Honours and the New Year, as night follows day.

On the brink of another  New Year, and we are assaulted as per usual  by the honours list.  What a charade! Why do people, who ought to know better,  actually accept  these awards?
Their history dates back as far as Anglo Saxon times when the monarch honoured  his loyal subjects with rings and other symbols of favour. The Normans introduced knighthoods, and The Order of the Garter was created by Edward 111.
Each year approximately 2,600 people receive awards personally from the Queen. The ceremony for receiving these is at Buckingham Palace and follows a tradition begun in 1876, it's a complicated ritual that involves members of the Yeomen of the Guard who were created  in 1485. It is rare that anyone refuses the offer of a reward, though Rabindranath Tagore renounced his knighthood in 1919.
In 1925 when Prime Minister David Lloyd George was found to be selling honours  some reform was brought about . In 1976 during Harold Wilson's government  there was  another scandal named the  'Lavender List', then in 2006-2007 during Tony Blair's premiership the  'Cash for Honours'  scandal  came to light, this was to do with the connection between political donations and the award of Life Peerages.
Once upon a time Life Peerages were awarded to members of the landowning aristocracy and royal favourites, now a variety of people from all walks of life are given honours including this year a sheep farmer, a circus ringmaster, and a nun.
This year 979 honours have been given , these include 842 received at MBE and OBE level. The 'man in the street' who works for the poor and needy, gives his/her time to charity does it because he wants to, and never for a reward, so why give him one?  But these honours   to 'ordinary folk' do  give a pleasing gloss to  honours given to the undeserving at a much higher level.
Patronage is the insidious  way the powerful keep their hold over the people.  Unworthy names still slip through, - thank yous for  favours given to governments,  for keeping their mouths shut at the appropriate moment,  or for turning a blind eye at the appropriate moment. For example the City veteran  Roger Carr  is listed this year despite his involvement in the sale of Cadbury, he is also chairman of the energy giant Centrica responsible for  large gas price rises!    Martin Broughton, despite the problems at British Airways receives a knighthood! The list goes on and on.   Isn't it about time we threw off the shackles and stopped grovelling to  these ancient patronising rituals?

Pear and half a lemon

Politicians are 'shite', pure 'shite'.

From a young age politicians  nostrils sense the odour of power.
Despite their protestations of being 'oh so benevolent', of going into politics 'to make a difference', of 'offering something to society', their only ambition is to gain power.
Margaret Thatcher built an organisation that had 'ideal ends' and therefore an excuse for the love of power. This inevitably produced a superiority, a ruthlessness and an  unscrupulousness. The Tories have at least got it written on the front of the tin. They want to privatise, we know that. That's what they do.
The Newlabour party (euphemism for Tory party) fooled the people because they thought Thatcher's wholesale privatisation of the utilities, the railways, telephones, sale of the council houses etc would be rolled back, and some of the excesses of her 'reign' would be rectified. The utilities etc would be returned to the people who owned them in the first place. But no such luck! The NHS was 'got at', privatisation by creep was the order of the day.
Politicians are like that, they promise the moon when they are asking for your vote, but renege as soon as they get it. Worst of all these Newlabour champagne so called 'socialists' live the high life, do the deals, work the room, collect their kickbacks, and their swollen expenses. The ex Newlabour Prime Minister Tony Blair, John Prescott, Peter Mandelson, the architects of Newlabour have a lot to answer for!
So the word shit/shite/schite, an ancient and beautiful Anglo-Saxon word perfectly describes all types of politicians whether from the left, right or centre.

Samuel Beckett, the writer who hated fame.

Samuel Beckett was born to an Irish middle class protestant family in 1906. His original family name Becquet was rumoured to be of Huguenot origin. He grew up in a large house in the Dublin suburb of Foxrock.
As a boy he was a natural athlete but was dogged by an intense sense of loneliness, in fact, as a teenager he regularly stayed in bed until mid afternoon he felt so depressed. He studied French, English, and Italian at Trinity College Dublin 1923 - 1927.
In 1928 he moved to Paris where he soon met James Joyce who became a great influence upon him. He then travelled extensively through Ireland, France, England, and Germany writing all the time his stories and poems while earning money from doing odd jobs. Beckett settled in Paris in 1937, and remained there during the 2nd World War, fighting for the Resistance until 1942 when he was forced to flee with his French-born wife Suzanne Descheveaux-Dumesnil to the unoccupied zone. He said he "preferred France at War to Ireland at peace".
In 1945 he returned to Paris becoming well-known around the Left Bank cafes regularly playing chess with Marcel Duchamp and Alberto Giacometti. This was a particularly prolific period for his writing when he produced masterpieces such as Molloy, End Game, Malone Dies , and Waiting for Godot which was premiered at the Theatre de Babylone. This play in which "nothing happens" became an instant success. All of Beckett's major works were originally written in French even though English was his native language.
Beckett creates a landscape of lonely inadequate people who struggle to express the inexpressible. His characters attempt to communicate, but in vain. Life means waiting, killing time, and clinging to the hope that relief may be around the corner overcome by a sense of lonely bewilderment. Beckett himself had "little talent for happiness". In 1969 Beckett was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. He was buried alongside his wife in the Cimetiere de Montparnasse, and his directive for the gravestone was, "any colour so long as it's grey".

Samuel Barber/Menotti/Scotland, part two.

Samuel Barber's lifelong partner was the Italian/American composer Gian Carlo Menotti. Born in Italy 1911, the two met at Philadelphia's Curtis Institute of Music. After they both graduated they bought a house together in Mount Kisco New York which they named Capricorn, and which they shared for 40 years.
He collaborated with Samuel Barber on several operas including Barber's most famous opera Vanessa for which he wrote the libretto. His most successful works were composed in the 1940s and 1950s.
In 1958 Menotti founded the Spoleto Festival in Italy, and its companion festival in Charleston South Carolina in 1977. In 1986 he extended the Spoleto festival concept to Melbourne, and this has now become The Melbourne International Arts Festival. It was in the field of opera that he made his most notable contribution to American cultural life.
In 1974 Menotti adopted Francis Phelan, an American actor and figure skater, and in the same year purchased the fine Robert Adam mansion house in the village of Gifford, East Lothian, Scotland. Yester House is a 17th century grade A-listed house with c85 palatial rooms plus 500 acres, situated 30 minutes from Edinburgh. He bought it on a 10 year loan, and on the marriage of his adopted son Francis to Malinda in 1985 gave it to them as a wedding present.
Gian Carlo Menotti was a sincere and sensitive man, a great composer who wanted to popularise opera, his dream was to develop the disused stables of his grand house and open a music school there, and was disappointed that due to lack of funds he was not able to do this. He died aged 95 in Monte Carlo in 2007.

From Samuel Barber to Scotland...... part one.

Unfortunately Samuel Barber's lovely music is not as well known, and not played as much as it should be.
Samuel Barber was born 1910 to a distinguished and well to do Irish-American family in Pennsylvania. His father was a doctor and his mother a pianist. He began composing seriously in his late teens, and it was during this time at the Curtis Institute that he met Gian Carlo Menotti who became his partner in life as well as in their shared profession. At the Institute he was a triple prodigy, in voice, composition, and piano. Many of his early compositions were commissioned by famous artists such as Vladimir Horowitz, Francis Poulenc, and D. Fischer-Dieskau. Toscanini remarked of his Adagio for Strings in 1938 that it was "semplice e bella".
He won the Pulitzer prize twice, in 1938 for his opera Vanessa, (for which his life-long partner Gian Carlo Menotti wrote the libretto), and in 1963 for his Concerto for piano and orchestra. Amongst his finest works are his 4 concertos 1939 - 1962. He was badly affected by the adverse criticism of his 3rd opera Antony and Cleopatra which had been written and premiered for the opening of the Metropolitan Opera House 1966, and spent many years thereafter in isolation suffering from depression. He continued to write music until his death in New York 1981.

Seasons greetings to everybody!

Love kindness, abhor violence.