From Private Eye

£400m = Profit made by South Africa from World Cup

£700m = Profit made by FIFA from World Cup

ZERO = Tax paid by FIFA to South Africa, as per agreement made when FIFA chose S Africa as 2010 venue

FIFA has been described

as a house of privilege, arrogance and corruption, built not of bricks but mud.

….interesting…….

“Sea-Fever”

I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking.

I must down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.

I must down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.

Although John Masefield (1878-1967) was a very popular poet in his day he is now largely forgotten – his poems regarded by the modern literary elite as too romantic and lyrical. Yet I would argue that Sea Fever is a beautiful poem that captures the feelings of anyone as they gaze out over the sea.
Strangely enough, though Masefield had briefly been a seafarer he was never able to adjust to the hardships of a sailor’s life. Yet his poems are probably more evocative of the sea than those of any other poet in terms of imagery, cadence and rhythm – and the nature of the modern world…..

“Cargoes”

Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir,
Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine,
With a cargo of ivory,
And apes and peacocks,
Sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine.

Stately Spanish galleon coming from the Isthmus,
Dipping through the Tropics by the palm-green shores,
With a cargo of diamonds,
Emeralds, amythysts,
Topazes, and cinnamon, and gold moidores.

Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack,
Butting through the Channel in the mad March days,
With a cargo of Tyne coal,
Road-rails, pig-lead,
Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays.

Your daughter’s being bullied, your son’s class isn’t learning anything because the teacher can’t control it, the playing field has been sold off, the roof leaks, reading levels are below average and Year 4 have had five teachers in two terms but stop worrying – the school has its priorities right….

The kids lunchboxes have been secretly opened, the contents photographed and certain parents have been summoned to the school and accused of not conforming to official “healthy eating” guidelines…

A recently discovered unpublished chapter discovered in a mislaid file in the office of the publishers of George Orwells “1984”?

If only….

Its from something that’s been going on in schools in Gloucestershire in the UK for several months. However it has now been stopped because some parents thought it was a little intrusive.

Nonsense, said the school, acting as “soft cop”

we did it in a very nice and careful way, and in no way was it demanding and intrusive

The local Director of Public Health was “hard cop”

Childhood obesity is a serious concern and has major implications for the individual’s health and health services

The lunch boxes were opened and photographed by teachers who then marked them and fed the information into a database and parents who failed to get good marks were “invited” to discuss their failure with teachers (whose union leaders are always claiming are overworked)

All the parents were very positive about it

No doubt – but one can’t help wishing that several parents had gone in and suggested, forcefully but politely, that the man hours wasted in this KBG type snooping would have been better spent teaching the kids to improve their reading, writing and arithmetic……

In 2004 Paul Bristow and his wife Thea didn’t have much money. They lived in a modest house near Torquay in Devon and had fairly low paid jobs – he worked in a zoo, she in a souvenir business. But the father of three didn’t bear grudges for any of that. Indeed he and his wife had organised the local scout troop for twenty years in the belief that being part of a community meant giving something back.

His one concession to his own pleasure was to go regularly to watch his local football team, Torquay United, a lowly under achieving club in the nether reaches of the professional leagues, in their consistently doomed attempts to break through into the higher divisions.

One day Thea came home and told Paul she was almost certainly facing redundancy.

The next day they won £15 million in the National Lottery.

They then rented a cheap trailer in a seaside resort in neighbouring Cornwall and gave themselves a week to ponder their future actions.

When they got back they paid a builder to put a new roof on their garage. They had some new carpets fitted in some of their rooms. They replaced some of their furniture. They refurbished their bathroom.

Then they paid half a million pounds to take their entire scout troop for a two week all expenses paid trip to explore British Columbia.

A year or so later they paid for a similar trip to Austria.

He heard that neighbours were worried that nearby woodland was going to be ripped out by property developers. So he spent £100,000 buying the site so it could remain untouched.

And when he heard that his beloved Torquay United was about to be put into liquidation he led a consortium which took over the club and revived its fortunes.

This week Paul, aged 59, died of a heart attack

I went to his scout group, he was a lovely man and so generous to all of us, not only did I know him as a leader but as a great family friend

Thank you   RIP Paul Bristow x

So sad he died so young. But then I guess a man like Paul Bristow would see things from a different angle – thinking he was incredibly lucky to be able to use his good fortune to help others.

Thank God for people like Paul and Thea Bristow…

Andrew Neil gives a master class in eviscerating a loony left champagne socialist – this woman, Diane Abbott, MP, is standing as a candidate for leader of the Labour Party.

I especially enjoyed the “racist” moment – she didn’t like that….

Andrew Neil is no respecter of politicians…..watch here as he gave Lib Dem Vince Cable a good smacking. Also note his colleague, Stephanie Flanders with her sweet smile just before she kicks Vince in his crotch.

Just imagine Andrew and Stephanie giving the same treatment to Obama….

Am I the only person on this planet who can watch these clips and recapture those ecstatic moments of feeling I was in a whole new dimension, away from parents, teachers, bosses and that smug, suffocating, pompous world of received opinion?

Rock n’Roll came exploding out of nowhere (or so it seemed to a gangly British 15 year old going through all those frighteningly mysterious upheavals of adolescence in the 1950s). The notion of a “teenager” was still perceived by most of UK society as an American cultural phenomenon, as alien to our green and pleasant land as those other Hollywood constructs, the cowboy and the gangster.

Although there was an established record industry in post war Britain it’s output was constrained by tastes dictated by radio and that, for us, meant the BBC which had a broadcasting monopoly throughout the land. The result was a bland easy listening diet leavened, occasionally, by the odd “novelty” number.

There was, of course, jazz which had, by the late 40s become respectable and the trade mark music of the student population and it’s bohemian fringe – New Orleans style, in the main, often lovingly analysed and deconstructed by an emerging coterie of bearded cultural commentators. Strangely enough modern jazz, more inventive and adventurous than the predictable drone of trombones and banjos, never became deeply rooted amongst the mass of student opinion in the UK.

Naturally the BBC played some jazz.

Fortunately, like supporters of the Resistance in Vichy France, at night, under the cover of darkness, my friends and I could listen to a different music,  sounds that were ignored by the BBC even though they were beginning to echo across the American airwaves. These came via Radio Luxembourg, a European commercial station with a transmitter powerful enough to reach S E England and, even more exciting, AFN, the American Forces Network operating out of Germany.

Unfortunately the signal was never clear and constant from either station and the sound would fade several times during the play of one record. Nevertheless, through word of mouth at school, we were able to get some sort of fix on what was happening in US music and that was how I came across Bill Haley and the Comets.

In some quarters it appears almost de rigueur to downplay Haley’s significance in the emergence of rock music and portray him as a one hit wonder who just got lucky with Rock Around The Clock in ’54/’55. In fact this run of the mill country singer  had been experimenting with introducing elements of black rhythm and blues into a western swing style as early as 1951 and, by 1953 had gained national chart success with Crazy Man Crazy but it was Rock Around The Clock, first recorded in April 1954 that became a global phenomenon in 1955 when it was used as the musical theme for the film Blackboard Jungle.

By the end of 1955 rockn’roll was big news not just in the record industry but throughout the world’s media and Bill Haley was The Man – and before any jumped up little scribbler from Rolling Stone tries to say otherwise I WAS THERE!  Of course there were other singers and groups (almost entirely from the world of black r&b) who were cutting significant records in the early fifties and, of course, the appearance of Presley as a national star in 1956 had pushed Haley out of the spotlight by 1957 but the fact remains that it was Haley and RATC that created rock as the global culture of youth.

A few months after Haley went global Chuck Berry burst into the charts with Maybellene. Berry was an awkward and sometimes unpleasant individual with a chequered personal life but his music was lively and laced with humour. Most of his songs told little stories, vignettes of everyday life that moved to a driving beat. He accompanied himself with a distinctive guitar style that made the instrument sing.

Berry was one of the first black r & b artists to cross over into the national charts partly because he himself (like Ray Charles) was quite a fan of country music so had a feel for the best way of tailoring his songs for white audiences.

Fats Domino was another black musician who hit the charts in 1955. He was already a well established young bluesman but the driving, steady beat of Ain’t That A shame coupled with an insistent riff placed this squarely in the rockn’roll canon. Unlike Berry, Fats Domino was never suggestive, just straightforwardly cheerful.

Little Richard broke into the big time in 1956. Long Tall Sally was fiery and fierce and full of sexual induendo intertwined with almost Runyonesque humour = just the ticket for a bunch of hormonally challenged teenage boys…….

Elvis was, of course, what the emerging rockn’roll movement,  was waiting for, a good looking young white guy who sounded black. Sam Phillips watched the impact of the Comets in 1954 and realised that the avuncular odd looking thirty plus Haley could never generate an emotionally driven fan base. With Presley he found his diamond in the rough and over the next eighteen months he created quite a stir throughout the south. Once he moved to RCA at the start of 1956 he was immediately transformed into a cult figure.

We are now so familiar with the bloated, white suited Vegas image from the 1970s (why do Elvis impersonators always have to reprise that sad image?) but to me this is the Elvis I like to remember – rough, raw and slightly menacing……and that Scotty Moore guitar solo – I’d never heard picking like that before in the suburbs of South London…..

Like I said – am I the only one on the planet with these memories?

Well remember you heard it here first (I am always modest….lol…)

David Cameron will defend his decision to slash Government spending as he meets US President Barack Obama for one-on-one talks on the fringe of the G8 summit in Canada.

Publicly, of course, the mood music is all sweetness and light between Cameron and Obama but, behind the scenes the President must be a little irritated – especially as, for once, he appears to be at the receiving end of a sideswiping homily…

While countries with a budget surplus, like China, need to stimulate domestic demand, nations with large deficits need to restore confidence by “living within their means”, said the PM.

“The risk to us – and the Americans and others recognise this – is not taking action,” said Mr Cameron. “I think that the G8 will actually conclude that those countries with the worst problems need to accelerate their action, which is what we have done.

Then another twist of the knife in this article for the Toronto Globe and Mail where he hammers home the point of rebuilding the global economy through getting national national finances under control and ( another poke in the eye for Team Obama’s conception of stimulus) encouraging free trade not spooning out pork to special interests…

Third, we must continue to press for the real stimulus that our economies need: trade. Trade is the greatest wealth-creator ever known. It has lifted billions out of poverty.

Memo to the US right blogosphere – second look at Cameron?

Earlier this week The UK government read President Obama’s letter requesting that the G20 countries carry on stimulating their economies – in other words copy current US policy – and binned it.

George Osborne, Chancellor of the Exchequer, used his budget statement to force some unpleasant medicine down British throats in the shape of tax increases and cuts in public expenditure – with the promise of more public spending cuts to come.

“Our policy is to raise from the ruins of an economy built on debt a new, balanced economy where we save, invest and export. An economy where the state does not take almost half of all our national income, crowding out private endeavour,”

Naturally people aren’t out on the streets dancing with glee and there were squeals of displeasure from special interest groups. But it seems that most of us are actually behaving like political adults for the first time in years.

Despite slapping an extra £40billion of savage spending cuts and tax rises on the nation, Brits have given the Chancellor a big thumbs up.

On the issue if the chancellor has taken the right decisions for the nation as a whole 57% said yes, 23% said no and 20% were unsure.

Even when asked the question had he taken the right decisions “for you as an individual” the break was

Yes 42%
No 33%
Not sure 25%

Of course once the taxes and cuts begin to bite opinions might change. But at least we seem to be weaning ourselves off rainbows and unicorns.

Perhaps more people than usual read the gloomy comment from The Bank of International Settlements

As the Bank for International Settlements said in April, we have moved into a phase of this global drama where sovereign debt fears have reached “boiling point”.
It warned of an “abrupt rise in government bond yields” in industrial states as investors choke on a surfeit of public debt. “Bond traders are notoriously short-sighted, assuming they can get out before the storm hits: their time horizons are days or weeks, not years or decade. We take a longer and less benign view of current developments,” said the study.
“Rapidly ageing populations present a number of countries with the prospect of enormous future costs that are not wholly recognised in current budget projections. The size of these future obligations is anybody’s guess,” it said.

Chilling words for those countries whose leaders are still claiming that tackling the deficit is something that can be left on the back burner……

If you have friends or family in the UK why not send them a gift of cupcakes through the London based Small Cake Shop for July 4th. They can decorate the cakes with the US flag or most other designs of your choice.

Contact them here….

 Great news – President Obama is having a new road named after him in Orlando, Florida.

Less attention has been paid to the new road being built in Hanksville, Utah, behind Blondie’s Eatery. It won’t connect with Highway 95 and, after 250 yds will just peter out into nothing. However, as a tribute to the Obama stimulus it will be named Ozymandias Drive and there are plans to build a huge statue of Obama bestriding the road.

The famous English poet Shelley was not available for comment but his representative issued the following statement to the media on his behalf.

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.