This soi disant Jet Set Hobo remained at home in Budapest this year, playing host to his younger brother Craig, a fine fellow who newly bearded, looks rather like the Captain of a submarine these days. We had a lovely, if rather bibulous time.
With my children’s book now in print and my television series pulling some really rather remarkable ratings for a late night cable show in central Europe, twenty-twelve was a banner year for this particular writer. And to cap it all off, just as I was downing tools (so to speak) on the afternoon of Christmas Eve, I received word that my friend Sir Christopher White, the Baronet of Beyoğlu is not only that much closer to finding the publishing deal he deserves for his works, he has made a sure-footed foray into the world of blogging. Granted, ‘blog’ seems too clunky a word to describe the online home of his witty and erudite prose, but there you are. Or rather, here you are – the Micawber Chronicles online. The Diary and Adventures of a Gentleman in Exotic Circumstances.
Continuing with my introduction to Sir Christopher White and his works
The Baronet & friend
My conversation with the Baronet rambled all over the map, and I did not see fit to press for a chronological autobiography. His childhood, he writes about eloquently in his memoir-as-novel, Shadows In Between. I know that he has been married three tines and that he once drove an MG from London to Rome and slept under the stars every night on the Spanish Steps, until via a series of scarcely creditable coincidences, he landed his first teaching job.
England 1 to Slovenia 0. ‘A damned near run thing’, to quote the Duke of Wellington after Waterloo. Well, actually what he said was “It has been a damn nice thing – the nearest run thing you ever saw.” But he meant nice as in finely judged, a close call. Ah well, the poor things deserve a bit of good luck I suppose, after their team’s abysmal performance on the field up until now, and of course, this week’s emergency budget. This of course was the most severe cutback on public spending since the dark days of the dark ages, back in the eighth century. And you know some of us still remember… But I jest. It has been the most severe belt tightener however since at least 1945. As you may be aware, following WWII, Britain’s economy was shot to hell, and far from strengthening the Empire, it hastened its demise. But at least they’d done something worthwhile with all that capital, defeating Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. This time around, it’s more like a collective shopaholic hangover, after a decade binging on overpriced clothes, real estate, drugs, booze, household goods and vacations in Ibiza.
Still, in times of crisis, people will cling to patriotism and to shared pride in identity wherever they can. Mainstream British media for instance, can all seem to concur that the injured David Beckham has still been a great morale booster for the (up till now) beleaguered English side.
Along these same lines, Princes William and Harry are spoken of again seriously as fine young chaps who do a lot of work for charity. When Harry walked through a minefield this week, eveyone remembered to remember his mother, the ill-starred Princess Diana. Even the Grauniad, supposed bastion of all things generally left wing and generally republican ran a piece entitled ‘Is Prince Harry Growing Up?’ Well, not too much one would hope. There’s usually one princeling in each generation allowed to comport themself like a cross between Bacchus and Captain Hook, and Harry would seem to be it.
Anyway, I know, I’m such an old curmudgeon, and I really fly under no particular flag. But congradulations to the English team. Oh and alright, and to the Americans too. I think I may now be ill.
The lady in question is Sarah Ferguson, who was at one time married to Prince Andrew, Prince Charles’ younger, even more equestrian looking brother. (He has molars like Mr. Ed).
Divorced a long time ago, but still trading on that royal connection for all it is worth, the Duchess of York is clearly someone that believes charity begins at home. She has been secretly filmed by the gutter rag ‘News of the World’ (known also as the ‘news of the screws’) selling access to her ex-husband for 500,000 pounds, with a $40,000 deposit.
Hardly the image that the silly moo was trying to project, that of a tireless campaigner for the needy and downtrodden.
Indeed, almost no sooner had the incident made the headlines in the UK (but not, evidently, on Americancentric True/Slant) before ‘Fergie’ was on her way to the United States to accept an award for her work with underprivileged children.
The heart of the UK’s tailoring industry is up in arms about plans by Moss Bros, the clothing chain, to sell “bespoke” suits. Moss Bros – which is firmly positioned in the middle to lower end of the tailoring market (though it would claim otherwise) – will take suit-buyers’ measurements in-store, allow them to chose from a “menu” of cloth, cut and lining options, send the details to a factory in China, and have the suits delivered in four weeks. The suits will cost between £250 and £350. What a load of old gabardine, say the traditional tailors of Savile Row.
250 squid for a handmade suit sounds like a snip to me, but you can see why the tailors on Savile Row would not welcome this development with much relish, not when they are used to charging more like 3000 pounds. Myself, I’ve had shoes and shirts and suits made in Hong Kong and in Seoul, at a price much closer to Moss Bros new offer. For £3000, I’d not only want the suit to look good, but caress me gently all day when I’m wearing it, then get up in the middle of the night when I’m asleep and do all my housework.
London mayor Boris Johnson, AKA Bojo - almost as English as the cross of St. George
Or not, as the case may be.
Today of course, is Saint George’s Day. Which means the more patriotic (jingoistic?) kind of Englishman will be sporting the flag of Saint George; whether worn as a t-shirt over a bulging lager belly, as a tasteful bit of face painting, or a painted cross worn over an equally dashing shaven head.
Anyway as to the provenance of, “Cry God, for Harry, England & old Saint George”. Harry in this instance is not William’s brother Harry, the rapscallion currently third in line to throne, but of course Henry V. The line comes from the play by the same name (Henry V) penned by one William Shakespeare. And as you may already know, today also happens to be the bard of Avon’s birthday.
So, plenty of reason to feel good about the flag of Albion? Perhaps not. For one thing, in the last decade or so, the flag of Saint George has been adopted by some pretty dubious groups within English society. Football hooligans, for one thing. The BNP, or British National Party, for another. For National, read here National Socialist, white supremacist party. The BNP of course would like England, and by extension Great Britain, to enjoy the kind of prestige that it did when a quarter of the globe was coloured pink, and the sun it said, never set on the British Empire. Ironic of course that nothing hastened the demise of that empire so rapidly as their defiant stand against Hitler and the Axis powers. This is one of many reasons the BNP’s particular brand of patriotism is so off-kilter, and just plain offensive.
Nigella Lawson has been revealed as the inspiration for the White Queen in Hollywood’s new adaptation of Alice in Wonderland.
Tim Burton, the film’s American director, said he based the character on the domestic goddess after watching her television cookery shows. As played by Anne Hathaway, the Queen has a Stepford Wives-esque smile and is a dab hand in the kitchen. “There’s this very beautiful cooking show host in England named Nigella Lawson and I quietly had her as my image for this character,” Burton told the Los Angeles Times.
Is Nigella, Britain’s ‘domestic Goddess’ not known in the United States then? To my mind, she was the first of the new wave (nouvelle vague?) of television cooks. The first one to come along and make cooking look sexy I mean, which she did so as she blew on hot spoons and licked the ends of her fingers in soft focus. For all of that, Nigella remains a very British type of sex symbol, of a certain age, with a touch of the school ma’am about her. Every time she appeared on television, one could imagine monocles popping from the eye sockets of old Majors in retirement homes in Gloucestershire, with cries of: “My God, what a woman!” The Jet-Set Hobo stood next to her in an elevator in the British Museum once, and the monocle stayed firmly in his socket, but only because he kept a stiff upper lip.
My loyal fans, all three of you, may have been wondering about the prolonged absence of the Jet-Set Hobo. Suffice to say, it has all gone pear-shaped here in Beirut.
As of tomorrow, I am once again a free agent, I am between engagements. Or to put in another way, unemployed. Probably it’s all my fault. Not in all honesty that I’ll be terribly sorry to leave the Lebanon. A bit of this place goes a looooooong way. The hobo has been routed, defeated, trounced, traduced, and put through the wringer. He has learned something about himself along the way however. In short, it is this. Without briefcases full of cash, a personal driver and an apartment with a uniformed doorman, he’s just not tough enough for day-to-day life in Beirut. And right now those kinds of accoutrements are somewhat out of reach. It has been a long, cold recession for this roving scribe and bon vivant, and on this rainy Sunday evening in Beirut, it’s hard to see the light at the tunnel except as a train heading towards us, as we struggle, tied to the tracks.
Whichever way you slice it, my implosion in Beirut represents another broken dream for the collection. Conventional wisdom has it that in life you only regret the things you don’t do, not the things you do. But that’s a load of tripe, I’m here to tell you.
The video link is to the trailer of A Cafe in the Sky, a little arthouse film I carried like a cross on my back for longer than I care to recall, but which of course has never made a dime. The tune is Gloomy Sunday, which is appropriate, and it’s the gloomiest possible version, which is also apposite.
Anyway, in a few days I fly to London. Oh my word. Whatever comes next, it will be a pleasant, initial change to be somewhere the electricity and hot water is reliable, internet speeds are faster than continental drift and I’m not regarded with something between bewilderment and suspicion when I walk the streets or into a cafe or bar. I have been trying to keep a brave face, at least in Facebook status updates, but it’s been getting to me.
Stiff upper lip and onwards and upwards. I do hope to send more chipper tidings from London, though too many of my pals over are there are writing me grim missives about job cuts and recession and you know, ‘broken bloody Britain’. For broken, they should try the Lebanon, where for example just this afternoon in the office, the electricity, gas, phone lines and internet have all cut off at various points. Spare me.
Ladles and jelly spoons, deepest apologies, for we might be a tad intermittent, a touch irregular with posts over the next few days.
You see I fly this evening to spend a few days in Christchurch, which is where I was brought up, and where my delusions of grandeur must have began. Christchurch itself seems to me to be founded on delusions – or at the very least on a dream. An Edwardian reverie of distant England, remembered through a rose-tinted lens. And what, prey tell me, is wrong with that?
At sunset on a summer’s evening watching the punts drift down the River Avon, or sunrise in Hagley Park on a frosty day in Spring, it’s hard not to be taken in by the vision.
In any case, for the next few days I’ll be spending some time en famille in Christchurch, before flying back to wretched bloody Auckland for a night, and then at last I’m Beirut bound. À bientôt! I will post as and when I can for the next few days. Do try and behave yourselves in my absence.
Boris Johnson saves woman from street attack… Green filmmaker Franny Armstrong pays tribute to ‘my knight on a shining bicycle’. Boris Johnson rescued a woman from three “feral kids” who were wielding an iron bar, chasing them away on his bicycle, it emerged tonight.
The three feral kids were apparently not much older than twelve, though one of them was carrying an iron bar as big as she was. The activist filmmaker in question confessed that she was traditionally a labour supporter, but that when it came to fending off nasty minded little guttersnipes, she’d opt for Boris the Tory every time over his opponent ‘red Ken’ Livingstone. Quite right too.
This on a day when I received mail from my brother, who works for Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu in London. Father to a handsome one year old, Craig worries about his son growing up in ‘broken Britain’, as the tabloids, quite correctly for a change, insist on calling it. He despairs of his young lad one day becoming a ‘CHAV’ (said to stand for Council House & Violence) or joining some knife wielding street gang.
It’s going to take more than chivalrous cycling civil servants to put his mind at rest, and quite understandably.
