Poor little Britain

It’s cold out there at the moment.

Sean Bean in Game of Thrones: “winter is coming”

Still, it is November, in the Northern Hemisphere, so we have to expect temperatures to be pretty uncomfortable. And at least we know that there are only three weeks to go before the days start to grow longer again. While the cold will be even more bitter, at least the lighter evenings will contain a promise of better times to come.

So much, at least, for the physical weather. When it comes to its status in the world, the cold has only just started to grip Britain. It will deepen a great deal further in the coming years, and not start to recede until British people at last emerge from the illusions behind which they prefer to hide.

Most central among these is the sense that their country is still a world power. A lion whose roar is heard around the globe. Some will cling on to that belief for a long time, but others are beginning to take the tough object lessons reality is delivering to them.

For many months, the hard Brexiters in government have been insisting that they will not move on the amount Britain will have to pay the EU on leaving. This is the so-called ‘divorce bill’. While a member of the EU, Britain entered into a number of commitments many of which involved the payment of money. Among other things, there are people who have retired from the EU Civil Service, to whose pensions Britain pledged to contribute. There is a sense in Brussels that these commitments have to be honoured despite Britain’s departure.

The hard Brexiters have been insisting that the figure should be low.

Take the case of Priti Patel. She had to resign from her post as International Development minister earlier this month, having demonstrated her humility in public service by conducting her own foreign policy while on holiday in Israel, where she had meetings with senior ministers including Benjamin Netanyahu, without reference to any other member of the government including the Foreign Secretary. Demonstrating the diplomatic self-control which make her such a loss to foreign affairs, she announced at the weekend that the EU could just “sod off” with their demands for a divorce bill.

It must have come as quite a blow to find that her erstwhile boss, the Prime Minister Theresa May, is now talking about paying as much as £50bn, perhaps twice the sum many had hoped. Ultimately, of course, there will be a compromise and a sensible figure will be agreed, whether near the £50n level or not. The key point is that Britain blinked first, and had to. In a doubtless unwelcome reminder to Brexiters, May had to admit that Britain is not in the driving seat, it can’t call the shots, it has to move towards the EU before the EU will move towards us.

Then came the affair of the Trump far-right Tweets. When Britain leaves the EU, it will be more dependent than ever on the US. President Trump (it still feels slightly unbelievable to write those two words together) early on made it clear that he was keen to offer Britain a trade deal, a piece of news Brexiters reacted to with glee. Sadly, Wilbur Ross, Trump’s Commerce Secretary was in the UK at the beginning of this month. He stressed that the US was ready to give Brexit Britain a trade deal, but we might just have to make a few minor accommodations. Like giving up on European-style regulation – shorthand for our having to abandon our unreasonable demands for our food to be edible.

Just over two weeks later his boss, the President himself, decided that it would be judicious to retweet three tweets with Islamophobic videos attached.

Even the most elegant of houses has to have a sewage system. All nations have to have their political cesspools. Britain’s is called ‘Britain First’, a neo-Fascist grouplet of no significance in our politics. Indeed, the woman who put up the tweets the President chose to pass on, chalked up the triumphant total of 56 votes in a run for parliament. Just to give some perspective on that figure, the winner of the election took 16,897 votes.

She is now facing criminal charges for religiously aggravated harassment and for using threatening and abusive language.

This is the person whose views the President decided to endorse.

In another example of our unreasonable attachment to certain standards, many of us in Britain rather resented this behaviour. The Prime Minister isn’t famed for her courage in standing up to Trump – she was the first head of government to visit him in the White House and issued him with an invitation to a State visit immediately, without the customary waiting period we generally like to take to see what kind of a President we are dealing with.

Yet even she felt she should speak out this time, telling Trump explicitly that he had been wrong. His reaction? To tell her to mind her own business.

When Home Secretary Amber Rudd spoke to the House of Commons about the Trump row, she repeated her boss’s rebuke to Trump. But then she went on to remind her listeners that the relationship with the States is vital. Which is true, and particularly now. But does she mean that we have to be careful what we say about him – even when he endorses our Fascists?

Many have been asking whether the invitation to Trump for the State Visit would be cancelled. It looks as though what Britain’s going to do is leave the invitation out there, but simply fail to set a date for it. Which, if you’re feeling generous, is a classic British compromise; if you’re feeling a little more severe, you might view it as something more like moral cowardice.

But what choice does Britain have? We’ve chosen Brexit which means we’ve chosen dependence on the States. Even under Trump.

Game of Thrones got it right. Winter is coming, and it’s going to be cold. For a very long time.

The faith that moves mountains. But not apparently nations

The head of the Catholic Church visits a country which has a majority of Buddhists, representatives of a religion that is a byword for peacefulness and tolerance, but who are busily exterminating members of another of the world’s great faiths, Islam. The Pope carefully avoids naming the victims as Rohingya, because that might further inflame those gentle Buddhists and turn their attentions to Christians as well.

The Pope in Myanmar: don’t mention the Rohingya

Those Rohingya are members of a religion that believes that to save a single life is tantamount to saving the entire human race. And yet members of that religion, Islam – admittedly a tiny minority of it – seem to have convinced themselves that it is holy work to kill large numbers of people in its name.

The behaviour of that minority has inflamed many in the West into passionate Islamophobia. Some of those justify their hatred on the grounds that they are Christians, or belong at any rate to countries that are Christian in their roots. This is a curious notion, in many cases.

In Britain, for example, only around one in twenty people regularly attends a church service of any Christian denomination. But then, maybe they’re thinking of the underlying values rather than actual Church practice. Principles such as

Let him offer his cheek to one who would strike him

or

It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God

or

Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these

The first of those is a little hard to reconcile with Britain’s long love-affair with weapons, a little reduced these days but only because austerity is enforcing cuts even on the military.

The second is just as hard to reconcile with the other side of the austerity coin, which has been to enrich the wealthiest members of society still further, making it, I assume, harder than ever for them to get into the kingdom of heaven.

As for the third, that commitment to children is proclaimed by most Brits, but rather subverted by the discovery that the country has one of the worst rates of stillbirth in Western Europe. Why? Here are the words of Gill Walton, Chief Executive of the Royal College of Midwives:

We’ve got a real concern about staffing levels… we really need more staff and more capacity in order to safely care for mums and babies.

Austerity hammers children too, it seems. As we find in the recent reports that two-thirds of English children referred for mental healthcare remain untreated. And it’s not just children: refuges for women escaping domestic violence are being forced to close through lack of funding, hospital Emergency Departments are being increasingly staffed by unqualified doctors, and the hospitals themselves are, in greater numbers than ever before, facing bankruptcy without more finance.

It seems that our Christian values aren’t strong enough to insist on the support the vulnerable. Instead we prefer to elect and re-elect a government committed to serving the wealthiest by imposing these cuts on services that would otherwise protect the poor. Perhaps our supposed Christianity has nothing to do with the teachings of Christ, and merely provides a justification for our dislike of the other, the foreigner, the person from outside our community.

Faith without compassion. Whether in Myanmar, in ISIS or, sadly, in Britain.

Where the Sat Nav goes in its free time

I’ve been wondering about what happens to my Sat Nav when I’m not using it.

Loyal servant. Although possibly somewhat disgruntled

Or rather him, not it. He has a rather plummy southern English accent, denoting membership of a rather a better class than mine. Or at least, an aspiration to belong to such a class, because there is in his voice something that says that he’s not quite as cultivated as he makes out. There may be something close to affectation there.

I don’t blame him, mind you. I expect Toyota demands something a little bit top-drawer from its Sat Navs. He may be obliged to lay it on a bit thick just to hold down the job.

It’s that sense that he isn’t quite as posh as he sounds that I picture him, when I release him from duty by turning off the car engine, sloping off not to one of the better eateries in London, but rather to a local pub to catch up with his mates. There he can, in all liberty, vent all his frustrations with the work he has to do and, indeed, moan about his boss.

“Make mine a double,” I see him saying to the barman, because I think his sense of himself as a cut above others is at least authentic enough to make him eschew beer in favour of spirits. “Same again for you three?” pointing to his companions’ empty pint glasses.

“Don’t mind if I do,” one of them will say for all of them, and as the pints are being poured, he tells them of the miseries of his day.

“Oxford again. To see his Mum. You know, I’ve been with him for less than a year but this has to be at least the twentieth time I’ve done that trip.”

“Dull, isn’t it?” one of the companions points out, “especially on the motorways.”

“Really tedious,” he says, “he’s a bit of a slow learner. Keeps taking the motorways even though they jam up each time and we end up crawling through traffic. He just ignores every one of my suggested detours. Thinks he knows better and then we show up late.”

“Oh, I know, I know,” says another, “you wouldn’t believe what happened to me…”

But my Sat Nav hasn’t just bought a round of drinks to have to listen to someone else’s troubles.

“To be fair, he went across country today,” he interrupts. “Maybe getting caught in traffic jams eight times in a row has taught him something at last. And they didn’t do too badly. Went a bit wrong in Aylesbury, but I got them back on to the right road. I can’t really complain about the trip out.”

“What about the way back?”

“Ah, that’s where it all went weird. About six miles from home. He just vanished off the road, would you believe? Started driving across the fields. Like he was in a tractor. Or a tank.”

“Across the fields?”

“I kid you not. Fields. Nowhere near the roads on my map. I thought he’d get his comeuppance but, you know the oddest thing? He eventually got back on to a road and closer to home than I expected. It was almost like he’d actually gained time by leaving the road.”

“Ah, but that means he didn’t leave the road, you know.”

“What do you mean? I told you. I couldn’t see a road anywhere near where he was driving. It was all blank on the map.”

“It must be a new road. He hasn’t updated your maps. It costs money, you know.”

My Sat Nav splutters in his drink, risking spilling some of his expensive whisky. Well, not the most expensive, but not cheap either. Sort of middle-of-the-range.

“What? What? He’s so much of a cheapskate he lets my maps get out of date?”

“Seems that way.”

But before he can reply, my Sat Nav spots an unwelcome arrival in the pub. Merino overcoat with a fleece collar. Gucci shoes polished enough to see your face in. Rather too florid a tie peeking out of the collar of his coat.

“Save me,” says my Sat Nav emptying his glass, “let’s get the hell out of here. I don’t want him wandering over here and lording it over us.”

“Oh, God, no,” says one of the others, “him and his ‘how’s life in the downmarket cars, then? Bearing up under the strain?’ I don’t I could take it.”

“No,” adds a third, “it’s all very well for him, but we can’t all be assigned Jags. Let’s get going.”

“Anyone fancy a curry?” says my Sat Nav.

“I know a great place,” says one of the others, “just left out of here, down to the roundabout, take the third exit and then your destination is three hundred yards down on the left-hand side.”

“We’ll follow you,” say the others.

Well, I hope they enjoyed their meal. And didn’t get lost on the way.

Black Friday and our sad mindset this side of the Atlantic

Black Friday is upon us.

It’s particularly remarkable on this side of the Atlantic. The Friday is black in the US because people are recovering from the excess of the Thanksgiving celebration the day before, or just need their morale boosted in the down that follows the high of a feast. Though behind that worthy goal lurks also the rather baser desire to make a lot of money by a day of sales in the shops.

In England, we don’t have the feast. We just have the Black Friday. The depression, in other words, without the celebration that led to it. But it’s still a wonderful commercial opportunity. Or at least shopkeepers hope so.

The problem arose because of the increasing disappointment of Christmas. This is the second most important feast of the Christian year. Believers worship the birth of Christ in December just as at Easter they celebrate the redemption of man through his agonising death followed by the miracle of his resurrection. Birth at Christmas, the even more glorious rebirth at Easter. .

Clearly, celebrating the birth of the Prince of Peace is a time for quiet reflection on the nature of God’s relationship to Man, the sacrifice of his incarnation and later death in pain for us all, and so forth. Where “so forth” covers over-indulgence in food and, above all, drink as well as the commercial miracle of a splurge of spending in the shops. Why, a great many retailers depend on Christmas for the bulk, if not the entirety, of their profits for the year.

Such are the benefits of a profound immersion in the spirit of Christian charity and restraint. An excellent arrangement. Serving God and Mammon, otherwise known as win-win.

Although it’s not that wonderful any more.

Britain has seen earnings falling for a decade already. There’s no sign of that ending any time soon, particularly following Brexit. Eventually, inevitably, loss of earnings power had to have an impact on spending patterns. Christmas just isn’t what it once was. Shops can’t count on it any more.

The answer was to find a way of incentivising expenditure at another time of year. And why not just a few weeks before? Adopting Black Friday seemed the obvious solution.

But we took it over without Thanksgiving. Meaning we have the depression not the celebration. The hangover without the party. 

What’s more, we don’t seem to be satisfied with just a single day of it, which after all is what the word ‘Friday’ would seem to imply. Oh, no. Ocado, which kindly delivers us our groceries, has gone for a long weekend of Black Friday. 

Ocado:
Black Friday from the 23rd to the 27th

And Debenham’s, the great department store, has gone for a whole week.

Black Friday week at Debenham's

This all seemed terribly British. After all, we are a nation steeped in the Protestant tradition. That teaches us that we are all, or nearly all, damned whatever we do, and life is a vale of tears. So when we take on a tradition from the US, why not take on the bleak and dismal bit, leaving out the part that might actually lift our mood?

But it’s not just British. I was in Italy over the last few days, and I noticed that even that great bastion of Catholicism has caught the Black Friday bug. Indeed, they too, perhaps out of increasing desperation over sales falling there as they are here, are wildly extending the understanding of ‘Friday’. In Turin, they’re going for a Black weekend.

Black Weekend in Turin

Maybe it’s a European phenomenon, not just a British one. Are we so short of confidence in our ability to emulate transatlantic flair and dynamism that we punish ourselves by taking on their harsher customs, and use them to try to dig ourselves out of our economic difficulties? Seems a bit of an indictment.

A sad thought. One to while away a Black Friday. As an alternative to spending the day in the shops.

Austerity buried? And the NHS too?

Britain has a new budget.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Hammond, for whom the word ‘beleaguered’ might have been specifically invented, has announced the government’s plans for spending and tax over the next year. And though it does little enough, what it does do is more noteworthy than one might have expected.

Hammond with the traditional red box for the budget

He has admitted at last that the prospects for economic growth are a lot worse than the government had previously claimed. What’s more, debt is at twice the level the Tories inherited when they first came to office in 2010, and which at the time they described as intolerably high. 

Indeed, their primary goal was to reduce the debt level massively. To achieve it, they launched a painful programme of austerity, to get government spending in balance within one parliament (five years), later extended to two parliaments, and now to some time in the next decade. Meanwhile, debt climbed inexorably.

This track record ought to be enough to prove to any but the most ideologically blinkered that austerity isn’t working. But the dogmatism of the Tories has prevented them ever accepting as much previously. So it’s interesting to discover that in this budget they have at last made the admission, if only tacitly: the Chancellor has announced plans for actual spending, most notably on housing, as a way of addressing the parlous state of the economy.

Sadly, however, he is doing a lot too little, particularly after the damage of the last seven years. For example, faced with a warning from the Simon Stevens, Chief Executive of the National Health Service in England, that healthcare needs another £4bn a year as a minimum, he has come up with £2.8bn over the next two and a half years. That’s going to mean that the service must still make choices that will be tough to the point of grief: certain treatments will simply not be available or will be denied so long as to lead to suffering or even death among patients.

What makes this even more depressing is that Hammond has also earmarked a further £3bn for Brexit preparations. In other words, we have to stump up more money that is being denied to healthcare, to cover the costs of a step – leaving the European Union – which will itself cause us even worse and longer-lasting economic damage. Not just shooting ourselves in the foot, but paying for the privilege.

There’s a special irony in the fact that we’re having to come up with this money for Brexit at a time that the NHS needs it so badly. A major element of the Leave campaign was the notorious claim that Brexit would free up £350m a week for the NHS. £18bn a year which would certainly sort the underfunding of the service.

Curious that in reality Brexit is costing us money, while the NHS crisis deepens.

Allotted task

Into every life, a little dung must fall.

At least, if you’re the husband of a committed allotteer. That may not be a word, but it’s the title I use for the keeper of an allotment. In turn, that’s a plot of land, generally rented out by a town council, usually to make a vegetable plot.

A vegetable plot, by the way, isn’t a bunch of cabbages in a conspiracy.

I have a high respect for manual work on the land. I admire it intensely, but preferably from afar. I have gone to great lengths to ensure that I would never find myself dependent on working with my hands, least of all in backbreaking agriculture.

The trouble is I benefit from the excellent broccoli, carrots, onions, broad beans, artichokes even, to say nothing of the soft fruit – the strawberries and raspberries – Danielle’s allotment produces. Even I have to admit that it’s hardly unfair to expect me to make some minor contribution to the endeavour. Especially if it’s just once a year, as is the case of the task of shoving a few hundred kilos of horse dung in wheelbarrow loads from one end of the allotment to the plots Danielle manages.

Or is it twice? I can’t remember. You know how oblivion draws a merciful veil over traumatic shock? I’m afraid dung-doling is that kind of experience for me – I agree that it’s reasonable to expect me to move the bags, I may even do the work willingly, but I can’t pretend I find it anything other tha a soul-shaking, morale-shivering and character-undermining challenge to me.

In my defence, the work started badly. While driving to the allotment, I found my way blocked by a colossal lorry coming the other way. I was forced to reverse several hundred metres just to let him by. At which point I saw that the flat bed at the back was loaded with huge bags marked “CompostDirect.com”.

Colossal bags.

The lorry that delivered my torment

My heart sank. That had to be the lorry that had delivered to our site. So I knew what I was in for.

Our colossal bag had been dumped at the bottom of the allotment area. From there, the individual 50kg bags had to be manhandled into the wheelbarrow and then man-shoved, two at a time, up to the plots. 

Sheer delight. And repeated eight times.

It’s an activity like banging your head against a brick wall, which only feels good when you stop. Shoving a wheelbarrow uphill provides no sense of satisfaction, I find, just a relief that it’s over, qualified by the consciousness that it has to be done all over again with the next two bags.

Danielle is quite clear, too. It’s not enough merely to do the job. I have to like the work too. Or at least look as though I’m happy doing it. Or if even that it’s too much to ask, it must be possible for me to smile while wheeling the barrow.

Genuine rictus of joy
at the sheer pleasure of dung-carrying

So I did. At least at the rictus level, much to Danielle’s amusement. Smile and the whole world smiles with you, the song assures us. Well, maybe the rest of the world. Not the bit inside me, though.

Until, at least, the work was done. The 750 kilos moved. At which point, I could plant my feet on the ghastly bags, with a small sense of achievement at having resisted their effort to break my spirit and wreck my knees. I’d come out on top.

At last! True joy. The dung job's done!

For once, the smile was real.

It was then I noticed that the bags were marked “Bord na Móna”, which is Irish for “Peat Board”. Suddenly it all fell into place. It was the Irish that had been giving me grief, and nothing could be more appropriate.

At the end of the last rugby season, the Irish team inflicted the first defeat on England that it had experienced in 21 matches. By doing so, they denied England back-to-back grand slams. For those not aware of the workings of the noble Six Nations Championship, a grand slam is when one team beats all the other five. England was denied, on the line, by Ireland. And not for the first time.

So it’s merely in keeping with the laws of the universe that an Englishman finds himself having to take a load of horseshit from the Irish…

Strand cigarettes: an object lesson for Labour?

“For the many, not the few”: it’s the slogan that Labour took into the UK general election in June 2017.

Nearly did it for Labour

Labour didn’t win that election but did a great deal better than I, or most commentators, expected. It came a far stronger second than we expected and the Conservatives hung on to office but lost their parliamentary majority. That’s about as successful as a losing campaign can be.

The slogan was key to it.

It’s an appealing slogan. Inequality is the great issue of our time, and we are infested around the world, and in particular in Britain, by governments that speak for a tiny minority already wealthy beyond belief but constantly enriching themselves, while the rest at best stand still and, among the poorest, sink further into poverty.

Reversing that trend is a matter of morality, but also of economic effectiveness. Gross inequality – as Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century shows – doesn’t just give an elite a disproportionate share of the existing cake, but makes the cake itself smaller for everyone.

The slogan neatly sums up the need, the urgent need, to fix the drift of the last four decades, from a divide between rich and poor, to a rift, to today’s chasm. Politically it’s right on target.

But I’m a marketing man. And I know that even the best of promotional campaigns can go wrong. Take, for example, the insurance campaign which took as slogan “we won’t make a drama out of a crisis”.

It’s a brilliant line, isn’t it? Easy to remember. Summing up what we need from an insurer when things go wrong. But who on earth was the company? I had to look it up before writing this, and discovered that it wasn’t who I thought it was.

Well, that’s not the problem with “For the many, not the few”. You really have to be entirely uninterested in politics in Britain not to know that’s Labour’s message. The example just shows badly an apparently good campaign can misfire.

The classic advertising flop

A much more closer example is what has become the poster boy of advertising flops: the 1959 movie advertising Strand cigarettes. It was made by Carol Reed, the director of The Third Man, no minor figure in the cinematic art.

It showed a man alone on a wet and deserted London street. He wanders along the pavement, looking disconsolate, until he stops by a streetlight, pulls out a packet of Strand and lights one. His expression turns to satisfaction, and in comes the voiceover “you’re never alone with a Strand.” 

Another excellent slogan.

But sales collapsed. Strand cigarettes were taken off the market. And yet the advert was popular, the background music did well in the charts, the actor became a star. And, let’s face it, “you’re never alone with a Strand” sound like a great line.

So why did it fail? The answer, analysts agreed, was that the advert was promoting loneliness. And who wants to be lonely?

That’s my problem with “for the many, not the few”.

Who wants to be one of the many? Most people like to think of themselves as unique. As individuals, at least. One of the many? Feels a bit like being relegated to a mere unit in the mass.

Should Labour speak for an anonymous mass? I want a government that speaks for me. I suspect most voters feel the same. How about, vote Labour because we matter? Because we have rights? Because we deserve better?

Remember that another way of saying “the many” is “hoi polloi”.

The principle’s great. And it’s a fine slogan. But then so was “you’re never alone with a Strand”.

Entertainment and purgatory

She could have been such an interesting travelling companion.

When I first saw her, sitting by the window across and empty seat between us, on a flight back to England from Munich, she was frenetically taking selfies of herself. She lowered the window blind, she turned one way then another, she seemed far from satisfied but she was in a hurry to text the photo away before the flight attendants told us to switch phones to airplane mode.

She’d spotted that I was interested.

“It’s a film role,” she told me in a distinctly East European accent, “I need to get a selfie to my agent.”

Was I sitting a seat away from a star? I didn’t recognise her.

“It’s the Ridley Scott film about Getty. Because of Kevin Spacey. They’re filming scenes with a new actor.” “Yes,” I said, “Christopher Plummer.”

From revered icon to unperson. In next to no time

A curious business. Kevin Spacey had gone in the space of a few weeks from much-admired, much-loved international star to non-person following a series of sexual harassment complaints. So much of a non-person that the Scott film is having to be reshot with him out of it.

An insider’s view could have been intriguing.

Of course, she wasn’t a star, but an extra as she quickly explained to me. She showed me pictures of herself in police uniform or as a paramedic, or just as a member of a crowd in costumes of various periods between the nineteenth century and today (including some from previous Ridley Scott films).

She does stunts too, and that sounds even tougher than thought.

“You have to have six skills. Like riding, and not just ordinary riding, but jumping bareback which is hard without stirrups, or riding two horses and going from one to another; I do rock climbing too, and water stunts, but it’s all getting tough as I get older.”

She showed me a pay slip and that was certainly an eye-opener: in three days she’d earned little more than I do in a day. Not everyone in film is a millionaire, it seems.

“This will not make me rich,” she earnestly assured me.

Now if only the conversation had kept going down that road, I’d have felt my original evaluation was right. Unfortunately, that wasn’t things were going to turn out. She had other subjects she wanted to talk to me about.

First was the two days she’d just spent in Munich, at a spa. The saunas were wonderful, apparently, but I’ve been to German spas before so I wasn’t really learning very much. Apparently you can to the spa from the hotel where she stayed by cutting across a field, something she told me three times, though it left me less than wholly fascinated: I’d never been to the hotel, the field or the spa and don’t currently plan to visit them any time soon.

She then chose to give me the compelling news that she plans to fast for forty days. Momentarily I wondered whether she had a Jesus Christ compulsion, but it turns out she only does these fasts to flush her system of toxins. Sometimes she doesn’t manage the Christ-like forty days but stops after twenty.

I’ll spare you the details of what she eats over this period, where she buys the vegetables and the lemons for her lemon juice, how much they cost, and how hard it is to find the time to cook the damn stuff (especially when her husband is eating food that she finds far more appetising). I spare you those details, but she didn’t spare me.

From there it was but an easy step to the enthralling subject of her health.

When I was studying French, one of the pronunciation exercises told us that an Englishman asked “how do you do?” replies “how do you do?” A Frenchman, on the other hand, asked “how do you do?” starts to talk about his health.

Well, the stereotype isn’t wholly false. As a service to any non-native English speakers readers of this post, let me make it absolutely clear that there’s only one English answer to the question “how are you?” and that is “fine”. Even if the person asking is a visitor to your hospital bedside, and you’ve just been told by your doctor that there is no further treatment for your condition, so from now on you’re getting palliative care only for the last few weeks of your life, the answer is still “fine”.

Sadly, despite her twenty years in the country, my travelling companion had clearly not managed that step in cultural assimilation. She delivered her health woes to me in full and graphic detail. By the end, I was leaning so far out into the aisle that I couldn’t hear over the engine sound.

But as well as the English reluctance to talk about health, I suffer from the English inability to find a polite way of telling someone to put a sock in it. I’d slept badly the night before and was desperate just to read a little or even sleep, and here was this woman talking to me endlessly about her health (at least, I believe she was, though I could no longer tell). And instead of telling her to stop it, for God’s sake, I was just saying “yes”, “no” or “indeed” at random, without it apparently having any effect on stemming her flow of words.

I was reduced to just longing for the wheels to touch down. That gave me the opportunity to interrupt her and suggest that she check her texts for an answer from her agent. But that only opened another floodgate: I get all her troubles with technology, how phones never worked for her as she expected, “more than six buttons and I’m lost”.

Eventually, though, she got her texts. Sadly, she hadn’t had the call.

Sadly, I say and, strangely, sadly I mean. I might have seen her failure to secure the job as karma for turning a short flight into a taste of purgatory. Instead, I felt sorry for her.

On the other hand, I didn’t hang around to hear just how upset she was. By then, I really felt I’d given enough. I’ve seldom left a plane so fast.

Roman roots. And Jewish

One of the best aspects of my job, not exactly new any more though I’m still a week or so from my first anniversary, is that it takes me to Rome from time to time.

Why should that matter so much? Well, I was born in Rome. I left when I was thirteen, too young to have really learned the city, and until I started this job I’d only been back once or twice. Even so, it’s a place that holds a large place in my being, as I realise whenever I return. At times, the city feels eerily familiar – I know what’s around the next corner, I feel I belong, I feel I’ve come home.

The voices, too, I know. The same slangy loping Italian, flowing from cadence to cadence to leap up and start again. It’s the Italian I know best.

Not that I know Italian that well. I’m working on it, and I can keep up a conversation. But I’ve an accent that says “British” from feet away, and every now and then I can’t find the word I want, though I know it well and often remember it soon afterwards, kicking myself for having been forced to use some long phrase instead of the elegant term that would have said it so much better.

Even so, it was fun to be in a restaurant the other night with four colleagues. It was a typically Roman place, the one who chose it told me. I was just pleased he’d picked somewhere other than the restaurant he’d taken me to four or five times in the past, until I said to him, “is there only one place to eat in Rome, then?”

Now he’s from Milan, as is one of the others in that company. Both women were from Turin, though one of them actually lives in Rome. But you don’t get to be Roman by merely living there. So it gave me great joy to be able to announce, in my best English-accented Italian, “I hope you realise that I’m the only true Roman at this table.”

Jewish-style artichokes: a culinary delight of Rome

The food was excellent too. I particularly enjoyed the dish that involved artichokes flattened and fried. They’re called “carciofi all giudia”, artichokes in the Jewish style – not to be confused with Jerusalem artichokes which are a different vegetable altogether – a truly Roman specialty. And delicious.

It tickled me to be a Roman with Jewish roots enjoying a Roman delicacy of Jewish artichoke. In Rome.

Of such small pleasures a satisfied life is made.

The thing about Rome is that it’s the quintessentially Italian city. Or at any rate the strip of Italy that runs from, say, Bologna down to Rome is truly Italy. North of Italy you get cities like Turin which is practically French, or Milan which is essentially just southern Austria: you know, they believe in efficiency and value for money and all those boring northern European notions. In Rome, there’s a feeling that it doesn’t much matter if things take longer than planned (or better still, happen without a plan) or if you’re ripped off as you go, as long as you’re enjoying yourself. Strikes me as a sensible approach.

Romans say that Africa starts just below Rome, so that’s not really Italy any more either. Of course, Northerners say that Africa starts just above Rome, but what would a bunch of Southern Austrians know about that? Not that I care: I like Africa, or at least the bits I’ve seen.

To me, Rome’s not just the Italian capital, it’s the worthy capital. It sums up Italy, it speaks for the country. And I enjoy being there. Hence my often-repeated statement that it’s a good place to be born, so I’m sure it would be a good place to die – for years I thought I’d retire there.

As it happens, that looks unlikely now. Partly it’s the sheer cost of the city. But more importantly it’s because two of my sons, both born in England, seem well-established in Spain. The third son, who was born in Switzerland, now lives in the UK, but we’re not keen on staying there: the climate’s too sad – physically wet and grey for far too much of the time, politically wet and grey since the Brexit vote.

Valencia attracts us. Down by the sea. A glorious climate. Good food. Easygoing people. I’m looking forward to it.

To be honest, I’ve been attracted by Spain ever since I watched The Princess Bride. Do you remember the recurring line? It’s spoken with a strong mock-Spanish accent:

My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.

It may not be an entirely accurate view of the Spanish soul, but it has something about it that attracts me. Enough, at least, to make me want to explore how plausible it is.

Should be as much fun as Rome.

Trouble in Paradise

The latest revelations about how the richest protect their wealth and minimise their tax burden tell us little but confirm a great deal. The information in the Paradise Papers show us a truly glittering pageant of celebrities using offshore tax havens, including fine upstanding members of the community, such as Queen Elizabeth II herself, Trump’s Commerce Secretary with shady friends in Russia, Wilbur Ross and, regrettably, the mostly admirable Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau.

Why, it seems that even Bono, fine humanitarian and protector of the poor in the Third World, may have been benefitting from tax regulations that protect the rich of the Old World. Ironically, I read (in a piece from the Sunday Express, not the most reliable of sources, but this story has the ring of truth), that Bono’s own foundation was set to denounce the tax haven system until it realised that he was a beneficiary.

Still, it isn’t these fine luminaries that interest me here, but just two specific individuals, for what they reveal of how our system works more generally.

(Lord) Michael Ashcroft
Worthy citizen, tax avoider and major contributor to the Tory Party

The first of these is Michael Ashcroft, Lord Ashcroft, former Deputy Chairman of the British Conservative Party and one of its main individual contributors. For many years, he held “non-domiciled” status in the UK, meaning he could live in the country without paying its taxes. When he was raised to the House of Lords, he pledged to give up that status and become a full UK resident, but failed to do so for ten years, when a change in the law would have forced him to give up his peerage otherwise.

It now turns out that he’s a major tax haven investor. That saves a power of tax. Who needs non-dom status when you have tax havens you can take advantage of – and without even giving up your peerage? You might feel, and I’d tend to agree, that the law needs changing again, so that a member of the House of Lords can’t benefit from tax havens any more than from being non-domiciled in the UK.But let s see why that s not likely to happen.

The use of a tax haven saves someone like Ashcroft a great deal of tax. That sets up a fine cycle of mutual benefit. With so much more money to play with, it’s easy for him to make contributions to his favoured political cause, in this case the Conservative Party. For the 2017 election campaign, he stumped up £500,000, which by British standards is a massive contribution to a political party.

Now, isn’t that neat? Serious money for a political party. The party that happens to be in government. In government at least in part thanks to that money.

Now, how much priority would you expect that government to set on changing the law to deal with the abuse of tax havens?

The second person is something of a favourite of mine.

Glencore is one of the world’s major commodities companies. The Paradise Papers reveal that Glencore “loaned” £45m to a shady Israeli businessman, on the basis that it would be repaid if they failed to win a lucrative deal in the blood-soaked, deeply corrupt so-called Democratic Republic of the Congo. Nothing illegal seems to have happened, but that only highlights the weakness of the law. It may have been legal, but there was nothing edifying about this transaction.

So how about this favourite character of mine? He wasn’t with Glencore at the time, but he is now. He’s the company’s non-executive chairman.

His name is Anthony (Tony) Hayward. Not a name to conjure with, you may feel, and I’d agree though I have mentioned him before. If you’ve heard of him at all, it’s likely to have been in the context of the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, when an oil exploration platform caught fire and the ensuing oil spill polluted vast swaths of the Gulf.

Deepwater Horizon: fitting monument to reign of Tony Hayward

The oil rig belonged to BP. And the Chief Executive of the time? Why, Tony Hayward.

He came to fame with a series of brilliant gaffes. The one I like the best was his apology for the damage and, indeed, loss of life caused:

We're sorry for the massive disruption it's caused their lives. There's no one who wants this over more than I do. I would like my life back.

I’m sure he wanted all that unpleasantness over. As I’m sure that the millions whose lives or livelihoods were affected by the oil spill, to different degrees but seldom positively, couldn’t have given a flying curse for how much he wanted his life back.

Now just as the tax haven issue proves how little consideration of integrity or any kind of principle drives our governments, the Tony Hayward story reveals how little high business office owes to competence or even basic humanity. The colossal remuneration these people receive is often justified as being a reflection of the responsibility they accept. But far from being driven into the outer darkness where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth, Hayward simply stepped from BP into a series of lucrative and comfortable directorships, including at Glencore.

He wasn’t with Glencore at the time of the Congo deal. But still, it’s interesting that it was a company with as savoury a reputation as Glencore that offered him its non-executive chairmanship. And that a man with his track record accepted it.

Might that be just a coincidence? Speaking for myself, I doubt it.

Homecoming

The younger members of the household – the ones who, naturally, run it – seem to be pleased with the transformation of the place. And pleased, above all, to be back in it. It didn’t take them long to pick up their old habits where they’d left off.

Misty, the feline element, never physically left. As we didn’t want to take him to a flat without a cat flap he stayed behind. That made him the household member who suffered the most: he was stuck at a house full during the day of strange, noisy people engaged in various aspects of building work, which always starts with a fearful destruction, leaving it full of dust, mess and strange smells at all times.

So it was good to see him, once the work was done, quickly learning the use of the new pet flap and making himself at home and at ease even before we’d moved back. That meant coping with a place without so much as a carpet let alone a couch, but he seemed to have no difficulty with any of that. 

Satisfaction

I also have to say that, while he would never admit it, he seems delighted by the return of the rest of the family.

It started with the dogs. Within minutes, Misty was dealing with the constant and not always welcome affection of Toffee. Since that affection is often tinged with slightly aggressive jealousy, I can understand that he found it advisable to take refuge behind a ladder and, when Toffee persisted, to use one of his fine sets of claws to express his sense that it was time for her to stop.

Misty's patience running out

There was, for a time, a little tension between those two. Once Toffee had also mastered the pet flap, she quickly realised she could position herself to keep Misty out of the house. I mean, she may just have been looking at him, but that pitiful “hey, let me in” look on his face suggested that Misty, like me, thought otherwise.

Important note added since the initial posting: I’m indebted to Deb, an ally Misty would be delighted to have if he knew about her, points out that Misty isn’t looking pitiful at all. “Looks to me,” she argues, “like he’s rolling his eyes and thinking ‘yeah, there are good things about them all being back but this I could do without...’” Examining the picture more closely, I have to say she may well be right.

Toffee watching Misty –or keeping him out?

With his domestic staff, Misty’s got straight back into usual routine. At breakfast time on the second day, I thoughtlessly left the table to get myself another coffee, and hadn’t even reached the kitchen before he’d jumped up and taken my place. He likes our dining chairs, but prefers them warmed up for him before he sits on one. He also knows that while Danielle will just tip him off, I haven’t the heart to do that. Or more to the point, I have too vivid a memory of scratches and bites with which my temerity has been rewarded in the past.

Curiously, Danielle never receives that treatment.

Anyway, I was pleased to see how comfortable Misty was in what I’d fondly come to think of as my seat. Although it made the end of breakfast rather less comfortable for me.

Kindly warmed for him, what I thought was my seat suits Misty perfectly

The dogs readapted quickly. The couch, their favourite place when not out on walks, had stayed with us during our exile, and it returned with us. That made the whole experience easier for them: they’d enjoyed living in a home-from-home for a while and now could relax completely in their home-at-home.

There have, however, been changes. There’s an extra floor now, and another set of stairs they have to climb when they want to jump on the bed with us for the night. The bed itself is higher, as well, so the leap is bigger. That sometimes bothers Toffee, so she occasionally prefers just to whimper till one of us lifts her up – even though she knows as well as we do that she can get up herself, since she’s done it many times.

Luci, at any rate, seems perfectly happy with it. Completely at ease.

Luci satisfied with the new accomodation

All in all, I’d have to say it was a successful homecoming.

Centenary of a revolution. Or coup d'état

November the seventh. The centenary of the October Revolution.

Yes, yes, I know. October. On 7 November because the Russians were a bit late switching from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar.

Lenin addressing a revolutionary crowd

When I first became interested in that portentous event, it had not long before celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. At the time, I accepted its description as a “revolution” and also believed that it had represented the seizure of power by a whole class, the working class of Russia, laying the groundwork for the introduction of socialism. Things had gone astray since but there was still hope that the course could be corrected and the promise of 1917 realised.

Nearly half a century on, I’ve had time to review my early impressions, correct some fairly crucial errors of perception, and fundamentally revise my opinion.

First of all, it was no revolution. That implies a fundamental change in society; in reality, Russia went from an autocracy oppressively run by a self-serving hereditary elite, to an autocracy oppressively run by a self-serving self-selecting elite.

Secondly, it was no revolution. This was not an uprising of the working class against oppression. Lenin never commanded a majority of the working class, but he had a wonderful theory to get around that problem: he proposed that though it was the revolutionary class, not everyone in it was as revolutionary as all the others. Instead, in his world view, there was a vanguard of the proletariat that understood the true working of history (which was to put Lenin and his pals in power) and would lead the rest of the working class to understand that truth. Finding a majority among the vanguard was easy, since the vanguard was by definition made up of those enlightened elements who’d realised that the Bolsheviks and Lenin were the best friends they’d ever had. That kind of sleight of hand is still popular, in groups of left and right alike, when they lack majority support outside their own narrow confines.

Thirdly, it was no revolution. Lacking mass support, what Lenin found was a God-given, or in his outlook, historically-inevitable opportunity in the chaotic conditions created by the government of Alexander Kerensky. With a small armed group and in the face of the impotence of the authorities to block him, he seized power in what he called a revolution but anyone else would call a coup d’état.

There was far more continuity than change across the dividing line Lenin and the Bolsheviks drew in 1917. Change came later, but it was one of degree, not of kind: the Bolshevik autocracy descended into bloodier oppression than ever previously seen in the long and blood course of Russian history. As many as 60 million Russians may have been put to death under the regime that followed Lenin’s, when Stalin mounted his own coup against the leaders of the first. Lenin died too soon to see it, which may have been fortunate: he might well have ended his life in gaol had he survived: he would have meant a constant embarrassment to Stalin, a reminder that he didn’t lead the uprising.

For if the October “revolution” was led by Lenin and his pals, it didn’t only include pals of his. Stalin, whose name meant man of steel, was a friend of no one but Jughashvili (his real name). It’s likely that his regime killed more people than the Nazis though, to be fair, it did have considerably longer.

Among his victims were leaders of the “revolution” that put him in power.

Bolshevik leaders
Indluded are Rykov, Radek, Zinoviev, Kamenev and Trotsky,
all put to death by Stalin – who’s nowhere to be seen

Not, then, an event to be celebrated with unmitigated cheer. I shall, I’m sure, raise a glass tonight, since I shall be with colleagues. But it’ll be to their health and mine, not to mark the centenary.

Of the October coup d’état.