OPEN SEASON

The Tories did another U-turn this week, this time on their proposed policy to blast buzzard nests with shotguns in the name of 'research'. The real reason for the proposed cull was so that certain sporting gentlemen like millionaire landowner, Richard Benyon, Minister responsible for wildlife, could shoot pheasants to their hearts' content, unhampered by the  buzzards for which the pheasant is a natural prey. Since there is nothing natural about a Purdey shotgun, the blast of public opinion has forced the sporting gentlemen to withdraw.  Last week, they had to shelve their Pasty Tax -- a victory for bakers everywhere and  especially for crimpers of the Cornish 'croust' which, in its humble way, does so much for the local economy,  far more than Charles, Duke of Cornwall with his overpriced Duchy biscuits.

Margaret Thatcher once made a famous pun about U-turns: 'You turn if you want to. The Lady's not for turning.' Well, Baroness Iron Pants, they're turning now.  Let's hope this heralds an open season on other draconian proposals intended to safeguard the interests of the land-owning class at the expense of the poor and disenfranchised. Bang, bang, and another one bites the dust.

Nesting Birds by Richard Faisey

TORIES ROUTED IN SOUTH WEST COUNCIL ELECTIONS

The tide is on the turn. South West voters have given the Tories the thumbs down, saying no to the cuts, the pasty tax, and, as one voter put it, the lack of care.

On Your Bike by Richard Faisey

EXETERFROG CELEBRATES NEW KINDLE PURCHASE

ExterFrog by Richard Faisey

I resisted buying a Kindle for a long time, then I ran out of space to build more bookshelves. Since I bought my Kindle a week ago, I have already downloaded more books than I could have stored on the overburdened bookshelves in my tiny home  (I call it The Bunker). Some of the classics were free in e-book format, or  almost free (Complete Works of Shakespeare, Donne et al for 77p).  New e-books are generally less expensive than tree books (print), although some buyers have cavilled at the price of new e-titles; but It is publishers who set the price and since more and more big publishing houses are developing their e- lists, they are taking full advantage of the market. Sooner or later, these prices will have to be more competitive, but I have not seen any e-title I'd like costing more than £8.00. In fact the most I've paid for an e-book so far  is £4.99 - for Doris Lessing's 'The Good Terrorist' I'd searched bookshops for a printed version of  Ernest Hemingway's 'A Moveable Feast' but I couldn't find a copy of this cherished novel anywhere, not even in London, where I scrutinised the shelves at Waterstones in Piccadilly, to no avail.  Then I saw it on Amazon and dowloaded it direct to my Kindle in less than a minute. It took me back to Paris, that mythical Paris where I like to return sometimes to escape our Big Society-pushers. I've since downloaded thirty odd novels, plus my own three titles in BeWrite Books; ten books of poems, including collections of Keats, Byron, Shelley, Robert Frost and TS Eliot (all 77p); and a book about learning to play the guitar. 


There are those, of course, who cleave to the tree-book like Luddites clinging to their spinning wheels. I have a house full of tree-books, some of which I could never bear to be parted from, although I have had to resort to periodic clear-outs. Recently, I had to cart a shed-load of tree-books down from my daughter's loft because cracks were appearing in my bedroom walls (I sleep downstairs).  One of my home nurses had been telling me about the joys of owning a Kindle (she hads carpel tunnel syndrome and finds it awkward turning the pages of tree-books in bed); and when a woman at the last Society of Authors meeting I went to told me she had read my novels on Kindle, I thought I should get up to speed with what was happening in the ever-expanding world of E.  Now I'm up and running, I can download my own work to the Kindle in document form, which will be handy if I have to go about doing readings - not that I do that very often, although there is one coming up in the summer on local radio. Instead of debating what I should take away to read and carting tree-books on the train,  I can take the Kindle.  I don't see it as an either-or, tree-book or e-book preference, but this is 2012: The E prefix is here to stay.

TELL ME LIES ABOUT AFGHANISTAN...

Yesterday, an American soldier, a so-called veteran of several recent wars declared by the USA on countries and cultures in the east, took his automatic weapon to some Afghan villages and shot sixteen people dead. Most of them were children. All of them were innocent. Hilary Clinton said she couldn't imagine what their families were going through. Well no, she can't, but she can do something about this outrageous situation by admitting defeat in this longest of all American wars, and by ensuring that the soldier is brought to justice. In the eye-for-eye and tooth-for-tooth politics that dominate so much of this uncivilised world, this murderer should really stand trial in Kabul, or maybe Peshawar or Jeddah, or in one of those US States where old Governor Bush could apply the ultimate penalty.

If anything positive can come out of this atrocity, it is that finally, finally, questions are being raised in our military-worshipping media about the redundancy and lunacy of the Afghan war. Over ten years of  deployment, it has now become an exercise in vainglory perpetrated by vainglorious politicians on both sides of the Atlantic, by vainglorious generals holding on to win a conflict that cannot be resolved, and by vainglorious soldiers who voluntarily enlist in the services and go out to fight in a country they probably couldn't find on a map. These men aren't heroes. They are professional soldiers, doing the job they signed up to do. Who and what are they defending? They have done more damage to ethnic, cultural and religious relations in the UK than the National Front and Islamic terrorist factions put together. David Cameron should stop pontificating about his plans for 'Transitioning' - a slow hand-over to the rightful Afghan authorities, and pull our troops out now. When Obama pulls out, as planned, in 2014 -  assuming he can sell this  timescale to the American people,  there will be civil war in Afghanistan and shame in the USA, just like there was after Vietnam when returning veterans were universally shunned by embarrassed and demoralised US citizens.  And thus the ten year deployment of British and US troops  in a faraway country will have resulted in nothing but waste and loss, the loss of innocent families like the ones who were murdered yesterday in their own homes. It is time we all stepped up to the Big Society to address the multitude of domestic tragedies overlooked so far in the  sentimental outpouring of feeling for the deceased military men who rolled through (Royal) Woolton Basset   - soldiers who died doing the job they chose to do, not in some killing spree perpetrated by a man with a weapon against small children.

THE BIG SOCIETY

Her Majesty has stripped Fred Goodwin of his knightly title, so he is no longer Sir Fred, but just Fred. It's a pity Her Majesty's subjects can't strip him of his ill-gotten earnings since the bank he ran down (RBS) was baled out by British taxpayers at the expense, no doubt, of the vital services we are losing as part of the austerity measures. No chance of a refund though. We weren't compensated for the sale of public utilities under the last Tory Government,  so compensation for the bungled antics of Fred and his banking band is as unlikely as re-nationalisation of the railways, the water, gas and electricity supplies, and the GPO, which a few of us traded for British Telecom shares, just as poor Siberians in the early nineties traded their shares in the state-owned oil companies that that were issued to them instead of pay.

But enough of that. I wanted to write about good people.  Yesterday, I met up with two good people, Sue and Paul Farmer, who are trying to put some heart back into the dying community that is Redruth by offering a number of creative projects designed to offset the hopelessness and apathy that is facing the young people of the town. Redruth has been in decline since the tin-mining industry fell off, but the last few years have seen the commencement of its death throes. It costs 50p to park in Redruth for an hour but that is too much for locals on a tight welfare budget, who can catch a free bus to Tesco. If the falling price of tin took the heart out of the town, then Tesco gutted it and filleted it so that it increasingly resembles an eviscerated corpse.  When I saw in the news last week that Tesco's profits are on the wane, I stood up and cheered. Shirley Cohen ), a major shareholder since her father started the supermarket chain, is finally getting some come-uppance. Why doesn't Her Majesty strip that woman of her Dame-ship? Who will be the next to be stripped of their ill-deserved title? I'd vote for (Lord) Julian Fellowes, but I doubt it will be him  because he got the gong for reinforcing a status quo that was out of date in 1918.

Sue Farmer's blog

Redruth Community Radio

JUBILEE

We are ten days into the new year, and plans for the Queen's Diamond Jubilee are already underway. News reports yesterday suggested that the pagentry and fuss would bring billions into the British economy from all the tourists who are sure to visit London this summer with its two-for-the-price of one attractions: Her Majesty and The 2012 Olympics. Now I have a great deal of time for The Queen. I think she is generally A Very Good Thing for this country, not just for her patronage of all kinds of good works, but because she shields us from the horror and embarrassment of a presidency (think Bush Junior, Berlusconi and his Bonga-Bonga, and others too unspeakable to mention). That said, I doubt very much that the hordes of Americans predicted to descend on Jubilant London in a few months time would want to exchange an elected head of state for a hereditary monarch, however good at her job Her Majesty has proved herself to be. It is delusional to think that the rest of the world (except for the Afghans maybe) is envious of our Monarch and our Royal Family. I fear that the billions of Jubilee pictures that are sure to be snapped by a tsunami of i-phones, and disseminated across the globe via Twitter and Facebook et al, may be as ephemeral as the House of Windsor when Her Majesty is no longer reigning over us.

In the meantime, Lord Julian Fellowes (Baron Claptrap) is spouting forth, as usual on all things great and small, latterly the Tories' plans to dumb-down the British Film Industry to make entertainment that 'people would want to see and which would make money', rather than the bleak, realist cinema turned out by directors like Ken Loach, who present a far more dystopian vision of this country than we like to project abroad, although one only has to watch the news to see the reality of life in the Fairest Isle in 2012. The ascent of Julian Fellowes means more films about the Royals and more daft dramas like 'Downton Abbey' the greatest piece of soma-inducing drivel to hit the small screen since Crossroads. I have a recurring memory of those sad people back in the '70s who tried to book rooms at the Cardboard Motel.

In spite of all that, I am jubilant so far this year because I have cast off the glass-half-empty syndrome and am looking forward to travelling abroad again with my beloved daughter.

LIFE UNDER THE TORIES

I have just calculated that I will be £4,000 worse off next year owning to 'reduction in duties' at work and to the loss of Child Tax Credit and Child Benefit from 1 September. I have friends - GPs earning in excess of £100,000 per annum, who didn't even notice their Child Benefit payments. Yesterday, I was taking coffee in the morning room of a very grand house in Devon, where the host, a big society sort of guy (he has certainly paid his dues to charity) was talking of buying another grand piano for a knock down price of £16,000 - nearly three quarters of my gross annual income before the forthcoming reduction. He also needs another house in which to place the piano (he has two already) and the large collection of antiques that have outgrown his mansion. The rich really are different - at least the ones I know. Their world view is entirely alien to that of most ordinary Joes like me.

We have a Tory Government composed of very rich people with vast inherited wealth which keeps on growing, thanks to careful investments and tax allowances (creative accounting). They may be nice people, some of them at least, but they all share the old Tory insousiance of the very rich when it comes to making policies that will affect the rest of us. I have survived under the Tories before, so I know pretty well what is coming, and I think I still have the personal resources to prepare for and handle it; but what of those who don't? What about the chronically disabled, the under-educated, the elderly poor and those lone parents with children under 5, who can't work at all and for whom the loss of £4,000 a year cannot be made up elsewhere? I like the idea of an austerity period - it has a fine and noble ring to it that makes it sound as though it is good for the soul. But I haven't found any belt-tightening amongst my rich friends, which suggests to me that, though all austerity measures are equal, under this Tory-dominated Coalition, some are more equal than others.