Madeley

Good news from the blogosphere - Richard Madeley is back in action, and on cracking form. Of course, he's me really - well, he says he is, and that's fine by me...

The Madness of Ed, The Sanity of Boris

It's a well known fact that prime ministers who serve any length of time sooner or later go mad (vide Thatcher, Blair), but Ed Balls, Gordon's anointed heir (how's that for a poisoned chalice?), seems to have achieved the feat before even getting a taste of the highest office. His plans for the school leaving age are beyond jaw-dropping. The men in white coats cannot be far away. Meanwhile, Boris's latest plan seems eminently sane. Boris Mark II (the new-look serious version) seems to be doing rather well so far...

Too Many People?

Talk of overpopulation as the prime problem facing the planet - even if it comes from the lovely lips of Selena Dreamy - always leaves me feeling queasy. The question is, what would you do about it? (Not you, Elberry - death sqauds aren't an altogether realistic option, outside South America anyway). Enforced contraception was tried and failed in India (a brutal business too - see Rohinton Mistry's great novel A Fine Balance). Even a totalitarian state like China was unable fully to enforce its one child policy, despite forced abortions etc. Surely the only humane solution is to encourage capitalism, as it seems to be universally true nowadays that the more economically active and money rich we get, the fewer children we have - the prosperous natives of most of Europe are barely bothering to breed at all, leaving that kind of thing to the underclass. Elsewhere in the world, the poor breed because they have to - lift them out of poverty (microcredit? I'm all for it) and they'd soon stop. Anyway, there's always Nature, currently hard at the work of depopulation in Burma and Sechuan. Or we might just wipe ourselves out...

... But Is It Art?

Here's a most ingenious defence, and potentially an exciting new area for Art to explore (perhaps with the aid of a generous Arts Council grant). Stone is clearly an advanced thinker, though arguably De Quincey got there first with his essay On Murder, Considered As One Of The Fine Arts.

Brown Unhappy, But Not a Hedgehog

No surprise that Frank Field sees Brown's future this way - but what struck me was his description of poor Gordie as being 'so unhappy in his own body'. This might seem to be 'personality politics', another bit of character assassination, but I think it's an important point. A leader should seem happy in himself, because one of his/her jobs is to make us feel good about ourselves, or at least no worse. The spectacle of Brown is at best depressing. I'm sure that when he enters the room, it's as if the lights have gone out and it's suddenly Sunday afternoon in the manse - the reverse of political 'charisma'.
The supreme exemplars of the relaxed cheerfulness that makes politicians popular were Reagan and Clinton (Bill)- and Blair, having sat at the feet of Clinton, managed much the same trick. All three were hugely successful electorally. Broon, on the other hand - for all his desperate stick-on smiles - comes across as a soul in torment, his nails chewed to the quick, his briefing papers scrawled over manically. After a while - especially with all the evidence that's piling up now - this begins to look like incompetence, like the man in charge being out of his depth. He's surely done for. As I've said all along, his only hope of being elected was to go for the snap election, before we'd had the chance to get his measure - but he couldn't bring himself to, and now he's doomed. Still, according to Wee Milliband, at least he's not a hedgehog.

A Puzzle Tree

Here's a curiosity. In an ordinary front garden near where I live, there is - and has been for at least ten years - a four-species tree. The mother tree, as it were, is a Locust or false acacia, but, at heights of from 8ft to 10ft of the ground, its trunk is growing Elder ( a rather weak growth, no more than a couple of feet, but still leafy and hanging on), Oak (a robust growth, projecting over 6ft from the trunk) and, higher up, a flourishing bush of Holly, about 4ft high. I can only assume that some experimentally minded gardener decided to poke an elder berry, an acorn and a holly berry into clefts in the locust's fissured bark and see what happened. The chances of any - let alone all three - taking must be very slim. But there they are, year after year. Are they living parasitically, or have their roots managed to reach ground? How long can all three last, and what will be the end of it? So far, the locust seems perfectly happy with the arrangement and continues to come into leaf and flower prolifically every year. Has anyone out there anything similar to report?

Sunday

Another Sunday and still no word from the Master, so presumably nothing worth reading in the Sunday Times - apart, of course, from Prezza's memoirs hem hem. And Cherie's at it too, her volume hastily brought forward in case Gordie's gone by the autumn. Of course it isn't possible to feel sorry for Gordon Brown, but this is getting pretty tedious and no longer funny.
Otherwise the main item in the news has been the unfolding horror in Burma (at least most media - even the BBC! - have rejected to the Myanmar option). This is clearly going to be one of those horrific situations that 'the world' can do very little about because of the paranoid obstruction of self-serving rulers - and yet we see and know enough to get an idea of how bad and how hopeless it is. In a truly closed regime - China under Mao, for example - this kind of thing could happen and the world would know nothing, there would be no news, no TV reports, just the regime's lies if anyone got wind of what was going on. Now the world is so open - thanks, not least, to satellite imagery - that even in North Korea it would be hard, probably impossible, to cover up a natural disaster on this scale. Anyway we are still powerless, and reduced to a kind of benign voyeur status.
To escape all this, I took myself off to the Surrey downs yesterday, which was thoroughly restorative. The birds were singing like crazy - chiffchaffs and other warblers among them - but I'm sorry to say that, even on such a warm sunny day, the butterfly count was very low. I blame John Prescott.

Global Warming: Even the Good News Is Bad

Much publicity today about how English wine is allegedly benefiting from global warming. The way things are going, we are assured, the South of England will soon be turning out red wine on a Mediterranean scale. Naturally I don't believe a word of this, not least because of the mounting evidence that we're probably already in a cooling phase in the northern hemisphere. And why would anyone bother with an English red wine? The much-vaunted whites are sorry stuff, compared to what you can get for your money if you buy French - and heck, if the good lord had meant us to drink English wine, he wouldn't have plonked France down on our doorstep, would he?
Anyway, a TV report last night from this very vineyard (which I've visited, and indeed walked through - nice place) included a contribution from the geologist who first spotted Denbies' winemaking potential. Oh yes, he said, they'll be making good robust reds all over the South of England soon - but of course (of course?!) by the end of the century, global warming will have made it far too hot to produce any wine at all in England. You can't win, can you, with global warming...

Cardinal Points

'Have you ever met anyone who believes what Richard Dawkins does not believe in?' asks Cormac Murphy O'Connor pithily in an interesting lecture that has received a gratifyingly large amount of attention. Which unfortunately meant a grilling by John Humphrys on the Today programme this morning - the last thing the Cardinal and his message needed. Of course Cormac came out of it seeming a thoroughly good egg, but he was unable to get across much of what he wanted to say/ reiterate, sidelined by an intelocutor who really doesn't 'get' religious belief (as he demonstrated in his recent interview series devoted to the subject). As the great Marilynne says somewhere, nothing true can be said about God from a defensive posture. But the Cardinal's basic point is well worth making - that there ought to be an acknowledged common ground between believers and non-believers, in the realm of doubt where both groups live much of the time (except of course the Dawkinsites, who simply know the truth). There's another area where the believers should be more assertive too, I think - in stressing the fact that most (if not all) of what secularists cherish in secular societies and secular 'enlightenment' values grew out of the fertile soil of Christendom and is at bottom, in the broadest sense, Christian; there is no easy escape from the gravitational pull of Christianity, and whenever western societies do break the bond with the Christian past, the results tend to be catastrophic. But, in the end, the best argument for Christianity has always been a matter of living the life, not arguing over dogma - least of all with those who, like Dawkins, will not hear.

Victory in Europe

Good grief - I' ve just realised it's V-E Day! Or it was in 1945 (and it was hot and sunny in London on that day too). This seems now to be a virtually forgotten date - how extraordinary. Some very evocative pictures here. I particularly like the heavily laden lorry carrying Toby ales and stouts, and sundry revellers. A different world...