S ummer storms can be worse than winter ones because the
branches of trees in leaf — particularly ash and willow — are more likely to break. Last week half of our village, including our house, lost electricity for 27 hours when one of these breaks brought down a power line. The power cut began at 2.30 p.m. At three in the morning I was woken by a telephone call from the burglar alarm company, ADT. They wanted to know if I was being burgled because their computer showed that my alarm was going off (it wasn't). I said I was not being burgled, and that the computer signals were probably related to the power cut. The voice from the company then became suspicious: 'Please could you give proof of your identity, or I shall have to inform the police.' Naturally, I did not know the relevant alarm codes. After about five minutes, though, I managed to persuade the voice on the phone that I was not burgling myself, and I tried to get back to sleep. Twenty minutes later, the burglar alarm went off, because the battery which automatically comes on when power fails had run out. Through the jangling, we telephoned the burglar alarm company. They would send an engineer, they said. From time to time, as dawn began to streak the sky, they rang to say that the engineer was coming. Finally, they rang to say that he wasn't. After two and a half hours, the alarm at last fell silent Later in the day, the engineer suddenly arrived. He couldn't do anything, he said, because there was (as we had reported) a power cut. The charge would be £58, though. The engineer went away. Luckily, he left his tools behind and had to come back for them. By that time, the power had been restored, so he had no choice but to mend the alarm. In totalitarian countries, the call at three in the morning is from the secret police. In post-modern market economies, it is from a service designed for your convenience.
The death of Anthony Buckeridge, author of the Jennings books, must bring sadness to any prep-school boy of my generation. With his expressions like 'supersonic', 'antiseptic eye-wash', and 'fossilised fish-hooks', Buckeridge was surely the major subliminal literary influence on the editor of this paper. (The Jennings books also contain the earliest known use of the word 'Doh!', later popularised by Homer Simpson; v. Jennings & Darbishire.) Reading Jennings gave me my first experience of comic psychological insight in literature. Somewhere Buckeridge writes, '"I couldn't care less," said Jennings, when, in reality, he could not
have cared more.' This entry into the mind of the schoolboy seemed to me (aged about seven) the cleverest, wittiest thing I'd ever read about anything, even funnier than A.A. Milne: "Are you there, Rabbit?" said Pooh. "No," said Rabbit.'
Tit uckeridge attended Seaford College in Sussex, in the town of that name which was once the world capital of prep schools. Another old boy of the school is Ahmed Chalabi, the now beleaguered head of the Iraqi National Congress. Poor Dr Chalabi must be needing all that cheerfulness in adversity that used to be taught by those windy cliffs. He has been subject to a fierce campaign of black propaganda from the British and American foreign policy elites which much of the press has repeated as if its truth were proved. It is suggested, for example, that his intelligence misled America into believing that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction; yet this error, if error it was, was accepted not only by America but also by the United Nations and, in effect, by Unscom. Dr Chalabi is also dismissed as irrelevant because he was an exile and because he took US government financial support. Iyad Allawi, the prime minister of the newly sovereign Iraq, is an exile who formerly worked with MI6 and the CIA, had their financial backing and supplied intelligence about Saddam's WMD, But he, mysteriously, is all right I do not know whether Dr Chalabi is the answer to Iraq's problems, but if he is so negligible, why is so much effort put into attacking him?
T 'm no expert on Michael Moore, but he 1 looks to me like a left-wing version of
Bernard Manning, You only find Manning funny if you think it axiomatic that black men are stupid; the same is true of Moore, so long as you delete 'black men are' and insert 'George Bush is'. This isn't really any other joke. In the Moore-Manning view of life, it was obviously brilliant of Jeremy Paxman to ask Tony Blair whether he and Mr Bush prayed together. But although I admit the comic possibilities, I still don't see why they shouldn't have. Religious people are supposed to pray, and sometimes it helps if they pray with one another. No doubt if Paxo had been around in August 1941 he would have tried to rouse the nation to mirth or outrage at the fact that Churchill and Roosevelt sang 'Onward Christian soldiers' together in Placentia Bay.
C hort Books produce an interesting series of history books for children. Settling down to the excellent Emily Davison, the Girl Who Gave Her Life for Her Cause by Claudia EitzHerbert, I was startled by the book's dedication: 'To my darling daughters, X & Y'. The last time I met X and Y (their real initials, by the way: nothing to do with chromosomes), they were darling sons. Perhaps Claudia FitzHerbert is following in the footsteps of his grandmother, Evelyn Waugh, who famously insisted that Marshal Tito was a woman. But such confusions create problems in any history of the suffragettes. It's lucky that every schoolgirl knows that Emily Davison died fighting for votes for men.
History tends to look kindly on those, like Emily Davison, who fought bravely for causes which later gained popular acceptance, but forgets the often equally brave souls who resisted them. I should like to read a short book (or a Short Book) about the sole remaining Roman senator who spoke up for the old religion when Christianity was made the official faith of the Empire, or about Lord Willoughby de Broke, who opposed all reform of the House of Lords under Asquith, or Mick McGahey, the miners' leader, who was never more eloquent in his defence of the Soviet Union than after it had invaded Afghanistan, or those heroes who refused to exhibit the Impressionists.
More and more, my computer is invaded by messages which, if opened, will give it a virus. It is quite easy to avoid the ones that say 'Hey baby! Somebody loves ya!' under 'subject', but I had to keep my hands behind my back to stop myself from opening the latest, perfectly designed for the journalist's self-doubt — 'You are a bad writer'.
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