That unforgettable moment…….

It’s a choir of women – but they are very special women, very special indeed.

They are British military wives – and their husbands have just got back from a tour of duty in Afghanistan.

For several months they were on their own, waiting every second of every minute of every day for “that message” – and all the time having to do the mundane family things with the kids and the house and without much of a social network because the families move bases so often they rarely have time to root themselves into a community.

Enter choirmaster Gareth Malone.

A soldier’s wife wrote to him and suggested he take a group of those women and form them into a choir.

Now Malone is no ordinary choirmaster.

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So he took up the challenge which is why earlier this year he found himself and his BBC TV crew in a Royal Marine base in Devon. He realised that his passionate belief in the power of music to transform people’s lives would certainly be tested in this environment.

It wasn’t easy. Many of the women were shy and self conscious and few had any ever sung in public. But over the months, although there were many ups and downs the women bonded and were transformed from “nervous novices into full voiced confident choristers”

Malone, (“geeky, glasses, bow ties, tweed jackets”) had never ever had anything to do with the services and was distinctly nervous about how he would be received by a military community that tends to keep to itself. But his passion for music, his unbridled enthusiasm and dogged determination won them over.

Finally Malone and the Military Wives sang in November at the Festival of Remembrance at London’s Royal Albert Hall before the Queen and a huge audience inside the concert hall and live to millions watching on TV. They sang “Wherever You Are” composed by Paul Mealor. He drew the words from extracts given to him by the families, extracts from letter and poems written by the wives and their husbands while they were parted.

Remember the vast majority of these women had never sung in public before March 2011 – and the words they were singing came straight from their hearts…….

See their very first rehearsal here and their first public performance here.

UPDATE See the official Military Wives Choir video with lyrics here – and pre order the single here….there are three good reasons to buy the single
1 It’s a beautiful song beautifully sung
2 All proceeds go to service charities
3 By making it the UK Christmas #1 you will be giving Simon Cowell’s and his X Factor a poke in the eye

Obviously the BBC has not made much of this story…..I wonder why?

Oxford educated left wing Guardian hackette Marina Hyde (“one of the funniest and most admired journalists in the UK”) might be getting the smallest Oxfam charity Christmas card this year from her editor Alan Rusbridger who had to endure the humiliation of seeing his face spread over The Sun as the tabloid helpfully pointed out

The much hyped Ms Hyde, the daughter of Sir Alastair Edgcumbe James Dudley-Williams, 2nd Baronet, blends in perfectly with the well born radical chic crowd at The Guardian burnishing their NW1 dinner party credentials by bashing the “rich” and the Tories. But it’s perfectly clear that this was a story that fitted so neatly into the Guardian’s Murdoch manic obsession she didn’t even bother to check it out.

Epic fail.

But her career will not suffer. Socialist hacks live in a risk free environment when it comes to peddling untruths because the golden rule of left wing journalism is that truth = what ought to be true rather than what is true. There will be no explosion of indignation from media colleagues for this shoddy piece of gimcrack “journalism”. No thundering broadsides from the BBC for it is now open season on Murdoch, not because of the hacking and blagging that anyway was probably par for the course for all tabloids, including the left wing Mirror – but because Murdoch and The Sun switched their support from Labour to the Conservatives in the final months of Gordon Brown’s tenure at No. 10 – and the many years of Murdoch supporting Labour were immediately conveniently airbrushed out of history.

Hence the lack of BBC interest in this story.

But imagine the outburst from the BBC if it had been a Sun reporter inventing stuff up about The Guardian. …..

Aaaaahhhhh….the sweet sense of liberal left hypocrisy in the morning…..

Murphy lives here.

He is 13 years old, was a rescue cat whose first home was obviously a living hell so he never has been particularly cuddly. Our grandson Oliver once summed him up perfectly as “the grumpiest cat in town.”

He has been hit by a lorry, fallen out of trees and accidentally clunked by a brick. In his younger days he saw off legions of other cats who dared to trespass into his territory plus one or two dogs. Now, however, apart from catching the odd rabbit just to prove he can still do it when push comes to shove, he prefers to take it easy, especially in front of a new log burner that, in the nature of cats, he assumes has been provided purely for his own comfort.

So, with all those crises ripping across the globe, Murphy just switches them out of his mind….maybe there’s a lesson to be learned here…..

OK they want you to buy stuff from their shops but set that aside for one moment.

John Lewis is one of the most profitable retailers in the UK with branches in every big city, renowned for quality, value and good service. It rarely advertises on television since it’s reputation in itself is sufficient to generate footfall but for Christmas a TV commercial is regularly screened. As always the production values reflect the public’s perception of the store.

In 90 seconds this advertisement says more about love and family than a regiment of pundits could ponticate about in a thousand books….

Usually we post pictures of England in the sun but, of course, we often have days that are damp and dull – like this one.

Every Wednesday morning, whatever the weather, whatever the season, we, plus an assortment of other aged folk, do a 5 or 6 mile walk in the countryside of Sussex or Surrey – then end up in a pub for a beer and a sandwich.

So here we are, at the top of a very steep hill, wet, muddy but unbowed…

Mrs P in the middle in red, yours truly next to the guy in the hat next to the lady with the umbrella….

Excelsior!!!

Same report, different reactions….

Overheard at a Guardianista North London dinner party

Overheard in a pub in South London

Overheard in a golf club in Dorking, Surrey

How do I know in my bones that the coverage of the 2012 US election will be total crapola, not just from the card carrying rainbow and unicorn lefty luvvies at the BBC but also from the “official” so called right wing media?

Like any sane, well balanced and nuanced English conservative populist I hardly ever bother to get my information about US politics from the established UK media.. BBC (MSNBC in drag), Telegraph (Country Club GOP), Mail (National Enquirer)…or the right wing blogosphere.. ConservativeHome (Douthat/Brooks/Frum), Spectator Coffee House (Frum/Brooks/Douthat)

Why should I bother with yesterday’s stale bread when I can go to Hot Air, Stacy McCain, Dan Riehl and Prof Jacobson to get the just baked bagels? Or fly around the Twitterverse with @SissyWillis, @pepper_10, @ginthegin and other wild Tea Partiers/Palinistas

It was from Hot Air & Co. that I first learned about the Tea Party as early as February 2009, long months before it appeared on UK media radar. It was also from those sites, articulating a fierce anger, not just against the Obama stimulus and healthcare plans but also against the Douthat/Brooks/Frum nexus of GOP choirmasters that I began to realise the strength of the fireball that hit Washington in the 2010 mid terms.

Until well into 2010 the UK media and blogs were following the Brooks line of working with Obama and the Democrats because they had won so overwhelmingly in 2008. Avoid outright confrontation and maybe, in 2016 or 2020 an Obama- lite GOP figure might be able to slip into the White House – the Huntsman scenario.

Palin, of course, was sniffily dismissed as an airhead. Herman Cain was blanked when he was an outsider and still is being relatively ignored even though he is currently pushing out Perry in the polls. Neither of them passed the David Brooks trouser crease test.

At almost every stage the UK media and “official” blogosphere has got it wrong about the US political scene.

Which is why I am dreading the forthcoming coverage of the 2012 primary and presidential campaign

We could really do with a UK website that totally ignores comments from NYT, WaPo and the official newsletter of the DNC, Politico, and the legions of lobbyists, consultants and seedy academics paraded by Rentaquote.

There has been progress – the relatively new Commentator isn’t interested in what David Frum opines, Spiked is wildly anarchic poking it’s rapiers from both the left and the right into the pompous and self serving political/cultural media elite and Biased BBC continues its never ending crusade against the smug, arrogant North London dinner party cartels that run the BBC. But it’s an uphill battle against a powerful network of establishment quislings who rely on the collective mental inertia of a an intellectually disenfranchised population more easily seduced by watching the degrading antics of publicity seeking clowns and charlatans and being politically masturbated by the politics of greed, envy and ignorance…..

We are beset by snakes – why isn’t there a mongoose around when you need one……

I suppose I can always dream….

This and this show a side of George W Bush that appears not to have been reported by the BBC…..I wonder why? Surely they cannot have an agenda…..after all didn’t they do a massive highlight on this report about Katrina, debunking many of the myths? I’m sure they did….

Would you buy your organic yoghurt from one of these hunky Somerset farmers?

My how those Somerset farmers have changed….

Yeo Valley pitched their commercial especially for the UK X Factor – it comes to something when a lot of viewers find an advert more interesting than the over ramped narcolepsy inducing Simon Cowell TV dross…..and The Wurzels are still going strong after forty years or so. Great music, their gigs are always sold out but they would never ever win X Factor….probably a moral there, somewhere….