Thursday, 23 June 2011
Monday, 6 June 2011
Marr and the Bloggers
THIS BLOG, such as it is at the moment, warmly welcomes back Mark Brentano's blog to the internet. If there is a more entertaining commentator or better writer of English currently being published on paper in England, or indeed western civilisation, I do not know about them. I missed it during its interregnum.
Mark has opened up batting with a good whack at Andrew Marr, in response to the broadcaster's dismissive comments about bloggers, made here.
I agree with practically all Mark has to say on the matter, but there are a few thoughts I'd like to toss in.
The real reason Marr has taken against blogs is because the ones that have caused ripples and crossed the divide into the mainstream media have generally been those that have criticised the pinkish political, media, legal and administrative class which runs the country and which Marr belongs to and thinks a very good thing indeed. These blogs are what the Guardian would call 'rightwing'. Sure there must be left wing blogs by the thousand and by the end of Cameron's period in office I would imagine we'll have a left-wing version of the right wing tattle site Guido Fawkes. Indeed, new Labour stooge Derek Draper tried to start one a couple of years ago when he realised the game was up for that government.
If blogging were dominated by a mentality that a champagne cultural Marxist like Marr could get on with then he'd refer to the activity as the People's Journalism or some other predictable bit of Mandlesonese and would pat them on the head in print, saying how wonderful puff-pieces on diversity and graffiti art in inner cities are. It's the lack of control which horrifies Marr and all the many others of his ilk. The unmediated thought that is baldly said. His generation have been extraordinarily effective in creating an alternative reality in a very short time simply by playing with words.
Despite his preoccupation with pop festivals*, a libertarian is the last thing Marr is. There is no cast-iron way, as yet, that the internet commentariat can be politically corrected and superinjuncted. The political, media, legal and administrative class (lets mint a bit of Newspeak and call them the polmedigad) do not like this and will, if we are not careful, in due course take steps to see that it is.
But there is another side to this. The real problem with blogs is that they are, as Mark Brentano says, for the most part journals and therefore the product of journal-keeping, which is halfway between diary-writing and op-ed. It is punditry not reportage. A pundit, from the sanskrit pandit for learned man. A source of opinion but not necessarily a news gatherer. The feeling I get from blog-browsing is that reportage, which what real citizens' journalism would be, is far too much like hard work. The blogosphere is rather like the Observer used to be about 20 years ago, ten per cent news and ninety per cent opinion columns. Opinions are like arseholes, everyone's got one. That's the trouble with blogs. In the blogosphere, I don't particularly like that word but we're stuck with it for the time being, hard news is hen's-teeth-rare. Bloggers don't appear to go in for the cold-calling, interviewing, document trawling, FoI-ing** and on-the-spot reporting that constitute active journalism.
Of course, many paid journalists are now mere churnalists, recycling press releases. Then there are the platoons of journalists handed stories from the PR men and women in politics, showbiz and sport. However, even within the editorial preoccupations of any given newspaper/TV channel there will be real news stories broken along with those copped from other organs or the wires. Bloggers don't generally do this.
They wait for the stories to be supplied, then comment on them or speculate on new angles and motivations within them. There is nothing wrong with this at all. It allows the publication of sometimes gloriously spot-on reaction that would never be allowed in the mainstream media. However, it does mean that blogs are something that can be taken or left, like op-ed in a newspaper. They are not essential and that is their flaw, if you are putting them up as an alternative to mainstream media. Internet media briefly became essential recently when it did something that the mainstream couldn't do: name public figures whose sex lives had been kept secret by law. It started to break stories the press and tv could not break. I wonder if bloggers learned from this important moment the sheer value of new information as opposed to opinion given about new information or opinion which says new information is not true information.
If blogs are to go on and become something to rival the mainstream media, as opposed to their current situation, which is closer to myspace or facebook, they will have to join the hunt for new information and then comment on it as well. When that day comes, Andrew Marr and his class will come to fear and respect them.
*In his TV history of Britain he looked down on the Glastonbury pop festival from a helicopter and spoke an encomium to the event, calling it 'microcosmic society', which are exactly the same words as Mick Jagger used in the film Gimme Shelter to describe the Altamont rock festival in 1969, and we all know how that ended up. In a way of course Marr was right: hundreds of thousands of people all pissed, talking platitudes while listening to rather rubbishy music high on drugs IS a miniature version of the country, or parts of it.
**Submitting Freedom of Information Act requests.
Mark has opened up batting with a good whack at Andrew Marr, in response to the broadcaster's dismissive comments about bloggers, made here.
I agree with practically all Mark has to say on the matter, but there are a few thoughts I'd like to toss in.
The real reason Marr has taken against blogs is because the ones that have caused ripples and crossed the divide into the mainstream media have generally been those that have criticised the pinkish political, media, legal and administrative class which runs the country and which Marr belongs to and thinks a very good thing indeed. These blogs are what the Guardian would call 'rightwing'. Sure there must be left wing blogs by the thousand and by the end of Cameron's period in office I would imagine we'll have a left-wing version of the right wing tattle site Guido Fawkes. Indeed, new Labour stooge Derek Draper tried to start one a couple of years ago when he realised the game was up for that government.
If blogging were dominated by a mentality that a champagne cultural Marxist like Marr could get on with then he'd refer to the activity as the People's Journalism or some other predictable bit of Mandlesonese and would pat them on the head in print, saying how wonderful puff-pieces on diversity and graffiti art in inner cities are. It's the lack of control which horrifies Marr and all the many others of his ilk. The unmediated thought that is baldly said. His generation have been extraordinarily effective in creating an alternative reality in a very short time simply by playing with words.
Despite his preoccupation with pop festivals*, a libertarian is the last thing Marr is. There is no cast-iron way, as yet, that the internet commentariat can be politically corrected and superinjuncted. The political, media, legal and administrative class (lets mint a bit of Newspeak and call them the polmedigad) do not like this and will, if we are not careful, in due course take steps to see that it is.
But there is another side to this. The real problem with blogs is that they are, as Mark Brentano says, for the most part journals and therefore the product of journal-keeping, which is halfway between diary-writing and op-ed. It is punditry not reportage. A pundit, from the sanskrit pandit for learned man. A source of opinion but not necessarily a news gatherer. The feeling I get from blog-browsing is that reportage, which what real citizens' journalism would be, is far too much like hard work. The blogosphere is rather like the Observer used to be about 20 years ago, ten per cent news and ninety per cent opinion columns. Opinions are like arseholes, everyone's got one. That's the trouble with blogs. In the blogosphere, I don't particularly like that word but we're stuck with it for the time being, hard news is hen's-teeth-rare. Bloggers don't appear to go in for the cold-calling, interviewing, document trawling, FoI-ing** and on-the-spot reporting that constitute active journalism.
Of course, many paid journalists are now mere churnalists, recycling press releases. Then there are the platoons of journalists handed stories from the PR men and women in politics, showbiz and sport. However, even within the editorial preoccupations of any given newspaper/TV channel there will be real news stories broken along with those copped from other organs or the wires. Bloggers don't generally do this.
They wait for the stories to be supplied, then comment on them or speculate on new angles and motivations within them. There is nothing wrong with this at all. It allows the publication of sometimes gloriously spot-on reaction that would never be allowed in the mainstream media. However, it does mean that blogs are something that can be taken or left, like op-ed in a newspaper. They are not essential and that is their flaw, if you are putting them up as an alternative to mainstream media. Internet media briefly became essential recently when it did something that the mainstream couldn't do: name public figures whose sex lives had been kept secret by law. It started to break stories the press and tv could not break. I wonder if bloggers learned from this important moment the sheer value of new information as opposed to opinion given about new information or opinion which says new information is not true information.
If blogs are to go on and become something to rival the mainstream media, as opposed to their current situation, which is closer to myspace or facebook, they will have to join the hunt for new information and then comment on it as well. When that day comes, Andrew Marr and his class will come to fear and respect them.
*In his TV history of Britain he looked down on the Glastonbury pop festival from a helicopter and spoke an encomium to the event, calling it 'microcosmic society', which are exactly the same words as Mick Jagger used in the film Gimme Shelter to describe the Altamont rock festival in 1969, and we all know how that ended up. In a way of course Marr was right: hundreds of thousands of people all pissed, talking platitudes while listening to rather rubbishy music high on drugs IS a miniature version of the country, or parts of it.
**Submitting Freedom of Information Act requests.
Monday, 23 May 2011
Ed and the Shammers
WHILE eating a late breakfast of boiled eggs I looked up at the television and saw Edward Miliband goggling and grinning.
I turned the sound on, reluctantly. Dermot Murnaghan of Sky news was asking the Labour Party leader about youth unemployment.
‘It’s a disgrace,’ Miliband said in that nutter-on-the-bus voice of his. He started on about a lost generation and the need for ‘more investment’ and all that political class rhetoric that you know so well you could do ten minutes of it yourself on TV.
Murnaghan prodded Miliband a bit, saying if it was a lost generation then generations take some time to get going, therefore surely the last Labour government had some hand in the present situation.
Of course, Miliband wasn’t having that. And so it went on, as it does. I looked down at my eggs and they goggled up at me just like Ed.
Murnaghan could have discomfited Miliband quite easily it seemed to me, or at least have wiped the goggliness off his face.
He could have asked the leader of the Labour Party why the last government engineered a population rise of about five million though immigration, many of whom do the sort of jobs that Miliband’s lost generation could be doing while they await work as management consultants, abortion co-ordinators and equality data officers to become available.
Edward Miliband will know something of this because his brother David more or less wrote the manifestos of the new Labour era. And of course, instead of gaining experience of how the country actually works Edward spent those years as a ‘special adviser’ to Harriet Harman and Gordon Brown, in other words a civil servant well paid by us to advise those two how to burn our money, sorry I meant implement social justice.
When standing in the long queues to buy, say, overpriced coffee from eastern European baristas, I often hear political class rhetoric about unemployment in Britain ringing in my ears.
To use a clichéd bit of that rhetoric, it is the elephant in the room. Various simple solutions to this seem blindingly obvious but you will never hear them entertained by the powers that be or their shadows. Nor will the media so much as suggest it.
This is because nobody in Westminster wants to solve the problem. Perish the thought. All interested parties are gaining something from the status quo: Big business, liberals, the Left. Besides, questioning mass immigration plays badly with the yummy mummy vote, or so the political marketing men say.
This led me to another massive pachyderm pacing round in front of the telly: the difference between the rise in accommodation costs and wages.
From my own research (recollecting my hourly rate and my monthly rent) I have established that wages for non-skilled jobs have risen about 33 per cent in the past 15 years while rent has risen between 200 and 250 per cent.
This again is directly linked to a huge influx of foreign workers and students: excess manpower and a lack of living space.
But I have never heard a politician say this on television. I have never heard a thrusting, truth-seeking BBC journalist say this on Panorama. It is the great unsaid thing.
Meanwhile, generations get lost.
Murnaghan finished his interview with Miliband. Two highly paid men going about their business, which happens to be largely a sham.
I finished my goggling eggs and went to work.
Tuesday, 10 May 2011
Email to a pal concerning Osama, Obama, The Beatles, Liverpool, Chester and the Ras Prince
From: William GAZY
To: Pal
Subject: Jelly Roll and the Ras Prince
Date: Tue, 10 May 2011 14:24:09 +0100
HALLO DERE!
Many thanks for the CD. I literally hurried to put it on. What was my disappointment to find 'CD not finalized' come up on the display! Not dissing your work old boy but I really fancied a listen.
The landlady has had the builders in at Highgate doing the windows and other bits and bobs. This has taken six weeks. I have been camping out at Croydon and getting no work done, by which I mean the work of using one's imagination to create things of aesthetic or literary interest. I have been busy lately, continually diverted by the two largest claims on any Londoner's time: work and Drink. There has been precious little time for art, low or high. I did have a dalliance with one Tina Perch but what with her one-year-old child, her part time lesbianism and belief in UFOs etc I felt that a long-term relationship was not in either of our interests.
I did have a fair run of luck on the Turf. One afternoon placing six horses in six races either first, second or third which, had they all won in a £1 accumulator, and they were all capable of winning, would have netted me one million and fifty three thousand pounds. Of course, I would have had to forego the £53,000 because bookmakers' payout limit is just the round one mill. Unfortunately I had them in different trixies. Ah well - but still a good pick-up.
I was pleased to see the Americans shot Bin Laden because among other things it would in a matter of hours reveal the hypocrisy of many of my liberal acquaintances, liberals in the sense of that seam of inchoate right-on opinion that dominates broadcasting, academia and etc.
Where was the outrage at this act of western imperialist freebooting? Where were the luvvies bussed in to BBC news studios every hour to be prompted into anti-American rhetoric? Where was the outrage on Facebook? There was none to be seen among my many liberal friends, none of the hand-me-down sarcasm from the world of stand up comedy. I dare say Noam Chomsky had his say somewhere but I didn't hear about it. Of course, one expects the the head of the Church of England to side with Al Qa'eda now and one receives the news with equanimity; the gobsmacker would have been the tiniest vindication of the action delivered with impeccable Anglican tact. Why have we spent a thousand years listening to old poofs in funny hats? (Good album title)
But really, it was a muted reaction from the Righteous.
And then of course it dawned on my slow brain: Barack Obama, the President of the U.S., is a black liberal. Or is perceived to be so. Had a white man named Bush, or indeed anyone from the Republican Party been in charge then etc.
In those crazy days nine years ago you regularly heard a kind of coded praise for Bin Laden, remember? At that time his war on the U.S. appeared to some of the more addled members of the Islington Tendency as a sort of underdog football match between Crewe Alexander and Manchester United. It was years before they grasped that Bin Laden and his friends were not the sort of edgy young shavers who would dig The Clash, Mark Thomas and dub reggae. I knew a stoner bus driver a few years ago who openly admired Bin Laden, pronouncing his name fussily each time as ozammabin ladenne.
As I used to say too much: it is impossible to keep up with the cuntishness of modern opinions.
But it does make you wonder who'll the Righteous Left will blame everything on while they wait for the next Republican government to come along. I did wonder at one point if the BBC would go against all instinct and make the French out to be the wrong 'uns of the world. They had Sarko AND the Burka ban, maan, to go on.
A pal from work suggested a trip to Chester races prefaced with a jaunt round his home town of Liverpool. I had never been up the North before. Day one was L/pool. The beer was better than beer served in London, there was no doubt about that. Another northern friend had said to me: I don't like southern beer, it's warm and flat; I like northern beer, it's cold and creameh. He was bloody well right. I liked the city, what I saw of it, with its faded but grand architecture and old pubs. My Liverpudlian pal took me in the best example of an ornate Victorian pub I have ever seen: The Philharmonic Dining Rooms.
We went down Mathew St and in the fake Cavern and past the electrical sub-station which stands on the grave of the real one. There is a Beatles shop at the top which had a large poster of the bad lord Jagger in the window marked: 'was £4 now £2'.
My interest in the Beatles' music faded a long time ago and I found the area slightly sad, but we went in a couple of good pubs, one called the White Star (filled with dramatic sea pictures and four brass plaques on seats where the Beatles are supposed to have caroused, marked with their names). In another pub there was a photograph of the 'the boys' next to the corner where it had been taken. 'THIS PHOTOGRAPH WAS TAKEN HERE'. There they were aged 17 and the spot did not seem to have changed. We contemplated this for a moment and then Agadoo by Black Lace came on very loudly. The area seemed to have potential for ironists.
Later we went to an old RC church that had been converted into a bar. I forget its name but seek it out if you go up there, it is well worth seeing inside.
Chester was a nice city and the racecourse very good in its appointments but every knobhead for miles around had come. I should have realised this when agreeing to the trip, in fact I think I did but I agreed to it a year ago and clearly forgot.
We had press tickets which kept us in the good bit while the races were on. The women were very hot but there was a lot of footballers wives-a-like mutton accompanied by coked-up wrong uns in the mix. Fair enough, that's racing anywhere. But in a pub beforehand my accent had been clocked by three laddos at the bar and there'd been some mild screwing out. From that moment I realised I was a) 180 miles off the manor and b) Londoners are by and large disliked up there. I briefly considered adopting a northern accent but found I had too much pride and self-respect. I had a forecast up and had a nice pick-up on the last. As we left the racecourse it occurred to me that it was rather like being a POW on the run in Germany during the war: every time I opened my mouth it was clocked and not admiringly.
I had to get a train to Crewe, which turned out to be full of drunken chavs going back to Sheffield and similar. As the train pulled in to Crewe one of them, very drunk and half-abetted and half-restrained by his mate, tried to start a fight with me outside the toilet, which was out of order (the toilet). He grabbed hold of my hair, which was slightly bouffant, and started calling me a fucking gay cunt. I was holding him off trying to delay the full fight because I knew there was more of them in the carriage behind. Then he clocked my accent and he the abuse increased. They don't half hate Londoners! I was very calm during this, which always surprises me when I'm in real danger. Both him and his pal had had chunks out of their faces in the past so one could guess their hobbies. However they were both slight compared to me and I made up my mind to do my worst if it came to it.
I am by no means a keen fighter but I am as strong as lion, plus I'd had a few pints of Okells myself. Just then an Asian woman came along the corridor and this claimed the main antagonist's attention: he began racially abusing her in a manner to make a BNP-er blush before being dragged away by his pal. The train came to a halt and off I got. I headed for the station bar and ordered a drink at the precise moment five drunken scousers came in and clocked me and the accent. One of them did a strange silent 'square up' to me which he immediately backed off from to play pool.
By this time I felt like Sedgwick the Manufacturer in the Great Escape.
I drank my drink and thought: these young idiots are monkeys and they know they're monkeys: that's why they hate us cos we remind them of it. Caliban shrieks. Eventually I got on the train to London. I travelled virgin first class because I’d got a deal on it - £35. As I sunk into my seat, thinking ‘fucking close call’ and the fields sped by at 125mph, a stewardess comes along and asked me if I wanted a drink.
‘Got a gin and tonic?’
‘Yes,’ she said brightly. ‘You might as well have two, mightn’t you?’
That’s a good idea, I said. I asked her how much.
‘Oh there’s nothing to pay, it’s free drinks in first class.’
Thereafter it was a happy journey back to London - 90 odd mins. Pope-like, I considered kissing the platform upon arrival at Euston. I went in the Doric Arch and ordered a large VAT: seven quid! Definitely back in London. I paid up cheerily.
Rgds
WG
Friday, 22 April 2011
Cleese takes to Bath or RACIST PIE-THONN
From: William Gazy
To: Pal
Absolutely, I didn't think it needed saying. Lib Demmite he is as well! He has actively funded the pinkish political class and now moans at the world they've brought about.
The poor luvvy's down to his last £3.5million. DIDDUMS.
It will be interesting to see how the BBC handles its former star in the light of this. His remarks will be pored over at the Ministry of Truth. Poisoned umbrella tips at the ready. I suspect The Alimony Tour will now be a Channel Four broadcast.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Fri, 22 Apr 2011 12:21:59 +0100
From: Pal
Subject: Re: Further to our conversation on the bus yesterday
To: William Gazy
Well said by Cleese but slightly ironic since arguably he and his chums helped along the death of respect started by Beyond the Fringe etc. A case of 'be careful what you wish for'?
--- On Fri, 22/4/11, William Gazy wrote:
From: William Gazy
Subject: Further to our conversation on the bus yesterday
To: Pal
Date: Friday, 22 April, 2011, 11:25
'Cleese also spoke about the shift in British attitudes away from a "middle-class culture" and the emergence of a "yob culture".
He said: "There were disadvantages to the old culture, it was a bit stuffy and it was more sexist and more racist. But it was an educated and middle-class culture. Now it's a yob culture. The values are so strange."
He added that he preferred living in Bath to London because the capital no longer felt "English".
"London is no longer an English city which is why I love Bath," he said. "That's how they sold it for the Olympics, not as the capital of England but as the cosmopolitan city. I love being down in Bath because it feels like the England that I grew up in."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/celebritynews/8455538/Lord-Cleese-of-Fawlty-Towers-Why-John-Cleese-declined-a-peerage.html
As P Hitchens said: 'Only the rich will be able to escape the consequences.'
To: Pal
Absolutely, I didn't think it needed saying. Lib Demmite he is as well! He has actively funded the pinkish political class and now moans at the world they've brought about.
The poor luvvy's down to his last £3.5million. DIDDUMS.
It will be interesting to see how the BBC handles its former star in the light of this. His remarks will be pored over at the Ministry of Truth. Poisoned umbrella tips at the ready. I suspect The Alimony Tour will now be a Channel Four broadcast.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Fri, 22 Apr 2011 12:21:59 +0100
From: Pal
Subject: Re: Further to our conversation on the bus yesterday
To: William Gazy
Well said by Cleese but slightly ironic since arguably he and his chums helped along the death of respect started by Beyond the Fringe etc. A case of 'be careful what you wish for'?
--- On Fri, 22/4/11, William Gazy wrote:
From: William Gazy
Subject: Further to our conversation on the bus yesterday
To: Pal
Date: Friday, 22 April, 2011, 11:25
'Cleese also spoke about the shift in British attitudes away from a "middle-class culture" and the emergence of a "yob culture".
He said: "There were disadvantages to the old culture, it was a bit stuffy and it was more sexist and more racist. But it was an educated and middle-class culture. Now it's a yob culture. The values are so strange."
He added that he preferred living in Bath to London because the capital no longer felt "English".
"London is no longer an English city which is why I love Bath," he said. "That's how they sold it for the Olympics, not as the capital of England but as the cosmopolitan city. I love being down in Bath because it feels like the England that I grew up in."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/celebritynews/8455538/Lord-Cleese-of-Fawlty-Towers-Why-John-Cleese-declined-a-peerage.html
As P Hitchens said: 'Only the rich will be able to escape the consequences.'
Monday, 18 April 2011
Wednesday, 16 March 2011
Email to a pal re England: An Elegy by Roger Scruton
I wasn't being facetious when I said sub's disease. I think it is an occupational hazard. It's hard to say whether I really disagree with you because I read the book more than five years ago, though I have looked at bits since. Parts of it are a hard read but as I say my guess is that he wanted to lay out concrete arguments alongside metaphysical ones if you know what I mean. He knew he would be slagged because you simply cannot write a book like that with upsetting the usual suspects. I found the Guardian's review of it online. It was, naturally, an exercise in juvenile carping. Its central charge was the book contained nothing about, yes, black or brown people's 'experience of England'. The reviewer had quite forgotten Scruton's stated aim, which was not a work of s*ciol*gy but an elegy, with all the faults and strengths of an elegy.
To turn the book into a magazine feature would risk losing some detail in the concision and would simply shorten it, something I reckon Scruton is constitutionally against because he is an academic and they adore length. But more importantly it would turn the book into mere journalism, which is ephemeral. A book is a lasting statement, or so you would like to think.
I had a small correspondence with him after I read the book but when he discovered I was a journalist that was the end. He hates journalists. He says a lot of questionable things in the book and if I remember rightly tries to mount a defence of social snobbery among other silly right-wing windmill tilts. But where I agree with him and evidently some on the nominal left/liberal side - Lord £Bragg£ for one - do is that the character of the country is changing into something inane, vicious and tasteless and that socialism (his father was a socialist of the respectable 1945 variety) has as much of a hand in the change as the hated Thatcher, someone who Scruton describes as 'an awful woman'. He also eats liver and bacon, likes horses, drinks a lot and (I was pleased to discover) has similar aesthetic tastes to me, excepting Wagner on my side and rock and roll on his. He unapologetically decries modern design, modern architecture, animal rights fanatics, political correctness, Islamism, dumbing down and television and does so with arguments that stand up. This makes him an admirable figure in my view.
To turn the book into a magazine feature would risk losing some detail in the concision and would simply shorten it, something I reckon Scruton is constitutionally against because he is an academic and they adore length. But more importantly it would turn the book into mere journalism, which is ephemeral. A book is a lasting statement, or so you would like to think.
I had a small correspondence with him after I read the book but when he discovered I was a journalist that was the end. He hates journalists. He says a lot of questionable things in the book and if I remember rightly tries to mount a defence of social snobbery among other silly right-wing windmill tilts. But where I agree with him and evidently some on the nominal left/liberal side - Lord £Bragg£ for one - do is that the character of the country is changing into something inane, vicious and tasteless and that socialism (his father was a socialist of the respectable 1945 variety) has as much of a hand in the change as the hated Thatcher, someone who Scruton describes as 'an awful woman'. He also eats liver and bacon, likes horses, drinks a lot and (I was pleased to discover) has similar aesthetic tastes to me, excepting Wagner on my side and rock and roll on his. He unapologetically decries modern design, modern architecture, animal rights fanatics, political correctness, Islamism, dumbing down and television and does so with arguments that stand up. This makes him an admirable figure in my view.
Sunday, 6 March 2011
Monday, 17 January 2011
Study for The Crucifixion of St Peter
From an email to a pal:
'This is the rough i did of the crucifixion of st peter the other night. I've been thinking of doing this picture for a couple of years. It's not a Christian thing - though no one will believe that - but more an image of the calculated domestic nastiness in our own age of conflicting idelogies colliding above the chavs. I'm thinking the background should be an ordinary English tatty suburban park - green railings, maybe even a game of football in the distance...'
OK, St Peter did ask to be crucified upside down, according to the Apocrypha, but still.
Tuesday, 11 January 2011
'Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss'*
A FEW years ago I got a lot of stick off friends and enemies for saying the right-wing 'Fundamentalist Anglican' Peter Hitchens had hit the bullseye a few times when attacking new Labour in particular and the political class in general and the fashionable nonsense that had seeped into their policies.
He is far from right about everything - in fact plain wrong on many things - but when I first read his dissections of leftish middle class's doctrinal preoccupations I knew he was on to something. His jibes against New Labour and its armies of supporters, or should I say in the media, arts and local government were delicious to me: truth well-aimed - and he never gets tired of slinging it at the nicely-thank-you inverted snobs, con-men and hypocrites with which our political and civil administration is filled.
Almost everyone who gave me stick subscribed to a widespread political view which persists despite years of evidence which proves it is full of holes and cant; indeed, to use a phrase beloved of my old man, it sticks like shit to a blanket.
It is of course: Tories are scum and Labour is on the side of the angels. Oh yes, don't you worry about that.
After a long, long period where holders of that viewpoint had to keep very quiet for obvious reasons, the good times are coming back. Ed Miliband was in the Times last week denying that Labour's 13-year spending splurge on bureaucracy and civil servants had anything whatsoever to do with the vast structural deficit it faces. This was a lie. Good for Ed; he's shown himself to be cheeky, and you need to be cheeky in the political class. You need brassneck cheek.
Cameron is handing the Labour Angels another gift by bottling it on bankers' bonuses. This shows a lack of pragmatism and balls. When you add that to the Coalition's backing out on so many key areas: EU, immigration, crime, welfare reform, then stir in VAT and tax rises and you start to wonder who the hell this government is representing. Only another four years of it to go. Or is there...?
Which brings me back round to P Hitchens, who had this to say a couple of weeks ago about Dave Cameron and the yellow peril welshing us all on the immigration issue which has turned parts of country into ongoing tinder-boxes and will provide many angry British adults in the future called Osama:
Well said.
Of course, the cry of right-wing press will be heard. I prefer to take my cues from reality. Such as my father, age 74 (still at work in a manual trade, started work 1951), attending a hospital last week for a blood test which he had been told would take an hour but which took about eight hours because there was a queue of 180 people in front of him. Yes, you read that correctly.
He made a little study of the queue, a proper socialist study of nationalities and ethnicities you might call it, and to the best of his knowledge he could only discern four English people in it. Yes, yes, Harriet Harman, I bet there was loads of British passport-holders in the queue. I know which lawyers to consult to buy one as well, should I ever have need.
But well done Labour! You lived the dream. Well, you didn't live it you just inflicted it on your sainted ordinary people who you hate and call bigoted it on the rare occasions you meet them - see Gordon Brown during the election.
One day someone will write a proper history of how a bunch of smartass exam-passing machines who did PPE at Oxbridge and thought everything they read in the Economist about globalisation and Multiculturalism was true and big and clever, and how it might lead them to sing the Red Flag *and* have a platinum mastercard ('the working class? Oh they're around somewhere I'm sure...'), led them, out of sheer arrogance and greed, to create a Nowhere out of a Somewhere. And still end up in £1.6million ex-National Trust property in Dartmouth Park, North London.
Yes Mili Minor, I'm talking about you.
In trying to make Ed Miliband look a good bet for the public in four years Labour's Alistair Campbell-elect, Tom Baldwin, will have his work cut out for him. Don't get me wrong, the strategy part will be easy: gallons of the sweet wine of socialist rhetorical carping: 'there's plenty of money available for you and it's all hidden in a golden chest under David Cameron's bed along with his Eton collar'.
It is selling Ed himself to the public that will prove difficult.
However, I did not return to blogging to write about the opposition. I didn't do it when Labour were in power and now we have another bunch of overprivileged, venal, incompetent cowards in charge I intend to criticise them. I merely draw your attention to Baldwin because he appears to be one of the larger media sycophants of the Blair years and his profile is classic political class, right down to the extreme wealth, Oxford PPE qualification and the 'fanatical loathing' of Tories.
Oxbridge is good at producing such people. If only they could give them such a thorough grounding in ordinary life as they do in Keynesian economics and Marxian critical modes.
Someone called Tanya Gold, who seemed very pleased with herself, wrote the cover feature for the Sunday Times Magazine this week called Marx and Spenders - How the Left took over North London Again. Again? I think she meant that they all sulked because of the war in Iraq, but now they are all voting Labour once again, apparently. 'We're happier in opposition, aren't we?' says some organic knitwear yummy mummy Gold vox-popped in Hampstead. You know it, girl! Carping is the natural state for such people - I can handle that as long as they aren't running anything. Trouble is they *are* running everything, every civil institution bar the Cabinet. But that is another story.
Sufficey to say that Ms Gold's piece about Darmouth Park, Hampstead and Highgate (where I reside) missed the most obvious and grandest irony about it being a colony of champagne socialists. These places are nice to live in because they have resisted everything that the cultural and political Left has imposed everywhere else.
*From Won't Get Fooled Again, words and music P. Townshend 1971
He is far from right about everything - in fact plain wrong on many things - but when I first read his dissections of leftish middle class's doctrinal preoccupations I knew he was on to something. His jibes against New Labour and its armies of supporters, or should I say in the media, arts and local government were delicious to me: truth well-aimed - and he never gets tired of slinging it at the nicely-thank-you inverted snobs, con-men and hypocrites with which our political and civil administration is filled.
Almost everyone who gave me stick subscribed to a widespread political view which persists despite years of evidence which proves it is full of holes and cant; indeed, to use a phrase beloved of my old man, it sticks like shit to a blanket.
It is of course: Tories are scum and Labour is on the side of the angels. Oh yes, don't you worry about that.
After a long, long period where holders of that viewpoint had to keep very quiet for obvious reasons, the good times are coming back. Ed Miliband was in the Times last week denying that Labour's 13-year spending splurge on bureaucracy and civil servants had anything whatsoever to do with the vast structural deficit it faces. This was a lie. Good for Ed; he's shown himself to be cheeky, and you need to be cheeky in the political class. You need brassneck cheek.
Cameron is handing the Labour Angels another gift by bottling it on bankers' bonuses. This shows a lack of pragmatism and balls. When you add that to the Coalition's backing out on so many key areas: EU, immigration, crime, welfare reform, then stir in VAT and tax rises and you start to wonder who the hell this government is representing. Only another four years of it to go. Or is there...?
Which brings me back round to P Hitchens, who had this to say a couple of weeks ago about Dave Cameron and the yellow peril welshing us all on the immigration issue which has turned parts of country into ongoing tinder-boxes and will provide many angry British adults in the future called Osama:
'...the modernised Tory Party, just like its New Labour twin, actively favours large-scale migration. Rich young careerists in pleasant parts of London – who form the core of all our establishment parties – couldn’t function without the cheap servants and cheap restaurants that immigration brings.
Not for them the other side of immigration – the transformation of familiar neighbourhoods into foreign territory. Not for them the schools where many pupils cannot speak English, and the overloaded public services. Not for them the mosque and the madrassa where the church and the pub used to be. Not that they mind that so much. These people have no special loyalty to this country, nor much love for it. They are not significantly different from the Blairite apparatchik Andrew Neather, who last year unwisely said openly what such people have long thought privately.
Let me remind you that he spoke of ‘a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the UK Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural’. And that he recalled coming away from high-level discussions ‘with a clear sense that the policy was intended – even if this wasn’t its main -purpose – to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date’.
Well, doesn’t Mr Cameron also like to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date? I think he does. And of course anyone who complained could be (and always will be) smeared as a ‘bigot’. In fact, the issue long ago ceased having anything to do with skin colour. We have many black and brown Britons who have, over time, become as British as I am – though alas this is less and less the case because the curse of multiculturalism has prevented proper integration, as has the huge size of the recent influx.'
Well said.
Of course, the cry of right-wing press will be heard. I prefer to take my cues from reality. Such as my father, age 74 (still at work in a manual trade, started work 1951), attending a hospital last week for a blood test which he had been told would take an hour but which took about eight hours because there was a queue of 180 people in front of him. Yes, you read that correctly.
He made a little study of the queue, a proper socialist study of nationalities and ethnicities you might call it, and to the best of his knowledge he could only discern four English people in it. Yes, yes, Harriet Harman, I bet there was loads of British passport-holders in the queue. I know which lawyers to consult to buy one as well, should I ever have need.
But well done Labour! You lived the dream. Well, you didn't live it you just inflicted it on your sainted ordinary people who you hate and call bigoted it on the rare occasions you meet them - see Gordon Brown during the election.
One day someone will write a proper history of how a bunch of smartass exam-passing machines who did PPE at Oxbridge and thought everything they read in the Economist about globalisation and Multiculturalism was true and big and clever, and how it might lead them to sing the Red Flag *and* have a platinum mastercard ('the working class? Oh they're around somewhere I'm sure...'), led them, out of sheer arrogance and greed, to create a Nowhere out of a Somewhere. And still end up in £1.6million ex-National Trust property in Dartmouth Park, North London.
Yes Mili Minor, I'm talking about you.
In trying to make Ed Miliband look a good bet for the public in four years Labour's Alistair Campbell-elect, Tom Baldwin, will have his work cut out for him. Don't get me wrong, the strategy part will be easy: gallons of the sweet wine of socialist rhetorical carping: 'there's plenty of money available for you and it's all hidden in a golden chest under David Cameron's bed along with his Eton collar'.
It is selling Ed himself to the public that will prove difficult.
However, I did not return to blogging to write about the opposition. I didn't do it when Labour were in power and now we have another bunch of overprivileged, venal, incompetent cowards in charge I intend to criticise them. I merely draw your attention to Baldwin because he appears to be one of the larger media sycophants of the Blair years and his profile is classic political class, right down to the extreme wealth, Oxford PPE qualification and the 'fanatical loathing' of Tories.
Oxbridge is good at producing such people. If only they could give them such a thorough grounding in ordinary life as they do in Keynesian economics and Marxian critical modes.
Someone called Tanya Gold, who seemed very pleased with herself, wrote the cover feature for the Sunday Times Magazine this week called Marx and Spenders - How the Left took over North London Again. Again? I think she meant that they all sulked because of the war in Iraq, but now they are all voting Labour once again, apparently. 'We're happier in opposition, aren't we?' says some organic knitwear yummy mummy Gold vox-popped in Hampstead. You know it, girl! Carping is the natural state for such people - I can handle that as long as they aren't running anything. Trouble is they *are* running everything, every civil institution bar the Cabinet. But that is another story.
Sufficey to say that Ms Gold's piece about Darmouth Park, Hampstead and Highgate (where I reside) missed the most obvious and grandest irony about it being a colony of champagne socialists. These places are nice to live in because they have resisted everything that the cultural and political Left has imposed everywhere else.
*From Won't Get Fooled Again, words and music P. Townshend 1971
Saturday, 1 January 2011
Email to Mark Brentano
You dear old boy,
I hope you have recovered yourself. I was on a skin-shedder from Boxing Day (which didn't stop me taking £75 quid off the relatives at roulette. Joe Pesci accent: you better do Nicky cos if you don't he'll play the alley bets till he beats you on the margins. Suggestion: Line for a rock and roll song: Play the Alley Bets). The 'Flu still hasn't entirely removed itself from my body but I feel a human being once again. I couldn't get my arms over my head on Wednesday. Didn't stop me taking a turn down to the Royal Standard though, where I consumed three pints of E.S.B. to get my bowels working again and throw something heavy at the contagion. It warmed me slightly and opened up the Limpopo but it was mere palliative care.
I have spent the week reading K Richards' memoirs and they are fun that's for sure. It's all about the turn of phrase. There are not many books which contain astute observations on heroin, Gram Parsons and Bexleyheath Tennis Club. There is a larf or a smile on almost every page.
All in all it puts me in the right frame of mind to play a bit of guitar in your proposed combo. Last time I was on stage was playing the ukulele at an open mic 5 years ago so what I may bring is debatable but maybe me and the serb can weave it up.
Richards says the Altamont fracas was largely caused by the vast amounts of two brands of cheap fortified wine the audience was consuming. One was good old Thunderbird the other Ripple. Thunderbird and Ripple - quite a good name for something.
He also remembers the Stones' piano player and road manager turning to him at Altamont and saying: 'Getting a bit hairy, Keith.' To which the great man responded: 'We've just got to brass it out.'
Like so many areas of life, eh?
See you in the bar and happy new year,
N
I hope you have recovered yourself. I was on a skin-shedder from Boxing Day (which didn't stop me taking £75 quid off the relatives at roulette. Joe Pesci accent: you better do Nicky cos if you don't he'll play the alley bets till he beats you on the margins. Suggestion: Line for a rock and roll song: Play the Alley Bets). The 'Flu still hasn't entirely removed itself from my body but I feel a human being once again. I couldn't get my arms over my head on Wednesday. Didn't stop me taking a turn down to the Royal Standard though, where I consumed three pints of E.S.B. to get my bowels working again and throw something heavy at the contagion. It warmed me slightly and opened up the Limpopo but it was mere palliative care.
I have spent the week reading K Richards' memoirs and they are fun that's for sure. It's all about the turn of phrase. There are not many books which contain astute observations on heroin, Gram Parsons and Bexleyheath Tennis Club. There is a larf or a smile on almost every page.
All in all it puts me in the right frame of mind to play a bit of guitar in your proposed combo. Last time I was on stage was playing the ukulele at an open mic 5 years ago so what I may bring is debatable but maybe me and the serb can weave it up.
Richards says the Altamont fracas was largely caused by the vast amounts of two brands of cheap fortified wine the audience was consuming. One was good old Thunderbird the other Ripple. Thunderbird and Ripple - quite a good name for something.
He also remembers the Stones' piano player and road manager turning to him at Altamont and saying: 'Getting a bit hairy, Keith.' To which the great man responded: 'We've just got to brass it out.'
Like so many areas of life, eh?
See you in the bar and happy new year,
N
Sunday, 19 December 2010
This is what gets on my wick about the assumptions of Guardian music writers (I have known one or two):
Par from Beefheart's obit:
No, they haven't returned. Old fashioned showbiz values meant the performers you see on X Factor would have been booed off. Simple as that.
'The 60s rock revolution' was balanced on the despised 'old fashioned showbiz values' in the sense that you had to have a talent honed through discipline, you had to be 'good'. You don't anymore and that is more a result of 60s cultural relativism, digging a pony as Lennon had it, than Cowell's shit-peddling.
I was sad to hear of Beefheart's death. I've long been a fan, even though I think he was a bit of a charlatan.
Par from Beefheart's obit:
'Captain Beefheart was also a visionary in one other, often overlooked, way: he hymned the natural world in his own inimitably odd way on songs such as My Human Gets Me Blues and Wild Life. He was an ecological warrior long before it was fashionable. His death, after a long period of self-enforced seclusion, comes at a time when it is difficult to imagine anyone as eccentric – and as eccentrically gifted – finding a place in contemporary pop culture. In the era of The X Factor the old-fashioned showbusiness values that the 1960s rock revolution was meant to have swept away have returned with a vengeance. There is no place now in pop for the madcap and the beautifully demented, but there is always Trout Mask Replica. Approach with caution.'
In the era of The X Factor the old-fashioned showbusiness values that the 1960s rock revolution was meant to have swept away have returned with a vengeance.
No, they haven't returned. Old fashioned showbiz values meant the performers you see on X Factor would have been booed off. Simple as that.
'The 60s rock revolution' was balanced on the despised 'old fashioned showbiz values' in the sense that you had to have a talent honed through discipline, you had to be 'good'. You don't anymore and that is more a result of 60s cultural relativism, digging a pony as Lennon had it, than Cowell's shit-peddling.
I was sad to hear of Beefheart's death. I've long been a fan, even though I think he was a bit of a charlatan.
Wednesday, 15 December 2010
Monday, 13 December 2010
Email to a pal re Melanie Phillips
THEY all slag her off but I read her book Londonistan and everything she says in it is borne out by current events - London and environs is the biggest breeding ground for Islamic terrorism outside the Orient* and the British public are paying for it with their taxes through benefits, grants and paying for the EU to build a legal system that gives protection to the radicals. No surprise the exploding dimwit in Sweden was radicalised here. She made the point that when the mullahs came here in the 80s, the Govt and MI5 made the basic error of thinking they would only cause trouble abroad so let 'em get on with it. For this reason I wrote to her and suggested she should use a George Orwell quote from his essay England, Your England, as an epigraph for the paperback edition:
Of course, Orwell's next line was: 'But it plays its part in the English mystique, and the intellectuals who have tried to break it down have generally done more harm than good.'
He goes on to say, rather wonderfully:
Still a recognisable picture, mutatis mutandis and accepting that they now have power, eh?
The essay can be read here.
*A word I have started to use again as it apparently offends both Islamic and Marxist mullahs. As a kid it was a word I enjoyed (Biggles in the Orient, for example and the whole mysterious Chinaman trend in adventure fiction). I even considered supporting Leyton Orient because of my liking for it.
'The insularity of the English, their refusal to take foreigners seriously, is a folly that has to be paid for very heavily from time to time.'I thought of that line on the 7th July 2005.
Of course, Orwell's next line was: 'But it plays its part in the English mystique, and the intellectuals who have tried to break it down have generally done more harm than good.'
He goes on to say, rather wonderfully:
'The mentality of the English left-wing intelligentsia can be studied in half a dozen weekly and monthly papers. The immediately striking thing about all these papers is their generally negative, querulous attitude, their complete lack at all times of any constructive suggestion. There is little in them except the irresponsible carping of people who have never been and never expect to be in a position of power. Another marked characteristic is the emotional shallowness of people who live in a world of ideas and have little contact with physical reality. Many intellectuals of the Left were flabbily pacifist up to 1935, shrieked for war against Germany in the years 1935-9, and then promptly cooled off when the war started. It is broadly though not precisely true that the people who were most ‘anti-Fascist’ during the Spanish Civil War are most defeatist now. And underlying this is the really important fact about so many of the English intelligentsia – their severance from the common culture of the country.
In intention, at any rate, the English intelligentsia are Europeanized. They take their cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow. In the general patriotism of the country they form a sort of island of dissident thought. England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings. It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during ‘God save the King’ than of stealing from a poor box. All through the critical years many left-wingers were chipping away at English morale, trying to spread an outlook that was sometimes squashily pacifist, sometimes violently pro-Russian, but always anti-British.'
Still a recognisable picture, mutatis mutandis and accepting that they now have power, eh?
The essay can be read here.
*A word I have started to use again as it apparently offends both Islamic and Marxist mullahs. As a kid it was a word I enjoyed (Biggles in the Orient, for example and the whole mysterious Chinaman trend in adventure fiction). I even considered supporting Leyton Orient because of my liking for it.
Saturday, 4 December 2010
Friday, 3 December 2010
The Philosophy of Losing
‘HABIT is stronger than reason.’ So said the philosopher George Santayana. The aphorism could well do with being posted in prominent positions everywhere bets are taken on horses.
I did not wish to burden you with a disquisition on horse-playing this early in my return to the online fold, but feel what I have to say will benefit me (by the action of writing it down) and you if you ever decide to gamble on racing yourself.
I had planned a little canter round the subject of what happens to revered American film directors once they’ve got their Oscar and have entered their seventh decade, but that can wait.
I don’t know if Santayana was a racing fan. It’s possible, I suppose. He knocked about Europe a fair bit and lived in Italy for years. He might possibly have had a few lire on the Palio. However, his little Christmas cracker motto nicely illustrates the primary error of the average punting mind.
Every punter has a bad habit. Indeed most punters simply have bad punting habits full stop. Mine is doing each-way trixies (A multiple bet consisting of three selections covered by three doubles and a treble – four bets. Each way makes eight bets. We’ll come back to trixies another time, for they are rivalled only by women as vehicles for inflicting joy and misery).
The first, foremost and worst punting habit is the one that ensures there is a profitable betting shop situated roughly between every pub and bank in England – the indiscriminate backing of favourites.
Happily it is not bad punting habit of mine. Though I have plenty.
If favourites won all the time there would be no racing and no betting. You cannot ‘buy money’ by lumping on short-priced favourites. OK, it can be done sometimes and is done, but as a strategy it is foolhardy and will send you to the poorhouse in short order. Yet the same people go back day after day to shove their hard-earned or not so hard-earned money at the cashiers for the ‘good thing’, the the jolly old favourite. Habit proving very much stronger than reason.
You are more likely to find me having unprotected sex with an African prostitute than putting a packet on a nag at evens or odds-on.
The following anecdote should prove nicely instructive about the folly of backing favourites.
I was walking to work in central London a couple of weeks ago when I remembered there was quite an interesting-looking race on the Newbury card that afternoon. That particular jumps meeting always has some class action and is usually worth getting involved in. I entered a betting shop in Camden Town a few minutes before the start of a novices' Chase.
The first thing I noticed was a young man gabbling into his mobile phone with a betting slip in front of him which had ‘Spirit River, £200 win’ written on it in an unsteady hand. Oh dear, I thought.
The place was full of Chinese and Poles plus the usual pensioners and builders. They were all lumping money on the favourite, a handsome, powerful-looking French beast, the aforementioned Spirit River, trained by the very clever Nicky Henderson (who trains the Queen's National Hunt prospects). With one eye I watched Spirit River cantering down to the start on the main tv set and with the other, so to speak, I had a glance at the form.
I’m not the greatest judge of equine physique but there was no doubt Spirit River was the best horse in the race and would win if he put in a clear round over fences. He looked as if he would have a high cruising speed and plenty in the tank.
It was a novice chase, so they were all hurdlers looking to score over fences for the first time. Hurdles are much different from fences. Fences are bigger and more of a challenge. If a horse is used to lifting his legs to a certain height he may find he has a surprise when going over fences in a race scenario. However, it was clear everyone in the shop and at the racecourse had elected to believe that a good hurdler will be a good chaser first time out despite plenty of historical evidence to the contrary.
Paul Nicholls’ well-regarded Celestial Halo was also making his chase debut but I didn’t fancy him over fences just yet. A tricky horse, he is.
My eye was taken by Cois Farraig, the only horse in the race with point-to-point experience. Point-to-points being amateur steeplechases.
At 10/1 and with some fence experience he looked like he might be worth a bet. I didn’t expect him to beat Spirit River in terms of racing, but in terms of jumping. If he could jump better than Spirit River – if the favourite fell, to be precise – then he was in with a serious chance I reckoned.
Meanwhile, money continued to pile on the favourite, Spirit River, which was 10/11. The young man approached the counter and pushed £200 under the window. Oh dear, I thought.
Off they went. Cois Farraig led until the fourth fence when Spirit River headed him. I felt a tad gloomy because Spirit River was doing OK. In fact I was on the verge of throwing my betting slip away. The Sporting Life’s report tells what happened to the favourite next with greater concision than I can hope to rival:
When poor old Spirit River fell a great oriental lamentation spread across the room, punctuated with Polish oaths. I simultaneously yelled, with a bit of mockery in my voice: ‘There’s no easy money in this game, fellas!’
The Poles regarded me sulkily for that. The Chinese said nothing. They simply shouted at each other and the screen. But I was busy watching my horse, which had looked as if its jockey, Dominic Elsworth, was easing it down for place money in the wake of the favourite. Now Spirit River was out of it every other jockey in the race suddenly realised they might be set fair for some of the £25,000 prize money. Cois Farraig picked up sharply, was
I did a little dance in front of screens as I sometimes do under those circumstances.
The race announcer, who’d said he’d backed Spirit River, sounded a bit gutted when talking the race over. No one but me was at the pay-out window. ‘Well done,’ the commentator said, ‘if you picked that one out.’
‘I did!’ I announced to the shop before toddling past them all – including the now dazed-looking youth who put £200 quid on Spirit River – back on to Camden High Street to continue my journey to work. A profitable little diversion.
But the nub is that the following day, the following race even, 90 per cent of the punters in the shop would be back on the favourite, lumping on short price certainty. Habit being stronger than reason.
Spirit River is once to keep an eye on. He’ll win a chase soon enough.
As I walked along chuckling a bit, another Santayana quote suggested itself as a betting shop legend, perhaps embossed on brass plaques above the main screen: ‘If pain could have cured us we should long ago have been saved.’
I did not wish to burden you with a disquisition on horse-playing this early in my return to the online fold, but feel what I have to say will benefit me (by the action of writing it down) and you if you ever decide to gamble on racing yourself.
I had planned a little canter round the subject of what happens to revered American film directors once they’ve got their Oscar and have entered their seventh decade, but that can wait.
I don’t know if Santayana was a racing fan. It’s possible, I suppose. He knocked about Europe a fair bit and lived in Italy for years. He might possibly have had a few lire on the Palio. However, his little Christmas cracker motto nicely illustrates the primary error of the average punting mind.
Every punter has a bad habit. Indeed most punters simply have bad punting habits full stop. Mine is doing each-way trixies (A multiple bet consisting of three selections covered by three doubles and a treble – four bets. Each way makes eight bets. We’ll come back to trixies another time, for they are rivalled only by women as vehicles for inflicting joy and misery).
The first, foremost and worst punting habit is the one that ensures there is a profitable betting shop situated roughly between every pub and bank in England – the indiscriminate backing of favourites.
Happily it is not bad punting habit of mine. Though I have plenty.
If favourites won all the time there would be no racing and no betting. You cannot ‘buy money’ by lumping on short-priced favourites. OK, it can be done sometimes and is done, but as a strategy it is foolhardy and will send you to the poorhouse in short order. Yet the same people go back day after day to shove their hard-earned or not so hard-earned money at the cashiers for the ‘good thing’, the the jolly old favourite. Habit proving very much stronger than reason.
You are more likely to find me having unprotected sex with an African prostitute than putting a packet on a nag at evens or odds-on.
The following anecdote should prove nicely instructive about the folly of backing favourites.
I was walking to work in central London a couple of weeks ago when I remembered there was quite an interesting-looking race on the Newbury card that afternoon. That particular jumps meeting always has some class action and is usually worth getting involved in. I entered a betting shop in Camden Town a few minutes before the start of a novices' Chase.
The first thing I noticed was a young man gabbling into his mobile phone with a betting slip in front of him which had ‘Spirit River, £200 win’ written on it in an unsteady hand. Oh dear, I thought.
The place was full of Chinese and Poles plus the usual pensioners and builders. They were all lumping money on the favourite, a handsome, powerful-looking French beast, the aforementioned Spirit River, trained by the very clever Nicky Henderson (who trains the Queen's National Hunt prospects). With one eye I watched Spirit River cantering down to the start on the main tv set and with the other, so to speak, I had a glance at the form.
I’m not the greatest judge of equine physique but there was no doubt Spirit River was the best horse in the race and would win if he put in a clear round over fences. He looked as if he would have a high cruising speed and plenty in the tank.
It was a novice chase, so they were all hurdlers looking to score over fences for the first time. Hurdles are much different from fences. Fences are bigger and more of a challenge. If a horse is used to lifting his legs to a certain height he may find he has a surprise when going over fences in a race scenario. However, it was clear everyone in the shop and at the racecourse had elected to believe that a good hurdler will be a good chaser first time out despite plenty of historical evidence to the contrary.
Paul Nicholls’ well-regarded Celestial Halo was also making his chase debut but I didn’t fancy him over fences just yet. A tricky horse, he is.
My eye was taken by Cois Farraig, the only horse in the race with point-to-point experience. Point-to-points being amateur steeplechases.
At 10/1 and with some fence experience he looked like he might be worth a bet. I didn’t expect him to beat Spirit River in terms of racing, but in terms of jumping. If he could jump better than Spirit River – if the favourite fell, to be precise – then he was in with a serious chance I reckoned.
Meanwhile, money continued to pile on the favourite, Spirit River, which was 10/11. The young man approached the counter and pushed £200 under the window. Oh dear, I thought.
Off they went. Cois Farraig led until the fourth fence when Spirit River headed him. I felt a tad gloomy because Spirit River was doing OK. In fact I was on the verge of throwing my betting slip away. The Sporting Life’s report tells what happened to the favourite next with greater concision than I can hope to rival:
‘Led 4th, blundered and fell 11th. Opened 11/10 touched 11/10. £1000-£800 (x3) £500-£400 (x4) £1200-£1000 £1100-£1000 (x2) £550-£500 £473-£400 £1000-£1000 £500-£550’The figures that follow the description are a record of some of the larger punts made with bookies in the betting ring at Newbury.
When poor old Spirit River fell a great oriental lamentation spread across the room, punctuated with Polish oaths. I simultaneously yelled, with a bit of mockery in my voice: ‘There’s no easy money in this game, fellas!’
The Poles regarded me sulkily for that. The Chinese said nothing. They simply shouted at each other and the screen. But I was busy watching my horse, which had looked as if its jockey, Dominic Elsworth, was easing it down for place money in the wake of the favourite. Now Spirit River was out of it every other jockey in the race suddenly realised they might be set fair for some of the £25,000 prize money. Cois Farraig picked up sharply, was
‘slightly hampered 11th, led 12th, driven after 2 out, stayed on well’to win.
I did a little dance in front of screens as I sometimes do under those circumstances.
The race announcer, who’d said he’d backed Spirit River, sounded a bit gutted when talking the race over. No one but me was at the pay-out window. ‘Well done,’ the commentator said, ‘if you picked that one out.’
‘I did!’ I announced to the shop before toddling past them all – including the now dazed-looking youth who put £200 quid on Spirit River – back on to Camden High Street to continue my journey to work. A profitable little diversion.
But the nub is that the following day, the following race even, 90 per cent of the punters in the shop would be back on the favourite, lumping on short price certainty. Habit being stronger than reason.
Spirit River is once to keep an eye on. He’ll win a chase soon enough.
As I walked along chuckling a bit, another Santayana quote suggested itself as a betting shop legend, perhaps embossed on brass plaques above the main screen: ‘If pain could have cured us we should long ago have been saved.’
Tuesday, 30 November 2010
The Return
DEAR readers, I do apologise for cutting off like that back in May but I trust you won’t hold it against me. You did not have to be a psychologist to realise that the last government had started to annoy me a bit too much. I needed a rest quite frankly.
However, you have to keep your hand in where writing is concerned and so, I reasoned, what better way to discipline one’s thoughts than reviving the old blog? Andrew Marr doesn’t like them, so that’s a point in their favour straight away.
In the intervening six months some things have changed and some have not, as things in life tend to. I have moved to Highgate, North London, from Croydon, South London. I did not set out to live ‘up there with all them pop stars and celebrities’ as a cab driver recently put it, but by chance I did and I find it rather agreeable, far more so than Croydon, a town where the worst mistakes of capitalism and socialism meet and hold on tight to each other like comic drunks on ice.
I still work for a national tabloid and I still like to mouth off about politics and culture. But you will have noticed that this blog is no longer called Better Than a Dead Lion.
My circumstances and my approach have changed and I feel this demands a different title. Kolley Kibber is of course the nom de plume, so to speak, of Fred Hale, the Daily Messenger journalist who is murdered by Pinkie Brown at the beginning of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock for exposing a slot machine racket. The above picture shows Alan Wheatley playing Hale in the film version, a favourite of mine.
Hale is also a keen follower of the Turf, tipping Ida Arnold the winning Black Boy at 10/1. I myself have a interest in racing and I will write here occasionally on my punting adventures and reflections on form study. Racing, and gambling on racing, often has a way of illuminating, or rather complimenting, what the great writers and philosophers have had to say about existence.
Greene explains Kolley Kibber as a preface to the novel:
I think the blog will be more descriptive of a life led than just the old soapbox but you know me. This government is starting to look like it could end up as bigger disaster as Project Blair, and the boy Ed – whose £1.6million ex-National Trust house is not far away from where I live and Marx lies – shows no sign of bring sense to the Labour Party.
And to finish, the opening page of Brighton Rock, one of the great openings I reckon:
However, you have to keep your hand in where writing is concerned and so, I reasoned, what better way to discipline one’s thoughts than reviving the old blog? Andrew Marr doesn’t like them, so that’s a point in their favour straight away.
In the intervening six months some things have changed and some have not, as things in life tend to. I have moved to Highgate, North London, from Croydon, South London. I did not set out to live ‘up there with all them pop stars and celebrities’ as a cab driver recently put it, but by chance I did and I find it rather agreeable, far more so than Croydon, a town where the worst mistakes of capitalism and socialism meet and hold on tight to each other like comic drunks on ice.
I still work for a national tabloid and I still like to mouth off about politics and culture. But you will have noticed that this blog is no longer called Better Than a Dead Lion.
My circumstances and my approach have changed and I feel this demands a different title. Kolley Kibber is of course the nom de plume, so to speak, of Fred Hale, the Daily Messenger journalist who is murdered by Pinkie Brown at the beginning of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock for exposing a slot machine racket. The above picture shows Alan Wheatley playing Hale in the film version, a favourite of mine.
Hale is also a keen follower of the Turf, tipping Ida Arnold the winning Black Boy at 10/1. I myself have a interest in racing and I will write here occasionally on my punting adventures and reflections on form study. Racing, and gambling on racing, often has a way of illuminating, or rather complimenting, what the great writers and philosophers have had to say about existence.
Greene explains Kolley Kibber as a preface to the novel:
During the summer season in England certainThis blog is a sort of Kolley Kibber route card left on the internet, if that is not too fanciful; reports from wherever my mind or body wanders. In the film of Brighton Rock, when Hale leaves a card on the magazine trolley at WHSmith's at Brighton Station, you can just spot 'Kolley Kibber Adventure Card' printed on it, so that gives me my title.
popular newspapers organize treasure hunts at
the seaside. They publish the photograph of a re-
porter and print his itinerary at the particular
town he is visiting. Anyone who, while carrying
a copy of the paper, addresses him, usually under
some fantastic name, in a set form of words, re-
ceives a money prize; he also distributes along his
route cards which can be exchanged for smaller
prizes. Next day in the paper the reporter de-
scribes the chase. Of course, the character of Hale
is not drawn from that of any actual newspaper-
man.
I think the blog will be more descriptive of a life led than just the old soapbox but you know me. This government is starting to look like it could end up as bigger disaster as Project Blair, and the boy Ed – whose £1.6million ex-National Trust house is not far away from where I live and Marx lies – shows no sign of bring sense to the Labour Party.
And to finish, the opening page of Brighton Rock, one of the great openings I reckon:
HALE knew they meant to murder him beforeI hope you few, you happy few, are still there to read this blog.
he had been in Brighton three hours. With his
inky fingers and his bitten nails, his manner
cynical and nervous, anybody could tell he didn't be-
long belong to the early summer sun, the cool Whit-
sun wind off the sea, the holiday crowd. They came in
by train from Victoria every five minutes, rocked down
Queen's Road standing on the tops of the little local
trams, stepped off in bewildered multitudes into fresh
and glittering air : the new silver paint sparkled on the
piers, the cream houses ran away into the west like a
pale Victorian water-colour; a race in miniature mo-
tors, a band playing, flower gardens in bloom below
the front, an aeroplane advertising something for the
health in pale vanishing clouds across the sky.
It had seemed quite easy to Hale to be lost in
Brighton. Fifty thousand people besides himself were
down for the day, and for quite a while he gave him-
self up to the good day, drinking gins and tonics wher-
ever his programme allowed. For he had to stick closely
to a programme : from ten till eleven Queen's Road and
Castle Square, from eleven till twelve the Aquarium
and Palace Pier, twelve till one the front between the
Old Ship and West Pier, back for lunch between one
and two in any restaurant he chose round the Castle
Square, and after that he had to make his way all down
the parade to West Pier and then to the station by the
Hove streets. These were the limits of his absurd and
widely advertised sentry go.
Advertised on every Messenger poster : "Kolley Kib-
ber in Brighton today."In his pocket he had a packet
of cards to distribute in hidden places along his route :
those who found them would receive ten shillings from
the Messenger, but the big prize was reserved for who-
ever challenged Hale in the proper form of words and
with a copy of the Messenger in his hand : "You are
Mr. Kolley Kibber. I claim the Daily Messenger prize."
Tuesday, 11 May 2010
1997-2010
'As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade...
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.'
WH Auden, September 1, 1939
Monday, 10 May 2010
Brown Trousers Time
I said all along that Brown wouldn't go quietly. When he made his speech this afternoon outside No.10 I was in the newsroom of a national newspaper. Gasps and incredulous laughter swept across the room. Of course, this was mostly journalistic lipsmacking at the feast of nonsense to come and all the good copy to be derived from it. But there was also a genuine sense of disbelief.
Someone turned to me, a Labour supporter as it happens, and said: 'That's the most insane thing I've ever heard.'
But it was no surprise to me. What, did they really think an arch-control freak like Brown would just say ta-ta? The defining characteristic of the modern Labour Party is a total lack of respect for constitutional normality: the whole mechanism of civil governance is there to be raped as expedience demands.
Only the other week I'd had a conversation in the pub with the same colleague during which I'd advanced my theory that Brown is mentally ill and unstable, as well as being a Communist.
'In what way,' said someone drinking with us, who regards himself, with some good reason, as a political specialist, 'is Brown a Communist.'
'Emotionally,' I replied.
But they were not up for that.
It seems obvious to me that Clegg will side with Labour - a window of opportunity lies in that direction: a voting system that will keep the Tories permanently out of office. Clegg must know that the Tories will never give him anything much on voting reform; turkeys don't vote for Christmas.
In the background, Mandelson politicks - the ol intrigant engineering the last great rolls of the dice to build a thousand-year Blairite reich with Cleggy boy and finally dance on England's grave.
Someone turned to me, a Labour supporter as it happens, and said: 'That's the most insane thing I've ever heard.'
But it was no surprise to me. What, did they really think an arch-control freak like Brown would just say ta-ta? The defining characteristic of the modern Labour Party is a total lack of respect for constitutional normality: the whole mechanism of civil governance is there to be raped as expedience demands.
Only the other week I'd had a conversation in the pub with the same colleague during which I'd advanced my theory that Brown is mentally ill and unstable, as well as being a Communist.
'In what way,' said someone drinking with us, who regards himself, with some good reason, as a political specialist, 'is Brown a Communist.'
'Emotionally,' I replied.
But they were not up for that.
It seems obvious to me that Clegg will side with Labour - a window of opportunity lies in that direction: a voting system that will keep the Tories permanently out of office. Clegg must know that the Tories will never give him anything much on voting reform; turkeys don't vote for Christmas.
In the background, Mandelson politicks - the ol intrigant engineering the last great rolls of the dice to build a thousand-year Blairite reich with Cleggy boy and finally dance on England's grave.
The Rat Parliament ii
I haven't written anything on here for a month or more because I was sick of politicians and related subjects. In fact I had resolved to close this blog down and put my efforts to more rewarding activities.
But the hung parliament is worth a few lines.
Cameron lost the election because he listened to Steve Hilton and Andy Coulson, the marketing men who called the shots on his campaign. They insisted he mouth liberal platitudes to capture the wavering Blairite vote. If Coulson and Hilton ever got their noses out of Notting Hill and saw how real people on average salaries are talking they would have known two things: one, the political attitudes of the young are created largely by 'Uni'. That is to say a decaff Marxoid reading of recent social history in which Margaret Thatcher is regarded as the antichrist. They will not vote Tory because of this and because of being spoonfed the same attitudes via BBC drama and others bits of pop culture. They cannot be wooed by boasting about gay marriages and black candidates.
Secondly, what Cameron lost by 'alienating' the youth and female vote in south by talking straight he could have won back with handsome interest in the North. I don't think it is an exaggeration to say he could have rampaged round the North on the issues that Gillian Duffy raised with Gordon Brown on that fateful afternoon. But these are politicians who only like to gamble with your money not their chance of power.
Cameron will now be firmly in the sights of the Tory Right-Wing.
The result of this election is that the Tories will never govern with a majority again. At least, not until the Union is broken up. Whatever farcical arrangments are announced today, the government will be weak, divided and vulnerable and will be disposed of in due course. Any concessions on voting reform will only bring about the Tories' end more swiftly. I am not overly troubled by the Tories going another step on their way to oblivion; but the fact is that if they now shrivel and make a Faustian pact with any sort of proportional representation then Mandelson's idea of perpetuating Project Blair/Brown through a 'progressive alliance' of LibDems and Blairites becomes a reality and that is not a government I wish to live under. The quickest way to see this country go the way of Greece, Spain and Portugal would be to have a Lib-Lab coalition. The IMF will be a frequent visitor to these shores.
As for Labour, well. I was quite shocked by my friends' sentimentality about them. There can be no doubt they are one of the worst British governments of the modern era, whose cv of folly, corruption, warmongering, incompetence, arrogance and criminality is breathtaking. And yet people, intelligent people, were blithely prepared to vote for them once again. Apart from self-interest - some of them work in the Public Sector - I am at a loss to understand the motivation. Concern for the poor? The working man has been shafted by 13 years of Labour quite as much as they were under 18 years of Toryism. So why this devotion? Because 'they mean well'?
This is the ultimate sentimentality, isn't it? Judging a government on its *intentions* and ignoring the results.
Unlike the Tories, Labour will win again. We live in an era of infantilised minds easily gratified and hostile to complicated ideas or arguments. Someone else will always pay; cake can be had and eaten always; nasty decisions need never be taken. This is the view that Blair triumphed on and Gordon Brown presents to his client base of civil servants and welfare claimants under the 'invesment' rhetoric. Anyone who publishes anything to the contrary is a stooge of the right-wing press.
Clegg. The less said the better, really. Blair redux. They say Cameron will offer him the job of Home Secretary. There's a thought to make you shudder. See my analysis of the LibDems' manifesto from last year for a taste of how well they'll fit into a Tory cabinet.
Let's hope things will be OK. Or, see you in the riots.
But the hung parliament is worth a few lines.
Cameron lost the election because he listened to Steve Hilton and Andy Coulson, the marketing men who called the shots on his campaign. They insisted he mouth liberal platitudes to capture the wavering Blairite vote. If Coulson and Hilton ever got their noses out of Notting Hill and saw how real people on average salaries are talking they would have known two things: one, the political attitudes of the young are created largely by 'Uni'. That is to say a decaff Marxoid reading of recent social history in which Margaret Thatcher is regarded as the antichrist. They will not vote Tory because of this and because of being spoonfed the same attitudes via BBC drama and others bits of pop culture. They cannot be wooed by boasting about gay marriages and black candidates.
Secondly, what Cameron lost by 'alienating' the youth and female vote in south by talking straight he could have won back with handsome interest in the North. I don't think it is an exaggeration to say he could have rampaged round the North on the issues that Gillian Duffy raised with Gordon Brown on that fateful afternoon. But these are politicians who only like to gamble with your money not their chance of power.
Cameron will now be firmly in the sights of the Tory Right-Wing.
The result of this election is that the Tories will never govern with a majority again. At least, not until the Union is broken up. Whatever farcical arrangments are announced today, the government will be weak, divided and vulnerable and will be disposed of in due course. Any concessions on voting reform will only bring about the Tories' end more swiftly. I am not overly troubled by the Tories going another step on their way to oblivion; but the fact is that if they now shrivel and make a Faustian pact with any sort of proportional representation then Mandelson's idea of perpetuating Project Blair/Brown through a 'progressive alliance' of LibDems and Blairites becomes a reality and that is not a government I wish to live under. The quickest way to see this country go the way of Greece, Spain and Portugal would be to have a Lib-Lab coalition. The IMF will be a frequent visitor to these shores.
As for Labour, well. I was quite shocked by my friends' sentimentality about them. There can be no doubt they are one of the worst British governments of the modern era, whose cv of folly, corruption, warmongering, incompetence, arrogance and criminality is breathtaking. And yet people, intelligent people, were blithely prepared to vote for them once again. Apart from self-interest - some of them work in the Public Sector - I am at a loss to understand the motivation. Concern for the poor? The working man has been shafted by 13 years of Labour quite as much as they were under 18 years of Toryism. So why this devotion? Because 'they mean well'?
This is the ultimate sentimentality, isn't it? Judging a government on its *intentions* and ignoring the results.
Unlike the Tories, Labour will win again. We live in an era of infantilised minds easily gratified and hostile to complicated ideas or arguments. Someone else will always pay; cake can be had and eaten always; nasty decisions need never be taken. This is the view that Blair triumphed on and Gordon Brown presents to his client base of civil servants and welfare claimants under the 'invesment' rhetoric. Anyone who publishes anything to the contrary is a stooge of the right-wing press.
Clegg. The less said the better, really. Blair redux. They say Cameron will offer him the job of Home Secretary. There's a thought to make you shudder. See my analysis of the LibDems' manifesto from last year for a taste of how well they'll fit into a Tory cabinet.
Let's hope things will be OK. Or, see you in the riots.
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