The Daily Novel

Quite suddenly, in the last few days, David Miliband has become a serious possible contender for the job of leading Labour into the next election. Which according to the pollsters is an election they are likely to lose.

The media coverage has escalated to an astonishing degree, even to me who has spent a lot of his life actually reading the newspapers. Miliband’s article for The Guardian last week, is now deconstructed as a plot by the Blairites of New Labour to overthrow the Brownites.

There is supposed to be a Milibandwagon. But none of the newspapers, working overtime managed to unearth any evidence of that. Most cabinet ministers and most party activists, when telephoned by journalists, warned of the danger of Labour changing its leader.

The Mail on Sunday, however, as I reported in yesterday’s blog, dredged up a Blair memo written nine months ago trashing Brown’s destruction of everything he had done for Britain and the British Labour Party.

The Mail reported that Miliband had had regular telephone conversations with Blair recently. The implication was that Miliband was wanting to overthrow Brown because he was reversing Blairism. The Mail gave no evidence of those conversations, let alone reporting what Blair and Miliband said to each other.

But if you read what Miliband actually said in his Guardian article it was not so much a complaint that Brown was not continuing the Blair path, it was the opposite.

Here is the key quote from The Guardian article.

Every member of the Labour party carries with them a simple guiding mission on the membership card: to put power, wealth and opportunity in the hands of the many, not the few.

Miliband is urging not that Brown be more like Blair. He is urging Labour to remember what it stands for as a politiccal party. His argument against Brown, who had solid Labour roots is not that he is reversing Blair’s policies, but that he is following them.

And Brown, like Blair before him, is totally ignoring the effect of their policies, jointly decided. Their joint rule hugely increased the inequalities of wealth and priviledge. Since Tony Blair came to power in 1997 the personal wealth held by the top 10 per cent of the population has swelled from 47 per cent to 54 per cent. This is a huge increase.

And now Britain, like the US is facing a recession, it is an obscenity for a Labour leader not to make a serious attempt to revserse this trend.

Milband, in his Guardian article, is suggesting Newer Labour needs to address this.

But of course the myth of Blair/Brownism is that Labour can only become electable if it cowtows to the fat cats with their ever increasing salaries. Miliband is challenging that myth.

In doing this he is in a somewhat similar position to Margaret Thatcher, when she ousted Ted Heath as Conservative Party leader. She won, not because of a plot. Although she had some close friends like Sir Keith Joseph and the far right Institute of Economic Affairs, she was essentially going on her own instincts. She refused to believe that Conservatives who embraced the bloody, survival of the fittest, capitalist policies, were unelectable. And she was proved right.

For a few years.

Today, we are faced with a mirror image of the Thatcher era. The notion that Labour is unelectable, unless it allows the greedy to earn huge salaries and get away with not paying tax on them.

Miliband is, maybe, challenging this myth.

I say, maybe, because I have not actually met him.

I cannot be sure that his is challenging what is happening for the right reasons.

But I do know enough to realise that much of the media stuff written about him is tosh.

He got into Oxford, so they say, because of influence. He had two D levels in his A levels.

This says a whole lot about our examination system.

Because it is evident to anyone who has listened to him, or read any of his speeches, that he is far more intelligent than the average.

He was schooled not at Eton, ilke David Cameron, but at Haverstock School, which was supposed to provide a brilliant education for whoever who went there, be they working class Irish immigrants, or sons and daughters of the intellectuals in the neighbourhood.

Since it was in my neighbourhood, I know it well. It was in no sense a bad school, but it was not orchestrated to seeing ‘good’ education as getting the largest percentage into university.

So I am awaiting to see Miliband shapes out. It is obivous to me, that he is vastly more intelligent than the average.

My qualification about him has been that most of what he writes and says is far too cerebal. In the language of the posh folks he met at Oxford.

It is unsurprising that he is cerebal, since his Dad was a noted Marxist philosopher. Not old Labour or new Labour, but someone who had studied Karl Marx and found that some of what he had to say was relevent to the world in which we live now, although Marx died before the Daily Mail’s Northcliffe, and Pulitzer and Hertz in the US had invented the mass media.

So if Miliband does go forward I will be looking at his education policies.

Blair and Brown have been pushing people into Academies dominated by wealthy businessmen. So that they can balance the budget and avoid the unpopular policies af asking for more taxes, from the rich and the not so rich.

Because in the idiot world in which we live, the super rich pay less tax than the middle classes.

According to Toynbee and Walker at least 32 of the UK 54 billionaires paid NO TAX AT ALL.

This blog reflects my rage about the computer age which has happened during my lifetime.

I totally failed to to get on my website, my video clip of the Riverside Jazzers, who do not have a web site, though they play very decent jazz.

Which is a great pity. Because, jazz was the music of protest, by America’s blacks, born into a country which said any humble citizen could inhabit the White House. (even a black!).

But their daily reality was very different. Most blacks found it not easy to earn enough to live, let alone give their children a decent education. But Louis Armstrong and Ellah Fitzgerald, and many others, showed what the blacks could do.

In August, 2008, this is for the first time a realistic possibility. Barack Obama may become President next November.

But that is by no means certain. And America is not yet sure that it wants to take the risk. Because in America the power is held by whites not blacks.

It should not make a difference.

But it does.

Arrived in our London flat to find no fewer than 19 letters from BT reminding us of the total now overdue of £126.50 all posted in the first few days of July. The mind boggles.

As long-standing readers of this blog will know this money is the accumulation of monthly phone rentals for the phone in our flat which we moved into an August 1st last year, when we sold our house in the next street. BT were supposed to transfer our old number, which we had had for 39 years, to the new flat. They failed. But early in September they connected the line to an entirely different number, much to the irritation of a Gospel Oak neighbour whose number it had been for 17 years, and who suddenly found that HIS phone had gone dead.

Phone calls from him and us managed to reverse that. And BT assured me that they would now connect my old number. They didn’t.

By this time I had spent about fifty pounds in mobile phone bills together with emails. At this point I decided that I was wasting far too much time, so I cancelled my order by email. To my astonishment BT then started to send me bills for the telephone on my old number, asking me for the monthly rental.

Inside the flat the phone is totally dead. But if you ring from outside it rings as if it is connected for a long time, and then stops: not even a message saying you have dialled an incorrect number.

At this point I wrote to my contacts and told them I was going to use my mobile in London and that they should scrub my old London number out of their address books.

I wrote two or three blogs on this last Autumn and even alerted the BT press officer suggest he get BT’s new chairman, Sir Michael Rake, to do something.

To no avail. BT continues to send reminders by post. Apparently they don’t take any account of phone calls or read their email. Instead they spend the shareholders’ money on snail mail.

This is a real irony. Because when the Post Office was privitised BT took all rich profit prospects whereas the loss making mail remained a separate entity.

So perhaps Sir Michael Rake and all the other highly paid BT men have been stricken by bad conscience and are deliberately paying out money to the poor postmen.

Or, perhaps, they are just grossly inefficient.

BT’s letters are putting money into the Pos

Only the day after hundreds of young people marched through North London in protest at the knife murder of Ben Kinsinella in a favourite partying area between King’s Cross and Camden Town, there has been an even more horrific murder of two French students at New Cross in South London. Laurent Bonomo had 194 stab wounds and his colleague, Gabriel Ferez, had 47 injuries. Both students were here on an exchange programme to do post-graduate research at Imperial College.

As yet the police have no idea who killed the two French students. Kinsinella was the 17th teenager to be killed by a knife attack in London this year. His murder resulted in a spate of articles about the propensity of today’s youth’s to carry knives for their nights out. The murder of the two French students is particularly poignant, because they were both the kind of people which gives oldies like me hope for the rising generation. Both were aged 23, not using their considerable intelligence to make a fortune in the city. But, at aged 23, they were not mesmerised by the chase for wealth to buy the many seductive products of our generation. Bonomo was studying a parasite which can spread from cats to human foetuses, the kind of thing that is a danger to us all in this era of mass travel where such things can travel around the world in weeks. Ferez was working on using bacteria to create ethanol for use as fuel, doing his bit to stave off global warming.

There is clearly a problem that needs to be addressed by the new Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, and the rest of us. But just how serious it is, and how much worse it is today, than it was when I first came to London in 1955, is not yet clear. The rest of this blog seeks to put it in perspective.

The scene of the Kinsinella killing is a few hundred yards from Gospel Oak where I lived for over forty years. Both of my daughters partied there, and at Camden Lock, and managed to survive, despite the presence of the drug dealers and the gangs. I also know the New Cross area, another tough inner London area where the gangs of the 1950s ruled the territory. But where Goldsmiths University, flourished and made a notable contribution in providing a very good education for thousands of students, including a large number of blacks. I have had many friends amongst the teachers and the students and some of my white middle class neighbours sent their children there without them coming to any harm.

I also taught daily for 27 years at City University, London, near the Angel. This, like King’s Cross and New Cross, was a tough inner city area, where gangs were extremely powerful. It had several pubs ruled by skin heads whose idea of a good time was beating up blacks. They mostly used their fists and boots. But what is truly remarkable is that only a tiny minority of City students came to any harm. Although City had a huge percentage of coloured students, from overseas and from the immigrant populations of the UK.

The punch-ups were not widely reported in the press. It was certainly not news in the 1980s, let alone the 1960s, that people got beaten up in pubs is such areas. Which have always attracted a criminal element, seeking to enlist newcomers to the area into prostitution or thieving. Just as it was in the time of Charles Dickens.

What is truly amazing is that all three of these areas have hosted thousands of students in the last thirty years and that mostly those students have not been mugged, or knifed. They have even managed to find the tranquillity to study. And, of course, combining that with many opportunities to let off steam by partying.

These inner city areas have been reclaimed for their law-abiding inhabitants. There are no such powerful gangs as the Kray Brothers, whose nastiness was quite equal to whoever killed the two French students. And, who despite their obvious wickedness, managed to mix socially with British ministers and friends of Winston S. Churchill, like Bob Boothby.

These areas of London are SAFER than they used to be.

At a buffet supper last night I ate my meal perched at a small circular table with two men whom I had just met. I will call them Harry and Jim. Harry and I were doing most of the talking, mostly about the joys and problems of living in the beautiful coastal village of Eype a few miles east of Charmouth, which all three of us knew and liked. But Harry had actually taken the plunge and bought a beautiful old house there. He loves it, as well he might. It is little different than it was one hundred years ago and not much different than it was two hundred years ago. It has escaped the developers. No 1930s bungalows. No glass palaces built by the seriously rich which you find up the hill in Charmouth. And, as Harry was quick to point out, he is only a short walk from the one and only pub.

Tranquillity indeed.

But for any incoming twenty-first century townie there are some practical problems. No shops. So to get any food which you don’t grow in your garden, or to buy a daily newspaper, you have to drive to Bridport. Not very far. But it can a take a long time in the season, because the lanes to the A35 are narrow, and you have to reverse to a passing place because of the tourists wanting to get in and have a few hours of this tranquillity.

Jim had said very little. I knew from what he had said that it was not because he was not interested in the subject matter, because, from what he had said, he was interested in the subject matter. Which was basically about what people do when they retire. All three of us had lived lives constrained by the economic needs of earning a living and providing for families. All three of us had decided that after retirement they would try something different. Against the advice of most of the retirement manuals, which warn people against moving away from friends and neighbourhoods they know well, to an idyllic spot of their dreams.

We were three retired folk talking about our present, but also relating it to our past. But as we explored our past we found that there was a considerable difference in our ages. Not surprisingly because I did not finally retire until I was 73, and then only reluctantly. Whereas both of my supper table friends had taken early retirement.

In the street in which I now live in Charmouth there are quite a few retired people (as there are in the street in London, from whence I came). And retired folk, as we all know, when they get together bask in shared memories of the past. That is certainly how it was in my father’s time, when nearly everyone, apart from a few company chairmen I had to interview at age 91, retired at aged 65.

Today’s world in Britain, let alone the rest of the world is radically different.

So in the street in which I now live I am probably the possibly the only person only finally retired until the ripe old age of 73. But amongst the people living in my street whom I have actually met, there is a an international company executive who retired aged 46, because by that time he qualified for a full pension, because he had spent much of his life working in places like the tropical rain forests, which most managers are not that keen on. And another who retired from ill health aged 45 from a fire brigade because his heart had murmured in protest as he climbed the ladders rescuing all those people from blazing buildings.

So in Britain 2008 there is a possible difference of 28 years in the ages of ‘retired folk’. More than a generation.

In my new neighbourhood I have also met people who have moved here while still raising young families. Two particularly. Both of them told me that they had moved here from metropolitan towns for ‘quality of life’ factors, much to do with their feelings about bringing up their children somewhere where they could swim in the sea and walk the hills. The wonders of computers and the internet make it entirely possible for many professionals to live in a place like Dorset, which boasts it does not have a motorway in the county, and still earn a living in the mainstream.

So the world is changing and not entirely for the worst.

Back to the supper table. When I turned my attention to Jim and asked him a question he said, ‘What did you say?’, he replied ‘What did you say?’. So I then asked if he was hard of hearing.

In his ears he had two of the latest digital hearing aides. Which were of course were quite invisible to the rest of us because, unlike the old fashioned ear trumpet, which was a signal that the person using it was deaf, the modern hearing aid conceals the disability, in contrast to the white stick and black glasses of the blind.

So I then spent some time with Jim urging him to read the latest novel by David Lodge, which I have just read because my eldest daughter got Amazon to send it to me on Father’s Day. It is quite the most insightful book I have read about being deaf that I have read. But since it is a novel it is not just about deafness. It says quite a lot about the subject of this blog; about what professional men do in our society when they grow older and realise that they can make some choices about what they do in the rest of their lives.

And though Lodge deals with two pretty heavy subjects his narrative is punctuated with his substantial wit, which raises laughs from youngish women who hear perfectly as well as oldish deaf men.

But in part two of this blog I will set out some reasons why every person who is ‘hard of hearing’ and every person who has a partner or close relative or friend who is so impaired, should read it.

While I was reading the book I wondered whether it was a work of the imagination and research. Or whether it was based on his own personal experience. I did not find the answer until after I had read the last page of the novel.

Because, contrary to usual publishing practice Lodge has put a section at the end called ‘Acknowledgments’ which according to usual publishing practice is at the beginning. The first sentence reads:

‘The narrator’s deafness and his Dad have their sources in my own experience, but the other characters in this novel are fictional creations….’

Fans of Lodge, who love his wit and humour will not be disappointed with his novel. But for those who are deaf, or who have a spouse who is deaf, this novel might transform their lives.

I will attempt to explain why in my next blog. Which will be written whenever. Because tomorrow I am due to commune with the New Zealand branch of my wife’s family on one of their much treasured visits to the home country.

Meanwhile the reference is:

Deaf Sentence. By David Lodge. Harvill Secker, London. List Price: £17.99. And worth every penny. Deaf Sentence: Part one

At a buffet supper last night I ate my meal perched at a small circular table with two men whom I had just met. I will call them Harry and Jim. Harry and I were doing most of the talking, mostly about the joys and problems of living in the beautiful coastal village of Eype a few miles east of Charmouth, which all three of us knew and liked. But Harry had actually taken the plunge and bought a beautiful old house there. He loves it, as well he might. It is little different than it was one hundred years ago and not much different than it was two hundred years ago. It has escaped the developers. No 1930s bungalows. No glass palaces built by the seriously rich which you find up the hill in Charmouth. And, as Harry was quick to point out, he is only a short walk from the one and only pub.

Tranquillity indeed.

But for any incoming twenty-first century townie there are some practical problems. No shops. So to get any food which you don’t grow in your garden, or to buy a daily newspaper, you have to drive to Bridport. Not very far. But it can a take a long time in the season, because the lanes to the A35 are narrow, and you have to reverse to a passing place because of the tourists wanting to get in and have a few hours of this tranquillity.

Jim had said very little. I knew from what he had said that it was not because he was not interested in the subject matter, because, from what he had said, he was interested in the subject matter. Which was basically about what people do when they retire. All three of us had lived lives constrained by the economic needs of earning a living and providing for families. All three of us had decided that after retirement they would try something different. Against the advice of most of the retirement manuals, which warn people against moving away from friends and neighbourhoods they know well, to an idyllic spot of their dreams.

We were three retired folk talking about our present, but also relating it to our past. But as we explored our past we found that there was a considerable difference in our ages. Not surprisingly because I did not finally retire until I was 73, and then only reluctantly. Whereas both of my supper table friends had taken early retirement.

In the street in which I now live in Charmouth there are quite a few retired people (as there are in the street in London, from whence I came). And retired folk, as we all know, when they get together bask in shared memories of the past. That is certainly how it was in my father’s time, when nearly everyone, apart from a few company chairmen I had to interview at age 91, retired at aged 65.

Today’s world in Britain, let alone the rest of the world is radically different.

So in the street in which I now live I am probably the possibly the only person only finally retired until the ripe old age of 73. But amongst the people living in my street whom I have actually met, there is a an international company executive who retired aged 46, because by that time he qualified for a full pension, because he had spent much of his life working in places like the tropical rain forests, which most managers are not that keen on. And another who retired from ill health aged 45 from a fire brigade because his heart had murmured in protest as he climbed the ladders rescuing all those people from blazing buildings.

So in Britain 2008 there is a possible difference of 28 years in the ages of ‘retired folk’. More than a generation.

In my new neighbourhood I have also met people who have moved here while still raising young families. Two particularly. Both of them told me that they had moved here from metropolitan towns for ‘quality of life’ factors, much to do with their feelings about bringing up their children somewhere where they could swim in the sea and walk the hills. The wonders of computers and the internet make it entirely possible for many professionals to live in a place like Dorset, which boasts it does not have a motorway in the county, and still earn a living in the mainstream.

So the world is changing and not entirely for the worst.

Back to the supper table. When I turned my attention to Jim and asked him a question he said, ‘What did you say?’, he replied ‘What did you say?’. So I then asked if he was hard of hearing.

In his ears he had two of the latest digital hearing aides. Which were of course were quite invisible to the rest of us because, unlike the old fashioned ear trumpet, which was a signal that the person using it was deaf, the modern hearing aid conceals the disability, in contrast to the white stick and black glasses of the blind.

So I then spent some time with Jim urging him to read the latest novel by David Lodge, which I have just read because my eldest daughter got Amazon to send it to me on Father’s Day. It is quite the most insightful book I have read about being deaf that I have read. But since it is a novel it is not just about deafness. It says quite a lot about the subject of this blog; about what professional men do in our society when they grow older and realise that they can make some choices about what they do in the rest of their lives.

And though Lodge deals with two pretty heavy subjects his narrative is punctuated with his substantial wit, which raises laughs from youngish women who hear perfectly as well as oldish deaf men.

But in part two of this blog I will set out some reasons why every person who is ‘hard of hearing’ and every person who has a partner or close relative or friend who is so impaired, should read it.

While I was reading the book I wondered whether it was a work of the imagination and research. Or whether it was based on his own personal experience. I did not find the answer until after I had read the last page of the novel.

Because, contrary to usual publishing practice Lodge has put a section at the end called ‘Acknowledgments’ which according to usual publishing practice is at the beginning. The first sentence reads:

‘The narrator’s deafness and his Dad have their sources in my own experience, but the other characters in this novel are fictional creations….’

Fans of Lodge, who love his wit and humour will not be disappointed with his novel. But for those who are deaf, or who have a spouse who is deaf, this novel might transform their lives.

I will attempt to explain why in my next blog. Which will be written whenever. Because tomorrow I am due to commune with the New Zealand branch of my wife’s family on one of their much treasured visits to the home country.

Meanwhile the reference is:

Deaf Sentence. By David Lodge. Harvill Secker, London. List Price: £17.99. And worth every penny.

David Davis’s attempt to provoke a national debate about the erosion of Britain’s civil liberties using the way Prime Minister Gordon Brown steered his controversial 42-day-detension bill through the House of Commons, turned to farce today. Downing Street has been telling journalists that Labour will follow the Liberal Democrats, who have already announced that they will not fight the by-election, which Davis has provoked by his resignation.

But Rupert Murdoch, the Australian, turned American citizen, has decided that the interests of British democracy are best served if Davis does get the fight he is looking forward. He is encouraging his own champion to stand and put the case for the 42-day-detension bill.

He is sending into battle one of his most trusted men, Kelvin MacKenzie, who was editor of The Sun, when in the days when it established a new high in British daily newspaper circulations and a new low in British popular journalism standards. MacKenzie later went on to adapt his popular journalism to television, introducing the much-ridiculed news bunny.

It is a quite astonishing development which demonstrates the old saw, ‘you couldn’t make it up. Since MacKenzie has declared his intentions on the BBC Radio Four Today programme there is no doubt that the story is not journalistic invention. Sun journalists have been known to invent quotes, when they could not find real people to voice the opinions they were seeking.

But MacKenzie in this instance was the news.

I still doubt, however, whether Rupert Murdoch will follow this one through. For Britain’s most powerful media tycoon to fund a parliamentary candidate in this way is gift to all those who question whether the free press in Britain is served by so much media control in the hands of one family.

And think how this will play in the US, which is gearing up for the Presidential election. This week Fox News, Murdoch’s US television channel, was forced to suspend one of their lead presenters because of offensive racist jokes about Barack Obama. Murdoch now also owns the Wall Street Journalism, which is traditionally Republican. But the New York Post, the leading popular newspaper in New York City, now owned by Murdoch, is traditionally Democrat.

Recently, as reported here, Murdoch lavished praise on Obama, though stopping short of endorsing him. His daughter, Elisabeth, hosted a fund-raising dinner in London last month for Obama.

But now that the Presidential battle is a straight fight between Obama and McCain, Murdoch must be seriously worried about his left-wing sympathies. McCain’s personal views are much closer to Murdoch’s. But, temperamentally, Murdoch, although he is now an old man, tends to prefer the young thrusters.

My view remains that if Murdoch thinks Obama is going to win, he will offer his support, as he did so often with Blair, in the hope that he can influence him in the direction of his own business interests and political preferences.

And I think, that he may well have second thoughts about funding his former editor as a candidate in a British election. That is not going to do his credibility in the US any good at all.

Indeed it might cause Americans to start crusading against media barons with ‘power without responsibisty’

Murdoch watchers will find ample food for conjecture in the coverage by the London Times Online of last night’s victory by Obama. The splash proclaims ‘Barack Obama seizes moment in history.’ There is a major analysis article by the chief American correspondent, Gerald Baker. It contains much praise for Obama, including this paragraph:

‘So it is a testament to his extraordinary political skills, his stirring oratory and, above all, the change represented by his eloquent calls for an end to partisanship, his relative youth and, yes, his skin colour. He brilliantly channelled opposition to the war in Iraq — having been one of the few Democrats courageous enough to oppose it in the first place — and ended up winning not only almost the entire black Democratic vote, but breaking the colour bar and gaining enough — just — of the white vote to win the nomination.’

But Baker also emphasises the difficulties Obama faces. He begins by saying that the American dream that anyone can become President is balderdash. Reminding readers that the 42 white Presidents have all been white males. And that the first serious female contender, Hillary Clinton, has just been defeated despite her vast experience and huge party support.

He goes on to note how many contenders from minority groups have failed:

‘A word of caution is in order on this historic day. Mr Obama will be well aware that the pioneers of ethnic, religious or gender presidential equality rarely make it all the way to the White House. The first Roman Catholic to win a party’s nomination was Al Smith in 1928. But no Catholic was elected president until John F. Kennedy 32 years later. The first woman to appear on a presidential ticket was Geraldine Ferraro for vice-president in 1984. But 24 years later, as Hillary Clinton would acidly note, no woman has been elected president. The first Jewish candidate was vice-presidential nominee Joseph Lieberman in 2000. But he lost, too.’

The leading article manages to face both ways as well. It has an enthusiastic start, signalled by the sub-head:

‘The senator has reawakened admiration for the land of opportunity’

And then this paragraph:

‘Such questions have been answered by Barack Obama in a way that has already rekindled America’s faith in its prodigious powers of reinvention - and the world’s admiration for America. He could still lose the White House to John McCain. It has been a bruising journey from the Iowa caucuses to Minneapolis, where he staked his claim last night to the Democratic nomination. But today at least the tide of history seems to be with him. Win or lose in November, he will have gone farther than anyone in history to bury the toxic enmity that fuelled America’s civil war and has haunted it ever since.’

But the concluding paragraph has the unmistakeable sound of the boot being put in, albeit tentatively:

‘For a generation, the politics of America has been commodified by pollsters and analysts. Its political landscape has been minutely mapped; its new online constituencies targeted by “dog whistles” and YouTube narrowcasts. Mr Obama has torn up much of these analysts’ conventional wisdom with what he calls the audacity of hope. For what? His promises of unity and change are vague. His critics say that the ranting of his former pastor shows them also to be empty. But he has survived such claims, and may be tougher for it. His Republican opponent, “too tough to die”, embodies many strengths that Mr Obama can only applaud. But he has his own. The epic continues. Act II starts now.’

Now much of these two articles I might have written myself for The Times when it was owned by Lord Thomson. But unlike Thomson Murdoch expects his editors to toe the line and advocate the policies he wants. Two weeks ago Murdoch’s daughter hosted a fund-raising party in her Nottng Hill house for 200 of Obama’s London supporters. Last week Murdoch himself heaped lavish praise on Obama in a speech in New York.

But he stopped short of endorsing his canditure.

There is no doubt that Murdoch is signalling his willingness to be courted by Obama, and on his past record Murdoch is entirely capable of supporting a left-of-centre leader, if that leader responds to some of Murdoch’s right-of-centre wishes.

And make no mistake he is in a very strong position to influence this vital election, which is still wide open. Had I been writing The Times leader today I would have also emphasised that Jack Kennedy despite his eloquence and all his powerful media connections and the fact that the US was ready then for a change from the Republican administration of the ageing Eisenhower and his Vice President Richard Nixon, Kennedy only won by the narrowest of margins.

Murdoch owns one of the three leading American television news networks, which usually follows the Republican line, as does the Wall St Journal, which Murdoch has just bought. Murdoch also owns the New York Post, a popular paper which for most of its history has supported the Democrats. The combined efforts of these three media are very powerful artillery for the battles ahead.

The recent election for the mayor of London has demonstrated how a sustained campaign by just one influential newspaper, the London Evening Standard, can swing a campaign. Arguably it was the Standard (owned by Lord Rothermere’s Daily Mail group) which won it for Boris Johnson. The Standard had several stories a day attacking Ken Livingstone, and some of them unearthed possible corruption which led to the resignation shortly before the election of Ken Livingstone’s number two and long-established friend.

Murdoch will not scream as loudly as the Standard, but you can bet your bottom dollar that his aides are already talking to aides of Obama and McCain. And that Murdoch will also be speaking with his silvery tongue to both men. But one of these men is going to get a blast from one of Murdoch’s big guns in the very near future.

Woke up this morning realising that I have not written a blog since a week yesterday. Partly due to the fact that the grandchildren have been visiting, and as my headline indicates I have been spending some time talking to them. As well as knocking down an ugly veranda at my house which none of the family liked.

But I have also been making a serious effort to learn more about computing and particularly the program I use to deliver this blog, WordPress. Amongst other things I have been reading the works of Lorelle vanFossen, who seems to be the Madonna of the WordPress world. She tells me in her latest
blog

that ‘A clear purpose will make or break your blog’. She has convinced me that I am doing everything wrong and that I should order her book from Amazon without delay. Here is this blogger who has been writing recently about anorexia, about which he knows little; the Lyme Regis landslip with pics; why Gordon Brown should be replaced by a leader in waiting; what Cherie Blair revealed in her book; the Obama/Clinton contest; and, some rather technical stuff about computer problems, WordPress and its attempt to mount the first

UK WordCamp
in Birmingham.

No clear purpose in that lot.
So I have decided to use this headline as the sub-head of The Daily Novel blog until I feel less depressed.

In the pursuit of research for a blog I will write in a few days, I spent several hours tonight reading the auto-biography of a woman who has suffered from anorexia. I went on reading, not because I have a consuming interest in the subject, but because of her compelling honesty. And because she was telling me about a world I could not easily inhabit. Foreign territory.

Because I am, thanks to my genes, a rather thin person. So I will never become fat, however much I patronise the fish and chip shops of my youth, or the burger bars of the present.

But in reading what she had to say, I was jolted into an awareness of how much her problems were the result of politics. Nothng to do with her genetics.

But quite simply to do with the dominant culture, which suggests that women will not get a man if they are ‘fat’. This myth pervades our culture, including the only serious left-wing publication in Britain - the Guardian/Observer, whose models on the style pages are not at all anorexic. But they are never, repeat never, fat.

Anorexics, who are nearly all women, have problems, because they can only be ‘not fat’ if they deny their own being. They want to eat and enjoy all the good things in life, which makes American consumer capitalism so popular.

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American consumer capitalism is male-dominated. And males, as the Greeks told us, are nervous af big women who swallow them.

It is the male fear of the big female, which dominates.

So the current fashion is for females so thin that they do not have any physical characteristics, which are threatening to the male.

They do not have breasts the size of those of Marilynn Monroe. And they have hips so slim that they would crack upon any vigorous interchange.

The rain that blighted much of Britain’s Bank Holiday left Lyme Bay alone during daylight hours. The sun broke through the cloud to lighten the riverside walk at Dartmouth yesterday afternoon. The beach at Charmouth has been crowded all day, and there were still a few enjoying the late evening sunshine when I took the picture below just now. Those who stayed home after listening to the weather forecast missed out.