WHERE were you last week, Banksy? I hear you asking (actually, to be honest, I don’t hear many of you asking; and the editor says he hasn’t been exactly flooded with calls from panicky readers demanding my immediate return).
But I do know my Uncle Davie in Duns worries when my weekly witterings fail to appear, so for his sake alone I thought I should explain myself: I was, dear reader, on a train crossing the Nullarbor Plain in Australia
An amazing place, the Nullarbor: 77,000 square miles of scorched, shrubless desert between Adelaide and Perth; hour upon hour of bleak countryside that looks like Farmer Morebottle’s tattie fields after he’s sprayed them to kill off the shaws. And nothing else.
Towns? The only brief stopping place 1,000 miles out from Adelaide was the ghost town of Cook (Elevation 0, Population 2), long since deserted by the navvies who laid the tracks for the Indian-Pacific 97 years ago and now looking like I imagine so many Northumbrian villages will look once the breathalyser has killed off the last of our pubs, the supermarkets have demolished the small shop trade and the Post Office has turned its last outpost into another wind farm.
And communications? No East Coast line, this: after leaving Adelaide not so much as a tweet from a mobile phone for three days (no bad thing, perhaps?) and the internet has not flung its web worldwide enough to be useable until our half-kilometre-long train finally lumbered into the sidings at Perth, days past my deadline.
So what was a workshy journalist to do for seventy-two work-free hours other than visit his favourite ‘inns’ . . . IN the dining car and INcommunicado!
IMPOSSIBLE to escape the North-east, even 12,000 miles from home.
First, driving from Sydney via Melbourne to Adelaide (and THAT’S no quick trip to the shops, let me tell you!) I was cut up at a traffic light in Lorne, Victoria by a 4x4 bearing the number plate ‘NUFC 2’, it’s back window smothered in ‘Toon Army’ stickers. One of you must know him/her and I expect an apology!
Then, on a beach hut further down the Great Ocean Road, I came across a plaque commemorating the feats of one “Alexander Weatherhead, born on Tweedside in 1809 and died here in 1901”.
This north-east Byreman of yesteryear is famed in south-east Australia as the cattle drover who successfully herded hs beasts “one flaming hot summer” from Nooroonga via Gundagai to Adelaide, cheating death thanks only to the survival skills of local aborigines and by drinking the blood of two of his cattle.
As I told the local café owner who lauded ‘the great Scotsman’, “They breed them tough on Tweedside - and there are TWO sides to the Tweed!”
NEWS that the Barmoor windfarm has been given the go-ahead reached me on my return to Sydney, thanks to The Journal’s (mercifully) still-free website.
My reaction is mixed: I am instinctively in favour of exploiting renewable alternatives to fossil fuels but sympathise with that minority of Turbin-aters who must pay the price in loss of amenity while the majority reaps the unburdened benefit.
I have friends on both sides of the argument (indeed, I have already demanded drinks for life from Klondike Barry, who stands to gain from the Barmoor ‘windrush‘) but it is ironic that I hear the news while travelling the breadth (if not the length) of this sun-drenched, windswept continent. For there is precious little sign of renewable energy sources Down Under.
Thousands of square miles of Nullarbor and barely a solar panel to be seen; thousands of miles of surf pounding the coastline and never a tidal barrage; bleak, windswept and uninhabited regions and only eight wind turbines spotted on our entire journey.
While the world worries about China’s rising consumption, the Third World’s deforestation and even little Northumbria’s unequal share of the renewables burden, who will point the finger at this ‘lucky, sunburnt country’ and ask Australia:
What are YOU doing to save the planet?
First published in The Journal, Newcastle on January 29, 2010
Thursday, 18 March 2010
Writing's on the wall for Wills
BACK home I’m a constitutional monarchist, born and bred. But if I were Australian I’d be a Republican.
Monarchy, an outdated, undemocratic institution, is acceptable only on grounds of nostalgia and tradition and to provide a refuge of last resort should parliament fall to tyranny. But the very idea of swearing allegiance to the King or Queen of a country half a world away is illogical and indefensible.
Nonetheless, Australians remain unswervingly patriotic to their ‘Queen of Australia’: the last referendum, in 1999, returned a 72 per cent vote against republicanism and few Aussies, even the republicans amongst them, would countenance any constitutional change while the current Queen is on the throne.
But two fascinating events have coincided with our month-long trip Down Under. First, and by any means foremost, a brief, informal trip to New Zealand and Australia by Prince William has rather overwhelmed the public in Auckland, Sydney and Melbourne.
Second, even before William’s arrival a sizeable opinion poll showed 56 per cent support for the notion that the young man the media has - quite incorrectly - dubbed “Prince of New Zealand” and “Australia’s prince” should be the next King of Australia.
In other words “Tough luck, dad“, on two counts: Charles is not popular here, because of the Diana divorce and subsequent tragedy. And the ascendancy of Prince William to pin-up boy Down Under owes more to his mother than to his royal right of succession.
What Australia wants is a Di-nasty. “You’re as lovely as your mother,” sobbed one middle-aged Melbourne mum as he gave her a peck on the cheek during an unprecedented royal walkabout. It was the same in the predominantly poor, aboriginal suburb of Redfern in Sydney. William wowed them.
To understand how extraordinarily his brief, supposedly private visit has turned into a major state occasion overwhelming even coverage of the Haiti earthquake and the Australian Open tennis championship you have to understand that an awkward relationship exists between Australia and its monarch in the same way as it endures a love-hate affair with we Poms.
There is undoubtedly real regard for Her Majesty who, in 1954, was the first British monarch to set foot on this distant shore. Similarly, the memory of Diana is revered and the torch Aussies carried for her has passed to her eldest son.
Little wonder the media has begun to murmur about the possibility that William might be invited to become Australia’s Governor-General, representing his grandmother and giving the Antipodes something even America would envy: its own Royal Family. Another one in the eye for his father, of course, who coveted the same role thirty years ago until Labour Prime Minister Bob Hawke put a stop to his ambition.
William isn’t home and dry yet, though. Not by any means. The current Labour PM, Kevin Rudd also has strong views on a continued constitutional monarch. “There’s a place for the British monarchy,” he muttered recently, “and that’s in Britain.” And amid all the hoo-hah on TV screens and front pages one Melbourne paper stamped its front page: “Warning: not a single Prince William story in this paper!”
But the writing is beginning to appear on the wall. And it would indeed be ironic if the scion of a flawed and tragic union were to claim a crown his father was denied.
IN my endless quest for suitable bottles to fill The Byreman’s almost constantly emptied wine cellar I have come up with a couple of labels in this land of oaky whites and mellow reds that put even his current favourites, Fat Bastard and Flying Pig, in the shade.
First of all I came across a delightful cabernet sauvignon by the name of ‘Ten Miles By Tractor’, which would seem designed to give the bibulous old Byreman and his farmer buddies a good night out sometime soon.
And if that doesn’t put him out to grass a couple of scoops of ‘Old Blue Cow’ should do the trick.
Hic!
First published in The Journal, Newcastle on January 22, 2010
Monarchy, an outdated, undemocratic institution, is acceptable only on grounds of nostalgia and tradition and to provide a refuge of last resort should parliament fall to tyranny. But the very idea of swearing allegiance to the King or Queen of a country half a world away is illogical and indefensible.
Nonetheless, Australians remain unswervingly patriotic to their ‘Queen of Australia’: the last referendum, in 1999, returned a 72 per cent vote against republicanism and few Aussies, even the republicans amongst them, would countenance any constitutional change while the current Queen is on the throne.
But two fascinating events have coincided with our month-long trip Down Under. First, and by any means foremost, a brief, informal trip to New Zealand and Australia by Prince William has rather overwhelmed the public in Auckland, Sydney and Melbourne.
Second, even before William’s arrival a sizeable opinion poll showed 56 per cent support for the notion that the young man the media has - quite incorrectly - dubbed “Prince of New Zealand” and “Australia’s prince” should be the next King of Australia.
In other words “Tough luck, dad“, on two counts: Charles is not popular here, because of the Diana divorce and subsequent tragedy. And the ascendancy of Prince William to pin-up boy Down Under owes more to his mother than to his royal right of succession.
What Australia wants is a Di-nasty. “You’re as lovely as your mother,” sobbed one middle-aged Melbourne mum as he gave her a peck on the cheek during an unprecedented royal walkabout. It was the same in the predominantly poor, aboriginal suburb of Redfern in Sydney. William wowed them.
To understand how extraordinarily his brief, supposedly private visit has turned into a major state occasion overwhelming even coverage of the Haiti earthquake and the Australian Open tennis championship you have to understand that an awkward relationship exists between Australia and its monarch in the same way as it endures a love-hate affair with we Poms.
There is undoubtedly real regard for Her Majesty who, in 1954, was the first British monarch to set foot on this distant shore. Similarly, the memory of Diana is revered and the torch Aussies carried for her has passed to her eldest son.
Little wonder the media has begun to murmur about the possibility that William might be invited to become Australia’s Governor-General, representing his grandmother and giving the Antipodes something even America would envy: its own Royal Family. Another one in the eye for his father, of course, who coveted the same role thirty years ago until Labour Prime Minister Bob Hawke put a stop to his ambition.
William isn’t home and dry yet, though. Not by any means. The current Labour PM, Kevin Rudd also has strong views on a continued constitutional monarch. “There’s a place for the British monarchy,” he muttered recently, “and that’s in Britain.” And amid all the hoo-hah on TV screens and front pages one Melbourne paper stamped its front page: “Warning: not a single Prince William story in this paper!”
But the writing is beginning to appear on the wall. And it would indeed be ironic if the scion of a flawed and tragic union were to claim a crown his father was denied.
IN my endless quest for suitable bottles to fill The Byreman’s almost constantly emptied wine cellar I have come up with a couple of labels in this land of oaky whites and mellow reds that put even his current favourites, Fat Bastard and Flying Pig, in the shade.
First of all I came across a delightful cabernet sauvignon by the name of ‘Ten Miles By Tractor’, which would seem designed to give the bibulous old Byreman and his farmer buddies a good night out sometime soon.
And if that doesn’t put him out to grass a couple of scoops of ‘Old Blue Cow’ should do the trick.
Hic!
First published in The Journal, Newcastle on January 22, 2010
Half a world away it's raining in Paradise
DON’T laugh, but it’s raining in Sydney. I travel 12,000 miles to the other end of the earth to escape the snow and am greeted Down Under by thick cloud, steady drizzle and airport workers in anoraks.
Oh look, I DID ask you not to laugh . . .
Anyway, Aussie rain is different. It’s the kind of precipitation those bare-bellied lasses would laugh at on a Saturday neet oot in the Bigg Market. It comes down like thick steam and lowers the temperature gauge to a hardly unbearable 23C.
Frankly, up with that I can happily put. Especially when I recall how the Good Lady and I fled the snowbound Borders a day early to evade the threatened second blizzard the London Met Office was predicting.
Actually, it wasn’t the Met Office warning so much as the Byreman that had us running scared: he and Lady B arrived home tanned and fit from Adelaide’s sun-baked plains three days before Gemma and I were due to fly in the opposite direction.
Naturally, having paid to fly in the posh part of an Emirates jumbo, Byreman and spouse were chauffeur-driven home from Newcastle Airport in fine style . . . until within fifty yards of their front door they were forced to abandon the limo and lug their Louis Vuittons through four feet of drifted snow.
The Byreman viewed my prospects equally bleakly: “Berwick to London should be okay,” said Milfield’s Michael Fish, “and once you get off the ground, London to Sydney will be a doddle.
“No, it’s Crookham to Berwick where you’ll come unstuck. I’d better take you.”
Cattle class it may have been but with the Byreman’s chauffeur service and a special plea to Virgin Atlantic to find me some extra leg space beside the emergency exit my holiday is off to a solid start.
Now if it would just stop raining . . .oh, PLEASE don’t laugh!
LIKE Lot’s wife, I made one mistake at the Heathrow departure gate, sneaking a last look at my emails before being condemned to 22 hours of cramped captivity in the semi-darkness of a Sydney-bound jet.
There it was: an unrefuseable call to action from David Lockie, chairman of my local parish council. Apparently an application has been made to Northumberland County Council to build a 17,500 square foot supermarket in Wooler, with parking for 130 cars.
Aware of potential controversy, the county council was canvassing as many views as possible throughout Glendale. Could my little Tillside email newsletter The Clarion (120 subscribers and rising) help spread the word?
No editor can refuse a call to action such as that!
With the departure gate deadline looming, my pounding fingers dispatched the hot news back up to Godzone country before I raced through the airbridge to my seat.
Mission just possible!
A SPOT of turbulence we ran into over the Bay of Bengal had me recalling that great flying story about the nervous young woman passenger who completely ‘lost it’ when the aircraft hit really rough turbulence and its wing was struck by lightning.
Running to the front of the plane she screamed: “If I'm going to die, I want my last minutes on earth to be memorable!
“Is there anyone on this plane who can make a girl feel like a woman?"
For a moment, there was a shocked silence. Then a man from Newcastle - handsome, tall and well built with dark brown hair and hazel eyes - stood up at the rear of the plane.
Slowly, he started to walk up the aisle, unbuttoning his shirt as he went, one button at a time. Then he removed the shirt. Muscles rippled across his chest.
Awestruck, no one said a word. The woman gasped. Finally, her he-man spoke.
"Iron this, will you? Then get us a beer, pet."
Moral: only a Geordie can make a lass feel like a REAL woman.
First published in The Journal, Newcastle on January 15th, 2010
Oh look, I DID ask you not to laugh . . .
Anyway, Aussie rain is different. It’s the kind of precipitation those bare-bellied lasses would laugh at on a Saturday neet oot in the Bigg Market. It comes down like thick steam and lowers the temperature gauge to a hardly unbearable 23C.
Frankly, up with that I can happily put. Especially when I recall how the Good Lady and I fled the snowbound Borders a day early to evade the threatened second blizzard the London Met Office was predicting.
Actually, it wasn’t the Met Office warning so much as the Byreman that had us running scared: he and Lady B arrived home tanned and fit from Adelaide’s sun-baked plains three days before Gemma and I were due to fly in the opposite direction.
Naturally, having paid to fly in the posh part of an Emirates jumbo, Byreman and spouse were chauffeur-driven home from Newcastle Airport in fine style . . . until within fifty yards of their front door they were forced to abandon the limo and lug their Louis Vuittons through four feet of drifted snow.
The Byreman viewed my prospects equally bleakly: “Berwick to London should be okay,” said Milfield’s Michael Fish, “and once you get off the ground, London to Sydney will be a doddle.
“No, it’s Crookham to Berwick where you’ll come unstuck. I’d better take you.”
Cattle class it may have been but with the Byreman’s chauffeur service and a special plea to Virgin Atlantic to find me some extra leg space beside the emergency exit my holiday is off to a solid start.
Now if it would just stop raining . . .oh, PLEASE don’t laugh!
LIKE Lot’s wife, I made one mistake at the Heathrow departure gate, sneaking a last look at my emails before being condemned to 22 hours of cramped captivity in the semi-darkness of a Sydney-bound jet.
There it was: an unrefuseable call to action from David Lockie, chairman of my local parish council. Apparently an application has been made to Northumberland County Council to build a 17,500 square foot supermarket in Wooler, with parking for 130 cars.
Aware of potential controversy, the county council was canvassing as many views as possible throughout Glendale. Could my little Tillside email newsletter The Clarion (120 subscribers and rising) help spread the word?
No editor can refuse a call to action such as that!
With the departure gate deadline looming, my pounding fingers dispatched the hot news back up to Godzone country before I raced through the airbridge to my seat.
Mission just possible!
A SPOT of turbulence we ran into over the Bay of Bengal had me recalling that great flying story about the nervous young woman passenger who completely ‘lost it’ when the aircraft hit really rough turbulence and its wing was struck by lightning.
Running to the front of the plane she screamed: “If I'm going to die, I want my last minutes on earth to be memorable!
“Is there anyone on this plane who can make a girl feel like a woman?"
For a moment, there was a shocked silence. Then a man from Newcastle - handsome, tall and well built with dark brown hair and hazel eyes - stood up at the rear of the plane.
Slowly, he started to walk up the aisle, unbuttoning his shirt as he went, one button at a time. Then he removed the shirt. Muscles rippled across his chest.
Awestruck, no one said a word. The woman gasped. Finally, her he-man spoke.
"Iron this, will you? Then get us a beer, pet."
Moral: only a Geordie can make a lass feel like a REAL woman.
First published in The Journal, Newcastle on January 15th, 2010
The Showbiz Agent from Heil . . .
A SLIPPY Christmas and a Scary New Year . . . that‘s what we’re having up here in the place tourist brochures call ‘Britain’s ‘secret kingdom’ but which we know better as The Land Northumberland County Council Forgot.
Didn’t take long, did it, for the suffering to start once Britain’s worst borough council handed over north Northumberland to what seems destined to be the UK’s most useless unitary authority?
Over the whole festive season I saw but ONE gritter on the main Cornhill-Wooler road, and an empty one at that; the yellow bins I checked were empty; there wasn’t grit to be had for love nor money. Only teeth got gritted where I live!
John the Joiner and I bought the last six available bags at Jewson’s and were told: “No more supplies ‘til after New Year.” Berwick Christmas Farmer’s Market was a dismally attended affair thanks to the car park that became an ice rink.
I understand the argument that excuses an absence of snowploughs and teams of gritters: it would be hugely uneconomical to invest millions in equipment that might only be used for a handful of days each year.
But grit? Or rock salt? A little manpower? Where were THEY when the weather closed in?
It certainly makes the deal that County Durham Primary Care Trust struck with its county council – to grit 35 miles of bus routes over the next two winters in exchange for £1million – a far-sighted bargain in terms of reduced accidents to car drivers and the elderly and, therefore, reduced costs to the NHS.
If we can’t expect our council to send the gritters around every village up this way – paying, don’t forget, just as much council tax as the cosseted burghers of Morpeth and Alnwick – what about creating ‘grit dumps’ when bad weather is forecast? Why not pay local builders and farmers with the machinery available to subdivide the grit around the locality, where householders could fill a pail and make their own pavements safe?
And perish the thought that some of our 2.5million unemployed might be expected to earn – indeed, might welcome – a bonus on their dole money when a national or regional emergency requires it.
I’VE been keeping one eye on the weather forecast and the other on the exchange rate for Australian dollars. Why? Well, to celebrate 35 years of married life the Bankses are taking a trip Down Under later this month.
It’s not the 24-hour flight that worries me – it’s what comes before.
Since the day six years ago when the notorious Shoe Bomber was arrested security checks have required that every air passenger remove his or her shoes.
What are they going to want us to remove now the Underpants Bomber has been exposed?
MY Daughter the Actress and her actor partner share a dyslexic agent called Daisy who once, appropriately, spelled her own name ‘Dozy’.
The other day, the man who would father my grandchildren was directed to attend an audition for a TV ad for Nationwide in which, Daisy told him, he was to play “a Germanic housebuyer”.
Now Alistair takes his acting very seriously and likes to ‘climb into’ the role, so he cut and dyed his hair blond, adopted a military bearing and stomped around the set clicking his heels and demanding “Wo ist die haus, Herr Estate Agent?”
The audition was over almost before it began. Mystified, the Hunnishly handsome young actor checked the film company’s requirement.
Not ‘Germanic’ at all . . . it was for a GENERIC housebuyer!
ONE thing puzzles me about the fall-out from Tory frontbencher David Willetts’ concern that marriage is becoming a ‘middle-class only’ institution: the accompanying statistic stated that marriage was at its peak in 1972 when 480,285 people said “I do”.
How could it have been an odd number? Did some sexy little threesome sneak in there? I think we should be told.
First published in The Journal, Newcastle, January 1 2010
Didn’t take long, did it, for the suffering to start once Britain’s worst borough council handed over north Northumberland to what seems destined to be the UK’s most useless unitary authority?
Over the whole festive season I saw but ONE gritter on the main Cornhill-Wooler road, and an empty one at that; the yellow bins I checked were empty; there wasn’t grit to be had for love nor money. Only teeth got gritted where I live!
John the Joiner and I bought the last six available bags at Jewson’s and were told: “No more supplies ‘til after New Year.” Berwick Christmas Farmer’s Market was a dismally attended affair thanks to the car park that became an ice rink.
I understand the argument that excuses an absence of snowploughs and teams of gritters: it would be hugely uneconomical to invest millions in equipment that might only be used for a handful of days each year.
But grit? Or rock salt? A little manpower? Where were THEY when the weather closed in?
It certainly makes the deal that County Durham Primary Care Trust struck with its county council – to grit 35 miles of bus routes over the next two winters in exchange for £1million – a far-sighted bargain in terms of reduced accidents to car drivers and the elderly and, therefore, reduced costs to the NHS.
If we can’t expect our council to send the gritters around every village up this way – paying, don’t forget, just as much council tax as the cosseted burghers of Morpeth and Alnwick – what about creating ‘grit dumps’ when bad weather is forecast? Why not pay local builders and farmers with the machinery available to subdivide the grit around the locality, where householders could fill a pail and make their own pavements safe?
And perish the thought that some of our 2.5million unemployed might be expected to earn – indeed, might welcome – a bonus on their dole money when a national or regional emergency requires it.
I’VE been keeping one eye on the weather forecast and the other on the exchange rate for Australian dollars. Why? Well, to celebrate 35 years of married life the Bankses are taking a trip Down Under later this month.
It’s not the 24-hour flight that worries me – it’s what comes before.
Since the day six years ago when the notorious Shoe Bomber was arrested security checks have required that every air passenger remove his or her shoes.
What are they going to want us to remove now the Underpants Bomber has been exposed?
MY Daughter the Actress and her actor partner share a dyslexic agent called Daisy who once, appropriately, spelled her own name ‘Dozy’.
The other day, the man who would father my grandchildren was directed to attend an audition for a TV ad for Nationwide in which, Daisy told him, he was to play “a Germanic housebuyer”.
Now Alistair takes his acting very seriously and likes to ‘climb into’ the role, so he cut and dyed his hair blond, adopted a military bearing and stomped around the set clicking his heels and demanding “Wo ist die haus, Herr Estate Agent?”
The audition was over almost before it began. Mystified, the Hunnishly handsome young actor checked the film company’s requirement.
Not ‘Germanic’ at all . . . it was for a GENERIC housebuyer!
ONE thing puzzles me about the fall-out from Tory frontbencher David Willetts’ concern that marriage is becoming a ‘middle-class only’ institution: the accompanying statistic stated that marriage was at its peak in 1972 when 480,285 people said “I do”.
How could it have been an odd number? Did some sexy little threesome sneak in there? I think we should be told.
First published in The Journal, Newcastle, January 1 2010
Monday, 7 December 2009
Britain as 51st state: a formal application
I WAS musing the other day on the fact that Britain's so-called 'special relationship' with its North American cousins has so far this decade cost Tony Blair the Prime Ministership, may have lost him the European Presidency job and now looks likely to tip Gordon Brown out of Number Ten, Downing Street.
It shouldn't be this tough being kissing cousins with the USA but it is. Left-wingers (goddammed Commies who believe in state-subsidised health care for all!) deride Little Britain (pop: 60million) as the '51st State' and that got me thinking...
We'd be a damned sight more influential if we were state number 51. We'd certainly be the most populous state (more Congressional districts than any of the current biggies), we'd have two mouthy Lefties (in American terms, at least) shouting for us in the Senate and we'd own a whole Eastern seaboard'sworth of electoral college votes.
Where are Tom Paine, Jefferson and Franklin when we need them to fight the blackguards who belittle us?
No defamation without representation!
It shouldn't be this tough being kissing cousins with the USA but it is. Left-wingers (goddammed Commies who believe in state-subsidised health care for all!) deride Little Britain (pop: 60million) as the '51st State' and that got me thinking...
We'd be a damned sight more influential if we were state number 51. We'd certainly be the most populous state (more Congressional districts than any of the current biggies), we'd have two mouthy Lefties (in American terms, at least) shouting for us in the Senate and we'd own a whole Eastern seaboard'sworth of electoral college votes.
Where are Tom Paine, Jefferson and Franklin when we need them to fight the blackguards who belittle us?
No defamation without representation!
Rupert, the globe's greatest grifter
I HAVE been conned by Rupert Murdoch before and I’m beginning to believe that he’s pulling the wool over my eyes once again.
The more I hear about his planned Operation Paywall the more I think that, great as he is, the guy is a grifter.
Remember the London Post? No, of course you don’t. Rupert’s vaunted national evening paper never existed, except as a brilliant ‘playwall’ behind which he constructed a weapon which resisted months of siege and won Britain’s greatest publishing war: Fortress Wapping.
For three months I was Assistant Editor (Day Desk) on project leader Charlie Wilson’s Newspaper That Would Never Be; I spent all that time in the USA on a ‘no-expense-spared, go anywhere’ mission to learn how American journalists produced newspapers using computers instead of glue-pots and Biros.
For me, the fairy story ended unhappily with one of those in-yer-face, “Shut the fuck up!” sessions with the unlikely Times editor after I demanded once too often to be allowed home to draw up a dummy and begin hiring production staff if (as I believed was the ‘plan’) we were to launch by October, 1985.
Of course, history has since taught us that the London Post launch, towards which I was working so hard, was Rupert’s equivalent of Churchill’s pre-D-Day inflatable tanks and balsa wood aircraft: Murdoch’s Operation Overlord was a scam designed to fool the battalions of bully-boy print unions.
And me.
Now, I have a horrible feeling he’s doing it again. The Boss (none of his ex-senior execs ever breaks the habit of calling him that) boasted to the world recently that he is determined to withdraw all of News Limited’s titles from Google as soon as he finds a way to erect his paywall.
No sooner was Sky carrying the Master and Commander’s words to the corners of the known world than one of his senior lieutenants, Times editor James Harding, outlined to the Society of Editors how his title planned to start charging a subscription for digital content in the spring.
It went down well inside the conference. A lot of mealier mouths than Murdoch’s are eager for the Citizen Paywall to dump Google, shut off the free news supply and . . . kerrching! A dozen and more digital Daily Deadlosses hit pay dirt again, and the advertisers can go to the devil.
But Keith Rupert Murdoch is an old newsprint man. As Matthew Norman recently noted in the Independent, “for a split second [during his Sky ‘paywall’ interview] Rupert was clearly bamboozled by the admittedly recherché term ‘online’. He doesn't speak the lingo at all, and barely understands it.”
He’s wily, of course. I have been monitoring recent US press comment (via free internet, of course) regarding the news paywall issue, and I’m certain Rupert does the same.
If so, he’ll know that almost universal media opinion across the land that gave us pay-per-view is that paywalls work fine where content is unimpeachably exclusive: The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg and The Financial Times are proof of that. So, for that matter, is Sky Sports.
But what about the New York Times? The Grey Lady aches to re-erect the paywall it abandoned in 2007 after a two-year trial produced minimal uptake and only about £5million in annual revenue. What it DID succeed in doing was to induce bloggers to plunder almost at will its resources for public benefit.
Now, with its free-to-all online approach pulling in a steady, if unspectacular, ad revenue the NYT is America’s most popular online newspaper website with 18million unique visitors per month.
We might, in fact, all have been too easily fooled by Rupert’s apparent infatuation for the idea of ring fencing his internet newspaper properties for a king’s ransom.
Maybe The Boss isn’t so much in love with the internet as at war with it. Perhaps his loathing is directed at the content-plundering Google, which offers no direct return for his well-financed journalism. Could it be that he will eventually settle for a simple slice of the internet action in order to buy time for his precious, but declining print media?
James Harding may be simply following in the footsteps of the non-existent London Post’s Assistant Editor (Day Desk) who once swanned off across the Pond with a pocketful of expenses and a head full of nonsense.
Which Rupert Murdoch will the New Year bring? Prince of Paywalls? Or King of Conmen?
The more I hear about his planned Operation Paywall the more I think that, great as he is, the guy is a grifter.
Remember the London Post? No, of course you don’t. Rupert’s vaunted national evening paper never existed, except as a brilliant ‘playwall’ behind which he constructed a weapon which resisted months of siege and won Britain’s greatest publishing war: Fortress Wapping.
For three months I was Assistant Editor (Day Desk) on project leader Charlie Wilson’s Newspaper That Would Never Be; I spent all that time in the USA on a ‘no-expense-spared, go anywhere’ mission to learn how American journalists produced newspapers using computers instead of glue-pots and Biros.
For me, the fairy story ended unhappily with one of those in-yer-face, “Shut the fuck up!” sessions with the unlikely Times editor after I demanded once too often to be allowed home to draw up a dummy and begin hiring production staff if (as I believed was the ‘plan’) we were to launch by October, 1985.
Of course, history has since taught us that the London Post launch, towards which I was working so hard, was Rupert’s equivalent of Churchill’s pre-D-Day inflatable tanks and balsa wood aircraft: Murdoch’s Operation Overlord was a scam designed to fool the battalions of bully-boy print unions.
And me.
Now, I have a horrible feeling he’s doing it again. The Boss (none of his ex-senior execs ever breaks the habit of calling him that) boasted to the world recently that he is determined to withdraw all of News Limited’s titles from Google as soon as he finds a way to erect his paywall.
No sooner was Sky carrying the Master and Commander’s words to the corners of the known world than one of his senior lieutenants, Times editor James Harding, outlined to the Society of Editors how his title planned to start charging a subscription for digital content in the spring.
It went down well inside the conference. A lot of mealier mouths than Murdoch’s are eager for the Citizen Paywall to dump Google, shut off the free news supply and . . . kerrching! A dozen and more digital Daily Deadlosses hit pay dirt again, and the advertisers can go to the devil.
But Keith Rupert Murdoch is an old newsprint man. As Matthew Norman recently noted in the Independent, “for a split second [during his Sky ‘paywall’ interview] Rupert was clearly bamboozled by the admittedly recherché term ‘online’. He doesn't speak the lingo at all, and barely understands it.”
He’s wily, of course. I have been monitoring recent US press comment (via free internet, of course) regarding the news paywall issue, and I’m certain Rupert does the same.
If so, he’ll know that almost universal media opinion across the land that gave us pay-per-view is that paywalls work fine where content is unimpeachably exclusive: The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg and The Financial Times are proof of that. So, for that matter, is Sky Sports.
But what about the New York Times? The Grey Lady aches to re-erect the paywall it abandoned in 2007 after a two-year trial produced minimal uptake and only about £5million in annual revenue. What it DID succeed in doing was to induce bloggers to plunder almost at will its resources for public benefit.
Now, with its free-to-all online approach pulling in a steady, if unspectacular, ad revenue the NYT is America’s most popular online newspaper website with 18million unique visitors per month.
We might, in fact, all have been too easily fooled by Rupert’s apparent infatuation for the idea of ring fencing his internet newspaper properties for a king’s ransom.
Maybe The Boss isn’t so much in love with the internet as at war with it. Perhaps his loathing is directed at the content-plundering Google, which offers no direct return for his well-financed journalism. Could it be that he will eventually settle for a simple slice of the internet action in order to buy time for his precious, but declining print media?
James Harding may be simply following in the footsteps of the non-existent London Post’s Assistant Editor (Day Desk) who once swanned off across the Pond with a pocketful of expenses and a head full of nonsense.
Which Rupert Murdoch will the New Year bring? Prince of Paywalls? Or King of Conmen?
First published in Press Gazette, December 2009
Sunday, 6 December 2009
Hate the war, not the warrior
MAYBE it’s because Coldstream is only a mile or two down the road from my home that I took in the death of the latest British soldier in Afghanistan with a heavy heart. Perhaps it’s because he was a local lad.
Whatever it was, the news of Acting Sergeant John Amer, proud Coldstream Guardsman from Sunderland, husband of adoring wife Sue and the father of a young daughter who will know her father no more hit me harder than most.
He was the 99th British soldier to die this year; the 236th to die since we invaded in 2001. But the statistics are nothing compared with the loss his family – indeed a whole battalion of grieving families – is feeling as this awful conflict escalates.
I hate this war with a passion. Any right-minded person in a civilised society would lament the passing of these brave young soldiers – and they are all young people of my son’s and daughter’s age – as well as regretting the toll of civilian casualties that is being inflicted.
Trouble is by the time our despair at the never-ending casualty figures – desperately badly wounded men and women as well as the dead – and our growing opposition to the war reaches the front line it translates into a lack of regard for the men and women who are fighting OUR conflict and whom WE sent to that barbarous land.
Make no mistake: I hate this war and its horrifying consequences. But I’m proud of the lads and lasses who answered the call unhesitatingly.
There is an opportunity to communicate our pride and thanks to those serving men and women: next Tuesday, more than 200 men and women from the Second Battalion of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers are to march through Ashington and Morpeth to celebrate their homecoming after a six-month tour of duty which has seen seven of their comrades killed and a dozen badly wounded.
I am proud to say that men and women from my village and from the surrounding area are travelling south to raise a cheer for our returning heroes. I will try to be on the streets of l unchtime Morpeth to see them home.
It is a small act of homage I urge you to make, moved as was I by the words of John Amer’s grieving widow:
"John was the best father our daughter could have wished for. This cruel world has taken a hero . . . the pain of losing him is overwhelming."
SCIENCE is playing God again. For the first time, meat has been produced in a laboratory from a pig’s cells as boffins struggle to play biblical one-upmanship by feeding the five billion.
Lab chops, anyone? Or a portion of Shepherd’s Pi, perhaps?
WHEN the Acer computer I bought at John Lewis developed a fault I took it back to the store for repair under their two-year guarantee.
But after nothing had happened for five weeks I called to complain.
John Lewis were wonderful: they tracked my computer through the Acer repair system – then hit a brick wall. Acer had moved their call centre off-shore to India and even John Lewis couldn’t get a reply to their inquiries,
After eight weeks they called to offer a refund or a replacement. I chose a substitute computer: “Anything but an Acer,” I pleaded.
Sure enough, my Dell replacement has arrived with all the bells and whistles I wanted . . . and one small hitch.
ANOTHER call centre in India!
SHADOW foreign minister David Lidington was outraged when Iran detained five British sailors who had strayed into Iranian waters (I use the term ‘sailors’ loosely for a bunch of yachties sailing in war-torn waters with no GPS, no engine spares and – to my mind – no bloody sense!).
“It is completely unjustifiable!” thundered the Tory tyro. “There was no justification for them being arrested.”
I can’t wait to hear what he has to say next time five Iranians beach their raft on Brighton’s British sands!
Whatever it was, the news of Acting Sergeant John Amer, proud Coldstream Guardsman from Sunderland, husband of adoring wife Sue and the father of a young daughter who will know her father no more hit me harder than most.
He was the 99th British soldier to die this year; the 236th to die since we invaded in 2001. But the statistics are nothing compared with the loss his family – indeed a whole battalion of grieving families – is feeling as this awful conflict escalates.
I hate this war with a passion. Any right-minded person in a civilised society would lament the passing of these brave young soldiers – and they are all young people of my son’s and daughter’s age – as well as regretting the toll of civilian casualties that is being inflicted.
Trouble is by the time our despair at the never-ending casualty figures – desperately badly wounded men and women as well as the dead – and our growing opposition to the war reaches the front line it translates into a lack of regard for the men and women who are fighting OUR conflict and whom WE sent to that barbarous land.
Make no mistake: I hate this war and its horrifying consequences. But I’m proud of the lads and lasses who answered the call unhesitatingly.
There is an opportunity to communicate our pride and thanks to those serving men and women: next Tuesday, more than 200 men and women from the Second Battalion of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers are to march through Ashington and Morpeth to celebrate their homecoming after a six-month tour of duty which has seen seven of their comrades killed and a dozen badly wounded.
I am proud to say that men and women from my village and from the surrounding area are travelling south to raise a cheer for our returning heroes. I will try to be on the streets of l unchtime Morpeth to see them home.
It is a small act of homage I urge you to make, moved as was I by the words of John Amer’s grieving widow:
"John was the best father our daughter could have wished for. This cruel world has taken a hero . . . the pain of losing him is overwhelming."
SCIENCE is playing God again. For the first time, meat has been produced in a laboratory from a pig’s cells as boffins struggle to play biblical one-upmanship by feeding the five billion.
Lab chops, anyone? Or a portion of Shepherd’s Pi, perhaps?
WHEN the Acer computer I bought at John Lewis developed a fault I took it back to the store for repair under their two-year guarantee.
But after nothing had happened for five weeks I called to complain.
John Lewis were wonderful: they tracked my computer through the Acer repair system – then hit a brick wall. Acer had moved their call centre off-shore to India and even John Lewis couldn’t get a reply to their inquiries,
After eight weeks they called to offer a refund or a replacement. I chose a substitute computer: “Anything but an Acer,” I pleaded.
Sure enough, my Dell replacement has arrived with all the bells and whistles I wanted . . . and one small hitch.
ANOTHER call centre in India!
SHADOW foreign minister David Lidington was outraged when Iran detained five British sailors who had strayed into Iranian waters (I use the term ‘sailors’ loosely for a bunch of yachties sailing in war-torn waters with no GPS, no engine spares and – to my mind – no bloody sense!).
“It is completely unjustifiable!” thundered the Tory tyro. “There was no justification for them being arrested.”
I can’t wait to hear what he has to say next time five Iranians beach their raft on Brighton’s British sands!
First published in The Journal, Newscastle upon Tyne, December 4 2009
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