THURSDAY BACKTRACK: Music and news from 60 years ago - week ending 24 February 1962

At #5 is Leroy Vandyke with 'Walk On By':

Giles cartoon for this week: The first American in space

(See 20 February below for details of John Glenn's historic spaceflight)

Some memorable events (via Wikipedia):

18 February: 'Two pilots of the French Air Force, described as "renegades", defied orders, broke away from a routine mission over French Algeria, flew their planes across the border into Morocco, and then attacked a rebel camp in the city of Oujda with rockets and machine gun fire. The two, believed to be members of the Organisation Armée Secrète, then flew their planes to Saïda, Algeria, landed, and deserted.'

20 February: 'The United States placed an astronaut into orbit for the first time, as John Glenn was sent aloft from Cape Canaveral aboard on third Project Mercury mission, in the space capsule Friendship 7. Glenn was launched at 9:47 a.m. local time and attained orbit 12 minutes later. After three circuits of the Earth, Glenn left orbit at 2:20 p.m., landed in the Atlantic Ocean at 2:43, and was recovered by the destroyer U.S.S. Noa at 3:04. Glenn, the first American astronaut, returned to outer space on October 29, 1998, at the age of 77, becoming the oldest man to orbit the Earth.'

21 February: 'Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev first danced together, in a Royal Ballet performance of Giselle at Covent Garden in London, creating one of the greatest partnerships in the history of dance. Nureyev had defected from the U.S.S.R. almost eight months earlier on June 16, 1961. He and Fonteyn received 23 curtain calls from the audience.'

    'On the day after John Glenn's historic flight, Soviet Premier Khrushchev sent a telegram to U.S. President Kennedy, proposing that the two nations co-operate on their space program. The first joint venture took place in 1975.'

22 February: 'Pope John XXIII signed Veterum sapientia ("Ancient Wisdom") as an apostolic constitution, the highest possible papal decree. The declaration, published the next day, directed that Roman Catholic seminary students should not only be instructed on the use of the Latin language, but that lectures should be given in Latin, "a bond of unity between the Christian peoples of Europe". The Pope also prohibited priests from arguing against the use of Latin, and created an institute to create new words in Contemporary Latin to keep it apace of modern developments. In 1963, the second Vatican council approved an order retaining Latin for specific rituals, but native languages for most other purposes.'

23 February: 'Astronaut John Glenn arrived in Cape Canaveral to a hero's welcome and was reunited with his family for the first time since before going into space. U.S. President John F. Kennedy, for whom Cape Canaveral was renamed during the 1960s, greeted Glenn and personally awarded him the NASA Special Services Medal. Kennedy praised Glenn for "professional skill, unflinching courage and extraordinary ability to perform a most difficult task under physical stress." It was then that Glenn revealed in an interview that the heat shield on his capsule began to break up upon re-entry, the loss of which would have been fatal. Glenn calmly said, "it could have been a bad day for everybody."'

24 February: 'The United States government began its first telephone and television transmissions via satellite, bouncing signals off of Echo 1, which had been launched on August 12, 1960.'

UK chart hits, week ending 24 February 1962 (tracks in italics have been featured previously)

Htp: Clint's labour-of love compilation https://www.sixtiescity.net/charts/61chart.htm

Ukraine: do we need the War Game? by Sackerson

I don’t know whether the Stop The War Coalition are or contain fifth columnists, as Iain Dale asserts https://www.iaindale.com/articles/why-i-accuse-the-stop-the-war-coalition-of-containing-fifth-columnists , though when he says he has ‘lost patience’ he reminds me of a certain testy old US President. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7chQfQ67SM I like Mr Dale’s output generally but I suppose that blogpost is another sign that we are entering Stage Three of ‘groupthink’ https://www.amazon.co.uk/Groupthink-Study-Delusion-Christopher-Booker/dp/1472959051 , where alternative voices are to be bullied and shut down.

In this context the Daily Mail is to be commended for going ahead and publishing Peter Hitchens’ article https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-10540829/PETER-HITCHENS-blame-arrogant-foolish-West-Ukraine-crisis.html castigating the West for its arrogance and folly in continuing to treat Russia as an enemy after the fall of Communism; though even the mighty Mail feels compelled to push it back into page 13 of the print edition and label it ‘A personal viewpoint.’ Somehow one senses masks and disposable gloves.

If you rely on the mass media you could be forgiven for thinking that Russia’s tanks and troops are already rolling into the Donbass; not so, according to a well-connected blogger https://therealslog.com/2022/02/23/exclusive-no-putin-invasion-of-ukraine/ who quotes a French diplomat as saying to him (Tuesday 22 Feb):

‘It is now clear that there have been Russian peacekeeping troops in the Donbass for at least five years. Their presence there has been maintained. Putin has signed a decree allowing for further troops to go there, but there is no NATO evidence as yet that any new troops have arrived.’

On the other hand, as The Independent reported back in December https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/russia-ukraine-army-donbass-troops-b1967532.html , Ukraine by then had already positioned half its army on the other side of the conflict zone – some 125,000 troops. One wonders how one of the poorest countries in Europe https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/gdp-per-capita-ppp?continent=europe can afford to maintain a standing army a quarter-million strong and bombard its eastern populace for seven years rather than implement the Minsk Protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minsk_agreements#Minsk_Protocol to split the country into autonomous regions. We could do with some quality mainstream journalism.

Speaking of the latter, as tensions mount it is disappointing to hear from the recently-freed Craig Murray https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2022/02/ukraine-where-to-find-the-truth-in-enormous-detail/ (appeal against alleged miscarriage of Scottish justice ongoing) that the independent team of observers known as OSCE, specified in the same Protocol, has just been abandoned by the USA, UK and Canada, three Western members of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes , at the time when they are most needed. OSCE was not allowed to access the site of the kindergarten shelled last week, allegedly a false flag attack by the eastern Ukrainians themselves, though according to another independent journalist, the intrepid Eve Bartlett, the munition was fired from an ‘American M141 bunker-type grenade launcher’ from the west. https://ingaza.wordpress.com/2022/02/18/ukraine-appears-to-have-staged-a-kindergarden-attack-to-cover-its-crimes-fuel-anti-donbass-propaganda/  

Doubtless there are several drivers behind these murky goings-on. One will be Russian politics post the Soviet collapse, which will have left many Russians suddenly finding themselves effectively stranded in countries no longer part of the communist empire. President Putin’s rewritten Constitution in 2020 empowers Russia to defend its citizens abroad https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/belarusalert/putins-new-constitution-spells-out-modern-russias-imperial-ambitions/ ; at the risk of attracting Mr Dale’s ire I might cite Britain’s similar approach in the past – the War of Jenkins' Ear https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_Jenkins%27_Ear , the robust defence of the Falkland Islanders ( who were technically not even British citizens https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Nationality_(Falkland_Islands)_Act_1983 ) and so on. We remain to be convinced that Putin simply has a plan for European domination; past history shows the traffic has sometimes been the other way.

Another factor is the longstanding US/NATO policy of Russian containment, first urged by George Kennan in 1946. https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/116178.pdf This made sense when the USSR was indeed what Reagan called an ‘evil empire’; the pity is that even when the battle had been won by the West – in 1989 Yeltsin was ‘sick with despair for the Soviet people’ and knew the end was near when he saw the cornucopia of a Texan supermarket https://www.nhregister.com/neighborhood/bayarea/news/article/When-Boris-Yeltsin-went-grocery-shopping-in-Clear-5759129.php - the policy continued. Five years after the collapse, President Carter’s former adviser Zbigniew Brzeziński wrote a book on American geostrategy  https://www.cia.gov/library/abbottabad-compound/36/36669B7894E857AC4F3445EA646BFFE1_Zbigniew_Brzezinski_-_The_Grand_ChessBoard.doc.pdf in which he worried that

‘… any ejection of America by its Western partners from its perch on the western periphery would automatically spell the end of America's participation in the game on the Eurasian chessboard, even though that would probably also mean the eventual subordination of the western extremity to a revived player occupying the middle space.’

25 years on, after President Trump had told European NATO allies to shoulder more of the burden of their defence https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jul/11/donald-trump-tells-nato-allies-to-spend-4-of-gdp-on-defence , we face that possibility. Now, it seems to be about containing, not lethally expansionary Communism, but a nascent power bloc in eastern Europe, a sort of Eurasian EU https://www.theguardian.com/world/shortcuts/2014/feb/18/brief-primer-vladimir-putin-eurasian-union-trade  . Is it our business to prevent that, at much expense of blood and treasure? Should we have outgrown Great Game-playing in the new era of potential nuclear global destruction?

Ukraine is an awkwardly complex corner of Brzeziński’s chessboard: the Washington Post illustrated its long history in 2015 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/03/09/maps-how-ukraine-became-ukraine/   and here is a simplified overview (reproduced on MoA https://www.moonofalabama.org/2022/02/some-bits-on-ukraine.html) :

The sudden changes brought about by the defeat of the Red Menace has presented challenges for everyone and we should proceed with caution. The area around the Black Sea has changed radically: in 1988 it was practically a Red lake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comecon#/media/File:Europe_1988.svg , except for the shores of eastern Greece and northern Turkey; in recent years, NATO allies have started to encircle it and if Ukraine joins up the lake will be largely Blue. NATO members have permitted the siting of weapons closer and closer to Russia’s western borders; the Great Game here is almost like the children’s game of ‘What’s The Time, Mister Wolf?’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What%27s_the_time,_Mr_Wolf%3F Is it necessary?

Is it affordable? Perhaps when we bemoan the state of our economy, of the NHS and the meanness of our State pension system compared with those in the EU, we should remember how WWI impoverished the UK – the Twenties did not roar in Britain - and WWII very nearly bankrupted us completely. We’ve been struggling against headwinds ever since 1914.

Sixty years ago, Dean Acheson told West Point that ‘Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role.’ https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780191843730.001.0001/q-oro-ed5-00000015 It’s time to grow up and not be anybody’s playground sidekick, unless it is in our national interest.

THURSDAY BACKTRACK: Music and news from 60 years ago - week ending 17 February 1962

At #4 is Eden Kane with 'Forget Me Not':

Giles cartoon for this week: Crufts

The famous dog show started in 1891 and has been held annually since then, apart from some of the years in the two World Wars.

Some memorable events (via Wikipedia):

11 February: 'Negotiations, between the government of France and Algerian independence leaders, opened at Les Rousses, a remote village in the French Alps, leading to a preliminary agreement on a transitional government.'

12 February: 'Spike Milligan and John Antrobus's play, The Bed-Sitting Room, is premièred at the Marlowe Theatre in Canterbury.' Here is the film version (1969):

13 February: 'A crowd of between 150,000 and 500,000 people marched in Paris in the first massive protest against the continuing Algerian war, which had gone into its eighth year. The occasion was the funeral ceremony for five of the nine people who had been killed by police in the Charonne metro station the previous Thursday. With many of the participants walking off of their jobs to protest, business in Paris and much of France was brought to a halt.'

14 February: '"A Tour of the White House with Mrs. John F. Kennedy", produced by CBS News and hosted by American First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy and CBS reporter Charles Collingwood, was broadcast on television by CBS and on NBC at 10:00 pm Eastern time. Attracting 46,000,000 TV viewers, or three out of every four households in America, it was the highest rated television program up to that time.' Video address: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x74jyr0

15 February: 'In Elisabethville (now Lubumbashi), the legislature for the Republic of Katanga voted to ratify President Moise Tshombe's declaration that the breakaway state should end its secession and return to the Republic of the Congo.'

16 February: 'Voting in India's national parliamentary election commenced, with 210 million voters going to the polls. There were 14,744 candidates for the 494 seats in the Lok Sabha and the 2,930 seats in the legislatures of 13 Indian states. The final result was that 119,904,284 eligible voters participated, and the Indian National Congress, led by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, won 361 (or about 73%) of the seats. The Communist Party of India was a distant second with 29 seats (6%).'

    'U.S. President Kennedy issued nine Executive Orders, numbered 10095 to 11105, delegating "emergency preparedness functions" for various federal agencies and departments, to be implemented in the event of a national emergency that required a declaration of martial law.'

17 February: 'In the North Sea flood of 1962, Hurricane-force winds and heavy rains swept across West Germany's North Sea coast and sent the waters flooding over the seawalls. There were 345 deaths in West Germany, 281 of them in Hamburg, when the Elbe River overflowed. An estimated 500,000 people were left homeless.'

    'U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara outlined the doctrine of flexible response, the nuclear strategy of the Kennedy administration, in an address to the American Bar Foundation in Chicago. The plan called for building a large enough nuclear arsenal that the United States would have the ability to launch a second strike of nuclear missiles against the Soviets even after an initial exchange of destruction.'

UK chart hits, week ending 17 February 1962 (tracks in italics have been featured previously)

Htp: Clint's labour-of love compilation https://www.sixtiescity.net/charts/61chart.htm

Five fine things found on Facebook (4)

 

“The Nutcracker”, Tchaikovsky; The London Royal Ballet Source

Bone-Titla. San Carlos Apache. 1913 Source

Built in the 18th century, this is one of the oldest buildings
in Hattfjelldal municipality in Norland, Norway Source

King Tutankhamun's shoes Source

Everest Source

The real battle, by Sackerson

Why Ukraine? Why now? Why at all?

It’s not about fighting Communism - the battle against the USSR was won in the 1990s.

Or are we to be persuaded by racialism? It’s worked before: see the WWI US recruiting poster by Harry Hopps, where a drooling monster ape in a German Pickelhaube helmet holds a despairing young woman – boobs out, lads, look! – under the title ‘Destroy This Mad Brute.’ 

Today the target is not the Hun but the Slav, appealing to what Peter Hitchens has just called ‘the ridiculous cartoon idea that Russia is like Mordor in Lord Of The Rings, an utterly evil country ruled by a Dark Monster.’ https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2022/02/peter-hitchens-granny-gets-her-gun-from-a-bunch-of-shamelss-neo-nazis-not-that-the-bbc-would-ever-te.html Do Slav lives matter?

Our propaganda may be as crude as that of a century ago – see last Friday’s Mail article describing President Putin as a ‘Snarling rat backed into a corner’ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-10525223/Vladimir-Putin-snarling-rat-backed-corner-writes-IAN-BIRRELL.html - but the quality of our politicians actually seems to have declined. Think of our Foreign Secretary, who can’t distinguish between the Baltic and the Black Sea https://www.dailymail.co.uk/video/vladimirputin/video-2604297/Video-Liz-Truss-confuses-Baltic-Black-Sea-700-miles-apart.html and goes into a meeting with Mr Lavrov unaware that Rostov and Voronezh are Russian regions https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/kremlin-cites-truss-error-evidence-west-doesnt-understand-ukraine-conflict-2022-02-11/ If she wishes to channel Mrs Thatcher she should imitate Maggie’s diligent preparation.

Perhaps our representatives are counting on the dumbing-down of a populace whose imagination has been fed by the fascistic violence of Marvel comic heroes and a secular religion figureheaded by an autistic teenage activist I call the Swedish Frightingale or Joan of Aargh.

Are we fighting for democracy? Let’s not look too closely at how the current regime in Ukraine was installed. For that matter, is the EU a democracy? If it is, why did we leave?

Is the UK a democracy? Actually, no; we have a constitutional monarchy and are subjects not citizens. When John Dunning proposed his 1780 motion to curb the influence of the Crown https://libquotes.com/john-dunning/quote/lbj9i1o he may have thought that Parliament was belling the cat; instead, power has simply passed down to the Privy Council, of which the PM and all the Cabinet are automatically members. Tony Benn, a socialist but a Parliamentarian to his bootstraps, warned many years ago - and I'm sorry not to have found a link - that our freedoms could be swept away in an afternoon by Order In Council. PM Blair knew this very well, for one of his first acts in government (3 May 1997) was to use the Council to make the Civil Service subordinate to spin doctors https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/247039/response/605821/attach/3/3%20May%201997%20Civil%20Service%20Amendment%20Order%20in%20Council%201997.pdf?cookie_passthrough=1.

The Opposition in Parliament is our safeguard against tyranny, but it has failed. A touchstone for this is the way that on 19 October last year Parliament renewed the extraordinary powers of the Coronavirus Act without so much as a division. https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/watch-mps-extend-the-coronavirus-act-without-a-vote The Covid episode has taught the State that there is almost nothing it cannot do to the people, provided the Opposition colludes in the hope of getting their turn soon and the Fourth Estate sings loyally from the State’s hymn sheet. We see this again in Canada, where Prime Minister Trudeau has invoked emergency powers merely to deal with trucker protests he himself has provoked by his high-handed Covid mandates.

Even the American Presidency is tending towards autocracy – remember how back in September Biden, speaking to his country about the Covid vaccination program, said ‘this is not about freedom or personal choice… my job as President is to protect all Americans… we’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin.’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7chQfQ67SM There as here, government has invaded our daily life so far that the new wine of super-power threatens to burst the old skins of restraining constitutional arrangements; for example, President Biden’s role is set down in Article Two of the Constitution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_Two_of_the_United_States_Constitution and there his protection was defined in military, rather than medical terms.

If the US were committed to genuine democracy, the Republicans would not find so many ways to make it harder for the underclass to participate in elections – redrawing constituency boundaries into fantastical politically-motivated shapes, siting polling stations far from left-voting population centres and so on; and the Democrats would not be turning a blind eye to, if not encouraging, an influx of poor immigrants whose ballots they hope may be counted on for a generation, or even allowing non-citizens the right to vote. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jan/09/new-york-allows-non-citizens-vote-controversial-law

It is hard to escape the conclusion that the real theme of what is happening domestically and internationally is simply the acquisition, concentration and retention of power. Former President Carter’s foreign policy adviser Zbigniew Brzeziński reflected on this in his book ‘The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives,’ https://www.cia.gov/library/abbottabad-compound/36/36669B7894E857AC4F3445EA646BFFE1_Zbigniew_Brzezinski_-_The_Grand_ChessBoard.doc.pdf  published in 1997 - five years after the Soviet collapse. In this work, the term ‘freedom’ appears ten times, ‘democracy’ 25 times but ‘hegemon/y’ 56 times; what he calls ‘the game’ is played out using a string of ‘perches’ for American forces around the globe.

Brzeziński worried that the EU might become more independent of US influence, even friendly with Russia:

‘… any ejection of America by its Western partners from its perch on the western periphery would automatically spell the end of America's participation in the game on the Eurasian chessboard, even though that would probably also mean the eventual subordination of the western extremity to a revived player occupying the middle space.’

Well, here we are, 25 years on.

In playing this real-life board game – more like Risk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_(game) than chess – I think our leaders have lost the plot. What good will it do us?

For it is ‘the economy, stupid.’ After a decade (the 1950s) in which the Soviet economy had been growing twice as fast as Britain’s, PM Harold Macmillan wrote (December 1960) to President Kennedy:

‘What is going to happen to us unless we can show that our modern free society – the new form of capitalism – can make the fullest use of our resources and results in a steady expansion of our economic strength… If we fail in this, Communism will triumph, not by war, or even subversion, but by seeming to be a better way of bringing people material comforts. In other words, if we were to fall back into anything like the recession or crisis that we had between the wars, with large-scale unemployment of men and machines, I think we would have lost the hand.’

-          Quoted in ‘Macmillan: The Official Biography’ by Alistair Horne (Macmillan, 1988)

For me the word that stands out there is ‘new’; capitalism old-style and protected by a very limited franchise was what fuelled the indignation that threatened to tear apart our ‘free society’; Lloyd George was forced to emasculate the House of lords in order to advance even his relatively modest welfare reforms.

Despite universal adult suffrage in the UK (still awaiting its centenary) the economic strains have begun to return as Western elites gave globalist bankers and traders their head. The tensions this has created at home are now being contained with high-handed government and unprecedented data-driven spying on and suppression of the people, abetted by an Opposition whose principal concern is its own welfare, and a complaisant mass media.

It’s not the Russians we need to sort out.

WEEKENDER: Kamila Valieva - a Pawn in the Game? by Wiggia

The young Russian figure skater caught out in the Olympics for drug use is currently getting a soft ride from both the IOC and the press. It cannot be a coincidence that her age is a factor in all this and the fact she is currently the world's Number One in her sport.

Should we care? Sport in general has not covered itself with glory when it comes to tackling difficult issues, such as footballers who insist taking the knee is a worthwhile practice, when the BLM is being exposed as an organisation that not only has ulterior motives away from race but is also a launching pad for the founders to fleece the public funds coming their way... millionaire row beckons.

Yet the players in our PL carry on as if this totally misguided gesture is actually having an effect on perceived racism, when in fact telling everyone every week they are racist just creates resentment for something that has been in decline for years; now, thanks to their agitation, it is headline news again.

It is and has been said that sport and politics do not mix, though the truth is politicians have used sport to their advantage for decades, and the fundamental principles of the Olympics as laid out by Pierre de Coubertin in 1898 have been jettisoned in favour of a flag-waving exercise. The Olympic movement is all about money and more of it, the amount poured into the IOC coffers to seal an Olympic bid are proof of that.

Nations and politicians all want to bask in the glory of having spent more than the last Games or World Cup to seal their place in history. The coming World Cup in Qatar  has to be one of the most ridiculous decisions by a sporting body in history: a country that has no interest in any sport other than importing a few Africans to boost their non-existent medal tally has only political reasons to bid for a major sporting event.  

The truth about how the stadiums have been built with the equivalent of slave labour with a death rate that has been deliberately hidden away was revealed very early on but ignored by FIFA and all the countries competing including our own kneeling team; the manager who believes kneeling sends the ‘right message’ is very quiet about competing in Qatar - why could that possibly be?

When one looks back to the fuss about touring cricket teams during the apartheid years in South Africa and the banning of players who competed there, today's attitude reveals a gap in moral fortitude the width of the Grand Canyon. The difference is money: no money for a breakaway cricket tour in real terms, but huge amounts gained in Qatar.

It was ever thus.

Back to Valieva. The sympathy being shown to the young Russian who is competing with a faux Russian team with the name ROC - a pseudonym for loophole - is being seen in a very different light to those young east Germans years ago, part of the regime's systematic doping program. Russia along with China has been doing the same thing in recent times, not that the USA or others have clean hands in all this during the same period.

Having failed a drug test she should have been automatically excluded from competing. It matters not if she was coerced, though the route to fame and fortune often does not need much coercion; she failed a test and that should have been that. If she wins now, we will now have the sight of other athletes being denied their rightful place on the podium and another sport being forever tainted.

This is the IOCs wording on anyone caught doping in competition at Beijing:

'An anti-doping rule violation in Individual Sports in connection with an In-Competition test automatically leads to Disqualification of the result obtained in that Competition with all resulting Consequences, including forfeiture of any medals, diplomas, points and prizes.'

You would think from that it is pretty cut and dried, but apparently not. They do themselves no favours in using weasel words to allow Valieva to continue.

Coming from a cycling background, I am more than aware of how doping ruins sport, and have written on the subject in a different context before. There is little doubt all sports have indulged in forms of doping. Lax testing and a reluctance to match other sports' doping regimes has allowed hitherto ‘clean’ sports to prosper whereas under the surface it has been going on for years.

Allowing this young girl to compete, along with some decisions deserving of derision in the USA regarding endless numbers of sprinters being found to fail drugs tests yet re-appearing months later in competition, has resulted in empty stadiums. When all sports become tainted with the belief that ‘everyone is at it’ sport loses its value in society. Fraudulent behaviour in sport should never be seen as different from fraud in the wider world, and whether the fifteen-year-old girl was used or was aware of being doped is of no consequence, she should not be there; it perpetuates the whole ‘winning at all costs' mentality that pervades sport these days when money is king.

Also, we must never forget the long term effects that doping has on competitors in many cases, including deaths. During the EPO (Armstrong) era many cyclists died after blood clotting events caused by the drug; again, the real numbers were not issued officially as far as I know, but it was not merely one or two, and again athletes as young as fifteen / fourteen were testing positive. Somehow though, I cannot see it ever being eradicated. Gene therapy is already being touted as the next challenge and we cannot be sure it is not already being trialled; this is very complicated to test for and prove though no doubt in the future it will be possible, but yet again it continues the drug era into the foreseeable future. Money and drugs will always triumph over morals in sport, it seems; a sad indictment of our times.

An article in the Times shows the hypocrisy among national sporting bodies. This runner has just retired:

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/3e0da814-8f43-11ec-9569-fea923928840?shareToken=2232a4d7cd091518051881a6143f9661

As this article is normally behind a paywall and I read it as part of my ‘free’ sampler I offer you this passage, which sets the tone:

'The US Olympic Committee was understandably disgruntled with the outcome of Kamila Valieva’s case at the Winter Olympics in Beijing. She is only 15, a “protected person” according to the World Anti-Doping Agency, and the latest chapter in Russia’s flagrant abuse of sporting ethics. However, that US Track & Field saw fit to post an image of Justin Gatlin alongside a starry-eyed emoji and the words: “Happy retirement to one of the greatest!” highlighted Olympic levels of hypocrisy as we sank further in the murk.'

FRIDAY MUSIC: Bert Jansch, by JD

"Bert Jansch (3 November 1943 – 5 October 2011) was born in Glasgow and came to prominence in London in the 1960s as an acoustic guitarist and singer-songwriter. He recorded at least 25 albums and toured extensively from the 1960s to the 21st century.

"Jansch was a leading figure in the 1960s British folk revival, touring folk clubs and recording several solo albums, as well as collaborating with other musicians such as John Renbourn and Anne Briggs. In 1968, he co-founded the band Pentangle, touring and recording with them until their break-up in 1972." 

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bert_Jansch
• https://www.bertjansch.com/history

ACOUSTIC ROUTES - Film trailer with Bert Jansch Billy Connolly Davey Graham Wizz Jones

CHASING LOVE - Jacqui McShee and Bert Jansch from the music film Acoustic Routes