Knats

APOLOGIES to my avid reader, for I think there is one hiding somewhere, about the lack of a blog. I’ve been too busy celebrating old people’s birthdays (including my own) and getting all cultural.

It’s been a while since I saw a gig, a play, a film, and a comedy show in the same week. You’d have to go back to London in the 1980s when the review tickets fell like confetti at a freeloader’s wedding. And that’s not to mention time spent watching Celebrity Traitors; more of that in a moment.

Here’s how the week took shape…

First we drove to Knutsford to spend the night visiting my 94-year-old mother, then found ourselves buffeted back in a rain-lashed gale that blew without regard to the feelings of medium-sized Spanish hatchbacks or their frowning medium-sized drivers.

Delivered home more or less in one piece, the next day we celebrated my father-in-law’s 90^th birthday with lunch at a country pub.

That evening we went to a gig by Knats, a Newcastle jazz, poetry and rap band led by lifelong best mates Stan Woodward (bass) and King David-Ike Elechi (a drummer with arms to shame a telegraph pole).

They’d been nominated for the Mercury Prize but didn’t seem too put out not to have won.

Unlike some members of the audience, they were absurdly youthful, larky, lusty and talented. At one point, they divided us all into two blocks so a radio-controlled racing car could be driven down the sweaty canyon created by this request. A joyous night.

Next up was The Penelopiad at York Theatre Royal, a play drawn by Margaret Atwood from her own novella that gives the women from Homer’s The Odyssey their say (unlike in Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster movie). At its core is Penelope, left hanging around for 20 years while her husband is off male gallivanting and Trojan warring. Amelia Bullmore was spry and athletic in the title role, but much of the credit for the show’s success lay in the eight-strong chorus of young female actors, who played assorted roles, including Penelope’s gravely abused maids.

On a day and we went to a morning screening of Ghosts: The Possession of Button House, a film version of the BBC sitcom about the nicest ghosts you could ever wish to meet.

Mind you, this glorious spin-off from the series has its surprises. For a start, Kitty tasers a police officer. Fanny pulls down her drawers to show off her behind (‘Take a look at these apples!’), while caveman Robin falls for an eco-activist who is not all she seems.

Ghosts was a wonderful family TV show, and this film fills out the characters nicely, and also temporarily frees them from their spectral chains. Best of all, Scout leader Pat, the one with an arrow through his neck, joyrides at speed while driving a stolen police car.

Next day our four-year-old granddaughter came for a sleepover. This was lovely, although she did wake up at a quarter to five on the Friday morning, excited because her uncle was arriving later, and because I was taking her out to buy croissants.

On the Saturday there was a family lunch at a fish-and-chip restaurant for my in-laws (my wife’s dad just turned 90, as mentioned, and her mum is about to).

On the Sunday afternoon I went with a friend to a show he liked the look of. It was called Wankernomics, a title to catch the eye. James Schloeffel and Charle Firth are Australian comedians who find humour in the bullshittery of modern life, the managerial business speak that haunts the office. It’s an easy target, perhaps, but the jokes hit home and the audience squirmed and squealed in agonised recognition.

Underlying the humour is the assured truth that no-one knows anything, and everyone is just spooning nonsense from the word salad bowl to hide this fact.

Thank heavens to be retired was my verdict. No more meetings ever.

TOO often my taste in TV programmes leans to the mildly obscure, including all those subtitled European crime dramas on Walter Presents. And if you haven’t discovered Walter yet, where have you been and how do you wile away those hours?

Celebrity Traitors is not the sort of thing I normally enjoy. But last year we were going away with friends who all said we had to watch. Not wishing to be left out of the conversation, we tuned in and loved the show.

A second series has just ended. It was good, but not quite up to the first, although the final episode was a belter. Before discussing further, it is time for a spoiler alert. Don’t read on if you’ve still to watch.

What’s good about this series, especially if normally you favour dramas seen by a small congregation of similarly minded TV snobs, is that you are watching along with millions of other people. It’s like television used to be. I like that sense of communion.

As for the latest Celebrity Traitors, I was sorry when Hannah Fry was killed off as she always brightens the evening. But compensation for this oversight came when the two winners sent their prize money to charities for refugees.

This annoyed the sort of people who deserve to be annoyed. The Daily Express spluttered… Celebrity Traitors sparks fury over winning charities – ‘ruined the show’.

Headlines, you will have noticed, are not what they were. ‘Sparks fury’ is, by the way, newspaper-speak to describe a few old miseries having a grumble.

So much media and political effort nowadays is directed at convincing us to suspect or despise refugees that it was wonderful to see Sebastian “Bash” Croft and Romesh Ranganathan supporting those charities.

Good on them. It was also interesting to see Bash – I had no notion of who he was beforehand, and probably still don’t – winning round the older, spikier Romesh to his point of view.

Well, there’s a puzzle. Reform UK still contains all those “extremists” and “bigots” Nigel Farage promised to purge. ITV’s film Undercover – A Year In Reform was stuffed to the rafters with them.

Perhaps it is one of those things that Farage can’t go anywhere without attracting a rabble of born-again racists. Not my fault if they like me, he seems to smirk.

Maybe it’s bad luck. Or something in the beer. For they do swig a lot. And swear a lot. And carry on like objectionable bigots who have been told it’s OK to be an objectionable bigot again.

The BBC has reported little about its rival’s investigation. Shame perhaps about being shown how the job should be done. Instead of wheeling out Chris Mason to blather and burble platitudes.

Robert Jenrick – the soap-slippery Tory who lubricated his way onto Farage’s crypto-stuffed galleon – was invited on to the Today programme to say that “Farage has probably done more than almost anybody to stand against racism and the far right”.

That, sir, comes from the bucket marked stinky old horseshit.

Might I point you to Alan Feeney, a Reform councillor and deputy mayor of Solihull, who was filmed calling Asian homeowners “parasites,” and stating that “no more than 1% of [the] British population can be non-white”.

Assorted Reform councillors and candidates made graphic threats of extreme violence while expressing racist and misogynistic views. There were many examples, but repeating all the awful things these awful people say is just too depressing.

If you’ve been around for a while, as I have, it was like being back in the 1970s. That was the most depressing part of all this. We went through all that back then and said, no, we are better than this. Now it’s back to Saturday night racism and repeats of He Ain’t Half Foreign Mum.

Perhaps the biggest surprise of the ITV film was that anyone found this to be a surprise. Farage’s greatest trick has always been to give the nod to racists while clutching his pearls in horror should anyone point this out.

If he honestly believes his party is not racist, he should throw out all the racists and see who’s left.

Reform UK is a sort of philosophical contradiction. It’s racist and not racist at the same time. Or it pretends not to be racist while attracting all the racists. Apart from those who think Farage has gone soft and have departed to the even nastier confines of Restore Britain.

These philosophical inconsistencies say everything about Farage.

He’s the anti-establishment man who’s an establishment as they come and invented ‘the establishment’ as a catch-all collective of things and people to blame. He hates the mainstream media and especially the BBC – and yet both have fallen over backwards to promote him.

He declares himself a man of the people while being extremely rich; he swears he’s a patriot while accepting money and support from right-wing types abroad; and he says only he can fix ‘broken Britain’ – even though it ain’t broke. And if it is, he broke it. Or scratched the paintwork so badly that no-one wants to sit in the car anymore.

Incidentally, one telling moment in the film sees the Reform MP Sarah Pochin complain to an undercover reporter that other party officials “are so fucking chauvinistic” and that “they just exclude you if you are a woman”.

In a sense that struck home more than all the dreadful men who made their excuses in the quotes displayed at the end. It was refreshing to see a dreadful woman speaking for a change.

A birthday selfie…

I have just marked an impossibly big birthday and wish to demand a recount. Or that thing they have at football matches where officials look at something again, just to be sure. A video assistant age verifier.

But it’s no use. The contentious foul has been nodded through. I will have to put up with being 70.

To reach this age I have suffered one serious heart attack and assorted minor ailments. The coronary stumble was two-and-a-half years ago. I don’t think about that too often now. Just sometimes. But I know my wife went through the wringer. She still worries if I am out longer than suggested. Then again, she probably did that before.

I wish now to turn to what has sustained me thus far. The love of family and friends; being with the same good worrying woman for more than 40 years and still having something to talk about (as well as all those repeats and re-runs); trying to retain a sense of humour.

Does reaching 70 teach you anything new? Oh, I don’t know. Ask someone who’s been at it for longer than a few days.

Here is more of what has sustained me. Reading words and writing words; many novels; the occasional pint of decent beer; a weekly glass of malt whisky; baking bread; going to see a film when I remember that cinemas still exist and are a good thing; watching television; listening to music and going to live concerts; playing the guitar; and liking to know stuff, even if there is too much left to know. When they lay me out, let my big toe still twitch with curiosity.

Stay interested in other people, that’s another one; remember to laugh; enjoy being in company and savour being by yourself. Remember which stories you have told and to whom. You will fail at that task but do try.

Exercise helps me, too. Walking, jogging, cycling; badminton and the last days of squash (should 70-year-olds still be allowed on court; my knee is grazed from when I fell the other day).

Thinking about politics too much, on the other hand, can’t be beneficial. Some habits are hard to shake. And who will put the world to rights if not you and me?

Talking of politics, I have joined u3a, the group for retired people. It’s all good so far. Full of old people, but there you go. As a newbie oldie, or an oldie newbie, I have signed up to two groups. One is for creative writing. This might be useful as I am attempting to write a novel again; 30,000 words and counting, although I have just hit a blockage. One that won’t be resolved by me sitting here writing these words but never mind.

The other group meets to discuss current affairs. This week’s topic was the party conference season, starting with the Lib-Dems, Labour and the Greens.

Perhaps surprisingly, considering the age of those taking part, nearly everyone was impressed by Andy Burnham and Labour. The Lib-Dems had a lukewarm reception. This could be summed up as: nothing wrong with them, but what are they for?

Nobody had a good word to say about Zack Polanski and the Greens. Sixth-form politics was one unfavourable verdict of Polanski’s speech. D minus was another. The parties of the right will be discussed next time, when I promise not to swear.

Everyone is very friendly so far. Sitting in that room was a bit like being back at university many decades after term has ended.

Do I have regrets? Oh, too few to mention. Or, perhaps, it is just pointless to hold onto them. A minor one is that I regret wasting time on my phone but still do it anyway.

More widely, I would like to have been a more successful journalist on what we used to call newspapers. A decent national newspaper, not that many remain. But I did sustain a whole working life in or around journalism, so that’s something.

I’d loved to have been John Crace, the parliamentary sketch writer on the Guardian. John is a hero to me, witty and almost too sharp for his own good, but always readable.

There are parallels between us. We have both just turned 70. We had a heart attack at the same time. I wrote about mine before John wrote about his. Many more people read about John’s heart attack than mine, but I got in first, almost as soon as they put that stent in me.

When you are 70 you know that most of your life now lies behind you. But everyone knows that anyway. Besides, we don’t have to be so linear about it. Life spreads in different ways. Yes, you have less countable time left than when you started out. But no-one knows what time will do. Look ahead rather than back; look sideways, too.

I just did that lazy thing where you search for a quote. This one caught my eye – “Don’t wait. The time will never be just right.”

It’s from Napoleon Hill, an American writer I’d never heard of. Turns out he was a self-help author and con man. It occurs to me that those two things might be the same.

Seven Up! started in 1964 as a Granada Television report for ITV’s World In Action. It evolved into a marathon series that ended this week with those still taking part having reached 70.

The original idea was to see how one group of children might measure up to the Jesuitical motto – “Give me the child for the first seven years and I will give you the man”.

That first episode was shot in black and white. I can’t recall if the world was all in grainy monochrome back then, or just the television.

Doctor Who began on the BBC one year earlier with an episode called The Unearthly Child, and that was in black and white. Viewers had to wait until 1970 for the corridors of time and space to be coloured in.

The children gathered for Seven Up! were earthly rather than unearthly, and every seven years they grew as we did. This made for a series that was magisterial, engrossing and emotional, although not without its problems.

In her Observer column last Sunday, Melanie Reid wrote that the Seven Up! series was ‘brilliant but exploitative’ and ‘should never have been made’. That seems to be a cake-and-eat-it moral position to take, and a redundant one too as it was made and has been enjoyed by so many people.

For some the problems lay in a set-up bluntly based on class divisions. The children were chosen from hugely different socioeconomic backgrounds as if to prove a point about advantage.

The Hollywood director Michael Apted, who shaped the series, emphasised this aspect crudely at first, but drew back later.

There were ten boys and four girls, and this uneven split was later acknowledged by Apted to have been a mistake.

Jackie appeared in the first episode alongside her friends Lynn and Sue. The working-class trio were asked about boys at school and their hopes for the future. Jackie, sparky from the off, said she would like to marry a boy “that’s not got a lot of money, but has got some money”.

The remaining girl, Suzy, was from an advantaged background, but her life was upended when her parents divorced. In the last episode she seems almost serene with age.

Jackie bristled against Apted, but then mellowed over the years, and this time round she was happily retired in Norfolk, still sharp, no longer kicking out. She became tearful in the end when talking about Apted, who died five years ago.

Neil, a wide-eyed boy from Liverpool, said in that first episode that he planned to become an astronaut or a coach driver. Instead his life has been a long trial, marked by episodes of mental ill health, homelessness, and an inability to settle or make friends. Yet at 70, living in a cold rented house in France, he seems content, apart from his loneliness. “But that is a characteristic of the age… I’m probably as happy as I can be, given my life.”

Bruce, a thoughtful boy from a more privileged background, said earnestly that his “heart’s desire” was to see his “daddy who is 6,000 miles away” in Rhodesia. The older Bruce becomes an engaging, kindly teacher who works in a tough part of London, in the area where some of the others grew up, moves to a private school, then retires.

In that first episode, three boys from well-off backgrounds, John, Andrew and Charles, were gathered in the headmaster’s office, or so it appeared, to map lives drawn out for them by well-heeled fate.

John later said that Apted had “a sneering and somewhat supercilious manner” and he felt they had been portrayed as privileged bogeymen.

Charles withdrew from the series altogether, eventually working in television for Channel 4. He did not appear in this finale, although his voice was heard from an interview, and he shared pictures of himself mountain climbing.

Peter Davies, a Liverpudlian teacher who stepped away from the series for 27 years to return in 49 Up, talks in the last episode about the difficulties of being cast as a troublesome left-winger. Now retired, but busier than ever, he is a gigging musician who has written a musical.

Sad-eyed Symon, who lived in a children’s home, married once, then again, and with his second wife has fostered more than 100 children in 20 years. The sadness seems to have gone, and the children he cared for often return to visit. His friend Paul, also from the home, moved to Australia, where he still lives, white-bearded and surrounded by his family. In the end family is everything for him, and for many of the others. And for many of us watching, or the lucky ones.

That’s to forget two key ‘players’. Eastender Tony dreamed of being a jockey but ended up a taxi driver. He called himself a “Little Artful Dodger” and had a winning charm, apart from outbursts of racism (he denies this, unconvincingly).

In that first episode, Nick Hitchon, a farmer’s son from the Yorkshire Dales, charmingly explained that he wanted to learn about the moon but wouldn’t be drawn on what he thought of girls.

Nick died aged 65 in 2023. His brother Andrew, who used to work on the same newspaper as me in York, wrote in an obituary for the Guardian that Nick “was an expert in nuclear fusion who eventually accepted that he would always be best known for appearing in a groundbreaking TV documentary rather than as a scientist”.

Nick gave a final interview to the series shortly before he died. It was, like much of this finale, deeply moving. He came to regard the series as something to look forward to, as a pleasing measure of his life.

Asif Kapadia, known for his documentaries on Amy Winehouse and Diego Maradona, took over the directing duties here. His thoughtful wrapping up gently explored the risks of filming children, giving due space to those with doubts, while also celebrating a series like few others.

Stories were told, or retold, with a novelistic eye, letting events repeat, almost to the point of wondering why you were seeing this again, only to then show a different angle.

The emotional weight came with watching people age, and in some cases die, much as everyone else ages and dies. The tousle-haired child turned into an ageing baldie. Something that can happen, or so the mirror tells me.

Three must have been a draft in the room as I watched for there were tears in my eyes by the end.

Picture: Pixaby

YOU got how much? Reform UK has been given £36m by one crypto-billionaire – and then the same amount in the same weekend. Both donors appear to have deep pockets stuffed with untraceable crypto millions.

This is hardly encouraging for British politics – or for any of the other political parties, right, left, or stuck somewhere in the middle.

The dubious benefactors are Christopher Harborne, a crypto-Croesus who lives mostly in Thailand, and Ben Delo, his crypto cousin, who lives mostly in Hong Kong and was convicted of money laundering in the US (until bunged a pardon by Donald Trump).

Nigel Farage, who earlier received five million quid in ‘pocket money’ from Harborne, swears he isn’t in hock to these crypto cronies stuffing money into his pockets.

Well, that’s true in a sense – but only because Farage has already pledged to hugely favour crypto billionaires. He promised them everything they want at a Bitcoin conference in Las Vegas in May 2025 but is now pretending there is nothing to see here.

Absurdly, he insists ‘Reform is the only party that doesn’t sell political favours’. While accepting £72 million in billionaire backhanders in one weekend.

Here, from an unexpected source, is the view of Suzanne Moore in a column in the Daily Telegraph, ‘Reform is a party for very rich men who pretend to care about ordinary people.’

There it is in a gold-plated nutshell. Reform has zero interest in ordinary people; and no wish to participate in the wearisome ins and outs of democracy. It’s all about the money and using that money to grease the game.

What sort of return are Farage’s billionaire pals hoping for? A workable theory would be that they wish to profiteer from asset-stripping what’s left of the British state. To do to Britain what Trump and his backers have done to the US.

One small party being given so much money is, as the Observer put it at the weekend, a ‘corruption of democracy’. But then, Farage displays clear contempt for the cautious meanderings of British democracy. There is nothing in it for him. Trump-like, he wishes simply to have everything his own way, to buy his way to power.

I’ve spent half a lifetime not agreeing with William Hague. And yet he said something sensible in the Times – that unless we use taxes to fund political parties, they will go in search of wealthy backers.

Just imagine, and pardon for me for being so naïve and foolish, a system where all parties had the same amount of money, or perhaps a sum adjusted for the number of seats they have, or the votes they garnered last time round.

They would all have a similar amount to spend on publicity, party political bore-casts, and so on. No single party would be able to throw more money at funding bots to undermine their opponents on social media. Or buying up endless opinion polls.

It would all just be about ideas. About winning voters round through honest persuasion. Not playing cheap political games, indulging in culture war spats, pandering to base prejudice or simply shouting inanities until their face turns purple (it is possible we are talking about you here, Nigel).

Still, that’s probably enough of that foolish daydream. We are where we are, but it’s starting to whiff.

THE RNLI represents the best of us. Those who shout abuse at its volunteers represent the worst of us. It’s a simple equation.

The RNLI sets out to save the lives of those lost at sea. Its brave crews will rescue anyone in trouble. They do not carry a racial colour chart to test the skin colour of those in peril. They do not say: ‘You’re the wrong skin tone – you can say in the briny.’

No, they pluck from the sea whoever may be in trouble.

Yet the RNLI continues to suffer abuse from those so afflicted by cruel idiocy that they equate saving lives at sea with letting too many immigrants into the country.

Thankfully, donations increase every time Tommy Robinson or whoever attacks their work along such lines. So cruel idiocy, while a depressing aspect of modern life, has an unintended positive side.

Here, to close, is an excellent letter in The Times from Dr Martin Stephen, whose life was long ago saved by the RNLI. There is here a line to set in stone…

‘Greater love hath no person than to risk their life for someone they do not know.’

AROUND 8,000 steps a day is said to boost health. Perhaps that was why the ‘patriots’ were out in Dover. Although the number of daily goosesteps needed to maintain a person’s fascist tendencies remains unclear.

They were protesting about asylum seekers, those ‘patriots’, the only topic their cramped craniums can contain. Hidden beneath black balaclavas, they dressed all in black.

It puzzles me that racist thugs don’t wear white, as it’s their favourite colour. Perhaps their mothers resent the post-rally laundry. Just think of the stains from all that sweaty intolerance; not forgetting the spilt beer.

The slight degree of levity introduced here is intended to remind us that mockery has its uses. I would not wish to have been in Dover at the time, or in Portsmouth on a different night, caught in a scrum of thugs.

According to Hope Not Hate, the anti-fascism organisation, the disturbance in Dover was organised by a group called Patriot Platform. As Joe Mulhall wrote in the Guardian of September 7, “Current members hail from the Kent Patriots, Watford Patriots, South London Patriots, South-East Patriots, North-West Patriots, Surrey Patriots and Chertsey Patriots, to name just a few”.

A sentence of grim comedy. And a sober reminder that gatherings of small minds may eventually amass into something bigger and nastier.

And this has happened in large part because Nigel Farage has spent years chasing the debate down a narrow stinking alley, one belligerent bellow at a time, until far-right views on immigration and asylum seekers can dress themselves up as normal or reasonable.

All too predictably, The Sun said the incident showed how the “anger of decent, law-abiding folk” was rising.

I will pause here point out that I don’t read The Sun but spotted that in a report on the BBC website. And I will pause again to say that I really should stop reading anything from the BBC, as its pro-Reform reporting is frankly disgraceful.

But let’s carry on.

If those ‘decent, law-abiding folk’ are angry (other lazy categorising clichés are available), it’s because newspapers such as The Sun, the Mail, the Telegraph, the Express never stop going on about anything else, removing all possibility of perspective, while also puffing up Farage.

Anyone who truly believes that all the problems of this country are caused by asylum seekers and immigration alone has swallowed the poison pills flogged to them by that political mountebank.

Now I have tried to swear off writing about Farage, but it’s difficult. My excuse on this occasion is that Reform UK just had its annual conference. This was marked by two senior aides being suspended after an undercover investigation into the party’s finances emerged during the conference.

The allegations are about money, as always. And whether a polling company called JL Partners broke transparency rules by failing to declare that three separate polls had been commissioned by the party.

This matters because Reform is forever banging on about leading in the polls.

Journalists posed as a Reform donor and his American father, who paid more than £30,000 for polling that generated positive headlines. Farage was filmed saying the polling was “amazing” and provided “bang for buck”. One discussed donation would have totalled £500,000,

Later, Farage told the BBC that he hadn’t been listening properly at that meeting, an excuse as stable as the ash at the end of his cigarette.

Also at the conference, there was a lovely bit of Reform community spirit when supporters attacked women protesters who heckled Farage. In some photographs, an elderly man (that’s one even older than me) appears to hit a protester with his walking stick, while others grabbed at her clothes.

As his speech? Oh, the usual putrid inflammatory nonsense, turned up a notch. If elected Farage would declare a state of emergency and demand that MPs sit for seven days a week to ‘fix’ Britain.

This state of emergency doesn’t exist, much like the lawless London Farage is always chuntering on about. Crime in Britain is falling, but Farage believes that if you repeat a lie often enough it transmutes into the truth. Or a handy weapon.

As for that seven-day week, this is from an MP who can hardly be arsed to turn up to Parliament for one full day. Chasing after dodgy crypto funds and dropping in on far-right cronies in the US clearly takes up more time than you’d think.

Oh, and not all polls are good for Reform. According to YouGov in a poll taken before the newest scandal, only 23% of Britains have a favourable view of Farage, while the rest regard him unfavourably.

And, oh again, now the Metropolitan Police are carrying out a criminal investigation into these latest allegations that Reform UK broke funding laws.

Nice and sleazy does it.

SOMETIMES the story you go looking for isn’t the one you find. That seems to be the case with Donald Trump randomly chopping down trees in Washington DC.

This is not to suggest that Trump himself has been swinging an axe, an activity that would be inadvisable considering his age and barely camouflaged frailty.

Mind you, he might have depicted himself online as a strapping lumberjack, for all I know. He does like AI slop images, in cartoonish self-portrait mode as a dashing superhero, rather than the shabby man he must see in the morning mirror.

What a sight. Sans suit, sans candyfloss toupee, sans orange stage slap on his face. Stripped of… no, let’s stop there. Time to withdraw, shut that door, and talk of trees.

We live in a tree-lined road. And if that sounds bucolic, it really isn’t. It’s busy and suburban but the trees lend grandeur and soften the passage of passing Morrisons trucks and bin lorries. They make life much more pleasant than it otherwise would be, as is the way with trees.

A neighbour has spoken of getting up a petition, having in mind what happened in Sheffield between 2013 and 2018. The council there axed more than 5,000 trees as part of a ‘street improvement’ programme, with plans to cut down around 12,000 more, until protestors got in the way.

Our back garden is also filled with trees, and a few have had to come down over the years. For all their glory, a tree is just a plant with a lifespan that can end in a fall or the chop. Other trees have been planted to replace those that have gone.

There is an old story about the first US president, George Washington, and a tree. The tale has it that as a boy Washington was given a hatchet as a gift and used it to damage his father’s cherry tree. When his father discovered what George had done, the boy said: “I cannot tell a lie…I did cut it with my hatchet.”

All the way from a presidential boy who could not tell a lie to an old president who cannot stop telling them.

Sadly, that story is not true. It is said to have been invented by one of Washington’s first biographers, Mason Locke Weems. He apparently wished to suggest that Washington’s public greatness was due to his private virtues. Whereas Trump’s falling short in greatness might be said to be due to his lack of any virtues, public or private.

According to many social media posts, Trump ordered the chopping down of weeping willows round the Kennedy Center. While a willow might well weep to see what he’s doing to that country, it seems those trees were felled thanks to decay.

A second tree rumour then went viral – Trump was chopping down dozens of cherry trees as part of his plans to renovate a golf course in Washington DC. The US fact-checking site Snopes, and others, found no evidence of such arboreal erasure. The misunderstanding, if that’s what it is, lay in a Washington Post article that reported around 60 trees had been removed from the golf course. This was true but most were poor specimens and only one was a cherry tree, so there you go.

Perhaps it’s just too damn hard to tell what’s true and what isn’t where Trump is concerned, cobwebbed as he is with lies and deceit. And it sounds just his awful thing. After all, he paved over the Rose Garden almost on day one and turned it into a crass patio. Then, without seeking any sort of permission, he knocked down a chunk of the White House in order to build his ridiculous ballroom.

And, you have to admit, he does a good impression of being an intolerant poltroon who would chop down a cherry tree because it looked at him funny; or because it was planted by someone else. Or because he wants more space to cheat at golf, and so on.

But Trump’s cherry tree story, like Washington’s in a way, doesn’t appear to be true. If any removed cherry tree would like to write in to put their side, I will happily print a retraction.

HOW interesting that GB News should put out social media posts praising Donald Trump for using the Falklands Islands as leverage to change Britain’s defence policy.

I thought that lot were in favour of our sovereignty. Nigel Farage never stopped banging on about it before Brexit. Unpuzzle this for me. How was it appalling interference when the EU, of which we were then a member, suggested we do something – but it’s fine now when Trump berates and bullies us and tells us what to do.

I can’t help but suspect that Farage would, if granted power, roll onto his back, stick his legs in the air and invite the Americans to tickle his tummy.

Dolly Parton remembered on the cover of Time

You had one job, God. And yet you shuffled the wrong 80-year-old into the exit queue.

So, yes, we are talking about the country singer Dolly Parton, alongside another octogenarian, who will remain nameless for the next few paragraphs.

When thinking about Dolly’s departure I went first to the American writer and humourist Mark Twain. He must have said something about death, I thought. This turned out to be a good hunch…

“Let us endeavour so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.”

Many people, presumably including undertakers, will be sorry to hear the country star Dolly Parton has died.

Dolly did much good while she was alive, giving pleasure to millions through her music, standing up for herself and therefore women in general, was a sharp businesswoman and also by most accounts a decent person. Beneath that lacquered surface, which was a sort of disguise, she was thoughtful in how she used her wealth and influence.

Behind the country glitter, the big hair and the frocks, beyond her ‘Bedazzled, Bewigged and Bodacious Style’ as the New York Times put it, she could be fun and self-aware.

Two often-repeated quotes suggest she could rival Twain for witticisms…

‘I’m not a fashion icon; I’m an eyesore’

‘It costs a lot of money to look this cheap’.

When famous people die, suddenly we are all fans, even if we are not really. Feeling sad just seems like the right reaction. The death of David Bowie in 2016 was notable for causing much public expression of grief, including from newspaper columnists.

“A hole has been ripped in the universe and we are lost, and we will be for a good while yet,” journalist Suzanne Moore wrote in the Guardian, adding: “This grief is serious and rational.”

The death in 1997 of Diana, Princess of Wales, is often cited as the moment when mass public outpouring of grief began. Yet outbreaks of mourning for the famous can be found deeper in history.

After Charles Dickens died in June 1870, a three-day-long procession of mourners filed past the great writer’s coffin at Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey.

But back to Dolly. Was I really a fan? Not exactly, but she wrote some great songs drawn from ordinary life, not least Jolene and Coat Of Many Colours (said to be Dolly’s own favourite). She also leaves much that is good. Her children’s literacy programme the Imagination Library, set up in 1995, posts books to children from birth to age five for free, regardless of income. Dolly started this in Sevier County, Tennessee, where she grew up, in honour of her father who had never learned to read or write. “Since then, almost 3.2 million children have registered with over 332 million books gifted”, according to the BBC.

That’s what you call a legacy.

And if you’re grieving for Dolly – and one friend certainly will be – your sadness is based in part on the loss of someone good who made life better with her music, her philanthropy and her attitude to life.

DOLLY Parton was born into poverty, eventually made millions while also enriching people’s lives, and then passed on much of her money. Donald Trump was born into great wealth, inherited and squandered millions, doesn’t have a philanthropic bone in that sad sack of a body, is mean and unkind about almost everyone (apart from dictators), and thinks only of himself.

And so it proved when he spoke of Dolly Parton’s death…

“She was unique, I mean, she was amazing. To lose her is like you lose a member of the family. We all knew her so well. I knew her a little bit. She wasn’t a very political person… she really liked me….”

Yup, it’s always about you, Donald. Did she really like you, Donald; does anyone like you at all? Seems the sharp side of unlikely.

That’s what you get, America, for electing a malignant narcissist.

Trump’s legacy seems mostly concerned with making a fortune for himself and his family. And slapping his name on things: hotels, failed casinos, failed universities, a country. If he can shove those five tawdry refugees from the alphabet on something, he feels better about himself for at least five minutes.

At present his administration is in a legal squabble to have the Trump ‘brand’ put back on the Kennedy Arts Centre – and threatening to abolish the place if he doesn’t get his way about modernising the centre.

Doris Miller

Also, a ship due to be named in honour of a black hero of Pearl Harbor, the splendidly named man Doris Miller, a navy cook who “reportedly shot down four to six Japanese bombers” (Guardian, August 22), could instead be named after, you guessed it, Donald Trump. And he hasn’t shot down anything, apart from just about everything anyone else has ever said.

As a reminder of how obsessed Trump is with himself and his endless grievances, his undying moaning, just look at the White House website. It’s been given a tacky Trump rebrand and has a crammed section dedicated to ‘media offenders’. Journalists who have narked him, in other words, by doing their job. It’s an exhaustive list.

You had one job, God.

The former Noah’s Ark pub in Deptford

A newspaper feature about ‘homes in former pubs’ transported me back to Deptford. A two-bedroom apartment in what used to be the Noah’s Ark was yours for £435,000. I cannot say if that represents value. Our first flat not far from there cost £40,000.

I worked on Deptford High Street for the best part of ten years, and retain an affection for the area, based on nostalgia and not being as young now as then.

The Noah’s Ark was a local landmark. Standing at the corner of the High Street, it had a distinctive curved frontage. A long time ago now, but I’m sure we sometimes drank in there at lunchtime.

Once I went there to interview the Flying Pickets, a group formed by left-wing actors. You may recall they had a number one hit with their acapella version of Yazoo’s Only You. One of the singers, Brian Hibbard, later enjoyed a run in Coronation Street.

Many people I interviewed in those days went on to have second or third acts, including Jools Holland of the band Squeeze, long before his big band days and long before presenting Later for a hundred years or whatever it is.

Dire Straits also once played at a festival on Crossfields Estate in Deptford. The flats were stacked up around a courtyard, and the band had a square of grass for a stage. With student friends I watched from above on a balcony belonging to someone or other.

A little light digging unearthed a further story about the Noah’s Ark. Planning enforcement officers from Lewisham Council visited the former public house after a complaint from a local resident.

They discovered that the building had been substantially demolished with only the ground floor frontage remaining. As the building stands in a conservation area, the developers were told to rebuild what had been destroyed.

The newspaper where I once worked is long gone; undue disappearance being something local pubs and local newspapers share. The office was next to Deptford station, with a view of the platform and its choreography of passing legs, cut off at the knees. A world of typewriters and carbon copies, ashtrays on the desks, lunchtime tipples in days when people still tippled.

Deptford has a grand old church, St Paul’s, consecrated in 1730. The priest, David John Diamond, was a great friend of our editor, Roger Norman. Drinks parties were sometimes held there. When Father Diamond died in August 1992, an obituary in the Independent described him as “one of the most remarkable parish priests in the Church of England”.

Roger Norman was remarkable too in his way, especially in how in the 1970s he used the South East London Mercury to stand against the National Front. He could also, after a pint or more of lunchtime Guinness, be touchy in the afternoon.

Deptford earns a few mentions in Peter Ackroyd’s book Thames, Sacred River, including that it is “perhaps most famous as the location of Christopher Marlowe’s death”. The Elizabethan playwright and poet was killed in a local pub, aged 29.

I knew about that and other unfortunate incidents. But it was new to me that, as Ackroyd also records, Peter the Great lived for several months at a house owned by the writer and horticulturalist John Evelyn. During that stay his “favourite pastime was to be driven in a wheelbarrow drunk, through Evelyn’s neat hedges”.

Other historical facts mentioned by Ackroyd include the riverbank at Deptford having once been home to “the first high-voltage power station in the world”. More gruesomely, he also mentions that the U-bend in the Thames between Deptford and the Isle of Dogs can delay the drowned in their course to the sea, earning the grim nickname Deadman’s Dock.

Another label given to the place was Dear Dirty Deptford, which could be seen as both affectionate and a reflection of the area’s poverty. The phrase was perhaps adopted from Dear Dirty Dublin, as used by James Joyce about the home city he escaped but never left.

The late historian Gillian Tindall once went in search of old Deptford. She reported that “Deptford, long ago, was a place of fertile green water-meadows, facing the Thames and adjacent to a creek. Here Henry VIII established his Royal Dockyard, in the days when he was a popular young sovereign rather than an obese tyrant. Ships built in Deptford went out all over the world for the next three-and-a-half centuries. By Shakespeare’s time, the scattered country village that had been medieval Deptford had expanded into a riverside settlement. Well-to-do Londoners came down by river to drink there on summer evenings…”

Perhaps they still do. I have always meant to return. Maybe one day I will.

Like most people, I’d never heard of the poor man; and yet there he was, in the headlines every day…

A lifetime in and around newspapers teaches you that journalists and commentators can benefit society – and also that sometimes their behaviour is appalling.

The latter is certainly the case for those who relentlessly hounded Jason Arday, a former Cambridge University professor of sociology, who died by suicide earlier this month. Arday resigned from the role after media investigations into his academic credentials.

Like most people, I’d never heard of the poor man; and yet there he was, in the headlines every day. Sociology professors are not normally granted such attention, or any attention.

Yet Arday had hundreds of articles and comment pieces written about him. His worth as an academic, and whether he only won such a coveted role for being black, was discussed endlessly, and without mercy.

I have no idea if he was suitable for the job he did, or if he made mistakes or suffered from poor judgement. But no-one deserves such a mauling.

Following his death, certain usual suspect columnists deleted tweets and social media posts attacking Arday. Others carried on laying into him, for theirs is a shameless pursuit.

I honestly don’t know enough about this to comment further, other than to say that I do know a witch hunt when I see one. Oh, and surely Cambridge University must have questions to answer about staff care.

And those columnists and presenters who hauled up this one man as a gotcha example of what they think is wrong with society really are beyond the pale.

Image by Erich Röthlisberger from Pixabay

HERE are two questions about reading. Both were posed by women, neither of whom I know. Have the ‘damn phones’ harmed our ability to concentrate on literature – and do older men still read books?

The first was put by the novelist Naomi Alderman in a newspaper article; the second in a post on Threads by a woman called Carmen.

Alderman feared modern life was leading people away from books. She told a friend who suggested a couch-to-5k style plan to revive the joy of reading. So she set up just such a scheme through her Substack.

It is worth pausing to explain what Substack might be. Broadly, it is a media platform that allows writers to publish their thoughts in essays or commentaries. Slower and longer in form than is normal on social media platforms, Substack can be an interesting place to hang out.

As for Alderman, she worries that even those of us who love books have been seduced by the lazy distractions of our phones.

Now if you seek an ageing man who never fritters time on his phone, you’ve come to the wrong corner of the old-guy room. The hours I have burnt on that nonsense could have been spent on something useful. But that hasn’t put me off reading novels, newspapers, factual books, and enough crime novels to construct my own locked room.

As a member of the book group in our local bar, I read at least one book a month, often more. Here is a rundown of this year’s reading. And to explain, at our book club we set a theme each month, and then all read different books inspired by the topic. The theme for the next one is capital cities, as seen in my choice below…

London Clay, Journeys In The Deep City, by Thom Chivers (unfinished at the time of writing).

An unusual but fascinating account of what lies beneath the streets of London. History, geology and subterranean exploration, from buried rivers to lost Tube stations, touched by the writer’s grief for his mother, who died when he was 13. If the second half is as good, it’s a deeply engaging and captivating dive into the hidden landscapes of our cities.

The Glassmaker, by Tracey Chevalier (also unfinished at the time of writing).

This came from our shelves and was a present from me to my wife; it had to be put aside, reluctantly, to read the book above. This time-skipping historical novel tells the story of Orsola Rosso, a Venetian glassmaker working in 1486; and, in a bold twist, across subsequent centuries. The writing is sparkling, and deep research brings everything to life, as Orsola, another of Chevalier’s wily female protagonists, wrestles with societal constraints. Looking forward to resuming the story.

River of Shadows by Valerio Varesi

An atmospheric Italian crime novel set in the frozen and waterlogged north as Commissario Soneri investigates the deaths of two elderly brothers with a shared suspicious past. Great atmosphere, good food, an eccentric policeman – and sex in surprising places.

The Silk Stocking Murders by Anthony Berkeley

A Golden Age detective novel, written in 1932, and one of the first to feature a serial killer, as hunted by the crime writer turned sleuth, Roger Sheringham, who outwits his friends at Scotland Yard. Almost modern in feel, although some social attitudes give off a loud clang.

A House for Mr Biswas, by VS Naipaul

This lively, funny, dark and very human novel was written in 1961 and tells the story of a man who claws his way free of abject poverty, fighting his in-laws at every turn. It’s a tremendous evocation of Caribbean life, and Mr Biswas is a tragi-comic hero of Dickensian proportions, a lowly man lifted by his delusions, his boiling rage, and buoyed by malice.

History of the Rain, by Niall Williams

A holiday read back in May. This magical, funny, tragic Irish novel is set on the banks of the river Shannon, in Faha, County Clare, “where everyone is a long story”. Confined to bed with an unidentified, debilitating blood disorder, 19-year-old Ruth Swain becomes the omniscient recorder of her community, through recounting the convoluted history of her own family. It is also a book filled with literature, especially Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson.

There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak

Another holiday read, as just as captivating as History of the Rain. Elif Shafak composes a hugely ambitious novel told from many perspectives, ranging from ancient Mesopotamia and Vitorian England to contemporary London. A drop of water links three main strands that seem separate but wrap together in the end. Politics and the preciousness of water fill these poetic pages.

The Crow Trap by Ann Cleeves

Another holiday read and a jump back in time to catch up with the first Vera Stanhope novel. Three women from different backgrounds come together at an isolated cottage on the North Pennines to complete an environmental survey. Each knows the meaning of betrayal, and no-one knows who that woman who resembles a mad bag lady might be, until she formally introduces herself halfway through the murder mystery. It’s Vera, of course, and she’s a tremendous creation, more interesting, more tortured, than her TV self.

The remaining books are:

This Sporting Life by David Storey, the brutal 1960s classic about rugby league player Arthur Machin who becomes something of a celebrity and rises above the restrictions of his class, only to become disconnected from everything.

An Evening of Long Goodbyes by Paul Murray. A properly funny novel from the Irish writer who rarely disappoints. Charles Hythloday sets about the heroic squandering of his family inheritance. Drinking, greyhound racing, vanishing furniture, old movies, Dublin lowlife, eviction and the perils of community theatre all feature.

Christine Falls by John Banville. Originally published under the pen-name Benjamin Black, this is the first in a series of crime novels set in the boozy, dank Dublin of the 1950s, and featuring his hero Quirke, who runs the pathology department of Holy Family hospital. Superbly written and plotted with panache (although the ending is odd).

And not to forget Midnight Blue by Simone van der Vlugt, a Dutch historical novel that resonates with the Glassmaker; The Progress of a Crime by Julian Symons, a classic murder case; and The Nancys by RWR McDonald, a charming and funny novel about Tippy Chain, an 11-year-old New Zealand girl and super-fan of the Nancy Drew books.

Oh, and two gathering dust by the bedside, which I believe were read this year…

How To Be Right by James O’Brien (enjoyably scathing political essays); and The Narrow Bed, Sophie Hannah’s bleak, funny and ambitious take on the procedural crime novel.

So, yes, Carmen, on Threads. Here is one older man who definitely reads books.