The Daily Novel

First day back in London and the papers are full of Michael Grade’s switch from the BBC to attempt the near impossible; revive the ailing ITV colossus which still reaches,
with terrestrial television, nearly all the 23 million homes in Britain. ITV contains nearly all the once great companies which changed the face of British television in 1956, when the Conservative government of the day broke the BBC monopoly and launched commercial television. They brought us Coronation Street, ITN News, and World in Action, the first hard hitting investigative television journalism programme and lots of first rate drama, notably from ABC Television and Granada and some outstanding documentaries. Read the history for yourself in Wikipedia. And all because the ITV Act required them to put in some quality programmes if they wanted to keep their programme contracts.

ITV’s advertising, which financed all these expensive high quality programmes, has slumped in recent years because of the huge success of Murdoch’s Sky satellite television and cable television, transmitted by the two cable companies, NTL and Telewest, who have just merged with Richard Branson as the biggest shareholder. They are to relaunch as Virgin Media.

Sky and Virgin compete vigorously with each other, but the diet they offer is remarkably similar. Lots of popular mass market programmes, including sport. Lots of films, including many of the best in film history, which are of course much cheaper than new drama or documentaries. Very little of the more expensive quality programmes in which Granada, London Weekend and ABC television excelled.

Sky and Virgin are equally keen to get their hands on ITV because it beams into the 7 million homes in the country which still rely for their delivery on the type of aerial my father installed on our roof in the late 1950s.

Murdoch now has 7.7 million homes with his satellite dishes on the roof. Virgin has dug the streets to get cable television into 3.3 million homes. Both companies have been gobsmacked by the success of the latest entrant to the new delivery game, the Freeview set top box. The BBC chose it to launch its digital services via Freeview and ITV now uses it as well. Freeview put on 2 million subscribers in the last year to reach 7.1 million viewers. The attraction of Freeview is that once you have paid for the set top box, you have nothing more to pay, whereas Sky and Virgin collect an annual subscription.

The leader in The Times yesterday welcomed Grade’s appointment and told him that he was the right man to do just what Murdoch wants. Namely go for the Sky/Vision diet of popular and low cost television. This has the added advantage for all three companies that they can cut their costs still further by offering their programmes to the other two.

So if Grade is a sensible chap, he will do just that and collect his near £10 million pay in two years and enjoy a well-earned retirement after his many achievments, including his latest one of quietly working to restore the credibility and morale of the BBC after the assault by Alaistair Campbell and the Hutton report.

My own impression of Grade, based on following his career and on meeting him a few times at various parties, is that he is a chap who likes hot seats, and likes taking on difficult jobs. See what you think yourself by looking up the potted biography in Wikipedia. Getting enough extra advertising to enable ITV to make some quality programmes is a near impossible task. But I hope he attempts it.

Meanwhile I am feeling cheered this morning by the article in The Times this morning that tells me the French red wine I was drinking in Paris is actually good for me. What’s more, while I was in Paris my cigarette consumption dropped from 20 a day to 5 a day. Not sure why that was. Relaxing with old friends, enjoying writing a few blogs which flowed out of my head. Back home my consumption has started to rise again. But, one day, I may find that I no longer need to smoke, and I shall have to throw away my collection of cigarette lighters, and use my beautiful Bohemian glass ashtray for serving peanuts.

On Friday morning, 24 November, as I was strapping myself into the cab taking us to Waterloo, I said, ‘I’ve been thinking about the Russian doll as a metaphor for the unconscious.’ My wife replied: ‘That’s odd, I had a dream about a Russian doll last night.’ I was stunned. But my mind was already awash with ideas so I asked her to write it down in my notebook. I did not look at it until last night.

All I can be certain of about dreams is that they have a powerful effect on energy levels and spark off the imagination. I can go for weeks without remembering any dreams. And quite often it is only fragments I remember. To illustrate what I mean I shall tell it straight.

My notes on my own dreams at 5.15 AM that morning are as follows.

Dream within a Dream was the heading. Then.

Stunning Revelation. How William James comes up in Google. Can see it on screen. Very big. Very significant. Maybe proof of God’s existence.

Then I dream that I wake up.

Don’t want to accept proof of God, perhaps there is another option. Could be trick of unconscious. Both God and the unconscious are threatening ideas (to rational thinking). Realise I can test the proof by going into Google again. Google has made changes to the search engine because religious experience is so popular. There is a feeling of a message from God. But all that I can see is the usual boring Google screen.

Then I wake up, really wake up, this time. The dream left me with lots of energy and a flow of ideas. But it is all rather disappointing. Contrast my wife’s dream, which is like a little story.

‘Explanation: Dulcie (our granddaughter) loves a little Russian doll I have, and any nesting toy. Yesterday, I bought her, in advance for Christmas, a Father Christmas Russian doll.

Last night in my dream someone gave Dulcie a package – it was large and shaped like a big Russian doll – representing Gorbachev, then smaller and smaller Russian presidents, ending up with Stalin. I didn’t actually see it but felt it through the wrapping.’

My wife also noted that today was the birthday of Holly, our elder daughter and Dulcie’s mother. Another co-incidence, but perhaps not such an odd one.

What follows is not an analysis of my wife’s dream but a report on how it affected my own imagination.

The Russian doll fits the Jungian, rather than the Freudian, concept of the unconscious. Jung postulated that we sheltered behind a persona, a mask we presented to the world. The Russian doll has a series of these personas, each smaller to represent growth, and a new persona to face new outside threats, and provide thicker armour to protect the baby within.

Jung further postulated that when analytical therapy helped the person to get back to the innermost baby, that this was the Self, with a capital S, which was also universal consciousness. This is quite close to the Christian belief that the Kingdom of God is within you, as well as without you. Not surprising the similarity, since Jung’s father was a Pastor.

As I lay in bed, before falling asleep, I let my wife’s dream float around my mind. The Gorbachev dolls were around in Prague, when we were there for two weeks in the summer following the velvet revolution. The day after we arrived there was a coup against Gorbachev, who had disappeared. President Havel sent his troops to the frontier and world waited with baited breath. The coup lasted only a couple of days and Gorbachev was restored. The Gorbachev doll probably emerged then as a kind of joke, because there was a carefree spirit alive in Prague at the time. Now in 2006 it does not look so funny. Putin is beginning to seem like Stalin without the moustache and with better manners. Maybe that Gorbachev doll is a prophetic warning.

And I was not too keen on the symbolism of the Father Christmas Doll either. A pagan figure harnessed to the interests of American consumer capitalism. And it fits in beautifully with the Christian fundamentalism of George Bush and his ilk, which believes that God rewards those who follow his way with material wealth on earth. Perhaps the smallest Father Christmas, has an even smaller George Bush figure welded inside it by those clever NASA scientists.

I fell asleep and had another of those dreams, which seemed very boring, but left me with huge energy.

The dream fragments were associated with a joke I often tell when I welcome visitors to my house. I tell them I started off, as an up and coming young financial journalist, in Frognal, at the top of Hampstead, amongst the most palatial houses, and have been going down hill ever since. To Belsize Park and then to my present house at the bottom end of Hampstead, slap bang up against a large council estate.

This produced a moving image in my imagination. I was sweeping down the long hill from Hampstead tube station, past the Royal Free Hospital, past my present house, right down to Camden Town, where I took a leap into space right back to my mother, who was a huge figure, surrounded by scaffolding. I climbed down the scaffolding and back into her womb.

This was an image, not a thought. It made me feel good, very good. My breathing became slow and deep, but strong. Not slowing down at a decelerating pace as when I go into anaphylactic shock, and need a shot of adrenalin to keep me alive.

I will leave the psychologists to interpret it. But end with the kind of conjecture a character in a novel might voice. Something like Nirvana. The ultimate peaceful resting place where no effort is required and you are fed and watered by God’s Almighty Hand. Only this God was a woman, who was not at all almighty. My own mother.

Maybe this is something like the feelings those born again Christians have. But if I am being reborn it will be as a born again Darwinian. And I am not going out to convert anyone. I am going to have lunch with an old friend at the Place des Vosges. To find out how he is and what he thinks about the latest star of French politics, Segolene Royal.

(Written on Friday 24 November. Not posted then because of technology problems.)

………not so much a stream of consciousness more an exploration of the earth.

Before I tell you why I wrote this replacement headline and strap for my blog I need to explain where I am now. In Paris, in a friend’s flat not far from Porte St Cloude.. It is 2.30 PM The windows are spattered with rain, the pavements are wet and the sky is grey. But I am happy, sometimes singing, sometimes, humming, sometimes whistling these two lines.

‘When this lousy war is over.
No more soldiering for me.’

From the song sung by the British soldiers in the trenches somewhere in France during the first world war from ‘Oh what a lovely war’, the Joan Littlewood musical I first heard in Stratford in the early 1960s. It came into my head when I started whistling it on the Metro a few stops past Odeon. It is a melancholy, almost mournful, song. But whistling it made me feel happy.

I was in a foul temper when I woke at 5.30 AM English time this morning in Hampstead. Not enough sleep and I felt sick. My temper got worse as I tried to get my things together. The last items, and the most important, were the two blogs I wrote yesterday. I wrote two because I was not satisfied with the first one. I did not post the second one because I was not satisfied with that either. But the printer kept jamming, saying ‘Out of paper’, then ‘Out of ink’.

The mini-cab driver was parked in the middle of our crowded street. So I had to give up. My temper got even worse, because although I told him we had ample time to get to Waterloo, he insisted on driving like a maniac,

Once the Eurostar train moved out of the station my anger evaporated. I was going on a journey. I closed my eyes. (As I wrote that line I started singing it. ‘Joseph and the amazingly multi-coloured dream coat’ by Lloyd Webber’ whose political sympathies are somewhat to the left of Joan Littlewood’s.) The structure and chapter headings of a book I might write started to form in my mind. I wrote them down and started to think about the main themes.

At the precise moment we entered the Channel Tunnel I was writing a paragraph about the unconscious. The essence of it was that although I believe in the unconscious, I do not agree with Freud that it is all repressed memories and I did not like his division of what happens in the human mind into id, ego and super ego. I prefer to keep on open mind. and consider the un-conscious still a mystery.

But of course I could not avoid the co-incidence that that we were now going deep below the ocean. And more than that my mood for several days now has had a large element of what psycho-analysts call ‘flooding’, which they explain as the powerful primitive emotional forces taking over the mind. But to me it is the mood I get in when I am writing in full flood.

It led me to think what actually happens in the mind. Sometimes it is images; with me recently it has been quite a few images of faces. Some of them are memories of an actual face, some of them are photographs of a face. It is easy to distinguish between the two. But on the train just as a face, or a photo, came into clear focus, it started to fade away. It is as if, once the conscious mind takes control, the wily devilish unconscious snatches the image away.

Most of the stuff in my mind is thoughts and although sometimes it is whole paragraphs together I do not see them written down as if on a screen, as do the very small minority of people who have eidetic memory. Thinking about longing led to me to think about Longing for you, an old pop song, but there no tune. Then it was ‘Longing my lord for thee.’ But again no tune. Suddenly I found myself singing in my head a song of longing, ‘The longest mile is the last mile home. When you’ve been away.’

The singing had not started consciously, it had just popped up into the mind of its own accord. But, of course, I then started to think about it. And about the fact that I was speeding through France on my way to Paris. And singing about going home. It was obviously connected with the fact that I wanted to be back.

If I am to be serious about finding my own authentic voice I must act on these unconscious messages. That set me thinking about not liking the latest title at the top of my blog, ‘Journalism of the mind’. Better than what I had before. But too pompous or something.

Then the unconscious conducted me in the singing of another two songs. The second was:

‘I don’t want to join the army. I don’t want to go to war.
I’d rather stay at home…’

Then, damn it, just as I was going to write this in my notebook, someone pushed past me to go to the loo. I lost the memory of the first song. It would not come back. I put my pen down, closed my eyes to take a snooze. But a few minutes later I am singing a hymn, which Mrs Thatcher also loves. (I mentioned her in one of my not good enough blogs yesterday.)

The first line is

‘Oh love that will not let me go, oh.’

I won’t bore you with anymore but on the train I sang it all the way through with all the enthusiasm of my late teens Methodist period.

As Eurostar gathered speed on the long journey across the plains of northern France, I had stopped thinking about the proposed book, and was considering how to make my blog more authentic. I wrote the proposed new title and the strap line at the top of this article. With one difference. The end was ‘exploration of earthy matters’. Was not happy with earthy, sounded too much like a hint that I was going to be rabbiting on about sex. Then two alternatives jumped into my mind almost simultaneously; ‘exploration of the earth’, and then ‘exploration of earthly matters’ I immediately saw that the latter definitely implied religion. Earthy suggested the Freudian unconscious, earthly matters echos the Christian distinction between the sublime and the mundane. ‘The earth’ sounded much more solid. It echoed my first attempt to explore the world through geography, which is part a science and part an art.

Somewhere on the Metro, a few stops after Odeon, when I was still writing in my notebook, I put down my pen and looked up. And actually arrived in France, at last. In front of me were two very French faces. A woman of about 18, in a bright red coat, out of which emerged a face of intense seriousness. She had a book in front of her and she was underlining passages, using a Waterman’s fountain pen loaded with green ink.

By her side was a woman in a cream anorak, whose face had an expression of even greater gravity. Her eyes seemed to be completely closed, but she was clearly awake, reading a tabloid newspaper with great concentration. It did not look like Liberation but it was probably something heavy. I was looking for a clue, but the only thing I saw clearly was when she turned over revealing a full-page ad for PC World. Perhaps it was a computer paper. I shall never know because she folded up the paper and got off at the next stop.

Suddenly I started to whistle, quite a shock, because I rarely whistle these days. It was the tune of ‘When this lousy war is over’. The unconscious was up to its tricks again. Telling me something that made me distrust everything I had written so far.

By the time we had got to our friend’s house, and my wife was keying in code on the front door, I was no longer sure that the book outline was quite right, nor that the proposed new front page blog heading was quite right. But I was starting to write this blog. Which I wanted to make a little more ‘authentic’ than the last one.

I had remembered that on Wednesday in an email to a young journalist, I had urged him to ‘follow his own imperative’, despite all the difficulties. I realised that still in what I am writing I am being distracted from that. Trying to do what a decent journalist should do. Trying to fit in with emerging ideas of what a decent blog should be. Trying to connect with an audience. And above all being afraid to choose ‘the road least travelled’.

Herve, our host, was talking at lunch about what is wrong with Agence France Presse, compared with how good it used to be. I share a lot of his views. But even while he was talking I realised that I have been an ‘ex-journalist’ ever since I started teaching full-time in 1976.

Quite what this means I shall not know until I write some more. The important thing is to allow this blog to evolve and not to cling on to the intentions I had for it when I started on 12 August. As Herve said, in French of course, ‘Demain is the first day of the rest of your life.’ My thought is that the truth of this old cliché rests on the fact that we are all a little different than we were yesterday, because we have been changed a little by what happened to us during the day.

More tomorrow, technology permitting.

…….. but I’m too tired to sing or dance.

I have written most of a blog, which I hope to post tomorrow.

Au revoir.

Last night I went in to the web to find out a bit more about Pirsig and how his book had been received. I found one review dated 1974 by the renowned philosopher, Professor George Steiner. It is a hatchet job that shows once again that academics do even better than journalists when they use their pens as weapons of mass destruction. The venom oozes from his pen.

Let me give you three examples.

Told by the blurb that we have here “one of the most unique and exciting books in the history of American letters,” one bridles both at the grammar of the claim and at its routine excess.

I have included the first quote for balance, because Steiner’s comment is fair. He is attacking the publishers, who did over-hype it. Frequently today’s publishers sell books as if they were just another product to make profits from on in our consumerist society. It makes me long for the days when people got their books from the lending library.

But there are pedestrian stretches, potted summaries of Kant which betray the aggressive certitudes of the self-taught man, misattributions (it was not Coleridge but Goethe who divided rational humanity into Platonists and Aristotelians).

The second quote starts a section in which Steiner brings in his big guns to shoot down the whole beat generation. It made me feel sorry for Steiner. Has he never experienced the exhilaration and soaring spirits you can feel on a bike on the open road? Even on a Bantam 125 cc. Even on a bicycle whizzing down one of these big hills on Salisbury plain and noticing out of the corner of your eye the stones of Stonehenge.

He dismisses the journey by pointing out that Kerouac and other beats had done it before, using the open road as a metaphor for getting away from the consumer society. But one of the reasons the book was so successful is that this metaphor is deep in the American psyche. The frontier spirit where the settlers moved steadily west and populated the vast empty plains of the mid-west. There are countless examples in American literature of novels that have used it. John Steinbeck is one that comes to mind. And one of the most popular American poems by Robert Frost, about ‘the road least travelled’ catches that spirit in a couple of lines.’

But there are pedestrian stretches, potted summaries of Kant which betray the aggressive certitudes of the self-taught man, misattributions (it was not Coleridge but Goethe who divided rational humanity into Platonists and Aristotelians).

The third paragraph is the clincher. It demolishes Pirsig’s attempts to understand academic philosophers like Kant and to relate their thinking to that of poets like Coleridge. Steiner’s demolition would have been totally OK if Pirsig had submitted the work as a thesis for a Ph D in Philosophy.

But he did not. He wrote a book, which was, as Tim Adams called in his Observer article about the ‘quest for meaning’. He wrote it (and this is me speaking not Adams) in the form of a novel, but what was in it was fact not fiction. It was Pirsig and his son on the motor bike, not two characters he had invented in his imagination.

Pirsig’s book is still in a cardboard box along with my diaries of those years. But my memory is pretty clear. Neither I, nor my friends in the organisational behaviour at the London Business School, found any ‘aggressive certitudes’ in the book. In fact, rather the opposite. We respected him for having the courage to write about his own confusion. And we thought that he was asking some of the most important questions of our time.

But the most moving parts of the book are those in which he allows some of the pain and suffering to come through. The quest for the meaning and the struggle to understand an academic subject are both inevitably painful sometimes. In Pirsig’s case it got him locked up in the loony bin and diagnosed as a catatonic schizophrenic. There is one paragraph about shock treatment in the Adams interview which reveals that pain far more vividly than anything I can remember from the book.

RP: Well they put a little rubber thing in your mouth and then they gave a drug like curare, used by South American Indians in their darts. It stops your lungs before it stops your mind. Before you go under you had a feeling like you were drowning. I woke up one time and I thought: ‘Where the hell am I?’ I had a feeling I was in my Aunt Flossie’s house, which I had liked as a child. I thought I must have passed out drunk. I started walking around; a nurse looked at me nervously. And a doctor came up, and he said: ‘Do you know who I am?’ So I just read his name on the little name tag. He did not realise that and it freaked him out. He said: ‘You are coming out of this really fast, too fast.’ [laughs]. You want to see real insanity, go to one of those places. This was after the 14th treatment I think.

He is talking over thirty years later and pain is still there but he manages to talk about it with a touch of humour.

It is this underlying pain that makes the Zen book different from what I can remember of other beat books and many New Age books. It does not promise you Nirvana.

Much of the power of the book comes from the zest of the American frontier spirit. Today not only all America, and most of the earth, but some of the universe, has been explored. The last great unknown territory is the country of the mind. And we need explorers of many kinds to help us understand it better; novelists and poets as much as scientists from many disciplines.

I think Pirsig wrote an important book which is still worth reading. He took one the ‘roads least travelled’. And I think he is a decent human being. If he ever comes to London I would like to shake his hand.

Did you notice the interview of Robert Persig by Tim Adams in Sunday’s Observer? I think it is the best example since Terry Coleman of the Big Interview article which gives the reader the full context. It reveals the questions that produced the responses by the interviewee. And in a style that is much more readable and revealing than the conventional question and answer format.

Even more interesting The Observer posted the full 9,000 word transcript of interview so that readers can judge for themselves issues like journalistic bias or quotes taken out of context. All journalism students should read it. The linkis are in my previous blog, Egg and the art of motorcycle maintenance.

It raised my curiousity as to what has Coleman has been doing since. According to the link to his agent he has been writing novels and controversial biographies of Nelson and Olivier. Curiosity impelled me further. Two reviews of the Olivier article popped up in Google. Christopher Sylvester in The Sunday Times thought it brilliant with lots of the stuff on his heterosexual love affairs. Anthony Holden rubbished it in The Observer His line was that because the biography was authorised by the family Colemen had censored the evidence of his several gay affairs, which Holden had revealed in his own earlier biography.

The question is did Coleman participate in a cover-up or were Holden’s contacts lying to him or guessing? Did Coleman ever reply?

This morning I woke up with another flow of ideas related to recent events, not religion. But when I came downstairs, I had to deal with money. Smile has just charged my wife £30 because she exceeded her £500 overdraft limit. And I was nearly up to my limit last month. The savings account is down to £2.17. And Paris is no longer as cheap as it used to be.

So top priority was selling the PEPs and ISAs bought in one of my rare attacks of financial prudence. It took forever. The first call was to Abbey National, head office, Number 221b Baker Street. Now trendily called Abbey. After going through the usual options I dialled 3 and got more messages. Finally a human being came on the line. All I wanted to do was to sell, not buy anything else, not have financial advice. Eventually she agreed to sell for me. She pressed some buttons on the computer and said:

‘Sorry. The computer is down. Call back in twenty minutes’. I called back in three quarters of an hour. Another voice told me: ‘Call back in half an hour.’ So I went on to the Legal & General, Scottish Widows and Egg,

They all told me much the same thing at interminable length. And sometimes I was transferred to another voice asking the same questions. I did manage to get a human response from Scottish Widows by telling them how much I loved their Scottish accent., because of my Edinburgh-born grandmother was.

The worst of the lot on the telephone was J. P. Morgan. Even after we had done the business, he still urged me to take advantage of their financial advisory service. Very politely, of course, because ‘this message is being recorded for training purposes’. I told him that I was a trained financial journalist who did not need advice.

That was not exactly true. I go for months without noticing whether the stock market is going up and down. I choose my investments for quite idiotic reasons.

I bought Scottish Widows because I was haunted by the image of the woman who has never aged in their ads. The nearest thing to the Mona Lisa that the advertising industry has come up with. I bought Legal & General, because I liked the jolly little multi-coloured umberella in their ads, such a contrast to their very sober name.

Egg is the internet arm of the Prudential, one of the oldest British insurance companies which owns that dignified red brick building in Holborn opposite the ghastly red and green glass building that the Daily Mirror built in the 1960s. What moved to me to buy was one of the favourite jokes of my childhood. Then their salesmen used to knock on the doors of the working classes and ask: ‘Is your mother in the Pru?’ ‘No’, said little Bobby, ‘She’s in the loo’. Sadly the old and new did not make a happy marriage. So in 2005 my investment was sold to Fidelity. Which meant I had to talk to both Egg and Fidelity!

Behind the J. P. Morgan investment is another tale of woe. I bought a Fleming PEP. Partly because they were one of the few British merchant banks which had not been taken over by the Germans, the Japanese or the Americans. But mainly because in the years of my naievity Richard Fleming impressed me as a very honest man, whose word really was his bond. Those visits helped to cure my naievity because his brother, Ian Fleming, used to lunch regularly at the bank And they told me that although James Bond is pure invention, Goldfinger was the spitting image of another regular attender at Fleming lunches. Fleming sold out to Morgan at the height of the big bang which and left me in the hands, J. P. Morgan, who was the gloomiest and most boring of all the Robber Barons..

It was nearly 4 PM when when I had dealt with that lot and rang Abbey again. Sorry. Computer still down. Try again tomorrow.

The day was nearly gone and, too tired to write any more, I sank into depression. I did not like anything I had written. None of it was quite right.

I checked my email and was briefly cheered by one from my Ph D student, who had found, at last, a photograph of the man who founded the Daily Telegraph in 1855. I smiled at the memory off him falling in love with my scooter and buying himself a Harley Davidson. Which he promptly fell off.

But still to tired and depressed to write anything else. So I went and put a pizza in the microwave. On top of the pile of newspapers on the kitchen table, was the unopened Observer Review, advertising a two page story inside based on an exclusive interview with the author of Zen on the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which is all about a ride on a Harley. I looked at the spread and my eye caught the quote in the right hand top corner. It was about the Buddha. More religion. Why does it not leave me alone?

But I did read it. It is very long and covers almost as many subjects as one my blogs. The journalist who wrote it, Tim Adams, revealed that he first read the book when he was 14. It is an example of good interviewing. It is not question and answer format. Tim reports what is going on in his mind, as well as his questions and the quotes from Robert Persig’s answers. It gives the reader something that he cannot get from radio or television. A ringside seat watching a dialogue between two minds. I think you will get something from it whether you have read the book or not even heard of it. You can also read the full transcript in three parts by clicking on Part One, then Part Two, then Part Three.

When I resumed the blog this morning I was in quite a different mood. So I wrote the following paragraph.

This book is not about religion. It is not about education. It is not about the wisdom that comes out the mouths of mad men. It is all about how to repair your motor bike.

I am going on to write down the stream of quotes that came into my mind, some remembered, some invented. They start with the one Tim chose about the Buddha.

The Buddha resides as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain.

If you meet the Buddha on the road, shoot him.

Freud’s greatest invention was the Freudian slip. But did he see the joke?

Teachers should not punish plagiarism. They should grade it. Top marks for the student who copies from the brilliant classmate. Zero for those who copy from the student talking rubbish.

Every great saying is only half true.

It’s not the motor bike that matters. It’s the motor cycling.

The best way to teach journalism is to let the students into the teacher’s secret. Skipping classes is good for you.

Workers of the world unite, you’ve nothing to lose but your jobs.

Henry Ford thought he had made the world safe for capitalism. What he did not know was that all those boring repetitive jobs on his production line freed the minds of the workers to plot the revolution while he was paying them.

If you can’t cry, you can’t laugh. If you can’t laugh, you can’t feel anything at all.

The camera never tells the truth.

Journalists always lie.

A cliché a day keeps the editor off your back.

Five million readers can be wrong.

The bomb is mightier than the pen.

Everything worth saying has been said before.

Out and Good Night.

Just in case some of you think I have gone on too much about God in the last few days, this is to let you know that my mind is already preparing itself for a long weekend in Paris starting next Friday. Long before I ever went there, Paris, for me represented one of the greatest days in the history of the world, back in 1789, when the people of Paris, rose up and in one blow, toppled the monarchy and knocked God off his perch.

Of course, my teachers told me that the French revolution, because it resulted first in rule by a succession of, what I would call agnostic fundamentalists, and then to the dictatorship of Napoleon, was evidence that violent revolution inevitably led to tyranny.

But as soon as I started to read the serious newspapers I noticed that the French of my youth, quite happily allowed their deputies to belong to religious political parties, so long as they did not try and get their Marxist opponents locked up in the Bastille. And that they had stayed firm to the revolutionary decision to keep God out of the state schools.

So the story of the French Revolution helped me to think for myself, and to challenge my teachers, and the preaching of the Daily Mail coming through my letter box.

My French friends are nearly all children of the secular tradition. If they were religious, they would insist on many Gods, including Descartes, Voltaire, Rousseau, Moliere, Flaubert, Sartres, Camus and Marcelle Marceau. They would also want some women, possibly Edif de Piaf, to provide the music, and Simone de Beauvoir, to keep all those rampant males in order.

Been thinking about the importance of following up stories, which is one of the things which I believe is very important in journalism. So here goes.

I am still surrounded by books in cardboard boxes, which I have to climb over even to get to the cupboard by the side of the piano which has files containing my bills, and inland revenue files, which I have to start looking at soon, because this is the time of year I have to do my tax return.

Negotiations with the insurance company and Camden Council proceeded satisfactorily but at a snail’s pace. The damp wall has been dried out and replastered and the decorartor was due to come back yesterday and finish off. But since it has been raining pretty well every day he could not come because the plaster has not yet dried out.

The importance of follow up stories I learnt not from journalism text books or newspaper editors, but from readers. Notably from Charles Jones, a Church of England vicar and lifelong reader of The Times.

It was his main criticism of the Rees-Mogg Times of the 1960s. Charles, because he was a fair-minded man and shrewd critic, would have applauded the Times present Religion correspondent, Ruth Gledhill, because she is very good at following up her stories, as well as breaking new ones. Even if she has to stay up half the night in order to write them, in the paper and on her blog.

But if he had read Ruth’s latest scoop, he would have been so blazingly angry that he would have been quite unable to speak. Ruth reports the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams as saying that the only thing that stops him becoming a Roman Catholic is the doctrine of Papal Infallibility.

Once he had cooled down, he would have laid the paper down on the table, and said to whoever was in the room, ‘What utter nonsense. The man has taken leave of his senses.’ With sadness, because Charles, no relation to me, was a real Celtic Jones, and would have been delighted to have a Welshman in Lambeth Palace and would have liked some of Williams’ views. Particularly that he does not share the evangelising fervour of Archbishop Carey.

Now I realise there is something serious to say on this subject. Today’s ’sermon’ was going to be a short ight-hearted story ready for the morning service.

The longer piece won’t be ready til Evensong. Ah well, that was always my favourite service, because it provided the opportunity of taking one of the girls on a walk over Bushbury Hill afterwards.

Which is what I felt tonight when I tried to close down my computer tonight after a half decent day’s work.

I got repeated messages, not from Spam, which I have leant how to deal with , but from a combined advertising message from three of the biggest and most respectable companies, Toshiba, Compaq and Gateway. I deleted the window but every time I tried to turn off the computer it came back. Writing this after the ninth attempt.

Why are no journalists complaining about this? Which is only one sign of how big companies are taking over the web, while the journalists yap on about the rise of the citizen’s journalism which is still very puny.

I shall have to pull the plug out of the socket. Oh well, at least that will be a contribution to halting climate change.