30Aug04 — 4

Mark Thatcher: A View From The Right

[Eric the Unread draws our attention to one way that evidence might have been gathered against Mark Thatcher.]

A commenter at PooterGeek suggested that my assessment of Mark Thatcher’s contribution to civilization to date might be biased by my instinctive antipathy towards the Thatcher family. For the sake of balance I have collected some opinions on Margaret’s golden boy from the other side of the political fence.

The Daily Telegraph:

“When Mark Thatcher’s mother entered Downing Street in May 1979, she quoted Francis of Assisi to the effect that she wanted to drive out discord, error, doubt and despair.

While there may be debate as to how far she succeeded, few would dispute that these unwanted qualities have attached themselves squarely to the public image of her only son.”

Slate Magazine

“a notorious businessman”

Mark’s peers at Harrow:

“Thickie Mork”

The Daily Express:

“It is not the first time that Sir Mark … has been connected with questionable dealings. But getting mixed up with mad-dog mercenaries surely is the worst … Sir Mark has been said to be his mother’s blind spot. If the allegations prove to be true he will have acted with blind stupidity.”

Bernard Ingham, Margaret Thatcher’s then Press Secretary, when asked by Mark how he could best help his mother’s election campaign [as reported in both The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph]:

“Leave the country.”

A “local industrialist” in, Constantia, the fashionable area where Mark Thatcher lives:

“He would keep banging on about his contacts throughout the world and the millions to be made in the Middle East, but when it came to a serious discussion about world affairs, international business or politics, he didn’t seem to have much to offer.

According to Five Live on Sunday, “just about the only paper that had anything nice to say about Mark Thatcher today” was the Mail On Sunday, where there was an extensive tribute—by, er, Jonathan Aitken.

The Financial Times:

“A sort of Harrovian Arthur Daley with a famous mum”

29Aug04 — 0

Humphrys. Again.

The man is such an easy target that sometimes I wonder why I bother. This is, after all, someone who unselfconsciously assembled an article complaining about bad writing from a collage of clichés. Then I hear him on the radio and I have to take another swipe. This weekend Humphrys was slagging off television today, though he claims not to have watched it for five years. Commenters at Tom Watson’s place save me more light assault training:

“What about the hideous wasting away of good interviews? There’s one programme on early mornings on Radio 4 which often interviews people on serious and complex subjects but gives them a minuscule time so that they are over before any contributor can do the issue justice, and where the argument consists entirely of soundbites because the presenters haven’t the time to get beyond it.

Worse, the interviewees who are given long time-slots are subject to constant interruption so that they can barely say more than four words without the interviewer butting in, and the interview becomes a simple battle of put-down and wit with no intellectual content whatsoever.

I wonder if this John Humphrys has ever heard of “The Today Programme”? Ought that not to be next in his sights?

Posted by David Boothroyd at August 29, 2004 02:01 AM”

“If I were a cynic, I would wonder aloud whether the serialisation of Greg Dyke’s book in today’s Mail on Sunday and Observer, following on from John Humphry’s comments, were coordinated…

Posted by Richard Gibbs at August 29, 2004 04:46 PM”

I truncate the latter post before it starts to make almost-favourable noises about His John-ness. We won’t be having that sort of talk around here.

29Aug04 — 1

Not An ‘Appy One

Squander Two has introduced me to The Policeman’s Blog. It’s the badger’s nadgers: brightly-written, entertaining accounts of life dealing with the criminal underclass. The Policeman’s struggles against people determined to take ruthless advantage of every kindness shown to them by the system remind me of the prison hospital tales of Theodore Dalrymple, aka Dr Anthony Daniels. The Policeman writes:

“As [an] unreformed conservative of the lock ‘em up and throw away the key school, I am frequently ridiculed (at least I think that’s why). I personally relish cooking the goose of another Burberry clad neer-do-well, whilst at the same time knowing that he is unlikely ever to reform and the only respite his neighbours will get is if he goes to jail.”

27Aug04 — 4

Make Your Own Entertainment!

Right. My sister‘s coming to stay with me today, so you lot can spend the weekend reading other ‘Blogs or dead trees or just talking amongst yourselves.

How about this?

“The so-called ‘Iron Lady’ of the international stage, Margaret Thatcher was, for the most part, a pragmatist in domestic matters, who disguised the timidity of her reforms and her weakness in the face of genuinely powerful segments of the establishment by picking off easy targets and noisily proclaiming a resolve that was, in fact, a projection of her admirers in the media.”

Discuss.

26Aug04 — 0

New Labour Update

This week I have had three emails from the Labour party. The first two asked me to be a candidate (again), this time for the Cambridgeshire County Council elections. The third, yesterday, invited me to a Labour “auction of promises”. Conservative/LibDem readers can now provide their own punchline to this post. To make things a little harder, you aren’t allowed to use the words “Bernie Ecclestone“.

25Aug04 — 5

Worms

As if to taunt me, a new bookshop has opened between where I live and my local supermarket. It is called “Libra Aries” and it sells volumes of new age bollocks:

“Earth Mysteries, Folklore, Druidry, the Northern Tradition, Wicca, Paganism, Shamanism, Golden Dawn, Buddhism, Taoism, Herbs, Vegetarian Cookery, Psychogeography, Self-Publishing & Small Presses, Green & Left Politics, Psychedelia..”

In a new, occasional PooterGeek feature I will simply link to an Amazon page featuring a book from the shop’s window that has caught my eye. Resisting further comment will be part of my own self-administered anger management programme. My dear readers need not feel so bound. Today’s book is The Cat Herbal: Simple Green Remedies for Your Cat.

25Aug04 — 6

Innocent, M’Lud

PooterGeek has somehow acquired a reputation for taking the piss. It is also currently the sixth highest Google hit for Oliver Kamm, because, although I have publicly said more positive than negative things about his writings, I gave the man a bit of a going over once.

Despite these facts I had nothing whatsoever to do with this parody of his ‘Blog. I did laugh at it, however—even when I shouldn’t have. That’s satire for you. It also scores by inventing attributes that its target doesn’t possess, but that somehow seem right (like Barry Norman saying “and why not” or Denis Healey calling people “silly billies”). I have to admit a sneaking admiration for the idea of Kamm suffering from a kind of ‘Blogging coprolalia and having to censor himself.

[Of course, if I were the perpetrator, this whole post would be so PooterGeek, wouldn’t it?—distancing myself from something I am secretly responsible for, while at the same time drawing people’s attention to it. And wouldn’t it be the cherry to then write a cautiously positive review of my own work? Being a smartarse can screw up your life.]

25Aug04 — 0

The Magazine For Bonkers Old Colonels

Non-Brits must understand: Victoria Beckham is not in any way “posh”. At the time she was given her showbiz nickname she was relatively well-off; now she is simply rich. She could buy and sell many genuinely posh—that is titled rather than monied—people, but they probably wouldn’t let her. Even if they had a financial crisis it would be too awful for them to contemplate selling out to someone so vulgar. You might think the former Spice’s habits and taste are weird, but a large number of “ordinary” British people would behave just like her if they dropped into her kitten heels tomorrow. In my strange, accidental outsider’s wanderings up and down the social strata of this country, from outside lavs to royal garden parties (the Windsors are certainly not as posh as it gets here, by the way), I have learned that truly posh people really are not like the rest of us.

I once placed a classified ad in The Spectator. I was looking for accommodation close my place of work, the Institute of Cancer Research on the Fulham Road, so it seemed like the perfect place to go a-fishing for spare rooms let by genteel, cash-poor, old Chelsea ladies. My choice was too perfect. If you want to meet characters who you thought only existed in P G Wodehouse novels I recommend the Speccie.

As well as carrying an obligatory red-faced-geezer rant about “health fascists”—

“Scarcely a day passes without some bossy New Labour drone appearing on the radio to announce yet another ban on something or other or to demand tougher regulations… …One gets the impression that they’re usually whining women… …but one can think of plenty of Labour men who year to prohibit or regulate our private behaviour, from riding horses in the harmless pursuit of vermin, or banning all smoking in public places, through to smacking uncontrollable brats…

—last week’s edition contains posh people galore. This is from its review of a biography of William Coldstream:

“Coldstream wanted to be a doctor like his father (who was also a Fellow of Royal Zoological Society and an excellent knitter), but although he went to a prep school that was so reverential about games that a boy was expelled for farting as he boxed, his formal education more or less ended when he caught rheumatic fever at the age of 11, and he did not pass the necessary exams.”

This is from a review of Christopher Simon Sykes’s history of Sledmere, The Big House:

“…Venetia Cavendish-Bentinck, married to a millionaire and yet so tight-fisted she bought bacon on a sale-or-return basis, recycled left-over milk from the cat’s dish for her guests, and tried to entertain Catholics on Fridays because fish was cheaper than meat…”

“…Sir Mark Sykes… …who distinguished himself internationally as an orientalist, MP, soldier and writer. He had a perfectly miserable childhood—its highlight being when his father, in a rage, hanged his beloved pet terriers from a tree and left them dangling dead for him to find—yet grew up to be energetic, humorous, honourable and kind…”

Then there’s Charles Spencer (not the late Diana’s brother) writing about why he’s glad he didn’t grow up to achieve his ambition at public school [that’s private school] to be a rock drummer:

“I’ve had enough problems with booze to realise that easy access to drugs would quickly have been the death of me. In hospital once for an operation—I had the embarrassing and acutely painful condition of an abscess on the bum—I was given morphine for 24 hours and suddenly understood why junkies maintained their habit, whatever the personal cost. It was sheer dreamy bliss. Who would mind lying on a filthy mattress in a rancid squat if this is where opiates took you? Even now, three years, ten months and 11 days into my sobriety, I still find myself wistfully and irresponsibly wishing that I had tried smack before getting clean and sober.”

24Aug04 — 1

Soylent Beige

You know that “chicken” they manufacture?—the stuff that sticks to your teeth when you eat it, the stuff made by lobbing live birds into the air intake of a retired Concorde turbine and spooling the output around an industrial bobbin, before binding and compressing the collected strands into “chunks”, and bleaching them with some waste product of an oil refinery? Well, I foolishly ate some yesterday evening.

23Aug04 — 2

“It Isn’t War”

Via Sgt. Missick, A Line In The Sand, I came to this short, fascinating, and hawkish piece by a military writer about the continuing fighting in Iraq. The author, Richard Hart Sinnreich, endorses the outlook ascribed to Ulysses S. Grant by one of his biographers:

“He had no liking at all for the cruel weight which modern warfare puts on the civilian, but he could order the weight applied without the slightest hesitation when it seemed to him to be necessary.”

It touches on, but is also at an angle to, some themes that have been debated at great length at PooterGeek here and here and here.

[My calling Sinnreich’s article “fascinating” is not the same as my agreeing with it.]

Killer fact: after his second term as President of the United States, U. S. Grant travelled to Sunderland, where he opened the first free municipal library in England.

22Aug04 — 0

Glad We’ve Got That Sorted Out

Globe-trotting teacher of English as a foreign language and funnyman ‘Blogger Harry Hutton puts me right over at Chase Me Ladies. It isn’t the Jooos who are to blame for the World’s ills; it’s the Joes.

UPDATE: Ever alert, US Homeland Security bans Joes from flying.

UPDATE UPDATED: Ted Kennedy is one of the main subjects of the article linked above. He is the youngest of Joe Kennedy‘s children. Joe Kennedy had a problem with Jooos. So the circle is complete.

22Aug04 — 1

Olympics Round-Up

White Russian wins 100m; Black Americans demand recount.

South Korean feels similarly as World notes gymnastics judges can’t do sums.

To balance the pictures of attractive women around here lately, here’s a link to the BBC’s gallery of Britain’s “oarsome” gold-medal winning rowing crew. And, for all persuasions, there’s always Yahoo’s slideshow of toned, tanned beach volleyball players of both sexes. I note, however, the trouble Playboy got into when they linked totty and the Olympics

Iraq continues its steady progress towards the day it beats England at a game we invented. (Don’t you love the cute way Americans talk about “soccer”? I mean “Karim was injured on the play“. It’s like when I go on about baseball “matches”.)

What does five-gold-medal-winner Michael Phelps do on his day off from swimming for the USA? He sits in the audience, waves a little flag, and eats three meals at McDonald’s. Having admitted to this, I doubt that he will ever have to pay for another burger again.

21Aug04 — 1

Questions About Language

Firstly, for the benefit of Jon and other non-English readers, here‘s a definition of “oik”

oik n. member of the lower classes of the UK—especially anyone not English—e.g. one who tends to pronounce an (i) sound as (oi) UK

Secondly, Norm is both a professor of political thought and a very clear thinker—a dying breed. Today he demonstrates that he thinks more clearly than a lot of “scientists” when he rightly (and modestly) questions the dogma of linguistic determinism—broadly, the belief that the extent of language shapes the extent of thought. It is a fallacy that grows from the vanity of the academy and from its lack of imagination. It’s a kind of establishment solipsism, like the earth-centred universe, historical inevitability, the ascent of man, and vitalism.

Brains process representations of the world and sometimes those representations are labelled with words. When you live in an ivory tower and its walls are lined with dead trees it’s hard to imagine that the marks on the bark in the forests outside can be as real as the inscriptions pressed up against your nose every day.

And another thing. As hard as I try to be frivolous around here, clever people keep visiting PooterGeek and making serious points in the comments sections. It happened with my jokey human cloning post. It happened with my jokey op-ed exam post. This post is serious, therefore I invite Pootergeekers to fill the comments with really bad jokes.

21Aug04 — 3

Why I Am Spending This Morning Buying A Camera Cleaning Kit

Last weekend I went with Caroline and Khadija to a wedding. Regulars might be surprised that it was the first time I have ever taken a camera to one. Making good pictures with an old-fashioned SLR can be a bitch, but some days everything seems to go pretty well:

the bride and groom duck under confetti and bubbles

[click to enlarge]

Sadly it’s not just your performance at the event that counts; what you do when you aren’t taking photographs matters too. At some point that afternoon a piece of crud I had failed to keep out of my little rucksack found its way between the World and the film. This is the kind of image that makes keen amateur photographers want to cry, but for all the wrong reasons:

flower girl throws rose petals

[click to enlarge]

And there were others that I am too miserable to share with you. Being women, C and K will make warm, reassuring noises about how they still love the picture anyway. Being a man, I will respond to those warm, reassuring noises as I would to the sound of fingernails scraping a blackboard.

I’m off to Jessops. See you all later.

19Aug04 — 0

The Decline And Fall Of Western Civilization Part XXXVI

As of 23:46 BST, the content aggregator Google News is displaying these words on its front page:

“Paris Hilton’s Lost Chihuahua Turns Up—ABC News and 254 other[ news outlets are reporting this story]“

This kind of item is being planted by cave-dwelling misogynists in comedy beards in an effort to turn us to the stoning of shameless women. Failing that, at the moment when the dirty bombs go off in synchrony across western Europe’s capitals, we will be reading about the debilitating psittacosis affecting Oprah’s African Grey.

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