Is Nothing Sacred?

I have never been an incandescent sort of person. In truth, you would probably have to douse me with 100% proof spirit and toss a lighted match on me to inflame me about anything. I just have this congenital belief that the other chap may not be talking total rubbish and that I should, in fairness, listen to him even if what he is saying is utter piffle. 

There does. however, come a point when the meekest of worms must turn and I have wriggled to that point. I have read the works of many authors and enjoyed them but there are only a handful of them who have enthralled me.

Obviously AA Milne, As it happened to happen for me, Dorothy L Sayers, Jules Verne, Isaac Aasimov, Thorne  Smith, James Thurber and others. Then , in due and happy course, I encountered  PG Wodehouse.

He has been my constant companion and delight ever since. As far as I know,  I have every one of his books, sometimes several times over. Which is my I am seriously considering self-combusting about the forthcoming BBC ‘Blandings’ series.

As any fule kno, Lord Emsworth is a vague,tall, thin, balding sort of cove. Aunie Beeb, whom God rot, have cast Timothy Spall in the part.

Timothy bloody Spall? Undoubtedly a fine actor but more suited to playing Lord Emsworth’s prize pig, the Empress of Blandings, or Beach the butler in my opinion. 

It will end in tears. 

 

 

Haggis Go Home

As we steadfastly march behind our Glorious Leader towards the glorious dawn of Scottish Independence, fanned by the zephyr-like breath of the tens of millions of wind turbines crowding across every available inch of our mountains and glens and far too sober thanks to the extortionate amount of alcohol duty levied by the Health Fascists of the Scottish Parliament, it is time to reflect on one of the few good things which will come out of that Independence.

I refer to the fact that one of the first edicts of Emperor Salmond will be to declare haggis a banned substance. For far too long our proud nation has lived with the vile calumny that we are responsible for this abomination. Haggis is one of the main reasons why we have a totally undeserved reputation for being dour and miserable. You would be pretty hacked off too if that was what you were supposed to dish up and eat every time that there was some sort of national celebration. It’s all the fault of the English and their erstwhile colonial masters, the Romans.

I refer you to the famous Roman historian/poet Livid and his oft-quoted ‘Hagges a Romanis revelata sunt’. Having discovered haggises, tasted them and spat them out, they sent them off to sustain the subject nations. Which is how they arrived in England. The Romans tried to foist them off on us as well in their forays into Caledonia (stern and wild) but we got severely piqued about that. That’s why they called us the Picts. The Romans got so fed up with us lobbing the haggises back at them that they built a wall to stop us.

We lived free and unhaggis-fed for centuries after that until we signed up of our own free will and in our own self interest to the United Kingdom of Great Britain in 1707. We were betrayed. As you will all remember, Article 210 of the Act clearly said ‘No stinking haggis muck will be imported into North Britain’.

Oh, that perfidious Albion! Within months of the Union, English agents were trying to reduce their haggis glut by flogging them to us. Didn’t work to begin with but then the English Haggis Marketing Board were lucky enough to employ two of the greatest spin doctors of all time.

Step forward Sir Walter English and Bob Burns. Sir Walter changed his name to the Jock-friendly ‘Scott’ and beavered away in Embra inventing a completely mythical history to soften us up. Meanwhile Bob, who originally came from Essex, learnt the Scots language, changed his name to Rabbie and was embedded in an Ayrshire farming family. In due course, he wrote ‘To a Haggis’ and the rest is an alternative and deeply untrue history. But now, the time has come to set the record straight.

To paraphrase The Proclaimers, ‘Haggis no more’. Let us rise as a free and united people and drive this English-imposed excrescence from our own dear native land for ever.

Mind, we’ll keep the Burns Suppers and the whisky. We just have to think of something to eat instead of the sheep’s stomach thing.

Being a Wodehouse fan, I’m tempted to suggest ‘Timbales de Ris de Veau Toulousaines’ as prepared by Aunt Dahlia’s chef, Anatole.

Or deep-fried Mars Bars.

Another Time and Place

Elections, even US elections, bring it all flooding back.

In my youth, I was a political animal, Neither ashamed nor defensive about that. It was just what I was. My first memory is the 1959 election. Lying on the floor of the lounge in an Army house on the Bulbridge Estate in Wilton filling in the ‘Daily Telegraph’ constituency map of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland in either blue or red (other colours were not really necessary) as the results poured in over the radio on the Friday afternoon and evening.

At 14, I joined the Young Conservatives, Young Liberals and Young Socialists to sample their wares. In those happy days, the young Scottish Nationalists were drooling incompetents so I felt no urge to sign up to them. Not a lot of change there, when I think about it.

I admit to having had my knee stroked by Jeremy Thorpe in the bar of the ‘Salutation Hotel’ in Perth, but that did not turn me Liberal. YS were never serious starters, to be fair, so I settled on the Tories as my party of choice. It was fun, starting with my first election activism in 1964. Wrote a McGonagall pome for that one as I recall:-

‘T’was the fifteenth of October in the year of ’64,
When Labour won the election, a thing I do deplore.
Their majority was five which later turned to three,
Thanks to Patrick Gordon-Walker, then Foreign Secretary,
For he lost the vote at Smethwick and later on Leyton,
By which he lost both the seats and his Parliamentary station…….’

I’ll spare you the rest, even although it is all still seared into my very sad memory.

Uni of Embra in 1967 and we’re talking ‘Bliss was it in that dawn’ time. I lived it and I loved it.

In 1970, I thought that Edward Heath was a great man. I now realise of course, that I could perhaps have been slightly wrong about that. But, I threw myself into that 1970 election with a fervour. We were sure we were going to lose but we were going to try our best. We were allocated to the Edinburgh Pentlands constituency held by our boy, Norman Wylie with a majority of about 60 in 1966. The national polls were against us and we thought that all we were doing was damage limitation.

I knocked my volunteer pan out for three weeks. My last remembered act of the campaign is harassing a boy out of his bath and huckling him to the polling station with half an hour to go. Tired and expecting defeat, we all adjourned to get blootered. The first result in showed a big swing to us and thereafter it all went pure magic. Norman won by 3,000 votes.

I moved on after that and went down the non-polly road to a respectablish job. I will always wonder whether I would have had the necessary thick skin and mental flexibility to be a proper politician.

Whatever, the blood still fires when there’s elections about so I will be watching tonight’s developments.

More importantly, I’m going to be right back in there kicking ScotNat backsides when referendum time comes. Keep Scotland British!

What I Did in Stoke on holiday last weekend

I’ve always known that I was lucky ever since I won a box of 12 Dunlop 65 golf balls at the Invergordon Conservative Club raffle at the age of 7. Total profit as my Auntie Ina had bought me the ticket and I was able to sell them to my Dad for the princely sum of three week’s pocket money (1/6d). Result!

In seriousness, however, I really am lucky.

A Lay Made About the Year of The City 1 (swiftly cobbled together for OZ)

With apologies to Thomas Babington Macauley

Aeneas of the ‘topless towers’,
By Helen’s choice laid waste.
Fled the ruin, death and fire
And westward sailed in haste.
To Dido came and thought to stay,
But duty called at last.
He hurried on and rushed to meet,
The fate his Gods had cast.

Pembrokeshire Revisited

Long ago and far away on the Dark Side, I wrote a series of blogs about our 2008 summer holiday. It was a trip around the MyT land and personalities of that era . I never found the time to finish it, not being a hasty sort of person. Part 4 was inspired by CO.

http://my.telegraph.co.uk/john_mackie/date/2008/09/

Despite my protestations at the time, we were knocked out by the place. Last September, we acquired a hound to celebrate Mrs M’s retirement and this year Dougal, Mrs M and I decided on a dog-friendly holiday. Pembrokeshire leapt to mind immediately and I booked up.

CO was kind enough to suggest a few places to visit and we ended up doing most of them. So, if you would just like to settle back and make yourself comfortable, here’s the holiday snaps.

This was one of CO’s tips and she was not wrong. A former slate quarry where the sea has broken in. It was pretty spectacular on the dull day that we were there. It must be truly mind-blowing on a good day.

Moving on, CO recommended St Govan’s Chapel and thither, in due course, we wended our way. To be fair, I was slightly driven by the fact that I had googled ahead and learned that the nearby Stackpole Inn allegedly served pretty decent pints and grub. Which it did. St Govan’s Head was also a wee bit special.

Next, CO suggested Broad Haven and a stroll at low tide around the head to Little Haven. Herein, she was, I fear, wrongish in claiming that there was a decent pub in Broad Haven. If she meant ‘The Galleon’, she is either out of date or plain wrong (with the utmost respect). It was a tourist dump and we decamped to the ‘Swan’ in Little Haven which was a delight. Dougal enjoyed the beach there a lot. That’s him in the middle of the photo, for the avoidance of doubt.

And so to our last day in Pembrokeshire and CO’s best suggestion. We had done St David’s Cathedral on the Thursday and had decided to forego the pleasure of traipsing around the Bishop’s Palace in the rain that was bucketing down. We still wanted to do it because it looked a bit tasty and resolved to return. Major result.

and

We came back to discover that there was going to be a pilgrimage that afternoon as part of the cultural Olympiad whereby our country is holding a joyous and unfettered celebration of the fact that the Games are in London this year.

Because there were rehearsals on, we got in free. The photo above is of the Artistic Director rehearsing the monks. I spent a couple of hours watching a community doing what we Brits do best. Just muddling through and getting on with it in the belief that it might be all right on the afternoon. I am certain that it probably was.

Thanks CO. However much you enjoy where you are now, there must surely be a part of you that misses where you were? There’s a lot of magic in Pembrokeshire.

In my opinion.

It Could Be Worse

In this cyber world, wherever I go and most of what I read, seems to be assuring me that my beliefs are a total waste of space. I keep getting told that the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is doomed and that it is only a matter of time before it is swept down the plughole of history to oblivion.

Allegedly, all the institutions of my country are corrupt beyond repair. We have, apparently, been swamped by unrestricted immigration to the point where we could never recover any semblance of national pride or identity. We have sold our soul to Political Correctness, the ‘EUSSR’ and a thousand other modern snares and delusions. Our children are ill-educated, feral louts, etc, etc, etc, etc.

In particular, people who have chosen to live elsewhere, or who have never lived here in the first place, seem to believe that they have an unqualified right and/or duty to lecture me in detail about everything that they perceive to be be wrong with my country. I would not do it to them, so I fail to understand why they feel the need to do it to me.

Whatever. I can and will only ever speak from my own experience. I still think that I live in a civilised and tolerant country and that I was fairly lucky to be born British/Scots as I could have done a lot worse in the great lottery of life, in my opinion.

The next generation of my family and the children of my friends are, almost without exception, a joy and I have every confidence in them. I know that my country will survive and prosper and am happy to pass the flame on to them.

So, just call me Pollyanna! I will continue to believe, however, that I am not wrong.