The Sunday Ishmael: 08/09/2024

At Keir Starmer's first Prime Minister's Questions, on Wednesday - the first Labour PMQs since Gordon Brown’s last such session on 7 April 2010 - Sir Keir delighted the nation by addressing Rishi Sunak, Leader of the Conservative Party in Opposition, as Prime Minister. And not just once. It caused much chortling and sniggering - the Commons being strongly reminiscent of feeding time at Eton; but Starmer thundered on, obliviously, mentioning the £22 billion Black Hole created of the nation's finances by the Conservatives. And not just once.

Sir Keir, with his ladies.

Fortunately, by the time Laura Kuenssberg interviewed him for her Sunday morning politics show, and pointed out that £9 billion of the Black Hole was created by the Labour Government's settlement of the outstanding public sector pay rises that the Conservatives had somehow omitted to deal with and bequeathed to their successors as a sort of strike legacy, Sir Keir had remembered that he was, in fact, Prime Minister. He said, predictably, that the Conservative government under its successive 5 or so leaders over the last decade and almost a half had broken the nation, the NHS and the economy, but he was going to sort it out, although it wouldn't be popular. He was berated about removing the Winter Fuel payment, but responded that it would be a targeted payment for very poor pensioners. As I said last Sunday, that's fair enough with me, as I have a deep-rooted objection to giving well-off pensioners an un-means-tested benefit that they don't need, out of my taxes. But the really important news was that he bribed his kids with a new kitten to sweeten the move into the Downing Street flat.

A Siberian white kitten with blue eyes, called Prince. Prince joins the existing family cat, Jo-Jo,

and the incumbent Downing Street cat, Larry, who is a Civil Servant and not a Sunak pet.

Just goes to show you that Starmer is a cat person. Rather him than me - sounds like all three cats are boys and Larry already has a street rep for extreme violence.

enough cats, already, mrs ishmael, you sound like a mad old lady in a purple hat with cats. ed.

No, please, just this one last cat:

Right, I'm done with the cats. We'll turn now to the question of what Sir Keir does in his study of an afternoon and who he likes to watch him doing it:

Not her, for sure. He had her portrait removed to a meeting room as he found it unsettling to have her staring down on him while he was getting on with his quiet reading in his private study. I do that increasingly often these days, but call it having a nap.

I went down south to Dundee in June to visit the kimono exhibition at the V&A: Kimono: Kyoto to Catwalk.

The building is a triumph. Kengo Kuma 隈 研吾 is a Japanese architect and emeritus professor in the Department of Architecture (Graduate School of Engineering) at the University of Tokyo. His design for the Dundee V&A was inspired by images of sea cliffs in Orkney, and is a building that hovers between land, sea and sky.

No two walls are the same,

the building is pierced by waterways and walkways,

juts out into the River Tay

and sits in magnificent contrast to the RRS Discovery, the last traditional wooden three-masted ship to be built in the United Kingdom.

Launched in 1901, she was built in Dundee for Antarctic exploration, and eventually returned to Dundee, where she rests in a custom built dock, a visitor attraction in Discovery Point.

Inside the Dundee V&A, the cliff-like faces of the external walls are echoed in moveable tiles of oak,

there is a Grand Staircase and a glass lift

In the midst of this magnificence, I thought the floor slates, which looked as though a careless painter had been at work were a disappointment,

but my son-in-law, who knows about these things, instantly recognised them as slates cut from fossil-embedded rock. Each of those splotches was a cross section of some millenia-old creature.

Dundee's V&A is a museum dedicated to Scottish design, and, as such, has a limited permanent exhibition. The Charles Rennie Mackintosh Oak Room is the most striking feature. Mackintosh designed it in 1907 for Miss Cranston’s Ingram Street tearooms. It was stored in hundreds of numbered pieces for almost 50 years after being salvaged by Glasgow Museums in 1971, and, carefully restored and rebuilt, was installed in the V&A.

Today, the fully restored Oak Room is on permanent display at the heart of V&A Dundee’s Scottish Design Galleries.

I didn't care for the Tweed and Quant foolishness, but I did like this:

The visiting exhibition space has walls that can be moved to accommodate exhibitions of different sizes and a massive freight lift to transport huge pieces to the galleries - this time the Kimono exhibition, which started off in the proper V&A in London then travelled the world until arriving in Dundee, where it will remain until January, so you have lots of opportunity to visit.

I've always been excited by Japanese textiles and surface design. Kimono simply means clothing, or "that which is worn". Both men and women wore the kimono. It looks the way it does because the cloth was woven on narrow looms to create rectangles which were assembled thusly:

The kimonos did not disappoint, nor did their display.

These are modern interpretations of the kimono, and its influence on catwalk design and film costuming - think Obi-Wan Kenobi's outfit in Star Wars.

But it was the traditional kimono that gave me pause. 

 

The doll-like courtesans and geishas of Edo's hedonistic 'floating world', dressed, coiffured and caked in thick white make-up presented women as exhibits or products. The rigid social order, from the Tokugawa shogunate to the chōnin lower class, was not mitigated by a religion that required adherence to a moral code or a concept of mercy - to the contrary, Shinto was strongly associated with militarism and imperialism. 

This is a kimono for a baby boy. And so is this. 

The text reads: " A child's first visit to a Shinto shrine, about 30 days after birth, marked an important rite of passage. Infant boys would be draped in kimono with motifs symbolic of achievement and strength. In the 1930's, as Japan expanded aggressively in Asia, traditional samurai images were replaced by contemporary militaristic ones. Wrapping the child in the image of a battleship symbolised wishes both for his and the nation's future."

And we know what all that led to. mr ishmael recounted this: 

"Tom Pendleton was an honorary uncle to mrs ishmael. After surviving some years in a Japanese prisoner of war camp he flew home, weighing just six stones, thirty-eight kilos, in the belly of a bomber; he never spoke of it but you can imagine, can't you.  I guess surviving those little yellow bastards' cruelties - or cultural differences as we would now be expected to say - took some balls but I don't think the returning POWs were called heroes." 

I said "and we all know what that led to". But, actually, not so much. We do, we ishmaelians of a certain age. But the younger generations, the ones who haven't got grandfathers, fathers and uncles to tell them what the war in the Pacific was like, what the camps were like - they believe that America and Britain were the bad guys, dropping nuclear bombs on defenceless civilian populations just to test them, for the hell of it; not to bring to surrender the filthiest, most cruel, narcissistic, imperialistic, Emperor-worshipping nation under the sun. And the young woke-istas certainly won't learn the truth of history from museum exhibits. Not when museum exhibit boards present this sort of disinformation, presenting Japan as a victim:

I don't get out much, on account of Orkney being a long, long way from the cities of the South. I'd read of this historical revisionism, this Orwellian NewSpeak, but now I've seen it, on museum disinformation boards. How bloody dare they?

There are four splendid anthologies of the writings of stanislav and mr ishmael, compiled by his friend, mr verge, the house filthster. You can buy them from Amazon or Lulu. Here's how:

Honest Not Invent, Vent Stack, Ishmael’s Blues, and the latest, Flush Test (with a nice picture of the late, much lamented, Mr Harris of Lanarkshire taking a piss on a totem pole) are available from Lulu and Amazon. If you buy from Amazon, it would be nice if you could give a review on their website.

IIshmaelites wishing to buy a copy from lulu should follow these steps 

please register an account first, at lulu.com. This is advisable because otherwise paypal seems to think it's ok to charge in dollars, and they then apply their own conversion rate, which might put the price up slightly for a UK buyer. Once the new account is set up, follow one of the links below (to either paperback or hardback) or type "Ishmael’s Blues" into the Lulu Bookstore search box. Click on the “show explicit content” tab, give the age verification box a date of birth such as 1 January 1960, and proceed.

Link for Hardcover : https://tinyurl.com/je7nddfr

Link for Paperback : https://tinyurl.com/3jurrzux

https://www.lulu.com/shop/ishmael-smith/flush-test/paperback/product-9yjvn7.html?q=Flush+Test&page=1&pageSize=4

At checkout, try WELCOME15 in the coupon box, which (for the moment) takes 15% off the price before postage. If this code has expired by the time you reach this point, try a google search for "Lulu.com voucher code" and see what comes up.

With the 15% voucher, PB (including delivery to a UK address) should be £16.84; HB £27.04.

The Sunday Ishmael: 01/09/2024

 They've been in power for 8 weeks, now and the litany of complaints is never-ending. Well, I can understand the Tories being miffed, on account of they think it is their god-given right to be lords of creation, trouser whatever's going, snatch up the unconsidered trifles, like Shakespeare's Autolycus, and the heftier sweeteners, and assume that if they're alright, then so is the country. And why shouldn't they look at tractor porn in the Commons and send photos of their genitals, just as if they worked for the BBC? 

But what did the lesser mortals think they were voting for? Oh yes, anyone but the Conservatives. 

Rachel and Keir enjoying a good laugh at our expense.

And now that they have got what they wanted, the removal vans have come and gone, come and gone, they find that sweetly-smiling, implacable head-girl Rachel Reeves is actually going to implement the policies she outlined and Sir Keir Remainer Starmer has popped across to cosy up to Olaf Scholtz about reinstating free movement of workers across Europe in the guise of some youth scheme to enhance the little darlings' experience of the world and nothing to do with undercutting the wages and working conditions of British men and women, honest. 
The statisticians tell us that Remainer Starmer's personal approval rate is dropping like a stone - down to minus 16 points. It's mainly the proposed smoking restrictions, I reckon. The British want to smoke themselves to death, 

causing untold cost to the tax payer in treating smoking related cancers, lopping off legs and providing wheelchairs. A total smoking ban, once the existing cancers, heart diseases, etc, have worked through the system and into the graveyard, might be just the measure to make the NHS financially viable. Won't happen, of course. Jeremy Clarkson, for fuck's sake, has been quite forthright about the plan to extend the smoking ban to outside public areas, calling it a Stalinist decree. If ever a man needed saving from himself, 'tis he.

He famously gave up, after smoking some 630,000 cigarettes; following pneumonia and blood poisoning, saying that: "the blood poisoning was so bad and I was so racked with the resultant rigors that I couldn’t work a cigarette lighter."

As a former trade union activist I have been especially amused by the indignation expressed in the press and by the citizenry that a Labour Government has settled the strike actions that were so disrupting the NHS and travel arrangements by making pay awards to public sector workers. Some are shocked that the Labour Party has links with the trade union movement, whilst continuing sanguine about the Conservative acceptance of massive financial donations from a "loose affiliation  of millionaires and billionaires" (Boy in the Bubble - Paul Simon)

A public sector worker came to my trade union advice surgery once, wanting assistance because she thought she was being bullied by her manager. I've known many a bullying manager in my time, and was very willing to take on her case, but explained to her that I couldn't do so, because she was not a member of my trade union - nor indeed, any trade union. I told her that if she joined, and set up a direct debit for her union dues, I was prepared to waive the requirement of 6 months membership before representation. This was greeted with grave suspicion by this non-trade-union  seeker of wisdom and truth, who said that she wouldn't be joining, because she thought that trade unions, like the Labour Party, were too political, but couldn't I represent her anyway? Not the sharpest knife in the drawer, this one. Not really surprised that her manager was bullying her. I'd be tempted in that direction.  I couldn't help myself - I asked what her problem was with the Labour Party. She said they were biased towards the trade unions.

Well, duh, of course - the Labour Party was formed in the late 19th century to provide a Parliamentary voice for the trade union movement, and it continues to be largely funded by the trades union - £3.00 per annum per trade union member of an affiliated trade union is paid to the Labour Party, in addition to any other donations they wish to make. Adds up, those 3 quids.

So of course the Starmer government was going to settle these annoying strikes by public sector workers - don't want to jeopardise the funding. Quite apart from the fact that it makes sense to get the healing and treatment services back to work, in order to get Britain's sick back to work. And to get the trains running to get folk to work. And the more money public sector workers have, the more they spend, not being the kind of folk who have or are accumulating generational wealth. And the more they spend, the more the economy grows. The Sunak Government didn't want to settle pay claims on account of class war, although they said it was an inflation-busting principled position. No - it just galled them that train drivers are the highest paid group of oiks in the UK - earning an average of between £48,500 and £54,000 per annum, depending on which pundit you read, and they haven't been to public school, Cambridge or Oxford, for pity's sake. Whereas, MPs earn a basic salary of a mere £86,584, plus any bonuses for special responsibilities, Cabinet posts, ministers with and without portfolios, and what they can wring out of the public purse in expenses - office, staff, second homes, cutting the wisteria hedge and draining the moat.

When I was at Trade Union School, learning my employment law and how to negotiate, I got chatting with a train driver. Miserable life. They can't have an alcoholic drink or take drugs, because they are subject to scheduled, but also random, testing for drink and drugs, and with shift work, extra shifts and expectation of overtime, you can't drink because you can't guarantee how much time off you have for recovery. Now, I certainly wouldn't want my train to be driven by someone off his face on drink or drugs, but what sort of job is it when you can't have a glass of red with your steak and frites? Then there's the suicides - increasingly popular and very public way of ending it all these days. My acquaintance said you never get over having a corpse on your windscreen, staring you in the face, and having to drive miles into the next station with it looking in at you. And blood everywhere.  Air pressure keeps it all in place. Apparently the driver has to phone ahead to the next station, get clearance to stop there, if it wasn't a scheduled halt, get the emergency services mobilised to remove the corpse and clean up the front of the train, and get the platform cleared so that the public aren't disturbed by the sight of the deceased. What's wrong with people that they want to do it in such a visible and undignified way? And don't they care that they are putting the driver into Post Traumatic Incident debriefing and on-going therapy at my expense? I wonder if China has the same problem with its Bullet Trains? Or if they go so fast that all the corpse-components just boil off along the track?

The other Starmer Government innovation that has caused an awful lot of dismayed outrage is the promise to remove the Winter Fuel payment. For our foreign readers, this is a tax-free welfare benefit of £200 paid to people of state pension age to help with the costs of heating their homes in the winter. It has  been a universal benefit, not means-tested, so presumably King Charles III and his lovely wife, Camilla, would qualify, as well as people whose only income is the state pension topped up by pension credits. The state pension is £11,541.90 and the pension credit is an additional £3,800. Now, not wanting to boast, or anything, but I'm not hurting for £200, and I'm not keen on my taxes being used to provide this non means-tested benefit. So it seems a sensible move to me. For the poorest pensioners, there you go, £200 in winter, just in time to buy the ungrateful brat grandchildren some Christmas pressies, and keep calm and shiver on. Martin Lewis was all over the radio and tv, saying he had a better scheme than pension credits for identifying  the poorest pensioners - because many pensioners don't claim the pension credits (why ever not?)  he wants them identified by  the Council Tax band applied to their house - if you live in a Band A, B or C house, then you obviously are dirt poor  and live in a slum. If you live in anything banded over D, then you have no need for a Winter Fuel Payment. The flaw, in this one, of course, is that people can be property rich and cash poor - maybe stuck in a larger house which is unsaleable  due to the conditions in  the housing market, or mining subsidence or being on a toxic landfill site, and maybe their rattling, cold old house is in really poor condition because they never could afford replacement windows and cavity wall insulation. Just saying. Or, au contraire, the little Band B house is a miniature jewel, with insulation, solar panels and a heat pump, maybe a windmill in the back garden - the owners being cash rich and property poor.

No, the really interesting thing about this Winter Fuel Payment grab is that it is the Starmer Government inserting a bony toe into the cold water of abolishing the State Pension in its entirety. Think about it. There never was a National Insurance scheme - there is no pot of money labelled mrs. ishmael, which has been cleverly invested for me over the 40 or so years (or whatever- the qualifying age goal posts are sliding around) since I've been paying my National Insurance stamps and my employers have been stumping up their contributions. No - N.I. contributions went into the general fund, out of which state pensions were paid. So it is a state benefit, not an insurance scheme. It is non means tested. For many, many pensioners in receipt of an occupational pension, it is just a top-up. Pensioners vote Conservative, not Labour. Removal of the state pension and replacing it with a means-tested pension credit benefit will upset Conservative voters, not Labour voters - so why should Starmer care, if the measure doesn't affect his voter base and saves the country £134.8 billion per year? And it will placate the young people, (who do vote Labour) who believe pensioners are wealthy, privileged and refusing to die?

You heard it here, first. 

Whilst on matters financial, we've been hearing about the Black Tax this week. Or, if you are Latino, the Brown Tax. Pundits have been going on about this as if it is something new and undesirable. Quick definition: 

Black tax is a term that originated in South Africa and refers to money that Black workers, especially professionals and other higher income earners give to their parents, siblings, or other family members, often out of obligation or a deeply ingrained sense of family responsibility. It has been described as Ubuntu (a philosophy that humans must live in sharing relationships with each other). Sounds fair enough to me. Working class white cultures in the UK have always operated on this principle. How else would a poor family survive? Eldest kid goes out to work and hands the first pay-packet over to mum, who takes what she needs and hands back pocket money to the new wage earner who is proud that she has been able to help out the family. Nothing especially Black about it.

You've not forgotten about the Undercover Policing Inquiry, chaired by Sir John Mitting? If so, you could be forgiven, as it started in 2017 and is not expected to finish before 2026 - the longest and most expensive inquiry in British history. Sir John is investigating the Metropolitan Police's Special Demonstrations Squad (SDS). His inquiry is looking into whether a secret taskforce overstepped the boundaries when monitoring mainly left wing campaigners in what has become known as the "spy cops" scandal.  SDS officers were ordered into deep cover and went as far as forming relationships and family units with the activists they were spying on, fathering children with them. How is that not rape? How could there be informed consent to a sexual act with someone leading a double life and deliberately misleading them?

The evidence of "John Kerry", police officer HN65, has just been released this week. He assumed the name and date of birth of a child who had died in infancy and his invented back story was that he had been a school drop out who had hitch hiked and travelled before forming a relationship with a young woman who had died. He infiltrated the Hampstead branch of CND with his sad story, gaining the trust of its membership, and becoming chair of the branch. He found nothing very much to report to his handlers. He reported about a film that 200 members had attended, legal  protests that CND had organised, warned that St Pancras branch had "been taken over by Trotskyists" and reported that " a number of women with Hampstead CND were active at Greenham Common Peace Camp." 

 "John Kerry" maintained his double identity for four years.  He said his time undercover came with the “great tension” of holding down two identities, “caused me a significant amount of stress” and had “an adverse effect on my career”. 

What can you say? Poor thing?

For mr bungalow bill, by special request, a few autumnal plant portraits.

Plant skeletons on the shore verge

The gunnera was much lashed by the winds, but nurtures a red flower at its heart.

Crocosmia

Tansy

There are four splendid anthologies of the writings of stanislav and mr ishmael, compiled by his friend, mr verge, the house filthster. You can buy them from Amazon or Lulu. Here's how:

Honest Not Invent, Vent Stack, Ishmael’s Blues, and the latest, Flush Test (with a nice picture of the late, much lamented, Mr Harris of Lanarkshire taking a piss on a totem pole) are available from Lulu and Amazon. If you buy from Amazon, it would be nice if you could give a review on their website.

IIshmaelites wishing to buy a copy from lulu should follow these steps 

please register an account first, at lulu.com. This is advisable because otherwise paypal seems to think it's ok to charge in dollars, and they then apply their own conversion rate, which might put the price up slightly for a UK buyer. Once the new account is set up, follow one of the links below (to either paperback or hardback) or type "Ishmael’s Blues" into the Lulu Bookstore search box. Click on the “show explicit content” tab, give the age verification box a date of birth such as 1 January 1960, and proceed.

Link for Hardcover : https://tinyurl.com/je7nddfr

Link for Paperback : https://tinyurl.com/3jurrzux

https://www.lulu.com/shop/ishmael-smith/flush-test/paperback/product-9yjvn7.html?q=Flush+Test&page=1&pageSize=4

At checkout, try WELCOME15 in the coupon box, which (for the moment) takes 15% off the price before postage. If this code has expired by the time you reach this point, try a google search for "Lulu.com voucher code" and see what comes up.

With the 15% voucher, PB (including delivery to a UK address) should be £16.84; HB £27.04.

Well, that could have gone better. Now look what we've got. 

The Sunday Ishmael: 25/08/2024

 

I guess everyone knows that the eponymous creator of our blog named himself after the opening line of Moby Dick. I started  Terry Eagleton's How to Read Literature the other day, and was much struck by Eagleton's musings on the opening line of Moby Dick. Why should the narrator invite the reader to "Call me Ishmael"? 

"Because of the name's symbolic connotations? The biblical Ishmael, the (bastard) son of Abraham, was an exile, outlaw and wanderer." .....the narrator has adopted a pseudonym to "signify his status as a wandering outcast"

I guess that sounds about right for our mr.ishmael - who was also enthralled by the sea and its dangers - he ran away to sea when he was 15, his mother having died the previous year, and served as a cook's boy on a merchant ship before they had heard of health and safety or employment rights. On the outward leg to Canada, he suffered extensive scalding when the ship lurched and he was drenched in boiling water. He was laid up in his bunk for three days and his pay was docked for those days. Here's an extract from his post on we who go down to the sea in ships: 

In 1966, a troubled kid, I ran away to sea in this old tub, the SS Ramore Head, from Belfast; it was old then, well, twenty years old, nineteen-forties construction, and at the cheap end of that unsophisticated style of construction;  it was no pinnacle of the shipwrights' art.

        

 But she did batter her way through the North Atlantic's midwinter gales and I remember standing on her plunging and soaring stern a thousand miles from anywhere, thinking, terrified and awestruck as I was -  Fuck me, this is good. Or words to that effect. I was unknowingly hymning my people's love affair with the mighty ocean.  Now that I am a man I have never put away this childish thing.  I live on  a quiet shore but I love it when it gets noisy and I take ship sometimes a dozen times a year

Y'know, once upon a time, the land was too much afforested, it was untravellable;  we made our way around our coastal  settlements - pilgrimages, trade, curiosity - by boat;  the Severn, the Irish Sea, the Channel and the North Sea being our motorways.  We really are ancient mariners.

Coming back, in '66 from the States, up the southwest of Ireland, I saw tiny, flimsy little fishing boats, tossed like corks in massive, skyscraper seas, their crews dancing around the decks, hauling and casting nets.  I have never, since,  begrudged the price of fish and chips.

Here's the entry in the National Archives:

London: SS Ramore Head (Ulster Steamship Company Ltd) travelling from Montreal to London.
Embarking at Montreal.
Official number: 99114.
List of passengers disembarking at London.
Date: 1918 Sep 4

So it looks like mr ishmael's boat was older than he thought - unless the name was just handed on to a replacement ship.

The dire conditions endured by sailors of the mercantile fleet were alleviated some time after mr ishmael disembarked in Belfast, but such refinements as better terms and conditions for the crew led to the decline of the British Merchant Navy, once  one of the largest ship registries and source of crew in the world, with 33% of global tonnage registered in 1939.  The Merchant Navy had engaged in major conflicts:

U-boat Campaign, (1914–1918)
Battle of the Atlantic, (1939–1944)
Operation Pedestal, (1942)
Falklands War, (1982)
Gulf War, (1991)

but shrank to a mere 1,054 ships on the British Ship Register in 2023,  as GreedyBastard ship owners got around H&S regulations that presented such an affront to capital by registering their shipping in countries with a more flexible approach to terms and conditions of employment - flags of convenience. Here's wiki, employing a little more moderate language: "Each merchant ship is required by international law to be registered in a registry created by a country, and a ship is subject to the laws of that country, which are used also if the ship is involved in a case under admiralty law. A ship's owners may elect to register a ship in a foreign country so as to avoid the regulations of the owners' country, which may, for example, have stricter safety standards. They may also select a jurisdiction to reduce operating costs, avoiding higher taxes in the owners' country and bypassing laws that protect the wages and working conditions of mariners. The term "flag of convenience" has been used since the 1950s. A registry which does not have a nationality or residency requirement for ship registration is often described as an open registry. Panama, for example, offers advantages such as easier registration (often online), the ability to employ cheaper foreign labour, and an exemption on income taxes."

The abuse of crew - appalling wages, long hours, sleep deprivation, cramped conditions and inadequate food, is common in the industry. But the modern slavery practised on 35 men from the Philippines, Ghana, India and Sri Lanka was uniquely savage. The men have all been recognised as victims of modern slavery by the Home Office after being referred to it between 2012 and 2020.

The workers were employed by TN Trawlers and its sister companies, owned by the Nicholson family, based in the Scottish town of Annan. The TN Group denied allegations of modern slavery and human trafficking and said its workers were well treated and well paid. Well, they would say that, wouldn't they?

The Group's dredgers, built in the 1970s and 80s, work by towing metal nets along the seabed. They scrape up shellfish, stones and other marine life which gets caught in the nets. Deckhands throw back the stones and pack the scallops in ice below deck. Crew worked 18 hour shifts, seven days a week when the dredgers were at sea. Documents were held by the Nicholson family. The crew were denied food, water and safety clothing, and were denied medical treatment following injuries. They were reduced to melting the ice from the packed scallops to drink. Police forces on several UK coasts knew of allegations about TN Trawlers, which had been prosecuted in 2007 for illegal catches worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. Tom Nicholson and TN Trawlers were ordered to pay £473,000 under Proceeds of Crime laws. They were also ordered to pay almost £150,000 in fines and costs after the Maritime and Coastguard Agency found a string of defects and safety breaches on vessels between 2009 and 2011. A 2012 police briefing, noted that six Filipino fishermen swam ashore from TN boats and complained of mistreatment.

In Hamilton Sheriff Court in October 2022, some 10 years after the men were removed from the boats, Thomas Nicholson Snr and TN Trawlers pleaded guilty to failing to get adequate care for Joel Quince, a man who sustained a head injury and was denied medical treatment. Nicholson's not guilty plea to withholding some of the crewmen’s passports without reasonable excuse. was accepted and the charge dropped.

Ishmaelites are already aware of my strictures about not eating Scottish farmed salmon. Don't believe any of that marketing bollocks about crystal clear waters - like this hype: "In this remote place, in the untamed wildness of its cold, clean waters, everything converges. The Atlantic Ocean and the North Sea. Powerful currents and strange, tumultuous tides. The very forces of nature itself, continually cleansing and replenishing the nutrient-rich waters. And the nearby Gulf Stream creates the perfect conditions for raising salmon with a superbly firm texture and moist, buttery flavour." And with ineradicable sea lice that eat the poor buggers alive, and with cataracts from peering through murky water in the pens, thick with uneaten food. and there's the collateral damage of dead seals, shot by the pen workers for trying to help themselves to a bit of salmon. I did tell you about the announcement on Radio Orkney, shortly after we moved here, that on no account should people eat the salmon that had been escaped from storm-damaged pens, and flabbily washed up on the beaches, because they were not fit for human consumption.

Well, now you have to add to your banned list dredged scallops. I don't like them myself - just a lump of white tissue, with an orange bit sticking out, and, like musselsforfuck's sake, it's the sauce that people really like - garlic and wine and cream, with a quarter of lemon and a sprig of parsley. Alright, you can eat the hand-dived ones if you insist, but this firm really should be boycotted.

All the men spoke of their bitterness at working for the company – and their experience of the justice system in the UK.

Joel Quince said his eyes had been opened.

“I see now how it works,” he said.

“This is how your UK law is done... You favour the wealthy people, and you don’t care about the poor.”

I have an illustrated Encyclopaedia on my shelves, published by Collins, with an inscription thus: Love from Mother to Winnie Xmas 1919 (the hands that wrote those lines are coffin dust now.) It is a very useful and beautiful book, with numerous coloured plates and sections on General Knowledge, a Gazetteer of the British Empire, a Guide to the Civil Service, and, most importantly, Letter Writing and Etiquette. For example, it tells you how to address your envelope when writing to the Speaker: "To the Honourable James Allen, Speaker of the House of Commons" and goes on for 101 closely-printed pages, authoritatively advising on how to conduct oneself in every imaginable social situation. It enumerates four unvarying principles upon which etiquette rests, namely:

1. Avoidance of all appearance of affectation in manner, speech or dress; and the endeavour not only always to be perfectly natural oneself, but also to help others who are perhaps shy and nervous to be easy and natural in their behaviour.
2. Remembrance of the courtesy, chivalry and reverence which should be extended to women and all old people as their just and lawful due.
3. Avoidance of taking liberties and dislike of allowing them to be taken.
4. Acknowledgement of the fact that there are of necessity very many different ranks of society, and, keeping this fact in view, the avoidance of all attempts either to push into ranks above one's own, or to condescend to or patronise members of those ranks below it.

Hmm - well, thank goodness we now have Tik Tok to guide us through the intricacies of the modern world. Of particular usefulness is the advice given by Influencer, Jools Lebron: ""You see how I do my make-up for work? Very demure, very mindful,” she told her millions of followers. "A lot of you girls go to the interview looking like Marge Simpson and go to the job looking like Patty and Selma. Not demure". When dressing for the office, her shirt "only has a little chi-chi out, not my cho-cho", adding: "You should never "come to work with a green cut crease".

Yes, that's right, it's a fat ugly bloke in a wig.

What's on Telly?

Steven Pemberton, that's what, reading an abridged version of  Kazuo Ishiguro's Remains of the Day, with utterly delicious settings in a vintage car and  the servants' quarters of a stately home. It is only an hour and I highly recommend it. It is part of Series 2, which seems to be a series of abridged novels in dramatised readings  by important actors. Here’s the link:   https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001z96c/the-read-series-2-the-remains-of-the-day-the-read-with-steve-pemberton

Remains of the Day has two central themes: Lord Darlington, the protagonist’s employer, was a Nazi sympathizer who was politically active, as so many of the aristocracy were, in attempting to move England into allying with Germany  during the inter-war period,  and was disgraced after World War Two; and the unexpressed love of the protagonist, Stevens, for Miss Kenton, the housekeeper. Constrained by his position and his need to keep up appearances he never declares his love and she marries someone else. He narrates the events of his life and his regrets, as he takes a motor trip in 1956 to visit the former Miss Kenton, in the erroneous belief that her marriage is unhappy and that they might renew their emotionally constipated friendship. This comes to nothing and the novel ends with him having unlocked his emotional core too late and reconciling himself to making the most of the remains of his day. 

Apparently, at the time, some thought that Kishiguro was foisting upon his readership a study of Japanese-ness under cover of a very English setting; but the orthodox reading is that it is a study of Englishness, its conventions, constraints and limited emotional range. I think it depicts the straight jacket that institutions force us into – it could be a top-notch butler’s role in a magnificent country house belonging  to a traitor, or a senior manager’s job in a local authority: work and duty overwhelm love and autonomous authenticity. The same dilemma that Shakespeare explored in Antony and Cleopatra – love or duty.

I don’t think it would be a misreading to see Stevens as autistic, or certainly neurologically diverse, as he performs his life in the way that he has been taught by his emotionally cold and very proper father.

It is a terrific work and a terrific reading by Steven Pemberton.

There are four splendid anthologies of the writings of stanislav and mr ishmael, compiled by his friend, mr verge, the house filthster. You can buy them from Amazon or Lulu. Here's how:

Honest Not Invent, Vent Stack, Ishmael’s Blues, and the latest, Flush Test (with a nice picture of the late, much lamented, Mr Harris of Lanarkshire taking a piss on a totem pole) are available from Lulu and Amazon. If you buy from Amazon, it would be nice if you could give a review on their website.

IIshmaelites wishing to buy a copy from lulu should follow these steps 

please register an account first, at lulu.com. This is advisable because otherwise paypal seems to think it's ok to charge in dollars, and they then apply their own conversion rate, which might put the price up slightly for a UK buyer. Once the new account is set up, follow one of the links below (to either paperback or hardback) or type "Ishmael’s Blues" into the Lulu Bookstore search box. Click on the “show explicit content” tab, give the age verification box a date of birth such as 1 January 1960, and proceed.

Link for Hardcover : https://tinyurl.com/je7nddfr

Link for Paperback : https://tinyurl.com/3jurrzux

https://www.lulu.com/shop/ishmael-smith/flush-test/paperback/product-9yjvn7.html?q=Flush+Test&page=1&pageSize=4

At checkout, try WELCOME15 in the coupon box, which (for the moment) takes 15% off the price before postage. If this code has expired by the time you reach this point, try a google search for "Lulu.com voucher code" and see what comes up.

With the 15% voucher, PB (including delivery to a UK address) should be £16.84; HB £27.04.

Coloured plate of pear and pear blossom from Collins' Encyclopaedia.