Tim Collard's blog on (and off) the Daily Telegraph

This blog is based on the one I write on the Daily Telegraph website (blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/author/timcollard). But it also contains posts which the Telegraph saw fit to spike, or simply never got round to putting up.

I'm happy for anyone to comment, uncensored, on anything I have to say. But mindless abuse, such as turns up on the Telegraph site with depressing regularity (largely motivated my my unrepentant allegiance to the Labour Party), is disapproved of. I am writing under the name which appears on my passport and birth certificate; anyone else is welcome to write in anonymously, but remember that it is both shitty and cowardly to hurl abuse from under such cover. I see the blogosphere as the equivalent of a pub debate: a bit of knockabout and coarse language is fine, but don't say anything that would get you thumped in the boozer. I can give as good as I get, and I know how to trace IP addresses.

Monday 3 January 2011

First Preview - The Millennial Divine Comedy

Nel mezzo del cammin. Dante meant that he was thirty-five when he started his great journey. But what about these days? When Dante said it he was thinking of the Book of Genesis, which said that in the ideal world (of the Book of Genesis) a man should normally make threescore and ten. But how many of them did in Dante’s time, or in the time of the Book of Genesis for that matter? Even poor Signor Alighieri only had twenty-one years to go after his mezzo.


I’m not over-optimistic. My father got caught cold by cancer in his early fifties, and I remember passing a dull train journey, shortly after his death, by making pointless calculations. I came up with a start, however, on working out that, if I were to live as long as he had, I was already two weeks into the second half of my life. I was twenty-six.


But now I had reached an unarguable mezzo, in the form of a half-century, however unimpressively nudged and nurdled. True, I had no great prospect of the ton; drink, diabetes and divorce had considerably lengthened the odds. But, I thought, these days my chances are as good as Dante’s: I might just match his twenty-one.


It was in the faint hope of shortening those odds that I donned woolly jumper and (ludicrously virginal) walking boots and yomped off through the Oxfordshire countryside with my trusty Ordnance Survey map. For some time I’d had my eye on the village of Sutton Courtenay, with its inviting PH promising two-pennorth of wassail which, five miles in, I could just about do with.


But before reaching the PH, my attention was arrested by the village church. It takes a lot to divert my attention from a PH, but a proper church with a proper churchyard will do it. And so I entered, and did my bit of looking around the tombstones, calculating ages, and who was related to whom, and how the power relationships might have worked in the village, and so on and so on (as in Coming Up For Air by George Orwell).


I was just about to leave and slake the noble thirst which had been so piously whetted, when I tripped. My usage of my gleaming walking boots had been too sparing to walk them in properly, and it was hardly surprising that I lost my footing on a tussock. Down I went, putting out both arms to break my fall, in stupid defiance of experience, which has provided me with four broken bones in this way. However, this time I was lucky, if you can call it that given what followed. I fell into unresisting earth, and kept on falling. And lost the plot for a while.


I awoke to find myself covered in mud. Which was fine, I reflected, as far as my hitherto pristine walking boots were concerned. But once I realised how far north the infestation had stretched, I was less chuffed. However, my attention was swiftly diverted by the clench of a bony hand on my shoulder.


“Aaaaarrrgghhh!!!”, I shouted, being related by blood or marriage to several people who watched horror films. My apprehensions were swiftly dispelled by the reply “Get up, you silly sod”. I swivelled round on the more functional of my elbows.


No, it wasn’t a skeleton. But almost. The figure was enormous, or at least looked so from my recumbent position. There was still some flesh on the bones. And the grip on my shoulder seemed strangely ill-coordinated. The spectre was obviously no real physical threat. Relaxing somewhat, I remembered my obvious lines: “Wh-wh-who are y-y-you?”


“You know damn well who I am,” said the towering figure. “Who the fuck did you expect to meet in a graveyard in Sutton bleeding Courtenay? Sorry, that should be ‘whom’. Except that it shouldn’t, because ‘whom’ would sound barbarous. Unless you’re some kind of linguistic pedant? ” And here the figure took on a frightening aspect for the first time.


“No,” I said tremulously. “I mean would you prefer to be Mr. Blair or Mr. Orwell?”


“George will do,” he replied. “It took me long enough to get used to it, after all. And I understand that the name Blair has…a bit of an overtone, these days.”


“Well, what do you think?” I said. “A pint or two at the George & Dragon?”


“We’ll deal with the dragons first, if you don’t mind. Besides, I found it difficult enough to cope with ordinary working people in pubs back in the day, what with being an Etonian and all. How I’d cope with the sort of people in there these days I can’t begin to imagine.”


“So what do you suggest?”


“Let’s get straight down there,” he said. “You need to see what’s what.” He produced, from within some interstice in his decayed graveclothes, a pouch of tobacco, and rolled himself a cigarette. “If we’d gone to the pub, you’d soon have found out what’s what,” I said to myself.


“Down where?”


“You know damn well where,” he said. “Just need to sort out the transport.”


I indicated, by a gesture of abandonment and impotence, that I was in his hands.


“And so we’re off to Hell,” said he, “by transethereal steamer!”

“The baddest guys these days,” I told him, “get there in a Beamer.”

“And, just to warn you, George,” I said, “I can’t do terza rima!”


“That’s because your generation is thick as mince,” he said. “I never got an Oxford First, but I’d still read two-thirds of English Literature by the time I was eight. And I may not have read anything they told me to at Eton, but I sure read a hell of a lot of other stuff. Terza rima? Cyril Connolly and I used to do that as a displacement activity.”


“Touché,” I conceded.

Saturday 1 January 2011

Ford Open Prison: the blithering idiocy of the jack-in-office

I have never met a British prison officer. The loss is, no doubt, mine: I should greatly enjoy a conversation about my fellow-jailbird Dostoyevsky’s “From the House of the Dead” with someone who knew the system from the inside. But I somehow suspect that prison officers here do not really belong to the Dostoyevsky-reading classes. I rather fear that, like policemen and social workers, they combine mediocre education with a rather horrifying level of power over their fellow-citizens.

And it’s not that I don’t sympathise with their working conditions. We aspire to be more of a free-booting, vibrant, devil-take-the-hindmost American-style society, while forgetting that the US imprisons (per capita) five times as many of its citizens as we do. And we won’t build the prisons for that, so the ones we have are all heaving. And money must be saved, which inevitably means staffing reductions. We hear that last night, at Ford Open Prison, there were only two prison officers and four support staff on duty.

Was that enough? Well, it was clearly enough to prevent a large-scale prison break-out, which is the bare minimum the public requires from prison management. But was anyone surprised to hear that, in a very lightly policed “open” prison, the inmates managed to smuggle in a certain amount of booze for a pennyworth of wassail on New Year’s Eve?

Now, it’s quite clear to me why alcohol has to be banned in prisons; so much crime is connected to it. The same goes for illegal drugs, with which most British prisons are reputed to be awash. After all, powders, leaves and resins are far easier to smuggle in, if only by reason of volume. But, you might have expected someone in authority to think, is it really so bad if the prisoners stage a bit of a New Year piss-up? The governor would have had every right to say to the powers that be “Look, if you cut our staffing that badly, we’ll still perform the basic duty to keep the cons locked up, but we’ll just have to turn a blind eye to the odd bit of smuggling. It’s only once a year, and no real harm was done.”

But no. Somebody decided that a hard line must be taken. The problem with people of moderate intelligence is that they tend to fall back on rule-books rather than using a bit of nous. And so a full inquiry was ordered. Everyone who might conceivably have been involved in the breach of regulations must be breathalysed. Result: dozens of cons chased around the place by screws with breathalyser kits, refusing to cooperate; the screws wouldn’t back off, and so a riot broke out. Even Ronnie Barker couldn’t make that up. Hundreds of thousands of pounds of damage done, and hundreds of prisoners now having to be moved to other prisons which are already bulging at the seams.

All because “Mr Mackay” didn’t have the sense of his near namesake, my late schoolmaster Richard McCall. After an extended – and totally illegal – post-exam celebration, Mr McCall came over to me at the morning meal and said “Collard, I strongly suspect you of being the first boy I have ever seen drunk at breakfast. But don’t worry, I shan’t pursue the matter.” But I fear that such men do not become prison officers.