Do people back in Britain still say, 'It's a free country'?

Surely only ironically. It used to be  a common expression especially used by sulky girls to men who asked to sit at their table. People used to say every day ‘Aren’t our police wonderful?’ too.

My town

Southend-on-Sea, Essex.
'Breathes there the man with soul so dead
Who never to himself has said
This is my own, my native place?' Well, yes, actually.


Whose heart hath ne'er within him burned, 
As home his footsteps he hath turned 
From wandering on a foreign strand! Nope.

Actually, I have been having occasional fond memories of Westcliff-on -Sea and Prittlewell Sq. One screens out all the bad memories and remembers the bandstand and a pre-relativist pre-multicultural England with Sunday roasts and church. Mr. Paul Channon M.P., son of Chips Channon, our improbably grand but tongue tied Member.


Alvaro's in St Helen's Rd. was one of the best restaurants in the Good Food Guide. Don't see it on the net. Strange, it was there in 1991...

Disjointed thoughts on the British monarchy

I can't help feeling it's slightly middle class of our dear Queen to do so many public engagements. After all, she's not a public servant. Or perhaps that is what she is nowadays.


Anyway the monarchy became very middle class after William IV died and maybe that suits us. The exciting glamorous members of the Firm were bad 'uns: Edward VIII and Diana. Although I love the most regal and glamorous of them all, Princess Margaret, one of the most attractive women I ever met. She conducted her public engagements at Oxford and Cambridge as much as possible where she ignored the girls and enchanted the boys. I remember her finishing a bottle of whisky at a reception at the Cambridge Union while none of us could leave. Nor did we want to except for poor Harry Hinsley the Vice-Chancellor who clutched his walking stick and clearly yearned for bed. How odd - how lie a Joe Orton play - that her body was cremated in Swindon.


We don't want our kings to be regal any more. The fact that a valet assists the Prince of Wales when he needs a sample of his urine excited comment not long ago. Oddly enough film and rock stars can be Hanoverian however. 


This reminds me of my favourite haiku by the Emperor Hirohito


We had intended
To visit the flower show at Kyoto
But were prevented by ill health.

Asia begins at the River Jordan

An Israeli just told me this week there are five great cities of Europe: London, Paris, Barcelona, Berlin, Tel Aviv.


I was interested that he a Jew mentioned Berlin a city I always forget about - the only East European capital I haven't visited, for 21 years, and probably the most exciting. Actually I have never been to Berlin. I have been to two cities which no longer exist called East and West Berlin.


Tel Aviv to my surprise does not feel American and it has a wonderful buzz, even though the old Middle Eastern Jewry in Cairo and Damascus would have been far more interesting than their descendants. Tel Aviv feels Near Eastern more than Middle Eastern. Greece and Turkey and Israel are the same cultural area. But Tel Aviv is also an important appendix to East European history. Romanians tell me they hear Romanian spoken all the time in Tel Aviv. Someone told me 10% of the population are Romanian Jews.


Since we in England are not European either I don't feel very qualified to judge where Europe ends but clearly it does not include 97% of Turkey. Nor Cyprus, nor Malta. Maybe I do feel qualified...


Europe includes Reunion and Guadaloupe, Ceuta, Melilla, St. Pierre and Miquelon. Spain was in Africa when Muslim and the Spanish still talk like we English do or did, about going to Europe. "Asia begins at the Landstraβe" said Metternich. Catherine the Great was more powerful than Metternich and moved the border of Europe from the Volga to the Urals. It will, disastrously I think, begin at the Iraqi border with Turkey if the EU, the State Department and the FCO have their way.


In any case Romania is doomed to be a success because she lies indisputably in the geographical expression (for it is not a continent) Europe. Georgia is much less fortunate.


A Romanian once said to me: 'You know people make the wrong comparison when they compare Romania to France. They should compare us to Syria. Compared to Syria we aren't doing badly.' And in the Christian quarters of Aleppo and Damascus I discovered an unknown Balkan country. In Armenia and Georgia I found two more.

From a William Trevor interview in Paris Review

I don’t like the Church of England. I feel much more drawn towards Catholicism when I’m in England—not that I’d 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. It’s part of an establishment with the armed forces; tombs, rolls of honor, that sort of thing.


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


It’s 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 you’re in the presence of an eccentric mind. It’s not like that at all with an Irish eccentric; you know about it all very easily and quickly. English eccentricity has a suburban quality—it’s like a very neatly trimmed garden in which you suddenly realize that the flower beds aren’t what they seem to be. There’s 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 it’s almost secretive. I’ve 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 he’s 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.

Collective noun

At a dinner at 10 Downing St to mark its 250th anniversary James Callaghan wondered aloud what is the collective noun of Prime Ministers? - to which Harold Macmillan 91 answered: a lack of principals.

Sir Winston Churchill on Islam in 1901

Unlike David Cameron, who thinks it borderline racist to suggest Arab countries are not ready for democracy,  Sir Winston Churchill in The River War his book about the conquest of the Sudan was very blunt. 

"How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men. Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities — but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilisation of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilisation of ancient Rome."

His writing is clearly a pastiche of Macaulay and none the worse for that. How much more interesting, informed and persuasive are the writings of Victorians on the subject of the psychology of nations than what is written now. 

By the way, Churchill in 1955 suggested Keep Britain White to his cabinet as a good election slogan. 

'Every day I thank God I'm not American.'

At university I remember a girl delighted me by saying 'Every day I thank God I'm not American.' Because I did the same each day. But nowadays I never think this. I suppose because I've got completely used to it. But more because America no longer seems the overwhelming cultural hegemonist it seemed back in the 70s and 80s before globalisation and European integration (dread words). Possibly also because England no longer feels so small or out-of-date. I was always pro-American in foreign policy and many other terms, a very questioning but always loyal Cold Warrior, tremendously grateful to the USA for defending Europe. As I get older I find more and more reasons to admire America and somewhat fewer to dislike what I think she stands for. I like Americans, have many American friends, I like American culture if that means Raymond Chandler, Frank Capra, George Caleb Bingham, James Stewart. Why does an American accent heard in the street very occasionally - not often - move me to a momentary burst of irrational rage? Something to do with modernity and a threat to the English way of life? Or to do with American egalitarianism which snobs call lack of culture?

Anthony Burgess said this in an interview in 1972: I used to think that England might become just a place that liked to be visited—like that island in J. M. Barrie’s Mary Rose—but now I see that so many of the things worth seeing—old things—are disappearing so that England can become a huge Los Angeles, all motorways, getting about more important than actually getting anywhere. England is now going into Europe, not—as I had once expected and even hoped—America, and I think it will now have Europe’s faults without its virtues. The decimal coinage is a monstrosity, and soon there’ll be liters of beer, as in Nineteen Eighty-Four, and no cheap wine or caporal tobacco. Absorption, anyway, since England either has to absorb or be absorbed. Napoleon has won.

Elsewhere he deliciously described Canada as the colony that stayed at home to look after mother.

I of course much prefer European cultural hegemony but only America despite all her recent very grave mistakes has the qualities to save the world. Though why she should bother slightly defeats me.
Save it from what? I am not quite sure. From relativism and Islamic zealots, I suppose, though she has enough fundamentalists and relativists herself and is allied with the worst Islamist state of all, Saudi Arabia.

Edmund Spencer, “Travels in European Turkey, in 1850″

Edmund Spencer, “Travels in European Turkey, in 1850: through Bosnia, Servia, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Thrace, Albania, and Epirus, with a visit to Greece and the Ionian Isles, and a homeward tour through Hungary and the Slavonian provinces of Austria on the Lower Danube”, London, Colburn and Co., 1851, vol. 2, p. 404

We would recommend the traveller, who may be desirous to make the tour of the Danube from Constantinople, to land at the little port of Kostendshe, on the Black Sea, by which he will escape a long and disagreeable voyage round by Soulina, the only navigable channel of all the outlets of the Danube. At Kostendshe he will find an agent of the Austrian Navigation Company, whose duty is to aid the traveller and attend to his wants. There are vehicles always in readiness to convey him to Tchernawoda, on the Danube, where he can amuse himself by visiting the villages of the Bulgarians in the neighbourhood till the arrival of the steam-boat.

In the time of the Romans, the Emperor Trajan entertained the idea of making a canal from this place to the Euxine, which, if completed, would shorten the distance from about three hundred miles to thirty, an enterprise that might be carried into effect at a very trifling expense, when we consider that the ground is quite level, with the Karasou lake in the centre of sufficient depth to assist the undertaking.

The late Sultan Mahmoud, who was really a man of energy, caused the ground to be measured and marked [p. 405] out, and would have carried the work into execution, had he not been prevented by the Cabinet of St. Petersburg. We presume, because it was contrary to the treaties of the navigation of the Danube, which secured to Russia the only practicable route to the Black Sea — that by Soulina; but as this treaty has expired or was said to expire in 1850, leaving the navigation of the Danube open to every nation, this much-desired work ought to be carried into execution, which would not only pay the contractors an immense profit, but considerably benefit the commerce of the Lower Danube. We fear, however, that the weak sovereigns of Austria and Turkey dread the displeasure of the Autocrat too much to carry the design of the vigorous Roman into execution.

In the mean time the poor mariner is obliged to adopt the long and tortuous route, the Soulina channel, which, owning to the accumulation of sand at the bar, can only receive vessels of a hundred and fifty tons burden; and we have still greater cause to regret, the non-completion of this work, when we remember the number of lives that are lost every year by malaria and fever during this voyage, rendered so long and tiresome, by endeavouring to avoid the sand-banks, as the mariner is almost certain to carry home with him the seeds of a disease, which it is said never leaves him.

Such a canal as we have alluded to, if constructed of sufficient depth for large merchant vessels, would materially facilitate navigation; for after passing the Delta of the Danube, the river deepens considerably till we arrive at Kladesitza, in Servia; here the navigation [p. 406] of the Danube is again interrupted by a ridge of rocks running across the river, called the Demirkapa (iron gate), and notwithstanding all Count Sz’echenyi, that excellent Hungarian, had done to deepen the bed of the river, the passage is still dangerous. This was proved a few years since by the loss of a vessel, its crew and passengers. The boat, on arriving in the midst of the rapids struck against a rock, became unmanageable and turning round with the most frightful rapidity, was instantly submerged in a whirlpool sufficient to engulf a man-of-war. The only panssenger that escaped was na Osmanli, who, being doubtful fo the ability of St. Nicholas, the patron saint of the Danube to ensure the safety of the vessel, landed with the intention of pursuing his journey on the banks of hte river till the danger was past. But the laughter and ridicule of his fellow passengers induced him ot alter his determination, and as he was in the act of stepping on board, a ring containing an amulet slipped from his finger, this was decisive — he would not tempt Kismet, and thus to the loss of a ring he owed his life.

Like that between Kostendshe and Tchernawoda, this break in the navigation of the Danube might easily be avoided by cutting a canal on the Servian side of the river at Kladesitza, which would then open an uninterrupted communication from the Black Sea into the heart of Germany, and shorten the route between Constantinople and Vienna, to a five days’ voyage at the utmost. It would appear, from the appearance of the marsh, that a canal had actually existed here, at some time or other, perhaps the work of the Romans, [p. 407] and which on their expulsion from the country, and the barbarism that followed, fell into disuse, and in process of time became filled up.

Can anything afford a more decisive proof than this, of the want of energy and enterprize in the inhabitants of these provinces; and of the indolent supineness of their rulers. We may ridicule the apathy and inertness of the Turks, yet here we see the noblest river in Europe running a course of eighteen hundred miles from its source to the Black Sea, traversing a succession of the most fertile countries, and uniting by the most natural, direct, and least expensive route the commerce of Central Europe with the vast countries of the East, still remaining in a state of nature. Every successive flood carries away with it the soil, and not unfrequently even the villages on its banks, and form accumulations, which impede navigation, together with vast marshes and stagnant lakes, from which arise exhalations, the most prejudicial to the health of man.

A few hundred thousand Anglo-Saxon colonists, if they found these countries a desert, would have done more in fifty years for the navigation of this noble river, and the salubrity of its banks, than all its Czars, Kaisers and Padishahs, Krals and Ko:nigs, Herzogs, Hospodars, Beys, and noble Princes, have effected in centuries. It is true they perfectly understand the parade, the marching, drilling and stuffing of soldiers (we do not mean internally), the ‘eclat and magnificence of courtly etiquette, the maintenance of an army of spies and court favourites, nor are any more sensitive [p. 408] to an invasion of their own royal will, or more prompt in cutting the throats of their own subjects, and those of their neighbours, about some crochet of precedency, or an acre of disputed territory. To support htese undertakings money is ever forthcomming; but for the execution of any great work of public utility, the advancement of industry and commerce, there is not a farthing to be found in the exchequer. Can we then wonder at the discontent of a people, ground down by taxation to support all this theatrical display, and finery of the State; or at Socialism, Republicanism, Deutsch-catholicism, Panslavism, Panteutonism, and all the other isms, which have already shaken Europe to its centre ?

Tradition saves, traditionalism kills

I love the past but hate conventionality or narrow mindedness. I am sometimes a reactionary but not really a conservative because I don't much like the status quo. Despite all my attempts I can't help being very broad minded.

Bucharest is a woman

‎"Cities have sexes: London is a man, Paris a woman, and New York a well-adjusted transsexual." Angela Carter
Bucharest is a blowzy but beguiling woman of a certain age, faded but flirtatious, fingers beringed. She landed her job because she was the mistress of the Director-General in the 1980s.

A pal asked me what my favourite sentence was in English.

I wasted eight minutes finding it in google.

There are no fields of amaranth on this side of the grave : there are no voices, O Rhodope ! that are not soon mute, however tuneful : there is no name, with whatever emphasis of passionate love repeated, of which the echo is not faint at last. (Landor.)  

 Quoted of course in '84, Charing Cross Rd', that enchanting play, then book and then film. 


My friend shocked me by asking who Landor was. Really, the world is becoming very philistine. Walter Savage Landor, he who threw his cook out of a first floor window into the garden below and then said, 'Oh God I forgot the daffodils.' 


Two more favourite sentences:

Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back, Wherein he puts alms for Oblivion. Troilus and Cressida

Life affords no human felicity more acute than that of a bishop from the Western United States when at a London dinner party he hears himself addressed for the first time as 'My Lord.'  

G.W.E. Russell

All the great man are dead. I don't feel so well myself..

The age of collectivism was formed by individuals: Lenin, Hitler, Einstein, Freud. The age of individualism is dominated by mediocrities. An age that worships celebrities has so very very few men of substance.The Western world seems to have been in decline since 1945 as far as literature and the arts are concerned. Have any great books been written in English since 1945? I mean ones comparable with the 30 best 19th century books? Declined even more as insofar as self-belief is concerned, It has produced no new ideas and very few great men. Yet people are richer and in many important practical ways freer (though in many ways less free) than ever before. Are they happier than in 1945? It has been the triumph of the bourgeoisie, especially the new class, the public sector bourgeoisie, whose values and interests dominate, and of technology. The amazing post 1950 economic miracle had nothing to do with new ideas, just old fashioned boring, vulgar, petit bourgeois, private sector ones.

I suspect Western civilisation is in a decline yet economically materially and technologically it flourishes. Gibbon starts the Decline and Fall with Marcus Aurelius - will a future Indonesian or Malay historian begin Decline and Fall of Western Civilisation at 1989?

Thoughts on the Revolution in Egypt, time for a female Caliph

I doubt if any Arab country is ready for representative government or democracy in the true sense. I hope I am wrong. Of course I feel full of hope and excitement but our chief concern should be British interests and peace in the region. It is difficult not to get swept up in euphoria about what is happening but the mob is not an attractive thing and young men are being killed like in Romania so that the first tier can be replaced by the second tier of the political class. Or worse by the Muslim Brotherhood. All the clever men tell us the Brotherhood are not a big factor but but this is not so. They won 20% of the vote in the recent rigged elections. The clever men (deliberate use of non-inclusive language) all pooh poohed the possibility of Egypt repeating Tunisia. Two very important points. Aid from the USA sustained the regime. Should we abolish foreign aid as Peter Bauer argued? And Tunisians aged between 15 and 24 made up 21 percent of the population in 2005.

The Telegraph has evidence that the Americans were working to achieve regime change. Like the USSR was in Romania in 1989. Whether true or not they may be punished for their public support of Mubarak.

All this is the result of the Liberals' decision to prefer Russia to Turkey as an ally before 1914. Disraeli was right to favour the Ottoman Empire (he would have had no truck with an ethical foreign policy) and its demise is cause of half the problems in the world today. The Russian Hapsburg and British Empires are also tragic losses. If a British Minister were advising a Khedive would things be better for Egyptians?

A shame the British allowed the Caliphate to come to an end. HM the Queen is a descendant of the Prophet. Caliph would make an excellent one of her subsidiary titles along with Defender of the Faith and Queen of France

Bucharest Hungary Serbia and Bulgaria in 80 hours

Hot Bucharest Saturday morning in July. 11.30 Geo called and suggests I drive with him to Szeged in Hungary to catch the Szeged Festival returning through Serbia and a corner of Bulgaria. I hate Szeged I say but after five minutes’ reflection I decided to take two days off and agreed.

Geo is a true Romanian and therefore a metaphysician who knows that time and space do not exist. I asked as we set out whether we might get to Szeged in time for the play that evening and he said let’s see. In fact we were half way there at 10.30 after driving with only a couple of pauses. Geo is, to my indignation, even less practical than me. Both of us are children when it comes to travel but he is sure he is a natural leader and I decide that it would be cruel and destructive to weaken his self-belief. His fatherly authoritativeness while losing his way is something to admire. One should never feel an urge to punch him.

Geo enjoys ill health. Whose last words were: ‘I am dying of a hundred good symptoms’? Geo is in the exactly opposite case. He warned me that I might need to take drastic action if his back gave in completely. I don’t drive and wondered whether he expected me to grab the wheel from him in mid-spasm and thus save us from hurtling to our deaths.. My father liked to dramatise his life and especially his driving in this way, which is why some people refused to drive with him. One makes friends because of psychological similarities and needs which are not easy immediately to discern.

Sinaia. We take the air for the sake of Geo’s back problems. The town where I rarely stop is increasingly spruced up and has an Edwardian air around the Hotel Palace, a flavour of Arnold Bennett.

Another crisis. Geo’s ‘claxon’ (car hooter) has failed him. A Romanian without his klaxon is emasculated, a hermaphrodite and I feel for him but tease him too. No he says not laughing this is serious. I do not use my car horn without a reason but it is absolutely necessary to have a horn and dangerous to drive without one. Later to his great relief it returns to life. All Romanians are Mr. Toad.

Jams in the mountains. A long queue in Busteni. Mid-afternoon. Why are people leaving Bucharest lazily at that time? But it is because of a landslide that the traffic is slow. And these landslides Geo say are caused by illegal logging.

I thank God Romania still does not have motorways or even dual carriageways. The roads are far less exciting than when potholed and third world ten years ago but they still pass through charming one horse villages where rushing through you can taste the emptiness of childhood. The road that twists across the mountains to Sinaia and Brasov is still the artery that links Romania to Europe and civilisation.

I miss the horses and carts which were common five years ago, much more so twelve years ago or twenty. Made illegal by the health and safety fascists of the EU. The same abominable people have made it illegal to kill a pig in your back garden.

Fortified Saxon churches (fortified to protect the parish from Genghis Khan and the Tartars as well as the Turks) glimpsed from the car. I glimpsed them on my first visit in 1990 in a prelapsarian Communist countryside before Romanians fled to Spain and Italy to pick crops, when the Lutheran churches still held services each Sunday for their Saxon congregations. And I am very ashamed that I have not explored them very much now.

A comfortable newly opened hotel in Sebes for less than €40 and a workmanlike pizza on the terrace downstairs. Sebes in the morning for fifteen minutes is a delight. Though it is mid-July the rains have kept the grass as green as in May. The melancholy churchyard around the Gothic church of this little German town could almost be in England. I want to read much more about the history of Transylvania which has little to do with that of the Regat. South of the Carpathians the Reformation meant nothing nor the Enlightenment. Only the French Revolution permeated.

There is nothing as enjoyable as a driving holiday unless it is a train holiday. A cumulative diagonal biopsy of Romania.

Arad so briefly I can’t remember it. A flash of C18th buildings and the poignant late nineteenth century Hungarian stuff when Magyars were momentarily a great power.

Maria Radna not far from Arad with its Hungarian or is it Swabian Catholic monastery towering on steep steps disproportionately over the little village. No time to find out its history. Although two generations older and baroque not neo-classical something about it reminds me of Esztergom.

Is this one of those parts of Romania near the border, like Arad or Oradea, which should really have been left in Hungary one wonders. I can’t help asking myself if Transylvania and the Banat could have been independent countries after 1918 instead of being taken from one procrustean national state to another. The short-lived Republic of the Banat failed in 1918. The Swiss ideal does not seem to work outside Switzerland. It remains to be seen how a multi-racial Western Europe will work out.

The corridors of the monastery are lined with the usual plaques in German and Hungarian recording the gratitude of the devout for intercessions by the Blessed Virgin but also by many paintings on the same theme many movingly naive. A brunette adolescent girl beneath the wheels of a car. A patient in a hospital bed attended by doctor and nurse. The Blessed Virgin appearing at a bedside. How far from Orthodoxy but far too from the understated murmered politeness of Anglicanism.

We decide not to take the shortest route to Szeged, fearful of hold-ups with lorries and instead take one of Geo’s imaginative routes which I come to learn do not save time. The heat is merciless and this is somehow fun. We are in central Europe in its tropical summer. We visit a village to try to find Geo’s grandparents’ grave without success.

We cross finally the Hungarian border and suddenly the ennui is palpable. Roads like roads in a child’s toy town. Neat grass verges. No no no I think. This is not what I want.

Szeged 18 years after my last visit, once more in stuffy intense heat, once more en route to the Voivodina. Szeged was destroyed by a flood in 1879 and rebuilt at the apogee of Hungarian self-confidence. The heat is in the upper nineties and cities in landlocked countries seem intolerable. I disliked the place in 1992 and do so again at first this time but staying till evening and a breeze I reconsider and find I like it. It is 18 years older and so am I. Now that the sooty London of my boyhood has been cleaned up and so have almost all the other cities in Europe, Szeged looks as old as anywhere else. Szechenyi Ter is reminiscent of a square in Lisbon a century or more older. And Szeged has a number of really splendid ‘Eclectic’ i.e. Art Nouveau buildings, much more beautiful than the pompous monstrosities found elsewhere in Hungary from the same period. And the wide turbid Tisza lined with Sunday afternoon crowds searching for a breeze.

We had dinner with some nice but slightly yeastless people who want to organise more festivals and I see that Geo surrounded by Hungarians from Hungary, Serbia and Romania is vulnerable. People might make jokes about Romania or criticise his country and he is alone and defenceless. His car with its unreliable klaxon is far away but everyone skirts controversial subjects.
We rather liked the town and Geo tangoed on the embankment of the Tisza with an astrophysicist but it is good, Geo and I agree the next day, to shake off the dust of Szeged and the EU.
Across the border in the Serbian Banat, Subotica 18 years on is very charming far warmer than Szeged, though without Szeged’s architectural distinction. Southern, even though the population is mostly Hungarian. Balkan by osmosis. I remember an old woman selling newspapers from a kiosk her wrinkled brown face alongside startling graphic covers of hard porn magazines. To my surprise they still sell hard porn alongside the daily papers but the vulvas and labia are less in your face.

Novi Sad. Very short time but a really excellent beef sour soup. Several baroque churches. The fortress overhanging the Danube and below it an ignored old town built in the 18th century and now empty dusty boarded-up and dilapidated. Like Lipscani ten years ago except it is old.

Just time for one of the lovely monasteries of the Fruška Gora: the Novo Hopovo monastery. Do the Serbs think the Romanian painting too frivolous perhaps. These dozen or more monasteries were I told founded by monks fleeing Turkish rule when Serbia was captured or recaptured by the Turk. The monk who sold us our postcard and keyring was thirty one from Bosnia and too young to have served in the war.

The Novo Hopovo monastery has magnificent wall-paintings which are comparable with those in Romanian monasteries but miss I think the vigour and colourfulness of the Romanian ones. Do the Serbs think the Romanian painting too frivolous perhaps. I think of Slavic countries for some reason as metallic. I supposed this is meaningless but Geo says he agrees with me; the Slavs are cold.

Off the useful highway to Nis and the roads are bad and the villages delightful. The Timoc valley. We spoke to several Timoc Romanians who speak an archaic Romanian. One said to me that he is proud to be Romania but his children do not speak the language. The Serbian government wants to make Serbians of them and is succeeding. Why? Because of TV or schooling I wonder. He had never been to Bucharest but I forgot to ask if he had ever been to Romania.

Zaijacar on the Timoc close to the Bulgarian border enchants me. 18 years ago compared even to Hungary Serbia seemed Western and uninteresting. It still feels comfortable but one has the feeling of a weight off one shoulders being in an obscure town in an obscure part of an obscure country. Yugoslavia was not obscure but Serbia is. The statues to the heroes of the 1878 War. I am put in mind of the imaginary country in Nostromo or of a Graham Greene setting – perhaps the border town in Argentina in The Honorary Consul. The Communist hotel with its inevitable net curtains and solid breakfast. It reminds me of Tulcea at the mouth of the Danube.

Zaijacar is gratifyingly obscure but should not be because five miles away are the extensive ruins of the palace of the Emperor Galerius whose father was a Thracian shepherd and his mother a Dacian (ancestors of the Romanians). He became a soldier rose from the ranks and married Diocletian's daughter. The man at the ticket office displayed an encyclopaedic knowledge of his life and reign but did not mention his savage persecutions of Christians. The persecutions attributed to Diocletian seem to have been instigated by Galerius or at least took place while he was Caesar (junior Emperor). A bad Dacian clearly and not one in whom Romanians can take pride. I would like to know more about the ancient Roman class system or lack of one. How English I am.

Interesting also that he went to war with Persia. The clash of civilisations between Iran and the West predates both Islam and Christianity.

Then Bulgaria, an easy border surprisingly. We stop in a small place Kula which also has a well preserved Roman fort the Castra Martis. And a sleepy small town down at heel Balkan feel that Bulgarian country towns have and which I love very much. The calm of the place is extraordinary.

A dog barks and the caravan moves on. We come soon to the ferry to Calophat which has no schedule and comes and goes as it listeth. We wait 90 minutes in the heat clinging to the shade from the customs building. I buy fun-sized mars bars from the duty free shop to keep hunger at bay and to pass the time.

Calophat with its one large white shiny hotel. Geo surmises it was built by and for smugglers in the time of the Serbian embargo. Ten years ago Geo says Romania and Bulgaria started building the bridge which will replace the ferry and carry a motorway to Timisoara. A few pillions are visible on the Bulgarian side, on the Romanian side almost nothing. These things are a parable.

A chimpanzee isolated in a cage. Is England going to the dogs?

An English friend of mine (lonely in Serbia?) sent me this response which made a great impression on him to a Guardian article by Simon Jenkins headlined "This is the healthiest, longest-lived, wealthiest, tallest, least prone to epidemics, poverty or the likelihood of war, generation in recorded history."

"You could say the same about a chimpanzee being kept isolated in a cage, but most people would consider that inhumane. We, like our primate cousins, need companionship, community, satisfying occupations and a degree of status (in the sense of feeling we are valued among our peers) in order to not end up "neurotic". Unfortunately, turbo-capitalism isn't very good at delivering those things to an awful lot of people, particularly the companionship and sense of belonging to a community."

Aren't occupations more satisfying on the whole than thirty years ago (were word processor operators fulfilled?) although a fair point about the atomisation of communities. Loneliness and pointlessness might be I imagine the two great problems in England. Romanians many of whose jobs are much more satisfying than in the old days have more pressing concerns.

I dislike very many aspects of globalisation and the move from living in towns to living in cars and malls and via internet but I believe in free trade. Old fashioned communities had a lot of downside. Societies where people know their neighbour are societies where people care what their neighbour thinks. Many people hate the twitching net curtains syndrome at least opinion formers who wrote for the Observer in the 70s. I think the net curtain twitchers and the cult of respectability are pretty useful though no doubt risible for the clever but when you abandon them you have to have state diktat instead. Everything is private so it has to be directed by the state. Still I doubt if the old curtain twitching could have continued. Immigration, the internet, cars and the pill have changed everything.

I like the sense of common values and cohesiveness in Romania yet a strong society or sense of civic pride or sense of community are exactly what Romania does not have. Decapitated by Stalin and forty years of egalitarianism followed by a banana republic. I suspect public spiritedness was not in much more supply before Communism though perhaps the pre-1945 hierarchical society had more deserving people at the top.
Romania is alive with curtain-twitchers. I was asked to translate the much used Romanian word ‘scandal.’ “It’s ‘scandal’ in English too but we don’t use the word because nothing scandalises us any more.” And the scandalmongers have been fully occupied for the last twenty years though it is unclear how effective a deterrent their tea sweetened by scandal has had in deterring the scandalous. Everything is a perfect scandal but Romania's transformation from a society where neighbours know each other is apace too.

Until the crisis declared halt to progress every month Romania became perceptibly a less friendly, more materialistic society where the car is king the streets and roads are gridlocked and most people noisily munch popcorn and conduct telephone conversations while watching American films at the cinema. To paraphrase Camus, man fornicates and reads the internet. There is nothing more to be said. Or rather something more. For those with the money and the good job in the foreign firm or the profitable business there is the mall, the gym and the lengthy car journey between. No need any more to step over beggars or navigate your way along the pavement between parked cars that block your way. If you live in Pipera, the newly built northern business district, and live in the soulless Baneasa there is little need to enter the gridlocked city centre at all. Foreigners who live and work there can scarcely be said to be living in Romania let alone Bucharest.

Yes I like a strong society, a limited state and am tired of BBC people knocking old wives remedies, folk wisdom and traditional ways of doing things as prejudice and unscientific. We need societies - they are organic - conservative - they run themselves. The internet is blessedly impossible to control, creates communities but no corner shops. Personally I always shop at alimentars not hypermarkets and in my heart I hate the retail industry but hypermarkets exist because people like them. As A.J.P. Taylor said people didn’t travel because the railways were invented. Had they not wanted to travel the trains would have run empty.

Things seem to be going to the dogs in England but that is because I shall shortly be 48 and am living abroad. My father in the 60s was disgusted by the modern world and I don’t want to be like him. I love the internet, stamps on sale in shops, railway stations where the telephone gets answered even if by someone in Bangalore wherever that is, no more Cold War though political correctness is the new Communism. And there are still 3 countries, Burma, Iraq and Syria left to visit. People in London are much more polite, there are cheap buses everywhere and few cars thanks to the unspeakable Ken. Most people do not get divorced or have abortions....People don’t hate and try to destroy the past like in the 60s. Architecture is infinitely better. Maybe slightly less bullying in schools, though I doubt this.

In Romania, things improve and at the same time get worse. More of the former than the latter. Like England.

Things I love about England

Things I miss about England

Nothing really except my mother's cooking and pantomimes at the Players' Theatre; neither still exist.

Things I love about England

The late Monsignor Alfred Gilbey
The late Alan Watkins
London, but not Greater London
Bandstands
Bowling greens
Allotments
Irish priests
Indian food
Second hand bookshops
The Daily Telegraph
The Spectator
Radio 4
Milk and suet puddings
Lemon meringue pie
Beef casserole and dumplings
Justin Webb
The civil service
Alan Bennett
The North
Hardware shops
Watch repairers
Piano tuners
Lonely people who feed pigeons
Formerly young fogeys
Girls from Chelsea and South Ken
Traditionalist Catholics
Nice couples who marry young
Hunting types
Bluestockings
The Prince of Wales
Lord Salisbury
Wendy Cope
Albany
Belgravia
The Importance of Being Earnest
E Nesbit
Greenwich
Melancholy Essex marshes
The Beano etc
Sheridan Le Fanu
Will Hay
London clubs, especially the ones that do not admit women
The Ingoldsby Legends
Point to points
Porridge
Bacon sandwiches
Black pudding
Pub theatre
The East End
Jews especially Nigella Lawson
Lord Skidelsky
Brighton
Wivenhoe
Wales
Northern Ireland
The Windsor Castle, Kensington, The Seven Stars, Holborn, The Surprise, Chelsea

Things I don’t like

Leftish Anglican clergymen
The Liberal Democrat Party
Oxford and Cambridge teaching 'Business'
The ubiquity of professors, universities, firsts
Gastropubs except the Tickell Arms
Garden centres
DIY
Harriet Harman
Johann Hari
Celebrities
Polytechnic educated MPs
The monstrous regiment of women
Leftish schoolmasters
Preoccupation with property prices
Consumerism
Shopping centres
1960s and 70s architecture and town planning
Chain stores
Pedestrianised areas
Cars
Public relations companies
Yobs
Child centred activities
Affluence
Anti-discrimination as a secular religion
Eastenders and all soap operas except Coronation St.
Social engineering
Local government
Bitter - beer or people

Eugen Ionescu on religion in Romania

Eugen Ionescu: Religion in Romania means something entirely different from what it means in Catholic or Protestant countries.

The Communist Origins of Political Correctness

The Frankfurt School of Marxism was a real school. It was really a building in Frankfurt and received gas bills. It was a think-tank set up to marry Marxism-Leninism with the insights of Freud. After the failure of the revolution in Germany, Austria and Hungary, Marxists had to conclude that the workers had failed to rise against their oppressors because of their false consciousness. From the Marxist point of view this was absolutely true, of course. This false consciousness included, in Lukacs’s words, the whole of western civilisation. Western civilisation was itself the enemy of the people. The Frankfurt school was excommunicated by Stalin for heretically adopting insights from psychoanalysis and expelled from Germany when the Nazis came to power (its members were Jews to a man). They sought refuge in academic tenure in third-rate colleges in the United States where they remained like a dormant bacillus. And there in the late 60s student radicals wanting a justification for free love, bohemianism and revolt discovered a philosophy much groovier than that contained in Das Kapital. Foucault was horrified by the student radicals and summoned the police to rid his lecture room of his long haired admirers but Adorno in Pittsburgh sprang from obscurity hoping to achieve the long delayed apotheosis of his revolutionary ideals.

If you seek the monument of the men and women of 1968 look around you. Not to be sure in the economies of western Europe. The moth-eaten phylacteries of Marxism Leninism have been discarded for the free market goose which lays the golden eggs that the welfare state redistributes to its clients. But in an attitude that rejects authority, tradition, organised religion (as opposed to personal, privatised spirituality), rejects parents, rejects the masculinity of the nation in favour of the maternal values of the social worker. The ideas of the Frankfurt School, that marriage was oppressive of women, that bourgeois sexual morality was a means of oppressing workers, women, homosexuals, became the ideology which took over the universities and therefore opinion formers despite the right being in office in America and Great Britain in the 80s and early 90s. None of it is new. All was invented during the Weimar Republic by Leninists seeking to replace bourgeois civilisation with Bolshevism. The student radicals of 1968 included Schroeder, Brown and many people who now help run the E.U.

What are the best five things about Bucharest?

What are the best five things about Bucharest someone (Craig Turp, actually) asked and found he could only think of four. He included decent primary schools (sounds like damning with faint praise but then I am not a father). My list? The people, the decrepit late nineteenth century Franco-Oriental streets, the humanity of Romanian life, the sense that the modern world is still a fair way off in the distance, the energy. But I could have gone on with many more examples. The folk religion, the jokes, the parties, the second hand booksellers, the wartime egalitarianism (people who sleep rough sit watching open air film shows without exciting the disdain that their counterparts would do in Western Europe), the gypsies, manele, the old-fashioned terraces where one can get a bottle of wine and a Bulgarian salad for a song, the serendipity, the way that every day is completely different from the day before (unless you work in a big foreign firm), the daily problems which you come to enjoy (or else go mad), the courtesy and great kindness that counterbalances the gracelessness and mercilessness. Food well...yes....up to a point. The Antim monastery which I visit every 5 or 6 years. The Stavropoleos Church. A number of the churches. Most of all the broken run-down streets. Until recently the slummy Old Town now drowning in a sea of wine-bars. Cismigiu. The beauty and femininity of the women which is unparalleled.