Portrait of the Week

A speedy round-up of the week's news 0 Comments The Spectator 18 December 2004 Lord Butler of Brockwell, who had headed the inquiry into intelligence about Iraq, accused Mr Tony Blairs administration of bad government, being unchecked by Parliament and free to bring in a huge number of extremely bad Bills, a huge amount of regulation and to do whatever it likes with an eye to the next days headlines. The Home Secretary, David Blunkett, denied a fresh allegation that he had helped fast-track a tourist visa to Austria for his ex-lovers nanny, Leoncia Casalme. Dame Janet Smith, in a 1,300-word report, her fifth on the mass murderer Dr Harold Shipman, blamed the General Medical Council for perpetuating the mutual self-interest of doctors, and recommended the construction of a national database about every doctor in Britain. Lord Winston said that the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority should be abolished because it was not seen to be a very good system. Ofsted, the education regulator, said that 10,000 schoolchildren had gone missing from official records. Sir Bill Morris, in a report on the Metropolitan Police, said there was a tick-box mentality in dealing with discrimination and that white officers lacked the confidence to manage black and ethnic minority officers. Lord Scarman, who headed the inquiries into the violence in Northern Ireland in 1969 and into the Brixton riots of 1981, died, aged 93. A report of the Catholic bishops conference said that prison must not be a dustbin for the problems society fails to address elsewhere. Mr Patrick Mercer MP sought to introduce a Bill which would protect householders unless they used grossly disproportionate force against burglars; Mr Blair said he would look at the Bill. There were 100,810 households officially designated as homeless at the end of September, according to the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, more than twice the number when Labour was elected in 1997. The empty Millennium Dome will be used by the charity Crisis to house homeless people over Christmas. Unidentified kidnappers were holding at gunpoint about 26 passengers on a bus in Greece, hijacked between Marathon and Athens. Mr Viktor Yushchenko, the leader of the opposition in Ukraine, was found after tests by doctors in Austria to have been poisoned with dioxin, which accounted for the sudden pimpling of his face. Mr Silvio Berlusconi, the Prime Minister of Italy, was cleared of long-standing corruption charges. The next day Senator Marcello DellUtri, a member of the Forza Italia party and an executive in Mr Berlusconis business empire, was convicted of having ties with the Sicilian Mafia and sentenced to nine years in jail; he remains free while appeals are pending. The Democratic Republic of Congo accused Rwanda of invading, and readied 10,000 troops to respond. A report by the International Rescue Committee, an American aid agency, said that 500,000 people had died in Congo between January 2003 and April 2004. A suicide car-bomb killed 13 in Baghdad on the anniversary of the capture of Saddam Hussein; Abu Musab al-Zarkawis terrorists

admitted responsibility. In Quetta, Pakistan, a bomb set off by an army lorry in a marketplace killed 10. Palestinians blew up an Israeli army base at the Gaza-Egypt crossing after bringing a ton of explosives through a tunnel, killing four. Mr Traian Basescu, the mayor of Bucharest, won the presidential elections in Romania, which hopes to join the European Union by 2007. Florence attempted to keep out four-wheel-drive vehicles by banning cars with tyres wider than 70cm. In the Massif Central, the Millau viaduct, 70ft higher than the Eiffel Tower and built to the design of Lord Foster of Thames Bank, was opened. Lisbon is to hold a referendum to see if it wants a 27-storey skyscraper, also designed by Lord Foster. Saudi Arabia beheaded two Iraqis found to have robbed and murdered a man they lured into their tent near the Iraqi border; 24 people have been beheaded in Saudi Arabia in 2004, down from 52 or so in 2003. CSH

Let them marry

It is not just republicans with whom Charles and Camilla will have to contend on announcing their marriage 0 Comments The Spectator 18 December 2004 It is 12 years since the Queen stood up at dinner and coined the expression annus horribilis to describe the miseries of 1992. She probably didnt even have in mind the fact that her Chancellor of the Exchequer had just frittered away 5 billion of taxpayers money and caused thousands of homeowners to lose their homes in the futile cause of pegging the pound to the Deutschmark; it was more a way of describing her sadness at losing part of Windsor Castle to fire, having to endure pictures of the Duchess of York cavorting on a Mediterranean beach, and above all having to suffer the announcement that her eldest son and heir was to separate from his wife. In some ways, the year of Our Lord 2005 promises little better than 1992. Once more, overborrowed consumers face higher interest rates and negative equity. A reluctant public seems determined, against all logic, to re-elect an unpopular government because they cannot conceive of any viable alternative. And once again the opponents of monarchy will attempt to seize the opportunity to take advantage of a big story involving the love life of the heir to the throne. Seasoned royal-watchers, as hacks stationed in the Mall are apt to be called, are confident that the Queen has sanctioned the marriage of Prince Charles and his long-term lover Camilla Parker Bowles, and that an announcement of the event will be made just as soon as the inquiry into the death of the Princess of Wales is complete. Should these observations turn out to be true, it will not merely confirm the prescience of our own political

commentator Peter Oborne, who in August 2001 predicted that Tony Blair may be required to announce a royal marriage by the end of this Parliament; it will bring an end to the curious manner in which the Prince of Wales has been forced to conduct his relationship with Mrs Parker Bowles for the past dozen years. The heir to the throne has behaved like a teenager creeping to the spare room in the small hours to meet the girlfriend his parents reluctantly agreed to allow to stay the night. Doubtless there will be those who see the impending marriage as an excuse, metaphorically, to storm the Palace. Republican commentators, themselves with mistresses and broken marriages aplenty, will clamber on to their high horses to moan about the indecency of Charles marrying a woman with whom he was conducting an affair during his marriage to the Princess of Wales. These will be the same republican commentators who regularly berate the royals for their failure to get modern. Surely that is exactly what Charles has done by adopting the flexible sexual mores of our time. Presumably, anyone who argues that the Prince of Waless divorce and impending remarriage makes him unfit to be king also believe that commoners who take the same action should be subjected to lifelong shame. But it is not just republicans with whom Charles and Camilla will have to contend on announcing their marriage. Even among those who welcome the marriage it has become received wisdom that it should be a quiet, apologetic affair. It has been suggested that the ceremony be conducted in private it would be quite possible to license a room at Highgrove for the purpose of a wedding and that afterwards the bride be known simply as Camilla Windsor, eschewing even a minor courtesy title. A public holiday is not envisaged, nor are bunting and commemorative mugs. There is also a constitutional issue to be resolved. Camilla is a Catholic. The Prince of Wales, on the other hand, stands to succeed his mother as head of the Church of England. But unless one is the Revd Ian Paisley, this is a relatively trifling matter. The British constitution is not set in stone, or even written in ink. This magazine has opposed many of Tony Blairs tinkerings with the constitution, such as the replacement of hereditary peers with political placemen and the botched abolition of the post of Lord Chancellor, but the integration of a Roman Catholic into the royal family is one to which we would happily accede. The principle to be defended is that the United Kingdom remains a constitutional monarchy, not whether the kings consort goes to mass. Indeed, aside from our national tendency towards carping, there is no reason that the forthcoming marriage between Prince Charles and Camilla should not be a time of celebration. We confidently expect that it will: just remember how foolish the Guardian ended up looking over its prediction that the Queens golden jubilee would turn out to be a damp squib. The death of Diana was a tragedy, but once the preposterous conspiracy theories surrounding her death have been nailed for good, the Prince of Wales should be given the

chance to do as every other Briton would be permitted positively encouraged in the circumstances: to move on. And now that every other retiring MP is pensioned off with the title Lord, why shouldnt Camilla have a title, even if it is not, for understandable reasons, Princess of Wales? The adapting of the royal family to the ways of Her Majestys subjects is something to be welcomed and celebrated bunting, mugs and all.

Diary
No one has ever died of dehydration at one of my shows 0 Comments Barry Humphries 18 December 2004 New York In Brisbane there was, and may yet be, an old-fashioned shopping arcade with a little tea shop on an upper gallery. There you could sit at a table with a cup of tea, a lamington or perhaps an asparagus roll (two Queensland staples) and, having drained your teacup and inverted it over the saucer, receive a reading from one of the psychic ladies who shuffle from table to table ministering to the credulous. You may assume that I am a regular patron of astrologers, palmists, tarot readers and assorted sibyls. I cant resist a glimpse, however occluded, into the future. At Byron Bay, a famous New South Wales beach and hippie timewarp, where barefoot and patchouli-scented odalisques still loiter, I found an authentic Irish witch who has converted the ramshackle tool shed in her garden into a spooky consulting room. It was there, in Sidonies tenebrous grotto, that I learnt, several months in advance, of the success of my present Broadway show, thus sparing myself the torments of self-doubt and first-night jitters other artistes experience as they wait up till dawn to read the reviews. Living in New York again and performing my Vaudeville show seven times a week in Irving Berlins Music Box Theatre is a lot of fun as London becomes less inhabitable. I love sitting in restaurants here without being engulfed in cigarette smoke. However, its mesmerising to watch Americans wrestling with their knives and forks. They dont seem to be able to use them properly. First of all they twine their fingers around the fork handle in the left hand, holding the instrument vertically over their steak or fish, and then with extreme awkwardness they hack away at it with their knife until they have assembled a plateful of bite-sized chunks. Both utensils then go back on the table, the fork is switched to the opposite hand, and the dissected dinner, by now cold, is forked mouthwards. This maladroit ritual is accompanied by the rattle and crash of iced water constantly administered by illegal immigrants to whom the adjuration no iced water please means fuck all. Soup is always cold because a few years ago a woman, possibly of Midwestern decent, burnt her mouth on a cup of McDonalds coffee and sued for a zillion.

Not that I dislike the Midwest, having in recent times done good business in Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus and Louisville, with their marvellous museums, orchestras and rapturous audiences. (I had been warned ages ago that my act was too East Coast, but then nearly 50 years ago, when as a student actor I went up to wicked old Sydney, they said I would probably be too Melbourne for the convict spawn in the harbourside city.) I noticed in Louisville, Kentucky, where the Governor kindly conferred upon me the title of Honorary Colonel, that the heart of the city, like that of so many once prosperous Midwestern cities, was, well, dead, and that in streets of boarded-up shops and derelict banks and offices the only thriving businesses were strip clubs, fortune-telling establishments and wig shops patronised by very large jolly black ladies. Although I did not consult any of the local psychics, I noticed that, along with fingernail reconstruction and penile enlargement, clairvoyance is one of Americas growth industries. In San Francisco in the window of an organic wellness shop was the sign Free tarot reading for all metaphysical purchases over $20. If I had not been told by a medium at a spiritualist meeting in Melbourne in 1953 that I would be living in the United States, I would have never believed it. Australians have always had ambivalent feelings towards the Seppos (septic tanks: Yanks) since we had so many rich and randy Americans in our midst during the second world war and Vietnam. Secretly, however, we rather touchingly want to be like Americans. Theres always a bit of excitement, especially in Adelaide, when they think theyve found a serial killer, or a Serbian runs amok with a weapon in a supermarket. That feels sort of American, and when we gave up pounds and pennies for decimal currency we loved talking about bucks and driving Ks instead of miles. It made us feel we were in the movies, though more travelled Australians were dismayed to visit the United States and find they still measure distances in antiquated miles. We now call men, even women and children guys, but then so do the Poms these days, and railway stations in Australia are now annoyingly called train stations, if you will. Fortunately two weeks in Australia is still a fortnight, but Americans dont understand the word, and though actors like me do shows twice on Saturdays, the word twice is absolutely unknown in the United States and if recognised at all is thought of as a puzzling archaism. Its two times over here, and I dont get off the train at the train station in America either I get off of the train, a silly and inexplicable usage. I havent been to the new Moma yet. I hope its possible to dodge the restaurants and boutiques and get to the pictures. That would also mean dodging the very large spaces devoted to contemporary art. On museum binges in the States I have seen enough neon tubes at 45-degree angles, piles of rocks and minimalist installations significantly called untitled (meaning without ideas) to last a lifetime. Theres a thing that crops up all the time in the contemporary wasteland of these museums which is a blob of white Styrofoam on a tripod on to which a little projector beams the flickering face of the lezzo or pooftah who created it. Unfortunately the film is not silent, for this installation usually screams things

like, Dont, dont, dont, youre hurting! or Harder harder or some other equivocal injunction to his or her tormentor. In Baltimore I was reprimanded by a gallery attendant for telling it to shut up, but you dont speak to artworks like that. So I fled to a remote part of the museum and tried to enjoy a small Tiepolo Circumcision. Alas, in the distance I could still distinctly hear that eldritch litany of pain and protestation. Thank God, I thought, that Francis Bacon painted in the silent era. In my early years on the stage I got used to chocolates. It wasnt just on matinee days that one heard the constant rustle and crackle of stealthily unwrapped confectionery, but even at night eating sweets and watching a show were almost synonymous. Now you never see them. They have been replaced by water! Younger members of the audience seem to be in constant need of rehydration and I look out at a sea of tilting Evian bottles, Poland Springs, Volvic and exotic Fiji Water in the more expensive seats. Dame Edna always reprimands the guzzlers, No one has ever died of dehydration at one of my lovely shows, she says. Are you frightened you wont be moist enough later? Its impossible to know what she means by this, but the guzzlers continue swilling their tepid fluids. Now Sidonie in Byron Bay emails me and tells me that its only a fad and after Christmas theatregoers in the know will revert to Black Magic.

How Tony Blair can win the election and still lose office
How Tony Blair can win the election and still lose office 0 Comments Peter Oborne 18 December 2004 Easter comes unusually early this year, on 27 March, which is not quite without political significance. The Prime Minister will probably wait for a few days beyond the festival before announcing the date of the general election, most likely to be held on 5 May. To put it another way, just 16 weeks remain before the start of the election campaign. The result is a foregone conclusion. Labour will win. The bookmakers put this outcome at 5 1 on. These apparently prohibitive odds actually represent superb value. Punters are being offered what amounts to a 20 per cent return in less than five months (the equivalent of 50 per cent annualised) at zero risk. Bet now! But the certainty of a Labour victory does not mean that the election itself is purely academic. Tony Blair can win in May and yet still emerge the loser. This paradox is accounted for by the fact that the real contest is not the official battle between Michael Howard and Tony Blair, but the war between Tony Blair and his deadly rival Gordon Brown.

The key facts are as follows. If Labour wins by another landslide, as the polls suggest it will, Browns political career is almost finished. A landslide would make Tony Blair one of the most successful politicians of all time, and give him back all the massive power and confidence that he has squandered since the 2001 triumph. Above all, it would provide the Prime Minister with the mandate to move Gordon Brown from the Treasury and govern on his own terms. Tony Blair would have the luxury, enjoyed by very few leaders, of grooming his own successor. But a sharply reduced majority would spell disaster. Tony Blairs rash decision to announce the date he intends to leave office means that at some stage in the next Parliament power will start to seep away. An emphatic victory at the polls next spring will head off that witching hour. A narrow victory anything under 50 seats would render Tony Blair impotent from the start. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that Blairite MPs tend to be those with the slimmest majorities, while trade-unionist-minded Brown supporters will tend to hang on if Labour faces a major electoral setback in May. A mirror image of this problem faces Michael Howard. The Tory leader has announced that anything short of victory is out of the question. In reality he must know that the only issue is the scale of his defeat. Howards place in history depends upon whether he can lead some modest Tory recovery. A repetition of William Hagues melancholy experience of 2001, when the Conservatives remained static at the polls, would lead to a Tory crisis on a scale that would dwarf anything yet seen: defections, moral collapse, talk of a new party, etc. This has led to a curious state of affairs. Tory leader Michael Howard and Labour Chancellor Gordon Brown are like Stalin and Churchill after 1941. They detest each other, yet are united against a common foe, and both would probably settle for a Labour majority of around 50 seats after the election. In practice, however, the matter is out of their hands. The Chancellor can take no public action against Tony Blair for fear of being accused of disloyalty. Michael Howard, meanwhile, has yet to find a way of talking to the voters. The man he hoped would do the trick for him, Maurice Saatchi, has failed, and there is little real prospect of redemption this side of May. This means that Michael Howard and Gordon Brown both find themselves in the humiliating position of having their destiny decided for them by Charles Kennedy and his Liberal Democrats. The Lib Dems are the only dynamic force in mainstream British politics. At present they stand a modest third in the polls, but this belies the true position. The pollrating of about 22 per cent is an astonishing ten points higher than it was at a comparable stage before the 2001 election. The Lib Dems have a record of performing brilliantly during general election campaigns, and there is no reason to suppose 2005 will be an exception. Charles Kennedy made the right call on the Iraq war, and after this week leads the only party with a civilised position on law and order. His campaign chief, Chris Rennard, is the single

British strategist with a lucid understanding of our political predicament. Kennedy himself is open to the charge that he lacks substance, but this seems to have no effect on the voters. In any case, he and his new wife Sarah have arranged, with awesome timing, to have their first child in April, practically the eve of polling day. Thanks to an eccentricity of the electoral system, the most important winner from this surge in Lib Dem votes would be the Tories. Certainly a surge in support would cause the Lib Dems to win seats at the expense of the Tories but not nearly as many as the Tories would win at the expense of Labour. This is the Lib Dem tragedy. If Tony Blair wins an overall majority of 100 seats or more, he will emerge strengthened from the election, but fewer than 50 and he is gravely weakened. As things stand, the most likely outcome next May is as follows. The Tories: 185 seats, Lib Dems 70, New Labour 360. This would mean a government majority of maybe 70 seats, and clarify nothing, not for Tony Blair, not for Gordon Brown, and not for the Tories either. Three years ago I announced in The Spectator my intention to write a pamphlet detailing the lies and deceptions put out by the Blair administration. Since then readers have occasionally written to inquire when this volume was to appear. Sorry: I got distracted by other things. Nevertheless, the theme remains a topic worthy of exploration. Apologists for the government loudly insist that a venal press is responsible for the current malaise in the political process and the contempt in which politicians are held. There is some truth in this assertion, but it fails to take into account the effect of falsehoods uttered by politicians themselves. The Spectator has kindly given me the next two months off to write a book, to be published next year by the Free Press. The subject matter has been widened to include lies told by politicians of all colours: Tory, Labour and Lib Dem. The mendacities of the last Tory government will be chronicled, as well as the lies of the present Labour administration, and deceits of the Lib Dems. The book will examine the social, cultural and political causes of the rise in political lying; and propose remedies. All contributions are welcome, and I can most readily be contacted on peter@spectator.co.uk.

The Spectators Notes

The strange world of theatre censorship 0 Comments Charles Moore 18 December 2004 People wont put it in Books of the Year, but there is no more entertaining Christmas present than The Lord Chamberlain Regrets by Dominic Shellard and Steve Nicholson (British Library). It is a history of British theatre censorship, and describes the strange system by which, until 1968, the chief courtier, the Lord Chamberlain, pre-censored all plays that were to be publicly performed. The system was always mistaken, and became increasingly absurd,

as, well into the Fifties, the Lord Chamberlain tried unhappily to maintain the policy that there could be no jocular portrayal of Queen Victoria or even her son (the play shows up King Edward VII in a tiresome light as regards girls). Two other tough rules were that Christ or God could not be impersonated on stage (perhaps were going back to that one) and that homosexuality could not be mentioned. Another was that plays should not depict the current politics of foreign countries, particularly ones which were, in theory at least, friendly. In 1938, for instance, a play called Take Heed had to substitute the word foreign for CzechoSlovakian, Vann for Berlin and yellow shirts for brown shirts. The words goosestepping, Herr and National Socialism were cut throughout. But the authors do not make the mistake of just laughing at the Lord Chamberlain and his readers. They notice that the readers reports, written by well-educated men for two guineas per play, were often thoughtful, well-informed and trenchant. Here is the beginning of one on Look Back in Anger: This impressive and depressing play breaks new psychological ground, dealing with a type of young man I believed had vanished 20 years ago It is about the kind of intellectual that thrashed about passionately looking for a cause. It usually married girls of good family, quarrelled with all their relations, and bore them off to squalor in Pimlico or Poplar where they had babies and spent all their spare time barracking Fascist meetings. Another makes the good and often forgotten point about Oscar Wilde (recommending against a play about him) that Wilde was the martyr of his own pride, not of British justice. The reader charged with Pinters The Caretaker (This is a piece of incoherence in the manner of Samuel Beckett) recommends the following cuts: piss off twice in Act I, Would you like me to have a look at your body?, Bugger it, up your arse, buggered, and from arsehole to breakfast time. Now that we know what the post-Lord Chamberlain works of Pinter are like, who can honestly withhold a twinge of sympathy for the censors blue pencil? Today, in a world free of Lord Chamberlains, we are told that we can and do say exactly what we think. I wonder. After a piece I wrote here criticising some current interpretations of Islam, I had an interesting letter from Fay Weldon. Four years ago, she said, she had been declared an Islamophobe by the Runnymede Trust. Her offence had been committed earlier, at the height of the Salman Rushdie affair, when she wrote: I do not believe the Koran is a suitable poem on which to base a contemporary society. Fay Weldon tells me, Id seen this as something rather nifty to discuss, open to argument: they saw it as an attack. Discussion not allowed. A few hostile questions at book readings, a few nasty remarks, and I was silenced. I never mentioned the Koran again. No one does. And soon, thanks to David Blunkett, we shall scarcely be allowed to. On Saturday, I wrote an article for the Daily Telegraph in which I said that, though I thought it a wrong description, people should be free to call the Prophet Mohammed a paedophile (the issue arising because he married a nineyear-old girl when he was 53). The Muslim Association of Britain quickly announced that the piece was a clear incitement to religious hatred, as well as full of falsehoods, lies, skewed

interpretations and poisonous remarks. Its website helpfully cross-refs to IslamOnline.net, which in turn offers a link to a discussion about whether non-Muslims who insult the Prophet should be killed. The MAB called for my dismissal and reminded the newspaper that it should have remembered the Rushdie affair before printing such filth and drivel, and invited 1.3 billion Muslims to be offended, shocked and horrified by what I wrote. The MAB may be a small, extreme organisation, but it knows exactly how to latch on to the fear and self-doubt present in a culture which is not robust about defending freedom of speech. If there is a religious hatred law, the MABs threats, implicit in its Rushdie reference, will have some legal backing. So, I should like to ask Mr Blunkett, Under your new law, will it be an offence to call the Prophet Mohammed a paedophile? If so, what other historical figures will be protected from any inquiry deemed insulting? Will it be an offence (because insulting to atheists) to call Socrates a paedophile, as his accusers did? There seem to be two main purposes to recycling as now being promoted by local government under EU orders. The first is to satisfy the Northern European belief that by doing something inconvenient to oneself one must automatically be doing good. The second is to transfer much of the burden of rubbish collection from dustman to householder. A reader from Newcastle-under-Lyme has sent me her schedule of collections ordinary rubbish bin every Thursday at 1 p.m., blue bag paper-recycling collection every second Thursday 11 a.m., blue box for bottles and tins every other second Thursday at 11 a.m., garden rubbish collection every second Monday 8.30 a.m. Is this a good use of time (or, indeed, of petrol for all the separate collections)? One of the key features of a successful civilisation is what economists call the division of labour. This is being sacrificed to the division of rubbish. It must be true, as people are saying once more, that books can sometimes rescue you from depression more effectively than pills. The chance to get outside ones own experience, and into that of another, helps preserve sanity, and it is what literature offers. Which books are best, though? Works of reference are very comforting, as Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch-hall, found with the Baronetage. Whos Who and a good dictionary provide constant variety and surprise. Funny books are good, of course, but if they are purely jokey, one starts to agree with the preacher of Ecclesiastes that as the crackling of thorns under a pot, so is the laughter of a fool and feel even gloomier. Some Experiences of an Irish RM is very good, not least because you can open it at any point and start reading with equal pleasure. The same applies to The Diary of a Nobody. But the most cheering of all is something more serious. This bleak mid-winter, read George Herberts short poem The Flower, and realise how you can come out the other side of despair.

Waiting for Mr Right

The Spectator Christmas short story

0 Comments Andrew Taylor 18 December 2004 I live in a city of the dead surrounded by a city of the living. The great cemetery of Kensal Vale is a privately owned metropolis of grass and stone, of trees and rusting iron. At night, the security men scour away the drug addicts and the drunks; they expel the lost, the lonely and the lovers; and at last they leave us with the dark dead in our urban Eden. Eden? Oh yes because the dead are truly innocent. They no longer know the meaning of sin. They never lose their illusions. Other forms of life remain overnight cats, for example, a fox or two, grey squirrels, even a badger and a host of lesser mammals, as well as some of our feathered friends. At regular intervals, the security men patrol the paths and shine their torches in dark places, keeping the cemetery safe for its rightful inhabitants. Finally, one should not forget to include Dave and the woman Tracy, perhaps in a special sub-human category of their own somewhere between life and death. In a place like this, there is little to do in the long summer evenings once ones basic animal appetites have been satisfied. Fortunately I am not without inner resources. In my own small way I am a seeker after truth. Perhaps it was my diet, with its high protein content, which helped give me such an appetite for learning. In my youth, I taught myself to read. Not for me the sunlit semi-detached pleasures of Janet and John. My primers were the fruity orotundities of funereal inscriptions, blurred and sooty from decades of pollution. Once I had mastered my letters, though, I did not find it hard to find more varied reading material. We live, I am glad to say, in a throwaway society. It is quite extraordinary what people discard in this place, either by accident or design. The young prefer to roam through the older parts of the cemetery, the elderly are drawn to the newer. Wherever they go, whatever their age, visitors leave their possessions behind. Litter bins have provided me with a range of periodicals from The Spectator to Marxism Today. The solar-powered palm-top personal organiser on which I am typing this modest memoir was abandoned among the debris of an adulterous picnic on top of Amelia Osbaston (died 1863). I have also been fortunate enough to stumble upon a number of works of literature, including Jane Eyre and Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. Charlotte Bront ******this runs to two-and-a-half pages in the printed version but not on-line******

Mind Your Language

A Lexicographer writes

0 Comments Dot Wordsworth 18 December 2004 I felt, the other day, like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken. The nova in my telescope was not just a new word but a new tense. No doubt this heavenly portent bodes no good. The tense might be called the past continuous future. (It is something the opposite of the paulo-post-future.) There was a good example on the television receiver after the collapse of the panda-like mating ritual between Mr Gerry Adams and the Revd Ian Paisley. There were always going to be recriminations after the failure of the deal, said the reporter. Were there, indeed? That rather supposes the inevitability of what has happened. If the deal had not failed, where would the always going to be? For this reason the tense might be called the Hindsight Future. The Hindsight Future is often used with the commentators Magisterial Impersonal: It was always going to be a difficult year for Mr Blunkett. The inevitability is thrown back not just to yesterday, but to all the days before, as far as the Big Bang. It is a continual or habitual intuition of future events, always at work, day and night. If I say to my husband, Youre always making rings with your whisky glass, it is no more than the truth. But he benefits from an undeserved exculpation if I thought, There were always going to be rings on that nice walnut table. The Hindsight Future is my prime candidate for abolition in 2005, but I have (although I have not always had) a sinking feeling that the construction will strengthen far more surely than the US dollar. Meanwhile Mr Peter Bonnett, from Norfolk, writes in with a correction and a menagerie of pet hates. The correction is on otiose, which he rightly says does not rhyme with atrocious as I had written. I apologise. It was the oti I was concentrating on, discouraging the pronunciation oaty. The ending rhymes with hose. Perhaps Mr Bonnetts most interesting specimens for hating are not nominal but prosodic. He blames the Americans for introducing aberrant stresses. Two familiar examples are ice cream and weekend stressed on the first syllable. But he also says that where we British English-speakers would say after the children have left home, with the stress on the home, Americans would put the stress on left. Is this a creeping innovation on our islands? Ive been practising it in combination with the dreaded antipodean (or interrogative) rising tone at the sentence-end, and I am afraid it is possible to have both.

Poor Jack is dead

Geoffrey Wheatcroft on how the death of his greyhound affected him more than he had expected, and perhaps more than it should have done

0 Comments Geoffrey Wheatcroft 18 December 2004 Somebody once said that the English dont really like animals, they just dislike children. It was a good line, better than Cyril Connollys characteristically over-elaborate Animal-love is the honey of the misanthrope: our attitude to animals is illogical, deeply hypocritical and too often emotionally false. We ban (or they do) the hunting of wild foxes, while we breed 20 million pheasants artificially every year to be shot, and inevitably sometimes winged and left to die. We pass laws (or they do) making cruelty to goldfish a criminal offence, while the loathsomeness of fish farming is added to the horrors of factory farming. And with our pet animals we do something else: we sentimentalise them, we anthropomorphise them, we project our own feelings on to them, we think we love them, and we expect them to love us. Recently Ive had reason to ponder that. As it happens this has been a sad year of bereavement for us, with the loss of too many family and friends, and by comparison with those it might seem frivolous or even immoral to fret over the death of a pet; but we do. Ive been thinking about that, and about the dogs I have known. When I was a young boy we had a Border terrier (they are charming animals) called Tigger, but long and peripatetic bachelor years were spent without animal companionship, and there was no other dog in my life until 1989, when I had occasion to meet Fanny. She was living in Camberwell, a shaggy black mongrel whose origins were lost in the mists of the Battersea Dogs Home. At first she greeted me with suspicion, and I wasnt at all sure how much she wanted me as part of her own life until the choice was made for her. Reader, I married her, or at any rate her owner, and Fanny and I had to make friends as best we could. She was a dog of very distinctive character, intermittently delightful and disgraceful, greedy and engaging. Although not particularly big, for a dog of her size she had a preternatural ability to reach high shelves, and we lost count of the cakes and especially cheeses she devoured in our kitchen and other peoples. Besides that she could be surly, baring her fangs at children and altogether politically incorrect to a degree which shocked even me. In fact, she was a Thatcherite dog. Early one morning on Primrose Hill (near where we were then living) an elderly tramp, infirm in mind as well as body and very likely a victim of Care in the Community, had just fished a fragment of mouldering pork pie from a rubbish bin to serve as his humble breakfast. Seeing this figure, Fanny bounded over, leapt up and, to his astonishment, snatched the pie from his palsied grasp. There is no such thing as society. When we settled in Bath she showed that she wasnt a complete townie, frolicking in fields and snuffling through copses, but she slowly began to weaken and she died peacefully eight years ago, at Mouth Mill in Clovelly, where she is buried and where I still mean to put up a small stone with her name on it.

By now we had young children who loved dogs (even those that sometimes bared their fangs), and Sally, my wife, now travelled to Carmarthenshire to acquire a replacement. Dorothy is a Dalmatian of fine conformation and mixed temper. As the Dalmatian pundits Trevor and Valerie Grove warned us, she needed a great deal of exercise, but thats no bad thing for us who have to take her out. Apparently she is imperfect by Crufts standards, as can be seen (one is told) from her almost entirely black ears. But she is very pretty, very small she was taken for a puppy for years and very affectionate, at least part of the time, jumping on top of us if we are lying in bed, or on me if I am reading on a sofa. Then in the spring of last year Sally said a little sheepishly that we had been asked to look after a dog found by friends of hers in a skip. I frowned and said that one at a time was enough, but after a frank exchange of views with the children I knew when I was beaten. Jack arrived, for the time being, and then just to stay. He was a fascinating dog, a greyhound with maybe a touch of lurcher, aged probably about three, strikingly beautiful Dorothy adored him; as Sally said, she couldnt believe this gorgeous Brad Pitt had come into her life but also terribly highly strung and jumpy at first, having very likely been ill-treated by whoever abandoned him. This meant that he was barely house-trained. Until gently dissuaded, he did what I had never seen a dog do before, and stood in the drawing room with a distant look while he quietly peed down the side of his own leg. His illicit appetite surpassed Fannys, made worse by his height. He could almost put his paws on my shoulders, as he would do to embrace me, and no food was safe from him: he would devour a pot of stew as it was cooking on top of the stove. When the subject of pets turned theological, W.H. Auden would end the argument by slamming the table and saying, I know my cat has a soul. I dont know whether Jack had a soul, but he certainly had a personality. He was quizzical and good-natured, fantastically energetic and lightning-fast over short stretches. He loved to chase rabbits, or pretend to. When he met one face to face he was downright cowardly, and in general he was terrified of most other animals; he would turn tail and run if he saw cattle two fields away. After he settled down, Jack seemed healthy as well as happy until earlier this year when he began alarmingly to splay his legs and collapse on the floor. If a large quantity of gin had been poured into his food (something I once did with our cat when I was a small boy, a cruel trick, although the results were highly comical) there might have been an explanation. As it was we were baffled until the vet said that he had a heart condition and needed to be examined by a specialist, who confirmed that one of Jacks heart valves was defective and that he might not have long to live. So Sally told me on her return from the consultation, adding with a faraway look that an artificial valve might be fitted for no more than 2,500. At that point, I remembered Jimmy Durantes Your money or your life routine: Im thinking, Im thinking, but I managed to stifle any untoward reply.

Before anything could be done the decision was taken out of our hands. I went to stay with Philip and Rosalind Watson for the York May meeting, and when I returned Sally greeted me at the front door in tears. Jack was lying on a sofa, as beautiful as ever but quite still. She had found him in the morning, after he had died peacefully in his sleep. We held his funeral on the Saturday, burying him under a newly planted tree in the garden, with the children holding candles, my daughter Abigails friend Nelly reading a poem, and myself giving a short address apt for the occasion. He had been with us for only a year. Since then I have wondered why I, an averagely cynical late-middle-aged journalist, appropriately hard-bitten and sometimes hard-hearted, missed him so much. As I say, to compare the deprivation of an animals company with a human loss is trivial and unseemly. Of all the terrifying sottisier of nonsense after the death of Diana, the most shocking of all was a man saying on the radio that he had grieved more for her than he had when his own wife died, and I do not want to feel more sorrow when a dog dies than when a man or woman I had loved does. Nor would I even call myself an animal-lover as its usually understood. I dont much like animal books (apart from a few racing memoirs and Timeforms Racehorses of the Year): neither Greyfriars Bobby nor Jock of the Bushveld will ever feature on my list of favourites. I dipped into the latter when I was writing a book about the South Afr ican mining magnates, since J.P. FitzPatrick, its author, was one of the most ruthless of those Randlords, and if one can get past its dedication To the likkle people I agreed with William Plomers verdict: Jock loves the veld, has large soulful eyes, and bites kaffirs, a true South African. And yet, and yet Jacks death affected us more than we had expected; me perhaps more than it should have done. My friend Clare Boylan, the Irish novelist, is disdainful about the way pet animals treat us: They engage our affections and then they go and die and upset us. We dont even know quite how or where they stand in our emotional and moral compass. Animals arent human; not even higher primates are our equals in ethical terms and I am convinced that the animal rights movement is wrong: animals have no rights, although we owe them obligations. Maybe part of the answer to my puzzle was C.S. Lewiss when he said that dogs have three legs in the animal kingdom and one in the human. They dont think as we do or feel as we do, but they are capable of emotion and affection, without the depths of human friendship or sexual love, but also without the problems. In Audens lines about the creatures in his garden, Not one of them was capable of lying,/ There was not one which knew that it was dying. Maybe the real answer is that we dont so much love our animals as envy them.

Carry on, cardiologist

First it was his bowels, then his heart: Andrew Gimson on the delicate procedures that followed a minor medical scare 0 Comments Andrew Gimson 18 December 2004 On a Friday morning earlier this year I kept an appointment with Dr Mark Hamilton, a consultant physician and gastroenterologist at the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead, to ask him about a bowel complaint. I was in two minds about whether my symptoms were significant enough to justify taking up Dr Hamiltons time. It seemed to me that if I went to see him, I might be yielding to hypochondria, but if I did nothing, and I turned out to have the early stages of a still curable cancer, my wife would be furious. She speaks very highly of Dr Hamilton, who has treated her for ulcerative colitis. About a year ago she had a colonoscopy, and I formed the distinct impression that she would not be satisfied until I had undergone the same procedure. On the way to hospital, I felt a pain in my chest, but attributed this to a rather contemptible anxiety about seeing Dr Hamilton, and decided not to tell him about it. He examined me, and after listening intently to my chest, told me I have a heart murmur. It seemed unreasonable at this point not to tell him about the chest pain, which I had never experienced before. He said he wanted me to have some tests, which could be carried out most quickly in the accident and emergency department. The cardiologist who saw me in A & E said the first tests were fine, but he wanted to do a second blood test, 12 hours after the pain started, and a stress test on a treadmill which could not be carried out until Monday. I was admitted to Langton Ward on the eighth floor, from whose window I could see about ten minutes walk away the tiny street where I live. I felt as if I was in a castle or a very brutish, unromantic fortress gazing down at the dwellings of peasants. The staff lent me some orange nylon pyjamas with short sleeves and gave me some wonderfully bad food. For almost the first time in my life, I had the unfamiliar experience of being waited on hand and foot. At 8.30 that evening Dr Hamilton came to see me, just as he had said he would, and strongly advised me to stay in hospital for the weekend. I had already formed a very high opinion of his judgment, and it seemed to me that it would be grotesquely rude, and also rather imprudent, to reject his advice, so I agreed to stay in. But I said that I really needed to get back to work and would be very grateful if the last tests could be carried out on Monday. It was fascinating to observe some of the difficulties with which the NHS must contend: not least the difficulty of looking after and investigating people like me, a 46-year-old man who might not be ill at all.

There were four other patients in my room. My neighbour on my right, an Irishman in his sixties, was suffering from acute asthma. He said life would be wonderful if he could breathe, but he had been unable to keep off smoking after he was discharged from hospital a few months ago, because every time he went to the pub it seemed unnatural not to have a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other. The Irishman said the five of us were a good crew and remembered with horror the junkie who was in his ward last time, who stole from the other patients, kept them awake all night and was visited by his junkie friends from South End Green, just outside the hospital. The junkie insisted on making jam sandwiches for himself at four in the morning, was filthy dirty and abused the staff, though a Nigerian nurse was fierce with him and got him to have a shower. A nice fellow, but the drugs, the Irishman concluded. My neighbour on the other side was an elderly Muslim man, whose food was brought in by his family. I discovered that his father had been killed while serving in the Royal Navy in 1943. The poor fellow coughed and retched dreadfully whenever he went to the lavatory. At 10.30 that night my wife brought in a bag of the things I needed. I was looking out for her like a child waiting at boarding school for visitors from home. We were woken at 6.30 the next morning by a nurse who came to take our blood pressure and temperature. Dr Hamilton called on me at 7.45 a.m. and asked if I had had any more symptoms, which I had not. I found myself saying to him, Youre up bright and early a remark which I felt, as soon as I had uttered it, verged on the impertinent. He made some inaudible reply, did not seem offended, and strode off like an energetic landowner to look at another part of his estate. At 9.30 a.m. I was given an injection in my tummy to thin my blood. The nurse warned me it would hurt, but it stung about as much as a nettle. I had these twice a day, and my blood pressure checked four times a day. Events pressed in rapidly, so that even though the role of patient is largely passive, one felt quite busy, rather as if one were on a cruise with a large number of organised activities, not that I have ever been on a cruise. I slept a lot I was certainly very tired but I also read Waughs A Handful of Dust for the first time for 25 years, and saw more humanity in it, and much more pain, than I did in my heartless youth. On Saturday and Sunday afternoon my wife and our three small children visited me, and we went to the caf downstairs. On Monday morning the pace quickened. I rose very early and shaved and showered, hoping that my last tests were going to be done. At 9.40, the 81-year-old widower in one of the beds opposite went off for his operation. He smiled bravely as he was wheeled out. I felt as if we were seeing him off to the front.

An altercation took place between the staff nurse and a visitor to my Muslim neighbour. Staff nurse: Hey, you are not supposed to be here. The visiting hours are two till eight [in the afternoon]. Young man: Im just bringing him his coffee. Im drinking my coffee. Staff nurse: This is not a coffee shop. A woman came by with the menus for the days food and sympathised with the Muslim for making his own arrangements: Id rather eat my own food too. The extremely jolly black woman who came in to clean the ward got cross with the Muslim for leaving dried blood on the basin in our lavatory: Its not nice. A few minutes later the cardiologist I saw on Friday swept in and took me off almost at a run. We went down in the lift and he rushed along a corridor, I struggling to keep up in my dressing gown and slippers. I thought it would be rather ridiculous to die of a heart attack while running for a test. The point of this haste was to use the Echo machine before a queue of about 50 out-patients. Grease was put over my chest and the cardiologist rubbed a stubby instrument over me and looked at a screen on which my beating heart could be seen, the valves opening and shutting like frogs legs. He said the valves were fine but he could see a bulge in the wall that runs straight down the middle of the heart. He consulted two technicians about whether they thought blood was passing through the bulge. We proceeded to the stress test. I was wired up for the ECG by a man who first shaved my chest, and I had to walk on the treadmill at three levels of speed, looking at pictures of mountain scenery clad in winter splendour, while I myself was watched by two rather unprepossessing medical students. The cardiologist expressed great surprise that I had never been on such a machine in a gym, and said the results of the stress test were only moderately satisfactory. He took me back to the Echo machine and with some difficulty inserted a needle into one of my veins. I nearly fainted, and was also sweating profusely, but he said this was a vaso-vagal attack and quite normal. After this he injected dye into me in order to see whether blood was passing through the wall of my heart. It was not, but he thought I might have coronary artery disease, which meant they would have to do an angiogram, which duly happened late that afternoon. This was by far the most extraordinary test, carried out by a team of about six people. A nurse shaved a small part of my pubic hair and a doctor, chatting merrily the while, inserted a piece of wire into my groin under local anaesthetic and ran it up into my heart, whereupon an image of my arteries appeared on a television screen. They looked like a beautiful river

system, great thick channels narrowing to delicate tendrils which flowed away to nothing, and they were completely clear. The doctor advised me to go on drinking whatever I drink. Some months later Dr Hamilton gave me a colonoscopy and found a small polyp, which he removed. In all I have been looked after by at least 100 people. I am grateful for their prompt and scrupulous investigations, but horrified by the amount of money I must have cost the taxpayer. It does not seem right to me, or remotely sustainable, that all this should be paid for from public funds. I shall have to go on having colonoscopies. My wife is delighted.

Globophobia
A weekly survey of world restrictions on freedom and free trade 0 Comments Ross Clark 18 December 2004 Gordon Brown does not usually receive support from this column but he deserves some congratulation on one initiative. He has written to the European Commission to request that it lifts the threshold above which duty becomes payable on goods brought into the EU for personal use. For the past 10 years it has been frozen at 170 euros (about 145). While the EU has been keen to encourage cross-border shopping within the EU, it does everything it can to discourage us from shopping outside the EU. Should you buy a 200 fur coat in New York, you are liable to pay, on your arrival at Heathrow, VAT of 17.5 per cent plus additional duty of 12 per cent in addition to any sales taxes you have paid in America. Should you omit to declare the goods and are caught by customs, you are liable to pay double. The UK has no discretion in duty rates; they are imposed by the European Commission. The perversity of the rules, one suspects, is designed to catch people out. Most clothes, for example, attract duty of 12 per cent, but baseball caps for some bizarre reason attract 2.7 per cent duty. Bamboo furniture attracts duty of 5.6 per cent, but wooden furniture is duty-free. Herbal teas attract duty of 17.3 per cent unless, that is, they are a blend of more than one herb, in which case they are duty-free. And so it goes on. The Chancellor should have gone further and demanded that these absurd taxes on shopping be abolished altogether. The EUs duty regime is a bizarre throwback to the days of credit controls, when holidaymakers had to count the pennies they were taking out of the country. There is little point in belonging to a free trade area if the EU then forces upon us petty rules and double taxation on goods brought into the EU from outside. Let us have our herbal teas and bamboo tables tax-free.

In praise of Jesusland

Whatever their faults, says Mark Steyn, Americas Christian fundamentalists are a lot smarter than Eutopian secularists 0 Comments Mark Steyn 18 December 2004 Whatever their faults, says Mark Steyn, Americas Christian fundamentalists are a lot smarter than Eutopian secularists New Hampshire As in previous years, Planned Parenthood has been selling greetings cards for abortion proponents filled with seasonal cheer to send to each other: Choice On Earth, they proclaim. I can just about understand being a proponent of abortion; I find it harder to fathom someone whose obsession with the subject extends to sending out holiday cards on the theme. Especially as, insofar as the Christmas story is relevant to this question, its a season to reflect on the potential of every new life. Two thousand years ago, if a betrothed woman such as Mary became pregnant by a man other than her intended, she was guilty of adultery and liable to stoning. But Joseph, St Matthew tells us, being a just man, and not willing to make her a publick example, was minded to put her away privily i.e., a quiet divorce. Given the prevailing social climate back then, had they had Choice On Earth abortion on demand Jesus would have been first in line for it. There would have been no Christ, no Christmas, no New Testament, no lines about peace on earth for abortion fetishists to riff off for their holiday slogan. Scripturally derivative even in its repudiation thereof, Choice On Earth seems an apt summation of the muddled state of Christendom at the dawn of its third millennium. These days we dont say Christendom, of course, except in an ironic way. We say the Muslim world all the time, without thinking The Iraq invasion enraged the entire Muslim world, declares the Democrats website. The notion of a Muslim world is acceptable to the progressive mind. The Christian world is a more problematic concept. But its still out there, just about, and 2004 was a good year for Jesus. He had the big boxoffice smash of the past 12 months with The Passion of The Christ, scorned by Hollywood but popularised by word of mouth, or word of tongues. And, a couple of days after His man won the US election, a couple of Democrat wags, in a widely disseminated Internet cartoon, renamed a big swath of the North American continent after Him Jesusland, stretching across the vast southern interior and pushing up along the Rockies to the 49th parallel. The godless coastal fringes, meanwhile, were joined with Her Majestys Northern Dominion and rechristened (if youll pardon the expression) the United States of Canada, a fate I wouldnt wish even on Democrats. And, while the thought of joining their own shrivelled redoubts in a grand union with the biggest blue state of all evidently cheers them up, they may be

overestimating the blueness of the Great White North: large chunks of Alberta and the British Columbia hinterland would be happy to sign up with the Bible-thumpers, if only for the non-confiscatory tax rates. So Jesusland could well be even larger than its disparagers suggest. Jesusland isnt exactly Christendom: the latter evokes Rome, bishops, cathedrals, bells, incense, oratorios; the former is evangelicals, pastors, church suppers, WWJD buttons (What Would Jesus Do?), Christian rock. Some Democrats in the beleaguered fleshpots advocate accommodation with the God-fearing rednecks: for a week or so after the election, Nancy Pelosi, the Dems leader in the House of Representatives, was quoting Scripture in every soundbite, albeit the wimpy social-workerish bits. But most of her party has no desire to go down the straight-and-narrow, even as a rhetorical feint: the other day I found myself motoring along behind some Vermont feminist whose faded Im Pro-Choice and I Vote bumper sticker was now accompanied by another one demanding grumpily, Instead Of Being Born Again, Why Not Grow Up? The Jesusland meme is so discombobulating to the secular elites of the western world that within a week it had become the prism through which they view every event in the great republic even lousy movies. For as the Independents headline put it, Alexander the (Not So) Great Fails To Conquer Americas Homophobes. I dont think you have to be a homophobe to find Alexander a stinker; its stinker status does not primarily derive from its mild gayness, so much as from Oliver Stones incoherent storytelling and a dull central performance by some Irish bloke whose efforts at characterisation start and end with bellowing every line. But, if the worlds media want to conjure visions of stump-toothed backwoods knuckle-draggers stomping out of the Jesusland multiplex firing off verses from Leviticus as they demand a full refund, why get in the way of their illusions? The Guardians Timothy Garton Ash, just back from a tour of Americas blue states, says that theyre crying out for Europes help: Hands need to be joined across the sea in an old cause: the defence of the Enlightenment, he writes, and adopts as his rallying cry a subtle modification of Le Mondes famous 12 September headline, We are all blue Americans now. Europeans need to ally with blue staters and Canadians and so forth and draw a cordon bleu, as John Kerry would say, around George W. Bushs Jesusland, throttling it in its manger. Well, good luck with that. I doubt whether a Euro-blue-state alliance is in any position to defend the Enlightenment. Even if one accepts that the modern Euro-Canadian secular state is the rightful heir to the Enlightenment, it would seem obvious that its got a lot less enlightened, at least in the sense of freeing from superstition. The ludicrous over-reaction by the elites to the US election results is at least as superstitious and irrational as anything the Bible Belt believes. And theres nothing very rational or scientific about refusing to engage with your opponents arguments and instead dismissing them as mere phobias homophobia, Islamophobia, Chiracophobia. Whatever else may be said about the

evangelicals, they dont sneer theophobia whenever theyre criticised, even though in that case the lame trope may be almost plausible when it comes to abnormal psychological fear of the unknown, blue staters theophobia is more pervasive than red staters homophobia. A year or two back, I attended a lunch for a minister from California who was applying for a pastors gig at a New Hampshire Congregational church. My friend, the aptly named Faith, cut to the chase and asked the minister whether she believed the Bible was the literal truth. Well, she said, somewhat condescendingly, I believe these are useful narratives that we tell each other. Even if thats so, is it helpful to give the game away? As it turned out, the minister was a lesbian whod been joined in what she called Holy Union with her partner back at their church in Berkeley, since when shed become an enthusiastic marrier of gay couples across the Bay area. Proclaiming the Bible a series of useful narratives is invariably a first step towards proclaiming many of them useless the relevant portions of Romans, etc. But if the Bible is merely a useful narrative, its an immaculately conceived one, beginning with the decision to root the divinity of Christ in the miracle of His birth. The promise of new life on earth prefigures the promise of new life in heaven. Once you cease believing in the latter, the former soon follows. Steve Sailer pointed out in the American Conservative the other week that George W. Bush won 25 of the 26 states with the highest fertility rate. On the other hand, Jo hn Kerry won the 16 states with the lowest. If I were a Democrat looking 20 years down the road, Id be very alarmed by this trend. But then not many Democrats do look 20 years down the road: radical secular individualism is a present-tense culture, in America as in Europe. In the long run we are all dead, as Keynes said. There speaks a childless homosexual. Those Old Testament big begetters knew better: a celestial afterlife is something we have to take on faith, but our afterlife on earth is the children we beget and the children they in turn beget. How many divisions has the Pope? scoffed Stalin. Demographically speaking, Jesusland has more divisions than Eutopia. Pace Timothy Garton Ash, you cant defend the Enlightenment if youre too enlightened to breed. Americans remain mystified about one of the landmark events of this year: the terrorist bloodbath in Madrid that changed the result of the countrys election. Why, they wonder on this side of the Atlantic, wouldnt the Spaniards stand firm? But whats to stand firm for? To fight for king and country is to fight for the future, and a nation with Spains fertility rate 1.1 children per couple or about half replacement rate has no future. In that sense, the Bible, beginning with Gods injunction to go forth and multiply, is a lot more rational than the allegedly rational types at Planned Parenthood. Im not an absolutist in these matters. Im a red stater when it comes to God and guns, but I like European arthouse movies where Juliette Binoche or Isabelle Huppert take their kit off. Its a question of

balance. And comparing Jesusland with present-tense Eutopia, it seems obvious which is more out of whack. What Timothy Garton Ash calls the Enlightenment has degenerated under its present trustees into a doomsday cult with all the coerciveness of the old state religion and none of the eternal truths. For example, for as long as I can remember, the pre-eminent eco-doom-monger on Canadian TV has been a chap called David Suzuki, who, in a poignant comment on the state of my country, recently made the Top Ten Greatest Canadians Of All Time list. A while back, Suzuki wrote a column called We Are All Animals Here, beginning as follows: The sign in the shopping mall said, No animals allowed. As I read it, I didnt know whether to laugh or cry. It reflected a failure to admit or unwillingness to acknowledge our biological nature. We are animals and have a taxonomic classification: Kingdom: Animalia; Phylum: Chordata; Class: Mammalia; Order: Primates; Family: Hominidae; Genus: Homo; Species: sapiens. Our reluctance to acknowledge our animal nature is indicated in our attitude to other animals. If we call someone a worm, snake, pig, chicken, mule or ape, it is an insult. Indeed, to accuse someone of being a wild animal at a party is a terrible insult. But apparently not at his pad; Suzuki, even at a sober wine-and-cheese do, is literally a party animal. This kind of standard ecoblather certainly has animal qualities if only in the sense that its barking. Everyone knows what the sign in the mall means. It may be distressing to Suzuki, but the world we live in is defined not by what we have in common with worms, snakes and pigs, but by what separates us. For the purposes of comparison, consider the Eighth Psalm: What is man, that thou art mindful of him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour. Thou hast made him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet: All sheep and oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field; The fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea. Now you can say thats a lot of Judaeo-Christian hooey. But the Psalmist, regardless of whether he got it from God or winged it off the top of his head, has characterised the reality of our existence better than the environmentalists and scientists. The Eighth Psalm describes the central fact of our world our dominion over the sheep and oxen, yea, and all the party animals. It was a lot less plausible when it was written, when mans domain stretched barely to the horizon, when ravenous beasts lurked in the undergrowth, when the oceans were uncharted and the maps dribbled away with the words Here be dragons. But, over the millennia, the Eighth Psalm has held up, which is more than you can say for the average

1970s bestseller predicting the oil would run out by 1998 and the Maldives would be obliterated by global warming. Its easy, in an otherwise wholly secular West, to mock the religiosity of Jesusland. But if eternal salvation remains unproved, the suspension of disbelief required of Eutopian secularists grows daily. If you were one of those redneck Christian fundamentalists the worlds media are always warning about, you might think the Continents in for what looks awfully like the Four Horsemen of the Euro-Apocalypse: Famine the end of the lavishly funded statist good times; Death the self-extinction of European races too selfish to breed; War the decline into bloody civil unrest that these economic and demographic factors will bring; and Conquest the recolonisation of Europe by Islam. But it goes without saying that Europeans are far too rational and enlightened to believe in such outmoded notions as apocalyptic equestrians. If there is choice on earth, Ill bet on Jesusland. Happy holidays.

Slaughter of the regiments

Andrew Gilligan on what the army stands to lose by adopting Starbucks regiments 0 Comments Andrew Gilligan 18 December 2004 Andrew Gilligan on what the army stands to lose by adopting Starbucks regiments W est Belfast in the autumn of 1982 was a bad place to be a British soldier. Booby-traps, like the one which destroyed Corporal Leon Bush, aged 22, of the Worcestershire and Sherwood Foresters Regiment, were routine, decidedly not news. Corporal Bushs death, like most soldiers, was quickly forgotten by everyone except his family. It was, therefore, an enormous consolation to Corporal Bushs blood relatives when they discovered that he had two families who wanted to keep his memory alive: themselves, and the Worcestershire and Sherwood Foresters. They came to stay with the regiment at its base in Germany, remembers Patrick Mercer, a captain in the WFR at the time, and later its commanding officer. We had a little silver statuette made. We called it the Leon Bush Memorial and we presented it each year as a prize for regimental competitions. Whenever we could, we had members of the family over from England to present the trophy, and it meant the world to them. This week the Worcestershire and Sherwood Foresters, and every other traditional, singlebattalion county regiment in the British army, effectively ceased to exist. The Defence Secretary, Geoff Hoon, that worthy successor to Liddell Hart, announced that all will be either abolished or merged into what Mercer, now a Tory MP, calls Starbucks regiments,

big, multiple-battalion regional franchises designed to uplift employee productivity, downsize overheads and deliver a more economically priced forward offer to key stakeholders in major war-fighting markets. The WFR will become part of a Mercia Regiment covering the whole of the Midlands, from Hereford to Chesterfield. The fate of the Leon Bush Memorial is not yet known. For sophisticates, the idea of the family regiment is faintly amusing, an idea as dated and sentimental as the avuncular Dixon of Dock Green-style British bobby. But those who devised the Leon Bush Memorial, and other such gestures, were acting not out of sentimentality or kind-heartedness. They are making a shrewd calculation about the signals it sends to the other soldiers: we care about you, we will look after your family if you die, we are an outfit worth fighting for. This sort of thing is not, of course, impossible in a Starbucks army. But it is much easier to pull off in a small, intimate regiment where some, perhaps many, will have known each other before they joined, and most will have shared experiences once inside. In a multi-battalion regiment with soldiers constantly moving around from battalion to battalion, half of them might not even know who a Leon Bush was. As the opposition to the changes has built up, Mr Hoon and the chief of the general staff, General Sir Mike Jackson, have laid down a devastating barrage of covering speeches, bombarding the newspapers with slightly less than precision-guided interviews. The message has been mixed: at times they have emphasised the radicalism of the change, at others they have been at pains to suggest that nothing at all is being sacrificed. Over the next few months a great deal of PR nonsense is likely to be talked about how cherished regimental identities have been saved by the use of a daring secret weapon: brackets. So the new, say, third battalion of the new, merged Royal Regiment of Scotland will be allowed to place after its name the words, in brackets, the Black Watch. For a time, 3 Royal Regiment of Scotland (the Black Watch) will indeed be an approximate facsimile of The Regiment Formerly Known As The Black Watch, as will many of the others. Each of the battalions in the new super-regiments will retain a good deal of autonomy. But as the Black Watch starts to receive new drafts of recruits from all over Scotland, and as soldiers move around between Scottish battalions more often, its identity will be diluted and its distinctiveness will wither. The experience of those English counties which lost their regiments in return for a set of brackets in earlier reorganisations is instructive. The Royal Anglians, perhaps the prototype for the mergers now happening everywhere, used to have lots of bracketed battalions naming the eight old county regiments they had absorbed. But the brackets, and indeed most of the battalions, lasted less than 15 years. No prospective 18-year-old soldier from, say,

Leicestershire would now realise that the county ever had a regiment of its own. Regionalised battalions with no particular local identity will be much easier to cut when the next round of economies comes along in a few years time. The tragedy of this weeks changes is that several of them are admirable. The ending of the arms plot, where units rotate between roles and home bases every few years, immensely disruptive to family life and military efficiency alike, is opposed by almost no one. Even the Starbucks units have their adherents. But the entire process has been contaminated by the need to make actual cuts to the infantry at a time when it has seldom been busier. The decision that has caused the greatest ill-feeling of all is the choice of which three or four infantry battalions out of the total of 40 are to be axed altogether. (Officially, these doomed battalions will also be merged with others; but in practice theirs will be mergers only in the sense that Czechoslovakia merged with Germany in 1938.) General Jackson has said that one of the key factors in the abolition decision is a regiments recruiting performance: how undermanned it is. But in the run-up to the cuts announcement, the MoD has curiously blocked all attempts by MPs and peers to get the figures. On 7 September a defence minister, Lord Bach, told Lord Astor of Hever in a parliamentary answer that information on regimental shortfalls was not held centrally and could be provided only at disproportionate cost. This, The Spectator has learnt, was untrue. Information on shortfalls by infantry regiments is, in fact, held centrally and is produced in a monthly report by the Directorate of Infantry, the last two months worth of which have been leaked to The Spectator at the disproportionate cost of a 26 pence stamp. The reports show that nearly all infantry regiments are undermanned to some degree. But they also show pretty clearly that some of the regiments in line to be axed including the Royal Gloucestershire, Berkshire and Wiltshire Regiment, the second battalion of the Royal Anglians, and one of the Gurkha battalions are, in fact, among the best recruited and the least undermanned in the entire infantry. The RGBW is undermanned by only 18 soldiers out of 530. The 2 Royal Anglians is one of a handful of infantry units which are actually in surplus. By contrast, some of the few units which are to be saved entirely untouched are, in fact, among the worst recruited and the most undermanned in the infantry. The Scots Guards, according to the document, are undermanned by 12 per cent, the third worst of the entire 40 infantry battalions. The Irish Guards is undermanned by 8 per cent. There has been persistent suspicion that the Parachute Regiment, another unit which will survive unscathed, has benefited from friends in high places. General Jackson is a Para. And indeed, the leaked figures show that the three Para battalions are undermanned by up to 6

per cent worse than 15 other battalions which will be abolished or merged, including the Black Watch. The deck has been stacked in favour of the best-connected regiments, regardless of the actual merits of their case, said one officer in a doomed battalion this week. To be fair, there is a little more to it than this. The army has taken a ten-year rolling average of recruitment, not a snapshot although in this analysi s, sources say, the Paras come out even worse and recruiting is not the only factor. General Jackson has stressed that every regiment, including his own, has been thoroughly looked at. Nonetheless, after a busy few years bailing the Prime Minister out of the fuel protests, the firemens strike, Iraq and other self-inflicted wounds, the army feels a little aggrieved at seeing 1,500 of its men packed off to the Jobcentre. Its all so pointless, said one serving infantry officer. Dont they realise how little an infantry battalion costs? All you need is a Nissen hut, some boots, rifles, and a few functioning radios. Well, perhaps not, then. Philip Hope-Wallace, the drama critic of the Guardian, famously warned that one should never work for a liberal newspaper, because they always sacked you just before Christmas. As the British army learnt this week, the same principle clearly applies to those working for a liberal imperialist.

A Christmas message to New Labour: give up preaching class hatred

A Christmas message to New Labour: give up preaching class hatred 0 Comments Paul Johnson 18 December 2004 Christmas is a time of goodwill and I must, as usual, suspend my dislikes for the season. What are they? The list lengthens every year. It now includes Scotch announcers on the BBC and radio reporters who use what I call Elementary School Sing-song when reading their (often ungrammatical) dispatches. All footballers and their managers (and mistresses) and football fans. Men who shave their heads; Welshmen (not Welshwomen, far from it); TV producers, and especially their assistants who ring me up and ask me to appear on their beastly programmes and call me Paul; all New Labour MPs and life peers and, a fortiori, Social Democrats David Owen, who knew, rightly called them Labour with syphilis; gossip columnists, whatever paper they work for; newspaper photographers, who waste my time and then connive with picture editors to show close-ups of me looking blind, toothless and senile; writers of Gobble Columns not cookery writers and especially not Tamasin Day-Lewis, who is not only a brilliant stylist but a cuisinire of extraordinary skill you should taste her caramel orange ice cream! I dislike Yags and Chromos, Lugs, Voidies and

Snagereens; pushy people who are always grabbing the headlines, like Nigella Lawson, the Archbishop of Canterbury (and the Bishop of Oxford), Michael Winner, Richard Branson and Philip Green; anyone connected with the Turner and Booker Prizes, and so dedicated to the destruction of art and literature; nearly all intellectuals, and especially anti-American ones, who curse the United States, all its inhabitants and everything it stands for in one breath while puffing their way across the Atlantic with the next to collect their royalties from the generous Joe Public. I dislike mullahs who enjoy our hospitality and tolerance and plan to slit our throats; Jacques Chirac and his latest puppy-dog camp-follower, poodle and yesman, the Spanish Prime Minister; anti-Semites who pretend they are anti-Zionists and who really want to begin again where Hitler left off and a great many other monsters, real and imaginary, Dongerites, Toileys, Loabs and Somerset Shingoes. I particularly dislike the Secretary of State for Culture and her horrible fountain in Kensington Gardens. Indeed, I dislike all ministers except Tony Blair and the Home Secretary. Let me assure readers I am totally without prejudice. I do not prejudge. I have formed my dislikes on the basis of long experience. I tried explaining this once to James Baldwin, who complained to me that it was sheer race prejudice and homophobia which made people dislike him: No, James, it is not prejudice, it is actual experience of how awful you are. He said, What experience have you had of prejudice? I replied, Listen, old sod, if, like me, you were born in England red-haired, left-handed and a Roman Catholic, theres nothing you dont know about prejudice. At this point he stumped off in a rage. But what I said was, is, true, though perhaps less so now than in my salad days. If you are left-handed you are liable to be told you are aggressive and likely to live less long than the rest of humanity. Actually I dont mind that. And, having had enlightened parents, I was spared the business of being forced to use my right hand and so turned into a hopeless stammerer, like poor King George VI. Of course his father, George V, did this because he thought theres no such thing as a first-class shot who shoots left-handed. This view was once widely held in the army, especially in rifle regiments like mine. Your company sergeantmajor was liable to thrust his enormous red-faced head to within an inch of your nose, so you could see last nights beer-stains on his eyeballs, and roar, Southpaw, are you? Ill paw you, believe you me! Fortunately I had learnt to shoot right-handed at school, as well as with the left, but other folks were not so lucky, because in those days the Kings Royal Rifle Corps did not go in for Lee-Enfield 303s with a left-hand bolt-action. Latrine duties for them; and the army did not take Nicholas Serotas view that a latrine is a supreme work of art, like a Michelangelo ceiling just an object to be scrubbed, daily. Having red hair, in my experience, exposes you to the worst form of prejudice, worse by far than skin colour. And accusing red-haired boys of being belligerent is still approved of, especially on the Left. At my convent school, the delightful and warm-hearted Dominican nuns assured me that red hair was no stigma. Sister Mary Angela told me, Many of the

angels have red hair. But at boarding school it was not the same. My mother would not allow me to go away to school until I was 12, so I arrived at the big school not having attended the attached prep school. All the other boys had, so I was an exception. And my flaming curls drew attention to me. Shortly after my arrival I was attended by a delegation of boys, or perhaps surrounded would be a more accurate word. It essentially consisted of one large boy and his sycophants. He had a powerful voice and was known as Boomer, and was lockforward in the under-14 XV. He surveyed me, up and down, and said, Youre a new squit, arent you? And suffering from capillary inflammation, I see. Can you give me one good reason why you should not be beaten up? By a happy chance I had been taught boxing at my previous school, but I realised that Boomers height was an insuperable disadvantage unless I could reduce it. So I said, Yes, Boomer, I have got a good reason, but I must whisper it. Hoping to hear something disgusting about me, which he could exploit, Boomer grinned and condescendingly lowered himself to listen. I instantly delivered what I believe to this day was an inspired and wholly justified uppercut to the side of his jaw, which caused him to yelp in pain, surprise and indignation. A general m

*********MORE MISSING STUFF*********** The message in the glass

In recent years, there has been a revival of interest in stained glass, writes Andrew Lambirth 0 Comments Andrew Lambirth 18 December 2004 Collecting stained glass seems to have fallen somewhat from fashion. In the first half of the 20th century, acquisition was lively and prices soared as the Big Three William Burrell, Pierpont Morgan and William Randolph Hearst vied for possession of the best examples of this essentially Christian artform. (There is no stained glass recorded before the Christianisation of the Roman Empire in the early 4th century. It may have become secularised later, but it was originally intended for purposes of religious instruction and adornment.) After the second world war, tastes changed and stained glass was largely ignored. In recent years, there has been something of a revival of interest, with Sam Fogg a pioneer in the field. Two years ago he mounted his first exhibition devoted to the subject, Images in Light: Stained Glass 12001550, and the entire show was bought by the J. Paul Getty Museum in California. The sequel, Illuminating the Past: Stained Glass 12001550, is now in the West End, and attracting a great deal of scholarly and general interest. The ground-floor gallery of Foggs premises off Bond Street gives a taste of the splendours to come. A handful of examples of stained glass are carefully presented, illuminated against custom-made light boxes, with the odd piece of stone carving or statuary placed strategically nearby. Theres a piece of English glass from the second half of the 15th century an armorial shield of the Horne family of Essex, wittily depicting two strap-hanging hunting

horns. There are a pair of composite panels made up of salvaged fragments from the Norwich School, also 15th century, probably put together in this fashionable mosaic style during the 19th century. Look at the unbearably plangent blues surrounding the lions heads in the right-hand one. Here is a lute-playing angel mixed up with architectural elements, drapery and clouds in a satisfyingly decorative whole. Across the way is a far more serious composition: a monumental scene from the life of the French monarchy, probably King Charles VIII with Louis XII as Dauphin and St Catherine. Once owned by Hearst, this richly coloured but sober image is of considerable historical importance, as well as being a splendid specimen of late 15th-century French technique. The exhibition continues upstairs with even greater glories. At the top of the staircase to the right is an utterly beautiful grisaille lancet window, devoid of any narrative, a superb exercise in abstract pattern-making (employing false or non-functional leads to complicate the design), laid out in cool green tones. This pale marvel is English, dates from 122030, and may have come from a Cistercian house. In striking contrast is the almost lurid Burgundian panel depicting the Execution of St John the Baptist, from around the same period, quite possibly originating from the Cathedral of Saint-Etienne at Auxerre. Predominantly in red and blue, with touches of green and yellow, this sombre image tells its tragic story with economy and precision. Of course, visitors want to know where all this glass has come from, whether it has been looted or ripped untimely from sacred settings. In England, at least, most damage to church windows was done (in terms of destruction under the various banners of the Dissolution of the Monasteries, the Reformation and the Puritans) between the 16th and the 18th centuries. In the 19th century, experts and enthusiasts set to work resetting and repairing old glass, and a great deal was removed then and in the earlier years of the 20th century whether for preservation or gain is difficult now to determine. Certainly that urge towards conservation accounts for the survival of so much that enriches us artistically today. Among the other treasures here on display are two large Austrian panels, from c.12901310, depicting the Baptism of Christ and the Adoration of the Magi. Previously unknown, these are accounted the exhibitions highlight with their distinctive vine-tendril ornament structuring the intricate patterns. Here can also be seen examples of manganese corrosion within the glass, to which the pink skin colour of the faces is particularly susceptible. More intimate are the group of 28 heads, 13th-century French and most probably from the Cathedral of Bourges, assembled fragments juxtaposed to often witty or telling effect. Or the tiny Figure of the Good Thief, from St Marys Meysey Hampton in Gloucestershire (dating to c.133040), raised aloft in the agony of crucifixion on a green cross. Or the panel of a king enthroned with courtiers (c.1420), in which the lines around the eyes and the crosshatching below the mouth so distinctive of the Norwich School may be readily discerned. Or, finally, the 15th-century French Nativity roundel attributed to Thierry Esperlan of Delft, depicting

two shepherds looking on from the left, the ox and ass centre, and Joseph removing his hat on the right. The dominant golden yellow colouration comes from applying silver nitrate to the glass before firing. This is one of the best exhibitions Ive seen for a long while thoroughly recommended. I havent yet had the chance to see the new stained-glass window in the Retro-quire of Beverley Minster, in the East Riding of Yorkshire, but I have been studying the specifications of its installation and the photographs give some indication of its aesthetic and spiritual intentions. Inevitably, there will be those who will denigrate a modern intervention in what is widely regarded as a Gothic masterpiece and the best non-cathedral church in England, but the Church must commission good new art if it is to make any pretence to artistic relevance and authority in an age of wildly shifting values. It is not enough to make stained-glass windows on a mediaeval pattern and expect them to be anything other than out of time and out of place, unless they are part of a restoration project for existing fenestration. New times call for new solutions. This ambitious project involves not only a 20ft-high stained-glass lancet window in the South Wall of the building, but also a life-size sheet-copper sculpture depicting two pilgrims, with nearby wooden prayer benches and seating, together with a cruciform candle stand, also in copper. The ensemble commemorates the many thousands of pilgrims who came in the Middle Ages to this easternmost part of the Minster to visit the shrine of St John of Beverley. The artist responsible is Helen Whittaker, and the whole scheme took 18 months to realise. It is apparently the largest single artistic commission undertaken in any major English church in recent years. The copper pilgrims have triangular stained-glass hearts within them, echoing the windows predominant pattern of triangles which leads in a sharply arcing spiral to the heart of the composition the eye of light in the upper half of the lancet. Whittaker comments thus on the geometry of her composition: The design for this scheme uses a compass point to represent God the creator, the starting point of all our journeys and, as with all geometric forms, it is impossible to tell the beginning from the end. So we have the notion of the everlasting stitched into the very idea and fabric of the window, which beams forth light transfigured into drops of colour, falling upon floor and sculpture alike. And this light symbolises the love of God. To judge of its effect, the Minster certainly deserves a visit. Illuminating the Past is at Sam Fogg, 15d Clifford Street, W1, until 15 January 2005.

Bookends

Brief and to the point

0 Comments Philip Hensher 18 December 2004 The Book of Shadows Don Paterson Picador, pp.208, 12.99 Very few people have ever dared to publish a book of aphorisms, and certainly hardly anyone in recent memory. The form is so demanding, basically requiring novelty, truth and literary excellence all at the same time, that even to embark on it needs a writer with high and justified confidence in his own abilities. Don Paterson is exactly that writer, the best poet of his generation, as well as an original and lucid thinker, and his boldness in bringing out The Book of Shadows is amply rewarded by the excellence of the final result. One of the impressive things about his last collection of poetry, Landing Light, was its suggestive and impressionist strain of narrative. Here, too, the aphorisms often embark on what, in other hands, might be whole stories: I came home. I had grown sick of my accent. Often these suggested stories are of sexual intensity: A mercy, I suppose, that it ended. Any deeper intimacy with each others anatomy would have involved a murder. This last one, instantly comprehensible and yet a thought so bizarre that as far as I know it is entirely original, gives the exact flavour of Paterson. Many of these aphorisms are really characters in the genre of Theophrastus, defining individual people so perfectly that they become types: Such is E.s need to be loved, he experiences the casual indifference of a stranger and a snub from his closest friend as the same torment. Paterson is very strongly concerned with art, its practitioners, and the circumstances surrounding its production, and these characters do have an abstract edge to them, as individuals personify points in an argument: He was a man of such wide-ranging ignorance it had real subtlety, depth, reach. Patersons aphorisms can be wonderful observations of the way the world tends to impact on us; I had never quite seen what he describes when he says, All those chairs and bathtubs and cars and shoes which, emptied of us, are immediately returned to absurdity. How many lonely things we make for the world. But one absolutely knows what he means, once having heard it. I dont think Ive ever heard anyone admit to the obvious widespread truth, either, that for many people its appalling that so many of my imagined triumphs still take place before my second-year assembly, who will finally vindicate me. Although the subjects of the aphorisms are wide-ranging and often universally applicable, Paterson returns frequently to art and creativity. Sometimes they are very specific technical points about writing the present tense in English is too sibilant to be of much use to poets a point which may sound metaphorical, but in fact is just a first-rate observation by a

technician. Paterson is technically very adroit as a writer, and frequently disdainful of ineptitude; he says, absolutely correctly, that if only poets and novelists could be translated into musicianhood, even for a few seconds, then wed see the vast majority, after only a few notes, revealed as a bunch of desperate scrapers without a tune in their heads or the rudiments of technique. God, the time wed save. This self-analysis goes deep into the book; there is a sequence of aphorisms on the art of the aphorism itself, and a recurrent strain of commentary on the nature of criticism. Some of these are wonderfully disdainful of the psychology of the critic: There are writers for whom no forms exist: too clever for novels, too sceptical for poetry, too verbose for the aphorism, all that is left to them is the essay the least appropriate medium for the foiled. They all end up critics. If this seems to teeter on the verge of self-congratulation, one of the particular pleasures of the book is that it seems, through reflection, to anticipate and rout all possible responses to it, dismissing itself as well as celebrating itself. It is a difficult book to review, since everything one could bring up against it, and, more alarmingly, almost everything one can say in praise of it, have already been said in the book itself. Tried to rewrite the Shad- ows as less self-important; gave up, realising that was their only virtue. Admiring the book for its absolute and recognisable truthfulness turns out to be no great achievement on the part of the critic: Anything that elicits an immediate nod of recognition has only reconfirmed a prejudice. All the same, even if this is true, and even if Paterson means it (something not to be taken for granted I no longer mean all of these. I meant them once. Some of them only once) then to state, once, perfectly, unforgettably, a prejudice one didnt even know one held is something of an achievement. It may be true that some of the most haunting of the aphorisms are the ones where the reader doesnt actually know what he means All that moves is ghost but the energy of the book comes from the way it seems to present observations for the readers passive assent, then to place that passive, unachieving assent under an unwavering analytical gaze. The only thing for a reviewer to do with this brilliant, honourable and savage book is, as you see, to quote substantially from it, silently accepting that he is not going to be able to express Patersons thoughts any better than Paterson already has; the only thing for any thinking reader to do is to buy and read it. The Book of Shadows has, self- evidently, been produced after long years of gestation and addition, and has an unmistakable authority. Paterson is a remarkable writer; this is a book unlikely to be competed with in its peculiar field any time soon.

Tough is the night

0 Comments William Boyd 18 December 2004 A Tragic Honesty Blake Bailey Methuen, pp.671, 25 Mostly we authors repeat ourselves, Scott Fitzgerald observed late in his life. We learn our trade, well or less well, and we tell our two or three stories as long as people will listen. Theres a lot of truth in this remark (though some authors have more than two or three stories to tell), but in the case of the American writer Richard Yates, subject of this fascinating biography, there was only one story that obsessed him and Yates, essentially, told it again and again in both his long and short fiction whether people were listening or not. Richard Yates was born in Yonkers, NY, in 1926 into a thoroughly dysfunctional family and his own tortured psyche and that of his mother and relatives provided him with the raw material of his fiction for his working life. Yates was mentally unstable and an alcoholic (as was his only sister). Their mother was a rackety, self-appointed Bohemian sculptress who divorced her dull, middle-management husband as soon as was feasible and took her children off on a series of flits through pre-second world war New England and Green- wich Village, somehow managing to keep one step ahead of the bailiffs and the creditors but royally messing up her children in the process (in her cups, she was in the habit of slipping into bed with her pubescent son). A scholarship pupil at private school, Yates was the talented poor boy who wanted to be a writer and he achieved relatively early success with his short stories. After graduating he served briefly with the US Army at the tail end of the war, married early and spent some time learning his trade, as Scott Fitzgerald put it, in France and London. The trouble with Yates was that he wanted to be a writer and a writer. The ghost of Scott Fitzgerald haunts his life both as an artistic exemplar and as a ruinous role-model. Yatess writing career was lived out against a background of 80 cigarettes a day, prodigious boozing and manic depression. The handfuls of pharmaceuticals he took to keep himself relatively sane were never designed to be washed down by Jack Daniels and it has to be said that, very early on, Yates placed his finger squarely on the self-destruct button and held it there. Marriages and relationships collapsed with regularity and the literary career that he embarked on so promisingly with his first novel Revolutionary Road (1960) soon evolved itself into a long, slow slide of falling sales, missed deadlines, alienated publishers and the law of diminishing returns. Yet throughout his life Yates was sustained by grants, prizes, spells in Holly- wood writing scripts, temporary creative-writing teaching posts (with a brief, unlikely period as a speech writer for Bobby Kennedy) and the affection and support of steadfast friends and colleagues.

As a young man he was tall and moodily good-looking. Yet for all his charisma he was, I suppose, that sad literary figure the one book wonder. His first novel, Revolutionary Road, turned out to be his chef doeuvre. It was written to be the Great Gatsby of the 1960s and it still has its fervent adherents. Reading Yatess fiction today one has to say that, looking at the work as a whole (six novels and two collections of short stories), there dont really seem to be grounds for resurrecting him as a forgotten master. His style is classically realistic and elegantly turned but the one-note samba of his inspiration finally enervates. John Updike who one might argue overtook and outshone Yates as the pre-eminent chronicler of middleclass American angst and adultery is in a different league. Yates is like many figures in 20th-century American literature: an early flowering of an intriguing talent rendered nugatory by crowding, tormenting demons drink, drugs, self-doubt, self-loathing, burnout and so on. Fitzgerald is the obvious precursor but Hemingway was equally undone, as were writers like Berryman, Capote, Kerouac, Cheever and many more. Yates in his middle age wound up in Boston, living in a bleak, roach-infested apartment with just enough money to feed himself in an Irish pub up the block. He looked like a derelict with a crusted beard, greasy clothes, muttering to himself as he trudged between his apartment and the bar. What sustained Yates what kept him alive, I suppose was his romantic vision of himself as an artist. He wrote all the time, even if what he wrote was inferior stuff, and pursued his vocation with a dedication that is in the end amazingly impressive, even if it was self-delusory. A friend described him as fun to be around but a pain in the ass. Unfortunately, as his life spiralled downwards the pain in the ass aspects seemed to dominate. Yates was both bitter and aggressive, his moods swung violently because of his bipolar disorder and the vast amounts of alcohol he consumed. He fought with friends and his family; through his drink-driven dementia he made a regular public spectacle of himself and was in and out of mental institutions. But it was, so his doctors claimed and pleaded with him, his refusal to give up alcohol that was destroying his life. Eventually, however, it was his manic smoking that killed him. In the early 1990s Yates wound up teaching creative writing at a university in Alabama. Virtually immobile owing to his chronic emphysema, he became a familiar figure driving around campus in a clapped-out Mazda alternately puffing on a cigarette and clamping an oxygen mask to his face. He quit smoking a few months before he died and was astonished at how easy it was to give up. By then it was too late: he was rushed into hospital for a routine operation on an inguin- al hernia (caused by his fits of coughing) and died alone in the night, asphyxiated by his own vomit. It was 1992: he was 66 years old. To write so well and be forgotten is a terrifying legacy, a critic commented post- humously. Yates was a fine writer, but the very uneven quality of his work will always have him categorised as a minor 20th-century American novelist despite the tremendous debut he made with Revolutionary Road. However, in a curious way, his hellish life itself may be what he will be remembered for. Blake Bailey has written a fully documented, wonderfully clear-

eyed, shrewd and sympathetic account of what must be one of the most nightmarish journeys across this vale of tears that any novelist has undertaken. Yatess battered, wheezing, ascetic indefatigability is almost heroic but, as with many artists who embark on this kind of slow suicide, one is left with the feeling that at root it is caused by an innate sense of the limits of their talent by their awareness of just how far they fall short of the genuinely great that sends them down the slippery slope to their own self-destruction.

The ogre of lullabies

0 Comments Christopher Woodward 18 December 2004 The Legend of Napoleon Sudhir Hazareesingh Granta, pp.336, 20 Napoleon and the British Stuart Semmel Yale, pp.354, 25 For six months I have been waking up on the island of St Helena. At nine oclock I walk to my office in Bath; two hours earlier I am at work on a pile of diaries kept by Napoleons courtiers during the six years of the emperors captivity. The mind flies 5,000 miles across the Atlantic to an island I have never seen and a white bungalow named Longwood. There are sublime moments. I who was master of the world! Napoleon shouts as he walks up and down the narrow corridors of the wind-battered house inside which he was exiled. Then he chuckles to General Gourgaud, Ah, it was a pretty empire, was it not? And it can be ridiculous. At dinner Napoleon comments on how much he has enjoyed the days good weather. No, objects Gourgaud, the weather was poor today. Marital silence. When Napoleon fell asleep three generals, a secretary, two valets and a changing succession of doctors and English duty officers went to their rooms to write their diaries. I hate to say it but there is something of Big Brother in the way each writer grumbles about their housemates performance of the daily tasks set by Napoleon, whether it has been to explain the loss of the battle of Waterloo or calculate the flow of water in the Nile. Subsequent to Napoleons death on 5 May 1821 over 400 books and articles have discussed his final six years. More ink per square foot has been spilt on the wooden floors of Longwood than anywhere else on earth. But one of the reasons that St Helena is addictive is that the diarists disagree. In front of me is a page of questions on which I have tried to reconcile their descriptions of events. Did the ice-making machine, the first to arrive on the tropical island, ever work? What did Napoleon

say when news came of the executions of Murat and Ney? Was he attacked by a cow? It is impossible to know who is telling the truth. Next comes the realisation that many other writers have undertaken exactly the same comparative exercise. In his classic The Last Phase (1900), Lord Rosebery talked of how there was something in the air of Longwood that put a mildew on truth (he wrote the book, he said, to expel a ghost from his own house). The great French historian Frdric Masson could recount the conversations on any chosen day. G. L. de St Marie Watson, author of Napoleons Death Mask (1909), befriended a cast of characters from the shop-keeper Mr Solomon to the farmer named Robinson whose daughter Napoleon dubbed the nymph. Why do I say all this? Because I am addicted to the blighted air of Longwood. And because two excellent books on the image of Napoleon in France and in Britain show that without St Helena, and without the earlier return from Elba, our view of the emperor would be utterly different. The constitution he granted during the Hundred Days presented him as a liberal. Death on a distant rock made him into a figure of sympathy. In 1909 Philippe Gonnard responded to Lord Roseberys depiction of the ennui of St Helena with The Last Phase in Fact and Fiction (1909), an eloquent, succinct study in which he argued that Napoleons actions in exile were the most successful PR campaign in history. Accepting that he would never return to Europe, he took on posterity, and won. He told his disciples to circulate stories of his suffering and his last will was a masterpiece: I am dying prematurely, murdered by the English oligarchy and its hired assassins I wish my ashes to rest near the banks of the Seine in the midst of the French people I have so dearly loved. I shall be a martyr and my son shall wear the crown, he added to his courtiers. The Legend of Napoleon by Sudhir Hazareesingh, a fellow of Balliol, argues that the resurrection of Napoleon was a far more spontaneous phenomenon. Within months of Napoleons exile myths of his return had sprung up in hundreds of villages across France. The heart of this book is research undertaken in regional archives over several years, deciphering the records by policemen and civil servants of protests made in the name of the emperor against the Bourbon regime. It is some years since I have read a book which has made such enthralling use of historical archives. Many of the files had never been opened, and it is impossible to overstate what an advance this research represents in understanding the politics of the period. And it is great fun too. In Rouen 24 Napoleonic plates were set aside for Bonapartist diners and elsewhere in the city a confectioner made chocolate statues of Napoleon for Christmas.

In Paris a man slipped a tiny bronze statuette into his friends wine glass when the police approached. His friend choked, and both were arrested. In the Ardche a peasant saw his face in the moon, while in Auxerre a child cried Vive lempereur three times immediately after leaving the womb. In the Somme an army sergeant built a house in the shape of Napoleons tricorn hat. I could not help but feel sorry for Louis XVIII, whom Philip Mansels biography of 1981 transformed from a fat figure of caricature to a man of tragic poignancy. When news of his death reached one village, a spy reported an elderly neighbour saying, There will be potatoes for us now that the King is dead, because when he was alive he used to eat them all. Louis XVIII was a more liberal ruler than Napoleon. So, this book asks, why did the most autocratic ruler France has ever known become a popular hero after his exile and death? And why was his nephew elected Emperor Napoleon III by a peoples vote? Hazareesingh does not claim to be writing a balanced appreciation of the political views of the time. What he shows is that, to quote the one ugly phrase in a beautifully written book, support for Napoleon was expressive rather than goal-driven. From 100 discontented points of view, he was an invigorating alternative to the status quo. On Waterloo day in London in 1830 the Duke of Wellingtons carriage was stoned by a mob shouting Bonaparte for ever! But Wellington understood why so many Britons admired the arch-enemy. To them he was not a real person, he said, but a principle a principle of opposition to the establishment. Napoleon and the British is the first book by the American political historian Stuart Semmel. Like Hazareesingh he does not tell us what he thinks about Napoleon. His interest lies in what attitudes to Napoleon tell us about Britain in the early 19th century. Britain created multiple Napoleons. The Liberator of Italy, whose thin, lank-haired face appeared in the print-shop windows in 1797. The First Consul, whose Roman profile was illuminated in London squares to celebrate the Peace of Amiens in 1802. The disciple of Rousseau, who called a halt to the slaughter of an Austrian army when he saw a spaniel licking the face of its dying master. The murderer of the Duc dEnghien. A Jacobin. A usurper. The liberator of the Jews in Europe. The man who censored the press. The Antichrist who was the 666th ruler of successor states to the Roman empire. The Boney of Gillray, the ogre of lullabies, the Cromwell, Caligula and Nero of popular broadsides . And all before he was 35 years old. Semmels argument is that images of Nap- oleon act as multiple mirrors to Britains fractured sense of identity during the early 19th century. The nation of Waterloo was a self-doubting and divided society. When the time came to decide Napoleons fate it was, at bottom, a

debate about the rights and wrongs of the British national character. True, Wellington refused Bl

*********MORE MISSING STUFF******* The heresy of explanation

0 Comments Digby Anderson 18 December 2004 The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary Robert Alter W. W. Norton, pp.1064, 34 The Pentateuch belongs to all sorts of different people and I cannot speak for them and their needs, so Ill stick with what I know. Most of my church friends rarely read the first five books of the Bible because they rarely read the Bible. They own Bibles, of course, several, maybe a Vulgate, a King James, a Revised Standard or even one of the more modern ones such as the Jerusalem. But they seldom open them; for a very good reason. They think it wiser to take their Scripture in short chunks edited and organised for them by authority. So they read it as presented in the Breviary or Prayer Book, in the various readings at Mass or in extracts followed by commentaries. They like their gin with plenty of ice and lots of tonic. The Bible itself, like neat, extra-strength Tanqueray, is just too strong. Some of them also doubt their ability to read it in the slow, reflective but concentrated way it requires. I think they are too careful but partly right. In the best translation, it is overwhelming stuff both religiously and aesthetically. But they dont have to avoid it altogether. Approached in the right frame of mind and at the most a chapter at a time, it is an extraordinary experience. Judging from past new translations, such events seem at least initially to send people back to their Bibles. Certainly sales increase. But rarely have these new translations given the overwhelming experience. Their fault, apart from limp prose, says Alter in his introduction, is the heresy of explanation. When accurate translation produces a word or phrase that the translators feel is strange or inaccessible to modern readers they adjust it so that it explains itself. The result is a betrayal and, since strangeness is a quality of the Hebrew original, the translation places readers at a grotesque distance from the distinctive literary experience of the Bible in its original language. The sort of thing Alter has in mind in speaking of the heresy of explanation is the rendering of metaphors of body parts such as hand by the function for which they stand e.g. power, control, responsibility. The substitution is needless the meaning was clear anyway and it subverts the literary integrity of the story in which it occurs where hand is repeatedly used in a connected way. Another example is the substitution of offspring, heirs etc. for seed, which cuts a passage off from all the other ones where seed is used. This is spot on. I have never seen the wrongness of modern translation so precisely explained except perhaps in the Vaticans recent and rather similar rebukes on the

sloppy, vulgar and politically correct translations into English of the Missale Romanum. Enough; Alters book is worth buying for the introduction alone and for the notes which make up about 500 of the 1,000 pages.. And his translation? Alter argues that the translation closest to the original is, despite its many faults, the King James. His own reads quite closely to it with, I assume, a lot of corrected inaccuracies: And the woman saw that the tree was good for eating and that it was lust to the eyes and the tree was lovely to look at, and she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave to her man, and he ate. And the eyes of the two were opened, and they knew they were naked, and they sewed fig leaves and made themselves loincloths. . . . And the Lord God said to the serpent, Because you have done this, Cursed be you Of all cattle and all beasts of the field. On your belly shall you go And dust shall you eat all the days of your life. Enmity will I set between you and the woman, Between your seed and hers. A contemporary translator of the Iliad and the Odyssey, Robert Fagles, has praised Alters translation for reanimating the King James version and for its cadenced gravity. You could not say either of those things about the New English Bible or Jerusalem. They are true of Alter. This translation will not only send people back to their Bibles but keep them going there, though not too often, mind you, and not lightly.

The joys and pains of solitude

0 Comments Justin Marozzi 18 December 2004 Gertrude Bell H. V. F. Winstone Barzan Publishing, pp.483, 19.95

Life in Iraq may not be half as apocalyptic as the media would suggest, but it is still sufficiently turbulent to welcome the reissue of Victor Winstones classic biography of Gertrude Bell, Arabist, explorer, archaeologist, snob and co-founder of the Iraqi state. Originally published in 1978, it has been updated to include the most recent conflict in the Middle East. This is a shame and disappointment, because much of Winstones revised introduction reads like a teenage diatribe against Israel and America. It is not worthy of his fine study of this remarkable womans life. He writes contemptuously of the disgracefully named Shock and Awe campaign, claims that past mistakes were repeated with sinister exactness, and detects a sinister AmericanIsraeli claim to hegemony. The motives of these modern campaigns, the erosion of Palestinian rights and hopes and the determination to immobilise Iraq, are all too clear, he concludes. They arent all that clear in Baghdad, where one sees the Coalition manfully doing its best to stabilise and reconstruct the country. Never mind the Palestinians. The injustices committed against them do not belong here. Bell, the child of an immensely wealthy and well-connected industrialists family, succumbed early to the pull of the East. At 32 she made her debut in the desert, a camel trek across Syria. Of the Orient she wrote, I find it catching at my heart again as nothing else can, or ever will, I believe, thing or person. Tragically, she was proved right. Love was not entirely elusive, but those she loved either died before she was able to marry them, were married themselves, or both. She therefore joined that fascinatingly troubled band of British desert explorers, together with her contemporary Lawrence and successor Thesiger, whose professional successes in the sands were never matched by personal happiness. There is poetry and beauty in solitude, a friend once told her. There was, there is, but she didnt always want it. In fact, she craved a husband and children and admitted to her inner circle that she was merely carrying on an existence. What an existence! For 58 years this virtually indomitable woman was sustained by stupendous personal reserves of energy and willpower. She possessed an ability to inspire and make friends around the world, married to a fierce intellect and felicitous talent for Eastern languages. Say, is it not rather refreshing to the spirit to lie in a hammock strung between the plane trees of a Persian garden and read the poems of Hafiz, she wrote in one of the more than 1,600 wonderful letters to her friends and family. Within two years of learning Persian she was translating its greatest writer. Her rendering of Hafizs poetry into English is widely regarded as the finest. She rose to the heights of influence in a mans world yet was, curiously, a passionate campaigner against the suffragettes. In 1917, with a wealth of Middle East experience under her belt (among her many triumphs was the award of the Royal Geographical Societys Founders Medal), she was appointed Oriental Secretary to Sir Percy Cox and settled in Baghdad. We shall, I trust, make it a centre

for Arab civilisation and prosperity, she wrote to her father as British troops entered the city in March 1917. Yes, of course, the parallels with 2003 are irresistible, but it is utterly unreasonable of Winstone to expect Bush and Blair to have learned from past mistakes. Human beings, least of all politicians, hardly ever do. The end of the war presaged the remaking of the deceased Ottoman empire into something a little neater and more orderly. At least that was the idea. And so came the state-making which so thrilled Bell, the delineation of Iraqs borders encompassing Kurds, Sunni and Shia Arabs which remains problematic to this day. Then the equally gratifying procession of ambitious sheikhs sweeping through her office and home. They are the people I love, she wrote, I know every Tribal Chief of any importance throughout the whole length and breadth of Iraq. She did, but with Iraq created and King Faisal installed on the throne Bell had practically outlived her usefulness to HMG. She felt it, and there was no family to fall back on. For a while, the national museum and library she founded, and her position as Director of Antiquities, sustained her. But it was not enough. Her heart rebelled against the solitude, no longer so poetic. An overdose of sleeping pills on the night of 12 July 1926 ended it. Justin Marozzi is the author of Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, Conqueror of the World, published recently by Harper- Collins. He is seeking donations for restoration and conservation work at Babylon, together with other community projects in Iraq. Spectator readers are invited to contact him about this on jsmarozzi@aol.com

Masters of the majors

0 Comments Michael Beloff 18 December 2004 The Grand Slam Mark Frost Time Warner, pp.431, 20 Ben Hogan James Dodson Aurum, pp.528, 18.99 Nick Faldo Nick Faldo Headline, pp.374, 18.99 The game of golf developed in Scotland in the 15th century. This trio of books chronicles the life, times and competition records (blow by blow and, occasionally, hole by hole) of three golfers who on any reckoning rank among its ten greatest exponents of all time.

They cover three distinct periods of the 20th century and open windows on social as well as sporting history. The career of Bobby Jones climaxed in 1929 when he won the then Grand Slam of US and British Open and Amateur Championships in an era when (which would be inconceivable today) an amateur could match strokes with the professionals; and the professionals used the tradesmens entrance in club houses. The career of Ben Hogan spanned the middle of the century and reached its acme when in a single year, 1953, he won three of the four majors, the US Open and Masters, and the British Open, confirming that the professional game was by now on a different and superior plane to the amateur, and that its practitioners enjoyed not only status but considerable income. The career of Nick Faldo (who won six majors three British Opens, three Masters a total far surpassing that of any other British golfer) covered the centurys closing years, when, as his example showed, the progress of the truly gifted from amateur to professional ranks had become all but automatic; and the rewards were so great that a champion was not merely a single person, but the construct of a team of coaches, physiotherapists, nutritionists, chiropractors and even psychologists. Although their playing careers did not overlap there are connections between the three other than their athletic distinction. Bobby Joness legacy to golf lies not only in his unparalleled sequence of significant tournament victories, but in his design of the course at Augusta, home of the US Masters, conquered by Hogan and Faldo five times in all. Hogan was Faldos hero and role model, and Faldos pilgrimage to meet him in the Shady Oaks Country Club in Fort Worth, Texas, where he still held court in his eighth decade, is described in two of the books from the perspective of both visitor and visited with enough variation to make the reader wonder whether it is old or young men who forget. Both, however, agree that when asked how to win the US Open Hogan sapiently replied, Shoot the lowest score. Legends can sometimes be built on platitudes. All three men overcame handicaps other than golfing. Bobby Jones had a sickly childhood, a nerve-ridden maturity, and a crippled old age. Ben Hogan survived a devastating car accident before his greatest triumphs. Nick Faldos public success had a subtext of a turbulent private life. Unlike Jones and Hogan, who were monogamous, Faldo changed his partners more often than he changed his clubs. I have no doubt that of the three, as they emerge from these volumes, Bobby Jones would have been the most agreeable companion: he was a gentleman as well as a player. By contrast Hogan, nicknamed the Hawk and the Ice Man, exploited his image as the Tough Texan to psych out his opponents. And while Faldo, with sports journalist Robert Philip as his ventriloquist, seeks to bathe in a softer light the many controversies in which he has been

involved on course and off, one has the sense that this is more a plea in mitigation than a protestation of innocent as charged. The lesson of all three books is that in golf, as in life, talent is not enough; commitment and will are essential concomitants of success (and, it would seem, a swiftness to anger and a command of a robust vernacular). Jones, Hogan and Faldo were among a handful who transformed, on both sides of the Atlantic, golf from a sport for rich men into one which made men rich. Through their efforts and those of their peers it became attractive to spectators and sponsors, created national heroes, and during the week of the Ryder Cup sometimes threatened to disturb Anglo-American harmony. The books will be read with pleasure in the afterglow of refreshment at the 19th hole by middle-aged men who still believe that on tee, fairway or green they can emulate their youthful selves an illusion unique to the game of golf.

Pleasure without angst

0 Comments Jane Rye 18 December 2004 Hockneys Pictures David Hockney Thames & Hudson, pp.368, 19.95 David Hockney is a conjuror who likes to explain his tricks, or, as one commentator put it, conducts his education in public with a charming and endearing innocence. This chunky picture-book brings the story right up to date with watercolours and portrait drawings made only a few months ago. It contains work from throughout Hockneys career, but is arranged thematically rather than chronologically, according to the themes and subjects that have occupied him for almost five decades. Of the four sections, Problems of Depiction, Life Stilled, Portaits, and Space and Light, the first is the most complex, with sub-divisions into Looking at Pictures; A Marriage of Styles (demonstrating his deliberate and diverse stylistic borrowings); Stages (dealing with his work for the theatre and the interior landscapes that grew out of it); Water, Movement, and Moving Viewpoint (including his experiments with photography and in the use of printing technology as a medium in itself). Apart from anonymous half-page introductions to each of the main sections and short quotes from Hockney himself, there is no text. He is a great communicator in words as well as pictures and these concise comments, with their combination of intelligence, candour and unpretentiousness are characteristically engaging and illuminating. Anyone who is tired of hearing that painting is no longer relevant, or who feels that contemporary art has somehow outflanked them and turned them (once, surely, so openminded?) into furtively indignant philistines, is likely to find at least temporary consolation

in the phenomenon of David Hockney. He is sometimes patronised as, in Simon Schamas phrase, a user-friedly modernist, his very versatility held against him. But he believes in the inexhaustible posssibilities of figurative art and unfashionably thinks that art is about sharing: you wouldnt be an artist unless you wanted to share an experience. Angst is not his thing and consequently he is thought by some people to be lightweight. He celebrates lifes pleasures, and while Philip Guston can turn an ashtray full of fag-ends into a tortured expression of the human predicament Hockneys remains a homely and inoffensive domestic object. He says, I have always felt that art should be a deep pleasure. I think there is a contradiction in an art of total despair, because the very fact that the art is made seems to contradict despair. Hockney seems benevolent to the point of cuddliness these days, a far cry from the outr, rather dangerous figure of the 1960s, and in the transition something, naturally, has been lost. Perhaps there has been too much technical curiosity. Interiors of his Californian home of the Eighties and Nine-ties may be interesting exercises in the possibilities of shifting perspectives and multiple viewpoints but too often they seem no more than that. One misses the miraculous lightness and clarity, the uneasiness, the surreal schoolboy wit, the sexual tension, in more recent work. The boys with their beautiful bottoms have gone and elderly dachshunds, however loved, are a poor substitute. Hockneys touch which used to be light as a feather or sharp as broken bottles became at some point curiously stodgy. He works today as hard as ever, trying out new things, drawing or painting everything in his path even if it is only a hole in the studio floor. There are some marvellous recent watercolours of Norway, Seville and Cordova, and the portraits are as fascinating, and sometimes moving, as ever. Not the least of the virtues of this book is that it opens like a dream and stays open, but annoyingly you have to look in the back for details of size and medium, and there is no biographical information at all. Thames and Hudson have at least half a dozen other books by or about David Hockney covering much the same ground and apart from the inclusion of recent work it is hard to see the justification for this one

Sheer magic
0 Comments Giannandrea Poesio 18 December 2004 For 100 years, ballet has been represented by the image of a ballerina with a feathered headdress and an arm raised as a quivering wing. Then, in 1995, came Matthew Bournes Swan Lake, and ballets icon lost its long-held supremacy. The Swan Princess met her masculine match: a bare-torsoed, bare-footed, muscled Adonis in feathery trousers. Never before, in ballet history, had the revisitation of a well-known work acquired the same iconic status as its predecessor.

Almost ten years down the line, Bournes Swan Lake is still splendidly engaging. Central to it remains the amazing transformation of the traditional tutu-ed ladies into now fiery, now subtly ambiguous guys. Although the original surprise has waned, the choreographic ideas conceived for the male swans have not lost their impact. Bournes swans scenes can be numbered among other legendary moments in theatre-dance history, for they stand out for their choreographic inventiveness, dramatic drive and visual appeal. Indeed, some editing has occurred here and there. And, inevitably, the new cast proposes a reading different from the one known by those who have seen the commercially available video or by those who have seen previous runs of the work. In each instance, the changes are for the better. The Princes drama now comes across more fully than ever, generating vibrantly effective narrative tensions between the mans fight against an unresponsive, etiquette-abiding and socially constraining world, and more light-hearted situations dominated by delectable jokes on the royal family and succulently camp balletic parody. Similarly, the relationship between the Prince and the Swan is intriguingly more ambiguous than before. The luscious homoerotic lyricism that underscored the Swans movement vocabulary in the original production, and which led to the fairly arbitrary label of gay ballet, has now been replaced by a more fierce, almost feral approach to the choreography. It is never clear, therefore, what the Swan represents in the eyes of the Prince, for the Swans prowess challenges any immediate thought of love that does not dare to speak its name. And yet the boundaries between male bonding, male adoration and male desire remain splendidly thin, thanks to the ingenious choreographic layout. Such an intentional lack of clarity adds greatly to the dramatic depth of the narrative and provides the performers with a varied interpretative palette. Neil Westmoreland, as the Prince, is certainly one of the artists who benefits most from such dramatic wealth. An excellent dancer, he is also a superb actor. His rendition of the unfortunate protagonist stands out for a gripping boyish characterisation, which adds considerably to his equally gripping depiction of the characters gradual mental disintegration. His Prince complements beautifully the now lustful, now unbearably strict Queen of Nicola Tranah, a real mother from hell, and matches perfectly his escapist idol/ object of desire, the Swan. The latter is Jos Tirado, who stands out for an imposing stage presence and extraordinarily powerful technical skills notably the lightness and the attack of his jumps. Yet, he can also display tenderness, though always in a dramatically tense but restrained way, thus adding an extra layer of mystery to his already mysterious role. Even his equivalent of the Black Swan mesmerises with an intoxicatingly individual extra dose of ambiguity.

Leigh Daniels, as the Princes girlfriend, also provides an interpretation that goes far beyond the caricature of the silly platinum-blonde starlet. Her darker side, highlighted by her murky deeds with the unsettling Private Secretary of Alan Mosley, keeps resonating throughout the party scene thanks to well-calibrated acting. I only wish she had considered the antics of the royal-box scene more, for they were a tad over the top the night I went. The rest of the company is simply perfect. The excellent mix of dancing and silent acting works like clockwork, and there is never a moment in which the action deflates or drags. Even the party scene, despite being constructed on what in the ballets traditional version is a rather ornamental series of national dances, fits in perfectly with the dramatic development. This Swan Lake might not be everyones ideal Christmas ballet. If it is just Christmas magic you are after, I strongly recommend you see the splendidly lavish Cinderella proposed by the Royal Ballet arguably the only version of the ballet worth seeing today or any Nutcracker that traditionally pops up at this time of year together with pantos and Santas grottos. But, if it is sheer magic and theatre at its best that you are looking for, then Bournes Swan Lake is the one to see.

Return to standard
Return to standard 0 Comments Robin Holloway 18 December 2004 As if to answer my recent complaints (Arts, 30 October) concerning the dumb deserts of Radio Three between the end of the early-evening concert and the wall-to-wall small-hour tapestry of Through the Night, two weeks in succession have provided high seriousness, requiring committed attention, yielding deep artistic rewards, reminiscent of the great old days (lets hope this is a trend; not all trendiness need be derogatory!). Both were anniversaries. We live in a culture wherein minority interests seem ignitable only by a birthday or deathday. First the former: Luigi Dallapiccola (given two whole sessions three one-act dramatic pieces; a long succession of variegated smaller work interspersed with authoritative commentary, including the composers own fierce guttural voice). Born in February 1904, he reached a plateau of recognition in the mid-century, only to vanish almost without trace, together with most other composers who followed on from the modernist pioneers in more recent years. Of this lost generation, Dallapiccola is in some ways the most attractive as well as the most admirable, not so much for his impeccably correct credentials anti-fascist, pro-freedom, humanity, classical stance with up-to-date techniques as for the quality of his musical invention.

The first evening confirmed the implied reservation. Volo di notte (19379), after Antoine de Saint-Exuprys celebrated novel of heroic nocturnal aviation, had moments both of radiance and of grandeur, but seemed deficient in operatic pacing and variety. Il Prigioniero (19445), after a conte cruel of Villiers de lIsle-Adam (itself deriving heavily from Poe), goes too far the other way, incongruously mating blatant Puccini-isms with an intricate mesh of purely instrumental polyphony out of Webern, the mix then smothered in luscious syrup sauce out of Strauss and Berg, disconcertingly inappropriate to the bitter subject: hope kindled, teased, deferred, betrayed. After which Job (1950) seems like expressionist rantnrhetoric out of Schoenberg at his corniest. Its self-conscious sublimity foretells Dallapiccolas testament, a full-length opera on Ulysses return to wife and patria (19658) where visionary/humane/profound are stamped across every page, vitiating the many stretches of rare exaltation. Alongside this first-to-final trajectory lies a lifetime of smaller delights, mostly instrumental; and at least one larger work the once-repertory Canti di Prigionia setting words from Mary Queen of Scots, Boethius Consolation of Philosophy, and Savonarolas farewell prayer wherein the spare luminosity is perfectly matched to the nobility of the sentiments. And, above all, the settings of lyrics with piano, or, better still, instrumental ensembles, to poems by Anacreon, Sappho, Alcaeus Goethe, Machado and others; a piccolo mondo of ravishment; Webernian rigour softened with Italian grace; Stravinskian dryness ameliorated with almost French efflorescence. That the dreaded 12-tone technique could so shine and twinkle was not lost on Stravinsky himself, whose move towards such a sound-world in his last years was predated by Dallapiccola, and surely influenced by it. The second return to standard was the four-hour evening devoted to Wilhelm Furtw

*********MORE MISSING STUFF8888888 Curious timing

Curious timing 0 Comments Michael Vestey 18 December 2004 No time is right to announce job losses, but picking just before Christmas seems to be favoured by many companies. One cant help wondering if theres sound business sense behind it or if it can be attributed to the streak of sadism that runs through British life. When last week the BBC director-general, Mark Thompson, chose to unveil his plans to remove up to 5,000 people from its payroll, I imagine a number of Christmases were blighted. Assuming this figure Ive quoted is correct. Ive seen several different totals and interpretations: 2,900 actual losses from mainly administrative departments, such as marketing, training and

human resources, with another 2,400 staff outsourced when some BBC commercial areas are sold or become joint ventures. It had to happen, of course. The BBC has been overstaffed since the 1950s, and not just with administrators. It has been incapable of reining itself in. With every new expansion, from BBC 2 and local radio to digital radio and television channels, staffing has risen to accommodate it. The licence fee has risen accordingly, but it couldnt last and indeed more redundancies are threatened in March, this time in radio and television news. One would like to think that these cuts are being made because they are the right thing to do, but its also clear that the BBC wishes to appease the government, which is reviewing the corporations royal charter before deciding whether or not to renew it in 2007. Thompson said on Today the following morning that these measures would have been taken regardless of the charter review, but I dont really believe it. Moving BBC sport and Radio Five Live to Manchester seems unwise to me. Thompson believes that the BBC has neglected the north of England and, in consequence, the north feels alienated from the BBC. He might be right, but I cant see how. There are regional television programmes and local radio in the north. Radio and television comedies often feature northern speech. More and more announcers have northern accents. Even the actors in a recent Radio Four play set in Paris had to have northern voices, and, as I wrote in last weeks issue, broadcasters are encouraged to use the flat a even though theyre from the south. Five Live uses a variety of different accents as long as they dont faintly resemble posh. I fear that in time Five Live will come to sound like a regional network. While some of its staff might like the idea of moving to Manchester, I wouldnt be surprised to hear that many dont and might already be looking for the exit signs. Since the BBC announced that it was introducing digital television and radio channels, I took the view, expressed here on several occasions, that the corporation was spreading itself too thinly and that it should concentrate on improving its core output. Fortunately, Radios Two, Three and Four escaped much of the dumbing-down of BBC television, which was bent on pursuing the ratings. One couldnt expect Thompson to sell the digital stations off as he is said to have created them in the first place and, in any case, the government wanted them to push the spread of digital before the great analogue cut-off in 2012 when well all have to be digital, whether we like it or not. The courage of Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of Zimbabwes opposition, the Movement for Democratic Change, shone through his interview on The Choice on Radio Four last week (Tuesday). Persecuted, intimidated and nearly killed by Robert Mugabes thugs, he resolutely refuses to slink away. Once a Mugabe supporter, he saw the extent of the corruption of government ministers, thinking, at first wrongly, that it wasnt the presidents doing. As the countrys leading trade unionist, Tsvangirai campaigned against the government and the

decision to tax workers to pay for a 4 billion Zimbabwean dollar handout to the so-called war veterans. The countrys students went on strike, the Zimbabwean dollar collapsed and the tax was withdrawn. Ten war veterans invaded his tenth-floor office, knocked him out and were about to throw him out of the window when they were disturbed by a secretary. The men ran off. If I had withdrawn at that time, my life would have been even more threatened because immediately I would have gone out of public protection, he told the presenter Michael Buerk. For my protection, I had to remain in the public arena. He was acquitted of treason after spending the past two years under arrest on trumped-up charges. If found guilty, it might have meant the death penalty. He thought his worst moment, though, was having the presidential election result stolen from him and the MDC by Mugabes party. He will soon have to decide whether or not his party should contest the general election next March. They would be damned if they do and damned if they dont, he said. He was sure the election would be rigged, but to boycott it would simply be to hand it to Mugabe anyway.

Figure it out
Figure it out 0 Comments Alan Judd 18 December 2004 Years ago, when the Times was a newspaper for grown-ups, it was said to have published a letter illustrative of our misuse of statistics. This was to the effect that there were about 3 million people in Wales, of whom about 3,000 had one leg and 300 no legs at all. Thus, the average number of legs per person in Wales was 1.99 whatever, and therefore most people in Wales had fewer than two legs. We read such basic statistical errors daily. Even the sad figures for road deaths over the Christmas period intended to shock are sometimes misleading, albeit differently, because its not always pointed out that Christmas figures are usually significantly lower than those for other times of the year. Or different again when the London Health Observatory tells us that road accidents in London cost the health service 29 million, can we be sure that this figure does not include salaries and capital costs that would have been paid anyway? Did they set the cost of the unfortunates who died against what they would have cost the health service if theyd lived to die of natural causes? Happily, there are many more cheerful transport statistics to be found on the Department for Transport website at www.dft.gov.uk. It is a pleasure, in these environmentally obsessed days, to find that there were nearly twice as many cars of over three litres on the road in 2003 as there were in 1993. Nor are they all 4x4s (some of which, incidentally, score better in pedestrian crash tests than conventional saloons). Unexpectedly, the north-east tends to

have the newest vehicles (average age 5.7 years) and London and the south-west the oldest (6.9). Twenty-nine per cent of vehicles tested failed the MOT test last year, compared with 38 per cent ten years before, with faulty lights the most common cause. In 1951, only 13 per cent of households had regular use of a car, 1 per cent of two cars. In 2002 the respective figures were 44 per cent and 24 per cent, with 5 per cent having three or more. Driving-test pass rates have declined from 50 per cent to 43 per cent over the past ten years, with the difference between men and women 47 per cent vs 40 per cent staying fairly constant. An emerging gender difference not yet quoted in DFT figures is that young women are now driving faster, more dangerously and more aggressively than hitherto. Research figures showing the increasing incidence of FFs this stands for something not suitable for a family magazine, so lets call them Fast Females are based on accident analysis and dont indicate wider reasons, though mobile phones apparently play some part. Its possible that changes in self-perception may be responsible, allied with having children later. My impression is that young women drive faster alone, when theres no one else in the car for whom they feel responsible, whereas with young men its the other way round showing off. A more proximate cause is probably increased wealth they can afford the cars that enable them to do it. Also, modern cars are so much faster, quieter and easier to handle than their predecessors, which took more physical effort to move them and stop them. Road-accident deaths have remained fairly static since about 1998, with a slight rise last year to 3,508. Grim though that is, we shouldnt indulge our passion for self-flagellation: deaths have declined from a 50-year high of 7,985 in 1966. By all international comparisons, our rates are second to none, being about half those of France and the USA. As there are reportedly about 4,000 accidental deaths a year in the home, you could almost were it not for the example of the disadvantaged Welsh use the figures to argue that youre safer on the road than in the kitchen. Youre certainly least safe on the road at nine in the morning and six in the evening on weekdays (and safest at 5 a.m.). During weekends the most dangerous time is two in the afternoon. Most company cars average 19,00021,000 miles a year, private cars 8,000 9,000. Your chances of being breathalysed were nearly half as much again in 2002 as in 1992, although the number over the limit declined from 17 per cent to 12 per cent (which may suggest the police are being overzealous). And so on and so on. Were all in thrall to the mania for measurement, even though figures dont always bear the weight we put on them. Theyre a modern superstition we cant do without. But dont forget all those Welsh people with too few legs.

Eel good factor

Eel good factor 0 Comments Simon Courtauld 18 December 2004 We are in danger of losing our eels. To many people this may be of little interest, but it is a serious matter. The vast numbers of baby eels (elvers) which cross the Atlantic from the Sargasso Sea, somewhere near Bermuda, and end up in European rivers two or three years later have been falling dramatically. Many are being netted offshore, but the principal explanation blames the warming of the Arctic Ocean, resulting in weaker currents to carry the elvers to their destination. When they struggle into the river estuaries and begin the last stage of their journey upstream, they may meet modern sluices without eel passes, or they may meet polluted water and die of disease. The eel catchers of the East Anglian fens (eels from Ely, geddit?) have been banned by the Environment Agency and an ancient way of life is coming to an end. None of this makes any difference to the British market for eels, which today scarcely exists. Jellied eels we all know about, and they can still be bought; but where are the eel pies, the eel puddings, the eel soups of yesteryear? (Apart from Eel Pie Island at Twickenham, there is an intriguingly named pub, The Eels Foot, out in the marshes of east Suffolk; its sign shows an eel peering from an old boot.) Time was, in the 19th century, when cargoes of eels were sent from Holland to London, but now the trade is all the other way. Three quarters of the eel catch in Lough Neagh, the largest eel fishery in the United Kingdom, now goes to Amsterdam, but numbers are severely reduced: elvers are being caught for European eel farms and, for whatever reason, too few are coming up the River Bann and into the lough. Smoked eel is popular in this country and makes an excellent first course with horseradish sauce and brown bread and butter, but it is just as likely to have been smoked in Holland as in Britain. Can we not revive the fashion for fresh eel, which is appreciated in every other European country and which I have hugely enjoyed in recent weeks? I am ashamed to say that, at a recent family party of ten in a Chinese restaurant in London, when I chose stewed eels in black bean sauce, only two others agreed to try even a small mouthful of this delicious dish. The eel was oily and rich, but also delicate in flavour. Dont take it from me, but read what that great fish cookery writer Jane Grigson has to say, I love eel. Sometimes I think its my favourite fish. The problem is in finding your eel. Unless you have access to a Chinese fishmonger, or a coarse fisherman, or someone who buys eels for smoking, you may have to go to Billingsgate. A friend brought me back a live two-pounder from there last week. I had been warned that eels continue to wriggle after they are dead, but I was not expecting mine still to be slithering about on the dish several minutes after I had decapitated and gutted it. There are

complicated ways of removing the skin, using string and pliers, but the easier method is to cut the eel into little steaks and let the skin fall off after cooking. Following a recipe from south-west France, I fried shallots, mushrooms and bacon, then the eel briefly on both sides, and made a roux with the juices, flour and wine (both colours). Prunes, which had been soaked in wine overnight, were added to the dish, and everything was then gently stewed, with a bouquet garni, for an hour. The result was loudly acclaimed, by the cook and several discerning guests. Eel-fanciers may also extol the virtues of the conger and the sharp-toothed Mediter-ranean moray, but I think they are best considered as material for soups. The lamprey, however, is in a different category: when I met Michel Roux the other day, he urged me to go and eat lampreys in Bordeaux, which may be a treat for next year. Elvers from the river Severn used to be available here in spring, but now they are transported to Europe and the Far East. You have to go to Spain to eat them, cooked in olive oil, garlic and red chilli and eaten with a wooden fork, but these angulas cost about 20 for a fairly modest portion. The good news is that an enterprising Spanish company now makes what are called gulas, from white fish transformado to look and taste like the real thing. They are one tenth of the price and not bad at all. In parts of Italy, close to the Adriatic coast, roast eel will be served, as it always is, on Christmas Eve. If I can find another eel in time, we shall follow that tradition in Cornwall this year. And then have a little smoked eel the next day before the turkey.

Your Problems Solved

Etiquette advice from The Spectator's Miss Manners 0 Comments Mary Killen 18 December 2004 Once again Mary has invited some of her favourite members of the prominentii to submit queries for her consideration. From Toby Young Q. I am a theatre critic currently appearing in a one-man show in the West End. Not surprisingly, several of my colleagues have been less than generous about my performance. One in particular, a man Ive always had a very congenial relationship with, was absolutely vicious, saying he hoped Id leave the country. When I resume my duties as a critic, Ill inevitably bump into this man two or three times a week and Im not sure how to behave. Should I just pretend I

didnt read his review and greet him in the normal manner? Or should I abandon all attempts to maintain friendly relations? A. When you resume your duties, break the ice instantly by rushing across to say Im so sorry you got all that stick over my play. Put your hand up to brook no interruptions as you continue: I mean, I said to people, He was just trying to show hes non-partisan and he went slightly over the top. So what? Shaking your head solemnly from side to side add, I said, No way does this discredit his judgment in general just because this one thing backfired. Then slap him reassuringly on the back with the pay-off: Dont worry. Ive always stood up for you and I always will. From Kirstie Allsopp Q. As a television presenter I need to spend a fortune on clothes so as to constantly ring the changes. I am also the eldest of four and my siblings have gleaned the erroneous impression that all telly presenters are given clothes free by designers anxious to publicise their wares. Since I am going home for Christmas I want to ensure that my wardrobe remains intact. How can I prevent my siblings from using it as a lucky dip? A. May I suggest you contact Mr Peter Hutchinson from Xtra-Sense, who supplies the art world with security surveillance systems? For as little as 150 a device can be fitted which detects changes in weight usually in objects on plinths, but it would work equally well with a wardrobe and triggers a noisy alarm. With his help you can loll back and relax over Christmas, secure in the knowledge that should your siblings attempt to leave the premises with some of your prized possessions, they can be swiftly apprehended.(XtraSense, 01404 43366) From Griff Rhys Jones Q. Is there a correct system of hierarchical address between celebrities, people who might not have met but do still know one another from the television? In the street it is not a problem once I passed Sir Richard Attenborough and the acknowledgement was very casually done. He was with his people and I was with my people and we just ran up a couple of flags and fired a couple of guns, like two ships passing. By contrast, when walking through a club such as the Groucho, you feel an obligation to make some form of acknowledgement of the other celebrities, whether because of their status or because they are a colleague in the same business. The acknowledgement cant be formal, like it can with Society. It has to have the right level of matiness and informality and also has to be sensitive to the hierarchies of celebrity film stars look down on television stars, televisions stars look down on journalists, and so on. The

conventional Groucho greeting All right? invariably leads one into a platitudinous trap. What do you suggest, Mary? A. Good to see you is a suitable all-serving remark to utter as you wade through the treacle of a club like the Groucho. It is seemingly anodyne with pleasing innuendo implied should the recipient be the worse for wear. More to the point it will allow you to pay your respects without interrupting your purposeful progress. From Bay Garnett Q. Friends and acquaintances who know how much vintage clothing I have often ask if they can borrow something. My problem is that because people know I have acquired most of it for tiny amounts of money in thrift shops and so on, they assume I will not mind if they do not return it. How can I put them straight and explain that these things are part of a collection without introducing an unfriendly nagging element? A. Hand the item over pleasantly and ask the borrower to write on the back of a plain postcard their name and the date they will return it by. Then take a polaroid of the borrowed item and pin it, along with the postcard, on to a giant corkboard centrally positioned in your living quarters. As you do so say jokily, I call this my naming and shaming board but dont worry about it. You come straight off as soon as you return the borrowed garment. From John Humphrys Q. In my line of work I often have to talk to politicians. Some of them are very unpleasant to me and it can be most hurtful. I am a rather timid person who dislikes confrontation. How should one deal with this? A. Please explain these problems to your local GP who, although the waiting lists may be long, can probably get you on to an assertiveness training course.

A surfeit of fish
The ongoing escapades of London's answer to Ally McBeal 0 Comments Petronella Wyatt 18 December 2004 People ask me why I spend Christmas in South Africa. Why dont I remain in England and have a proper British Christmas? Or, why dont I go to Hungary, where I used to go, for the snow and the River Danube, which, when partly iced over, resembles shattered crystals?

Im not sure myself. In England, Christmas seems to last too long (no one in the rest of the world, for example, seems to understand the idea of Boxing Day). And, much as I love Hungary, there is simply a surfeit of fish. Not on the streets, that is, but on the dining table. Hungarian Catholics, who include the maternal side of my family, eat nothing but fish for their Christmas meal. Because the country once had an admiral as regent (Horthy), there are a few imbeciles who assume Hungary has a sea. Not true. Horthy had been made an admiral when the Austro-Hungarian Empire still existed. Hungary itself is landlocked. There is, admittedly, Lake Balaton, but the fish that comes out of that, a creature called fogas, tastes like mud mixed with piss. In any case, contrary to received wisdom, South Africa is a very convenient place to spend Christmas at least for me. This is primarily because my brother lives in Johannesburg; secondarily because he does all the cooking. Property remains so cheap that he succeeded in building himself a small palace. Much of the ground floor is taken up by a state-of-the-art kitchen that could house three families. You know, one of those things with huge granite counters, blenders the size of Ming vases, and seven sinks. I never met a man who liked to cook as much as my brother. This may be because food in South Africa is about a tenth of the price of what it is in Europe. Some women are addicted to clothes shopping. He is addicted to supermarkets. No morning is complete without a trip to the nearest mall to fill at least five carts full of edibles. Being a chap who dislikes waste, he then determines that everything should be eaten. Anyone who spends some length of time with him shoots up a dress size in two days. Not that this bothers me as it is perfectly angelic of him to cook Christmas dinner. The only thing I am required to do is produce the occasional souffl for guests. This is another thing I like about South Africa. Christmas parties in London require going out in the cold every night and then sweltering in a hot room, with nowhere to sit, and with some clumsy chap likely to brush past you and cause your very expensive Wolford stocking to ladder. Christmas parties in South Africa are all held outside. Instead of a view of the wall, there is the unsurpassable African landscape and night sky. If you feel like taking the weight off your legs, you can sit on the grass. Nobody would ever be able to tell if you were drunk or not. The only disadvantage to this is that it can be very hard on your evening shoes. The heels sink straight into the earth. I have spent morning after morning trying to brush off reddish soil. But, hey, what is this to the credit side? No one even notices if you get bored and disappear. They merely assume youve been mugged or abducted. This is an excuse which can be used with particular frequency in Joburg. Morning call to hostess of night before: So sorry I left early. Two youths pulled me over the garden wall. This is the only occasion on which you are likely to receive flowers from the party-giver as opposed to vice versa.

Besides, if one gets bored of such jollities, one can always take off to see some lions, as opposed to lion hunters. Or there is the Blue Train. The Blue Train has little to do with pornography. Rather, it takes the passenger through some of the most beautiful African country. The train itself is only a slightly less glamorous version of the Orient Express it certainly beats Virgin down to Cornwall. Moreover, the gentle quiet is astonishing, punctuated only by romantic associations. Think of the song, These Foolish Things The sigh of midnight trains in empty stations. Wonderful.

The borrowers
A great white hunter takes aim at a few sacred cows in contemporary Africa 0 Comments Aidan Hartley 18 December 2004 Laikipia When I saw the Chief in his Land Cruiser filled with hangers-on bouncing towards me through the bush I knew he was after his Christmas fatted lamb. It is customary in this part of the world for ranchers to hand out barbeque-ready slaughter animals to our local officials as thank-you presents for the help they genuinely give us through the year. At the time of Uhuru, the Europeans and Africans used to sit down to consume such gifts together while discussing the issues of the day. Sadly, these days the government vehicles tend to tour farms to pick up sheep and goats that are scoffed at ceremonies to which we are not invited. Hello, Chief, I said. After a sheep, are you? Yes, he said. But apart from that what I really want are some more books. Of course, I realised, it had been a few weeks since the Chiefs last visit. For the African outback our area is amazingly literary. One neighbour is a descendant of the poet Cowper and nephew of the novelist John Cowper Powys. His daughter has written the definitive upcountry nature book. Another neighbour is a multinational bestseller, and our local MP has written a readable autobiography. But nobody talks much about books, which I like to do. Book clubs are big in Africa, and when some European ladies bravely tried to launch one in our area a couple of years ago I thought wed see progress. Men were excluded, but I was invited along as the only honorary female. All the women invited to the meetings had to drive long distances through the bush to attend. Most were farmers wives, and I suppose its hard to concentrate on anything, even for a few hours, if cows need dosing, or visitors feeding, or horses riding. The book club swiftly foundered, and the ladies decided to turn their meetings into beauty sessions, when their nails and hair could be done. I was not invited.

I have a well-stocked library, but as a rule I dont like lending books, which is as good as throwing them away. But when the Chief appeared one day to discuss the matter of cattle rustling or grass poaching, he pleaded with me to give him something to read. I relented. Within days I had the local District Officer visiting. He picked up some more. The lands surveyor and various councillors followed. Now they are regulars. The consumption of books by these people is impressive. They always return them within a couple of weeks, though I may find them dog-eared because theyve been swiftly circulated between two or three people. They prefer non-fiction, politics or biographies to novels. They like African subjects but are happy to browse other material. They keenly want to discuss what they have just read and they are getting inspired themselves. In the 1960s there was a modest renaissance in African books. I grew up reading authors of the Heinemann African Writers Series. Some of them were brilliant: Achebe, Mwangi, the early Ngugi wa Thiongo. Others were beyond dreadful, but even with the bad ones you could see we were heading somewhere. In the 1980s it all went into decline, like so much else in Africa. Ngugi began turning out unreadable nonsense and fled into exile. Heinemanns orange and black covers faded on dusty shelves. When Ngugi returned after 22 years in exile recently, he was robbed and his wife raped. In recent years there has been a revival of hopes that the Africans will get their act together. Some excellent books have been finding their way on to the shortlists of big prizes, though most of these are written by diaspora Africans. In Kenya, we have magazines funded by foreign-aid foundations, but those who contribute tend to be privileged city kids with dreadlocks and soft hands. The writing is dull, pretentious and soaked with resentment towards white people. Who knows? The Chief and his peers who live in the real Africa may turn out to be quite different. They have genuine stories to tell. I am touched and surprised by this spontaneously formed club because I live in a very poor and backward part of Africa. These book borrowers, who have annual salaries roughly equivalent to the cost of a case of mediocre wine, are the only people who will talk about literature with me. They live in houses that may not even have electricity. And they sit alone at home, reading.

Utter zoo
0 Comments Jaspistos 18 December 2004 In Competition 2371 you were asked to provide rhyming couplets describing imaginary animals, involving eight consecutive letters of the alphabet.

The progress of the Unipod,/ As youd surmise, is rather odd. This perhaps unillustratable couplet by Jeremy Lawrence is one of many splendid offerings among the runners-up. Hugh King made me smile with The Umpzov, from remote Siberia,/ Is quite like Eeyore, only drearier. And W.J. Webster, Adrian Fry and Bill Greenwell were all in sparkling form. There was a ginormous entry, judging was pleasure mixed with agony, and I confess that sheer caprice played a part in my final decisions. The prizewinners, printed below, get 25 each, and Jill Greens purely avian octet gains the Cobra Premium beer. Happy Christmas! The Aardlark changed its name to be The first bird in the dictionary. The Bladderbill has bandy legs, But then it lays enormous eggs. The Chug is something of a clown, Youll see it flying upside down. The Danderelle is so depressed, It very seldom leaves its nest. The Erik sits about and sings; It doesnt care, it has no wings. The Flumps on the endangered list, But its so dull it wont be missed. The Gubbets life is rather grim, It is a duck but cannot swim. The Harpic is too bad for words, It preys on all these other birds. Jill Green With knife for nose, the Jagster may Slit envelopes this easy way. The Klyntz has strawberries for toes: If swallowed, each at once regrows. The Lardrops seaweed-sprouting hair Makes fish in admiration stare. Upon the Mendrums shelf-like waist Books may conveniently be placed. A lamp projecting from its head, Assists the Norje to read in bed. Curved, heat-resistant like a cup, The Ogbys paws save washing-up. The Phurph, a clanking metal sheep, Counts humans when it cannot sleep. The Quarrasong, if given chocs,

Rejects them, but consumes the box. Godfrey Bullard The Nurge, found only on Corfu, Stands on its head each day at two. When scared the Oom emits a cry, Which shatters any glass nearby. Few men have seen the Pocalize Which digs its grave before it dies. The four-winged Quainjel cannot fly Its wings are used for keeping dry. Pellucid ear-lobes on the Raize Can, in fierce sunlight, start a blaze. Sopors have sixteen purple eyes, For use when hypnotising flies. The Tett has two heads, sometimes more (My grandfather owned one with four). The Unker, with its armoured tail, Decapitates small birds like quail. Juliet Scott The Ah-ha lives on sauerkraut; A yawn can turn it inside out. Whenever Breadwells drop their toast, The buttered side lands uppermost. The Crested Oblong Darters wish Their acronym was fowl, not fish. The Dolichocephalic Drongs Keep whistling rather lowbrow songs. The Escoffs gorge on Camembert: They all believe in laissez-faire. The Fibbers buzz round Crete like flies, Dispensing Melton Mowbray pies. The Gumb-Gumbs keep their teeth in jars And cannot quite pwonounce their Rs. The Huff is gauzy, light as air, And yet, somehow, you know its there. Keith Norman The Bojest nestles in its roost, Devouring fudge and reading Proust,

While Chummaroos prefer to sleep Beneath the dashboard of a jeep, And Dynamockas prowl the air, With grinning beaks and stiffened hair. The Elci, on the other hand, Live metres deep beneath the sand. Ferocious Fraxels bare their teeth, Consume their prey and send a wreath. The portly Grinnell, though, is placid, Being eternally on acid, And Lesser-Crested Hoobis play The tunes that chase the blues away. The Swedish Idem has no face, Yet runs at an Olympic pace. G. M. Davis Ashaboks resemble whales With purple fluorescent tails. The Bimblette twitters constantly And bathes in lukewarm Earl Grey tea. The Crooker feeds on shrimps parboiled And much prefers his bedding soiled. Dingledellers dont climb trees Because their feet sprout from their knees. Egglebeggles soon take fright; Their bark is far worse than their bite. The Fronklemooters keen to please; He trains a troupe of circus fleas. The Grotprop has a pointed nose Thats used to clean between its toes. The Hemanhoman yearns to breed With humankind, so please take heed. Rosemary Fisher No. 2374: Useless info Do you know the largest number of votes cast for a chimpanzee in an election, or that in Idaho it is illegal to fish on a camels back? You are invited to supply ten pieces of invented useless information to clutter our minds. Maximum 120 words. Entries to Competition No. 2374 by 6 January.

Second Opinion
He is best who empathises most 0 Comments Theodore Dalrymple 18 December 2004 Empathy these days is the greatest of the virtues, and he is best who empathises most. That is why pop singers and British politicians are the best people in the world: they cant see the slightest suffering without empathising with it. Whether they behave better than anyone else is beside the point; it is what they feel, especially in public, that counts. In my own small way, I also sometimes empathise. Last week, for example, a patient came to see me who seemed very nervous. He looked around him as though he expected at any moment to be taken by a giant raptor. Are you like this all the time? I asked. Yes, he said. Since when? Since I was young. Why? You know how you feel when youre stealing a car? he said. Actually, I said, I dont. Then I thought this sounded rather priggish and unempathic. But I can imagine, I added. And the strange thing was, I really could all too easily, in fact. Well, he said, I feel like that all the time, even after I stopped twocking cars. The patient went down on his haunches and mimed breaking into a car, while looking around him for witnesses. When he had finished his dramatic reconstruction of his earlier career, he stood up and said, Thats how I am, all the time. I asked him whether he had any genuine enemies. I suppose it would have been more to the point to ask him whether he had any genuine friends.

Youve got to have enemies, havent you, where I live, he said. Thats why I never walk, I always creep. Do you ever get into fights? I asked. Im up for assault, he said, because I get these violent mood swings. Whom did you assault? One of my mates. And why? Because I wanted to see how he would like it to be beaten up. A disinterested inquiry into truth, therefore. What are you going to say in court? I asked. My lawyer says my doctor says I have hallucinogenics of being a gangster. I changed the subject. I asked him whether he worked. Do you mean work work? he said. Is there any other kind? I thought about it for a second. In a way he was quite right, of course. Theres work (what my patient called work work) and theres make-work. At a rough guess, I should say that about half the people in paid employment in this country do make-work, whose only end product is difficulties in the way of the other half, the half that does work work. He cast around for faint traces in his memory of work of any description, but could find none. No, he said decisively. Ive never worked. I moved on. Next to him was an alcoholic, a married man who had fallen off a goods train of wagons in his time. He was a nice man, though, and his wife had stuck by him. What does she think of all this? I asked. She just wants me back to normal.

What is normal? I asked. I make promises, he said. And then break them. Now he was a man with whom I could really empathise.

Christmas at Chatworth
A short history of festivities at the big house 0 Comments Deborah Devonshire 18 December 2004 Not much was made of Christmas at Chatsworth in the 18th and 19th centuries. Diaries and letters hardly mention it. Prince Alberts trees and decorations took a long time to reach Derbyshire and would have been wasted on the December air because there were no children here for nearly a hundred years. At the turn of the 20th century the grown-ups made up for this strange state of affairs at Christmas-time with homemade entertainment. The theatre in the house, which seats 250 people, was used every night and neighbours were roped in to take parts in the sketches between ambitious songs sung by Princess Daisy of Pless and other would-be opera stars among the guests. They moved in for the duration, so had lots of time for rehearsals. Mrs Hwfa Williams (where did she get that name?), the author of It Was Such Fun, an incredible chronicle of Edwardian high society life, tells us that the house was so hot at Christmas that it was almost unbearable. In Andrews grannys time the temperature plummeted, and what people remember of her reign, 190838, was the intense cold. Nevertheless, Christmas came to life again, as she had seven children. In due course they produced 21 grandchildren who, with their parents, stayed for most of the Christmas holidays, bringing nannies, maids, valets, grooms and ponies they hunted with the High Peak Harriers on Boxing Day. Some of the nannies were keenly aware of the status of their charges. My sisters-in-law remember being told to sit down on their luggage in a passage while their nanny visited the best night nursery, which was already occupied by cousins who had arrived earlier. Granny had a famous cook who trained under Escoffier, no less. Mrs Tanner has left books of receipts and the Christmas food was rich and rare as were the menus, which seemed to go on for ever. The dining room, schoolroom and nursery all had different menus. The poor children had to eat the hateful bland food thought suitable for their ages. Even the Christmas puddings were made of different ingredients according to where they would be eaten. Those for the staff were mostly suet and breadcrumbs mixed with stout and milk, whereas Mrs Tanners Best Christmas Pudding Buckingham Palace receipt included French plums, stoned raisins and half muscatels, plus half a bottle of brandy underlining the great unfairness of life. It is too late to give recipes for these; they should have been made months ago, like the rich fruit cake in the Chatsworth farm shop which matures in the loft and is not sold till it is nearly a year old.

With my own family in Oxfordshire it was different. Seven of us children were a solid start. In the 1920s my mother gave a Christmas tree party for the Asthal and Swinbrook schoolchildren on Christmas Eve, with the parson as Father Christmas. She bought and wrapped a toy and a garment for each child and took infinite trouble over the list of ages and sexes. One year she settled on penknives for the boys. In 2004, these innocents would find themselves in the police station. Christmas Day routine never varied for us. Early-morning opening of stockings, church, undoing presents (the festival of paper, my mother called it), lunch of turkey and plum pudding with sixpences, bachelors buttons and other anti-Health and Safety charms embedded in it, and after dark a card game so simple that the youngest and stupidest of the children (me) could play. Fancy dress in the evening anything to hand was seized on. Nancy was always the most imaginative. My fathers only concession was to wear a red wig. He took the group photograph so was never in it. My mother must have been thankful when it was all over. It starts in October now. The Chatsworth farm shop is packed with things to eat and people to buy them, its reputation having spread since its quiet start in 1976, when we only had planning permission to sell hunks of freezer meat. The hampers are sent hither and thither to corporate and private buyers galore. Some, Im glad to say, prefer us to the famous London shops. The butchery counter is crammed with 745 turkeys, 50 geese, 400 hams and a goodly show of our own beef and lamb. Our children, grandchildren and 12 great-grandchildren come to stay in alternate years. It is odd having middle-aged grandchildren, and some of the greats are getting on. The change in them in two years is fascinating to see. The five-year-old, who told an inquiring schoolfriend last year that he was going to a public house for Christmas, will probably give a dissertation on Euclid next year when he is seven. Stone passages apparently constructed for rollerskating come in useful when it is wet. There are hazards which make it more exciting, like a long ramp where you get up the speed to crash into the door of the boiler room, hundreds of yards and two staircases away from the comparative safety of the nursery. For the intervening Christmas come old (very) friends 92 is the oldest this year plus a wheelchair cousin who will be whirled up and down the corridors by a nine-year-old, I hope with some notion of safety. Its no good sinking into the chair after lunch. Whatever the weather the hens must be fed before 3 p.m. The midwinter light disappears over the woods to the west at that moment. No sensible hen stays out of doors after dark or the foxes, which our government adore, would get their all-time Christmas dinner. Like everywhere else in the country, the spectre of foot-and-mouth caused havoc at Chatsworth in 2001. Andrew suggested the house should stay open till Christmas to recoup the losses, and so it has remained. People come from all over England to see it decorated and lit by candles (yes, candles) and the house shops turned into fairyland. No one from outside advises; the regular staff do it and seem to be inspired so that the result pleases all who come.

Well, nearly all. Last week I got a letter saying how awful the shiny wreaths round the heads of Roman busts are (tacky) and what frightful taste I have to allow such a travesty. There is no artistic flair to enhance the aesthetically pleasing rooms.The decorations do not reflect the quality of the works of art. A Rembrandt next to a tinsel-draped statue. So we cant please everyone, but I think Christmas without tinsel, however close to a Rembrandt, would be tragic.

Florida notebook
Post-election blues in the Sunshine State 0 Comments Carl Hiaasen 18 December 2004 Miami Its a mild and tranquil December here in Florida, the headlines flickering with routine weirdness and depravity. Four years ago at this time, we were roiling in the acid-bath aftermath of a presidential contest that required 36 ridiculous days to resolve, and only then by a brazenly partisan vote of the United States Supreme Court. Our state was the infamous ground zero of that fiasco, and ever since then we Floridians looked forward to 2004 much as one would to an amateur colonoscopy. On election day I fled far into Everglades National Park to contemplate my options. Like many, I anticipated a sordid replay of the 2000 stalemate. However I emerged to learn that the Sunshine State fell early and without drama to George W. Bush. The deciding controversy, brief as it was, would unfold in a couple of counties in Ohio. Florida was finally off the hook! Whatever lunacy comes out of Washington DC during the next four years, nobody can blame us. This time Bush seems to have been chosen by an actual mathematical majority of American voters, not just by friendly judges and a handful of Republican hacks in Tallahassee. Predictably, the Internet is pulsing with conspiracy theories about how the presidency was stolen, again, in Florida. One scenario has Bush supporters hacking into the new touchscreen voting machines and preprogramming them in advance of the election. Fuelling the rumour was this titbit: the chief of Diebold, a company that manufactures the machines, was a major campaign donor to the Republicans. Unfortunately for the conspiracists, the urban Florida counties that used the touch-screen devices produced vote tallies that were fairly consistent with the opinion polls and with prior voting patterns. Still another theory of chicanery focuses on rural counties in northern Florida that, despite a predominance of registered Democrats, voted heavily Republican. This is no mystery to anyone whos ever

travelled through places like Dixie County. It is the Old South, and Old South Democrats are not the same breed, or possibly even the same species, as Massachusetts Democrats. I am willing to bet that John Kerrys core campaign message, whatever it was, did not resonate in Steinhatchee, Florida. Partly in reaction to on-line conspiracy bloggers, the Miami Herald dispatched reporters to examine the November voting results in three disputed counties Lafayette, Union and Suwanee where machines called optical scanners were used to read paper ballots. Few discrepancies were found; Bush was clearly the overwhelming choice of voters there, including Democrats. I would have been astonished to learn otherwise. But dreams do die hard. Only last week I received an earnest letter from a reader imploring me to investigate the vote-counting shenanigans in northern Florida, with an eye towards exposing the presidential election for the fraud it was. It would be fun to try, if only there were evidence. Some experts on voting-machine technology have stated that an election could be rigged by corrupting the central computers that compile and add the precinct results. Obviously a local political contest would be easier to sabotage than a national election, which would require the hijacking of hundreds of computer programs in multiple states. After what happened in 2000, Im hesitant to rule out any scenario as impossible. Nonetheless, I would be surprised and, frankly, impressed if it turns out that Bush operatives in Florida managed to steal 380,978 votes, which was the Presidents margin of victory here last month. Four years ago he won the state by only 537 votes, and that was a sloppy chore. However, it was enough to put him in the White House and make Florida a punch-line for snarky TV comedians ever since. The mainstream media have laid this seasons election to rest, leaving us to look elsewhere for amusement. A newspaper colleague of mine, Jim DeFede, has just completed a crosscountry journey with a grilled-cheese sandwich, upon which the visage of the Virgin Mary is said to be emblazoned. The sandwich had been lovingly preserved by a Florida woman for ten years in her freezer. Recently she sold it on eBay for $28,000 to an on-line gambling outfit in Las Vegas. My fellow columnist Jim, who had generously offered his services as both chauffeur and security guard, transported the sandwich by automobile to its new home in Nevada. There it will be prominently displayed in a manner befitting such a relic, somewhere between the virtual slot machines and the virtual crap tables. Photographs of the cheese sandwich reveal an image that might be imagined as that of a young woman, although to my eye it resembles not the Virgin Mary so much as a young, post-Oz Judy Garland. In any case, Jim in search of insight designed a travel route through Red states that had gone solidly Republican in the election. Not surprisingly, many folks he encountered along the way were happy to believe that the mother of Jesus Christ would choose to manifest herself as a grilled lunch entre. While its easy to generalise about

regional politics and faiths, I must point out that the woman who made the holy sandwich and guarded it for a decade lives in a Blue county, Broward, which voted heavily for John Kerry. If the most anxiously awaited event in Florida was the official end to the corrosive and nerveracking presidential campaign, the second most anxiously awaited event was the official end to our long and destructive hurricane season on 1 December. This year the state got smacked by four substantial storms, which I view as divine retribution for the run-amok greed that has transformed our coastlines into a domino-style condominium hell. Nature has all sorts of ways, some more subtle than others, to remind the human race of its foolish incursions. For a few recent days, local television news featured a rare North American crocodile that had occupied a freshwater lake on the University of Miami campus. Students were of mixed opinion as to whether or not the hefty reptile should be removed, since it hadnt eaten anybody. Normally Id cast my vote for leaving the croc alone, but in this case the animal seemed destined for a late-night showdown with some drunken frat-house nitwit. For that reason, I wasnt dismayed when trappers with grappling hooks arrived to haul the crocodile out of the lake and truck it deep into the Everglades. Believe me, there are worse places to be. Carl Hiaasen is the author of ten novels, as well as Hoot, a Newbery Award-winning book for young readers. He has been a columnist for the Miami Herald since 1985. His most recent novel, Skinny Dip, was published by the Bantam Press in October.

Feedback
Readers respond to recent articles published in The Spectator 0 Comments The Spectator 18 December 2004 Ulster is not all right Leo McKinstrys knowledge of his native province as it is today seems somewhat superficial (Ulster is all right, 4 December). It is not clear how the rebranding of the Royal Ulster Constabulary as the Police Service of Northern Ireland a move resented with good reason by many in Ulster can be regarded as bringing policing here into line with the approach taken in the rest of the United Kingdom. And it is more than a little shameful that in paying tribute to the armys role in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, McKinstry neglects to mention the RUC; he may have forgotten the more than 300 police officers murdered since 1969, but few here have done so. In his concluding paragraphs, he says that Northern Ireland has more cultural amenities, better schools and higher standards of healthcare than the rest of the United Kingdom. The real Northern Ireland rather than McKinstrys fantasy version has its education and library

boards in financial crisis (one third of Belfasts libraries may be closed next year), longer hospital waiting lists than the rest of the UK, fewer specialists in critical areas such as neurology than elsewhere in the country, and fewer diagnostic tools such as MRI scanners than the mainland. McKinstry writes, in sarcastic tones, that Northern Ireland does not have to cope with the delights of multicultural Britain. Northern Ireland may have the smallest ethnic minority population in Great Britain, but it is not without its own race-relations problems. Attacks on ethnic minorities often orchestrated by loyalists have increased considerably over the past few years. Before he writes about Northern Ireland again, Mr McKinstry would do well to familiarise himself with the province today; the odd visit to a smart south Belfast restaurant will not do. Colin Armstrong Belfast, Northern Ireland The right to repent Bruce Anderson (Politics, 11 December) suggests that the quarter of a million males who are responsible for half of all crimes should have their details recorded on computer. But he fails to explain exactly how this would allow us to cope with the criminal underclass. Records are already kept of the convicted and their offences, as well as of those suspected of offences but never convicted or brought to trial. This by itself does not prevent repeat offences. Furthermore, Mr Anderson suggests that this quarter of a million have their activities monitored, which means that they would be considered irredeemable. The governments new laws may very well not make us safer, but Mr Anderson should consider that we also need protection from the lawmakers and their officers. Surely the best strategy is not to remove from the convicted the right to repent and make a fresh start in life. Daniel Veen London SW17 Sucked dry by the EU The contribution by Nick Herbert on Swedish taxes (Gordons Swedish model, 4 December) is interesting, but incomplete. To be specific, the highest taxes in the world could easily have allowed this country to retain the highest welfare level in the world had it not been for an overdose of internationalism. By that I mean sending billions of crowns to countries in the Third World so that they can buy

weapons and plane tickets and, worst of all, join the EU. If you want to know what happened to Swedish welfare, a large slice of it has been transferred to Brussels. The most amazing part of all this is that membership of the EU has resulted in everything that Swedes do not want. Examples are more alcohol, more crime and excessive immigration, which in turn have taken resources from healthcare at the same time that demand for this service increases (because of more alcohol, more crime and excessive immigration). You can add more exposure to a major curse of globalism, by which I mean the departure of employment opportunities to low-wage countries. These things translate for those of us who remember how to add and subtract into an inability to reduce the tax burden. I remember laughing at, and later apologising to, the Nobel laureate Sir John Hicks because of his belief in the rationality of the electorate. Had I known what I know now, he would never have received an apology from this teacher of economics and finance. Ferdinand E. Banks Uppsala, Sweden History lesson In the first volume of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Gibbon describes how Augustus deliberately and effectively replaced the institutions of the Republic with his own autocratic rule. He says: The principles of a free constitution are irrecoverably lost when the legislative power is usurped by the executive. This seems to match almost exactly Lord Butlers view of what is happening now (How not to run a country, 11 December). John Radford London E1 More letters please Tom Sutcliffe takes serious issue with a point I make in the introduction to Never Apologise: the Collected Writings of Lindsay Anderson (Books, 11 December), but his objection seems based on a slight misreading. I did not say that Lindsays small private income was an advantage, nor that it meant Karel Reisz could tell him he didnt need the money, had freedom to choose. What I actually wrote was that Lindsay was fortunate that his small but constant private income allowed him to remain aloof from the desperate financial need that motivates some artists. Of course he needed money, and having freedom to choose means little in the film business if you are not yourself chosen by backers and producers. How Karel got dragged into the argument, I dont know. Elsewhere, Mr Sutcliffe finds the subtitle of The Collected Writings misleading it is not, it merely refers to writing which is deemed collectable (the choice, as his review makes clear,

was largely Lindsays own); it made no claim to being complete. He is also frustrated that the books index has no keyword references such as alienation (Brechtian) God help us or a definitive list of all Lindsays writings ever. Like Lindsay Andersons earlier book, About John Ford, Never Apologise was always intended for the intelligent general (rather than academic) reader; Lindsay did not want a book that was clogged (his word) with footnotes and references, and I am pleased that I kept faith with him on that. I am sorry if Mr Sutciffe thinks this poses difficulties for those wanting to use it seriously the only real way to use a book seriously is to read the damn thing. But this is nit-picking and, while picking a few nits of his own, Mr Sutcliffe makes a great many valuable points in his article. Not the least of these is his complaint about the volume of Lindsays diaries managing to muddy the waters of a primarily confessional text by deploying letters to and from Lindsay himself. Lindsay Anderson was a prodigious and brilliant letter-writer, but the tone of voice in them, while often intimate, is strikingly different from that of the private diarist. Let us hope that a smart publisher will commission a volume (or more) of these letters, edited by someone who had a real knowledge of Lindsay and his work, and who has the assiduousness to guide us through the broad social and cultural sweep encompassed by them. Might I suggest Tom Sutcliffe? Paul Ryan London WC1 As the editor of Lindsay Andersons diaries, I very much enjoyed Tom Sutcliffes review. It gave me a good laugh. There are few sights and sounds more British than a green journalist yapping at the ankles of a wr iter who dared to think up and carry off a project that the journalist hadnt the conviction, the talent or the learning to do for himself. My favourite bit was Sutcliffes reference to the friendly letter from Anderson to the presumptuous Sutton (whom we are told was too young to know Anderson). I have the book in front of me but cant find the letter. What page is it on, Tom? Paul Sutton London SW1 Glory of Livias garden It would be a pity if Mary Keens review of the book Gardens of the Roman World (Books, 4 December) were to put readers off going to see one of the most enchanting and wellpreserved survivals from classical times, the frescoed garden chamber from the Empress Livias villa, on the grounds of its being inaccessible. Since the reordering of the main classical antiquities in Rome into various museums during the late Nineties, there has been absolutely no problem in viewing it. It is to be found on the top floor of the superb Museo Nazionale Romano, Palazzo Massimo, along with other exquisitely frescoed rooms, splendid

mosaics and many of the finest extant examples of ancient sculpture. John Fort Rome, Italy Creepy Taki Taki fawns continually on Hitlers generals. If it is not Guderian, it is Rommel. If Rommel was such a smart military man, how is it that he skived off on a 48-hour leave just as Eisenhower was about to launch D-Day? He could have spent some overtime trying to break the Allies codes, for example. If the old fool ran out of fuel in the desert there must have been a good reason for this state of affairs. Such as Admiral Cunningham and the Royal Navy which controlled the Mediterranean sinking Germanys tankers. At the same time the RN maintained supplies to the 8th Army at El Alamein. Some achievement. I am no military strategist but it appears to me that Takis continual creeping to Hitlers High Command is misplaced. Eric Potts Bishop Middleham, Co. Durham Daily grind Bevis Hillier states that Spinoza pursued his hobby of glass-engraving (Books, 11 December). Spinoza renounced most of his inheritance and earned his living by grinding and polishing lenses. A.N. Binder Speldhurst, Kent Avian error I feel compelled to take issue with Rachel Johnson. In her enjoyable piece on the Diana Memorial Fountain (What a shower!, 4 December) she mentions that fencing erected around the fountain may limit take-off space for grey-leg geese that have migrated all the way from Canada. Im no bird expert, but its my understanding that the grey-leg is not native to Canada. The migration pattern of North Americas geese is north-south, but never transatlantic. Manuel Escott Toronto, Canada

The borrowers

A great white hunter takes aim at a few sacred cows in contemporary Africa 0 Comments Aidan Hartley 18 December 2004 Laikipia When I saw the Chief in his Land Cruiser filled with hangers-on bouncing towards me through the bush I knew he was after his Christmas fatted lamb. It is customary in this part of the world for ranchers to hand out barbeque-ready slaughter animals to our local officials as thank-you presents for the help they genuinely give us through the year. At the time of Uhuru, the Europeans and Africans used to sit down to consume such gifts together while discussing the issues of the day. Sadly, these days the government vehicles tend to tour farms to pick up sheep and goats that are scoffed at ceremonies to which we are not invited. Hello, Chief, I said. After a sheep, are you? Yes, he said. But apart from that what I really want are some more books. Of course, I realised, it had been a few weeks since the Chiefs last visit. For the African outback our area is amazingly literary. One neighbour is a descendant of the poet Cowper and nephew of the novelist John Cowper Powys. His daughter has written the definitive upcountry nature book. Another neighbour is a multinational bestseller, and our local MP has written a readable autobiography. But nobody talks much about books, which I like to do. Book clubs are big in Africa, and when some European ladies bravely tried to launch one in our area a couple of years ago I thought wed see progress. Men were excluded, but I was invited along as the only honorary female. All the women invited to the meetings had to drive long distances through the bush to attend. Most were farmers wives, and I suppose its hard to concentrate on anything, even for a few hours, if cows need dosing, or visitors feeding, or horses riding. The book club swiftly foundered, and the ladies decided to turn their meetings into beauty sessions, when their nails and hair could be done. I was not invited. I have a well-stocked library, but as a rule I dont like lending books, which is as good as throwing them away. But when the Chief appeared one day to discuss the matter of cattle rustling or grass poaching, he pleaded with me to give him something to read. I relented. Within days I had the local District Officer visiting. He picked up some more. The lands surveyor and various councillors followed. Now they are regulars. The consumption of books by these people is impressive. They always return them within a couple of weeks, though I may find them dog-eared because theyve been swiftly circulated between two or three people. They prefer non-fiction, politics or biographies to novels. They

like African subjects but are happy to browse other material. They keenly want to discuss what they have just read and they are getting inspired themselves. In the 1960s there was a modest renaissance in African books. I grew up reading authors of the Heinemann African Writers Series. Some of them were brilliant: Achebe, Mwangi, the early Ngugi wa Thiongo. Others were beyond dreadful, but even with the bad ones you could see we were heading somewhere. In the 1980s it all went into decline, like so much else in Africa. Ngugi began turning out unreadable nonsense and fled into exile. Heinemanns orange and black covers faded on dusty shelves. When Ngugi returned after 22 years in exile recently, he was robbed and his wife raped. In recent years there has been a revival of hopes that the Africans will get their act together. Some excellent books have been finding their way on to the shortlists of big prizes, though most of these are written by diaspora Africans. In Kenya, we have magazines funded by foreign-aid foundations, but those who contribute tend to be privileged city kids with dreadlocks and soft hands. The writing is dull, pretentious and soaked with resentment towards white people. Who knows? The Chief and his peers who live in the real Africa may turn out to be quite different. They have genuine stories to tell. I am touched and surprised by this spontaneously formed club because I live in a very poor and backward part of Africa. These book borrowers, who have annual salaries roughly equivalent to the cost of a case of mediocre wine, are the only people who will talk about literature with me. They live in houses that may not even have electricity. And they sit alone at home, reading.

The ogre of lullabies

0 Comments Christopher Woodward 18 December 2004 The Legend of Napoleon Sudhir Hazareesingh Granta, pp.336, 20 Napoleon and the British Stuart Semmel Yale, pp.354, 25 For six months I have been waking up on the island of St Helena. At nine oclock I walk to my office in Bath; two hours earlier I am at work on a pile of diaries kept by Napoleons courtiers during the six years of the emperors captivity. The mind flies 5,000 miles across the Atlantic to an island I have never seen and a white bungalow named Longwood.

There are sublime moments. I who was master of the world! Napoleon shouts as he walks up and down the narrow corridors of the wind-battered house inside which he was exiled. Then he chuckles to General Gourgaud, Ah, it was a pretty empire, was it not? And it can be ridiculous. At dinner Napoleon comments on how much he has enjoyed the days good weather. No, objects Gourgaud, the weather was poor today. Marital silence. When Napoleon fell asleep three generals, a secretary, two valets and a changing succession of doctors and English duty officers went to their rooms to write their diaries. I hate to say it but there is something of Big Brother in the way each writer grumbles about their housemates performance of the daily tasks set by Napoleon, whether it has been to explain the loss of the battle of Waterloo or calculate the flow of water in the Nile. Subsequent to Napoleons death on 5 May 1821 over 400 books and articles have discussed his final six years. More ink per square foot has been spilt on the wooden floors of Longwood than anywhere else on earth. But one of the reasons that St Helena is addictive is that the diarists disagree. In front of me is a page of questions on which I have tried to reconcile their descriptions of events. Did the ice-making machine, the first to arrive on the tropical island, ever work? What did Napoleon say when news came of the executions of Murat and Ney? Was he attacked by a cow? It is impossible to know who is telling the truth. Next comes the realisation that many other writers have undertaken exactly the same comparative exercise. In his classic The Last Phase (1900), Lord Rosebery talked of how there was something in the air of Longwood that put a mildew on truth (he wrote the book, he said, to expel a ghost from his own house). The great French historian Frdric Masson could recount the conversations on any chosen day. G. L. de St Marie Watson, author of Napoleons Death Mask (1909), befriended a cast of characters from the shop-keeper Mr Solomon to the farmer named Robinson whose daughter Napoleon dubbed the nymph. Why do I say all this? Because I am addicted to the blighted air of Longwood. And because two excellent books on the image of Napoleon in France and in Britain show that without St Helena, and without the earlier return from Elba, our view of the emperor would be utterly different. The constitution he granted during the Hundred Days presented him as a liberal. Death on a distant rock made him into a figure of sympathy. In 1909 Philippe Gonnard responded to Lord Roseberys depiction of the ennui of St Helena with The Last Phase in Fact and Fiction (1909), an eloquent, succinct study in which he argued that Napoleons actions in exile were the most successful PR campaign in history. Accepting that he would never return to Europe, he took on posterity, and won. He told his disciples to circulate stories of his suffering and his last will was a masterpiece:

I am dying prematurely, murdered by the English oligarchy and its hired assassins I wish my ashes to rest near the banks of the Seine in the midst of the French people I have so dearly loved. I shall be a martyr and my son shall wear the crown, he added to his courtiers. The Legend of Napoleon by Sudhir Hazareesingh, a fellow of Balliol, argues that the resurrection of Napoleon was a far more spontaneous phenomenon. Within months of Napoleons exile myths of his return had sprung up in hundreds of villages across France. The heart of this book is research undertaken in regional archives over several years, deciphering the records by policemen and civil servants of protests made in the name of the emperor against the Bourbon regime. It is some years since I have read a book which has made such enthralling use of historical archives. Many of the files had never been opened, and it is impossible to overstate what an advance this research represents in understanding the politics of the period. And it is great fun too. In Rouen 24 Napoleonic plates were set aside for Bonapartist diners and elsewhere in the city a confectioner made chocolate statues of Napoleon for Christmas. In Paris a man slipped a tiny bronze statuette into his friends wine glass when the police approached. His friend choked, and both were arrested. In the Ardche a peasant saw his face in the moon, while in Auxerre a child cried Vive lempereur three times immediately after leaving the womb. In the Somme an army sergeant built a house in the shape of Napoleons tricorn hat. I could not help but feel sorry for Louis XVIII, whom Philip Mansels biography of 1981 transformed from a fat figure of caricature to a man of tragic poignancy. When news of his death reached one village, a spy reported an elderly neighbour saying, There will be potatoes for us now that the King is dead, because when he was alive he used to eat them all. Louis XVIII was a more liberal ruler than Napoleon. So, this book asks, why did the most autocratic ruler France has ever known become a popular hero after his exile and death? And why was his nephew elected Emperor Napoleon III by a peoples vote? Hazareesingh does not claim to be writing a balanced appreciation of the political views of the time. What he shows is that, to quote the one ugly phrase in a beautifully written book, support for Napoleon was expressive rather than goal-driven. From 100 discontented points of view, he was an invigorating alternative to the status quo. On Waterloo day in London in 1830 the Duke of Wellingtons carriage was stoned by a mob shouting Bonaparte for ever! But Wellington understood why so many Britons admired the arch-enemy. To them he was not a real person, he said, but a principle a principle of opposition to the establishment.

Napoleon and the British is the first book by the American political historian Stuart Semmel. Like Hazareesingh he does not tell us what he thinks about Napoleon. His interest lies in what attitudes to Napoleon tell us about Britain in the early 19th century. Britain created multiple Napoleons. The Liberator of Italy, whose thin, lank-haired face appeared in the print-shop windows in 1797. The First Consul, whose Roman profile was illuminated in London squares to celebrate the Peace of Amiens in 1802. The disciple of Rousseau, who called a halt to the slaughter of an Austrian army when he saw a spaniel licking the face of its dying master. The murderer of the Duc dEnghien. A Jacobin. A usurper. The liberator of the Jews in Europe. The man who censored the press. The Antichrist who was the 666th ruler of successor states to the Roman empire. The Boney of Gillray, the ogre of lullabies, the Cromwell, Caligula and Nero of popular broadsides . And all before he was 35 years old. Semmels argument is that images of Nap- oleon act as multiple mirrors to Britains fractured sense of identity during the early 19th century. The nation of Waterloo was a self-doubting and divided society. When the time came to decide Napoleons fate it was, at bottom, a debate about the rights and wrongs of the British national character. True, Wellington refused Bl

Recent arts books

Recent arts books 0 Comments David Ekserdjian 18 December 2004 This years crop of art books for Christmas is the usual mixed bunch, and if they have anything in common, it is their general lack of festive associations. The one exception is M. A. Michaels Stained Glass of Canterbury Cathedral (Scala, 25), a beautifully illustrated picture book with an exemplary and truly instructive text, which includes the Magi not having a notably cold coming of it among its panoply of more and less familiar religious scenes. Naturally, the lions share of the images is of mediaeval glass, and they are accompanied by handy diagrams detailing exactly which pieces are replaced or repainted, but more recent additions, such as Sir Ninian Compers commemoration of King George VI and of the Queens coronation, also have their place. The ecclesiastical theme is pursued in a very different idiom in Sandra Berresfords extraordinary Italian Memorial Sculpture 1820-1940 (Frances Lincoln, 40), a celebration of some of the most bizarre and hideous works of art ever produced. I have whizzed past the grandiose entrance to the Cimitero Monumentale in Milan in the past, and I suspect that when I go there next week, I will ask the taxi driver to keep his foot firmly on the accelerator, but it has to be admitted that these strange tableaux deathbed scenes aplenty, and acres of

marmoreal naked flesh are compellingly awful. How kind of the author and her heroic photographers to save the rest of us all that morbid wandering. The art market is hoping that the Russian oligarchs are going to prove to be the stars of the next generation of mega-collectors, and I would certainly much rather spend my roubles on the Badminton Cabinet than another playmaker for Chelsea, so the publication of Oleg Neverovs Great Private Collections of Imperial Russia (Thames & Hudson, 45) is extremely timely. The names of these collectors have become attached to their greatest treasures, so that the Metropolitan Museum of Arts latest acquisition is the Stroganov Duccio, and in the same vein we speak of Leonardos Benois Madonna or of the Basilievsky situla. The array of goodies assembled is predictably spectacular, although the whistle-stop nature of the tour is ultimately frustrating. Most of what is on offer is staunchly old-masterish, but the Shchukin and Morozov collections provide a stupendous early 20th-century avant-garde finale. Single collection catalogues are able to spread their wings incomparably wider than such anthologies, and Paintings in the Muse dOrsay (Thames & Hudson, 50), edited by Serge Lemoine, is an awesomely comprehensive doorstopper of a tome. It boasts no fewer than 830 colour illustrations, which gives it ample opportunity to do justice to the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists what might be described as the old alumni of the Jeu de Paume but also to represent all sorts of other 19th-century painters. In their day, many of them were deemed to be the norm, but now such fevered oddities as Georges Rochegrosses Le chevalier aux fleurs, a frustrated adolescents vision of Parsifal surrounded by nubile flower maidens, have come to look like the odd men out. It might be assumed that the Impressionists would have been researched to death by now, but happily scholarship does not work that way, and although Clare A. P. Willsdons In the Gardens of Impressionism (Thames & Hudson, 29.95) builds on earlier studies, it also goes much more deeply into its chosen theme. Monets garden at Giverny is inevitably here, but there are also many surprises, for all that most of the emphasis is rightly on the big names of the movement. In spite of strenuous efforts from the wilder shores of art history to discredit them, monographs remain a dominant category. These days, many are by-products of exhibitions, as is the case with Arthur K. Wheelock Jr.s Gerard Ter Borch (Yale, 35), which unashamedly concentrates on the best of this uneven but periodically sublime genre painter, who may not be quite up there with Vermeer, but whose understated vision is at least as haunting as that of their better-known contemporary Pieter de Hooch. Malcolm Warner and Robin Blakes Stubbs and the Horse (Yale, 30) is another exhibition catalogue, but is at the same time a full-dress study of its chosen theme, and is almost bound to be the pick of this bunch for hunting-friendly Spectator readers (and at least one former

editor). Delacroix, Degas, and Picasso are only three of the great artists who were exceptional painters of horses, but I do not think it is patriotic fervour that convinces one that Stubbs was the best and most various of the lot. Daumier by Sarah Symmons (Chaucer Press, 15.99) comes hottish on the heels of a blockbuster show, but there is always going to be more to say about such a fascinating figure, and here the balance is nicely judged between the more familiar newspaper caricatures and the paintings and drawings. Daum- ier had a particular gift for capturing the posturing absurdity of critics and connoisseurs peering at works of art; like all of his finest creations, these images are scarily timeless in their understanding of human frailties. Were it not for the fact that its author is Nicholas Penny, a book entitled National Gallery Catalogues: The Sixteenth-Century: Italian Paintings, Volume I: Paintings from Bergamo, Brescia and Cremona (National Gallery Company, 75, available from the National Gallery at 50) might not exactly set the pulses racing, but in fact it is both a scholarly triumph and at the same time a thumping good read. The entries on individual pictures are exemplary in their detail, and reflect the writers passionate all-but-omniscience concerning frames and provenances, while the biographies of particular artists go far beyond the usual digest of the existing literature. Penny is now working at the National Gallery in Washington as opposed to the one in Trafalgar Square, but if he had been eligble for an export stop, then I am sure the appropriate funding bodies would have ensured that he was saved for the nation. As it is, this catalogue is the first in a series of volumes promised by Penny, which should serve as highly superior presents in the years ahead.

We are all pagans now

Paganism is one of our fastest-growing religions. Mary Wakefield talks to a druid and finds out why witchcraft appeals to 21st-century Britain 0 Comments Mary Wakefield 18 December 2004 The sky was already murky at 4 p.m. when I locked my bike outside Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese on Fleet Street. Inside, it was even murkier: wood-panelled corridors stretched off into the gloom, men in grey suits were wedged together, smoking Bensons and drinking bitter. No one looked even slightly like an Arch Priest of the Council of British Druid Orders. At 4:10 I found a separate little bar near the back of the pub. As I walked in, a big man with round shoulders and grey hair stared at me and I saw the corner of a magazine poking out from inside his coat. As I watched, the whole cover slowly emerged: a yellowy-purple watercolour of a fairy, and the title: The Witchtower. Steve? I said. He nodded. We bought bitter, found somewhere to sit, and began what turned out to be a three-hour crash course in modern paganism, one of the fastest-growing religions in Britain.

Its time for us pagans to make ourselves heard, said Steve. Steve is founder of Pebble (the liaison committee for British paganism) which has given all the various pagan factions Witches, Druids, Heathens, Voodoo Priestesses, Shamans, Chaos Magicians an official voice. Look at the 2001 census, he said, the results have just been published. Were the seventh largest religion in the country there are at least 40,000 of us. Its time that we were taken seriously. What sort of people are pagans? I asked. Ooh, every sort: lawyers, teachers, nurses, pensioners, students. There are lots in the Civil Service, said Steve, who works for the Charity Commission. Theres even one writing regularly for the Daily Telegraph. Who? Steve chuckled, raised his eyebrows and took a pull on his pint of Pride. Anne Robinson? I thought; Bill Deedes? I asked, What is a pagan these days anyway? Well, said Steve, relaxing, the first thing is that were not Satanists and we dont sacrifice babies. He rolled his eyes. The Devil is a Christian concept. We worship the ancient, preChristian gods and goddesses. A pagan is defined as a follower of a polytheistic nature-based religion which incorporates beliefs and rituals from ancient traditions. As he laid a line of Golden Virginia on to a Rizla, I examined Steve closely for signs of in-leagueness with the Devil. There were rolls of grime under his fingernails and some red scratches on his right hand. So, can a modern pagan just pick any god to worship? I asked. Egyptian? Roman? African? Are there any rules? Steve put his hands self-consciously under the table, No rules, he said. Being a pagan is about being free from institutional rules. And the gods? Once you start seeking they choose you, really. Everyone has their own path, but we all celebrate the same festivals: the summer and winter solstices, spring and autumn equinoxes and four other festivals: Samhain, Imbolc, Beltane and Lughnasad. Pagans, I discovered during our second pint, are also united by their sense of the injustices done them by Christians. The last 2,000 years of history, as explained by Steve, is a heartwrenching tale of innocent occult revivals squashed by ignorant, scaredy-cat Christians; of forced conversions by English kings desperate for Roman approval; of goddess-worship suppressed by chauvinist orthodoxy and cries of Burn the witch! Eventually, after a tour through the Enlightenment (good), Freemasonry (also good), Constantine (bad) and Dominican monks (Satan spawn), we reached the 20th century, where, said Steve, paganism was once again revived by a man called Gerald Gardner. In 1957, after 20 years of frolicking with a coven of witches, Gardner wrote Witchcraft Today a mix of folklore, Masonic rituals, nudism, sex and Aleister Crowley-style magic which became a sort of handbook for the modern Wicca witch and inspired the whole postmodern frogspawn of spiritually and sexually liberated pagan sects. Paganism today is continually evolving, said Steve. Theres no right or wrong thing to believe, so even if we disagree, its impossible for pagans to be schismatic.

Why did you become a pagan? Oh, Steve leant back and stretched. When I was young, I was a Christian, but I couldnt take the idea that good people like Buddhists, for instance, are going to Hell. Then I met someone who was involved in the Fellowship of Isis, and the idea of the goddess just started making sense to me. But everybody finds their own way, he said. I mean, 9,000 teenagers became Wiccan witches in England because of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. What!? Its true, said Steve. When Buffys friend Willow became a lesbian witch, the WiccaUk website went mad, and 4,500 of the new young witches have stayed pagan ever since. Its the future! Steve went to the loo and I flicked cautiously through his copy of The Witchtower. An article on Animal Spirit Guides by Janet Robson ended with something called an Affirmation: I recognise my true beauty within; I value and cherish all that I am. I have the power to transform my life. To experience true joy. It sounded dismally familiar. Like every self-help book, and most after-dinner conversations in Camden. On Monday David Hope, the Archbishop of York, said that he would find it difficult to describe England as a Christian country, and hes right were all really pagans already. Nearly everybody I know is a keen believer in some sort of energy and that basking in it will lead to healing. They take it for granted that youre more likely to hit on the truth by making up your own spiritual rules than through orthodoxy, that abstinence is unhealthy, monotheism narrow-minded and a belief in original sin a sign of mental illness. That your personality is determined by your star sign is, however, regarded as common sense. The nearest thing Wicca witches have to a creed is a prose poem called The Charge of the Goddess written for Gerald Gardner by a woman called Doreen: If that which thou seekest thou findest not within thee, thou wilt never find it without thee. Youd have a tough time finding anyone in the country who disagreed. Steve, I said, when he came back, isnt paganism just about discovering your inner strength? You dont actually believe that all these hundreds of ancient gods exist, do you? Oh yes, I do, said Steve. He laughed. The gods are very real indeed. Once they start communicating with you, coincidences happen, youre led his voice became softer its like having the wind behind you. So all the different deities Anubis, Athena, Baron Samedi are actually out there, with their different personalities? Yes, said Steve firmly, they are. Most pagans wouldnt distinguish much between whats inside and whats outside your mind, but the gods are certainly real. They have an effect. If youre taken over during a ritual, its not something you can control its a very powerful feeling and unique to that particular spirit. What happens? Well, recently, for instance, I

went to Neasden reservoir for a West African Yoruba ceremony. I was standing among 50 or 60 people, but the priest came up to me and chose me to be the Yoruba god, Obatala. As soon as he chose me, I immediately felt Obatalas presence; I was literally stunned, only half there. As Steve spoke, I suddenly remembered an odd experience I had, seven years ago, in New Orleans. Bored and lonely, I accepted an invitation to a voodoo ritual in the French Quarter, and as I watched the priestess swaying around, muttering in Creole and asking the Voodoo spirit, Chango, to possess her, I saw her change. The way she smiled and danced became different, and the light in her eyes went out, like a sleepwalker. At the same time, I felt an odd intense buzzing in my head, as if something was trying to get into my mind. I had to fight to stay conscious. What is it like to be possessed by a god? I asked Steve, wondering if I had come close. You cant recall much because they take over. Steve seemed suddenly cagey, as if I was prying. We sat in silence for a while remembering our rituals. I worried for a moment that the existence of Chango and Obatala contradicted the idea of a Christian God, then I remembered a passage from Chestertons Orthodoxy (which I later looked up): It is not enough to find the gods; they are obvious; we must find God, the real chief of the gods. We must have a long historic experience in supernatural phenomena in order to discover which are really natural. So what do you think about modern-day Christians? I asked Steve. They dont drown witches any more, do they? They still spread lies about pagans, said Steve, looking irritated. Christians still teach that paganism was and is just about indulgence and hedonism. Like what? Okay, I bet you think that the Romans had a room called a vomitorium where they sicked up food, so that they could eat more? Yup. Well thats rubbish. Its anti-pagan Christian propaganda. A vomitorium was just the foyer of a theatre, a place where people would spill, or vomit forth after a performance. But the Church of England, Steve, I said, you should like it. Its tolerant of other faiths, reluctant to lay down the law, it has women priests and its Archbishop is a druid. Steve looked jaded. As a matter of fact, he said, I am totally opposed to the ordination of women priests and practising gay clergy. Something small but important snapped inside my head. I think they should just make the break, said Steve, and leave Christianity behind. I was talking to an Anglican priest the other day and it was just like listening to a pagan except that he wouldnt let go of this ridiculous text. A few days after my re-education, I went to a pagan get-together, or moot, that Steve had organised in a room above a pub. No one looked noticeably luminous with inner divinity or liberated by their lack of rules, but nor did they look particularly depraved. In fact, despite

the dragon medallions, crushed velvet scoop-neck tops and dyed black hair, it felt comfortingly like a C of E church fete. A cheery woman with schoolteacher glasses sat at a table by the door taking entry fees and selling raffle tickets for a prize draw which included a tray of scented candles. Men in long-sleeved T-shirts drank pints of lager and made jokes about Catholic priests and choirboys. After half an hour, a small plump man in a black leather waistcoat stood up to give the pagan equivalent of a sermon. He was a zoologist, he said, who investigated supernatural phenomena. At first it sounded promising a case of two wallabies found mysteriously beheaded and drained of blood. The congregation listened attentively. But, disappointingly, the culprit turned out to be not a vampire but a local smackhead. The lecture disintegrated into a debate about who, between Buffy and Dr Who, would kick whose ass in a fight. Afterwards, parish notices: the dates of a discussion on the Goddess and The Da Vinci Code hosted by Jocelyn Chaplin, (artist, psychotherapist and founder of the Serpent Institute); details of a book called Now Thats What I Call Chaos Magick, and advertisements for The Knights Templar Walk (With tangential links to the dreaded Bavarian Illuminati!). A friendly, skinny man handed me a flyer advertising an open ritual for the Turning of the Wheel and Birth of the Sun-Child, Led by Hernes Tribe. I used to work at the London School of Economics, he said, and now I do shifts on the Catholic Herald. A poet called Rory brought over a piece of his performance verse: Love is a nice cup of cocoa, I read, when youre feeling all alone and frightened like a small rubber ball. So what are you doing for Christmas? I asked Steve as I got up to leave. Something fun? The big feast for us pagans is the winter solstice on the 21st, he said, looking relieved that his moot had gone well. And Ill probably celebrate in the traditional way. Ill put on my white djellaba and go off to a pre-Christian burial mound to make vows to the deities and watch the sun come up. What sort of vows? I asked. Oh you know, said Steve, that Pebble goes from strength to strength and that paganism everywhere thrives.

A City Christmas, with seasonal grumbles from Ebenezer and Timmy

A City Christmas, with seasonal grumbles from Ebenezer and Timmy 0 Comments Christopher Fildes 18 December 2004 In the narrow courts between Cornhill and Lombard Street, where the old City lives on, I find the senior partner in his seasonal bad temper. He likes to get on with his work but, he says, nobody else does and, what is worse, nobody thinks that they should. Take that clerk of mine, Cratchit, he grumbles. I never see him at all. First of all it was stress and now its paternity leave. Hes taken the year off. Still expects to be paid. Claims hes looking after Tiny

Tim. When I told him thats a poor excuse for picking a mans pocket, he threatened me with a tribunal. His mood does not improve when a sharp-suited figure bounces in: Merry Christmas, uncle! Can I cut you in on my new hedge fund? You pay the fees and I top-slice the profits. Its sure to make money. Money? Whats Christmas to you but a time for paying bills without money? Yes, uncle, and quite right too. Its consumer confidence that keeps our economy so strong. That and public spending. The Governor was saying so. Or was it the Chancellor? I read it somewhere. Well, cant stop. At the door, he collides with a portly pair whose patter marks them as consultants. They want to introduce the senior partner to the joys of corporate social responsibility: Theres not a line about it in your firms accounts. Modern boards have reports that go on for pages and pages, explaining all they do to make this a better world. Diversity, the environment, global warming what are your policies, what are your strategies? What shall we put you down for? Nothing, he snaps. Its enough for a man to understand his own business, and not to interfere with other peoples. Mine occupies me constantly. Good afternoon, gentlemen! Alive and working Later, a small Fernet Branca in the City Club helps to calm him down: Those two spoofers were wished on me by my non-execs. Typical. They dont understand the business, because the Code says they mustnt it would mar their independence. So instead they get fired up about the work-life balance. As if work and life were two opposite things. You know, if they were, what poor things they would both of them be! Dear old Antony Hornby at Cazenove used to say that we spent most of our lives in the office, so that it needs to be fun. Fat chance, these days. We get loaded down with more rules, more compliance, more alternatives to work. But then, how easy it is to be generous with other peoples time and money. I know about that. I help to support it. Club rules apply The last of the Fernet Branca goes down the wrong way as a sudden anxiety strikes him: By the way, all this is between the two of us, isnt it? Club rules apply? I was terribly let down by that fellow from the Daily News, what was he called Dickwick? Pickens? Wrote it all down in a book. Little wispy beard. Never trust a chap with a beard. Thats a good rule in the City. Out of it, too, come to that. The same thing happened to poor Melmotte well, rich Melmotte, really. What a genius, how well he understood credit light as air, he would say, strong as iron. Another chap with a different beard wrote a book about him called The Way We Live Now. Claimed that when it all came unstuck, he took poison. Nonsense, he jumped off his yacht and then swam to Australia. Changed his name again. Now hes promoting a nickel mine. He hasnt lost his touch. Dont forget, I never told you. I forbear to wish my friend the compliments of the season, and am heading back across the City when Timmy Yellowbird hauls me into the Gantry.

Close to the share Now here, I reflect, is someone with a grievance against authors. The youthful Alan Clark put Timmy into his City novel, Bargains at Special Prices. Copies are scarce mine was unearthed by the ace of book-sleuths, Hilary Rittner no doubt because Timmy and everyone else in it threatened to sue for libel. It describes his wideawake broking firm, Blowdon & Debly, on the fourth floor of Breadenhall House. (The Gantry, of course, is the bar in the basement.) There is nearly always something on at Blowdons, we are told, and in a mining share, Glasma, a ramp is in progress. Unhappily, Timmy and one of his clients (but never mind her) are left holding the parcel when the music stops. Can a bigger fool be found to take it off their hands? Yes In a sense, we here at Blowdons are pretty close to the share, wed pass it through a tame jobber, Bargains at special prices, you know but Normie Fryer of the Daily Grunt agrees, on terms, to run a suitable story. City grandees fuss about the Stock Exchanges image and complain of not being tipped off. For a delicious girl called Polly, worthy of her authors imagination, all ends sexily, but not for Timmy. Fill your boots Even today, Timmy looks grumpy. The Gantrys house champagne (faint aroma of rhubarb) is doing nothing for him. You know, he says, its hard on a firm like ours, which still tries to give personal service. The rules are written for the big boys and they walk all over us. I wouldnt dare to suggest that markets get ramped nowadays. It was just that Citicorp woke up one morning and blitzed every bond market in Europe. When it was over they sort of apologised. Of course, if youre in the bulge bracket, what does a fine matter? Its just an incidental expense and part of the cost of the deal. As for planting suitable stories, well, Normie has retired to Spain now and the rules are different. You pay an agency to wrap them up nicely and leave them on the right doorstep. They tend to look pretty in pink. The Treasury does this all the time, so it must be legal I dont say theres no enterprise left. The other day, someone at Evolution funny name for a broker, that went short of a share and sold two and a half times as many as there were in issue. Something like that happens in Alans book. Now, I know you cant touch it yourself, but theres a red-hot new issue just coming along an Australian nickel mine and we at Blowdons are pretty close to the share. Fill your boots. Well, fill your readers boots. Happy Christmas. Christopher Fildess book, A City Spectator, is published by Nicholas Brealey (12.99). Fill your boots! Timmy Yellowbird. Bah! Humbug! Ebenezer Scrooge.

Holy sage

It is fashionable to sneer at the Archbishop of Canterbury, but, says A.N. Wilson, he is a good man and profoundly Christian 0 Comments A.N. Wilson 18 December 2004 There is an old Jewish proverb that if God came to earth, people would start smashing His windows. After an initial period of loving Rowan Williams, the press and the Church are beginning to have their doubts. The man who was hailed as the complicated Welsh poet and the much longed-for Intellectual in Public Life is now a Welsh Windbag who can control neither the openly gay bishops in America nor the conservative evangelicals at home. He has dismayed his former liberal friends by supporting, a little oddly, it must be said, a measure in the Synod (heavily defeated in the event) which would have brought back heresy trials to the Church. At the same time, he still wants to be gentle and understanding over the issue of gay sex, so he hasnt really won any friends among the Bible-bashers. As well as the evangelicals, the usual suspects among right-wing journalists now line up to denounce him Peter Hitchens, the Revd Peter Mullen and so on because of his supposed weakness on such subjects as Hell, Islam and other matters. Yet my faith in him is undimmed, and my admiration has grown in the last year. The crowning glory for me was a trivial matter. The Today programme on Radio Four offered him a prime slot to do Thought for the Day on Christmas Eve and his office replied that the Archbishop would be offering his thoughts on the Nativity of his Saviour from the pulpit of Canterbury cathedral. To those who run programmes such as Today it is all but unthinkable that a public figure should not wish to appear on their show. Margaret Thatcher was wise enough to refuse to go on Today, and it did not do her much harm. Rowan Williams sees the point of not constantly appearing in the popular media. He is right. A cathedral is a better place than a radio studio for a sermon. Yet can you imagine Williamss predecessor George Carey being able to resist making a chump of himself and of his faith by trying to squeeze three minutes of platitudes in between the weather forecast and some merry japes from Jim the Wig Naughtie? Well, come on then, I hear you say, whats so good about Rowan? Isnt the Church falling to bits about his ears, and what has he done about it? I was meditating on this question, which concerns the successor not just to George Carey but also to the martyr Thomas Becket, when I went to see Marco Bellocchios extraordinarily powerful film about the kidnapping and assassination of Aldo Moro. Buongiorno, notte provides a haunting illustration of Christianitys staying-power, its capacity to enter a situation and make a surprise. The Red Brigades, a group of communist fanatics, kidnap the Italian President and keep him imprisoned in a rented flat. There is dramatically little contact between them, until they allow him to write letters home. When they read the letters it becomes immediately clear that a huge fissure divides them. Their saving mythology is

that class hatred will eventually cause the triumph of the working class, the overthrow of capitalism, and the end of hypocrisy and exploitation of the majority by a minority. Moro begins by trying to persuade them verbally that his version of Christian Democracy is not in fact oppressive, that he believes in liberty and justice and goodwill to all. But in the end it becomes clear that what they want is a death; they formally indict him. And in spite of their hatred, what he becomes is not what they want. He is not just an executed criminal, condemned by history. He invokes the early martyrs and becomes himself a prayerful victim, a martyr, a Christian witness. I preface an article about Rowan Williams with this thought, because Bellocchios film makes one think that perhaps all Christian witnesses are, or are preparing themselves to be, martyrs which is simply the Greek word for witness. No one has, at the time of going to press, actually assassinated the Archbishop of Canterbury as a physical presence. But in the last year he has had to endure a constant barrage of hostile criticism. And the Church of which he has become the chief bishop, the Church of England, together with its sister churches in the so-called Anglican Communion throughout the world, has been apparently preparing a series of absurd tests for itself which will lead ineluctably to its own implosion or institutional destruction. Given the nature of these tests, it is inevitable that whoever became Archbishop of Canterbury at this time would be bound to fail them. Until a few decades ago, it would, of course, have been unthinkable for openly practising homosexual men to seek high office in any Christian Church, just as it would have been unimaginable that women could be bishops, or that the Church could bless same-sex unions. But as even a rudimentary reading of Church history shows, there are plenty of unthinkables which become, within a few years, matters of commonplace acceptance. Most early Christians would have deemed it unimaginable that the Church could ever accept active soldiers into its essentially pacifist ranks. Read Peter Browns book on early Christian attitudes to the body, or Ferdinand Mounts book on The Family, and you will realise that the early Church frowned on almost any form of sexual activity, that it deeply distrusted the family as a unit, and interpreted St Pauls injunction It is better to marry than to burn as a strong indication that it was, of course, better not to marry at all. Likewise, the Churchs attitude to usury was utterly uncompromising until well, until it simply decided it could not afford to be opposed to money-lending any longer and so it just changed its mind. Many of those who line up to criticise Rowan Williams come from what is called the evangelical wing of the Church. One of the strongest anti-Rowan churches is St Helens in Bishopsgate, headed by the Revd William Taylor. He has refused to take salaries from the C of E while Rowan is in charge. In October 2003 Taylor said: After his [Rowan Williamss] appointment and after having read his writings I wrote to him. I explained the difficulties with his public, private position. And I asked him whether, to

protect the unity of the Church, he would be willing to say that his personal writings had been wrong; and whether he would call on Christian people in same-sex sexual relationships to turn from them. He will not do that. He will not refute error and defend the truth against error. Indeed, in his writings he has taught error. And he has encouraged men into Christian leadership who themselves are teaching error. It is perhaps worth emphasising that although Mr Taylor and his pious congregation think they are the very models of what it is to be Christian, they would almost certainly, with their strong emphasis on family life, and with their wealth largely based on usury, otherwise known as sound City investments, have been thought suspect, if not totally unChristian, by, let us say, Tertullian, Jerome or St Antony of Egypt. Now the funny thing about Rowan Williams is this and it is not just the beard. Unlike so many of his contemporary critics, he is quite recognisably of the same strange breed as the early apostles and martyrs, as the doctors and hermits and confessors of mainstream Christendom throughout the ages. John Henry Newman, a few moments after becoming a Catholic, reached for a volume of one of the early Church fathers and kissed it with the words, Now I belong to you. Rowan belongs to them. He may express this belonging in an extraordinarily convoluted manner at times, which might well sound better if translated back into ancient Greek or modern Welsh, but he speaks the language. Christian ethics are bound up with theology, but many of them have changed throughout the ages. There is also a mysterious something which hasnt changed. One sensed it overwhelmingly watching the drama of Aldo Moros martyrdom. One senses it in Rowan Williamss whole take on existence in his well-aimed and often well-timed swipes at the politicians, in his thoughtful engagements with contemporary writers, such as his public debate with Philip Pullman, in his poetry and in his sermons. And in his books try his superb short book on Teresa of Avila, which I have just read. In spite of what some Christians today believe, the future of Christianity does not depend upon what a few bigots on the one hand, and a few homosexual enthusiasts and their friends on the other, believe about same-sex unions. It really does not. The loudest critics come from some little enclave within the Church whether high or low where they are so busy with their church hobby and so smugly certain of their own rectitude that they have managed to overlook a rather obvious fact. Their churches, such as Holy Trinity Brompton or St Helens Bishopsgate might be full to the rafters on Sunday mornings, but the numbers who enjoy their particular form of holy club are a tiny minority of the population of this planet. Rowan Williams is sufficiently intelligent and normal to be aware that in the West, being religious these days is, outside America, very distinctly odd,

and trying to defend Christianity against the whole ethos of materialism and scientific rationalism which most intelligent people take for granted is a more than intellectual task. We might very well be living in Christianitys last days. Many of us who go to church do so a little wistfully, knowing that, unlike Rowan Williams, we do not believe in the ways which our ancestors did. Our prayers so languid and our faith so dim is one of the few lines of a hymn which we could sing with gusto. Fightings within and fears without might be another. Yes, Rowan Williams brings cleverness and originality and subtlety to public debate, and those are not qualities to be sneezed at, even if they are repellent to so many bigots in the press and the Church. But he also has a quality which cant be faked and which is always shown in the life and death of a martyr: holiness. When the last church on earth has closed, that will be the quality which the human race will most miss about the days of faith. The only tests Rowan is failing as Archbishop are ones not worth posing: silly posturings on both sides about homosexuality or women priests. In all the essential things, he is just what the Church and the nation most need. Of course, when it has a godsend, what does the Church of England do? It calls for his resignation.