FRIDAY MUSIC: The Traveling Wilburys, by JD

"The etymological origins of The Traveling Wilburys have aroused something of a controversy amongst academic circles. Did they, as Professor “Bobby” Sinfield believes, originate from the various Wilbury Fairs which traveled Europe in Medieval times, titillating the populace with contemporary ballads, or were they rather derived from, “YE TRAVELING WILBURYS”, who were popular locksmiths during the Crusades and used to pick or unlock the jammed chastity belts (rather like today’s emergency plumbers.)

Dr. Arthur Noseputty of Cambridge believes they were closely related to the Strangling Dingleberries, which is not a group but a disease. I think this can be discounted, not only because of his silly name but also from his habit of impersonating Ethel Merman during lectures. Some have even gone on to suggest tenuous links with The Pillsburys, the group who invented Flour Power.

Dim Sun, a Chinese academic, argues that they may be related to “THE STROLLING TILBURYS”, Queen Elizabeth the first’s favourite minstrels, and backs this suspicion with the observation that The Traveling Wilburys is an obvious anagram of “V. BURYING WILL’S THEATRE”, clearly a reference to the closing of Shakespeare’s Globe theatre by Villiers during an outbreak of the plague. This would account for the constant traveling. Indeed, many victims of the plague and St.Vitus’ dance literally danced themselves to death, and it is this dancing theme that resurfaces with The Wilbury Twist. Not a cocktail but a dance craze, reminiscent of The Wilbury Quadrille made famous at Bath in 1790 by Beau Diddley, and the Wilbury Waltz, which swept Vienna in the 1890’s.

One thing, however, remains certain. The circumambulatory peregrinations of these itinerant mundivagant peripatetic nomads has already disgorged one collection of popular lyrical cantata, which happily encapsulated their dithyrambic antiphonic contrapuntal threnodies as a satisfactory auricular experience for the hedonistic gratification of the hoi-polloi on a popular epigraphically inscribed gramophonic recording. Now here’s another one.

Professor “TINY” Hampton is currently leading the search for Intelligent Life amongst Rock Journalism at the University of Please Yourself, California."

“Sometimes you think you’re crazy, 
  But you know you’re only mad, 
  Sometimes you’re better off not knowing, 
  How much you’ve been had.”

-The Devil’s Been Busy, The Traveling Wilburys
https://www.travelingwilburys.com/



















Bonus track: the original version of Wilbury Twist. As you can see the Wilbury family is bigger than we thought it was. Charlie T Wilbury Sr had an energetic and busy time. No wonder he died so young!

Biafra and the British Establishment: Tools You Can't Trust

If you read Frederick Forsyth’s autobiography 'The Outsider' (2015), you’ll come away with a long list of British institutions to mistrust and deplore.

His experience in Africa illustrates why. In 1967, as the world was recovering from the surprise victory of Israel over Egypt in the Six-Day War, the BBC sent Forsyth to cover a civil war in Nigeria, whose Eastern Region, known as Biafra, had decided to secede.

Forsyth knew nothing on the subject, but was briefed by a man from the BBC’s World Service, based in Bush House, London. According to this expert, the Ibo (or Igbo) tribe of Biafra were chronic troublemakers who had been misled by their regional military governor, Colonel Ujukwu, into rebelling against ‘the very fine republic’ of Nigeria. The rebel army were a rabble and would soon be defeated by the British-trained Nigerian army. Forsyth was not to file a report but simply find the Deputy High Commissioner and stick with him as the Nigerian army swept down into Biafra, then be taken back by boat to neighbouring Cameroon, from where he could file an ‘upsummer’ report on the inevitably short revolt.

When Forsyth repeated this briefing to the Deputy High Commissioner based in the eastern regional capital Enugu, the latter put his head in his hands. It turned out that the official line had come from the High Commissioner (Ambassador) in Lagos, who had sold this to the Commonwealth Relations Office and they in turn to Bush House and the BBC’s foreign news department. ‘The London briefing was wrong on every point,’ says FF, and confirmed ‘the old adage for foreign correspondents. Never mind what the embassy says: go and ask the old sweats who have been there for years.’

The problems had started in the 1950s with the British decision that Nigeria, previously ruled by the British Empire as two countries, should be united and become a democracy.  Northern Nigeria, says FF, was Islamic, feudal and with no middle class, shunning education and technology. The South had largely been converted to Christianity and the Ibos of the eastern part were clever and entrepreneurial, used by the British to run the technical and office support in the North.

The emirs and sultans of the North resisted democracy until it was pointed out that as their people were numerically superior they would dominate the federation, which came into being on 1 October 1960. Six years later a group of Ibo officers who had been trained in England led a coup against what they saw as Nigeria’s sham democracy and corruption. The plotters were soon overthrown and a military governor appointed to each of the new country’s four regions. The North then retaliated against the Ibos there, first by killing hundreds of Ibo soldiers in the region’s  barracks, then by mob violence against Ibo ghettoes that left thousands dead (FF’s London briefing had called it ‘a storm in a teacup’).  The survivors fled south.

Over the next ten months relations between the Ibos of the east and the Lagos government deteriorated. ‘In London the mandarins of the Commonwealth Office and later the Foreign Office quickly showed a passionate favouritism towards the federal regime, stoked by the resident High Commissioner,’ says FF. Biafra seceded on 30 May 1967.

Reporting from Lagos in western Nigeria, the BBC’s Angus McDiarmid repeated propaganda from Nigeria’s Ministry of Information, alleging anti-Ojukwu riots among the Ibo and successful advances by Nigerian military forces. The reports were false but the BBC was relaying them sloppily: ‘The broadcasts out of Lagos that first month had attribution, if at all, in the fourth or even fifth paragraph. It sounded like the BBC itself talking.’

Three weeks after the conflict started, FF was asked to provide a ‘matcher’ report from Biafra, confirming the statements from Lagos. Instead, he sent a telex saying that ‘my briefing had been garbage and the reports out of Lagos were tripe.’ FF had thereby killed his BBC career: ‘I did not realize that when broadcasting for the state, a foreign correspondent must never report what London does not want to hear.’ FF was recalled to London and reassigned to the BBC’s home news department, whose head explained to him his error in contradicting the High Commission in Lagos, HMG’s Commonwealth Office, the BBC World Service and the recently-appointed foreign news editor at the BBC, Arthur Hutchinson.

The official line was that the war would be short, but instead of collapsing the Biafran army crossed the river Niger and almost got to Lagos before the expedition was subverted by a traitorous officer. By February 1968 the Biafrans had secured their finances, were increasing their own army and had set up an agency for media communications, inviting international press to come and see.

The BBC boycotted the visit. Hutchinson (who had never wanted Forsyth in his department in the first place, having lined up his own protégé) forbade him to go, saying, ‘You have to understand, we are not covering this war.’

FF secretly used leave time and his own savings to fly back out to Africa. Mechanical failure on his return flight meant that he could not return on time and found his flat had been broken into by two people from the BBC claiming to be ‘worried’ about him. He wrote a resignation letter to his new boss saying that the Nigerian war ‘was going to be a major story with considerable length and many casualties.’ He decided to go out to Biafra again, as a freelance reporter.

As the conflict stretched out to ten months, children in rural Biafra began to starve to death. There was plenty of starch from cassava and yams, but where an adult needs one gramme of protein a day a growing child needs five. The government blockade of food imports had forced the Biafrans to eat their pigs and chickens, and their main protein source, dried cod from Norway, was shut off. FF agreed to provide on-the-ground information for MI6. Meanwhile the head and deputy at the Commonwealth Relations Office had both resigned over the government’s policy.

The CRO had then merged with the Foreign Office to form the new FCO, whose head was in thrall to his civil servants, who maintained the policy recommended by the Ambassador to Nigeria. Despite the humanitarian argument for a ceasefire the British Government resisted, for reasons FF calls vanity and cowardice: HMG would have had to admit they had been wrong. Instead, the strategy of supporting the Nigerian federal government continued, with increased British assistance to bring the war to an end as quickly as possible, despite marches and protests:

‘There were times when Harold Wilson appeared almost under siege and twice, I learned later, the “reconsider” policy was almost adopted.  Had the opposition Conservative Party lent its weight, the change of policy might have gone through and the dying of the children ended, but Edward Heath, the Tory leader, shared with the FCO his European Union obsession and he was their man.’

Part of Britain’s help to Nigeria was in the form of secret arms shipments to supply the Nigerian Army that had introduced conscription to bring up numbers.

‘Behind a mendacious screen of “neutrality”, the Wilson government poured in the equipment, without which the war could not have proceeded […] Another early lie was that no weapons at all were being shipped from Britain to fuel the war. The key word was “from”, not “by”. In fact, the supplies were coming from British stocks at the immense NATO weapons park outside Brussels, and thus technically from Belgium. They were then replaced by shipments from Britain to Belgium.’

The war dragged on. In Biafra, the clergy recognized the children’s protein-deficiency illness – kwashiorkor – and began to appeal for funds and medications. In June, the Daily Express and Daily Sketch each sent a reporter and photographer; Forsyth escorted the former. The Express reporter stayed at his base, working through the supplies of whisky he had brought with him, so Forsyth took the cameraman to the battlefronts and composed the staff writer’s despatches for him (the Express reporter later ‘filed the lot for the international Reporter of the year award – and won.’)

Then the photographers found starving children at a local mission and the pictures shocked Britain and eventually Europe and the USA, prompting a large-scale church-organised relief operation that (illegally) flew in supplies through Nigerian airspace.

Even then the British authorities did their best to suppress the truth. One ‘ex-public-school product’ at the FCO’s media relations office claimed a small group of suffering children had been taken to one place after another to mislead everyone as to the scale of the disaster.

‘On another occasion the war hero Group Captain Leonard Cheshire VC was asked to go to visit, be shown around Nigeria only, and return to peddle the official line. He duly went to Nigeria but then refused not to go to Biafra. What he saw on the second visit so shocked him that he came back and denounced the official policy. He was immediately smeared as a gullible fool.’

The final toll of dead children in Biafra numbered around a million, and would have been perhaps twice that without the relief flights. Forsyth compares the situation to the Holocaust, in that it was not only the immediate doers that carried the blame, but also the bureaucratic enablers without whom such crimes could not have been carried out.

‘That is why I believe that this coterie of vain mandarins and cowardly politicians stained the honour of my country for ever and I will never forgive them.’

_________________________________________________________________________________
See also Forsyth's article in The Guardian on 21 January 2020, 'Buried for 50 years: Britain’s shameful role in the Biafran war':

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/21/buried-50-years-britain-shamesful-role-biafran-war-frederick-forsyth

SOMETHING FOR THE WEEKEND: Lick my plate (dogs in restaurants), by Wiggia

From what I have seen lately in the few newspapers I buy now, and especially in their supplements, there are endless articles about what various correspondents, celebrities (a pretty meaningless word these days) and anyone else who will give of their time, did in the lock down and what they have done since.

The articles on what they have done / will do / won't do since lock down dominate the colour section at the moment. Hardly a day goes by without some Islington bubble dweller pronouncing how they don’t know how they survived the confinement but learned how their life balance had been enhanced by being surrounded by obnoxious out of control children for four months and how brave they all are stepping out again in the world - the new normal.

There have been several articles on how eating out at the Ivy and elsewhere has created a void that can’t be filled and how wonderful it is to be able to go back sit near a Z list celeb, meet a celebrity chef,  and spend lots of money on linguine again, how did we manage!

But one article on eating out caught my eye on Thursday in the Times supplement. The article was little more than a huge plug for Georgio Locatelli’s restaurant and the restaurant industry in what for them are dire times, but it had a strange slant, something which has been gaining momentum for some time in this country: dogs in restaurants.

The above comes into the attention-seeking category: aren’t I clever, ain’t they cute? - No, not really.

The writer, one Kate Spicer (food critic! No, me neither) made great play of dog friendly restaurants and Georgio's in particular and the main photo in the two spread piece shows her with her dog at the table in Georgio's. When I say at the table I mean sitting on a chair looking at her plate of food; this may well have been staged for the piece, yet a paragraph early in the piece suggests otherwise…

“Good dogs are allowed there, I’ve been welcomed alone with bad hair in my dog walking clothes and with two leggy lurchers. It’s an intense pleasure to eat there solo with my boys curled up beside me and a plate of chestnut tagliatelle with wild mushrooms and a glass or two of fruili to go with it.”

For a food writer the throwaway ‘fruili’ was a bad error: there is no such thing as a glass of fruili and it should have a capital F. Fruili is a region in northern Italy home to Pinot Grigio; she should know that, or not, but I digress.

There is no law against dogs being in restaurants. Until recently very few food-serving premises allowed dogs inside but that has softened quite a lot in recent years. I can only assume it drums up extra trade.

The French have never had such qualms about dogs being in restaurants. It has been a regular sight, the lap dog on the lap of the eater, something that I could never get my head round as to why anyone would want to have a dog's nose near food, knowing that it had been up its own arse minutes earlier. I really don’t get it; the French, well…

Please...

I have lived with dogs at home for the greater part of my life. I trained dogs for competition at the highest level as a hobby for twenty years so I feel I am coming at this with a the slant of a dog lover not hater.

Not once in all that time did I take a dog to a restaurant or ever wanted to. Pubs, yes, where the dog stayed on the floor when you had a drink at the bar; but even that was a rare occasion. Even in the home the dogs were never allowed into the dining area if we were eating and definitely no sleeping in the bedroom or on the bed as many do.

There was an article linked to this photo talking about the deadly disease the owner who allowed this had caught. Unfortunately it is not available in this country but this gives a short low-down on why you should not allow your dog to lick your face.
https://www.quantumbooks.com/other/travel-and-living/is-is-dangerous-to-let-your-puppy-lick-your-face/

In the end you come back to why would anyone, as this writer says she did, take the dogs out in the rain and then ‘pop in’ to their local Michelin-starred restaurant. What proprietor would want those muddy feet on his plush carpet, never mind on his seats? Madness. Is this another case of “because I can” rather than any practical reason? She finishes her piece with another recommendation of a restaurant, trying hard to mitigate the effects of the virus, that has made an outdoor space and installed a beehive (?)  And the place is dog friendly. I am glad she told me that so I can cross another pretentious establishment off my go-to list; not that I go to many restaurants these days, mainly because they are already expensive rip-offs in the main and are still pretentious.

It did however remind me of the days I used to be able to buy the dog meat in bulk from the local abattoir, then sorted it out for freezing when I got home, cooking raw tripe after washing in large containers, all whilst the dogs salivated outside at the kitchen door. You wont get a plate of that at Locatellis - the dogs would have it off your plate before you could say wild mushrooms.

Doggy bag, anyone?

And lastly a photo that has absolutely nothing to do with the above, but I thought you might like it: my last two OES at play (or one is, the other is just being momentarily tolerant.)

Oh, and as a breed you definitely do not want them anywhere near a carpet!

SATURDAY ESSAY: Online Shopping, by JD

What could be easier? Sit in the comfort of your own home, browse at your leisure the things you want/desire/need, a few clicks of your mouse and the goods of your choice are swiftly despatched to your door. No problem, no venturing out in the rain, no trudging from shop to shop only to find the shops do not stock what you are looking for, no travelling and, of course, no 'worn out feeling' after you return home. Shop online and all your dreams will be fulfilled!

Unfortunately the reality is somewhat different.

Last week I checked, via Royal Mail 'track and trace' web page, the progress of an item I had ordered using this online shopping 'experience' (why is using the internet now described as an experience?) The Royal Mail site told me that my package had arrived at my local Delivery Office at 08:05 that morning and just as an aside, when and why did the sorting office become a delivery office? So I waited for delivery knowing that the sorting office is no more than half a mile from my house. And I waited. And then I waited some more. Where on earth was it? Eventually the van arrived with my package some time after 4pm. More than eight hours to travel half a mile! We have all heard of snail mail but that must be some sort of record; eight hours, half a mile, one sixteenth of a mile per hour: one hour for each half furlong. (For any dumbed own young people reading, half a furlong is 110yards or the length of five cricket pitches.)

When I mentioned the tale to a taxi driver he said "Aye well, ye know what the traffic is like these days!" Clearly he has the same sense of humour that I have.

Couple of days later I was sitting waiting once more for two more packages. I had emails from the suppliers telling me that my packages were despatched on the 20th and 22nd. Royal Mail website tells me that "in these 'difficult' times blah blah deliveries may take longer than usual blah blah" One of these packages has a tracking reference but the message was 'despatched' followed by '..we will let you know.'

Based on past experience that means they will let me know after it has been delivered!

Trying to find how to contact Royal Mail is impossible. The web page is a madhouse designed to misdirect customers into a labyrinth of choices and options all of which lead astray into further obfuscations of frequently asked questions, none of which offer any actual help. The telephone 'help' line is the usual 'press button one for...' etc and none of the buttons leads to an actual human voice.
Their web page is a wonderful demonstration of Hutber's Law ('improvement means deterioration') at its best. The law so beloved of web designers and bureaucrats everywhere. It is the law which underpins the Bible Of Bureaucratic Obfuscation or Bobo for short which is appropriate - https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/spanish-english/bobo

Just to add insult to injury, the opening hours of the sorting office have been changed and it is now open between 7am and 9am only. (It used to be open until noon.) So if I do miss a delivery I must then get up in the middle of the night to catch those opening hours which are inconveniently outside the hours during which my pensioner bus pass is valid!

The two errant packages eventually arrived on the 31st; after eleven days and nine days respectively. The Postie said the sorting office was 'chaos' with an above average number of packages and parcels; with everyone now frightened to go shopping they are all shopping online. Added to that are the staff shortages for either illness or the Government's generous 'furlough' scheme. Royal Mail is erratic at the best of times so this 'crisis' has geven them the perfect alibi for their poor service.

Before online shopping gets to the delivery stage there is the obstacle course of filling in the order form. Some are well designed and easy to use but some are bafflingly complex to my tired old brain. And sometimes they just do not work! Their are occasions when the order form flags up a message telling me my card is 'invalid' but a quick(?) phone call to the card company tells me that the card is valid and there is no block on it or what i am buying is well within the credit limit. There are times when I go round in circles trying to resolve things if the contact phone number, if any, is well hidden and so I just give up. If I do find a contact number, usually smaller companies and not the big names, there will be a cheerful and helpful voice on the other end. I will then place the order over the phone which is much quicker and easier than filling in the online order form. The person on the other end of the phone will have my failed order on screen which helps the process and the despatch is usually the same day.

I have not bought anything from Amazon for a long time. Not since they changed the way they operate which now seems to be as a reseller or agent for third party suppliers. But I have noticed that the name of the supplier is displayed, not very prominently, somewhere on the screen. I have found that by going to the supplier's web page the item is available directly from them. Very often it is the same price shown on Amazon's page and occasionally it may be cheaper. If it is non specific or one of a range, there will be alternative choices not shown at Amazon. I would recommend buying direct if possible. Why help a foreign inavader to dodge its share of tax liabilities?

Irony of ironies is that Amazon has been accused of helping to destroy the high street but they have recently announced they will be moving into the high street with lots of Amazon Shops!
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8585211/Amazon-giant-plans-chain-UK-book-shops-cashless-convenience-stores.html

Cashless shops which automatically bill you when you take something from the shelves? I don't like the sound of that but the story prompted this perfect riposte in the comments from Billy M - "I'm a professional shoplifter. How the hell am I supposed to make a living if I sneak out with goods stuffed into my Y Fronts and then getting billed for them before I get home? This profession is stressful enough without added pressures."

Finally, a word about online grocery shopping. I am getting old and weary so buying some of the heavier items online made sense, it would save carrying it home. I rely on the bus these days having given up driving years ago. I did a tour of the Morrisons web pages, adding things to the 'basket' but when it came to checkout time I couldn't find the checkout. More spinning round in circles until eventually everything disappeared and a sign in the corner of the screen indicated that my 'basket' was empty. So I sent an email to Morrisinghs and a reply dawdled in a few days later. I don't think I am fit for the modern world because I didn't understand a word of the explanation of 'how to shop.' I did go back to their pages to have another try but I couldn't be bothered to spend ages going clickety click. It takes ages to go through all the choices. But I did notice that they now had a very prominent checkout sign in the top right corner.

I have since then been informed that their delivery service is less than perfect, with items missing or wrong items etc so I don't think I shall trouble them further. Come to think of it, I have not seen any of their vans. I have seen Asda vans and Iceland vans and the occasional Tesco van but Morrisons? No sign of one.

Internet shopping? Not a pleasant experience so far but it might be that it becomes unavoidable in the future. I think I need to advertise for a personal shopper who could also act as archivist for my vast collection of unsold and abandoned artworks. Any and all offers will be considered. I am not saying that the pay will be much but the experience and the entertainment value will be priceless!

FRIDAY MUSIC: Joe Venuti and Eddie Lang, by JD

Born and raised in an Italian-American neighborhood in South Philadelphia, Guiseppe [Joe] Venuti (1903-1978) met guitarist Eddie Lang when he was ten years old. The two soon became fast friends and musical collaborators. After falling in love with jazz, Venuti and Lang started a band while in high school, and pioneered the use of the violin and guitar as jazz instruments while playing in the clubs and dance halls of Philadelphia.

"In addition to being the first great jazz violinist, Joe Venuti was something of a prankster. In perhaps his most famous prank, Venuti called twenty-six tuba players in Hollywood and told them he had a gig lined up. There was no gig. (Tommy Dorsey said 37 to meet at Hollywood and Vine) He just wanted to see what would happen when they all arrived at the same time. Unfortunately, for Venuti, the musician's union made him pay compensation to each musician who showed up for the event. Venuti was also famous for having pushed a piano out a window, and filling up Bix Biederbecke's bathtub with Jello. What may have started out as one of his pranks became one of his musical innovations. To play chords on the violin, Venuti tied his bow around his instrument to bring it into contact with all four strings, and thus enabled him to play rich chordal passages of music." (from the notes to the second video here)













This is the only live performance by the duo that I can find. Pity it is so short but they look like natty dressers - I love those 'custard cream' jackets!

Joe Venuti & Eddie Lang - Wild Cat (1930) "King Of Jazz" 7:07

Remembering Hiroshima

A version of the post below also appears on The Conservative Woman today:
https://conservativewoman.co.uk/8-14am-august-16-1945-the-bomb-that-changed-the-world/
________________________________________________________________________________

Father John A. Simes was starting his day at Hiroshima when it happened, at about quarter past eight on 6 August 1945 http://www.atomicarchive.com/Docs/Hiroshima/Hiroshima_Siemes.shtml . He was up in the hills with the Jesuit Mission that had relocated there after the gigantic fire-bombing of Tokyo in March by hundreds of American planes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo#Operation_Meetinghouse . This time, incredibly, to inflict similar damage only needed a single bomb, a weapon so different that it took Father Simes some time to piece together what had happened. Conventional air raids in World War Two – yet how is napalming civilians conventional? – claimed perhaps twice as many lives in Japan as Hiroshima’s and Nagasaki’s victims combined; but ever since that day 75 years ago, warfare’s potential has been on a new, even ghastlier level.

The British people’s reaction to the radio news, first relayed on the Home Service at 6 p.m., was not unmixed rejoicing, according to sources quoted by David Kynaston in his ‘Austerity Britain’ (pp. 82-86). https://www.amazon.co.uk/Austerity-Britain-1945-1951-Tales-Jerusalem/dp/0747599238 The nine o’clock edition gave more details of the Bomb and its effects – still hard to discern through the ‘pall of smoke and dust’ - on what had been a Japanese ‘army base’ at six but three hours later was ‘a city of once over 300,000 inhabitants.’ There was ‘elation’ at the prospect of peace, but ‘terror’ at the scale of destruction; the novelist Ursula Bloom and her husband were speechless with horror; the Dean of Oriel College abandoned any belief in a Just War; J R R Tolkien wrote to his son deploring ‘the utter folly of these lunatic physicists to consent to do such work for war-purposes; calmly plotting the destruction of the world’, especially while mankind’s ‘moral and intellectual status is declining.’ A London schoolteacher noted the hypocrisy of cheering the ‘Atomic bomb’ yet hating the Germans for their air raids on us; a housewife in Cumbria worried whether Japan had the Bomb, too, and was merely biding its time; a Scots engineer wrote in his diary, ‘There is no hope in man… The end is near – perhaps some years only.’

Out East, the morale of the ‘Forgotten Army’ had been low: they had learned of Victory in Europe, but had been expecting perhaps another ten years of fighting the Japanese to the last ditch. Instead, to their great relief, the conflict was to end in a few days. What, however, did they make of the Bomb?

There are three books that taken together serve as a trilogy describing the war in Burma at first hand and at every level. The first, ‘Defeat Into Victory’ (1956) https://www.amazon.co.uk/Defeat-into-Victory-William-Slim/dp/0330509977 , is by the Fourteenth Army’s commander, Lieutenant General (later Field Marshal and Viscount) William ‘Bill’ Slim. In the final chapter ‘Afterthoughts’ he saw that future armies, facing enemies in possession of battlefield nuclear weapons that could wipe out whole units at a stroke, would have to fight in a dispersed, semi-autonomous fashion in order to complete their campaigns.

The second, John Masters’ ‘The Road Past Mandalay’ (1961) https://www.abebooks.co.uk/book-search/title/the-road-past-mandalay/author/masters-john/ , is by one of Slim’s military planners who for a time took command of a Gurkha Brigade dropped behind the Japanese lines, initiating a ferocious battle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Masters#Life and ultimately forced to retreat. When he returned to HQ he resumed the heavy burden of intricate planning and towards the conclusion of the Burmese campaign became so exhausted that he was in danger of making fatal errors. Granted leave, he set off to walk the Himalayas with his new wife. Near the end, they came to the Rest House in Joshimath where the resident priest remarked that he was glad the fighting was over. This made no sense until His Holiness showed him a newspaper over two weeks old, with the splash headline ‘ATOMIC BOMB DROPPED ON JAPAN.’ The couple had started on their mountain journey, cut off from communication with the outside world, on the morning of 6 August.

‘I believed with instant conviction that there could be no more war. No more tactics, no more strategy, only total destruction – or peace. The training and experience of a lifetime had vanished into the thin Himalayan air, and I was happy.

‘I took my wife in my arms and kissed her. His Holiness said, in Hindi, ‘May God bless you, in peace.’

1992 saw the appearance of ‘Quartered Safe Out Here’ https://www.amazon.co.uk/Quartered-Safe-George-MacDonald-Fraser/dp/0007105932 , George MacDonald Fraser’s celebrated vivid account of his part in the Burma Campaign, serving as a private in Cumbria’s Border Regiment. Many years after the war, he argued with a man who was denouncing the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as obscene, monstrous and barbarous. Fraser reflected on what other and how many more lives would have been lost had the war continued; possibly his own, in which case his three children and six grandchildren would never have been born:

‘And that, I’m afraid, is where all discussion of pros and cons evaporates and becomes meaningless, because for those nine lives I would pull the plug on the whole Japanese nation and never even blink. And so, I dare suggest, would you. And if you wouldn’t, you may be nearer to the divine than I am but you sure as hell aren’t fit to be parents or grandparents.’

Here we are now, with these horrors sitting in their silos and launch tubes, plus chemical weapons and vile diseases carefully crafted by laboratory white-coats. Which of the above witnesses are right? Among the military, the tactician, the idealist, the balance-of-terror-ist? For the civilians, the elated, the horrified, the triumphant, the bleak pessimist?

How can we get rid of such dark toys? For surely, we’re not fit to play with them.
______________________________
Suggested further reading:

John Pilger on the risks of another nuclear war:
http://johnpilger.com/articles/another-hiroshima-is-coming-unless-we-stop-it-now

Professor Francis Boyle argues that atomic weapons are illegal:
https://consortiumnews.com/2020/08/04/atomic-bombings-at-75-the-illegality-of-nuclear-weapons/

Planning Permission: Bulldozing the Opposition, by Wiggia

This government has made great play about building houses to fill a need for people desperate to get a home. Various schemes, Home Start and the like have been introduced to ‘help’ people get on the housing ladder. Housebuilders give incentives like discounts - that aren’t really; part exchange; deferred mortgage payments; contributions to removal costs and other add-ons all to get mainly young couples into their badly built rabbit hutches.

It has been going on for years: ever smaller homes on ever smaller plots which only maximises the builder's profits, the granting of planning on more and more green belt as it is cheaper to build on that than in urban areas and the willingness of councils to allow every small green space including back gardens to be marked for building; and the undoubted acceptance of brown envelopes from builders to get that permission - not an urban myth, a fact of which I could quote two examples that I know.

An extra large image of tiny houses

These are ‘Tiny Houses’, an idea that has been used in the States and the Continent as a way of providing temporary? or cheap one-person houses at an affordable price. Naturally the land they are built on decides the price, but don’t give the house builders ideas: they would like nothing more than  to build, I resist using the word 'homes', these things no different from a seaside beach huts - at inflated prices.

Having gone this far, the government could always take the route that in many countries provides a roof over people's heads - and they have to a degree already done it by turning a blind eye to many areas with high immigrant populations, where garden sheds and garages are turned illegally into accommodation: why not go the whole hog and allow favelas?

Over all the years this has been going on one thing above all else has been missing: the infrastructure to support all these estates. Our road system is chaotic and  in this crowded island the same roads are expected to carry ever more traffic - never do you see new roads, only feeder roads onto existing ones. The provision of new schools, doctors' surgeries (not that we have the doctors to man them now), shops etc mean existing providers are inundated with extra clients they cannot look after properly in regards to health and education.

But in the last few years there has been a significant shift in the Conservative Party towards a free-for-all as regards planning: a couple of easements in regards to what you can extend without planning (and bugger the neighbour who loses light and privacy!) as examples, and a loosening of the green belt laws - as we all know, brownfield sites are too expensive for our builders to consider without considerable help from councils with easings, and as in the recent case of a certain Mr Desmond in Tower Hamlets, quite a bit more than that:

“Marxist doe”: The money at the heart of the Robert Jenrick planning row

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2020/06/robert-jenrick-richard-desmond-money-marxist-doe-billionaire-tower-hamlets

I saw a good example of how the public is conned, the council keeps schtum and builders gain when I lived not far from Stansted airport near Great Dunmow, Essex. This was when (in the late Eighties / early Nineties) Stansted was expanding at a rate and as usual ‘workers’ needed places nearby to live. Our beneficent building sector were glad to step in and help: a total of 1500 homes were planned on two sites, one of a thousand units and one of five hundred; the thousand-unit site would incorporate a school, shopping centre and doctor's surgery and community centre.

The objections to this came in thick and fast: too much, unnecessary, blah blah, from the protest groups. After much to and froing the council said the thousand unit section would be halved and the five hundred unit one would be scrapped. The builders sat on their hands during all this as they had no obligation to provide for the five hundred units the extra infrastructure they would have had to provide for the thousand. Of course this was never revealed at the protest meetings by any party.
So the five hundred were built, retrospective planning was submitted for the other five hundred and passed and probably another couple of thousand units have gone up since, all without infrastructure of any worthwhile sort provided by the builders (I no longer live in the area so cannot be sure of the facts of later development but would take a fair bet I am not far wrong as it is a pattern repeated nationwide.)

We have all seen the individual who makes the DM front pages with his illegal building hidden behind straw bales and the like, and take great pleasure in seeing it rightly demolished as it had no planning permission; but little is said about the reverse - now why would that be, when for example (also in Essex) a traveller commandeered a lay-by, hooked up to an electricity pole and fought for the right to stay. He won. The address, and I kid you not, is 'No1 The Lay-by'; paid not a cent for it and it is now a legal building.

That was a long time ago but the precedent stands, and we all saw what happened after spending millions of taxpayers' money at Dale Farm, another travellers' site turned legal by refusal of the authorities to do anything about it at the onset. They are extreme examples of a particular type of the flaunting of planning regs but nonetheless the illegals prevailed at a cost to the local community on many fronts.

What is being proposed here -

New homes to get 'automatic' permission in England planning shake-up

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-53625960

- is nothing more than the total subversion of all planning laws, inadequate and perverted over time as they have been. Where I live now a privately-owned large field sloping down to a picturesque river and including a part flood plain and water meadow was subjected to a planning application by the absent owner. It took a lot of effort by local people who resisted this application, including raising money for environmental, legal and non-suitability-for-building reports by professional independent assessors to get this application thrown out and rightly so, but an appeal was made and the planning inspector came down in favour of the objectors.

An aside to this was the cost: it turns out the applicant had an agreement with Taylor Wimpey that they would fund the legal costs on their side win or lose, as the land had in effect been sold to them in the event of the planning being granted. It is expensive and difficult to fight big builders in cases like this. What hope is there for that land now, seemingly having won the fight only less than two years ago?

Do we really need all these houses? Well yes, if you allow immigration to boom as it has for years now, that of course is a separate argument but a valid one as we decide (or rather, our Tory government decides for us) this is the way forward. This is a relatively small island; there has to be a limit or we end up as a giant version of Hong Kong and the ridiculous proposal we should decant three million Chinese here is perhaps an indication that that is what the Government wants !

As a nation we have been governed appallingly by successive administrations. This is just another off -loading of responsibility of government to local authority and having seen local authorities tread water, avoid issues and take their ill-gotten salaries and pensions from the ever-increasing local taxes which never seem to give anything back to us in return, I for one would not trust them to run the proverbial whelk stall. Their track record in this area proves it. You only have to look at Milton Keynes: I had no idea you could bulk buy roundabouts but Milton Keynes planners thought it a good idea to buy them all and foist them on the motorist, with absolutely no one at all having responsibility.*

With planning all local councils are interested in is the extra council tax take, no less, no more; their actions prove it. Like the NHS patient, the resident has become a hindrance, so by-pass him.

What is being proposed is the usual 'get out of jail' card being played, rather than having a meaningful appraisal of the convoluted planning laws and streamlining them to avoid the endless bottlenecks. It is much easier to grease the road ahead for those Tory donors, isn’t it, and to blight for ever many areas that until now have escaped the new-build horrors.

I expect this new proposal will escape scrutiny as we are obsessed with the latest non-deaths with the Covid virus - they can and have kept that going long enough to slip several pieces of legislation through unnoticed, it’s what governments do.

For the first time in my life I did not vote at the last election as I felt there was no one to vote for worth my vote. I did have some reservations about that but the events and handling since have vindicated my decision and as the late George Carlin said:

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*Sackerson adds: this article on the development of Milton Keynes is interesting if not enraging:
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/may/03/struggle-for-the-soul-of-milton-keynes - sample:

'Milton Keynes also defied 1970s austerity because it was built using a mechanism that some urban planners say could be used to solve the current housing crisis. It was a state-funded city. The government loaned the corporation money, and the corporation could (eventually) return its investment because it was entitled, under the New Towns Act, to buy land at agricultural prices. As soon as this land was developed, it became far more valuable: this uplift paid for MK’s infrastructure.'

40 years on and Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy seems more relevant than ever:



P.S. It looks as though Exeter, Devon is for it, after some skirmishes:
https://www.devonlive.com/news/devon-news/greater-exeter-strategic-plan-next-4380102

- as previously Totnes, Ivybridge, Dartington etc., further west. And as for the planning blight in Cornwall, the ring roads with their hypermarkets, the withering of town centres and the social decay, let those who have seen St Austell (for example) bear witness.