Dear Mr. Trump,
I am going to talk to you man-to-man: straight-talking (which you claim to favour, though your own discourse is more a kind of crooked blustering). I am one of your peers. I was embarrassed to find that we were born two days apart. I am your junior by about 48 hours and perhaps that accounts for your superior knowledge and experience, gained in that interval. For some of the things you have that I don't have - like your temperament - are probably grounded in infancy, though not usually quite that early. I wonder if your grasp of world affairs was also formed during this critical period, possibly.
You are an impostor. You claim the wisdom, the knowledge, the skills and worldly experience to be President of the United States, the most powerful country in the world. Really? Show us the evidence, for it is not clear from your behaviour. You have very little relevant knowledge and experience: what you have is half-baked ideas to grab headlines, prejudices as a substitute for facts, repeated endlessly as though they were facts, with great conviction, to persuade the audience that you can do what you say. (How are the plans for The Wall coming along? Any tenders under $20 billion yet?).
Ignorance and bigotry are to be expected on the campaign trail, but they don't work in incisive television interviews and press conferences. You will be found out, exposed and totally humiliated. Your tactic so far has been ad hominem argument (that means attacking the questioner personally, or their newspaper/tv channel, rather than answering the question - but you knew that). Talking of latin, do you remember ex-VP Dan Quayle, returning from a tour of Latin America, explaining that he couldn't really talk to the people he met as he didn't speak Latin..................well, he was the laughing stock of the entire world, but worse awaits you. In the last few days the 'revelations' about you have been so extreme that you look visibly shaken. This is just the beginning, you have four years of this pack of rabid dogs baying for your blood. They scent it already. Is it possible that you may not even make the Inauguration, because of a coup détat by the military? Unthinkable, but not a fate worse than the Donald: some of them are as bigoted as you, but more sane.
Suppose you make it to the Oval Office: what about decision making: have you decided yet whether it is going to be dice or Tarot cards? You have surrounded yourself with a Cabinet of yea-sayers who owe you for their jobs, people who are all totally unrepresentative of The People, just like you, and who will be prone to help you make decisions to help people like them. They are not doing this for love, but for the love of money, and fame, respectability or business deals. What happens when two of them argue different courses of action. How do you decide between them when you know nothing? Go to the Gents and toss a coin?
It is not just you who will suffer (though you will, to the point where you may consider commissioning your own assassination). You will drag your country with you through the slime more than Richard Nixon or Bill Clinton, or both combined. The rest of the world looks on in shock and awe as this tragedy unfolds. Disbelief that America could elect such a man, piled onto the disbelief that you would have the chutzpah to stand in the first place. You must know how little you know. Now we just wait for the major blunders that will follow, 'as the night, the day'.
You have conjured up undreamed-of reservoirs of hate in your country. You were clever to identify the legions of unemployed, dispossessed, mortgage-stricken, fearful, regressive, anti-liberal, Rust Belt, trailer trash, and a raft of people that technology and globalisation was leaving high and dry. It was said of the British politician, Michael Heseltine, that he 'knew how to find the clitoris of the Conservative Party'. You have managed to do the same for half of your country. The con is that you have no idea how to bring them prosperity, and even if you did, they would only get to the trough after you and your kind had taken the lion's share.
You have alienated so many people, so much, so soon that you may as well install one of those machines that issue numbered tickets at the White House: form a line here for people who want to have a pop at President Trump. No sir, you want that line, for assault riflemen, this one's for Uzi owners. You see hate begets hate, and the sick truth is that the world would breathe an audible sigh of relief if some of the hated hit back. Maybe there is a plot already afoot, a group of assassins with a sense of irony: not head-shots in a motorcade, but lining you up in front of a Wall: "You're fired!" shouts the firing squad. Those who live by the Wall...
Is this really what you want? Look at it this way: it's been great fun playing the stadia, puffing yourself up to be someone really important, the razzmatazz, the cheerleaders (what a gift to you), the applause, you've had a ball! You've had great publicity that money couldn't buy (although you did your best to, of course). You can make countless billions off it. But now get real: if there were a person specification for the job, you'd not match up to any of it, nor have the skills or knowledge to fit the job description. Donald, you're in deep shit. Do yourself, America, and the Rest of the World a favour: make your first act in Office to be: Impeach Yourself. And the second one: repeal the law that proscribes a Third Term for the President. Quit while your ahead, and you still have one. You know it makes sense.
BBC Radio 4 has had something of a coup: Trump has agreed to appear on Desert Island Discs and has submitted the following list for approval.
My Way Frank Sinatra
Money for Nothing Dire Straits
The (First) Lady is a Trump Ella Fitzgerald
If I Ruled the World Tony Bennett
Money, Money, Money Cabaret, original cast recording
Baby Love The Supremes
Living Doll Cliff Richard
His indispensable choice was the final one. Do listen (below). For his book he nominated 'The Wit and Wisdom of Donald Trump' (which the sub-editors cut from a 373 page volume to a single paragraph); for his single precious object he asked for a full-length, unbreakable mirror (obviously to light fires from the Sun's rays).
Last week The Items got its first reader from Albania. 'Tis a wondrous thing. How on earth would it happen? Surely a keyboarding accident, for we must modestly state that we are not well-known in that tiny corner of International ex-Communism? Or maybe they just explored Google Shqipëri, the Albanian branch of the Hydra-headed monster (generally benign) that has taken over our lives (but when will Amazon eat it: you may well ask). Anxious to access our venerable namesake, The Sunday Times, possibly confused by an English keyboard in a tourist hotel, they carelessly anagrammatised Times into Items. Just like The Editor did when this blog came kicking and screaming into the virtual world.
That must be it. Anyway, young Enver (this is the only Albanian first-name that we know), welcome to our world. Much as we'd like to write something especially for you, because we place the cultivation of a relationship with Albania well above most other priorities, we are handicapped because we know so very little about you. We do know that you were a Stalinist communist country from 1947 to 1990, rather following the Chinese rather than the Soviet model of communism, so earning the disfavour of the USSR. Your leader, some would say 'dictator', was Enver Hoxha. He was a heroic figure, he said, and there are many monuments to him in your country, before he was toppled. A bit like Saddam Hussein in Iraq. The Editor also recalls that there used to be an English performance poet called Attila the Stockbroker who, with tongue firmly in cheek. celebrated Hoxha and Albania to the point where he became a national hero, received in your capital, Tirana, with something close to rapture. Those were the days, when you were a closed country, closed to foreigners who didn't want to go there anyway, because you were a closed country. Now it's different and you're just another ideology-lite European country with your culture and folk-music swamped by your brand of Eurorap: definitely some Eastern influence + a bit of James Corden!
That's it. That's all we know. But if you should make the same mistake again and read this, and you would like to submit a piece in the Comments section at the end of this post, we will publish it. Example 'How I gave up kabanos and learned to love McDonalds Quarter Pounder/No Cheese'. Promise. Falemnderit!
PS It is true that the The Editor once wrote a novel, Black + Blue, in which the fugitive main characters fled through Albania, fearing for their lives; but that's another story, though one which may yet re-surface in electronic form, despite the level of popular demand...
Last year, I was reunited (after 45 years!) , with my long-lost
Sri Lankan guru, mentor, muse, teacher, compadre, Ambalavaner Sivanandan (also an ideologue, Marxist, revolutionary firebrand, orator, writer, poet, and in order to blemish
this Renaissance Man CV, Manchester United supporter). Naturally he has never
lived anywhere near Manchester, in common with most of his fellow fans, preferring
a kind of long distance virtual fandom. Since I last saw him he has retired
from the Institute of Race Relations. He had joined it as a Librarian and he helped to engineer a bloodless coup which removed the former regime. It had been happy
servicing ex-colonials writing their memoirs about the Raj, but that was replaced
with an active campaigning institution serving the needs of the British Black community,
with Siva as Director (I have often thought that there must be easier ways of
getting promotion, but I have never taxed him with this).We got divorced in 1972, painlessly and without acrimony, in fact without either of us knowing or noticing at the time. It was simply a matter of a callow youth, still quite immature, needing to remove himself from the orbit of this very powerful and persuasive man to complete his growing-up, afraid to become merely a disciple. Between then and now we had seen each other only once, at the Institute. I always think it’s important for good, old friends to see each other at least once every forty years and although we had fulfilled that quota, another visit was now due. Siva and his wife Jenny, no doubt fleeing the revolutionary tumult of Finchley Central, had settled in rural Hertfordshire. They have an idyllic country view where knife-crime is more likely to be a matter of the use of inappropriate cutlery than street violence.
Siva is now 92, and though physically compromised, is sharp as a tack (possibly spelled attack, though he is less aggressive than he used to be, when the stem of his pipe would find my rib-cage with unerring accuracy, though for emphasis, not intentional harm). We sat at their kitchen table, two old men struggling a little with deafness and memory loss, with Jenny as the memory-stick, referee and guide when either of us meandered completely off the point. It was delightful. It is customary in these situations to say that we took up exactly where we had left off, and so we did in our emotions: there was a lot of love around, and we laughed a great deal. But in what we discussed we went back earlier, recalling and reworking the first few years of our relationship, filling in the gaps in each other’s memories, meeting again old friends we had forgotten. It could have been very sad because some have passed and because it is such a marker of one’s own age and ageing, but it was the reverse: the warmth of recollection, almost like a physical sensation, and the possibility of re-making those friendships now.
It was a great re-union: there will be more afternoons like that. But the first episode was so stimulating in so many different ways that sleep was impossible that night: at 3.45am I was sitting up in bed writing this, having given up the attempt. Lying here thinking about the afternoon and so many glimpses of an important past, I was reminded of those flicker books we used to make as kids with a matchstick man drawn in a slightly different stance on every page: flicked through (as with the snap/shuffle of playing cards) they produce an animated figure. It’s an illusion of course, but the afternoon was a little like doing that with a photo album, or with mental pictures of our times together, and that’s not an illusion. It was real and a very important part of my story, come into the light again, and to be cherished.
The first time ever you saw my FESS...
In January 2014 I started to write an autobiography, although I didn't know it at the time. For the previous two years some rather extreme things had been happening to me, or around me: very serious illness, the death of a very close friend, a rupture with another erstwhile close friend because of an abuse of my friendship that was treacherous (more of that another time), but also some very good things that excited me. So it was a strangely good/bad period, often very emotional, the kind of time when you start reviewing your life, thinking of all of your ups and downs, pondering the eternal verities, and the Meaning of Life, and most of all, 'What's it all about, Alfie?'
This turbulence caused some very old memories to float to the surface, things I had effectively forgotten, sometimes for 50 years, from my childhood and adolescence. And so that I wouldn't forget them again, I started to write them down. Then I put a few on Facebook and people like Chrissie Garner and Chris Wickham said very nice things about them. Encouraged by this, I was writing more and more, and with the kind of urgency that would only otherwise come about if I was on Death Row; but I had been, very nearly, and so I knew what the clock ticking sounded like. Very soon it was looking at itself in the mirror and saying "Hmm. You know you could be book if you really wanted to". So with a lot of help from my friends, notably Dave Solomon, Barbara Saunders and Janet Swan, I did.
The point is this: it was one of the best, most enjoyable things I've ever done. What happens is that once you have started, an endless stream (well, trickle to begin with, tsunami at times) of associations leads you to rediscover great chunks of your life, the events, the people and the emotions that accompanied them, and it's a high that is better than you'll get from drugs of any Class, trust me. You thought you had a bad memory that you'd forgotten everything - even forgotten that you'd forgotten. You hadn't, you'd simply mislaid - and now found - the key to the filing cabinet.
If this is sounding a little happy-clappy and evangelical, well I can't deny it. Because I could not give anyone a better gift than this knowledge: how to recapture those vast, distant tracts of your life that you thought were lost - to enjoy all over again - even the bad bits, now they're over. You may think that autobiography is unforgivably narcissistic and self-publicising. Maybe it is. Maybe it can't help but be. It is what it is (just like Brexit). But in there is an immensely valuable, even therapeutic process, which is also a legacy to your grandchildren, and theirs: a personal account of what it was like to live between the Second World War and the time the climate changed. It's not just the winning side which gets to write history - you can also do it for yourself. Finally, there is also a drive to communicate, to externalise, all those lessons you've learned, which are lodged somewhere in your brain and want to get out. The one thing we all have in common is Life. We don't all suffer the same disasters or exult in the same triumphs. As humans we have the ability to think, anticipate and plan. We don't all have to invent the wheel: we can learn so much to help ourselves from other people, especially their construction of their life.
When it was all over and the book was published (self-published - I'm not One Directional, a celebrity cook, nor was my life any number of shades of grey), I decided to write a blog on how to do it. I never finished it *. As I was walking down that long, lonesome road that is Willesden High Road, a stand-up chameleon stopped and offered me a lift, and the rest is hysteria...
So, because I have reasoned that, if you have liked any of this blog you might like the book (logically sound, but maybe not psychologically so) I am pasting in a few chapters over the coming weeks. They are very short and will soon be available on the NHS for insomnia ('Take two chapters before retiring...'). And should you want to add profiteering to narcissism etc in your indictment, I will just point out that the book version gives me a royalty of about two-and-sixpence in the old money, not even 25p) and the paperback version costs £7.20 per copy to produce and £1.70 to post. The net profit will not buy an Aston Martin. Unless some of you, the roughly ten thousand students I tried to teach during my career, would like to crowd-fund it: it's only about ten quid each. Just sayin'...
Where on earth, you may be wondering, did I cross paths with the diminutive songster from Minneapolis, the one with the moustache that was less visible than my grandmother's?
Well, it never
happened: this was a transparent device to capture your attention. But I was Prince-for-a-day in 1953, at St James Infant School, Chase Road, Southgate, N14, where we were temporarily billeted, waiting for the completion of a new primary school. St. James was the opposite: a Victorian relic which must surely have been a workhouse for the undeserving poor when it was built: some of that atmosphere remained.
I have virtually nil recall of my time at
St. James. I do remember gathering bluebells one weekend in a wood out in
Hertfordshire, giving a huge bunch to my teacher, and then seeing them in the
staffroom waste bin later in the day. Hard to say whether this affected my subsequent attitude
towards women or not. And I also remember the classrooms having very high windows that you couldn’t see out of. But the main memory, the episode which haunts me
to this day was some bizarre concatenation of patriotism, monarchism, pagan
rites and Marxism-Leninism, when the school decided to mark May Day and the
Queen’s coronation with a pageant.
It starred the May Queen, SC, the automatic
choice because she was a beautiful little thing, delicate, pretty, modest,
scrupulously well-behaved and therefore absolutely guaranteed not to say ‘oh
shit’ if she dropped her posy. Let the Palmers Green and Southgate Gazette
court correspondent complete the picture:
“The Queen was ably escorted by her gallant Prince, David Milner (7)”. The accompanying picture (quite large and
probably displacing several W.I. reports and the Mayor’s Musings, a page I
always turned to first) showed Susan looking so stunning that it might have
advanced and accelerated my adolescence, had I not been more interested in my Hornby
OO-scale train set than torrid sex then.
Had I followed this order of priority
through life it might have all turned out a lot better. Anyway, there she was,
in her filmy fairylike dress, her hair garlanded with paper flowers, stepping
out on the arm of this funny little fellow in white shoes, socks, shorts and
shirt, plus a huge rosette on the chest, looking ever so much like a target for
a firing squad. But why on earth was he wearing a satellite dish on either side
of his head, in an eerie anticipation of the present day? Ears: they were his
ears.
The
final touch of humiliation, the coup de grace, had been applied by my Mum.
Tiring of wetting and coaxing his hair into a suitably regal style and running
out of time she had improvised a solution to the fly-away bits. Of course, why
didn’t we think of it before – a hair-grip! Assured that it wouldn’t show, and
aware of a 7 year-old’s lack of sanctions, the condemned boy was marched off to
the scaffold. I believe this was the only truly cruel thing my Mum ever did to
me. In a way she was fortunate: today’s sensibilities would have dictated that
the visible hair-grip on a boy constituted child abuse under any contemporary
penal codeI’m sure nobody noticed. I’m sure it was
just a trick of the light that it shone out of the PG&SG’s photograph like
a beacon. One thing is certain: if there had been thunder and lightning, I
would not be alive now to tell this tale.
Did I mention the speech? I had to give a
speech. I was allowed to read it, which I did with all the passion of the second
iteration of the football results. It was my first acquaintance with public
speaking; I felt it went quite well, really. I had thought of a good
beginning: “I have a dream…….. ". (possibly when Martin Luther King plagiarised my words for his Washington speech, ten years later, I should have sued for breach of copyright, but I decided he deserved the world's approbation). And anyway, I got a kind of mobile standing ovation at
the end. There was a whisper of applause, then everybody rose to me and
scampered off to get their cars from the little playground car park...
What a day.
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