The first day of the rest of our lives ... and other clichés

Malcolm recalls the well-known story of the couple with horse-mad (but personality-opposite) twin daughters. For their birthday, the girls were given ponies. Overnight, the couple left the saddle and tack in one bedroom, and a pile of dung in the other.

Next morning, there was gloom in one bedroom, as the pessimistic daughter fingered the traces, bits and leather, trying to figure out what the catch was. The other girl, the optimist, was whooping with glee as she heaved manure around, saying, "With all this crap, there's got to be a pony in here somewhere."

The latter's feelings approximate Malcolm's daily riffle through the Times.

Malcolm is sure every other blog-artist in sight has spotted the chart on page 13:
The alternation of party in power goes across the columns, going back in time over Blair, Thatcher/Major, Wilson/Callaghan, Heath, Wilson, Churchill/Eden/Macmillan/Home and Attlee. The rows down then ask: "More Jobs?" "Fewer Unemployed?" "Better health results?" "Better education results?" "Lower crime?" "Economic growth every quarter?"

The whole graphic appears under the strap headline:

"There is only one Government since 1945 that can say all of the following:
more jobs, fewer unemployed, better health and education results,
lower crime, and economic growth in every quarter — this one"

That, of course comes from Tony Blair's speech. No amount of shilly-shallying (and the Times inevitably fills columns with ordure) can deny that boast.

And, to be fair, though it was not, by any means, a unanimous and rapturous cheer

... even the ranks of Tuscany
Could scarce forbear to cheer.

The Times first (and only! Now, there's class!) leader went the distance:

He has not, even his most uncompromising enemies must acknowledge, been an inconsequential leader. Let history have the time and space to consider him and the Britain he had headed for the past decade. The historian has, after all, the immense advantage of being, as Friedrich von Schlegel correctly observed, “a prophet looking backwards”.

Meanwhile, the Telegraph is predictably vindictive, but Bill Deedes is allowed a more gentle perspective as their resident incarnation of Schlegel:

How few leave 10 Downing Street with laurels, I reflect, as Tony Blair at last starts to pack his bags. Not even Churchill could do it after winning a difficult war. In 1945 he paid the price of being the fourth head of a coalition government with no appeal to the post-war generation.

Most of them in my time have gone, as Blair is going, amid defiant cheers from their remaining admirers, boos from detractors and faint relief from a largely indifferent electorate.

Malcolm senses that the mood of the chattering classes, those "opinion formers", has shifted, and seismically rather than subtly, in the last couple of days. This is Iain Dale, no less:

The next two months will be dominated by one man - Gordon Brown. For the Conservatives, it will be like going back to 1997 when no one, not even their mothers, wanted to hear from them. The media will ignore their every word, no matter how relevant. It's Gordon's time and Conservatives had better get used to it.

It was the latest Sunday Times that was puffing:

Cameron 'on course' for No 10.

Ha! Doubtless, at this point, Malcolm should quote Harold Wilson about political weeks. Instead, he offers this attempt to source the Wilson quotation:

Attributed. quoted in Sayings of the Century, “Prime Ministers: A Word from No. 10,” Nigel Rees (1984). When asked by Rees in 1977, Wilson was unable to remember when or even if he had uttered this dictum always associated with him. Rees suggests the words were probably said in 1964 shortly after Wilson became prime minister. A journalist recalled Wilson saying, “Forty-eight hours is a long time in politics” at a party conference in 1960.

Dale's "two months", though. That's a political lifetime. So, Cameroonies, do not ask for whom the bell tolls ...
Sphere: Related Content

A spokesman whistling in the dark

Malcolm's bile reached critical levels when, thanks to a redirection from Slugger O'Toole, he discovered the crystalline (and outdated) logic of Spokesman for the Opposition:

A political blog highlighting the issues that politicians prefer to dodge, intellectual, humourous [sic], down-to-earth. Spokesman was over 20 years a journalist.

Aaargh! A journalist but never a sub-editor.

Spokesman predicts:

74 seats for Fianna Fail, and 9 seats for Sinn Fein, this adds up to the magic figure of 83 seats - a majority of one seat in Dail Eireann - and they will be backed up by another 8 Independents, so when all is said and done, that's your new government, a Fianna Fail-Sinn Fein coalition.

And this will result in:

the best ever [Government] in the history of Ireland in tackling poverty in Ireland - the most important onjective [sic] of all for any new government.

At this juncture Malcolm's Brooklyn-born son-in-law might well say: "Blow it out your arse!"

Let's change direction for a moment.

When Malcolm was at school, Charles II was supposed to have said “Let sleeping dogs lie”. Only later, Malcolm discovered this was another schoolman's lie: the actual royal utterance was more alliterative: “A stirred turd stinks.”

That ought to be enough to persuade Malcolm to keep stumm on this one.

However ...

1. Any alliance between FF and SF would invite all jobbing cartoonists to parody David Low’s “Rendezvous” cartoon:

2. “[T]he best ever in the history of Ireland in tackling poverty in Ireland...” Heaven help us! That possibility existed at the time of the 13th Dáil, with the coalition of Fine Gael and the progressives in the "First Inter-Party Government" of 1948-51:

The coalition government ... deserves recognition as a reforming administration and not just as the one that presided over the declaration of the Republic, the Mother and Child controversy ... and the internal squabbling of Clann na Poblachta. [Ferriter, page 482]

That government (and all its laudable aims) foundered on the clericalism of Seán MacBride and the opportunism of de Valera. Its lasting achievement amounted to what Liam O'Bríain called:

the arresting of the Führer mentality which had reached such dangerous heights in that section of the Irish people — the infallibility and superhuman quality of Dev. [Ferriter, page 483]

Any fantasist who has not read (for example) Diarmaid Ferriter still cannot be excused from noticing just how badly a decade of FF has been for the under-class. Equally, Sinn Féin has no track record of attaining social improvement. Any incoming Government will be dependent on the volatile votes of the newly-affluent bourgeoisie of the Dublin metropolis, who in turn are dependent on property values, inward investment and a frothy economy. On what grounds can we expect the tiger to change its stripes?

No. Definitely no. The next Irish social revolution is not yet. The next Dáil, whatever the complexion of the government bench, is the recipé as before.

So, Malcolm suggests:

• See tomorrow's Irish Times poll (spoiler at www.irishelection.com). This suggests little movement: FF @ 36%∧; FG @ 28%∨; Labour @ 13%∧; and SF @ 10%=.
• 73 seats for FF? Surely, you're joking!
• Don't expect great shifts on this until the final few days, if then (E&OE).
• Certainly don't expect any bounce for SF from the events up North.
• If total torpor sets in, watch the other radical vote: Labour (if only!) and even the Trots, but not SF much above 10%. Remember, too, this is a young electorate, and beards are not "cool".
  
• Overall, on any basis here, the revolution is postponed.

Sphere: Related Content

Con or conundrum?

What have the following items in common?

• a cardboard box containing unused rolls of wall-paper;
• a broken wicker basket;
• a sack of shredded letter paper;
• a discarded zippered shopping bag;
• rolled foam-plastic camping pallets.

Yep: neither the regular refuse nor the recycling service of Haringey will take them.

Every week there is a ritual. Malcolm collects and sorts the waste, and leaves it out for the weekly collection. In the cold light of dawn the refuse truck collects the contents of the wheelie-bin, usually resulting in it being thrown back down the driveway on its side. There is a lull until later, often much later, the recycling truck comes for the rest. And then begins a selection process, which results in the left-over of either party remaining where Malcolm left it, or (more often) scattered more widely as it was discarded.

Malcolm then has to refill the wheelie bin with the residue, to be collected a week later, or remove it himself to the recycling centre across the Borough. The later option, involving an unnecessary car journey, seems to defeat the whole object.

Clearly there is a mismatch between the Borough's stated aims, the operatives' implementation and Malcolm's understanding thereof. What's to be done? Sphere: Related Content

By their friends you shall know them...

Malcolm, like all old lefties, was rooting for Ségolène Royal. He is less than surprised by the result (though 53-47 is a heck of a lot better than the last outing) and less than staggered by the following piccy:

That's Sarkozy lurking behind the red duster. Only last Sunday he was pledging to be President for all the French people, and preaching his mantra that the French must work harder and make sacrifices.

Back home, the French were indulging in their usual vigorous post-election analysis:

Tuesday night, some 200 cars were burned around France and at least 80 people detained in the third night of post-election violence, Interior Minister Francois Baroin said on France-Info radio Wednesday. That was down from 730 cars burned on Sunday night.

Vandals broke windows at a local headquarters of Sarkozy's Union for a Popular Movement party in Villeurbanne, near Lyon in the southeast. But Baroin insisted the violence was ebbing, and was under control.

Meanwhile Sarko was cruising off Malta, on a floating gin-palace owned by Vincent Bolloré, number 17 on the French Rich List and 451st among Forbes world-wide plutocracy. Bolloré gets his kicks by collecting BDs (French comic books) and corporate raiding:

With his easy manners and sleek good looks, Vincent Bolloré seems the epitome of Gallic gentility. But in clubby French business circles, the 49-year-old industrialist and investor is considered a killer. Bolloré has a habit of shaking up undervalued icons of French business--often family-run companies--then wresting cash and choice industrial morsels from them. Film group Pathé, construction and telecom giant Bouygues, and even venerable merchant bank Lazard Frères Co. all got a taste of his medicine.

He may even have aspirations to go the Berlusconi route by muscling into media, currently by adding the British advertising firm Aegis (in which he currently has a near-30% holding, just below the level at which he must make an all-out bid) to his fiefdom. Aegis is significant because it is:

the world's largest independent media buyer... Havas [which Bolloré already owns] controls an estimated 4 percent of the global media buying market, while Aegis controls approximately 9 percent.

It was refreshing to see that the French opposition press were out of the blocks, and harrying Sarkozy. La Depeche du Midi of Toulouse saw Sarkozy indulging in luxury "in the manner of a newly-rich who had won the lottery." Nîmes-based L'Independent du Midi predicts Sarkozy "will be our first American-style president," because he is a "great admirer of the country where money and luxury are considered as mandatory symbols of success." Sphere: Related Content

Changing the world?

It's May 9th, so that's the June issue of Mojo (published by Emap plc) on the shelf of the newsagent. Headline: "100 records that changed the world":

The most influential singles and albums in history, selected, sorted and saluted by Mojo’s favourite musicians.

Wow! That's original! Or would have been if not for Q magazine (published by Emap plc) in January 2003, sporting the title: "100 songs that changed the world". Oh, and look: here's Rolling Stone doing "40 songs that changed the world".

Malcolm used to buy Mojo occasionally: it filled the torpor of lunchbreaks. He hasn't been near it for a couple of years. And doesn't feel inclined to invest in this issue.

The Q list is still on the Net. Many of those 100 songs may certainly have changed or developed the mood for popular music. A prime example is number 64: Jackie Brenston's Rocket 88 (though Ike Turner, whose band it was, pirated it from Jimmie Liggins). Malcolm suggests only isolated Q readers have actually heard that one (Malcolm keeps it on his back-up hard-drive). Even so, this product of Brentson/Turner/Sam Phillips was mainly significant in retrospect, because the combination of tenor-sax, the drummer's back beat and the fuzz-guitar indicated how and when R&B developed into Rock'n'Roll. To an extent, then, Rocket 88 is a historical marker for 1951, just as Joe Oliver inviting Louis Armstrong to Chicago had been in 1922.

Few songs on this list changed the course of the planet. Leave out the Lennon sentimentality and Malcolm would suggest only a couple even have any political content. Malcolm would note those obvious exceptions as:

• number 6: Billie Holiday's Strange Fruit;
• number 73: Woody Guthrie's This Land is Your Land.

One represents a brave attempt to protest against the lynch mob (one of FDR's disreputable moments). The other (particularly in its earlier form, with the edited two verses) is one of the great statements of solidarity, especially when taken along with the rest of Guthrie's work.

For Malcolm, though, the concept of such a list is intriguing. Does popular music merely reflect public mood, or can it be an agency of change? Country Joe Macdonald at Woodstock, belting out Fixin' to Die Rag (which Q scandalously ignored) represents a clear example: was that "changing" or just catching a mood? Sphere: Related Content

European values

Malcolm was hastening to meet his lady for lunch. The pavement was blocked by sixth-formers coming the other way.

Because there is a generation thing about speech volume, Malcolm had fragments of conversation forced on him. He was totally lost by this:

Girl 1: ... like the Holland people.
Girl 2: They're the Danish. Sphere: Related Content

Malcolm discovers relative values

Cousinly thoughts
Some time ago, one of Malcolm's inanities prompted a comment from yourcousin. This came as something of a surprise to our Malc, who is rather precious about his relatives. However, yourcousin is going to be an on-going thread of Malcolm's future bloggery, so we had all better get used to him.

Our American Cousin is a goodish mid-19th century farce with tragic overtones: it was famously the play at Abraham Lincoln was attending on 14th April, 1865. To commemorate that, Malcolm proposes to refer to this source in future, not just as yourcousin, but to Our American Cousin (who, under moments of tension, when fingers fail to keep up with brain, will find himself abbreviated to OAC).

Since that initial comment, a small exchange has continued between Our American Cousin and Malcolm. Malcolm is in debt to Our American Cousin's insights into Northern Irish politics and country music; and if any reader doubts that these will be recycled here, be reassured they will be.

A week ago Our American Cousin's peroration threw in a googly or slurve (notice how Malcolm strives to be bilingual):

I want to note that you and I keep using different labels to deal with the same topic. While I refer to "Ulster-Scots" you refer to"Ulster-prods".

This instantly brought Malcolm to full attention, because it had been his meditation in the sleepless early hours: the identity of those whom Ruth Dudley-Edwards calls The Faithful Tribe and Patrick Griffin as The People With No Name. The topic has been appearing serially in Malcolm's pronouncements here and on Slugger.

Ulsterdom revisited
Once upon a time it was easy. The emigré Lowland Scots who transported and planted themselves (note: it was largely voluntary — they were not passively transported and "planted") across Jacobean Ulster knew themselves as Northern Dissenters. This adequately described their Presbyterian faith, which distinguished them from the "Churchmen" (the Ascendancy class who followed orthodox Anglicanism) and the despised Roman Catholic Irish. They were different in class, too: the Churchmen were the landowners; the Northern Dissenters were largely tenants. What Malcolm had not appreciated, until he started dipping into Griffin, is that originally the Ulster confessional arrangements were also quite distinct:

In 1642, when a Scottish army arrived in Ulster to quash the Irish Catholic rebellion, chaplains and officers encountered Scottish migrants with few Presbyterian institutions. To be sure, settlers had assembled themselves into congregations by erecting meetinghouses at convenient sites throughout the countryside, as they had created sessions in which lay elders resolved disputes within the community, scrutinized church attendance, and dispensed charity and justice. But they had little else.

Only after 1690 was the full Presbyterian structure established across Ulster.

"Ulster Scotch"
The term "Ulster-Scotch" is useful, but suffers from being anachronistic and displaced. It refers specifically to the average 3,500 to 5,000 who emigrated each year from Ulster to the American colonies between 1717 and 1775. These figures are not capable of exact audit. Arthur Young, in his Tour of Ireland [1779] provides an estimate that a quarter of Ulster's manufacturing population went between 1729 and 1750. The other source is to log the departures and arrivals of ships. Leyburn quotes the Gentleman's Magazine of 1774 [XLIV, page 332]:

... asserting that 6,222 immigrants from Ireland had come to America between August 3 and November 29, 1773; while in five years between 1769 and 1774 152 ships with passengers from Londonderry, Belfast, Newry, Larne and Portrush, with a total tonnage of 43,720. The note is added: "the number of emigrants is supposed fully to equal the number of tons of shipping."

Whichever way one totals, it amounts to somewhere each side of a quarter of a million in total. So, sorry OAC, "Ulster-Scotch" or "Scotch-Irish" applies only in America, and mainly to Pennsylvania (the immediate destination of most Ulster emigrants): re-exporting the word to modern Northern Ireland is not appropriate.

The word is also anachronistic. After 1775 it has little relevance. Again Leyburn makes the point. George III's proclamation of 7 October 1763 forbade general settlement west of the Appalachians. That was soon a dead letter:

After 1782, however, it seemed as if a considerable part of America was determined to go west; and in the vanguard of the pioneers were the restless Scotch-Irish ...
Across the mountains began a new phase for American history, for here people of many national backgrounds met and merged as they had never done in the east. From the Appalachians west to the Pacific Ocean the pioneer was simply an American ...

That was then, this is now
That, of course, is not the "end of history" (on which Liam Clarke commented to some effect, in the Sunday Times a couple of Sundays back), any more than yesterday's doings at Stormont were.

So, Malcolm continues to reflect on both.

Despite yourcousin/OAC cited above, Malcolm maintains there is a distinct Ulster Protestant type. And, he concedes, OAC is also right in so far as it is not a homogenised, one-size-fits-all personality.

The main differences are class (see above) and location. Attitudes harden with accent; and none come harder (with some good reasons) than the small farmer from west-of-the-Bann, though his (or her) personality crops up across the whole province: "Not an inch", indeed. The urban warrior, though, seems on the way out — though, in Portadown (which is just over the Bann) on his latest visit, Malcolm noticed the "ours" and "yours" differentiation was still applicable even in choice or adoption of shopping centres.

As for class, the distinction is visible in voting preferences: UUP versus DUP may be a shorthand. If, as seems at least possible, the UUP is in terminal decline, that begs the question of where the bourgeois Unionist vote goes. The NITories offered a desperate and pathetic option, but are not going to make it without some heavy input from London. Notice how Trimble is lost to view already. There is, of course, the Alliance to soak up tender consciences. A third, perhaps more realistic, option is a Peter Robinson-led DUP, with suitable mood-muzac and soft furnishings; though, that will invite another split with hard-line DUPers (led by Donaldson, for example).

An Ulster future?
Where does this take us? Perhaps we should be looking for the future of the "Ulster consciousness" (which is as near as Malcolm has yet reached in defining the state-of-mind that is at the centre of his rumination). To that extent, history has barely reached a comma, despite the apostles and critics alike of Fukuyama:

The other major "contradiction" potentially unresolvable by liberalism is the
one posed by nationalism and other forms of racial and ethic consciousness... Nationalism has been a threat to liberalism historically in Germany, and continues to be one in isolated parts of
"post-historical" Europe life [such as] Northern Ireland.

Hence the edginess common to all the broadsheet editorials today, in reflecting yesterday's events at Stormont. The Times opines:

While sectarianism remains a harsh reality in sections of Belfast and Londonderry, it has been ameliorated elsewhere. The real test for devolution in ten years time therefore, is whether the terms "Unionist" and "nationalist" are less consequential than today.

While one can see where that is going, to Malcolm it reads more E98 1TA than anywhere between BT70 and BT82. And what is the logic for differential capitalisation for "Unionist" and nationalist?

The Guardian is, to put it mildly, guarded:

The peace process is over. The political one is just about to begin...
The task facing Northern Ireland's new rulers is to use yesterday's spirit to better the lives of its people. Their work has only just begun.

Much to Malcolm's disquiet, he finds the Telegraph ["Tha's gotta know wha' t'enemy's thinkin'!" © Cousin Ralph Copley] most closely approaching his own feelings:

The blizzard of back-slapping platitudes that greeted yesterday's re-establishment of a power-sharing government in Stormont could not disguise a profound sense of unease...

If yesterday does mark an end to the vicious tribalism that has disfigured Northern Ireland's politics for decades (and that has to mean an end to the gangsterism into which the paramilitaries have diversified), there will be a big vacuum to fill. We have noted before that the Province has been ill-served by its political classes, not least because they have such little experience of governing. This will be the real test of the new Stormont Assembly. It must resist the temptation to keep glancing over its shoulder at the murderous nihilism of the past.

That has always been the seductive, soft option. The altogether tougher challenge facing the power-sharing administration will be to provide the good governance for which the people of Northern Ireland are crying out. We can only hope they will not be disappointed.

Forward to single-mindedness!
The bottom line, surely, is that the re-occupation of Stormont's limestone halls gives us a breathing space, at best that Six County history can pick up again from the 1890s where it has been stuck. With any degree of luck the "Northern Dissenters" are going to rediscover that lines of communication rather than of demarcation exist between Lurgan and Dundalk, that there are more shared values and interests than divisions. Even the died-in-the-linen Northerner may come to appreciate that Dublin has been rapidly evolving into a post-confessional multi-ethnic community (something that Fianne Fáil may have to learn the hard way soon).

In Malcolm's days as a student, returning to Archbishop McQuaid's Dublin was (as the joke had it about New Zealand): "We are about to land. Turn your watches back thirty years." Today Dublin is cosmopolitan, and more resembles Barcelona or Berlin than it does Belfast: the sooner all Belfast catches the zeitgeist the better.

Cliché alert! "It all comes down to economics"
When Malcolm reads:

There have already been several hints from Martin McGuinness that he expects to see America pitching in with Britain, Ireland, Europe and everyone else to help subsidise our brave new world with its 10 ministries and jobs for everyone

he hears echoes from opinion columns in the Belfast Telegraph, specifically Eric Waugh:

the new state would require bolstering for up to 20 years by the UK, the EU - and possibly the US and even the Republic.

To McGuinness and Waugh alike, will say the various purse-holders (and as Malcolm has recited previously "little chance":

Northern Ireland’s quest for normality should focus on more mundane concerns. Chief among these should be the state of its economy, where development has not matched political progress. Northern Ireland depends too heavily on the public sector. On any measure, it is evident that the private sector is too small, and that the province is less productive than it could be. The government directly employs about one-third of the workforce, and accounts for almost two-thirds of economic output. The proportion of people of working age who are economically inactive is 27.7 per cent – the highest percentage of the 12 UK regions, and well above the UK average of 21.4 per cent.

Whatever the Ulsterman calls himself, pride precludes adopting the tone of poor provincial relative. Whether the model for the Six Counties lies in Dublin or Docklands, it implies a tougher future, with fewer dole-queues (if only because there will be fewer handouts).

Else, for Dissenter or Catholic alike, the only alternative is, once again, that cruel emigrant passage. Sphere: Related Content

Rocking the vote in Meath

Malcolm has been ignoring the elves of late: in fact, there has been rumination about a bulk issue of P45s. Yesterday, though, Malcolm hit upon a huddle of the little buggers twittering over Frank McNally's An Irishman's Diary in the Irish Times.

So, it being spring, moonless night in the Norf of Lunnun, starless and bible-black, Malcolm decided to investigate, and begins at the beginning.

One of the thorns in the flesh of the retiring Fianna Fáil government has been the long-overdue M3 motorway from Dublin into the County Meath. Slap in the middle of the direct route is a hill. Not just any old hill: the Hill of Tara, Teamhair na Rí, no less. Molehills do not come more mountainous than this one.

Heavy brain-bashing by the planners eventually provided no less than ten possible routes in a rainbow of colours. The line of least resistance, designated the "Pink Corridor", ran well north of Tara's Halls, and was given more kudos than the rest. The government, however, winced at the additional cost of such a routing, and ordained a shorter line going south of the village of Skryne, and so much closer to Tara.

All hell broke loose among the chattering classes, involving anyone who had watched more than ten minutes of archaeology on TV.

However, back to elven excitement over Frank McNally's prose.

It seems the latest twist in the saga is The Ark of the Covenant, last seen (one might think) safely tucked away in a US government warehouse. Not at all, at all. In point of supposed fact, the Ark was reburied at Tara. Check it out here.

At the end of the 19th century the British Israelites went digging for it. Máiréad Carew of UCD tried to keep a straight, academic face to write the story of that bit of the farce. Arthur Griffith, WB Yeats, George Moore and Douglas Hyde (a fine team there) tried physically to intervene, to prevent the desecration of a national monument: they were seen off by a gun-waving gent. Maud Gonne's protest involved lighting a bonfire on the Hill of Tara and singing "A Nation Once Again".

Anyone writhing in mirth should pause, recall that British-Israelite nonsense permeates the Orange Order's and the Black Preceptory's mythologies, then redouble the writhing and mirthing.

Yes, Malcolm decided: P45s all round.
Sphere: Related Content

Malcolm's modest proposal:

It seems the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square is up for offers. Channel 4 News speculate that the owners may be looking for a site which is accessible, defensible, out-of-town and (presumably) prestigious.

Malcolm knows of just such a property:
Consider the advantages:

• commanding position;
• no bomb-damage in living memory;
• only one previous owner;
• easy access to city centre and two airports;
• well-maintained with minimal recent use;
  
• a bloody-sight better-looking than that concrete monstrosity in Ballsbridge, D4 (why not double up?);
• the original plans (doubtless still available) include a dome and are "reminiscent of the U.S. Capitol in Washington DC."

The prospective new tenants (who have yet to enter into full occupation) could easily be rehoused in the projected "Titanic Quarter", a.k.a. Ceantar an Titanic. There, at least they could sink or swim, hit the rocks, feel the chill hand of destiny on their shoulders, suffer an icy fate or whatever in appropriate fashion. Sphere: Related Content

Putting his mouth where his money is ...

Malcolm sees that, at 10.55 pm on 14th April, he made a prediction:

Scotland will be going substantially SNP next month. On current form the Nats will be the largest single party, though well short (say high 30s, low 40s) of the 65 seats for an absolute majority. The SNP won’t get its referendum; but the voters will have to be assuaged by additional powers to the Scottish Parliament.

And, here today, the venerable Scotsman is publishing its eve-of-poll prediction:

According to the latest and last Scotsman/ICM opinion poll of this crucial campaign, Labour has made significant progress into the SNP's lead...
The SNP would have 43 seats to Labour's 42, with the Liberal Democrats on 23, the Conservatives on 17, the Greens with one and the others three.

_______________________________

Salmond, desperate to keep the LibDims [sic] in play, has already softened the devolution-referendum commitment:

Alex Salmond has announced he is prepared to compromise on the nature and timing of a referendum on independence.

The SNP leader said he was prepared to do a deal with the Liberal Democrats on a vote on independence if the parties gain enough seats in May's elections to form a new executive...

Until now, Salmond has put a vote on whether Scotland should leave the UK at the heart of his policies.

What makes this even more smoky-and-mirrored, is the referendum was the only firm, definable and bankable commitment that Salmond was prepared to make when Adam Boulton interviewed him, a month ago:

We’re offering Scotland progress, progress in government, in health, education, on the economy in particular where we have got to do a lot more and a lot better and obviously the opportunity for people in Scotland to take the future into their own hands and to vote for independence in an independence referendum which will take place in the second half of our four year term.

And the SNP manifesto laid down, as an essential responsibility of the First Minister:

Publication of a White Paper detailing the concept of Scottish independence in the modern world as part of preparations for offering Scots the opportunity to decide on independence in a referendum, with a likely date of 2010

How often does one witness a party ditch its manifesto in mid-campaign?

In the 1979 Election, after the Winter of Discontent, there was a telling anti-Labour graffito: "Cut out the middle man. Vote TGWU." Let's be brutal here: the SNP were the Tartan Tories, and so they remain. Absent the issue of independence, and their sole function in the Scottish game is an alternative to Labour. Supporters and financiers include former Royal Bank of Scotland chairman Sir George Mathewson, multi-millionaire Donald MacDonald of the eponymous hotel chain, Tom Farmer of Kwik-Fit, and (most ominous, perhaps) Brian Souter of Stagecoach, Christian fundamentalist and arch-privatiser. Salmond himself was an economist with the RBOS; and his spokesman for economic affairs, Mather, is an accountant and businessman. So an SNP vote looks like a being "anti-socialist under a saltire".

Now, if the SNP is not going to stand by its first and only distinctive policy, what bloody use are they? Why buy Salmond's snake-oil? Where's Billy Wolfe when he's needed? Wolfe had some principles: he needed them to hold his corner against Tam of the Binns. By comparison, Salmond's SNP is an opportunist creature of Edinburgh capitalism.

Money and mouthpieces, indeed. Sphere: Related Content

Malcolm has a quick one on
The great 7/7 panic

Here's the consensus of opinion from today's front pages:
MI5 in the dock as terror trial shows link to suicide bombers - Daily Telegraph
How MI5 missed the links to July 7 suicide bombers - The Guardian
Why didn't MI5 stop July 7th? - Daily Mail
Angry families ask how July 7 bombers got through MI5 net - The Herald
MI5 let the ringleader behind 7/& slip the net - The Press and Journal ("The Voice of the North")
Bomb victim's family hit out at MI5 - South Wales Echo

And that's without going below the headlines.

Ditto Channel 4 News. Ditto the Today Progamme. Etc. Etc.

So now we know whom to blame.

For those with a wider horizon, or a longer memory, here's a thought:

"Today we were unlucky, but remember we only have to be lucky once. You have to be lucky always "
PIRA statement to Thatcher Government after Brighton bomb, 1984.

Sphere: Related Content

... and we thought Hiaasen just made it up

From today's Miami Herald:

A substitute teacher at an Orlando high school could be charged with a felony for a gun he took to work, authorities said.

Orange County sheriff's deputies pulled Joshua Cummings out of class Monday morning after they searched his car and found a 9mm pistol, according to a report.

Malcolm, whose alter ego suffered as a "supply teacher" in London, empathises with Mr Cummings.

A school spokesman said teachers, employees and students are not allowed to bring weapons to school.

Well, that's all right then.

Sphere: Related Content

Good things in small packages

A number of good things come out of Seattle: Hendrix, the Bainbridge Ferry, the B-17 bomber, I-5 south to Portland ... and a decent toilet on most streets in the world simply found by looking for the Starbucks logo (pass up the coffee, though — vide infra). The one that has most changed life for the better is www.amazon.com.

On Sunday evening, Malcolm was wrestling to find a conclusion to a rambling meditation. He was seeking to define the Ulster-Prod mindset, how it adopted "Britishness" and why its descendants around the world seem to have lost contact with the Province. The more he blogged, the less happy he was with the lack of firm conclusions. He realised that he was prejudging the issues, largely because of poor research and reading. His mind went to two books he felt he needed:
The Scotch-Irish: A Social History by James Graham Leyburn;
The People with No Name: Ireland's Ulster Scots, America's Scots Irish, and the Creation of a British Atlantic World, 1689-1764 by Patrick Griffin.

The former appeared back in the earliest '60s, when Malcolm was still a pallid TCD student. The latter is more recent.

Within minutes both had been located on amazon.co.uk, the order registered and acknowledged.

Now comes the magic, the wonder of modern capitalism.

At 7.28 a.m. this fine May Day, just thirty-six hours later, the door-buzzer announced the arrival of the package, and the books were sharing the breakfast table with the marmalade and proper-coffee spills. Now that is service. Some academic libraries in Malcolm's recollection would struggle to match that.

Expect further drivelling from Malcolm on this topic in due course. Sphere: Related Content

"He did little harm"

Malcolm believes it was Jim Hacker who wanted his obituary to read "He did little harm". Most politicians achieve that result: anyone outside those parameters becomes posthumously either a statesman or a disaster. Because most people who enter politics do so out of some altruism or belief that they can, individually or collectively, improve matters, inevitably they feel, in Enoch Powell's maxim, that "All political careers end in failure".

Yet, there are those exceptions: the few who achieve something positive, often from unpromising beginnings. Last Friday's obituary of Boris Yetsin in The Economist marked such an individual. For all of his weaknesses and follies and compromises and admitted mistakes:

He believed in freedom and rejected communism not because he was a libertarian, but because he felt freedom was part of human nature. His hatred of Stalinism was instinctive, not intellectual. He cursed fascism and Stalinism in the same breath, without putting so much as a comma between them.

To merit a page of obituary in The Economist is itself a marker. That short paragraph, a trifle long for a tombstone, is not a bad epitaph. And nicely written, too.
____________________________

Note: the Economist's leader on Yetsin is also on line, on open access. Sphere: Related Content

Of holes, names and history
Denis Healey's famous First Law of Holes ("When in a hole, stop digging") has, in the last couple of weeks, been adeptly implemented by Des Browne, Patricia Hewitt and even Tony Blair. Malcolm would now like to add to the code with his Law of Blogs: the more promising the thread, the more likely subsequent posts descend into partisan abuse.

Malcolm spent some time elsewhere this month, matching his abilities with the Real Men at Slugger O'Toole's Fisticuffs and Flyting Forum. Malcolm likes Slugger because it is a prime source of news for Northern Ireland across a spectrum of sources, has a quantum of bright and breezy contributors, and frequently the commentary is spot-on. Inevitably, though, any extended thread of discussion descends into abuse between Nationalist/Unionist, Prod/Mick, green/orange.

That sparked Malcolm to consider two related issues:

• The Ulster Protestant identity: British or Irish or what?
• Why it is that, once they have left Ulster, most seem unconscious or dismissive of that identity? And why this is particularly so in the United States, where more than half the "Irish-Americans" are Protestant and descended from the Ulster diaspora.

Root and seed
Malcolm was taught that the root of the Ulster "problem" was the 1607 Flight of the Earls, the forfeit of their lands to the Crown, and the distribution of those lands through plantation. If that was the root, the seed must be earlier yet.

Cause and effect: the accession of James VI to the throne of England provided a terminus ad quem to the Border wars between the two kingdoms. All that energy had to go somewhere:

Thousands of Scots ... poured into Down and Antrim, reinforcing the already significant Scottish element in the populations. Strongly Protestant in character, they were to introduce a radical element into the area which made the north-east prosperous as well as ethnically different. The Scots also came in substantial numbers as tenants on the new estates in the planted area. Such was the level of emigration that in 1636 a proclamation banned any Scot from coming to Ireland without licence. But they continued to come throughout the century and the Scottish colony grew to be almost a little Scotland beyond the sea. The 'Scottish nation in the north of Ireland', as it called itself, formed a powerful political as well as religious presence in Ulster. By the 1640s, Presbyterians had become dominant among the Scots and henceforth Presbyterian Ulster was to provide a powerful religious, political, radical and even military voice in Ireland. A social revolution of immense significance for the future of the province, and indeed of the island at larger, had taken place.

Malcolm savoured that, if only because behind the text he could recall the voice of James Lydon of TCD.

But what about the seed?

George MacDonald Fraser introduces The Steel Bonnets, The Story of the Anglo-Scottish Border Reivers with an observation:

At one moment when President Richard Nixon was taking part in his inauguration ceremony, he appeared flanked by Lyndon Johnson and Billy Graham. To anyone familiar with Border history it was one of those historical coincidences which send a little shudder through the mind: in that moment, thousands of miles and centuries in time away from the Debateable Land, the threads came together again; the descendants of three notable Anglo-Scottish Border tribes—families who had lived and fought within a few miles of each other on the West Marches in Queen Elizabeth's time—were standing side-by-side, and it took very little imagination to replace the custom-made suits with leather jackets or backs-and-breasts.

And, of the physiognomy:

Richard Nixon, however, is the perfect example. The blunt, heavy features, the dark complexion, the burly body, and the whole air of dour hardness are as typical of the Anglo-Scottish frontier as the Roman Wall. Take thirty years off his age and you could put him straight into the front row of the Hawick scrum and hope to keep out of his way. It is difficult to think of any face that would fit better under a steel bonnet.

And that, presciently, was first published in 1971, a year before the Watergate burglary.

Besides Nixon, Johns(t)on and Graham one could add names like Armstrong, Irving, Potts, Turnbull (Trimble); Tailor and many more. [Malcolm found it interesting that David Trimble, on his first outing as a paid-up Tory, was emphasising his lowlands Scots ancestry: he did not feel it significant enough to include this on his website.]

That, surely, was the seed.

The first attempt
No sooner had the Scots appropriated much of Ulster than, like the Vikings before them, it was time to go further. On 9th September 1636, the Eagle Wing sailed, where the Down coast crests northwards before the trunk of the Ards Peninsula, with 140 Presbyterians:

Robert Blair, John Livingston, James Hamilton, and John McClelland: all afterwards promoters of the cause of truth in Scotland and Ireland. Among the families that composed the company were the names Stuart, Agnew, Campbell, Summervil, and Brown.

They intended west for the Merrimac in New England. That voyage failed:

half-seas through, the manifold crosses they met withal, made them give over their intentions.

They landed back at Lochfergus on 3rd November.

Others would follow:

The first Ulster Scots turned up in 1713. In Worcester, Massachusetts, they were much in demand as Indian fighters and as a tough barrier between the English settlers and the 'savage wilderness' beyond... Between 1717 and 1776, perhaps a quarter of a million Ulstermen came to America, 100,000 of them as indentured servants. They did not remain servants for very long, as colonists soon discovered that Ulster Scots were not born to be obedient...
The people who best represent the traditional Presbyterian Scot culture were the Ulster Scots, or, as the Americans called them, the "Scotch Irish". They were Irish by geography only ... they had struggled to preserve the twin characteristics of their Scottish forbears. The first was a fierce Calvinist faith. The other was a similarly fierce individualism, which saw every man as the basic equal of every other, and defied authority of every kind...
The first great wave of Scotch-Irish emigration began with the failed harvest of 1717... Another wave of Ulster Scots followed in the 1720s; so many, in fact, that the British Parliament demanded an enquiry, wondering whether they would completely depopulate the Protestant element in Ireland before they were done.

Malcolm noted, in passing, those "indentured servants". Squeamish souls should look away now.

100,000 indentured servants from Ulster
In essence the process was:

• a ship-owner publicised an imminent departure;
• individuals and families arrived at the stated date and place;
• those who could, paid (and so were free agents on arrival): all the rest accepted indentures, normally seven years service in exchange for the passage;
• on arrival in the American colonies, the ship-owner could sell those indentures to the highest bidder;
• after seven years, the indentured servant was free of obligation, unless other commitments or debts were incurred (as they frequently were).

This was, of course, a form of serfdom: indeed, it was the legal basis which evolved into slavery (and, let it be recalled, there was slavery for whites in the colonies before the "peculiar institution" involved black slaves). Lerone Bennett, Jr, is pertinent:

When the ships arrived in American ports, the dead were thrown overboard and the survivors were cleaned up for on-deck sale. In some cases both men and women were stripped naked and examined by prospective buyers...
Like the slaves who followed them, the white servants were separated and sold with little or no regard for family connections. Husbands and wives were separated, and children under five were sold or given away until their twenty-first birthday...
It was not unusual for merchants to sell blacks, whites and Indians from the same auction block. In 1714 Samuel Sewell, a prominent Boston merchant, offered for sale:
several Irish maid servants time
most of them for Five Years one
Irish Man Servant who is a good
Barber and Wiggmaker, also Four
or Five Likely Negro Boys
Some enterprising and insensitive merchants, called "soul-drivers", bought servants in lots of fifty or more and drove them through the countryside, selling them by ones and twos...
Once the sale was consummated, the servant became subject to the will, whim, and interest of another human being... In practice, as almost every student of white servitude has pointed out, he was a de facto slave until the end of his indenture.

Enough, already!

The consolation of religion, and moving on
Malcolm finds it incredible that the indentured undertook the "hazardous, even murderous" crossing and the subsequent horrors in ignorance or out of some belief in "freedom" and opportunity. They were going through desperation: the famines of the early 1700s were smaller, more localised than the 1840s, but for individuals the choice was the same—emigrate or die.

But, at least Puritan New England would be sympathetic to Ulster Presbyterians? Wrong: those Ulster Scots in Worcester, MA, may have been useful in keeping the savages at bay, but, when they tried to build their own Presbyterian church, their neighbours tore it down. Conformity was enforced. Failure to be in church, the endorsed place of worship often meant a week of servitude. Persistent absence merited a year and a day of servitude. Not surprisingly:

It was said that no Scotch-Irish family felt comfortable until they had moved twice.

Hence the frontier, ever moving westward:

The Scots-Irish ... had been transported from Scotland to northern Ireland around Ulster, and their struggles with local Catholics encouraged aggressive qualities. They also learned to hate and fight Englishmen, and it is not surprising that in America they immediately got away from the seaboard colonists as possible. The Scots-Irish were fighters, hunters, marksmen and they bred leaders like Andrew Jackson, John C. Calhoun, and Sam Houston.

Hence, too, the proliferation of communities with telling names: all those Orange Counties, for one obvious instance. Meanwhile, as David Hackett Fischer has shown, these Scotch-Irish devised their distinctive whiskey (note that spelling), by substituting local corn and rye for barley. Their Appalachian dialect came down through mountainmen and cowboys to be the lingua franca of truck-drivers and C&W ballads, and thereby to be re-exported. So "I guess" came from the archaic "I wis" (still current in Shakespeare, meaning "I think"), only to come back into British English via the GI and the Hollywood movie. A even more curious re-import is craic, which has been lurking there, to be re-discovered to sell Temple Bar and the Stag Weekend:

crack, craic, crak vb Originally to boast; to engage in lively or entertaining conversation; gossip; tell jokes; etc. Hence n A boast; a quip; chat; entertaining talk ... The spelling craic, now frequent in Ireland, erroneously suggests that the word is from Irish, but this spelling arose only in the early 20th century. In English the term dates from as early as the 15th century.

The Ulsterman might still say, "That's a real cracker", and thereby declare his Scots origin.

"Britishness"
Self-evidently this is a concept that had no place in Ireland, except in the great houses of absentee aristocrats, before 1801's Act of Union. Even then, it was something foisted on the protestant populace by the Ascendancy, the true natural enemy of Presbyterian Ulster. Those Presbyterians had been United Irishmen, even (perhaps with little enthusiasm) went with Wolfe Tone's republicanism. Yet, within a couple of generations they had adopted the Union Flag as testimony of their "Britishness". What happened?

The Ulster image defined
The Scots-Irish became "British" at a specific moment: it was when Thomas Macaulay published his History, specifically Chapter XII (which dealt with the Siege of Derry):

A new city soon arose which, on account of its connection with the capital of the empire, was called Londonderry. The buildings covered the summit and slope of a hill which overlooked the broad stream of the Foyle, then whitened by vast flocks of wild swans...

The inhabitants were Protestants of Anglosaxon blood. They were indeed not all of one country or of one church: but Englishmen and Scotchmen, Episcopalians and Presbyterians, seem to have generally lived together in friendship, a friendship which is sufficiently explained by their common antipathy to the Irish race and to the Popish religion.

Chapter XVI (which covered the Battle of the Boyne):

The first of July dawned, a day which has never since returned without exciting strong emotions of very different kinds in the two populations which divide Ireland. The sun rose bright and cloudless. Soon after four both armies were in motion...
A wild shout of defiance rose from the whole shore: during one moment the event seemed doubtful: but the Protestants pressed resolutely forward; and in another moment the whole Irish line gave way.

Not only was Macaulay's History a stonking best-seller (which, incidentally, established the Whiggish tone for history texts as long as that subject was properly taught in English schools), it gave the Ulster Protestants what they saw as their rightful place at the crucial moment in English/British/Irish history. They now had an identity in the Empire, and were glad to be British.

The deracinated Ulster-American
Not so across the Atlantic. The Ulster-Scots had been the backbone of the Revolution, indeed (as Governor McKinley, later the 25th President, and descended from emigrants from County Antrim, declared):

They were the first to proclaim for freedom in these United States; even before Lexington the Scotch Irish blood had been shed for American freedom.

The first encounter of the War of Independence was a skirmish at the Alamance River in North Carolina, on 14th May 1771, between local Ulster Irish and Governor Tryon's regulars. Six signatories of the Declaration had Ulster origins: the secretary of the Congress, Charles Thomson was from Maghera. The printer of the Declaration was John Dunlap of Stabane.

Yet, many of those who descended from Ulster stock seemed to have lost the link. Malcolm suggests there are historical, sociological, demographic and even technological reasons for this. And they all boil down to An Gorta Mór.

Kerby Miller did the spadework twenty years ago: between 1815 and 1819 two-thirds of Irish immigrants into the United States were from Ulster, overwhelmingly Protestants; between 1822 and 1832, this flow was still accounting for half of the Irish immigrants. Only in the 1830s did Catholics come to outnumber Protestants. Throughout all of this period, the emigrants were not destitute: US port officials in 1820 recorded 27% of immigrants from Ireland were "farmers", 22% artisans, 10% tradesmen and professionals, and just 21% labourers. In 1818, the Dublin Evening Press observed that:

Emigration is necessarily restricted to the class immediately above the labouring poor, who cannot raise the money to pay their passage.

The Queenstown Story Interpretation Centre at Cobh has a display showing how emigration through the port increased. When Malcolm first saw it, it denied one of his assumptions: there was not a sudden "quantum leap" in emigration in the 1840s, but a continuing upward geometric curve. What was happening was a combination of push- and pull-factors. Remittance monies from emigrants allowed and encouraged other family members to follow. Brunel's Great Western heralded the arrival on the Atlantic steam packets: fifteen days across. Costs came down, for vessels could now make more than a single return crossing in a season, and the season was extended as the vessels grew larger: in itself, this technological improvement meant more and more emigration.

Until the late 1840s, Ulster Protestants were regarded in America simply as Irish. The arrival of the despised Catholic hordes changed that: a new identity was needed. Carl Wittke spotted that, writing as early as 1956:

The sharp distinction between Irish and Scotch-Irish developed in the United States in the last half of the nineteenth century for reasons that were primarily American. After the great influx of Irish immigrants and the problems created by this sudden boiling over of the melting pot, the Scotch-Irish insisted on differentiating between the descendants of earlier immigrants from Ireland and more recent arrivals.

The curious anomoly of Seamus McFly
Marty McFly's great-grandfather is Seamus, a farmer, recently arrived in America:

SEAMUS: Sir, I'm proud to make your acquaintance. McFly's the name. Seamus McFly.
Marty is amazed to meet his ancestor ...
MARTY: Seamus McFly. Right. I've heard of you.You started the whole family.

Seamus has to have a stage-Oirish accent and stereotyped red hair. Clues (making the sign of the cross before food) suggest the McFly household of 1885 is Catholic.

If so, he would be extremely non-typical. The vast majority of the Irish Catholic immigrants stayed very close to the urban centres, where they had support mechanisms through the Catholic church and the trades unions which they dominated by the 1850s. When the Irish moved West:

Often they came West to find work as miners, clustering in the mining districts of states such as Montana, Wyoming, and Nevada, where the proportion of Irish-born greatly exceeded the national average. At the end of the nineteenth century the copper center of Butte was the most Irish city in America ... Butte miners told the joke of the Irish man who sent a letter home encouraging his brother to come over. "Don't stop in the United States", he wrote, "come right on out to Butte." The Irish community in Butte was rooted in strong kinship ties, ethnic associations such as the Ancient Order of Hibernians, and, most important, the Catholic parish, staffed almost entirely by Irish priests.

In other words, precisely the environment and associations that the independent-minded Ulster-American would eschew. In reality, it would not be the newly-arrived Irish immigrant to be found in his sod-house on the Plains, if only because he lacked the $1,000 the Department of Agriculture regarded as the minimum capital:

By the end of the [Nineteenth] Century Germans made up a third of the population of Texas, and so large were the numbers of Swedes, Norwegians, and Russians in the population of the northern plains that according to the census of 1890 the region had the highest proportion of foreign-born people in the country.

[Both those last two quotations are from Hine and Faracher.]

The still-unanswered question
Malcolm began this diatribe by musing on identity. He has satisfied himself of why and how the Ulster Protestant became "British". Whowever, he feels no nearer to explaining why the Ulster-Americans, seemingly unique of all the immigrant groups, lost awareness of their origins (except that many think of themselves as "Scots", which is only part of the story). Why is that googling "Ulster American" drags up a vast number of sites this side of the Atlantic (mostly devoted to the Omagh theme-park) and so few from the other side?

Malcolm feels he has more reading to do. Doubtless (if he continues in this vein) in due course he will be referring to James Graham Leyburn and Patrick Griffin, which are the next items on his reading list. And Griffin may have the solution: the title of his book is "The People with No Name". And so, Malcolm, for the time being, ceases excavation, and leaves his hole part-dug.


Sphere: Related Content

Travelling hopefully

Some time ago, March 12th to be precise, Malcolm called in aid Steve Goodman's great song The City of New Orleans. He received a response from Clay Eals, who is publishing a biography of Goodman. It took a while for the penny to drop, but Malcolm later remembered handling (but not buying) an out-of-print copy of Eals's history of Seattle's West Side Story, in Seattle's best book-store, the rambling Elliott Bay Book Company. Eals has also written a biography of Karolyn Grimes, "Zuzu" in It's a Wonderful Life (cis-Atlanteans may not appreciate the significance that movie has in US Christmas television).

Richard Marcus, reviewing Eals for Blogcritics opined that City is

what I consider the best contemporary train song written, if not one of the best train songs period. Simple words that evoke a whole lot more then what appears on the page, spelling the end of an era. The airplane and people's desire to get from one place to another with no thought but the destination in mind was the death knell of train as a means of mass public transportation.

Malcolm would not wish to demur from that, particularly in US terms, but in a Judgement of Paris might suggest standing City up against (say) Ewan MacColl's Song of the Iron Road (from the Radio Ballad of John Axon, of course) or Gordon Lightfoot's Canadian Railroad Trilogy.
For a moment Malcolm was about to toss in Flanders and Swann doing Slow Train; but that is really about railway stations, and the spot for best-railway-station song is already booked by Paul Simon's Homeward Bound.

Some years ago, the Mudcat Café had a thread on train songs which provides other suggestions.

City was, of course, one of the songs that went into space. It was used as the wake-up call for Apollo 17 on the morning of the last Moon-landing. Unfortunately, that was the Jimmy Thudplucker version.

[At this point, the archive elf hazarded a correction: that it was John Denver's version. Malcolm merely harrumphs, and mutters "Same difference".]

If City is "the best contemporary train song", that raises questions about other modes of transport. So, in the spirit of High Fidelity, Malcolm proposes his "desert-island, all-time, top" transport songs:

• Best motorcycle song: 1952 Vincent Black Lightning. No argument about that. Here's Richard Thompson himself:

A 1952 Vincent Black Lightning, which is an English motorbike, sounds mythological and British people can relate to it. But I'm surprised that it has become such a popular song because it's a ballad with eight verses. I didn't think people had that much attention span anymore. 'Vincent' is my most requested song...

• Best submarine song. Now, the expectant audience is chortling at Malcolm's imminent discomfort on this one. Ha! Cyril Tawney! Diesel and Shale! So rats to Lennon and McCartney.

• Best bus song. Well, Transport of Delight (Flanders and Swann, again) is a runner; but Malcolm rates Jake Thackray's North Country Bus, if only because it reminds him of the late 1950s and CIE's service 66 (now Bus Eireann's 47 service) from Cork City to Schull (and, twice a week, on to Goleen). And also the service between Norwich and Watton, which (allegedly) was at the end of the 1960s still running to the schedule established in 1919.

• Now the cruncher: best car song. The problem here is choice, and therefore we may have to return to this category with an elimination contest. For the moment, Malcolm has Kathy Mattea's 455 Rocket seeing off the competition on the line.

And is there a decent recent aircraft song? Dear God in Heaven! Could anyone conceive of a lyric about Heathrow Terminal 4?

So goodnight for him, and goodnight from bored elves. Sphere: Related Content

But does it matter?

Ribald laughter from the less-couth elves.

BBC Radio's Today programme headlined fertility treatment. One interviewee (Mr Yacoub Khalaf, Malcolm believes) revealed that, in this issue, one size does not fit all. Sphere: Related Content