(Image: Frank Ruiter from the BBC)

Are you a glass half-full person or has someone drilled a hole in the bottom of that glass?

I’d call myself a foolish optimist, certain everything will turn out right in the end. And when it doesn’t, I tell myself it surely will next time.

I went looking for quotes about optimism versus pessimism and found one from the American humourist and poet Don Marquis – “A pessimist is a person who has had to listen to too many optimists.” I like that as it has a certain Jack Dee-like grumpiness.

Then again, I’d be a lying optimist if I pretended to know anything about Don Marquis. His name was just the bran left after I sifted those quotes.

This is perhaps a circuitous way to discuss another skirmish in the standoff between Donald Trump and the BBC, but there is logic here. Five years or so ago, the Dutch historian Rutger Bregman published an excellent book called Human Kind. It was subtitled A Hopeful History.

I chose his book as my read for our book club in a bar, where we match different books to a theme, to avoid us all having to yatter on about the same book.

Rutger believes that basically people are good. Early on in his “quest for a new view of humankind”, he sets out potential obstacles to optimism.

To stand up for human goodness, he says, “means weathering a storm of ridicule. You’ll be called naïve. Obtuse. Any weakness in your reasoning will be mercilessly exposed. Basically, it’s easier to be a cynic”.

Rutger could have been forgiven for feeling a touch cynical himself this week. In October he gave the BBC’s annual Reith Lecture in front of 500 people who heard him describe Donald Trump as “the most openly corrupt president in American history”.

When the lecture began airing this week on BBC Radio 4, Rutger discovered that the BBC had removed those words – despite his lecture having been approved by the very same BBC.

What happened there? Between the lecture and the broadcast, Trump threatened to sue the BBC for at least $1 billion over a separate editing controversy involving Panorama, that’s what.

Bregman quite reasonably called the removal of his words from the lecture “self-censorship driven by fear”, noting the irony that his lecture was about elites’ “paralysing cowardice” and “bending the knee to authoritarianism”.

He told the Guardian: “I’m really sad about it. The whole team behind the Reith Lectures was incredible.

“And it was such an honour to deliver them, especially because the first Reith Lectures in 1948 were delivered by my intellectual hero Bertrand Russell, who was a huge advocate of free speech.

“I still hope lots of people will listen to the lectures. Because it seems to me that the message, about the cowardice of today’s elites, is more relevant than ever.”

Although a self-confessed European liberal, Bregman is fair-minded in his lecture, confessing at one point his admiration for the far-right. Not for their beliefs – which stand in cynical counterpoint to his optimistic view of humankind – but rather in their persistence, their willingness to spend years or even decades moulding events in their favour.

He cited as an example the protracted battle to overturn the right to abortion in the US; again, he did not approve of this action but could appreciate the long-term effort involved. The left, he said, needed to be organised in a similarly efficient manner.

His lecture is well worth a listen; and Human Kind is well worth a read.

Still, it is hard sometimes to remain optimistic in a world run by a self-serving cabal of pessimists. Trump’s threat to sue the BBC may well not come about; and if it did, it could be found to be baseless.

Sadly, that is beside the point. Trump uses the law to wear down all opposition. And he employs bullying in the same way. The BBC board, running scared after his threat to sue, have done his bidding anyway by censoring criticism from an academic they invited to give a lecture.

Then again, I am optimistic that one day Rutger Bregman’s words about Trump will stand true.

Here is another quote from Human Kind:

“To stand up for human goodness is to take a stand against the powers that be. For the powerful, a hopeful view of human nature is downright threatening. Subversive. Seditious. It implies that we’re not selfish beasts that need to be reined in, restrained and regulated. It implies that we need a different kind of leadership…”

Amen to that.

Image by Tom from Pixabay

I HAVE played the guitar for ever, not that you’d know it some stumble finger days.

At my boys’ grammar school in the early 1970s, I gave a mini-recital of a study by Matteo Carcassi, an Italian guitarist and composer born in Florence in 1792 (or so it says here on Wikipedia).

Etude Op 60, No 3. Recalling that title is no feat of memory. It’s just that I have picked up the piece again more than 50 years later.

My guitar teacher was called Robert. He used to cycle with a guitar in a hard case and a rucksack full of bricks. He was in training to ride somewhere far from Cheadle Hulme, Spain perhaps.

My performance went OK but Robert said I should have tuned my guitar beforehand. I made a mental note of his advice. It is still there just in case there ever is another public performance.

I abandoned the classical guitar as a teenager, you see. It didn’t exactly rock; and the pieces became harder and harder. A foolish decision, it now seems, but we are all made of those.

I have lessons again now, every other week online, with a teacher here in York. Andy is very good, keeps me ticking over and hardly ever sighs at my innate lack of rhythm. We cover all sorts from the Beatles to Bach, with blues and jazz in between, plus scales. The piece I am presently doing a disservice to is Strawberry Fields Forever.

I like all sorts of guitarists, but particularly folk-rockers such as the great Richard Thompson, Bert Jansch or John Martyn, another acoustic hero.

Over the years I have played, or tried to play, songs by Thompson as collected in his songbooks. When interviewing him once, I said his songs were hard to play. “They’re meant to be,” he said with a chuckle.

Anyway, back to Carcassi.

The sheet music for that one came in an email, as usual. With tablature alongside the score as my music reading is rusty. Printing this off, I squinted at the musical jigsaw puzzle. Ah, yes, that chord goes there, fits into that chord, as the tune rises up the neck.

Fingers old and not so pliable mostly knew where to go. I was back in the school hall, nervous with the audience before me. Playing a guitar I’d forgotten to tune. After my recital there was a guitar trio comprised of me, Robert, the cycling-with-bricks teacher, and a younger but better student who surely went on to grace other stages; unlike me.

A long time to have been playing the guitar. By this stage of life, you have done most things for an era or two. You stumble on. You get better. You get worse. But it’s the doing that matters. The keeping going, the pursuit of the unattainable, the barely attainable, the doable. You walk that road. Strum that chord. Write those words. Bake that bread, or whatever it is that you like to do.

To borrow a phrase, you just do it. And just doing is good, or better than not doing.

Late in the evening, after my wife has retreated upstairs, I play while watching television. A few scales. Or laying one chord on another. Over and over. And I always tune the guitar first.

After I stopped having classical lessons, I briefly taught a younger boy. He graduated to a proper guitar teacher, who said he’d been taught well, so that was something.

We have three grown-up children, and the middle one is a much better guitarist than his dad. Late at night at his house, after his partner has retreated, he fetches his guitar from his study, goes back downstairs and plays while waiting for their cat to come back indoors.

In the past week I have seen two singer-songwriters who can hold an audience with guitar and voice.

John Smith gave a captivating show at City Varieties in Leeds. He is on tour marking his twentieth anniversary as a professional musician, having started out supporting John Martyn two decades ago.

He fills an auditorium with his fiendish finger-picking and strumming and a resonant voice. He is engagingly self-mocking, too. And his performance of Winter, guitar open-tuned and laid across his lap, fingers beating out the rhythm on the body, was stunning.

A late change of plan allowed me to nip and see folk singer Chris Wood at the NCEM in York, having long admired his albums, especially So Much To Defend. His songs address the everyday, fatherhood, local football, the trials of being a musician, and are quietly philosophical, too.

Eccentric, quirky, the emotion spilling over at times. Another fine guitarist, despite some trouble with his lead.

He introduced a song written for a lifelong male friend. On hearing the song, the pal had said the song was shit. It wasn’t but that was Wood’s wry aside on male bonding, men hiding their affection behind rudeness. Another great night.

Panorama on Trump

Donald Trump vs the BBC is a thing now swollen like an appendix fit to burst. Let’s prod and see where we get.

The US president has threatened to sue the BBC for a billion dollars over an edition of Panorama. Wow, Trump watches Panorama! You’ll be telling me next that he hunkers down in front of Mastermind, shouting out answers through mouthfuls of cheeseburger.

Well, no – he doesn’t watch Panorama, even when it’s about him (his specialist subject). But he was alerted to a programme he never watches thanks to internal chaos at the BBC and pressure from the usual suspect newspapers.

The edition of Panorama in question was shown before last year’s US election and looked back at the insurrection of January 6, 2021.

It condensed into a clip a speech Trump made just before his supporters marched on the United States Capitol.

All the words used were undeniably spoken by Trump. You can find a transcript online. That was one long whiny ramble of a speech. It needed condensing more than anything that ever ended up in a can of soup.

Nothing Trump said makes you think, oh, he’s only trying to calm things down. The words ‘fight’ or’ march’ are not usually repeated so often when attempting conciliation (which, of course, he wasn’t).

Did Trump urge his supporters to march on the Capitol and protest about the election he lost? At such junctures it is traditional to say history will decide and nod your head sagely.

The trouble is, Trump has been busy rewriting history, removing official mentions of the Capitol riot, while also issuing pardons for around 1,000 of his supporters who were convicted of serious offences.

That edition of Panorama was only shown in this country – and, anyway, as Trump won the election shortly afterwards it can hardly be said to have damaged his reputation. He’s perfectly capable of doing that all by himself. Will he get anywhere with this Florida court case? Is he now going to sue all the world’s media? Or is it just part of his usual bully boy grift?

You won’t be surprised to hear that ejected Tory prime minister Boris Johnson is about to burst forth from that appendix. He set all this in motion when he reshaped the BBC in his image. As part of this, Robbie Gibb, Theresa May’s former communications chief, was appointed to the BBC’s board. This appears to have made the board in part anti-BBC.

Michael Prescott, a former Murdoch journalist and until recently an independent external adviser to the BBC’s editorial guidelines and standards committee, was the man who raised the contentious edit in a memo to the board.

He is said also to have made claims of systemic bias in coverage of Trump, Gaza and transgender rights, according to the Guardian.

All this led to the shock resignation of the director general, Tim Davie, and the head of news, Deborah Turness.

Johnson, typically, says talk of this being a right-wing instigated attack on the BBC is “complete bollocks”. So it’s almost certainly completely true.

A headline in the Telegraph urges Trump to sue the BBC

Are the Telegraph, Mail and others attacking the BBC because that’s just what they do? Or do they want to bring about its collapse to make room for more right-wing broadcasters, maybe funded from the US? That’s a lasting worry.

And this row about the BBC being left-wing comes just as many people are complaining about the BBC being too friendly to the right, especially to Reform UK and Nigel Farage.

To my eyes the BBC clearly favours Farage. I even put in an official complaint (result: nothing much). Farage receives endless unquestioning airtime on the BBC. Yet he would abolish it in an instant – along with the NHS.

Farage, who spends more time in the US than in his constituency of Claton, turned on his usual Trumpy toady act, complaining about the BBC’s attack on the “leader of the free world”. Good god, if he’s our leader we’re done for.

Honestly, I am more concerned about an elected British politician expending so much energy on doing down his own country. And to think he calls himself a patriot.

The BBC should defend itself and not bow down to Trump. Sir Keir Starmer should look at the running of the BBC – but he says he won’t be doing that. Perhaps it would just be better if politicians of all persuasions had no say in who runs the BBC.

Lord Patten, a politician who sees both sides, has been chairman both of the BBC and the Conservative Party. He had this to say…

“I don’t think that we should allow ourselves to be bullied into thinking that the BBC is only any good, if it reflects the prejudice of the last person who shouted at it.”

Quite so.

The BBC, for its faults and annoyances, for its occasional self-importance and inwardness, is too important, too central to British life, to be brought down by right-wing media owners considering only their own interests and pockets.

Just ask the 11 million people who watched the final of Celebrity Traitors.

On a train in Cambridgeshire at the weekend a man committed multiple stabbings. The reasons for this atrocity are as yet unknown, but news travels so fast now it instantly attains what you might call the speed of stupid.

Answers are demanded as those injured in an incident are still being blue-lighted away. This shouty need to know often comes from far-right agitators who hope what’s unfolding might align with their prejudices.

Nigel Farage of Reform UK plays this game too, while pretending to do nothing of the sort. I dislike quoting that man and only do so in the line of duty.

Here’s what he said on X before anything was known: “The attack last night in Huntington was horrific. My thoughts are with all the victims and their families. We need to know who committed these awful attacks as soon as possible.”

If you spotted a subtext hoping to blame an ‘illegal immigrant’, you will not have been alone.

British Transport Police later announced two men had been arrested: a 32-year-old black British national and a 35-year-old British national of Caribbean descent. The 35-year-old was later released and was said not to have been involved in the attack.

Spelling out the racial background of suspects is unusual but is intended to scotch right-wing conspiracy theories and social media misinformation, as spread so rapidly last summer after the murder of three schoolgirls in Southport.

The far-right may have been disappointed to discover that the man arrested was a British citizen, but they were still able to make vile mileage out of his race, as evidenced on social media. There is no satisfying these people and attempts to do so will always fail.

This willingness, nay eagerness, to believe what you want to believe and never mind the evidence is becoming a defining curse of the age. The US even elected as President a man who is consumed by a raging sociopathic compulsion to be right about everything and suppresses or denigrates anyone who offers evidence to the contrary.

There are other ways that such a shocking incident as that in Huntington can be used to bolster belief or prejudice. Many posting on social media later pointed with something like glee to another aspect of this sad story.

The hero of the hour was a rail worker gravely injured while saving passengers on the train. Samir Zitouni came to the UK 20 years or so ago from Algeria. He represents the best of modern multicultural Britain, although some on the right won’t like such elevation of an immigrant.

We should celebrate this man – but even to do that is to bend him to your side of the wider societal debate while he still lies in hospital.

Sometimes our eagerness to have the last word can override our humanity, our thoughtfulness.

Amid all this, the dormant scab of racism is being scratched into angry new life, thanks to Reform UK and others.

In the Guardian today, the Health Secretary Wes Streeting says he has been shocked by the rise in racism faced by some NHS staff.

Streeting said: “I’m disgusted that a level of racism last seen when Britain was a very different country, 50 years ago, has made an ugly comeback and I’m frankly shocked by those in parliament who’ve leaned into it.”

More such statements from Labour ministers would help.

LET’S end with an uplifting story about an Afghan refugee who found sanctuary here in Yorkshire.

Nahid Hamidi, above, and her husband Ahmad were targeted by the Taliban thanks to Ahmad’s work as a British Army interpreter. They fled the Taliban and Nahid has thanked the UK for giving her family a home.

Now living in Harrogate, Nahid has set up The Afghan kitchen, which has “fed thousands of people and offers other refugees help with their English – and a route into work”.

She said: “I am really happy. We want to say thank you so much to the government for this opportunity to come to the UK. I can work, my children can go to school. We feel safe here. But in Afghanistan, people are in a really bad situation.”

We are lucky to have Nahid in Yorkshire. This is the Britain we should celebrate.

I’ve gone off the BBC due to its unhealthy Nigel Farage obsession. But this is a good story. You can read it here:

Entrepreneurial refugee says ‘thank you UK’ for giving family sanctuary – BBC News