House of Lords

Reform of the House of Lords. How those words inspire! How they make the adrenilin flow!
If I were to consult some of the habitual denizens of my local pub I think I can guess what their answers would be if asked the question: "Do you think the House of Lords should be reformed?" It would either be "Couldn't care less" or "Yes, they should just get rid of the House of Lords altogether."
The Spectator's editor believes that it works quite well as it is so we should follow the advice given by Viscount Falkland in 1614: "When it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change." Or, as it might be put today: "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."
Nick Clegg is someone who believes, it seems, with an almost religious conviction, that the Lords should be reformed. According to Simon Heffer, writing in the Daily Mail, "Mr Clegg's desire to reform the House of Lords is gratuitous, narcissistic and ignorant." But, Simon, it's in keeping with everything that Nick Clegg has done over the past year or so: first was his admission that he had slept with 30 women (which, when Nicky got up in parliament to say that in a constituency meeting a young woman had approached him.... had inspired a remark from another MP : "Thirty-one!") which is not, as I suppose he imagined it might have been, something that would prove him to be "at one" with the ordinary guy; then his assuming that the vote on proportional representation would go through; then ..... Too many cack-handed things to list.
Reforming the House of Lords is about as interesting as watching cricket when it's raining or reading articles about the imminent election of a London mayor when the two main candidates are buffoons.
Apparently, according to a recent poll, "only 42% are interested in politics." As much as that!
People are finding it hard to make ends meet and our beloved politicians are pondering over reform of the House of Lords. As the Daily Mail might put it: "you couldn't make it up."

Mina

I went to Trip.com to find out which are the best restaurants in Cardiff and found a Lebanese place called Mina to be top of the list. It had a series of excellent reviews so I was tempted to go there. Recently I had received a certain amount of money from an American cousin who wanted to give me a present - I won't tell you why. She sent me a couple of hundred quid and I told her I'd use it to buy some good meals in Cardiff.
Thus my wife and I went to Mina's. It's an unassuming sort of place from the outside in an area of Cardiff where there are many Asian and Chinese retaurants. Inside,the decor was bright but not off-puttingly stark. We were shown to two seats at the window overlooking the street. The waiter was very charming and pleasant. We ordered a bottle of red house wine and soon had before us a bottle of Lebanese red wine which was delicious and cost about £11. I noticed it said 14% on the label which, to me, is quite hign, almost as much as Sherry.
The meal we ordered was chicken with mushrooms and a few other bits and pieces in a delicious white sauce, not spicey, rather bland perhaps but very tasty, with rice. Very enjoyable.
But I couldn't finish it and when the waiter looked with some apologetic wonder at my not having quaffed the lot I had to explain that now that I was "getting on in years" my stomache capacity was not what it had been when I had been a young man.
It is a little embarrasing I find. It happens whenever I go out to dine. I feel the waiter and chef must feel that the food was not to my liking but this isn't so, it's just that I get "full" after I have eaten about half to two thirds of the quantity on the plate. I wish they would cater for us olduns and serve us smaller portions (at a reduced price of course).
The desert was a lighter affair: youhurt with soft honey covered in pestachio nuts. Angel's food.
9 out of 10 for Mina's. Cost for two? £43. Good.

Mina

French Films

What is it about French films that make me cringe? Often they receive rave reviews but I see only mediocrity. A few years ago I saw a film called, I think, "Hidden" which had rave reviews; I thought it above the average for depth but to me it had a sense of believing it was greater than it actually was. There was so much in it I wanted explained. There was a mystery that, to my mind, was never solved. And that is, I think, a feature of serious French films: they present something to the eye that appears to carry intellectual weight but doesn't; they present problems that they seem not to want to solve because, if they do, the game is given away, the emperor has no clothes.
In "The Kid with the Bike" the young lad who is in a sort of Borstal asks a stranger, a woman who he has clung to in a doctor's surgery to evade capture by the school's staff, if he can stay with her on weekends. Why does she say "yes"? No reason is given. You are not supposed to ask this question. The reason? It doesn't have an answer. But the makers of this film are wiser than me: later on the boy asks her the same question: "why did you take me in?" and she replies "I don't know". She acts mysteriously in a realistic setting. Why? Then there is the boy riding his bike: long sequences with the hand-held camera (in a car, no doubt) on him. Why? Are we supposed to be thinking the boy's thoughts? But we don't know what he is thinking or even if he is thinking.
This is a film that was enjoyable to watch and infinitely irritating to think about thoughout.
But French films are like that; they always have been. Except their thrillers like "Riffifi". Why don't they make more of them instead of trying to arty and intellectual. Trying to be!

The Hunger Games

What a film! I am not a fan of sci-fi films, though I enjoyed "The Thing", the black and white version many years ago, and was not expecting to enjoy "The Hunger Games" but I did. More than just enjoyed it as if it was something nice like ice cream; I felt it had an intellectual element that lifted it above the usual sci-fi films. The action takes place in a future America which is now - then - a totalitarian regime run from a city called Capitol and run with a demonic ferocity and control that is excitingly frightening. There has been in the past an uprising by the poor people in the various outlying parts of the country, an uprising which was put down ruthlessly so that the people now live in terror and severe poverty. For the entertainment of the mass of those in control, a decadent-seeming lot of dandies, perverts and dolls, every year two young people, a boy and a girl, are taken from each of the 12 districts and forced to fight to the death in a large wooded area until only one of them is left alive. It is not only a way the dictator has of maintaining his control over the people but is also shown on TV to entertain, like some ghastly reality programme.
What gave it, to me, an extra element of interest was that, due to the masterly way in which the society was presented in the film, it made me think of the way some societies we know now, like Syria or Iran or The Sudan, function. Not just some which now exist but many of those in history. The Romans, The Pharoahs, The Chinese. It made me feel that I now know something of how it must have felt to a person in, say, China during the Gang of Four's horrific reign of terror.
I wished for some kind of solution or even just a glimpse of a solution to the state which held its people in such dreadful subjection but the film didn't give it: at the end things went on as before. And, in a way, this brought home the horror of it more scarily.

Collectibles

A distant relative of mine was a man who possessed "collectibles". I assumed that they were old comics, magazines, bits and pieces of things that were collectible because, in time, they would prove valuable - though that's rather an unkind thought since he may have collected them simply because he liked them. I don't know what happened to them when he died a few years ago but, having just seen the TV programme on Channel 4 called "Four Rooms", I have the feeling that they might have been worth a heap of money. I know that old comics can sell often at high prices and I know that he had some of these. The amazing thing to me about "Four Rooms" is that the stuff that people come to the studio to sell to four dealers is that they are worth anything at all. For example, last night a man brought along a tin can with paint brushes in it and sold it for £17000. The fact that the brushes had been the property of Francis Bacon (used when he painted a portrait of Lucien Freud) didn't mean anything to me but to the dealers it meant a lot. "I just have to have those Francis Bacon brushes," one dealer said as if he were talking about a Francis Bacon painting itself. The four dealers were all interested in acquiring them and all offered quite large sums. But the owner held out and eventually, dropping his expected price a little because he liked the dealer, sold them for £17000.
Phew! It doesn't seem to matter, with "collectibles", that they possess any aesthetic quality, only that they are collectible, that they have attained a value on the basis of their collectibilty. Book dealers aren't interested in what is written in the books they deal in, only in how old they are, what condition they are in, if they are signed by the author, if they are first editions etc. So it is with the dealers on "Four Rooms". A fascinating programme because it takes you into a world where only money counts for anything and, for most people like myself, it's into a world devoid of all that education tells us should be important. It's a bit like watching sharks hunting.

Class

Melvyn Bragg's first programme on Class brought together two writers of entirely different backgrounds, style and themes: Evelyn Waugh, the upper class twit who could write brilliantly and Arthur Greenwood, working class who wrote a famous book in the thirtees called "Love on the Dole". Bragg compared, or rather contrasted, this book with Waugh's "Vile Bodies" which I tried to read a few years ago but failed to reach page 20 (I have always, previously, found Waugh's novels entertaining and stylish but this one left me cold, even angry I think). It was a good comparision in that here was a Waugh, full of himself, looking like a gentleman (which he certainly wasn't), trying to look like a toff, which he tried hard to be but becoming only a person on the fringes of the upper class where he wanted to be and probably bitter about not being fully accepted; and here was an ordinary looking fellow in the shape of Greenwaood wanting to change the lives of working people from the gutter they were living in to a more pleasant path to some properity. Waugh wrote about the beastly upper set and Greenwood about the lower set who were forced to work hard and had liitle time to do much else. Waugh's lot didn't work at all but lounged their way through life.
I saw the film of "Love on the Dole" a few years ago on TV and while I found it rather hard going as entertainment, it got its points across well. Deborah Kerr played a young working class woman who turns to prostitution to make her life bearable - much frowned on of course by her family. The arguments were strong and the action presented them dramatically. "Vile Bodies" was just vile. I believe that Stephen Fry made a film of it a few years ago (is there anything he can't do?) but you wouldn't have got me to see it with a team of wild horses dragging me there.
"Love on the Dole" I'd like to see again.
I wonder why Melvin Bragg didn't mention Bernard Shaw's play "Pygmalion" in his treaty on "class": here was a young woman "from the gutter" introduced to high society and taught to speak properly; she has no problem with getting into the upper class. Why? Because it's not to do with "blood" or breeding as with racing horses but with how you speak and how you conduct yourself in high society. It's that simple. Devastating exposure I thought.