The female porn film director, the Octopus Boy and a Scottish Parrot named Fernando.

ROBERT BEERS

The British election is in its final days and the first ever televised debates have changed the electoral landscape and for the moment the nation’s zeitgeist.

Suddenly, the UK’s usually policy-intensive politics have been,  it is claimed, ‘Americanized’. This time the election season was a cross between a personality contest and Britain’s Got Talent which meant the

Cameron Clegg Brown

incumbent, Gordon Brown, became a long shot.

The Prime Minister is ideally a back room policy wonk.  Even if  politics is show business for ugly people, as the saying goes, the Prime Minister was hard pressed to compete in three 90 minute debates with two younger, more attractive and decidedly more glib opponents.

After the first of the three debates a star was born. Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat, gave a powerful,

Liberal Democrat's leader Nick Clegg

energetic performance and raced to the top of the polls.

Clegg did well in the next two debates but the Conservative Party’s David Cameron improved and began to regain a narrow lead over the Liberal Democrats.

Labour’s Gordon Brown was in third place and when he was caught on tape last week calling a supporter ‘a bigot’ behind her back and bigotgate (of course) was born in the British media, Gordon was Brown toast.

Cleggmania however has to now deal with the Mail On Sunday’s article entitled ‘If you thought it was safe to vote for the Lib Dems…just look at the parrot puppet, the octopus and the female porn film director.”

Most people simply don’t know a lot about the Lib Dems, the smaller third party, but Nick Clegg is the first to admit they have a number of eccentrics.

Here are a few:

RON BEADLE

Ron Beadle running in Newcastle North is a campaigner for circus performers’ rights and his brother David has been voted the 3^rd most popular clown in Britain. If elected he promises to work on circus issues.

Phillip Tibbetts running in Halesowen is writing a book featuring a boy with the powers of a pigeon.  Now I thought this might be an unfair solo reference regarding Mr Tibbetts so I went to an interview where his local paper asked him to state what he thought was the largest issue facing the west Midland town of Halesowen: “The unequal car parking fees in the area undermine the economy of our town.”

PHILIP TIBBETTS

Moving on….

Anna Arrowsmith running in Gravesham is Britain’s first female porn film director. Her most famous film is “Eat Me, Keep

ANNA ARROWSMITH

Me and Hug a Hoodie.” A “hoodie’, for the American readers, is the British name for feral teenagers or juvenile delinquents, tending to wear hooded sweatshirts. Ms Arrowsmith thinks what these knife-wielding gang members need are more hugs.

JOHN LOUGHTON

John Loughton, 22, is running in the Scottish areas of East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow. In 2008 Mr. Loughton, dressed as an octopus, won the Big Brother TV show. He thinks good works in politics and/or reality TV shows can give young people a better name.

The Libs Dems also have a candidate who wants to ban the word ‘ethnic’ when referring to mixed race people as he prefers calling himself and them  ‘diverse people’. In the historic city of York the Lib Dems candidate’s claim to fame is being the author of an eco-friendly version of The Three Little Pigs. (I haven’t read it yet but I fear they all end up homeless.)

CHRIS YOUNG

Finally, standing for a seat for the Lib Dems in Glasgow, Chris Young is a ventriloquist who in his own words, is ‘a bit of a character’.

He says he is an out-of-work lawyer and a part-time poet, actor and entertainer. He performs at bars in Scotland with Fernanado, a large stuffed parrot.

The comforting fact for these folks is that in Britain the word ‘weirdo’ is virtually nonexistent.  When the results come in Thursday night I will let you know who among these fine candidates is heading for the grandeur of the Palace of Westminster.

Now that you are hospitalized you could get really ill.

ROBERT BEERS

The first thing to remember once you are in your 21st Century hospital room is don’t touch anything.

Superbugs, especially MSRA, kill thousands of people a year in British and American  hospitals.

So I am sure all these precautions are absolutely needed even if they do tend to make me quite paranoid.

These soaps and rubs are never more than a few feet away. Thankfully, I had five of them in a my room and I was the only one in it.

Now the good news is that the British Design Council last year had a competition to redesign the hospital gown. No more ties and no more backless. The one I was issued had three arm holes with the end result being a total wrap-around garment. Of course when you are a totally unhandy person getting the right combination of which arm in which holes took me about ten minutes to master. But it is comfortable and I never could tie those old one behind my back.

Even more remotes than we have at home and none control a TV.

Uplifting artwork in the hallways helps lift the spirit.

Well….

now that you mention it….

do you have any Lotus Brand,

Cushion-Softies?

Meanwhile….just remember……

I wonder whether a tissue is allowed in that thing.

Memory movies.

Robert Beers

I  have memory movies.

They are all scenes from at least twenty years ago that are as clear as yesterday.

For me they tend to be one-reelers made up of a collection of moments I frequently remember vividly out of an entire period of time long ago. The rest is not so much forgotten but certainly not remembered as precisely either.

Miami Beach 1972

Richard Nixon is being re-nominated at the Miami Beach Convention Center. The arena is surrounded by empty school buses to keep thousands of protestors at bay. Yet more than a thousand people are arrested.

The air is becoming toxic with tear gas and I am in a CBS News van helping out with local angles of the network’s coverage.

Walter Cronkite is focusing more on events outside the convention than the predictable march to Nixon’s run for a second term in the hall. We are busy. Finally the nomination speeches and voting begins and the protest coverage crews are given a break. I go outside with a wet towel to help my eyes and nose with the tear gas. I walk up 18^th Street and the burning air is diluting. Three blocks away the sound of the protesters has faded.

Two elderly ladies are rocking on a front porch. They are knitting.  I smile and nod and they smile back and go back to their needles and yarn and I walk on and then stop and go back to them.

“Do you have any idea of what is going on maybe a quarter of a mile from here, outside the Convention Center?”

“Don’t know.  Waiting for all those folks to go home. Don’t care.”

And so an early lesson in news. Whether it is unrest in the Middle East or a riot in France or the World Series in the States a mile away chances are regular life is going on and oblivious to my monster-sized, dramatic and or traumatic story.

For those two ladies – impossible as it was for me to imagine -knitting was more important that rioting and Richard Nixon.

I promised myself that I would  remember that.

San Salvador 1981

I was trying to learn more Spanish with a dictionary and Venezuelan soap operas on TV in my third floor room of the Camino Real Hotel.

On the fourth incidence of Caracas infidelity and fourth screaming hysterical fit when she finds out, along with a father promising to remove his manhood and a mother ready to poison his huevos rancheros at breakfast, I could take no more. TV off and relax, reading on the bed.

Ten minutes later I am in mid-air briefly before crashing to the floor. Luckily all the glass is on the other side of the bed. The concussion of the bomb left me dizzy and with a head throbbing but otherwise uninjured.

I call downstairs and hear that it was the Hertz office that had been hit but that there was damage to other parts of the hotel.

I run upstairs to check on our crew. Their door is open. Domingo Rex, cameraman and marvellous gentleman, Roberto Moreno another good friend and a Salvadoran fixer are playing cards. “Come on in” they say pouring some more Flor de Cana rum and picking up a few cards the bomb blast had sent to the floor. Domingo is dealing another hand. There is broken glass near the window. They are repositioning their chairs around a bed stand serving as a card table.

Camino Real San Salvador

“Get your gear, we’ve got to go.”

“Where?”

“Where the bomb went off, you know, downstairs where this hotel was bombed,  a couple of minutes ago.”

“We’ve got to sort out this card game first. Everything got messed up. Chips, cards, money everything.”

My cultural understanding did not go this far. So I pulled rank and got the crew downstairs taping and then off to another similar incident and another.

But it was another big lesson. To have anyone react that way challenged me. Which was and is the reward of dealing with other cultures. My way has so often proven to be not the only way and mine is the wrong way all too often.  Maybe not in this instance, but what about next time or the next ten times?

1980 Bolivia

Bolivia was averaging a new government every nine months with a series of coups, counter-coups, and caretaker governments. In 1980,  a junta had carried out a particularly ruthless and violent coup d’état that did not have popular support.

We entered with tourists visas so we got into the country soon after the coup.  To welcome us to this beautiful country they announced right after our arrival a shoot-on-sight curfew.

La Paz

The authorities were most unhappy with our presence in La Paz. One night I came back to my room and my ties had all been removed from a drawer and were hanging mini-nooses from the ceiling. Most of my other clothing had been cut into pieces. The hotel put on a guard at the door which was about as far as we went. To inform the police wasn’t necessary as they probably did it. It was meant to scare and it did yet if they wanted us out they could have easily done so.

In Chile they just told us we had violated some phony prohibition and took us to the airport. In Cuba they would make up some excuse, we need your room was a frequent choice,  and then sorry you have to leave. Now.

But in this case they had just sent a message so we decided to stay.  We were the only Americans in the country which always pleased CBS News so we got our stories out and got out.

Havana 1981. May Day.

Across the Florida Straits South Florida was dealing with the aftermath of the Muriel boatlift. Reagan was in the White House hard-lining Brezhnev’s Soviets and here  in Britain Margaret Thatcher was focusing on troubles at home. “I have the Agriculture Ministry for the farmers, the Defence Ministry for the soldiers and the Foreign Office for the foreigners,” Ms Thatcher famously said. And in Havana Castro wanted to show the new US President and the Sovs his complete command of his island.

He bussed in a million workers from the campo. It was a hot day and various international crews were on a platform to tape the enormous crowds marching into the Plaza de Revolucion and then Castro’s speech.

But the march went on for hours before Castro would speak for even more hours. At one point several of those of us on the camera platform took refugee in the shade of the bleachers where the party officials were reviewing the parade. Finally some official took the stage and I looked up and recognized Castro standing right above me preparing to sit down and from my vantage point I saw Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz wresting with a wardrobe malfunction trying to sort out the derriere portion of his freshly and heavily starched fatigues. In modern terms he had a severe wedgey.

Tel Aviv 1988

From early morning up the coast in a car, paralleling the Lebanese border and then back to Tel Aviv, I am tired but not sleepy. Everything I have and can find in English has been read, the television offers three news bulletins and a Mr. McGoo cartoon all in Hebrew,  so down to the lobby and then into the bar where I encounter the most bizarre lounge act  perhaps on the planet or  at least in my experience. Broadway Danny Rose would not have signed this guy,

He could sing but it was his shtick that  was  amazing.

He was a Joseph in an Amazing Technicolor Sport Coat.

You see this particular lounge lizard  could speak 7 languages and his coat featured 7 different colors. The colors had nothing to do with a particular language but when he changed  languages in mid-verse he pointed to a different color. Can’t remember exactly the exact spectrum but say one sleeve was red and the other yellow, one side pocket was purple and the other green, half the front was pink and the other half brown, and so on.

So our friend would start belting out a ballad in French and point to a sleeve, switch to Spanish and tapped a pocket, on to German and a lapel is lifted, and on and on to finally a big finish and off the coat comes and  he twirls it around over his head, to the last chorus now singing in Hebrew what else, of course, but FEELINGS! Oh, Oh.

Moscow 1983

First trip to a place I had always dreamed of seeing. After a 20-hour journey we landed in the Soviet capital under dark clouds and in heavy rain and then we arrived at the National Hotel and around 6pm I spread out on the bed to get a few minutes rest.

I woke up six hours later. Midnight in Moscow. Clear skies now , moonless, silent. Not a sound, no cars nor people on the broad streets.  The Kremlin was across from the hotel and to the left were the colourful onion domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral. In the distance were other government buildings each with a floodlit Soviet red flag, hammer and cycle in the corner. It is such a cliché, but the first thought that came to mind was “Toto, we are not in Kansas anymore.”

The next morning I was out the door early.  Now the city had revived and was full of Russians heading to their offices yet still the traffic was as slight as New York’s at 2 a.m. on a holiday weekend. Only a couple of cars waited at the red light as I stepped off the curb to cross the street at 8:30 in the morning.

From three directions whistles were blowing, militia traffic officers came running, yelling and pointing and I not understanding a word, of course, had an officer  take me by the arm and lead me to an underground entrance to tunnels that connected to the metro and various government buildings.

I joined the subterranean pedestrian rush hour. The signs even in Cyrillic helped me find my way around under the Kremlin. I had been walking for a few minutes when it hit me.

The sound.  Only of footsteps, no talking. Hundreds of people walking or standing, some families, some couples, not a word spoken.

That was Moscow in those days, somebody might be listening.

Beverly Hills 1989

For a few years we had productions and filming scheduled for the National Education Association every January in LA.

Radio host, TV reporter, ad executive and great companion Hank Goldberg was in charge and he always had us lodged at the Beverly Hilton. As it happened this always coincided with the Golden Globe Awards at the same hotel. Most of the stars were in and out on award night but a few lived outside of LA and stayed in the hotel and this year Morgan Freeman had a room a few doors down from mine. I had seen him a few times in the hall or one or the other of us going in or out of our rooms. A nod and smile relationship.

The whole crew and I had been out shooting all day and then out the door quickly to dinner before the awards began in 1989. For a couple hours before the ceremony the limo-jam tied up the hotel entrance completely.  So we wanted not to be trapped in the hotel as we had the previous year.

When we came back that night the show had just ended.

I got on the elevator and just as the door started to close Morgan Freeman grabbed it with his left hand and came into its oak wood-panel interior holding a Golden Globe Statuette in this right hand.

It was just the two of us. Freeman though was alone in his thoughts. After we passed a couple of floors he took the statuette raised it over his head, said ‘yes’ and then cradled it like a newborn. His eyes were watery.

Morgan Freeman, 52 at the time, had never won any major award after years  of solid character parts and years before that of often-obscure stage roles, including an all-black version of Hello Dolly. In this, one his first leading roles, he nailed it.

I said congratulations as we reached our floor. We got out, turned left and he said, softly not to me, just to say it, ‘all my life, all my life.’

I told him, which was the truth, that I had seen Driving Miss Daisy twice and loved it.

“Tonight I really love that film, too!”

Of course there are many more of family memory movies and of more recent times. These are the kind that just got recorded in the grey matter even though there could be even more interesting ones that gof erased.

Nuts.

“Time is the longest distance between two places.” — Tennessee Williams

ROBERT BEERS

My long-time Miami friend Jeanne Roberts Eklund and I ruminate back and forth across the sea sharing similar insights, and mostly laughs, about the oddities of humankind be they British, Americans or others.

Her latest:  “I always say Northerners have as many nuts ones as we Southerners…but they lock theirs in the attic while we rejoice in ours and put them on display. Tennessee Williams was a journalist, not a novelist…he reported on typical family members.”

Instantly I related and thought of my Blanche Debois mother and Colquitt.  Mom was essentially a delightful fantasist,  a 100% Southerner who carefully cultivated her pronounced drawl, maintained her Deep South airs and graces whilst living most of her life north of the Mason-Dixon line.

Colquitt was her family’s hometown, in Southwestern Georgia, as well as in another solar system and a former century.  I had been to Colquitt as a child and in my college years went on Thanksgivings to visit my Aunt Grace and Sis Charlie.  Now Charlie (they were expecting a boy and, what the heck,  already had the name selected) never married but was a sister to Grace and my late grandmother Kate, so for reasons that defy logic outside of the Confederacy, she was nicknamed ‘Sis.’

My own youth was spent largely in the Midwest and around Cape Kennedy, both quiet Middle American. So Colquitt forever fascinated.

As you drove into town a road sign read:  ‘Pull for Colquitt or pull out’ and they meant it. The local newspaper was inexplicably named The Miller County Liberal and gave my brothers and me great reading material and laughs for months after every visit. The ads where the best part and still are.

Miller County Liberal ad from March 30, 2010

In 1968 Tennessee Williams arrived at Florida State University to visit its rather accomplished English Department. Not one to be confined in a lecture theater, he had a large, fanned wicker chair brought out to leafy Landis Green supposedly to give a bit of a talk and to answer students’ questions.

Unfortunately, while I was not too far away from the master playwright, I could not understand a word he said. I heard only mumbles and throat-clearing. Tennessee natty in his three-piece white suit, smoking from an ivory cigarette holder, flashing that broad Mississippi smile was blotto, pie-eyed, drunk.

A week later the news came that Aunt Grace died. The ensuing few days were the Glass Menagerie meets Suddenly Last Summer. My uncle, William Calhoun Baggs, called to tell me the news saying that he was flying up from Miami straightaway and we would drive from Tallahassee to Colquitt.

This was the only good news. Baggs was my mentor and hero, editor of the actually liberal Miami News, close friend of Jack and Bobby Kennedy and a journalist of the ilk I wanted to become.

‘Uncle Calhoun’ arrived and we set off up US 27, a straight shot, one hour drive north to Colquitt.

“A newspaper editor and a university student, the first human beings in recorded history to ever get lost coming from Tallahassee to Colquitt,” Sis Charlie said in her best stern schoolmarm tone tapping her left foot in its sensible oxford laced shoe on the grey wooden veranda.

“Guilty. I was driving; we were talking, ended up in Dothan, Alabama,” I said.

Sis Charlie was a lifelong high school English teacher, the family realist and sweet of heart. It was hugs all around as we went into the house and for the first time in my experience I saw a few tears on my rugged aunt’s cheek.

The house was pre-Civil War with 20-foot high ceilings, had little lighting and was scented by the sweet fragrance of the talcum powder they wore in the searing heat.

We talked of Aunt Grace. She was the frailest flower in the bunch and always had some ailment, usually ill-defined with the primary symptom being ‘a case of the (mysterious) vapors.’ In the end her heart was weak, as she had always maintained, and it stopped in the night.

My two aunts were Methodists and went to church every Sunday and they fervently believed, not necessarily in their religion, but that being Methodist was greatly superior to the only other choice in town, being a Baptist. The Methodists were upper-class and the Baptists quite something else, as we had been told many times, in the lore of Colquitt.

Soon the rest of the cast arrived. Alice Jane was Grace’s only child and her husband was Mickey Middleton. Alice Jane, like her mother, was the mistress of smooth Southern sarcasm and Mickey, a controversial choice to marry being a Baptist, had the patience of Gandhi and piercing insights into his wife’s family.

After medical school Mickey became a GP for a few years, then considering various friends and family as well as Southwest Georgia in general, he went back to med school and became a psychiatrist practicing in Thomasville, Georgia.

Next came Aunt Essie and Felix, Junior. Aunt Essie resembled the kindly grandmother who looked after Tweedy Bird.

A few years back the entire disparate clan had assembled for a family reunion one Thanksgiving in her home in Gainesville, Florida. Essie was the hostess, of course, and therefore insisted on doing all the driving around town. However, Essie could hardly see a thing, wore eyeglasses with lenses a half-inch thick and drove with her nose nearly touching the windshield.

“Essie, just want to know when did the State of Florida pass this law that allows blind people to drive?” Aunt Grace asked as we yet again almost hit a palm tree and slid through a stop sign.

Grace had her own rules regarding cars. Once stopped for going the wrong way on a one-way street she told the police office, “But I am only going one way.”

On another occasion she was stopped for having out-of-date license plates. Not missing a beat and with some outrage Grace said she certainly did have new plates and if the officer would kindly come over to her house they are waiting for him on the mantle and he would no doubt know, unlike Grace, how to install them.

The star of the funeral was Felix, Junior. Far from the rest of the family’s fondest for 1960s preppy attire, FJ dressed as if he was a permanent resident of the Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach:  Bright blazers, equally colorful trousers and woven two-toned leather loafers.

He owned a hair dressing shop in Gainesville, sported brown hair dyed bright blonde and was above all else prone to hysterics.

So soon after he arrived there was a prolonged attack of tears which led to Felix face down and pounding his fists on the floor and then curled up in a ball howling: “Why did it have to be her, why not me? I am ready God, take me, take now!”

He hadn’t even called her in five years,” Sis Charlie sniffed.

Uncle Calhoun and my cousin Dr. Mickey decided it was high time for a drive and invited me to escape with them. Grace and Charlie were teetotalers and Miller County was a dry county so we were heading to a bootlegger.

It was soon after the Untouchables had been a top TV show and I was expecting a hidden building with a little sliding opening so they could see who was at the door. Instead, outside of town we pulled into the driveway of a large, grand ranch house. Mickey went to the door, rang the bell and he and a gentlemen from inside the house emerged and motioned for us to come with them to the garage.  The garage door lifted up electronically and revealed a warehouse of bonded booze.

“Better get a case, Calhoun suggested, Mickey agreed and we headed back to the house with 12 bottles of blended Scotch.

Now while the two ladies never drank in this house we would be allowed to and Mickey had long ago made sure Charlie and Grace could, too. When Grace was having trouble sleeping he put Creme de Menthe in medicinal looking bottles and told them both to have a small glassful every night.  Both often remarked how their medicine did, in fact, really help with insomnia.

None the less, quite a few drinks did not settle Felix Junior down and while the theme of his moaning sonatas changed from time to time, the volume did not.

So, eventually with pleading from neighbors added to those inside the house, Mickey went to his medicine bag and produced a syringe full of sedative.  FJ took the shot gladly.

“I don’t understand, I gave him enough to down a rhino and he is still standing,” said Mickey a couple of hours later.

I found Uncle Calhoun  in a back bedroom. It was his room in high school. My grandparents, his parents, both died very young and he was orphaned at 13 and Aunt Grace and her husband took him in and he went to Colquitt High School.

I could tell Grace’s death was beginning to hit him. We talked and he told me of his journeys to the local library and reading Shakespeare, Clements and Dickens in this room. He spoke of their many kindnesses and how Alice Jane as well as my mom was like his sister.

Adjacent to the bedroom was a large bathroom that had obviously been added to the house after indoor plumbing came into being. In the center of the room was a very large bathtub.

“That’s the tub,” he said.

I did not understand.  Calhoun explained that Bill Dancer, Grace’s husband who died when I was a baby, used it as his summer office. And it turned out, and Tennessee would have liked this touch, that he conducted business in the hottest months sitting in the tub ‘buck naked’. He sold lumber and clients would pull up a chair and they would make deals, all others clothed and Bill Dancer without a stitch on.

“And, this was not considered unusual?” I asked, really astonished.

“Not here, not then.”

And as Jeanne wrote there was no hiding of or from any of it; we just over a long funereal weekend rejoiced in all that was there and always had been on full display.

Coastal and Flyover America

Idle toads and one-man-bands.

ROBERT BEERS

Dispatch to America

The Right Honourable Gordon Brown, according to various newspaper accounts, has serious issues with office equipment.

The Prime Minister has been known to rip phones out of the walls, spiral pens at assistants and when you get a fax from Mr Brown it may be tossed over to you while still attached to the fax machine, according to various media accounts.

In one incident, reported last year, the PM in a bit of a snit sent an office photocopier smashing to the floor of number 10.

There are also stories about the unusual decor in his ministerial Daimler Super V8. It seems the back of the front seat is black with dots from the PM’s marking pen. Perhaps this is Gordon’s artistic side during many elongated temper tantrums.

There have been more serious allegations:

CIVIL SERVICE CHIEF WARNED BROWN OVER HIS ABUSIVE TREATMENT OF STAFF.

This headline in the Observer consumed several news cycles

The article cited the PM’s ‘abusive behavior’ and ‘volcanic eruptions of foul temper’ in addition to reports of ‘bullying of staff’.

It is the lead-up to a UK election so the ‘Brown the Bully’ stories went on for days.  Most recently an Oxford Don who advises Brown on international relations claimed that Gordon shoved him on a staircase. “Get out of the way!” the PM shouted pushing the adviser against the wall.

Many of these accounts come from the Observer’s a political correspondent Andrew Rawnsley’s new book The End of the Party.

Gordon denies all the above. “I don’t do that kind of thing.”

But there have been so many reports of incidents, including several calls reportedly to the National Bullying Hotline from 10 Downing Street employees, that it seems unlikely they are all fabrications.

Gordon Brown has the same physical fluidity and body language of the legendary Ed Sullivan. Ed, some may remember, seemed unable to move his head without moving his entire body at the same time. He would introduce a guest star whipping his body left or right so suddenly that he would nearly fall over.  And sometimes he would do this to the right forgetting that the act would enter stage left and so Ed would have to re-twist and end up as a human pretzel.  Off camera stage hands would try to get Ed untangled enough to continue the show.

Watching Gordon Brown’s awkward pirouettes at the dispatch box in the House of Commons are much the same as tuning in old Ed but without Senor Wences, Elvis or the Beatles to breakup the viewer’s unease at watching rigor mortis afflict someone still living.

And especially when he is speaking in Parliament there are hints of Richard Nixon. He scowls, moves his tongue around his mouth awkwardly and appears massively uncomfortable.

Gordon Brown has for years had  to deal with a remark attributed to Tony Blair or his spin-doctor Alistair Campbell or some someone else in the Blair camp that the current prime minister is ‘psychologically impaired’

Now on the other side of that dispatch box is Brown’s nemesis Tory Leader David Cameron, the leader of the Conservative Party.  Ideologically, by American standards, both major parties in Britain would easily fit in the US Democratic Party.

The great divide in British politics to me comes not from policy differences but more from the historical legacy of the two parties. Labour originally was the working class party and the Tories had an upper class heritage.

Tony Blair was a thoroughly New Labour type who just wanted to be seen as a regular bloke. His Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott was old Labour, an On the Waterfront type. In the 2001 campaign when the DPM was on the receiving end of an egg tossed by a protester, he went into the crowd and punched the fellow in the face.

The Tories, however, are overwhelming from the boarding school expressways to success; the elite private called public schools are the traditional kennels for kids to become ruling class adults.  Cameron is a blue blood with an Eton-Oxford pedigree.

To offset this David ‘just call me Dave’ Cameron tries to get down with the plebs but can’t dish his inner patrician as he leads the Conservatives into the next election.

Various journalists lately have tried to write the proverbial ‘Who is David Cameron?’ piece. The answers all seem still seem elusive.

Only a few months ago Cameron had a 20-point lead over a decidedly unpopular Brown but the Tory’s overly-focus-grouped image campaign so far  has been unsuccessful reducing their advantage to anywhere from a 4% to 7% lead. Cameron’s campaign  has been like watching a pro golfer consistently missing half-inch putts.

And now a quintessentially Tory scandal has swept the Bully-gate stories off the front page.

Michael Anthony Ashcroft, Baron Ashcroft, Lord Ashcroft, KCMG (Knight Commander of St. Michael and St. George or more perhaps Kindly Call Me God) is a major financial contributor to the Conservatives but recently we learned he is not a big giver to her Majesty’s tax man. He is a non dom, i.e. his domicile is elsewhere. In fact, while he is in the House of Lords and in keeping with its dress code he is the biggest of wigs in the Tory party he is legally a resident of …. Belize.

And artful dodger, officially ensconced in a tax haven in Central America, who has also given £4 million to the Tories and is credited with masterminding the party’s election strategy in marginal constituencies.

The tired Labour party with its grumpy maestro and the more fashionable Conservatives with their sleek salesman at the helm have failed to catch fire with the electorate.

Behind door number three are the Liberal-Democrats who stand at about 20% in the polls and could be crucial if neither of the other two parties get a majority in whole rules Britain by this summer.

There has to an election by early June and with local elections May 6 the betting is on that date.

Britain is like other developed nations coming out of this mega recession tentatively. British Airlines is on strike today and the trains could be next. Massive government cuts are predicted after the election whomever wins.

Yet in asking dozens of friends, colleagues and strangers how they will vote they each offered an explanation about why before saying whom. None is enthusiastic for Brown or Cameron and each said whom they could not vote for before saying how they will vote.

I, on the other hand, have found my party; The Idle Toad Party only exists here in Lancashire and has no political ideology. They are new but already have elected one member to the County Council. They, in essence, stand for nothing. Of course they are just a local party.

Nationally, the Pirate Party has a future among the young as they want everyone to be able to download anything legally.  Then there is the Animals Count Party which was founded by someone from Holland with the delicious name of Jasmijn de Boo and the best I can figure they want a dog to be Prime Minister. And in the last election there was the One-Man-Band party, which had candidates who were simply one-man-bands.

These parties happily are not proponents of Olympic fax machine hurling or beholden to Belizean special interests.

Dog day afternoon

Robert Beers

Crufts, the world’s largest dog show, is back.

It never really went anywhere but last year it was not on British television which would was a bit like the time in America when a strike canceled the World Series.

Crufts was a BBC annual extravaganza but the Beeb cut its ties with The Kennel Club and therefore the dog show when Panorama, BBC News’ hour-long weekly investigative news-hour, last year found that dogs featured on the show suffered from genetic diseases as a result of in-breeding.

This year More4, a cable channel of the commercial Channel 4, is broadcasting it.

So as you entire the immense National Convention Centre in Birmingham the message is we are now about healthy dogs.

Inside there are dozens of competitions going on but the sheer size of the five huge halls means you can only actually get to a handful of them in a few hours.

To get an idea of the size of this event, the Westminster Dog Show in New York has 2,500 dogs while Crufts has 28,000.

What is most interesting for me is to see the little venues. There are agility demonstrations that are like dog Olympics with hurdles, high jumps and races.

Most meaningful was to meet dogs with their British army partners who are just back from Afghanistan having  all saved American and British soldiers’ lives by detecting explosive devices.

Speaking of Afghanistan, I got to meet the European champion Afghan hound. Admittedly, ‘Afterglow Jezebel’ looks like a greyhound in drag, but she is as gentle as can be and very friendly. Her owner told me she has been in dog shows in Germany, France,  US, Canada, 37 countries, in all,

Afterglow Jezebel

at which point I was seized by my inner Larry David. “Let me asked you something, has she been in a show in Afghanistan, I  mean, she is an Afghan dog?”  No,  it turns out the Taliban, oddly enough, are really not that big on dog shows.

The only prima donnas are the breeders and handlers, even the fanciest of dogs, I was pleased to see, are still dogs. I guess they have all been trained to behave in front of the judges yet backstage there is plenty of normal barking, growling and best of all dogs going on sit-down strikes when the hair dryers and hair sprays and marathon grooming gets to be too much.

I never saw any dog that wasn’t normal but some people were disturbing, like the Japanese family looking at all the tiny breeds while carrying around swatches of fabric. A  breeder told me that was because they consider dogs fashion accessories and they are looking for dogs that fit into their Prada handbags and then looking at dyes to colorize the dog to match an outfit.

Everywhere there are stalls  with hundreds of merchants selling every known brand of dog food on the planet, organic and natural being the in thing. There are lots of dog toys, of course, and tailor-made dog clothing.

Many of the items on sale are not for dogs of course but for humans.

You can get most of the major characters in British history in dog figurines.

Like so many giant conventions or shows, Crufts, started by a dog biscuit salesman in 1886, is like a 12-ring circus. So with limited time what I enjoyed was meeting some great dogs. And speaking with  several reasonable people, like Charles, a vet who was sharing my amazement with the enormous number of dry dog food companies. All a waste, the vet said. “If a dog gets lost he never runs into a wheat field to find food. Meat is their only natural food.”

HARRY

So at the end of a long day, back home after a fast  100 mile train ride, one more dog to see. Ours. Harry. A very large Standard poodle. And of course he wanted to hear all about my dog day afternoon. And when I told him about fancy pants poodles wearing purple nail polish he fell on the floor laughing hysterically.

BEST IN SHOW!

Why Larry David matters.

Robert Beers

There are those among us who have an inner Larry David.

We want to be more candid than these massively sensitive times allow. At the same time our, or at least my, excessive neurotic tendencies have to be kept largely to myself. Even though moments of high anxiety may be slightly noticeable. And, of course, we all have codes of conduct we follow even if no one else sees our versions of certain truths.

And this seems to be the key to most stories on Curb Your Enthusiasm. Larry has his ethics and a code of conduct that inevitably contrasts with most of the rest of the planet and all it takes is the right set of unfortunate circumstances and you have ‘a Larry David Moment’.

One of my favorite sets of such unforeseen circumstances came when Cheryl, his wife on the show, a Christian, had her parents from Tallahassee come to the Davids’ house in Southern California for Christmas.

For the Jewish Larry having a 20-foot Christmas tree in the house was problematic. He was also bemused about the caroling, the presents and the rest. And then it turned out that Cheryl’s family, from Tallahassee, apparently had a holiday tradition of baking a nativity scene from gingerbread on Christmas Eve before going to church.

That night, Larry, home alone, got a little hungry and while roaming through the kitchen made a stop at what he thought was a pile of Animal Crackers.

Upon returning home Cheryl’s mom, dad and sister were devastated over the fact that Larry “Ate the baby Jesus.”

Then things took a turn for the worse when Larry, trying to made amends, hired a live nativity, a manger scene group from a nearby church,  to come to his house after the morning service.

While they were setting up outside the front of his house Larry made a causal comment that Mary, or rather the woman playing her, had a great figure,

The fellow playing Joseph took offense to that and other remarks and he and Larry ended up tussling on the ground just as the Tallahassee-ites and Cheryl drove into the driveway.

Good intention, unfortunately circumstances. Could happen to anyone.

Cheryl Hinds

In another instance Cheryl had a bad cough so she asks Larry to stop at the health food store for some colon cleanser to take care of it.

So he asks why and she explains that it will cleanse the whole system and cure the cough. Larry looks dubious but goes to the health food store where he makes a statement that resonates with me anyway: “Health food stores always make me feel so unhealthy.’

Ted Danson, Mary Steenburgen, Wanda Sykes, and Richard Lewis all have recurring roles as characters based upon themselves. And they all get into wonderfully twisted situations usually due to Larry.

But not always. Richard Lewis, who says he feels under the weather 98% of the time, ends up falling in love with a Christian Scientist. For a committed hypochondriac Lewis has problems with a girlfriend who does not have a medicine cabinet.

Larry, Ted Danson, Michael York and others invest in a new restaurant. Two days before it opens Larry fires the chef because he was wearing a toupee. Larry accidentally breaks the thumbs of LA’s most famous restaurant critic who nonetheless recommends a new chef who it turns out has Tourette’s Syndrome.

So mid-evening the chef lets out a long tirade of profanity. Larry, trying to take the edge off the chef’s outburst responds with his own sizzling repertoire of cursing and everyone in the restaurant joins in with a chorus of profanity. Life is complicated on Curb Your Enthusiasm but Larry David often finds ways to get to the heart of the problem even if his answer only appeals to Larry David.

There are long discussions of the rules of life, which have real gravitas in Larry’s world. For example, what is the cut-off for making phone calls? Depending on age of the children, if any, in the house…..8:30,9:30, 10?

I have tried, rather unsuccessfully, here to capture the humor of Curb but the attraction is a character who sometimes says what many of us may think. He wrestles with life, stumbles through it and somehow has not alienated everyone in his life, try as he might.

And he and the program are just as popular on this side of the Atlantic as it is on HBO.

And every year the real Larry David says he has had enough and this season was the last.

But  Jeff Garlin who plays Larry’s best friend and manager on the show has let it slip that Larry is hard at work on a season 8 for later this year.

LD:  Hear the birds? Sometimes I like to pretend that I’m deaf and I try to imagine what it’s like not to be able to hear them. It’s not that bad.

iStory

It was three months ago. I was sitting in the lobby of the Manchester Royal Eye Hospital listening to the I Love Lucy theme song.

Lucy ended and I switched the iPod to Carly to Frank to Pavarotti to off.  

The three-story-high hospital atrium echoed lone footsteps as a nurse left work; otherwise it was empty, quiet.

I was trying to whatever the cliché may be, collect my thoughts, get my act together but really just begin the process of acceptance and see well enough to call a taxi, take a train and go home only to come right back here in a few hours.

This was suppose to be a routine check up, I thought.

Essentially, I was in a ” huge odds against this ever happening” situation of having the retinas in both my eyes detach simultaneously.

Four hours of testing and then a half hour with four surgeons to discuss where we go from here.

If I did nothing I would be totally blind within 72 hours.

Yet there was a chance that the surgery would end up with the same result.

This would be the third detachment surgery in less than three months on the right eye and the first on the left eye.

It began in Tuscany in the first week of September. An hour plane ride east, in England, September is often the best month of summertime.  But not, we quickly learned, necessarily in Italy.

In the town where we were staying the bambinos were back in school, mamas are now at home and so there was no more of the nightly festive gathering of families in the piazza.

Mario at the gelateria was standing on one foot and then the other in his empty shop, no takers for some of the best ice cream in the world (Not true really, I was there so there was a taker about 5 times  a day.)

And there were the cold sirocco winds starting up, blowing desert dust in from Libya across the Med and swirling around, then cooled  by the Tuscan hills.

This is what I thought I had in my eye: desert sand and dust. I washed them and by nightfall they seem to clear. The next day they were back but not all the time. On our last day a week later a thin line of grey was at the top of my field of vision.

Googling these symptoms and with my Doctorate in Internet medicine, I diagnosed this as a cataract. Right for my age and a relatively simple problem to fix.

When we got home the thin grey line was getting wider. I made an appointment with the optometrist at Boots the Chemist where I had a thorough eye exam the previous year. A couple of days passed before I saw him and the curtain had gone from a line to a bit of cloud.

On the day of the exam there were new symptoms. An occasional silver lighting bolt zapped across my field of vision, as did the odd round silver blobs, very much like drops of mercury.

I went into the exam still in denial that this was all but a cataract gone bizarre. The optometrist was a gentle Asian man. The test lasted three times longer than last year’s and when it ended he said your retina is detaching and there is a taxi waiting outside to take you to the Preston Hospital.

”You must go straightway as this is a true medical emergency. You could lose sight forever in the eye if not treated very soon.”

The specialists at the local hospital confirmed the diagnosis but the local hospital did not have the type of laser required and I was sent to the Royal Eye Hospital.

By the time I got there my right eye was on its own LSD trip. Clouds top and bottom – ‘curtains of blindness’ – lighting bolts and silver and gold bowling balls sailed through everything I tried to see. And when I shut my eye I still saw it all; the images were not something I was seeing but shadows inside the eye and effects of the retina tearing. There was no way to turn off the fireworks of the eye.

The next morning Charles Hopley, ophthalmological surgeon born in South Africa, schooled in Australia, tall, lanky and easy-going, did the surgery.  It all went well, he said.

Now the hard part. Two weeks at home, face down, in bed, with your head in a cushioned horseshoe harness. The eye was filled with gas bubbles and the head-down treatment would help keep the repaired retina in place. Surgery can’t attach it only repair it.

After three weeks at home I started getting around and went to give a few lectures at the university.

The bubbles slowly evaporated and with that the sensation that your head is attached to – looking through -a jiggling fish bowl.

Annoying, but I was pacified by the thought that it would all by over soon and that would be it.

But at six weeks after the operation a check up showed it was detaching again.

I wanted reasons. There really weren’t any. The natural gel in the eye dissolved over one’s lifetime and as it does the retina in 1 in 10,000 people tears and detaches and now for a round two we are talking 1 in 100,000, so say the surgeons.

The best they could offer as to why was my gel must be very sticky.  Maybe I ate a lot of glue as a kid, I don’t know and neither do the medics.  I leave the hospital walking stooped over like Richard Lewis mumbling about why haven’t they gotten to eye transplants.

Back to the ‘posturing’, as they called the head-down two weeks of treatment at home where you could not read or watch anything so I found audio books as the only distraction.

Same pattern. Bubbles begin to dissolve, lots of nausea and insomnia as side effects of the field of vision constantly bobbling.

And then to that cold December afternoon and the examination where for the first time the spare eye was also in trouble.

I had virtually no sight in my right eye with the aftermath of the surgeries and the bubbles for three months. You learn to do pretty well with only one.  Now both would be impaired. Plus I would have bandages on both eyes after this operation, rendering me helpless for a time.

Throughout this I had tons of help and encouragement from Melanie.  She is still doing all the driving and reminding me of things I should be doing and care giving and I know that is often as tough as being the person with the health problem.

I had a lot of encouragement and concern in emails and calls from  Carrie as well as support from colleagues at work.

And I got my reality checks long distance from Darryle Pollack, a friend 30 years ago and now a friendship renewed when I saw her last summer in the California.

Darryle became the embodiment for me of the old story of the person complaining that he had no shoes until he met a person with no feet.

Darryle is a cancer survivor.

My potential blindness, and that word did come up a lot before this last surgery, was put into perspective by Darryle’s gentle messages that after all, as serious as this was, it was not life threatening.

I was getting quite good at feeling sorry for myself by the third round of detachments so I needed some perspective.

Now I just had my third check up after the doubleheader op and both retinas are in good shape.

The prognosis is good.

Paolo Stanga, head of vitreoretinal surgery at the eye hospital, took over my case after the first surgery and has been very accessible and did the last two operations with the third one lasting seven hours.

Can’t say enough about the hospital. Brand new building, very kind nurses and an army of specialists attending. Even the food is not awful.

There was an American writer on the BBC radio’s World Have Your Say the other day.  She has top-of-the-line US health insurance yet a cancer scare, she ended up with a liver problem, but not cancer, recently cost her $100,000 out of her pocket.

I can only imagine in horror what my share of three hospital stays, four operations, two dozen clinic visits, a myriad of tests and surgeries with four doctors attending would cost in America. It will go on in aftercare for some time and I am on four types of eye drops as well as various other meds to reduce eye pressure and inflammation.

But of course here it is all part of the National Health Service.

So when you hear Fox. The Tea People, that woman from Alaska and various other idiots malign the British ‘socialized’ medicine, it certainly helps one’s recovery to not have to wonder ever about money or dread wrestling with insurance companies and to leave a doctor’s office or hospital and never see a bill.

My surgeon went to Cornell Med and trained at NY Hospital, but could not handle splitting his time with medicine and arguing with insurance companies and he is at the top of his field in Europe while Royal Eye is listed as one of the top 5 eye centers in the world.

There are problems with the NHS to be sure as there are all with all systems but I can only speak from this experience that there are also very dedicated professionals who are sensitive with hypochondriacs and pain-in-the-ass patients like me.

I was in the right place at the right time and I have people in my life who care, which ultimately matters the most and  makes me extremely lucky and extremely grateful.