Quintin Jardine's blog

Unusual thing happening in Spain; unusual lately that is. It’s raining, and it will persist for the next few days, according to the forecast. Good. I’m selfish, and I like it to rain when I’m working.

My small flutter paid off last night. The Silent Witness cast has not been reduced by one. The way the writers did it stretched credulity a little, but Doctor Harry did indeed have a miraculous escape from a fiery fate, and went on to ‘save the ******* day,’ in the unforgettable words of Cameron Poe. Why was I so sure that this would happen? Well . . . no, I’m not saying.

I’m still not signing up to the hysteria. Okay, so Andy’s in the semi, but the guy he’s playing just beat Nadal. Okay, so it’s now possible for him to  win the thing without having to play either of the top two. But he won’t, not just because he’s a British tennis player, bearing a burden of history that’s just too great, but because he’s Scottish, a member of a nation whose destiny is always to piss in the soup. (A Chris Hoy only happens once in a century.)

Best keep low expectations and be magnificently surprised than build up one’s hopes and have them dashed.

Ice on the pool again this morning: an odd event for L’Escala but not as odd as something else that happened. We have a duck that’s actually a thermometer and floats around freely. This morning, when the ice began to break I went out and saw that there were two, thermo-duck and a smaller version, without appendage, floating along behind like a duckling. My first thought was that it was one of Mia’s toys and that one of the dogs had dropped it in, but no, there are no ducks in her  inventory. So, where the duck did it come from? Dunno, but I have my suspicions.

How the hell do you make me feel sorry for Andy Gray? I’d thought it impossible, but it wasn’t. Here’s how you do it.

You’re Barney Francis, managing director of Sky Sports, you dig out a five second piece of video in which Gray throws a silly aside to a female colleague who either didn’t hear it, ignored it, or didn’t take offence, then you describe it as ‘new evidence’ when it’s been sitting there for over a month and you use it as an excuse for canning a guy who’s been the face of your football coverage for  twenty years, and who happens to be past his sell-by date. I won’t miss Andy, but Barney Francis . . . what a shit!

Isn’t the Andy Gray/Richard Keys thing becoming a little bit silly? Leaving aside the fact that I can’t stand either of them and will not mourn their disappearance from the telly, the manner of it is something else. Two men had a private conversation, unaware that a colleague would record it then release its contents to the world. That’s what happened. Now they are being pilloried, yet we hear from Sky that there will be no internal investigation into the eavesdropping and  the leak. As an old and very non-PC mate of mine used to say, that is a Zulu’s left leg, neither right nor fair. (By repeating that remark, I invite the attentions of the PC police, but that’s the world we live in.) Let Sky fall on those two,  if they broke its company rules, but the world deserves to know exactly who ratted on them. So why isn’t that happening? Is it because the guilty party is a woman? If she is, let her have the guts to stand up. If not, let him be identified, in which event it will be interesting to see, next time he goes into a pub, say in the Midlands where Andy Gray lives, whether he’s bought drinks all night or has the shit kicked out of him.

As more and more commentators (But not Karen Brady)  are pointing out, there is an ITV show called Loose Women, which is rampantly sexist, yet no exception is taken because all of it is directed against men. Should that be taken off the air? Of course not, because it’s loads of fun, and most of us guys have thick skin. By the way in case anyone thinks I don’t understand the difference between that and Andygate, I do. One is public entertainment, the other was private comment.

In the passing, after catching some of last night’s Sky game, will a football club please employ Sam Allardyce. He’s much more entertaining in the dug-out than in the commentary box.

Oh yes, and one other thing, my last word on the subject. How can anyone seriously consider Andy Gray to be sexist? It’s a matter of record that he loves women. He has to; he’s fathered five children by four of them.

Fans of Silent Witness, and I’m one, lately, will be in mourning across the land this morning. The trailer warned us that Harry was in for a hard time, but no way could anyone have predicted that by the end of episode one of a two parter he’d have found the butchered body of his pregnant girl-friend, been falsely accused of her murder, been pursued all over Budapest by corrupt cops and ferocious Ukrainian mafioso, seen his rescuer, a fat ex-Communist street person assassinated before his eyes and finally shot through the head himself and cremated in the street, just as Leo, fairly useless in a rumble anyway, it must be said, arrived on the scene, too late to save the day.

So that’s it. The team is down to two, and Tom Ward is moving on to another series. (Maybe to play Skinner, who knows?) Or is he? Can they really wipe out the lead character in mid story? Looks that way, for five or six gunshots at close range, a can of petrol and a match are generally pretty conclusive. Or are they? I wouldn’t put the house on it, but I’ll have a small flutter with Victor Chandler that some how he will rise, literally from the ashes before tonight’s episode is over. Why am I modestly confident of this? Because, if you know where to find it, there’s a spoiler out there.

By the way, if the Hungarian tourist ministry had any involvement with the story, did they know what they were getting into? Lovely city, but hardly the endorsement they’d have wanted.

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.

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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.