ABOUT
GETTING OLD.
You
can't avoid cynicism.
Another election on the way and here they come, oozing from the woodwork, with their visits (jacketless in rolled up shirt sleeves) to hospitals and their paternal posing in schoolrooms surrounded by cute kiddies. It's like a Hollywood casting couch for UK members of parliament.
Anything goes.
Today the Tories are saying that if we vote them back in they will drastically cut immigration and that a vote for Jeremy Corbyn will see a veritable tsunami of foreigners flooding our cosy clique of a country. It's an appeal to that shitty facet of the British psyche that used only to be seen on football terraces.
Another election on the way and here they come, oozing from the woodwork, with their visits (jacketless in rolled up shirt sleeves) to hospitals and their paternal posing in schoolrooms surrounded by cute kiddies. It's like a Hollywood casting couch for UK members of parliament.
Anything goes.
Today the Tories are saying that if we vote them back in they will drastically cut immigration and that a vote for Jeremy Corbyn will see a veritable tsunami of foreigners flooding our cosy clique of a country. It's an appeal to that shitty facet of the British psyche that used only to be seen on football terraces.
As
for old Jeremy himself: at present he seems hell-bent on widening the
north/south divide by unfavourably comparing tardy governmental
reaction to flooding up north with what might have been had it
happened in Surrey.
Y'know what? North/south/red/blue/stay/leave, I'm sick of the bloody lot of it.
Will no one ever wake up to the fact that we're now just a piddling little spot on the world atlas, not the Great British Empire we were brought up to believe we were (and had a divine right to be) when I was a boy in the nineteen thirties? Those days will never come back, thank God, no matter how much we depressingly creep to America or try to convince ourselves we are still of worldwide importance. We're not big enough to constantly be indulging in petty area rivalries, either. The North - South thing is just as stupid as the Catholic - Protestant thing and almost as self-destructive.
Rulers divide to conquer.
So let's try to find somebody who wants to govern for the benefit of country, not self, without childish point scoring, or playground bullying, or appealing to isolationism.
I might even vote for them.
What?
Yeah. It's an impossible dream.
I'd be convinced they were lying.
YOUR AGE SHOWS
In your musical taste, too.
I know I've said as much before, and may well do again, but I have been reminded ever since Lauren Laverne took over Desert Island Discs on BBC Radio 4 that my musical taste is no longer compatible with that of the majority of modern castaways chosen to reside on that imaginary island. Many of my favourites are no longer with us.
As I write this, Harry Nilssen (above) is serenading me for the umpteenth time on the Steepletone with A Little Touch of Schmilsson. He follows Georges Guetary whose Ma belle Marguerite CD features 23 mono recordings 1946 to 1951. Wonderful.
While I would determinedly row my boat away from the music I heard from most desert islands now, Nilssen's rendering of This Is All I Ask and Over The Rainbow, or Guetary's I'll Build A Stairway To Paradise would have me landing on a tide of musical enthusiasm.
Takes all sort, don't it.
Back again before the election all being well.
Mind how you go.
Will no one ever wake up to the fact that we're now just a piddling little spot on the world atlas, not the Great British Empire we were brought up to believe we were (and had a divine right to be) when I was a boy in the nineteen thirties? Those days will never come back, thank God, no matter how much we depressingly creep to America or try to convince ourselves we are still of worldwide importance. We're not big enough to constantly be indulging in petty area rivalries, either. The North - South thing is just as stupid as the Catholic - Protestant thing and almost as self-destructive.
Rulers divide to conquer.
So let's try to find somebody who wants to govern for the benefit of country, not self, without childish point scoring, or playground bullying, or appealing to isolationism.
I might even vote for them.
What?
Yeah. It's an impossible dream.
I'd be convinced they were lying.
YOUR AGE SHOWS
I know I've said as much before, and may well do again, but I have been reminded ever since Lauren Laverne took over Desert Island Discs on BBC Radio 4 that my musical taste is no longer compatible with that of the majority of modern castaways chosen to reside on that imaginary island. Many of my favourites are no longer with us.
As I write this, Harry Nilssen (above) is serenading me for the umpteenth time on the Steepletone with A Little Touch of Schmilsson. He follows Georges Guetary whose Ma belle Marguerite CD features 23 mono recordings 1946 to 1951. Wonderful.
While I would determinedly row my boat away from the music I heard from most desert islands now, Nilssen's rendering of This Is All I Ask and Over The Rainbow, or Guetary's I'll Build A Stairway To Paradise would have me landing on a tide of musical enthusiasm.
Takes all sort, don't it.
Back again before the election all being well.
Mind how you go.
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