LONDON LETTER 4th FEBRUARY 2012

From my stats I am now getting more readers from outside the UK than inside. I am grateful to you all wherever you are, would love to hear from you. I worry sometimes that what I write about is a little parochial and therefore do try to raise my eyes ‘from this sceptred isle’ from time to time.

What a miserable month January was. I feel we should ditch the whole month and replace it with a month long festival of bonfires, singing and dancing, readings of poetry, ghost stories and the odd bit of human sacrifice. (No, not the last, I just put this in to see if you were paying attention). This great unashamedly pagan festival, for that is of course what it would be, would be a great way to start the New Year. If we are to have religion, and people seem to need it, let us be pagans, that way we could all openly admit it was all bullshit whilst having fun dancing around the fire. Personally I would like to start worshiping the great God Otiositas, the God of idleness who is engaged in his great struggle with the evil Lord Laborem, the dark master of work and slavery.

Of course the downside to such a festival is that it would merely push the mantle of miserable month onto February. February however is a shorter month and is all that bit closer to the onset of spring.

What made January all the more depressing was to see the governing elite, terrified of popular sentiment against immigration, turn the full force of their instinctive xenophobia and racism upon, as yet unrealised, Bulgarian and Romanian immigration. If further restrictions are placed upon Bulgarian immigrant labour then the Bulgarian government should retaliate by introducing a hefty non domicile tax on British property owners in Bulgaria. Actually they should do this anyway; these greedy Brits are our worst foreign export. The money raised could go towards repairing Bulgarians road network, thus helping to develop the economic infrastructure. Should Britain leave the EU all such property should be confiscated and given to homeless Bulgarians. Such thoughts cheer me up no end as I drift to sleep of an evening.

Talking of things cheering me it has been good to watch the Tory party tear itself apart over Europe and the inherent dislike of the Tory right with David Cameron. This of course is a hideous blood sport, not for the squeamish, and should possibly be banned; all the same great fun to watch.

Cameron represents that peculiar phenomenon of the posh boy, born with a silver spoon in his mouth, with an inferiority complex. Somehow he cannot convince himself he is a real man never having to fight in a comprehensive school playground.[1] This curiously, I think, explains his picking a fight over gay marriage and his current predilection to be seen on the front line in Algeria and Libya.

He is haunted by two spectres, Tony Blair and Ted Heath. He feels he needs to demonstrate he is man enough to take on his own party, as Blair did, as well as flex his muscles on the international stage, again in the manner of Tony Blair.

Heath provides the spectre of the failed, one term, Tory prime minister. Heath however did have two lasting achievements to his name, decimalisation and, more importantly, taking Britain into the European Common Market. Will Cameron have any legacy to speak of at all?

The BBC has produced an all star production of the Wodehouse Blandings novels. I would have preferred to criticize these from a position of ignorance, but forced my self to watch at least some. Nothing can compete with the perfection of Wodehouse’s prose and his novels, other than the Jeeves and Wooster books,[2] have not translated well onto the screen. The problem being that television, I am not aware of any of his books being transferred to the larger screen, treats Wodehouse’s characters as pure caricatures which they are not. Lord Emsworth for example has depth and should be played not for laughs but as a serious figure, albeit one often behaving absurdly. The laughs will come later. These, no doubt, worthy, efforts fail on two fronts, a) trying too hard, and b) not trying hard enough.

P G Wodehouse

I have often thought that real drama can be found in the fact that in 1940 Wodehouse was captured in France by the advancing German army. His later conduct in captivity, fooling around with his German captors and providing the Germans with some broadcast material, caused a furore in this country during the war. The best article about this I believe was written by George Orwell, ‘In Defence of P G Wodehouse.’[3] I have often thought this material well worth dramatising and only wish I had the talent.

All the news is depressing, in particular there is piece in the Guardian that I had to steel my self to read,

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/feb/02/mali-jihadis-sharia-black-africans

I challenge any one to read it and then deny that it was right for the French to intervene, though no doubt some, imagining themselves to be terribly left wing will do so. “None of our business” they say……cultural….real evil is Western Imperialism blah blah blah.” Since when did ‘A far off country of which we know little” become a mantra of the left?

As I write this Talbot Towers is bathed in bright sunshine, belying the cold outside. I sit, plagued by mouth ulcers dreaming of The Havana Club bar in Primorsko Bulgaria. So wherever you are, in sunshine, rain or snow, have a good day.

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[1] It was interesting to watch a recent Labour Party political broadcast, really little more than a paean of praise for the wonder that is Ed Miliband,  Miliband constantly making references to his time at Haverstock, a Comprehensive in North London and the lessons that he had to learn mixing with all types in the playground.  

[2] Jeeves being Wodehouse’s only truly one dimensional character, being wholly implausible, is consequently easier to play, though I will say that Hugh Laurie and Ian Carmichael both did a good job of re-creating Bertie Wooster. 

[3] The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, Volume 3, Penguin 1968, p388.

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