No Official Umbrella - Glyn Jones

2012-02-01T09:57:00.000+02:00

‘The Hollywood Writers’ Wars.’ We are dealing here with the thirties before the Second World War and, in particular the years of the great depression. It really is true that there is nothing new under the sun and reading of the depression, what was going on in America at the time and in particular what was going on in Hollywood in the early thirties, it could be equated with what is going on in Greece today. For ‘the producers’ read the Greek government and for ‘the writers’ read civil servants. Because of the depression people could no longer afford to visit the cinema so often and box office takings dropped alarmingly. So what did the powerful producers do?

It was necessary in order to protect themselves from the machinations of the producers, Warner, Schenck, Mayer, et al that the writers and actors formed their guilds –anathema, horror, to the producers: socialism and worse communism lurking just beneath the surface, employees making demands that would erode their profits even further.

The surprising force of the general strike of 1934 saw labour immediately linked with communism and the times were not favourable to the artist as a work force. The hangover of the Protestant work ethic still condemned the artist as a shiftless non-worker and the underlying belief during the depression was that artists should find themselves any kind of job rather than starve for lack of creative work. The same thing was to happen in the UK in the seventies. So what effect did this have on Hollywood?

The producers up to this point had used intimate, familial form of economic and psychological manipulation to retain absolute control but in March 1933, except for MGM which paid its employees in cash, the studios were unable to meet their payrolls. Universal suspended all contracts. Fox notified its employees that salaries would not be paid: (Greece today?) Paramount, Warner brothers, Columbia and RKO faced bleak prospects (just like the Greek government today). Naturally (as in Greece today) workers lost their jobs and for those who remained a blanket wage cut was imposed (again as in Greece today). Those receiving $50 or more weekly would get a fifty percent wage cut. Those earning less would get a 25 percent cut, the cuts to last for eight weeks. More out of fear that it was the beginning of the end the cuts were reluctantly accepted. Naturally it did not affect heads like Thalberg who was on $4000 a week. Nor I suppose does it affect the Greek politicians today who are paid fourteen times for twelve month’s work.

The wage cuts had made several things obvious to the studio employees, chiefly that producers didn’t think contracts were sacred – tell me about it who has first hand experience – and it was time to unionise. My union, The Writers; Guild and The Writers’ Guild in America were of no help in my dispute with a major Hollywood studio but more of that at a later date maybe.

But to show what chicanery the producers could get up to in order to protect themselves; in 1934 a writer by the name of Upton Sinclair announced he would be a candidate for the Democratic nomination for governor of California. ‘I saw hundreds of thousands of persons driven form their homes (Greece today) an economic process which has turned most of California over to money lenders and banks…(!) And for every official who was sent to jail (Greece) I knew that a thousand were hiding with their loot (Greece yet again).

So in the face of someone obviously on the side of the worker what did the studio bosses do? In order to destroy Sinclair they organised a smear campaign costing millions of dollars. They created fake newsreels in which vagrants on the way to California said they were drawn there because of Sinclair. Louis Mayor had his director of screen tests make the anti-Sinclair films. Joseph Mankiewicz was instructed to write anti-Sinclair radio spots, circulars were printed and hoardings supporting Sinclair’s rival, a man named Merriam, all paid for by the studios. But here comes the real humdinger. All studio employees, who were mostly for Sinclair, were expected to contribute one day’s salary to the Merriam campaign or their contracts would not be renewed. This was sheer blackmail and the New York Times at the instigation of the Guild reported that ‘motion picture producers attempted to collect funds for Merriam with deceit.’ The producers immediately denied it but it was yet once more thing that antagonised them towards the Guild. Needless to say Merriam won. It’s little wonder that the studios employ banks of lawyers.

2012-01-30T08:57:00.001+02:00

Dark, dismal, dreary, drizzling, depressing and what is more very very cold. It’s been this way for weeks with a few hours of intermittent sunshine and we might just as well be living in Yorkshire as the rain never seems to stop. Has this winter been sent just to add to Greece’s agonies? Much more of it and we’ll all be going stir crazy and screaming for summer. Then no doubt we will be complaining that it’s too darn hot.

Have finished writing Thornton King number six, ‘Men And Their Toys’ all 80000 words of it so there is nothing else on the horizon. Am very pleased with the way it has turned out as I never thought I would write a sixth Thornton King. Will I still be around to see it published? Who knows? It’s a long way off that’s for sure. My Gothic horror, ‘The Museum Mysteries and other Stories’ is on the cards at the moment and T.King number five, ‘Celluloid and Tinsel’ is still to go, presumably later this year.

I still want two plays published, ‘Twilight of Aunt Edna’ and ‘Rosemary.’ The latter has already been published but I have made amendments so it will have to be done again.

Got my nose into a very interesting book at the moment. Surprising what one can find on the shelves. At the last count before we left Yorkshire there was a library of over five thousand books. Now it must be touching six thousand if not more. No wonder Douglas is always yelling, ‘No more books!’ In fact there simply isn’t room for any more. There are two sets of shelves in the guest bedroom crammed with books in double rows; there are books in the library downstairs including all those stacked on top of the piano for which there is no room on the shelves. There are books in my study, books in the office, books in my bedroom. At our doctor’s surgery last month we met a very interesting German woman who was a librarian before moving to Crete. She has a collection of books she wants to get rid of and was bemoaning the fact that she can’t even give them away so what will happen to our six thousand and more when all three of us have popped our clogs? The books in my study are all on the performing arts; plays, histories, theories, biographies, and more in my bedroom. Together with the large collection of theatrical ephemera we have, gathered over the years, I suppose those could be left to a university that might appreciate adding to their theatre collection. That is if they are prepared to collect and ship. For the rest? Again, who knows? All of which has got me off on a tangent and I haven’t continued with the interesting book I was going to write something about. Well, for now, it is called ‘The Hollywood Writers’ Wars’ by Nancy Lynn Schwartz, a heavy hardback tome (in weight that is) published in 1982. I’ll get around to it next time.

2012-01-29T08:36:00.001+02:00

The earthquake was followed up by another twenty-four hours later so I have now slept through three earthquakes. I’ll never forget as a kid seeing the 1936 film ‘San Francisco’ and being terrified out of my mind by the panic in the streets, the falling masonry and in particular the bar scene during the earthquake.

It’s the memory of the swaying and then crashing chandelier that I can still see after all these years, such was its impact. Chandeliers must have a certain cachet in show business. Think of ‘Phantom of the Opera.’ And there are possibly more. It’s a good effect. The film received six Oscar nominations but won only one – for best sound recording.

I can still see Clark Gable in that movie though I have no recollection of Spencer Tracy and Jeannette MacDonald who also starred in it.

Finished reading the ‘Kenneth Williams Letters’ and I was really disappointed to have reached the end because I would have liked more. Judging from these letters he really was quite a remarkable man; not just a funny face and a funny voice but erudite and obviously a deep thinker. It’s a shame he had to suffer so many painful ailments and really I suppose his death at sixty-one came as no surprise. I found myself wishing I had known him. He had something of a reputation of being a viper but was obviously extremely loyal to his friends and in fact I think it was simply that he didn’t suffer fools gladly, and my god the world is full of fools.

We have met a sprightly old lady of 91 who lives in Xania. She is a real charmer and recently she discovered that her life savings of over five thousand euro had been stolen from her bank account and there is no way she can recover that money. Not a nice thing to happen to someone of ninety-one. Not a nice ting to happen to anyone for that matter. What makes the situation even sadder is the police discovered the thief to be a Bulgarian woman who our acquaintance employed to clean her flat and had done so for the last ten years so they obviously got to know each other very well. I don’t suppose they could be referred to as friends exactly but the lady after all this time was naturally completely trusted. Evidently she filched the old girl’s bank card and every two days withdrew seven hundred euro, putting the card back after each withdrawal. She has two children and must have been desperate, the state of affairs in Greece being what they are. The first time was easy, so the second time followed, and the third, and the fourth until Marie went to the bank on other business and discovered the loss. One has to feel sorry not only for her losing all that money but for the woman ruining her life.

But the economic situation in the country gets worse day by day. There are now more people queuing up at soup kitchens and more and more people being made homeless and more and more crime. It is the great depression all over again. In the meantime the government has a list of over 4000 people owing billions in unpaid taxes – a total debt to the state of almost 50billion euros going back many years including –

Yiannis Raptopoulos 14,300,000

Pavlos Psomiadis 1,150,000

Sami Fais 1,820,000

Yiorgos Batatoudis 2,500,000

And a single individual, Nikos Kasimatis owes a staggering 952million!

There is little chance of much of this loot being recovered. And just how did all this come about? I think arrant corruption over many years has a lot to answer for.

The rich get richer. The poor get poorer.

2012-01-27T08:25:00.001+02:00

Yesterday morning at 5.20 Chris and Douglas were both woken by an earthquake, 5.2 on the Richter scale. (There’s a coincidence.) For the second time since coming to Crete I slept soundly through an earthquake. I remember the first time I knew nothing about it until I came across all our neighbours standing at the bottom of the lane in a state of great excitement and they immediately asked the question , ‘Did you hear the earthquake?’ to which the answer was ‘What earthquake?’ Strange way of putting it, did you hear rather than did you feel. Anyway this one was evidently half way between Crete and Santorini and not very far down so Heraklion and the eastern end of the island would have felt it more than us. As far as we can ascertain there has been no damage. Phew! If we were badly damaged by a quake we would be in deep shit and no mistake. Earthquake insurance is very expensive and we’ve never had it.

A further mention on the euthanasia debate: Seven years ago, former rugby player, Tony Nicklinson was the victim of a stroke and suffers from locked-in syndrome, a paralysed body able to move only his head and an active mind; he communicates by using a computer that detects his blinking. In a statement, he described his life as "dull, miserable, demeaning, undignified and intolerable." and he wants to die. He cannot speak and obviously needs constant care. He recently asked Britain's High Court to declare that any doctor who gives him a lethal injection with his consent won't be charged with murder. Under U.K. law, anyone who helps Nicklinson die could be charged even if they are carrying out his wishes. A murder charge has a mandatory life sentence, regardless of motive or circumstance. Nicklinson’s argument is that British law hinders his right to a "private and family life" — guaranteed by the European Convention on Human Rights — on the grounds that being able to choose how to die is a matter of personal autonomy. Since my previous Blog I have discovered that apart from Holland and Switzerland, euthanasia is also legal in Belgium, Luxembourg and the state of Oregon in the United States. So what is the position in the UK at the moment? Evidently there have been forty cases of assisted suicide in the not too distant past but no one has been prosecuted so isn’t it really time the law was changed? Unfortunately for Mister Nicklinson even if it is changed the way the reformers want, suffering as he does from locked-in syndrome, sadly he would still be denied his wish.

2012-01-25T09:58:00.001+02:00

I believe in euthanasia and I believe, even if it happens very gradually, that eventually the practice will be accepted virtually everywhere. What is the point of continuing a life that has no quality, that has no hope, which has nothing but pain? I only know that if my life gets to the stage where I would like it to end it than someone should be allowed to send me peacefully and painlessly into oblivion. So far, as far as I know, only Holland and Switzerland allow assisted deaths and I think one Australian state has tinkered with it. In Holland there has to have been a long rapport between doctor and patient before it is allowed whereas in Switzerland a number of foreigners have gone there for the sole purpose of having their lives ended. Good grief! We do it for animals, why not for humans? Ah, the objectors say, because life is sacred. Life is sacred? I consider this a fatuous argument when you consider how many people are killed in wars, under dictatorships, as the result of crime, accidents, early deaths, natural disasters, from disease in early life, deaths at birth, cot deaths, abuse. How is life sacred? If life were sacred all of us would live to a ripe old age as happy as Larry but that just isn’t the way it is. The other argument is the tired old religious one that so many still cling to, that suicide is a sin and euthanasia is a form of suicide. Neither of these arguments holds water for me. The third argument is that euthanasia will be abused, i.e. let’s get rid of granny, she’s a flaming nuisance and any way we want to inherit her estate. This argument does hold some water. There will always be those ready, willing and able to abuse any system but on the other hand there would not be a rash of illegal killings so it is not an argument worth considering.

Campaigners who want to see the law changed have set up a ‘Commission on Assisted Dying’ saying the current law is inadequate and that assisted death should be allowed within a strict set of rules so as not to be abused. The commission was chaired by Lord Falconer, a barrister and former justice secretary, and included a wide range of experts including doctors, an ex-police commissioner and a former president of the General Medical Council. The panel received evidence from more than 1,300 sources during its year-long inquiry, although some groups opposed to a change in the law refused to take part because of its remit and way it was put together. Wouldn’t it have been better if their arguments are valid to have joined in the discussion and put their point of view? Boycotting strikes me as throwing the baby out with the bath water. The group said that assisted suicide should be allowed if a person was over 18, terminally ill and judged as having less than 12 months to live, making a voluntary choice and not impaired mentally. Before it should be allowed, the person would also need to be independently assessed by two doctors, the report said and that they should also be acting under their own steam and not be mentally impaired in any way. In practice this means that dementia patients would not be eligible, including the author Sir Terry Pratchett, who helped to fund the commission, as those in the final year of the condition would not be considered mentally fit enough. Nor would a person who has a significant physical impairment, such as locked-in syndrome, as they would have longer than 12 months to live under normal circumstances.

The commissioners said the current arrangements were "inadequate, incoherent and should not continue". But one of the commissioners, the Reverend Canon Dr James Woodward, disagreed with the conclusion.

Sarah Wootton, chief executive of ‘Dignity in Dying,’ said the report was "comprehensive and robust", adding she hoped it would "form the foundation of future legislative change" but Dr John Wiles, chairman of ‘Care Not Killing’ - "The safeguards proposed... are really inadequate" and Dr Peter Saunders, campaign director of ‘Care Not Killing,’ an alliance of faith and disability groups and doctors, said: "This investigation was unnecessary, biased and lacking in transparency, and its report is seriously flawed. It is being spun as a comprehensive, objective and independent review into this complicated issue. It is anything but." Rubbish.

2012-01-23T08:27:00.001+02:00

Another couple of movies out of the cupboard, seen before but well worth watching again. We seem to have accumulated quite a collection of DVDs since moving to Crete and of course brought out from England a few hundred video tapes embracing all manner of programmes from mainstream film, opera, ballets, to ‘Carry On’ movies to comedy shows, documentaries, odds and sods that interested us at the time. Some of these tapes have deteriorated which is a shame. I would have liked the other night to have watched again the Merchant/Ivory film ‘A Room With A View’ but this tape was one of those no longer viewable, the flickering and jumping of frames was jut too irritating. One of Douglas’s favourite films is ‘Thoroughly Modern Millie’ which he must have watched at least twenty times and knows off by heart.

I love Japanese period films, especially the work of Kurasawa, ‘Seven Samurai’ ‘Rashomon’ ‘Throne of Blood’ ‘The Hidden Fortress’ ‘Ran’ and a wonderful movie called ‘The Burmese Harp’ directed by an equally brilliant Kon Ichikawa, and I particularly like what I call small movies, ‘Tea With Mussolini,’ ‘Ladies In Lavender,’ ‘Maurice,’ ‘Death In Venice,’ ‘The Madness of King George,’ ‘The History Boys,’ the films of the Spanish director Pedro Almodόvar for example and the two we watched the other night fall into that category. Firstly that beautiful Italian film that won any amount of awards and quite rightly too – ‘Cinema Paradiso’ I can’t remember how many times we’ve watched it but this time it was the director’s cut which added three quarters of an hour to the film. I still loved every minute of it. Douglas said he could do without the extra three quarters of an hour thank you. Too many lingering shots.

The other one we watched again was ‘Total Eclipse’ with David Thewlis as Verlaine and a young Leonardo DiCaprio (well he had to be young playing a sixteen year old) as Arthur Rimbaud. Marvellous casting if one looks at photographs of Rimbaud and beautifully played by diCaprio. He really is a very fine film actor. The only performance of his I have seen and haven’t taken to was his Romeo but then I didn’t rate the film highly and not everyone can play Shakespeare.

The spiel on one of the many posters for ‘Total Eclipse’ reads –

‘Touched by Genius

Cursed by madness

Blinded by love.’

DiCaprio certainly doesn’t shy away from controversy. In an earlier film ‘The Basketball Diaries’ he plays a young junkie who in order to get money for his habit allows himself to be fellated in public toilets. Now he has just played J. Edgar Hoover, reputed drag artist and homosexual.

Rimbaud had a four year old affair with his mentor, the poet Verlaine who was married and a father, and in ‘Total Eclipse’ the physical aspect is not shirked hence, I suppose, the ‘Blinded by love,’ for who knows where love will take one?

Rimbaud, who evidently changed the face of French poetry at that young age – ‘Touched by genius,’ was it seemed a total iconoclast with little respect for anybody and anything – ‘Cursed by madness.’

Verlaine, whilst they were in Belgium, bought a revolver and shot Rimbaud in the hand. He was arrested and then accused of unnatural practices, something not to be encouraged in Belgium. Having been examined by doctors none too gently the verdict was that he had committed ‘acts of sodomy both active and passive’ and sentenced to two years in prison. Now I might not be up on medical procedures, I can understand how passive intercourse can be ascertained, but how on earth can active be proved?

Anyway, having served his prison sentence Verlaine and Rimbaud met one last time, Verlaine wanting to resume their relationship but Rimbaud having none of it. He gave up writing at an early age and the rest of his life was travel and adventure until he died of cancer at the age of 37.

The film’s screenplay is by Christopher Hampton and is based on his stage play. It is a gem.

2012-01-21T09:14:00.002+02:00

At last some glorious sunshine after weeks of rain and grey cloud filled skies but a bitterly cold wind blowing down from the north and the courtyard littered with fallen oranges. Algeria has seen quite heavy snow and when last did snow fall in North Africa? The wood stove in the breakfast room has been going all day, previously unheard of, being lit only in the evenings, and the central heating has been switching itself on all night despite the thermostat being turned down another coupe of degrees. I have never known Crete to be so cold so my prediction some weeks ago of a hard winter has come to pass. In the old days before modern heating when there was probably one fireplace in the house I believe if a Cretan felt the cold all he or she did was put on another sweater. That might warm the body a bit but would have no effect on the damp and it can get very damp, especially after days of rain. An English friend visited our lovely Doctor Elizabeth as he was suffering from bronchitis, something he had never experienced before, and she said chest complaints are common among northerners this time of year being caused by a combination of the damp and an allergy due to spores from the olive trees as the fruit is reaped; the branches being thwacked quite violently so that the olives fall on to the nets spread out below.

The chest specialist at IKA (National health) Doctor Vilgarides, who I see once a month for a check-up, is a delightful bundle of charm, always full of high spirits. ‘That’s what you came to Crete for,’ he said with a laugh, ‘the climate.’ I must admit that despite all the current woes created mainly by the short-sighted corrupt ones and the financial situation, petrol has gone up dramatically by 10 cents a litre in a matter of a couple of days and now stands at nearly two euro! Which means everything else must go up. Going into Souda yesterday to see Doctor Vulgarides there was hardly a car on the road and despite being Friday when people do their shopping for the weekend, the supermarket and Kalyves town were practically deserted as everyone pulls in their horns. This does nothing for the Greek economy. It is a never ending downward spiral unless the stupid politicians which include the French and Germans change their tactics and the banks are made to pay for their incessant greed. The Cretans on the whole though are a philosophical lot. When there was a bank strike and we had no cash in hand our vet said, ‘What do you want money for? You live in a village don’t you? You’ve got a garden haven’t you? Keep chickens, grow potatoes, grow tomatoes. You have friends you don’t need money.’ I think I have mentioned before how in circumstances like this, not being in a position to pay, the usual reaction in the village where people know you is pay when you can. And indeed the garden has over the years, while I was still capable of working in it, provided us with a variety of vegetables, and of course masses of fruit. Oranges and lemons at the moment (humongous lemons, bigger than a cricket ball and juicy) and we have just reaped our first olives from the six little trees I bought some years back. They have at last taken off. Eggs we sometimes get from a neighbour when her chickens are laying well and I can’t remember when last we bought olive oil as friends who have olive trees constantly supply us with all we need. I remember in England how sparingly we used olive oil and how here we go through litres of it every year: virgin, cold pressed and pressed and it is all delicious.

All right, so it is not the country we came to fifteen years ago but the world is not the same world, is it?

2012-01-19T08:50:00.000+02:00

An interesting few evenings viewing. As the Greek TV stations usually put out what could be a movie worth watching very late at night we seldom see them. Once or twice one has been recorded for viewing at a decent hour otherwise we haven’t watched Greek telly for weeks except for the government channel Vouli that broadcasts a ballet every Saturday, an opera on Sundays, and occasionally an interesting documentary. So we have been selecting programmes from our archives and this time came up with ‘Broadway Melody of 1935’ and ‘Broadway Melody of 1938’ also the television production of ‘Pennies From Heaven’ in which Chris dances as a prostitute and as a cowgirl, both very pretty I have to say. It was fascinating watching it again after all this time. Douglas was a little discontented, not grasping the concept but Chris and I enjoyed it enormously and we all agreed the performances were fabulous. We then watched the American movie which we remembered as a disappointment and it still was second time round, mainly because in order to fit a movie time-scale it became a précis of the original and fascinating sections had to be left out. It did have a couple of simply enormous extravagant production numbers but even they didn’t do all that much for it. We had previously spent many evenings watching the American programme ‘24’ starring Keifer Sutherland and were really hooked on it. This was the first series and evidently nine were made!

With my first attempt, at a Gothic horror, ‘The Museum Mysteries’ to be published later this year. Douglas is of the opinion that I end it too abruptly but I can’t agree with him as to drag out a climax is to defeat its purpose which brings me to the endings of both ‘24’ and ‘Pennies From heaven.’ In the first there is an ending and an alternative ending. In the ending the wife of the hero, having gone through hell and high water is shot and killed and in the alternative ending she’s rescued and they all live happily ever after. Now Douglas and Chris both go for the first ending but I, being a real soft-hearted Nellie, go for the alternative. We do however, all agree about the ending of ‘Pennies From Heaven.’ I nearly misspelt pennies there and that would have been a Freudian slip would it not?) No, actually because it was sex, the desire for and the lack of it from his wife that got our hero Arthur into all his trouble, I suppose a misspelling wouldn’t be totally inaccurate. But to the ending – Having been accused of a murder he did not in fact commit, Arthur is sentenced to be hanged and in the TV version we witness the actual hanging. In the film version it is glossed over by Arthur standing on the scaffold next to the rope and singing but we presume that is where he met his end. And that is where the show should have ended. Maybe a shot after of the girl-friend Eileen standing on a bridge looking down at the river but nothing more. Unfortunately Arthur puts in a surprise appearance with the rather fatuous line ‘After all we’ve been through we deserve a happy ending’ or words to that effect. Sorry, fable though it may be, for me Arthur is most definitely dead and does not put in an appearance to wind up the show. Of course in the film having Arthur standing by the rope singing was artistic licence – I think and we don’t actually witness the execution. The method of execution in Illinois in the ‘30s was the electric chair by the way. Also I felt the location chosen for the blind girl and her subsequent murder was totally inappropriate consisting as it did mainly of what appeared to be rundown or abandoned factories. What was she doing walking there? She said she lived in a house over the way but that house never came into view. In the TV version the girl walks trough a field just off the road and with a beautiful scenic background. Evidently the ground belonged to her family and that is perfectly reasonable.

And the small cheats: the policeman talking to Arthur’s wife says his shoe matches a footprint found at the scene of the crime. Again perfectly feasible in a possibly muddy field that doesn’t have much in the way of human traffic but on concrete paving where any number of people might have walked? He also states that they have Arthur’s fingerprints on a cigarette packet discarded at the scene. Hey, hold on one cotton-picking minute there, buster. When did Arthur have his fingerprints taken that they could be compared? Tch! Tch!

2012-01-17T09:39:00.001+02:00

Back in December I wrote about a play, ‘The Wit To Woo’ by Mervyn Peake that was produced at the Arts Theatre, how the critics gave it a right mauling with the consequent disastrous effect that had on the author. I have just come across a reference to the play as I am in the middle of rereading Kenneth Williams’ letters and in 1971 a gentleman by the name of J.B. Batchelor, lecturer in English at Birmingham University wrote to him asking for his comments on the play. I didn’t know Williams was in it but this is what he writes –

‘I read the play in February 1957 and I was struck by the nature of the dialogue. It is always the words that interest me and I hardly ever find myself thinking in critical terms of construction or plot or technical details of stage mechanics. Mervyn Peakes’ dialogue was full of verbal conceits, wonderful imagery, natural fluency and, above all, theatrically effective. I had no hesitation of accepting the part of Pike. I thought it glittered with malevolence and vituperative wit.’ He then has a brief word about his ability to play the part and continues with, ‘The play needed wholehearted bravura acting and vocal relish. In the vent it was played in a modern high comedy manner with considerable throwaway technique’ (Director’s choice I ask myself?) ‘You will understand it would be impolitic of me to discuss what I regard as shortcomings in performers or in the director …With the right cast and management, a rare combination I admit but not an impossibility, I think The Wit To Woo could be an engaging Gothic comedy and a profitable venture.’

That was his opinion and so what went wrong? Was the play blamed for the shortcomings of director and cast? Well it would most certainly not be the first time and it wouldn’t be the last. Mister Williams and I concur on the abilities, or lack of, of many a theatre director. I’m sure there are actors who say the same about me. But this is what he says in a letter to Stanley Baxter whilst rehearing for the play ‘The Platinum Cat.’ – ‘The cast have all got better and better during the four weeks and this is mostly due to Bev (Beverley Cross). I know this is not saying very much but it has been the first time in my life that I have worked with a real director. I know that this is probably, because I have met with so many bug-eyed phonies and I have always tended to dismiss them all as a bunch of meretricious parasites.

I wish I had met Mister Williams. His letters are fascinating, humorous, intelligent, educated and in many instances wise, a natural philosopher, not at all what one would have expected looking at the Carry On films which is what most people remember him for these days, especially that wonderful line when he is playing Julius Caesar, ‘Infamy! Infamy! They’ve all got it in for me!’ This certainly too often applies to the critics.

2012-01-15T09:09:00.003+02:00

An estimated 3,000 people dressed as zombies took to the streets of Brighton one day last year.. It's the latest proof, if any was needed, that the undead are really on the march - culturally at least. Nearly 10,000 people have paraded in Mexico City dressed as zombies in what organisers claim is the biggest "zombie walk" ever held. Evidently the zombie craze is mostly down to video games, children playing them despite the 18-certificate. Zombie video games are a niche market which makes millions of dollars a year and consumes millions of hours of youngsters' leisure time. But it's not just games. Ever-growing legions of the undead have been appearing on TV and cinema screens: the blockbuster series like ‘The Walking Dead’ or ‘Dead Set’ or of Brad Pitt's latest zombie movie ‘World War which is why Mexico claims the biggest zombie walk and why three thousand people in zombie costumes turned up to amble, shamble and groan their way through Brighton’s city centre and along the sea front. But some media critics and cultural commentators have begun to wonder whether this explosion of zombie enthusiasm is, as well as a bit of fun, an expression of something else. So what might the current zombie craze, this mass of rotting flesh, tell us about the world we're living in now? Paul Gilding Author and former Greenpeace CEO said "Zombies are incredibly popular, the growth is phenomenal - not only are they in films, TV shows and fan productions on You Tube, but there's a vast growth in books, with zombie survival guides selling very, very well on Amazon. You even see small garden ornaments dressed as zombies - zombie garden gnomes!" In fact, Winchester is soon to become the first university in the UK to offer a study module devoted entirely to zombies. A Dr Leaning said "We're living through the hardest economic times in most young people's memories. Maybe zombies speak to austerity Britain in a way other monsters don't." Nick Pearce, director of the Institute for Public Policy Research, is a man who spends much of his time reflecting on the interplay of democracy, economy and citizenship says, "Even before the global economic crisis we saw unskilled young men finding it much harder to get a foothold in the labour market and since the crisis there has been a rocketing of youth unemployment. There is something in the idea that if you can't see a future, if you don't have a sense of progress for yourself personally, then you are stuck in the present tense, and this would lend itself to the notion of a kind of recurrent nightmare of repeatedly being a living-dead." Some of Brighton's 'un-dead' said they dressed as zombies just for fun

Paul Gilding believes that something more profound might lie behind the recent boom in zombie culture. He suggested, this is why the anti-capitalist protesters on Wall Street and elsewhere have sometimes dressed in zombie costumes to underline their point. "The system is eating itself alive," he said. "The idea that we can have infinite growth on a finite planet is just not physically possible." So have zombies really been rising in such numbers in recent years because they're a metaphor for our times? Whatever the reason there is most definitely a zombie craze.

The current Guinness world record is held by Asbury Park in the US, where 4,093 zombies marched in 2010. Zombie walks have grown in popularity worldwide in recent years. A group in Brisbane in Australia has also laid claim to the record after massing 8,000 zombies last month. Apart from Mexico elsewhere in Latin America, Lima in Peru, Santiago in Chile and Sao Paulo in Brazil have all staged zombie walks last year.

2012-01-13T09:59:00.001+02:00

It is cold. In fifteen years I have never known Crete to be so cold. The central heating is switching itself on at the point we normally turn it down to at night and the wood stove has been going all day for the last three days. Can’t remember when we last saw the sun and the rain has been incessant, not heavy but a depressing drizzle, plus a freezing wind and hailstorm for added interest. Looking out at the courtyard first thing this morning I saw it was littered with oranges the weather had knocked off the branches. Despite this the trees are still laden, so much so that some branches are hanging virtually vertical to he ground, but I learn from the news that orange juice is going to shoot up in price. Doesn’t everything? Orange juice prices hit record levels reads the headline. More than half the world’s orange juice comes from Brazil and traders say the main reasons for the price hike are safety concerns about juice from Brazil and cold weather in Florida. The US Food and Drug Administration said carbendazim, a fungicide, has been found in shipments from Brazil. Orange juice has risen by about 25% since the beginning of the year, to $2.12 a pound. Carbendazim is banned in the US, but is used legally in Brazil to treat black spot on trees. Consumption at the low levels that have been reported does not raise safety concerns, the FDA said in a letter published on its website but any orange juice which could be a risk to the public would be removed from supermarket shelves. The US is the second-largest producer of orange juice, with production mainly concentrated in Florida. Why did I always think it was California? Did Mister Steinbeck make me think that? Maybe they gave up oranges for grapes, wine being more profitable but that’s only a guess. A few days of cold weather in Florida has led to ice being found in some fruit and damage to leaves so it is not only Crete feeling the ravages of winter. Interesting that oranges grow in profusion on Crete and right now they are everywhere but the EU I believe banned their export because they are too big!

Never mind the orange juice, overnight the cost of petrol has risen alarmingly, from 169 to 176 lefta (cents) a litre. This means the heating oil has gone up again and I dread to think what it will be. Two thirds of a tank at the start of winter cost 660 euro

We have had three tons of firewood - 450 euro and the last two electricity bills plus the new property tax has cost us almost a thousand, so Greece sure ain’t what it used to be. And although this means every time some money comes in virtually all of it immediately goes out again. At least our income is in pounds so we are not as badly off as 20% of the population living below the poverty line. It has got so bad some mothers are giving up their children to charitable organisations because they can t afford to feed them and children are the whole reason for existence in Greece.

Doesn’t it make you want to bring down every curse on the fat cats who have fled the country taking their money with them and those who owe literally millions in tax and seem to be getting away with it.?

Rising energy prices have pushed Germany's inflation rate up to 2.3% in 2011, the highest since 2008, official figures show. Big deal!

2012-01-11T09:22:00.000+02:00

So the French are trying to ban prostitution in Paris and one of the world's biggest insurance companies in Germany organizes an orgy with prostitutes for its top salesmen at a Hungarian spa! Ergo, a division of the firm Munich Re, has confirmed that this happened in 2007. Gerhard Schneibel, journalist for the media organisation Deutsche Welle, said: "There was plenty of alcohol and 20 prostitutes there. They had colour-coded arm-bands, apparently. One was for regular hostesses, the other was for prostitutes, and the white ribbon was for prostitutes reserved for top management." Top management always get the cream do they not? Didn’t the girls not chosen for top management feel their noses had been put somewhat out of joint? There’s nothing more depressing than being second class.

Still on the subject of sex, a subject of never ending interest you must agree, those of a religious bent are totally engrossed with it one way or another, an account of a frenzied encounter in a shower has earned US writer David Guterson the annual Bad Sex In Fiction Award. He beat the likes of Stephen King with a scene from his novel Ed King, a modern version of the fable of Oedipus. The offending passage in the book is introduced as "the part where a mother has sex with her son". On hearing of his win, Guterson said: "Oedipus practically invented bad sex, so I'm not in the least bit surprised." East Enders star Barbara ‘boobs to the fore’ Windsor (who else?) presented the award to the author’s publishers, he being unable to attend the ceremony which is now in its 19th year, having been established by Auberon Waugh in 1993. Previous winners include Norman Mailer, AA Gill, Melvyn Bragg and Tom Wolfe. The award is run by The Literary Review, which says its purpose is to "draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it". It’s a pity there isn’t a similar for film, or is there?

Ed King, Guterson’s fifth novel, takes the Sophoclean tragedy Oedipus Rex (the title is a pun on the original and I’m glad he didn’t call him Thornton) and transports it to late 20th Century Seattle. As with the Oedipus tale the story revolves around a baby boy who is given up for adoption and goes on to become one of the world's most powerful men, killing his father and sleeping with his mother in the process. Branded a "sweaty-palmed narrative" by the Washington Post, the novel contains several pages of explicit exposition. One goes into exhaustive detail about an erotic massage, where the protagonist "massaged, kneaded, stretched, rubbed, pinched, flicked, feathered, licked, kissed, and gently bit her shoulders." But judges said they were finally swayed by a passage that begins: "Ed stood with his hands at the back of his head, like someone just arrested, while she abused him with a bar of soap." The scene concludes: "Then they rinsed, dried, dressed, and went to an expensive restaurant for lunch." Reviewing the novel in the Express, David Robson argued that "Guterson's descriptions of hyperactive incest are absolutely unbearable and not in a good way".

Well it’s all good publicity I suppose even if it’s not good literature. Should make the best seller list in no time if it hasn’t done so already.

2012-01-09T09:31:00.000+02:00

Vamos is icy. This is the coldest I remember ever being on Crete. The kitchen and my study are the two areas without central heating and walking into them is like walking into an icebox. We have however been spared the simply dreadful weather that has engulfed the rest of Europe. I see pictures where men in Orthodox countries brave icy waters for Epiphany. In Greece priests throw a crucifix into the sea and a dozen young men or more all dive in after it. I presume the one who claims it gets good luck for the year, that is if he recovers from pneumonia. Mind you, in Russia they have to break the ice. They’re all mad. The things people will do for religion!

It is said that those the gods wish to destroy they first make mad and without doubt the world is due for disintegration pretty darn soon because madness has surely set in.

As though the world didn’t have enough superstitions, enough religions, enough sects, the Swedish government has recognised a new one. The Church of Kopimism claims that "kopyacting" - sharing information through copying - is akin to a religious service. Can you really believe this? The "spiritual leader" of the church (or should one say charlatan to join all the other charlatans) said recognition was a "large step". But quite naturally others were less enthusiastic “It doesn't mean illegal file-sharing will become legal, any more than if 'Jedi' was recognised as a religion everyone would be walking around with light sabres,” he said.

A music analyst said. Kopimism as a religious organisation was registered shortly before Christmas. Gustav Nipe, chairman of the organisation said, “We had to apply three times.! Gosh! Third time lucky huh? The church, which holds CTRL+C and CTRL+V as sacred symbols, does not directly promote illegal file sharing, focusing instead on the open distribution of knowledge to all. It was founded by 19-year-old philosophy student and leader Isak Gerson. He hopes that file-sharing will now be given religious protection. "For the Church of Kopimism, information is holy and copying is a sacrament. Information holds a value, in itself and in what it contains and the value multiplies through copying. Therefore copying is central for the organisation and its members," he said in a statement. "Being recognised by the state of Sweden is a large step for all of Kopimi. Hopefully this is one step towards the day when we can live out our faith without fear of persecution," he added. Despite the new-found interest in the organisation, experts said religious status for file-sharing would have little effect on the global crackdown on piracy.

And that is what this ridiculous bullshit is all about – the protection of internet piracy. The government is pushing ahead with the controversial legislation despite continued opposition.

Further to my previous remarks regarding the feral youth of today, how about this for a bunch of bent bananas? A 10-year-old boy has been arrested over an alleged attack on two teachers at a school in south-east London. One of the victims, who are both women, suffered a broken leg and suspected dislocated kneecap and the other had a facial injury. The boy, who was arrested at the scene on suspicion of causing grievous bodily harm, has since been bailed to return on a date in mid-February. Both women, who are in their 50s, were taken by ambulance to a nearby hospital in Orpington. What do you suppose will happen to the boy? He will be told don’t be a naughty boy and don’t do that again.

2012-01-07T09:15:00.000+02:00

The compensation culture in the Disunited Kingdom has really gone beyond the pale, quite ridiculous in fact. Is this all because of elf and safety or just about the freebies one can get for trifling accidents? A school teacher stubs her toe in class and is awarded damages of £500. Okay, you say, so what is £500 out of the education budget? Wait for it. The lawyers in the case earned over thirteen thousand! And this is not an isolated happening. Some compensation paid out is more than five hundred of course but always the lawyer’s fees are in five figures. One teacher was paid compensation for having her thumb dislocated by an unruly pupil and was awarded a nice tidy sum, but who was to blame in this incident? The school? The modern educational system that is without discipline and allows children to be as feral as they like without fear of punishment? The violence in the media and computer games? Bad vibes from the internet? The parents who would simply wash their hands of the whole thing or rush to absolve their little darling, probably putting the blame fairly and squarely on the teacher who shouldn’t have had her thumb there in the first place or what was she doing that the boy had to defend himself from possible serious injury and hospitalisation? Of course the union backs its members in their claims but the union’s officers seem to have about as much sense as Greek politicians when they cannot see the damage they are doing, the never ending drain on limited resources. It’s all very well decrying financial cuts and calling for more money and then it is wasted. Now I don’t argue that a stubbed toe or a dislocated thumb are very painful conditions but worthy of compensation? I really do not think so, not for one moment. Thank god the compensation culture has not reached Greece. If you saw the state of some of the pavements in Athens you could be quite sure Greek lawyers would make a fortune but in most cases the answer would simply be watch where you put your feet.

As far as children and the internet is concerned evidently four leading web providers are to offer customers the option to block adult content at the point of subscription.

BT, Sky, TalkTalk and Virgin will offer the protection for smartphones, laptops and PCs.

It comes as David Cameron met industry representatives amid concern over the sexualisation of children. The prime minister also launched Parentport - a website to help parents complain about inappropriate content.

Mr Cameron said there was a "growing tide of concern" amongst parents who were concerned about children being exposed to "inappropriate advertising and sexual imagery. There's no doubt that the sort of pressures - what you see on television programmes and advertising hoardings and sort of a mixture of pester power problems but also just the sense that our children are being forced to grow up too quickly," The new measures, aimed at helping parents protect their children from internet porn and other explicit sites, follow a report earlier this year by the Mothers' Union Christian charity known as the Bailey Report.

But will it really work? How do you control mobile phones for example? Kids are also very smart and have proved themselves more than capable of getting around the filters set up in schools so it won't be long until there is widely-available "advice" online about how to avoid the home versions. TalkTalk blocks a variety of websites, including suicide and self harm, violence and weapons, dating sites, gambling sites and file sharing. Parents decide what sites they want blocked but the fact is technology is not the answer – parental control is, except these days parents just don’t seem to have any.

2012-01-05T09:15:00.000+02:00

Watched the movie “Fried Green Tomatoes at the whistle stop café.” Amongst all the dross Hollywood churns out, now and again it comes up with a gem and this is one of them.

What a delightful surprise for the start of the New Year. Our friend Ian Dean sent us a DVD “At The Haunted End of the Day” a biography of William Walton whose music I am particularly fond of, especially monumental works like “Belshazzar’s Feast.” We played it almost immediately and all three of us thought it quite wonderful. What a history, what a career, what music! If you are unfamiliar with Walton’s music you might know it from Olivier’s three Shakespeare films, the beautiful haunting funeral music from Hamlet for example or the truly thrilling Agincourt music building up to its climax with the shower of arrows desiccating the galloping French knights, a scene I never tire of watching and it is the music that really makes it.

Books, books, books, another Christmas treat, this time from our friend Ray Peters who sent me “Bull’s Eyes,” some memoirs by the actor Peter Bull. It is not a volume I would have thought of buying or even reading for that matter but having opened it, it has been difficult to get my nose out of it; what larks, Pip, as Joe Gargary would say. I haven’t laughed so much over a book in quite awhile. Sometimes a little on the twee side but for the most part written with such refreshing wit and self-effacing charm, how it evokes memories of my early days in the theatre despite his career being well ahead of mine, starting in fact in 1931, the year I was born, and mine starting twenty years later. But the experiences were so similar. He died ‘unmarried’ but he had a friend so you know what that means and it would seem he was a great person to know. I’m sorry our paths never crossed. These memoirs are extracts put together and edited by Sheridan Morley from different writings and very well done too. Apart from his early experiences I particularly enjoyed his description of Hollywood where he was under contract for six months, did four days work and finally didn’t even end up in the picture. A young English actress put under contract had to undergo two film tests a week, one on Monday, one on Thursday, because the studio simply had no idea of what to do with her. Eventually having done precisely nothing she returned to England where she immediately made a big hit in an English picture. I wonder what the studio executives in Hollywood thought when they watched that. As William Goldman said, in Hollywood nobody knows anything.

Brooding on the name Morley brings to mind another book I have just finished, this one called “The Muses darling” and based on the life of one of my favourite Elizabethan characters, that roistering boistering (no such word according to my computer) boy genius, one Christopher Marlowe whose name was sometimes spelt Morley but that can wait till another time.

2012-01-03T10:37:00.001+02:00

So The Daily Mail will no longer be printed and available in Greece. We have been getting it every Friday for the theatre, film and book reviews and Jan Moir’s column which I always enjoyed but alas no more. It advertises in the last issue that the paper will still be available on kindle or I-pad and as I am not a proud possessor of either of these expensive toys and have neither the means nor desire to get them in the immediate future that’s the end of The Daily Mail for us.

First of all we lost The Sunday Times which we relied on for reviews but this was from choice as the price stayed the same, a hefty five euro, but the paper gradually became a skeleton of its former self starting with the magazine and the comics and finally, despite howls of outrage, the culture section. They did leave in car sales but what ex-pat is interested in British car sales for goodness sake? No reason is given for the demise of The Daily Mail but I can only assume it has all to do with the economic situation in Greece. Were the publishers not being paid? More than likely. But it is sad really because it is a blow, albeit a small one in comparison to much else, to the Greek economy and of course it means more people out of work.

Well, here we are already in to the third day of the year, only 352 days to Christmas. Apart from being invited by friends for lunch this last Christmas Day and again on New Year’s, the festive season passed by hardly noticed. I don’t know if there were many in Greece who felt festive. We sent no cards for the very first time. The money that could have gone towards that went on the iniquitous new property tax the government have brought in. Interestingly the financial situation of Greek’s politicians reveal that most of them, apart from drawing pretty hefty salaries, have well over the million euro stashed away, and that is apart from other assets they might have like one of them owning six rental properties. They all obviously had a very festive season, no worries there, though I am sure none of them are looking forward to the next general election. Lose your seat and you lose the gravy train and, as the banks aren’t paying decent interest these days, you’d best find yourself a decent job or be another of the ever increasing number of unemployed. It’s a bloody mess and no mistake. Happy New Year, Greece.

2012-01-01T09:08:00.000+02:00

The first day of 2012: to whom shall I send best wishes for a happy and peaceful New Year? First of all of course to my nearest and dearest, to family, and then to good friends far and near. To those who were once friends but who for some reason or other best known to themselves have dropped out of our lives but who we still remember with affection. To the poor people of Iraq and Afghanistan, Somalia, and any country living under the threat of militant Islam. May their lives be made easier and less frightening. To the mad Mullahs and brainwashed Jihadists themselves, may they find peace and discover that truth does not exist in murder and mayhem, bombs and bullets and that they are as far away from the prophet as it is possible to be. To the Christian fundamentalists who evince such unchristian hatred, ditto. To the Iranian people and the Zimbabweans and any others living in the shadow of a malevolent dictatorship. To those living under regimes that allow torture. To the gays of Ghana, Nigeria, and other African nations reverting to the perceived morality of ancient tribal Israel and the unforgiving religion of the Middle Ages who are liable to lengthy prison sentences, torture, and in some countries even death, simply for being themselves.. To druggies everywhere in the vain hope they may be cured of their addiction and to those who feast and grow rich on their pain. To the sufferers of cancer and HIV and in hopes that a positive cure might at last be found. For the homeless, the destitute, and the starving. For the corrupt politicians of any nation in the hope that this year might possibly see them turn honest and put their country’s and ordinary citizen’s interests first. For the fabulously wealthy both individual and institutional. May they find it in themselves to use some of that wealth to succour those less favoured. To the bankers without conscience who helped create the state the world of finance is in and are still paying themselves millions in bonuses. To the Jewish community in Israel where ultra-orthodox Jews are evidently trying to force their beliefs on those of a more secular frame of mind. You would have thought, thinking of Jewish history, that they would be able to get along without friction in their own land but evidently when it comes to religion such is not the case. For the priests of the Orthodox and Armenian churches who have recently disgraced themselves at Christmas by brawling with broomsticks like hooligans in the Church of The Holy Sepulchre. To oppressed and abused women everywhere.

Love, peace, and a happy New Year to one and all.

Glyn.

2011-12-30T09:26:00.002+02:00

Alan Ayckbourn has just produced his 75^th play. Seventy five plays! How can anyone be so prolific, it beggars belief. And how many of Mister Ayckbourn’s seventy-five plays have I seen? Three maybe four. The man is a history of theatre all to himself. Anyone using his life and work on ‘Mastermind’ would have sunk without trace.

Have you heard of an author by the name of Georgette Heyer? I must admit, like the jockey who was the author of over forty novels and whose name I have forgotten, I hadn’t heard of her, but a biography has just been published informing me that Ms. Heyer (Politically Correct there you see?) published, that is she had published 55 novels still in demand and selling millions! We all know about lady authors who reputedly produce book after book. Sometimes I think after the first few best sellers they become a brand name for a factory. I think Agony Christie wrote all her books. No one else could possibly write like Ms Christie but take Barbara Cartland for example who evidently produced a number of romantic novels clearly plagiarising Ms. Heyer’s early success and just as clearly, Ms. Heyer was horrified and had this to say, “I would have borne it better if Miss Cartland had not been so common-minded, so salacious and so illiterate” Oh, boy! She went on to say that the novel she wrote aged 19 which Ms. Cartland had plagiarised “had more style, more of what it takes, than this offal which Cartland has written at the age of 46.” Ms. Heyer, according to her biographer, was not a nice lady at all. If the plagiarism was so obvious how come there was no action taken for breach of copyright? These days a shit-hot lawyer would pounce without a second thought.

Still on the subject of books I have just finished reading “The Lancashire Witches” by Harrison Ainsworth, another nineteenth century writer and another prolific one. A friend and associate of all the famous and literary names of his day; Disraeli, Bulwer-Lytton, Coleridge, Thackeray, Carlyle, Southy, the Count D’Orsey, Dickens. His first novel “Rookwood” went through three editions earned him a fortune and made him famous. As a schoolboy (Manchester Grammar) in the basement of the family home he was producing plays he had written, and he wrote articles, short stories, etcetera for various magazines, but it was his Gothic novels that hit the bullseye. ‘The Lancashire Witches’ is the only one I have read and it truly is a Gothic novel to out-Gothic them all, and a massive one – 716 pages, the writing as florid as Mister Marion Crawford. No typewriter to make life easier and, even more so, no computer, just everything written out by hand. Can you imagine the work that entails and that was only one novel of many? It was the same of course for all writers of the period. Think of the thousands and thousands of words Dickens produced and the Russians with their massive tomes.

The interesting thing about ‘The Lancashire Witches’ is that he writes of them as if their witchcraft really did exist, that they were in the thrall of Satan, even to the extent of being able to fly on their broomsticks – in one instance two people fly on a hazel switch! Naturally King James features heavily. No story of The Pendle witches, the witch hunts, the tortures, the burning at the stake, can be told ignoring the baleful influence of that strange superstitious man. Isn’t it weird that his influence is felt to this very day with the production of the King James Bible?

2011-12-28T08:21:00.001+02:00

Here is a moral problem to solve. Nature sometimes throws up some pretty weird phenomena, not least of which are Siamese twins. In many cases apparently they can with modern surgery be separated but here is the dilemma – just recently conjoined twins have been born in Brazil with two heads, two functioning brains - but a single heart. Doctors say separating the twins, named Jesus and Emanuel, is not currently an option because there is only one set of organs, Reuters reports. They are being monitored by specialists to see how they develop. Dr. Neila Dahas, who is treating the newborns, said surgery was not being considered at the moment. But she said separating the boys would be impossible because of the single set of organs - and that it was difficult to choose which head to remove because both brains were functioning well. And this is the moral dilemma because, if both brains are functioning normally and both have been breastfed with normal appetites then both boys are alive and to take off the head of one is without doubt to commit murder.

Patrick O'Brien, a spokesman for the UK's Royal College of Obstetrician and Gynaecologists who has been involved in several conjoined twin cases, said no decisions were likely to be made about Jesus and Emanuel's future for some time. "A lot of work is needed, in terms of scans and tests, before doctors will know if they can separate them or not, and just how organs and blood vessels are shared and linked. It takes quite a while before they can decide how feasible it is." But what if after a lengthy spell of work and tests there is no chance for the boys to be separated. They have now developed further as human beings; does the option of removing one head still remain and how do you decide which one it is to be? Toss a coin? Say eeny-meeny-miny-mo? Pray for enlightenment? It’s a Gordian knot and no mistake. Jesus and Emanuel the boys - they might share one body but they are still two boys - might be named but was God anywhere around when, like so many unfortunates, they were malformed in the womb?

I am most definitely an Epicurean. According to a review in The Sunday Times, in a book, “THE SWERVE: How the Renaissance Began” the author, Steven Greenblatt states that the philosophy of Epicurus, a man now widely misunderstood simply as an advocate for the pleasures of the table was, according to Lucretius much more startling. “Predating modern physics by centuries, he speculated that the universe is composed of atoms in constant motion and that everything in it, from humans to trees is made by these particles swerving randomly and then dissolving in a ceaseless cycle” As Greenblatt puts it, for Epicurus there was “no master plan, no divine architect, no intelligent design” and therefore no afterlife and no fear of death. As a result the highest aims for a human being are the avoidance of pain and the pursuit of pleasure – by which he meant achieving peace of mind.

If baby Jesus and baby Emanuel do grow up, will they ever be able to achieve this?

2011-12-26T08:44:00.001+02:00

It’s not only the religious who are brainwashed (for want of a better word) into bizarre beliefs but superstitious folk who are not necessarily religious in the orthodox sense. I am thinking of the death of the North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il and the belief and reporting of strange natural phenomena. On a famous lake ice cracked so loud it seemed to shake both heaven and earth and a mysterious glow was seen on a revered mountain top. Boy oh boy, this is ancient Rome when divine or near divine status was bestowed on her Emperors. The 69-year-old had led North Korea since the death of his father in 1994 and an elaborate personality cult, involving multiple stories of alleged miracles or astonishing deeds, has been built up around him. Even nature is mourning, the state-run Korean Central News Agency reported on Thursday. A snowstorm hit as Mr. Kim died and ice on the volcanic Chon Lake near his reported birthplace at Mount Paektu cracked, it said. Following the storm's sudden end at dawn on Tuesday, a message carved in rock - "Mount Paektu, Holy Mountain of revolution. Kim Jong-il" - glowed brightly, it said. It remained there until sunset. On the same day, a Manchurian crane also apparently adopted a posture of grief at a statue of the late leader's father in the northern city of Hamhung. "Even the crane seemed to mourn the demise of Kim Jong-il, born of Heaven, after flying down there at dead of cold night, unable to forget him," KCNA reported officials as saying. On Wednesday state media said more than five million people had already turned out to pay their respects to Kim Jong-il. State media have called on North Koreans to unite behind his designated heir, youngest son Kim Jong-un, who is being called the "Great Successor". Looking at photographs of the 27 year old Kim Jong-un he looks like a rather fat gormless young man so who knows how long he will last or will there be a dynastic struggle? He does have older brothers who have been overlooked.

Thinking of the siege of the Paris theatre by the religious, I wonder what would happen if my play “Twilight of Aunt Edna” ever did get put on. Would there be riots on Shaftsbury Avenue, or the South Bank, or even further afield? It has got close to a production half a dozen times but always failed at the last hurdle. Cold feet? I wrote it at the height of the phenomenon that was Mary Whitehouse and, although I say it myself (well no one else is going to, are they?) it is quite brilliant in a Joe Orton kind of way, so there. Of course it is not the only work regarding this intrepid relic of a woman; the BBC did a play titled “Filth, The Mary Whitehouse Story” starring Julie Walters. The difference between that and Twilight of Aunt Edna is that Filth was based evidently on fact and Twilight is pure fiction. I wonder what Mary Whitehouse would think of the media if she were alive today to hear famous film actresses using the c word and the f word on television chat shows let alone the boring over use of the f word in film. Her campaign was obviously a lost cause from the very beginning. The floodgates had to be opened and that is all there is to it. I still would like to see my play produced. Maybe it is time to send it out again.

2011-12-24T07:46:00.001+02:00

Two extremely interesting reviews in The Sunday Times; one a film and the other a book. Verily, to use a good old-fashioned biblical sort of word, truth is indeed stranger than fiction. The debate about global warming is still making headlines and, if global warming is actually taking place, there is only one reason for it – too many humans. The book reviewed is “The Viral Storm: The Dawn of a New Pandemic Age” by Nathan Wolfe, professor in Human Biology at Stanford University. Also the director of Global Viral Forecasting, an organisation searching for “the first human infection by an animal virus that may wipe out millions, or hundreds of millions, of people throughout the planet.”

The influenza pandemic of 1918 killed 50million. Today swine flu will eventually infect 2billion, killing 1% and the bird flu virus has a fatality rate of 60%. The danger is bird flu could combine with swine flu creating what he calls “a mosaic daughter virus.” Alternatively, a chimpanzee kills and eats a monkey; a hunter kills and eats the chimp and, whacko! There’s your virus passed on. This evidently was how HIV was born. So “bush meat” over which Wolfe is especially worried is a major problem which leads us to the population explosion. Urbanisation, deforestation and road building are taking millions of hungry people into previous remote forest regions and exotic wild animals are increasingly on the menu. Another problem is the amount of globe-trotting humans are now indulging in. Chris has just flown back from London and has arrived with the mother and father, grand parents of a cold, if it’s not the flu, and I swear, as I’ve maintained for some time, it’s from the aeroplane. In the US influenza rates rise sharply every Thanksgiving as people fly home for the holiday and I invariably come down with a chest infection after flying. It’s not really surprising when you think of bring cooped up in steel tube using recycled air with hundreds of others some of whom are bound to be unwell and whose germs can easily be passed on. Our interconnected world is just one “giant microbial mixing vessel.”

Now for the fiction bit – A film called ‘Contagion’ with a truly star-studded cast is quite simply about a global pandemic such as Professor Wolfe has scientifically postulated. One woman catches a mysterious virus which soon spreads around the world and it is up to the scientists and brave doctors (American of course) to discover a cure before the human race is wiped out.

So, truth or fiction or truth and fiction and can anything be done about it or has it already gone too far? One has only to watch the news, see thousands of people milling about in city centres like swarms of ants, note the number of cars on the roads, look at the modern skyscrapers and sprawling densely packed cities to realise how overloaded the planet is and, apart from the possibility of a pandemic, the earth’s resources are not going to last forever, in fact are being depleted fast.

At my age none of this concerns me but I do feel for future generations if future generations there are going to be.

And on this optimistic and joyful note ya’ll have a good Christmas and a bonny new year.

2011-12-22T09:05:00.000+02:00

We have got used to Muslim fanatics hating, killing, or destroying anyone or anything they think demeans their religion. We’re used to foaming at the mouth American fundamentalists who hate everything but themselves. (Most probably don’t really like themselves very much either when push comes to shove). Now it seems Catholics are joining in the fray. Riot police in Paris have been brought in to protect a city centre theatre putting on a play said to be blasphemous by many Catholics. A group of young Catholic activists has already disrupted another play said to be offensive, but critics say they are attacking the right to free speech. They have kept a vigil outside the theatre with the police holding them off. The play is followed by a nude pianist playing Haydn’s “Creation”! Maybe he is meant to represent Adam except that I don’t think Adam would have been quite so fat. Not a pretty picture.

The more I hear about religion the dafter it seems. Thinking of the mob outside the theatre, are they using the slogan "what would Jesus do?" Where did the slogan come from and is there ever an answer to the question posed? It sounds like something happy clappies would have come up with. Actually the question has a long history. In 1896 Congregational minister Charles Sheldon published a novel called “In His Steps - What would Jesus do?” in which a town is revolutionised when Christians "pledge themselves, earnestly and honestly for an entire year, not to do anything without first asking the question, 'What would Jesus do?'".

Thanks to a mistake by its first publisher, the book was never covered by copyright, so it was sold cheaply by multiple publishers. As a result it has sold 30 million copies, putting it in the top 50 bestselling books ever. Have you read it? I never even knew it existed.

A youth leader at Calvary Reformed Church in Holland, Michigan, one Janie Tinklenberg, after re-reading it in 1989, talked to her youth group about it.

At the time friendship bracelets were all the rage, so she got a local company to produce 300. She opted for the abbreviation WWJD and asked the group to wear them for 30 days, they caught on locally, and more were needed.

Naturally others with more of a commercial eye than Tinklenberg spotted the trend, made their own and took the marketing to the national level. By the time she attempted to register her trademark it was too late. Particularly in the US, but also elsewhere, it's on wristbands, mugs, T-shirts, bumper stickers, necklaces and earrings, though most of those seem rather to defeat the purpose of reminding the owner about anything, but God sure makes the wide boys who see a shining opportunity rich beyond belief. Apart from T-shirts, also available are WWJD? teddy bears, WWJD? lunch boxes, WWJD? underwear, and WWJD? baby bibs. Will the Muslims follow the example I wonder? Probably not. It would mean mentioning the prophet and that would be blasphemous.

Like all the most enduring slogans, "what would Jesus do?" has inspired countless rewrites. There has been everything from political parody - anti-war T-shirts asking "who would Jesus bomb?" - to something that is a parody in itself such as the "what would Jesus eat?" biblical diet plan!

The original question has been taken seriously by millions of Christian teenagers and has now been co-opted by protesters outside London's St Paul's Cathedral threatened with eviction.

Someone has commented, “I would have thought that anything that encourages people to stop and think before they act has got to be a good thing. At least that way you would know that anyone breaking the law had thought about it first and decided to continue anyway. With that knowledge perhaps judges would be more ready to hand out sentences that reflect the crime. Bankers and politicians spring to mind.”

2011-12-20T08:21:00.000+02:00

Still on the subject of books: some time ago on one of the shelves I came across and wrote in a previous Blog about a book by a Victorian writer whose name was F. Marion Crawford; found it a delightful read and quite a page turner. Well, blow me down and shiver me timbers as Long John Silver would say (well it is getting close to Christmas and the Mermaid Theatre used to do ‘Treasure island’ every year: I was in it twice) I have found another Marion Crawford lurking there. Where did they come from and why? Well that is a mystery that will never be solved. Mister Crawford was not one of your one book authors but appears to have been quite prolific. This one is called ‘Saracinesca,’ set in nineteenth century Rome and, although the writing is distinctly Victorian and what one could term florid: if one were to compare it to architecture would Baroque or Rococo suit? Or to painting, how about Fragonard; every leaf on every tree and every bug on every leaf? Despite this it is a ripping yarn! This guy certainly knew how to tell a story and it would make a fabulous film in the manner of ‘The Leopard’ which, of course, started life as a novel and the same period: the Risorgimento, or better still, a television series. I couldn’t get my nose out of it and, when I got to the end, imagine my surprise and bitter disappointment to read that over 400 pages was only part one and the story would continue. But bugger me gently and sideways, I cannot find ‘Saracinesca Part Two’ anywhere. Did he write it under another title maybe? Or did he just not get around to it at all? Anyway, here is an example of Mister Crawford’s writing and you will see what I mean by florid –

“She said nothing, and though she at first made a slight movement – not of resistance, but of timid reluctance, utterly unlike herself – she suffered him to hold her hand. He drew closer to her, himself more diffident in the moment of success than he had ever been when he anticipated failure; she was so unlike any woman he had ever known before. Very gently he put his arms about her and drew her to him. ‘My beloved – at last,’ he whispered, as her head sank upon his shoulder. Then with a sudden movement she sprang to her height, and for one instant gazed upon him. Her whole being was transfigured in the might of her passion: her dark face was luminously pale, her lips almost white, and from her eyes there seemed to flash a blazing fire. For one instant she gazed upon him, and then her arms went round his neck, and she clasped him fiercely to her breast. ‘Ah, Giovanni,’ she cried, passionately, ‘you do not know what love means!’

Beat that if you can and if anyone knows where I can find part two please let me know.

2011-12-18T08:59:00.000+02:00

Who in their right mind would want to be a writer or, at least, attempt to make a living from it? Is it true that Amazon stocks over 3million books? And although many are listed as ‘The Best Seller’ how many of these actually are? I think I’ve made this point before. Beginning to repeat myself. Beginning? So just how many books are in circulation and how many writers are there, setting aside the celebs and what is known as chick-lit, from one book authors to forty book authors? My niece e-mailed my sister from America to say she has found my books in a bookshop there! That is the very first indication that any of them have been available other than through Amazon. Let’s keep fingers crossed that they take off, even in a moderately successful way. What brought on this speculation is reading the book reviews in the Kultur section of the S.T. I’ve only just started to go through the pile, maybe half a dozen, and already I’ve found six or seven I would like to have but (a) there isn’t the money and (b) there is no more room in this house for more books. As it is they’re piling up on top of the piano, and a short while back Douglas, for charity, got rid of two big boxes full, mostly chic-lit and romance that holiday visitors have left.

When I say who would want to be a writer, something else was brought to mind reading the review of a biography “Under A Canvas Sky” of Mervyn Peake by his daughter Clare and what caught my attention particularly was this – ‘In 1957 everything changed. As Clare remembers it, it happened in a single day. Mervyn had written a play called The Wit To Woo, which was put on at the Arts Theatre. The first night seemed to go well, but next morning’s reviews were disastrous, and when he read them he collapsed, shaking uncontrollably …. For the next twelve years until his death he was in and out of hospitals but never recovered.’

The exact same thing happened to me in the exact same theatre but, fortunately, I didn’t react to the critics’ venom as badly as he. Later I had another play produced in London, at The Old Vic, and the critics were just as diabolical there. This time the reason for their venom was obvious: the play dealt with an Irish subject and Louis Mountbatten had just been murdered by the IRA so anything Irish was verboten. What a furore it created. This time the criticisms definitely did have an effect. I didn’t write another word for the next two years. I found it impossible to even contemplate it.

Though I’ve heard of the Gormenghast trilogy I’ve never read any of Peake’s work. Maybe I should, but there are so many many books to read and that is the problem of wanting to be a writer.

2011-12-16T10:54:00.002+02:00

Arguments, discussion, theories are still raging over the summer’s riots. All manner of reasons have been put forward as to why it happened. It happened because what started off as a stream became a flood and floods cause a lot of damage. One of the problems about Facebook, Twitter, etc., is that news soon spreads and it seems to offer an open invitation for hoodies, thugs, criminals, and even a whole host of normally law-abiding people to join in the looting and mayhem. And, even as it must have come as a great shock to many, it was hardly a new phenomenon.

Evidently it is said anti-police sentiment was a major factor in the riots. What, for example, does one make of this?

Daniel – Was on holiday abroad when he started receiving viral messages about the unrest, including images of burning police cars in Tottenham. "As soon as I saw that, I was happy, like. For some reason I just wanted to be there. I actually wanted to burn the cars," he said.” What I've been through my whole life, police have caused hell for me... now was my opportunity to get revenge.” Interviewed on the BBC's Newsnight, he said the government had made it hard to get jobs, cut people's benefits, and made university unaffordable. "We thought, 'Okay, you want to financially hurt us?' We'll financially hurt you by burning down buildings. "That was the best three days of my life." Note, financially hurt as he was he could still afford to be on holiday abroad and he doesn’t say how the police made his life hell. And how burning down buildings affected the government is anybody’s guess.

A week ago Athens and Thessaloniki had more anti-police riots, the excuse this time as in previous years, being the third anniversary of the death of a teenager shot by a policeman. Once again private property was vandalised. Suspects arrested were between the age of 18 and 33

In England the riots were characterised by widespread looting and arson attacks on both businesses and homes.

The time Prime Minister David Cameron said the unrest had been driven by criminality and devoid of political meaning. “This was not political protest, or a riot about politics, it was common or garden thieving, robbing and looting,” Mr Cameron told the House of Commons.

Many of those interviewed admitted they had been involved in stealing, saying that a perceived suspension of normal rules presented them with an opportunity to acquire goods, often describing the riots as a chance to obtain "free stuff". As someone commented, if the looting was about poverty then chickens, baby foods, bedding, and basic stuff should have been stolen not flat screen television sets.

But is there anything new about this? Paris has seen mainly student riots, Los Angeles over police brutality. In April 1981 riots broke out in Brixton, shops were looted and burned, arrests were made, people injured. In July the trouble broke out in the London suburb of Southall where mainly Asian youths committed arson and pelted the police with petrol bombs. Worst of all, In Toxteth, Liverpool the trouble continued for nearly two weeks, and there was many a riot in the UK in previous centuries over one grievance or another. No, it most certainly is not a new phenomenon.

2011-12-14T08:58:00.000+02:00

Yet another dig at elf and safety but only because the stories grow more and more bizarre. We’ve had policemen who won’t climb ladders or go out in the rain in case they slip and hurt themselves and we’ve had the story about the lady dying because she wasn’t rescued from the mine shaft in time and we now have a paramedic who refused to lift a fourteen year girl suffering a heart attack in case she hurt her back – her own back that is, not the girl’s, who died on the way to hospital. There’s no saying she would have been saved but the delay whilst elf and safety rules were invoked certainly didn’t help matters. The paramedic, a Miss Lynn admitted mentioning health and safety but said: ‘What I actually said was we need to think of the safety of everyone. That included Shannon. I was trying to get control of the situation.’ Yes, just like the fire chief.

Another very interesting story this week which goes one step further in proving to me that the world (England if nowhere else) is going stark raving mad: pupils aged five are to be given transgender lessons. Aged five! Whatever happened to childhood? I’m not saying children aged five are little innocents but why lumber them at that age with something they need know nothing about until later in life or until they ask? It isn’t going to stop bullying which is evidently the reason being given. It’s just going to make them more curious and probably more aggressive in targeting those who appear to be different. Whereas before it might not have been so noticeable now they will know what to look for and appearances as we know only too well can be deceptive.

I seem to remember some time ago writing to say that after a half century or more of getting The Sunday Times, we gave it up. This was because of the cavalier way overseas readers were treated, despite howls of outrage. The paper got thinner and thinner as section after section was cut. The price never went down and the last straw was losing the Culture section. They kept the car sales section but who living outside the country want to know abut car sales? I suppose one can get the culture section on the internet these days but to be honest I can’t be bothered to even try. I still get it anyway. Friends in England every three months or so send it to me, minus the television pages which are of no interest, and I was thinking only yesterday that I hadn’t received any for quite some time and Hey Presto! As if by magic, two rolls, not one, but two rolls are delivered, half a year’s worth, twenty-five in all so guess that will keep me in reading matter until Christmas. Thank you the Maffins of Huddersfield.

2011-12-12T07:52:00.001+02:00

Hard to believe this is Blog 400! I wonder, should I keep on ranting or shall I call it a day? Whatever, before getting on to the two hetero stories, one more about Africa. According to a new report by Human Rights Watch violence against LGBT people has reached a new high and what is more is usually totally ignored by the police. The report includes the case of one lesbian who was repeatedly raped by a family member, her soccer coach and her pastor, all in an attempt to “convert” her and show her how to be “a real woman.” Her case is one of many including the slaying of lesbian women in the townships. The South African constitution promises equality for all its citizens but for some that promise is not being kept.

And so on to the nitty gritty of this sad mad world, beginning with France where their parliament seems to be as myopic as the Nigerians as they have decided to ban prostitution(!) by fining (3000euro) and imprisoning (six months) anyone paying for sex! Around 20,000 people are believed to be working as prostitutes in France and France evidently has been committed to abolishing the practice in principle since 1960. The resolution says the country should seek "a society without prostitution" and that sex work "should in no case be designated as a professional activity". It urged abolition at a time when "prostitution seems to be becoming routine in Europe. What on earth are they talking about? It’s been routine all over the world since the year dot. So long as men need sex and that is the only way they’re going to get it prostitution will be with us.

Pimping is another matter and is punishable with a prison sentence of up to seven years. There are some 1,000 convictions annually. One MP claims that nine out of ten prostitutes are victims of trafficking. “From now on prostitution is regarded from the point of view of violence against women and that has become unacceptable for everyone.” When it comes to trafficking I wholeheartedly agree but nine out of ten seems a very high proportion. From where does he get his statistics?

However, France's sex workers have a trade union and a rally outside parliament was organized to oppose the proposed bill. Several dozen prostitutes and supporters gathered under placards reading "Sex Work is Work" and "Prostitution - No Repression - No Punishment - Rights!" In a letter to MPs, it and other groups accused politicians of treating prostitutes as “marginals whose voice does not deserve to be heard.” As far as trafficking is concerned a woman in China found guilty of heading a gang has just been executed for forcing hundreds of women into prostitution. The brothels were disguised as tea houses, beauty salons or hotels. Too often here in Greece one reads of women being lured to a foreign country under the impression they will get good jobs only to find they have been the victims of trafficking, and victims is not too harsh a word for the treatment they receive. The traffickers are usually Albanians, Bulgarians and the like, not that the Greeks are blameless. The French government will find it impossible to stop prostitution. A much better idea would be to licence the women making sure as far as possible they have in no way been coerced by anybody into what they do and that they work in conditions of safety.

I am at the moment writing the sixth Thornton King book and the previously established character of Carlotta the London prostitute has this to say of herself –

‘I know what I am, Thornton. There’s no point in denying it, but I do supply a service to society and I’ve never been ashamed of it. Oh, yes, sometimes I’ve regretted the way my life has turned out, it wasn’t how I thought it would be, but never ashamed, no. I don’t drink, I don’t do drugs, except for this of course.’ She indicated the cigarette. ‘I’m not mixed up in anything criminal and I have regular check-ups at the clinic. I’m very careful, I’m clean and, as far as I am aware I have never given anyone anything to worry about or have sleepless nights over. I’m just a member of the oldest profession, that’s all. What they call the sex industry these days. Everything seems to be an industry these days. I mean, we’ve been with you since the year dot haven’t we?’

Very old joke – gay walking down the street sees a prostitute and hails her with ‘Hello prostitute!’ To which she replies ‘Hello substitute!’

One way or another sex for the sake of sex, sex for the enjoyment and pleasure of sex, sex to satisfy a natural need, is a fact of life and no amount of government wishful thinking or religious venom is going to get rid of it so why get your knickers in a twist over it? As the actress said to the bishop.

2011-12-10T09:17:00.001+02:00

Blog 399

This is a subject I fervently hoped never to mention again as I felt I had written about it quite enough, but sometimes events take place that make you wonder just when are bigoted idiots going to see some sense. Yes – the subject is sex, firstly homosex and then heterosex because both aspects of human sexuality have been in the news. It is a fact that in Africa, with the exception of South Africa, homosexuality is illegal. Though I don’t know whether, as in some other countries, it can incur the death sentence the Nigerian parliament has just passed a law making the very fact that one is homosexual by nature if nothing else punishable by a jail sentence of fourteen years. Just what is supposed to be gained by this? Do these ignorant politicians really believe that it will act as a deterrent and that homosexuality will just fade away and be no more? If that is the case they are sorely fooling themselves. The result will more than likely be that any imprisoned gay will be sexual fodder for sex starved inmates with no access to women. There will be no contraceptives and more than likely a transmission of HIV. Apart from the misery caused there can be no other outcome. The excuse behind this monstrous piece of legislation is tradition and religion, both Christian and Muslim. To give some idea of the virulence of religious emotion you only have to read some of the comments.

The are always reason given for anti-gay prejudice. In England in the fifties there was a purge brought about because of fears of the cold war, the bomb, and the spying scandal culminating in the disgraceful stitching up of Lord Montague, Pitt-Rivers and Peter Wildeblood. After they had all been sentenced and sent to jail the two RAF men they were supposed to have corrupted confessed to having written and said exactly what the police and prosecution wanted. As for the boy Scouts they were evidently right out of the frame. The English came to their senses and the purging not only stopped but homosexuality – with certain provisos- was no longer a criminal offence and no longer considered an illness. Poor old Oscar Wilde suffered prison and vilification not just because he was gay but because he consorted with ragamuffins way below his class and society found that unforgivable. Today his tombstone in Paris was in such a state of disintegration due to countless woman kissing it it is now protected by a glass screen which hasn’t stopped the kissing but at least it’s easier I suppose to wipe of the lipstick.

In Nigeria the vote was passed unanimously. Now I don’t know how many MPs there are in Nigeria but do you honestly want to tell me that all those unanimous votes came from 100% heterosexuals? That none of them had any intimate knowledge of someone who was gay? A brother maybe? A cousin? A best friend? Somehow I very much doubt it but if you were a Nigerian MP and a little on the doubtful side would you be brave enough to stick your neck out and vote against? I somehow very much doubt that as well.

This brought to mind the treatment of gays in the Third Reich so I did a little research and came up with what can only be called the horror story to end all. Historians evidently, and I presume they have done their research well, have come to the conclusion that if it hadn’t been for homosexuals Hitler and the National Socialist Workers Party, that is the Nazis would never have made it, there would have been no World War ll, no holocaust. If this was the case why were countless homosexuals sent to the camps? The answer evidently is that these were ones whose sexual orientation was unmistakable. Apart from those who blatantly flaunted their homosexuality like Ernst Röhm, the earliest meetings of the Nazi party took place in a gay bar in Munich, the SS and the SA were a hotbed of warm brothers and with Hitler it wasn’t so much, some of my best friends are Jewish, but some of my best friends are gay, like Hess for example who he addressed with the endearment “Bubi,” and he preferred homosexual soldiers, storm troopers, etcetera because they were much more willing to indulge in atrocity than the straight German soldier. I wonder what the modern neo-Nazis think about that.

The hetero stories will have to wait till next time.

2011-12-08T09:30:00.000+02:00

The third account of money in our modern world. Two small boys have made a staggering (staggering considering their age) £100000! How did they do it? Or rather how did their parents do it for them? They put a 57 second video on You Tube that went viral – the internet term for spreading like wildfire - and which has been seen 400million times. And just what is this 57 second video that is so fascinating that it is worth 400million, or more by now, viewings? It is called ‘Charlie Bit my Finger.’ Yes, folks, and that is it. Charlie bit his elder brother’s finger. It was videoed by dad and the result is the family is now £100000 richer. Having hit the jackpot with Charlie bit my finger; the family have followed it up with other truly inspiring videos like Charlie with the scooter he got for Christmas! Wow! Isn’t that fascinating? It is the advertising around these videos that generates the income and it appears more and more people have become aware of the possibilities and are having a go as though the internet isn’t overloaded with crap as it is. Don’t I sound like a real old bear? But I honestly can’t get my head around the fact that there are millions of people world wide who go for this sort of thing. Not surprising really I suppose if you consider that if you hit the jackpot it’s money for old rope. Kids and animals are always up for the aaaah factor. Advertisers are not slow in realising the potential, You Tube evidently fitting the product to the video. For example with Charlie bit my finger there is advertising for Aptamil baby milk. ‘Lots of people know that You Tube is a place to upload and watch ‘inspiring’ videos,’ says Sara Mormino, head of ‘You Tube Online Content Partnerships for Europe.’ Gulp. Inspiring? Inspiring? Come on, is this what life is really all about? Is this to be the sum total of people’s ambitions? Either that or making it on a reality TV show? Anjula Mutanda, a psychologist and social scientist said, ‘For all those parents tempted to grab their camcorders and start making cash from their children there is a caution – ‘If you are going to put your head above the parapet be prepared to be shot. Not everybody will find your clip funny, your child cute or your pet adorable and the flipside of You Tube fame is that by going public with your video you are inviting the chatter of the universe (I like that phrase, good on you Anjula) and not all of it will be flattering.’ And sometimes, when the furore subsides and they are no longer famous, people can suffer a severe depression.

On Greek TV every evening there is a programme called ‘America’s Funniest Videos’ which I have watched a couple of times and which consists mainly of people falling on their arses, sometimes obviously painfully and dangerously so. It’s a multi-variation of the old banana skin joke and the studio audience seem to find it incredibly if not hysterically funny. Small things obviously amuse small minds but again it’s money that attracts. If your video in any programme is voted best of three it’s worth ten thousand smackaroos. Go for it kids.

2011-12-06T09:21:00.000+02:00

I see once again I repeated myself on the 3rd. Such carelessness, Made up for it by publishing Blogs two days running. Today’s Blog is mainly about money – other people’s – so what’s unusual about that? It’s just that I thought some items in the paper quite interesting. Firstly I am back again hammering publishers who seem to have lost all sense of decorum and must surely now, like the film industry, be run by Philistine accountants whose only interest is how much profit a book will generate. Never mind content, never mind relevance, never mind literacy, never mind style, never mind intelligent writing, just think of all that lovely lolly rolling in. The author is a celeb, a VIP. They might only be famous for fifteen minutes so cash in while you can. I’m sure I went on about this before but what got me thinking about this yet once again was the news that the Duchess of Cambridge’s younger sister Pippa Middleton (she just had to be named Pippa – doesn’t it conjure up the King’s Road?) has pocketed £400000 for evidently writing a manual on entertaining. And what nuggets of wisdom does the book hold for the avid reader? Well now, this is what I read - party tips – ‘To be a social hit make sure you have the right equipment: a lovely big sister.’ Wow, how about that? Each and every aspiring party goer who wants to be a hit has to produce another Kate Middleton aka Duchess of Cambridge. I bet Her Maj is really thrilled to bits to read that little bit of wisdom, perhaps asking herself just what she has allowed into the house of Windsor. ‘Get her to marry the heir to the throne.’ Have you ever in your life read such rubbish? ‘Remember bumpkins, it’s napkins, not serviettes and serve the peanuts before the pud.’ I guess this is meant to be humorous? This is wit? This is worth nearly half a million quid? This is reputedly her ‘first book’. Can’t wait for the second. And talking of seconds and thirds whatever happened to Wayne Rooney’s autobiography in half a dozen or so parts for which he was paid the most enormous advance. The first volume seems too have died a death so maybe no more will be forthcoming. Spending your young life kicking a football around, throwing a temperament, and having it off with ladies of the night doesn’t really amount to very much to write about I suppose, and the lovely wife has been into the literary trough as well. Any more to come from her I wonder? News of expensive handbags is always so fascinating.

I keep getting e-mails from various organisations and charities asking for donations. I would love to give, in particular where animals are concerned. Unfortunately at the moment I am just not in the position to respond to these requests even with a small amount, and small amounts I am sure can sometimes produce miracles. This Christmas money is so tight we can’t even afford to send Christmas cards.

It is estimated that Rupert Grint, the third of the principal trio in the Harry Potter films is worth something like £28000000. We’re already aware of what Mister Radcliffe is worth and no doubt Emma Watson is worth a pretty bundle.

The question I ask is, do these lucky kids ever get e-mails asking for donations to charity and do they ever respond? Just curious. A portion of twenty eight million would definitely produce miracles.

Next time the third interesting money story; a phenomenon of our modern world.

2011-12-04T17:09:00.000+02:00

Thinking about Monster Mugabe and Mad Mahmoud’s homophobia that gets them frothing at the mouth – could it be fear that does it do you suppose? – started me thinking about all the different phobias humans suffer. I’m not too bad on heights and I revel in wide open spaces but, on the other hand, placid Taurian though I am, I do have a phobia in that I’m scared to death of enclosed spaces; that is I suffer from claustrophobia. The picture of how mental patients used to be confined in a sort of flat cage in which they were unable to move fills me with horror and even the thought of not being able to use my arms causes a shudder. Although as a child I went through the Cango Caves in South Africa and even on a school field trip went down a coal mine with no problem, today I wouldn’t be able to go down that coal mine or go potholing for example for all the money in the world.

Apart from the obvious phobias, why do people get such fixations in life that they behave in the most irrational way, obviously unable to help themselves? For example, stalkers. A Dutch woman who called a man 65,000 times in the past year - an average of 178 calls a day - is to face charges of stalking. The man told police he had been bombarded with calls, texts and emails from the woman. Lawyers say the 42-year-old woman claimed to be in a relationship with the man and denied that her actions were excessive. The 62-year-old man denies that they were in a relationship. The police raided the woman's home in Rotterdam and seized a number of mobile phones and several computers. At a preliminary hearing in The Hague a judge granted the woman bail on the condition that she leave the man alone but just a couple of hours after being released, she allegedly called him again. She has been kept in custody ever since and it was decided three judges should hear the case. A new date for the hearing is yet to be set. Goodness alone knows what her phone bill must have been like. Unlike the stalking of famous people, film stars for example, the man doesn’t appear to be anybody special except in the eyes and mind of his stalker. What would a psychiatrist make of it I wonder?

And here is another one – women who are quite well but believe they need cosmetic surgery on their sexual organs; what has become known as designer vaginas and should they be referred to overstretched (whoops! ) NHS hospitals? Specialists at a Central London teaching hospital say they received 30 such referrals, mainly from family doctors, over the past three years. This included women who mistakenly believe they need surgery and eight schoolgirls - one as young as 11. Bupa says the procedure is purely cosmetic and does not offer financial cover for the procedure. The NHS has no such restriction and it is apparently a boom industry, 2000 procedures being paid for by the NHS each year.

“Dr Sarah Creighton and colleagues believe the future demand for so-called "designer vagina" operations or labial reductions is potentially infinite and is driven by society's wider and growing desire for cosmetic surgery in general and changing expectations about what is a desirable appearance for women. It's shocking, particularly because we are seeing girls who are really young. They are asking for surgery that is irreversible and we do not know what the long-term risks of the procedure might be. That's probably just the tip of the iceberg. It's a massive boom industry in the private sector." In a study, they reviewed 33 women referred to their clinic between 2007 and 2010 with requests for a labial reduction. Most of the women were seeking help because they were concerned about appearance. Only a fifth wanted the surgery to reduce discomfort. One woman said she felt compelled to have the surgery after seeing a television programme on cosmetic genital surgery. On examination by the doctors, all of the women were deemed to have "normal" genitalia, but three were offered surgery to address "a significant asymmetry". The remaining 30 were refused any procedure at all.

2011-12-03T10:10:00.001+02:00

Thinking about the crassness of those crude stand up comics of today, a couple of evenings ago we watched an old programme made by Thames Television, ‘Tribute to Tommy Cooper,’ and couldn’t help but think, as we laughed like gurgling drains all the way through, how brilliantly funny the man was without any recourse to smut (there’s an old-fashioned word for you). No four letter words, no dirt, just what used to be called good clean fun. Admittedly today comedians are hamstrung by Political Correctness: no mother-in-law jokes, no Jewish jokes (unless you are yourself Jewish), no jokes about sexual orientation, no nationality or racist jokes, in particular black jokes of which of course in private life there are plenty though I won’t mention any of them here. I must admit Cooper during a ‘This is Your Life’ programme about Bill Frazer, did make one racist joke he certainly wouldn’t get away with today, pretending to mix up Frazer the actor with Frazier the boxer. Black he might get away with, a reference to thick lips he certainly wouldn’t. PC, like elf and safety, really does have a lot to be blamed for when it comes to limiting our lives. Something as wonderfully naïve as the old seaside picture postcards: fat man in swimming costume standing on the beach, his little son beneath his beer-barrel belly and the caption, ‘When did you last see your little Willy?’ or over the garden wall ‘My husband is making his whatnot stand’ banished forever. There were other comedians of a bygone age who were equally as funny as Cooper, even someone like Benny Hill who was always being accused of sexual innuendo (and no that is not an Italian suppository! Boom Boom!) or the suggestive dialogue of the Carry On films, though I am glad to say there appears to be something of a backlash these days with the pendulum beginning to swing back. It would seem the trendy theories about education (no one is a loser, which means no one is a winner) that have led to a generation of virtual illiterates is also being challenged. ‘Put elitist back in our schools,’ says the MP for education. I’ll never forget many years ago when we were living in the Soviet Socialist Republic of Hackney where they were/ are so leftwing they almost came/come around to the right again, we wanted to put on performances of Chris’s one man show, ‘Champagne Charlie’ for the benefit of old people’s homes (Oops! sorry, facilities for the elderly) and, when Chris mentioned the fact that the show was fully professional and really very good, the harpy on the other end of the phone told him the council did not go in for excellence, excellence was elitist! You wouldn’t think that anyone could be that stupid but obviously they can.

Whatever happened to three score and ten? Eighty-four seems the predominant age to be dying these days. Virtually every time I read of someone’s departure from this vale of woe, the latest being the film maker Ken Russell, that seems to be the favoured age to go, though Stalin’s only daughter by name Lana Peters went one better to go at eighty-five. Still eighty-four gives me three more years to rant against the iniquities of this world, ha ha!

2011-12-01T09:12:00.001+02:00

Thinking about the crassness of stand up comics of today, a couple of evenings ago we watched an old programme made by Thames Television, ‘Tribute to Tommy Cooper,’ and couldn’t help but think, as we laughed like gurgling drains all the way through, how brilliantly funny the man was without any recourse to smut (there’s an old-fashioned word for you). No four letter words, no dirt, just what used to be called good clean fun. Admittedly today comedians are hamstrung by Political Correctness: no mother-in-law jokes, no Jewish jokes (unless you are yourself Jewish), no jokes about sexual orientation, no nationality or racist jokes, in particular black jokes of which of course in private life there are plenty. I must admit Cooper during a ‘This is Your Life’ programme about Bill Frazer, did make one racist joke he certainly wouldn’t get away with today, pretending to mix up Frazer the actor with Frazier the boxer. Black he might get away with, thick lips he certainly wouldn’t. PC, like elf and safety, really does have a lot to be blamed for when it comes to limiting our lives. Something as wonderfully naïve as the old seaside picture postcards: fat man in swimming costume standing on the beach, his little son beneath his beer-barrel belly and the caption, ‘When did you last see your little Willy?’ or over the garden wall ‘My husband is making his whatnot stand’ banished forever. There were other comedians of a bygone age who were equally as funny as Cooper, even someone like Benny Hill who was always being accused of sexual innuendo (and no that is not an Italian suppository! Boom Boom!) or the suggestive dialogue of the Carry On films, though I am glad to say there appears to be something of a backlash these days with the pendulum beginning to swing back. It would seem the trendy theories about education (no one is a loser, which means no one is a winner) that have led to a generation of virtual illiterates is also being challenged. ‘Put elitist back in our schools,’ says the MP for education. I’ll never forget many years ago when we were living in the Soviet Socialist Republic of Hackney where they were/ are so leftwing they almost came/come around to the right again, we wanted to put on performances of Chris’s one man show, ‘Champagne Charlie’ for the benefit of old people’s homes (Oops! sorry, facilities for the elderly) and, when Chris mentioned the fact that the show was fully professional and really very good, the harpy on the other end of the phone told him the council did not go in for excellence, excellence was elitist! You wouldn’t think that anyone could be that stupid but obviously they can.

2011-11-29T09:03:00.000+02:00

Further to my criticism the other day of Benetton and the like, Jan Moir in Friday’s Daily Mail (a paper trendies and lefties do NOT read but which we get every Friday for Film, theatre and book reviews – and Jan Moir of course) has taken to task a comedian by the name of Jimmy Carr. Having been out of the UK so many years and not having access to British television I haven’t a clue who Jimmy Carr is but, if what Miss Moir says about him is true, I have no wish to know anything about him. Evidently his latest funny ha ha is a cheap shot at Down’s syndrome children. How low can a body get? Well, I don’t know, there is already that something who goes by the name of Ricky Gervaise who’s latest funny ha ha is evidently about servicemen who have lost limbs. Oh, no, wait a minute, in his latest TV he invites viewers to laugh at a dwarf. Great going, Gervaise. Why don’t you pick on someone your own size as we used to say of school bullies? A friend once sent us a copy of “The Office” and we watched about fifteen minutes of it, if that, before deciding that Gervaise was the most objectionable greaseball ever to hit the small screen. What makes the man popular? Is it his very crudeness the great unwashed find amusing? And then there is Frankie Boyle with his unspeakable gags about Katie Price’s disabled son. What was I saying about hurting people?

The following is for the benefit of the Monster Mugabe and the Mad Mahmoud – What do the following people all have in common? Alexander the great, Richard the Lionheart, Augustus, first emperor of Rome, the Emperor Hadrian, Julius Caesar, Leonardo de Vinci, Euripides, Horace, Virgil, Ovid, Juvenil, Plautus, Seneca, Donatello, Raphael, Cellini, Lord Byron, Michael Tippett, Valentino, Rachmaninov, Michelangelo, Frederick the Great, Ludwig ll, Handel, Tchaikovsky, Aaron Copeland, Charles Laughton, Abraham Lincoln, Lawrence of Arabia, D.H.Lawrence, Joe Orton, Verlaine, Benjamin Britton, Peter Piers, Montgomery Clift, Cole Porter, Aristotle, Plato, Visconti, Rimbaud, Jean Cocteau, Walt Whitman, Hans Christian Anderson, Elton John, Richard Chamberlain, Rock Hudson, James Dean, Danny Kaye, Jimmy Edwards, Laurence Olivier, Frankie Howerd, Somerset Maugham, Gore Vidal, Ivor Novello, Terence Rattigan, Jules Verne, Almodovar (Spanish film director) George Cukar, Herman Melville, Truman Capote, Flaubert, Thomas Mann, Caravaggio, Tennessee Williams, Igor Stravinsky, Cary Grant, Vincent van Gogh, William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Freddie Mercury, Larry Grayson, Andy Warhol, Sergei Eisenstein, James Dean, Marlon Brando, Botticelli, Armistead Maupin, Ang Lee, Anthony Perkins, Cary Grant, Dirk Bogarde, John Frazer, Errol Flynn, Sal Mineo, Tyrone Power, John Gielgud, Francis Bacon, Harvey Milk, Ian McKellen, Jean Genet, Nureyev, Nijinsky, Steven Sondheim, Leonard Bernstein, Christopher Isherwood, Alan Turing (code breaker World War 11) Lord Kitchener, General Gordon, Baden-Powell, Cecil Rhodes, and many many more, the list is virtually endless and includes at least five Popes, a number of cardinals and let us not forget the Theban Band and the Samurai of Japan. According to Mugabe they are all pigs and dogs. That’s the answer of course – they were/are all gay or bisexual. If Mugabe and Mad Mahmoud enhanced the world just an infinitive fraction of the way most of these men did, each in their own way, maybe their ignorant phobia would lesson somewhat and they would stop ranting and foaming at the mouth. Mugabe’s latest is to call Cameron a Satanist for promoting gay rights.

It is estimated that in 1928 1,200,000 men in Germany were gay including of course members of the SS, the SA, and the armed forces. Like Monster Mugabe and Mad Mahmoud, Hitler (there is some doubt about his own sexuality) thought the world would be a better place without them.

And is there not more than a little doubt about St. Paul? He certainly, gay basher that he was, seemed to have a whole heap of trouble with it. I wonder why.

2011-11-27T07:45:00.001+02:00

I’m thinking of giving up. Have I got nothing good to say about anything? My Blogs these last few days seem to have been nothing but doom and gloom. Hardly surprising I suppose considering the state of things but I wish it could be different. I wish there was some sweetness and light. There is certainly no sweetness and light in Colombia. The government there, according to a documentary made by VBSTV, has conscripted police and soldiers to murder the homeless in the name of “social cleansing”. The homeless are forced to hide in sewers to escape the death squads but militia groups have been known to ignite the sewers with gasoline trapping and killing those hiding there. It is obvious that many of these homeless people who have been living on the streets with no support are children and adolescents. Is this called population control? The whole idea of it actually happening is so horrible it is almost beyond belief except it would seem that South American countries are constantly throwing up these “death squads.” In a few years time the world will get around to condemning Columbia for this atrocity with accusations of crimes against humanity but it will be too late for the hundreds if not thousands who will die in the meantime.

David Beckham has been offered an eighteen month football contract for almost twelve million pounds. How many of the homeless could be sheltered for twelve million pounds?

Sir Philip Green is reputedly personally worth six billion! How many could be housed if he gave away only a half of his fortune, or even a third?

Yet another black mark against the deadening (deadly?) influence of elf and safety. A woman who fell 45feet down a mineshaft wasn’t rescued because firemen were told using life-saving gear would break the rules. Fire chiefs refused to mount an immediate rescue operation because of health and safety fears. With several broken bones Alison Hume who was found by her teenage daughter was left lying in agony in the cold and dark for eight hours. A report has found she could have been brought out alive if firemen had been allowed to do their job, instead of which while the rescue operation was in progress, a certain group commander by he name of Paul Stewart, realising he was the most senior man there, took charge, ably assisted by his colleague, one William Thomson. Although one fireman had already gone down Stewart’s first move was to stop a paramedic, who was already strapped in a harness, from being lowered. He and Thomson refused to use a winch to lift the woman out because elf and safety rules state the equipment can only be used to save their own staff! Alison Hume was finally brought out alive but died of a heart attack due to hyperthermia. Moral of the story? If you are in difficulties, no matter how dreadful, don’t even think of relying on the rescue services, because of elf and safety rules they’re more concerned with saving their own skins and the fear of being sued if things go wrong. Unbelievably group commander Stewart had the gall to say the operation had a successful outcome because the casualty was ultimately brought out. He is still in the fire service and is on the waiting list for promotion to divisional commander! Pathetic.

2011-11-25T08:49:00.001+02:00

Never mind off-putting photographs of the mad Mahmoud kissing bearded Mullahs, the Vatican has been a positive hornet’s nest of outraged sensibilities. It would appear Benetton produced an advertisement featuring a mock-up of His Holiness giving a bearded Mullah a real smackaroo; the Mullah with pursed lips and closed eyes obviously enjoying it! The Vatican threatened legal action saying the advert was “damaging to not only the dignity of the Pope and the church but also to the feelings of believers,” and, despite my own feelings regarding religion and the religious, I have to admit they’re dead to rights though there was no mention of the other side. What has happened to sense and sensibility (and sensitivity) these days or even plain good manners that people feel its funny or they can get away with discourtesy, ridicule, obscenity, insults, hurt, scurrility? Witness the witlessness of the disgusting phone calls made by Russell Brand and Jonathon Ross on their show and the pair seemingly stupidly unaware of the backlash it would cause. Did they believe they were so popular they were above criticism? Now evidently a transcript is available in schools for pupils to analyse, naturally causing even more outrage, and you want to tell me the world isn’t going totally apeshit? Evidently the Benetton campaign, now withdrawn, featured other political leaders as well and a spokesman said it had been aimed at “fostering tolerance.” Alessandro Benetton, the company’s executive deputy chairman said, “The images are strong but we have to send a strong message.” Indeed? Is that so? Who do they think they are, who do they think they are kidding and who on earth requested they should send out any kind of message at all let alone strong ones? There is only one reason for advertising - to drum up trade and sell more of your wares – that was the strong message it was meant to convey. I am truly surprised that some fanatical Muslims, incensed by what they see as an insult to their religion and, as is their wont, haven’t attacked the Benetton establishments in droves, or that some mad Mullah hasn’t issued a fatwa.

Here on Crete, any new business or office opening requires the services of the local papas to give it a blessing. Like all Greek ceremonies it goes on interminably and watching it the other day at the opening of a new office for the Vamos Culture Society priest and cantor moaning away with book, incense, holy water, crucifix and basil I couldn’t help feeling what a load of superstitious old moody it all was but wouldn’t dream in a thousand years of voicing that opinion.

And still on the subject of religion, in Croydon a Roman Catholic school for girls aged 11 to 18 has been taken to task for selecting pupils who, along with their parents, attend mass, help out at church, and who were baptised within six months of their birth. Evidently “faith schools” tend to do this. I can understand Jewish schools wanting to be completely Jewish and Muslim schools likewise, there really would be little if any point a non-Jew or non-Muslim wanting their child to attend though even within these religions there are schisms of course; but when there are so many varying beliefs in the Christian religion it does seem a bit cliquey to say the least. Evidently, because of the excellent academic record of faith schools there are parents prepared to change their religion in order to enrol their offspring in the school of their choice.’

Nurse: Congratulations, Mrs Christian, you have a bonny bouncy baby daughter.

Wife to husband: Quick, dear, we have just under six months to convert from Congregational to Roman Catholic, have her baptised, and enter her for the convent school.

Husband to wife: I’ll set the ball rolling at once, darling.

It’s a bit like entering your son for Harrow or Eton the moment he’s born.

2011-11-23T09:58:00.000+02:00

Well, folks, here it is as promised – Headlined “A Tax Too Far” and illustrated with a photograph of two men holding up their tax demands towards the camera.

“ARE POLITICIANS – Greek and European – deaf, dumb and blind or just plumb crazy that they can’t see the wood for the trees?

Do members of the government not realise that the more they pile on the taxes, the less people will buy and, together with all the small businesses that have been forced to close, the tax base will be further eroded?

The property tax will more than likely be the last straw. I know that I, for one, when the time comes and living on a small UK pension, will simply not be in a position to pay it. What will happen? Will my electricity – now more expensive than ever anyway –be cut off? And if this should apply to not hundreds but thousands of people in the same boat whose income has been reduced or who have been made redundant and their electricity is cut off, what a fine old mess that is going to be.

Of course the very rich have no cause to worry, but for the ordinary working man this could very well be a tax too far, as it were.

Secondly has this nonsensical idea of obtaining shopping receipts using a swipe card been thought through? It’s fine for the big supermarkets that accept credit cards but there are thousands of small businesses that don’t. They simply won’t accept anything but cash.

And what about the itinerant peddler who sells his wares from the back of a truck? Or farmers for example? Or the baker who, apart from his shop, does a bread round in a van, a boon to the elderly? Or the stall holders in street markets? Or the sellers of plastic furniture and nurserymen selling plants, wood merchants and more? I’ve seen a fishmonger’s van, someone selling tools from the boot of his car, Chinese merchants flogging tat and even live chickens for sale. Are they all going to use swipe cards? Do me a favour.

Another point –multiple households. In this house there are three people, each with his own tax number. Now if one goes shopping on behalf of all three (which is in fact the case) can you imagine a supermarket teller’s reaction when the shopper says, ‘This purchase goes on this card, this one on the second card, and these others on the third. The whole idea is absurd.”

A short Blog today, pithy and to the point … I hope.

2011-11-21T08:53:00.000+02:00

Letters to the editor – open letters to newspapers, what is the point? To let off steam I suppose, get something off one’s chest, tell the world how idiotic it can be. The use of open letters to newspapers with dozens of signatories has become an increasingly common form of protest of late. Fifty-three MP’s urged reform of drugs policy, 46 actors protested about cuts to regional theatre, 33 barristers opposed a British Bill of Rights. Twenty Church of England Bishops have written to condemn benefit cuts. Although addressed to the editor, the letters are obviously meant for a much wider audience, politicians in particular, sometimes to possibly open a debate on whatever subject is being aired. The array of acting talent that wrote to the Observer about arts funding, including Helen Mirren, Kenneth Branagh and Julie Walters, was stellar enough to make the news section. Likewise, when business figures have grouped together to support or attack the government's economic policies, it has invariably made a splash. Recently supported or condemned are forest privatisation, changes to the NHS, arts funding cuts, tuition fees hike, Bill of Rights, drugs policy and high-speed rail. I’m sure there must also have been letters for or against any extension to Heathrow. But do these letters really have any influence? It’s a tradition evidently that goes back to the 18^th century when newspapers were taking off. The anti-slavery movement in the early 18th Century and early 19th Century used the national press like the Times, but provincial papers like the Manchester Guardian and the Leeds Mercury were even more important.

Two famous letters in history are those penned by Emile Zola and headed “J’Accuse” taking the French government to task and accusing them of anti-Semitism in the trial and imprisonment of Alfred Dreyfus. The French government didn’t take too kindly to that with the result being Zola, convicted of libel, was forced to flee to England.

The other was from Martin Luther King written from jail in Birmingham, Alabama which contained the famous line, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

One of the most influential letters in England was sent to the Leeds Mercury in 1830, by English labour campaigner Richard Oastler and entitled ‘Yorkshire slavery.’ It read, “Thousands of our fellow-creatures and fellow-subjects, both male and female, the miserable inhabitants of a Yorkshire town, are this very moment existing in a state of slavery, more horrid than are the victims of that hellish system 'colonial' slavery.” The concern and debate it generated helped his campaign to bring about the 1833 Factory Act, which restricted the use of children in the textile industry.

What started me thinking about this is that, in all my years in England I did write a few letters to various papers, none of which was ever published whereas here in Greece, letters I have written to The Athens News have all been published. For those of you who don’t read The Athens news, in my next Blog I will print out my last letter. Now, if you can hold yourselves in anticipation and for a couple of days not get too excited, isn’t that a treat to look forward to?

2011-11-19T08:56:00.001+02:00

It would appear, according to a review in a newspaper, that there are something like 700 biographies of Adolf Hitler. It beggars the imagination. How can there possibly be 700 books written on the life of one person, major historical figure or otherwise? Could they be solely on the life of the man or do they include wider histories of the Nazi era? I wonder. It must be a typo surely. Even 70 is pushing it somewhat. No other persons have ever had that much written about them. There are quite a few books written on various historical figures but 700? Amazon lists a hundred but even those are not all complete biographies but encompass various aspects of the time and events for example the German/Russian pact. Oops! Just out of interest went to Wikipedia and learn there are not hundreds but thousands of books on Hitler! So maybe 700 ain’t no exaggeration after all. The review in question was actually not about Hitler at all but about Eva Braun and the mention of 700 was by-the-by, in contrast to which the poor, I can’t help the feeling from seeing her home movies, rather stupid girl has only had three or four books written about her. Not surprising really. Apart from brown nosing Adolf what is there to say about her? Saw the film on Hitler’s downfall, an excellent essay and if accurate, as I presume it must have been, based partly on the memoirs of Hitler’s secretary in his last days, I’m really not surprised the man is still of so much fascinated interest.

And now we have yet another biography of Willy Shagspaw. Considering, in contrast, how little is known about him, how many more ‘I guess it must have been this way’ kind of biographies can we get? This one is called ‘Nine Lives of William Shakespeare’ by Graham Holderness. Now what does Professor (or is it Doctor?) Holderness know that we don’t know, or that hasn’t been conjectured up in previous essays into the secret life of the bard’s lost years? According to the headline of the review I have just read, our poet spent his time drinking and chasing older women. Now where did Professor Holderness get that from? That as a callow youth Willy married a lady a few years older than himself? Anne wasn’t a thirteen year old Juliet but neither was she exactly approaching middle age. Can the good professor put names to all the other older women Willy was supposed to have pursued? And what about his infatuation (if I may call it that,) with Mr. W.H. as evinced in the sonnets? “The master mistress of my heart’s passion.” As for the drinking, I am sure he quaffed his ale no more or less than any other man of the period and, if he drank to excess, where did he find the time to write the poetry and all those wonderful plays as well as rehearse and act in them? I don’t think a mind befuddled with alcohol could produce such work. Which brings us back to the conundrum of who did write them if it wasn’t Willy, and the new film out called ‘Anonymous’ pleads the cause of Edward de Vere, Seventeenth Earl of Oxford. There is nothing new here. This debate has been going on for ages and will always ruffle Stratfordian feathers. I think I mentioned before that contenders in the slips are Francis Bacon and Christopher Marlowe. There is a lovely story about a group having an argument as to whether it was Bacon or Shakespeare who was the true author. W.S.Gilbert, he of Gilbert and Sullivan fame and a bit of a wag, sat listening to this for a while and then said, ‘Why don’t you dig them both up, lay the coffins side by side and get Beerbohm Tree to recite from Hamlet? Whichever body turns over - that’s your author.

2011-11-17T09:14:00.001+02:00

Once upon a time when I was very young I had obviously done something stupid, not unusual, for which I remember I got a good ticking off from my mother. A short while later she gave me some money and told me to go to the shops and get some common sense. Our next door neighbours were a family named de Jongh and Mister de Jongh was a shoe repairer whose work, I seem to remember, was carried out in an old converted garage. That’s what it looked like anyway and it was on the way to the shops so I popped in and asked if I could have one of his old tobacco tins which I filled with sawdust from his floor and took back to my mother with, ‘There you are.’

‘What’s this?’ she exclaimed, opening the tin.

‘Common sense,’ I said, giggling smugly. But her mirth was even louder and longer as she explained that she really did want some “Commonsense,” evidently a domestic product of some kind, I don’t remember and know not what for, a cockroach killer maybe.

The reason for my telling this little story is that I am beginning to think the commonsense of some people these days is on a par with that tin of sawdust. I am fully aware that life in the computer age grows more and more complicated and bewildering and sometimes one remembers how simple and comfortable life used to be but it would seem, with all the advances of technology, that commonsense in many cases has quite simply flown out the window.

I’m not just talking about silly children who never learn that, if they put out on the internet, Facebook, or Twitter (what a danger and a waste of time they are) the date and address of a party, they must expect to get a whole crowd of feral gatecrashers all out to make joyful boisterous mayhem and trash the joint. And I don’t mean big sabre-rattling scene stealers either making statements like “Iran is ready for war!” (It’s that Mad Mahmoud at it again) but ordinary people in every day ordinary walks of life, for example – Diane Taylor, aged 92 wanted to buy a bottle of whisky and was asked for ID, at which she promptly produced an over sixties bus pass, an OAP card and her pacemaker certificate and her purchase was refused. Why? Evidently none of these were worth diddlysquat as far as identification was concerned. No, indeedy, what she needed to produce was either a passport or a driving licence. At ninety-two she was hardly likely to have either, nevertheless a spokesperson (note that, PC, folks, spokesperson) for the shop said ‘We are sorry for the inconvenience but staff are required to ask all customers for ID. The shop has to enforce a strict policy or risk losing its licence.’

A man of 44 who was devoted to his collie dog named Beaky believed it might be getting aggressive and could attack someone so he had the animal put down and then hanged himself with the dog’s lead, leaving a note which read, ‘I’ve gone to be with Beaky.’ Questions – Had he never heard of muzzles? Such a simple commonsense solution, and why did the vet he took the dog to not try and talk some sense into him?

A lady was asked by her neighbours if she would keep a lookout on their property while they were away to which, as she was a good neighbour and on friendly terms, she readily agreed. One day, having inspected the house and finding all was well, she decided to take a stroll in the back garden, never dreaming for a moment of what lay in store. Her idyll was suddenly shattered when half a dozen burly policemen came hurtling over the garden wall and rushed at her as a prospective burglar. Talk about incipient heart attacks! They responded swiftly to the call having been tipped off by another neighbour who, knowing the family was away and seeing what she thought was a stranger in their garden, was obviously on neighbourhood watch. But was this amount of force from the intrepid boys in blue really necessary? Couldn’t a couple of them simply put their heads over the garden wall and say something like, ‘Oi, Missus! Who are you and what are you doing in this ‘ere garden wot does not belong to you?’ Or words to that effect. And chief constables complain that their forces are stretched to the limit and overworked. A little more commonsense should ease that problem but I suppose it’s too much to ask for. I’m only surprised they weren’t in riot gear, carrying weapons, or prepared to taser her just in case she proved to be violent and might hurt them. After all they have been known to refuse to climb ladders just in case.

2011-11-14T08:42:00.003+02:00

Poor George Papandreou, I feel so sorry for him. He tried so hard for so long to make it as Prime Minister of Greece only to inherit a nest of vipers and, most likely after the bullying tactics of the Merkel and that French twit, finds he is pushed aside. The financial mess that is Europe, Britain, and America at the moment seems to be a Gordian knot that needs an Alexander to unravel it with a clean blow. Not that there is anything new about it; even cities of the ancient world did at sometime or other find themselves in financial straits. Bankruptcy is hardly a new phenomenon but the multimillion dollar rats have fled and, make no mistake about it, the wolves are at the door ready to pounce and it’s the poor wot pays the price. The horny Italian has quit too. What an upheaval it has been. He can now invite as many girls as he likes to his bunga-bunga parties as long as they’re not underage.

Continuing my reasoning as to why the world is going to hell in a hand basket (apart from the financial situation that is) two footballers in Iran have been sentenced to 74 lashes each for bringing the game into disrepute after an “immoral” goal celebration on the pitch televised live; footage which shows Mohammad Nosrati pinching Sheys Rezaei, a team mate’s, bottom. The flogging could very well rake place on the pitch where the celebrations took place after a judge said they may have violated public chastity laws. Judge Valiollah Hosseini told the state-run Fars news agency that the punishment for violating the chastity law is up to two months in prison and 74 lashes. "It is even worse that these actions took place before the eyes of thousands of spectators and TV cameras," he was quoted as saying. In another YouTube video Rezaei is shown hugging another, unidentified teammate to celebrate the side’s winning goal in the last few minutes. Apart from the flogging they have been banned from football for an indefinite period and fined the equivalent of £25000 for “immoral” acts. For pinching a bottom? For a hug? Oh, come on!

Homosexuality is outlawed in Iran and can carry the death penalty so, oh dear, the slightest hint of anything even remotely suggestive and the balloon goes up.

In 2007, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (Mad Mahmoud) famously declared in a speech at Columbia University in New York City that there were "no gays" in Iran. So, if pinching a bottom is worth suspension, 74 lashes, and a fine of £25000 what punishment should be meted out for Mahmoud practically giving bearded Mullahs tongue sandwiches? These are no chaste kisses on the cheek, common in many non Anglo-Saxon countries, but definitely lip-smacking mouth to mouth. There are photographs available that show this disgusting “immoral” behaviour.

It’s lucky for English footballers that they don’t play in a country like Iran. In England the scoring of a goal is the signal for an immediate flurry of activity involving the whole side and practically ending up in an orgy – well an orgy of celebration anyway but definitely an uncalled for indulgence in “immoral” behaviour. What would Stanley Matthews have said at the behaviour on the pitch of today’s footballers?

2011-11-12T08:11:00.000+02:00

Continuing the saga of the Lennon tooth: there’s material enough here for Conan Doyle, were he still alive, to write a really gripping new Sherlock Holmes.

‘The first thing to ask, my dear Watson,’ Sherlock said, as he paced the room, ‘could this be yet another of Moriarty’s fiendish schemes? And if so, what does he hope to gain by it and who, in the process, will kick out his life in the dentist’s chair as it were? By the way, Watson, do you know where the expression “to kick the bucket” comes from?’

‘No, actually I don’t, Holmes, but I do wish you would stick to the matter in hand or the case of the Lennon Tooth will never be solved. Scotland Yard is at its wits end and they don’t know which way to turn.’

‘They seldom do, Watson, It is with irritatingly smug self-satisfaction I can say, they seldom do.’

‘And, Holmes, if I may say so, don’t pick up that violin now. This is not the time for music, no matter how soothing. Mrs Hudson is taking her afternoon nap and you know how absolutely beastly she gets if she doesn’t have it, like a schoolboy missing out on dirty doings in the dorm.’

‘It helps me concentrate, focuses the mind quite brilliantly, Watson, but you are absolutely right and I will at this point acquiesce to your wishes.’

‘And please refrain from smoking that awful Meerschaum. It stinks the place out and I don’t want to have to open the windows as we will without doubt catch our death. It really is high time you threw it out and got yourself a new one.’

‘Throw it out? My favourite pipe! My old and trusted friend who has helped me solve many a tricky case? I suppose you would like me to get rid of my magnifying glass, my smoking jacket and tasselled cap as well. What kind of a detective would I be without these accessories? No, no, Watson, I couldn’t dream of it. Were I to do that I would spend more than half my life down at Limehouse. I spend enough time, and a great deal of money I might add, down there as it is and those particular dreams are becoming quite disturbing which is putting it mildly. I know you have retired from practice but you could be called on at any moment to look into something absolutely ghastly and where would you be if I had encouraged you to throw out your old and trusted surgical apparatus?’ Doctor Watson winced and raised an eyebrow at the word “apparatus,” almost as bad as paraphernalia. ‘You would have to use your fingers,’ Holmes continued, ‘perish the thought. But this exchange, delightful as it may be, is getting us nowhere so back to the investigation in hand. What we have to discover, and prove, or disprove as the case may be, is the provenance of this mysterious tooth – that is, did it indeed come from the mouth of the great John Lennon or is it an ingenious and total fake? It is described by a certain young lady as being of a somewhat gruesome appearance, well to a young woman of a sensitive disposition it would, that goes without saying. She goes on to give an uncannily accurate description of the object in question as being yellow, browny (a word I have to admit I have never come across. I wonder if it is in the lexicon) and with a cavity, and her intimate knowledge does, I have to admit, arouse my suspicions. However, let us ask a number of pertinent questions. Let me see now, where to start? I have it. Quite obviously the cavity was the cause of excruciating pain and the sole reason for the tooth’s extraction. Was the tooth pulled in Liverpool or New York and who was the dentist who pulled it? If he is still alive perhaps he could confirm to our satisfaction that this is indeed John Lennon’s tooth and not just any ordinary old tooth. Of what age was Lennon when his visit to the dental surgery necessitated the extraction of this particular tooth? Judging by the description given by the young lady he was of mature years. Did the tooth really come into the hands of his housekeeper’s daughter and what did she do with it? Perchance she hung it on a chain and wore it around her neck. Girls have been known to do that sort of thing, bizarre as it may appear. And where is that young girl now to whom the tooth was given? Though I don’t see that as being particularly relevant as she could quite easily have been palmed off with any old molar in the first place and, if she got rid of it, how, why, where, and to whom was it got rid of?’ Holmes wasn’t too sure of his syntax here. ‘I have to admit in this we have quite a conundrum, Watson. May I smoke my pipe now in order to solve it?’

‘By the way, Holmes, purely as a matter of interest… Doctor Watson tugged at his left earlobe, a habit he had when asking a serious question… ‘how did the expression “kick the bucket” come into being?’

‘Well, my dear old chap,’ Holmes said, tapping down the tobacco in his pipe with a well-tarred thumb and searching for his Swan Vestas, ‘evidently the French when they kill a pig, string the unfortunate creature up by its hind legs to a beam in the barn, the name of which sounds suspiciously like bucket in English, and slit the animal’s throat, at which point of course in its death throes, its hind legs kick the bucket. You haven’t seen my Swan-Vestas anywhere have, you Watson? They do so have a habit of disappearing.’

2011-11-10T07:18:00.000+02:00

I have for a long time felt the world is growing madder by the day and I think I am right. One of John Lennon’s teeth is up for sale and reckoned to fetch £10000! Evidently after its extraction he gave it to his housekeeper to get rid of or pass it on as a souvenir for her daughter. What the hell does someone do with a tooth, even one from a celebrity like Lennon? ‘Hey, guys, come and look at this tooth. Belonged to John Lennon don’t you know? No I don’t want to take it out of its glass case. You can look but not touch. Can you not feel the vibes, man? It’s like John is right here in the room with us. I reckon it was ten thousand quid well spent, worth every penny just to know I have it. Yes, I know ten thousand can by a whole heap of food for starving kids or keep a couple of African families for a year or more but, man, just to have John Lennon’s tooth and to know I am the only one to possess such a memento, that really says something, that’s really cool, man. What do you mean I’m an idiot? You’re just jealous, man. If we had a séance a medium could use that tooth to bring John back from the dead and talk to us.’

Oyez oyez oyez! Update on that miraculous tooth. It has evidently been bought by a Canadian dentist for £19500, virtually double its estimation. £19500 is more than a whole lot of fillings and extractions – that’s any amount of expensive bridge and crown work which only goes to show how rich dentists can be.

And what has the dentist, a Mister Zuk, who once wrote a book on celebrity teeth (My God, what next? People actually buy that kind of thing?) have to say about his purchase? He is going to display it in his surgery and take it around other surgeries and dental schools. As though they could possibly be interested, having never actually seen a real tooth before. ‘My God! Is that what a celebrity tooth looks like? Awesome! I would never have guessed.’

Karen Fairweather from Omega Auctions said of the tooth, ‘It’s rather gruesome, yellow, browny, with a cavity. Mister Zuk said, ‘Some people will think it gross, others will be fascinated by it.’ Fascinated? By a tooth????

So, if John Lennon’s rotten tooth is worth nearly twenty thousand nicker what do you suppose Jesus’ foreskin would fetch at auction today? Wow! A fortune beyond belief. I am led to believe there are a number of churches claiming to hold this important relic but anyone can come up with a little scrap of wrinkled old leather and claim it is the genuine article. After all there is evidently enough pieces of wood taken from the true cross to make a hundred thousand crosses or more and, in the old days, after a public hanging, executioners made a whole heap of money by selling lengths of the rope – enough for a hundred hangings or more. Art for sale has a provenance, what about famous teeth? Who’s to say the Lennon tooth isn’t a fake? Oh, how gullible and how stupid, how gross, Mister Zuk, and how bizarre is the behaviour of some humans. Barnum was absolutely right.

2011-11-08T09:14:00.000+02:00

‘The bells! The bells!’ I have at last got around to actually reading the play made famous by Sir Henry Irving and which I’ve often heard mentioned or read about.

How it got there I have no idea but I found a book in the bookshelf titled ‘Hiss the Villain –Six Melodramas edited by Michael Booth.’ Why I say I wonder how it got there is because it was once the property of Tufts University Library. I must have got it legitimately though because I see on the flyleaf we paid £15 for it and that must have been some time ago when £15 was worth quite a lot. It’s been a long journey unread from New England to Crete, presumably via London and Yorkshire. Not Virginia or New York or it would have been marked in dollars. I was rather surprised not to find ‘Murder In The Red Barn’ or ‘Sweeny Todd’ in the collection, two most famous melodramas, but the ones included are more along the moralistic line, especially when dealing with the demon – alcohol! ‘Ten Nights in a Bar-room’ ‘Lost in London’ ‘Under the Gaslight’ and, of course, ‘The Bells’.

Talking of the demon alcohol – I saw a photographic reproduction of a dozen ladies with a large sign reading ‘Lips that touch alcohol shall ne’er touch mine.’ Looking at the grim faced rather plain harridans in the picture I shouldn’t think anyone would want to touch theirs. But back to melodrama.

It’s too easy now to find these works laughable, melodrama being a joke, but it was the mainstay of English and American theatre in the nineteenth century and evidently right up to the First Wold War and any management wanting to fill the theatre put on melodrama despite the number of elaborate (and expensive?) scenes required in each. Shakespeare and modern drama did not pull in the punters and the upper classes preferred the opera. The writing of these plays, fodder now for send-up and excruciatingly bad as it is with dialogue unheard of except upon the Victorian stage, was however evidently taken seriously by its authors if you consider for example the note Watts Phillips wrote at the end of his play ‘Lost In London.’

“The above explains my reason for requiring a great width of window at the back. I wish the great city to appear most distinctly as a background to the last act of the drama. The moonlight view will give a beautiful tone to the scene.”

And “It is required that the silver light of the moon should fall suddenly on the figure of Nelly, flooding it as with glory.”

Of course melodrama had to develop further and give the masses more of what they wanted hence the inclusion of what was known as “the sensation scene,” that is for example the rescue in the nick of time from an advancing locomotive or the hero diving into the lake to rescue the drowning heroine. What The Times called “a triumph of sensationalism” was in a play ‘The White Heather’ when two deep sea divers fight on the ocean bed and one is killed when his air pipe is severed. Evidently the scene was very realistic including the swimming fish. One of the reasons I suppose for the decline in melodrama was the advent of moving pictures that could reproduce these events that much more easily and with greater effect.

Of the six melodramas in this volume ‘The Bells’ is something of an exception as the writing is much more natural and consists of lines people could actually act in a more realistic way though, as with the others, the sets are many and the cast numerous. Managements could afford huge casts in those days. Now if you present a play with more than one set and two or three characters hands are thrown up in horror. The sensation scene I suppose is Mathias having a fantasy of a courtroom and being tried for murder, being hypnotised by a mesmerist (!) in order to reveal his guilt and naturally being sentenced to death.

Funnily enough we watched an early Sherlock Holmes movie in which that evil fiend Moriarty uses mesmerism to blackmail victims into believing they are guilty of murder. Melodrama wasn’t quite dead.

‘The Bells! The Bells!’

2011-11-06T09:55:00.000+02:00

Played the other evening the 1954 ‘A Star Is Born’ with Judy Garland and James Mason giving a terrific performance as Norman Mayne. Needless to say Judy was a great star anyway. The extras on the disc included a snatch of the 1937 version and trailer for the 1976 production starring Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson and I simply cannot wait not to watch it. Remakes can be pretty terrible. Whose great idea was this?

Driving back from Xania the following day and with ‘The Man That Got Away’ going round and around in my head, I remarked to Douglas that nearly all my favourite singers were/are female: Barbara Cook who I one heard live in concert in London – Wow! What a voice! What a consummate artiste! What an unforgettable experience!

Ella Fitzgerald who I also heard live, this time in Toronto out in the open air and equally as exciting as the Barbara Cook. Everything said about the former, repeat for the latter. Sarah Vaughan whose voice gives me that legendary tingling up the spine but who unfortunately I have only ever heard on record. And, of course, Judy. I have to admit without a blush to being a friend of Judy. Some men I suppose I can listen to with pleasure, Sinatra for example, but then he had the assistance of the brilliant Nelson Riddle, so it would seem women far exceed men when it comes to ballads. I’ve just created a profile to go with these Blogs and one of the questions asked is, ‘what is your favourite music?’ Well, a difficult one to answer as my musical tastes spread so wide: serious music of all kinds with the exception of some modern composers whose music is far too linear for my liking, songs from shows, ballads, Blue Grass, jazz, country and western, R and B. I don’t particularly go for rock ‘n roll, boy bands or girl bands (I couldn’t even name the latest) and I can’t be doing at all with rap. There are individual compositions that are favourites of course: Richard Strauss’ ‘Four Last Songs’, ‘Pavanne For A Dead Princess – Ravel, ‘Romeo and Juliet Overture, Tchaikovsky.

Many years ago a play of mine called ‘Bay Rum’ was produced at Buxton. It is a ghost story. Well, if Dickens and Wilkie Collins and Henry James can write ghost stories why can’t I? It’s not an eerie ghost story but a romantic one and, when I saw it at Buxton, I sat with delight through the first act it played so well, the audience with it all the way, getting all the laughs and obviously enjoying it. Then came the second half and I felt I would like to slide under my seat I was so embarrassed. It went down like a lead balloon. Now why did it bomb? I can’t understand it because all these years here I’ve been thinking it is a lousy piece of writing but, having just taken it out and reread it, it isn’t that at all. In fact it is quite delightful though a bit old-fashioned now and I still can’t see why the second half was such a flop when the writing is equal to the first half. Weird. Was it the direction? The performances? I just don’t know. Anyway I have spent the last two days correcting errors in the script and making a few teeny-weeny amendments. That’s all I felt it needed. Maybe someone will resurrect it and I will eventually solve the puzzle of the second half. Who knows?

2011-11-04T10:01:00.000+02:00

Some years back, 2000 in fact, a friend sent me the following which I discovered whilst having a sort out and which I pass on to you with the hope that you will find it edifying even if you don’t, or can’t, for example if you live on the top floor of a high-rise block of flats, follow all the commandments – but Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann and Tea Party members please take particular note.

Laura Schlessinger is a radio and television personality who dispenses advice to people who call in on her shows. Recently she became a convert to Judaism and is now Baalat T’shuvah. She has made some statements about homosexuals that has caused the Canadian anti-hate laws to censure her. But even better, this was an open letter to her posted on the internet –

Dear Dr. Laura,

Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God’s law. I have learned a great deal from your show, and I try to share that knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind him that Leviticus 18:22 clearly states it to be an abomination. End of debate. However I do need some advice from you regarding some of the specific laws and how best to follow them.

a) When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a pleasing odour for the Lord (Lev.1:9). The problem is my neighbours. They claim the odour is not pleasing to them. Should I smite them?

b) I would like to sell my daughter into slavery as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. In this day and age what do you think would be a fair price for her?

c) I know I am allowed no contact with a woman while she is in her period of menstrual uncleanliness (Lev. 15:19-24) The problem is how do I tell? I have tried asking, but most women take offence.

d) Lev.25:44 states that I may indeed possess slaves, both male and female, provided they are purchased from neighbouring nations. A friend of mine claims this applies to Mexicans but not Canadians. Can you clarify? Why can’t I own Canadians?

e) I have a neighbour who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly states he should be put to death. Am, I morally obligated to kill him myself?

f) A friend of mine feels that even though eating shellfish is an Abomination (Lev.11:10) it is a lesser abomination than homosexuality. I don’t agree. Can you settle this?

g) Lev.21:20 states that I may not approach the altar of God if I have defect in my sight. I have to admit that I wear reading glasses. Does my vision have to be 20:20 or is there some wiggle room here?

h) Most of my male friends get their hair trimmed including the hair around their temples even though this is expressly forbidden by Lev. 19:27. How should they die?

i) I know from Lev. 11:6-8 that touching the skin of a dead pig makes me unclean but may I still play football if I wear gloves?

j) My uncle has a farm. He violates Lev. 19:19 by planting two different crops in the same field, as does his wife wearing garments of two different kinds of thread (cotton/polyester blend). He also tends to curse and blaspheme a lot. Is it really necessary that we go to the trouble of getting the whole town together to stone them? (Lev. 24:10-16) Couldn’t we just burn them to death at a private family affair like we do with people who sleep with their in-laws? (Lev. 20:14)

I know you have studied these things extensively so I am confident you can help. Thank you again for reminding us that God’s word is eternal and unchanging.

Your devoted disciple and adoring fan,

Aaron.

2011-11-01T09:03:00.000+02:00

So the world population has reached nine billion. The only question to ask now is how long before Armageddon? It won’t be a physical battle or any of the other weird and wonderful beliefs (I’ve just looked it up on the internet) of the various religions but simply that the world will run out of resources, they’re not infinite, and as the population is destined to grow even faster, that time can’t be too far off. Science-fiction will come into its own when mankind, what is left of it, has to find another planet on which to survive even if artificially. It is estimated that the UK population over the next ten years will increase every year to the extent of populating a city the size of Leeds. Mentioning Leeds reminds me of that wonderful old Music Hall, City Varieties, that has just reopened after refurbishing. It is definitely not as grand a theatre as the Bolshoi which has also undergone a facelift recently but it is nevertheless another piece of theatrical history saved from the wreckers. Now, hopefully. Wilton’s will be saved, especially after the BBC made a programme called Michael Grade’s History of the Music Hall in which Chris is featured as George Leybourne, Champagne Charlie. It has been well received and he has had dozens of messages saying as to how much people enjoyed it. Of course, here in the wilds of Crete and not being in a position to afford a way of getting the Beeb we haven’t seen it as yet though any number of friends have recorded it and offered to make a DVD for us so I guess we’ll soon get around to it.

Now he is currently working on his lecture/illustrated show he is to give in December to the Society for Theatre Research under the title of ‘The heaviest of Swells’. This was a Leybourne number and also the title of Chris’s book – volume one (see Amazon) – currently working on volume two which hopefully should come out next year.

He and Douglas are much in demand locally as entertainers. Sunday they did a turn or two at the Doulakis Winery that’s fast becoming a venue for social events and early in the New Year they are performing a full evening’s concert of two hours. This follows on by request after their successful Cole Porter programme.

Vamos seems to have become the centre for a lot of cultural events so it’s pleasing that they are in the thick of things especially as Chris really has missed entertaining, especially when it comes to pantomime each Christmas. He’s a bit like Bernard Miles’s old parrot at The Mermaid that sulked the whole year through, even to the extent of pulling out feathers, but came to sudden life as ‘Treasure Island’ went into rehearsal.

As for me, I long ago lost interest in performing so don’t miss it one little bit. The closest I will get to anything theatrical is a workshop I am holding with the local amateurs next month - should be fun - I hope.

2011-10-30T09:56:00.000+02:00

The religious of various persuasions have been indulging in a few shenanigans and dust-ups recently. A few weeks ago Police in the US state of Ohio were investigating a rare violent feud in the Amish community, in which members have had beards and hair cut off. (Amish men grow beards but not moustaches which they believe have military connotations. Women do not cut their hair). Spiritual differences were said to be behind the attacks on more than half a dozen men and women, according to the police. Amish folk rejected by the mainstream community are suspected of having carried out the attacks. The Amish reluctance to help the police in their enquiries led Sheriff Fred Abdalla to say, ‘You see this crime being committed, and I'm sitting here with my hands tied’. The victims have included a 13-year-old girl and a 74-year-old man. The feud is thought to involve 18 Amish families, most of whom are said to be related, some having broken away to become members of a cult. Violence in an Amish community is extremely rare though, in another incident, if incident it can be called, a man of 32 entered a school and having let the boys leave opened fire on a number of girl pupils, causing deaths and injuries and devastating the community. Nobody can fathom out his motive. Neighbours describe the man and his family as ‘ordinary Christians’.

Several Christian parishes in the Indian state of Kerala have begun offering incentives to couples to have more children; ten thousand rupees for the fifth child as though the world, and India in particular, aren’t already over-populated. Evidently the number of Christians is on the decline but then so are Hindus whereas Islam is growing apace. I really don’t know how you reverse the trend by producing more kids. I suppose it’s like the American fundamentalist sect who believe the more kids they produce (ten or more in some cases) the more future Christians there will be to spread the good word. Just how they guarantee their kids growing up the way they want or expect is something they obviously haven’t considered. Jesus saves and all that.

Still on the subject, a doctor in England has been suspended for bringing Jesus into the consulting room. Evidently it was more than a spatula he rammed down people’s throats. A proselytizer will proselytize wherever he may be.

At least three people in London with HIV have died after they stopped taking life saving drugs on the advice of their Evangelical Christian pastors. The women died after attending churches in London where they were encouraged to stop taking the antiretroviral drugs in the belief that God would heal them.

"I've only seen that once, but it has happened," said Prof Jane Anderson, director of the Centre for the Study of Sexual Health and HIV, in Hackney. "We see patients quite often who will come having expressed the belief that if they pray frequently enough, their HIV will somehow be cured," she added.

HIV prevention charity African Health Policy Network (AHPN) says a growing number of London churches, for example “The Synagogue Church Of All Nations” (I’m surprised it doesn’t end with an Inc.) may be involved in telling people the power of prayer will "cure" their infections. The church is headed by Pastor T B Joshua, Nigeria's third richest clergyman, according to a recent rich list. "HIV-Aids healing" is listed on the church's website among "miracles" it says it can perform. "Cancer healing" and "baby miracles" are also advertised and there is a miracle elixir called ‘anointing water’ which will do the trick if God is deaf to your prayers. Talk about snake-oil. Those carpetbaggers had nothing on this lot. Evidently by using the anointing water "you are positioned for healing". But what’s new? Isn’t there a sect that bans blood transfusions even when it is needed to save life? Could it be Christian Scientists? Could it be Adventists? I don’t remember.

In Tunisia a mob tried to storm and torch a TV station that had the temerity to broadcast a prize winning film because they considered it blasphemous. Evidently it contains a scene that has God talking to a young girl.

In the states the question is ‘will religion harm Mitt Romney’s hopes’? An Evangelical pastor has claimed that Romney is not a Christian and belongs to a cult because he is a Mormon. Hey-ho! There is obviously no chance this in-fighting is ever going to cease.

2011-10-28T08:41:00.001+03:00

Someone else who shouldn’t be living in England but it would seem cannot be deported because of the Yuman Rights Act is an ex-Mugabe henchman and torturer of opponents by the name of Phillip Machemedze. Why is he still in England instead of being sent back to Zimbabwe? It’s not because he shouldn’t be in the country at all and has been working illegally for seven years but, despite his horrendous past, his Yuman rights would be violated, that’s why. But what about the human rights of those he tortured so mercilessly at the behest and in the name of Monster Mugabe when he was with the feared Central Intelligence Organisation? It is said he smashed one victim’s jaw with a pair of piers before pulling out one of their teeth. Another was beaten and punched unconscious and a woman victim was taken to an underground cell where she was stripped and whipped and Machemedze admitted rubbing salt in her wounds.

In a small way he was made atonement for past sins in that his work in England, illegal though it was, involved caring for those with learning disabilities and on a unit dealing with drug addicts and alcoholics. He also worked for an organisation called The Milestone trust, a learning disabilities and mental health charity. It wasn’t all altruism though. He did in that period earn £151000 but is now out of a job and guess what – applying for benefits of course.

He arrived in Britain in 2000 on a six month visitor’s visa which banned him from working but, like so many illegal immigrants, he merely went to ground.

There was outrage when an immigration court in May ruled he must be allowed to stay because he would face mistreatment if sent back to Zimbabwe. Now, though he admitted in court, to breaking immigration rules, Judge Julian Lambert deferred sentence and said he would not face jail if he volunteered for just half a day a week at his local Pentecostal church for the next six months! Half a day a week! ‘I require you to work hard with your church to make better the lives of the poor and needy,’ the judge said. How he does that on half a day a week beggars the imagination. Does this man live in the real world? Nevertheless, ‘You should bring letters,’ the learned judge went on, ‘to show the good work you have done. If I see you have done good work when you return and I have your promise that you will continue that good work I shall give you your liberty.’ In the slightly truncated words of William Shakespeare, ‘Oh noble judge … most learned judge…’

Moral of the story? No matter what heinous crimes you have committed in your home country, flee to England where you will be treated with kid gloves, and worry not, you are fully protected by your Human rights.

2011-10-26T09:03:00.000+03:00

THE number of foreign murderers in British jails has almost doubled in the past 10 years. There are 573 non-British nationals behind bars for murder – up 86% from 308 in 2002. An extra 50 foreign murderers were jailed in the past year alone. In 2010, seven were released from their life sentences – but only four were deported, leaving two in the community and the third recalled to prison.

Tory MP Priti Patel said: “The increased numbers of foreign murderers in our jails is alarming. Worse still, having them released back into the community is outrageous. Not only could public safety be compromised, but why should hard-pressed taxpayers foot the bill for them to live here?” The revelation comes as the Home Office came under increasing pressure after admitting violent foreigners had been wrongly freed without being deported.

In April 2006, then Home Secretary Charles Clarke admitted more than 1,000 ex-convicts were not considered for deportation after their sentences. How many more now five years later? By law, any non-national jailed for more than a year must be considered. The Shadow Home Office minister called for the Home Secretary to “come clean” on those not deported.

She said: “If Theresa May is unwilling to admit there is a problem how can anyone have confidence in her ability to put it right?” It costs £23million a year to keep non-British killers in our jail system. There are 11,500 foreign prisoners all told and prisons are supposedly bursting at the seams. Why can’t these criminals be got rid off? Mostly I suppose because they cite the Yuman Rights Act – that is, if sent back to their own country they’re likely to be maltreated, tortured, or even killed. £23million a year is quite hefty sum to keep criminals in what passes these days, apart from very old prisons like Wandsworth, as virtually a four star hotel. All they lose is their freedom.

British immigration is still allowing hundreds of people in who should never even be allowed to leave the airport, including possible terrorists and hate vendors, the latest being the virulent anti-Semitic cleric, Raed Salah. He is naturally fighting his case against deportation, and many more will be coming who will no doubt join the 11,500. Those who do not will happily milk the benefits system of many millions more.

There are child beggars on city streets, some as young as four and something that’s possibly not been known since Victorian times, certainly not in numbers. Are they British kids? No way. They’re the children of Rumanian gypsies and back in their impoverished homeland it would appear their sponsors, gang or family, are living in virtual mansions and driving BMWs. If living in the UK, they claim benefits while their children are out begging. As one Rumanians told a reporter, the British are generous and make it all too easy. In other words, if you an get away with it which seemingly they do, it’s money for old rope and, of course, the more kids you have, the bigger the benefits. Good for some, huh?

2011-10-24T09:21:00.000+03:00

Still on the subject of theatre, I wonder if there is a question someone somewhere can answer for me. If it takes approximately an hour to read a full length play, why on submission does it take days, weeks, months, even years to get some kind of response, if a response is forthcoming at all? The latest only took two weeks which must be a record. The record for the longest promised response must surely go to the last of the actor-manager laddies, Charles Vance, who I see on the net is still producing weekly rep together with his wife Imogen. Good grief, I thought weekly rep had died the death a thousand years ago. Charles in the beginning was, I am led to believe, one of the J.Arthur Rank charm school together with people like Dirk Bogarde but, unlike Bogarde, he didn’t make the grade. Never mind, over the years many a young actor, including myself, has had reason to be grateful to Charles; he has given dozens of young actors jobs both touring and in seasons. In fact in those early years it seemed virtually everyone had worked for Charlie at some time or other. At Chelmsford he produced and directed my play, ‘Early One Morning’ which, in the provinces got excellent reviews despite the lady in this production being like a stick of wood which doesn’t help in a two-hander, but in town it was slaughtered, mainly because of piss-poor direction and even worse acting by the lady who took over. After seeing the dress rehearsal I immediately phoned my agent and begged him to stop the play going on. There was no way it wasn’t going to be a total disaster and I was right, but he refused to listen. It couldn’t have been that bad a play, though according to a lady from The Guardian’s woman’s page, Fiona McCarthy it most certainly was. I sold half a dozen options on it. That in fact was the only money I made. Trevor Bannister, later to make his name in ‘Are You Being Served’ and who died just recently played the boy and was excellent but I have always felt if that play had gone on on the Avenue with say Maggie Smith and Albert Finney it would have been a roaring success. But what has brought Charlie to mind now is that over twenty years ago I sent him another play and got a very sweet reply saying among other things, ‘You know how much I admire your work’ and a promise to read it as soon as possible. I am still waiting.

At Chelmsford, after a performance of ‘A View From The Bridge’ I think it must have been, old age makes the memory hazy, I was talking to Charles’s wife, Imogen in a corridor when the actor Barry Howerd came out of the shower stark naked except for a fur around his throat. Barry is not what one might call exactly unequipped and Imogen, faced with this full frontal, let out a gasp at which Barry said, ‘What’s the matter, Imogen? Have you never seen a fox fur before?’ And swept on into the dressing room.

2011-10-22T09:01:00.001+03:00

It would seem American film stars in considerable numbers cannot wait to take the plunge on British stages and not only in the West End. The latest to join the trend is Sharon Gless, now in her sixties, one time star of the popular TV series, ‘Cagney And Lacey’ who is appearing at the Riverside Studios, Hammersmith in a play called ‘A Round-Heeled Woman.’

Whatever happened to quotas? According to the dictates of both English and American Equities there was a time when it was virtually impossible for actors to cross the Atlantic in either direction. It was a wonderful game of tit for tat. We’ll allow so-and-so to appear on Broadway if you will allow so-and-so to appear in London. Have Equity in both countries lost their teeth and how many Brit actors are appearing in America at the moment? There is Daniel Radcliffe of course in ‘How To Succeed In Business’ but then, as the star of Harry Potter, he is a gilt edged investment for putting bums on seats. That is not to denigrate his talent. Looking at exerts of the show he is quite obviously a true performer.

Dominic Cavendish in The Telegraph decrying the trend heads his article ‘When the player, not the play, is the thing’ though he is not against the big guns whatever their nationality treading the boards. He has nothing but praise for the likes of Keira Knightly, Kevin Spacey, Jude Law, Ralph Feines. No, instead of fine actors being used and God knows there is talent in abundance; his objection is to what he calls the tatty names and faces off the telly that managements think are necessary to bring in the dumbed down crowds to see their favourites, especially with the price of theatre tickets what they are. I’m not denying that television is a powerful medium. Why else would advertisers use it to push their products with ‘As Seen On Television.’ Do they still do it I wonder? And of course there are gifted actors appearing on television but there is also a great deal of dross that should never be allowed near a theatre to spoil a good play which is what Cavendish is saying, as is Alan Ayckbourn.

I have suffered the fate. Many years ago a two-hander play I had on in London was slaughtered by the critics mainly because the actress in it, who was known from a popular soap at the time, was dire and simply couldn’t act her way out of a paper bag.

I was once in a dreadful play called ‘Who Goes Bare?’ set in a nudist colony obviously, for a summer season; admittedly not in the West End but in a pretty large seaside town and virtually everyone in the cast was billed as ‘Seen in so-and-so on television.’ I’m quite sure the holiday making audiences would have come to the theatre without that incentive.

I had a star from the soap 'Eastenders' play Captain Hook in a production of my 'Peter Pan' and I might as well have directed a piece of wood. Come to think of it I might have got a better performance out of the wood!

2011-10-20T09:56:00.001+03:00

Come sing along with me – “Lumbago, lumbago, that’s my kind of pain,” with apologies to Mister Sinatra, and Al Capone as well, as it definitely was his town for a while. Just in case any of you are not familiar with the song it goes “Chicago Chicago, that’s my kind of town.” And the reason for my singing? Kneeling on the kitchen floor the other day and siphoning off some homemade orange wine I twisted my back. I felt it go and knew immediately I was in dead trouble and so it was. I became incapacitated and dead boring it was, apart from the agony I mean. Is it because we are two-legged animals that the lumbar region is so prone to aches and pains? And all for two bottles of wine, delicious though it may be. And I’ve still got about eight or nine demijohns of various wines to decant. Will have to go more carefully in future.

At last it would seem the season of that nasty little bloodsucker the mosquito is over for this year and the nets are no longer needed. I am informed, I don’t know how true it is, that a mosquito can detect its next meal from a distance of twenty feet and that it is body odour that leads it to its prey. Using an anti mozzie spray or rubbing a lotion on exposed parts might stop them there but the question I would like answered is how do the little buggers get through clothes to bite you where you ‘re not protected and in the most intimate places? Vitamin B12 is evidently off-putting but how much vitamin B12 must a body take to be effective? There are various herbs as well, the scent of which they dislike; lavender, rosemary and, from a tree rather than a herb, eucalyptus. So, as we have both lavender and rosemary in the garden and the trees at the bottom of the lane are eucalyptus, instead of buying expensive commercial anti-mozzie sprays, this summer Chris made up one of our own which did appear to be just as effective, though they still managed to get through to those body parts not sprayed.

In the dryer parts of the island mosquitoes are not a problem but we live in the greenest area and of course the house is surrounded by foliage so the little buggers breed wherever there happens to be a bit of damp. Funnily enough it was only at the end of the summer that they became a real pain but at last I can sleep without the net which means it’s all over till next year. Now that we have had the first rains, and I mean rain, solidly for three days and nights, greenery is shooting up all over in front of your eyes. It seems to grow as you watch.

I’m just grateful we don’t live in South America where they have those really ugly little blood-sucking horrors – the vampire bat. Yuk!

2011-10-18T09:11:00.000+03:00

Did you know that the Emperor Justinian banned homosexuality because it causes earthquakes? We’ve had a Mullah recently put a country’s earthquakes down to girls wearing short skirts and now we have that weird creature, the all but in name dictator of Iran, Ahmadinejad (Why not shorten his name to ‘Mad’?) whose election has always been in some doubt, blame the wicked West because the country is suffering a severe drought with its rivers running dry. Boy, western scientist really have entered into the world of futuristic sci-fi that they can produce a drought over an entire country. I wonder how they do it. They have recently discovered Venus has an ozone layer, much thinner than earth’s evidently but there nevertheless so now the belief in the possibility of life elsewhere gets a decided boost. Of course there is life elsewhere. I’m a firm believer in that. It’s not possible that in the unending vastness of the cosmos and far away galaxies there is no life other than our own. Maybe in the discovering of Venus’s ozone layer they have inadvertently caused Iran’s droughts or maybe it’s all down to homosexuality and girls dressing immodestly.

I’ve been thinking, something I still do, despite the mind growing more feeble by the day, what was the point of various countries getting rid of their monarchs when the elected heads of state are kings in all but name and with much more power over their subjects than a constitutional monarch? What is Assad but king of Syria? What is Ahmadinejad but the new Shah of Iran? What was Sadam Hussein? Has a dynasty not been founded in North Korea that looks, unless there is something like a revolution, to continue?

But to carry on our discussion on the madness of our elected masters. The UK is in almost as deep a doodoo as Greece whose government keeps on borrowing more money when they can’t pay back what they’ve already borrowed, but in Britain the chancellor of the exchequer when questioned about foreign aid says he didn’t think Britain should get out of the mire by not helping those in need of help (or words to that effect and whatever happened to God helps those who help themselves?)) and blithely earmarks another billion dollars in foreign aid. Well, so what? He shrugs. It’s not his money. If he wants to play the good Samaritan with someone else’s money who are we to question it? But whatever happened to charity begins at home? It is estimated that in 2012/13 an extra 600000 children and 800000 adults of working age will be living in poverty?

And who are we to question that that venerable old institution the BBC that is fast becoming an anachronism, has been awarded three and a half billion this year to keep its head above water? Are any of the overpaid management likely to make a small sacrifice and possibly reduce their salaries a little? Not bloody likely, not while the TV licence stands at £145.50 and, like the Greek property tax, is something, unless you throw out the television set, unavoidable. And what about those obscene bank bonuses? Is the government ready to tackle the banks? Not bloody likely.

One could go on and on but really why bother?

2011-10-16T09:24:00.003+03:00

Sometimes I wonder if politicians have their heads screwed on or whether they can’t (or won’t) see the wood for the trees. Apart from selling Greece lock, stock, and barrel and at rock-bottom prices, consider this scenario: I am a Greek civil servant of some years standing. I have a wife and children to support. My salary has been cut as has my pension or I have been made redundant. I now have barely enough to put food on the table as the cost of living has rocketed and one does not even dare mention the price of petrol. Now the government is putting a tax on the house in which we live. Just where, oh, where, do they think the money is going to come from? And, in case anyone thinks they’re not going to have to pay up, the tax is to be added to the electricity bill which has already in the last few years doubled in price.

I am the owner of a small once popular taverna. It was always busy, Greeks love food and dining out, but now people with less to spend, are not eating out that much any more. If it gets worse I will have to close.

I own a small shop that used to do a roaring business but people are tightening the purse strings, business has dropped off alarmingly and I will soon have to put up the shutters. You can see it happening with premises empty all the way down the road and the ‘For Rent’ signs everywhere. These empty shops and work places are earning no money for their owners who might have relied on that rental income so where are they going to find the money to pay for a property tax? There are too many like me and gradually the tax base is being eroded. Also the Greek tax system is so bizarre there simply is no incentive to start a new business.

For example and this is a true story – I am a foreigner who thought it would be a good idea to buy a small hotel and advertise it in my home country and so attract the tourists Greece depends on so badly. Before I have even started the tax authorities are demanding 4000 euros. Why? And there is no arguing or reasoning with the Greek taxman. He is implacable. His word is law even though the system seems to be a shambles.

Meanwhile the fat cats so I am informed, I don’t know how true it is but it wouldn’t surprise me, have like rats deserted the sinking ship and fled elsewhere taking their money with them. A case of ‘I’m all right, Jack and to hell with everybody else.’

And one has to ask oneself, if people’s homes are to be taxed, why is there no tax on luxuries like swish yachts of which there are many? And why, when it is so fabulously rich and the biggest landowner is the church free of the tax burden? God has quite enough to be getting on with thank you very much, He won’t mind his servants giving a few euro all in a good cause.

At lease one Greek has voiced his criticisms. Constantine Michalos, president of the Athens Chamber of Commerce and Industry said, “the mixture of economic policy which is currently being applied to the Greek economy is completely in the wrong direction. It will lead to a further, and even deeper, recession in 2012" Or, as they say, things are going to get worse before they get better.

2011-10-14T09:11:00.004+03:00

God is wiser than I thought – he has told Ms Palin not to stand for the US presidency next year. Thank you, God. Sometimes (not very often but sometimes) I guess you do know what you’re doing. I mean for example some time ago you decided to nominate a certain people as your chosen and they’ve been the world’s scapegoats and seen nothing but trouble and strife ever since though, even after all they’ve been through, for some reason best known to themselves, they still think you’re the bee’s knees. I digress but I thought I would just point out that little error to you. So back to the presidential nominations; to put it in her own words, Ms Palin said in a statement that the decision came after much thought, and that she and her husband, Todd, "devote ourselves to God, family and country". (She couldn’t serve her country by being president? Some pretty oddball thinking there.)

And, "After much prayer and serious consideration, I have decided that I will not be seeking the 2012 GOP nomination for President of the United States," Ms Palin wrote in a letter to supporters. “My family comes first and obviously Todd and I put great consideration into family life before making this decision." Does this mean all the many heads of state have shown no consideration for their families?

She’s not above a bit of manipulative blackmail though: the declared Republican candidates for the presidency will have to compete for her blessing and for the support of her loyal followers. Oh, boy! Not God’s blessing, but Ms Palin’s blessing.

The mother-of-five has signed a number of lucrative television deals, published two best-selling books and set up a successful fundraising machine. God is still worth a bob or two to the faithful. That’s fine, as long as, being a God-fearing celebrity making lots of lovely dosh, it keeps her away from that insane desire to be president. Last time a born again was in power the world got into such a mess it’s going to take another ten years to recover, if not more.

There has of course been a positive rash of comments on the receipt of this wonderful piece of news.

“Who cares what her politics are or whether you agree or disagree with what she says. She's far prettier to look at on the TV news than Obama, Bush, Clinton, etc. and you can always turn the sound down!

Miss tea potty has been warned off methinks. She is not the sharpest tool in the political shed; even the yanks are not that stupid? She is the only politician who can make the gang we have put in charge look competent, that is no mean feat.

At least she will have more time to serve her country by keeping an eye on Russia from her back yard.

For once I'm genuinely happy that the idea of God exists as it diverts this insane women away from power.

This is a great pity. She was the perfect follow-on to George Dubya, and the world of satire has lost one of its best targets!”

No news of the other tea-party lady and I suppose in this instance no news is good news. Maybe God had a quiet word with her as well.

2011-10-12T10:11:00.001+03:00

I don’t remember if I have ever written a complete list of the fruit trees in our garden. I know I have mentioned them individually now and again so here is the complete list which I am sure will raise a great deal of interest and only goes to show I have very little else to talk about. At the far end of the garden there is an ancient pear tree. Goodness only knows how old it is. The bole is a good two foot or more in diameter. We occasionally get fruit from it if the ants don’t get there first. There are two apricots, one fruiting in the summer and the other autumnal, four walnut trees, nuts dropping like hailstones at the moment, four olive trees, a black mulberry, a quince that has given us masses of fruit every year, an avocado pear, three lemon trees, a nut-peach, a winter fig laden down right now, prickly pear (also masses of fruit at the moment), a yellow plum, a guava and a strawberry bed. Everything needs to be frantically cut back. It never ceases to amaze me how plants flourish on a shallow layer of topsoil over volcanic rock and when the rainy season is so short and the summers so fierce. The prickly pears are sweet and always remind me when a small boy of holidays in Port Elizabeth and my Aunt Marie rubbing butter on my fingers to get rid of the hairs when I was careless enough to handle them. There is also a mature nectarine tree American friends gave us about five or six years ago but, as I think I said before, that is due for the chop as it has never given any fruit and develops peach curl every year. It will be replaced with the loquat I have grown from seed.

In the small lower garden there are two varieties of orange, a loquat, and a white mulberry and in the courtyard a mandarin, a red plum, pomegranate, grapevine and another orange. The oranges will be ready for Christmas.

In the current economic climate it’s good to have all these and a Cretan said the other evening, if you have walnut trees you can live off a diet of nuts bread and salt. It might very well come to that.

The last two years we’ve let the vegetable beds lie fallow (except for the flourishing weeds of course) but before then we had tomatoes, peppers, green beans, peas, zucchini, carrots and pumpkin. I don’t know why the English don’t eat more pumpkin. It really is a delicious vegetable and pumpkin soup is out of this world. Even tried sweet potatoes at one point but that was a failure like the apple tree I planted. Apples, like parsnips, evidently need cold winters and we don’t get them cold enough here.

It’s now fifteen years almost since we came to live on Crete and it, as well as Greece, has changed enormously since those early days. It’s still a beautiful island though and, as Douglas once said; even if everything were to go pear shape it will all have been well worthwhile.

2011-10-10T08:54:00.000+03:00

I am on a diet. That is to say I am eating smaller portions, particularly in the evening, and have lost two stone. Went to a birthday dinner the other evening and wore clothes I haven’t been able to get into for fourteen years or so. I want to lose another stone but taking it slowly day by day. Eating less is the only sure-fire way to lose weight. We tried the Doctor Atkins diet once and lost a couple of pounds and that was it. Certainly didn’t feel any healthier for it. Other diets have proved equally inefficacious. I’ve had a weight problem most of my life though why this should be, apart from eating too large portions and having a very sweet tooth, I really don’t know because looking at photographs of myself up to the age of about ten or so I wasn’t exactly skinny but there was no sign of any superfluous weight. I didn’t start the diet deliberately. After my illness it just sort of happened but I’m certainly glad it did.

A number of times I have received e-mails that included photos of truly obese people, mainly American or African and it is never a pretty sight. I don’t know why Africans should be so gross but I can understand the Americans because they simply have no limits to what they shove in their mouths, and not just the multi-calorie fast foods: all you can eat breakfasts for example. In a hotel in Charleston Douglas and I ordered sucking pig for dinner one night thinking we would get what we considered a normal sized portion of meat. What arrived? Half a sucking pig each! In the dining rooms at the university where I taught, students would shovel food onto their plates until they resembled mini-mountains but then, having gorged themselves to a virtual standstill, half of it was left and went to the trash. Such a terrible waste. In my first semester I attended a performance at the college’s dinner theatre and sat next to a lady who had two gigantic servings of the main course before returning for a third. This was accompanied by those soft rolls the Americans call biscuits and was followed by two enormous helpings of dessert. Funny language, American: how can a soft roll be called a biscuit when the word biscuit comes from bis cottes meaning twice baked, that is rusks, originally hard tack for Roman soldiers? And how come the plural mathematics, geometry, algebra, trigonometry, is shortened to the singular math instead of maths? But I digress so back to the subject of food.

Obesity has become a major health problem in both America and Britain and not just with adults but with their kids, including quite a few in Greece. I suppose if you spend your life (apart from going to school where you sit in a classroom anyway) seated in front of the telly or a computer and you consume more calories than are needed the outcome is inevitable – you’re going to get fat. Sad when you think that, although food is so plentiful half the world doesn’t get enough to eat.

As Wilkins McCawber was fond of saying, ‘Income twenty pounds, expenditure nineteen pound nineteen and sixpence, result happiness. Income twenty pounds, expenditure twenty pounds and sixpence, result misery.’

You could apply it to calories; two thousand calories (or however many calories it is reckoned for a daily intake) slim, two thousand five hundred calories, fat. And make no mistake about it.

2011-10-08T09:21:00.001+03:00

Watched ET for the umpteenth time and still found it a delightful movie but there is one thing I’ve always wanted to ask Mister Spielberg: the corn field in which Elliot comes across ET, where in the geography of the town is it located? There are panoramic shots, wide-angle shots, and extra long shots but nowhere is there a corn field to be seen. Yes, there is open countryside and forest but a corn field? Elliot walks from his back yard into a corn field? No. I presume it is in the picture simply to provide a somewhat sinister location for Elliot to explore with his torch and to suddenly come across this weird creature. Something else that worries me: Elliot’s brother cycles into the forest to find ET which he does but the alien is sick and virtually unconscious lying half in, half out of a stream. How does the boy, all on his own, get ET, a dead weight, back to the house?

Well, they’re only small points I suppose. The performances are good all round, Drew Barrymore was a perfect little gem and for Elliot Spielberg could not have chosen a more angelic looking child than Henry Thomas who seems to have made the grade from child actor to adult, something that doesn’t always happen, having appeared in a number of movies: Legends Of The Fall, All The Pretty Horses, Gangs Of New York to name but three. Also in that latter film of course was another actor who started his career at a very tender age and made the leap to adulthood and, in his case, stardom, namely Leonardo diCaprio.

An interesting piece I came across; Horace Walpole who wrote amongst other things ‘The castle of Otranto’ reckoned to be the first Gothic novel in the English language, said: ‘I have learnt and practised the humiliating task of comparing myself with great authors; and that comparison has annihilated all the flattery that self-love could suggest. I know how trifling my own writings are and how far below the standard that constitutes excellence … My simple writings have had better fortune than they had any reason to expect; and I fairly believe, in a great degree, because gentlemen-writers are treated with some civility if they do not write absolute nonsense.’

‘My simple writings have had better fortune than they had any reason to expect.’ I wonder, of the thousands of books published every year by hundreds of writers, how many authors today would in all sincerity make a statement like that, even best selling authors. Would Jeffrey Archer whose latest novel is already in the top ten? Would Dan Brown whose writing (what I have read of it) is simply appalling? And what about the writers of romance and so-called chic-lit. Celebrity biogs, mostly ghost written, don’t even come into it. All these people however must have something, are laughing all the way to the bank and back, whereas I, eighty years old, the author of twenty six straight plays, not including television and film, the book and lyrics for seven musicals plus eight other works am still grubbing for every penny. Somewhere down the line I went badly wrong. Like Walpole I have practised the task of comparing myself with great authors and have been found wanting, but after such a lifetime of so much effort and body of work, a little success certainly wouldn’t come amiss.

2011-10-06T09:07:00.000+03:00

Despite Greece being in such an unholy mess; due in the main to nepotism, cronyism, corruption, greed, and the short-sightedness of self-serving politicians, I still think our move here was more than worthwhile and a couple of stories out of the UK make me rather glad I don’t live there anymore.

In St. Austell, Cornwall, a lady by the name of Joy Bloor has been keeping tortoises for forty years and now her sanctuary is being threatened with closure after council officials ruled that her 400 tortoises are ‘wild animals.’ Her Tortoise Garden is a popular tourist attraction and admission was free until she was suddenly ordered to pay business rates (on no financial business?) so now has to charge £3 a head to cover costs. It gets even more ridiculous. The council is also insisting the tortoises are tagged with electronic micro-chips. Good God! Are they likely to break out and go savaging around the countryside? More than likely galloping through fields and scaring the cows to death? And just how would you go about micro-chipping them anyway? Dogs yes? Tortoises? I would say a definite no-no. Bailiffs have already visited the sanctuary and issued an enforcement order, the counsel saying they have no alternative but to comply with the Zoo Licensing Act of 1981. Miss Bloor is being threatened with prosecution and the question is why? Why should she have a lifetime’s hard work and devotion ruined by petty bureaucrats? The idea that she is running some kind of zoo is beyond ridiculous and at a time when councils are cutting back on essential public services how much time and money has been wasted while councillors discuss whether tortoises are pets or wild animals?

The man who instigated this nonsense goes by the name of Lance Kennedy who styles himself ‘Cabinet Member Of Cornwall Council’ and ‘Portfolio holder for Community Safety and Protection,’ two previously unheard of positions and to my mind indicating a jumped up nincompoop with an inferiority complex. No, more than that, he just knows he’s inferior.

Talking of safety and protection, there have been complaints that some of the prison sentences handed down after the riots have been too severe and community service would be more beneficial so some young offenders were put to work painting the outside of a community hospital and guess what happened next! You’re quite right. ‘Elf and Safety put a stop to it on the grounds that it was too dangerous to climb ladders! Can you believe it?

Final story for today – with the price of housing reaching astronomical proportions and the dearth of mortgages and people struggling to keep their heads above water. A young coupe decided they could save up for a deposit on a house of their own by living temporarily in their parents’ garden shed. And of course the local council had to step in saying the shed ‘does not provide adequate living conditions’ and creates an ‘undesirable precedent.’ For goodness sake, they were comfortable in the garden shed. They had heat and for toilet facilities and the bathroom they had the parents’ house up the garden path. They have been given nine months (oh generous sympathetic council) to comply by finding other accommodation.

Tell me, is ‘Ripley’s Believe it or not still going strong? Oh, forgot to say, I never thought I would live to see the day when a kilo of lamb chops would cost £15! No wonder sheep rustling is on the increase.

2011-10-04T09:26:00.001+03:00

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” Sorry, Mister Jefferson but just what did you mean by this high-fallutin opinion’? I would have thought it self-evident to Jefferson that all men are not created equal. Interesting that at the time he adopted this wonderful idea he still kept slaves. But, putting that aside, isn’t it perfectly obvious that we are not all born equal? As I don’t believe in karma I don’t believe we have any choice as to where, when, and to whom we are born. Who, for example would want to be born, as what used to be called, an untouchable in India? But apart form the place, time, parentage, and social standing of our birth we are born with a tendency to ill-health or good health, a short life or a long one, not counting accidents of course. We are fat, we are thin we are short, we are tall, we are beautiful or plain or downright ugly and some unfortunately have much worse physical defects. There is also this to consider – some have an innate talent that hopefully during the course of their lives will be nurtured, others do not and not everyone is born with the brains of an Einstein, some are two sandwiches short of a picnic or, as an old comedian had it, if brains were dynamite he wouldn’t have enough to blow his hat off.

Such a one I believe is a rapper who goes by the name of The Game. He has come up with this wonderful theory that closeted gay men are spreading AIDS “fooling” women into having sex with them." On an interview with VladTV (whatever that is) he said he doesn’t have a problem with most gay people – just the ones who are “pretending” not to be gay and sleeping with women.

“The number one issue with that is you could be fooling somebody and you could give them AIDS and they can die and that shit spreads because any girl you might be fooling might leave you and go find another dude who ain’t gay and give him the disease.”

Well, well, well, what an interesting theory. This guy really put what few brain cells he has into high gear or, as they say, got his shit together, to come up with something so totally ridiculous. In the first place he is assuming that every closet gay has the virus and the best thing they can do is come out and be counted, and in the second place why would anyone want to behave in the way he suggests?

The danger of someone like this being allowed to voice his ignorant opinion is that, as a rapper I suppose he has a following, they can be easily manipulated and so homophobia gets a boost – even if just a minor one – a boost nevertheless.

2011-10-02T09:18:00.000+03:00

Watched the 1969 made for TV movie of ‘David Copperfield,’ directed by Delbert Mann, written by Jack Pulman, music by Malcolm Arnold. It boasted an absolutely stellar line up, the crème de la crème of British acting talent, starting with Olivier hamming it up unashamedly in the small part of Mister Creakle and, going down the line – Richard Attenborough, Cyril Cusack, Dame Edith Evans, Susan Hampshire, Wendy Hiller, Ron Moody, Michael Redgrave, Ralph Richardson Emlyn Williams, and more. Even the five liners were names. The film evidently won three Emmys plus an award for Outstanding Directional Achievement, plus Outstanding Single Performance by an actor in a leading role - Laurence Olivier! Now, come on, do me a favour pu-lease! His performance as I have said was in my opinion pure ham and, as for it being a leading role, he was on screen for a maximum five minutes. There was also an award for leading actress, Edith Evans.

A reviewer from Chicago on Google has written, ‘Delbert Mann's TV movie of David Copperfield is unique among film adaptations in that it tells the entire story from a series of flashbacks rather than an ongoing narrative. It works extremely well, adds to the emotional punch of the entire story, further illuminates Dickens' wonderful characters and is aided by a haunting musical score by composer Malcolm Arnold.’

Ho-hum…Ho-hum…the movie is a bloody great bore simply because of the way it is written and directed. Why can’t these egoists trust their material and not feel they have to put their indelible stamp on it. Jack Pulman was a well-established writer but then so was Mister Dickens so was it really necessary to try and improve on his work albeit for a different medium? In the opposite camp another reviewer has written, ‘This version of David Copperfield is dreadful from start to finish. I knew we were in for a wasted evening's viewing when a rather silly to the point of embarrassment Attenborough and Olivier camp it up as two baddies. It was all downhill after this. Aunt Betsy was adequate but had none of the eccentric flair she was noted for. The worst of the worst was the producer's choice for Uriah. This was the music hall version of this character, previously and admirably played by Roland Young. And what was all this self-absorbed angst from David? Dickens must have rolled over in his grave to see his favourite child turned into a wimp weeping in his beer.’

The beach the weeping wimp wandered along nursing his painful memories was sinister; littered with its numerous rotten black stumps of wood sticking out of the sand and perfect for moody shots: in close-up, in big close-up, in medium and long shot and shots of only legs and feet, between each one David has one of his flashbacks and each time you’re returned to the beach you want to say, ‘Oh, for god’s sake, Mann, get on with it!’ Early on, at the insistence of aunt Betsy he is joined on the beach by a girl named Agnes who he treats most discourteously. The question at this early stage is who the hell is this Agnes and why should aunt Betsy insist on her travelling all the way up Great Yarmouth to talk to David? We don’t find out until well into the picture.

I stayed with it to the end only because one time friend Nicholas Pennell had the rather nice sympathetic part of Steerforth and David’s friend, Thomas Traddles and I think the film only won its awards because of the impressive cast list.

Nick Pennell came to the public’s notice in The Forsyte Saga and was later for twenty three seasons a leading actor at Stratford, Ontario. I saw him playing the Scottish King when I was there and I am glad to have had the opportunity of seeing him for the last time as he died shortly after and much too young.

The previous evening we watched the spectacular European/Chinese production of Puccini’s opera ‘Turandot’ set in Peking and there is only one word to describe that – Awesome!

2011-09-30T08:50:00.002+03:00

Nudity. Is nudity with some people a statement? Remember the days when nudists were coy figures of fun to be sniggered at: the magazines and those dreadful movies of naked people in colonies walking behind low cut hedges and in other ways discreetly covering the genitalia, always with fixed smiles on their faces; the reasons or excuses for indulging in such bizarre behaviour consisting mainly of nudity being perfectly natural and healthy and giving folk a wonderful sense of freedom! Yes indeed, having stripped off on a nudist beach here in Crete, I can vouch for that sense of freedom and, once you’ve been swimming in the buff, having to wear a bathing costume is an encompassing pain in the arse if you will pardon the expression. Kids skinny-dipping in a pool is one thing and innumerable naked bodies on the beach is something else. I suppose those who have never experienced it must automatically think of it as sexually arousing, titillating at least as Frankie Howerd might have said, but in fact, with exceptions, I suppose there are always exceptions, at the sight of so many nude bodies sexual desire is curiously lacking

One day on another Cretan beach, one with far fewer bodies, probably only half a dozen, there was a large sign on the sand - NO NUDE BATHING - and using the sign as a backrest was a woman completely nude. Now, not to put too fine a point on it, this particular lady was fat. She was obese. She was gross. Rubins would have adored her. Later, in the sea, she sat on a protruding rock laughing with delight as the waves splooshed over her and here is the remarkable thing - she was absolutely beautiful, a giant flopping in every direction mermaid but so beautiful. Now had she been wearing even a bikini that beauty would have been lost and she would have been most unattractive.

So what about all the laws and municipal by-laws regarding nudity and the forbidding thereof? We’ve had the “Calendar Girls”, middle-aged ladies stripping off and posing for the camera all in good causes but they didn’t actually do it in public, and now we have a photographer who can persuade hundreds of people to strip off so that he can photograph them en masse and in public. The pictures I’ve seen have been most discreet; a display of hundreds of bums, in other words the equivalent of people walking behind low cut hedges.

But getting back to nudity masking a statement – Headlines – ‘Women Pose Nude To Combat Ageism On Television.’ Four actresses have stripped off challenging the powers that be not to ignore them. ‘Look at us,’ their action says, ‘we’re still beautiful, gie’ us the jobs.’ As the journalist Jan Moir writes, ‘What does their nakedness prove? Nothing except a bit of naked ambition’ and good on you, ladies, but is it going to have the slightest effect? I doubt it but you have to give cat in dog shows thumbs up for trying.

2011-09-28T08:36:00.001+03:00

Isn’t it strange, don’t you think, that the three major world religions whose followers have created more mayhem, caused more anguish and been responsible for more bloodshed should have all originated in the Middle East? Judaism whose ancient prophets with their direct communication to their God were a horror story in themselves; followed by Christianity, good start maybe with the man himself but no improvement after that, followed by Islam. Nuff said.

Will mankind never be free from superstition? Not only of the religious kind with all its multitude churches, denominations, sects and beliefs, every one of them claiming to be the only holders of eternal truth, but in other ways as well? And here I am referring to the belief in witchcraft.

In England in 1612 the belief in witches and the paranoia it evoked was endemic. James l was on the throne, living in fear of a Catholic rebellion in the aftermath of the Guy Fawkes' gun powder plot. The king had a reputation as an avid witch-hunter and wrote a book called ‘Demonology.’ In it, he wrote: "Children, women and liars can be witnesses over high treason against God." This influenced the justice system and led to the nine year old Jennet Device being the key witness in the notorious trial of the Pendle witches in Lancashire in which she accused her mother and other members of her family resulting in ten people hanged. Previously children under fourteen were considered too young to be witnesses though today, thanks to Jennet and the Pendle witches, a child as young as three has been a witness.

Jennet was calm and convincing in her testimony against her mother, grandmother, brother and neighbours. Standing on a table she said, "My mother is a witch and that I know to be true. I have seen her spirit in the likeness of a brown dog, which she called Ball. The dog did ask what she would have him do and she answered that she would have him help her to kill.”

"At 12 noon about 20 people came to our house - my mother told me they were all witches."

Jennet named six people whose names she knew and her mother and her brother James, who also denounced his mother, but Jennet then turned on him saying he had been a witch for three years and she had seen his spirit kill three people.

Of course the Pendle affair was not the only notorious trial. There was Salem in Massachusetts and after the Civil War terrifying witch hunts continued for two years between 1645 and 1647. Perhaps the most ghastly figure to emerge was the Witchfinder General, Matthew Hopkins. The hunt for witches was of course a good way of making money and getting rid of troublesome Catholics.

Belief in witchcraft is dead then you think? Think again.

After my previous remark about albinos and witch-doctors in East Africa, malignant witches according to some do exist. I believe in South Africa the witchdoctor is still very much feared. But what set me off even more is that in the Northern regions of Ghana there are six “witches camps” holding over 1000 accused women and 700 children subject to the most inhumane treatment.

Someone please reassure me we are living in the 21^st Century.

2011-09-26T07:55:00.000+03:00

Nature can be so cruel; not just the red in tooth and claw eat and be eaten predator variety but in other ways as well. I know when it comes to animals nobody could be more sentimental than I and what started this off was an article and sad photograph in the paper of an outcast seal pup; outcast because his fur, instead of being a sleek black, is ginger and his normal black relations want nothing to do with him. It doesn’t pay to be different. Think of the consequences of being albino in some parts of Africa. It could lead to your death when the witchdoctor wants your body parts to make muti.

I never knew there could be ginger seals but evidently there is a large colony of them near San Francisco so if the poor little outcast pup had been born in a different neck of the woods instead of Tyulenly Island, Russia, the whole start to his life would have been different. Evidently the colouring is caused by a build up of iron in his system but that can’t be explained to the normal seals so there he sits, so as not to be bullied, a forlorn little figure a hundred yards away from the cavorting colony on the beach and waiting for his mother who will never come to feed him. To make matters worse he has blue eyes and is partially blind. Fortunately at the time he took the pictures the photographer was with staff from a dolphinarium who took the pup under their wing. Maybe some philanthropic millionaire will fly him to San Francisco.

But to another animal story of a different kind. Of all the predators that exist surely mankind must top the list. Animals kill because they are hungry. Human beings kill.

The Faroe Islands have their own government, language, flag, currency and make their own rules but they are part of Denmark and the Danes and Danish government should hang their heads in shame at what goes on in the Faroes every year. I refer to the mass slaughter of dolphins and pilot whales when the sea runs red with their blood as they are hideously slaughtered in their hundreds. There are those in the water doing the killing while the rest of the community, including children, stand watching. This gruesome festival is supposed to prove adulthood! ‘Kill a dolphin and you will be a man my son.’ It has evidently been going on since the 10^th century but should it be allowed to continue? The hideous wholesale slaughter of these defenceless, friendly, beautiful, intelligent animals? The answer has to be a resounding no, no, no, and no again. The Faroes might have a certain independence but isn’t it time the Danish Government stepped in to stop this horror? It has no place in a modern supposedly humane civilised society. And, should you think horror to be too strong a word, look up ‘Denmark – dolphin killings’ on Google; that is if you feel your stomach can take it.