The Songstone

That instead of this tawdry little story , Sky News ran something like this: The producer of the long-running TV series hit Midwonder Blunders has been commended after saying part of the show's appeal is an absence of Tories. Brian False-Gay, the drama's co-creator, who has been with it since day one, said in an interview that the shows - which have run for 14 series - "wouldn't work" if there were any Tories in the village life. "We just don't have Tories involved. Because it wouldn't be the English village with them. It just wouldn't work. Suddenly we might be in Old Amersham. "Ironically, Boreston (one of the main centres of population in the show) is supposed to be Old Amersham. And if you went into Old Amersham you wouldn't see a human face there. "We're the last bastion of Englishness and I want to keep it that way," he added. ITV was quick to praise Mr False-Gay's remarks. "We are delighted and eu

I have been looking at Google Labs and their NGram viewer , which allows you to research the use of any word or phrase in the book corpora of (so far) English, French, Hebrew, Russian and Spanish from 1800 to 2000 and spot trends. I have been playing with this and offer one example . 'You' fell from a peak of over 2 instances per 1000 printed words in 1900 to just over 1.2 per 1000 in 1965 (a 40% drop!) before rising again over the past 40 years. Why did 'you' fall so dramatically out of favour? Why has it revived? Was 1965 a particularly selfish year? Are we now writing about others more than about ourselves? Perhaps not . Certainly the long-term trend for 'I' is quite similar to 'you' with a peak at about 1900 and a steady decline thereafter (although since 1980 and the rise of the New Right it seems to be on the increase again). Even so, at 3.5 per 1000 it is still twice as common as 'you' and more common than any other pronoun. Our favouri

The Great Wave off Kanagawa : Katsushika Hokusai 1760-1849)  (thanks to Tom Clark ) And an update on the nest :

This post from the Guardian says it all so well that I am going to take the liberty of posting it. If Melkelly objects to this I am sure he/she will let me know: Another way to fight : THE POWER OF THE POUND As well as strikes, the British people can use the power of the pound. Every pound has power Move our money from Barclays, HSBC, Santander, Tesco Bank to the Nationalised banks or the Nationwide. That will increase the health of the nationalised banks quicker, increase the share price and help reduce the deficit Don't shop at Tesco, Marks & Spencer, Prudential, Boots and any other tax avoiding company. If boycotts worked for South Africa they can work for the British people. Remember companies like Boots and Prudential are making the deficit worse by holding board meetings abroad to avoid paying the tax they are due to pay. Boots should have paid £280 million but paid £14 million instead. Don't give Boots and Prudential our business or our money. 7 million peop

Still with birds. Perhaps to be heard with this other Nightingale song

I bought a leg of Australian lamb on Thursday. 6lbs for a tenner can't be bad; after hosting a dinner party for four and five days of fricassée, curry and cold cuts, I have just put the bone to simmer for some flavoursome stock.  The dinner party was very pleasant: with the lamb there was mash (potatoes from Saudi) and wilted spinach (from Lebanon), all washed down with vast quantities of South African claret and some good conversation.  I am not as a rule the most sociable of people. At most parties I would be the one standing by the door wondering if anyone would notice if I went home now and listened to Verdi. But although I have to agree that I'm a bit odd, I don't wish to be thought aloof, so it was nice to have company and thank you to those who came. We'll do it again. But not too soon.

Opposite my chamber window, On the sunny roof, at play, High above the city's tumult, Flocks of doves sit day by day. Well, not flocks, but you will remember the various comings and goings of the doves outside my bedroom window. First there was mother dove: Collared dove and her eggs Then one day mother disappeared and one of the eggs, which had been just about to hatch, soon grew black and a bit smelly, until I pushed it over the edge. All was not lost though; after a few days another collared dove turned up and laid two more eggs, one of which soon hatched to produce this little charmer: the lovely doveling So all was well. I felt quite paternal and supplied bits of strawberry and bread, which were scoffed voraciously. On my window-ledge, to lure them, Crumbs of bread I often strew, And, behind the curtain hiding, Watch them flutter to and fro Alas, this passerine paradise could not last. The other morning, very early, there was a squawking and wailing outsid

I've never been in a desert before. High Wycombe, where I spent my adolescent years, does not qualify, geomorphometrically, so it was a pleasure to take a jeep out of Doha a couple of weeks ago and see the sand: Camels I couldn't avoid the ghastly trap of paying 10 riyals to a Bedouin tout to hold his hunting falcon: A bird in the hand Well, that's Qatar for you: sand. And sea. And Doha. No rivers, lakes or mountains. Still, it has its charms; one of my students has promised to take me out for some falconry. If he passes his exams. Any suggestion that I will now pay him extra attention in class will be vigorously rebutted...

Ah well, the long and pleasant weekend is over and five hours of classes beckon this morning. Enjoy tha Sunday morning lie-in, yer bastards:

February's winner is regular contender Rod Liddle, for this  nasty little piece in the Spectator (no, I don't normally read the rag but it came up on one of the BBC's stories about Libya as an external link). Of course the breathtaking bigotry and sheer ignorance Liddle displays here fit in well at the Spectator, as a glimpse at some of the comments below the article confirms. For a quick tour of the darkest parts of the Tory soul, look no further. If anything nasty should happen here (I don't remotely anticipate it, but...) I want to make it clear that I do NOT wish to be evacuated, by HMG or anyone else; I shall see it through and observe. Oh and by the way, Liddle, my salary, although quite generous, comes nowhere near the vast sums you rake in. If more proof were needed that there is no correlation whatsoever between remuneration and worth, you have surely provided it.

There's an obnoxious little crow flapping round our school. Foulsmalls is the corvid's name; she stinks of spite and stool An ugly bird, of evil mien, she pecks and caws and claws. Her frizzy feathers, frazzled face are fairly fatal flaws This crow is desperate for a mate (her beady eye's on me). Her halitosis, though, is such Don Juan himself would flee For gossip, innuendo, cant Foulsmalls is your bird; a vicious tongue, a nose for dung: her beak's in every turd

In the compound where I ‘worked’ until yesterday (affectionately known as the Gulag to its inmates), Rashid is the ‘tea boy’. Aged 25 and from Mombasa, he has a degree, fluent English (he was laughing at the native speaker banter in the tea room) and is obviously as bright as a magpie’s eye. So why is he serving us coffee and wiping the tables for 1500 riyals (£250) a month? Corruption, he sighed; unless you know the right people in Kenya, or pay bribes, it’s impossible to find a job. Marwan picked us up outside the souk on Wednesday evening, driving a Toyota that he was using as an unlicensed taxi (the licensed variety are in short supply in Doha). He wanted 15 riyals for the trip back but we beat him down to 10 and got in. He was from Syria, also with a degree and very good English. His day job? A cook in a Lebanese restaurant for 850 riyals a month. So he borrows a car and drives the streets to augment his income, much of which he sends home, and works 20 hour days. After hearin

I am having huge problems accessing the internet right now; multiple proxy servers and stress. Bear with me a while...

Of locusts, warping on the eastern wind, That o'er the realm of impious Pharaoh hung Like night, and darken'd all the land of Nile: BBC Middle East and Al Jazeera have rolling coverage of ‘The crisis in Egypt’. Many Egyptians here are glued to their screens watching events, while the government in Egypt has taken to blaming the foreign media, including Al Jazeera, for inciting the protests. This war of words escalated recently: Qatar itself has come under fire for allowing Al Jazeera to broadcast. Tunisia, Egypt, the splitting of Sudan, protests in Jordan and Yemen; I have come to the region at an interesting time. Sad news and good on the ornithological front. Mother dove (for that is what the bird on my window ledge was) abandoned her eggs, one of which soon became putrid in the sun. But 4 days later a new dove has come in and laid two more. The nest, which looks like a mass of multi-coloured electrical wire because it IS a mass of multi-coloured electrical wire, is thus i

I'd like to tell you about adventures of derring-do in the souk ; how I went there with an English rose; how we were set upon by a posse of qat -crazed fiends intent on infamy; how they were fought off with cold steel and stiff upper lip. However, despite sharing a birthday with Rider Haggard I can’t go that far: the rose was tired and we've put it off till tonight. I was given a class this morning! Perhaps not the keenest students I have ever encountered, they are studying to be security guards and firemen. They knew 'stop' and 'fire', or at least most of them did by the end; they should go far. Cooler this morning; a wind from the North made it like a Spring day back home, but the sun is out now and it’s 25C. I'm looking forward to getting home for a nap and then the evening ahead. Toodle-pip.

At once, as far as Angels ken, he views The dismal situation waste and wild: A dungeon horrible on all sides round ran through my mind as I surveyed the outside of Marks and Spencer, Doha. Carrefour is OK: for me at least it’s mildly exotic, but M&S? I didn’t come to the Gulf for fucking M&S; there isn’t even a food section. It was a quiet weekend. I spent much of Friday cleaning, unpacking and trying unsuccessfully to get my mobile to connect to the Internet via WiFi. I called the Indian who acts as our block’s general dogsbody and barked a few complaints about broken lightbulbs. I went wandering in the district looking at Turkish and Lebanese eateries. Most of the time I just slept and watched films. I have taken the first step on the road to the Residence Permit with the blood group test, which involved a prick on the finger and a few drops squeezed onto a glass slide. Two minutes later I had a printout declaring me A negative. Next comes the full medical, which as m

Opiate dependence has its drawbacks in terms of getting things done, so now that I have full medical insurance I decided to do something about my shoulder. After a couple of hours of blood tests, X-rays, prodding and poking, the diagnosis is not as bad as it could be: osteoarthritic changes of the left shoulder joint with narrowing of the lower part of the joint space and marginal osteoaphytic lipping at the lower acetabular margin, just to be clear. What this means in practice is a 10 day course of Divido and Gupisol , followed by a few months on various things to arrest and perhaps reverse the degeneration of the cartilage. Fingers crossed. The clinic itself was a microcosm of Doha: an excellent Egyptian doctor, Indian assistant and Filipina secretary, all speaking good English and working in high-tech efficiency. No queues, no waiting room: in, tests, diagnosis, prescription and the bill - 800 riyals (150 pounds) including the pills. Can’t be bad, especially as I’ll get it bac

Had lunch with the boss yesterday in the Villagio ; lamb with couscous and iced coffee - delicious. She bought me a SIM card, which in theory cannot be obtained until one has a Resident's Permit, which takes a long time. There is WiFi in my apartment, so I shall be experimenting with mobile internet, something completely new to me, but it's free. I was told the stark and awful story of the Canadian 40-something teacher who had sent amorous texts to his 20-something secretary. They had to get him out of the country in two days, because if her father had complained he could have gone to prison. In a country where there are 4 men to every women I can imagine that desperation might set in, and 'lock up your daughters' is clearly the local response.

Friday night/Saturday Left London 6 hours late; sandstorms in Dubai had damaged the plane, which had to be repaired. Once on board I enjoyed Emirates's good food and wine and fell asleep over Budapest. Arrived in Dubai at midday local time and caught the connection to Doha. No luggage in Doha; after an hour of calls and consternation I was told it had been left in London. Airport full of Japanese and Australians here to watch the final of the Asian Football Cup (Japan 1 - Australia 0). My car was waiting for me and things began to improve once I arrived at my apartment: a beautiful 6th floor space fitted with all the gadgets. Fell asleep very quickly and woke up after a few hours to go out for some fried chicken. Bed. Sunday Woken at 5am by the call to prayer; good timing as working hours are from 6.30am - 2.30pm. Minibus drove us to the compound. Not much to do here yet except show our faces, so spent the whole day chatting and playing Scrabble with two fellow English exil

I am off to Qatar today for a few months' teaching. No post tomorrow, so enjoy this: 1/4 2/4 3/4 4/4

It's strange how things that were on my mind 4 years ago are still topical...   First published on 15 October 2006 Last thing's first   Friday 6th was the Mid-Autumn Festival: the second most important festival in China, traditionally celebrated with lanterns, fruit and mooncakes. In my residential garden many families put lanterns in their windows: a glorious, multi-coloured spectacle. On the Saturday I was invited to a party to appreciate the Moon, so along I went to another residential garden, the Villandry, on the outskirts of town. The opulence! The apartments here would have had the planners of Versailles scratching their heads. I sat by the pool with Mystic Meg from Hiroshima, being served champagne cocktails and watching bevies of beautiful girls with lanterns. On the next table was the Italian consul; some high-ranking executives from Sony on the table after that; the whole place was packed with the movers and shakers of Guangzhou's diplomatic and commerc