The straw that breaks the camel's back...

Poor old President Mubarak. His people are revolting, his army is mutineering, his coppers hiding, scoundrels are even attacking mummies in the Cairo Museum. Now we learn he has had to endure a stern telling-off in a phone call from David Cameron.....

30 minutes later

Pigeon now a handful of feathers.

Nature red in tooth and claw

Just watching a buzzard devour pigeon outside my French doors. Not sure whether pigeon pre-deceased its encounter with buzzard -- perhaps it froze to death last night. Anyway not much of it left. Buzzard seems to be supremely uninterested in my presence.

Mr Gove has been reading Dickens' Hard Times...

...which is strange because it's usually the novel Tories like to ignore. Anyway even if he hasn't, his speechwriters clearly have. This is the much admired opening, written in 1854:  

“NOW, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!”


Hard Times, Charles Dickens

BBC Cult of Youth

Alan Yentob (63) has announced that, following a David and Goliath style humiliation over the Miriam O'Reilly case, the BBC will be ultra ultra careful about ageism in the future. There will be lots of special training for executives and monitoring and policies and probably a few layers of compliance management as well. Of course that's how the BBC always responds when it get gets caught out.

The real problem is that the BBC just doesn't get it. The Corporation already has a vast apparatus of "diversity" with tsars and enforcers and committees and monitoring groups; equality policies by the ton; a groaningly large Human Resources Empire -- headed by executives whose pay is in multiples of the Prime Minister's; and a Director General who leads the TV Industry's Cultural Diversity Network. If it still screws up after all this what good are a few more Diversity Awaydays going to do...?

Circa 1971

In the garden in Dartmouth Row, Blackheath. Just to prove I got there with the haircut over three decades before Justin Bieber.

Talent Show

Freya Salkeld on drums...

Chips II

I came across chips nearly as fine as those from the Hind in Bray at a roadside caff on the South Coast near Mombasa, Kenya. 30p a plate. Can't go wrong but quite a trek to satisfy the craving so Heston's number one slot is safe.

This Sporting Life

I am pleased to find that the Kenyans’ favourite cigarette is still called “Sportsman”. Recently in neighbouring Tanzania the name of that same smoke was changed to “Portsman”. The cigarettes remained unchanged as did the rest of the natty orange packaging with its equine branding. The fags are still universally known as “Sports” in both countries.

So what about a rather bizarre new name? Well of course it didn’t just happen. It was a victory for Western health busybodies. No doubt the name change will have been the “output” of some bossy master plan. Goals will have been achieved, targets surpassed, KPIs will be buzzing, a thousand dreary powerpoints will be launched across the development world. And the game won’t be over there, a year on business class to Africa will packed as more “consultants” jet in to justify their existence with evaluations and data gathering. Reports that no-one will ever read will be tapped out on expensive laptops. That’s where your aid money goes, banishing an “s”.

Meanwhile a weary Tanzanian will seek a moment’s solace after a day’s labour cleaning the consultant’s offices or wiping the consultant’s children’s arses or other such services to development, and reach for a “Sports”. What a difference an “s” makes.   

Africa at last

It is very difficult to avoid the Chinese in Africa. They have been there a long while. Graham Greene mentioned the British Intelligence Service’s neuroses over Chinese activity in Zanzibar in The Human Factor. I passed the faded TAZARA railhead in Dar this morning, a 1970s Chinese gift to the peoples of Zambia and Tanzania, or more strategically a route for copper exports out of landlocked Zambia that bypassed apartheid South Africa.

Now it’s business. Scarcely a development goes up without a Chinese name on the construction boards. Take an African flight and the chances are you will be sharing it with a posse of immaculately dressed Chinese businessmen or officials. They drive a bargain as sharp as their suits. The Chinese are here for very self-interested purposes, recognising the long term economic potential of “undiscovered” Africa.  They have of course drawn ire from the Western poverty lobby for their rampant commercialism. I wonder how things will look in fifty years’ time? The selfish Chinese would have to have done remarkably badly to match the disasters of half a century’s Western attempts at development in Africa. We may find that the inscrutable men in suits deliver a lot more to the average African than all the pampered, Land Cruisered poverty parasites we send. 

Alice Beatrice West 1913 - 2010

My grandmother Alice died on Saturday at the grand age of 97. She woke up as normal but faded and passed away in the arms of a carer mid morning.

She really was a link with a different era or indeed eras. Born before the Great War or the Russian Revloution, her parents were Victorians. She came of age during the Great Depression and joined the many setting up home in London's new metroland suburbs.

She saw the abdication crisis, the rule of the dictators and brought her own children up in the Blitz.

She lived through an incredible century. There were properous as well as impoverished times -- she never had it so good with Macmillan and enjoyed a Saga brochure retirement. She enthusiastically took to the new Jerusalem with its foreign holidays, night schools and patio doors but never lost her sense of thrift and self reliance -- she had witnessed the impermanence of civilisations and systems, she had seen them come and go.

I do wonder if we will expereince lifetimes like hers again.

Love at first bite

I fell in love last night...with a chip, or in fact a whole portion. The cause of this potato epiphany, Mr Heston Blumentahl's celebrated thrice cooked version. Sublime. Not that the rest of the meal wasn't up to his "perfection" standards but the chips were something else. I have tried chips on five continents and to eat possibly the most familiar dish in the world and still be rewarded with such a sensation is a real achievement.

A blog for our times

I have been enjoying Redundant Public Servant's blog  if enjoying is quite the right word. He desribes it as "News from the front line of deficit reduction" and like all great blogs it merges the personal with the timely and the profound. He writes so well I cannot picture him as the author of anonymous government memos and disseminator of ghastly offcial gobbledegook. I feel we have a future Orwell prize winner. 

New Internationalism

I was in the USA on Sunday. I recieved a text message from a friend in Zanzibar. He told me that a Spanish footballer in Liverpool had played a blinder, scoring twice and bringing his team, owned by an American, a much needed victory over another English team, owned by a Russian, and populated mainly by Africans...

The Zanzibari friend -- who goes by the name Gerrardi after his favourite English player -- partied all night.

The Best Weather Service

We have launched the new weather service for S4C. It works. It is the UK's first service which uses 1km forecasting data -- that means the information you get is directly relevant to your actual location, not somewhere down the road or over the hill or in the next county.

This is most useful on the website -- here for the English language version, here for the Welsh. When you enter your postcode you get the forecasst for that exact postcode, so it gives a street or close neighbourhood picture. It works all over the UK. This is a huge improvement over the rather dishonest BBC weather website which asks you to enter the postcode and then gives you the forecast for somewhere miles away. Very little use in our highly localised climate.