27th January 2019

Today is international Holocaust Memorial Day. Yet a recent poll found that one in twenty British adults believes it never happened, and 8% say the scale of the genocide has been exaggerated. In France, 20% of those aged 18-34 said they’d never heard of it. In Austria, Hitler’s birthplace, it was 12%.  The scale of this ignorance, when there are Holocaust survivors still living and speaking honestly to people of exactly what happened to them, is chilling. Are there schools then who are deliberately not teaching this historical event for presumably ideological or ethnic reasons?  There is an important difference between the Holocaust and other mass killings, e.g in Stalin’s Russia. No other genocide actively selected out mainly one group from its own citizens on faith grounds before publically humiliating, starving then murdering them.  3000 years and still antisemitism continues. Enemies come, enemies go but still the totally irrational hatred continues. Time it stopped for good.

20th January 2019

Comedy central continues both sides of the Atlantic. Trump’s US government has been shut down for five weeks so he can build a wall to keep out about six illegal immigrants via Mexico, compared to many more entering via Canada where there is no wall. Meanwhile federal workers queue up for free food. In the UK, the House of Commons provided the best live TV ‘Punch  n Judy’ entertainment ever. The speaker John Bercow v Michael Gove v Jeremy Corbyn was a sight to behold. Gove’s masterly performance in the House was Churchillian in its 90 minute expose of Corbyn. (If you didn’t catch it, google Gove’s Commons Speech in its entirety.)  Who needs comedy shows when we have live political entertainment like this. The EU?  I’m glad May picked up on my email to No. 10 telling her to arrange a cross-party committee but where will it all end? I could write a book...

13th January 2019

13th today. Unlucky for some.  In the US, huge snowstorms head for Washington DC. Tomorrow, Australia will bake through a heatwave,  the soaring temperatures predicted to last for 4 days. Multiple days in a row of 40C plus are unusual there. In the UK, a land notorious for grey, damp, moderate weather, last summer was unusual in that we enjoyed continuous blue skies and hot weather for weeks on end. Elsewhere last year saw a plethora of eruptions, earthquakes, tsunamis and massive flooding. Global climate change? Undoubtedly.  Man-made? The jury’s out. A similar global warming period has happened several times before, one such in 950 AD. Scientists gave the causes of that one as increased solar activity and changes to ocean circulation. Clearly not man-made then nor, in my view, is today’s!  Time for the world to stop discussing carbon emissions and to actively tackle the effects of climate change. Move people off tiny, flat islands and inland to high ground, away from coasts, fault lines and volcanos. Fact, not superstition.

6th January 2019

2019. A new year and I’m writing again. To be an author is a great risk, gambling that your ideas will resonate with others sufficiently to make a mark in the world. In the past I’ve dipped my pen into children’s novels, noir, wartime dramas, college intrigue, travel memoirs and humour.  When meeting people for the first time, I’ve often joked ‘Don’t annoy me or you’ll be finished off in my next book!’  But writing is no joke. It’s a serious business. Reputations are won or lost by the toss of a coin.  How to predict what will be ‘fashionable’ in the months it takes to write, edit and publish your masterpiece before releasing it to an unsuspecting world? Celebrities, unfairly, often use ghostwriters to pass their work off as their own. How is that allowed? I suppose, though, the public just want to read about their favourites, not really caring who actually wrote it. Despite all this, however, I feel a quiver of excitement as my new work builds day by day by my own fair hand. What’s it about? Will it set the world alight? I’m no celebrity so it’s a big, big gamble. All will be revealed in the months to come. Hope you like it, dear readers. A very happy and healthy New Year to you all.