More of mordant Morin

Malcolm reckons that Jim Morin of the Miami Herald manages as many "hits" as most cartoonists. Here is yesterday's (well, it's dated yesterday) and it's again right on the button:

To think, only weeks ago those bastards were begging for taxpayers' money.

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Esprit de corps

First, put down all sharp-edged tools, anything hot or breakable.

Then consider this:

Parents who send their children to private school have been so stigmatised that they have been made to feel their decision is "tantamount to treason", a leading headteacher claimed last night.

Andrew Grant, chair of the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference, said politicians and other critics of the fee-paying system should be grateful for the money parents are saving for the state sector.

And he added that without them "Britain would not have enough officers to lead its army."

Not to mention the upper echelons of the Tory Party, half the places at Oxbridge, the massed ranks of barristers and judges, the MCC, and all those hereditary peers.

It is, with good reason, the story which has attracted most comments on the Guardian site.

Oik at the back: stop sniggering, this instant! Sphere: Related Content

Another way with words

Country Life, that noble glossy, is notable for its property ads.

Proof-read this one for them:

This handsome period property dates from the 18th century and has a lovely main façade. The property was formerly part of the Badminton Estate and is now situated within the village conservation area. The house has very well proportioned accommodation with three good sized reception rooms, two with terrific open fireplaces.

The kitchen/breakfast room has an AGA and a lovely Belfast stink while the ground floor also has a large reception hall, utility room, and the first floor has the master bedroom suite with bathroom and dressing room and two further double bedrooms and a family bathroom. The second floor has another bedroom suite as well as a further two bedrooms and a bathroom.

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The Gray Lady goes on a pub crawl

Phone call from Number One daughter in the former Colony: had Malcolm seen today's New York Times? Yes, he had (on line, anyway), and he knew what had caught her attention.

A was a piece by Henry Shukman on the pubs of:

a corner of the northeast Cotswolds where I misspent my youth, an area littered with picturesque towns and villages, and studded — as I remembered it — with lovely pubs.

He then rattles off a sequence of pubs, mainly tied houses of the Hook Norton Brewery. They are (with Malcolm's passing thoughts):

• the Chequers in Chipping Norton (that's a Fuller's house, so expect London Pride and ESB);
• the Red Lion, also in Chipping Norton (it's in Albion Street, and a decent local);
• the Sun (about which there are, ahem, mixed reports) and the Pear Tree (effectively, the brewery tap: good beer, good place) in Hook Norton itself;
• the Plough in Kingham (a pretentious gastro-pub, boasting its Michelin star)
• the Falkland Arms in Great Tew (thatched and be-creepered exterior; oak beams, flagstones and inglenook fireplace within -- a place that makes the effort, and is worth finding); and
• the King's Head in Bledington (set back from the village green, another of those picture-postcard pubs).
  

Malcolm defers to nobody in his liking for Old Hooky (4.6% ABV), but he finds that choice of hostelries partly perverse. His would add alternatives:

• in Chipping Norton, the Bell in West Street, and Stones in the Market Place;
• the Masons Arms in Swerford (between Chipping Norton and Great Tew), a gastro-pub of distinction, and in glorious countryside;
• the Red Lion in Bloxham, on the road to Banbury; another Fuller's house: in good weather, watch the stream run through the garden, else a two-bar interior;
• the Tite Inn at Chadlington, another one with superb views and a decent restaurant, just a couple of miles out of Chipping Norton;
• and so on.

Fortunately, in the Cotswolds there's enough back-roads, villages and pubs to allow one to avoid the sweltering hordes.

There is more than a grain of truth in Shukman's gloom:

Closing at something like a rate of more than three a day, pubs have become scarce enough that for the first time since the Domesday Book, more than half the villages in England no longer have one. It’s a rare pub that still thrives, or even limps on, by being what it was meant to be: a drinking establishment.

Well, we cannot be sure about the pub-density in 1086, but change is happening. We can blame that on cheap alcohol at the supermarket, on the changing social habits, or whatever we like. Many pubs are adapting (they always have): either by becoming "sports bars" (Murdoch's monopoly of big sporting events, especially football, being the main accelerator there) or by becoming much more family-friendly and food-orientated. The developments, then, may not be entirely negative.

One can still locate what is purely "a drinking establishment", if one must. That's one of those grim establishments where a handful of old sods, dog at feet, each sat in his own corner, chewing a pipe, silent and morose: only the death-watch beetle broke the silence. Malcolm's experience is that such places always were the exception rather than the rule. Sphere: Related Content

Malcolm's Classy rumination

Blame it on Our American Cousin. Zach introduced a new dimension by commenting on a recent posting:

As to whether or not you're free. Well you still have a Monarch and an unelected upper house of parliament for what it's worth.

There are too many tomes on the British class "system" and its psycho-pathology. A few are just about readable. Most are ill-digested and barely literate, spewed out of the Ph.D. factories of minor universities. As it used to say, just above the toilet-roll holder in number 4, Trinity College, Dublin:

Sociology Degrees: please take one.

A French encounter

A couple of decades back, in a small town in the Hautes-Alpes, Malcolm was settling his hôtel bill.

Prominent, beside the desk was a framed photograph. Madame and her son (a local sporting hero) were with Valéry Giscard d'Estaing. To lighten the ceremonial swiping of the credit card, Malcolm felt he should acknowledge this image:

"Ah, Monsieur le Président!"
"Non!" was the decisive reply, "Monsieur le Président de la République française!"

Malcolm was suitably chastened.

What struck him was such a comment would be unthinkable in Britain:

"Ah, the Queen!
"No: Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland."

It simply doesn't work, does it?

The brain-death of monarchy

The Royals (even that term contains a dismissal) are fragments of the universal "celebrity" culture. The Diana Spencer moment, now fortunately past and gone except for an ever-shrinking delta-minus semi-moronic rump, is regarded as a disastrous experiment in populism. The only remaining issue there being whether

• with a couple more brain-cells she could have been a plant, or
• was she so dissimulating that she was truly a calculating minx.

The current batch of princelings, noted mainly for night-club frolics, are not likely to upset that pattern.

For many, Helen Mirren is The Queen as much as the original article. Indeed, she seems to have edged aside Betty Boothroyd as a potential republican Head of State. Idle chatter of that kind tells Malcolm that there is a perverse lingering wish for a bossy, even brassy female figure to be National Governess. As was Margaret Hilda Thatcher of spine-shuddering memory.

But what to do with the Lords?

Zach's other thrust is more pertinent.

The Blair reforms, stripping out the lumpen mass of hereditary peers, went a long way; but it remains an incomplete project.

There are arguments for the great and the good to be there. "Statesmen" (i.e. retired parliamentarians) deserve a place: after a due period of silence, their comments may have worth. On the whole they don't insult the captain or spit on the deck. Since Parliament makes the laws, senior Justices should be allowed their voices. Religious leaders, too: better in the Chamber, where they will be heard critically, than in their pulpits, where they have unbridled licence. Appointment, too, should not be totally dismissed: Roberts Winston and Skidelsky are unlikely to gain a place by other routes.

Then comes the issue of election. How? It obviously should not be an adjunct to a General Election: that would merely ensure that the Upper and Lower Chambers are of similar complexion. Should the Upper House be as (party) political as the Commons? The logic of that is fixed-term, proportional-representation, without constituency boundary; in effect, a list system: yet that, in turn, gives factional groups power to "fix" the lists.

Perhaps, though, the British system even as presently constituted is not as bad as possible alternatives.

We do not want a "Senate" on the US model (too powerful) or on the Irish model (too ineffectual). Seanad Éireann is a pale, subservient creature: it is a model of what happens when patronage imposes on its clients. Its "electorate" is a self-mockery. As for the US Senate: Blagojevich in Illinois, the curious doings around Caroline Kennedy in New York, and the Minnesota Franken/Coleman stand-off suggest not all is well. Then there are the senatorial families: the Rockefellers, the Gores, the Bushes, the Kennedys, whose continued eminence suggests inbred, nepotistic dynasties are not just a British phenomenon.

Gunning for the aristos

This all arose from a chance remark about guns and government.

Malcolm grew up, with the Holkham Estate to west and south. The Earl of Leicester would host shooting parties at Holkham, to which royalty would arrive. At one time, perhaps still, the record "bag" for a day's shooting was set at Holkham, in a hecatomb of partridges helped along by Phil the Greek.

It is all too easy to be cynical about such events: the pre-metric assessment of running a shoot was "up goes a guinea, bang goes sixpence, down comes half-a-crown". And if the upper-class were prepared to finance their sport so lavishly, others could benefit.

For every gent with his Purdeys there was a Fred Hooker. Fred could snaffle moonlit birds as easily as anything. Among the up-and-comers, young Barry "Salts" Davie had a deadly silent catapult and an overcoat with poacher pockets. As Malcolm recalls, the view from the lower orders was short in condemnation for the malefactors: excoriation was left to Tommy Cook on the bench of the local magistrates. The class system can be seen from both sides: the exploitation was not all the one way.

This symbiosis goes back beyond dynasties, beyond history. There is, underlying that class-system and petty-snobbery to which Americans like to point, a parallel sub-culture. The urban worker detests and ridicules his bosses: the rural one has evolved long-standing pre-industrial ways around the landlord. As so often, Kipling, recently risen to land-owner on the back of his personal talents (and later brother-in-law of the Prime Minister-to-be), caught the mood:

I have rights of chase and warren, as my dignity requires.
I can fish--but Hobden tickles. I can shoot--but Hobden wires.
I repair, but he reopens, certain gaps which, men allege,
Have been used by every Hobden since a Hobden swapped a hedge.

Shall I dog his morning progress o'er the track-betraying dew?
Demand his dinner-basket into which my pheasant flew?
Confiscate his evening faggot into which the conies ran,
And summons him to judgment? I would sooner summons Pan.

His dead are in the churchyard--thirty generations laid.
Their names went down in Domesday Book when Domesday Book was made.
And the passion and the piety and prowess of his line
Have seeded, rooted, fruited in some land the Law calls mine.

Kipling, of course, refused all titles, most honours, knighthood and ennoblement. Queen Victoria profoundly disapproved of him. To Malcolm, the biggest strike against this otherwise admirable and egalitarian man is not his alleged racism, nor his ambiguous imperialism: both are marks of the times, with which Pandit Nehru had no problem. No: it is his militant anti-Home Rule Unionism, sprung from a long friendship with Carson.

Little removed from that, the neatest definition of "Anglo-Irish" is "a Prod on a horse". Sphere: Related Content

How beastly the bourgeois is ...

... though D.H. is not really appropriate here, because the utterance originally came from the female of the species, and she was an Essex nimby:

A spokesman for the Stop Stansted Expansion campaign told BBC News: "If Stansted were permitted to expand to maximum use of the existing runway, the local environment would suffer, the national economy would suffer and we would have taken a giant step backwards in the battle to combat climate change."

Carol Barbone, from the campaign group, said the expansion would not help the economy because it was encouraging people to go on holiday abroad.

Malcolm, with his usual perceptiveness, read the sub-text: it's all fine and dandy to have a convenient airport for us business types, but — my goodness! — the lower orders are getting above themselves! Going orf to Spain and Ibiza when they should be quite happy at Cleethorpes or Whitley Bay.

The point is reinforced by the delicate tendresse with which the BBC treats its chosen few:

Protesters lobbied the first session of a public inquiry into expanding Stansted Airport. But the campaigners from nearby towns and villages were far from the stereotype of green activists.

They wore Barbour jackets rather than camouflage gear, and sensible brogues in place of Doc Martens.

Not so much a protest, more a Daily Telegraph fashion parade.

There is, of course, nothing new here. The class system is based upon such things. Wordsworth, recently appointed as Poet Laureate, wrote a letter to Gladstone, the President of the Board of Trade, on October 15th, 1844, asking him to prevent the railway coming to Kendal :

We are in this neighbourhood all in consternation, that is, every man of taste and feeling, at the stir which is made for carrying a branch Railway from Kendal to the head of Windermere.

He could have been as well standing at Stansted in his Barbour and brogues to declaim his accompanying sonnet:

And is no nook of English ground secure
From rash assault? Schemes of retirement sown
In youth, and ‘mid the busy world kept pure
As when their earliest flowers of hope were blown,
Must perish; — how can they this blight endure?
And must he too his old delights disown
Who scorns a false utilitarian lure
‘Mid his paternal fields at random thrown?

Malcolm finds it remarkable, and depressing, that the mind-set, the attitudes, the prejudices and even the vocabulary of English Toryism passes unchanged through generations. So, appropriately, back to Lawrence:

Full of seething, wormy, hollow feelings
rather nasty—
How beastly the bourgeois is!

Standing in their thousands, these appearances, in damp England
what a pity they can’t all be kicked over
like sickening toadstools, and left to melt back, swiftly
into the soil of England.

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