An apology

Back in August I shared my expert knowledge of underperforming first division football teams, suggesting that a bet on Spurs to be relegated might be tradeable - surely it was impossible that they could start strongly and stay near the top. With their 9-1 defeat of Wigan today, it's time to accept I was wrong, and that my stake is lost forever. I am sorry about this, because although I kinda supported Spurs when I was a kid, I'd love to see their manager get what's due to him.

On the other hand, if you paid heed to my tip and have lost money as a result, that really is your own fault.

Cheryl Cole and a racist

One of the conservative councillors in Bromley has turned out to be a racist. No surprise there. You can read about it in Anton Vowl's typically infuriated blog entry. Like me, he's not surprised at what the councillor said, or at the conservative party's condemnation, or even at the way the Daily Mail presented it. It's the reaction of commenting readers that gets him, but again, no surprises there. At least you know where you are with Daily Mail readers. I left a comment of my own, something like

So he is against prospective candidates simply because they have foreign-sounding names. That's simply racist.

I daren't go back to see the response. Loads of red arrows, no doubt. I think it is important to add comments on stories like this, and to recommend sensible (ie non-racist) views. But maybe the response of people judging comments is even less worth worrying about than the comments themselves.

It's a rainy sunday, and while looking for something else I found a story in the Times about Cheryl Cole's hair product adverts. Some people with even more time on their hands than me have complained that Cheryl's lovely hair is probably more to do with the extensions she has had fitted (if that's the word) than the conditioner she advertises. I've searched my heart and soul and find I can't give a toss about this. But someone has commented (and this is the full extent of his view):

Ceramides in conditioners are isolated from pig brains

Pointless and mad, probably, but considerably saner than the eleven people who have clicked to recommend this comment.

José Saramago

José Saramago is possibly my favourite living novelist. So imagine how thrilled I am to see that he has a new novel out, called Caim (Cain). It's not yet been translated into English, but I am sure his regular translator, Margaret Jull Costa, is on the job already. The novel, as far as I can understand from coverage in Portuguese and Spanish websites, is the story of the Old Testament, retold by Cain after he murders Abel and is banished to spend a life wandering. Unsurprisingly, it doesn't give a very positive picture of God, and even less surprisingly, this has not gone down too well in Saramago's land of birth (Portugal) or his land of residence (Spain).
The Spanish newspaper Vanguardia has an interview with the great man. Obviously it's in Spanish but even I can understand the sense of mischief and humour in some of his replies. Of his attitude to the Bible, he says:

This has to do with my position that if we don't understand the other side of things, we don't understand them at all. [...] Even a book considered holy, like the Bible, permits - and demands - that we try to read it from the other side. And this other side always puts right some ideas we had, while it confirms some others.

It's very easy to condemn Cain for fratricide, and I don't absolve him. Of course not. What I do do is to put some of the blame on God: He, everyone should know, could have avoided this. His responsibility is that, when the two brothers offered him the products of their work, Cain, the arable farmer offered vegetables, while Abel, the grazier, offered him meat. God was delighted by the meat roasting on the hearth ... and deprecated Cain's offerings. What kind of God is this, who can only value one person by putting another down in such a provocative way? Cain is humiliated by God, and kills his brother because he can't kill God, which is what he wants.

To the comment that there is a lot of violence in the book,

Yes, but I didn't need to add anything to the violence that is in the original biblical texts.

In the retelling of the Babel story, it seems that the two original languages are Basque and Portuguese:

this will make my Basque readers happy, as it is an extraordinary proof of the antiquity of their language.

Asked if the message of the novel is about the destructive nature of belief, he says:

I never like talking about a message in literature. The message is whatever each reader takes from it, very different in each case. I am an atheist and I feel it impossible, even with mental effort, to believe in God or to get close to this sensation. And, for me I have never had any doubt of the enormously negative and harmful consequences of the existence of religions, which always set people against each other. Killing, killing, killing - it's what they have done throughout history ...

I'm putting this post into my regular blog, not the literary one, because no-one reads that. (Hardly anyone reads this.) Saramago's books aren't easy, but they aren't as difficult as they first look. The sentences are long, but have a rhythm derived from dialogue that soon becomes easy to read. Sometimes, as in Blindness, the subject-matter is almost unbearably hard to take, and you have to learn to trust Saramago as a guide through terrors. So, don't start with that one. I'd recommend The Double as a start, or maybe a more recent novel, Death at Intervals as good starting points. Both have a story that's fascinating (in fact, Death at Intervals has two; being structurally a bit lumpy, it's virtually two novels joined at the middle), and are a fairly smooth way into his unusual but addictive style. Do try.

(Shocking, certainly, but the question is - should we interpret it literally?)

Bloomer

I can't help feeling unreasonably proud of today's bread. This is a bloomer, characterised by the diagonal slashes across the loaf, which are decorative (and would be more so if I'd got the distance between them uniform) and help the dough rise tidily.

At Blackheath Farmers Market one of the bread stalls serves something called a London Bloomer, with six slashes. They claim this was introduced during the war, and the slashes divided the loaf into seven portions, to see you through the week. This must be nonsense. Without preservatives etc this bread will be rock hard by Wednesday.

Bread-making can become an obsession, as the number of blogs about it shows. I don't think I'm becoming obsessive, but I will just note that this loaf is stone-baked, with steam, using Allinsons Seed and Grain flour.

Charlton 5 MK Dons 1

Some things are hard to explain. Why do they bother fitting indicators to black taxis? How can one size ever fit all? Who keeps giving Piers Morgan work?

But how, I ask you, can the team that plumbed the depths of ineptness last week, causing Charlton fans to almost use up the world's supply of words ending in -less (gut, feck, hope, clue, guile, spine, feck, feck, feck), turn on a performance like today's, when in the second half they simply tore apart a decent MK Dons team, lying just one place below them in the table?

It's obviously why we love football: for every 90 minutes of utter misery, there's maybe 45 minutes of bliss.

It was a windy day at the Valley. The ball was swirling around among the leaves and plastic bags all over the pitch, and it seemed like the horror was continuing when MK Dons - actually, I can't continue to call them that - when Franchise FC took an early lead - a well-taken lob over the Charlton 'keeper. But Charlton equalised almost immediately, and the rest of the first half was a great game to watch, with both teams committed to attack, and the uncertainty caused by the wind just adding to the fun. Charlton took the lead on 21 minutes with a fine header by Nicky Bailey, and the score at half-time could easily have been much higher.

Paul Ince escorted the referee off the pitch, moaning about penalties he thought his side should have been given. Pointless, of course. He'd have been better off exploiting the sense of grievance within the team to bring out a stronger performance. But the second half was all Charlton's. Commitment and confidence grew and 12 minutes in the middle of the half saw Charlton take an unassailable lead. Bailey took increasing control of the game, and was undoubtedly man of the match.

Franchise FC are probably everyone's second most hated team, so it was especially good that this return to form should come against them.

Coming soon, to a constituency near you

Just finishing Roy Porter's Flesh in the Age of Reason and found this nugget.

Thomas Love Peacock's novel Melincourt (1817) features a character called Sir Oran Haut-Ton (say it out loud).

This higher primate has been taught to dress in human clothes, and despite - or rather precisely because of - being utterly silent, Sir Oran makes an impeccable backbench Tory MP.

But, seriously, just imagine the quality of some of the Tory MPs who'll make it into parliament next year. All the useless second sons and brothers-in-law, who've been given seats presumed unwinnable to keep them quiet or return a favour, will just have to turn up in a blue rosette to get elected.  They'll make Jim Dowd look like Abraham Lincoln.

Simply racist

I was talking to a friend on Friday night and was astonished to find that she thought the BNP's definition of British is the same as hers. She considers herself British, and so does everyone else apart from the far right. The BNP has clearly failed to get its message across, so I have to do it for them.

Here's what the BNP's website says:

(a) The British National Party is a party of British Nationalism committed to the principle of national sovereignty in all British affairs. It is pledged to the restoration of the unity and integrity of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. It believes that the indigenous peoples of the entire British Isles, and their descendants overseas, form a single brotherhood of peoples, and is pledged therefore to adapt or create political, cultural, economic and military institutions with the aim of fostering the closest possible partnership between these peoples.

(b) The British National Party stands for the preservation of the national and ethnic character of the British people and is wholly opposed to any form of racial integration between British and non-European peoples. It is therefore committed to stemming and reversing the tide of non-white immigration and to restoring, by legal changes, negotiation and consent, the overwhelmingly white make up of the British population that existed prior to 1948.

It's hardly hidden away. There it is, in the statement of principles. The BNP wants to restore the overwhelmingly white make up of the British population, by 'legal changes, negotiation and consent'. That means, of course, that a lot of non-white people will have to stop living in Britain.

Someone always says, at this point, that if the government was willing to pay for them to go and live in the West Indies, they'd do it. But we would be talking about millions of people being paid to leave. And where would they go? My friend has no obvious place to go: her background is complicated, and her home is here. The cost of facilitating such a mass migration would be crippling - not just in the funding of the programme but in the consequences for the depopulated country left behind.

And what about mixed-race children? Presumably, they'll have to go too, as products of some 'form of racial integration between British and non-European peoples".

Basically, the aim of restoring the overwhelmingly white make up of the population by negotiation and consent is not a serious political proposal. It's an outright expression of racism.

And what happens when people don't agree to leave: when 'negotiation and consent' fail, what are the 'legal changes' that could be introduced? How can you possibly reduce the number of unwanted people in a country if they don't want to leave or there's nowhere for them to go? The answer's too horrible to consider. The BNP's constitution only offers protection to 'British people'. And that doesn't include my friend.

The BNP is founded on this simple racist principle: that white people are better and non-white people should have no rights in this country. We need to remember that. Beneath the sweaty, gross, slightly ridiculous public image, there's something much much worse.