Walking past Waterstone’s bookshop yesterday I noticed that our exciting recent literary phenomenon, Tony Blair’s A Journey, was on offer at half price.
Nothing expresses my reaction better than an exchange from that classic film Casablanca. Rick (Humphrey Bogart) is listening to Ugarte (Peter Lorre) trying to justify selling an exit visa to refugees who can’t afford to pay the price charged by the chief of police, Renault (Claude Raines):
Ugarte: Rick, think of all the poor devils who can’t meet Renault’s price. I get it for them for half. Is that so… parasitic?
Rick: I don’t mind a parasite. I object to a cut rate one.
Thursday, 9 September 2010
Tuesday, 7 September 2010
Love the bookburners as thyself
Don’t you just love Pastor Terry Jones? He’s the ‘Christian’ minister from Florida who’s organised a Koran-burning session on 11 September. This is because nine years ago on that day a few dozen people, out of the billion and a half to whom the Koran is sacred, mounted their terrorist attack on the Twin Towers in New York.
You’d think that a Christian Minister would have read as far as the Gospel of St Matthew (it’s the first), though maybe he never made it as far as chapter 7, verse 12, where we’re told to do unto others as we would have them do unto us. I’m not sure how this fits in with burning other peoples’ holy book.
Of course, I suppose that all I’m doing is accusing him of double standards. But then all of us have double standards, don’t we? I know I do. For example, I’m a strong believer in tolerance towards religions and their spokespeople. But when I come across someone like Pastor Terry Jones, I start to feel an irresistible urge to put a stake in the ground and start piling brushwood around it.
Anyone got a match?
You’d think that a Christian Minister would have read as far as the Gospel of St Matthew (it’s the first), though maybe he never made it as far as chapter 7, verse 12, where we’re told to do unto others as we would have them do unto us. I’m not sure how this fits in with burning other peoples’ holy book.
In any case, it isn’t clear to me that book-burning has a particularly attractive track record. Some fairly unappetising people have engaged in it.
 |
| Book burning: not the best of track records (Berlin, 10 May 1933) |
Anyone got a match?
Sunday, 5 September 2010
Never give up on distant friends
There was a time when people were born, grew up, lived and died in the same place. I remember Rabbi Hugo Gryn telling the story of a Jew who’d been born in Austria-Hungary, gone to school in the Ukraine and university in Poland, been persecuted in Germany, and lived out the rest of his life in the Soviet Union. ‘He moved around a lot,’ a journalist commented. ‘No – spent his whole life in the same village,’ came the reply.
Well, these days few of us stay still that long. We go from place to place doing either the same thing or, at best, the next: from one level of education to the next, one job to the next or one spouse to the next. The latter, by the way, is often curious to watch: it generally bears out Oscar Wilde’s view that a second marriage demonstrates the triumph of optimism over experience (for the record, my wife is an optimist, while I’m perfectly satisfied with the experience). Down the years, I’ve moved through a series of homes in wearying succession. My grandmother once told me I’d completely filled the pages for one letter in her address book.
Generally, those who do move around this way don’t usually do it by choice. We live like corks among the waves, buffeted first from one side and then from the other. One aspect of this existence which seems particularly sad is the way we make friends, grow close to them, and then have to part again. Recently, though, I’ve decided that it’s far less sad than I thought.
In the first place, there’s a pleasure that doesn’t fade in remembering times spent with friends. A statement on the lines of ‘Do you remember when we got stuck in the snow with Alice and George?’ usually leads to something much more enjoyable than the original experience itself. There are also incidents which were pleasurable both at the time and in recollection. While we were living in Germany, we were introduced for the first time to the celebration of the Chinese New Year – twice with a Chinese friend who will no doubt head back to China in time, and on three other occasions with friends who turned up at our place to prepare a meal for us, and who are now back in Singapore.
But there aren’t just pleasures of memory. Because ultimately friendship is about contact with someone, today, not just in the past. And that matters not just because it’s a pleasure, but because it’s an expression of what matters most in life: a link to others.
Friendship gives links that last. I say links deliberately, because bonds are something else: they bind, they tie us. That can be a source of just as much happiness – if you’re lucky, bonds with your family are invaluable, if you’re unlucky they’re murder (if Sartre was right and hell is other people, surely it’s at its most hellish with bitter relatives). So the friend you haven’t heard from for years remains a friend for all that: we saw a friend some months ago for the first time in seventeen years, and only a few months before her death. The real tragedy would have been to have missed the chance to see her again, and we’re both delighted to be in touch again with her widower.
We were able to see her again because the Internet brought us back together. It’s fashionable to knock contact via the Internet, but to me it’s a tremendous tool to maintain old relationships. We’ll exchange messages with a friend several times in a couple of weeks, and then perhaps won’t hear from them again for several months, but it’s wonderful to know that the exchange can happen again. It can even maintain a new kind of friendship: I had a message the other day from a friend, now in Shanghai, whom I’ve never met; Danielle corresponds regularly with a friend in Minnesota she’s never met.
Then one day someone will write and say ‘I can come and see you on such and such a day’, or you can say ‘I’ll be with you in two weeks.’ Soon you see a smile coming towards you at an airport or a station and a burst of recognition, not just of the person, but of the joy you had in being with them.
And the most amazing thing? With a good friend, at least, it’s as though you’d never been apart. You pick up the conversation as though it had been interrupted only minutes before. I’d like to say that it’s as pleasurable as slipping into a jacket that you love for its familiarity, except that’s only half of the feeling, because familiarity is comforting but not uplifting. The other half is the feeling you get when you hear a burst of music that you’d loved as a child, and you sense again the well-being it gave you then. Well-being isn’t so common that we should ignore any chance to experience it.
So keep in touch with your friends, however distant they may be. You never know when paths can cross again. And you must know as well as I do what a magical moment it is when they do.
Well, these days few of us stay still that long. We go from place to place doing either the same thing or, at best, the next: from one level of education to the next, one job to the next or one spouse to the next. The latter, by the way, is often curious to watch: it generally bears out Oscar Wilde’s view that a second marriage demonstrates the triumph of optimism over experience (for the record, my wife is an optimist, while I’m perfectly satisfied with the experience). Down the years, I’ve moved through a series of homes in wearying succession. My grandmother once told me I’d completely filled the pages for one letter in her address book.
Generally, those who do move around this way don’t usually do it by choice. We live like corks among the waves, buffeted first from one side and then from the other. One aspect of this existence which seems particularly sad is the way we make friends, grow close to them, and then have to part again. Recently, though, I’ve decided that it’s far less sad than I thought.
In the first place, there’s a pleasure that doesn’t fade in remembering times spent with friends. A statement on the lines of ‘Do you remember when we got stuck in the snow with Alice and George?’ usually leads to something much more enjoyable than the original experience itself. There are also incidents which were pleasurable both at the time and in recollection. While we were living in Germany, we were introduced for the first time to the celebration of the Chinese New Year – twice with a Chinese friend who will no doubt head back to China in time, and on three other occasions with friends who turned up at our place to prepare a meal for us, and who are now back in Singapore.
But there aren’t just pleasures of memory. Because ultimately friendship is about contact with someone, today, not just in the past. And that matters not just because it’s a pleasure, but because it’s an expression of what matters most in life: a link to others.
Friendship gives links that last. I say links deliberately, because bonds are something else: they bind, they tie us. That can be a source of just as much happiness – if you’re lucky, bonds with your family are invaluable, if you’re unlucky they’re murder (if Sartre was right and hell is other people, surely it’s at its most hellish with bitter relatives). So the friend you haven’t heard from for years remains a friend for all that: we saw a friend some months ago for the first time in seventeen years, and only a few months before her death. The real tragedy would have been to have missed the chance to see her again, and we’re both delighted to be in touch again with her widower.
We were able to see her again because the Internet brought us back together. It’s fashionable to knock contact via the Internet, but to me it’s a tremendous tool to maintain old relationships. We’ll exchange messages with a friend several times in a couple of weeks, and then perhaps won’t hear from them again for several months, but it’s wonderful to know that the exchange can happen again. It can even maintain a new kind of friendship: I had a message the other day from a friend, now in Shanghai, whom I’ve never met; Danielle corresponds regularly with a friend in Minnesota she’s never met.
Then one day someone will write and say ‘I can come and see you on such and such a day’, or you can say ‘I’ll be with you in two weeks.’ Soon you see a smile coming towards you at an airport or a station and a burst of recognition, not just of the person, but of the joy you had in being with them.
And the most amazing thing? With a good friend, at least, it’s as though you’d never been apart. You pick up the conversation as though it had been interrupted only minutes before. I’d like to say that it’s as pleasurable as slipping into a jacket that you love for its familiarity, except that’s only half of the feeling, because familiarity is comforting but not uplifting. The other half is the feeling you get when you hear a burst of music that you’d loved as a child, and you sense again the well-being it gave you then. Well-being isn’t so common that we should ignore any chance to experience it.
So keep in touch with your friends, however distant they may be. You never know when paths can cross again. And you must know as well as I do what a magical moment it is when they do.
Friday, 3 September 2010
The Italians
In a couple of weeks I’m due to sit an exam for a position as a translator for the EU. I have mixed feelings about the prospect. I’ve done translation work for years, but almost entirely out of French. The EU requires at least two languages of member states. Now German, alongside French, would probably open more doors, but Italian, the language of my country of birth, just comes more naturally to me. I had to offer it, if only so as to play to my strongest suit.
That leaves me with two problems to overcome.
The first is my approach to translation itself. My philosophy is to ask ‘what would a mother-tongue English speaker have said in the circumstances?’ This has proved an interesting task on occasions, as I’ve tried to express myself as an Anglophone psychiatrist or histopathologist might. This has led to exciting challenges since I’m neither a psychiatrist nor a histopathologist.
Now some people really like this approach (I once had a French computer scientist I’d translated telling me ‘I really like my written English style’). Others think it’s a real cheek on my part. They want their words, expressed their way, as far as English allows. I was turned down for a translator’s job on the grounds that my translations were too literary, which I think means that they weren’t literal enough (amusing distinction since both words have the same root).
The second problem is that it’s been years since I’ve translated out of Italian. Perhaps that doesn’t matter a lot. The crucial language is the target. I have sometimes worked into French, a language I thought I’d mastered, but the results were frankly sad. To adapt my principle of translation, I was expressing myself in French just as a mother-tongue English speaker would.
The source language you just need to understand. So what I have to do is get myself working and thinking in Italian a bit more – not something I’ve ever completely stopped doing, as I regard La Repubblica as one of the best newspapers out there, on a par with The Guardian. Of course, Berlusconi can’t stand La Repubblica which counts for an awful lot in my book.
Still, I think I need to read a lot more Italian over the next two weeks. In a Waterstone’s the other day, I saw a couple of books of Italian short stories with English facing translation. Ideal: good Italian writing with good translations from which I can clear up any vocabulary problems I may have, as well as pick up some clever translation hints (or will they be too literary?)
Anyway, I’ve been reading these stories with fascination. I’ve just been through three that were set in the years leading up to the Second World War or during the War itself. One by Elio Vittorini describes how he became a writer during the Fascist period. When his first novel appeared – the Fascists were less effective censors than the Nazis – he was hauled up in front of the Milan committee and threatened with expulsion from the Party, to which he replied that unfortunately they couldn’t expel him, since he’d already been expelled by the Fascists in Florence. The Florentine lot had made him pay a lot of money, to bring his subscriptions to the party up to date, since he hadn’t paid any since being forced to join while at school. Once he was paid up, they expelled him.
In Milan the Fascist leader ended up apologising to him, and pointing out that since he couldn’t expel him, there was no further action he could take.
Much sadder was the story by Mario Rigoni-Stern about fighting in Russia on 26 January 1943. Ten years to the day before my birth, making the story all the more poignant for me. It was curious to read a first-person narrative from someone who’d been fighting alongside the Germans, but the real impact was the ending: ‘That was January 26th, 1943. I parted with my dearest friends that day.’
I have to say that I would have translated ‘I miei piú cari amici mi hanno lasciato in quel giorno’ as ‘My dearest friends left me that day’, which is odd, because I’m preferring the literal to the literary, or perhaps saying they’re the same in this instance. Just me thinking I know best again, I suppose. Could cost me marks in the test.
Finally, I read a story by Beppe Fenoglio about a partisan group taking on a Fascist detachment. It wonderfully evokes the infinitely frustrating, and frightening, experience of fighting a much bigger and far better armed enemy, where landing any blow is a victory.
That reminded me of one of the finest moments in the Italian partisan war, the liberation of Genoa. The city showed extraordinary courage throughout the war. Towards the end, the Germans laid mines throughout the port so that they could blow it up when they left. The dockworkers would watch them during the day and sneak back at night, at peril of their lives, to remove the mines.
As for the partisans themselves, they were growing in numbers and confidence in the hills nearby. Eventually, they invested the city with such dynamism that on occasions they seized German artillery positions and turned the guns on the fleeing enemy.
The Allies made it to the City a few days after the partisans had liberated it. The American General commanding the troops met a British agent from the Special Operations Executive who had been fighting with the partisans. The American asked him to interpret for him.
They met the Mayor and the General asked the Englishman to say that he was proud to have been able to liberate the city which he was delighted to hand back to the Mayor’s civilian control. When the Englishman hesitated, the American asked him ‘what’s the matter? Can’t you translate that?’
Just at that moment there was a noise from the street outside, and they went over to the window. Winding down the middle of the road, between ranks of jeering Italian civilians, was an apparently endless column of German prisoners guarded by a handful of partisans. The men in the Mayor’s office watched for a few moments and the General turned to the Englishman.
‘OK,’ he said, ‘I understand your problem now. Tell him I congratulate him on having liberated his city and I’m proud to count myself among his allies.’
A happy ending. Not one I expect in two weeks time. I’ll be chasing one of 20 posts from a field of 200 candidates or more, the vast majority of whom will certainly be at least as well qualified as I am.
At least the process will have got me reading some interesting material that I wouldn’t otherwise have come across, and reminding me how much I like Italy and the Italians. Despite all that Berlusconi does to spoil their charm.
That leaves me with two problems to overcome.
The first is my approach to translation itself. My philosophy is to ask ‘what would a mother-tongue English speaker have said in the circumstances?’ This has proved an interesting task on occasions, as I’ve tried to express myself as an Anglophone psychiatrist or histopathologist might. This has led to exciting challenges since I’m neither a psychiatrist nor a histopathologist.
Now some people really like this approach (I once had a French computer scientist I’d translated telling me ‘I really like my written English style’). Others think it’s a real cheek on my part. They want their words, expressed their way, as far as English allows. I was turned down for a translator’s job on the grounds that my translations were too literary, which I think means that they weren’t literal enough (amusing distinction since both words have the same root).
The second problem is that it’s been years since I’ve translated out of Italian. Perhaps that doesn’t matter a lot. The crucial language is the target. I have sometimes worked into French, a language I thought I’d mastered, but the results were frankly sad. To adapt my principle of translation, I was expressing myself in French just as a mother-tongue English speaker would.
The source language you just need to understand. So what I have to do is get myself working and thinking in Italian a bit more – not something I’ve ever completely stopped doing, as I regard La Repubblica as one of the best newspapers out there, on a par with The Guardian. Of course, Berlusconi can’t stand La Repubblica which counts for an awful lot in my book.
Still, I think I need to read a lot more Italian over the next two weeks. In a Waterstone’s the other day, I saw a couple of books of Italian short stories with English facing translation. Ideal: good Italian writing with good translations from which I can clear up any vocabulary problems I may have, as well as pick up some clever translation hints (or will they be too literary?)
Anyway, I’ve been reading these stories with fascination. I’ve just been through three that were set in the years leading up to the Second World War or during the War itself. One by Elio Vittorini describes how he became a writer during the Fascist period. When his first novel appeared – the Fascists were less effective censors than the Nazis – he was hauled up in front of the Milan committee and threatened with expulsion from the Party, to which he replied that unfortunately they couldn’t expel him, since he’d already been expelled by the Fascists in Florence. The Florentine lot had made him pay a lot of money, to bring his subscriptions to the party up to date, since he hadn’t paid any since being forced to join while at school. Once he was paid up, they expelled him.
In Milan the Fascist leader ended up apologising to him, and pointing out that since he couldn’t expel him, there was no further action he could take.
Much sadder was the story by Mario Rigoni-Stern about fighting in Russia on 26 January 1943. Ten years to the day before my birth, making the story all the more poignant for me. It was curious to read a first-person narrative from someone who’d been fighting alongside the Germans, but the real impact was the ending: ‘That was January 26th, 1943. I parted with my dearest friends that day.’
I have to say that I would have translated ‘I miei piú cari amici mi hanno lasciato in quel giorno’ as ‘My dearest friends left me that day’, which is odd, because I’m preferring the literal to the literary, or perhaps saying they’re the same in this instance. Just me thinking I know best again, I suppose. Could cost me marks in the test.
Finally, I read a story by Beppe Fenoglio about a partisan group taking on a Fascist detachment. It wonderfully evokes the infinitely frustrating, and frightening, experience of fighting a much bigger and far better armed enemy, where landing any blow is a victory.
That reminded me of one of the finest moments in the Italian partisan war, the liberation of Genoa. The city showed extraordinary courage throughout the war. Towards the end, the Germans laid mines throughout the port so that they could blow it up when they left. The dockworkers would watch them during the day and sneak back at night, at peril of their lives, to remove the mines.
As for the partisans themselves, they were growing in numbers and confidence in the hills nearby. Eventually, they invested the city with such dynamism that on occasions they seized German artillery positions and turned the guns on the fleeing enemy.
The Allies made it to the City a few days after the partisans had liberated it. The American General commanding the troops met a British agent from the Special Operations Executive who had been fighting with the partisans. The American asked him to interpret for him.
They met the Mayor and the General asked the Englishman to say that he was proud to have been able to liberate the city which he was delighted to hand back to the Mayor’s civilian control. When the Englishman hesitated, the American asked him ‘what’s the matter? Can’t you translate that?’
Just at that moment there was a noise from the street outside, and they went over to the window. Winding down the middle of the road, between ranks of jeering Italian civilians, was an apparently endless column of German prisoners guarded by a handful of partisans. The men in the Mayor’s office watched for a few moments and the General turned to the Englishman.
‘OK,’ he said, ‘I understand your problem now. Tell him I congratulate him on having liberated his city and I’m proud to count myself among his allies.’
A happy ending. Not one I expect in two weeks time. I’ll be chasing one of 20 posts from a field of 200 candidates or more, the vast majority of whom will certainly be at least as well qualified as I am.
At least the process will have got me reading some interesting material that I wouldn’t otherwise have come across, and reminding me how much I like Italy and the Italians. Despite all that Berlusconi does to spoil their charm.
Tuesday, 31 August 2010
No mermaid, no murders, plenty of Aquavit
We’re just back from a long weekend with friends in Copenhagen. We liked the city, we liked the atmosphere, and we liked the Danes: friendly, warm and without exception fluent in English. That made me feel the way I do in Holland, acutely embarrassed at expecting people in their own country to communicate with me in my language, not theirs. The worst of it is that they do it so well: why, they were able to banter with us, for God’s sake.
Everyone who goes to Copenhagen naturally sees at least two things: the Tivoli gardens and the little mermaid. The Tivoli Gardens is an amusement park and I have to confess that none of us felt in the least bit inclined to try any of the rides. So we decided to save the entrance fee, particularly as my good friend Ronnie and I were of the view that the money would be better invested in Aquavit, from which we got a buzz much more suited to our temperaments.
Acquavit is one of those terms, like the French eau de vie or Gaelic usquebaugh (whisky) which just means ‘water of life’. Curious, isn't it, that we tend to think of strong spirits as an essential element for the good life? A waiter told us that Aquavit induced ‘a special kind of drunkenness’, which he presented as a desirable goal to pursue. Personally, it put me to sleep, but quite pleasantly, which suggests that whether or not it’s the water of life, it’s certainly effective as an anaesthetic against any of life’s pain.
As for the Little Mermaid, she simply wasn’t there. She’d gone to Shanghai for the world exhibition. I guess everyone needs to be able to travel away from time to time, and I suppose when you’re half a fish anyway, being stuck on a rock must get frustrating after a while.
Incidentally, the Danes had had the decency to set up a screen at the spot where she usually sits, with a live feed of the mermaid in Shanghai. You may find this hard to believe, but we weren't wildly keen to get across the city to watch a screen display of a statue some 8000 km away.
Everyone who goes to Copenhagen naturally sees at least two things: the Tivoli gardens and the little mermaid. The Tivoli Gardens is an amusement park and I have to confess that none of us felt in the least bit inclined to try any of the rides. So we decided to save the entrance fee, particularly as my good friend Ronnie and I were of the view that the money would be better invested in Aquavit, from which we got a buzz much more suited to our temperaments.
Acquavit is one of those terms, like the French eau de vie or Gaelic usquebaugh (whisky) which just means ‘water of life’. Curious, isn't it, that we tend to think of strong spirits as an essential element for the good life? A waiter told us that Aquavit induced ‘a special kind of drunkenness’, which he presented as a desirable goal to pursue. Personally, it put me to sleep, but quite pleasantly, which suggests that whether or not it’s the water of life, it’s certainly effective as an anaesthetic against any of life’s pain.
As for the Little Mermaid, she simply wasn’t there. She’d gone to Shanghai for the world exhibition. I guess everyone needs to be able to travel away from time to time, and I suppose when you’re half a fish anyway, being stuck on a rock must get frustrating after a while.
Incidentally, the Danes had had the decency to set up a screen at the spot where she usually sits, with a live feed of the mermaid in Shanghai. You may find this hard to believe, but we weren't wildly keen to get across the city to watch a screen display of a statue some 8000 km away.
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| With such defenders, why should Denmark tremble? |
So we didn’t see either of the key sights of the city, but we did see lots of other things. Soldiers in bear skin hats marching through the streets. Beautiful buildings. Lots of water, some of which we travelled along. We had plenty to enjoy.
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| A city that takes spirits and spirituality seriously: even the church spire looks like a corkscrew |
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| Water, water everywhere, but this wasn't the water of life we wanted to drink |
We even had a day out in Malmö. I didn’t realise just how close Sweden was. There’s a fabulous bridge across to the other side and, though we took passports just in case, no-one even checked our papers. It’s like the crossing between Strasbourg in France and Kehl in Germany: it takes you between nations that in the past fought brutal wars with each other over territory, and now allow free passage across agreed borders. Why, one wonders, did they fight each other in the first place? And why on earth do countries like the UK and, even more tiresomely, the US, make their immigration procedures so difficult? I don’t believe that the security problems of Denmark or Sweden are any worse.
 |
| The bridge to Malmö |
If we'd wanted to, we could have stayed on the train beyond Malmö and travelled to Ystad, but I was relieved to get off the train when we did. Do you watch the Wallander crime series on TV at all? The Swedish version is good entertainment (far better than the weak English version, where Kenneth Branagh just can't get the grim and unapproachable air of the Detective Inspector from Henning Mankell's novels).
The series is set in Ystad, on the surface a sleepy market town of 17,000 souls in Southern Sweden. It seems that it is in fact the homicide capital of the world. A new psychopath sets out on a trail of serial killing there every single week, leaving at least three bodies and often more. Fortunately, in Wallander and his team, the town also boasts one of the world’s most effective police forces. They successfully solve the crimes and arrest (or kill) the psychopath every single week, within the allotted hour and a half of the episode. I can tell you, it’s a tremendous relief each time we get to this happy resolution.
In any case, you can imagine that none of us was anxious to expose ourselves to the kind of risk that a visit to such a town implies. So we got off at Malmö instead, and had a good time there.
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| Malmö windmill: sticking to safer places than the crime centre at Ystad |
The danger to which over-indulgence in Aquavit might lead seemed quite thrill enough for one visit, without getting caught up in any murders.
Wednesday, 25 August 2010
The popular pastime of foot-shooting
If we conjure up a mental image of a target, I suppose most of us think of some kind of disk with rings of alternating colour around a bull’s eye at the centre. Perhaps a more appropriate image would be a human foot, since shooting yourself in the foot is the traditional metaphor for a self-inflicted wound. And it’s extraordinary how often we inflict them on ourselves, with decisions taken without properly considering all the facts, leading to months or years of regret as we struggle to correct them.
Picture a bridge across a river on which the calm of a late afternoon in September is beginning to settle.
On the bridge, there’s anything but calm. In the middle, carpenters have built a square enclosure, with doors facing either bank. Two men with ten companions each are due to meet here to try to overcome their mutual antagonism and unite against a third. The negotiations should have started at 3:00 and it’s a measure of their mutual distrust that they’re already two hours late.
In the event, the meeting takes minutes. One leader makes a gesture which someone who wants to pick a fight could interpret as threatening. There’s a shout and a man moves in and strikes a fatal blow with an axe. Contrary to the agreement, his side has left its door unlocked so more men pour through and the fighting becomes general.
The year was 1419 and the murdered leader was John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy. The man he had come to meet was his cousin the Dauphin or Crown Prince of France, later Charles VII. The third figure was one of England’s more successful soldier kings, Henry V, whose forces were at the gates of Paris.
The Dauphin had stood by while the assassination took place, and he had plenty of time to regret his inaction. The war ended with a French victory, but it took another 34 years. Why so long? He had forfeited the support of Burgundy which instead sided with England against him. Killing John might have seemed an expedient move to rid himself of a dangerous rival, but it cost him decades of struggle against an implacable enemy.
A century after the murder, King Francis I visited Burgundy where a monk showed him the skull of John the Fearless and pointed to the wound made by the axe. ‘Sire,’ he said, ‘this is the hole through which the English entered France.’
Roll forward some centuries. The Saville enquiry recently reported on the 1972 Bloody Sunday killings of 13 civilians by British paratroopers in Northern Ireland. The objective was to arrest troublemakers, which is a police job. Paratroopers are highly trained and fully equipped for one job only, killing people, which they do extremely well. Use paratroops instead of police and you really have no excuse for being surprised that the result is dead bodies.
The outcome of these events is summarised perfectly by the Saville report:
‘What happened on Bloody Sunday strengthened the Provisional IRA, increased nationalist resentment and hostility towards the Army and exacerbated the violent conflict of the years that followed. Bloody Sunday was a tragedy for the bereaved and the wounded, and a catastrophe for the people of Northern Ireland.’
Someone thought that teaching these people a sharp lesson was a good idea at the time. Looking back at the quarter century of violence that followed, we can see that perhaps it wasn’t that bright.
In Britain today, we’re living under a coalition government of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats. Now it has to be understood that the Conservative or Tory Party is the natural party of government here. They provided Prime Ministers for nearly two-thirds of the twentieth century, Labour and the Liberals having to share the rest. So the Tories define British politics: you vote for them or you vote against, which generally means either Labour or Liberal Democrat.
But by joining the Conservatives in government, the Liberal Democrats have closed off one of the options for an anti-Tory vote. So it really shouldn’t come as a surprise that their standing in the polls has collapsed and previous Liberal Democrat voters are flocking to Labour.
Joining the government may have seemed a great scheme to get close to power for the first time in ninety years. But right now it’s looking like a suicidal move from which it may take a generation for the party to recover.
It isn’t just the great and the good, or at any rate the historical and incompetent, who engage in this kind of foot-shooting.
Some years ago, while we were still living in Strasbourg, I persuaded my sales colleagues to hold a meeting there. Everyone had a great time. However, we were in a hotel some twenty minutes drive outside town. On one occasion, we drove there in a convoy of three cars that I was leading. It was pouring with rain and pitch black, and I was chatting away to my passengers so I missed my turning.
Now the obvious solution was to do a U-turn and get back onto the right road. What was the worst that could happen? I’d have had to admit that I’d made a mistake. Clearly the sensible option. For reasons that remain obscure to me, I didn’t take it and kept on driving, sure that I’d find another way that would avoid my blushes.
I didn’t. We spent the next two hours driving round Alsace, the region to which Strasbourg belongs. To be strictly honest, we weren’t even in Alsace all the time: at one point I realised that we had driven right into Lorraine, the region next door. By the end, my passengers were gasping to relieve themselves, but I wasn’t prepared to stop for fear of being lynched by the people in the cars behind.
My decision to press on had seemed a good idea at the time, but it wasn’t. I’d hoped to avoid embarrassment, but in fact I only made it worse. Like the Dauphin, like the men who sent in the paras on Bloody Sunday, like the Liberal Democrats propping up the Tories, what looked like a shortcut to success proved absolutely the opposite.
See what I mean? Bang – wow, that’s a couple of toes gone. Just let me take aim again: next time I might be able to take out the whole of the instep.
Picture a bridge across a river on which the calm of a late afternoon in September is beginning to settle.
On the bridge, there’s anything but calm. In the middle, carpenters have built a square enclosure, with doors facing either bank. Two men with ten companions each are due to meet here to try to overcome their mutual antagonism and unite against a third. The negotiations should have started at 3:00 and it’s a measure of their mutual distrust that they’re already two hours late.
In the event, the meeting takes minutes. One leader makes a gesture which someone who wants to pick a fight could interpret as threatening. There’s a shout and a man moves in and strikes a fatal blow with an axe. Contrary to the agreement, his side has left its door unlocked so more men pour through and the fighting becomes general.
The year was 1419 and the murdered leader was John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy. The man he had come to meet was his cousin the Dauphin or Crown Prince of France, later Charles VII. The third figure was one of England’s more successful soldier kings, Henry V, whose forces were at the gates of Paris.
The Dauphin had stood by while the assassination took place, and he had plenty of time to regret his inaction. The war ended with a French victory, but it took another 34 years. Why so long? He had forfeited the support of Burgundy which instead sided with England against him. Killing John might have seemed an expedient move to rid himself of a dangerous rival, but it cost him decades of struggle against an implacable enemy.
A century after the murder, King Francis I visited Burgundy where a monk showed him the skull of John the Fearless and pointed to the wound made by the axe. ‘Sire,’ he said, ‘this is the hole through which the English entered France.’
Roll forward some centuries. The Saville enquiry recently reported on the 1972 Bloody Sunday killings of 13 civilians by British paratroopers in Northern Ireland. The objective was to arrest troublemakers, which is a police job. Paratroopers are highly trained and fully equipped for one job only, killing people, which they do extremely well. Use paratroops instead of police and you really have no excuse for being surprised that the result is dead bodies.
The outcome of these events is summarised perfectly by the Saville report:
‘What happened on Bloody Sunday strengthened the Provisional IRA, increased nationalist resentment and hostility towards the Army and exacerbated the violent conflict of the years that followed. Bloody Sunday was a tragedy for the bereaved and the wounded, and a catastrophe for the people of Northern Ireland.’
Someone thought that teaching these people a sharp lesson was a good idea at the time. Looking back at the quarter century of violence that followed, we can see that perhaps it wasn’t that bright.
In Britain today, we’re living under a coalition government of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats. Now it has to be understood that the Conservative or Tory Party is the natural party of government here. They provided Prime Ministers for nearly two-thirds of the twentieth century, Labour and the Liberals having to share the rest. So the Tories define British politics: you vote for them or you vote against, which generally means either Labour or Liberal Democrat.
But by joining the Conservatives in government, the Liberal Democrats have closed off one of the options for an anti-Tory vote. So it really shouldn’t come as a surprise that their standing in the polls has collapsed and previous Liberal Democrat voters are flocking to Labour.
Joining the government may have seemed a great scheme to get close to power for the first time in ninety years. But right now it’s looking like a suicidal move from which it may take a generation for the party to recover.
It isn’t just the great and the good, or at any rate the historical and incompetent, who engage in this kind of foot-shooting.
Some years ago, while we were still living in Strasbourg, I persuaded my sales colleagues to hold a meeting there. Everyone had a great time. However, we were in a hotel some twenty minutes drive outside town. On one occasion, we drove there in a convoy of three cars that I was leading. It was pouring with rain and pitch black, and I was chatting away to my passengers so I missed my turning.
Now the obvious solution was to do a U-turn and get back onto the right road. What was the worst that could happen? I’d have had to admit that I’d made a mistake. Clearly the sensible option. For reasons that remain obscure to me, I didn’t take it and kept on driving, sure that I’d find another way that would avoid my blushes.
I didn’t. We spent the next two hours driving round Alsace, the region to which Strasbourg belongs. To be strictly honest, we weren’t even in Alsace all the time: at one point I realised that we had driven right into Lorraine, the region next door. By the end, my passengers were gasping to relieve themselves, but I wasn’t prepared to stop for fear of being lynched by the people in the cars behind.
My decision to press on had seemed a good idea at the time, but it wasn’t. I’d hoped to avoid embarrassment, but in fact I only made it worse. Like the Dauphin, like the men who sent in the paras on Bloody Sunday, like the Liberal Democrats propping up the Tories, what looked like a shortcut to success proved absolutely the opposite.
See what I mean? Bang – wow, that’s a couple of toes gone. Just let me take aim again: next time I might be able to take out the whole of the instep.
Friday, 20 August 2010
The best of friends
Being made redundant is, I’ll admit, a pretty depressing experience (particularly when it happens for the third time – why, I may soon have to start wondering whether I’ve been doing something wrong in my career, a thought that had never previously occurred to me). However, there are benefits too.
First of all, there’s the time for reflection offered by what I hope will turn out to be a brief period of unemployment. Then there’s the redundancy itself which can be quite a learning experience.
In my case this has led to my giving some thought to the nature of friendship.
My reflections were helped by listening to a discussion on the theme in an old episode of In Our Time. The participants started their review way back in classical antiquity.
Now I should say that I don’t always go along with the unquestioning admiration of all things Greek. For instance, Plato’s Lysis which I learned is devoted to the subject of friendship, rules out the attraction of opposites as a possible basis. This is because it would imply the good being attracted to the bad. This strikes me as a painfully formalistic and limited view of good: two people of opposite temperament can still both be good – there are many ways to be good. My way of being good may be the best way, but I’m tolerant and broad-minded enough to admit that yours may not be entirely without merit.
What really interested me was when they got onto the subject of Aristotle. He, it seems, distinguished three categories of friendship on the basis of utility, enjoyment or excellence. The problem with the first two is that as soon as the utility or enjoyment ends, so does the friendship – only the third endures.
Now this I can go along with. Utility friendship is clearly the kind of thing that exists in general between colleagues. At the lowest end of the scale, it’s forced – you oblige yourself to get on with people you’d probably go out of your way to avoid, left to your own devices. I confess I’m not good at that kind of artificial friendliness as people read my real feelings much too easily. I like to think that I have no patience with fools, but lots of people link to think that: after all, it’s a neatly disguised boast wrapped in contempt for others. Clearly, I think numerous people around me are fools, while thinking that I’m not a fool myself. Ironically, I’m probably at my most foolish when I get impatient with others who disagree me with me (and class themselves by that token with the fools).
Then there are the colleagues with whom one can have a real friendship. These are people one admires or who do outstanding work or with whom it’s just fun to work. Sadly, however, once we part company there’s little basis for the friendship to continue. It’s a pity, but I suspect before long all I’ll have of these utility friends is some pleasant memories and a sense of pride over some of our of things we achieved together.
This is the same as what happens with friends of enjoyment. Drinking friends or friends with whom one plays football are great until one realises that hangovers really aren’t much fun and running up and down the same pitch several dozen times is no way to spend an hour or two. When you go off to do something a bit more rational – which means more or less anything – you tend to lose touch with the old friends, some of them getting very old, who are still trying to cling on to the image of their youth and its pastimes.
Then there are the friends of excellence. These are the ones to whom you’re bound by an affection that’s mutual and unconditional: they’re your friends not because they’re cleverer or more skilful or more amusing than others but because they are who they are. No-one summarised that better than Michel de Montaigne, the sixteenth-century French writer. After his friend the poet Etienne de la Boétie died, he wrote if people pressed him to say why he loved la Boétie, he could find no better of way of replying than to say ‘because he was Etienne de la Boétie and I was Michel de Montaigne’.
Now that’s the kind of friendship that’s worth having. And I’m glad that I leave my former company with a few friendships of that strength and they won’t be broken by a mere inconvenience like redundancy.
First of all, there’s the time for reflection offered by what I hope will turn out to be a brief period of unemployment. Then there’s the redundancy itself which can be quite a learning experience.
In my case this has led to my giving some thought to the nature of friendship.
My reflections were helped by listening to a discussion on the theme in an old episode of In Our Time. The participants started their review way back in classical antiquity.
Now I should say that I don’t always go along with the unquestioning admiration of all things Greek. For instance, Plato’s Lysis which I learned is devoted to the subject of friendship, rules out the attraction of opposites as a possible basis. This is because it would imply the good being attracted to the bad. This strikes me as a painfully formalistic and limited view of good: two people of opposite temperament can still both be good – there are many ways to be good. My way of being good may be the best way, but I’m tolerant and broad-minded enough to admit that yours may not be entirely without merit.
What really interested me was when they got onto the subject of Aristotle. He, it seems, distinguished three categories of friendship on the basis of utility, enjoyment or excellence. The problem with the first two is that as soon as the utility or enjoyment ends, so does the friendship – only the third endures.
Now this I can go along with. Utility friendship is clearly the kind of thing that exists in general between colleagues. At the lowest end of the scale, it’s forced – you oblige yourself to get on with people you’d probably go out of your way to avoid, left to your own devices. I confess I’m not good at that kind of artificial friendliness as people read my real feelings much too easily. I like to think that I have no patience with fools, but lots of people link to think that: after all, it’s a neatly disguised boast wrapped in contempt for others. Clearly, I think numerous people around me are fools, while thinking that I’m not a fool myself. Ironically, I’m probably at my most foolish when I get impatient with others who disagree me with me (and class themselves by that token with the fools).
Then there are the colleagues with whom one can have a real friendship. These are people one admires or who do outstanding work or with whom it’s just fun to work. Sadly, however, once we part company there’s little basis for the friendship to continue. It’s a pity, but I suspect before long all I’ll have of these utility friends is some pleasant memories and a sense of pride over some of our of things we achieved together.
This is the same as what happens with friends of enjoyment. Drinking friends or friends with whom one plays football are great until one realises that hangovers really aren’t much fun and running up and down the same pitch several dozen times is no way to spend an hour or two. When you go off to do something a bit more rational – which means more or less anything – you tend to lose touch with the old friends, some of them getting very old, who are still trying to cling on to the image of their youth and its pastimes.
Then there are the friends of excellence. These are the ones to whom you’re bound by an affection that’s mutual and unconditional: they’re your friends not because they’re cleverer or more skilful or more amusing than others but because they are who they are. No-one summarised that better than Michel de Montaigne, the sixteenth-century French writer. After his friend the poet Etienne de la Boétie died, he wrote if people pressed him to say why he loved la Boétie, he could find no better of way of replying than to say ‘because he was Etienne de la Boétie and I was Michel de Montaigne’.
Now that’s the kind of friendship that’s worth having. And I’m glad that I leave my former company with a few friendships of that strength and they won’t be broken by a mere inconvenience like redundancy.
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