Open Writing

Ken Livingstone, Lord Mayor of London, announced plans that he will undertake if he is re-elected for a third term. They include a £16bn Crossrail Project and a £1bn per year Tube modernisation scheme. His manifesto also describes a London bike hire scheme involving 6000 bicycles with each one available free for the first 30 minutes.
And Boris Johnson, the Conservative MP who is also putting up for the job, announced that he is descended from a Russian slave.
Comment: More outrageous stories are on the way.

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Leon Greenman, who lived in lford, a Londoner who survived the Nazi concentration camp in Auschwitz, died at the age of 97. He had been living in Holland with his Dutch wife and three-year-old son when they were rounded up in 1943 and sent to a death camp in Poland. He stayed in six different camps and was freed when the Americans liberated Buchenwald in 1945.
Comment: He received an OBE for speaking up against racism.

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Mohammed Hamid, aged 50. who dubbed himself “Osama bin London”, was sentenced to life imprisonment for conspiring to solicit to murder. He ran a training camp in the New Forest for 4½ years for prospective terrorists.
Comment: His pupils were involved in the attacks on the London Underground.

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Poems for Posterity

I Don’ Like
by Henry Jackson

You
When you say No,
The winter
With winds and cold snow,
LBC
Lotsa bad crap to me,
Channel Five
With mediocre bad vibes,
Michael Heseltine, ex Minister,
Flashy, quite sinister,
Andrew Lloyd Webber
Big head but clever,
Noisy airport lounges
Filled with travel scroungers,
Hans Blix
Knows a few tricks,
Michael Douglas
Has a wife quite luscious,
Michael Portillo
Political armadillo,
Saddam Hussein
A killer insane,
Bush, by George
Lives by the sword,
Chancellor Schroeder
Another free loader,
President Chirac
Political doctor or quack,
Red Ken the Mayor
A glib soothsayer,
A singer named Posh
Filled with the power of dosh.3.

I could continue for ever
But the damage is done,
Winners win and losers lose
And time marches on.
--February 27 2003

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The London stage show “Hairspray” won four awards as the best musical of the year at the Olivier Awards at Grosvenor House, Park Lane. Kristen Scott Thomas was named best actress in the play “Seagull” and Chiwetel Ejiofor was named best actor in “Othello”. Andrew Lloyd Webber was honoured for his achievements in theatre and his role in bringing theatre to new audiences around the world. The latest production of George Bernard Shaw’s ”Saint Joan” picked up awards for best revival and best sound while Rory Kinnear was named best supporting actor for his performance in “The Man of Mode”. The best musical revival was named “The Magic Flute” and Simon
McBurney’s Barbican production of “A Disappearing Number” was named best new play. The Gielgud Theatre on the South Bank won the award for best lighting and Rupert Goold was named best director.
Comment: Applause all round.

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Four Asian police officers attached to Scotland Yard are being investigated as possible members of Al Quaida engaged in supplying secret information to the terrorist organisation.
Comment: They are believed to be copying IRA methods of infiltration into the service.

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Lindani Mangela, aged 24, of Romford, Essex, was gaoled for seven years at Southwark Court for persuading one thousand fellow Seventh Day Adventists to invest in his bogus investment businesses. They were members of the same church and he promised them earnings of more than 3,000 per cent on their money in six months but they actually lost £3.2m.
Comment: Mangela spent the money on luxury living.

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Looking Back
The Women in My Life (Joan)

The year 1944 was an important year for me. I had returned home after two-and-a-half years abroad in the Royal Navy and the war at sea was still raging. I came home to find my wife living in my house with a Canadian soldier and she refused to give him up. I was serving in a Fleet minesweeper at the time and the Normandy invasion had just begun. After a minor scuffle with a German mine off Arromanches we came in for repairs at the Royal Albert Dock in London and I managed to scrape some leave. I was 32, angry with the war, angry with my wife, lonely and bitter. My life had fallen to pieces.

Returning to England after a long period in primitive places was the stuff of my dreams but the reality was different and harsh. War had accustomed me to excitement and drama, even death. I had travelled half way round the world, visited strange and primitive places, met strange and primitive people and had been shot at, bombed and even lost my ship when a mine hit us in a place I had never heard of before. After that everything else seemed pale and insipid.

When I arrived and found my home occupied by my wife and a soldier who both refused to leave or be parted, I made a telephone tour of my friends and discovered that they all had their own problems and it seemed that my return was a matter of indifference compared with rationing, the shortage of food, the absence of most of the comforts they enjoyed before the war and the necessity to survive.

Except for one person. Her name was Joan and she lived just round the corner from my home in the neat suburban enclave we both had shared with the owners of little shops, managers of big shops and professional losers who would never make it to the top.

She had been married to a Scottish accountant named Tom who talked himself into an executive position to Elstree film studios and was on the point, he boasted, of revolutionising the British film industry when the call to arms overtook him and he joined the Royal Air Force. He became an accountant in the Service and juggled with figures in a sleepy little town in the Cotswolds and rose to the rank of Wing Commander.

Joan, who was an amply endowed fluffy blonde, resented the war because she had managed to become a perpetual film extra and earned a steady income by being around with other fluffy blondes and smiling at a distance into the cameras. Occasionally she persuaded a cameraman to linger on her shapely body but her dreams of stardom were never realised. She revelled in the hustle and bustle of film making, even the uncertainty of every day, and enjoyed the drinking and temporary entanglements with men she would never meet again.

Her husband boasted that he was on the point of revolutionising the Royal Air Force when he met another blonde from South Africa and pursued her without success. She was quite definite in her requirements. Yes, she would go out with him. Yes, she would go to bed with him. But first they had to get married. So Tom got special leave, broke the news to Joan which she accepted with a sigh of relief, and the divorce went through. He married the new wife with impressive RAF pageantry and was then shattered to discover that his sexual performance had vanished. He worried himself into a psychiatric hospital and the war had to go on without him.

Joan moved away from the matrimonial home, where she had been on afternoon tea terms with my wife, and took over a big, fading terrace house closer to central London where she met and married an insurance agent and had two children before he joined the Fifth Army and became one of Montgomery’s heroes.

(Continued next week)

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A bid to make London the tidiest city in the world in the run up to the 2012 Olympic Games was announced this week. Under the scheme teams of volunteers will carry out a 100-day effort every year clearing away rubbish and getting rid of graffiti. They will also clean up the foreshore on the banks of the Thames.
Comment: The plan is backed by local authorities and the Keep Britain Tidy organisation.

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This Week in History

1879. Albert Einstein born.
1917. The Russian Revolution began.
1959. The people of Tibet staged an ill fated rebellion against their Chinese occupiers and were slaughtered in thousands.

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Famous quotes
An eye for an eye only makes the whole world blind - Gandhi

I’m not afraid of death. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.
---Woody Allen.

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Nigel Kennedy, the punk concert violinist, made a triumphant return to
London this week with a concert at the Festival Hall 18 months after breaking his wrist in a fall. Now aged 51, he is married to a Polish woman and lives in Krakow where he directs his own orchestra.
Comment: He played Elgar’s “Concerto”, a great classical masterpiece.

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A 28-year-old Polish builder was trapped for 2½ hours when the roof of a mosque in Old Devonshire Road, Tooting, collapsed. Another man escaped with minor injuries.
Comment: Forty firemen took part in the rescue.

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London’s Richmond and Wandsworth Councils and Berkshire’s Windsor and Maidenhead Council are taking their bid to reduce night time flights to Heathrow Airport to the High Court. They claim that some flights break government rules on noise.
Comment: Other authorities backing the claim are Kensington & Chelsea, Hammersmith & Fulham, Hounslow, Hillingdon and the Greater London Authority.

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London Underground workers voted to go on strike in a dispute over safety and ticket office closures,
Comment: But London Transport denied that safety was at risk.

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Fare evasion on London buses nearly doubled in the last four years, reports the Liberal Democrat Party. ”Bendy buses” are the source of the biggest losses that cost the operators £6.4m of the total £52.3m. losses last year.
Comment: London Transport gets about £1bn a year from bus fares.

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Transport for London has handed out 10,000 stick on lenses that will enable drivers of heavy goods vehicles to see cyclists coming up on their left.
Comment: Last year collisions between cyclists and trucks accounted for half of all cycle fatalities.

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Cocaine weighing 33bs was found strapped to the legs of two Mexican children who arrived at Heathrow Airport on Wednesday. They are aged 11 and 13 and came with their mother from Mexico City.
Comment: The drugs have a street value of £675,000.

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Carina Templeman Adams, aged 15, of St John’s Wood, North-West London, is to attempt to become the youngest British woman to ski to the Nouth Pole. She hopes to follow in the footsteps of her father David, the world famous explorer.

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The Queen and Prince Philip visited Tate & Lyle’s Sugar Refinery in
Silvertown in London’s East End to mark the 130th anniversary of sugar production on the site and met the great great grandson of Sir Henry Tate, the founder of the company.

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Me

My love of words is even greater than my love of beautiful women. So I must tell you about an incident this week to illustrate my beliefs. In the middle of the raging storms that struck the country I wondered how my friend Gillian was coping with the gales around her home in Totnes, Devon, so I sent her the following Email:

HOPE
you can
COPE

And the answer came:

WE SNORED
while it
POURED

Gillian is beautiful AND brainy.

The arrival of the Cheltenham Festival reminds me that in 1991 my son Michael won the Championship Hurdles race with his horse Morley Street. Michael, who died eight years later at the early age of 62, worked for me after leaving school and went on to become a paper merchant. He also built up a string of racehorses that he kept in the stables of his Sussex home and later flew Morley Street to America where he won the famous Breeders’ Cup Hurdles Race. Michael’s trainer was Toby Balding, the father of Claire Balding, the BBC’s horseracing commentator. I met them both.

Somewhere near me there is a clock that sounds the hours with melodious chimes. It sends shivers down my spine, shivers of pleasure, and reminds me of the time when my mother took me to church every Sunday, twice on Good Friday, and I was buzzing with the acrid smell of incense that enveloped me when I served as an altar boy.

My brother Ted would have been 98 today. He died nine years ago and spent the whole of the war in the RAF working behind a desk in Blackpool and rose to the rank of Flight Lieutenant. After the war he became a Civil Servant and when he retired lived in an RAF Home in Sussex. He was a tireless worker for the RAF Benevolent Fund for which he raised many thousands of pounds.