Big Words by Lord Black of Crossharbour

"It was hilarious," said a former Fairfax worker yesterday.

"We'd go down to the Fairfax annual general meeting, record his speeches that would go on forever, and then we'd all run back to the office and get out our dictionaries.

"Most of the words we'd never heard of before, but they all existed even though they hadn't been used for 100 years."

To prologise - gadzooks!

One does not expect perpetual encomia when one confronts peripeteia involving incarceration but, really, the peons are getting above themselves. I could understand insubordinate compositors but for wordsmiths to oppugn my linguistic felicity is extraordinarily odious. In what times have we arrived when it’s hopelessly optative for me to assume comprehension when speaking to persons in their native tongue? During peroration, all too quickly do the functionally illiterate cry grandiloquence.

Let’s be clear here, I’m not being accused of verbosity or prolixity but of the sin of learning and if crapulent mediocrities can’t understand me, I say the fault lies with them. I trust you will not think it rodomontade to point out that I have written well received biographies of Nixon and Roosevelt when the best these half-wits have knocked out is 500 heavily edited words on a collision between a small goods pantechnicon and a Peta protest. That story writes itself! But to capture on page the essence of quixotic FDR or mercurial Nixon is as elusive and fraught as the conjugal right.

No doubt the jaundiced hacks will beat timbrels as conveyed by tumbrel I commence incarceration. But armed with Roget and several years, my revenge will be exhaustive, if lacking concision.

Flightmares*

Those boxes in the weekend magazines or the appalling Australian Financial Review magazine in which jetsetters relate their travel secrets:

Name: Earnest Most

Position: Vice President, Excellence**

Preferred carrier and seat: QANTAS, because they know me! 1A - in the event of an accident I like to know I’ll be the first atomised.

Most frequent destination: Singapore. The place really works and I just love sweating. It’s wonderful to see how the ethnic Chinese treat anybody who is not ethnically Chinese.

Hotel: The Fullerton. It’s very expensive but its close to the office, has really cosy rooms, is great for working and has a super bar where drinks are 5 times more expensive than outside.

Never fly without: I always work on the plane so I never forget my laptop, adaptor and Bose noise cancelling headphones. Some people say I am a gullible fool for buying the headphones but I say, Sorry, are you talking to me?

Tips: Don’t drink too much when flying or you might forget to work. Haggle! The locals really enjoy it and you could end up with a bargain!


As a one time Platinum QANTAS, Gold Kris and blah, blah, blah member here’s the truth about international travel in any class. It’s shite.

Practical advice:

Always watch the safety demonstration so you remember to forbid your children from being hosties.

To meet Asian hosties, leave your business card on your seat. To meet Australian hosties, cash.

Passengers who work on flights are invariably tossers.

Consuming 2 large valium and 3 martinis before boarding is a great way to meet people during the flight but less helpful in an emergency evacuation.

They’re not called hosties anymore.

Waitress in the Sky is still the best song about hosties, by far.

American hosties have no sense of humour. Nor do Singaporean, German, French, Dutch, Japanese, British or Australian ones.

If you give hosties a hard time, they will wipe your teabag round the bowl.

Don’t eat the food unless it comes in tamper proof packaging.

People who don’t drink on the flight are wasting their time (and money).

Lest departure be delayed, drug your children after take off.

Don’t tuck in your 1st class jammies.

Mr. Bean is no funnier at altitude.

1st class jammies tend to bunch and creep. Pull out before heading through cabin.

Other people’s children are best avoided on the ground and threatened in the air.

If you see a morbidly obese man when checking in, he will have frequency and be sitting next to you.

The hostie call button is there to be used. Don’t be shy!


* Not to be used as a nickname for QANTAS hosties.

** This is a real job title.

Age shall not weary some of us

Please remain clam, but, according to a host of books, if you look out the window you’ll notice society under threat from marauding packs of adults who refuse to grow up.

It’s hard not to panic when, at any time, you could be run over by fifty year olds on skateboards, but you are urged to stay focused and read on.

Even the Archbishop of Canterbury has concerns about dysfunctional infant adults, apparently the product of non-caring childhoods. Perhaps their parents were busy playing Twister.

We’re told to look at the alarming trends – more American adults between 18 and 49 watch the Cartoon Network than CNN. What’s more, there’s been a rise in the “obscene popularity” of toys and video games among adults.

Oh, come on! Toys? Obscene?

Maybe I’ve been playing Xbox on ganja too much to notice this latest threat to civilization (#3255, I believe). I have seen a few school mums who dress like their daughters. The only threat they pose is to dignity. Mind you, if you squint your eyes really, really tightly, some of them look pretty good.

And, thanks all the same, I’ll take SongeBob over the Late News and Even Stevens over Californication any day.

Where’s the evil?

We’re not talking about Oskar Matzerath from The Tin Drum – an adult in a child’s body, born with all his intellectual faculties intact and who deliberately stopped growing (I always thought in protest at how disgustingly badly adults behave – his mother’s adultery with her first cousin, for example) and later became a criminal.

On the whole, we’re talking about adults who have evolved as society allows. If you create a nanny-state you end up with a society of babies. If you diminish the importance of individual responsibility why should adults act responsibly?

If the relevance of tradition and social mores has been eclipsed by the rise of rights without concomitant duties, we can all damn well do what we like until we run up against a law. With no authority or guide but the state, we might as well make the most of the free space between it and the individual while we still can.

But this isn’t really about adult irresponsibility. It’s about jealousy, conformity and prosperity.

We're talking about adults who have the resources and time to disengage from real world concerns and indulge in the distractions which modern society has created. If the dude in board shorts at parent teacher night pays his taxes and discharges his responsibilities, it’s nobody’s business but his if he wants to don children’s clothes, play frisbee and spend his time pissed. This makes the guardians of culture uneasy and this "concern" is really about the snootiness and insecurity of the self-appointed intelligentsia.

Around 1890 Wordsworth wrote that the world is too much with us. The intervening century certainly has not made the world less present. Creepy little anti-establishment bugger though he was, those alarmed about the alleged rise of immature adults couldn’t find Oskar’s disengagement uninformed. Could it be that, while some adults indulge themselves childishly because they can afford to do so, others just want to get away from it all?

As ever, I’m talking my lead from poetry and rock ‘n roll.

Keef is only going to stop rocking when he croaks and Led Zep expose the young pretenders as, well, pretenders. As a Welsh drunk wrote:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light...

Well done us!

The world has watched in awed wonderment as Australia changed government without a single drop of blood being shed!

Congratulations to us all!

Every foreigner is smarting with envy at our grace, civility and maturity. The Chinese people I was entertaining on election night were dumbstruck that Mr. Howard should pass the baton to Mr. Rudd without first beating him around the bonce with it a few times and applying a swift knee to the goolies on the way down.

Sure, there was some initial confusion as I explained the concept of an election to my communist visitors. Oh no, no, Mr. Hu, the word I am using is election! How we laughed! But, they understood soon enough and the look on their faces could only be described as deep admiration.

While I was at it, I took the opportunity to explain to my guests that Australians aren’t just good at peaceful exchanges of power - we have many things to be proud of. For example, I explained, we buy our groceries. In most countries, those that actually have food, citizens steal them – often at the point of a gun. I told the delegation that Australians, as peaceable people, queue patiently to buy comestibles which we pay for with “money”, a kind of exchangeable token of little inherent value.

And you know what else?, I asked Mr. Hu and his colleagues as they stood before me, mouths agape, shaking their heads in disbelief, We’re really very good at sport too, as you will see in Beijing.

I could see they were at once impressed and a little worried.

What a country we have! What a people we are!