I have to say I entirely agree with this post from Tim at Bringing up Charlie. WTF do all the broadcasters have to send extra reports out to “disaster zones”? They’ve done it with Japan; I dread to count how many extra reporters BBC TV alone has sent out to Japan to use their precious fuel and get in the way. They did it a couple of weeks earlier with Libya. And a couple of weeks before that with Egypt, where at one point I counted at least 8 extra reporters. If you don’t trust the staff you already have there to cover whatever happens, why are they there in the first place? Come on guys, wake up! This is totally unnecessary consumerism.
Category Archives: current affairs
Public Holidays
Diamond Geezer posted an interesting analysis yesterday about the UK’s public holidays. In it he shows why we will never get St George’s Day adopted as a public holiday. Basically this is because it concentrates too many public holidays in the period from late March to late May, especially given that Easter most usually falls in April and this we would get Easter, St George’s Day and May Day holidays all within a period of 3-4 weeks. Well yes, that’s just like this year when Easter is exceptionally late (it can fall anywhere between 22 March and 25 April) when we also have the extra bank holiday for the royal wedding knees-up.
Diamond Geezer also makes the point that we’re essentially stuck with this scheme as we can’t move Easter because it’s fixed by the church. Err … why not? We moved the late May holiday away from Whitsun which is also fixed by the church. And we don’t actually celebrate May Day but pick the first Monday in May. So why can we not move (or ignore) Easter?
I suggest an alternative scheme for our public holidays, viz:
- New Years Day (1 January)
- Spring Equinox (21 March)
- St George’s Day (23 April)
- May Day (1 May)
- Summer Solstice (21 June)
- August Holiday (last Monday in August)
- Autumn Equinox (21 September)
- Christmas Day (25 December)
- Boxing Day (26 December)
Note that I propose we keep the actual days and not the nearest Monday, although obviously where any of these falls on a weekend they would be moved to the next available working day. Note too that I have not stooped to include red letter days from ethnic minority traditions.
In the provinces of the UK St George’s Day could be replaced by their “national day”: St David in Wales (1 March), St Andrew in Scotland (30 November), St Patrick in Northern Ireland (17 March).
This has, to my mind, several advantages. It spreads out our holidays a bit better. We get one extra day bringing us more into line with western Europe and other English speaking countries where the average is more like 10 or 12 public holidays annually. It also takes the calendar away from the religious focus and returns it to the actual solar cycle without making it too overtly pagan.
It also presents some other options:
- We could keep Good Friday, if desired which would generally slot in between the Spring Equinox and St George’s Day. I see no logic, sacred or secular, for retaining Easter Monday, although this could be retained in preference to Good Friday.
- If desired the late August holiday might move back to the first Monday in August (as it still is in Scotland) from where it was moved in 1965, thus better harmonising the UK’s public holidays.
- To be logical Christmas should relocate to the Winter Solstice (21 December). However given how entrenched Christmas now is in the collective psyche I can see this not being acceptable. Maybe we should scrap Boxing Day and move that to the Winter Solstice? No, that’s a really bad idea because it will give us three separate holidays within 2 weeks (Solstice, Christmas Day and New Years Day) thus we risk everything shutting down completely for two weeks rather than the current week. So Christmas has to be retained as is, which also helps the balance of holidays between sacred and secular.
I still see one problem with this scheme though. There is still a long (3 month) gap between the autumn Equinox and Christmas, at a time when we arguable need a break. Trafalgar Day (21 October) has been mooted as a possible public holiday. I personally don’t like this as I feel we ought to stay clear of celebrating the military and I’d rule out Armistice Day (11 November) for the same reason (see also my dislike of Remembrance Day). Equally Guy Fawkes Day risks being interpreted as celebrating terrorism rather that its defeat. Halloween I would also rule out as it would inevitably perpetuate that annoying American import: trick or treat. Perhaps we ought to celebrate Harvest Festival (which need not, of course, be religious but remind us where our food comes from) in mid- to late-October?
Anyone got any better ideas?
And the Managers are Still in Charge of the Loony Bin …
This is a long quote and deserves a post all of it’s own.
Sir Hartley Shawcross, after the Labour victory [1945], had announced: ‘We are the masters at the moment.’ But who were the ‘we’ in this sentence?
The most eloquent answer to this question in art is found in Anthony Powell’s comic masterpiece A Dance to the Music of Time, the first volume of which, A Question of Upbringing, was published in 1951. The story begins in the year 1911 at an unnamed boarding school, obviously Eton, as the hero, Nick Jenkins, ambles idly through the winter mist to have tea with his chums. As he makes his way back to the house he passes a very different sort of boy – it is Widmerpool, who forces himself to have a run each afternoon. Widmerpool appears to be no more than a figure of fun in the school section of the book, but even in this early glimpse of him, the narrator and his readers become aware that he is a figure who lives by the will, in some mysterious sense more in tune with his times than the languid, bohemian Nick, who wishes to live by the imagination.
Powell was a close friend of Malcolm Muggeridge at this date, and the two men would often walk round Regent’s Park together discussing the fundamental clash on which the emergent novel was to feed, namely the war between the will and the imagination. Power mania had been an obsession of Muggeridge’s since his Marxist days: what draws men and women to power, how they become addicted to it, how it takes over from other appetites. One of Muggeridge’s beliefs was that power addicts were often dyspeptic, and he rather cruelly attributed Stafford Cripps’s dyspepsia to power addiction. When Widmerpool grows up, he too is a dyspeptic. There is a memorably funny Sunday lunch when Widmerpool gives the narrator a meal in his club, washing down cold tongue with a glass of water. By the time the narrative has reached the postwar period, it is no surprise to find that Widmerpool, a fellow-traveller with the Communists, who has rather dubious associations in Eastern Europe, is an MP in the Labour interest. He has achieved what he wanted from the very beginning, on that run through the winter mists in the Thames Valley: the free exercise of power. Widmerpool is a manager, a wheeler-dealer. He judges people by how they have got on; he has no sense of England’s past, no feeling for people (at quite a late stage of the sequence, he forgets the narrator’s Christian name). Much of Powell’s somewhat peppery Toryism goes into the creation, no doubt, but the novel contains a really acute perception of what had happened to England during the war. It had not been taken over by Bolsheviks or by the working class. Widmerpool is an efficient, ruthless staff officer, a paper pusher. He could easily have said, after the 1945 election: ‘We are the masters.’ He would have meant that the managerial class, previously all but non-existent, had taken over. The growth of bureaucracy in Britain in the postwar years, the filling up of political, Civil Service and professional posts with colourless, pushing people controlling others for the sake of control, was to be a feature of life from then onwards. Widmerpool was a man of his time, and a man of the future.
[AN Wilson, After the Victorians]
Well, no change there then!
As so often in his two books, The Victorians and After the Victorians, AN Wilson gets his rapier right to the heart of the matter. Although both books are chunky paperbacks (both weigh in at some 500 pages) they are well worth reading – and eminently readable. AN Wilson gives a rather more perceptive, and admittedly slightly jaundiced, view of the history of Britain between the 1830s and 1950s than one finds in the standard texts. He delves under the political and economic covers, especially around the underlying reasons for both world wars and (at least for me) puts a completely new spin on modern British history.
So They Think It's All Over, Do They?
As readers will know I rarely comment on politics and international affairs, but I have to be honest and say that the situation in Egypt (and indeed in Tunisia) is worrying.
The Egyptian people (the demonstrators anyway) seem to think that having got rid of Hosni Mubarak it’s all downhill.
Well maybe not. As I read it, all they have done is manage to force Mubarak into an orchestrated military coup. Mubarak bought himself enough time to get his money to a safe haven and is now in the process of following it having handed power to the military. Let’s not forget that the military senior officers are almost certainly all Mubarak’s men; as such they have little interest in change even if their junior officers and men don’t share their views.
What would you read into these headlines from BBC News today?
Egypt army tries to clear square. There is a stand-off in Cairo’s Tahrir Square as protesters who have camped there for 20 days thwart army efforts to clear the area.
Egypt’s army dissolves parliament. Egypt’s military authorities say they are dissolving the country’s parliament and suspending the constitution, two days after taking power.
Superficially this looks to me like the actions of the average military dictatorship:
We do not want any protesters to sit in the square.
Hundreds of policeman – who had become hugely unpopular for their violent attempts to suppress the uprising – had entered the square.
Military statement said the current government and regional governors would “act as caretakers”.
The higher military council said it would stay in power six months, or until elections … saying it would suspend the constitution and set up a committee to draft a new one.
Main priority was to restore the country’s security … if instability continued there could be “obstacles”.
It is all the right noises, but they are the noises all newly installed military rulers make: “We’ll stay in power until we can arrange elections”. And so often those elections never come.
It all sounds to me like the beginning of a repressive military dictatorship. For everyone’s sake I just desperately hope I’m wrong, and that this …
… doesn’t turn into this …
Pubic Hair Removal – Why?
An interesting article in the Guardian on Friday (11 Feb) by Bidisha in which she asks why women are these days removing their pubic hair. Her contention is that it’s a fashion (almost certainly) and that it is generally a bad idea, psychologically, for both men and women. I’m not sure I entirely agree with this, but it’s an interesting argument:
Are women so ashamed of their bodies’ natural beauty, so unaccepting of things as they are that they will do anything at all, even if it’s degrading, to get some willy time? A man who withholds his attention and affection according to the follicle count of a lady’s crotch doesn’t deserve intimacy with a real-life woman. A man who likes a woman without pubic hair despises adult women so much that he wants us to resemble children […]
I worry about these men too […] They are now in danger of returning to a Victorian naivety. They may well believe that […] women naturally do not have any body hair. Upon seeing some real hair on a real woman for the first time they may well vomit or faint, or both […]
As for the women, don’t you have anything more interesting to do than dutifully coif your cassoulet?
You can find the full article here.
Love in a Dish
Yesterday’s Times reprinted an interesting essay written by one Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher under the title Love in a Dish. As the introductory blurb says: “Couples who delight in food will delight each other: it is as true now as it was when food writer MFK Fisher wrote this essay on cookery and intimacy in 1948”. Although the article is now deeply un-PC (and American) the essential sentiment is indeed still relevant today.
As the article is hidden behind a paywall (so I can’t link to it) here are a few key extracts.
Brillat-Savarin,who amused himself in his old age by writing The Physiology of Taste […] concerned himself mightily with the problem of married bliss. He wrote many paragraphs and pages on the importance of gastronomy in love, and told […] that happiness at table leads to happiness in bed.
A mutual enjoyment of the pleasures of the table […] has an enormous influence on the felicity that can and should be found in marriage. A couple […] who can share this enjoyment “have, at least once every day, a delightful reason for being together […] have an unfailing subject of conversation; they can talk not only of what they are eating, but also of what they have eaten before and will eat later, and of what they have noticed in other dining rooms, of fashionable new recipes and dishes, etc. […]
Brillat-Savarin felt […] that a man and woman who share any such basic need as the one for food will be eager to please and amuse each other in the satisfying of that need, and will do what they can to make the basically animal process enjoyable. “And the way in which mealtimes are passed […] is most important to what happiness we find in life.”
[…]
It seems incredible that normal human beings not only tolerate the average American restaurant food, but actually prefer it to eating at home. The only possible explanation for such deliberate mass-poisoning, a kind of suicide of the spirit as well as the body, is that meals in the intimacy of a family dining-room or kitchen are unbearable.
[…]
At home, fatigue and boredom would sour the words they spoke and the food they ate, and the words would be hateful and the food would be dull as ditchwater and drearily served forth. […]
And having failed so completely to satisfy in harmony one of their three basic needs, it cannot be wondered that the other two, for love and shelter, are increasingly unfulfilled. There can be no warm, rich home-life anywhere else if it does not exist at table, and in the same way there can be no enduring family happiness, no real marriage, if a man and woman cannot open themselves generously and without suspicion one to the other over a shared bowl of soup as well as a shared caress.
[…]
A healthy interest in the pleasures of the table, the gastronomical art, can bring much happiness. […]
In Richardson Wright’s Bed-Book of Eating and Drinking, he wrote in a discussion of the delights of supping in the kitchen, that more meals served on oilcloth by the stove might be one way to “stabilise our American marital status. I hold to the lowly belief,” he went on, “that a man never knows the sureness of being happily married until he has… cooked a meal himself”.
[…]
“The first sign of marital trouble is when a man or woman finds it distasteful to face each other at table. … I am convinced that a man and wife with congenial appetites and a knowledge of foods and cooking have the basis for lasting happiness.”
[…]
Even steak and potatoes, when they have been prepared with a shared interest and humour and intelligence, can be one great pleasure which leads to another, and perhaps — who knows — an even greater one.
In fact I would be tempted to go a step further and suggest that anyone who cannot enjoy food cannot truly enjoy life.
MFK Fisher’s Love in a Dish and Other Pieces is due for publication by Penguin in April 2011; it can be pre-ordered from Amazon.
World Shattering
Today is the 25th anniversary of the Challenger Disaster, when the space shuttle broke up just 73 seconds after launch killing all seven astronauts aboard.
Whether one agrees with manned space missions or not (and I have to say I’m divided on the matter) we should be mindful of the huge challenges which have been overcome to achieve this and admiring of those who have been a part of it. The spin-offs from space exploration have been tremendous and include such everyday things as smoke detectors, crash helmet design, digital imaging, ultra-sound scanning, satellite communications and whole swathes of computer and medical technology.
Thinking about the Challenger Disaster got me thinking further about the sheer number of world-changing events which have happened during my three-score years. Well let’s just restrict it to ones I remember (which rules out the Suez Crisis as it’s too hazy a memory). In no particular order …
- Challenger Disaster, 28 January 1986.
- 9/11, 11 September 2001; al-Qaeda flew two planes into the World Trade Centre in New York.
- Fall of Berlin Wall, 9 November 1989.
- Assassination of John F Kennedy, 22 November 1963.
- First Man on the Moon, 21 July 1969.
- Sputnik, 4 October 1957. I think this is the first world event I really remember at all clearly. I recall my father taking me into the garden one night to see Sputnik 1, or one of it’s very early successors, as a tiny star passing quickly overhead.
- Chernobyl Disaster, 26 April 1986.
- Fall of Communist Russia, 1 July 1991. This was just one of a whole series of revolutions, including the fall of the Berlin Wall, which saw the dismantling of the Communist Bloc in the late ’80s and early ’90s; in many ways it is hard to tease them all apart.
- Cuban Missile Crisis, October 1962. I don’t think I fully understood this but I remember how frightening it was.
- Rhodesian UDI, 11 November 1965. This was probably the first world event I recall following properly and trying to understand. I think history will tell us that in realigning the politics of southern Africa UDI was seminal in the breakdown of apartheid.
These are just the events which spring immediately to mind; I’m sure there are many more. But looking at that list makes me wonder at the interesting times I’ve lived through even before one takes UK domestic events into account. Leaving aside world wars and invasions (I’m thinking WWI, WWII, 1066, Civil War) few generations can have lived through such interesting and momentous times.
What about you? What events do you remember?
Class
Does class still matter in Britain today?
BBC Lab UK works with leading scientists to create real, ground-breaking scientific experiments. One of their current experiments is to find out if class still matters in modern Britain. And if so, what does the real class system look like?
You can contribute and find out how YOU wield power and influence by taking the BBC’s Britain’s Real Class System test.
At the end you’ll find out something about you and your place in British society today – and have the satisfaction of knowing you’ve contributed to research.
4/52 Katyn Memorial
Week 4 of the 52 week challenge of a photo a week.
This is the memorial in Gunnersbury Cemetery, west London to the thousands of Poles murdered by the Russians at Katyn in 1940. I’ve inset the inscriptions as otherwise they are unreadable. Click on the picture to get a larger version.
The cemetery itself is rather interesting, if not a little OTT with competing acreages of black, white and brown polished marble. It is owned by the London Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, although it is actually in the LB of Ealing. Consequently it is the final resting place of many from the Polish and Armenian emigré communities. Many of the Armenian graves are written in Armenian script; and not all have a simultaneous translation. You will also find members of the Chinese community, at least one member of the French nobility and the expected English including architect Aston Webb. There is also a grave commemoration a number of members of the 24th Polish Lancers and a small group of twenty WWII war graves.
It is immaculately maintained and well worth a visit, even on a cold January day; it’ll look really pretty in the Spring when all the cherry blossom is out.
Quote of the Week
This week’s usual rag-bag of oddities which have crossed my path in the last 7 days or so …
*****
If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you first must invent the Universe.
[Carl Sagan]
*****
I like your Christ. I don’t like your Christians. They are so unlike your Christ.
[Mohandas Gandhi]
*****
Journalists write to support democracy, sustain truth, salute justice, justify expenses, see the world and make a living, but to satisfactorily do any of these things you have to have readers. Fairness and accuracy are of course profoundly important. Without them, you aren’t in journalism proper: you are playing some other game. But above all, you have to be read, or you aren’t in journalism at all.
[Tim Radford at Guardian Science Blog]
*****
Trivial is a favourite insult administered by scholars. But even they became interested in their subject in the first place because they were attracted by something gleaming, flashy and – yes, trivial.
[Tim Radford at Guardian Science Blog]
*****
The Guardian used to have a special Muzzled Piranha Award, a kind of Oscar of incompetence, handed to an industrial relations reporter who warned the world that the Trades Union Congress wildcats were lurking in the undergrowth, ready to dart out like piranhas, unless they were muzzled. George Orwell reports on the case of an MP who claimed that the jackbooted fascist octopus had sung its swansong.
[Tim Radford at Guardian Science Blog]
*****
3 July 1679. Sending a piece of Venison to Mr. Pepys Sec: of the Admiralty, still a Prisoner, I went & dined with him.
[Guy de la Bédoyère; The Diary of John Evelyn]
*****
26 May 1703. This dyed Mr. Sam: Pepys, a very worthy, Industrious & curious person, none in England exceeding him in the Knowledge of the Navy, in which he had passed thro all the most Considerable Offices, Clerk of the Acts, & Secretary to the Admiralty, all which he performed with greate Integrity: when K: James the 2d went out of England he layed down his Office, & would serve no more: But withdrawing himselfe from all publique Affairs, lived at Clapham with his partner (formerly his Cleark) Mr. Hewer, in a very noble House & sweete place, where he injoyned the fruit of his labours in geate prosperity, was universaly beloved, Hospitable, Generous, Learned in many things, skill ‘d in Musick, a very greate Cherisher of Learned men, of whom he had the Conversation. His Library & other Collections of Curiositys was one of the most Considerable; The models of Ships especialy &c. […] Mr. Pepys had ben for neere 40 years, so my particular Friend, that he now sent me Compleat Mourning: desiring me to be one to hold up the Pall, at his magnificent Obsequies; but my present Indisposition, hindred me from doing him this last Office:…
[Guy de la Bédoyère; The Diary of John Evelyn]
*****
For more than forty Cold-War years the United Kingdom played the role, in the words of the eminent investigative journalist Duncan Campbell, of America’s Unsinkable Aircraft Carrier.
[Nick Catford; Cold War Bunkers]
*****
Spring Quarry near Corsham in Wiltshire became the Central Government War Headquarters – the alternate seat of government to which the Great and the Good would decamp in the event of a nuclear war. The very existence of the site was denied by the Government for decades. When its secrets were finally revealed in December 2005 it proved to be a grave disappointment. Starved of cash by successive administrations, its development had been halting and, despite its enormous size, the Spring Quarry site is bathed in a gloomy aura of half-hearted compromise.
[Nick Catford; Cold War Bunkers]
*****
Apropos this last quote, when you start reading about the UK’s WWII bunkers and the like (of which Corsham is a prime example) you seriously wonder how the country achieved anything, let along managed to win the war. But then reading Sam Pepys’s diaries and letters things were much the same in the 17th century – ministerial obfuscation at every turn and a serious lack of funding. Oh, what do you mean? It isn’t any better now? Surely not!