Nixon and his successors: rememberance of things past, anticipation of things to come

Little incidents can bring buried memories flooding back, so that a distant moment is suddenly with you again as though you were living it now.

For Proust, it was the taste of a Madeleine cake conjuring up his childhood.

For me, this weekend, it was seeing the latest releases of extracts from the Nixon tapes. Suddenly, I was back in a New York street, in fine rain, the street lights glistening on the wet pavements, in front of a shop window with a poster whose evocative message had stopped me in mid-stride.

Tricky Dicky: man of confidence or confidence man?

Oh, for those long-lost days when the United States had a President who was clearly not a man forced into politics only because he couldn’t make a success of any other career. With his wits and ethics, Tricky Dicky Nixon could have flourished in many other walks of life. Say, as a market trader.

Doesn’t it warm the cockles of the heart to remember those glorious aphorisms of his such as ‘When the president does it, that means that it’s not illegal’?

What’s been coming out now? It seems that ‘…the Irish can’t drink … Virtually every Irish I’ve known gets mean when he drinks. Particularly the real Irish.’ The Italians: ‘those people … don’t have their heads screwed on tight.’ And as for the Jews, they ‘are just a very aggressive and abrasive and obnoxious personality.’ Don’t limit your amazement to the sentiment, let yourself go in wonder at his command of the English language too.

As for Blacks, he commented on the view expressed by a colleague that ‘they are coming along, and that after all they are going to strengthen our country in the end because they are strong physically and some of them are smart’. ‘Some of them are smart’ and ‘they are coming along’ were, it seems, judgements that were just a little too generous. ‘My own view is I think he’s right if you’re talking in terms of 500 years. I think it’s wrong if you’re talking in terms of 50 years. What has to happen is they have be, frankly, inbred.’ Ah, yes, a little breeding is what these people need. Presumably to turn them into shining examples of humanity such as the Nixon product itself. And don’t you just admire the prescience? I mean, he was speaking over three decades before the election of Obama.

I noticed that USA Today reacted with something less than enthusiasm to one of Nixon’s utterances. Talking about the prospects of Ronald Reagan occupying the Oval Office, he had said ‘Good God, can you imagine – can you really imagine – him sitting here?’ And he added ‘I can imagine anyone ... but Reagan.’

The paper seemed to feel that Nixon had revealed a character flaw (even the finest have them) in misjudging this great man who would indeed eventually follow him into the White House.

Reagan had his own magnificent quotations. Faced with student unrest at Berkeley, he showed his resolution: ‘If it's to be a bloodbath, let it be now. Appeasement is not the answer.’ Later, he denied that he had called for a bloodbath. He’d probably forgotten he’d said it. His was another of those times that conjure up feelings of nostalgia, in his case for a President with the gifts that come from incipient Alzheimer’s.

Since then the same Grand Old Party has thrown up two George Bushes to teach us to rate Reagan more highly.

But it isn’t nostalgia that is my main emotion today, it’s that delightful tingle that anticipation of the future gives. Could the Republicans be about to serve us up another White House occupant to make even Dubya look good?

Remind yourself of gems such as:

“Refudiate,” “misunderestimate,” “wee-wee’d up.” English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it!’

Isn’t that worthy of Nixon at his best?

And what about:

... obviously, we've got to stand with our North Korean allies.

The command of foreign policy and sensitivity to its nuances is deeply reminiscent of Reagan, isn’t it? For instance, in his famous statement into a live mike:

My fellow Americans, I am pleased to tell you I just signed legislation which outlaws Russia forever. The bombing begins in five minutes.

Who’d have thought anyone could make us look back on Reagan and Dubya as men to miss? And to feel that Tricky Dicky, deceitful, racist and convinced he was above the law, represented something of a golden age?

Yep. Get ready to enjoy the Sarah Palin show.

Training a good wife, catching a good husband

If you were a woman born in the Swiss canton of Argau at the turn of the twentieth century, the younger daughter of a master craftsman, career opportunities as you reached adulthood were limited. The heroine of today’s story is Emma Lina, who faced just this predicament.

Things were better for the elder sister, Bertha, who stood to inherit something. She lived a colourful life, including a long list of unsuitable lovers (but when was a lover suitable?) and adventures in every corner of the globe. And I mean every corner: she was someone made for the age of flight, catching planes to every imaginable destination.

In fact, she eventually became a little tired of Emma Lina’s stay-at-home prudence.

‘Some day, you’re just going to have to learn to get into a plane.’

‘A large metal thing suspended in thin air? Not on your Nelly.’

You understand that neither sister spoke English, so the expression ‘not on your Nelly’ is artistic licence by your humble narrator. But I’m sure there’s some equivalent in mid-twentieth century Swiss German dialect, and equally sure she used it.

Despite all that, Bertha convinced her eventually. Emma Lina caught a plane from Basel to Geneva – not a flight you can take any more – to see her youngest daughter there. As they approached their destination, the plane seemed to take an unconscionable time circling over Lake Geneva. A beautiful view, but it palls after a while. Still, the boredom turned out to be infinitely preferable to what it was replaced by.

‘We regret to announce,’ said the pilot over the public address system, ‘that we are unable to lower the undercarriage at the present time. We are therefore going to have to circle to burn off fuel and then force land at the airport. We regret any inconvenience caused.’

That last bit is probably artistic licence too.

They eventually belly landed on a foam-covered runway surrounded by fire engines and ambulances. Emma Lina immediately insisted that she would never fly again and, indeed, her family had better book her a railway trip back to Basel.

‘Don’t be silly,’ said Bertha, ‘that kind of thing is just terribly bad luck. It’ll never happen again.’

Bertha must have been gifted with oratorical charm, or been a highly dominant personality, or perhaps both, because she persuaded Emma Lina to get back into a plane for the flight home.

They got to Basel and the pilot came on the public address system. ‘Terribly sorry, Emma Lina, it’s happened again. We can’t get the undercarriage down.’ I expect he really used other words to that effect, but that was the effect on Emma Lina.

Unfortunately, Basel airport is smaller than Geneva and couldn’t accommodate a belly landing, so they had to fly on to Amsterdam. Check the map: Basel is a lot closer to Geneva than to Amsterdam. There they put Emma Lina through a repeat of her previous landing: foam on the runway, fire engines, ambulances.

‘Never again,’ were her first words when her family, who’d been flown up to Amsterdam, met her at the gate. This time even Bertha saw the wisdom of buttoning it. The airline had offered the choice of a free flight back to Basel or rail tickets. They went by train.

Now rewind back to the years immediately after the First World War. What to do with this younger daughter with limited prospects, poor Emma Lina? Well, her parents sent her to housekeeping school in Basel. Here the young women learned the best way to dust, to iron, to make a nutritious and succulent evening meal, to keep household accounts, to look after kids and to warm slippers in front of the fire. The last bit may not actually have been on the curriculum.

‘If she does really well at that school, who knows?’ said her parents, ‘a prosperous farmer might like her enough to marry her.’

Every Saturday, the young women of the school ran a little café where the public could enjoy a cup of coffee and a slice of the cakes the inmates had baked. Obviously, all the eligible men of the district would be there, checking out the talent on show.

By ‘talent’, I mean, of course, ‘housekeeping talent’. Anyone who thought anything else please move immediately to the back of the class and write a hundred times ‘I will not think prurient thoughts while reading respectable family blogs.’

One such eligible bachelor was a young man who had recently been made French, by ‘réincorporation’ as the government put it, i.e. by their action in taking Alsace back from Germany. He was rattling a bit from the shrapnel still inside him and which would, ultimately, kill him; I presume, though I don’t know for sure, that it was French shrapnel, received while he was in a uniform of German grey rather than French blue. His brother hadn’t made it through the war at all.

He, Prosper Brugner, took a shine to Emma Lina. The results, in April 1921, are revealed by the photo below.

Prosper was no prosperous farmer. He was a craftsman who prospered by installing shutters in buildings. His sons would later set up a whole business in that trade.

Between them, Emma Lina and Prosper had a short but happy married life, which produced two daughters and three sons. Their elder daughter and second child was Jeannette. Her only child was Danielle, who went even further out on a limb than Bertha, and married an Englishman, in probably about the best coup I’ve ever managed to pull off in my life.

As for Emma Lina, her marriage ended far too soon, in 1947, when the shrapnel at last got the better of Prosper. She found herself another husband, though, by the simple expedient of going round the village and looking at the wood piles outside the houses of all the bachelors. She reasoned, correctly as it turned out, that a man with a large wood pile would know how to look after a house and the woman inside it. It didn’t matter at all to her that he was Jewish, a pleasing and refreshing freedom of racism in the face of pragmatic good sense.

When Danielle was reaching adulthood herself, her grandmother used to say to her regularly, ‘I wish the housekeeping school still existed and you could go there. Your mother’s taught you nothing.’

Don’t worry, Emma Lina, don’t worry. She’s learned. By dint of looking after me and three other boisterous males, she learned to stay calm in any situation, keep a house that is neither too tidy nor worryingly dirty, and cook some extraordinary meals.

You don’t have to go to a formal housekeeping school. The school of life can be just as effective.

Slow learners in the art of losing

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same

… you’ll be a man, my son, according to Rudyard Kipling in his most famous poem, If. Perhaps it would be nice to add ‘you’ll be a woman, my daughter’ as well, but then Kipling wasn’t perhaps the most progressive of men. I had a lot of time for him until I discovered that he had contributed to the fund for that poor Brigadier Dyer, so cruelly driven out of the Army for carrying out a policing operation in Jallianwallah Bagh which unforgiving folk like me think of today as the Amritsar Massacre.


Spot of unpleasantness in Amritsar: a monument to Brigadier Dyer

Still, Kipling has a point in expressing the sentiment in these lines. You take part; sometimes you win, sometimes you lose; you should take either with equanimity and move on. That certainly is the ideal behaviour of the phlegmatic Englishman, imperturbable in all circumstances.

Which is why it’s a major concern when Sepp Blatter, president of the world football federation FIFA, absolutely rightly accuses England of being bad losers.

FIFA handed the 2018 World Cup to Russia. So what? In the first place, it’s time more places outside the traditional regions of Europe and South America got their chance. In the second place, this is a contest with only one winner and multiple losers and the latter need to take it with good grace. It’s increasingly embarrassing to see our papers bleating on about how badly we were treated.

One reason we lost the bid was because sections of our media have been campaigning against corruption among FIFA officials, and those same FIFA officials decided to punish us by not choosing England to host the Cup. That’s not a cause for regret. It’s a cause for pride. We wouldn’t shut up about how rotten the organisation is, and it cost us the World Cup. That’s called taking a stand on principle and accepting the consequences. The opposite, if we’d muzzled our press and TV on the subject in the hope of succeeding in our bid, would have been craven.



Blatter and Putin:made for each other?



And Wikileaks has confirmed what all of us have long suspected about the debased nature of the Russian Federation. If two thoroughly dishonourable federations join up, who’s to be surprised? Again, why sulk? That’s the natural order of things.

But what shocks me most about the fact that we’re losing so badly is that we’ve no excuse for it. Kipling’s advice is excellent. But in addition, they say that practice makes perfect, and England has an unparalleled track record for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, in sporting competition after competition.

So how come we’re still so bad at losing?

The American on the Truro train

On a Truro to London train, I met a retired trial lawyer from San Francisco. He lived there from 1963, a time and a place ‘where it was good to be a single.’ But in his late forties, with the latest woman he’d been seeing heading back East, he began to wonder whether he was getting to an age where ‘no-one gave a damn any more’ and he might turn into a sad figure hanging around bars hoping for action that would never happen.

It was approaching Christmas in 1985. A niece rang him. She knew an Englishwoman – more specifically a Cornishwoman – who was living in Detroit, where she was editing a magazine. She was going to be spending Christmas in San Francisco, and it seemed to the niece that the uncle should meet her.

The uncle allowed himself to be persuaded and phoned the Englishwoman at her home. The call was taken by her then seven-year old son, who ‘for the only time in his life took a message correctly. He’s never done it since and he’s 32 now.’

As arranged, the lawyer called at the flat where the Englishwoman was staying. She sent someone else to answer the door, in case she couldn’t stand him. The man who opened the door said ‘who are you?’ gruffly.

‘I’m the uncle,’ came the reply.

They went out and liked each other. They met again on Boxing Day, at which point in his words they ‘hit it off’. I’m not quite sure what he was implying but he did add that there was nowhere open for them to eat, so perhaps he meant that they were forced indoors and indulged in more than polite conversation.

He suggested they should meet again. She had a pretty packed schedule, but said she would try to get him an invitation to a dinner she was going to. He turned up and found that of the eight people there, he already knew two, one of them a former client.

It soon became clear to the others what was going on between the two of them, particularly when she announced that she didn’t want to go back to Detroit as planned on the 31st, and not just because she didn’t like Detroit. There was, however, a problem.

‘I can’t cancel,’ she wailed, ‘I have a plane ticket.’

‘Of course you can,’ explained a doctor who was present, ‘you have terrible earache.’

She stayed on another week. He was introduced to the delights of organising babysitting so that he could meet his new girlfriend.

Eventually she had to go, however. So he went down to the local TWA office. A strike was under way; for the first and only time of his life, he crossed a picket line. ‘What you’re doing,’ he said, ‘is temporal, but this is important.’

He laid $1000 in cash on the counter and said ‘give me as many round trip tickets to Detroit as this will buy.’

The answer was ten. This meant that for the next several months they visited each other every other weekend. That phase ended only when, in the early summer of 1986, they married.



San Francisco

Today he’s in his seventies. They share their time between a place near San Francisco and another on the Lizard peninsula in Cornwall. ‘If you’d told me when I was young that I would end up living in Cornwall I wouldn’t have believed you. At the time, I didn’t know where Cornwall was, let alone the Lizard peninsula or the hamlet of 50 people where we actually live. The most active business in our village is a hole in a wall, the village post box.’

Urban life in the The Lizard, Cornwall

At least it explains why we met on a train up from the lovely Cornish city of Truro.

When you're crossing the country, you may meet some interesting people

Capitalising on the city

Sometimes nothing beats sticking with tradition.

On Saturday, Danielle and I had a great day in London. We had lunch at the Mitsukoshi Department Store, one of Japan’s most prestigious, at its branch in Lower Regent Street. The restaurant is in the basement, giving it an atmosphere of restful calm which complements the excellent food and takes some of the painful edge off the prices. Nearly all the clients are Japanese and you hear the language all around, so it’s about as close to being abroad as you can get without the tedium of the flight.

Mitsukoshi - a fine ingredient in a great day out

From there we made for the King’s Head in Islington. The name ‘King’s Head’ might suggest that it celebrates that extraordinary moment when the English actually took radical action against bad government. That is, indeed, a moment to celebrate. Viscerally opposed to the death penalty as I am, I can’t help admiring Cromwell and his mates for having the chutzpah to tell that bloody awful King that they’d had just about enough of him and cutting off his head to prove the point. As an act, it certainly had the merit of being dramatically decisive. I wish the English today could recapture some of that spirit, at least to the extent of not voting ghastly people into government instead of chasing them from it.

In fact, however, the name ‘King’s Head’ has nothing to do with Charles I’s unlamented end. It is, in fact, a traditional pub name. So imagine a U-shaped bar serving every kind of drink, wooden floors, subdued lighting, a heterogeneous mixture of seats from armchairs to bar stools, generally everything that makes for one of the pleasanter pubs, an ideal setting for a long and enjoyable conversation with just enough lubrication to keep it going over any possible rough places.

The King’s Head is, however, unusual in having a theatre attached to the back. Now, if that conjures up an image of a sweeping hall, with banked rows of well-upholstered seats, think again. The King’s Head Theatre would probably fit inside the dining room of, say, your average bank executive. There are a few rows of benches and an open space in front of them that passes as a stage. One merit is that, since it’s attached to a pub, you can take a drink in with you.

King's Head Theatre: makes up in atmosphere for what it lacks in size

In this unprepossessing environment we saw an excellent production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore (perhaps The Mikado would have been more appropriate after that lunch, but it wasn't on). It was performed by nine singers, down on conventional productions by about forty, and the orchestra was a single piano, which is probably thirty instruments short (but it was a big piano).

Somehow the voices were so good that they filled the (admittedly restricted) space and were able to create the effect of a chorus as well as covering the main parts (even if some singers had to play more than one). There were a few minor amendments to the words – for instance, the original’s reference to ‘his sisters and his cousins, whom he reckons up by dozens, and his aunts’ was reduced to ‘his sister and his cousin, who make not even half a dozen, and his aunt’. We had one sister, one cousin and an urn representing the aunt.

It was brilliant. And of course full of wonderfully familiar tunes. I could have sung along most of the time, if only I could sing at all. In fact, I tried to join in what ought to be England’s (not Britain’s) national anthem, with the haunting words ‘for in spite of all temptations / to belong to other nations, / he remains an Englishman’. Danielle, however, urged me politely but firmly to stop, confirming my view of my singing talents.

Anyway, we had a great time. And it was of course a wonderful celebration of English tradition. This is what we do in this country when we travel all the way to our great capital: we eat foreign, we go to the pub and we take in a show.

The thrill of bed hopping

For aeons, indeed probably for as long as men – and quite a few women – have possessed the skill of cunning, bed hopping has been one of the great pastimes of mankind.

In the traditional form, it’s being in a bed with someone other than your partner that gives the experience its spice. Trouble is, that comes with a lot of baggage, not much of it enjoyable: suffering, recrimination and ultimately divorce. Why, it can lead to Aids, for God’s sake.

Things aren't a lot better even if you’re using the bed for its other purpose, the one that in truth it actually serves for a much higher proportion of the time. When it comes to sleeping, most people agree that no bed is more comfortable than their own. Obliged from time to time to spend nights in hotels, I rarely wake as rested as I do at home.

All of which suggests that bed hopping isn't quite what it's been cracked up to be. Not a bed of roses, in fact.

So I’m indebted to Danielle, my wife, for introducing me to a form of the game that avoids all the disadvantages. On the bed that I like to think of as ‘ours’ even if we’re not sleeping in it, we have a ‘memory’ mattress that allegedly ‘remembers’ the shape of our bodies and moulds itself to them. Now I find it perfectly comfortable. Danielle, on the other hand, believes that its memory only reminds it of all the ways it can shape itself to cause maximum discomfort to her back.

So every few months she decides it’s time for us to sleep on something a little harder. Like the other bed, in the guest room. And that’s where we went last night. As we only moved here a couple of months ago, it was the first time I’d slept in that room. It’s actually the master bedroom, but because it’s at the front of the house and exposed to the noise of the road, we prefer to use the smaller bedroom at the back.

A different bed in a new room! Just how exciting can life be? And the knowledge that I could enjoy this deliciously fresh experience without leaving home only made the prospect all the sweeter. The fact that I would be sharing it with a woman who happened to be the same woman didn't detract from the pleasure either – after all, who needs all that hassle?

Bed hopping without danger. Win-win all round.

Apparently it’s doing Danielle’s back some good, too. Though she didn’t sleep that well. The road, you understand. She’ll be using ear plugs tonight.

It's the games people play with each other that matter

An excellent test of the character of a town is the quality of its badminton.

When we were living in the Paris region, we were in a beautiful suburb on the West of the City, St Germain-en-Laye. A wonderful town centre with all the most glorious shops you could possibly want – in fact, given the prices they charged, rather more than we could possibly want. There was also a fabulous chateau, where one of the greatest of French Kings, Henry IV was born, or lived, or something – I’m vague on the details. I can confirm that he wasn’t in residence when we were around.

Anyway, it wasn’t the chateau itself that had the charm, it was the extraordinary terrace beyond, where you could walk for ages through formal gardens with a glorious view down to the river Seine and, beyond it, Paris. Unbeatable. Wardown Park in Luton is great, but not quite in the same league, and the river Lea – well, it’s not quite the Seine.

The river Lea in Luton

Majestic view from the terrace in St Germain

Problem is – a view’s a view. You see it once and think it’s wonderful. Maybe even twice or three times. But then – what else are you going to do with it? It stays beautiful, but despite changes in light and weather, well it’s pretty much as beautiful each time. What matters is the people. That’s what really gives a place its charm.

And when it comes to the people in St Germain-en-Laye – I’m reminded of the guardsman’s comment on the Battle of Waterloo: ‘my dear... the noise... and the people.’

St Germain was where friends of ours were asked, nay told, by neighbours to take in the futons they had hung out on their balcony to air. Said neighbours had ‘visitors coming round in the afternoon’ and what did our friends think? That ‘this was Naples?’

So I suppose our experience at the badminton club was hardly a surprise. We paid our subscriptions to join (OK, OK, I mean, I paid, I was the moron). We went just once. After an hour hanging around it became clear that no-one already playing was going to leave a court, ever, to let us play. So we left and never came back.

Tonight Danielle and I went to our local club here in Luton. There were only four other people there, all men, playing an intense doubles match when we arrived. It looked as though we’d be obliged to knock up on a court on our own for the whole evening.

Nothing of the sort. The four men finished their match and called us. ‘Come on, we’ll swap in,’ they said. Two of them went off to play singles, and we played a doubles match. So it went on for the time we were there – four playing doubles, two playing singles, swapping around each game.

That’s tolerance, decency and generosity. Would I exchange them for a view? You’ve got to be kidding.

Anyway, to be honest, the Lea’s not that bad. Quite pretty, isn’t it? When you look at the picture closely.