At best a pyrrhic victory

My political predictions have always been rubbish, but here goes.



I do not know who might win a November election.



But Gordon Brown will not gain anything worth having.



Except, perhaps, 2 1/2 more years in power (in 2 1/2 years time) than he is guaranteed anyway.



There is no issue on which to vote. Especially now Blair has gone. Brown seems to be doing OK(ish). Not sure about Cameron.

All we will get will be political anoraks playing their tedious war games all over the airwaves.

So there will be a record low turnout, even if the weather is reasonably good

This, of necessity, means a greater variance around the national average swing. Greater unpredictability of outcome. Idiosyncratic local factors having proportionately greater effect. A hospital closure here, there a sitting MP who has got up too many local noses, an attractive new candidate over yon

So even if GB wins, no one except a political anorak will believe he has a mandate for anything very much at all, really

Well I never!

A picture of oppressed Victorian womanhood

HRT for 15 year-olds

from Private Eye, circa 1990






Should we prescribe oestrogen for young males aged 15 to 24?

Their mortality rate is 3 times the rate for females in the same age group

A lot of this excess mortality is due to accidents caused by the daft things young men do when fuelled by too much testosterone

So calm them down with HRT

If this is a silly solution to a silly question - why is that so? How does it differ from much of the health advice with which we are daily bombarded?

Bird needing hormone replacement (7) - Times cryptic crossword clue

2 Marsham Street

More photos of historical interest now that their subject has been demolished

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Such a reviled building in its time. Domineering, out of scale, dwarfs surrounding buildings. True, up to a point. In fact, because of surrounding narrow streets & angle of vision you could barely see it except from alongside. Certainly not from Millbank or Parliament.

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I started to think much more kindly of it one day at the Oval Cricket Ground, from where you could see the 3 towers in the distance. The proportions were elegant, near perfect.

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The towers were built during the 1960s, but construction was interrupted by a prolonged strike.

A friend of mine, who lived near by, swore she would never want to go to work there. She was nervous of being high up anyway, but was convinced that the steel frame had rusted so much while left exposed during the strike that the building must be unsafe.

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She was right. By the mid-1980s the North Tower had cracks into which you could insert a hand. These pictures must have been taken about 10 years ago, when they had had to put up nets to catch the bits falling off!

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It was the curtilage which really spoiled it. Why do pilotis always manage to be so windswept? And those ugly wartime concrete bunkers which, so rumour had it, they had tried & failed to demolish. Rather reassuring that, in its way. I wonder if they managed to demolish them before they built the new Home Office?

Mystery contrail pictures

I was sorting through some old photos when I found these, which must be about 10 years old now.
I cant work out whether the way one contrail seems to loop over the other is just an optical illusion, caused by the angle of view

Or something due to atmospheric conditions?

Or was it a near-miss?

Ancient tree

I love this photo of the bark of a very ancient Californian tree

More on tenants

Children are noisy. Babies cry. Toddlers race around, bouncing on beds & doing a Batman jumping off the settee. They also do a lot of damage to your furniture, fixtures & fittings. Furnished accommodation was pretty much the norm, partly for convenience, partly because the landlord then had greater powers vis a vis the tenant. Would you want to be the next tenant of a single bed previously occupied by a small child?

Irishman, in the ads of those days, was code. Code for: I dont want single, Irish men as tenants. Probably here as temporary or seasonal migrants, employment insecure & uncertain so not a reliable payer of rent. Likely to do a moonlight flit. Probably working as a navvy, so bringing a lot of mud into the house. And over fond of a drink.

A nasty stereotype. But being Irish, as such, did not necessarily make life so difficult. I doubt a young Irish barrister would find it more difficult than his English equivalent to find somewhere to live

Unlike the pin-striped, plummy-voiced, Oxbridge-educated barrister in Two Gentlemen Sharing, who, when it came to finding somewhere to live was 'Hopelessly black, madam, hopelessly'

The differences between these categories illustrates the subtlety of discrimination, the differences between the remedies needed, & their likely success in practice.

To formalise anti-discrimination legislation is to risk encouraging competitive victimhood - My problems are worse than your problems. Adjudicating, holding the ring between all the claims, requires the patience of Job & the judgement of Solomon, & the tact to not alienate those who feel that their problems are undervalued & ignored because they cannot be attributed to membership of a particular group.

I wish the new overarching Equality Commission all the best

Desirable tenants

I dont really want to be an apologist for the discriminating landlords of the 1960s, but in the face of so much right-on-ness I feel like pointing out a few things

The first is the nature of rented housing in those days. All those grand houses in the crescents of Notting Hill, all those smart Fulham terraces would, in those days, have been houses in multiple occupation. Tenants occupying one or more rooms, with minimal, if any, structural conversion to give them a self contained space behind their own front door.

Often sharing cooking facilities. And bathrooms - if they were lucky & there was one on a half landing. Otherwise it was a weekly trip to the Municipal Slipper Baths. Just check out the Census statistics &, if you can get hold of a copy, the Enumerators Instructions for the 1971 Census of England & Wales.

The landlord - often a widow - was quite likely to be sharing the house too.

Wouldnt you want some say over who lived with you in such hugger-mugger fashion?

Children not wanted here

According to a comment I saw in yesterdays Times the Commission for Racial Equality, no less, has perpetuated a myth in its valedictory report.

The myth is that newsagents windows used to carry cards advertising accommodation which said:

NO BLACKS, NO DOGS, NO IRISH

The report also claimed these cards were still common 30 years ago. 1977? That surprises me - I thought they were illegal by then.

What I can say (having been excluded on 2 of the 3 counts) is that in the 1960s such cards used to say:

NO COLOUREDS, NO IRISH, NO CHILDREN

Cathy Come Home is such an iconic piece of tv - doesnt anyone remember what it was actually about?

Older viewers may also remember a tv comedy series - Marriage Lines - starring a very young Prunella Scales & Richard Briers. Particularly the hilarious episodes where, in order to avoid eviction, they tried to conceal her pregnancy from the landlord.

I prefer not to think about why dogs rather than children now seem more plausible equivalents of Black & Irish

Work & freedom

I found this poem by Vikram Seth so very affecting when I first read it 18 years ago.

Over the years I have quite often given a photocopy to friends. Including (with some trepidation) to one who came over to England on the Kindertransport

All have found it affecting too

Don Dirk of Dowdee

Once you start, the memories come flooding
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Ho, for the Pirate Don Dirk of Dowdee!

He was as wicked as wicked could be,

But oh, he was perfectly gorgeous to see!

The Pirate Don Dirk of Dowdee.

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His conscience, of course, was as black as a bat,

But he had a floppety plume on his hat

And when he went walking it jiggled - like that!

The plume of the Pirate Dowdee.

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His coat it was crimson and cut with a slash,

And often as ever he twirled his mustache

Deep down in the ocean the mermaids went splash,

Because of Don Dirk of Dowdee.

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His conscience, of course, it was crook'd like a squash,

But both of his boots made a slickery slosh,

And he went through the world with a wonderful swash,

Did Pirate Don Dirk of Dowdee.

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It's true he was wicked as wicked could be,

His sins they outnumbered a hundred and three,

But oh, he was perfectly gorgeous to see,

The Pirate don Dirk of Dowdee.

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I cant believe I knew the whole of that by heart when I was 7 ( theres more!) but I must have done. I did it as my party piece at the street party for Coronation Day.

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Were things really better when we had to make our own entertainment?

Is this Herman Munster?

Old age & callow youth

There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes ones head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other peoples pain. You ought to have some apprehension that the man you see before you was once even younger than you are now & arrived at his present wretchedness by imperceptible degrees

Jacques, in Giovannis Room by James Baldwin

Now I am an old lady Im quite pleased to see I put that in my commonplace book when I was 25

I never could understand money

For years now THEY have been telling us that we are, financially, an ignorant lot

More likely to get divorced than to move our bank account

We ought to check regularly, move to take advantage of the best deal

Odd how often best is assumed to need judging purely in terms of immediate direct financial costs

No account taken of the opportunity costs of all that time needed to check which terms & conditions apply

Or the indirect costs – all that time needed to travel further or in the wrong direction to find a branch. Or hours spent on the phone to India. Or buying, checking & installing all the security needed now that your home computer might otherwise provide an open invitation to pass through the door to your bank account.

All those new account details to be remembered, along with the PINS. Though not, of course, to be written down anywhere, ever

And do keep up. Try to remember who you are banking with this week

Not all that many years ago I was approached in Cross Street in Manchester by someone looking for the Midland Bank. Its here somewhere, I said, casting round. No, she said, Ive walked all the way along twice & cant find it.

Oh, I said, Well I know Ive seen it, but I cant remember where exactly. Youll just have to ask someone else.

Esprit d’escalier – a few yards further along I was passing HSBC. Of course, that’s the new name for … But the seeker had disappeared from view

Financial ignoramuses also ought of course to know that the one time you ought not to change your bank account is when there seems to be a chance that your money might disappear completely in a puff of electrons on a hard disk or through some other mysterious means.

We should know that that will only make things worse

Cartoon by Pugh

What would you have done?

For me, the following story tells as much about what happened in 1930s Germany as could any more complex account

Max Delbruck had reached the stage of his career where he should apply for a permanent university post. By then all formal correspondence of that kind should be signed off with 'Heil Hitler'

Delbruck (from an upper class Protestant family) was reluctant to do this. He consulted a friend.

How would you normally expect to sign? asked the friend

Oh um - Yours very respectfully said Delbruck

You wouldnt mean that either said the friend

Delbruck signed the letter

Related post: Work & freedom

Cynics paradox

A sadist is one who is kind to a masochist



Im giving up being a masochist, I enjoy it too much



Overheard: If he really loved me, he'd have married someone else

What did I tell you?

In financial markets it is usually a mistake to follow any line of argument to its logical conclusion

- Anatole Kaletsky, Times 17 September 2007

Epitaph for an unliberated woman

aka The Tired Womans Epitaph. By that prolific poet, Anon. No comment required

Here lies a poor woman who always was tired;
She lived in a house where help was not hired.
Her last words on earth were: "Dear friends, I am going
Where washing ain't done, nor sweeping, nor sewing:
But everything there is exact to my wishes;

For where they don't eat there's no washing of dishes.

I'll be where loud anthems will always be ringing
But, having no voice, I'll be clear of the singing.
Don't mourn for me now; don't mourn for me never -
I'm going to do nothing for ever and ever."

Except that the bit about anthems echoes, for me, Hardys Church Romance

Spermatozoa

This cant be said to be a really good poem, but it sticks in the mind. And the more you think about it, the more it says about this lottery we call life, especially in these DNA obsessed days

A million million spermatozoa

All of them alive;

Out of their cataclysm but one poor Noah

Dare hope to survive.

And among that billion minus one

Might have chanced to be

Shakespeare, another Newton, a new Donne

But the One was Me.

Shame to have ousted your betters thus,

Taking ark while the others remained outside!

Better for all of us, forward Homunculus,

If you'd quietly died!

Aldous Huxley: Fifth Philosophers Song

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One of the things that intrigues me is the different ways 'forward Homonculus' can be stressed. As a battle cry, or as an admonition about your presumption

Even now we are old

Until quite recently I think I could, if pushed have recited virtually the whole of AA Milne, especially When We Were Very Young. James, James was probably my favourite, which I remember loving as a small child for its word play & rumty-tum rhythm

I got a shock when I read it to my own daughter for the first time. What an awful thing to tell a child - Mummy disappearing like that! But she seemed unconcerned, just as I had been at her age

I think its because it catches that delicious small-child imperious self-importance. Dont go out without consulting ME. Plus its just the kind of thing they like to make up when they first start telling their own stories: And then a great Big Bear came & ATE THEM ALL UP!

James James
Morrison Morrison
Weatherby George Dupree
Took great
Care of his Mother,
Though he was only three.
James James
Said to his Mother,
"Mother," he said, said he;
"You must never go downto the end of the town, if you don't go down with me."


King John
Put up a notice,
"LOST or STOLEN or STRAYED!
JAMES JAMES MORRISON'S MOTHER
SEEMS TO HAVE BEEN MISLAID.
LAST SEEN
WANDERING VAGUELY:
QUITE OF HER OWN ACCORD,
SHE TRIED TO GET DOWNTO THE END OF THE TOWN -
FORTY SHILLINGS REWARD!"


James James Morrison's mother
Hasn't been heard of since.
King John said he was sorry,
So did the Queen and Prince.


(Now then, very softly)

J.J.M.M.W.G.Du P.
Took great c/0 his M*****
Though he was only 3.
J.J. said to his M*****
"M*****," he said, said he:
"You-must-never-go-down-to-the-end-of-the-town-if-you-don't-go-down-with-ME!"