The Wintle Blog

It wasn’t the elevation of the younger Milliband which surprised me. Given the choice between Yogi Bear and Boo Boo, the extra-parliamentary party, smarting from years during which powerful leaders had been out of its control, opted perhaps inevitably for the more manipulable of the brothers. No – what stopped me short was a line on the radio in the run-up to the coronation. We were told that the five candidates, before being placed in purdah and told who’d won, had been obliged to surrender all Blackberries, mobiles, pagers and any other electronic means of communication. The precaution – if this commentary was true – must have been taken in case one or more of them chose to leak the news. Aren’t decency and trustworthiness necessary qualities if one is to be eligible to lead a party, a parliament, and a country? In other words, shouldn’t it have been sufficient to say, “look, we don’t want to rob our lady chairperson, the conference, the media and the country of their moment of thea...

It’s January 22, 1942. Six years to the day since Edward VIII was proclaimed King, and now the proclamation is to be repeated. Beside Edward is his Queen, Wallis, née Simpson. His brother, described these days by the State-run Press as “the usurper Albert,” is in hiding (Canada? New Zealand?) with his wife and their two daughters. The honour guard at St James’s Palace consists of Royal Horse Artillery and Waffen SS. There is jubilation among the people – at least the bombs have stopped falling and the boys are home – but there’s also fear, loathing and anxiety. Winston Churchill died in the early Summer of 1941. Hitler seized the moment to redouble the blitz, adding what he called “influential” to strategic bombing. Surrey, Middlesex, Essex and Buckinghamshire were on the way to becoming wastelands when the appeasers resumed power and the public clamour – “why are we fighting this war?” – caused Parliament to sue for peace. The invasion, therefore, happened without a shot being fired. ...

That Wintle, he no blog no more. Where he gone? (Ssssh, says you, don’t encourage him). What happened was this. We went to Greece, to an island called Zakynthos, where, by the way, given the state of the local economy, a plate of calamari costs c. £31.23, and a bottle of wine only slightly less. And we hired a car – Renault? Citroen? can’t remember: some sort of grey mackerel tin, anyway, with an underpowered engine and an unforgiving gearbox. So that: after two weeks crashing the wretched machine upward into first on every ascending mountain corner, and wrenching down through the box on each anfractuous descent, your blogger inflicted himself with a bad case of right-arm tenosynovitis. Ever had this? Lower arm and hand swell up, redden and get hot, and the exquisite accompaniment is a pain I’d describe as like a constant toothache in the wrist. If you do get to sleep, you’re woken shortly after by the screech of your own profanities as you turn over. And among the things you can’t do...

Two events on successive days. First, one of our neighbourhood walls acquired a Banksy overnight. Next, the author Beryl Bainbridge died. The Banksy is sharp and whimsical. Picture and caption (“Make Tea, Not War”) indicate that the “beautiful” generation of flower-empowered potheads who minted the phrase “Make Love, Not War,” is now settling towards a last life-chapter in which their pot is the teapot which chinks on the cup beside the herbaceous border, which is where all the flowers may turn out to have gone. We are being satirised, ladies and gentlemen. Beryl Bainbridge was 75, or 77, depending which paper you read. Is that old, either way? I used to see her drinking whisky in one of the pubs on Camden Parkway. When it was still permitted, she alternated swigs of scotch with drags on a cigarette. According to The Times , she wrote in her diary on Tuesday, April 18, 2000: “The foundations of our view of the world are laid down in childhood. Save for a few excepti...

At one time there was a nameplate on a door in BBC Broadcasting House which said: “Head of the Spoken Word.” Dylan Thomas, apparently, walked past and murmured: “but just think of the power of the Head of the Unspoken Word.” That’s not just a good gag, it’s a truth, and one worth flagging up while the BBC, and ITV, Channels 4 and 5, Sky and Virgin, behave as if no factual programme passes the quality test unless every piece of information is recycled every fifteen minutes, with each clue or inference signalled several times more and explicitly spelled out. Which is why Mary, Queen of Shops (BBC 2, Monday’s., 21:00) is probably the best show around – the stories it really tells are the ones it leaves unsaid. Here’s the pitch: Mary Portas – “I made my life in high end designer retail” – is on a mission, because the local high street is under assault from the big stores, who are “killing” Britain’s small retailers. Five hundred village shops close every year. “We’ll miss our neighbourhood...

A week in County Clare, thanks to the hospitality of generous friends, beside the majesty and mystery of Lough Derg, the waters of which, every time you glance back from book, or plate, or glass, or the face of lover or friend, have changed their colours. The herons lift their great bodies off the stones with one or two wing-flaps, and then retract their necks as they soar, rather as a plane retracts its undercarriage. The swans (albeit bigger) need a long, long run, step and frantic flap along the lake before they get airborne. But once aloft, that creaking, calling sound carries from one shore to the other... “All’s changed since I, hearing at twilight, The first time on this shore, The bell-beat of their wings above my head, Trod with a lighter step...” We’re near enough to visit (again) Yeats’ one-time home, Thor Ballylee, shut this year after a flood, and Coole House and Park, where he memorialised the swans, and to wonder why exactly the mansion there was demolished (one of our f...

So, first, a question: what do these countries have in common? Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Belgium, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Cyprus, Denmark, Estonia, Georgia, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Moldova, Norway, Romania, Russia, Sweden, Turkey, Ukraine and the UK? Answer: all these nations’ entries in the 2010 Eurovision Song Contest are sung in English. I fetch back a recollection of the first EVSC I ever saw, in 1961, when a UK duo, The Allisons, came second with a bright and harmonious number called Are You Sure . What I remember of the other contestants is a kaleidoscope (if you can have a black-and-white kaleidoscope) of language, costume, dance, performance and minstrelsy which ranged from the picture-postcard quaint through the exotic to the bizarre. I also remember thinking how, as they watched, viewers in each country must be ranking the performances on a spectrum that rose towards “extraordinary” from a base point of “ordinary” which was settled in their own coun...