More British humour

Talking of great Punch jokes, in his (highly recommended) bogside book, Paperweight, Stephen Fry points us to a cartoon from a 1939 edition.

A man is shown leaping into a London taxi and shouting at the cabbie: "The Royal School of Needlework - and drive like hell."

Blog Pub

Appleyard has nicked my well-worn analogy of the blog as pub.

As the landlord of this establishment, I feel it is important to make beneficial introductions.

I would therefore like Thought Mesh to meet McCabism, if they haven't already done so.

I think Susan's Husband/AOG and Gordon have a lot in common with each other, but not necessarily with the rest of us mortals with normal-shaped brains.

The curate’s egg

Over on Thought Experiments I made the claim that ‘True Humility’ by George du Maurier (grandfather of Daphne) is the Daddy of all English self-mocking jokes.

I stand by that claim. In a simple image and a single phrase it covers everything you need to know about the absurdity of class deference, priggishness, the logical extremes of etiquette, timidity, flattery, and the business of eternally behaving as if you have a poker shoved a good distance up your behind.

Like all the very best jokes, it has more pathos than humour.

Bacon butty news

Scientists have created a mathematical formula of how to make the perfect bacon butty, says the BBC.

Brown roll, tommy sauce, English mustard.

Bish bash bosh. Innit.

Back off, Brussels

A British shopkeeper in Spain has been fined for selling a jar of pickled onions with an English label - even though her customers are all Brits.

Food inspectors spotted the £1.20 jar among hundreds of correctly labelled items in Helen Rush's store, reports The Sun. A local law says ingredients must be translated into Spanish - but Helen branded her treatment unfair.

She said: "I spend hours translating the labels but when I make one small mistake I get hammered for it. It's irrelevant to them that 99.9% of my clients are Brits and a Spaniard wouldn't eat a pickled onion at gunpoint."

It's good to know that the expats who have set up such magnificently rigid Little Britains in the Spanish sun - where Only Fools and Horses and Premiership football are always on the telly, and full English breakfasts, Marmite soldiers and pints of John Smiths are always at hand - have not forgotten to take with them our beloved tales of EU bureaucracy GONE MAD.

Quite religious

Tim Hames tackles what has become a proper chestnut: what to do about the Church of England.

There is a story about William Whitelaw which, in a touching if faintly damning way, sums up the plight of the Church of England. It involves the moment when the Conservative politician was told that, somewhat unexpectedly. Robert Runcie was to be appointed Archbishop of Canterbury. Whitelaw, who had admired Runcie’s military record during the Second World War, was delighted. “Splendid news,” he said. “Fine man, Runcie. I knew him in the Army; very brave, very brave.” He then concluded: “Quite religious too, you know.”

“Quite religious” is an awkward place to be stranded between the more robust stations of militant secularism and theological fanaticism. “Quite religious” is also an accurate description of our contemporary Easter. On Friday, Gerard Baker wrote in these pages that in Japan, where there are not many Christians and an element of confusion is perhaps understandable, it is possible to purchase a Father Christmas nailed to a Cross. Coming soon, a chocolate egg nestling in a Nativity manger?

Anglicans are desperately close to the worst of all worlds. They are perceived as both irrelevant and bitterly divided, especially over homosexuality, which threatens to rip the Church apart at the Lambeth conference next year. It is a moment when leadership at the top — charismatic, intellectual and spiritual — is especially important. Yet leadership is not so much missing as mislocated. Rowan Williams at Canterbury and John Sentamu at York are well qualified to occupy the two most senior portfolios in the Church of England. Unfortunately, they are most well qualified for each other’s positions.

Dr Williams is probably the most intelligent man to sit in St Augustine’s chair for centuries. He is kindly and thoughtful and almost painfully reasonable. His anguish over how to simultaneously hold his Church together and his conscience intact is manifest. He is the personification of the thesis that a liberal is a man so broadminded that he would not take his own side in an argument.

At a deep level, I identify strongly with Rowan Williams. I like him and, to use an Appleyardism, I find him consoling.

He is everything that is good about religion. The sad thing is that he is presiding over the decline of everything that is good about religion, and by being good, he is in a way helping to accelerate this decline.

On the Ignorance of Yanks

"Do you have television in England?" an American lady once asked Mrs Brit.

We Brits (and Europeans and Australians and everybody else) like to have a laugh at the ignorance bred by America's media isolationism.

But then, when they can kick our arses into oblivion whenever they like, and given that we Brits are, essentially and sensibly, America's poodles, it is important to our psychologies that we can have a good laugh at things like this.

It's like Ahmadinejad 'choosing' to release the sailors.

American plot to start Iranian war foiled!

Sir Richard Dalton analyses the Iranian sailor-kidnapping fiasco.

It is a human instinct to construct a narrative to try and make sense of events. The Iranians were planning to get x and have achieved y. The Brits knew what was going to happen all along and played a good diplomatic game.

9/11 Conspiracy types took about two minutes to proclaim that it was all a set-up by the Americans to justify bombing Tehran*.

But as with so many things, the truth is rather more prosaic. It was just another sorry series of stupid, make-it-up-as-you-go-along cock-ups. Plus a healthy dash of pathetic personal hubris on the part of Ahmadinejad.

(*Some of the sailors themselves clearly forgot to read this script. The Stockholmish toadying to their captors from one man in particular was bizarre and difficult to watch.)

Big Guns fight old battle

Here is a write-up of a recent debate on the motion 'We'd be better off without religion'. Old Dawkinsy, AC Grayling and Chris Hitchens were for; Julia Neuberger, Roger Scruton and Nigel Spivey agin'.

The heathens won. But then with Dawkins and the Hitch on board you'd expect that, since as I tried to explain to deaf ears elsewhere, when every argument that can be made has been made, only style matters.

Just who is Guido Fawkes? is the question nobody is asking

What are blogs for? Guido Fawkes thinks they are for battering British politicians.

Guido has attained a moderate bloggish kind of fame for his daily assault on political animals of all colours. He has no agenda except a kind of adolescent anti-everything anarchic libertarianism.

Bryan Appleyard met Guido and has given him a rather too generous write-up here.

The fact that Guido met a mainstream journo like Bryan illustrates that his real problem is that he can’t decide whether he wants to be famous or anonymous. Or rather, he wants to be famous for being anonymous. So he settles for a ridiculous halfway house where he appears on national television in silhouette. But anyone who gives a hoot one way or the other knows who he is. He is some guy called Paul Staines who calls himself Guido and has a daily bloggy bash at British politicians.

Here he is on telly, in 'disguise', being beaten up by a proper journalist:

A lot of rot about Trotsky

Clive James debunks one of the last great myths of communism: that Trotsky was the nice guy and if only he had triumphed over Stalin, rather than vice versa, Eastern Europe would now be a utopia.


…But the Russian civil war that turned Trotsky into one of the century's most effective amateur generals also unleashed his capacities as a mass murderer. The sailors at Kronstadt, proclaiming their right to opinions of their own about the Revolution, were massacred on his order. The only thing true about Trotsky's legend as some kind of lyrical humanist was that he was indeed unrealistic enough to think that the secretarial duties could safely be left to Stalin. His intolerance of being bored undid him. But his ideas of excitement went rather beyond making love to Frida Kahlo, and at this distance, there are no excuses left for students who find him inspiring. Trotsky's idea of permanent revolution will always be attractive to the kind of romantic who believes that he is being oppressed by global capitalism when he maxes out his credit card. But the idea was already a dead loss before Trotsky was driven into exile in 1929. He lost the struggle against Stalin not because he was less ruthless but because he was less wily.

The Most Hated Family in America

Louis Theroux tried to work his faux naïve magic on the members of the Westboro Baptist Church on BBC2 the other night, but failed to find any trace of humanity or deep-buried sanity within The Most Hated Family in America.

There are religious nuts, and there are religious nuts, and then there is the family of Fred Phelps. They travel across America to picket the funerals of US soldiers, shouting at mourning mothers that God has killed their sons to avenge the country’s tolerance of homosexuality.

“God hates fags”, they encouraged their seven-year old daughter to shout from the roadside, as justifiably angered passers-by hurled abuse back at them.

Unfathomable.

Dilemma

I'm not sure what to make of the world today. On the one hand, it seems that many Iranians are fiercely proud of the pointless act of aggression that could ultimately bring Armageddon raining down on their idiot heads.

But on the other hand, these otters are just so damn cute.

Gill versus Hitch

I recently lambasted AA Gill over on the Daily Duck, but this week he wrote two eminently sensible things in his TV review column for the Sunday Times.

Gill - an incorrigible contrarian - hates everything of course, but by the law of averages he's sometimes right. I was going to post about his thoughts on The Great Global Warming Swindle, but I find that McCabism has beaten me to it. However, his critique of another incorrigible contrarian, the Younger Hitchens, is also spot on:

George Monbiot turned up in Peter Hitchens’s splenetic rant about David Cameron and the Conservatives, Cameron — Toff at the Top (Monday, C4). Seeing Monbiot and Hitchens together reminded me of those animal photos, beloved of the tabloids, where Alsatians marry ducks and tigers cohabit with goats. Among journalists, Hitchens is fondly known by the nickname Bonkers. He’s called Bonkers Hitchens because he is raving bonkers, in a way that sells papers but makes him very annoying to sit next to on long flights. I’ve covered elections with him and seen him chase cars like an incensed border collie.

His thesis is that Cameron is nothing but a filthy upper-class prat. He revealed this as if it was a well-guarded secret. Cameron, he insisted, as is the wont of his elitist privileged class, had taken the good old working-class Tory party and made it an annex of the smug, snobbish Labour party, thereby running together Magna Carta, habeas corpus and the rules of Association Football, thus destroying democracy as we understand it. The great thing about Hitchens is that he never disappoints. Blissfully, he is utterly bereft of self-irony. For Bonkers there was nothing remotely odd or absurdly hilarious about hating the Conservative party for having Eton-educated, upper-class boys in it. Hitchens should be encouraged to do more. He’s like a lost biblical character from The Life of Brian.

Is this ironic?

How about this one then? Is it ironic? Well?



My guess is not intentionally. However, the implied accusation that men are to blame for body fascism and that We are all Sisters Together (whoop, holler!) is highly ironic, since the magazines that publish those mean pics are bought exclusively by women. Men genuinely don't give a hoot.

Ben Helfgott

The guest on today's Desert Island Discs was the remarkable Ben Helfgott. A Jew, he was the only member of his family to escape Nazi-occupied Poland. His mother and sister were shot in the ghetto. He lost his father when he was deported to the concentration camp. When he was liberated from Theresienstadt he was a 15-year old skeleton.

Helfgott was taken along with seven hundred other Jewish orphans to start a new life in England. He grabbed this life with both hands, and went on to become a successful businessman and the British weightlifting champion - representing his adopted country at the 1956 and 1960 Olympic Games. He now organises Holocaust Memorial Day.

He says he has never hated the Germans, but that, far from fading, the trauma of his memories becomes more intense as he gets older. No matter how many times one hears the stories of the Nazi atrocities against their fellow humans, the listener still goes through the same emotional wringer: rage, disgust, guilt, incomprehension, sadness; and finally awe at people like Helfgott.