RosieBell

Going West

Oh north west wind when wilt thou blow
So the small rain down can rain?

I was reciting those lines to myself last Friday while I was cycling north-west, right into the rain, not small but quite heavy and driven by a cold wind across the island of Arran. After two hours and two trains through the central belt then another hour on the ferry it is grand to arrive on Arran and start cycling along the sheltered east coast that looks so fertile and prosperous, with beech hedges and fading rhododendrons and white houses, all washed clean by the frequent rain.  The air smells of wild roses and the sea. Arran always fills me with a sense of well-being.

I was on my way to Lochranza to catch the ferry to Kintyre but instead of going the fourteen miles straight up the coast from Brodick I turned west and cycled up the B880 that crosses the island.  I was climbing up into the cloud, the rain grew heavier, and cars approaching me had their lights on.  It was a slog but I got over the pass and dropped down to come across the finest post box I’ve ever seen.

 

I diverted to see the standing stones at Machrie, then cycled along the wild west coast. I was now heading north-east so it was slightly easier going and it was a splendid ride along the barren side of the island, with far fewer houses for retirees and in front of one house hens and peacocks were walking on the road. 

I caught the ferry at Lochranza to Claonaig, so was now on the Kintyre Peninsula and had the steep climb up the B8001, which I found a struggle as the rain was right in my face.   I had only cycled about 25 miles or so and I was not carrying much gear but the wind and the rain made each mile seem doubled.  I finally dropped to the main A83, a fairly quiet A road and after a few miles came to the West Loch Hotel, about a mile short of Tarbert.  It’s an old coaching inn, family run and pleasant and cost only £28 per night.  I had a room with a dormer window through which was a view of the loch.  The food was ample and well-cooked and the bathroom had a bath, where I could lie and drink a glass of Springburn whisky from the nearby Campbeltown distillery.

The next day the wind had dropped and I cycled eighteen or so miles south to Taiyburn to pick up the ferry to the island of Gigha, famed because after changing ownership many times it now belongs to the people who live there.  Like all the islands in the sounds and sea lochs on the west coast of Scotland it has its own micro-climate, which is mild.  It also has a wind farm, some wooden houses and what look like large cabbage trees that do so well on the west. 

 

I stopped off at Auchamore Gardens.   They are fairly extensive and you are guided up woodland slopes and round pretty flower gardens by red arrows that point you this way and that in an agreeable maze.  By the walled garden finches and tits clustered on a bird feeder and the place seemed like Paradise, as the sun had come out.  The gardens are famed for azaleas, rhododendrons and camellias.  These had finished blooming but there were plenty of other flowers like roses, passion flowers and asters.  Occasionally in a weedy herbaceous border would be a sign:- This border is being replanted. Thank you for your concern, or by a pond which just contained a rubber sheet:- This pond is being redeveloped and will be completed in 2010.  Thank you for your concern  (not the exact words which I didn’t write down but to that effect).  I could imagine the state of polite exasperation that whoever looks after the garden must have got into when visitors said, By the way, those herbaceous borders are a bit overgrown, or Is something wrong with the pond?

After leaving the gardens I cycled to the northern tip of the island and saw an eagle which wheeled in the sky, calling out Kark! and disappeared behind a crag. Then I got the ferry back again and did the eighteen miles to the hotel on the A road, with a few hard hills and fine views of the Inner Hebrides. 

Sunday was the solistice when I think I should rise at dawn and greet the sun but the cloud lay low and it drizzled all day so I stayed indoors reading and watching the telly.  Monday I cycled back to the ferry up the B8001 which I’d climbed on a hot day a couple of years before, on a trip to Islay and remembered as horribly steep and exhausting, but on a cool damp day it was not bad going.  The flags and foxgloves were out and the fence posts were sprouting beards of lichen. 

Several other cyclists were waiting for the ferry, fit lads from Motherwell who boasted to me of the superiority of cycling near Glasgow rather than Edinburgh. We arrived at Arran, and starting on the east coast route I saw a deer hanging around a recycling bin. I began the stiff climb towards the typical Highland upland of bog and heather and rock.   The sun came out and the crags of Goat Fell appeared through thinning white clouds. From there I could look down to a great sweep of green fertility and make a swathe to the coast, belting along the road, with the sea on one side and houses with pretty gardens or a woodland of vigorous trees on the other.  I stopped to look at a seal that was lying on a rock about the same size as itself and scratching its stomach with its flippers then went for a swish lunch of mussels and Arran Blonde beer before I caught the ferry. 

In the ferry shop I was in a queue to buy a newspaper and the person next to me pointed out Andy Murray’s face on front of the paper.  “My optician is his aunt,” said the shop assistant, then laughed at his own name-dropping.  “How sad is that.”  I met some chums in a pub yesterday and they gave me a brief greeting before turning their faces to the screen to see Murray get through the first round at Wimbledon.   In a small country he looms large.

Wonderweeingwall

Oasis gig yesterday in Murrayfield Stadium, a couple of hundred yards away from my flat.  They had to close the primary school. At the last Oasis concert fans turned up drunk at 10am and there was general mayhem.  This time it was better managed and all we had to suffer was a stream of people drinking from two litre bottles of cider, litter and broken glass.  According to my flatmate, a couple of guys who were trying to slip into gardens to have a piss were seen off by the police.

I stood outside now and then and could hear the music – that is the massed vocals against a vague roar.  I caught a bit of Don’t Look Back in Anger and other old hits, and I still think the words “champagne supernova in the sky” are sheer euphony.

My flatmate went out for the duration.  When he came back he said I had better hose down the side passage.  However I can expect heavy showers of rain will do that soon.  What would this city smell like if it didn’t rain so much?

D-Day Dodgers

Denis Healey was on Desert Island Discs last Sunday, speaking about his wartime experiences in the Italian campaign and mentioning the song D-Day Dodgers.  The tune is Lilli Marlene, and he said he couldn't remember who wrote the words.

A description of the Italian and Mediterranean Campaigns of World War II:- 

Napoleon once said that the only way to invade Italy was from the top. The Allies did not heed his warning and paid dearly for every inch of ground. Battles compared in their sheer intensity and horror with those of World War One. At Anzio alone the Allies suffered 135,000 casualties and Monte Cassino, over 54,000. In Tunisia, another 45,000 casualties. 20 Victoria Crosses were awarded during the Italy Campaign - 5 at Cassino alone!

So the legend goes, veterans of the Italian campaigns were called "D-Day Dodgers" by Lady Nancy Astor MP in a speech, after she received a letter from a disgruntled British soldier who signed it "D-Day Dodger".

The words of the song D-Day Dodgers were written as a response to Nancy Astor’s insult by Hamish Henderson, who also fought in that campaign.

The first few verses are sarcastic about the jolly time the soldiers were supposed to be having:-

We landed in Salerno, a holiday with pay,
The Jerries brought the bands out to greet us on the way,
Showed us the sights and gave us tea,
We all sang songs, the beer was free,
To welcome D-Day Dodgers to sunny Italy,

The last verse ends as most war poems must:-

Look around the mountains in the mud and rain,
You'll find the scattered crosses,
the sum that have no name,
Heartbreak and toil and suffering gone,
The boys beneath them slumber on,
They are the D-Day Dodgers who stay in Italy,

This is the best version I could find on YouTube, with the swearing that you would expect from disgruntled soldiers though those words are not in the official lyrics.

Hamish Henderson was a collector of folk music, poet and lyricist and played a big part in the Scottish folk revival. Someone else who fought in the Italian campaign was E P Thompson, left wing historian and later one of the leaders of the peace movement during the chilliest days of the Cold War.

He describes the campaign thus:-

In one of his less happy flourishes Sir Winston Churchill described Italy as “the soft underbelly of the Axis beast”.  Soft it was not.  Italy has a singularly rugged spine and the successive mountains and rivers provided barriers behind which the German armies could execute an orderly withdrawal while their well-disciplined rearguard inflicted, day after day, sharp casualties on the advancing Allied armis.  It was a preposterous error to plant large motorised armies in the toe of Italy and then to fight, mile by mile, up the boot.  It may be because the whole campaign was so misconceived that it is rarely mentioned.

(from the essay The Liberation of Perugia.)

Thompson was an officer and recalls three dead troopers who were killed in the tank advance:-

They had shared in the resigned complicity of military life and had joined in the repartee of ironies as we camped in the evenings beside our tanks in the beautiful countryside of May and June.

The “repartee of ironies” is the exact spirit of D-Day Dodgers.

Triple Exposure

My sister took this photo.   I think it's astonishing.

The Ordinary Bloke

Go over to Chicken Yoghurt to see how we are represented in America's Daily Show after the BNP gained a seat.  No charisma, says the presenter re Griffin. 
 
 British fascist leaders are going to the dogs.  Moseley - now he was handsome, athletic and a ladies' man.  He had English ruling class and entitlement written all over him.  Whereas Griffin could be the bloke from Credit Control in The Office, the one that would make David Brent look like sparky by comparison.  Brought home as a prospective son-in-law, he would seem harmless enough.  If he is a ladies' man, please can we be spared the pictures.
 
Moseley was for an age of outdoors oratory and arm waving rhetoric standing at the head of military columns (something which won him ridicule in the piss-taking Britain of his age).  He is The Leader.

Griffin is reassuring, the rather sympathetic fellow who helps you out at the benefits office.  He is not intimidating. Obama can get away with high-flown rhetoric in the USA but it wouldn’t work here.  No, the low key wins the day.  The ordinary is reassuring. 
 
Griffin though does have a lurid fantasy life.  As Hitler was sickened with disgust by pure German girls being attracted to bandy-legged Jews so is Griffin violently upset by Asian blokes getting off with young white women. 
 
So anyone wanting to caricature him, surround him with demons with Asian heads.  He’ll be in his armour fighting them, only he will be six foot two and blue eyed.

 

Another Country

Something happens in a country, and it is never the same again.  That arch-reactionary Philip Larkin spoke about it in Homage to a Government, a kind of post Kipling poem about the folding away of empire and of a sense of loss that is half felt.

Next year we are to bring all the soldiers home
For lack of money, and it is all right.
Places they guarded, or kept orderly,
We want the money for ourselves at home
Instead of working. And this is all right.

…..

Next year we shall be living in a country
That brought its soldiers home for lack of money.
The statues will be standing in the same
Tree-muffled squares, and look nearly the same.
Our children will not know it's a different country.
All we can hope to leave them now is money.

So last Sunday night I heard that a fascist party, for the first time in the history of the UK, had won seats in a national vote.

Homage to an Electorate

This year British electors voted for fascism,
For some reason, and it is all right.

At least people tell me it’s all right.  It wasn’t a vote for the Westminster government.  It was for the European Parliament and only a protest vote.  There had been the expenses scandal, which means most of the electorate was completely disillusioned with government and didn’t vote anyway.  It could have been a lot worse.  You can’t compare the BNP with the British Union of Fascists of the 1930s and our times with their times.  The overt racism of that time is nothing like it is today.

I was appalled, ashamed, outraged, disgusted and furious.  Larkin had the idea of his country as an imperial power.  I had an idea of this country as one where people don’t vote fascist or for extremist parties generally.  950,000 voters proved me wrong.  

An essay by J Sakai written in about 2002 has some worryingly relevant things to say about the revival of fascism, mostly in the usa (as he calls it) but also here:-

In many countries the far right has replaced the left as the main political opposition.

. . .

Not Depression but change propelled by the development of the world capitalist economy. In the industrial North of England, for example, the entire blue-collar culture of the British working class was transformed as factories, mines and shipyards steadily kept closing year after year. A new white-collar yuppie boom economy produced the Americanized England of Tony Blair just as marginal employment and three generation welfare families living in public housing came to characterize many in the former industrial working classes.

Remember that despite well publicized fringe activity, fascism never sank roots in 1930s working class Britain. The British working class back then remained loyal to their colonial empire and their own social democratic Labour Party despite the misery of the Depression. But it's a different world now, of classes feeling abandoned by empire. Widespread "Paki-bashing", fascist marches and now a successful neo-fascist electoral protest party are only small signs of things to come. In a chain reaction, the British town of Tipton that was surprised to find four of its Muslim youth fighting in Afghanistan with Al-Qaeda had given 24% of its vote in the 2000 local elections to the neo-fascist British National Party. And Britain is only playing catchup, lagging behind as all of Europe is being tugged, pulled by the political shift towards the right in all its forms. Despite historic prosperity.  

The colonial empire went long ago, the social democratic Labour Party no longer represents their old working class base and now the historic prosperity has gone as well.

The Final Cut

As Gordon Brown slowly falls to political death, an article in the New Statesman asks which of Shakespeare's stricken protagonists he resembles – Hamlet, Lear or Macbeth?

As for me the Prime Minister with his heavy build resembles a bull in the ring.  The picadors have pierced him here and there, the matadors have taunted him, the crowd has been bawling, but shaking his blunt head and still not aware of his inevitable fate, he staggers on fighting.  His lurching about in a dazed second wind is painful to witness.

You want someone to have the guts to end this botched and bloody business.  The Tories, when they brought down Thatcher, showed some panache and elegance.  A few quick slashes, and that was the end of her. 

I put it down to the urban background of the Labour Party.  Urban folk take their cancerous cat to the vet, prolonging the poor beast's pain.  The countryside Tories know that you put a wounded animal out of its misery.   

The Sun has got its righteous hat on

The Sun and the Daily Star are finding in Nick Griffin an unmitigated hate figure, ranking with paedophiles as being qualified to be put in the stocks for unabashed pelting.  When activists chucked eggs at him The Sun says:-

SHELL-SHOCKED Nick Griffin turned tail and scrambled off yesterday after being splattered with eggs outside Parliament.

The cowardly BNP leader had hoped to revel in his racist party's Euro poll wins at a triumphant press conference. Instead the yolk-speckled chicken showed his yellow streak when he was sent packing by anti-fascist protesters.

Griffin, newly-elected MEP for North West England, had just begun spouting off on Westminster's historic College Green.

Dozens of demonstrators surrounded him and his shaven-headed cronies, and drowned him out with chants of "Nazi scum off our streets".

Griffin and cohort Andrew Brons, the BNP's other new MEP, beat a hasty retreat under a hail of eggs - some daubed with swastikas.

A phalanx of burly "minders" cleared his escape route by shoving placard-waving protesters and passers-by out of the way.

A slightly-built woman in a red jacket was elbowed in the neck and sent sprawling.

Shaken Griffin and Brons were bundled across the road and into a silver Ford Mondeo. The car then sped off - to a chorus of cheers.

Last night the protest was defended by Weyman Bennett, national secretary of Unite Against Fascism. He said: "We came here to stand up for the people who have faced the intimidation and violence of racist thugs.

"If people in Germany and Italy had stood up to the Nazis and fascists in the 1920s and 1930s, maybe we could have avoided the horrors of the Second World War.

"We cannot make the same mistakes. We must confront the BNP."

But Griffin whinged: "It's a very, very sad day for British democracy. People should be entitled to hear what we have to say."

He even claimed nearby cops had been ordered not to intervene to protect him.

Once the slightly built woman and Weyman Bennett would have been trouble-makers, out for confrontation, trying to stifle democracy and so on and fit for banging up.

The Daily Star’s headline about the egg throwing was The Yolk on You.  (Eggs are paydirt for pun miners).

The Sun and its ilk have been running stories about Muslims protesting about The Three Little Pigs; Anjem Choudary (feared leader of about twenty) denouncing Christmas; golliwogs incarcerated and destroyed, asylum seekers being put up at the Doncaster and all the other bits of news trash which are either false or trivial but which give the impression that this country is about to be taken over by a Guardian reading Osama Bin Laden.   They loathe the overt racism of the BNP – good for them and their readership for that – but they have been pretty much making propaganda for them over the last few years.

The Community

Something else interesting on Radio 4 last Wednesday was Thinking Aloud with Laurie Taylor interviewing Vernon Bogdanor, author of The New British Constitution.

Professor Bogdanor said that although the number voting at elections has fallen interest in politics is about the same as it was fifty years ago.  The democratic spirit is healthy but the democratic institutions are failing.  Levels of volunteering and charity giving are very high.  The RSPB and National Trust have a million members each.

“Disenchantment with democracy flows from the conflict between a maturing democracy accustomed to universal suffrage and the rights that go with it and the traditional mass party which increasingly exists not to give effect to popular demands but to frustrate them.”

Fifty years ago one in eleven of the population was a member of a political party, now it is one in eighty-eight.   He ascribes this to the marked difference between ideologies in those days, that the parties were more class based and issues were simpler.

One in eleven seems very high to me. People’s social lives must have revolved around Conservative Association dances and Labour fund-raising dos far more than now.  I remember hearing David Starkey, the historian, speaking about his childhood in Kendal, and how important trade union outings and choral societies were.  The trade union was the focal point of his parents’ community, as the church or mosque or synagogue is in a faith community.  Charity plays that role to a degree these days.  Three times a week a colleague will ask you to sponsor them cycling or walking in groups for some good cause.

Slothful on Radio 4

The wonderful David Attenborough wishes he was a sloth, which spends most of its life asleep or else moving very slowly.

It lives a solitary life and meets its mates at the local sloth latrine.

David Attenborough usually commentates over or against splendid footage of the natural world.  But he can make the sloth come alive (if somnolent) with his words without the need of pictures.