Le Longue Carabine in John Irving Country

OR…The Inland Home of the US navy

We travelled through Vermont and on to Hanover, New Hampshire for the weekend.

It is very interesting how place names here originated. The uninitiated could be forgiven for thinking the names of all north European towns were loaded into a bag which was then emptied randomly across a map of North America. We travelled through Whitehall, Rutland, and Woodstock before arriving at Hanover. Hanover is home to Dartmouth College which is part of the US Ivy League of universities.

Whitehall, believe it or not is famous for being the birthplace of the US Navy despite being inland and in Upstate New York. It is all to do with its location on Lake Champlain which was a strategic location in the revolutionary war. In 1776, Congress ordered General Philip Schuyler to construct a fleet of ships capable of countering an expected British invasion. This first US Naval fleet of thirteen ships added to the four already patrolling Lake Champlain was constructed during the summer of 1776. Led by Benedict Arnold, the action of this fleet at the battle of Vancour in October of that year caused a delaying action that ultimately saved the American Forces at Saratoga. This naval fleet was the only one to see active service in the Revolutionary War. The current day US Navy doesn’t seem to want to have much to do with Whitehall; maybe that’s because Mr. Arnold changed sides a bit later.

The rest of the journey through Vermont followed the path of Hurricane Irene. It was shocking to see some of the damage caused. A mangled metal bridge lying in the river. Houses ripped apart and seemingly irreparable. Complete tracts of land washed away and changing the landscape. Lots of families seemed to be living in Recreation Vehicles (caravans). In Woodstock it was Wassailing Parade Day.  Wassailing apparently has its roots in the middle Ages and seems very similar to the tradition of carol singing. Nevertheless, Woodstock is a very picturesque little town and not dissimilar to its counterpart in Oxfordshire.

The ambience of Woodstock is continued in Hanover. The Ivy League originated as an athletic community eight private institutions of higher education in north eastern USA. The eight institutions that make up the Ivy League are Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, Pennsylvania and Yale. The town of Hanover was like a smaller version of Oxford or Cambridge and a very pleasant weekend was had by all. It was made all the better when I was informed of the Arsenal result against Everton as we sat down to dinner in The Canoe Club, a very nice restaurant in town.

Hawkeye

Divorce?

Looks like it is all about divorce in England. The Scots are divorcing us, whilst canoodling with Europe, and the UK, well England, Wales and Northern Ireland, are about to divorce Europe.

The European Union needs a new look, bound together as it is by mid 20th Century agreements and treaties. But this financial crisis must not be allowed to fuel the Euro sceptics’ ambitions for total separation. Now is the time for the UK to be making European friends not creating enemies.

Must say I am an inveterate Europhile and a London without Europe, as in the ‘green hill far away without a city wall’ is a horrifying prospect. Over here politicians, press and media constantly fail to mention the hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Brits who live and work in other European countries.  London itself is now a modern European capital and must remain so. Isolation is not an option.

The weather here is gorgeous after the storms and hurricanes and even snow of the last week.  Of course in London all we had were strong gusts of winds. But now, fabulous dawns, clear blue day time skies criss crossed with frozen jet streams and vivid sunsets. A chill in the air but unseasonably mild, with temperatures above the norm. Seems that temperatures in Winter in London are always above the norm, which begs the question…no, leave it.

But speaking of divorce tomorrow is a day for Mikel Arteta to confront his old flame. Really looking forward to the game.

Carmon Arsenal, Carmon Arsenal, Carmon Arsenal

Frank

 

 

Shame about Manchester…

What a rotten shame...

All that remains after last nights results.

All credit to James Chadderton.

 

Frank

 

 

 

Well I never!

Moving to a new house soon and we have to buy a washer and dryer. Went to a place called the Home Depot; it’s like a Homebase or a B&Q to look for the appliances. Whilst looking around I overheard one of the staff speaking in an English accent so I asked for his help. Very nice and helpful bloke. My wife asks him where he comes from,  “Billericay” he says. She then says “and are you an Arsenal supporter?” I am thinking if he is from Billericay he won’t be an Arsenal fan but he says “yes, I’ve been a gooner since the 1979 Cup Final”.

Turns out they also lived in Woking close to my last home. His wife, who is a US citizen and social worker, got a job with Surrey CC and they got priority housing. Despite that they couldn’t cope with the cost of living so returned to her Mother Country. The way things appear to be going here it could end up in a very similar situation to the UK. Will the country of the Revolution stand for that?

The answer that the Occupy movement or the 99% would give would definitely be no and a week ago I was hoping either or both movements would gain some purchase the way The Tea Party did.

Now I am beginning to wonder if it will be 1968 all over again. I’ll have to think about that comment before I expand on it but that’s my call at the moment.

Got my Green Card last week and I am told to expect my Social Security Card in th enext week so I could be looking for work in the New Year although I am far from bored at the moment!

I was watching the Republican Presidential Candidate Debate with my 80 year old Mother-in Law earlier this evening. None of the candidates are particularly impressive and Herman Cain is an absolute buffoon but she  remarked, “you know, three years ago I thought the good Republican candidates had held back from the nominations because they knew Obama would win but if I was a Republican the only one I could vote would be Newt Gingrich because he is making them all look like idiots.” Of course, she is not a Republican and NG has been around the block so often he just knows how to present himself.

Hawkeye

An extra hour to rewatch Arsenal beat Chelsea

Entire family sat down to watch yesterday including my rather frail parents. Little one’s birthday weekend.

RvP was exceptional, what a hattrick.  Gervinho is really sparkling now. Great to watch. Theo was in his element. Mikel Arteta and Alex Song worked their arses off, and Aaron is moving up the gears. Great to see TV back on the pitch. Andre Santos is something else a real attacking left back, gets caught for pace in defence sometimes but that will change, he has great technical ability and a wonderful shot. Great to see Carl make an appearance at the end, Johan did a reasonable job but he is not a right back really. Per still has to get used to the pace and positioning in the EPL but he will adjust. Kos is just Kos, getting better and better. TR is going from strength to strength this season and held midfield very well when he came on. I think we have potentially the best keeper in world.

Our support was just fabulous yesterday. Great to see Robin hand his shirt to a bloke with more piercings than St Sebastian.

Not surprisingly the press response to this great victory is that Arsenal’s defence is poor and we will struggle to keep Robin. They wheeled out George Graham to bemoan the fact that we don’t bore the arse off the fans anymore with a solid 1-0 performance built from the back. Our football is just too damned interesting.  Neville the arsehole even got angry about the defending. No Manc agenda there..oh no. What a bunch of fucking fuckers. It was great to see two teams with the gloves off going for each other and there is only going to be one winner in a game like that.

Fantastic game of football, hawkeye, you will enjoy it.

Frank

Hello America, this is London calling

Glad you got to NY State OK, Ian. RvP was magnificent as a last twenty sub in the Stoke game. Not a one man team though. Gervinho was fantastic. Song (captains innings), Mertesacker, Koscielny, Santos, Ramsay, Arteta all had great games. Chamakh is getting his mojo back too. Not one bad performance.

Youngsters and new boys despatched Bolton tonight. Excellent.

Jeep Patriot hey? Just hope they don’t bring out a Jeep Braveheart!The sooner the American colonies start paying their taxes to the mother country again the better I reckon.

Frank

What goes around comes around

One day in 2007 I saw a bloke sitting on the top of a moving parking control vehicle apparently trying to wrench the roof camera off its mounting. The terrified traffic control ‘officers’ inside the van had given up trying to get him off the roof and instead had opted for driving to the nearest Police Station. He didn’t care. He had probably passed the point of no return.

I assumed that he was so outraged at what he saw as an enormous intrusion in his life that he was prepared to risk his life and to suffer the legal consequences of his actions. Wouldn’t be surprised if the Armed Response Unit were waiting for him at Plod Central. ‘We are armed Police. Put down the camera and remove yourself from the roof of the vehicle’……probably about 37 of them in 25 vehicles. Blocked roads. Stripey tape. Trained negotiators. Megaphones. Helicopter. The works.

Of course it may just have been a terrible mistake and he was in fact a mobile camera engineer having a very bad day.

One of those days though. You could just feel it. I passed Simon the Seer earlier in the day and he smiled at me. He only has one tooth in his upper set. When he smiles it is just a black maw with one stalagtite dangling down. Nothing good ever happens when Simon smiles. Most days he plays a three string fiddle outside of a Romanian charity shop on the high street. Straight faced of course, very serious. He knows everything, a real Oracle. Well that’s the locals’ take on it. If he smiles at you he knows something. Something really bad.   

That same day I headed home at a leisurely pace. Lady Neena and I had been visiting old friends on the site of Barnet Fair. I was unhitching her in the yard when my wife ran out of the kitchen.

‘My God, he has been assassinated’  she shouted

‘Who has?’ I replied

‘Dein….David Dein’

‘What the fuck? Somebody has killed David Dein? Who has? What happened? When?’

‘Dunno, Somebody tried to cut him up’

‘Chrissakes, Delilah, calm down and tell me what has happened’

‘I was listening to the wireless, trying to find the Archers, I really can’t tune the bloody thing. Anyway out of the crackle I heard a newsman say that David Dein has been axed’

‘Axed! Axed! Dearie me, Delilah, this is London, not the North, you must realise that down here ‘axed’ means sacked? You know, lost his job, fired, given the boot, thrown out?…… Doesn’t matter though it will be a disaster either way. I can’t believe the idiots would do this. Not now. Of all times, not now.’ 

What happened, of course, is now public knowledge. Or is it? Received wisdom is that David Dein was removed from the Arsenal Board because, behind their backs, he had attempted to persuade a wealthy benefactor to take over the club. Stan Kroenke was the benefactor’s name.  But I don’t get this ‘going behind the Board’s back business’, it seems petulant and unprofessional of the Board to eject a major asset at a time when you probably need him most. If Danny Fiszman was indicating that he wanted out then surely it was right to find buyers for any available shares. Whether other Board members knew who DD was talking to is irrelevant, he could hardly have sold their shares behind their backs could he? The guy was out there networking like crazy on behalf of the club for years and years. What did they expect him to do? No. I don’t buy it. Never have. I have always thought there was something strange about that decision and their actions were unforgivable.  To this day I still think that it was linked to G14, the strategic direction of the top clubs in the English Premier League, UEFA, FIFA. The Board were duped.

Anyway, no matter. Water under the bridge as they say.  I just thought that I would share this with you now that Stan Kroenke is about to take over the club. If you are even remotely interested in the history of the EPL you may want to listen to a story from the lips of a man who was there in the thick of it….  

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-ymfpXEIBI

by Frank

Some things never change…

A farmer named Sid is overseeing his stock in a remote moorland pasture in North Yorkshire  when suddenly a brand-new BMW advances towards him out of a cloud of dust.
         
 The driver, a young man with a grey mullet in a Brioni suit (whatever that is), Gucci shoes (whatever they are), RayBan sunglasses and YSL (Yoghurt Sausage Leotard?, fuck knows)  tie, leans out the window and asks the farmer, “If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, will you give me a calf?”   
                 
Sid looks at the man, then looks around the field and calmly answers, “Aw Care”.

‘What?’ says the young chap

‘Aw care, geron wi it’  
  
‘Oh right, will do’

The young fellow, who had just celebrated his 48th birthday,  parks his car, pulls out his Dell notebook, connects it to his Cingular RAZR V3 cell phone, and surfs to a NASA page on the Internet, where he calls up a GPS satellite to get an exact fix on his location, which he then feeds to another NASA satellite that scans the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo. 
         
The young buck then opens the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop and exports it to an image processing facility in Hamburg , Germany  
           
Within seconds, he receives an email on his Palm Pilot that the image has been processed and the data stored. He then accesses an MS-SQL database through an ODBC connected Excel spreadsheet with email on his Blackberry and, after a few minutes, receives a response.     
 
Finally, he thinks about printing out a full-colour, 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturized HP LaserJet printer, but he has run out of paper. Nevertheless he  turns to the farmer and says, “You have exactly 1,586 cows and calves.”         
                 
“Raht. Well, ye may av won o me caaaaarves” sez Sid. 
         
He watches the young chap select one of the animals and looks on angrily as he stuffs it into the back of his car. 
               
Then Sid says to the young un, “Hey, if ah cun tell e exactly what your biznis is, will ye give me back me caaarf?”        
       
 The young man thinks about it for a second and then says, “Okay, why not?”
       
 ”You’re a fuckin futbahl pundit int Lundun ont Sky”, says Sid.
         
 ”Wow! That’s correct,” says the youngster, “but how did you guess that?” 
   
“Naw guessing required.” answers Sid. “Yuh show up ere even thaw nawbody’s carled yuh; yuh want to get peared fuh t’answer I already gnaw, to a question I aven’t even asked. Yuh ewes millions of paarnds wuth o equipment traying to shaw meh ow much smaaarter than me yooo aah; peared fah bah advitarzin ah hairt coz yuh doornt avon start program at kick off; and yuh doawnt t’ gnaw a thing about ow wucking people mek a livin - are abaht cows are fuckin futbahl for that mattuh……. This is a flock o sheep, mon”.

Nah gi meh back meh dog….and fuck off”

You know who you are.  Beware

By Frank (..and Cathy and Lorna)

Just got back….

Just got back from the game.

I have been on the run from Plod for since yesterday  afternoon. It seems that one of the more vigilant hobby bobbies was onto my post-match scam. Many of you may be aware of the ‘blockade’ between Hornsey Road and Holloway Road set up by the gentlemen and women in dayglo and blue after the match. Why that particular way out of the stadium is blocked is anyone’s guess. Personally I think that it is something to do with the massage parlour located at just that point, behind the chip shop. Many a time I have seen a sergeant or two leaving that establishment doing up their flies, looking furtively around, and signalling to the next lucky chap.  

Anyway rather than walk hundreds of miles back to the stall or suffer the indignity of standing for hours in a packed crowd whilst two banks of policemen hurl silent abuse, I settled on a scheme to smuggle people out…and make a bob or two at the same time.    

A friend of mine works at the Whittington Hospital, Archway Wing if anyone is interested, and he let me have a consignment of wheel-chairs and crutches. It has been obvious to many of us who hang around that particular ‘exit’ leering at Plod that these fellas are a sucker for an invalid. Turn up pushing a wheel chair or using crutches and they invariably let you through. I even managed to get through once by talking absolute gibberish and scratching myself furiously.

I put my idea into operation yesterday. Handed out wheelchairs and crutches on the Arsenal Stadium side of the barrier. Fiver a chair, two quid for a crutch. The idea was that any successful escapees leave the chair or the crutch in the alley just before Holloway Road on the left. I was making a fortune. Even enjoyed the dramatic ‘Good Luck, Son…see you in Piccadilly’, bit like John Mills….

 ..bit too successful though. After five minutes the Plod blockade were dealing with 47 wheelchairs and 35 men and women with crutches. Things started to get out of hand when they let two wheelchairs through and the encumbents upped and legged it before they had cleared the last Plodmobile. Realising what was happening they tried to stop the remaining wheelchair and crutch users. Sadly some of them were genuine. One old man was physically yanked from his chair by an enthusiastic young officer who found to his embarassment that the old chap had no legs. Lost them in the last war. 1939-45 that is. Blokes of his age always refer to that as the last war ignoring the hundreds of others that have happened since.   

Pretty soon there was mayhem. Wheelchairs and crutches flying through the air, horses pushing their way through the disabled and able bodied alike.  My operation was rumbled and pretty soon I was running for my life, head back, with a rictus grin, pursued by disillusioned punters, policemen and one or two ‘disabled’ folk who had obviously been running their private scam for some time and were not too pleased that the cat was out of the bag.

As for the game…Arsene said it all really. Very bad day at the office. Nothing seemed to gel. I reckon that it was just one of those games. The Baggies deserved their victory bless em. I was proud to be one the hundreds of Arsenal supporters to clap them off the pitch. I hate to lose like that but if we have to have a disastrous game I would rather that it was at this end of the season than at the other.

We will still win the league by a Country Mile…you wait and see.

By Frank  (the real Frank that is)

In Cold Blood….

“Capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders.”
-Albert Camus, French philosopher

At 0100 GMT today, the good people of the United States of America committed cold-blooded, pre-meditated murder. Those who stood by and did or said nothing about the murder of Teresa Lewis are accessories prior to, during and after the fact. Pitiful behaviour from a so-called civilized nation.

The name Ruth Ellis springs to mind on days like today. Ruth was hanged in Holloway Prison on Parkhurst Road less than a mile away from the Arsenal Stadium on 13th July 1955. The football close season. She shot her racing driver boyfriend outside the Magdala pub just off Hampstead Heath whilst suffering from a recent miscarriage. The execution marked a low point in British legal history, though some believe that the case lead to the eventual abolition of capital punishment in this country. Poor Ruth was the last victim of British legal misogynists at the time, who were probably turned on the by the idea of a young woman bound, gagged and hooded…dangling at the end of a rope. 

55 years later it seems that Americans get off on a more sterile fantasy. The white coats, the smell of hospitals and a defenseless woman strapped to a cart. Grotesque and pitiful…

“What says the law? You will not kill. How does it say it? By killing!”
-Victor Hugo, author of Les Miserables

By Frank