I went to pay for drinks in the pub. I put forward my card to tap. The barmaid looked quizzical. I was attempting to use my Ancient Person's TFL card. The barmaid smiled in a kindly way. Age creeps on, and no way I could try the 'I look much younger than I really am' trick.
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The turn of phrase that Ron DeSantis is living rent-free inside Donald Trump's head. Sometimes a turn of phrase is so good that you just have to quote it. This one from American writer, Bonnie Greer.
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World Cup Notebook 1
- On the issue of articulacy, I was confounded by World Cup pundit, Martin Keown using 'analogy'. However, the lads must not get too confident too quickly. Gary Lineker talked of how well Bukayo Saka had handled a press conference. And he had. But Bukayo slipped in talking about the team playing 'good'. As 'talk' is a verb, the qualifier is an adverb, so he should have used 'well'.
- But Saka being a 22 year old footballer, I cannot fault him. That is how you talk in football speak. And I doubt if I could have turned in England's third goal against Senegal. Go Bukayo, my son!
- Infantilissimo (see Late Life Crisis November) sits on his throne with no one in sight. He is bored out of his skull looking at the match, and spends most of the time looking at his phone. 'Today I feel like a Billy No Mates'.
- Rod Liddle's polemic of the week concerns the World Cup. He berates the England team for first stating that they would wear the One Love armband and then deciding against it when it became clear that transgression would mean the players getting fined and booked.
The fine is neither here or there - a dribble of punishment where the value would probably be less than that of your 25th Breitling watch just nicked from your Cheshire or Surrey mansion. But the bookings - hmm - that is another matter, and a smart bit of thinking by FIFA. So as Mr Liddle berates, he would clearly be happy about the team going into Match 1 and all receiving yellow cards. A different eleven would then be picked for Match 2 and there would be the same outcome. For Match 3, with even no injury or other absences, eight of the eleven (25 man squad) would get red cards. Und so weiter, as our former nemesis team might say, or even better, an ultimate reductio ad absurdum.
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Ancient Persons: I am amused at contributions by journalist Cosmo Landesman. In a piece about Christmas party dances he describes himself as a '...cold and melancholic 68-year old single man who works and lives alone'. Elsewhere he has written about his dating experiences, online and face-to-face. Mr Landesman has an embryonic Rod Stewart look, as in he has still got it, whatever 'it' is. What amuses me is that in order to maintain his public profile presumably he self-denies finding a good woman with whom to settle down. I ponder on whether it is a sentence worth suffering, for his art.
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It used to be said that there were certain law firm partners who should never be given junior lawyers to supervise, not because off any risk of inappropriate behaviour in the worst sense of that as we understand it today, but because the individuals were so empathy-free that they could not understand the challenges for a junior in surviving practice.
So to Lady Susan Hussey v. Ngoza Fulani. No contest between those two. From what I have been able to gather, Lady Hussey seems a benign character. Yet she reached a pinnacle of awkward expression. How come?
The Royal Household has a formidable comms machine. Any engagement of the Firm with outsiders surely is preceded by a briefing on conversation issues and what and what not to say. The training word seems invidious - let's substitute not putting your foot in it, and if you want some psychology theory then check out the blind spot person under the Johari Window (devised in 1955 so no thoughts please that the reference is discriminatorily ableist).
Yet could you trust an aged Royal Retainer in this scenario? It should, I stress should, be possible, with a serious pre-briefing. Only the insiders would know Lady Susan's style; however, they ought to have read the visitors better, and foreseen the risks.
We're talking a group representing abused women, and where in terms of victims there was a strong racial element. Possibly we are thinking individuals who would see the Royal Family as the epitome of white privilege, but where the opportunity of a Palace reception could not be turned down as it offered a unique platform for publicising the causes of invitees. And maybe we are thinking invitees with super sensitive antennae ready to react in an instance to a clumsy question or remark. Don't help the old bat, but let her dig the hole deeper and deeper.
Conjecture beyond that will be into the realm of conspiracy theory. Take 'react' on to 'weaponise'? Have the studio tour provisionally lined up in one's head? Oodles of social media output. Make them pay. Go hard on it as there is already so much outrage competing to be heard.
One cannot say. But to me two things are clear: (1) Lady Susan should have been kept out of that event and (2) The Palace comms folk have a lot for which to answer.
PS The PRs worked overtime to secure a subsequent photocall apology. But my point remains.
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All very serious. So to lighten the mood and reflect name changes in one's life, I call on Boycey:
'Marlene, give that toilet roll back to Lady Susan, Camilla's desperate to get off the bog'.
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World Cup Notebook 2
'They're coming home, they're coming home, they're coming...'
PS And for the seasoned followers: Chris Waddle.
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It's always a relief when England exit an international football tournament. And presently there is solace in Test Match cricket, in that England have secured a 2-0 series win (later to become 3-0) against Pakistan, in Pakistan. The England captain, Ben Stokes, advocates brave cricket, where the team goes all out to win and accepts the risk of losing (it has been nicknamed Bazball after the England coach, Brendan McCullum). Maybe Liz Truss read the Stokes playbook, though Bazball didn't do much for her.
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A paraphrased sentence from the London Evening Standard, concerning the London Stock Exchange:
'While LSEG is best known as a trading platform for shares, its data and analytics business.....is what has attracted the tech giant founded by Bill Gates.'
'While' and 'Whilst'. The former denoting time, the latter denoting contrast. The usage above denotes contrast, does it not? So while we munch on our vegan pigs in blankets, we can see that the writer got it wrong.
The writer's name: Simon English.
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A testing walk on ice and packed snow, from Kentish Town to Kenwood, over the Heath. The exercise benefit was then blown with a hot chocolate and doughnut. Oh, weakness. Though there was even more testing in the mostly downhill return. PS The smart money in these conditions is on walking over grass.
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The key word used by Mick Lynch: 'rebalancing'. This is an anti-capitalist project as much as a fight to protect members of his Union.
But for me Matthew Parris has the insight. He says go away from the morals of each dispute and look at supply and demand. It appears that railway jobs are generally not difficult to fill. Different though for nursing jobs (my own chip in is that a 'vocation' does not put food on the table). Parris makes his point through quoting a pitch from a nursing recruitment agency:
'[A]gency work is much better paid. Your hourly rate could increase by as much as 66 per cent and could double if you are prepared to work antisocial weekend night shifts...Not only can you choose when you'll work, you can also choose where. Don't like that GP's practice? Don't take the gig. Life's too short to work somewhere ghastly if you don't have to.'
Hmmm.
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Radio 4 Today Programme compassion for its listeners: re M & H, 'We're watching it, so you don't need to'. Thank you.
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How to bust that frustrating customer service phone line queue. The smart people press an alternative option, say for a new service from the same provider. When they get through they pretend that they are on the customer service option. When told that this is not so they apologise and ask to be transferred to the correct option. I am advised that often this works and gets you up the queue.
So to gaming 999 if the ambulance workers dispute continues, say if it is a Category 2 but you want Category 1 service assured. Talking to the call handler do you say that the patient is not breathing, but when the paramedics arrive say that in a state of panic you thought that this was so but since then it has become apparent that the patient is indeed breathing? An ethical dilemma for you.
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Another ethical dilemma (from one who periodically pokes fun at signage misspellings). A services business near a tube station closes due to sustained reduced footfall as a result of Covid aftermath. In its poster announcement it produces a gross misspelling. If you are a commenter on social media do you post a photo of the poster, with a humorous quip? Not necessarily one answer to this.
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And is such a humorous quip as above funny, or is what is funny entirely subjective? I could wickedly posit something on this. Imagine a 'wacky' alternative quiz show, the sort that might be aired on Channel 4 after 10.30pm. To get us into the right zone, imagine Jimmy Carr as the driving force behind the programme. Now imagine a Round where a series of pictures of women are put up, in each case with the woman exhibiting an protruding midriff. The task of contestants is to decide for each woman what is their physical state, and the Round is called - wait for it......
'Fat or Pregnant?'
Now what was your reaction? Was there a titter? Only you would know. The late great Frankie Howard might dash in to exclaim: 'Titter Ye Not!!!', and some respondents might be horrified. And there will be a faction who will defend the cruel humour. We all probably have in our minds the sense of a line not to be crossed, but where is the line?
It was to some degree in this area that I wrote 'Dated and Hated?'. It is a difficult area.
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At Christmas 2022, it's a 40/20/40 UK. 40% are seriously struggling financially, 20% are the squeezed middle, and 40% are at minimum comfortable. I am in the latter 40%. I am lucky.
If you are in the at minimum comfortable group and you hear from people who have suffered socio-economically or through abuse or through mental illness or through any other analogous factor that could be named, there is a tendency for any of us who have had a tough time in the past to bring that up, either in our minds or articulated, as some sort of response to a perception that as of today we are privileged.
I can do this if it feels appropriate in any moment. My mother had two bouts of illness that had her dispatched to a mental hospital. The first place was Goodmayes outside Romford, where she was subjected to electric shock therapy (yes, hospital visits found her strangely placid); the second place was Chartham near Canterbury, where she was sent to with a 'nervous breakdown' following my father's death - I 10 at the time.
With detail added there is enough material for me to publish something and pine for a slot on Radio 4's 'Saturday Live' - 10 year-old braves adversity, gets into grammar school, and becomes a partner in a large London law firm at 29 etc etc. But I was lucky - there was the beloved aunty who scooped me up and took me to stay with her in Scotland until my mother was better (Aunty Pat has appeared in these pages before), and there was the opportunity of a grammar school education.
But where I am clumsily getting to is that my mother did sort of recover from her illness and, possibly buoyed by the determination to help me succeed and at times doing a seven day a week nursing job, looked after me very well. I was fed properly, I was always smart for school (she ironed my school trousers every night to within a millimetre of what the fabric could stand), she went to every parents' meeting she could manage, and I can recall her testing me on French and German vocabulary where she would give me the English word and I would say and spell out the other.
Sure enough my mother was damaged for the rest of her life (there were sacrifices to follow), but I suppose I am saying that we are all the products of our early years, and whilst the more uncomfortable aspects of the past have to be acknowledged, for most of us there was good stuff as well, and even the bad stuff might in some way (in my case generating self-sufficiency) have helped us make a relative success of life.
Apologies for ending this month on an introspective note (we could do with some Boris Johnson absurdity to lighten the economic gloom), but introspection is what can come at this time of the year.
So Happy Holidays - suitably neutral language - and I shall innovatively be dropping the Prosecco and exploring some Cremant - as my wonderful children would say, woo hoo!
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The author is a writer, speaker, historian, occasional tour guide, and former Managing Partner of a City law firm.