A Lord and a Dame

But firstly, a spot of teeth-gnashing at Liverpool, so good for 50 minutes and so much like a crowd of strangers plucked from the streets for the remaining 40. Still, a win's a win, if you ignore the nerve-shredding nail-chewing manner in which it was accomplished.

I have a friend, who we'll call Max, who works in the US Department of Defense. I wonder just what Max is doing at this moment (5.48pm on a Wednesday evening in DC). I wonder this because Max has got to get his head round the intelligence report, which seems to have two obvious corollaries:

1 - if you say that the occupation of Iraq was never going to be easy and a mammoth troop deployment would merely have enraged more people sooner, the straightforward response is 'then why did you invade in the first place, jackass?'

2 - if you say that the plan was right but that mistakes were made, you open yourself up to the justifiable conclusion that you did actually make everything worse for minimal gain, and there seems no good reason why you should be trusted with correcting your own errors.

With the public - certainly in Britain - convinced that (a) the given casus belli, WMD, was a fantasy at best and lie at worst, (b) Iraq is hell on earth and (c) we are now in more danger than previously, the whole war on terror thing looks a little ragged, especially considering victories over Al Q'aeda.

Max could hold onto the undeniable fact that Arab countries tended to hate America anyway, not to mention Israel, and they are not exactly countries known for reasoned argument on the subject. He could also note that realpolitik has a checkered history in the region, and that you can, in fact, quite successfully make war on an ideology. Max has, after all, studied the Cold War.

Max is an intelligent and sharp guy, and if anyone can make the case, he can. But I do not envy Max his job.

And finally to the title of today's blog. Sad news was the death of 'Lord' Byron Nelson, the American golfer who signed his card and passed into the celestial clubhouse at the age of 94. Byron Nelson was a genuine great of the game, not least because he retired to his Texas ranch aged 34. One can only dream how much he could have achieved; but then, he was often physically sick before playing. He was quoted as saying that he knew three things: a little bit about golf, how to make a stew, and how to be a decent man.

I'd be happy with that epitaph.

The Dame is Julie Andrews, whom the Screen Actors' Guild announced would be honoured with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2007 ceremony.

I'm slightly surprised. Although Dame Julie has become a much-beloved legend, her contribution to film is arguably less substantial than that of, say, Dame Judi Dench, and certainly less than that of Dame Maggie Smith. I don't for a minute underestimate either Mary Poppins or The Sound of Music, both films I love and in which Julie Andrews is far far better than the casual observer might think; but beyond that she is perhaps remembered for Victor/Victoria and Thoroughly Modern Millie. The latter, which is a hilarious 90 minute comedy lost inside a two-and-a-half hour movie, may even be her best performance and demonstrates just what she could do when allowed the freedom.

We may regret that she wasn't Eliza (although we would then have lost her Mary Poppins); we should certainly regret that she (and perhaps also Richard Burton) didn't transfer from stage to screen in Camelot. We should be grateful for her work - on film and onstage. I just wonder what she could have done as an actress. Ah well.

Intermission

I do have a couple of major blogs lined up, one on the past weekend and the other on the particular idiotic genius that lives and breeds inside facebook.com (NOT, I hasten to add, the genuine genius that is founder Mark Zuckerberg). But these will have to wait until the moment I'm not dropping with exhaustion. For sheer emotional and physical fatigue, try a round-trip of 200 miles to take your ex-boyfriend from his current flat to his new place, where he can leave his stuff before he moves in, and to then take him back home.

First, major applause for Europe's leathering of the USA at the Ryder Cup. This is becoming slightly embarrassing, and if the current trend continues the contest should possibly revert to US v Great Britain & Ireland. Here's a bit of fantasy: if that had been the case, the Americans would have lined up against the following:

Luke Donald
David Howell
Colin Montgomerie
Paul Casey
Padraig Harrington
Paul McGinley
Paul Broadhurst
John Bickerton
Kenneth Ferrie
Anthony Wall

even allowing for the same wildcard picks of Darren Clarke and Lee Westwood, perhaps on second thoughts we should stick with Europe for the time being. Or maybe we could play the Americas: what would the match have been like with, say, Angel Cabrera, Mike Weir and Stephen Ames on the opposition? Let me know, I'm interested.

And more full marks to Liverpool for beating Spurs 3-0, although how Jermaine Jenas contrived to miss from a yard I'll never know.

Quite how this came up I can't remember, but my father idly mentioned that 'very few people would now admit to voting for New Labour.' Well, ladies and gentlemen, I can and I did. I voted Labour in 2001 and 2005 and, were there an election tomorrow, I'd vote for them again. Rather like the Democrats, I'd happily join them if it wasn't for their supporters.

I only caught snatches of Gordon Brown's speech to Conference but it seems to sum up a party worth supporting. More on this later, but it beats seven shades of hell out of the massed ranks of idiocy who turned up in Manchester to protest against more or less everything, it seemed. Regular readers will know my thoughts on Iraq: it's a mess; it remains an entirely justifiable decision; leaving now would be gross negligance and stupidity; anyone who believes things were going or would otherwise have gone fine is on a different planet (just ask the ever-helpful French); it is not the fault of Israel, Wal-Mart or oil companies; it is not, pace Tony Benn, an imperial war. Would that it were.

Can one believe in a Wellsian World State and simultaneously perform the mental gymnastics required to die in a ditch for the national sovereignty of despots and homicides? (yes, I've read the latest reports on torture in Iraq - bits of Iraq - and it's sickening, I agree).

While we're on the subject, the sooner somebody goes into Darfur, the better. Do we have to wait for UN clearance this time?

Chavez of the Lower Fourth

Is not the most annoying feeling in the world that of eating an apparently perfect peach and finding it to be mushy, brown and generally rather unpleasant?

Ok, perhaps not the most annoying. But the risk is often the reward with fruit.

Changing tack entirely, I couldn't quite work out what President Chavez' rant about President Bush (the 'alcoholic daddy's boy') reminded me of until I reprimanded one of the Lower Fourth for saying 'fuck.' Then it struck me: Hugo Chavez is the adolescent of Latin America, throwing out oaths in a desperate desire to shock the adults. Venezuela is being run by a man in the throes of a teenage strop.

On the BBC's splendid website, a member of the public - always a risky business, and whoever invented the phone-in has much to answer for - commented that 'Afghanistan and Iraq show that America will stop at nothing in pursuit of its interests.' To which the best response is probably that recommended for all historians by the late - and deeply lamented, at least by me who knows him only through Modus Operandi - Yale professor Robin Winks; that is, 'And So What?'

A more serious and considered criticism came from Menzies Campbell at the Lib Dem Conference. Sir Ming attacked Tony Blair for a foreign policy that 'elevated belief over evidence, conviction over judgment, and instinct over understanding.' Of course it's not fair - when has a party conference speech been fair? - but it is true enough to send shivers down Labour spines. With two-thirds of the country having decided that the government does not deserve a third term, this raises the frightening prospect of David Cameron's happy wanderers sauntering into Downing St. Whether the prospect is more or less alarming with Ming at his side as Foreign Secretary in a Coalition Government is open to debate, but neither make me any less inclined to Gordon Brown.

Also in today's paper was news of Fine Cut Seville Orange Marmalade with Whisky, Champagne and Gold (at c£5000 per jar, enough to put Paddington in a coma). Apart from reminding me unpleasantly of Goldschlager, and there is simply no other way to be reminded of the vile stuff, why would anybody want to taste whisky and champagne together?

Good news of the day was Monty's putt at the final hole to send Europe into the second day with a 5-3 lead. As seven of the eight matches went to the final hole, I'm quite glad I didn't watch the Ryder Cup: not only would I have accomplished nothing today, I'm not sure my nerves would have coped.

Memory failure

It's always embarrassing when you're about to deliver an aphorism of pithy brilliance...and you forget it. You not only look stupid, you inevitably raise the suspicion that you didn't have one to begin with.

My brain spasm of three days ago looked stupid, and although it's not remotely important, I want to make the point that I did have something else to say, and the something was this:

Having had not enough sleep, the M6 and its contents were swimming in and out of focus by the time I'd driven from Birmingham to Keele. Why, then, did only 20 minutes' powernap at Sandbach services provide enough energy to make it through the rest of the day?

More questions: why do we 'start from scratch'? Why are there no single 18-y-o public schoolboys on dating websites? Is the 2-0 win against Newcastle the start of Liverpool's season? Why did Cats run for so long? Why do I fear that Europe, being clear favourites, will contrive to lose the Ryder Cup?

And a question that's been bothering me for a while: why are Shakespeare's final plays so bizarre? Personally, I have the theory that he was fed up with producing works that retained a modicum of sense and wanted to see how far he could get before the actors' companies realised he was producing plays that a later age would have attributed to a serious opium habit.

One can just imagine him sitting at his desk, chuckling as the acceptances rolled in. 'They've taken Cymbeline? They're not insisting on editing Winter's Tale?' And then a final weary shake of the head as he reads the scroll informing him that they think The Tempest is the best thing he's ever written. And then, realising that he's never going to be able to write himself out of business, Shakspeare reaches for a quill and pens a short note agreeing to John Fletcher's suggestion that they collaborate.

The Flight From Reason

When I think the time has come to offer some pithy comment on life at school, or the current depredations of the Liverpool midfield, or the surprising dullness of Measure for Measure - then along comes the world to draw me back to the fray. I'd rather not write about the incredulity engendered by the reaction to Pope Benedict's speech, but once again it makes me wonder if it's me or if it's the world.

I was in the office on Saturday and rhetorically wondered why we in the West didn't take to burning effigies of people with whom we disagreed.

'Because we're civilised,' answered a colleague.

And you have to wonder. Reading the full text of the Pope's speech, it's hardly surprising that he wondered what all the fuss was about. The 'offensive' comment is (a) tangential to the body of the speech (b) a quote from a fourteenth-century emperor (c) placed firmly in context if you bother to read the rest.

So His Holiness makes the speech, which is thoughtful and thought-provoking, and is burnt in effigy in Pakistan while the BBC tracks down Muslims to be offended on camera. Thanks to the wonder of realclearpolitics.com, I have now read the op-ed in the New York Times and Karen Armstrong's piece in the Guardian. As for the latter, I assume that the author of Islam: a history knows more than I do, but the column itself is sub-tabloid hackwork, to which I amy return if I have more time.

And the Times, in calling for a 'deep and persuasive apology,' has lost the plot completely. I realise that it's easy to sit here and happily lay into other people's work, but this is borderline insane. This is how the piece concludes:

'A doctrinal conservative, his greatest fear appears to be the loss of a uniform Catholic identity, not exactly the best jumping-off point for tolerance or interfaith dialogue.'

From the leader of the Universal Catholic Church! Who'd've thought?

'The world listens carefully to the words of any pope. And it is tragic and dangerous when one sows pain, either deliberately or carelessly. He needs to offer a deep and persuasive apology, demonstrating that words can also heal.'

But the world hasn't been listening carefully, for which the media - who seemed to be pre-emptively calling for apologies - bears a heavy culpability for deliberate deception.

So many points haven't been missed since Sunderland were last in the Premiership. But the wider issue exemplified by the Times' reaction is that waspishly addressed by my colleague (who would, presumably, also fall foul of their in-house Board of Sanctimony). Only the other day my sister and I were reflecting on the gloomy fact that, despite a broad consensus on acceptable social behaviour, people who are bullying, self-centred and generally unreasonable seem to forge successful careers. This is often because it's far too much trouble not to let them have their way.

You can see the analogy. It is increasingly the case that somebody says/writes/draws something that some Muslims find offensive; some Muslims react with a mixture of righteous indignation and violence; many non-Muslim bodies cringe that the somebody has offended Muslims; the somebody backs down. Rather like the Boston newspaper that admitted it wouldn't print the Muhammed cartoons because it didn't want to be attacked.

The reaction to the Pope's speech was ridiculous and absurd. Yet he gets it in the neck from the Times for promoting a 'false and bigoted' view of Islam as beligerent and aggressive, while the Muslims issuing threats and burning him in effigy are, obviously, the perfect advert for a modern, tolerant faith. When exactly did we go through the looking-glass?

Why do we react to offences against the 'west' (of which there are many, ignored by the media with what amounts to a curious inverse racism) with shrugs and apologies? Because 'we're civilized.'

What did Pound say about an old bitch gone in the teeth?

Crane flies: an apology

Last week I incorrectly stated that daddy-longlegses were female crane flies. I began to doubt this when I found two mating and, although Sapphic tendancies may be prevalent among crane flies for all I know, I found from wikipedia that I was entirely wrong. (I'm convinced, by the way, that one could get a GCSE simply by reading wikipedia).

Nonetheless, they're still annoying little buggers. I stumbled across one of the fifth form on a one-man campaign to eradicate them with a vacuum cleaner, an act I thought excessive until they started buzzing the lights in my room. Kill 'em all, I say, and God will take His own.

According to a colleague, the crane fly epidemic is due to the hot summer, as a result of which we have lots of crane flies and bigger spiders. Oh great. Up until today I was chilled about global warming (Britain was warmer in the Middle Ages, as any fule kno) but this is too much.

Further recent thoughts: Liverpool played rather well against Chelsea but still lost; The Queen is a very good film with eerily brilliant performances; Starbucks' low-fat blueberry muffins are significantly less tasty than normal blueberry muffins; and other things that now slip my mind and may return at some less convenient moment.

And also that, having been for a blood test, I should note that I've never had cause (personally) to complain about the NHS beyond normal human imperfection. They were very good, for instance, when I gouged a lump from my finger with a corned beef tin. The police, on the other hand, I'm still waiting to respond to the 999 call I put in 10 days ago.

What..?

We are currently having an outbreak of female crane flies at school, otherwise known as daddy-longlegs. And no, I don't know why the female is called after the male either, but the patriarchally-oppressed insect is a right little nuisance. Hopefully it's just the crane fly season.

One advantage of living in a boarding school is that my laundry is done and returned, neatly folded. The disadvantage if this is that all my clothes have got nametags. If ever I go out on the pull, I must remember not to wear any tagged clothes. The possible embarrassment would be like Bridget Jones, only worse. I can get away with wearing socks that have my name on, but any would-be boyfriend would surely be slightly alarmed at any supposedly mature and sophisticated guy apparently living in imminent peril of mislaying his boxers.

Amongst all this has been a sudden raft of nonsense, and not only from the Lower Fourth. A letter to today's Telegraph from Dr Nick Brooks of the UEA actually stated:

'The advent of civilisation was not entirely positive, associated as it was with increased inequality.'

Damn the trilobite with aspirations! If the ambitious plankton had known that millennia of evolution would result in such a desperate asseveration, he would have turned his back and floated quietly away.

And then there's Ashley Cole. To be ruthlessly fair-minded, I have no real problem with footballers' wages; Cole is one of the world's finest left-backs and he's entitled to ask for a market salary. I can also appreciate that a relatively small amount (of anything) can assume vastly inflated importance on principle.

But.

How far removed from reality do you have to be to reject £55,000 per week as derisory? You or I or the next person in the street is lucky to make that in a year; and even if that isn't the point, would anybody notice the difference between £55,000 and £60,000 per week?

Maybe if you're that rich you do notice. After all, it does add up to £250,000 pa. But it reminds me of Father Brown's comment (I paraphrase): 'to be clever enough to make all that money, you have to be stupid enough to want it.'

Finally, I'm beginning to lose all hope in David Cameron. And as if his speech on reconfiguring the US-UK alliance wasn't bad enough, along comes Andrew O'Hagen in the Telegraph to reinforce the suspicion that Cameron looks increasingly like a bien pensant poseur.

O'Hagen is a writer and commentator for whom I have a great liking, but his column struck the most cringeworthy chord in British informed opinion, that which treats America like an embarrassing relative.

For one thing, as I've said before, it's sheer posturing to treat Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, however disgusting, as equivalent with suicide bombers. For another, O'Hagen seriously seems to be suggesting that Britain should oppose for the sake of opposition, an absurd position even if you call it 'independence' (O'Hagen is far from alone in promoting this fallacy, sadly). For another, the US cannot be seriously accused of 'misunderstanding whole cultures and creeds'; at least, not if my three years in the country are any guide.

Most disturbing are two of O'Hagen's final comments. First, he describes President Bush's remark that 'you're either with us, or with the terrorists' as 'playground bravado.' Bush was much sharper than - to be fair - that comment might at first appear. The President's point was that there is no neutral ground here, no point of triangulation, and to make the attempt is to create a vacuum that will not be respected.

Second, he writes that 'Cameron has said he is 'sceptical of grand schemes to remake the world', and that, to any truly open ear, is a statesman speaking. It should be beneath a writer of O'Hagen's quality to use the sly assertion that anybody who doesn't agree is an idiot, but use it he does. And although Cameron would be cheered by traditional Tories - Lord Salisbury springs to mind - this may be why, on politicalcompass.org, I wound up on the Authoritarian Left. Even if chary of grand schemes, the little details should have a grand end in view, or else why enter politics?

Cameron seems to be pushing cosy pragmatism as a vote-winning technique. It may well work: yet for all I'm an Augustinian, and therefore sceptical of Utopian visions, the traces of Tony Blair's idealism will, like the Cheshire Cat's grin, linger long after the man himself. It is a sad irony that he was actually doing the work of the United Nations...but that is another blog entirely. Iraq was a far more justifiable war than the Falklands; but then, I think we can safely assume that David Cameron would not have fought that war either.

I think we can also safely assume that if David Cameron had been an MP in the 1830s, he would have scorned Wilberforce on the grounds that he was 'sceptical of grand schemes to remake the world.'

9/11

Along with millions of other people, I want to post my thoughts on 9/11.

I had no personal connection to 9/11; knew nobody involved; felt, to be honest, very little beyond a sense of staggered amazement. And the awful, guilty cliche: it's like a film.

But 9/11 changed the world and changed our lives.

There will be those blogging today who insist that America deserved it. There will also be those (Sen Kerry) who insist that the world has become less safe since.

Effective cries, because partly true. In the grand scheme of things, America (and certainly American weaponry) has killed more people than any other country. And an American life lost on 9/11 is no more - or less - valuable than an Iraqi, Israeli or Palestinian life. And when the Americans deal death from the air to anybody, only the saintly, the heroic and the mad could welcome it as a liberation.

And yet, God willing, that may be what it becomes.

Possibly there are more terrorists, more hatred of America now. But this is to assume that this would not have otherwise been the case, which seems to play tricks with the known facts. It seems more to me that America is like Sam Neill in Jurassic Park: attract the dinosaur now, for fear of the consequences if you run and hide.

And America cannot run and hide. Like it or not, it is the world's superpower; the only nation remotely capable of even attempting to implement blithe UN resolutions. As a historian, I firmly believe that posterity will be kinder to President Bush and Prime Minister Blair than their contemporaries think. Yes, that's a horrible question of death and mayhem reduced to a retrospective geopolitical calculation. But after 9/11, it became clearer that the choices were very bad and appalling. No time for counter-factuals now, merely reflection and - hopefully - humility, but the case can and will be made that the President saw the bigger picture and saw it right.

To borrow another film, America is now Gary Cooper in High Noon. On the frontier, we have to hope that the greater violence is on the right side.

But it does look like a question of sides. That is the lesson of 9/11.

I do not know what fate awaits me
I only know I must be brave
And I must face a man who hates me
Or lie a coward
A craven coward
Or lie a coward in my grave

Small assault, nobody hurt

At the boarding school where I work, there was an unexpected turn of events yesterday at about 10pm when five local youths scaled the gate in pursuit of two of my students. Their attentions were not, sad to say, honorable. More violent. Fortunately, they were deterred by the presence of myself and a colleague.

Skipping the details of why my two students were being pursued by locals, one is left to wonder what the optimum reaction should be. This is not a deprived area, and although there is relative depravation, it would take a sociologist of manic genius to flog that as an excuse for everybody involved. I suspect (as mentioned earlier this week) family problems, but I have no idea.

If they were caught (not likely), they should be punished in some way. I've always thought this is non-negotiable; there should certainly be more of an emphasis placed on the rehabilitation of incarcerated prisoners, but rehabilitation as a concept makes no sense without the original acceptance of wrongdoing and the implied punishment.

But this was a small incident, and would have been so even if my students had been physically hurt, sadly. The foremost emotion was pity; pity that people would choose to spend their Friday evenings drinking and pursuing other people with intent to harm. But I strongly suspect that my pity would mean nothing to them.

Give them something to do? But what, and what happens if they get bored? In the last resort, whose life is it anyway?

Larkin may have been right, but not in the way he meant.

'Bye, Tony...

I realise I may be the last man standing in the Western Hemisphere who rather likes and admires President Bush and Tony Blair, but try as I might I genuinely don't get the elation with which their departure is heralded. This is for another time, but the Kennedys were far more crooked than the Bush clan, said much the same thing (the inaugural addresses of Kennedy and Bush's second term are remarkably similar) and yet the Kennedys are canonized while Bush is demonized.

But anyway, Tony Blair. To my mind, and I admit I've been out of the country for most of three years, the Labour Government seems to have been a fairly decent Social Democratic administration. Only the fox-hunting bill, which was a vindictive and unnecessary piece of legislation, really annoys me. Domestically, Blair's problem was largely falling between two stools; too right for the left and too left for the right. And, of course, coming into office with the most over-inflated expectations of a nation.

Conversely, his pleasing boldness in foreign policy has also been damned. Whether pro-Europe or not, one must admit that the Prime Minister has sought, in difficult conditions, to improve British relations with Europe - even though the means and ends were sometimes unappetising. His illegal - yup - intervention in Kosovo was encouraging.

And goodness knows I don't want to keep going on about Iraq, but this comment was made by a student at the school where the Prime Minister was jeered today:

"They [the protesters] are not exploiting us. We understand some stupid people in politics are trying to kill the Lebanese and Iraqis and everybody else."

Ok, I can forgive her stupidity on the grounds that she's 13, but what is the BBC thinking by posting it on its news website?

People have short memories. And they enjoy sitting back and saying smugly, 'well, I wouldn't have done it like that!' For the zillionth time:

1 - Iraq was in violation of goodness knows how many UN resolutions. If you're going to have International Law, it needs a mechanism of enforcement. I can tell my students to finish their prep till I'm blue in the face, but without the power to back it up I may as well whistle for it. This is ALWAYS forgotten by international law fetishists.

2 - Iraq was in pursuit of, and widely believed to be in possession of, WMD. Whether they hadn't got very far or the WMD are in Syria (those that haven't been found in Iraq, and there are some), they would have had them before long, joy of joys.

3 - Although a secular state, Iraq took the 'enemy's enemy' view with Islamic terrorists.

And finally, what is annoying is the desire - and even The Economist does this - to equate American failings with those of their opponents. Abu Ghraib and various war crimes were morally and legally indefensible; no argument there. Guantanamo is arguable, but to suggest that it ranks on the scale of the gulags or concentration camps is a simple offence to logic. Nor does America, unlike Saddamite Iraq, use rape as an instrument of policy.

In essence, American soldiers commit crimes that are punished. Generally speaking, they follow rules of engagement that attempt not to kill non-combatants. Terrorists, who don't hold with the combatant/non-combatant distinction, send suicide bombers to massacre pilgrims (who are often their countrymen and fellow religionists, please note) and video themselves hacking off the heads of journalists.

And America is the bad guy. But of course!

This sort of behaviour is affirmative action for terrorists.

ISBO

As part of my induction into education, I attended a session on Aptitude Testing. This contained the extraordinary revelation that if a child scores highly on numerical but low on clerical, s/he is more likely to be (a) foreign (b) dyslexic (c) both. No shit?

(What was scarier was the distinct implication that these scores were going to be used to plot the rest of the child's career in education. If all educational theorists - or most theorists, come to that - stopped work, would the world suffer?)

This evidence must have been produced by the ever-busy Institute for Stating the Blindingly Obvious. Why, today's paper had two such reports:

First, not working for a living makes you fat and depressed and also shortens your life.

To my mind, this supports my inclination that Keynes was right when he suggested paying people to dig holes (yes, I can think of at least five objections, so please feel free to point them out and I'll post them).

Second, marriage is good for the couple, the children and society.

I wonder if it will ever come to be accepted that the twentieth century, by embracing divorce (and to a certain extent the cult of the individual) did more to encourage the social breakdown than anything the free market ever did? And it's interesting that those who 'encourage' divorce, or at least treat it neutrally, encourage state intervention to alleviate its effects.