CWI featured more or less the same adversaries and dealt with the same geopolitics, although this time the trigger is the looming NW/SE partition of the Ukraine, leaving a bankrupt Kiev with no Black Sea port and the task of negotiating cross-border traffic with their second-worst enemies, the Poles. The EU, its famous army, and some of the madder Turkics appear all set to stumble into CWII, but the important question is what all this will mean in literary terms. Will this second folly produce a hero to equal Harry Flashman, or verse to match the epitaph to James Bosworth, Crimean veteran and station-master at Northam? What, never heard of it? Here it is:
Though shot and shell flew around fast,
On Balaclava’s plain,
Unscathed he passed, to fall at last,
Run over by a train.
The recording of Tennyson on that page is rather splendid. Someone recently sent me these Edisons of Theodore Roosevelt, before breakfast shows, screen souffleurs and tit mikes. Nostalgia for an age one is probably quite glad not to have known.
One of the consequences of the Russian Crisis has been the appearance in Spain of monstrous numbers of tax evaders and mafiosi, leading to an interesting transition in upmarket Barcelona gyms from dumpy brunettes with moustaches to svelte blondes with impressive handbags. I am told that Paseo de Gracia is now referred to in real estate circles as the Russian Mile.
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I was thinking about this poem, and Flashman’s farting charge a few weeks ago. And now look what’s happened.
The Russians already have Crimea if they want it. Maybe they’ll let the US bomb Syria in exchange and then everyone can be friends again?
I’m sure somewhere there’s someone who says that bombing Syria is win-win: everyone normal has fled in the last 50 years so you’re either going to get the dictator or the Islamists.