AA Gill turns his eloquence to a description of the Morris men

Twenty minutes from the airport is Thaxted. It crawls up a hill. Georgian and Victorian rural cottages and shops lean on each other for support. The streets are free of the cloned monopolies of building societies and mini-supermarkets. There is an overindulgence of pubs, and a church that is too grand for this market town, and beside it a windmill. It was paid for by the great post-feudal wool boom. This neat and congenial town, with its greens, a clock mender and merchants’ houses, is surrounded by a vale of gently decrepit farmland. It is everything the vile Cotswolds aspire to plagiarise. But it’s a little more than it seems. This big church is a cradle of unconventional radicalism. It had a famous vicar, Conrad Noel, who preached Christian socialism, and another, Peter Elers, one of the first openly gay vicars in the Church of England, who blessed a lesbian “marriage” in 1976 on the understanding that, if the church blessed battleships and budgerigars, it ought to find it in its heart to bless men and women in love. Gustav Holst lived here, and a couple of doors away, so did Dick Turpin.

Early on a blissful blue and bright morning, Thaxted is quiet and elegantly somnambulant. Stepping out of the long shadows, I catch sight of two men in white — unusually early cricketers perhaps — and then another man, in a coat of rags, talking to a pantomime dragon. In the distance I can hear the rhythmic timpani of sleigh bells. There are more men lifting their beer-blown faces to the sun. Men in straw hats with ribbons, men with bright waistcoats.

Thaxted’s insurgent heretical secret isn’t canonical bolshevism or buggery, it’s folklore.This glorious weekend is the annual coming together of Britain’s morris men. Not just a run- of-the-mill summer ritual line-up of hanky wavers and broomstick bashers, but the 75th anniversary of the Thaxted Morris Ring — the quango of morris dancing and mumming. This little market town is the heart of the mysterious cult of the morris. This will be the largest get-together of morris men in living memory.

The day starts with various teams going out to Essex villages and doing their jiggy business as a pub crawl before converging on Thaxted high street. We start off in Finchingfield, a village of idiotic prettiness. There’s a green, a pond with ducks, a church, cottages, burgeoning flowers, simple yokels leaning on sticks, tow-haired children in smocks delivering wholemeal bread, and an antique shop with a prominent welcoming message pointing out that this isn’t a museum, everything is for sale, and if you don’t want to buy stuff then sod off. And there’s a pub, a real pub-on-the-green called the Fox.

Inside, the moment it opens, there is a gimpy collection of morris men in stripy waistcoats and straw hats with plastic flowers, sinking the first pint like fire engines taking on supplies. They tip out onto the lawn and, after a lot of to-ing and fro-ing and bad-breath backchat, a team of blokes arrange themselves in a ragged line with a fiddle, an accordion and a penny whistle, and strike up the familiar sound of summer weekends in rural Middle England. Their bright and gaudy costumes make the picture complete as they go after each other like fat, rheumatic game hens, chaffing and puffing and heavily skipping through routines that would bore an infant school. Morris dancers are one of the most riotously risible and despised groups in Britain. Yet they caper on regardless. To be a morris man is to live a regardless life. These are men apart, oblivious of or immune to the mockery and the curled lips. They keep alive an uncared-for and unwanted tradition — simply for the pleasure of a thing itself, and their own company, and bladder-deforming quantities of beer. Sir Thomas Beecham’s advice to try anything once except incest and folk dancing has wrapped the morris in a received wisdom of disdain. For most people it is the bizarre and tasteless Terpsichorean graffiti, like animated garden gnomes.

A pair get up and do a jig with each other. Nobody watches. I notice that one of them is wearing Velcro comfy-fit shoes of the sort advertised in the back of The Sunday Telegraph. Behind the dancers there is that eternal punctuation mark of English villages, the comforting war memorial that chimes the knell of passing days, the names resonant of another England; Ernest and Tom Purkiss, Portor Choat, Tom Juniper, Percy Wiffen, T O Ruggles-Brice. They seem to belong to the accordion and the tinny roundelay, the clack of wands and the beery “ya” of bucolic voices. The pub is advertising a Neil Diamond tribute evening.

In the nearby village of Cornish Hall End, the morris men mill about, unclipping their personal tankards from their elasticated belts to sink pints through Lovelace-gaping gullets before forming up in a ragged square and skipping their simple circular pattern. In the beer garden, families lounge, children run in mobs, nobody takes much notice. The Horse and Groom is having a Blues Brothers tribute evening.

The Morris Ring rules the dance. It has been based in Thaxted for all its 75 years. This year is its three-quarter century, and promises particularly splendid meetings of the nation’s dance troupes. They are all based in villages, and vary in their particulars, but like football teams, they obey the niceties. Each has a leader, a treasurer and a coach. They dance traditional dances identified by their places of origin. They also have fools who caper with bladders — theirs and pigs’. There are men on hobbyhorses, men who dress up as women, often representing Maid Marian or Queen Victoria, and sometimes they “go molly” — that is, in blackface.

There are also men who are animals — deer, dragons and horses — and it’s always men. There are no women in the Ring. Nobody knows the origins of morris dancing — the name probably comes from “Moorish”. It may have been born in North Africa or Spain, it may have come back with the crusades. There was certainly Elizabethan morris dancing. Shakespeare’s comic actor Will Kempe famously took nine days to dance from London to Norwich.

Seventy-five years is really not that old for a governing association for an ancient rural folk art. Ping pong is half a century older, and the rugby football association is nearly twice as old as the Morris Ring. What we see is a recreation — or, perhaps better, a resurrection. The great fire-and-brimstone, steam-and-grind of the industrial upheaval of the 19th century dislocated, and in many places extinguished, a whole canon of frail, delicate, English rural culture.

Factories and mines broke the legs of the Celtic and Saxon patchwork of time and magic. The mass march of the working classes from hoes to picks, moved from village greens to the satanic mills and smog of back-to-backs. But just as the morris faded to white, so a few urban middle-class musicologists and folklorists stepped out back down the rutted lanes to the extremities of green England and began to piece together the vanished life. Cecil Sharp collected thousands and thousands of folk tunes. They were used by composers such as Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Holst and Britten. The Arts and Crafts movement enthused hundreds of Hampstead socialists to get in touch with their pointy-toed roots and to look to a new medievalism of weaving and pottery, husbandry, cottage gardens and vegetarianism. They grew unironic beards and dressed their children in homespun smocks, and occasionally, like Eric Gill (no relation), they lived entirely recreated medieval lives and slept with their children. The folklore of the Morris got a worthy and self-conscious kiss of life. It got polite, and a hierarchy, and snobbery, and rules. Like the druid and bardic movements in Wales, a few proselytising enthusiasts became the bottomless butt of jokes for the metropolitan masses.

Writers such as Orwell, Waugh and Betjeman mocked the beer and beards, the lentils and earnestness of the morris. The dance became emblematic of a certain sort of Fabian —humourless and sexless, worthy socialism. But nobody really knew what the original meanings or intentions of the dance had been, and they didn’t seem to care much. It was enough that they could make it fit this Hardyesque and patronising vision of a peasant, elfin England.

Anthropologists tend to explain all rural ritual, craft and culture as “fertility”, or harvest thanksgiving. They’re the catch-all explanations for rude behaviour that doesn’t come with a manual. It seems that there may well be connections with ancient mystical characters and pre-Christian beliefs — the Green Man appears and Herne the Hunter, lord of the forest. There are animistic spirits of flowers and green things, but it never really gets let out from under the tasteful and picturesque hey nonny nonny of pub bores and country tourist posters.

At the next village pub, something quite different happens. They release the beast. In the car park by the wheelie bin, the Saddleworth Morris Men from Yorkshire arrive, trotting like pit ponies, bells on their black clogs, wearing hanging baskets of flowers and feathers on their heads, led by a meaty man with a whip. There is none of the hop, skip and whack about this troupe. They have a muscular, purposeful swagger. Their dance is physical and masculine, and beautifully aggressive under their great flowered hats. They have the gimlet-eyed, tuber-featured faces of the north, and suddenly the morris is captivating. The rhythm stamps out darker motifs and bellicose camaraderie. The patterns they make stay in the mind’s eye. You can see them weave spells.

My small boy offers a swan’s feather he found to one of the dancers, who takes off his hat to put it in. The boy’s mother asks if she can see the hat. “You mustn’t put it on,” the dancer warns like a woodland troll in a fairy story. “I don’t like to say in front of your man, but if a lass wears the hat she has to have… you know… go to bed with the morris man. That’s the rule.” Nicola thinks about it for a moment, and hands back the hat with an apologetic, maybe-next-time smile.

For all its fecund heritage and its promise of seed time and harvest, morris dancing is incontrovertibly the least sexy jigging in the world. Unlike the folk dances of the rest of Europe, with their silly dressing up and geometric patterns, or the leaping reelers of the Celtic edges of the British Isles, the morris is perversely and defiantly not the vertical expression of a horizontal desire. They not only do not dance with women, but they don’t dance for or at women. Indeed, you get the feeling they don’t really dance for anyone but themselves.

There is something admirable about this — the absence of showmanship. Nobody could accuse these men of overt displays of vanity. Their vast stomachs held in by sweaty nylon shirts like warm mozzarellas, their blotched faces, the pallor of lives lived on a slow bar stool. They exhibit the stamina and grace of shopping trolleys, with beards that loom like badly eaten Weetabix and hair that has given up under the torture of middle-aged ponytails. Morris dancing never had a golden age. It never grasped the zeitgeist. There was no morris Woodstock or summer of love. It was reborn beyond the aesthetic pale and contrarily, there is something wonderful about that, something brave and properly, collectively eccentric.

While the bien pensants snigger and change their beliefs and preferences with the season, the morris dancers skip on, knowing that every year will be like the year before, knowing they will always be the back marker of the least “now” occupations on Earth, just ahead of incest, yet continuing, convinced of their own inverted rightness, free of whim or caprice, excused riches, vanity, ambition, celebrity or cachet. And then, as if to prove the utter imperviousness to aesthetics, along come the Britannia Coco-nut Dancers of Bacup.

You’ve never heard of them, or seen them, unless you’re from north Lancashire, and even then you might have given them a wide berth. They rarely travel from their home village — this is the first time they’ve been to Thaxted, and they only came because the Saddleworth team was here to look after them. They are small, nervous men. And so they might be, for they are wearing white cotton night bonnets of the sort sported by Victorian maids, decorated with sparse ribbons. Then black polo-neck sweaters, like the Milk Tray man, with a white sash, black knee-breeches, white stockings and black clogs. As if this weren’t enough, someone at some point has said: “What this outfit really needs is a red-and-white-hooped miniskirt.” “Are you sure?” the dancers must have replied. And he was. But it doesn’t finish there. They have black faces, out of which their little bright eyes shine anxiously. On their hands are strapped single castanets. A single castanet is the definition of uselessness. The corresponding castanet is worn on the knee. To say you couldn’t make up the Coco-nutters would be to deny the evidence of your astonished eyes.

The dance begins with each Nutter cocking a hand to his ear to listen to something we human folk can’t catch. They then wag a finger at each other, and they’re off, stamping and circling, occasionally holding bent wands covered with red, white and blue rosettes that they weave into simple patterns. It’s not pretty and it’s not clever. It is, simply, awe-inspiringly, astonishingly other. Morris men from southern troupes come and watch in slack-jawed silence. Nothing in the civilised world is quite as elementally bizarre and awkwardly compelling as the Coco-nutters of Bacup. What are they for? What were they thinking of? Why do they do these strange, misbegotten, dark little incantations? It’s said that they might have originally been Barbary corsairs who worked in Cornish tin mines and travelled to Lancashire, and that the dance is about listening underground, a sign language of miners. And then there’s all the usual guff about harvest and spring and fecundity, but that doesn’t begin to describe the strangeness of this troupe from the nether folk world.

At tea time in Thaxted, the crowds stumble out of the pubs and line the main street that dips down the steep hill and escapes out into the countryside, which glints with the shimmering gilt of nostalgia, waiting for the return of haystacks and corn dollies and scarecrows. This is distant Albion in the afternoon. From the top of the hill, the morris men parade en masse with their attendant fiddlers and accordionists, drummers and whistlers, hobbyhorses, mystical animals, female impersonators and capering fools. From the bottom of the hill a corresponding group starts up. It’s like the final illustration from a compendium of nursery rhymes and cautionary tales. A scene of the day of judgment from a half-forgotten, half-recreated lexicon of English folklore and fairy stories. The vivid swag of all the bright pomp and rhythm drags you along, exorcises the ridicule and the patronage, the lifelong received metropolitan wisdom of disdain. This is a lost part of what we once were, and who we still are. The two groups meet and dance their dances, turn swords into pentangles, sticks into eaves, and hankies into hankies. They prance and skip and jig, the bells jingle, they shout and clack and cheer and canter, calling up the great lost way of being. The morris twitches like an amputated limb from a body that has been long since buried. It is the last rite of a belief that nobody can recall. The movements and the tune and nonsense, an ancient language that’s bereft of the life that formed it.

But as you watch, there is a tingle, a spasm of recognition, a lightness in the stomach, a tightness in the throat, and the faint spark of connection. A distant echo, a folk memory, of what all this once was, what we once were. In the great, Gadarene dash for progress and industry, for the brick and stone and concrete, for the iron and smoke, we broke something vital, severed a link in the chain of ourselves, and there was no going back. There is a realisation that the dislike and the mockery of the morris is not wholly rational or deserved — that if this was some other nation’s rural culture we’d watch with polite interest and inquisitive enjoyment. But because it’s so close, it comes with the buttock-clench of embarrassment, the guilt and the squirm. Like seeing photographs of ourselves in foolish fancy dress at drunken student parties, this is not who we grew up to be.

But the morris men dance on anyway, propitiating they know not what, an awkward family heirloom that doesn’t go with anything else and is all we have left of our preindustrial heritage. The dance is a kiss on the forehead of a skull that has sunk back into the earth and the dappled fields, that in turn have become the ring roads, roundabouts, runways, shopping centres and starter-home cul-de-sacs of the postmodern age. They dance anyway. No longer for us, but despite us. The sun goes down, the accordions play on, the pewter tankards slop, and at 11, the clamour and the shouting and the clapping and singing fade away, as if someone has pulled a plug, letting out all the noise. The lights of the town go out, and under the heavy, early summer moon there is the faint sound of a distant violin.

Down a winding cobbled street from the church trips the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance, the most evocative and strangely dramatic of all morris dances, performed for perhaps hundreds of years, conceivably for thousands. They are led by a single fiddler, dressed in a rag coat, playing a tune that is childlike and simple, but also full of sadness and an ethereal, mordant power, like the soundtrack of a dream. Behind him come men carrying antlered fallow deer heads in front of their faces. Behind them, a man-woman, a hunter and a hobbyhorse. They dance in silence, slowly. The hunt turns and turns, casting patterns in the moonlight. You feel its mossy, shadowed meaning beyond understanding. A ghost dance, a silently keening sadness. The things we misplace always bear a heavier loss than the things we choose to grasp with white knuckles. And in the darkness, quite unexpectedly, I feel tears of mourning on my cheek.

SOURCE

The real history of Calvin Coolidge

Robert Sobel's absorbing new biography, Coolidge: An American Enigma, has just been published by Regnery. And on Sunday, the late president's sudden inauguration was reenacted at the Calvin Coolidge Historic Site in Plymouth Notch, Vt.

That summer night, back in 1923, was one of high drama. As President Warren G. Harding lay dying in San Francisco, Vice President Coolidge was visiting his father and stepmother in the lonely Vermont village where he had grown up. There was no electricity in the house, no plumbing, no telephone. Light was provided by a kerosene lamp.

Word of Harding's death reached White River Junction, the nearest sizable town, by telegram. By the time someone got the news to Plymouth Notch, it was extremely late. John Coolidge, the vice president's father, answered the knock at the door. In a trembling voice he called upstairs to his son.

"Coolidge and his wife returned to the bedroom," Sobel writes. "They washed, dressed, and knelt by the bed to pray. Then they went downstairs, where Coolidge dictated a message of sympathy to Mrs. Harding. The house was now crowded with reporters and others."

The attorney general urged Coolidge to take the oath of office without delay. He "went across the street to the general store and telephoned Secretary of State [Charles Evans] Hughes, who informed him the oath could be administered by a notary. Coolidge told Hughes his father was a notary. Coolidge returned home, and in the downstairs sitting room John Coolidge, using the family Bible, swore his son in as president. The time was 2:47 a.m."

The modesty of Coolidge's inauguration befit his style. He was a frugal man, with words no less than with money. Indeed, about all he is popularly remembered for is his reticence. As the story goes, the matron seated next to him at a dinner said that she had wagered she could get the famously nontalkative president to say more than two words. Coolidge replied: "You lose."

The story may have been apocryphal. But it was certainly true that Coolidge didn't believe in wasting words. In a profile written when he was still governor of Massachusetts, the New York World called him a "sphinx." He "talks little," the paper noted. "It is his silences which seem to speak loudest, for when one ventures to put a question to him, the answer comes in a tightening of the governor's lean face and the closing of his lips."

Yet he wasn't shy when he had something to say. He delivered more speeches than any of his predecessors. He held 520 press conferences. He was the first president to address the nation by radio and did so about once a month, paving the way for FDR's fireside chats.

In fact, he was a superb politician. He stands as one of the great vote-getters in Massachusetts history -- he was elected state representative, state senator, lieutenant governor, and governor -- and one of the most popular men ever to run for president. After finishing Harding's term, he was elected in his own right in a landslide in 1924. A second full term would have been his for the asking. Never, perhaps, has anyone been so admired while in the White House -- and so disdained afterward.

Coolidge's reputation plummeted after 1929 because the first reviews of his career were written by hostile New Deal historians. Lionizing Franklin Roosevelt for sharply expanding the role of the federal government in Americans' lives, they painted the conservative Coolidge by contrast as a do-nothing who had failed to foresee the Depression. Unable to defend himself -- he died in 1933 -- Coolidge slipped from the ranks of the nation's most esteemed figures to the level of its most disparaged.

Now, belatedly, his fine record is getting the clear look it deserves. The first hint of a Coolidge rehabilitation came in 1981, when Ronald Reagan ordered Coolidge's portrait to take the place of Harry Truman's in the Cabinet Room. At the Kennedy Library conference, Time columnist Hugh Sidey recalled the buzz that went through the press corps when the Coolidge painting appeared. Reporters thought the custodian must have fetched the wrong portrait.

But Reagan's instincts were solid. In the judgment of Robert D. Novak, the veteran political commentator, Coolidge's "personal integrity, faith in the market system, and concern for the ordinary citizen" made him "the model of American conservatism." His White House years were distinguished not only by unstained honesty but by a fierce drive to reduce taxes and slash the national debt. Coolidge was the last president until Reagan who grasped in his bones the importance of limiting government. "It is much more important," he insisted, "to kill bad bills than to pass good ones."

Quiet, modest, careful, the thoughtful New Englander raised to the presidency in that hasty ceremony 75 years ago turns out to have been one of the most honorable public servants ever to hold the job. What a pity that he has gone so long without the credit he deserves. What a blessing it would be to have his like in the White House again.

SOURCE

Those Aren’t Fighting Words, Dear

By LAURA A. MUNSON

LET’S say you have what you believe to be a healthy marriage. You’re still friends and lovers after spending more than half of your lives together. The dreams you set out to achieve in your 20s — gazing into each other’s eyes in candlelit city bistros when you were single and skinny — have for the most part come true.

Two decades later you have the 20 acres of land, the farmhouse, the children, the dogs and horses. You’re the parents you said you would be, full of love and guidance. You’ve done it all: Disneyland, camping, Hawaii, Mexico, city living, stargazing.

Sure, you have your marital issues, but on the whole you feel so self-satisfied about how things have worked out that you would never, in your wildest nightmares, think you would hear these words from your husband one fine summer day: “I don’t love you anymore. I’m not sure I ever did. I’m moving out. The kids will understand. They’ll want me to be happy.”

But wait. This isn’t the divorce story you think it is. Neither is it a begging-him-to-stay story. It’s a story about hearing your husband say “I don’t love you anymore” and deciding not to believe him. And what can happen as a result.

Here’s a visual: Child throws a temper tantrum. Tries to hit his mother. But the mother doesn’t hit back, lecture or punish. Instead, she ducks. Then she tries to go about her business as if the tantrum isn’t happening. She doesn’t “reward” the tantrum. She simply doesn’t take the tantrum personally because, after all, it’s not about her.

Let me be clear: I’m not saying my husband was throwing a child’s tantrum. No. He was in the grip of something else — a profound and far more troubling meltdown that comes not in childhood but in midlife, when we perceive that our personal trajectory is no longer arcing reliably upward as it once did. But I decided to respond the same way I’d responded to my children’s tantrums. And I kept responding to it that way. For four months.

“I don’t love you anymore. I’m not sure I ever did.”

His words came at me like a speeding fist, like a sucker punch, yet somehow in that moment I was able to duck. And once I recovered and composed myself, I managed to say, “I don’t buy it.” Because I didn’t.

He drew back in surprise. Apparently he’d expected me to burst into tears, to rage at him, to threaten him with a custody battle. Or beg him to change his mind.

So he turned mean. “I don’t like what you’ve become.”

Gut-wrenching pause. How could he say such a thing? That’s when I really wanted to fight. To rage. To cry. But I didn’t.

Instead, a shroud of calm enveloped me, and I repeated those words: “I don’t buy it.”

You see, I’d recently committed to a non-negotiable understanding with myself. I’d committed to “The End of Suffering.” I’d finally managed to exile the voices in my head that told me my personal happiness was only as good as my outward success, rooted in things that were often outside my control. I’d seen the insanity of that equation and decided to take responsibility for my own happiness. And I mean all of it.

My husband hadn’t yet come to this understanding with himself. He had enjoyed many years of hard work, and its rewards had supported our family of four all along. But his new endeavor hadn’t been going so well, and his ability to be the breadwinner was in rapid decline. He’d been miserable about this, felt useless, was losing himself emotionally and letting himself go physically. And now he wanted out of our marriage; to be done with our family.

But I wasn’t buying it.

I said: “It’s not age-appropriate to expect children to be concerned with their parents’ happiness. Not unless you want to create co-dependents who’ll spend their lives in bad relationships and therapy. There are times in every relationship when the parties involved need a break. What can we do to give you the distance you need, without hurting the family?”

“Huh?” he said.

“Go trekking in Nepal. Build a yurt in the back meadow. Turn the garage studio into a man-cave. Get that drum set you’ve always wanted. Anything but hurting the children and me with a reckless move like the one you’re talking about.”

“Huh?”

“How can we have a responsible distance?”

“I don’t want distance,” he said. “I want to move out.”

My mind raced. Was it another woman? Drugs? Unconscionable secrets? But I stopped myself. I would not suffer.

Instead, I went to my desk, Googled “responsible separation” and came up with a list. It included things like: Who’s allowed to use what credit cards? Who are the children allowed to see you with in town? Who’s allowed keys to what?

I looked through the list and passed it on to him.

His response: “Keys? We don’t even have keys to our house.”

I remained stoic. I could see pain in his eyes. Pain I recognized.

“Oh, I see what you’re doing,” he said. “You’re going to make me go into therapy. You’re not going to let me move out. You’re going to use the kids against me.”

“I never said that. I just asked: What can we do to give you the distance you need ... ”

“Stop saying that!”

Well, he didn’t move out.

Instead, he spent the summer being unreliable. He stopped coming home at his usual six o’clock. He would stay out late and not call. He blew off our entire Fourth of July — the parade, the barbecue, the fireworks — to go to someone else’s party. When he was at home, he was distant. He wouldn’t look me in the eye. He didn’t even wish me “Happy Birthday.”

But I didn’t play into it. I walked my line. I told the kids: “Daddy’s having a hard time as adults often do. But we’re a family, no matter what.” I was not going to suffer. And neither were they.

MY trusted friends were irate on my behalf. “How can you just stand by and accept this behavior? Kick him out! Get a lawyer!”

I walked my line with them, too. This man was hurting, yet his problem wasn’t mine to solve. In fact, I needed to get out of his way so he could solve it.

I know what you’re thinking: I’m a pushover. I’m weak and scared and would put up with anything to keep the family together. I’m probably one of those women who would endure physical abuse. But I can assure you, I’m not. I load 1,500-pound horses into trailers and gallop through the high country of Montana all summer. I went through Pitocin-induced natural childbirth. And a Caesarean section without follow-up drugs. I am handy with a chain saw.

I simply had come to understand that I was not at the root of my husband’s problem. He was. If he could turn his problem into a marital fight, he could make it about us. I needed to get out of the way so that wouldn’t happen.

Privately, I decided to give him time. Six months.

I had good days, and I had bad days. On the good days, I took the high road. I ignored his lashing out, his merciless jabs. On bad days, I would fester in the August sun while the kids ran through sprinklers, raging at him in my mind. But I never wavered. Although it may sound ridiculous to say “Don’t take it personally” when your husband tells you he no longer loves you, sometimes that’s exactly what you have to do.

Instead of issuing ultimatums, yelling, crying or begging, I presented him with options. I created a summer of fun for our family and welcomed him to share in it, or not — it was up to him. If he chose not to come along, we would miss him, but we would be just fine, thank you very much. And we were.

And, yeah, you can bet I wanted to sit him down and persuade him to stay. To love me. To fight for what we’ve created. You can bet I wanted to.

But I didn’t.

I barbecued. Made lemonade. Set the table for four. Loved him from afar.

And one day, there he was, home from work early, mowing the lawn. A man doesn’t mow his lawn if he’s going to leave it. Not this man. Then he fixed a door that had been broken for eight years. He made a comment about our front porch needing paint. Our front porch. He mentioned needing wood for next winter. The future. Little by little, he started talking about the future.

It was Thanksgiving dinner that sealed it. My husband bowed his head humbly and said, “I’m thankful for my family.”

He was back.

And I saw what had been missing: pride. He’d lost pride in himself. Maybe that’s what happens when our egos take a hit in midlife and we realize we’re not as young and golden anymore.

When life’s knocked us around. And our childhood myths reveal themselves to be just that. The truth feels like the biggest sucker-punch of them all: it’s not a spouse or land or a job or money that brings us happiness. Those achievements, those relationships, can enhance our happiness, yes, but happiness has to start from within. Relying on any other equation can be lethal.

My husband had become lost in the myth. But he found his way out. We’ve since had the hard conversations. In fact, he encouraged me to write about our ordeal. To help other couples who arrive at this juncture in life. People who feel scared and stuck. Who believe their temporary feelings are permanent. Who see an easy out, and think they can escape.

My husband tried to strike a deal. Blame me for his pain. Unload his feelings of personal disgrace onto me.

But I ducked. And I waited. And it worked.

SOURCE

August 1st, 1943 - The Ploesti Raid

Good in theory

When one heads north out of Bucharest (by either road or rail), it takes a considerable amount of time for the city to “fall away.” When that finally does happen, you find yourself out on the Wallachian plain – which is very flat, now nearly treeless, and (in summer) very hot. The cityscape and traffic of Bucharest are replaced by scenes of peasant farmers transporting wood, hay, and other agricultural substances in horse-drawn carts – often doing so while chatting on their mobile phones.

But between Bucharest and the Carpathian foothills, just 35 miles north of Bucharest, the transportation corridor runs just by the western edge of the small city of Ploesti. Just to the west of the road and the rail line looms the large and venerable Ploesti oil-refining complex.

Today, Ploesti and its environs are peaceful – and almost bucolic.

But on this day 66 years ago, Ploesti was anything but peaceful. In the short span of 30 minutes, the Ploesti refinery was engulfed in flames, and the cornfields of the Wallachian plain were littered with the burning remains of aircraft – following one of the most unusual and brutally-courageous air attacks in history.

Europe is famously devoid of petroleum resources. When the “petroleum age” dawned in the latter part of the 19th century, crude oil could be found in only one place in all of Europe – outside the small town of Ploesti.

During the early years, the methods for the collection of crude oil at Ploesti were, well – crude. This was done mostly with hand-dug pits, which were allowed to fill up with crude oil – which was then collected by hand with buckets.

As demand for petroleum products grew, the more sophisticated methods that were being employed around the world for collecting crude oil came to the plains around Ploesti. However, the Romanians pioneered much of the chemical engineering innovation that really made petroleum a multifoliately-useful material – one that could be “cracked” and refined into a much wider variety of products. Ploesti saw the development of what was arguably the world’s first modern refinery operation.

By the time that World War 2 broke out in Europe, Romania was already a key German ally – thanks to the ideological sympathies and inclinations of Romanian dictator Ion Antonescu.

But the Germans were equally anxious to have Romania as a close ally for an obvious reason – unique in Europe, only Romania could supply crude oil and other petroleum products for German industry and the German military. Romania (via the Ploesti oil fields and refining complexes) supplied near all of Germany’s “normal” petroleum products – with the balance largely coming from “synthetic” methods of producing close-enough products from other starting resources (such as coal, which Germany had in abundance).

Gasoline, oil, and other petroleum products were obviously very critical to the highly-mechanized German military – on land, at sea, and in the air. This need was so critical – and the vulnerability to problems was felt so keenly in Berlin – that Hitler had directed the German summer-1942 offensive not at Moscow, but at Baku.

All of this made Ploesti a very, very critical facility to the German war effort. As a result, Ploesti was very heavily defended – by large concentrations of anti-aircraft guns (crewed by some of Germany’s best anti-aircraft gunners) and three full squadrons of Luftwaffe fighter planes.

Equally, the strategic importance of Ploesti made it a very tempting target for Allied war planners.

During 1942 and 1943, strategic bombing was still seen as something that could land devastating and crippling blows on key aspects of an enemy’s war infrastructure. As such, American planners gave very high priority to identifying – and attacking – “high-value” targets – “panacea targets” whose destruction would have a catastrophic effect on Axis war-making capabilities.

Not surprisingly, Ploesti appeared high on any such list of targets.

With the defeat of Rommel’s Afrika Korps and the complete ejection of Axis forces from north Africa, the Allies moved on to attack Sicily – and then Italy itself. To support these activities, the Ninth Air Force had slowly begun to be set up in North Africa – centered on the Libyan port city of Benghazi.

The Ninth Air Force’s heavy bomber arm consisted mostly of B-24s – in contrast to the situation with the Britain-based Eighth Air Force, which was built mostly around the more famous B-17.



The B-24 was a strange aircraft. Its wings – an innovative, low-drag design – were long and narrow. They were mounted along the top (rather than the bottom) of the plane’s fuselage; the design also included a very distinctive twin-ruddered tail. The fuselage was almost bulbous; many of the flyers derisively noted that in flight, the B-24 had the appearance of a pregnant cow.

The B-24 could not fly as high as its more famous cousin, the B-17. But it could carry a heavier load, and – crucially – it had a longer range.

Given the range of the B-24 and the temptation of Ploesti as a “panacea” target, it was inevitable that those two factors would converge. If a B-24 could be tweaked slightly – to carry an extra fuel tank in the bomb bay, at the cost of carrying a slightly-decreased bomb load – Ploesti was within range of the American air base at Benghazi.

By June of 1943, in great secrecy as “Tidal Wave,” plans were made for a strike on Ploesti – and B-24 squadrons were marshaled at Benghazi. In addition to the Ninth Air Force’s B-24 squadrons, several Eighth Air Force B-24 squadrons were transferred from Britain to Benghazi. In addition, several other brand new Eighth Air Force B-24 squadrons, fresh from flight school in the United States, were sent to Benghazi rather than to Britain. For these completely-green flight crews, the attack on Ploesti would be their first combat mission.

During July, the aircrews began their training – with absolutely no knowledge of what the target was that they were training to attack. But their training had one very odd feature about it. The B-24 was a four-engine strategic heavy-bomber – designed to fly to its targets at an altitude of some 20,000 to 25,000 feet. The flyers now found themselves practicing for a mission which would have them flying at very low altitude – no more than 200 feet off the ground. Before their July training, it wasn’t even known if there would be unforeseen complications that would render efforts to fly a massed formation of B-24s at such low altitude impossible; it wasn’t until the intensive July training was nearly over that such a strategy was even considered feasible.

This novel approach was one that was beginning to be developed, and which would continue right up into the 1980s, with the B-1 – which was designed to penetrate Soviet air defenses by flying at a ground-hugging (and computer-controlled) altitude of some 100 feet.

It was hoped that by flying at such a low altitude and using a careful flight path, the attacking force would be able to slip in unnoticed and achieve complete surprise. In addition to taking the target area by surprise – and getting in and out before German and Romanian fighter planes could get into the air – it was hoped that a surprise, low-level attack would leave too little time for the German anti-aircraft crews to reset the air-burst elevation on their shells from high altitude to low altitude.

These expectations indeed seemed far-fetched. But given the comparatively remote location of Ploesti, American planners had clearly underestimated the defenses that the attacking B-24 crews would face.

The plan of attack was relatively simple, as this map shows:



The first leg of the journey would carefully cross the Mediterranean to avoid German-occupied Greece – with its many islands and observation posts. Instead, the plan was to make landfall on the Albanian coast just north of Korfu, and then to turn inland over the sparsely-populated mountains. Crossing those mountains would bring the attacking force out over Wallachian plain, where one more small turn would bring them roaring into Ploesti.

That, at least, was the plan…

As the first hints of dawn broke over Benghazi on the morning of Sunday August 1st, 1943, 178 B-24s – carrying a total of some 1780 flyers – prepared to take off for the 2700 mile round to trip to Ploesti. With the extra fuel tanks in their bomb bays, each plane carried 4000 pounds of bombs – less than a normal bomb load, but still a combined collection of more than 350 tons of explosives.

Burdened to their carrying limits with fuel and bombs, the ungainly B-24s struggled into the air and formed up for the long and dangerous journey ahead.

Of the 178 aircraft that took off, 10 soon encountered mechanical problems that forced them to turn around and return to Benghazi.

But of more serious import, over the Mediterranean the lead aircraft for the mission – carrying the critical lead mission navigator – suddenly dropped out of formation and plunged into the ocean. The second-in-command aircraft, carrying the second navigator dropped down to make a pass to look for survivors – to whom a life raft could be dropped; but found nothing but a smoke plume. Worse, the still-overloaded B-24 couldn’t climb back up and rejoin the formation; this plane was also forced to return to Benghazi.

Still on course, the attacking force reached Korfu and the Albanian coast, and made its turn inland. Not surprisingly, it was spotted by coast-watchers – who relayed that information up the command channel. At that point, it was clear that a big raid was underway, even if the target remained unknown; however, some German air defense officers already had suspicions that Ploesti might be the target.

Moving inland, the attacking force would have to gain altitude to clear the mountains that ran down the middle of the Balkan peninsula. With the crest of the ridge reaching some 9,000 feet, the attacking force split into two vertical groups to keep apart. Again, things went unexpectedly wrong; the group that climbed up to 16,000 feet caught an unexpected tail wind and was wafted over the mountains, while the group that went over at 12,000 feet ran into strong head winds and was badly slowed down. Maintaining radio silence to avoid detection, the attacking force had now inadvertently been split in two.

Even more ominously, as they crossed the mountains, the lower, slower group noticed that they were being shadowed by a small group of Bulgarian fighter aircraft. Though no direct threat to the big bombers, their presence meant that there was now no chance for surprise. The German and Romanian air defense would be alert and ready – waiting for the B-24s to appear over Romania, no matter what the unknown (to the defenders) target might be.

Finally leaving the mountains behind, the B-24s followed the contour of the decreasing elevation of the land as they flew out over the Wallachian plain – and began to drop down to their attack altitude of some 200 feet.

The target was drawing closer, but things continued to go wrong – as they always do in war.

There was one final navigation checkpoint – a small town – ahead; here, the attacking planes were to make one final small right turn and head straight for Ploesti.

Unfortunately, the navigator of what was now (due to the weather problems in the mountains) the lead element of the attack force mistook the wrong small town for the turning point; turning too soon, the first half of the attack force turned and headed directly for Bucharest – rather than for Ploesti. When what was now the second part of the attack force came along, they picked out the correct ground checkpoint, and headed (properly) for Ploesti.

As the lead force roared low over the flatlands toward Bucharest, they began to encounter the unexpectedly-thick concentrations of anti-aircraft guns – and B-24s began to fall from the sky. Visibility was restricted at that low altitude, but when the skyline of Bucharest – rather than of Ploesti – came into view ahead, the navigational error became cruelly apparent.

Improvising and using their maps well, the pilots turned their B-24s in a sharp left turn – intending to follow the rail line running north from Bucharest, to guide them right into Ploesti. But now they would be coming at the target from a completely unexpected direction – and were now not properly lined up for their intended targets.

After all of these difficulties and problems, around noon the B-24s coming up from the south finally began to reach Ploesti. An atrocious and heart-rending 30 minutes was about to begin.

As the B-24s approached Ploesti, the anti-aircraft fire they faced – and the losses they suffered – grew worse and worse. Unable to properly find their intended targets and with no opportunity to set up as planned, the order went out to aircraft crews to attack whatever “targets of opportunity” presented themselves. So the lead wave of aircraft attacked whatever targets seemed most suitable.

Meanwhile, what was now the trailing force was rapidly closing in on Ploesti from the west, as planned – coming into the target at right angles to the direction taken by the improvising lead force.

As the “trailing force” flyers approached Ploesti, they were surprised to see low clouds and rain over the target – the meteorologists in Benghazi had assured them that fine weather prevailed over southeastern Europe. It was only as they drew closer that they realized that the “low clouds and rain” were actually the acrid smoke rising from the strikes of the inadvertent lead force.

Due to the navigation errors and the “targets of opportunity” order, the lead force actually attacked many of the targets that had originally been assigned to what became the trailing force. The trailing force aircraft were now going to have to try to find their targets through the smoke and fire left by the lead force – and do this while the aircraft of the now-exiting lead force were zipping across in front of them from right to left.

By now, the carefully planned and well-thought-out plan-of-attack against Ploesti had turned into total chaos. Coming in low, many of the B-24 gunners fought virtual duels with anti-aircraft gun crews on the ground only some 200 feet below. The heat from the fires was so intense that many pilots, strapped to their seats in their cockpits, had the hair singed off their forearms. In the eloquently-descriptive words of the great historian of World War 2 in the air, Edward Jablonski:

The great B-24s, twisting and turning to avoid balloon cables and chimneys, wallowed like so many winged whales in a fiery sea.

The close-in intensity of the attack is well-recounted by Edward Jablonski in his description of the events that would earn Lloyd Hughes the Congressional Medal of Honor – posthumously:

Hughes’ [B-24] Liberator had been struck by flak as it approached the drop point. A wide stream of fuel poured out of a ruptured bomb bay tank, twisting and flashing under the big plane like a liquid ribbon of fuse. Now on his bomb run, Hughes did not attempt to land or evade the wall of flame which stood in his path. In an instant Hughes’ Liberator was set afire. The bombs fell into the target, but the stricken plane, a white sheet of pure fire streaming from the left wing, had no chance. Obviously still under control, Hughes seemed headed for a streambed for an emergency landing. A bridge loomed ahead in the path of the burning plane, but the plane rose above the obstruction, lowered again – and then a wing tip brushed the riverbank. The blazing Liberator whirled across the earth, spattering molten wreckage and scarring the meadow in its scorching death throes; all but two men in the plane died in the crash.

As B-24s became stricken around the target area, the pilots who were still able to control their aircraft did their best to belly-land their damaged planes in the corn and wheat fields around Ploesti.

Local Romanians rushed to the scenes of many of the crashes, attempting to extricate survivors. And despite the fact that Romania was at that time formally at war with the United States, many of the Romanians attempted to hide the American flyers from the German and Romanian troops who were coming to take them prisoner – as this remarkable story recounted by the then-six-year-old Corneliu Iliescu attests:

While my father and I were heading northwest toward Ploesti, we scanned the sky for bombers. As we were approaching the village, my father spotted a smoking B-24 bomber flying at low altitude. It looked like the plane was going to crash-land on the highway right in front of us. As it descended, the plane veered toward a cornfield that ran alongside the highway. The B-24 crash-landed, but there was no explosion or fire. My father jumped out of the car with me in his arms and rushed to the wreckage. He placed me on the B-24 outer wing so he could go into the plane to rescue any crewmembers who needed help. He was able to extract three aviators and rushed us all into the wooded area nearby.

My father then went back to the aircraft to see if he could save the rest of the crew. As he returned, he saw - too late - that Romanian soldiers had arrived at the crash site. I was now hiding in the woods with the three American crewmen. One of them gave me a pair of pliers to play with and then told me to be very quiet. I did as I was told, and he rewarded me with my first Hershey’s candy bar. We were still hiding when my father and the rest of the crew from inside the bomber were arrested. We four were eventually found in the woods by a Romanian army search party and arrested, too. The Americans were taken prisoner and I was taken to the local police station to spend the night.

My father was released the next day and found me - still at the police station with my new American friends and the pliers they had given me as a toy. (I still have those 15th [sic – ed.] AF pliers today) After a few minutes of talking to my father in the police station, one of the Americans told me in English that I “was a tough kid.” I did not understand what he said until one of the Romanian officers translated it from English for my father. In turn, my father explained to me that the Americans had given me a high compliment.

By 12:30pm – scarcely 30 minutes after the attack had begun – the last bombs were dropped into Ploesti. The surviving B-24s fled west with all the speed they could muster, trying to form up as best as they could for the long return voyage back to Benghazi.


Many of the aircraft were too badly damaged to make the trip all the way back to Benghazi; some managed to reach Allied bases in Malta, Sicily, and Cyprus, while a few resorted to the desperate measure of landing in neutral Turkey.

Meanwhile, much of the Ploesti complex was in flames; but by early afternoon, the Wallachian plain was once again quiet.

It was evening before the surviving B-24s began to reach Benghazi, landing as best they could. Many of the planes had flown so low that back in Benghazi it was discovered that they had cornstalks stuck in their bomb bays.

It was only after the last planes had landed that the total cost of the Ploesti mission could be tallied.

Of the 178 B-24s that had taken off from Benghazi that morning, 164 had managed to reach the target area. Of these, 41 were lost due to enemy action. Six aircraft had been lost due to non-combat-related causes, while 8 others were in neutral Turkey – where they and their crews were to be interned for the remainder of the war. In addition, 23 B-24s had landed – in various states of disrepair – in Malta, Sicily, and Cyprus. Of the aircraft that had managed to make it back to Benghazi, fewer than 30 were now airworthy.

In total, 310 American airmen were killed in the attack. The official tally counted 50 wounded – but that did not include airmen who were now either interned in Turkey or prisoners of war in Romania. In total, some 100 surviving airmen were taken prisoner on the ground in Romania, and spent the rest of the war as POWs there.

The flames and smoke produced during the attack had given the impression that the attack had been a great success. But sadly, this was actually not the case. Much of the smoke and flame had come from the ignition of storage tanks that held finished products – not from the destruction of the main capabilities of the facility itself. The Ploesti complex had indeed been hit hard – and it was badly damaged. But the damage was reparable – and by that time, the Germans had available as labor a nearly limitless pool of POWs from the eastern front. The damage at Ploesti was rapidly repaired, and the complex remained in operation until it was overrun by advancing Soviet troops – in August 1944, a year after the American raid.

Edward Jablonski summed up the Ploesti raid this way:

In short, the men who undertook Tidal Wave had attempted the impossible. Their true achievement could be measured only in courage and not in decisive results. For the tragedy of Ploesti is that there were no decisive results.

Perhaps.

But it seems that this was actually a case of “Right church, wrong pew.”

Up to that point, “strategic bombing” had been perceived as a way to strike cataclysmic blows at the enemy’s few most critical holdings – basically, the idea was that if you could knock out just a few such ultra-high-value targets, the damage to the enemy war effort would be immediate and almost decisive.

That was tried – at Ploesti, in the celebrated British “dam-busters” attack in the Ruhr, and in the horridly-costly Eighth Air Force B-17 raids on what was thought to be the panacea target of the German ball-bearing-production facilities at Schweinfurt.

But it quickly became clear that this strategy was wrong. The losses were far too excessive (they would quickly render the bombing squadrons inoperable due to lack of men and planes), and the attacks were unable to produce anything even close to the expected decisive results.

But the sinews of modern, industrialized warfare run broad and deep in a belligerent country. There are a vast number of important facilities in play – and a well-functioning transportation network is required to move supplies, equipment… and men.

Chastened, American strategic bombing commanders completely changed their strategy. Rather than hitting the big “glamour” targets, they began to hit seemingly less-important targets. By suffering much lower loses in the effort, the bomber groups were able to maintain a very high tempo of operations – and aircrews gained experience and became very, very good at what they did. The vast European transportation network – so critical to the Axis war effort, and so obviously critical to Germany, with its “inside position” – was so vast that it was in toto indefensible.

The new strategy, while not spectacular, was frightfully effective – and the Germans soon realized this. As Edward Jablonski notes,

But inside Germany, unknown to Allied air leaders arguing about the cost of daylight missions and the foolishness of panacea targets, there was serious consternation. The bombing was taking on a serious pattern, no longer the derring-do of knocking out a dam, or a foolhardy low-level attack on an oil field. The bombing was beginning to look more business-like, less haphazard.

In particular, although Ploesti (and the German “synthetic” facilities) continued to operate, Allied (chiefly American) air action so disrupted the transportation network that the Germans found it increasingly difficult to simply get fuel to their units. The German Luftwaffe was increasingly hard-hit by fuel shortages, and found it more and more difficult to get planes into the air. Naturally, this process fed back on itself – the less the German planes could fly, the more the Allied air forces came to dominate the skies over Europe; due to that domination, the transportation infrastructure was squeezed even further.

By the time of the Normandy landings on June 6th, 1944 – barely ten months after the Ploesti raid – the main fear of Allied invasion planners was that there would be so many Allied planes in the air that they were more likely to shoot each other down by mistake than to be shot down by German aircraft. As a result, all Allied aircraft were garishly painted – on wings and fuselage – with broad black and white stripes, so that they would be clearly identifiable to all their friends. Such a notion would have been almost suicidal had the Luftwaffe been able to fly. And indeed, the fuel shortages suffered by the Luftwaffe were so great that on the day of the Normandy invasion, exactly two German aircraft got into the air – making one quick flight over the beaches (where they did no damage) and then returning to their base.

The strategic bombing campaign against Germany had (at first) been badly-thought-out – and had been able to accomplish anything at all due solely to the courage of the airmen who flew the big bombers. But once the strategy had been adjusted and the airmen got the knack of their tasks, the results were – finally – catastrophic indeed.

It was a long way from the 164 B-24s that had appeared over Ploesti on that hot August day in 1943.

http://www.redstate.com/skanderbeg/2009/08/01/august-1st-1943-the-ploesti-raid/

Dame Edna Everage returns to Britain

Flags are out for Barry Humphries as his alter ego prepares to revive her Last Night of the Poms show



Barry Humphries has been a housewife superstar for 54 years; a dipsomaniac diplomat for almost 40 years; a performer committed to getting a reaction since he was in short trousers. “Barry, stop drawing attention to yourself,” his mother used to tell him as he grew up in Australia. As maternal pleas go, it was the least effective since Mrs Wilde told her boy Oscar to stop being such a smart-arse.

Now 75, Humphries is getting ready for his first British shows for ten years. We should have seen him return as his greatest creation, Dame Edna Everage, at the Glasgow Comedy Festival in March last year, but an emergency operation on a burst appendix three months earlier put the mockers on that. “I had this massive tap on the shoulder,” he says. “When you wake up in hospital and the doctor says, ‘That was a close one’, it’s a little alarming.”

But not so alarming that he considered retirement. He cancelled Glasgow and an American tour. He scaled back to less physically demanding work, such as sitting on the panel of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s talent contest I’ll Do Anything. He began work on a biography of Dame Edna, which is due out at Christmas. He mounted an online exhibition of his paintings: “I’m quite a good painter, you know,” he says. “I’m considerably better than Damien Hirst.”

And then he went back to his usual busy schedule as Dame Edna, whose American career has been as blooming as her trademark gladioli since a triumphant Broadway run in 1999. You suspect that part of the appeal of America is that Edna’s bumptious disrespect for propriety, dressed as an obsession with propriety, has more barriers to kick down there. But Humphries insists that there is no great strategy at play: “You can’t plan a career,” he says, “not in my job. It just kind of drifts on.”

And now he’s drifted into a revival of Last Night of the Poms, a large-scale show first staged at the Albert Hall in 1982 in which Dame Edna and the drunken Sir Les Patterson are backed by an orchestra and choir. Sir Les performs an Aussie parody of Peter and the Wolf called Peter and the Shark. Dame Edna performs a cantata, a history of Australia in music. Carl Davis conducts his own score. And if that sounds a bit precious, Humphries insists that it’s a crowd-pleaser, with plenty of banter and insults. He offers to send me a CD of the show from Melbourne in 1982 — and much of it backs up his claim. Whatever Sir Les was wordlessly doing during an orchestral section of Peter and the Shark, it got some huge laughs.

Sitting opposite this steady, watchful man, with his foppish black hair and fine suit, it’s hard to keep remembering that you’re with Dame Edna. Can he keep playing her indefinitely? “It’s a kind of therapy,” he says. “I’d miss it if I couldn’t do it. On the other hand, there is a point where you wish performers would stop, isn’t there? My mother would take me to matinees where once-favoured actors and singers would appear, and she would say to me, ‘Isn’t it pathetic at his age?’.”

Humphries has a quiet confidence. Edna has a deafening confidence: “People adore me,” she confided to Jonathan Ross on his chat show this month. “I’ve tried to analyse that and the answer is so simple. I adore myself. My self-esteem is infectious.” Yet she wasn’t always quite so infectious. She was created for a student show in 1955. “Then, every time she was revived, every time I’d take the Edna costume out, it was different, it had more jewels on. And every time Edna gained confidence I gained confidence. And it is a question of confidence, the job of a comedian.” Edna only truly took flight, he says, in her chatshow appearances in the 1970s. Since then, she’s been almost as famous as she thinks she is. “So, by now, I have a great deal of authority on stage. And it’s very relaxing to do.”

Relaxing? “Yes, it’s restful,” he says. “It’s a bit like channelling. When Edna’s on stage I sometimes get that rather spooky thing where Edna speaks something that I couldn’t have written.” No audience member, he insists, has ever been offended by her. Even during the time when he called a woman up on stage at a first night on Broadway, only to find that she was blind. “There was a silence in the room a tragedian would envy,” he says. “She tottered across the stage with a white stick. So Edna said, ‘At least you didn’t bring the dog.’ The woman burst out laughing and the audience were off the hook. It was like going into a skid — you don’t try to redeem the situation, you push it farther. You learn that with experience.”

Humphries had been rehearsing this satire on suburban complacency since his own childhood in Melbourne. Neither his mother nor his father, a successful builder, valued culture as he did. Indeed, when he was 9, his mother gave his books away to the Salvation Army, reasoning that he had already read them all. “And now,” he says, “I am a bibliomaniac.” He owns some 25,000 books, divided between a house in Australia and the house in North London that he shares with Lizzie Spender, his fourth wife.

He has his father’s interest in construction, his own desire to tear things down. The art critic Robert Hughes once described Humphries as “the only Australian who ever understood the Dada principle of provocation”. He would play outlandish, Dadaist pranks as a student. On a train he would dress up as a blind man and then get an accomplice to attack him, tearing up his Braille book, waiting to see how far he could go before anyone reacted. He wanted — and wants — to make things come to life. “Yes, I wanted to feel something. Or I wanted them to feel something. Something they can’t explain. In a way I’m still really a Dadaist.”

He came to London with his second wife, Rosalind, in 1959. He got involved with Peter Cook and other satirists of the early Sixties and wrote for Private Eye, “even though I felt like the dunce in the class. I thought I might end up a failed comedian like David Frost.” Throughout this time, as he worked steadily on television and in theatre, he was drinking to flamboyant excess. His benders ended for good in 1971, when he admitted himself to a clinic.

Had drink given him confidence? “I did find it very liberating. But I would get these blackouts. People would say, Oh, you were very funny last night. I’d say, no, I was at home last night. They’d say, no, we saw you at that party in Chelsea... It made me a nightmare to live with. I had two young children, so I was putting people at risk. I buy alcohol for people now and they say, why not have a drink, you haven’t had one for 39 years? And I say, there’s no new experiences for me there. I’ve had every possible alcoholic experience, all of which were disastrous. There were early times when it was euphoric. Many alcoholics say this. And then you try to recapture that wonderful experience and it’s ever-elusive.”

Humphries’s drug became performance. “I think I’m addicted to adrenalin, which I fortunately secrete myself, at no charge.” What if he couldn’t do it any more? “I’d probably put my hand on the wrong knee in the Tube.” Become a saucy old boy? “I hate to think! No, I have a very happy life. I’m grateful for it.” His two daughters live in Australia; his two sons in England. He rarely talks to their mothers, he says, except about the children. “You don’t have any ex-wives, do you? Not worth it. Not worth it.”

A few days later the promised CD arrives in the post. Out of the Jiffy bag falls a slip of pink card on which, in classy italicised font, it reads: “With the grudging compliments of Barry Humphries.” Who else can make being insulted feel like such a privilege?

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/stage/comedy/article6726424.ece

Bad tempered cow disrupts Hindu worship

You can tell which one above was the meanie

BRISBANE'S Hindu Society bought a Brahman heifer for worshippers to adorn with garlands for worship and prayer ceremonies at their Burbank temple. In return for their adoration and specially prepared vegetarian meals, the worshippers were chased, hit and kicked by the bovine, whose attitude was more mad cow than sacred cow.

Unlike Brahman cattle in India, which are very docile and perfectly suited for being around a temple, this particular Australian animal was very aggressive – so much so that a month of important ceremonies in September looked under threat.

That was when the Queensland Department of Primary Industries stepped in to solve this cow conundrum. "Unfortunately this particular Australian Brahman has a very difficult temperament and was almost unapproachable," Primary Industries Minister Tim Mulherin said. "She was tethered in an enclosure, and the congregation was not sure on how they were going to handle the animal."

To solve the problem, the DPI brokered a cow-swapping deal between the Hindu Society and Maleny High School on the Sunshine Coast.

Biosecurity Queensland district inspector Janet Hull became aware of the situation when she was contacted by saleyard staff. "Ms Hull consulted with Binendra Pratap, a DPI Veterinarian of Hindu faith, who knew exactly what the cow was for and understood the situation," Mr Mulherin said.

Dr Pratap said that as soon as he visited the temple it was immediately clear that the cow was unsuitable for Hindu ritual. "If the cow was injured, it would be an insult to the Hindu society, which had purchased this heifer for the community to worship," he said.

However, Ms Hull knew Maleny State High wanted to sell some of its Southern Devon heifers to purchase new stock for the students. "When I contacted the school and told them the problems the Hindu community was facing, they offered to swap one of their docile heifers for the Brahman heifer the Hindu temple had purchased," she said. "Let me tell you, the joy on the face of the Hindu priest and the other people at the temple was worth seeing when I told them."

Ms Hull said the Brahman was "settling in beautifully at the school" and enjoyed its new surroundings. It had shown a completely different temperament with the children.

The Hindu Society's Asha Tripathi, wife of priest RH Tripathi, said cows were sacred and were treated like the mother of the family. "The old one was very aggressive. . . but this (new) cow is very gentle, very nice, very calm and we can handle her easily," Mrs Tripathi said. "We cannot express our feelings of joy. We love this cow, we have called her Ganga. We will always worship our Ganga."

Mrs Tripathi said the first cow had cost the society $3000.

They had also bought two peacocks, which are also important to have around the Hindu temple, but there have been no reports of behavioural problems with the birds.

http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,25833935-3102,00.html

Italians like Berlusconi just the way he is

Silvio Berlusconi continues to enjoy approval ratings that most leaders would die for, says Tobias Jones



In any normal country Silvio Berlusconi would surely be dead and buried by now. In the past few months, he has been battered and bruised by a succession of scandals. It was discovered that he had been courting (to put it politely) 18-year-old Noemi Letizia and showering her with jewellery.

He then lied, embarrassingly badly, about how he knew her (we still don't really know). His wife has filed for divorce alleging that he consorts with minors.

Photographs have been published of apparently orgiastic parties at his Sardinian villa that leave little to the imagination: young, topless women outnumber the occasional nude male. It then emerged that there's a network of people across the peninsula who provide these women for the Prime Minister and, ahem, pay them for their services.

This week the smoking gun arrived: a recording of one of those escort girls, Patrizia D'Addario, being seduced, if that's the word, by Berlusconi. She didn't charge because generous Silvio promised to sort out a little planning issue for her – something he has since denied.

One would have thought that such scandals would be enough to end his career, but Italy is no normal country and Berlusconi is certainly no normal politician. He has, as always, come out fighting, saying "the Italians like me just the way I am". And he seems to be right. He's won three landslide elections in the past and, despite the depths of a recession and the throes of these scandals, he enjoys approval ratings that most leaders would die for.

Bizarre as it may sound, he somehow manages to have his finger on the pulse of the nation. My Italian mother-in-law maintains that the majority of Italians have a mini Silvio inside them to whom Berlusconi speaks directly. He is what they wish to be: a person with chutzpah in abundance, a crazed fantasist with so much power and daring that his dreams come true. He's a man with his own, all-winning football team who is rich beyond comprehension, he's someone who defies the ageing process and sleeps with a stream of beautiful women. In fact, when you ask Italians about this current scandal, many say, "So what?" or "Good for him".

Some, of course, find him vulgar and repugnant, but many more are admiring and even envious. Rather than damaging him, these latest reports have allowed Berlusconi to present himself as a voracious, priapic leader, the sort of man who can make the Marquis of Sade look chaste. It all adds, of course, to his popularity. That's why the first magazine to splash a "Berlusconi's Harem" story two years ago was, in fact, one of his own.

Even if he weren't so popular, there's the vexed question of how to get rid of him. Political parties that have abandoned his coalition in the past, such as the UDC, have sunk almost without trace, and of his allies, neither Bossi nor Fini, Berlusconi's main political partners, seem likely to push their captain overboard .
The opposition hasn't even got a leader at the moment and the candidates have all the teeth of a new-born baby. They couldn't run a bath, let alone a campaign. The magistrature has brought accusations against Berlusconi in the past that far outweigh sleeping around, but if they haven't knocked him out, it's unlikely that a bit of hanky-panky will.

The recording of Berlusconi's moments of intimacy appears such a well-organised sting that there's been gossip about secret service involvement. But even though the secret services have manipulated, to put it lightly, domestic Italian politics at one time or other, they couldn't single-handedly bring down Berlusconi.

There is the media, but you know, of course, who owns most of that. In fact, these scandals have been much bigger news in Britain and abroad than in Italy. Partly because the Italian media have never, until now, been interested in the private lives of its politicians; and partly because there has been an injunction against the publication of the photographs from Sardinian parties on privacy grounds (they were published by El País in Spain).

Although publications such as La Repubblica and L'Espresso have been relentlessly pursuing the story, many Italian newspapers don't even have it on their front pages, if they have it at all; and were you to get your information solely from television you would barely know anything was up. Berlusconi was televisually, as much as democratically, elected, and there's no way the country's most powerful medium is going to turn on its overlord.

Which leaves perhaps two other sources of opposition to Berlusconi. The Vatican has never been averse to wading into Italian politics, but until now Berlusconi has been given a shamefully easy ride. His right-wing coalition has been seen as the bastion of family values, despite the fact that all of its leaders – Berlusconi, Bossi, Fini and, until he jumped ship, Casini – had split with their wives and set up with younger women.

There are signs that the Catholic hierarchy is finally waking from its slumbers: in recent months there have been veiled criticisms of the Prime Minister, with calls for "sobriety" in government, and critical articles have appeared in magazines such as Famiglia Cristiana. And yet given a choice between supporting a left-wing coalition that is determinedly secular and a right-wing one whose libidinous leaders nominally avow Catholic values, the Vatican will surely plump for the latter. It knows, after all, on which side its communion bread is buttered.

The only hope lies with the most enigmatic opposition of all: the sacred Italian popolo, the people. Once in a generation, it seems to rise up in furious indignation against injustice, oppression or corruption. In recent years the country has seen the usual pageants of protest in piazzas across the country: huge demonstrations and marches and strikes and so on. But there's no sense that another revolution is imminent.

Berlusconi derides such events as mere extremist agitations, the work of the "noisy minority". Until the silent majority switches off the TV, such ground-level protests seem unlikely to lead anywhere.

Which is why Berlusconi's government will, like his last one, survive to serve its full mandate. And it's why he's already planning for greater things. It's an open secret that he's aiming to reinvent the position of President of the Republic, turning it from a ceremonial, red-carpet role into a powerful presidency like that of America or France. No prizes for guessing who he thinks should get the job. And the tragic thing is, he probably will.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/italy/5901937/Italians-like-Berlusconi-just-the-way-he-is.html

Ploughmen, peasants and boys aged 12... Named after six centuries, the unsung heroes of the carnage of Agincourt

Agincourt. After nearly six centuries, it's still a name that rings triumphantly in the English ear, one of those heroic, impossible last stands against overwhelming odds, up there with Rorke's Drift, or Leonidas and his 300 Spartans at Thermopylae.

Now, a project by the University of Reading, the Medieval Soldier Database, has put online the records of 250,000 soldiers who fought through the Hundred Years War, giving the very names of the archers and men-at-arms who fought at that historic battle.

Many have already found that something rather mysterious and marvellous happens when you read this list.

Instead of an abstract idea of '6,000 men', you suddenly begin to form pictures in your head of what this band of brothers might have looked like. Names are powerfully suggestive, and they give these ordinary heroes a startling, poignant reality.

Among their numbers, we find such good old English names as Robert Smith, archer, serving under Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, and James Barton, man-at-arms, serving under Sir John Dabridgecourt.

They came from every shire, we can tell, because often their surnames simply record their place of origin, such as Lancashire lad, Richard of Bolton, or Richard of Kelby, from the tiny hamlet in the county of Lincolnshire, not far from Grantham.

From farther afield come more Celtic names such as Thomas Pentryth, surely a Cornishman, and David ap Llewellyn Lloyd, who might just have been Welsh, like many of the heroes of Agincourt.

Others are somehow quintessentially medieval, such as Watt Hunter, or Hodgekin Somerton.

The priceless muster rolls on which these richly atmospheric names appear survive because busybody bureaucrats were just as active in the Middle Ages as they are today.

The English exchequer, which controlled the state finances, wanted to know exactly which soldiers had served where, and so kept scrupulous records.

This is why we know now about Lord Despencer, whose military career had started at the age of 12; Sir Thomas Erpingham, who had fought from Scotland to Spanish Castile; and Thomas Gloucestre, whose soldiering lasted an astonishing 43 years, ranging from 'the vasty fields of France', as Shakespeare calls them in Henry V, to the sun-baked plains and valleys of Palestine.

Yet it's safe to assume that the redoubtable Thomas Gloucestre never saw combat quite like Agincourt.

A cold, wet morning, October 25, 1415, St Crispin's Day. The sun edging up over the thickly forested countryside to the east, not far from the River Somme. And in a muddy ploughed field, a small, bedraggled army of Englishmen, waiting for their inevitable end.

Henry V had led his men into France back in August, late in the campaigning season. They had besieged and finally captured the port of Harfleur, but it had taken longer than expected.

And now it was time to retreat, fast, before the onset of the bitter medieval winter. Their ships were waiting for them at Calais, 280 miles away, and the Channel was becoming rougher by the day in the October storms.

Meanwhile, somewhere in the hinterland, a vast French army was gathering. But if they could just make it to Calais and the ships...

They came so close. But in mid-October, as they marched north between the little villages of Agincourt and Tramecourt, across some fields hemmed in on either side by thick woodland, they came to a sudden halt.

Across their line of retreat lay a vast French army. They were cut off and vastly outnumbered.

Henry commanded about 6,000 men, 5,000 of them only lightly armoured archers. Before them stood an enemy army of some 30,000, ready to fight on their home soil and burning to avenge the previous defeats of Crecy and Poitiers.

The flower of arrogant but ferocious French chivalry, pennants fluttering, swords gleaming, knights grimly smiling.

Many of the weary English must have crossed themselves and bowed their heads in the rain when they saw that sight. They must have thought of their loved ones. For there would surely be no going home now.

On the eve of battle, the chronicles tell us, many of the English confessed their sins, ready for their deaths on the morrow.

Nevertheless, the next day, the Feast of St Crispin, under the inspiration of their great warrior-king, Henry V, they summoned their last reserves of energy and spirit.

Outnumbered as they were, they could not hope to attack, only defend. So they set sharpened staves in the soft ground, which would break the French charge and impale their horses.

Then they stood shoulder-to-shoulder, butted their long-handled pikes into the earth, and waited for that thunderous onslaught. It never came. The French nobles were quarrelling among themselves about who would charge first. So Henry gave his men the astonishing order, against all the rules of engagement for an outnumbered force.

Attack! And the English pulled up their defensive staves and began to march forward.
The territory gained proved crucial. Rapidly, the English set up a new line of staves, now only 200yards from the enemy. Well within bowshot.

Their men-at-arms stood shoulder-to-shoulder once more, hands clenched white-knuckled around the long ashen shafts of their pikes, raindrops beading on their steel helmets and running down into their eyes, trying not to shake with fear.

Along the lines, many faces of beardless boys, some as young as 12. And hanging over them all, the terrible sense of dread before a battle. Gregory More, archer. Thomas Langford, man-at-arms. Sir John Grey, Knight. They would stand or fall together.

King Henry gave the order and the English bowmen began to drop volley after volley of arrows on to the stationary French. A trained archer could shoot around 15 arrows a minute, so a force of 5,000 could shoot a staggering 1,000 arrows per second.

The rain of arrows forced the French to move forward and attack. Since the field was hemmed in by woodland, any attempt at outflanking was impossible. They could only march forward, heavily armoured, through the saturated mud.

Crossing even 200 yards in such conditions was exhausting. Some of them sank up to their knees, some even drowned, according to eyewitnesses.

And as they approached, that arrow storm from the English longbows became ever more lethal, shooting with a power and accuracy that would be unmatched until the invention of the rifle. At last they reached the English line, and the real fighting began.

Men on foot, facing each other with lead-weighted maces, war hammers, bill hooks, falcon-beaks ending in terrible pointed spikes, and pole axes, usually used for killing cattle.

And then it was a matter of bone-crunching, slashing and clubbing your enemy into the mud. Now those horny-handed, barrel-chested ploughmen and blacksmiths from the English shires, wielding little more than glorified clubs, proved themselves more than a match for French chivalry.

The left flank under the command of Lord Camoys came under particularly fierce attack from the French. Yet Camoys and his men stood their ground unyielding: men such as Simon Codyngton and John Colmer, Thomas Fitzhenry, and the aptly named John Bold.

They fought without mercy, trapped and outnumbered as they were. A second French wave was sent in, but as in the most atrocious scenes of carnage from the trench warfare of World War I - which Agincourt in some ways resembled - the dead bodies of their fallen comrades only made their advance harder.

Another key to English survival was the extraordinary fighting spirit of Henry V himself. An elite of 18 French knights, an assassination squad, had sworn to make directly for him across the battlefield and kill him, or die in the attempt.

Theydied. All 18 of them, at the very feet of the warrior-king, cut down either by him or his bodyguard. He fought in the front line for much of the day, taking many a blow, one of which demolished part of his crown.

And his resolute cries of 'Rally!' and 'Stand firm, men of England!' contributed immeasurably to the victory.

Yet along with his encouraging cries there were the sickening sounds of metal bludgeoning into flesh, the screams of horses, men drowning in a quagmire of blood.

If a Frenchman fell to the ground, injured or not, he would struggle to rise again in the sucking mud. And in a trice, an Englishman would be kneeling by his side like a ministering angel of death, flipping up his visor and dispatching him with a quick stab of a blade to his eyes.

Late in the battle, with the English slowly beginning to feel that they might yet survive and make it back to Calais after all, Henry feared that the French were going to try a final attack from the rear.

So he gave orders for all prisoners to be executed, in case they should be freed to fight again. But the French had had enough. Leaving at least 5,000 dead, against an English total of about 120, they fled the field.

Last year, French academics accused the English of having committed 'war crimes' at Agincourt. Applying 21st-century standards to the 15th century is the kind of stupidity which only the most eminent French academic could rise to.

You might as well complain that the French knights, in their turn, had some simply frightful ideas about the role of women. And as for their views on Jews...

The truth is that Agincourt was an astonishing victory, a testament to those centuries- old English qualities of sheer determination and stubborn refusal to acknowledge when we're beaten: a rock on which many more glamorous armies have broken.

Indeed, it is precisely because Agincourt was so atrociously unglamorous, so grim and bloody and mud-spattered, that it was so heroic: ordinary and exhausted men, achieving something quite extraordinary.

It's for this reason that many of us will be checking out the names of those who fought there on the Internet, and feeling a pride in our brave ancestors that stretches out across six centuries.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1201517/Ploughmen-peasants-boys-aged-12--Named-centuries-unsung-heroes-carnage-Agincourt.html

More "incorrectness" from Boris

London's outspoken mayor, Boris Johnson, has caused controversy after describing the 250,000 pound ($500,000) second salary he earns for writing a newspaper column as "chicken feed".

Workers on London's transport network, which ultimately is headed by the mayor, reacted angrily to Johnson's comments, which he made in an interview with the BBC.

"Transport workers in London will look at Boris Johnson's claim that 250,000 pounds a year for moonlighting in a second job is 'chickenfeed' and wonder just what planet he's living on," said Bob Crow, the head of the RMT transport union.

"Our members working as cleaners on London Underground, who have been denied the London Living Wage that was promised them by Boris Johnson, will be especially angry when they are out there doing dirty jobs for little more than six pounds an hour."

Johnson, who attended Britain's elite Eton College and Oxford University and was a Conservative member of parliament, also earns a regular mayoral salary of 140,000 pounds a year. The average annual wage in Britain is about 25,000 pounds.

In the BBC interview, Johnson was asked whether he thought having a second job paying 250,000 pounds a year was appropriate alongside his busy mayoral role. He dismissed the amount as "chicken feed".

"I don't presume to ask what you earn from the taxpayer and frankly there's absolutely no reason at all why I should not on a Sunday morning, before I do whatever else I need to do on a Sunday morning, should not knock off an article," he said.

Johnson's secondary work, which amounts to about 5,000 pounds per article, is unlikely to go down well with workers in London, where the average earnings are about 630 pounds a week, according to the national statistics office.

Johnson has caused controversy before, angering the residents of Liverpool after describing them as having a "deeply unattractive psyche" and once referring to "flag-waving piccaninnies", a remark that drew accusations of racism.

Asked to comment on Johnson's latest faux-pas, the mayor's office said it had no statement to make.

Johnson's views are unlikely to sit well with Conservative party leader David Cameron. In an effort to make the party seem less elitist, Cameron has called on senior Conservative MPs to give up their second jobs.

Johnson said he had no intention of giving up his newspaper column, saying he was not in the Conservative shadow cabinet and therefore did not need to.

http://www.smh.com.au/world/london-mayor-says-514000-second-salary-just-chicken-feed-20090715-dkks.html

World's oldest Bible published in full online

The world's oldest surviving Bible, which has been scattered around the globe for more than a century, has been published in full online.

More than 800 surviving pages and fragments from the The Codex Sinaiticus, which was written in Greek on parchment leaves in the fourth century, have been reunited.

Last year The British Library put The Book of Psalms and St Mark's Gospel online, and now the remaining pages have been made free for public use for the first time.

Along with the Codex Vaticanus, the Codex Sinaiticus is considered the oldest known Bible in the world. Originally more than 1,460 pages long and measuring 16in by 14in, it was written by a number of hands around the time of Constantine the Great.
It offers different versions of the Scriptures from later editions of the Bible, notably in St Mark's Gospel which ends 12 verses before later versions, omitting the appearance of the resurrected Jesus Christ.

The reunification of the book is the culmination of a four-year collaboration between the British Library, Leipzig University Library in Germany, the Monastery of St Catherine in Mount Sinai, Egypt, and the National Library of Russia in St Petersburg, each of which hold different parts of the manuscript.

They hope that by bringing together the digitised pages online, the project will help scholars worldwide to research in depth the Greek text, which is fully transcribed and cross-referenced.

"The Codex Sinaiticus is one of the world's greatest written treasures," said Dr Scot McKendrick, Head of Western Manuscripts at the British Library.

"This 1,600-year old manuscript offers a window into the development of early Christianity and first-hand evidence of how the text of the Bible was transmitted from generation to generation. The project has uncovered evidence that a fourth scribe – along with the three already recognised – worked on the text; the availability of the virtual manuscript for study by scholars around the world creates opportunities for collaborative research that would not have been possible just a few years ago."

To mark the reunification, the British Library is also holding a new exhibition, open today that tells the story of the book.

Professor David Parker from the University of Birmingham's Department of Theology, who directed the team which made the electronic transcription of the manuscript said the four-year process was a "huge challenge".

"The transcription includes pages of the Codex which were found in a blocked-off room at the Monastery of St Catherine in 1975, some of which were in poor condition," he said.

"This is the first time that they have been published. The digital images of the virtual manuscript show the beauty of the original and readers are even able to see the difference in handwriting between the different scribes who copied the text. We have even devised a unique alignment system which allows users to link the images with the transcription. This project has made a wonderful book accessible to a global audience."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/religion/5749555/Worlds-oldest-Bible-published-in-full-online.html

Hitler's stealth bomber: How the Nazis were first to design a plane to beat radar

With its smooth and elegant lines, this could be a prototype for some future successor to the stealth bomber. But this flying wing was actually designed by the Nazis 30 years before the Americans successfully developed radar-invisible technology.

Now an engineering team has reconstructed the Horten Ho 2-29 from blueprints, with startling results. It was faster and more efficient than any other plane of the period and its stealth powers did work against radar.

Experts are now convinced that given a little bit more time, the mass deployment of this aircraft could have changed the course of the war. First built and tested in the air in March 1944, it was designed with a greater range and speed than any plane previously built and was the first aircraft to use the stealth technology now deployed by the U.S. in its B-2 bombers.

Thankfully Hitler’s engineers only made three prototypes, tested by being dragged behind a glider, and were not able to build them on an industrial scale before the Allied forces invaded.

From Panzer tanks through to the V-2 rocket, it has long been recognised that Germany’s technilowcal expertise during the war was years ahead of the Allies.

But by 1943, Nazi high command feared that the war was beginning to turn against them, and were desperate to develop new weapons to help turn the tide. Nazi bombers were suffering badly when faced with the speed and manoeuvrability of the Spitfire and other Allied fighters.

Hitler was also desperate to develop a bomber with the range and capacity to reach the United States.

In 1943 Luftwaffe chief Hermann Goering demanded that designers come up with a bomber that would meet his ‘1,000, 1,000, 1,000’ requirements – one that could carry 1,000kg over 1,000km flying at 1,000km/h.

Two pilot brothers in their thirties, Reimar and Walter Horten, suggested a ‘flying wing’ design they had been working on for years. They were convinced that with its drag and lack of wind resistance such a plane would meet Goering’s requirements.

Construction on a prototype was begun in Goettingen in Germany in 1944. The centre pod was made from a welded steel tube, and was designed to be powered by a BMW 003 [jet] engine.

The most important innovation was Reimar Horten’s idea to coat it in a mix of charcoal dust and wood glue. He thought the electromagnetic waves of radar would be absorbed, and in conjunction with the aircraft’s sculpted surfaces the craft would be rendered almost invisible to radar detectors.

This was the same method eventually used by the U.S. in its first stealth aircraft in the early 1980s, the F-117A Nighthawk.

The plane was covered in radar absorbent paint with a high graphite content, which has a similar chemical make-up to charcoal.

After the war the Americans captured the prototype Ho 2-29s along with the blueprints and used some of their technological advances to aid their own designs.

But experts always doubted claims that the Horten could actually function as a stealth aircraft. Now using the blueprints and the only remaining prototype craft, Northrop-Grumman (the defence firm behind the B-2) built a fullsize replica of a Horten Ho 2-29.

It took them 2,500 man-hours and $250,000 to construct, and although their replica cannot fly, it was radar-tested by placing it on a 50ft articulating pole and exposing it to electromagnetic waves.

The team demonstrated that although the aircraft is not completely invisible to the type of radar used in the war, it would have been stealthy enough and fast enough to ensure that it could reach London before Spitfires could be scrambled to intercept it.

‘If the Germans had had time to develop these aircraft, they could well have had an impact,’ says Peter Murton, aviation expert from the Imperial War Museum at Duxford, in Cambridgeshire.

‘In theory the flying wing was a very efficient aircraft design which minimised drag. ‘It is one of the reasons that it could reach very high speeds in dive and glide and had such an incredibly long range.’

The research was filmed for a forthcoming documentary on the National Geographic Channel.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1198112/Sleek-swift-deadly--Hitlers-stealth-bomber-turned-tide-Britain.html

A vast business "success" that wasn't

That good ol' journalistic "fact-checking"

Normally, Lord Bilimoria’s appearance in a business publication would be as remarkable as a bottle of Hildon water in a conference room. The founder of Cobra Beer has, in recent years, become omnipresent, banging on at every opportunity about the early days of the company, when he was delivering beer in a 2CV so battered that you could see the road through the floor.

But two advertisements in a recent issue of Management Today, one informing us that he would be a keynote speaker at the Chartered Management Institute’s 2009 National Conference, and another alerting us to the news that his book, Against the Grain: Lessons in Entrepreneurship, was available for purchase, caught my eye, because in the gap between them being placed and being published Cobra went into pre-pack administration.

Most of the company, which not long ago was touting itself around leading brewers with a reported price tag of £180 million, subsequently re-emerged under the ownership of Molson Coors, having been sold to the American brewer for £14 million, with Lord Bilimoria retaining a 49.9 per cent stake. But unsecured creditors, owed about £75 million, got nothing. Painful.

Something else quite painful: the way in which the business establishment failed to spot any problems. Here, in February 2007, we have the Press Trust of India reporting that “Bilimoria, one of the ten youngest members in the House of Lords, aims to make Cobra into a $1 billion retail brand by 2014”. Here we have Director magazine remarking in March 2007 that Cobra’s strategy “will almost certainly make [Bilimoria] a very rich man”. And here, just months ago, we have a trade publication reporting that Cobra reported a “20 per cent rise in beer volumes for its fiscal first half”, which “contrasts with an 8 per cent volume decline across the UK beer market in the last three months of 2008”.

No one seems to have picked up, until it was too late, that for all Cobra’s glitzy marketing efforts — it spent £40 million on marketing over 20 years — people rarely drank the stuff unless in Indian restaurants, that the company had never been profitable and that, in the year to July 2007, the latest for which accounts are publicly available, Cobra lost £13 million.

Indeed, the story of Cobra highlights a number of awkward truths for the business world, the first of which is this: business journalists rarely get the full truth about companies. The fact is that, despite all the awards we enjoy giving ourselves, with the exception of one or two individuals, we failed to predict almost all the crises enveloping us: the Ponzi schemes, the frauds, the credit crunch, everything in fact, including Cobra. Not that it’s our fault: journalists are only as good as their sources and if there’s one thing we’ve learnt this year it is that the people running businesses are as clueless as everyone else.

The second painful truth revealed by the Cobra debacle is that the business world is hugely susceptible to the influence of public relations. This is, in part, because business is overrun by PR people — and Cobra was more image-obsessed than most, announcing plans to sponsor this year’s Bafta awards as part of a £8.4 million PR and marketing drive only months before it went into administration — and, in part, because business is a bit boring and a good story, such as Cobra’s, gets seized upon.

I’m not guiltless in this respect. I was one of the hundreds of journalists who wrote positively about Bilimoria in recent years, penning a piece a decade ago that mindlessly cited growing sales without mentioning the lack of profits. Frankly, I should have realised when the company subsequently sent me some Cobra wine to try — a beverage that tasted like fermented mouthwash — that its attempts to diversify were going to get it into trouble.

Which brings me to a third painful truth revealed by the Cobra debacle: Asian entrepreneurs get away with more than most. I don’t mean this in a way to suggest some kind of politically correct conspiracy. But in my experience Asian companies don’t get subjected to as much critical analysis as they should be because: a) a huge number of Asian entrepreneurs are very successful and it is just assumed that they all are; b) the rags-to-riches tale is a seductive and romantic one; and c) people want to write about and hear about Asian entrepreneurs doing well, as it is one of the things that shows that multiculturalism and immigration can work.

As it happens, Bilimoria is not the most extreme example of the phenomenon. This unhappy accolade must go to Reuben Singh, who, as a schoolboy, founded Miss Attitude, the fashion chain, and was listed as the youngest millionaire by Guinness World Records, publicly fêted by Tony Blair, made a government adviser, dubbed “the most powerful man in Britain under 30”, had his picture hung in the National Portrait Gallery and named entrepreneur of the year at various awards ceremonies, but who in 2007 was unmasked as a serial fantasist, branded a “liar” by a judge and declared bankrupt.

Also, as it happens, Bilimoria is not your typical Asian entrepreneur, arriving in Britain with £5 in his pocket and subsequently building a huge company. For all the talk of delivering beer in a 2CV so battered that you could see the road through the floor, he comes from a privileged background. His father was a general in the Indian Army, he left India for England at the age of 19 to train as a chartered accountant, attended Cambridge and speaks with an accent that would make the Duke of Edinburgh sound chavvy.

But his ethnicity was undoubtedly one of the reasons he had a profile that far outstripped his achievements and one of the reasons he was so ludicrously overpromoted, being enobled and, among other things, being made deputy president of the London Chamber of Commerce and Industry, chairman of the UK-India Business Council and Chancellor of Thames Valley University.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/sathnam_sanghera/article6643948.ece

Meanings of flower names

Throughout history and in cultures around the world, mankind has held a deep connection with flowers. From the smallest blossoms emerging from the melting snow, marking the end of winter, to elaborate bouquets given as gestures of love, flowers are unmatched in their ability to please the senses and delight the soul.

They have also been infused with symbolism that transcends their colorful blooms. A poetic regard for flowers is evident even in Neanderthal culture with the discovery of burial sites containing Hollyhocks -- an indication that the Neanderthals too considered it as "holy"' as its name also suggests today.

The names we give to flowers reflect a loftier esteem than the ones we give to, say, vegetables. Broccoli, for example, derives its unappetizing moniker from the Italian brocco, meaning simply a shoot or stalk -- in line with the opinions of countless picky eaters. But the names given to flowers often denote their benefit to the spirit.

Like many words in our language, many of the names of flowers hold clues about their history and relationship to us. The daisy, for example, known for its small yellow blossoms, is quite common throughout the world. Daisies are unique in that they close their golden petals during the night and keep them shut, as if in sleep, until the morning. This peculiar characteristic earned this little flower the name 'day's eye' from speakers of Old English. Eventually, that name was compounded into the word daisy.

Dandelions also derive their name from their characteristically numerous thick and slender yellow petals. It is not so strange for an imaginative observer to equate the dandelion's coarse petals to rows of teeth on a well-fanged beast. This comparison explains its French origin dent de lion, or in English "teeth of a lion."

Some flowers, on the other hand, were named not from their appearance alone, but for their associations with mythology. The iris, a flower which appears in a wide variety of colors, shares its name with the Greek goddess who unified heaven and earth. Aptly, she was personified by the rainbow.

The narcissus flower, too, is said to have sprouted upon the death of its mythological namesake, though there is no evidence that the flower is as self-absorbed. The Virgin Mary also has left her mark on floral taxonomy with the marigold, or Mary's gold. According to Flemish tradition, the flower sprouted from her tears.

Still, other flowers' names offer some insight into their utility in the past. The sweet, aromatic lavender was used to add a pleasant scent to recently washed clothes and to perfume bathwater -- as evidenced by its association with the Latin lavare, meaning "to wash." Calluna, the flowering shrub also known as heather, seems to have been appreciated not so much for its beauty as its handiness as a broom. Its name originated from the Greek word meaning "to sweep."

The Pansy blossom in late summer begins to droop. The flower's name is derived from the French pensée, or "thought" -- the source for the word pensive.

Carnations are also appreciated for their human qualities. Their soft pink petals are likened to the hue of skin, sharing its meaning closely with the word incarnation, "to be made flesh." There are early writings, though, that refer to this flower as coronation, which some scholars believe is an allusion to its use as a garland in Greek tradition.

Flowers are so universal in their appeal that nearly every culture names their children after them. From Ambuj (Indian for lotus) to Zara (Arabic for a blossom), floral names are timeless in their popularity. While millions of people around the world share their names with flowers, the opposite is also true. The Zinnia and Dahlia flowers, for example, can thank the 18th century botanists Johann Zinn and Anders Dahl, respectively, for their names.

Ultimately, the names assigned to flowers reflect less the flowers themselves than our longstanding relationship of love and esteem for them. A rose by any other name might still smell as sweet -- but a flower's name and the story behind it are deeply meaningful, human stories. They are our contribution to one of nature's most cherished creations.

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