Friday 17th May

Yet again my early morning peace is shattered by the sight (and sound) of the single mum and the screaming child.  Well, maybe she isn’t a single mum but she has no wedding ring so here I am jumping to conclusions.  And of course the screaming child is not reserved exclusively for mums trying desperately to bring up a kid on their own – there are plenty of well-heeled mums driving around in Chelsea tractors with a wailing banshee in the back.

Each generation I am sure bewails the indulgences of the next.  It is also true of course that we all want to give our ‘sprogs’ a better life than we had, so we all tend to evercompensate in some way.

This may be news to some of you but I was a single parent, not as some sort of lifestyle choice as is all too common these days, but through circumstances when my first wife eventually left me for a Sinn Fein activist when we lived in Holloway.  She decamped to Belfast in the early 70’s, no doubt seeking a more peaceful life and left me to bring up our son on my own.  And over-indulgent as I surely was compared to my own parents very strict ideas about child-rearing; I never had a screaming child with me.

I do find it hard to understand why so many parents (and it is mostly women I see) have no control whatsoever over their children.  There seems no communication except the child’s unrestrained desire for whatever and the parent’s inability to deal with it, constantly bringing out bottles and a variety of prepackaged foodstuffs and dummies and toys in a vain attempt to pacify the child. (All the while engaging more with their mobile phone than the child)

So, I have finally become an old person moaning about the young, and am officially a ‘Grumpy Old Man’.  None of which stops the brat from screaming until eventually at some point one assumes it will get what it wants and its mother can finish putting on her make-up and read her messages on her phone in peace.

Thursday 16th May

Last night (Tuesday) we were witness to the rather unedifying spectacle of the (estranged) father of Tia Sharp declaring that her murderer should not only serve the 38 years he was handed down but then be taken out and hung.  The next day the papers were full of the quote knowing it hits the spot with many of their readers, for whom, like the papers they read, everything is indeed black and white.  While having no sympathy for Tia’s murderer and also acknowledging that there is indeed nothing that can ever bring back a murdered child, one has to question the wisdom of the media in giving so much prominence to a victim’s relative.

The Law is the Law and Justice, while imperfect, must be administered by those with calm heads who can carefully consider all the evidence and decide on the punishment they consider appropriate.  What the victim’s relatives or me or you or anyone else thinks might be a more suitable punishment should have no bearing on the case.  In fact it could be argued that for very good reasons the victims (and families of victims) views must have been distorted and prejudiced by the effect the crime had had on them and are therefore the very worst people to decide the punishment.  This is not to say that the victims do not deserve some sort of closure, some feeling that the guilty have been apprehended and tried.  Justice must always be transparent to be believed.

It has been a worrying trend that the media, in particular the tabloids, always interview the victim’s families, often in a state of rage or grief, as if they are in some way experts on Justice.  Inevitably the victims and their families (especially of more heinous crimes) think that the punishment is too light.  But why not go the whole populist hog and let them decide the punishment and pull the trapdoor too, and let us televise it so that us armchair judges can feel good about those awful people out there at last getting their just desserts.  Worryingly we are moving inexorably in that direction, but victim’s justice will be no justice at all – witness the vigilante mobs when a known paedophile is identified by the tabloids.

Wednesday 15th May

Lindisfarne emerged in the early seventies – the very best time for music.  They came out of the North-East and named themselves after a small off-shore island near Newcastle, and they have never forgotten their roots.  Coming from a folky background they married perfectly traditional instruments, fiddle and harmonica with guitars and drums to ride the wave that was breaking in the creative years after the Beatles. What set Lindisfarne apart was their incredible songwriting, courtesy mostly of Alan Hull, constantly coming up with great tunes and songs you could sing along to like ‘Fog on the Tyne’ and ‘We Can Swing Together’ along with gorgeous ballads such as ‘Lady Eleanor’ and ‘Clear White Light’.  So they hit two spots simultaneously, reaching out to young listeners like me who wanted that plaintive singer songwriter sound together with rousing renditions of old favourite tunes you just couldn’t help jigging around the room to. They were also a part of that very English sound, singing in English, not some transatlantic soulful warble that included Strawbs and Fairport Convention and even the Sutherland Brothers and Gallagher and Lyle.

They were great favourites of the late John Peel, and I bought all their early albums and saw them live a few times, always a great gig.  Inevitably the band broke up but after a few years they reconvened and have carried on with mixed success ever since.  They don’t seem to have ever cared particularly about success, seeming to just enjoy playing music for music sake.

I return time and again to those first few albums and they sound as fresh as ever, and quite unlike anything else on the CD rack.  They are one of the few bands that you can recognize straightaway.   So glad I was around when they were.

Tuesday 14th May

The Tory party is amazing.  It has been out of office for thirteen years, largely because it’s internal wrangling over Europe so dominated the Major years that the public had finally had enough of them.  And David Cameron has tried to lead them away from Europe, time and again warning them against banging on about it.  But then he made the desperately stupid mistake of promising an in-out referendum on a renegotiated Europe (whatever that means) but like Blair before him he kicked this into the long grass, hoping everyone would forget it for a while.  And for a while his strategy seemed to work, the opinion polls narrowed, and it seemed he may have pricked UKIP’s bubble.

And now, after renewed success for UKIP the party is erupting with Euro-fever again.  And now it has spread to the Cabinet itself.  On Sunday we had Michael Gove declaring that if a referendum were held today he would vote to leave the EU.  Firstly, that is a completely hypothetical question; there is no referendum today or in the near future, so the only reason not to have sidestepped it but to have answered so positively was for purely political reasons.  And this exercise in political positioning was repeated by Phillip Hammond a few hours later.

It seems to me that potential successors to Cameron are lining up and waiting for the starting gun, which could be Cameron losing the next election, or even if by some miracle he won it then losing the referendum itself.   A self-defeating strategy if ever there was one.

The great danger in all of this is that we may well have a referendum which could easily result in us leaving the EU.  Or even before that Cameron failing to get any major concessions out of the EU.  My hunch is that the EU will diverge into two distinct groups, those within the Eurozone who will move inevitably towards closer political union; and those who are members (maybe Associate Members) of the EU but not in the Eurozone, and who have a quite different relationship with the Eurozone countries.

Though not perfect I cannot see anyone really holding the line of maintaining the status quo with any great success.  Milliband must hold firm and not promise a referendum at all, but put all his efforts into his own preferred re-negotiated European position, and the hard part – selling that to the public, who are daily being drip-fed this hatred of Europe, of Immigrants, of others to blame for our malaise rather than ourselves.   Mind you the Tories aren’t helping themselves by tearing themselves apart so publicly over Europe.  Again.

Monday 13th May

Except, of course, that it can.  Chelsea have regularly spent more than almost every other team and for a few years they were winning nearly everything.  Manchester City, a fairly also-ran team until rich Arabs bought into it, bought a team and a manager and won the league last year.  And no-one can deny that Manchester United have spent well and pay good wages too, though they do earn more than any other team too.  So, what is the secret of success, in the fast changing, high turnover, big money game of Premier League Football?   Was Sir Alex Ferguson simply the greatest football manager ever, or did he have a bit of luck, a patient board of directors and a team with a growing fan base that provided the cash for him to keep renewing his teams.

There is no doubt that Man U have been far and away the best team during the last twenty years, winning consistently, but also getting the best out of players other teams couldn’t, and rebuilding, constantly re-building.  And buying cleverly.

And it is always gratifying to see the mighty fall, especially those that have bought their success.  In the week that Sir Alex steps down gracefully at the top of his game, their near neighbours City are going into meltdown, not only losing the FA cup to minnows Wigan but now losing their manager too.  Like Chelsea, whose management merry-go-round makes them a laughing stock, City thought they could simply buy success, the most expensive players, the most expensive manager, but somehow no heart.

The real successes of the premier league are the teams that fight and battle with little or no resources, and against all odds buy carefully and nurture talent like Stoke and Fulham and Wigan and Swansea and Norwich.  Oh, and Manchester United, who do the same only with a lot more money at their disposal.

Sunday 12th May

Why is it that even the weekends are such a mad rush ?  How come I am the only bloke in Britain who is too busy to sit down and fall asleep while watching the F.A. Cup Final ?  Why is it that my life has descended into one complication after another ?  Where have the lazy weekends gone?

Time was when I used to buy the Independent on both Saturday and Sunday, and managed to read them almost the whole way through, yes, even the Business and Sports sections.  Okay, I did miss out the Travel stuff, which was nothing but one long advert, and why tease yourself with places you will never visit anyway.  At least you can kid yourself that you might just see the film or play you are reading about, or if not at least you will have some idea when your friends say they have seen it.   Nowadays, I don’t even slow down when passing the Newsagents; I don’t even get itchy fingers; I don’t even crane my neck to read the headlines anymore.

I simply don’t have the time to even think of such indulgence.  Even though I am now down to just four days work a week, there always seems a hangover to complete on Friday (anything to stop me working on the book).  And every weekend we seem to have filled up with jobs to do, gardens to tidy, cars to clean, places to see, people to visit.  And then when that rarest of events occur and a free day (never a whole weekend) opens up, you get a phonecall from a friend, or even worse the doorbell rings and ‘friends’ descend on you.

And so invariably when Monday comes around and I crank up the work machine one more time, slog my way through the tube, grab a latte and almond croissant and when I actually get behind my desk I can at last begin to relax.

Saturday 11th May

As I get older I find I have become far less tolerant of stupidity, specifically of people doing their job badly.  Incompetence should never be rewarded, but it seems that the level of actual competence is diminishing as the years go by.  Maybe it is an over-reliance on computers, where people trust that the spreadsheet must always be right and stop thinking for themselves.  Maybe it stems from the fact that when I started working, way back in the last century there was precious little employee protection – quite simply if you were incompetent you got sacked.

Now, I would be the last to want to scrap the employment protection laws, and I have unfortunately seen from the employer’s side how redundancy is used as a tool to get rid of ‘troublesome’ staff, and it is grossly unfair.  But there is also an element of ‘couldn’t care lessism’ that has crept into many people’s performance of their work.  Do they never think to themselves what a poor job they are doing?  Do they never question whether they are actually earning their wages at all?

And almost every day I come across incompetence; new starters missed off the wages even though they have worked a whole week, and the stupid manager asks where the payslip is, not even bothering to see if they had included them on the wages schedule; managers deciding that it wasn’t necessary to do the weekend’s banking until Wednesday, even though Monday was a Bank holiday, for some reason as Tuesday isn’t a normal banking day let’s just keep four days cash in the safe; managers neglecting for weeks to print off a new supplier’s e-mailed invoices.

I try not to get angry, because getting angry only hurts me, but honestly if I cock-up I feel terrible and do all I can to rectify my mistake.  It is the nonchalant shrug of the shoulders that really irritates.  Everyone makes mistakes, but you will never learn from them unless you take it seriously and realise the damage and extra work for someone else you have caused.

Friday 10th May

What a week David Cameron has had.  First the humiliation of seeing UKIP do so well in the local elections.  On top of which he was shown repeatedly and belatedly attempting to show some respect to the voters who had deserted him in droves, saying that it was no good insulting UKIP, only to be immediately followed by clips of him doing just that in an earlier tirade.   He is obviously running scared of them and had he had the chance would have rewritten the Queens Speech to be even harsher on Immigrants than it is attempting to be.  Ed Milliband was right when in his reply he said that no matter how much he, the PM, pandered to the Right, they would keep coming back for more.

We have had a succession of Tory Grandees coming out and saying that simply re-negotiating Europe will solve nothing.  Opening this Pandora’s box just a smidgeon means he cannot now close the lid again.  Europe is threatening to break up the Tories yet again.  It is the Corn Laws again on constant repeat.

Then to cap it all the Queens Speech, which was a pretty drab affair anyway, has been completely overshadowed by the surprise resignation of Fergie.  What should have been a news-topping free bit of Government publicity where new (and some old rehashed) policies are presented with all the pomp and ceremony the state can throw at it, even here there was more excitement because Charles and Camilla were there too, raising speculation about her Maj’s possible abdication in the near future.

And then Fergie goes and explodes his bombshell, and today’s papers and the News were full of his remarkable achievements.  Football fans of all persuasions were celebrating, and a really popular man was being lauded.  No matter what Cameron goes on to achieve, which will probably be very little, he will never touch our hearts as Fergie has done.

Thursday 9th April

It has almost become ‘de rigeur’ to speak of the deceased in hushed tones, with a reverence and a glossing over of their faults.  And John certainly had faults.  He was many facetted but like a flawed diamond he shone brilliantly at times.  Always the most dominant of the Beatles, as a child growing up with them he almost scared me, he was the one pushing the envelope.  He drove them along and was as creative as any of them, absorbing all around him and regurgitating it as something new and different.

And he was clearly going off the rails, addicted to everything going.  He met Yoko and ditched his wife and child.  Then the Beatles split and, like Paul and George, he produced at least two brilliant albums that were as good as anything done by all four of them.   Then he seemed to go off the rails again, and had his ‘lost weekend’, and made a couple of poor albums, though even here there were hidden gems, it was just that the quality control switch was never turned on.  Maybe he was just too big for anyone to say ‘Hold on John, this is rubbish. Let’s think again.’

He had a renaissance just before he was shot, and who knows what brilliance or failure he might have achieved.  Would he have become a respectable elder statesman of rock, or continued a rebel, or sunk into oblivion?

His legacy must be the song ‘Imagine’ – he sung ‘you may say that I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.’  No, John you weren’t the only one, but you more than anyone else put into words what a lot of us have always felt.

Maybe, in a strange way going out in such an awful blaze, has done the memory of John a favour.  I prefer to concentrate on his musical legacy, which is wonderful.

Wednesday 8th April

There is a political snowball which needed a mighty shove, but has now started moving, rolling over and over, slowly gathering pace, picking up debris and fresh snow as it begins to roll down the hill.   It has been obvious for years really, though most of us were happy not to see it.  There has been an increasingly large proportion of the electorate who do not vote, or have stopped voting or who no longer vote the way they always have, or the way their parents did.  At first it was simply moving over to the opposition, whichever that was, then they dabbled with the LibDems, who for a while sounded as if they might actually be different.  Now the snowball has coalesced on UKIP, and the unlikely but eminently likeable face of Nigel Farage, who looks and sounds like a second world war spiv, a car salesman, a smoker, a drinker, probably a gambler, in short the opposite of all the politically correct metro-sexual smart-suited leaders of the other parties.  And he smiles and laughs at difficult questions and insists he isn’t a politician at all.  In fact he is that extraordinary beast – a non-political charismatic leader of a political movement which threatens to push all the other parties aside, or at least to bump them along, shake them out of their complacency a bit, and he is certainly doing that.  I bet all the three leaders are dreading losing any of their MPs and facing a by-election at the moment.

Of course we will have to wait a bit and see whether the snowball gathers pace and keeps on careening down the hill sweeping all in front of it, or if the sun of reason begins to melt it and it ends up a damp squib, just a pile of slush with a fallen carrot and lumps of coal as the only sign of its once greatness.