A Welsh Week

I fear I have slacked somewhat, having been back in Manchester for almost thirty-six hours without typing anything new here. It's not as if I haven't been online or anything.

Wee Welsh, or Tiny Taffies

It would appear that the Welsh are, in the main, a rather short race. That may not be a particularly profound observation, but it struck me twice while I was there.

The first occasion was at Mass with Dad on Easter Sunday, when it dawned upon me that I was the tallest person in the congregation. Being a resolutely average five foot ten inches, I could be considered tall in very few gatherings. The Mass, while I'm on the subject, was a pretty haphazard affair. The boney and rather jovial priest had candles given out to all those present, and seemed to sing at random throughout the ceremony. This sort of thing annoys me. I tend to think that if you're going to have rituals then go the whole hog and have a full-blown Latin Mass. If, on the other hand, you're going to trim away whatever's unnecessary, then do so, but do it properly. This Vatican One-and-a-half nonsense just annoyed me.

On Monday I was again struck by the apparent shortness of the Welsh. While visiting the slate mines at Llechwedd, which, should you care to exercise your tongue, is pronounced something like 'thLechhooeth', I must have hit my head off the roof at least eight times. It was most embarrassing, not to mention frustrating. The mines were fascinating, and one cavern, housing a sizeable lake, was particularly eerie. I've read that that cavern was used as a location for the Disney film of The Black Cauldron; this seems unlikely, since the film was animated rather than live-action, but I suspect that it may well have been sketched by Disney artists who would then have used it as the basis for some backgrounds.

Shaggy Dog Stories

I had headed off to Wales on Saturday morning, and was met by my Dad at Bangor's train station. It had cost only £14.65 for a return trip to Bangor from Manchester - Bargain. Mam, Dad, and myself set off in the car for Harlech, where my sister had hired a house for the week.

Leaving Bangor we passed by the old Roman auxiliary fort of Saguntium, easily identifiable by being, as Eddie Izzard would say, a series of small walls. We carried on along a stretch of road that supposedly followed the old and oddly crooked Roman road. Evidently the Romans had decided that the A487, the main road through Caernarvon to Portmadog, was far too busy and cluttered, and instead decided to cut through the mountains.

We had lunch at the beautiful village of Beddgelert, first going to see Gelert's grave. I'd heard his tale as a child, and had deeply upset me then. My dad said that he'd read it when he himself was a child, and it had quite distressed him.

Gelert was a great hunting dog belonging to the thirteenth century Welsh prince, Llewelyn the Great. One day the prince went hunting, leaving the hound behind to guard Llewelyn's infant son. When the prince returned from the hunt the dog eagerly ran out to meet him, and Llewelyn was horrified to see Gelert covered in blood. He rushed into the lodge to see the everything torn asunder, with the cradle overturned and blood everywhere. Horrified, he turned on the dog, drew his sword, and stabbed Gelert, believing that he had killed the child. Only then did he approach the cradle to find the child safe and well, lying beneath the cradle next to the dead body of a wolf. Gelert had clearly slain the wolf to protect the child, and indeed, had been wounded himself in doing so. Llewelyn, it is said, was so distraught by what he had done that he never smiled for the rest of his life, and had the site of the dog's death named Beddgelert, raising a great rock to mark his grave.

While I stood at the grave it struck me that this story was almost certainly a Victorian fiction. I hadn't thought about it since I was a child, but looking at the grave, and the tourist industry that has grown up around it, I couldn't help but be suspicious. Call me a cynic.

So I did some reading when I got to Harlech, and found that the tale appears to date from no earlier than 1798, when a a canny publican, David Pritchard, either invented the story or imported it from elsewhere, and had a big stone put in a field not far from the Goat Hotel, which he owned, claiming that this stone marked Gelert's grave.

Typical.

Men on Harlech in the hollow...

Looming over Harlech, on a great rocky crag, is Harlech castle, a stunning and defiant fortress looking out over the sea. In the fourteenth century the garrison of Harlech, led by Dafydd ap Ivan, held out for several months against Yorkist troops. It is said that when the Lancastrian garrison was asked to surrender, Dafydd proudly replied, 'I have held a castle in France until every old woman in Wales heard of it, and I will hold a castle in Wales until every old woman in France hears of it!' 

They continued to hold out, evntually being starved into submission, but only after the defenders had been promised a pardon. The King tried to go back on his word afterward, but his own commander threatened to replace the garrison himself and renew the siege if the pardon was not granted.

Or so I hear.

The castle was in plain view from the kitchen window and the door of our house, which was perfectly located, with the gorgeous and enormous beach and sand dunes lying just behind us, across the railway track. The town was admittedly a bit of a hike, being quite high above us, but I got used to the steep climb; it reminded me of Siena, Assisi, or Cortona in that regard. Just behind the town were beautiful woodlands, while below the castle law a large flat fertile plain, which had evidently once been the sea bed.

I went for a walk in the woods on Sunday morning after mass, climbing down the 'zigzag' path to the railway track, which I followed back to the house, and that afternoon visited the castle. Inside it members of reenactment society were demonstrating medieval archery techniques and bashing each other with swords and maces. Apparently they don't choreograph their fighting, which strikes me as perhaps just a tad risky; the many dents in their helmets testified to this.

I climbed the spiral staircases to the battlements with surprising ease, perhaps because there was a rope bannister, held in place by metal clips in the wall, giving me something to hold on to. I have a thing about spiral stairways. I don't think I'm actually scared of heights, as such, rather of heights where there's a good chance of me falling to a rather nasty death. Spiral staircases seem to invite that. The stairway in Berlin's Siegesaule is one of the worst in this regard, but the worst of them all is the bell tower of Florence Cathedral. It's between six and seven hundred years old, worn shiny smooth and slippy from countless thousands of feet, and lacking in any form of hand holds. I climbed that, slowly, back in the summer of 1997, with a cold sweat on my forehead and trying to clutch the smooth wall for support. It was worth it for the view, as I knew it would be, but I don't think I'll be doing that again.

The view from Harlech Castle's battlements was fantastic, especially looking north towards Snowdon. Unfortunately, being up on the battlements was quite nerve-wracking. It was extremely blustery, and it didn't feel all that safe being up on the ramparts, especially since the parapet was usually barely above knee high. It would have been quite a drop had I fallen. Suffice to say that I would not be typing now. My nervousness must have been quite obvious.

One woman smiled while passing me and asked 'Not good with heights?'

'No,' I replied, 'You might say that.'


An eye like Mars, to threaten and command...

I had some trouble with the TV schedules while there, mainly because S4C, the Welsh Channel Four, has quite different programming to Channel Four proper. My Mam was a bit put out when she expected The West Wing to be on one night, and I pointed out that that was only in England. It turned out that S4C was showing it the following evening though, so I managed to see it when everyone else had drifted off the bed. I'd seen it before, as it happens. Channel 4 is a full season behind RTE.

On Monday evening we all watched 'Major Fraud', the ITV documentary about how Major Charles Ingram conspired with his wife and a Welsh lecturer called Teflyn Whittock to use a coughing code to cheat and win the grand prize in 'Who Wants to be a Millionaire?'. It was highly entertaining, but what really struck me is how useless the Major must actually have been when in the army.

'Sir, what do we do?'
'Well, we could attack, or attempt to negotiate with them. Or we could just dig in. That's probably the thing to do. I've never heard of radioing for support.'

(Cough)

'No, I still think we should probably dig in. Or attack. Or maybe negotiate. That sounds like a good idea'

'Are you sure?'

'I've never heard of asking for support...' (Cough) 'I'm fairly sure we should either attack or negotiate...'

'So which is it to be?'

'Well, I think we should probably attack.' (Cough - NO! - Cough)

'Is that your final decision?'

'Well, like I've said, I've never heard of asking for support-' (COUGH!) '-so that's what I'm going to do.'

'What?'

'Yes. I'm going to go for that. I'm going to ask for support.'

'You're not going to attack?'

'No. I'm going to ask for support.'

'Even though you've never heard of doing that before?'

'Yes. Definitely.'

'Okay....'

A man to inspire confidence in the field, what? I bet you'd follow him to Hell and back.

Fire on the Mountain shall find the harp of gold...

On Tuesday I went out to Dolgellau with Mam and Dad. After lunch Dad drove me around the eastern slopes of Cader Idris, and as we neared the northern shores of Tal y Llyn, a rather beautiful lake and the site of the finale of The Grey King, I got out and started walking. My plan was finally to see places that I'd read about and been enchanted by the thought of as a child.

I walked the length of the lake, around its southern tip, and then further along the valley, after a couple of miles turning right along a winding lane that led me over a pass into the adjoining Dysynni valley.

The Dysynni valley is beautiful, a level green and gold plain, surrounded at flanks and rear by high mountains and gently leading down to the sea by Tywyn, from where I was due to catch a train to Barmouth a few hours later. There are very few interruptions to the flatness of the valley, but one striking one lay a mile or so north of where I entered the valley, so I set out in that direction.

Castel y Bere is a thirteenth century castle, built by Llewelyn, apparently, around 1220, and taken by the English around 1280. They extended the castle greatly, but it fell again when the Welsh rose up a few years later; after that it was left to nature to break it down. Situated on a rocky and heavily wooded hill, the castle appears to grow directly out of the rock, with its thick broken walls and pretty grassy courtyards. It's well worth a visit if you're ever in the area.

As I emerged from the woods towards the castle I was spotted by a young boy, brandishing a plastic sword and shouting 'I can see you, Sir Knight!' No sooner had he uttered the words he realised that I was not who he thought I was, and ran away.

I met his father shortly afterwards, a fellow named Will who was originally from the area but now lived in Somerset with his wife Fiona. He seemed to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of the castle, which is hardly surprising, since as a child his mother would regularly leave him there with his friends for the day, and he grew up playing in the ruins and the woods, hearing stories and reading about the place.

After spending a couple of hours relaxing in the castle, clambering about, chatting, and admiring the views, I returned back to the path and continued towards Tywyn.

I soon reached the crossroads where I had initially turned right towards the castle. The map indicated that a standing stone should have been there, but it took me some time to find it, concealed as it was behind a hedge, and with the rusty hinges of an even rustier gate embedded in it. This doesn't strike me as a wholly appropriate way to treat prehistoric monuments, however humble.

Another mile or so along I came to the massive rocky outcrop that is Craig y Aderyn, the Bird Rock. This is the only place in Britain where cormorants nest inland, albeit only four miles from the sea. I'd never seen them before, and didn't realise quite how big they were. In a more nostalgic vein, Craig y Aderyn is also the place in The Grey King where Will and Bran find the Harp of Gold.

It was quite a painful journey to Bryncrug, as my legs started to play up. I have bad knees, and a tendency to forget to take my glucosamine supplements for them, despite one of my friends having gone so far as to buy some for me at one point. Anyway, by the time I reached Bryncrug, a tiny village, it was hitting seven and I had a further two miles to go before I got to Tywyn, from where my train was due to leave for Barmouth at 7:31. Normally this wouldn't have been a problem, but with every step feeling like a small explosion in my knee, this was going to be difficult.

In agony I rushed to Tywyn, and then limped painfully through the town as fast as I could, ignoring the church that houses the oldest extant bit of written Welsh, which is mentioned in one of Susan Cooper's books, and made it to the station at 7:33. I gave thanks for the inneficiency of British railways and dragged my tortured legs up the hill to the station and then boarded the train, sagging in exhaustion into a seat to wait for someone to sell me a ticket. The doors closed, and the train started to move.

The wrong way.

I sighed with resignation and dug about in my bag for the timetable. Yes, the 7:31 for Barmouth had already gone, it appeared, as it was scheduled to do. I was clearly on the 7:34 to Machynlleth, where, if I wanted, I could get off and change to go to Birmingham. Feeling that would be rather off my planned route, I paid 35p and got off in Aberdyfi, where, incidentally Silver on the Tree begins. This was, if you'll pardon the expression, a bit of a silver lining. 

I had two hours to kill, so wandered about futiley looking for an open newsagent, then sat in the Dovey Inn, where I had a pint of bitter and a very welcome bowl of soup, before heading off to get a train direct to Harlech.

My right knee has almost recovered.


Back for Good
I came back to Manchester on Wednesday afternoon, Dad having brought me as far as Porthmadog. I got a bus to Bangor from there, and then a train to Manchester. God alone knows when I'll get away again. I have a lot of work ahead of me in the next while, so I might not get a chance to get out of here again until June, when I have weddings to attend. We'll see.

Susan Cooper And The Worlds That Books Build

I felt somewhat tender this morning, despite not having overindulged by any stretch of the imagination when I was out last night. There are times when I feel rather shortchanged on the alcohol-hangover exchange mechanism. If I have a mad night, I expect to suffer. Fair enough. But not when I just have a couple of beers. I mean, come on. Where's the justice in that?

Late in the afternoon I went into town on a brief shopping blitz to buy presents for my nephews and niece. I was pretty clear on what I wanted to get one of them, but I hadn't the faintest idea what to do for the other two.

I checked the theatre to see was Stuart in, just to say hello, but it was closed so I made a direct line for Waterstones. Crossing Saint Anne's Square I met a friend of a friend, who'd been out on the tear with a couple of my mates the previous evening. She too was on a present-buying mission, so we had a root around Waterstones together.

She's a historian like myself, albeit quite a bit more modern than me, working on American slavery, and so naturally suggested a children's history book for the elder of my nephews. I was tempted by Terry Deary's Horrible Histories, but I'm fairly sure the lads have a few of them and I'd worry that I'd wind up getting them something they'd already have. I tentatively settled on a big book about Rome, and then Laura and I went our separate ways, she going into the history section while I went up another floor to the children's section.

I'd wanted to get The Dark is Rising Sequence by Susan Cooper, a book I had read repeatedly and loved dearly as a child and young teenager. Brother the Elder gave it to me, for my ninth birthday, if I remember rightly.

Unfortunately, although the shop computer was convinced there were two copies in stock, neither was anywhere to be found. Since that was the only present I had planned, I decided to go back to the chocolate egg option for all, and left the Roman book back on the shelf.

Strolling back across Saint Anne's Square I thought I'd chance my arm in the smaller Waterstones there, and found three copies of the Cooper book. 'Back of the net!' I thought, and set about getting something for the other two. I spotted Neil Gaiman's Coraline there and thought that would be an ideal gift for the eldest of the three - it's a fine book, wonderful and scary - so decided to buy that. And after ringing my sister to check, I picked up Jill Murphy's The Worst Witch for my niece.

Happy with my purchases I came home, and then opened Coraline, for no particular reason, and made a rather pleasant discovery.

Neil Gaiman had signed it. 

By the pleasant lake the sleepers lie...

So why was I so keen on getting the Susan Cooper book at this point? Couldn't it wait?

Well, yes, it could have. But this weekend is quite special.

I'm going to Wales in the morning. Sister the Eldest has hired a house for herself, her husband, and the kids for a few days, and Mam and Dad are coming over from Ireland. Well, I suppose they're already there, more or less; they're staying over in Bangor tonight.

I've never been to north Wales before, though I've been through it dozens of times. Other than journeys by road and rail through Anglesea and along the north coast, my only real experience of Wales is of a day in Swansea at a University Open Day, and a rainy day in Cardiff, spent in profitable conversation about different aspects of ancient warfare.

But I've always wanted to go to north Wales, mainly because the Grey King and Silver on the Tree, the last two books in the Dark is Rising Sequence are set there. I'm probably one of the few Irish people who finds Welsh reasonably easy to pronounce, due to having carefully studied the lesson in Welsh pronunciation Bran gives Will in The Grey King, and Cader Idris has drawn me since I was eight.

Cader Idris and Tal y Llyn are only a few miles south of where we'll be staying. I'll finally get to see them.

And if the kids read Cooper's books, these places might someday have the same magical meaning for them that they do for me.

Parochial, but not provincial...
In some respects, when I was growing up in Dublin, England and Wales were more real to me than Ireland.

That sounds odd, but while I knew every inch of my parish as a child, and even now it seems soaked in a deeply personal mythology of place, my knowledge of places further away was limited. Ballyfermot was a frightening place across the field, populated, or so it seemed, by savage shaven-headed men on horseback -- it was only safe to go there, to the Library, or to the Church, when accompanied by an adult. Lucan and Clondalkin were exotic faraway lands where older brothers and sisters went to school, while Ashtown and Baldoyle were where my grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins lived. The Phoenix Park I knew well, as I did Montpellier Hill, site of the notorious Hellfire Club, and the City Centre began to gain familiarity once my friends and I began sneaking in on the bus, at the rather precocious ages of eight and nine.

But aside from that? Outside Dublin?

I knew Offaly quite well, and spent plenty of Sundays in Wicklow and the odd spot in Kildare, but other than that, the country was a blur to me. I knew of plenty of places, but with very few exceptions, they were no more than names on a map.

A Bookworm's Atlas...

On the other hand, I read a lot as a child. Too much, perhaps. And from the age of eight on, I think I lived almost in a world that books built, protecting myself from the world with stories. And most of those stories - at least most of those that weren't set in outer space, Narnia, Prydain, Oz, Middle Earth, or southern California -- were set in England.

Malcolm Saville's 'Lone Piner' books have long left me with a wish to visit Rye, and Winchelsea, and Romney Marsh, and to wander throughtout Shropshire. Richard Adams made no secret of the fact that if anyone wanted to they could visit Watership Down. Wimbledon Common is still the home of the Wombles for me, thanks to Elisabeth Beresford's books at least as much as the television series. And Roger Lancelyn Green's phenomenal retelling of the tale of Sir Gawaine has ensured that whenever people mention the Wirral to me I don't think of shrill scousers, but rather of the inhospitable wilderness that was the home of the Green Knight.

Thanks to Susan Cooper's books, I've long had a desire to visit not just North Wales, but Cornwall too, the setting for Over Sea, Under Stone and Greenwitch. I've made a point of avoiding Alderley Edge since coming to Manchester, even though Cheshire is really only a short drive away, because I suspect that the reality of middle England would destroy the mystique conjured up by Alan Garner in The Weirdstone of Brisingamen.

Other writers, rather than locating their books in any particular location, instead conjured up a flavour of a fictional England that had more reality to me than any anecdotal Ireland, however vague their writings were. I could never figure out where Michelle Magorian had set Goodnight Mr Tom, but its Englishness, at least on paper, was beyond doubt. E. Nesbit, with books like The Enchanted Castle and Five Children and It, filled this world with magic, as if it were needed, while Hugh Lofting's Doctor Doolittle merrily plied his trade across the land. And surely it was on the Thames that Ratty persuaded Mole that there was nothing more enjoyable than messing about in boats? Even if it wasn't the Thames, it was blatantly England. It could hardly have been anywhere else.

Quarries and Smugglers

Enid Blyton hardly ever located her books anywhere in particular -- though they're blatantly all set in the West Country -- but through them I became enamoured with this strange land of moors, coves, and islands. The villains in Blyton stories were almost invariably smugglers. As a child I had a severe dislike of the dictionary, and tended to believe that if a word was important its meaning would be clear soon enough. This generally worked, but, sadly, Enid never saw fit to explain what exactly smugglers did. I must have read at least fifty Blyton books without any idea what the bad guys were up to. 

Quarries were another regular feature of her books, and a great place to find prehistoric arrowheads in. I was particularly excited when I was about nine and saw on a map that there was a quarry only a few miles from my house. Diarmait and myself plotted at length to go there, but never did. I've no idea what he wanted to go there for, but for me, arrowheads were crying out to be found. Despite having also read dozens of Doctor Who novels, far too many of which were set in and around English quarries, I never expected to find any Cybermen tramping about. There were, after all, limits to my credulity. 

In hindset, a somewhat inaccurate view of British education...

That said, the consensus of my childhood reading did lead me to think all English children went to boarding school. Roald Dahl talked about his own experiences there in The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, but most of the fictional characters in whose exploits I revelled were clearly public-school sorts; they came home for the holidays, after all.

I didn't read any 'Billy Bunter' or 'William' books, but I read my fair share of books set in public schools.  Blyton's 'Malory Towers' and 'Saint Clare's' books being engaging but inferior sisters of Anthony Buckeridge's marvellous 'Jennings' books. Buckeridge was a true comic genius, a Wodehouse for children, and his books enamoured me of this odd land where people lived in their schools, and played cricket, and learned Latin. True, the school at the start of C.S. Lewis's The Voyage of the Dawn Treader didn't sound like much fun, but that was clearly an anomaly.

The idea of midnight feasts always intrigued me, and I was fascinated by this odd game called 'lacrosse' that the girls played. It all seemed so exotic.

I suspect that I would have loved Harry Potter, had he been around then. He would have fitted right in.

What state is the Union in?

I was reading Bush’s State of the Union address yesterday, and am troubled by all sorts of things in it. I appreciate that his backing attempts to deal with AIDS in Africa is a very good thing, and I can’t comment on his economic policies because they’re none of my business. But as the world’s only superpower, America’s foreign policy concerns everybody.

 

It is strange that GWB should be claiming that one of his goals is 'to promote energy independence [...] while dramatically improving the environment'. His quest for energy independence has driven him to plan history’s biggest war crime, as discussed yesterday. As for improving the environment, I notice that no attempt is even hinted at regarding curtailing the SUV Hydra; this is hardly surprising for an Oil lobby president who has repealed environmental legislation, plans to plunder Alaskan reserves irrespective of the consequences, and has rejected the Kyoto Agreement.

 

‘The American flag stands for more than our power and our interests.’ Presumably then it stands primarily for power and interests. Fair enough, as long as we're clear on that. It may be a disappointment to those who salute it thinking it represents American ideals, but they can console themselves with the thought that the flag represents ideals too, sort of as an afterthought, or a by-product. What are these ideals, so?

 

'Our founders dedicated this country to the cause of human dignity, the rights of every person, and the possibilities of every life. This conviction leads us into the world to help the afflicted, and defend the peace, and confound the designs of evil men.’ The quasi-biblical terminology troubles me, but my main concern here is the reference to defending ‘the peace’. Is preparing to slaughter countless thousands defending peace? After all, prevention is better than cure. And is slaughtering countless thousands, in the knowledge that this will inspire anger, hatred, and fanaticism, creating countless new enemies, really conducive to peace?

 

I like the reference to continuing to seek for peace between ‘a secure Israel and a democratic Palestine.’ Interesting. Israel doesn’t need to be democratic, while whatever jigsaw state the Palestinians are allowed have will be far from secure.

 

‘And this nation is leading the world in confronting and defeating the man-made evil of international terrorism’ Maybe so, but if that’s the case then George ought to consider Nietzsche’s injunction to ‘Battle not with monsters, lest you become a monster.’ As my last posting hopefully made clear, terror tactics appear to be all the rage in Washington nowadays.

 

‘All told, more than 3,000 suspected terrorists have been arrested in many countries. Many others have met a different fate. Let's put it this way -- they are no longer a problem to the United States and our friends and allies.’ Ignore the issue of what happened to these suspected terrorists for a moment. Just concentrate on one word. Suspected. We don’t know if these people who were arrested or who ‘met a different fate’ were terrorists or not. Whatever happened to that principle of being innocent until proven guilty? And what was the ‘different fate’? Quite a chilling euphemism, that one. Is the President making a little joke here, about people who might or might not have been guilty of conducting terrorist operations being killed in combat or even executions or assassinations?

 

‘One by one, the terrorists are learning the meaning of American justice.’ That last phrase is interesting. Justice is a universal quality, not a local or national one. By talking about ‘the meaning of American justice’, Bush implied that American justice is distinct from true justice. Sometimes these rhetorical flourishes reveal what is really going on . . .

 

‘Whatever the duration of this struggle, and whatever the difficulties, we will not permit the triumph of violence in the affairs of men -- free people will set the course of history.’ Does this even need a comment? He’s about to begin a war. He’s not merely permitting the triumph of violence, he is perpetuating it.

 

(I thought for the moment that he was lifting Shakespeare here - There is a tide in the affairs of men / Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune’ and all that. I don’t think it’s anything of the sort, though. In the Two Towers there are several references to threats to the world of men, and if you look at George W. Bush’s lines prior to this what do we see but ‘In the ruins of two towers, at the western wall of the Pentagon, on a field in Pennsylvania, this nation made a pledge, and we renew that pledge tonight.’ So he’s riffing on Tolkien.)

 

‘This threat is new; America's duty is familiar. Throughout the 20th century, small groups of men seized control of great nations, built armies and arsenals, and set out to dominate the weak and intimidate the world.’ Ignoring the questionable historical claims in the subsequent sentences, settle for how this sentence itself could well be used to summarise how Bush and his buddies took power in what was effectively a bloodless coup, and then began to behave on the global stage.

 

'All free nations have a stake in preventing sudden and catastrophic attacks. And we're asking them to join us, and many are doing so. Yet the course of this nation does not depend on the decisions of others. Whatever action is required, whenever action is necessary, I will defend the freedom and security of the American people.' Aside from the Messianic tone here, is he officially saying that the UN is irrelevant? That global approval is no longer necessary?

 

'Iranians, like all people, have a right to choose their own government and determine their own destiny -- and the United States supports their aspirations to live in freedom.' I'm glad that the US now supports Iranian aspirations to live in freedom. It didn't when the Shah was in power. I wonder how it feels about General Musharraf, or the House of Saud, or on the other hand Castro or Chavez?

I was amused by the claim that Hussein has shown ‘utter contempt for the United Nations, and for the opinion of the world.’ This from the man who has scorned the Kyoto Agreement, and attempted to strangle the International Criminal Court. References to pots calling kettles black would not be out of place . . .

 

'U.S. intelligence indicates that Saddam Hussein had upwards of 30,000 munitions capable of delivering chemical agents. Inspectors recently turned up 16 of them -- despite Iraq's recent declaration denying their existence. Saddam Hussein has not accounted for the remaining 29,984 of these prohibited munitions.' Perhaps so, but such missiles are hardly a threat to anybody. They are used on unguided rocket artillery systems, and only have a range of about 12.5 miles. They might be useful in defending against an invading army, but not much else.

 

'Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production.' Several nuclear scientists have said that such tubes probably weren't suitable for this purpose, while the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed El Baradei, thinks they were probably for use in non nuclear rockets which would have a range less than 150 kilometres. I don't know why he thinks that, but Mr Bush should probably follow his lead on this matter, if he is indeed 'strongly supporting the International Atomic Energy Agency in its mission to track and control nuclear materials around the world', as he claims.

 

'The 108 U.N. inspectors were sent to conduct -- were not sent to conduct a scavenger hunt for hidden materials across a country the size of California.' Really? I imagine that's news to the inspectors. Bush was right before he corrected himself. I think Iraq may be even bigger than California, for what it's worth.

 

Referring to Hussein’s as yet unseen arsenal, Bush claimed ‘The only possible explanation, the only possible use he could have for those weapons, is to dominate, intimidate, or attack.’ That’s a reasonable supposition, I suppose. After all, that’s what Bush uses them for.

 

'Evidence from intelligence sources, secret communications, and statements by people now in custody reveal that Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of al Qaeda.' This seems rather unlikely, since round the time of the attack on the World Trade Centre it was thought that Hussein had very few links with terrorists, since he regarded them as unreliable and potential loose cannons. A spurious story which circulated in the aftermath of September Eleventh concerning meetings between Mohamed Atta and a prominent Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague looks unfounded, and no other convincing evidence for such a link has been drawn up. It is certainly possibly that imprisoned members of Al Qa'ida may have claimed that there was a link between Iraq and their network, but they may well have been attempting to provoke a war, knowing how it is likely to whip the Islamic world into a frenzy. We need to remember that Osama bin Laden has described Saddam Hussein as 'an apostate, an infidel, and a traitor to Islam.'

 

‘Before September the 11th, many in the world believed that Saddam Hussein could be contained. But chemical agents, lethal viruses and shadowy terrorist networks are not easily contained. Imagine those 19 hijackers with other weapons and other plans -- this time armed by Saddam Hussein.’ There is a logical collapse somewhere in the middle here. Hussein hasn’t done anything except fire off the odd anti-aircraft gun in over a decade. If he had anthrax or such weapons, he would have been in a perfect position to supply terrorists before September the eleventh. So why didn’t he use them? This whole argument is utter rubbish.

 

‘Your enemy is not surrounding your country -- your enemy is ruling your country. And the day he and his regime are removed from power will be the day of your liberation.’ George was referring to those ‘brave and oppressed’ Iraqis,* not the people of America. Strange.

 

*You know, the ones that have been dying for the past twelve years since their water supply was ruined by the last Western attack on Iraq – a war crime, incidentally, if you take a look at article 54 of the Geneva convention.

 

Finally, from my standpoint as a military historian, the following claim is completely false. ‘Sending Americans into battle is the most profound decision a President can make. The technologies of war have changed; the risks and suffering of war have not.’ This is a lie. The risks have changed immensely. Over 58,000 Americans died in the Vietnam War. Guess how many died in the Kosovo conflict?

 

Answers on a postcard please.

Memories are made of this...

Memory is a deeply mysterious thing, don't you think?

Take the example of how a couple of weeks back, when Diarmait was over from Dublin. After being out in Squirrels we wound up drinking tea in my room with a few of the others. Stories were swapped. 

Diarmait entertained the crowd with a story of how we'd cycled down towards the river in Palmerstown as children. His bike was a Releigh Grifter, which bore much the same relationship to a BMX as a rhino does to a horse; mine was its idiot cousin, a small blue beast with solid tyres and back-pedalling rear brakes and a regular front brake. Hurtling downhill, for Mill Lane is very steep, I pulled the front brakes for no apparent reason and was catapulted not merely over the handlebars but over an adjacent wall into the local hospital for mentally handicapped people. There I was surrounded by the patients, who were deeply fascinated by this unusual visit. A nurse charged over, scattering the crowd, and yelling at me to leave. I gladly obliged.

An entertaining tale, I'm sure you'll agree, but one which, as I pointed out to Diarmait the following day, rates at about a mere eight per cent on any authenticity index. Elements in the tale do certainly converge, however tangentially, with reality, but I'd not say more than that...

We did indeed cycle headlong down the very steep Mill Lane, and accidents nearly took place, but nothing like this. The bike as described by Diarmait is a mutant hybrid of my sister's bike, a maroon machine with back-pedalling brakes, and my own inferior specimen, a tiny thing, navy blue with solid tyres and, by the time we took to hurtling down Mill Lane, no brakes whatsoever. My braking technique consisted of putting my shoes on the ground several times in succession to slow the infernal device down, and then a final application of sole to ground. It was a braking technique that wore out many a shoe, as you can doubtless imagine. The only person I know of who was cast over the front of his handlebars was Christopher Cass, and that tale has already been narrated on this site; I certainly never suffered such an ejection; indeed my cycling accidents were usually more elaborate, less dignified, and more painful. I would rather not speak of them. And while there is indeed an enormous hospital for mentally handicapped people in Palmerstown, located to either side of Mill Lane, I'm fairly sure that there is no point at which someone could be catapulted from the road into the grounds. The wall is too high, and would surely be at an impossible angle to the road for such a feat to occur. Which is a shame, because the story, while entertaining as it stand, would be even better if true.

Diarmait believes this story. He has apparently been telling it for years. It is possible that a true story, based perhaps on simply how stupid it was for me even to attempt cycling down that hill on my ridiculous 'bike', grew with the telling, mutating in strange directions, converging with other anecdotes and speculations, eventually freezing into the form in which it was told the other day. I guess it's been told that way for so long that it's become almost 'historical'.

What's the point of this, you might ask? This site, you are probably saying, while rambling and never remotely to the point, usually has at least some tangential connection to events that happened that day. Well, true enough. I'm getting there.

I described at some length yesterday the rules and etiquette of our computer room. For the past couple of days, keys have been rarely necessary, save to provide support when you absolutely needed to claim a computer, because the door was really difficult to shut. There appeared to be nothing wrong with the lock. At some ungodly hour last night, or this morning to be chronologically accurate, I realised what was causing the door to remain so conveniently open.

Along the floor, at the base of the door, where a door jam ought to be, lies a thin metal strip, pinning the carpets in place. This strip has been loosened by the simple expedient of having partially unscrewed one of the screws. The strip is now slightly raised; more importantly the screw itself protrudes a good centimetre above the strip, creating a small, but fairly effective, doorstop.

I was impressed. Indeed, I still am.

I have no idea who did this, but that's not the point. This minor act of sabotage reminded me of an old school friend, a potential criminal mastermind who was content to waste his talents and become a mere Tom Sawyer-esque waster. God only knows where he is now.

Eoin was a great man for minor acts of sabotage. His speciality was lightbulb theft. Many's the time he'd be spotted sauntering about our school's corridors, drifting aimlessly between classes, stretching a casual arm above his head, swiftly and nonchalantly removing lightbulbs. The Lord alone knows how many lightbulbs the school was deprived of during Eoin's five year reign of mischief.

One of his finest hours took place while in our Inter Cert year, if I recall even remotely correctly. Whenever we'd have book-keeping homework in commerce class the answers would be displayed on the overhead projector the following day. One day, for some reason, no sooner had the class begun that our teacher had to leave the room; hardly had he gone, leaving us with work to do, that Eoin darted out of his seat and over to the projector. He calmly took the plug from the socket and produced a screwdriver from his pocket. It was the work of a moment to open the plug, remove the fuse, reassemble it, plug it in again, and then merrily skip back to his seat. Not a word had been said, and I think less than a couple of minutes had passed. When our teacher returned he was not in a good mood, and his temper was further aggravated by the inexplicable failure of the projector to work. Much time was wasted in that particular class that day.

A good story, I think you'll agree, and one I've been telling for years.

Lately, however, I've begun to doubt it. Could I have once been talking to him, and he merely suggested doing this? Or maybe a few of us had been talking in the canteen over whether such a thing would be possible? In either case the scenario could well have been vividly imagined and described, always preceded with the words 'Wouldn't it be brilliant if...' And at some point those opening words could have been dropped. And eventually the story would have become, to all intents and purposes, true.

In the World Fantasy Award-winning 'Midsummer Night's Dream' issue of Sandman Neil Gaiman has Dream comment to Auberon and Titania that 'Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and dreams are the shadow truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes, and forgot.'

He has a point. But I wish I could be sure.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern might have been better off dead

Two years ago, when I was intermittently working at the Canadian excavations at Stymphalos in Greece, I wound up attending a performance of Aristophanes' classic anti-war play, The Acharnians. Unfortunately, I hadn't actually read the play at that point, and it was in modern Greek -- or at least pronounced in the modern Greek fashion, so I understood nothing. Nor did my friends. Josh, Andrea, Lisa, Crystal, Dana, John, and several others including myself sat clustered together high up in the theatre at Epidavros, staring in bemusement, frequently gesturing in confusion, and laughing in the wrong parts. Afterwards, I commented that it was like watching a Monty Python sketch in a foreign language, if it had been directed by Salvador Dali. I'll tell you all about it some other time, if you're good.

Anyway, I never imagined that I would someday have the same experience when watching an English play.

Last night was extraordinary. It was beyond all my expectations. 'Theatre of the Absurd' indeed... you have no idea.

I mentioned yesterday that last year's play, A Bird in the Hand, was by all accounts abysmal. Among other oddities, it featured, I am told, one character who was unaccountably covered in glitter for the duration of the show. To this day, nobody knows why. Marlisa, who attended that show, was somewhat anxious that this year's display might not remotely rival that mess. She need not have worried. Brace yourselves . . .

Of the two main characters in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Guildenstern tends to be the wordier, having longer speeches, questioning the meaning of things; Rosencratz, on the other hand, is simpler, earthier, more concerned with the here and now. This is not always the case, as at times the characters are virtually interchangeable, but it works as a general rule of thumb.

It was inconvenient then, that I could hardly understand a word Guildenstern said. He had an impenetrable Geordie accent, tended to splutter, and spoke incredibly fast. Now, I speak fast, as you know, but at least I make a brave effort to separate the words. Guildenstern made no such attempts, so that whenever he spoke, which was often, all that would be emitted were strange machine gun-like bursts of Geordie, loud and incomprehensible splutterings of northern saliva.

To give an example, take a look at the following passage, where coins have been flipped, turning up heads on eighty-nine occasions in a row. After the eighty-ninth flip, Guildenstern wonders how this could happen:

"List of possible explanations. One: I'm willing it. Inside where nothing shows, I am the essence of a man spinning double-headed coins, and betting against himself in private atonement for an unremembered past. Two: time has stopped dead, and the single experience of one coin being spun once has been repeated ninety-times. On the whole, doubtful. Three: divine intervention. Four: a spectacular vindication of the principle that each individual coin spun individually is as likely to come down heads as tails and therefore should cause no surprise each individual time it does."

Now, I count ninety-four words there. I may be off, slightly, but that's about right. Guess how many I could distinguish when they were (spl)uttered last night?

Two.

'Divine intervention.'

I make that less than 3 per cent of the whole thing. Granted, that was a particularly puzzling passage, but even so, I doubt he made it above a comprehensibility ratio of 15 per cent over the course of the play. What made this particularly bizarre was that the girl playing Rosencrantz was fine, or at any rate I could understand her. I don't ask for much really. So what would generally happen was that Guildenstern would splutter away for a minute or two, and the Rosencrantz would reply with a clear, pointed, one-liner. Than Guildenstern would go off again. . . with barely a word being distinguishable.

To say I was mystified would be putting it mildly. Marlisa constantly had to turn away from me, or to shield her eyes so that they did not inadvertently alight on my dumbfounded face. Every time Guildenstern spoke I leaned slightly forward; sometimes my eyes narrowed and my head tilted in a futile effort to catch some semblance of Guildenstern's meaning; other times my eyes simply widened, my jaw dropped, and my hands spread in a blatant state of hopeless perplexity. My mixture of horror and confusion had her on the edge of laughter for the duration of the play, and she constantly had to nudge me so I adopted a more seemly countenance.

Guildenstern, for the record, was played by the same guy who played the lead in a Bird in the Hand last year. Sadly, Marlisa can't remember how he sounded, but, I'm told, he was distinctive by having just one facial expression, a perpetual sneer of some sort. Shaw remarked at the interval that, although it sounded really nasty to say this, the guy playing Guildenstern had the same face as the guy who haunted her childhood nightmares.

A bit of a breather...

The interval was fun, it must be said. We resisted the temptation to run away - to be fair, I was enjoying the weirdness too much, and in any case, I don't think our warden would have been happy had all five of her postgrads in the audience all scarpered at half-time. She knew we were there. When we arrived, we were announced to the two wardens, who would then shake our hands... ' Miss Hubbard!.... Miss Cartwright!.... Miss Ross!.... Mr Daly!....and so forth.'

No, the interval was spent munching sandwiches and drinking wine, while laughing at the photos of the boys in the hallway - our brother hall, as you might expect, is an all-male hall. Aside from the fact that it appears that the boys must get through a vast quantity of hair gel - I felt decidedly undergroomed -- many of them have highly entertaining names. Mr Drinkall... Mr Drysdale... Mr Coxhead. Need I say more?

Before returning to the play, Shaw and I explained the plot of Hamlet, so that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead might be slightly more comprehensible to the others. In case you don't know, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are just about the two least significant characters in Hamlet, and R&GaD takes place in the margins of that play, with the action occasionally intersecting with episodes from the source play.

The explanation given by Shaw and me was quite entertaining, I think, and must have come across as something from 'The Reduced Shakespeare Company,' with each of us completing the other's sentences, adding in quirky references, surprising ourselves my how much we remembered, and being mutually nonchalant when our memories failed us. I'm not entirely sure that it helped the others, though.

Having resisted temptation...

The second half began with us trying to keep straight faces. Not a hope. The minute Guildenstern opened his mouth it was all I could do to stifle the paroxysms of laughter than threatened to overwhelm me. I was shaking with mirth, keeping my mouth shut the whole time, and occasionally failing to control the snorts from my nose. Jenny, two seats along, held her programme over her face to conceal the tears that were running down her cheeks. She had the added disadvantage of being able to see the guys working the lights constantly holding up cards with hastily scrawled words on them in a desperate attempt to prompt the leads.

Making our situation, and indeed, behaviour, worse, was the fact that the lads who'd been sitting in front of us during the first half had all done a runner, so that we were in plain sight of the cast. And we'd gone to so much trouble, sitting in the back row over at the edge.

(The back row is the only place to sit when you have a bad feeling about plays. Alison, Georgia, Claire, Daron, and I once saw a spectacularly bad version of King Oedipus in UCD, where we were all very grateful that we were seated well away from the stage. Especially when all five of us were quaking with silent laughter. I had to take my glasses off that time, so I couldn't see the stage. I'm not sure what caused me to crack that time... was it the dubious bandage Oedipus wore over his gouged-out eyes....or the rather busty messenger falling onto the stage.... or the shepherd with crutches and a broken leg?)

During the second half the American girl playing Hamlet was far more prominent that earlier on - Shaw reckoned she was drunk, since she was slurring so much - and indeed, at one point I heard what sounded like a beer can being dropped backstage, but I half-suspect that she'd been taking acting lessons from Guildenstern. Whenever she spoke it seemed as though the stage was being filled with a fine mist. There's a bit where Hamlet says that Rosencrantz is like a sponge 'that soaks up the King's countenance, his rewards, his authorities... when he needs what you have glean'd, it is but squeezing you and, sponge, you shall be dry again.' By the end of that I bet that poor Guildenstern was wishing for a sponge to mop the spittle off herself.

The Player King definitely had the privilege of creating the second half's most memorable moment, revealing himself on the ship to England by leaping up and declaring 'Ah Ha!' Not, in the traditional manner, I must point out. No. Think Alan Partridge.

As for the rest of the cast? 

The director played Polonius, and was clearly inspired by every Hammer Horror 'Igor' that has been committed to film... 

Ophelia and Horatio were played by the same person, who was fine in that small part (there are no small parts - only small actors - blahblahblah)...

Gertrude was nicely unobtrusive, a good thing compared to some of the others... 

And the King? Ah, Claudius was definitely a real find. This smiling damned villain was wan and insipid, almost zombified in appearance. His speech was a thin and reedy upper-class English accent, punctuated with countless pauses, each one located with a truly Shatnerian randomness.

I quite liked the guy playing Alfred, one of the tragedians... definitely the play's unsung hero.

I should stop now. Who am I to take the piss out of this? I'd never have the nerve to do it myself. Fair play to them for having the balls to do it.

(Except for Guildenstern, who has apparently been in thirty-five plays, and doesn't feel complete without a script on his desk. By this point he should have realised how crap he is. Plonker.)

Rubbing my hands in anticipation...

This evening I'm going to see 'Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead' in our brother hall. Last year the combined halls Christmas play was an unintentional comic masterpiece - a farce, for want of a better word. This was, however, as much due to the material being performed as it was to the performance. At least this year they're doing a decent play. I'm looking forward to this...

That Damn Lard

I'm looking forward to this evening, when I'll have a visitor from Dublin, my first since moving to Manchester. My visitor is one of my two oldest friends, the leader of a childhood trio that was -- frankly -- rather wild. At any given moment in our youth we were bound to be wandering around our neighbourhood's more remote spots, doing things we, frankly, shouldn't have been doing.

We each had our preordained role. My visitor was the oldest, and had a legion of older brothers to inspire him; as such he was the leader, and it was his job to come up with ideas. His deputy's job was to get enthusiastic about them so we would actually carry them out. Mine, invariably, was to get caught, since I was always prone to stitches, which made it hard to run far.

Getting caught was generally not a problem though, since unless I had been apprehended by an adult, our leader was always able to return and point out that he had numerous older brothers. Faced with the implications of this, my captor would almost always let me go.

One of the few exceptions to this rule was a thoroughly lovely fella, a near neighbour of mine, who was one of my childhood nemeses. This was almost entirely my fault, since I rather spoiled our friendships by once dropping a large chunk of cement on his head. It was an accident, but for some reason he took it personally. I still can't see why. He needed less than a dozen stitches...

My scarred nemesis took to hassling me constantly. He stopped, however, after once foolishly approaching me in the presence of my visiting friend, who was on foot, and holding a stick. This gave him a massive tactical advantage over my nemesis, who was on a bike. I'm sure you can imagine what happened.

One whizzed past on his bike, the other waited patiently; the cyclist whizzed past again, and my visitor turned slightly, but did nothing; the rider tried to whizz past yet again - and my guest thrust the stick between the spokes of the front whell. The poor bastard was hurled headlong over the handlebars. Quite a nasty gash he wound up with on his leg as I recall. Ah well. Kids, eh?


Many other anecdotes could follow, but I'd be here for weeks. Instead, one will do.

You may have heard this already... still, when's that ever stopped me before? In the mid-1980's Irish summers were phenomenally wet. I don't actually remember this, but I am assured that this was the case, and I certainly have very clear memories of glorious Septembers as we returned to school.

Well, on one particularly wet day, which itself followed several other insanely wet days, the three of us headed down to the local field. This is a field about two minutes' walk from my house, with several football pitches, some scrubby bushes at the edges, and back then, far too many marauding horses. Running through the field is a stream, or more accurately, an open storm drain.

It used to be possible to climb into the pipes from where the stream flowed, and indeed one gobshite once did so on a school sports day -- climbing through storm drains not being an approved activity so much as one engaged in by the dossers at the fringes -- but slipped and fell. When he emerged with tears running down his face he was covered in green slime. I think the rats may have scared him too. Ah well. But I digress.

Well, on this rainy day in, say, 1983, my guest decided that it would be good if we could dam the stream. Needless to say, we thought this was the best idea ever, so, well-armoured in raincoats and wellies, we began wading along the stream, hopping from rock to rock, gathering as many rocks as we could carry and piling them up.

We made a pretty impressive wall, which, of course, had no ability whatsoever to prevent any water from getting through. This was a problem, and my guest's oft-proclaimed and -- let's face it -- nonexistent knowledge of building wasn't helping us. My visitor's Dad, I should mention, was a builder. So, rather stuck for how to make our 'Dam' work, the three of us began scouring the stream and its banks in a determined quest to find something that would somehow enable the dam to actually function as a dam.

Amazingly, we found something. Something which astonishes me even to this day. Near where the pipes fed the stream, where the water was shallowest, was a giant slab of lard. It must have been a foot-and-a-half square. I had no idea that lard was available in anything larger than the little white bricks, which, as Eddie Izzard points out, tend to lie at the back of supermarket fridges, bearing the simple red legend 'LARD'.

What am I saying? That's projecting my later mystification. I had never even heard of lard then! All I knew, instinctively, that this strange white malleable slab was 'cow fat', and what's more, waterproof...

(And no, I have no idea how it got there. This happened. I'm not making it up.)

So, needless to say, we took the lard to the dam, and began to break it up into smaller bits, which we moulded and rubbed between our hands, before shoving it into the dam, plugging all the holes, cementing it over, and waterproofing the whole thing. And it worked. Okay, it wasn't very big, but it did succeed in forcing the stream to fill up behind it, driving the waterlevel up a good couple of feet. Somebody had to come and break it down a couple of days later. Deep down, all three of us consider that day one of our finest achievements.

Unfortunately, there were side effects. The most worrying was the fact that this slab of lard had been lying in a storm drain for ages, and smelled worse than usual. And we'd been playing with it. And it was waterproof.

So we stank. For days.

But it was worth it.

The Greatest Briton? Really?

I was about to do a big nostalgic piece today, but more important matters have come up.

Winston Churchill is apparently the greatest Briton ever. Hmmmm. I suppose this was inevitable. What with the Second World War being just about the only thing on the British history curriculum, most people seem to think that Britain's 'finest hour' was more-or-less Britain's only hour. How could there have been any other result? Unless the Di brigade had come out in force....

I must admit, I'm a little puzzled at John Lennon having done so well. A couple of years back, if i remember rightly -- and I haven't checked so don't just take my word for it -- Channel 4 and HMV organised a poll in which John Lennon was ranked as only the second most important musician of the millennium, a nose ahead of that little-known Austrian Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Well, it should be noted that the winner of the poll, the person regarded by most Britains who voted as the most influential musician since the year 1000 AD, was the illustrious Robbie Williams. Since Mr Williams is undoubtedly a Briton, surely he, and not Mr Lennon, should have pride of place among the nation's greatest children?

Incidentally, I see that said Mr Williams is to perform in Dublin's Phoenix Park early next August, to an estimated crowd of 120,000 people, and presumably a few deer. This will be the biggest gathering in Dublin since the visit of the Pope in 1979, of which I have hazy -- but I'm sad to say very real -- memories. More than a million people were in the Park that day, which is a bit weird, considering that there were only about five million on the whole island at the time, a million of whom weren't even nominally Catholics. Williams' response to hearing this was typically 'witty'. If I may cite the great man: "Great billing, eh? The Pope and me. But his last album wasn't up to much, John Paul Sings the Blues, I think it was."

It might have been funnier had similar jokes not been made by Irish people on at least four million other occasions over the last twenty-odd years.

The eminent Robbie also claimed he was "bigger than Bono," which is a useful link to bring me back to the main thrust of this blog.

Bono, Bob Geldof, and Arthur Wesley, later Wellesey, the first Duke of Wellington all made the top hundred Britons list, but thankfully didn't make the top ten. This is probably just as well, since none of them were actually British. Irishmen all, I have to say. At this point, I suspect, someone is ready to pipe up with that Wellington nonsense about being born in a stable not making one a horse. Fair enough, he probably has Jesus on his side on that one, but it's worth pointing out that not merely was Wellington born in Ireland, of an established Anglo-Irish family, but he also was married to one of the Longfords, spent many years as MP for Trim, a seat traditionally held by the Wesley family, and was even appointed Chief Secretary in 1807. The Peninsular War, Waterloo, and his stint as Prime Minister, during which he ushered in Catholic Emancipation, came later. Incidentally, he was one of only three non-Royals ever to get a state funeral in the United Kingdom, the others being William Gladstone and Winston Churchill.

Which by an admittedly circuitous route brings me back to the point. Why was Churchill picked? Ahead of Newton, or Brunel, or Elizabeth I, or Shakespeare, for Heaven's sake! What were people thinking?

The short answer is World War Two, where he was undoubtedly the right man for the job, once the UK was in that mess and hanging on my the skin of her teeth. The rest of his career though was basically a shambles, which makes it odd that people should revere him now. But then, see my opening comments about modern 'education'.

Look at the First World War: who bears the blame for the farce that was the Dardanelles campaign in general and Gallipoli in particular? Yep, good old Winnie.

And who was Secretary of State for War and the Air during the Irish War of Independence? Fancy that, Winnie again. Dear old W.C., if I may be so familiar, was opposed to the deployment of regular troops in Ireland to fight the IRA and instead favoured the RIC being backed up with irregular units - the Auxiliaries and the Black and Tans, who have such a fond place in Irish hearts.

He also was a big fan of the idea of chemical warfare, even after the miseries of the First World War: with reference to the Kurds and Iraqis in particular he commented "I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favour of using poison gas against uncivilised tribes." Charming.

Let's also not forget that despite popular mythology, prior to the Second World War he was hardly a Lone Prophet in the Wilderness who predicted the rise and threat posed by the Nazis only to be ignored by the British establishment. Appeasement was a policy largely designed to buy time for the British and French to build up their armed forces so they could credibly challenge Germany. Everybody knew war was coming.

I also tend not to approve of his expectations that Ireland would be a willing vassal for Britain in the war, but that's a personal thing. And of course, there's Dresden. Perhaps 135,000 people killed -- probably rather less, but certainly an incredible number -- in the firestorm on the night of 13 February 1945. Arguably history's greatest single war crime, carried out by the 'good guys', when the war had basically been won.

In his favour, however, it must be said that he could on occasion come up with the odd decent put-down, and was, along with Adenauer and De Gaulle, an advocate of a United Europe... so I guess he wasn't all bad.

I have no idea who I would have picked as the greatest Briton... I'd be tempted to pick Newton, but if the English language is indeed the greatest British contribution to the world, as Melvyn Bragg argued in yesterday's Observer, then I guess it has to be a writer. Despite his cosmic canvas, Milton's too narrow, and Chaucer not so much British as English -- in many ways he invented what it is to be English, or at least immortalised it. It has to be Shakespeare then, really, doesn't it?

A cliche, perhaps, but only because it's true.