DUFF & NONSENSE!

'Little Willy' should avoid exposure!

Oh, there is a God, and sometimes the ironies of life that He, She or It produce are just so delicious you want them to last forever and ever!  Two days ago, our beloved House of Commons under the wise, all-seeing, all-knowing leadership of that mendacious, porridge-eating, Jock dimwit, debated global warming.  They waffled on the subject for six hours, thus raising the temperature of the globe by several degrees with all the hot air they spouted.

But . . .  outside, the snow fell in London, "the first October fall in the metropolis since 1922"!  Oh my giddy aunt, you really couldn't make it up, the tears of laughter are freezing on my face.  Anyway, with the generosity of spirit with which this blog is famed the length and breadth of, er, well, somewhere, I'm sure, I wish to pass on some advice to 'Little Willy' who managed a whole comment here yesterday without a single swear word - do wrap up warm 'Willy'!

Hat tip to Andrew Orloski via Anthony Watts.

'Trev' trashes 'Mandy'

I am not a regular reader of The Sun although I am a distant, if discriminating, admirer.  One of the people who writes for it, and who I have long admired, is Trevor Kavanagh, its senior political editor (although I think he might now be a deputy editor).  Occasionally, he is interviewed on TV and I think he can be summed up as quiet but deadly!  I am obliged to 'Guido' for pointing me in the direction of a piece written by Kavanagh in which he conducts analytical surgery on the career and reputation of Lord Mandelson using the equivalent of a chain-saw - the blood and body parts are left splattered all over the the pages of The Sun!  These excerpts will provide you with the flavour but I urge you to read the whole thing.  He begins by re-stating 'the bleedin' obvious':

"THE first thing to remember when considering Peter Mandelson’s version of events is that he is a proven liar. I won’t say you can tell he’s fibbing if his lips are moving, but it’s not a bad rule of thumb."

It is, of course, 'right, fitting and proper' that our 'prime liar' in No. 10 decided to recall this scallawag to his government despite the fact that he  has been forced to resign on two previous occasions for blatant mendacity. Well, it takes one to know one!

"Last week our new Business Secretary, formerly Europe’s powerful trade supremo, lied about his links with Oleg Deripaska, a mysterious Russian billionaire who has profited handsomely from recently changed EU trade rules."

So no change there, then!  But why did he lie?

"But did he know British secret services keep a file on the man who, aged 20, was starving and poor yet two decades later was Russia’s richest man with £16bn in assets?  Did he know that in Russia’s so-called “Metals Wars” which made Oleg fabulously rich, hundreds of rivals died by assassins’ bombs and bullets?   Did he know Deripaska was closely linked to one of Russia’s most vicious mobsters, Anton Malevsky, who owned ten per cent of Oleg’s company?"

More important, perhaps, and an explanation of why Mandelson refuses to answer questions on whether or not he ever discussed tarriff cuts with this Russian mobster is put forward by Guido:

"He no doubt has heard the rumours of tapes and boasts by oligarchs that they have western politicians in their pocket. So perhaps the explanation for his reticence in answering the question, and uncharacteristic aversion to risking a lie to deny ever discussing tariff cuts worth billions to Deripaska, is the fear that he will be contradicted."

The media made a huge, and rightfully so, fuss about 'Corfu' Osborne's pathetic and amateurish effort to 'swim with the sharks' but it sinks into insignificance when compared to the scale of deceit practiced by Mandelson over the years and the outright lies being repeated ad nauseum by the bullying,bluffing coward in No. 10 over exactly how much this country is in debt and who is responsible.  As Kavanagh reminds us, the stinking, corrupting effluent that now pervades the whole of our government which was once an example to the world for proberty began with Blair's dodgy deal with Bernie Ecclestone in which the Labour party trousered a million quid.

The whole rotten lot of them deserve to be destroyed at the next election - Do It Britain!

In praise of 'orny-'anded zons of the zoil!

(Before I begin: a service announcement!  I have received complaints to the effect that my font size is too small for comfortable reading.  This might have come about because I always have my screen settings showing everything in large scale and it had not occurred to me that others might not and thus my print would appear to be very tiny to them.  I have now increased my font size from 15 to 17, except the final two paragraphs which I have set to 16, and I would be very grateful for any feedback, positive or negative.)

I have often been rather dismissive of gardeners because, in so far as I ever think about them at all, I always suspected they were rather fussy, bossy sort of people forever ordering their poor little plants and flowers into dead straight lines with precise and exact gaps between them like a Guards RSM marking the parade ground prior to Trooping the Colour.  Now, as an officially designated, retired, old codger I have had more leisure to inspect the work of gardeners and I confess to error - again!

Last week the little 'Memsahib' and I went for a walk round the gardens at Stourhead, and this morning, with a luke-warm sun attempting to breathe some warmth into a crisp, bright coldness, we went for a stroll round the grounds of Sherborne Castle.  Absolutely stunning, both of them!  Everytime I visit them I am reminded of Tom Stoppard's brilliant masterpiece of a play, "Arcadia", in which the grounds, never seen, only spoken off and hinted at, are almost as much part of the play as the characters.  In the play, Stoppard reminds us of the way English garden style and fashion changed during the 18th c., moving away from the French-influenced formal gardens of the Tudor era with their strict, geometric patterns into the 'natural' look of Capability Brown's landscapes.  Sherborne's parkland is Brown's work and each time I visit I have to admire the sheer 'artful artifice' of it all, much in the way that I admire a superb theatre set whose realism appears to be tangible and yet you know that in the end it must suffer the fate so beautifully described in "The Tempest":

"And, like the baseles fabric of this vision, 

The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,  

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,  

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, 

Leave not a wrack behind."

The fact behind the facade of the great country house garden is that the whole thing is an "insubstantial pageant" craftily constructed to lull you into a belief that you are in, and part of, nature.  Alas, if ever the labours of those 'horney-handed sons of the soil' were to cease their constant endeavours to maintain that pretence, the whole thing would be a jungle within a lifetime. 

But in the meantime, I am content that sometimes Man can outdo Nature.

You should sue Al Gore, he's worth more than 'Little Willy'!

If you ever had the slightest doubt that HAFs (Hot Air Fanatics) are dim-witted, dangerous  morons (see Little Willy, passim) then Anthony Watts provides the definitive proof .  These irresponsible idiots in the name of fighting global warming (stop giggling at the back!) are intent on persuading us all to help produce a chemical that is - wait for it - 17,000 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than the dreaded CO2 - Shock-Horror!  Honestly, these people are a menace, they should all be locked up.  Apparently this new nasty is called, whisper who dares,  nitrogen trifluride (NH3) - I mean, CO2 is just sooo last century, and if any of you suckers, oops, sorry, readers have just spent a fortune fitting solar panels in your roof because the likes of 'Little Willy' and Al Gore told you to, then you have just increased global warming by a huge amount - "you dirty rat, you!"  The same goes for all you bloated capitalists who can afford HDTV, because the process entailed in manufacturing these, and other similar, items produces NH3 by the bucket-full - er, well, more like the thimble- full, actually, or to be honest, even less than that, really, according to one of his commenters:

"Yeah, and if this stuff keeps growing at the Present Rate it’ll be up to One Part per TRILLION in 50 Years."

Don't say you haven't been warned - the end of the world is, well, not exactly nigh but getting ever so close, honestly it is, Al Gore says so.

 

Geopolitical economic planning, or, just a gut feeling?

I have hesitated to pontificate in detail on the macro-economic and financial storm that is lashing us all for the simple reason that I do not fully understand the details.  My ignorance is shared by virtually all the world's political and financial leaders, including potential leaders like McCain and Obama.  Of course, that is not to say that they don't all have opinions on the subject but it should never be forgotten that they don't really know what they are talking about!  As I have remarked before, in such a confused and confusing maelstrom, it is very human to reach for a touchstone, a cherished idea, an ideology, upon which you base your world view, even as you are buffeted this way and that by "Events, dear boy, events!"  Thus it is with them, and thus it is with me.

I base my own entire world view on the premise that governments should come with a government health warning!  Almost everything governments do is usually wrong, or badly executed, and is always more expensive than it need be.  Unfortunately there are certain activities which only governments can do and one must simply grin and bear it.  However, the imperative is always to keep what governments do to an absolute minimum.  I hasten to add that were my principles to be enacted (don't hold your breath!) Nirvana would not be created, life would still be pretty much of a mess, but it would be less of a mess than it is under the present system of increasing governmental powers which, I should add by way of warning, are now being strongly reinforced by an even higher level of power in the proliferation of global governmental institutions.

Given all of that, you will understand my deep suspicions concerning the rush by governments to interfere in the market place.  Apart from anything else, they hardly ever rush back again when the emergency is over, it takes a Reagan, or a Thatcher, or a Clinton - er, 'Bill the Bright', that is, not 'Hill the Pill' - to actually retract governmental power.  It seems to be an economic 'given' that in these straitened(*) times it is essential that money be spent on a huge scale in order to re-stimulate the economy.  The question is, who should spend it, the government or us?  Instinctively, without too much thought, relying entirely on my gut, my answer is us, the people.  My detailed knowledge of economics is roughly the equivalent of a primary school pupil who has just mastered a "John and Janet" book, so it is a relief to see my opinions given intellectual weight by a very considerable expert, indeed.

The WSJ has recently published an essay by Arthur B. Laffer, he of the famous curve that I find infinitely more alluring than anything on a Hollywood starlet!  (I have been pointed to his article by too many bloggers for me to 'hat tip' them all.)  The essence of his belief (and my faith) is summed up, thus:

"And the government doesn't create anything; it just redistributes. Whenever the government bails someone out of trouble, they always put someone into trouble, plus of course a toll for the troll. Every $100 billion in bailout requires at least $130 billion in taxes, where the $30 billion extra is the cost of getting government involved."

In an American context he gives this chilling warning:

"If you don't believe me, just watch how Congress and Barney Frank run the banks. If you thought they did a bad job running the post office, Amtrak, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the military, just wait till you see what they'll do with Wall Street."

"Twenty-five years down the line, what this administration and Congress have done will be viewed in much the same light as what Herbert Hoover did in the years 1929 through 1932. Whenever people make decisions when they are panicked, the consequences are rarely pretty. We are now witnessing the end of prosperity."

Alas for poor America with McCain and Obama as their only options, but I cannot spare too many tears when I view with trepidation the huge accretion of power by the utterly useless, bumbling, bullying, deceitful, psychotic, power-mad, nail-biting, nose-picking Jock who now runs more of my country than even Clement Attlee dreamed of!  I turn in terror to the Tories - only to see more of the same.  A bunch of Old Etonian twits caught like rabbits in the headlights without any philosophy to guide them beyond what I might call, with justification, 'Blairism', which can be summed up, thus: there is only one aim in our political vision, and that aim is to keep us in the top jobs for as long as possible. 

In the circs, I have only one thing to say . . .

HEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEELP!

(*) You write 'straitened' I write 'straightened', let's call the whole thing off!  I am obliged to Andy M, see comments below, for straightening me up - again! (Take a hundred lines, Duff!)

Wilde, the jokester; Joyce, the joke; Beckett, the bore!

The Irish have a lot to answer for!  I mean to say, what have we ever done to them that we deserve a slow, excruciating death by boredom from the likes of Samuel Beckett?  Yes, yes, alright, I know that, like some of "the ruins that Cromwell knocked about a bit", we biffed and bashed a few Paddies from time to time, but inflicting Beckett on us is just a typical piece of Celtic over-reaction.  (Oh God, I hear you mutter, what's set the old fool off this time? - I had better explain.)

Last night I sat through a performance of "Happy Days" by Samuel Beckett, a title which surely deserves an action under the Trade Descriptions Act.  For those sensible people who are blessed with only a passing knowledge of the late, and not at all great, Mr. Beckett, let me tell you that this play is the one that features a woman buried up to her waist in the first act, and then up to her neck in the second.  She talks.  She talks a lot. A lot of talk. Non-stop talk. Talk, talk, talk, is what she does a lot of.  And she repeats herself. Constantly. Over and over again. As she talks . . .   well, you get the flavour of the thing, I trust.  It was rather like standing in a very long, supermarket queue next to a woman chattering and chuntering in a loud voice about nothing to a silent companion - I forgot to tell you that in the 'play', her husband?, companion?, makes a few very brief appearances and interjections from the depths of the earth mound in which this woman is buried.  A critic described Beckett's technique, thus: "a few words are entered on the page, then repeated in various orders or identical phrases until their possible meanings have been exhausted."  You can say that again! And "exhausted" is 'le mot juste', if I may use the language in which Beckett preferred to write.

I am only familiar with two of Beckett's works, this 'play' and the one he made his reputation on, "Waiting for Godot".  In so far as I understand either of them, I think the author is trying to tell us all that life is empty and meaningless.  Were he still alive, I would be tempted to offer him ten foot of rope and a suggestion box, but that would be a futile gesture because he would make no attempt to use the rope in order to facilitate a quick exit from what he alleges is this utterly miserable "vale of tears".  Of course he wouldn't, because he doesn't believe it for a second!  Going around looking intense and sorrowful whilst wearing a polar-necked jersey and telling everyone, especially young girl students from the Sorbonne, that life is empty and meaningless was a technique much in use by French intellectuals as a tactic for parting those same young girl students from their knickers!  That old fraud, Sartre, depended on it, and given that he had a face like Toad of Toadhall, he needed a good line.  'Paddy' Beckett simply took this technique to extremes such that not only silly girls from the Sorbonne were impressed but even sillier 'arty' intellectuals fell for it, too.  Well, we all know how dumb they are as any quick visit to the Tate Modern will confirm - and all visits to the Tate Modern are usually quick given the rubbish contained there-in.  Actually, thinking about it, I would rather spend and hour and a half contemplating Damien Hirst's dead sheep in formaldehyde than sit through "Happy Days" again, at least the sheep wouldn't talk!  Talk.  Speak.  Chatter.  Gossip ... Oh God, it's getting to me again!

Mind you, the sheer humbuggery of Beckett does deserve some admiration.  There he was for 50-odd years telling us how futile, cruel and malignant life was and how wretched the human condition, whilst living in Paris and carefully salting away the considerable royalties, to say nothing of the huge financial bonanza that came with a Nobel Prize for Literature(?) and shagging innumerable young French women!  Happy Days, indeed!  I bear him no malice, I just wish I'd thought of it first, what a wheeze - write incomprehensible rubbish, tell everyone it's deeply meaningful and watch the money roll in.  It isn't too difficult because you can always rely on the spectacularly dim and pretentious, like Harold Pinter - another Nobel Prize-winner and, please note, a man much given to polar-necked jerseys - to rush in where fools fear to tread like our 'Arold, thus:

"The further he [Beckett] goes the more good it does me.  I don't want philosophies, tracts, creeds, ways out, truths, answers, nothing from the bargain basement.  He is the most courageous , remorseless writer going and the more he grinds my nose in the shit the more I am grateful to him. [...] He's not leading me up the garden path, he's not slipping a wink, he's not flogging me a remedy or a revelation, he's not selling me anything I don't want to buy - he doesn't give a **** whether I buy or not.  Well I'll buy his goods, hook, line and sinker because he leaves no stone unturned and no maggot lonely.  He brings forth a body of beauty.  His work is beautiful."

Does Private Eye still have a 'Pseuds Corner'?

"Please fasten your seat-belts, we're expecting even more severe turbulence and . . .

. . . the pilot is a 'wingless wonder' who has never flown before!"  That is the sort of announcement you might expect from the White House in November - but which you will definitely not hear or read - if Obama wins.  The financial hurricane has already hit mainland America but the economic one has yet to devastate Main Street, America.  What will Obama do?  I don't know, and nor does he.  No shame in that, hardly anyone does know, but in times of emergency there is a tendency to cling to dogma.  Needless to say, Obama's version, more soppy socialism to match his already soppy thinking, is the worst one possible for the situation.  However, I sense a streak of ruthlessness in him which might - repeat, might - take some of his clueless supporters by surprise, but then necessity is a stern task-master!  There are no panaceas available to deal with the slump that has already started.  Like a doctor in a plague-hit area armed only with sticky plasters, Obama will have precious little to dish out for comfort as a means of bolstering his popularity which, I suspect, will drop like a stone before the 2012 election.  That is just on the home front . . .

Overseas, "troubles will come not single spies but in battalions", starting with China.  Their desire for Taiwan has been supressed for too long.  Now, hyped up with their Olympic 'success' and facing a home population that might become restive if there is any diminution of their standard of living, a foreign adventure against a frail and sickly Uncle Sam will be very tempting.  So question #1 for Obama is what will he do when the Taiwan card is played?  Does anyone know?  Does he know?  I doubt it, so he will have to do some quick thinking!

Then there is the highly dangerous instability within nuclear-armed Pakistan and the fraught situation on the border areas with Afghanistan in which lurk, with almost complete safety, the fast-growing Taliban.  Already, some observers are suggesting the equivalent of the Tet offensive might take place in Kabul timed to test a young and inexperienced president who has a reputation (not yet earned, I might add) for being soft on international affairs and who is, in any case, bedevilled with a faltering economy.  Of course, it is possible that he, in order to demonstrtate to the world that he is no push-over, might 'do a Kennedy in Cuba' (the action of another young and inexperienced president) and over re-act in Pakistan.  Certainly his words in regard to Pakistan during the campaign have been very belligerent - but will he put the American army where his mouth is?

Meanwhile, the Russian 'mafia' (it is silly to think of it as a government) will be positively eager to seize any scraps that a wounded America leaves lying around.  After all, they can safely ignore the Europeans whose tender gas-filled testicles are safely in a Russian vice.  So where will they push - Ukraine seems favourite, but perhaps they might take an easier target in one or more of the tiny countries in the Baltic.  What will 'president' Obama do about that?  Do you know?  I certainly don't!  Does the Democratic party know?  Of course not!

On top of all these grand strategic problems there remains, as always, the activities of the 'usual suspects'.  The Iranians continue to struggle amongst themselves but give every appearance of forging ahead with their bomb and everyone knows that the second the Israelis believe it's birth to be imminent, they will attack.  The USA will then be tasked with keeping the Gulf open for oil supplies which will not be that difficult but will require determination - and money - from Washington.  Pin pricks from South America are certain to increase but the world-wide slump is likely to inhibit their ambitions even more than most.  Finally, South Africa looks likely to slide downhill into internal strife, possibly even civil war - and they are a main supplier for all sorts of essential commodities such as gold and platinum.

I have no idea how 'president' Obama will cope with all these problems but optimistic I am not!  Perhaps more important is the question of how the American people will re-act, after all, they are the great sheet anchor that both holds and steers a presidency.  At the moment a huge section of them appear to be filled, in the usual American way, with great optimism, enthusiasm and hope for the future with their about-to-be-crowned president, but as another, truly wise American once said, in a phrase that will be echoed in Peking, Moscow, and sundry caves in the Hindu Kush, "Never give a sucker an even break!"

 

A spokesman reports . . .

I am obliged to the hawk-eyed 'Guido' for this piece of nausea-inducing 'bumf' produced, no doubt reluctantly, by the head of our un-civil non-service.  It shows the increase in the numbers of, er, "communications staff" employed by the government in the last ten years.  In case you are unsure as to exactly what is meant by the title "communications staff", they are the lying liars' liars!  They will all be on handsome salaries, perks and, of course, pensions  so generous it would positively encourage you to live long enough for the Queen's telegram.  If, like me, yesterday you completed your tax return, due in by the end of the month, you are probably now vomiting into your waste bin.  Do try not to splash, and please bear in mind that Gordon really, really is feeling your pain!

Alan Sullivan: A Yankee gentleman and a brave man

This might read like an obituary which is entirely appropriate because in a few months it will be!  I only 'met' Alan Sullivan earlier this year on his blog, http://www.seablogger.com/, and I wish now that I had come across him sooner.  He exemplifies the qualities Kipling urged on us all in his poem "If".  He is homosexual and thus these lines will probably resonate:

Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,

He has made money and lost money in a life that he seems to have lived to the full ...

If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run

 and now he is in the final stages of leukemia and admits his doubts as to whether he will reach 2009 ...

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same . . .

which is exactly what he does, with stoicism and fortitude.  I should add, and I suspect he would agree with me, that in this, the final test, his courage is not singular, it is shared round the world by people of all races and conditions who are forced to face directly their own mortality and who do so with as much dignity and bravery as they can muster in an always amazing tribute to the human spirit.

I feel privileged to share Alan Sullivan's thoughts and feelings and when my time comes I can only hope for even a little of his strength of character.

 

 

"A man's a man for aw' that"

I am prompted to that quote by Alexandra who left a comment yesterday on a post of mine that is just over a year old.  The subject of the post was Navarone John-Vacher, a minor drug dealer, or at least, someone who associated with drug dealers, and who, in a dispute with one of his compatriots last year, stabbed him to death.  Vacher was 17 years old and drew a sentence of 10 years which, I guess, with good behaviour will see him out on the streets in 4 or 5 years from now.  Alexandra knows him and insisted that:

"Navarone is one of the nicest people we know and for that reason i am leaving this comment, never judge a book by its cover !! "

That is a generalisation with some merit if it simply means that one should not come to an instant and final decision about the worth or otherwise of an individual but, of course, in the real world one simply does not have the time to suspend judgment; it is often necessary to make up your mind quickly on the facts as you experience them, or, to put it differently, "judge a book by its cover".  Alexandra goes on:

"Nobody knows him for who he is they just know what he done and judge him on that!"

Indeed they do, or to correct the tense, indeed they did!  I was not then, nor am I now, in possession of all the facts but it seems reasonable to assume that he was connected to the drug trade and that he was in possession of a knife and that he used that knife to take the life of another man.  Alexandra implies that it might have been self-defence but I can only assume that if that was so, it would have been offered up in mitigation at his trial.  Perhaps it was, and that accounts for the ludicrously low sentence of 10 years which means 6 or 7 years in reality.

Each man is responsible for his own actions but of course no-one acts in a vacuum.  We are all shaped to a degree by our circumstances.  Thus, a case could be made that the people who share some of the blame for the circumstances which surrounded Vacher  and his downfall are those who in the past 40 years have subverted discipline in schools and society and who have condoned drug use.  Sometimes I could weep at the sight of young thugs being led off to gaol, uneducated, uncomprehending, as bovine as cattle going to slaughter.  Each and every one of them had, at some time,  something in him, some merit, some worth, something upon which a decent future might have been built but it never stood a chance of growing because it had to fight for existence in a Nietzschean jungle of egotism, of self above self-sacrifice, of instant gratifiaction against future contentment.  And these young boys have very little to look up to in the way of examples to follow.  You only have to read on the internet the vapid braying of their so-called educated contemporaries who, in their heedless hedonism, delight in spitting on decency, despoiling morality and find endless delight in tearing down anything of true worth.

So, yes, Alexandra, I do have an inch of pity for Vacher, and not just because of your touching and admirable loyalty,  but alas, were I the judge under a legal system of my making, and assuming my facts are right, he would have hung because he went out bearing a weapon.  However, whatever his current circumstances are, the fact is that he is a lucky young man.  He has you for a friend, and friends are gold in the bank.  I just hope he knows it!

Clutching at straw polls now that Hank is fired!

As some of you may remember, I fired Hank as my pollster of choice because he kept displaying a graph in which Obama's blue line mounted steadily above McCain's red line.  I screamed and ranted and even bit the carpet but he was unmoved so, well, he had to go, after all, there is a bottle of 12-year old Macallan at stake and I just know that stingy, grasping, Southern 'good ol'boy', 'Fallen Monk', won't do the gentlemanly thing and let me off a losing bet.  (You know, that Sherman chap, he wasn't all bad!)  So, in desperation I have sought comfort, figuratively speaking, in the arms of a blonde who at least has the advantage of being better looking than Hank!  I refer, of course, to the delectable, if a tad formidable, Ms. Ann Coulter.

In her usual 'tell-it-the-way-it-is-and-damn-the-consequences' style, she reminds us that people lie a lot.  This is proven over and over again in any sex survey that was ever published.  But as she points out, another subject upon which few are prepared to be utterly truthful is the thorny subject of race, and so answers to pollsters' questions in this current, presidential competition featuring a black candidate need to be treated with care:

"First of all, if true, this is the opposite of racism: It is fear of being accused of racism. For most Americans, there is nothing more terrifying than the prospect of being called a racist. It's scarier than flood or famine, terrorist attacks or flesh-eating bacteria. To some, it's even scarier than "food insecurity."  Political correctness has taught people to lie to pollsters rather than be forced to explain why they're not voting for the African-American."

According to Ms. Coulter, there is also a sort of reverse social embarrassment at work which is evinced in the response of secret McCain supporters:

"In addition to the social pressure to constantly prove you're not a racist, apparently there is massive social pressure to prove you're not a Republican. No one is lying about voting for McCain just to sound cool. "

She continues to hearten me with every word as she reconciles the poll forecasts with actual outcomes in elections since the heady Reagan days.  She points out that the media polls always went wrong in one direction - they never over-estimated the Republican vote!  True, she does admit that the polls in the last election - not including the hopeless exit poll - were fairly accurate but then, in her final sentence, in true Coulter style, she hurls in a vial of acid:

"So either pollsters got a whole lot better starting in 2004, or Democrats stole more votes in that election than we even realized."

I'm beginning to hope, just a little, and I swear I can almost taste that Jack Daniels - and if that 'Fallen Monk' thinks he's getting off the hook, he can think again!

Monkey nuts business!

Update on the Banking crisis – latest news from Japan.  Following the problems in the sub-prime lending market in America and the run on HBOS in the UK, uncertainty has now hit Japan. In the last 7 hours:

 

Origami Bank has folded, Sumo Bank has gone  belly up and Bonsai Bank announced plans to cut some of its branches.

 

Yesterday, it was announced that Karaoke Bank is up for sale and will likely go for a song.

 

Today, shares in Kamikaze Bank were suspended after they nose-dived and Samurai Bank is soldiering on following sharp cutback.  Ninja Bank is reported to have taken a hit, but they remain in the black.

 

In late news, 500 staff at Karate Bank got the chop and analysts report that there is something fishy going on at Sushi Bank where it is feared that staff may get a raw deal.

 

Where will it all end? (Er, the jokes, I mean!)

Monkey business!

The following was sent to me by a friend and as it was educational I though it suitable for inclusion in this erudite blog:

 

"If anyone has difficulty understanding the current world financial situation and shoring up of the banks, the following may help …

Once upon a time in a village, a man announced to the villagers that he would buy monkeys for $10.  The villagers, seeing that there were many monkeys around, went out to the forest and started catching them. The man bought thousands at $10, but as the supply started to diminish, the villagers stopped their efforts. The man then announced that he would now buy at $20. This renewed the efforts of the villagers and they started catching monkeys again.

 

Soon the supply diminished even further and people started going back to their farms. The offer rate increased to $25 and the supply of monkeys became so small that it was an effort to even see a monkey, let alone catch it!  The man now announced that he would buy monkeys at $50! However, since he had to go to the city on some business, his assistant would now act as buyer on his behalf.

 

In the absence of the main man, the assistant told the villagers: 'Look at all these monkeys in the big cage that the man has collected. I will sell them to you at $35 and when he returns from the city, you can sell them back to him for $50.'  The villagers squeezed together their savings and bought all the monkeys.

 

They never saw the man or his assistant again, only monkeys everywhere!

 

Welcome to WALL STREET."

An upside down view

Some people might suggest, unkindly, that that is the editorial policy of this blog!  I shall ignore such jibes and simply reprint a picture from Anthony Watts's site that came via http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/en/index.htm, a Japanese-based international site for reporting on arctic conditions.  Incidentally, Anthony Watts recommends this particular site because it confines itself to reporting the facts, as recorded, without recourse to 'interpretation'.  If you are a really silly person, that is, even sillier than than the twerp who tried to paddle his canoe to the north pole and had to be rescued from the ice, and you remain worried about melting ice in the arctic, then relax, because apparently there is 28.7% more of the wretched stuff today than there was this time last year!  However, that was not the reason for me publishing this map which shows the globe from above the north pole, and I was fascinated by this - to me - highly original view of the world.  Apart from anything else, the United Kingdom is upside down - Her Majesty will not be amused!

More surprises from 'Tokyo Rose'!

I could hardly believe this when I read it!  In mitigation I confess that hitherto my knowledge of the Japanese side of WWII was not at all detailed and I had swallowed whole the 'MacArthur Myth' that Hirohito was a rather ineffectual puppet in the hands of a ruthless military clique.  Also, I believed that this cabal at the heart of the Japanese government in the late '30s and early '40s was so inflated with arrogance and ambition that all strategic commonsense had deserted them.  I nearly fell out of my chair when I read this:

"Six months before Pearl Harbour [my emphasis] Hirohito had had the Naval General Staff make a study of war prospects.  When the results were submitted to him, he had ordered that the study be made again by a seperate group of staff officers.  The second analysis corroborated the conclusion of the first: that Japan could wage war successfully on the United States of America for eighteen months, or until June of 1943.  After that Japan must negotiate a peace or she would gradually lose everything." (*)

Apparently, from the capture of Singapore in February 1942, Hirohito nagged his ministers to take any opportunity to cut a peace deal; he even despatched two seperate peace missions, one Navy, one Army, to Switzerland in order to keep contact with American diplomats.  They quickly discovered, to their chagrin, that the Americans had no interest in a peace deal because they were perfectly confident of final victory.

So the Japanese knew at the highest level and from their own analysis that they would lose the war - and yet they still went ahead.  It beggars belief and even a passing contemplation of the millions of dead and injured that were to ensue is enough to make grown men weep.

(*) Japan's Imperial Conspiracy by David Bergamini, Heinemann, 1971

'Little Boy' and 'Fat Man'

Correction: Originally I entitled this post "'Thin Boy' and 'Fat Boy'" referring to the two A-bombs used on Japan.  A couple of commenters have picked me up on this and suggested that they were called 'Little Boy' (Hiroshima) and 'Fat Man' (Nagasaki).  I took the nicknames directly from Bergamini's book (see below).  A very quick check seems to indicate that he got the names wrong but that may have come about from different organisations using variations.  For example, and at the risk of confusing you further, there was a 'Thin Man' developed at Los Alamos using a gun-type explosive charge to set off the chain re-action.  However, slight impurities in man-made plutonium might have resulted in the bomb going off 'half cock', so efforts were concentrated on surrounding the fissionable material with high explosive and driving it into itself.  This required a spherical shaped casing and thus 'Fat Man' was born.  Thank you to my commenters for putting me right and I have changed the text accordingly. 

http://www.lanl.gov/history/atomicbomb/littleboyandfatman.shtml

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In my previous post I mentioned a fact, hitherto unknown to me, that I had picked up concerning the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to which my e-pal, 'JK', responded in a comment.  I thought it might be of interest to expand the story.

'Little Boy' was the nick-name for the Hiroshima bomb on account of its slim, elongated shape in which small pieces of uraniam-235 were held at one end and then fired at a large piece the other end thus causing the atomic fission.  'Fat Man' was the second bomb dropped at Nagasaki which used a different technology in which particles of a man-made element, plutonium, were packed round a cylinder and then driven into each other by conventional explosives thus causing a more efficient type of chain re-action.  The 509th Composite Group, USAAF, charged with dropping the bombs, had been practicing over Japan for a fortnight before the first real attack.  Always in threes, with one bomber and two observer aircraft, they had been spotted by the Japanese several times making mysterious runs across city centres and then dropping oddly shaped dummy bombs.  However, on August 6th 1945, 'Little Boy' was dropped for real by parachute in order to allow time for Enola Gay to make a run for safety and it exploded at 1,500 feet over the north west of Hiroshima.  Some 60,000 Japanese died instantly, either burnt or crushed.  A further 26,000 were scorched with atomic radiation which killed them off either immediately or over the next few days, weeks or months.  Nearly 7,000 buildings were immediately flattened and 4-square miles of the city were left burning and out of 45 hospitals, 3 were left standing and of their staffs only 28 out of 290 doctors, and 126 out of 1,780 nurses, were uninjured.  A final count taken 6 months later reckoned that around 90,000 civilians and 10,000 soldiers died.

'Fat Man' was scheduled to be dropped on August 11th but was rapidly brought forward on the grounds that the weather was forecast to close in around Japan for 5 days, however, the cynical correspondent for the NYT, William Laurence, observed drily, "I'll bet those weather forecasts came all the way from Potsdam!"  There, the Russians had alerted their allies that they intended to attack the Japanese in Manchuria starting midnight on the 8th.  On the morning of the 9th, the crew of Bock's Car took off with 'Fat Man' and plotted a route to its primary target, Kokura, meeting up with two camera planes en route.  The mission was plagued with a series of small but critical glitches.  First, the fuel pump to the auxilary tank meant that the plane would be short of fuel for the return journey, then there was an extraordinay breach of radio silence caused by the fact that a boffin due to fly in one of the observer planes and operate a very complex camera had been left behind and for half an hour the whole operating manual had to be read out over the airwaves with the Japanese listening in!  Then, suddenly, a warning light went on in the control box for 'Fat Boy' indicating that all the firing circuits were active.  An urgent (possibly frenzied!) investigation revealed that it was a faulty switch!

Kokura was one of four industrial cities lying close together in a flat plain and which have since merged completely to produce one big city, Kitakyushu.  It has been estimated that if Bock's Car had dropped 'Fat Man' there, it would have killed at least 300,000 inhabitants.  As it was, Bombardier Kermit Beahan could not find the arsenal which was his aiming point because of smoke from factory chimneys and after three bomb runs which had begun to attract the attention of enemy flak and fighter defences Maj. Sweeney, the commander, decided that with fuel running low he would divert towards the secondary target of Nagasaki.  This had cloud cover and Sweeney asked permission to use radar as a means of identifying the target.  This ran counter to President Truman's order that all A-bomb attacks must use visual means to identify targets and thus avoid errors.  Permission was granted by the local commander but in the event Bombardier Beahan spotted, through a break in the clouds, a stadium that he recognised as an aiming point.  He released the bomb but in fact he was nearly 2 miles away from the city centre and it exploded over the Urakami valley which housed the important Mitsubishi Ordnance Works and to a certain extent restricted the blast area.  A count taken six months later reported that just under 40,000 people had died but it was later estimated that Beahan's 'mistake' probably saved a further 50 to 75 thousand lives if 'Fat Man' had hit the city centre.  Apparently, after the event, Bombardier Beahan was extremely guarded in his remarks, claiming that he knew where he had dropped the bomb but the stadium he saw was an "alternate target".  It has been suggested that authorisation for this "alternate target" might have come from higher up in Gen. Spaatz's Strategic Air Command.

A total of approximately 140,000 people were killed in the two A-bomb raids, almost exactly the same number as the casualties inflicted by the Japanese on the Chinese during what came to be called the rape of Nanking some eight years earlier.

Source: Japan's Imperial Conspiracy by David Bergamini, Heinemann, 1971

Nippon No. 1. Yeees, but No. 1 what, exactly?

This is another of my premature ejaculations - no, no, not that sort, you very rude person - I mean that it is another example of me getting very excited about a book and rushing to tell you about it even though I have only read a few pages.  In this particular case, I have read as far as page 150 but the whole thing runs to nearly 1,100 pages so I can only hope that I live long enough to finish it.  When I give you the title I just know I will hear your long-drawn-out sigh of utter and total boredom, but honestly (he said excitedly as he clutched you by the lapels before you could make your excuses) it really is a fascinating book.  Here's the title: Japan's Imperial Conspiracy by David Bergamini, Heinemann, 1971.

Still with me?  Oh good!  As some of you know I have long been fascinated by the history of Prussian, then German, militarism, particularly as demonstrated by the run up to WWI.  This really was a case of a ruling class going collectively mad - not that the Junkers and the German General Staff did not have causes and imperatives acting upon them, not least, fear, but there were better solutions to their difficuties than a war which, in the event, they lost in the first eight weeks and then took four years to own up!

Similarly, I have long been vaguely interested in why the Japanese in 1941, with deliberate malice aforethought, went and poked a sleeping giant in the eye with a very sharp stick.  Again, rather like their Prussian counterparts in 1914, they lost their war in the first six months but took four years and two atom bombs before they owned up.  Now, I write this with all the authority of an ex-Corporal but you really do not need to be a Clausewitze to see that the notion of Japan, a titchy little Island with a miniscule population and absolutely no strategic commodities, taking on the United States of America, was stark, raving mad!  But they did it, and I have often wondered why?  Hitherto, I had swallowed the very generally circulated myth that although the Emperor was considered by his people to be a 'man-god' with absolute power over everyone, he was in fact a helpless puppet in the hands of a military clique.  With his book, Mr. Begamini inserts a stick of gelignite into this fairytale and blows it to smithereens.  According to him, the Emperor was up to his armpits in the blood and guts of the Japanese long-term strategy of conquering the whole of South East Asia.  It is fair to point out that Mr. Bergamini's book has had its critics but I suspect (I cannot know) that much of it emanates from so-called Japanese 'experts' in the USA who had themselves swallowed whole what can be called, I think, the MacArthur Myth established in the years that he ran post-war Japan.  You can read something of it here  in Wiki, but also it's worth reading this interview with an author, Herbert Bix, of a much later history, Hirohito and the making of Modern Japan, in which he came to similar conclusions as Bergamini reached.

Amongst many facts of which I have been blissfully ignorant until now, one is that apparently the second A-bomb on Nagasaki was dropped nearly two miles off target and there is a strong suspicion that the Bombadier, who would have been 'steering' the plane during the approach, knew that he was off-target but could not bring himself to drop it over the city centre.  Also, for the benefit of some of my breast-beating American readers who still believe their country is the 'Great Satan' of civilisation, the American troops who accompanied MacArthur into Japan following the surrender of a foe they had every reason to hate and despise, behaved with impeccable rectitude and even kindness.

I shall give you all a final opinion on the book when I have finished it in about the same time it took to fight the war!

Good News/Bad News

I'll begin with the bad, shall I?  A one Kiloton nuclear bomb just exploded.  The good news is that it went off in the Sudan - so that's alright, then!  Actually, to be serious, and to be accurate, what happened was that a 2 to 5 metre diameter asteroid hit the earth's surface somewhere in the Sudan with the force of a one Kiloton bomb going off but as no deaths have been reported, thankfully, it is assumed that it crashed in the desert.  According to Dee Norris over at Anthony Watts's site, this incoming asteroid was tracked by the Spaceguard organisation and apparently 'missiles' of this size hit earth every few months!  Now, to cheer yourselves up, here is a little game you can play, draw up a list of the three places you would most like to be hit by an asteroid - and, no, my address is not for publication!

Now for some good news.  The narrative, or fairy tale if you prefer, peddled by that pair of non-scientific 'flim-flam' men, Dr. James Hansen and Al Gore, is slowly but surely unravelling.  I can understand - to a certain degree - those of my readers who remain neutral when the criticism emanates from the likes of Steve McIntyre, but now they are coming from the greenest of the Greens, in this case, Richard A. Muller in conversation at an impeccably Green site called 'Grist'.  Here is an extract and I am grateful to Anthony Watt's site for the tip:

"Here are a couple of excerpts from the Muller interview:

What’s your take on NASA climate scientist James Hansen?

Hansen I’ve known for many years. He’s a very good climate scientist, but he’s decided to do the politics. I feel that he’s doing some cherry-picking of his own [when it comes to the science]. At that point, he’s not really being a scientist. At that point, you’re being a lawyer. He’s being an effective advocate for his side, but in the process of doing that he’s no longer a neutral party and he’s no longer giving both sides of the issues.

I know you drive a Prius. What else are you doing to reduce your carbon emissions?

My house is lit by compact fluorescent light bulbs. Let me just tell you, though: Suppose I drove an SUV and lit my house with the worst kind of light — I could still be an environmentalist. Al Gore flies around in a jet plane — absolutely fine with me. The important thing is not getting Al Gore out of his jet plane; the important thing is solving the world’s problem. What we really need are policies around the world that address the problem, not feel-good measures. If [Al Gore] reaches more people and convinces the world that global warming is real, even if he does it through exaggeration and distortion — which he does, but he’s very effective at it — then let him fly any plane he wants."

 

Oops, sorry, unforeseen circs, old boy!

I suppose those words might sum up the response of the mandarins in  our beloved 'Ministry for Foreigners' but the re-action in the State Department, to say nothing of the White House, is likely to be of the "expletive deleted" variety.  According to Andrew Neil at The Coffee House, the financial stability of Iceland is disappearing even more rapidly than their glaciers and that has permitted the Russians to step in rather smartly and offer a life-saving loan - but only on condition!  Apparently, our American allies, in their wisdom, closed down the base they used in Iceland rather abruptly two years ago which upset the locals more than somewhat.  In return for their loan, the Russians want to use it, which is rather a delicate matter because Iceland is supposed to be a member of NATO.  You really do not need to be a strategist to see how very much closer that puts Russian forces to the American mainland, and of course - oh my God - quick - where's my tin hat? - don't panic - to us!

Hank's fired!

No, no, it's no good pleading with me, Hank, you're fired ... sacked ... dismissed without a character!  'Lord Gradgrind' Duff is not a man to suffer the sort of dereliction of duty that is evident from your 'graph of graphs' on the presidential election without retaliation.  I tipped McCain to win and ever since he has dropped in your wretched polls like a sky-diver without a parachute.  It can't be my mistake because I am all-wise and all-knowing - so it must be you!  Of course, before I make up your final wage packet I will be deleting the cost of a bottle of 12-year-old Macallan which it looks as though I will have to send to 'Fallen Monk' in November - and I was really looking forward to tasting his Jack Daniels.  I think I'll go out and thrash a few peasants to put me in a better mood!

"Crisis? What crisis?"

The ineffable words of 'Jim' Callaghan back in the '70s just before the IMF sent the brokers men in to take over the wreck of the British economy.  In retrospect, that was a mere ripple compared to the financial tsunami which is thundering towards us.  If anyone tells you they have the answer they are either a fool or a liar.  If it's a politician then he will be wearing both hats simultaneously.  The eventual outcomes are impossible to forecast but there will definitely be some exceedingly nasty surprises.  Here are a few things to watch as the maelstrom swirls about you.

The EU in general, and the Euro in particular, will come under intense strain.  This is the sort of test that is long overdue.  Will national governments pool their resources, and thus, their sovereignty, in order to deal with the crisis; or will they simply leave the sinking ship rowing away in their own national lifeboats?  Personally, I hope the latter because I have an intense dislike of the whole European project but I fear the former because politicians are usually cowardly and will huddle together in difficult times, not so much for safety but to ensure that the blame is spread all around!  Even so, the question then arises as to whether or not their electorates will stand for it? Do we wish to pay to support Greek Banks, for example?

Internally, the strains will be even more enormous.  Unemployment will rocket to levels not seen for decades.  Welfare budgets will simply be unaffordable on the generous terms now available as the tax income drops.  This will cause severe stress and strain in our main cities with immigrants being the target of an angry indigent population.  All sorts of 'nasties' will appear from the woodwork to take advantage of this situation - and they will not all be from the extreme Right.  The armed services will face cut-backs and a withdrawal from all overseas locations, including Afghanistan, will almost certainly take place.  The NHS will be sold off piecemeal by a desperate government unable to fund it.

Internationally, the outcomes are very difficult to foresee. The good news, in a way, is that the price of oil and gas will drop like a stone - $30 a barrel was mentioned today - which will give Putin and his cronies a badly needed lesson in economics, that is, that the weight differential between buyer and seller is never static, it shifts constantly, sometimes to the advantage of one but then back again to the other.  Both Russia and China have populations who have tasted the pleasures of affluence but shortly they will see these golden prizes snatched away from them as the world economy slows down.  How will they re-act?  More to the point, how will their governments re-act in order to divert the anger of their disappointed peoples?

The key question, the absolutely critical question, is 'Whither the USA'?  The 'Curse of Duff' - I tipped him to win - has fallen upon the McCain campaign and it looks as though it will be an Obama presidency.  The fact that he is profoundly ignorant may not be quite the drawback it seems because in this situation everyone is ignorant!  His test will be decided by how quickly he learns, but for sure, he will make some colossal mistakes to begin with.  We must all hope that he is intelligent enough to allow the socialist orthodoxies to be stripped off him by experience "until in God's good time, the New World, with all its [economic] power and might, steps forth [yet again!] to the rescue and the liberation of the old".

Er, have a nice day!

"Wee, po, belly, bum, drawers"!

Ma's out, Pa's out,
Lets talk rude,
Pee, po, belly, bum, drawers.
Let's run through the garden in the nude,
Pee, po, belly, bum, drawers.
Let's write rude words all down our street,
Stick out our tongues at the people we meet,
Let's have an intellectual treat,
Pee, po, belly, bum, drawers.

Some of you may remember Flanders & Swann's amusing ditty on the efforts of little children to use naughty words.  It seemed an appropriate introduction to my topic today which is swearing.  This all-too-human activity has been in the news recently with one of our football team managers delivering a one minute tirade aimed at the media which contained 52 swear words.  It reminded me of an occasion in Singapore back in the '60s when I spent an evening drinking with some Aussie soldiers whose ability to interject a four-letter expletive at the rate of one every third word made their spoken sentences so long and so convoluted that all syntax was lost.  Anyway, it induced me to ponder on the nature of swearing, and it goes without saying that if four-letter words upset you then read no further.

I am no etymologist, as will become embarrassingly clear in this post, but I assume that the main sources of swear words are bodily functions and religion, but this raises the question as to why such topics are considered improper.  Of course, religion, in the Britain of the past and most of the rest of the world today, was a delicate if not downright dangerous activity.  Any use, or mis-use, of it's sacred words and phrases could bring down severe retribution, and thus, such usage was confined to moments of extreme passion such as fear or anger, or, the words were disguised, like "bloody" so that they filled that no man's land between outright sacrilege and the language of polite society.  Swear words based on bodily functions are obviously useful to those who wish to shock a polite society in which references to such things as sexual organs and excreta are avoided.  The interesting question is why they are avoided in the first place?  What is it about these two human activities that make most of us flinch if they are brought up in conversation using uncompromising language?  Indeed, most of us would seek to change the subject even if it was spoken of in the most technically and medically correct language.  My e-pal, Ion, has a series of posts on the subject of what she calls her "fanny" which, as far as I am concerned, very definitely come under the heading of "Information Overload"!  The intracies of women's 'bits' have always remained a mystey to me and the longer it stays that way the better, not only because I find the medical details mildly disgusting but also because I become intensely embarrassed.

Alas (for the sake of this rambling essay), all of that simply begs yet another question: Why do the details of bodily functions provoke such embarrassment?  It seems to me that it stems from a human nature imperative that, when reduced to basics, simply acknowledges the fact of morality, that is, a sense that some things are right and others are wrong.  This facet of human nature, of course, ties the sillier sort of 'Darwinistas' (eg; Richard Dawkins) into knots as they seek to explain away a characteristic which has no usefulness in the attainment of longlife and the maximisation of the chances to reproduce, and yet which applies to all humans everywhere, and of all times, but which is not shared by any other living thing.  Mind you, this sort of innate decency is currently under attack in our Western world.  Another of my e-pals, Sister Wolf, delights in the constant use of the word "cunt" but in doing so she fails miserably to project the image of a modern, intelligent, liberated woman and instead comes across as the sort of pathetically naughty little girl who would, when "Ma and Pa" are safely out, shout loudly, "Wee, po, belly, bum, drawers".  The dimmer sort of 'PoMo' rationalists would have you believe that swearing, or 'telling it the way it is', as they would put it, is the triumph of honesty over hypocrisy.  Such a belief is so inherently moronic that I cannot even be bothered to expose it. 

Of course, expletives have their uses as a means of releasing passion comparitively harmlessly in moments of dire distress, such as hitting your nail with a hammer!  Also, in honesty, I must admit that very occasionally I have seen expletives used with almost poetic effect.  I cannot be bothered to trudge back through the very smelly mire that constitutes 'Snotty McShot's' Blog but he did once produce a foul-mouthed diatribe of epic, one might even say, heroic, proportions; but then he's Irish and, presumably in relief at escaping the appalling spelling of the Gaelic language, they're always better at English, even English swearing, than we are!  Mention of 'Paddy' McShot reminds me that these days there is a new, post-modern 'swearing' that has taken over from the old-fashioned sort.  Thus, you may call the owner of your corner shop a cunt but never, on any account, a 'Paki', even if, and in fact, especially if,  he is one!

Well, as you suspected when you began reading , this essay of mine has gone nowhere and reached no brilliant conclusion - fuck it!

44 Years of undetected crime!

Sorry for the lack of posts recently.  General jollifications last weekend which left me walking wounded, plus, a visit this week from old friends.  Talking of old friends, today marks the 44th year of my marriage to the little 'Memsahib'.  Outstanding, don't you think, that she has managed to put up with me over all these years?  Usually, at this point, on this particular topic, old wrinklies like me start issuing forth a serious of platitudes explaining the success of their marriage.  I have only one - the whole damn thing is a pure fluke!  When I married, many of my friends were already onto their second partners and I sort of assumed that probably that is what would happen to me.  I am suspicious of the word 'love' because I know that it means different things to different people at different times in their lives.  Once I recovered from a severe, teen-age crush on a Swiss au pair girl who went back home swearing undying love and then never wrote me a single letter, I have never quite understood what people mean by 'love' other than infatuation.  By and large, I prefer the word 'friendship' which means very much more to me than the doubtful word 'love'.  I occasionally tell the little 'Memsahib' that she is my very best friend which, in earlier times, failed to impress her very much but these days I think she knows me well enough to realise that it is the highest and deepest expression of affection that I can offer. Friendship is for ever!