Bungler v Bungler - Bungler Wins

Reeves forced to back down in net zero row with Miliband

Ed Miliband has defeated an attempt by Rachel Reeves to raid one of his key net zero programs in next week’s spending review, The Telegraph understands.

The Treasury has for months been considering cuts to the £13.2 billion warm homes plan, which aims to insulate properties and make them more energy efficient.

But Mr Miliband, the Energy Security Secretary, and Ms Reeves, the Chancellor, are understood to have reached an agreement in the past few days after fraught negotiations and the scheme will remain largely unaffected.

Destiny does not make mistakes. Destiny apparently does not even punish you for sins. Half the time you can get away with murder before that august and inscrutable visage. On the other hand Destiny is ironic and punishes your stupidities by means of endless, sticky entanglements....

Ford Madox Ford - Henry for Hugh (1934)

Ignoble horseplay

Was the whole of life to be given up to ignoble horseplay?...She spoke with increased rancour because of the increasing thump and rumble of the air-raid...Of course the politicians were ignoble beings that, before the war, you would not have thought of having in your house...But whose fault was that, if not that of the better classes, who had gone away leaving England a dreary wilderness of fellows without consciences or traditions or manners?

Ford Madox Ford - No More Parades (1925)


I’d like to add something to that, things being they are now, but it isn’t easy. Ignoble horseplay says it well enough. I’ll go and make another cup of tea instead of trying to improve on it.

Old Shops

Memories fade, but as I remember them, old shops had a certain aroma. A sweetly fusty, sooty aroma sometimes mingled, paraffin, soap and scrubbed floorboards.

There was once a shop round here with an evocative aroma. It sold everything from rat traps and cast-iron grates to Mr Kipling cakes and cheap alarm clocks made in China. An odd mix of old and new where the new was likely to be imported rubbish. Gone now and the aroma will have gone too.


Her shop subsisted in its corner by reason of the conservatism of poor neighbourhoods. She sold penny yellow and black tea mugs that came from a pottery down Bristol way — tea mugs of a pattern one hundred and fifty years old. She sold brown moist sugar that was nearly black, and had something the flavour of liquorice, such as none of the new stores sold or would have known where to buy. She sold red herrings from a factory on the east coast that had been established two hundred and fifty years, and that had only three or four customers.

She sold medicinal herbs in packets and cooked pig’s-trotters — which she boiled herself — as well as penny broad-sheet ballads that were hung up all over the shop, and onions from Brittany that depended in long ropes all down the window. Her profits from the establishment, except at Christmas and about the fifth of November, when she sold fireworks, were seldom more than seventeen and six, and never less than nine shillings a week. In return she was the dictatress of opinions and the wise woman of Henry Street, James Street, and Charles and Augusta Mews, Westminster.

Ford Madox Ford - Mr Fleight (1913)

Always for the purest of motives

That she was “advanced” you could also postulate, but “advanced” in a strange way that would make her all the more dangerous, if only to small circles;. You would know, if you happened to know the type, that she would have “principles” that at odd moments would wreck enterprises, homes, or the lives of friends — always for the purest of motives.

Ford Madox Ford - The Marsden Case (1923)


What strange and occasionally horrible things principles are. Supposedly they reflect some kind of personal stake in a virtuous life, yet too often they are no more than window dressing for vanity, spite, incompetence and malice.

It is not a bad rule to be suspicious of anyone who makes a point of claiming to act on the basis of principles. Especially progressive principles, or “advanced” as Ford called them a century ago.

Things don’t change much in this respect. People with advanced principles are still a menace.  One of their number is even due to be crowned next month. At the moment they are intent on wrecking my life and yours — always for the purest of motives. 

Perfuming the air like Madonna lilies

Gentlemen don’t earn money. Gentlemen, as a matter of fact, don’t do anything. They exist. Perfuming the air like Madonna lilies. Money comes into them as air through petals and foliage. Thus the world is made better and brighter. And, of course, thus political life can be kept clean!...So you can’t make money.

Ford Madox Ford - A Man Could Stand Up (1926)

Climate change: New idea for sucking up CO2 from air shows promise

At a plant in Iceland the captured CO2 is injected deep underground where it is permanently turned into stone.

The company has recently started selling a certified carbon removal service to large corporate clients including Microsoft, Spotify and Stripe.

COP26 is the hint not the science

To all deep and still natures the sudden revelation of an aspect of life causes a slow but pervasive emotion, akin to fear, akin to joy, partaking of one and the other, a trouble of the mind such as we feel when we touch for the first time on the mysteries of religion, of sex, or discover for the first time a hint of the ground plan, of the hypocrisy, the opportunism, and the common sense of a system of human government.

Ford Madox Ford - Mr Apollo (1908)


COP26 may be a bore but it's a hint of the ground plan. An impossible hint to miss but we'll still call it a hint.

Covid rules for travelling to the UK will be relaxed for thousands of delegates attending the UN COP26 climate summit in Glasgow in November.

Up to 25,000 government representatives, media and campaigners from around the world are expected.

By now it must be painfully obvious to all but the terminally deceived that the official climate narrative never had anything to do with the global climate. If nothing else, shoving poor little Greta Thunberg onto centre stage must surely sow a few seeds of doubt into even the most tightly guarded political allegiance. It is not about the science. It never was. It is about you.

The clues are all over the place, elites barely bothering to hide them. The future is to be the same as the feudal past. One world for the aristocrats and one world for the rest of us with useful technocrats to glue it all together and make it work.

Unfortunately they think there are too many of us and we consume too much to make it work for much longer. Too many of us consuming too much to make it work for their children and grandchildren. Here’s yet another recent and very widely reported hint - that lavish birthday party.

Jen Psaki defends Barack Obama's 500-person 60th birthday party and dismisses fears star-studded bash could be a super-spreader event but Joe Biden WON'T attend.

Hope and change indeed - all for me and none for thee.

It must be equally obvious that the coronavirus debacle has little to do with the virus. For the most part it was a political opportunity. Our government was slow to spot the opportunity but soon altered course. Boris and co. quickly steered away from the dangers of good science with all those prickly people who talk about caveats and uncertainties.

The lockdown approach was of course a taster session. A police state where benign repression could be instituted on the back of an exaggerated public health scare coupled with one-sided scientific pronouncements and relentless propaganda. A huge advantage being that some of it was real.

As for the disadvantages – well they all land firmly in our court. As for the disadvantages of COP26 – well they all land firmly in our court too. Unless you live in the land of the private jet of course.

They were all mad

They were all mad. Or just going mad... Or drifting into superstitions that were disguised madnesses!

Ford Madox Ford - When the Wicked Man (1932)

Strolling through the park today, chatting about this and that, Mrs H and I briefly touched on the issue of political correctness. We agreed that it is not something we should delve into deeply or take too seriously. It is serious, but that way madness lies. Stay detached. 

Coercive places

He was drinking his tea. He would have preferred not to. But the spirit of the place was coercive.

Ford Madox Ford - Henry for Hugh (1934)

Places certainly can be coercive; we encounter them all the time. Schools, hospitals, churches, courtrooms, police stations. They induce certain kinds of behaviour and rule out other kinds of behaviour and everyone knows which is which. Almost everyone.

Often there is official power behind the coercion and increasingly it is more overt that it was in the comparatively recent past. Notices about zero tolerance of abusive behaviour in hospitals for example. This means you. Even if you are never abusive it still means you.

It is perfectly understandable in A&E, nobody should have to put up with drunken abuse, but not so understandable in Urology where everyone sits quietly and ignores the drinking water station. I merely offer this as an example hem hem.

Those threatening notices seem to have oozed out of places where they obviously applicable into more mundane surrounding where one never seems to encounter a raised voice, let alone threatening behaviour. There are no clear caveats either, no boundary where some kind of negative behaviour is deemed acceptable. In hospitals one is left with the impression that they really mean don’t even think about criticising us even if you have been waiting for hours. As if we would. We are too polite.

As far as I can see, schools like their threatening notices too. What are they afraid of? Angry parents of course and no doubt there are appalling parents who are not fit to bring up a goldfish let alone a child, but why point the finger at everyone? Again one is left with the impression that they really mean don’t even think about criticising us even if you child isn’t receiving a particularly good education. As if we would. We are too polite.

Even roads have become coercive places, coercive ribbons of tarmac lined with directions, warnings, speed limits and cameras. Even cars are becoming coercive places with warnings about seat belts, tyre pressures and service intervals. Useful perhaps, but also coercive, part of a trend which seems unlikely to slow down. In which case we may soon be hard pushed to find places which are not coercive.

Support your local curmudgeon

...for they were either politicians or reporters, which, of course, comes to the same thing.

Ford Madox Ford – The Good Soldier (1915)

Almost every morning I use the  iPad to run a quick check on news headlines. I used to rely on Ceefax for my daily fix but those days are gone forever. I don’t usually read past the headlines apart from an occasional yen to get some detail, but an outline is usually enough.

I also find myself skipping from headline to comments and if there are no comments I move on. In other words, I’m hardly ever interested in what the average journalist has to say about a story. Only if the story is written by a tough-minded curmudgeon am I likely to read it and there aren’t many of those around, especially in the mainstream media.

Which finally leads to the point of this post, because in my experience there is something important about unyielding scepticism. We are stuck with a major social dilemma where mainstream opinion has to be – well mainstream. Otherwise it could not fulfil its social function, its need to suck up to the establishment and foster political correctness. Fear shapes behaviour, which is why the news is mostly alarmist. Doom and gloom rules the newsroom. Always has.

As a species we are not particularly intelligent and accept the most absurd garbage if it is socially acceptable to do so. A sharply critical outlook is required to detect the garbage but here’s the rub. Detecting garbage ought to be a positive and respected social skill, a welcome addition to the tools of social discourse. Unfortunately it isn’t, because it can’t be, because socially cohesive consensus would flounder if critical analysis were to be valued as a welcome corrective to the garbage and to the establishment viewpoint.

Support your local curmudgeon.

The dance

Isn’t there any heaven where old beautiful dances, old beautiful intimacies prolong themselves?

Ford Madox Ford - The Good Soldier (1915)

“Hi there, fancy another?” I ask holding up my empty glass. Nick sits alone at a nearby table so I make an effort to be sociable although one can’t expect much of a return from Nick.

“Oh it’s you.” Nick withdraws his gaze from the dance floor as if I’ve just invited him to a funeral. Moody as usual.

“Yes it’s me. I asked if you fancy another drink”. Taking my courage in both hands I move over to his table and sit down. Only joking about the courage thing of course. Nick isn’t that formidable. A strange sod with an occasional spooky stare but not formidable. The things he says, the ideas he come up with - most people steer well clear of him.

“I don’t mind – thank you.” That’s Nick for you; always polite, always well dressed. I leave him to it while I fetch the drinks. No need to ask what he is drinking – it’s always beer.

When I return he still stares at the dancers out on that vast floor. I never could watch them for long. Makes my head spin – too much noise and dazzle. I’d rather go somewhere else but everyone I know is here. At least I think they are, it’s hard to tell sometimes.

“Even more crowded than usual,” I say as I plonk down the drinks and take my seat. There is a buzz on the dance floor and many more people seem to be out there dancing their little socks off. Hardly anyone watching now, tables mostly empty, not much conversation. Again I take a look around. Yes – almost everyone is dancing.

“Freedom and Dignity is what I call those two,” Nick says after a good long pull at his beer. He points to a pair of dancers who gracefully whirl around each other then vanish from view in the melee. Old fashioned dancing I’d say although I’m no expert. I can barely see them now. The floor is so huge, almost insubstantial in its vastness. The music and lights don’t help although there is no point criticising.

“Have you noticed something about those two?” Nick adds in that morose way he has. The guy watches too many movies in my opinion. Although that’s impossible. Or maybe it isn’t.

“Noticed what?” I reply.

“The old style dancers – they keep drifting out of sight.”

“They would. So does everyone else. It’s the crowd.”

“Happens more often now though.”

“It’s a bigger crowd,” I reply. I wonder if Nick intends to turn the dancers into a heavy handed parable by calling them Freedom and Dignity. He does that sometimes.

“It is a bigger crowd isn’t it?” Nick stares at me with those blue eyes then looks away. “I’ve been watching them for quite a while,” he adds after a slight pause. “It was different before.”

“Before what?”

“Before now. Before any time you care to name. Things change but people don’t notice. Soon they’ll be gone and we’ll miss them.”

“Miss them? We don’t know them?”

“That’s right,” Nick replies, “but we did know them quite well once upon a time.”

“I don’t remember,” I reply, because I don’t.

“Of course you don’t remember, you never do - ”

At this point I decide to hit the off button and yank off the VR headset. I’ve had enough of virtual reality for one day. The app I’ve been playing is supposed to reflect your psyche. That’s what the app is called – Psyche. I’ve no idea who Nick is supposed to be.

Everybody plays Psyche these days. Everyone knows Nick in one way or another. He’s almost like an old friend but maybe I’ll go out instead, look up a few real friends for a change...

Or perhaps not.

I pick up the VR headset again. I could try another scenario this time. Nick will be there of course because he’s part of the app, part of Psyche, part of my psyche. Yes – Nick is always there – watching.

Cursed with celebrity principles

That she was “advanced” you could also postulate, but “advanced” in a strange way that would make her all the more dangerous, if only to small circles;. You would know, if you happened to know the type, that she would have “principles” that at odd moments would wreck enterprises, homes, or the lives of friends — always for the purest of motives.

Ford Madox Ford - The Marsden Case (1923)

This morning found this humble blogger sitting in the dentist’s waiting room reading a Daily Mail piece about celebrities who are in favour of immigration but highly unlikely to experience any of its negative impacts. People such as Stephen Fry and Helena Bonham Carter who live in the most agreeable surroundings and proclaim political principles with no possible impact on their own lives. Unfortunately those same principles may well have an impact on the lives of other, lesser mortals.

Oddly enough I’m in what could just about be called a similar situation. Here in former coal mining areas there has been very little local immigration. I’m not sure why, houses are cheap, but whatever the reason it would be mildly dishonest of me to demand mass immigration or make a case against it. Immigration has barely affected me in any direct sense.

I suppose the difference is that over time it could affect this area and another difference is that I’m not a wealthy celebrity, not in that enviable position where it doesn’t matter either way. The point to be made is not so much about immigration, but about proclaiming principles which are really virtue signals emitted simply because they can be emitted without any personal risk of negative repercussions. Those repercussions are left for others to deal with. To my mind it is one of the more loathsome aspects of celebrity culture.

Changing course

Conventions and traditions, I suppose, work blindly but surely for the preservation of the normal type; for the extinction of proud, resolute and unusual individuals.

Ford Madox Ford - The Good Soldier (1915)

In the medium to long term, does it matter who is elected to lead the world’s major democracies? Is it the case that certain leaders are able to change the course of events in a way which favours the led? Or have we run out of suitably proud, resolute and unusual individuals? Or perhaps they have merely given up on us.

Political enthusiasts seem to believe not only in the rightness of their allegiances, but in the ability of some remarkably limited leaders to justify those allegiances. A degree of political confidence which seems to be sharply at odds with the flow of global integration. It does not fit with the reality, with the ever tightening webs of law, treaty and common standards. Instead, modern political life is like trying to change the course of a river. The flow may be slowed but cannot be turned back on itself.

Does it really matter who US voters elect as their next president? Does it matter if the UK Conservative party manages to take advantage of Jeremy Corbyn’s obvious lack of political nous? To a degree it does because riding the flow of events can be made more painful than it need be by political incompetence and that seems to be the key.

Without those proud, resolute and unusual individuals we may need a change in outlook, a shift in our expectations. It is not so much the ability to manipulate events which we require because that is no longer open to us, if indeed it ever was. Instead we need leaders who allow us to adapt to the flow of inevitable events having first identified what they are and how inevitable they may be. 

Continued membership of the EU may not be inevitable, but tighter and tighter global integration may be. In which case the EU referendum may speed up or slow down the course of events, but that is all. In the medium to long term it may make little difference either way. Admitting it politically is a different matter, but it need not be. Political dishonesty is not compulsory. 

Or perhaps it is.

An extraordinary sense of leisure

I cannot tell you the extraordinary sense of leisure that we two seemed to have at that moment. It wasn’t as if we were waiting for a train, it wasn’t as if we were waiting for a meal — it was just that there was nothing to wait for. Nothing.

Ford Madox Ford - The Good Soldier (1915)

When I first came across this quote it set me wondering about my own sense of leisure and that delicious feeling of relaxation which isn’t as common as it might be. Is it connected with having nothing to wait for? I suppose it could be if one is the kind of person who doesn't find it easy to wait for something without dwelling on it then dwelling on it again.

As Ford indirectly suggests, it doesn't have to be a glass of wine on a summer afternoon, a cosy winter evening by the fire or a day spent lazing on the beach. It can be more to do with future, with not having to wait, which means not having to mark time, not watching the clock, the diary, the to-do list. This sense of leisure seems to come from clearing the mind which isn’t easy if there are things to be done, appointments to be kept, projects to steer, jobs to be done which all involve waiting for this, expecting that.

Some people seem able to clear their minds anyway, even if a whole pile of commitments clutter up their immediate future. Others don’t find it so easy. I’m in the latter group which is probably why Ford’s observation chimes with me. Having nothing to wait for, nothing to anticipate isn’t particularly common, but sometimes it all subsides into trivia and that sense of leisure does indeed emerge.

I suppose it is one reason why our anticipated life of leisure disappeared, the one automation was supposed to have delivered by now. What destroyed the dream wasn’t only a need to continue working, but the clamour of modern life. There is always something to wait for, some event, some change. A sense of stillness becomes impossible and with it dies that extraordinary sense of leisure where there is .nothing to wait for. Nothing.

Pig’s trotters and red herrings

Her shop subsisted in its corner by reason of the conservatism of poor neighbourhoods. She sold penny yellow and black tea mugs that came from a pottery down Bristol way — tea mugs of a pattern one hundred and fifty years old. She sold brown moist sugar that was nearly black, and had something the flavour of liquorice, such as none of the new stores sold or would have known where to buy.

She sold red herrings from a factory on the east coast that had been established two hundred and fifty years, and that had only three or four customers. She sold medicinal herbs in packets and cooked pig’s-trotters — which she boiled herself — as well as penny broad-sheet ballads that were hung up all over the shop, and onions from Brittany that depended in long ropes all down the window.

Her profits from the establishment, except at Christmas and about the fifth of November, when she sold fireworks, were seldom more than seventeen and six, and never less than nine shillings a week. In return she was the dictatress of opinions and the wise woman of Henry Street, James Street, and Charles and Augusta Mews, Westminster.

Ford Madox Ford – Mr Fleight (1913)

We may deplore the ubiquity of supermarkets and the consequent change in our high streets, but the alternatives were not always quite so quaint as popular sentiment would have us believe. The pig’s trotters and red herrings might have been tasty though.

Imbecile and corrupt millionaires

A dead silence reigned. But after a time Mr. Fleight remarked meditatively: “You don’t seem to object to these corrupt institutions. You seem rather to like them. I can’t understand that.”

“I don’t, you know, care a halfpenny,” Mr. Blood answered, “but if I did have any preferences I should say that it’s more picturesque and better for everybody concerned that there should be secret courts presided over by blind, deaf and obstinate old men than that the country should be run by imbecile and corrupt millionaires.

Ford Madox Ford - Mr Fleight (1913).

I’m not so sure about preferring the secret courts presided over by blind, deaf and obstinate old men, but I’ve had enough of the imbecile and corrupt millionaires. Financially corrupt we could probably deal with if only we had less of the political and moral variety.

The limbo of forgotten races

I tell you what it is, the place is a sink, and if God Almighty doesn’t wipe all this sort of person off the face of England, it’s because He means the poor old country to go right down into the limbo of forgotten races!

Ford Madox Ford - The Simple Life Limited (1911)

The joys of pessimism

Few who are not pessimists can imagine the cosy feeling of completeness that there is in pessimism, for it has many joys of its own unknown and undreamt of by the busy optimist world.
Ford Madox Ford - The Shifting of the Fire

Pessimism doesn't actually work you know. Absolutely hopeless. I'd give it a go myself, but I can tell it's no good before I even start.

Men with weary eyes

Ford Madox Ford

What fatal things are all human institutions, what evil passions they all breed, and what an accursed being they have made man in the eyes of Nature and the God who framed her. 

Everywhere around us are men with weary eyes running upon futile errands, who snatch from one another futile things that human institutions permit them to retain until someone less weary-eyed can be found to snatch them away.

Ford Madox Ford - The Simple Life Limited (1911)

A mug's game

A while back I finished Ford Maddox Ford's tetralogy Parade's End - a superb read. The four novels are set mainly in England and the Western Front in World War I, where Ford served as an officer. He vividly brings back to life the dirty, routine, mechanical ghastliness of trench warfare. 

Here his main character Christopher Tietjens reflects with a peculiarly grim irony on the grisly inefficiency of it all :-

This was the war of attrition...A mug’s game! A mug’s game as far as killing men was concerned, but not an uninteresting occupation if you considered it as a struggle of various minds spread all over the broad landscape in the sunlight. 

They did not kill many men and they expended an infinite number of missiles and a vast amount of thought. If you took six million men armed with loaded canes and stockings containing bricks or knives and set them against another six million men similarly armed, at the end of three hours four million on the one side and the entire six million on the other would be dead. So, as far as killing went, it really was a mug’s game. 

That was what happened if you let yourself get into the hands of the applied scientist. For all these things were the products not of the soldier but of hirsute, bespectacled creatures who peered through magnifying glasses. 

Or of course, on our side, they would be shaven-cheeked and less abstracted. They were efficient as slaughterers in that they enabled the millions of men to be moved. When you had only knives you could not move very fast. On the other hand, your knife killed at every stroke: you would set a million men firing at each other with rifles from eighteen hundred yards. But few rifles ever registered a hit. So the invention was relatively inefficient. And it dragged things out!

Ford Maddox Ford - Parade's End

The Inheritors

Ford Madox Ford - from Wikipedia

Ford Madox Ford’s novel The Inheritors (1901) was the first of his collaborations with Joseph Conrad. It introduces the Inheritors as amoral materialists calling themselves Fourth Dimensionalists. Their plan is to inherit the Earth.

I found it rather loosely structured but quite readable and oddly prescient. Once we grasp that probity is seen as the great stumbling block in the way of the Inheritors' amoral ambitions, it even seems curiously modern in spite of being written well over a century ago.

After all, probity is what most of us want from politics. Yet ours is an audit, not a probity culture. We may value probity and try to live up to it, but find ourselves continually fobbed off with laws, regulations and processes because probity doesn't suit the gilded ones strutting the corridors of power.

I heard the Dimensionists described: a race clear-sighted, eminently practical, incredible; with no ideals, prejudices, or remorse; with no feeling for art and no reverence for life; free from any ethical tradition; callous to pain, weakness, suffering and death, as if they had been invulnerable and immortal.

 “But—” I said. A feeling of unrest was creeping over me. “But why do you tell me all this?” I asked. “Do you think I will enlist with you?”

“You will have to in the end,” she said, “and I do not wish to waste my strength. If you had to work unwittingly you would resist and resist and resist. I should have to waste my power on you. As it is, you will resist only at first, then you will begin to understand.

You will see how we will bring a man down — a man, you understand, with a great name, standing for probity and honour. You will see the nets drawing closer and closer, and you will begin to understand. Then you will cease resisting, that is all.

It isn’t even only Churchill,” she said, “not even only that de Mersch will bring down Churchill with him. It is that he must bring down everything that Churchill stands for. You know what that is — the sort of-"

“I don’t,” I answered, “I don’t understand at all.”

“Ah, yes, you do,” she said, “you understand….” She paused for a long while, and I was silent. I understood vaguely what she meant; that if Churchill fell amid the clouds of dust of such a collapse, there would be an end of belief in probity … or nearly an end. But I could not see what it all led up to; where it left us.

“Don’t you see? Don’t you understand? We are the inevitable … and you can’t keep us back. We have to come and you, you will only hurt yourself, by resisting.”