Can A Bearded Man Ever Pleasure a Woman?

I'm not criticising my neighbour but when I hugged him on impulse the other day as a thank you for finding a lost key to my bike lock, I was suddenly made aware that he had grown a beard. Ouch!

One sees it everywhere. Imitation Beckhams? Or are they imitation Imams? The worst is probably the total baldie with a great bush on the chin. "Mummy", do I hear a little girl cry? "Why are the men wearing their heads upside down?"

Equally with smokers and baldies, I avoid the bearded. One of my Paris lovers grew one and I made it clear I couldn't have a sexcessful evening with him unless he came clean shaven for our date. Bless him, he shaved.  On the spot!

It's not only the kiss that suffers. Full love making involves lingual caresses of other body areas. Does one really enjoy the sensation of a brillo pad between one's thighs? Or do we deny oral sex its place in the love making experience?

My feeling on returning recently to the UK and seeing these dreadful facial growths was that men were retreating from sex. Or was it that they felt so dominated by the confident females one sees striding around that they had to fight back and say, "It's ok to be male" and even more that, "A man has to convince you that he has the hormones to grow a bushy beard.

I've noticed the older male usually grows a beard. Grey, of course. Perhaps it's a statement that his sex life is finally over? But now the younger ones are wearing these feeble little fungi. Is this also a statement? Men must be Men! Awch! If they have no other way of proving their maleness: must they grow these often badly tufted outgrowths?

When Mark Antony accepted Cleopatra's invitation to dine aboard her barge on the river Cydnus, we are told (by Plutarch) that he shaved himself almost to the bone to impress her--and indeed to start his historic love affair with her. Are we to believe that Roman men who did not have the facilities available to present day men would have managed such a feat, using a very sharp knife?

My impression is that stubbled jaws and beards are a sign of disregard of and disrespect to women's sensibilities. Females have more sensitivity to touch and the notion of being scraped by a stubbled male face wherever it puts itself in her anatomy, is an insult to that notion of the love of women which should be at the heart of male approaches to sex. Or are women so desperate these days for a caveman experience after a belly full of beer and pizza (and I'm afraid that's what it amounts to for many) that they will accept anything? Face down, presumably?

Beards like the present ones were prevalent during Victorian times when women were corseted and closeted and had few political rights. Can it be that men by becoming bearded are striking back into the heart of female liberation by saying, beards show who's boss?

And then there's the 'Health and Safety' question, "When did you last shampoo your beard dear?"

The Vandals are at the Gate. What next?

Periodically I leave this sceptered isle for lands less prosaic. East Africa, America, France: I lived in them for years, left them, then came back to what I supposed to be home. Last time I returned it was not quite as desperate a venture as that of clinging to the underside of a lorry for the entire crossing. I financed my, nevertheless, refugee like return from Paris to the uk with a job for my Paris Production Services film facility: it contributed the bulk of what I nicknamed "The Colditz Tunnel Escape Fund."

That was because returning from France was more complicated than my escapes from Africa and America. Those latter flights to my London homes of those days were accompanied merely by personal baggage. When I moved to Paris however, I left no home in the uk and embarked for what I thought might be forever taking all my furniture, files and treasures. Most of those now rest in a friend's chateau in Burgundy but I had some pieces in Paris that I wanted to bring with me and all of this requires organisation, packing, shipping, and funding. After several months hard work I found shippers and a haven to which my stuff, including a 1912 Bechstein I inherited from my mother, could be carted.

I was a sort of refugee fleeing from the jelly bellied Francois Hollande and coming hard times in France after his election. The problem began when my landlady's husband died and she decided to sell my apartment where I had lived for 13 years. I had paid a total of some €150,000 to her in that time but I had no rights under the law to either buy the place as a sitting tenant or keep on renting it with a new owner. Moving had become a difficult option. I had been living in a privileged location, poised above the Place des Pyramides on the corner of the Louvre and Tuileries Gardens. The only blight to my southerly view was the wretched Tour Montparnasse. The other blights were related to my discomfort under the legal regime that favoured the landlady's over my own rights and which, due to demand, made it by now virtually impossible to find a substitute central Paris apartment. I did not think I could stand being a foreigner any longer.

I left a great love behind me, but it was a great relief to reach Angleterre. Alas, I found it greatly changed but still very civilized with sensible common laws for property rentals. Now I am watching with some horror, those others, less blessed than myself and without a British birthright, trying with intense desperation to come to the uk.

Recently, a photograph appeared in the Telegraph of a 22 year old Sudanese whose words "Britain is good" touched my heart. He was pictured sitting at the Toddington Service Station on the M1. I could not but chuckle. Never had such a banal place seemed so much like Paradise, it seemed. He had crossed to the UK clinging to the underside of a lorry. Now he hoped to study for a degree. I was moved. I cannot bear to think of him, after his brave enterprise, languishing in a prison cell.

I can also be moved by the plight of thousands who, whether political or economic refugees and with only the clothes they are wearing, are trying to enter the country by force, even with their children? Desperation to reach a country where welfare will help them and indeed where there are many lower level jobs: surely our compassion cannot refuse them? But, we can't let them blackmail us, can we? Legal immigration procedures must be enforced. We must have the immigrants we choose, not those forced upon us.

This is a terrible harvest reaped by the great success of the English language and by the equally great success of the British economy which can provide the jobs that are unavailable in the Social Chapter strapped EU.  And the freedom of movement allowed within the EU is also our great handicap. Italy, Hungary, France, just wave them through.

We are besieged and must man the battlements.

A Criminal Geo-Political Plot

Few recall that an American bank helped Greece to enter the single currency.

The idea of monetary union existed in the EU since its inception. The late 1990's saw preparations for all EU countries other than the UK and Denmark to adopt the currency. In 1999 the currency existed in virtual form. The Euro coins and notes actually entered circulation on January 1st 2002. Greece had joined the virtual currency on January 1st 2001 after several years of preparation with what are now known to be fudged statistics, to which evidently the EU's Eurostat turned a blind eye.

During the height of the Grexit crisis of July 2015, President Obama urged Angela Merkel to 'ease up' on her demands for a renewed Greek austerity programme. Was it his business? Most certainly. The US and its always fumbling geo-political strategy has been at the heart of the Euro's creation (as a competitive currency) and deeply, in the sense of 'deep politics' (political actions hidden from public scrutiny) a part of the European Union's attempt to become the United States of Europe.

What am I saying? The United States of America and the dictators of Brussels are at one in their goal to rule the world. Only, of course, in the endgame's outcome the US comes out on top.

The Euro had its inception in the Maastricht Treaty of 1991--1993. But that treaty also ruled no country could join the single currency without qualifying by having a budget deficit no more than 3% of GDP, nor could its government debt exceed 60% of GDP. Almost every EU country, France and Germany included were cheating on this percentage. But Greece, having worked the magic of statistical manipulations also received help from a US investment bank who's deal was the fount of 2015's disturbing debt drama, and before that, of Greece's fall into the pit of long term debt accumulation.

I quote from a Spiegel Online article of Feb 8th 2010.

"Greek Debt Crisis: How Goldman Sachs Helped Greece to Mask its True Debt

By Beat Balzli

"Goldman Sachs helped the Greek government to mask the true extent of its deficit with the help of a derivatives deal that legally circumvented the EU Maastricht deficit rules. At some point the so-called cross currency swaps will mature, and swell the country's already bloated deficit.

"The Greeks have never managed to stick to the 60 percent debt limit, and they only adhered to the three percent deficit ceiling with the help of blatant balance sheet cosmetics. One time, gigantic military expenditures were left out, and another time billions in hospital debt. After recalculating the figures, the experts at Eurostat consistently came up with the same results: In truth, the deficit each year has been far greater than the three percent limit. In 2009, it exploded to over 12 percent.

"Now, though, it looks like the Greek figure jugglers have been even more brazen than was previously thought. "Around 2002 in particular, various investment banks offered complex financial products with which governments could push part of their liabilities into the future," one insider recalled, adding that Mediterranean countries had snapped up such products.

"Greece's debt managers agreed a huge deal with the savvy bankers of US investment bank Goldman Sachs at the start of 2002. The deal involved so-called cross-currency swaps in which government debt issued in dollars and yen was swapped for euro debt for a certain period -- to be exchanged back into the original currencies at a later date.

"Such transactions are part of normal government refinancing. Europe's governments obtain funds from investors around the world by issuing bonds in yen, dollar or Swiss francs. But they need euros to pay their daily bills. Years later the bonds are repaid in the original foreign denominations.

But in the Greek case the US bankers devised a special kind of swap with fictional exchange rates. That enabled Greece to receive a far higher sum than the actual euro market value of 10 billion dollars or yen. In that way Goldman Sachs secretly arranged additional credit of up to $1 billion for the Greeks.

"This credit disguised as a swap didn't show up in the Greek debt statistics. Eurostat's reporting rules don't comprehensively record transactions involving financial derivatives. 'The Maastricht rules can be circumvented quite legally through swaps,' says a German derivatives dealer."

How does this fit the Criminal Geo Political Plot scenario as orchestrated from Washington DC?

1. Washington wants to control global politics.

2. Washington believes its real enemy is the China/Russia bloc.

3. Europe is a useful device or decoy for manipulation and control of the frontiers that are inaccessible to the US and to the resources that lie behind them. That is the Middle East, Central Asia, the Eastern Mediterranean, and Eastern Europe bordering the Russian Federation.

4. Current and continuing destabilisation in these regions, notably the Ukraine, Afghanistan, and now Greece, suggests interference by a global manipulator. Greece, of course falls under the control of the EU. And the EU is governed from Brussels aka from Berlin.

For the US plot to succeed, Greece has to remain in the Euro. After all, Greece geographically commands the Eastern Mediterranean. But it has signed over some usage of the port of Piraeus to China and the US can hardly have wanted the left wing Syrzia to start doing deals with Putin's Russia--even more danger if the Russians gained a warm water port within a EU and NATO territory.

The US has long been pushing for Turkey to become a EU member state. Why? Oil pipelines from the Caspian reach the Med via Turkish ports.

Now, the plot seems to falter. If Greece leaves the Euro might it not also leave the EU? Might historic tensions between Greece (still a NATO member) and neighbouring Turkey break out once more? Worse, could Russia find ways of buying itself into that Mediterranean port? Via gas swap deals for instance?

Solution, Greece must stay in the Euro and of course the EU. Thus diplomatic pressure from Washington plus public words from Obama, encouraged the Brussels/Berlin/Paris axis to try harder avoid the Grexit. When the project seemed lost and Grexit looked only hours away, even with a paper from the German Finance Minister--who in all logic has the right idea, to kick Greece out of the Euro but with a nice diplomatic compromise of re-entry in five years--brilliant but not what Washington wants, Obama tells Merkel to ease up the pressure for increased austerity. France, never likely to bow to US diplomacy has another reason for wanting to keep Greece alongside: socialist solidarity and the kudos that comes to Francois Hollande for being Merkel's poodle in keeping the Eurozone together. And also for keeping the wolves away from France's own currency credibility when the Front National looms as a powerful voice for the return to the Franc forte, and France's own economy and debt mountain threaten her economic stability.

Quite a stitch up don't you think?

And where does it lead us?

To the conclusion that independence from the Eurozone and the EU is a far, far better thing than being a victim (and a paying one too) of these alarming geo-political power games.

Britain, now is the time to GET OUT!

Nesta Wyn Ellis: from politics, journalism and biography to songs, stage and film.

She was the most famous author of the 1990's, splashed across front pages and plastered across inside pages too, and a favourite of TV shows for her revealing biography of John Major and a subsequent collection of mini biographies of "Britain's Top 100 Eligible Bachelors." These two books were all about Sex, Power and Politics and Sex, Power and Money. She denied being John Major's Mistress while Edwina Curry believed this was true

After a decade of inconvenient celebrity, of being stopped in the street for autographs and written about in a way she thought distorted her character, Nesta Wyn Ellis decided to live in Paris. She returned to the uk last year after 13 years. 

At once, she set about editing and organising the publication on Amazon Kindle of some of her novels. One, 'The Banker's Daughter' is a title well known to the public, already issued in hardback and paperback and still available from Internet bookshops world-wide

Some reviewers compared it, due to its tale of passion across a class divide, with DH Lawrence's famous love story, 'Lady Chatterly's Lover.' Currently, there are many who say this wonderfully plotted story of obsessive sexual passion set against a taughtly drawn background of Westminster politics, crime and City of London banking is far more tittilating than Fifty Shades of Grey.

Lioness Books is also publishing three novels Nesta wrote in Paris. One of these "Three Days in September," is the book version of the screen story she is now producing and will direct.

Set mainly in Paris, 'Three Days In September' tells how a singer who follows her elusive love there, is compelled to resolve shadowy issues from her past, when, in Paris, she meets a second love: the encounter moves the story forward into a confusing miasma of haunting visions.

Nesta's songs and theme music will bring a beautiful subtext to the story, enhancing the subtle shades of grey of the Parisian Autumn and Winter scenes and the deeply melancholic mood of this drama of divided love.

Locations have been found, some key actors identified and distribution and production finance are being coordinated.

Work on the musical score now dominates Nesta's agenda. Some songs that she has already performed at London and Paris concerts and the Edinburgh Festival in English and French have been recorded on earlier albums. Now, songs composed in Paris and London form the body of work that will be part of the film score and tracks for the latest album she is preparing.

Hard on the heels of this comes the actual production work and directing of scenes for 'Three Days In September' in London, Germany but mainly France (where Nesta, a fluent French speaker, has already worked on productions for internationally based companies with her 'Paris Production Services' facility).

A half hour interview in the Face to Face series from ITV Wales appears on October 23rd. A tour of Nesta's career from her political and journalistic days to her singing and film production developments will keep audiences engrossed with the life of this unusual and versatile talent. Meanwhile, she is completing work on a version of her life story that covers those most startling years from the late 1970's in Africa, America and London to her departure, shrouded in mystique, for another life and a story, yet to be revealed, in Paris.

Links to Four novels by Nesta Wyn Ellis published by Lioness Books on Amazon Kindle"

The Mistress

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00MZJBOBS?*Version*=1&*entries*=0

Three Days in September

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00NX4YK7O?*Version*=1&*entries*=0

The Banker’s Daughter

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00MZJBOGS?*Version*=1&*entries*=0

A Love Is Like A Day 

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00A5X2AAK?*Version*=1&*entries*=0

Iron in the Soul: David Cameron's destiny.

During my now celebrated interviews with John Major, I asked him, "When did the iron enter into your soul?" The answer is in the biography I wrote. But I now want to ask that question of David Cameron: and I'm going to second guess the answer. The rather flabby Mr Please All PM of recent years has suddenly developed grit and vim of the sort that only comes after the iron has entered into the soul. It happened while he agonised over the outcome of this Scots vote. Did it matter that much to the English? No, it was just an exercise somewhere else. Not quite a far away people of whom we know nothing, these purveyors of salmon and scotch, proprietors of North Sea oil, seemed to turn Cameron from polite yes man into a sudden superman.

If he hears Boris barking at his heels or senses worse to come at the in/out EU referendum, or thinks he's found a way of leaving Nigel Farage without a foot to stand on, and Ed Milliband with 40 fewer MP's he has now risen from his couch and is beginning to look like a leader rather than a follower of pubic opinion.

He'll bomb Asil and try to win a Tory coalition on English Rule and maybe he'll win the next General Election. I still doubt he'll remain as leader after that, unless he shows real determination to lead the country out of the EU. And he may still need to be pushed hard to do that. Meantime, I have been watching and waiting anxiously for this decent and chronically indecisive man who waits to see what people think before he leads them forward, to discover that leadership is more than managing the results of market research.

Has he found the way? I think so. I thought he found a way in 2010 when he came to an agreement with Nick Clegg after a ten day wrangle that ended in the Coalition. This was artistry of the possible at work, I thought, as I watched from my eerie above the Louvre and was pleased with them both.

Cameron is a negotiator and a diplomat but real leadership needs a rougher gift of uncompromising conviction in one's own rightness and the firm determination to win the day.

Seeing a nation poised on the edge of calamity with constitutional reform as the unavoidable agenda for the next few years, Cameron may have tempered steel out of that iron newly in the soul. At last the flab has become firm muscle. On your horse, boy! History may yet award you the prize. Not only Britain, but Europe, needs to be led out of a floundering mess of indecision, excess government and false notions of union. The poor economic performance of the EU and its member states is due to a system of government and economic management that is too cumbersome to function effectively. Sweeping reform is needed to simplify government to allow real growth through fresh enterprise; and where better to start than at home, from the ground up. Constitutional reform is the way to release the forces of economic dynamism that are now trapped among layers of bureaucracy. But the reforms must be good ones. There is no point in adding another layer of government to soak up more taxes and generate busybody laws.  The aim should be to reduce not increase government and to ensure its relevance to present day patterns of economic activity.

The common good is to be found in new political structures that reflect a true sense of participation in regional and national life, in the roots that choose their expression in a sense of identity with origins and traditions, no less the tradition of Parliamentary democracy. As George found his dragon, David may have found his Goliath, while Cameron is discovering his destiny.

So, what next, Dave Nick and Ed?

Is this the week the reality principle sets in for the EU? And for the political leaders who support the massive fiction that they can actually govern their countries without being told what to do by the Brussels Commissioners and the Committees that dream up newer and better ways of diminishing personal liberty?

Yes. This is the week that will go down in history as the undoing of the European master plan for a toxic super state to end all others.

In an earlier post on my Paris blog site (http://nesta-wyninparis.blogspot.com) headlined " A Walk in the Woods" I described how I got lost in the Forest of Rambouillet and found the house, now a museum, of Jean Monet, founding father of the European Union. As I reported then, I was moved by the sentiments expressed by Monet, De Gaulle and Winston Churchill in the letters they wrote to each other in those days before World War 2. The idealism, the belief in a European Union that transcended nationalism, the hope that this union would end war in Europe.

My belief in the European dream, which also inspired me to stand in the first European Parliamentary elections, had however dwindled to a mere 'If only." Now, I've hardened my determination that the uk should leave the EU, as its own interests are seriously threatened.

If the only means of doing this is to vote for a politician who is listening to the pulse of opinion, then we do it regardless of the rest of the package.

I fear that the Cleggs, Camerons and Millibands of this world think they know better what the demos wants. But now, a voice has been heard --which however dodgily connected to far right sentiments-- does actually show that its owner has been listening to what all us ordinary folks are saying.

Let's not try to educate the voters at this point. Let's just listen to their heartbeats.

As I came out of Tesco last night carrying my bottle of Cava, I paused to chat to a guy who works there.

He was preparing to risk the rain on his bike, as was I. After our comments about cycling in tropical downpours we turned to the EU elections. I had missed the close of poll on my return from Paris but he had passed his polling station on his return from Ibitha and cast his vote. We discussed UKIP. I said I dont mind foreigners, I just dont like Brussels telling us what to do. He said he had been to eight countries already this year so foreigners were not a problem. What he disliked, he said was not being listened to.

So it's the arrogance of the Dave, Nick, Ed types that, frankly, get's us onto Nigel's ticket.

Will these ear-plug wearing party leaders respond? They must now know the options. The number one item on the Agenda is getting the uk out of an expensive catastrophe which, alas, is will get worse.

Too swift enlargement of the EU is one mistake, but the common currency is the major reason for the EU's failure. I warned John Major about the disaster of being part of the ERM in 1992. He stepped back after Black Wednesday. But I suspect his belief in the common currency had not faltered. Cameron, then Special Advisor to Chancellor Norman Lamont, quickly found another job when Major fired Lamont in May 1993 for saying he sang in his bath after the UK left the ERM.

So, to get back to my question, what next, Dave, Nick and Ed?

Clearly, if you read the rhetoric from the other side of the channel, whatever they say as palliatives about border control and immigration, the juggernaut of political and fiscal union is still rolling. Regardless of the impossibility of harmonizing disparate economies, the conventional party leaders still want one United States of Europe. And it's this obsession with competition with the US that is driving Europe to disaster. Thanks to the failure to understand the nature of the Federal Union as opposed to nations with thousands of years of cultural individuality, this is doomed. Thanks to the Euro, the failure of EU economies is keeping the world in recession.

So, will Dave, Nick and Ed get the message? Or will they persist in their support for central, undemocratic control of all European nations. More Governance, better Governance, said my French EU loving lover. In other words more and more central control of banking, finance and law.

Grab the lifebelts say I. The Titanic is going down.

When "the Toffs" went "Rotten"

My new blog http://nestawynellisinlondon.blogspot.com does not replace my Paris blog http://nesta-wyninparis.blogspot.com Rather it adds the dimension of my life in the uk after 13 years in Paris. I will be commenting on lifestyles, politics, personalities, arts, love and new trends as well as giving my views of how London and the uk have changed during my absence.

Here, I am posting a review of a book by a British author who is well worth reading.

The Whitehall Mandarin by Edward Wilson

published by Arcadia Books Ltd on May 15^th 2014

Those were the days when ladies wore gloves. Arcadia Books’ cover for Edward Wilson’s, “The Whitehall Mandarin” shows an elegant, gloved woman walking into a Whitehall Office. The days were also those when public and private standards were collapsing and when, as Wilson’s protagonist Catesby remarks to his devious boss Henry Bone, “The toffs have gone rotten".

Much of Wilson’s gripping story centres on Vietnam where he served with US Forces prior to renouncing his citizenship. It also focuses on the UK Ministry of Defence where leading players are pawns in a complex game of lies and betrayals woven around the Mandarin’s enigmatic figure.

The early 1960’s were also the focus of Wilson’s 2013 novel, “The Midnight Swimmer” which plays on secret events behind the Cuba Crisis of 1962. As the plot of The Whitehall Mandarin unfolds we revisit Cliveden, scene of erotic parties, where a nubile young stripper from Murray’s Cabaret Club, Christine Keeler, played a key role in the demise of Defense Minister John Profumo and the fall of Macmillan’s government.

Cliveden in the early 1960’s is an alluring point of attachment for the English dimension of this singularly shocking tale, shocking because of the revelations its author makes about the inner corruption of crumbling political institutions. The elite running that world were, it seems weakened by amorality. The story opens us to an understanding of how the ruling class of Britain of the time became corrupted. There are mentions of Kim Philby and Guy Burgess by the fictional characters. In life as in fiction, privileged people who should have been more grateful to their country were working to undermine its fabric. Sexuality and secrecy about sexuality except between members of a special coterie, was one of the subtle raisons d’etre for this undermining of the Establishment. Homosexuality, in those days a criminal offence, had to be a secret and its practice led to other secrets and to vengefulness against the established moral order. A sexually deviant motif lies at the heart of Edward Wilson’s story where it plays its subtle undercurrent of sinister sounds under the melody of the main plot to its denouement.

The suspicious sudden death of Hugh Gaitskell and his replacement as Labour leader by Harold Wilson, plus the latter’s role as a suspected Soviet front man comes under scrutiny. While the suspicion about Harold Wilson, the suspected fellow traveler, is dismissed perhaps for legal reasons, that dismissal fails to convince the reader that Soviet collaboration among those high in politics and in espionage, was not a part of the rot affecting the British Establishment. The left and the right wings of the British ruling class seem to have been equally corrupted, to have suffered a failure of belief in the system that gave them their privileged lives. During the evolution of this story, we find ourselves doubting the trustworthiness of senior MI6 operators, civil servants and politicians. We become aware of the venal international manipulations that laid the foundations for the Vietnam War. A scene with an unnamed President (clearly Johnson) at the White House cues the reader about the close involvement between British and American leaders and secret services over the reasons for and pursuit of the Vietnam War.

This story is a natural sequel to “The Midnight Swimmer” which leads us along the mad precipice when the Kennedy Brothers in their embroilment with Castro and the Cuban Mafia almost brought civilization to its end.

This is a work of fiction with well-drawn characters and a deftly constructed plot but it reads at times like a documentary. Wilson, an academic, has researched his subject deeply but imparts much private experience and knowledge throughout his story telling. He is clearly writing about what he knows and there are only rare moments when a flight of imagination intrudes into this narrative that otherwise convinces one of the authenticity of the author’s material, his characters and his storytelling. When one reads Edward Wilson one feels sure one is only one step away from the truth of what really happened in that place and time. The result is a chilling conviction that history as it happened is not what we have been told.