Columns

I know lots of second world war veterans who rather enjoyed their war against the Germans. But I’ve never met one who enjoyed his war against the Japanese. As the Eastern Front was to the Western Front, so the Far Eastern front was to the European/North African front: the fighting was more implacably brutal, the conditions more ferociously grim, the chances of coming out in one piece notably slimmer. That’s why, in dark times like these, I find it of such great comfort to read a novel like Harold James’s The Scorpion Trap (Janus). It’s a brilliant fictionalised account by a former Gurkha officer of those hideous and terrifying early stages of the war when implacable Japanese overran our colonies.

It was in the autumn of 2005 that the Conservative party finally shed its allegedly ‘toxic’ image and embraced modernity and the values of today’s vibrant and inclusive Britain, all through a single photograph on the front page of a tabloid newspaper. The picture showed the future Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, with a black whore on his lap and three kilos of gak up his left nostril, allegedly. At a stroke, the popularly held image of the Conservative party was suddenly dispelled.

If you’re near a laptop and in search of a giggle, go to http://tinyurl.com/6gamb73. Otherwise, let me explain in words: that links you to a gallery of scores of photographs of Muammar Gaddafi in silly clothes. There are images of him in absurd, invented, full military dress, festooned with the gilt and silverware of bogus medals; sashes of every kind, colour and cloth, all gaudy. There are images of the tinpot dictator decked out in purple like a Roman emperor, swathed in silk with turbans, in mid-desert in combat gear, taking the salute in braid and twill, or crowned in gold.

Even if, like me, you scarcely know the first thing about electric guitars, you’ll definitely be familiar with the Gibson. It’s the legendary American brand you can hear Jack Bruce and Eric Clapton playing on Cream’s ‘White Room’, and Mark Knopfler on Dire Straits’ ‘Money For Nothing’, and Dave Grohl on ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’. Paul McCartney uses a left-handed Les Paul Standard as his main stage guitar; John Lennon wrote most of his songs on The White Album on a Gibson he borrowed in India from Donovan; Bob Marley’s Les Paul Special is buried with him; U2’s The Edge is a fan, as is Bob Dylan, as were Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson.

Sadly, I wasn’t among the 260 souls who watched Stranraer FC narrowly defeat Berwick Rangers a couple of weeks back. Sadly, I wasn’t among the 260 souls who watched Stranraer FC narrowly defeat Berwick Rangers a couple of weeks back. I’ve only been to Stranraer once, in 1975, when I watched my father stand by the docks and spit in the direction of Ireland, which loomed just beyond the edge of our eyesight. We were on holiday in this rather lovely and underrated neck of the Scottish woods and had ventured into Stranraer to buy provisions for the forthcoming evening meal in our camper van: a ‘salad’ — tomato cut in half, iceberg lettuce and processed ham sliced the width of a muon. And salad cream.

At my uncle’s holiday apartment in Salcombe, Devon, is a tiny service lift so cramped and claustrophobic that you only use it in extremis: when you have heavy bags to carry up from the car, say, or a pile of sodden wetsuits which need drying on the balcony. At my uncle’s holiday apartment in Salcombe, Devon, is a tiny service lift so cramped and claustrophobic that you only use it in extremis: when you have heavy bags to carry up from the car, say, or a pile of sodden wetsuits which need drying on the balcony. Otherwise, it’s best avoided. Even the 40 seconds or so it takes to get from the bottom floor to the top are enough to give you the heebie-jeebies.