WOMAD and bucket lists

There are bucket lists and then there are reverse bucket lists.

Bucket lists contain the things one feels one really ought to do at least once before kicking the bucket. I’ve never been on a helicopter ride, or visited the Taj Mahal, or seen the Northern Lights. They’re all things I’d like to do before I get my visit from the grim reaper (even if he turns out to be rather a sympathetic character, as in the Terry Pratchett view).

On the other hand, I’ve also never visited a firing range or the state of Israel. The first of these I feel no desire whatever to do, the second is one of those things I don’t contemplate with any enthusiasm for the present or the future, but would quite like to have done in the past: I’d like to have already been to Israel, to know a little more about what it’s really like, but as far as any future plans are concerned, it’s probably pretty much at the bottom of my list of places to visit, outside war zones.

Really. Below Minsk, say, or even Pittsburgh. 

I’d actually quite like to go to those places, if only because my grandfather’s family came from Minsk, and Pittsburgh includes the place that was once known as the ‘Forks of the Ohio’ – George Washington was there, as a Militia officer supporting British military operations, and it still feels ironic to me that Washington once served under, rather than against, British colours.

The Forks of the Ohio.
Less built up in the time of loyal British subject, George Washington

Another thing I’ve never done is ever visit a theme park. I say that without pride, though with relief. I gave up going to amusement parks when I realised, aged 22, that rides I’d loved as a child simply made me sick as an adult – anything, in particular, that spun round and round. As for a ride that takes you to the edge of a death-defying fall and then plunges down, my vertigo leaves me regarding the experience as to be avoided at any cost. A source of pleasure? I’m not that masochistic.

That does leave me feeling guilty towards my poor, long-suffering wife. She was once deeply familiar with more or less every theme park from South West Germany (Europa Park) and North West England (Alton Towers), enduring in particular several visits to Disneyland Paris and the nearby Parc Asterix. Somehow I was always unavoidably elsewhere when any of these trips occurred.

My only grandchild to date has now reached an age where she doesn’t need her grandfather to accompany her to one of those ghastly places. Since my other two sons are proving slow at producing any further grandchildren for us, I expect to be able to plead age and infirmity by the time it comes to taking any of them if, indeed, any of them ever show up.

So visiting theme parks remains firmly on my reverse bucket list: things not to do this side of the grave. I’m making no dispositions for what may happen on the other side. I suspect, given the life I’ve led, that I might find myself condemned to an eternal theme park anyway.

But tomorrow an important box gets ticked off one or other of the lists. I’m still not sure which. Certainly, it wasn’t something I felt inclined to do – otherwise I might already have done it – but nor am I averse to doing it. Either way, it happens tomorrow.

I shall be off to my first ever music festival.

Gets ticked off a list tomorrow

WOMAD (World of Music, Arts and Dance, I’m told), near Malmesbury in Wiltshire. Danielle and I are going and meeting a bunch of friends there. I expect it’ll be fine, though probably not in the meteorological sense of fine: heavy rain’s forecast. But I understand that mud is part of the experience, so that’s probably appropriate.

Anyway, at least I’ll be able to tick it off the list. And by the time I get home, I’ll no doubt have decided which list it belonged to.

Luci's diary: it' so hot...

Luci’s Diary. It just keeps getting hotter. But playing's still fun. If you find the right companions, or pick the right element. 

July 2015

It’s got so hot! When I was just a little puppy, it was fine. I used to be really proud of my fine coat. It kept me feeling great while all the humans went around being miserable about the cold. But now I’m a big girl: 4.1 kilos, I’m told, and if you think that point-one isn’t important, think again: it puts me in the big dog category for Advocate flea treatment, and that matters.

And I don’t care that the silly owner of one of those stupidly oversized dogs – a Rottweiler or something – reckoned I was just the size of one of his dog’s meals. All that says is that there’s a lot too much of his dog.

Panting time.
I say pants to this hot weather.

Anyway, now I’m a big dog, it’s much too hot. I just hope it won’t go on getting hotter and hotter because, though human number 1 has got my fur clipped really short, I still find myself panting all the time when I’m out walking. And walking has to be my second favourite activity, after eating (you never know, I could make it to 4.2 kilos soon), so I don’t like it being made uncomfortable for me.

Well, I say second favourite. It’s probably third really. Playing with Misty has got to be second. He’s funny about that. Always complaining. He has this silly plaintive mew, and it fools the humans.

“Luci,” they say, “stop tormenting the cat.”

Yeah, right. I’ve got the measure of him. If I stop so-called “tormenting” him, he just comes running up to me, saying “go on, play with me, play with me again.” He just likes playing hard to get, that’s all there is to all the fuss he makes…

You think he's not enjoying himself?.
If I stop, he comes chasing me to start again

It’s not just with the cat that playing’s fun. It’s brilliant playing with puppies. And I’ve worked something out: humans have puppies too. They’re the smaller ones, the ones I always liked. Human puppies, if you know what I mean.

It turns out they’re good for a romp too.

We met some in the park the other day. I don’t know if everyone has this problem, but whenever we meet humans they always seem to want to touch me. They come up saying silly things like “oh, isn’t she cute?” (or worse still, “isn’t he cute?”) and then, inevitably, they follow it up with “can we stroke her?”

The puppy humans in the park were just the same. They all kept asking whether they could stroke me, as though it was any good asking human number 2 (he’d come along on my walk.) He said yes, but I shot off as soon as they got close. And – joy! bliss! ecstasy! – they started chasing me. Oh, wow, that was such a great time. Even in this terrible warm weather. Somehow I didn’t notice it so much, oddly enough. Funny how much you can put with when you’re having a good time.

It seems human puppies like playing as much
as the real ones do.

In any case, I’ve found out what’s good in this heat. Water. Go right into it and it cools you down like magic. Don’t think I mentioned before that I’d learned to swim. Well, I have, and it’s great.

It’ll be useful, too, if things just go on getting hotter.

Yup. That's me swimming.

Cameron the unbriefed, setting new standards in the idleness stakes

David Cameron is making up policy on ISIS “on the hoof” according to a senior member of his own party, the Chairman of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Defence, Julian Lewis.

Julian Lewis, leading Tory, concerned about Tory incoherence

He’s worried that the government’s Syria policy is incoherent as a result.

The only surprise is that Lewis might think this is somehow news. It has been Cameron’s way ever since he became Prime Minister: he blunders into situations, making up his position as he’s speaking, and then having to reverse himself later.

This is reminiscent of no one so much as Dubya. The former US president, now viewed in some quarters as officially the worst in history, couldn’t read a proper briefing paper. Staff therefore had to prepare summaries for him. He was never, therefore, fully briefed on any subject on which he chose to pronounce.

Cameron can, no doubt, read a briefing paper, but he shows no sign of actually taking their contents in. Instead, he prefers to improvise, perhaps partly in the belief that this shows his versatility and decisiveness: the man of action who can take clear-sighted decisions on the spur of the moment. In reality, sadly, all it does is set him up for humiliating retreat.

Early in his first premiership, he wandered into a 2011 meeting of the EU discussing steps to support the Euro, and applied his “veto”, only to discover that the Eurozone group could continue meeting without him, and leaving him only with the capacity to “veto” their use of EU offices for their discussions; with bad grace, he realised that this would just be acting like a dog in the manger, and grudgingly allowed them to do even that.

Equally, he decided to sell of Forestry Commission land, only to change his mind, or to stop supporting school sports, later announcing that he wouldn’t after all. And the list goes on.

Specifically on Syria, he decided in 2013 that Britain should support a US initiative to launch missile attacks against Assad’s government. That would have meant in effect supporting the jihadists who have, since, set up the so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

Fortunately, he was forced to back down by a parliamentary vote. As a result, the US too understood that the initiative was ill-conceived and dropped it. Later on, of course, the US started bombing ISIS instead, in effect helping the Assad government that they had previously planned to target.

David Cameron, man of action
A little more thought might be helpful

The latest complaints from Julian Lewis have been prompted by Cameron’s announcing this weekend that Britain should “step up and do more” in the campaign against ISIS. A comment that he has, as usual, made without seeming to have thought through the consequences or decided on the means. And, naturally, without consulting anybody else.

Lewis thinks this is incoherent. I’ll say. But what on earth can anyone expect if policy is being managed by a Prime Minister who seems to find it simply too much trouble to understand what he’s trying to address?

It’s amusing that the talk at the moment is all about the difficulties Labour is having electing a new leader. The real problem, it seems to me, is not in Labour but among the Conservatives. And their leader, sadly, is the present holder of the post of Prime Minister…

Soapy tricks, and how irritating they are

“Yes, you are better than my old boyfriend,” Donna Moss tells Josh Lyman in The West Wing, after a slightly flirtatious, bantering argument about whether he’s sufficiently concerned with her wellbeing or not.

The comparison with her former boyfriend isn’t that flattering. She’d been hospitalised after an car crash; on the way to see her, he’d stopped to have a drink with some friends. Josh does, indeed, feel obliged to relativise his superiority.

“I'm just saying if you were in an accident, I wouldn't stop for a beer.”

“If you were in an accident, I wouldn't stop for red lights,” she replies.

Bradley Whitford as Josh, Janel Moloney as Donna
in The West Wing

That strikes me as a pretty clear indication of where we're heading. However, this exchange takes place in episode 18 of season 2. And it isn’t until the closing episodes of the series, in season 7, that the couple finally forms.

The West Wing is one of my favourite series, so I’m not trying to run it down. But that piece of narrative strikes me as one of the worst devices that I associate with soaps: it’s deliberately intended to announce a destination which we’re then going to be delayed reaching for many, many hours more.

That happens a lot in series, where one of the major goals is to keep the story rolling for as long as possible, and you really don’t want to see things wrapped up too soon. One of the simplest devices used to extend the narrative is a failure to communicate. How often have you seen the scene where the male protagonist is seen out one night by the female, in the company of a particularly attractive woman? When they meet, she gives him no chance to explain himself, saying something like “you have nothing to explain. And I certainly don’t want to hear any lies.” 

That means it will be another 39 episodes before she realises that the attractive young woman was his sister.

One of the most annoying occurrences of this kind is at the of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. The failure of the male to find out the real relationship between the female and the man he sees her with costs them some forty or fifty years of happiness. Fortunately, it takes only a few pages in the book, so the pain for the reader or the spectator of the film lasts less long.

That example shows that it isn’t only in series that the device appears. Even in a relatively short piece, like a film, it’s used fairly frequently. Have you seen The Holiday, a gentle little feel-good romantic comedy? Twice, to make sure we don’t miss the point, Cameron Diaz, playing Amanda, picks up Jude Law’s mobile to see that he has an incoming call from someone with a woman’s name.

“Sophie, Olivia, Amanda,” she says, “busy guy.”

Fortunately, this is a film so it’s only going to be a matter of minutes before she finds out that Sophie and Olivia are his daughters, from a marriage ended by widowhood, not divorce (leaving him still the perfect man). In a series, it would have been at least five episodes, by which time the spectator would have been screaming, “ask him who they are, for God’s sake.” That, after all, is what any normal person would do; it just doesn’t suit the fiction.

My heart sinks every time I meet this kind of trick. I think of it as “soapy” because I feel it belongs more to the soap genre. That makes it exasperating when it appears in something I otherwise regard as good.

At the moment, for instance, in Britain Channel 4 is showing a skilfully constructed series called Humans. The central theme is that society has developed highly sophisticated humanoid robots; some of them now have consciousness. It’s fun and it’s compelling.

Humans. Compelling.
Particularly when it's not being soapy

So I was sorry when the young man who truly knows the conscious robots, having failed to contact one through his computer, reacts to the young woman who suggests “why don’t we try it my way?” with an immediate rejection. He’s tried everything, and how could she possibly know more about the subject than he does.

Yeah, right. Some time soon we’re going to discover that her way works. But not until the writers have spun out the narrative a bit longer.

Cheap. Facile. Soapy. And I wish they hadn’t done it.

Labour: it's got to be Cooper or Burnham

The main mouthpiece of British high Toryism, the Daily Telegraph, is involving itself in a Labour Party election.

The Telegraph gets stuck into the Labour leadership election

This is made possible by the rules adopted for the election of a new leader to replace Ed Miliband. The old system gave massive weight to the voice of the Trade Unions, which is what gave us Ed Miliband in the first place. This time round every member of the party has exactly one vote (“one member one vote”, as the system is accurately if not imaginatively called).

To accommodate the many trade unionists who are Labour supporters but not Party members, a special category has been created which allows such people to register and, on payment of £3, take part in the election.

The Telegraph has decided to urge Tories to register themselves as Labour supporters and vote for the most left-leaning of the candidates, Jeremy Corbyn. This is because it has rightly decided that Corbyn would stand no chance of winning a general election. Indeed, the paper believes that as leader, he would bury the Party for good.

No one younger than their late forties will have been particularly aware of politics the last time the Labour Party elected a leader from the Left. This was Michael Foot, in the early eighties. Foot was one of the gentlest, most tolerant and most intelligent of leaders the Party has ever had. An expert on Jonathan Swift, he could be regularly seen in the British Library researching the author of Gulliver’s Travels, when he might have been in the House of Commons.

That gentle soul was crucified by the right-wing press. On one occasion he turned up for the annual ceremony commemorating British war dead in a duffle coat. He was mercilessly hounded in the media, as though what mattered in a potential British Prime Minister was his willingness to dress conventionally.

In 1983, Foot led the Party to crushing defeat by the Tories under Margaret Thatcher. The Party took fewer votes than at any other election since the end of the Second World War. Indeed, although there has been much heart searching about the disastrous election result earlier this year, the 1983 results were nearly 900,000 votes worse.

The depth of the disaster was due in large part to a massive, radically left-wing manifesto which has come to be known as the longest suicide note in history. It is a measure of the capacity for self-delusion of certain people on the far left – not I think Michael Foot, who was far more of a realist – that another veteran of that wing, Tony Benn, described the result as a major success for socialism.

Michael Foot and Tony Benn
Didn't work out so well as we might have liked

His argument was that never before had eight and a half million people voted for so strongly socialist a manifesto. To Benn it was apparently irrelevant that nearly 21 million had voted against, 13 million of them for the Tories. And as a result one of the most radical right wing governments we have seen was elected with a massive parliamentary majority.

The Daily Telegraph may be obnoxious and unprincipled, but it’s not stupid. It has realise that Jeremy Corbyn as leader would be as disastrous for Labour today as Michael Foot was 35 years ago. It’s a lesson Labour members need to bear in mind. Corbyn may be the choice of many activists, as Foot was. He does not appeal to the floating voters we need to attract back to us, any more than Foot did. To elect Corbyn is self-indulgent and it plays into the hands of the Telegraph and its ilk.

So who should we choose?

I recently listened to Liz Kendall, one of the other candidates, and heard her describe herself, unprompted, as a “fiscal conservative”. We have plenty of those in office at the moment, within the Conservative Party. It’s also beginning to feel as though across Europe, a movement is starting in reaction to the austerity politics such figures represent. In Greece, of course, in Spain too, in Scotland, even in Germany, where protestors have been taking to the streets against the behaviour of their own government towards the Greeks.

It also seems likely that austerity politics may begin to hurt wider sections of the British population who escaped relatively unscathed during the last five years. As they lose faith in the economic policies of the present government, it would seem unfortunate if all we could say to them was “the fiscal conservatism of this government has failed; now give our version of fiscal conservatism a try.”

That leaves only two candidates, Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper. Both are former ministers, and therefore arguably damaged goods, tainted by their association with the Blair-Brown governments. They are also highly experienced, intelligent politicians. Do they have the courage to take the country in the direction it needs to go? I don’t know. But I do know there is no fifth candidate.

Cooper or Burnham may not be the most inspiring of choices. But neither would take us in the direction of the wilderness of 1983, or into the embrace of the very policies that are failing in the government we oppose.

Avoiding either of those alternatives strikes me as vital if we are to give Labour another chance. And the Telegraph the comeuppance it deserves.

The poet and the diplomat: 150 years of Yeats

“My only qualification for teaching this course,” one of my best lecturers told a class I attended, “is a sense of my complete inadequacy to the task.”

He was teaching us about Michel de Montaigne, whose great work is a series of essays. He used the word essay in the literal French sense of a trial, or a test: “these are the trials of my natural faculties” he explained in a preface. It is that sense of tentative reflection that marks Montaigne, and justified our lecturer’s humility.

Two months later, he completed that course and moved on to the poet Ronsard.

“A great many people have written on Ronsard,” he told us, “and you can ignore them all. None of them has understood him. Only I can explain him to you.”

The contrast in the lecturer’s attitude made me smile, particularly as his new mood was, again, so completely appropriate to the subject. Ronsard knew he was the best poet France had ever produced. He would also write in the style of the great figures of antiquity, as if to say, “you think they’re good? Watch how I can do the same thing – better.”

I thought about all this again yesterday, when we attended a talk at the Luton Irish Forum about William Butler Yeats, marking the year of his 150th birthday. The speaker was the Irish Ambassador to the United Kingdom, Daniel Mulhall. 

Daniel Mulhall, in a suit, with pupils of a local school
who contributed to a great evening at Luton Irish Forum

Mulhall showed you don’t have to be one-dimensional to be a senior diplomat. Indeed, he displayed an insightful relationship with a great poet – and he communicated his enthusiasm to others, by talking for just the right length of time, quoting just the right number of poems and commenting on them in just enough detail to be illuminating without ever becoming dull, far less pompous.

He did admit that, many years ago, he had quoted Yeats at some length to a young woman on their first date and, since she had decided to become his wife then, and still is today, it clearly had done him no harm.

Among the poems he quoted, few of which I knew, he recited this one: 

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

The woman addressed is Maud Gonne, to whom Yeats proposed not once but six or seven times, being refused on each occasion. As Mulhall pointed out, it is astonishing that Yeats wrote this poem when he was only in his twenties, and yet it looks forward to a time far distant in the future.

When that time actually came, Yeats had been married, in all appearance happily, for nearly twenty years to another woman. Even so, he must have been 60 or so when he wrote Among Schoolchildren, containing the line “she stands before me as a living child”: as an older man he sees Maud Gonne still, though now he conjures up a childish image.

Above all, however, what hearing this poem did for me was remind me of another, by Ronsard. Roughly translated, it starts “when you are quite old, in the evening by candle light, sitting at the corner of the fire, spinning and threading, you will say, singing my verses and full of wonder, ‘Ronsard celebrated me, in the time of my beauty’.”

Yeats includes enough allusions to Ronsard to make sure we see the connection: nodding by the fire, thinking about a poem (reading it instead of singing it, but it’s still a matter of recall), thinking back to lost love.

But the contrast is far more striking than the similarities.

Ronsard’s poem is about him. It’s about the wonder the older woman will still feel that Ronsard had once sung her praises – had, indeed, been generous enough to give her his love. In other words, all the arrogance my lecturer had pointed to, infuses the poem.

Yeats, by contrast, focuses on his love and the woman he loved. instead of pride of accomplishment, of conquest, we get wistfulness and a sense of loss: love “hid his face amid a crown of stars.”

I liked my lecturer, but I was never really comfortable with Ronsard’s arrogance. Having now enjoyed the gentle half tones of Yeats’s poem, I can say that it does the same thing as Ronsard – better.

Yeats: a touch more subtle

My thanks for that discovery to a man who represents Ireland to government, and a great Irish poet to the rest of us.

Greek debt: parallels and contrasts with the US

Greeks who remember the German occupation, according to the BBC, are now talking about another invasion by Germany without a shot being fired.

Greece will, it seems, stay in the Euro. At least for the moment. It will do so at the cost of measures that apparently represent more severe austerity than the terms rejected by Greeks in a referendum just over a week ago. It feels like Greek voters have lost, but German politicians – apparently the fiercest critics of Greece and the harshest in their demands of them – have won.

Merkel may have avoided this destiny so far
But certainly not be being gentle with Greece

This reminds me of how the United States dealt with a similar crisis, when it faced debt problems not unlike those of Greece within the Eurozone.

The original constitution of the United States was deeply unsatisfactory, giving almost no power – certainly no power to raise funds – to the national government, and leaving most authority in the hands of the States. It became increasingly clear over just a few years that the situation was untenable and something with a more serious Federal government at its centre would have to be set up.

A Convention met and drew up the Constitution of the United States that we know today (though at that stage without any amendments, of course). George Washington became the first President and, among an all-star cast of Ministers, he appointed Alexander Hamilton as his Secretary of the Treasury (Minister of Finance).

Now there’s little on which I agree with Hamilton, particularly his views of popular sovereignty, but that’s for another debate. On finance, he was something of a wizard. And one of his first major measures concerned what came to be known as Assumption – not a religious moment, except for those whose God in Mammon, but the initiative by which the Federal government would take over the debts incurred by the individual States in fighting the War of Independence.

That was great news for Massachusetts and South Carolina, which were saddled with heavy debts (viz Greece) but not so good for Virginia and North Carolina which had cleared most of theirs, and didn’t appreciate having to pick up the tabs for the others (viz Germany). There was a battle royal. James Madison, destined to become the Republic’s fourth president, was a Congressman at the time and led the campaign against Assumption. He defeated the proposal.

The story has it that Alexander Hamilton met Thomas Jefferson, then Secretary of State but destined to be the third President, in the street outside Jefferson’s house. He was distraught and Jefferson invited him in. Hamilton explained that without Assumption, certain States would be driven towards bankruptcy, and also the Federal government would be shown to be powerless to face up to dealing with a financial crisis (viz the Eurozone).

What’s more, Hamilton maintained the apparently paradoxical view that the Federal government would be accepting a “national blessing” by taking on the debt: it would oblige it to collect taxes and establish it as creditworthy (viz the Eurozone again).

Jefferson was a close ally of Madison’s and increasingly an opponent of Hamilton’s. But he allowed his then-colleague to convince him, and took it on himself to win Madison round.

The two allies came up with a compromise solution: Madison would not block the question of Assumption coming up again in Congress; he would vote no, but would not speak against the proposal. That’s what happened, and Assumption was adopted, over the silent opposition of Madison.

At the time, the US had a population of under 4 million. Even the UK had 8 million, and France 20 million. GDP was around $200 million, corresponding to about $4.5 billion today – when US GDP is about $17.7 trillion. The US was, in other words, a minor sideshow in geopolitics back then; today it is the wealthiest and most powerful nation on Earth.

There is no need for Europe to aspire to that status. European nations have been massive global players in the past, and places like Amritsar or Algiers testify to how badly that went. But it strikes me that Europe needs to get its act together if it is only to defend its status in a world increasingly dominated by huge nations, such as the US, China and Russia.

The success of the US wasn’t naturally entirely down to acceptance of Hamilton’s proposals on handling debt. But they certainly contributed: they set up the notion of the Union has owing a duty to all its components, and therefore being more powerful than any of them, capable of playing a full role on the world stage.

So the US passed its test over Assumption.

I’m not sure the Eurozone has done anything like so well over Greek debt.