News from Kernow

Time to move on like Phil Ochs!

2007-11-18T23:19:00.001Z

Having been promoted to the higher echelons of a sham democracy, where I can set the rules for 100 percent of the population, whilst only 27 percent of the people voted for my party I am now DICTATOR IN CHIEF. I therefore order you to go to

primeministersquestiontime.blogspot.com

where you will receive further orders. Meanwhile listen to a genius:-

ComradeGordovich

Shitty day - trying to get an old UNION MAN to

2007-11-16T00:02:00.006Z

reconnect with the world, If he doesn't he will die, and I don't want that to happen.

Under Old Mother Thatcher in the 1970's, individuals and whole communities were wiped out and some have never recovered. Some of us, God knows why have survived and have handed the torch on to a new generation.
When we are gone, whatever, they can step over the ground where we lie and know that we point in the direction of the new Jerusalem.

The flying pickets:-

The Strawbs

Nanci Griffith - It's a hard life!

Gornphissing

Brass bands, Badges and Union solidarity!

2007-11-14T01:42:00.000Z

The three go together. We stand united or we fall together. No pure union man/woman like, Brian and Pat have, and never will let me down. We stand united for the cause of justice and human rights.

As for the working classes music, beat this.

Brothers and Sisters indeed, we will never be defeated.

GorgIneedtothinkaboout this.

James Dean.

2007-11-13T01:10:00.000Z

Jim Dean Of Indiana
By Phil Ochs

Intro: Bm A Bm Esus4
A D Bm E
It was on an Indiana farm in the middle of the country
D G F#m C#m Esus4
Growin' in the fields of grain, Jim Dean of Indiana

His mother died when he was a boy, his father was a stranger
Marcus Winslow took him in, nobody seemed to want him
The hired man sang like a storm(?), sometimes he'd beat him
'Cause he would never do the chores, he was lost in dreaming

He never seemed to find a play with the flatlands and the farmers
So he had to leave one day, he said to be an actor
Once he'd come back to the farm with starlets from the stages
They locked themselves inside his room, the people turned their faces

A neighbor ran from the movie house, chickens they were scattered
He swore he saw upon the screen, Jim Dean of Indiana
He played a boy without a home, torn with no tomorrow
Reaching out to touch someone, a stranger in the shadow

The Winslows left for the movie town, they drove across the country
They hoped that he would stay around and they hoped he would be friendly
He talked to them for half an hour but he was busy racing
He left for the Grapevine Road[1], they left for Indiana

Then Marcus heard on the radio that a movie star was dying
He turned the tuner way down low, so Ortense could go on sleeping
It was not until they reached the farm where the hired man was waiting
The wind rushed silent through the grain, it was just as they had told him

They buried him just down the road, a mile from the farm house
That is where I placed a flower for Jim Dean of Indiana.

Notes:
1. The Grapevine is the highway that goes over the mountains from Southern California into the Central Valley. It was here that James Dean had his auto accident. (Michael Gutierrez) Max Crittenden corrects this saying that "the accident occurred about a hundred miles farther northwest, at the intersection of highways 41 and 46."
Gordthey were both geniuses.

Greatest beers and lagers of the world.

2007-11-13T00:17:00.000Z

It's strange but smell and taste always remind you of time and place. About four years ago I was lucky enough to visit Prague and o our final day we found this wonderful pub, close to a bridge over the Danube. We ordered "dark beer" and here it is, empty now though - vunderbar!
Gordhealth!

Goalkeepers are Crazy!

2007-11-13T00:10:00.000Z

Both of my knees are shot and I have to go into hospital shortly, to have the gunge cleared out. This has come about after years of pretending to be the great Lev Yashin, which of course I wasn't.
The consultant, who is not a football man, said if you must be a goalie then when you leap up to tip a save over the bar don't land on your knees but do a single twist and land on your arse. This, apparently stops the knee damage.
Goalies of the world, are you listening?
Gordonsaves

Anthem for Doomed Youth

2007-11-11T19:02:00.000Z

On this day, on the eleventh hour, of the eleventh month of 1918 World War 1 ended. And Wilfred Owen's mother received a telegram, from the War Office informing her, that her son, Wilfred Owen, had been killed in action, a few days before:-
Anthem for Doomed Youth.
By Robert Owen

Wilfred Owen (1893 - 1918)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Anthem for Doomed Youth
What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
- Only the monstruous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, -
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

When Johhny Comes Marching Home.

2007-11-11T15:38:00.000Z

Jock Milne R.I.P.

2007-11-11T14:01:00.000Z

Jock was our neighbour during the war. He was a communist and a conscientious objector. Out of some warped and dreadful malice he was therefore assigned to the bomb disposal squad, whose job was to diffuse unexploded weapons - mainly bombs.
Although he survived the war only 2 out of his unit, including Jock, survived such was the risk these brave men took.
Winston Chuchill said of them, "I have never seen men with faces so grey and haggered", I wonder why?
Gorpleasenomorewar

Pengelly's do it Drekly in Kernow plus Old Latymerians!

2007-11-10T00:34:00.000Z

I have finally got back my fine ebony clock which took two years to repair in east Kernow. See above - lugger ticks too hard Kernow, I can't sleep.

The book was presented, as a one off prize - coat of arms and all, to a pupil of Latymer school in 1923. Any bids please Old Latymerians?

Gordwhataday

Pakistan and it's weapons of mass destruction.

2007-11-08T08:42:00.000Z

Will Bush and Brown be invading this country, which is run by a power mad despot who owns weapons of mass destruction? If not then these two evil liars, who have killed thousands of Iraqi innocents, are inconsistent hypocrites.
Come on Condy pull your teeth out!
Godiswatching

Sponzi's Delicatessen & Caterer's

2007-11-06T23:47:00.000Z

Giovanni 'e Christine Sponziello bring you the very best of Italy.

Specialita

Auteentica e qualita Italiana.

Olio/Pasta/Salse/Salami/Formaggi.

Lecce/Tavistock

Telephone: 01822 614247

In one corner of a quadrangle surrounding Tavistock's Pannier Market you will find an Alladin's cave of wonderful Italian food - the best in the world. Do not take my word for it, go and see. They are wonderful friendly people , who will offer you conversation and genorousity.
GordonsoldonItalia

BANKSY.

2007-11-06T22:26:00.001Z

NO Comment!

I support China!

Nuff said!

The real reason why the liars Bush and Blair went into Iraq!

I try hard to understand the Israeli point of view. After the terrors of the holocaust, of course they need to protect themselves. But having gone through the horrors of genocide, why torture, maim, kill and separate Palestinian from Palestnian by building this obscene wall.
Robert Frisk, writing in Pity the Nation wrote this brilliant article entitled "THE KEYS OF PALESTINE"

It is a tragedy of both our people. How can I explain in my poor English? I think the Arabs have the same rights as the Jews and I think it is a tragedy of history that a people who are refugees make new refugees. I have nothing against the Arabs ... They are the same as us. I don’t know that we Jews did this tragedy — but it happened.

Shlomo Green, Jewish refugee from the Nazis, on learning that his home in Israel was taken from a Palestinian family in 1948.

Editor’s note: In 1990, Robert Fisk, the British foreign correspondent in Beirut, published PITY THE NATION, an enormous narrative of the war in Lebanon during the 1970s and 1980s, based on his dispatches for the London Times, for whom then wrote; he is now with the Independent. The book has just been re-issued. The chapter printed here offers, as the book does, a view from the ground of how terrible, deep-rooted, and complex is the unended conflict in the Middle East. Reading it, we are also moved to ask, What then is the journalist’s obligation? In the preface, Fisk gives his answer:

I think I was in Lebanon because I believed, in a somewhat undefined way, that I was witnessing history — that I would see with my own eyes a small part of the epic events that have shaped the Middle East since the Second World War. At best, journalists sit at the edge of history as vulcanologists might clamber to the lip of a smoking crater, trying to see over the rim, craning their necks to peer over the crumbling edge through the smoke and ash at what happens within. Governments make sure it stays that way. I suspect that is what journalism is about — or at least what it should be about: watching and witnessing history and then, despite the dangers and constraints and our human imperfections, recording it as honestly as we can.

However, in recent speeches and articles, Fisk has refined his definition of the journalist’s task, by quoting, and agreeing with, his colleague Amira Hass, of Ha’aretz. He writes: “‘There is a misconception that journalists can be objective,’ she tells me…. ‘Palestinians tell me I’m objective. I think this is important because I’m an Israeli. But being fair and being objective are not the same thing. What journalism is really about – it’s to monitor power and the centres of power.’”

—KM

When David Roberts toured the Holy Land, he was an explorer as well as an artist, a romantic who filtered the hot and crude realities of the Middle East through a special screen. As he journeyed on horseback through Palestine and then up the coast of southern Lebanon in the 1830s, he was an adventurer, staying overnight with the governor of Tyre, crossing the snows of the Chouf mountain chain to the gentleness of the Bekaa Valley where he sketched the great temples of the Roman city of Heliopolis.

In the world that he created, there were no wars, no political disputes, no dangers. His lithographs of Palestinian villages and of Lebanon, of Tyre and the peninsula of Ras Naqourra, of the temples of Baalbek, are bathed only in the peace of antiquity, a nineteenth-century dream machine that would become more seductive as the decades saw the collapse of the Turkish and then of the British Empire.

For today, Roberts’ delicate sketches and water-colours of Ottoman Palestine can be found in the hallways, bedrooms and living rooms of tens of thousands of Palestinians in Lebanon. In the dust of the great Elin Helweh Palestinian camp just east of Sidon, cheap copies of Roberts’ prints — of Nablus, of Hebron, of Jericho and Jerusalem — are hung on the cement walls of refugee shacks, behind uncleaned glass, sometimes held in place by Scotch tape and glue. His pictures of Lebanon’s forgotten tranquillity hang in Lebanese homes too. Volumes of Roberts’ prints of Lebanon and Palestine can be bought in stores all over Beirut. They can be purchased in almost every tourist hotel in Israel. They are a balm in which anyone can believe.

In Roberts’ drawing of Jaffa, the old city seems to bend outwards with domes and minarets and dusty tracks, watched from a distance by a pastoral couple with a donkey. At Acre, the ramparts of Richard Coeur de Lion’s massive fortress stretch down to a tideless Mediterranean while tiny Arab figures promenade in the dusk past the serail. From time to time, the dun-coloured hills are washed with a light green, faint proof for the Palestinians perhaps that the desert bloomed before the Israelis created their state. In his epic landscape of Jerusalem executed in April of 1830, Roberts draws the Holy City in silhouette, its church towers and minarets, the Dome of the Rock, mere grey outlines against a soft evening sky. Six Arabs — their headdress and robes suggest they are Bedouin — rest beside an ancient well of translucent blue water. A broken Roman column lies beside the pool, its mammoth pedestal a reminder of the immensity of history. Roberts’ prints have become almost a cliché, corrupted by overuse, representative of both a cause and a dream. If it was like that once, why cannot it be so again, a land of peace and tranquillity?

On the wall of my Beirut home, I have one of Roberts’ lithographs of Tyre in southern Lebanon. There in the distance is the great peninsula upon which Alexander built his city, there are the familiar standing Arab figures, the broken Roman masonry in the foreground. One afternoon in 1978, I returned from Tyre after spending 12 hours in the city under Israeli shellfire. The Tyre from which I had travelled was a place of unpaved roads and overflowing sewage, of Palestinian camps and fedayeen guerrillas, of guns and sunken ships and the sharp clap of explosions. Could I relate this in any way to the picture on my livingroom wall? Was this part of the Lebanon I knew? Was it a scene which in later years I would look at with nostalgia, even longing? For the Roman ruins of Tyre, a few of the old Ottoman harbour warehouses, the little Christian streets near the port, are still there. And the Mediterranean, the great pale green sea that sloshes away at the coastline of Phoenicia, this too still shaped our movements and our lives, provided the essential and unchanging link between that distant, unphotographed world of Roberts and the country in which I now lived.

Reading Roberts’ biography, one learns that the world he visited was violent: crossing the snows of the Chouf mountains, he was told that there were gunmen on the road to Baalbek — just as there are today. But this picture hung there on my wall with the depth and serenity of a new world. And if I could enjoy the dream, how much easier for those who were born in Israel or Lebanon or Palestine — or for those who wished to live in the land that was Palestine — to believe in it.

Certainly, the Palestinian Arabs can reflect that when Roberts drew Jerusalem, the Jewish population of the land can have numbered scarcely 10 per cent of the total. There had always been a continued physical Jewish presence there over the centuries; it was for the Jews too an ancient homeland. But eight years before Roberts sat on that hilltop above the city, there were only 24,000 Jews living in Palestine.1 Browse through the second-hand bookshops of Beirut or Jerusalem, however, and the ghosts begin to appear. In 1835, for example, just five years after Roberts had sketched the recumbent city of Jerusalem, we find the French writer Alphonse de Lamartine returning from a visit there to recommend to his readers in VOYAGE TO THE ORIENT that since Palestine did not really constitute a country, it presented remarkable opportunities for imperial or colonial projects.

Within 60 years, the nineteenth-century fascination with the Middle East begins to lose its romantic edge, even for the most mundane travellers. In a broken-backed 1892 edition of John Murray’s HANDBOOK FOR TRAVELLERS IN SYRIA AND PALESTINE which I bought in an antiquarian bookshop in west Beirut, a volume with a faded title in gold on its pale red cover, I discovered an item entitled ‘Muslim Arabs’. These people are, we are told, ‘proud, fanatical and illiterate ... generally noble in bearing, polite in address, and profuse in hospitality; but they are regardless of truth, dishonest in their dealings and secretly immoral in their conduct.’ The Jews, on the other hand, were in the guidebook’s opinion ‘the most interesting people in the land ... The Jews of Palestine are foreigners. They have come from every country on earth ... of late years there has been a remarkable influx of Jews into Palestine, but the Turkish government are striving to hinder their settlement by every means in their power.’

These were the authentic reactions of an imperial Britain to a land which covered its transit routes to the Indian empire. Britain encouraged the growth of Zionism in Palestine in the early years of the First World War because she wanted American Jews to ally their country in the war against Turkey. Since the Tsar was already an ally against German, it was politically inconvenient to demand an end to anti-semitism in Russia. The idea of settling Jews in Palestine, the British Foreign Office cabled two of its ambassadors in 1916, ‘might be made far more attractive to the majority of Jews if it held out to them the prospect that when in course of time the Jewish colonists in Palestine grew strong enough to cope with the Arab population they may be allowed to take the management of the internal affairs of Palestine ... into their own hands ... Our sole object is to find an arrangement which would be so attractive to the majority of Jews as to enable us to strike a bargain for Jewish support.’2

This is cold-blooded business indeed, just as was the Balfour Declaration of 1917 that gave Britain’s support to a Jewish homeland providing that ‘nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine’. The equally earnest Anglo-French Declaration of 1918 promising the Arabs of former Ottoman colonies their independence if they supported the Allies against the Turks fell into much the same category, although it was not a promise that was intended to be kept. As Balfour himself said the following year, ‘in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country.’ So far as Balfour was concerned, Zionism was ‘of far profounder import than the desire and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land [of Palestine]’3 The slaughter on the Somme and at Passchendaele had helped to bring about these conflicting pledges, just as a far more terrible massacre would in the second great European war virtually guarantee the creation of the Jewish state in Palestine. Against these historical profanities, the descendants of those colourfully dressed figures in Roberts’ lithographs stood no hope.

The British themselves began their descent of the bloody staircase the moment Balfour blotted his signature in 1917. As Winston Churchill was to write on a different occasion, ‘at first the steps were wide and shallow, covered with a carpet, but in the end the very stones crumbled under their feet.’ One of the men who had to walk down this precarious companion-way was Malcom MacDonald, the British dominions secretary in 1938, still vainly attempting to reconcile the desperate promises of the First World War before the outbreak of the Second, trying to preserve order in the British mandate of Palestine by restricting Jewish immigration.

Forty years later, I sat in the drawing-room of his home at Sevenoaks in Kent, watching him shake his head vigorously from side to side as he contemplated the ruins of his own efforts to resolve the Palestine problem. The ghosts were more substantial now. Churchill, a strong Zionist supporter, had fiercely condemned MacDonald in the Commons in 1938 and continued his verbal assault afterwards in the Division Lobby of the House of Commons. ‘Churchill accused me of being pro-Arab,’ MacDonald said. ‘He said that Arabs were savages and that they ate nothing but camel dung.’ But the British could avoid turning such disputes into personal grievances with a generosity not available to those who would ultimately be their victims. ‘I could see that it was no good trying to persuade him [Churchill] to change his mind,’ MacDonald said, ‘So I suddenly told him that I wished I had a son. He asked me why and I said I was reading a book called My Early Life by Winston Churchill and that I would want any son of mine to live that life. At this point, tears appeared in Churchill’s eyes and he put his arms around me, saying “Malcolm, Malcom.’” MacDonald sat there in his deep armchair, savouring this story, an old man contemplating lost opportunities. He was to die four years later. He fussed for a while over a large teapot, pouring both of us outsize cups of tea. He put down the pot, stared at the floor for a few seconds and then looked up glowering, pointed his finger at me in a way that was frightening because it was so sudden. ‘But you are living now in Beirut,’ he said, ‘because I failed.’

How could he have succeeded? More ghosts, more photographs intervene. The Yad Vashem memorial on the hills west of Jerusalem is supposed to commemorate the Holocaust. That word ‘supposed’ may anger Jewish readers, but Yad Vashem is not so much a memorial as a political statement. Its documents, its photographs, dictate its theme: that the Holocaust produced the state of Israel and that anyone who opposed the creation of that state is on the level of the Nazis. Thus in the same building as the photographs of SS officers selecting the Jews on the ramps of Birkenau are news pictures of British paratroopers ordering the concentration camp survivors away from postwar Palestine. The British, it says in effect, were like the Nazis; they too were war criminals. When I first visited Yad Vashem in 1978, I found it a place of unanswerable accusation. When I went there in 1987, after my journey to Auschwitz, it seemed somehow facile, an instrument of propaganda that used the horror of what happened in Auschwitz and Treblinka and all the other camps to justify not just the existence of Israel but all that Israel had done since.

It is also a place of accusation against the Arabs of Palestine. For there are pictures at Yad Vashem of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem being greeted in Nazi Germany by Heinrich Himmler. The photographs are perfectly clear. Here we can see Sheikh Haj Amin al-Husseini shaking hands with the leader of the SS, there he proudly inspects a volunteer Muslim contingent of the Wehrmacht. On the wall are his words — an accurate translation — exhorting the German government to prevent the Jews of Europe going to Palestine. The inference is clear: the Muslim religious leader of the Palestinian Arabs is also a war criminal. So why should not his political successors be war criminals? If the Arab Palestinians who saw in the Nazis some hope of preventing Jewish immigration into Palestine were on the same level as the SS, were not those Palestinians who oppose Israel today equally guilty?

The civil war in Palestine that followed the end of hostilities in Europe inevitably embraced the tired holders of the imperial mandate. From the desert of political opposition at Westminster, the old Zionist Churchill contemplated the murder of British troops by Jewish gunmen and pronounced Palestine a ‘hell-disaster’. It was far worse for the Arabs whose homes lay in that part of Palestine in which the United Nations had decided to locate the new state of Israel. Those whom Balfour had described as ‘the existing non-Jewish communities of Palestine’ were about to undergo their first catastrophe.

The Arab armies that invaded the new Israel were driven out, together with between 500,000 and 700,000 Arab Palestinians whose homes had been in that part of Palestine that was now Israel or in those areas of Arab Palestine that the Israelis captured. For decades after their War of Independence, the Israelis claimed that most of the Arab Palestinians had left of their own free will after-being urged by Arab radio stations to leave their homes and take sanctuary in neighbouring states until the Arab armies had conquered the upstart new Israeli nation. Israeli scholars now agree that these radio appeals were never broadcast and that the allegations were fraudulent. The Palestinian Arabs left their homes because they were frightened, often because they had heard stories — accounts which were perfectly true — of the massacre of Arab civilians by Jewish gangs.

The result was inevitable. While the Jews of Israel exulted in their renaissance, the Arabs of Palestine left in despair. From the camps of Europe, those who had avoided the execution pits and the gas chambers had at last reached the Promised Land about which their cantors had sung at Auschwitz. Here, for example, is how the American journalist I. F. Stone describes the last hours of his voyage to Haifa, aboard a Turkish refugee ship called the Akbel, a listing hulk carrying hundreds of concentration camp survivors on their journey to Palestine. The vessel approached the coastline at dawn, somewhere to the north of Mount Carmel.

Shortly before dawn I slept for a while on top of the wheelhouse. I woke to see the dim outlines of a mountain towards the southeast.

As the light increased and the sun rose, a cry ran over the ship.

‘It’s Eretz Israel.’

We saw Mount Carmel ahead of us and the town of Haifa sleeping in the morning sun below us ... The refugees cheered and began to sing Hatikvah, the Jewish national anthem ... People jumped for joy, kissed and hugged each other on the deck.4

And here is the militant Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani recalling an Arab family’s departure from that same country just a few months later:

At Al-Nakura, our truck parked, along with numerous other ones. The men began to hand in their weapons to their officers, stationed there for that specific purpose. When our turn came, I could see the rifles and guns lying on the table and the long queue of lorries, leaving the land of oranges far behind and spreading out over the winding roads of Lebanon. Then I began to weep, howling with tears. As for your mother, she eyed the oranges silently.5

The feelings of joy and despair in these two passages are almost equally balanced, and the Jewish cry of delight on seeing the shore-line of Palestine in the first and the image of Arab guns and hopelessness on leaving Palestine in the second are even more relevant now than they were then. The idea that Israel is the final and true refuge of all Jews — ‘the first and last line of defence of the Jewish people’, as Szymon Datner called it — is as credible to Israelis today as it was in 1948. And amid the hovels of Sabra and Chatila in Beirut, in Ein Helweh, in the Nahr el-Bared camp in Tripoli, in Bourj el-Shemali in Tyre or in Rashidiyeh further south, the guns and the bitterness and tears that Kanafani witnessed have congealed in hatred.

Henceforth, the many thousands of Arabs who fled — like the few thousand who stayed and like the inhabitants of Jerusalem and the West Bank that would shortly be annexed by Jordan — would call themselves Palestinians. The Jews of Palestine were now Israelis. And from the ‘land of oranges’, the new exiles arrived in the West Bank and in Lebanon and in the Kingdom of Transjordan with an identity — as ‘Palestinians’ — that applied to a country that no longer existed, that indeed never did exist as an independent nation. This irony was only accentuated by the refugees’ initial belief that their exile was to be brief, a few days perhaps, at most a month, after which — in the manner of other civilians who had abandoned their homes in the midst of battle — they would return to their houses and fields to resume the life which had been interrupted by war.

It was for this reason that many of them carefully locked their front doors when they left their homes. Those who had time also diligently collected their most important legal documents — the deeds of ownership to property, the maps of their orange groves and fields, their tax returns and their identity papers going back to Ottoman times — and packed them into bags and tins along with family heirlooms and jewellery and their front door keys. With luck, their homes would not be burgled and any disputes that might subsequently arise over their property would be swiftly resolved on production of those impressive-looking deeds, some of them so old that they bore the colophon of the Sublime Porte.

By one of the more subtle cruelties of Middle East history, the papers and the keys were to prove the most symbolic and most worthless of possessions to the Palestinians. They acquired a significance that grew ever more painful as weeks and then months away from home turned into years. Younger Palestinians — Palestinians who were born in Lebanon, for example — can remember how their parents angrily threw the keys away in the early 1950s, how the documents that were guarded with such care in the initial days of exile were mislaid or destroyed as their true meaning became clear; because they proved ownership of a world that had disappeared. For the keys — often made of thick grey iron, sometimes with decorated handles — were in a sense a promise of return, a promise that history inevitable broke. The new owners of those homes forbade any return and then changed the locks.

Yet among the half million Palestinians now living in Lebanon, many stubbornly went on cherishing these keys and their titles of ownership in Palestine. When a Palestinian political identity began to emerge after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war — when the West Bank and Gaza Strip were occupied by the Israeli army — the promise contained in these mundane implements and pieces of paper was somehow renewed. Reminders of humiliation once again became priceless possessions, as emotionally valuable as they had once been legally essential. In Lebanon, where the Palestinian war against Israel was focused once the PLO’s guerilla movement was evicted from Jordan in 1970, they were squirrelled away beneath floors or carpets, sometimes stored in rusting biscuit tins, broken suitcases and ancient trunks, often the way containers in which the refugees carried their most valuable belongings from Palestine in 1948.

Each document is signed by a British mandate official and gives in detail the figures of sale and settlement in the name of the Palestinian who inherited or bought the land. Some of the papers are now torn and others have been heavily creased because they have been re-read and re-folded so many times over the past 41 years. But each of them, surmounted by the royal coat of arms and the monogram of King George VI, carries the authority of the British Crown. Laid across a map of Israel, these documents form a patchwork of disputed ownership, a matrix of lands from northern Galilee to Ashqelon for which there are now in existence two perfectly legal deeds: one, in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv or Beersheba, proving irrefutably that the land is now owned by an Israeli, the other — in Beirut or Amman — showing that the rightful owner is a Palestinian Arab. Placed next to each other, the documents are both a territorial and a political contradiction; one is proof of the existence of Israel, the other carries with it the dream of Palestine.

The first time I ever saw one of the keys was in the Chatila camp in Beirut in 1977. I had been interviewing a family — four young brothers, two sisters, their parents, the children’s paternal grandmother — about their lives in a city that was now dominated by the Syrian army. Were they watched by the Syrian intelligence service? Probably. Had any of the family been arrested? Perhaps. Did Yassir Arafat truly represent them? Of course. And then — because the deepest questions curiously acquire the least importance in such interviews — did they ever really think they would return to ‘Palestine’? At this, the grandmother stood up and shuffled into a little hut-like concrete alcove, her bedroom, and emerged carrying something in a handkerchief. ‘It is from our home in Haifa,’ she said, unwrapping the cloth. And there was her key, its gun-metal grey shaft rusted brown but the handle still gleaming. How many families kept these keys? They did not know. Only the grandmother was old enough to have lived in Palestine. Her son and his family regarded the instrument as the key to ‘their’ home, just as they regarded Haifa as ‘their’ town although they had never been there.

Over the following three years, I was to see the keys again and, more often, the deeds of ownership to lost land. In many cases, they were kept in a container with ageing brown British Palestinian passports, the last used page of which registered their owner’s final departure into exile. Before the fighting started in 1948, some Palestinians had even arranged to take a holiday in case of hostilities and had called at the Lebanese consulate in Palestine to pick up a visa for Beirut. An agreeable sort of departure, a legal exit to which no legal re-entry was ever to be forthcoming. But if it was so easy for me to see this evidence and to talk to those who had substantial proof of their ownership of homes in mandate Palestine, surely it would be no more difficult to go to Israel, find those same homes and — the idea had a special excitement about it — to knock on those same front doors. Who would open them?

What I did not realise then — but what I would discover the moment I embarked on my journey to those front doors — was that I had touched upon the essence of the Arab-Israeli war; that while the existence of the Palestinians and their demand for a nation lay at the heart of the Middle East crisis, it was the contradiction inherent in the claims to ownership of the land of Palestine — the ‘homeland’ of the Jews in Balfour’s declaration — which generated the anger and fear of both Palestinians and Israelis. The evidence of history, not to mention the physical evidence of those land deeds, suggested a subject of legitimate journalistic inquiry: who legally as well as morally had the right to ownership of the property? To the Palestinians, the question appeared naive, almost insulting. In their eyes, they were not refugees but legal inhabitants of Palestine who were illegally exiled. Their homes had belonged to them, had been taken away from them and were now in the hands of others. Merely to ask the question was to imply that the justice of their cause was in doubt. To the Israelis, however, and to their supporters in the Jewish diaspora, the same question struck at the very morality of Zionism. To knock on those front doors, it transpired, was to cast doubt upon the very legitimacy of the state of Israel.

It mattered not that after weeks of interviews with 35 Palestinian families in Lebanon, I chose to write about the experiences only of those who had no immediate connection with the Palestinian guerrilla movement. It proved of no consequence that I then chose only those four families who still possessed their original Palestine passports, complete land deeds and mandate tax returns. The fact that three of these families had been moderately wealthy in Palestine and had managed to acquire the same social status in their exile — that they behaved and looked like millions of middle-class couples in Europe, or indeed in Israel — only compounded my error. I set off from Beirut for Jerusalem in the late autumn of 1980; and the moment I entered Rafi Horowitz’s office in Jerusalem, I realised that I had set myself no easy assignment. Horowitz was an Israeli government spokesman, a middle-aged man with an angry, almost bitter way of explaining what happened to the Arabs of the old Palestine mandate. Every few minutes, he would break off to apologise for his own cynicism. ‘You’ve got to realise that the state of Palestine never existed,’ he said. ‘The Arabs went to war with us in 1948 to destroy our Jewish state. Please excuse us for winning.’

Outside, in the rainy winter evening, the rush-hour traffic still clogged Jaffa Road. It had taken almost half an hour to reach his office along streets jammed with tourist coaches, the Americans inside staring through the windows at the neon Tel Aviv highway sign that glowed through the drizzle. The advertisement hoardings, the posters on the buses, the names above the shops — all were in Hebrew. A pretty Israeli girl had been selling magazines in the little paper-shop on the corner. ‘That’ll be two dollars,’ she said. ‘Have a nice day.’ She sounded like a clerk at a Manhattan bookstore. Could this really once have been Palestine?

It is a question that immediately caused irritation in the office of Israel’s official spokesman. Ask just who legally owns the land in Israel — who owns the deeds to the houses and orchards and blocks of property parcelled out under the British mandate — and the irritation turns to open annoyance. Horowitz left the room for a moment and returned with a slim red volume entitled Land Ownership in Palestine 1880-1948. It was written by Moshe Aumann of the Israel Academic Committee on the Middle East and its 24 pages are sprinkled with quotations stretching back a hundred years — from Mark Twain and Lamartine to Lord Milner and the 1937 Palestine Royal Commission — all of which assert that Palestine was a land of brigandage, destitution and desert before the mass immigration of Jews in the late 1930s.

Aumann, for example, quoted Mark Twain’s account of his visit to the Holy Land in 1867 in which the American writer spoke of ‘desolate country whose soil is rich enough but is given over wholly to weeds — a silent mournful expanse ... We never saw a human being on the whole route.’ Twain is quoted as recording that ‘one may ride ten miles, hereabouts, and not see ten human beings’ and that ‘the hills are barren ... the valleys are unsightly deserts ... it is a hopeless, dreary, heartbroken land ... Palestine is desolate and unlovely.’ The quotations were accurate but one sensed within Aumann’s text an underlying idea: not just that Palestine was empty of people — which it assuredly was not — but that perhaps those people who did live there somehow did not deserve to do so; that they were too slovenly to use modern irrigation methods or to plant trees or to build brick houses. That Palestinian Arabs did cultivate the land in the nineteenth century — as a glance at Roberts’ lithographs clearly proves — went unnoticed by Aumann, who concluded his thesis by stating that the contention that 95 per cent of the land of the state of Israel had belonged to Arabs ‘has absolutely no foundation in fact.’6

To Horowitz, the Palestinians were now refugees, pure and simple. ‘When the entity of the mandate ended,’ he said, ‘two other states — Jews and Arab — were to have come into existence but the Arab state did not. It was annexed by Jordan. Of course, Arabs owned land here legally in what is now Israel. There are Arabs who owned land and can prove it without any doubt. But these people are now citizens of Arab states that are at war with Israel and they cannot claim possession of this land. As a result of losing the war in 1948 — excuse us for winning — the Arabs became partly a community of refugees. That is part of the Middle East problem.’

There was a pause in Horowitz’s peroration. Then he leant forward across his desk. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘you people have a habit sometimes of coming here to Israel with some specific details and thinking that from them you can deduce some universal truth. Forgive me for being a little cynical of that.’ There was in reality no need for his self-proclaimed cynicism. Up in Lebanon, where so many of the 1948 Palestinian refugees are concentrated, there is sometimes precious little detail to be had about the land they once owned.

Even memories have been sealed up. One elderly Palestinian in Beirut wanted to draw a map of his olive grove for me and spent ten minutes sketching and re-sketching the roads south of Jaffa. But after a while, the roads on his map began to criss-cross each other in a crazy fashion and it became clear that he had forgotten the geography of his land. ‘I am very sorry,’ he said, ‘but you must understand it has been a very long time ...’ There is indeed an opaque quality to the memories that Palestinians like to tell of Palestine. Many now recall how happily Jews and Arabs lived together before 1948, although it is a fact that in some parts of Palestine near civil war existed between the two communities long before that date. Elegiac recollections are buttressed by the Roberts lithographs, pictures which have become part of a deep and dreamlike sleep through which the Palestinians have passed since 1948.

They bear little enough relation to the land that now lies west of Jerusalem. In many places, the Arab villages have disappeared, their names erased from the map. Even the township of Deir Yassin — notorious in Palestinian history as the village in which Jewish gangs massacred 250 Arabs, half of them women and children, in April of 1948 — has vanished. It is now called Givat Shaul and is a mere suburb of Jerusalem, its main street a line of petrol stations, garages and highrise apartment blocks, more like the Edgware Road or Brooklyn than the scene of a mass murder. Only occasionally can you glimpse the old Palestine. Near the Latroun monastery, for example, and along the back road to Ashqelon, you can briefly catch sight of Arab women picking fruit in the dark orchards, their traditional Palestinian dresses of gold and red embroidery glimmering amid the heavy foliage, descendants of the 170,000 Arabs who stayed behind in 1948. Down in the old Arab quarter of Jaffa, the cosy streets of Roberts’ lithographs are all but gone. The Arab houses are little more than shacks separated by acres of devastation where developers have torn down vacated Palestinian homes. While I was searching for some Arab property in the area, I had come across three young Palestinians standing beside a shabby food stall on the waterfront. The three — all were Israeli citizens — were arguing fiercely among themselves about a loan of ten Israeli shekels. One was talking in Arabic. But the other two Palestinians were shouting at each other in Hebrew. After the Palestinian militancy of Lebanon, it was like staring at the wrong side of a mirror: Palestine through the looking glass.

Is this the land to which the Palestinians of the diaspora wish to return? It was not difficult to find the answer in Lebanon. For every Palestinian who expressed doubts about the worth of returning, there were hundreds who would go back to what is now Israel if they had the opportunity to do so, people like David Damiani, a Christian whose family had been in Palestine since the time of the Crusades. Sitting on a thin metal chair above one of west Beirut’s noisiest streets, eyes staring intently through heavy framed spectacles, he described his family tree with careful pride. Boutros Damiani was born in Jerusalem in 1687 and his four sons were consuls there for Britain, France, Holland and Tuscany. The last consul in the Damiani family was Ferdinand, who represented Mexico in 1932. David Damiani has an old photograph of him, a slightly pompous-looking man in a top hat surrounded by some Jerusalem worthies and an Englishman or two.

‘When Napoleon besieged Jaffa,’ Damiani said, ‘my ancestor Anton Damiani interceded on behalf of the Muslim population and protected them from French anger — we have an official certificate from the sharia court to this effect.’ In the early nineteenth century, Lamartine stayed with the Damiani family in Jaffa and mentioned them in Voyage to the Orient, the same book in which he advertised the colonial possibilities of Palestine. David Damiani’s father Jean owned olive groves, extensive properties in Jaffa, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and a soap factory which he operated inside the old Turkish serail on the hill above Jaffa not far from St Peter’s church. The Damianis had bought the decrepit domed buildings from the Jaffa municipality and for several decades after the First World War the name of Damiani was proudly displayed in English and Arabic over the vaulted gateway where Turkish pashas Turkish pashas once administered the law.

David Damiani’s memories of the time were those of a schoolboy in a safe land. He lived with his five brothers, sister and parents in an old building near the Cliff Hotel in Jaffa and he still remembered the day in 1935 on which Jean Damiani bought the first family car, a magnificent light green Buick saloon costing 350 Palestinian pounds, equivalent then to the same amount in sterling. Damiani senior maintained a chauffeur to take him round the family olive groves. ‘Before 1936, the harbour at Jaffa was flourishing,’ Damiani recalled. ‘There were always 25 or 30 ships moored off the port waiting to load. It was a prosperous place. Arabs and Jews were happy to live in Palestine. Everything was in abundance — fruit, vegetables and foodstuffs of all kinds. People would have lived happily if it wasn’t for the troubles instigated by the government and the Jewish Agency.’

It was only when he came to 1936 that Damiani’s face grew suddenly cold and his hands, until now resting quietly on his knees, began to move in agitation. ‘I remember the general strike starting in 1936. It started on April 19th, a Sunday; and the next day I didn’t want to go to school. I was fourteen years old. A bus used to take us to school in the Ajami area of Jaffa but there was no school that day and I was pleased. It was an Arab strike but we were in a safe area. It was middle-class.’ Damiani paused here for several seconds. ‘When the Arab revolt came in 1938, the Arab leaders used to impose taxes on well-off people. So like many others, my father went to Beirut to get away. In his absence, the factory was run by honest workers. I was still at school but at home I used to look after the accounts for the soap factory. My father did give money to the Arabs to keep his head.’

With the outbreak of the Second World War, life in Palestine returned to normal — ‘in a day’, according to Damiani — as old enemies temporarily cooperated. When the Allies liberated Lebanon in 1941, David Damiani went to the American University in Beirut to study business administration. It was a gentle enough life and it took only six and a half hours to travel home by taxi from Beirut to Jaffa. The first hint that things were not really changing for the better came in 1945 when, according to Damiani, two Palestinian Jews paid a visit to his father.

‘They were both prominent Jews in the town. One was called Jad Machness and the other’s name I can only remember as Romano. They proposed to my father that he make a list of all our properties in Palestine so that they could buy them. They said he would then have to take his family to Switzerland. My father would not accept the idea. He told them that we were a very ancient family in Palestine and were much respected. He said that our grandfathers fought for the Holy Land and that we must stick to the Holy Land. Then Romano took me to one side — my father was sitting at his desk — and told me that I had a great future in front of me and that people would be prepared to sell property to the Damianis. He brought out a list of thirteen Arab properties that he wanted me to buy and then resell to the Jews. One of the properties comprised five thousand dunums of land owned by the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem near Nablus. He told me that if I bought this land at five pounds a dunum, he and his friends would buy it from me at twenty-five a dunum. He told me he also wanted me to buy land from an Arab magistrate called Aziz Daoudi who had an orange grove near Tel Aviv. “You will make two million pounds,” he told me. “Then you can go and live in Switzerland with your family.” I told my father and mother about this and my father said: “Is there anything that you lack? Do you lack clothes, food or a home? Why should we do such a dirty business and stain our name, we who for centuries had an excellent reputation?” I turned Romano down.’

When the United Nations resolved upon the partition of Palestine in 1947, the Damianis were in Jerusalem, buying property near Talesanta in the Jewish part of the city. ‘We thought that if we didn’t like the Arab sector of Jerusalem after partition,’ Damiani said, ‘we would also have property in the Jewish sector. We thought that Jerusalem sooner or later would be an international city. We wanted to put our money in various places so that if one was not safe, the other would be. We did not think of going to live abroad or of buying property outside Palestine. We did not think things would be as bad.’

A year earlier, David Damiani had married Blanche, an 18-year old Nazareth girl, and set up a home of his own in the Arektenje district of Jaffa. He bought a two-storey house at the end of a narrow street just off the Tel Aviv road and furnished it with new tables, chairs and beds. There was a handsome portico outside and four mock Grecian columns at the back of the front hall that gave the house a museum-like effect. There was no street number but in Beirut years later, David Damiani could remember that his postal address had been Post Office Box No. 582. It was to be the only home he ever owned in Palestine.

‘You have to realise,’ he said, ‘that we didn’t think in terms of a Jewish state and an Arab state. We thought the worst that would happen would be a national partition with Jews and Arabs still living in their own homes. But from the beginning of December 1947 until April 1948 there was continuous fighting around Jaffa. In early 1948, people started sending their families outside Jaffa to Nablus, Gaza and Lydda. Some Arabs went to Amman, Egypt, Lebanon or Syria. In Jaffa, life was rendered very difficult. Water pumping by the municipality stopped. The electric wires were cut. The British cooperated with the Jews against the Arabs. Dogs and donkeys were killed and left in the streets to create a health hazard. The city was in chaos and we were afraid that armed men would attack us. I once went to the Ajami police station to ask for protection but the British constable wouldn’t open the door to me.’

Palestinians find it almost impossible to recall their final departure from Palestine without considerable emotion, for it was not only a tragedy for individual families but has become a critical moment in modern Palestinian history. The Damiani family made their decision to leave in the third week of April after snipers in Tel Aviv began shooting into the centre of Jaffa, sending at least one bullet into David Damiani’s home. They left for Beirut by sea on 25 April.

‘My father originally refused to leave Jaffa,’ Damiani said, ‘But the rest of our family insisted because we did not want him to be endangered. We were peaceful people. We did not care very much for politics. We are still not interested in politics. We locked the front door of our home just before lunchtime. We carried only suitcases and clothes and we had a case with our jewellery and the registry deeds to our lands inside. We never thought we would not be able to go back. If we had thought that, we would never have left. We thought we were going for a month or so, until the fighting died down. We took our front door keys with us but we threw them away some years ago. They are worthless now ...’

In Jaffa harbour, the Damianis boarded the Italian passenger cruise ship Argentina, a comfortable vessel which would take the family on the 16-hour journey to Beirut port. Damiani still has the tickets for the journey. ‘When we pulled out of Jaffa, I stood on the stern and looked out over the old city,’ he said. ‘I could see our soap factory in the serail on top of the hill and St Peter’s church next to it. Then I did ask myself if we would see this place again; and when Jaffa started to disappear to our starboard, I remember I said to myself: “If this ship could turn round now, I would return to Jaffa.” We were foolish. It was too late.’

David Damiani said nothing for several seconds after finishing his narrative but he opened up a battered suitcase and produced from it his old pale brown British Palestine passport and opened the document on page six. There, in the top left-hand corner, is an exit visa. ‘Jaffa Port,’ it says. ‘25-4-48’. It still retained the same dark blue colour that it had when it was stamped into the passport by a British policeman 32 years earlier; last exist from Palestine.

David Damiani’s life since 1948 was a mixture of family bereavement, hardship and moderate business success. The family spent the summer of 1948 in the Lebanese hill resort of Aley, living on 7,000 pounds they had taken with them from Palestine. By the standards of other refugees, they were well off. ‘We heard the radio and saw photographs of the damage in the papers,’ Damiani said. ‘We wondered who would take care of our orange groves. After about a month, we realised that a catastrophe had taken place. My father was very sad all the time; he was an old man without home, property or money. He died in 1952, a broken man.’ Damiani and his wife went to Jordan in 1950 while his brothers looked for work in Beirut. In Amman, he worked for UNRWA — the newly established United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine refugees — and started a small soap factory, but the project was not successful. He became a civil servant in Jordan and then part-owner in a Beirut hotel. In 1949, he had become a Jordanian citizen and in 1954 secured some family money that had been locked in Jaffa bank accounts, making him ‘not a rich man, but living’.

Yet he still kept all the family deeds and files. On a clean parchment headed by the British crest were the deeds to his home in Jaffa, bought from his father for 3,493 Palestinian pounds and dated 27 October 1947. He was even able to produce the fragile Turkish deeds to the serail in Jaffa and British documents proving family ownership of orange groves in Yazour on the main Jaffa—Jerusalem road (32 dunums), near Holon (76 dunums) and at Beit Dajan (240 dunums) and to property in Jerusalem, part of which was rented to a British assistant district commissioner.

‘I once had an opportunity to visit Jaffa again,’ Damiani said. ‘My wife went but I refused to go there. I would see my house occupied by other people. I am not allowed to dispose of my property or live in it. If you were not allowed to go back and live in your country, how would you feel? And if you could go back, would you stay in Beirut just because you had a nice home there?’

There is something insulting about the way in which a stranger can visit a place which is forbidden to people with infinitely more interest in such a journey. If Damiani could go to Jaffa, most of his fellow exiles are prevented forever from walking in the streets outside their old houses — or knocking on those front doors. The nearest a Palestinian in Lebanon can go to his former family home in what is now Israel is likely to be the orange orchards south of Tyre or the east bank of the Jordan river. A key or a lifeless deed or a cheap Roberts reproduction, perhaps a family snapshot or a tourist postcard of the 1930s, is the nearest that many Palestinian exiles can move in spirit towards the place they regard as their homeland. Blessed be the foreign correspondent who can fly from Beirut to Athens, therefore, and in the same day pick up an El Al flight from Athens to Tel Aviv and land at Ben Gurion airport and travel — faster even than the old direct taxi route from prewar Beirut — to Jerusalem. Doubly fortunate is the journalist who can within 24 hours leave Beirut and look upon what is left of the world Damiani lost on that April day when the Argentina sailed out of Jaffa harbour for Beirut, carrying his family from Palestine for the last time. It was not difficult to find the ghosts of that world. The Israelis had turned the Damiani soap factory into a municipal museum but you could still see the family’s name in fading Arabic letters on the archway at one end of the building. The wind and rain on the little hill above Jaffa had ripped away at the paint but it was just possible to make out the words ‘David Damiani’ to the left of the broken wooden gate.

The rest of the wall was stained with damp and flaking brown paint; the winters had cut deeply into the fabric of the old serail. The museum had taken over the northern end of the building but the main hall of what had been Damiani’s factory, with its vaulted roof and tunnels, was in semi-derelict condition, leased on occasion to a firm of Iranian-born Jews who dealt in Persian art. The outer windows had been smashed and the cut stone had been severely fissured. Dust lay thickly over the cracked flagstone floor and only when I ascended a dangerous staircase did I find a solitary reminder of the business that helped to make the Damianis one of the richest Arab families in Jaffa. Against a wall was a corroded iron trolley that was once used for carrying oil in the factory. It was perhaps as well that David Damiani had not come back.

The first-floor museum for the Ancient History of Tel Aviv-Jaffa just round the corner was well cared for, although it recorded not the Arab history of Jaffa but the Biblical history of the land; there was an exhibition to illustrate the Israelite Royal Period (930 BC) with references to King David. A large Biblical map of Solomon’s life lay beneath a quotation from the Book of Chronicles chapter 2 verse 16: ‘And we will cut wood out of Lebanon, as much as thou shalt need: and we will bring it to thee in flotes by sea to Joppa; and thou shalt carry it up to Jerusalem.’ The museum staff knew the name of Damiani, although it was not recalled with much enthusiasm. ‘Do I know the history of this building?’ asked the Israeli Jew in the museum curator’s office. He was a cheerful, tubby-faced man, born in Australia and still using the broad, flat accents of the Antipodes. ‘This place used to be the Turkish administrative headquarters in Jaffa. It was one of the most important places in the city. Then much later it was bought by a very rich Arab Christian family called Damiani and they turned this building’ — the man paused in humorous reflection for a moment — ‘into a soap factory. In 1948, this became a Jewish town and we took over the building.’ The whole structure was now owned by the municipality of Jaffa and the museum hoped to extend it galleries into the rest of the building when money was made available.

When I told the museum official that I had met David Damiani, his eyes opened wider with interest. ‘Does he know this is a museum now?’ he asked, and then walked over to a glass-fronted bookcase. He withdrew from it a rare bound second volume of Palestine Illustrated by Francois Schotten, published in Paris in 1929. The Israeli flicked through the pages of photographs, sepia prints of Arab peasants and donkey-drawn carts clattering through the streets of a forgotten Palestine, until his thumb came to rest on a picture of workers inside a cavernous hall. And there, sure enough, was the interior of old Jean Damiani’s soap factory with a row of moustachioed Palestinians piling up bar after bar of soap around the walls. Each man in the picture was staring blankly at the photographer, a bar of soap in each hand as if caught in the act of some doubtful ritual. ‘When you get back to Beirut,’ the Israeli said, ‘you must ask Damiani if he’s got that picture.’

Beneath the hill on which the serail huddles, the great iron gates of Jaffa port still stand next to a row of small stone shops, their Arab architecture belied by the Hebrew names above the windows. David Damiani set off from here with his family in April 1948, and it was not difficult to see how clearly the old factory and the church above the city must have stood out on the horizon as the Argentina slipped past the tide bar and steamed for Beirut.

Finding Damiani’s old home, however, was not quite as easy. The Israelis had turned the old Arab buildings south of the serail into a shopping and restaurant precinct, a tastefully laid out tourist attraction in which the best architectural features have been preserved. But no one there had ever heard of the Arektenje area of Jaffa where the newly married Damiani had bought his home. Nor did the Israelis in the market by the Jaffa clock-tower have any idea where it was. It was only when I entered the Arab quarter, a network of dusty roads and wastelands of rubble interspersed with a few small houses just south of the city, that a Palestinian remembered the name. He directed me to a main road on the edge of Jaffa and to a small lane that ran off it to the north. I followed his directions and down a narrow street came to a cul-de-sac dominated by a large white house with a portico over the front door.

Jews and Arabs lived together in the street, speaking each other’s language with some fluency, and it was an Israeli Jew who first pointed to the white house. An Arab woman, a Palestinian, was peering from the upper balcony. ‘Was this Damiani’s house?’ he shouted up to her in Arabic and she replied, in Hebrew, that it was. A small Palestinian boy led me up some steps to the side of the building and the woman ushered me inside. It was a light, airy room with some rural paintings on the wall and two small clean bedrooms leading off on each side. Very shyly, the woman introduced herself as Georgette Aboud. She and her husband Louis, a garage owner, had bought the upper floor from a Jewish family and were bringing up their four children there. The little boy, Zohair, was sent to make coffee.

Mrs Aboud led me to the balcony from where it was evident that many of the surrounding buildings — like those elsewhere in the Arab quarter — had been devastated, their roofs smashed in and their windows punched out of their frames. ‘The landlords do that,’ she said, and pointed to three small cottages that had been vacated and destroyed within the past 24 hours. ‘Two Arab families and a Jewish family lived there and the moment they moved out, the landlords broke the houses. They want to build on the land.’ Mrs Aboud — she and her husband were both Israeli citizens — seemed resigned to this gradual destruction of the little mixed society around their home. But her family owned only the upper floor of Damiani’s old house. ‘There is an old man living downstairs,’ she said. ‘We do not usually see him but he is a kind man. He is a Jew.’

It was growing dark and a sharp wind was coming in off the Mediterranean, blowing up the dust around the house. But downstairs I rang the bell next to the black steel gates and after a while I heard someone coming to the front door. The gate opened to reveal an old man, slightly stooped and staring quizzically at us. We told him why we had come. ‘If you know the man who owned this house, you had better come inside,’ he said. And so we followed the old man up the stone steps beneath the portico and into the long hall.

At the far end it was possible to see four mock Grecian columns, painted white and glowing in the light of a single bulb. ‘I live here with my two daughters,’ the man said and sat down carefully in an armchair beside the columns. There was a little table between us, piled with books upon which lay an old photograph of a man in British army uniform standing next to a beautiful young Jewish girl. ‘That was my wife,’ the old man said. ‘I was in the British army during the war. I have been here eight and a half years now. I bought this floor of the house from an Arab family. I never knew Mr Damiani.’

The man spoke in short sentences, as if trying to strain out of his monologue all but the most essential facts. There was a long silence and then he said with just a trace of a smile: ‘I am a sculptor, I am an old man and I am a Jew.’ He wanted to talk. His name, he said, was Shlomo Green and he had been a refugee from Romania. He had left his village of Clug on the Romanian-Hungarian border in 1939 and boarded a ship for Palestine just before the outbreak of the Second World War. ‘The British navy caught our ship but we were lucky,’ he said. ‘It was the last ship from which the passengers were permitted to stay legally in Palestine. I spent a year and a half in a kibbutz then joined the English army for five years. I went from Alamein to Tobruk then to Syria. All my family were sent to Auschwitz. Only my mother survived. They made her a slave labourer. She told me my father died in the camp in 1944. I lost about a hundred relatives in Auschwitz.’

Shlomo Green stopped speaking for a moment. It was a natural coda in his story. He joined the Israeli army in 1948, fought at Latroun and in Galilee and joined up again in 1956 and 1967. His wife had died just over a year earlier; one of his daughters was a teacher in Tel Aviv, the other a painter, and Shlomo Green was himself a sculptor of some distinction. He had had 11 exhibitions in Jerusalem and some of his creations lined the walls of his little home, of David Damiani’s home. Shlomo Green was only 62 but he looked much older.

He walked quickly around the room to show off his sculptures and then said: ‘Tell me about Mr Damiani. I know nothing about him.’ So he sat down again and listened to the story of the Damianis, of their life in Jaffa and of how they fled in 1948, how David Damiani stood on the stern of the ship off Jaffa port and wished he could have turned round then and gone back to his home. If human death is a measure of suffering, then David Damiani would surely have agreed that he had suffered less than Shlomo Green.

But the old Jew sat for a long time in silence as the wind and rain in the darkness outside lashed at the windows of Damiani’s old home. Then he looked up quite suddenly with tears in his eyes. ‘I am very moved by what you have told me,’ he said. ‘What can I say? I would like to meet these people. If you can say for me ...’ Here he paused, but he wanted to go on. ‘It is a tragedy of both our people. How can I explain in my poor English? I think the Arabs had the same rights as the Jews and I think it is a tragedy of history that a people who are refugees make new refugees. I have nothing against the Arabs. I am living here with Arab people in peace and I have some friends among them. They are nice people. They were the same as us. I don’t know that we Jews did this tragedy — but it happened. I want only one thing: peace for the new generation and progress. How can I say more than this? I feel at home here.’

In Beirut, I told Damiani of what Shlomo Green had said, of the warm old house with the mock Grecian pillars still standing in the front hall. I repeated the details of how so many of Green’s family had been murdered at Auschwitz. Damiani showed no bitterness. ‘I wish him happiness,’ he said. ‘Can you tell him that? Can you tell him please that I wish him happiness?’

It would, however, be an historical untruth to suggest that all Palestinians felt as generously as Damiani towards those who now own the lands that belonged to them. Kanaan Abu Khadra was a case in point, a journalist in mandate Palestine — by all accounts a good one in a crusading and courageous if rather partisan sort of way — who founded and edited a newspaper called Al Shaab. In 1946, in the top front page article in the very first edition of his newspaper, whose title in Arabic means ‘The People’, he urged Arabs to struggle harder to maintain their land in Arab ownership in Palestine. The page carried a map covered in dark smudges. ‘These shaded land areas have become the property of the Jews,’ the caption said. ‘This will become the national homeland of the Jews.’ It was a prophetic piece of journalism.

Leafing through bound volumes of those old editions in Beirut, Abu Khadra could still experience the odd moment of journalistic triumph as old newspapermen tend to do, long after their papers have died. ‘We had a great paper,’ he said. ‘By 1948, we had a circulation of 12,000 — the highest in Palestine. I bought a second-hand English flatbed press and issued shares. We were less than self-supporting but we were an independent, neutral paper. We were independent of the Husseinis and the Nashishibis, the big Arab families. It was a national paper. The Jews hated it but we were not against the Jews.’

Abu Khadra’s heavily boned face and strong rectangular glasses gave him a slightly fearsome appearance. He was also the kind of editor who would ask you to check the spelling of a place name or the age of a politician (he was born in 1920). He was as exacting in his own business affairs. The old blue suitcase which he carried out of Palestine in 1948 was still stuffed with his files and documents, all neatly labelled and dated — land deeds, deeds of sale, taxes, rents and maps of allotments — together with correspondence with the United Nations about the ownership of his family’s land. There was a lot of it. Indeed, the Abu Khadras were one of the largest families in Palestine, their orchards and property scattered between Jaffa, Jerusalem and Gaza. There were two Abu Khadra Streets in Jaffa and there still is an Abu Khadra Mosque in Gaza. The family jointly owned 12,000 dunums of agricultural land and about 20 properties in Jaffa. One of Abu Khadra’s first memories — and one that he went back to again and again — was of walking with his brothers Rabah and Anwar through his father’s olive grove in Jaffa to visit the house of his uncles. The family grew oranges, corn, barley and sugar cane.

‘I used to go there every day when I was a boy. My uncles Fawzi and Tawfiq lived in two houses joined together, one of which had been built by my grandfather Ismail. It had three big windows with iron doors and white walls and you used to go into the house up a flight of steps because there were shops underneath. My cousin Ibrahim lived in a two-storey house a few hundred metres away, just beyond the Tel Aviv-Jaffa port railway line. He had Jewish tenants in the house.’ In 1937, Abu Khadra went to study science in Beirut and attended the American University — as David Damiani was to do four years later — but he did not like the course and returned to Jaffa, eventually settling for a degree in journalism at the American University in Cairo.

He started Al Shaab in 1946, with four full-time staff in Jaffa. He was at his desk at the paper when the UN passed its resolution to partition Palestine. He kept working when the war started between the Arabs and the Jews but his last edition came suddenly on 9 March 1948. ‘We wanted to print a banner headline above the capture of a Jewish settlement by Lebanese soldiers,’ he recalled. ‘The British mandate censor, a Jewish man called Arieh Siev — a nice fellow although we never saw eye-to-eye — refused to let us print. On the next day, the district commissioner suspended our paper. My father and mother had died some years before and I lived with my brother Rabah, my sister Rabiha, my wife Sulafa and my baby son. It was originally my father’s home; there was a big hall inside the entrance which was also used as a dining-room. Most of the house was white. My father had been a great admirer of Kemal Ataturk — he fought in the Turkish army against the British in Gaza — and Ataturk’s picture hung in the living-room.

‘About April 15th, my house was mortared. It was in the middle of Jaffa. Two shells hit the roof and one exploded in the corridor during the night. By five in the morning, it was impossible to stay there. We had a car, an English Rover, so we drove to the southern part of the city. We locked the house up but we thought we were going back. People say that the Arabs were told to leave their homes by Arab countries. But in Jaffa it was panic. The city was being destroyed. Some people left babies behind. We were being murdered.’ The shelling, according to Abu Khadra, came from Tel Aviv. The family stayed with relatives for ten days, then drove to Ramleh where Abu Khadra’s second brother Anwar lived. Abu Khadra remembered stopping at a gas station and finding three bullet holes in his car from snipers. Then he went on to Gaza. By this time, the Egyptian army had entered southern Palestine but Abu Khadra was to watch them, only a few days later, retreating along the beach towards Sinai. The family Rover also became bogged down on the beach road and his brother Anwar suffered a heart attack after spending a night on the open beach. He died of a second attack a few months later.

For days, the Abu Khadras lived in a house in Gaza under nightly air attack. ‘We could not move further,’ he said. ‘We could not move back home and we had reached the end of Palestine.’ Abu Khadra became a refugee camp official for the UN in Gaza, leaving in 1951 to become an UNRWA officer in Lebanon. He was later to become owner of a Beirut company that dubbed educational films and translated technical books into Arabic. Yet he took with him to Beirut his old suitcase of deeds and taxes, proof that the Abu Khadras owned their land in Palestine. The documents amounted to a small archive; they even included his Palestine mandate press cards, entitling him ‘to pass freely anywhere in Palestine, including areas in which a curfew has been imposed’. There were 1948 tax receipts from the Municipal Corporation of Jaffa and rental agreements for the lease of land to the Royal Air Force. There were deeds for the family home in Jaffa, in the name of his father and dated 1 August 1930, and a map of the Abu Khadras’ mortgaged orange orchards at Barqa around the Wadi al Gharbi on the road from Jaffa to Ashqelon.

‘The groves were just above the sea,’ he said. ‘They were magnificent oranges, the best in Palestine. These were the original Jaffa oranges; they were grown in Palestine long before the Israelis came. From my orchard, I could see the steam trains running down the coast to Gaza. I used to hear the locomotive’s whistle.’ Abu Khadra showed little physical emotion when he talked about the past, but his words were carefully chosen and sometimes very angry. ‘It is miserable for us to look back on these things. The West says the Palestinians are better off now and this could be true in some cases. But it is not the point. Palestine is our home. My sister-in-law was allowed to visit Palestine a few years ago. She brought me some oranges from my orchard but I couldn’t eat them. I threw them away. I don’t realise even now that we will not go back. My kids want to go for a visit and my daughter wants a picture of our home ... I was asked if I wanted to go. But I could not stand the humiliation of crossing the Allenby Bridge — at my age, being stripped and searched by a Zionist, Jew, a Pole, a Russian or a Romanian who is living in my country, in my home, asking me questions and searching me. And it is my country. I think about my land every day. I remember every stone in my house and every tree in my orchards. I am not willing to sign any paper that would release that land to anybody.’

Abu Khadra’s faith in legal niceties was only a gesture. He knows what has happened to his land. The trains still run along the coastline south of Jaffa where the family’s old orange groves stand. It is no longer a steam locomotive but a fast diesel pulling a trail of red, white and blue carriages, an express that rumbles down to Ashqelon between the orchards and the sea. I could see it from where Abu Khadra used to stand at the edge of his fields in Barqa, although few people knew where Barqa was. ‘Was’ is the correct word; for Barqa, like hundreds of Palestinian Arab villages, disappeared after 1948.

The Israeli Jews in the little kibbutz a mile or so away had never heard of it, but an old Arab woman in a long dark dress picking fruit pointed up a hill when she heard the name and shrugged her shoulders. The orchards, now part of a large farming combine, stretched across a little hill. The Wadi El Gharbi — mentioned in Abu Khadra’s land maps — elicited a faint response in the woman. It is buried today, like the village beneath the trees, their branches heavy with fruit.

The Abu Khadra inheritance in Jaffa was almost equally hard to find. The house which Kanaan Abu Khadra fled in April 1948 had lain in semi-derelict condition for years, its windows partly boarded up. The olive grove through which he used to walk as a boy was submerged beneath a main road and a cluster of lean-to engineering sheds even before 1948. But I found the home which his cousin Ibrahim owned next to the Tel Aviv-Jaffa port railway line. The railway track had been torn up years earlier — a cutting lined with ivy-covered telegraph poles marked it now — but the house, in need of a few coats of paint, was just next to the old railway bridge. One of Ibrahim’s former Jewish tenants still lived on the second floor.

David, a small, thin, smiling man with a long, sensitive features, welcomed me to his little home. He and his wife were Turkish-born Jews who came to Palestine before the Second World War. They had never left their home, even when the Arab-Jewish front line ran behind the house in 1948. He well remembered Ibrahim Abu Khadra. ‘He was a nice enough man,’ David said. ‘But we saw little of him in 1948. This house was part of the Jewish front line and although Mr Abu Khadra never knew it, we had guns and ammunition stored downstairs. Menachem Begin used to come here during the 1948 battles to this house, and he came up to see us three or four times during the fighting to have coffee and biscuits with us. He was a good man, an agreeable man.’

The war had left its mark, too, on the home of the two uncles whom Abu Khadra so often recalled visiting. Abu Khadra Street had now become Gerulot Street, but the white-stone house was still there, with its three fine, tall windows of delicate iron tracery. The embossed iron doors were rusting and one of them had fallen off its hinges. On the south wall, there were some faint shrapnel marks; several deep bullet holes could be seen beside a window. The ground floor consisted of a key-cutter’s stall and some small shops, just as it did when Abu Khadra knew it. Up the flight of steps was a very old door, covered in flaking green paint.

I knocked on it but it was so dilapidated that I could see right through the door frame and into a large room where a man was sitting in a kitchen chair, dressed in trousers and vest. He was suspicious but courteous. ‘Yes, this was Abu Khadra’s house,’ he said. ‘It is not his house now.’ He was joined at the door by his wife and daughter. He wanted no publicity and he did not want to talk about himself. ‘I own this house now,’ he said. So I left, and as I walked back to my car, the man watched me from the little steel balcony upon which Kanaan Abu Khadra had played as a boy. His hands were thrust deep in his pockets, his shoulders slightly hunched in the breeze, a man looking after his home.

At least in Jaffa there had been doors to knock upon. The same cannot be said for many thousands of Palestinian houses in what is now Israel. Fatima Zamzam, for example, knew just what had happened to her home and lands. But from her two-room concrete refugee shack, she could now just see Palestine. She still called it that; and indeed, beyond the line of evergreen trees beside the main road south of the Lebanese city of Tyre, I could see above the coastline a faint, thin grey line of hills inside Galilee on the other side of the Israeli frontier. Mrs Zamzam had left her home on the other side of those hills more than three decades earlier and she had never been back.

She lived in the Palestinian camp at Rashidiyeh, a wretched four square miles of breeze-block huts and cabins relieved only by the occasional tree, a straggling plant hanging from a poorly made brick wall and an open sewer that snaked uneasily down the centre of the mud roads. Mrs Zamzam had a tiny garden; a few feet of clay with a stunted flowering cherry tree that shaded the sandbagged air-raid shelter. For Rashidiyeh was coming under shellfire or Israeli air attack almost every day.

She was at first sight a cheerful figure, a plump woman of 65 who wore a brightly patterned dress and whose curly hair showed around the front of her white scarf. She had a heavily lined face, a prominent, almost hawk-like nose, but she had kindly eyes and every so often she would display a vein of sharp humour that suggested her family had to keep their shoes clean when they approached her little parlour. When she told me how she came to be a refugee, she paused reflectively before each statement, conscious that as a foreigner I might not know the history of Palestine before 1948.

‘I come from a village called Um Al-Farajh,’ she said. ‘It was in northern Galilee. My family had three houses in the village. We used to make olive oil to sell to the other villages around. We grew wheat and made flour. My husband was Mustafa Zamzam and we had three orchards — two with olives and one with citrus. We even grew grapes on the side of our houses. We had all kinds of fruit — we had everything. In 1944, we had a new house built just outside the village for my husband and myself. Mustafa got Arab engineers up from Tel Aviv to build it and it cost about 700 Palestinian pounds. Some English tourists even came to take pictures of our home. It was a stone house — white stone — with four rooms upstairs and four rooms downstairs. It was built in an orchard opposite a place where we used to have our old house. It was known in the village as the Island Area. We had seven children — five boys and two girls.’

Mrs Zamzam spoke slowly, a village woman speaking to a stranger, and without warning she stood up and went to her other room, returning a minute or so later with a rusting tin. I could still read the name of the English toffee manufacturer on the lid which she prised off with a knife. From inside, she took a piece of pale mauve, floppy parchment. It was the 1915 Turkish deed to her family land, heavily stained by damp, the corners torn but the wording and the ornate flowered crest still clearly visible. A Turkish stamp was still affixed to the bottom left-hand corner. ‘This shows that my family owned the land,’ she said with a simplicity that might have left even a lawyer silent. Then she took a cleaner but still crumpled paper from the tin. Government of Palestine Certificate of Registration, it said at the top. ‘Land Registry Office of Gelo, Sub-District: Acre. Village: Um Al-Farajh. No. of Land 18151. No. of Doc 52. Block: Al-Habara Kanel. 19 dunums ...’ The date is 22 October 1947. The document was in the name of Mustafa Ibn Assaad Shihada Zamzam, Mrs Zamzam’s husband, and when she said that I recognised this type of British mandate deed Mrs. Zamzam’s face lit up as if a great discovery had been made. Mr Zamzam was dead but his widow regarded the land — not without reason under Islamic law — as rightfully hers.

She said that it never occurred to her or her husband that her village would be harmed or its people endangered. ‘We used to visit Jewish people,’ she said. ‘There was never any problem. We took our sick people to a Jewish doctor. There was a Doctor Kayewe and a Doctor Natani and there was also a lady doctor called Miriam. They were good to us. Sometimes we took our goods to sell in Jewish villages. But one day in 1948, Jewish gangs stopped a truck from our village. They ambushed the truck and killed the driver. Jewish women then shot all the men on board the truck. This happened on the road between Um Al-Farajh and Acre, near the Al-Insherah orchard opposite Nahariya. So no one went to Acre any more.’

According to Mrs Zamzam, Jews then began to shell her village. ‘We were surrounded. Other Arabs told us we were surrounded and should move to another village. We tried to use the date palm trees to close the roads — we had only eight English .303 rifles in Um Al-Farajh. The Jewish gangs were just outside. I met a brother-in-law who told me to leave but I stayed another night in our new house just outside the village. The men stayed behind but we left next day. I held my son Hassan who was 40 days old and the small children carried the other babies. We took the keys to the house with us — we lost them here in Rashidiyeh.’

Mrs Zamzam listed the villages through which she travelled — Al Naher, Al Kabil, Al Nahalie, Tashiha and Al Dear — and then she fell into a kind of swoon, wailing as if she was mourning a husband or son and holding her hands to her face. The young Palestinian who had gathered in the room to hear her story sat quietly, knowing that she would finish her grief and that this was a ritual even if it was a deeply felt one. Mrs Zamzam looked up to the wall of the room where there hung a framed portrait of a young man and woman. The girl was dark-haired with an attractive but serious face; the man was painfully innocent, his handlebar mustache and sleeked-down hair with its sharp parting at odds with his handsome features. It was a photograph of Mrs Zamzam and her husband taken in 1939, six years after their wedding.

Outside Um Al-Farajh as she fled, she had met her brother-in-law Mohamed, who had a car, and he returned briefly to her home to get blankets and clothes for the children. ‘We thought we would only be away from our village for a few days,’ she said. ‘But the Jews entered the village. My husband was in the fields and he saw them blow up our new house. They discovered the olive oil we had left behind and they took all our olive oil machines. The Jews destroyed all the village. Even the cemetery was destroyed — my father had been buried there.’

In May of 1948, the Zamzams crossed the Palestine border into Lebanon at Naqqoura — where the Palestinian writer Kalafani was to describe the misery of the refugees — and rented a house in Tyre for 12 Palestinian pounds a month. ‘We moved to Baas camp from there,’ she said, ‘We had only tents for shelter and we tried to make concrete blocks. Then we cam to Rashidiyeh. I thought I would go home when I left but it has been a long time. I have been twenty-nine years in camps now.’

Just as Mrs Zamzam was finishing, there was a shriek from a home-made air-raid siren in the street and a general movement towards the door of the little hut. High up in the deep blue midday sky were the contrails of three Israeli jets. They soared above us up towards Tyre and then turned southwards over the Mediterranean, back towards Galilee. Mrs Zamzam watched all this with equanimity. A year and a half earlier, she had lost her previous camp home when a shell fired from the Israeli-armed Lebanese Christian enclave to the south hit the roof. She had lived almost half her life amid violence.

Throughout our conversation, a loaded Kalashnikov automatic rifle had lain propped against a wall of her living room, left there by a youth who had gone off to drink tea. When I asked Mrs Zamzam what her sons did for a living, a young man interrupted to say that they all worked ‘for the revolution.’

When I asked Mrs Zamzam whether she would really go back to Palestine if the frontier was opened, she did not hesitate. ‘We are waiting to go back. I hope I am still alive to go back to Palestine again. I would like to die there.’ Mrs Zamzam agreed to let me photograph her and she sat a little unsteadily beside the wall of her home just in front of the cherry tree. She stared into the camera as if she was talking to it. But when I suggested that she smile, another young man interrupted to answer for her. ‘She cannot smile,’ he said bleakly, ‘because she has lost her land.’

Mrs Zamzam’s land should have been only 25 minutes’ drive across the international frontier. It was actually only 15 miles away. But true to the political contours of Lebanon and what is now Israel, I had to fly to Greece, then to Tel Aviv and then take a four-hour car journey to see it, a round-trip of almost a thousand miles. On the way to Mrs Zamzam’s land, I looked across the same Lebanese border from the Israeli side and could actually make out in the far distance Mrs. Zamzam’s camp at Rashidiyeh inside Lebanon. It was a journey that would not have made Mrs Zamzam happy had she been able to make it herself.

For her land now lay underneath a plantation of banana trees a few hundred yards down the road from a bricked-up mosque. Her two-storey white-stone house long ago disappeared. It had vanished as surely as the name of her village had been erased from the map of Israel. The Palestinian Arab hamlet of Um Al-Farajh simply no longer existed.

Just how it came to be extinguished was something of a mystery, and even the Israelis who live in Ben Ami — the farming settlement that has been built on the site — had scarcely heard the name. A young man wearing a yarmulka skullcap and sitting astride a roaring tractor wiped his brow with his arm when I asked for the location of Um Al-Farajh. ‘I have never heard of this village,’ he said. ‘Why do you want to know?’

The mere question had been enough to provoke suspicion. Ben Ami lies just five miles south of the Lebanese border, well within range of the Katyusha rockets which were then being fired by Palestinian guerrillas around Tyre and Rashidiyeh; there were concrete air-raid shelters with iron doors between the bungalows. Barbed wire zigzagged in front of the small houses and large Alsatians snarled at strangers from behind steel fences. The people of Ben Ami were not frightened but they were prepared for an enemy; and visitors interested in the Arab-Jewish war of 1948 were well advised to present convincing explanations for their questions before they stirred memories too deeply.

‘So you are writing about those things,’ another Israeli said as he stood in a narrow, shaded lane. ‘There was an Arab village here but there is nothing left now, you know. All that business is over long ago.’ His friend, a tall, bearded man in a black vest with a pair of garden shears in his hand, stared at me without smiling. ‘Whose side are you on?’ he asked. ‘Are you on our side or their side?’ He did not bother to explain what he meant by ‘their’ side. In the event, it was a local veterinary surgeon, a woman with a brisk, hospitable but no-nonsense attitude towards journalists, who invited me into her home and confirmed that this had indeed been Um Al-Farajh. She gave me sandwiches and coffee while I told her of Mrs Zamzam’s flight from the village in 1948. She listened carefully to the details of the Palestinian woman’s story, of how Jewish gangs had murdered a truckload of Arab villagers shortly before Um Al-Farajh was surrounded and of how the Jews then destroyed Mrs Zamzam’s home, the village and even the little Muslim cemetery beside it.

‘This certainly was an Arab village,’ the Israeli woman said. She spoke charitably of what happened so long ago but her attitude was to grow colder as the evening wore on. She suggested that I speak to a man who had lived nearby in 1948, and after some hours he arrived at the house, a middle-aged Israeli with a lined face and very bloodshot eyes. He spoke only Hebrew and the woman translated for me. I never knew his name; if I wanted to quote him by name, I would have to get permission. Neither of them disclosed from whom this permission would have to be obtained. The newcomer listened in his turn to the description Mrs Zamzam had given me of the events that led her to run away from Um Al-Farajh, occasionally nodding agreement or interrupting to correct her account.

Yes, he said, it was true that the houses had grapes on the outside walls. He himself had seen them when he used to bring olives to the village so that oil could be made from them. Yes, Jewish doctors did indeed care for the Arab villagers then, although Mrs Zamzam had mispronounced the names. It was Dr Kiwi not ‘Dr Kayewe’ as Mrs Zamzam remembered, and Dr Nathan not ‘Dr Natani’, but there was indeed a woman doctor called Miriam just as Mrs Zamzam had said. Her family name was Beer; all were now dead. But the man was clearly unhappy about Mrs Zamzam’s memory. Did she really have a two-storey house? he wanted to know. All the houses in the village had been small single-storey homes, perhaps only four square metres in area. He was to become even more disenchanted about Mrs Zamzam’s record of events.

The first ambush was staged not by Jews but by Arabs, he said. A bus travelling from Haifa to Nahariya in the early spring of 1948 was stopped by Arabs who took the five Jewish passengers from the vehicle and cut their throats. Then it was rumoured that Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti, was travelling from his postwar sanctuary in Lebanon to Acre and there was an ambush at Insherah on the bus believed to be carrying him. When shots were fired at two cars accompanying the bus, one of the vehicles, which had been loaded with ammunition for the Arabs, blew up. This, the man thought, was the ambush to which Mrs Zamzam had referred.

‘Um Al-Farajh was not shelled,’ the man said, ‘although the Jewish forces threw hand grenades near the village of Kubri some kilometres from here. Mrs Zamzam had accurately remembered the way she travelled away from Um Al-Farajh but the Jews never destroyed her village. They never blew up the houses. The mosque is still standing here and one of the stone-built houses of the village is still here. You can see it. And the cemetery was not destroyed. It is still here. Some houses fell down later. Mrs Zamzam is correct when she says that the villagers put tree trunks on the road but she seems to have forgotten why this was done. They were afraid of reprisal because the Arabs had just ambushed a relief convoy at Kubri. It had been sent to an isolated kibbutz with food but the Arabs stopped it and killed forty-seven Jews. That is why Mrs Zamzam left Um Al-Faraih. All she forgot to tell you about was the killing of forty-seven Jews.’

It is quite true that the Jewish armoured convoy was ambushed over at Kubri. What is more, the old iron trucks with their armour plating are still lying rusting beside the old Kubri road just where they came to a halt in 1948, the wheels stripped of their tyres but their iron bullet shields still intact. The rifles with which the Jews defended themselves have been welded onto the sides of the vehicles as a memorial. A plaque erected by the Israeli Ministry of Defence pays tribute to Ben-Ami Pachter, the Israeli commando leader who died in the ambush; which is one reason why the name Um Al-Farajh ceased to exist and the name of Ben Ami took its place.

It was also perfectly true, as the Israeli said, that the village mosque was still standing. Its windows and doors had been sealed up with breeze-blocks but the Koranic inscription beneath the roof remained and someone had painted it in the past ten years. The only surviving house of Um Al-Farajh was now used as a storage shed.

It was not so easy to find the cemetery where Mrs Zamzam’s father was buried. The same bearded man whom we had already met said that it lay next to the mosque, behind some barbed wire which had been put there to protect it. It was impossible to see it now, he said. But I walked round the barbed wire and crawled inside the little ground that lay beyond. The Muslim cemetery of Um Al-Faraih was a field of rubble and undergrowth, distinguished over most of its area by nothing more than small mounds of earth and scattered, broken stones. Two cement graves had been smashed open, apparently several decades earlier. Just as Mrs Zamzam had said — and contrary to what the Israelis had told me — the cemetery seemed to have been systematically destroyed.

Beside a new gymnasium not far away, an Arab Israeli was sweeping a path. Where was Um Al-Farajh, I asked him, and he led me to a large square of fir trees and pointed to the earth. ‘There is Um Al-Farajh,’ he said and raised his hands quickly together in the way you might imitate an explosion. There he left me.

So I walked beneath the trees and found just under my feet pieces of old concrete and what might once have been bits of wall. There was what looked like a door lintel. It was cheaply designed, the kind that villagers would have used in their homes. All this time, I was watched by three Israeli farmers standing next to a tractor.

It seemed as if the circular ironies of history in Ben Ami were too strong. The dead Jewish convoy commander had given his name to the land where Mrs Zamzam’s village once stood, an Israeli hamlet that was now periodically threatened with rocket-fire from Palestinian guerrillas, perhaps the same men who as children walked with Mrs. Zamzam from Um Al-Farajh after the ambush on the Jewish convoy.

My visit might have ended there if my car had not run short of petrol on the road south of Nahariya. The gas station attendant was an Israeli Arab, a young man with light brown hair who assumed I was a tourist and wanted to know what I was doing in the cold far north of Israel in winter. I mentioned Ben Ami and Um Al-Farajh and referred momentarily to Mrs Zamzam, when suddenly the boy’s face lit up. ‘She is may aunt,’ he said.

And so it was that Osman Abdelal took me from the gas station and up to a small Arab village called Mazraa, clustered round the ruins of an old Roman aqueduct. He lived in a small house there with his brothers and sisters, all Israeli citizens who spoke Hebrew and lived and worked in Israel. It was Osman’s father Mohamed who had returned in his car for the clothes for Mrs. Zamzam’s children just before Um Al-Farajh was finally abandoned by the Palestinian Arabs in 1948. The family did not want to talk about politics but they asked about Mrs Zamzam’s health. They never went near Ben Ami, they said, and smiled at me. What happened to Mrs Zamzam’s house? I asked. ‘It is gone,’ one of Osman’s older sisters replied. ‘My mother went to look for it later but it had gone.’

Then what happened to Um Al-Farajh? Osman looked at his brother and sisters. ‘They blew it up, he said. ‘My family did not see it but they heard the noise of the explosions. They were already coming here to Mazraa.’

And so Mrs Zamzam’s family, perhaps irrevocably split by nationalities, was living only 15 miles apart, divided by the Israeli—Lebanese frontier. If Osman Abdelal and his sisters had climbed the furthest hill to the north, they might have just been able to see Mrs Zamzam’s refugee camp at Rashidiyeh. But they had never climbed the hill.

There are, of course, specific Israeli laws to stop Damiani and Abu Khadra and Mrs Zamzam from crossing back in the other direction. There is Israeli ‘absentee’ legislation and there are land expropriation laws passed on from the British mandate. Palestinians with relatives still inside Israel could pay two-week visits — many, like Damiani’s wife, have gone wistfully to look from a distance at the homes they once bought and lived in — and the same Israeli spokesman who referred to the Palestinian Arabs as ‘a community of refugees’ said that he had himself assisted 40,000 Palestinians to rejoin their families and become Israeli citizens. Yet most exiled Palestinians instinctively reject the idea of taking Israeli citizenship in order to return. The spokesman, Rafi Horowitz, was wrong when he said that Palestinians could not claim their lands because they were citizens of a country at war with Israel. Whatever his or her status, a Palestinian can claim compensation from the Israeli Special Committee for the Return of Absentee Property. But only about 170 Arabs had claimed such compensation in five years; making a claim in the Israeli courts means recognising the state of Israel.

It was a point made to me with some vehemence by Mahmoud Labadi, who was then official spokesman for the Palestine Liberation Organisation in Lebanon, a bespectacled figure every bit as urbane and cynical as his Israeli counterpart. ‘Do you really wonder,’ he asked me at an embassy function in west Beirut, ‘why we won’t claim compensation? We don’t want compensation — we want our land.’ He sipped his champagne (Veuve Clicquot 1976) and raised his finger in the air. ‘It’s invidious for any Palestinian to take a cash payment from the Israelis. It undermines our demand for the return of our homes.’

And he was right, as the Israelis themselves were well aware. They still hoped in 1980 that the Palestinian issue — the demands of Palestinians who lost their homes in what is now Israel — could be dealt with as part of a general Arab—Israeli peace settlement, that the whole two and a half million Palestinian diaspora could be given a lump-sum, once-and-for-all payment of compensation. They do not want the Palestinians back and a glance at the statistics quickly shows why. Well over two million of that diaspora regard themselves as victims of the 1948 war; the half million or so who fled Palestine in 1948 have had children — in many cases grandchildren — who regard themselves as Palestinians. Many Arabs who lost their homes in what became the state of Israel and settled on the West Bank in 1948 became refugees for a second time during the Six Day War in 1967. All these people now regard themselves as having a moral claim to land inside Israel — which is one reason, of course, why the PLO was for so long loath to consider a Palestinian nation outside the boundaries of the Jewish state.

Exactly how much land the Arabs owned in the part of Palestine that became Israel is still disputed. Moshe Aumann concluded from original British figures that in 1948 Jews owned 8.6 per cent of the land and Arabs 20.2 per cent; of which, he claimed, 16.9 per cent was abandoned by Arabs when they thought the neighbouring Arab armies were going to destroy Israel.

But there was one man to talk to in Israel who knew more than anyone else about the land of Palestine. Jacob Manor proved to be the very opposite of David Damiani or Fatima Zamzam. He was academically specific and efficient, a thin ascetic man with a degree in jurisprudence from the Hebrew University and offices in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Manor held the title of Custodian of Absentee Property — the word ‘Absentee’ giving the curious impression that the absent person could not be bothered to return. He could describe the land registration bureaucracy of the Ottoman Empire, define the intricacies of land expropriation and run off a photocopy of the Israeli Absentee Property Law (1950) in the twinkling of an eye. And everything he did, as he told me several times in his Tel Aviv office, was strictly according to the law.

In his possession were copies of almost every British mandate land registration document, file after file of papers recording in detail the Arab and Jewish owners of property in pre-1948 Palestine. Ask Jacob Manor about the land that belonged to Mrs Zamzam’s husband in the village of Um Al-Farajh and he could immediately explain how it came into the hands of the development authority and was then leased to the village of Ben Ami. Each transaction — of which the original owners remained in ignorance — had involved the transfer of money from one Israeli government department to another. If the government expropriates land, then it must pay compensation to the office of the custodian. The custodian can then in theory pay compensation to the original owner — although the land, of course, has gone.

The law is so rigorous and so thorough that it would be difficult to misunderstand the import of the statutory legislation which governs the property of the Palestinian Arabs who fled their homes in 1948 and who — by the same law — cannot return. Manor knew much of this legislation by heart. An absentee, according to the 1950 Israeli law, includes anyone who, between 20 November 1947 and the ending of the State of Emergency, was ‘a legal owner of any property situated in the area of Israel ... and who, at any time during the said period, was a national or citizen of the Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Trans-Jordan, Iraq or the Yemen or was in one of these countries or in any part of Palestine outside the area of Israel ...’ An absentee also included anyone who was ‘a Palestinian citizen and left his ordinary place of residence in Palestine for a place outside Palestine before 1 September 1948, or for a place in Palestine held at the time by forces which sought to prevent the establishment of the State of Israel or which fought against it after its establishment.’

The definition is broad. For the ‘State of Emergency’ has not yet ended. And if a Palestinian Arab fled his or her home during the 1948 fighting for an area controlled by Arab forces — even though the individual did not in any way participate in the war — Israeli law effectively deprived the owners of their homes and lands. Jacob Manor made no bones about it. ‘Let us suppose,’ he said, ‘there is someone called Mohamed and that he was born and lived in Acre. And let us suppose that in 1948, following the fighting, he left his ordinary place of residence for a place of insurrection, then he is an absentee — even if he did not join the Arab forces that were fighting against Israel.’

There is a further clause in the 1950 law that permitted Manor to confirm that a man or woman was not an absentee if that person left his place of residence ‘for fear that the enemies of Israel might cause him harm or otherwise than by reason or for fear of military operations’. Manor said he had given this dispensation on 40 occasions. But the law did not take specific account of Arabs who left their homes for fear that Israeli forces might cause them harm — the reason most Arabs give for their sudden departure. So much, therefore, for the Damianis, the Abu Khadras and the Zamzams.

Of those who left — well over half a million people — scarcely any had disinherited themselves by claiming compensation under the Israeli Absentees Property Compensation Law of 1973. Only 170 Arabs made successful applications in five years. The Israelis, of course, do not dispute the legality of the old British mandate deeds. ‘There is no dispute about the legality of the mandate papers,’ Jacob Manor said. ‘There is no dispute about the land unless a claim is made ... compensation for those who claim it for their land and receive it from the authorities is calculated according to the value of the property in 1973 plus the difference in the index of inflation together with four per cent interest.’

Manor sat back in his office chair as he rolled off these statistics. ‘I am a very liberal man,’ he said. ‘I always take a positive view towards any claim.’ He himself was an Iraqi Jew and estimated that 150,000 Iraqi Jews were expelled from their country. ‘They left all their property. They cam here penniless and made a claim to the Minister of Justice. We have a list of all the claimants for the future when there is peace with Iraq.’ Manor holds the figures, too, for those Jews who lost all their property in Egypt, Yemen and Morocco after the creation of the state of Israel. The Israelis have in fact scrupulously recorded every dunum and block of lost Jewish property in the Arab world so that it can be placed on the scales of compensation payments when there is any balancing of refugee debts at that final Middle East peace conference.

The Custodian of Absentee Property did not choose to discuss politics. But when I asked him how much of the land of the state of Israel might potentially have two claimants — an Arab and a Jew holding respectively a British mandate and an Israeli deed to the same property — he said he believed that ‘about 70 percent’ might fall into this category. If this figure was accurate — and it should be remembered that over half of Israel in 1948 consisted of the Negev desert — then it suggested that Arabs owned a far greater proportion of that part of Palestine which became Israel than has previously been imagined. Jacob Manor seemed unaffected by this fact. ‘Do you really believe that the Palestinians want to come back?’ he asked. ‘Most of them have died. And their children are in good positions now.’

If this extraordinary statement involved a blindness to reality, it provided no warning of the storm of anger and abuse which my series of articles in The Times was to generate among Israelis and their supporters in Britain. At some length and in careful detail I had told the story of David Damiani, Kanaan Abut Khadra, Fatima Zamzam and of another Palestinian woman, Rifka Boulos, who had lost land in Jerusalem. To visit their former homes and lands had been like touching history. For I had also told of the lives of those who now lived on or near those lands. Save for one mention of a PLO official in Beirut — the spokesman slugging champagne at the diplomatic reception — Yassir Arafat’s organisation did not receive a single reference in the thousands of words I wrote. The Times also carried a long interview with Jacob Manor. But the reaction to the articles — a series that dealt with Palestinians as individual human beings rather than as some kind of refugee caste manipulated by fanatics and ‘terrorists’ — was deeply instructive.

On the day that the last of the articles appeared, the Zionist Federation staged a demonstration outside the London offices of The Times, some of their supporters holding placards which announced that the paper was ‘a new Arab secret weapon’ and that the PLO would be the next owner of The Times. Shlomo Argov, then Israeli ambassador in London, denounced the series as ‘a bold apologia for what is none other than basic PLO doctrine’. In the letters columns of The Times, Jewish readers variously suggested that I was ‘making a serious attempt to undermine the legal basis of Israel’s existence’ and that the paper had become ‘a platform for the enemies of Israel’. The general drift of critical correspondence suggested that the mere publishing of the series was anti-semitic. Argov himself had written an earlier letter of such hostility that it had to be returned by the paper because its contents were regarded by lawyers at The Times as potentially defamatory. When this was first pointed out to the ambassador, he said that he could not be sued for libel since he possessed diplomatic immunity. The Zionist Federation condemned Damiani, Abu Khadra, Mrs Zamzam and Mrs Boulos as ‘victims of their own aggression’ who had ‘remained refugees because they are being used as an instrument of the destruction of the State of Israel.’

Just how such lack of pity could be justified was not vouchsafed. Eric Graus, the Federation’s honorary secretary, was involved in a heated argument in the street outside The Times building with Louis Heren, who was deputy editor of the paper and a former Middle East correspondent. Heren was actually in Palestine in 1948 and was one of the first correspondents to enter Deir Yassin after the massacre of its Arab residents by Menachem Begin’s Irgun gunmen. He found himself bitterly telling Graus of the horrors which he had witnessed during a war in which the Israelis still claim they never committed atrocities. No comment was made by either demonstrators or critical readers — or by the ambassador — about the kindness of Shlomo Green, the old Israeli who showed such compassion towards the Palestinian in whose former home he was now living.7

Generosity, however, was not an emotion that could be found in many Palestinian hearts in Lebanon, and the hatred that burned in 1948 was eagerly taken up by a new generation. I witnessed this phenomenon in tragically symbolic form several months after The Times had published my series. In early 1981, the Israelis had staged an air raid against the Rashidiyeh Palestinian camp — where Mrs Zamzam had her home — and I drove down to southern Lebanon from Beirut to report on the attack. The Palestinians had been firing Katyusha rockets into Galilee, the missiles landing not far from the Israeli village of Ben Ami where Mrs Zamzam’s Arab village of Um Al-Farajh had once stood. There had been little damage to Galilee or Rashidiyeh in the exchange of fire but, not far from the entrance to the Palestinian camp, I was briefly introduced to a man who was described as the ‘leader of joint PLO forces’ in Rashidiyeh.

Several seconds passed before I recognised the features of the PLO officer who was defending the Palestinian camp and shelling the area around Ben Ami. It was Hassan Zamzam, Fatima Zamzam’s son, the same Hassan who as a 40-day-old baby had been carried by his mother out of Um Al-Farajh in 1948 on the family’s road to exile. So now the children of the dispossessed were attacking the children of those who had brought such misery to their Palestinian parents. The war had truly gone full circle.

Notes:

1 Edward Said, Question of Palestine (New York: Times Books, 1979), p. 9.

2 Among the most carefully researched works on this period, containing many other examples of Foreign Office pragmatism, is BRITAIN AND ZION: THE FATEFUL ENTANGLEMENT by Frank Hardie and Irwin Herrman (Belfast, Blackstaff Press, 1981).

3 Quoted in Said, QUESTION OF PALESTINE, p. 16.

4 I. F. Stone, UNDERGROUND TO PALESTINE, AND REFLECTIONS THIRTY YEARS LATER (New York, Pantheon Books, 1978), pp. 205-06.

5 THE LAND OF THE SAD ORANGES, quoted in DISPOSSED: THE ORDEAL OF THE PALESTINIANS 1917-1980 by David Gilmour (London, Sidgwick and Jackson, 1981). Gilmour’s book is among the most readable accounts of the Palestinian tragedy in Lebanon.

6 Moshe Aumann, LAND OWNERSHIP IN PALESTINE 1880-1948 (Israel Academic Committee on the Middle East, undated), pp. 5-8.

7 The complete series of ten articles entitled ‘The Land of Palestine’ can be found in editions of The Times between 15 and 24 December 1980. Editorial comment, readers’ letters and a report of the demonstration by the Zionist Federation appeared in the paper between 23 December 1980 and 20 January 1981.

©copyright Robert Fisk, 1990, 2003
From PITY THE NATION, The Abduction of Palestine
Atheneum Books, (1990); Thunder’s Mouth Press/Nation Books 2002 (pb)
With permission of the Author and Nation Books.

A selected list of links to sites concerning Robert Fisk (Ed.):

Robert Fisk, “Amira Hass: Life under Israeli occupation,” 26 August 2001

Robert Fisk’s articles in The Independent

The unofficial Robert Fisk website, maintained by Z Magazine

Robert Fisk, “Oussama bin Laden ,” Le Monde, 18-09-01

Interview with Robert Fisk, “Four Corners,” Australian Broadcasting System

PITY THE NATION, Nation Books

For criticism of Fisk as a Palestinian apologist, see for example, Andrea Levin (1994) and “Robert Fisk’s Orwellian Newspeak.”

A French view of death threats against journalists, particularly Fisk, for criticizing Israel.

Fisk in Afghanistan: “UK journalist beaten by Afghanistan mob,” BBC, 9 December 2001

Partial transcript of Robert Fisk speech, Concordia University, Montréal, Canada, Nov. 17, 2002
Gordwhatamess

NO ACCEPTO LA PENA DE MUERTE

2007-11-05T23:32:00.000Z

For my Spanish amigos. See the post below.

GordforaunitedEurope

Citizens United for Alternatives to the Death Penalty (CUADP).

2007-11-05T23:10:00.000Z

More on what they are doing can be found at http://abolition.org

But tell me if you manage to purchase any of these. It's a mystery to me!

Gord help the innocents!

A feast of Traveling Wilburys and Jeff Lynne and Roy Orbison..

2007-11-05T21:55:00.000Z

Dear Reader,
I beg you please, do click on the Roy Orbison photograph when this video ends. The outstaning voice of popular music in the last century. Go on treat yourself. Or better still call in the wife/partner/girfriend/kids/family and friends to hear it . Thanks to You Tube.

And Jeff Lynne:-

Gordstuff

Melanie Safka - an Ochs fan and pretty good herself!

2007-11-05T01:00:00.000Z

Gordnight

Saw a shooting star tonight over Kernow - was it Bob Dylan?

2007-11-05T00:03:00.000Z

Very slow video of Dylan follows - but you get my drift!

Gordandcrocket

Judy Collins and Eric Anderson - Thirsty Boots

2007-11-04T11:09:00.000Z

GorditsSunday

Phil Ochs and Abe Hoffman buddies who loved America and were killed by the FBI

2007-11-03T21:54:00.000Z

Phil Ochs wrote this shortly before he died. It is haunting poetry and tragic also.
Both of these young men believed in a FREE AMERICA not an imprisoned USA violating human rights and supporting foreign despots like Saddam and Musharraf.

Gordcompromiser

Condom free cucumbers at The Co-Operative.

2007-11-03T18:35:00.000Z

To reduce their use of plastic the Co-op are taking plastic off of cucumbers and swedes. Very soon most of our plastic wrapped good can be placed under the tap, and without causing any pollution, will shrink to about one tenth of their size. After which you can place this tiny bit of plastic in you smaller waste bin. Also you will need smaller wheelie bins which, by the way, should not be made of plastic.
You can read more here http://co-operative.co.uk/en/corporate/ join us.
Gordoncooperator!

Phil Ochs - from the optimism of youth, to disillusion and suicide.

2007-11-03T00:54:00.000Z

Boy In Ohio
By Phil Ochs

G C G
Creek was running by the road
D
And the Buckeye sun was a-shinin'
G C G
I rode my bike down Alum Creek Drive
Em Am
When I was a boy in Ohio

G C G
The English teacher he didn't care
F
He challenged us to checkers
Bb Dm D7
And once in a while we'd swap a joke
Eb
When I was a boy in Ohio

Once I was caught playing hooky from school
They found me home in the evening
I confessed I had been to the movie show
When I was a boy in Ohio

We would wait for the summer to come
For swimmin' and pickin' berries
But now a freeway covers the field
Where I used to be so happy

I remember the Burger Boy
Where the girls would shine like the engines
And the radio was always loud
When I was a boy in Ohio

Spanish teacher she tried to help
She was much too pretty
So I just stared at the back of her legs
When I was a boy in Ohio

It was 3.2 beer* at the honky tonk bar
Where they said the girls were easy
But somehow I never found me one
When I was a boy in Ohio

Soon I was grown and I had to leave
And I've been all over the country
But I don't believe I've had more fun
Than when I was a boy in Ohio.

This was his farewell message to his daughter. What a terrible, terrible tragedy.

Rehearsals for Retirement
By Phil Ochs

A G D A
The days grow longer for smaller prizes
A G D A
I feel a stranger to all surprises
Bm E A
You can have them I don't want them
C#m D
I wear a different kind of garment
F#m E
In my rehearsals for retirement

The lights are cold again they dance below me
I turn to old friends they do not know me
All but the beggar he remembers
I put a penny down for payment
In my rehearsals for retirement

D A - A7
Had I known the end would end in laughter
F#m E
I tell my daughter it doesn't matter

The stage is tainted with empty voices
The ladies painted they have no choices
I take my colors from the stable
They lie in tatters by the tournament
In my rehearsals for retirement

Where are the armies who killed a country
And turned a strong man into a baby
No comes the rabble they are welcome
I wait in anger and amusement
In my rehearsals for retirement

Had I known the end would end in laughter
Still I tell my daughter that it doesn't matter

Farewell my own true love, farewell my fancy
Are you still owin' me love, though you failed me
But one last gesture for her pleasure
I'll paint your memory on the monument
In my rehearsals for retirement

Here is a young boy who can not cope with what was happening to the cray world around him. His constant links to, "painted ladies", were about the exploitation of women, long before the 60's feminist revolution. Purest poetry and art.

Gord.

The spoken English word - preserve and protect - Querulous

2007-11-03T00:25:00.000Z

Characterized by or uttered in complaint; peevish: a querulous tone; constant querulous reminders of things to be done.
Recently on the BBC a reporter, from that most articulate newspaper The Sun, used this word to descibe football. Methinks the Sun don't know thur enlishh!
Gordofftobed

Phil Ochs - a Nanci Griffith tribite - USA out of Iraq.

2007-11-03T00:11:00.000Z

http://www.amazon.com/gp/recsradio/radio/B000002O6C/ref=pd_krex_listen_dp_img/102-8162974-9374515?ie=UTF8&refTagSuffix=dp_img
Due to silly copyright, I can not play all of this so they will lose out, and you wont rush out and buy it - but do listen to a smidgen at the link above. However the full lyrics are available:-

Nanci Griffith/James Hooker
We all said you'd never make it
Cuz you had that fragile heart
And you were odd within the ways of the social
You through a caution to us all
And now when the late night drinkers
gather for their falls
Someone says they've seen you out there
laughing at us all

You mourned the cause of discontent
with those who couldn't loose the dark
From the broad of daylight to half spent stars . . .
Just waiting dusk to fall
Tell me, what the hell were you saying?
Was there a point to it all?
Oh, and did they really see you out there . . .

(chorus)
Is there anybody out there?
Is there anybody out there?
Oh, were you really out there . . .
Laughing at us all?

The midnight boy from Minnesota
shut you down and stole the show
They say that you were bitter in your anguish
Cuz it was you they ought to hold
You wore your causes on your sleeve
like a beacon wears the dark
It's only right you should be out there
laughing at us all

Now you are only dust for art
You're a shadow to recall
For all of those late night drinkers
in their ragged lonely bars
And we all said you'd never make it
cuz you had that fragile heart
Now, all our hearts you held are wasted
you're out there laughing at us all . . .

(repeat chorus twice)
Gordonbenit!

A few nice picies - appearing soon Giovanni!

2007-11-01T23:02:00.000Z

Cheers everybody!

Sumptuous and the BBC

2007-11-01T22:27:00.000Z

A wonderful word that has disappeared from modern English. Why? I demand that the BBC informs the nation, by using it, that it is restored to its rightful place.
Gordrivetime

Sir Paul McCartney

2007-11-01T14:47:00.000Z

I think Sir Paul McCartney should try to put his current predicament into perspective.
In olden days, if you were unfortunate enough to be robbed by an omniped, it would almost certainly be a pirate. At least he's going to come out of this alive.
Gordonmacca'sgottoobigforhisboots

Johnny Cash.

2007-10-31T09:43:00.000Z

Rejected by his record company (Columbia) Mr. Cash was picked up by a young producer who still thought he had a lot to offer. He did indeed, and the America 1 to America 5 albums, were arguably, the best work of his career. This recording sums up his life and his daughter Rosanne said she was shocked when she saw the video because it exposed everything about the inner workings and disappointments of his life. Amazing song and video.

The death penalty - Execution - And The Iron Lady

2007-10-30T09:45:00.000Z

I well remember the ceaseless campaigning that we had to do in the UK in the 1950's and 1960's to get hanging abolished. Eventually under Harold Wilson, see post below, we achieved success.

Since then, it is true to say that unless we had stopped hanging, that there wold have been dozens of men and woman sent to their death, who have subsequently been released because of their innocence. Some of these have unfortunately spent a long time in jail and, although, they have received large sums of compensation, to recompense, some are mentally scarred for life.

This boy knew it was wrong in the USA and made his own protest. Listen, but not the children, too horrific.

Also go to http://abolition.org/ and support their campaign as I will be doing with every fibre in my body.

Gordtobealive

Phil Ochs - Changes and the USA

2007-10-29T09:45:00.001Z

This young man was a patriot and loved the American values of decency, loyalty, love of country and above all the truth. But he was betrayed by Richard Nixon and Mayor Daley. He was constantly harassed by the FBI, who had a very thick file on him but he fought back through his energy and his only weapon his music.

Disillusioned and abandoned by many of his so called friends like Bob Dylan, his dreams shattered, he became a drug user, drank a lot and became schizophrenic. He wandered around New York looking like a tramp and called himself John Train. Eventually he had enough and hanged himself, in his sister's home, at a tragically early age.

However his music remains and he has an ever growing fan base around the world. He wrote some of the most hauntingly beautiful music that I have ever heard - a gift that generations will cherish, as his music is timeless.

The following song was the last recording that he ever made. He said cherio to the crew in the recording studio and the production manager, concerned at his state of mind asked him what he would be doing. He replied, "I'll be around" and went away and hanged himself. He had had enough. Fought his fight and lost.

But he won and the world pays homage to what he stood up for and the legendary music.

This is sadly one of his last videos, singing the first chorus of the song. Look at the strain on the man's face:-

and here are the lyrics:-

Changes
By Phil Ochs
Capo 1st fret
Intro: G/A/D/Em/G/A/F#m/Bm/Em/A/D/Em/A/D
G A D Em
Sit by my side, come as close as the air,
G A F#m
Share in a memory of gray;
Bm Em A D
And wander in my words, dream about the pictures
Em A D
That I play of changes.
Green leaves of summer turn red in the fall
To brown and to yellow they fade.
And then they have to die, trapped within
the circle time parade of changes.
Scenes of my young years were warm in my mind,
Visions of shadows that shine.
'Til one day I returned and found they were the
Victims of the vines of changes.
The world's spinning madly, it drifts in the dark
Swings through a hollow of haze,
A race around the stars, a journey through
The universe ablaze with changes.
Moments of magic will glow in the night
All fears of the forest are gone
But when the morning breaks they're swept away by
Golden drops of dawn, of changes.
Passions will part to a strange melody.
As fires will sometimes burn cold.
Like petals in the wind, we're puppets to the silver
strings of souls, of changes.
Your tears will be trembling, now we're somewhere else,
One last cup of wine we will pour
And I'll kiss you one more time, and leave you on
the rolling river shores of changes.
(repeat first verse)

The invasion of Iraq

2007-10-29T00:51:00.000Z

On the news tonight, it said that the coalition had been provided with a Rough Tour guide of Iraq, dated 1991, as a guide for the military to carry out their invasion.
Rather reminds me of when I was a spy at GCHQ. In those far off days I was the desk officer monitoring Franco's Espania. In case they invaded Gibralter our troops were to be provided with second world war photographs of Algeciras to guide them ashore. Laugh, ask agent Hoots and agent Speks to verify this!
Gorditstoughbeingpm

Old Europe and the Bush Rice recipe!

2007-10-28T23:56:00.000Z

Above is a picture of old Europe from an even older Europe in Kernow.
They push money down the throats of new Europe to support their crimes in Iraq and elsewhere in an attempt to divide and rule. But all of Europe has been ravaged for generations by war and barbarism. We have learnt our lesson. The USA is losing yet another war. When will these little children, toting their guns everywhere, learn about common decent humanity?
Gordoff!

Friggin Norah

2007-10-26T23:17:00.000+01:00

Are the police after me?
http://www.sitemeter.com/?a=stats&s=s19cs301dm&v=72&r=9&vlr=8&pg=1&d=1026
Wht have I done? After all this is GB addressing you.
I thank you GB

Her Highness the Queen

2007-10-26T23:10:00.000+01:00

should retire and declare that there is no successor. The old bird has done her job with dignity but the thought of having the adulterers Charley and Camilla on the throne fills me with revulsion.
I totally agree with this bloke http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/graham_smith/2007/10/royally_upset.html
Good night any may your lord be with you.
Gordonstarinthenorth

Viva Valencia =

2007-10-25T22:31:00.000+01:00

just keep away. It does not need tourists or Big Mac or Irish pubs. Feck orf I say.

Bush and Condy with Rice!

2007-10-25T22:26:00.000+01:00

These two bustards, together with Tory Blair, have wrought untold death and sorrow on the Iraqi people. Now The American twosome are threating Iran.
Where were these simpletons educated? Neither of them has the slightest idea about politics in the middle east. That meal twosome make me puke.

The Road to Wigan Pier

2007-10-25T09:53:00.000+01:00

The British Cabinet.

2007-10-25T09:42:00.000+01:00

The first cabinet in history that has consisted of Darling, Brown, Balls. Think about it!

IPF rides again.

2007-10-24T21:02:00.000+01:00

this supplier of software to GCHQ is a badger lover, but I forgive him 'cos he's a Blues fan. We speak in codes!
RG

OUR WORLD

2007-09-29T00:31:00.000+01:00

We send brave young men off to fight, for gawd kernows what, in Iraq and Afghanistan, where due to our good offices, the people are poorer and more afraid. Whilst the mega terrorists like Mugabe and the Junta in Burma can permit whatever abuses of human rights they determine.
Can anyone explain this to me please?
Gord down the pan.

Birmingham City F. C.

2007-07-03T22:21:00.000+01:00

At the moment there is frenetic transfer activity. We have signed players who are injury prone (nothing new there), or have been out on loan because they are not considered good enough for the Italian second division, or have not been picked to play a full league match in eighteen months in Putin country.

These are gambles, but hopefully, one or two will be winners. Meanwhile a Hong Kong company will be scrutinising the books of the club and a sudden large increase in season ticket sales might persuade them to buy in. In this takeover bid both parties are playing an astute game of chess.

The fans, as ever, are mere pawns in the game.

Gordmate!

Birmingham City F.C.

2007-06-25T15:13:00.000+01:00

END OF TERM REPORT
Congratulations must go to the manager Steve Bruce for getting us promoted back into the Premiership. Quite how we managed it remains a mystery to me. Not only did we play ugly football most of the time and also manage to lose to the bottom six teams but we were also very, very lucky running out undeserved 1-0 winners on numerous occasions. It would appear that the gypsy curse has indeed been lifted.
In achieving this feat however we have stirred up the predatory monsters that feast on the English premier league these days. A minimum thirty million pounds bonus, received by each club from television revenues, ensures that the fat sharks begin to circle for their piece of the meat. Transfer fees, for average players, soar as likewise do the salaries that the players and their agents demand.
But a new, and perhaps more threatening beast has been alerted and is rumbling into town. The foreign billionaire who sees a Premiership club as a brand and investment to be added to his portfolio. A marketing opportunity, a cash cow and, if things go tits up, assets to be stripped. No previous links or ties to the club. We are selling over a century of local history and pride for a mess of pottage.
THE Blues latest suitor is a mystery man from the far east. He apparently goes under the name of Carson Yeung Ka-sing. Very little is know about this supposed Hong Kong billionaire. He appears on no "rich list" but is said to be acting alone and to be associated with several companies. Extensive serches on the internet by Blues fans and others however have failed to reveal the extent of his wealth. He was briefly associated with Hong Kong Rangers, sacking the manager after three matches and left over a row about interfering with team selection. China remains a closed society and Mr. Yeung seems happy to play his inscrutable part.
As for my part I am beginning a campaign called, "STOP KA-SING IN ON BLUES" or in plain english "bugger off".
Gordenigma

I Gordon Brown will tax the poor until they starve.

2007-05-30T11:16:00.000+01:00

In my final budget I have managed to do what no other Labour Party Chancellor of the Exchequer has done before. By abolishing the 10p rate of income tax on the first £2200 of taxable income and replacing it with a 20p rate I have effectively doubled the tax payable by some of the poorest in the land. This is my finest hour.
Gord for PM

Messing about on the river.

2007-05-17T11:40:00.000+01:00

Red sails on the Torridge, North Devon

Harold Wilson - a most perceptive man.

2007-01-17T17:17:00.000Z

Relatively early during the troubles in Northern Ireland Harold Wilson correctly predicted that there were storm clouds gathering. Presenting his '15 point plan' in the House of Commons, the central point of which was that the final settlement of the Irish question lay in unity, he stated that new initiatives had to be brought forward speedily because, 'if men of moderation had nothing to hope for, men of violence will have something to shoot for'.
He won more elections (four) than any other 20th century Prime Minister and some of his governments initiatives have proved to be far-reaching achievements. These include:-
the foundation of the Open University;
the liberalising of laws affecting homosexuals and obscene publications;
the ending of capital punishment;
the holding of a refendum which ensured that we remained in the European Union.
He also gave us a national holiday to celebrate May Day and his coming to power in 1964 heralded the birth of the swinging sixties and in 1966 we won The World Cup.
He was a powful orator and some of his more legendary quotes survive to this day:-
A week is a long time in politics;
I'm an optomist, but an optomist who carries a raincoat;
The monarchy is a labour intensive industry;
The Labour Party is a moral crusade or it is nothing;
N0 comment - in glorious technicolour;
He who rejects change is the architect of decay. The only human institution which rejects progress is the cemetry;
Whichever party is in office, the Treasury is in power.
When hit in the eye by a stink bomb thrown by a schoolboyhis response was, 'With an arm like that he ought to be in the England cricket team.'
His premiership was frought with problems however. He managed devisive cabinets many of whom had sharp intellects and inflated egos and, although he was thought to be paranoid at the time, it has since been proved that he was undermined by parts of the military and the security services.
He kept us out of the Vietnam war, despite American demands for the presence of British troops and it was also under Wilson that, for the first time in a century or so, a whole year passed without a British soldier being killed on active service.
How different to the cringing subservience by Tony Blair to George Bush and his recent assertion that Britain had a moral duty to go to war anywhere in the world where western values (whatever those are) are threatened.
Nice one Harold
Your old friend Gordon.

Birmingham City F. C.

2007-01-12T09:33:00.000Z

The time has come for the mid term report. The Blues are, currently, top of the league although they have forfeited five of their eight points credit over the last few weeks - it is said because of a superfluity of Xmas pudding. Come teatime on Saturday however, because of events I will explain later we may only be joint top.
We remain a conundrum. Because we are not used to success nobody is convinced, despite our current lofty status, that we will return to the Premiership next season. Some of the fans are suspicious of the manager and the board who, in turn, suspect that there are a number of fifth columnists on the terraces (some of us have been called a disgrace) and that many more have taken to fishing, shopping, watching the tele and other flippant activities like prefering to be with their families.
St. Andrews, once famous for producing an atmosphere that chilled the blood in opposing ranks and fired the hearts of tens of thousands of Brummies has, for no apparent reason, become a genteel place where silence is golden and most of what sound there is usually comes from a few thousand visiting fans. Something strange and unexplained is happenning. Is there a lack of excitement or anticipation or has a fervent and passionate generation moved on?
However, famous as we are for being one of the great blunderers in football on this day, Saturday 13 January 2007, we have made ouselves look very foolish indeed. Our home match against Leeds United has had to be cancelled because a newly laid playing surface is awash with water and has to be replaced. We have been charged by the F.A. for failing to fulfil a fixture and await our sentance. We could even have points deducted. Who is responsible for this gross piece of mismanagement - apparently the weather - it was wet in January surprise, surprise. How we could have done with this deluge during the the Second World War incident involving a member of the National Fire Service, a happily burning brazier and a bucket of unidentified liquid. Unfortunately for the fire fighter the bucket contained petrol, not water. Result: the destruction of the main stand, and exile to Villa Park.
So disaster follows disaster but at heart all of us Blues fans know that one day, one day we will succeed at something. Like the song says, "Keep Right On".

Birmingham City F C

2006-08-27T20:03:00.000+01:00

After the up, the usual down. Top of the league for a while and now about to crash through the rafters.
We have spent shedloads of money, at over inflated prices, on ordinary players who although not without merit at their own clubs will be turned into non entities by our manager and his staff/crock.
On top of this we have three, yes THREE, of Arsenal's rising starlets on loan whom we are going to be very dependent on because they are better than anything that we have in our locker. Now I am not against loans per se. - to cover for an injury crisis or a lack of depth in a particular area of the squad. But to take three, who will expect regular first team football to gain first team experience etc. is bordering on the insane for obvious reasons.
However this time there is a difference - the long suffering fans are exasparated - not only about the above but because of our over cautious and boring football. Apparently the rule is you avoid defeat at all costs (a rule which was broken at Cardiff yesterday, and good luck to them). We have set out to either draw or win by a single goal. As I promised exciting times lie ahead.
Gordon

Birmingham City F. C.

2006-07-16T22:25:00.000+01:00

As foretold in March the inevitable happened and THE BLUES are now in the FIZZY POP League, or as it will ever be for me, the 2nd Division. This is our natural home - 2nd City, 2nd Division.
We have paid over the odds for a couple of rookies and a right back and managed to obtain for free the fine Bruno N'Gotty, a Frenchman from Bolton. According to a recent poll our fans are not overly optimistic about a quick return to the upper reaches. Not surprising after over one hundred and thirty years of under achieving. However the bookies make us favourites to win our league, which is the certain kiss of doom.
My recent absence has been due to a spell in HM 's custody due to the clever whiles of agent Hots. Also suffering are my friends from Sunderland who are looking for a manager - I happen to know a man called Geordie who could do the job very well.

Gorn Down the Pan

2006-07-12T13:01:00.000+01:00

Birmingham City F.C.

2006-03-13T10:42:00.000Z

Once again my team are poised to be relegated from the higher reaches of the football league to a lower division, and who knows the year after that to an even lower rung on football's slippery ladder. Now this is not unusual, since I first stepped out onto the terraces of St. Andrews in 1957, we have always struggled to maintain our status in the premier division.
This is a pity because our team represents England's second city and the fans deserve better for numerous reasons. This long suffering bunch of dedicated pall bearers and their descendents, nearly all who live within a stone's throw of the venerable old ground, have shown more dedication to their team than perhaps any other supporters in the land.
Just look at the facts, founded in 1875 the club have never won a major trophy in their history and yet the unqualified support of the people of Birmingham, in large numbers, has been their's for the asking. This dedicated bunch have not only had to put up with, for the most part, mediocricy, if not downright garbage, on the pitch but equally unwholesome meat pies and highly diluted tea or bovril (sometimes it is difficult to tell the difference) to sustain them through their misery. Even to take your appointed place on the terraces at St. Andrews it has often beeen necessary to negotiate a river of urine overflowing from the brick walled enclosure that sufficed as bogs when I was a young man. Despite all of this the most enduring characteristic of generations of Blues fans remains their stoical sense of humour and their expectancy that next season all will be different and that at last it will be our turn.
And yet, and yet we have had our moments. Sometimes we have seen artistry on the pitch that transcends a mere sporting moment and remains in the memory like something Da Vinci may have created. It is these moments that bring us back again and again - too often to be depressed and disappointed by weeks, nay seasons, of struggle and pain - indeed overall Munch's tortured painting entitled, 'The Scream' may be a more approprite pictorial metaphor for a Blues fan than anything that came from Leonardo's studio.
Why has this happened? It is said that we are suffering from a gypsy's curse. Even exorcism has been tried, but alas to no avail. Our board has certainly succeeded in appointing a long line of managers whose football careers have halted or gone downhill after departing from St. Andrews simply because they were not good enough for the job. There has, for instance, never been a cerebral thinker in the post like those who dominate in most successful football clubs these days. And even when a manager has arrived and started to assemble a team with potential then the directors have cashed in on his efforts and our best talent has been sold.
I would argue that any football club is the property of its fans - they are the one constant and the fans of Birmingham City deserve better. It is their club and it should belong to them. As it is they are unable to influence events and have any say on one of the great passions of their lives.
There is already a trend, in the lower regions for clubs to belong to the fans as is demonstrated by the fans co-operatives who own Exeter and York. And for those of you who scoff and say that dubious Rusian milionaires are the answer then look no further than Barcelona whose fans own the club and elect the board. Power to the Blues people.

Kate Bush, new album after many years

2005-11-10T23:02:00.000Z

I haver heard a few tracks - she is enigmatic, always was. Anyone have any comments?

Gord

Phil Ochs - Changes

2005-11-08T23:51:00.000Z

Changes
By Phil Ochs
Capo 1st fret
Intro: G/A/D/Em/G/A/F#m/Bm/Em/A/D/Em/A/D
G A D Em
Sit by my side, come as close as the air,
G A F#m
Share in a memory of gray;
Bm Em A D
And wander in my words, dream about the pictures
Em A D
That I play of changes.
Green leaves of summer turn red in the fall
To brown and to yellow they fade.
And then they have to die, trapped within
the circle time parade of changes.
Scenes of my young years were warm in my mind,
Visions of shadows that shine.
'Til one day I returned and found they were the
Victims of the vines of changes.
The world's spinning madly, it drifts in the dark
Swings through a hollow of haze,
A race around the stars, a journey through
The universe ablaze with changes.
Moments of magic will glow in the night
All fears of the forest are gone
But when the morning breaks they're swept away by
Golden drops of dawn, of changes.
Passions will part to a strange melody.
As fires will sometimes burn cold.
Like petals in the wind, we're puppets to the silver
strings of souls, of changes.
Your tears will be trembling, now we're somewhere else,
One last cup of wine we will pour
And I'll kiss you one more time, and leave you on
the rolling river shores of changes.
(repeat first verse)

Brilliance yet to be discovered - Gord an seek!

The 0870 fiddle.

2005-11-04T10:10:00.000Z

The Met. were reprimanded yesterday because they used an 0870 number for relatives of people who may have been involved in the July 7 London bombings to contact them. They have duly apologised.

I note however that this premium rate number (10 pence a minute) is being increasingly used by banks, building societies, insurance companies etc. instead of the 0800 freephone number or the 0845 local rate number. What annoys me very much however is that you can then be held in a queue for anything up to 20 minutes listening to some ridiculous music waiting to speak to someone at the othe end. I'm sure that this is deliberate and that the firms and BT are making huge money out of this dodgy practice.

Bah humbug, I shall refuse to call anyone with an 0870 number in future and write them a letter instead.
Gordon Fuming

Apply now for a job at Birmingham City F.C.

2005-11-01T22:31:00.000Z

It's job security for life. Having won only one match this season and, with a team, in the bottom three of the Premiership, the manager, a certain S. Bruce, has been told that even if the team is defeated in all it's remaining fixtures this year, that he will not be sacked. What a job - be a complete failure with us and you have a secured future. Can I buy into this? No - of course not - as a loyal supporter I am expected to pay £45.00 pounds a match to get a seat to watch my team lose. Feck 'em says I - my feet will vote for me.
Gordown a division.

Johnny Cash and me.

2005-10-29T22:22:00.000+01:00

At last I find that I had something in common with the great man. Oh noo, I have none of the voice or the presence or the charisma of JRC but for three years he worked as a radio intercept operator in Germany, taking down Russian morse code - whilst I was sat in GCHQ at Cheltenham analysing it.
Rock on John, and I hope you are with your God whoever he or she may be.

Gord Brown

Flock - the new kid on the block.

2005-10-27T23:30:00.000+01:00

Flock Developer Preview is now available.
Our code couldn't wait any longer to be free!
But! This preview ain't for the faint of heart! If you're the bleeding-edge type and don't mind a few scrapes and busted knees from time to time, feel free to give it a whirl.
We've got interesting ideas in this thing. We want to know what we've done right how we could improve. And we've got a lot of work ahead of us!
So if a bucket of source code and developer binaries sound enticing, head over to our Developer page now.
Wanna keep tabs on what we're up to? Check out FlockRadio, broadcasting our blogs around the clock.
Other Flock sites and content:
FlockRadio
FlockBuzz
FlockPhotos
Five ways to:
Get Started Get Involved
Get Support
Get the Code
-->
Gordown interersting.

MI5 - I'm quite flattered - they visit this blog every day - see details

2005-10-25T23:14:00.000+01:00

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88.111.104.# (Tiscali UK Limited)
88.111.104.215
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Tiscali UK Limited
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Continent
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United Kingdom (Facts)
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Lambeth
City
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London
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Language

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Browser

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I thank you
Gordon Brown

eBay mega expensive. Paypal a rip off.

2005-10-25T22:14:00.000+01:00

Time was when you could get a bargain, but rarely these days. They have all caught on to the internet. Tesco, mower nerds as a way of making a quick buck. Forget it - go to your local charity shops - not only can you examine the article, you get guaranteed delivery and a refund if it isn't what you expected.
Many of those on eBay and Paypal are rip off merchants who swindle you. 'Nuff said. Today I purchased a brand new hugo Boss jacket for £1.50 in an animal charity shop. On eBay it would have been £50 at least plus the usual postal charge swindle of £10.

Gordon the bargain hunter.

Birmingham City Blues - ELO - recorded it - I'm in it

2005-10-25T00:18:00.000+01:00

The BLUES have had their usual spectacular rise in the Premiership. Not middling but bottoming this time.
An enormous bunch of genuine, nice and decent people, have for a century and a quarter endured a side that is mainly magnificent in defeat. We've won nothing, done nothing and, I'm sure, will never acheive anything.
Our present manager blames everybody but himself for our terrible performances this season. No matter that he purchased them , picks the team and decides on the tactics. I will soon have lived, nearly a century, please someone rescue us.
Gord Help Us!

Gunnislake 2 Sticker 1

2005-10-21T00:35:00.000+01:00

Our defence doing sterling work.

The Internovella is now discontinued -

2005-10-19T23:19:00.000+01:00

I've lost the plot!

Gordon Wasting Away.

Saddam was given millions, plus arms, by the USA

2005-10-19T00:00:00.000+01:00

and the British when he waged a terrible war against Iran, where hundreds of thousands died.

His crime then, he didn't win. So when you back a horse and he fails you claim retribution. The British and the Americans, along with Sad Dan should be in the dock for war crimes against Iran. As Gorbachov said tonight - big mistake - keep out of the middle east. Which of course we don't, because we want their oil. But they will carry on proping up the undemocratic and cruel Saudis - bet your bottom dollar!

Gordon Oiler

Thatcher - her hero worshippers called her, "The Iron Lady"

2005-10-17T23:47:00.000+01:00

ironic that - see below - although she was an executioner of large swathes of our green and pleasant land. I will remain alive until I dance on her tomb.

The Iron Lady
By Phil Ochs
Am F Dm
Have you seen the iron lady's charms
Am F Dm
Legs of steel, leather on her arms
Bb Gm
Taking on a man to die
Am Dm
A life for a life, an eye for an eye
Bb Gm Dm C
And death's the iron lady in the chair.

Stop the murder, deter the crimes away
Only killing shows that killing doesn't pay
Yes that's the kind of law it takes
Even though we make mistakes
And sometimes send the wrong man to the chair.

In the death row waiting for their turn
No time to change, not a chance to learn
Waiting for someone to call
Say it's over after all
They won't have to face the justice of the chair.

Just before they serve him one last meal
Shave his head, they ask him how he feels
Then the warden comes to say goodbye
Reporters come to watch him die
Watch him as he's strapped into the chair.

And the chaplain, he reads the final prayer
Be brave my son, the Lord is waiting there
Oh murder is so wrong you see
Both the Bible and the courts agree
That the state's allowed to murder in the chair.

In the courtroom, watch the balance of the scales
If the price is right, there's time for more appeals
The strings are pulled, the switch is stayed
The finest lawyers fees are paid
And a rich man never died upon the chair.

Have you seen the iron lady's charms
Legs of steel, leather on her arms
Taking on a man to die
A life for a life, an eye for an eye
That's the iron lady in the chair.

We have murdered through state authenticated orders thousands of innocent men and women.

Gord help us!

Birmingham City F. C. and pain.

2005-10-16T23:51:00.000+01:00

Today the Blues have lost at home to Aston Villa, who probably deserved their victory. We have not won at home this season. This is the poorest start in the Prem. that we have ever made.
Our manager is clueless but the board and our chief exec. , having appointed him, after sacking a better manager don't know what to do. They would lose face - and so they should - most of them deal in pornography.

They are embarresed and look like headless chickens - which is what they are. Football clubs should not be owned by rich ego seekers - they should be owned by the fans. In this country Exeter City and York City belong to the fans - in Europe Barcelona are owned by their fans. It is time for a Blue Revolution - the fans must take over BCFC. We have had 130 years of disaster - time for a change.
Gordon Fuming

We'll keep thr red flag flying here.

2005-10-13T23:54:00.000+01:00

Little insect - big bloom!

2005-10-13T23:26:00.000+01:00

Blues v Aston Villa and the BBC

2005-10-13T22:58:00.000+01:00

This Sunday, at some ungodly hour, the two teams from the second largest city in the United Kingdom will do battle. Because we are not based in London or the north we seem to be totally excluded from the television companies agenda.
If you don't support; Chelsea, Arsenal, Spurs, Manure, Liverpool or the barcodes = you do not exist. The vast majority of supporters who will never abandon Swindon or Cheltenham Town or Scunthorpe or Carlisle or Argyle or Portsmouth or Wrexham or Burnley or Nottingham Forest or Blackburn or Bristol Rovers cease to exist in the minds of the addled popinjays who decide what we will watch.
In the meantime I will watch my own village team, Gunnislake F.C. and get more fun and enjoyment than those who run ther BBC will ever know. Elitist bastards I call them - get football back to its roots - don't chase wild young men earning more than it takes in a week to feed someone from a third world country for all of their lifetime. Get your priorities right - the majority of foootball supporters do not exist in London or Liverpool or Manchester - refuse to pay your licence - let's all go to jail.
Gordon Midlothian

2005-10-12T21:44:00.000+01:00

Crazy Horse? Somewhere in China.

Drink beer, tea is dangerous stuff - William Cobbett

2005-10-12T12:21:00.000+01:00

The evils of tea (and the virtues of beer) If you have ever wondered about which is better: tea or beer, this piece should put your mind at rest. It is extracted from William Cobbett's Cottage Econony, published in 1822. His reasoning is hard to challenge.

The drink which has come to supply the place of beer has, in general, been tea. It is notorious that tea has no useful strength in it; that it contains nothing nutritious; that it, besides being good for nothing, has badness in it, because it is well known to produce want of sleep in many cases, and in all cases, to shake and weaken the nerves. It is, in fact, a weaker kind of laudanum, which enlivens for the moment and deadens afterwards. At any rate, it communicates no strength to the body; it does not in any degree assist in affording what labour demands. It is, then, of no use. And now, as to its cost, compared with that of beer. I shall make my comparison applicable to a year, or 365 days. I shall suppose the tea to be only five shillings the pound, the sugar only sevenpence, the milk only twopence a quart. The prices are at the very lowest. I shall suppose a teapot to cost a shilling, six cups and saucers to cost two shillings and sixpence, and six pewter spoons to cost eighteen pence. How to estimate the firing i hardly know, but certainly there must be in the course of the year to hundred fires made that would not be made, were it not for tea drinking. Then comes the great article of all, the time employed in this tea-making affair. It is impossible to make a fire, boil water, make the tea, drink it, wash up the things, sweep up the fireplace and put all to rights again in a less space of time, upon an average, than two hours. However, let us allow one hour; and here we have a woman occupied no less than three hundred and sixty five hours in the year; or thirty whole days at twelve hours in the day; that is to say, one month out of the twelve in the year, besides the waste of the man's time in hanging about waiting for the tea! Needs there anything more to make us cease to wonder at seeing labourers' children with dirty linen and holes in the heels of their stockings? Observe too, that the time thus spent, is, one half of it, the best time of the day. It is the top of the morning, which, in every calling of life, contains an hour worth two or three hours of the afternoon. By the time that the clattering tea-tackle is out of the way, the morning is spoiled, its prime is gone, and any work that is to be done afterwards lags heavily along. If the mother have to go out to work, the tea affair must all first be over. She comes into the field, in summer time, when the sun has gone a third part of his course. She has the heat of the day to encounter, instead of having her work done and being ready to return home at an early hour. Yet early she must go to; for there is the fire again to be made, the clattering tea-tackle again to come forward; and even in the longest day she must have candle light, which never ought to be seen in a cottage (except in case of illness) from March to September.
I have here estimated every thing at its very lowest. The entertainment which I have here provided is as poor, as mean, as miserable, as anything short of starvation can set forth. And yet, the wretched thing amounts to a good third part of a good and able labourers' wages. For this money, he and his family may drink good and wholesome beer; in a short time, out of the mere savings from this waste, they may drink it out of silver cups and tankards. In a labourer's family, wholesome beer, that has a little life in it, is all that is wanted in general. Little children that do not work, should not have beer. Broth, porridge, or something in that way, is the thing for them. However, I shall suppose, in order to make my comparison as little complicated as possible, that he brews nothing but beer as strong as the generality of beer to be had at the public- house, and divested of the poisonous drugs which that beer but too often contains; and I shall further suppose that he uses in his family, two quarts of this beer, every day, from the first day of October to the last day of March inclusive; three quarts a day during the months of June and September; and five quarts a day during the months of July and August; and if this be not enough, it must be a family of drunkards. Here are one thousand and ninety seven quarts, or two hundred and seventy four gallons. Now, a bushel of malt will make eighteen gallons of better beer than that which is sold at the public-houses. And this is precisely a gallon for the price of a quart. People should bear in mind, that the beer bought at the public-house is loaded with a beer tax, with the tax on the public-house keeper, in the shape of license, with all the taxes and expenses of the brewer, and with all the taxes, rent, and other expenses of the publican, and with all the profits of both brewer and publican; so that when a man swallows a pot of beer at a public-house, he has all these expenses to help to defray, besides the mere tax on the malt and the hops.
But I look upon the thing in a still more serious light. I view the tea drinking as a destroyer of health, an enfeebler of the frame, and engenderer of effeminacy and laziness, a debaucher of youth, and a maker of misery for old age. In the fifteen bushels of malt there are 570 pounds weight of sweet; that is to say, of nutritious matter, unmixed with anything injurious to health. In the 730 tea messes of the year, there are 54 pounds of sweet in the sugar, and about 30 pounds of matter equal to sugar in the milk. Here are eighty four pounds instead of five hundred and seventy, and even the good effect of these eighty four pounds is more than overbalanced by the corrosive, gnawing, and poisonous powers of the tea.
It is impossible for anyone to deny of this statement. Put it to the test with a lean hog: give him the fifteen bushels of malt and he will repay you in ten score of bacon or thereabouts. But give him the 730 tea messes, or rather begin to give them to him, and give him nothing else, and he is dead from hunger, and bequeaths you his skeleton, at the end of about seven days. It is impossible to doubt in such a case. The tea drinking has done a great deal in bringing this nation into the state of misery in which it now is; and the tea drinking, which is carried on by "dribs" and "drabs", by pence and farthings going out at a time; this miserable practice has been gradually introduced by the growing weight of the taxes on malt and on hops, and the growing penury amongst the labourers occasioned by the paper money.
It must be evident to everyone, that the practice of tea drinking, must rended the frame feeble and unfit to encounter hard labour or severe weather, while, as I have shown, it deducts from the means of replenishing the belly and covering the back. Hence, succeeds a softness, an effeminacy, a seeking for the fireside, a lurking in the bed, and in short, all the characteristics of idleness, for which, in this case, real want of strength furnishes an apology. The tea drinking fills the public-houses, makes the frequenting of it habitual, corrupts boys as soon they are able to move from home, and does little less for the girls, to whom the gossip of the tea-table is no bad preparatory school for the brothel. At the very least, it teaches them idleness. The everlasting dawdling about, with the slops of the tea-tackle, gives them a relish for nothing that requires strength and activity. When they go from home, the know how to do nothing that is useful. To brew, to bake, to make butter, to milk, to rear poultry; to do any earthly thing of use they are wholly unqualified. To shut poor young creatures up in manufactories is bad enough: but there, at any rate, they do something that is useful; whereas the girl that has been brought up, merely to boil the tea kettle, and to assist in the gossip inseparable from the practice, is a mere consumer of food, a pest to her employer, and a curse to her husband, if any man be so unfortunate as to affix his affections upon her.

A wee dram helps as well - try it instead of coffee.
Gordon Brewing

Kick ASS and ABBA

2005-10-11T23:16:00.000+01:00

Much to my surprise, in my formative years I learnt, that young ladies sized a man up on the shape of his ass. Arse, buttocks, rear-end, bottom (in polite circles) and backside are other terms used to describe this part of our anatomy.

Then, with the advent of tight jeans and Levis and ladies wearing trousers - a rare event in my youth, men forsook boobs for the shape of a ladies bottom. They are fat, thin, rounded, oval, and flat in my experience. I like them rounded and tight and therefore I was greatly surprised when the blonde ABBA girl won the ass of the year prize sometime ago. Her's were oval and not at all conspicious or rounded and did absolutely nothing for me. So, dear reader, what was all the fuss about?
Rearguards
Gordon Brown

The Internovella - Chapter 2 - continued

2005-10-10T23:40:00.000+01:00

did not. A damp and heaving, sweat and blood stained ark of ribs for a hull, and patchwork sails. A slave trader - blacks in from Africa, but little to take back except tobacco, potatoes, cotton and whatever else they could pack down below. In the captains words, "Scum in and scum out".

Mary felt uncomfortable, the ship leaked and smelt, the rope was rotten, the crew were threatening. But her Dad had made a brave and decisive decision: America was not for them. It was not to be - the New World which was a phoney conundrum, run by gangsters and zealots was finished with, he had decided to make a return to the values, morals and principles that he had grown up with in that damp and misty island.

The Internovella - Chapter 2

2005-10-06T23:08:00.000+01:00

that was a coded meaning for Irish Earls who raised mercenary armies to go and fight abroad. The politics and the morals were of no concern - wild geese needed to be fed only on money.

But she had read of the mist, the dew, the desparate poverty, and the cruelty of Cromwell and the English. The famines, through a reliance on an entirely rotten foreign vegetable, called the potatoe, which blighted a nation that, for thousands of years had lived on wheat and barley.

What would she find there now. In a few weeks it would be home. But there was another side that she had learnt about Ireland - her resistance, her pride but most of all the ability of this small nation to make music, to sing and to laugh. Laugh at a corpse, not to feed upon it, but to celebrate its rising from the dead into a new world where people frolicked and held hands, and cared, and looked into one anothers eyes and say I will always care for you my dearest brother or sister. In one word Ireland stood for: unity.
She went to sleep that night, not happy, but with a calmness and a certainty that things would improve. And improve they

2005-10-04T23:00:00.000+01:00

Beyond this canyon, the sea of dreams and nightmares.

LENNY.

2005-10-04T10:00:00.000+01:00

Doesn't Lenny Live Here Anymore
By Phil Ochs
INTRO: G/C/G/C/G
C G C G C G /C/G/C
You laugh at the people who walk outside on the sidewalk
G C G
And you talk to yourself so much
C G /C/G
when you see other people you can't talk
Am
This time it's true
D7 G G /C/G7
The charade is through
Bm C /D7
And you can't seem to run away from you
Away from you
Am D7
And the haggard ex-lover of a long-time loser
G C G
Stands rejectedly by the door
C G Em Am
Doesn't Lenny live here anymore?
D7
Are you sure?
You sit at the desk
To lose your life in a letter
But the words don't seem to come and you know that they're(?) better
and it's all so strange
Pictures lose their frame
And I'll bet you never guessed
There was so much pain
So much pain
Until the haggard ex-lover of a long-time loser
Stands rejectedly by the door
Doesn't Lenny live here anymore?
Are you sure?
The moon, she shines too soon and simply sadly
You loved your love so much that you'd strangle her madly
And it's all so slow
Time has ceased to flow
And the whistling whore knows something you don't know
And the haggard ex-lover of a long-time loser
Stands rejectedly by the door
Doesn't Lenny live here anymore?
Are you sure?
You swore you'd store your love for one time only
Now you searched the books in vain for better word for lonely
And you're torn apart
No other love will start
And you, you'd like to steal a happy heart
A happy heart
Then the haggard ex-lover of a long-time loser
Stands rejectedly by the door
Doesn't Lenny live here anymore?
Are you sure?
The fat official smiles at the pass on the border
And the hungry broom makes sure that the room is in order
You pull the shade
All the beds are made
As your lips caress the razor of the blade
Of the blade
And the haggard ex-lover of a long-time loser
Stands rejectedly by the door
Doesn't Lenny live here anymore?
Are you sure?
The soul of the sun shines just outsde of the winter
The shoulders charged, the boards of the barricade is splintered
Now at last alone
The flashlight is shown
Hello inside is there anybody home?
Anybody home?
It's the haggard ex-lover of a long-time loser
Standing rejectedly by the door
Doesn't Lenny live here anymore?
Are you sure?
Are you sure?
Are you sure?

Gordon

Nomes.

2005-10-04T00:21:00.000+01:00

The infirm on their daily outing - disguised as nomes!
Rock fairies who serve the Nome King . The word nome means "one who knows." They are so named because they know where all the precious stones and gold and silver are hidden in the earth

The Internovella - Chapter 2 - continued

2005-10-03T23:39:00.000+01:00

Off to Ireland. A land of fighters and poets. But it is impossible to be one without the other".

Mary thought about the future, some say the past is gone; forget it, it is history. She at once remembered her history teacher that had tought her, repeatedly, that what had happened would happen again unless a human mind had learnt from history and was determined not to let it happen again. The mistakes of our forebears need not be repeated, but that comes from learning and experience.

She had often read of the invasion of distant lands by cruel invaders. The English, the Spanish, the French - the list is endless. And Ireland too had her wild geese

2005-10-02T22:16:00.000+01:00

Gunny trouble - the first of four. Bad day by the river! Every credit to St. Column Major - good team.

The Internovella - Chapter 2

2005-09-30T22:39:00.000+01:00

As Mary began to find out about the outer world, not the closeted world that she lived in, suddenly she, herself, had an earth shift. Her farther came home one evening, tired and sweating, and announced that he had had enough of the New World. There were no values, no principles and worst of all, no bloody decent music. They were to return to Ireland, within a month , sure there was poverty in Ireland but, the English apart, there was no blood lust and people had roots in their community and morals.
America was a nation full of gangsters, gunmen, rapists and robbers such as Al Capone and The Western Union. Her mother, a reasoning soul, said to the father, "What about the disruption and disturbamce to the little ones - it just is not fair", Then think on this said Liam. "

Phil Ochs at his most poetic and beautiful:-

2005-09-29T22:51:00.000+01:00

No More Songs
By Phil Ochs
intro chords: Dm\C\B flat\A
Em
Hello, hello, hello
C
Is there anybody home?
Em
I've only called to say
C D
I'm sorry.
Em
The drums are in the dawn,
G D
and all the voices gone.
C D Em
And it seems that there are no more songs.

Once I knew a girl
She was a flower in a flame
I loved her as the sea sinks sadly
Now the ashes of the dream
Can be found in the magazines.
And it seems that there are no more songs.

Once I knew a sage
who sang upon the stage
He told about the world,
His lover.
A ghost without a name,
Stands ragged in the rain.
And it seems that there are no more songs.

The rebels they were here
They came beside the door
They told me that the moon was bleeding.
Then all to my suprise,
They took away my eyes.
And it seems that there are no more songs.

A star is in the sky,
It's time to say goodbye.
A whale is on the beach,
He's dying.
A white flag in my hand,
And a white bone in the sand.
And it seems that there are no more songs.

Hello, hello, hello
Is there anybody home?
I've only called to say
I'm sorry.
The drums are in the dawn,
and all the voices gone.
And it seems that there are no more songs.

It seems that there are no more songs.
It seems that there are no more songs.

Thanks to Trent Ochs - Gordon Moved - this is the saddest song that I have ever heard - tears roll down my cheeks each time that I play it.

2005-09-28T22:15:00.000+01:00

Hit the post - blast!

2005-09-28T22:13:00.000+01:00

Gunnislake 4 Boscastle 2 - the real result but the little, fat man in black disallowed two of our efforts, due to their biased linseman who had red tinted glasses! So we only drew 2-2. Report him the the F.A. says I.

Labout Party terrorists

2005-09-28T21:10:00.000+01:00

attempted to throw out an octanagarian gentleman from leafy Richmond today who had the temerity to shout out "Nonsense" whilst our failed Foreign Secretary Jack Straw attempted to justify the British illegal occupation of Iraq.

This is just the behaviour that our Prime Minister wants to stop - nay not stop but whisk the culprits out of the country, or into jail without trial. Well said Tory Tony put those violent bastards in jail.

We are almost becoming a facist state where free speeech must be suppressed at all costs. Hypocites all. Stand up for our rights, in the street, in the pub, on the phone, on the net, in the media and say what you want to say. It was your birthright and do not dare let the members of this government, many of whom were once communists attempt to gag you with their suppresive and thuggish tactics. Bollocks to them all says I.
Gord Help Us.

The Internovella continued -

2005-09-28T20:57:00.000+01:00

As Mary grew from a child into a young girl she rigorously read and read any book that she could obtain on Africa or Native Americans. Mind you books were hard to come by in her dustball but with the help of the lady from the mobile library, who visited her town on every other Wednesday, she managed to acquire knowledge and learnt what others had writtten on the subject. What she saw puzzled her - conflicting information. She often pondered on why two or three or more people would report on so called facts differently. She sought the truth, but who was she to believe?

The USA -

2005-09-27T23:26:00.000+01:00

A country of generous and nice people but also a country that does not, or is eductaed not, to know about a global village - our earth. I once went to West Virginia and a young lady in a shop had never heard of Europe.
Come on George - educate - there is life elsewhere, you bomb it every day!

Gord Forgive Him

The intenovella continued

2005-09-27T18:08:00.000+01:00

Mary had never had any pretentions as a young girl. No starry eyed thougts of becoming an actress or a model, although she hoped that she would be able to write a book one day. For now though it was a question of going to school and learning how to write and read using correct English grammer, in the correct way. Maths bored her, although she coped, but as well as English the subjects that she relished were history and geography.
She loved learning about the history of her nation, though she often wondered why her teachers never talked about the history of other nations. And, surely her nation had once had native Americans. Why were they never discussed as part of the history of her nation? Later she was to learn that the native Americans had almost been wiped out by the European settlers and that genocide was an uncomfortable subject for the new Americans who in many instance were fleeing from persecution and genocide in their native nations.

At least in geography they had a globe and atlases and she could wonder what it was like in places like Spain and Australia and Africa. She once asked her geography teacher what Africa was like. "Ah my dear child", he had replied looking at her over the top of his rimless spectacles, his grey locks descending to the nape of his neck. "Africa consists of ten's of thousands of nations each with its own language and culture. If I were to talk to you about Africa then I would not know where to begin, or stop". This puzzled her and she decided, to hell with it, if they wouldn't tell her about Africa and native Americans then she would find out for herself. Indeed one day she might even meet one or become friends with one or even marry one - therfore she needed to know.

Bob Dylan - Martin Scorsese's new documentary

2005-09-27T09:51:00.000+01:00

1. I have purchased most of his stuff but, certainly in recent years, for every song of genius there are five or six tracks of rubbish.
2. He ruthlessly exploited the folk/protest movement for his own ends and when it suited his commercial ambitions he ditched it and even worse mockingly sent it up.
3. He had a friend, called Phil Ochs - who he admitted was better than him. Ochs' looked after him in Greenwich, when he was down and out, but as soon as he became famous he ditched Ochs and did not even attend his funeral. No sincerity and a lot of unreliabilty to everyone he came into contact with.

P. S. Will Scorsese mention Ochs - I think not - we must leave that to Sean Penn.

Phil Ochs and Bach -

2005-09-25T23:20:00.000+01:00

Bach, Beethoven, Mozart & Me
By Phil Ochs
Em F Em F
Every morning at the dawn dust is in the air.
Em F G Am
Karen rises early, runs brushes through her hair.
Em F Em F
Then she buys the paper, I lay on my back,
Em F G A
Then she feeds the monkey, then she feeds the cat.
Chorus:
G
I'll talk, I'll talk they live by the sea
D G
Surrounded by a cemetery.
Bm A
If you get tired come up for some tea
Em Bm D Em
With Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and me.
Frances is the next to rise
Powders up her nose.
She's working for the tailor
Makes the western clothes.
Andy drives a sports car
To the Warner Brothers ghost
He used to live in England
Now he loves the coast (chorus)
Some times a friend comes by
To sing the latest song,
But David fights with Susan
Nobody gets along.
Every other Sunday
It's time to make a call.
Judy has a barbecue
Play the volleyball. (chorus)
In the evening When the sun goes down
The streets are all aglow.
We walk out on the hillside
City shines below.
We sit down for our supper
The news begins to play.
Walter he is speechless
Eric speaks cliches. (chorus)
Andy plays a cricket game.
Frances holds a glass.
Karen reads and darns a dress.
I dream of the past.
Dark is spreading up now
Good evening, good night.
Karen turns the bed sheet.
She's turning out the light. (chorus)

Oh how lucky we are in Europe -

2005-09-25T22:58:00.000+01:00

We live in the cradle of civilisation - Blair excluded - a continent rich in every harvest - our culure, our food, and especially our drinks, but most of all a longing for peace and harmony after so much fighting. The angst has gone - we love one another, a continent at peace with itself.

Europe my Europe how I love thee.

Gordown European

2005-09-25T22:07:00.000+01:00

The Fiat Panda!

2005-09-25T22:04:00.000+01:00

Chinatown my Chinatown!

Peter, Paul & Mary

2005-09-25T21:54:00.000+01:00

Favourite song:-

Puff, the magic dragon lived by the sea
And frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called honah lee,
Little jackie paper loved that rascal puff,
And brought him strings and sealing wax and other fancy stuff.
ohPuff, the magic dragon lived by the sea
And frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called honah lee,
Puff, the magic dragon lived by the sea
And frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called honah lee.

Together they would travel on a boat with billowed sail
Jackie kept a lookout perched on puff’s gigantic tail,
Noble kings and princes would bow whene’er they came,
Pirate ships would lower their flag when puff roared out his name. oh!
Puff, the magic dragon lived by the sea
And frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called honah lee,
Puff, the magic dragon lived by the sea
And frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called honah lee.

A dragon lives forever but not so little boys
Painted wings and giant rings make way for other toys.
One grey night it happened, jackie paper came no more
And puff that mighty dragon, he ceased his fearless roar.

His head was bent in sorrow, green scales fell like rain,
Puff no longer went to play along the cherry lane.
Without his life-long friend, puff could not be brave,
So puff that mighty dragon sadly slipped into his cave. oh!

Puff, the magic dragon lived by the sea
And frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called honah lee,
Puff, the magic dragon lived by the sea
And frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called honah lee.

Nice song - innocent times.

Gordon Sentiment.

The internovella continued

2005-09-24T22:40:00.000+01:00

He was a man that had killed his wife of forty years with with five sharp stabs of a kitchen knife.
He was on the run - running away and his fate lay in the hands and minds of a few young children. "Let me be honest he said - when I was your age I most of all wanted to play, run sing for my country - but my country did not want me".

Phil Ochs - immense unrecognised talent -

2005-09-23T23:46:00.000+01:00

Singer/songwriter Phil Ochs was a self-coined "singing journalist" when he began performing in New York in the early '60s. Like Bob Dylan, the rival who always outpaced him, Ochs made his reputation singing topical protest songs. He stayed with them much longer than Dylan (and indeed would never really abandon them), but eventually he too would follow Dylan into electric music and more personal, abstract, and romantic compositions. Ochs came off as a perennial second-best to critics during his heyday. It was only after his tragic tailspin and eventual death that he was properly appreciated as one of the most sincere and humane songwriters of his day, whether detailing political atrocities or more poetic concerns. Ochs moved from Ohio to New York in the early '60s, and was soon a prolific writer of the topical, left-leaning protest songs then in vogue. His initial recording efforts, heard on compilations for Broadside, Folkways, and Vanguard, were rather dry and instantly dated. By the time made his Elektra debut in 1964 with All the News That's Fit to Sing, Ochs was finding his own voice -- more melodic than Dylan (if not as lyrically innovative), its strident accusations tempered by a warm delivery and underlying compassion. With second guitar by Danny Kalb (later of the Blues Project), his first album was highlighted by "Power and the Glory" and "Bound for Glory," as well as an adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Bells." The similar follow-up I Ain't Marching Any More (1965) gave the anti-war movement two rallying calls with the title track and "Draft Dodger Rag," along with a moving civil-rights piece, "Here's to the State of Mississippi." Ochs addressed all manner of anti-war, civil rights, labor, and social justice issues on his first albums, the best of which was In Concert (1966). Ochs' social criticism was deepening in acuity, as heard on "Canons of Christianity," "Cops of the World," and the satirical "Love Me, I'm a Liberal." But he also began to move into non-political subjects with equal or greater effect, as on "There But for Fortune" and "Changes," his most famous love song. In Concert was Ochs' final acoustic album. He'd already moved into electric rock with a fine (though flop) single-only version of "I Ain't Marching Anymore." In 1967, he broke from his acoustic folk troubadour image with a vengeance, leaving Elektra for A&M and moving to Los Angeles. There he plunged into Baroque folk-rock, with mixed results. Some of the tracks on his late-'60s A&M records are among the best he ever did, especially the devastating social apathy parody "Outside a Small Circle of Friends." On others, he seemed to be overreaching or straining for highbrow poetry. The L.A. session production sometimes enhanced his musical settings, but the more elaborate and pretentious arrangements worked against the material just as often. Ochs hadn't forsaken his political commitments, appearing at the violence-riddled 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. By 1969's Rehearsals for Retirement, some weariness and disenchantment with idealism was beginning to seep into both his compositions and his singing. The problems became more acute with 1970's facetiously titled Greatest Hits, when the standard of his material began to drop noticeably. Although it wasn't foreseen at the time, Greatest Hits was his last studio album. Ochs did remain active, recording a live LP (initially released only in Canada) that excited controversy with its strange mix of original songs and unexpected covers of old rock & roll tunes by Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly, performed in a gold lamé suit. The '50s revival act was received poorly by an audience accustomed to a folkie troubadour, but that was among the least of Ochs' obstacles. His well of original compositions had run dry, and he was developing severe alcohol and psychological problems. In a mysterious mugging incident in Africa, his voice was permanently damaged. Ochs did record a couple of flop singles in the early '70s, but by the middle of the decade he was largely inactive, and afflicted with serious depression. In early 1976, he hanged himself at his sister's suburban home. ~

Gord Will Not Forget

Starbucks and Oxfam - read below - a good spat but

2005-09-23T22:13:00.000+01:00

The Oxfam non apologist signed themselves:-
Ingrid Kamikazi Supporter Relations Oxfam
Good name for a customer relations advisor or not perhaps - zeroooom!

Gordon Wondering!

The Internovella continued

2005-09-23T20:18:00.000+01:00

Joe found himself arse up in a muddle of thistles. Not only was this undignified but it hurt, pricks everywhere and his ankle to contend with. He heard the sound of cheers - his ignoble act was being applauded. A bunch of boys with a football gathered around him and grinned. But these boys - lanky and small, fat and thin, pimply and smooth skinned also had compassion in their eyes and, stranger still they all had blue shirts on with something about 1875 on their badges. I'm Bassie said one and he's Fat Buddha- pointing to yeah, a Fat Buddha, and my best mate is IP Freely, he dribbles a lot. The lanky one is our goalie - we call him Spionkop - he once saw a film of Lev Yashin and then read a book called "Goalies are Crazy" and he is, so he fits the bill.

Joe was dazed and drained, and the boys recognised that and one offered him his sacred botttle of Lucozade. At least it had started out as Lucozade but his Mom had thinned it down so many times it now tasetd like sugared water. But to Joe this was better than any beer or wine or whiskey that he had ever supped - this, to him was the sacred nectar. Bassie asked if he should run home and call an ambulance. "No please don't do that", said Joe, "We need to pow wow". "Just like the Indians did", said Bassie. Jo felt the pain in his ankle returning - what to do, what to do ..

2005-09-23T09:57:00.000+01:00

But after the storm the calm.

2005-09-23T09:56:00.000+01:00

Storm clouds over the bay.

Europe my Europe - the cradle of civilisation -

2005-09-22T22:55:00.000+01:00

A dream come true. We have forgetten all of the wars and the hatred. And we stand united as a continent for democracy, art, and civilisation. Civilisation = what a word and we have it in a United Europe.
Gordon Brown Black and Blue!

The intenovella continued

2005-09-22T09:43:00.000+01:00

why - from my perspective it had been a vicious attack on an old lady. I was taught always to expext the unexpected but this appalled and saddened me. Malon clearly read my thoughts because he said, "Son is it right to let a human being that you love waste away in agony and die a hopeless unfitting death - I think not - far better to end it quickly and help them on their way to their god whoever he or she may be".

"But why the violence", I asked. Bur Malon had faded and no answer was forthcoming. The river wended its way to the sea and a lone heron plucked a fish from its waters. Another violent death - why is there death I cannot understand the reason for it. I have three beliefs - 1) that we were put on this earth for a purpose; 2) that fate rules everything and, three, that when we die our atoms are transferred and we become a single drop of rain or a mushroom and that when somebody eats that mushroom that its components form a part of that body and if that body produces children then a part of me will exist in that child. Perhaps after all we don't die we merely become something or someone else. I think too much dear reader back to our story

Oxfam volunteers in their shops get a bad deal.

2005-09-21T22:21:00.000+01:00

No union, no meetings - in my shop we have had two meetings in two years where we were told by our manageress, "You will do as you are told".

In Africa they have a fair employment policy - it is a shame they do not have one for their UK employees.

Gordon Fuming