DUFF & NONSENSE!

Hello...hello ... is anyone listening?

With all the sanctimonious, hypocritical howlings and catawaulings emanating from parliament, Whitehall and the media, to say nothing of the whining, mewling grizzles from the 'Trot-lot' creche, as Israel fights for its existence, it will have been easy to miss this little speech from the second-in-command of al-Qaida who informed us all last week that his organisation saw "all the world as a battlefield open in front of us [my emphasis throughout].'' He continued, "The war with Israel does not depend on cease-fires ... . It is a Jihad for God's sake and will last until (our) religion prevails...from Spain to Iraq.''   He added, "We will attack everywhere.''

Unlike the putrid liars who control most of what passes for policy and opinion in the west, at least dear old Ayman al-Zawahri tells it the way it is, so you can't say you weren't warned.  But then again, we've been here before; back in the 1930s no-one believed that mad Austrian ex-corporal, either, even though he'd written a book spelling it all out, and when it was almost too late we had to go cap in hand to those ghastly Yankees and beg for the where-withal to defend ourselves.

Hello ... hello ... is anyone listening?

Oh dear, Leah ...

She's back again with the 'Post of Posts' entitled "Shallow Hal".  Not to be missed, people, particularly if you are of a masochistic bent!  Me?  I'm biting the pillow.

The Dawkinci Code: Revelations Book III

Sorry to return to this so quickly but whilst my mind is 'turning and churning' I must take advantage of it before ossification takes over.

I would like to begin with the last (as I write) comment to 'Book II' below which in its way sums up the causes of much of the dispute.  It comes from a lady called Ion and if it appears that I am personalising the debate that is not so because I do not know Ion, except via the medium of her blog and her comments here in which she appears to be a very bright and sharply intelligent woman and, more-over, a trained biologist or botanist.  There-in lies the problem - " a trained biologist or botanist"!  In other words she is the proof, if ever I needed it, to convince me that I had a lucky escape in not attending university and becoming, like Ion in her speciality, imbued with the orthodoxy.  Biological orthodoxy, of course, has the magic ingredient 'X' to add real vim and vigour to its disciples because traditionally one of its main theories, proposed by Charles Darwin, is supposed to have confirmed Nietzsche in his opinion that "God is dead!"  Thus, any attack on Darwinism is instantly interpreted by the faithful (I use the word advisedly) as an attack on atheism and is met with the sort of verbal GBH with which Dr. Dawkins is famed the length and breadth of any TV studio that will have him.  One has only to read the comments here and on other sites to see quite clearly that the science is of no interest to the neo-Darwinists, only the maintenance of the anti-theistic line which they rush to defend like the Guards closing the north gate at Hougemont Farm.  To be fair, the theists, in turn, seek any hole in Darwin's theory (and God knows [irony intended], there are enough of them) to rush forward the soldiers of the Lord, or at least, of the Intelligent Designer.  "A plague o' both your houses", I say, because you are both missing the new science which, apart from being infinitely more persuasive than Darwin and Dawkins's incremental gradations and which wouldn't have worked if the universe was three times as old, is spectacularly and speculatively exciting and fascinating in its implications.

"I wasted Time and now doth Time waste me", complained Richard II and that might be the epitaph for the neo-Darwinist paradigm.  (Incidentally, I excuse Darwin, himself, an honourable man who I just know would have dropped his theory like a hot-cake if he had known what we know.)   I began this assault on the neo-Darwinists by pointing out that long before the eye evolved in any way similar to what we know now, a huge and devilishly complicated evolution at the micro-bio-chemical level would need to have taken place first.  Now let us go back even further and contemplate the difficulties of producing "a given protein from the 20 (*) amino acids - the building blocks from which they are made. [...] The total time taken to construct a protein depends on its size and what is assumed to be the unit of time needed to place an amino acid in its appropriate position in the sequence.  Consider a protein requiring about 1,000 amino acids and suppose that it take a second to place one of them.  The correct one out of the twenty has to be selected and placed in a given position in the sequence, so if it took one unit of time to place one amino acid, it would take 20 times as long to place two, 400 times as long to place 3, and 20 to the power of 1,000 times as long to place all of them.  At this rate it would take over a thousand billion years to create this one protein, unless some other process was at work.  And this is only one of the many thousands of proteins required to constitute an organism.  The proteins themselves [as we saw in my last post concerning the re-actions to a photon hitting the eye] would have to be capable of working together in the organism,and the resulting organism would have to reproduce in a way permitting natural selection to operate.  Unless some organizational principle is applied, changes would have to occur and be passed on by reproductive success incredibly often over a sustained period to arrive at the results we see today. (1)  Sorry, people, but the sums just don't add up.  Something else is going on here and it is not 'gradual incrementations', as per the good Dr. Dawkins!

Our friend, Ion, suggests that I am 'polarising' Dawkins and Gould when I point out that the first is a 'gradual incrementalist' and the latter a saltationist (a believer in sudden bursts of evolutionary creation that produces new species).  I would humbly suggest that they, and their respective followers, not me, polarised each other in the furious, bitchy, academic warfare that ensued!  Anyway, Ion, says that it doesn't matter (!) because they were "in agreement on the primary generator (successful reproduction) and mechanism (natural selection)", and then accused me of "hairsplitting".  Actually,of course, she forgot to mention the third and most important element, constant and inheritable, mutational, genetic change without which nothing happens.  But let us concentrate on the mechanism of natural selection which goes to the very heart of Darwin's theory.  Is the environment (in the widest sense of the word) really the anvil upon which life forms are created?  Well, of course not, because natural selection creates nothing, in fact, the opposite, it destroys!  But that is, I admit, to play with words.  Does the action of the environment, then, in hammering organisms with the life and death test of natural selection lead inexorably to new species?  Unlikely according to J.C.Willis in his books Age and Area (2) and The Course of Evolution (3) in which he reports on his investigations into the distribution of species over land areas.  He found that the distribution was uneven with old species occupying most of the area nd smaller, newer species crammed into smaller areas.  In addition, the areas over-lapped so that precursor and descendant lived alongside each other which makes one ask what the pressure is that would bring a new species into existence if the old one is doing quite nicely thank you?  Also, Willis noted that there were many more smaller species, that is, species with few numbers than there were of the older, bigger species.  This seems to argue against natural selection since if it was operating at the Darwinian level of harshness you would expect fewer small species on the grounds that they are either not fit and dying out, or just emerged.  There is a final indication of the inherent weakness of the neo-Darwinian paradigm.  When the first 'mutants' appeared with the very slight advantages so beloved of the good Dr. Dawkins there is no reason why they wouldn't continue to mate with their confreres, thus watering down the inheritable differences.  That would make the time scale for the appearance of new species even longer than it is now.

It is indisputable that the environment will lead to changes in the morphology of organisms.  Darwin's (in)famous finches are proof positive, but short beaks or long, coloured or dun, they remain finches.  The question remains, what is the mechanism that can produce entirely new species, very fast, so fast that the precursors will not mate with it?  I don't know but I have to say that the mathematical theory of very simple but non-linear equations iterated zillions of times and which have been demonstrated to produce sudden, huge leaps completely at variance to the established pattern seems to me to be a very exciting prospect for scientists to explore, particularly when you understand that the constant 'twinning' of separate strands of DNA that takes place in reproduction is the equivalent of a Turing machine operation.  The answer, my son, lies not in the soil, or even in the fertile imagination of Dr. Dawkins and his little green globs, but in mathematics. 

I am not surprised at this conclusion and if I may, with due modesty, finish with my own contribution, let me tell you that my description of the big bang goes as follows: at the instant of the bang, four things were created; hydrogen, helium, energy - and mathematics!

(*) There are now 21 amino acids

(1) Richard J. Bird, Chaos and Life, Columbia University Press

(2) J. C. Willis, Age and Area: A Study in Geographical Distribution and Origin of Species, Cambridge University Press, 1922

(3) J. C. Willis, The Course of Evolution by Differentiation or Divergent Mutation Rather Than by Selection Cambridge University Press, 1940

"C' est magnifique, mais ce n' est pas la guerre."

Quelle horreure!  Nom de Dieu! La plume de ma tante ... no, no, that's not right, I know, but I'm scratching desperately at the back of my memory for some of those French phrases that helped me pass one of the few 'O'-levels I did manage.  Alas and alors (oh shut up with the French, already!) if my written French is abysmal my spoken French has been known to reduce strong Frenchmen to tears.

And tears, if I may suddenly turn serious, are the only response on reaching the end of Adam Zamoyski's superb but terrifying history "1812: Napoleon's Fatal March on Moscow". For once words almost fail me but thank goodness they didn't fail Zamoyski because this is history at its very best.  I thought I knew the bare bones of the tragedy but now I realise I only knew the tiniest fraction of it.  I almost wish I hadn't learnt the rest!  I found myself letting the book fall in time with my dropping jaw!  The monstrous stupidity, venality, arrogance and culpability of the two high commands and the courage, stamina, loyalty and esprit de corps of so many of the soldiers is a contrast almost unbearable to read about.  I use French phrases but what I had not realised before reading this book is what a polyglot European army it was that Bonaparte led into death and damnation.  At Zamoyski's best estimate, something like 550,ooo to 600,000 soldiers went into Russia and roughly 100,000 made it back.  He makes a brave effort at judging Russian casualties but they are virtually unknowable but were likely to have exceeded the invader's.  This is not, I hasten to add, just military history of the 'Gen. A pushed his division north and Gen. B outflanked him' type.  It is also packed with the private and personal anecdotes of the participants, some of which are tremendously heartening and others make you either want to weep or to throw up.

A terrific tale told by a terrific writer - get on to Amazon NOW!

Additional:  I seem to be reading dates these days.  I told you about "1815", above, but now I have started "1599" by James Shapiro.  I have only reached page 45 and already I have trebled my knowledge of Shakespeare and his theatre - which is a sort of confession of my shameful ignorance hitherto.  I am lost for the right words to express my admiration for Shapiro's book and also my gratitude because my next 'job' starting in September is to direct "Hamlet" and "1599" is simply invaluable.  I should stress that it is not solely concerned with Shakespeare but includes the domestic and international politics of the day as well as the social mores of the times.

Sorry, folks, but get on to Amazon - again!

The Dawkinci Code: Revelations Book II

Yes, we're back to the land of Hobbits and Harry Potter and Darwinian fairy tales in which our hero, Dr. Dawkins, would have us believe all sorts of wondrous things, such as, that we are all at the mercy of little, secret 'thingies' that control us.  But now, with one leap and the help of our trusty common-sense, we shall break free.

Let us return to our favourite wrangle, the eye.  According to Dr. Dawkins and his mentor, Charles Darwin, this unbelievably complex construction came about by zillions and zillions of tiny incremental improvements beginning back in the mists of time with simple, single-cell organisms whose membranes had a light sensitive patch and this gradually evolved via changes to the structure so that concave hollows allowed the direction of the light to be sensed, followed by the evolution of lens, retina, eye-movement and a nervous system capable of interpreting the signals.  But let us pause at their fist 'given' - the development of a light sensitive patch.  Darwin is forgiven because he had no knowledge of micro-biochemistry.  We must assume that Dr. Dawkins is similarly crippled judging by his scant regard for it as a subject.  Thus, both of them ignore the all-important starting question which is, how did the light sensitive patch begin? 

Here is a layman's description of how just one part of the process of vision works.  Scientists should turn away in horror at my language.  When a particle of light, a photon, hits a retina it collides with a speck of a molecule (S1) which instantly changes shape to become S2, and this in turn cause the blob of protein (B1), to which it is attached, to change shape and this change alters B1's behaviour so that now we must call it B2.  As a partly-fledged B2 it sticks itself to another blob (B3) who, up to this point has been happily married, or at least stuck to, a smaller bloblet (BL1) which it promptly drops and picks up a close relative bloblet (BL2).  (With me so far?)  Now, the whole stuck together mass (B2+B3+BL2) goes off and elopes hand-in-hand with another protein containing a certain chemical (C1), so let us now call the whole thing Big Blob (BB1).  Part of the protein that binds together BB1 contains a channel to allow in further chemicals whose strength has been lowered by C1; and another protein contains a pump to push it out if the level becomes too high.  However at the instant of contact with C1 an imbalance occurs in the positively-charged ions of sodium that are present and that, in turn, leads to a tiny electric current being produced.  Eventually that small charge is interpreted by the brain as an image.

See, it's as simple as that!  Or, rather it's as hideously complex as that.  And bear in mind that all those complex procedures now have to unwind so that the original situation is ready for the next photon of light.  I would stress that any impairment to any of that convoluted dance of chemicals, cells, membranes, proteins, channels and pumps - and the eye doesn't work.

Now my question is this, and here I must turn to my old adversary, Dr. Teabag, the mathematician; given that 'x'% of mutations are either harmful or neutral to the benefit of the organism (and I would dearly love to know what that 'x' is) that leaves only 'y'% of mutations that are beneficial.  To quote Richard Bird (1), "... the question becomes how to account for mutations of an adequate number and variety to bring about the required rate of evolution"?  he goes on, "On the face of it, there are far too many possibilities that might arise in unpatterned mutation.  Ulum(2) has calculated that, if achieving a significant advantage, such as the human visual system, requires 10^6 changes, then it will take 10^13 generations in a population of 10^11 individuals for the change to become established.  If there is one generation per day, this means several billion years.  Other attempts to calculate the rate at which changes need to occur for mutations themselves to become effective have also yielded enormously long times."

Going back to the eye, Dr, Dawkins now needs to explain not only the evolution of the eye in purely biological terms and timings but also the micro-chemical-biological changes that are required and, more-over, that are required to progress together, because if one piece is missing the puzzle is not completed.

Readers will take note, I'm sure, of my confession to being a maths, physics and chemistry failure at 'O'-level when they formulate their responses.

Additional:  I had forgotten this passage from a book which is, I think, relevant and worth repeating from a comment I have left below:

"No one knows what the actual probabilities of the mutations required for eye evolution are.  However, the maths is not too difficult:  if there are 10,000 steps needed in evolving an eye (and there would have to be many more of course), then each new mutational step must arrive by chance with a probability of it arriving.  By multiplying such probabilities we can arrive at some sort of figure of how likely it is to happen. 

If each mutation has a probability of occurring in one in 10 million individuals (I would see this as a very conservative estimate), then the chance of getting all of the 10,000 mutations *in series* [my emphasis] is 10 million times itself 10,000 times.  We arrive at the probability of a series of such mutations occurring to be one chance in 10 to the power of 70,000.  This greatly exceeds the number of atoms in the universe.

A Darwinist may then accept that the human eye is a highly improbable structure but may argue that it is just one of many other types of potential eye that evolution could throw up. [...] This idea helps the evolutionist to scale down the improbability of some such eye occurring.  This might just be a valid argument were it not for the almost identical eye of the octopus.  We know that the octupus eye is like our own - uncannily so.  Yet we also know that the octopus comes from a totally seperate phylum and would have a completely seperate evolutionary history.  To have two seperate cases of such an improbable event is simply beyond credence."(3)

(1) Richard J. Bird: Chaos and Life: Columbia University Press, p50

(2) S. W. Ulum: How to Formulate Mathematically Problems of Rates of Evolution? in P. S. Moorhead & M. M. Kaplan, eds., Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution: Philadelphia, Wistar Institute Press, 1967

(3) Antony Latham, The Naked Emperor, Janus Publishing, 2005

Murder most foul!

Were I to bump off a government tax inspector (don't tempt me!) whilst shouting "Take that, you snivelling, Brownite leech" I would probably get 8 - 10 years.  However, were I to bump off a Paki shop-keeper shouting, "Take that you snivelling, brown leech" I would probably draw an extra 5 years for aggravated murder because my motive was deemed to be racial.  Why?  I mean what makes a murder more heinous because its motivation is racial hatred?  And were I to bash a Polish bricklayer over the head with a cudgel on account of his 'footie' side knocking our very decent British chaps out of some competition whilst shouting, "Take that, you Polish swine" should I not expect the extra 5-year bonus on my sentence which in this case, the race laws being inherently ridiculous, I will not get?  I will go further and ask, why should motive play any part at all in sentencing?  After all, motive can be exceedingly difficult to pin down, even for the perpetrator.  One thinks of Iago whose inherent malignancy far exceeds the slights and insults that he puts forward as his motivation.  Any attempt to dig deep for real motive puts us all in the hands of those pox-doctor's clerks, psychiatrists, whose arrogance and ignorance is mutual. Murder is murder and motivation is speculation, so just hang them all!  Oooops, sorry, we covered that one a few months ago, I mean, just let the sentence match the crime - and hating people because of their ethnicity might be stupid, or unpleasant but it is not a crime.

"Deliver Israel, O God, out of all his troubles"!

Unusual for me to quote the Bible but I'm sure Hank will approve the practice if not the sentiment.  (Incidentally, Hank has rather a good, witty joke over at his place under the title "Chauffeur".)  Of course, regular readers will not confuse my sentiment, as expressed in Psalms XXV.21, with any altruistic feelings on my part towards the state of Israel and its inhabitants about whom I care very little.  What they won by the sword, they must keep by the sword or fall prey to the sword.  All I do care about very much is what's in it for us!  Not, you understand, in terms of booty or possessions but strictly in the strategic sense of how it will impinge on the war that has been declared on us by militant Islam.  It seems obvious to me that the interests of the west (by which I mean us and the Yanks - you can forget about those pathetic and utterly useless Europeans) is best served by a very strong Israel which must not on any account be allowed to fall to the Arabs.  Israel is, in international strategic terms what Hougemont Farm was in tactical terms at Waterloo, or Midway was in WWII, that is, a damned nuisance of an outpost that distracted and drew on to itself huge enemy forces that might have been used to very much better effect elsewhere.  We must never allow that outpost to fall, so let's hear it for 'plucky little Israel'!

In writing this, of course, I am aware of the risk that some 'Softie Lefties' will burst into tears at my nasty real politik - whilst simultaneously, some 'Very-Hard-Indeed Lefties' will pretend to burst into tears whilst actually agreeing through gritted teeth with my analysis and hoping that Hezbollah will some how or other succeed in imposing a single state solution which, as they know perfectly well, will entail the second holocaust.  Like Oscar Wilde reading the death of Tiny Tim, one would need a heart of stone not to laugh at the confused meanderings of the 'Softie Lefties' as they cheer on a bunch of fanatical, murdering Islamists to utterly destroy the only democracy in the middle east, one of whose main political parties is, er, 'Softie Leftie'.  Anyway, as the overwhelming majority of the so-called 'Arab Street' appear to share the views of Youssef Ibrahim (see below)  and have decided to ignore completely the 'sufferings of their Arab brethren', then, in the interests of fair play and even-handedness, and in furtherence of this site's policy of allowing all sides to express their views, let's hear it for 'the plucky little decapitators'!

Can't say fairer than that, can I?

The Darbyshires

I will not tell you exactly how I stumbled across this site because it might prejudice your re-action to it.  Suffice to say, in the most neutral of tones, that it is the blog of Leah and Robin Darbyshire, and Yucki (ooops, sorry) Yishi, their dog.  I must include him(?) because he contributes the occasional post!  Leah and Robin are a modern, one might even say, post-modern, young couple working and living in Singapore.  It is a site whose flavour, like my (in)famous dry martinis, should be sipped gradually rather than swallowed in gulps.  I shall be pleased to hear your re-actions to it.

Additional, Friday 21st:  Sorry, 'Typepad' was playing up (again!) yesterday so I have had to wait for the chance to urge you all not, under any circumstances, to miss the chance of reading yesterday's post by the ineffable Leah Darbyshire entitled "We are legally blonde again and I am always right".  'Wonderful', isn't quite the word!

The sort of brutal truth only your friends can tell you!

"Dear Palestinian Brethren,

The war with Israel is over.  You have lost.  Surrender and negotiate to secure a future for your children.  We, your Arab brothers, may say until we are blue in the face that we stand by you, but the wise among you and most of us know that we are moving on, away from the tired old, idea of the Palestinian Arab cause and the 'eternal struggle' with Israel.

Dear friends, you and your leaders have wasted three generations trying to fight for Palestine, but the truth is that the Palestine you could have had in 1947 is much bigger than the one you could have had in 1967, which in turn is much bigger than what you may have to settle for now or in another ten years.  Struggle means less land and more misery and utter loneliness.  At the moment, brothers, you would be lucky to secure a semblance of a state in the Gaza Strip into which you have all been crowded, and a small part of the West Bank of the Jordan.  It isn't going to get better.  Time is running out even for this much land, so here are some facts and figures, and sound advice, friends.

You hold keys, which you drag out for television interviews , to houses that do not exist or are inhabited by Israelis who have no intention of moving from Jaffa, Haifa, Tel Aviv or West Jurusalem.  You shoot old guns at modern Israeli tanks and American-made fighter jets, doing virtually no harm to Israel while bringing the wrath of its mighty army down upon you.  You fire ridiculously inept Kassam rockets that cause little destruction and delude yourselves into thinking this is a war of liberation.

Your government, your social institutions, your schools, and your economy are all in ruins.  Your young people are growing up illiterate, ill, and bent on the rites of death and suicide, while you, in effect, are living on the kindness of foreigners, including America and the United Nations.  Every day your officials must beg for your daily bread, dependent on relief trucks that carry food and medicine into the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, while your criminal Muslim fundamentalist Hamas government continues to fan the flames of a war it can neither fight nor hope to win.

In other words, brothers, you are down, out and alone in a burnt out landscape that is shrinking by the day.  What kind of struggle is this? Is it worth waging at all?  More important, what kind of miserable future does it portend for your children, the fourth or fifth of the Arab world's have-nots?

We, your Arab brothers, have moved on.  Those of us who have oil money are busy accumulating wealth and building housing, luxoury developments, state-of-the-art universities and schools, and new highways and byways.  Those of us who share borders with Israel, such as Egypt and Jordan, have signed a peace treaty with it and are not going to war for you any time soon.  Those of us who are far away, in places like North Africa and Iraq, frankly could not care less what happens to you.

Only Syria continues to feed your fantasies that someday it will join you in liberating Palestine, even though a huge chunk of its territory, the entire  Golan Heights, was taken by Israel in 1967 and annexed.  The Syrians [and the likes of 'BionOc', 'lenin', Meaders, etc - DD], my friends, will fight down to the last Palestinian Arab.  Before you got stuck with this Hamas crowd, another cheating, conniving, leader of yours, Yasser Arafat, sold you a rotten bill of goods - more pain, greater corruption, and millions stolen by his relatives - while your children played in the sewers of Gaza.

The war is over.  Why not let a new future begin."

The author of this refreshing gust of reality is Youssef M. Ibrahim, an Egyptian-born American and a senior foreign correspndent for several prestigious American newspapers.  This open letter was re-printed in The Business from its original in the New York Sun.  Ibrahim claims that it represents an increasing current of opinion in the Arab media as expressed by Arab pundits, letters to the papers and talk shows on Arab-language networks.

The certainty principle!

In my review of Stoppard's brilliant new play Rock 'n' Roll, I suggested that it was an illustration of the playwright's belief that the only certainty in this world was uncertainty.  But of course, there are a couple more of which we are all only too well aware - death and taxes.  I will forgo discussion of the first for personal reasons.  In the small development in which I live surrounded (for the time being) by people older than me, they are dropping like flies, to the extent that I'm thinking of renaming the place Death Row!  So let me turn to the second, taxes, and advise you to read the leader in this weekend's The Business (Britain's ONLY newspaper - blah-blah-blah!) but if you're too busy trying to earn enough to pay your tax bill then you may read this less erudite synopsis.

As is well known, president Bush has in recent years pushed through a programme of tax cuts to howls of outrage and excoriation from amongst others, the D(i)mocrats, sundry (un)wiseacres in the American media and various economic illiterates in the twin dustbins of bovine British stupidity, the Labour and Conservative parties.  "Tax cuts for the rich", was the suitably juvenile slogan produced for the babies in the 'Trot-lot' creche to chant, not least because it consisted of words of only one syllable!  Two D(i)mocrat senators described the tax-cutting policy as "one of the most dangerous, destructive, and dishonourable acts of government ever seen" and "a policy of debt, deficits and decline".  So what happened?  Read on ...

"Since the Bush tax cuts in June 2003, America has increased the size of its entire economy by 20% - or $2,2 trillion, roughly the same size as the total [my emphasis] Chinese economy", reports The Business, adding that a third of the extra taxes received are coming from individuals in the richest 1% of the population as a result of cuts to personal taxation on executive bonuses and stock market profits, the unkindest cut of all, according to the economic and psychological dimwits who still cannot grasp the truth that if you lower taxes to the rich they end up contributing even more.  I should add quickly, before Leftie critics pile in, that The Business points out that whilst president Bush has been superb in pushing through these tax cuts, he has also been stupidly profligate in spending.  Even so, better to be half right rather than totally wrong as are virtually all the western European nations with the honourable exception of Eire where, since 1993, they have reduced their tax burden from 42.2% down to 34.5% and seen the tax haul treble, up 192% in real terms compared to Britain's 58% despite Gordon Brown reaching historically new heights of taxation. 

The cheerful thought for those of you cretinous enough to believe that higher taxes are good for you, is that in your choice for the next prime minister of Britain, as far as taxation goes, you have no choice!  Both 'Greedy' Gordon and 'Dim Dave' reckon they can spend your money much more wisely than you can, so they will share the same slogan, "Stand and Deliver!"

Let's hear it for la Rullsenberg!

From time to time I have tweaked Lisa Rullsenberg, in the best possible taste, of course, because she is rather amusing in the Falstaffian sense of being 'not only witty in herself but the cause that wit is in others'.  Now I am even more in her debt because she made me laugh out loud by pointing me to the following link which is a post in something called the Encore Theatre Magazine on the subject of the 50th anniversary of the Royal Court Theatre.  The writer, an impeccably Left-wing 'Dave or Davina Spart' produces a tolerable impersonation of a retired colonel from Tunbridge Wells reading in his 'Daily Torygraph' that they're letting queers in the army!  The writer is appalled, shocked, horrified and disgusted that the Royal Court has invited Sir Tom Stoppard (I mean to say, dammit, the fella's a Knight of the Realm, whatever next?) to preview his latest play Rock 'n' Roll. Stoppard is dismissed as "politically conservative" and a writer who "flatters his audience", as opposed, presumably, to the normal run of Royal Court writers who insult their audiences.  Even worse, according to this latter-day Spartist, Stoppard "is a member of the establishment, a theatrical knight [who] rarely, if ever, engages with the world. We are not expecting sociology, but he has the kind of aloofness from the present that the Royal Court has always detested".  The unknown writer goes on to list a number of worthier playwrights who should have had the honour on this auspicious anniversary year but, alas, I have never heard of any of them except Caryl Churchill, two of whose woeful and utterly forgettable plays I once had the misfortune to sit through.

The Royal Court has always struck me, on the base of an admittedly flimsy knowledge (going to see Stoppard's play just recently was my very first visit), as an organisation that was inherently ridiculous and verging on the ludicrous.  I can imagine Stoppard's quiet, inward chuckle at the deliciousness of the joke in being invited to open his play there of all places.  Also, it has provided me with a sly smile through the years that the one playwright with whom the Royal Court is indelibly linked, John Osborne, turned out to be more Right-wing than the current leader of the BNP.  All of which goes to prove that the further reaches of Left-wing nuttery are hand-in-hand with their Right-wing brothers, and that the people who run the Royal Court are a bunch of ninnies!

Muslim "fun" day - or a clash of civilisations?

I see that Alton Towers has single-handedly tried to resuscitate the notion of multi-culturalism with its “Muslim fun day”, which has unfortunately clashed with Chav and Chavetta’s Western Liberal-Democracy wedding day.

Women and men will be “prevented from mixing” on the same rides and, of course, the usual vices of the infidel - smoking, drinking, gambling and the wearing of non-Muslim clothes – will be banned too.  Naturally this has gone down like “un sandwich-de-merde” with Chav and Chavetta and their 60 guests.

Aside from a “pain of death” punishment for being caught, it doesn’t sound too dissimilar to the “no music, no dancing, no football” edict of the new Islamist proprietors of Somalia, does it?

Perhaps Alton Towers could punish individuals caught infringing the rules with obligatory goes on “Death ride”, or whatever the scariest fairground attraction they’ve got is called these days, and re-badge the day as “Islamo-Fascist fun day”?

And maybe they could market a “National Socialist fun day”, where Aryan and non-Aryan people are “prevented from mixing” on the rides, and 6 million of the most undesirable non-Aryans are condemned to “Death ride”?

And of course, McLenin, Smeaglers, Bi-Octopussy, etc. would have to have their own “Socialist fun day”, where the working class get to go on all the rides except “Death ride”, which, of course, will be reserved for 120 million middle class people.

Son of Duff

Alas, poor Hamlet, I thought I knew him!

Poor, old Shakespeare! Over the last 400-odd years he's had to put up with a hell of a lot and now comes the final indignity - David Duff (yes, me!) has been chosen to direct Hamlet next year.  (Just in those two lines several Shakespearean quotations occurred but I firmly resisted the temptation.)  The first job, of course, was to cut the play which I have just completed.  Our audience at the RSS is, shall we say, mature and a 4-hour Hamlet might be described as 'incontinent' in all senses!  Apart from that, we simply don't have enough actors, so I have to produce a working script from the original using no more than 8 men and 3 women.  Cutting Shakespeare is not for the sensitive.  It takes an unfeeling brute like me to do it with verve and confidence.  It's not that I'm unaware that I'm tampering with a master-piece but I am bouyed by the knowledge that Shakespeare was, as much as anything else, a practical man of the working theatre, in other words, he would have understood that you do what you have to do to put a show on and get an audience.  It might be a work of art but it's also 'show business'.  I take care to maintain scansion and I have kept in the Fortinbras sub-plot even if the Norwegian, himself, does not appear.  I suspect that my working script will suffer more cuts and perhaps even some additions from the cutting-room floor.  Anyway, it is the Mount Everest of my own personal theatrical journey and I am thrilled and slightly scared at the prospect.  More news later.

Here's a laugh ...

That cheeky little Marxist tyke, Will, has done us all a favour by finding a priceless piece of Monty Python and you can see it for yourself over at his place under the heading Kidding Mr. Hitler.  God only knows, what with this, that and the other (no jokes please!) we could do with the laughs.  Enjoy, as our American cousins put it.  And thanks, Will!

"An' go to your Gawd like a soldier"

Kipling summed it up better than most but, of course, he has been out of fashion for decades so none of the semi-educated smart-arses who run our benighted country will have read him even assuming they have ever heard of him!

"When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,

An' the women come out to cut up what remains,

Jest roll to your rifle an' blow out your brains

An' go to your Gawd like a soldier."

It isn't just that it is my old lot who are taking casualties out there, although I confess it does strike home a touch when I see those proud, young faces with their hard-earned, red berets, but regular readers will know my deep aversion to the idea that we have anything to teach other people concerning their way of life.  However, setting that aside, our Victorian ancestors found out rather rapidly that Afghanistan was a 'no-no' and, indeed, the entire Soviet army re-learnt that lesson the hard way, so, why in God's name are we there?  Why are young British lives being thrown away on a futile and unwinnable campaign?  It doesn't make much difference if the Taliban take over because we can use B-52s, cruise missiles, even hit-and-run raids to smash any terrorist training camps they might build up.  Better still, we can always pop a Tomahawk missile down the flue of the Mosque favoured by members of the government.  I am always happy to put the boot into this government but now I am forced to swivel my aim in the direction of the General Staff, in general (no pun intended) and Gen. Sir Michael Jackson, in particular.  Dammit, he's an ex-Para, so what's he doing throwing away young 'Toms' on a totally futile exercise?  I'm not overly sentimental, if you take the Queen's shilling, you take the shit that comes with it, but you should be able to look to your officers to stand up for you in the face of political and military stupidity.

Post Script:  Max Hastings says it so much better than me in today's Daily Mail:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/newscomment.html?in_article_id=394640&in_page_id=1787

The Dawkinci Code: Revelations Book One

You must prepare yourselves for a shock - I am not an original thinker.  Oh, you knew that already!  All right, all right, so I am merely a sponger-upper, if that's quite a word, of other men's ideas, so be it; I'm not worried by it, after all, it is a characteristic I share with 99% of Mankind and I have always made clear to you that, at best, I can only be described as semi-educated.  So there you are, I'm all 'fessed up with cards on the table, which leaves me clear to mount an onslaught against Dr. Richard Dawkins, another un-original thinker but, apparently, given his Doctorate, better educated than me.  (That sentence provides me with an opportunity for a cheap crack at the expense of another Ph.D. who regularly visits these hallowed pages but I like to think I am above such things and anyway, I'm sure being a Doctor of Tamponology requires very rigorous training.)  I should warn you all that this will be merely the first in a series of onslaughts and that one of my main sources will be the work of the late David Stove, Darwinian Fairytales, Ashcroft Publishing, 2000, 2001.  Having said that, I will almost certainly put it into my words rather than his, unless I use quotes, and he should not be held responsible for my interpretation.

I intend to start with the title of Dawkins' book The Selfish Gene so it is only fair to explain my title to these posts.  Whilst I cannot claim Larry's expertise in the field of 'tamponology', I can and do boast of a considerable experience with what I call 'Crash - Bang - Wallops', that is, American crime books and films.  I devour them by the ton!  A few years ago, and long before all the hype began, I picked up a copy of the Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown and if memory serves, I gave up on it after reaching quarter point.  It wasn't just the veiled hints of revelations to come concerning Opus Dei, a private and exclusive organisation and thus one that shares with Freemasonry, Jewry and for all I know, the Women's Institute, a tendency to excite the febrile imaginations of the ignorant and superstitious; but also the 'character', in so far as it was drawn at all, of the hero, a man so wooden he made a plank seem exciting!  However, the success of the book/film is yet another demonstration that 'you'll never go broke underestimating the great Anglo-American public' particularly if you can convince them that there are secret 'thingies' out there which only I, the author of this book, can vouchsafe to you.  Even more success will accrue to you if you add, with a nudge and a wink, that these secret 'thingies' actually control the world, and more-over, you can prove it by the interpretation of certain signs and signals hitherto ignored by Mankind.  I am assured by those whose Biblical studies exceed mine that the Book of Revelations is a mine of such secret information.  Hence the title of this and following posts.

Now Dr. Dawkins' book, or at least the one I intend to concentrate upon, is called The Selfish Gene and that title alone should set off warning bells in any sensible person's head.  The fact that it did not, originally, do so in my case speaks volumes for my silliness but at least I can own up to it now and "Joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth", and all that sort of thing,  because, of course, it is a ridiculous notion to think that a micro-glob of protein is 'selfish'.  It would be as daft to write a book called The Generous Gene or The Very Shy but Polite Gene, although it must be admitted that Dr. Dawkins and Mr. Dan Brown are both rich beyond the dreams of Man, or at least, a hell of lot richer than me, so who knows ...?

Now, defenders of Dr. Dawkins will immediately hit back in outrage and point out that he makes it perfectly clear that he does not mean 'selfish' in the literal sense but as a metaphor to which I can only reply that metaphors are for poets not scientists.  Even Dr. Dawkins, himself, appears confused because these are the opening words of his Preface to the 1976 edition; "This book should be read as though it were science fiction.  It is designed to appeal to the imagination.  But it is not science fiction: it is science.  [...] We are survival machines - robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.  This is the truth which still fills me with astonishment.  Though I have known it for years, I never seem to get fully used to it.  One of my hopes is that I may have some success in astonishing others."  I think you can take that as a 'yes', Doctor, because you've certainly "astonished" me!  I am only surprised that he didn't finish with an "Hallelujah! Praise Charles Darwin", or some such, for there is a definite tone of the fundamentalist convert about that opening paragraph, the sort of thing you expect to hear when you answer the door to a couple of those well-dressed, young Americans with bibles under their arms, or, a cymbal-toting Hari Krishna accosts you outside the super-market.

You see, dear reader (and please try not to behave the way you do when that Seventh Day Adventist collars you outside the newsagent), Dr. Dawkins believes that those secret 'thingies', sorry, those selfish genes are controlling us all, yes, really!  You see, they like (and here I imagine his voice sinking to a whisper) to replicate, oh yes, and replication is a sign of selfishness.  Now here we can pause to bang our heads against the wall and remind ourselves that globs of protein neither 'like' nor 'dislike' anything.  At the same time we can point out that self-replication is impossible and, more-over, the exact opposite of "selfish".  No one thing can ever be another thing.  If, God help us all, I replicate a copy of myself, it is not me, it is just a copy of me.  And were I to indulge in this practice, it would be anything but selfish since I would have to expend energy to carry out the exercise and would then be involved in nurturing the result through to adulthood when the unspeakable bastard would start eating my food supply!  If I was truly selfish, I would set about killing off anything that remotely resembled me and take very good care not produce any copies.

So you see, Dr. Dawkins got it wrong from the very beginning, his title, which might, with more plausibility but not much more accuracy, be better called "The Vain Gene" because vanity is about the only reason I can think of for wanting a replica of myself.

Here I will quote Stove, p 127, who sums it up much better than me: "For reasons [...] I have now given, sensible people take no notice when yet another crank or charlatan publishes yet another book which says that human beings are the helpless puppets of something or other: God, or God and demons, or History, or Race, or the Unconscious, or Aliens from Outer Space, or whatever. The Selfish Gene is simply another member of this slum breed of books, and ought to have been recognised as such from the beginning."

Post Script: I am obliged to Ben at: http://www.religionisbullshit.net/blog/index.php

Ben is an honourable opponent of mine who was kind enough to send me the links to a fairly ferocious cat and dog fight between Mary Midgley and Richard Dawkins plus a following article from 'butterfliesandwheels'.  Not to be missed by anyone interested in this subject.

http://www.royalinstitutephilosophy.org/articles/article.php?id=14
http://www.royalinstitutephilosophy.org/articles/article.php?id=5
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=1

Rachel North from Planet Zog

Rachel North is a young woman from north London who was on a train hit by Islamist terrorists on July 7th last year.  I first crossed 'pens' with her over at The Sharpener  (I can't find the link but it was about a month ago) and then again yesterday and today on her own site - although you will be hard pushed to find much because she censored me first before banning me!  Apparently I "insulted" her by, amongst other things, suggesting that she was mounting a political platform on the backs of the dead and wounded.  It was certainly a robust accusation but, I like to think, not quite up to, or down to, her own standards when she implied that I was a Fascist!  Anyway, she is one of the leading lights of an orchestrated campaign insisting on a public enquiry into the actions and policies of the security services.  At this point it is worth printing the exact words of the petition:

"We, the British Public, call for a fully comprehensive Public Inquiry into the July 7th 2005 London Bombings.

Only this can provide us with the information we need as to what actually happened, how it happened and why it happened so that we will be better prepared to prevent such a tragedy happening again.

We, the Public were attacked. We, the Public have questions. We, the Public want our questions answered, independently, transparently and honestly."

Let me examine this more closely.  The signatories to this document are not "the British public", they are just 'signatories to a petition', no more, no less.  They demand to know what, how and why it happened.  I can only suppose they are even more ignorant than I already suspect because I know the answers to those questions already and with, I believe, a fair amount of accuracy, they are, after all, to quote a phrase, "Bleedin' obvious"!  Again, the claim is made that "We, the Public, were attacked."  No they weren't!  A tiny handful of people were attacked, grievously and viciously, and the resulting death toll was slightly less than a week's worth of road deaths.  Is Rachel North campaigning for a public enquiry into road traffic policy? I think we can assume a 'no' to that!

But let me dwell on the final sentence: "We, the Public want our questions answered, independently, transparently and honestly." First there is the assumption that any questions that Rachel North, in her disguise as "the British Public", cares to dream up, must, a fortiori, be answered by government ministers and officials.  Well, once you grant that sort of 'right' then you can kiss goodbye to any sort of governance because our governors will all be too busy answering busy-bodies like Rachel North - and me, 'cos I've got quite a few, too!  What seems to have escaped the notice of Rachel North is that we have a system of government here called parliament in which our representatives ask the questions on our behalf.  Now, to Rachel North in all her mixture of anguish, pomposity and outrage, it may seem inadequate, to which one can only respond by telling her that whilst it's not perfect, it seems to have served us fairly well for a couple of centuries and on the face of it, it seems a lot more sensible than her 'Charter for Self Important Busy-Bodies".

Should you doubt her political wisdom, to say nothing of her common-sense, consider her next requirement, that is, that the questions be answered "independently".  Some one should tell her, gently, that there are no independents - everyone has an opinion.  If she can name one report in which the tribunal members had no previous opinions on the subject I shall send her a bunch of flowers by way of apology.  Of course, the best amongst them will try valiantly to dismiss these previously held beliefs and some may well succeed but the point is no one else will believe them!  Because every one has an opinion, only those who agree with the enquiry result will accept it, and those that don't, won't!  (Which is part of the reason why Rachel North, herself, refuses to accept two of the enquiries that have already taken place but laps up the one that goes part way towards her opinion.)

When it comes to the "transparency" she calls for in a "public" enquiry, it transpires, under hot questioning from me, that she would accept part of it being held in camera.  Instantly the "transparency" turns opaque and every Tom, Dick or Rachel who doesn't like the outcome will cry 'foul'.  I leave others to judge her political acumen when she actually asks that her questions be answered "honestly"!  All I can reply is, "Honestly, what planet do you live on?"

I am sorry for Rachel North, the young woman who suffered a dreadful danger and shock; but I cannot show any mercy to a silly young woman whose agitations, encouraged and lapped up by the press in general and the BBC in particular, are likely to do our country even more damage as we struggle to fight a war the like of which we have never seen before.

"Rock 'n' Roll" by Sir Tom Stoppard, part II

First, an instantaneous apology to The Royal Court for my false accusation below when I berated them for not listing the parts played by the support actors.  I had looked to the pages containing their 'bios' to give me that information but, in fact, had I turned another page I would have found a cast list.  Sorry, and now let's hear it for eight actors who were playing against three of the very best in the land and who, in quality, were right up there with them: Edward Hogg, Alice Eve, Miranda Colchester, Antony Calf, Peter Sullivan, Martin Chamberlain, Nicole Ansari and Louise Bangay.

A few posts down I was writing on the subject of Coriolanus and I suggested that it was one of the greatest political plays ever written with Ibsen's "Enemy of the People" running it close.  A wild, if harmless, piece of hyperbole even by my extravagant standards but now, I think, "Rock 'n' Roll" (along with Stoppard's earlier "The Coast of Utopia") must join them.  "The personal is political" claim the Marxists but in this play Stoppard, through his hero, Jan, refuses to accept the dictum.  For him, the personal is just that, personal!  Jan has no wish to change the world even if his world in the 1960s to '80s is regimented by Soviet tanks.  All he wants is the freedom for his beloved rock bands to perform their songs.  Even the fall of Dubcek fails to dent his insistence on a private, personal 'pursuit of happiness'.  Husak, he claims, might be a Soviet puppet but he will be better than Dubcek because he will deflect the worst antics of the political apparatchiks.  He argues with his friend Ferdinand who is a dissident activist, "You can't face life without a guarantee.  So you convince yourself everything's going to end badly.  But look - when the Russians invaded, you would have bet on mass arrests, the government in gaol, everything banned, reformers thrown out of their jobs, out of the universities, the whole Soviet thing, with accordion bands playing Beatles songs.  I thought the same thing.  I came back to save rock 'n' roll, and my mother actually.  But none of it happened.  My Mum's okay, and there's new bands ripping off Hendrix and Jethro Tull on equipment held together by spit.  I was in the Music F Club where they had this amateur rock competition.  The Plastic People of the Universe played 'Venus in Furs' from 'Velvet Undergorund', and I knew everything was basically okay."

Here, I will touch on a point that is not central to Stoppard's theme but which his sharp observation of all matters Czech has brought to his attention.  The Czechs are the epitome of central Europeanism (if I may call it that).  For centuries they have been subject to this or that 'regime', royal, imperial, Fascist and Soviet, all of which have come and gone and no doubt others will arrive.  Through a personal connection I have enjoyed a slight insight into Moravian village life which, in comparison to the West, is a very unsophisticated society, but also an immensely enduring one!  By and large people there are self-sufficient in the necessities of life and this 'independence' allows them the 'freedom' to keep well away from politics above the parish pump level.  In the play, Jan is an educated version of this personal self-sufficiency and indifference, an attitude that chimes with Stoppard's own belief and desire that people should avoid the rigidities of political dogma and, instead, concentrate on the personal and the human.  Here is Jan explaining it to his friend Ferdinand following an incident in which a rock musician has been arrested:

Ferd: I'll put it another way.  Who's going to lay bare the ideological contradictions of bureaucratic dictatorship?  Us intellectuals, or - ?

Jan: The Plastics [a rock band].  Why do you think you're walking around and Jirous [the band leader] is in gaol?

Ferd: Because he insulted a secret policeman.

Jan: No, because the policeman insulted him. About his hair.  Jirous doesn't cut his hair.  It makes the policeman angry, so he starts something and it ends with Jirous in gaol.  But what is the policeman angry about?  What difference does long hair make?  The policeman is angry about his fear.  The policeman's fear is what makes him angry.  He's frightened by indifference.  Jirous doesn't care. He doesn't care enough even to cut his hair.  The policeman isn't afraid of dissidents!  Why should he be?  Policemen love dissidents, like the Inquisition loved heretics.  Heretics give meaning to the defenders of the faith ..."

Which is all well and good but, as Stoppard knows all too well from his personal experiences in Czechoslovakia at the time, sooner or later the 'politics gets personal'!  In 1976 the regime jailed several Czech rock musicians for spreading anti-socialism in their songs and as a result the dissident movement produced 'Charter 77' accusing the government of failure to comply with the Helsinki Accords.  In the play, Jan succumbs to the political by signing the 'Charter', following  an attack on his 'personal', in the form of a police raid on his flat in which all his precious rock records are smashed.

As I indicated in the post below, the other activist in the play is Max, an English Philosophy don and a committed Marxist.  He is, I suppose, Stoppard's means of demonstrating how ideology that forgets the human is eventually self-destructive.  Despite Stalin, despite Hungary in '56 and despite Czechoslovakia in '68, Max refuses to leave the party that stands for everything in which he believes:  "To be human is to be joined together.  Society!  When the revolution was young and I was young, we were all made from a single piece of timber.  The struggle was for socialism through organised labour, and that was that.  It wasn't revolution in the head, or revolution by an alliance of single-issue groups.  What remains of those bright days of certainty?  The Trotskyites squabble over their place at the front of the march without noticing there's no one behind.  The New Left is an ivory ghetto where the defeat of capitalism is supposed to follow from correct analysis.  Where do I belong?  The Party is losing confidence in its creed.  If capitalism can be destroyed by anti-racism, feminism, gay rights, ecological good practice and every special interest already covered by the Social Democrats, is there a lot of point in being communist? [...]"  The eventual loss of Max's communist faith is matched by his loss of belief in materialism.  His bold assertion that mind is as material as the body is smashed by his dying wife's assertion that her surgically amputated body is nothing without her mind and in his anguish he is forced to admit that he loves her with his immaterial soul.  Max is a great creation by Stoppard and even as one disagrees vehemently with his politics one is moved to pity by the intellectual and personal journey he goes through before his eyes are opened.

Obviously from the title you can judge that Stoppard uses the 1960s revolution in rock 'n' roll as a central motif in this play and thereby touches on an extremely pertinent and contemporary point.  For some time now I have wondered, in the 'War on Terror', or to be precise, the war between militant Islam and the West, whether their semtex will blow us up before our corruption poisons them!  By which I mean that in this world of instantaneous and global communication, the glittering, gaudy, bawdy ways of the West are constantly dangled before orthodox eyes as an affront to Allah, no doubt, but as a temptation to the faithful, as well.  As Max ruefully admits during a visit to Prague in the '70s during which he meets several apparatchiks in the Sovietised government, he is probably the first communist they have ever met!

However, perhaps Stoppard's most poignant motif that is touched upon obliquely throughout the play is the life and times of a certain Syd Barrett, a gentleman hitherto unknown to me, but apparently a leading light in the group, Pink Floyd, when it first started but whose drug-binges, verging on the 'heroic', led to his dismissal.  He ended up living with his mum back in Cambridge.  We meet him first at the very beginning of the play as long-haired, young man,  crouching on his heels atop a garden wall softly serenading a young girl with a single-reed pipe, who, in her dreamy state imagines him to be Pan; perhaps, in Stoppard's metaphor, the first, wild rocker of mythical history!  Later the girl, now grown up, sees him again, this time as a fat, bald man on a bicycle.  Stoppard, I think, shares Shakespeare's fascination with Time and its ravages.

I hope I haven't made this brilliant play sound like a dire political tract.  It is anything but that, and the personal lives and loves are drawn with great tenderness and wit.  Before I finish, I cannot resist the temptation to repeat a passage that could stand forever as an example of Stoppard at his very best.  A security service's interrogator is questioning Jan on his return to Prague in the course of which he says, "We're supposed to know what's going on inside people.  That's why it's the Ministry of the Interior."  Please, please, go and see it, it is everything that drama should be.

"Rock 'n' Roll" by Sir Tom Stoppard

This, to paraphrase the football commentator's well-known 'boo-boo', is likely to be a 'review of two halves'; not only because I want to deal with the play as a theatrical event first and then discuss its political philosophy second, but also because, having been away for three days, the little 'Memsahib' might want me for karate practice or shopping in Sainsburys both of which inspire equal feelings of dread.  However, for those unlikely or unwilling to plod through my florid prose for much more than a nano-second, here is a synopsis of my review: beg, borrow, steal, maim or murder, if you have to, in order to get a ticket for this example of theatrical excellence!

The play covers the history of the Czech struggle for liberty under Soviet oppression from the 1960s to the 1990s, as seen from Cambridge and Prague.  Stoppard's hero is Jan, a Czech-Jew whose family fled the Nazi invasion to England, where Jan spent his childhood, but returned after the war to their homeland.  Jan (Rufus Sewell), having gained a doctorate at Prague is now in Cambridge studying philosophy under the tutelage of Max (Brian Cox), a 'died-in-the-red-wool' Marxist.  It is the 'Prague Spring' of 1968 and Jan is giving up his studies to return home.  Max is furious, not only because Jan is both a friend and his favourite student, but because he suspects that Jan is going back to aid the liberal Dubcek government.  In fact, he's returned, seriously, to make sure his widowed mother is safe and, semi-flippantly, to bring rock and roll to Czechoslovakia!  Jan is a young man of his 1960s times and the only revolution he's really interested in is the one that liberates people from what he sees as social conformity.  However, as we know, the 'Prague Spring' was rapidly turned to Soviet winter by several tank divisions and a plague of KGB.  Jan's friend in Prague is Ferdinand*, as absolute for social democracy as Max is for red-in-tooth-and-claw Marxism.  Jan, however, remains obdurately uninvolved.  He points out to Ferdinand that despite the loss of Dubcek and the invasion by Russian troops, in fact, when measured against the great atrocities of the 20th c., the Sovietised regime is something of a soft hand in a velvet glove and he refuses to sign petitions or become involved - so long as they allow his beloved rock 'n' roll to be played and performed.  Of course, eventually that is precisely what, after a while, is also stamped on and Jan's protest leads to a spell in jail followed by non-skilled labour in a bakery.

Meanwhile, back in Cambridge, we meet Max's wife Eleanor (Sinead Cusack), a classics professor who is suffering from breast cancer, and their 16-year-old daughter, Esme.  The relationship between the intellectually bullying Max and the equally sharp-tongued Eleanor is drawn superbly consisting, as it does in many real-life marriages, of a mixture of friendship, love, tensions and exasperation.  During the course of the play, Eleanor dies, and we then jump in time so that we see her daughter, Esme (played by Sinead Cusack) as an adult with a daughter of her own.  The play ends in the 1990s with the widower Max, reconciled to the failures of Marxism, finding companionship and love with an old flame; and Jan returning to Cambridge from a 'liberated' Czech Republic to find love with Esme.

Jan, of course, is an autobiographical creation.  Stoppard, himself, is a Czech-Jew whose family fled the Nazis, and he was a discreet supporter of those Czech intellectuals who spoke out against the iniquity of the Soviet occupation.  However, the similarities go deeper.  Here, I am forced to speculate because obviously I do not know Stoppard personally, but I have seen or heard him on those rare occasions when he allows an interview, and it seems to me that Sewell has captured the essence of Stoppard in his portrayal of the 'fictional' Jan.  The diffidence, the shy smile, the hesitancy in speech which, in Stoppard, stems not from an inability to make up his mind but from a proper regard for the proper use of language and a humility in the face of the only certainty in this world - uncertainty!  Sewell's performance is simply terrific.

Max (and to a certain degree, Ferdinand, the political dissident) are the opposite of Jan.  Max is committed to his Marxism despite the blatant and brutal facts of its outcome.  As he puts it, "I speak as one who's kicked in the teeth by nine-tenths of anything you can tell me about Soviet Russia", but when Jan asks him why, then, has he remained in the Party, he replies, "Because of the tenth". Max is an almost Lear-like figure of furious temper and passionate commitment which stems from a powerful ego but Stoppard's incredible achievement is, like Shakespeare's, to bring an audience round to pity for this politically blind old man who, at the end, is forced to see clearly.  Here, with deliberate irony but genuine anguish he sums up his lost dreams, "There was a place once, a huge country where square-jawed workers swung sledgehammers, and smiling buxom girls with kerchiefs on their heads lifted sheaves of wheat, and there was a lot of singing, and volumes of poetry in editions of a hundred thousand sold out in a day ...  What happened to it?"  In this character we can see what makes Stoppard such a great writer.  Take almost any modern Left-wing playwright creating a super-rich capitalist monster and you will almost certainly see a Brechtian, two-dimensional caricature of, say, Robert Maxwell with the all-too obvious expectation on the part of its creator that we in the audience should hiss and boo his every appearance like children at a pantomime.  No such childishness from Stoppard who gives his Marxist 'monster' time and eloquence to express his philosophy and to fill out his all too human strengths and frailties.  I have never seen Brian Cox on stage before and I was stunned by the power, the energy and the technical acting expertise of his performance.

Sinead Cusack is sublime in the two roles of mother and then, adult daughter.  As Eleanor, her fear and courage in the face of a disease that is killing her is almost too painful to watch.  Here, driven to a fury by Max's philosophical pedantry concerning the non-existence of mind and the reality of  body, she bursts out, "They've cut, cauterised and zapped away my breasts, my ovaries, my womb, half my bowel, and a nutmeg out of my brain, and I am undiminished, I'm exactly who I've always been. I am not my body. My body is nothing without me, that's the truth of it."  She and Cox together are electric!

Trevor Nunn, of course, 'realises' Stoppard's plays better than anyone.  In this production a revolve is used, divided into three sections so that rapid  changes from scene to scene can be effected quickly.  During these brief, blacked-out intermissions, extracts from various rock bands are played and the details projected onto a screen.  This is one of my few caveats concerning the production because the sheer, brain-scrambling volume of what to me is a cacophonous din forced me to put my fingers in my ears, but you old, and not-so-old, rockers will probably love it!  There was also another irritation in the form of a lady in black who stood to one side of the proscenium arch in a spotlight and waved her arms about like a demented tic-tac man! Apparently this was sign-language for the deaf.  I was about to stand up and demand to know exactly how many deaf people were present to justify this intrusion into my theatrical enjoyment when it occurred to me that they wouldn't be able to hear me!  I have since been informed that this is now a regular and frequent occurrence at theatres which confirms my suspicion that the tyranny of the disabled is spreading beyond their insufferable claims to the best parking spaces in every supermarket.  Back to the production!  The Royal Court is to be congratulated for selling a 'programme' that not only lists the details of the company but also includes the text of the play.  Equally, they are to be given a raspberry for failing to indicate which of the several supporting actors, all of whom were excellent, played which roles.

In my next post, tomorrow, I hope, I will try and explore the densities of Stoppard's philosophical musings as expressed in this play.  In the meantime, I urge all of you to try your hardest to see this production, particularly with this cast.  For me, it was the most exciting, enthralling and moving theatrical event since "The Coast of Utopia" - and you know who wrote that one, too!

* I am unable to name the excellent actor concerned because the programme does not inform us.  See the penultimate paragraph above.