Wind farms perform the role of Ceausescu's tower blocks

Russell Taylor has written a diatribe against wind-farms (I abominate them too) in which he draws an interesting parallel with tower blocks that were intended to be built in Communist Romania had the Revolution not intervened. 

Wind turbines serve an additional purpose for the Left, similar to that performed by the tower blocks Ceausescu built in the middle of farmland, or the factories found on the horizon of Soviet rural scenes: they are statements of power. These steel sentinels remind country-dwellers that they are within the gravitational pull of the capital’s dark star, and that if they believe they are free to reject the beliefs of the metropolitan elite, they can think again.

The countryside has long been an object of suspicion for liberal townies, who consider it a viper’s nest of erroneous thought, inhabited by toffs, retired colonels, golf-playing Rotarians and other conservative bogeymen. The propensity of country folk to choose their own values, to observe age-old traditions and to rely on each other to get by puts them in conflict with everything the Left stands for. In the liberal worldview, you’re either one of them, one of their flock, or an enemy of the people whose way of life must be destroyed. First they banned fox hunting, then they ruined the landscape. What next? Collectivised farms? Internment camps for UKIP voters?

Into my mind come these lines from Betjeman:

Cut down that timber! Bells, too many and strong,
Pouring their music through the branches bare,
From moon-white church-towers down the windy air
Have pealed the centuries out with Evensong.
Remove those cottages, a huddled throng!
Too many babies have been born in there,
Too many coffins, bumping down the stair,
Carried the old their garden paths along.

I have a Vision of The Future, chum,
The worker's flats in fields of soya beans
Tower up like silver pencils, score on score:
And Surging Millions hear the Challenge come
From microphones in communal canteens
"No Right! No wrong! All's perfect, evermore.

'There is no hunting like the hunting of man'

There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.

This quotation comes from Hemingway and i note that he is talking about armed men and hope they were bring hunted for a good reason. I remember reading some Edwardian travel book about South America which referred to a rumours that men, Indians of course, had been hunted on one occasion instead of wild game. I hope this did not happen. I do not have time to research it on the net thoroughly.

There is an idea for a book or more probably a film here.

Life and death

'I see that you have made three spelling mistakes.'

These were the last words of Thomas de Mahay, Marquis de Favras, upon reading his death sentence before being guillotined.

It sounds as though the Marquis was an honorary Englishman. Perhaps Leslie Howard might have played him in the film.

For some reason this reminded me that Harold Wilson persuaded the Times to let him read his obituary, which inevitably was not flattering. After reading it he corrected one date.

It also reminded me of one of the Decembrists. He was led to the scaffold but something went wrong with it and he had to walk down the steps again and wait while the machinery was adjusted. His last words were,

Nothing ever goes right for me.

Girl guides go Godless

A sad piece of news from the Independent.

For decades, Brownies and Girl Guides have promised to “love my God,” and “serve the Queen and my country”. But now, in a triumph for secularists, the organisation has decided to drop references to the deity – and the nation – from the oath taken by members.

Instead the Guide will promise

  to be true to myself and develop my beliefs.

What a narcissistic, pagan and empty promise and how appropriate for the age. What tedious young women these new guides threaten to grow into. I also discover that bob-a-job was abolished twenty years ago, but that was boy scouts.

"However, the Guides decided to retain the pledge to serve their patron Queen Elizabeth II in the Promise. Anti-monarchy campaigners told The Independent that the organisation had “missed” an “opportunity” to truly open up the organisation."

It sounds like a parody, perhaps written by Evelyn Waugh. Who are these anti-monarchy campaigners?

The idiot-proof wrapping paper for men

Another Daily MaIl scoop. In the 1970s and 1980s I disliked that paper but now it is becoming indispensable.

The idiot-proof wrapping paper for men that doesn't need scissors or Sellotape (and yes, it was designed by a man) 

• Martin Grix has created 'Man Wrap' to help men who struggle to wrap gifts

• 
  

• It doesn't require scissors, or Sellotape, nor is there a need for fiddly folding 

• 
  

• The man just has to roll out the paper, places the gift in the middle, tear off a strip and twist it around the present to secure it in place

The story is here.


I cannot or do not want to wrap things well. I also find the cheapest paper in existence for my family - but it is not  a man thing as my father wrapped with great precision and patience, saving every piece of paper however small and reusing Christmas paper from presents he received. 

I agree with Logan Pearsall Smith about this, as about so much.

'I would lay down my life for my friend but don't let him ask me to wrap a parcel for him.'

I hate wrapping things, perhaps because my father was so very good at it. I can sometimes wrap passably well if the present is a book, which good presents usually are. There is something about book shapes wreathed in paper that brings out the conscientious wrapper in me, sometimes. And I can do wrap well, of course, when there is a powerful incentive. 

If you receive a beautifully wrapped present from me that means you, dear reader, are that powerful incentive. But if you are Romanian, as you very possibly are, you know that Romania has solved the man-wrap problem by not wrapping things at all, but presenting them in special gift bags. 

The bookshops also wrap things beautifully at a price that seems cheap to me. Although, to be sincere, almost any price seems cheap compared to the labour of wrapping things oneself.

The tie-less G8

"They look like middle management who are on an away day and about to go paintballing." Peter York

They do not look good and not wearing a tie is very ageing. Mr. Obama looks least uncomfortable without his tie, but we still know he is not really cool but a clever nerd. 

On the one hand, for years now it has been mostly dodgy people who want to sell you insurance who wear ties. On the other hand, however old I get, I still feel young because there are still plenty of Romanian men (I suppose they are no older than 65 or at most 70) who wear ties at the weekend and hats too in cold weather. They wear them while drinking cheap cognac type drink at the terrace downstairs on a Saturday morning. They gives me hope and restores my faith in human nature.

As far as I know, the first appearance of tielessness as a statement in political history was the 1948 Progressive Party Convention which nominated Henry Wallace (Roosevelt's left-wing Vice-President from 1941 to 1945) for president. This is not a good precedent since Wallace was convinced of Stalin's benign intentions. Since the turn of the century tielessness has spread, like some plague bacillus.

For psychological reasons I wanted as a very small boy to be a Victorian. Perhaps I wanted to be my grandfather (a bad-tempered man who wore a bow-tie and owned a bowler hat) and this take seniority over my nostalgic conservative parents. Whatever the reason i wanted to wear striped trousers and a stiff collar and this was one of the things that made the Bar appeal. Anyhow it is just too hot in Romania for stiff collars and there are no laundries but I shall settle for being the last man to wear a tie. 

My left-of-centre, rock music loving contemporaries from Cambridge all went into jobs in the City and tried to be cool, but it always pleased me to know they were really their tall-hatted late 19th century counterparts, surrounded by clerks on tall stools.

What would Lord Curzon have said about the leaders of the Great Powers meeting without ties? Would he have said it was 'Ghastly', with his short Derbyshire 'a'? Or would he have thought ties were middle class anyway? 

Ah, Lord Curzon, who debauched the novelist Mrs. Glyn on a tiger skin rug.

Would you like to sin

With Elinor Glyn

On a tiger skin?

Or prefer

To err with her

On some other fur?

He was 'surprised that the working classes had such white skins' and went in for meetings with Indian princes of 'rollicking pomposity'. I do not think he would have approved of David Cameron even though they both went to Eton, but would have preferred him to John Major whom he would have considered a 'man of the utmost insignificance'. He would have thought the same of Ed Miliband.

I should have loved to have been Viceroy of India more than to be a king. Even being the Portuguese Viceroy of Goa would have made me exquisitely happy.

More people migrated to the UK in 2010 than from 1066 to 1950

"More people have now migrated to the UK in a single year (2010) than did so in the entire period from 1066 to 1950, excluding wartime." 

Sir Andrew Green of Migrationwatch, speaking to the Bruges Group in April.

Things people told me today in Jerusalem

A foreign Protestant clergyman:

Islam is a very insecure religion. Why? Because it has always lived alongside two more developed cultures, Christian and Jewish.

Hitler made war on the Jews because he was making war on God. The Jews introduced the world to the monotheistic God of love.

The paedophile crisis in the Catholic Church is mostly a crisis of homosexual priests and most of their victims were boys over the age of puberty.

The current multiculturalist ideology will give way in the USA to its opposite: racism and discrimination. Americans do not find a middle course.

A perceptive foreign journalist, with Zionist sympathies:

Arab Christians often say they get on well with Muslims but the truth is different. The Christians are often scared of Muslims. In particular there are many cases of Muslims sleeping with Christian girls with no intention of marrying them. In some cases raping them. Muslim youths would not dare sleep with Muslim girls before marriage because the girl's tribe would take revenge. Christians tend not to be organised in tribes and to be less vengeful.

A Christian television station in Palestine was finally forced off the air after the owner had received death threats and his headquarters had been fire-bombed.

Arab Christians in Israel suffer from religious and social discrimination but they have absolutely secure legal rights. On the West Bank they suffer from those forms of discrimination and do not have the rule of law.

From a well-guarded building in Jerusalem Christian missionaries are sent to all the Middle Eastern countries. They often face great danger. 

The foundations of first century Nazareth were discovered by accident in 2000, while preparing for Pope John Paul II's visit. The place is called Nazareth Village and is kitsch but impressive.

In the last three years the Church has been organising affordable housing for Christians and this has slowed emigration. 

An American Christian theology teacher and missionary, who speaks Arabic well:

In my experience, almost all Arab Christians have a public discourse in which they say that they and the Muslims are brothers and a private discourse in which they complain about the Muslims and say they are ill-treated by them.

I asked all the Muslim converts to Christianity that I know if they think that the God they worshipped while they were Muslims was the same God they worship as Christians. To my surprise, I would say 60% of them said no. I had not expected so big a number to say that.

An Arab taxi-driver from East Jerusalem, who is an Israeli citizen:

Things would probably be worse if the Arabs got back East Jerusalem. Why? It would be corrupt, taxi licences would only be obtained though bribery. The Israelis award them fairly, with no bribes.

A Muslim who kept a religious souvenir shop in the Christian quarter:

I spent ten years in prison for being one of the leaders of the first Intifada. I love that man [points to picture of Yasser Arafat]. See what they are doing? Beating up women in West Jerusalem for wearing veils. [Points to story in his newspaper.]

This is certainly not any kind of representative sample, of course. On other visits to Jerusalem I have met plenty of Christians and Muslims who complained in strong terms about the Jews, for good reasons. Some Christians told they had problems with Muslims but all said they had much worse problems with the Jews. I do not think the Israeli Jews are more sinned against than sinning.


My journalist friend said few people had written about the plight of Christians in the West bank but that Peter Hitchens had. I found this from an article he wrote in 2010.

[In the West Bank] I saw the outline of a society, slowly forming amid the wreckage, in which a decent person might live, work, raise children and attempt to live a good life. But I also saw and heard distressing things.
One – which I feel all of us should be aware of – is the plight of Christian Arabs under the rule of the Palestinian Authority. More than once I heard them say: ‘Life was better for us under Israeli rule.’
One young man, lamenting the refusal of the Muslim-dominated courts to help him in a property dispute with squatters, burst out: ‘We are so alone! All of us Christians feel so lonely in this country.’
This conversation took place about a mile from the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, where tourists are given the impression that the Christian religion is respected. Not really.

I was told, in whispers, of the unprintable desecration of this shrine by Palestinian gunmen when they seized the church in 2002 – ‘world opinion’ was exclusively directed against Israel. I will not name the people who told me these things.
I have also decided not to name another leading Christian Arab who told me of how his efforts to maintain Christian culture in the West Bank had met with official thuggery and intimidation.
My guide and host reckons there are 30,000 Christians in the three neighbouring municipalities of Bethlehem, Beit-Sahour and Beit- Jala. Soon there will be far fewer. He has found out that 2,000 emigrated between 2001 and 2004, a process which has not stopped. What is most infuriating about this is that many Christians in Britain are fed propaganda blaming this on the Israelis.
Arabs can oppress each other, without any help from outside. Because the Palestinian cause is a favourite among Western Leftists, they prefer not to notice that it is largely an aggressive Islamic cause.

The West bank was once predominantly Christian but the Christians are leaving. Bringing the story up to date is this very alarming news item from three weeks ago.

Back in Jerusalem

'If English was good enough for Jesus Christ it is good enough for me.' 

(Allegedly said by a politician in the American South, but really a canard.)

I should write a book about Americans. If I did I might get to understand them. I am on the internet in the Notre Dame centre which is an odd and very American combination of  religious institution and four staff hotel, just outside the walled city.  It was built in the 1880s but restored in the 1970s and feels very 1970s. Every guest (pilgrim) seems to be American.  

Around me are Americans talking across me at the top of the voices. One offers to send me a video about the history of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. When I suggest we cannot know if the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is built on the site of Calvary he looks absolutely furious. As if I had doubted the existence of God. He is not going to send me that link. I feel like a dangerous freethinker. I begin to understand for the first time why some people are pleased to be atheists.

One expects more subtlety from Catholics, but American Catholicism is very Protestant, just as Romanian Catholicism (happily) is very Orthodox. The Catholicism of this place seems breezy and cheerful, like the late Senator Edward Kennedy's grin. It has none of the darkness of the Spanish baroque, for example. On the first floor the interior of an English Gothic church has been created. Mercifully, though, the evening Mass is half in Latin.  I wish the last pope had ordered every church in the world to say or sing the Gloria, Credo and Sanctus in Latin, but I tell myself to be self-forgetful and obedient.

I saw this poster in the kasbah in the Christian quarter, from the good old days. 'No photographs' read the sign alongside it.

I like travelling alone and coming closer to ones true self than when at home. I like meeting new people. I like the solitude though there is perhaps faint undercurrent of not displeasing melancholy. I like this quotation from Thomas De Quincey which I just came across:

Solitude, though it may be silent as light, is like light, the mightiest of agencies; for solitude is essential to man. All men come into this world alone and leave it alone.

If once a man indulges himself in murder

My brain buzzes all the time with quotations. This is reasonable famous but not everyone knows it and, anyway, I felt like quoting it.

If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination.

Thomas De Quincey 

President Basescu is in favour of homosexual marriage

Asked whether he agrees with homosexual marriage, President Basescu said today, on the "After 20 years" Pro TV show, that "everyone is free to do what one wants with own life" and if they want to get married (man to man and woman to woman) "it is their problem."


"Everyone is free to do what he/she wants with his/her life. If they want to get married man to man, woman to woman, it is their problem. However, I am Christian Orthodox and observe the precepts of Christianity and Orthodoxy. Others may have different precepts. It is their problem.

He added that regulating this issue through interdictions included in the Constitution is "a big mistake", because "no one knows what developments will follow".

"I agree with everyone’s freedom to do what he/she wants with his/her life, including this freedom, because what each of us does within the walls of our home is our problem. And it is a big mistake to enter this area, to regulate it through interdictions in the Constitution. We have a Civil Code which says what family means and regulates the relationships and we do not know what developments will follow. You don’t include in the Constitution something that tomorrow may be amended.”

All the (now defeated) constitutional amendment on marriage would do is to ensure politicians could not bring in same-sex marriage without a democratic vote. Who can oppose that?


Well, a lot of foreign journalists could and Mrs. Merkel, David Cameron, Francois Hollande ....

But I truly don't understand how democrats can, why democrats do. 

Modern Christianity: 'God as an awfully nice bloke'

An article in the Catholic Herald caught my attention, about the new Pope's meeting with the new Archbishop of Canterbury. The headline read:

Catholic-Anglican relations are actually in good shape

I only clicked on it to see how Catholic-Anglican relations can be good after the Anglicans destroyed any hope of a reunion by deciding to purport to ordain women. But I did not find out the answer to this question because I read the following half-sentence, quoted with approval from the new Archbishop of Canterbury, and decided the article did not deserve any more of my time. 

'... our brothers and sisters in Christ suffer terribly from violence, oppression and war, from bad government and unjust economic systems. If we are not their advocates in the name of Christ, who will be?” 

I am not in favour of or indifferent to violence and oppression and think we should speak up for people who are badly treated, but I have a question: didn't Palestine suffer from violence, oppression and bad government when Jesus Christ preached? I wonder if Dr Welby would think the economic system under Pilate or Herod was all that just. Yet Our Lord did not suggest any change in the political or economic system or criticise anyone in government. It was Barabbas who did that.

I remember my foolish decision to study law in my early thirties when what fascinated me was theology and religion. I used to dive off on my way to and from lectures into the theology department of Bloomsbury bookshops. What I skimmed there roused me to fury and frustration - full of unconsidered and silly premises. One writer apologised profusely for the fact that he believed Jesus is God incarnate but immediately stressed that this did no make him want to convert anyone. Heavens forfend. On the contrary everyone should, he said  remain in the religion in which he was reared.  Another critiqued an Anglican catechism from around 1911. An Anglican catechism! Whatever happened to those? 

Apparently, the author said, some of the things in the  catechism were true and useful whereas others, such as that people should be grateful to God for the station to which He had called them, were clearly wickedly mistaken.

What a shallow and false idea of God, Who makes some of us rich, others poor, some beautiful, strong or intelligent  others the opposite.  But the idea of equality deludes modern religious thinkers, though thinkers is a polite word for them. It comes I think from the fact that modern man, even when he believes in God, finds it hard to believe in a very immanent God, a god who intervenes in our lives moment by moment. That is why, amongst many other things, Catholic teaching on artificial birth-control is so out of fashion. 

Someone else, I recall, deplored the use of words like King or Lord to describe God. Masculine words were also bad.  

Anglican books of the 1990s would make a cat laugh. I suspect that things may be worse now.

I remember moving a liberal Christian friend to real fury by quoting from my father's missal (Bishop Challoner's Garden of the Soul) the words

Let me always remember to be submissive to my superiors, condescending to my inferiors.

It is the idea of superiors and inferiors which modern man is uneasy with, even more uneasy than he is with God. Which makes it very difficult to imagine God, who is surely superior. In fact modern man is uneasy that the world does not bear much relation to the ideals of liberalism and social democracy. Biology, for example, obstinately ensures that women and men do not resemble each other very much and that homosexuals acts are very different from heterosexual ones. History seems to ensure that every kind of equality is a (very fatuous) ignis fatuus.

Every age remakes God in its image. The eighteenth century made him an absolute monarch, which was accurate. The radical thinkers of the 1960s made Him a Marxist freedom fighter. In the 1990s he had become, in England at least, in the words of jonathan Meades, 'God as an awfully nice bloke'.  Church architecture reflects these ideas. Catholic churches were one black, gloomy, frightening, full of statues of saints. They are now airy, painted white with lots of glass and one statue of St Francis of Assisi almost the only saint who appeals top modern man (who has been renamed modern person). Most of the saints were far too difficult and ascetic. There is no theological reason for these changes.

Now, suddenly, with a bleak feeling in my heart I see that it was my vocation to do battle with the soft-headed religious ideas that mislead good people and incidentally have put England in the the mess she is in. As Hilaire Belloc said, every major question in history is a religious question. 

I am writing this in the jewish Quarter in Jerusalem, but it is just as obvious in Bloomsbury and Bucharest.

Valbonë, Albania

Camille Paglia

"If civilization had been left in female hands we would still be living in grass huts."

"A woman simply is, but a man must become. Masculinity is risky and elusive. It is achieved by a revolt from woman and it is confirmed only by other men. Manhood coerced into sensitivity is no manhood at all."

"The trauma of the Sixties persuaded me that my generation's egalitarianism was a sentimental error. I now see the hierarchical as both beautiful and necessary. Efficiency liberates; egalitarianism tangles, delays, blocks, deadens."

"I am troubled by the provincialism and amorality of the gay world and as a lesbian, I'm sick and tired of the gay rights movement being damaged by the cowardly incapacity for self-examination of many gay men."

"History shows that male homosexuality, which like prostitution flourishes with urbanization and soon becomes predictably ritualized, always tends toward decadence."

"Homosexuality is not 'normal' On the contrary it is a challenge to the norm...Nature exists whether academics like it or not. And in nature, procreation is the single relentless rule. That is the norm. Our sexual bodies were designed for reproduction...No one is born gay. The idea is ridiculous...homosexuality is an adaptation, not an inborn trait...."

"I have written repeatedly about my theory that homosexuality is an adaptation, rather than an innate trait, and that it is reinforced by habit. With its cant terms of “oppression” and “bigotry,” gay activism, encouraged by the scientific illiteracy of academic postmodernism, wants to deny that there is a heterosexual norm."

"Every man must define his identity against his mother. If he does not, he just falls back into her and is swallowed up."

"The more woman aims for personal identity and autonomy ... the fiercer will be her struggle with nature - that is, with the intractable physical laws of her own body. And the more nature will punish her: 'Do not dare to be free! For your body does not belong to you.'"

"Television is actually closer to reality than anything in books. The madness of TV is the madness of human life."

"To me the ideal education should be rigorous and word-based—logocentric. The student must learn the logical, hierarchical system. Then TV culture allows the other part of the mind to move freely around the outside of that system . . . I want schools to stress the highest intellectual values and ideals of the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian traditions. Nowadays, “logocentric” is a dirty word. It comes from France, where deconstruction is necessary to break the stranglehold of centuries of Descartes and Pascal. But to apply Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault to American culture is absolutely idiotic. We are born into an imagistic and pagan culture ruled by TV. . . We need to reinforce the logocentric and Apollonian side of our culture in the schools. It is time for enlightened repression of the children."

"Teenage boys, goaded by their surging hormones run in packs like the primal horde. They have only a brief season of exhilarating liberty between control by their mothers and control by their wives."

"Men know they are sexual exiles. They wander the earth seeking satisfaction, craving and despising, never content. There is nothing in that anguished motion for women to envy."

"Out with stereotypes, feminism proclaims. But stereotypes are the west's stunning sexual personae, the vehicles of art's assault against nature. The moment there is imagination, there is myth."

[My gloss on the last quotation. I am too old to know what the word stereotypes means exactly but I hear intelligent people using this clunking word to shut off argument. Of course stereotypes are in principle good. Prejudices can be ancestral wisdom but some people in universities hate ancestral wisdom on principle. Ancestral wisdom can be wrong but to assume it is as a default setting is a sign of decadence.]

Amending the Romanian constitution to ban same-sex marriage

400 people took to the streets of Bucharest for a Gay Pride parade on Saturday, including several Ambassadors required by their governments to take part.  At least one Ambassador had difficulty squaring this with his conscience. A smaller group of people demonstrated in favour of ‘normality’.

Meanwhile the Romanian Parliament were  discussing a constitutional amendment to entrench the legal definition of marriage as  a "union between a man and a woman". What it meant was that homosexual marriage could not be introduced without a referendum, so the amendment was not an illiberal or authoritarian measure but a very democratic one. The article was proposed by the dominant Orthodox Church and accepted by a parliamentary committee in charge of revisising  the constitution, which was enacted in 1991.

Prime Minister Victor Ponta asked  for a new vote in the committee, saying he does not see the need for a change to the current definition of marriage as "a union between spouses". Mr. Ponta pointed to Hungary, where a similar constitutional amendment by Prime Minister Viktor Orban's government led to very  sharp criticism from the European Commission. Mr. Ponta said he did not himself back same-sex marriage.

So this  issue has suddenly come to Romania.  It  is more important sub specie aeternitatis than the future of the euro, but even more important still is the right of  countries to decide such things for themselves, without the undemocratic intervention of the European Union, which, according to the Prime Minister, is what would happen, is happening. Predictably, he got his way and the amendment was dropped for fear of foreign opinion.

Why can't Romania decide for herself on this and a thousand other questions, from caning in schools to capital punishment (I am opposed to both, by the way) to smoking in restaurants (it should be up to the restaurant owner to decide)? And on and on the list goes.

W.H. Auden, a practicing homosexual and a practicing Christian, said, 'Of course it’s a sin and we must hope that God will forgive us.'  This is true of lots of other things people do in and out of bed, but although they are jaded about most  sexual sins (Bucharest is Babylon), most Romanians used to be, until a few years ago, rather shocked by homosexuality. It was the same with smoking joints and other things which are pretty normal further West. It is very good that people should not victimise homosexuals, but they are learning slowly from the EU that Christian teaching on the matter is bigoted. In other words, the old doctrine is a sin against human rights. 

Human rights is in some ways a new religion which seems to complement but is, in fact, replacing Christianity. Human rights and welfare considerations are taking the place of the sacred in the European imagination. Homosexuality is the issue where human rights and Christianity seem to conflict. 

It is very easy for people to be pharisaical, most of all about sex. I find a lot of Romanians, when discussing this subject, in Samuel Butler’s words,

 Compound for sins they are inclined to 

By damning those they have no mind to.

I have no wish to do this, but homosexual marriage would be a solemn, public recognition by the law that  Christian teaching is not just out of date but even bigoted. 

It would also mean that the word 'marriage' had changed in its essential meaning.  Easy divorce changed marriage, but did not change its essence. 

This is the precise historical moment when Western European culture moves from being post-Christian to being anti-Christian. And almost no-one in England is saying anything.  But I am sure that homosexual marriage will never come to the Orthodox countries and certainly not Romania and I am happy it is so. There should be respect for all, I say, including the majority who believe in Orthodox Christianity.

It was the Christian church that gave the world the idea that homosexual acts were immoral, along with such hitherto normal things as contraception, infanticide and gladiatorial contests. The ancient Greeks and pagan Romans celebrated homosexual love between men, although it was considered shameful to take the passive role, as Julius Caesar was accused of doing. Lesbianism was disapproved of, but if we are to judge from Sappho or Juvenal's Sixth Satire it was pretty commonplace. Yet none of the ancients suggested men should be able to marry one another, except, of course, Eliogabalus. The idea that people in the last fifteen years are wiser than everyone before them since the dawn of time seems to me to be extraordinarily presumptuous. 

By the way, a similar political discussion is going on in Catholic Croatia, which in three weeks will join the EU.  20% of the Croats have so far signed a petition asking for a referendum on whether marriage should be defined in the constitution as being between a man and a woman and it is they, the 20% who want a vote on the matter  - not the 'gay activists' or the EU who recoil from the idea of a vote - who are  accused of being 'intolerant' and 'undemocratic'. Orwell called it Newspeak. Humpty Dumpty said, 'When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.' 

-- 

My manor

Pasajul Victoriei, close to my flat and across the road from my first office in the Union Centre. In this picture it reminds me, as Bucharest used to do a lot, of Havana, mon amour. 

There was a very good café which did very good very cheap cappuccinos and downstairs a reputedly slightly wicked club. Also  a kind of indoor terasa with a synthetic green lawn, serving ciorba de burta, ficat de pui and cascaval pane. Best of all a kiosk that sold wonder placinta cu carne or cu branza. Where can you get those now?

Source: Bucuresti Realist. https://www.facebook.com/BucurestiRealist  Republished by permission. 

Strada Lipscani as it used to be in 2010. Now one with Babylon and Nineveh. For 6 centuries it preserved its (very disreputable) character through fires and earthquakes and innumerable invasions. Now it is restaurants and bars. There are even a smattering of foreign tourists. (How I hate those people). 

Source: Hachi Teaotspp (http://oncemorewithafeelin.tumblr.com/)

The whole old town until about 2008 was like this. I think this has not yet changed. 

King Michael and Queen Ana celebrate today 65 years of marriage

I  wish them a happy Sapphire anniversary.

Not to know what happened before you were born is to be a child forever.

Not to know what happened before you were born is to be a child forever.(Cicero)

Very many clever people in England have no idea about things before 1939 - just a confused idea that things were oppressive, slavery, children sent up chimneys, women not having the vote. This is the greatest problem we have today in the West. Eastern Europeans, thanks to Communism as it happens, know their history and are proud of their countries.


A friend of mine, who has a Ph.D. in Political Science, referred to George Orwell as an old writer and thought he wrote a hundred years ago, before he corrected himself. I told the same man I believed in two things, as far as politics is concerned: freedom and tradition. He answered that he only cared about freedom. Much later, I realised he did not care about tradition because he does not know about it. People who have not read plenty of 

He is a Liberal Democrat. I wonder if some conservatives are equally ignorant and suspect, no, know they are.

Tony Blair in Bucharest last night

Tony Blair and Victor Ponta were dining upstairs at Casa Doina last night while we celebrated Emilian Dima's wedding. The newly weds had their picture taken with Mr Blair but Emilian, who is more English than the English,  wishes it had been Margaret Thatcher Norman Tebbit.

According to the press:

Victor Ponta said that discussing with somebody who was prime minister for ten years was an extraordinary opportunity. “On the labour market and in the investment area, Romania has to be taken increasingly more serious and I believe that, although I am not overly optimistic, just realistic, I believe Romania can become a Poland in its geographical area,” said Ponta after meeting Blair. Also he said that when he asked him for a piece of advice for Romania, Blair said Romania should increase its self-confidence. “Self-confidence was his advice, because if we do not have confidence in Romania nobody else will have more confidence than we have,” says Ponta. 

This was a very astute judgment on the part of Mr. Blair. Giving countries self-confidence is hard to do but can be done. Margaret Thatcher, whatever one thinks of her legacy, did this and so, with the same caveat, did Ronald Reagan and Charles de Gaulle. I cannot see any political leader doing something in similar in Romania. it will be up to Romanians themselves then.

Eternally fascinating Romania

A gypsy palace in Huedin, Cluj county.



Petru Voda monastery.



Danube near Clisura.





Sambata de sus.



Two pictures of Ceahlau.

 

A fact about Albert Einstein

After he left university Albert Einstein took a job as a patent clerk, in order to have time to think about what became his great theory. While doing so, Einstein was the patent clerk who patented the Toblerone. 

This fact is like a poem or a beautiful woman. It makes the universe slightly more coherent.

As Michael Caine would say, 

Not a lot of people know that.

Now you do, dear reader. Or perhaps you don't, depending on whether it is really true.

I read this decades ago and posted it without consulting the net but find it is mentioned there in many places. However, it seems that Einstein's work at the small Federal Office for Intellectual Property in Berne involved assessing electromagnetic devices. In 1908, he took up a post at the University of Berne. Thomas Tobler applied for a patent in 1909. Does anyone know more? I begin to think my fact which seemed to explain slightly the universe is not very solid.

The Pope speaks out on the killing of the Armenians

Turkey has reacted “furiously” according to the daily Hürriyet at the declaration of Pope Francis, who defined the Armenian genocide at the hands of the Turks from 1915, as “the first genocide of the 20th century." in which a million and a half men, women and children died, and which, according to some historians, furnished Hitler with an example of how a people could be destroyed with impunity. The Pope had made this statement during a meeting with a delegation headed by the Armenian Katholikos of Cilicia on 3 June. The Turkish Foreign Minister expressed his disappointment.

As Adolf Hitler said

Who now remembers the Armenians?

Fortunately more and more people nowadays do, though not in Turkey.


It was tragic that under Enver Pasha Turkey went to war with England, France and Russia. Think how happy the Middle East would be now were it Ottoman. The Ottoman Empire, with a parliamentary system, would have the oil, there would be no Israel, Syria, Iraq or Saudi Arabia, the Armenians would not have been murdered, the Greeks might still be living in Anatolia and the Caliph would be reigning in Constantinople, so Al Qaeda would not be murdering people to bring the caliphate back. Egypt might be a semi-detached part of the Ottoman Empire, though by 1914 Libya had already been taken by Italy. But perhaps the Libyans would have preferred to rejoin a democratic Ottoman Empire rather than be ruled by Gaddafi.


Enver dreamt of a greater pan-Turkic Ottoman Empire. He died fighting to become an Emir in Turkmenistan after being an agent of Lenin's. Kemal, the creator of modern Turkey, was a Turkish nationalist who overthrew the Sultan and was happy to give up the Arab domains, though he wanted the oil in Mosul. The British prevented that. Enver, like George W. Bush, was one of history's great losers and his country lost under him - Kemal was a great winner.  Luck was the quality Napoleon thought most important in a general. Kemal had it. Enver didn't.

Bad verse and worse

All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling, said Oscar Wilde and this is usually, though not always, true. I love really good bad verse. Somewhere in Bucharest have the complacence books I wrote by hand aged 22, with scores of examples, but they are not to hand. Still, here are some bad poems.  Does anyone have any other more?


The first everyone knows.

UP the airy mountain,
Down the rushy glen,
We daren't go a-hunting
For fear of little men;
Wee folk, good folk,
Trooping all together;
Green jacket, red cap,
And a white owl's feather!

William Allingham, a better diarist than a poet.

Few months of life has he in store

As he to you will tell,

For still, the more he works, the more

Do his weak ankles swell.

Wordsworth

Across the wire the electric message came.

He is no better. He is much the same.

Said to be by Poet Laureate Alfred Austin on the illness of the Prince of Wales but someone read the whole of Austin's dreadful verse and it was not there. How much better life is now we have computers. Gladstone thought of appointing Christina Rossetti as our only female Poet Laureate but instead left office with the position vacant and Lord Salisbury unforgivably preferred the hack, Austin

And now, kind friend, what I have wrote,

I hope you will pass o'er,

And not criticise as some have done

Hitherto herebefore.

Eliza Cook wrote this. She was American equivalent of William McGonagall. I have not bothered to read very much or quote him here. Perhaps I am pout off by the fact that Spike Milligan liked him. The Goon Show was great but before my time and in my time Milligan had ceased to be funny.

Irks care the crop-full bird? Frets doubt the maw-crammed beast?

Browning, Mr. (Rabbi Ben Ezra)

Will you oftly


Murmur softly?

Browning, Mrs.

Death!

Plop.

The barges down in the river flop.

Flop, plop,

Above, beneath.

From the slimy branches the grey drips drop...

To the oozy waters, that lounge and flop...

And my head shrieks-"Stop"

And my heart shrieks-"Die"

Ugh! Yet I knew-I knew

If a woman is false can a friend be true?

It was only a lie from beginning to end-

My Devil- My "friend."...

So what do I care,

And my head is empty as air-

I can do,

I can dare

(Plop, plop

The barges flop

Drip, drop.)I can dare, I can dare!

And let myself all run away with my head

And stop.

Drop

Dead.

Plop, flop.

Plop.

"A tragedy" by Theophile Marzials

I am one of the few people, I suppose, who has read a whole book of Marzials' verse. I was at Cambridge and not studying for my degree. Betjeman put me onto him.

I also read much of James Russell Lowell's poetry and essays. They left me with the abiding suspicion that Americans cannot write. How much indiscriminate reading I did. Had it been harnessed to some cause...

"Over his keys the musing organist,

Beginning doubtfully and far away,

First lets his fingers wander as they list,

And builds a bridge from Dreamland for his lay..."

"The Vision of Sir Launfal" by James Russell Lowell


Lowell of course was one of the famous Brahmins, who gave rise to a very good poem:

And here is to good old Boston,

The home of the bean and the cod,

Where the Lowells talk to the Cabots

And the Cabots talk only to God.

I could have added most of certain poets, of course, like Southey, for example, another Poet Laureate. The only good thing he wrote was his Ode to Gooseberry Pie, which led me after reading it to buy my mother six pounds of gooseberries (my father said they were only in season for about a week so I bulk bought them when I saw them in the greengrocers). She made and I now love the eponymous dish. How ancient that makes me sound. Greengrocers. Fruit being in season. Reading Southey (though probably few people did, even then).

By the way I had a completely mistaken idea of how to pronounce Southey's name until I read Byron rhyming it with 'mouthy'. (I did, however, know how to pronounce Carew and Cowper.)

I do not like TS Eliot much, except for Prufrock, which I love, and thought of including something of his, but instead I shall cheat and give you the first stanza of a parody of Eliot which he himself admired, Chard Whitlow by Henry Reed. Parodies are something else I once collected and are of course not bad poems at all.

As we get older we do not get any younger.

Seasons return, and today I am fifty-five,

And this time last year I was fifty-four,

And this time next year I shall be sixty-two.

And I cannot say I should like (to speak for myself)

To see my time over again— if you can call it time:

Fidgeting uneasily under a draughty stair,

Or counting sleepless nights in the crowded Tube.

When I was twelve I thought Lord Macaulay's essay on Robert Montgomery the funniest thing I had ever read. Lytton Strachey called Macaulay's humour elephantine but it still makes me smile.

'Hungary: The Cancer in the Middle of Europe?'

I just read a very bad article about the Fidesz party which is in power in Hungary. Like the author I remember how popular and impressive they were when they were founded in 1990. All nice Hungarians supported them. This was their famous poster. The author of the article describes the poster as  "especially eye-catching (if heteronormative)". 

I looked this word up. It is defined as 'a viewpoint that expresses heterosexuality as a given instead of being one of many possibilities'.

Liberalism of the kind that uses the word heteronormative seems to me just as frightening as unpleasant Hungarian right-wing extremism. And whereas right-wing extremists are not going to be a threat in Europe in the next twenty years, liberals have proven how very dangerous they are already. The role of right-wing extremists is, I think, as a bugbear with which to frighten electorates into thinking the way the opinion-formers want them to, on the EU, immigration and homosexual marriage.

Since 1990 Fidesz has disappointed many of us. The author of the article, however is much more disappointed than me and objects with disgust to Fidesz's  desire to "redefine" marriage "as between only a man and a woman, and implement a "stand your ground" law to allow gun owners to use their firearms to protect their property". On the whole I am for Fidesz if people like the man who wrote this article are against them. Likewise, for all his faults, Mr. Berlusconi.

I have this feeling that a majority of European leaders have lost their faith in what made Europe great and into an influential factor in the world. Moreover, it seems as if it would be something shameful or something forbidden to talk about this issue. We can not help to see that those who are coming up now, stand firm for their spiritual identity: the Islamic peoples to Islam, the Asian peoples to Asian traditions and their spiritual system. It’s not just about God, but also about the culture that was influenced by their traditional beliefs. We on the other hand reject the power that comes from the fact that this is the world of Christian culture. The successful ones make sure that there is no future without children and family.

Victor Orban,  the founder and leader of Fidesz, said this in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, on 4th March 2012.  If only Eastern Europe would save Western Europe from the cultural revolution which the EU enforces, but, though politicians may makes noises for opportunistic reasons, it is not going to happen.