Liberal Burblings

Archive for September, 2009

Yesterday I was walking along the street and a rather dodgy looking man walked up to some teenagers and, holding out his mobile phone, said, in tones of some desperation, “Lasses and lad, could you phone this number please?” One of the teenagers duly rang the number he gave them.

My first thought was that it would be insane for anyone to respond to the man’s request because he would then have your number on his phone and could phone you whenever he likes.

But quite frankly, I was baffled by the incident. What bona fide reason would the man have for asking someone to phone his mobile? It is utterly perplexing. Any ideas from my reader?

As a Republican and an avowed hater of men who go anywhere near a bottle of hair dye, I suppose I could have been nasty and written a title like “McCartney the Royal Toady”. But that would have been uncalled for. Paul McCartney, when all’s said and dyed, has, it seems, retained a wide-eyed innocence from his childhood. A laudatory essay on the Queen which he wrote when he was 10 years old has been unearthed.

It has interesting echoes with a tiny track on Abbey Road. Abbey Road has got a few interesting, very short tracks on it. One is “The End” which is part of a Medley just before the er….end of the album. It is interesting to reflect that if you listen to all the Beatles albums in the order they were recorded, “The End” is fittingly the last thing you will hear (it would be interesting to know if it was the last track they actually recorded), except for the tiny and simple track stuck on the end of “The End” called “Her Majesty”. It’s a wonderful little end to the album, complete with rather abrupt ending:

Her Majesty

(Lennon/McCartney)

Her Majesty’s a pretty nice girl,
but she doesn’t have a lot to say
Her Majesty’s a pretty nice girl
but she changes from day to day

I want to tell her that I love her a lot
But I gotta get a belly full of wine
Her Majesty’s a pretty nice girl
Someday I’m going to make her mine, oh yeah,
Someday I’m going to make her mine.

That track is so short and, I suppose, odd, that it is hardly ever played on the radio. In fact, I have only heard it played on the radio once. That was last week by the (now he’s stop being silly like he was on Radio 1) excellent Chris Evans. Well done Mr Evans.

Not wishing to ride a complete coach and horses through copyright law, here’s a great video by a young American lady featuring “Her Majesty” on the Ukulele (twice) plus some interesting nonsense in the middle. It’s received 655,010 hits on You Tube so it must be relatively good:

(And yes – I couldn’t sleep)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgHoY_IOp_s&hl=en&fs=1&]

As a Republican and an avowed hater of men who go anywhere near a bottle of hair dye, I suppose I could have been nasty and written a title like “McCartney the Royal Toady”. But that would have been uncalled for. Paul McCartney, when all’s said and dyed, has, it seems, retained a wide-eyed innocence from his childhood. A laudatory essay on the Queen which he wrote when he was 10 years old has been unearthed.

It has interesting echoes with a tiny track on Abbey Road. Abbey Road has got a few interesting, very short tracks on it. One is “The End” which is part of a Medley just before the er….end of the album. It is interesting to reflect that if you listen to all the Beatles albums in the order they were recorded, “The End” is fittingly the last thing you will hear (it would be interesting to know if it was the last track they actually recorded), except for the tiny and simple track stuck on the end of “The End” called “Her Majesty”. It’s a wonderful little end to the album, complete with rather abrupt ending:

Her Majesty

(Lennon/McCartney)

Her Majesty’s a pretty nice girl,
but she doesn’t have a lot to say
Her Majesty’s a pretty nice girl
but she changes from day to day

I want to tell her that I love her a lot
But I gotta get a belly full of wine
Her Majesty’s a pretty nice girl
Someday I’m going to make her mine, oh yeah,
Someday I’m going to make her mine.

That track is so short and, I suppose, odd, that it is hardly ever played on the radio. In fact, I have only heard it played on the radio once. That was last week by the (now he’s stop being silly like he was on Radio 1) excellent Chris Evans. Well done Mr Evans.

Not wishing to ride a complete coach and horses through copyright law, here’s a great video by a young American lady featuring “Her Majesty” on the Ukulele (twice) plus some interesting nonsense in the middle. It’s received 655,010 hits on You Tube so it must be relatively good:

(And yes – I couldn’t sleep)

Well if you track back to the original story about Brown’s health it seems to be based on a “long list of foods” which he is supposedly not meant to be served. Strangely, this “long list of foods” is so far, in the public domain, a short list of foods. In fact it is just two foods. “Cheese and chianti“.

(The story also demands to know where Brown “runs daily” as if to suggest that such an assertion by his spokesperson is made up. Would suggesting that he runs in a private gym be terribly earth-shattering? A treadmill in the Number 11 flat? He doesn’t need to go out in Hyde Park to actually run, stupid.)

I have a confession to make. I love cheese, but on two occasions in fifty years when I have gone over the top on the old fromage consumption I have had a headache the following day. On one of these occasions I had to lie down for an hour. So I have to be careful with my beloved cheese.

Once I had to avoid red wine for six months because I appeared to develop a temporary allergy to it. Happily, I can consume it freely these days.

At some stage in the past, if someone could be bothered to draw up a list of foods I should avoid, there might have been “cheese and red wine” on such a list.

When I was much younger (like 40 years ago) I used to throw tantrums when I was losing at “Risk” (a game involving the quest for world domination – it brought out the meglomaniac in me and when I was left owning just Australia I used to flip) and used to throw the board across the room. It was a running family joke for a long time.

I occasionally pick my nose. I do use my handkerchief though (mostly).

So this would put me in the Gordon Brown category it would seem, according to John Ward and Guido. I am one step away from the funny farm. Bring on the strait jacket.

This “cheese and chianti” “long list of foods” has been used to suggest that Brown may be on some very strong anti-depressants, except that “Dr John Crippen“ (which is a nom de plume of an actual GP) says that such claims are nonsense.

So that rules out those strong anti-depressants. So what if Brown is on Prozac? As Stephen Tall points out in a comprehensive and typically sensible post, it’s reckoned that 15% of the population will face a sever bout of depression at some point in their lives. Prozac is apparently so commonly used that it shows up as a trace element in the water supply.

We really shouldn’t get so jumpy about mental health problems. People need to take care of their mental health. Making them jumpy about it will not help the situation.

Guido says Brown is clearly “on the edge” because he picked his nose once and was reported to have thrown a tantrum in the office etc etc. Well come on, he’s Prime Minister. He’s dealt reasonably well (in the sense of surviving) one of the greatest economic emergencies of our times. His poll ratings are in the toilet. He has every right to be “on the edge”.

All this has made me feel: “Well, full marks to Brown for keeping going while all this manure is flying around”.

As for Andrew Marr – should he have asked Brown about his health? Of course. It is a free country. But questions are not answers. As is the practice with some American office holders and potential office-holders, I do think that regular health reports for our leaders should be in the public domain. But often they are so edited that they ask more questions than they answer. On balance, I think we should know if our Prime Minister is on medication. However, it shouldn’t be problem if he or she is on Prozac, that’s for sure.

Wonders never cease.

I hesitate to say Baroness Scotland should resign. What do they think in Scotland? – I wonder. I have enormous admiration for the lady.

However. The Mail says that she allegedly did not ask her Tongan employee to show her passport during a ten minute employment interview. As Attorney-General, you would have thought Baroness Scotland would have more sense.

However, reading the Mail story (someone has to, I suppose) one wonders whether the housekeeper is the villain of the piece. She’d been allegedly working illegally here for four years and there is an alleged forged second passport at the heart of the investigations into her.

Scotland (the Baroness not the country) has been fined £5,000 for not carrying out the right checks. Fair dues. But come off it, is an employee, even the Attorney General, meant to be a one person investigation unit in addition to their legal requirements (for the non-performance of which, the Baroness has already fessed up and paid her fine)?

And does this really impact on Baroness Scotland’s discharge of her governmental duties? If someone can come up with some evidence of incompetance in her role, that would be different. Perhaps she was too busy concentrating on her governmental role to faff about with paperwork.

Having said that, there appears to have been shocking ignorance of the law shown by the Attorney-General and for that I have great sympathy with the calls for her to resign. But the housekeeper has presumably been paid by the Mail and they are using her story as knocking copy with which to beat Scotland. This seems to be a very unusual, some might say uncomfortable, position for the the Mail. Just read the Mail story and its rosy picture of the housekeeper. It’s an extraordinary turnaround for the Mail.

A confession first. I first listened to Radio 1 when Tony Brandon did the “bit in the middle” lunch time slot. Now, that is going back a bit.

Along with occasional flits round Radio 2, 4, Absolute (the radio not the vodka – which hasn’t go an ‘e’ anyway), XFM, Heart etc, I still do listen to Radio 1, mainly because I am seduced into it by my offspring. Chris Moyles? A great talk show. Scott Mills? Very funny. But I do like Nihal and his 3.15 fact machine which often isn’t a fact machine (“Walt Disney has the third largest navy in the world” – yes, of course, if nations go to war using log flume boats).

Unfortunately, Nihal’s fact machine is no more at 3.15 because there’s been an almighty shake up and Nihal has now been shuffled off to nights. (I’ll say this for Radio 1, they certainly cater for lots of tastes in music in non-peak hours when I am not listening.)

So poor old Nihal – I really like the man. But, then again, I am still rather bemused as to why Spoony isn’t still on Radio 1 on Saturday mornings. We used to like being official members of his “early doors” club as we ventured, bleary-eyed, to swimming at some ungodly hour.

Jo Whiley has been plonked onto the weekends. Not before time, if you ask me. She breathes too much. She’s been replaced by the excellent Fearne Cotton who is much better than Whiley. This has brought forward accusations of ageism from the Daily Mail. Jo Whiley is 43. Come off it. It’s Radio 1. There are only two people who have defied age to stay on Radio 1. John Peel and Annie Nightingale (and they never had regular peak weekday slots). Even Simon Bates had to be dragged physically out of the studio, after his fingers were prised forcibly from the desk using a crowbar, in the end.

Edith Bowman has also been shoved on to the weekends. I suspect her ratings weren’t too good, darling. I like her. But Fearne Cotton is better. Fearne Cotton is the biz.

But Greg James replaces Edith. He’s a bit too whilly-woffly for my liking. But the Daily Mail says he is only 23, so he’s been put on to get young listeners. (Well they’re doing well to keep fifty year-olds, if I am anything to go by.) (By the way, I have just had an awful thought. I was a radio dee-jay for a few years. But I have just realised that Greg James was born – actually physically born – a clear two years after I did my last radio show. For goodness sake, I’ve been married for longer than he’s been alive! Blimey – I am old).

Ho hum.