The National Debt: if only . .

Denis Healey: the best Prime Minister Britain never had.

Think about this: if you had a load of money in the bank and a mortgage, would you pay the mortgage off?

Tax advisors say no, don't pay it off as you get tax relief on the mortgage interest – personally I would pay it off, tax relief or no tax relief.

Many years ago we had an interest only mortgage; to have one of these we had to take out an endowment life insurance plan to secure the balance. What they didn't mention was the insurance plan might not mature to more than the balance of the mortgage as there is no guarantee that it will.

And in fact a lot of them didn't.

One time a long time ago I put an advertisement in the newspaper as I had a violin to sell. 

A man came to the house to look and eventually bought it. 

However, this man only bought the thing to get in to the house. He was an insurance salesman. And he sold me an endowment mortgage. He paid me £100 or so for the violin just to make a sale. He would be paid commission on every payment I made to the insurance company for 25 years. All for giving me £100.

After a few months I found I couldn't really afford the premiums so I cancelled it.

Isn't the national debt a bit like that. Aren't we borrowing money from ourselves and trying to balance the books as if we have a load of cash in the bank but we are borrowing money to pay the mortgage, the utility bills and everything else and at the end of the year we say we have a deficit when all the time our capital stays in the bank.

Without giving precise numbers it has recently been announced that the National Health Service has lost two point something Billion pounds in the past year. That is despite the one Billion the government gave them. The word gave by the way is wrong but that's what I heard.

Two Billion in the scheme of things is a drop in the ocean when you consider that the government gave forty three Billion to the Royal Bank of Scotland to bail them out.

Yes gave. Because they ain't getting it back!!

And then there's the rest of the banking world.

Now - where did the government get it from?

Was it in a big hole somewhere, stashed there for a rainy day or was it borrowed?

If it was borrowed who did we – yes the royal one – borrow it from?

Why from ourselves, of course. I think the national debt is around three Trillion or thereabouts and that three Trillion is owed to The Bank of England – our bank.

It is also owed to the people who buy government bonds.

Maybe the Rothschild who lent money for the Napoleonic wars in the first place?

We don't borrow from The World Bank or the International Monetary Fund because our national debt is not an INTernational Debt.

We invest in the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, I shouldn't wonder.

The crisis in the National Health Service gets discussed and debated as if the solution is monetary, as if it's some kind of business and is likened to private companies whose aim is to make a profit.

The National Health Service is not here to make a profit or even pay for itself.

It's here to serve and for those who complain about management salaries etc I would ask the question: who do you want to manage it if not managers?

The doctors?

Some countries don't have national debts: Norway for a start.

When they discovered the oil they paid it off.

Could we do that or are we only renting the island from the Rothschilds?

Maybe the deficit is, like the national debt bullshit.

One Hundred and Eighty!

Have you ever looked at darts on TV? And have you ever wondered how the players throw a dart from that distance – about eight feet – and it lands in the treble twenty; the sixty. Then they throw two more into the sixty and the announcer says one hundred and EIGHTY!!! And the crowd goes wild? Sometimes if the first one doesn't go in neither do the other two. They might get one more in there but the other will be in the twenty or even the one or five.

The confidence of that first dart spurs them on to the other two or vice-versa.

That's why they will go to the bottom of the board and go for the nineteen to try and get a couple of trebles in there – or they may go down there because the flight of one of the darts is blocking their view of the treble twenty.

Now I am a good shot with a rifle – well I was, I got my marksman's badge when I was in the army cadets (hey!!! the ACF not the CCF!!) - but I was using sights. They weren't telescopic sights, which are easy to use as long as you can keep the rifle still, but a kind of V sight.

There again, though, you have to keep the weapon still. A good way of doing this is to pull it into your shoulder and twist at the same time, then squeezing that trigger so softly that you don't even feel it. Rather like tickling a trout as they swim beneath you and suddenly it's in your arms – but don't ask me as I don't fish even though my son is an expert carp angler.

But going back to the darts with their shooting/firing without sights. I have never really fired many pistols – a sten, yes and a bren gun – but I have been told that if you hold a pistol in your hand and point it at the target as if it's your finger you get a sure shot. So it might be the same principle for dart players.

David Beckham, when he was a boy, would practice hitting the cross bar from way out till he got good. How good? Well you know.

I have always thought that good photographers would be good rifle marksmen as they have the discipline to be still and to touch that shutter at the right time and with the gentleness in the finger of an eye surgeon.

I remember I went out on a smallish boat to see the whales migrating north in the Pacific Ocean. Unfortunately I didn't have a zoom lens on my camera and it wasn't automatic focus or anything so as soon as the shout went to – WHALE ON THE STARBOARD SIDE AT TWO-O-CLOCK – or whatever, you had to point, focus and squeeze. I took a few but they were so tiny in the the frame that they didn't look great when I cropped them; not bad, but not great.

It was an Olympus with all the bells and whistles of what was available to me (at my price) at that time so I bought a Canon not long after that. That was great but it eventually wore out; I was having to take gaffa tape with me everywhere to keep the thing closed and I left it on the Queen Mary 2 on our way back to Blighty when the time came – unfortunately I left the lens by mistake.

So recently I looked on eBay for a 35mm camera and bought one. Not remembering that I was looking for a Canon with automatic focus I bought the same kind of Olympus again – mistake!!!

Maybe I should have practiced trying to hit the cross bar or the treble twenty?

I'm back - where've I been?

Dear oh dear, I'm sorry I haven't written to you for some time; gawd knows why, I suppose I've just been busy.

Look:

those are the books next to my bed which I haven't had time to finish. Some of them I have finished but I keep them there as they are the ones I really liked, for example, Marty Feldman's autobiography. I loved it so it stays there in case I want to dip in to it again. Sometimes I get bored with novels so a few there are half finished or half started, depending on which way you look at it, and one, John Osborne's autobiography, I have been reading for years. It's a must for all writers and actors as it's well written and interesting and he was probably one of the most influential writers of the 20^th century. 

The first play that startled everybody was Look Back in Anger and a lot of people these days think that his character Jimmy Porter is still relevant – it was in the 50s but not now I don't think.

He wasn't exactly (John Osborne) the nicest of people; I got to know one of his wives, Jill Bennett, when she worked in Nottingham and she was lovely. She was a big star and people in the company (I was working with at Leicester Haymarket Theatre) would pull my leg and say she's out front or she's coming tonight because I'd had a few drinks with her.

I met her after a play she was in and made her laugh solidly for an hour or so whilst we were in the pub before driving back to Leicester.

When she committed suicide it is reputed that her ex husband, John Osborne, spit on her grave. Whether that is true or not I don't know but I have seen it in print before the phrase post-truth was even imagined. But why did he do that (if he did)?

Maybe because of the suicide and not for anything else. Maybe he didn't like the fact that she had abandoned him after he had abandoned her in life. So why would I want to read his book? Just an interesting read that's all. I don't know if he even mentioned her in his writing; yet!

I saw in the west end a follow up to Look Back in Anger but Jimmy Porter wasn't played very well. Jimmy was originated by Kenneth Haigh at The Royal Court and played by Richard Burton in the movie. 

The thing about Jimmy is that he was/is a wife abuser. He spends all the play trying to play the trumpet (off stage) and then comes on shouting and roaring. He calls his mother in law names and describes her as rough as a night in a Bombay Brothel at one point. And he kicks out at anything and is a true bully which is what the author probably was; this was in the fifties when the old guard were going out and classes were changing and it was in the last days of rationing, national service (the draft) when a new day was dawning and creativity which was always stifled by the royal shilling (the draft). John Lennon and Ringo Starr just missed the draft and we got The Beatles.

I didn't play Jimmy Porter but I played his Welsh lodger, Cliff, when I went to night school – night drama school to be precise. They couldn't afford sound FX and the guy playing Jimmy couldn't play the trumpet so I played it. Now what made me think I could play a trumpet? Well I used to be in the army cadets and knew how to get a sound out of it so it worked.

But all this, as I ramble on, doesn't give you much of an excuse as to why I haven't been writing.

Well I have a new agent after the unfortunate demise of my last one who sadly died just before my play opened so there we are.