Writers Write

Which, as those who have been with me from the outset of this journey will recall, is the First Law of Marchant, he being the man what schooled me in writing. I think you'll agree, he did a bang up job.

By turns this brings me to the crux of my dilemma (do dilemmas have cruxes? Is that the right plural? How did I get here? That last one a knowing crib from Talking Heads): of late I mostly feel just so low about the fate of Planet Big Fat Pig that I can't be arsed to write. This is silly (that's an understatement) because all is golden domestic-wise - the Groupie is still with me (she must be bonkers I know) and Daughter Number One and Daughter Number Two are both thriving, a credit to their parents in fact. No, it is the wider world that aggravates me. No, not just bloody Trump (doesn't help though); no not bloody Brexit (doesn't help though); No it is the sheer asininity (one of the Pig's favourite words - mind you, if you've been with me on the journey this far, you'll know that) of what passes for adult discussion these days. Just listen to serious radio news and hear what I mean. We live in interesting times but debate takes place behind a screen of mediated PC bollocks. Brexit is, I suppose, the biggest and best example - a major constitutional moment being mishandled by a failed political class whilst the unlovable and the condescending (work out for yourselves which is which) are pitched at each other in the deepest circle of Hell by a flippant commentariat. Too serious to be funny.

I'm avoiding the Trump business most of the time but he still makes me sick - how's that for a telling response to asininity! In that connection however my eye was taken by this:

[He] has been honest, but he has been vulgar; and there is no greater external misfortune ... than for a great nation to be exclusively represented at a crisis far beyond previous, and perhaps beyond future, example by a person whose words are mean even when his actions are important.

You may have guessed that this is our old mate Walter Bagehot. He was writing about another Republican President - one Abraham Lincoln, no less. You have to wonder what the Boy Bagehot would have made of the ghastly Mr Trump. Walter, by the way, had the decency (and one has to admit, unusually for him, the modesty) to recast his views on Lincoln as the full scale of Lincoln's political genius unfolded. I'm not even remotely persuaded that I will have similar cause to repent of my opinion of Trump.

On the subject (which I sort of have been) of the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable (another favourite BFP aphorism) Baron Hain (Pete to his mates) has used the cloak of parliamentary privilege to out Philip Green as the beneficiary of a super-injunction preventing his being named as an alleged serial racial and sexual discriminator. I could bore you on the rule of law on this one but, you know what, I can't be arsed. Green should know better - and so should Hain.