And Now For Something Completely Different: Brian Cox Gravity

You learned the theory in school, but you never really believed it, well I didn't anyway.

Until that was, Brian Cox came along with this demonstration of the Isaac Newtons.

And it still takes some believing, even as you witness it. 5mins

Comments and Link Dump

Kate McCann Curtains. Blah blah.

Comments full, new dump.

Mad Dogs and Englishmen

Unedited

Is it the Onion I'm reading here? Is someone really trying to take the proverbial?*

Even if  you knew me, as the cynical old git that I am, you wouldn't blame me; not with a story like this you wouldn't. But then I got to thinking, thinking about things past, thinking about past experiences that we encounter, along this road we call life. That road, as it happens, being a cul-de-sac on this occasion.  

Let me tell you a little story. Are you sitting comfortably, then I'll begin?**

Whenever I go foreign, and providing I have the time, I do like to get off the beaten track and explore a wee bit. Be that, searching out goat stew in the hinterland of Teneriffe, stumbling around the woods in the wilds of Canada, or just diverting through previous unseen parts of the Netherlands.

But it is none of those places that feature in my little story today, but rather that most beautiful of Mediterranean Islands, Mallorca. Shame about the tourists.

On no day in particular, and after a perusal of the map, Cap Blanc, says I, I wonder what's at Cap Blanc?   So true to form, it's in the car I sit, and off we go.

Now as you can see from the photo immediately below, Cap Blanc is a pretty isolated spot. And given the time of year, of which I haven't a clue, but it wouldn't be high season, one does not holiday in high season if one has any sense. But given the time of year, it was quiet, deathly quiet, so quite in fact, the place almost had an ethereal feel to it,  if you will.

Now Cap Blanc might not be the Cliffs of Moher, but still pretty impressive nonetheless. And where you find cliffs, invariably you find a bloke, me on this occasion, having a gander over the edge; as one does. So there I am, soaked in the quiet and the isolation of the place, doing a bit of gandering, oh, and philosophising, you can't can't stand on top of a cliff and not philosophise, can you?

And it is in this atmosphere that I hear a door open and close. I don't have to turn around, the sound could only have come from the keeper's cottage, the place wasn't exactly a metropolis as you night have noticed.

Oh shit! Oh fuck! Oh my giddy aunt! as my mother might exclaim on occasion. There it it stood, with hate in its eyes; I'm convinced it was hate. I'm on its turf, a three hundred foot drop on one side of me, and the biggest fuck off dog I have ever seen in my life, stood between me survival, between me and my car.

Oh! and it had hate in its eyes, did I mention that? Pure fucking evil in fact, for want of a better expression.

I tell you, the son of a bitch was enormous, so big in fact, it made this bugger below, look like a puppy. Although I must say, they shared many of the facial characteristics, those normally associated with something that is going to take great delight in ripping your throat out.

Nice doggy, nice doggy.
   

Giant Fukushima Mutant Dog Wows Social Media

Picture of a giant Fukushima mutant dog has wowed social media. According to various sources, the dog was bred in Japan using in-vitro techniques. The gametic maternal cells were infused with Fukushima irradiated male DNA, then the eggs were grown in vitro. The result of the experimentation resulted in the giant dog above, which Japanese scientists are calling 巨大な犬, which translates to Kyodaina inu or Inukyodaina, ‘giant dog’ in English. No kidding. More

And I still need to be convinced the story ain't via the Onion.
 

As best I remember the situation, but I don't remember the wall.

Irrespective, wall or no, the beast would have stepped over it.

For readers not familiar.

* With it being the opening of the article,I chose to choose the proverbial, rather than the usual technical term of: Taking the piss

** Are you sitting comfortably, then I'll begin. Listen with Mother

Lighthouses of Spain: Balearic Islands

The Man Who Volunteered for Auschwitz: Read of the Year

The Man Who Volunteered for Auschwitz

Why a member of the Polish underground sent himself into the infamous prison camp

David de Sola 5 Oct 2012

WARSAW -- There are very few places that can accurately be described as hell on Earth. One of these is the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II, where as many as 1.5 million people died during the five years the camp was in operation.

The Polish resistance had been hearing horrific first- or second-hand accounts about the conditions inside Auschwitz. These early accounts came primarily from released prisoners, but also from casual observers like railway employees and residents of the nearby village of Oswiecim. The resistance decided they needed someone on the inside.

 It is into this environment that Witold Pilecki, a 39-year old veteran of the Polish-Soviet War of 1919-1921 who fought against the initial Nazi invasion and a member of the Polish resistance, volunteered himself in 1940. Pilecki's mission was to allow himself to be arrested and, once inside Auschwitz, to collect intelligence for the Polish resistance in the country and the government-in-exile in London, and to organize a resistance from inside the camp.

"I think he knew, he realized what he was getting himself into," said Jacek Pawlowicz, a historian at Poland's Institute of National Remembrance. "But even so, he was not prepared for the things he was actually able to witness."

During the next three years, Pilecki was involved in one of the most dangerous intelligence-gathering and resistance operations of the war. He authored three reports about life inside the camp for the Polish resistance. During his incarceration, Pilecki witnessed from the inside Auschwitz's transformation from a detention facility for political prisoners and Soviet soldiers into one of the Nazis' deadliest killing machines.

An English translation of Pilecki's third and most comprehensive report -- a primary source for this article -- was recently published as a book titled The Auschwitz Volunteer: Beyond Bravery . It is a fascinating first-hand account of virtually all aspects of life inside the camp. The original document is in the custody of the Polish Underground Movement Study Trust in London.

"He was there in all of Auschwitz's worst periods, because he arrived at the moment when the camp was being created and was there until [1943]," Pawlowicz explained. "So while there he saw the camp growing, he saw [Birkenau] being built -- where the ovens were. But the ovens were not only in [Birkenau], there were gas chambers and crematoria on the territory of Auschwitz I.

" Pilecki's family was kept out of the loop regarding his activities for security reasons. His son Andrzej Pilecki recalls, "There was secrecy because of the danger, so that the children would know as little as possible. But I felt something. My father was in Warsaw. We were 100 kilometers away. We came to visit him sometimes and my father would teach us how to behave during the occupation."

Pilecki began preparations for his mission in the late summer of 1940. While staying at a safehouse, he found identity papers belonging to a man named Tomasz Serafinski, who was erroneously presumed killed in September of 1939. Because the Nazis asked for the names and addresses of inmates and their relatives as a method to keep the population under control, Pilecki wisely decided not to give his real name or those of his immediate family. Pilecki placed his photograph on Serafinski's papers and memorized his details. His plan was to be arrested and booked under the Serafinski alias.

In the early morning hours of September 19, Nazis did a roundup in Warsaw and arrested as many as 2,000 people. According to Adam Cyra and Wieslaw Wysocki's 1997 biography Rotmistrz Witold Pilecki, Pilecki was in the apartment of Eleonora Ostrowska the morning of the roundup. A caretaker and member of the resistance came in and made several suggestions to Pilecki for how to avoid being caught. According to Ostrowska, "Witold rejected those opportunities and didn't even try to hide in my flat." When a German soldier knocked on the door and asked who lived there, Pilecki walked out. As he was saying goodbye to Ostrowska, he quietly whispered to her, "Report that I have fulfilled the order."

Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, who later became Foreign Minister of Poland, was arrested in the same roundup and taken to Auschwitz in the same transport as Pilecki, which left the morning of September 21 and arrived at the prison camp at 10 p.m. that same day.

"At the time we were not aware of what Auschwitz was," he wrote. "The underground movement was compelled to investigate what was happening to those people, to check the possibilities of organizing them somehow, possibly of helping them. And Witold Pilecki embarked on that tremendous task. It was his aware and voluntary decision to join another huge round up in Warsaw."

Pilecki was not happy with the behavior he saw of his fellow Poles. "What really annoyed me the most was the passivity of this group of Poles," he later wrote. "All those picked up were already showing signs of crowd psychology, the result being that our whole crowd behaved like a herd of passive sheep."

"A simple thought kept nagging me: stir up everyone and get this mass of people moving."

Pilecki was booked under the Serafinski alias, and was assigned the prisoner number 4859. Once inside, Pilecki immediately began work on organizing a network among the inmate population. In his own words, his objective was to set up a military organization on the inside to keep up morale, provide news from the outside world, distribute food and clothing to members, smuggle camp intelligence to the outside world, and to prepare detachments to take control of the camp by force if the order were given.

He called his network the Union of Military Organization, known by its Polish acronym ZOW, and would be part of the Home Army, the Polish resistance. The secrecy of the ZOW's existence was paramount. To ensure its continuity in the event of discovery by Nazi guards or informants, Pilecki created a highly compartmentalized system of five-man cells. The leader of each cell would be people of utmost confidence, committed to the Polish resistance and able to withstand possible interrogation or investigation by the German guards. Each cell leader swore an oath to Pilecki himself and only knew of the four men under his command, but not of the existence of any other cells. By doing so, Pilecki effectively minimized the risk of exposure to the entire network.

 Pawlowicz estimates that Pilecki's network included some 500 inmates at Auschwitz by March of 1942, but notes this number may have doubled by the time of Pilecki's escape the following year. In time, Pilecki was able to place informants and allies in key positions throughout the camp. In time, these would prove crucial for Pilecki and other ZOW members. more 

Witold Pilecki's Auschwitz Report, translated from Polish.
H/T Maren.

Ink: A Mother's Tale

It was only two months ago that I ran a post on tattoos where I had this to say:

There's No Taste Like Bad Taste - No Regerts: Insane Ink

To say I am no lover of ink, would, I have to admit, be putting it rather mildly.

Given that 99.99% don't pass the acid test, 'would you hang the same thing on your wall?' then I suppose it's hardly surprising.

I think the wearing of cringe-worthy tats must surpass any other single human activity in the world, but I think I reserve a special place, a special abhorrence, for those that adorn the bodies of young chicks.

To see the most beautiful work of art that exists in the world bar none, the body of a young female in her prime, desecrated by some ghastly tattoo or other, really makes me want to weep. What a travesty, to turn something so lovely into something ruined forever. More

So it will hardly come as a surprise that the author of this piece, a mother of a twenty one year old boy, has my fullest understanding and sympathy.

Just one little tattoo
Tess Morgan
11 August 2012

When Tess Morgan's son came home with a tattoo, she was griefstricken. She knew her reaction was OTT (he's 21) but it signalled a change in their relationship

Put out the bunting, crack open the beers, stand there in the kitchen smiling from ear to ear, because he's home – our student son is home and the family is together again. And after supper, after the washing up is done, the others – his younger siblings – drift off to watch television, and he says: "Would you like to see my tattoo?"

I say, "You're joking."

He says, "No, I'm not."

But still I wait. Any minute he's going to laugh and say, "You should see your faces" because this has been a running joke for years, this idea of getting a tattoo – the hard man act, iron muscles, shaved head, Jason Statham, Ross Kemp. He's a clever boy. Maybe during his school years he thought a tattoo would balance the geeky glory of academic achievement.

His father says, "Where?"

"On my arm," he says, and touches his bicep through his shirt.

His lovely shoulder.

In the silence, he says, "I didn't think you'd be this upset."

After a while, he says, "It wasn't just a drunken whim. I thought about it. I went to a professional. It cost £150."

£150? I think, briefly, of all the things I could buy with £150.

"It's just a tattoo," he says, when the silence goes on so long that we have nearly fallen over the edge of it into a pit of black nothingness. "It's not as if I came home and said I'd got someone pregnant."

It seems to me, unhinged by shock, that this might have been the better option.

His father asks, "Does it hurt?"

"Yes," I say, cutting across this male bonding. "It does. Very much."

For three days, I can't speak to my son. I can hardly bear to look at him. I decide this is rational. The last thing we need, I think, is an explosion of white-hot words that everyone carries around for the rest of their lives, engraved on their hearts. In any case, I'm not even sure what it is I want to say. In my mind's eye I stand there, a bitter old woman with pursed lips wringing my black-gloved hands. He's done the one thing that I've said for years, please don't do this. It would really upset me if you did this. And now it's happened. So there's nothing left to say.

I know you can't control what your children do. Why would you want to, anyway? If you controlled what they did, you'd just pass on your own rubbish tip of imperfections. You hope the next generation will be better, stronger, more generous. I know all you can do as a parent is to pack their bags and wave as you watch them go.

So I cry instead. I have a lump in my throat that stops me from eating. I feel as if someone has died. I keep thinking of his skin, his precious skin, inked like a pig carcass.

My neighbour says, "There's a lot of it about. So many teenagers are doing it." I stare at pictures of David Beckham with his flowery sleeves, Angelina Jolie all veins and scrawls. Tattoos are everywhere. They seem no more alternative than piercings these days. But I still don't understand. Sam Cam with her smudgy dolphin, the heavily tattooed at Royal Ascot – these people are role models?

"My niece had doves tattooed on her breasts," says a friend, "And her father said, you wait, in a few years' time they'll be vultures."

It's the permanence that makes me weep. As if the Joker had made face paints from acid. Your youthful passion for ever on display, like a CD of the Smiths stapled to your forehead. The British Association of Dermatologists recently surveyed just under 600 patients with visible tattoos. Nearly half of them had been inked between the ages of 18 and 25, and nearly a third of them regretted it.

I look up laser removal. Which is a possibility, I think miserably, that only works if you want a tattoo removed. And I'm not in charge here. My son is.

My husband asks, "Have you seen it yet?"

I shake my head. Like a child, I am hoping that if I keep my eyes tightly shut the whole thing will disappear.

"It's his body," he says gently. "His choice."

"But what if he wants to be a lawyer?"

"A lawyer?"

"Or an accountant."

"He'll be wearing a suit. No one will ever know. And he doesn't want to be a lawyer. Or an accountant."

I know. I know.

I meet a colleague for lunch. "He knew how much it would hurt me," I say, tears running down my face. "For years I've said, don't do it. It's there for ever, even after you've changed your mind about who you are and what you want to look like. You're branded, like meat. It can damage your work prospects. It can turn people against you before you've even opened your mouth."

She says, "Tell him how you feel."

But I can't. For a start, I know I'm being completely unreasonable. This level of grief is absurd. He's not dying, he hasn't killed anyone, he hasn't volunteered to fight on behalf of a military dictatorship. But I feel as though a knife is twisting in my guts.

I get angry with myself. This is nothing but snobbery, I think – latent anxiety about the trappings of class. As if my son had deliberately turned his back on a light Victoria sponge and stuffed his face with cheap doughnuts. I am aware, too, that I associate tattoos on men with aggression, the kind of arrogant swagger that goes with vest tops, dogs on chains, broken beer glasses.

Is this what other women feel? Or perhaps, I think, with an uncomfortable lurch of realisation, just what older women feel. I stand, a lone tyrannosaurus, bellowing at a world I don't understand.

Tattoos used to be the preserve of criminals and toffs. And sailors. In the 1850s, the corpses of seamen washed up on the coast of north Cornwall were "strangely decorated" with blue, according to Robert Hawker, the vicar of Morwenstow – initials, or drawings of anchors, flowers or religious symbols ("Our blessed Saviour on His Cross, with on the one hand His mother, and on the other St John the Evangelist"). "It is their object and intent, when they assume these signs," says Hawker, "to secure identity for their bodies if their lives are lost at sea."

Tattoos, then, were intensely practical, like brightly coloured smit marks on sheep.

Perhaps even then this was a fashion statement, a badge of belonging. Or just what you did after too much rum. Later, the aristocracy flirted with body art. According to the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich (they know a lot about tattoos), Edward VII had a Jerusalem cross on his arm while both his sons, the Duke of Clarence and the Duke of York (later George V), had dragon tattoos. Lady Randolph Churchill, Winston's mum, had a snake on her wrist.

But you can do what you like if you're rich.

On day three, still in a fog of misery, I say to him, "Shall we talk?"

We sit down with cups of coffee. I open my mouth to speak and end up crying instead. I say, "You couldn't have done anything to hurt me more."

He is cool and detached. He says, "I think you need to re-examine your prejudices."

I think, but I have! I've done nothing else for three days! But I don't say that because we aren't really talking to each other. These are rehearsed lines, clever insults flung across the dispatch box. (This is what comes of not exploding in anger in the heat of the moment.)

I say, "Why couldn't you have waited until you'd left home? Why now when you're living here half the year?"

"It's something I've been thinking about for a long time. There didn't seem any reason to wait."

Which makes it worse.

"I'm an adult," he says. "I paid for it with my own money. Money I earned."

But we're supporting you as well, I think. As far as I know, you don't have separate bank accounts for your various income streams. So who knows? Maybe we paid for it. "If you don't want to see it, that's fine," he says. "When I'm at home, I'll cover it up. Your house, your rules."

In my head, I think, I thought it was your house, too.

He says, "I'm upset that you're upset. But I'm not going to apologise."

"I don't want you to apologise," I say. (A lie. Grovelling self-abasement might help.)

He says, "I'm still the same person."

I look at him, sitting there, my 21-year-old son. I feel I'm being interviewed for a job I don't even want. I say, "But you're not. You're different. I will never look at you in the same way again. It's a visceral feeling. Maybe because I'm your mother. All those years of looking after your body – taking you to the dentist and making you drink milk and worrying about green leafy vegetables and sunscreen and cancer from mobile phones. And then you let some stranger inject ink under your skin. To me, it seems like self-mutilation. If you'd lost your arm in a car accident, I would have understood. I would have done everything to make you feel better. But this – this is desecration. And I hate it."

We look at each other. There seems nothing left to say.

Over the next few days, my son – always covered up – talks to me as if the row had never happened. I talk to him, too, but warily. Because I'm no longer sure I know him.

And this is when I realise that all my endless self-examination was completely pointless. What I think, or don't think, about tattoos is irrelevant. Because this is the point. Tattoos are fashionable. They may even be beautiful. (Just because I hate them doesn't mean I'm right.) But by deciding to have a tattoo, my son took a meat cleaver to my apron strings. He may not have wanted to hurt me. I hope he didn't. But my feelings, as he made his decision, were completely unimportant.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one; pack up the moon and dismantle the sun.

I am redundant. And that's a legitimate cause for grief, I think.

Tess Morgan is a pseudonym Gruniad

Gun Homicides and Gun Ownership Listed by Country

I'm placing this here, sans text, for two reasons. One being, I shall know where to find it should the occasion arise, and two, I have another article posted on gun/knife stats, that gets a small but steady stream of inquiries via the search engines. So it's a bit of a service if you will.

Gun homicides and gun ownership listed by country

Where are the world's guns - and which countries have th highest rates of firearms murders? Guardian Article

New Maya Temple Found, Covered With Giant Faces

"Dramatic" New Maya Temple Found, Covered With Giant Faces

Archaeological "gold mine" illuminates connection between king and sun god.
July 20, 2012

Some 1,600 years ago, the Temple of the Night Sun was a blood-red beacon visible for miles and adorned with giant masks of the Maya sun god as a shark, blood drinker, and jaguar.

Long since lost to the Guatemalan jungle, the temple is finally showing its faces to archaeologists, and revealing new clues about the rivalrous kingdoms of the Maya. More video

After Man’s Death, Woman Watches NASCAR with Him for 18 Months

How terribly terribly sad, poor old soul, "He was the only guy who was ever nice to me.”

After Man’s Death, Woman Watches NASCAR with Him for 18 Months

A Michigan woman didn't want to say goodbye to her friend, so she kept the corpse in his armchair.
By William Lee Adams
July 16 2012

Charles Zigler of Jackson, Michigan died in December 2010. Eighteen months later he was still sitting in his armchair, watching TV. That’s because 72-year-old Linda Chase, with whom he shared a house for more than ten years, decided to keep Zigler’s corpse well after he drew his final breath.

“It’s not that I’m heartless,” Chase told the Jackson Citizen Patriot on July 10. “It’s just that after so many bad things happen to you…I didn’t want to be alone. He was the only guy who was ever nice to me.”

Chase, who reportedly spoke to the newspaper in a flood of tears, said that Zigler passed away peacefully around Christmas 2010. He was 67. In the months that followed she dressed and cleaned the corpse daily. It appears that she carried on with her routines as if nothing had happened. She would still speak to her deceased friend while watching NASCAR. (Despite the deep attachment, Chase maintains the pair were not romantically involved.)

Friends and family grew concerned when they were unable to reach Zigler following the 2010 holiday. They made repeated attempts to visit him, but Chase, whom they mistook for his girlfriend, always said he had stepped out. His niece Barb finally called 911 on July 6, which led to the gruesome discovery. “[Chase is] always telling everyone he’s gone,” she says on the 911 recording, questioning how a man on an oxygen tank could stray so far so frequently. “We don’t understand how he could be gone when he’s in such bad shape.”

Chase cooperated fully and voluntarily. She admitted that she had kept and tended to the body, and revealed that she had cashed Zigler’s Social Security checks after he passed away. “I’m probably going to prison,” she told the paper. “I told them the truth. I didn’t lie about that.”

Chase not been arrested, but police have said they are investigating charges of financial fraud. Article with links and photo

Saturday Round-Up

Pride of place to this, from the land of free.

Californian city extends smoking ban to include apartments More

Shame on you.

Merkel to allow circumcision in Germany despite ban More

Further tales from the land of the free.

Woman convicted of battery for protesting TSA pat-down More

I think we might thank the influence of the Catholic Church for this one.

Jamaican doctor arrested for performing abortion on 12-year-old
Dr Lloyd Goldson and the girl's mother have been arrested for allegedly procuring an abortion, and could face life in prison More

Shameful, but then I don't live in a slum built on top of the local dump.

Indian campaign confronts prevalence of female foeticide
Activists target antenatal clinics as people face so many problems, killing newborn girls has to compete for attention More

Not so free ourselves in England's green and pleasant land.

There was some surprise in the comments of yesterday’s post over the fact that the United Kingdom has effectively outlawed encryption: the UK will send its citizens to jail for up to five years if they cannot produce the key to an encrypted data set. More

What has the Egg and Spoon race come to, if it has come to this?

‘Lethal force’ at the ready: No-fly zone over London Olympics
It’s official: starting Saturday, Britain’s Royal Air Force (RAF) may use “lethal force” against any unauthorized craft, including passenger jets, caught violating London airspace during the Olympics. More

We are not insane, honest! we've just got religion.

Virgin Mary image on tree in West New York still drawing onlookers More

Please Don't Mention The War

When a blog author, me, had this to say previously:

When All Else Fails Roll Out Adolf Hitler - Rick Santorum

I've lost count as to how many times I have iterated the header in commenting on this blog. When you are talking bullshit and you have nothing to support your argument, roll out Adolf.

It then leaves little doubt as to why I have picked up on this article posted in the BBC's News Magazine.

Making some excellent points on all manner things, both historical and contemporary, there is little I would disagree with, other than, yes there is always an other than or a but in most everything one reads. And so there should be, critical thought differentiates us as individuals rather than one of the flock, plebeian or religious, the choice matters not.

The author writes:

When I read well-intentioned people talking about the impossibility of assimilating Muslims in my adopted country of France, for instance, I become frightened when I see that they are usually entirely unaware that they are repeating - often idea for idea and sometimes word for word - the themes of the anti-Semitic polemics that set off the Dreyfus affair a century ago.

Yes quite. Don't we already know that Muslims just want to be left alone so they can subjugate their women in peace? The odd Jihad apart that is. When you find Utopia Mister Gopnik, please do let me know.

But that said, the rest of it quite readable.

A Point of View: Don’t mention the war?
by Adam Gopnik
29 June 2012

It's time to stop invoking Hitler and the Nazis in arguments about everything from censorship to birth control - but we should never stop heeding the lessons of World War II, says Adam Gopnik.

Whoops! sorry, wrong photo, here's the one.

It's time to stop invoking Hitler and the Nazis in arguments about everything from censorship to birth control - but we should never stop heeding the lessons of World War II, says Adam Gopnik.

Over the past few weeks, I have been talking about bees, and the Beatles, and babies (at least ones who are babies no longer), and also about books and bad reviews. I am as deep in the Bs as the crew that went hunting for the Snark in Lewis Carroll.

I hope you will forgive me if I turn this week to something, if not more serious, then more obviously sombre, and that is the question of what the memory of World War II ought to mean to people now.

It recedes, its soldiers die, its battles become the occasion for camp fantasy, or Quentin Tarantino movies - the same thing.

Recently, the Economist published a long book review asking just that; what WWII ought to mean to people now?

We know already what it means to publishers and television networks. The publishers love new books about the war's battles, and the cable shows can never get enough Nazis. A German friend once complained to me that educated Westerners often know far more about the German government during those five years of war than they do about all German governments in the 60 years of subsequent peace.

But then, as The Economist wrote: "the sheer magnitude of the human tragedy of [WWII] puts it in a class of its own, and its relative closeness to the present day makes claims on the collective memory that more remote horrors cannot."

Does it, should it, make such claims? Of course, there is a band of American neo-conservatives who insist on seeing every new year as another 1938, with whomever is the monster of the week cast as a Hitler figure.

On the other extreme, there are those who insist that there is, in a sense, nothing to learn from what happened then, because it was so uniquely, horribly evil. There is even a principle, frequently repeated during internet squabbles, and half-jokingly called Godwin's Law (after Mike Godwin, an expert in internet law of the unjoking kind, who first invoked it). It states simply that as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler gets greater. The stupider the argument becomes, the more likely someone is to use the "reductio ad Hitlerium".

Therefore Godwin's law implies - and this is the law-like bit - one should try never to compare anything or anyone current to Nazis, Nazism - or for that matter, to mention 1938, Munich, appeasement or any of the rest of the arsenal of exhausted exemplars. It's a bit like Basil Fawlty's old rule when the German guests come to the hotel: "Whatever you do, don't mention the war!"

And, to an extent, this caution is sane and sound.

The people on the right who invoke "liberal fascism" should be bundled off - with those on the left, who morph Thatcher's or Blair's picture into Himmler's - shut up in a library, and made to read some history.

But I'm always haunted by the simple words of the historian Richard Evans towards the end of his good book, The Third Reich at War, where he said that we should always remember that what happened was not some act of Satan - though Satanic acts took place - but the result of the unleashed power of long latent traditions of militarism, nationalism and the hatred of difference. It was the force of three ever-living things, braided together like hissing, poisonous snakes around a healthy tree.

The danger is that each of these things is not necessarily evil on first appearance, and each seeks a new name in new times.

"There are obvious topics in which the [Nazi] comparison recurs. In discussions about guns and the Second Amendment, for example, gun-control advocates are periodically reminded that Hitler banned personal weapons.

"And birth-control debates are frequently marked by pro-lifers' insistence that abortionists are engaging in mass murder, worse than that of Nazi death camps. And in any newsgroup in which censorship is discussed, someone inevitably raises the spectre of Nazi book-burning.

"I developed Godwin's Law of Nazi Analogies: as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one."

The old distinction between patriotism and nationalism, made many times by many people, has never been more vital to our mental health than it is now - as vital for the health of the country as the distinction between sexual fantasy and pornography is for the health of a marriage. Patriotism, like fantasy, is a kind of sauce, a pleasing irrationalism that is part of what makes us human - and saucy. Nationalism, like pornography, is a kind of narcissistic addiction that devours our humanity.

Patriotism is a love of a place and of the people in a place. As GK Chesterton understood, it becomes more intense the smaller the unit gets, so that it was possible for him to feel more patriotism for Notting Hill than for Britain.

Nationalism is the opposite belief; that your place is better than everyone else's and that people who don't feel this way about it are somehow victimising you.

Recently in America, "exceptionalism" has become the new name for this illness. All nations are exceptional, but some are more exceptional than others, and America is the most exceptional of all. This sounds like a mordant joke, but it is actually what many people in the US believe, and want everyone else to believe, and routinely arraign President Obama for not believing in enough. (As it happens, for good or ill, he does.)

To believe this, it is necessary first of all to be exceptional in never having lived in any other place that thinks itself exceptional.

"History is full of wars that were bloodier than the Second World War. As a proportion of the population, more people were killed during the An Lushan rebellion in 8th Century China, for example, or by the Thirty Years War in 17th Century central Europe.

"But the sheer magnitude of the human tragedy of WWII puts it in a class of its own, and its relative closeness to the present day makes claims on the collective memory that more remote horrors cannot."

Any American lucky enough to grow up in Canada, as I did, which believes itself rightly to be exceptional among the world's nations in its ability to cover an entire continent in common values without the governments ever having once resorted to internal violence. Or else to have lived, as I also have been lucky enough to do, for many years in France, which believes itself to be exceptional among the countries of the world because… well, I haven't time to enumerate all those reasons, though they were nicely summed up in Noel Coward's remark, just after the death of General De Gaulle. Asked what De Gaulle might say to God, Coward said that that depended entirely on how good God's French was.

Exceptionalism, it seems, is the least exceptional thing on earth.

Just as nationalism is the opposite of patriotism, not its extension, so militarism is an emotion opposed to the universal urge to honour soldiers for their courage. Militarism is the belief that the military's mission is moral, or moralistic. That the army can be used to restore the honour of the nation, or to improve our morals, and that a failure to use it to right every imagined affront is a failure of nerve, rather than a counsel of good sense.

After 9/11, in the US we suffered from a plague of militarism of this kind, again mostly from sagging middle-aged writers who wanted to send someone else's kids to war so that the middle-aged men could feel more manly in the face of a national insult. Militarism is not the soldiers' faith that war can be conducted honourably, but the polemicist's belief that war confers honour.

Hatred of difference - notice I carefully did not say racial hatred, or religious hatred. Hitler hated Jews because of their religion, and because of their race, but he hated them above all because of their otherness.

When I read well-intentioned people talking about the impossibility of assimilating Muslims in my adopted country of France, for instance, I become frightened when I see that they are usually entirely unaware that they are repeating - often idea for idea and sometimes word for word - the themes of the anti-Semitic polemics that set off the Dreyfus affair a century ago. For those writers, too, believed not that Jews were eternally evil, but that Judaism was just too different, too foreign to France, and tied to violence against the nation and its heritage.

And indeed there were Jewish anarchists in Europe, as there are Muslim extremists now. But there was never a Jewish problem in France, any more than there is a Muslim problem now.

This is a question in which after a half-millennium of religious warfare, the results are really all in. If we accept the Enlightenment values of tolerance, coexistence and mutual pursuit of material happiness, things in the long run work out. If we don't, they won't.

So, from now, when we evoke Godwin's Law, as we ought to, I would like to propose Gopnik's Amendment to it. We should never believe that people who differ from us about how we ought to spend public money want to commit genocide or end democracy, and we should stop ourselves from saying so, even in the pixelled heat of internet argument.

But when we see the three serpents of militarism, nationalism and hatred of difference we should never be afraid to call them out, loudly, by name, and remind ourselves and other people, even more loudly still, of exactly what they have made happen in the past.

We should never, in this sense, be afraid to mention the war. We should say, listen: you've heard all this before - but let me tell you again just what happened in the garden the last time someone let the snakes out. It is exactly the kind of lesson that history is supposed to be there to teach us. BBC

Fishing Discard Policy To End

Good, not before time.

Fishing discards practice thrown overboard by EU

EU makes compromise agreement to phase-in ban on discards from 2014, but critics say that will be too late for some species
Fiona Harvey
13 June 2012

Who's that young fellow me lad?

The wasteful practice of throwing away healthy and edible fish at sea will be ended in Europe, for the first time in four decades, in a partial victory for environmental campaigners who have viewed a discards ban as the key step to preserving fish stocks.

But – crucially – the date when such a ban will come into force is still in question, raising fears that it may be implemented too late to save some species.

More than 1m tonnes of healthy fish are annually thrown back dead into the sea by fishermen – due to EU rules, or in order to maximise their profits – and a ban on discarding fish such as mackerel and herring is likely from 2014. However for other very pressurised species such as cod, haddock, plaice and sole, the ban could be phased in from 2015, and not be fully in force until 2018. That, experts say, may be too late to be effective.

Mette Gjerskov, the fisheries minister for Denmark, the current holder of the revolving EU presidency, said: "Today the [EU] Council for the first time stated that a discard ban will be a reality."

Maria Damanaki, the EU fisheries chief, said: "It was a compromise, but a step in the right direction, a step forward, [and] workable."

Although her proposals for comprehensive reform of the common fisheries policy – the biggest overhaul of the longstanding policy since it was formed – have not been implemented as Damanaki wanted, she vowed to fight on, saying the focus would switch to the European Parliament, which will now discuss the council's decisions and could try to strengthen the proposals.

Richard Benyon, the UK fisheries minister, who stayed firmly in favour of a discards ban but faced a revolt from the Scottish devolved administration over its timing, said: "After years of pressing to eliminate discards it was always my aim to get the council to agree to end this wasteful practice as soon as possible. While I am disappointed that the council has not agreed the firm dates that I was seeking, a commitment to ending discards is a step in the right direction."

The key question is now over when a discards ban for key species is implemented. Conservationists warned that unnecessarily prolonging the practice could be the death knell for many of the EU's dwindling fish stocks.

The compromise agreement came after a marathon negotiation session in Luxembourg, at which EU fisheries ministers warred over whether to ban discards, when to do so, and how to set a "maximum sustainable yield", by which fisheries would be managed in accordance with scientific advice over how much fishing they could bear.

After more than 18 hours of negotiations, which stretched on to dawn on Wednesday morning in Luxembourg, the final decision was hailed by the Danish presidents of the European Union as "a very important step in the direction of a radical new fisheries policy – a sustainable fisheries policy".

Gjerskov emphasised the battle that had to be fought to get this far: "This was not given, six months ago [that the EU would opt for a ban on discards]." Several member states, including France, had campaigned vociferously against banning discards, because the current system allows fishermen to make up their quota by selecting only the highest value species and the best specimens, throwing away the rest, and thus maximising their profits but destroying large numbers of healthy and edible fish. more

Perverted Penguins Perturbed Polar Pioneers

I seem to recall the Fundies hi-jacking penguins for some reason or other, just let me see what I can find that will put this post in the correct context.

Well I have found something, boy oh boy, have I. So before you read on, might I ask you to read the post below, before delving in here.

'Depraved' sex acts by penguins shocked polar explorer
By Matt McGrath
10 June 2012

Accounts of unusual sexual activities among penguins, observed a century ago by a member of Captain Scott's polar team, are finally being made public.

Details, including "sexual coercion", recorded by Dr George Murray Levick were considered so shocking that they were removed from official accounts.

However, scientists now understand the biological reasons behind the acts that Dr Levick considered "depraved".

The Natural History Museum has published his unedited papers.

Dr Levick, an avid biologist, was the medical officer on Captain Scott's ill-fated Terra Nova expedition to the South Pole in 1910. He was a pioneer in the study of penguins and was the first person to stay for an entire breeding season with a colony on Cape Adare.

He recorded many details of the lives of adelie penguins, but some of their activities were just too much for the Edwardian sensibilities of the good doctor.

He was shocked by what he described as the "depraved" sexual acts of "hooligan" males who were mating with dead females. So distressed was he that he recorded the "perverted" activities in Greek in his notebook.
Graphic account

On his return to Britain, Dr Levick attempted to publish a paper entitled "the natural history of the adelie penguin", but according to Douglas Russell, curator of eggs and nests at the Natural History Museum, it was too much for the times.

"He submitted this extraordinary and graphic account of sexual behaviour of the adelie penguins, which the academic world of the post-Edwardian era found a little too difficult to publish," Mr Russell said.

The sexual behaviour section was not included in the official paper, but the then keeper of zoology at the museum, Sidney Harmer, decided that 100 copies of the graphic account should be circulated to a select group of scientists.

Mr Russell said they simply did not have the scientific knowledge at that time to explain Dr Levick's accounts of what he termed necrophilia.

"What is happening there is not in any way analogous to necrophilia in the human context," Mr Russell said. "It is the males seeing the positioning that is causing them to have a sexual reaction.

"They are not distinguishing between live females who are awaiting congress in the colony, and dead penguins from the previous year which just happen to be in the same position."
Sexual coercion

Only two of the original 100 copies of Dr Levick's account survive. Mr Russell and colleagues have now published a re-interpretation of Dr Levick's findings in the journal Polar Record.

Mr Russell described how he had discovered one of the copies by accident.

"I just happened to be going through the file on George Murray Levick when I shifted some papers and found underneath them this extraordinary paper which was headed 'the sexual habits of the adelie penguin, not for publication' in large black type.

"It's just full of accounts of sexual coercion, sexual and physical abuse of chicks, non-procreative sex, and finishes with an account of what he considers homosexual behaviour, and it was fascinating."

The report and Dr Levick's handwritten notes are now on display at the Natural History Museum for the first time. Mr Russell believes they show a man who struggled to understand penguins as they really are.

"He's just completely shocked. He, to a certain extent, falls into the same trap as an awful lot of people in seeing penguins as bipedal birds and seeing them as little people. They're not. They are birds and should be interpreted as such." BBC

The old Queen might have been dead for a decade, but her uptight sexual attitudes were alive and well that's for sure. I should imagine that female sexual emancipation was about as rare a thing as a female orgasm; a quick thrust in the dark in the missionary position, was I suppose, the standard operating procedure of the day.

Below there is the trailer for the film, Ninety Degrees South, and the full movie, with sound commentary, below that. The files version that I downloaded some while ago, was in fact the unadulterated silent version of Herbert Pontings' film. If you call 'with captions' unadulterated that is.

I did however find the silent version to be more in keeping with the presentation. But that is not to say that the footage is still anything but the original and shouldn't detract you from watching this remarkable footage.

For me personally, there is just one thing that gives Scott's expedition a slight taint, and to a somewhat lesser extent Shackeltons; classicism, it pervades throughout all these 'Boys Own' adventures of the day. (Interesting Shackleton link)

But that said, and particularly after watching Pontings' film, nothing but nothing can take away from a feat of tenacity and human endurance, Scott's trek to the Pole and nearly back, that is probably unparalleled in the history of human endeavour. And made all the more so, by the quality of the kit available at the time, to these intrepid heroes.







H/T http://www.youtube.com/user/riverbanksy

Queen Tried To Use State Poverty Fund To Heat Buckingham Palace

Queen tried to use state poverty fund to heat Buckingham Palace

Ministers were asked if money earmarked for schools, hospitals and low-income families could be used to meet soaring fuel bills
Robert Verkaik
24 September 2010




The Queen asked ministers for a poverty handout to help heat her palaces but was rebuffed because they feared it would be a public relations disaster, documents disclosed under the Freedom of Information Act reveal.

Royal aides were told that the £60m worth of energy-saving grants were aimed at families on low incomes and if the money was given to Buckingham Palace instead of housing associations or hospitals it could lead to "adverse publicity" for the Queen and the Government.

Aides complained to ministers in 2004 that the Queen's gas and electricity bills, which had increased by 50 per cent that year, stood at more than £1m a year and had become "untenable".

The Royal Household also complained that the £15m government grant to maintain the Queen's palaces was inadequate.




In search of more money-saving schemes, the Queen's deputy treasurer wrote to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport to ask whether the Royal Household would be eligible for a grant to replace four combined heat and power (CHP) units at Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle.

He asked: "Community Energy can fund up to 40 per cent of the capital costs of implementing a community heating scheme... Since we are already grant-in-aid funded [the Queen receives £15m a year for the upkeep of her palaces] we would like to know whether the Household [would] be able to benefit from these grants. I look forward to your comments."

Under this scheme administered by the Environment department, schools, hospitals, councils and housing associations have been awarded £60m for heating programmes which benefit people on low incomes.

Taxpayers already contribute £38m to pay for the Royal Family. Yet some of the buildings which would have benefited from the energy grant were occupied by minor royals living in grace and favour accommodation on the royal estates. Surprisingly the Government offered no resistance to the proposed application and cleared the way for the Queen to take advantage of the handout.

But by August 2004 the documents show that Whitehall officials had changed their minds and poured cold water on the whole idea. In an email sent to the Palace it was diplomatically explained that the funds were aimed at people on "low incomes".

The official wrote: "I think this is where the Community Energy Funding is directed and ties in with most allocations going to community heating schemes run by local authorities, housing associations, universities etc. I also feel a bit uneasy about the probable adverse press coverage if the Palace were given a grant at the expense of say a hospital. Sorry this doesn't sound more positive." More Independent

Social mobility? Not While We Have Our Hereditary Monarchy

Social mobility? Not while we have our hereditary monarchy

The royal family depends on a history our schools don't teach any longer and a lifestyle too close to Hello! for comfort
Editorial. The Observer
3 June 2012

Once upon a time, it all seemed so simple. "Queen and Empire: a Pageant of unparalleled meaning and magnificence." Or so ran the newspaper headlines in 1897 when Queen Victoria celebrated her 60 years on the throne. Some 50,000 troops converged at St Paul's to give thanks: the Dyaks from Borneo, the Sikhs from the Punjab, all honouring "the Queen of Earthly Queens". Britain strode into the future with pride, confidence, pomp and circumstance. But this weekend, as a second monarch has her diamond moment? The headlines look back, not forward. There is, and will be, magnificence all right, carefully screened against terrorist outrages, suitably muted for an era of austerity. But the "meaning" of it all remains painfully elusive.

That isn't, in any sense, the fault of the 86-year-old who commands stage centre. Hereditary monarchy is a throw of the dice. Queen Elizabeth II has served Britain well. She's been tireless, devoted and beyond personal reproach. She deserves the affection that will be lavished on her today. But the nature of the country she reigns over has changed utterly, and so, in turn, has the nature of its monarchy.

No dissembling. The Observer has long seen Britain's monarchy as an anachronism, a barrier to its full freedom and renewal. You cannot worry seriously about social mobility or last year's big idea of an even bigger society without seeing the furred arteries of class, deference and birth that hold us back. Where else in the democratic world does an unelected second chamber wield legislative power? Where else is the confected pall of the past, with its lords, ladies and faintly ridiculous rituals so strong?

The monarchy has changed over those 115 years. It has descended, sometimes unsteadily, from its pedestal of remoteness, so that it sometimes seems to exist today at the whim of the nearest news-stand or flick of a TV remote. So 80% of Britons support the royal status quo, routing a mere 13% of republicans on the latest polls. So what happens next year or the year after when poll ratings take a sudden dive (as they inevitably do)? Fold a formidable queen, a gallant duke and a couple of young, photogenic princes into the mix, season with a dash of Kate and sprinkle of tiny feet and you have the perfect celebrity recipe for Leveson times. Yet celebrity culture, as we know, always moves restlessly on. It doesn't like old and boring. It would like – those polls again – to give King Charles and Camilla a miss and jump straight to a more glamorous generation.

By the time that grey King William and Queen Catherine arrive, decades on, the moving finger of adulation will surely be dancing elsewhere. Just look at some of the guests who ate lamb and asparagus at Windsor's great jubilee lunch a couple of weeks ago: Prince Hans-Adam of Liechtenstein, Grand Duke Henri of Luxembourg, King Mswatsi of Swaziland, the Emir of Qatar, Prince Albert of Monaco — plus, from Greece, Romania, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia, the deposed remnants of former dynasties.

There was some disquiet as that party assembled. What on earth was a brutal King of Bahrain doing in such company? But the message was rather subtler than that.

Hereditary monarchy survives in northern Europe – in Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark – by lying low and living modestly, wearing woolly sweaters fit for The Killing. In other lands – Japan, Thailand – it still retains an almost mystic allegiance. In the Arab and African worlds, monarchy means crude power. There is really no common theme to serve with those "juicy Kent strawberries" on the Windsor menu. And nor is there a continuing royal show, anywhere in the world, to match the buckets full of media significance now heaped again over the House of Windsor this long bank holiday.

It's a weird brew: public service and publicly funded privilege intermingled. It depends on a history our schools don't teach any longer and a lifestyle too close to Hello! for comfort. It has sustained Elizabeth II through 60 testing years. Inertia or better may sustain it for many more. But Britain's future? There, perhaps, it is best to close discussion, like London's bridges, and live for the moment where meaning doesn't much matter. The Observer

Dennis Potter The Last Interview

Updated below.

It was afterall a rather light hearted program, never for a moment had I expected to find within, content that moved me the way it did. But that part of the program, Frost on Interviews, (UK only) that featured Melvyn Bragg talking about, and talking with, Dennis Potter (The Last Interview 1994) I found profound, inspirational, and quite moving.

It's at this point that I would normally say a few more words on the subject, but I can't, and for no other reason that I am posting the full interview sight unseen. Unusual I know, but I'm pretty sure it's a decision that will be without regret, watching for the first time, as you yourself may, here on this blog.

Though I can't give you an introduction, I an taking the liberty of employing one already writ, courtesy of Brian Edwards Media.

The Finest Television Interview Ever Recorded: Melvyn Bragg talks to Dennis Potter
Brian Edwards
February 7th, 2011

On 15 March 1994 Melvyn Bragg interviewed the playwright and television dramatist Dennis Potter. The interview was broadcast on the BBC’s Channel Four on April 5. Potter died of cancer two months later on June 7.

Potter smokes throughout the interview, holding the cigarette and lighter between the bunched fingers of his clawed right hand. Like his hero Philip E Marlowe, the mystery writer in perhaps his most celebrated work, The Singing Detective, the playwright had suffered for much of his life from debilitating and painful psoriatic arthropathy, a skin and joint disease which, in its chronic stages, formed lesions and sores over his entire body, partially crippling his hands and feet. He was eventually obliged to write with the pen tied to his wrist.

Beside his chair in the television studio he has a flask of morphine, which he drinks from at intervals during the conversation to control the pain.

All of this would make the interview remarkable enough. But it is the quality of what is said, of Bragg’s questions and Potters responses, which allows me to call this ‘the finest television interview ever recorded’. Much of a media commentator’s time is given over to criticism in the negative rather than the neutral sense of the word. I thought it appropriate to redress the balance a little by inviting you to watch this small screen gem. The YouTube version is in seven parts, each just under 10 minutes long.

If you’re unfamiliar with Potter’s work, Wikipedia or YouTube are both good places to start.

Enjoy! Brian Edwards

By the by, enjoy the three minute "parting shot" from Potter, I think you may find it quite amusing. Certainly topical.

Update:

What can I say; other than perhaps to parrot the words: ‘the finest television interview ever recorded’? But by concentrating on the 'interview' does that do disservice to the man? Most surely, for if nothing else, you bathe in Potter's remarkable essence throughout this fascinating, sixty some odd minutes.

Of all that past, and there was much, during this fleeting hour, I never felt more connected with a man as when he described his type of patriotism, for as you might know I don't do patriotism, but Potter described his love for this England, not for its flags and all the razzmatazz that people normally associate with, as Samuel Johnson put it: Patriotism, the last refuge of scoundrels, but a quiet almost unspoken love for this country ours, this England.

But no few words would be complete, particularly in light of what is transpiring at this very moment that I write, is Potter's scathing condemnation of Rupert Murdoch, and in other places during the interview other than the aforementioned 'parting shot.' Which is by the way, part of the main body of the interview, not the parting shot as the words imply.

File under: unmissable.

Update: Bollocks, video private. There are some miserable fucking cunts about, let me see if I can find a new upload.

Sorry folks, everywhere I've searched it comes up as private, I can't even find any files to download in order that I might up it myself. What a bummer.  

















Tip of the hat to HerefordMSV for the uploads.

An Interview With David Starkey

Love him or loathe him, and since his recent forthrightness on Question Time, probably quite a few new additions joining the ranks of the loathers.

No matter, Starkey is one eminently watchable historian, giving me as he has, hours of learning and genuine enjoyment via any number of his renowned historical documentaries. Not only that, how can you not love a man who describes our present Monarch as 'a housewife who lacks a serious education?'

That said, I have to say in all honestly, that I didn't know the first thing about the man; not that he was born with two clubbed feet or for that matter, his sexual orientation. Little wonder then, that I found this interview between Starkey and Rachel Cooke of the Observer, of particular interest.

David Starkey: 'I can be a bit harsh'

When Rachel Cooke went to meet historian David Starkey, often called the rudest man in Britain, she expected it to be war. But that was before she started laughing at his tales of a first date in the Beaver's Retreat
Rachel Cooke
22 April 2012

Tales of the river: Starkey at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, where he is curating an exhibition on Thames pageantry.

In the afternoon of 3 June, the Queen will mark her diamond jubilee by sailing the Thames from Hammersmith to the Old Royal Naval College at Greenwich aboard the royal barge, the Spirit of Chartwell. In her wake will travel a flotilla of 1,000 boats decorated in streamers and flags, their crews resplendent in their finest rigs. There will be ancient boats and modern boats, rowing boats and sailing boats, steam boats and motorised boats, musical boats and boats spouting geysers. Most amazingly of all, the flotilla will be led by a floating belfry of eight bells, the largest of which, named for Queen Elizabeth, will weigh half a tonne. Its peal will be answered by the bells of churches all along the river and theirs, in turn, echoed by others up and down the land.

"Yes indeed," says David Starkey, distinguished constitutional historian, pressing the tips of his fingers together carefully. "The idea of a set of church bells on the river… I don't think that has ever happened before. Thames river pageants have always been a mixture of the grand and the loony, and this one looks like it is going to have elements of complete lunacy. It will certainly be interesting to see what the, er, sonic effect is." Starkey pauses and then, unable to resist, adds: "My guess is that the whole thing is just going to go straight over."

"Plop!" I say quietly.

"Plop?" A look of purest delight spreads across his face. "Ha ha ha! I think it will be rather more than a plop!"

Starkey and I are hidden away in a back room at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, where he has guest curated an exhibition tracing the history of Thames pageantry. So far most of the advance fuss about this has centred on the fact that it will include Canaletto's The Thames on Lord Mayor's Day, a painting not seen in London since its completion in 1747. But it would, I think, be unmissable even without this astonishing centrepiece, taking the goggle-eyed visitor all the way from Anne Boleyn's coronation procession in 1533 to the Great Stink of 1858 and beyond. Among the 400 precious relics on display will be the earliest-known copy of Handel's Water Music, Bazalgette's original contract drawings for the construction of the Thames embankment, and a flag flown on the Apothecaries' barge at the funeral procession of Lord Nelson.

The Tudor and Stuart kings, of course, used their ever-more-elaborate Thames processions as a distraction, drawing public attention from such sticky matters as the fact that the king would persist in remarrying (awkward to crown Henry's numerous women in the traditional way) or, in the case of James II, that he was a Catholic (ditto). Would it be fair, then, to characterise our own dear queen's procession as yet another distraction? "I suppose if one was being terribly disloyal, the whole jubilee is a bit of a distraction," says Starkey. "But perhaps that's one of the essential purposes of the monarchy. As Walter Bagehot said: it's the dignified part of the constitution. It casts a veil of popularity over the efficient. Or, er, not. His words, rather than mine. But equally, whatever else one thinks of the Queen, time has gilded her. Only once she's gone will we really be forced to confront the changes that have gone on in Britain during the period of her reign. She has acted as a kind of facade."

So, if this isn't too indelicate a question, are we looking at a case of "après moi, le déluge"? No. "What is striking is how the reputation of the monarchy has gone up and down in my lifetime. It was untouchable until the 1970s. Then the younger members of the family… actually, it seems to me that they didn't behave particularly badly. After all, they're typical members of the post-1960s generation, and the idea that you sit on your private unhappiness and suffer in marriage, that no longer washed. But anyway, there was the annus horribilis and all that – and then this extraordinary reversal. The team kept going. William has had the sense to marry a girl who's naturally conventional. The important point, though, is that all this is set against the failure of our other institutions: parliament, the civil service and – please don't think me rude – the press. The monarchy has risen serene above a general wreck.

"If we address the future, we [the British] are driven by two principal forces: inertia and sentimentality. Monarchy benefits from both. I can see a more general political collapse ahead, though. It seems to me that it's 50:50 at best whether the United Kingdom survives. Alex Salmond is a malign genius and David Cameron is utterly without imagination or any idea of what he wants to do."

As for the Church of England, of which the sovereign remains Supreme Governor, it's a hopeless mess. "The church made a lethal mistake when Michael Ramsey was appointed archbishop by Harold Macmillan. It rediscovered Christianity, and that was fatal. Until that point, the archbishops had been the high priests of English Shinto: in other words, the church's job was really just to [enable us to] worship the monarchy and, by extension, ourselves. That was sensible. But then it gets cluttered up with all this nonsense about Christianity. The absolute disaster will be if someone like John Sentamu [the doctrinally conservative archbishop of York] is appointed. Catastrophe! The church has got to choose between being a national church or an international communion. It can't be both."

Should gay men be priests? A coy (or coy-ish) smile. "It's not for me to say. It's for the church to say." To gay marriage, though, Starkey is implacably opposed – and he remains bewildered, or so he insists, by the concept of civil partnerships. "There was a piece in the paper the other day about gay divorce." A moue of disgust. "What are gay people doing inflicting these horrors upon themselves? Get a civil partnership, and the moment things go wrong, the person who will determine your financial future is some incompetent, uncomprehending heterosexual! For God's sake. How mad can you be? Why would you want to drape yourself in the trappings of marriage? To voluntarily put your head in that noose!" Crikey. His disappointment – lofty, comical and haloed with his own somewhat old-fashioned brand of gay pride – is, if you ask me, as extravagantly theatrical as anything you will find on display in the gallery.

Thanks to recent appearances on Question Time and Newsnight, it is popular – righteous, even – to loathe David Starkey. When I tell friends I'm going to meet him, they grimace and roll their eyes. And I must admit that, en route, I prepare myself for combat. The rude pig! I think. The bigot! Naturally, my expectation is that he will be disdainful of me, a nice little liberal, and impossible to interrupt. I fantasise wildly about arriving at Greenwich on a golden barge or, better still, in an Elizabeth I outfit… That would shut him up. But playing to an audience of just one, I must report – don't all howl at once – that he is mostly (emphasis on the mostly) delightful: funny, interesting and courteous. I disagree with him passionately about the cause of last summer's riots. But unlike many of the men of his age and reputation I interview, he treats me as if I might have a brain. Amazing. Which leads me to wonder: are his antics on the telly an act? Or is it that, overexcited and prone to showing off, he sometimes backs himself into a rhetorical corner? He casts me a look. If he were a cat, he would now be purring. "Yes, I am quite charming and kitten-like, aren't I?" he says. And then: "My dear mother, 1,000 years ago, told me: 'Your tongue will be the ruination of you.' Well, in fact, it has proved to be rather the opposite. But she was 50% right, as mothers tend to be."

Mostly, though, he is keen to point out that when he is on television, he is merely doing exactly what the producers of these programmes want him to do. "What people have to understand – and this is why most politicians are so catastrophic on Question Time – is that it is a bear pit. It's a Colosseum. On Moral Maze [the Radio 4 programme which, when he joined it in 1992, earned him the title 'the rudest man in Britain] the producer was a brilliant impresario. Michael Buerk would be there, trying to calm things, and behind him, through the window, I could see the producer mouthing the words: 'Fuck the bugger!' at me. I've never, ever said anything that I didn't basically believe. But you dramatise and you personalise. It's a mixture of soap opera and wrestling."

Does he ever feel awful afterwards? "Of course! You wake up in the middle of the night, and you think: 'Why did I say that?'" So when he said of last year's riots, on Newsnight, that "the whites have become black", did he at least regret the hurt he caused? (He doesn't regret the remarks themselves, as he has said repeatedly.) "I'd want to put it the other way round. It's precisely because I do care [about the feelings of the black community] that I made them. It seems to me that this pussyfooting around and pretending that every problem blacks have in Britain is because of wicked whites is what is destroying them. I care desperately about the incidence of black murders. But more blacks are killed by blacks than by whites. So there is clearly a problem.

"The one thing I valued about my Quaker upbringing was the insistence on calling things by their proper names. Unvarnished truths. This terrible sentimentality… people have to be told the truth even when truths are very painful. It's the only way anything gets any better. The great Victorian improvers were fearless. They didn't respect feelings. Wilberforce didn't respect the feelings of slave owners." It seems not to occur to Starkey that it is always members of your own community who are most likely to be violent towards you, whether you are white, black or Asian. Nor, apparently, does it strike him that comparing the sensitivities of 19th-century slave owners with those of black people everywhere is both utterly ghastly and muddle-headed. But perhaps he does register my disquiet, because he moves on from this point rather quickly and begins talking about George Galloway instead. And, on this, we do agree: the man is shameless.

Starkey was born in 1945, in Kendal, Cumbria – "a right tight little town", as he once put it. His father worked as a factory foreman, his mother was a char, and their only son was born with two club feet and infantile polio. Not an easy start, and yet Starkey lays all of his confidence, and all of his success, pretty much at its door. "This is going to sound shocking, but being born with two club feet was quite a good beginning. If you pull through that, you're very unsentimental. My earliest memories are of really agonising pain." He points at his brown deck shoes, which look a bit odd with his navy suit, tie and pocket square. "I've had some work done lately, because the surgery I had as a child hasn't lasted. That's why I'm wearing these. Anyway, I was about four. I was in the surgical ward at Westmorland General Hospital on Kendal Green, and it was agony. Every bone in the foot had been broken and reset. It was a general male ward, so I was told to shut up, not to disturb other people. So if I sometimes appear a bit harsh…" His voice trails off.

His mother, thwarted in her own efforts to attend teacher-training college, was determined and encouraging, and there were various teachers – he can still remember each of their names, and even their handwriting – who spotted him early on, with the result that he became a prize-winning pupil. "Of course I was the lonely, swotty child. But I was also the crippled child. I wore special boots at a time when boys wore shorts. So they were bleeding obvious. Sport was impossible. I was, though, too big to bully. I got into fights and I pounded the other person." His hands curl theatrically about an imaginary neck. "I had an uneasy transition between primary and secondary school, and I had a kind of nervous breakdown aged 13. People thought I'd sink to the bottom of the class, but I resumed where I was before. My school had honours boards and I decided my name would be up there. I always, I suppose, dreamed dreams. It was a cold, wet, northern town, and there was absolutely no spare money, and I decided that didn't suit me."

He won a scholarship to Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, bagged a first and, having completed a doctorate supervised by Geoffrey Elton, eventually became a fellow. In 1972, he joined the LSE. In 1998, however, he abandoned academic life: his television career was beginning to take off – in 2002, he signed a £2m contract with Channel 4 – and he was finding it increasingly desiccated. He will bristle, though, if you ask him if he misses the life of the scholar. "Without wishing to sound pompous, I do more research now than ever. I'm working on a second volume of Henry VIII, and I've come up with some astonishing stuff on the crucial changeover from Henry VII that is going to revolutionise our understanding of his reign." Happily, the public is able to separate the snarling Starkey of Question Time from the serious historian, and his books are well-regarded, and sell in vast quantities. Commissioning editors also know the difference. His deal at Channel 4 will end shortly with a film about the Churchills, and then he is to make a BBC series about the royal courts.

It was when he moved to the LSE that he truly discovered gay life. Hampstead Heath, as he doesn't mind telling you, was a kind of sylvan sweetshop so far as he was concerned, a Swizzles lolly behind every tree. "Oh, yes. Exquisite." Did he ever worry about picking up the wrong man? "I only had one unpleasant experience, when I was stupid enough to pick up someone in a loo at Piccadilly. I'd been to the Reform Club for dinner. I'd had a run-in with this dreary professor at the University of London, and dinner at the Reform was his peace offering. He was teetotal and I decided to punish him by ordering the most expensive claret on the list. So I was a bit tiddly and I finished up in this loo with someone threatening to beat me up."

I remark that he was never much of a marcher for gay rights. But, no, I'm wrong. "I did actually go on one march. Yes! It is hard to imagine. Though it's even harder to imagine what I was wearing." Oh, go on. Tell. "Well, it was the early 70s. Flares, 3in soles, my arms conspicuously wrapped around Jamie Gardiner's bottom, no doubt. He was the man who lured me into all that stuff. What was particularly ludicrous was that the march was in Great Malvern." So would he have been more keen on civil partnerships then? "No! We didn't campaign for equality. We knew we were superior. We were campaigning for the right to do whatever we wanted. I remember Jamie saying: 'We've got to establish that having sex is like having a cup of coffee: all that matters is whether you want milk or sugar.' Wonderful! I'm a libertarian, you see."

How did his parents respond when he came out? "My mother was… it effectively destroyed our relationship. My father. Dear dad. His reaction to every problem was the same: he went out and bought a book about it. He was the classic working-class autodidact. He solemnly read a book about it and then he solemnly talked to me about it. Of course, that was excruciating for me, but he was completely wonderful and it was through that that we really got to know each other, because my mother had been fiercely possessive."

His cruising days are, of course, long since over. He has shared his houses in London and Kent with James Brown, a publisher, for the past 18 years. How did they meet? A puckish grin. "Oh, nobody ever believes me when I tell them this. It was in a bar at the LSE called [cue dramatic pause]… the Beaver's Retreat." He waits while I recover myself – this takes a while, if I'm honest – and then he says, with mock seriousness: "The beaver, you see, is on the LSE shield. It's a symbol of hard work."

He knew this relationship was going to be different right from the start: "You could tell it was high romance because we didn't fuck each other on the first night." So what's their secret? For a moment, he falters, and I wonder if I am about to be told to get knotted. But, no. On he goes. "I suppose, finally, that it's two things. There has to be a high level of mutual tolerance and a thorough enjoyment of each other's company. It's got to combine love and friendship, but also, you can't be captious. The reason so many relationships run aground is that we're a spoilt generation used to having everything exactly as we want it. But I'm afraid that if there are two of you together, there will be lots of occasions where neither party has exactly what they want. The best is the enemy of the good. Human life isn't about ideals. It's a compromise, and occasionally it's boring. We spoke very seriously. We had a sort of honeymoon in Bologna, and we made a series of promises to each other. I won't tell you what they were. But we weren't too ambitious and I think we've both stuck to them." His voice is suddenly soft, almost gentle, and I think, not for the first time: if only the politicians who avoid him in the Question Time green room could see him now. Observer

Just a small taster for those whom Starkey is a stranger.