Angels of Death

Like Woody Allen, I don't mind dying but I don't much want to be there when it happens. Still, at least I won't be there at my funeral. Well, obviously my mortal coil will be present, or some placeholder at least, but I won't.

So why do I care what music is played during the final rites? Actually, I'm not sure I do care that much, except I find myself thinking about it from time to time. Three times at funerals I have been poleaxed by it - when singing "Jerusalem" at my mother's, singing "I Vow To Thee, My Country" at my father's, and at the end of the funeral of a very dear friend too soon taken unto the Lord, when Charles Trenet's "La Mer" brought the house down.

I mention this because the Reverend Ed (note the blokey contraction - yeah, man, this rev is right down wiv da kidz) Tomlinson is in the news complaining at the "death of death" - specifically the increasing popularity for secular pop songs at funerals. He singled out "My Way" and "Simply The Best" for particular mention, as well as a "poem from Nan".

He's had opprobrium heaped upon him from all sides - especially from the seculars and humanists. I think he's got a point. How can anyone seriously celebrate someone's life while listening to Robbie Williams spew forth "Angels", surely one of the tritest hits ever to presume to take upon itself the mantle of profundity? I suppose the whole thing comes down to a single question - for whose benefit is the funeral? The deceased? Or the relicts? In any case, I know what I'm having at mine - Angela Hewitt playing Wilhelm Kempff's transcription of J S Bach's Cantata "Wir Danken Dir, Gott" BWV 29, and to finish Jackson Browne's "Late for the sky".

*****

I have just heard that the agreement in principle to stave off tomorrow's postal strike was nixed by the management at the last moment. I cannot help but detect the dread hand of Mandy Antoinette behind this: his previous attempt to flog off the Post Office to his oligarchic chums having been stymied, he's been extra busy behind the scenes, softening it up in readiness for another go. Quite why he's so desperate that Great Britain rid itself of yet another of the shining glories of our recently ended Age in the Sun God alone knows; it could, the cynic in me suggests, be something to do with all those highly remunerated non-exec. direc.s that will be on offer to him and his chums when he and the rest of the current rabble are given their P45s. In a similar vein last night Bank of England governor Mervyn King gave a speech of the profoundest bleeding obvious, when he opined that, since the country had given the clearest possible signal to certain organisations in the financial sector that they were too important to be allowed to fail, it followed as night follows Mandelson that these organisations must be reorganised so that their unique and insupportable status be removed. In case you don't follow his or my reasoning, let's posit a bank called, say, TSBarclays. Let's say that it consists of a standard commercial banking arm - you know, the kind of thing where you pay your wages/salary in, which you later take out to buy stuff like, oh, I don't know, electricity, food, the little fripperies of life. Let's say that this part of the bank can also be prevailed upon to lend you the odd few grand for a new car or, if you're a company, the odd few tens of grand to continue the overdraft.

Let's posit that TSBarclay also has an investment banking arm, where men in silly shirts and suits that cost my monthly salary trade Credit Default Swaps, Credit Derivatives and other Toxic Assets. No-one outside half a dozen ex-Cambridge University or MIT PhDs understands what they are, or how they work, but since our men in suits are just barrow boys they'll trade anyfink, and they do, and then pay themselves quite staggering amounts of our money for being such diamond geezers. Until, of course, the wheels come off, since this is a gigantic Ponzi Scheme, or Pyramid Scheme, or some other Scheme beginning with P but which amounts to A selling B something that has no intrinsic value.

In any properly ordered world, such an organisation would be permitted to exist only as long as it remained solvent; upon the cessation whereof the employees and anyone stupid enough to have invested in it directly would immediately learn the error of their ways. Unfortunately we live in a world governed (if indeed it is governed in any real sense) by Gordon Brown, Alistair "Who The Fuck Is This Guy?" Darling, and Mandy Antoinette.

So nothing will change. The banks will continue, as they are today, to pretend that they're solvent (so they should be - they've been given enough of our childrens' money) and that because they've done such a ripping job in the few short weeks since they last brought the global economy to its knees, they should be allowed to share out the odd few billion surplus they have lying around. And if anyone tries to stop them - well, there goes that seat at the board, the box at The Royal Opera House, the Royal Enclosure, Glyndebourne....

*****

Nick Griffin is on BBC1's Question Time tonight tomorrow night (Thursday - thanks PhilipH), to the eternal shame of the BBC. I am entirely unconvinced by the argument that they're a proper political party - of course they're not, since they only allow white non-Jews to be members. Griffin seems to be determined to hole his ship below the waterline before he even gets onto the panel, with his fatuous remarks about Generals Sir Richard Dannatt and Sir Mike Jackson who had complained at the BNP's co-opting military symbols. Not only has the BBC soiled itself by permitting this odious wretch to give his racist filth the cloak of respectability, it has entirely failed to line up any genuine heavyweights to counter-punch. Instead of a ready wit and brilliant debater like, say, William Hague or Boris Johnson they put up Bonnie Bloody Greer who can hardly hold her own in the teddybear pit that is Newsnight Review and Jack Broken Straw. Feeble.