Morris Cargill

IT'S AMAZING what you come across when you start browsing through the foreign press. For example, I see that in the USA they have started again to argue about the question as to the true author of the works of Shakespeare. Many years ago the argument raged in England and it was held that the true author was Francis Bacon although this view very shortly ceased to carry any weight with scholars.

The candidate in the USA now appears to be Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford. Poor old Shakespeare! Lots of people seem not to want to give him credit.

Bathing

I also came across another piece that only half the people of France take a bath every day. The writer not only concluded that the French didn't smell very nice, but also alleged that the next dirtiest people were the English aristocracy.

In my view the cleanest people in the world are Jamaicans. When I was a very small child, accompanied to England by my Jamaican nanny, she used to express stern disapproval of the English on the grounds, so she claimed, that they only bathed once a week. She had a point there, for every hotel we stayed at in England in those days only had one bathroom for each floor. A room with a bath was simply unknown.

In consequence, there was always a queue for the bathroom. My Jamaican nanny would station herself every morning outside the bathroom on our floor. The moment it became free I would immediately be dragged in and scrubbed from head to foot. She did this every morning.

Even up to the last War it was understood that Friday night was bath night. Not many English bathed more than once a week. In fairness it should be said that the cooler climate of Europe helps people not to become sweaty.

All the same, my parents and my nanny, being Jamaicans, had baths at least once a day and they were all convinced that the English were rather unbathed people.

Who is a columnist?

I got a letter a few days ago from a correspondent wishing to be nameless who took me to task for being rather unkind in my column last Sunday to The Gleaner's new boy Daniel Thwaites. Those of us in the media have to get used to a bit of rough and tumble every now and again.

But to make amends to Daniel, I would like to commend him on his excellent article that he wrote in the Gleaner of March 12. It was headed "Getting away with murder". It was on the subject of President Clinton's bashing about in Sudan, Afghanistan and Iraq. Daniel started it beautifully with the observations that activities in those countries showed that Clinton has had the singularly most expensive sex-life of any man in the 1990s. The article that followed was splendid.

I have only two very small criticisms. One is at times it was overdrawn and the other is that it was too long. Even this excellent piece could have been improved by cutting it by a third. This brings me again to the subject of the writing of a column and I fear that on this one occasion I'm going to break my own rule about never being preachy.

A feature article and a column are two quite different things. Daniel's piece was an exceedingly good feature article. On the other hand, the people who read columns are those who usually do so while they are grabbing a cup of coffee before going out to work or who read their columns in the evening while having a drink before dinner prior to facing what I consider the horrors of television later on. While the people who read columns can be highly intelligent, the facts of life often dictate that they have short attention spans. The comparatively few people who read feature articles are those with greater leisure to do so.

Half a century of being a columnist and also of making a lot of mistakes have taught me that a columnist should mix things up a bit and should be brief. It is very easy to write at length. It is much more difficult and exacting to compress.

When Delroy Chuck first began to write for the Gleaner he suffered greatly from writers' diarrhoea, which was a pity because he's always written good sense. However, I notice recently that he has been compressing.

So, if I may be pardoned for it, I would like to tell Daniel that he should compress too and not run on too long.

I now promise never again to be so damn preachy.

Money laundering

I see that our legislators are still messing about with their Money Laundering Act. They'll soon have every bank teller in jail for handling suspicious transactions. I wish they'd just tear up the whole bloody act. As things are in Jamaica today the only decent amount of foreign capital we'll ever get is from those who want to dispose safely of drug money. After all, a lot of that money has been made from trading in Jamaican ganja and I think we are entitled to it. Virtue and nice thoughts are all very well, but it is the money that matters.

Morris Cargill is the Gleaner's senior columnist who has been writing for more than 45 years.