A self-portrait in quotations

Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.‎

Peter McWilliams

Enjoy each moment. Appreciate what is. Be completely here and now. That is where eternity is found.

J.G. Gorton

I am always prepared to recognize that there can be two points of view- mine, and one that is probably wrong.

Gerald Brenan

Those who have some means think that the most important thing in the world is love. The poor know that it is money.

Seneca

What you think of yourself is much more important than what others think of you. 

Lee Marvin 

One of the good things about getting older is that you find you’re more interesting than most of the people you meet. 

‎
Ken Wilber

The measure of a man is his unflappability - but this comes not from hardening and defending against painful thoughts, emotions and experiences but by being willing to experience it all.

Hilaire Belloc

Every major question in history is a religious question.

Charters: If only we hadn't missed that train at Budapest.

Caldicott: Well, I don't want to rub it in, but if you hadn't insisted on standing up until they'd finished their national anthem...

Charters: Yes, but you must show respect, Caldicott. If I'd known it was going to last twenty minutes...

Caldicott: It has always been my contention that the Hungarian Rhapsody is not their national anthem. In any case, we were the only ones standing

Ralph Waldo Emerson
To have laughed often and much; won the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; earned the appreciation of honest critics and endured the betrayal of false friends; appreciated beauty; found the best in others; left the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden, or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded. -

Dostoevsky

Well, then, eliminate the people, curtail them, force them to be silent, because the European enlightenment is more important than people.

William James

Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune. 

Houari Boumediene, President of Algeria, at the United Nations, 1974

One day, millions of men will leave the Southern Hemisphere to go to the Northern Hemisphere. And they will not go there as friends. Because they will go there to conquer it. And they will conquer it with their sons. The wombs of our women will give us victory.

Julie Burchill’s top five things that make her happy: (1) my marriage, (2) my faith, (3) getting trashed, (4) going on holiday, (5) my friends

Orhan Pamuk

When I look at Istanbul, which becomes a little more complex and cosmopolitan with every passing year, and which now attracts immigrants from all over Asia and Africa, I have no trouble reaching this conclusion: the poor, unemployed and undefended of Asia and Africa who are looking for new places to live and work cannot be kept out of Europe indefinitely.

Soren Kierkegaard

There is nothing with which every man is so afraid as getting to know how enormously much he is capable of doing and becoming.

Richard Halliburton

Youth – nothing else worth having in the world… and I had youth, the transitory, the fugitive, now, completely and abundantly. Yet what was I going to do with it? Certainly not squander its gold on the commonplace quest for riches and respectability, and then secretly lament the price that had to be paid for these futile ideals. Let those who wish have their respectability —I wanted freedom, freedom to indulge in whatever caprice struck my fancy, freedom to search in the farthermost corners of the Earth for the beautiful, the joyous and the romantic.   

Nadia Comaneci

Do not pray to have an easy life; pray to be a strong person!

‎‎
Henry Miller

Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music-the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself. 

W.B. Yeats

The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.

Rodney Dangerfield

My mother didnt breast feed me. She said she only liked me as a friend.

Alexander Pope

The peoples voice is odd,/It is and it is not the voice of God.

Barry Kolodkin

The most luxurious thing in the world has nothing to do with aristocracy or attractiveness. Its time. Being able to take a nap on a Sunday or having the opportunity to enjoy a glass of wine in a beautiful setting at 16.00 are luxuries well beyond any palace poshness.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

The amount of violations of human rights in a country is always an inverse function of the amount of complaints about human rights violations heard from there., former US Ambassador to the United Nations.

Carl Jung

Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there, love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.

Marie Louise von Frank

 You have to be lonely so that the unconscious becomes stronger.

There are many people who are not in analysis, but if they are naturally gifted - which I would call if they are honest - they can find these things without analysis.

... the devouring aspect of the unconscious, which suffocates life and prevents the human being from developing. It is the swallowing or the regressive aspect of the unconscious, the looking-backward tendency, which grips when one is overcome by the unconscious.

The ego must be able to listen attentively and to give itself, without any further design or purpose, to that inner urge toward growth. ... People living in cultures more securely rooted than our own have less trouble in understanding that it is necessary to give up the utilitarian attitude of conscious planning in order to make way for the inner growth of the personality.

Jules Romains

Friendship without the everyday becomes an allegory.

Mike Tyson

Everyone has a plan till they get punched in the mouth.

Wilhelm 

Love is only a seeking for love in return, Do, ut des (I give, that thou shalt give). If the patient notices that love is not given in return or that it has not reached that degree which he expected, defiance enters in place of the love, which in turn manifests itself as active resistance.

People who do not understand themselves have a craving for understanding.

Paul Theroux’s 3 rules of travel: Travel on the ground — avoiding air travel. Travel alone when possible. Keep notes. That’s it.

Mark Steyn

Federally funded cowboy poetry. That phrase has never existed in any language in the entire course of human history. Thats an innovation of our time and the fact that that combination of words can be used with all seriousness by the Senate majority leader of the worlds superpower is an indication of the depths were in. -

R.L. Stevenson

I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.

Ronnie Smith

Be where you are and look forward. That is where contentment and happiness live.

Martin Israel

Antichrist is not a demonic figure typified in our own century by the person of a fascist or communist dictator or one of his henchmen....Antichrist reveals himself much more subtly and plausibly than this. He appears as an outwardly enlightened man of apparent good nature and well-disposed to his fellows, who takes charge of the world and usurps the place of God. He organises the world into the form of an advanced welfare state and makes everyone happy provided they bow down and worship him. All who co-operate with him live pleasant, uneventful lives, have plenty of possessions, and strive for the maintenance of their present status. Their inner eye is no longer lifted up to the Figure on the cross, who is the way, the truth and the life in God. Therefore they are not themselves transformed. They remain comfortable, complacent people, selfish and blind to the greater world, living like intelligent animals. They do not respond to the existential problems of life until they disappear, like the followers of Korah, swallowed up by the earth that splits and opens to receive their mortal bodies (Numbers 16:31). This is the way of Antichrist, that great deceiver, who promises us all the kingdoms of the world in their glory if we will only fall down and do him homage (Matthew 4:9).

Where there is an ebullient sense of humour, the holy spirit cannot be far away.

Of one thing I have no doubt: until we can love ourselves there is no possibility of our loving anyone else, even a person as close to us in physical relationship as a parent, spouse or child. Only when we love ourselves with the intensity of charity that will accept all aspects of ourselves as infinitely treasurable, even when they are palpably immature if not frankly perverse, can we be still and flow out in charity to all around us.

If, on the other hand, I acknowledge the darkness that is mine and lift it up to God in prayer, He will, through His healing grace, effect an inner transformation of my psyche, so that I will be driven by love and compassion for others and not by motives of self-improvement. The paradox about self-awareness is that once we have achieved it we should let it go. It is far removed from the self consciousness of the selfish man grasping for material or spiritual gifts to boost the self that he really hates, or that of the neurotic person enslaved by the imagined contempt of others for the self that he despises.

....every relationship is sacred. This applies especially to the most intimate of all relationships, the sexual one. It is a sacrament, and is defiled to the detriment of all participating in it. It is worth remembering that in the properly consummated sexual act, an act in which both parties have lost themselves in love for each other, each experiences a new reality, one that transcends the narrow isolation of personal gratification. Such an experience is the glimpse of mystical union destined for Everyman - by which I mean the person who does not aspire to great spiritual understanding but lives in a useful mundane way - by Gods grace. I believe that this is the primary purpose of sexual union; the other two, growth into a full person and the procreation of the race, are secondary to it. It follows from this that sexual intercourse is a holy action, and should not be contemplated except in a spirit of awe and gratitude. How far man has fallen from this understanding is a measure of his distance from the divine nature implanted in him. I should add at the same time, that those exceptional people called to the state of celibacy in the cause of a greater love for all mankind, may also experience mystical union in their unceasing self-giving to others.

The wise person delays marriage until he has attained sufficient intellectual and emotional balance to judge clearly how he wishes to order his life. The practice of self-control, which is the last fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5.z2), should govern all physical explorations of sex until there is a deep love for the other person.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Skill to do comes of doing.

Paulo Coelho

Life is short. Kiss slowly, laugh insanely, love truly and forgive quickly.

Benjamin Disraeli.

Mr. Kremlin was distinguished for ignorance for he had only one idea and that was wrong.

No man is forgotten when it is convenient to remember him.

Alfred North Whitehead   

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.

Dag Hammarskjöld

Silence is the language of God;
It is also the language of the heart.

Yogi Berra

In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.

Nietzsche

That in woman which inspires respect and fundamentally fear is her nature, which is more natural than that of man, her genuine, cunning, beast-of-prey suppleness, the tigers claws beneath the glove, the naivety of her egoism, her ineducability and inner savagery, and how incomprehensible, capacious and prowling her desires and virtues are.

‎
Anthony Haden-Guest

I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.

Margaret Thatcher

Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren’t.

Hendrik Ibsen

Live, work, act. Dont sit here and brood and grope among insoluble enigmas.

William James

The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.

I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do. Leonardo da Vinci

‎
George Bernard Shaw

 Life isnt about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself. Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.

Dr Johnson

When the famous actor David Garrick asked what was the greatest pleasure in life, Johnson answered fucking and second was drinking. And therefore he wondered why there were not more drunkards, for all could drink though all could not fuck

Nietzsche

All philosophy is disguised psychology

Camille Paglia:
If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts. 

Edward Norman

The age is described by welfare: it occupies the space for sacral values once filled by the churches. Indeed the neo-Puritanism of the times promotes welfare considerations as exclusively important.

Extraordinarily enough, the leaders of the Church manage to identify the present welfare idealism - which is based in Humanist materialism - as fundamental Christianity, an application of the love of neighbour enjoined by Christ. But preoccupation with material welfare, whatever higher considerations may become attached to it, cultivates worldliness, and is an enemy of authentic faith.

Through contact with liberal and Christian values the other world religions were sanitised and made acceptable to Western sensibilities: widows were no longer incinerated alive on their husbands funeral pyres, and the way was opened for that late-20th-century phenomenon, the Western idealising of Oriental religiosity, beads and mantras in Californian condominiums.

The Churches themselves, in fact, have rushed to acclaim the new humanism - the `caring society - as the very essence of Christianity. But it is actually quite pagan, concentrating as it does on the merely worldly needs of people in a way which is plainly contrary to the renunciations indicated in the teachings of Christ. This is not an academic matter. For when Christians identify the present secular enthusiasm for humanity as basic Christianity - the love of neighbour - they are in reality acclaiming and legitimising their own replacement.

If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more, and become more, you are a leader.-John Quincy Adams

Saint Augustine

Seek not to understand that you may believe, but believe that you may understand. ~

Lord Salisbury

People are fully alive to the danger of superstition in priests...in course of time they may find out that professors may be just as bad.

‎Evelyn Waugh

I believe that inequalities of wealth and position are inevitable and therefore it is meaningless to discuss the advantages of their elimination.

The last Duke of Cambridge

They say I am against reform. I am not against reform. There is a time for everything. And the time for reform is when it can no longer be resisted.

Epictetus

The key is to keep company only with people who uplift you, whose presence calls forth your best.

George Orwell

 At any given moment, there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas, which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that, or the other, but it is not done to say it . . . [And] anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, whether in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.

Cicero

Knowledge which is divorced from justice, may be called cunning rather than wisdom.

Aristotle

Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.

‎Cities have sexes: London is a man, Paris a woman, and New York a well-adjusted transsexual. Angela Carter

‎William Trevor

Personally the last person I want to know about is myself.

Its a dry quality that you get with English eccentricity at its best; Irish eccentricity is much more outlandish. Crazier. English eccentricity is something you hardly notice until all of a sudden you realize that youre in the presence of an eccentric mind. Its not like that at all with an Irish eccentric; you know about it all very easily and quickly. English eccentricity has a suburban quality—its like a very neatly trimmed garden in which you suddenly realize that the flower beds arent what they seem to be. Theres a kind of well-turned-out quality about English eccentricity, whereas the Irish equivalent is higgledy-piggledy, and sometimes even noisy. The marvel of the English version is that its almost secretive. Ive never quite believed in the obvious English eccentric, the man who comes into the pub every night and is known to be a dear old eccentric. I always suspect that that is probably self-invention. What I do believe in is the person who scarcely knows hes eccentric at all. Then he says something so extraordinary and you realize he perhaps lives in a world that is untouched by the world you share with him.

I don’t like the Church of England. I feel much more drawn towards Catholicism when I’m in England—not that Id do anything about it. I always feel that Protestantism in England is strangely connected with the military. All the cathedrals here are full of military honors. Its part of an establishment with the armed forces; tombs, rolls of honor, that sort of thing.

Thomas Mann

I’m talking nonsense, I know, but I would rather babble away and at least partially express something difficult than reproduce impeccable clichés.

La bloc

A good dinner with George, a schoolmaster educated at Eton and Oxford, Gabi and their nice son Johnnie (not Ion) who is just starting to talk. They live in a typical flat in a 1970s Ceausescu tower block of which he is very unnecessarily ashamed. So I was not unique in not driving and not owning property despite an Oxbridge degree.

George talked about a friend of his Anthony James who went down from Oxford in 1978. For George this is like the early 1960s are for me. (George thinks all England’s ills began in 1997 and thinks the 1980s were a golden age of myth. How did I get so old?) Anthony James was completely unmaterialistic (this sounds 1960s not early 1980s) never went to restaurants or owned a car or had a well-paid job. He sounded like someone I could deeply respect but then the story darkened. Eric Anderson appointed him a master at Eton without qualifications because of the old boy net apparently but really to keep a space warm for one year for someone else. At another public school (he had no formal teaching qualifications which I approved of) he developed a crush on a schoolmistress and the boys somehow found out. James was fired from  the school for hitting a boy who taunted him about it and banned from teaching for life. Then suffering from encephalitis he committed suicide.

In my teens I wanted to oppose the spirit of the age and this was very priggish and morbid of me but now that age seems much wiser than this one in quite a lot of respects. The country it seems really is going to the dogs. I discovered over dinner to my great surprise that:

Smacking a pupil in Great Britain means being banned from teaching for life.

Lines are considered humiliating and are illegal as, ‘certainly’, standing in the corner would be.

Even with a II:ii degree from Oxford in classics jobs are not easy to come.

Being an Etonian does not make it easy to get girls. (This one I do not believe.)

Strangest of all, George suddenly said (this kind of abrupt and slightly startling remark is typical of him) that he hoped his son would not become a homosexual. And then said this was something he would not dare say in England. Even some of his friends would disapprove and all his friends are conservatives in politics. 

Summertime in Bucharest and the livin’ is easy

A hundred years ago they demolished a charming Turkish inn in Calea Victorei in Bucharest to make way for Cercul National Militar, the National Military Club, a pompous building of pink granite reached by a tall flight of steps above which fountains play. But a hundred years is enough to let ugly newcomers fit in and Cercul National, owned by the army and now probably the city's last state-owned catering establishment (so recently there was no other kind) is an oasis of civilisation in a Bucharest gone badly wrong. Live music, great location, nice customers, deeply unfashionable, 50 cl of palatable wine for EUR 2.50. 

Modest proposals for solving the Greek crisis without costing Europe money

In the 19^th century when the world was civilised a bankrupt Greece would have been forced to disgorge one or two islands. It's probably impossible for Greece or any country to leave the euro - a European income tax is more likely. But forced sale of islands is a much better solution. China might happily buy them but ideally Turkey would. Even better, perhaps the Gaddaffi family should buy one for the Colonel to rule as his Elba.

Oh and why not auction the Greek throne (only immensely rich would-be constitutional monarchs need apply)? Greek Orthodox or willing to convert. Good moral character, etc.

They could sell titles of honour too - a billion for a dukedom et al. There could be a Duke of Illyria just like in Twelfth Night.

They could sell the Parthenon marbles. Oh I forgot they already did. Or at least the Turks did. (After Great Britain spent much more on the Greek bailout than we saved in the recent spending cuts, I hope no Greek will ever again dare ask for the Elgin marbles back.)

Stupid people are usually wiser than clever ones.

I try to remember that being intelligent is not the same as being right. Stupid people are usually wiser than clever ones. John Stuart Mill’s canard that the conservatives are the stupid party is, said AJP Taylor in a wry gloss on his own views, a back-handed compliment.  `The Tory Party are the stupid party but to be stupid and to be sensible are not far apart. The Progressive party, Radical and Socialist, is clever, but silly.'  Yes indeed and if you seek their monument look around you.

Mrs Thatcher Charles Moore pointed out was where all the snobberies met, snobbery towards a grocer’s daughter, Southern snobbery towards northerners, Arts students’ snobbery toward scientists, male superiority.  She sounded like the Daily Mail (my mother’s paper) made flesh and grated on my ear (I was an ardent teenage Tory) like a knife scraped across a plate. 
Intellectual snobbery was the main reason why in the 80s I didn't see how good Mrs. Thatcher, Mr. Reagan and Lord Lloyd-Weber were. I have now been introduced to Phantom of the Opera and it is very good - as good or better than the 1925 silent film version. And I esteem Mrs. Thatcher for much that she did though I admire her somewhat less than my leftish friends (privatisation meant selling off industries cheaply) and I love her for all the things she didn't do which Labour did: devolution; out of control immigration; politically correct equality legislation, powers surrendered to Brussels and all the rest. 

Some more reactionary thoughts on tomatoes

If everyone simply refused to enter shopping centres they would all fail and eventually be demolished and people could go back to shopping in markets like they did ten years ago. And why not boycott supermarkets too? I who had started shopping occasionally in supermarkets certainly shall do so. Last night I ate the kind of delicious tomatoes that were until Romania joined the EU universal in Romania. My hostess told me she bought them from a peasant at Piata Domeni which I had previously heard was the best fruit and veg market in town.  Good fruit and vegetables are now impossible to obtain in the supermarkets. Instead beautiful red tomatoes imported from Turkey without any taste at all fill the shelves fallaciously beguiling housewives (and bachelor shoppers too).

Standing athwart history yelling 'Stop!'

All over the world in what historians will call the Great Boom or perhaps the Golden Age 1993-2008 people bought cars in order to be free agents and spent increasing large amounts of time sitting in traffic jams. When I first came to Bucharest one could have sat down and had a picnic in Calea Victoriei on Saturday or Sunday. Now most journeys of less than two miles are quicker on foot than by car.

What to do?

First, let's all agree that what Bucharest desperately needs are wheel clamps! A hundred thousand of them! Please. Now!

And cars should be taxed more to discourage people from buying them. Petrol should be taxed higher too.  I know this is a lost cause but cheap efficient public transport which we are lucky to enjoy in Bucharest is the acceptable face of socialism. Drivers cost the community a lot - road building, urban sprawl, road deaths, pollution, gridlock, etc. etc. and should contribute more.

The answer to congestion costs very little: wheel clamps and a congestion charge to pay before you can enter inner Bucharest between 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. Mondays to Fridays.

Instead we are increasingly living in the Romanian version of  the American dream/nightmare: people working long hours for multinational firms, suburbia, shopping centres, cars, mortgages, consumerism, expensive lawyers, sitting endlessly in traffic on the way to the gym, no time to sit on a terrace and drink beer which is in any case not good for your health. 

Meanwhile the mass of taxpayers dream of buying a car. These poorly-paid employees support the great majority of Romanians who are not employed, pay for the thefts of the political class and the Romanian oligarchs and pay for outrageously overpriced roadworks that take years to edge a few miles.  

A Cold War within the Cold War - Romanian exceptionalism

A review of With Friends Like These by Larry Watts



The recent past is a forgotten country. The Cold War now seems a
period as remote as the Thirty Years War, John le Carré’s novels
almost as quaint as those of Dumas père. Those of us who grew up in
the West in the Cold War rather than studying it as history rely on
memories of information that was very partial and misleading. We now
know that the so called satellites of the USSR were very much actors
following their own scripts. Often the supposed puppets were pulling
the strings. Kim Il Sung manipulated Stalin into supporting his attack
on South Korea and Ho Chi Minh inveigled  Russia into enabling him to
defeat the South Vietnamese. Now Larry Watts’ ground-breaking,
enjoyable  and meticulously researched book, which deserves to find a
wide audience, shows that Ceausescu’s Romania posed a threat to the
USSR greater than Tito and comparable with the 1956 Hungarian
uprising, the Prague Spring and the Solidarity movement in Poland.


Eastern Europe was not the story of quislings ruling subject people
on instructions from the Kremlin. The men and one or two women (of

whom Romanians Anna Pauker and Elena Ceausescu were two of the most significant)
who ran the Communist Empire were believers who had risked death and
imprisonment from their enemies and from their communist friends
because of their beliefs. In power they combined as all politicians do
the desire for power, love of manipulation and genuine idealism, to
which they added a ruthless devotion to their grim cause and a
fanatical conviction that they understood the direction of history
which seemed to them scientific but we clearly see to be essentially religious.



Of course Marx and Lenin were wrong. Class is not the
driver of history, nor even are economic interests. Nations command
far more allegiance even from socialists than social classes. Behind
the monolithic appearance of the Soviet Bloc the disappearance
of national differences of course did not happen. What is remarkable
is the degree to which the conflicts between neighbouring countries in
Eastern Europe before 1945 continued seamlessly after the Communists came
to power. The most arresting example is Hungary, until 1918 the most
reactionary country in Europe west of Czarist Russia. There in 1919 in
the vacuum left by the disappearance of the Hapsburg Empire the arch
conservative antisemitic army and civil service enlisted as supporters
of the Bolshevik revolution of Bela Kun a.k.a. Aaron Cohen.
The Hungarian gentile middle class saw in Bolshevik Russia the only
hope  of preserving Greater Hungary, in particular Hungarian
possession of Transylvania and the Banat, which had been occupied

after the armistice by Romania. Kun’s regime hoped the Russian Red 
Army would break through Romanian lines into the Bucovina and link 
up with the Hungarian Red Army. Instead, the Romanian army occupied

Budapest and overthrew the Communists.

Larry Watts's book explains that in the 1944-46 history repeated itself and
the supporters and gendarmes of the Hungarian dictator Admiral Horthy
who had distinguished themselves in Hungarian occupied
Transylvania with great brutality, reinvented themselves as Communist
officials and ‘people’s police’. Stalin encouraged Hungarians to hope
that Transylvania would become a  separate country  or divided between
Romania and Hungary. He played off Hungary and Romania against each

other in the same way that Hitler had done.

Meanwhile the annexation of Bessarabia (now most of the Republic of Moldova)

and the Northern Bucovina (which became  part of the Ukraine) led to the arrests,

deportations and killings of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Romanians who 
found themselves living in the USSR. In addition, Khrushchev in charge of
post-war Ukraine presided over a deliberate famine which Watts says was

probably aimed at ethnic Romanians that may have killed between one and 
two hundred thousand people, while Leonid Brezhnev, First Secretary of 
the Soviet Republic of Moldavia, may have reduced the ethnic Romanian 
population there by as many as a quarter of a million.

Mutual antipathy between Russians and Romanians (the Mamalizhniki  or
polenta eaters) has long roots in conflict over territory. Russia ruled

Bessarabia (Eastern Moldavia) off and on since 1812. She occupied the rest of Romania on several occasions between 1812 and 1919. It was very feasible had it not been for the other Powers that Romania would have been incorporated in the Russian Empire as were

Georgia, Armenia and central Asia.

Communism only exacerbated things. Engels whose works had the status
of holy scripture for Marxist-Leninists had written that the Romanians
were a ‘degenerate’ people, ‘a people without history’. The revolution
said Engels would ‘annihilate’ the Romanians, wiping them ‘from the
face of the earth. And that too would be a step forward.’ Engels wrote
this in 1849, angry with the Romanians for fighting for the Emperor
against the 'progressive' forces of the Hungarian nationalist Kossuth.
From Communism to Fascism was always but a step.

Gheorghiu Dej the Communist leader of Romania from 1948 till his death
in 1965 was unique among Stalin’s satraps in not being a ‘Muscovite’, a
Communist trained during the 30s in Russia. He won favour with Moscow
for his support in helping reassert Soviet control over Hungary after
the 1956 Revolution and succeeded (one would like Watts to have
explained in more detail how) in persuading the USSR to withdraw
troops from Romania by 1958. Crucially the Romanians also managed to
roll up very extensive KGB and Hungarian spy networks (very often the two
were combined).  These included a series of Hungarian irredentist
secret societies operating in Transylvania run by the Communist
government in Hungary with KGB knowledge.

In the Warsaw Pact Organisation hastily cobbled together in 1955,
Romania from almost the beginning played the role of enfant terrible
and barrack room lawyer. Romania took an independent line, enjoying
good relations with Tito, building the Iron Gates hydroelectric plant
on the Danube without Khrushchev’s permission. In 1963 Dej told Kennedy that he did
not support Soviet missile deployments in Cuba and would never allow
Soviet missiles to be stationed on Romanians soil. The Cuban crisis
may have precipitated an effective declaration of independence in
1963 by the Romanian government who refused to increase military
budgets saying they saw no threat of aggression from the West. The
Bucharest Spring of 1964 Watts convincingly argues should be compared
to the split with Tito in 1948, the Hungarian revolution of 1956 and
the Prague spring four years later.

Ceausescu was more disruptive than de Gaulle in NATO. In June 1965,
unnoticed by Western secret services, Romania was dropped from Warsaw
pact military operations. The Pentagon continued to plan on the
assumption that Romania would fight alongside her Warsaw pact partners
even though Romania’s role in the alliance was to impede Soviet
policy. Again unbeknown to the CIA, Romania became a Chinese ally
second only in importance to Albania, a position it used to help mend
fences between China and the United States. For example, Romania helped

persuade Hanoi to negotiate with Washington. In 1967 Romania refused to 
break off relations with Israel following the Six Day War while De Gaulle
aligned with the Soviet position. Romania acted as honest broker between Israel

and the Arab states and can be take some of the credit for the 1978 Camp

David agreement that led to peace between Israel and Egypt.

Ceausescu, alone of the Communist leaders, publically backed the
Prague Spring and condemned the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia.

Yet none of this was understood by the CIA who were spellbound for many

years by the disclosures of the Soviet defector Golitsyn. Golitsyn said that
Romanian independence was a KGB ruse. This Trojan horse  theory which
had been disseminated before Golitsyn continued through
the Gorbachev period. By 1990 it had become the received wisdom in the
West, after Ceausescu’s regime had been overthrown by Romanian
Gorbachevites working in league with the Kremlin and the KGB.

Other legends were circulated according to which Kadar and Gomulka
followed independent lines whereas both were always loyal to Moscow.
General Jarulselski and Urho Kekkonen long-time President of Finland
were Soviet agents. Tito was far more amenable to the Soviets than
Romania and unlike Romania bought Soviet military equipment. He
allowed the Russians to fly over Yugoslav aerospace and use land
transport routes and Yugoslav ports for transshipping arms to Soviet
clients in the Middle East.

Watts tells us that on several occasions between 1968 and 1971 Russia
planned to invade Romania and Honecker of East Germany was told as
late as the end of 1973 that Brezhnev had approved an invasion. Russia
was emboldened by the relative nonchalance with which the Western bloc
has reacted to the invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Had an
invasion of Romania been received in the same way, Russia intended to
march into Yugoslavia. In August 1968, the Romanian Communist Party
expected an invasion by the USSR and voted almost unanimously to
fight, though as Ceausescu admitted without hope of success. The Stasi.

 the East German secret service reclassified Romania as an enemy state

at this time. The Americans unaware of what was going on were anxious

to avoid being drawn into a conflict. So was Tito, who had good reason

to fear that Yugoslavia would be invaded after Romania. In August 1968

Tito turned to Great Britain for help, using Sir Fitzroy Maclean as an

intermediary, in the event of a Soviet invasion of Romania. MI6

unlike the CIA knew that a Russian invasion was on the cards. Harold

Wilson discussed with Michael Stewart and Denis Healey the idea of

sending crack troops to fight alongside partisans as in the Second

World War. 1968 not 1963 was probably the moment when Cold War

came closest to becoming hot.

Ceausescu’s famous speech from the balcony of the Central Committee
building on 23rd August 1968 had won him national support but
Nagy and Dubcek had had equal popular backing. Why did the Russians
and their allies not invade? For a number of reasons. Because in
Romania, unlike in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, they no longer had a
sufficiently extensive intelligence network enabling them to
know what was going on in the party or the armed forces or clients in
top positions who could request a Soviet intervention, because
Ceausescu and his colleagues unlike the Czechs would have fought and
because they had assumed national control over their armed forces
which were prepared a military response against an invader from any
direction. The fact that the US, Britain, and perhaps most explicitly,
Socialist giant China had weighed in to deter a Soviet move no doubt
played their role. 


Courted by the Carter Administration in the late 70s

Watts argues that Ceausescu was free in the late 1970s to have led Romania

into a non-aligned position similar to that of Yugoslavia and to have 

competed with Tito for American favours. Instead he decided to create 

an autarchic national communist state, independent of Moscow and

Washington, a path that led him to the firing squad in Tirgoviste on
Christmas Day, 1989.

©Paul Wood 2011

Balkan Journey

Friday 7 August 2009

In England the great train robber Ronnie Biggs slips away from prison.  A figure from my 1960s childhood, playing in the street,  along with Georgie Best, Bernadette Devlin, Henry Kissinger, the  Viet Cong and Cilla Black.

The drive to from Bucharest to Vratza, four pretty hours . A wonderful hotel,  the Chaika Hotel, found by me in a few moments on the net coast €25 a double room overlooking the Vratcata Gorge.  Leaving Patrick in the hotel, I walk through the gorge as darkness falls. Feel proud of myself. Good food.

Saturday

Walking. Lunch. Drive to Sofia. Not via the mountain road. We miss it. I point it out. Patrick doggedly refuses to believe it is the road.

Sofia. Dullsville. Sunshine. Quiet and hot on a Saturday evening in August. 

The Hotel Anel. I thought from listening to Tony  that other people thought nothing of paying €60 a night for a five star hotel but Patrick who does not like to give himself presents is dismayed and I consider expensive places corrupt.

The mosque. The man wants me to wear flip-flops which I decline grateful for the feel of sock on carpet. What kind of Muslims are these? Attractive, empty except for one white foreigner praying energetically, head down and bottom up.

Too much food in a very dimly lit pizza terrace near the mosque full of 20-somethings talking loudly in the dark. 

Sunday, Sofia

The dark (pastel coloured actually) satanic mall in the middle of Sofia doesn’t make me very nostalgic for Communism. That’s far in the past now. I tell myself it makes people happy. Finally with difficulty after I from boredom bought a striped tie in an extraordinary mint green (only Americans wear striped ties I know) we find the exit from Sofia  for Macedonia. 

Kyustendil. Little town near the border with a beautiful derelict mosque. The guidebook says there is no longer a significant Muslim population here no doubt veiling all sorts of human tragedies. Sunshine. Quiet. Balkan. The profound Bulgaria. The great calm of small towns in Eastern Europe.

Just over the border is the monastery of St. Joachim Osogovsky, near Kriva Palanka, Macedonia’s most attractive monastery. In fact there are two twin monasteries, on the Macedonian side of the border perched on a hill, just like one I visited in Syria where the villagers  spoke Aramaic. One is old. Many Macedonian Mass-goers pilgrims, day trippers. Very pretty road through mountains. The journey from Sofia to Skopje took three and a half hours not the seven which it took me when I went by bus including much time on a mountain top waiting while customs officers on both sides went through our luggage piece by piece (I as an Englishman was spared this). by bus. Rain torrential. Skopje.

Much though not all of Skopje was destroyed in an earthquake in the 60s and rebuilt not in a Communist style but in the same style as Winchester would have been rebuilt had it been destroyed in the 60s. The result is that it is charming but a bit like Hornchurch. And what is so wrong with Hornchurch after all?

That great cafe in the centre which Philippe took me to.

The dingy, strange hotel with character, the Jadran, which I discovered last time and found again, with its mock Arab facade.  Setting for a ghost story. By Le Fanu perhaps. Empty sitting rooms on each floor with splendid wainscoting. One has an ironing board in a corner forgotten. Ottoman Empire’s dying gasp. A pastiche built in the lost 1920s before Tito and the horrors of modernity.

Monday Skopje

Woke in the strange room with its ceiling 20 foot high and the chandelier at 5.40 = 6.40 Bulgarian time and escaped and finally found refuge in a hotel where I ate breakfast. The only thing about Patrick that interests me is his inner life and that to a limited degree. And my pride does not want me to be his friend. I am exciting. He is not. So say I. He would disagree about my being exciting, I know, nor if he thought me exciting would he have wanted me as a friend.

Hot. The Muslim town north of the river and I saw many things I didn’t see with Philippe. The bazaar. Tea and lemonade served in cafes for tiny prices. Very very like a small town in Turkey but less spruce than say Antioch?  The cars driving at 10 mph reminded me of Aleppo. Utterly un-European and enchantingly so. We saw three beautiful mosques. There were others but Patrick told me his appetite for mosques is not unbounded. Mine is.

The drive to Ohrid is very beautiful – we took the scenic route but it is hard to remember scenery especially writing this up six days later.

Tetovo the capital of the Albanian region, traffic choked and unexceptional. We did not get out but carried on.

A number of lakes. We lunched overlooking one. Too much very beautiful scenery and too many hair pin bends. Finally Lake Ohrid. Little places on the lake where people rent rooms cheaply looked fun a bit like the fringe of Constanta. The jolly and comfortable hotel for €35. Seemed a great price but now I recall the 80s when I didn’t travel one could stay in the centre of Madrid for £1, Istanbul in a three star hotel for £4.

My first impression was that it would be more vulgar than I had expected and Patrick said it reminded him of the Romanian seaside at which I protested. He wisely said that late afternoon was when resorts were at their worst people coming back dishevelled and sunburnt. Patrick said is it so bad to see people being happy?

Excellent table by the lake in a good restaurant watching the reflection of the lights of the town in the lake. It reminded me of Amasra very much.

Some beautiful women of twenty. A blonde and brunette nymph laughing.

Tuesday Ohrid

Patrick said we should spend the day alone until dinner and this was an immense liberation.

Three cappuccinos a cheese and ham pancake and I reread Mark Marzower on the Balkans. A wonderful essay. History like great paintings and good jokes reveals a hidden meaning in the universe.

The long promenade.

The St Sophia church with the best C 11 wall paintings in the world outside the St Sophia church in Kiev. Where I have also been though I do not recollect any wall paintings

.

Relaxed. Unintellectual. Not too warm. I shall return.

The Muslim quarter with mosques and a market which might be called the bazaar. A British lower middle class voice heard for a moment. An Englishman does not travel abroad to meet Englishmen.

We ate at a dull restaurant of Patrick’s choosing on a road not on the lake.

Wednesday Ohrid

I can scarcely jog any distance. Climbed some of the way to the top of the castle. The small very old churches are closed. A bit like Nesebar before Nesebar was ruined by tourism and synthetic new old buildings.

Patrick and I  get very lost looking for the crossing into Albania. Bad maps and we lacked the courage of our convictions. And Patrick always gets lost for psychological reasons that I do not understand. But we found some places on the Macedonian Western shore of the lake before the border which seemed wonderful. Little villages. The armed 19 year old soldiers guarding a disused border crossing to Albania.  An air of the Cold War within the Cold War between Tito and Hozha. An isolated hotel where they spoke German. Getting lost is the beginning of wisdom or at least of genuine travel.

The mountain crossing and suddenly immense heat. How I wish I had not unselfishly suggested we take Patrick’s old car, the bright red SUV which looks like a Southend hairdresser’s babe hoover but has no air conditioning. Very hot indeed. Amazing scenery much more like from a Clint Eastwood film. Wild. The badlands. A road better than I expected. Pretty reasonable. Deserted country.

Berat. Slummy hot higgledy-piggledy. Down at heel. Eastern. Oh I love it said Patrick and my opinion of him suddenly changed fundamentally. The first time I ever heard him express enthusiasm for something?

The main street at 6 p.m. lined with dusty trees where a dozen ATMs didn’t work for either of us until one released money for me. A kind of corso where young girls walk and families and old couples sometimes with grandchildren slowly. Outside the cheap cafes under the dusty trees sit men of various ages from twenty to sixty smoking and looking. A very curious scene which I want someone to explain. Like the corso in Dubrovnik where girls saunter with friends to be looked at?

[I have been told since by Kim Hakkenberg and Bill Cash that this is common in Romanian provincial towns where it is called the promenada.]

None of this seems post communist but third world. Patrick does not agree with third world, thinks it looks  more affluent than he expected but I do not understand why. All of Albania makes one think that like somewhere in Asia, in some ways Communism brought a kind of progress much as I would very much prefer what went before.

I called my sister to share the scene with her, the very opposite of what she I think would like. I didn't want to make her jealous and perhaps I slightly wanted to remind myself that my tastes are not those of Middle England.

In Berat I like Albania much more than ever before. This is life but not as we know it. This is the Albania I was looking for.

An Ottoman hill-town like Gijrokastra but with much more life. Three mosques. A river running through the town.

I found a good hotel the Malibu Club with AC and a good view and breakfast for €25.

An indifferent dinner, Turkish food, kababs not cooked with love,  in a roof restaurant with a great view overlooking the river.

Thursday Berat

An epiphany as I drew back the curtains and remembered the unexpected view of the bridge across the river and the Ottoman wooden buildings on the other side crawling up the hill. Then I got cross trying to put Carmen in touch with Nir using Facebook and the HTC. Excellent breakfast wonderful olives the best I ever tasted. The guide book said Berat is famous for its green olives and the fame is deserved. I sat for two hours loving the scene from the roof garden of the hotel. 

Hot beyond words, a Middle Eastern heat. The harem built when Northanger Abbey was finished. The inevitable and enjoyable ethnographical museum (the one in Bucharest across the road from my office i was guiltily aware I had never visited and I repaired the omission when I returned).

The coastal road. Hairpin bends but the road has been remade since last year. I saw no deserted beaches (but I remembered them from last year) and someone told me for those you need a boat. The guidebook said that most coves now had a hotel and a single hotel would have been great but we could not find even that.

A road off to the left and the coast and Patrick unlike most drivers is keen to explore. Twenty minutes of rough unmade road and red soil and very sharp hair pin bends and finally a cove with four or five bars on the beach built from straw like the illegal beach bars in Vama Veche in Romania. A cheap hotel which was full. And we found a camping site where for €9 we got a tent with ground sheet and sleeping bag and breakfast and a decent supper. A piece of ground lit by coloured bulbs on strings full of people of twenty bursting with youth and good spirits. A blonde girl with amazing dimples seraphic with happiness and life.

Friday Jar

I was very tired but did not sleep for hours, my first night in a tent.

A good cappuccino on an isolated beach in Albania. Then another and a third. The man selling them to me warned me two was too much.

Sea as clear as water in a wash basin. Every stone as clear at the bottom as if seen through a window. Too lacking puff to jog. I swam, read Kaplan.

The road to Saranda, in places a potholed track last year,  has just been remade. Saranda itself chic colourful. Like where? Like a setting for a Lesley Charteris novel I thought. Like the South of France thought Patrick. Yes.

Great meal at that place overlooking the  sea where I lunched last year: octopus risotto. Some lovely Albanian faces. One in particular intelligent clear-sighted and womanly belonged to a 15 year-old.

The long drive back. Through winding roads among cold damp mountains of North West Greece no doubt as Patrick said full of stories of gods and nymphs. Deserted and very beautiful.

A little town before the motorway called Napoli pop. 5,000 (thank heaven for Wikipedia on the HTC) where I drank a Greek coffee and ate divine baklava from the shop across the street. Patrick asked me not to buy baklava and eat it in the cafe. I asked the waitress if I might and she said yes of course. I still wish you hadn’t done it said Patrick. The best meal of the holiday.

Long drive. Salonica. Walking around negotiating with hotels at close to midnight. I found a 4 star hotel yards from the waterfront for €60 which was more than Patrick wanted to pay. Good to know that Tony Gray is not the standard for spending money on hotel rooms but this was a good deal and I prevailed.

Saturday 15, Salonica revisited

Salonica has this time a certain charm. When were you last here asked the girl in reception. Seven years ago I realised with a start. It has changed a lot in the last seven years. So have I for the worse said I. No doubt Salonica has changed for the better.

No-one in Greece speaks a Slav language she says. She thinks the Jews who built the hotel in 1926 were forced to leave because of problems between Jews and Greeks.

Lunch in a place called Sidirokastro, which Wikipedia on my HTC told me was in Bulgaria 1912-1918.  The conveniences of the 21^st century. I see that little towns in Greece and Turkey are very similar. Full of bright shops and cafes and plastic advertising. Modern. Rebuilt in the 70s. If Macedonia is really Bulgaria, Bulgaria is not very different from Greece. And Greece and Turkey are still the same place. We eat chicken rissotto made with tinned peas and carrots.

Shooting through the mountains of Bulgaria on the motorway then turn off. The Rila monastery as night was falling extraordinary wooden galleries painted white and read. Unlike anything in Romania or elsewhere. The heart of Bulgaria. Empty. We only have a short while before the place closes. Boris III’s tomb. Sculpted on the tomb he looked like a Mosleyite.

After a very long search we find a  hotel that smells of antiseptic like a clean WC. €30 for a suite. Empty sterile room with balcony. Crashed.

Patrick saw that the ads for DJs in Jar includes DJs from Macedonia and thinks this is the future without ethnic hatred. He still thinks he says that decency kindness and gentleness will conquer terrorism. I think ethnic groups live together at best without liking each other and thus is human nature. The world is being remade by liberals who think human nature basically good.  Perhaps they are unusually good themselves.

Sunday, 16 August 2009 Rila

Rila. The monastery burnt down in the 1840s and was rebuilt. Very atmospheric with high arcades which reminded me of the Great Mosque at Damascus. But I still felt cheated – only Victorian. Swiz in Molesworth’s lingo. A coach party of British at 10.30. Bulgaria is no longer obscure. This is however ersatz the real Bulgaria which survived only via the Church. Suddenly I forgot my Metternichianism and became a Bulgarian nationalist. How wonderful that they threw off the Muslim yoke after 500 years.

Long journey home broken by uninspired late lunch at a hotel in Ruse, the Bulgarian river port on the Danube.

Hot sunny motionless Sunday afternoon in Ruse. I tell Patrick: all of us spent our adolescence in Ruse. Patrick: Some of us spent us adulthoods in Ruse.

©Paul Wood 2011

‎"A princely marriage is the brilliant edition of a universal fact, and, as such, it rivets mankind"

I was rather indifferent until the day came. Funny thing the monarchy. 



But come the day! What larks this wedding is! Will there be peeled grapes? 

But 30 years since the last one...

The Duke of Cambridge! An auspicious title! The last Duke of Cambridge one of the great reactionaries said: They say I am against reform. I am not against reform. There is a time for everything. And the time for reform is when it can no longer be resisted. 

Thanks to Delia Burnham I was asked on TV to discuss help commentate (dread word). ButI am very glad I decided not to burble on on Antena 3 in heavily accented Romanian about the wedding. What to say? Edward the Confessor bla bla, Prinny bla bla... 



The King and Queen of Romania are in the Abbey with Princess Margarita and Prince Radu. The King of Romania of course met his future Queen at our Queen's wedding in 1947.

The service heavenly though I was at a cocktail party and I did not give it my full attention. Roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, pretty girls, Romanian champagne, the people one knows, all subsidised by the British tax payer poor chump. A very good sermon by Chartres who says in a Godless age personal relationships substitute for religion which is why marriages fail.

Why can't England always be like that? Book of Common Prayer, beauty, people brought together by patriotism and party spirit not partisan spirit. 

A royal wedding should be a festival of stuffiness. This one is cool instead. Like a Richard Curtis film. 

The new Princess smiles too much, looks Northern down-to-earth. Asked on TV whether she would be a good queen I said the individuals aren't important. The monarchy is what matters. ('Oamenii nu sunt importanti. Monarhia este ce conteaza.') 



Satisfying and funny that the Guardian and Independent are as full of royal fervour as the conservative papers. The Guardian is supposed to be republican. 

Personally I rejoice that the monarchy is not compatible with a meritocratic society, or equality of opportunity, or post-imperial guilt or separation of church and state or multiculturalism. But that's just me - the people in the street don't care about the arguments for and against the monarchy. It is associated with the great cause of cheering us all up. 

The people in the mall may not care about the divine right of kings or social hierarchy but they do care very much about being part of an extended family = the nation, and a very long beautiful tradition = the nation. The royal wedding and the Pope's state visit showed the media class they misjudged the British people completely. 



Stuart Maconie in the Daily Mirror says the new Princess is Middle England - as English as the Six Nations, gas barbecues, Ikea and Dire Straits. I have no knowledge of any of these four things. I always felt a foreigner in my own country and generation. England for me is R.S. Surtees, the Charing Cross Road, the Inns of Court, Trollope and Belloc and cathedral closes, Broadstairs, allotments, 1930s Rupert Bear Nutwood Green ribbon development, the countryside in Derbyshire and Dorset. None of this is very up to date except I suppose the countryside which is new every moment, assuming  executive housing estates are not built are built over it. Even allotments (the unrevolutionary end result of Joe Chamberlain’s policy, in his red republican phase, of land reform – that truly IS English) are going to be sold off to property developers to make money.