This year we have a rare opportunity to actually see Santa as he passes over the UK!!!
Look directly above at 7:10, and you will see his sleigh as it passes over. It will be moving quite fast will look very different to the other stars/planets. It should be a great sight for all the family. A pair of binoculars will ensure a really good view!
Well, OK, it’s not realy Santa, it’s the International Space Station, but don’t tell the kids that!
Have a Happy Christmas!
Update: it was cloudy.
Sad to hear today that Bernard Cribbins has died at the ripe old age of 93.
A man of many varied tallents, but I think I’ll allways think of him singing his song, “Right Said Fred”, along with the rather primitave early 1960s animation. Enjoy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5XX9LX2es4
“Right, ” said Fred, “Both of us together
One each end and steady as we go.”
Tried to shift it, couldn’t even lift it
We was getting nowhere
And so we had a cuppa tea and“Right, ” said Fred, “Give a shout for Charlie.”
Up comes Charlie from the floor below
After strainin’, heavin’ and complainin’
We was getting nowhere
And so we had a cuppa teaAnd Charlie had a think, and he thought we ought to take off all the handles
And the things wot held the candles
But it did no good, well I never thought it would“All right, ” said Fred, “Have to take the feet off
To get them feet off wouldn’t take a mo”
Took its feet off, even took the seat off
Should have got us somewhere but no!
So Fred said, “Let’s have another cuppa tea”
And we said, “right-o.”“Alright, ” said Fred, “Have to take the door off
Need more space to shift the so-and-so.”
Had bad twinges taking off the hinges
And it got us nowhere
And so we had a cuppa tea and“Right, ” said Fred, “Have to take the wall down
That there wall is gonna have to go.”
Took the wall down, even with it all down
We was getting nowhere
And so we had a cuppa teaAnd Charlie had a think, and he said, “Look, Fred
I’ve got a sort of feelin’
If we remove the ceiling
With a rope or two we could drop the blighter through.”“All right, ” said Fred, climbing up a ladder
With his crowbar gave a mighty blow
Was he in trouble, half a ton of rubble landed on the top of his dome
So Charlie and me had another cuppa tea
And then we went homeI said to Charlie, “We’ll just have to leave it
Standing on the landing, that’s all
You see the trouble with Fred is, he’s too hasty
You’ll never get nowhere if you’re too hasty.”
It’s quite common to hear people say that violence never solves anything. Well that’s true in many situations of course, but there are cases where I beg to differ.
I’ll give you an example from my life. As a child I grew up with a bad stammer, and not surprizingly it attracted a certain amount of ‘unwelcome’ comments at school, in the Scouts etc, and even from adults in some cases. For years I simply put up with it, partly because I’d never known it any other way. But one day a mocking comment from some other kid tipped me over the edge, so I hit him as hard as I could.
Well I got into some trouble for it, but he never laughed at me again, and nor did many other people. So I’m sorry, but in that case, violence worked! I think I maybe did it on one other occasion, but I don’t recall much need for it after that.
You see, verbal assaults and abuse can be just as unpleasant as physical ones. Contrary to the fameous proverb, words CAN hurt you.
Which is why I tend to have a certain amount of sympathy with Will Smith for slapping the ‘comedian’ Chris Rock at the Oscar ceremony last night. Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, suffers from alopecia (hair loss), and Chris Rock thought it funny to mock her from the stage.
For me it has never, and never will be, acceptable to mock people suffering from an affliction, illness, or condition which they can do little about. It’s cruel and nasty, and you can hardly be surprised if they react strongly.
Well Will Smith did react strongly, and argueably quite gallantly, to protect his woman. She shouldn’t have to put up with that sort of crap.
He’ll probably suffer badly for it, but maybe Chris Rock will think a bit more carefully about his material in the future. Hopefully other commedians whose routines often rely on abuse, such as Frankie Boyle, will follow suit.
A further funny thing is the statement from the Oscar Academy, which said, “The Academy does not condone violence of any form”. This is the organisation that has awarded Oscars to films like Midnight Cowboy, Rocky, Unforgiven, French Connection, Deer Hunter and the Godfather. Go figure…
I’ve just read that the hospitality sector says they expect to see a substantial rise in the price of beer by Christmas because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The Ukraine produces about 10% of the worlds grain, the war is having a significant impact on production and so the price of barley has, or is expected to rise by about 30%.
So lets see if that stacks up.
When making beer at home I pay roughly £30 for a 25kg sack of malted barley – that’s £1.20 per kg. The breweries probably pay much less since they buy in much larger quantities. My ‘standard’ brew uses about 4.5kg to make about 40 pints. Thus cost of barley per pint is therefore 1.20 x 4.5 / 40 = 13.5p/pint.
Of course that doesn’t tell the whole story – overall costs of hops, energy and other sundries increases this to about 25p/pint. Everything extra you pay at the bar is tax, duty, staff costs, distribution costs, overheads etc, and of course profit. A bar is a business, and so will charge the highest price the owner thinks the local market will stand.
So based on this the justifiable increase will be just 30% of 13.5p. That’s just 4p. Anything else is just people in the supply chain, including HMG, making more money out of you. Oh I know they’ll say it’s more complicated than that, and that many overheads are based a proportion of the manufacturing costs, etc, etc, but I don’t buy it, and nor should you!
It’s a shame – pubs and the brewing industry seem hell-bent on self-immolation.
A few days ago I suggested one way of getting into the mind of Putin is to study the behaviour of another psychopathic dictator – Adolf Hitler in the film ‘Downfall’. I’m not sure that was entirely correct, but my point was that the way these people think is so far removed from the way a normal person – that’s you and I – thinks, if we want to understand them we need to find some way of getting inside their head.
The following article by the historian, ‘Orlando Figes’, was published in the Daily Telegraph today. It provides an interesting perspective on the current situation which I’ve not seen anywhere else. I’ve no idea whether he’s right or not, but the idea that there’s some religious organisation, in this case the Russian Orthodox church, functioning as a driving force behind the actions is all too believable. Lets face it, you can motivate men do terrible things in many different ways, but if you want them to bomb a maternity hospital, you probably need to convince them that they’re doing Gods Work.
Russian World: the dangerous doctrine driving Putin’s destruction of Ukraine
Putin’s foreign policy aims to reunite the Orthodox ‘family’ of Russians, Slavs, Ukrainians and Belarusians – whether they like it or not.
What are the ideas driving Putin’s war against Ukraine? Is he trying to restore the Soviet Union? Or remake Russia as a “great power” as it was in tsarist days? Is he fighting in Ukraine to push Nato back? Or to grab those lands, from Kharkov to Odessa, which, he has argued, were never part of Ukraine before 1917? The answer, I believe, is none of these.
Putin’s aim, it now seems clear, is no less than the destruction of Ukraine. He does not think it is a “real country”. In his view it has no “state idea”, and received its statehood only from the Bolsheviks when they formed the Soviet Union in 1922. Historically, he argues, it has always been a part of greater Russia, a borderland protecting Moscow’s heartlands from the West, which has often used it as a springboard to attack Russia. That is why he needs to destroy Ukraine as an independent state.
Where do these ideas come from? When this war began eight years ago, Putin’s ideologists promoted the idea of the “Russian World”(Russkii mir) to justify the invasion of Crimea. It is an amorphous concept resting on the idea that Russia is a meta-territorial civilisation with a mission to unite the Orthodox, whether they are Russian, Belarussian or Ukrainian.
The concept had existed in a Pan-Slav sense in the 19th century. But after 1991 it was recast by the Russian Orthodox Church to promote its spiritual inheritance from Kievan Rus, the “first Russian state” and from the 10th century the source of Russia’s Christianity, from which modern Ukraine, Belarus and Russia can all claim their descendance.
For the Church the “Russian World” idea was a means of reunifying its Orthodox communities in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus which had been fragmented by the break-up of the Soviet Union, and to reclaim the Moscow Patriarchate’s control of the Russian Church Abroad (in Paris, London and so on).
The idea was taken up by Putin, who used it as an arm of his foreign policy from 2012. The Russian World, he argued, was a “family” of Slavs, the Russians, the Ukrainians and the Belarusians, who shared a common history, religion and cultural inheritance from Kievan Rus. This world had been torn apart by the collapse of the Soviet Union, the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [20th] century”, as he described it in a 2005 address. “As for the Russian nation,” he went on, “it became a real drama. Tens of millions of our citizens and compatriots found themselves outside the territory of Russia.”
Putin invoked the defence of these, “our citizens”, meaning ethnic Russians, to justify his wars in Crimea, the Donbas and Luhansk, the mainly Russian-speaking territories of south and east Ukraine. The fact that these Russians were citizens of a foreign sovereign state, and identified themselves as such, did not count in Putin’s view.
After 2014 the Russia World idea became less apparent in the publications of the think-tanks close to the Kremlin. Russia-watchers assumed it had gone away. Similar ideas had disappeared from the Kremlin’s discourse at this time – the “New Russia” (Novorossiya) project, for example, whose irredentist ideologists argued that the “Russian” lands from Kharkov to Odessa should never have been given to Ukraine in 1922, like Crimea in 1954, and so should have been returned to Russia in 1991.
The ideology of the Russian World idea was never dropped in fact. Many of its ideas reappeared in a long essay by Putin, On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians, published by the Kremlin in July 2021. At the time it was dismissed as a crazy piece by a man obsessed with ancient history but without relevance for his policies today. Now it can be read as a manifesto for his war against Ukraine.
In it Putin argued, yet again, that the Russians and Ukrainians were one people, that Ukraine was part of “historic Russia”, and that at many points throughout its history it had been used by foreign powers, the Poles, the Austrians and the Germans, the Allied Powers in the Russian Civil War, to undermine the Russian Empire by creating and encouraging a nationalist movement in Ukraine. The West today, he argued, were doing just the same.
The Russian World idea remains the basis of Putin’s anti-Western ideology, and goes well beyond the question of Ukraine. It contains three elements – modern-day equivalents of the trinity of principles, “Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationality”, invoked by the Tsar Nicholas 1 (the Russian ruler most like Putin) in the 1830s to counteract the democratic challenge of the West with its “Liberté, égalité, fraternité”.
First, it is conservative, based on the defence of Russia’s “traditional” and Christian values against the liberal decadence of Western civilisation. Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, has been one of the main ideologists of this campaign, which has included homophobic laws and the prosecution of the punk group Pussy Riot for blasphemy. Church and state go hand in hand in Russia, as they once did in Byzantium. In his sermon last Sunday, the Day of Forgiveness in the Orthodox calendar, Kirill gave his backing to the war as a crusade against Western liberal values in which the “sin” of homosexuality was celebrated in “gay pride parades”.
The Russian World idea is authoritarian. It justifies a quasi-autocratic state by the mystical idea that this is what the Russians by their nature want – a god-like Tsar to protect the Russian land. Putin made his thinking clear when he wrote, way back in 1999: “For the Russians a strong state is not an anomaly to fight against. On the contrary, it is the source and guarantor of order, the initiator and main driving force of any change.”
Thirdly it is Slavophile in its nationalist defiance of the West. Putin draws on the ideas of the 19th-century Slavophiles, who wanted Russia to reject the Western path in favour of its own “traditional values” (the collectivism of the “Russian soul” and similar ideas).
Putin relies heavily on the ideas of Nikolai Danilevsky, one of the most militant of the later Slavophiles to emerge on the scene after Russia’s humiliating defeat by the West in the Crimean War. Danilevsky argued that Russia needed to reject the West, it was not part of it and should not seek its approval or measure its own progress by Western “universal” principles, which were in fact self-serving, a means for Europe to impose its values on other civilisations.
All Putin’s talk of Western “double-standards” and “hypocrisy” is rooted in this politics of resentment. Inside Russia it appeals to those who lost out from the Soviet collapse (public sector employees, low and middle-ranking officials, workers in the old state industries) and have struggled in the market-based economy. Outside Russia it appeals to authoritarian regimes, from China to Iran, which have their own grievances against the West.
As this war has shown, the Russian World idea is just another version of empire. In recent years it has been alloyed to the geopolitical theories of Carl Schmitt, the German philosopher and Nazi supporter, who conceived the global order, not in terms of international law and institutions, but in spatial or civilisational spheres of influence controlled by “hegemonic states”. Putin thinks that Russia is the hegemon, and that it, along with China, will control Eurasia.
The one thing Putin never stopped to ask, before he went to war, was whether the Ukrainians themselves wanted to be part of his Russian World? Their courageous resistance has given him the answer to his unasked question. They want to live in their own country.
By Orlando Figes 9 March 2022 • 4:08pm
Like everybody else, I’m shocked, horrified and disgusted by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Sitting here in the comfort of my house in Hasketon, I long to be able to do something, but apart from the obvious donations to aid agencies and encouraging our government to support Ukraine as much as possible, I’m really not in a position to do much to help.
The problem is, I think, that we all spend the vast majority of our time interworking with reasonable, sensible and pragmatic people. People who, generally speaking, think like we do even if we don’t agree. But occasionally we encounter that dreaded individual, the idiot.
Now the problem is that the idiot, has his/her life-times experience of being an idiot, and they’re rather good at it. On the other hand, we, as the rational and sensible person, have comparatively little experience of actually dealing with idiotic people. So right of the bat, they have a tremendous advantage over us, and usually we come off second best. They understand themselves, we do not.
So when we look at Putin, we think the man is clearly insane but really have no idea, intellectually, how to assimilate his way of thinking: the attitude simply does not compute.
So this is why I found myself reaching for my DVD of the brilliant and harrowing 2004 German film ‘Downfall’ (Der Untergang). It covers the last 10 days of Hitler’s life, spent almost entirely inside his underground bunker in Berlin. It’s horrible, really horrible, but strangely compelling, so you can’t stop watching as he rants and raves about his situation, surrounded by loyal Nazi supporters. For example, he says,
“I have always obeyed this law of nature by never permitting myself to feel compassion. I have ruthlessly suppressed domestic opposition and brutally crushed the resistance of alien races.”
and
“If the war is lost then it is of no concern to me if the people perish in it. I still would not shed a single tear for them because they did not deserve any better”.
Perhaps the worst bit is watching Magda Goebbels as she murders her 6 children because she can’t face the idea of them not being raised under National Socialism.
Do watch it. The cast are brilliant, and it’s all historically accurate. You won’t enjoy it at all, but if helps you get inside the mind of psychopathically deranged people like Hitler, and now Putin, you’ll be glad that you did.
One Sunday afternoon a year or so ago I found myself listening to a Radio 4 adaptation of Jules Verne’s story, ‘20,000 Leagues Under the Sea’. It’s a good yarn I remembered reading as a teenager, although I did recall getting a bit confused at the time since I had assumed that 20,000 leagues referred to the depth, not the distance travelled. (A league is about 3 miles, so 20,000 of them would have gone right through the earth and out the other side).
Anyway, the main characters in the story are Professor Pierre Aronnax, his servant Conseil, the harpoonist Ned Land, and of course Captain Nemo. I can’t recall there being any women in the cast.
But there was a prominent female character in the radio adaptation, which initially puzzled me until the penny dropped: they’d substituted Conseil with Pierre’s daughter, ‘Miss Connie Aronnax’, thus, it seems, bringing the story into the 21st Century.
This is silly I thought. As I understand it, no self-respecting 21st Century girl would ever allow herself to be titled as ‘Miss’. But more importantly, despite M. Verne’s story being a best seller for over 150 years, somebody in the BBC had decided that it needed updating. The fact that Ned Land, a superstitious fisherman in the 19th century, would NEVER have sailed with a woman on deck, was conveniently over looked.
I listened to it for a while, but it didn’t work. It’s a man’s story, and I’m sorry ladies, that’s really all there is to it. It’s as silly as trying to re-write ‘Little Women’ with a male lead. Of course there’s no reason why a woman could not have done everything Conseil did, but the point is, M. Verne didn’t write it that way.
So, fast forward a year or so, and the Beeb is at it again, this time with a TV adaptation of Around the Wold in 80 Days, and though it appears to be done rather well, there are massive changes to the original story. It stars David Tennant, as Phileas Fogg. But he’s not the Fogg of Jules Verne’s creation, who was a calm, calculating man. For some reason he’s become a fastidious, clumsy and awkward person, haunted, it seems, by accusations of being a coward.
So let’s see how the BBC version differs from the original:
So why all the changes? It seems that ‘adapted for TV’, really means, ‘completely re-written so as to address modern day issues’. I’m not suggesting issues such as racism and sexism aren’t important – of course they are. But is it really appropriate to modify a well-loved story in order to address them – why not simply write a new story? And can’t we simply have entertainment for its own sake, rather than using it for educational purposes?
If there were a shortage of women who were able to overcome the social limitations placed upon them by society in the nineteenth century I could understand it, but there’s plenty of inspirational figures to base a new story on. For example:
So please BBC, stop re-writing old, well-loved stories to reflect modern values, and employ talented modern writers to write some new stories. You never know, they might end up being still read in 150 years time!
Two years ago most of us took little notice of virology, vaccines or pandemics. Different strains of flu came and went, but we didn’t take much interest in which strain it was. In the early winter the doctor gave us a jab that may, or may not, have done any good, but we had no interest in which pharmaceutical company had made it, or whether it was better than any others.
Nowadays, which vaccine we have just been given an armful of is a common topic of conversation. We nod sagely at the perceived benefits of 2 shots of ‘Astrafizer’ followed by a ‘Johnzenica’ booster, and express concern about the likelihood of side effects. We then regale each other with stories of how somebody we know developed amnesia because the nurse didn’t aspirate the needle properly, and whether the time between doses had been more or less favourable. We don’t really know much about it, and certainly not enough to have any sort of worthwhile opinion, but it makes us feel better, more involved with the process. It’s all pretty harmless conversation.
Unfortunately, that all begins to change when it gets more public, particularly with social media, where misinformation and alarmist news can travel like wildfire. But again, unless people are totally dependant on Facebook for information, there’s not much of an issue.
But the real problem begins when newspapers and more formal media outlets get involved, because if the information is in writing and looks properly typeset, if it is written in an authoritative way and the issues are eloquently put, it is much more likely to be believed. It’s not that the journalists involved are actually better informed than the rest of us, it’s simply that they’re more practiced at glossing over the fact.
For many years, idiot that I was, I had naively assumed that newspapers were interested in promulgating the truth. It took ‘Deep Throat’ to correct this illusion with his advice to Bob Woodward in ‘All the Presidents Men’ to ‘follow the money’. Once you start seeing the world through these spectacles many things in life start becoming clearer. For instance, you realize that all newspaper owners are really interested in is selling newspapers. Telling the news impartially and making the readers better informed in a balanced way is not a priority. They look at the potential market, decide which sector to target based on a sales/profit analysis and then tailor their reporting to appeal to those people.
So the editor of the newspaper decides the overall editorial policy regarding each particular issue, and his journalists write articles to reflect this policy. These journalists are good at writing, but not particularly good at specialist subjects. Thus when it involves anything remotely scientific or technological, their lack of understanding of the necessary scientific processes becomes clear. The giveaway is the all too often indulgence in what is called, ‘Cherry Picking’. In this, the writer looks for scientific articles that back up their preconceived views, and ignores any articles that don’t. So instead of presenting a balanced assessment of the situation, based on all the evidence, they present a biased view, coloured by their initial prejudice. It’s a dangerous practice, since to the inexpert reader they appear knowledgeable and authoritative.
Some excellent examples of this have occurred in the Daily Telegraph over the last two years. No matter that the SAGE committee has more Ph.Ds.’ between them than Fleet Street in its entirety, as far as the commentators are concerned, they are the experts. Thus, we have one of them, who had no scientific qualifications at all, accusing SAGE of ‘indulging in pseudoscience’. Others made claims that masks were useless, that the modelling was nonsense for example.
As I write, a headline has appeared, written by the great journalist, Alison Pearson, claiming that compared to earlier COVID variants, ‘Omicron is a pussycat’. This was just after the top man, Professor Sir Chris Whitty has pointed out that, “There is nothing good about omicron”, and there’s a clear spike in hospitalisations. Poor deluded Alison, not a scientific or other relevant qualification to her name, thinking she is better informed than the country’s top medical advisor and practicing consultant. So full of her own self-importance (since she writes for the Daily Telegraph) that she can’t see how silly she looks.
So next time you’re ill, are you going to consult, (a) a doctor, or (b) somebody in the pub? I think the answer is obvious!
With all the excitement about OMICRON and Christmas going on, we seem to be overlooking an exciting event which was originally planned for 2007, then 2010, 2016, and now is finally scheduled to happen tomorrow, Christmas Day 2021 at 12:20 UK time. Yes, it’s the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)!
Intended as a successor to the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), the JWST is bigger, more complex, more expensive, has incredible performance at infra-red wavelengths, and is going to revolutionise our knowledge of the universe… or that’s what the sales blurb says anyway. It’s certainly an impressive bit of kit – read all about it here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope
or here:
But here’s the thing, do you remember how much trouble they had with the Hubble Space Telescope when it was first launched? Basically, NASA made one of the most spectacular and embarrassing engineering cock-ups in the history of cock-ups when they ground the telescope mirror the wrong shape. To be fair it was only slightly the wrong shape, caused by a missplaced washer in the testing jig, but the effect was to render the whole multi-billion dollar project useless until they developed a set of ‘spectacles’ about a year later. This transformed it into a rather brilliant project. A great recovery, you might say!
But the JWST is not only much more complicated, but the way it is designed to work means it CANNOT be modified after launch. Its operating location will be at what’s known as the earths 2nd Lagrange point, 1.5 million kilometres away, way too far for a maintenance mission. And because it’s so big (the heat shield alone has 5 layers and is the size of a tennis court, and the main mirror is 6.5m across) it has to be folded so it will fit inside the Ariane rocket launcher.
So what is supposed to happen is after launch it gradually makes its way to the operating location, unfolding heat shields, solar panels, telescope mirror supports, and the main mirror itself, in stages as it goes. But will it? I know it’s been tested as far as it can be tested, and NASA has had several more recent successes under its belt, but I can’t help feeling there’s simply far too much to go wrong.
But obviously, I really want it to succeed, because if it works as planned it will be brilliant.
Fingers crossed!
In my younger days there was very little sport on television. Saturday afternoon programmes existed in the form of the BBCs ‘Grandstand’, or the ITV ‘World of Sport’, but sadly they didn’t show much that I actually wanted to watch, notably football. Instead, there was a range of dull options such as Rugby League, wrestling, cricket and horse racing. It was the latter that really puzzled me – why would you want to watch a bunch of horses galloping around a field, occasionally jumping over some tiny fences. I simply didn’t get it, especially the betting with its indecipherable language accompanied by grown men making silly signs with their hands. I suppose I did quite enjoy the Grand National, because the riders often fell off, but at the time it didn’t register with me that this was a bad thing because occasionally the horses were severely injured and had to be destroyed.
Recently, however, my interest was piqued by the discovery that Hasketon had a historic connection with the Sport of Kings, with National Hunt racing at Home Farm between 1889 and 1907, and later point-to-point races at Witchpit Farm. These latter races ended in the late 1960s because of the proximity of the increasingly busy A12 road, and were moved to the racecourse at Higham, just down the A12 from Ipswich.
Sadly, like so many things, racing at Higham had become a victim of COVID, and all events were cancelled after March 2020. But the 2021-2 season was given the go-ahead, with the first event being the Waveney Harriers Point-to-Point meet taking place on Sunday November 21st 2021. So I decided to take a look, not, if I’m honest, really knowing what to expect.
It turned out to be a surprisingly enjoyable afternoon. Yes, there were some problems: a large number of horses had pulled out over concerns about the going and the inevitable worries about COVID. This meant that of the six races, two were uncontested and two others only had two runners. But the racing was exciting, and I’d not fully appreciated how majestic thoroughbred racehorses look when seen up close. It’s clearly a well-run, fairly informal event with a lot of enthusiastic followers from all walks of life. It was a cold afternoon, but many people were making a real occasion of it. Back-of-the-car picnics were much in evidence with some fine looking spreads on show, accompanied by appropriate drinks to keep out the cold. For those less organised there was a bar and some burger/pie/chips vans doing a brisk trade.
Knowing nothing about the form, I decided keep my money in my pocket on this occasion, but several bookies were present for the better informed punter.
You can read more about racing at Higham on their website: https://www.highamraces.co.uk/. Future events in this year’s calendar take place on January 16th and April 15th (Good Friday). Other point to point events are covered here: https://www.pointtopoint.co.uk/.
I may well return, but maybe only if there are some assurances regarding a full field of runners!
In the James Bond film Casino Royale, a high ranking member of Spectre known as ‘Mr. White’ decides to assassinate the banker, Le Chiffre, after he discovers he’s lost over £100 million. Just before he carries out the deed using a silenced pistol he tells Le Chiffre that, “Money isn’t as valuable to our organization as knowing who to trust.” (He’s actually being a bit disingenuous here, because he’s already made plans to recover the money.)
Whatever. The point here is that for any leader, good or bad, knowing who to trust is enormously important, and that betrayal may well have serious, indeed devastating consequences.
I’m wondering at the moment if Boris Johnson is rather wishing he was simmarly armed and could dish out summary justice to errant members of his team. The issue here being that somebody has exposed the existence of some Christmas ‘parties’ at number 10 last year, and it’s had a devastating impact on his government’s credibility. We don’t really know the nature of these parties, except they were allegedly ‘raucous’, and there is film of one employee practicing how she’d explain it to the police. The party might have been just a couple of bottles of wine brought out after an important meeting, or it might have been a wilder office disco including the traditional misuse of the photocopier.
But the point is they were illegal, because we were supposed to be locked down, and shouldn’t have happened. It’s really not good, and those involved should be dealt with as appropriate under the law.
But here’s the thing. It looks like somebody who was put in a trusted and responsible position by the government, has decided to betray their employer. Not though, as a matter of principle – if that were the motivation they’d have gone to the police at the time. No, they kept the information to themselves for almost a year, before releasing it at a time when it could do most damage – to both the Government and also to the public health campaign to control this wretched virus.
So I can kind of understand if Boris wishes he had a silenced SIG P230 and the backing of a secretive organisation to cover his tracks.
Well, having just tested positive for COVID, I now find myself, and indeed the whole family, in self-isolation until Christmas Day. Great – not! I was rather looking forward to Boxing Day with the grandkids, a party or two, a few drinks in the Turks Head etc, but now… nothing. No carols, no Crib Service, nothing. Obviously I do get to be in isolation for 10 days with my two favourite people but, as Heidi would say, “Even so!”
One big question is how will it compare with last year? Christmas 2020 was a bit crap realy, and not just because we were all forbidden to visit each others homes. I’d been suffering from toothache for a lot of the year, and had had 3 dentist appointments cancelled, but finally I got seen on Christmas Eve, at 3.00pm. A charming eastern european dentist took one look it at and said it really had to come out. He could fill it, but couldn’t guarantee it lasting very long or a even an appointment to re-do it if it broke. So that was it, and the next 30 mins were spent with a face full of anesthetic and the tooth being gently but firmly wiggled until being finally removed. “If it hurts, take some paracetamol”, he said, in true NHS fashion. (The NHS has an amazing, and in my view unwarranted, belief in the power of paracetamol). It didn’t work, and neither did the additional brufen and the bottle of gin I bought on the way home.
A miserable Christmas Day followed.
Fortunately I had some codeine tablets in the cupboard, left over from a previous incident. They were a little out of date, but they’d been brilliant when I broke my arm, so what could go wrong? Quite a lot, as it turned out. Unlike on that occasion, they had the effect the medically minded readers here will know all about, and the rest of you probably don’t want to know.
It did improve eventually, but how will this year compare? I’ll let you know!
