Well, that’s it for another six months minimum.  Yesterday I arrived back to a Britain I’d heard absolutely nothing about for over two weeks. It’s not that they didn’t sell UK newspapers in India (albeit dog-eared and at least three days old), it’s just that I was having such a good time that I didn’t really care or concern myself with what was happening here.  It was my third trip to India, and hopefully they’ll be others in the distant future.

We took off from Heathrow Terminal 3.  As anyone who has travelled from Heathrow will tell you, it is expressely forbidden to hire white British people to work there.  We were checked in by a Pole, served drinks at the bar by some Portuguese dude, and had sweeping brushes pushed over our shoes by an army of Asian workers even the Delhi and Bombay airports couldn’t match.  It was nine hours to Bombay.  Nine hours!  When I first went in 1985 it took over twelve and a half.  But the miracle of aviation means the world has become a much smaller and more easily accessible place.  And the ‘green’ loonies want those of us who can afford to travel widely to take a 7-night break in Saltburn-by-the-Sea?  Yeah sure!!

For when you arrive in, and travel through, India you realise just how potty and pointless all this Western crap about separating milk cartons and keeping food scraps in designated bins in order to save the planet really is.  Bombay and Delhi are big – very big.  18 and 12 million respectively, with the populations swelled by literally thousands every day, chiefly by the arrival of migrants from the countryside, creating disease infested slums the size of a small British town.  There are also 4 babies born in India every second!!  Both Bombay and Delhi have streets clogged with beat-up old Indian-built Ambassador cars, buses older than the Golden Hind, and autorickshaws that haven’t had an oil change since Nehru – all spewing out dirty great globules of thick, black exhaust fumes.  After three days I had to go to a doctor with a serious throat infection caused by the dust and the pollution.  For the remainder of the holiday I wore a mask over my mouth when venturing outside.  Please remember that the next time some long-haired hippy starts pontificating about Britain making a valued contribution to saving the planet.  Our efforts make bugger all difference – and never could.

On our first day in Bombay (we were only there two) my mother and I ventured down to Colaba to see how things were progressing on the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel. You’ll recall it was bombed and torched by followers of the religion of peace last November.  Although, sadly, we couldn’t go in and sample the fabulous Harbour Bar (India’s first licensed premises, which opened in 1933) like my mate and I had done almost two years ago to the day, it was brilliant to see just how much hard effort had gone in to making the hotel look as splendid as it was prior to that awful event.  Like the reconstruction of the Grand Hotel in Brighton after the IRA terror attack in 1984, the restoration effort had the distinct and defiant impression of ‘we’re not going to allow those bastards to keep us down’ about it.  We missed the reopening of the Taj as we were airbound for London when it threw open its doors yesterday.  Jolly good luck to every guest and worker who goes to make that place what it is.

We spent the first week in Delhi, seeing all the sights (Connaught Place, India Gate, Rajpath, various museums, the zoo) and catching up on the gossip with my Manipuri friend who now lives and works in the city.  We then travelled on to Agra to see the greatest monument ever built in the name of love.  Like or loathe Islam, the Taj Mahal metaphorically knocks you sideways. It is one of the few places I’ve ever been to that bettered the pictures and the impressions you get from them.  When you enter into that garden in front of the mausoleum, you can’t help making a sharp intake of breath and saying ‘f**k me!’ in a loud voice.  There were thousands of Brits, Yanks and Aussies all swearing and sucking air simultaneously.  It’s a wonder we didn’t all suffocate.  What the information boards at the Taj are curiously reluctant to tell you is that the wife, in whose honour the Taj was built, died giving birth to her husband’s 14th child (the dirty, perverted swine)!!  That was Islam in the seventeenth century.  Has anything changed?

All this brings me neatly on to the subject of Islam in India.  Yes, Muslims have the freedom of worship, sufferage, expression of thoughts and way of life.  But foreigners are left without a doubt that India is a Hindu country and is determined to stay that way.  There is no way 88% of the population is going to allow 10% to dictate the requirement for special laws and exemptions that run contrary to general Indian culture. What a shame we in Europe can’t be more like them. Many in Islam seek world domination?  I think India will have something to say about that.

We then moved on to Jaipur – the pink city.  It was painted pink to welcome the Prince of Wales in the late 19th century and apparently gets a fresh lick of the stuff every year.  However, my most abiding memory of Jaipur was a woman who thrust a  malnourished baby through the taxi window and asked that I adopt him.  That’s India I’m afraid.  You need a tough hide to cope with some of the sights you encounter.

Jodhpur (you see, it’s not just a pair of trousers!) was our next destination.  Whereas Jaipur is painted pink, Jodhpur is painted blue, but for reasons I could never really find out.  It was like being immersed in sulphur.  Finally, after a gruelling day and night train journey, which was about as comfortable as lying on a bed of top soil, we arrived in Varanasi.  I admit this spot by the Ganges is sacred to Hindus, but I wanted to go there just because one of my musical icons, George Harrison, had his ashes scattered there after succumbing to cancer in 2001.  George, we miss you.

So I’m home, jet lag-free and ready to go.  I understand there were some floods in Cumbria whilst I was away.  I also read that the argument between Sinn Fein and the DUP over the devolution of justice is continuing with gusto.  What the DUP party as a whole needs to appreciate is that when you jump into a pit of viscous slime, it will both stick and prevent you from getting out of it.  In other words, they have only themselves to blame for their predicament.

So that’s it for today.  I’ll browse the web and be back with some blogs starting tomorrow.

Ciao!

Here are the four books currently on my bedside table!

First up, “We are Doomed – Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism” by National Review’s John Derbyshire. I have long been an admirer of Derbyshire –  a Brit from here living over there. He is witty (the title alone is a classic!) but also an acute observer of why conservatives have lost the plot in recent decades.  He tackles issues like diversity and culture with aplomb.

Next up is the excellent and authoritative “Against Leviathan” by Robert Higgs. This is a sweeping indictment of Big Government and the menace it presents to our freedoms. 

Then there is the relatively obscurist “Edward de Vere, a great Elizabethan”. This 1931 book which provides insight into the life of the author of the Shakespearean canon.

And finally…..need I say more?

I have received the gift today of “Going Rogue” – the new book by Sarah Palin. Am looking forward to reading it.

I dunno about you guys, but I’m gonna open a used hockey stick shop…

 - comment under Bishop Hill’s post “The code”.

Bishop Hill is doing sterling work digging into the data freed from the charlatans at the Climate Research Unit (where “research” = “make it up”), but he needs some help:

Everybody, I’m sinking under weight of things to do here. I need you to post one or two line analyses of what you are finding in which bits of code.

Why not pop along to help if you can? I would, but I haven’t a clue what code is. Five minutes of me fumbling about and we’d be as confused as an Irishman told to take his pick from a line up of shovels. One thing I do know, this is dynamite stuff. Today, AGW sceptics/deniers appear completely vindicated.

I’ve long thought that governments would have suppressed the interweb if they knew where it would go. This is yet another reason why. The MSM was wholly fooled by the greatest of scams and now is less than enthusiastic in reporting what the blogosphere has done. So be it, the blogs are doing the job anyway. The scam is unravelling still tonight and there will be much more to say about this.

Ann Coulter asks… 

“It’s been weeks since eyewitnesses reported that Maj. Nidal Hasan shouted “Allahu akbar” before spraying Fort Hood with gunfire, killing 13 people.

Since then we also learned that Hasan gave a medical lecture on beheading infidels and pouring burning oil down their throats (unfortunately not covered under the Senate health-care bill). Some wondered if perhaps a pattern was beginning to emerge but were promptly dismissed as racist cranks.

We also found out Hasan had business cards printed up with the jihadist abbreviation “SoA” for “Soldier of Allah.” Was that enough to conclude that the shooting was an act of terrorism – or does somebody around here need to take another cultural sensitivity class?

And we know that Hasan had contacted several jihadist websites and that he had been exchanging e-mails with a radical Islamic cleric in Yemen. The FBI learned that last December, but the rest of us only found out about it a week ago.

Is it still too soon to come to the conclusion that the Fort Hood shooting was an act of terrorism?”

On Thanksgiving Day, I came across this interesting article asking if a Muslim can say Happy Christmas to a Non-Muslim? (and mean it?) The answer seems to be it depends who you ask. 

Here’s how a British hospital operates…

Countless red dots scattered across the world map on the wall of a NHS hospital reveal the story of the changing face of Britain. Each dot denotes the birthplace of a mother with a baby in the neonatal ward of London’s Chelsea and Westminster hospital.

The map was put up by hospital administrators to ‘celebrate the ethnic diversity’ of the sick children treated there, each at a cost of £1,400 a day. 

It shows dramatically how the NHS now treats patients from every corner of the globe. The 243 mothers are from 72 different nations. They include Mongolia, the remotest regions of Russia, Japan, Africa, South America, swathes of Asia, Australasia and even Papua New Guinea.

Only 18 mothers said they were from Britain. Less than 10%.

And the bill? All picked up by the British taxpayer!

Hurray for socialised healthcare – no wonder it is the envy of the world, the WORLD are using it! 

Oh no.

The BBC has abandoned plans to screen a ballet featuring a deformed Pope who rapes nuns which it had announced as one of the highlights of its Christmas schedule. 

Last month the corporation said it would televise In The Spirit Of Diaghilev from Sadler’s Wells as part of a season of ballet programmes.

The tribute to the Russian impresario comprises four acts, each by a groundbreaking choreographer, with the entire production due to be screened on BBC Four next month. Richard Klein, BBC Four Controller, promised viewers “a great watch”, hailing “the combination of one of the most inventive and musically exciting ballet scores being performed by one of Britain’s foremost dance groups”

You can read the gross details in the link above. I’m just amazed that anyone in the BBC could have considered this as vaguely commissionable in the first place.

Oh, happiness!  Maybe the kleptocrats at the UN and in Washington DC will be stopped before they can permanently cripple the last remnants of the industrialized West with unnecessary punitive carbon taxes and regulations.  For the children, of course. 

More fraud exposed!  More faux science exposed supporting global warming!  This time in New Zealand, from Watts Up With That. com  website:

“The New Zealand Government’s chief climate advisory unit NIWA is under fire for allegedly massaging raw climate data to show a global warming trend that wasn’t there.

The scandal breaks as fears grow worldwide that corruption of climate science is not confined to just Britain’s CRU climate research centre.”

In the nick of time, too.

I give thanks.