Nick Clegg’s miserable apology to the nation for breaking his word on student tuition fees was perked up enormously when a prankster set it to music.

It’s now riding high in the charts and probably being closely studied for tips by the Obama and Romney teams in the US. Truly, serendipity makes jokers of us all.

But why stop there. Nick should hire the same musician to set his Wednesday Leader’s speech to music. The world would surely tune in en masse, girls mobbing him in the street.

Politics would finally have achieved the status of soap opera.

Eric Pickles, the Local Government Secretary, has abolished the hated EU regional structure imposed upon us by the Labour government.

For us in the Westcountry, it means that the South-West region disappears completely and English counties, such as Devon and Cornwall become individual entities again.

We who live at the pointy end of the Westcountry peninsula were baffled that the administrative centre of gravity rested in far-flung Bristol and not in Exeter and Truro. That has now changed.

Physically, it’s not an immediately apparent change, but old boundaries are important down here. Witness the furore over a Devonwall constituency which bestrode the Tamar river and shattered the unity of Cornwall, a Royal Duchy.

As Eric Pickles puts it, the regions are “arbitrary lines on a map that have no resonance, in contrast to England’s long-standing cities, boroughs and counties which have a real sense of local identity and popular support, dating back centuries.”

Let us hope that the move also means the end of the ludicrous attempt by Brussels, assisted by expenses-cheat Hazel Blears, to merge the South of England with northern France in a new EU region.

After Pastygate, peace and commonsense return. Three cheers for Eric Pickles, a Yorkshireman who understands the world outside the Metropolis and, most importantly, acts upon it.

Tibet has long fascinated the western imagination for its purported magic and mystery.

Tales of mystical wonders have leaked out of the country for centuries, often via British India, and were eagerly snapped up by a credulous British and European audience.

There were the lamas who could run a hundred miles in no time at all by taking gigantic Bob Beamon style leaps. Tulkus who could appear magically wherever they chose, and immense longevity among the priestly caste. The book and film Shangrila were typical of the genre.

All this was fuelled by theosophical writers and explorers searching for “the secret doctrine”. Such was the interest that books about Tibet became instant bestsellers.

Perhaps the strangest individual was Lobsang Rampa, later outed as Cyril Hoskin, a plumber from Plympton in Devon, whose book The Third Eye created quite a stir. It was published by Secker & Warburg, no less.

Apart from a gullible book-buying audience, it also attracted the attention of a number of experts on Tibet who questioned its authenticity. Cyril Hoskin claimed to have been a lama in Tibet before switching to the body of an Englishman.

Since the Chinese invasion of the country, and the exile of the Dalai Lama, the mysticism has been replaced by mining operations and development. A sad end to a small, proud country.

In a strange reversal of fortune, a Tibetan author, Sogyal Rinpoche (a high spiritual leader), in his influential book, The Tibetan Book of Living & Dying writes that his favourite account of the afterlife was written by an 8th-century English monk, the Venerable Bede.

How times have changed.

Poppycock Watch
While we are on the subject of Shangrila, I was interested in Evan Davis’s take on the UKIP party Conference on the Today programme. “It’s full of mystics and oddballs,” claimed the always scrupulously neutral presenter.

Sounds just like the party for me, then.

Downton Abbey, the hit television series, is upon us again. It’s one of those TV events that you swear you’ll never watch until you walk into a room where someone else is. Then you’re irretrievably hooked.

In the last episode, I was fascinated by “the battle of the dowagers”, the incomparably theatrical Maggie Smith and the American pantomime dame, Shirley Maclaine. The latter burst into the genteel environment with a voice like a Brooklyn auctioneer and a face so plastered with slap it was rendered almost immobile.

Now, as someone who once wrote broadcast scripts for a living, I spotted writer Julian Fellowes’s dilemma right away. In real life the Maclaine character would not wish to embarrass her daughter, the wife of m’Lord of Downton, so would have hired a posh Englishwoman in New York to coach her in proper behaviour. But there’s no drama in that.

So in she comes screeching like a Harlem alley cat and attempting to take control of everything.

Downton Abbey may be addictive, but it sure ain’t real life.

Profundity of the Week
“We are going, in a symbolic sense, back into the forest like the hunter of old who has nobody around him to tell him how he ought to feel and how he ought to use his senses. Like the hunter, we must therefore find out for ourselves.

“It’s in this exploration that a person becomes, in the truest sense of the word, a “self”, an original, authoritative source of life, as distinct from the person in its original sense, a mask, a role that he is playing in society.” Alan Watts, author of The Way of Zen

John Evans

… who is the author of The Eternal Quest for Immortality: Is it staring you in the face? Available from Amazon and all good booksellers.

Spiritual Mystics in the Modern World is coming soon.

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I’ve been sat at the computer for at least a day preparing the Christmas advertising offer for our Devon & Cornwall Online newspaper. It’s still early September. Through my office window I can see the sun. The temperature is a warm 70 degrees. Why would anyone even think about Christmas this far in advance?

But they do. Businesses have been musing on their “Holidays” advertising campaigns for some time.

At the risk of sounding like Bryony Gordon, I was out at the crack of 7am this morning, voting in a tedious local election rerun, in a short-sleeved summery shirt. Christmas seemed like another planet.

Mind you, I remember when t-shirts were still being worn in November — 2005, I think it was. Naturally, the Met Office had forecast the bitterest winter since the early 1960s. What would we do without the little darlings?

We don’t have to. The BBC has rehired them for another five years. I expect weather now comes under Light Entertainment.

I suppose the New Zealand forecaster option was ruled out because of the thought of all those Maori weather presenters in grass skirts, bare tops and ceremonial spears.

Now I’m beginning to sound like the Duke of Edinburgh.

Annoyment of the Week

Stephen Hawking’s new book dismisses God as the creator of the universe. It follows that if God didn’t create the universe, there is no God in our terms.

When challenged by the BBC this morning, he said that philosophers had “not mastered the maths”, implying that maths prove that God does not exist.

You see the paradox: How can God be defined by maths if God created everything, including the conditions for maths’ existence? If you dismiss the possibility that God created the universe because maths prove God does not exist, there is an Almighty hole in your argument.

Saturday Ramble: Who, what and where is God?

While we are on the topic of advertising, if you’re looking for a late autumn or winter break take a look at our online newspaper for Devon and Cornwall: DCO. There are ad offerings on almost every page. Thought I’d mention it.

Speaking of which, our new Christmas Ratecard is now up: Ratecard. It’s a bit sketchy because I don’t have much of a feel for the market right now.

With the Comprehensive Spending Review due in October, it’s hard to know what weight of advertising many businesses are planning this year. The marketplace is very flaky and uncertain. Consequently, we’ve gone for lower rates from the start.

My own view of the CSR, is that the blood and thunder approach currently being peddled is deliberately misleading. While it won’t be pleasant, I’m guessing most people will be relieved when it actually arrives. “Could’ve been worse,” will be the prevailing view.

When you think about it, no Tory Government, fighting two overseas wars, would ever slash and burn the Armed Forces in the way we are being led to believe. Stand by for relief all round.

On a psychological note, current propaganda around the CSR can’t be good for anyone. It’s hard right now to plan business for the year ahead when even a well-run construction company in the social enterprise sector like Connaught is forced to the Receivers at the first sniff of public sector cuts.

Their’s was not a good business model for the long term, I grant you, but if cash is on offer, businesses will take it.

With Gordon Brown’s new 90,000 word tome on the financial crisis due for publication this autumn, it would be interesting to know how his previous books have fared.

Many of us will remember his solemn effort on “courage”, a work that uncannily resembled John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage. There was a follow-up title that also dealt with, er, courage, among other things, plus two more books on the same theme, according to Amazon, and another titled Britain’s Everyday Heroes.

None was a red-hot bestseller. Indeed they were much mocked because their author conspicuously lacked bravery during his political career, choosing to hide away in his Downing Street bunker when things got complicated, as in the run-up to the Iraq war.

Gordon allegedly let off steam by throwing office equipment at his staff and manhandling secretaries out of their chairs. He was even accused of bullying by a quango that dealt with abuse in the workplace.

For those of us who are published authors, it’s a relief to learn that Brown’s recent book of his collected speeches (2007-2009), sold just 32 copies. At only £20 a throw, shurely shome mishtake.

But then, who but Gordon Brown would buy a book called The Change We Choose?

Bloodbaths are always difficult to predict with any certainty. This is because they are generally motivated by supremely irrational forces. What novelist could have conjured up a character like Pol Pot and his deeds, for example?

Some bloodbaths are easier to predict, especially if there’s a history behind them. The stock market is a case in point. Here’s a stabette in the (less than) dark.

Economics guru Albert Edwards, a strategist at Société Générale, is warning of a “bloodbath” in share markets in the months to come. October is a traditional month for stock market crashes and it’s beginning to look ominous for 2010.

“Equity investors are in for a rude shock. The global economy is sliding back into recession and they are still not even aware that these events will trigger another leg down in valuations, the third major bear market since the equity valuation bubble burst,” he said.

“So far the equity market has shrugged off much of the weaker data that abounds, and has not joined the bond market in a perceptive move. The equity market will though crumble like the house of cards it is, when the nationwide [US] manufacturing ISM slides below 50 into recession territory in coming months.”

We are about to witness a “valuation nadir” last seen in 1982.

I mention this in passing.

I haven’t got back into the political groove yet. So here’s a little sketch I wrote about the Red Arrows a few weeks ago in another age: August.

It’s the sound that gets you every time.

It starts with a bulldog growl, then in seconds becomes a mighty cacophony of noise that scrambles your nervous system. Almost instantly, the Doppler Effect kicks in — appropriately called the Red Shift — when the tone changes as the flight passes overhead.

Then they’re gone.

For a moment you feel like an omlette, before the exhilaration sets in. You have experienced the Red Arrows.

They always fly very low, demonstrating their attack posture when going into battle.

I’ve been “privileged” to live in two houses directly on the flight path of this troupe of daredevils and their flying machines. Once in Bournemouth where I could watch the entire display from a balcony.

These days, my house in Exeter witnesses them overhead as they shoot down to the Dartmouth Regatta and other Westcountry gigs. Is “gigs” the right word for them?

Last week I experienced the familiar roar of jet engines right above my residence. Why do they always pick on me?

For a moment I imagined a stricken airliner from Exeter airport crunching into on my domestic arrangements unannounced. Then I remembered. The Arrows were back.

This morning I saw them again, heading out Dorset way for more displays. A perfect “V” in the sky, with one plane following behind. Along the way, sheep and cows may drop dead with fright, and householders will cower beneath their beds imagining the worst.

Don’t you just love them?

It’s the sound that gets you every time.

Pics of the Week

The photograph above depicts the River Exe in the 1800s. To be precise, it’s Starcross, a small village near the estuary. The two craft on the right are The Swan and The Cygnet, ferries plying between Starcross and Exmouth.

Below is the refurbished Cygnet in the Exeter Maritime Museum circa 1991.

We don’t have such colourful ferries nowadays. Rowing boats like these would certainly be useful in our age of austerity.

Pictures: courtesy of Les Gibbings

John Evans

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I’ve been totting up all the places in Britain I’ve resided in. The list does not include holidays or short stays, only genuine residency. I’m staggered.

Here they are: London, Edinburgh, Farnham (Surrey), Oxford, Melton Mowbray (Leics), Bournemouth, Poole (Dorset), Exeter, Cambridge, Canterbury, Cardiff, Swansea, Borth (Mid-Wales), Penzance and Cheltenham. I may well have missed out one or two.

This does not include foreign climes: Spain (Benalmadena and Estepona), Paris, Perth (Australia), Kaiserslautern (Germany) and a myriad of short stays here and there. I could claim to be an expert in answering the question in the title of this piece.

What makes someone extend their gap year for the rest of their life? Restlessness, perhaps? Inability to settle in one spot? That’s not true, since I’ve been over a decade in my current city in Devon.

It’s a mystery, especially as I’ve known for a long time that most locations have their faults and are much the same once you are familiar with them. Your own viewpoint is always present wherever you go. If you allow it, it will flatten all differences and enhance dullness.

One spot will always stand out though.

For me, Devon is the pitch-perfect place to be, across a wide range of variables. It has everything. Solitude, crowds if you want them, sensible cities, intriguing towns and chocolate box villages, beaches to north and south, and the greatest moor of them all — Dartmoor. Not to mention cream teas and great fish. It never fails to amaze or surprise.

It’s also relatively peaceful by today’s standards, and is thankfully insulated from most of the big political questions of the day. Even union leaders are more benign in Devon than elsewhere.

The big society is a reality here. Take a look at Northlew on Dartmoor, the tiny village that set up its own wireless broadband service, undercutting BT and all other providers feeding off the internet backbone. Devonians are nothing if not enterprising. They have to be. Big Society writ large.

While Cornwall can at times seem like the Wild West, Devon is for ever civilized and tidy. It’s the perfect county for a writer, even better for a contemplative, superb for a conservationist.

This is not a hagiography, nor a billet-doux to a patch of red soil. It is nothing but the unadulterated truth.

The Royal Mail, it is said, intends to abolish counties for delivery purposes. Those upcountry folk just don’t get it, do they?

John Evans

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Last week I wrote a rather alarming piece about the euro currency: Is the eurozone about to collapse?. Some significant commentators are doing likewise, notably, Will Hutton, Liam Halligan, Edmund Conway and Ambrose Evans-Pritchard.

These guys don’t mess about. If they are nervous, we should be too. My antennae have been twitching for some considerable time.

And yet, and yet … Where are the front-page stories in our national press warning us of the calamity to come? Today’s Sunday Times does have a mini article, “Greece urged to give up the euro” on page 11 of the main paper, squashed into a bottom corner next to a large advert for Hyundai cars, and cut into by a promotion for “Britain’s Best Picnic Walks”.

What comes next will not be a picnic, nor a drive in a spanking new motor.

We are informed, in around 250 words, that the British Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) “has warned Greek ministers they will be unable to escape their debt trap without devaluing their own currency to boost exports. The only way this can happen is if Greece returns to its own currency.”

As Greece’s debt is denominated in euros, it will increase as the local currency falls. Thus the debt must be “converted into the new currency unilaterally.” I’m sure that will go down a storm with holders of Greek euro bonds.

Doug McWilliams, chief exec of the CEBR, thinks the move is “virtually inevitable” and other members may follow. “The only question is the timing. The other issue is the extent of contagion. Spain would probably be forced to follow suit, and probably Portugal and Italy …”

He ends ominously, “Could this be the last weekend of the single currency? Quite possibly, yes.”

At least the ST lifted that out of the Business section. I suppose we should be grateful for small mercies.

David Laws is gone, having entered the annals of the Guinness Book of Records as the shortest occupier of a Cabinet seat in British history. I’m talking about time here, not stature. Someone should check that out too.

Eighteen days is not a long time in politics, whatever grumpy old Harold Wilson might have said. One thing made Laws stand out. His vanishingly small career is filled with superlatives.

Apart from the length of his stay on our political radar, he has been elevated to the status of “the star of the coalition government”, a Prime Minister-in-waiting, the best brain in Parliament, the ablest candidate for the job, and “a good and honourable man” (David Cameron).

If he can manage all that in 18 days, what might he have accomplished in 18 months?

Can we afford to lose such concentrated talent in these hard times?

If you have ever watched old British films, you will know what a charabanc is.

Charas (pronounced “sharabang”, suggesting a French connection) were old buses designed for long-distance outings to the seaside and, more often than not, pub crawls through the countryside. They were usually painted a drab green, or cream with brown highlights. Very public sector.

Charabancs were the quintessential working class form of transport right up to the 1960s. When in Malta a few years ago, I had the misfortune of travelling in one on a tourist trip to Medina in the centre of the island.

It was a very uncomfortable journey, especially when the engine caught fire, filling the bus with thick, black smoke. Alarmingly, the Maltese driver regarded this as perfectly normal.

I mention all this because while out walking in Exeter the other day, I came across a perfectly preserved example of a charabanc. By wonderful serendipity, it was parked alongside a luxuriously modern German coach with every facility and comfort known to man. Here’s my pic:

Doesn’t it just warm the cockles of your heart?

Annoyment of the Week

One of my pet aversions of the late, unlamented Labour government, was Yvette Cooper and Ed Ball’s constant use of the phrase, “It’s the right thing to do”.

Where do I start?

The word “right” is a value judgement, so should always be prefaced with “In my opinion …”. Instead it was used as a fait accompli, an argument stopper.

The gruesome/winsome couple (you decide who gets which adjective) were claiming infallibility of decision, something even the Pope would be wary of these days.

Imagine then my surprise when our shiny new leader, David Cameron, started using this verbal tic in putting his points across.

Dave, it’s not the right thing to do to say it’s the right thing to do.

Here in East Devon we’ve had a major sporting triumph, something we’re not used to, or geared up for.

Our local rugby club, the Exeter Chiefs, won a splendid two-leg final against formidable Bristol, 38-17 to win promotion to the rugby Premiership. That is a huge event for the club, for next season it will be hosting the like of Wasps, Leicester, Bath and Northampton, giants among the rugger crowd.

Yesterday the entire city centre was filled with an enormous crowd welcoming our heroes in their open-topped bus as they were greeted by the Lord Mayor of Exeter.

My photo is a bit blurred, but it was the best I could do in the circumstances.

Hail to the Chiefs

John Evans

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An 18th-century view over the River Exe captured this morning. Click on pic for larger image.

Photo by John Evans.