Thursday 18 September 2014

The taxman, as always, cometh (though, I notice, dragging his knuckles along the ground). Trouble is I don’t have the dosh to buy Dave Hartnett a spiffing lunch*

OK, so I might be going on 92 - oh, all right then, 103 - but I still cross my fingers that I have not yet become one of those irritating jeremiahs who blight all our lives and have done so since Adam and Eve first bonked.

For the record, I don’t think the world is now going to Hell in a handcart and haven’t done so since I was 14. I think, most probably, it always has been going to Hell in a handcart since man first crawled out of the primordial swamp and invented television. Nor do I think there was ever a golden age of anything (except



perhaps a Golden Age of Golden Ages - golden ages just aren’t what they used to be. Which doesn’t actually make sense, but it is well past 6.30am and I’ve been up for several hours.) I’m always accused of having a loud laugh, and I do laugh quite a bit, mainly because I am alive. And I laughed again very loudly this morning courtesy of the office of Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, more commonly known as ‘the taxman’.

The ‘taxman’ (and the ‘taxwoman’, of course) doesn’t enjoy much of a reputation in Britain these days, or rather its reputation which was already very low - no one likes paying taxes - has sunk a good deal lower over these past few years.

Given that every single vast and wealthy corporation - for example Vodafone, eBay, PayPal, Google, Starbucks and all manner of outfits with really dodgy names to fit really dodgy business practices - can afford to hire clever tax accountants and run rings around the taxman several times before breakfast, the taxman is in a perpetual bad mood. It doesn’t help that anyone with any nous who works for the taxman very soon ups sticks once he or she knows enough about the workings of HMRC, goes freelance and starts earning ten times the pitiful wage paid by HMRC by helping those vast corporations keeping their tax liability to a bare minimum.

That means that there is a steady flow of the very good brains leaving HMRC and, not to put too fine a point, those who stay have a great deal less nous. And they are the ones you and I - or you and I here in Old Blighty - are obliged to deal with when we contact the taxman.

The ruses the good brains who jump ship to assist the wealthy corporations come up with are beautifully simple. For example, the BBC reported in October 2012 that eBay paid just £1.2 million in tax on UK business of £800 million (for the thickos out there, that’s just £200 million short of £1 billion). The same report claims that Starbucks paid just £8.6 million in corporation tax over 14 years. The kind of ploy they use is, for example, to set up wholly owned, but autonomous, companies with which they do business and can thus write off various ‘business expenses’.

For example, I understand that Starbucks rents all its coffee mugs from Starbucks Coffee Mugs Gmbh which is based in Lichtenstein. The tables in its empire of stores are all leased from Starbucks Tables Gmbh of Vaduz. And so on, and every transaction is a tax write-off. It’s all perfectly legal, I am bound to acknowledge, but from where I sit these ruses and ploys are as close to con tricks as it is possible for me to claim they are without getting some lawyer up my arse serving me a writ for tortuous malfeasance and libellous promalgamation under the Let’s Nail All Smartase Bloggers Acts of 1991, 1993 and 2007.

Naturally, HMRC is very put out that it it obliged to start every week of the year holding its dick and looking like a prize prune. And equally as naturally it seeks out every way to get revenge. But as the numbskulls which staff the agency know they can’t lay a finger on the real culprits, week in week out they come down very heavily on what socialists like to call the ‘little man’. And HMRC isn’t above coming up with would-be smart ruses of its own.

Knowing that daily several billion pounds are slipping through its fingers, it most recently announced that, in order to claw back some of that cash, it has granted itself powers to dip into each and every bank account in the land to claim tax it think it might be owed, all without our say-so. Obviously that has led to an enormous row, but to date the British government has done nothing to stop the practice except to get awfully huffy about it, officially declare that ‘look, it isn’t on’ and set up various parliamentary committees to look into the possibility of writing to HMRC to tell it in no uncertain terms that ‘look, it isn’t on.’ ‘He’s making it up’ I hear you declare. Well, no he isn’t: take a look at this BBC report.

. . .

My encounter with HMRC this morning which had me laughing out loud and reflecting for the umpteenth time this week that the world is indeed totally bonkers came about thus.

At the ripe old age of 122 I have become rather better at managing my money than I ever was when I was younger. I learned the hard way. So now I pay several of my bills upfront: as soon as my wage hits my bank account, a substantial portion of it goes off to the electricity company, the water company, the folks we buy our oil from and HMRC.

This means that when the bills eventually arrive they are - depending upon the time of year - often already paid. And once I have paid upfront I can happily live on my overdraft limit without the fear of getting yet another bill which will push me beyond what I and my several banks have agreed is my overdraft limit. Because cross that ‘agreed overdraft’ line and they really hammer you. (Oh, and I have several banks accounts because that is the only way this financial ingenue can keep an overview of what is going on. One for car-related expenses, one for utility-related expenses and the last for spending money.

It also means that if one is getting horribly close to going over the top, I can top it up from another. And let me stress I don’t regard myself as clever. I do it this way because, in all honesty, I regard myself as rather stupid.)

Years ago, I bought a very modest house in Birmingham. I only lived there for four years before life took me elsewhere, but I kept it on and eventually paid off the mortgage. It is now rented out and the meagre rent - it hasn’t gone up in 24 years because the house is so modest, anything higher than what the agent thinks I can charge would mean I wouldn’t get any tenants at all. I don’t mind giving figures: after the agent has taken his cut, I receive £377 a month, which works out at £87 a week.

Lucky sod, you might think, but in fact that just about covers my petrol bill for getting to London and back from Cornwall every week. So not such a lucky sod, really. And because I like to sleep at nights and in the past have always come unstuck whenever I tried to pull a fast one, I declare that rental income to the taxman every year.

Then there’s the dosh I make a month from my sideline of placing the puzzles on the quiz pages of the paper I work for. I have done that for more than four years now and it has helped pay the bills. But I am not paid an enormous sum for doing the work, and I also declare that income. The tax I owe for both income streams comes to just under £2,500. But I have got into the habit of paying upfront so I am not embarrassed by a tax bill I can’t pay.

In fact, I pay more upfront than I need to so that I am always in credit. It’s a form of saving, and not such a daft one when currently the interest paid on savings is around 0.5pc - if you are lucky - while inflation is around 2pc. So I am building up, slowly, a small surplus which might come in handy if I faced with a very unexpected bill.

To add a little more context, I am not a big spender and have only twice paid more than £800 for a car. And I only did that on those two occasions because I was nagged into doing so (by you know who).

When I got home last night and looked through my post, I was very surprised to find a letter from HMRC. I shall give some it verbatim. It was dated 10 September, 2014:

Dear Mr Powell,

 Thank you for your repayment claim dated 8 August and the 2014 self assessment tax return.

I cannot make a repayment now because you are making regular monthly payments to your Self Assessment account. So that I can deal with your claim, you will need to stop your payments. You can do this by:

  • going to our website at hmrc.gov.uk if you have registered to use our online services
  • phoning our Payment Helpline on 0300 200 3822
  • contacting your bank.

Once you have stopped your regular payments and your last one has cleared, I will be able to deal with your repayment claim. You can restart your regular payments again one your have received your repayment.

Yours sincerely,
M E Parker,
Assistant officer.

I was baffled. I was thoroughly baffled. I was completely and utterly baffled because I had made no such claim. And as no letter from the taxman is ever good news, I rang HMRC the first thing this morning to find out what the bloody hell was going on.

Why, I asked, were they thanking me for making a repayment claim when I hadn’t made any such claim? 

Because, the dimwit I spoke to at HMRC replied, that’s how our letters are written.

But it doesn’t make sense, I said. I haven’t made any such claim.

But, she repeated, that’s how our letters are written.

But why, I asked, why do you write them like that?

Because we do, she replied, implying that I was being completely unreasonable.

Well, you should rewrite them, I told her.

We can’t afford to, she replied. Nonsense, I told her, it would take less than ten seconds to rewrite the letter.

But we can’t afford to, she repeated. And that was that.

The rest of the conversation wasn’t very long, and I have to confess it descended into argy-bargy. (I am not proud of the fact that I am rather good at argy-bargy, especially if I am in the right. The trouble is I am not always in the right, although on this occasion I was.)

Argy, in fact, became so much bargy that she finally informed me that she was inclined to ‘terminate this phone call’. That means you are going to hang up, I told her, so I’ll save you the trouble, I added, and hung up.

We little men who do not have the apparently unlimited resources to hire clever-clever tax gurus to ensure we screw the state as legally as possible have no option but to trust the taxman and trust that he gets things right. We like to think, the rings vast and wealthy corporations run around them notwithstanding, that they do know their arse from their elbow. But, dear reader, I really, really, really have my doubts. For example, a week earlier I had received a letter saying my tax code had
been changed, with the result that my annual tax-free allowance was being reduced by £2,750, from £10,000 to £7,250. So, my dear employers would be taking more tax from me. When I got the letter, I rang to ask HMRC exactly why my tax code had been changed (and my tax-free allowance reduced). I was told that the taxman calculated that that would be the amount I owed in tax on my extra earnings next near.

But, I protested, why are you doing that? I have always paid my tax bill on the button because I already pay upfront and am in credit. Just look at my account and you will see that there’s more than enough to pay what I shall be owing. Ah, said the HMRC wiseacre, but that’s what we have decided to do. On that occasion, having very little stomach to charge head-first into a brick wall, I gave up. I reasoned that at least I would have fully paid my tax bill even before it was due and that as the tax bill would have been paid, I would have saved up that much more to fall back on if and when I unexpectedly found myself on my uppers.

Dealing with the taxman is an act of faith. We like to think that despite the sage advice we are given, in this case, to ‘check our tax code if you think we have got it wrong’, they haven’t actually got it wrong. Because unless you are some boring nerd who has chosen to follow an accountant’s path to Nirvana, all tax speak, all tax affairs and everything to do with tax are about as comprehensible to 99pc of us as are the ramblings of a mawkish alcoholic in confessional mode after a four-day bender. They are goobledegook.

So getting a letter thanking me for a claim for repayment I never made from the folk who have granted themselves the powers to dip into my bank account whenever they choose to do so is, to put it mildly, not at all reassuring.

Mind there are worse things at sea: Chelsea only managed a draw in the season’s first Champions League fixture, against, out-and-out no-hopers Schalke 04 after leading 1-0, and after holding Bayern Munich to 0-0 for 89 minutes, thanks to several spectacular Joy Hart saves, Manchester City were pipped at the post 1-0. To put that last comment into perspective: I support Manchester United. (And I bet they have a few clever-clever tax gurus on the books.)

*This reference will be very obscure. And I’d be well advised to leave it that way. Hint: under Dave’s watch Vodafone really took the tax piss.

Tuesday 16 September 2014

The Scots go for broke – makes sense. The English discover they ‘love the United Kingdom’. Really? But what the hell: it’s the middle of the fence for me

Will they, won’t they? Well, apparently, according to Radio 4’s ‘flagship’ programme Today, even the Chinese are holding their breath about the outcome of the referendum on independence for Scotland due to be held on Thursday.

It has long been known that the Catalans are interested to see what the outcome will be, because, they might be reckoning, if the Scots can do it, so can we. So the government in Madrid is keeping its fingers crossed that the Scots Nats will not get the magic 50pc plus one which will be necessary to stick two fingers at the English and depart to cock up their affairs without any ‘foreign English’ interference. The Chinese, of course, who are as sympathetic to the expression of separatist sentiments as Count Dracula was to holy water are also as keen as Madrid that it will all end in tears for Alex Salmond.

Me? Well, a year or two ago sympathised with the sentiment of Scots who are fed up with centuries of condescension by England, or, more specifically the ‘Home Counties’ and are now within a midge’s dick of achieving that longed-for independence. But at the time I thought the wisest course of action would be to stick with the Union. I could not write that I’m no longer all that sure, but the truth is I really don’t care either way. On the one hand the desire for independence comes from the heart and, in a way, it makes no sense at all to listen to your head on the matter and, despite profound misgivings, vote to keep the Union.

If you want something that badly, and the SNP and its supporters do, I would have thought you just go for it and carry whatever consequences there might be.

As for those consequences, a great, great many financiers, businessmen, economists and the rest of every stripe have trotted out utterly convincing reasons why Yes/No is the way to go. As in most such matters at the end of the day you pays your money and you makes your choice. So the SNP has a legion of financiers, businessmen, economists and the rest who say ‘it will be fine, what with this that and t’other assets blah-di-blah…’ And the ‘Better Together’ gang has trotted out any number of financiers, businessmen, economists and the rest who insist it will all end in disaster, Scotland will go bankrupt, there will several outbreaks of the Black Death within minutes of the Yes victory being confirmed and more likely than not global warming will hit Scotland especially hard.’ And to both sides I say ‘pull the other one’.

Given that these pronouncements have come from the impassioned supporters of the one side or the other, I really don’t believe any of it is objective. Which, of course, make the warnings worse than useless.

The Nationalists have overall had the easier ride: they can afford to promise the earth, a golden dawn and jam tomorrow. Those who want to keep the status quo, on the other hand, are thrown back into the unenviable position of pointing out all the bad things they claim will happen if Scotland throws off the English yoke (which in Scot Nats’ minds is basically what it all comes down to).

So the Better Together gang have come across as a remarkably negative lot and I shall not be the first to observe that surely it would have made more sense to point out the advantages of sticking with the Union. But, no, that doesn’t seem to have occurred to them (and, to be honest, I can only think of one which is that bound together in a United Kingdom, Scotland and England are economically stronger than fighting the good fight alone).

Then there’s the odd sensation that although the referendum has been more than a year coming, England – that is the ‘Home Counties’ - don’t seem to have been taking it seriously whatsoever until the last month. Then they panicked. I can think of no better word. As for all the ‘concessions’ they have belatedly been making it strikes me as being about as useful as a homeowner who has discovered burglars trying to buy them off by informing them they can take half of what he’s got if they will leave the rest. Stupid or what?

As for the remarkably large amount of mawkish guff on the Better Together side along the lines of Cameron’s ‘I love the United Kingdom’ and ‘the Scots are our brothers’, forgive me if it doesn’t, from where I sit, all stink of rotting fish.

Anyone who wants you to believe that he or she ‘loves the United Kingdom’ is most certainly a nine-bob note and you would be well-advised to count the silver spoons before he or she departs the house. It’s bollocks. I love my two children above all else, then my family, both immediate and extended. That’s it. And if I

And unbiased view from the Home Counties. Or, perhaps, not. Who knows, who cares. As long as the exempt haggis from import duty, I'm happy

have any knowledge of the Scots psyche (and I believe I have at least a small insight) the reaction of those the Union bods want to win over with their Love The Union crap will most certainly be: Get to fuck you pretentious git!

Yes, there are many Unionist Scots all over Scotland, but I suspect that if Thursday’s vote shows us that they are in a majority, the only thing it will confirm is that when push came to shove, more Scots follow their head than their hearts. Money does matter to them, you know, and who can blame them. The notion of the ‘skinflint Scotsman’ is a myth. In fact I have met a great many remarkably generous Scots, more perhaps, than in England, and most certainly more than in the bloody ‘Home Counties’. But the notion that your average Scot is not quite as foolish with his money than your average English is not myth. As a rule they believe there are better things to do with our money than throw it away.

My brother and I were discussing all this the other night and we both agreed, however, that a genie is out of the bottle. There has been some violence in parts of Scotland and it was not pleasant. Sectarian violence is by no means unknown in Scotland and I do wonder just how well the losing side, whoever it is, whether Yes or No, will take to defeat.

As for what the outcome will be: I haven’t a clue.

. . .

If the Scots Nats win, the political fallout will be fascinating. The majority of the SNP is, I suspect, inclined to the Left. But there is a marked right-wing number of them two, united with the lefties only in the desire of independence. And it would be a mistake to write of ‘Tory’ Scots: the Conservative Party has been doing badly in general elections these past 30 years not because there is no conservative support or sentiment in Scotland, but because it is so unassailably identified with ‘the fucking English’.

In an independent Scotland I don’t doubt that the fortunes of a right-of-centre party would perk up quite a bit, though drawing its support mainly from the country areas. Then there’s the question of the 45 or so Labour MPs with Scottish constituencies whose days in the Commons would most certainly be numbered but upon whose membership of the Commons the British Labour party relies heavily to form a majority government. Seen in that light, it no-brainer to understand why, ironically, Labour have found themselves in the Unionist camp.

Another question which will have to be tackled is, given a Yes to independence vote on Thursday, which would mean the loss of all those constituencies (some of which are Lib Dem, by the way) in Scotland, what should be done about the British general election due in May 2015. Some have even suggested that it should be postponed until after Scotland is fully independent.

They fear a silly scenario such as: Labour, as some suspect, get a majority and form the government. Then, with independence, at a stroke they lose 45 of their MPs and perhaps even lose their majority. Would that mean another election. Certainly, because a minority government could carry in with a deficit of two or three, but 45 would prove to be impossible. Because of the possibility of this conundrum, there is even a suggestion – I think from the Tories – that next May’s election should be postponed in the event of the Scots voting for independence.

And they would certainly like that: faced with an Opposition which is, a stroke 45 MPs short, it would seem the Conservatives would be shoo-in to form proper government, crucially without those bloody awful Lib Dems. Tory heaven if the Scots vote to tell bloody English to piss off. Trouble is they can’t go for it, because they all ‘love the United Kingdom’ so much. Damn!

. . .

I find it very, very creepy that my movement around the web is so completely followed. This morning I was trying to sort out a mobile phone problem for my daughter. Her Sony Experia SP keeps freezing, even though he was apparently ‘repaired’ by her provider, O2, so I have lost faith in their ability to ‘repair’.

The solution I came up with was to by an unlocked phone on eBay (or one locked to O2) and she can use that until the contract (which I am paying for comes to an end). I was alerted to the fact that iPhone 4s are still available brand-new, but I also looked at other phones. And bugger me if not every page I look at which carries ads – news pages etc – has bloody ads for the very phones I was investigating. Yes, I knew it went on, but I don’t like it.

Ironically, Google, who provide this blogging service for free, are one of the worst offenders. You can’t take a dump these days without returning to your desktop or laptop to find you have inadvertently installed the bloody Google toolbar.

Saturday 13 September 2014

More on John O’Hara: a critique from someone or other and my response to it

Tonight I was just about to sit down with the end of a bottle of Pernod (a great drink if you like aniseed and don’t believe all the guff that it has to be drunk in sunshine. It doesn’t, and you can get as pissed or not as you like depending upon the amount of water you add. As I get older, I find myself adding more and more) and finish off my second reading of the novel. As it happened I set down the full glass next to the sofa and as I went to put away my guitar, I kicked it over. Damn.

So instead I have decided to post my response to a critique of the novel by one Henry Gonshak who is, apparently ‘the Rose and Anna Busch Endowed Professor of English at Montana Tech’. I found it when I was looking up websites to do with the novel. You can read what Mr Gonshak had to say here. I wanted to leave a comment on the blog, but for some reason I couldn’t so I have emailed it to him. But, after kicking over my glass of Pernod, I decided - what the hell - to post my response here, too. Since emailing it and then deciding to post it here, I have slightly rewritten and expanded it, although not a lot.

I recently finished Appointment In Samara - and I can’t remember how I came across the novel and then bought it - and was so impressed, I bought a collection of John O’Hara’s New York short stories and Butterfield 8. The name of that second novel was familiar to me, because I’d heard about the Elizabeth Taylor film years ago and remembered that it was in some way ‘shocking’. But I only saw it recently and, at the time, I rather liked it.

Last week, I read the Butterfield 8 the novel, and once I had finished it, I immediately, as has sometimes become my habit with books which impress me, began again. That others don’t do so, or at least I’ve never heard of others doing so, baffles me a little. We will listen to recordings of music and watch films again, often very soon after we have just heard or read them, but no one seems to grant a novel the same respect.

I’ve done the same with films (watched on DVD or the internet) and all I can say is that the practice of reading a novel (or watching a film) like that pays off in spades. I have to say I disagree with you almost completely on your evaluation of the novel Butterfield 8, and must agree with you about the film. Having now read the novel my estimation of the Taylor film has plummeted.

It is, at the end of the day, just another piece of Hollywood melodrama, and although there are, as in most things, degrees of worth or otherwise - there can be ‘good’, well-made melodrama and there can be total crap - it was nonetheless nothing more than a piece of melodramatic schlock which might have done good business at the box office and garnered Taylor her Oscar, but in no way whatsover approached the subtlety of O’Hara’s novel.

In that sense it has nothing to do with the novel except sharing a title and vaguely, ever so vaguely, echoing its story. The novel is much, much, much more, and I can understand why when it was first published, and coming soon after Appointment In Samara, it made O’Hara’s name. But

John O'Hara

you [Henry Gonshak, the guy whose take on the novel I am responding to] don’t seem to rate it highly at all. And that, too, baffles me.

You supply the quote, quite possibly well-known, from (Wright State University English professor) Martin Kirch that ‘O’Hara’s achievements have been so long and thoroughly denigrated that he is now considered a novelist of the second, or even the third, rank’, and on the face of it that would seem game, set and match: it seems to say ‘O’Hara was once good, but not that good and certainly no longer as good as other novelists’. You say something similar (’In our era O’Hara comes across as a dated and minor writer who should not be classed with such brilliant’). But read Professor Kirch’s quote again: he says the ‘achievements’ have been ‘denigrated’.

Now that is an odd word to use if he means ‘re-evaluated’. But he doesn’t say ‘re-evaluated’: he uses the word ‘denigrated’, and when someone is ‘denigrated’, the implication is that he has been unfairly treated. And that’s how I read Kirch’s judgment: that O’Hara is still as good as he was, but taste has moved on to such an extent that he is seen as no longer cutting the artistic mustard. And so although you say you agree with Kirch, he does not seem to be saying what you are saying.

In your evaluation of the novel you make several factual errors, and I think these are important: you say Gloria Wandrous was 18 when the novel takes place. She wasn’t, she was 22. You also say the Weston Liggett, the man who picked her up - or was picked up by her - was divorced. He wasn’t: once he had confessed to taking Gloria to bed in the family home, he fully expected his wife Emily to divorce him, and offered to make it easy for her. But he wasn’t divorced - how could he be if the essential story at the centre of the novel takes place between a Friday night and the following Wednesday?

There is also more than a suspicion that, with Gloria now dead - and Liggett’s reaction being pretty callous in that all he thinks about in the aftermath of her death is retrieving the mink coat to avoid being implicated in any way - he will not be divorced and that he and Emily will evntually continue in their conventional, by now dull, marriage and both will continue to enjoy the life of an ‘upper-class’ wealthy American as before (possible recriminations notwithstanding - after all she is well-aware that he has had several affairs).

It is these two errors, and your judgment of Gloria as just another ‘spoiled rich girl, pampered by her indulgent parents’ make me suspect that you simply haven’t understood the novel and, pertinently, its endless subtleties. (Another error: Gloria didn’t have parents, she had a mother and William Vandamm, her uncle, though undoubtedly they did indulge her pitilessly and she was pretty spoiled.)

You don’t seem to take on board that Gloria was not just another good-time girl out for what she could get, and that the key to the tragedy of her life and death - if tragedy is, under the circumstances not a tad hi’falutin - and her unbridled promiscuity and virtually alcoholic drinking is most probably because she was sexually assaulted at the age of 11 by Major Boam and, crucially, felt she was unable to tell anyone. She did not feel able to tell the black maid who was in the house at the time, partly because of the casual and rampant racism abroad at the time of which she was equally as guilty as her peers.

When she did bring herself to tell her mother and uncle, her mother dismissed the story out of hand and, although, he didn’t react as his sister did, Vandamm also let Gloria down. Far more seriously, she was later thoroughly corrupted at the age of 15 by Reddington, a man who was ostensibly a pillar of his community (a detail which he brutally used to brush off similar incidents with a young girl in his hometown).

Now, however, already disillusioned by the disbelief she encountered when she was first violated, she seems to enjoy the sex, the drinking, the sniffing ether and the year-long abuse by Reddington. But, of course, deep down she didn’t, and it was the cause of the despair to which she woke up every morning. She seems to have lost all hope and decided just to go for it. It’s as though if she doesn’t feel valued, she can see no reason to value the world.

O’Hara - in my view - doesn’t create as you put it ‘a stick figure, and a rather tedious one at that’. Quite the contrary: Gloria is intelligent, sensitive, alert, on the ball and witty and, even at 22, no one’s fool. And she is an appealing figure, although you don’t think so. You seem not to have been on her side. I was. She is far more attractive than the gallery of shallow, boozy young men who use her and who are her daily companions. And she is very aware that her life is going nowhere. At the end of the novel she has some kind of epiphany and realises life doesn’t have to be like the life she is leading, and O’Hara suggests that she might, just might, be turning a corner.

Yes, she is still young and immature and believes she ‘loves’ Liggett. But, I suggest, even she, deep down, knows that is nonsense and that the affair - if it can even be called an affair, consisting as it does of two nights of sex and a lot of drinking - will go nowhere. Her death is wholly ambiguous: was it an accident or did she jump off the boat?

The encounter on that boat with Liggett in his cramped cabin is nothing but a sordid and embarrasing interlude, and she knows it. All he wants is sex with her, despite his middle-aged fantasy about being in love with her. She, after the pleasant afternoon she had spent with her mother and her surprising realisation that a marriage and love can, perhaps, be good after all, wants more. She doesn’t sleep with Liggett. She leaves him. And when they are due to meet upstairs, she comes towards him, but then ‘turns’ away and runs off. Did she trip over the low railing? Or had she decided to end it all. The ending is by no means ‘shaky’ or one intended to add spice to an otherwise ‘meandering’ novel.

There is nothing ‘meandering’ about the novel. O’Hara was rigidly disciplined in his build-up, from the scenes in speakeasies where Gloria’s crowd are nothing but a bunch of well-off, but stupid and vacuous halfwits, to the portrayals of the empty relationships of the Liggett’s, the Farleys - the wife casually decides she wants an affair with the actor, but can’t even be resolute enough to go through with it - Jimmy Malloy and Isabel’s on-off relationship, and that between Eddie Brunner and Norma Day, where Eddie reconciles himself to marriage to a ‘safe’ woman for all the wrong reasons, are all small pieces of a jigsaw which O’Hara quietly but deftly puts in place to give the overall picture of what choices a girl like Gloria - a girl with a history of being demeaned and abused - thinks she has.

Perhaps the back stories of the characters make the reader - you, perhaps - think that the novel meanders, but in truth nothing O’Hara writes is superfluous however it might at first seem. And, again I have to say, in my view, the final sentence in the novel is perfect and sums up the whole corrupted, perverted morality of the time and age he is describing: ‘The Reddingtons always went to a hotel where the women guests were not permitted so smoke.’ So as long as the trivial niceties of ‘good’ society are observed - for example that women guests were not permitted to smoke - everyone can pretend all is well in the world even though it damn well most certainly is not and they damn well know it.

At first blush O’Hara’s portrayal of a small part of New York society on just six days in 1930 would seem to be something of a miniature. But it isn’t. What he writes about - hypocrisy and a selfish, callous disregard for others - is universal and most certainly not restricted by being ‘of its time’. And that hypocrisy is just as shocking now was it was then. And that is why O’Hara’s novel is a great novel.

I understand Butterfield 8, only his second novel, was the high-water mark of his writing career and although her wrote several more novels, none was quiet as good and reached its class. Well, as I haven’t read any other them (but I intend to do so) I can’t comment. But I do know that O’Hara is a great writer - his turn of phrase, his dialogue, his insight, his seemingly casual way of writing, the looseness of it, his ability to portray depth when none is apparent - prove it for me.

So, I disagree with you. Completely.

Wednesday 10 September 2014

Why this ‘newspaperman’ is not in the slightest embarrassed not to be regarded as a ‘newspaperman’. Chuffed, in fact; or to put it another way: fuck deadlines, embrace discipline. Then there’s why John O’Hara deserves to be better known, at least as well as once he was

This entry needs (and will get) a rewrite.

Well, I’m doing the honourable thing, the thing that has to be done on any last day of a holiday in a ‘Med country’ and that is to sit outside a bar and watch the world go by. I happen to be sitting outside the Teyma (or perhaps Bar Teyma) in Albocasser, district of Valencia (thought the exact nomenclature eludes me and I’m really not anal enough to look up exactly what administrative part of Spain Albocasser (or Albacasser, Albacacer or any number of different spellings I’ve seen) is in.

It’s not quite as romantic as it might seem as, now the lunch/siesta period has finished (it’s now 17.45), and they really do shut down for most of the afternoon, though the weather is not extraorinarily hot, everyone and his truck/tractor /car/moped has come alive and decided to roar, quickly or slowly depending on the tractor/truck/car/moped up and down the main street where I am sitting. But, well, who bloody cares, because I don’t.

I am also on my own, but that is no reflection on my host. It’s just that as I have got older, I am beginning – well, not even beginning – to ensure a little time on my own and I couldn’t even tell you why. I just do. For a hack (though surely I have long made clear that as ‘newspapermen’ are concerned) I am the least likely candidate to get the long-service medal – ‘newspapermen’ are supposed to ‘care about news’, be ‘news hounds’, be ‘first with the news’, regard it as a ‘privilege and an honour’ to serve the Fourth Estate. If what passes for ‘news’ really is ‘news’ – Kim Kardashian is still shagging Kanye West, but he’s already losing interest (you can tell by how, publicly, he’s still ‘deeply in love’); the unions warning Ed Miliband that unless he toes the line, it’s curtains as far as dosh is concnerned; Mary Berry was a real goer when she was a lass, but the BBC is saying nought – I don’t five a flying fuck about news.

Yes, there is news, and there are very admirable reporters and hacks out there doing a very good and often very dangerous job. But they are a distinct minority. As for the rest of us, all this brave talk about ‘needing a deadline’ is just pap for the suckers: the deadline my employers care about is 10pm because just a minute over getting the stuff down to the printers costs hard cash, and that, my hearties gets a lot closer to the beating heart of journalism, past and present, than any amount of waffle about ‘getting the story’.

Let me elucidate: in the golden age of print journalism, before TV and radio and latterly the net, which last about 100 years from the mid-nineteenth century, newspapers had real rivals. Each city, whether in Britain, the US, or in Europe, had at least two evening newspapers and it was a cuthroat business. The amount of advertising cash being spent was limited so, just to survive, let alone make oddles of cash to keep the proprietor happy, each newspaper had to grab as much of that cash as possible. That meant asuruing the advertisers that 1) more people read your paper than read the opposition; and 2) making sure you got your paper out onto the street first to make sure more people read your paper than the opposition. And that was where this ‘be first with the story came from’. No one is going to buy the Evening Beast to read about what’s happened if they have already bought the Evening Brute and already know what’s happened (and the names aren’t my joke but Evelyn Waugh’s or at least a variation of it).

There were once, of course, times when ‘the governing classes’ were dead against newspapers getting even a sniff of what they were up to and passing it on to the hoi polloi. That’s why, here in Britain, they imposed a duty on each paper to ensure it was too expensive for the plebs (for that was how they were regarded) to buy. And that is why one copy of a newspaper would be read allowed to a group of people, in libraries and taverns: at least the cost could be carried by a group. That is also why one element of the ‘governing classes’ fought tooth and nail agains each and every Education Act, to ensure the great unwashed would never learn to read. (That was the same reason why the Roman Catholic church, often on pain of death, wanted only Latin copies of the Bible to be allowed and did not want it translated into any of the vulgar languages, vulgar not here meaing quite what you think it means.)

But on the Tweedledum and Tweedledee principle, another segment of the governing classes, although in no way more disposed to ensuring the well-being of the great unwashed than their opponents, supported each and every Education Act on the grounds that ‘the others’ were opposing it (except, sadly, it really wasn’t all that simple – there were good men on both sides, but don’t let that delay a chap in full rant).

So at one time part of what newspapers were printing was worthwhile – the decisions of government, the debates in the Commons – although even then it wasn’t half has hi’falutin as Newspaper Romantics would have you believe: years ago, I went for an interview for a reporter’s job on the Northampton Chronicle, which was already in those days based in some soulless industrial estate. While I was waiting to be shown in, I spotted, under a protective glass cover a copy of the paper from the end of the 18th century and read parts of it. I happened upon the classified ads and there I came across two things: a lonely hearts column and an ad for wasing powder, which – believe it or not – included a ‘blue whitener’. Pluc ca change . . .

Yes, newspapers had an important role in ensuring a beady eye was kept on the goings on in parliament and in our courts, but arguably it is no longer a role they fulfill. Other media outlets do so.

Some still do, of course, but there is always more than half an eye on what might make money. Even the saintly Guardian, as Private Eye repeatedly records, is not above acts of utter hypocrisy, decrying dictatorship and the rest on one page while further on graciously accepting a dictator’s shilling for carrying what are euphemistically called ‘advertorials’, but should be called ‘advertisements’. But let them all plough their own bloody furrow.

Any hacks reading this might well object that I’m an em rule short of a layout, but what they hell. To get to the point (if I remember it, which somehow I doubt), ‘newspapermen’ are supposed to relish deadlines. I don’t. I like to try to get things done and dusted long before the deadline is reached, which, if nothing else – and there is a lot else – means you can go over what you have written again and again and try to improve it.

To be frank, which is not the same as honest, that is sadly something I don’t do immediately in these blog entries and it doesn’t surprise me that quite often a reader might ask her or himself ‘what the bloody hell is he on about now?’ Once posted, I will look through an entry and correct the spelling howlers I spot, and, if necessary, try to rewrite a passage to make sure it makes more sense.

But as a rule I sit here, waffle and pointificate, then post. That doesn’t mean that I haven’t thought about what I am writing, and, for example, what I have written above I what I thought about for years, partially to explain to myself just why my journalistic ‘career’ has been about as outstanding as Eddie the Eagles in ski jumping. If I can leave you with one thought, it is this: when next you hear a hack, whether a retired old fart reminiscing about his or her career, or a young turk pumping up the PR volume and trying to make out what a keen blade she or he is banging on about ‘needing a deadline’, just remind yourselves that it is so much bollocks. They don’t ‘need a deadline’, they just need a lot more discipline.

. . .

I am now well over halfway through re-reading Butterfield 8 (see, I remembered), and it is well worth it. In a sense I am reading the story for the first time because I can now take in the slight details and no longer be stalled and snared by those bits which snared and stalled me the first time round. Re-reading a novel – re-reading a novel just as soon as you have got to the end – is something I have done several times now and I can recommend it, especially if you do so immediately you have finished the novel (or short story or novella) for the first time.

As I said earlier, I had seen the film starring Elizabeth Taylor several years ago, and although I liked it then, I now realise, despite Taylor’s Oscar, that it is no more, and possibly even less, than just another piece of Hollywood schlock. In it Taylor, in keeping with the utterly hypocritical morality of the time, dies at the end because she was when all was said and done, and in Hollywood terms, a bad girl. Not so the protagonist of O’Hara’s novel, Gloria Wandrous. I have read that O’Hara was an alcoholic who was not just difficult to get on with but ‘impossible’. Perhaps, but he is also a very honest writer. Wandrous shagged around, took drugs, drank the city dry and had even dabbled in lesbianism (shock horror!) and – apparently – stole a mink coat.

Yet she was by no means a ‘bad girl’. She had been sexually abused at 11, and then again, for a far long period at 15, and it destroyed her. She is a bright, intelligent, savvy and very likeable young woman and when she dies (in the wheels of a paddle steamer after falling overboard – and it is really not clear whether it was an accident or whether she turned and jumped overboard), it is the sad end to a young and sad life.

There are other likeable characters – Eddie Brunner, a true friend who most probably has fallen in love with her in the best possible sense, but who decides he will settle for a more conventional woman because, well, it is safer; and Jimmy Malloy, another character who is at heart honest and has no illusions about the city he lives in. But there are also some deeply hypocritical characters, Weston Liggett, who more or less rapes Gloria and thinks he has fallen in love with her. O’Hara is merciless in his portrayal of they hypocrisy of conventional morality, conventional marriage, conventional love, the unthinking and odious racism of the well-off – even Gloria is not immune to that – and the mad and manic drinking and spending culture of the post-1929 crash era.

And Christ he can write well. I have already said how much I admire the ‘looseness’ of his writing but which is not in the slightest bit ‘loose’ in any other sense. Here is a bit, by no means typical, of his prose. (I copied it out a few days ago to post here. To be fair the passage goes on much further, but I think it makes my point.

Check him out, possibly again. You will not be disappointed.

The excerpt (Emily is Liggett’s wife:

Liggett was not quite one of these men; Emily certainly was not one of these women. For one thing Liggett was a Pittsburgher and Emily a Bostonian. That was one thing, not two. Liggett was precisely the sort of person who, if he hadn’t married Emily, would be just the perfect person for Emily to snub. All her life she seemed to be saving up for one snub, which would have to be delivered to an upper-class American, since no foreigner and no lower-class American could possibly understand what she had that she felt entitled her to deliver a snub. What she had was a Colonial governor; an unbroken string of studious Harvard men; their women. Immediately and her own was, of course, the Winsor-Vincent Club-Sewing Circle background. She had a few family connections in New York, and they were unassailable socially; they never went out. It came as a surprise which he was a long time understanding for Liggett to learn, after he married Emily, that Emily had never stopped at a hotel in New York. She explained that the only possible reason you went to New York was to visit relations, and then you stopped with them, not at a hotel. Yes, that was true, he agreed – and never told the fun he had had as a kid, stopping at New York hotels; the time he released a roll of toilet paper upon Fifth Avenue, the time he climbed along the ledge from one window to another. He was a little afraid of her.

If I have time, I shall add the rest of this passage. It doesn’t quite stand as it is here.

Monday 8 September 2014

Pound plummets, stocks plummet, economy in dire straights: why? Well, the Scots might well – perhaps - en masse tell Perfidious Albion to take a running jump

Las Albadas: Year three, fourth day.

Well into my week of doing nothing and caring even less about it. Nothing much to report, really, except that somewhere along the line I’ve been bitten several times – about nine or ten times – and have the marks to show it. Where the spider came from, and why it had it in for me I don’t know. I most certainly do not have a ‘thing about spiders’ (being afraid of them, rather than wanting to shag them, as is the other meaning of ‘having a thing for’), and had I seen the bloody spider and/or caught it in the act, it would have become acquainted with the full fury of a Powell bitten. But spiders are a long way from the Scots desire for independence from Perfidious Albion (or, at least, the desire of many Scots for independence – just how many there are, or rather just how many there are who can be bothered to leave the TV alone for the 15 minutes it takes to go along to the polling booth and cast their vote, will be revealed a week on Thursday.

I mention this for two reason: first writing about the Scottish independence referendum and, well, possible Scottish independence allows me once again to post the pic I came across several years ago of a Scottish bar stool. Here it is:


Scottish bar stool

The second reason is to register my bewilderment, experienced again today for the umpteenth time, at the behaviour of ‘the markets’, or more specifically ‘the financial markets’ and ‘the stock exchange.

I’m not a complete naif about the workings of the economy, the stock market and the rest of that goddam-awful shite, and, whisper it quietly, I even own a few shares, although these are part and parcel of my ‘pension plan’ (the inverted commas, as ever useful for making a point, are intended to convey what a pitiful ‘pension plan’ it is: with luck I shall be able to pay my yearly electricity bill and my weekly bus far to the local food bank.) But the stock market seems once again to prove the truth of a realisation most of us come to at some point in our lives, that however upright, bright, pleasant, rational and attractive folk are individually – or, of course, depending upon the individual, not – gather them into a group of more than, say, ten or twelve and they lose most of their rationality and most certainly the group as a whole begins to behave like a dumb shit.

A herd mentality takes over, and I know, because I once bought (but never read) a book about the herd mentality of the stock market, the group behaves like someone with an IQ in minus figures. So, for example, an opinion poll this morning revealed that, according to its research (i.e. the number of folk they questioned down the pub last night) more Scots want to become independent and leave the United Kingdom than want to stay and – well, there are better ways of putting it and I know that by putting it in this very crude way and am also betraying my own sympathies – carry on sucking the Westminster dick. And what happened: apparently ‘billions were knocked off the value of the pound’ and ‘stocks fell sharply’. But why, for God’s sake?

The standard answer is that ‘the market likes stability’. Well, don’t we all, but a bit of uncertainty over how many Scots will be bothered to tootle along to the polling booth and add their X to the choice to ‘Tell England To Fuck Off!, is surely nothing but a summer storm. Yes, there are dire predictions that ‘business will suffer’, but anyone taking the long view – which the herd never does – will know it will all blow over and be business as usual quite soon.

Then there’s the other curiosity: although this one poll signified that a majority of Scots want independence, ever other poll held at exactly the same time came to the opposite conclusion: that the number of Scots who want their nation to stay as a part of the United Kingdom (and as I so crudely put it above, carry on sucking Westminster’s dick) is still greater.

Admittedly, over the months and years that these polls have been held the Yes vote has been gaining ground and the No vote, conversely, losing it, but ask yourself: if just one poll of many predicts an overall Yes vote a week on Thursday (September 18 , to make things easy for the innumerate), is that really good enough reason to go into panic mind and junk the pound? (The point should also be made that opinion polls are questionable from about ten different directions, but apart from mentioning it, I shan’t pursue if further, because, well, I can’t think of anything facetious to say on that score, so dull are opinion polls. I mean, what would your reaction be if you asked a son or daughter ‘what do you want be when you grow up, sweetheart?’ and the replied with a toothsome lisp ‘I want to be an opinion pollster, daddy’.

But back to the lunatics and fuckwits who run our banks, the stock market and upon whose utterly irrational behaviour depends whether stocks rise or plummet. Like a great many, I was baffled by the stock exchange for many years, just as I was baffled by ‘banking’, ‘derivatives’, ‘futures’, ‘the national debt’ and the rest of it. Then, not so many years ago, and having served for many years in the bullshit industry, the penny dropped: it is all very, very simple, but the schtick to stop folk realising just how simple it all is is to use jargon. Thus ‘debt’ – and we all know what debt is – becomes ‘highly leveraged’.

In fact just two days ago I read, just by chance I have to admit, a letter in the most recent issue of The New Yorker from the head honcho at S&P Capital in response to a piece a John Lanchester had written about the impenetrable jargon employed by the financial world to confuse the hell out of the rest of us. Lanchester chastised our bankers, brokers and their camp followers for describing ‘debt’ as ‘credit’.

Yes, wrote the S&P head honcho patiently in reply, of course, he took Lanchester’s point, but, you see in a sense ‘debt’ was ‘credit’. And he is right: I you owe me money, you are in debt and I have a credit. But that does expand a great deal more the already vast amount of land covered by the notion of bloody disingenuousness. Is, in a sense, ‘evil’ really ‘good’? At this point the bankers, brokers and their camp followers will certainly be nodding to each other and muttering ‘well, the trouble is this Patrick Powell chap doesn’t understand the subtleties of finance and banking’.

To which I reply: on the contrary, this Patrick Powell chap and a growing number like him are beginning to understand only to well the ‘subtleties’ of finance and banking. And they are getting rather fed up with carrying the can for the implications of those ‘subtleties’. This all started with a headline I spotted in several papers about how ‘the pound has plunged’ because one poll suggested ‘wee Scotland’ might finally be getting terminally fucked off with being patronised by the chinless Herberts who hold the reins of power in the United Kingdom.

There are, of course, two issues at stake here: Scottish independence and the herd mentality of another set of chinless Herberts who mad and manic panic can affect the immediate future of the British economy. And much as I’d like to waffle on for some considerable time, I am informed that supper is ready.

. . .

A few hours later

It is still another nine days to the Scottish referendum and I think from the above it is pretty obvious where my sympathies lie. I also get the feeling the the No Together campaign, or whatever they are calling themselves today, is panicking as only bullies can panic when they realise their bluff has been called.

All their sudden promises for ‘more power’ if you stick with us strikes me as just the kind of crap a violent husband promises the wife he has been beating up for the past 15 years: ‘Sorry, love, I really, really do love you and I’ll never hit you again. Promise.’ Several hours later, after yet another imagined blow to his ego, he lashes out, and the good lady packs her bag for ever.

My solution, and one which doesn’t have a cat in hell’s chance of ever coming about, not least cos Ireland, Scotland and Wales don’t trust England one inch, would be a truly federal arrangement, one in which all four constituent parts of the UK are equal partners, and the Commons is reduced to something like 200 MPs, with 50 (or whatever is regarded as an equitable number) representing each federal partner. But, forget it, that ain’t never going to happen.

So, my best wishes, Scotland. It might blow up in your faces, and it might not. But at least you will be shot of the English and their insufferable patronising attitude.

. . .

Later still (in fact, the following day)

It has come to my notice that in an entry (at some point somewher, I know not where now. Shame, eh?) I said (I ‘opined’ for Will Self fans) that when all was said and done I believed Scotland would be better off in the Union. It would seem I have changed my tune, but actually I haven’t.

I still think, if these things are considered in pounds, shillings, pence and salmon, that Scotland would be better off remaining in the Union. But there come times when not everything can be reduced to its financial value. (In the same spirit I heartily dislike the current obsession that reduced education, both secondary and tertiary (‘university’ for Will Self fans), to ‘finding a role in the workplace’ or some other such utiliratian and utterly soulless guff.

We don’t educate our young to work and become the next generation of worker drones, we educate them to expand themselves and their minds and to make the best they can of themselves in whatever way they choose to. OK, so 110pc of use do end up as worker drones, but there is not good case I know of for making the process easy and assisting the grandgrindian tendency.