The Daily Novel

I was somewhat irritated the other day when I had decided to try and attract youth to my site. My students often rely on free hatmail and put up blogs free on the Microsoft live.spaces site. I decided to learn from them so opened up a site there and copied my Power from shit story posted her the day before.

The Bill Gates lot deemed it unacceptable, so I had to change the wording to Power from manure which does not quite have the same ring to it. But I wanted to get the story out because it is about sustainable energy from municipal waste and manure unearthed in Florida by one of my ex-students worknig for the St Petersburg Times lot. David Adams.

Tonight I thought I would do a little research and find out just how Microsoft was controlling our world. Just how is the biggest ever monopoly in the history of capitalism controlling the world in which we live.

In summary I found that I could use all the four letter words in the text but not in the headline. The headline allowed me to say that Bill Gates had a crap every day but not that he had a shit every day. That is American imperialism invading the English language.

But then I went on. Headlines can say that Christ was gay, that Bill Gates has sex with all and sundry. But I cannot say that anyone fucks anyone.

As we say in the journo’s trade you could not make it up.

David McKie, aged 71, long-standing columnist of The Guardian, is leading a revolt of the Aged. On 11 September G2 is going to be edited by a team of Oldies. Great idea. It is absolutely true that The Guardian, in its determination to attract new young readers, has got carried away. There are just too many bright young things writing the columns these days, even though some of them are ex-students from my stable, City University. But I am not sure that I am going to volunteer to spend the day of 11 September sitting around the table with a bunch of oldies, even though it only takes me 15 minutes on my scooter to get to Farringdon Road.

I’ll tell you why.

When I was supposed to be planning my retirement I knew I did not want to spend the years after 65 chatting to the other oldies in my neighbourhood, even though some of them have many interesting things to say. So I conceived the idea of starting a new undergraduate degree, Journalism and Contemporary History early one morning when I was walking my dog, Larkin, over Hampstead Heath.

There was one reality problem in implementing this undoubtedly grandiose idea. City University did not have a history department. So a few weeks later I scooted down to the Mile End Road one rainy Friday afternoon, to see Peter Hennessy, Professor of History at Queen Mary, University of London, but also a former journalist. It was love at first sight. We both agreed that a deep knowledge of contemporary history would be enormously useful for would-be serious journalists. Before we could do anything we had to await the return of Peter’s head of department, John Ramsden. John is a career academic, a bit sceptical about much of the stuff he reads written by journalists, and his political sympathies are somewhat to the right of those of Peter and myself. His gets his kicks and his academic eminence from writing books about Winston Churchill.

(That’s one of the reasons I write so much about Churchill myself because whenever I have lunch with John, Winston joins us at the table.)

But I digress, as old men sometimes do.

We were aware that we were all a bit long in the tooth to be starting something for eighteen olds so John and Peter decided to give the youngest member of their staff, John Ellison, the task of running it in the first year. It was a brilliant idea. Not only did John immediately bring his own particular brand of enthusiasm to the team but he confessed, that as a young man, shortly before he got seduced by academia, he had seriously considered going into the journalism trade. And talking to John helped me to adjust my teaching wavelength to 18 year olds.

Up to the time the JCH started the whole of my teaching career had been spent in classes with post-graduate and mature students (my oldest ever student was an American Professor aged 64 who decided he would learn something new by sitting in a class in London, where he had been as a young man. Then he was helping to fight the Nazis, and no doubt getting up to a bit of hanky panky with the young women, most of whom were in love with anything wearing an American uniform and bearing gifts of fags and chewing gum).

I decided to go the whole hog and commit myself to teaching the first years.

It was the best decision I made about retirement. Of course, I had difficulty with the attention span of some the students. But you cannot be a serious journalist if you have a short attention span. My job was not to pander to the demands of the customers but to seek to get them to learn, what my colleagues and I had decided they needed to learn, in order to be a good journalist.

And, believe it not, I am still doing this with some of these blogs. In my head I am sometimes writing for 18-year-olds and some of my blogs look distinctly like a bastardised blogging version of contemporary history.

So that’s why I still don’t want to spend too much time with old folks. Like The Guardian I want some young readers. And I hope as soon as they hear of its existence some of next year’s 18 year olds will be posting a few comments to the blogs. Who knows, if their attention span is long enough, they might even get the hang of my weird sense of humour.

Whenever two or three Liberals are gathered together they are asking each other whether they made a serious mistake when they chopped Charles Kennedy, after two or three ‘tired and emotional’ television performances. I think they did. Better to have a boozing leader than a boring leader. Particularly in the television age parties need a leader who can inspire, who can articulate policies in words that all viewers understand. Above all they need a leader who can speak from his or her heart to the hearts of the viewer.

The latest revelations by Greg Hurst, in his book Kennedy: A tragic flaw, do nothing to shake my conviction. Indeed rather the opposite. I would rather have a drinking American President than a reformed alcoholic like George W. Bush, who is much too self-righteous for my taste. I am not arguing that being in control of a country while drunk is any less dangerous than being drunk in charge of a motor car. That other famously drunken leader, Winston Churchill, did manage to impose a few bad decisions on the nation while drunk (which he frequently was when he called meetings of the War Cabinet at 8 PM at night by which time the early-rising generals were ready to go to bed). But mostly his colleagues managed to restrain him. It was a cabinet that included some pretty powerful figures including those of the opposite political persuasion like Clem Attlee. (That is what democracy is about, ensuring that no one man or woman ever gets too much power. Not ensuring that the world is safe for consumer capitalism which not everyone wants.)

And I don’t think we would have done nearly so well in the war if the entirely sober pipe-smoking Clem had been the leader. Churchill’s fatal flaws were all part and parcel of his personality. He was highly emotional and subject to all kinds of excesses. But he also had the eloquence to inspire millions and to empathise with their feelings.

A few years ago I bought a tape recording of parts of Churchill’s wartime speeches. I was disappointed when I listened to them, because though the eloquence still came over it had nothing like the impact it had on me, and others, when we first listened to them.

I would have been around 7 at the time. I would be sitting with my father and mother and my brother and sister, probably doing jig-saw puzzles, my mother knitting my father mending his watches and clocks on the card table. We were all in one room with a coal fire burning. The room was stuffy because not only were all the windows closed but the three piece suite was piled up against the French windows to protect us from flak.

When Churchill came on (or when the BBC News came on) we would all stop what we were doing. The clicking needles in my mother hands would be stilled. My father would take the eye glass from his eye and turn towards the radio in the corner of the room. That’s why the tapes are so disappointing. Churchill was talking in the language of the times and speaking to the hearts and minds of the people of those times.

Leap ahead to 1959 when I was in New York at the celebratory party for the election of Jack Kennedy (no relation to Charlie). It was crowded with young people delighted to be rid of the tired Eisenhower administration and its big business cronies with whom Eisenhower played golf. Kennedy (better call him JFK to avoid confusion) had brought in all these young people (to the campaign not to the hotel because JFK was in Washington on that night) through his eloquence. Like Churchill he had one or two fatal flaws. He was emotional and sometimes over-impulsive, as when he crashed his motor torpedo boat into the pier.

I have not got any tapes of JFK’s speeches but parts of them still ring in my head; ‘Do not ask what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.’

Those words, and others which JFK uttered, still have relevance today. Churchill’s do not because Britain is not facing the same kind of threat. America is facing a similar threat to the one JFK saw so clearly. JFK was by means anti-capitalist but he thought that the power of big business needed to be restrained by Governments and that the ideology of unbridled consumer capitalism was blinding it to the plight of America’s poor people and to the weak and vulnerable everywhere.

Today America has an administration which is far more right-wing than that of Eisenhower and a Christian fundamentalist idealogy which fails to understand other religions, let alone the quite large numbers who think any religion is bad for thinking folk. The essential message of the Christian fundamentalist lot is that if you believe in God he will make you a millionaire. Notsomuch throwing the money changers out of the temple but telling the meek, that if they only they believe and come and pray in the temple, they will become as rich as the money changers.

Jesus Christ must be turning in his grave, except, of course, he can’t do that because he is immortal.

So carry on drinking Charlie. And all you liberals remember that you ain’t going to get anywhere unless you have a leader who can inspire and who makes it clear that he cares for the people who will suffer if Blairism continues or if the quite eloquent Cameron is elected. Eloquence is not all. You have to have the right message. Perhaps I should have said the left message. But no, I am more of a JFK Democrat than either a little liberal, a little conservative, or a little labourite.

For those who are having difficulty coping with unzipping help is on the way. Mark Keates, my computer programmer, is putting up a new version in the next day or two, which should work easily on all computers.

Over in Florida Dr Jose Sifontes has invented a method for turning municipal waste and horse manure into gas in just three weeks. Sifontes used to work for Mobil. But a few years ago (inspired perhaps by his theology degree) he decided to strike out on his own. He used his own money to do research and now he reckons he has got the thing working.

The full story is in a new blog The Fuelling Station (link under Work in the panel to the right of this one) which is on the Tampa Bay site associated with the St Petersburg Times. It is written by an ex-student of mine in the 1980s, David Adams.

Not only was he a good reporter and journalist but he took the trouble to learn the basic skil of touch typing which he found a bit difficult. Countless times as I left the office about seven I would find him alone in a room tapping away on an ancient Imperial typewriter.

That was long before the days of typingbytouch. He was using an ingenious invention by Robert Flanders. Flanders had worked for National Coal Board for most of his life but in the 1970s ended up managing something or other at The Financial Times, where the editor was having great difficulty in getting the Oxbridge graduate trainees to learn to type.

One night, lying in his bath, Flanders had an inspiration. A looseleaf pad with a typing exercise printed out double spaced. You tore off the sheet, inserted it into the typewriter, and typed the words in the space below. The Financial Times thought they should own this invention. So Flanders resigned, went back home to Lewisham and developed it there. He wrote the boy’s adventure story Tom’s Tale, which is part of typingbytouch. He patented the pad idea and made enough money to pay the mortgage for a few years.

But then the computers took over. And you cannot patent an idea. Though the same concept is used in most computer typing tutorials Bob had to find another way to earn his living. He generously told me I could use Toms Tale in my Writers Keyboard Tutor for free. I last heard from him a few years ago when he was using that program to teach dyslexics. His researches into the psychology of learning difficulties led him to believe that learning to type helped dyslexic’s to overcome their disability.

Bob was the sort of chap who was always more interested in solving interesting problems than making pots of money. Dr Sifontes sounds a man of the same ilk.

Another charge is being brought in Scotland against an actor for smoking on stage. This time it is Keith Richards. Last time it was the actor playing Winston Churchill. To play Winston without that cigar is a travesty and it also makes it more difficult for the actor to get into the role, to get into the feeling of how it was to be Winston. And, of course, one cigar in a theatre is not going to do any damage to the lungs of the audience or even the cast.

It demonstrates that this excessively restrictive legislation is driven by the new Puritanism. And, of course, it just makes life even more difficult for the remaining smokers, who are all addictive smokers, not social smokers. Addicts deserve sympathy not punishment.

Churchill was a serious alcoholic as well. He ran the second world war while quite often totally pissed. He harangued the generals and the other ministers around the table. This is not gossip. It is all there in great detail between hard covers in the memoirs of his cabinet secretary, Lord Alan Broke, published only a few years ago. The others around the table had to keep their tempers and concentrate on cajoling him in to giving up his insistence on sending the troops in yet again to the wrong place. Because Churchill, like anyone on the booze, became more and more convinced that he was right the more he drank. It is pretty amazing that we managed to win the war.

But consider what would have happened if his colleagues had hidden the whisky bottles. Black dog taking over. Churchill slumped in his chair, morose and grumpy, staring into space. All ability to inspire and rise to fluent eloquence drained from him.

That was in the 1940s.

About two weeks ago my younger daughter, Kathy, strode into the kitchen with a smile on her face, announcing that she had given up smoking. Three days ago she came around and found me in a fit of coughing. ‘You must give up, Dad. These patches are wonderful. If you don’t get one I shall go out and buy one myself and stick it on your arm.’ I smiled wanly and said if it worked for her, fine. But I did not want try it right now until I had got the blog established. Yesterday, when I went into the kitchen, there she was puffing way at the Silk Cut.

I have given up myself a few times. The longest time was for four months when I was living in New York. It was a time in my life when I was not quite so driven by wanting to become a famous journalist. I was enjoying my social life. I had a group of friends who were in the vanguard of the Make Love Not War brigade, linked in America to something called the Committee of 100, their equivalent of CND. I had also turned vegetarian and was living off raw carrots and lettuce provided at a restaurant in the West Village.

But, apart from that, it was fun. I was going to parties where young people were making love in cupboards while elderly Quaker ladies were standing around drinking cups of tea, smiling benignly and pretending not to notice. I was not spending much time in cupboards but there were occasions when my bed, a mattress on the floor of a fifth floor walk-up on West 13th street, was not entirely empty.

And I had a couple of male friends whom I used to go out to dinner with who would ask, ‘Did you score?’ If the answer was ‘No’ their faces would show concern and sympathy. They would tell me how many times they had failed to score. We would then move on to talking of other things and having a giggle. These days they call it male bonding.

In November 1961 I decided to leave New York. It was a complicated decision but one I have never regretted. I decided to go home by ship to give me time to adjust to the change.

As the Berliner left the harbour I was leaning on the rail waving to my friends on the shore. Feeling good. I turned to the man standing next to me and bummed a cigarette. I lit it, inhaled deeply, felt the charge go right through my body, and then, deliciously exhaled. By the time the Statue of Liberty disappeared over the horizon I had smoked three. A little later I went downstairs, bought a pack of Camels, then went into dinner and ordered a steak.

I did regret one thing about leaving New York on that day. The last night I met the archetypal Swedish blonde. Just the right size and shape. Blonde hair. Blue eyes. Oh, and she was a psychologist, a subject I was also interested in. I can see her now standing in the doorway of her apartment as we parted. Even writing about it makes me feel a little weak in the knees. She clearly liked me.

But I didn’t score.

Yesterday I did some real work for a change and it almost brought the sweat to my brow. Clearing out the living room so that the window cleaner and his mates can redecorate it. Hundreds of books and papers into boxes. Vases and other objets on the top shelves carefully handed down by my wife on the step ladder. Heaving the piano stool up to the next floor. These feels like hard physical labour for someone whose daily exercise is flexing his fingers on the keyboard.

The last item I removed from the room at 8 AM this morning was the 1930 chair which I use to sit at my desk. This is just the sort of item which decorators think has been left for them to stand on and park their cups of tea. When I got it into the kitchen I realised that I had not really looked at it for years. The pattern is only visible around the edges. More than 70 years of squirming bottoms have revealed the bare wood. And there were a few specks of white paint, the droppings of some previous decorator.

This chair is the one I used to sit on to do my school homework at the dining table. It is also the one on which my mother suckled all three of her children. According to family myth I was the most the most difficult birth and my mother had a painful time feeding me. Some shrinks think that is why I am only smoker and enthusiastic drinker of the three of us. But maybe it is because my brother and sister, like Tony Benn, have remained addicted to the favourite family tipple, tea. I can survive on just two cups of tea a day without suffering any withdrawal symptoms. Benn needs at least twenty-five cups a day and, if my memory is accurate, his daily consumption spiralled to forty a few years ago when he was living with the stress of being Labour’s leading rebel and the Daily Mail’s favourite target. Actually I have no idea how much he drinks today. But since he is now an elder statesman, and revered on both sides of the house, as a defender of the British constitution, he may be able to manage on ten cups. Must ask him sometime.

Today I don’t feel the need of anything at all. (Correction. I must confess there is a cigarette smoking away in the ashtray.) It is the perfect day for idling. Grey sky and gentle drizzle. Not the kind of bank holiday weekend you feel you really must brave the traffic queues and rush out to enjoy the countryside. There is nothing to disturb my tranquillity so long as the decorators do not knock a can of paint onto the wireless transmitter downstairs. Now that would really make me agitated because I would not be able to write this blog on my wife’s computer on the first floor.

Oh, yes. Why is it the window cleaner who has come to do the decorating? It is his ‘night’ job. And come to think of it, both jobs involve climbing ladders, making surfaces clean and shiny, and drinking endless cups of tea.

The article about why computers are such a pain to all of us will have to wait. I was going to deal with the way the big companies, and particularly American companies, have dictated the way that computing has developed. But I then realised that to make it clear where I was coming from (American language, I am afraid) I would have to do yet another long blog first articulating my position on the influence of big companies generally on the way we live our lives. And that requires explaining how my political position has changed through my lifetime which has led me to believe that ‘American cultural imperialism’, as Tony Benn likes to call it, is not the main enemy in relation to business (though it certainly is in relation to the Iraq war).

I was brought up with the Daily Mail and the Wolverhampton Express & Star coming through the letter box. Their political stance was remarkably similar. (It remains the same today and, also interestingly enough has remained the same throughout the history of both papers. Both papers are still under the control of the Harmsworth and Graham families which founded them.)

What I read in those papers certainly influenced me in my school days. And in the history classes my favourite Prime Minister was Disraeli. Outside the classroom I became a huge admirer of Enoch Powell and canvassed for him when he became the candidate for Wolverhampton in 1950. (This was long before the ‘rivers of blood speech’).

My university career reinforced, rather than changed, my political position. I was, amongst other things, the Vice-Chairman of the Conservative Association and invited Rab Butler to speak. I respected his views and I was grateful to him because it was his 1944 Education Act which was passed just in time for me to go to grammar school for free. Otherwise I could not have gone because our family budget would not have stretched to paying for two children and I was the second son.

What has gradually shifted my political position to the left was not my education but what I discovered as a by-product of my work as a journalist. I began as a City journalist where my job was to talk to stockbrokers, merchant bankers and the bosses of large companies. The more I learnt about the way large companies behaved the more I began to doubt the views of my youth.

That period of my life climaxed in the late 1960s when I wrote, with Oliver Marriott, a colleague at The Times, a book about the history of the British electrical industry. What our researches into some original documents revealed was that by the late 1920s American companies had acquired a much bigger hold on that industry than was generally known.

But what those researches also showed was that in Britain, and in much of the world, the electrical industry, and several other important industries, were controlled by cartels; agreements between the major companies to divide up the world into areas of operation, and, in effect, to work together to stifle new competition.

This was not a solely American phenomenon. The other leading players included Britain, Germany, France, Belgium, Spain and the Dutch amongst others. Cartels, of course, have long since been made illegal but the spirit of cartels is still very much alive. It was alive and well in 1970, when we went up in the lift at Stanhope Gate, the headquarters of the Late Lord Weinstock, with the boss of one of GEC’s biggest competitors, the Dutch giant Philips. We were there for a quick chat with Arnie. He was early for a private lunch with Lord Weinstock during which I am sure they talked about many matters of mutual interest.

Before I go on I need to make it clear that my trajectory to the left has not taken me into the arms of Tony Benn. My political position is that it is healthy to have a world in which powerful governments have to take into account the power of large companies, whose budgets exceed those of small countries. I would not enjoy living in a country where the government controlled all places in which people worked and decided what products should be produced for me to consume.

Where the problems arise is when governments and big companies work too closely together. This has, and does, cause problems in journalism, because most of the world’s media is dominated by large companies, of which the Murdoch empire is only one example. And the same thing is now happening in the wonderful new world of the web. Google is getting far too lovey dovey with the government of China which is limiting freedom of expression and stifling dissent.

The old cartels were able to exercise their power because governments allowed them to. Today some governments have a much too cosy relationship with big companies which is what I mean when I say that the spirit of the cartels lives on.

This is definitely a plug for Anatomy of a Merger, (Cape 1970,, Pan 1972) which is still worth reading because it reveals quite a lot about the old cartels and the way that the Labour government helped Arnold Weinstock to get control of most of the heavy electrical industry in the late 1960s. (And come to think of it dear old Tony Benn was a minister in that government.)

Unhappily Anatomy is long since out of print. But you might find a copy in the library or on a second hand bookstall. Look out for it.

(Actually this is only 949 words. Not too bad for such a big and complex subject.)

And all because of computers.

Yesterday my eldest daughter could not get her home email to work. Which is bad enough for anyone, but when you are trying to rear two kids, do a part-time job and a part-time MA, it is enough to send you round the bend. So I went round there today just after breakfast expecting to fix it in an hour. In fact I was there until nearly 5 PM.

There were, as so often, a number of problems. Not only was her email not working but it was impossible to get into the web at all. I spent some hours messing with the settings but nothing worked until I went in to the other room, and disconnected the Blueyonder box, left it off for a few minutes. And then turned it back on again.

It worked. But like a snail. I could have written a short page in the time it took to for the Blueyonder home page to load. But it was working so I decided to download the free software Firefox from the Mozilla site. And I was then able to reconfigure Holly’s email so that it worked both ways.

Except that I then found that her partner’s email would not work. I managed to get his working again but found that all his old emails, including a few he had not read, had disappeared.

I shall have to go there after breakfast tomorrow to try and find them. But if it does not take the whole day I shall do another posting tomorrow about why computers cause so much trouble, even to people who have spent quite a lot of time seeking to understand how they work.

Last night’s play was Rock’n'roll by Tom Stoppard. I don’t have time to write a review because the sight of the several of the cast smoking on stage sent my energies off in quite a different direction where campaigning journalism is urgently needed. It reminded me that actors can no longer smoke on stage in Scotland. And that next year it will be illegal to smoke pretty well in every public place in England, even, perhaps, on the cold and draughty pavements outside office buildings.

And that thought lit a blazing fire of anger in my belly. It causes similar anger in the bellies of all smokers and particularly those smokers who are also manic depressives. This ill-thought out legislation is being rushed through by the majority therm party (for those who have not read my ‘In manic flow post’, a therm is anyone who is not a manic depressive). They are ignoring some very important evidence on smoking. They are ignoring civil liberties issues. And they just don’t take into account that they are making manics even madder than they already are, forcing them into ghettos, and depriving them of the company of non-smokers.

Let it be clear I do not ignore the evidence on the number of deaths caused by smoking. On the contrary I had a conversation with Richard Doll a few years ago and we hit it off very well. I deeply admire the way he devoted most of his time into research on smoking in the face of lots of scepticism and some pretty forceful opposition from the tobacco companies. Now the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction.

The evidence on passive smoking causing deaths is far from conclusive. What it does show, however, is that for the smoke to cause any harmful effect on non-smokers you need to be crowded together in a very small space with all the windows closed.

The psychological evidence about the difference between people who smoke for social reasons and people who smoke because they are addicted is ignored by efforts made to encourage smokers to give up. It is no good telling addicts to stop. They all know by now that there is a serious risk that smoking will kill them one day. But they also know that meanwhile it helps them to live. And unlike many addictions smoking does not play havoc with the mind, like binge drinking, heroin, cocaine and even the pot which Stoppard’s characters were pretending to smoke last night.

Above all the evidence of the beneficial effects of smoking on those with mental health problems is ignored. Several research studies have shown that smoking is good for depressives.

This is partly the effects of the drug. Nicotine is a most unusual drug which both stimulates and depresses. It is a particular help as a pick-me-up in the depressive phase. In the manic phase it helps to reduce the agitation. The long exhalation of the smoke relaxes. In the manic phase I tend to smoke more cigarettes but it does not affect my thinking. By contrast, if I drink too much in the manic phase I cannot even type properly, my mind gets fuddled, and my behaviour towards others can be quite unpleasant. Yes, I know alcohol affects everyone in this way. But I also know that when I am in between the extremes of mood (i. e. experiencing life like the therms) I can drink far more before the harmful effects happen.

Smoking is also beneficial because of the rituals attached to it. The last thing my father did before he went to bed at night was to go to the mantelpiece and place his packet of Players Navy Cut side by side with his silver cigarette case. He would count out one by one eight cigarettes, which was the quantity he limited himself to for economic reasons. Then, he would raise his hand and close the case with a flourish and a satisfying snap.

My own smoking is also surrounded by lots of rituals. I use a cigarette lighter and if in extremity I have to borrow a match it is very annoying. I have a huge collection of cigarette lighters, including one which my nephew has just given me. This is an old Ronson petrol lighter. And it is a replica of the one which was given to my father by his three childen, the first expensive present they had bought him with their own saved up pocket money.

I also have a large collecttion of ash trays. Some bought for their beauty. Others acquired for sentimental reasons like the Wills Woodbine beige ashtray used by my paternal grandfather. The most beautiful one is made of Bohemian glass and I bought it in Prague just after the Velvet Revolution. Which is what Stoppard’s play last night was all about. All of our party of four enjoyed it. If you want to know about what it’s about I am sure you can find a review through Google which will be far better than anything I could write.