The DREAMY GAME
Four days in London can have quite an effect on you. I hadn’t been home twelve hours before I knew that I’d picked up a bug. This nearly always happens now when I go to town. There came a point when the return visits to the city where I lived for nigh on 40 years became far enough spaced out that I lost my immunity to it. I’m sure that the source of this vulnerability is public transport, particularly the underground. So many germs get trapped down there in the carriages where they multiply and seek new victims. Residents are immune; visitors are not.
My generation was taught to “put your hand in front when you cough”. There was even a lyric, sung to the tune of Deutschland über Alles: “Coughs and sneezes/Spread diseases;/Catch them in your hand-ker-chief”. Nobody bothers now. A man passed me in the street, respectable enough in suit and tie and carrying a briefcase, and just before he drew level he sent an explosive, unstifled cough into the air all around both of us. Maybe he was the one who infected me.
I rose into semi-consciousness while it was still dark this morning. My throat was fiercely sore but I wasn’t awake enough to do anything about it. I had a half-awake dream about Sol Campbell. This is pretty odd. I know three things about Mr Campbell: he is a footballer though I couldn’t guess for which club he plays; he is of Afro-Caribbean appearance though, had I walked into my London hostess’s living room and he had been sitting on the sofa, I would not have known who he was; there have been persistent rumours, strongly denied, concerning his sexual orientation. Probably this third element prompted the dream.
Why did I dream of a footballer? I mock my football-following friends of whom there are rather few though the friend with whom I stayed is certainly the most devoted: she and her daughter support Fulham (evidence of true devotion, I believe). So I guess football was more in my head than usual. But I do take more of an academic interest in the game than I usually pretend. I never actually watch it on television and the last time I went to a match was at Upton Park at the end of the 1960s when – I guess, though I don’t really remember – West Ham would have been playing host to Manchester United, among whose most enthusiastic fans was a fellow member of the student group with whom I was then sharing a flat. At that time I developed a temporary interest in football managers and their psychology, so I know who the likes of Bill Shankly, Joe Mercer, Malcolm Allison and Brian Clough were. Shankly, a fascinating character and a legendary manager of Liverpool when it was the dominant team in England, famously declared in his deep Scottish brogue that “football isn’t a matter of life and death – it’s more important than that”. Of course it wasn’t meant as a joke.
Apart from unavoidably seeing snatches of matches on television news (BBC News is little less than obsessed with English football), I often watch Final Score on BBC1 on a Saturday afternoon, largely to catch the results for the teams that are based in the part of the world where I grew up, namely Northampton Town, Kettering and Rushden & Diamonds, the latter persistently mispronounced by presenter Ray Stubbs and results reader Tim Gudgeon: it’s Ruzhden, not Rushton. I have no feeling for the teams that represent the area where we now live. On Sunday, I look at the sports pages to see the tables and upcoming fixtures for the Northants teams and take a mild interest in other clubs for arbitrary resonances or ancient associations: Liverpool, West Ham, Stoke City, Ipswich, Reading, Southampton, Nottingham Forest, Accrington Stanley. Though I lived for more than twenty years in the catchment area of Arsenal, I never had any curiosity about that particular club which anyway now lives further off; after all, its origins lie on the far side of the Thames.
On Friday, I went to a pub on the Great West Road to see a man about a debt. I got there on the stroke of noon and found the pub closed. Two men were outside at one of the pub tables, one seated, the other standing. I asked the seated one if he knew when the pub opened. “It should open at twelve” he said. “Oh,” said I, “any minute now, then”. “I certainly hope so” said the man who was standing. I looked at him for the first time. It was John Motson. I betrayed no flicker of reaction. I know enough people in the public eye to understand that having a quiet drink is an important oasis.
Then the pub opened and I followed them in. ‘Motty’, as I understand the BBC’s chief football commentator is known, ordered a cider shandy, a suitably abstemious beverage. My debtor was late. I looked over at the pair I’d earlier addressed, the only other people in the bar. Their conversation was just a burble within which “BBC” was occasionally discernible. I decided that, after all, I did want to approach Mr Motson. I would wait until his colleague went to the bar, then nip across and say: “Excuse me for being presumptuous. I know nothing of football, but your fame and the great affection in which you are held extends far beyond the realms of football and I do hope you know that”. That would be all, it wouldn’t be an opening gambit. He could hardly be other than gratified. And I meant it. I avoid the word “icon” like the plague but if it must be used in its contemporary meaning it could hardly apply more properly to anyone else. However, the pair had the one drink and left. It was perhaps just as well because, on both occasions that I retailed this anecdote, I found myself unaccountably filling up. Why?
Does football run deeper than I know in the national – indeed global – consciousness? I hope not. From my detached perspective – though it is clearly far less detached than I imagine – football represents much of what I deplore: blokes, grotesque overpayment, naked marketing and exploitation, gratuitous competitiveness, continuously unsporting behaviour, the elevation of something wholly trivial into something that grown-ups imagine is more “important” than their own lives (and deaths), a culture that is violent, drunken, exclusive, self-important, grasping, frequently racist and xenophobic, always misogynistic and homophobic. What can football possibly mean to me?
Well, something clearly. Not enough to make me want the World Cup to come to Britain, any more than I welcome the 2012 Olympics which, as I predicted long before London “won” the struggle to stage it, will cost us dear – primarily financially but in other ways too – for decades to come. Certainly, I hope not to dream about any more footballers, particularly ones of whom I have no more than a sketchy image. Let’s hope it was just the effect of London germs.
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Friday, March 20, 2009
DOWN HERE on a VISIT
Tomorrow, March 21st, is the first day of Spring. Actually, some argue that today, being the Vernal Equinox this year, is the first day of Spring. I was always taught that the seasons begin on the 21st of the month irrespective of the small changes in the dates of the equinoxes (equinoces? – on the analogy with index and indices?); one tends to cleave to early teachings.
At any rate, spring certainly didn’t begin on March 1st. The political parties, ever spinning reality to make it seem more attractive, each call their opening gathering of the year The Spring Conference, even when it takes place in February. But it’s no good putting your faith in politicians.
A few years ago, the weather forecaster Penny Tranter mentioned in passing that it was the first day of spring. I checked the calendar. It was March 1st. I wrote to inform Ms Tranter that I had been taught that the first day of spring was the 21st. When and why had she changed it? Ms Tranter wrote back, very promptly and fully. She reckoned that meteorologists measure the seasons by quarters beginning on the 1st of the month, rather than from the equinox. I found this rather unconvincing. Meanwhile, Michael Fish had explained much the same thing on air. Every viewer but me must have wondered why he suddenly felt the need to launch into this subject. Nevertheless, my letter has changed the thinking at the Met Office in a way I could not have anticipated. On March 21st the following year, Helen Willetts announced; “It’s officially the start of spring today”. On March 21st the year after that, Daniel Corbett was saying the same when I switched him off (I can’t watch Corbett and still keep my sense either of humour or of proportion). Nevertheless, I suspect I am fighting a losing battle over the ”official” First Day of Spring. Another gallant but doubtless doomed fight is to keep the designation of this coming Sunday what it has been historically – Mothering Sunday – rather than what the transatlantic media calls it – Mother’s Day.
Spring heralds the houseguest season. Indeed, the season has already begun at our gaff. Having friends to stay is an almost wholly unmixed blessing. Apart from the particular pleasures associated with particular visitors, the generality of these visits suggests far more to raise the spirits than to lower them. First of all, it means we have to do some cleaning. This is a necessity from which we gain as much as do our guests. I confess that, while my partner and I are in many ways opposites (a lark and an owl, for instance; a nurse and a patient), we share an almost limitless capacity for squalor. If no one ever came to the door, we might well succumb to a sea of paper, discarded clothes and dust. Actually, the dust is under rather tighter control since our little dog Tati, the one who has suffered a major sight loss recently, was diagnosed last year as atopic, which means that among his twenty-odd allergies are dust mites. So we need to pay attention to the level of dust.
Something David and I also share is a tendency to solitude. It is no hardship for either of us to be confined to our shared company or – often even better – the company of none, not even each other. Happily, our house is large enough for this to be practicable. For David to pass the day in the garden while I fill the same time in my study makes us both as happy as pigs in muck. Neither of us wants such days to be unavoidably the norm but to have the choice is very heaven. To have this complaisant peace shattered is of course a most welcome change. We genuinely relish visitors.
Solitude can make you cranky, isolated, wary and inured to matters that you ought not to neglect to tend. Visitors bring important input: the direct or vicarious perspective of different generations, different circumstances, different geographies, different cultural textures. Sometimes, they even bring political and other challenges to one’s settled views. This is essential stimulus. And just as it is patently good for our dogs to have socialising with people reinforced by a steady traffic of intruders upon their territory, so it is equally good – nourishing, challenging, expanding – for us.
I think, hope and believe that we show our guests a good time. With few exceptions, they are temporarily escaping life in the city (usually but not always London) and are taken aback all over again by the restorative powers to be found even within spitting distance of the A4. It helps a lot: a) that our house was long ago re-orientated away from the road and towards open fields (and the guest bedrooms are on that side of the house); b) that the journey from London by road or rail is a snip while psychologically the distance is vast; c) that our guestrooms and especially the beds are very comfortable; d) that David is a fabulous (trained) cook; e) that we are, I think I can claim, in no way proscriptive.
Needless to say, we have made mistakes. An early guest, whom we dearly wanted to make welcome, insisted on coming at a time when there were builders here, not merely at but in the house. Our guest – let’s call him Andrew – is himself a noted and fastidious cook. We weren’t up to speed yet with the kitchen and even found ourselves offering Andrew a takeaway one evening. When he complained about a splash mark he’d noticed on the bathroom mirror (which is the full length of the wall), David lost sympathy and has little regret that he has steadfastly never returned.
Another guest – Ruth, say – came with her husband (Robert) and child. We had already got off slightly on a wrong foot over some footling misunderstanding about what the child was prepared to eat. On the second day, Ruth couldn’t stop herself, over Robert’s objections, asking David why we didn’t use liners under the pillowcases. David dealt with the query civilly enough but he was furious because he had spent more than the issue deserved looking for the missing items the morning before. After that, things flew downhill. I handed Ruth a glass of sherry that she promptly handed back because the glass was clearly cracked. How had that happened? At lunch, I was mortified to spot a flake of some previous morning’s cereal still attached to the bowl from which she was about to attack her pudding. The visit’s sense of being doomed has been reinforced by Ruth’s kind but firm refusal of a repetition of the experience. The innocent child would, I swear, come like a shot if allowed, though more to see the dogs than us.
Other visitors have been less than well attended. In David’s absence I served to guests from the Americas a bowl of home grown raspberries that, had I been more attentive, I might have noted were more mouldy than good. On another occasion, my culinary innocence was revealed by the offering of a dish – “the Aga is perfect for this” – that inadvertently lacked one of its major ingredients; a little short of perfection on that occasion and no fault of the Aga.
On the other hand, there have been guests who have fallen short of our own expectations. The most tenacious of guest faults is the (no doubt earnest) desire to “help”. As we sometimes bark at strangers who stray into the kitchen: “no passengers in the engine room, thank you – please return to the sundeck”. Stopping them clearing the table requires eternal vigilance because it’s the kind of gesture that they can slip past you without you registering that it has begun: the major alert usually comes with the question “where shall I put this?” to which the only sensible rejoinder is of course: “back on the table”.
“Helping” to clear the table is the thin end of the wedge. Once they’ve persuaded you to let them “help” with the washing up, the peace of the house is doomed. I learned this long ago. In my childhood, when Christmas Day was hosted turn and turn about by different households within the extended family, there was a lame-brained “uncle” (by marriage not blood, I hasten to add) who always took it upon himself to “do” the washing up and who, without fail, broke at least one item every year, to my mother’s white fury when it was one of hers. Before we hardened our own hearts against those who would take over the sink, we did permit one or two minor washings-up to be conducted by guests. I think it was the six weeks it took us afterwards to find the potato peeler that finished that foolish weakness.
Guests have other traits that do them no credit, from commandeering the television (particularly for some seemingly endless sports event) to misunderstanding the function of the bidet to making off with the toothpaste or a book that was in the process of being read by one of us. But no one has yet come close to the nightmare of one of our first guests. Admittedly, we had already been warned by mutual friends that ‘Miles’ was “the houseguest from hell” so we should have known better than to admit him. Like many who have lived alone for years, he has lost all notion of consideration for others.
As it happened, he and I travelled down from London on the train together. I had asked him (as we always do) if he had any particular dietary requirements and he announced that he was indeed on a special diet at that time. I no longer recall the details, save that potatoes were not permitted. This did not prevent him from consuming an entire 150-gram bag of kettle chips, which he declared to be “not the same”. Aside from the diet, he claimed to be easy to feed, so long as he was able to have his daily Marmite. I couldn’t remember if we had this item in the cupboard and couldn’t raise David to ask him (this was before either of us had a mobile phone) so I purchased a jar ahead of the train journey, only being able to put my hand on the largest size. Needless to say, it turned out that we had an almost full jar in the cupboard (the new one eventually had to be thrown out); that was irritating enough, though not quite as irritating as the fact that Miles never once touched the Marmite during the endless week of his visit.
What else did he do? He was forever leaving ajar the door of the fridge (which he visited often and without a by-your-leave), justifying the laxity by claiming that his cats were always opening his own fridge and failing to close it. After he had taken a bath, I found he had trampled under the bathmat my own towel, which he dismissed as “some old thing”. He complained because on one or two occasions he was down before me in the morning (though never before David) as if somehow I had an obligation to be up and ready to wait on him each day. I pointed out that, unlike him, I did not take a lengthy siesta after lunch, an irrelevant point as far as he was concerned.
None of this, I am sure, seems much of a trial but it all came wrapped in a loud and insistent expectation that he deserved all the consideration that the white colonialist would demand of his coolies. We were profoundly glad to see the back of him, as we indeed have done definitively because a few years later we came to the realisation that, living abroad as he now does, he had dropped us from his contact list without a word of explanation. Perhaps he was afraid that we might want to visit him as we did once long ago when he lived in another foreign land. On that occasion, we arrived laden with the comestibles and other items he missed from Britain and found ourselves sleeping each on one of the two foam mattresses that served as his regular bed, while he slept on a rather comfortable-looking futon that he had borrowed for the duration of our stay. I wish we had had the foresight to leave his fridge door open.
Next week I shall be in London, staying as the houseguest of someone else. I hope I shall manage to comport myself with proper but modest deference.
PS: This week's was a fabulous episode of Desperate Housewives. For the benefit of my international readers, it was episode 13 of season 4, a self-contained story entitled The Best Thing That Ever Could Have Happened which, like many of the best episodes, is named after a Stephen Sondheim number, the kind of allusion that alerts those viewers likely to know that they will share a sensibility with this show. Beau Bridges played a handyman who had come to know the various housewives professionally but also as something of a confidant. It was a finely-turned portrait of a good man, neat and economical, sentimental but not superficial and it also shed passing light on each of the regular characters. What a terrific piece of bread-and-butter television, as nourishing as it was delicious.
Tomorrow, March 21st, is the first day of Spring. Actually, some argue that today, being the Vernal Equinox this year, is the first day of Spring. I was always taught that the seasons begin on the 21st of the month irrespective of the small changes in the dates of the equinoxes (equinoces? – on the analogy with index and indices?); one tends to cleave to early teachings.
At any rate, spring certainly didn’t begin on March 1st. The political parties, ever spinning reality to make it seem more attractive, each call their opening gathering of the year The Spring Conference, even when it takes place in February. But it’s no good putting your faith in politicians.
A few years ago, the weather forecaster Penny Tranter mentioned in passing that it was the first day of spring. I checked the calendar. It was March 1st. I wrote to inform Ms Tranter that I had been taught that the first day of spring was the 21st. When and why had she changed it? Ms Tranter wrote back, very promptly and fully. She reckoned that meteorologists measure the seasons by quarters beginning on the 1st of the month, rather than from the equinox. I found this rather unconvincing. Meanwhile, Michael Fish had explained much the same thing on air. Every viewer but me must have wondered why he suddenly felt the need to launch into this subject. Nevertheless, my letter has changed the thinking at the Met Office in a way I could not have anticipated. On March 21st the following year, Helen Willetts announced; “It’s officially the start of spring today”. On March 21st the year after that, Daniel Corbett was saying the same when I switched him off (I can’t watch Corbett and still keep my sense either of humour or of proportion). Nevertheless, I suspect I am fighting a losing battle over the ”official” First Day of Spring. Another gallant but doubtless doomed fight is to keep the designation of this coming Sunday what it has been historically – Mothering Sunday – rather than what the transatlantic media calls it – Mother’s Day.
Spring heralds the houseguest season. Indeed, the season has already begun at our gaff. Having friends to stay is an almost wholly unmixed blessing. Apart from the particular pleasures associated with particular visitors, the generality of these visits suggests far more to raise the spirits than to lower them. First of all, it means we have to do some cleaning. This is a necessity from which we gain as much as do our guests. I confess that, while my partner and I are in many ways opposites (a lark and an owl, for instance; a nurse and a patient), we share an almost limitless capacity for squalor. If no one ever came to the door, we might well succumb to a sea of paper, discarded clothes and dust. Actually, the dust is under rather tighter control since our little dog Tati, the one who has suffered a major sight loss recently, was diagnosed last year as atopic, which means that among his twenty-odd allergies are dust mites. So we need to pay attention to the level of dust.
Something David and I also share is a tendency to solitude. It is no hardship for either of us to be confined to our shared company or – often even better – the company of none, not even each other. Happily, our house is large enough for this to be practicable. For David to pass the day in the garden while I fill the same time in my study makes us both as happy as pigs in muck. Neither of us wants such days to be unavoidably the norm but to have the choice is very heaven. To have this complaisant peace shattered is of course a most welcome change. We genuinely relish visitors.
Solitude can make you cranky, isolated, wary and inured to matters that you ought not to neglect to tend. Visitors bring important input: the direct or vicarious perspective of different generations, different circumstances, different geographies, different cultural textures. Sometimes, they even bring political and other challenges to one’s settled views. This is essential stimulus. And just as it is patently good for our dogs to have socialising with people reinforced by a steady traffic of intruders upon their territory, so it is equally good – nourishing, challenging, expanding – for us.
I think, hope and believe that we show our guests a good time. With few exceptions, they are temporarily escaping life in the city (usually but not always London) and are taken aback all over again by the restorative powers to be found even within spitting distance of the A4. It helps a lot: a) that our house was long ago re-orientated away from the road and towards open fields (and the guest bedrooms are on that side of the house); b) that the journey from London by road or rail is a snip while psychologically the distance is vast; c) that our guestrooms and especially the beds are very comfortable; d) that David is a fabulous (trained) cook; e) that we are, I think I can claim, in no way proscriptive.
Needless to say, we have made mistakes. An early guest, whom we dearly wanted to make welcome, insisted on coming at a time when there were builders here, not merely at but in the house. Our guest – let’s call him Andrew – is himself a noted and fastidious cook. We weren’t up to speed yet with the kitchen and even found ourselves offering Andrew a takeaway one evening. When he complained about a splash mark he’d noticed on the bathroom mirror (which is the full length of the wall), David lost sympathy and has little regret that he has steadfastly never returned.
Another guest – Ruth, say – came with her husband (Robert) and child. We had already got off slightly on a wrong foot over some footling misunderstanding about what the child was prepared to eat. On the second day, Ruth couldn’t stop herself, over Robert’s objections, asking David why we didn’t use liners under the pillowcases. David dealt with the query civilly enough but he was furious because he had spent more than the issue deserved looking for the missing items the morning before. After that, things flew downhill. I handed Ruth a glass of sherry that she promptly handed back because the glass was clearly cracked. How had that happened? At lunch, I was mortified to spot a flake of some previous morning’s cereal still attached to the bowl from which she was about to attack her pudding. The visit’s sense of being doomed has been reinforced by Ruth’s kind but firm refusal of a repetition of the experience. The innocent child would, I swear, come like a shot if allowed, though more to see the dogs than us.
Other visitors have been less than well attended. In David’s absence I served to guests from the Americas a bowl of home grown raspberries that, had I been more attentive, I might have noted were more mouldy than good. On another occasion, my culinary innocence was revealed by the offering of a dish – “the Aga is perfect for this” – that inadvertently lacked one of its major ingredients; a little short of perfection on that occasion and no fault of the Aga.
On the other hand, there have been guests who have fallen short of our own expectations. The most tenacious of guest faults is the (no doubt earnest) desire to “help”. As we sometimes bark at strangers who stray into the kitchen: “no passengers in the engine room, thank you – please return to the sundeck”. Stopping them clearing the table requires eternal vigilance because it’s the kind of gesture that they can slip past you without you registering that it has begun: the major alert usually comes with the question “where shall I put this?” to which the only sensible rejoinder is of course: “back on the table”.
“Helping” to clear the table is the thin end of the wedge. Once they’ve persuaded you to let them “help” with the washing up, the peace of the house is doomed. I learned this long ago. In my childhood, when Christmas Day was hosted turn and turn about by different households within the extended family, there was a lame-brained “uncle” (by marriage not blood, I hasten to add) who always took it upon himself to “do” the washing up and who, without fail, broke at least one item every year, to my mother’s white fury when it was one of hers. Before we hardened our own hearts against those who would take over the sink, we did permit one or two minor washings-up to be conducted by guests. I think it was the six weeks it took us afterwards to find the potato peeler that finished that foolish weakness.
Guests have other traits that do them no credit, from commandeering the television (particularly for some seemingly endless sports event) to misunderstanding the function of the bidet to making off with the toothpaste or a book that was in the process of being read by one of us. But no one has yet come close to the nightmare of one of our first guests. Admittedly, we had already been warned by mutual friends that ‘Miles’ was “the houseguest from hell” so we should have known better than to admit him. Like many who have lived alone for years, he has lost all notion of consideration for others.
As it happened, he and I travelled down from London on the train together. I had asked him (as we always do) if he had any particular dietary requirements and he announced that he was indeed on a special diet at that time. I no longer recall the details, save that potatoes were not permitted. This did not prevent him from consuming an entire 150-gram bag of kettle chips, which he declared to be “not the same”. Aside from the diet, he claimed to be easy to feed, so long as he was able to have his daily Marmite. I couldn’t remember if we had this item in the cupboard and couldn’t raise David to ask him (this was before either of us had a mobile phone) so I purchased a jar ahead of the train journey, only being able to put my hand on the largest size. Needless to say, it turned out that we had an almost full jar in the cupboard (the new one eventually had to be thrown out); that was irritating enough, though not quite as irritating as the fact that Miles never once touched the Marmite during the endless week of his visit.
What else did he do? He was forever leaving ajar the door of the fridge (which he visited often and without a by-your-leave), justifying the laxity by claiming that his cats were always opening his own fridge and failing to close it. After he had taken a bath, I found he had trampled under the bathmat my own towel, which he dismissed as “some old thing”. He complained because on one or two occasions he was down before me in the morning (though never before David) as if somehow I had an obligation to be up and ready to wait on him each day. I pointed out that, unlike him, I did not take a lengthy siesta after lunch, an irrelevant point as far as he was concerned.
None of this, I am sure, seems much of a trial but it all came wrapped in a loud and insistent expectation that he deserved all the consideration that the white colonialist would demand of his coolies. We were profoundly glad to see the back of him, as we indeed have done definitively because a few years later we came to the realisation that, living abroad as he now does, he had dropped us from his contact list without a word of explanation. Perhaps he was afraid that we might want to visit him as we did once long ago when he lived in another foreign land. On that occasion, we arrived laden with the comestibles and other items he missed from Britain and found ourselves sleeping each on one of the two foam mattresses that served as his regular bed, while he slept on a rather comfortable-looking futon that he had borrowed for the duration of our stay. I wish we had had the foresight to leave his fridge door open.
Next week I shall be in London, staying as the houseguest of someone else. I hope I shall manage to comport myself with proper but modest deference.
PS: This week's was a fabulous episode of Desperate Housewives. For the benefit of my international readers, it was episode 13 of season 4, a self-contained story entitled The Best Thing That Ever Could Have Happened which, like many of the best episodes, is named after a Stephen Sondheim number, the kind of allusion that alerts those viewers likely to know that they will share a sensibility with this show. Beau Bridges played a handyman who had come to know the various housewives professionally but also as something of a confidant. It was a finely-turned portrait of a good man, neat and economical, sentimental but not superficial and it also shed passing light on each of the regular characters. What a terrific piece of bread-and-butter television, as nourishing as it was delicious.
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
The FACE that LAUNCHED a THOUSAND PROFESSORSHIPS
The facial image of Shakespeare has been a matter of intense conjecture since his very lifetime, when of course there was no television and no press daily to convey his presence to a curious populace. The latest claimant to the role of authentic, definitive likeness of the great man is the shining morning face of the portrait known as The Cobbe. Until now it has been in private hands, those of the Cobbe family (hence its identification). Now, after extensive further research, it emerges to offer itself to the public gaze. It’s a lovely image, almost as seductive as the fabulous portrait of John Donne by an equally unknown hand, to the saving-for-the-nation of which I contributed rather recklessly three years ago when we had more money to throw around.
But is it the real thing? Professor Stanley Wells believes so but he does have a vested interest in the portrait being a major draw for he chairs the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, which august body will, from Shakespeare’s next birthday onwards, host an exhibition of which the Cobbe will be the centrepiece. Other experts are less sanguine, not least those based at the National Portrait Gallery where a really beguiling show entitled 'Searching for Shakespeare' was mounted some seven years ago.
Naturally enough, the playwright anticipated all this. “I have heard of your paintings too, well enough” Hamlet tells Ophelia. “God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another” (III.i.150). The prince was of course speaking of women’s makeup but the remark will, with only gentle distortion, serve to suggest its author’s abiding prescience.
The simultaneous unveiling of the foundations of the first playhouse to have staged Shakespeare’s work is less controversial and more objectively significant if lacking the romantic appeal of the portrait issue. Known simply as The Theatre, the site is in Shoreditch. The playhouse that stood on the site was constructed by James Burbage, father of Shakespeare’s close associate Richard. Perhaps the major dig that will start twelve months hence and close Blackfriars station (which is to be rebuilt and its Thameslink connection upgraded) will yield some trace of the long sought theatre built over the grounds of the Dominican monastery that gave the area its name. This was another construction of Burbage Sr. Shakespeare was a founding shareholder in that project but its repertoire was largely devoted to the younger Jacobean playwrights.
All this is bracing stuff but what we really need is the supreme playwright here among us now, plying his trade. What a subject he would find in Zimbabwe. The power struggle between ZANU-PF and the MDC-T yields nothing in drama and blood to the ancient British history that Shakespeare found in Holinshed’s Chronicles. In Macbeth, Duncan says of the original Thane of Cawdor, discovered at the play’s outset to be traitorous: “There’s no art/To find the mind’s construction in the face./He was a gentleman on whom I built/An absolute trust” (I.iv.12). The next stage direction is the favourite in the canon of my old English master James Hasler: “Enter Macbeth”. He’s right: it should be a wonderful moment of theatrical irony and premonition but I have never seen a production – and I have seen tens if not dozens – that made anything much of it.
Those who supported Robert Mugabe’s assumption of the premiership of what was then still Southern Rhodesia in 1980 might well feel that they failed to find his mind’s construction. The last ten years of Mugabe’s presidency have provided a textbook demonstration of absolute power corrupting absolutely. But the last twelve months have seen a change, though it is still too early to be sure whether it presages an unravelling of Mugabe’s power. And how far is Mugabe engaged in a deep game of quadruple bluff? He is, after all, one of the great Machiavels on the modern world stage.
This week has provided fantastic material. What playwright wouldn’t surrender a limb to write that scene when the Mugabes visited Morgan Tsvangirai in hospital after the apparent accident that killed Susan Tsvangirai. The president uttered various pious sentiments – he is, of course, a devout Catholic as could be guessed from his taste for conspicuous consumption and his hobby of having people killed – and Grace Mugabe wept gracious tears of a crocodile nature. The first lady, though not the intellectual equal of Lady Macbeth, makes a terrific study in hypocritical harpiedom. Then yesterday there was Mrs Tsvangirai’s funeral at which the president spoke, striking a note that the innocent might hear as conciliatory, even fraternal. For his part, the bereaved prime minister has stamped on speculation that the supposed accident was suspicious, despite the number of road collisions that have conveniently eliminated enemies of ZANU-PF over the years. What’s he up to? The MDC-T has nonetheless commissioned an independent enquiry into the incident.
There is terrific scope for Shakespearean drama in these events. One is bound to imagine that the end of Mugabe’s rule will be occasioned by his death of natural causes rather than by some Zimbabwean equivalent of Birnan Wood being come to Dunsinane (and I have not heard any suggestion that Mr Tsvangirai was from his mother's womb untimely ripped). Even so, the monologues, duologues, crowd scenes and set pieces would flow thick and fast. The Tragicall Historie of Mugabeth: who’s going to write it if not Shakespeare?
The facial image of Shakespeare has been a matter of intense conjecture since his very lifetime, when of course there was no television and no press daily to convey his presence to a curious populace. The latest claimant to the role of authentic, definitive likeness of the great man is the shining morning face of the portrait known as The Cobbe. Until now it has been in private hands, those of the Cobbe family (hence its identification). Now, after extensive further research, it emerges to offer itself to the public gaze. It’s a lovely image, almost as seductive as the fabulous portrait of John Donne by an equally unknown hand, to the saving-for-the-nation of which I contributed rather recklessly three years ago when we had more money to throw around.
But is it the real thing? Professor Stanley Wells believes so but he does have a vested interest in the portrait being a major draw for he chairs the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, which august body will, from Shakespeare’s next birthday onwards, host an exhibition of which the Cobbe will be the centrepiece. Other experts are less sanguine, not least those based at the National Portrait Gallery where a really beguiling show entitled 'Searching for Shakespeare' was mounted some seven years ago.
Naturally enough, the playwright anticipated all this. “I have heard of your paintings too, well enough” Hamlet tells Ophelia. “God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another” (III.i.150). The prince was of course speaking of women’s makeup but the remark will, with only gentle distortion, serve to suggest its author’s abiding prescience.
The simultaneous unveiling of the foundations of the first playhouse to have staged Shakespeare’s work is less controversial and more objectively significant if lacking the romantic appeal of the portrait issue. Known simply as The Theatre, the site is in Shoreditch. The playhouse that stood on the site was constructed by James Burbage, father of Shakespeare’s close associate Richard. Perhaps the major dig that will start twelve months hence and close Blackfriars station (which is to be rebuilt and its Thameslink connection upgraded) will yield some trace of the long sought theatre built over the grounds of the Dominican monastery that gave the area its name. This was another construction of Burbage Sr. Shakespeare was a founding shareholder in that project but its repertoire was largely devoted to the younger Jacobean playwrights.
All this is bracing stuff but what we really need is the supreme playwright here among us now, plying his trade. What a subject he would find in Zimbabwe. The power struggle between ZANU-PF and the MDC-T yields nothing in drama and blood to the ancient British history that Shakespeare found in Holinshed’s Chronicles. In Macbeth, Duncan says of the original Thane of Cawdor, discovered at the play’s outset to be traitorous: “There’s no art/To find the mind’s construction in the face./He was a gentleman on whom I built/An absolute trust” (I.iv.12). The next stage direction is the favourite in the canon of my old English master James Hasler: “Enter Macbeth”. He’s right: it should be a wonderful moment of theatrical irony and premonition but I have never seen a production – and I have seen tens if not dozens – that made anything much of it.
Those who supported Robert Mugabe’s assumption of the premiership of what was then still Southern Rhodesia in 1980 might well feel that they failed to find his mind’s construction. The last ten years of Mugabe’s presidency have provided a textbook demonstration of absolute power corrupting absolutely. But the last twelve months have seen a change, though it is still too early to be sure whether it presages an unravelling of Mugabe’s power. And how far is Mugabe engaged in a deep game of quadruple bluff? He is, after all, one of the great Machiavels on the modern world stage.
This week has provided fantastic material. What playwright wouldn’t surrender a limb to write that scene when the Mugabes visited Morgan Tsvangirai in hospital after the apparent accident that killed Susan Tsvangirai. The president uttered various pious sentiments – he is, of course, a devout Catholic as could be guessed from his taste for conspicuous consumption and his hobby of having people killed – and Grace Mugabe wept gracious tears of a crocodile nature. The first lady, though not the intellectual equal of Lady Macbeth, makes a terrific study in hypocritical harpiedom. Then yesterday there was Mrs Tsvangirai’s funeral at which the president spoke, striking a note that the innocent might hear as conciliatory, even fraternal. For his part, the bereaved prime minister has stamped on speculation that the supposed accident was suspicious, despite the number of road collisions that have conveniently eliminated enemies of ZANU-PF over the years. What’s he up to? The MDC-T has nonetheless commissioned an independent enquiry into the incident.
There is terrific scope for Shakespearean drama in these events. One is bound to imagine that the end of Mugabe’s rule will be occasioned by his death of natural causes rather than by some Zimbabwean equivalent of Birnan Wood being come to Dunsinane (and I have not heard any suggestion that Mr Tsvangirai was from his mother's womb untimely ripped). Even so, the monologues, duologues, crowd scenes and set pieces would flow thick and fast. The Tragicall Historie of Mugabeth: who’s going to write it if not Shakespeare?
Saturday, March 07, 2009
A SORRY BUSINESS
What is it with this incessant clamour for Gordon Brown to say “sorry” for some nebulously all-embracing omission he is claimed by his political opponents to have made while Chancellor of the Exchequer? A member of the audience on this week’s Any Questions? asked “What part of the word ‘sorry’ does the Prime Minister not understand?” I would counter: “What part of that question could not be deemed snide and which opposition party planted it?”
I thought Westminster was united in deploring what is known as “gesture politics” but evidently, as with so many other matters, if it suits then it serves. It has served to the extent that Mr Brown has been slow to pre-empt the clamour and shifty in dealing with it when it is raised. “When” he might ask in reply “may we expect the Tories to apologise for the poll tax? Isn’t it rather long overdue for the Liberals to say sorry for their suicidal divisions over free trade in the early 1930s?”
Being sorry signifies in personal relationships but not on the public stage. On Monday, it was revealed that the Vale of Glamorgan council had placed in foster care a teenager with a five-year history of child abuse. The couple who took him on were not apprised of the teenager’s proclivities, even though they had two young children of their own. The council has admitted “a serious error of judgment” and expressed its “deep regret” for the “distress and harm caused to the family”. For the nine year-old daughter who has been sexually assaulted and the toddler-age son who was anally raped, I doubt that an apology, however “deep”, suffices. I hope that the family will be suing the council for several million pounds. In such a case, the social services officers on the council payroll are surely far more at fault than those excoriated over several weeks by the press and driven from their posts in Haringey in the so-called Baby P affair.
This requirement for public figures to “put their hands up” – one hand used to be thought sufficient – is a relatively new phenomenon but frequently refers to events of long ago. Pope John Paul II, a great one for rhetorical gestures, apologised for the crusades, the Spanish Inquisition and “sins and accidents of omission” against non-Catholic Christians, women and ethnic groups. Why? How does it put anything right if the US President apologises for the extermination of the native Americans: “Red Indians”, as they were called when they still constituted a force in the land, even though named in an ideologically unacceptable manner? What good does it do if the Emperor of Japan apologises for his country’s part in World War II? What manner of fence is mended if the Queen says sorry to the peoples of various countries that Britain plundered and dominated during the building of the Empire?
All well and good if reparations are made. Military spokesmen routinely express their condolences to the relatives of personnel killed by that fearful failure of intelligence known by the horrible euphemism of “friendly fire”. We might think them sincere if they could also report that those families were to receive handsome payments to buttress them against the loss of the breadwinner; that the officer commanding the exercise that led to the deaths had been stripped of his rank; that new strategies were already in place to ensure that such horrors never recur. This they do not do. Who thinks that saying "sorry" is enough? Only those who elect to say it, especially when (as often) that "sorry" anyway sticks in the craw.
But many expressions of regret and apology, like similar ones of welcome and gratitude, are no more than scripted and calculated pieces of public relations waffle. Why should one place any faith in a printed or recorded gesture: “welcome to our website”, “thank you for not smoking”, “we’re sorry to keep you on hold – all our agents are dealing with other customers at present”? What good are these statements? Those who laid them down in the first place have no knowledge of the circumstances of their use. How much mileage is there in my arguing that a website that has refused to recognise my legitimate password or disputes my correct credit card details is in no discernible way making me welcome and is therefore liable under the Trades Descriptions Act?
Nowhere is the apology – routine, anonymous and unanswerable – more prevalent than on Britain’s railways. Older readers who foreswore public transport long ago may be unaware that live announcements, one of the thrills of visiting a big terminus in a ’50s childhood (“Attention, please!”), are a thing of the past. On platform PA systems today, recorded phrases are segued by computer so that details of particular journeys and their fates are constructed like Lego buildings from given materials.
Three of these recorded phrases go as follows: “I am sorry”, “I am very sorry” and “I am extremely sorry”. According to my own observations while attempting to fill the yawning wait as my train slides further and further down the timetable, these formulations are played in conjunction with the phrase “for the delay”, followed by details of the particular missing train. The extent of delay is graduated and seems to comprise, respectively, up to ten minutes, between ten and twenty, thereafter anything over twenty minutes. It may amuse the bored customer to track how accurately timed is the switchover from “sorry” to “very sorry” to “extremely sorry”.
What is not in doubt, however, is that nobody associated with the network is experiencing actual regret on our behalf. To the (usually invisible) station staff, the workings of the trains seem as impenetrable a mystery as they are to us. The distinction between them and us is that, to them, it is a matter of profound indifference. Perhaps it is only the drone operating the computer program who is even aware that there is a delay and that it has been acknowledged publicly at any level of the railway operation. So, is this recorded apology of any value? Not to me.
How different it is on the train itself. There one is treated to a live running commentary by someone termed ‘the train manager’, giving more information than even a congenital train spotter might desire. These commentaries, evidently issued as scripts from head office, use curious constructs about “arriving into the next station stop” and “on behalf of myself and the on-board crew”. Some time thereafter comes a bulletin from the buffet car, lovingly listing all today’s items of an allegedly comestible nature. Needless to say, the rather good full silver service cuisine served without fanfare on trains in my childhood (not least the legendary British Railways breakfast) has long been swept away, to be replaced by pre-packaged, under-microwaved bacon rolls and other such undesirable matter. Nothing, you would think, for a public service announcement to crow about.
If not already scuppered by a choral symphony of shouting into mobile phones, the tinny buzz of personal stereos and the full-volume persistence of toddlers’ observations (one could have escaped all this in the old compartmentalised carriages), any chance of catching a doze or reading a book is thwarted by the eagerness with which every detail of the journey’s geographic and gastronomic progress must be imparted after every ‘station stop’ has been ‘arrived into’, along with urgings to read the safety drill as if we’re all virgin (as against Virgin) travellers. If this is not too much information, I don’t know what is.
All such affectless public postures are the spawn of the marketing culture that we have enthusiastically embraced for a century and more. A prime ministerial apology is only of import if it is in some sense “saleable”: “look,” the government can say, “our man is big enough to admit when he is wrong and move on”; “look,” the opposition will be able to smirk, “we’ve got him to climb down which only shows him to be spineless”. I don’t want the Prime Minister to be diverted by fruitless considerations of what meaningless form of words will play best with the electorate while surrendering nothing to those who would bring him down. I want him to devote himself to the considerably more urgent business of steering the nation through the present economic mess.
What is it with this incessant clamour for Gordon Brown to say “sorry” for some nebulously all-embracing omission he is claimed by his political opponents to have made while Chancellor of the Exchequer? A member of the audience on this week’s Any Questions? asked “What part of the word ‘sorry’ does the Prime Minister not understand?” I would counter: “What part of that question could not be deemed snide and which opposition party planted it?”
I thought Westminster was united in deploring what is known as “gesture politics” but evidently, as with so many other matters, if it suits then it serves. It has served to the extent that Mr Brown has been slow to pre-empt the clamour and shifty in dealing with it when it is raised. “When” he might ask in reply “may we expect the Tories to apologise for the poll tax? Isn’t it rather long overdue for the Liberals to say sorry for their suicidal divisions over free trade in the early 1930s?”
Being sorry signifies in personal relationships but not on the public stage. On Monday, it was revealed that the Vale of Glamorgan council had placed in foster care a teenager with a five-year history of child abuse. The couple who took him on were not apprised of the teenager’s proclivities, even though they had two young children of their own. The council has admitted “a serious error of judgment” and expressed its “deep regret” for the “distress and harm caused to the family”. For the nine year-old daughter who has been sexually assaulted and the toddler-age son who was anally raped, I doubt that an apology, however “deep”, suffices. I hope that the family will be suing the council for several million pounds. In such a case, the social services officers on the council payroll are surely far more at fault than those excoriated over several weeks by the press and driven from their posts in Haringey in the so-called Baby P affair.
This requirement for public figures to “put their hands up” – one hand used to be thought sufficient – is a relatively new phenomenon but frequently refers to events of long ago. Pope John Paul II, a great one for rhetorical gestures, apologised for the crusades, the Spanish Inquisition and “sins and accidents of omission” against non-Catholic Christians, women and ethnic groups. Why? How does it put anything right if the US President apologises for the extermination of the native Americans: “Red Indians”, as they were called when they still constituted a force in the land, even though named in an ideologically unacceptable manner? What good does it do if the Emperor of Japan apologises for his country’s part in World War II? What manner of fence is mended if the Queen says sorry to the peoples of various countries that Britain plundered and dominated during the building of the Empire?
All well and good if reparations are made. Military spokesmen routinely express their condolences to the relatives of personnel killed by that fearful failure of intelligence known by the horrible euphemism of “friendly fire”. We might think them sincere if they could also report that those families were to receive handsome payments to buttress them against the loss of the breadwinner; that the officer commanding the exercise that led to the deaths had been stripped of his rank; that new strategies were already in place to ensure that such horrors never recur. This they do not do. Who thinks that saying "sorry" is enough? Only those who elect to say it, especially when (as often) that "sorry" anyway sticks in the craw.
But many expressions of regret and apology, like similar ones of welcome and gratitude, are no more than scripted and calculated pieces of public relations waffle. Why should one place any faith in a printed or recorded gesture: “welcome to our website”, “thank you for not smoking”, “we’re sorry to keep you on hold – all our agents are dealing with other customers at present”? What good are these statements? Those who laid them down in the first place have no knowledge of the circumstances of their use. How much mileage is there in my arguing that a website that has refused to recognise my legitimate password or disputes my correct credit card details is in no discernible way making me welcome and is therefore liable under the Trades Descriptions Act?
Nowhere is the apology – routine, anonymous and unanswerable – more prevalent than on Britain’s railways. Older readers who foreswore public transport long ago may be unaware that live announcements, one of the thrills of visiting a big terminus in a ’50s childhood (“Attention, please!”), are a thing of the past. On platform PA systems today, recorded phrases are segued by computer so that details of particular journeys and their fates are constructed like Lego buildings from given materials.
Three of these recorded phrases go as follows: “I am sorry”, “I am very sorry” and “I am extremely sorry”. According to my own observations while attempting to fill the yawning wait as my train slides further and further down the timetable, these formulations are played in conjunction with the phrase “for the delay”, followed by details of the particular missing train. The extent of delay is graduated and seems to comprise, respectively, up to ten minutes, between ten and twenty, thereafter anything over twenty minutes. It may amuse the bored customer to track how accurately timed is the switchover from “sorry” to “very sorry” to “extremely sorry”.
What is not in doubt, however, is that nobody associated with the network is experiencing actual regret on our behalf. To the (usually invisible) station staff, the workings of the trains seem as impenetrable a mystery as they are to us. The distinction between them and us is that, to them, it is a matter of profound indifference. Perhaps it is only the drone operating the computer program who is even aware that there is a delay and that it has been acknowledged publicly at any level of the railway operation. So, is this recorded apology of any value? Not to me.
How different it is on the train itself. There one is treated to a live running commentary by someone termed ‘the train manager’, giving more information than even a congenital train spotter might desire. These commentaries, evidently issued as scripts from head office, use curious constructs about “arriving into the next station stop” and “on behalf of myself and the on-board crew”. Some time thereafter comes a bulletin from the buffet car, lovingly listing all today’s items of an allegedly comestible nature. Needless to say, the rather good full silver service cuisine served without fanfare on trains in my childhood (not least the legendary British Railways breakfast) has long been swept away, to be replaced by pre-packaged, under-microwaved bacon rolls and other such undesirable matter. Nothing, you would think, for a public service announcement to crow about.
If not already scuppered by a choral symphony of shouting into mobile phones, the tinny buzz of personal stereos and the full-volume persistence of toddlers’ observations (one could have escaped all this in the old compartmentalised carriages), any chance of catching a doze or reading a book is thwarted by the eagerness with which every detail of the journey’s geographic and gastronomic progress must be imparted after every ‘station stop’ has been ‘arrived into’, along with urgings to read the safety drill as if we’re all virgin (as against Virgin) travellers. If this is not too much information, I don’t know what is.
All such affectless public postures are the spawn of the marketing culture that we have enthusiastically embraced for a century and more. A prime ministerial apology is only of import if it is in some sense “saleable”: “look,” the government can say, “our man is big enough to admit when he is wrong and move on”; “look,” the opposition will be able to smirk, “we’ve got him to climb down which only shows him to be spineless”. I don’t want the Prime Minister to be diverted by fruitless considerations of what meaningless form of words will play best with the electorate while surrendering nothing to those who would bring him down. I want him to devote himself to the considerably more urgent business of steering the nation through the present economic mess.
Wednesday, March 04, 2009
Tati, summer 2007
photo: Barbra Flinder
The ONE-EYED DOG is KING
An update on Tati (further to the previous entry, Dog Days, immediately below): our PBGV is half-way through an enforced period of wearing one of those inverted lampshade affairs that prevent him scratching the delicate areas (in his case, the eyes) and, in practice, pretty much anywhere else. This of course is frustrating and uncomfortable for him. He is not supposed to get excited or to bark much or to go tearing off round our field so he is often walked on the lead (which is attached to a harness so as not to interfere with the lampshade) and, because he is naturally ebullient even in his reduced circumstances, he finds this stressful.
The worst part – perhaps even more for us than for him – is that he has suffered significant sight loss. His right eye, which underwent the operation, is now permanently longsighted so that he can see what he is aiming at but not necessarily what is along the route. And that is his good eye. His left eye has a partially detached front lens that is being held in place by the iris, which is functioning normally. The right iris was unable to do this job, which was why he had to lose the lens. But it means that effectively he has no useful sight in his left eye. So he finds himself much like Gordon Brown: blind in one eye and partially sighted in the other. Perhaps he too can raise 17 standing ovations in Congress.
On Monday he will again see the specialist and we shall learn where we go from here. It may be necessary at some juncture to operate similarly on the left eye or we may have to continue to medicate and monitor it, perhaps for the rest of his life. Currently, he is taking an extensive regime of medication, most but not all in the form of eye drops. He accepts all this with what, in a human, you would call good grace. In canine terms, he has certainly not lost his wag and, when distracted from his condition, he is still capable of getting excited about the prospect of a game or a walk, though of course we have to damp down any such excitement.
It is all most distressing but, as I say, more distressing for us who discuss and fear and speculate and question than for the dog who finds himself perplexed and quelled but, to pick up my refrain from Dog Days, living in the moment and adjusting and coping.
PS: What an outstanding episode of Shameless on Channel 4 this week, written by Jack Lothian and directed by Paul Norton Waller. Even though it was part of an on-going serial dreamt up by someone else (the mighty Paul Abbott), it still managed to shift some telling material and fashion some powerful individual scenes. British teledrama is still – just – alive and kicking.
Saturday, February 28, 2009
DOG DAYS
The last ten days have reinforced my conviction that humans can learn a good deal from animals. I am thinking in particular of dogs, but creatures at almost any stratum of evolution have something of value to tell us.
I am not unaware of my capacity to be a dog bore but I defend my frequent bending of my friends’ ears on the subject of our dogs by pointing out that we have listened patiently to their reports about their children for more than two decades without (much) complaint (at least, not to them). You might argue that dogs are not as “important” as children and I decline to engage the point. I will say, though, that dogs are assuredly a rather larger responsibility than children. There is not much mileage in packing dogs off to school or sending them to the high street with a shopping list and an injunction that they are to bring back the change (and not eat all the sausages on the way home). In the unfortunate circumstance that he attacked somebody, it is unlikely that your child would be, as they say, “put down”.
You expect that your children will grow up and leave you and you hope that they will duly outlive you, whereas a dog is for life, its span being something most likely to be subsumed within yours. While it might at a pinch survive ferally (quite a few do), a dog is entirely dependent on you, while in your charge, for its shelter, sustenance and general welfare. You can’t teach it to make itself an omelette or take its worming tablets on the due date.
Both my partner David and I were brought up with dogs and we have known many mutts belonging to others over the years. In his various domestic posts, David (who worked as “char to the stars”) often performed dog-sitting and dog–exercising duties and necessarily but easily bonded with his charges. As responsible and sensitive people, we manfully held off through many years of keen broodiness for a dog because we knew that our circumstances did not lend themselves. I have no doubt that many – perhaps most – dogs lead the “lives of quiet desperation” that Thoreau said were the lot of men. We wanted no dog of ours to enjoy less than a safe, stimulating and contented existence. Only in the last decade have we found ourselves able to make such provision.
The first and most defining aspect of dogs is that they are pack animals. Even if the pack consists of no more than the dog and a single owner, the dog nonetheless has its pack therein and needs to feel sure that the pack endures. Separation anxiety is one of the most common and most powerful stresses that a dog experiences. It follows then that a dog left on its own all day at home while the family – its pack – scatters is a dog that is profoundly miserable on a continuous basis. If the dog then tries to assuage its misery – veering from boredom through frustration and even to terror – with behaviour that a senior member of the pack (its master or mistress) deems to be destructive, it will perhaps be “punished” without gaining any sense of why this further misery is visited upon it.
Both of us are at home most of the time. Four hours is our limit for going out and leaving the dogs in the house, where they at least have the company of each other. Longer and we arrange for the neighbours to visit and let them out and, if necessary, to feed them. When we go away, we have house-sitters who know and happily look after the dogs.
We have our own field adjacent to our property in which the dogs are exercised. They are fed natural raw foods according to the BARF diet (see www.barfworld.com). They do not suffer the indignity of being dressed in dog versions of human clothes and are not treated as if they are somehow “little people”. They are, by any standard, lucky dogs. None of this – nor can it – guarantees that they will lead trouble-free lives.
The senior of our dogs, at seven-and-a-half, is a Great Dane, named Fargo after a movie we both love. His likeness provides the avatar on this blog. More than any dog I have ever known, Fargo has been a supreme ambassador for his species. When we first took him to training class (which he still attends, if fitfully), he was alluded to by certain of the more nervous owners as “the beast”, but before long even the most reluctant had begun to dote on him. Now, when there is an exercise that obliges us to handle a dog other than our own, people clamour for his leash. Among our houseguests, he ranks with David’s cooking and the comfort of our guest rooms as one of the chief lures. Even those indifferent to dogs – it seems odd that we should know such people – are comparatively won over. He is that walking cliché, a gentle giant. People anyway do take him for a giant at some ten-and-a-half stone. In fact, he was the runt of an unthinkably large litter of 11 and, though sturdily knit, often stands a little below other Danes we meet. But I would gratefully accept a tenner from everyone who has, however “subtly”, ascribed to him some equine quality (“if you saddled him up, my little daughter would love to ride him, ho-ho-ho”). Fargo takes it all with better grace than do I.
Our Dane is in the twilight of his years. Decades – indeed, centuries – of selective breeding have produced many strains of dog that are much bigger than the animals from which they originated, but their organs have not grown apace. Big dogs have small dogs’ hearts and inevitably they fail sooner. If we get Fargo to ten – and, with his healthy lifestyle, we hope to do so – we shall have achieved something admirable. Meanwhile, he has this year undergone a sad little operation. Variously afflicted by anal polyps and occasional traces of blood in his water, he was thoroughly examined by our superb vet who determined that his issues were hormonal and that a complete and speedy remedy was castration. Most reluctantly we acceded and the unkindest cut was made. I shall ever recall the two little boys – perhaps eight years old – whom we and Fargo passed at the village fête some years ago, only to overhear the stage whisper “cor, did you see the balls on him”. David and I both knew to whom the remark referred.
It must be said that the dog has been unmanned – or undogged – with remarkably little effect that one might call deplorable. His attempts to make love to his favourite chair have declined and his enthusiastic (and noisy) autofellating in response to the protein rush of his supper of raw chicken wings has ceased entirely. There is no evidence of regret about this on his part, hence none on ours. The junior dog made a few half-hearted attempts to renew his bid to be top dog but soon abandoned the mission. Fargo seems perfectly reconciled to his new state and, happily for all of us, is no longer inclined to spend long sessions in licking his poorly bum for the simple reason that it is no longer poorly.
The younger dog is a little over five and he is a Petit Basset Griffon Vendéen. That is quite a rare breed in this country, rather more common in France – the Vendée is the region on the Atlantic coast immediately to the south of Normandy. The breed name indicates that he is a small (about the size of a Cocker Spaniel), low-slung, rough-coated hound. There is also a Grand version: we have surprisingly seen one in our town. He has a beard and moustache, Denis Healey eyebrows and a sunburst of hair between his eyes. Like Fargo, he is a scent hound but he has a much more cultivated nose. He is tricolore – white, black and tan – and carries his tail very erect and ever ready to wag. We call him Tati, after the great French comic and director Jacques Tati, in part because, while he is certainly blithe and drôle, he will never be lanky but he can always aspire to be so. Unfortunately, some people who are not cinéaste think his name is a girl’s and so, being pretty, he must be a bitch. Very properly, he barks at this nonsense.
We first clapped eyes on a member of his breed in Central Park and, polite Englishmen that we are, asked his off-hand Manhattan mistress if we might say hello to him. When we asked of what breed he was, she shrugged “PBGV” as if only out-of-towners like us would not know this. It isn’t the easiest breed name to remember but I recommend to friends that they think of him as Stevie’s PBGV.
Tati is a most energetic dog, full of enthusiasm for every next move. He has learned shrewdly how to handle the much larger Fargo and pays court to him, cleaning his ears and eyes regularly and smartly leaping out of the way when Fargo goes on one of his mad tazzes round the field, less frequently these days. I am acutely aware of the need to avoid anthropomorphising the dogs and so I write this with due thought. But I think Tati is a very kind little dog. That kindness, though, is not an intention; it is a result.
For all our dedication to a healthy regime, both of them have suffered dermatological problems. Such afflictions are anyway almost universal among dogs, especially those who, like ours, live in an environment that is also visited by foxes, deer, badgers, hedgehogs and all manner of other infection- and parasite-bearing wildlife.
Both dogs are regularly medicated in their exposed regions – ears, pits – but Tati’s troubles of this nature, harder to detect under his dense coat, are the more resistant to treatment and, following a battery of tests, the vet has now determined that he is atopic. This means that he is allergic to a wide variety of phenomena – pollen, grass seeds, dust mites, storage mites – and needs more regular treatment. A dedicated vaccination is being prepared for him, designed to alleviate the worst aspects of the condition, and we currently await the insurers’ decision as to whether to pick up the tab for this ambitious treatment.
Last year, Fargo injured his eye. This is not uncommon among dogs who are apt to stick their noses into things without much caution. The eye didn’t heal as fast as it should and, somewhat alarmingly, the vet decided to injure the eye again, following a well-established procedure, the result of which was that the eye soon healed completely. Early this year, Tati suffered a similar injury. His eye also failed to heal immediately; indeed the cornea became disturbingly cloudy. Then he began to misjudge distances and objects at night. Further examination suggested that there might be a deeper-seated problem and he was referred to a specialist. Then his condition rapidly worsened. At this point, we understood that his cloudy eye was his “good” eye and that the more serious matter concerned the lens in his other eye. The complication of a fierce infection in the affected eye now arose. By this time, the dog was visiting the vet daily and undergoing a regime of medication daily adjusted to meet the latest development in his condition. Like his atopic status, the problem with his lens appears to be hereditary.
The crisis has now, we believe, peaked. As I write, Tati is some 100 miles away, kept overnight at a seaside veterinary surgery where, this afternoon, he underwent an operation to remove the front lens of his right eye. This lens was in grave danger of becoming wholly detached and causing more extensive damage than would the operation. The result, we are assured, is that he will be no worse than long-sighted, a condition shared by David. With his unrivalled nose, he should be able to adjust very happily.
And what have I learned from this peculiarly harrowing ten days wherein, pretty much by the by, workmen have daily clattered above us removing and restoring about a third of the area of our roof? Well, it has been instructive to see how the dog adjusted to each development of his condition and attempted to compensate. There is no doubt that he was brought low – indeed, all but overwhelmed – by the complication of the infection, the pain of which needed to be addressed by painkillers. I choose my descriptions with care. I think it would be anthropomorphic to call him depressed but he was certainly, objectively subdued.
I have thought before – and these days have reinforced the thought – that dogs live wholly in the moment. They of course have memories but these might be properly characterised as sense memories: retrieving the appearance and especially the scent of someone who once petted them; retaining a few words of command; recognising the route to a place where they have been carefree; feeling that a meal is due. Tati has had to cope with a changing degree of sight. There was a day or two when he was effectively almost blind, particularly at night, and had to be led round the field. But he works at it, adjusting and compensating. When he returns home with impaired vision tomorrow, he will work with what he has rather than moping because of what he has not. Now that the antibiotics and soothing ointments have done their work and the pain and discomfort that afflicted him are lifted, he will soon get his mojo back. He will learn how to steer around the close hazards in the field and the house and how to cope with differing light levels.
The experience of watching a dog play the hand he is dealt makes one reflective. I have been thinking how the gifts that we humans have (and animals do not have) complicate as well as deepen our experience of existence. Because we have language, we have the means to articulate worry and anticipation, sympathy and intent. I have troubles of my own with my eyesight. Because I have language, I may learn about my condition and my prospects, my treatment and my options. Because I can describe my experiences, I retain them as narratives and so can assess and compare them in quite a detailed way. Unlike animals, humans do not live in the moment. Arguably we live far more in the past and future – I mean, simultaneously – than in the present.
To the question “What is mankind’s greatest invention or discovery?”, I have often thought the answer is not the conventional notion of fire or the wheel or the combustion engine or penicillin or reality television (joke) but the twofold skills that must be learned anew in every generation and by which we break free of nature and become humans: walking upright and talking. With these means, having made the wheel, we can stroll over to the next valley and tell the people there about it. By walking upright, we learn to ride upright and we free our forearms for tasks other than walking (making calls on our mobile phones, for instance). By using language, we create concepts and find the means of exploring and accounting for the world around us. These accomplishments are what Tati cannot do. Because he cannot stand and use his front paws and understand the notions of illness, disability, treatment and cure, he cannot medicate himself nor know to do so. I can do all these things but I cannot, like Tati, discard my known past or imagined future experiences and avoid speculation, calculation, hope and dread.
We are at once liberated and oppressed by our evolution. We have fashioned the world to fit with our upright stance so that most activities suit our facing forwards at head height, the hands free to perform tasks, the legs able to convey us or to execute manoeuvres. One price is that about a third of the human race suffers some degree of back pain or damage because it is not natural for us to walk, sit and do things upright; another is that many of us suffer from too much pressure on our legs and/or feet; and we fret about our armpits made sweaty because they are “unnaturally” kept less aerated than if we proceeded on all fours.
Because we have language, we have invented the notions of dismay, hope, resentment, loyalty, blame, admiration, mendacity, courage, love, hate and all the rest. These complications may have enriched but they have not necessarily lightened man’s short span. John Stuart Mill asked whether it was better to be a happy pig or an unhappy Socrates. The irony in the question is that only the unhappy Socrates would think to ask.
The last ten days have reinforced my conviction that humans can learn a good deal from animals. I am thinking in particular of dogs, but creatures at almost any stratum of evolution have something of value to tell us.
I am not unaware of my capacity to be a dog bore but I defend my frequent bending of my friends’ ears on the subject of our dogs by pointing out that we have listened patiently to their reports about their children for more than two decades without (much) complaint (at least, not to them). You might argue that dogs are not as “important” as children and I decline to engage the point. I will say, though, that dogs are assuredly a rather larger responsibility than children. There is not much mileage in packing dogs off to school or sending them to the high street with a shopping list and an injunction that they are to bring back the change (and not eat all the sausages on the way home). In the unfortunate circumstance that he attacked somebody, it is unlikely that your child would be, as they say, “put down”.
You expect that your children will grow up and leave you and you hope that they will duly outlive you, whereas a dog is for life, its span being something most likely to be subsumed within yours. While it might at a pinch survive ferally (quite a few do), a dog is entirely dependent on you, while in your charge, for its shelter, sustenance and general welfare. You can’t teach it to make itself an omelette or take its worming tablets on the due date.
Both my partner David and I were brought up with dogs and we have known many mutts belonging to others over the years. In his various domestic posts, David (who worked as “char to the stars”) often performed dog-sitting and dog–exercising duties and necessarily but easily bonded with his charges. As responsible and sensitive people, we manfully held off through many years of keen broodiness for a dog because we knew that our circumstances did not lend themselves. I have no doubt that many – perhaps most – dogs lead the “lives of quiet desperation” that Thoreau said were the lot of men. We wanted no dog of ours to enjoy less than a safe, stimulating and contented existence. Only in the last decade have we found ourselves able to make such provision.
The first and most defining aspect of dogs is that they are pack animals. Even if the pack consists of no more than the dog and a single owner, the dog nonetheless has its pack therein and needs to feel sure that the pack endures. Separation anxiety is one of the most common and most powerful stresses that a dog experiences. It follows then that a dog left on its own all day at home while the family – its pack – scatters is a dog that is profoundly miserable on a continuous basis. If the dog then tries to assuage its misery – veering from boredom through frustration and even to terror – with behaviour that a senior member of the pack (its master or mistress) deems to be destructive, it will perhaps be “punished” without gaining any sense of why this further misery is visited upon it.
Both of us are at home most of the time. Four hours is our limit for going out and leaving the dogs in the house, where they at least have the company of each other. Longer and we arrange for the neighbours to visit and let them out and, if necessary, to feed them. When we go away, we have house-sitters who know and happily look after the dogs.
We have our own field adjacent to our property in which the dogs are exercised. They are fed natural raw foods according to the BARF diet (see www.barfworld.com). They do not suffer the indignity of being dressed in dog versions of human clothes and are not treated as if they are somehow “little people”. They are, by any standard, lucky dogs. None of this – nor can it – guarantees that they will lead trouble-free lives.
The senior of our dogs, at seven-and-a-half, is a Great Dane, named Fargo after a movie we both love. His likeness provides the avatar on this blog. More than any dog I have ever known, Fargo has been a supreme ambassador for his species. When we first took him to training class (which he still attends, if fitfully), he was alluded to by certain of the more nervous owners as “the beast”, but before long even the most reluctant had begun to dote on him. Now, when there is an exercise that obliges us to handle a dog other than our own, people clamour for his leash. Among our houseguests, he ranks with David’s cooking and the comfort of our guest rooms as one of the chief lures. Even those indifferent to dogs – it seems odd that we should know such people – are comparatively won over. He is that walking cliché, a gentle giant. People anyway do take him for a giant at some ten-and-a-half stone. In fact, he was the runt of an unthinkably large litter of 11 and, though sturdily knit, often stands a little below other Danes we meet. But I would gratefully accept a tenner from everyone who has, however “subtly”, ascribed to him some equine quality (“if you saddled him up, my little daughter would love to ride him, ho-ho-ho”). Fargo takes it all with better grace than do I.
Our Dane is in the twilight of his years. Decades – indeed, centuries – of selective breeding have produced many strains of dog that are much bigger than the animals from which they originated, but their organs have not grown apace. Big dogs have small dogs’ hearts and inevitably they fail sooner. If we get Fargo to ten – and, with his healthy lifestyle, we hope to do so – we shall have achieved something admirable. Meanwhile, he has this year undergone a sad little operation. Variously afflicted by anal polyps and occasional traces of blood in his water, he was thoroughly examined by our superb vet who determined that his issues were hormonal and that a complete and speedy remedy was castration. Most reluctantly we acceded and the unkindest cut was made. I shall ever recall the two little boys – perhaps eight years old – whom we and Fargo passed at the village fête some years ago, only to overhear the stage whisper “cor, did you see the balls on him”. David and I both knew to whom the remark referred.
It must be said that the dog has been unmanned – or undogged – with remarkably little effect that one might call deplorable. His attempts to make love to his favourite chair have declined and his enthusiastic (and noisy) autofellating in response to the protein rush of his supper of raw chicken wings has ceased entirely. There is no evidence of regret about this on his part, hence none on ours. The junior dog made a few half-hearted attempts to renew his bid to be top dog but soon abandoned the mission. Fargo seems perfectly reconciled to his new state and, happily for all of us, is no longer inclined to spend long sessions in licking his poorly bum for the simple reason that it is no longer poorly.
The younger dog is a little over five and he is a Petit Basset Griffon Vendéen. That is quite a rare breed in this country, rather more common in France – the Vendée is the region on the Atlantic coast immediately to the south of Normandy. The breed name indicates that he is a small (about the size of a Cocker Spaniel), low-slung, rough-coated hound. There is also a Grand version: we have surprisingly seen one in our town. He has a beard and moustache, Denis Healey eyebrows and a sunburst of hair between his eyes. Like Fargo, he is a scent hound but he has a much more cultivated nose. He is tricolore – white, black and tan – and carries his tail very erect and ever ready to wag. We call him Tati, after the great French comic and director Jacques Tati, in part because, while he is certainly blithe and drôle, he will never be lanky but he can always aspire to be so. Unfortunately, some people who are not cinéaste think his name is a girl’s and so, being pretty, he must be a bitch. Very properly, he barks at this nonsense.
We first clapped eyes on a member of his breed in Central Park and, polite Englishmen that we are, asked his off-hand Manhattan mistress if we might say hello to him. When we asked of what breed he was, she shrugged “PBGV” as if only out-of-towners like us would not know this. It isn’t the easiest breed name to remember but I recommend to friends that they think of him as Stevie’s PBGV.
Tati is a most energetic dog, full of enthusiasm for every next move. He has learned shrewdly how to handle the much larger Fargo and pays court to him, cleaning his ears and eyes regularly and smartly leaping out of the way when Fargo goes on one of his mad tazzes round the field, less frequently these days. I am acutely aware of the need to avoid anthropomorphising the dogs and so I write this with due thought. But I think Tati is a very kind little dog. That kindness, though, is not an intention; it is a result.
For all our dedication to a healthy regime, both of them have suffered dermatological problems. Such afflictions are anyway almost universal among dogs, especially those who, like ours, live in an environment that is also visited by foxes, deer, badgers, hedgehogs and all manner of other infection- and parasite-bearing wildlife.
Both dogs are regularly medicated in their exposed regions – ears, pits – but Tati’s troubles of this nature, harder to detect under his dense coat, are the more resistant to treatment and, following a battery of tests, the vet has now determined that he is atopic. This means that he is allergic to a wide variety of phenomena – pollen, grass seeds, dust mites, storage mites – and needs more regular treatment. A dedicated vaccination is being prepared for him, designed to alleviate the worst aspects of the condition, and we currently await the insurers’ decision as to whether to pick up the tab for this ambitious treatment.
Last year, Fargo injured his eye. This is not uncommon among dogs who are apt to stick their noses into things without much caution. The eye didn’t heal as fast as it should and, somewhat alarmingly, the vet decided to injure the eye again, following a well-established procedure, the result of which was that the eye soon healed completely. Early this year, Tati suffered a similar injury. His eye also failed to heal immediately; indeed the cornea became disturbingly cloudy. Then he began to misjudge distances and objects at night. Further examination suggested that there might be a deeper-seated problem and he was referred to a specialist. Then his condition rapidly worsened. At this point, we understood that his cloudy eye was his “good” eye and that the more serious matter concerned the lens in his other eye. The complication of a fierce infection in the affected eye now arose. By this time, the dog was visiting the vet daily and undergoing a regime of medication daily adjusted to meet the latest development in his condition. Like his atopic status, the problem with his lens appears to be hereditary.
The crisis has now, we believe, peaked. As I write, Tati is some 100 miles away, kept overnight at a seaside veterinary surgery where, this afternoon, he underwent an operation to remove the front lens of his right eye. This lens was in grave danger of becoming wholly detached and causing more extensive damage than would the operation. The result, we are assured, is that he will be no worse than long-sighted, a condition shared by David. With his unrivalled nose, he should be able to adjust very happily.
And what have I learned from this peculiarly harrowing ten days wherein, pretty much by the by, workmen have daily clattered above us removing and restoring about a third of the area of our roof? Well, it has been instructive to see how the dog adjusted to each development of his condition and attempted to compensate. There is no doubt that he was brought low – indeed, all but overwhelmed – by the complication of the infection, the pain of which needed to be addressed by painkillers. I choose my descriptions with care. I think it would be anthropomorphic to call him depressed but he was certainly, objectively subdued.
I have thought before – and these days have reinforced the thought – that dogs live wholly in the moment. They of course have memories but these might be properly characterised as sense memories: retrieving the appearance and especially the scent of someone who once petted them; retaining a few words of command; recognising the route to a place where they have been carefree; feeling that a meal is due. Tati has had to cope with a changing degree of sight. There was a day or two when he was effectively almost blind, particularly at night, and had to be led round the field. But he works at it, adjusting and compensating. When he returns home with impaired vision tomorrow, he will work with what he has rather than moping because of what he has not. Now that the antibiotics and soothing ointments have done their work and the pain and discomfort that afflicted him are lifted, he will soon get his mojo back. He will learn how to steer around the close hazards in the field and the house and how to cope with differing light levels.
The experience of watching a dog play the hand he is dealt makes one reflective. I have been thinking how the gifts that we humans have (and animals do not have) complicate as well as deepen our experience of existence. Because we have language, we have the means to articulate worry and anticipation, sympathy and intent. I have troubles of my own with my eyesight. Because I have language, I may learn about my condition and my prospects, my treatment and my options. Because I can describe my experiences, I retain them as narratives and so can assess and compare them in quite a detailed way. Unlike animals, humans do not live in the moment. Arguably we live far more in the past and future – I mean, simultaneously – than in the present.
To the question “What is mankind’s greatest invention or discovery?”, I have often thought the answer is not the conventional notion of fire or the wheel or the combustion engine or penicillin or reality television (joke) but the twofold skills that must be learned anew in every generation and by which we break free of nature and become humans: walking upright and talking. With these means, having made the wheel, we can stroll over to the next valley and tell the people there about it. By walking upright, we learn to ride upright and we free our forearms for tasks other than walking (making calls on our mobile phones, for instance). By using language, we create concepts and find the means of exploring and accounting for the world around us. These accomplishments are what Tati cannot do. Because he cannot stand and use his front paws and understand the notions of illness, disability, treatment and cure, he cannot medicate himself nor know to do so. I can do all these things but I cannot, like Tati, discard my known past or imagined future experiences and avoid speculation, calculation, hope and dread.
We are at once liberated and oppressed by our evolution. We have fashioned the world to fit with our upright stance so that most activities suit our facing forwards at head height, the hands free to perform tasks, the legs able to convey us or to execute manoeuvres. One price is that about a third of the human race suffers some degree of back pain or damage because it is not natural for us to walk, sit and do things upright; another is that many of us suffer from too much pressure on our legs and/or feet; and we fret about our armpits made sweaty because they are “unnaturally” kept less aerated than if we proceeded on all fours.
Because we have language, we have invented the notions of dismay, hope, resentment, loyalty, blame, admiration, mendacity, courage, love, hate and all the rest. These complications may have enriched but they have not necessarily lightened man’s short span. John Stuart Mill asked whether it was better to be a happy pig or an unhappy Socrates. The irony in the question is that only the unhappy Socrates would think to ask.
Friday, February 20, 2009
CRASH and BURN
I was never one of those boys who couldn’t get his hands on a toy without taking it to pieces. I found myself to be mildly diverted by gadgets but only by what they could achieve, not by how they achieved it. In adulthood, I have never been seen as a pair of legs emerging from under a motorcar, feet pointing upwards. Indeed, I never even learned to drive. I have signally failed to attest to my manhood by stripping down a motorbike or dismantling a circular saw, two implements wholly alien to me. Changing the bulb in a torch is challenge enough. Sometimes I can’t even get the house keys to work.
So computers hold little intrinsic delight for me. By temperament and aptitude, I am a quill and vellum man. A computer is my friend if it does what I want it to do – indeed, does what I have been led to expect it can do for me – but beyond that I don’t care to know what goes on under the bonnet. Nor am I much given to taking delight in wrestling with – with a view to besting – a dumb but fiendishly clever object such as a programmed computer appears to be.
In a related matter, I derive little sustenance from the instruction books that come with modern electronic appliances. Time was, manuals were booklets of modest length, illustrated with colour photographs and expressed in simple, step-by-step directions. Now they are vast tomes hung about with line drawings and daunting diagrams, translated from the Japanese into unidiomatic English (and several other languages too, presumably with equal lack of feel and ear) and stupefyingly banal in their scope. For instance, they usually begin with tens of pages warning you against such unlikely behaviour as throwing the appliance into the bath while plugged into the mains, using it as a surface on which to stand a Bunsen burner or cut flowers in a vase of water, and allowing your gerbils to fornicate within its workings. Frankly, there ought to be graded electrical goods, some sold to geeks, some to grown-ups who eschew jargon but don’t need to be told the facts of life, and some to idiots. Naturally, I gravitate to Group B.
By now, my smarter readers will have intuited that my recent silence in these environs has been occasioned by PC purgatory. Actually, very specifically not PC. I am a Mac man, entranced around a decade ago by the newly launched iMac that seemed so cool and sleek and desirable. The thing served me well for a few years and was succeeded by a more recent model some three years ago. Perhaps because there is so much that is pleasing about the iMac, perhaps also because as I get older I get more sedentary, I surely spend the larger part of my waking hours in front of its screen, destroying my posture, worsening my RSI and further eroding my already compromised eyesight. My work and much of my communication, information and leisure activity resides in the iMac.
So being cut off from it is a big deal. The problem arose from a failure of the machine to accept or be able to read DVDs. This was a peripheral annoyance but I had stuff I wanted to burn onto DVD and I wanted my pound of flesh from my gizmo. So I bought a different brand of blank DVD, one that I was assured should be readily embraced by an iMac, but the problem persisted. A succession of friends now volunteered their services. Though of differing ages, they were united in being, to a degree, instinctive techies and/or mackies, able immediately upon being confronted with a computing problem to switch into that lateral thinking mode that utterly escapes me.
Not that they have yet been able to prevail. Acting on some strong advocacy, I bought a new external hard drive and loaded everything portable that lived in my iMac onto it, prior to conducting a reinstall of my system. The whole process anyway filled me with gloom, but the gloom turned to despair when the iMac started to react to the external hard drive as if it were a corrupted DVD and refused to recognise it. So I was cut off from all my stuff: it was inaccessible on an external hard drive that my iMac reckoned did not exist. Franz Kafka, thou shouldst be living at this hour.
Well, the successive pals wrestled. Eventually the external HD and the iMac began talking to each other again, sufficiently for me to be able to reload at least the important stuff onto the iMac whose restored operating system was, the while, taking on all the software updates that had been lost in the reinstall. During the course of this, one of my teacher-pals enunciated a rule for wrestling with one’s home computer: “try everything, especially when you know you’re completely right. Then try the opposite”.
Of course “try everything” can be a dangerous philosophy. I know enough to know that, when the iMac again refuses to recognise the external HD, as it is now again so refusing, I should not click on the button that allow me to “initialise” the HD because if I do I will lose everything on it. Meanwhile, my system is crashing and freezing rather more frequently than hitherto, and some programs have been tricky to reactivate – getting the desktop mailer to communicate fully with my mail server was a work of many hours – and others just require a lot of dull repetition to bring them back up to speed – for instance, while all the music stored on iTunes appears to be safely retained, none of my playlists that organise the material has survived, so I am having to rebuild those, track by track. And the original problem – the refusal to read DVDs – remains.
It is the sheer volume of time that all this consumes that is the most frustrating aspect, only bearable of course if at the end of it all I have a computer that bends to my will: we’re a ways off yet (if I may use an American expression). And of course I have not attempted since disaster struck to post a new blog entry until now. Only if you are reading this can you know that this part at least of my computing life still functions. If you are not reading this, it perhaps means that the issues remain and are still worse that I feared. Or, of course, you may be doing something altogether more nourishing. How could you ...
I was never one of those boys who couldn’t get his hands on a toy without taking it to pieces. I found myself to be mildly diverted by gadgets but only by what they could achieve, not by how they achieved it. In adulthood, I have never been seen as a pair of legs emerging from under a motorcar, feet pointing upwards. Indeed, I never even learned to drive. I have signally failed to attest to my manhood by stripping down a motorbike or dismantling a circular saw, two implements wholly alien to me. Changing the bulb in a torch is challenge enough. Sometimes I can’t even get the house keys to work.
So computers hold little intrinsic delight for me. By temperament and aptitude, I am a quill and vellum man. A computer is my friend if it does what I want it to do – indeed, does what I have been led to expect it can do for me – but beyond that I don’t care to know what goes on under the bonnet. Nor am I much given to taking delight in wrestling with – with a view to besting – a dumb but fiendishly clever object such as a programmed computer appears to be.
In a related matter, I derive little sustenance from the instruction books that come with modern electronic appliances. Time was, manuals were booklets of modest length, illustrated with colour photographs and expressed in simple, step-by-step directions. Now they are vast tomes hung about with line drawings and daunting diagrams, translated from the Japanese into unidiomatic English (and several other languages too, presumably with equal lack of feel and ear) and stupefyingly banal in their scope. For instance, they usually begin with tens of pages warning you against such unlikely behaviour as throwing the appliance into the bath while plugged into the mains, using it as a surface on which to stand a Bunsen burner or cut flowers in a vase of water, and allowing your gerbils to fornicate within its workings. Frankly, there ought to be graded electrical goods, some sold to geeks, some to grown-ups who eschew jargon but don’t need to be told the facts of life, and some to idiots. Naturally, I gravitate to Group B.
By now, my smarter readers will have intuited that my recent silence in these environs has been occasioned by PC purgatory. Actually, very specifically not PC. I am a Mac man, entranced around a decade ago by the newly launched iMac that seemed so cool and sleek and desirable. The thing served me well for a few years and was succeeded by a more recent model some three years ago. Perhaps because there is so much that is pleasing about the iMac, perhaps also because as I get older I get more sedentary, I surely spend the larger part of my waking hours in front of its screen, destroying my posture, worsening my RSI and further eroding my already compromised eyesight. My work and much of my communication, information and leisure activity resides in the iMac.
So being cut off from it is a big deal. The problem arose from a failure of the machine to accept or be able to read DVDs. This was a peripheral annoyance but I had stuff I wanted to burn onto DVD and I wanted my pound of flesh from my gizmo. So I bought a different brand of blank DVD, one that I was assured should be readily embraced by an iMac, but the problem persisted. A succession of friends now volunteered their services. Though of differing ages, they were united in being, to a degree, instinctive techies and/or mackies, able immediately upon being confronted with a computing problem to switch into that lateral thinking mode that utterly escapes me.
Not that they have yet been able to prevail. Acting on some strong advocacy, I bought a new external hard drive and loaded everything portable that lived in my iMac onto it, prior to conducting a reinstall of my system. The whole process anyway filled me with gloom, but the gloom turned to despair when the iMac started to react to the external hard drive as if it were a corrupted DVD and refused to recognise it. So I was cut off from all my stuff: it was inaccessible on an external hard drive that my iMac reckoned did not exist. Franz Kafka, thou shouldst be living at this hour.
Well, the successive pals wrestled. Eventually the external HD and the iMac began talking to each other again, sufficiently for me to be able to reload at least the important stuff onto the iMac whose restored operating system was, the while, taking on all the software updates that had been lost in the reinstall. During the course of this, one of my teacher-pals enunciated a rule for wrestling with one’s home computer: “try everything, especially when you know you’re completely right. Then try the opposite”.
Of course “try everything” can be a dangerous philosophy. I know enough to know that, when the iMac again refuses to recognise the external HD, as it is now again so refusing, I should not click on the button that allow me to “initialise” the HD because if I do I will lose everything on it. Meanwhile, my system is crashing and freezing rather more frequently than hitherto, and some programs have been tricky to reactivate – getting the desktop mailer to communicate fully with my mail server was a work of many hours – and others just require a lot of dull repetition to bring them back up to speed – for instance, while all the music stored on iTunes appears to be safely retained, none of my playlists that organise the material has survived, so I am having to rebuild those, track by track. And the original problem – the refusal to read DVDs – remains.
It is the sheer volume of time that all this consumes that is the most frustrating aspect, only bearable of course if at the end of it all I have a computer that bends to my will: we’re a ways off yet (if I may use an American expression). And of course I have not attempted since disaster struck to post a new blog entry until now. Only if you are reading this can you know that this part at least of my computing life still functions. If you are not reading this, it perhaps means that the issues remain and are still worse that I feared. Or, of course, you may be doing something altogether more nourishing. How could you ...
Tuesday, February 03, 2009
The INTEREST in DISINTEREST
The story of the BBC and the appeal by the Disasters Emergency Committee for humanitarian aid to be distributed in Gaza has had a good run – almost a fortnight. My devoted readers, who naturally hold off from forming an opinion on such matters until I have instructed them as to what to think, may have grown impatient for my finding. I have stayed my hand because it seemed to me that the point I would make was so painfully obvious as to be superfluous. But no. No one, at least in my hearing or sight, has advanced my argument and so, if only out of compassion for my devotees, I unburden myself here.
The broad lines of the issue are readily sketched. Medication, surgical supplies and indeed safe places in which to tend wounds and save or amputate limbs; food; shelter; clothing and bedding; sanctuary; the basic infrastructure of trade and agriculture: all these and more are urgently required by the populace in Gaza. The DEC, a federation of 13 aid charities including Oxfam, the Red Cross, Save the Children and Christian Aid, readied a television appeal that, at the draft and shooting script stages, the BBC agreed to broadcast. Then the Corporation decided that, “to avoid any risk of compromising public confidence in the BBC’s impartiality in the context of a news story”, it would not after all record and carry the appeal. ITV cameras shot it instead and the short programme was carried by ITV, Channel 4 and Five. Sky followed suit with the BBC.
The DEC has been putting together these packages for years and the BBC has always been happy to transmit them. The first refusal to carry an appeal based on an objection concerning impartiality came from the BBC over the invasion of Lebanon by Israel in 2006, though it had broadcast the appeal for the Lebanese citizens whose homes were destroyed in the Israeli invasion of 1982. You can be sure that, both through official channels and by more informal means, various Jewish, pro-Israeli and Zionist interests will have worked on the BBC between 1982 and 2006.
Authoritative figures in politics and the Anglican church have weighed in to criticise the BBC’s decision. The Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, declared that “this is not an appeal by Hamas asking for arms but by the Disasters Emergency Committee asking for relief. By declining their request, the BBC has already taken sides and forsaken impartiality”. The former BBC foreign correspondent and former independent MP, Martin Bell, wrote that “the coverage of the 22-day conflict was flawed by a misconstruction of the concept of balance – as if a war were a general election and the main protagonists entitled to equal airtime”. The DEC chief executive, Brendan Gormley, had made a similar point: “The BBC seems to be confusing impartiality with equal airtime”. But even the Board of Deputies of British Jews noted that “there is no doubt that any appeal which simply seeks to raise money for innocent civilians should be applauded”.
Sir Michael Lyons, chairman of the BBC Trust, makes a fair point when he says that “the level and tone of some of the political comment is coming close to constituting undue interference in the editorial independence of the BBC”. Ministers such as Douglas Alexander and Hazel Blears would have done better to decline to be drawn into this matter.
The BBC rulebook states that “impartiality is and should remain the hallmark of the BBC … It is a legal requirement and should also be a source of pride”. It is with this text at his back that the Director-General, Mark Thompson, has led the BBC’s counter-attack and refused to budge.
But here’s my take on this. By what criteria is the BBC’s coverage of Gaza – or of any other issue where different factions contend – to be read as impartial? Most of us got most of our information about the Israeli assault from television and print news coverage. That there was widespread revulsion towards that assault among people with no tribal axe to grind is evident. By a week ago, the BBC had received 15,500 complaints about its stance. That is fewer than the number of complaints engendered by the Ross/Brand farrago, which says a good deal about contemporary public concerns (and indeed the mobilising power of The Daily Mail). But it is still an impressive response. Public confidence in the BBC’s editorial judgment has clearly eroded.
Is the conviction that the BBC has been over-zealous in applying its own rules in fact a result of sympathies among the public fostered by the BBC coverage that is supposed to be impartial? It was clear to me, as a regular viewer of BBC Television News, that a great deal more emphasis was placed day-by-day on the impact of missiles and then ground weapons fired into and in Gaza than on the impact of rockets sent into southern Israel by Hamas. But then that is only right and proper. The casualties in Gaza were a hundred times those among Israelis and many of the latter were invading military (some were victims of “friendly fire”). Had the BBC angled its coverage to favour Palestinians in the ratio 100:1, it would have been remarkable but would it have been merely just? Had the BBC made as much of the Israeli casualties as of the Palestinian, that indeed would have been a travesty of the facts.
But what are facts in these stories? In the first place, the facts that are presented by the reporters and their crews are necessarily selective. The information gleaned on the ground and passed on by reporters may be polluted by propaganda or may in subterranean ways of which the reporter is not even aware be skewed by the reporter’s own inclinations and prejudices. Furthermore, in recent years, very much more comment and “interpretation” has been permitted to – indeed, encouraged from – location reporters. These days, to-camera pieces in particular, narrated footage in general, often carry very little objective information. News reports tend to be largely a mishmash of rumour, conjecture, prophesy and received opinion.
How scrupulous, would you say, is the BBC on the matter of, for instance, Robert Mugabe’s government in Zimbabwe? President Mugabe himself would dismiss the BBC’s coverage as “all lies”. Indeed, because of these “lies”, the BBC is banished from the country. Our own feelings about Mugabe are substantially created by impressions formed on the basis of a very few verifiable facts – the rip-roaring inflation, the evidence of refugees leaving for South Africa – and a lot of subjective allegations and images – claims of repression, descriptions by Mugabe’s enemies of the continuing inability to agree on the composition of the new government, Mugabe’s own lofty disdain, anecdotal evidence of hardship and disease. But the “crisis” in Zimbabwe, you could argue, is a construct fashioned by BBC reporters. We want to think badly of Mugabe and the BBC plays to that prejudice. And what else do we have to go on?
What of other issues? Is the BBC impartial about racism, the fall of the Berlin Wall, gang culture, Andy Murray, climate change, Holocaust denial, paedophiles, the Queen? The BBC would no doubt wish to unbundle these matters and would then argue that it cannot be expected to stand neutral on illegality and that stances subsumable under notions of patriotism do not require disinterest. It ought, though, to accept that philosophical debate would be appropriate about each element, and that satisfying no one on anything is not exactly the highest common denominator to aim for.
What the BBC cannot be allowed to offer as an acceptable method is the one alluded to by Martin Bell, treating war – and by extension every issue – as though it were a general election. This is the philosophy of the man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Nor, as I have argued, does the BBC anyway uphold this kind of balance, however vaunted its fastidiousness. Even its coverage of parliamentary and party politics – the stuff that is most nearly like a general election and is most readily policed according to notions of equal or proportionate airtime – is plainly moulded by such subjective and highly partial notions as whether the government (or indeed each of the opposition parties) is “in trouble”. I am convinced that some wonk at, say, the Glasgow Media Centre, could soon come up with a chart that showed that by far the majority of news bulletin mentions of any figure in British politics could be listed under the general heading “in trouble”. After all, it is trouble – whether prime ministers up against it or children being killed or the south of England evidently paralysed by a heavily predicted snowfall – that gets the news editors’ cheeks up. In that sense, the row about the BBC’s refusal to broadcast the Gaza appeal was actually nothing more than a thundering good news story.
The story of the BBC and the appeal by the Disasters Emergency Committee for humanitarian aid to be distributed in Gaza has had a good run – almost a fortnight. My devoted readers, who naturally hold off from forming an opinion on such matters until I have instructed them as to what to think, may have grown impatient for my finding. I have stayed my hand because it seemed to me that the point I would make was so painfully obvious as to be superfluous. But no. No one, at least in my hearing or sight, has advanced my argument and so, if only out of compassion for my devotees, I unburden myself here.
The broad lines of the issue are readily sketched. Medication, surgical supplies and indeed safe places in which to tend wounds and save or amputate limbs; food; shelter; clothing and bedding; sanctuary; the basic infrastructure of trade and agriculture: all these and more are urgently required by the populace in Gaza. The DEC, a federation of 13 aid charities including Oxfam, the Red Cross, Save the Children and Christian Aid, readied a television appeal that, at the draft and shooting script stages, the BBC agreed to broadcast. Then the Corporation decided that, “to avoid any risk of compromising public confidence in the BBC’s impartiality in the context of a news story”, it would not after all record and carry the appeal. ITV cameras shot it instead and the short programme was carried by ITV, Channel 4 and Five. Sky followed suit with the BBC.
The DEC has been putting together these packages for years and the BBC has always been happy to transmit them. The first refusal to carry an appeal based on an objection concerning impartiality came from the BBC over the invasion of Lebanon by Israel in 2006, though it had broadcast the appeal for the Lebanese citizens whose homes were destroyed in the Israeli invasion of 1982. You can be sure that, both through official channels and by more informal means, various Jewish, pro-Israeli and Zionist interests will have worked on the BBC between 1982 and 2006.
Authoritative figures in politics and the Anglican church have weighed in to criticise the BBC’s decision. The Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, declared that “this is not an appeal by Hamas asking for arms but by the Disasters Emergency Committee asking for relief. By declining their request, the BBC has already taken sides and forsaken impartiality”. The former BBC foreign correspondent and former independent MP, Martin Bell, wrote that “the coverage of the 22-day conflict was flawed by a misconstruction of the concept of balance – as if a war were a general election and the main protagonists entitled to equal airtime”. The DEC chief executive, Brendan Gormley, had made a similar point: “The BBC seems to be confusing impartiality with equal airtime”. But even the Board of Deputies of British Jews noted that “there is no doubt that any appeal which simply seeks to raise money for innocent civilians should be applauded”.
Sir Michael Lyons, chairman of the BBC Trust, makes a fair point when he says that “the level and tone of some of the political comment is coming close to constituting undue interference in the editorial independence of the BBC”. Ministers such as Douglas Alexander and Hazel Blears would have done better to decline to be drawn into this matter.
The BBC rulebook states that “impartiality is and should remain the hallmark of the BBC … It is a legal requirement and should also be a source of pride”. It is with this text at his back that the Director-General, Mark Thompson, has led the BBC’s counter-attack and refused to budge.
But here’s my take on this. By what criteria is the BBC’s coverage of Gaza – or of any other issue where different factions contend – to be read as impartial? Most of us got most of our information about the Israeli assault from television and print news coverage. That there was widespread revulsion towards that assault among people with no tribal axe to grind is evident. By a week ago, the BBC had received 15,500 complaints about its stance. That is fewer than the number of complaints engendered by the Ross/Brand farrago, which says a good deal about contemporary public concerns (and indeed the mobilising power of The Daily Mail). But it is still an impressive response. Public confidence in the BBC’s editorial judgment has clearly eroded.
Is the conviction that the BBC has been over-zealous in applying its own rules in fact a result of sympathies among the public fostered by the BBC coverage that is supposed to be impartial? It was clear to me, as a regular viewer of BBC Television News, that a great deal more emphasis was placed day-by-day on the impact of missiles and then ground weapons fired into and in Gaza than on the impact of rockets sent into southern Israel by Hamas. But then that is only right and proper. The casualties in Gaza were a hundred times those among Israelis and many of the latter were invading military (some were victims of “friendly fire”). Had the BBC angled its coverage to favour Palestinians in the ratio 100:1, it would have been remarkable but would it have been merely just? Had the BBC made as much of the Israeli casualties as of the Palestinian, that indeed would have been a travesty of the facts.
But what are facts in these stories? In the first place, the facts that are presented by the reporters and their crews are necessarily selective. The information gleaned on the ground and passed on by reporters may be polluted by propaganda or may in subterranean ways of which the reporter is not even aware be skewed by the reporter’s own inclinations and prejudices. Furthermore, in recent years, very much more comment and “interpretation” has been permitted to – indeed, encouraged from – location reporters. These days, to-camera pieces in particular, narrated footage in general, often carry very little objective information. News reports tend to be largely a mishmash of rumour, conjecture, prophesy and received opinion.
How scrupulous, would you say, is the BBC on the matter of, for instance, Robert Mugabe’s government in Zimbabwe? President Mugabe himself would dismiss the BBC’s coverage as “all lies”. Indeed, because of these “lies”, the BBC is banished from the country. Our own feelings about Mugabe are substantially created by impressions formed on the basis of a very few verifiable facts – the rip-roaring inflation, the evidence of refugees leaving for South Africa – and a lot of subjective allegations and images – claims of repression, descriptions by Mugabe’s enemies of the continuing inability to agree on the composition of the new government, Mugabe’s own lofty disdain, anecdotal evidence of hardship and disease. But the “crisis” in Zimbabwe, you could argue, is a construct fashioned by BBC reporters. We want to think badly of Mugabe and the BBC plays to that prejudice. And what else do we have to go on?
What of other issues? Is the BBC impartial about racism, the fall of the Berlin Wall, gang culture, Andy Murray, climate change, Holocaust denial, paedophiles, the Queen? The BBC would no doubt wish to unbundle these matters and would then argue that it cannot be expected to stand neutral on illegality and that stances subsumable under notions of patriotism do not require disinterest. It ought, though, to accept that philosophical debate would be appropriate about each element, and that satisfying no one on anything is not exactly the highest common denominator to aim for.
What the BBC cannot be allowed to offer as an acceptable method is the one alluded to by Martin Bell, treating war – and by extension every issue – as though it were a general election. This is the philosophy of the man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Nor, as I have argued, does the BBC anyway uphold this kind of balance, however vaunted its fastidiousness. Even its coverage of parliamentary and party politics – the stuff that is most nearly like a general election and is most readily policed according to notions of equal or proportionate airtime – is plainly moulded by such subjective and highly partial notions as whether the government (or indeed each of the opposition parties) is “in trouble”. I am convinced that some wonk at, say, the Glasgow Media Centre, could soon come up with a chart that showed that by far the majority of news bulletin mentions of any figure in British politics could be listed under the general heading “in trouble”. After all, it is trouble – whether prime ministers up against it or children being killed or the south of England evidently paralysed by a heavily predicted snowfall – that gets the news editors’ cheeks up. In that sense, the row about the BBC’s refusal to broadcast the Gaza appeal was actually nothing more than a thundering good news story.
Monday, January 26, 2009
PEOPLE’s PRESIDENT
I have been reading Dreams from My Father. It seemed the right time to do it. Apart from the evidence that he could have carved a major career as a writer if he had decided against politics, what the book reveals is that Barack Obama is that rare thing in politics: a real human being who has led a useful life among ordinary people. I cannot think that, in the fourteen years since the book was first published when he was 33, he has wholly forgotten the ideals that fired him then or the practical lessons that he learned. I feel sure that the White House is in the keeping of a man who will know how to stay in touch with his roots for much of, if not for all of, his first term in office.
President Obama has begun well in many ways. He of course understands that everything about him is now different, while at the same time the Obama who toiled earnestly in obscurity still walks with him. He wears the dignity of office lightly yet with suitable solemnity. Compare and contrast with his immediate predecessor. His stony face when the garrulous Vice-President Biden attempted a risky wisecrack told its own story. He is not afraid to tackle head-on the grave crises that beset his nation and the world. We can continue to hope that, as a rule, he will be bold and creative, progressive and empathetic.
Yet he already has blood on his hands, in his first week. American jets have, at his order, attacked targets in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Civilians on either side of the border have died in these raids. The new American president immediately loses the moral advantage that he could have taken with him to meet Ehud Olmert. He too has killed children of a foreign land and he cannot even plead that he was defending his own borders. This is a pity. Was it avoidable? Yes, I rather think so.
No doubt during the campaign the then Senator Obama sounded an aggressive note in the matter of Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaida because he felt the need to do so. These are enemies that every American can agree on. To let Senator McCain run with the suggestion that a President Obama would be “soft” on these enemies might have been fatal to his chances. It was ever thus for candidates from the left and, as a result, governments from the left on both sides of the Atlantic have tended to be even more likely to become embroiled in war than governments from the right, as though anxious to show that, expectations to the contrary, they are not an easy touch.
But if President Obama is going to prove just as ready as Former President Bush to launch missiles without consulting other governments – in this case, either in Islamabad or in Kabul – we shall not feel that the change of government in Washington has been all gain.
Meanwhile, there has been plenty of speculation, much of it somewhat wild, about the future of the so-called special relationship between Washington and London. In some quarters, it has been mooted that Obama might downgrade Britain’s status because of the abominations of colonial rule that were visited upon his father’s homeland of Kenya during colonial rule, as described in Dreams from My Father. I think this is fanciful. Obama is nothing if not a realist. Every nation’s history is littered with atrocities and, if diplomacy were conducted always with one eye on past events, nothing would ever be achieved.
Then of course the press, ever ready to sneer at Gordon Brown, has been setting up the Prime Minister for what the papers will declare is “a snub” if he is not the first European leader to be welcomed to the Obama White House. Again, this is unrealistic. Of course Brown will want to feel that he is privy to Obama’s thinking on a regular basis and indeed Brown’s long experience of international affairs will not be superfluous to the new president. Brown has been on familiar terms with the evolving Washington scene all his adult life and it’s probably no exaggeration to suggest that he knows more key people in the American capital – certainly has known them for longer – than does Obama, if not Biden and Secretary Clinton.
What is more, Obama’s perspective is different from that of George W Bush and indeed that of Washington veterans. He is bound to put out feelers to a much wider range of nations than any president before him and with a different order of priorities. Brown need not feel overlooked – and, I suggest, nor will he – if Obama’s focus is more immediately on the middle and far east and then on Africa, Asia generally and Latin and South America, rather less on old alliances with Europe that perhaps do not require too much restating. In any case, Brown was the first European leader granted a phone conversation with the new president. That should suffice. I know – indeed, I say it often – that how it looks is often more important in politics than how it is but it’s also important to judge by results and, in that case, appearances sometimes have to go hang.
If Brown has a really useful function in the transatlantic relationship at present, it is to warn Obama that deepening the engagement in Afghanistan, even though he promised it during the campaign, is fraught with unanticipated danger. I have advocated it before and I will advocate it again. Keeping the peace in countries like Afghanistan and Iraq is much better done by UN forces than by the forces of nations that have vested interests in the outcome.
I have been reading Dreams from My Father. It seemed the right time to do it. Apart from the evidence that he could have carved a major career as a writer if he had decided against politics, what the book reveals is that Barack Obama is that rare thing in politics: a real human being who has led a useful life among ordinary people. I cannot think that, in the fourteen years since the book was first published when he was 33, he has wholly forgotten the ideals that fired him then or the practical lessons that he learned. I feel sure that the White House is in the keeping of a man who will know how to stay in touch with his roots for much of, if not for all of, his first term in office.
President Obama has begun well in many ways. He of course understands that everything about him is now different, while at the same time the Obama who toiled earnestly in obscurity still walks with him. He wears the dignity of office lightly yet with suitable solemnity. Compare and contrast with his immediate predecessor. His stony face when the garrulous Vice-President Biden attempted a risky wisecrack told its own story. He is not afraid to tackle head-on the grave crises that beset his nation and the world. We can continue to hope that, as a rule, he will be bold and creative, progressive and empathetic.
Yet he already has blood on his hands, in his first week. American jets have, at his order, attacked targets in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Civilians on either side of the border have died in these raids. The new American president immediately loses the moral advantage that he could have taken with him to meet Ehud Olmert. He too has killed children of a foreign land and he cannot even plead that he was defending his own borders. This is a pity. Was it avoidable? Yes, I rather think so.
No doubt during the campaign the then Senator Obama sounded an aggressive note in the matter of Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaida because he felt the need to do so. These are enemies that every American can agree on. To let Senator McCain run with the suggestion that a President Obama would be “soft” on these enemies might have been fatal to his chances. It was ever thus for candidates from the left and, as a result, governments from the left on both sides of the Atlantic have tended to be even more likely to become embroiled in war than governments from the right, as though anxious to show that, expectations to the contrary, they are not an easy touch.
But if President Obama is going to prove just as ready as Former President Bush to launch missiles without consulting other governments – in this case, either in Islamabad or in Kabul – we shall not feel that the change of government in Washington has been all gain.
Meanwhile, there has been plenty of speculation, much of it somewhat wild, about the future of the so-called special relationship between Washington and London. In some quarters, it has been mooted that Obama might downgrade Britain’s status because of the abominations of colonial rule that were visited upon his father’s homeland of Kenya during colonial rule, as described in Dreams from My Father. I think this is fanciful. Obama is nothing if not a realist. Every nation’s history is littered with atrocities and, if diplomacy were conducted always with one eye on past events, nothing would ever be achieved.
Then of course the press, ever ready to sneer at Gordon Brown, has been setting up the Prime Minister for what the papers will declare is “a snub” if he is not the first European leader to be welcomed to the Obama White House. Again, this is unrealistic. Of course Brown will want to feel that he is privy to Obama’s thinking on a regular basis and indeed Brown’s long experience of international affairs will not be superfluous to the new president. Brown has been on familiar terms with the evolving Washington scene all his adult life and it’s probably no exaggeration to suggest that he knows more key people in the American capital – certainly has known them for longer – than does Obama, if not Biden and Secretary Clinton.
What is more, Obama’s perspective is different from that of George W Bush and indeed that of Washington veterans. He is bound to put out feelers to a much wider range of nations than any president before him and with a different order of priorities. Brown need not feel overlooked – and, I suggest, nor will he – if Obama’s focus is more immediately on the middle and far east and then on Africa, Asia generally and Latin and South America, rather less on old alliances with Europe that perhaps do not require too much restating. In any case, Brown was the first European leader granted a phone conversation with the new president. That should suffice. I know – indeed, I say it often – that how it looks is often more important in politics than how it is but it’s also important to judge by results and, in that case, appearances sometimes have to go hang.
If Brown has a really useful function in the transatlantic relationship at present, it is to warn Obama that deepening the engagement in Afghanistan, even though he promised it during the campaign, is fraught with unanticipated danger. I have advocated it before and I will advocate it again. Keeping the peace in countries like Afghanistan and Iraq is much better done by UN forces than by the forces of nations that have vested interests in the outcome.
Thursday, January 15, 2009
AS FAR BACK AS I CAN REMEMBER
Rewind thirty years and a few more. I was then working as television editor at Time Out, the London listings magazine. TO was at the absolute zenith of its success and the magazine had considerable influence in the corridors of television power because it was virtually out on its own – the boom in press coverage of the medium was still in the future. I was working alongside Patricia Williams who was on the section before my return to the magazine to take up the television post. By rights she should have become section editor but Tony Elliott, the proprietor and sometime magazine editor, was notably leery of politically articulate women.
Happily, Pattie and I hit it off and, with complementary qualities, quickly became a successful team. We built up the amount of insider information that the section ran. A BBC producer told me that each week Television Centre went silent for half the morning while everybody digested the new Time Out television section. Someone at the mag cut out a headline from The Guardian about Bruce Forsyth – “the most important man in television” – and pinned it over my pigeonhole in the mail rack. Heady times.
It got headier. After barely a year, I was invited to join The Observer, which was greatly expanding its coverage of broadcasting. All the national newspapers were looking at TO’s success and learning the lessons. I was, I believe, the first TO journalist to “graduate” to Fleet Street, as the industry was still called in those days – by no means all the national newspapers were located on Fleet Street even then; indeed The Observer was on St Andrew’s Hill at Blackfriars.
The obvious succession was for Tony to pick Pattie, but once again he flinched at the thought of an editor who, as he saw it, talked a different language from him. Pattie sportingly suggested that seeing her as “too political” was a slight upon me. At any rate, Tony made a totally unexpected move. He appointed a beanpole newly graduated from Oxford as the next television editor. His name was John Wyver. Pattie was rapidly scooped up elsewhere: she was offered the editorship of the trade magazine Broadcast, which she gladly accepted and of which she made a fine fist. We all felt that this was one in the eye for Tony Elliott.
In my own role at The Observer, I inevitably came across young Wyver immediately and then regularly. It was natural to me to treat him with decency – after all, he wasn’t the cause of Pattie being passed over and anyway he was a fait accompli. He was well aware that his appointment was controversial and handled it and himself with grace and poise. I gave him all the help I could to find his feet.
Now fast forward to rather more than a decade ago. I was about to publish my critical biography of the television playwright Dennis Potter. It seemed to me that a television programme off the back of publication would be a good idea, both for the book and for, say, Channel 4. I had appeared on television in a few fleeting capacities but had never fronted a programme. Still, I considered myself wholly capable of doing so. During the intervening years, I had worked as a television producer for the BBC and some independent production companies – I had hardly been at The Observer a year before I was headhunted by the BBC as a producer, surely the least qualified person (as I observed at the time) to be a producer since the pioneering days of some 25 years earlier.
Meanwhile, there had been a fracture at Time Out, the political contradictions at its heart inevitably coming to the surface. Many of the staff, including Wyver, had left to found a rival publication, City Limits. It lasted a while but was never distinctive enough and eventually folded. In the new television world after the birth of C4, Wyver had formed a production company, Illuminations, which carved itself a useful and evidently pretty lucrative niche in arts programming. So it was Wyver whom I approached with the notion of a programme about Potter.
We did lunch. I hadn’t seen him in a long time and I was astonished. The beanpole had turned into Robert Maxwell. A vast expense-account stomach sloped away from his still bony shoulders. Underneath this weird disguise, John remained the same slightly bashful, rueful boy I remembered, still looking slightly shocked to be having his career. We chewed over the proposal and John told me to put it down on a sheet of paper and drop it in. Then he took me back to his suite of offices and, less boyish now, showed me round with a proprietorial air. At one point, he introduced me to a woman working at a computer screen and murmured “Truly my mentor”. “Oh,” I said to her, “then I’m very pleased to meet you”. “No,” snapped John, rather irritated as he evidently suspected that I was sending him up. “You are”. It was a wholly genuine misunderstanding on my part. I hadn’t seen it coming and it’s often hard to tell if people hold you in high regard, even when they do. We all know those occasions when everyone is celebrating someone newly dead and we wish the departed could hear this and wonder if she or he would credit it.
I posted off my proposal the next day (the time had yet to come when all communication was by email). John called me to acknowledge receipt and said he’d look it over and call me by the end of the week. After a fortnight, I phoned to enquire if he’d had a look at it yet and he said he was really sorry, he’d been very busy and he’d be sure to get back to me by the end of the following week. That was fourteen years ago. I have neither heard from him nor seen him since. Just occasionally, when I’m feeling a little bruised, I wonder how, if that’s how he looks after his mentor, he behaves towards his enemies.
Now let’s come into this century. My partner and I had moved out of London and I had set about the task of attracting some income by writing what I wanted to write rather than what an editor – in journalism or book publishing – wanted. One day I got a letter from a chap called Simon Farquhar who was writing a book about television drama. He said he had read my play Circle Line and loved it. This play began my professional career. I was at university when the BBC announced a playwriting competition open solely to college students. I had been going to write the play anyway and it was about a student: what could be more suitable? The play won the competition, was put into production and, after a delay while the BBC decided to fret about certain of its content, was broadcast in the first season of Play for Today in January 1971.
Simon could only read the script because that is all that survives of it. About three months after its sole transmission, the annual list came round to BBC heads of department from which they were obliged to choose which of their output from the year should be archived. The Head of Plays, Gerald Savory (back in the 1930s the white hope of drawing-room comedy with his one stage success George and Margaret), looked down the list and didn’t check Circle Line. So the master tape was duly wiped. A friend had made an audiotape of the broadcast – characteristically he’d missed the first few seconds – and I had the copy of that … somewhere … in a box.
I found that Simon had an astonishing encyclopaedic knowledge of vintage teledrama, all of it broadcast before his time: he was in his early 30s. We took to swapping anecdotes, firm opinions, memories on my side for research findings on his. I had always intended to write a book of my own on teledrama, a field on which I reckoned myself a bit of an expert. Simon both drew on and bolstered my own knowledge. And he was clearly in earnest about his book and the place of Circle Line. Though he’s never completed the book and so of course never published it, he showed me the chapter that treats of the play and it was extremely gratifying, not least because it was such an intelligent assessment.
Meanwhile, Simon’s own writing career was blossoming. He had a couple of radio plays produced and then the Royal Court bought his play Rainbow Kiss and gave it a run at the Theatre Upstairs. He was in his element. Knowing that I had an unproduced stage musical kicking around, he persuaded his leading man, who had some track record in the field, to make off with a copy of the show. This was clearly a mutually beneficial friendship (though, not too surprisingly, nothing has come of the actor having my musical).
A different thread comes into my story here, but it will interweave, so be patient. Some eighteen months ago, I was beginning to feel that there might be a television programme in my own burgeoning disenchantment with the medium that I had championed so keenly in my youth. I alighted on the title British Television: A Dim View. After all, every programme title these days has to feature a colon. It would be what is called in the biz an authored piece, which to say a report that is shaped by the reporter’s opinion rather than a (supposedly) impartial documentary with voice-over by an actor. I kicked the idea around for a while and then tried it out on my old compadre Pattie Williams.
During the intervening years, Pattie and I had drifted a little but had connected up again in the 1990s when I sketched out an idea for a series about the history of television drama. By this time, Pattie had her own production company, Case Television, which was very effective across a wide range of programming. The series was offered to BBC Knowledge, the forerunner of BBC4, but eventually declined. Now Pattie had just wound up her company but that, it seemed to me, was an asset in my quest to make a really hard-hitting programme about the parlous state of British television. I had no ambitions of my own in the medium, Pattie now had none either, so we could both offend anyone we wished without fear of career damage.
Dealing with Pattie over the proposal became a long drawn-out business and it took me fully a year finally to get her to admit that her heart wasn’t really in it. While I was waiting for her to come to this realisation, I wrote a new stage play, a four-hander revisiting the student life of the late 1960s that had informed Circle Line. It was called Observations from a Hill, after a number by a rock group that we adored at the time, Family. I was pleased with it and the few people I allowed to read it (including Simon Farquhar) were complimentary and supportive of it. But I couldn’t get any theatre to take it on.
Finally, Simon told me of a friend of his who was stretching his wings as a director. He had an in at the King’s Head Theatre in Islington and if he liked the play he might be able to persuade the artistic director to take it on. His name was Jason Lawson. I duly met up with Simon and Jason at the King’s Head where we watched the current production together. Jason was charming and very polite. He was about to start work on a new production but as soon as that was put to bed he would take a look at mine. At the end of the evening, he made off with a copy of my play. Meanwhile, Simon had told me a tale about how he owed a large sum of money and had been faced with threats of violence. He seemed truly scared. I immediately promised to pay off the debt for him but gave him to understand that he would have to repay me by the end of that year, 2008.
Jason duly read the play, said he liked it and thought it was very doable. I had hoped to see the production that he had been working on but he had never given me the details and it finally emerged that he was only the assistant director so seeing it would have taught me little. But we had a meeting to talk it over and I felt very bucked up. He asked all the right questions and he put his finger precisely on what was needed to improve the play. I came home and did some more work on it and posted off the rewrites. I was not alone in believing that I’d made an important difference to the play but Jason was not very forthcoming about what I sent him. However, he said that he would set up a reading with some actor friends.
That was last June. Since then all communication between us has been at my initiative and at greater and greater intervals. Jason remains elusive and nothing happens concerning the play. I sent him a Christmas card, which he did not reciprocate, and now I have given up on him.
Through the summer, the subject upon which Jason was most forthcoming was that of Simon Farquhar. I had not seen him since that evening at the King’s Head in March. His emails, at one time arriving almost daily, dried up. It turned out that he had moved house, though this had always been a regular occurrence. Jason, to whom it seemed he also owed money, tracked him down to a pub on the Hammersmith Embankment where he was said to be working. After many attempts to reach him by email, phone and text, I finally had a phone conversation with Simon in the summer, during which he enthused about his new job as a barman and reckoned the publican had taken to him, was appointing him assistant manager and was about to install him in the pub flat. Pub life, he maintained, was terrific grist to the mill of his writing, which he intended to resume before long. We didn’t speak of his debt to me.
Since then nothing. The deadline for his repayment to me has passed. A friend familiar with Rainbow Kiss reminded me that the main character in that play had unpaid debts and was threatened. Was Simon perhaps testing me to see if I was paying attention? Were he and Jason in cahoots to rob me? Well, tomorrow I go to town for a social event at the weekend and I shall take the opportunity to trawl the pubs of Hammersmith Embankment and find this ne’er-do-well. He will not find me sympathetic on this occasion.
After Pattie passed on British Television: A Dim View, I sought out an old chum from television days, Paul Kerr. I knew that, like so many of our generation, he was teaching media to university students – or, as he put it, teaching them to read and write – but he still took a bit of raising. We finally made contact and then met up. To no surprise on my part, we were of one mind on the state of British television. I was also glad to learn that his college was keen for him to continue to make occasional programmes. We agreed that I should set out some more of the proposal on paper and that he would look it over. I sent it off on October 7th and, after some chiding from me, he promised to read it in the first week of November. At the end of the week after that, I wrote to him expressing my disappointment at his silence. There was a distinct snappiness in his reply and since then he’s gone completely silent. I feel as if I am being punished.
In the summer, as the prospects for Observations from a Hilll dwindled, I came to the conclusion that I was going to retire from trying to make a living as a writer. Nothing since then has done other than reinforce that conclusion. The fact is that there is really nobody in the business in a position to determine that I get work whom I trust or on whom I feel that I can rely. Those very few organisations that are willing to consider unsolicited work, be it prose or drama, do not have readers who know how to read. In the early 1970s, I was trained to read scripts in the BBC Script Unit, a whole department set up to process unsolicited submissions. But of course that department was closed years ago and nobody now learns how to read, they just cast an unpractised eye over the work and guess at a response. I know from the rejection letters I receive – those few that risk any sort of assessment – that the reader has really no idea what a script assessment is. And frankly what is the point of trying to forge alliances with like-minded people in the business who then don’t have the time to deal with you, the kindness or courtesy to tell you where you stand or the conscience that would stop them treating you shabbily.
It was a hard and a quite emotional decision to give it all up. After all, to paraphrase Ray Liotta’s character at the outset of Scorsese’s Goodfellas: “As far back as I can remember, I wanted to be a writer”. I started to write my first novel when I was seven and I must have completed two whole, if rather short, chapters. That my first income from writing came from a play that I wrote at 21 was no surprise to me or to my parents. The surprise, I think, has been at how difficult it has been to sustain a career as a writer.
The rebuffs and disappointments over the 40 years since I was 21 are too long to rehearse in a blog posting and at present too painful as well. I have contemplated a book about failing as a writer – that’s not something I’ve read so I’m hoping it would have some prospect of at least being an original idea. I have its title – it’s from Stephen Sondheim’s wonderful song 'I’m Still Here', which the character Carlotta sings in Follies: “Then You Career from Career to Career”. But of course nobody will publish such a book. I’m not a comedian or a footballer or a graduate of the Big Brother house. And although such a book would be written out of my ever-sunny disposition, editors will reason that people don’t want to read about failure and the business doesn’t want books that suggest that those who run the business are less than brilliant. So I don’t suppose I will write it, even if I could afford to do so.
You see, I do have to earn. I am retraining, something that doesn’t come easy at my age but needs must. More about that can wait for a future posting. Meanwhile, I won’t stop writing the blog because it keeps my hand in. It’s just that the novels and plays and scripts and non-fiction books that are at various stages in my head will stay there, unwritten. I still have the pleasure of them and, if no one else ever does, that sure as hell ain’t my fault.
Rewind thirty years and a few more. I was then working as television editor at Time Out, the London listings magazine. TO was at the absolute zenith of its success and the magazine had considerable influence in the corridors of television power because it was virtually out on its own – the boom in press coverage of the medium was still in the future. I was working alongside Patricia Williams who was on the section before my return to the magazine to take up the television post. By rights she should have become section editor but Tony Elliott, the proprietor and sometime magazine editor, was notably leery of politically articulate women.
Happily, Pattie and I hit it off and, with complementary qualities, quickly became a successful team. We built up the amount of insider information that the section ran. A BBC producer told me that each week Television Centre went silent for half the morning while everybody digested the new Time Out television section. Someone at the mag cut out a headline from The Guardian about Bruce Forsyth – “the most important man in television” – and pinned it over my pigeonhole in the mail rack. Heady times.
It got headier. After barely a year, I was invited to join The Observer, which was greatly expanding its coverage of broadcasting. All the national newspapers were looking at TO’s success and learning the lessons. I was, I believe, the first TO journalist to “graduate” to Fleet Street, as the industry was still called in those days – by no means all the national newspapers were located on Fleet Street even then; indeed The Observer was on St Andrew’s Hill at Blackfriars.
The obvious succession was for Tony to pick Pattie, but once again he flinched at the thought of an editor who, as he saw it, talked a different language from him. Pattie sportingly suggested that seeing her as “too political” was a slight upon me. At any rate, Tony made a totally unexpected move. He appointed a beanpole newly graduated from Oxford as the next television editor. His name was John Wyver. Pattie was rapidly scooped up elsewhere: she was offered the editorship of the trade magazine Broadcast, which she gladly accepted and of which she made a fine fist. We all felt that this was one in the eye for Tony Elliott.
In my own role at The Observer, I inevitably came across young Wyver immediately and then regularly. It was natural to me to treat him with decency – after all, he wasn’t the cause of Pattie being passed over and anyway he was a fait accompli. He was well aware that his appointment was controversial and handled it and himself with grace and poise. I gave him all the help I could to find his feet.
Now fast forward to rather more than a decade ago. I was about to publish my critical biography of the television playwright Dennis Potter. It seemed to me that a television programme off the back of publication would be a good idea, both for the book and for, say, Channel 4. I had appeared on television in a few fleeting capacities but had never fronted a programme. Still, I considered myself wholly capable of doing so. During the intervening years, I had worked as a television producer for the BBC and some independent production companies – I had hardly been at The Observer a year before I was headhunted by the BBC as a producer, surely the least qualified person (as I observed at the time) to be a producer since the pioneering days of some 25 years earlier.
Meanwhile, there had been a fracture at Time Out, the political contradictions at its heart inevitably coming to the surface. Many of the staff, including Wyver, had left to found a rival publication, City Limits. It lasted a while but was never distinctive enough and eventually folded. In the new television world after the birth of C4, Wyver had formed a production company, Illuminations, which carved itself a useful and evidently pretty lucrative niche in arts programming. So it was Wyver whom I approached with the notion of a programme about Potter.
We did lunch. I hadn’t seen him in a long time and I was astonished. The beanpole had turned into Robert Maxwell. A vast expense-account stomach sloped away from his still bony shoulders. Underneath this weird disguise, John remained the same slightly bashful, rueful boy I remembered, still looking slightly shocked to be having his career. We chewed over the proposal and John told me to put it down on a sheet of paper and drop it in. Then he took me back to his suite of offices and, less boyish now, showed me round with a proprietorial air. At one point, he introduced me to a woman working at a computer screen and murmured “Truly my mentor”. “Oh,” I said to her, “then I’m very pleased to meet you”. “No,” snapped John, rather irritated as he evidently suspected that I was sending him up. “You are”. It was a wholly genuine misunderstanding on my part. I hadn’t seen it coming and it’s often hard to tell if people hold you in high regard, even when they do. We all know those occasions when everyone is celebrating someone newly dead and we wish the departed could hear this and wonder if she or he would credit it.
I posted off my proposal the next day (the time had yet to come when all communication was by email). John called me to acknowledge receipt and said he’d look it over and call me by the end of the week. After a fortnight, I phoned to enquire if he’d had a look at it yet and he said he was really sorry, he’d been very busy and he’d be sure to get back to me by the end of the following week. That was fourteen years ago. I have neither heard from him nor seen him since. Just occasionally, when I’m feeling a little bruised, I wonder how, if that’s how he looks after his mentor, he behaves towards his enemies.
Now let’s come into this century. My partner and I had moved out of London and I had set about the task of attracting some income by writing what I wanted to write rather than what an editor – in journalism or book publishing – wanted. One day I got a letter from a chap called Simon Farquhar who was writing a book about television drama. He said he had read my play Circle Line and loved it. This play began my professional career. I was at university when the BBC announced a playwriting competition open solely to college students. I had been going to write the play anyway and it was about a student: what could be more suitable? The play won the competition, was put into production and, after a delay while the BBC decided to fret about certain of its content, was broadcast in the first season of Play for Today in January 1971.
Simon could only read the script because that is all that survives of it. About three months after its sole transmission, the annual list came round to BBC heads of department from which they were obliged to choose which of their output from the year should be archived. The Head of Plays, Gerald Savory (back in the 1930s the white hope of drawing-room comedy with his one stage success George and Margaret), looked down the list and didn’t check Circle Line. So the master tape was duly wiped. A friend had made an audiotape of the broadcast – characteristically he’d missed the first few seconds – and I had the copy of that … somewhere … in a box.
I found that Simon had an astonishing encyclopaedic knowledge of vintage teledrama, all of it broadcast before his time: he was in his early 30s. We took to swapping anecdotes, firm opinions, memories on my side for research findings on his. I had always intended to write a book of my own on teledrama, a field on which I reckoned myself a bit of an expert. Simon both drew on and bolstered my own knowledge. And he was clearly in earnest about his book and the place of Circle Line. Though he’s never completed the book and so of course never published it, he showed me the chapter that treats of the play and it was extremely gratifying, not least because it was such an intelligent assessment.
Meanwhile, Simon’s own writing career was blossoming. He had a couple of radio plays produced and then the Royal Court bought his play Rainbow Kiss and gave it a run at the Theatre Upstairs. He was in his element. Knowing that I had an unproduced stage musical kicking around, he persuaded his leading man, who had some track record in the field, to make off with a copy of the show. This was clearly a mutually beneficial friendship (though, not too surprisingly, nothing has come of the actor having my musical).
A different thread comes into my story here, but it will interweave, so be patient. Some eighteen months ago, I was beginning to feel that there might be a television programme in my own burgeoning disenchantment with the medium that I had championed so keenly in my youth. I alighted on the title British Television: A Dim View. After all, every programme title these days has to feature a colon. It would be what is called in the biz an authored piece, which to say a report that is shaped by the reporter’s opinion rather than a (supposedly) impartial documentary with voice-over by an actor. I kicked the idea around for a while and then tried it out on my old compadre Pattie Williams.
During the intervening years, Pattie and I had drifted a little but had connected up again in the 1990s when I sketched out an idea for a series about the history of television drama. By this time, Pattie had her own production company, Case Television, which was very effective across a wide range of programming. The series was offered to BBC Knowledge, the forerunner of BBC4, but eventually declined. Now Pattie had just wound up her company but that, it seemed to me, was an asset in my quest to make a really hard-hitting programme about the parlous state of British television. I had no ambitions of my own in the medium, Pattie now had none either, so we could both offend anyone we wished without fear of career damage.
Dealing with Pattie over the proposal became a long drawn-out business and it took me fully a year finally to get her to admit that her heart wasn’t really in it. While I was waiting for her to come to this realisation, I wrote a new stage play, a four-hander revisiting the student life of the late 1960s that had informed Circle Line. It was called Observations from a Hill, after a number by a rock group that we adored at the time, Family. I was pleased with it and the few people I allowed to read it (including Simon Farquhar) were complimentary and supportive of it. But I couldn’t get any theatre to take it on.
Finally, Simon told me of a friend of his who was stretching his wings as a director. He had an in at the King’s Head Theatre in Islington and if he liked the play he might be able to persuade the artistic director to take it on. His name was Jason Lawson. I duly met up with Simon and Jason at the King’s Head where we watched the current production together. Jason was charming and very polite. He was about to start work on a new production but as soon as that was put to bed he would take a look at mine. At the end of the evening, he made off with a copy of my play. Meanwhile, Simon had told me a tale about how he owed a large sum of money and had been faced with threats of violence. He seemed truly scared. I immediately promised to pay off the debt for him but gave him to understand that he would have to repay me by the end of that year, 2008.
Jason duly read the play, said he liked it and thought it was very doable. I had hoped to see the production that he had been working on but he had never given me the details and it finally emerged that he was only the assistant director so seeing it would have taught me little. But we had a meeting to talk it over and I felt very bucked up. He asked all the right questions and he put his finger precisely on what was needed to improve the play. I came home and did some more work on it and posted off the rewrites. I was not alone in believing that I’d made an important difference to the play but Jason was not very forthcoming about what I sent him. However, he said that he would set up a reading with some actor friends.
That was last June. Since then all communication between us has been at my initiative and at greater and greater intervals. Jason remains elusive and nothing happens concerning the play. I sent him a Christmas card, which he did not reciprocate, and now I have given up on him.
Through the summer, the subject upon which Jason was most forthcoming was that of Simon Farquhar. I had not seen him since that evening at the King’s Head in March. His emails, at one time arriving almost daily, dried up. It turned out that he had moved house, though this had always been a regular occurrence. Jason, to whom it seemed he also owed money, tracked him down to a pub on the Hammersmith Embankment where he was said to be working. After many attempts to reach him by email, phone and text, I finally had a phone conversation with Simon in the summer, during which he enthused about his new job as a barman and reckoned the publican had taken to him, was appointing him assistant manager and was about to install him in the pub flat. Pub life, he maintained, was terrific grist to the mill of his writing, which he intended to resume before long. We didn’t speak of his debt to me.
Since then nothing. The deadline for his repayment to me has passed. A friend familiar with Rainbow Kiss reminded me that the main character in that play had unpaid debts and was threatened. Was Simon perhaps testing me to see if I was paying attention? Were he and Jason in cahoots to rob me? Well, tomorrow I go to town for a social event at the weekend and I shall take the opportunity to trawl the pubs of Hammersmith Embankment and find this ne’er-do-well. He will not find me sympathetic on this occasion.
After Pattie passed on British Television: A Dim View, I sought out an old chum from television days, Paul Kerr. I knew that, like so many of our generation, he was teaching media to university students – or, as he put it, teaching them to read and write – but he still took a bit of raising. We finally made contact and then met up. To no surprise on my part, we were of one mind on the state of British television. I was also glad to learn that his college was keen for him to continue to make occasional programmes. We agreed that I should set out some more of the proposal on paper and that he would look it over. I sent it off on October 7th and, after some chiding from me, he promised to read it in the first week of November. At the end of the week after that, I wrote to him expressing my disappointment at his silence. There was a distinct snappiness in his reply and since then he’s gone completely silent. I feel as if I am being punished.
In the summer, as the prospects for Observations from a Hilll dwindled, I came to the conclusion that I was going to retire from trying to make a living as a writer. Nothing since then has done other than reinforce that conclusion. The fact is that there is really nobody in the business in a position to determine that I get work whom I trust or on whom I feel that I can rely. Those very few organisations that are willing to consider unsolicited work, be it prose or drama, do not have readers who know how to read. In the early 1970s, I was trained to read scripts in the BBC Script Unit, a whole department set up to process unsolicited submissions. But of course that department was closed years ago and nobody now learns how to read, they just cast an unpractised eye over the work and guess at a response. I know from the rejection letters I receive – those few that risk any sort of assessment – that the reader has really no idea what a script assessment is. And frankly what is the point of trying to forge alliances with like-minded people in the business who then don’t have the time to deal with you, the kindness or courtesy to tell you where you stand or the conscience that would stop them treating you shabbily.
It was a hard and a quite emotional decision to give it all up. After all, to paraphrase Ray Liotta’s character at the outset of Scorsese’s Goodfellas: “As far back as I can remember, I wanted to be a writer”. I started to write my first novel when I was seven and I must have completed two whole, if rather short, chapters. That my first income from writing came from a play that I wrote at 21 was no surprise to me or to my parents. The surprise, I think, has been at how difficult it has been to sustain a career as a writer.
The rebuffs and disappointments over the 40 years since I was 21 are too long to rehearse in a blog posting and at present too painful as well. I have contemplated a book about failing as a writer – that’s not something I’ve read so I’m hoping it would have some prospect of at least being an original idea. I have its title – it’s from Stephen Sondheim’s wonderful song 'I’m Still Here', which the character Carlotta sings in Follies: “Then You Career from Career to Career”. But of course nobody will publish such a book. I’m not a comedian or a footballer or a graduate of the Big Brother house. And although such a book would be written out of my ever-sunny disposition, editors will reason that people don’t want to read about failure and the business doesn’t want books that suggest that those who run the business are less than brilliant. So I don’t suppose I will write it, even if I could afford to do so.
You see, I do have to earn. I am retraining, something that doesn’t come easy at my age but needs must. More about that can wait for a future posting. Meanwhile, I won’t stop writing the blog because it keeps my hand in. It’s just that the novels and plays and scripts and non-fiction books that are at various stages in my head will stay there, unwritten. I still have the pleasure of them and, if no one else ever does, that sure as hell ain’t my fault.
Wednesday, January 07, 2009
ISRAEL’s FINAL SOLUTION
What in hell does the Jerusalem government imagine itself to be achieving in Gaza? When it first began its aerial bombardment of the densely packed towns and cities where the Palestinians live, it reckoned it was “applying pressure” to Hamas, a mealy-mouthed kind of word-spinning. Now it says it means to “destroy” Hamas, but, it adds carefully, only militarily. Hamas, after all, is the legitimately elected government in Gaza. Matters of sovereignty of course arise in considering Israel’s ten days of relentless attack on its tiny neighbour but nobody is about to invoke the law in this matter, nobody anyway who has any clout in the corridors of power.
Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s thoughtful Middle East editor, has daily asked what Jerusalem will consider “a victory”. It’s a good question. In the year before Israeli fighters began attacking Gaza on December 27th, Hamas had been periodically firing rockets into Israel. Jerusalem says that it was to stop this rocketing that it attacked Gaza. So it must be assumed that Jerusalem will consider victory achieved when the rockets cease. In the ten days since Israel stirred, four Israeli civilians have died from Hamas rocket attacks. And that compares with how many in the preceding twelve months? Precisely one. On that basis, then, Israel’s assault has been a four-fold catastrophe for Israel itself. Up until now, in all conscience, Hamas rockets have been but an irritant, at least compared with a full-scale air and ground invasion.
Now I don’t know whether Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, is an intelligent man or not. It isn’t very easy to tell. But he must have anticipated that Hamas would not just lie down and let the Israeli tanks roll over them. He must have had it pointed out to him that the likelihood was that, as far as they possibly could, Hamas would continue to fire rockets into Israel because every rocket sent is a message declaring that Hamas is still there. So he went into this knowing that civilian casualties in Israel must rise. And he must have gone in with a pretty good idea that, if he really wished to destroy Hamas as a military force, this would not be the way in which such an aim could be achieved. Did he learn nothing from the Lebanon debacle two and a half years ago?
For Israel has spent ten days ensuring that thousands upon thousands of Arabs right across the Middle East now have a new and fiercely burning desire to destroy Israel. Olmert has cut Israel’s security off at the knees for generations to come. You can be sure that terrorist attacks will return in full measure to the streets of Israel, that hundreds of new suicide bombers are already signing up to be trained to inflict mayhem on public transport and in the streets and markets and meeting places of towns and cities from Haifa to Elat.
And what has Israel done for its own standing in the world? At best, you can say that it has tested to breaking point the remarkable international support it has enjoyed for 60 years. The retiring regime in Washington has predictably washed its hands of the matter, ostensibly blaming Hamas. The incoming president has very properly cleaved to the mantra that, as far as international affairs go, there can only be one president at a time. It is be hoped, however, that his representatives are making clear to the Jerusalem authorities that the blank cheque Israel has been scribbling upon for so long is no longer to be mistaken for the support of naked aggression. Gordon Brown’s remark today, that this is “the darkest moment yet for the Middle East”, strikes a wholly different note from that of Bush. David Miliband and Condoleeza Rice will have conferred. Washington will have known that London’s stance would differ from Bush’s. And Obama had better be ready to take a constructive and firm position, otherwise his first crisis will set a bad precedent for the rest of his term.
For, in one of history’s bitterest ironies, Israel is in serious danger of committing genocide in Gaza. When it talks of destroying Hamas, it may intend to draw a distinction between movement and people. But its actions, which it describes as “targeted”, are comprehensive. Today, Olmert has reportedly agreed to cooperate in allowing some food and medical supplies into Gaza. This, says his office, is “to prevent a humanitarian crisis”. Does he not hear the contradictions in that statement? Whence does he imagine the humanitarian crisis arises? From the wickedness of Hamas governance of the territory?
Since Israel attacked Gaza, there have been five military deaths among the Israeli military. Three of those, the majority, were as a result of what is known as friendly fire. So Israel has lost a total of six citizens at the hands of Palestinian aggression, none of them (if you think this important) women or children. This is an agreed figure. No two people are going to agree about Palestinian deaths. The Israeli assessment will be on the low side inevitably, just as Hamas will put it high. But by any objective count, it must be 600. A lot more than six. A hundred times more.
Hamas accuses Israel of indiscriminately attacking homes, mosques, refugee camps and shops. Today, three schools were bombarded by Israeli tanks and so inevitably many of the casualties were children. Jerusalem says that Hamas is responsible for this because it locates its rocket launchers in residential areas. It says that it drops leaflets warning civilians to leave. This is cruelly disingenuous. If an armed bank robber grabs a baby and tries to flee the bank, does the police marksman calculatedly shoot the baby? And where would Jerusalem have the rocket launchers sited? On open ground? It is unusual for any participants in conflict to go out of their way to make things more clear-cut for the enemy. Hamas might say in response: bring the Knesset nearer to Gaza’s border and dismantle the security around ministers so that we can kill them, then we will not need to spray rockets around Israel. No less fanciful, I venture.
Israel has a choice here. It could forbear bombing and shooting up civilians. There is no imperative in its relations with Hamas that says Israel must murder hundreds of people in order to hit at a few dozen militants. Israel could resort to diplomacy. It does not do so because the government imagines that its credit with the nations that matter is bottomless. I hope President Obama stands ready to disabuse them.
And those three schools attacked today: all were UN-administered schools, flying the UN flag. Does Israel have no regard for any authority other than its own? I hope the general assembly votes to throw Israel out of the UN and institutes war crime proceedings in the international courts of justice. But no such thing will occur unless Obama proposes a very different approach within the security council.
When you take a position about an issue, you are apt to be accused of bias. I write what I do from this perspective: I have friends in Israel about whom I care very much and many more friends who have family and friends of their own in Israel. I have none in any Arab country. I have visited Israel, Egypt and Iran. Anybody who has read much on this blog or who cares to trawl back will know that I am Islam’s foe and would dearly wish to see that barbarous bigotry banished from the face of the earth. None of that persuades me that what Israel is now doing is right. Or – perhaps more importantly – is wise.
What in hell does the Jerusalem government imagine itself to be achieving in Gaza? When it first began its aerial bombardment of the densely packed towns and cities where the Palestinians live, it reckoned it was “applying pressure” to Hamas, a mealy-mouthed kind of word-spinning. Now it says it means to “destroy” Hamas, but, it adds carefully, only militarily. Hamas, after all, is the legitimately elected government in Gaza. Matters of sovereignty of course arise in considering Israel’s ten days of relentless attack on its tiny neighbour but nobody is about to invoke the law in this matter, nobody anyway who has any clout in the corridors of power.
Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s thoughtful Middle East editor, has daily asked what Jerusalem will consider “a victory”. It’s a good question. In the year before Israeli fighters began attacking Gaza on December 27th, Hamas had been periodically firing rockets into Israel. Jerusalem says that it was to stop this rocketing that it attacked Gaza. So it must be assumed that Jerusalem will consider victory achieved when the rockets cease. In the ten days since Israel stirred, four Israeli civilians have died from Hamas rocket attacks. And that compares with how many in the preceding twelve months? Precisely one. On that basis, then, Israel’s assault has been a four-fold catastrophe for Israel itself. Up until now, in all conscience, Hamas rockets have been but an irritant, at least compared with a full-scale air and ground invasion.
Now I don’t know whether Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, is an intelligent man or not. It isn’t very easy to tell. But he must have anticipated that Hamas would not just lie down and let the Israeli tanks roll over them. He must have had it pointed out to him that the likelihood was that, as far as they possibly could, Hamas would continue to fire rockets into Israel because every rocket sent is a message declaring that Hamas is still there. So he went into this knowing that civilian casualties in Israel must rise. And he must have gone in with a pretty good idea that, if he really wished to destroy Hamas as a military force, this would not be the way in which such an aim could be achieved. Did he learn nothing from the Lebanon debacle two and a half years ago?
For Israel has spent ten days ensuring that thousands upon thousands of Arabs right across the Middle East now have a new and fiercely burning desire to destroy Israel. Olmert has cut Israel’s security off at the knees for generations to come. You can be sure that terrorist attacks will return in full measure to the streets of Israel, that hundreds of new suicide bombers are already signing up to be trained to inflict mayhem on public transport and in the streets and markets and meeting places of towns and cities from Haifa to Elat.
And what has Israel done for its own standing in the world? At best, you can say that it has tested to breaking point the remarkable international support it has enjoyed for 60 years. The retiring regime in Washington has predictably washed its hands of the matter, ostensibly blaming Hamas. The incoming president has very properly cleaved to the mantra that, as far as international affairs go, there can only be one president at a time. It is be hoped, however, that his representatives are making clear to the Jerusalem authorities that the blank cheque Israel has been scribbling upon for so long is no longer to be mistaken for the support of naked aggression. Gordon Brown’s remark today, that this is “the darkest moment yet for the Middle East”, strikes a wholly different note from that of Bush. David Miliband and Condoleeza Rice will have conferred. Washington will have known that London’s stance would differ from Bush’s. And Obama had better be ready to take a constructive and firm position, otherwise his first crisis will set a bad precedent for the rest of his term.
For, in one of history’s bitterest ironies, Israel is in serious danger of committing genocide in Gaza. When it talks of destroying Hamas, it may intend to draw a distinction between movement and people. But its actions, which it describes as “targeted”, are comprehensive. Today, Olmert has reportedly agreed to cooperate in allowing some food and medical supplies into Gaza. This, says his office, is “to prevent a humanitarian crisis”. Does he not hear the contradictions in that statement? Whence does he imagine the humanitarian crisis arises? From the wickedness of Hamas governance of the territory?
Since Israel attacked Gaza, there have been five military deaths among the Israeli military. Three of those, the majority, were as a result of what is known as friendly fire. So Israel has lost a total of six citizens at the hands of Palestinian aggression, none of them (if you think this important) women or children. This is an agreed figure. No two people are going to agree about Palestinian deaths. The Israeli assessment will be on the low side inevitably, just as Hamas will put it high. But by any objective count, it must be 600. A lot more than six. A hundred times more.
Hamas accuses Israel of indiscriminately attacking homes, mosques, refugee camps and shops. Today, three schools were bombarded by Israeli tanks and so inevitably many of the casualties were children. Jerusalem says that Hamas is responsible for this because it locates its rocket launchers in residential areas. It says that it drops leaflets warning civilians to leave. This is cruelly disingenuous. If an armed bank robber grabs a baby and tries to flee the bank, does the police marksman calculatedly shoot the baby? And where would Jerusalem have the rocket launchers sited? On open ground? It is unusual for any participants in conflict to go out of their way to make things more clear-cut for the enemy. Hamas might say in response: bring the Knesset nearer to Gaza’s border and dismantle the security around ministers so that we can kill them, then we will not need to spray rockets around Israel. No less fanciful, I venture.
Israel has a choice here. It could forbear bombing and shooting up civilians. There is no imperative in its relations with Hamas that says Israel must murder hundreds of people in order to hit at a few dozen militants. Israel could resort to diplomacy. It does not do so because the government imagines that its credit with the nations that matter is bottomless. I hope President Obama stands ready to disabuse them.
And those three schools attacked today: all were UN-administered schools, flying the UN flag. Does Israel have no regard for any authority other than its own? I hope the general assembly votes to throw Israel out of the UN and institutes war crime proceedings in the international courts of justice. But no such thing will occur unless Obama proposes a very different approach within the security council.
When you take a position about an issue, you are apt to be accused of bias. I write what I do from this perspective: I have friends in Israel about whom I care very much and many more friends who have family and friends of their own in Israel. I have none in any Arab country. I have visited Israel, Egypt and Iran. Anybody who has read much on this blog or who cares to trawl back will know that I am Islam’s foe and would dearly wish to see that barbarous bigotry banished from the face of the earth. None of that persuades me that what Israel is now doing is right. Or – perhaps more importantly – is wise.
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