No bed for Bacon, Brahms v Beethoven, UK’s back door, an unmanned(ish) ship, and assisted dying

9 March 2024

A friend said recently she was “sad about the state of the world.  I think I might ditch the news.”  I know exactly how she feels. 

I scrabble around each week to find some good news to help cheer everybody up but there ain’t much out there and I’m coming to the conclusion that we just have to carry on until we can’t take any more, then give up.  I’m thinking of taking out a subscription to Hello magazine so I can chuckle at the irrelevant and boring activities of people I’ve never heard of. 

I am actually cheering myself slightly at the moment by re-reading a book that makes me laugh:  No Bed for Bacon by Caryl Brahms and SJ Simon.  You probably need to know a little about Shakespeare and the times he lived in to get some of the jokes but it still makes me smile.  For instance, it explains in passing that the Elizabeth’s second best bed, which Francis Bacon wanted, was delivered to a cottage in Stratford.

There are quite a few books on my shelves waiting to be re-read (the ones I don’t want to read again go straight back to the charity shop) so I’m not sure why I picked this one, an old orange Penguin edition.  It might be because I remembered a discussion with a friend many years ago about the relative merits of Brahms and Beethoven;  she said she thought Brahms’s music was much more intellectual and I said that I thought Beethoven wrote better tunes, which just goes to show what a philistine I am.

One piece of good news this week came when the Daily Mail reported that David Neal, the UK borders inspector, reported that 10 private jets a week land at London City airport alone and let the passengers in the UK’s back door, without their having to go through any of those tedious passport checks that make life so difficult for drugs and arms smugglers, illegal immigrants, child slavers, politicians and other undesirables.  The government immediately took the obvious action and fired Neal.

But we must look on the bright side.  After the budget, Rishi Sunak praised the government’s successes in an interview on Thursday and said “we’ve got inflation down from 11% to 4%”.  I found myself squirming as I listened to this hypocrisy.  After all, wasn’t he one of the chancellors who had so dismally failed the repair the damage inflicted by George Osborne’s disastrous years of austerity and the later collapse of Trussonomics?  In fact, when the Conservatives were first elected, inflation was about 3% but saying “we’ve got inflation down from 3% to … er … 4%” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.

A similarly cavalier approach to the truth was taken in the triumphant announcement that an “unmanned” ship is being tested in a Norwegian fjord.  It’s 78 metres long, is being controlled remotely by computer operators in Southampton and will only need a crew of 16 instead of 40 or 50 people.  Yes, I wondered that too.  16 crew on board = “unmanned”?  Perhaps they’re all women.

But National Insurance is going down by another two percentage points, from 8% to 6%, in April which means you’ll have to pay 25% less from next month in addition to the 20% reduction you were already given in January.  If you pay it, which the poorest and the oldest don’t …

The amount the government will receive from national insurance contributions will therefore reduce by 50% in a year and Jeremy Hunt promised to remove it entirely in due course.  What?  Where else are they going to get the money from, did you ask?  That’s being passed on to the next government to decide so if, as many people expect, Labour will win, they can take the blame for having to fill the hole Hunt has dug for them.

And look at the wonder of George Galloway who’s been elected as the Workers’ Party of Great Britain MP for Rochdale despite having supported more parties than Winston Churchill.  He seems to be on the left at the moment but he backed Nigel Farage campaigning for Brexit and voted Conservative in Scotland three years ago.

What chance does integrity have when it gets in the way of someone’s ego?

In response to another attempt to legalise assisted dying, the Ministry of Justice has reminded us that “the Government is committed to providing time to the Backbench Business Committee which gives MPs the opportunity to bring forward debates of their choice and MPs also have the option of introducing Private Members’ Bills which provide MPs with an opportunity to address public concerns and to change the law”.  Or, in plain English, no comment.

In the real world, there is increasing pressure for something do be done in England as its legislation lags behind outliers like Jersey and the Isle of Man.  It isn’t even a political matter and various surveys have shown that about 3 in every 4 people support the principle.  There are of course differing opinions about the various conditions that should be included and the extent of protection for vulnerable people but a change has been backed by an ever-increasing number of famous names including Jonathan Dimbleby, Prue Leith, Terry Pratchett, Esther Rantzen, Diana Rigg and Harriet Walter.

I rather fear a new law might be too late for many of us so I’m keeping my own inherited supply of pills (which I’m hoping haven’t lost their power in the decades since they came into the family) and I will take them if the need arises and, like my mother, die alone if the law hasn’t been changed enough to let someone hold my hand as I drift away.  My only problem is that I need to do so much tidying before I go but I naturally have an up-to-date Will and a DNR just in case.

(Ken Kesey said he wanted to die during an LSD trip.  Does anybody know if he did and, if so, was he able to communicate his feelings as he died?  “Wow man, just look at that!” perhaps?)

Overpaid CEOs, best-selling albums and kamikaze survivors

6 January 2024

Last week, I aired what I thought was a bright idea, that the Conservative and Labour parties should split in two.  A friend who listens to Times Radio has told me that they have already broadcast discussions about splitting about both parties and her father, a Tory councillor when he was in his 20s, doesn’t know who to vote for but she thinks he could find a left of right or a right of left that might satisfy him.  Come on people, let’s go for it.  Anybody know how we sell Christmas to turkeys?

One legacy of 2023 we need to change is the inexplicable inequity in how companies distribute their profits.  Latest figures show that, by lunchtime on the third working day in 2024 (last Thursday in England and Wales, yesterday in Scotland), the median pay for the bosses of FTSE 100 companies (£34,963) will have been the same as the median pay of UK workers for the entire year.  In James McMurtry’s song ‘We can’t make it here anymore’, it seems he shares my faith in CEOs:

“They’ve never known want, they’ll never know need
Their shit don’t stink and their kids won’t bleed.”

It’s just another brick in the wall dividing the rich from the poor, isolating them in different worlds so neither can understand the other.  It’s the difference between burning a £50 note in front of a homeless person and giving them a fiver. 

I know people who live on the breadline and try to help when we can but I’d love to see one of these CEOs bringing up a family on Universal Credit and having to present themselves regularly at a job centre to ‘prove’ they really have been looking for work, knowing that if they’ve been ill or can only work in term-time, the rules mean they may not even get that.

A happier legacy from 2023 was the list of the ten top-selling vinyl albums in 2023, which included three by Taylor Swift about whom I know very little but that she seems to be willing to use her power to defend lesser mortals.

In 2013, she told her management that a Colorado KYGO radio DJ called David Mueller had groped her at a photo op and they excluded him from all her future gigs.  Two days later, he was fired by KYGO after its own investigation.  In 2015, he then sued Swift, her mother and her radio promotions director for up to $3m saying the allegation cost him his job and reputation.

Swift responded immediately with a counter-claim for a symbolic $1 saying she wanted to serve as an example to other women who have been sexually assaulted.

At the trial, she said ““What Mr. Mueller did was very intentional … I am critical of [him] for sticking his hand under my skirt and grabbing my ass.”  A federal jury has found him guilty and awarded her the $1 she had asked for.  Mueller didn’t pay until the last possible moment, when he posted her a $1 Sacajawea coin;  these look like gold but have a copper core clad in a manganese brass coating and they have no intrinsic or collectors’ value over their face value.

Swift also previously become vocal about the pitiful amount artists receive from streaming services and later, after the masters to her early work had been sold from under her, re-recorded an entire album and issued it as “1989 (Taylor’s version)”, which became the best-selling album last year.

On a similar theme (geddit?), a letter published in the Guardian on Tuesday suggested our dirge-like national anthem could be replaced by the Archers’ theme tune and, on the following day, Rachel David from Sutton Coldfield said she agreed with the principle but the first writer had got the words slightly wrong:  “The first verse actually ends ‘ti tum ti tiddly dee’.  The second verse is the one that ends ’ti diddly tum.’”  What better reason could anybody need for reading at least the letters page in the Guardian?

What’s more fascinating in the list of best-selling albums last year is that two of them are antiques:  Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Rumours’ (number 5) was first released in 1977 and Pink Floyd’s ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’ (number 7) was first released in 1973.

I’ve just finished one of Alec Guinness’s books of memoirs and was interested to read he’d been told by ‘Jack’ Profumo* that kamikaze pilots had dedicated their lives to the emperor which was equivalent to dedicating their lives to the country so, after Japan’s surrender, kamikaze pilots who had survived the war were forced to attend their own funerals and became officially dead, with no status, and their wives could remarry.

This struck me as somewhat unlikely so I checked it.  In the 12^th century, seppuku referred to honourable death by self-disembowelment based on Bushido, the code of conduct under which Samurai would sacrifice their lives to regain lost honour or to atone for crimes.  It means the same as hara-kiri except that it later stopped being limited to the Samurai.  While we Westerners call it hara-kiri, the word seppuku is still more commonly used in Japan.

Kamikaze reflects the tradition of an honourable death (it means ‘divine wind’ in honour of the two tempests that prevented the Mongols’ invasion of Japan in the 12^th century) and it came into common usage in World War II when Japan created a unit of pilots to fly suicide missions against America’s fleet.  Members of the unit had to be single and childless and not the oldest child;  some were conscripted but many volunteered because Bushido emphasised the importance of dying with honour rather than surrendering.

In fact, many did survive, either because their planes broke down or they couldn’t find a target or because they were never called on to fly a mission, and they were absorbed back into society and normal life;  there’s a short video online of two of them, then in their 80s or 90s, talking about their experiences.

So there Sir Alec.

*          Yes, that Profumo, who redeemed his indiscretions at Cliveden with genuinely valuable charity work for which he was awarded the CBE in 1975.  His wife was the actor Valerie Hobson.