The Crown of Life

Malcolm gave up the weed when fags went to 4/6 [22½p] a packet, and because, quite frankly, he couldn’t see the point.

However, he is a beer bore. There are few British breweries of which he is totally ignorant. He regards the Belgians with considerable affection for their ability to turn basic ingredients into something splendiferous. An American micro-brewery is another delight to be tested, tasted and marked down for love or (rarely) loathing.

So he was distinctly chuffed when first Irish, then Northern Irish, then British pubs went smoke-free.

Now, in the spirit of Dave Bowman’s advice to Heywood Floyd, for something wonderful.

There is, in Belfast, at 46 Great Victoria Street, the self-proclaimed Most Beautiful Bar in the World. That claim may be arguable, but not actionable. In any case, the Crown Liquor Saloon has one of the best pub-based websites in the world (albeit in need of a spell-check), and that is beyond peradventure.

The Crown has been owned by the National Trust for thirty years, and it has been well-loved. Malcolm’s first visit there was long before that, and before it began to be tidied up and gentrified. Its survival (together with that other wonder, the Edwardian glass in Stroke City’s Guildhall) is one of the great escapes of the years of the Troubles (and the decades of “redevelopment”): in its own small way as remarkable and deserved a survival as St Paul’s and St Pancras in London, or the Kölner Dom.

Now, the Crown is a fixture and place of pilgrimage on every Belfast tourist trail. Rightly so. And it’s about to get even better. Here’s Linda McKee doing a puff piece for the Belfast Telegraph:

The nicotine layer has been scraped away – and restorers working at the Crown Bar in Belfast are discovering the beautiful colours beneath.

A small army of conservators has been working hard to restore the National Trust-owned Victorian pub to its former glory, and the work is expected to be complete by the end of October.

Project manager Claire McGill, a freelance conservator, says the £500,000 restoration scheme was long overdue.

The popular bar is the only National Trust-owned pub in Northern Ireland and has been described as the best preserved Victorian pub in the UK.

Not only was one of its snugs reproduced for the classic film Odd Man Out but its interior was described by John Betjeman as a “many coloured cavern”.

But the gorgeous glass, ceramic and woodwork which lined that cavern has suffered a lethal combination of cigarette smoke, graffiti, wear and around 20 bomb attacks in the area.

Ah, yes. The ceiling was always a very dusky brown. The snugs bore the imprints of many a misplaced pen-knife. The floor and tiles were, at best, well-worn. The jakes were a disgrace.

All changed, changed utterly. And all, Malcolm hopes and expects, for the better.

Malcolm’s only regret is that he has no visit planned before December. Just time for the Guinness properly to settle.

Doctor Newton’s third Lawe of the Body politick

As Malcolm has argued here before, the most immutable rule in politics is that for every action there is a necessary and predictable reaction. It may not be instant, but it is inevitable.

This is evidenced yet again by the commendable action of U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero in the New York U.S. District Court, and reported this morning by Dan Eggen on the front page of the Washington Post.

Anyone with half a smigeon of a liberal principle will long have been uneasy about the “catch-all” (if only…) nature of the Patriot Act. Anything that requires such a convolved acronym (The Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act), is instantly suspect in Malcolm’s book. The Act was a major knee-shudder reaction to 9-11, but was intended to have a life-expectancy of four years. Naturally, like all extensions of state power, it has lingered on, not greatly modified from its original totalitarian conception. In the 2005 review, the usual suspects slugged it out on either side, with the mule-headed hard-liners of the House winning out over the Senatorial defenders of liberty.

This is how the particular provision which Judge Marrero has red-lined works:

the FBI’s issu[es] of tens of thousands of national security letters (NSLs) each year to telephone companies, Internet providers and other communications firms. The FBI says it typically orders that such letters be kept confidential to make sure that suspects do not learn they are being investigated, as well as to protect “sources and methods” used in terrorism and counterintelligence probes.

Notice the Stasi-like symmetry of that: tens of thousands of intrusive trawls every year, but the carriers, the ISPs, the telecoms companies, the postal services are put to silence to protect hypothetical “sources and methods”. It is difficult to come up with a more outrageous example of state power trampling on the individual.

Anyone trying to make sense of our present world is aided and hampered in equal measure by the ever-present Orwellian truism. Most of Malcolm’s blogs, in fact the pensées of all shades of opinion in the blogosphere, come down to restatements of original truths mouthed by the alter ego of Eric Blair. There ought to be some randomiser which spits out these declarations of the bleeding obvious. Strung together, of themselves they would spell out the depths of our servitude. So here goes:

• Political language… is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
• During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.
• In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics.’ All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.
• Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
• If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.

So, cheers all round for Judge Marrero. The reaction against ever-intrusive state machinery continues with him and his like, our last line of defence against boot-boy politics.