Wir fahren auf der autobahn (Kraftwerk)

This is an appalling carbon-centric view of the late C20 from German "group" Kraftwerk. Instead of celebrating the various militarily active socialist groups around in the early 70s, it chooses to issue a tedious clarion call to the users of this murderous waste of concrete. The album's cover suggests that the ignorant manslaughterers of the roads, both rich (mercedes) and poor (VW) are heading both to, and in a very real sense, from, a sunlit upland. The pointlessly continuitive melody demonstrates the incubating effect of road travel on the intelligent mind; the occasional sub-sonic breaks the service stations with their dead life. The use of synthesisers is, surely, a satire on the un (or should we say-sub, or even preter-) natural existence of the endless, soulless, moralless roads. It reminds us that we are non-eternal sounds on the false road of unliving - it is, in short, a trial, that we all attend, and when we find ourselves guilty of the greatest crime - that of destroying our planet - what do we say? "Jesus!" (oh!! how ironic); "get bent!" or, worst of all, the cry of the fascists - fuck off - ?

Charlie "Democracy" Falconer

I loathe and detest the political animal that is Charlie "lord" Falconer. As a passionate democrat, I refuse to capitalise the l in "lord". Here is a man who only today on Radio 5 Live was pontificating on the type of society we wish to have: clearly, for him, an ideal modern democracy contains unelected politicians who are able to change the constitution and then argue that it represents greater modernity on public radio. Don't get me wrong: I wish for a fully elected house of lords, if I am ambivalent about de-monarchisation that is because I think QEII has greater integrity and wisdom than any unelected president (please don't be fooled into thinking that becoming a republic would mean an elected president - Australia's debate showed the fallacy of this reasoning well enough). And yet, for this man, and presumably, for many other like minded lawyers (sorry, I meant "devoted defenders of our ancient constitution"), the Human Rights Act is great because it means we have an active duty of care over people who hate our guts and come here precisely to act this hatred out. For such people, according to Charlie Falconer - "ordinary people have rights just as criminals have" (as near as dammit a direct quote from R5L this morning).

My loathing and mistrust of him is equal to his loathing and mistrust of me and the rest of us ordinary people. The man is a shit. Before getting rid of Blair, who at least is a democrat, get rid of Falconer, who is a destructive, anti-democratic and blissfully ignorant pus-filled boil on the arse of Britain.

Sorry. I really don't like him at all.

Hang on....

Someone else on CIF (see below) has nominated God. I think this is a bit harsh, as I have quite a bit of affection for the old bearded fellow, but you have to admit he's made a tremendous hash of things. Not least in getting all the people who believe in him to hate each other's guts; in which bizarre case they neatly resemble the political Left.

CIF Rubbish Classics

This is a great thread on Comment is Free. Name some classics you think are actually a load of rubbish. Pour moi:

1. The Beatles
2. James Joyce (except Dubliners)
3. DH Lawrence (aye your ladyship, 'appen am gonna 'ave thee up the jacksie)

On the other hand some clot nominates Ian Curtis. This is extremely offensive and out of the bounds of such a discussion as this. I'm tempted to ring Greater Manchester Police and see if they wish to prosecute a hate crime.

Business As Usual at the ICC

Inzamam gets off the charges of ball tampering; is found guilty of bringing the game into disrepute; is handed the least possible suspension of 4 ODIs which Pakistan may well appeal against.

In other news: Pope "not yet ready" for conversion to Islam and bears to shit in woods for "the forseeable future".

Coursework

Excellent news - the abolition of maths coursework for GCSE and the supervision of all other coursework. This will, after a short drop in grade standards, lead to the improvement of our nation's mathematical skills. Coursework has for many years been the means by which people who are crap at maths, like me, get grades they do not deserve, like me, and thereby think they are better at maths than they are, like me. I did mine some years ago now and, by dint of pure time (not thought) and some nice presentation, as well as some judicious conversations with friends better at maths than me, came up with a near maximum mark. This propelled me to an A I did not deserve, being rubbish at the actual process of calculation.

A small change like this could lead to a real rise in standards. But when are the government going to improve our appalling take up of the sciences in schools? Introducing a "Friends of the Earth Propaganda for GCSE" isn't going to win us any Nobel prizes or lead to any great discoveries, unless everything is completely mad already. There are hardly any physics teachers, university chemistry departments are closing down, and many students already don't cover the three sciences. Blithering on about the unsustainability of the conservative dominant scientific paradigm isn't going to cut the mustard. We need more real science, and fast, before Britain's scientific community actually starts to forget stuff. That means - experiments, formulae, and maths. Well, one out of three isn't bad.

Gordon's Speech As It Happens

..is on Radio 5 now. Gordon says "we must never forget that we are servants of the people" [paraphrased]. Rubbish. He doesn't believe that and nor does anyone else who governs Britain or part of it today.

He also says that his relationship with Tony Blair has been at times a bit shaky but he is proud to have worked with him. Ho ho.

Jeez, he is talking about the next 10 years now! Of course the programme for government will be different, Gordy, that's because it will be a different government as soon as the public have the chance to vote you out as a totally uncharismatic, aloof and narrow-minded prime minister. Does anybody still believe this guff about New Labour being for everyone, instead of for a small cadre of like minded North London liberals?

Parents into it now. He loves his mum and dad. "Each of us had to live by a moral compass" said his parents. Well why are you a member of a government that hates the very concept then?

It's only been 10 minutes or so and I am bored already. I'll never make a true political junkie. I'm off to the co-op.

Dangerous Dogs

This sort of thing happened at the fag end of Thatcherism too. Attacks by rottweillers, media panic (Radio 5 Live has talked about little else bar Andrew Lloyd Webber all morning), and calls for new laws.

Re-view

I have, as usual, to revisit some of my previous opinions on stuff. In my post about White Heat I drivelled on at length about the author's less than deep coverage of culture. What I totally failed to point out, and something else that I really like about the book, is that quite long bits of it work well as metaphors and allegories. It is almost as if Dominic Sandbrook is an historian who thinks we can learn from the past (which is quite refreshing). For example, the Brown/Wilson relationship is discussed at length. George Brown comes across as, no doubt, what he was: vain, drunk, aggressive and unreliable. Wilson's paranoic and manipulatively selfish approach to politics is shown to be part of his outlook from 1966 onwards (at least); and the cabinet infighting between characters and departments obsessed with their own power that prevented the serious decisions being taken before the economic situation became desperate is told with some sadness, as well as acuity.

The Brown/Wilson thing is there in such depth, not just to shed light on mid 60s politics, but to hold up a mirror to our own era with its important decisions hidebound and suffocated by personal political relationships: Blair/Brown; Blair/Bush; Brown/anyone else. In the 60s of course, the country faced more serious economic problems than it appears to today; but the result is similar - stagnation, inaction, disaster. In our case it is foreign policy and therefore domestic unrest that has been caused by all this, as well as constitutional chaos, criminal justice being completely ignored, and the gradual, perceptible severing of the links between governed and government. In today's Sunday Telegraph for example, Nigel Farndale recounts a letter he has received which carries all the pomposity and self-importance of the President of the USA - from his local council, giving serious and detailed consideration as to whether to let him have another bin.

The chapter on Swinging London has echoes of the Cool Britannia nonsense that Blair's government started off by championing, in which a time where there is a genuine cultural renaissance (however small in the late 90s' case) becomes instead a byword for the sordid and ultimately boring lives of a few celebrities, often drunk on their own importance, to the exclusion of ordinary people. Sandbrook points out that the Swinging London phenomenon was essentially an elitist and restricted one, but one which people were encouraged to see as the centrepoint of culture. The parallel with today's celebrity rubbish, a hangover from the sudden celebrity boom of the late 90s, is evident.

I must point out that these readings of the subtexts of the book are mine; I have literally no idea whether the author would agree or not. But sentences like this one seem to support my case:

...the effects of change were often manifested in ways that seem disappointingly mundane to writers who like to sneer at "Middle England".(p190)

This, surely, is a modern habit of people who live and work in a similarly restricted circle to the Swinging London celebrities, but who happen to think their circle is the entire ethical and political world. Fortunately for us, blogging's rise means this won't last. It also brings me back to my previous point, which I still agree with, that Dominic Sandbrook writes with as unbiased a style as anyone who has read the likes of Kenneth O Morgan, Clive Ponting or David Childs -all on postwar Britain - could wish for.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Apropos of nothing, today's Catholic Herald prints that speech of the Pope's in full. It also reserves its fiercest criticism in the whole row for the BBC, who, in its view, by failing to provide the persectives of Catholics on the dispute, and leading so consistently for nearly two days with the story in its bulletins, as well as by giving what it thinks is ludicrous amounts of airtime to Islamic extremists, has stoked the fires very effectively. It is a view I've seen on the blogosphere and one it is, frankly, hard to disagree with.

Still on the Catholic Herald (but not wishing to turn my blog into papist propaganda), I liked this quote on the Westminster Cathedral demo last week from Assistant Commissioner of the Met Tarique Ghaffur on the lack of arrests despite the calls for the death of the Pope:

We have a long history of facilitating lawful demonstration and are keen to continue dialogue with any group wishing to protest.

I'd like to know if this applies to the likes of Stephen Green, or is it just people who threaten actual violence who get away with it?

White Heat

Currently reading White Heat by Dominic Sandbrook, the follow up to his highly regarded Never Had it So Good. both are detailed social and political histories of Britain (and, in fact, mostly England at that) during a short space of time: 1956-63 for the first one and 1964-70 for the second.

Both books are good, excellent on politics, particularly on the thoughts and personalities of the politicians concerned, through a judicious mix of whitehall documents and MPs diaries. They also like to do a bit of soft revisionism: ie Douglas-Home was quite good and a bit more ambitious than previously thought; and Harold Wilson's government was pretty poor from quite early on, especially in financial matters (even if a lot of it was Reggie Maudling's fault). But both books are I think a bit weak on culture; the author spends a lot of time writing about the Beatles, or New Wave, and drops in mentions of sundry other cultural icons, but you never really get the feeling he is that keen on it. The stuff about New Wave theatre and film in the first book was particularly vaguely thought out. He wrote a lot of it off as inferior to anything other countries had to offer (and thereby seeming to hint at a cultural decline), while almost completely ignoring the amazing contribution to culture that British tv made from 1953 onwards. Sure, Doctor Who got one or two mentions, and does in the second book, but not as part of an overall understanding that Britain has had, for 50 or so years, a televisual culture to rival or surpass any. Dramas and concepts like The Wednesday Play or 1954s Nineteen Eighty Four, Coronation Street, and later Made in Britain and Threads, stand comparison as art with many many films of the past 50 years, and it is silly to patronise this achievement as just being for tv, or to ignore it on that basis.

I'm not necessarily accusing Sandbrook of this - but it occurred to me reading his books - many critics seem to be in love with grand gestures, sweeping films, existentialist philosophy; things that glory in deliberate complexity. (I think AN Wilson is often guilty of this) It means that works of great art in their own right - like some of Kingsley Amis - are dismissed because they appear, in comparison with the great themes, to be trivial. But they are of course, the great themes in microcosm and in symbol form. And British culture has often specialised in the ironic, the trivial, the sardonic and the deflating. This is all the more so, since the war, for probably obvious reasons.

Sandbrook is very keen on the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, which may seem to disprove my point. But there was a vast amount more to 60s music than these guys, which he only really touches upon. Perhaps for reasons of space.

I am also not sure about his habit, especially marked in the first book, to discuss (say) public concerns about crime, and then dismiss them with a vague "the rise in crime had already started" or something. It seems, occasionally, that things do not quite fit into the vision he has, so they need to be squeezed out. The Cuban Missile Crisis is given fairly short shrift in the first book, compared to the detail that Peter Hennessy gives to it in his book The Prime Minister; Sandbrook totally plays down the significance of the British government's role and of the incident itself in the British consciousness. Fair enough. That is his view.

I don't want to seem nit-picking or critical because I really do like the books and he has a very easy style. They cover a vast amount of ground in a remarkably unbiased way (compared to a lot of postwar histories I've read) and deserve a wide readership.

Catholic Londoner

I am such a hypocrite. Well actually this post is not about the Pope as member of the evil trinity (Bush, Blair, Pope) - my god, I am actually tempted to believe that this trinity really exists as a demonic conspiracy - but about a chap called catholiclondoner.blogspot.com or rather a chap who blogs by the name of catholiclondoner. He has some extremely funny photos of the Westminster Cathedral protest and he causes me to take back one of my earlier posts. In no way should any prosecutions result from this protest. It has furnished us with theological truth and comedy of the highest degree.

And it is clearly a deliberate attempt to incite.

So the right response? According to Mr CL? Pray the Rosary for them. Sounds good to me, as a practising Catholic*.



*with due deference to atheist readers, I mean in no way to demonise or criticise them ("Dawkins is St Paul's slave!!!!!"). Also I am a practising Catholic largely because I am not very good at it.

Satire

I read the Eye, of course, used to read the Onion, watch the occasional tv show like Time Trumpet but otherwise I'm at a loss. I gave up with the Onion because of its increasingly knee jerk leftism. Maybe it is like the Eye of the 60s, which as Richard Ingrams said, became more left wing as the only response to the outrages of Macmillan's government, and particularly the appointment of the Earl of Home as PM. In other words, when events became too bizarre for rational argument and standing on one side shouting abuse was the only option. Time Trumpet is just too surreal for me, I wonder if Armando Ianucci is really a satirist of the human condition, (an existentialist maybe) rather than of politics per se. I fail to see where the political punches are really landing in that show. I find more accurate and biting satire in Viz these days than anywhere else. but the writers of Viz don't want a satirical magazine, they want jokes about toilets, which is fair enough, because when I read Viz, that is exactly what I want too.

But although I love satire I worry about its health. Does satire work? Is it actually worth anything at all for the Eye to print a few spoof articles about the Rev ARP Blair? Has it ever really done anything, apart from raise a few wry grins or temporary moral panic?

There is no cold war anymore, to be sure; there may be no semi-permanent heated argument being played out in the nation from the Commons down through business, the unions, to the streets anymore - but there is a government stealing our privacy and rights away; causing death on an industrial scale; and sitting in the middle of the festering corpse of the United Kingdom's constitution apparently enjoying the smell.

So where is the outrage? where are the humanists with anger and pity in their hearts to expose and reflect all of this and hold up the vileness for public consumption? I suppose the likes of George Galloway are the satire on modern politics we need, given (say) his ridiculous and laughably hypocritical statements on all manner of issues from Palestine to um, other Muslim-concerned issues. But the sad thing is I think he really means it.

We might, given some proper satire, take more interest in politics. We might be tempted to act on certain issues. We might, at the very least have a wider (ie not blogger based alone) debate on the key problems facing us. I don't think satire should have a definite, firm standpoint, because then it just risks being selective political pointscoring, which I think is now the Onion's problem. It needs people of intelligence, anger, honesty and thoughtfulness to bring more than just spoof articles; there has to be other kinds of visual and literary satire too in which targets other than the soft ones are hit. Arguments, made in a polemical style (after Swift, maybe); a new Gerald Scarfe (sorry, Steve Bell doesn't count- he is propagandizing) is needed; something completely new like an interactive satirical webpage maybe (or am I missing this already) or computer games, downloadable ones like Stickcricket but with a satirical theme.

You see that I am short of ideas already. Is it me, or satire, which has the problem defining what it should be? More spoof articles, however acute, will do nothing, change nothing, attract nobody to political thought or engage anyone with a sense of scepticism or anger. We need less of Marcus Brigstocke taking the piss out of the old lefty targets (cah! those Daily Mail readers, eh? cah!) and more of someone willing to evenly puncture authority whenever it is not in danger of bursting. But maybe, as I heard on Radio 5 Live today, in our advanced, nearly technocratic society, we will have to trust authority and "experts" more and more, because we just cannot get it (in this case, the rationale for closing hospitals to provide a better service). Maybe that is the reason for the lack of satire. Also, of course, the fact that the leftists who write most of the satire I've read recently actually quite like authorities like LEAs, councils, unions, loudmouth MPs, Brussels, media scientists (especially if they can put some environmental problem down to capitalism), academics and so on. They just don't seem very keen on having a go at stupid academics, like the 75 US idiots who recently confirmed their moonbat belief that 9/11 was caused by the evil Bush government.

So who is going to be honest and stand up for true satire? Not me, I'm afraid. Not up to the job (as Attlee would have said, in between puffs on the pipe).

CIF etc

Actually the temperature on CIF is a little higher than I thought....

I think you do have to give the Guardian credit for this (shudder). It is a great forum. Often the posts are rubbish but there is always something in the comment threads. It is exactly this kind of thoughtful and intelligent intellectual revival conservatism needs and I am really not sure it is getting a great deal of it at the moment.

CIF

I said I wasn't going to bother with the pope/Islam debacle but there is a pretty good debate going on at CIF about it, based on something of a one-sided "Christianity is aggressive and horrible and all the problems are caused by Christian ignorance" article by Karen Armstrong, the former nun who seems to have made it her job since she quit the convent to put the knife into her old employers. Among the usual personal abuse and mud-flinging are some excellent and well-reasoned posts on both sides of the argument, including serious doses of what I assume is worthwhile history.

Today's rubbish includes the photos at the BBC website of the protests outside Westminster Cathedral. The BBC must take their share of the blame for this nonsense by making it the lead story across almost all Sunday and Monday news bulletins on 5 Live (at least) and helping to stoke the rage. They have been a lot quieter on the consequences for innocent Christians of the reaction across the Muslim world. A quick inspection of the online news now (7.30pm) reveals a prominent article on the protests against the pope and the reasoned and tolerant reaction "in pictures", but the articles on the consequences or Sunday's protests a lot harder to find. Teletext pointed out this evening that Sunday's protest passed off peacefully and without arrests. Given the rather inflammatory (or at best mildly irritating) nature of the slogans being chanted you'd think it merited a caution or two, or even a prosecution, such as Stephen Green is expecting for his leafleting a gay rights meeting or something. Au contraire, but the police are "investigating" some comments made by Anjem Choudhary about people who insult Islam being executed, although in his defence he was pointing out that this was under Sharia Law (R5Live 4.30pm).

Expect, as before, the "investigation", to be quietly dropped when the stupidity has all died down and everyone is back to normal. Forgive me for thinking that while the police will happily feel the collars of people they don't think are real threats to lawandorder, where they do sense a threat they will refuse to act; fine and dandy for short term community relations but in the long term it will leave peace-loving people without the protection they need while denying genuine peaceful and non-threatening protest.

Pope Crisis

I don't want to get involved with this, it really is tiresome.

But I do love the idea that the merest suggestion that Islam is intolerant will inevitably cause violence. I presume the MCB will now be queuing up to apologise for the burning of Christian churches in Palestine, the threat to kill the pope, and the shooting of the nun in Somalia, that have all resulted from this outrageous and unfair criticism of the religion.

Iain Dale's Top 100 Conservative Blogs

Get in! I've just discovered that I turn up in Iain Dale's list of top 100 Conservative blogs at 99! Given that I don't post as often as I should, and haven't done as much politics as I'd like to, this is cool, assuming that there are in fact, more than 100 Conservative blogs in the world.

Some of our old favourites pepper the list but I'm really not sure about Conservative Home as No.1. For me it seems more like a chat-site, or a media hoover, and less like the kind of Conservative intellectual revival that some of the other blogs on the list represent. My personal favourites are linked to from here, so I'm not going to go into them now. I do notice that Biased BBC is not on the list. That can hardly be because it isn't conservative: more likely because it can be way over the top sometimes.

It is good to see a genuine, if sporadic, reappearance of conservatism as a thought-through worldview, capable of being defended and advanced; the clear question for me now is whether this can be translated into practical policies. I'm really not sure about Cameron - at least, about how far he has thought about policies. He has done the key thing, to make the Tories appeal outside their core vote, the only surprise about which is that it has taken so damn long to get to that point. But the Tories cannot just "go green" - so much of the environmentalists' world view is anti-individual, anti-success, anti-progress. If he is to make this a centrepiece of his policies he must combine it with a strategy that does not seek to punish individuals for (say) putting rubbish in the wrong bin, but positively encourages the "right behaviour". Tories should stand up against the punishment through higher taxes and prices and advance the cause of the market in developing green technologies, or at any rate provide incentives rather than penalties. The "progressives" advocating taxes on everything, surveillance of bins, the use of the courts to enforce recycling policies, and the closure of power stations are showing their loathing of ordinary people (Mr Brown's "hard-working families) .

Apropos of nothing, no-one has yet wondered aloud how much CO2 has been expended jetting Al Gore across the US and the world showing his wretched film on climate change. He says himself he has given the lecture hundreds of times. I notice no criticism of him for this, but "hard working families" cop the outrage of George Moonbat if they go on holiday once or twice a year by plane.

Conservatives cannot go back to the past on social policy and Cameron is right to change that. Whatever your views, being perceived as anti-women, anti-minorities and anti-gay has been tremendously damaging. I don't think the Tories as a party have ever hated anyone in the way they are often accused of doing, I just think they were very slow to realise that identity politics was an essential part of modern political discourse. But Conservatives should demonstrate that there are not merely two diametrically opposed views: the tolerant and the full of hate, the right and the wrong. There are shades of opinion and people should not be coerced by employers to support worldviews they disagree with. Maybe this would just make them seem like hypocrites in the current climate, but I don't see any contradiction between having a full set of legal rights (including gay marriage, and the right to children) and the right of an individual to disagree with these. Conservatives should challenge the view that says disagreement on these issues is inseparable from physical attacks and is motivated purely by hate.

I'm sure all of this is discussed by better minds than mine all the time. But my little political handbook at the moment is After Blair by Kieron O Hara, which lays down the possible route of a revived, coherent, modern Conservatism. Well worth a look; I hope Cameron has already read it.

Nineteen Eighty Four

I've always been a fan of this novel, and a somewhat more qualified fan of the Michael Radford film - amazing visuals and wonderful Winston but not entirely sure about the music or the way bits of the story are compressed. I know that it is not, technically, a "great" novel -the characters are just not sharp enough (though I've always thought that was part of the point: how can you have sharply drawn characters for an era where character has been poured down the drain?), the language is a bit clunky at times (odd for Orwell, whose prose is usually, as he wanted it, crystal clear, and the story is a bit one dimensional. However, leaving its obvious and now cliched political import to one side, a few things have always bothered me as to the story's meaning:

1. O Brien. Bear with me here. Imagine for a moment that O Brien is an extremely clever, but extremely ruthless member of the Brotherhood. The only way around the Party's mind control for such a character would be to adopt it absolutely, as he does. Such a person would duplicitously attempt to uncover thought criminals, in just the way O Brien does, passing on knowledge of the Brotherhood while being able to use it in an interrogation also (to dismiss Winston's claims of humanity). Such a person would be as fanatical a Party member as possible, would work inside and with the Thought Police to identify possible recruits. They would, as O Brien says outright to Winston in his flat, employ the most brutal methods to overthrow the Party, knowing for certain that such a victory will not be achieved for many many years. The Brotherhood do not have to be nice, social democrats - almost certainly they are not. It does not matter how many people are caught, emptied out, and shot. The word is spread, the possible methods of resistance out there, somewhere. The game, a member of the Brotherhood might say, is too big to be lost by taking stupid risks - like a punt on an unreliable Winston for longer than is absolutely necessary to spread, however slightly, the word of "the Book" and so on. To be a member of the Inner Party and to work for the Brotherhood might therefore be two sides to the same coin - something an outstanding pracitioner of doublethink could easily accomplish. O Brien punishes and interrogates Winston as fully as possible because once suspicion is aroused and other people know (Winston's rebellion is obvious, even to the Parsons boy who shouts "you're a thought criminal" at him) he has no other option. Smith is an agent lost, and O Brien's prediction comes to pass: "When eventually you are caught, you will confess." O Brien will do this to everyone and anyone he comes across, sooner or later, while still, slowly, achieving tiny successes for the Brotherhood.
Plus: he wrote "the Book"; refuses to deny the existence of the Brotherhood (despite being quite keen in the interrogation that there is no alternative to Ingsoc anywhere - surely a simply "no" would have sufficed); and he clearly makes reference to Smythe's disappearance in an ironic way.

Hmmm. Well, maybe.

2. The Appendix is written in the past tense. Has Ingsoc been defeated by this time, hence the workings of its language could be explained in detail? Or is it just a simple part of the rest of the past-tense narrative?

3. To leave 85% of the population free from interference is hardly the act of a party which cannot allow anyone to conceive of a different way of life. Why let so much power drift away from you like that? I know that to some extent it is a satiric point, but does it indicate a much weaker Party than we are led to believe?

4. Where does Julia get all her nice stuff from? Is she still sleeping with Inner Party members? In which case why does she proclaim her love for Winston so loudly? Perhaps he doesn't mind - it is quite possible - but it does make you wonder whether Julia, whose interrogation was apparently "a textbook case", was more than she seemed. What she has done, after all, is not that much cleverer than what Charrington did.

I suppose it is highly unlikely that a writer with clear aims, like Orwell (and in many respects the themes of Nineteen Eighty Four grow naturally out of Coming Up for Air) would leave such minuscule clues as these. But I have always, while nodding sagely at the political parallels, wanted the entire Ingsoc edifice to be destroyed; so I am trying to comfort myself with this. Any further "hints and guesses" that it isn't quite as monolithic as it seems would be welcome!

Modern Life is Rubbish

There is a letter to the Torygraph today from academics, teachers and children's authors which claims that children are being poisoned by modern life.

Fair enough. After all, broken relationships, splitting families, exposure to adult sexual behaviour, and a prevailing sense that children should just discover values for themselves must make life confusing for children.

Or rather it doesn't:

Childhood creativity is being stifled by a combination of junk food, school targets and mass marketing, a group of authors and academics has claimed.


Oh, right. So, in other words, idiot parents and cynical capitalists. And schools asking children to work hard. As if some of the prep-school and/or Oxbridge educated authors of the letter didn't. Junk food is of course a modern swipe at the working class idiots who really don't know how to bring up children. It is a scapegoat that conveniently allows for socialist preaching on the evils of big business as well. Shouldn't the letter have been sent to the Guardian? I thought they loved "ordinary people are idiots" stuff there.

So who signed the letter? Lots of people, including Jacqueline Wilson, who has made a superb living writing about the poisoned lives of children, and Jonathan Porrit, who has never made a secret of the need for millennial environmental education.

From the BBC website again:

The end of their letter reads: "Our society rightly takes great pains to protect children from physical harm, but seems to have lost sight of their emotional and social needs.
"However, it's now clear that the mental health of an unacceptable number of children is being unnecessarily compromised, and that this is almost certainly a key factor in the rise of substance abuse, violence and self-harm amongst our young people."


Quite so. So presumably they will queue up to denounce the teaching of abortion to 11 year old children, which is currently being proposed:

Gill Frances, head of the advisory group, said in a message to ministers yesterday: "Pregnant young women and their partners need to understand all the options open to them, including abortion, so that they can make an informed decision about whether or not to continue with their pregnancy.
"We are concerned that PSHE programmes very often avoid the subject and do not provide sufficient evidence-based information about abortion, therefore leaving pregnant teenagers ill-equipped to assess abortion as an option." [Thisislondon.co.uk]

[Incidentally I love the implication of this person's view - there simply aren't enough teenagers having abortions!]

So are 11 year old children to be protected from junk food, or are they "young women" with their "partners" who need to have abortions? What a weird world it will be when children can no longer watch adverts for burgers, but go out and have abortions and then play happy familes again with their uninvolved and excluded parents (who are needed to protect them from school targets of course), until the next time the safe and sensible option of abortion is needed. And so on. This is the point: many people, including "advisory groups", would like to make sure children's ethics have nothing to do with their parents, and everything to do with a certain progressivism (the kind that loves to "combat myths", as in the story above,). They would like to guarantee that children are sexually active (there is no indication anywhere at all in the above story that sexual activity before the age of consent might not be a good idea), would like to treat them like sexual adults. But junk food - no way! Exams - far too stressful for the poor little mites! Maybe even leave school and work before 18 - ugh! capitalist slavery. So the objects of this little political tussle are children when it comes to chips, but young people and their partners when it comes to sex. Strange world.

No wonder they're ****** up. The parents I mean.


link to the thisislondon story: http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-23366118-details/Abortion+lessons+for+schoolchildren/article.do

(hat tip: http://publicinterest.blogspot.com)

Thanks Ants. Thants.

I've just seen Look Around You 2 on DVD. It's ok, in fact often it's appallingly funny. But I'm really not sure what it's for. Is it a Pythonesque surrealist fantasy? Is it a satire of 70s science shows (people who say it's 80s have no idea what they're talking about)? Is it just a parody of television (it seems acutely aware of modern piss-poor factual tv)?

I prefer to think it's a parody. Why? Because it is obviously set up as one. But for a parody, it pulls almost all its punches. There are no political references at all. There are very few cultural references that could place it in its design-inspired environment (say, 1973-1981) except for, say, the item on Cobbles, which is obviously AIDS but done in rather poor taste. The title sequence and many of the effects act against the parody, horribly (as if the programme makers were worried we would really think it were real - For ****'s sake!). It just seems as if the producers got cold feet on the idea of the parody. For me though, the glaring own goal is the Ros Lamb feature in "sport". There is a golden opportunity there for an item like this: "Ros Lamb won this year's 400 000 metres with the aid of a new development in running science. It's called an "anabolic steroid" and it threatens to revolutionise athletics...". Instead of which we get a sub- Python sketch of an athlete speaking funny and getting smaller. Even the majestic Peter Serafinowicz fails to convince as a science show host. Though his voice work is amazing. Is that a Peter Donaldson I hear before the opening titles? Having said that, Robert Popper is clearly Howard Stableford, even down to the slightly nasal, ever so slightly smug voice.

So maybe it is surrealist fantasy after all. I think it does better as this, even if the best jokes are the least weird. The best jokes of all are the ones I thought were rubbish on first viewing. Thanks Eddie. Theddie. Thanks ants. Thants. And so on. I can't explain why I now think this is great. Because it is crap, probably. Because it is Chris Morris-lite, maybe.

It's worth watching, and worth a laugh. But it's too lame for satire, which is a shame, as we are desperately short of real satire.

Alice Thomson today

Alice Thomson in today's torygraph (linked to above):

Forty per cent of Muslims say they would like to introduce Sharia in Britain. When I interviewed Muhammad Abdul Bari, leader of the Muslim Council of Britain, he suggested Britain should adopt arranged marriages and women should cover up. But Molly is right. Anyone who wants to live a strictly Muslim life under Sharia should consider following her example and go to live in an Islamic state.

Not much to disagree with there. In Radio 5 Live's coverage however, there is a lot to disagree with. Their headlines at 7.45am and news at 8.00am both said: "Misbah Rana, whose mother calls her Molly..." Well unless I am much mistaken, the child is a citizen of the UK and so her passport and birth certificate will probably say "Molly Campbell" or something similar. Where is the documentation calling her "Misbah Rana"? I also like the nice touch that it's just her mother who calls her Molly, as if it were a nickname.

12 year olds are too immature to be detained for crimes, work, or do exams. They are, however, old enough to use contraception or go to Pakistan to live without telling their legal guardian*. I love the beeboid mindset.

*Yes I am aware that the two things are causally related in this case.

Cricket's Shame part 94

Aggers has mentioned on TMS during today's ODI that there is Sky TV footage of the Pakistan bowlers that might be useful in the defence of Darrell Hair. I've heard no other mention of it at all, but I gather there is quite a discussion among the viewers of Sky, and the BBC messageboards have a couple of threads devoted to it.

News

A couple of news stories that have taken my attention lately. Firstly, the death of the Australian naturalist Steve Irwin; it seems a bit unfair to call him a "nutter" now he is dead, but I don't think I am saying anything revelatory when I say that I think a lot of people felt he was a bit mad to take as many risks as he did. He always maintained he knew the physical and behavioural limits of his animals and perhaps he did, but the manner of his passing - effectively being stabbed by a stingray he was probably holding at the time - suggests that he could be overconfident or even arrogant about it. I liked his shows but in a voyeuristic sort of way (though I guess that was the point of them) and I feel a bit guilty for being part of his enthusiasm for such dangerous activities. He knew what the audience tuned in for. We knew what we wanted. He went to get more of it. He died. It's all very well saying he was an environmentalist and a naturalist and so on - fair enough- but it wasn't for that he gained his global reputation: it was for doing risky stunts with dangerous creatures.
And there is often a reason why people aren't afraid of things that should inspire fear. It's not fame or fortune either.

Another story that has caught my eye today is the ICC telling Pakistan to shut up and stop crowing about Darrell Hair and the inquiry into ball-tampering and bringing the game into disrepute. Is this the ICC showing teeth, or is just to fool us into thinking anything will actually happen? Since I last posted on the subject, the ICC have shown themselves, through the unexplained activities of Doug Cowie, to have been effectively entrapping Darrell Hair over the payoff incident. Such evidence would be dismissed in a court of law, which is why we have been told that Pakistan will win any ball tampering case (Hair's evidence practically inadmissable). So now will Hair be allowed to umpire as normal, as Pakistan can play as normal? Will he bunnies.

The third story is the firemen punished for not attending the gay rights parade story. In common with other conservative inclined bloggers, this concerns me. For one thing, I have yet to see any evidence at all that, as Stonewall have claimed, gay firemen have been sent to (say) Christian Voice meetings and accepted it as part of their job. I don't remember any firefighters at any of the church fetes I've been to, nor am I aware of their regularly turning up to masses to hand out leaflets. Secondly, the men would have been forced to watch their religion being lampooned. How is such a thing legally enforcable? The fire service doesn't need to discriminate; it could have sent people who weren't bothered. But it didn't want to. Which leads me to the third point. That is exactly it. The men are being punished for having religious views and attempting to live by them. This is why they are being punished by being sent on diversity awareness courses (do atheists ever get sent on these, I wonder. As we know, religious belief is a choice, so it is ok to be hateful towards people who have it. Abitrary reasoning, but it seems to work). It is the same with laws discussed recently in Europe to remove a doctor's right of conscience over performing abortions. If you have different views you may not express them or live by them in the public sphere. But there is no point in having a right of freedom of conscience if you are not allowed to act on it or to live by it. The alternative is to say that religious people cannot work in the public services. This itself constitutes a ridiculous breach of human rights; people who wish to fight fires or be medics should not have to sign up to the demands of gay rights groups or pro-abortionists. There should be space and opportunity for diversion of thought. Of course, once you accept the principle, as we seem to have done, that the positions these firefighters have taken are based purely on hate, there is no reason to give that space.

Incidentally, have made clear that matters of conscience are private, I wonder if Stonewall is supporting the policeman who wants to wear a stud in his ear to work as an overt statement of his sexuality, and I assume they would not support conscientious objection in wartime.

History Research

I have occasionally implored readers to check out my other, rather dull, site about postwar local history, which I have linked to on the sidebar. This is not another plea but rather a whinge. As a totally untrained historian I have been trying to learn how to get the most out of archives, but have found it very difficult. Many documents are only fragments of files, the rest of which have been destroyed. Finding anything of substance is extremely difficult and often something will look promising in the catalogue but will turn out to be irrelevant or very thin. Searching through newspapers is also difficult, unless you have something you are looking for. Microfiches hurt the eyes after a few minutes if you are just skimming through and besides, I am never quite sure where to go to back up what I find there. Is it that nothing interesting has happened, or that it just hasn't been documented? Am I missing something massive, making me look a total fool? I have resisted trying to interview people, possibly because doing it on an amateur level means I can't say "Oh, it's for a book"- well it may turn out to be, but isn't at the moment, or for the foreseeable future, so I don't feel as though anyone will want to give their time to me. Perhaps I'm being pathetic here. I cannot believe that nothing interesting has happened in this place during 50 years of unparalled social and economic and technological change. What if it hasn't, though? What if life and death have just carried on, plodded through the years undisturbed by anything dramatic or newsworthy? Imagine it - a village where nothing ever happens. It's almost an X File, although it would turn out with Mulder and Scully scratching their heads at the end saying "I don't believe it, Scully. you're right. There really is, nothing to it at all. Nothing at all."

Bunnies

As I am boycotting Cricinfo after Andrew Miller's hysterical denunciation of England fans last week (see below, last Monday), I haven't been on it to see what he has written since. Has he written the following, perhaps?


So Pakistan have effectively avoided the charges of ball-tampering and bringing the game into disrepute because of the well timed public release of Hair's supposedly confidential emails to the ICC. These emails allow Pakistan to claim that he was bent all along, has poor judgement and is unsuited to any umpiring at all, while making a case against them nearly impossible. Given that he wrote these emails after two solid days of being libelled as a racist by various media, and was only trying to get himself bought out of his contract (Sven Goran Eriksson is still being paid by England - there's a payoff for you), this is an impressive result. No-one will now be so foolish to accuse Pakistan of ball tampering, if, indeed, the rule is not changed anyway. How curious.


Has he bunnies.

God: A Guide for the Perplexed by Keith Ward

A review of a book I read recently. I am not a philosopher or theologian so I often find abstract ideas of this kind hard to grasp, though I do my best.


This is a survey of Western ideas about God, from a Christian perspective but not tied to Christian concepts. Jesus, for example, is mentioned only fleetingly. The main thesis is that the classical view of God is one of a Spirit, absolute in being, which also ties in with modern philosophical and theological ideas of God. It seems at times to fly close to the idea that there is no God as such, but the concept is overwhelmingly affirmed in the concluding chapter, which posits 7 main strands of thought about God: the powers of being, something beyond speech, the perfect good, the self existent creator, the self realising spirit, the ultimate goodness of being and the personal ground of being.
The centre of the book seems to be a survey of Hegel in particular. The author ties in Hegel’s idea of the dialectical process of history with a view of a creator as being tied into, though in some way distinct from, his creation. The creator does not create of necessity but in order to increase the amount of good and of knowledge he can have, As part of this he needs rational agents. They will cause evil. There is also some "natural evil" which people are going to have to deal with, if there is to be freedom and the eventual success of a kind of permanent, worthwhile goodness. Thus God is absolved of blame for evil, and will in the final realisation of the dialectic, sublate or redeem all evil into the final triumph of good. Belief in God is therefore a belief, not in a being or person, but in the possibility and meaning of the triumph of good (this comes from a summary of various other thinkers).
It is also important for the author to dispose of commonly held views of God: that he is omnipotent or omniscient, and so on. God does not deal in logical impossibililty nor in foretelling the future, but (in a twist of the ontological argument) in knowing more than any other being (real or imagined) could possibly ever know. God is therefore ascribed only a greater, not an infinite power. Hence the problem of evil is partially (though maybe not convincingly) resolved.
In the process the book occasionally diverts in poetic methods of expression. There are descriptions of the soul becoming a part of the Godhead, or of the souls of people being reunited in the later triumph of good over suffering (pace Polkinghorne’s idea of the purely sacramental universe). There are descriptions of looking into the darkness between stars or of being unable to speak of what we see or dimly perceive.
Another theme then is the inexpressibility of Godhead. Which is why we talk in imperfect analogies about God (as a person) which lead us down the path of error (the idea of omnipotence is really also a kind of analogy).
Unfortunately this does relegate Jesus somewhat, and the fleeting description of the Trinity does him not many favours at all, as an expression of a part of God, rather than God actually made flesh. The more difficult elements of the incarnation are sidestepped. This is presumably to focus on a question which could unite the largest majority of people: whether the universe was created, by a being, which itself is pure, actualised, perfect, being, and which is involved in though not running like toys the creation, which suffers and which hopes, like us, for the victory of good. He is sure it will happen, but has no privileged view of the future universe. He is simply good, his existence is, maybe necessary, ours I think, ultimately, contingent. We are not compelled into being but are an attempt to create an increase of good and increase of potential of good. This is where the author likes to dispose of the ideas of omniscience: at times it is confusing to read that no increase of good can increase God’s perfection and then that we are created to do just that. Perhaps it is that we can increase God’s self knowledge.
This idea of an ultimately mutable God is the one that could resolve the tensions in philosophy (the author's claim rather than mine) and that, he claims, is well in tune with classical views of God; just not the ones that most of us were brought up with.

POSTSCRIPT: I read, some time ago, John Polkinghorne's book Belief in God in an Age of Science, and there were many things that struck me. He attempts to resolve the problem of God's actions in the world as being a sort of information input; but I find that very hard to understand so I keep having to re-read the chapter. He is determined to place his theology on a level in tune with his academic discipline, particle physics; hence he accepts the total destruction of matter in the end of the universe (heat death or big crunch) but retains the hope of resuurection through a kind of divine memory of the universe: hence the "world to come" is an act of divine new creation - a "totally sacramental universe", mentioned above, which consists of the saved old universe, matter delivered from transience and decay. This concept, exciting but a little bizarre to the non-physicist (and presumably to the non-believer too), is a part of a wider theory of the universe and creator as both beings that are "becoming" - the divine spirit grows and learns with its creation and sees all from all parts of that growing, becoming creation. "Omniscience is self-limited by God in the creation of an open world of becoming." I am well aware of the debt such views owe to existentialist philosophy, but he doesn't really acknowledge that in depth. Hence both these books present a divine spirit much more vulnerable than that of traditional Christian doctrine; immutability; omniscience; omnipotence as we have come to understand the concepts make way for something more organic but no less divine because creative in an infinitely improvised way. Polkinghorne mentions, in passing, the idea of a universe created by an evil God - something similar is part of the novel Dante's Equation by Jane Jensen.

Blog Round Up

Thought I'd just mention a few blogs currently doing some excellent work. Iain Dale, is as usual, but has been more interested in football and political sex novels over the last couple of days. I guess it is the silly season after all. Over at Harry's Place there has been lively discussion of gay rights and free speech, the latter in relation to the holocaust exhibition that has gone up in Tehran (it looks like the in-favour-of-free-speech-government has decided to see if Europe can be provoked by something so they can go "ha ha! You don't care about free speech after all!" As far as I'm aware no embassies have been torched yet). Biased BBC is an odd one because often the posts are brilliant but the comments are a bit much for my tastes. But they are rightly getting upset about the BBC's latest attempt at self promotion. Guido Fawkes has an excellent debate on the right-to-buy issue, slaying some socialist myths in the process, as well as a totty report from Blair's holiday in the caribbean. Oliver Kamm is quieter than usual this summer, just posting some of his articles but there is a good one about Gunter Grass. I find the Devil's Kitchen brilliantly angry, with some excellent swearing, no matter what the subject, it seems. Samizdata today goes with the inverted, Alice in Wonderland story of the Gay Police Association's anti-homophobia advert being the subject of a hate crime investigation.

But today's winner is a fabulous, delectable fisking of George Monbiot at the Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler (linked to in the title). It is detailed, angry, incredulous and long. It is well worth the effort. If only someone on the radio would do the same instead of hauling the lunatic up to debate rational issues in his weird, hyperbolic style all the time.

Made in Britain

A couple of months ago I saw Alan Clarke’s Made in Britain (1983) for the first time. Knowing that I was looking for something vaguely gritty, from the 1980s breed of made for television plays (remember those?), it took hours of internet searching to find the right candidate for the role. And here it is. If you know of any others, do let me know.

The play follows a day or so in the life of Trevor, the teenage skinhead played with frightening intensity by a young Tim Roth. It begins with his incarceration in an Assessment Centre, developing his point of view as the plot progresses through acts of minor criminality, racist abuse, to a final violently celebratory night which involves urinating on files, stealing a van, and eventually handing himself in to the police.

It is gripping in that grainy, grim, soulless, desperate 1980s way. It reminds me of Threads in that all the colours are faded and dim, the buildings we see either functionally dreary (JobCentre), or physically dreary, with a high emphasis on shots of corridors, walkways, and other lifeless, sleepless places. The people who inhabit this world are either largely shabby but have their hearts in the right place, or slightly snappier but wicked. The police are evil. The Steadicam follows Trevor claustrophobically, until he seems to be screaming out of the television at us.

Yet something bothers me about it. It is at its best when giving vent to Trevor’s articulations, but it only serves to stir pity or an understanding for this kid who has been betrayed by an establishment he knows to be cynical and brutal. His racism, loudly and viciously expressed, would normally mean that the character cannot be empathised with at all in twenty first century television (after all this is a world where even history books for adults feel compelled to gloss the British Empire by adding sententiously "This is racist" - Norman Davies of all people). Yet we do, a bit. Just enough to make us feel guilty. He is vicious and vile. He is intelligent too. And he has been systematically betrayed since he was a child. We are accustomed to liberals telling us to be sympathetic towards young offenders, but towards racists? Not. Very. Often. That the audience is actually treated like adults is enough to shock as it is.

I am not sure whether to be convinced by the swearing. You know it is old television when characters say "fuck" a lot but not the other one. A lot of people are "wankers". But the swearing is too varied, too artistic to be real. Trevor’s articulation is meant to indicate his intelligence; despite being able to communicate perfectly well, no-one has ever understood him - another sign of decaying Britain. By contrast, in Threads, the world ends and someone only says "fuck" when they find a packet of prawn cocktail flavour crisps.

The plotting is patchy and moves from the kind of extended discussion we expected from plays, to a more telescoped narrative where the character’s act of changing, or resolving, is shown by a series of stares he gives: into a shop window, or a school, before returning to the speech laden conventions at the end. Here too the narrative reminds me of Threads.

That shows a literally blasted Britain, though you could read it as a metaphor for the 1980s, especially with its focus on no longer industrial Sheffield. There is nothing culturally enjoyable or successful about Trevor's Britain either. Everything has gone to hell - except banger racing, which Trevor quite enjoys and which is the main extended metaphor sequence in the film.

Finally the system shows itself to have been hell for a while, as Trevor takes a truncheon in the bollocks and grimaces to camera. So he proved his point and the system is cynical and brutal and it was just pretending to be nice. At least he survives. In Threads the system destroys the world without ordinary people knowing much about it at all. So why should he pretend? He knew it all along. In Threads no-one can really speak by the end; in Made in Britain, speech is stopped by a blow to the groin. And Trevor is Britain: brutal, white, racist, with a sense and an intelligence deliberately hidden from view in favour of a violence of soul that will only ever destroy.

Whatever happened to that Britain?

Cheltenham

Pottering around yesterday I noticed that the old place is looking better than it has done for years. A lot of previously dingy side streets suddenly look all spruced up, St Pauls is undergoing almost complete renovation it seems, and the lower high street has been cleaned up nicely. I do think that for proper renewal that lower high street should be almost completely demolished and rebuilt though. Certainly that monstrosity that houses Wilkinsons and others should be rebuilt. something is going on to the old Littlewoods building; you could tell that it used to be some kind of post war reappraisal of the civic neo-gothic that populates the high Street (like the Smiths building) but I'm not sure what they're doing to it at the moment. Hopefully it's being demolished. Montpellier is looking great all the way along it now as well. I don't like Victorian or neo-gothic architecture much, for the reason that the medievals really believed it; and the Victorians started a revival because they didn't. But having said that, Cheltenham boasts some subtle and attractive versions of the genre: Francis Close Hall (formerly St Paul's College), part of the university of Gloucestershire; the chapel of the Boys' College; the Ladies' College and one or two others. Compare these with Keble College Oxford, which is not subtle, but to my mind is one of the most impressive achievements of the neo-gothic style. Cheltenham is known as a regency town but a lot of growth, especially cultural and educational went on in the Victorian period and after.

Cricket's Shame

So much for the spirit of cricket. Like almost everyone in the world I have no idea what really happened yesterday, whether or not Pakistan did tamper with the ball, and so I'd rather not make any comment about it.

However there has been some truly pathetic comment on the matter from people in positions of power. One was from the head of the PCB, Shaharyar Khan, who said that the ball that was replaced had been hit for several sixes and fours and hence the damage to it. If you are going to defend yourself against an accusation, which is fair enough, at least get your facts right, before it makes you look like a fool. In fact two sixes were hit, by Kevin Pietersen, after the ball had been replaced.

The second pathetic comment is from Andrew Miller in a piss-poor article for Cricinfo (linked to above). I am afraid I'm going to fisk it a bit. But not too much.

According to him the most "chilling" part of the day was the booing of the (mainly English of course) fans! Phew. Well done to Andrew for exposing the real villians of the piece, the ignorant English fans. You see, they were "ignorant" - they genuinely had no idea who was to blame but just blamed the Pakistan team anyway. Well Andrew, whatever the rights and wrongs of the decision to punish Pakistan, who was it who refused to take the field? Whose protest caused the umpires to call the game off, as is clearly written in the laws of the game? Whose decision not to play wasted those fans' money? Crowds boo players in all sorts of sports for all sorts of reasons, and it is not "chilling", it is a sign of disgust, which the fans are absolutely entitled to make. This is my favourite bit:

So to hear the boos at The Oval yesterday was a frightful jolt back to reality. It was a reminder of the ignorance that has tainted so much of the dialogue between East and West, because the crowds were being fed limited information, and their preconceived notions were doing the rest. [my italics]

Ah, you see, the fans are really just pawns in a game of geopolitics; their actions are metaphors for international relations; they're not pissed off fans at all angry at wasting their time and money, they're prejudiced members of a (single entity) West that treats the (also single entity)East with contempt. Andrew doesn't really go into detail as to what "preconceived notions" the fans held, but we don't really need to go too far. He is precariously close to calling the fans the "r -word", which coming from a person working in the media doesn't surprise me at all, though it should.

I like this too : "and not one of the 26 cameras that Sky has permanently trained on the action has yet produced any evidence to back up this lofty claim. How curious." [my italics again]

How does he know this? Has he examined all the footage? and has he examined the ball? Presumably the ball itself is the evidence which Andrew seeks. But that's not the point - It's a conspiracy, you see. That last sentence quoted above is the kind of sentence that ufo researchers used to write when, having no evidence at all to back up their opinions, didn't want to sound extreme, so decided to put it obliquely, just so that we all knew what they meant anyway. "...the original claim put out by RAAF that they had discovered a flying disk was changed to the discovery of a weather balloon. How curious," and that sort of thing.

And anyway! Even if they are guilty of ball tampering, who cares! It's a stupid rule! not an exact quote, but not too far off- need I say more about the intellectual clout needed to write a paragraph of this standard.

and the final paragraph - the coup de grace:

Here is one such depressing missive. "There is no doubt of the racism and hatred that the British have towards the Muslims and especially Pakistan ." It's just not true - look at the evidence of this series for starters. Actually, after today, it's best not to.

You don't have to be Jacques Derrida to see the implications of this. "After today", you can't look at this series for evidence that "the hatred" that "the British have towards the Muslims" is untrue. [Sigh] In other words, hate towards Muslims is implied by Sunday's events. and so it all comes down to racism in the end. The fans, Darrell Hair - whoever.

I have no idea what happened on the field. Pakistan, I would say, are probably innocent and the ball, maybe of inferior quality, just got scuffed up. I don't know. but I do know that self serving and self righteous claptrap by those in power, blaming the blameless - the fans - is no use, and resorting to sneaky and unfounded allegations of racism is lazy and "ignorant" journalism.

What Time Do You Call This?

I'm currently watching Doctor Who season 25 for the first time in years and am struck by a number of things. When I first watched Sylvester McCoy as the Doctor (age:10) I thought he was rubbish. When I thought about it a bit and re-watched his 3 seasons, (age:16) I thought he was brilliant - deep and dark and insightful. On my latest watching (um, old enough to be my own father) I have returned more or less to my original view. Not that I dislike Sylvester McCoy as a person but that I am embarrassed by his limited range as an actor; by the faux depth he brings to scenes like the famous "look me in the eye, end my life" in The Happiness Patrol, which is actually quite cringe-making in its artificiality and quite rubbish easiness; by the terrible way he does humorous, enthusiastic, friendly or sardonic scenes, especially in The Greatest Show in the Galaxy; and by the utterly unconvincing way he tries to be authoritative, especially in Remembrance of the Daleks (cue several wiggles of the eyebrows).

He is an actor, simply, of limited ability, who struggles to convey real depth of personality, let alone the depth of a 900 year old Time Lord whom we now suspect of being involved in the very origins of time travel and of Time Lord society (or are supposed to, from Remembrance onwards). His relationship with Ace is superficial and non-manipulative because he just doesn't carry the massive intelligence or alienness required for what the Doctor is supposed to be doing with Ace (fnarr fnarr). Ace herself is pathetic, a sketch character who responds like a cartoon only less 3-dimensional. Which is a shame, as when I watched her in 1987-9 I thought she was spunky and great. But Tegan (for example) is a far more convincing human being because her range of emotions and expressions are far greater, even if she is annoying. Tegan is annoying. The Doctor knows it and she knows it. She is a flawed human being. Ace is just an idea and the idea of a 9 year old not-quite-sexual-boy at that.

This is not to say I hate Season 25. The design, ideas and direction are quite cool. Unfortunately the plotting, acting and scripts are poor. How come there are parallel ideas in Remembrance and Silver Nemesis (shudder) and Happiness and Greatest Show? Who the hell was script editing this crap? Don't tell me - I know. Yet, the conceits behind all 3 stories (I don't count Silver Nemesis) are quite cool.

Happiness in particular, is not "joyful in its kicking of right wing fantasies" (Day, Cornell, Topping) but quite the reverse, is joyful in its booting of leftist fantasies - it is leftists who always insist people should be happy (unoffended, fulfilled, together, bonded, united) and that societies should be built for people's happiness, along with the repressive state organs that go with it. And the candy victim does not wear a pink triangle, I have no idea where they get that from. Happiness builds a powerful case for: solitude, depression, uniqueness, voluntary as opposed to compulsory collectivism, opting out, the subversion of union demonstrations, the destruction of state broadcasting, the exposure of state-inspired rubbish about not imprisoning criminals ("we don't have prisons on Terra Alpha...but if you cross that line you're a dead man"), compulsory collection of identity, active refusal to join in, passive-aggression, the use of genuine academic study to demolish official state bullshit (Earl Sigma is a medical student), against the lack of an independent police force, and finally, satirises, mercilessly, government obsession with sweets and the danger that sugary foods pose. In short - all non-paleo Tories should support The Happiness Patrol.

And yet. And yet. A lot of the actual words characters have to say are crap; the demolition of Helen A is pisspoor; her final catharsis predictable and dull; MCoy's performance over the top and stupid. Who the hell are the guys in the tunnels? What is their culture? What happened to them - I know the settlers wiped them out or something but how, and how does that affect both cultures? What are their names? I know Gilbert M (who is brilliant) built the Kandyman but why? And why shape him like a series of sweets? Why make him hate Gilbert M's guts? Why not re-programme him? How do the fondant surprises kill (apart from the obvious satrical element)? Why are the Patrols such lousy shots? How come Susan Q is disaffected and reveals it so easily to a stranger? and not just any stranger but the one she has only just that minute been placed in charge of? surely such a govt keen on happiness would have sussed her out ages ago, the miserable sod?

But.

It does have the greatest line EVER uttered by a villain, and in this DC&T are absolutely right.

"What time d'you call this??" is a classic, obsessive, manipulative, dangerous, fed up, pain in the arse kind of line. Spoken by a robot Bertie Bassett it is twice as effective as if it were (say) Alan Rickman or your boy/girlfriend. But I'm sure you can just imagine your significant other coming out with that line, if not also being a maniacal designer of fatal sweets.

Tin Drumming

Thought I'd just mention that I have chosen the name of my blog not because I am a Nazi, which I'm not, or because I'm unaware of what The Tin Drum is about, which I'm also not, but because I just like the idea of someone, like me, pointlessly going on and on about stuff when no-one is listening or wants to listen. And as a metaphor for that banging on a tin drum is pretty good. Plus a few people at school used to think of me as a poisonous dwarf mouthing off ignorantly to all and sundry, even though I'm of average height.

Still, Grass's confession this week puts the book in a slightly different light.

England playing poorly at the moment, Pakistan bowling well. I would think Australia have worked out now that Pietersen is so pumped up at the start of his innings that he is extremely vulnerable between 0 and about 35. All they have to is bowl quick and straight at him and he is a candidate for a rubbish score. Today does show you that good though England are, against good, probing bowling, they can be made to struggle.

Fourth Test

Weather seems to be playing up for tomorrow's non-decisive final Test at the Oval. I think it would be a shame to lose the Test as Test Cricket is a gift from God, and anything that causes there to be less of it is evil. Why is Test Cricket wonderful?

1) It is played out over a nominal 5 days, allowing for the game to be the focus of ruthless tussles for dominance over an extended period.

2)It brings together the best players in the world under rules which are more equally balanced than ODI cricket, which is biased against good fast bowling.

3)It is sapping, emotionally exhausting stuff for the players. That's why it's called "Test" cricket.

4)The possibility of redemption (the second innings) after initial failure. Stepping up and saving the team after getting them into dire trouble a couple of days earlier.

5) It is a team game, to be sure; but the individuals concerned know there is nowhere to hide. You bat alone and bowl alone and if you are, say, Mohammad Yousuf or Panesar, however good you are at your chosen discipline, often you field alone too.

6) A single moment can change a series like a butterfly...you know the rest. And it could be something so totally minor, like Angus Fraser keeping out a Donald yorker. In that sense almost every delivery has the potential to be the equivalent of a penalty kick. No wonder Ramprakash was always so nervous.

7)The match can be all but won after five days of dominance...only for the something to go wrong at the very end - a wicket falls, or doesn't fall, a dodgy decision, a dropped catch. I can't think of many sports where unrelenting dominance can be, in the end, so pointless (if you compare effort to result I mean -for example Old Trafford 2005). Obviously football matches can change with 90+mins on the clock but it is 90 minutes, not five days of effort.

8)Test cricket is where the best players play their best. Yes, Ponting hit a 100 in the WC Final of 2003. But Tests are where the great players most often step up to the mark and the ones who don't quite cut the mustard, don't. Think of Shoaib this winter, or Vaughan and Trescothick, two players with average county records, both excellent Test players. Or think of Ramps, again creaming county bowling, but just not quite good enough at the highest level.

9) Test cricket is an extended human test of the crowd and umpires too. Who would have been Billy Bowden on that final day at Edgbaston? What a momentous decision to have to give after such a wonderful, sapping game.

10)As if all that weren't enough we have the random element too - weather and the toss.


What other sport could be more like life itself?

Dreary Rationality

I wanted to expand on some of the points I made in yesterday's post, except the one about Ray Santilli being a twat. That, surely, is self explanatory.

It was really the reason I left the study of Forteana. If you don't know what that means, I guess the easiest way of putting it is to say that it is the study of weirdness, as pioneered by US author Charles Fort, and carried on by Fortean Times.

In my mid-late teens, about ten years ago, I was passionate about it. With my friends, I would go UFO spotting, go to ancient sites (the most wonderful being Silbury Hill at midnight with a full moon) and read and write endlessly on the subject. A friend and me even started an extremely short-lived magazine about it.

I suppose, firstly, it was the discrediting of a lot of UFO stuff that sent me off the subject, even though Forteana is a much bigger subject than just that. Mexico City footage from 1991 that looked so brilliant and then turned out to be easily achieved fakery; the Ray Santilli bullshit; the exposure (somewhat self inflicted) of Graham Hancock; many other photographs which turned out to be fakes when examined with computer equipment. But more than that, much more, it was the death of friends and family who since then have left no trace of themselves at all, not at all, not even in the dark spooky winter hours. It was the skies always seeming to be clear, whenever I stood out and looked. It was the fact that life really is, barring the odd coincidence, absolutely rational and boring. When I realised I was looking for things that just were not there, I realised I was looking for a second kind of religion; at about the same time cultural interest in Forteana died down and the X Files came to a barely noticed close at least in the UK. Have we finally passed the point of being a post-religious culture in need of something to believe in and suddenly entered the phase of a genuinely secular society? Interestingly Forteana was far more prevalent as a cultural theme in the 90s, with its sense of the "end of history" and hence need for something else, than it is now, with key battles to be fought.

Secondly, and more prosaically, it was also the fact that as the security services of the western world had missed several devastating terrorist attacks - it made it highly unlikely that they have been successfully covering up something as massive as alien visitation for 60 years.

Thirdly, and connectedly, the events of the past 5 years have made me realise that conspiracy theories of all kinds are much more psychological than they are real. I know that sounds devastatingly obvious but when you have been involved in them and thought about them, and seen them as a rational part of the world, it comes as a bit of a shock to realise what you have been doing is utterly irrational and depends in part on networks of elaborate, even fiendish construction; on frankly bizarre coincidences - for example this is how a well known writer, let's call him GH to spare his blushes, argues: "but let's suppose x is not the case; let us suppose instead that y is: now z begins to seem more than just a possibility" - this is fine, except that, usually, x is the case; above all these theories and their relation to the real world depend on the entire world being against you. Politically speaking, it made me realise I had been doing what some total idiots (some of whom write for well known newspapers) have done this week by imgining that the terrorist alert was all cooked up to deflect attention from Israel - utterly logical to a certain mindset, totally rational to someone who thinks the world is run by Jews, but all the same, utterly ridiculous.


I would love there to be other things. I would love the universe to pop up and say "ho ho, I bet you didn't see that coming!" but I just don't think it will anymore. What if Brian Greene (say) is right and string theory really is the final theory of everything, and we have cracked it? What then? Where to go after that? the pub? Not that I am saying knowledge is dangerous, just that I would like ultimate knowledge to be impossible, just to keep us going, and hoping for more. I really want there to be weird, inexplicable stuff - I just don't believe any of that anymore.

Alien Autopsy

Sat down last night a little bit the worse for wear to watch Ant and Dec's film, Alien Autopsy, based on the Ray Santilli saga of 1995. Ant, or Dec, played Ray himself as a shuffling idiot, funny and accident prone; Dec, or Ant, played his mate, a sort of straight man propping up the chaos. The look and feel of the film is very mid-70s, maybe it is cashing in on the style of Life on Mars (ho ho). This was all well and good until, through the acohol and pizza daze I had been laughing through, I realised that this was just not funny.

Santilli is a con-artist and a shyster, not a fool. I have lost count of the number of straight faced interviews he sat through in 1995 and afterwards, earnestly proclaiming his honesty. I even had one of these on video, until I threw it in the bin; perhaps I can now produce an amusing little film about howI did really did have Ray Santilli on video insisting he was telling the truth but the tape got destroyed so I made one up instead. That he has allowed himself to be portrayed as such a tool only goes to prove that he is still sticking a massive two fingers up at the people he lied to for ten years.

Did I think the autopsy footage was for real? Well yes, I did - until I saw it. I wanted it to be real, like many people desperate in those grim 90s for something to come along and give us something new to believe in; but the footage itself was so disappointing and taken apart so well by almost any magazine you care to name (except the execrable UFO Magazine, I think) that it would have been fair enough if Santilli at that point had said "Ok, you've got me bang to rights", instead of which he continued to try and milk the thoroughly discredited footage for all it was worth. Now the film, which is so jokey in style and substance that you know that Santilli is still taking the piss, continues that milking. I left Forteana some years ago, disgusted with the disappointing rationality of much of the world so I may be out of touch on what the weirdness-community thinks of Santilli now. I think he is a twat, but then at least I didn't pay to watch his film.

Patrick Allen

Patrick Allen died this week.

So what? Big deal? He was a C movie actor who found belated fame (at the age of 78) as a voice over artist for E4. One might argue that he was made as it were post-apocalyptically famous and that these voice overs were his ultimate acts of irony.

But there was more to him than this. In 1975 he took on some voice overs for a series of animations made by Richard Taylor Cartoons. These animations were to be the tv and radio broadcasts for when the tv people, along with the government, had headed down to the shelters before a nuclear war. They were called "Protect and Survive". There was no irony intended, or needed, for many thousands of people could have protected and survived, using its advice - enough, at least, to provide the labour to start again. It did not, and never intended to, mean that everyone or anyone could survive. In fact, the deaths of most listeners are encoded in the broadcasts if you listen carefully enough; it is the suburbanites that the films are aimed at (damn that ammunition for socialists!).

Patrick Allen would have been, probably, the last voice you ever heard, had there been a nuclear war between 1975 and 1983. The Protect and Survive series of PIFs, classified for quite a while (though obviously made available for the Threads team to use) would have been broadcast on TV and radio in the run up to a nuclear war. His brilliantly deep but never heavy nor not too RP (less so than Peter Jones, whose voice would have given us an ironic world war III) voice was perfect to tell Britain what to do in the event of the unthinkable.

He was the end of the world.

"If, however, you have had a body in the house for more than five days, and if it is safe to go outside, then you should bury the body for the time being in a trench, or cover it with earth, and mark the spot of the burial." [Casualties]

Casualties, and especially this passage, would probably, because of its extreme pessimism (ie realism) have been the very last broadcast before the alarm. I mean, given that most of it would have been on a cycle, the last one to go to air before the final unchanged cycle began on a loop, would have been "Casualties". This may have been as late as the day before a strike; Threads suggests no more than two hours before. It is surely a piece of post-modern irony inherent in the world itself that in 1986 the piss-poor tv series "Casualty" started, and was a huge success.

RIP Patrick Allen, RIP the C20, RIP the Cold War.

Norman Geras

I hate to sound like a lickspittle, but honestly, Normblog is one of the most decent, well argued blogs around. As more of a conservative than a liberal I err towards Iain Dale in terms of political blogs but I seem to always agree with what Norm posts, which is often explained carefully for those (like me) who don't get it first time. More to the point, perhaps, Norm is a leftist who truly believes in emancipation of the weak and social justice, instead of just cheerleading for today's left terrorists (Provos, Baader-Meinhof, Red Brigade, "Angry Brigade" - bunch of twats - ETA, Hamas and Hezbollah - not that these two are proper leftists, but they're attractive to leftists, it seems) against an imaginary capitalist conspiracy. Norm is a bright guy, much much brighter than me, and he believes in a better, thoughtful, unprejudiced future. If his posts seem uncritical of Israel that is not the case, but he is extremely critical of leftists who think that the future is to be secured by shacking up with homophobes, religious extremists, borderline racists and, let's be honest here, fascists. There are many sites which are full of unthoughtful leftists, so let's celebrate Normblog, one which unashamedly promotes everything that is brilliant and intelligent (rather than clever) - not least of which is cricket, although his clear Australian sympathies mean he should perhaps be put on trial.

More on Memory

I can't help trying to think about memory again, even if I am not getting very far. How do things that were habitual become forgotten? Why is something that until recently was familiar suddenly seems never to have existed? for example, a tree was recently cut down outside my house. It had been there for 20 years but already I can barely recall its appearance or position from my window here. Most car journeys are forgotten even while I am still driving - I frequently wonder how I got to a certain point and find I cannot recall how. But, as I said before, I remember all my humiliations, even down to the actual feelings of embarrassment! Not remembering anything from, say, 1979, as far as I am concerned I was there as much as I was in 1975 (ie not at all); have those days actually died within me? Have they any effect at all on me (they must do, surely)?

Moment to moment, regardless of whether I recall, say, an early event that led to a fear of wasps, I still run away from them.

I do remember my beloved late grandfather, whom I last saw on his deathbed, a couple of days before he died not all that many years ago, but when I close my eyes I find I cannot see him clearly, though he turns up in my dreams reasonably frequently and I think he looks like I remember him.

Memory

It is a funny thing; but I exist and think and feel despite huge swathes of my 30 years being closed off to me, for reasons I cannot fathom. I first realised it when I was about 15 I think; that I could not remember being 5,6, or 7 at all. I thought and thought, looked at photographs, tried to remember, walked over and past old haunts; but nothing came back. Today I just feel something; a shudder or a glow or something else, more ambiguous, that is a mixture of pleasant and worrying sensations, when I see certain things, including, bizarrely, the side indicators of old Fiats (don't ask - I don't know and don't really want to know) or painted black wooden window frames. But even now I remember very little about being 15. I don't remember what it was like being at school, what it felt like, what I thought; I remember what it smelled like and that brings back - self confidence, arrogance, immortality, fear - but I couldn't tell you what I actually did all day, or all night (probably just as well). I remember my humiliations - of course - but what else, I'm not really sure. I vaguely remember Oxford, but what I read there needs to be re-read to be remembered properly. And I half remember my near on year spent in Australia. But not the air, the birds, the feel of my feet on the ground.

It is said that you need memory for identity. Clearly you do - in some respects. I don't remember my experiences but am still composed of them - I think. At some level the memory of my first 8 years has not been completely wiped, but is retained in personality or in symbol, like a Windows icon - trees, sounds, fears. Is that why I find the crappy music of the early 80s so utterly evocative, so spine tinglingly close to a real feeling? I know my personality- I remember my favourite x, y and zs, my first day at school, my name, my old friends. If I forgot these, and my family, I maybe would cease to be me, and suffer amnesia. But I can survive barely knowing anything about my past, in some cases barely more than I know my future; and seem a coherent personality, a self aware being. Could things I do not currently remember somehow be erased from my whatever it is (subconscious, etc &c) and then cause me to suffer amnesia or personality problems?

The question I really want to answer is: is there any more? Is there more to me, more to any of us? Is there something waiting to be found? Are there memories that I glimpse in dreams or only see as symbols that can be shown fully for what they are, even if those memories are just me packing my old bag and heading off to school? This may just be a symptom of a wider issue - I would like there to be more. To me, to the universe.

My mistake in the previous posts made me think of all of this: I know something was wrong, terribly wrong, with what happened to England on the 1998/99 tour of Australia, and that I was there; but what the hell was it - I don't recall, properly. I see images, stills, hear noises, have vague feelings of outrage. Other than that it is guess work or Wisden.


-You see, all my life, I've had this feeling that there's something fundamentally wrong with the universe.
-Oh, that's just perfectly normal paranoia. Everyone in the universe has that.
-Everyone?
-Everyone.

(Remembered, not looked up, from Hitchhikers Guide, Arthur and Slartibartfast)

Erratum


I think I have it wrong in the previous post: in Adelaide in 1998 I now think after a middle of the night recall, that it was Atherton given out by the 3rd umpire when the tv showed he was not caught, the ball bouncing before the slip fielder caught it. In any case, what definitely happened was that England did not get the rub of the decisions in that series, even if they had been saved by a storm at Brisbane.

Sajid Mahmood, England

There's plenty on the BBC and in various newspapers today about the barracking Sajid Mahmood received from a section of the Headingly crowd yesterday. Chants of "traitor" were shouted at him during his excellent couple of spells that helped win the Test for England. He was a bit annoyed but responded in the two best possible ways: 1) taking wickets and 2) attributing the chants to his dad, a Pakistan fan, and thereby showing he is a really mature head on young shoulders who should be pencilled in for Australia now. Yes he needs a lot of work and practice but he has the pace and the suggestion of reverse swing that says he could replace Simon Jones, if he is allowed to prosper. It has been a tough 18 months for England and they have come out of it well, and deserve to be rated No2 in the world. Wins v Australia, Pakistan, draw v India in India and a win in South Africa are excellent performances, even if the loss in Pakistan was rubbish and the draw v Sri Lanka appalling. It is even better when you consider that England just does not have the raw talent these other countries have - there are no great players in the England side, no Inzy, Yousof, Murali, Tendulkar, Dravid, Ponting, McGrath, Warne and so on - and that playing at home is possibly less of an advantage for England than any other nation, given the number of foreign players who play (or have played) county cricket.

I do not think that we will retain the Ashes -home advantage and Warne might prove too much for us, but we are developing a good squad of players, and the days of Hick or Crawley being called up for a couple of tests are well and truly over (Jon Lewis notwithstanding). It is sobering to think that had Ramprakash been born in, say, 1979, rather than 1968, he would be enjoying a magnificent test career right now and England might have had a great player in the side. We have had good, very good, players, betrayed by short sighted management; we have, hopefully, seen the last of that. We have not seen the last of injury though, and if they are not careful the management can still repeat the disasters of 2002/3 by sending an unfit Jones, Flintoff, Vaughan and Giles to Australia. We can only hope that Mahmood, Panesar, Read and Cook have done enough to persuade them to take only fit and strong players.

A word on the umpiring. It cannot have escaped anyone's notice that over the last 12 months, England have received the rub of tosses, decisions, (often) injuries, and even weather. CMJ remarked, rightly, on TMS this weekend that during the long long spell that England were being thrashed by Australia, not winning any 5 test series, and not winning abroad, everything seemed to go against them. I still remember a run out so blatant at Sydney in 1999 (I was there), when the batsman (Slater, who then made a hundred in an innings when only one other batsman reached double figures) was already walking and England celebrating before the the 3rd umpire called him back; and Adelaide that same winter when the big screen showed so clearly that Atherton had taken a catch that we were all celebrating, only for us to be utterly dumbstruck when the verdict came back: not out.

I could list all the cliches, but I really can't be bothered.

A word on language: I am taken by the Australian and perhaps US convention of referring to teams as singular nouns rather than the UK convention of assuming they are plural entities ("United were rubbish" rather than "United was rubbish"). It makes logical sense to me, and I think it is rather cool.

Other Interests

Now that I have finally managed to master the most extremely basic html I have posted another site, with some of my researches into local cold war history, here: www.coldwarbourton.co.uk

Please bear in mind that it is no visual treat because it really is only the most very basic html that I have used. I am finding being stuck on Windows 98 a bit of a handicap, and also being crap at using html.

Self Criticises Houellebecq


In a reasonably well argued piece on Spiked Josie Appleton mentions that Will Self has dismissed Houellebecq as a "little guy who can't get enough sex". Frankly I'd have thought that was the whole point of all of Houellebecq's books, so full marks to Self for stating the bleeding obvious, but apart from that it is a remark that betrays Self's own departure from literary outsider with the volcanic junk fuelled imagination (or William Burroughs wannabe) to fully paid up member of the literary bore establishment. Reviews of Self's latest novel, The Book of Dave, which admittedly I have not yet read, have tended to gush about the criticism of holy and sacred texts it contains - thus maybe proving Houellebecq's point in The Possibility of an Island nicely: "[artistic recognition went]... to productions that.. challenged moral values conventionally described as "traditional"..." - and so on for a good page or so.

The Will Self of My Idea of Fun, Grey Area and Great Apes was a fearsome talent, of prodigious angry imagination whose obsession with identity bore strange and exciting fruit, especially in the short stories. His conception of different, essentially satiric states of mind was vivid and startling. It was the work of an edgy writer writing about edges of various kinds. I especially loved Great Apes for its exposure of so many things: language, sex, sociability, drugs, art, human animalness and so on. The Self of How the Dead Live, going back to an old idea, seemed to me at least to begin to lose this torrential imagination without replacing it with anything of real depth. His was a greater imagination than Houellebecq, whether he is as prescient I don't know. Self is, however, a fairly conventional lefty, but Houllebecq doesn't fit that category quite so nicely, hence the remark. Stick to bizarre, funny and frightening imaginary worlds, Will, it's what you're best at.

England won the Test and Series today, their first home series win over Pakistan since 1982. There are a number of coincidences here, currently being discussed on the BBC's TMS site: then as now, an unpopular UK PM kowtowed to a powerful US Republican president; Israel was causing havoc inside Lebanon; England were going down under that winter; England were lacking key players; Pakistan were unhappy with several umpiring decisions and so on. This aside, it is notable for being yet another instance of England being a great team without any great players. England has no-one of the talent of Yousof, Younis Khan, or Inzy. But hunting in packs they more than make up for that.

Return

I'm back from holiday so posting can safely resume. I read and loved The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, though I don't know it well enough to see if the author has got her own murderer wrong yet. I did spot the murderer but couldn't quite put my finger on why until Poirot helpfully explained it for me. Not having read any other detective fiction at all I have nothing to really assess it against but I will be back with more considered thoughts later. For the moment I'll just say that I liked the idea that Poirot is really this kind of bully, convincing people with bluff rather than pinpoint detection to get them to reveal things. Despite this, he is clever, and does work things out. But a lot of things we do right start off as bluff or bluster, or even as lies, and take on lives of their own from there. I wasn't a reader until I persuaded Oxford to let me study there. I haven't finished the new(ish) Houellebecq yet; as predicted it does make me feel sick: there are plenty of meditations along the same theme he set out as early as Whatever (I think) that "sex is a system of social hierarchy" and that life without sex or sex drive at least is no life at all. Very little in it is, I think, completely original - most of it, including the stuff deliberately designed to outrage Muslims and the thoughts on the decay of society, has been discussed at greater or lesser length in previous novels. In fact, I've skim read a lot of it, which is a bit disrespectful so I guess I will have to re-read this too.

I'm not impressed by England's bowling today, even if Younis and Yousof are brilliant batsmen. I was however impressed with the interest some Dutch people showed when the cricket scores were shown on the telly on the boat from Dunkirk yesterday.