LOYAL readers - there must be two or three - may recall my blog a few weeks ago recalling how Thatcher burned billion pound notes by refusing to sanction the building of a gas pipeline into the North Sea. As a result of that penny-wise, pound-foolish decision gas has been flared off for the past 25 years.
Now Gordon Brown is saying we must act to avoid being reliant on Russia for our gas supplies.
Does it make you want to weep? It does me..
Americans are so addicted to lists that they publish a Book of Lists. Idly reading the list of ten favourite books started me thinking what mine would be.
Immediately I hit a difficulty; do series count as one book or should one choose one volume? Jeeves and Blandings, Sherlock Holmes, Rumpole of the Bailey, Flashman, Hornblower - they are all favourites but I would struggle to choose any one title.
I’ll start with single volumes, then let’s see where we get.
A favourite book has to bear frequent re-reading. On that basis Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain is my number one, the story of two runaways, a white boy - aged maybe 13 or so, son of the town drunk - and Jim, a slave, floating down the Mississippi on a raft through the slave states of pre-civil war America.
They meet up with all sorts of characters, some decent, many anything but, and the action swings back and forth between peaceful but comic philosophising and violent action and danger.
Huckleberry has no moral motive for helping Jim escape; just the opposite, he thinks he is doing wrong. When he decides not to give Jim over to slave hunters he thinks it will send him to hell. He is not ‘a low-down ab’litionist’. Twain’s brilliance is to show the horror of slavery without preaching. Even at the end of the book there is no sign that Huck’s feeling about slavery has changed. I first read Huckleberry Finn as a teenager. It is a sequel to Tom Sawyer and a rare example of a sequel better than the original.
Number two is another book about a raft, but Kon Tiki is as different from Huckleberry Finn as it is possible for a book to be.
Author Thor Heyerdahl has a theory that the Polynesian islands of the South Pacific were populated by people from Peru who escaped westwards from some unknown threat on mighty balsawood rafts. With a group of fellow Scandinavians he puts his theory to the test by building such a raft and sailing it to Polynesia. It is named Kon Tiki after a pagan god of the Polynesians.
Other ethnologists think this is nonsense but to me that doesn’t matter. The journey of the Kon Tiki is an idyll. There are no conflicts between the crew. They share some hardships, of course, and finally crash into a South Sea island where they get on fine with the natives who are gratified that an ancestral god has been recognised.
The only discordant part is when Heyerdahl gets alarmed that Kon Tiki might be undoing the work of missionaries. As Christian missionaries caused disaster wherever they went I’d have encouraged them.
Kon Tiki can be seen in an Oslo museum. Heyerdahl made more journeys, including ones in boats built of reeds to show that the Egyptians could have got to South America, but none matches Kon Tiki.
Number three is Stalingrad by Anthony Beevor. It tells the story, terrible, ennobling, sick-making by turns, of the pivotal battle of World War II compared to which which El Alamein little more than a skirmish.
It starts with the Russians reeling back under the Wehrmacht’s onslaught until they make a stand at Stalingrad. It becomes a symbol to both sides, of resistance to the Russians, of the defeat of Communism to the Germans. Stalin orders that the city named after him should be held at all costs and he means it. The number of Russians shot by their own side for cowardice or desertion is equivalent to a division - about ten thousand men.
The fighting continues hand-to-hand through the much fought-over ruins. Vainglorious Goering promises he can supply the Sixth Army by air, but fails and out of sight sight of the Germans, new Russian divisions are being prepared to be thrown into the Kessel - the cauldron. Hitler knows the game is up but expects his Army Commander to die rather than surrender. Von Paulus doesn’t agree and surrenders the remnants of his 600,000-strong army. They are marched away into the hinterland. Only 600 ever make it back to Germany, years after the war is over.
It takes skillful writing to make sense of battles to the non-military mind but Stalingrad is fairly easy to understand. Beevor’s book draws convincing pictures of what it was like for the soldiers on each side. It is difficult to feel much sympathy for Stalin, and impossible for Hitler, but one can for the soldiers doomed to fight the most hellish battle of World War II.
Equal third is Paths of Glory, Alistair Horne’s masterly account of the Battle of Verdun in 1916, a generation before Stalingrad, but not dissimilar in some respects. In February 1916 Verdun, a legendary fortress to the French, is a backwater to the battles raging elsewhere along the Western Front, but secretly the Germans are bringing up artillery and fresh divisions, hiding them in the forests of the Argonne. The calculation of the German commander is that the fall of Verdun would be a psychological hammer blow to the French.
At first it looks as though he will succeed. The Germans blast a gaping hole in the French line. But gradually the line coalesces and the French hold on. Division after division is hurled into the ’sausage machine’ as it is called by the French soldier. Verdun causes the British to launch the Somme battle to take pressure off the French and that leads to the worst one day loss of soldiers lives - nearly 20,000 - in Brtitish history. Verdun does not fall and eventually the Germans are fought to a standstill. It is estimated that every metre of land they gained cost ten lives and skeletons are still being dug up weekly in the forests that have been grown over the battlefield.
I visited Verdun in the late seventies with Horne’s book in hand. On the ramparts of the Citadel I notice a very old but spry Frenchman with two younger men I take to be his sons. He gazes over the battlefield with a far away look and a slight smile, but is that a tear in his eye or just the cold wind making it water?
Books like Stalindgrad and Paths of Glory do not lead one to be ‘ardent for some desperate glory’ in Wilfred Owen’s words. They teach that military victory is usually transient and if politicians and generals remembered that there would be fewer people dying on barbed wire, or in napalm or by suicide bombers.
Time for a decision. What do I say about PG Wodehouse? He wrote an enormous number of books, I think about 90, and his works are being republished in their entirety. My daughters, who find me impossible to buy presents for, are ecstatic. Problem solved until the books run out.
Even taking Wodehouse in series - Jeeves, of course, and Blandings and the golf stories and Mr Mulliner - would fill half the list. But I nominate the lesser-known Ukridge series. Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge is a big, dishevelled chap - a bit like Boris Johnson, I imagine - always with slightly dishonest schemes for making money to relieve his chronic penury (not like Boris). Of course, they always come unstuck and Ukridge lands himself on a long-suffering friend, the narrator. I suspect Wodehouse drew on an acquaintance when writing the Ukridge stories; he comes alive in a way that Jeeves and Wooster and the cast of Blandings don’t quite. So Ukridge is number five.
Number six is a more recent fictional invention. Flashman, the later adventures of the bully of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, by George Macdonald Fraser who died quite recently. The dastardly Flashman has no sexual morals and few of any other kind. Macdonald Fraser wrote 13 Flashmans and it is difficult to choose a favourite, but perhaps Royal Flash, a reworking of The Prisoner of Zenda, is the one I have re-read most.
The Pickwick Papers at number seven narrowly beats Great Expectations for my Dickens preference. It was originally published in episodes and I found a first edition in the original parts in Australia a couple of years ago. I was tempted to buy them but I phoned a bookseller in Bedford for advice. He put me off by telling me all the things to watch out for before parting with a considerable amount of cash. I decided not to buy but I still reread Pickwick.
That’s seven down and we have no detectives yet. My choice lies between Sherlock Holmes and Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe. Holmes shades it for being endlessly re-readable although many early plots are repeated in later stories. My favourite is the Hound of the Baskervilles which retains its impact even after the umpteenth reading.
Number nine is England, their England, a ‘roman a clef’, i.e. a fictionalisation of real people. Its author, AG McDonnell, was one of the London bohemian literary set between the wars. Some of his characters are identifiable even today, such as Alec Waugh, lesser known author brother of Evelyn, but it scarcely matters. England, their England is almost always funny and sometimes outright hilarious. My English teacher once read aloud the chapter on the village cricket match, in which the delivery of the last ball takes three pages to describe, and had the whole class helpless with laughter.
All satires date but this one can be enjoyed even if one knows nothing of the people it satirises. McDonnell wrote other books but England, their England is the only one to score a long-term success.
Number ten is out-of-print and hardly anybody will have heard of it. The Secret Roads by Israeli brothers Jon and David Kimche tells the story of the ingathering of Jews into what became Israel. Whatever one’s views about what Israel has become, this part of the story is moving and heroic by turns.
Jews fleeing the Nazis find the doors of potential refuges slammed against them. Only Palestine, controlled by the British, offers some hope of escape. But the British, after having first welcomed Zionism, are now fearful of the reaction of the indigenous Palestinians to this influx of strangers. They, too, slam the gates.
As the war ends, the survivors of the holocaust creep out of the death camps. Some return to their homes but many, especially those from Eastern Europe, find them occupied by other people. In one Polish town, a hundred survivors of the death camps are massacred when they try to reclaim their own homes. Again, Palestine beckons, and this time the Jews of Palestine, hardened by having fought in the war, are determined to bring them in by any means possible.
Reading The Secret Roads should not blind one to the Palestinian tragedy. The horrible irony is that the Israelis have turned from persecuted to persecutors. One needs to balance ‘The Secret Roads’ by reading one of the many books telling the other side. Probably the best is Karl Sabbagh’s ‘Palestinians’.
But whatever happened later, I find it impossible to condemn those who, having suffered more atrociously than anybody else in the 20th Century, sought a place where they could stand up straight and say, ‘I am a Jew; I am a man’.
I fear that the story can only end in even more tragedy for two tragic peoples. The Kimches’ book reminds one why Israel exists; Sabbagh’s book tells of the injustices that existence has caused.
So my list is:
1) Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
2) Kon Tiki by Thor Heyerdahl
3=) Stalingrad by Anthony Beevor; Paths of Glory by Alastair Horne
5) The Ukridge stories by PG Wodehouse
6) Royal Flash by George Macdonald Fraser
7) The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
8) The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens
9) England, Their England by AG McDonnell
10)The Secret Roads by John and David Kimche
Notice, no Hobbits or any other fantasy, nor Sci-Fi, but if I were to extend the list, Douglas Adams’ Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy would be in 11th place.
Anybody care to comment or share their list?
POLITICIANS in a panic do tend to shoot themselves in the foot, don’t they?
John McCain has given away his strongest card against Barack Obama (apart from the fact Obama’s black) which is his inexperience.
By choosing Sarah Palin, whose political experience is as mayor of a town half the size of Kempston and governor of a state with half the population of Birmingham, to be a heart-beat away from the Presidency, this 72-year-old has proclaimed that experience doesn’t matter much anyway.
IF somebody who two years ago was mayor of a town of 9,000 is now qualified to be Vice-President of the USA, I, with six years as Mayor of a borough of 153,000 sould, must qualify for something pretty good.
Relatively, Deputy Prime minister of Great Britain is a bit beneath me although if Gordon Brown goes the top job would be available.
On the whole, though, I fancy something which will let me travel far and wide at the taxpayer’s expense. Anybody fancy nominating me as President for Life of the European Community?
THOSE of us who have the misfortune to remember the previous housing slump of the late eighties/early nineties are seeing some of the old signs coming back; not just gazundering, where the buyer reduces his offer at the last moment, but also strange offers.
In an upmarket London estate agent at the weekend I saw a house offered at £670,000. Three bedrooms and a free Ferrari, it said. Presumably the latter was bought with one of those City bonuses we read about by some chap who thought the good times would never end - and found he was wrong.
IT is always traumatic when one has to consider interfering with people’s pastimes. But it is equally traumatic when one has to prepare a budget and such an issue comes up.
As it has with bowling. The borough has seven bowling greens - one of which is out of use, whether temporarily or permanent.
Bowling is mostly a leisure pursuit for the elderly, although it needn’t be, but even while the number of elderly people is going up the number playingn bowls is going down. Currently the six active bowling clubs in the borough have 243 members. Subsidising the cost of maintaining the greens and the clubhouses is costing the taxpayer something in the order of £60,000 a year which averages out at a subsidy of just under £240 per member for a five month season.
And it gets worse. The smallest club has 15 members which brings the subsidy per member up to more than - draw a deep breath - about £660 per member. It is by far the biggest person-to-person subsidy in Bedford’s leisure services and it cannot go on.
Priory Bowling Club, in the heart of Bedford, has more than 60 members with a subsidy of about £160 a member. Compared to some other clubs, that seems almost reasonable.
According to experts, a viable bowling club should have about 100 playing members. None of those in Bedford come anywhere near it.
On Tuesday morning I reassured members of the Priory Club that they could plan their 2009 season in confidence, and that applies to most of the other five active clubs but I had to make it clear that things could not carry on as they are.
The best way to deal with the problem would be to attract more members, otherwise the only alternative is merging clubs and closing some of the greens. I recognise that members feel an attachment to their own clubs but sooner or later there has to be increased usage or rationalisation.
STILL on irony and the Olympics, a few blogs ago I suugested London shouldn’t try to compete with Beijing in opening ceremonies by should stick to a few buskers from the London underground and a tour by Her Maj in an open coach.
Judging by our performance in the handover ceremony, I wasn’t far wrong. We had an open top bus and an aging rocker, and David Beckham instead of the Queen.
But why was the bus one of those boring ones which only let you on and off when the driver says so and not one of the much-loved open-platform Routemasters that Boris was pledged to save?
Maybe one of the 2012 events could be leaping on to a moving Routemaster (the medals going to those who caught the bus at the highest speeds) or disembarking with the bus moving at full tilt, marks being given for grace and style. In my young day I reckon I would have stood a chance.
NOW the OLympics are over I must put away the small dream I had about half-way through that directly-elected mayor authorities would lead the gold medal tables. There are only 12 of us - 13 if you count Boris Johnson - out of more than 300 boroughs and districts.
The dream began when Rebecca Adlington, the swimmer from Mansfield, won two golds. I imagine Tony Egginton, my Mansfield counterpart, was bouncing up and down Tiggerishly before hitting the phone to arrange the open top bus tour.
So, I thought, if our Paula or Liz Yelling can get a gold in the marathon and Gail Emms two in singles and doubles badminton, and that taekwondo girl from Doncaster - where Martin Winter is directly-elected mayor - get another, that would be a total of six from mayoral authorities. Who would then dare say we didn’t deliver? (For those with an irony bypass, I have tongue in cheek).
Sadly, my hopes crumbled one-by-one. But congratulation to Victoria Pendleton, the gold-winning sprint cyclist from Mid-Beds. I wonder if she would like to move to Bedford for 2012.
And actually, even with two golds directly-elected mayoral authorities have still punched above their weight.
Many years ago, before Hanson bought up London Brick, I was invited to a reception by the latter to celebrate a new venture, contracting with London boroughs to bury their waste as landfill.
A somewhat inebriated director of London Brick told me the holes would one day be worth more than the clay that came out of them. Later, when he had sobered up, he denied he had ever said it but I told him that if he had been too drunk to remember, I certainly wasn’t.
Back at the BoS office I wrote an article in which I said London Brick had bought farmland which it rented out to tenant farmers until needed, then dug the clay to make the bricks, now it was going to fill the holes with the rubbish of London. One day, I speculated, the rubbish would have a value and would be dug up in its turn.
I am not saying I really believed it, but then the methane being produced by the fermenting landfill was burned off to make electricity and I saw my prediction as having become at least partly true.
According to The Times on August 11 and 12, the other part is now coming true. The discarded plastic is now worth serious money, about £200 a ton, more than the original clay had been worth. The paper speculated that within a few years it would be worth mining landfills for the plastic. It would be an industry worth billions.
I admit I’m quite proud of my clairvoyance. If only I had thought of some way of cashing in on it at the time.
The county council’s website has asked its readers for ideas for a mission statement for its library service.
It has received the following offering:
Bedfordshire Libraries are a vital community facility, committed to providing excellence and value in enabling the whole community to participate in lifelong learning and providing access to information, knowledge, works of creeative imagination and information technology with particular emphasis on social inclusion, citizenship and democracy.
I had always assumed their mission was to lend books but that’s not mentioned so obviously I’m wrong.
It’s the morning after the Olympics opening show, which apparently cost China £52 million to stage, and already people are shaking their heads and asking how London is going to match that in 2012.
I have the answer. Don’t bother.
Beijing was four-and-a-quarter hours of empty spectacle. No wit, no humanity, no message - except that when it comes to naffness China can beat anybody. After 30 minutes I had had enough. Why should we want to emulate that? The Olympics are overblown, riddled with drugs and corruption. In the forthcoming new world of tightened belts and straitened finances squandering that amount of money on what amounts to a circus would be obscene.
The reason Olympics ceremonies are so awful, incidentally, is that they have to they have to appeal to a polyglot audience. You have to have words for wit.
My suggestion is that we go back to the last time the Olympics were held in London - 1948, the austerity Olympics. The athletes stayed in army huts or in private homes, took public transport through blitzed London to the venues carrying their packed lunches but I bet they had at least as much fun as will the pampered pets of Peking, sorry Beijing. And people still remember stars such as Fanny Blankers-Coen creaming up the medals for women athletes.
I’m not suggesting we blitz London for 2012, but I have some ideas for the opening ceremony: round up some buskers from the underground, have Her Maj (I expect it will still be her) doing the circuit in a horse-drawn carriage like she does at Ascot, maybe a stint by the Cirque du Soleil followed by a couple of opera singers giving it wellie backed by the audience from the last night of the Proms. An hour-and-a-half max, then get on with the games.
What a relief that would be. I might even watch it all the way through.
As the years pass so do one’s friends and acquaintances. It’s always sad, but particularly so when one hears of the death of young people who should have many years of life ahead of them.
So I was shocked today when I heard that Annette Martin, who lived with her partner Roger Round in Commercial Road, had died of cancer at the age of 40.
It can’t be much more than three months since I last saw her, seemingly the picture of health, shortly before she was diagnosed with cancer of the colon.. An operation appeared to have been a success but a subsequent general check-up revealed that cancer had spread throughout her body. The only slight consolation is that it appears she did not suffer long.
Annette made the day seem brighter with her warm personality and happy smile. She and Roger were strong supporters of Better Bedford and had set up Riverside Residents Association for the people living in the streets between Midland Road and Commercial Road. To many people that might have seemed one of the least desirable parts of town but Roger and Annette loved it and the people who lived there.
Everybody in Better Bedford and Riverside Residents Association will miss Annette and will join Marlies and myself in sending Roger our deepest sympathy for his dreadful loss.
WILL American author Bill Bryson succeed in stopping Britain from becoming a fly-blown rubbish tip despite the efforts of some of the least attractive members of society? I hope so.
More particularly, I hope the Panorama programme Notes from a Filthy Island due to be aired on Monday in which Bryson, whose gently comic travelogues have made him a best-seller, shows Britain for what it is and persuades us into a massive clean-up.
While I can cross my heart and say I am a decent citizen now in that I don’t leave litter, it was only on becoming Mayor that I realised just how far we as a people have gone in fouling our own nest. One of my first decisions was to double the amount of street and graffiti cleaning and to have regular clear-ups of the roads through the borough.
My eyes have also been opened to the amount of fly-tipping that goes on. Much of it is due to people paying dubious individuals to dispose of bulky waste and closing their eyes to what is done with it. What is done is that it is taken away to some layby or waste ground and dumped, leaving the council to clear it up, which we do once notified.
I hope Bryson’s Panorama programme will act as a wake-up call and that it will bring us out of our homes to improve our own environment, but unless we also commit to ensuring our own rubbish is properly disposed of and demand our neighbours do the same it may prove a shortlived effect. Still, it’s a start and I urge everybody to watch the programme and pledge to play their part in a Great British Clean-up.
I hate to admit it, but I wasn’t too surprised at the loss of a crucial bit of evidence by Bedfordshire Police in the swan shooting case. Nor, apparently, was the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds which says Bedfordshire Police seem to find a lot of difficulty in prosecuting such cases.
In the four decades I have worked in Bedford I have known directly or indirectly of quite a lot of cases which were dropped, screwed-up, or maybe never even started despite an apparent abundance of evidence. At least one of them was certainly down to incompetence, but others? I am not so sure.
I can’t go into detail because proof of intent is by definition almost impossible to get which leaves no defence to a libel action. The Police Federation employs a very active firm of lawyers on behalf of its members who, of course, never have much difficulty in finding witnesses to support their case.
The failed cases show no consistent patter but it is all very mysterious and quite worrying.