TROLLS ON A ROLL: THE ANTI-ISRAEL HATE CAMPAIGN IN THE MEDIA

Whenever there’s a serious conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, especially the Hamas Islamic terrorists who control the Gaza Strip and used it to fire rockets into Israel from the moment they took over the territory, out come the Israel hating trolls of the British Left along with part of the British media, and not only in Britain but also in Europe, especially France, Scandinavia, and more recently Holland. This trolling is characterized by a ferocious vituperation, especially when United Nations backed Palestinian civilian targets such as schools and hospitals are hit. Whenever such things happen the fury of the Left and its media trolls knows no bounds and allegations of War Crimes and barbarism make the rounds like an accusatory finger pointing at the right of Israel to exist.

Such incidents and the loss of civilian lives can be looked at another way. Anyone who knows anything about the history of the Jewish people and the humanitarian ethics that guides the personal conduct of Israel’s defence forces as a whole would immediately understand and accept that Jewish people in general and the soldiers of Israel in particular bear no malice whatsoever towards Palestinian civilians, whether men, women or children, and would never countenance or support any deliberately harmful or malicious attack upon them. In other words they would appreciate and realise that such deaths in schools, hospitals or municipal centres are entirely unintentional and accidental.

The Israelis have said that that the Hamas terrorists, freedom, fighters to many on the Left, are using the civilian population of Gaza as human shields, storing large quantities of rockets and other military hardware in municipal premises which they use to attack Israel, also building tunnels to reach and enter its territory to kidnap and murder civilians. In this they are probably correct, but such allegations cut no ice whatsoever with their fervent supporters from the British Left and sympathizers in the British media, though War Crimes in themselves they may be, particularly when using Israeli army uniforms as a disguise for engaging in such infiltration. 

You don’t need to look far for this trolling. It’s not just spread across the press or television but widely all over the Internet with a small army of active anti-Semitic Israel hate trolls perennially busy on Facebook and Twitter. Taken together they’re a miasma of infantile filth that’s individually crawled up out of their toilet bowls with the aim of infecting the public mind with their virulent bigotry. And among this Internet army of hate trolls not a few Jews themselves may be included. Those of the self-hating kind along with others who kid themselves that the Palestinians are an oppressed people and therefore a worthy cause for socialists who believe in liberty and social justice. And with this in mind both they and the whole spectrum of the socialist left think it’s correct to give their support to Hamas, a Muslim group with a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam. One that has no interest whatsoever in social equality, social justice and human rights… in political parties, trades unions or workers’ rights.

Indeed, Hamas has no interest whatsoever in either socialism, liberalism or democracy of any form whatsoever and the reason is simple enough. It’s an organisation rooted in religious extremism. The structure of social organisation throughout most Arab countries today is feudal. There’s no conflict between labour and capital because there’s simply no capitalism to speak of, or where it exists it’s small scale at best. Likewise there’s no large scale working class because there’s no large scale industrial production. In short the contradictions between labour and capitalism common to modern Western industrial society is unknown. Religion prevails as the dominant ideology so organizations such as Hamas can have no political agenda for social change outside the Islamic faith that might appeal in any way to Western liberals or socialists. Marxism, revolutionary socialism or even social democracy are utterly alien notions to such Islamic fundamentalists who don’t believe that women have a right to an education, support judicial practices that are barbaric and abhorrent let alone taking the view that homosexuals are animals best put to death.

There are indeed countless areas of ideological difference between the so called freedom fighters of Hamas and the British leftist trolls of the Internet along with sections of the British media and supporters of the Labour Party and Liberal Democrats. Their support for Hamas therefore cannot be based on any rational ideological confluence of views, so what then is it that draws them together in a broad church of support for an Islamic terrorist group and its armed fight against a democratic Jewish State with its wide range of political parties and trades union movement? It’s a simple question to answer. What unites them to one another is their loathing of Israel as a Jewish State. Only scratch this a little more and it’s a fundamental loathing of Jews. Many of these trolls may never have met any Jews. Just seen them in the standard televised showing wearing beards and round furry hats and found their appearance utterly alien much the same as Hitler once did of those orthodox Jews he saw in his youth. After all there aren’t many Jews around in the UK and the orthodox is used to typify them all. Indeed, their actual number is tiny so most people get what they see from the television.

But never mind that! They’re all thought to be rich! Got loads of money which they make in dubious ways and only too often ostentatiously splash it around. Others perhaps hang on to the ever popular historic accusation that they’re responsible for the death of Jesus. They murdered Jesus, I heard it said on a fairly regular basis during early morning assemblies at the Church of England School I once taught at. However never mind the reasons. One thing’s for sure. Those who are hostile to Israel and support Islamic terrorists fighting to destroy it aren’t likely to hold out a hand to any Jew anywhere!

Another set of trolls, those more ‘respectable’ than the nasties who dole out their spleen on the Internet busily stirring up hatred and condemnation of Israel, are the BBC and Channel Four Television media monkeys best typified by Jon Snow, that most regular and venomous long term critic of Israel in the entire British media. Strangely enough his hostility to the Jewish State seems to have given him a certain credibility. Not only was he recently allowed into Israel to broadcast a snide anti-Israel diatribe, he was also given the courtesy by the Israeli ambassador to Britain of a lengthy interview during which he just couldn’t hold back his bile. Alas, the man hasn’t yet realised that when his views are countered with a calm, logical and moderate response it only reveals his bias all the more. Makes his frustration in having his hostile views countered with tolerance ever more clear so that he always seems to end up nonplussed, bitter and twisted. Oh dear, oh dear, you’ve failed to ruffle their feathers and those damned moderate Jews have got the better of you on the box all over again.

Jon Snow apart, and I’ve never heard a good word about the Jewish State from him, BBC Television has its own very special kind of bigotry and hostility towards Israel. Their so called academic experts, presented as ‘independent’ are invariably pro-Hamas terrorist and hostile to Israel, slandering that country endlessly. Their journalists are based in large numbers in Gaza and specialize in presenting photo images of sick or injured Palestinian children accompanied with unanswered accounts of Israeli aggression… of allowing various United Nations Palestinian support organisation staff to give unchallenged accounts of events… of giving lengthy interviews to leading members of this internationally recognized terrorist organisations while only occasionally allowing Israeli politicians to present the viewpoint of that country. BBC Television also specializes in seeking out and interviewing Israeli anti-war soft targets for its very own pro-Hamas propaganda purposes! Naïve members of Israeli Peace Campaign groups are a special target for these highly politicized so called correspondents.

No, in most part, BBC Television is an endless snide enemy of the Jewish State while Channel Four doesn’t even bother to disguise its bigoted hostility. It’s little different in much of the press with the Guardian, Mirror and Independent leading the way. Only the Murdoch press and Sky Television is fair and moderate, a major enemy to all those on the Left. Imagine then the contradictions of being a genuine Israel supporting British socialist today! You don’t like the anti-trades union Left baiting Murdoch yet you’re grateful for his support for Israel, the Jewish State! So make up your minds, Jewish socialists… what the hell are you? Are you a Jew or are you a socialist? This seems to be a contradiction presented to the minds of so many British Jews today. It’s not enough having to deal with the bigotry of the anti-Semitic, anti-Israel trolls on the internet. They’ve got personal ideological contradictions and questions of allegiance in their heads as it is!

If the anti-Israel trolls serve any purpose it’s to deflect such Jews from the more serious issue of what they are ideologically and where they stand. And it’s an emotional issue just as much as it is intellectual. If you’re a genuine socialist then you can’t support the oppressive Israeli State… Or if you’re a dedicated supporter then you can’t be a socialist! That’s how it’s presented to so many Jews these days. You can either be one thing or another but not both.  

Quite frankly this creation of such a dilemma is fraudulent and something invented to go along with the notion of an oppressed Palestinian cause. Much of the agrarian structure of modern Israel is indeed collectivist and socialist. It’s Labour Movement has powerful historical roots. Never mind its ever demonstrative religious minority, secularism is widespread throughout Israeli society. Thus the perennial question. Is it possible to be a Jew and a Socialist at the same time? It’s a question I’d like to answer this way. In Israel it’s easier than it is today in Britain and most other countries in Europe. It’s a dilemma deliberately presented to those who are born Jews, who are often not religious in any way, who believe in a Socialist ideology but still remain Jews because it’s not something they’ll just give up and abandon. Ideological critics of Jews tell them they can’t have it both ways. No you can’t have it both ways!

It helps give Jews an easy disposition! Nobody’s going to tell me anything! And truth to tell they can be both things at the same time with a simple shrug of the shoulders! It’s another case, another example of fiddling with your intellectual and daily existence on the roof! Not a case of being absolutely one thing or another but being both at the same time and somehow dealing with it! Trolls are dogmatic and full of hate. Jews are flexible. And by Christ, they need to be in a modern world only too hostile all over again.

Yes, you can be a Jew and a Socialist at the same time. Liberal minded and secular. A man or a woman of the big world we live in and fair minded with it. Someone who cares about the rights of minorities while knowing your own history and remembering that you too are part of a historically oppressed group that’s had to find its own way to freedom over thousands of years and won’t be gulled by dogmatists and their snide hangers on who try to put you in a corner and make you feel bad about this, that or the other.

ISRAEL, THE GAZA STRIP AND THE PALESTINIANS

The first and most important thing to be understood in this Post is that Israel is a Jewish State. In fact it is the Jewish State, the historical and geopolitical State of the Jewish people even with many non-Jews living there alongside Jews who are not in any way religious! Many Jews in fact, who’d had former nationalities are now Israelis. Added to this is the key historical fact that Israel has been a Jewish State for thousands of years. Despite the brutal expulsions of the Jews from their land by the Romans, accompanied by mass murder and genocide, such attempted depopulations were never total or complete. Jews continued living there in small numbers one way or another. Furthermore, despite earlier conquests by Assyrians, Babylonians, Egyptians and Greeks, then Romans and Christian Crusaders, Mamalukes , Arabs, Ottoman Turks and finally the British, Jewish people have always lived there under one kind of occupation and subjugation after another.

The Jewish people of Israel, scattered to the four winds by conquest and persecution over thousands of years have always somehow returned to their historical land. Millions of Jews might have left it over time or were destroyed in it, but a handful always stayed and held onto the soil and their faith. And through all this long time the descendants of those who’d left always seemed to drift back. And to make the story even more fascinating, the Jews of the Jewish State today don’t mind sharing it with the Arab Israelis who live there, who of course have the right to vote. Something the Jews themselves never had for thousands of years until 1949 when the State of Israel was created anew by Resolution of the United Nations.

Up until 1918 the land was ruled by the Turkish Ottoman Empire until its defeat by the British in the First World War. The latter then took over a Mandate to rule the territory. During the 1930’s and up until 1945 the Jews of Europe were persecuted and mostly annihilated by Hitler’s Nazi Germany. They had very few friends. The nations of the world wrung their hands and looked away. Between 1945 and 1949 the pitiful remnants of those who’d survived the death camps along with others who’d somehow stayed alive elsewhere crawled back to British Palestine. There they were helped by those Jews and their families who’d lived there from the 1800’s, mainly immigrants from Russia and Poland working the land, and there they slowly, painfully returned to their human selves with little help from their British rulers. In fact it’s true to say that the British Labour Government of the time put every obstacle in the way of Jews who’d survived the death camps from reaching Palestine, going so far as to imprison large numbers of them in barbed wire camps on Cyprus. And this despite the fact that thousands of Jewish men from Palestine fought in British army detachments during the Second World War!

Further to the Resolution of the United Nations the British departed in 1949 but not before handing large quantities of arms to Arabs living inside the territory who immediately attacked the Jews living there supported by surrounding Arab states. This was Israel’s first modern War of Independence with its Jewish population emerging victorious. A new independent Jewish nation state had been born out of the blood of the holocaust and thousands of years of persecution along with this latest sacrifice by its soldiers. Subsequently the Jewish State was attacked by Arab armies in 1956, 1967 and 1973. In the Six Day War of 1967 Israel captured the Gaza strip of land from the Egyptians and the West Bank of the River Jordan from the Jordanians including the eastern part of Jerusalem. Both the Gaza strip and the West Bank were now militarily occupied by Israel.

Subsequent to this, under substantial political pressure from the United States, the main international supporter of Israel on the world stage, along with Britain, never really a friend, there have been substantial changes to the occupation and political character of both territories. A new national political grouping had emerged from among Arabs displaced by Israel’s initial victory of their War of Independence who called themselves Palestinians and have over the last five decades, through various terrorist campaigns and attacks on the Jewish State and on Jews and Jewish organizations internationally, gained support from the Western media and passed themselves off as representing the rights of all Arab opponents of Israel. Giving way to international pressure and receiving continued promises of support from its supposed political friends, Israeli Governments subsequently gifted control of the West Bank to Yasser Arafat’s secular Fatah terrorist movement, allowing its towns and cities to be occupied by the Palestinian Arabs while at the same time creating settlements of Jews in that territory.

It is currently the political demand of the Palestinian Government of this West Bank that such settlements be removed and control handed to the Palestinians for the creation of a purely Palestinian Arab state.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict concerning the Gaza Strip is more disturbing. It’s a problem in my view  created essentially by the Israelis, or more accurately by the staggeringly short-sighted and stupid Israeli politician, former hero-general Ariel Sharon. Having for years wanted to enter Israeli politics, this well-known military figure initially attached himself to the Likud Government of Menachem Begin. However finding little room there for his personal ambition decided to move out and form his own political party, Kadima a kind of right-centrist outfit. Jewish settlement of the captured Gaza strip had already begun prior to the time of the Begin Government but during its period in office went forward in earnest. Large numbers of orthodox and secular Jews felt inspired to move there, setting up a wide variety of agricultural settlements and enterprises along with schools, synagogues and housing.

The Gaza Strip, having formerly belonged to the Egyptians, became a place of passionate though benign Jewish settlement. Ariel Sharon however saw it as something else. A kind of stepping stone for his national and international political aspirations. In a General Election his Kadima Party emerged victorious and seeking above all to be recognised as a peacemaker after his long military career, both by an Israeli public tired of conflict and by the Americans, Sharon decided to commit himself to a peacemaking agenda with the Palestinians. His aim being to give his country what he thought would be a lasting peace. He’d fought in many wars and was now driven by the dream of peace, convinced he was the one to achieve it. To this end he’d therefore make a binding deal with the long term Palestinian enemy and to show he was in earnest, in a gesture nothing short of astounding, offered the Palestinians political and territorial control of the Gaza Strip. What followed was nasty and stupid. To back up his commitment to the Palestinians and belief that peace would come from his generosity,

HE ORDERED THE ISRAELI ARMY BACKED BY LARGE NUMBERS OF POLICE TO EVICT ALL THOSE JEWS WHO’D SETTLED THERE!

In a period that ran into months thousands of Jewish Settlers along with their wives and families were forcibly removed amid terrible scenes from their homes and agricultural settlements by Ariel Sharon’s police and soldiers, all of these being destroyed to make way for Palestinian occupation by, among others, members of former terrorist groups. Jewish settlers in the Gaza Strip had already been subjected to a long campaign of hostility and hatred in the Western media often being described as extremists and fascists when the truth is that most of them were simply Jewish idealists wanting to further extend and create the land of Israel, something that infuriated the Jew-hating, Israel-hating European left with the British left and British media, BBC and Channel 4 Television standing out in particular as open enemies of the Jewish State. Their pro-Palestinian hatred of Israel only a cover for their fundamental anti-Semitism in general.

So with the Jewish Settlers of the Gaza Strip vilified as extremists and facing a hostile international climate now backed up by the United States, Ariel Sharon made his gesture of compromise and friendship and handed the territory over to the Palestinians. Within months all trace of Jewish people having lived there was obliterated and their synagogues desecrated and destroyed. Tens of thousands of Palestinians began moving in with no more Jewish presence tolerated. The secular now former terrorist movement took political control only worse was to come. Within a couple of years trouble of a far greater consequence began.

Alongside Yasser Arafat’s secular Fatah movement another terrorist grouping began to emerge. Hamas was not simply Muslim but Islamic and Fundamentalist. Entirely opposed to the very existence of the Jewish State of Israel. Since its inception it had only one political aim, the destruction and annihilation of the Jewish State. Ariel Sharon had handed control and occupation of the Gaza Strip to Fatah, all Jews forcibly removed. Now a struggle began between the military wing of Hamas and Fatah within the Gaza Strip for its control. Within weeks the secular Fatah was defeated and ousted by the Muslim fundamentalists and in 2007, Israel, a tiny country as it is, faced a new and deadly threat. From its immediate west a fanatical and well-armed Muslim terrorist group and from the north the Iranian backed Hezbollah terrorists. In short Ariel Sharon’s totally short-sighted political gesture, born of a mixture of personal ambition and political ignorance now placed Israel in serious jeopardy.

The Hamas Movement is not only anti-Israel it is also virulently anti-Semitic. It’s stated aim is to wipe out and destroy the Jewish presence in their ancient historical land and to that end has fought a relentless  terrorist campaign against the Jewish State. When it wasn’t kidnapping Israeli citizens it was manufacturing rockets and launching them into Israel, and in breaks between doing this it was digging tunnels for its terrorists to get into Israel and kill Jewish civilians. Even with the hateful holocaust denying regime of Iran dedicated to destroying the Jewish State and preparing nuclear weapons for this, the Hamas regime in Gaza is currently Israel’s prime military enemy. Since taking over the Gaza Strip in 2007 it has received the political and electoral support of Palestinians living there but done little to nothing for their welfare, preferring instead to launch endless attacks on Israel from that territory. Three serious conflicts have now been fought and many truces called, Hamas unilaterally breaking them all with kidnappings and rocket fire.

Another conflict is currently ongoing. Having recently kidnapped and murdered three Israeli youths, Hamas launched a three week rocket offensive against Israel. Their missile capability has drastically increased. The distance achieved now no longer a matter of dozens of miles but hundreds, putting many Israeli cities under threat. These have all been manufactured under previous terms of truce. So the threat to the existence and survival of the Jewish State is serious. The attack on Israel by endless rockets from an anti-Semitic Islamic Fundamentalist group will not suddenly end by fruitless negotiation however much the Americans wish it. Hamas does not recognise the right of the Jewish State of Israel to exist and will not deviate from that policy so how the Americans, the British and the rest of Europe expect Israel to offer compromises and make a truce with its deadly enemy only bent on its destruction IS A MYSTERY.

The United States is no longer Israel’s friend as it had once been. Israel is certainly no friend of Barak Obama and likewise no friend of the British Government and its Arabist Foreign Office. Right now Israeli soldiers in Gaza are bravely fighting for the life of the Jewish State and its Jewish people with their dearest blood. And right now the Governments of the West like those of Scandinavia along with France, along with the entire wretched anti-Semitic British left are rolling their eyes and shaking their hands in disgust.  So here’s a message for all you anti-Semitic hypocrites…

WHEN THE JEWISH PEOPLE WERE PERSECUTED DOWN THE AGES AND BEING MURDERED IN MILLIONS DURING THE HOLOCAUST YOU ALL WRUNG YOUR HANDS AND CRIED OUT OH DEAR OH DEAR HOW DREADFUL… BUT ALL OF YOU DID NOTHING.

NOW THAT THE JEWS HAVE THEIR OWN STATE, ONE THEY CREATED WITH THEIR OWN SWEAT AND TOIL AND ARE AGAIN FIGHTING FOR THEIR SURVIVAL AGAINST MURDERERS YOU GET UP AND SAY,

HOW DARE YOU FIGHT BACK… YOU OUGHT TO BE ASHAMED OF YOURSELVES KILLING CIVILIANS! I MEAN HOW HORRID… YOU JEWS FIGHTING BACK!

Ariel Sharon gave the Gaza Strip to the Palestinians in the hope of creating a lasting peace between the Palestinian people and those of Israel. In this he was totally naïve, as are most Israeli generals turned politician. Golda Meir and David Ben Gurion would never have done such a thing. The consequences of his ridiculous gesture to those who could never understand such a thing has been a disaster. The Palestinians, fully supporting their terrorist political leaders, only saw it as an incomprehensible gift by someone who must have been stupid. You gave us territories from which we could attack you, you arsehole, so that’s what we’re doing!

UKRAINIAN NAZIS ARE AT IT AGAIN

The demise of yet another Malaysian Boeing passenger aircraft, this time over eastern Ukraine, seems on the face of it yet another mysterious tragedy. Nearly three hundred men, women and children fall out of the sky in an area officially a War Zone creating an incident highly charged with dramatic political consequences. Although the aircraft’s black boxes have both been recovered there is still nothing definitive known about the cause of the disaster. Claims and counterclaims are flying in every direction. Obama and the United States, naturally closely followed by Britain, accuse those in Eastern Ukraine rebelling against the new extreme nationalist Ukrainian Government of having shot down the aircraft with a missile and with this allegation point a finger against Russia and its President as being complicit in what the Ukraine Kiev Government is calling a terrorist attack.

The rebels on the other hand say they did not have the military capability to do such a thing and therefore were not responsible. Their claim supported by Russia.

The blame game is therefore well and truly underway with all kinds of threats being made, mainly in the direction of Russia.

To my mind there are a few simple questions that might be asked. Firstly could the destruction of this civil aircraft be the result of a terrorist incident on board? Could a bomb have blown it out of the skies? Secondly, the fact that this is the second Boeing civilian passenger plane involved in a tragedy in recent months could there be a serious flaw with the aircraft? While both are at least possible explanations for the most recent incident it is more likely perhaps that given the geographical location in which the tragedy occurred, the witches brew of war and politics is a far more likely candidate in the causation stakes.

Apart from that there is only one question to be asked. Who had the most to gain from the destruction of this aircraft flying over Eastern Ukrainian territory? Was it the Ukrainian rebels and their Russian supporters or was it the Nazi inspired Ukrainian Government engaged in fighting the rebels supported by their backers, the American State Department and President Obama?  

The question is simple enough. Who had the most to gain?

Well for one thing it certainly wasn’t the rebels and almost certainly it wasn’t the Russians. The latter are already experiencing heavy sanctions and condemnation, imposed on them by both Europe and the United States over Crimea. It’s therefore hardly likely that President Putin would deliberately seek to exacerbate this by putting Russia in the dock of universal outrage for such a dastardly deed. So was it the so-called rebels? What did they have to gain by doing this in their struggle against the Kiev Government both they and so many others regard as Nazi inspired? If you sit down and think about it the only conclusion possible is that they had nothing to gain and indeed everything to lose by doing such a thing such as support for their cause. For the rebels to shoot down the plane would have been stupid in the extreme.

So let’s look again. And by the way, who had the missile hardware that could bring down the plane? Only Russia and the Ukrainian Government. The rebels never had the capability nor the technological know-how to use it. Alternatively was its destruction by the rebels accidental as some British experts suggest? Just a mistake! Well no, if this civilian plane was brought down by a missile its destruction was quite intentional.

So let’s look again. What kind of people may have done such a thing and what would they gain? Here it must be remembered that the Kiev Government was brought to power by Nazi inspired political groups operating in the Western Ukraine who received support from the American State Department. The overall and ultimate plan was to break any ties between this former part of the Soviet Union and Russia itself, much as the Ukrainian nationalist movement had attempted to do during the Second World War. President Obama’s State Department was certainly complicit in this seizing of power by Nazi groups who had already committed major atrocities against civilians in Kiev and soon after, Odessa. And lo and behold not an hour had passed after the destruction of the Malaysian plane for the new President of the Kiev Government to appear on international television screens and blame the disaster on those now actively fighting against this new Nazi inspired rule. In other words the Kiev Government was already primed up and ready to attack their opponents as terrorists before the world’s media.

So who had the most to gain from the atrocity? The answer seems clear enough. The Kiev Government! So what kind of people are they one should ask? Well if their Nazi supporters had no problem shooting civilians in the back during the Kiev protests the answer is plain enough. The regime in Kiev is far less likely to have any scruples in organising the destruction of the aircraft. You only have to remember what kind of people they are! Their political ancestors provided the largest number of the auxiliary staff used by the Nazi SS in their extermination camps during the Second World War.

If the Kiev Government had the most to gain from the destruction of the Malaysian Boeing passenger aircraft, they’re the people most likely. The whole thing was easy enough. Simply put the blame on those fighting them in the east and point a finger at Russia in the process. With support from the politicians of the United States, Britain and Europe guaranteed they could muster up full support from their media and turn it all on their enemies!

For anyone intelligent enough in Britain to smell a genuine rat you only need tune into BBC News to grab hold of your nose and it’s the same with the press. In this connection it’s fascinating to read some of the front page headlines, led of course by the Daily Mail, one of the nation’s favourite rags. PUTIN KILLED MY SON it blares out on Saturday July 19^th next to the picture of a child in another story and without any hard factual evidence. But then this one time Hitler friendly, Nazi friendly paper with its Goebbels style red and Jew baiting mentality doesn’t need any hard factual evidence to say what it does and neither it seems do the others. But then consider this if you will. If it was the Republicans running the United States Government… like John McCain or the loonies out of the Tea Party… they’d have been bombing Moscow by now.

To sum it all up. Forget all the news revolving round in your head. Forget all the gossip, all the crap from the Jonny on the spot reporters and journalists. Forget all the experts called in to give an expert opinion joke-joke, with the backing of GCHQ and the CIA, it was the Kiev Government that did the business, possibly with a few phone calls to the American State Department beforehand to help set it up.

That’s my opinion, but it’s only an opinion. In the absence of fact, of hard no-nonsense evidence, it can’t be anything more. But if political friends of the Nazi inspired Kiev Government here in the West along with their baying for blood media are all pointing a finger in one direction, I’m only suggesting another and of course I may well be wrong. That’s where we differ. Even without any hard evidence they jump to a conclusion that leaves no room for doubt. It’s a game I prefer not to play.

GERMANY’S 2014 WORLD CUP FOOTBALL TRIUMPH

After their offensively dismal performance in the FIFA World Football Cup, England’s players returned home with their tails between their legs. The victorious German team on the other hand returned to Berlin in triumph, and what was noticeable about their celebration was the minimal news coverage given to it by the British television channels. A bit of reluctant footage here and there and not too much in the press either. It all smelt of sour grapes with a genuine injustice done to the well-deserved victory of a sparkling well organised team of highly gifted players, carefully put together over many years by a superbly competent manager. The Germans won the tournament because that was their intention. They went to Brazil to win it and that’s what they did so let’s take a look at some of the factors behind their performance, in other words what made them winners and contrast them with those of England.

The German performance was that of a highly integrated team with many individually gifted players. Right from the start it was clear that they all played together as a team. That no single player however gifted would be allowed to dominate proceedings in any game. In other words they all played for each other and used their individual gifts unselfishly in a team spirit. In this the basic philosophy of manager Joachim Loew was only too evident. Over the last decade Germany’s football performances had all too often been poor. Other nations like Spain and Italy had surpassed them and there were clearly lessons to be learned. Germany had the players, no doubt about that, only they played as individuals first and foremost. There was no-one perhaps who exemplified this more than the rugged and gifted Bastien Schweinsteiger. He played as an individual within the German team but not necessarily for the German team. In short the essence of German failing was that their players didn’t play collectively and it was this I think that Loew came to realise when he was given the task of creating a new national side.

His philosophy was simply this. That the individual gifts of the players he selected had to be harnessed for the purpose of team endeavour and that once they played as a collective entity, for each other and as a team unit, only then could their individual talents and skills be freed up to shine. Put simply, they could shine as individuals for the team purpose. Schweinsteiger is again the perfect example to come out of Germany’s victorious team. There was none of the old individualism so apparent in earlier years. In the final against Argentina, as in earlier games, he was all over the pitch, defending, attacking and helping his colleagues in a remarkably unselfish performance that quite frankly more than entitled him to win the Golden Ball Award for being the player of the tournament.

It was this collective team philosophy that Loew brought to the German national side when he took over its management. It was first introduced by him in the creation of a German Under 21 squad some years back, five of its players appearing in Germany’s 2014 team for Brazil. They were taught early on to play together for the youth team. To initially harness their talents for its collective purpose. And in the years that followed he carefully, patiently, selected talented players whose skills could be harnessed for a collective purpose. It was a long very deliberate process that went on over seven, eight years or more of building a team with a very definite end in mind by a patient, highly intelligent manager who knew exactly what he wanted and where he was going.

The highly specialized team he created is a product of his own managerial philosophy. That team football is first and foremost a collective endeavour with success best achieved through that end. All other things like individual genius come second! Take a look at how it panned out. Some of the great individual stars of the tournament made little difference to their national team’s progress through the competition. Star players like Messi and Ronaldo, Rodriguez, Robben and Van Persie shone brightly but only too briefly in individual games before being man-marked and all but snuffed out. It was collective team performance on the other hand that made its mark with those of Costa Rica, Chile, Columbia and Algeria standing out. Teams built around star players on the other hand failed dismally when they failed to perform or were injured. The most glaring example in the whole tournament in this respect was Brazil!

The German approach was the complete opposite. They played as a team, many of their players shining as individual stars, so when one of their best players, Sami Khedira, was ruled out of the final only moments before it began it made little difference. Their performance rested on their ability as a team, not on one or two gifted players as with Brazil and Argentina.

Having said this what then was the managerial philosophy of Roy Hodgson who had a much shorter time to build up a team. Two years indeed wasn’t that much but it was something! So what did Roy Hodgson do with the players he’d chosen? Well there was the problem! In two years of supposed selecting and planning he switched his national team players around with such remarkable regularity that it left most observers bewildered let alone players. It was a kind of in-out, in-out and shake-it-all-about approach to team building with no single squad of eleven ever getting much of a chance to play together. Astonishingly, even up to the time of the pre World Cup ‘friendlies’ against Ecuador and Honduras, no team appeared to be finalized with everything kind of being kept secret!

No single team finalized, let alone players having worked together for hundreds of hours, their individual personalities, skills and abilities forged into a unity. No collective purpose and enterprise worked out. No mutual understanding between players. No plan for each individual game. Was it any wonder then that each player seemed to lack any imagination in knowing what to do with the ball, and in the absence of any concerted plan kept on passing the ball back only too often from up front all the way back to the goalkeeper! This back passing was a key feature of England’s play. They just didn’t know what to do with the ball. Their players just kept walking it around as though in a daze. All of it explained by their lack of playing practice together. Its result, a shabby, totally unimaginative and shameful series of performances entirely the fault of a hapless, sterile management philosophy.

Let’s take a much deeper look while we’re here. Since Germany became a nation at the beginning of the 1870’s they’ve had an extensive experience of dominant one man rule. Bismarck first followed by Kaiser Willy who dragged them into the First World War followed by the greatest, most murderous dictator of all. Three brutal national leaders, a war against France in 1870 followed by Two World Wars in rapid succession. Result of all this splendid one man leadership effort, hundreds of millions dead and Germany reduced to ashes. From 1945 onwards, German society became an altogether more collective creation, especially in its social and economic organisation. No more single individual top down approach anymore. Economically, an entirely more collective attitude to industrial organisation and cooperation between workers and management. A steady build up and creation of a highly prosperous economy based on stability and the harmonizing of industrial relations. Much of it best summed up by the notion of a collective team approach.

For eighty years the German experience was brutal and it was only at the end of that time that they learned. By way of contrast the British experience has been so very different, but whenever its people chose leaders who came close to being dictators the result was similarly bad i.e. Margaret Thatcher, who at the end was clearly losing her marbles. There was endless chaos, endless conflict, endless social division and disharmony. All notion of community and community spirit, of a collective effort, of a harmonious society, gave way to a notion of individualism, of personalization and privatization which she encouraged. In Britain we actually stood on the brink of becoming a police state with social conflict only too often prompted by top down heavy handed political and managerial attitudes.

A top down heavy handed approach to society and its problems came to characterize the Thatcher era. It was in its way almost an extension of feudal mannerisms and attitudes. With the rapid replacement of industrial occupations and employment by those of finance and commerce the new values of a selfish individualism quickly replaced those of communality, of people selflessly helping each other and the broader spirit of social harmony and cooperation. It was out of such a time that the Premier League of English football was born. One that came to be dominated by individualists, star performers of the game often from overseas, which at the same time witnessed the evolution of football from what was once essentially a sport into a commercial endeavour dominated by a transfer fee system which brought huge financial rewards to clubs and individual players.

English football today is very different to what it had once been in the 1960’s and 70’s. In this context it should be remembered that it was in 1966 that England won the World Football Cup. It was a very different time of English football, English footballers and English footballing management skills. The England World Cup winning team was built by its manager Alf Ramsay, himself a long time professional, over a period of many years. It’s players had been trained to play together as a team and it was a team philosophy more than any other that prevailed in its creation. One that was very much part of English football for many years previously. Football as a sport. As a club game. Its First Division down teams gaining their support and finance from an audience that was solidly industrial working class. The spirit of English club game football dominated Ramsay’s creation of England’s winning World Cup team of 1966. In tournaments since then, England performances, often overseen by foreign management, have drifted into steady decline culminating in the fiasco of 2014 under a desperately rushed managerial compromise.

English football management philosophy today, particularly those operating in the Premier League where  so much is dominated by financial consideration and the use of overseas players, is imbued more with a consideration of individual performance than with the collective performance of the team. Stardom and transfer fees dominate what is now essentially a business. The patience and skill necessary for creating a national squad is something almost lost to the English game. That’s why there’s a problem.

That’s why those managing English football right at the top need to start thinking all over again. Do you actually care about the millions of people who support the English national game, or do you only care about money?

I suggest that you give some of your time to thinking why so many national teams that participated in the 2014 World Cup who built their hopes around one or two individual star players bit the dust and why others who seemed to come out of nowhere and play in a collective team spirit became the real stars of this year’s celebration of football.

Football should be a game. A game about people. Not about money.

RIP VAN PRINGLE

This is a tale told to me more than a month back. If I have hesitated to bring it to the attention of my readers, of the wider public in general it is for good reason. Not so much for its credibility but for the extraordinary circumstances surrounding it which I, myself, found it difficult to believe. At first, I genuinely believed myself to be the victim of a hoax. An ingenious story made up to push my imagination, my sense of credulity to its furthest limits. Quite frankly I refused to accept at face value what I was hearing. It was a joke. The whole thing a plain pack of lies. Then as the days passed I stopped to think and asked myself the one simple question. What if… Nothing more, just what if?

It was then that I paused, with the cynicism still washing over me. Crazy as it seemed what if there was an element of truth in the thing? It was then that I began thinking. It all sounded so plausible. Most of the facts he’d given me could be ordered. Put into some form of rational sequence. It was then that I began what I’d best describe as an initial investigation. His name, the place from where he’d been confined for so long, his illness if you can call it that, the exact timing of the events that made up the story. That and so much more. As I pursued my enquiries my investigation took a remarkable turn. I had travelled to one of the quietest, most rural parts of the Welsh borders, patiently undertaken a discourse with persons, a very select few I have to say, of those still alive who’d been acquainted with the mental health service as it was then back in 1950’s. People initially reluctant at first to confirm or deny anything I had to say or questions I asked but from whom I painstakingly put together shreds of evidence that collectively, slowly but inevitably pointed me increasingly in the direction of what could only be true.

From these I was able to confirm the institution in which the incarceration of my friend began. Who he indeed was and what had happened to him. And further confirm the fact that was the most incredible of all. That his coma, which had lasted an astonishing five decades or more, had not seen him age. He’d been admitted as a mental patient while in his mid-twenties and for medical reasons commonplace within the broad, crude institutional treatment of the time, to our way of thinking these days bordering on the barbaric, had been induced into a coma in the belief that it would progress his treatment. This had seemingly failed and the authorities at the small rural hospital had decided that the situation was best left as it was. That he’d somehow emerge from it on his own without further treatment. Only he didn’t. When the hospital was shut down he was transferred elsewhere and left to sleep.

The tale seemed impossible. Such things just didn’t happen, only all the evidence I had piling up told me that in this case they had. All the same it just couldn’t be true. The dates checked out only there was one impossible, utterly impossible fly in the ointment. The man had been admitted in the mid nineteen-fifties aged twenty-seven. This I was able to verify from the records I traced and the persons I spoke to, and both supported each other. What I didn’t reveal to my contacts however was that he was still alive when of course they’d supposed him deceased. This was because of the once simply impossible fact. That I was looking at and listening to someone with the physical appearance of a man in his mid-twenties. Someone who’d be in his mid to late eighties but didn’t look any older than thirty. In short, as impossible as it seemed, the man hadn’t aged! For some reason, while asleep for half a century or more he’d remained in biological stasis. His ageing process had ceased.      

I spent weeks consulting medical texts. Spoke casually to various medical experts without revealing any pertinent facts. It was just a matter of curiosity on my part! From what I learned such a medical condition was, though not impossible, exceptionally rare with less than a handful of cases ever recorded. Clearly my own contact was someone who’d slipped the net. The lengthy history of his circumstances never recorded. I indeed, was the first and only person to know.

From his early part of his story it seems that he’d woken up in a dark room, the smell around him strange, even forbidding. He didn’t know where he was or even why. He had little memory. Only fragments of his childhood and teenage years. He’d staggered up, explored the room he was in then opened the door, eventually emerging into the gardens of a large rural house. It was daylight and he saw everything clearly. For a while he sat on a bench besides a small lake then gradually everything began coming back as if out of a fog. One thing after another. His fear as he recounted it to me palpable. He was unsure of his circumstances. Terrified of talking to anyone. All he knew was that he’d somehow been confined. That he somehow had to get away.

His early experiences as he related them to me were a long and conflicted story. He’d slept rough at first then reached a nearby town. Eventually managed to find shelter and accommodation and soon after employment. His most remarkable most terrifying experience was when he learned of his temporal circumstances. That he’d awoken in the twenty-first century. That most of his family and all those that he’d known were deceased. It was a crushing, incomprehensible blow. He’d struggled to come to terms with his fate but found it impossible. Intelligent man that he was he’d put together what had happened to him but didn’t know why. And then that most terrifying realisation of all. He couldn’t turn the clock back! He didn’t look the way an old man might look but it was small consolation. Everything and everyone he’d known had gone. All of it lost in the past and he a complete stranger to the present! He was fifty years out of his time. A stranger in an entirely strange land and he couldn’t go back.

At first he found everything around him extraordinary. He tried making comparisons. Tried understanding his circumstances. Eventually overwhelmed with curiosity and wonder. And it is this part of his story perhaps that fascinates me the most and which I wish to relate.

I’d first come across him sitting on a bench among the roses in Queen Mary’s Gardens, Central London. The air was warm, indeed pleasant, and most of the other seats occupied by tourists, munching sandwiches and sitting out taking their ease. A space was vacant and I politely asked if he wouldn’t mind me sharing the seat. A brief nod seemed to confirm it was okay so I sat there, enjoying the fine view of the flowers. All the same I sensed what I took to be an awkwardness in my companion. A morose strangeness as though he felt an unease with my presence. Naturally I said nothing. Clearly the man wanted to be alone with his thoughts.

It must have been fifteen minutes or more that I noticed him glancing my way. A brief look that I put down to nothing more than curiosity. Fine time of year I remarked casually, wanting to do nothing more than be pleasant. Is it, he muttered, is that what you think?

Quite frankly I wasn’t sure how to respond. Well the weather was fine, I said evenly, waiting for him to continue, only he didn’t. He just sat there looking at nothing in particular, a blank expression on his face. He had to be one of the local office workers I surmised. Already worn out by the tedium of a morning’s dull work and taking a break during lunch-time.

Again that curious look… prompting in me a certain small affability. Was he alright I wondered, putting my thoughts into a quiet friendly question. As alright as it’s possible to be, he snarled, and I’ll ask you to mind your own business…

I got up immediately, turning to leave. Aware I’d said the wrong thing. Clearly he preferred to be on his own. My gesture must have disturbed him. It was his turn now to look apologetic. He was sorry! He hadn’t meant to upset me. He had a lot on his mind!

I resumed my place on the bench saying nothing. Just resolved within myself to stay quiet. The fine view of the flowers was everything I could ask. Half an hour ran by with a silence between us, and it was then, gradually, with a few words about the fine weather, and a spattering of remarks about work, and life in general that he began talking. Everything unremarkable at first, just a flat discourse until I began noticing a strangeness in his remarks. Certain things I hadn’t expected, like the differences between life now and how it had been fifty years back. He was a young man and I middle-aged and I found his comparisons interesting. I let him go on, expecting some kind of scholarly discourse though as I observed it was nothing of the kind. It was all peculiarly personal. As if in some way he’d had a personal  involvement in those times of the past. As though there was some deeper connection between them that was more than a matter of study. 

I felt intrigued and responded with a few easy questions. Nothing intrusive, just a pleasant curiosity that seemed to me harmless enough. It wasn’t long before his story unfolded. A series of events, of places and times… An account of times in the past… Of a past life, all of which so remarkable that I found it impossible to believe were in any way true. This was a wonderful tale I was hearing. Whoever he was he had a really great aptitude for making up stories! The most amazing piece of nonsense I’d ever heard only I didn’t say so! Finally he stopped and looked at me hard. He’d never related his story till now… If I didn’t believe him here were some of the facts. I could check them out if I wanted.

I shook my head. Why me I wanted to know?

His reply came with little emotion. Strangely flat in the warm summer air. It’s been a very long time he said earnestly. It had to happen sooner or later. Just you though. Nobody else. I gave him my immediate assurance. There wouldn’t be anyone else.

We arranged to meet a month later. Same bench, same time, same day of the week. I made him a promise. Rain or shine I’d be there!

The month went by. As I said earlier. I travelled. Talked to people. Checked out the documents and medical records. All with increasing amazement and horror. Everything he’d said came together. The whole impossible story was true. Then a month later, on the day and the time I made my way through the Gardens. I had so many questions. There was so much more I wanted to know. Three o’clock at the bench. The exact time. I rounded the bed of white roses. Yes he was there only something was wrong. Someone was sitting there all right only not him. An elderly face stared up at me curiously.

I looked down, thinking for a moment I was in some kind of nightmare. Somehow the face looked familiar. Even so it couldn’t be him. Suddenly a voice came from behind. Let’s try the bench further down.

I turned. It was my friend from the past. We shook hands, me feeling glad he was there. Taking the seat I told him what I’d been doing. How I’d checked out his story. His expression darkened. Well then, did I believe what he’d told me?

I knew what I wanted to say but wasn’t sure how to say it. The whole thing just didn’t seem right yet the evidence was plain incontrovertible. Improbable as it seemed the truth was as stated. Yes, I quietly acknowledged, his story was borne out by the facts. He was who he’d said. A man in his late eighties straight out the deep past. My reply must have pleased him because now I heard the story related above. How he’d awoken and returned to the present. Began to live life all over again.

His wonder and amazement at reawakening in the twenty-first century is perhaps the most astonishing aspect of the whole story. The account of his remarkable discoveries something I learned over the following weeks. Yes they were indeed tales of discovery, related with a fluency and delight that made me realise at once that he’d overcome his dilemma. That he was truly a man of two worlds. That everything he’d lost in the past could be made up in the present. Lost wasn’t really the right word. He still had his memories and now he could start living all over again.

His first impressions were naturally of people, and the differences between those he remembered and those he saw and knew now. People today were so very different. Not only in their appearance but in their values. In the way they behaved. In the early 1950’s, not long after the Second World War, much less food was available for general consumption than today. People ate less and were slimmer. There was no universal habit of snacking at lunchtime and there were no great stores, supermarkets, from which to purchase ready- made foods. Yes, people in general looked leaner, especially women. He was surprised to see so many grossly fat women, and the men too looked overweight.

It was because of the cheap food that was available now I told him. Food with a high content of fat that so many poor people ate. What we now called fast food. Surely he’d noticed all the places that sold it?

His expression confirmed.  Countless ready-made fast food outlets selling pizza, chicken and portions of grilled beef in rolls. Little to nothing like it at all in the fifties. People eating all the time in the streets, in restaurants where they could order and consume a meal in minutes rather than hours. People had acquired a seriously unhealthy eating habit that had made them diabetic with an overconsumption of sugar and prone to heart attack with an overconsumption of fat. The health risks from an overconsumption of food were so very different today to that of only fifty years back. To his eyes people simply looked fat and unhealthy.

But then that was only one side of custom and habit. People today drank astonishing quantities of alcohol, particularly the youth. In the fifties most working men drank together down at their local pub. Maybe a pint. More like two at the maximum. And it was indeed mostly men. Women were rarely seen in public houses on their own. They were always accompanied by their husbands or boyfriends. Today, he’d observed, teenagers drank huge quantities of alcohol, both beer and spirits drunk by girls as well as lads who became intoxicated and behaved in a simply appalling manner. They became drunk, got into fights and swore. And it wasn’t just the lads. The way that girls behaved was astonishing compared to what he had known. It reflected an astonishing shift in values that governed the behaviour of young people.

I understood his thoughts only too well. True, they had more money to spend these days than they’d had back in his time, but then not all of them. Many were unemployed and too many others in poorly paid jobs. All the same the old habits had changed. All the old family values. There was less control. Too much family breakdown.

He knew what I was talking about. All these things being a result of fundamental changes in the economy in the last fifty years. Changes in the way people worked and what they did for a living. All the old traditional industries that gave men and women work and a wage like mining and manufacturing, engineering and shipbuilding, textiles and cars had all but disappeared, along with the big working communities they’d once sustained. In the mid 1950’s they employed 75% of the working population, today it was less than 20%. It was light industry these days that kept people employed. That and the financial sector and of course tourism and what was called ‘heritage’. Sectors of the economy that had once employed 20% of the population had doubled and trebled in size in the last three decades of the twentieth century. These changes, profound in themselves, had created astonishing social upheaval and fast changing values. A whole section of the working class had disappeared. Become a semi-literate, socially dysfunctional underclass with great social and psychological problems.

Physical changes within the population and those that were social and economic. He’d perceived it all very clearly I said. So what else had he noticed? What other major differences had he observed.

His eyes shone as he spoke. There was so much that he’d seen. So much that he wanted to tell me about. 

I sensed his excitement. His enthusiasm as an observer. There were many more cars now. In his time most people travelled by bus. Public transport was everything. The buses and trains all part of the great state owned industries like electricity, water and gas. These days everything had changed. Everything privately owned. Especially transport, like cars. It was a fundamental change in just fifty years. Most public services privatized. Even the Post Office and the Royal Mail. There was even talk about doing away with the free National Health Service. Today social and economic life was far more fragmented. Far less communal with a community spirit. Everything altogether more personal. More individual. The Conservative Government and its Liberal partners were even scrapping the benefits people once got for being poor or sick or out of work. Benefits ordinary people had paid for themselves were being taken away.

I found him fascinating to listen to as he went on. Most people alive today were born well out of his time. They knew little of recent British history and really didn’t care anyway. The contrasts and comparisons he was able to make were beyond them. He was a man of two different times. The world had changed only he was someone of both, the past and the present. As a keen observer his mind was a bridge between them. There were things that astonished him, especially the wonder as he put it of modern technology, especially in the fields of personal communication and entertainment. There’d been a great miniaturization of devices for private use such as mobile phones that also acted as computers or played music directly into the ear. There were tiny computers that performed the function of television. The whole mechanical process of communication had disappeared and had been replaced by a new age of electronics and the digital. Colour television had replaced monochrome. It was also a new information age where knowledge could be internationally exchanged through a globally interlinked network of stored data.

Naturally I knew all of this and while I understood all his enthusiasm and wonder I just couldn’t share it. Get excited and thrilled the way he was. These modern times were a part of me. I’d grown accustomed to everything there was around me. To him it was new. Something to be marveled at.

He paused for a moment as though thinking. But perhaps most fantastic of all he went on was the arrival of the Space Age. He’d disappeared from life before the first Russian Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin the first man in space. Learning of this when he awoke then hearing about the great American triumphs of men landing on the Moon, of satellites exploring the Solar System, the outer planets then landing exploration rovers on Mars were things he found utterly incredible. And all in the short time of fifty years. In fact, looking back on the time that he’d known, of the time he’d come out of, it was all very sombre and dark.

Of course it was, I cut in. We’d just come out of a War that engulfed the whole world. A hundred million people died. Even ten years later there’d been little progress made. Things only began taking off in science and technology from the 1960’s around fifty years back, and look at everything that’s happened. It’s only been fifty years!

There’s a United Nations organisation these days, I went on… And no more British Empire. All those colonies we once owned in Africa and Asia, like India, are all independent countries of their own these days!

He laughed. I didn’t have to tell him! And there was no more Soviet Union either he added.

I took it all in. Clearly he’d been doing a whole lot of reading and a whole lot of thinking. He had a place of his own now in London and a job which enabled him to travel and see things. We met again over the next three months. Every couple of weeks while the weather was warm and always on that same bench in the Gardens. Then one day he never appeared and despite my frequent visits I never saw him again. He’d left me with no phone number or address so as time passed I often got to wondering. Over the three months though I learned much more about his perceptions and what he thought. His main interest it seemed had been people’s habits and how they had changed. Particularly their appearance, their eating and drinking, as much curry and rice now as fish and chips, and of course that so many lived in their own houses. He’d noticed with genuine dismay the proliferation of a drugs culture which he found disturbing and sad. A displacement activity as he put it and a waste more than anything.

What equally fascinated him was the way people spoke. A new informal kind of language more than anything along with their propensity to snack. The common favourite being crisps, a favourite during his time thought to a much lesser degree. It was the sheer variety that he found so extraordinary, something to which he found himself falling victim himself! He now had a favourite munch of his own. Something I observed with no uncommon fascination when he began turning up with them again and again! He’d taken the tube out of a carrier bag and to my amazement offered me some.

I could barely take my eyes off his face as he guzzled. Clutch after clutch with an almost hypnotic abandon. As for myself I’d found them salty and moreish but nothing desperately special. He on the other hand loved them to pieces. Pringles, plain Pringles had become his firm, even addictive habit! Where his salivary glands were concerned the Pringle was king.

It was not my way to criticize him for this. Look down on his prize confection with snobbery. If that’s what he liked so be it. It was though, to my mind, one of the strangest, least considered aspects of modern life that had clearly got under his skin. The common salty Pringle! So now I see him somewhere or other, marveling at all the wonders of modern life and reflecting on some of the worst aspects of all the changes. Somehow coping and increasingly more at ease with his fate. And yet through it all finding a no uncertain solace in one of those things that these modern times has provided for his pleasure. The ubiquitous and ever crunchy Pringle Original in its tight fitting tube.

So there it is. The true story of a man who slept through five decades of turbulence and awoke to all the miracles of these modern times, only to be captivated most by one of the humblest, most basic of human activities and instincts. The making and eating of a tasty confection.

GLASTONBURY : FROG ON THE ROCKS

Apart from crystals, crystal pendants and slices of agate what other commodities do you think we sell in large numbers at the Glastonbury Festival? Could they be condoms, anti-vomiting agents, diarrhoea tablets or cigarette rolling papers? None of these but come to think of it they’re really worth considering if no-one else has got the licence. Okay, I’ll give you a clue. What’s the Festival famous for? Music? Well maybe. Drugs and filth? We’re getting closer but truth to tell it’s none of these. In the mind of the public Glastonbury is synonymous with mud. Heavy rain on the festival site end of June brings with it flooding, washed out tents and mud. The televised image of people wallowing in it, dancing in it and up to their elbows in it is only too typical. All that mud amid all that greenery! And what goes with mud and greenery, croak, croak, croak? Why it’s frogs!

Our best selling items at the Glastonbury Festival are frogs on marble. Little resin made frogs with big blue eyes and broad red lips glued onto pieces of polished marble or granite are the perfect complement to the oceans of greeny-grey sludge that covers most of the festival site after three days of downpour. People just love them. There they are, dozens of them sitting on our table, singly, in pairs or even three together mounted on a single piece of rock looking up at the kids like irresistible talismen. Mud, mud, mud, croak, croak, croak! Sunday mornings we can’t sell them fast enough.

They come from the wholesaler in boxes of three, same as the other resin animals we sell such as rabbits, squirrels and tortoises. One large, two small to a box. Buy them by the gross and they’re cheap. Around twenty pence each. All the small singles, whatever the animal, sell at two-fifty. The large on their own are three. Two small ones together are four pounds, a large and a small, four-fifty. All together as a family group the price is five. Not bad for our customers, the discount always appreciated. Of all the animals we sell, however, frogs outstrip everything else by at least ten to one. Here the positioning of the frogs on the rocks gives real scope for the imagination! We can put two small frogs together side by side facing each other. Very cute! Alternatively we can mount a big frog right behind a little frog, the suggestiveness of which everyone knows at a glance making the posture very much in demand. Another popular display is all three together, the large frog in the middle with a juvenile on each side facing inward or outward.

Given the serious demand and the fact that the frogs are often purchased as symbolic gifts of the Festival and its muddy experience, a great selling point is to customise each of the pieces on request. That means mounting them on pieces of rock just large enough to be written on. An example of this can be Glastonbury 2000. Equally popular is to have the name of the giver, Glastonbury and the date i.e.from John Glastonbury 2010 or even For Mum Glastonbury 2011. Most frogs sold however are kept by their purchasers so Glastonbury and the date are the most common inscriptions.

Each product is heavy and fifty together in a box weigh a ton so transportation is crucial. After making each piece we put them into strong cardboard boxes like those used for carrying bananas. Two full layers one on top of the other separated by a sheet of cardboard. Mercifully these boxes come with a space cut into each short side of the rectangle making it easy for two people to lift so that three or four days before we leave for the Festival our camper van floor is loaded with four boxes each side of the bedding area with six additional behind the driver and passenger seats. A serious weight with all that granite and marble so we need to make sure of the tyres!

Once we arrive we offload the whole lot stacking them up back of the stall, maybe a dozen or so pieces on one of the tables at any one time, most of them being frogs. Yes there’s definitely something about them, all sitting there in a bunch waiting to go to good homes. Simply irresistible if you’re wearing Wellington boots two sizes too big and you’ve already been trudging in filthy deep mud. Even irresistible if there’s no mud at all! They just sit there, on pink Italian marble, polished Aberdeen red granite or Norwegian black larvikite, glaring up at customers through baleful angry blue eyes with jaw to jaw bright red lips all merry with an insouciant smile. However you look at them, face on or from the side, they have a strange sinister demeanour. Almost like they could come alive at any moment, hop onto your cheese sandwich and let go something nasty all over it. And with such charm going for them they sell in hundreds. We just can’t make enough. Everyone loves them to pieces.

I’ve got one sitting in front of me at the computer and boy does it look malevolent! Almost like it knows what I’m typing and doesn’t like it one bit. It wants some fucking royalties out of this post make no mistake and if there’s no slugs to hand it’ll piss all over the keyboard!

You’d better not try that one on you slimy bastard or you’ll go outside on the ledge. You can try hopping off that onto the railings below!

No, seriously, I didn’t mean it! These frogs have been very good to us over the years and are favourably thought of in the highest quarters at Barclays. I’ve even thought of sending one to Chief Executive, Bob Diamond to put on his desk. Hi Bob, thought you might like to see how I get rid of my overdraft. In fact, would it be possible for the bank to lend me half a million so we could set up a factory unit in China. With a billion Chinese we could do serious business!

And what do you know all you banking cynics? You should be ashamed of yourselves. A week ago I got a letter from Barclays Head Office. Dear Valued Customer, it began. I can’t tell you how tearful it made me feel when I read it. Me! A Valued Customer! You could almost cut the sincerity. It was like having a conversation with Nick Clegg! Why, just imagine me being a liberal democrat voter; I wear stripy hooped green and black woollen stockings, pink sandals and a floral dress with water vole motifs on it and I believe in human rights for bluebottles and guess what? Someone at party headquarters phoned me up and told me I was a valued supporter, and furthermore, if I was a banking executive no worries about my million pound bonus.

In this day and age it’s so nice being made to feel that banks and politicians really care about you. It makes you feel you can trust them with any money you’ve got!

Okay, the idea of a German Ruhr size frog gluing assembly line in China on the backburner let me return to Glastonbury where two hundred and fifty thousand potential frog lovers come to chill out. A new approach to selling our frogs recently came to mind and was shown to have definite mileage. Why not, we thought, liven up their character by giving them a national identity? If a French guy or girl came to the stall we’d call a frog Henri, for a German we’d call it Fritz and for Italians Berlusconi! Most of our frog clientele however was English, particularly guys with blond dreadlocks or girls with ripped stockings. That said we needed names that fitted the type. George was out and you could forget Charles and Camilla. We needed cool. We needed iconic. Rooney was good and so too was Elton, but even better was Oggie. The punters just loved Oggie the Froggie!

By Saturday night the boxes were emptying and Sundays were always a landslide. A bit of bubble wrap then into a carrier. Customers lining up though customising took time. Non-stop activity with a gold marker pen. Me flogging the animals, Louise working flat out on the crystals, pendants and trees. We sometimes brought helpers. Young people we knew and counted on being reliable. Plenty of time to go to gigs, free admission onto the site, free food and a decent day’s pay. Sometimes our generosity paid off but not always. More than once on a Sunday, when help was needed the most, they’d fail to show up. Wander in mid-afternoon after unscheduled time in a tent with the drag end of a spliff stuck in an earring.

By late Sunday most of the boxes were empty and the frogs gone to good homes along with rabbits and squirrels. The slowest sellers were always the tortoises. By Monday tortoises were down to a quid. Nobody wanted the fuckers. It took an Attenborough program on the Galapagos to get a few moving and often not even then!

Frogs are always popular, tortoises are not, but at Glastonbury frogs are seriously popular. Why is that? There’s a simple answer. Glastonbury people are froggie people. Frogs, one way or another are full of character. Tortoises aren’t! Frogs are a like it or lump it species of being and if you don’t like it fuck off! They’re opinionated. When they croak they’re probably saying up yours or go fuck yourself. Tortoises are like dipping a knife in water. They’re yes we agree with whatever you say types. They’re well we really haven’t got any opinion right now but if you let us think about it for a few months maybe we’ll give you a call. In the meantime put some more lettuce in the bowl and a few pieces of cabbage.

Frogs are purposeful, tortoises don’t have any ambition. Now saying this you might think that things should be the other way round. You know, Glastonbury types being laid back unwashed hippies with a going nowhere philosophy as maximum cool. But in that you’d be wrong. Glastonbury people are keen to convey that appearance but to stick it on them as a generalisation is a major mistake. They’re mighty purposeful about their likes and dislikes and they know what they want. The laid back image is only an image, a device to convey cool but actually they’re more often full of something one way or another. Whether it’s shit or sound common sense is a matter for debate.

Tortoises on the other hand are full of nothing. They lack character and they lack oomph. They’re definitely not get up and go types. Frogs on the other hand are. They’re we’re out of here characters. Don’t like it and they’re off, same as Glastonbury types. Our Glastonbury frogs are on the rocks all right but the people who buy them know they’re only sitting there for their own convenience. They’re on that bit of rock because it’s where they want to be. They’re free spirits really like the people who buy them. They can hop off or piss off whenever they fancy and because they and their purchasers are genuine free spirits they can both do their thing whenever they like. Buying a frog on marble means two free spirits getting together in a kind of art-deco alliance. We know, and so do the two billionaire Russian oligarchs who approached us recently to set up a frog manufacturing facility in Eastern Siberia. One of them we understand owns a football club somewhere in England.

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GLASTONBURY: MISTER TOASTY AND HIS YOUNG APPRENTICE

Mister Toasty was the name we gave to the tall, thin, garrulous old bastard who ran an early morning toasted cheese sandwich, tea and coffee stall at Glastonbury Festival on the same drag as our crystals, frogs on marble and gem trees pitch. He was up and busy at five in the morning for the countless festival-goers and traders alike, desperate to wet their whistle and crunch on anything molten and cheesy. But as much as anything else his stall was one of the first places lit up in the dark and served as somewhere for people to congregate after they’d staggered out of their tents and into the portaloos for a desperate shit. Then it was immediately over to Mister Toasty’s for something equally slidy.

His early morning queues were long despite having his wife, son and daughter in on the act along with a youthful additional helper. He did good business and must have made money because next to his Mercedes was a luxury trailer and we soon learned from those in the know that he had it all worked out. Bread and cheese slices, tea bags and coffee all bought for less than wholesale, the water free and the electricity for toasting there with the rent. With his family in on the job there was almost no cost for labour. Forget fresh milk! We were talking powder at best. With a low cost, fast turnaround necessity product the man was really a genius. Did all the high volume festivals April to October and spent the next six months sunning in Spain.

Approaching his stall you faced a high business-like counter with two or three queues feeding in. Behind it was a blackboard with prices, below which were various tables, some containing urns for boiling water, others piled high with paper plates and cups. The piece de resistance however was a fully automated toasted cheese sandwich making machine. A triumph of engineering ingenuity. Set on a long solid wooden table it consisted of a set of rollers onto which bread smeared with butter was laid. As the bread moved forward thin slices of cheese with a low melting point and high stringiness factor were laid on then another slice of bread stuck on top. This now passed between two thin metal burners with electric filaments above and below, and out the other side came a perfect toasted cheese sandwich. It may not have been homeboy cheddar and tasted plastic at best but oh what a joy to the famished!

The man had it nailed. No bacon, sausage or fry ups. This was a pour and smear rig with the rollers and heat doing the cheesing. Seventy pence for a tea or twenty more for coffee and two quid for the bread and the cheese. Sorry I meant toast! Not much more than ‘any spare change’ only when sold by the thousand it was Bill Gates eat your heart out.

What a joy to see it all work. At four in the morning countless figures wearing army surplus and boots falling around in the dark slamming portaloo doors and waiting for that magic moment of light when Toasty plugged into the electrics. Water up on the boil, crates of loaves dragged out of the trailer with the man himself taking charge of his tried and trusted regime like a fucking field marshal. It was actually a relief, a light in the dark to so many after a night of cider and spliffs. Teas and toasted cheese sandwiches guaranteed five-thirty a.m. just like a Glastonbury orgasm.

We didn’t put our own gear away at night. Just covered the stall with canvas tarpaulins held in place with powerful clamps while Louise or I stayed up watching and guarding, and boy, those nights were long. Then up came the lights of the toast stall on the other side of the drag like a welcome.

We soon walked over early morning. Mister Toasty knew who we were. The people who took all the big money doing the trees and the crystals! Yes, there he was with his wife who we’d christened Toastina and his sullen son the Toastevich. And there it all was. We could hear it. The roll, roll, roll of the rollers… The slap, slap, slapping on of the bread… And on, on, on went the slices of cheese… That could melt a heart made of lead! All of it going on at the back like a Hollywood Musical.

But what was this now? Serious ructions! Something rotten in the State of Danish Blue. Mr Toasty, warned by his wife of an infraction had turned on his trainee. Only one day gone and he’d apparently learned nothing. The youth was taken to one side. He’d been putting too much butter on the bread! This was only just short of being a capital offence. Everything in the toasted cheese sandwich making process had been worked out to perfection. There was no room for additions or additives. The butter had to be spread to an exact thickness or they’d be wasting huge sums of money. Mister Toasty had taken hold of the smearing knife. Now watch! Side run along the surface of the tub like so. Now, turn it across the bread running it smoothly at an angle of exactly thirty degrees. There, you see how it’s done. The Master himself had demonstrated. It was like so. And he didn’t want to have to tell him again! It was either the Toasty Way or the Highway.

The Young Apprentice took it heavily. His Master acknowledged. He was sure he would learn. End of the lesson. The Toastevich’s sullen eyes gleaming. The Apprentice would never last the harsh rigors of cheese application let alone tea making.

We purchased some tea, declining offers of free sandwiches, but wishing the Master all success. Early next morning however, Louise decided she’d try the coffee, though again declined a free offer, while I waited at the stall for some news. She’d been gone twenty minutes then returned to tell me all. Mister Toasty in high dudgeon. His Apprentice temporarily relegated to tea pouring duties for what was little short of insurrection! And so it would have been under the Articles of War had the toasted cheese rig been at sea. His sworn duty had been service at the end of the automated process where the sandwiches emerged through the burners, hot and lip smacking toasted before being wrapped up in cling-film. The wretched youth had apparently taken his eye off the machine and let them roll onto the floor. Dozens of them! All lying there in the sawdust!

Louise, who’d seen it all happen, could barely contain herself. The Toastina in an absolute rage. Was this how he showed his gratitude? Being chosen out of a hundred other applicants after he’d answered the card in the window? And not only being taken to Glastonbury, a privilege in itself, but also being paid. Was this the way young people showed gratitude these days to those who gave them a job? The cost of the sandwiches would be deducted from his wages. Now, could he remember how many tea bags went into an urn and how many cups of medium strong but definitely not strong tea could be made from a dozen tea bags?

Ah! No reply. Mister Toasty had waved a finger. So he’d forgotten all he’d been taught! And he’d seemed so promising a youth. It was all so simple. He was supposed to be good at mathematics at school wasn’t he? Well it could all be calculated by the inverse square law. Isaac Newton had done it. The more tea bags that went into the urn the less strong the tea got because you had to keep increasing the water. It was the same thing with buttering the bread. The more you put on the soggier it got until it became unreceptive to the cheese sitting on it. There, you see, Mister Toasty turned to his wife. The lad thought that making a toasted cheese sandwich was simple and easy when it was really full of complex technical problems that took years to understand. Which is why he needed to listen. Appreciate that what he was being taught came from someone with years of experience. Be invaluable for him throughout later life.

The young man had stayed silent, only nodding his head on occasion. There, he’d been given a good talking to. He could pour the tea for the next hour then go back to putting slices of cheese onto the bread. As Louise noted, this was extraordinary! Mister Toasty showing what might best be described as his softer side. It didn’t last. Half way through the morning we were startled to hear a high pitched voice shouting across the drag and next thing we knew the Young Apprentice appeared at our stall. He’d been banished! Sent away in disgrace! It hadn’t been his fault. The tea urn had fallen off the table after he’d put in the ladle to stir up the brew. It was only what he’d been told to do.

We commiserated. The best thing he could do was go back and apologise. Tell Mister Toasty he was sorry. Seen the error of his ways and that it would never happen again. The Apprentice smiled. Mister Toasty… He liked that!

We heard nothing more all day. By next morning all had been forgiven. The toasted cheese sandwich making process was running like clockwork with the Young Apprentice now back in charge of buttering the bread. This was a remarkable turnaround. The Apprentice fully back in favour at the head of the operation while the Toastina laid on the slices. The early morning clientele thronged. We heard it all later. The Apprentice had apparently contributed a brilliant new innovation into the process. Instead of the packets of cheese being left in the trailer fridge, he’d suggested that they be removed and placed close to the burners, thus ensuring that the slices were softened before being laid on the bread. This had resulted in a more rapid toasting process. The Apprentice, it seemed, had a genuine aptitude for the business and was beginning to take his duties altogether more seriously. Could it be that he might one day become a fully-fledged toasted cheese sandwich maker? Clearly the skill ran strong in him. He’d come close to falling off the edge into the dark side but now everything was different. His training was almost complete and with it would come his own personal knife for butter application.

Late Sunday morning with sales at our stall in full swing we looked up to see a wonderful sight. There, crossing the green, walking stick in hand and wearing his cape was Mister Toasty purposefully hobbling towards us accompanied on one side by the Toastina and on the other by his Apprentice. I bowed as he arrived saying we were honoured by his visit. It was of course to have a nose or maybe hope we might offer him something. I did! Would his wife like one of our beautiful amethyst miniatures? He could forget anything bigger! Wrapped and into a carrier bag it was passed to the youth. “Sales very brisk?” Mister Toasty enquired. Well he could see all the dosh flowing across the stall and was adding it up in his head. “Nothing like yours,” I said with the required deference. One junior Master to another more senior!

“The boy’s good,” he said briskly, giving his charge a wan toothless smile. “Though there’s nothing like a bit of experience.” And then, with a quick glance around, muttered, “you must be taking a shilling.” Nosy fucker, I thought. “Yeah, it’s been very good for us this year,” I said referring to the takings. “We’ll need a bodyguard to help us get it into the bank.” Like we take notes while you only do toasted cheese coinage!

It was the last we saw of him that year as he turned away and hobbled back to his stall, one of his arms on the Apprentice’s shoulder. Maybe he was lining him up for his pimply daughter, Louise and I joked later.

We didn’t see the Young Apprentice again. With the aptitude he shown for buttering bread he was a prime candidate for recruitment to the Financial Services Sector and was by now probably running a bank!