LIFE’S RICH PAGEANT

I have borrowed the title of this piece from the modest autobiography of my much-cherished Arthur Marshall, the humorous writer and acute stylist (1910-89). Arthur was a most entertaining fellow, who found amusement in almost everyone he met and whose gentle mockery of some contemporaries among his amazingly wide circle is an example of us all – beam warmly at mankind and avoid being harshly critical!

                            Arthur Marshall, humourist

I have now been 22 days in Greece, much of it bucket and spade time with our delightful 3-year-old grand-daughter, Theodora, on sandy beaches near Athens. The internationalism of modern life is striking. Despite gnashing of teeth from Macron, the world speaks English even though the speakers originate from Germany, Poland, Mexico, Egypt or wherever. Theodora made sand-castles with a 2-year-old Chinese boy appropriately called Theodore, whose charming Anglophone parents now live in Vienna.

French is of course a fine language and its literature is unparalleled, although one has to admit to some longueurs emanating from the over-fertile pens of Corneille and Racine. Macron, Barnier and before them de Gaulle were anachronistic in expecting the world to return to an unattainable Francophone paradise. I have always loved France, notably Paris, Normandy, the Champagne Country (all those delicious bubbles!) and my favourite, majestic Rococo Place Stanislas in Nancy. Long may they prosper and add lustre to our proud Western civilisation!

I must now leap to the defence of an old gentleman, much disparaged in the popular prints. Joe Biden is admittedly an old git, painfully miscast as President of the USA. He is a mere 79-year-old (like me), forgets names (like me) and shuffles around with a tottering gait (ditto me). His recent speech proclaiming the triumph of the Kabul evacuation, was humiliating nonsense but he had to cheer up his domestic audience. Charitably I would concede “he means well” but that is faint praise indeed. The truth is that the US and UK should have quit Afghanistan 10 years ago and left it to its peculiar ways. No vital Western interest was ever at stake. If it ever threatens the security of Pakistan, Iran and Uzbekistan, that is a matter for those countries to sort out.

                                                     Beleaguered Joe Biden

As for inept Old Joe, he was elected on the ticket of “Not Trump”, his only visible virtue. If the strain gets too much, Biden could resign to be succeeded by his VP Kamala Harris, ten times worse, certain to dispense heavy doses of Californian Wokery. She would thereby lay a strong foundation for the predatory return of Donald Trump, a most alarming possibility. So, let’s keep Joe going, supported by blinking Blinken and his gang and pray that meanwhile the Republicans return to some semblance of sanity.

Oddities among US politicians are not new. I have been re-reading some of the inter-war pieces by hard-boiled and hilarious H L Mencken and his verdicts on Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge and perennial presidential candidate W J Bryan are far from flattering. Even in our time, genial Ronnie Reagan was no streak of intellectual lightning, although he actually did very well.

Current affairs are just too depressing to contemplate – Boris’s lot foul up almost everything they touch. I have taken some solace from leafing through the Oxford Dictionary of The Popes, a weighty reference book produced by the then-retired Principal of my Oxford College, St Edmund Hall, John Kelly, a vivid Oxford character. The Renaissance Popes were a very rum lot, much prone to outrageous nepotism and with Borgias about, not above spiking the drinks with lethal poisons. Not much had changed with Pio Nono, (Pius IX) the mid-19^th century “reformer” who fought for and lost the Papal States, promulgated the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, enunciated the doctrine of Papal Infallibility and declared war on the modern world with his Syllabus of Errors. Not a life-enhancer in my book.

So, to life-enhancers I speed. In Athens I always read the Mr Mulliner story The Truth about George by incomparable P G Wodehouse which has me guffawing even on my 20^th reading. For comfort reading, I peruse Arthur Marshall on show-biz as a child in Barnes theatre-going with his mother, or as a performer himself meeting such luminaries as the Oliviers, Terence Rattigan, Ivor Novello, Somerset Maugham, Gielgud, the Lunts, Noel Coward, Dame Edith Evans – wonderfully anecdotal and light of touch, or experiences at prep school or at his beloved Oundle both as pupil and school master or rhapsodies on his beloved Devon cottage at “Myrtlebank”.

Frank Muir once described Arthur as “England’s Unofficial Sunbeam”, most apposite, and no other writer has given me such consistent and gentle pleasure.

SMD

2.09.21   Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2021

 

STIRRING FROM MY DEN

Thanks to the best efforts of our allegedly conservative government, foreign travel currently is a bewildering labyrinth of regulation and restrictions, echoing a regimen concocted by Walter Ulbricht or Clem Attlee on one of his bad days. The cost of air tickets has soared and there are wholly unnecessary and amazingly expensive mandatory tests that even the dutifully vaccinated must take on re-entry to their native land. The rich can shrug this off but most people cannot, and for sure many spivs are lining their pockets at our expense. Despite all this we are planning to fly to Greece soon to see our charming, ever-helpful middle son and 3-year-old grand-daughter there, not embraced since November 2019. We want some sun (probably we will get an excess) to warm our aching joints and lots of Mediterranean cooking and cold vino to leaven the suety Northern European lump.

                        

                                                            Tasty Greek Food

I have been a little out of sorts of late and the trip is in part recuperative. Normally I approach the journey out with excited anticipation but this time there is also a strong dash of trepidation – what nasties do London Airport and Greek Border Control have up their sleeves? We hear of half-mile queues at UK passport control, planes at remote departure gates, anti-Brexit fines (the Macron tax) on incoming Brits, Greece burning at 40C and electricity supplies collapsing, shutting down the aircon. Wild fires are very dangerous, killing 102 at the seaside town of Mati, well known to us, in July 2018. Maybe I can avoid these horrors – I can only hope and pray to that frisky group on Mount Olympus.

To instill some degree of serenity, I loved the recent Albert Hall Prom given by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Maxim Emelyanychev, of Mozart’s last 3 symphonies, the skittish and cheerful 39^th, the deeply felt 40^th and the triumphant 41^st (the Jupiter). What joy! – I was proud again of being Scottish, a volatile emotion as Boris and Nicola supposedly have an on-off meeting today – inevitably a dialogue of the deaf, sowing discord, perhaps best avoided.

While on holiday I will read and my thoughtful and golden-hearted eldest son gave me a couple of choice books. The first is Doom, the Politics of Catastrophe by Niall Ferguson, which will be fascinating, but perhaps too near the bone for holiday reading. The second book, The Best of A. A. Gill will be perfect. Gill was a clever Scotsman who wrote for the Sunday Times, as a foodie and as a wide-ranging critic of politics and international affairs, written in a flamboyant fashion, with much sympathy for refugees, the dispossessed and the helpless. He was not blameless, but given to drink and infidelity. He also was married for 5 years to Amber Rudd, later the offensively outspoken Remainer, who somehow was appointed to May’s cabinet as Home Secretary and who could not work with Boris. Anyhow Gill was a memorable writer, joining those belle lettristes like H L Mencken, Arthur Marshall, Tom Wolfe and even Boris himself in his Brussels days, all of whom much enlivened literature with their humourously trenchant short pieces.

Our Greek holiday is most wonderfully subsidised by our youngest son, a high-flying banker, – limos, business class travel, the works – who is our constantly generous benefactor – how lucky we are! Our next expedition will be to his house in Charlotte, N Carolina, which we have never seen and I am sure is very civilised (if we can avoid wokeish fans of cataleptic Joe Biden and crackpot nostalgics for Donald Trump!). America will find its admirable feet again soon.

My lovely wife will shepherd me through our journey to her native Athens. She will miss some TV, especially American house-renovation series as she is an avid fan of Chip and Jo Gaines’ Fixer-Upper, The Property Brothers, Drew and Jonathan Scott, and of Nate and Jeremiah, all full of advice on how to change our house, probably at vast expense! They feed a fantasy, at least.

So, we’re off – fingers crossed!

 

SMD

5.08.21

Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2021

 

HERE AND THERE

I try to keep cheerful but the wind this week is not blowing in a favourable direction. The UK has supposedly the highest Covid infection rate in the world (if we accept, as we should not, the figures from Russia, Turkey, India, China and dozens of other unreliable states) and while restrictions have been relaxed, many voices are calling for their early re-imposition. Inevitably epidemiologist Prof Neil Ferguson, arch doom-monger and influencer, has added his tuppence-worth of predictive gloom about new variants and the rate of contagion. Some other “expert” forecast “possibly” cases of 100,000 per day in a few weeks – I suspect yet another gross exaggeration. The medical profession seems to be oblivious of the necessity of maintaining public morale and that of ordinary NHS workers. Milton would have given the attitude of these experts short shrift:

                                            Dismal Jimmy Prof Neil Ferguson

Hence loathed Melancholy,

Of Cerberus, and blackest Midnight born,

In Stygian cave forlorn,

      'Mongst horrid shapes, and shrieks, and sights unholy;

Find out some uncouth cell,

      Where brooding Darkness spreads his jealous wings,

And the night-raven sings;

      There under ebon shades, and low-brow'd rocks,

As ragged as thy locks,

      In dark Cimmerian desert ever dwell.

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Another event to endure from 30 October to 12 November will be the COP26 United Nations climate conference in Glasgow. Gallons of eyewash will be pumped out, grand-standing-resolutions will be passed, hot air will warm the globe even further and all past troubles will be blamed on white imperialists and their successors. Our woke elite will revel in this fiesta of cant – we will be blessed by the gracious presence of Obama, Biden, the ineffable Greta Thunberg and the inevitably ageing Her Majesty the Queen

 

Of course, precisely nothing will be achieved. The worst polluters, Russia and China, are only sending junior delegations, not their leaders. The resolutions will be kicked into the long grass by the harder-headed governments in the cold light of day. Boris made a good joke of the purported movement towards heat-pumps rather than gas boilers with his flippant assurance;

 

The Boiler Police’s Greenshirts aren’t going to break down your door with their sandal-clad feet and seize your trusty old combi at carrot-point.

No Western government is going to commit political and economic suicide by kowtowing to the minority ravings of climate warriors, anti-vaxxers, Greens and LibDems. Yes, global warming is an issue. It can only be tackled on a realistic and affordable time-scale. The UK does not need to be a pioneer. It still has large reserves of coal, shale and lithium. We should press on with fracking shale and lithium extraction. Coal-fired power plants should be re-opened and precautionary coal supply contracts signed with friends like Australia and South Africa. Nuclear power generation should be enhanced, if need be, in cooperation with the insufferable French.

Meanwhile scepticism on climate change is my order of the day.

I mention the French and I am struck by the poor quality of recent Presidents. Sarkozy, Hollande and now Macron have not filled the office with the distinction one has come to expect. All three have displayed a compound of petulance and arrogance, which I find deeply unattractive. Of course, the French are not easily regulated – as de Gaulle observed:  How can you govern a country with 246 varieties of cheese?

French politics seem historically unstable. As in the UK, an increasingly conservative electorate is dismayed by an increasingly woke and lefty metropolitan elite. Presidential elections are due in April 2022.  The Jewish-Algerian Right-wing pundit Eric Zemmour is the current darling of the anti-Macron faction and strikes a sane chord. I wish him well.

                                Eric Zemmour, probable candidate

Political violence is a deplorable area, widely incited, and the slope is slippery from Insulate Britain blocking the motorways, to Michael Gove being harassed in the streets of Westminster to the foul murder of Sir David Amess in his constituency surgery. Yet we must not despair: I trust the resilience of Fred and Ginger who advised:

Nothing’s impossible I have learned

But when your chin is on the ground

Pick yourself up, dust yourself down,

And start all over again

SMD

21.10.21         

Text copyright © Sidney Donald 2021

 

HYSTERIA ON THE HIGHEST

 

We have long known that we often live on the edge and in this particular year we know that we have rather easily fallen over the edge. The UK had had some form of collective breakdown and has gone completely potty, her normal eccentricities morphing into serial insanity.

Boris wows the Tories

Starting at the top, Boris Johnson treated us to a barnstorming and jokey oration at the Tory conference, all about “levelling up” and how raising the cost of labour by shunning migrants and hiking up prices will somehow make the population rich and happy. There was plenty flannel about British ingenuity and about the beneficent influence of free markets. The ghosts of Adam Smith and Maynard Keynes might whisper a remark or two about inflation and deficit financing but all that was ignored as Boris rallied the troops, leaving Rishi Sunak and “Jon Bon Govi” to find coherence in it all and pick up the pieces. The conclusion is inevitable that Boris makes policy on the wing, opportunistically, and that our own government has a weak grasp on events and does not possess a plan to see us through the winter, let alone until the next election. Yet he rules the national roost with his potent frivolity.

Boris has many political enemies but their grip on reality is equally tenuous. Sir Keir Starmer is a seriously-minded fellow but he is boring and he presses no buttons to enthuse the electorate. He is irredeemably Woke, a successful but limited lawyer, old-fashioned in his vision for the country and quite devoid of the popular touch. He is a Clem Attlee throwback. His Deputy, Angela Rayner, the Stockport shock-trooper, gets so worked up by her partisan oratory that she is a froth-in-the-mouth public danger. Her latest tirade, berating the Conservatives, included these immortal, if illiterate, words:

"We cannot get any worse than a bunch of scum, homophobic, racist, misogynistic, absolute pile of banana republic, vile, nasty, Etonian, posh... piece of scum."

 

             Angela Rayner, noisy spokeswoman of the Left

When in 1948 Aneurin Bevan described the Tories as “lower than vermin” he was kicked down the steps of White’s Club in St James’ for his pains. He had crossed a boundary. La Rayner appals most people. She shows no restraint, only visceral hate, and she uses the language of the Nazi Brownshirts or a show-trial prosecutor in Moscow. She and many others on the Left incite violence – something UK politics tries hard to suppress. In Parliament there are plenty other malcontents such as the Remainers like vocal Lord Adonis and all the LibDems, self-righteous to a man and likely to be decimated at the next election or the residual Corbynites, whose extreme views are anathema to the voters. What keeps these crackpots going?

Outside Parliament the madness spreads. We are bored to tears by sour-puss Nicola Sturgeon and her Scottish independence fantasies but the Union will hold firm. Anarchic Insulate Britain mobs glue themselves to motorway slip-roads and infuriate travellers. Idiotic plans are laid for compulsory filming of anti-covid lateral flow tests by any UK entrant – meat and drink for every obstructive bureaucrat. Our Royal Family (the UK’s Disneyworld) persists in extravagance, and needs a thorough pruning, just as the House of Lords is a scandal and disgrace. Our police forces deserve a shake-up (not just for the Wayne Couzens murder) and the scope for reform of the out-of-control NHS must be immense. There is thus a huge UK resurrection agenda.

In the outside world, things are no better. A hostile EU makes mischief in Ireland, giving credibility to nationalist terrorists. Macron threatens to cut electricity to the Channel Islands, blockade our fisheries and curtail Eurostar. A leaderless Germany bows to Russian gas blackmail. Spain claims control of Gibraltar and watches expat Brits flee the new red-tape of the Costas, never to return. The UK economy is threatened as supply chains seize up without adequate numbers of HGV drivers.

Gloom and Doom stalk the land, as it has for about 18 months. We must rely on our reserves of resilience and optimism and stiffen our upper lips!

SMD

7.10.21

Text copyright © Sidney Donald 2021