Across the pond

The Royal Free Hospital is surrounded by thick black cloud but in the east there are streaks of pink announcing the arrival of the dawn. And overhead the sky is as blue as a sailor’s trousers. The pavements of Parliament Hill are shining with yesterday’s rain under the street lights, still not switched off. On this date, and at this time, 75 years ago I was already showing that obstinacy that so irritates my family and friends. Resisting my mother’s efforts to rid herself of the ten pound painful burden I had become.

I still hate doing anything until I feel ready to do it. And can often be found still in my dressing gown at noon.

Today I know there will be hell to pay unless I get up quick because I know that an unknown number of the neighbours are due to burst in at noon.

I know that because yesterday, when I answered the doorbell at 12.30 there on the doorstep were two of my neigbours with big smiles. She was carrying a paper bag with a box inside it wrapped with ribbon. He, a giant Spaniard, enfolded me in a bear hug, warming my cold English blood with his Latin hot passion.  Better a day early than a day late. They have promised to come back again today. I have to wait til then to discover just what is in the paper bag.

I do know that I am getting a black woollen overcoat from my eldest daughter because she dragged me down to Oxford Street on Friday. We finally found something I did not object to in Muji. It was £44 knocked down from £125 but when my daughter got it to the counter to ask the assistant how to get out one or two creases, she was told that the price was now £10.  So I am also getting a purple cardigan, another bargain at £19.

At the cash point yesterday I met the new lady of our local Rumpole of the Bailey, who told me that January 18 was the birthday of her daughter who had died a few years ago. I murmured something appropiate. She said, ‘No’, she no longer felt sad because she had worked it through. Indeed her face was shining with happiness and she could not wait to run back to the car, where our Rumpole was waiting.

He is a lucky chap. His first wife died four years ago and now he has found another woman who thinks he is the greatest.

Sir John Mortimer, who died yesterday aged 85 also had two adoring wives, both called Penny. And it took two full pages of The Guardian to record his many accomplishments at the bar and as a writer.

Alas I don’t have his talent and prodigious energy. But at least I can write a few more blogs before I make a little space on the planet for the next generation to have their say.

The death toll in the nineteen day invasion of Gaza, passed the one thousand mark today, which has been highlighted by nearly all the western media. Most of them leave it at that. Because figures are boring, to the readers and to a lot of journalists.

But the BBC website gives the detailed figures. Those killed include 300 children and 76 women. These figures came from the Gaza Ministry of Health, so maybe they have been inflated a bit for propaganda purposes. But the Beeb also gives the Israeli figures: 13 Israelis killed by all those Hamas rockets, 9 Israeli soldiers killed during the invasion of Gaza.  Divding by ten and translating this into a football score card, that is the equivilent of:

Manchester Uniited 101, Wolverhampton Wanderers 2.

In military terms the Israelis have scored an over-whelming victory. The figures provide the objective verification of the pictures on the television screens. This is not war. It is slaughter. And so it is not surprising that Israel is losing the propaganda war.

Except in Israel where polls report that the invasion has the backing of 80 per cent of the population, and that population is one of the best educated on the globe. Many of the older generation are victims of Nazi or Stalinist atrocities. And all of them are conscious that they are a small nation surrounded by rich and powerful Arab states, some of which are probably supplying Hamas with their old and not very effective missiles.

But the present reality is that Israel is very strong indeed. Their fears are unjustified and exaggerated. How to demonstrate this? I decided to look at the figures for our own ‘Irish troubles’.  (Yes, I know, there a lots of differences between the two situations.)

Northern Ireland was the corner of that country which the British had conquered in Cromwell’s time. In my lifetime all that remained was the north-east corner, with a Protestant dominated government, contrasting with the Catholic majority in Ireland. The conflict raged from 1969 to 2001. During that 32 years 3,253 were killed. 1,123 of those were from the British Army and local security forces, the rest were ‘civilians’. (Figures here are from the Wikipedia entry.)

But amongst the 1,855 civilians killed, 394 were Republican ‘freedom fighters’, trained by the IRA, or sister groups, and 151 were Loyalist, or Protestant, ‘freedom fighters’.

Of course, some of the Gaza citizens killed over the last 19 days, have been Hamas freedom fighters, not civilians. Just how many we will not know for some years, until the researchers have subjected this current conflict to the exhaustive analysis of Britain’s Irish troubles.

But the contrast between the two situations is crystal clear when you look at the scorecard for who did the killing. (Figures from Wikipedia article.) The IRA and its sisters killed 2,055. The Protestant equivilants killed 1,020. The British and other security forces only managed to kill 368. Whether this is because the British army is run by idiots who talk about Pakis and call Prince Charles’ Indian friends, ‘Sooty’, or whether it is to do with the fact the British public opinion did not allow them to bomb and shell the streets of Belfast, I leave you to judge.

But the Irish story has a happy ending. It led to the Good Friday agreement, so that now peace reigns in the Emerald Isle. And what people of my generation thought was an insoluble problem has been solved. And the man who did it was Tony Blair, who has just received a medal of honour and a hug from the same George W Bush, who has just vetoed the proposed UN action to bring peace to Gaza.

Blair, like George W, is now yesterday’s man. but despite all his many faults as Prime Minister, he showed that he had learnt the bitter lesson of Suez, which was that Britain was no longer an empire and that it could not behave as such without the support of the US. And Tony, always streetwise, realised that the hearts of many Americans – including many Presidents – were not with the ‘special relationship’ with the UK, they were with the Irish, who are as visible and active in US politics as they are in Camden Town.

Fast forward back to Gaza.

Israel has, in military terms, won the Gaza war. It is far more powerful than the Arab nations surrounding it. Even though the incoming US President is black, a so-called ‘lefty’ and has Muslim ancestors, he cannot and will not sanction any Arab agression against Israel.

But he will be open to a political solution. And that is what Israel should be fighting for.

The Good Friday agreement settled the centuries old bitter conflict between Roman Catholics and Prots in Ireland.

May 14th this year will be the 61st anniversary of the declaration of independence of Israel. It is also the 92nd anniversary of the Balfour Declaration.

Balfour, the Prime Minister of Britain when it was still fighting the First World War, wrote in his letter to Lord Rothchild:

“His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country”.

The language is pompous and dated. But the message is as relevant now as it was in 1917.

Israel needs to learn to live with, and respect, its non-Jewish population. And the rest of the world needs to respect the rights of Jews to live anywhere, and, implicitly to wipe out the stain of anti-semitism.

Although the television screens are still showing harrowing scenes from Gaza, there is some good news. Obama made it clear on a US television talk show that he will be doing what he can to deal with the problem by talk, not bombs, when he takes over on 20 January. And Hillary Clinton, who was at war with Obama for most of last year, is reported to be planning diplomatic initiatives.

Hillary, thanks to her long spell in New York, has won the hearts of some of the most influential of America’s Jewish population. Whereas Obama, because of the colour of his skin and Muslims in his ancestry, at least has a chance of gaining the confidence of the Palestinians and the Arab nations who support their cause.

Let’s hope that Israel and Hamas will give them a chance.

For me the last few days have been harrowing, because I have ex-students and close friends on both sides of this conflict. Including one of my oldest friends, a psychologist born in Birmingham, part of the West Midlands which is my homeland. He was so committed to the Israeli cause that he went to live there some twenty years ago. Last time he came over he was earning his living as a bereavement counsellor for the Israeli army.

He was very depressed on that visit because he felt his old friends were favouring the other side. My Arab friends feel exactly the same.

It is not easy to decide whether the British media is biased towards one side or the other. Over the last few days the pictures on our television screens have been of the Israeli military demolishing people’s homes with almost no pictures of all those Hamas missiles. This is to do with news values and practicalities. There are plenty of pictures available of the destruction in Gaza, which is a small concentrated area, whereas the Hamas missiles are aimed at a variety of targets, where there is no press corps. And, of course, the Hamas missiles have done not very much damage, so are not ‘news’.

On the other hand, in this latest war, the Israelis have done far better, with effective and articulate spokespeople, both on the television and quoted in the newspapers. This must leave many viewers, listeners and readers in total confusion. Unable to distinguish between the elected government and the Hamas militants who are firing the rockets.

Come 20 January Obama has to deal with the worst recession since the 1930s in the US and the rest of the world. Which is more than a full-time job. But now he has made it clear that he will also make the Middle East a priority. And he cames to power with, reportedly, the highest approval ratings of any President in US history.

Let’s hope he can make a difference.

…….2009.

I have read – and written – far too many New Year articles in my life to have any faith in predictions or futureology. So am not going to make any predictions for 2009. Since I had an old-fashioned journalistic training, my preference at this time of year was not to comment on the forecasts for the future made by distingished men from many different disciplines, but to look at the future which has already arrived.

Several things have happened in 2008 which make it certain that 2009 is going to be very different from 2008, and very different from any other year in the history of western civilisation.

So what follows is a few facts to substantiate this assertion.

Starting with the last half of the year.

1. American consumer capitalism collapsed for the second time in recent history. There has been a lot of obfuscation amongst the commentators, who have mostly said we are facing, not a depression like that of the 1930s, but a serious recession. That is a matter of opinion and semantics. But the facts are clear as daylight.

During the last half of 2008 both the banks and the American motor industry, the driver, via Henry Ford and the rest, of American consumer capitalism, went bust. They are still there on the High Street, looking after our savings. And selling us cars, most of which are polluting the atmosphere.

They are still there because they have been bailed out by Government money, money which comes from the taxes paid by all citizens. And most of it by wage-earning American tax-payers, not the multi-national banks and other big companies, who pay big salaries to lawyers to help them to legally avoid taxes.

The President who has bailed them out is George W Bush, who is a right-wing Republican and Christian fundamentalist. He has bailed them out by abandoning his own beliefs and handing over billions of taxpayers money to failed capitalists.

Because he did not want to repeat the mistakes of his Republican predcessor, Herbert Hoover, who took charge after the Wall Street crash of 1929, and plunged not only the US, but the whole world into the Great Depression, which blighted the whole world in the early 1930s.

So there at last there is one good thing I can write about George W. He showed himself flexible enough to abandon his beliefs in the face of the evidence. Which was, and is, that American consumer capitalism is bankrupt. And would have died, were it not for Bush shovelling in the money from US taxpayers.

Because the clear difference between today’s world and that of the 1930s is that the world economy is nourished by a variety of economies around the world, many of which are not driven by the same idealogical imperatives as George W.

Chinese capitalism, although it is very effective in undercutting prices on all sorts of goods which sell in UK shops, from kid’s toys to computer stuff, is certainly not American capitalism. And it comes from a society which does not nourish such important American freedoms as the right of the individual citizen to dissent from the majority.

2. But what is quite as important about what actually happened in 2008, started happening in the first half of the year. When the attention of the whole world was focussed on the US election. Because – and the citizens of the world are not idiots – although the US does not dominate the world, as it did in the 1930s in economic terms, it does in terms of military power.

The US has the nuclear capability to end life on the planet earth. Even Putin, the newish boss of Russia, cannot compete with that. So, although he behaves like Stalin sometimes, he is not under any illusion that the world is how it was when Stalin ran the Soviet Union.

He would like to liquidate those Russians, who after the fall of Stalinism cashed in and became multi-millionaires western style. But, since several of them are supported by the west, he can’t.

What he thinks should happen in 2009 is not a subject of many column inches in the western press.

But it surely matters, doesn’t it. Putin, by fair means or foul, governs a large population and probably has more sophisticated nuclear weapons than any other country, other than the US.

So, I want for the rest of this blog, to focus on what happened in the first half of 2008.

The year began with the real possibility that the US might be about to elect the first black President ever. The primaries had shown that the the voters wanted a change from Bush and all the other Republicans, so the contest, then was between Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton, who had vast support amongst those who had worked for her, and for her husband, Bill, in his two terms as US President.

The battle was hard fought and in doubt until the last minute. Because blacks are still a minority in the US electorate and the fear of blacks is greatest amongst the white working class, who were some of Hillary Clinton’s most enthusiastic supporters.

When it came to the election on 4 November Obama won more easily. Because by that time it was clear that Bush’s devotion to ‘American consumer capitalism’ was built on castles of sand.

The leading banks were bust, though their bosses were still holding on to their million pound bonuses. (And, according to report, are now using their imaginitive abilities to write stunning fiction and make still more money, from people who want temporary relief from the realities of life in 2009.

America needed a change, because many of its decent ordinary citizens, were being threatened with having their homes repossessed by the banks. This is what was foremost when Americans went into the polling booths.

That is why not too many of them were impressed by John McCain, who had the experience to do battle with the President of Iran, if he were so minded to launch his few crude atomic weapons against the US mainland.

Because the problem the US faces in 2009, is not a foreign threat, from Iran, or the Muslim hordes reared on the teaching of bin Laden.

The threat is from the version of capitalism, married with Christian fundamentalism, favored by George Bush, and many others.

Not only America, the world needs a rest from this sort of claptrap.

Particularly when it is promulgated so as to make a division between Christianity and Islam.

Mohammed, the prophet of Islam, accorded with most of the teachings of Jesus Christ.

The hatred that much of the Muslim world has for the US is not to do with religion or race.

It is because the US has tried to dictate what other nations should do. In Vietnam. And more recently in Iraq.

Many Americans are unhappy with this.

Because America was founded by people who left their homeland to live a better life elsewhere.

Barrack Obama has not reacted to the many things that have been happening since he won the vote. Because he does not take power until later this month, although tradition dictates that the out-going President consults with the incoming President.

What he has to deal with when he takes office, is a world that is quite different from the world as it was when he started his campaign.

Since then, as this blog demonstrates, American consumer capitalism has collapsed.

So Obama is faced with a task that is even more daunting than that faced by Franklin D Roosevelt in 1932. To save America he has to produce a new New Deal.

But he does not, like Gordon Brown, have to try and save the world.

The world of 2009 is very different from the world of 1929. The world’s economy is now supported by many varieties of capitalism and post-Stalinist socialism.

But in many ways what has been happening in the US in the last few years is just what was happening in the 1920s.

American bankers, stockbrokers, and other financiers, were then cashing in on the gullibility of the multitude. They created an atmosphere that suggested that ordinary people could borrow far beyond their means, because the boom would go on forever. And their house would be worth far more than they had paid for it, in a few years.

At the end of the 1920s some of the greedy financiers were thowing themselves off skyscrapers. Today, according to report, the bankers who made their millions from loaning money to people who could not afford to pay, are turning their talents to writing fiction, so that they can build on the wealth amassed through their bonuses.

This is not the kind of society the founding fathers of America subscribed to. But the new President of the US, who has to deal with this situation is the first black President in US history.

Which latches into quite different imperatives.

He has an impossible job. Americans, and Brits, are having to face the consequences of Thatcherism and Reaganism, the notion (I don’t think it is worthy to be called a theory) that the boom could go on forever. So long as you gave all citizens the license to make their millions, without any government regulation.

That led to a few citizens, many not entrepreneurs, but salaried employees of the banks and other big companies, making millions is bonuses. By encouraging the ordinary citizen to do, what the bankers of my youth warned them against – borrowing more than you could afford to pay back.

Obama has said very little about what he intends to do over the last two months. I hope this means that he wants to think about it, rather than be pushed into quick solutions.

But at least I am thankful that I supported him.

Just imagine what it would be like now if John McCain was going to be the next President. He was more experienced in military matters, so that if the US were facing a nuclear attack from Iran, as was mentioned during the campaign, McCain had the experience to deal with it.

The reality of 2009 is that the Iranian President has plenty of his own problems, so the likerlihood of him launching a nuclear attack is near zero. And even if he did his nuclear arsenal is puny compared with the US.

McCain would have been a disaster in dealing with America’s 2009 problems, which result from eight years of devotion to ‘un-regulated capitalism’ under. George W. And a lot of tacit support from around the world. Most notably from the supposedly Labour men in the UK, Tony Blair and his financial ‘expert’, Gordon Brown, now UK PM.

On this, the first day of 2009, the death threat is not from Iran, nor Muslim fundamentalists. It is from the state of Israel, who have used their sophisticated western weapons to murder more than 400 residents of Gaza. Their justification is that Palestine has been launching rocket attacks against Israel, which have killed 4 Israelis.

They have launched their attacks over Christmas, when the newspaper are relatively empty of news. And during the period when the US is in the long wait, before the new President takes over from the out-going President.

For someone like me, who has spent many hours arguing against anti-semitism it is a very sad day indeed. The victims are now bullying the people of Gaza, with killing weapons provided by American consumer capitalism.

And they are doing it in the few remaining days before Barack Obama takes power.

They are trying to force their concerns to the top of his agenda.

But at the cost of the lives of 400 residents of Gaza, most of whom were not Hamas terrorists.

This is profoundly depressing.

Israel is adopting the same callous tactics to the Palestinians which Hitler and Stalin adopted towards the Jews. Not because the Palestinians are a threat to their country, but because they want to exclude them from it.

The Israelis, who have been saved from oppression, are now oppressing the inhabitants of the land they have settled in.

And, incredibly they are doing it just before the leadership of the US, which is primary bankroller of Israel, is due to be taken over by a black man, who though he is a Christian, has Muslim ancestors.

In this context the Israeli attack is not only callous, heartless and bullying, it is lunatic in terms of strategy.

The incoming US President has far more pressing matters he has to deal with than Israel. And even if he rated Israel a top priority, there is not much any US President can do for Israel. Israel is a complex political problem, where the interests of America are often at odds with the wishes of America’s Jewish population.

These problems can only be solved by dialogue. Between the people who live in the region.

But, though I am gloomy about Israel, I am not totally pessimistic about 2009.

We have a new US President who is quite different from George W Bush, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. He is also quite different from Martin Luther King, Jesse Jackson and James Baldwin.

I have never met him. But I don’t think that is a disadvantage, because I have followed his campaign from the start. And there is no journalist I have read who even claims to really know him, and what he will do when he takes power.

What he has said himself, and consistently throughout his campaign, is that he wants change. But, equally emphatic in his campaign is the message that he wants to unify America. He not only wanted to win the election he wanted to win the continuing support of the majority of Americans.

At one level this is hopelessly idealistic from the vantage point of someone like me who has lived in the US and seen the huge contradictions between the American myth and the reality.

But maybe, just maybe, Barack Obama can make a difference.

I knew Adrian Mitchell, who died during this holiday season, as a neighbour in that part of Hampstead, where the ‘chattering classes’ live cheek by jowl with working class folk, some of whom have lived here for generations, and others, who are housed in the vast housing estates of Gospel Oak, erected by Camden Council.

I liked him as a person. He seemed to me always to have time for the folk around, although he was a ‘celebrity’. And he always had time for the children.

I liked the philosophy behind his poetry. He was a pacifist, but also a fighter. He was a socialist by heart, rather than by doctrine. He spoke up for the oppressed, although he was not particularly oppressed. His father was a scientist, his mother a school-teacher. Part of his education was private and he had the benefit of a small legacy, which enabled him to write what he wanted, rather than make his living by working full-time for the media.

He lived and wrote with zest and enthusiasm. I am not sure whether he would have relished the column Jackie Ashley wrote after his death, just before Christmas, in The Guardian. She raises him high above Bernard Crick and Harold Pinter, two far better known left wing writers who died during 2008. Mitchell was a modest man.

But Ashley shows herself to have been touched by those qualities for which I valued Mitchell. Here is her last paragraph.

But in terms of spreading good values, getting people to laugh and feel angry for the right reasons, it may be that Mitchell mattered most. Across the country there are people who have been influenced by Mitchell’s socialist, pacifist and kindly values. We have plenty of cleverness. We need a bit of heart.

Any lingering thought I may have had about blogging on the year ahead was shattered yesterday. Part of the day I spent reading Journals by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr, a vast tome of 894 pages, published in Britain by Atlantic Books just in time to make my Christmas stocking. It is a riveting book. Last night I got to Page 298 while the others were watching Airplane on the television.

By the time it had finished they had all fallen asleep. But I was wide awake turning every page eager to know what happened next. By Page 298 Journals has arrived at December, 1967. Of course, I remembered what happened next in terms of American politics and world events, but Schlesinger did not. And although he was one of the shrewdist contemporary historians, his thoughts about what was going to happen in 1968 were soon to be totally invalidated by events, which no-one could have predicted.

But what I don’t know is how Schlesinger reacted and what effect that had on his life and subsequent thinking.

There are two reasons why this book makes such compulsive reading.

The first is the genre. Journals and Diaries, unlike biographies and auto-biographies, if they are honest and carefully edited, take you back into how it was in times gone by, and how the author was changed by unfolding events as well as by his own imperatives.

It is not clear why Schlesinger wrote his diaries. The un-edited original comprises 6,000 pages of typescript, which may seem a lot. But they covered a period of fifty years and were a minute part of his total output which included several books, as well as newspaper articles, academic articles and hundreds of speeches he wrote for US Presidents and would-be Presidents.

My guess is that he was an occasional diarist (rather than a compulsive diarist like Britain’s Tony Benn), who wrote his diary when he had time, picking up what had happened on that day and the few days preceding. Partly to unwind and, perhaps, partly as material for his memoirs, if he ever found time to write them.

The second reason his Journals make compulsive reading today, is that Schlesinger lived his life at the centre of American politics, and, particularly, Democratic politics.

His father was a distinguished political writer of the Franklin Roosevelt era and a professor at Harvard. Young Arthur, born in 1917, followed in his footsteps, and first made his name as a writer about the New Deal, a fierce Democratic advocate and a critic of unregulated capitalism.

In the early 1950s he became an active participant in politics. He became a leading speech writer and adviser to Adlai Stevenson in his failed bids for the American presidency in 1952 and 1956. As the Journals reveal he continued to admire Stevenson and thought that John Fitzgerald Kennedy was shallow and opportunistic by comparison.

But when Kennedy came to power in 1961 he joined him as a special assistant in the White House, and became a personal friend as well as one of his most influential advisers. Although the Journals say little about his personal life and feelings there is no mistaking his grief at Jack Kennedy’s death and his disgust at the policies of Lyndon Johnson.

As the months rolled by in 1967 he became more and more depressed. He even considered voting Republican. Richard Nixon, whom Schlesinger disliked, had disgraced himself, and Schlesinger felt, along with most commentators of the time, that Nixon had finished his own career with his self-serving book, Six Crises. The most likely Republican contender was Nelson Rockefeller, then Governor of New York, whom Schlesinger did not warm to.

By December 1967 Schlesinger was cheering up. Johnson’s ratings in the polls were plunging as the protests about his Vietnam policies rose to a crescendo. Robert Kennedy’s star was rising and by December Schlesinger had become convinced that might be able to beat Johnson for the Presidential nomination in 1968.

As I write now, I know that Schesinger is due for another shock on Page 290 when he too was assassinated and a different kind of shock later when Richard Nixon rose again and took the Republicans back into the White House. I can’t wait to read his re-action.

Just now I have peeped at the last page of the book, the entry for 28 November 2000. The election result was then undecided and Al Gore was fighting for a full recount of the Florida vote. Schlesinger’s last sentence is:

He (Gore) was dignified and effective, especially as compared to Bush’s speech the day before claiming victory; Bush looked like frightened ventriloquist’s dummy.

Schlesinger lived through most of the dummy’s two terms as President, which must have made him even more depressed than in 1967. But at least it had become clear by the time he died on 28 February, 2007, that the next President might be the first Harvard Professor President in American history.

But because of the march of events since then he died before he knew that the biggest problem facing the new President is how to deal with the consequences of un-regulated capitalism.

So, as I read the next 500 pages I shall be looking for clues about what he might have written had he still been alive in 2009. And comparing the speech which Barack Obama makes later this month with what Schlesinger might have written for him.

It must be Christmas Day because there are no trains rumbling by on the London Overground. Have just finished in a desparate rush wrapping my Christmas presents. Our tiny flat is crammed with presents, the results mostly of Janet’s efforts over the last few weeks. Just cleared a space around the sofa to make room for our first visitors, due in five minutes.

No time, I’m sorry, to run down to the men’s pond and take a pic of the Christmas swim for this blog. They won’t freeze this year and there was even a flash of sunshine an hour ago. In any case people don’t usually bother reading blogs on Christmas Day.

That’s the doorbell.

So Happy Christmas to all my readers.

So after Deep Throat and the Iraq war now for a blog on something really serious. The article by two scientists, Harold Maxwell and Mahmood Bhutta, in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. Brought to my attention at this hour of the night, because both The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph has chosen to report on it.

With all the rigour of their discipline the scientists have discovered that for some people sex and sneezing go together, well, like love and marriage. This is because, the scientists assert, of a fault in their autonomic nervous system. Their research was based by interviews with people in internet chat rooms. They found that 17 men and women sneezed after thoughts about sex and that three people sneezed uncontrollably after actually engaging in sexual congress.

That’s science, folks. But first I looked at this mementous story from a journalistic viewpoint.

The Guardian headlined their story:

Sneezing uncontrollably after sex may be more common than realised

The Telegraph went for:

Thoughts of sex ‘can cause some people to sneeze’

Does this mean that Guardian readers do it, while Telegraph readers mostly just think about it? Or is it merely that the sub-editors of The Guardian have a bias towards minorities, whereas those on the Telegraph are conscious of its history and present as the largest circulation serious daily newspaper?

You decide. I certainly can’t.

But both papers report that the scientists think that no-one has discovered this before because people are too embarrassed to talk about it with their doctors. This strikes me as highly questionable.

From my journalistic discipline, where you learn to by your own experience, which you report, and are not concerned to ‘prove’ that your experience means that all people in all societies are governed by what governs you.

As it happens I sneeze hugely quite often after intercourse, but never when I am just thinking about sex. I have never mentioned it to doctors, not because I am embarrassed by it, but because it is too trivial to mention. And it does not in any way interfere with my life, in the way that my recently discovered Viking finger does, not to mention my lifelong depression and the severe headaches, which were the symptom of the tubercular meningitis I suffered when a young man.

This line of thinking led me to realise that I have been much too ready to accept the doctor’s view, that my Viking finger is a genetic condition. The fashion in doctoring has moved in favour of those who look for causes in genes, rather than in the influencing from parenting and from the socio-economic environment. The favoured research is by quantitive studies, which are ‘objective’, rather than depth interviews with patients. The favoured treatments are pills rather than the talking therapies.

But maybe the current medical fashion is just plain wrong. After all, the doctors do not claim to know what causes either Viking finger or sneezing after sex.

I would like to write much more about this. But my own logic is sending me to bed. If my Viking finger is just a result of my genes it does not matter what I do. But if it has been partly caused by my hammering at the keyboard then I need to be careful.

So my New Year’s resolution is to spend more of my time in 2009 having sex and a good sneeze after it.

Apparently Le Pain Quotiden means Daily Bread. So once the refurbishment of Orwell’s beloved Prompt Corner is complete, folks in South End Green will have yet another place to take breakfast. A delight for all those who like to start the day with croissants rather than bacon and eggs.

Left the house yesterday at 9.30 AM, ample time to do some necessary shopping and make my appointment with ear consultant in Gray’s Inn Road at 11 AM. Two 24 buses were waiting on the bus stand to transport me. And I only had to wait a minute or two before one of the drivers decided that the time had come for him to go. We sailed down Agincourt Road and down the hill on Malden Road. But as we approached Camden Town the rhythm changed to long stops punctuated by spells of crawling. There were five buses ahead of us as we waited to turn into Camden Road.

I began to fear that I would have no time to do my shopping at PC World on Tottenham Court Road and that even without stopping I might not get to the hospital in time. That thought fuelled my rising anger, because it reminded me of Sunday morning, when I had to wait 30 minutes at South End Green for a C11 to take me to Brent Cross, where I hoped to get the wireless router I needed to get the Virgin Media broadband which was installed on Friday up and running to my satisfaction.

The Pole Richard Branson had sent to install it told me that in order to get my wireless system working I would need to buy a different modem, in place of the one that he had installed, and that it would cost me only £30. The man at John Lewis begged to differ. He told me that what I needed was a wireless router that would cost me £45. I thought he was probably right, but I should check with Virgin or look elsewhere. By then there was no time for me to go to PC World at Staples Corner and be back home in time for my visitors. Nothing for it but to find another C11 and endure the 45 minute bone shaking ride back to Parliament Hill, gnashing my teeth in frustration.

Yesterday, on the 24 bus, the combination of these two experiences, had left me seething with rage and fury. Though all around me, the passengers were chatting happily to each other or to friends on their mobile phones. Nothing to be get worked up about surely.

I closed my eyes and tried some deep breathing. By the time I opened them we were passing the old Black Cat factory. The bus speeded up somewhat and we reached Euston Road at 10.25. I lept off the bus, negotiated the traffic lights and heavy west-east traffic and ran into PC World. It was empty and five assistants moved over to help. (The recession, or is it a depression, has arrived.) Within two minutes I had a Belkin 54 wireless router for just £24.45 and a Kensington Optical track ball to help me cope with my newly discovered Viking finger. Two small items, but both encased in plastic and in huge cardboard boxes.

Back across the Euston Road to the bus stop, where a number 30 glided in just as I arrived there. I was ten minutes early for my hospital appointment. I was in and out in an hour and twenty five minutes. When I came out, a 46 bus immediately appeared and took me back to South End Green in twenty minutes.

I plugged in the router to my wife’s desktop PC and to my utter amazement it worked first time. Quite as important I was able to go on, change the configuration slightly, and get my own email working on the desktop, for the first time since we sold our house and moved into the rented Savernake Road flat a year ago last August.

So overall not a bad day. I should have woken up this morning happy as a sandboy, thanking the Gods for making it all right in the end. Instead, I am growling with anger at the way big companies control so much of our lives.

I am not in the mood to bow down and worship Virgin Media, though my broadband is now working to my satisfaction. The engineer installed it by an ethernet cable connection to my laptop. On Saturday discovered that somehow this connection was draining the power from the laptop battery. So although it was connected to the mains, the battery was losing more power than it was getting from the mains. (Yes, I did check, and test that it worked normally, once I took out the ethernet connection.)

Additionally Virgin gave me substantial aggravation when I tried to claim my Virginmedia email address. This was because they ask new customers if they want to make Virgin Media their home page or if they want to add Virginmedia tabs to their top line. I wanted to say ‘No’ to both questions. Because I had cable broadband from Telewest, when it was taken over by Virgin Media a few years ago, and I hated all the advertising and sheer clutter of that opening screen. But when I said ‘no’ to both questions it gave me an error message. And instructed me, hilariously, that I should type in something fitting their rules, such as richardbranson, all lower case. (No, I am not kidding.) I finally got it working with my own home page, but at the cost of having two Virgin Media tabs as well, slowing things down, whenever I booted up.

Which all goes to show that Richard Branson is no virgin. But then neither is one of his chief competitors, BT, who yesterday wrote to me enclosing their final bill for £262.06. The letter concludes,

‘Thank you for using BT’

Regular readers of this blog will know that I have been trying to get BT to connect their line in the rented flat in Savernake Road since June, 2007. Since then the line has been live only for two or three days (in September 2007) when it was connected to the number which a local businessman had held for several years. (He rang me up and told me).

BT has never replied to my complaints and request for a letter of apology and compensation of £50 to cover my mobile phone bills in trying to find someone at BT who would listen to, and act on my complaints. On two occasions, I have managed to get through to a BT person who agreed that they might be doing something wrong. The last occasion was five or six weeks ago, when that person promised me that her manager would call me back in two working days.

I am still awaiting their call. Although, as the ads tell is, they love to talk.