Christmas Mr Hack 107

It time to wish readers and contributors a happy and hopefully prosperous New Year, largely depending on how the terms of the Euro agreement work out for all of us. Two cards to admire this time ... the first a very festive picture but one I hope we don't get to enjoy here. The other image comes from 1971 and was UTV's friendly way of sending greetings to its people ... many of whom you will no doubt recognise, so good luck guessing who they all are. I know at least six ... starting in the middle with Ian Sanderson. Happy guessing ... and again, Happy Christmas.  

Comments

[Chairman]

Have been informed that the quotation from the late Aneurin Bevan, relates to the Suez Crises in 1956, after the then Prime Minister, Anthony Eden, claimed that the invasion of Egypt was undertaken in order to strengthen the United Nations. Bevan said that every burglar could say the same thing. Argue he is entering a house in order to train the police. He added that if the Prime Minister was sincere in what he was saying, then he was too stupid to be Prime Minister. A little known fact about the Suez invasion was that chat show host, and professional Yorkshireman, Michael Parkinson was a junior Army officer with the invading force, dealing mainly with press releases, I understand. Either that or interogating prisoners. Perhaps that's where he perfected his chat show style.

[A.McQ.]

I have today been observing the Old Customs of our inky trade - going out for a good Christmas Drink. A good eight hour + session with good friends. So a Happy Christmas to all my readers and AKK Copyboys, particularly The Best Chairman We Ever Had. Hic.

[Mitchell Smyth]

Alastair: You must still be a youngster. If I had an eight-hour-plus drinking session I'd be getting my wife to type for me. Or maybe you did . . .

[ruthie]

After an eight month search across all the LK Bennett stores in the UK, I eventually found what I was looking for last week in The Outlet Banbridge.
A lambskin pair of Verity wedge heel kneeboots in size 41 reduced massively from the £350 they were last year.
These elusive last season boots I eventually got my hands on. Probably the best kneeboots ever designed, my belated birthday present to myself.
Now to waterproof them with Scotchguard three times in time for Monday's Down Royal racing.
It's the little things in life that keep us girls happy.
And not forgetting matched up with £3 leggings from Primark.
Who needs stilettos ?

[sm]

A very Happy Christmas and a healthy and prosperous New Year to all Copyboys - and girls.

[Chris Ryder]

Can I add my best wishes to everybody as well. Have a good one.

[Chris Ryder]

My edition of the Bel Tel can only manage a nib on page ten about the DoE's illness. And they call themselves a newspaper!,,..

[Graham]

The Duke of Edinburgh's admission to hospital was on Sky News around 11pm last night. It was the front page splash in the Daily Mail,which I believe is printed here. But perhaps the Bel Tel thinks there's not much interest in the old cove; or perhaps the deadline at the BT is even earlier than we imagined. However the online edition makes up for it with better coverage...including a recycled piece on "Prince Philip - 90 gaffes and cringes in 90 years" You'd think they'd wait. Christmas spirit and all that.

Speaking of which - A VERY HAPPY CHRISTMAS AND A PROSPEROUS NEW YEAR to all our members, contributors and watchers!

[Chairman]

Glad Ruthie got bargain boots. I find late Christmas shopping very economical. Did my entire shopping for presents in an hour in Lisburn this morning. Practically everything was heavily discounted. Most of the stuff I bought my wife was half-price or better. The perfume, the chocolates, the odds and ends. And getting the lady counter assistants to wrap them up in festive paper for me was a bonus. But the beauty of it is that it was mostly fellas in the shops getting the bargain prezzies. The women who'd been doing their shopping over the past couple of months were largely absent. Shopped out I expect. Also with less stuff available on the shelves today, it greatly simplifies choice. Perhaps the only sour note was the faces of the poor shop staff coming to the end of their tether with Slade screaming his seasonal hit through the damned tannoy. Anyway, enough of my gloating, I again wish all of you a very merry Christmas and an unexciting new year. At our age excitment can set the pacemakers racing. Which can be delightful but dangerous.

[Cal McCrystal]

Best wishes to all Copyboys/girls for a nice pudding tomorrow and lots of sweets in 2012.

[Cal McCrystal]

I was thinking today about how possibly unfairly I regard modern journalism. Of course there are serious sins, but often these are committed in an unsinful effort to get at the truth. With this in mind, I offer some recollections about a paper which once emplyed me.

It used to be said that the late Henry Brandon, doyen of the British press in Washington DC, enhanced his position on the Sunday Times by performing little personal favours for its then owner, Lord Kemsley. These included errands of a financial nature for his lordship and the procurement of certain medicaments for Lady Kemsley, whose health was not always robust. These services, while they did not noticeably improve the standard of the correspondent’s journalism, did have the effect of underpinning his tenure, magnifying Head Office’s view of him, and, however disenchanted an editor occasionally might be about the quality of his prose, making him virtually untouchable.

As many journalists know from experience, the far-flung correspondent often feels forgotten or inadequately appreciated by Head Office. He/she, therefore, may be prepared to compensate by whatever means thought necessary; be it carrying the foreign editor’s bags as he steps off the plane for a visit to a distant bureau, or (as happened in my case) making vigorous inquiries into the possibility of my editor-in-chief’s son obtaining a green card, to enable him to find work in the United States. On occasion, the correspondent may make a career out of ingratiation or obsequiousness (the phrase, ‘tongue-in-groove journalism’ is not far off the mark), fearing that Head Office may exploit unfairly its ascendancy. But that sort of thing is, I think, now rare. More often the relationship between Head Office and its man yonder - providing it has a man yonder - can be mutually rewarding.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the relationship that evolved between Ian Fleming, author of the James Bond novels, and Antony Terry, the Sunday Times (and Kemsley Newspapers) man in Bonn. Before Fleming found fame and fortune with 007, he was foreign manager of the Sunday
Times - a position which once imposed a wider authority than is the case today. But he died in 1964, the year of my arrival in London to join his former newspaper, before I had a chance to know him. Antony Terry died in October,1992, in Wellington, New Zealand, aged 79, by which time I had got to know him quite well, and to regard with awe his past endeavours both as a foreign correspondent and as an interrogator of suspected Nazis at Nuremberg after the Second World War.

Both Fleming and Terry were strange men in their different ways. It was more than their previous connections to the intelligence services that made them strange; in any case, it was not unusual to find former code-breakers, spy-catchers and characters with misty motives and backgrounds swimming in the pools of western journalism after the war ended. Fleming’s strangeness as a journalist manifested itself, I was told, in his habit of closing his eyes, jabbing a pin into a map of the world, re-opening his eyes and exclaiming: ‘Well, we haven’t been there before. Let’s send so-and-so to take a look!’ Terry’s strangeness surfaced in a different way, or series of ways. Every morning, he peeled the shell from two nearly hard-boiled eggs and swallowed them without chewing. Another idiosyncrasy was to carry with him at all times a snuff-box containing chilli powder - a searingly hot variety - which he would sprinkle on restaurant meals he considered bland. He had slightly bulging eyes, light-blue, penetrating, unblinking, and disconcertingly accentuated by dark-rimmed spectacles with thick lenses. Under the high slope of his forehead, the eyes made him resemble a comic-book hypnotist or the bad guy in the sleazy bazaar of an old Hollywood B-movie. When he became terminally ill (from cancer), his wife, Edith Lenart, telephoned me from Wellington and asked if I would write his obituary for The Times when the time came. I of course agreed, calling her some days later to say that it was now written. Presumably to comfort her bedridden husband, she took the unusual step of telling him: ‘Darling, Cal has written your obit!’ Terry’s immediate reaction was to say: ‘I’d like to see it. Get him to fax it.’ I did so with a twinge of anxiety, for I had no wish to embarrass him. The final paragraph described him as ‘among the last of a peculiarly gallant and fastidious breed of reporter; self-disciplined, self-motivated and, in a sense, creatively remote from head office.’ A day passed. Edith phoned again. ‘He loved it,’ she said. ‘But he says it’s too long and needs subbing [sub-editing].’

Strange individual or not, Antony Terry was remarkably good at his job and was, to me and to some of my colleagues, an extraordinary friend.

Some weeks after his death, Edith Lenart sent me a pile of papers she had selected from her husband’s extensive files relating to his Sunday Times employment. She wanted my opinion on whether they were worth editing into a book. I was unsure at first, but in the end suggested that she should go ahead with a compilation of the most interesting items: the correspondence between her late husband and Ian Fleming. In the end, Edith herself being terminally ill, this task was performed by Judith Lenart, her daughter by a former marriage, and published privately in New Zealand. I then wrote about this correspondence for the British Journalism Review.

The papers contained what appeared to be a full record of Terry’s dealings with Fleming from shortly after the war when the latter invited Terry to join the Sunday Times. Until then, Antony Terry had no journalistic experience. He was born in North London but spent much of his childhood and early youth in Berlin, where his father was attached to the British embassy between the world wars. Even when relaxing with him at his villa in the south of France, I found him politely resistant to questions about his career before the 1939-45 war, though I assumed a former involvement in espionage. In his typically reticent way, he rarely talked of Fleming’s work for British naval intelligence or about the Military Cross he himself was awarded for leading a divesionary commando raid against an Axis port in the second war. Terry and his men drew German fire as they crossed an iron bridge, bullets ricochetting against its girders, and were captured. His team was actually being lined up against a wall by German soldiers to be shot when saved by the distraction of another British team’s limpet-mines going off under the battleship Tirpitz a short distance away. Terry was sent to a prisoner-of-war camp where he immediately organised a clandestine news-sheet. This may have been the beginnings of his journalistic career, but, if so, it was one which he postponed for a couple of years. At the conclusion of the war, his fluency in German dialects and familiarity with the German psyche made him a formidable allied interrogator of suspected war criminals. Sometimes in jest, post-war journalist colleagues surmised that his expertise in obtaining answers to questions from reluctant subjects might be attributed to the skills he acquired from those official interrogations.

On joining the Sunday Times, Terry became a tireless foreign correspondent. He had an intimate knowledge of Cold War politics and diplomacy, and was a fastidious checker of facts, a burrower into dark corners and a traveller who never complained of fatigue (No one was greatly surprised when his first marriage, to the novelist Sarah Gainham, fell victim to Terry’s workload). Based for much of his career in Bonn, he regarded himself as a kind of garde mobile who undertook assignments far from his bureau: Budapest in 1956, Biafra in 1970. He once cut his way, machete in hand, through the South American jungle in search of war criminals who had managed to evade Nuremberg.

What is fascinating about the Terry-Fleming correspondence is that neither man seems to relate warmly to the other until personal favours, as opposed to journalistic instructions, have been carried out. For example:

Kemsley House, London, WC1
20 October 1949

Dear Terry,

I attach particulars of a man who has been recommended to me as being particularly well-informed, especially regarding Russian manaeuvres in Germany, and think that from time to time you may get useful material from him ...

Yours truly,

Ian Fleming

In his replies, the correspondent - at first based in Düsseldorf, then in Berlin, then in Bonn - addressed himself to ‘Mr Fleming’, signing himself formally ‘Antony Terry’. One has to allow for the fact that both Fleming and Terry came from backgrounds in which intimate forms of address
generally were eschewed. Yet newspaper men and women today find it odd that such formality persisted among colleagues.

c/o British Press Centre, Berlin
BAOR 2 - Germany
13 May 1950

Dear Mr Fleming,
... I fully realize the need to keep down expenses and I shall do my utmost to achieve this. We have got rid of the driver and I now am my own chauffeur. In this we are almost unique among the other correspondents here ... We have so far also saved Kemsleys the cost of a new car by using my secondhand Volkswagen ... I think that the analysis of my expenses over the last few months will show a downward rather than upward tendency.

Yours sincerely,

Antony Terry

Even when Terry continued to curtail his expenses and pull off some nice scoops (‘Congratulations on your fine showing in the Sunday Times yesterday, but I still note the absence of the first person singular’), Fleming was no warmer towards his colleague than ‘Dear Antony Terry’. It is only when Fleming wanted something that would directly further his own career that Antony Terry got the Tony treatment. Fleming had married Anne Viscountess Rothermere in 1952, a ‘painful process’, he later confessed, to divert himself from which he had sat down and written Casino Royale. As a budding writer of spy stories, he would require plenty of research. And who better to provide it the the obligingly indefatigable Terry.

1 September 1953

Dear Tony,

Many thanks for the V-2 book, and here is one more request ... You will have heard that still colder winds have been blowing in Kemsley House recently but they do not affect you and I see no reason why they should in the future. If I ever have any different views on the matter I shall let you know at once.

Yours ever,

Ian Fleming

One of the things that impressed me about Tony Terry when I was foreign features editor of the Sunday Times was his willingness to depress his own career ambitions below the immediate needs of the paper. He would not hesitate, for example, to spend several days researching material for an article put together in head office which he was well aware might not have his byline on it. Reading this correspondence, one is reminded of his forbearance in the face of Fleming’s seemingly insatiable demands. In February 1954, he sent Fleming material on East-West escape routes for agents (‘When they arrive in Hungary and Czechoslovakia on the first stage of their journey Soviet authorities provide the agent with a Propusk [frontier crossing identification]. This document is in Russian, 6.5 inches by 4 inches [folded] and is light brown in colour’). In a letter the following year, Fleming’s gratitude permitted him to write: ‘My dear Tony, Admiral Godfrey, famous war-time DNI, who was my Chief, may be in your neighbourhood ... and he would very much like to meet you ... ‘ This letter was signed, ‘Yours ever, Ian F’. A month later, Fleming wrote:-

My Dear Tony,

I am pleased to tell you that your salary has been increased by £1.10s per week, backdated to 1st November 1954 ...

Yours ever,

Ian F

By this time, Terry had also been feeding Fleming paragraphs for the paper’s Atticus column, which the latter edited in addition to his managerial duties for the Kemsley group (it owned several provincial newspapers as well) and novel-writing. And it must be said that if Fleming was less than reckless in dishing out pay rises, he was generous with his praise. ‘My Dear Tony,’ he wrote in July 1955, ‘I must say, looking back on your years of service ... I can think of no correspondent with anything approaching your record’. And in September: ‘Dear Tony ... I don’t think there is any possibility of Brandon unseating you ... Henry is badly needed in Washington and I think it is most unlikely that the chairman [Lord Kemsley] would allow him to move from there.’ So Terry, now in Bonn, redoubled his efforts on behalf of James Bond’s creator.

13 May 1956

Dear Mr Fleming,

I think Eva Braun’s suite (£6 a night) at the Hotel Dreesen will be available if you want it. Or there is the older and more sedate Schaumburger Hof, also on the Rhine, with the room (no. 22) where Queen Victoria slept, in the hotel where she became engaged to Albert ... but on the other hand the room where Hitler slept ist auch etwas, as the Germans say. Perhaps you could let me know if you want either of them?

Two months later, ‘Dear Tony’ was asked to furnish, ‘for the purposes of my next opus’, the address, five years previously, of British military intelligence headquarters in Berlin’s Western sector and ‘a sensible sounding address’ in the same sector ‘for the head of a German Intelligence Group working for the British and Americans’. Fleming even set Terry the task of editing a passage of the proposed opus. ‘Please correct and expand with geographical details the following sentence: When he had collected the day’s outgoing mail from the Military Intelligence Headquarters he made straight for the Russian sector, waited with his engine running until the British Control gate was opened to allow a taxi through, and then tore through the Russian frontier post. These labour, Fleming added, ‘are in exchange for my, I hope successful, efforts to get Sarah Gainham’s excellent work into the Sunday Times ... ‘ (the Terry-Gainham marriage was to founder shortly after this).

By now the bonding between Fleming and Terry was firm and inescapable. The latter never discussed with me - either over roast beef at Simpson’s, or in his South of France retreat - how he felt under such pressures, or whether he received a fee from Fleming or his publishers for all this help (I am fairly sure it did not earn him a penny). What he was being asked to do, it appears from the correspondence, was to help feather Fleming’s next with his unique German expertise. I can’t think Terry got a lot of material comfort out of the arrangement - which yielded, among other things, a 3,000-word, minutely detailed briefing sent to Fleming in 1956. It shows that Terry was in fact doing a vast amount of Fleming’s homework for him and getting no credit for it, other than his Sunday Times salary. Here are some extracts from the briefing Terry sent in response to Fleming’s questions.

For someone driving it would mean coming out of tree-lined small suburban streets or squares lined with modern apartment blocks and large villas, into a wide four-lane North-South thoroughfare, the Heer-strasse, fast traffic (no speed limit, big cars commonly move at 130km down the boulevard) and coping with the complicated traffic crossings of the Reichskanzler-platz ... If the Military Intelligence is the active rather than the passive or Security kind, a house in the Grunewald would be better than an office where most of the British stuff is, including open things like the NAAFI and Officers’ Club ... It makes a difference whether you want your Germans to be working for British or American intelligence because they wouldn’t be working for both with the knowledge and consent of them both ... They might easily be actually working for both without eighter knowing it definitely, but Bond for instance would know or suspect that without being able to do much about it ...

To which Fleming responds thus (he could hardly have done less):

Dear Tony

Many thanks for your vast and splendid memorandum ... You have practically written a thriller and I was fascinated by all the gen.

Yours ever,

Ian F

There seemed no end to the burdens Terry was prepared to take up on his foreign manager’s behalf: an outline of the difficulties of travelling in Yugoslavia; advice on the advantages of a Mercedes 220 SE over the four-year-old Thunderbird Fleming was about to replace. It was not until March 1960, when Fleming left Kemsley House to devote more time to James Bond (by then he had also published Live and Let Die and Diamonds Are Forever) that the correspondence grew discernibly chummier. By now, the Bonn man had a new wife, Theresa, an attractive highly-strung woman who came with him on a visit to my London home some years later, who took pills between dinner courses and whose mood could change from jolly to withdrawn quite rapidly).

Only four years before Ian Fleming’s untimely death, aged 57, he and Antony Terry met in Vienna (which Terry also knew very intimately; it was then not only a big centre for refugees from the Soviet bloc, but also a p[lace where spies from East and West honed their skills), caroused together and, finally, got on first name terms with one another. Later, the novelist sent Terry, from St Anton Am Arlberge, a rather cryptic postcard:

‘Aunt-ony I must tell you that I have terrible trouble because the Tyrolians are very busy at their sawmills. The high note seems to be unending! Wish you were here to help make her behave. She’s been drinking Slivo out of a bottle all the way up the Arlberg. For many other reasons we miss you very much. Hope the V.W. is fahr-fahring again - and Theresa. Many herzuch.

Thanks again, Ian’

Fleming still had a few books in him - On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Dr No, From Russia Wiuth Love, Goldfinger - and the Bonn correspondent continued to be a mine of helpful information. In the summer and autumn of 1960, letters containing stuff about transvestites, Nazi treasure, strip-tease shows and other night life in Berlin, Hamburg and Vienna were addressed to ‘Dear Ian’. So were lengthy memos packed with information to help Fleming produce a book about ‘thrilling cities’ for Jonathan Cape. Fleming’s reliance on Terry never flagged, even when the James Bon author became ill. ‘What’s Baden Baden like these days? Would you recommend it for a week’s recuperation?’ Or, ‘Dear Mr Terry, Mr Fleming would be most grateful if you could send him some general details of the new 220 Mercedes convertible coupe with the more powerful engine, please ... B. Griffe-Williams, Secretary to Ian Fleming’.

And, on Fleming’s recovery, his letters to Bonn grew ever more insistent - and just a touch more peremptory. He was ‘depressed’ to learn from Terry that the Berlin Congress Hall was not the work of Corbusier but of an American architect. ‘Is this so? If it is, I shall have to amend my text.’ And ...

Thursday [undated]

Dear Antony,

For my next book I have invented a ‘Verein West Deutscher Zeitungen’. Does it exist? If so, would you please invent a fictitious group of West German papers ...

Yours ever, Ian

Terry obliged, as usual, adding: ‘Glad to hear Bond is coming to these parts’. Two months later, it is ‘My Dear Antony’, asking for information about a building near the corner of Wilhelmstrasse and Kochstrasse which Fleming needs for ‘a long Bond short story’. Within a week, Terry again came up trumps. In May 1963, helpful photographs and memos from Bonn were still arriving at Old Mitre Court in Fleet Street, Fleming’s London base. In December that year - eight months before he died - Fleming wrote to ‘Dear Tony’ to thank him for contributing to a Kemsley House farewell presentation (an 18th century paper knife) to its former foreign manager.

We shall continue to see each other so I won’t say goodbye - just to thank you for being a good friend and one of the finest foreign correspondents I have ever known - and I mean it.

Yours ever,

Ian

Aside from such effusions, was the arrangement mutually rewarding? It is hard to say, since the correspondence only cam to my notice after the demise of both men. But I believe Antony Terry’s unpaid researches for Ian Fleming’s Bond books were so painstaking, so penetrating and so frequent that his salaried journalism assumed a precision and endurance that was to benefit him - and his newspaper - immeasurably, particularly in the decade following Flemings death; when investigative reporting enjoyed a potent post-war rebirth, much of it modelled on the relentless style and energy of Ian Fleming’s man in Bonn. Antony Terry was to become European editor, based in Paris which is where he got to know Edith Lenart, then working for the Economist Intelligence Unit. For most of us, I reckon, a move from a small town in Germany to the City of Light would have been a wonderfully heady ascent. But Terry was more comfortable, I think, reporting from Germany and for years afterwards maintained a pied-à-terre in Bonn.

It was obvious to my wife and me, even while we were witnesses to the Lenart-Terry wedding ceremony at Chelsea registry office in 1984, that Edith wanted to slow down her tireless husband so that they could enjoy their remaining years in relaxed comfort. She was greatly responsible for
demolishing the stern reserve that could deflect some of his acquaintances. She bought him a dog so that he could become accustomed to another creature’s total dependence on him. I think she failed to slow him down all that much (He was filing despatches to his paper well into his so-called retirement). But to watch him playing with his dog in Les Alpes Maritimes, was to see a man retrieve, as though from an abyss, lost echoes from a distant and unchronicled childhood.

***************

[sm]

Old age is obviously creeping up on me - stamina's gone. I'll have to come back in the New Year to finish that!

[Chris Ryder]

Cal: apart from wishing you and Stella a fabulous Christmas I want to say how much I enjoyed your fascinating post. Paul Eddy once introduced me to AT in the Blue Lion and often thereafter enthralled me with tales about him. A superb read.

[Fred Hoare]

Happy Christmas and have a great New Year, especially to all my former photographic colleagues and friends.

[Derek Black]

Is the blogmeister away? Or on the sauce? We are being infected! Wasting their time at my age, however.

[Blogmaster]

Away I am and, it has to be admitted, with a glass of Mr Jameson sitting by my right hand as I type this response ... but, please notice: spam is still being marked as spam and deleted so as not to interrupt too much the generally easy flow of comments which we like to see appearing around here ... Happy New Year to all because I will still be away when that event takes place ...

[Cal McCrystal]

Nowhere Road
(formerly Fleet St.)

Disenchantment rakes my heart,
Ploughing through my reasoning,
Clapping blinkers on my eyes,
Smothering the evening.

It has palsied sober thought,
Stopped my ears to common sense,
Brought a tremor to my speech,
And let delirium commence.

Stumbling down this Nowhere Road,
I hear phantoms in the fog
Offer contrary advice
With a dreary apologue.

On down Nowhere Road I rush
Past a signpost to Farfetch,
Through a tunnel called Beguile,
To Imagination’s Stretch.

Molten tar impedes my way,
As do zones of frozen tears,
Holding me to Nowhere Road
For inestimable years.

Through the murk I glimpse a light
From the Great Delusion Tower,
Which, in all expectancy,
I attain within the hour.

No one answers to my knock.
The light that drew me there has gone.
No sounds echo from within.
And shadows mock me from the lawn.

Happy New Year -
Cal McCrystal

[JC]

Lovely, Cal ... lovely and tearful, too. Thanks for that one.

[Graham]

WATCH OUT FOR THESE!
Some of these expressions haven't reached Northern Ireland yet - but watch out, they will! This is from a website called businessinsider.com and is entitled "The Ten Most Annoying Management Terms of 2011"

10 - Internalise - As in "What you have all failed to internalise is that there has been a paradigm shift. As a result you are all now behind the curve when it comes to the multi-lateral interoperability needed to realise the supra-organisational mission statement.” Even though there is an awful lot to detest in that statement "Internalise" is the word we most object to. It appears to just means learn or remember but as telling someone to learn or remember something appears instructive, suggesting they internalise it will sound more empathetic, but at the severe cost of sounding like a clone-monkey.

9 - Hi, I hope all is well - With the birth of the email there came an awkward period when the formality of letters, with their "Dear Sir / Yours sincerely" had to be detuned to fit in with the new immediacy and informality. After a stuttering start the world passed through an embarrassed joint squirm and settled on "Hi" for anything other than legal representations. But 2011 has seen a pernicious ingress of a new form of insincerity with the addition of "I hope all is well" to the "Hi". Rather than questioning either the validity or sincerity of that statement, we would just ask that the bulk senders of such missives consider where they are sent to, as for many recipients things are blindingly obviously not well. We suggest the only time this greeting is appropriate is when addressed to bore-hole companies.

8 - Weaponise price opacity - As the scarcity of new Himalayan Pink Salt in the financial market takes its toll on the bottom lines of financial institutions it is becoming more important for them to make sure that they maximise the profitability of existing basic products. Opacity of price is critical in this process but weaponising it? Wow.

7 - Ideation - What happened to good old "have a think" or "come up with some ideas"? Even running things up flag poles is less irksome than "ideation" which sounds as though it should involve radioactive iodine.

6 - Stakeholder Community - Not a Transylvanian village but the new plural of stakeholder. Theoretically a stakeholder is anyone who can affect, or is impacted by, your decisions and so could be a lowly minion in your company, but deference only ever seems to be made to "stakeholders" when they are either your bosses, investors or regulators. Please let's call them who they really are.

5 - Socialise - When issues got out of hand in the old days you would normally either just tell the boss, or perhaps "take it upstairs." But now a cunning adaptation of the old mantra of "My profit, our loss" has invoked a caring sharing attitude to screw-ups by "socialising" them. As in "I think we should socialise this issue with senior management and the stakeholder community."

4 - Complementary - Odd one this, and it's really down to our own stupidity, but we have regularly opened emails this year expecting some nice free service only to re-read it and find it's not "complimentary" but something expensive and homeopathic. We expect the marketing world to soon be jumping on this and emailing multitudes of complementary not-at-all-free offers. Such as Ryan-Air offering "Complementary Flights" which sound as though they are free but are actually expensive and just "complement" what a decent service should be by being dreadful. Or have they done that already? "Complementary" should be banned from subject lines so that the vaguely dyslexic amongst us shouldn't be taken advantage of.

3 - Bandwidth - The adoption of IT geeky words into mainstream fashion is nothing new but the latest over-usage of "Bandwidth" by management is particularly grating. Just as "spending more time with my family" has become the acceptable expression of "Just been fired/stiffed/shafted/backstabbed/found out but have photos" so has "I'm sorry I can't action that, I don't have the bandwidth” become the generic replacement for "I don't have the time/resources/authority or inclination." But the saddest part is the way it's used under the false allusion that "bandwidth" is new and fashionable. Our grandmothers, thanks to broadband adverts and home routers, know what bandwidth is so please, unless you are the type of person who still uses "groovy" in the boardroom, please drop "bandwidth."

2 - Geosourcing - Why you lose your job to someone in a different part of the world. "The support function has been geosourced" or "How's the front office geosourcing project going?” It's the sharp end of a simple belief of ours that if there is someone able and willing to do your job for less than you, you are toast. But the use of "geo," which has connotations of environmental friendliness married to "source," which conjures images of babbling fresh springs in the mountains, results in a super-eco word which actually means "You're fired."

1 - Reaching out - TMM first came across 2011's winning term in July and since then it has spread like wildfire, which has us looking like Irish Riverdancers as we try to stamp it out as fast as we can. The origins and epidemiology of this disease has us suspecting it's the product of some Class of 2011 Management School somewhere. It really is complete and utter rubbish. If you are about to call an investor for some documents you don't "reach out to the client," you phone or mail them. If you want to know why a trade hasn't settled you don't "Reach out to Bangalore" you "call back-office." So let's just kill that one right now before someone gets accused of molestation.

Happy New Year

[Cal McCrystal]

Graham, did you not reaiise that these words and phrases which you rightly ridicule are part of a new international language called "Desperanto" -or possibly "Guessperanto"? I hope to attend night classes in it.

[Cal McCrystal]

On t'other hand, according to a book recently perused (Being Human: Historical Knowledge and the Creation of Human Nature - by Roger Smith), "language and culture express the historically formed, unique life of a people. As a consequence, to have knowledge of other people requires us, in the manner in which we know ourselves, to enter into a way of life and to understand the use and expressive life of language." Hmmnn, I think I'll stick with "Desperanto/Guessperanto"

[Cal McCrystal]

The Sales are on Big Times. Shop-lifting is a winner. Here's something to celebrate it:-

The Minstrel Boy’s Sister

The Menstrual Girl to the store has gone
In the ranks of dresses ye may find her.
Her mother’s scent she hath squirted on,
Unfazed by the carping behind her.
“Ooh, nice sarong,” cried this gurrier bird,
“I wonder if the thing might fit me.”
So she tried it on, and one-two-three,
She’s out of that store. What knavery!

[Chris Ryder]

Cal: happy new year to you and Stella. Loved the poems. Cannot help but think of PD. We always spoke on Christmas Day.

[Cal McCrystal]

Chris, and a very Happy 2012 to you and to your lovely wife whom I first met and was charmed by at Peter's post-funereal party earlier this year.

[chairman]

I'd like again to wish all our Copyboys a happy new year but having seen a lot of new years in my time, I can't say I'm over optimistic. I think it would be more realistic to wish you all a 'neutral' new year. A year that doesn't attack us or pile on more problems than we can fairly cope with. Just for a year I'd like to be Switzerland. No wars, no invasions, no noise and no hassle. My own effort in this direction is not to watch 24 hour news on TV. Those news readers and 'experts' who drone on like Private Frazer about how we are all doomed, are paid fantastic sums to keep viewers depressed. They can depress somebody else for a while. Even the morning newspapers I get each morning tend to be 'glanced over' until after I've had a crack at the crosswords. And am astonished to discover how many words there are in the language that I've never heard of. My advice to all of you is to worry less and laugh more. Advice I shall endeavour to take myself. A very neutral new year to you all.

[Ian Sanderson]

And a Happy New Year from the land down under.
It's mid-morning and we're preparing for a top temperature of 40 degrees (it's currently 33). That's real blast furnace stuff. Hope it's not a portent for the bushfire season ahead...

[MS]

It's 40 here in Toronto, too. But that's Farenheit. So you see we didn't have a White Christmas.

[Graham]

LOCAL NUJ 76 YEARS AGO

The minutes of a meeting of the N Ireland NUJ branch of September 21, 1935 were signed by Ruddick Millar, as vice-chairman. Ruddick Millar’s father was lost in the sinking of the Titanic. As well as being a journalist he was also a playwright. His son, Rupert Millar, was also a journalist, who worked on the “News Letter” and at BBC N Ireland. Rupert’s daughter, Susan Millar, grand-daughter of Ruddick, also became a journalist with both the BBC and UTV. In recent times she went into business organising tours of the Titanic quarter, and speaking on the subject.

At the November 1935 meeting a letter was read from the editor of the “Irish News” regarding the “forcible expulsion of Mr Woods, Irish News, from the Ulster Hall on the occasion of a meeting held under the Protestant Association auspices”

On another topic, the secretary was instructed to write to the Recorder of Belfast “regarding the lack of proper accommodation for the Press at the Recorder’s court, on occasion being taken sometimes to use the ante-room”

It was also agreed at this meeting that the Inspector-General of Police be written to “putting forward the suggestion that identification cards, bearing the photographs of Pressmen, be issued” [This could mean that NUJ cards were not being recognised, or that NUJ did not then issue cards. I don’t know]

At the same meeting Mr Millar reported that the Dublin branch “were desirous of having reptvs of the Northern Branch at their dance on 14th Decr. The vice-chairman, secy and treas were appointed to attend."

[Chairman]

I do not envy our friend Ian Sanderson his 40 degree temperatures. Don't mind being colder than Australia, but now Mitch Smyth informs us that we are colder than bloody Canada. That's a bitch. Walked the dog early this morning and my ears nearly fell off. That wind must have bounced off some polar bears before it got to me.I did buy one of those helmets with the fur ear flaps but don't wear it because it makes me look like a Kamakasi pilot who chickened out. Wish I'd worn it this morning all the same.

[Michael]

THE HUNTING PARTY

Half a century ago the old police courts, now preserved, offered a fine prospect of Victoria Square. On the right was Churchill House, then Belfast's tallest building, on the left Louis N. Davis, purveyor of Armstrong Siddeley motor cars, centre was the Jaffe Fountain, and conveniently alongside was that masterpiece of the ironfounder's art, the Victoria Square public toilets.

Cast-iron curliques cascaded in profusion, and ferrous fronds decorated the GENTLEMEN sign. Inside, brass and copper pipework entwined like pythons, massive porcelain stalls enfolded the poorest aim, while the sound of gently tinkling water in the background encouraged one's efforts. These days my own ancient plumbing requires no such encouragement ... but I digress.

The iron panels forming the outer walls were like lacework, with a multitude of tiny holes so one could see out, but passers-by could not see in. Alas the magnificent old loo became the city centre trysting place for gentlemen of a certain inclination, who were all too willing to accept new members to their club.

The Wolfenden Report of 1959 had recommended that homosexual practices be permitted between consenting adults in private, and this recommendation was passed into law. But not in Northern Ireland, which held out for many years until even the great Doctor's efforts to Save Ulster from Sodomy were in vain.

When complaints increased -- I myself was accosted once or twice on my way from court, so they must have been pretty desperate -- the police took action. But the advance from Musgrave Street was easily spotted and the clubbers drifted away or formed an innocent line-up along the stalls long before the arrival of the pounding boots. Sergeant Tom, whose surname I can't remember, led several raids which were (groan) fruit-less.

One day the dock was almost filled with men on indecency charges, while Tom and his team looked like the cats who had got the cream. It transpired that they had used one of the new-fangled street sweeping machines as a stalking horse, creeping along behind it to pounce as it passed the lavatory door. After that the club posted a lookout, which Sgt Tom countered by visiting in plain clothes to block the door while his uniformed team lurked around the corner. On one occasion he borrowed a van to disgorge his raiders into the doorway. The game was still going on when I left the BT in 1968.

I read a few years ago that the old convenience was removed for preservation when the Square was redeveloped. If it ever goes on display I'll bet this story will not be on the information board.

Happy and healthy New Year, everyone!