Doris A Wright set the standard for new year resolutions. It was she who wrote the famous lines: the future lies before you like a field of fallen snow, take care how you tread it ‘cos every step will show. Not quite Shakespearean, but with a memorable mixture of threat and hope.
Suitably inspired, I decided to prepare a modus vivendi for 2022, a plan based on a new friendlier, more forgiving attitude to the world. A plan with a list of rules that would guide one’s faltering footsteps through the months ahead. Not quite walking on with hope in the heart to avoid walking alone, but definitely avoiding any storms. My 2022 rules are as follows:
1. Don’t mock royalty. They make many folk happy and because they own the foreshore it will be their job to clean up those wee pearls of plastic that are destroying marine wildlife.
2. Don’t mock politicians, particularly the Prime Minister. Someone has to keep the civil service under control while criminal stupidity and greed are just normal human characteristics.
3. Don’t think unkind thoughts about Donald Trump. He may plunge America into a moral and financial morass but he may also put the country into its rightful place in the world â near the bottom.
4. Don’t sign online petitions. Especially those trying to rescind Mrs Thatcher’s Honours. Like Stalin, she was firm but fair.
5. Don’t abuse call centre employees who try to scam you. They need the money. Just block.
6. Please leave history to historians. They never agree so best to accept that truth is the first casualty of history.
7. Think kindly of David Attenborough and Greta Thunberg. One won’t see if he was right while the other may. Not a happy outcome.
8. Believe in the next generation. We survived gas masks so they’ll cope with classroom masks, etc. Also, they could not care less about our beliefs.
9. Avoid diets. Since the 1521 Diet of Worms, which did no good to the Christian religion, they have aye been good to circumvent. Just don’t Eat.
10. Never make a list of resolutions. Â Â
David Donald
There are times when Google surprises. I was looking for something the other day and decided to see if I googled myself, I would get something other than references to the famous Times correspondent or the playwright Willy Russell. The latter turned out not to be called Willy Russell, which was unfortunate as the idea of interviewing him was Willy Russell talks to Willie Russell. Sharing a name can be embarrassing. I was at the King’s Head Theatre, then run by a legend called Dan Crawford, to review a show. ‘This is Willie Russell’ was how our mutual friend introduced me. Dan said how much he liked my work which took me aback until I realised he thought he was talking to the other Russell. Smile and move on fast was all one could do.
The new year 2022 Google surprise was a reference to The Guardian of 26 June 2008, where someone called Bill Blanko had written a column about the favourite films of Gordon Brown, who fluffed his answers, and David Cameron who, when asked the following day, was prepared with something suitable. Mr Blanko, a pseudonym I assume, went on to reflect on journalists who moonlighted doing things other than their main job and started with me as an alleged doyen of the lobby who also worked as a film critic at the same time. I did do so briefly at the behest of the then Herald editor Arnold Kemp after Lindsay Mackie, our film critic, got pregnant and gave it up for motherhood.
I left Westminster in 1986 so how on earth Blanko dug me out as the peg on which to hang his piece in 2008 is a mystery. I did one or two things I am quite pleased about when I was in the Press Gallery â I was for some years the Gallery secretary and ran events â including securing for free the celebrated drag act Rogers and Star as the cabaret for our Christmas dance held in the Press Gallery dining room â so the Queen is not the only queen to have played the Palace â and writing a revue for the Gallery centenary dinner performed by the great and the good of the time like James Naughtie, Eleanor Goodman and Julia Langdon. Ms Langdon still performs one of the songs on the radio from time to time when talking about the Thatcher years.
I also conned a herd of political cartoonists into giving us cartoons to hang in the Gallery dining room, some of which may still be there although not all as several got stolen. There were light fingers all over the Palace of Westminster then and probably still are. But just how Blanko dug me up is a mystery. I can’t say that getting my name in the papers did not happen a lot during my career but when it is in one you are not employed by it is, well, rather pleasing. And so 2022 began on a high note.
Bill Russell
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