nick nacks for Dick Heads in the new year.

Something struck me the other day, in this age of social networks, smart phones, texting, tablets, voice recognition, address books in mobile phones and so on; are we losing some of the skills of our forefathers and replacing them with useless ones?

I was watching a programme on TV called QI which is introduced by Stephen Fry who is surely the busiest actor/presenter/pundit/writer etc in Britain. Someone said the other day that he was due to be on TV here in Britain over 100 times over the Christmas period – he is also on lots of radio shows, plays and quiz games and this is not to mention that he is playing Malvolio in Twelfth Night in the west end.

On QI he asked his little panel of comedians what date was the first piece of music added to an advertisement; now you may think that it must have been since the radio was invented but you'd be wrong. It was a magazine add with words and music written out for the public to read and sing for themselves and it was sometime during the 19^th Century many years before Marconi even invented the radio.

Many people could read music in those days; they had pianos in their front rooms to entertain themselves; most pubs in Britain had pianos in the bars and people – the hoy poly (the plebs) – would gather there and sing along with the pianist.

By the way 100 pubs per week are closing in Britain and going out of business – that's the downside to social networking and cheap booze in supermarkets.

Pianos in pubs was quite common right up to about 20 or 30 years ago; in my childhood I would go to people's houses and there would be a piano there too. 

Someone in the house usually played and if it was somebody really good it was always a great experience.

I sat with a pianist at Butlin's Holiday Camp in Pwllheli, Wales, one day who was a Fats Waller fan and he went through his Waller repertoire for me and a few others - my brother included; I also sat with Jools Holland at the piano in Cannes when he played a boogie for a lot of people who had gathered around. On each occasion the one word that went through my head was 'practice' – I should have practised.

I could have sat with the same two people and they could have played me a tape of Fats Waller or lent me their iPod but it wouldn't have been the same.

I'm not saying we should all be playing pianos but I know that with the advent of automation we are forgetting how to do things. People used to write to each other; they still do but they don't write properly putting pen to paper, they use emails, in fact a lot of us never put pen to paper and have literally lost the skill.

I used to be able to remember all of my friends' telephone numbers, all the phone numbers of the TV Companies in London, the casting directors there, my National Insurance Number, my wife's, my Social Security number and my wife's in the USA and now – I don't even know my wife's cell phone number; it's in my address book on my mobile phone. I still remember all the other numbers in London but these days most of the hirers and firers have moved – to Manchester!!!

The only things I have to remember now are the PINs and where the lavatory is!!

And with texting words are being cut – 'n' for 'and' and so on. Words have always been cut; if you look at a postman's badge you will see the name of the city or town where he works such as LDN for London and BM for Birmingham and so on.

It would be terrible if the shortened words and coded phrases made it to the hard copy page – such as lol (laugh out loud) as this would ruin the language. The Americans have already ruined some of the English language with their Webster's Dictionary; I mean what was the point of that? What was the point of changing the word colour to color?

Leaving words the way they were educated us and we could find out where some of the words came from. Colour came from the French word coleur which, I suppose, came from the Latin colōr – so there we are going around in circles.

But we always did go round in circles - we started electronic communcations with morse code - -.-- . ... / .-- . / -.. .. -..

But I think you know what I mean.

One of the series on TV that Stephen Fry is in, is a show called Gadget Man in which he tries various gadgets. I haven't seen it as I am bored by those kinds of shows - and cooking shows, sports programmes etc. - but it shows the lengths people go to, to not do something. If you want to play a guitar like Eric Clapton it is perfectly possible to buy the guitar hero game and stand there pretending to be a rock star – or you can practice like he did and does and play it properly.

I have no idea where Stephen Fry came from; he kind of appeared one day about 20 years or so ago in sketch comedy with a wonderful 'RP' voice which he seems to be able to do whatever he likes with; he has gone on to be an author, compare, quiz show host, actor and general bon viveur but when I see him introduce the quiz show QI with his ridiculous good evening good evening good evening good evening good evening schtick, I can see a look of uncertainty in his eyes whereas I'm sure he would be better off just saying 'good evening' – I know he is supposed to suffer from bipolar disease and I'm not getting at that. In fact I'm not getting at him at all because he manages so many things at once, has so many balls in the air that I wonder how he copes.

He made a lot of money when he wrote the stage show 'Me and My Girl' which was a huge hit on Broadway and many other places and if you follow him on Twitter – which I did for a short while – you won't be able to keep up with him. He goes from here to there and back again all the time. Sometimes in Los Angeles, where he will do a few episodes of a thing called 'Bones' then off to Berlin to a Wagner concert then back here and . . . . I saw him one day in The Farmers' Market, Los Angeles, getting some food from one of the worst food places there; maybe I should have said hello and guided him to the French place.

The next thing is new year – 2013. As with any other year I wonder if I'll get used to that number. I don't usually make any resolutions; I don't smoke, I'm not fat so there is nothing for me to cut out, but I will think about it. Maybe not moan about coffee so much or stop telling my daughters how to boil rice or maybe even look for somewhere to live permanently – the lease runs out on this cottage in November!!

Happy New Year. - Yes that man above is the famous Robert Burns who wrote these words:

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And auld lang syne?

For auld lang syne, my dear,
For auld lang syne,
We'll tak a cup o' kindness yet,
For auld lang syne.

And surely ye'll be your pint-stowp,
And surely I'll be mine!
And we'll tak a cup o' kindness yet,
For auld lang syne.

For auld lang syne, my dear,
For auld lang syne,
We'll tak a cup o' kindness yet,
For auld lang syne.

We twa hae run about the braes,
And pu'd the gowans fine;
But we've wandered mony a weary fit
Sin' auld lang syne.

For auld lang syne, my dear,
For auld lang syne,
We'll tak a cup o' kindness yet,
For auld lang syne.

We twa hae paidled i' the burn,
Frae morning sun till dine;
But seas between us braid hae roared
Sin' auld lang syne.

For auld lang syne, my dear,
For auld lang syne,
We'll tak a cup o' kindness yet,
For auld lang syne.

And there's a hand, my trusty fiere,
And gie's a hand o' thine!
And we'll tak a right guid-willie waught

For auld lang syne.

For auld lang syne, my dear,
For auld lang syne,
We'll tak a cup o' kindness yet,
For auld lang syne.

Happy Christmas

I have been writing this blog since September 2009 and I get plenty of hits; I use two counters, one comes with the software and the other you can see to the right at the top. The one that comes with the software says I have had 69,144 hits since I first started and 3611 last month. The one at the top of the page – Statcounter – says I have had 49,028 hits so it must be somewhere in between; that's good enough for me.

Let me just wish everybody who reads this whether on a regular basis or now and again, a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

I know it's politically correct to say happy holidays in America and it's hard to even buy Christmas cards but I find it quite embarrassing even saying happy anything to people.

So Happy Christmas, Happy Honika, Happy Quanza and Happy New Year.

Hope to be back in the New Year!!

And that picture above - that's my class in school when I was eight years old. Unfortunately I'm not in the photo but I recognise some of the faces.

Dave Brubeck.

Dave Brubeck.

Very sad to hear that Dave Brubeck died yesterday; he was 92 apart from one day. Today is his birthday. My dad died the day before his birthday; it was a bit pathetic as the birthday cards came in the mail to him and he wasn't there to read them.

Dave Brubeck upset a lot of purist jazz fans in the 60s; his type of jazz wasn't traditional enough for them – his stuff was too clever; it was called modern jazz. I haven't heard that description for a long time and the other crime he was guilty of was having some of his records in the hit parade, the top twenty, the charts in other words they were hits!

The thing I really loved about Take Five, which is what he is famous for, was the repetitive rhythm of the piano; doo dat doo dat doo dah – I loved this minimalist accompaniment to Paul Desmond's solo on his licorice stick; a solo which was a kind of fugue which gave way to the best drum solo on record by maybe the best drummer ever, Joe Morello, who died not too long ago.

Joe Morello was almost blind and wore those dark spectacles for sight reasons as opposed to looking cool; but he looked cool as did Dave Brubeck.

Of course there were other hits (how terrible for those purists) Blue Rondo a la Turk and It's a Jazzy Waltz – I think it was a Jazzy Waltz or a Raggy Waltz but a something waltz at least.

Dave Brubeck's rhythm influenced my taste a lot as I have been hooked on minimalism ever since and another of my favourite composers is Philip Glass the greatest exponent of it.

It's a strange thing, isn't it, when purists protest at something new – Dylan going electric, springs to mind. Up to the time of The Beatles, University students in Britain would only follow jazz and they would grow beards of the type which seem to be fashionable at the moment – I don't know what it's called; Van Dyke?

But back to the jazz – I am not the greatest jazz fan but I do like piano music of all kinds. I love Fats Waller (and Fats Domino) and his stride piano style of play. Stride piano is when the left hand plays the bass part plus the rhythm; so it's like a guitarist playing the bass and rhythm guitar at the same time plus the lead. The little finger plays the bass and the chord follows it to keep the rhythm and the right hand plays the melody – or the solo.

A great stride piano player, besides Fats Waller, was a middle aged woman who was fairly heavy in weight who had permed hair – yes my mother. But another one was a woman called Mrs Mills. But because she was as she was – middle aged and permed – she wasn't very popular with jazz fans but she was with piano players; she was an amazing player. I can't say the same about my mother but she could certainly knock a tune out too.

A few years ago – and I can't remember the exact circumstances – The Dave Brubeck Quartet were due to play at The Hollywood Bowl, in Los Angeles, and on the night they were due to play something happened to the flights from New York to LA – it might have been the volcano but the point is Dave Brubeck was in Los Angeles and the other three were in New York and flights were cancelled between the two cities. So Dave merely recruited a clarinettist, a drummer and a bass player in Los Angeles who did the concert at a moment's notice; they knew all the tunes.

So that's the end of the Quartet - I have forgotten the name of the bassist as I didn't want to search the Internet for this particular post – and one wonders if it will go on like The Glenn Miller Band; I hope not.

Bitterly Cold Weather.

Me in my 'Bates of Jermyn Street' Gatsby cap.

Recently I walked out of my front door and headed towards Eastcote Tube Station, and as I walked I could feel the icy cold wind at the back of my head. I pulled the collar of my leather jacket up but the wind caught the very top of my napper and it was then I realised that I had walked out without my very expensive Bates of Jermyn Street Gatsby Cap – given to me as a present, I might add, by the lovely manager of The Jermyn Street Theatre, Penny.

As I walked I knew that I had put it onto the radiator so it would warm my head when I came out the house and that thought made the icy blast seems even colder but then . . . . I remembered last year when I would walk out of my front door and think about my baseball cap. Should I have put it on to stop the sun from burning my hair as I felt the warmth of it on my shoulders? I was well protected with factor 30 sun barrier which would prevent that terrible red burnt look that tourists attract and which I would get if I ever forgot to use barrier cream and I was trapped in some place without shelter – from the sun and not the rain as in London – and as I thought of this in my imagination I got warmer.

I could actually feel the LA sun on my back and that kind of warmth you get around the ankles when you step off a plane in a warm climate. This was great as I carried on towards the station but as I crossed the road by Budgen's Supermarket a real big blast nearly knocked me off my feet and I was back in Eastcote.

It wasn't the coldest I had ever been. I remember once when I went to New York from Los Angeles on the red eye; this, as it sounds, is as it is; you get your flight from Los Angeles around midnight and land in New York at about 8:00 am New York time, and when we landed the temperature was zero. That's zero degrees Fahrenheit which is 32 degrees below freezing – or minus 18 Celsius.

The hotel we had booked wasn't ready for us till midday and we had to hang about, go and eat somewhere, browse a book shop and take coffee and the like till midday – Oh you should have come straight around, they said, when we told them as we were checking in.

For some stupid reason we went to the top of the Empire State Building; up there we could really feel the cold. We could feel it biting into our bones and once or twice we stayed out in the open air for at least one minute. I have to say that I took some terrific photographs in the crisp clear air but brrrrrr!!

One sort of silly thing happened: when we reached our desired floor, we were invited to have our photo taken in front of a picture of the building with the New York skyline in the background. I laughed at that but that was before I realised just how cold it was outside up there.

When we were in Los Angeles and I would see people attending theatrical first nights on the TV in London or New York I would wonder how they got to the theatre in the cold and ice or the rain but now I am back in London it doesn't seem too bad; especially after New York.

The one thing about London is that you dress for the weather and don't have to come to a decision about what to wear. No more do I have the inconvenience of having to dress in a black suit to go out for a commercial in the hot 100 degree sun and having to drive to the other side of Los Angeles in traffic with the heat and the . .. God was it really such an inconvenience?

I spent most of the time in Los Angeles in the car; you have to as it's such a huge place with very little rapid transport. Of course you can get a bus to any place but it takes so long – it's a bit like London without the tube.

So I would be wearing shorts most of the time and one day my agent called and told me I had to get to West Los Angeles and go dressed smartly in my suit as they wanted to see people about playing a King in a commercial.

So I drove home, went to the bedroom and grabbed my suit, shirt and tie and some black shoes. I put them into the car and headed out to West LA which was quite a jaunt. I got there with about five minutes to spare and got changed in the parking lot. It was a lovely sunny day and I was between two cars and I didn't care that people would see me in my underpants. Everything went smoothly till it came to the shoes. I had picked up two right shoes and one of them was a tap shoe.

I kept my sneakers on and didn't get the job anyway!!!

LMS, British Rail and Finglas.

LMS logo

When I was a little boy, around the same time as God was a little boy, my dad worked for the Railways. He worked for LMS which was the London, Midland & Scottish Railway Company which I thought, till today, meant the London, Midland and Southern but you can see how a life time of thinking one thing can disappear in a moment.

He didn't have anything to do with the trains as he worked at the goods yard at Lawley Street, Birmingham, and delivered parcels to all and sundry using a horse and cart; the horse's name was Bob and I know for a fact that my dad loved that horse in a way that grown men love animals and not in any modern thinking perverted Equus type of way.

My dad stayed at that job for most of his working life, even though he'd been a qualified barber in Dublin where he had a little shop. Business was so bad there that he used to sit my mother in the chair pretending she was a customer when anybody walked passed.

When he retired from the railways he was the boss of that yard and as to Bob? Dog meat or glue, I suppose, but he never forgot him.

My first job was in an Army & Navy Store in the warehouse and various goods were delivered via the back entrance to the Goods Inward where I would take them from the drivers of railway vans. I would say – my dad works there, and they would say – he's my boss!!

For some reason, and I can't remember what, my dad had to visit the place where I worked one day, on business and he came via the back entrance – it's my dad, I told my supervisor, who kind of trembled into the corner as he might have thought I had told my dad about him trying to reach for my back entrance when I was up some steps putting army boots and the like on to the shelves. I didn't tell my dad because he would have killed him and in any case, at the age of 15, I was quite able for the old 'perv' with a few kicks that he always managed to dodge. 

Yes it was always a world full of perverts and pranksters who blacked young kids' balls with polish 'just for fun' amongst other things.

In January 1948 LMS was nationalised and turned in to a part of British Railways but it didn't make any difference to us as we could still travel free on all railways, including those in Ireland, three times a year – so that's what we did. We went three times a year to Dublin on the ship and train – we could have gone to the Continent but went to Dublin and in the summer time we were left there with our aunt & uncle in Finglas.

When we went back to school in September we would have Dublin accents which lasted for a few weeks – it still happens today in Roman Catholic Schools in Britain, I am told.

One day my father brought home a pudding spoon for me; it was a spoon from the Railways and it was made by Mappin & Webb, a famous silversmith (even today). The spoon was from the railway canteen but it didn't have 'LMS' on it – it had GWR which was another of the private companies who were nationalised at the same time as LMS. 

GWR were known as 'God's Wonderful Railways' but officially as Great Western Railways and I believe they ran the famous Flying Scotsman which was the most famous train of all.

Sometimes, when our bikes had punctures, our dad would mend them and as he didn't have any tyre levers he would use pudding spoons – or dessert spoons as some seem to say – and one day a few of those spoons bent with the pressure. So in he came and took my spoon from the drawer. As soon as I saw this I screamed as I didn't want my spoon broken but the spoon was very strong and stood up to it.

For some reason that spoon came with me when I got married so I used it for my breakfast up to the time I went to live in America. One day, before my wife came across, the mail man came with a packet for me and it was my spoon; my wife had sent it.

I still use it now but only for breakfast such as porridge or corn flakes etc – never for pudding for some reason.

So I suppose the spoon will stay with me for the rest of my life; it has never been treasured or revered by me it just kind of stayed – here is a picture of it.

As far as I was concerned British Railways seemed to work okay; if you wanted to get a train to anywhere you would just show up at the station and buy a ticket. If you missed that train you would get the next one and so on.

It was very useful when I was working in London and living in Northampton; I would never know what time I finished work and sometimes would stay for a few drinks.

But since we came back from America things have changed – and not for the better. Now you have to nominate the train you wish to travel on and sometimes even book your seat. If you are caught on the wrong train your ticket is no good and you have to pay for another.

If you book a ticket at the last minute you have to pay an arm and a leg – it's okay if you book well in advance but . . . . there are so many railway companies these days; one company owns the track and leases the lines out to the others; private catering companies supply the food and drinks and when this arrangement first came into force the company that owned the track went bankrupt.

The present railway companies have to apply for the franchises to run their trains every so often and recently Virgin Trains lost their franchise to run their trains on a particular line – and then Richard Branson whinged and wept and moaned about the company that won the franchise and how incompetent they were and how they had submitted a dodgy tender, then lo and behold Virgin were re-awarded the franchise.

But isn't it about time we went back to British Railways? Why did people stand for it and why are we standing for what is happening to the National Health Service here now? And everything else – but there we are and . . . . here we are!

By the way, last week I went to the movies to see The Master; good enough movie and a superb performance from Joaquin Phoenix. I thought I was going to see it at The Curzon Cinema in Soho but when I got there they told me it was showing at The Curzon Cinema in Mayfair; so I went to Mayfair and waited for my companion.

I was chatting to the man on the door and he said that a lot of people went to the Soho theatre by mistake sometimes and sometimes it was the other way around. He had a kind of Irish accent so I asked him where he was from – Dublin, he said, Finglas.

Finglas, the place we would go to as children all those summers ago. 'I know Finglas' I said, 'we went there for the summers when we were kids.' 'What about that?' he said. 'Mellowes Road' I said, 'number 11.' 'Ha ha', he said, 'I lived at number 15.' 

I think his name was Wally MacDonald!

NW by Zadie Smith

I have just read NW by Zadie Smith; in fact I have just read it for the second time. I watched the first in the series of FILM 2012 on the BBC and when they reviewed The Master the reviewer said I loved this film and when it had finished I wanted to watch it all over again; well with a book you can do that quite easily: you go back to page one – or back to 101 as they say in Los Angeles – and this is what I did.

I always knew Zadie Smith was a wonderful writer by reputation and I saw a dramatisation of her first novel, White Teeth, which I think was made by Channel 4 when I was in America.

I was attracted to it by the reviews; they mentioned that this novel could be put in to the same bag as Ulysses as it was written with the 'stream of consciousness' technique which James Joyce was famous for; he was also renowned for not using inverted commas to denote when someone is speaking; he used a dash; for example – Come in, he said.

Zadie uses them sometimes, uses the dash at others and sometimes doesn't use anything at all as in this passage:

The rain got heavy. They stopped in a pub's doorway, Jack Straw's Castle

  Them shoes are bait.

  They're not shoes, they're slippers.

  They're bait.

  What's wrong with them?

  Why they so red?

  I don't know. I think I like red.

  Yeah, but why they got to be so bright? Can't run can't hide.

  I'm not trying to hide. I don't think I'm hiding. Why are we hiding?

  Don't ask me.

  He sat down on the damp stone step. He rubbed at his eyes, sighed.

  Bet there's people that live in them woods, blud.

  On the Heath?

  Yeah. Deep in.

  Maybe. I really don't know.

See what I mean; it's quite easy to see who's doing the talking without the inverted commas or the dashes. I think James Joyce called them 'perverted commas' when the publishers of his first novel put them in. He ordered them to be removed by the 'sergeant at arms!!'

As well as Joyce calling them perverted commas they are also called quotation marks or speech marks

As I mentioned I was drawn to the novel by the reviews and I know that part of London a little bit, the part with the NW postal code: Willesdon, Kilburn, Notting Hill and the novel is about a few people who come from the Caldwell council estate and the lives they try to make for themselves in the nearby suburbs.

One of the leading characters, a black girl called Natalie who looks like Angela Basset, has become a barrister and in that passage above she is wandering, towards the end of the book, with Nathan who came from the same estate and is high on drugs and homeless.

He was a charmer when he was at school with a lot of girls fancying him.

Another character called Felix is a tragic character; we know what's going to happen to him before it happens but we have forgotten that we have been told so when it does happen it comes as a bit of a shock but . .. that's up to you to find out.

There is also the mystery of Chapter 37 – it comes between Chapter 11 & 12 and is on page 37. It starts off - Lying in bed next to a girl she loved, many years ago, discussing the number 37. Dylan is singing. The girl has a theory that 37 has a magic about it, we're compelled towards it.

It goes on to say that the number 37 is used in movies and poetry etc and that web sites discuss it (I don't know I haven't looked) and then, later in the book, she skips from Chapter 36 to 38 – the 37 bus also runs through NW by the way.

It isn't like Ulysses at all as it's not so dense or nearly as long; Ulysses is about 720 pages and NW about 295; but Zadie does write in a stream of consciousness as I think many writers do these days.

It's a kind of interior dialogue and the reader will know what the character is thinking all the time and once in a while the stream of consciousness will be interrupted by some external dialogue as someone might pass them in the street or they might order a pint in a bar.

You have to concentrate when reading it as you can miss bits – which I did about Felix the first time I read it – but if you are at one with the author it's a great experience in reading.

NW is set in the time leading up to the Notting Hill Carnival which is a Caribbean celebration that takes place once a year. There's Caribbean food, reggae and dancing but it also attracts trouble and the metropolitan police haven't quite learned how to handle it yet.

In the novel various people are getting ready for the big weekend, planning what they are going to wear and who they are going to dress up as and the mood of the novel reminded me of The Trouble With Harry by Jack Trevor Story.

It's a long time since I read it but that novel seemed to be set in the sun and NW seems to be too, even though it is set in London.

London gets very humid in the summer months and there is a pregnant woman on the tube who is sweating and in other scenes people are sitting out on their balconies playing music. A haziness and laziness is there all the time and now I'm going to put the book away and hoping to read it again one day.

Starbucks II

Here I am writing about Starbucks again; there are a couple of comments from the last time and I have had a few private emails too; I didn't know Starbucks stirred up so much passion.

So this is a short post as a kind of retort!

I have no problems with Starbucks at all and I don't blame them for not paying their corporation tax either; I am not going to be the one to throw the first stone. If the government here wait till now to question the leaders of the big international companies about their shortfall in tax payments they are even more stupid than I thought.

I don't know how long Starbucks have been over here as I was living in Los Angeles but when I first went there in August 1994 they were very well established.

In a country which doesn't look after its citizens – health care wise – it was good to know that there was a company which gave their employees free health care!

Starbucks is not well liked by everybody either here or in America; it is thought that it is a bit snobby and expensive.

In America the coffee is very cheap – maybe about 60p a cup - and you get free refills. It's very annoying to get back here when you go out for breakfast and you have to keep ordering your coffee and paying for it as you eat. The waiters hover with 2 pots of coffee – the orange one is decaf – and they refill as they pass your table.

In Starbucks you pay for each cup – unless you have proper filter coffee which is what I drink - even here I get free refills; that's only for the proper filter coffee I reiterate. But the staff are very nice; they are friendly and try to please. I know there will be branches were you will meet the opposite but I haven't found any yet.

Over here I have been to a Starbucks at Liverpool Street Station where, if they moved out tomorrow, you wouldn't know they had been there. All the fixtures and fittings in the old building are still in place.

Before I went away Wardour Street was the film centre in London; there were film companies, cutting rooms, post production houses etc and then they moved out and the tee-shirt and souvenir shops moved in – now I am back there is a Starbucks and loads of other coffee shops and sandwich bars which I prefer to tee shirts.

I go to Starbucks every day here – well nearly every day. One of the days I noticed an old man who came in, ordered his drink, then sat down, took his newspaper out, and did the crossword; 20 years ago he would have been in the pub taking a drink.

They never kick you out of Starbucks for not buying drinks. Students and school children come in and use the free wi-fi. The other day a woman came in, bought herself a drink, curled herself up on one of the armchairs and read her book. She had dropped her child off to a birthday party and waited in Starbucks in the warm and comfort.

There are also sofas scattered about so it is a new experience and a comfortable way to drink coffee.

Before I went to America it was quite possible to buy a good cup of coffee here – sometimes they would call it 'drip coffee' but since coming back proper coffee is hard to come by.

For some reason the Italians have taken over the expertise in coffee drinking; I read the other day that no Italian would take coffee after a certain hour in the morning – so what? The largest coffee drinking nation is the United States and they drink coffee all day.

In Britain there is a company called Costa – they don't serve filter coffee so I don't go there. They serve Americano which I won't bore you with again but they are a British Company owned by a brewery – Whitbread. They have branches in 30 countries, including Britain, but none in the United States whose national drink is a cup of joe (coffee) and I wonder if they pay local corporation tax in those countries?

By the way the coffee taster at Costa has his tongue insured with Lloyds of London for £10,000,000. Apparently he has 10,000 finely tuned taste buds. Here he is:

Gennaro Pelliccia

Starbucks.

Last month it emerged that Starbucks had paid nothing in UK corporation tax over the previous year, despite making sales worth £398 million here – that's about $597 million. There are other companies here which I don't have to name, but I'm sure you know, who haven't paid their full share of tax either. This is because they have their headquarters in another part of the almighty Common Market, known to the rest of the world as The European Community, where the rate of Corporation Tax is lower than here.

Places like Ireland and Luxembourg.

I know big companies do the same in America; credit card companies tend to be based in Delaware and Starbucks themselves are based in Seattle, Washington; that's Washington State, for my pals over here who don't know, and not the capital Washingon DC.

There are other companies, corporations or just firms who don't pay sales tax in America but collect it and don't give it to the government. They do this because the local government want them in their vicinity because they create jobs which means they pay wages into the community and the people that receive the wages spend in that community and so stimulate the economy.

What usually happens in America is the local government will give the new company a free ride for ten years to give them a chance to build up the business then hope they will start to pay taxes after the ten year period is up and not move away.

Well that is in America and this is Britain; this is another country, unlike America who have different tax laws and rates in different states. In fact they have different laws and, would you believe, I don't think murder is a federal offence and neither is a hate crime. If they were federal offences they would all have the same punishment – such as the death penalty. You will know which states still carry out the death penalty – they're the ones with the most murders!! So where's your argument about a deterrent now??

In Britain, plans are afoot this week to occupy Starbucks coffee shops throughout the high streets of the land.

The idea is that because Starbucks do not pay corporation tax – or very little - they are causing some of the cuts to the economy; the campaign is being led by an activist group called 'UK Uncut' whose activist Sarah Greene said: “It is an outrage that the Government continues to let multinationals like Starbucks dodge millions in tax while vital services like refuges and rape crisis centres face the axe. It does not have to be this way.

"The Government could easily bring in billions that could fund vital services by clamping down on tax dodging, but are instead making cuts that are forcing women to choose between motherhood and work, and trapping them in abusive relationships.”

The UK Uncut group plan to fill the Starbucks shops with women and their children as crèche facilities have been withdrawn through cuts, the homeless, as shelters have been closed due to the cuts and women in need of help who are in battered relationships.

Crèche facilities are usually supervised services and so are the others; are they going to provide the personnel?

This is all because of the cuts the Chancellor of the Exchequer and The Prime Minister have introduced because of the recession/depression and here is a photo of the Prime Minister taken yesterday - 

 

as you can see he is really tightening his belt!! 

Whoops!!

Maybe he needs to tighten more than his belt!!

Let me just say that Starbucks is one of the few places here where you can buy proper filter coffee!! They sell the dreaded Americano too but at least I don't have to drink it!!

China/USA.

Now what do I know about China? Well, not much really; but, as I have said before, when has that stopped me?

'China' in Britain has always been slang for your friend; - Hello, my old China, you'd say. China plate = mate. Cockney Rhyming slang, it is, and it seems to have spread to all classes and places like Ireland and Australia and is far better than the modern slang.

The main reasons for a lot of slang was to either speak in code to your China, or make the meaning clearer.

Making the meaning clearer is when there is a lot of noise and you lengthen the word the same as you do on the phone when spelling things out. 

I think the Americans got that wrong, by the way, when they were giving clues to letters over the phone; for example in Britain you would say 'B for Butter' but when I got to America they would say 'B as in Boy.' The problem with that is that 'Boy' is one syllable and could sound like 'T as in Toy' but Butter has two and gives you a clue when spelling things out; of course it's B-Beta, these days.

The other slang of years gone by was the butchers' back slang so that they could talk to each other in front of customers in confidence. They used a lot of curse words such as sipffo!!

A lot of people these days won't use the rhyming slang for secrecy maybe because everybody knows it. I could have said, instead of people, the younger generation or youngsters, but it seems those are phrases are not used anymore.

I don't think the modern slang will last that long. Some of the sales/estate agent types use things like SPOC – he's my spoc, for example. Spoc = Single Point Of Contact!

But the 'in slang' in North West London use words like 'long' meaning late and 'bare' meaning 'a lot of;' I'd only recently got used to 'bad' meaning good!!

Anyway back to China – I have no idea why I went on about slang!!

They say – and who are they – that China is the fastest growing economy on earth and that by about 2030 it will be larger than America; the economy that is; but China, the country, the place, is a strange anomaly isn't it? It has a population of 1.3 billion; that's an American billion, by the way but in British terms it would be one thousand, three hundred million – 1,347,350,000 – as a British billion is one million million, a trillion is a billion billion and so on.

Because of the huge population, they tried to control the birth rate by only allowing couples to have one child, so one wonders how what the population would be now if it had been left alone.

What is certain is that it would be a more balanced society. At the moment there are many families with just one child; that one child will have to look after its two parents later in life and four grandparents. If you multiply that by how many families there are, you can see that there might be a problem in a few years time. 

This is because in a modern society the younger generations have to support the older ones. They do this through taxes and that is how it works; there will be a larger than natural older percentage of the population which will increase the tax burden.

They are supposed to be a communist country; that's what they call themselves, in fact there are people in America who still call it Red China.

But it's about as far from the philosophy of Karl Marx/communism/socialism as you can get; like the USSR used to be.

They are a Capitalist Society run by the government – Government Capitalism - and the only people that seem to benefit, as far as I can see (and what do I know?), are the American Companies, the Chinese Government and a few very privileged people.

The economy, which is still growing, is only based on a relatively small percentage of the population as there is a vast rural society where people are starving. Even the middle classes can't afford to buy a house and are living from hand to mouth.

So what's going to happen there?

China are America's bankers; they will make a lot of money from the USA as America will continue to service its debt. If America switches its debt elsewhere, China will be in the soft and smelly and if America, when the MAD president is ever elected, decides to welch on the debt all bets will be off.

At the moment the USA are an asset to China; companies, such as Walmart, run a lot of the economy by giving them lots of business and controlling the terms.

Walmart, for example, have a workforce of 2.2 million worldwide but not many in China; a lot of companies in China manufacture only for Walmart and if Walmart turn off the tap???? Soft and Smelly!! 

The Chinese Companies manufacture their stuff for as little as 1 cent per item and the Americans nickle and dime them so that the only way they can deliver the goods is by paying slave wages.

So don't ever feel sorry for the Americans with their debt to China. The USA produce 15 trillion dollars worth of goods every year - every year - and they are too big to fail – it's not going to happen - so we need to get over it and deal with it; there's not going to be a revolution there, no Arab Spring type of uprising just the same old same old.

If Obama wins on Tuesday he will have the same hard job getting things through Congress as he has had in the past four years as the Republicans will try and thwart him every step of the way which is why he didn't get the health care system he wanted and why he couldn't close Guantanamo Bay - but he did save the Car Industry (yes he did) and he has improved the standard of living for the middle classes.

That would be a strange platform to stand for in Britain – the middle class; despised by both the working class and the upper class; they both hate the bourgeoisie.

Talking of Britain, a man call IDS, who is some kind of one man band Conservative Think Tank Commander, who was once the leader of the party (one of the many who tried and failed to oust Tony Blair and New Labour) wants to abolish Child Benefit after the second child. One more than in China.

Surely they are getting it wrong; when I did sociology, many years ago, it was estimated that with loss of earnings, general upkeep, schooling, nursery fees and everything else, it cost, on average, £80,000 to bring up one child to the age of eighteen.

I'm sure that figure is much much larger by now! May more like £250,000.

Then you have the cost of University – or Uni as it is now called.

When that child is ready for work everybody chases it. First the banks – because they know that there is a potential one million pounds worth of business there. If 10% of them never work the other millions will kick in, as many of those will be worth more than a million and the banks can always bother the ones who owe them money for the rest of their lives for their student loans and put their debts down as assets so they can raise money against them.

On top of that the children will pay taxes.

So why restrict child benefit?

As soon as it gets spent it puts money in to the pockets of the exchequer. 

In fact instead of trying to trim 10% off the welfare budget they should double it; yes DOUBLE IT!! the extra money will make the recipients feel better and they will spend money in the shops who will pay their workers who will pay tax – sometimes even the big stores and companies will pay corporation tax; sometimes!!!!

But then we have the 6,000 pound gorilla in the room; the deficit.

Da da da daaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

What the hell is the deficit? They keep talking about it; John Stewart got mixed up with America's debt and the deficit recently in a mock debate, but a deficit is the difference between what you pay out and what is paid in; and that is for the last year. If less is paid in than what is paid out it is a deficit!

Some people live on a deficit for years; eventually they will go broke – unless they have a nest egg; as this country and the USA have; so why can't we have a deficit some years? It's all business; Britain lent the IMF £10 million a few months ago; we send aid to countries; we spend money on the conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and any other place we want to invade and as soon as this lot is over we will have to find some other place to invade or the arms industry will go broke.

What Eisenhower said in the fifties is true when he spoke of the Military Industrial Complex; we can't make money without war so why be surprised by it?

The Greek debt, for example – and try to find out how much it is – is far less than the USA's and Britain's debt. Under George W Bush the bailout to banks was $750 billion; one quarter of that would have done Greece very nicely, thank you; I'm not suggesting that the USA should have bailed out Greece but . . . ..

Not my problem – but do you see what I mean, my old China?

Something else is going on and we're letting it happen.

But back to America - the good old US of A and the election tomorrow: in Britain we are miss reading what's happening in America; over here we see Obama as a 'shoe in' and should easily beat Romney but what we don't realise is a lot of people over there don't want health care; they don't care that much about their fellow Americans and see the introduction of health care as the road to socialism and their country turning in to Soviet Russia. What was that HL Menkin quote I used recently?

My Mother.

Esther Sullivan

(Essie of the Alex; my mother)

I have had a few people ask me what my mother did at the Alex; the Alexandra Theatre, Birmingham, which I wrote recently about concerning Marlene Dietrich's appearance there in 1973.

Well she made the tea and bacon and eggs for the stars and backstage workers. She asked them all for autographs and her collection of autographs must have been worth a small fortune when the boss of the 'Alex' asked her for it, which she freely gave; where is it now, I wonder?

But I have no idea how she came to work there (but I'll guess, later on) – and we all worked there at one time or another; the family, I mean.

When we were growing up, she was a company director at a firm in Birmingham called The Lawden Manufacturing Company in the city centre. She would arrive home in the evenings at around 7:30 – 8:00 and tell my dad about her whole day. He would hear about the ups and downs at the board meetings, the welfare of the staff and employees, the office politics and a lot of gossip.

I would sit there listening to this too and I would love it. I knew what Tom Pierce was like at work when we went around and met his family, I knew a lot about the managing director, Mr W.W. Kirk and knew he liked a drop of whisky.

When he would come to our house, with his wife, for dinner the whisky bottle would take quite a beating.

He was a dynamic little Scotsman with the gift of the gab; he was brought to my mind when I first heard the J.M. Barrie phrase 'There are few more impressive sights than a Scotsman on the make,' as he certainly was on the make. He had a great knack for publicity and we were quite used to seeing him, and our mother, in the newspapers.

One time a whole supplement was devoted to the Lawden Manufacturing Company in the local paper and she was heavily featured.

Another time, when I was 16, a photographer came to the house and took photographs of the whole family.

And why did they profile us?

Because my mother was a company director and she was a woman!!! 
Unheard of in those days.

Who would look after us?

Who would do the cooking and cleaning?

My dad didn't really like being photographed as he knew the men at work would take the piss and jeer that he was doing housework; he was right. Many a time when I went in to work (at the post office) people in their offices would ask me if I'd done the washing up – but that was then; this is now.

It never occurred to me in those days that you shouldn't drink and drive and many a night Bill Kirk would drive home from our house in his posh Jaguar with a good few drams inside him; but he got away with it and survived; I presume.

Barely a week went by without him being interviewed on TV about this that and the other and, many years later, when I was working at a TV station in Birmingham I saw him waiting to go on to be interviewed.

There he was; all five feet six of him strutting about like a Scottish James Cagney spouting controversial sound bites which would get picked up by other news sources.

One day he was discussing 'prisoner's rights' and he was complaining that they had too many already and used the phrase 'they get a bunk up at the weekend.'

People sitting around the studio burst into laughter and the next day the phrase was headlines in the newspapers.

Bunk up, by the way, was – sexual intercourse; still is!

It all ended when my mother came home one day and told us she'd resigned. Kirk kind of kept in touch but not much.

I saw him at the railway station in Wolverhampton when I was a drama student and he invited me into the first class compartment. I didn't really want to go in there but he assured me all would be okay and we sat and discussed my mother; he was surrounded by a lot of other men in suits on their way to London.

I think one day a friend of a friend of my mother's asked her if she could help out at the Alex; she (the f of f) had a job backstage making tea and snacks and she wanted my mother to relieve her for a week or two and this is what she did – but I have no idea how she became a permanent fixture there. The little canteen was about nine feet by about twelve with a hole in the wall which was the counter.

She wasn't a great cook at home but she could sure do bacon and eggs so I got used to seeing the most unlikely of people sitting down on one of the stools, eating this from the shelf (which is about all it was) which surrounded the room.

People like Laurence Olivier, Richard Todd, Margaret Lockwood, Leslie Phillips – all these people well known in Britain at the time - and when they did a pantomime I saw Des O'Conner and a host of other so called stars.

To Essie, thanks for the bacon and eggs read most of the dedications on the signed autographs.

When touring in a play at various theatres and venues, stars would come up to me and wonder where they had met me and I would tell them.

My mother was mentioned in the artistic director's autobiography – she was referred to as Essie of the Alex; I had a copy once which was by Derek Salberg.

My brother eventually went to work there part time as a backstage electrician – moving the lights etc. That's where he met his wife who was the stage manager.

I did the electrics too, for a time, when I was at drama school and I also did the sound a few times. My dad would help my mother and burnt the toast one night and the whole audience could smell it; I would also help her once in a while with the dishes.

Sometimes we would do 'get ins' and/or 'get outs' – I hated those but they were well paid; it involved clearing all the scenery from a touring production, flats, scenery, props and costumes, etc, from the theatre before the next tour came in.

We worked for the world famous Sadlers Welles Opera, London Festival Ballet and the Gilbert & Sullivan Company, D'oyle Carte.

Even now if I hear snatches from their operas or The Sleeping Beauty ballet I remember the times we had cues.

Derek Salberg was a cricket enthusiast and would cast his plays depending on how good a cricketer you were; but he never cast me – I was Essie's son.

Rock 'n' Roll.

Buddy Holly

There is one thing about the Americans which I don't think they appreciate; I don't think they appreciate some of the things they have started, or invented if you like, which have influenced the world.

They think they invented the computer and the Internet – well they didn't.

A British scientist called Donald Davies started the Internet – and with a name like that he was probably Welsh – and the computer was invented by an Englishman called Charles Babbage in the 19^th Century, he was the first to conceptualise and fully programme a computer which he never developed but his son completed and simplified a version of the machine's analytical unit and gave it to the Science Museum in South Kensington where I believe it is still there to this day.

Alan Turing is generally considered to be the father of the modern computer; he was in the news recently as 2012 is his centenary.

But what am getting at?

I am getting at the great things Americans have given to the world; no not cooking or food, unless you like hamburgers and the dreaded Americano coffee, which the Italians think they invented, but the music.

They have given to the world some of the greatest music and they ignore this feat. And I'm not talking classical music either, even though I love Samuel Barber and Philip Glass.

Rock'n'Roll and jazz – that's what they gave us.

I used to attend many of the jazz concerts at the Hollywood Bowl and also the smaller ones at the Hollywood/Highland Centre (or Center) where they hold the Academy Awards.

My favourite, of course, is rock'n'roll. I have seen some great bands over there, in Los Angeles, who were largely ignored by the punters.

I saw The Blasters at The House of Blues but that was because they were the support group for Percy Sledge, and I think they were appreciated by the audience on that night, but a couple of years ago I went to a party at the Peterson Car Museum – well The Peterson Automotive Museum – as the local auctioneers, Bonhams & Butterfields, were selling a collection of Steve McQueen's motor bikes and cars.

There were quite a few motor-bike enthusiasts there who were full of hair and leather and who turned out to be the most gentlest of gentle creatures. These fellas stood around mainly in groups of blokes and some groups had their women and I got the impression, now and again, that they were Hell's Angels but they weren't.

At one time, during the evening, the actor Robert Patrick, who was in Terminator 2, came in with a politician and they stopped the band for a while, whilst he spouted some garbage about 'our boys in the front line' – they stopped the band.

Do you know who was playing?

None other than Ricky Nelson's son. He looked just like Ricky Nelson and sounded like him and he was singing his dad's songs – I'm not sure if he was Gunnar Nelson or Matthew Nelson - I was spellbound as he sang and the guitarist was playing just like his dad's great guitarist, James Burton.

I couldn't believe that they were being treated like background. Some excuse for a guitarist, whom I knew and could only play Bossa Nova, came up to me and said 'rubbish.'

That was enough to put him in my shit list!

Just listen to James Burton's guitar work for Ricky Nelson and later with Elvis Presley and see what I mean; and this guy was up to that standard but because it wasn't jazz he was thought of as 'rubbish.'

One of the songs he sang was his dad's song Garden Party, which his dad wrote in disgust after a Madison Square Garden audience booed him, because, in his mind, he was playing new songs instead of just his old hits; the song was about that Madison Square Garden Concert and was autobiographical; the younger Nelson, at the party, joked about it being autobiographical for him too.

All lost on the crowd that night.

Another time I went to a bar on La Brea, in Hollywood called the Lava Lounge, and the band – or the group – played and sang Buddy Holly songs and Bobby Fuller songs.

Again the crowd didn't even look at them.

I had heard many groups years ago play and sing Buddy Holly songs in fact before The Beatles that's what a lot of groups would do – Holly or The Shadows in Britain. But they couldn't quite get that guitar lick that Buddy played on Peggy Sue.

I asked someone I was with if he knew who the originator of the songs was and he guessed Elvis!!!! Arrrrgghhhhhhhh!!!!

All of them dead, now of course. Buddy Holly and Ricky Nelson in plane crashes and Bobby Fuller died mysteriously in Hollywood right by where we used to live.

He was found in his car dead; there's a bit of a complicated story about his death, which is maybe apocryphal in Wikipedea:

Bobby Fuller

Within months of "I Fought The Law" becoming a top 10 hit, Fuller was found dead in an automobile parked outside his Hollywood apartment. The Los Angeles deputy medical examiner, Jerry Nelson, performed the autopsy. According to Dean Kuipers: "The report states that Bobby's face, chest, and side were covered in “petechial hemorrhages" probably caused by gasoline vapors and the heat. He found no bruises, no broken bones, no cuts. No evidence of beating." Kuipers further explains that boxes for "accident" and "suicide" were ticked, but next to the boxes were question marks. Despite the official cause of death, some commentators believe Fuller was murdered.

Erik Greene, a relative of Sam Cooke, has cited similarities in the deaths of Cooke and Fuller. Fuller bandmate, Jim Reese, suspected that Charles Manson may have had something to do with Fuller's death but never provided credible evidence. A sensationalist crime website has speculated that the LAPD may have been involved because of Bobby's connection to a Mafia-related woman.

Over the street from where Bobby was found, is The Highland Gardens Hotel; Janice Joplin died in there from a drug overdose one night and they still rent out her room. Our kids would stay there when they came out to see us with their families.

So I am asking Americans to appreciate what you have and what you are really famous for overseas; it wasn't Ronald Reagan who brought the Berlin Wall down; it was pop music and another American product – Levi Jeans.

A few months ago I bought my 23^rd pair when I was in Los Angeles; when I was a lot younger I would buy a new pair of 501s, put them on and get into a bath - to shrink them to my shape - I think I had read about it somewhere. I don't do that any more as I don't think it works at all.

After a time, 501s get a bit bigger as you wear them and become 'old person's jeans' – as they are called by some people – but they're not really.

Levi Jeans started out being worn by cowboys and 'blue collar' workers in America so why the 'old person' moniker?

It's because the older you get, the shape of you changes – you can't help it, it isn't a crime or even a vice but and, by the way, I lied about the jeans I bought a few months ago being my 23^rd pair.

Rock On!!

Levi Jeans

worn with boots - as they should be.