Quintin Jardine's blog

When Dom checked the duck in the pool  yesterday and told me that the thermometer hanging out of its arse read 3ºC, I confess I was a little sceptical. That vanished this morning when we let the dogs out and I saw the layer of ice that had formed overnight. The duck’s stuck fast, until the sun gets to him.

I was asked yesterday to write something in defence of  the library service against public sector spending cuts. This is it:

As my wife and friends will tell you, I had my fill of Andy Gray years ago. When he appeared as a football pundit not long after retiring as a player, he was new, young, fresh and he had an original viewpoint to bring to the game. None of that is true any more; he ran out of things to say about ten years ago and since then his observations have been mainly critical and mainly focused on those decisions of officials which he and the dodgy Sky technology deem to be wrong. I’ve also had enough also of Richard Keys, Sky’s main football host, a smarmy twerp who has always seemed to me to be overcome by his self-perceived cleverness.

So, when I woke this morning to hear that the pair had been hit by the curse of the live microphone, my first reaction was to laugh and hope that it would lead to their imminent early retirement. Then I paused, when I realised that I’m not entirely on the other side of the argument. I don’t accept at all the assertion that, ‘female officials don’t know the offside rule.’ Confusion over that law of the game is widespread. It exists among refs, linesmen, managers, players and pundits. As it happened, I watched the Liverpool game, and when Sian Massey, the female assistant ref, allowed the controversial goal, I said aloud, before a witness, ‘God, she’d better have got this one right.’ She had, tv indicated, spot on, an instant judgement call which  would have probably gone the other way five times out of ten had the flag been in male hands. However, I’m not sure she should have been put in that position.

These days, women’s football is a global game, on in which Britain is lagging behind. It needs to be developed here across the board and that means that it needs its own corps of elite officials. They’re not going to be improved if the brightest and the best are taken and made to run the line at a male Premier League game in front of a baying, largely sexist crowd. If inter-gender officialdom grows, it will not be long before there are terracing chants reserved for women refs and lines-people, and they will not be attractive. Then there’s a practical consideration; football grounds have three changing rooms, home team, away team and officials, and they will all have urinals. How are they going to handle that one? Mind you, there is a strong case for: if there were more women officials, it would cut down on footballers’ use of industrial language. I do not believe that on Saturday a single player ran up to Ms Massey and screamed in her face, ‘You are ******* blind! That was out ******* throw-in!’ Mind you, I did see Glen Johnson gesturing towards her, making the shape of a ball that he thought he had won, as he would have done in a European game, where the person with the flag spoke no English.

On balance, though, to each their own is how I see it, not because I want to retain male  bastions, but because I don’t like to see a woman with her back to thousands of screaming, abusive, foul-mouthed guys. Nothing to do with the petty, childish, out-dated Gray and Keys. I’m sure that Ms Massey could see them off with a few words, as Kelly Dalglish Cates has done already. And as has Karen Brady, but she’s another story.

I’m not going to sign up for Murraymania, not just yet. Memories of 1978, when the Messianic Ally Macleod convinced all Scotland that we were off to Argentina to collect the World Cup that was our due are still much too fresh in my mind. Plus, whenever a sports commentator declares, ‘It’s only a matter of time before . . .’, it is usually time to back the other horse. So all I will say is, if Andy digs in and plays the best tenis of his life, then next Monday morning I will be celebrating with the rest. But I’m not going to hold my breath until then.

. . . on AJ’s 20% off deal of the week., the paperback of Aftershock, normally retailing at £7.99. To  take advantage, click or cut and paste this link

http://www.campbellreadbooks.com/departments/books/quintinjardine/qj_books.php

select ‘Aftershock‘ then enter code QBW3D1 in the promotion window. Offer runs from now till Wednesday.

It can be dangerous to comment on a continuing British criminal investigation, but here goes . . . again. I cannot recall one in recent years that has been pursued as bizarrely and erratically by the police as has the Yeates murder inquiry in Bristol. From the beginning, details were released to the media that would normally have been kept for the jury in an eventual trial; Joanna’s shopping trip, the pizza she bought but which was never found and which we now know she never ate. Then we had the charade of the unfortunate landlord being arrested in a splurge of prejudicial and detrimental publicity, detained until the last minute the law and the court would allow, only to be released ‘on police bail’, a clumsy way of not admitting that the investigators had screwed up. We moved on; there was the  odd, ‘one sock’, press conference. A week or so back, we had a media briefing by the sadly bereaved parents. I won’t speculate on whose initiative it was, or who wrote the script. Then there was the inevitable BBCtv Crimewatch reconstruction, filmed in a blaze of publicity; a violent death become showbiz. I’m sorry, I can’t bring myself to see either of these last two steps as proactive police work, only as an admission that they had run out of lines of inquiry. I don’t question that from the very start the Bristol homicide team have done  their sincere best for Joanna and her family; but I can’t understand the way they’ve done it.

Now, a month after the poor lass died, they’ve arrested and charged the bloke next door. Eh?

After over 20 years in a Spanish community the size of ours (in the winter) you’d think you’d know all the Brits. But no, even in the middle of January it’s rare for us to sit down for a coffee anywhere without hearing English spoken nearby, and almost invariably we’ve never seen that person before in our lives. There was a period, 2009 – 2010 when the exodus seemed to be reversing, with the euro-sterling conversion being pretty brutal, but my gut feeling is that it’s back in place. Maybe the long-term German, Belgian and French residents are saying the same; dunno for sure, but I will be keeping my ears open for a while.

Anyone who has come over here for a ‘better life’ or is even thinking about it, should be wary. My economic barometer is simple; I sit outside Cafe Navili and I count the construction cranes on the horizon. A few years ago, it peaked at fourteen. Last week, I could only see one small, sad, and solitary cross-beam, and it wasn’t  doing anything.

I’ve become constitutionally incapable of staying in on a Saturday evening. I’ve never seen ‘Casualty’, or “Strictly’, or any of that stuff, and I check my lottery ticket on line. Last night we went out on spec, and picked on a place called 1869. (I call it 1690 sometimes, but nobody gets the joke.) It’s been one of our favourite howffs since it opened. While the food isn’t spectacular, it’s good, none of it has come out of a caterer’s van, and it’s all freshly cooked. The house wine isn’t dangerous either, and the beer’s always keen and clear, as an old ad used to say. Mind you, the Big Man is in the process of trying to become the Slightly Smaller Man once again, so that’s off limits. Instead I’m following the principle of my dear and late friend Roger, who believed that white wine doesn’t count.

Check out this report.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-12257958

The Spanish tourist industry doesn’t want you to hear stories like this one, but they’re common.

No, Fiona, you won’t find me on the Crime Writers’ Association website. Why should members of one of the most solitary professions on the planet feel the need to associate? Plus . . . I don’t want to belong to any club that would accept me as a member. Groucho Marx said that. If there was any logic in the world, surely the Groucho Club in Soho would be empty. Which crime writers would I recommend?  In alphabetical order, Linwood Barclay, Peter Guttridge, Michael Jecks and Barbara Nadel.

The wind has a name on L’Escala; more than one in fact, depending on the direction from which it comes.  The least popular is the Tramuntana, which comes howling from the north over the Pyrenees, always strong, and in the winter always cold. It’s near hurricane force; there are days when you can’t stand up before it, and you never seek its company. It’s blown for the last couple of days, but this morning, it’s gone, leaving the air cool and the sky cloudless.

We’re still five months off the publication of Grievous Angel, Skinner 21, and I wouldn’t normally dream of doing this, but for all devotees, here’s a very big advance on Skinner 22, hot off today’s press. Sarah’s on her way back, and sparks will fly in June 2012, when she touches down.

For me, each year begins in stages. One important step is the reopening of a particular restaurant in St Marti d’Empuries, after its winter holiday. Normally that happens on the first weekend in February, but this year, Pep, the owner, decided to bring this forward by a couple of weeks. It’s called L’Esculapi, and that’s where we were tonight. God’s in his heaven and all’s well with the world.

http://www.esculapi.com/

Check it out.

. . . on AJ’s 20% off deal of the week. This week’s choice is the paperback of Aftershock, normally retailing at £7.99, post free in the UK, discounted RoW. To  take advantage, click or cut and paste this link

http://www.campbellreadbooks.com/departments/books/quintinjardine/qj_books.php

select ‘Aftershock‘ then enter code QBW3D1 in the promotion window. Offer runs from now till January 26.

They are available as eBooks, globally on Amazon and on major UK sites.

You’re quite a historian, townie; I must introduced you to my friend Michael Jecks. Good for the Saint. I might have done the same myself, but I played in a different street, and maybe at a different time. I don’t remember McLeod; it was Charlie Cox in the number four shirt when I came along. Paton was there though; chosen as the greatest Motherwell player ever, even though only a minority of the voters will ever have seen him wear the shirt. (But why wasn’t the wonderful Andy Weir in the top team? Davie Cooper could have played on the right.) No, Skinner will never head the new national force: I wouldn’t allow it, since I am deeply opposed to it myself. Politics and justice should be kept as far apart as possible, unless a politician is in the dock. In fact, Bob may resign in protest against its establishment, but we’ll have to wait and see whether the next Scottish Government is foolish enough to do it.

I made a mistake last night. I caught some of Question Time, switching over as they were discussing Tony Blair’s appearance today before the Chilcott Apologia. If I’d realised that George Galloway was on the panel I wouldn’t have bothered, but he was, in full cry, demanding that our former Prime Minister be tried as a war criminal, and calling Alastair Campbell, one of his fellow panelists, ‘his Goebbels, his Lord Haw Haw’, with blood on his hands. As Campbell  remarked, that was rich coming from a man who had been in his time an apologist for Saddam Hussein. But George would not be silenced. George never is silent; he is an articulate and supremely gifted speaker, with a quickness of thought that makes him a hugely dangerous opponent in debate, as a US Senate committee famously discovered.

George was not the only man to oppose the Iraq War. He had the right to do so, even if his actions led to his expulsion from the Labour Party. He denies supporting Saddam, and he and his cronies claim that his notorious praise of the dictator and mass murderer was misquoted and out of context. But the film evidence is there, of George smiling in the company of a man who had by that time used weapons of mass destruction on his own people, killing thousands, and who had conducted a different sort of genocide on others, the marsh arabs. The question at issue has never been whether Saddam had WMD, but when he had them; his willingness to use them has never been doubted. George has been interviewed several times by television stations in the Middle East. I’m not going to reproduced some of the things he’s listed as saying, because I find them too offensive for this blog, but they’re out there if you care to research them. (By the way, Saddam is not the only unpopular cause that George has espoused. In 1990, he backed the military coup in Pakistan, although he later criticised President Musharraf . He also expressed support for the Soviet Union. I can find no record of him expressing a view on Hitler.)

It is good that the cages of the major UK political parties, and their leaders, should be rattled by people of independent mind. But George doesn’t have an independent mind. He seems to be obsessed by a notion of a global Zionist conspiracy, and he is extremely selective in his definition of terrorism. George is in fact a dangerous demagogue, a mob orator of the worst sort, because he has the gift of appealing to the basest instincts, and of stirring people by the sound of his words when normally they would be repelled by their content. He’s glib too, and very clever, as in his interview with Piers Morgan, in which he said that the assassination of Tony Blair would be justified, but was careful not to say a single word that might have constituted support for it.

George plans to run in the next Scottish Parliamentary Election. He doesn’t have a cat’s chance in hell of being elected as a constituency member, but the calculation is that he only needs 11,000 votes to gain a seat as a regional list MSP. I will be deeply disappointed if that many of my fellow Scots support his slate, but I suspect that they will, given the current state of play.

No, I don’t, not really, but sometimes it’s difficult to keep your head down when the sun is splitting the effing trees outside. I’m thinking about adding a web-cam to the blog, so visitors can share it with me. However,  you’d have to share the rain when it comes, and believe me, it will.

New for Skinner fans. Starting today Campbell Read Books is offering a deal of the week, giving 20% discount on a selected, signed, Skinner novel. This week’s choice is the paperback of Aftershock, normally retailing at £7.99, post free in the UK, discounted RoW. To  take advantage, click or cut and paste this link http://www.campbellreadbooks.com/departments/books/quintinjardine/qj_books.php select ‘Aftershock‘ then enter code QBW3D1 in the promotion window. Offer runs from now till January 26.

Channel-hopping at lunchtime, I was cruising past MTV when I came upon something called Hogan Knows Best, a reality show based on the family life of Hulk Hogan, (Terry Bollea) who was in his time, the Godfather of pro wrestling. However Terry’s time is over, and all this did was make him look  old, tired and beat up in the eyes of all those Hulkamaniacs. The show itself made The Osbornes seem like Tea with the Huxleys. But don’t let me put you off watching MTV. The rest is pretty damn good, plus my friends’ daughter Caroline is an exec with the company.