31st March 2009

 

telescopes, ends etc etc

 

There's a story I've been following and researching all day, because it intrigues me. It's not what you'd call 'news' as such, but it is of enormous importance to mothers everywhere in the UK. The Government has just 'upgraded' the qualifications needed to be a preschool childcare worker, as well as dishing out the usual welter of forms, targets, achievement to play ratios and other assorted bollocks. In short, nursery school care has been invaded by the same useless anal retentives who screwed up special needs teaching some years back.

The result is that some 17,500 child care operatives have left the profession since the new measures were introduced. Today on Woman's Hour (don't knock it - this is great radio) one of the instigators of the 'improvements' was interviewed by a lady who showed commendable restraint, in that she didn't strangle the silly cow after the first five minutes. I do realise that the first resort of the bucolic Brigadier in deepest Sussex is this 'why oh why' stuff. But the capacity of our resources to look after tots just fell by 25%.

You'd think, wouldn't you, that even to the bureaucratic mind this might seem like the wrong result. But not a bit of it: Ms liaison intervention ongoing road map Pillock chose a disapproving tone to express her 'disappointment' that these carers 'have felt it necessary to desert their calling'. Amazing.

 

bashing the expenses

 

It will come as no surprise to anyone that the most expensive MP in the House of Commons is Hazel Blears. To be honest, even if she was paid ten quid a decade and had never claimed more than 75p, she would still be an expensive overhead - on the grounds of being incapable of anything beyond that intensely irritating nose-and-gob wrinkle thing she adopts most of the time. Hacks often use motor lenses so they can catch politicos with a ghastly facial expression, but with Bleary none of this paraphernalia is required: she looks like a dork 24/7.

In many ways, the fuss about all these jollies and economically truthful claims is a bit silly. It plays well in the media because most people have never experienced life in the senior corporate bubble. I don't know a single one of my former adland friends who's remotely surprised by any of it: after all, quite a few of us have entertained these Parliamentary troughers ourselves in the course of duty. We knew they were doing exactly the same when visiting other agencies; it is perfectly possible to become morbidly obese as a Minister without expending a penny oneself. So we mustn't be surprised that, having clocked this largesse, they fancied some of it for themselves.

The one flaw in this argument is that while we were all fiscally responsible for delivering a profit after all the lunches had been consumed, our legislators face no such measure. Further, we weren't wankers. And finally, while in pre-Thatcher days of 65% tax rates it was sort of understandable that one put through everything from domestic grocery bills to tailoring costs, the whole point of AD 1979 was that we got tons of boulah to make up for the rapidly closed loopholes concerning coats, women - and in one memorable instance, a heifer.

As for the argument that MPs are underpaid, I'd like to know the criteria involved in the 'under' judgement. Looking back over the professional lifetime of those fitting the average age of Commons wasters, the last thirty years can be summarised as follows:

Mad handbag takes power and destroys our industrial base. Puts Unions back in box. Vows to do same on civil service, leaves power with 23% more civil servants than when elected. Having rendered wealth disparity wider than at any time since 1789, the Tories elect a grey cricket bore who wipes out all the national debt repayments made by Baroness Handbag, shags Edwina Currie and presides over the infamous 'bastards' who proceed to cover the Party in sleazy shame. Having won one more election, Major gives green light for deregulation of greed, and sets up the circumstances in which selfish delusion can flourish. He is succeeded by New Labour grinning Bambi who can only get elected by ditching every last Socialist principle that he never adhered to in the first place. After leading us into a completely unnecessary £11 billion war in search of his legacy, Blair hobnobs with City crooks, donates a further £9 billion to the EU, and allows his depressive Chancellor to sell all our gold while running up the biggest deficit in history. Chancellor Brown succeeds to the top job, and within months has fucked up the Budget by needlessly bailing out tossers, cutting VAT and boosting banks to the tune of 800 billion quid, most of which goes overseas within minutes. Secondary achievements over these three memorable decades include ruining education, bankrupting the NHS, aiding and abetting social meltdown, filling the prisons, cutting Britain's share of world trade by 40%, creating mass negative equity (twice), laying the foundations of corporate bullying, trebling the use of anti-depressants, tearing up most of Magna Carta, paving over half of Kent - and overall (in 1994 and 2007) choosing the two most corrupt, compromised and incompetent Cabinets since 1720.

And they want a rise for this?

 

29th/30th March 2009

25th March 2009

boom in the midst of crunch

Thanks to New Labour's obsession with white hot technology, Devon's TV and electrical businesses are booming at the minute. This is because with the onset of digital and the ditching of analogue, a whole county (which is bigger than all the Home Counties put together) suddenly needs to be tooled up for it. Mind you, most young and/or working class people are either unemployed or on a housing list, so installing digital isn't exactly a priority for them.

The way the Government has handled this is nothing short of stupid, but then very little of anything they do is ever less than blind when it comes to the foresight thing. The poorer classes and the old will seriously struggle to afford the upgrade (for anything worthwhile you're talking a grand) but they either do it or have nothing....because of course analogue is being switched off.

Why is it being switched off? Sorry if you've heard me quote this before, but the French broadcasting authorities continue to make it clear that they 'have no plans to remove analogue as a televisual option'. When everyone zigs, France zags - so you can be fairly sure that once again, we're wrong and they're right. They were right about autoroutes, nuclear power, early introduction to alcohol in a familial context, the mixed economy, screwing the Germans and staying out of Iraq. That's not a bad track record.

As for us, being close to the coast in an underpopulated area, it's all we can do to get a mobile signal much of the time, and our local landline exchange still uses only five digits. Thanks to an enormous clump of ugly sycamore trees in the next-door field, we can't use the Devon transmitter; given it's only five miles away, this is bizarre - but anyway, we've opted for Freesat as well as Freeview from the Cornwall transmitter. It's nearly a hundred miles away, but there's nothing bar the English Channel between us and it, so it works a treat....up to but not including some of the weaker secondary add-on stations.

For example, BBC4 is always without sound and E4+1 without colour. On the old Grundig upstairs, quite a few of these repeaters as I call them come out upside down and in negative. Mind you, our Grundig is one of those tellies produced by the Spielberg Outer Limits Elm Street Group. It's never a good idea to watch it on your own, and especially not at night. We had a guest to stay some years ago, and although one always assumed she just left in the night, we never heard from her again. I keep expecting to wake in the early hours to the sound of tapping, with an eerily distant voice shouting "Heeeeelp....let me ouuut"

useful gordon

As will be obvious from that title, we are not talking here about the Caledonian Clown who (when he isn't cavorting round the Globe in GB1) occupies 10 Downing Street. Oh dear me no: I refer of course to painter, bathroom installer, loft insulator and financial advisor Gordon - our little treasure without whom life at Yesterday Towers would turn feral within months.

I have written on the subject of this gentleman before, but every reader would do well to harken unto his outlook on life. Gordon has no pension ("Funny 'ow they go down jus' afore you take 'em" he says) and nor does he have anything after his name apart from a few O-levels. But he does nevertheless have the sort of investment portfolio to make Warren Buffet's look compulsively narrow - and he is astonishingly well-informed about everything from beer-belly futures to new nickel mines.

This afternoon while passing him a cup of tea, I learned about unsold land with planning permission, structured notes in silver, and how the demographics of Devon are changing. Just in case any of you think all this is academic, I should point out that Gordon spends winter in the West Indies, has three summer holidays each and every year, and as far as I can gather does odd jobs to stave off the boredom of regularly knocking every investment analyst for six with his eyes closed and dick in a bear-trap.

Anyway, the bloke eats a sandwich for lunch while still painting, and has knocked off our exterior wood surfaces in three days flat. If only we had a Prime Minister who could do that.

 

24th March 2009

Watching Mrs Ward plonk a large pack of Liebnitz biscuits in our trolley the other day (it's the German half, see - she can't resist them) I made the obvious crack about watching weight, only to be told that she needed them for her art class.

In my day we got nudes and vases, but given they're all girlies in the class, I suppose they'd be inclined to put more passion into a rendition of something involving chocolate.

"A bit odd to paint biscuits isn't it?" I enquired.

"We're not going to paint them you pillock" she replied "They're for our coffee break".

 

23rd March 2009

 

in search of sense

I wonder how our poverty-lifting Government proposes to square off the Law forbidding homophobic jokes and statements with the raving homophobia of the Islamic community? The terrifying thing about writing such a question is that one knows - were a Cabinet minister enlightened enough to be reading it - he or she would go, "Ooh, I hadn't thought of that".

Years ago on radio there was a pastiche quiz show called Does the Team Think? I'm not talking about the awful remake using Vic Reeves and Ulrika Slapperssohhnn, but the one first broadcast in 1957, which starred folks like Jimmy Edwards and Cyril Fletcher. What made the show really funny was the way in which Edwards in particular could sound uncommonly stupid when he quite obviously wasn't*. The trick has been learned by our contemporary leaders, minus only the irony.

There was a chap on the BBC's news Channel this morning, condemning Government databases and various pieces of ill-thought-out legislation, most of which were the handiwork of those femmes fatales Spliff and Harmaman. A jovial fellow, he smiled while telling viewers, "The Government seems to think that meaning well is enough. As anyone with half an hour's constitutional training and history GCSE could tell you, it isn't". To be entirely accurate of course, he should've said 'history O-level', but apart from this minor gaffe his elliptical swipe at idiocy was masterly. My colleague The Beak has a rather more direct go at the elite's prunes on the Home page today.

Increasingly, the same rule applies to most of our professions - giving Bankers the day off for once, lawyers destroy the fabric of responsibility, doctors the hyppocratic oath, accountants the honesty of real numbers, and police the principle of obedience to the law. In today's Independent, a small piece ran explaining how femented milk can cure stomach ulcers. The piece ran:

'....ulcers were once thought to be caused by excessive acid, but are now known to be primarily caused by the bacteria H. pylori'

This is drivel, but most people now accept it as a fact. I was a sufferer for many years and I can tell you without doubt that the primary thing required for the development of ulcers is stress, pure and simple. There remain only two matters to sort out: does the stress cause the acid to develop and thus provide a perfect breeding ground for pylori? Or does the lowering of immunity through stress make patients prone to catching the bacterial infection in the first place? It is yet another case of dull and incompetent extrapolation from data - and mirrors the Australian case from last year, where researchers had been looking at the wrong gene for half a decade. Even worse, it shows the medical profession stuck in the same old groove of wanting a physical cause for everything.

Anyway, the proposed law to ban homophobia is the worst kind of mad species hubris. It also enables me to add to my maxim as follows: 'An uncivilised society bans homosexuality, a decadent society celebrates homosexuality, and an insane society tries to ban criticism of homosexuality'.

*I should point out that Jimmy Edwards was a rear gunner in both senses of the term, but also a war hero. I care not a fig for a chap's proclivities, so long as they are accompanied by the actions of a gentleman, and a sense of humour.

republican revenge evades hacks

I'm sure I'll be proved spectacularly wrong about this, but whether he's on the right track or not (and I suspect he isn't) Secretary Geithner is basically a good egg who finds himself at present nothing more than the victim of GOP revenge. The business of 'approving' Presidential appointments has been something of a rodeo-cum-circus for years, but the Republicans' bitterness at having been found out for putting forward a jerk for the Oval Office (and then renominating the pillock) is like a woman scorned. The fury with which they are torpedoing everything a naive administration tries may seem smart now; but I have a sense that history will judge them unkindly for this sabotage.

Some Brit journalists understand this, but many don't. The Indie's deputy business editor David Prosser is firmly rooted in the latter bed. So rooted, in fact, you could be forgiven for thinking the bloke is a vegetable.

Get this for an analysis of Geithner and AIG:

'...closely involved with the bailout of AIG....he had no excuse for not knowing about the bonuses'

We're not talking Lord Myners here, as in one great big fuck-off everybody pension worth £32 million: we're talking an elaborate and 100% crooked attempt by the bastards in charge of this appalling bank to use smoke, mirrors, bribes, smears and general obfuscation to keep the truth from all prying eyes over a period of several months, and generally lie their sleazy way into a Federal bailout they never deserved. But now cop for the conclusion Prosser draws:

'....it is not this lack of political nous that worries the financial community: it is more concerned with Geithner's ability to solve the crisis'.

Breathtaking isn't it? 'It's not just that we despise Geithner for showing a scintilla of trust - what makes things worse is that the guy has no answer to all this crap we left around for him to clear up. I mean Jeez - what a schmuck, huh?'

I'm afraid there is a disturbingly large proportion of the human race who will just never get that they are a joke. And as for Mr Prosser, he needs to get a reversal for his ethicoctomy. It makes me ashamed as a Manchester United supporter to have seen the club I worship 'sponsored' by AIG. Polluted would be a better term.

 

asking for permission, obama style

 

Not only do too many journalists see President Obama as just another slick suit, they also underestimate the street-wisdom that any good suit builds up over time. While simply a further example of how the media want it every which way but true, the key point here is that Barack Obama is beginning to demonstrate a degree of wisdom.

On the day after his election, I wrote a largely unpopular piece pointing out that if Obama had a plan, it was incredibly short on detail and finance. Having had a brief chance to see the books, the President has since both managed expectations and tried to sprint up a learning curve. Compared to the naivety with which Kennedy took the Pentagon's word on a certainty of success at the Bay of Pigs, the black guy's aplomb is to be admired.

In similar fashion, there has been a tidal wave of media derision about Obama's open offer of the hand of peace to Iran. But here again is evidence of the cynics being naive: the US leader's strategy is eminently sound, in that if the Iranian regime is of good heart, there will be a positive response. And if they stick the finger up to him....well, the world is watching.

I cannot believe the President expected anything other than the olive branch being rammed up his elegant arse. And while a large part of Barack Obama would love peaceful co-existence, the back-up instinct I'm sure he has (because every black man has to have it) tells him that he must first of all establish a provenance of at least trying.

 

22nd March 2009

thy rod and thy stafford comfort me not

As the bedlam that was Stafford Hospital becomes clearer by the day, I see little sign that NHS 'reformers' wish to shoulder any of the blame for it; or an a broader canvas, the slightest glimmer that the social engineers at Westminster see it as anything to do with them. (The Minister concerned has already rejected the idea of a public enquiry, which suggests business as usual on the FUCU strategy - Fuck-Up, Cover-Up).

Sanctimonious MPs have once more applied their rod to a failing institution. But for anyone who wants to look at recent history, or is a long-term nby reader - or has been to Stafford as I did last week - the scandal is extremely easy to explain....and foresee.

Skip back with me now if you will to Page One, and this central point from the Commission Report:

'The Commission damns the trust's management for being obsessed with hitting targets and cutting costs in a bid to secure that foundation status. In the process, the interests of patients went by the board.' (My italics)

Of course, the press are full of the usual outraged 'warnings ignored', 'slow to act' and all the rest of the dilatory behaviour intrinsic to Jobs for the Boys Quango government. But this is chucking Dettol at the sore rather than analysing the disease. For years now, hospitals have been closing wards, GPs prescribing poor drugs, primary carers fobbing patients off, and local Trusts refusing to release treatments for everything from cancer to dementia - all in the name of targets and cost-cutting.

For the Commission now to point the finger at Stafford Hospital Trust as if they had invented the system is high cant.

In the political interests of saving a sacred cow called the NHS, successive governments have been putting patients last for decades. This is the ironic obscenity of Gesture Government.

The NHS cannot continue in its current form. New Labour's contemporary borrowing fest has speeded up the process by which eventually, one day, this will be recognised as obvious - but it was always going to come off the rails. These are the simple realities:

1. State healthcare is a bottomless pit into which one could pour money for excellent reasons from now until Domesday.

2. Reformers, meddlers and especially the unpleasant Patricia Hewitt chose instead to pour money down the lavatory bowl - on the ridiculous premise that changing the shape and IT formulation of the NHS could solve its terminal illness. They didn't even salve its death throes.

3. The introduction of internal markets, targets, profit motivation and associated Friedmanite drivel has unsurprisingly shown that Trust boards and GPs would rather guarantee funding and bonuses than put patients first.

I shall not hold my breath waiting for the proper debate to begin.

Rather, I would recommend as usual that one or two disguised Cabinet ministers (I've no idea why, but for some reason the names Harriet Harman, Keith Vaz, Hazel Blears and Andy Burnham spring to mind) go to Stafford. Not the hospital, the town. Because there they will find the results of over a decade of delusion and denial.

We stopped at a petrol station in Stafford, on our way to pick my daughter up from the London train. At the next pump, a yob dressed in a cockeyed woollen hat and stained trousers seven feet too long for his mercifully hidden legs chewed gum, his mouth wide open because the amount of metal around and in it meant that to do otherwise would've asphyxiated him. After a minute or two, a white open-top Escort pulled in, it's horn announcing perhaps that the circus was in town. In the car were four further Underclass progeny. The driver saw my gaze and smiled insolently. Yob One at the pump grinned in recognition (a facial movement that was actually noisy) and yelled Whereafuckayowbin?

Yobs 2-5 tore across the forecourt, screeching to a halt diagonally across two parking bays. In a superbly synchronised arm-symphony, beer can, tabloid newspaper, sweet wrapper and fag packet were tossed onto the ground around the vehicle. I went in to pay (seeing as I did so the wary look on the till lady's face) while Jan drove our Peugeot into the car wash.

A third car turned up, white again but with smoked windows. This one parked in the disabled driver space alongside the Yobmobile, and two obese young women emerged, both smoking. One wore a top diagonally slashed so low she might just as well not have bothered, and both sported skirts displaying far more than I wanted to see of their gigantic thighs. They looked for all the world as if they'd stepped straight out of Viz.

The six passed conversation between the two vehicles. This consisted entirely of insults and fuck, fuckin, fucker and fucked. In between the joshing, cigarettes were flicked hither and thither. Captivated by the scene, I suddenly noticed I was staring.

"Yowcan'tfuckinafforditgrandad" said slash-top. Everyone laughed at the drolerie, but I continued to stare blankly. Twenty years ago I would've riposted to the effect that being braindead she obviously deserved the disabled space, but time has mellowed me. Time has also frightened me quite a bit too, and my bowels did a minor somersault as Smiley the driver now spoke.

"Worrafuckayowlookinat?" he asked, entirely predictably. Jan's timing - pulling alongside me at that very moment - was immaculate.

Early for Jo's train, we drove about for a bit in the suburbs and centre of Stafford. There is no easy way to say this: Stafford is a shithole. It is a shithole in which brutalist concrete, multiply defaced and vandalised civic machinery and slobs all vie for one's gaping attention. Chav is as good as it gets in Stafford.

Burglary there is up 8.4% year on year. I'm astonished that there's anything worth nicking, but there you are. Violent crime is up 5.1%. Anti-social behaviour is up 8.7%. But fear not, because the Sisters who are big on Stafford urban Council have 'a zero tolerance policy on domestic violence'....and the Stafford Community Partnership Intervention Team's target is to reduce all crime by 15%. Mind you, that was from 2005 - 2008, and they haven't bothered to update it. You can sort of see their point.

70% of those who live in Stafford sign up to the fact that the town has a serious drinking problem. I'd imagine the other 30% were too pissed to answer the question, because every day of the year, thirty-five drivers are stopped in this metropolis - and found to be over the limit. The local NHS Trust itself admits that the town's level of teenage binge drinking is twice the national average, and just under 14s alcohol poisoning cases are running at 100+ A&E admissions a year.

But fear not, for Stafford's police force are on the case - as this strategy goal from the website shows:

'Staffordshire Police is working to tackle alcohol-related problems. As well as targeting hot spot areas, we’re working with licensees through initiatives such as Pubwatch, raising awareness of the problems alcohol can cause and encouraging sensible and responsible drinking'

Most of the folks I saw looked to be in need of sense and responsibility, period. But you take my point: Stafford is a crime-riddled, drink-addled shithole. It's official.

Now you may think all this is just another excuse for me to be rude about somewhere else, but these figures are central to a proper understanding of the hospital's failings. In a nutshell, the Stafford NHS problems are a result of three things: an idiotic quasi-management consultancy bollocks culture; a local culture in alcoholically violent meltdown; and recruiting staff from those same civically challenged environs.

There's no point in the Telegraph going on about 'heal our hospitals': we need right now to face up to our fractured culture. The Sunday Times this morning ran a front-page second lead 'Lawyers use NHS as £100 million cash cow'. Is this just the media exaggerating again? Judge for yourself by Googling 'Stafford hospital scandal'. This is what you'll see at No 1 as a sponsored advertising link:

Stafford Hospital Crisis

www.SimpsonMillar.co.uk      Mistreated at Stafford A&E? Get Advice Today About Compensation

Bags-I be the first one to torch the offices of Simpson Millar.

17th March 2009

16th March 2009

lunacy round-up

You know, some days you just go about your business and there's more of it than usual. Popping into the local shop on the way to Axminster, there was Jade Again saying Goodbye Again to her Little Boys Again. She has said goodbye more times than Peter Cook and Dudley bloody Moore. Now is the time to say goodbye, Jade: just go already.

Is this me being horrible? Well, yes - but with a constructive purpose. The long, slow death of Jade Goody is a sort of metaphor for the British way of life really; not just the stiff upper-lip thing and being stoically private when conking out, but rather the rejection of media-maudlin drivel and celebrity privilege. You may observe if you wish that terminal cancer is not much of a privilege, but think on this: every single day in this country, unknown Ms Goodys with names nowhere near as daft as Jade are leaving broken-hearted penniless children behind and - half the time - being denied the drugs they need.

Not so our Jade, for she has media pimp Max Headbum to ensure that her overdue departure from Limelight St goes both well remarked and well rewarded.

The newspaper I bought was the Daily Express - a rag I wouldn't normally read, but professionally must. Averting my gaze from Jadeboyz, the headline announced that we have cracked the slim gene. It seems we now have the key to staying slim while stuffing our faces. Anyone with one third of a brain and a gram of common sense would realise instantly what a disastrous discovery this is: but not the British medical profession. This is only the first step - soon they'll be able to restore liver function. So everyone can relax and get pissed 24/7 without facing the consequences.

Before Axminster's gym, it was time for another joust with the Lyme Bay GP Group Practice. 'Know your Prostate!' screamed a brochure as I entered the automatic door which bore a notice saying 'Warning! This is an Automatic Door!' The world is full of warnings nowadays, and my lady GP was not to be left out.

"How much?" she gasped when I told her my (entirely true) weekly alcohol points score. This was an indirect result of me complaining for the sixth time of numb toes, eyes that go funny now and then, and constant tiredness. Not surprisingly, Mme Medecin was keen to blame much of my condition on evil drink, but she wasn't getting away with it that easily. When I gave the stuff up, I still had these symptoms. When she was challenged by my liver failure vs Alzheimers argument, the debate became quite lively.

She's a good egg, my doctor. Having spent a lifetime being patronised by men, she has none of the talking-down God complex displayed by blokey GPs. She had no answer to my parting shot: "Can you explain why I should keep to a weekly total you guys plucked out of the air?" This doesn't excuse my behaviour: she's right and I'm wrong. But not knowing this keeps the lady on her toes.

At the gym I meandered through the bigotry and occasional truths of the Daily Express. The Government spent £110 million on Palestinian Relief last year but without bothering to check how the recipients spent the dosh. It turns out that a sizeable proportion went on persuading schoolkids to bomb the infidel to bits. Luckily, the BBC took a bit more notice of their journalists and refused to join the lemming stampede to donate money to death-mad Islamists. Meanwhile, a Government Islamic advisor (not an ist, he) was arrested for stabbing a bloke. The stupidity of government folk is boundless....but then again, the media know that Muslims doing bad stuff sells papers - and the opposite doesn't.

Still, the one irrefutably good thing about our media is that their snooping on our leaders goes at least a tiny way towards cancelling out the degree to which those same leaders seem keen to snoop on us. Two Oxfordshire district councils have invested our money to plant anonymous cameras in our wheely-bins to make sure that our recycling is entirely correct. The obscene irony of this would be bad enough were it not for the certain knowledge held by your correspondent to the effect that Council recycling is a sham: half the time, private contractors dump it out every which way at the other end. This is a major scandal waiting only for reliable photography to break; and when it does, more little Hitlers will be swinging upside down from long-dark lamp-posts.

When I got back to the house, the post had finally arrived: two hours too late to guarantee First Class delivery of a vital sae by the next day. So I had to buy Guaranteed Next Day at £4.60 in order to send my reply. Like many folks, there's nothing I'd like better than to stuff £4.60 up the Caledonian bottom of Adman Crazier - all in ten-p pieces.

 

15th March 2009

tapas, liverpool, and impairment

Red Nose Day came and went uncelebrated here. If I'm honest about it, I think the occasion is a tired old horse beloved of Eighties comics which raises a lot of money, but which in turn doesn't seem to make much appreciable difference. Cue seventy-four 'how could you write such a thing?' emails. Easy really: Comic Relief is well-meaning and selfless, but shouldn't be necessary: when a whole enormous continent is still (sixty years after the White imperialists left) a basket case, then it is unlikely that White guilt charities are going to solve the problem. 'At least they're trying' runs email number twenty-nine. Trying and failing on this sort of scale isn't enough. If I knew how to change the culture of sub-Saharan Africa, I'd work hard to bring it about; but I don't - and neither do the folks running Comic Relief.

However, short of staying up in the attic and wearing earplugs all day, it is impossible to avoid at least one encounter with Red Nose Day. The recent opening of Lyme's only tapas bar spread the good word amongst the locals about its charms, and so we took No 2 Daughter and her bloke to try it out, along with nby's Vegetarian Teacher Fashion correspondent, Agent A. As luck would have it, the already infamous Agent P was there with his wife, and so there was much hail fellow and well met. I realise perfectly well, by the way, that the correct form in Cool Brownosia is to call other halves 'partners', but I can't be doing with the term: it makes me think of 1960s ballroom dancers cavorting about under the rotating Ball while commentators describe taffeta, sequins, and what the dancers do for a living when not playing their vital role in the Norman Billington East Kilbride Formation Dancing Team.

The tapas place was good - in fact, very good - and not silly prices. Friendly staff and the cellar ambience helped to make it an all-round top-hole evening. And in the end we gave them a whopping tip because everything was going to Comic Relief.

 

The following morning (while young guests slumbered on) I went down to the gym and spent on the bike while ploughing the The FT Weekend. It was full of people searching for a Bear bottom, so it was no surprise to see Fondlebum featured on several pages. Apparently, readers have been bombarding the Pink 'un with emails asking why it can't be less doom-laden, a fate I'd imagine the Berliner Zeitung faced during February 1945. However, the businessman's Bible seemed to have taken some of this on board: equities had surged, it said; fashion shops were fighting back; stores were displaying signs of revival; tax haven and Swiss bank secrecy were about to end; glimmers of hope were everywhere.....and Tony O'Reilly's son Gavin was to be seen on a white charger, galloping to the rescue of their company INM.

Erm....well, let's start at the end there. I used to know Gavin quite well, and to call him a twit would, I think, be inexcusably twittist. Other descriptions like smug spoilt Preppy and gung-ho wah-wah would be much closer I think. As as for the glimmering, fighting, open and generally surging financial sector, I fear that any search for the bare arse of this slump will be fruitless for some time yet.

Here are six simple and fairly obvious reasons why. The first three concern That Which is still the Come. One, the insurance sector meltdown. Their need for investors right now makes the banks' shortage of them look like a brief respite from the rain. All the trends and indicators are against them. And with gilts being knackered by quantitative easing, they've nowhere any good to invest the money even if some wealthy folks did turn up. Two, the still largely indefinable but very obviously profound depth of HBOS debts flying straight for Eric Dando's twin towers; the quite remarkably close correlation between borassic Russian plutocrats and the bad debts of RBS; and the continuing tendency of taxpayers' money sloshing into the front doors of UK banks to rest only briefly before pouring straight out the back.

Three, East European bad debt not yet defined as such, but awaiting only the Russians' own energy sales difficulties and internal financial chaos to come to light. Four, the impending and inevitably dismal failure of the Gordon Twenty Show, and the speed afterwards with which even the dimmest financier will discern that America intends to look after Number One and turn protectionist (See nby Weekend featured story) . An associated bad sign, while we're at it, is the Chinese government getting heavy about the money it's owed by the US. Five, the increasing likelihood of the survival of the unfittest at the expense of vital new entrepreneurial genes. Like it or not, this is what happens when a downturn coincides with very tight banking credit: large companies use small company suppliers as their banks - smiling sympathetically as the latter go bust while waiting for the money they're owed. One figure picked up by very few last week (but emphasised by the CBI) was a 40% yoy rise in the number of overdue invoices in the UK's SME sector. That is a quite staggering increase over one year, and demonstrates perhaps as well as anything precisely how the banks' own incompetence has forced them to renege on their socio-economic duties.

Finally - leaving the best as always until last - inside a mindset which insists there is no alternative to consumer-spend driven economic growth, there is very little room for anything else - especially a volcano. But the Vesuvius in the mindset is the hot-ash depth of debt beneath which that very same consumer lies inert: the very same credit-maniac who, allegedly, will consume his and her way out of our woes.

It is all so daft as to make wise-assed pieces like this almost irrelevant. But as ever, the sheer daftness of the recovery-and-then-back-to-normal assertion is directly related to the required degree of foot-weight on the wiseass pedal. As the last piece about this warned (11th March below) we all need protection from the incompetent lunatics and self-absorbed experts. I'm just trying to do my bit as one of the minor players in The Seven Samurai.

By lunchtime, a warm Spring sun was caressing our garden, and so I persuaded daughter and bloke to accompany me to the muggy Public Bar of The Nag's Head where a Sky HDTV mega-screen would be showing The Big One: Man United versus the only team who could still catch them, Liverpool.

I had a thoroughly enjoyable afternoon, despite United losing 4-1. First and foremost I enjoyed the best game of soccer I've seen in a long time. Second, I marvelled at the Gerrard/Torres Liverpool combination, which I fancy may prove too strong for anyone in the Champions' League. And third, it was a rare pleasure to sit having a quiet beer with my family, while supporters of both sides were fair to everyone about every event in the game: there was near-universal agreement that the ref had a good game, that both penalties were justified, and that on the day Liverpool simply showed more bravery and ambition. Hurrah for all that.

It goes without saying, therefore, that Sir Fergus the Bogeyman was almost entirely without grace in his acceptance of defeat, declaring that the result 'flattered' Liverpool given United had been 'the better side on the day'. Wrong on all counts, Alex: Liverpool scored four to United's one - ergo, they won.

But the day was made by reading the news that Lord Fondlebum of Boy has set up a trust for the blind. What a fine example His Lordship is to all the young people of our country, confused and rudderless as they are in the face of all those other politicians lacking Sir Manglesum's principles. Such politicians fiddle mortgage applications, lie to Parliamentary Committees, obfuscate on the subject of National Debt, smooth naughty passports and silly oligarch loans, shag Hungarians and then give them EU grants, shag sailors and then lower their import tariffs, demand payoffs for breaking contracts, brief against everyone who criticises them, and end up with engorged bank accounts for which they cannot account.

I do not as yet have the details of Lord Maninbum's trust, as I understand from his accountants that the exemplary Peer wishes all his generosity to remain entirely discreet. I can only observe how wonderful to is to be British, and know that we are the one remaining bastion against self-aggrandizing old Queens who cannot see beyond the next yacht-owner's keel.

12th March 2009

think again about madoff

In the midst of sociopathic bankers refusing to accept their folly and desperately seeking other culprits, I find myself uneasy with the case of Bernard Madoff. I'm sure that, like me, many of you have been surprised by the speed with which his case has both come to trial and then resulted in this enigmatic man being condemned to incarceration for the rest of his life.

If ever one was looking for a classic case of Freudian desire to be caught, this man is it. Not only was his cover-up of malfeasance flimsy at best, he had no financial reason to commit these crimes - he is a billionaire - and even told his sons what he'd done. The very fact that they immediately shopped him suggests that he must have got some things right in bringing them up. He put the ill-gotten gains into an ordinary bank account. He offered no defence, and seems to have accepted the sentence without wishing leave to appeal. If there were others involved, he has stoically refused to hint at them.

There is something nasty about the glee with which Wall Street has been happy to see Madoff condemned and then demonised. He may not be a sacrificial lamb - but he is quite clearly a clean, no-frills case of embezzlement on a gigantic scale. I fancy many of the lesser (but nevertheless sleazier) crooks are delighted to have this Messiah die for their sins.

From the start of this affair, I felt that part of Bernie Madoff wanted to show the world how greedy and gullible most people are. I'm not saying he did this for a higher reason - that would be reading too much into it; but one cannot escape the conclusion that his crime has shown everyone who's awake just how 'light' regulation has been - and how the only thing necessary for the success of a sting is blind appetite for personal gain.

Were I thirty years younger, I'd be keen on the idea of writing abook about this affair in general, and what made the central figure in it tick. Madoff may well have got what he deserved: but something tells me he also got what he wanted.

 

what tiggy will do when she grows up

As she matures, our youngest terrier Tiggs is trying her hand at various potential callings, prior to taking up an adult role in the pack. The speed at which she picked up behavioural training made us wonder if a career in metaphysics or even quantum theory might lie ahead, but then she seemed to have a bent towards opthomology.

This was reflected in her obsession with glasses. Chewing them mainly (she got through four pairs of mine during this phase) but also sniffing at the lenses, and then barking when I put any surviving pairs on. Her attention then turned to interior design, and to give the little lady credit, some of her essentially free-form rearrangements of shoes, firewood, cushions, screwdrivers and flower-pots did suggest that a future in the more anarchic school of decorating was imminent.

Of late, however, I'm more inclined to think she's destined to be a celebrity chef. She loves oven-gloves, constantly peers into the aga, tries any food left on plates in the dishwasher, and rarely has the washing-up towel out of her mouth. When I prepare a meal, she watches the procedure very closely, especially at those points where chef's privilege allows me to test something without giving any to her. It's obvious she wants to join in, so I've started her on The River Cafe Cookbook. So far, Tiggs is on Page 11. The first ten she ate, which shows an enthusiasm above and beyond the call of duty.

 

teaching our kids, banker-style

You may have read as I did yesterday of the 'idea' about retraining gainfully unemployed bankers to be teachers. Apart from being just one more hysterical example of what happens when New Labour's stormed brains think outside the box in a tank, it also gave me two relatively positive insights.

The first is that we should never let bankers (and their eccentric grasp of reality) anywhere near our kids. Imagine how things would be going after just one week:

"OK children....so we can see that dividing the sum equally, 26 for me and 4 for you makes 7,192"

And can you picture 3rd year physics?

"What goes up must keep on going up. What goes down is somebody else's problem"

The second thought suggested to me that the real thing required is for bankers to go back to school themselves. The rationale behind this is (1) they're short on civics lessons (2) they can't add up and (3) they're not yet adult. ("I will so have my sweeties, you just see if I don't!")

Of course, the more nostalgic side of me wants to simply round them up and create a new Cultural Revolution in which they reinstitute coal mines, help pick the hops in Kent and go round in short trousers doing Bob-a-Job. Wouldn't that be lovely?

 

11th March 2009

happy days not here again

Up early to greet the chap taking our new car away for Attempt Number Four to make it drive straight, I glanced at the overnight Asian and South American markets. I kind of knew what to expect, because yesterday was Spring Bear Rally day in the West; and sure enough, most of the BRICS - with the notable exception of China, where more meticulous minds are running things - were up anything from 3-8%. One Russian index was up 10%, but then the Russians are usually drunk as well as mad, so that sort of thing is to be expected. Still, the whole world seemed to be whistling a happy tune more or less in unison.

There are two vital points I want to make in this context of temporarily uncontained joy. First, here we have cast-iron evidence of why Bullish traders (except those cynically driving things up for short-term profit) have an IQ in the region of 75. That's not an average by the way - that's it. And in a wider sense, it is why capital financing based on decisions made by chimps and influenced by daily events cannot be the whole and only answer to the future. Some very large businesses may always need to work that way, poor things: but the rest of the commercial spectrum - from medium sized businesses to SMEs and start-ups - need more reliable, more supportive and more on-board forms of capitalisation. This has always struck me as A,B,C - especially after the unprecedented 2008 systemic collapse - and I can only pray that one day enough other folks will catch on to it.

Second, once again we must apply common sense and key data to the situation. The two most influential Governments in the global financial system (although not for much longer, I fear) are as I write easing away at their quantitative, aka buying up bad debt with printed money, aka printing money. The last time this was tried, the result was Hitler. And if that seems a tad melodramatic, listen to the reassuring words of top Commerzbank economist Peter Dixon:

"The more we think about it, the more questions there are that we can't answer....they're pumping this money into the banking sector on the idea that it will be passed on to the wider economy, but I don't think anyone knows what's going to happen....none of the fundamental models that we use will be able to operate in this environment...supply and demand has moved out of all parameters."

Uh-huh....but apart from that Pete, WHAT IS YOUR PROBLEM?

Leaving aside the let's-go-print-some-more approach to money shortages, just review for a few seconds the shiny-hard brown solids yet to hit the fan - which is, by the way, set at 'Hurricane'. First, East European bad debt. This is, to be precis with our analogies here, not the usual EU sitting on a can of worms scenario: this is your one lone guy spreadagled across the caldera of Krakatoa situation. There's the argey-bargey that's bound to start when places like Hungary fall apart (what's going to happen to all those nice boys, Mandy?) and the keen interest certain to be taken in their welfare by the Russian state - itself on the brink of a catastrophe somewhere between the US and Iceland. Talk to people who've been to the RF recently: it's like Caligula's Rome during Happy Hour over there.

Finally, we need to review how things are on the ground, as it were, among the other major players in the mix. The UK has a debt which, put simply, is unmanageable, and a currency becoming increasingly unpopular. The February figures for industrial output decline were twice what was expected. House prices - having steadied in January - unsurprisingly continued their steep descent last month. The banks still aren't lending. Lloyds shareholders have lost faith in the management who bought an enormous black hole called HBOS, and for once I don't blame them. The Labour Party has embarked on another frenzy of empire-division.

The US simply hasn't prepared enough for the radical changes that will be required to its industrial base. Too many years of crooked dealing and profit-taking are now coming home to roost, and at the minute I see little hard evidence that President Obama knows what to do beyond (quite rightly) reassuring folks that in future he will do what's fair rather than what's expedient. Three weeks into the job, his new Treasury Secretary is a busted flush. GM is so completely bankrupt, there is in reality nothing that can be done to save it.

China's growth has all but stopped, and it needs 3% per annum just to stand still given the continuing population explosion. And then there's Japan, so close to where it was in 1945 it's no longer amusing. There are two disturbing features in the Japanese situation. First, everything we're trying now they tried ten years ago, and it all failed. And second, they've tried everything and now have nothing left in the armoury. The very social fabric of the nation is visibly splitting.

Finally, there's the ecological issue. Unless we all want to die within forty years, pretty much everything about the way we do business, move about, eat, store water and use science has to change. The move from fossil to renewable energy is woefully behind schedule (the East has yet to realise there is a schedule) and the new industries designed to provide the clean, relevant products and services we will need to counter climate change and adapt our lifestyles are only just getting born. Even worse, we just spent all the money set aside for bringing up baby.

Those who call share valuations too low at the moment are quite right. But markets over-correct: and we're involved in a level of correction here where it would be wise to have the bathyscape handy. This latest blip is nothing more than a Bear rally, period. With governments everywhere losing and printing money, central banks buying their own gilts back must drive down yields. So with no options left (and currencies being undermined) Gold is still the place to be. In fact, after ten days in which the proce dropped a hundred bucks, it's a steal at $885 an ounce.

The idea of major central banks buying this much of their own government's debt would have been interpreted as a sign of clinical insanity only a couple of years ago. And in the end, like most of commerce, it is a three-card trick: where, for example, is the crumpled old lady in Threadneedle Street going to get the money to carry out all this debt-purchase? A printing machine. Good idea: we'll do that then.

So then, Mr Clapham-Omnibus....how bullish do you feel now?

 

10th March 2009

nobbling fidel & hammering jade

Although the demonisation of Cuba's most celebrated cigar-chomper got a bit out of hand over the years, there's a fair amount of evidence to hand suggesting he was, like most dictators, a bit full of himself, generally unpleasant, and completely wrong about almost everything. More of this has come to light of late with the revelation that there were, during his near half-century in charge of one small island, 638 attempts to kill him - only a fraction of which emanated from the CIA.

That is some batting average. Adolf himself was in power for twelve years, during which time a mere twenty-four attempts were made on his life. Castro's steady fourteen a year suggests a magnetic appeal to assassinators that dwarfs the murderous attraction enjoyed by the nastiest German of all time. It also, of course, hints at a quite staggering level of incompetence on the part of what must have been a total of several thousand plotters overall. So small is the Cuban population compared to most places you've heard of, a fairly high percentage of its citzens must have been engaged in trying to bump Fidel off at any given time. But if you had laid all the plotters end to end, it wouldn't have made a ha'porth of difference, because when offered the chance to put the driving of 1950s cars behind them, every last freedom fighter fucked up.

To date there has been just the one recorded attempt to do away with Jade Goody, but the mystery woman with the hammer seems to have relented at the last minute. Perhaps (like all the others who haven't bothered to try) she figured what the Hell, she's dying anyway. What's not clear is how Max Clifford could on the one hand tell the press corps that Jade had pleaded to die 'right now' the day before, but then inform them of how his charge had been 'terrified and traumatised....freaked out' when a lone nutter took her up on the offer.

I know my writing in this manner is found offensive by some readers, but the real obscenity in the amphitheatrical spectacle of Jade Goody's passing is the masses eagerly rubber-necking with the help of vicious tabloids and a PR reptile so odious even my literary imagination doesn't stretch to a properly apt description. It is all truly and profoundly sick.

 

9th March 2009

men are of cheese, women of onion

Sugar, spice and all things nice from Venus are all very well, but the Swiss know otherwise. The reality, it seems, is Gordonzola Brown and Harriet Honion.

I wonder if there is any point at all in condemning something that is obviously unacceptable to the vast majority of people in a liberal democratic culture? I'm sure there isn't, but politicians seem to insist on doing it whenever possible. It's a form of cheap applause, nothing more: flag-saluting. And nobody gives better salute than the Brownshirt - if it proved anything, his Congressional address gave us all the evidence we needed about that.

After the post-real-continuity IRA killed two policemen, our Prime Minister greedily gobbled up some free airtime to call the attack 'cowardly'. Stone me, Mr Trouser Snake: that was a brave stand you made there.

The bloke is risible.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is remarkable in many ways. Its special effects, make-up, sets and costumes leave one (as ever these days) gaping at the technical mastery our film-makers enjoy. The messages therein are multivariate and refreshed nicely: lost opportunities that pass too quickly for us to realise what we've missed, lost youth too fleeting for genuine appreciation of experience - and yet the reality that it is never, never too late.

It is in my view far and away the best thing Brad Pitt has ever done, and he is indeed an unlucky young man to come forth with this performance in the same year as Danny Boyle realised Slum Dog Millionaire. For Pitt too (I suspect) it is far from too late. For Cate Blanchett, it is yet another page in the incomparable filmography she is building. Ever since her Italian film debut in Heaven, I have been convinced that one day she will be the kind of treasure whose value can never be calculated.

For film buffs, the movie is full of opportunities to feel clever, and thus one of the cognoscenti. The use of New Orleans amid storms, and Black alongside White, represent perfect timing in a country growing into its mould of ethnicity alongside the rebirth of a new Orleans from the old. The film's credits also run back to front (cute) and the choice of Benjamin as the hero's name allows for a delicious in-joke: for he finds himself a latter-day Dustin Hoffman to Blanchett's Anne Bancroft: "Goodnight Benjamin" she says, after one bedroom encounter. Homage indeed.

What leaves this film short of greatness is its derivative nature. The basic premise isn't new - a 1925 F Scott Fitzgerald short story I once read and enjoyed inspired it - while in many ways it's a kind of Forrest Gump run backwards: a twentieth century sweep of great events, art, music, style, cars and wars seen through the eyes of a man growing young. And there is more than a hint of Sliding Doors as Pitt describes the fickle-fate events leading to a tragedy.

Equally, some of the parables are as old as Buddhism itself: all things must pass, everything is in transition, and nothing is infinite. "None of us are perfect forever" says Pitt, as his once under-age love grows old. The idea that being very old is like being young is...well, as old as the hills. And the movie's resolution is predictable - although this may have been entirely intended.

But drawing a line between Great and Hugely Engaging is not to suggest the film isn't worth the ticket: it's a grand movie, and makes you think at least twice after almost every unfolding episodic stage. In a world with more than its fair share of excellent cinema at present, it is not to be missed.