There are books that change your mind about things. They can either persuade you that you were wrong in a previous belief, or they can at least push you to make up your mind about something which didn’t previously seem so certain. That’s what Jeremy Whittle’s Bad Blood did for me.
This doesn’t mean it’s actually a good book. In fact, the quality of Whittle’s writing is astounding only in the sense that it’s hard to believe he’s a journalist. ‘Would have benefited from extensive editing’ sums it up. A good start would be to eliminate the repetition of thoughts in successive chapters, and sometimes even in successive sentences.
Despite the writing, Whittle paints a compelling picture of the damage doping does to cycling in general and the Tour de France in particular. It has certainly made me abandon a certain ambivalence I used to have, summed up by the question ‘if you can’t eliminate doping, should we just legalise it, if only to re-establish a level playing field?’ No, we shouldn’t. If high performance requires people to do to their bodies what doping does to them, we should settle for lower performance.
That being said, Whittle also shows clearly that doping turns good riders into superstars, and superstars earn colossal sums both for themselves and for the sporting authorities. So we’re talking about an illegal but hugely remunerative activity, which sounds like the start of a pretty nasty conspiracy. The book demonstrates how anyone who tries to speak out against doping, cyclist or journalist, is systematically marginalised and silenced by other competitors with the connivance of the very authorities who should be stamping out the practice.
So doping is likely to be around a long time, with all the corruption it brings in its wake.
My initial reaction was one of depression. But then I realised that there really isn’t a wind so ill that it can blow no good at all. Turn it around: if doping is the key to the Tour de France, then the Tour de France becomes a huge, prestigious, annual tribute to the pharmaceutical industry. We all need pharmaceuticals at different times. But where are the equivalents of the Oscars, the literary prizes, the prestigious awards for this essential industry?
Well, now there is one.
Perhaps we should celebrate the fact. Perhaps, indeed, we should look at extending the model into other industries not currently recognised for all they do. For instance, in this country politicians regularly tell us that we need the armaments industry. It’s a major source of employment. Obviously, it leads to a lot of people being killed, but they’re a long way away whereas the unemployed are on our doorstep. It seems a small price to pay for all those jobs, here, at home.
So here is my modest proposal for a fitting tribute to this major benefactor of humanity. Or some of humanity. Let’s have a yearly, international sporting event to celebrate its successes. The main event should be a marathon, because arms production like war itself just goes on and on long beyond the point where you’d think we’d had enough. We could call it ‘The Tony Blair International Marathon in honour of the charitable use of lethal weapons’.
A subsidiary event, for the amateurs wishing to take part, could be the ‘Saddam Hussein Weapons of Mass Destruction fun run.’ It would be short and obscure and difficult for people to find.
And of course far from being banned, doping would be encouraged. That way we could further support one of our major industries while celebrating another.
See how reading the right book can encourage creative thinking?
Wednesday, 30 September 2009
Monday, 28 September 2009
The quality of mercy is not strained
It was curious to hear Roman Polanski’s people this morning, lining up the arguments for his being released from arrest in Switzerland without being extradited to the States.
But wouldn’t it be nice if we could be as generous towards a few more offenders? And let’s not forget Polanski is an offender: he did plead guilty.
Last weekend it was revealed that there are more former British soldiers in prison than there are present British soldiers serving in Afghanistan. We have a full-scale army of convicts.
It feels to me that the move against Polanski reflects something pretty wrong about our attitudes, but as the British prisons show, it is a problem of society generally and not just of one celebrity film director. If the case became the occasion to review the general problem of our attitude towards retribution, towards handling people who have been hurt far more badly than anyone ever should be, towards rehabilitating offenders, Polanski would have made a contribution to society at least as great as any of his films.
Some might say greater, but I’m not getting into a discussion of cinematic taste here.
- It’s been 32 years since the offence
- He’s lived an apparently blameless life since, and contributed major films to society (at least, if you like his style of film)
- The victim of the time is now saying the charges should be dropped
- Polanski’s family suffered horribly, his mother lost in Auschwitz, his father a camp survivor. Polanski himself spent from 1943 (when he was ten) to the end of the war on the run
- He lost his wife to the most brutal of murders in the Manson killings
But wouldn’t it be nice if we could be as generous towards a few more offenders? And let’s not forget Polanski is an offender: he did plead guilty.
Last weekend it was revealed that there are more former British soldiers in prison than there are present British soldiers serving in Afghanistan. We have a full-scale army of convicts.
It feels to me that the move against Polanski reflects something pretty wrong about our attitudes, but as the British prisons show, it is a problem of society generally and not just of one celebrity film director. If the case became the occasion to review the general problem of our attitude towards retribution, towards handling people who have been hurt far more badly than anyone ever should be, towards rehabilitating offenders, Polanski would have made a contribution to society at least as great as any of his films.
Some might say greater, but I’m not getting into a discussion of cinematic taste here.
Friday, 25 September 2009
Mali: the irony of it all
It’s fascinating to see the protests in Mali against the proposed new family law, which would in particular free women from the obligation to obey their husbands. Among leaders of the opposition were many women, speaking out against a law that would have enshrined their right to do so.
The real key to the opposition was that it removed a religious consideration from the law. The obligation of obedience on wives enshrined a principle of Islam; another provision would have made marriage a secular institution, not a religious one. That separation of religion from civil life is contentious in many Communities, such as 85% Moslem Mali, though it's a hallmark of the West. The first amendment of the US Constitution famously states that ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof’ though even in the US many are uncomfortable with that principle of separation between state and faith.
Curiously, the roots of the separation lie in the work of one of the greatest ever Islamic thinkers.
With the explosion of scientific work as a discipline independent of theology, the principle became fully established in the eighteenth century, the century of the US Constitution. The culmination of the process is perhaps best symbolised by the moment when Napoleon asked the scientist Laplace why his latest work contained no mention of God; Laplace replied ‘I had no need of that hypothesis’.
The road that led to Laplace had far earlier origins. Back in the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas remodelled Christian thought along Aristotelian lines. He saw the hand of God in the laws that governed the behaviour of the world itself, and not just in spiritual matters. That meant that it was theologically valid to study the physical universe and its principles in its own right, instead of confining oneself only to the study of the divine.
Thomas was declared a saint within a hundred years of his birth, but not before having been denounced as a heretic, because many in the Church so just how dangerous legitimising the study of nature might be: it could lead to views such as Laplace’s nearly six centuries later.
And where did Thomas learn his Aristotle? Above all from reading the commentaries of Averroes, the outstanding Muslim thinker, from the then great Arab city of Cordoba in Spain.
If Christians realised that the Aristotelian ideas voiced by Aquinas were dangerous, Moslems were equally aware of the danger when they were voiced by his master Averroes. Islam nipped his ideas in the bud, exiling him to North Africa and banning him from public office for much of his life. His ideas could only flourish outside his own religious community.
So what we’re seeing playing out in Mali this week is a cultural clash between the coreligionists of Averroes and the descendants of those who adopted his principles.
Isn’t irony one of the great joys of life?
The real key to the opposition was that it removed a religious consideration from the law. The obligation of obedience on wives enshrined a principle of Islam; another provision would have made marriage a secular institution, not a religious one. That separation of religion from civil life is contentious in many Communities, such as 85% Moslem Mali, though it's a hallmark of the West. The first amendment of the US Constitution famously states that ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof’ though even in the US many are uncomfortable with that principle of separation between state and faith.
Curiously, the roots of the separation lie in the work of one of the greatest ever Islamic thinkers.
With the explosion of scientific work as a discipline independent of theology, the principle became fully established in the eighteenth century, the century of the US Constitution. The culmination of the process is perhaps best symbolised by the moment when Napoleon asked the scientist Laplace why his latest work contained no mention of God; Laplace replied ‘I had no need of that hypothesis’.
The road that led to Laplace had far earlier origins. Back in the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas remodelled Christian thought along Aristotelian lines. He saw the hand of God in the laws that governed the behaviour of the world itself, and not just in spiritual matters. That meant that it was theologically valid to study the physical universe and its principles in its own right, instead of confining oneself only to the study of the divine.
Thomas was declared a saint within a hundred years of his birth, but not before having been denounced as a heretic, because many in the Church so just how dangerous legitimising the study of nature might be: it could lead to views such as Laplace’s nearly six centuries later.
And where did Thomas learn his Aristotle? Above all from reading the commentaries of Averroes, the outstanding Muslim thinker, from the then great Arab city of Cordoba in Spain.
If Christians realised that the Aristotelian ideas voiced by Aquinas were dangerous, Moslems were equally aware of the danger when they were voiced by his master Averroes. Islam nipped his ideas in the bud, exiling him to North Africa and banning him from public office for much of his life. His ideas could only flourish outside his own religious community.
So what we’re seeing playing out in Mali this week is a cultural clash between the coreligionists of Averroes and the descendants of those who adopted his principles.
Isn’t irony one of the great joys of life?
Wednesday, 23 September 2009
Frog dreams of Princess
So Valéry Giscard d’Estaing has written a new novel about a president of the French Republic’s love affair with a beautiful British princess. For those who have mercifully forgotten who VGE was, let me just say he is a former president of the French Republic. His princess character is called ‘Princess Pat’ and it hasn’t escaped the attention of our eagle-eyed journalists that she has points in common with our late lamented Princess Di.
Did VGE have an affair with her? Who knows. But there are moments when his behaviour is a little bizarre, to the point where one might wonder whether he isn’t a little delusional.
The most striking aspect of his presidency, in my memory, is that he referred to one of the more bloodthirsty African Dictators, Jean-Bédel Bokassa, as his ‘cousin’ and received some rather fine diamonds back from him as a gift.
More generally, his use of the name ‘d’Estaing’ with that aristocratic ‘d’ is highly dubious. It was taken over by his grandfather on the basis of the most tenuous of links to the noble family. I was told that on one occasion, when he was Finance Minister, the government decided to launch a new bond issue. The custom in France is to give this kind of initiative the name of the serving Finance Minister. De Gaulle, then President, was told that this particular one would be called the ‘Emprunt d’Estaing’, the d’Estaing loan. ‘An excellent loan name (nom d’emprunt),’ replied de Gaulle, an expression that suggested that the name itself was a loan to which the borrower had little right.
This didn’t stop VGE at a dinner in the Caribbean, to which he had invited British diplomatic staff, having the tables set out in a rather strange disposition that he explained corresponded to the position of the ships at a victory over the British obtained by his ‘ancestor’ Vice Admiral d’Estaing.
A man therefore of modesty and tact. One can’t help wondering whether the same qualities haven’t marked his latest literary endeavour.
Did VGE have an affair with her? Who knows. But there are moments when his behaviour is a little bizarre, to the point where one might wonder whether he isn’t a little delusional.
The most striking aspect of his presidency, in my memory, is that he referred to one of the more bloodthirsty African Dictators, Jean-Bédel Bokassa, as his ‘cousin’ and received some rather fine diamonds back from him as a gift.
More generally, his use of the name ‘d’Estaing’ with that aristocratic ‘d’ is highly dubious. It was taken over by his grandfather on the basis of the most tenuous of links to the noble family. I was told that on one occasion, when he was Finance Minister, the government decided to launch a new bond issue. The custom in France is to give this kind of initiative the name of the serving Finance Minister. De Gaulle, then President, was told that this particular one would be called the ‘Emprunt d’Estaing’, the d’Estaing loan. ‘An excellent loan name (nom d’emprunt),’ replied de Gaulle, an expression that suggested that the name itself was a loan to which the borrower had little right.
This didn’t stop VGE at a dinner in the Caribbean, to which he had invited British diplomatic staff, having the tables set out in a rather strange disposition that he explained corresponded to the position of the ships at a victory over the British obtained by his ‘ancestor’ Vice Admiral d’Estaing.
A man therefore of modesty and tact. One can’t help wondering whether the same qualities haven’t marked his latest literary endeavour.
Monday, 21 September 2009
Things to miss, things to share
There are experiences I’m glad to miss, others that I’m sorry not to witness.
In the first category was an incident a week or so ago when the driver of a French high-speed train (the famous TGV) saw the body of a man lying between the rails ahead. He couldn’t avoid running over him and, indeed, by the time he’d been able to stop, the driver had to walk back nearly a kilometre to investigate.
Quelle horreur! With what dread he has must have walked back up the line. Not something I would have liked to have to share.
To his relief, what he found when he got to the spot was not a dead body but an apparently unhurt but completely drunk young man in a semi-comatose state. He’d come close to giving a whole new meaning to the concept of ‘dying for a drink’.
Neither the driver nor the emergency services when they arrived were able to wake him, although at one point the young man did come round on his own, just long enough to open an eye and stick a finger up at the crowd around him. He then passed out again.
In Britain, we like understatement. I therefore particularly appreciated the response of the police to the event. They announced that they were going to give him the time to sober up and then invite him in to give, as the French expression has it, ‘explanations’ of the events that led to his being found unconscious on a TGV line.
Now there’s an experience I’m sorry to have had to miss. What fun it would have been, don’t you think, to be a fly on the wall during those explanations?
In the first category was an incident a week or so ago when the driver of a French high-speed train (the famous TGV) saw the body of a man lying between the rails ahead. He couldn’t avoid running over him and, indeed, by the time he’d been able to stop, the driver had to walk back nearly a kilometre to investigate.
Quelle horreur! With what dread he has must have walked back up the line. Not something I would have liked to have to share.
To his relief, what he found when he got to the spot was not a dead body but an apparently unhurt but completely drunk young man in a semi-comatose state. He’d come close to giving a whole new meaning to the concept of ‘dying for a drink’.
Neither the driver nor the emergency services when they arrived were able to wake him, although at one point the young man did come round on his own, just long enough to open an eye and stick a finger up at the crowd around him. He then passed out again.
In Britain, we like understatement. I therefore particularly appreciated the response of the police to the event. They announced that they were going to give him the time to sober up and then invite him in to give, as the French expression has it, ‘explanations’ of the events that led to his being found unconscious on a TGV line.
Now there’s an experience I’m sorry to have had to miss. What fun it would have been, don’t you think, to be a fly on the wall during those explanations?
Saturday, 19 September 2009
Good neighbours
It’s funny how nostalgia paints idyllic views of the past. Mining was never a pleasant occupation – it was the second most dangerous in Britain after deep sea fishing. A couple of visits down the pits in the seventies left me with a lasting memory of the lurid glow of the lights, the claustrophobia, the rivulets of sweat in the coal dust on the miners’ bodies, the noise and the terrible sight of seven hundred yards of earth falling five feet when a set of pit props was moved.
Nevertheless, I remember the image of peace and harmony that was painted by a documentary I once saw on a Welsh mining village where each evening at about 5:00 the men, home and clean after their day in the mine, would come and squat on the front door steps of their narrow houses, to smoke and chat. All gone now, of course: Mrs Thatcher who made so much of her desire to conserve traditions, tore the heart out of those communities when she wiped out coal mining as an industry, and they’ve not recovered to this day.
Still, some traditions are deeply anchored in the human psyche and though they may be uprooted in one place, they re-emerge in another.
Where we live in Stafford we’re blessed with excellent neighbours but cursed with north-facing gardens. With the strictly rationed amount of sunshine we tend to get, we can’t waste any of it by sitting facing away from the sun. In Danielle I have a most resourceful wife and so she has simply moved a couple of chairs round to the front of the house. Though this is the unenclosed, public side, that’s where she’s been enjoying as much as she can of a glorious September that has done so much to make up, in light and warmth, for the lamentable July and August we had this year. Again.
There she sits, reading or knitting. And our excellent neighbours have taken to gathering around. Knitting has caught on among them too, with even Jenny, at fifteen, working on some socks. Her mother Melanie and our other neighbour Becky are also keen. Honestly, at times it’s like the women knitting round the feet of the guillotine in the French revolution out there, with all the needles going.
Yesterday I was working 200 miles away, down in Kent. I was delighted to get home just in time to catch the last of Danielle’s enjoyment, with Becky, of their afternoon’s sun worship, before its object finally dipped below the horizon.
It’s wonderful to see a time-honoured tradition, of neighbours gathering outside their houses to talk and take their rest after the efforts of the day, in the companionship that makes a real community.
Mrs T. said there was no such thing as society, only individuals and families. But as usual she was wrong and I have living proof of it on my own doorstep.
Nevertheless, I remember the image of peace and harmony that was painted by a documentary I once saw on a Welsh mining village where each evening at about 5:00 the men, home and clean after their day in the mine, would come and squat on the front door steps of their narrow houses, to smoke and chat. All gone now, of course: Mrs Thatcher who made so much of her desire to conserve traditions, tore the heart out of those communities when she wiped out coal mining as an industry, and they’ve not recovered to this day.
Still, some traditions are deeply anchored in the human psyche and though they may be uprooted in one place, they re-emerge in another.
Where we live in Stafford we’re blessed with excellent neighbours but cursed with north-facing gardens. With the strictly rationed amount of sunshine we tend to get, we can’t waste any of it by sitting facing away from the sun. In Danielle I have a most resourceful wife and so she has simply moved a couple of chairs round to the front of the house. Though this is the unenclosed, public side, that’s where she’s been enjoying as much as she can of a glorious September that has done so much to make up, in light and warmth, for the lamentable July and August we had this year. Again.
There she sits, reading or knitting. And our excellent neighbours have taken to gathering around. Knitting has caught on among them too, with even Jenny, at fifteen, working on some socks. Her mother Melanie and our other neighbour Becky are also keen. Honestly, at times it’s like the women knitting round the feet of the guillotine in the French revolution out there, with all the needles going.
Yesterday I was working 200 miles away, down in Kent. I was delighted to get home just in time to catch the last of Danielle’s enjoyment, with Becky, of their afternoon’s sun worship, before its object finally dipped below the horizon.
It’s wonderful to see a time-honoured tradition, of neighbours gathering outside their houses to talk and take their rest after the efforts of the day, in the companionship that makes a real community.
Mrs T. said there was no such thing as society, only individuals and families. But as usual she was wrong and I have living proof of it on my own doorstep.
Thursday, 17 September 2009
How the City got it right
The fact that there are clear signs of the end of the recession is, naturally, excellent news in itself. The anxieties of the last few months may be beginning to fade and some of the people who suffered most, particularly those who lost their jobs, may have reason to start hoping again. Personally, however, I take particular satisfaction from the first indications of recovery because of a conversation I had a couple of months ago. Not that it really was a conversation: it was more of a one-sided rant in which all I could say was the occasional ‘Oh, I hardly think…’ or ‘it’s surely not as bad as that’.
The guy doing the talking was someone who ‘does something in the City’. I used to think that we used this kind of phrase because what happens in the City of London, or the financial sector anywhere, is so arcane that no ordinary mortal can understand it. It’s mysterious because we don’t know what they’re doing. Since the financial collapse, however, I’ve realised that it’s mysterious because they don’t know what they’re doing either. That doesn’t stop them posing as experts in anything to do with economics, so you think they’re talking knowledgeably when actually they’re just talking.
The one I met turned out to be a fund manager. That sounds like a job for people who handle money carefully. It turns out that they actually handle money with extreme carelessness and, unfortunately, it’s not just their money.
He painted me a picture of complete gloom. The country had been indebted to an impossible extent. An incompetent government had driven it to the brink of destruction. As a result it was now in a lamentable state. He didn’t actually say ‘lamentable state’. He used a fine old English term suggesting previous involvement in sexual activity, but that was what he meant.
It now turns out that actually our indebtedness isn’t quite as bad as all that. The housing market has stabilised and prices may even have begun to rise. Factory activity is picking up and workers are being taken on. The doom sayers have been gainsaid.
Of course, he’d never admit he was wrong. He would no doubt claim that he saw it all coming, but that underneath the apparent recovery there lie the seeds of the next and far more destructive catastrophe.
All this reminds me of a saying of Winston Churchill’s: ‘Politics is the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn't happen.’
Just as apposite a comment on City experts as on any politician, I’m sure.
The guy doing the talking was someone who ‘does something in the City’. I used to think that we used this kind of phrase because what happens in the City of London, or the financial sector anywhere, is so arcane that no ordinary mortal can understand it. It’s mysterious because we don’t know what they’re doing. Since the financial collapse, however, I’ve realised that it’s mysterious because they don’t know what they’re doing either. That doesn’t stop them posing as experts in anything to do with economics, so you think they’re talking knowledgeably when actually they’re just talking.
The one I met turned out to be a fund manager. That sounds like a job for people who handle money carefully. It turns out that they actually handle money with extreme carelessness and, unfortunately, it’s not just their money.
He painted me a picture of complete gloom. The country had been indebted to an impossible extent. An incompetent government had driven it to the brink of destruction. As a result it was now in a lamentable state. He didn’t actually say ‘lamentable state’. He used a fine old English term suggesting previous involvement in sexual activity, but that was what he meant.
It now turns out that actually our indebtedness isn’t quite as bad as all that. The housing market has stabilised and prices may even have begun to rise. Factory activity is picking up and workers are being taken on. The doom sayers have been gainsaid.
Of course, he’d never admit he was wrong. He would no doubt claim that he saw it all coming, but that underneath the apparent recovery there lie the seeds of the next and far more destructive catastrophe.
All this reminds me of a saying of Winston Churchill’s: ‘Politics is the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn't happen.’
Just as apposite a comment on City experts as on any politician, I’m sure.
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