Please Pander To My Vanity

If you type 'Shakespeare and Bagehot' into Google, the top result will take you to my doctoral thesis, now deposited in the open access area of the BCU Library. If that sounds like too much work, don't worry, here is the link https://www.open-access.bcu.ac.uk/15794/

Thank you and goodnight.

And Goodbye To All That

Alongside this text will appear rather inadequte pictures (yes, taken on my antediluvian telephonic implement) of the two books I returned last week to the university library. Their subject matter (evident from their forbidding titles) will tell you where OG was felt to be lacking in his first submission of his doctoral thesis Shakespeare and Bagehot: a Study in Drama and Politics. 

Having now kicked over the traces of the opinions of my learned examiners, I am more than happy to concede that they had a point. So what is this all leading up to? Well, I will mention this just once (not entirely sure that I will keep this promise) but my formal studies are at an end. On October 11 2023 I received an email (no snail mail I'm afraid) addressed to 'Dr David Roberts'. It took me bloody years and no small amount of doubt and panic but I got there. No more examinations for Dr. Dave. 

About those two books. After I had consigned them to the returns bin, I instinctively turned left to go to the literature shelves to seek more obscure tomes for my studies, only to pull myself up short - I didn't know what next to read. The necessity had gone. There was a mild tinge of regret, followed by a knowing grin. It is over. I hope I never stop learning, but there are no more badges to be won. In 1978 I failed to do myself justice in my A Levels. I think I have now, and only now, atoned. To all who kept me going and put up with me, thank you. The Nobel laureate Bob Dylan sums up my state of mind best: 'I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now'.    

I Went To Manchester And It Didn't Rain

All of which was a pity since after my return to good old Brum, the rain has hardly left Manchester alone. I was there for the cricket and it looks as if the destiny of the Ashes will be settled by the intervention of the weather. England have utterly outplayed the Australians in this match but you have to have a poor medium-term memory to be oblivious of previous occasions where England have got away with it. So no complaints from this quarter - those should be reserved for the gratuitous gifting of the first test to the Aussies - see earlier grumpy entry.

All is forgiven

Our day at Old Trafford was a real treat. We saw Jonny Bairstow at his pugnacious best and we saw the Aussies reduced to pleasing dishevilment. Gratifying. Sadly one has to comment on the truly shocking toilet provision within the ground. Half hour queues to avail oneself of a squalid sewer is not acceptable. I feel a strongly-worded letter coming on.

So what else? Not much to be honest. I was having what I hope will be my last examined encounter with Shakespeare and Bagehot last week and found myself mentally drained as a result. Then a day on the quasi-lash at Old Trafford left this poor little poppet physically empty as well. Time for the Pig to act his age not his shoe size.

A thought - Italian red wines. Yes please.   

From The Desk Of The Author

bloody lovely

I have spent the last couple of days here on the island (that's Mon to you and me) in confinement with Shakespeare and Bagehot, pushing through the rather tedious task of correcting the manuscript of my thesis. I never thought I would say this but I can actually tire of exposure to my own purple prose. Who would have thunk it eh? Still, my efforts have been productive and as the afternoon slips into its seventh hour I have given myself permission to open a recently purchased bottle of Basciano Il Corto 2019. I do get some things right - it's bloody lovely.

So what (apart from the academic distractions which quite properly don't interest you) has been going on with the Pig? Well, he's strained his left calf muscle (in a new area - of the leg, not of the country) which is a pity because he's been feeling quite fit. He's played quite a bit of golf and after some encouraging signs has gone significantly backwards in the last couple of weeks, so we won't dwell on that.

Politics, bloody politics. What a shitfest. No I'm not going to depress myself by dwelling on the subject. Just for now. Oh I know what I can tell you about. You may remember that I was lamenting the deplorable adaptation of Great Expectations offered up by the BBC. Well the good news is this - the same organisation's 2011 offering of the same source material is on iPlayer and it's so much better that the it makes you suspect that someone at the Beeb left it up there because they were so ashamed of the newer pile of shite. It's teatime - spicy mussels are calling and that wine won't drink itsef. TTFN.

Sun And Strewn Seaweed

I thought maybe you'd like to be kept up-to-date with the weather and associated matters here on the island. And while I'm at it, yes thank you I'm getting to grips with poor old Walter Bagehot's alleged scientific racism. One should not, of course, minimise these things but I can honestly bring myself to forgive him and not lose any more sleep over it. I hope you will believe me when I say that I really did have some misgivings.

Anyway, the weather. Reports from back in Brum confirm that they have had a shit-load of snow (that's a climatological term - I've got Geography A Level you know) but, despite some flurries, nothing has settled here on the coast. I did however pull back the curtains this morning to the stunning sight of the Great Orme snow-clad on the horizon. I took myself down to the beach where things were a deal calmer than yesterday - one could actually get down to the beach-front. I took a photo, intending to put it up as a comparator to yesterday's but unfortunately I find that a quarter of the picture is taken up by my unfocused finger. Sorry. I was going to take a further picture of the piles of seaweed that had been cast onto the road in the storm but by the time I came out of the cafe (Americano and a nice piece of carrot cake) some efficient soul had cleared it away. Such efficiency might even make me feel sanguine about the licensed larceny that is our penal Council Tax, assuming always that it was a public servant who had done the cleaning-up.

Another film a - very good one. The Killing Fields relates a true story within the context of America's dubious history in Cambodia. The structure of the film is risky - the first narrative arc concerns the build-up to the shambolic vacating of the country by the West. The second arc largely (and you might think riskily) abandons its American and European protagonists in favour of a chilling depiction of the Khmer Rouge regime that filled the power vacuum. Powerful and important. 83/100.       

Ooooo, Big Waves

 

I'm no photographer but I snapped this image this morning down at the seafront in Benllech. Pretty cool eh? The prevailing winds mean that Benllech is generally a sheltered bay, but not today. I was half-way down the steps to the front and could venture no further - I even got an uplifting dousing in the sea-spray when a particulrly large wave crashed over the wall. Delicious.

As you will have gathered, I am here in Ynys Mon. I study best here and have been trying to get to grips with  the notion that Walter Bagehot was a nasty old racist. I won't bore you with the story but someone brighter than I am, put this notion in my head so it has to be tested. It troubles me, most notably in the context of Bagehot's Physics and Politics. I am reading a contentious tome that glories in the title, The Victorian Reinvention of Race: New Racisms and the Problem of Grouping in the Human Sciences, by Edward Beasley. He really has it in for my boy Walter. We all do it I know but Beasley ends up being reductivist. He is a better and more elegant writer than the Big Fat Pig but The Pig is nonetheless trying to mount a defence of the Boy Bagehot and, in the process, to rescue his doctoral thesis from the flames of redundancy. This is not simple when you are facing an opening paragraph as lucid (and thereby attractive) as Beasley's:

To classify the peoples of the world, we sometimes invent races. What I mean is that we cut the human continuum into discrete groups, each with a bilogical identity that we think of as passed down from one generation to the next.

Beasley goes on to throw Bagehot into the circle of Hell occupied by the French brute Gobineau. Check him out if you have a minute. Walter deserves better. 

Let us move to a more comfortable environment. I've been watching films again. This time it was something of a curiosity - The Sisters Brothers (available on iPlayer if you fancy it) - a beautifully mounted Western set in mid 1850s Oregon and California. I say it is a curious film because it has a lot going for it but somehow it fails to fire. Three of its four principal characters are played by Hollywood heavyweights. John C. Reilly, Joaquin Phoenix, and Jake Gyllenhaal are all excellent and matched by the not quite so stellar Riz Ahmed. All well and good. But somehow the movie can't make up its mind whether it is Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid or Unforgiven. The truth, I'm sure, is that it wants to be neither but to be itself. It is good but, in the end, the weight of the venerable genre pulls it down and it manages to be a good film from which a great one wants to escape. Its wistful ending is worth the effort. 66/100. Interesting to note that it attracted good reviews but bombed at the box office. 

 

A Dignified Job

My old mate Walter Bagehot got a mention from the BBC Political Correspondent the other day. It was in the context of the constitutional mechanisms that have whirred so efficiently into life in the five days since the death of Queen Elizabeth II. You can say what you like about poor old Britain but it is hard not to agree that we do pomp and ceremony rather well. And that, over a century and a half ago, was the point that good old Walter was making. The role of the monarchy is to be dignified and thereby to underwrite the efficient administrative secret that keeps the country on track. Like Bagehot, I am a constitutional monarchist, probably a tad more romantic in my soul than was Bagehot.

And this is the point - Elizabeth understood her Bagehot and played her role steadfastly and well. As the past few days have liberally confirmed, her subjects largely appreciated the work she did and they wish the new King well as he gradutaes from the longest apprenticship in history. There will be some naysayers who will self-indulgently tout their right to dissent and to behave execrably in the face of a funeral. That is indeed their right but they demean their cause.

Anyway, the old rhythms are the best - the Queen is dead, long live the King      

Taking A Rest From What Passes As Labour

It is fast approaching crunch time for my academic efforts. I have therefore been spending an unhealthy amount of time with my non-contemporaneous contemporaries, Messrs Shakespeare and Bagehot. After a decade (very much on and off) of being intimidated by the inadequacy of my word-count, I now find myself six thousand words over the top and I don't want to let any of my precious prose go. I'll get over it.

Having at last delivered a full draft of the thesis on Sunday (with all those offending extra words) I played golf with the lads yesterday evening and had my best round for  a year or so. Which was nice. I'm not geting carried away though - I was dependent on an outrageous slice of good fortune on my nemesis hole, the 13th at Royal Pype Hayes. I think that hole owed me mind. 

I have (undeservedly but hell, it's my life) granted myself a day away from Shakespeare and Bagehot today. Now such self-rewarding largesse can often be counter-productive as it induces a depressive tendency to guilt. But, lo, today has been fine, more than fine in fact. I went for a run this morning and both troublesome heels were in co-operative mood. Which was nice. Then this afternoon I watched a great film. More of that anon. But first my review of a lesser picture but one I nonetheless recommend.

Do you get what I mean when I say a film is a nice weekend film? Of course you do. Well, Dream Horse is just such a film. Yes, it is a tad soppy but it is based on a true story that rather defies belief. You don't have to have an interest in horse racing to enjoy it but bringing sucha predilection to the party will not do any harm. Its cast of familiar British support actors are joined by two rather grander stars, Toni Colette and Damian Lewis, who both do creditable Welsh accents. This does not masquerade as anything it is not - it is good old-fashioned entertainment. 60/100.

And now for something completely different. Nashville is not a film to be taken lightly. Insofar as it has a plot, it rambles all over the place. Characters weave in and out of shot and conversations intrude with, overlay and generally fragment each other. This is viewed by some as Robert Altman's masterpiece, by others as self-indulgent tosh. I love Altman. This is his masterpiece. 89/90. 

A Stately Pleasure Dome

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure dome decree

Coleridge lived too early ever to have seen the stately pleasure dome decreed by the remarkable Lord Armstrong at Cragside but the poet's lambent words went searing through the Pig's pretentious mind as he walked from the car park to Cragside this morning. Don't get me wrong, the Pig loves this sort of stuff, that is to say both Coleridge's poetry and Armstrong's grandiosity.

The house itself is a higgledy-piggledy affair, remodelled and extended on several occasions by Armstrong as he rose from a law office to mechanical genius - yet another case (take my mate Walter Bagehot for example) of someone qualifying as a lawyer and deciding there was a better life elsewhere. If only, if only, muses the Pig.

The whole Cragside Estate is testament to man working on his environment - lakes were created, hydro-electric power harnessed, millions of trees planted. It is fabulous. The Groupie made a very good point as we soldiered about in the rain - precisely what would the modern media make of a billionaire who had the audacity to try something as adventurous as Cragside today.

The Coleridge lines get an outing in Citizen Kane of course. I don't know enough to say whether Armstrong died bereft like Kane, but he certainly died childless and a century plus later his creation is in the hands of the National Trust who do a grand job. Death and taxes - life's two great certainties.

Cragside - a brilliant and thought-provoking day out. No dining out today. We're having shop-bought pizzas and I've opened an insolent (vinous argot for cheap) rioja. Good times.  

More Serendipity

I have a drawer designated for my use in the Groupie's kitchen - it's to discourage me from my lawyer's habit of filing things in plain sight ie. just left lying around. Anyway, I decided to have one of my too-irregular clear-outs. These things are cathartic once you have steeled yourself to do it. 

In amongst the bills for filing (I had at least paid them all) I found an old encrypted (my own weird code) list of passwords for gambling sites. These days I favour the good people at Coral with my paltry trade and I had thought that I had emptied the various other accounts usually opened to take advantage of free offers. Still you never do know, do you. Lo and behold I located fifty-odd of your English quids in my Paddy Power account. At some point I must have had a winner. This is refreshing to learn because winners have been few and far between of late. I am going to spend it wisely - more gambling.

Dignified

Just a thought - I was reminded on Saturday of another thing the British are good at (the first being the organisation of mass vaccination) - we do a mean state funeral even at times of pandemic. Militarily precise, dignified and even a tad moving. Walter Bagehot would have approved.    

The Joy Of Reading

That's reading books, not Reading the place, though I'm sure it's perfectly nice - I've only ever been to the railway station.

I bought a couple of new books last week, both (relatively) recently published and on the respective topics of Shakeapeare and Bagehot. So interesting to me, if perhaps not to many others. First up is Tyrant: Shakespeare on Power (for some unfathomable reason Shakespeare on Politics in the US) by the much-lauded Stephen Greenblatt - he is credited as the father of New Historicism, not, I suspect, that this bothers you greatly. Anyway this latest little scholarly pot-boiler is clearly written in a brilliant hissy-fit about the rise of Trump. It is tremendously well done and the ghastly Trump never even gets a direct mention. Clever. It is a towering exercise in American Liberal ire. There is a brisk analysis of the Henry VI trilogy which, just as the author intends, has you sitting there thinking 'that's so true and so modern.' How about this?

Populism may look like an embrace of the have-nots, but in reality it is a form of cynical exploitation.

What a great sound-bite that makes. Of course it has liberal snobbishness coursing through it but we can leave that for another day.

The other, and weightier, tome is Bagehot: the Life and Times of the Gretaest Victorian by James Grant. Yet more proof that the best Bagehot scholarship these days comes from across the Atlantic. In truth it is mildly irksome to find another Bagehot biography appearing after you have finished drafting your own chapter on the Bagehot literature. Hey ho. 

Grant's bias is towards my boy Walter as an economist and I think he gets him right. Bagehot can come across as a right old smart-arse (Grant would probaly say 'smart-ass' if descending to my level) but you have to admire his sheer energy as a writer and you have to accept (perhaps grudgingly) that he was often onto something. Anyway I was amused to encounter the pithy dissection repeated below of the cycle of boom and bust that is, to this ignoramus at least, the key to the pseudo-science of economics. Those of you with keen memories will remember that good old Gordon Brown abolished boom and bust - bet you wish you'd never said that Gordon. 

Overstone - like Bagehot, a clarifier of complex ideas - was among the first to identify the cycle of boom and bust, which he described  in these words in 1837: "First we find it in a state of quiescence - next improvement, - growing confidence, - prosperity, - excitement, - overtrading, - convulsion, - pressure, - stagnation, - distress, - ending again in quiescence. 

Plus ca change? 

I recommend both books.

 

 

Quotable Stuff

In my eclectic reading over the past week there has been a surfeit of stuff that had me thinking, yes he's got a point there, possibly wrong but there's an arguable point to it.

First up is my favourite member of the commentariat, Rod Liddle, Milwall fan and provocateur. In this week's Spectator on the topic of the lockdown (of which he is broadly a supporter):

The notion that we might end up kindlier, greener, gentler as a consequence of our brush with this ineffectual Armageddon was always horribly misplaced. The only lasting impact will be that reform of the cumbersome and often fantastically inept National Health Service will be off the cards in perpetuity and instead we will probably still be forced to kneel down before it every Thursday evening to give praise, clutching a used face mask in lieu of a rosary.

Next, my favourite denigrator of all things Bagehot whose lucid vitriol when it comes to my old mate Walter has even me thinking again. This, from his one hundred and forty page rant against Bagehot The Case of Walter Bagehot, is C.H. Sisson:

The central object of Bagehot's writing - and it is a destructive one - was to give exclusive respectability to the pursuit of lucre, and to remove whatever social and intellectual impediments stood in the way of it. Intellectual pursuits, and whatever strives in the direction of permanence and stillness, have to give way to the provisional and divisive incitements of gain. In the end one is left contemplating numbers over a great void. 

Finally from Waugh's Officers and Gentlemen, the arrestingly crafted summary of Guy Crouchback's private desolation occasioned by the entry of Russia into the war:

It was just such a sunny, breezy Mediterranean day two years before when he read of the Russo-German alliance, when a decade of shame seemed to be ending in light and reason, when the Enemy was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off; the modern age in arms. Now that hallucination was dissolved.

I am not, of course, at all sure where I am going with all of this but I take mild comfort in the fact I am in my inefficient way still trying to get somewhere.  

Writers Write - Good Writing Has Its Own Necessity

By way of haphazard research I find myself reading a collection of C.H. Sisson articles, Anglican Essays. I say haphazard because I first came across Sisson because of his elegant but deeply felt animosity towards the work of Walter Bagehot. These very Anglican essays leave poor old Walter out of it. If you want to see Walter condemned then search out Sisson's The Case of Walter Bagehot.

Anyway here is a bit of Sisson that damns a lack of felicity in the written word. He puts it so well that you find yourself scared to go back to writing:

But these are large claims, and Good is a dangerous thing to be sure you are Doing. Moreover, good writing has its own necessity, a humble one no doubt, but even a divine should think carefully before he asserts that he is excused from it.

US poster

 Enough of this. Let me tell you about a nice film, underrated by the critics I think. Released here as The Perfect Catch, it is in fact (and as it was released in the USA) the americanised version of Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch. As with the earlier film of Hornby's High Fidelity the change of continent does no harm, indeed in the case of The Perfect Catch the switch from football to baseball adds to the fun - Boston's miraculous season in 2004 being intrinsically more dramatic even than Arsenal's 1989 league title. 77/100. 

A Vulgarising Influence

I have been rooting around in Walter Bagehot's journalism again and was struck by a passage from a piece written for The Economist dated 17 May 1873. Bagehot is rehearsing (yet again one might justifiably comment) his famous diagnosis of the dignified/efficient dichotomy as explanatory of the durability of the English constitution. (And incidentallly I use the descriptor 'English' deliberately because that is what Bagehot invariably did).

We hold therefore that Mr. Bright was quite right and wise in not expressing any distaste to the abstract object of the republican working men's ambition. It is a very natural political ambition for working men to feel. They see their class much more completely shut out from the objects of political ambition than they would be in the United States, where any one of them might rise, as Abraham Lincoln did, from rail-splitter to President, and, very naturally indeed, they do not count the cost of a change. They do not see from what sort of evils the aristocracy and monarchy still protect us. They do not realise the vulgarising influence of the worship of mere wealth.  

No prize which world leader I was moved to think about. I think it's dangerously close to being an obsession with me. Oh well, it gives me something to do with my down time.

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.

The Trouble With Being A Faux Intellectual

The trouble is that your eyes glaze over when you read complex texts and, in the spirit of the blogger, you reach for salient aphorisms and skip-read the whole, this latter reading quite often out of sequence as you dance around in searching said aphorisms. A little learning can go a long way. That, at least, has been my sad experience. But what the Hell, let's go for it anyway. Nobody's looking.

Sir Thomas Smith

Sir Thomas Smith was Secretary of State to King Edward VI, sometime cleric, sometime parliamentarian, sometime Cambridge Professor of Civil Law, and author in English (this is important because the language of most varsity scholarship was still Latin) of De Republica Anglorum, published in 1583, six years after his death. The subtitle to the tract (which I will render into modern spelling) tells us what to expect: 'The manner of government or policy of the realm of England'. It's good stuff. Did Shakespeare read it? Interesting.

In much the same way as my boy Walter Bagehot (you must have guessed that he was going to crop up) Smith is an erudite hedger of bets - but that's ok with me, I lean that way myself. In fact the older I get, the less I am plagued by certainty. De Republica Anglorum posits three types of commonwealth: monarchy; aristocracy; democracy. Within each of those categories lie the possibilites of either just or unjust manifestations. Thus there are six possible types of constitution. However (and here Smith is removed from the absolute designations of a theorist such as Bodin) Smith accepts that though any constitution will have a dominant inflection, it will usually have strains of the less dominant. So what did he make of his England? As I say, he hedges his bets but we can perhaps come down on the side of a monarchy infected by democracy - what later theorists might deem a constitutional (rather than an absolute) monarchy.

It is tempting to make a leap from Smith to the Boy Bagehot but we are warned off such presumption by William Maitland, Smith's Victorian editor: 'One fact, however, stands out clearly. The "constitution" does not for Smith consist of the same elements as for Walter Bagehot or his imitators ... For Smith the framework of a commonwealth consists almost entirely of its courts, its judicial system, and its methods of police.' So is that my sloppy contention (that Smith stands at the front of a queue that leads to Bagehot) blown out of the water? Not quite I think, and that is because, just as Smith (a good lawyer) was fixated on the place of the courts in exercising sovereign power, so Bagehot (a failed lawyer - he was called to the Bar but never practised) was fixated on everything but the courts. Both however had an eye for the mutability of sovereign power not possessed by more rigid commentators. And both can help us with another possessor of that discerning eye - the Boy Shakespeare. Which is the point I am making. Badly. 

The Old Ones Are The Best

I've been reading that Walter Bagehot again. In his masterwork, The English Constitution, he praises 'intelligible government'. What would my boy Walter make of the Donald? Try these for size:

If the highest post in conspicuous life were thrown open to public competition, this low sort of ambition and envy would be fearfully increased. Politics would offer a prize too dazzling for mankind; clever base people would strive for it, and stupid base people would envy it.

... the end of it always is, that you put a man at the head of society who very likely is remarkable for social defects, and is not eminent for social merits.

Trump And Public Intellectuals

There was a Spectator piece recently which highlighted right wing intellectuals who, far from disavowing Trump, are actively promoting his candidacy. (Very sadly I have to report that the list included Roger Kimball, a worthy promoter of Walter Bagehot's relevance.) A common factor is their absolute distrust of Clinton and her prim leftish orthodoxy. They point to the Obama administration and in particular its foreign policy failures. They have a point - just when precisely has America conducted itself less resolutely in the global field than during Obama's tenure? Clinton will, for them, simply mean more of the same but with a different face. They almost have a point - The United States has been the enabler in chief for a revivified Russia. Mind you the rest of us have sat pathetically on our hands through the whole immoral process - one of the truths echoing in Trump's general vacuousness is the shameful neglect of NATO by America's western cousins. Anything is, on this analysis, better than La Clinton. I've looked at this from both sides now and, well, it's bollocks.

Symbolism does matter. Ask Walter Bagehot whose two armed test for civilised political systems involved the marrying of the efficient and the dignified. If this wasn't still relevant then why else was Obama awarded a Nobel Prize before he had even done anything? Where, oh where will lie the dignity of the office of the President if Trump occupies it? I'm sorry Donald, I've spent plenty of my life in sporting locker rooms and talk like yours has never been regarded as legitimate 'banter' - rather it is seen by good men as the eruptive bragging of the empty and impotent. It is pathetic and pitiable.

And so Trump's diversion worked. He lives to fight another day, to continue to bring embarrassment and shame to the Republican Party and the political careerists who would risk a debacle of a presidency rather than take a stand on principle. Lies spill from Trump's mouth and he exudes bigotry, yet he learned long ago that only suckers pay their debts and take reposibility for what they've done. He simply moves on. If he succeeds this time, then we are not his creditors, but as morally bankrupt as he is.   Washington Post, 11 October

9 Days To Go - Knackered But Exultant

I've just managed to achieve that elusive thing, the fabled Runner's High. I awoke feeling mildly grotty (nascent sore throat) and first had some domestic duties to attend to, taking garden rubbish to the dump for the aged parents. I had it in mind to go for today's run in the afternoon but fought that lily-livered instinct and set forth in the late morning more in hope than expectation that this would be my projected longest training run. One hundred and fifty minutes later I was in full state of High, knackered but exultant. Now I can manage my taper. I will need to be careful that the training does not better the experience of the race itself - that was certainly what happened when I did the London Marathon nineteen years ago. I made all sorts of miscalculations on that occasion and finished badly dehydrated and diminished by the sprint finish in which I lost to a man in a rhino costume and a bloke with a prosthetic leg.

Time for one of our occasional consumer recommendations - this time for Mere Green Service Station to whom I have had recent cause to entrust both Helen's Precious Peugie (it's a Peugeot) and Rachel's Precious Fifi (Ford Fiesta). Swift, courteous, reasonably priced - you can't say much better than that - A Good Garage

The Overgraduate (who as any fule kno is a considerable intellectual) had a nasty moment the other day. He was surfing internet records of obscure second-hand books which might have a bearing on his studies when he was disturbed to find a listing for The Memoirs of Walter Bagehot. Now the received wisdom in the OG outpost of the halls of academe is that the Boy Walter died before he could pen any memoirs. Were this not to be the case, well I'm afraid OG would look not a little like a chump. We are therefore relieved to report that the said Memoirs are the recent confection of an Oxford historian Frank Prochaska. OG has a copy and has to say that it is rather good, a clever work of reconstruction. Here is a rather tasty morsel,

There is no method by which men can be both free and equal. If it be said that people are all alike, that the world is a plain with no natural valleys and no natural hills, the picturesqueness of existence is destroyed, and, what is worse, the instinctive emulation by which the dweller in the valley is stimulated to climb the hill is annihilated and becomes impossible. In contrast to our system of removable inequalities, there is an opposite system which prevails in the East - the system of irremovable inequalities, of hedged-in castes, which no one can enter but by birth, and from which no born member can isssue forth. In England, this system needs no attack, for it has no defenders. 

On The Sofa With Walter And Jeremy

Today's guest on Dave's Sofa of Life are...

Walter Bagehot and Jeremy Corbyn of course, for Walter is seldom far from my mind and Jez is fascinating me. I watched Prime Miniser's Questions yesterday and was thoroughly stupified by the lack of any spark. The Boy Cameron could hardly believe his luck as the ordinarily baying crowds opposite were reduced to meek silence as Jez read out emails he had received from the public. This may have been an act of genius but I'm tending to another view for now.

What of our boy Walter? Well, it just so happens that I have been reading his articles filed from Paris during the 1851 coup d'etat. Those missives are provocative and vigorous, befitting a tyro writer finding his voice.

... even I can'tbelieve in a Government of barristers and newspaper editors, and also as against the Red party who, though not insincere, are too abstruse and theoretical for a plain man. It is easy to say what they would abolish, but horribly hard to say what they would leave, and what they would find.

Quite. Mind you I don't think I should push my luck by repeating Walter's views on universal suffrage or Jez and the boys will be picketing my local Waitrose to stop me buying Good Ordinary Claret.

Au revoir mes amis.