World BBC

Reading about the British SBS being involved with Italian commandos in recsuing two Italian soldiers along from Afghan kidnappers, the British sources said the Italian victims may have been tortured. Gasp, how nasty torture is when it is committed by shifty, shabby Afghan bad guys, all of whom no doubt were hunchbacks. All a far cry when the squeaky clean USA and the US's Afghan allies torture in the American gulag archipelago because, of course, torture is then legitimate and the Geneva convention is 'outdated'. In these 'Freedom Camps', such as Guantanamo Bay or bounty hunter dens in Kabul and Herat (where people have been known to have been hung on meathooks to extract a confession), everything is ship-shape. And nothing is professional. I go by the Israeli secret service, Mossad. They believe torture is useless because the person under interrogation could be innocent, but were they to be tortured they might give untrue details and divert valauble security attention just to make the torture stop. Too many idiots in the USA and UK (e.g. Tony Blair) believe that anyone arrested must be guilty of something, as if security services are infallible. No smoke without fire, they chant, but that smoke will be caused by smoke canisters used by the police. Mossad knows what works because they are professional.

As to what works, Jeff Randall, formerly BBC business editor, now working at the Telegraph, complains the BBC promotes a 'liberal consensus'. Along with other rabid right-wingers, he is first and foremost a hypocrite, since he probably follows the US line of 'competing biases' for a quick read of the Telegraph would leave no-one in any doubt that it is not impartial. It may be the only broadsheet, but the size is misleading. The BBC won two Emmy awards for its news coverage today, both of the only international prizes available. the real reason for the attacks of Randall and others is that they want to shift the mainstream further right, mimicking the US way they so fawn over. But as we've seen with possibly the most distrastous presidency in living memory (because Tricky Dicky was authoritarian but competent), trying to implement nutty right-wing ideology is an unmitigated failure. As BBC executives often say, being attacked by both sides of the political spectrum means they must be doing something right. This is proved that trust in it is higher than any of the rags that attack it.

Working for the man (hopefully)

Went for a job interview today in London. I arrived in High Holborn around twenty minutes early and pottered about so I could arrive at 11am on the dot, as we had agreed over the phone. The job was regarding a group of headhunters. I was asked of my skills of decapitation and shrinking of heads in the Amazonian-style and the relative merits of this over the Congolese-style.
Er, well, not quite. They were business headhunters. I was fairly relaxed throughout, the only downside was to to over-gesticulate with my hands, when the classic pose is arched in the chapel-fashion and to remain so for the duration.
It was standard interview stuff, why I want this job, why I'm suited for this job, what are my strengths and weaknesses (for the latter, 'perfectionism' is done to death I was told prior to answering), what do my friends think of me, what are my short-term and long-term career ambitions, what are my two greatest achievements, how well do I work in a team?
There was also that question that's leftfield, though not so much in this case since it was related to advertising. In this instance, what's the most effective ad currently in my opinion. There were a few that have made me chuckle, but the only one that I could squeeze out of my brain and appear at ease was the Cadbury's gorilla bashing drums. As I talked a few others flooded back, but I had read about this one in the media pages of a newspaper and so was fairly familiar.
Then the interview technique cunning - asking if I had any questions when no mention had yet been made of salary, pension plans, health insurance, working hours (plus lunch break), perks and activities outside of work. To not ask about salary alone is enough to be marked for the reject pile. It was only the first stage. Were I to be successful, I would be invited back along with several other candidates to make a presentation to test, well, our presentation skills. This is no one-stop-shop job.
As I go for employment, Jose Mourinho leaves his. I must imagine that Chelsea fans are feeling 'blue is the colour, depression is the name'. The bookmakers will be rubbing their hands with glee at all the lost bets on Sammy Lee or Martin Jol, though some punters may make a technical point that Jose left of his own accord and was not sacked. I must admit I believed that if Jose made it to August he would survive the season, since departing in the middle of it smacks of an amateurishness that I thought the Abramovich Chelsea would not tolerate. Apparently, he could tolerate his manager even less, but to lose Mourinho just before the big game against Manchester United is calamitous. It will be interesting to see who is the replacement that can deliver the excitement. As for Mourinho himself, he will lurk like an ominous shadow at the back of any struggling manager at a big or big-ish club or rather his agents will lurk for him. The Portuguese always provided and provides interesting times.

So what about New Europe?

I must confess that I was slightly disappointed with the Michael Palin's series that premiered last night, New Europe. I guess that I should have expected this, given that I was a bit of a specialist on this, having studied the region at university and having lived in one part of it.
I haven't lived in the ex-Yugoslavia or Albania, but it was skimpy. If it had to be detailed on any of these countries, it would probably have ended up on BBC4. Slovenia is a small country, but it was covered in 20 seconds, with not a smidgen about a country's background which has a longer history of civilisation than Britain. Palin tended to stick to the Croatian coast with Zagreb not even getting a look in, despite being a staging post on the orginal Orient Express.
Bosnia-Herzegovina was covered by only Mostar and Sarajevo, but no talk of Torville and Dean's skating gold medals. Not even mentioning the 1984 Winter Olympics is a bit odd. Again with Serbia. There is so much to the country than just Belgrade e.g. Kosovo and when two Serbian women joked about how Serbs celebrated a catastrophic defeat, Palin knew they were talking about the battle of Kosovo, I knew they were talking about the battle on "the field of blackbirds," but how many casual others?
Montenegro was bypassed altogether. So was the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, unless that gets 20 seconds in the next episode. It was onto Albania with Palin messing about on top of pillboxes in the main Albanian port, Durres. This small corner of Europe got ten minutes and Palin did fill in a bit of backstory, but it once was one of the most advanced regions in the ancient Mediterranean. Implying that the capital, Tirana, is a turd is a bit harsh. Maybe for a tourist it is not that impressive, but I'm sure to stay there more than a few days one can get a feel for the undercurrents of the local culture. Ulaanbaatar in Mongolia can seem a bit grey to the transitory person, but one really needs to live there. Palin rounded it off with a trip to the home village of Albania's greatest national hero, Skanderbeg, where Sufism, mystical Islam, is practiced. No explanation as to how it might have migrated from the Indian subcontinent to here, but I could theorize how it could of.
The main trouble with the series is that it does not have much of a point, except paying Palin to be a tourist. With his first two travelogues, Around the World in Eighty Days and Pole to Pole, he wasn't just wandering about but there was a sense of mission. With later series such as Himalaya or Sahara, that overriding impetus was gone and so it is with New Europe. Only the scenery truly commands the attention, but it lacks drive and detail. I'll still watch it for the glorious landscapes, both countryside and city.

International roundball

The Russians are coming. And now they are going, having shipped three goals. The Wembley crowd surprised me. One could understand the lack of taking to task Israel's national anthem, but Russia's rousing Soviet-style ditty met with even less booing and that only at the start, as if some England fans were being jabbed in the ribs by their friends, the latter saying to the former "don't make an idiot of yourself." It makes one happy to feel English again, or at least have a majority of English blood.
The other national sides that comprise my make-up did wonderclasses as well. The Auld Alliance could soon become the New Emnity, as Scotland, amazingly, brilliantly, won in Paris, the place of foreboding that the suspended-for-the-game Thierry Henry warned that people should wait for, when France were beaten at Hampden Park. France can still qualify if they overcome Ukraine and Scotland can inflict some damage on Italy in Glasgow, though it will be tough.
And Wales went out to Slovakia and gave them a thrashing to match the one the Slovaks handed out in Cardiff. 5-2 away for a belittled Welsh team is some going.

Apropos le weekend et tout le monde

Well, it was three goals from the Three Lions against Zion. Fairly routine really but it released one pressure valve. I was also pleased by the limited and muted booing of the Israeli national anthem by some of the boneheads that call themselves England fans. If only we could make general xenophobia as unacceptable as anti-semitism, since the crowd response to the Israeli's patriotic tune explodes the myth that the mocking is 'just a bit of fun', since if that were the case it would have got the same treatment as all the other foreign anthems. Can't we take pride in our own anthem and leave it at that. What could have legitimately piqued the Israel team though, is by adopting that Blake hymn adopted by rugby fans - "And we will build Jerusalem/ On England's green and pleasant land."

Continuing with sport, I was listening to the full line-out of the Italian F1 Grand Prix, being read from bottom to top (just before going to church) and experienced a dissonance. Jenson Button was being read out as ninth in the grid, the first time he has broken into the top ten all season. I was thinking, no, he isn't or hasn't. He's broken into the top one or two in qualifying throughout and anyway, he's second on the grid for this race. But then it dawned on me. I was merging yesterday's bright new hope with today's. For while Lewis Hamilton is the toast of the town and "could become the best racing driving ever," it was only last season that Button was the British hope, his first ever Formula One victory (after three seasons) being lauded as the start of a new dawn, where he would be "the next Nigel Mansell or Damon Hill." How's Button's star has dramatically faded and been eclipsed. I do hope that Hamilton wins the World Championship not merely because he's British but also because no rookie has ever done that before and so it carries and underdog spirit to root for. The car helps but Hamilton does have raw talent that one hopes he can innovate on as the years go by.

As for weekend TV, I watched The Dinner Party on BBC1, largely because I knew it was going to be reviewed in the next day papers and I wanted to see if it was worth the fuss. By the end, it was clearly why this was a one-off programme. I wished I'd seen Abigail's Party for a comparison, since this was obviously an update, almost a remake. The Dinner Party certainly satisfied the current public need to be gratified by watching people shout at each other. Maybe the director thought if the characters were loud enough it would distract from the manipulation which was a little too obvious. The four middle-aged codgers all vote Tory - gasp, how bad they must be - and two even criticise the other two for voting Labour, just the once, in 1997 - double gasp. When the host's racism is exposed at the end, it only feels tacked on, as if the writers were pondering 'how can we make this guy as throroughly reprehensible as possible' and drew up a checklist to help them. As the great film critic Pauline Kael wrote, when drawn out of retirement to comment on the hype surrounding the movie American Beauty, it punches all the liberal buttons i.e matters that liberals can relate to by their abhorrence of them. That was a fine film though, far more nuanced than this show. The acting made a good fist out of the material, but the clumsy characterisation always made one feel like a spectator instead of being drawn into it.

Anita Roddick RIP. God bless her soul. The same for Luciano Pavarotti, an even larger than life figure, who in his twenties weighed not much more than I do.

Finally, Ive just finished Wolves Eat Dogs by Martin Cruz Smith, where Arkady Renko, his rough-bitten Russian detective, returns. Renko had most fame in the Cruz Smith novel (subsequently film) Gorky Park. That was in the 1980s. Now, Wolves East Dogs (pub. 2005)finds Senior Investigator Renko in Chernobyl's Zone of Exclusion, after stirring up trouble in Moscow simply by doing his job. The radiation poisoning murders with caesium chloride (which looks like salt) carries eery advance echoes of the Litvinenko killing with polonium-210. The fleshing out of so many different people and plot strands all means the whodunnit is by the by, but the extras serve to add to the appeal of the book. It all leads to the 1986 Chernobyl disaster and the almost equally distrastous initial cover-up by the Soviet authorities so as not to be embarrassed at disrupting the May Day celebrations. People still live in the Zone, though from what the highly-informed book says, I may steer clear of the game option on the menus of restaurants in Kiev and Minsk, as well trying to avoid contact with Ukranian tap water (water becomes more irradiated than earth, objects or animals). Still, the bizarre atmosphere around Chernobyl (or apparently Chornobyl in the local dialect) including the ghost towns that were eventually evacauated and the bizarre vegetation in places, makes me hanker to visit it, at least for a day trip or two. It's the same reason why Michael Palin is exploring East-Central Europe in his upcoming television series and why I will be watching it.

London transport down the tubes

During the era of the bus boycotts in the south of the USA, civil rights campaigners used to sing "You don't need to ride Jim Crow/ No, you don't need to ride Jim Crow," but now a new anthem is required for our times with the tube strike, only just ended apparently. "'You ain't going to ride,' - Bob Crow/ 'No, you ain't going to ride,' - Bob Crow." Yes, he was voted in by members, but was so was the current US president for a second term, and yes, the members voted for the strike, but only after he whipped them up.
Bob Crow is actually endangering 95% of his members' rights because with the meltdown of MetroNet, a commercial company in the farce that is the Private-Public Partnership, it was damanded that all London Underground workers who had to join Metronet's auspices were given guarantees over LU job security and pensions. This was granted before the strike. It's the 5% who joined Metronet in the last two years and therefore have no claim to LU job security or pensions on whose behalf the strike is happening. When you join a a private organisation, you sink or swim with its fortunes. Unions are partly about sticking up for an underdog, but this particular set joined after the LU rules were confirmed for existing members, not future ones. Moreover, two of the three unions affected by the demise of Metronet's contract accepted the terms and conditions. Only Crow's RMT did not.
It was a piece of political spite by a so-called Labour government to inflict the PPP farrago on Londoners, particularly directed at Ken Livingstone, orchestrated by the authoriatarian nature of the New Labour machine to quash dissent when it could not ride it out. Londoners were suffering enough as it was without the antics of Bob Crow and his refuseniks. Such immoderate behaviour and contempt for the public by the unions in the 1970s and '80s was the equivalent of signing their own death warrant. It was union leaders like Bob Crow who ushered in 18 years of Conservative rule and gave a popular mandate for the power of the unions to be broken. Many people would like to see Bob Crow broken. To use one of Crow's favouite phrases, 'at the end of the day', it's time for the sun to set on his cantankerous career.

Public issues

I conclude a separate email concerning matters that do provoke in me strong emotions and can lead to vituperation. I was particularly moved by an edition of Any Questions on the radio, held in Kibworth, Leicestershire, where two elderly friends now live.
The EU treaty was one of those up for discussion - should there be a referendum for it? Now, I don't think there should for the same reason that there should not have been one. Who would actually read the text? I think maybe 1% of the country would. People basically have more important things to deal with in their lives and if that should be so, then a referendum is unnecessary and indeed counter-productive to true democratic engagement. David, now Lord, Steel gave a masterclass in being one of the few people able to confront Tony Benn's polemicisms in real time. So if no-one at large will read it, it should like all other obscurantist notions like regulating the copyright of certain cheese manufactures, be delegated to parliament. Certainly few MPs would themselves read it, but the party whips would enforce their compliance on orders from the cabinet who will have read the treaty. Gordon Brown played a key role in shaping it. Now some xenophobes carp about more power being given to unelected bureaucrats and they get a clap (when they should get a slap). Unelected bureaucrats - then make the elected in a true EU democracy. Oh, no, no, no, no. That would mean more integration. These dunderheads prefer the Brussels eurocrat to remain unelected the same way left-wingers prefer the current administration in the White House - it gives them something to kick against. What I say is stop dissembling. Say you hate Europeans and all engagement with them. Put up or shut up. And as a postscript, in an interdependent, globalised world, the only true independence for a country now is to take it back to the Stone Age, something the xenophobes would prefer since it would guarntee the superiority of the fist (in a metaphysical and physical sense) as the main instrument of power. That's what they want.
A 67 year old man's killers were convicted today of his manslaughter and public disturbance. The unique fact is that they were all under 15. The parents sat with them in the dock, ostensibly to comfort them, but really they deserved to be there as well. On the unanimous guilty verdict of the jury. The parents started crying with their children. Well, if they had been proper parents they would not have allowed their kids to be in the position to form an aggressive and noxious gang. Rhy Ifans' parents knew how to be good parents. The trouble is, like trying to imitate the myth of the gangsta chill, most of these kids are middle-class disillusioned with life and nothing to fill it. Is it any wonder that children seek binge drinking to reach oblivion before they have to contemplate the imponderables of thousands of years?
Finally, the Princess of Wales. The Diana legacy regarding AIDS and landmines is admirable. The Diana hype which is everything else from the day she died is detestable. That might seem bemusing to get worked up over an item of supreme triviality, but the Diana brouhaha totally overshadowed the death of Mother Teresa the next day who was relegated to a footnote in history. Mother Teresa did incomparably more for humanity than Diana did and not by occasionally stepping down from an ivory tower. The Wembley concert for her would-be birthday was stomach-churning enough, raising it to the stature of African poverty and climate change, but it was for good causes. The public memorial service was a mistake, it should have been private. If it had been for Mother Teresa, I would have no complaints but it was for a fashion horse who was very good at playing the public. It is disgusting navel gazing, from which I could not put enough distance between me and it. But there is one further aspect of the Diana legacy - in cars wear seatbelts.

A sad farewell

So, we bid farewell to another British summer, if it ever existed. I went to a funeral yesterday of a former vicar, Ken Hayes, of the local church in Gillingham. I thought a long-sleeve shirt, buttoned up to the top with a tie, would be enough, but the musty church in Sidcup where the service was had a chilly temperature inside that made the breeze outside refreshing. I shifted my shoulder blades several times in my chair just to produce warmth through movement.
From the road the church built in the early 1930s looked like a glorified scout hall, but its more ecclesiastical trimmings became more obvious the closer one got as they were no longer obscured by the trees. The bell tower was small but looked Mediterranean in its tiling and styling. The flag flying at half mast and it was a design by the deceased, who was a dab hand at craftsmanship and design. Inside hung a decent picture of the Holy Lamb, one of fifty copies Ken had made for people. There were hymns to inspire people and the last two were overtly associated with joy, 'Lord, the light of Your love is shining (Shine, Jesus, Shine)' and 'The trees of the field shall clap their hands'. I'll always remember Ken's smile, since he always sought to be happy to inspire others.