NEW YEAR'S EVE REFLECTIONS

2025

As 2024 draws to a close, I have been reflecting on what has happened throughout the year. This is customary for me, although I usually ignore all the parties around the New Year event itself, having long expressed indifference to it. An early night will do me fine. I may stay up to watch the fireworks on the television but I will not be toasting the New Year in and definitely not singing Auld Lang Syne as 2025 starts up.

Why so Scrooge towards New Year? Whereas the north of Christ seems like something worth celebrating, even if we live in largely secular age and his being the son of God seems a bit of a stretch to the agnostic-atheists who live in it. I do go to church occasionally and quite enjoy it but I find it difficult to believe in any sort of afterlife. Apart from anything else it would seem a bit dull being perpetually nice to one another for eternity.

I know that my body is starting to decline now and, although I fight this off as best I can, this progress seems inexorable. Sooner or later the decline will bring about my death. I am more or less reconciled to this although I have always wanted my body to get there before my mind also begins declining. Having seen the effects of dementia on my grandmother and even my father, who had a very sharp mind, I have no desire to go through it myself.

I wake up at six every morning - often woken by the alarm in my phone - and do my exercises in an attempt to strengthen my knees and hold off the effects of ageing. I have done that every day except once since the physio gave me them and my youngest brother tells me in his somewhat bossy way that doing them is 'a good thing'. It is one way to start the day, I suppose, and makes me more flexible than I used to be, It certainly beats getting a new knee fixed.

One of the reasons I feel Scroogish towards New Year is that many of my friendships are fading as I concentrate on family more. Friendship sued to be very important to me and I counted lots of friends, many of whom I have lost touch with in recent years. This does not seem so important, however, as I have little interest in singing along with them. I am happy to see my daughter and son in the period around New Year and wait for my partner to come home.

She is in Ireland on tour now and, although she is looking forward to stopping work so that she can spend every day with her beloved horses, I have little interest in retirement, which I always felt was overrated in any case. I am rather dreading having to give up work because of dementia or disability and want to fend off that date as far as possible. I have no intention of retiring, although I accept that I may be retired as people decide I am too gaga to work anymore.

My grandfather on my father's side - I never knew me maternal one who died before I was born - said that he would be dead within six months of being forced to stop work. That happened more or less as he predicted once he had sold his stationery business and was eased out by the new owners of the business he had built up. Much the same applies to me, I think, and one of my main preoccupations is what to do with my private pension, which I have not touched yet.

Still, I should not complain too much. I have my health - sort of - a fine family and I can still work in what is probably best described as 'semi-retirement' in which I still get paid for work I love and  can pick and choose to a certain extent how much I work. In practice, I tend to accept jobs which are offered to me and do about 100 to 120 a year, which is ample for me. As they say, I should count my blessings as the sun sets on another year.

Edwin Lerner

My other blog is )diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

FOUR MORE YEARS OF TRUMP

Victorious again - Donald Trump

I cannot say that I was particularly surprised when I woke up to find that Donald Trump has been re-elected to the presidency of the USA. The opinion polls put him and his opponent Kamala Harris neck and neck but he won quite comfortably in the end, carrying all the swing states and winning both in the electoral college and the popular vote, which he actually lost quite heavily to Hilary Clinton. This time he won on both counts fairly easily. 

Why was this? Obviously, Harris is a woman of colour and, although America was prepared to elect a black man to the presidency – and Barack Obama campaigned valiantly for her – the country would not elect a woman, even a gun-owning one, to the office. Sexism is stronger than racism it seems and people would not admit this, even to an opinion poll questioner. This applies especially to black voters, probably both male and female.

 

There were other factors too. A large number of Moslem voters would not turn out for her because her boss Joe Biden was a strong supporter and supplier of arms to Israel. Prices kept on rising, bills were increasing and improvements in the economy had not registered strongly enough. American voters were more interested in paying the bills rather than saving the world. Let us not sneer at them – most people around in other countries are the same.

 

Trump, despite not yet being in office at the time of writing, is already saying that he will increase tariffs on goods coming from other countries, particularly Canada and Mexico and its biggest trading partner China. This is an attempt to stem the flow of drugs like fentanyl into the country - as well as illegal immigrants. That was one of the main issues in the election, stopping people coming into a country that has always relied on immigration.

 

This is one of the many problems Trump will face when he takes office. There is a real tension between his promise to put America first, to secure the borders from illegal immigrants and to protect American workers from cheap imports on the one hand and the support of neoliberal people on the other hand. The neoliberals believe in free trade and market forces and Trump has promised to protect the American people from these forces.

 

Trump sounds good. He knows how to work a room simply by telling people what they want to hear. However, he relies on backing from people (mostly men) who may agree with his conservative agenda but who also support free trade and are quite happy to buy goods from the cheapest supplier whatever their country of origin. This is a fundamental contradiction that will not disappear – free trade versus the protection of American jobs.

 

Trump’s message to those who voted for him – keep working in the jobs you have done for generations and do not worry about things like the environment – is very different to that of those who bankroll him. Sooner or later, the tension between the two will become obvious and I have a feeling that market forces will prevail, as they usually do. Whenever I go to the shops, I tend to go for the cheaper option if the goods are of similar quality.

 

The ability to work a room is an often underestimated quality but it is essential for those who want to be elected. I have to admit that Ronald Reagan was good at it. The old actor spoke well and I was naïve enough to think that he was speaking off the cuff when he was really reading his speech from an autocue. In my defence, it was some time ago that I heard Reagan speak and I was not familiar with this machine at the time. I soon learned.

 

Who else had the ability to work a room? Bill Clinton, who had very good ratings when he left office, had it but I do not think that his wife Hilary did so. (Bill would never have made the mistake of labelling potential voters as ‘deplorables’.) George Bush junior had it but George Bush senior did not. JFK and Obama had it in a rather lofty way while LBJ had it in a down-home way – but lost it, I believe, because of Vietnam, a war he could not defend and which eventually cost him the chance of re-election when he dropped out of the race.

 

The elephant in the room, of course, is Adolf Hitler, who had the ability to inspire the German people into thinking he was their saviour. It is said that even well-meaning liberal Germans who went to his rallies became carried away with patriotic fervour once they heard him and started screaming for revenge against the enemies of the fatherland. The ability to convert people who, in their sober selves, would disagree with you is obviously priceless.

 

The Nazis, incidentally, were very sexist, believing that women were best employed as mothers and housewives, staying at home and producing male soldiers for the German army. In that, they had something in common with Trump supporters. He is reported to be something of an admirer of the German leader and the belief that women were better off at home rather than in jobs or on the campaign trail is something right-wingers all share.

 

People often look back when they vote, trying to recapture a lost golden age when men went to work at traditional jobs and women stayed at home and did not worry about things like equal pay. We live in a forward-looking society, however, in which women sometimes earn more than their partners and are not content with being housewives. Trump will find this when he eventually stops sounding off and starts making real-world decisions.

Edwin Lerner

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

 

  

 

 

MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS

George Orwell at the BBC

It is Halloween tonight and was going to write about how it is taking over from the communality of Guy Fawkes night soon after on the 5^th November. Then again, I was going to write about what is happening in the Middle East but Howard Jacobson has done that much better in UnHerd, which is worth considering, even if it does give voice to a lot of conservatives I disagree with. Also I have already explained why I am (still) a Zionist. (Go here to see why.)

Instead I am going to talk about different types of equality. The essay title comes George Orwell’s book Animal Farm and I have never been quite sure if ‘more equal’ means superior or inferior. In any case, it refers to how true equality is easy to wish for but extremely hard to obtain. The book ends with the animals in charge of the farm talking on equal terms with the neighbouring human farmers and the onlookers being unable to tell the difference.

 

This occurred to me when I remembered a female film director saying that as women made up half the population of the world, they should be directing half the films, instead of a tiny fraction of them. Female film directors are actually more common these days but men still outnumber them when it comes to directing, particularly the big blockbusters which make Hollywood its money. There is nothing like the bottom line to overcome feminism in films.

 

My reaction to the statement that women should make half the films as they make up half the population is, do you think that half the people sent to prison should be female. No? So it is only the good stuff you want half of and the bad stuff can be left to men to dominate. There is actually quite a strong lobby saying that women should be kept out of prison altogether. That means giving them carte blanche to commit crimes so I don’t support it.

 

That is a little unfair but it does raise the question of what sort of equality you want to promote – equality of reward or equality of opportunity. They are basically incompatible. The best analogy is probably with a race. With equality of reward, everyone finishes at the same time or, in practical terms, we all get paid the same whatever we do. With equality of opportunity, everyone starts at the same time but passes finishes at different times.

 

In practical terms, this means that we all get paid different amounts, depending on our talents, determination, hard work and ability to persuade people to pay us different amounts for what we do or make. Entrepreneurs prosper and also-rans get by, often with a little help from those same entrepreneurs willing to share their wealth with others. Put simply, capitalists like equality of opportunity while socialists like equality of reward.

 

I know that it does not work that way in practice, of course. Successful people naturally want to pass on some of their good fortune to their offspring and give them things like private education which give them an arguably unfair advantage over those who come from disadvantaged backgrounds. To create true equality of opportunity you should have 100% inheritance task so that everyone does start from the same place. Good luck with that.

 

However, the argument has been effectively won by capitalism, which gives everyone the freedom to create wealth for themselves and for their families. In a society in which a teenager can become a millionaire by creating an app, there is not much hope for state-organised socialism, which simply did not work. Privilege, instead of wealth, was passed down to succeeding generations and those who disagreed with this were silenced - or shot.

 

Apart from fascism, particularly if you were Jewish, the worst sort of society to live in during the twentieth century was a top down communist one in which dissent was forbidden and all were expected to toe the party line. Because there was what turned out to be a purely theoretical equality of reward in such societies they increased the absurdity by claiming to be ‘democratic’ while genuine democratic states were labelled as capitalist and corrupt.

 

Socialism, I believe, can work but only as an opt-in system such as existed on a kibbutz where wealth if genuinely shared. This is not an opt-out society which few people had the chance to leave unless they, ironically, were particularly talented and had a skill in sport or performing that was in demand in the capitalist west, in which case they could defect while ordinary people had to stay at home and endure the privations of opt-out socialism. 

 

In western democracies, the main debate is not whether socialism should be imposed but how much it can be tolerated in a society that allows people to amass wealth but then taxes them on how much they earn. Politicians of all parties have learned that people do not have much tolerance of high levels of income tax and, no matter what lip service is paid to ear-marking taxes for the NHS, people simply will not vote for parties they think will raise taxes.

 

This is why the Labour party in Britain has devised ever more ingenious ways to raise taxes without increasing personal tax rates. This was demonstrated in yesterday’s budget, in which the country’s first female Chancellor of the exchequer Rachel Reeves raised tax without apparently taking more from the wage-packets of ordinary workers. Britain, by the way, has had to wait much longer for a woman chancellor than for a female film director.

 

Tax rates are now pretty much the same whatever party is in power and certain things are taken for granted, like free healthcare. The main debate is now how much socialism is to be combined with a capitalism economy. Capitalism works better for at increasing prosperity, socialism at distributing it and we are just discussing how much of the latter should be combined with the former. We do this every five years or so in what are called elections.

 

This is the chance for the ordinary citizen to put a mark against what he or she believes in – and they should take it even if they think all politicians are grasping opportunists. The main job of the politician is to decide how much money can be taken from the average worker to help those who are less well-off. The answer is not much. We may celebrate equality of reward but, when it comes down to it, we seem to prefer equality of opportunity.

Edwin Lerner

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

  

ON BECOMING AN EARLY RISER

  

No need for an alarm clock these days

 

This is being written at six o’clock on a Sunday morning – a time that I would not so long ago have been fast asleep. Yet I have been awake already for over an hour, have done my exercises and had a shower and breakfast and am now settling down to write before I take the train to Reading to see my daughter and her boyfriend before driving to Bristol with them to see my son, wife and daughter to celebrate his birthday and give him his presents.

 

I am not being particularly moral about this. It is just an example of my changing habits, which surely come with old age. As I grow old, I get tired around ten o’clock at night and simply want to go to bed. About seven to eight hours later I a wide awake and getting up seems the obvious thing to do. I am at my most productive early in the morning and often do an hour or two of ‘work’ before I get ready to face the world of work.

 

Having often found it an effort to get out of bed early in the morning – and usually doing so at the last minute – I now actually like doing so. The early morning is both peaceful as well as productive and you usually have the time to yourself with few distractions except the radio which I half-listen to as I write, only switching it off if I really need to concentrate on something. I may have to rub my eyes occasionally but having the time is worth it.

 

I still write me blogs and do editorial work on a magazine for tourist guides called Guidelines which I realise I have virtually taken over. I am careful not to push my own ideas in its publication, being a neutral umpire rather than an active and opinionated participant in many of the debates which are always a sign of a healthy audience. If people care enough to write in, then they are evidently committed to the continuation of the publication.

 

Maybe I am just at the stage of life when I am not that bothered with evening activities like going to parties (where I often leave early) and to the theatre or cinema, which I often do in the afternoon these days, when it is often cheaper and more convenient. It also means that I can get home in time to cook dinner rather than having to go out. It used to be a pleasure to have a night out but it now seems more like a chore.

 

What this comes from is a change of priorities as I grow older. Family seems more important than friendship to me. I would drop everything to look after my children, was devastated to hear my daughter say that she does not think she will have children of her own and enjoy spending time with them celebrating birthdays, Christmas, etc. Yet I do not mind to much losing contact with friends, even ones I have known for a long time, which surprises me.

 

The other thing I like is work and often do things – even if there is no money in them. ‘Work’ is a variable word for what I do (like these monthly essays and my weekly posts on tourist guiding). I have long given up on trying to make a living from writing but I still enjoy it and keep writing and editing, just as I continue to work as a guide, even though I am now in my eighth decade and my fifth as a guide. Retirement, as I have often said, is overrated.

 

So I will keep on working as long as I am capable of it – and will not indulge in lie-ins any more. This is not a moral but a practical decision. I simply do not feel tempted by them. As you grow older an early night seems more attractive than a late start in the morning. 

Edwin Lerner

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com 

 

   

CULTURAL CHRISTAINITY

 

Rcihard Dawkins (from Wikipedia)

Curiously enough, it was that famous atheist Richard Dawkins who introduced me to the concept. Maybe he was trying to deflect attention away from his notorious atheism – in effect, saying that there was more to him than just his lack of belief in a deity overlooking humanity – or maybe he did genuinely believe in what he was saying, which was that he had a great affection for things like evensong and festivals associated with Christianity. He was a ‘cultural Christian’, a concept I identified with, although I had not come across if before. 

 

I would go a little further than Dawkins and say that inventing religion – and the concept of an afterlife that goes with it – is one of the most creative things that human beings have done and that we should not throw out everything that it encompasses if we choose to follow Darwin in believing that humans are just sophisticated animals, who have evolved over centuries and now stand at the apex of the world, dominating the landscape.

 

Try as hard as I can, I find it impossible to believe in an afterlife. In that sense, I am an atheist and I believe, as my own ends draws ever nearer, that our life – traditionally three score years and ten – is all that we have to enjoy and that we should make the most of it because nothing comes afterwards. Maybe I am wrong, but I do not believe in either Heaven of Hell coming after death – just oblivion.

With life traditionally 'nasty, brutish and short' in days of old the promise of an afterlife were things would get better was particularly attractive to people who could not enjoy riches in this world. They were promised them in the next world and might be expected to accept their lot more phlegmatically (and less revolutionarily) in this one. In this way religions can be seen as the handmaiden of conservative government systems that required mass obedience. 

 

Apart from anything else, perpetual life might turn out to be rather dull. Just imagine being stuck in Heaven (or Hell) with nothing to do except being nice to your neighbours, who you might not have got on well with in this world and do not want to be stuck with in the next. This idea was expressed in an article in The New Yorker magazine and I found myself agreeing with it – as I often do with things I read there, the world’s best magazine. 

 

I found it repeated in John Mortimer’s play A Voyage Around My Father, in which the father in question did not look forward to an afterlife once he had died. In fact, he dreaded being unable to enjoy his garden and the few things he had left after his sight was lost in, ironically perhaps, a gardening accident. His blindness was then ignored and never mentioned by the family for the rest of his time on earth and things continued pretty much as before.

 

I have seen the play three times now with actors like Laurence Olivier, Derek Jacobi and now Rupert Everett (a gay actor like Jacobi) who nevertheless took on the role of Mortimer’s father. They are portraying a man they cannot be like in real life because they will never marry and have a family. That is not to say that gay men (and women) cannot be parents, as Elton John has shown, just that they cannot marry someone of the opposite gender.

 

I have seen the play several times but had forgotten the father’s outburst at Christianity, an antipathy that was shared by his son. However, Mortimer said that he took his own children to Midnight Mass at Christmas and, like Dawkins, enjoyed the cultural aspects of Christianity without sharing the belief system behind it. I do not think that these well-known atheists are being hypocritical, just that they accept parts of Christianity they like and reject others.

I have no desire to live in a godless society and the idea of a Museum of Atheism, which apparently are found in communist countries, fills me with horror. 

Religion teaches us humility, which many of us could use. When Vladimir Putin was asked to confess his sins, he reportedly replied that he was leader of the world’s greatest nation and had nothing to fear. All I can say is that I hope he rots in hell, having being brought down by God, probably the only figure who is more powerful than him. His power is eternal and omnipotent. Putin’s is merely temporal and, therefore, temporary in comparison.

 

The church maybe has more to fear from those who are indifferent to religion totally rather than those who reject it intellectually but accept it emotionally – as I do. As a teenager I was an atheist but, as an adult, I have come around to accepting some of the premises – but not all – of the premises of Christianity. Much of this, of course, has to do with my work as a tourist guide. Some of that religion has rubbed off on me after taking people into churches.

   

It was, I think, Coleridge who said that intelligence means being able to hold two apparently  contradictory ideas in your head at the same time without fully rejecting either of them. I do (and should) not claim to be a particularly intelligent person but, in religion, I am able to accept religion and its contributions to society completely while rejecting its fundamental belief system. If that means that I am a hypocrite, so be it or, as they say in church, Amen.    

Edwin Lerner 

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

 

 

   

BRITAIN - A ROLLS ROYCE TYPE OF COUNTRY

An old-fashioned Rolls Royce I once guided in

Some years ago Rolls Royce and Bentley were effectively the same cmpany. All cars came in both marques – Rolls Royce for those who wanted to show that they had arrived, Bentley for those who wanted to show that they were a bit different. They might also have arrived but they did not want to do so in such an obvious way. A Rolls Royce screamed wealth at everybody. A Bentley was a little cooler somehow and more restrained than the famous Roller.

Ironically Charles Rolls, who was an aviator, never saw a Rolls Royce car. He and his partner Edward Royce first built aeroplane engines and then switched to cars, by which time Rolls had died in a plane crash. His statue stands in his home town of Monmouth and his name is attached to that of the famous car simply because Royce felt that the two RR name had a certain ring to it, He (Royce) was the engineer who really made the Rolls Royce name  big in cars and planes.

Then the Germans arrived. They are good at making reliable luxurious cars, which keep on going long after other cars have given up the ghost. Taxi drivers like the German Mercedes because, although they are expensive, they are also reliable – an important factor for those who drive a lot of miles. In 1998 Bentley were bought by Volkswagen and Rolls Royce by BMW – but not before it had been owned by Volkswagen who sold it to Vickers and then on to BMW.

 

In the rather complicated negotiations that were involved in the sale of the Rolls Royce marque to BMW, it appeared that Volkswagen wanted the Bentley name because its cars outsold RR by two to one. They were always interested in volume rather than cachet. Both car companies were careful to preserve the distinctly British character of the cars they had acquired – although their engines were to be designed and made by German engineers.

 

Ask anyone in the street and they would probably say that Rolls Royce and Bentley were two luxury cars that were made in Britain. True, but they were both owned and controlled by German companies who made a significant proportion of their profits through them – to the benefit of German rather than British shareholders. BMW had done a similar thing with Austin-Rover, buying up the company but soon abandoning most of its cars except the Mini.

 

The Mini has changed and is now bigger than it was in the days of films like The Italian Job when three patriotically cars painted red, white and blue literally ran rings around the Italian police in Milan. It is still made in Oxford but is now bigger and safer than it was when it first appeared and had anachronistic features like a petrol cap which stuck dangerously out from the body and could be a death trap in an accident by pouring out petrol.

 

Books could – and probably have – been written about British cars leading the world in design but not in manufacture, where bad labour relations and outmoded construction techniques led to poorly made marques that were later sold abroad to more ruthless and efficient companies – German ones or, in the case of Jaguar-Land Rover, first to Ford then to the Indian company Tata. They may still be made in Britain but the profits go overseas.

 

Only Aston Martin is both producing cars in Britain and is British owned, although it has survived several bankruptcies and relies on appealing to its well-heeled clientele with a series of luxury products that can use the Aston Martin name and logo but have little to do with the sports cars made famous by James Bond. These include a bicycle, watches and even a vertical take-off plane. They have also produced a Lego version of the Bond car.

 

In short, we seem to be very good at producing car marques but not at making cars themselves, which are often produced with more efficiency, better safety and more reliability in other countries. I do not believe, in fact, that there is anything particularly shameful about this. We are good at names in Britain but not so good at producing cars that start every day and run around the clock a few times. So be it.

 

The great argument in favour of free trade is that people can concentrate on what they are good at and leave behind what they do not do so well. The British may have invented great motoring names and designed the original cars that used them but we are not very good at rolling them off the production line cheaply and effectively in the way other nations – especially the Germans are able to do. In an era of world-wide trade that is no bad thing.

 

The only reference to the Beatles in a James Bond film (at least that I remember) involved Connery portraying Bond and being sarcastic and rude about them. However, they both provided considerable exports for Britain’s film and music businesses in the sixties and since so they have a certain amount in common. Add Harry Potter, J R R Tolkien’s books and those of C S Lewis’s Narnia stories (surely due a film version soon) and you have successful names.

 

Who needs efficient factories when you have best-selling franchises? That seems to be the lesson (or take-away in modern parlance) from these examples.  A British company may not make Rolls Royce anymore but their names live on – second only to Coca Cola in name recognition according to one survey. It would be nice to actually own a company that could produce the cars, however. But you cannot have everything, I suppose.

My other blog comes out on Mondays and is called diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com 

Edwin Lerner

 

IN PRAISE OF PUBLIC TRANSPORT

An old-fashioned Routemaster bus

We own a car - my partner Leena needs it to see her horses - and I have to pay Lambeth Council to park outside my house, but it is usually parked outside that house and does not move if she is on tour. I simply never drive my car into central London these days. Wi th the congestion charge the high price of paring and traffic delays it is just not worth it. SO the car stays unused until the more rural side of our life kicks in. Irony or what? We never use the car in town.

I usually take the tube into London, occasionally the bus, but the problem of parking and the fact that I often end my tours elsewhere to where I start them make parking the car not only expensive but awkward. I am of an age when public transport is not only convenient but free. My travel card gives me free access to the system.I do not care for motorcycles - noisy and unpleasant vehicles constantly drawing attention to themselves - and I no longer cycle either.

Going on buses and tube trains does, of course, have its downside. Sometimes trains are cancelled and buses, despite the bus lanes, can be slow and unreliable but on the whole it is the quickest - and certainly the cheapest - way to get around in London or indeed any major city. The Mayor of Greater London Sadiq Khan (the only Moslem to hold that office in a major western city, incidentally) is keen to get people onto public transport and he has succeeded.

Khan's father was a bus driver so he spent a fair part of his childhood on such vehicles. He has also encouraged bicycle travel by opening up cycle lanes. You will rarely if ever hear a taxi driver with a good word to say about him as taxi and car journeys are often very slow because of bicycle lanes which are often half empty next to crowded roads.I have a sneaking sympathy for the cab drivers, who are just trying to make a living, but I think Kahn's policy is right for London.

A friend of mine who used to work for British Rial said that it was impossible to bring everybody into work in a major city by anything other than trains. Fortunately, I have never had to do a regular commute of an hour or more but I agree with his analysis. (Actually, he probably borrowed it from some paper but you know what I mean.) Everybody driving their car would result in chaos so some form of public transport system is necessary to bring people to work.

I write enjoy the bus or tube ride to the centre of town. Tube trains travel at set speeds but bus drivers choose their own speed and some of them ignore the speed limit signs and go faster than the common twenty miles per hour limit in the city. I get the impression that just about anybody with the required licence can get a job with Transport for London (TfL) which used to go by the simpler name of London Transport and is still pretty much under the control of the Mayor.

So I will continue to join the rush and use public transport. I am about to set off to meet clients at a new hotel not too far from here and, if apprpriate I might suggest a journey on a bus. Tourists are usually (not always) keen to travel on one. although the old-fashioned Routemasters, as picture above, are rarely seen these days except on private tours. Whatever they cost the operator or passenger, they are cheaper and usually faster than hiring a car and driver.

Edwin Lerner

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide,blogspot.com

 

TIES VERSUS TATTOOS

Sean Connery as James Bond wearing a tie - as always

 

I briefly chatted with a person serving me teach was working for English Heritage at Stonehenge the other day. His skin was covered with tattoos and I commented on this. He told me that he had been tattooed ten years ago and was quite fond of them. They were a part of his identity and he encouraged me to do the same and get myself tattooed. I told him that I would pass as I was not very fond of needles and we left it at that.

 

I was probably wearing a tie at the same time as I was working. I am old-fashioned enough to wear a tie when I go to work – although it is hardly necessary these days and lots of tourist guides do not bother to put one on and hardly any tourist do either. Casual is king these days but I am one of those curious men who feels he has not finished getting dressed unless he has put on his tie. An open neck shirt just does not do it for me.

 

A tie is a completely unnecessary piece of menswear. Women do not bother with a tie – unless they are trying to look like their male equivalents – and one man called it ‘a snake around my neck’. He obviously did not like his particular snake (and I like his image) but I have quite a collection of ties and I take a certain amount of pleasure in selecting which one to wear and putting it on, usually with a Windsor knot and the top button undone. 

 

The point about a tie is that it is temporary. You do not have to wear the same one tomorrow and I adjust which one I put on depending on what I am doing and which shirt is on underneath. Some of my ties I hardly ever use, others have seen a good deal of service and others are now starting to show their age. Although I wear one when I go to work or to some kind of formal occasion, I have called a halt to tie acquisition and don’t buy new ones.

 

A tattoo, however, is permanent. Removing one is both expensive and unsightly, often leaving nasty scars on the skin. Most people stick with their tattoos or ‘body art’, as it is sometimes called.  No matter how good (or bad) your tattoo is, you are stuck with it for the rest of your time on this planet. What will older people with elaborate body art on the surface of their bodies look like as said bodies start to shrink and shrivel as people age.

 

When I look at footballers, most of them have tattoos and sometimes they are covered with them. I prefer plain skinned people, I must admit, and I will almost certainly never allow anyone to carve anything on my torso. Not only am I unhappy with the thought of needles but I simply do not want anything permanent on my skin. Give me a temporary tie any day rather than a permanent tattoo. You can (and do) change your tie but not your tattoo.

 

I have further theories about ties. If you wear it fully buttoned up, you are indicating that you are a member of the establishment. If you wear it loosely around your neck with the knot loosened then you may be in the establishment but you not of the establishment. It is an expression of independence to wear your tie loose around your neck. You might earn a living by working for the establishment but you do not accept all their (usually) conservative values. 

 

This is almost an accepted code in Hollywood films. When James Bond appears on screen he usually wears a suit and tie as he works for MI6, the ultimate establishment organisation – even if he is something of a lone wolf with his own agenda. Billy Crudup, playing a composite of journalists interviewing Jackie Kennedy is shown, however, with a loosely knotted tie  in the film Jackie. The Kennedy men are shown with properly done-up ties.

 

In real life, Jackie Kennedy was enough of a fashion icon to not have given the time of day – let alone a full interview – to someone dressed as casually as Crudup was shown. However, the filmmaker (and possibly the actor) wanted to show a rebellious streak to the journalist so he is shown with a loosely knotted tie, which is shorthand for saying that the journo and the film are not mere hagiographies but are fashioned out of respect for the subject.

 

That this is the main thing I remember about the film – Crudup’s loosely knotted tie – is probably significant. I am enough of an establishment type to normally wear a tie when I go to work but, having a rather thick neck, I do not do up my shirt fully but use a Windsor knot to cover this up. I tell people that this is the one thing that the Duke of Windsor contributed that was worthwhile – even if Bond thought that the knot was the sign of a ‘cad’.

 

Neither ties nor tattoos are necessary. They are purely decorative aspects of menswear but, why should we not have something superficial and decorative to add to our wardrobe? Tattoos, however are permanent, and you are stuck with them even if you no longer support the cause (or the woman) honoured in them. Wearing a tie may be unnecessary but it can be fun and should not be ditched altogether for the sake of playing it casual. 

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My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

Edwin Lerner

MIXING STRONG AND WEAK

Martini Glass (Wikimedia)

I used to like a dry martini. The trouble was that they did not like me. It was hardly ever just one – but two or sometimes three. They would then send me to sleep and I would wake up at three o’clock in the morning, often with my heart beating too fast. Despite owning some Waterford Crystal martini glasses I effectively gave them up by the simply expedient of not buying the Vermouth which I would use to make the drink they are named after. 

With gin so with vodka, except more so. I like an alcoholic drink that has a stop mechanism in it. So I tend to drink whisky or, occasionally, brandy rather than clear spirits. You can sip some and then it is natural to stop, whereas with clear spirits like vodka, gin and ‘white’ rum like Bacardi, you tend to continue drinking until you realise you have had too much, by which time it is a bit late to stop (although I do).

 

Do not get me wrong. I have always said that I hope to drink champagne on the day I die so that I can toast a life well-lived. In fact, I will drink almost anything alcoholic, although I do not care for cream liqueurs like Baileys Irish Cream. This is because of the cream and not the whisky or other spirit it is mixed with. I am not that keen on retsina, the sour Greek wine, but I dare say I could develop a taste for it if I had to and there was no alternative available.

 

Alcohol is my drug of choice. I come from a non-smoking background and, apart from the odd cigar, I have never bothered with it much. Likewise, I do not do drugs, not out of principle but more from cowardice. If I want to relax with something it has to be legal: I am that boring, I am afraid, although I think that the government’s attitude to drugs is little short of absurd and they are missing out on valuable tax revenues by criminalising drugs.

 

There are three types of substance we can put into our bodies which I shall call black, white and grey. Black substances like cyanide and strychnine are obviously dangerous and have to be prohibited or at least controlled very tightly. White ones are nutritious and, unless mixed with black, are harmless – food and water, basically, necessary for life but not particularly exciting in themselves. You can consume these to your heart’s content with fell ill-effects.

 

Then there are grey ones, which make life more interesting (worth living for some) but are not necessary for survival. I would put alcohol, tobacco and drugs in this category but also caffeine drinks like tea and coffee which are unnecessary for survival but give us a kick start now and again. Widen this category and you can include birth control pills, hand guns, even pornography, all involving products we do not need but enjoy for the pleasure they provide.

 

The trouble is that pleasurable products are addictive. We find it hard to srvive without the high given by a simple glass of wine or a simple cup of coffee, even though we do not need them to survive. Some people cut all grey substances out of their lives. Mormons come to mind here: they do not consume alcohol or caffeine and, although they do have sex, it is largely for procreation so probably do not use the pill very much.

 

Now, it is perfectly possible to ruin your life with grey substances. Most of us have known alcoholics, those addicted to smoking or junkies who have died early because they cannot seem to shake off a dependency on the drugs they crave. However, I firmly believe that the fact that some people become addicts is not a reason to prevent people like me enjoying a glass of whisky, a cigar or even the occasional joint. We simply have to put their probably early deaths down to collateral damage and go on enjoying our grey substances.

 

That is why I am so firmly opposed to the smoking ban which the British government seems so keen to introduce, albeit surreptitiously by preventing people from buying cigarettes or other tobacco products if they are born after a certain year. This will have the effect of criminalising the shopkeeper who sells the tobacco rather than the purchaser, which is yet another burden on them and is surely another good reason to oppose the law.

 

If this anti-smoking law is passed, and not repealed by a future government, it will surely make it much harderto decriminalise soft (and eventually hard) drugs, which I think should be at the top of the agenda for the government. The authorities have no business banning the consumption of grey products in order to protect the vulnerable. I am enough of an individualist to think that these people have a responsibility to look after themselves. 

 

Plenty of people lead normal - or near normal - lives while consuming grey substances and should not be stopped from doing so because others destroy their lives. Michael Gove, not exactly known for his liberal attitude to drugs, has even admitted to taking cocaine after a drinking session in the last, yet this action was largely ignored by those who want to ban drugs. Do what I say not do what I do seems to be their attitude.

 

As my own contribution towards exercising restraint on grey substances, I have given up Martinis and now content myself with gin and tonics, mixing a strong drink with a weak non-alcoholic one. I also refrain from drinking twice a week and for the first two months of the year if only so I can free myself of the accusation of being an alcohol addict. I still enjoy a drink and hope to have one on the day I die – although I have no immediate plans for that.     

To read my thoughts on New Zealand's smoking 'ban' go here

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com 

Edwin Lerner

CLEMENT ATTLEE - A DULL BUT ELECTABLE FIGURE

Attlee, reformer who looked like a solicitor

Although I am a Labour voter, I have to admit that the Conservatives give the impression of being a better home for both women and people from ethnic minorities. Only four people – all men, all white – have won power as Labour leaders yet the Conservatives have had three female leaders (who have all become Prime Minister) and, if rumour is true, they may have a fourth before long. Kemi Badenoch, who is both female and black, is said to be favourite to be their next leader if, as expected, Rishi Sunak, who is brown, loses the next election.

Labour has had six Prime Ministers, two of them having inherited the role. The four who won elections were Ramsay MacDonald, Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson and Tony Blair. The first was MacDonald, who was reviled for having agreed to form a national government with the hated Tories and was actually expelled from the party he had helped to found with Kier Hardie (after whom Starmer was named). Wilson was a clever fixer and a shrewd politician who was Prime Minister four times and Blair held office for ten years before handing over to Gordon Brown.

 

However, it was Attlee who led the post-war Labour government and probably made the most significant changes of all four of them. It was under Attlee that the National Health Service was started, many major industries were nationalised and the taxation of the rich was increased. This increase continued under Wilson to lengths which now seem both punitive and impossible and which seemed to show that Labour was the high tax party, willing to hit the rich with high marginal rates, maybe not so good at stimulating the economy to help people earn.

 

I read Attlee’s autobiography recently. It is safe to say that it is not an exciting read. Attlee was ‘a safe pair of hands’ who effected a lot of radical changes in society despite being a small c conservative in appearance. I did not see the film but Ken Loach, a noted left-wing film-maker, produced a homage to the post-war Labour government of Attlee some years ago. What received less publicity was that Attlee had not objected to the Americans dropping of the atom bomb and that he allowed British soldiers to be sent to fight in Korea.

 

Attlee himself had fought in the First World War and, had it not been for a lucky illness, may well have paid with his life, having been in the ill-fated Gallipoli campaign which was attributed to Winston Churchill. Later Attlee was to serve under Churchill as his deputy during the Second World War. Afterwards he defeated his former boss in the 1945 election and then brought the atom bomb to Britain. Labour governments are often more bellicose than Conservative, as the Iraq war, where Tony Blair supported the American invasion of Iraq, proved.

 

Attlee had proved to be a loyal and able deputy to Churchill during the years of the Second World War. Their duties were divided into running the country and running the war. After Germany had been defeated – but before Japan surrendered – Attlee’s Labour party beat the Conservatives by a thumping margin. It was before the days of opinion polls and people are still sometimes surprised at how comprehensively Churchill’s government was defeated.

 

I remember Barbara Castle, who was a cabinet member in a later Labour government, said that people might have voted Churchill back in out of gratitude but not his party. In Britain you do not vote for a president as the Americans do (we have a monarch for that job) but for a party to run the country. People felt it was time for a change and entrusted Attlee not his former boss Churchill to effect the changes needed – particularly founding the NHS.

 

Winning elections is not about preaching to the choir but, under our electoral system at least, involves persuading floating voters in marginal constituencies to vote for you. I suspect that these are not the most sophisticated voters and that they do not spend a lot time perusing manifestos and commitments but make their voting decisions on very a very visceral level, often reacting to their perception of the character of a party’s leader. That Blair (or Thatcher or Attlee) seems ok and I will vote for him/her as ‘a safe pair of hands’.

 

Attlee, who went to a public school and practiced as a lawyer, came from a background where a strong sense of public duty was expected. His very dullness was actually a recommendation to people who would not otherwise have trusted some of the more fiery radical figures he was surrounded with, but whom he allowed to get on with the business of founding the NHS, which doctors now swear by but which many of them swore at when it was started. As its founder Aneurin (Nye) Bevan said he would ‘stuff their mouths with gold’ to win them over. And he did.

 

Attlee was far more complimentary about Churchill than hw was about MacDonald. One of his last public duties was attending Churchill's funeral, where he caught a chill and died soon after. Attlee never made MacDonald's mistake of sacrificing socialist values for the sake of national unity. He showed no embarrassment about using the word ‘socialist’ to describe his views. At a certain level, however, he knew that he had to reassure rather than alienate those floating voters if he was going to get things done. He too was a doer and we are still grateful for what he did. 

Edwin Lerner My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

 

 

LEAP YEAR MANSPLAINING

 

On Facebook I saw a cartoon (above). It said that men are always right on the following dates: 29^th, 30^th and 31^st February. Of course, these dates do not normally exist but 2024 has a 29^th February, being a Leap Year. These posts go out on the last day of the month, which is 29^th February this time and so I thought it might be relevant to look at the Leap year issue, which will at least be relevant to the date. It may not seem important but there is a reason for it.

To explain the Leap Year, process I have had to resort to Wikipedia, my normal source of information. You can read the full account here but it basically comes down to the differences between the Julian and Gregorian calendars. The Julian calendar was, as its name suggests, introduced by Julius Caesar in 45 BC and made a year match the movement of the sun. The Gregorian calendar came into effect in 1582 and was that bit more accurate.

 

The earth moves around the sun in 365 and a quarter days, which means that you have to elbow in an extra day every four years to make up for the quarter day. That is why we have Leap Years. However, it is not quite that simple. The exact time it takes for the earth to rotate around the sun is 365.245 days, which means that the more accurate Gregorian calendar misses out the Leap Year in dates divisible by 100 but not in those divisible by 400.

 

The Gregorian calendar was introduced in 1582 and named after – but not invented by the Pope at the time, Gregory the Thirteenth. The real inventor of the new and more accurate calendar was Aloysius Lillius and it was suggested by a German mathematician and astronomer called Christopher Clavius. Both men, however, have been largely forgotten by history and Pope Gregory is remembered simply because he gave its name to the more accurate calendar.

 

The slightly slower rotation of the earth around the sun means that 1600 and 2000 are Leap Years but 1900 and 1500 are not. Over time this in turn led to the Julian and Gregorian calendars being out of sync by eleven days and in the eighteenth century the more accurate Gregorian calendar won out over the less accurate Julian one. Britain ended up admitting defeat and aligning with the Gregorian calendar by an Act of Parliament in the year 1752.

 

This in turn led to eleven ‘lost’ days in that year as the two calendars aligned and, predictably enough, a lot of muttering about bloody foreigners stealing days from us. There is nothing new in the world. This just an early precursor of Brexit and by which we think we can solve all our problems be breaking away from countries that we had previously quite happily done business with. And that has not turned out well - in my opinion, at least.

 

I was wondering how serious the riots and objections to the ‘lost’ eleven days really were so, inevitably, I looked it up on the internet. The satirical painter William Hogarth showed an election scene in which a Tory poster is shown demanding these eleven ‘lost’ days back. The site I found this on (historic-uk.com) also says that ‘most historians now believe that these protests never happened [and were] the Georgian equivalent of an urban myth’.

 

There was probably a fair bit of grumbling about the ‘lost’ days and complaints about new-fangled ideas but most people accepted the new system and grudgingly admitted that there was a certain amount of sense in being aligned with the rest of Europe. After all, we still did a lot of business with European countries and it seemed sensible to be on the same calendar (or page) as them, even if we did not like the idea of synchronising with a European system. 

 

There was nothing imaginary about the Brexit vote, however. Those who wanted to break from Europe won that one and got their way. That surely was only the start of the process. It now behoves those who were in favour of breaking with Europe to show that the process can be successful and profitable for us as a country. If it had been left to people like me, nothing much would have happened and we would be trading with Europe as we were.

 

My partner and I went to Spain (which, incidentally, did not convert to the new calendar until 1926) before the Brexit referendum. We reached our hotel barely an hour after the plane touched down and were greeted pleasantly by the staff, who all spoke perfect English, and checked in quickly. I wondered why we considered it necessary to hate these people so much, what possible benefits could come from breaking with them and making Britain more bolshy.

 

It is apparently far harder now for people who actually make things to export them to European countries because they have to jump through a series of totally unnecessary hoops and fill in multiple forms to do so. The trade wins which were supposed to come about after Brexit seem to me to be totally imaginary. As one of my friends said when we had the original vote on the subject ‘The future for Britain has to be in Europe - surely.’

 

I see no reason to contradict him fifty years later. It is up to the Brexiteers to prove that their system of an independent Britain is going to work better than one which is integrated into Europe and there is not much sign that this is happening now. Just as the calendar was changed, despite the objections of those who considered it a popish plot and a European impertinence, so Brexit does not seem like the sensible solution to Britain’s problems.

 

Edwin Lerner

My other blog is diaryofatourist guide.blogspot.com