Bryan Islip's Blog, page 31
September 13, 2012
Gimme the job
I heard recently that applications have been invited for the post of Governor of the Bank of England, the incumbent apparently being ready for honourable retirement. Thinking, toether with Tim Dowling of The Guardian I could do that I sent in my application. Unfortunately it did not, to the best of my knowledge, get past the Bank's post room. However to my astonishment, not to say excitement, the rejection signed by one Alexander Platz was succeeded in short order by the following. I would like to share it with you today so that you may say in future times, 'I knew him when he was just a banker in the Scottish Highlands.'
Dear Mr Dowling
I have received and have reviewed a copy of my colleague's (Alexander Platz's) response on the matter of your application. I thought it a little harsh, to be honest (I am noted for honesty) and as Mr Platz's ultimate boss, I would wish to invite you in for interview.
The post of Governor of the Bank of England has come in for much criticism, indeed much misplaced hilarity of recent times. I feel that the whole tone and tenor of your application does merit serious consideration by myself, my much maligned deputy and my Rate Setting Panel. Of course I must add that any recommendation I/we make must be agreed by the P.M. and his cabinet as well as by the Big Five Banks and the Chair of Goldman Sachs in New York City.
Before your interview I would suggest that in your own best interests you might consider the following ...
Apply to join my Club in St James' Square. It will help if you answer the question about schooling simply 'Eton College.' We will assume credibility on the grounds that gentlemen do not fabricate direct untruths although occasional this mantra lets us down, vis a viz in the case of the late Chairmen of Barclays and of The Royal Bank of Scotland, amongst regrettably many others.
Gain at small cost a Doctorate in Law and one in Politics from the university of Banga-Wanga in The Phillipines
Practice your speech-making, perhaps taking as your model the current Mayor of London without necessarily adopting much of his unbankerly ebullience, not to say his erratic wildness of behaviour.
Learn how to spell.
Enlist the support of the Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Oxford University so that, in all those irksome money matters, you may call upon him for answers to questions like, 'How much does my Bank or my Nation owe the world this day'.
Wear at interview your best and dullest suit of clothes with a white shirt and a blue tie. Eschew the suede brothel-creepers. Oh, and shave off that beard. Beards are considered unreliable, you know.
Do not on any account ask the interview panel questions appertaining to where might be the gold and how much do we have. The penultimate Chancellor and I would find that a little embarrassing.
Good Luck Tim! (If I may be so bold in the use of your Christian name, assuming you are one.)
Signed
Lord Emperor of Ilkley Moor (Note: I definitely do have a hat, ha ha! We are not without a sense of humour here in Threadneedle Street, tha knows!)
Keeper of the Keys to the National Printing Press, incumbent.
Winner of the School Prize for mental arithmatic, 1948.
Dear Mr Dowling
I have received and have reviewed a copy of my colleague's (Alexander Platz's) response on the matter of your application. I thought it a little harsh, to be honest (I am noted for honesty) and as Mr Platz's ultimate boss, I would wish to invite you in for interview.
The post of Governor of the Bank of England has come in for much criticism, indeed much misplaced hilarity of recent times. I feel that the whole tone and tenor of your application does merit serious consideration by myself, my much maligned deputy and my Rate Setting Panel. Of course I must add that any recommendation I/we make must be agreed by the P.M. and his cabinet as well as by the Big Five Banks and the Chair of Goldman Sachs in New York City.
Before your interview I would suggest that in your own best interests you might consider the following ...
Apply to join my Club in St James' Square. It will help if you answer the question about schooling simply 'Eton College.' We will assume credibility on the grounds that gentlemen do not fabricate direct untruths although occasional this mantra lets us down, vis a viz in the case of the late Chairmen of Barclays and of The Royal Bank of Scotland, amongst regrettably many others.
Gain at small cost a Doctorate in Law and one in Politics from the university of Banga-Wanga in The Phillipines
Practice your speech-making, perhaps taking as your model the current Mayor of London without necessarily adopting much of his unbankerly ebullience, not to say his erratic wildness of behaviour.
Learn how to spell.
Enlist the support of the Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Oxford University so that, in all those irksome money matters, you may call upon him for answers to questions like, 'How much does my Bank or my Nation owe the world this day'.
Wear at interview your best and dullest suit of clothes with a white shirt and a blue tie. Eschew the suede brothel-creepers. Oh, and shave off that beard. Beards are considered unreliable, you know.
Do not on any account ask the interview panel questions appertaining to where might be the gold and how much do we have. The penultimate Chancellor and I would find that a little embarrassing.
Good Luck Tim! (If I may be so bold in the use of your Christian name, assuming you are one.)
Signed
Lord Emperor of Ilkley Moor (Note: I definitely do have a hat, ha ha! We are not without a sense of humour here in Threadneedle Street, tha knows!)
Keeper of the Keys to the National Printing Press, incumbent.
Winner of the School Prize for mental arithmatic, 1948.
September 9, 2012
Biography v autobiography? Mary Walsh Hemingway.
A week or two ago I paid a little money for a weighty tome on a local market stall: 'How It Was', by Mary Walsh Hemingway. This is part bio (Papa Hem), part autobio (Miss Mary). First thing to say about it is - I read it through. No, not as obvious as it sounds for I often begin a book and put it down unread, sometimes after just a few pages. Maybe the theme or subject matter fails to hold my interest or seems phoney (although it might well hold the interest of or seem less phoney to a million other folk) but mainly because the writing hurts. Just hurts.
Biography is difficult because for we human beings objectivity is well nigh impossible when it concerns our fellow Man. For this reason Adolph Hitler can be a virtual divinity to one as to millions or he can be the devil incarnate to one as to millions. So, the story of his life will be vastly different depending on who writes it, correct? The same must apply, whoever is the subject of a biography. For instance if someone were to write your or my biography (heaven forbid) you and I would both, if we were honest with ourselves, acknowledge the existence of one person who would write with pen dipped in acid and another who would write our lives in a golden glow (We would both plump for the latter of course, given a choice in the matter.)
Autobiography is just as impossible or even more so. That which we may suspect in the dark side of our fellow is that which we know in the dark side of ourself. Who amongst us would set down on paper the innermost secrets of his / her soul? Who would have the courage to admit their most scurrilous acts of meanness, cowardice or even criminality?
May Walsh Hemingway's book is a seven or eight hundred pages long act of well-written but highly selective journalism. It is interesting more from that which it leaves out than for that which she reports. I found the early passages of greatest interest, the ones concerning her relationships, for instance with Lord Beaverbrook, and the ones of the life she lived and everyone lived in wartime, blackout London.
But I bought the book because I have long been interested in anything and everything Hemingway. This is the biography bit of the book as opposed to Miss Mary's autobio. Her accounts of their life together in Africa and out on the heaving Main in the fishing boat Pilar and in Paris or Spain at the bullfights and ... loads and loads more ... these were fascinating episodes for me.
I can see Hemingway standing at his writing table in the Cuban farmhouse called The Finca. I can see Mary assiduously typing out and re-typing, often in tears, (text-inspired emotion rather than pain!) his greatest work of literature, The Old Man and the Sea. I read this mini-novel when it came out and again after it won for him the Nobel Prize and again ten years ago and now, again. I've bought a nicely illustrated edition of it on Kindle. The Old Man is like any other of the greatest works of art. You can look at it many times and each time you can see the same wondrous beauty in the same thing, as well as in new and different aspects of the thing.
Brazzaville 1997, 2012
Reading of the latest killings in Africa I thought of this poem I composed in 1997 after a media-fest over something similar; young lads on the bloody rampage, Red Cross trying earnestly to rationalise the totally irrational, help those beyond help .... Too many with too little armed by too few with too much.
Brazzaville 1997
How happy does the soldier seem
Downtown in good old Brazzaville
In television’s nightmare dream
As searches he for more to kill
Black face split white in one wide beam
Whilst from the rubble bodies spill:
There is this frightful innocence
And you can smell the pestilence.
They must have told him that they’d won
Who gave themselves that Cobra name,
And flies that fatten in the bloody sun
Of Africa know more of shame
Than we for such as this destruction -
And each one knows he’s not to blame:
But cobras have their grace and know
Their place and in what space to grow.
Attend the screen’s sick images
See how this nice Swiss boy has made
The chance to make the moment his;
Red Cross or something who have paid
So much so uselessly - now show biz
Time, for prying cameras stayed:
Behind him there a kiddie stands
Wide crazy eyed, gun in his hands.
The media’s the message, true?
This would not be this
but for it?
There’s really nothing we can do
But watch them sport in their own shit?
As in my mind these questions queue
What thrills me when the fuse is lit?
Do answers lie in schaddenfreud?
Is this our true selves, unalloyed?
Bryan Islip
Dharan 20 October 97
Brazzaville 1997
How happy does the soldier seem
Downtown in good old Brazzaville
In television’s nightmare dream
As searches he for more to kill
Black face split white in one wide beam
Whilst from the rubble bodies spill:
There is this frightful innocence
And you can smell the pestilence.
They must have told him that they’d won
Who gave themselves that Cobra name,
And flies that fatten in the bloody sun
Of Africa know more of shame
Than we for such as this destruction -
And each one knows he’s not to blame:
But cobras have their grace and know
Their place and in what space to grow.
Attend the screen’s sick images
See how this nice Swiss boy has made
The chance to make the moment his;
Red Cross or something who have paid
So much so uselessly - now show biz
Time, for prying cameras stayed:
Behind him there a kiddie stands
Wide crazy eyed, gun in his hands.
The media’s the message, true?
This would not be this
but for it?
There’s really nothing we can do
But watch them sport in their own shit?
As in my mind these questions queue
What thrills me when the fuse is lit?
Do answers lie in schaddenfreud?
Is this our true selves, unalloyed?
Bryan Islip
Dharan 20 October 97
September 5, 2012
Ministry of Nothing
Once upon a time Big Company A bought ownership of Small (but profitable) Company B. Over the following twelve months all of the long time leaders of Company B were fired or made redundant, myself included, and replaced by Company A incomers. Anyone care to guess what happened? Oh yes, for profits read losses. What a surprise.
Mr David Cameron is performing a trick similar to the boss of Company A today. Apparentlly his raison d'etre is to increase this government's popularity and their chances of re-election. What? The team he selected eighteen months ago, who have spent a large part of those eighteen months learning their various functions (i.e. how to navigate their Ministries), is being replaced by a team of learner Ministers. Just what the country needs at this point in time. "Pilot to navigator, where are we?" Navigator to pilot, '"Don't know skip. Trying to find the compass." Pilot to co-pilot, "We're lost. Don't tell the passengers."
I read that changing the cabinet is supposed to make me happier with the government of my country. It does not. It cannot.What needs change is not the faces, old or new, honest or not in the system, but the system itself. After several hundred years it is suffering a severe hardening of the arteries and needs to change as all things must change. Numbers and associated cost of national government representatives, quality of same, location and workstyle - all need to get in tune with what is happening, what is possible, out there in the world as well as what is happening in my village.
This government, indeed no government working the current Westminster system can possibly be expected to become the architect of its own radical change. So who or what can? Well, the people can if democracy is to be more than a convenient word for the status quo. The problem is that it will take a real and painful catastrophe to make the people act. Not simply a fall in our living standards or house prices or who is appointed by some very ordinary, very unimaginative person to run the Ministry of Nothing..
Mr David Cameron is performing a trick similar to the boss of Company A today. Apparentlly his raison d'etre is to increase this government's popularity and their chances of re-election. What? The team he selected eighteen months ago, who have spent a large part of those eighteen months learning their various functions (i.e. how to navigate their Ministries), is being replaced by a team of learner Ministers. Just what the country needs at this point in time. "Pilot to navigator, where are we?" Navigator to pilot, '"Don't know skip. Trying to find the compass." Pilot to co-pilot, "We're lost. Don't tell the passengers."
I read that changing the cabinet is supposed to make me happier with the government of my country. It does not. It cannot.What needs change is not the faces, old or new, honest or not in the system, but the system itself. After several hundred years it is suffering a severe hardening of the arteries and needs to change as all things must change. Numbers and associated cost of national government representatives, quality of same, location and workstyle - all need to get in tune with what is happening, what is possible, out there in the world as well as what is happening in my village.
This government, indeed no government working the current Westminster system can possibly be expected to become the architect of its own radical change. So who or what can? Well, the people can if democracy is to be more than a convenient word for the status quo. The problem is that it will take a real and painful catastrophe to make the people act. Not simply a fall in our living standards or house prices or who is appointed by some very ordinary, very unimaginative person to run the Ministry of Nothing..
September 1, 2012
One more tragedy; one brave little girl
In November 2009 I wrote on this site a blog headlined 'Longa Island in the Gairloch'. The blog mentioned our holiday experiences of many years before, fishing from our old, clinker built boat Culash (Gaelic - 'Little Fly') We had towed her all 700 miles up from our home on the south coast of England. I included a picture of my pastel painting of Longa Island, also the verse I wrote about it and its Viking ancestry. The verse was called 'The Gurgle of Their Oars.'
I noticed yesterday that quite a few people had clicked into this rather ancient blog, the reasons being not hard to guess for on Sunday last two men, each with two small children, set out for Longa Island from the adjacent campsite. They were paddling a Canadian style canoe. The boat overturned some four hundred metres out. One of the fathers and both of his sons died. The other father managed to swim ashore, preceded almost unbelievably by his ten year old daughter. His other, even younger daughter died in hospital a day later.
The sea was flat calm, the sun was shining from a clear blue sky and I know from many, many fishing drifts around Longa Sound that there is very little tide. Holiday makers were out the beach enjoying the late summer weather. If anyone was looking they must have seen the canoe upturned. But they didn't. Nobody raised the alarm until the ten year old came ashore, scrambled painfully over rocks and ran to a nearby house. She had only in recent weeks attended her swimming lessons. She had held on to her toy (pet) dinosaur all the way in, dropping it only when she knew either the dinosaur or she would have to go down. Brave? I should say so.
Of course you can pontificate about the apparent foolhardiness of the wrong sort of craft, lack of proper lifejackets, one father being a non-swimmer etcetera, but that will not bring back the man and the three children now dead. And if you take all the risk out of life I guess you lose the spice, the sense of adventure. I hate to think how many times I set sail with my boys and their disabled mother up the Gairloch to fish Longa in conditions that represented a considerable risk. No lifejackets.
Thirty years ago a party of five local men, grown men, were out angling
again off Longa Island. Their boat, too, capsized. Three of them were
were lost. The sea is where we humans came from, so they say. But it is and will always be an implacable foe, never to be trusted, never to be taken lightly no matter how innocent it might sometimes seem.
I noticed yesterday that quite a few people had clicked into this rather ancient blog, the reasons being not hard to guess for on Sunday last two men, each with two small children, set out for Longa Island from the adjacent campsite. They were paddling a Canadian style canoe. The boat overturned some four hundred metres out. One of the fathers and both of his sons died. The other father managed to swim ashore, preceded almost unbelievably by his ten year old daughter. His other, even younger daughter died in hospital a day later.
The sea was flat calm, the sun was shining from a clear blue sky and I know from many, many fishing drifts around Longa Sound that there is very little tide. Holiday makers were out the beach enjoying the late summer weather. If anyone was looking they must have seen the canoe upturned. But they didn't. Nobody raised the alarm until the ten year old came ashore, scrambled painfully over rocks and ran to a nearby house. She had only in recent weeks attended her swimming lessons. She had held on to her toy (pet) dinosaur all the way in, dropping it only when she knew either the dinosaur or she would have to go down. Brave? I should say so.
Of course you can pontificate about the apparent foolhardiness of the wrong sort of craft, lack of proper lifejackets, one father being a non-swimmer etcetera, but that will not bring back the man and the three children now dead. And if you take all the risk out of life I guess you lose the spice, the sense of adventure. I hate to think how many times I set sail with my boys and their disabled mother up the Gairloch to fish Longa in conditions that represented a considerable risk. No lifejackets.
Thirty years ago a party of five local men, grown men, were out angling
again off Longa Island. Their boat, too, capsized. Three of them were
were lost. The sea is where we humans came from, so they say. But it is and will always be an implacable foe, never to be trusted, never to be taken lightly no matter how innocent it might sometimes seem.
August 29, 2012
Politics means people
Quote from the speech made by Deputy Prime Mionister Nick Clegg yesterday ... Britain is coping with an economic downturn that is far deeper than anything we expected...
How
come, Mr Clegg, when me and most of my friends back in
2007/8 expected it? I myself even blogged about it in these pages,
March 2008. This was not a recession, I said, whether of your expected V shape or the dreaded, semi-inconceibable W. It was, I said, the first sign of a healthy society getting ready to realign itself with the world and with reality. This was the L shape that only fools could fail to understand - and, with their constant references to 'The Recovery' still apparently do not understand.
My suspicion is that you and your friends in
Westminster, backed up by your old school chums in the City of London, beavering away on computers soon to be paid for by the public knew damn well the bubble, and that it was about
to burst, big-time. If you had any genuine belief in or any understanding
whatsoever of the virtues of a capitalist society you must have
realised that piling up debt upon debt would bring the whole thing crashing down.
But you, whether for lack of honesty or of courage
or of intelligence or for reasons of self-interest, you decided to keep schtum and ride out the
storm - no matter how much hurt the people you were supposed to be
'governing' would get to experience. Shame on you. You have ruined everything
for everybody but your friends in the banks. You cannot mend now that which is beyond repair.
If there was in fact any such thing as democracy the people would dissolve that which does not work and re-form, re-align, both government and its finance system lapdog. But there is not, so let's all grin and bear it.
How
come, Mr Clegg, when me and most of my friends back in
2007/8 expected it? I myself even blogged about it in these pages,
March 2008. This was not a recession, I said, whether of your expected V shape or the dreaded, semi-inconceibable W. It was, I said, the first sign of a healthy society getting ready to realign itself with the world and with reality. This was the L shape that only fools could fail to understand - and, with their constant references to 'The Recovery' still apparently do not understand.
My suspicion is that you and your friends in
Westminster, backed up by your old school chums in the City of London, beavering away on computers soon to be paid for by the public knew damn well the bubble, and that it was about
to burst, big-time. If you had any genuine belief in or any understanding
whatsoever of the virtues of a capitalist society you must have
realised that piling up debt upon debt would bring the whole thing crashing down.
But you, whether for lack of honesty or of courage
or of intelligence or for reasons of self-interest, you decided to keep schtum and ride out the
storm - no matter how much hurt the people you were supposed to be
'governing' would get to experience. Shame on you. You have ruined everything
for everybody but your friends in the banks. You cannot mend now that which is beyond repair.
If there was in fact any such thing as democracy the people would dissolve that which does not work and re-form, re-align, both government and its finance system lapdog. But there is not, so let's all grin and bear it.
August 28, 2012
Requiem for a dead pigeon
For months and months he had been one of the many birds fluttering
down to our back lawn, there to feed on Delia's daily offerings of
B&B breakfast remains, peanuts and seeds.
And now he's dead,
struck down by the beautiful, marauding sparrowhawk who sometimes uses
our garden as his own breakfast table.
We saw him clinically
beheaded, de-feathered and eventually carried away with great
difficulty, his weight being very little if any less than that of his
captor / killer. These feathers all that remain. Sad are we for him.
Glad must we be for he who eats and so can live.
All that lives
consume and are in turn consumed, whether by living creatures or by
fire. And I hope that somewhere there are those of his kind who carry on
his genes, those who will carry on to grace our lawn and our lives.
July 27, 2012
Questions, questions ...
How do you feel about competitive quizzing? Me, I'm ambivalent. Love it if I win, think up excuses when I lose. 'Was deliberately distracted', 'mistaken answers from the quizmaster', 'impossible questions', 'those guys must be professional eggheads etc etc'. Just joking, folks. My memory cells may never have been all that data intense (grandfather Islip told me as a twelve year old that I had more imagination than intelligence. I'm still trying to work out whether that's a good or a bad thing. If it's true, that is.
Poolewe Supper and Quiz Night on Friday 3rd
August. Don't miss it!
Raising funds to
bring the Cairngorn Reindeer to Poolewe Christmas Market on Saturday
1st December,
The Poolewe Christmas Market is in turn a great fundraising market in aide mainly of
Dundonnell and Torridon Mountain Rescue Teams
Friday 3rd August there's Angle's lovely homemade 2 course
supper including homemade banoffee pie, trifle, lemon cheesecake, blackforest
gateaux and raspberry ripples for dessert.
Just turn up at the door and pay your four person team entry fee (£10)
Dee and I sometimes try to answer the questions on University Challenge. Before the contestants answer, of course. Which means lightning fast. Dee is ahead of me three or four to one. But if I live to be one hundred I will definitely catch up and overtake.
July 23, 2012
Time and The Book
Time: Albert Einstein and fellow physicists have done their level best to describe it and we, all of us, have to live with a constant eye on that wretched clock, but who on earth can create time? Only, I would submit, the composer of fiction
I suppose by 'create' I really mean 'create and manipulate.' James Joyce created his 900 page Ulysses around a single ordinary day in the life of an ordinary man or two, or three. Tolstoi's equally voluminous War And Peace spanned many years of time. Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice covered but a few months. William Shakespeare set his marvellous plays over everything from a few days of love to the entire drawn out reign of an English King and Douglas Adams's Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy defies classification by time, space or anything else.
A writer doesn't have to take his story forward through time. He / she can and often does take it backwards as well as forwards and can jump in time between one paragraph and the next - hours, weeks, months, years, generations. Entirely illogical of course, but in some strange way absolutely believable - truer than the truth as all good fiction has to be. Perhaps, I found myself wondering, time itself is an illusion based merely on age; perhaps on each our own vision of the passing of our years.
Why this preoccupation with time? Read the story so far: www.bryanislipauthor.com No charge. I'm about 55,000 word into writing it. Maybe half way, so a further half year 'til done. Time, WS wrote, is indeed of the essence - especially when it comes to The Book.
I suppose by 'create' I really mean 'create and manipulate.' James Joyce created his 900 page Ulysses around a single ordinary day in the life of an ordinary man or two, or three. Tolstoi's equally voluminous War And Peace spanned many years of time. Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice covered but a few months. William Shakespeare set his marvellous plays over everything from a few days of love to the entire drawn out reign of an English King and Douglas Adams's Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy defies classification by time, space or anything else.
A writer doesn't have to take his story forward through time. He / she can and often does take it backwards as well as forwards and can jump in time between one paragraph and the next - hours, weeks, months, years, generations. Entirely illogical of course, but in some strange way absolutely believable - truer than the truth as all good fiction has to be. Perhaps, I found myself wondering, time itself is an illusion based merely on age; perhaps on each our own vision of the passing of our years.
Why this preoccupation with time? Read the story so far: www.bryanislipauthor.com No charge. I'm about 55,000 word into writing it. Maybe half way, so a further half year 'til done. Time, WS wrote, is indeed of the essence - especially when it comes to The Book.
July 18, 2012
A painting of true worth
This is a painting by our daughter Julie. Portraiture is, I think, the most difficult of the painter's arts, but the subject is most certainly 'captured' in this one.
Quite apart from being the monarch of this realm, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, we all know the lady as a unique and most remarkable person. She has always seemed to me to be the veritable rock around which the vicissitudes of modern life may pound and swirl but do not move.
Yes, I am a self-confessed royalist. There are times indeed when I think the monarchy a better form of government that the one we now have at such great cost and with such battered repute. You know, the one that spends / wastes so much of the nation's money in downtown Westminster. The one supposed to be by the people for the people but that is today more like by The City for The City, God help us.
Brilliant portrait, Julie. More please! (We have your Lionel the bull on the windowledge to remind us ...)
