marketing ploy. He hated them for their excessive confidence – I’m not sure what French word he used, but it seems a common complaint: Brits are smug. Not me of course: I’m perfect but modest.
Today’s title derives from the teaser headlines you see in the hot-selling magazines – it's usually an odd number, like ‘27 ways to improve your sex life’. Obviously I’m not going to do all 15 things at one go but only as I think of them, but it kind of stakes my claim to the title. Today’s post is not about your sex life. It’s about Food and the French.
I like the French fanatical food fetish. Where the average British and American family puts its domestic spend into status things like household, furnishings and cars, and spend barely enough for survival on food, the French family will spend just enough on warmth and shelter to support human life (DIY stores do not make money) and drive scooters or little white Peugeot 106s, but spend as much as they can scrape together on la nourriture, taking out a mortgage for this purpose if necessary. This is why in France you’re unlucky if you come across a bad restaurant, while in Britain and the US you’re lucky if you find a good one unless you spend a fortune – and even that is no guarantee. And if you do find one, you’ll be so stifled by glass-filling, ash-tray-changing, tip-seeking flunkeys that they will drive you mad.
The French also tend to know about wine. Where your average Brit (average American households, in which the choice is between Coke, Pepsi, and an oil industry derivative made by Ernest & Julio Gallo, may skip this part of the discussion) tends to buy according to grape variety, ie. merlot, chardonnay etc., the average Frenchman chooses by, first, region of origin – Bordeaux, Burgundy, etc. – then vigneron - Domaine, Château, etc – and not give a stuff about the grape variety. (It’ll usually be a mixture anyway.) I have this friend in Paris who keeps his wine in his garage – and pushes his car in and out by hand, lest the engine noise disturb, not the neighbours, but the wine.
The wines will have one infuriating thing in common: they will all be French – nationalism rules in food as it does with language. We presented our neighbours with some of our best English Cheddar cheese, brought over lovingly for their appreciation. ‘Du fromage anglais’, (Some English cheese) said my wife. Their startled reply is griven on my heart: ‘Il y en a?’ (‘Is there such a thing?’) We have never heard about the cheese since.
That’s where I admire Mauriac – he had the courage to say that France had never produced a novelist of the calibre of Dickens, Austen or the Brontes. Whether he was right or not I’m not sure – I like Victor Hugo myself. But Mauriac was fired anyway.

Bring back Hadrian, the MacMafia are coming

[Re the Rahman case: the comment is valid. I should have made it more clear that what troubled me was absolutely not the Afghan government’s refusal to intervene in the verdict, but the law saying a person can be executed for converting to Christianity. Or any law based on religious bigotry. Especially if you are of the southern religious right and the law is the American Constitution as interpreted - in Roe v. Wade - by the Supreme Court.]

(I’ll be neither rowing nor wading this weekend. I’ll be enjoying bucolic Devon – on a dairy farm so remote that, to my readers’ relief – both of them - I won’t be blogging for a week.)

That’s not to say that we don’t have laws every bit as sinister as those of Afghanistan. My next post could well be datelined H. M. Prison Service, arrested under new laws making it a crime to criticize anything.
It’s about the Scottish Problem. First of all it is important to point out that I have nothing personally against Scots. I like all the ones I know and most that I don’t: Alan Hansen, Eddie Gray and many others, and I love the country. (I dislike only Gordon Brown and Alex Ferguson, so will the person in Stirling please keep reading.) My only objection is their excessive presence in England. Our heavily Scot-infiltrated government, in order to attract voters away from the Scottish National Party, gave Scotland its own parliament.
Not surprisingly, they voted themselves benefits – a nice new building, pay hikes, home care for the elderly, free university education, etc. - that the rest of Britain could not afford. English taxpayers thus finance perks for those across the border without themselves being entitled to them.
For the English, this would be a highly acceptable situation if it meant that the Scots would stay north of said border. But no – not only are they allowed to sit in the House of Commons, but they may vote on purely English matters, such as the structure of London’s Metropolitan Police. But surely, you say, English MPs can vote on Scottish matters, such as teachers’ salaries in Scotland? Sorry, no.
Not only are Scots over-represented in Britain's parliament, but, because we have a chameleon-like prime minister who takes on the nationality of those in his immediate vicinity and a Scottish Chancellor of the Exchequer – and next prime minister; they have surrounded themselves with a ministerial MacMafia from across that very Wall that, 2000 years ago, a Roman Emperor put up to keep them out.
It’s not surprising that they are deeply entrenched in the media – after all, the BBC was founded by a Scot – but so they are in literature, medicine and sport. Nowhere is immune: even Everton’s manager is a Scot, as is Big Duncan, their red-card-attracting striker.
It is not too late to remove them, but it soon will be. Already, many have discarded their kilts and swords and learned to speak and write British, like A. A. Gill. (At least RLS could write in Scots.) It will be a massive task, and will require subversion, bribery and blackmail. What’s Senator McCarthy doing these days? Or is he one of them?.

Indifference: the essence of inhumanity (Shaw)

I really wanted to do a cheerful post today. Despite appearances, I’m not by nature a ranter, but crazy things keep happening about which the word processor (now there’s a rant in its own right) itches to seethe. Today there’s a news item about a man in Afghanistan who is on trial for a crime that, if found guilty, will get him the death sentence. What did he do, you ask, expecting to hear that he was caught blowing up a busload of innocent civilians, or rape or child abuse.
None of the above. The man was denounced by his family as having converted to Christianity 16 years ago. On more detailed investigation he was found to be in possession of, not 500 kilos of cocaine or a couple of dozen Kalashnikovs - but a bible.
The governments of Canada, Italy and Germany, countries which have troops in Afghanistan for the maintenance of law and order, have expressed mild disapproval, and the US has made ‘subdued’ representations on Mr Rahman’s behalf, (Britain and the Vatican have yet to comment - we're too busy, it's budget day). But the Afghan government has said it is a matter for the court and they cannot interfere.
But all is not yet lost – the defence is expected to plead insanity. Maybe it’s we who should be pleading insanity – we who thought we went to Afghanistan to put a stop to the human rights abuses of the Taliban.

In the new budget our newly-green government plans to force gas-guzzling cars off the road by increasing the road tax on them by £40 a year: ie. the cost of half a tankful.

Spring hope's eternal

It’s the first day of spring, but you wouldn’t know it – a high of 8 Celsius in protected areas – and we don’t have any protected areas. (It’s 13 in Villefranche.) The normal harbingers of spring have yet to be seen or heard: no gentle hum of shears or mowers, not a lamb in sight except for the 'frozen meats' section, and only the odd hardy daffodil wanders lonely as a cloud, looking embarrassed at having stuck his neck out so early.
But there is one reliable vernal herald: the Frustrating High Street Card Quest – for this is also wife’s birthday, and I never like any of the cards I see. It's especially important this year because it is a special number. (I will not say what it is but you could divide it by ten or twelve and get no remainder – and she isn’t 120.) But the cards! They get more nauseous every year. I imagine the sales director of the evocatively-named Clinton’s looking at his figures and being content. But that’s not because his cards are good - it's because cards are a necessity, with specific deadlines, so people across the land do what I’ve done and after weeks of searching settle for the least worst. Thankfully there are fewer puke-invoking rhymes these days, but there still seems to be nothing (with the exception of those laughingly classified as ‘humorous’) between the glutinously sentimental and the ostentatious (the ones which say in effect, ‘I know it’s ghastly, but feel the price’). And if you do find one with anything remotely approaching an appropriate text, it has a picture of a kitten on the front.
So happy birthday babe, thanks for another wonderful year and have a great day – and sorry about the card.

Thanks a lot Saint Paddy

Wonderful trip to Liverpool. Yes, a bonding exercise, going with No. 1 (and only) son to watch your favourite football team and sinking a few pints of Guinness together on Saint Patrick’s Day. But also, to me, a nostalgia trip: a return to the city where I was born. Alsop’s, where I went to school; St. Nicholas Church (flattened by the Luftwaffe early in World War II) where my parents married while my Dad was on special leave before going back to the trenches in World War I; Exchange Station where he worked; the Pier Head from which we used to sail to Ireland, or across the Mersey to New Brighton; the theatres to which my parents used to take me; and so on.
Great match. As Everton manager David Moyes said after the game, ‘going in at half-time three goals up was a new experience for me’. (A half-time at which, thanks to No. 1 son, my birthday was greeted over the PA system.) Eye-watering stuff - it matters not that they came out in the second half looking for a while as if they had swapped shirts - Villa inspired, Everton dire. But they got it back together and went on to win.
I guess teams and families are similar in a way, strength in adversity and such: Everton was the club that nurtured Wayne Rooney until he got so good they couldn’t keep him. But when he left, instead of going under without him, they got better – they became a team again instead of a support system for Rooney.
Ah yes, and for anyone who might have been in outer space, the result: Everton 4, Aston Villa 1, which puts us in top half of the Premiership table. Saint Patrick smiled: thanks Paddy for great weekend.

Merseyssippi Blues

Tonight, the 12th century walls of the citadel of Villefranche will echo to sound of – a ceilidh. A ceilidh! you repeat, astonished – not just that I can spell it, but that there should be an Irish knees-up on the French Riviera.
Well yes, for at least two reasons: it’s March 17, St Patrick's day; and St Paddy, although the patron saint of Ireland, is reputed to have been born in England in the 5th century and to have studied on the Isles de Lerins, just off the Riviera coast.
I won’t be there myself - I’ll be on my way to Liverpool with my son, to watch Everton play Aston Villa at Goodison Park. The teams will run onto the field to the tune of the ‘Z-Cars’ theme and I will have a king-size lump in my throat. I always do. I will think of the days when my Dad used to take me to Goodison Park to watch the Blues play, and hope that one day I might take my grandson.
My Dad never saw his grandchildren. I have before me a print from the 1901 UK census. In the “Newsboys’ Home”, at 118-126 Everton Road, in the Parish of Everton, in the County Borough of Everton, Liverpool, lived my Dad; another Newsboy was his older brother, Bert. By that time their father had died and their mother was a domestic servant – the usual refuge for the uneducated.
27 years later, Dad and Uncle Bert, festooned with blue and white rosettes, went to Wembley to watch Everton win the FA Cup. (Everton 3, Manchester City 0.) So you could say I’m an Evertonian both genetically and by habitation.
Furthermore, son and I are going to see Everton win: James Beattie is at last finding form and so are the team – even if there are only seven games to go to the end of the season.
But if they don’t win, it won’t matter - which seems somehow appropriate: St. Paddy’s most famed characteristic was his ability to accept success or failure with equal grace. And so will we – we will remain Everton supporters no matter what.

Still, I’d rather not have to wait another 27 years.

Don’t count your clichés…

It’s been a good day for clichés. I guess the Cliché Watch staff were late to work and missed the morning news programmes. Before 10am we had had ‘litmus test’; ‘moved the goalposts’; ‘level playing field’; not one, but TWO of that weather forecasters’ and traffic reporters’ standby: ‘but the good news is’s; and innumerable ‘the bottom line is’s. (Not sure what the plural of ‘bottom line is’ is.) Oh shit, is ‘not one, but TWO’ a cliché? Still, when in Rome, I say.
Someone counted the clichés in Hansard (report on proceedings in Parliament) over a whole year. The five-lengths winner, with some 900-plus uses, was ‘at the end of the day’. If politicians attend on 90 days a year, which I think is about right, it means that on average ‘at the end of the day’ aired more than ten times a day.
Cliché machines were in overdrive at the week-end in the obituaries of John Profumo, who, 40 years ago, when he was a minister in Harold MacMillan’s Tory government, had an affair with a prostitute. He had to resign, of course, but not for the affair – he had to quit because he lied. He told parliament ‘there was no impropriety in my association with Miss Keeler’. How values change: today our beloved prime minister lies to parliament every day with impunity; and ministerial affairs with prostitutes are almost obligatory. And a US president said, ’I did not have sexual relations with that…’ and stayed president.
I suppose it’s a bit of a cliché to call a journey ‘an odyssey’. But everyone does it: especially travel writers and chefs (would you believe An Odyssey of Jewish Food?). An amazing play I saw last night was based on the original: Homer’s The Odyssey, a very clever show setting Odysseus’s ten-year travels in the context of illegal immigration. Appropriately it was in an unfashionable theatre in an unfashionable – unless you’re an immigrant from Poland or Ireland – suburb; but everything - acting, sets, sound and visual effects, and music were amazing. The musician, Peter Troake – yes, apart from a bit of percussion by the actors there was only one – played everything: acoustic guitar, mandolin, Greek bagpipes, cimbalom, drums, accordion, tin whistle and tenor sax. And he acted a bit.
Virgil said of Odysseus’s generous gift of a wooden horse to the Trojans: ‘beware of Greeks bearing gifts’. A 3,000-year-old cliché brought to life.

Happy birthday to me - and St. Leander

Had a birthday yesterday – stopped making a fuss about them years ago, but the older you get the more fuss other people think they should make of them – lest it be your last I guess. But Monday birthdays tend to be quiet affairs – here in suburbia most decent restaurants are closed Mondays, and people don’t feel like going out anyway. But we found one that we hadn’t been to for years and it was as morgue-like as we had expected – wife, daughter and me sitting there trying not to chew too loudly lest we woke the waiter. Then an old friend and former neighbour, with whom I share the March 13 birthday, arrives, place livens up, cakes, candles and much singing of ‘Happy Birthday’, great meal and a good time had by all.
Wife, just home from eye surgery, sports a tasteful multi-coloured eye which we shall call 'spectrum minus only red': yellow, blue, indigo, violet and black. I sport a T-shirt bearing the words ‘I didn't do it’. I buy her an eye-patch and parrot but she is not amused.
On the subject of dates of birth, the conversation got to changes of values of abstract things according to one’s age. To us wrinklies, time is about the most precious commodity there is because you know there’s a finite amount left and you can’t bear to see young folk squandering it - lying in bed until noon, say - as if they expected to live forever. Impecunious youth thinks that money is the only big problem, but that tends to reduce in significance as the gray stuff increases. No, to us it’s all about health: yet kids can eat junk, sunbake, smoke and snort stuff, while knowing full well what it does to them.
Don't we have any values in common with youth? Well, yes, there is one – but even that has different attitudes accorded it by Anno Domini – you can manage on less of it, and it has to be shared with the right companion.

Yes, I can't bear to drink good wine alone. And I lied about the parrot.

Not that I'm one to complain...

Came in on Easyjet last night, 45 minutes late – I don’t mind that, it happens – but I was rather annoyed to hear the Flight Attendant (or whatever they’re called this week) say, ‘Would you please leave the aircraft as quickly as possible as we have only eight minutes to turn it around’.
Wait a minute, isn’t the reason that you’ve only got eight minutes the fact that you were late taking off? And have you ever tried getting off a Boeing 737 quickly? I imagine an emergency disembarkation - flames are licking at the starboard engine and you’re in row 29 waiting for the woman in row 28 to find her make-up case…
…and I got to thinking about all the fatuous statements made by airline crews. As we were taxiing to take off, that same Hostess/Stewardess/Flight Attendant said, ‘As we have a very full flight tonight we will not be providing our usual drinks service’. What’s that? You only do drinks if you have a handful of customers? At what level of occupancy do you decide that the aircraft is so full of pesky passengers that you will deny them the privilege of purchasing a few millilitres of throat-burn for 6 pounds? I noticed they managed to get the ‘Duty Free’ trolley around easily enough - could this be because there’s more profit on a bottle of Chanel No. 5 than there is on a cup of coffee? (And do you think we don’t know that there’s no such thing as Duty Free between two European Union countries?)
Another one that gets me is ‘We apologise for our late departure - this was due to the late arrival of the incoming aircraft’. Well yes, but since you are the same people that crewed the incoming aircraft, it sounds like you’re saying, ‘We’re late because we’re late’. Why can they never tell you the real reason? We’re grown up.
(When I got to England and switched on the news, there was Stelios – owner of Easyjet – showing off his apartment in Monaco.)
So I made a decision: we’re flying British Airways next time. It may cost twice as much, but you get a free cardboard sandwich, the drinks trolley does come around, and it’s free - even if the wine does arrive 20 minutes after you’ve finished your meal.

Spring in the air

I always feared that there might be a finite number of anti-Bush stories, jokes and cartoons, that, once exceeded, would tip the needle on his popularity meter over onto ‘Sympathy’ - the ‘poor bastard, he hasn’t a friend in the world’ syndrome – affecting first California and spreading gradually across the country. (The NE states will probably retain their immunity.)
So my New Year – well, March 7 – resolution is not to forward any of the 47 jaded, cliché-ridden Bush jokes I received yesterday, and henceforth not to use the B word. Even Cntrl+B is out. (WORD just excelled itself – it says, rightly, that Cntrl+B is plural! Sorry WORD: Cntrl+B are out) But I am free to comment on the irony of a guy who shall be nameless riding yee-haw into a second term on a fear ticket and the continuing democratization of the Middle-East, telling a democratically elected government (elected on a genuine fear ticket) that they must try to be less aggressive – like us. Septic tanks!
Blair, on the other hand – a different B word and fair game – shows his contempt for the poor suckers who elected him and the parliament that keeps him in power by saying that he is responsible only to God. (Presumably a Christian god – nay, an RC one.)
As Big Daddy would say, ‘there’s an odour of mendacity around here’.
Meanwhile here in France, la grippe aviaire gets ever closer: a migrating duck literally drops dead over the marshes of the Rhone delta – and not from lead shot – not a dozen miles from France’s 3rd largest city. Truculent farmers (as is their habitude) say stuff you to the government – we will transport our fowl anywhere we want. But not yesterday they didn't – yesterday they were busy flooding the autoroute with zillions of gallons of wine in a protest aimed at achieving ‘a total ban on the importation of wine from overseas’. Tough if you were one of those farmers trying to move your turkeys illegally to another Département so you wouldn’t have to vaccinate them; and even tougher if you were busy trying to produce wine that was fit to complete with the foreign product instead of only for flooding autoroutes.
Over in Britain they refuse to be panicked by a few frightened Frenchies: the government’s chief scientific adviser (Professor Sir somebody) tells us that ‘even if we had H5N1 [the deadly version] among the chicken population in Britain’ our chances of catching bird flu are 1 in 100million. (Beware of Professor Sirs bearing figures - that’s less than 70% of one person!) Let's hope the ostriches don't catch it - whose going to bury their heads in the sand?
And the Côte d’Azur basks in vernal sunshine: only when I went to switch off the central heating last night did I realise that I’d forgotten to switch it on. Must go now – got to nip over the border to Italy to have a nice lunch and top up the Valpollicella and Pinot Grigio.

Villefranche: 'source of myth and inspiration'

I didn’t intend to do travel on the blog – seems a bit like taking work home - but I guess I can tell you about the place where I live. I didn’t choose Villefranche – it chose me. I was driving along the coast road one day when I realised that a big horse race(that’s a big race – not a race just for big horses, though many of them are: thought I ought to make that clear) was on in England and I needed to stop to point my short wave antenna at the booster station. That was over 20 years ago, and it was what the French call a coup de foudre: I fell in love, and the longer I stay here the better I like it.
So this is about Villefranche – I hope you don’t find it too literary, but that’s because it was here I wrote my book, The French Riviera: A Literary Guide* – little plug there, but so subtle you probably didn’t even notice it. Many towns have poetic links: Ambleside with Wordsworth, Hull with Larkin, but Villefranche-sur-Mer, the little port on the French Riviera, has inspired poets for centuries, from Dante to the Rolling Stones.
It lies 5km east of Nice and 13km west of Monaco, on the Bay of Villefranche facing the sun, its hills forming a natural amphitheatre - ‘as if in a box at the opera’, as Jean Cocteau, the town’s ‘poet laureate’, put it. To complete the theatrical illusion, the precipitous slopes of the Southern Alps are its backdrop. Cocteau called the town ‘a source of myth and inspiration’.
The town’s history is recorded as far back as 130 BC, but its ‘modern’ age began in 1245, when Charles II of Anjou offered tax reliefs to encourage people to live there - Villefranche means, literally, free town. (The town still attracts tax exiles: the Rolling Stones recorded their aptly-named Exile on Main Street here.)
Although the hills above the town have not escaped a sprinkling of opulent mansions, Villefranche has managed to retain much of its 18th century atmosphere. The ochre and terracotta houses huddled around the Baroque church confirm - as do the surnames on its war memorials - its Italian heritage: it became part of France only in 1860. Yet the town is so typically Provençal that it could be a film set – and often is: films shot here include Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief, the James Bond thriller Never Say Never Again, de Niro’s Ronin, and the Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner epic Jewel of the Nile.
Its population of 8,000 more than trebles in holiday times - and that doesn't include a quarter of a million cruise passengers. With a natural harbour deep enough to accommodate the world’s biggest ships – it was once the Mediterranean base of the of the US Sixth Fleet - Villefranche welcomes more than 250 cruises a year.
The old port has many historical and literary links: Pope Paul III was here in 1538; George Bernard Shaw stopped off in 1896; Ernest Hemingway disembarked in 1934 on his return from Africa; and the Irish navy came by in 1948 to take the long-exiled bones of the poet W.B. Yeats back to Sligo. Between the wars, the Hotel Welcome, in prime position dominating the harbour, attracted dozens of writers, many of whom, like the Waugh brothers, Evelyn and Alec, came to pay homage to W. Somerset Maugham, who lived his last cantankerous years on nearby Cap Ferrat.
In Cocteau’s time, the Welcome changed its character when the fleet was in. ‘On the first floor of my hotel–brothel’, he wrote, ‘the sailors dance and fight day and night.’ Across the street, a bronze bust of the artist bears his testimonial: ‘Villefranche, […] Pray Heaven it may never change’.
It does change, but not very much. Villefranche is change-proof: there are no tower blocks because there’s nowhere to build one, and with the exception of the busy Basse Corniche that traverses the town, there’s little traffic because the terraced streets that wind down to the old port are too narrow to admit cars.
Although the US Navy left in 1967, the American landings continue: a third of the cruise passengers come from North America. The sumptuous villas peppering the Villefranche hillsides no longer house European royalty: they belong to stars of entertainment and sport, like Tina Turner, U2’s Bono, Riverdance creator Michael Flatley and cyclist Lance Armstrong - while, overlooking them all, astride the peak of Mont Boron, stands the Château Elton John.
Despite – or perhaps because of - its proximity to more publicized attractions like Nice, Cannes, Monte Carlo and St. Tropez; Villefranche has remained pretty much unspoiled.
Is it still ‘a source of myth and inspiration’? Of course - otherwise I wouldn’t be here!

* - (Published by Tauris)

So much to learn, so much to unlearn

A word for wrinklies who thought they were keeping up moderately well with today’s rampant technology; advances in IT and the internet; and personal entertainment devices beginning with ‘i’ or other italics. (Is that why Tiscali is its anagram?) And who may even be relieved at being able to free up their brain cells from having to remember the intricacies of programming in numeric code, or such even more cutting-edge tools as BASIC and COBOL.
But let me tell you: when it comes to raising children, you’ve forgotten just about all you ever knew – and such knowledge as you do retain is Neanderthal.
Has the past quarter of a century selectively erased all that expertise? Or has the technology of child-rearing advanced so far in this period that your methods are now obsolete?
You know what I’m talking about: ‘Don’t let her go near the top of the stairs, Dad – she might fall down them’.
‘Oh, is that - gravity? Gee - thanks for telling me about that son. We never had to contend with that when you were a baby. It’s a miracle you survived.’

Well actually, we have to admit that the technology of child-raising has moved along. When my kids were babies, the baby mavens said we had to lay them down on their stomachs.
I remember I did have trouble accepting this at the time. We were never given any medical justification, but logically it seemed crazy – after all, you weren’t supposed to give children cling-film to play with lest they suffocate themselves, but you were positively encouraged to put them to sleep with their spongy little nose in direct contact with any type of surface with the weight of their heads on top of it.
Some women who adopted this technique were convicted of murder; some of them on the evidence of the same highly respected paediatricians who had recommended the practice.
Then, a few years ago, the baby gurus made, literally, a 180-degree turn: babies should be laid on their backs.
The incidence of the strange phenomenon that came to be known as ‘cot death’ plummeted and the change was trumpeted as a triumph for medical science. And the mothers were released from jail and allowed to join their families – if they had any families left. And the expert paediatrician, although a laughing stock, was cleared to continue to practise. And, presumably, if called, to give expert evidence.
So maybe we should admit it: we don’t know beans about kids.
But I would like to hang on to gravity.

I guess that's what they call serendipity

It didn’t seem like a life-changing decision at the time. On the scale of Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus it would barely have registered. I just thought I needed to get some discipline into my reading habits. I used to read like a kid in a candy store - there was always another book that looked more exciting than the one I was reading.
I remembered that, when I was at college 40 years earlier, my reading routine was governed by a study programme and not subject to passing whims. So the answer, I thought, would be to take the first year of an Open University arts course. The broad theme of that year was the Victorian Years: the art, the music, the philosophers, the architects, the engineers, the explorers and the writers of that highly inventive and productive age. No blinding revelation - just a slight change in direction – not so much a U-turn as an OU turn.
To someone unused to study, it was tough. But it needed to be: it meant studying at home after work; getting up in the middle of the night to watch television programmes; attending tutorials; studying video and audio tapes; researching a testing written assignment every month; an intensive summer school at Manchester (that most Victorian of cities) University; and reading, reading, reading.
At the end of the year I was mentally exhausted – but smitten. Still with no intention of completing the degree course, I signed up for another year. I chose another period in history: that quiet 18th century revolution in intellectual, scientific and artistic thought that became known as The Age of Enlightenment. I emoted to Mozart, raved over Reynolds and Gainsborough, and revelled in written works that, in my previous existence, I would not even have picked up: Gibbon’s irony-packed Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, or Voltaire’s unexpectedly bawdy Candide.
There was no stopping after that. The Enlightenment was followed by the plays of Shakespeare, two years of French, and a year of modern English literature. By this time I was finally learning to read: not more quickly, but more deeply
Somewhere along the way, a decision had been made by default - that I would finish the course. All this was against the background of a fairly testing job – setting up a business and travelling world-wide. So when the job started to interfere with my studies, I retired and became a student. The degree course ended with a year studying the art and architecture of 14th century Italy, which took me on study trips to Venice, Padua, Florence and Siena.
At no time did the adventure lessen, and my feelings at the end of the final examinations were not of relief, but of loss. Seven years after that fateful non-decision, I put on my rented cap and gown and, applauded by my family, walked on to the stage of the Royal Festival Hall to be get my degree – the oldest student there.
If you thought that graduation was the end of the story you’d be wrong: it was only the beginning. In the seven years since then, the group with whom I toured northern Italy have become close friends, and we meet at least three times a year to visit London art exhibitions, and have extended our studies independently, with art trips to Spain, France, Italy, the Czech Republic and Latvia and, this year, Estonia.
A bonus was that the discipline of having to write an essay every month had improved my writing skills, so I started to turn my travel experiences into revenue. And when the OU opened its own library last year I gave them a copy of my first book – A Literary Guide to the French Riviera (shown above). It seemed a small return for all that they had given me.
As decisions go, it may not have ranked seismically alongside Cortes’s burning of his boats in the Yucatan, but it was a metaphorical boat-burning, because there is no going back.
And my reading: is it now planned, ordered and disciplined? Well, no: it’s as chaotic as ever. I still have five books on the go in the bedroom, half a dozen in the lounge and at least two in the loo. But I’m married to another book freak, who keeps me in bookmarks. I guess that’s what they call serendipity.

Is your participle dangling?

Yesterday I got a letter from Barclays which read, ‘As your Plan Manager, the Inland Revenue requires us to inform them of […]’. And I wondered if I should write back, asking indignantly why they transferred the management of my account to the Inland Revenue without my permission. Well no, what they meant was ‘As your Plan Manager, we are required by the Inland Revenue to inform them…’

It’s the dreaded dangling participle again. Now I’m not a split infinitive bigot. I don’t even complain about ‘who/whom’ any more now that the Times (but not, quirkily, their Style and Usage Guide) routinely accepts ‘who’ in the dative case. But those hanging participles can be positively – or is it negatively? – misleading. Perhaps ‘misrelated participles’ would be better, but Fowler (of Modern English Usage, not the one who’s just signed for Liverpool) calls them ‘unattached’. I don’t agree – they’re usually attached, but to the wrong subject. (Not often I disagree with the mighty Fowler.)

But they all do it.

An invitation to a writing course: ‘As someone who has requested information about this course, we’d like to invite […]’ Why did they request information about their own course?
P & O: ‘As a valued customer, I would like to thank you […]
Citalia: (More than once) ‘As a previous client, we […]’
AOL: ‘As a valued AOL member, I’m delighted to […]’
Jaguar: ‘As a valued […] client, I am writing to […]’
Henderson Investments had the vanity to claim: ‘I am writing to you as an astute investor[…]’
BBC Radio 4: 'Being unique, I won’t try to imitate him.'
Even Writer’s Digest: ‘After two years in New York, Time transferred her to […]’
And The Sunday Times, in and article about Germaine Greer, may have risked libel action: ‘With past lovers including Warren Beatty, did the producers of Big Brother hope […]’

It's easier to do it the right way than the wrong way, so why do they do it? - but then as a regular writer (if not a particularly regular blogger), you must not get the impression I’m a pedant.

Not that I'm paranoid or anything

I’ve got this friend who’s vegetarian, vegan, non-leather-or-wool-wearing and non-car-driving. But he does like a pint, and we meet from time to time in his local pub and have a drink before I drive him to a French club. (He accepts lifts in cars.)
He’s a very nice guy. Recently he said look, we’re always drinking in my local – why don’t we meet up in yours, so you won’t have to worry about drinking and driving – and I’ll be on my bike so it won’t matter. It was a nice thought. So I said fine, let’s meet in the Stag and Hounds.
His jaw dropped. ‘I’m sorry’, he said, ‘I won’t meet you in a pub called the Stag and Hounds. I don’t believe in the exploitation of animals.’
‘But,’ I said, ‘we’ve always drunk in your pub, and it’s called the Nag’s Head’.
‘Yes’, he said, ‘but the head is attached to the nag’.
‘If you look at the sign outside my pub,’ I said, 'you will see that the heads of the Stag and the hounds are firmly affixed to their bodies’. But he wouldn’t budge, and we still meet in the Nag’s Head. I drove by it the other day – and you know what? – the head of the nag is torso-less. Perhaps he just doesn’t want to drink with me.

Now I didn't think I was paranoid - well not very much - but when my wife gave me Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots and Leaves at Christmas, I had second thoughts. Much as I like her, and I do (she might read this) I have to question her tact in choosing that particular gift*. Giving a writer a book on punctuation is a bit like giving Michael Schumacher Car Driving for Beginners or Fred and Ginger First Steps in Ballroom Dancing.
Paranoia apart, it’s a fascinating book, but I still don’t know why it was so successful: grammarians didn’t need it and the rest don’t care.
Ms Truss talks of the APS – Apostrophe Protection Society – a group of grammar vigilantes who write (in impeccable grammar no doubt) to perpetrators of sins like the grocer’s apostrophe (banana’s) and such, to point out their error. Her book even has a set of adhesive apostrophes of different sizes that you can stick in where they have been omitted, and a set of plain white stickers with which to cover redundant ones – a printed card I got from an estate agent recently said they dealt in ‘sale’s and rental’s’!
But this surely highlights a basic contradiction of blogging. You start off saying, 'This is my blog and I will write it how I please, regardless of such trivialities as grammar, punctuation and the like'. But once you know someone is reading it, you feel a writer’s duty to proof-read and correct.
Hemingway said that easy writing is hard reading, and that it takes hard writing to make easy reading – so what was formerly a casual personal record of one’s innermost thoughts becomes hard work – and unpaid work at that. Or is it only me?
Next week – dangling participles (‘As a valued customer, I am writing to tell you about…’) and the difference between ‘less’ and ‘fewer’. Yawn.

* OK – I’ll come clean. I asked her for it.

Make history history

We had a secretary of State for – of all things – Education, who believed that there was no need for history. (He was a science grad.) So of course he was promoted – to Home Secretary, where his mission is to remove as many civil liberties as he can in the shortest possible time. Please, can we make Charles Clarke history?

When blogging on about irony the other day, my thoughts turned to other abstract terms that are more significant when ignored than when used – a veritable blog mine.
One day when my kids were very small, I heard my son say to my daughter, ‘You’d better get inside, quick – Dad’s steaming’. I was worried by this, and wondered if he was trying to scare his sister unnecessarily, and whom he could be talking about. Surely not me, I thought – I? ‘Steam’? It has worried me for 30 years, and the only solution that I’ve found that I can live with is: understatement. Their mother used to say ‘I asked you to tell C off about such-and-such and you haven’t’. ‘Yes I did.’ ‘Well yes, you did – but you only told him once.’ And I would try to explain that I thought that repetitive admonishments were counter-productive, devalued the words, were boring to the recipient etc. etc. I can only assume that in the above account I must have asked where she was – hence ‘steaming’.
I once worked in an office in the US where everyone shouted everything. If someone shouted at me I would look at them in bewilderment, and they would say ‘Oh, don’t take any notice of me – you have to shout around here or people won’t listen’. I decided, since I was shy and didn’t know any other way, to stay with my usual sotto voce – and in almost no time, people got used to it – and would just listen harder. Then people started to see that I got people to do things by not shouting at them. And most – not all, but most – stopped shouting.
Although quite young at the time, I remember a radio report – there wasn’t TV yet - from the battlefield at Arnhem. It’s a small town in Holland where in World War II British paratroopers were dropped behind the German lines to try to make it easier for the ground troops to move in. The operation was a disaster. The Germans knew about it and were ready, and the paras were mown down as they hit the ground. I can still hear the report of the BBC war correspondent (who miraculously survived), heard against a background of machine gun fire: ‘This is Wynford Vaughan Thomas speaking to you from Arnhem. It’s Sunday afternoon – teatime. But there’s no tea…’ I’ve never been able to talk about the effect that report had on me, a schoolboy listening at home. Men were dying all around him - there were few survivors - but there were no heroics, just ‘there’s no tea’.

Subtlety, irony - and how the Twain did eventually meet

Have you noticed how WORD does not like ‘emigrated’? Probably not – it’s not a word you use every day – but if you try to, you’ll get the dreaded wavy green line. When you ask WORD why, it tells you you meant ‘immigrated’ – when of course you did not. We’re talking your latest ‘International’ version of WORD here, by the way, not the ‘homespun all-American’ one. I think of this whenever I see Gates has given another $57 million (ie an hour’s pay) to some deserving cause.
I don’t want to make a big thing of this. Why am I then? Well, it’s a metaphor, you see.
In case you don’t, here’s another, less subtle one: in my early days as an accounting machine salesman selling American machines in the UK, we had a big shot come over from our Philadelphia HQ to visit us. He outlined the corporate policy – in the Financial Times no less – as ‘Think globally and act locally, but without going native’. (Sound like Rumpsfeld?) He then asked us why we weren’t selling 1004’s. Ah yes, we said, great machine, but we’ve already pointed out to the marketing people in Philly that you can’t sell accounting machines in the UK without a £ (pound) sign. The top banana’s reply was: ‘Why the hell can’t they use the dollar sign?’
It lacks the irony of the first example, but the point is the same: if Americans don’t need it, it isn’t necessary. Nobody emigrates from the US.
No, this is not one of those clichéd ‘Yankee Go Home’ banners. Now you might ask why I always take a ball-breakingly long time to get to the point and finish up having to say what the blog is not about. I’ve wondered about that, and I think it’s because Alistair Cook got away with it for best part of a century and I was one of his greatest fans.
I’ll come to the point: it’s about irony. (Phew – collective sigh of relief - at last!)
It all arose from a Sunday Times review of a new biography of Mark Twain, in which it said, ‘Irony was a European invention’. How’s that for a truism? Irony is as old as literature, and didn’t western literature come from Europe? Still, it made me think, so can’t be all bad.
Early European immigrants to the US – look, no wavy green line! – were bucolic illiterates, so, apart from the family Bible, did not take literature with them. And in the age of Enlightenment, when Voltaire, Gibbon, Diderot and the like were ladling out irony like Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, dour America was busy writing declarations of independence. Thomas Jefferson was never in his lifetime accused of having written a single ironic word.
But my claim for Twain (while mainly on the wane?) is that he was the 19th century writer most responsible for the introduction of irony to AmeriLit. – the man who brought ambiguity to the West. And the fact that he spent most of his life hating all things non-American is the biggest irony of all.
The many Euros who think that irony isn’t appreciated in the US are usually comparing the wrong centuries. Like the hoary old jokes about French plumbing, it’s one of those clichés that, while it had some credibility in the past, is now way past its sell-by date. You should not try to compare 19th century clods like Fennimore Cooper and Longfellow with Beckett and Pinter. But try it with John Updike, Truman Capote, Toni Morrison or The Simpsons and you might get somewhere.
I could finish with a succinct phrase that sums up the whole blog, but Alistair never did – and he was the best blogger there ever was, even if he never knew the word.

Saints preserve us!

There used to be a jazz venue in New Orleans – not a bar or a club, a venue - called Preservation Hall. There were precious few seats, no tables, no waiters, no food and no booze. In a city where you can buy it in plastic glasses from stalls in the streets that’s pretty unusual. It was dedicated to the preservation of traditional jazz, and most of the players were over 80 and wore suits. The average age of the audience was under 30 and they wore shorts and XXXL T-shirts.
A sign on the wall reads ‘Requests $1, Saints $5’ – which says a lot about the level of jazz sophistication of the audience. They didn’t get many requests for Livery Stable Blues or Strange Fruit.
I used to wonder who the saints were, and why they were marching in, but then decided that there weren’t any saints – just as there was no ‘Aintree iron’ in ‘Thank you very much’. Those guys were just looking for four iambic syllables with the accents on the odd – instead of the Shakespearean even – feet.
And that’s where, after considerable research and reflection, I stand on St. Valentine. There wasn’t one. Have you ever seen him in an ancient work of art, like the endless sequence of skewered Sebastians? Is there a statue of him, like the plethora of petrified Peters? A church named after him – alliteratively or not?
Until the shopkeepers realised that they had found a way of keeping the cash registers ringing after the Xmas rush and the January sales, the patron saints for Feb 14 were the Greek brothers Cyril and Methodius. Methodius gave us a word and Cyril, not to be outdone, a whole alphabet – hence Cyrillic. Not nearly as romantic or profitable as Valentine: he has only just made it onto some catholic websites. (I realise that tills don’t ring any more – it was a deliberate anachronism to make the point.)
But I’ll admit that ‘Don’t miss our special St. Methodius menu, £9.95’ doesn’t have quite the same ring. So I guess we’d better preserve Valentine – the economy needs him.

Whom do you tell?

‘MY BLOGS are the tendrils of my soul’ as Robert W. Service might have said. (He said ‘books’ actually.) As a relative newcomer to the genre, the thought of baring one’s soul in public is still in diametrical conflict with my character. The only explanation I can think of is that it is NOT in public – the audience does not know me and is unlikely to meet me. The stranger on the train syndrome – and as soon as someone says ‘Hey, are you the Ted Watchamacallit from Hicksville?’ I will have to reconsider my position. For that reason I have told no-one except my wife and son about my blog. Well, they let me read theirs.
But does that mean it will for ever remain a secret garden? It’s a serious question. Because, while I’ve no wish to publicise my views – I’ve been known among friends and family not to express a view on anything from one year’s end to the next. (When I started to say something recently, my stepson said ‘Quiet, everyone, I think Ted is about to express an opinion’. I was so embarrassed I immediately forgot what it was.)
So who do you tell – OK Messrs Strunk & White, I know it’s ‘whom’ but I’m pleading common usage here. Because the more people you tell, the more people you have to consider when writing. Or don’t you consider anyone? I really would like to know people’s views on that – but who’s going to tell me?
There, I think, is the nub of the problem. I worry about what others may think. Not caring is essential for the true artist. If she had cared what we thought, would you ever have heard of Tracy Emin? (Though, to come out of character for a second, I don’t consider her an artist – more a seeker of celebrity.)
When William Faulkner’s daughter complained that he didn’t spend enough time with her, he said, ‘Does anyone know the name of Shakespeare’s daughter?’ When Gauguin was about to leave for Tahiti, his wife said, ‘But your daughter's dying of consumption’. He said – ‘but if I miss this boat there won’t be another for two weeks’. Now that's art.

On this, Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, when lies are not permitted, I feel an opinion coming on so must voice it. I went to a pub for lunch today. It’s a pub I use often because smoking is forbidden and it’s always quiet – and we had to wait for a table! Why? I’d forgotten about Valentine's Day, despite the fact that my greatest joy these last few weeks has been in zapping e-mails with the words ‘Valentine’s day’ in the heading. What sort of a life is that – waiting all year for a pub lunch to find out if someone cares for you?
I didn't I want to be an artist anyway.

Simone Martini comes to Liverpool

No, this is not about the signing of an Italian striker by one of our local football teams, but some musings about the city where I was born, some years ago. It was so long ago that there was only one flavour of potato crisps, so it didn’t need a name and only got one after the cheese and onion invasion. The ivy-clad towers of my natal manor were destroyed by the Luftwaffe in WW II, but fortunately I was not in it at the time.
(If I don’t seem to write much about the interests declared in my profile, it’s not that they’re not interesting; it’s just that I’ve got other interests, such as finding things I didn’t realise I was interested in. But tonight I'm sticking to the songsheet.)
Liverpool will be the European city of Culture for 2008. The city’s pride is the Walker (not the guy who makes the potato crisps) Art Gallery, one of whose most treasured exhibits is Simone Martini’s Christ Discovered in the Temple.
As a child, Christ is said to have strayed from his parents during a visit to the Temple in Jerusalem and stayed behind to talk with its learned scholars. The picture is one of a naughty kid getting an earful from his parents. His father, Joseph, head on one side, looks puzzled; while his mother, Mary, hands raised, is laying down the law. Her words on finding him are written in Latin on the book she holds: 'Son, why have you dealt with us like this?'
Martini signed the picture along the bottom edge of the frame with the words (also in Latin) 'Simone of Siena painted me in the year of Our Lord 1342'. He was very successful in impressing the papal court with his talents, and when the popes, fearing the political upheavals in Italy, moved their court to Avignon in southern France for much of the 14th century, Martini went with them and spent the rest of his life there. This picture was painted in Avignon. From its detail and lavish use of colour, especially the more expensive golds and blues, it is generally believed that the picture was commissioned by a high ranking member of the papal court, possibly even the pope himself.
That Martini’s talent, like that of his fellow Sienese mentor, Duccio di Buoninsegna, has long lain in the shadow of Florentine painters like Giotto has as much to do with writers as painters. With Florence’s artists being trumpeted by writers of the stature of Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch, Martini and Duccio were always going to be outsiders in the PR stakes. (For Florence and Siena you could substitute Manchester and Liverpool.)
But the legacy of Duccio, Martini and Giotto and their contemporaries was an essential launch pad for the quiet revolution that was the Italian Renaissance; and I find I take a totally unjustified pride in the fact that one plank of that pad has ended up in my home town, where anyone can pop in and admire a 700-year-old work of art.
(That’s two for the price of one: Liverpool and 14th century Italian painting.)

Everton play their Cup replay against Chelsea tonight. We who are about to die salute you.

Does my bomb look big in this?

Is this the latest thing in Halloween costumes?
Omar Khayam, 22, was nicked in London at the weekend wearing an imitation suicide bombing outfit. He was arrested, not for incitement to racial hatred - a new law passed for just this purpose - but for busting parole on an earlier drug-dealing sentence. The chairman of his mosque, with an unconscious pun, said: 'It has been blown out of proportion'.
But it was the guy's name that got me. Odd that a suicide bomber - even a phoney one - should have the same name as the poet who 900 years ago wrote:
Indeed the idols I have loved so long
Have done my credit in this world much wrong,
Have drowned my glory in a shallow cup
And sold my reputation for a song.

A rehearsal for a suicide bombing - what next?

One small step for Man U...

It’s almost 50 years since Munich. No, not Chamberlain or Spielberg; Busby. Busby? Yes, Matt Busby, the Manchester United football (soccer) team coach. On February 6, 1958, in a snowstorm at Munich airport, the plane carrying the Man U team failed to clear the end of the runway and crashed, killing most of the team. Busby was seriously injured, but survived.
Ten years later, to national joy, the team’s young replacements, the Busby Babes, were the best team in the country.
Things have changed since then. Today, every British football fan supports two teams: his own, and the one playing Man U. Man U are the most reviled team in the country – and the man responsible for bringing the team, and the sport, into disrepute is their present manager, Alex Ferguson. He intimidates referees, encourages diving (his players feigning injury in order to win free kicks and get members of the other team sent off), time-wasting and other unsportsmanlike gestures - and he is very successful.

It’s a sporty weekend, with Everton playing Manchester City at soccer, England v. Wales, Ireland v Italy and Scotland v France at rugby, and the Superbowl tonight. A sporty, anxious, exciting and tearful weekend. Tearful? Well yes: first, because of dietary constraints there will be no chicken wings or potato crisps, and what’s a sporty weekend without chicken wings? Secondly, they play the Irish national anthem at the Ireland/Italy game – and that always makes me weep. It has something to do with my mother being Irish, and it recalls the ceilidhs we had on Sunday evenings when I was a kid in Liverpool and my mother used to sing ‘Paddy McGinty’s Goat’ and dance to Gaelic music on Irish radio. The Irish national anthem signalled the end of the programme – and my bedtime. So it means many things: childhood, fun, home, my mother - and her loneliness after we moved to another town where there weren’t any Micks with whom to dance ceilidhs.

But the weekend results are so far satisfactory: Everton won, as did England, Ireland and Scotland. The superbowl I don’t much care about this year so I’ll watch the big guys in tights tomorrow after the beer commercials and half-time excesses have been removed.

And now the bad news: Man U won.