DIARY ALAN WATKINS
With the West, or part of it, merrily bombing one Mohammedan country and threatening to bomb another, or several others, I wonder why our leaders are so apparently confident that the oil will continue to flow. I read in the City pages that the oil-producing states of the Middle East no longer occupy their dominant position of the 1970s, and that, in any case, they need the money. I would not be so sure. They could still cut off the oil — as the late Tommy Cooper used to say, just like that. Indeed, if I were Saddam Hussein (which thank the Lord I'm not, sir), this is precisely what I should now be trying to negotiate with the rulers of Saudi Arabia.
0 ne grumble a column and no more is my rule. This week's is that I was having my roof repaired at ruinous expense, which is not the complaint. In the course of their labours the roofers displaced my Sky aerial, so rendering me unable to receive Rupert Murdoch's service. This is not the complaint either, for they were perfectly open about what they had done, and promised to deduct the cost of repairing the damage from their bill. I telephoned Sky, spoke to a polite Scotsman and told him precisely what had happened. He immediately fixed an appointment with an engineer — they are all called engineers — having first taken the precaution of extracting £60 from me through my credit card. The engineer duly turned up, only to inform me that he was not insured to work on roofs. But. I protested, I had specifically told Sky that the damage had occurred on a roof. Just so, he replied, just so. He was always being lured on to roofs. Why, only the other day, in Rickmansworth. he had been asked to ascend a ladder. Luckily, my daughter was able to persuade him to use our own step-ladder and squeeze through a trapdoor. So now I am once again Our Man in Islington with a Large Drink and a Sky Digital Television, though no thanks to Mr Murdoch.
0 ne of the accompaniments of growing old is, 1 find, that I forget to turn on the television to see a programme I want to see, in the meantime having become immersed in something else, usually a book. So on Wednesday last week 1 switched on at 10.25 to be sure of catching Newsnight. a matter of duty rather than enjoyment. I found two naked young persons disporting themselves vigorously, filmed by a cameraman who, it turned out, specialised in pornography, and observed by Joan Bakewell. whose expression combined boredom, disapproval and surprise — which was odd, given that she had set up the entire exercise in the first place. Examinations of pornography in a superior manner are not, of course, new. In the mid-1960s (when I was with this paper) the Observer decided to investigate the subject. To this end a friend of mine, Colin Cross, was dispatched to Soho. He entered one of the shops which then littered the place, penetrated a back room and requested a copy of a sado-masochistic publication entitled Justice Monthly. Mackintoshed, pipe-smoking, crazedlooking, Cross might himself have been a regular customer of one of these establishments. But the manager was not deceived. 'If I was you. sonny,' he said,
'I'd try one of them law bookshops in Chancery Lane.'
Spotting aeroplanes was not a recreation I had heard of before. I am prepared to believe that the 12 citizens held in Greece on spying charges were innocent — though it does seem a little tactless of one of them previously to have accepted the hospitality of the Turkish government. Several papers have become indignant: It couldn't happen here'. But it could, you know, and it did. In 1964 in Chandler v. DPP the House of Lords upheld the convictions of the Wethersfield nuclear disarmers under the Official Secrets Act. Their offence had been to approach a 'prohibited place'. Their intention to demonstrate rather than to spy made no difference. The law, as far as I know, is the same today.
There is what the Victorians called a 'hum' against the sentence of seven years passed on Jonathan King and, indeed, against the trial itself. I sympathise. The offences took place a long time ago. The boys involved were not children. Most of them came back for more when they did not have to do anything of the kind. As Ian Jack pointed out in the Independent, Oscar Wilde behaved worse with (admittedly slightly older) boys and has now been canonised. Not for the first time, metropolitan opinion is right and the Sun wrong.
People used to think that all dirty jokes were made up on the Stock Exchange, whence they percolated to the rest of the country. Today, similarly, people think that stories of political correctness originate from a special unit at the Daily Mail. Not so. My elder grandson, who is nine, was playing at school with a darker-skinned young friend. 'Let's play James Bond,' the friend said. 'I'll be James Bond.' You can't be James Bond,' my grandson said. 'James Bond was white: There was a tremendous row. The boy was taken aside and told that what he had said had caused much distress and that he must never say anything like it ever again. When the story was retailed at the Sunday lunch table, I said that, while my sympathies lay with him, nevertheless there was a problem in the performing arts: white Othellos, black Hamlets and so forth. After I had been dilating for some minutes on illusion and imagination in the arts, my grandson interrupted: 'Grandpa, James Bond was white.' I felt proud of him.
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