Quintin Jardine's blog

A welcome bonus from the Olympics; Denise Lewis on the telly. Lovely lady, class act.

RIP Maeve Binchy, a great story teller who’ll be missed by many.

I hesitate to offer advice to the Governor, but this is not the way to maintain good media relations.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/mitt-romney/9441636/Mitt-Romney-aide-in-new-kiss-my-ass-gaffe.html

It’s the first of August, and I have a date. An old flame is coming back into my life.

Those of you watching BBC telly in the last couple of days may have seen a rather lurid Eastenders trailer, announcing the return to the soap of one of its old stagers, Sharon Watts. A tornado is about to hit Walford, it would seem. Trust me, that will be nothing compared with the effect of my annual reunions with Primavera Eagle Blackstone, née Phillips. I’ve never known a woman who can get deeper inside my head. She dominates my existence for every waking moment of each visit, and then buggers off leaving me to keep up the mess. Recently she’s had this fixation that Oz, her ex and the father of her fast-growing son Tom, isn’t really dead. Nonsense, of course, but she won’t let it go. She’s still in St Marti, while I’m stuck in Gullane, but that’s no hindrance to her. She’s on Facetime even now demanding attention. Got to go.

Is there a whiff of racism in the air over Olympic Park? When the 16-year-old Chinese swimmer Ye Shiwen, knocked lumps off her personal best to win a gold medal, she was barely out of the water before the BBC presenter Clare Balding announced that questions would be asked. Inevitably, they were. The kid was accused of doping, indirectly, by an American coach and has been forced to protest her innocence.

Last night a 16-year-old Lithuanian girl, Ruta Meilutyte, knocked lumps off her personal best to win a gold in the same pool. She became a folk hero instantly, without a whisper of suspicion, and quite rightly so.  Ruta happens to live in England and attends the same school as the golden boy diver Tom Daley.

In the same session, a 17-year-old American, Missy Franklin, swam a semi-final (successfully), then, less than half an hour later, went back into the pool and won a gold, a remarkable achievement that has received nothing but the acclaim and praise it deserves.

Do you see where I’m going with this?

I’m not normally a vindictive guy, (I hope) but I take more than a little pleasure from a report in this morning’s press. It claims that the Serious Fraud Office is taking a keen interest in bankers who are accused of rigging the London inter-bank overnight  rate, and that it believes that they could be prosecuted under existing UK legislation. Several unnamed institutions are under investigation, and it’s a good bet that these include Barclays, the bank over whom the storm broke, and RBS. If the SFO taks it all the way, some of the people involved in the scheme/scam could be looking at a few years as guests of the Mountbatten-Windsor hotel group.

If it takes such draconian action to restore morality to the banking industry as a whole then so be it, for it is surely lacking. I heard a radio ad the other day, for Nationwide, in which it promises to keep customers informed of changes in the variable interest rates on their savings, and trumpets this as a virtue. Excuse me? That should be a legal requirement, and in very large letters. A couple of years ago, my wife opened an internet savings account with Barclays. The interest rate was reasonable, but only for the first year. There was a clause hidden away in the small print that she didn’t notice; as a result her money has been earning interest at 0.01%, a rate that goes way beyond miserly and well into the Shylock zone. This from the bank that has just allowed its chief operating officer, the man at the heart of the Libor scandal, to walk away with a pay-off of £8.75m. (Hopefully he has left a contact address with the SFO.)

Thanks for those tips.I’d love to join you in a glass of Erath Hills pinot noir, (or pinot gris for that matter) but Oregon wines are hard to find where I live.

Okay, I haven’t been active on the blog for the last month or so; if apologies are due, you have them. There have been several reasons for my absence; most of  them were family-related, but also I’d become just plain bored by the main issues of the day. I was tired of the constant wrangling between the partners in our so-called Westminster coalition, an enterprise that was doomed to mediocrity from day one, since the Lib Dems can’t stand the Tories, the Tories all hate Vince C able, and nobody really knows who Nick Clegg is. I didn’t care who won the French election . . . although the French people will soon be caring a great deal, I reckon. I didn’t care whether Greece left the euro, even though the only solid reason I can see for it staying in is that in supporting it Germany is weakening itself, and making it less able to dominate the rest of mainland Europe. I did and still do care about the under-capitalised Spanish banks and the toxicity they piled upon themselves by handing out 110% mortgages more or less for the asking, but there’s nothing I can do about them, other than take advantage of the improving £/€  exchange rate. I had passed my boredom threshold  with the slow lingering death of  Rangers Football Club. (It really is dead, you know. Yes, I know ten guys in blue shirts and a goalie struggled past Brechin City yesterday, but they are in no way the lineal descendants of Alan Morton, Corky Young, Bob McPhail, Jerry Dawson, Jim Baxter, et al. I’m sorry, Ally; you are a lion, but you’re working for donkeys, and  the former temple which is still your home has become a mausoleum.)

So what’s prompted me to come back? Disgust, mainly. We’re three days into the Olympics and our cancerous media seem hell bent on digging up as many knocking stories as they can manufacture. For example, last night after the England/Wales select football match at Wembley, well won by the home team,  Sky Sports News stationed a reporter and crew outside studying the time it took to leave the stadium. Yes, it takes a while to clear 90,000 punters from any venue of that size, but so what? Fact was, Sky’s ace reporter couldn’t find a single punter who was prepared to complain about it on camera. The next non-story was the loss of a set of keys to some secure areas of Wembley. Yes, it happened: last week. There was never a security risk, and all the locks have been changed, yet Sky described it as an ’embarrassing incident’. Go back three days to the first England/Wales select match. What did the Online Daily Mail (where the real pond life can be found) choose to highlight? Ryan Giggs wasn’t seen to be singing the national anthem; somehow this was transformed into and reported as a deliberate snub by all the Welsh players in the squad.

I began my working life as a journalist. I worked alongside some great reporters, all of whom had two things in common; their integrity, and the fact that they knew a genuine news story from a pile of shite. There don’t seem to be any of them left.

The feedback for Funeral Note has been astounding, so I hope that correspondents can accept this as a collective response. I thank everyone for their constructive comments. Now I must explain something. The book isn’t so much a ‘Whodunnit?’ more of a ‘Whogotdun?’, but I have played by the accepted rules. There is a very big clue, and I’m surprised that so far only Cheryl Horne has got it. (Well done, Cheryl.) Alongside there’s another way of solving the puzzle, and I’m amazed that so far nobody has got that. If there is a cliff-hanger, it’s one word. ‘Why?’

I missed this on the night, but it’s worth catching up on.

Hah! Is that so? Maybe you should consider dumping him, n the ground of lack of imagination.

Today, I’m worrying about the state of the world, because of a lady’s kindness.

Yesterday my wife and I were on a train, bound for Barcelona, when she had a coughing fit, a bad one, the kind that makes your face go puce and wonder if your lungs are coming up. And I was helpless. There was nothing I could do but hold her hand and make sure she had water to sip, when she could. The guy in the seat in front, he was pissed off , for sure. Well wouldn’t you be? There  you are, listening to Europop on your iPod, and you can hardly hear it for some bloody woman. He looked around, and had the good sense to look away again. I was not at my best, that was for sure.

Then a quiet voice, unexpectedly English, said to me, ‘Give her this. It’s lavender, and it will ease her breathing,’ as she handed me a tissue that she’d soaked from a small bottle. She was right; it worked, the paroxysm passed over and the rest of the journey was calm. We both thanked her as we all got off the train at Passeig de Gracia, but she simply smiled and went on her way. I have no idea who she was, and there isn’t a cat’s chance in Butch’s kennel that I’ll ever find out, but on the off-chance, if anyone does know a tall, slim auburn-haired lady who caught the Medio Distancia from Flaça to Barcelona yesterday morning, please put me in touch with her, as Eileen and I would like to send her something in return.

So why am I worried about the state of the world? It’s because such a simple, kind, personal gesture from one stranger to another has become such a rarity that when it happens, it’s both astonishing and moving. Would I have done something similar? Before yesterday, I’m not sure; today, I’d like to think so.  So thanks again, Ms Whoever-you-are. We need more like you.

We’re travelling back to Scotland tomorrow, exchanging 32c for around half that. Am I looking forward to it? Yes, and no.

I’ve been getting a lot of ‘OMG!’s about  the ending of Funeral Note. Next one, next year; title, in due course.

I’ve just read a piece on the BBC website by a man called Adam Gopnik, on how an author should deal with a bad review. My review of Mr Gopnik’s article is short and sweet; it would have been twice as good if it had been half as long. He may take that or he may leave it; his choice, but I’d recommend the latter, since it wasn’t written with malice in mind.

How do I deal with them? Mostly, I do not react, unless I feel that the reviewer is being personally offensive, in which case he or she will get to know about it. Reviews on Amazon are the exception to that policy; that facility offers, in my view, an open door to wannabes, egomaniacs and idiots, and they are all best left to their own devices. It’s a pity that it isn’t more carefully moderated, since there are some valid points made there and valid views expressed, but they tend to be suffocated by the dross. In basing judgements and purchase choices on Amazon reviewer ratings, it’s worth noting that they give Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, four stars out of five in book form, and four and a half in Kindle.

To any would-be reviewers among you, and indeed to any professional reviewers, remember this; however qualified to comment on someone else’s work you may believe you are, you are simply an individual with a keyboard, expressing an individual opinion. Whatever you thought of a work, that is your view and yours alone. Every  person who reads a book, whoever the author might be, will form a unique mental picture of the events described.  Some will agree with you, some won’t; do you have the right to dissuade any of them from finding out for themselves?

A trip on a Lothian Tour Bus? That’s not a bad idea; I may take you up on it.

Happy birthday our Mia, two today . . . or as she says ‘dos’.

I’ve been watching, slightly out of sequence, the second series of BBCtv’s above average drama ‘Silk‘. For me, this one was made by the performance of the brilliant Phil Davies, who seems to be in the prime of his career, and the ominous Frances Barber, who’s probably a pussy-cat at home but who does an excellent on-camera line in formidable women. It looks as if she will return in series three, but I don’t see an opening for Phil, not after the way it finished

I have only one complaint. I thought the director went a little far with the detail of Billy’s prostate investigation. It can’t have encouraged too many guys to have symptoms checked out. For those who watched it and wondered, as I did, what was the song that Billy had on his player as he went through the scan, it was ‘Puncture Repair‘, by Elbow. (Down-market Coldplay, IMO.) Appropriate.

Thanks for your good wishes. In fact the next Skinner novel is created. Sorry, my fingers didn’t bleed, not even a wee bit.

National perceptions can be so unfair. I read this first, mistakenly as ‘Australian’.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/austria/9334182/Wildlife-camera-catches-Austrian-politician-having-sex-in-forest.html

Didn’t think an Austrian would have had it in him . . . or her.