Somewhere in a Hotel In Somerset

Is a piano-body in a garden. The rest of the hotel was pretty fancy as well and the lunch was excellent. Well worth the diversion on the way down to the north coast of Somerset. This was several years ago.

Totally forgotten the name!

Real Men Do NOT Text In The Gym

At my gym, I'm seeing more and more young men sitting on weights machines, texting or flicking through their music collection, because I really hope they are not flicking through Facebook.

Oblivious to all around them, they need to be shifted by a tap on the shoulder and a request to work in. At that point a lot of say they have 'one more set', or just get off and move to another machine.

 I suspect these young men are not running on a full tank of testosterone.

Dom Mazetti agrees with me. Though he uses different words.

 

SOHN: The Circle

You know that moment when you suddenly hear a song you’ve been playing as part of your train music?

Usually I get a song fairly quickly, but sometimes the mood and the emotion escapes me. Happened with The Human League’s Human which I finally understood at 09:00 on weekday morning on a northbound Northern Line train leaving Camden Town. Happened with this song recently. I was on the District Line westbound going into Turnham Green.

 It was so much that I heard it, but felt it. In all its Ecclesiastes-style mournfulness.

 

It’s by a singer / composer / producer who goes by SOHN. I’ll let you look it all up.

Enjoy.

Classic Mercedes Convertible in Mayfair

Sunday evening, on my way back from the gym and supper in Soho, passing through Mayfair on my way to Green Park tube, and across the road from Cecconi's is this Thing of Beauty.

It's a 300SL, which was the the fastest production car of its day, and one of the first to use fuel injection. It was actually more powerful than the racing cars it was derived from. 

Look at the tachometer and the speedometer. That's a red line at 6,000 rpm and a top speed of about 120 mph, unless you want to go the whole 7,000 rpm and slightly downhill, when you might get 160 mph out of it. No aerodynamics, just sheer brute power.

Oh. And you're looking at over £1,000,000 worth of car. At least.

Sir Mo Farah in Feltham

High quality street art hits a Feltham industrial estate. The artist worked a while on this, and it's clearly sponsored by Russell Finex, who supply specialised filtration equipment. Click on the picture because I uploaded it full-size and it shows the detail, the quality of the artist's work, and how damn good an iPhone SE camera is.

Random Photographs From Recent Days

A book in Foyles about Arnold Bax I'm never going to read (I listen to a lot of music, but don't read much about it); remember the General Election?; the Frank Pick memorial in Piccadilly Circus; runners in the London 10k by St James' Park; my local Air Park on a Sunday evening; the converted church across the road from Feltham station, taken through the clearest air I can remember.

The Arrogance of the German Chancellor: My Last Political Post

Two years ago, the Chancellor of Germany, without consulting her fellow Europeans, or her fellow regional governors, decided to open Germany’s, and hence Europe’s, borders to millions of economic migrants who were mostly illiterate, innumerate, could not speak German or any other European language, had no trades, no skills, and had arrived mysteriously fit and aggressive at Mediterranean ports or eastern European borders after what must have been gruelling 1,200-mile journeys (at least) from Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Eritrea, Nigeria and all points African and Middle Eastern.

The Chancellor did this despite the warnings, she must have received from her own intelligence services, about the low economic value of these young men, the fact that they had been recruited, transported by truck and lorry to the ports and borders by NGOs, and that they had been sent to Europe to farm for welfare benefits. Europe’s intelligence services are staffed by smart people: they must have worked out that communities all over those countries were sending Europe their lazy, angry, crazy, surplus, and criminal. Just as Castro sent the US his criminals, AIDs victims, long-term sick and other undesirables (as he saw it). They would have briefed the German Chancellor, and the EU, on this possibility.

A politician works for their constituents first, their fellow citizens second, and anyone else a very distant third. The job of governments is not to tell citizens how to live, and what they can and cannot say, do or believe. The duties of a government are to defend those people and their families against violence and exploitation, and then to advance their interests. It does not matter if the exploitation is the so-called Gig Economy and zero-hours contracts, or by migrants sent to farm welfare benefits, or whether the violence comes from men from another country wearing uniforms, or men from another country without uniforms beating and raping women. The German Chancellor failed in that duty. Victor Orban of Hungary did not. Neither did David Cameron, whom we may assume listened to the brief by his intelligence services, and refused to take large numbers of the fake Syrian refugees.

The German Chancellor’s act was one of sheer political brute force: she had the power to dump disaffected, violent and unemployable young men all over Europe, and she did so. Because power means nothing if it is not exercised arbitrarily from time to time. It was a message to the EU that Germany would do whatever its Chancellor wanted to do, that she could and would on a whim ignore her duties to the electorate, and that the EU would pay for it as well. She dared the EU to reprimand her, and it did not. She dared her own politicians to reprimand her, and they did not. When ordinary people started to complain, she turned the media companies into her censors. Her response to the outrage felt by ordinary European people at the invasion of 2015 was to make it a crime to express that outrage. Arrogance masked by righteousness.

So-called Liberals and other assorted “Good People” show a genuine righteous arrogance when they suppose that it is their job, and the government’s job, to make the electorate “better people”. It was a New Labour strategy to "rub the Right's nose in diversity” with indiscriminate immigration in the Oughties. One has to assume the was some gerrymandering intended as well. Now those “Good People” are smugly watching what they think is the train wreck of Brexit, thus showing no understanding of the cunning of reason. We can only be thankful that none of them have the ability to act with the same reckless and malicious brute force as the German Chancellor.

This righteous arrogance is why I want dump a basket of wet fish over the heads of many editorialists at the Financial Times, the Economist and other formerly august media institutions. It’s not their job to be on the right side of history, but it’s not smart to be so smugly on the wrong side either. A little self-awareness would help.

Having understood that it’s a wholly pointless anger about the arrogance and smugness (“Good People”) or hypocrisy (the German Chancellor) of politicians who refuse to do their job, and the media who fail to hold them to account for that failure, I’m now going to stop with the politics. This and the previous CUPID post are it. Prepare for lots of posts on things mundane, artistic or otherwise of a man with a life.