Malcolm has left the building

For the next few days Malcolm is lurking in the thorny thickets of the County Armagh.

Those with a strong stomach, and a taste for his fine line in narrative might care to visit Malcolm Redfellow’s World Service.

There one will be regaled with a short series of The not-so-great and the not-so-good who have had walk-on parts in Irish, and World history.

“What does Twitter say about us?”

Headline borrowed from the Sunday Times.

Obviously an article that Malcolm instantly by-passed, discounted, dismissed, ignored.

Malcolm has no thoughts on the subject, beyond what Nich Starling, the Norfolk Blogger, had already considered at some length, sandwiched between far more worthy topics, such as the security of the Bacton gas terminal and Tory education policy (both of which he found severely wanting).

In contrast with Starling’s commendable scepticism, Iain Dale features his Twitter feed. This tells us more than we need to know about Dale and his penchants. Malcolm has no objection to Dale publicising “appearances” and audiences on minority TV and radio channels: that is how Dale earns his crust. Yesterday, though, Dale was telling the world he came close to referring to a fellow broadcaster as a “c*nt”.

Consider what is evidenced there: Dale has sufficient contempt for his audience to assume they would be somehow assuaged by the use of an asterisk.

Malcolm pauses innocently to wonder what possible word could he imply.

• “Cant” is an obvious possibility: there is so much of it spouted on the Right to be habit-forming, but the word is usually a substantive or a verb.
• “Cent” might imply something $ or €: one of which would be anathema to the Right.
• “Cont” is a rare variation of “quant”, which is the East Anglian variation of “punt”.
• The OED knows of no such word as “cint” or “cynt”.

Which leaves only one other possibility

Let us be clear here. This is, in Malcolm’s view, one term of abuse which goes a step too far: not because it is obscene (when the Wife of Bath employs it, it isn’t), but because, used metaphorically, it is chauvinist and sexist. It is as hateful as those other loaded terms: “cow”, “bitch”, “sow”. Doubtless when Dale, in an e-mail, referred to Malcolm as a “twat”, he was again unaware that he was evidencing acute gynophobia. Since Dale is a wordsmith by trade, he is either lexically-deficient or very sloppy with his metaphors.

Mentioning the unmentionable

The polite press always have problems when they are reporting “taboo” words. One needed to refer to the Guardian to discover what term Peter Mandelson had used of the head of Starbucks, Howard Schultz. Others, more squeamish, tip-toed round the issue:

• for the BBC, it was a four-letter word tirade;
• to the Times, it was a four-letter work attack, but we were left fairly certain when told The Business Secretary declared, “Who the f*** is he?”
• the Telegraph, doubtless concerned about becoming the cause of cardiac arrests across the stockbroker belt, was satisfied with “Why should I have that guy running down the country? Who the —- is he?“
• the Mail described it as a foul-mouthed attack and a four-letter-word outburst. Curiously, though, the Mail was then able to repeat verbatim what the Telegraph had assured its readers was exclusive to that paper.

That is reporting the words of others. Dale, going further into taboo territory, is a first-person narrator. It is the horse’s mouth. So, what justifies the use of the asterisk?

• Is he suddenly shy of the word, one which he finds acceptable elsewhere on his blogspot?
• Is it some kind of decoding exercise, to test the linguistic and intellectual capacity of the average Dale reader?
• Is there some Bowdlerising mechanism in the Twitter system?
• Is it just another Old Wife’s Tale? [OK: Malcolm only threw that one in for the bad pun, and to justify the use of the piccy from the Ellesmere Chaucer, so he could brag that he'd seen the original in the Huntingdon Library.]

Another triumph for British technology

First there was the success of recreating a 1940s A1 Peppercorn Pacific:

What could follow that?

Well, there’s this

News from BBC Science/Nature’Superguns’ of Elizabeth I’s navy

Elizabeth I’s navy from around the time of the Armada was evolving into a far more powerful force than previously realised.

That’s from Scienceweek: the latest news from the Scientific, Research and HighTech world.


And, for our next trick, chipping a flint axe-head.

Note: Malcolm’s trivial observations here are subject to a serious rethink elsewhere. Even further ruminations can be expected now he has located his copy of N.A.M. Rodger’s The Safeguard of the Sea.

A wall-eyed view

Nice, gentle canter for Frank McNally in today’s Irishman’s Diary. It’s a serial meditation based on the theme of “wall”: precisely the kind of outing Frank can manage stylishly, without working up a sweat.

Just the thing to go with a mid-morning tea-break, particularly when one has negotiated, and tried to comprehend the Byzantine mayhem that is the (heavily-doctored) Anglo Irish Bank report.

The punch-line is the theft of the granite wall, alongside the Liffey, across the river from St James’s brewery:

… equipped with heavy-lifting equipment, thieves broke into the site one night and make off with 24 square metres of it. In a poignant footnote, the stolen material was described as “priceless” by the then deputy city engineer, a man called “Tim Brick”.

Thank you, Frank: don’t call us; we’ll call you.

Only with the preceding paragraph did Malcolm find any point of mild dissention. McNally had been dealing with the old idiom to give the wall:

which, according to Brewers’ Dictionary, meant to “allow another, as a matter of courtesy, to pass by. . .at the side furthest from the gutter”. (The risk of having something emptied on you from an upstairs window might occasionally diminish this courtesy.) The dictionary also notes another phrase, “to take the wall”, meaning “to take the place of honour”. Thus Shakespeare’s: “I will take the wall of any man or maid of Montague’s (Romeo and Juliet I:1).

Ok, Frank, we’re with you there, all the way, until when you chickened out. It’s the low-comedy first scene of Romeo and Juliet, and it illustrates why the designers of the National Curriculum got it so wrong:

SAMPSON: A dog of that house shall move me to stand: I will take the wall of any man or maid of Montague’s.

GREGORY: That shows thee a weak slave; for the weakest goes to the wall.

SAMPSON: True; and therefore women, being the weaker vessels, are ever thrust to the wall: therefore I will push Montague’s men from the wall, and thrust his maids to the wall.

Oh dear, the first of a series of crude knob-jokes that proliferate through this hallowed text. Did nobody warn the Secretary of State?

Or, perhaps, Frank intended us to ruminate further on his wall motif. He did, after all, imply a connection with the current economic problems:

IN A certain school I know, when children misbehave, they may be asked to stand for short periods at the “Balla smaoineamh”, or “Wall of reflection”…

Where would we erect a State-sponsored Balla Smaoineamh? Well, it would have to be somewhere central, I suppose: probably in Dublin. In fact, the city already has the “North Wall”, just down the road from the Financial Services Centre. So for various reasons, that might be as good a place as any.

Meanwhile, the rest of us have suffered the fate that inept Sampson fantasised for Montague’s maids:

we have gone to the wall, and been well-and-truly screwed.

Humping a zebra?

The great traffic-calming industry was in its infancy. Malcolm was attending a Haringey Labour do. Among the gathering was the late, great Naomi Sargant. Malcolm recalls her scabrous delight that a raised pedestrian crossing was sign-posted as a “humped zebra”.

Now, many years later, the whole of North London is bespeckled with traffic pinches, chicanes, road humps, bus lanes, mini-roundabouts, pavements with attitude problems that affect strange excursions into the carriageways. One does not have to descend into the twattery and prattishness of a Brian Coleman reasonably to wonder whether the disease can go any further.

Yet, here comes a flyer inviting Malcolm to a community meeting. Normally, nothing would stop him cavorting at such an occasion. Imagine the unlimited delights of and evening  spent in the company of the local bourgeois in a draughty hall. It makes root-canal work seem a soft option.

Sadly, Malcolm will be out of the country.

Since Malcolm and his family moved to Redfellow Hovel, local traffic has increased exponentially. 5 a.m. is a wakeful contest between the TNT lorries (bringing the good news from Murdoch to the world) and the early 747s coming in over the Pole. At any time of the day or night the Metropolitan Police scream by, hee-hawing their way to an emergency or a tea-break. The Fire Brigade thunder up the hill in tandem.

Cars, driven by the young fuelled by alcohol, regularly loose it and pile into the front garden of the house on the bend. Once it was a young diplomat’s son, accompanied by two hysterical girls, so drunk he could only crawl when he dumped the car.

So what’s wrong with “traffic calming”?

In itself, very little. But a little goes a long way.

Why is it necessary to have seventeen humps on a half-mile road? When they’ve moved the pavement, reduced the parking spaces, it’s only a matter of time before parking charges follow. There’s a severe learning experience for those who have used the road for years, and suddenly encounter a new obstacle.

Then there is the thought that most of the homes in Malcolm’s street were built before twentieth-century building regulations. Many have quite shallow foundations, and are founded on London clay. Subsidence is either a past horror or a continuing fear. Add in the vibration from heavy trucks hitting humps, and …

What Malcolm expects is a heavily-engineered proposal: pavements realigned, multiple humps, major budget items. Jobs for the boys.

In fact, a couple of mini-roundabouts at the two debouching streets would suffice more than adequately.

Or even a complaisant zebra, all passion spent.

Oh, and another happy memory of Naomi Sargant. When her husband, Andrew McIntosh was ennobled, she reverted to her maiden name. Malcolm likes to think that was a good socialist transcending the example of Lord Passfield and Mrs Sidney Webb.

Monday in Tudor Street

Monday afternoon found Malcolm ensconced in the Black Friar, with a fine pint of Timothy Taylor Landlord. Quite why the Black Friar is not on every London tourist trail is a mystery, but, until it is, one to be celebrated in a quiet sit, drink and think. Malcolm knows of no watering-hole quite so exotic in London EC: a frolic of Edwardian excess — marbled walls, bas-relief statuary, mottos on walls, panelling … and an excellent choice of ales.

He was there for a tryst with the lady in his life. She arrived, a traditional and honoured few minutes late. They together debunked across the road, and into Tudor Street.

There, at number 2, they entered the newly-removed and newly-opened Irish Club, redolent of fresh paint, and everyone trying to come to terms with the new technologies. A further curiosity: no draught beer on offer yet.

This, Malcolm is convinced, will become a place of regular resort.

The building now occupied by the Irish Club was once the Journalists Club (as an elaborate plaque to the right of the main door gives evidence). Now that Fleet Street is dead to newspapers — only a few overseas and provincial papers have even token offices there, any more — the trade has lost cohesion in the flight to the fringes of the City.

Once, come late evening, this area thundered to the presses starting up for the first editions. Just down Tudor Street is Bouverie Street, where the late, great News Chronicle was based, until it was fouly murdered by the reactionary cads of the Daily Mail. That was back in 1960; and the kindest thing that can be said about the demise of the one great campaigning liberal paper is that it left the way clear for the once-Manchester Guardian to transplant to London.

Now, come a February twilight, the tradesmen heading home are the barristers from the Inns of Court, each towing a suitcase of legal tomes.

We have too many laws and too few liberal newspapers.

Huh?

It feels like another dodgy statistic, because in Malcolm’s mind it doesn’t quite add up:

Married couples are in a minority for the first time since records began as fewer people choose to tie the knot, new figures indicate. They showed that couples are less likely to get married now than ever before, with the number of weddings at a 100-year low.

The marriage rate, a more accurate guide to the long-term trend, also fell sharply to a record low in 2007. Experts say that since the number of marriages is closely tied to the fortunes of the economy the proportion of married couples is likely to shrink even further in 2009.

Only one in 50 single women now marries each year, and only one in 43 single men. Those are the lowest marriage rates since they were first calculated in 1862. At that time weddings were largely the preserve of the wealthy, with everyone else settling for common law marriages.

That’s the opening of a two-page spread in yesterday’s Times. Curiously, in the print edition Rosemary Bennett’s story is classified as “Society: News”. By the time it reaches the web version, she has been discriminated into a gender ghetto as Home > Life & Style > Women > Families.

Look again, and carefully, at the last of those quoted paragraphs.

Malcolm cannot make it tally. The UK population, as of mid-2007, is estimated at 60,970,000: Other statistical tables suggest that the total population is rather more than 49% male and slightly less than 51% female. So how is there such a discrepancy between the number of singles, male and female, marrying? Even if that is cleared up, there remains another glaring inadequacy here. Whence comes the evidence that, before 1862, marriage was substantially the state of the wealthy? Malcolm can assure all and sundry that is not his experience of rootling through the family histories of quite humble stock.

All clarifications welcomed.

Malcolm’s night out

Over at Malcolm Redfellow’s World Service, our boy is telling of last evening, and an audience with Ian Paisley.

The detailed geography of Brook Street, Mayfair, goes unremarked there. So let Malcolm correct that deficiency.

The Savile Club is at number 69.

The Argentine Embassy, Embajada Argentina en el Reino Unido, is two doors away at number 65. The flag pole is just discernible on the left-most of those white-fronted buildings illustrated above.

That leaves one important building in between. This is the City of Westminster. This is Mayfair. No structure can possibly go uncelebrated, unremarked, undignified.

So number 67 has to be remarkable in some way. Well, there’s the brass plate of the head office of Chelsfield, property developers. Whoop-piddy-doo.

Sure enough, 67 has been awarded a blue plaque, up there on the façade, shining forth as a beacon of culture, civilization and enlightenment. What great achievement of human endeavour and advancement distinguishes number 67, Brook Street?

Citizens of the world, prepare yourselves:

Intemperate language?

The expletive-loaded diatribe that was Boris Johnson’s telephone rant at Keith Vaz deserves all the attention it has received.

It seems that Johnson clocked up double-figures in his “fucking” utterances over a quarter of an hour. Assuming that Vaz participated in an equal debate, that implies Blasted Boris was effing every 45 seconds or so. The Evening Standard, no longer the reliable Evening Boris, reports:

The minutes allegedly taken of the phone conversation the two of them had between 7.10pm and 7.25pm on 4 February, were passed around to [Home Affairs] committee members.

Some of the members were so stunned by the Mayor’s language and his attitude towards Mr Vaz and the committee, that they wrote down some of the most colourful phrases.

Mr Johnson was spitting with rage — saying he was “so f***ing angry” — that a member of the committee had gone on TV suggesting the Mayor would be recalled to give evidence a second time …

Mr Johnson allegedly stormed at Mr Vaz: “I used to think that you were a straight guy. A man that you could do business with. This is f***ing ridiculous.”

etc. etc.

As Malcolm has previously noted, this is quite consistent with Johnson’s past form. It is, therefore, instructive to see Tory circles trying to rewrite history.

The Tory blog-sites have been concerned with three aspects:

• the “leaking” of a telephone converstaion;
• the gutter language; and
• the accusation that Johnson, if not blatantly lying to the Committee in answering questions over “Green-gate”, was a long way short of being “a straight guy”.

In turn, then:

Johnson has been in public life long enough to know that a conversation with a Commons Committee chair, particularly one as plumptious as Keith Vaz, is going to be minuted and noted. To winge now is specious in the extreme.

Johnson has a long track record of being loose-tongued. This was the man who denounced “mawkish sentimentality” repulsed by a 62-year-old man (Ken Bigley) being beheaded by an Iraqi death-squad. He, too, saw black children as “piccaninnies” with “watermelon smiles”: his reward for this came when the BNP recommended Johnson for transferred votes in the Mayoral election.

As for Johnson’s veracity, Michael Howard, as Tory leader, sacked Johnson from the Front Bench , not because of his affairs, not because he had been exposed as a serial adulterer, but because he blatantly lied about his bed-hopping. He was denounced by the society mother of the deserted girl-friend, in the Daily Telegraph no less, for betraying his wife, impregnating his girl-friend after lying to her about marriage, and talking her her into an abortion.

So, apart from character showing through, how do we explain this latest example of Old Etonian boorishness?

Surely, one clue lies in the anxiety shown during the Mayoral campaign about his bibulous temperament:

His aides kept a close eye on him. “Boris is off drink until the election is over,” said one, cutting off a vendor who tried to give Mr. Johnson a cup of alcohol-laced cider.

So what was talking that evening?

Stoatally weaselese

George Orwell usually comes to mind when language is twisted to hide, even contradict meaning, as here:

New pay and display scheme to make it easier for shoppers to park.

That’s the proud boast of Haringey Council’s “action” for Muswell Hill.

Of course, what it means is that the Council devised a “scheme” (nice calculated word, that, even on its own). The scheme was so convoluted it caught a large number of parkers with confusing language. Indeed, the language and signs were so self-contradictory, confused and confusing they were illegal, had to be withdrawn, and replaced.

The weasel words came back to bite them once before, so this assumption that fleecing shoppers makes anything “easier”, except of course to ease the Council’s budget, is breath-taking in its brashness.

To be fair, Orwell may get the credit, but in this case Steinbeck was there a full decade earlier:

… when I hear a business man talkin’ about service, I wonder who’s gettin’ screwed. Fella in business got to lie an’ cheat, but he calls it somepin else.

Which is another way of saying that language is a way of concealing thought. And that is a notion which goes back to the beginning of human expression.

Weasel words, indeed.

In turn, that brings Malcolm to one of his recent delights, the “snow-crazed stoat” shared by so many visitors to the BBC website that it topped the “most-viewed list”.

Some say that’s no stoat, but a weasel. So, time for a message from the Other Side, as offered in life so often by Malcolm’s Dad:

What’s the difference between a stoat and a weasel?

Well, a weasel’s easily distinguished, because a stoat is stoatally different.

Wait! Or, as Beowulf would have offered: Hwaet!

Malcolm has more on the topic of Haringey and its parking operations, from his local free-sheet (the epitome of “pisspoor” pseudo-journalism):

Parking attendants working illegally with forged documents were arrested last week in a raid on Haringey Council buildings.

Most of the 15 Africans had contracts to patrol Haringey streets through employment agencies Unity and Synergie …

Haringey (not the employment agencies) had noted:

during routine checks that the documents the parking wardens were using were professionally forged.

Unity Recruitment Ltd boast:

We are currently the leader in the market with an extensive database of over 5000 experienced candidates which have good working knowledge of the Road Traffic Act 1991 & the new traffic management act so are ready to hit the ground running.

• Notice the use of “which” there. Wouldn’t “who” be more human, and treat the candidates a little less like commodities?
• When (was it in Westminster?) the parking attendants were asked to produce identification documents and passports, that’s exactly what they did: hit the road, running.

Synergie (which seems to be more correctly “Synergy” in its UK manifestation) has a mission statement:

Refreshingly different, service focused, ethically sound.

It achieves this because it

… helps its clients find high-quality workers who fulfil their expectations from both the professional point of view and also from the point of view of their corporate culture.

Ah, the meaning of outsourcing!

And the outsourcing of meaning!