Handel and Mozart in London at St Martin in the Fields and George Osborne tells us to stop thinking about China as a sweatshop...

The Meteorological Office are predicting a terrible storm on Monday, and this makes us think that the gusting wind and scurrying litter are harbingers of worse to come. Dark and lumpy islands on an inky sea scud across the great canopy above London. We expect the weird sisters to jump out in front of us, gibbering and screeching about the ingredients of chaos to come.

We thank the sun, sea and skies for St Martin in the Fields, whose glorious baroque stone shines bright against all this gloom as we approach it for the concert to be given by the London Concertante: Handel, Mozart and Vivaldi, plus some contemporary composers.

As we enter the elegant, spacious and gracious commode of the church, I find the speech that George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and number two to the Prime Minister made about China niggling away at me. He said we must stop thinking of China as a sweatshop and think of it as a high tech trading partner.

The trouble is China is much worse than a sweatshop - it's a forced labour camp. In fact, China runs the biggest concentration camp system the world has ever seen, even bigger than Stalin's Gulag. Chinese companies have front companies that they show to foreign activists and investors, but behind these are political and criminal prisoners working for nothing in brutal and murderous conditions. A leopard doesn't change its spots that quickly, and China's tradition of running the country as a vast prison camp has not changed much. If you don't believe me, check out the work of Harry Wu, who after 19 years in the camps has dedicated his life to exposing the truth. It's hard work for him because it's easier for all of us to dismiss him as bitter, twisted and wrong. But the evidence is irrefutable.
Should we care?
I think so, but now the sinuous and seductive violins are stroking my troubled soul, and I hold Elena's hand and think how lucky I am..........around us is a packed church of listeners all entranced by the music. Some of them look Chinese. Would they welcome my thoughts.......would they share them?

Sometimes we just get the blues, because there are no easy answers but we know something must be done. When that happens, listening to the blues works pretty well. Try this, from Gary Clark Jr....

London tradition on the streets, we liberate Ronnie Scott's for the people...

The charming sound - clip clop, clip clop, of horseshoes on tarmac.

The bright and cheerful red and gold uniforms of the carriage drivers, the two 18th century carriages themselves, one open, the other covered. It could only be London. The Queen has sent a couple of carriages round to Queens Gate SW1 to pick up the new Iraqi ambassador to Her Majesty's Government. She wants to say hello. What a gracious way of facilitating a business meeting. It saves on petrol and is good for the environment. And it probably is very impressive, a reminder, perhaps, that Britain's now tired and corrupt representative democracy has been evolving slowly since roughly 1215, when the big Barons' got King John to agree to trial by Jury and an embryonic parliament. They achieved this by taking to arms and capturing London from him. In other words, by the threat of violence. By the way, here are the two great clauses 39 and 40 of The Magna Carta which he was forced to sign. It is the most important document in English and world history and it shaped the future of freedom in Britain and around the world :

No free man shall be seized, imprisoned, dispossessed, outlawed, exiled or ruined in any way, nor shall we attack him or send men to attack him, except by the lawful judgement of his peers and the law of the land.

To no one will we sell, to no one will we deny or delay right of justice.

 There you go - here are the origins of consent to taxation, parliament, due process and the rule of law.

But it took a lot of trouble and strife to get from there to 1928 when Britain finally became a full democracy and women got the vote on an equal basis to men.

History lesson over, we go with my youngest daughter Charlotte to Ronnie Scott's jazz club for the late show. It didn't start until midnight, but man, what a brilliant scene it was, packed with young jazz fans and even a few old timers like me. The lights were low, the vibe was cool, then brisk and driving, the trumpet urgent, plaintive, insistent, indignant, intemperate and insolent, ingenious, then treading soft, calming, pleading........and the pianist, the bassist and the drummer listened to the trumpet and joined the conversation and they all listened to us, the audience, and created the sound and song of the joy of all life...yes, we are here, let's enjoy it because it is exciting and will only happen once!

No more war!

And we liberated this short clip from Ronnie's to encourage you all. Just click on this link below.

click here to see the video

London life: Debate, discussion and misunderstanding

The heavens are caressing London with  golden light and the trees in Hyde Park bring out their golden robes in return.
All is well in this the greatest and freest city on earth!

It is Elena's birthday. To celebrate we go the The Landmark Hotel on the Marylebone Road for afternoon tea: me, Elena, her Mum and one of her sons and his girlfriend. A happy and harmless crew.
The solicitous doorman is kind and considerate as he shows us how to get the wheelchair conveying Elena's Mum into the cafe.
We are seated in the voluptuous setting of the atrium cafe and champagne is served.
Elena's Mum is beaming with happiness, pride and joy.

But alas - it is fearfully expensive. I ask the waiter if we can buy just one afternoon tea and share it. We are not very hungry. The waiter must ask the manager. No, we must buy three. This would amount to £126. Surely, I persist, since the cafe is virtually empty, and we are drinking the champagne (not cheap either - at £76!), you can bend the rule for once. The manager appears and firmly insists that the rule cannot be broached. If we consume less than three afternoon teas, we will have to sit in another part of the hotel. This would mean us reseating Baboushka in her wheelchair and going up to another floor.
We decline, amazed by the lack of initiative allowed The Landmark workforce. I was tempted to ask if I would have to ask the manager if I could use the lavatory.

Still, it was a pleasure only partly spoilt, and we walked across to The Frontline Club in Paddington (The Journalists Club) to listen to a discussion about the future of Russia and the fate of the oligarch Khodorkovsky.

The former British ambassador to Russia Sir Tony Brenton thought that things were getting better and that the rule of law will one day prevail in Russia, whereas it is perhaps a little patchy now.
We should welcome their money, he said, and that will be good for us and for Russia.
Other speakers disagreed. The money is tainted and our taking it discredits us.

Later, we are dining in the restaurant below, discussing this issue.
I take the view that it is a matter of balance, but to illustrate my point, say that we should not have wanted to trade with Hitler's Germany if the conditions were that we were not allowed to trade with Jewish people, or with Stalin's Russia if we were forced to trade with companies that employed Gulag labour.

Suddenly, a woman sitting at the table next to us leaned across.

" I would be very careful if I were you" she said, and continued, " I'm jewish, and I heard what you said"

Now of course, she only heard half of what I had said.

But that's how wars start, isn't it?

Somewhat dismayed, because she persisted in threatening me, we left.

Ah well, nowhere is perfect.

Lying London Cops get off with a caution - so did Britain's greatest traitor.

Another disorientating day in lovely London town. Damp and mild with bright blue patches around the islands of creamy clouds. Last year, some policemen that guard the House of Commons were found to have fabricated evidence against a senior politician - indeed, one of them pretended to be a member of the public who had overheard the politician swearing at the police and calling them ' effing plebs'.

But all is well in ours the best of all possible police forces. The policemen were let off with a caution by their bosses. They did not intend to lie, concluded their bosses, merely to be misleading or ambivalent.

That's alright then.

Back in 1962, the bosses of MI6 realised that one of their senior spies, Kim Philby, who ran the anti - Soviet desk, was in fact working for the Soviet Union.

They decided to have a quiet word with him to ask him to desist.

If he agreed, he could retire with a pension. The only condition being that he must not do it any more. But he bolted for Moscow before this generous package could be unveiled to him. Talking of Moscow, Beria, Stalin's KGB boss must have wished he had worked over here. The Russians have a more robust approach to treachery, real or imagined. Ask alexander Litvinenko, or his widow anyway.

The link here is obvious. In the UK, the powerful, from wherever they draw their power or however high or low they are, are usually exempt from the sanctions that underpin the legal system for the rest of us.

We are with John Lennon : just give us some truth

Strange goings on in London : Romeo and Juliet, Blue Jasmine and Woody Allen and Estate Agents in disgrace.

There is something wrong in London. The trees are still wearing their green summer frocks. Our winter jackets are out and on but only because we mistakenly think that winter is here at last. Late autumnal gloom should have settled on every soul but there are baffled smiles playing on our lips. More perplexing still is that an English film of Romeo and Juliet is playing, no, grinding, in cinemas in London and it is stultifying, tedious, ridiculous, turgid, risible, depressing, boring and painful to watch and hear.

The English are supposed to be good at Shakespeare. They are supposed to be proud of him. So we wonder why Shakespeare's prose and verse has been hacked away and replaced by bland modernisms. Of course artists are free to experiment with Shakespeare, but surely the idea is to bring something new or different when you do. If the result is that the audience begins to suffer from rigour mortise while watching it then something has gone badly wrong. The centre cannot hold......a vacuous male model of a Romeo kept pouting at the audience. He was pale, anaemic and bloodlessly vain. She was podgy and frumpy. On the big night, he kept his underpants on and she her bra and nightie. Their love lacked any heat or passion. It was literary and fey, foppish and tired. Even the soundtrack sounded insincere. We didn't care when Tybalt was stabbed. He was a pantomime baddy. Benvolio had never been in a fight in his life. A bag of flour could have been cast for all the main roles and it would at least have made us laugh.
This production didn't squeeze a single tear out of us or even the glimmer of a smile. Nurse is supposed to make us laugh, She made us wince when she said to Juliet that she '...certainly had good taste in men'

This review is written more in sorrow than in anger, but also by way of public warning : life is short, and none of us knows what may befall us on the morrow. So don't waste your time on this lifeless corpse of a variation on a theme by Shakespeare.

You could, however, spend an enjoyable hour and a half with Woody Allen and his new film ' Blue Jasmine' - deceit, lies and betrayal are all involved, and they wreak their havoc on the lives of all of us, and Woody knows how to remind us of this with characters and a story that make us feel, phew, there but for the grace of God go I.....

We finish by hanging our heads in shame. Estate Agents in London are covertly but blatantly discriminating against Afro-Carribean applicants for rental accommodation. The BBC caught them red handed. Can you imagine how angry you would feel if someone decided to lie to your face just because of the colour of your skin and a stereotype created in the 1950's. Civilisation rests on flimsy foundations, even here, in one of the finest and most civilised cities on earth.

Even in the rain

Something good going down in Deptford, London SE, something to make you free

A wet and drizzly day in London town. The sun is tired and anaemic, its rays failing to push through the damp lid of pale plastic cloud that rests over our heads. We take so much for granted. We assume certain things are true but they turn out not to be. Life began in the depths of the earth, not in a warm chemical pond on its surface. Oil and gas are not the residue of rotting plants after all, but are mixed up in the geological furnace close to the centre of the earth. Not many people know these new things, and it will be hard for us to throw out the old ideas, but we must. If we don't know where we came from we can't get to where we are going.....ask old Oedipus about that one....

...so, we decide to go down to Deptford, where the great jazz man, rapper, hip-hopper and freedom fighter has his jazz - rap - opera The Legend of Mike Smith running in The Albany Theatre.

Soweto Kinch 

Soweto Kinch is a brilliant rapper and a great saxophonist too, and his theme is that when we are free we are most truly human, and when most truly human we are creative and good - but to be free we need to be strong, because the seven deadly sins are snatching at our souls every day, ripping away our humanity and aiming to leave only the bestiality beneath, quivering ugly and twitching naked and salacious....all this insidious intent tucked away behind the logos, brands and advertising of the so called free market.

Tyrone Isaac-Stewart

But we can be free. We can let others be free. Let them sell their wares. We just have to know what's going on and where we came from and where we want to go........let's talk about it, sing about it, play jazz about it....this should be on the school curriculum.

Ricardo da Silva, Soweto Kinch, Tyrone Isaac-Stewart at the fabulous finish of the show

A long time ago, in Deptford,  Peter the Great lived, learning how to build ships for his Russian Navy. He was there because Henry the 8th built his Navy here. These men were great bastards, tyrants of the worse sort. And Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare's younger rival and admirer, was stabbed to death in 1593 in a pub here too. But now something good is going on down in Deptford. Get yourself down there to see it at The Albany Theatre.

And have a look at Deep Hot Biosphere (The myth of fossil fuels) by Thomas Gold. It will open your mind about where we came from.

Read more about East London here 

Hannah Arendt, the movie, stand up comedy in Soho and at the Conservative Party Conference

Elena and I, now married and blissful, have settled back into London life in Barnes, down by dat ole man river Thames, -  he must know somethin', he don't say nothin' he jus' keep rollin' along.

We were amazed to see that someone has made a film about Hannah Arendt, the late great political theorist and one of my heroes from an early age, well, 18, since I read her brilliant book called ' On Revolution', which I recommend to all humans interested in the fate of the world.

The film was gripping, thought provoking, moving.

There was intelligent dialogue, witty conversation, the intimation of mature, affectionate and passionate love between men and women but a complete and refreshing absence of any explicit sex or violence.

It was, however, all about violence and evil, the evil represented by Adolf Eichmann and his role as the man in charge of deporting the victims of the Holocaust to the gas chambers.

If you want to witness courage and independence of mind, and you wish to be inspired by these qualities, please go and reward the producer and director and all involved in this brave and beautiful project. It's on in London now.

Last night, by way of a change, we went to see my best friend's son, Sean Cannon, play support in his new career as a stand -up comedian.

He had a good Edinburgh, and last night at the Soho Theatre he had five funny minutes in support of the main act, which we thought was so bad we shall refrain from mentioning his name in case it offends or we just weren't in the mood for his brand of comedy.

Go and see Sean Cannon. He has his own style, a blend of memoir, confessional and observation of the culture around us that leaves you feeling uplifted as well as amused, more of a proper meal than the chinese take-away that a lot of stand - up provides.

Talking of comedy, impossible not to laugh at the sight of David Cameron, our Prime Minister, trying to look and sound as if he has a dream, a vision for Britain that he feels passionate about. He's on the side of hard working people now, (because they will pay back the bankers' losses faster), so he's going to kick you if you haven't got a job, and that's going to make the country great again, full of hard working people, a land of opportunity for people who work hard enough to send their children to private schools, the sons and daughters from which run the country.
We have  Conservative aristocracy, a Labour aristocracy and a Liberal - Democrat aristocracy, and we get a choice every five years as to which set can have the time of their lives running the affairs of this wonderful country, its wonders being made by everyone here except that lot who pretend to be in charge.

Ah well, easy for us to criticise.......