This ledge is offering only a part-time service as it is our two-week holiday (days out, more to eat and drink than usual, and Liverpool looming). Here are two snatches, the first about gardening; the second, more to custom, about Boris Johnson.
Fights with the rector…
Two long stints in the garden have been devoted to tackling a rampant old rose. We believe this to be a rambling rector – and not, as a friend misheard, a rambling rectum.
We inherited this thicket. It is delightful and dreadful; the delight lying in the froth of white blooms; the horror in the deadly thorns. It rambled all over, climbing to the top of a fir tree. A mild prune last year barely touched the unbridled rector. Now that rose is tamed; and half a ton of barbed greenery has been put in bags for the tip.
This has not been achieved without casualty. I was punctured in the forehead two or three times, scraped my scalp and had a wound in my forearm that bled again a day later when we were having lunch in Halifax. Yesterday a severed branch had revenge on my little toe through a sandal gap.
My wife’s arms look as if she has lost an argument with a roll of barbed wire; she too leaked a day or so later, leaving a spot of blood on a summer skirt.
As I am writing a new crime novel, a gruesome scenario suggests itself. Some of the inner branches were perhaps an inch thick. That would, my darker side observes, make for a horrible murder; and you could throw the weapon on the bonfire afterwards. Or is that all a bit too Midsomer Murders?
Boris Johnson’s porky pies…
Speaking at the Edinburgh television festival, Dorothy Byrne, Channel 4’s head of news and current affairs, warned last week that politicians including Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn are adopting Trump-like tactics by declining to subject themselves to journalistic scrutiny. She argued that such leaders were trying to ignore journalists – “And that means they are not being held to account.”
Neither Johnson not Corbyn are keen on the big interviews with, say, the BBC Today programme or Channel 4 news. Instead, they prefer soft social media outings, such as Johnson’s stage-managed meet-the-voters Facebook forums.
Johnson, having picked the lock to Number 10, seems unwilling to be interviewed at length, unlike his predecessors Margaret Thatcher and John Major. Instead he wishes to hog the headlines without being questioned.
Byrne suggested that broadcasters should call out politicians who lie, which was taken as a criticism of Johnson (largely because he is a proven liar, having even been sacked from a newspaper job for lying).
As we head for a probable no-deal Brexit on a raft made of lies, here is a small example of Johnson bending the truth. In Biarritz in France for the G7 summit, Johnson talked up trade deals with his equally truth-twisting pal Donald Trump. He gave as an example the US trade restrictions on pork pies, saying: “Melton Mowbray pork pies, which are sold in Thailand and in Iceland, are currently unable to enter the US market because of, I don’t know, some sort of food and drug administration restriction.”
I hoped you noticed that tell-tale “I don’t know”. The likely reason he doesn’t know is that he’s just made it up, hoofed out another lie or at best a partial truth. This is the bantering, Telegraph-typing side of our new prime minister, the journo who won’t talk to other journos.
This morning on the Today programme, Matthew O’Callaghan, chairman of the Melton Mowbray Pork Pie Association, popped up to say the pies he represents were not sold in Thailand and Iceland. This led to an outbreak of porky pie jokes on Twitter. Pork pies is, as we all know, cockney rhyming slang for lies – a phrase often shortened to porkies.
All very pleasing when contemplating a prime minister more packed with lies than a pork pie is with meat.