Johnson v Johnson

 "Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel."

 Of course. I'd forgotten, in among all such other eminently quotable things, that that was Dr. Samuel Johnson.

He might not necessarily have meant it as a general truth but it will do for me.

I can't help thinking how one of the greatest Englishmen had the same name as one of the worst. At least the ex-Prime Minister, as I hope we will forever be able to know him, was born in New York and so for me he's American and they can have him back.

But he is also a scoundrel and demonstrates very convincingly the good doctor's sentiment. He likes to be pictured with the union flag behind him, to make him look patriotic, but it's only one of his many ruses. He's no more interested in his country than he is in anything else beyond the one thing he really loves, himself, but even he hasn't yet had the nerve to stand in front of a portrait of himself.

Give him time.

Dusty Springfield, I Just Don’t Know What To Do with Myself

 George Best was non-plussed by Dusty Springfield, his genius for unlocking the defences of Northampton Town, Benfica and most other football teams not translating into one of his other god-given gifts. He need not have fretted.

With Petula Clark, Cilla, Lulu and Sandie Shaw for opposition but with Burt Bacharach writing songs like this and symphonic production to compare with Phil Spector and Tamla Motown, Dusty need not have fretted either, and yet she did. The majestic diva act and heavy mascara were an impressive disguise but inside, it seems, it hurt as much as the songs she sang said it did.

I'm not convinced there's such a thing as a white soul singer. Reports that Elvis thought Tom Jones must be black only serve as further evidence that Elvis wasn't very bright. But, if there ever was a white, British reply to Tamla Motown, it was Dusty Springfield.

It's this song ahead of several others like I Can't Make It Alone (Carole King/Gerry Goffin), You Don't Have to Say You Love Me, I Close My Eyes and Count to Ten as well as the still desperate but ostensibly more positive I Only Wanna Be with You, mostly on account of,

Baby, if your new love ever turns you down
Come back, I will be around
Just waiting for you
I don't know what else to do

 

which expresses desolation in words of almost always one syllable.

For Dusty, it wasn't to be the films or taking a penalty, however badly, to open the World Cup by the iron ambition of Diana Ross. It went quiet until the Pet Shop Boys gave her the opportunity to come back in 1987 with What Have I Done to Deserve This?, re-invented as ironic, electronic and a bit disco but gorgeously mature and glam.

It wasn't a happy story but genius and greatness aren't a passport to comfort, as George Best would have been able to explain. 

Roxy Music - Virginia Plain

 Lest we forget, I'm supposed to be gradually compiling short essays on pop records here towards a book that will never be finished. I'm easily distracted. It's working title changed from 'A Perfect Day of Pop Radio to 'Playlist' because its contents are a playlist of radio shows from 6 a.m. to 1 a.m. and now the file is called' Wake Up, Maggie'. I had better add something further to it before it loses all momentum. 'Virginia Plain' is the first track on The Rock Show'.

Anybody inclined to follow Pop Music Theory in horse racing- and I suspect there aren't many - would have been rewarded with 'Legend of Xanadu at 12/1 yesterday and Riders on the Storm at 16/1 today. Maybe somebody noticed because then Jean Genie was a well-backed favourite- and finished second.

---

Roxy Music are currently touring their 50th Anniversary show. Most of them are. To many of us it's not completely Roxy Music without Brian Eno. A number of acts have caused some consternation with their first appearances on Top of the Pops. Boy George and Culture Club made us wonder a bit more deeply about gender as well as what we thought might be Polish national costume, The Crazy World of Arthur Brown seemed to have been conjured from some deranged underworld, my father was concerned how Hawkwind knew they were playing Silver Machine right and perhaps most disturbing of all were the likes of Clive Dunn, Neil Reed, Terry Wogan and Lena Martell. What we had been used to were debonair heartthrobs like Engelbert Humperdinck, girls next door like Sandie Shaw and harmless groups of likely lads like Herman's Hermits.

Roxy Music came in with the wave of less denim-clad, more made-up artists like David Bowie and T. Rex and yet still made us wonder what we were looking at, like ground-breaking art is supposed to. They mixed the lounge lizardry of Bryan Ferry with some sparkle and the sophistication that Nile Rodgers was later to use for Chic with Eno, who was clearly from outer space, overseeing some electronic apparatus and a song that seemed to spend most of its time on the same note, not have a chorus and not mention its title until the last words, which Up the Junction by Squeeze was due to do in what seemed like another age then but was really only seven years later. But whereas Squeeze referred back to 1960’s socially aware commentary on working class Britain, Virginia Plain referenced the set of outré hangers-on in the Andy Warhol set.

They were clever and very good at what they did. It's hard to imagine now why anybody would find fault with it but at the time it was no doubt far too arty for those who could understand Slade but not T. Rex or for who an exhibition of machismo for machismo's sake was all that counted. Virginia Plain remains musically adventurous as the first incarnation of Roxy Music were before Eno took himself off into even artier adventures and Bryan developed his louche stylings towards a more mainstream career and some high maintenance girlfriends.

Racetrack Wiseguy

 I will only have myself to blame if Pied Piper (Cheltenham, 2.40) doesn't repay my blind faith in him tomorrow. I plunged in peremptory fashion on the even money even though the two Gordon Elliott raiders I backed today got beat and only then did I check his record for the last 14 days, which isn't very good.

But, the scientific way of reassuring myself that it could be okay is that the even money is disappearing from the early prices and he is a bit more odds-on at the moment. He's also probably expected to be a better horse in time than Knight Salute who he dead-heated with before a debatable disqualification at Aintree last season. The entirely unscientific reason for hope is that Pop Music Theory did well by us earlier in the week with You Wear It Well and so perhaps Crispian St. Peters might prove as good a tipster as Rod Stewart.

They don't make videos like that any more.

--

After the debacle of 2016 when I invested confidently in a Remain vote of 50-55% and Hillary Clinton, I'm not betting on politics any more. Common sense goes out of the window. However, I note the sustained market move for Boris Johnson in the Next Prime Minister market. My friend, armed with his degree in politics, is confident that Rishi Sunak wins but, as in the previous race, the best horse doesn't win if not suited by the conditions.

The conditions of this event are that two names go out to the Conservative Party membership who are a seriously deranged group of insulated weirdos with no concept of much beyond Rule Britannia, the Union Flag and, yes, Boris Johnson. They don't care that he's an incompetent scoundrel, narcissist and compulsive liar. And it's them who decide, so if Boris has 140 MP's prepared to back him, we've had it and even at 7/4, he's the bet although you could have had 10/1 last week. And that's the trouble with politics these days, you simply can't imagine what will happen next.

The prospect is too gloomy to contemplate. We simply can't have two more years of that bad circus act followed by the faint chance that something might go disastrously right for him and he gets a second, or you might call it a third, term in office.

My next job is to scan a list of countries to emigrate to. I've heard good things about Antarctica and I'm not a fan of hot weather, I'm just not sure if the library system, brilliant as it is, will deliver biographies of Brahms, Schubert and the like when I want to read them to somewhere nearby I can collect them from.

To re-write the Carpenters,

Calling occupants of interplanetary craft,

Please could you drop the Conservative Party

back at the planet that you brought them from.    

T.S. Eliot in Bosham

It's time for a break from Dr. Johnson for a few days. One can't read the same writer all the time, even if it's such a good one. Reading the same writer all the time, sir, is like drinking nothing but the same vintage. However fine it is, one's palate becomes accustomed to it and in due course fails to appreciate its fineness.

The reason is the arrival of The Waste Land, a biography by Matthew Hollis, so come back here next week for a report on that. Meanwhile, though, I am reminded that he stayed with Vivien in nearby Bosham, as pictured. I know exactly where that is.

It prompts the idea of a series that might be called something like Poets in West Sussex and East Hampshire. We already have Rosemary Tonks buried at Warblington. There's Edward Thomas houses at Steep. There's the book signed by John Donne in Chichester cathedral, pictured some years ago here under the John Donne label. John Keats stopped off at Bedhampton on his journey to Italy. Simon Armitage attended Portsmouth Polytechnic. There's the plaque in Chichester marking where Keats began The Eve of St. Agnes. Looking up the Eliot picture, one finds Dylan Thomas also spent some time in Bosham.

I'm sure there must be a few more.

The Rambler

Givega didn't run at Fontwell today, having been well backed, and so we'll be looking out for when he is entered next. But, although Pop Music Theory isn't either scientific or proven, You Wear It Well was impressive and saved the day.

Meanwhile, reporting from the frontline of Comparative Tory Studies. Good Grief, one can hardly take an evening out without coming back to more horror stories. It seems to me they've lost something since the 1750's when Dr. Johnson was a most amenable and considered commentator on humanity. One of several epithets one gladly applies to his thought and writing is integrity. He sees through the trivia of fame, fortune and glamour in passages that conjure up some recent eminent Tories to who such scepticism has obviously not occurred. Always prefaced by a translation from Horace or other Classical source by the likes of Dryden or Pope, it is like long-standing wisdom that was self-evident but not, it seems, to the desperados intimidating reluctant members through the lobbies this evening to shore up, for one more day at least, this most ramshackle of governments.

It is hugely enjoyable to read Dr. Johnson, bringing forward from Socrates,

casting his eyes over the shops and customers, 'how many things are here', says he, 'I do not want!'

and he finds himself, or someone like him, beholding,

a thousands shops crouded with goods, of which he can scarcely tell the use, and which, therefore, he is apt to consider of no value.

I'd know. I was so forlorn of suitable paid employment at one time that I worked in retail jewellery, selling the gross untruth that gold and silver, rings, bracelets and other such adornments meant something. It wasn't my job to tell the bedazzled customers that it was all rubbish. Once in a while one might sell a Seiko watch and think that although they've paid twice as much as it's really worth for it, at least it's a well-made thing.

Dr. Johnson did also consider that,

A voyage to the moon, however romantic and absurd the scheme may now appear, since the properties of air have been better understood, seemed highly probable to many of the aspiring wits in the last century,

 

but I don't entirely blame him for that because out of all the conspiracy theories put about by outlandish fringe thinkers, often socially distanced, male and geeky, the idea that we never did put a man on the moon seems one of the more reasonable. That we are expected to believe that Wilbur and Orville Wright first made an aeroplane fly for 12 seconds in 1903 but, by 1969, Apollo 11 had landed Neil Armstrong in the Sea of Tranquility is much more astonishing than the progress made from Rock Around the Clock in 1954 to Hunky Dory in 1971 or from The Lake Isle of Innisfree to Byzantium.

However, on balance and having no more than a poor 'O' level in Physics to argue with, if Brian Cox and Stephen Hawking believed it, so will I.

I'm more dubious about Economics as a subject, though. I entirely understand how prices shift according to demand at the racetrack. That is free market supply and demand and one doesn't have to play if one doesn't want to. Liz Truss and her ferocious back bench supporters have proven once and for all, though, that a theory can't be applied to the world in the hope that the world will comply with it.

If only it would.

She is surely a record-breaker in waiting as the briefest term any Prime Minister ever served and the record she breaks is that of the recently more famous than he had been, George Canning, in 1827, who died.   

Liz Truss, thus, is likely to go down as the worst Prime Minister we ever had, which would have been inconceivable in the last days of the Boris chaos but lest we forget, lest we somehow come to regard the Boris years as an idyll, a missed opportunity or a Golden Age and suffer any remorse, let us remember. I had twelve of these reasons last night without trying very hard-

His default position was that of a barefaced liar. He preferred the challenge of obfuscation to any admission of the truth.

He lied to Mrs. Queen in order to suspend Parliament, which was illegal and quickly overturned.

He didn't believe in Brexit. He didn't believe in anything apart from him being Prime Minister. It was only a career move to get the job he wanted which it soon was to prove he couldn't do.

He first said Covid was 'only bird flu', then he said 'let the bodies pile up', then he nearly died of it but only offered the NHS nurses that saved him a 1% pay rise while inflation shot up to 10%.

He hid in a fridge to avoid an interview with a journalist as well as avoiding as much scrutiny as he could while being the 'front-runner' in the leadership election.

The neighbours in the flat next to where he lived with Carrie heard shouts that suggested he was assaulting her before she decided to be his third wife and mother of yet more of his children.

It wasn't Partygate, the events in Downing Street at which juniors were sent out with suitcases to the off licence to fetch more booze during lockdown that did for him,

it was Pinchergate, in which he stood by one of his allies when he was accused of sexual assault, 

stories not unlike those in recordings made of Donald Trump boasting of his own such behaviour who endorsed Boris as 'a good guy'.

He attempted to dismiss female MPs in the House of Commons as 'hysterical' and referred to homosexuals and 'bum boys'.

He never answered a question at Prime Minister's Question Time but came back with spurious claims such as that he had 'got Brexit done' but Northern Ireland remains unresolved, he signed agreements only to later renege on them and promised 'levelling up', selling places like Workington and Bolsover down the river, spending money he would never have to or be able to repay- which is what it was feared Jeremy Corbyn would do, including the gaudy redecoration of no.10 Downing Street to his taste which was, as far as we know, paid for by somebody else.

As Foreign Secretary, his intervention in the detention of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe in Iran resulted in her sentence being extended.

Boris the Third is a play by Adam Meggido based on the time at Eton when he played Richard III but didn't bother to learn his lines and previewed his polotical career, and his appearances on Have I Got News For You, by showing he couldn't do anything properly or get it right but needed to have the starring role.

 

I haven't done any research beyond confirming some detail. There's plenty more than that. I haven't even started trying yet and that's betting without all the stuff that nobody knows about yet, or ever will.

Jennifer Arcuri. Throwing out those respectable, remainer Conservative grandees, like Ken Clarke. Accusing his rivals in the leadership campaign of being 'vanity projects' ( !!! ). The book would take too long to read, never mind write, and you wouldn't want the story contaminating your bookshelves.

So, please, let's not him back. He's currently between 8/1 and 10/1 to be the next Prime Minister and only 11/1 after the next General Election. 

That is conspiracy theorists for you. I can forgive Dr. Johnson everything but I'm not having that. 

Racetrack Wiseguy

 We landed the nap, at least, here on Saturday. If you do nothing else, it's best to do that. At Plumpton yesterday I led everywhere except where it mattered but, undaunted and with ammunition in the account to go with, this is the time of year to be involved and some of these little midweek meetings are the bread and butter jobs worth looking at.

It was one of Gary Moore's than did me on the line at Plumpton and then he had another winner. He is generally one to keep on the right side of at Plumpton and Fontwell and so we'll be having at look at Givega (Fontwell, 1.12) when Mr. Joe Coral chalks his prices up.

Mr. Henderson sends a few to Worcester and while we will expect Fuji Rocks to improve for his first run, Morning Line (2.40) looks like one we can take an interest in here and 'going forward' and then You Wear It Well (3.45), which was one of the more likely prospects suggested by my very unscientific 'pop music theory' when I had a rare bet at Catterick last time out.

We will have to see how they price them up but 7/4 about each of them, they look like the ingredients of a trixie, one of the Professor's favourite recipes, the three doubles and the treble. These are fairly confident selections but I've been confident before and regretted it so there will be plenty left in the account even if nothing comes of it as long as we don't have an irresponsible plunge in a wildly optimistic hope of 'growth'. One tends to stick with a proven strategy. 

In a fine valedictory essay in the last issue of The Rambler, Dr. Johnson writes,

I have seen the meteors of fashion rise and fall,

while hoping that he has left behind something of worth.

Translating that into horse racing investments, it means one has seen big, noisy gamblers come and go but, having been quieter and more considered about it, one has outlasted them and is still getting by,

A little old fashioned but that's all right.