The Aspidistra Blues

Young blood

2011-08-12T08:59:00.007+01:00

One evening in February I was on my way home from work when I saw a group of people heading towards me.

Faced with potential danger I behave as though I am 6' tall rather than the 5'3" I actually reach and my fantasy Dobermans are panting at my side, giving an outward show of respect to those involved unless the mood changes. I do not speed up and sometimes even slow down but without hesitating or giving ground. In this way I moved through a group of young males, ranging in age from late teens to a couple who could not have been older than eight years old. That shocked me and I risked looking at them as I passed. It was cold, dark and past 8pm on a week day. I wondered if their parents knew where they were or even cared. They certainly weren't dressed for the weather.

"Am I goin' to hear a smash, Ash?!" one of them called out, as they swarmed around a bus shelter. But it was left unscathed as they moved up the street like a shoal of fish, suburban piranhas. It occurred to me that, in their own way, the older members of that group were caring for the youngest and however much I disapproved of their method, they were filling the gap left by parents, often mothers, unwilling or unable to handle the children they have bred.

Six months later I can remember the sudden urge I had to take them all home, to scrape enough money together for a pizza - to share if not to nourish - and be mother. That pang was a strange and unfamiliar feeling, I am not the maternal type, but for a few moments I felt their need so deeply that it made a dent in the cynical shell that protects me from daft notions like that. I suspect that I am on my own with this sense of concern, especially after recent events.

The rioting, looting mobs that filled our screens for two days have led to all the usual calls for greater parental discipline, harsher police tactics and support for deprived areas. I find that I am tired of hearing them, probably because I've heard it all before so many times. Perhaps I am old enough now to recognise that there is no single solution, that any effective repair to the confidence of business owners and residents will be haphazard and largely accidental. There seems to be a growing acceptance that it will take a change in mindset rather than funding to fix things and it is tragic that it has taken so long for this to sink in.

Many are shocked, as I was, that children whose ages must be in single figures were not safe in their homes, watching the chaos on television. Instead they were wandering through the debris of ruined shops, following the example of their older friends and taking the leftovers. Some were even treated as porters, their innocent arms filled with loot by adults too stupid to realise that every move was being recorded on CCTV.

Loving parents who hang on each childish word, lavish time on home cooked meals and lose sleep over unsatisfactory school reports might as well be from another planet to those who raised these tiny looters. My lip used to curl at the mere thought of the selfish lazy creatures who have helped shape our future citizens but scorn has been replaced by a sense of fear that there are so many of them.

A former colleague became pregnant at sixteen by a man whose lack of interest in his son was a regular topic of our largely one sided conversations. I became a near expert on her son’s failings, including his own poor record as a father. Having set the example for his spending habits through her own need for instant gratification she spent hours on her phone berating him about it. Last year I was trapped in a waiting room with several others listening to another woman’s very similar, loud conversations, full of "I" and "me", on her mobile as she described at some length the hard time she was having.

The call that left the greatest impression on me was the one she made to her son. She complained that he wasn't with her, that he had spent the weekend "smoking", that he had failed in every way imaginable, yet when she ended the call and looked around at us she smiled, satisfied that she had such an audience for her woes, oblivious to our vinegary contempt. What a martyr. I could imagine the teenager on the other end, for whom humiliation by stranger was probably a common event, switching off for its duration, almost but never quite numb to the sarcasm pouring from her lips.

I was an adult before mobiles became common but my mother bitched about me to other people, in front of me, in the same selfish cathartic way and I admit that a degree of fellow feeling helps me overlook his use of cannabis. My mother's constant sarcasm cut deep and had a long term, negative impact so I wonder how anyone who does not have enough self confidence to know that they are good at some things could cope under such a negative barrage. Teachers report that very young children now begin school unable to recognise and respond to their own names because their carers rarely speak directly to them except to shout, too busy putting the world to rights on their phones.

To me it is no coincidence that terms such as “bruv” and “bro” are used by young men. When the people that society expects us to respect first and most, our parents, do nothing to deserve it, it is hardly surprising that a peer group or gang becomes the most readily available substitute family. If the dominant woman in your life treats you with contempt whilst behaving in a contemptible manner it is unlikely that you will regard others of her gender as people you want to commit to for life. It becomes inevitable that those who these children choose to prove themselves to are friends who really will follow through, with a beating or even a knife, if they fail to deliver, will teach them shame and pride in a way that their parents never could. It is the closest that many will get to the even handed discipline we all have a right to.

Do not mistake my words for a rant about single mothers because parents become “single“ for all sorts of reasons. An elderly neighbour never tired of telling me of the beloved gentle woman, a war widow, who raised her by herself with very little financial assistance from the government in a way that set a positive pattern for three more generations. The women who typify the modern negative stereotype of the "single mother" are now grandmothers to children who may well turn out just like their parents, raised in the 1980's when conspicuous consumption was a near religion, a measure of self worth.

This is not just about the benefits culture. I point a steady and unforgiving finger at parents who were so keen to achieve their career goals that they replaced love, affection and a guiding hand with all the material goods their earnings could buy. Is it any surprise then, that their children fill the gap left by a lack of nurturing with stuff they don't need when they need stuff they don't want, like education and jobs? To them, greed is still good. As their offspring hurt themselves kicking in shop windows, bleeding on pavements across the UK, the cry went up: “Where are their parents?!” They were watching them in HD, on televisions they may have actually paid for.

Am I the only one to see the irony in the appeal made by David Lammy MP to network providers to shut down the SMS system through which many of these riots seem to have been organised? Thefts were being carried out by those who can afford a Blackberry, using communications that earlier this year were seen as essential to the success of the Arab Spring. To some these looters are revolutionary heroes. The rioters have been characterised as disaffected youths from underprivileged backgrounds but it was predictable that those already convicted include a number who do not lack for money. The emotional famine that their entire peer group, rich and poor, has suffered for a generation or more is only now becoming apparent. Unfortunately the remedy for this sickness is something that money can’t buy.

Thirty minutes

2011-07-27T14:55:00.006+01:00

It is hard to believe that this screen of ubiquitous buddleia, scenting the suburban air, hides a railway line that has triggered intense debate, caused thousands of people to protest, and made a minister of state into a figure of hate. It is often referred to as “the Chiltern Line” and if the government has its way it will be the route for HS2, a high speed rail link connecting London to Birmingham and reducing the time of the present journey by about thirty minutes. What could you do with thirty minutes? Start the clock.

Spend your thirty minutes trying to complete a public consultation document, bearing in mind that it has been drawn up by someone who wants you to fall into a trap, to make you say that you actually do want a train charging past your home at over 200 miles an hour, that you have no objection to years of construction work, that you believe every word they say about noise levels. You left school to get away from this kind of thing and here you are taking an exam to stop your home becoming worthless, to justify the years, decades of work you put into paying a mortgage. You take advice, watch videos, listen to the experts before you answer “no” to everything, in a desperate attempt to save all that effort and sacrifice.

Think of all those minutes and half hours spent in a job you hate, gritting your teeth to get through one more day, hour, minute without flinging your letter of resignation at the boss, all for nothing because you are a nimby, small fry, nothing to a man whose salary you pay but didn’t vote for. Another nameless face in the crowd at a demo, along with all the other unwanted little people who have cluttered up his day, getting in the way of “progress”.

You will never be one of those gaining that extra half hour on a train moving so fast that the rest of mankind becomes a blur. You will never afford those plush seats and wonderful service. You will wait with all the rest on a station platform waiting for a worn out train that has been held up, again. Because there is no money to improve what already exists, what you can afford. You will sit in your car, on a bus, in a jam caused by the years of construction work that you are paying for to build a railway line you don’t want, can’t afford, don’t need. You will grind your teeth and curse those who inflicted this upon you and your lowly kind and know that you are helpless. You don’t count, your kind never have.

Thirty minutes in a bluebell wood, deafened by birdsong yet wishing you could make less noise as you walk amongst trees that were old when you were a child. A thousand cobwebs and caterpillar threads cling to your arms as they must have done to those of your ancestors when places like this were vast and untouched. You are the first to walk here today, in a place that has never changed and you thought never would until the minister expressed his opinion. Knowing that you are barely a heart beat in the time it took to make this place that cannot be replaced, replicated, remade. Thirty minutes, a pin prick in time in this woodland set like sapphires and emeralds amongst the coral of suburban rooftops, one last place to remember what it must have been like in this land before “progress” came and ate away at your soul. Time counts for nothing here.

Half an hour at an estate agent’s office, listening to all the advice he can give you on how to sell a worthless house. Paint the walls a neutral colour, thank God you redecorated some of it last year, it will take less money, less time. You’ll get the downstairs lav done in thirty minutes. Put the “For Sale” sign up and hope to hell that the neighbours don’t put one of those bloody posters in the window, hope that whoever takes the bait doesn’t check up on what that means. Keep your fingers crossed for a lot longer than thirty minutes, through every rare viewing, trying not to wince when “it” gets mentioned until you realise that they were just curious, not serious, bad luck. Wish that the things that once made your home such a bargain (“Five minutes walk from the nearest station!”) weren’t the things that make it so undesirable now.

The worst half hour is the one spent listening to your tearful elderly neighbour, born in her house, the one she hoped to die in. Listening to the despair of a woman who cannot fill in a form at the best of times and is rendered incoherent at the thought that her childhood home might be demolished, just another of the worthless small fry who will be swept away for the greater good. She loves her garden but even that has made her a target for the mockery of businessmen. She doesn’t own a bowler hat and her lawn is tiny, a postage stamp of green, but she knows each lily and rose, remembers the ones her mother planted and loves them still. It has taken many a half hour to make this patch of heaven and it was worth every moment.

Wonder, sometimes, how long it would take, how many pills, how much booze, to take the problem away forever. How many of those affected regularly spend thirty minutes that close to edge, when the worry becomes too much - “Why are you crying Mummy?” - when there is no fight left and despair takes over. When you begin to think that all the effort is pointless, that all those half hours have been wasted and you are worn away to nothing, for nothing. Knowing that, when the dust that can never settle makes its way, every day, into your home, your precious half hour will be frittered away by a business man, distracted by the many pleasures in that brand new temple to retail - the station - rushing off half an hour late in a wasteful carbon heavy cab to the appointment he might have made, had he been more mindful of those thirty minutes.

Stop HS2 - advice on completing the consultation document
Stop HS2 natonal petition

A greener shade of blues

2011-07-26T14:30:00.018+01:00

A twenty minute walk from my house brings me to a supermarket, once the Granada Cinema, where The Rolling Stones played a gig in 1965. Fifteen minutes away in the opposite direction is an apartment block, the site of the Oldfield Tavern where in 1962 a drummer called Keith Moon auditioned for a band called The Who. They played gigs there throughout 1963 at the Music Club which also hosted Screaming Lord Sutch and many others. It is easy to imagine these young men travelling through the green and pleasant suburb of Ealing, ready to set the world on fire with their sound. With such an impressive musical history it is hardly surprising that Ealing holds an annual festival and this year I made the effort to attend the blues event held in Walpole Park.

At £4 for a day’s entry it is extraordinarily good value. The event is held in what used to be Sir John Soane’s back garden, just off a high street lined with the usual stores. The sun shone on this particular day, but had it proved wet and muddy, the day-glo wristband I was issued with would have allowed me to nip out to Marks and Spencers for some clean clothes or into Pitshanger Manor to dry out. In some ways this is part of the problem with this event and I’m afraid I did have a problem with it.

As at any other music festival there were the usual stalls flogging dream catchers and ethnic clothing but while I was there hardly anyone was buying because the age group for that kind of thing was barely in evidence. In fact the image I took away with me was of the many foldaway chairs that almost filled the main tent. I’ve seen these things advertised in the Observer colour supplement but until now I didn’t know that anyone actually bought them. They even outnumbered the pushchairs, and there were a lot of those.

Once parked in these things their owners just seemed to sit there, a few feet away from bands that were giving it their all. Occasionally someone would head to or from the bar with a beer which they would then place in the specially designed drink holder on the arm rest. They actually used it. How uncool. I found it hard to determine whether any of them were having a good time. I could have got it wrong. Perhaps these were the same people who sat listening reverently to singers in clubs in the sixties and they are still doing it fifty years later. On the other hand it might be that the worthy citizens of the borough were just making sure they got their money’s worth from a council subsidised event. Enjoyment didn’t appear to come into it.

On the smaller South Stage Sam Kelly’s Station House revue featured singer Debbie Giles, TJ Johnson and local guitar player Lally. A group of accomplished musicians who clearly love performing together, they sounded really tight and even though there were some foldaway chairs in evidence their occupants managed to behave as though they still had a pulse. The band were enjoying themselves and had nothing to prove.

Sandi Thom was promoting her new blues influenced album, “Merchants and Thieves”, on the main stage. Perhaps 3pm was just too early a slot but it was a shame that a talented and fresh blues voice was exposed to such a dozy audience (the obligatory dancing drunks didn‘t count). It wasn’t helped by the number of photographers, amateur or otherwise, who began to pop up during her set, to the point where a security guard intervened. This drew the wrath of one man who deliberately encouraged two small boys to dart about right in front of the stage with cameras for the rest of the performance, distracting to everyone and unbelievably rude. I was standing well away from the stage but put my own camera away out of embarrassment.

A great singer, I think Sandi deserved a better reception and I hope that if she returns to Ealing she and her excellent band will be treated with more respect. Another Scot with a particular affinity for the blues, she has embraced them and made them her own. I loved the fact that someone who has had a single at number one in seven countries was still prepared to sell t-shirts and CDs herself and sign them afterwards. She even unwrapped mine for me when I just stood there, star struck! This seemed to be the only opportunity to buy music at the event and although I realise that the download is now king, it seemed strange that this should be the case along with a lack of t-shirts, a staple of every other gig I’ve been to.
　 Music fans struggle to pay for and attend gigs in muddy fields in the middle of nowhere but this conveniently situated one is so cheap and safe that it might as well be a funfair. The local council supports it because it brings more money to the area, generating another layer of income. My impression of Ealing’s annual blues festival is that is a place where people come to socialise rather than celebrate a musical genre that grew from the pared down wisdom, wit and humour of impoverished African Americans, expressed in the most beautiful soul searing way. At this event the music is almost incidental. I went home while it was still light. If I had paid more perhaps I would have stayed all evening to get my money’s worth.

The Stones fell in love with music which evolved in prisons, farms and shacks, far from the comfortable suburbia they grew up in, and had respect for those who made it. I wish Ealing was a magnet for young guitar based musicians and genuine fans, an up and coming generation to ward off the onslaught of over commercialised plastic pop but I’m not sure that you can recreate New Orleans in London without making the area a place where they can flourish and perform with fewer restrictions. The Stones and The Who came about because there used to be so many pubs, clubs and other small venues where they could perform and find each other. You seem to need expensive licenses for everything now.

I have a great deal of respect for the organisers behind the event because they do actively promote Ealing’s blues heritage. My criticism is not aimed at them. I feel very strongly that it requires the intervention of a younger generation that genuinely loves that music, sees what Jagger saw in it and actually performs it. Council grants and worthy people who use the drinks holders on their foldaway chairs are no substitute for a respectful and truly appreciative audience.

The D word

2011-04-29T02:26:00.005+01:00

I have no idea why I do it. There is no explanation for the fact that I’ve ended up with these things. Some time ago I spotted a book about the late Princess of Wales in a charity shop and bought it. Since then I’ve bought a few more, along with a couple of thimbles on Ebay though I think the thimbles had more to do with their kitsch appeal than sympathy. For some reason I have taken more interest in Diana since her death than I did when she was alive.

I’ve noticed that a lot of the books that were produced about her in the 1980’s have begun to crop up for sale amongst the bric-a-brac, possibly because someone has moved and decided to let go of a collection or because there has been a death. It is likely to be the latter because so many of her fans were loyal to the last.

Looking through those books it is impossible not to feel sad that the behaviour most of us took to be a coy shyness was in truth indicative of a fear and nervousness we could not have begun to imagine. How mean some of the comments made about her then seem now, with the benefit of hindsight. I can’t help wondering how she felt, at an age where young women are particularly self conscious about their appearance, to have all that aimed at her when she was coming to terms with such a strange new life. Regarded as one of the most elegant women of 1981 she was then voted one of The Ten Worst Dressed of 1982.

From what she said to those who recorded her thoughts, she could never really understand why she had such a potent effect on some of the men around her. I saw this for myself when a teacher at the school I attended at the time came back from a lunch break having seen her. The tough, blunt Scot was useless for the rest of the day because she had smiled at him.

Of course her daughter-in-law to be, the girl she never had the chance to meet, has all that ahead of her and the strange thing is that there has a been a lapse of time large enough for many to forget that the same things are being said all over again. That Kate is a style icon, that she is bound to encourage new interest in the British fashion industry, that she will set trends rather than follow them.

“It was really on the day that she became engaged to the Prince of Wales that she became a leader of fashion. Copies of the magnificent sapphire and diamond engagement ring were very soon on sale for anything from a few pounds to a few thousand pounds, depending on whether they were made of coloured glass or the real thing. Of course the soft blue suit, which became the perfect foil for the engagement ring, was copied everywhere too, and the colour of the season became ‘Lady Diana Blue.‘” “Princess, Leader of Fashion“, Martina Shaw

A few weeks ago I was walking behind someone who looked so much like Kate because of her clothes and hair, and I realise now that what she has in common with Diana is her ordinariness. Diana set a trend for pie crust blouses and that bobbed hairstyle because the media transmitted her look (worn by hundreds of women in central London) to thousands elsewhere. The woman I was following by chance wore her hair long, her raincoat belted in at the waist and her long boots kitten heeled because so many others of her generation do. And now even more do simply because she does.

How easily the lessons of Diana’s trials at the hands of the media have been forgotten. Kate and her family have already suffered the ignominy of being scrutinised and then criticised when her relationship with William broke down briefly. The footage of her walking quickly through a horde of photographers in the early days, head down and hunted, brought back many queasy memories of Diana and her ordeal, both before and after her marriage.

Few are willing to say it out loud, that Kate will inevitably be seen through the filter that her mother-in-law’s experience created. Every British royal bride will be for the foreseeable future. Diana has slept on her island at Althorp for over a decade now and she isn’t coming back but her influence is as powerful as if she had risen from the dead. The special but intangible wedding gift she has given both her boys is contact and experience of the real world. Their experience of normality may still be a long way off from that of the man who waves at them as they drive past today but they are so much closer to it than their father and his siblings ever were.

I hope that this gift will give the marriage of Prince William and Catherine Middleton a fighting chance. I wish them a long, happy and drama free life, full of all the things that a certain blonde, whose memorabilia I will probably continue to accumulate, was denied.

Royal Wedding Charity Fund
Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund

Made in China 2: Something to remind you

2011-04-23T14:28:00.008+01:00

Just in case you’ve been on Mars, two major events are on the horizon that will be especially significant for Londoners.

The first is a royal wedding, an occasion when at least two of those involved will probably wish they could just get on with it without all the attention. The second is the 2012 Olympics, an occasion where all of those concerned hope for lots of the right kind of attention (a sports festival free of corruption/scandal/performance enhancing drugs - don‘t hold your breath).

What they have in common is that they will provide opportunities for a great many people to make an awful lot of money, in some cases by selling something truly awful.

Having perused gift stalls in the stifling heat myself, I can understand why someone saw a certain item and thought of me. They were thirsty, their feet hurt and they felt they had to get me something. Besides, everything looks terrific in strong sunlight. Bad taste isn‘t really why I‘m raising this issue, if someone cares enough to buy me a gift on their holiday I should be grateful for it. What winds me up is how often I turn these things over and see the words “Made in China” on the back.

One of the ugliest gifts to grace our home was a nightlight holder from Lanzarote, nasty to handle and impossible to clean because it was so rough, a humorous reminder of the black volcanic landscape of the island. It was horrible but at least it had the virtue of being made in the place that it represented! Its maker is holding their own against an onslaught of foreign made souvenirs.

If, as I do, you live near a big city that attracts tourists, take a look at what’s on sale to those who spend their hard earned money in your country. Take a long hard look at the things that some retailers have chosen to represent you, your culture, your home. Remember, they’ll see them and they’ll think of you.

Walking past a shop in a local station overflowing with items aimed at visitors, I’ve always wondered where the small plastic Union flag purses were made. So in the interests of research I bought one and found that it was, of course, made in China.

I doubt if those buying these purses really give a damn where they were made, they probably just want something cheap, but I’m beginning to wish that they did. “Souvenir” is a French word meaning “to remember”. If the people who buy these things want something to remind them of the time they spent in the UK I would rather it was actually made here and reflected the good design we are capable of, however cheap the item.

Those plastic purses are made by a British company and according to their website they design what they sell. At one time they also made their products in the UK. All sorts of reasons get cited for the transfer of production abroad by companies like this. Top of the list is that it is often cheaper to manufacture goods outside the UK. Lower costs, fewer regulations, quicker production and supply of short runs all figure in the reasoning behind a move abroad. It makes for a wider profit margin and you could argue that, as the company is based in the UK, it’s a good thing because the profits stay here. However, lower costs means lower wages. Fewer regulations can mean poor working conditions and little or no trade union representation. Speedy supply and short runs? Pressure to work long hours in a job with little security. It also means jobs lost or never even created in the country that these souvenirs are supposed to be a reminder of.

The company responsible for the purse has also created a royal wedding range and I would be surprised if any of it has been made in the UK. They’ve used licensed photographs of the couple on their plates, mugs and magnets which means they’ve had to pay to do so. Another company has avoided this by producing a range called “Royal Wedding” which makes no specific reference to them. You’ll find it in branches of a large supermarket chain, everything from paper napkins to a replica of that sapphire engagement ring. It appears again, in miniature, as a pair of earrings, made in China. The official royal wedding range sold through the Buckingham Palace shop, is made in Stoke-on-Trent, where ceramic goods have been produced for centuries and the profits will go towards preserving the extensive Royal Collection.

I find the failure to provide British made souvenirs for a truly British event like the marriage of Prince William and Kate Middleton particularly frustrating because I keep being told that the UK will benefit from both it and the Olympics. It’s hard to see how we can if there are factories in China just waiting for the news of a royal engagement and capable of turning out thousands of items within days.

The Olympics should be an opportunity for the creative as well as the sporting community of a host country to profit but it seems to me that the benefits and rights of the occasion are shared out amongst corporations long before the circus hits town. The contract to supply enamel pin badges, one of the most lucrative elements of the souvenir industry for the London 2012 Olympics, was awarded to a Chinese company. Many of the twenty-six companies it beat off to win the contract were British - where did they go wrong? I contacted one company that sells enamel badges and according to the person I spoke to there is only one small business still making them in this country. The reasons they aren’t using that manufacturer? Cost and lead time. The profit made on these things is so big that even notching up thousands of air miles by flying them to the UK is no big deal.

It is the small, almost disposable items like badges that bring in the cash, the things that almost everyone can afford. Ask the person managing the shop at any stately home in the UK what the best sellers are and I guarantee that the answer will be erasers, pencils and postcards, because they regularly welcome parties of school children with pocket money budgets. It would be fantastic if all those small basic souvenirs could be made in the UK. A company called Pageantry Postcards is making the effort to produce its goods here and they are typical of the sort of company we should all be supporting. Another, at the more expensive end of the scale, is Colonial Soldier which sells hand carved figures of British soldiers alongside antiques.

I find it extraordinary that a country with such a great reputation for studio pottery does little to promote it to tourists visiting the UK and to organisations such as the London Olympics Organising Committee. Use of the Olympic brand is so tightly regulated that it is unlikely that a local potter could get away with knocking out a few mugs with “Olympics 2012” painted on them. In fact he or she wouldn’t even be allowed to paint on the words “London 2012” without the written consent of LOCOG.

In my opinion it is only legislation and official promotion which will help local artists to genuinely benefit from big events. Discussion and awareness of the issue by local legislators is long overdue. In some cases it is takes simple embarrassment to effect a change but what will it take to embarrass our politicians into changing this?

Think about what you spend your money on when you next take a holiday or mark an occasion. It isn’t just about job creation and national pride. Concerns about human and animal rights should make everyone think twice about what they take home with them. Personally I don’t want to look at something in my home and know that the person who made it is denied rights that I take for granted, nor do I want visitors to my country to believe that I’m happy that British souvenirs are made somewhere like that. It’s nothing to be proud of. There are so many gifted craftspeople and artists out there - make the effort to look for them. They might not be plastering what they make with the local flag but what they create can be just as effective a reminder of a good time.

Guggenheim Museum petition for Ai Weiwei, collaborative artist, Bird’s Nest stadium, Beijing
Olympics 2008

Make a donation to Kate and William’s favoured charities

Stand up and be counted

2011-04-14T13:05:00.004+01:00

I’ve got to admit that it took me several days to send off the census form. For some reason I put off filling in or even looking through it, in spite of all the television and newspaper ads encouraging me to get on with it.

This is our third census at our present address. It’s one of those things that mark you out as an established couple, like replacing a saucepan or a washing machine that you bought when you first moved in together. It occurred to me that our former neighbours must have filled out at least five during the time they lived next door and that it will be the last one that another neighbour will complete as a resident of our street before she moves.

Establishing where we all are every ten years, the census of the UK’s population asks questions about employment (or unemployment), religion (a voluntary question) and the kind of home you live in, amongst many other things. Genealogists love them. Now that many are online you can find out within minutes what your great-great grandparents were up to in, for example, 1871. A tantalising absence from a census could be explained by a contemporary event such as a war. A child born a few months before one census may have died by the next one, a great aunt or uncle representing a potential branch of your family tree.

Unfortunately for those keen to know what more recent generations have been up to, the information collected by the census remains secret for a century. This rule only became a legal requirement in 1920, allowing the records for 1911 to be released three years early. Women had begun to demand the right to vote and some boycotted the census taken that year as a protest. One suffragette wrote “If I am intelligent enough to fill in this paper, I am intelligent enough to put a cross on a voting paper.” This comment, her personal direct action, remained a secret for almost a hundred years.

The question “Do you stay at another address for more than 30 days a year?“ tells of university for one young adult or military service for another. There must have been many households in the UK for whom the absence of one name at their address brought a sense of pride and happiness because their child had succeeded in gaining a place on a course. For others it meant pride and sadness at the loss of a family member in Iraq or Afghanistan.

The questions being asked are as good an indicator of cultural, economic and political changes as the information they bring in. I wonder what my ancestors would have made of questions about same-sex civil partnerships? The 2011 census allows for the fact that these relatively new official forms of relationship may have broken down already (“Separated but still legally in a same-sex civil partnership”; “Formerly in a same-sex civil partnership which is now dissolved”).

A great uncle of mine earned some extra cash while a student by gathering information for the 1921 census and came across a situation that revealed how some people dealt with failed marriages at the time. Calling at one house he asked for Mrs. X to which the reply was “Which One?” The head of the household was living at the same address as his wife and his new partner along with all their children. Both women referred to themselves as “Mrs. X“ to maintain a veneer of propriety at a time when it was not easy for the average person to obtain a divorce. The Divorce Act of 1969 came into force in 1971 so it may have been another ten years before the impact of the new legislation was evident in a census.

The questions that I found most difficult to answer were the one about qualifications (really confusing - I’m still not sure I picked the right option) and the one about the ethnic group I think I belong to. I wonder how many others from a partly foreign background struggle to answer that sort of question as I do. The promotion around this year’s census has emphasised its value to individuals, that it represents around £22,000 in spending. The government is trying to persuade those reluctant to complete it that it will ensure the right level of services in each area. One question asked if I help or support a neighbour or family member with age or health related needs. Another asked how I travel to work.

They seem to want to know so much and that may be what put me off getting stuck in. For the first time I found it rather intrusive. In the end it turned out that only a small part of the booklet required completion because it allowed for a household of more than two people. I got off quite lightly but I feel for anyone organising a sleepover on the same night.

“H4: Apart from everyone counted in question H2, who else is staying overnight here on Sunday 27 March? These people are counted as visitors. Remember to include children and babies.”

Some unexpected extras for the census officials.

Cherry blossom days

2011-03-24T10:28:00.004Z

In the days following the momentous events in Egypt earlier this year I heard a brief exchange between a woman and a young man. She had not been able to hear what he had called out to her across the road.

“Sorry?”
“I said, I like you better without the hat!”
“Oh. Right.”

I told her I thought it was a compliment and would have forgotten it if it were not for the fact that she was a sturdy, no nonsense British police woman and he may well have been Egyptian . For a moment, thousands of miles away from Tahrir Square, the uniform that she wore represented so much more than it did to the average Brit. In Egypt the police had been obliged to withdraw from the streets, hiding away from an enraged population who had finally had enough of their corruption and cruelty.

As I grew up in London it was impossible to ignore the many refugees who regarded it as a place of safety. They brought with them their food and customs, for the most part keeping them behind their front doors unless a bond was formed with neighbours or business contacts. Most of the time they did not confide their reasons for fleeing their countries. When they did, it was often a shock to those who had grown up in a free and democratic society, even hard to believe.

Hardest of all to hear was the news that someone my family had come to like had died a prolonged and dreadful death at the hands of people who had lured him back to his former home. We came to understand why the children next door would not drink perfectly safe tap water. A childhood in Beirut meant a mistrust of any that did not come from a bottle as you never knew whether damage to pipes had led to contamination. I watched their mother pull handfuls of crumpled £20 pound notes from the pocket of her fur coat in Harrods toy department to pay for anything that would take away her little girl‘s memory of being kidnapped. Her au pair wept as she watched Sadat and Begin make peace on our television in 1977.

When I moved to the suburbs I found that I had not left these sad, sometimes terrifying tales behind me. There are pockets of the rest of the world all over the outskirts of every British city. From the restaurants and cafes where proprietors wait for the lunch time rush to the empty offices where cleaners spend their evenings, there is always someone who remembers long ago and far away, a time when things were better. Last night the scent of hyacinths wafted towards me which, at this time of year, speaks to me of Iran and exile.

Some of the best stories come from minicab drivers. I used to hear a lot about the former life of a young Sri Lankan, a former policeman who had been obliged to leave his wife and child behind when he fled from death threats. He pulled over to show me the scar on his leg, sustained in an accident, and gave a graphic account of what it is like to be in a car while being attacked by an elephant. He was waiting for his family to join him but I have not seen him since before the Boxing Day Tsunami of 2004.

In the suburbs we have the pleasure of seeing blossom at this time of year as the trees whose ancestors were brought back from the East give us a brief but lovely show. In Japan there would have been picnics under the trees as they came into bloom, spreading from the south in a wave of creamy pink. This year the picnics and celebration of Spring have been forgotten as the country comes to terms with the aftermath of the latest tsunami.

Here, anyone who looks even slightly Japanese is avoiding eye contact in case someone mistakes their nationality and expresses their sadness. It is hard to know what to say when I do encounter someone who is actually from Japan. The enormity of what has happened is hard to take in. In a matter of days all those petals will fall and clog up the ventilators in cars parked along the street and create sticky drifts in the gutter. There is nothing to make me think that those trees will not blossom again next Spring but for many people thousands of miles away it must feel as though the world has come to an end.

British Red Cross appeal for Japan
Shelterbox
Save the Children

A girl thing

2011-03-08T13:46:00.005Z

A couple of years ago I had almost reached my front door after returning from work when I heard something that stopped me in my tracks. I was outside a neighbouring house and I could hear loud, continuous sobbing and weeping. It sounded as though a woman was in great distress.

I really did not feel like sorting out anyone’s problems at the time, I was tired and fed up, but this was days after the discovery of Jaycee Lee Dugard, kidnapped as a young girl and held for 18 years. I decided that I did not want to be one of those people who noticed something and did not act on it. So I dumped my bag just inside my front door with an explanation to my partner, walked back and listened again. The sound was still coming from a first floor window. I rang the bell and explained myself to the man who answered the door. “I suppose you want to see them for yourself?” he said before turning and calling to someone upstairs. Two teenage girls appeared who seemed perfectly happy. So I left. A week later the same thing happened but I ignored it. I’ve seen both girls since then and I still have no idea what was going on.

At the time I was already aware that the suburb I live in was home to a number of brothels, with convenient transport links. The ads in the back of the local paper testify to it and I suppose that most of us regard it as a fact of life. What the majority of people who glance at those ads do not know is that apart from the women who engage willingly in prostitution there are now many who have been forced into it. Women desperate to earn money and gain independence are brought to the UK by traffickers, discovering too late that the men who promised them a great job and a new life are actually selling them into the worst situation imaginable. Even if they are rescued they are cut off from their old life forever, knowing that other young girls from their home town are being targeted by the same traffickers.

The cases of Elizabeth Fritzl and Natascha Kampusch are bound to chill the blood of anyone who thought that women in the West were no longer vulnerable to this kind of ill-treatment. There has been much speculation, particularly in Austria where these incidents occurred, that the men who held them captive were fossils, throwbacks to an earlier time when women were expected to do as they were told. Others suggest that these cases are symptomatic of an underlying desire to keep women in their place.

It is tempting to think that, one hundred years after the first International Women’s Day, the repression of women is restricted to countries where it is part of a cultural tradition. The truth is that all around us women suffer in silence, treating the bruises they get from an angry partner as part of the deal. It was revealed recently that it is common for there to be an increase in the rate of domestic violence after football matches involving Rangers and Celtic, in fact they doubled after one game.

At the same time I have noticed the capacity for violence is no longer restricted to men, if it ever was. There was a time when it was taken as read that a young teenage girl who caused trouble was a fluke and likely to come from a challenging background. How things have changed. Last year a young women was convicted of manslaughter, having stamped on and kicked a man who later died. She was seventeen years old at the time, her fashionable ballet pumps and handbag covered in her victim’s blood. So much for an expensive education and a comfortable home. I see Ruby Thomas in many of the teenage girls I now encounter, the smart back chat that some see as confidence as likely to be a first step in a potentially violent encounter. I never underestimate the dangerousness of girls in school uniform.

Almost thirty years ago, when I was still at school, a fellow students was told by one teacher that she was not welcome to study technical drawing in his class as he did not feel that a career in engineering was suitable for a woman. Even then this comment made jaws drop amongst students and staff who took it for granted that a woman could have any career she wanted. By then women had begun to take control of reproduction using the Pill and, especially with the advent of AIDS/HIV, by insisting on the use of condoms. That made it easier for them to delay having children until they wanted too but it has become clear that some have delayed too long and it has now reached the stage where women are being warned not to wait until their forties to get pregnant.

The influx of Eastern Europeans, largely Poles in my area, has shown up this element in the change of women’s fortunes. I don’t suppose that many of the young women who moved here several years ago planned to stay more than a few years but have in fact settled down and had babies. They stood out, often slimmer and healthier than their British counterparts and now that they are mothers they are unusual again in that the fathers of their children are in evidence and even live with them as part of a family unit. In my street it had reached the stage where there were barely any young children living in the surrounding houses. One morning I found that I had spent several minutes standing by the bathroom window transfixed by something unusual - the sound of a baby crying, coming from a neighbouring house.

The impression I get is that in my area British couples wait until they can get a mortgage before they begin having children whereas other nationalities are quite happy to raise their families in rented accommodation. These newcomers have at times seemed to have old fashioned values that were once common in the UK and the women in that group don’t seem to regard motherhood as restrictive. Personally I don’t believe women can have it all. I think you can be a good mother and hold down a job once the children are at school but I now find it difficult to accept the idea of a woman heading back to work leaving a very young child in someone else’s care. Perhaps I’m getting old and conservative.

Even so I was stunned when I heard about the impact that the notion that a male is worth more than a female has had on ante-natal care in the UK. Hospitals in areas where there is a large Asian population do not advise the expectant mothers in their care of the gender before the child is born as it can be a death sentence for a female foetus. It could lead to a “miscarriage”.

During my life I know that things have improved beyond recognition for so many women but it is hugely dispiriting to think that we are still being paid less because of our gender. In Portugal, a short flight away from the UK, women can still end up in prison if they have an abortion. In Guatemala it is almost commonplace for women to be murdered. In Afghanistan women continue to kill themselves in despair at forced marriages. In my own country women return to the homes where they are beaten and abused because they have no other choice.

I suppose you could argue that the fact that I was prepared to challenge someone over what I thought might be a case of domestic violence means that things aren’t as bad as they once were. People used to look the other way when I was a child because they felt that it wasn’t their business. Worse than that, the policeman who attended the incident might actually commiserate with the perpetrator. Today, the police officer who attends is as likely to be female but still capable of standing up to a man who thinks that pounding his wife after his team loses on a Saturday night is a form of leisure activity. Perhaps that is the biggest gain of all.

Small society

2011-03-04T23:49:00.003Z

Something happened last week that brought to mind the Prime Minister’s continued efforts to explain his concept of the “Big Society” .

I was at the small parade of shops a street away from my home when I spotted a young woman, wearing the kind of long skirt favoured by Roma women, standing very close to an elderly man with whom she was deep in conversation. I didn’t think anything of it until I happened to look that way again and realised that I could see banknotes. Sometimes you just know that something isn’t right and as I was in the mood to take notice I walked up to them and asked what was going on.

By this time I was less than two feet away and could also see a substantial gold chain which I automatically grabbed to keep it where it was. I couldn’t tell which direction it was travelling in but in the seconds I had my hand around it I realised that it wasn’t the heavy gold necklace it appeared to be. I know metallised plastic when I handle it. The girl was startled and pulled it away from me but I had reached them in time to see that she had been taking more and more five pound notes from him. Over her shoulder I could see a man and another girl standing a few feet away, clearly worried at my intervention.

Something about the girl I was standing close to threw me, she seemed so frightened. I couldn’t work out exactly what was going on so I backed off and left them to it but by the time I had dealt with my errand I realised that I should have been firmer with her and told her to get lost. It was too late. All those involved had disappeared. I asked a shopkeeper if he had seen anything and was given one of those answers that makes me despair. Yes, some people had been trying to sell fake gold jewellery in the street, especially to pensioners. There was no point telling the police because by the time they arrived they would be gone. That was the mindset of every person I told in the minutes after it happened. When I mentioned it in another shop and said that I thought those involved might be Roma someone asked me what my nationality was. The suggestion was that to point out their ethnicity was to be racist, even though that is the sort of information the police would have asked for.

Looking at it now, days after the event, it occurs to me that what happened in the small space between the three of us brought up some really big issues. That young woman represented centuries of persecution and discrimination. As a citizen of the European Union she is of monetary value to her family in that she can be married off to someone who wants the right to live in the UK and is prepared to pay for a wife. She wouldn’t keep the money she was making by selling jewellery, it would be passed on to someone else, possibly along with any she managed to acquire through the benefits system and was actually entitled to.

The man being conned was clearly a veteran, of an age to have fought the fascists who murdered as many as 600,000 Roma. His reward was to be ignored because no one seemed to have noticed what was happening to him. Perhaps old soldiers really do fade away. The elderly, constant and uncomfortable reminders of what we will become, tend to be left to their own devices these days, their lives characterised by isolation and loneliness, their pensions worth less and less.

And there I was, unable to decide what to do or who to tell. Was it theft and therefore a police matter? Would I be wasting their time? Should I contact Trading Standards? Should I have just had the guts to shout at that young woman and scare her off, aware that she was as much a victim as the man she had targeted? So fearful of doing the wrong thing, of being drawn into something I might lose control of, of being accused of discrimination. My original urge to follow my instinct and intervene drowned in a sea of doubt and fear, undermined by the knowledge that I would probably be on my own with it, that no one else would help. In that small space between a young Roma woman, a veteran of World War Two and a forty something blogger, it was my responsibility to decide whose rights took priority at that moment but I had forgotten how to do it. I made the wrong choice.

It took me some time to realise that personal experience of dealing with the legal system influenced the way I reacted. The despair I felt at hearing the words “no point” came from understanding that those who spoke them were probably right. If the case was proved the pensioner would be unlikely to get his money back and the girl, a pawn in someone else’s game, would find herself in an even worse situation. In the hands of a sharp barrister a statement written in a hurry at the time could make the whole process pointless. If every person I had told about it had at that moment rushed up to deal with those involved we would have been called a mob. I want to make it clear that I do not believe the police are to blame for this, I am sure they are just as frustrated as I am at times.

Mention the “Big Society” and immediate reference is made to volunteering, or to the running of state facilities by charities, or to taking part in local government. That’s when I (and a great many others) switch off. The sad thing is that I think I understand what the Prime Minister is talking about. In some ways it is about being bigger than yourself, “ubuntu“, I am because we are. Have a conscience, give a damn, get your hands dirty. Well, a lot of us do that already. The postman who notices that a vulnerable pensioner is being targeted by scam mail . The neighbour who reports a child’s bruises. We need to make it easier and more socially acceptable to intervene in small ways, and back up those who do so. Somehow we need to develop more confident caring habits because until we do we won‘t be willing or able to move on to the bigger things that we are being asked to take on.

There are plenty of people out there who haven’t waited for someone else to fix a problem for them. There are probably even more who want to do that but are put off by the fear of being told off for doing so. We’ve protected ourselves through legislation to the point where we’ve painted ourselves into a corner, a lack of common sense in relation to child protection and volunteering has made it almost impossible to do something as simple as drive someone else’s children to a football match. At the same time it would be foolish to risk the kind of incident which brought that hard won legislation into force. I suppose those who promote the “Big Society” are asking us to take the risk of being found at fault in the hope that our motives will be understood by the majority, to rediscover self-reliance. It has reached the stage where too many of us believe that we longer have to be conscientious because we’ve paid others to do that for us. It remains to be seen whether we will recover from the atrophy that has developed as a consequence of being so well looked after, leaving some of us unable to think for ourselves.

“Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home - so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person; the neighbourhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm, or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world.”
Eleanor Roosevelt

Fort Home, Suburbia

2011-01-19T12:13:00.003Z

At first I laughed when I saw it. Someone had pinched some pampas grass from a nearby street and stuck the stems very neatly into the shared hedge that edges ours and the neighbour’s front gardens. It looked quite festive, a night time prank by some passing reveller. Then it was pointed out to me that to leave them there might invite more negative attention, suggesting that if we let this pass something less funny might follow. So I called on our neighbours to ask if they didn’t mind my removing them and was really surprised to find that they were concerned that the opposite might happen. They had left them there in case the person responsible retaliated.

This incident is typical of the kind that leave the average householder with what we are told is an exaggerated sense of threat. The statistics tell me that the crime rate in my area is at an average level compared to central London but the sight of an empty wallet abandoned in the street or broken glass on a pavement where someone has broken into a car remind me that someone suffers as a result of criminal activity every day within a few metres of my front door. It doesn’t matter how often the police remind drivers not leave anything, even cigarettes, on show in their vehicles or suggest that we keep credit cards zipped into our inside pockets. We still leave ourselves open to opportunists with no conscience. One hot summer evening I called at a house to point out that I could see a handbag, heavy with money, cards and keys from the pavement through a front door that had been left open to ventilate the house. Even a locked door is no deterrent to car thieves who use a hook on the end of a broom handle to steal car keys from stairs and tables in hallways. I was told of one incident where all three cars belonging to one household were stolen at once.

In my experience it is older people, often those who have been on the receiving end of this kind of attention, who are most switched on about crime. A former neighbour giggled as he showed me his latest ploy to ward off burglars, a recording of a barking dog that was triggered when I walked past his back door. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that it actually sounded like a recording of a dog and I suspect he was as aware of it as I was but it was certainly more convincing than the man who began barking when I slipped a piece of misdirected mail through his letterbox.

These attempts at putting off baddies may sound absurd but at least they were aware of the threat. Many people have no idea that they regularly leave their home in a state that screams “Come and get me!“ to burglars. I am left open mouthed at the naivety of the householders in my area. The enclosed porches that were meant to prevent heat escaping through the front door are often left unlocked. It is common for the post to be pushed through the letterbox in the glazed porch door so that bank statements, tax returns and all manner of confidential paperwork sit there for hours until the householder returns from work. Even if the door is locked there is barely anyone around to take notice if the glass panel is kicked in.

Those bold enough to go that far might take the opportunity to tackle the main door and help themselves to something more substantial than the cash, credit cards and jewellery left in full view. A surprising number of householders leave a spare key under a plant pot or somewhere similar and burglars know this. They are some of the most accomplished people watchers, reading the message sent out by the festering milk bottles and soggy newspapers that collect on your doorstep during your summer holiday. They know that a confident manner will reassure those passing by and that the average person is reluctant to sort out someone else’s problem, leaving them to get on with it.

“Kick ins”, where a driver waits in a car outside a target house while an accomplice literally kicks in the front door and carries out valuables, are quite common in the suburbs. I know because we were targeted in this way a few years ago. I was in the middle of a nap on a weekday afternoon when someone rang the doorbell and used the knocker rather too vigorously on the door . I took this to be an impatient courier and as I got to the top of the stairs in time to see the front door fly open I actually thought that some fool had lobbed the parcel at it in haste, bursting it open. It was the brief sight of a man stepping in and then very quickly out of the hall that put me right. I got to the bottom of the stairs in time to see him duck behind what was then an untidy and rather high hedge and into a car which tore off at speed. Being half asleep didn’t help as I tried to work out what had just happened but the one other person I saw in the street didn’t seem to realise that anything was wrong. It turned out that ours was not the only home to be targeted by this pair of thieves on that day. Their movements were tracked for some time on CCTV using number plate recognition technology. I was lucky in that I was in and did not come face to face with someone who would use violence rather than get caught.

Since then we bother to double lock the front door during the day and use the bolts and chain once we are both in. The hedge is now kept at a height that allows us to see the car when we are downstairs - we‘ve already lost one to someone who needed spare parts for his own similar car (he was kind enough to dump what was left of it a few streets away). The lawn is also kept in a reasonable state as it seems that untidiness suggests a vulnerable occupant who won‘t fight back. The hedge that the owner is no longer able to trim themselves also provides a screen for anyone busy at the front door for the wrong reasons. It seems that the message sent out by a house proud homeowner is “I am prepared to defend my castle” whereas an unkempt lawn and hedge suggest the opposite.

Suburban homes are particularly vulnerable because they usually come with front and back gardens. If a boundary fence comes down it often stays down until the owner establishes who is responsible for it. The fact that a long section of fence can be owned in part by several people doesn’t help as it can mean that the various sections don’t match up and a gap becomes a highway for cats, foxes and thieves. It is usually the police officer chasing a suspect who tells us about the intruder in our back garden. Reluctantly I have come to the conclusion that the low fence that has been in place there since 1936 between ours and the adjoining semi will have to be replaced with something much taller. It’s a sad comment on our times. We will also be replacing the gate to the front garden that was removed long before we arrived to reinforce the psychological barrier between the street and the house.

Those who lived in my area when the mock Tudor semis were newly built will tell you that there was a time when you could go shopping leaving the front door unlocked. If that really was the case I suspect it had more to do with the fact that there was usually someone around to put off a thief than with the general level of honesty. That generation knew their neighbours, married women were often housewives and strangers stood out. Ours inhabits a world where you can live next to someone for years and exchange no more than a few words with them in all that time. We no longer rely on our neighbours to inform and entertain us and are more likely to speak online to total strangers on the other side of the world than the person we know on the other side of the wall.

The irony is, of course, that we are as much at risk from the attentions of the dishonest online as we are in our homes. I have decided that I will never bank online as I’ve seen one news story too many about errors made by various banks. I get so many phishing emails mentioning HSBC that it has put me off becoming a customer. My partner spent Christmas Day eliminating a virus that had wormed its way into his PC. Fraudulent websites are so convincing that even the most alert are sometimes taken in. However, when it comes to emails Mr Musa Mohamad, Mrs Madina Dauda and Mr Hassan Karim should probably give it a rest as I’m unlikely ever to respond to their “urgent appeals” although I’m glad to know that I “remain blessed in the Lord”. It must be worth their while to keep up the relentless attempts to dupe people in this way although I can’t help thinking that it might be more fruitful to invest in the air fare to the UK and rifle through the recycling boxes out put every week by the trusting. Oblivious to the concept of shredding confidential documents, they discard bank statements and payslips, unaware of the goldmine they provide for those engaged in ID theft. Or they could just stick their hands into a few letterboxes.

I know that I will become much more vulnerable as I get older. An elderly neighbour told me that she is often the target of fraudsters via her telephone. Because she isn’t expecting the call she is not on her guard and before she knows it she has given away personal information to someone she cannot see and has never met. She has a piece of tape marked with a cross on the receiver to remind her to watch what she says when she lifts it. “Boiler room” fraud has deprived some of thousands of pounds in this way. I can see why some older people own the sort of dog you choose not to pat and that shreds their mail with enthusiasm. When I get to that age (and possibly even before that) I will have a pair of highly trained Dobermans called Heckler and Koch - I already fantasise about the next miscreant feeling the heat of their breath on his arse as he flees the neighbourhood.

http://www.met.police.uk/crimeprevention/burglary.htm

Enough for California

2011-01-09T01:47:00.004Z

Ours is a fairly typical suburban wardrobe in that when you open it quite a lot just falls out. A year ago the avalanche would have included bags stuffed full of unused Christmas cards amongst the sweaters, handbags and toilet rolls for which there is no other home. This peculiar form of hoarding went on for several years but it wasn’t because I’m a big fan of the season. I don’t do Christmas. The hundreds of cards that took up space in and then on the wardrobe as the year went on represented my commitment to a particular human rights issue, as they were intended for prisoners across the United States who are on death row.

Following a conversation with a member of an organisation that befriends them I came across some unused cards at the back of a cupboard. I wondered how many other people had a few left over every January and if any were willing to donate them. I had learned that the number of DR prisoners was so great (over 3000) that it was too expensive to send them all a card at Christmas, even though it might be the only one they got. Friends and family are often thin on the ground when you’re in that situation. I mentioned my idea to a contact at a local church and was rewarded a few weeks later with several bulging carrier bags. By now it was late October. I called one of the organisation’s co-ordinators and told her I had some cards. She didn’t sound terribly impressed.

“How many do you have?” “About six hundred.” There was a moment’s silence. “That’s enough for California. This year everyone gets a card.”

It took a couple of years to get going but eventually it became an annual ritual to ask for cards on Freecycle in the early weeks of the New Year. January found me trudging round the suburbs with my trusty A to Z, collecting donations. To these were added the cards sent to me by members of sympathetic groups, some from as far away as Australia. The strange thing is that I ended up with around six hundred every year, apart from one occasion when I was fifteen short of a thousand.

When it got to September I would begin to sift out any inappropriate ones which could mean anything from the pornographic (Santa‘s little helper in fishnets) to the relentlessly cheerful (“Have a great Christmas with your family and friends!”). I was given humorous ones with a cartoon of frantic Christmas shoppers outside a travel agent’s window. “Seven more escaping days to Christmas!” said the poster. I didn’t think the censors would laugh. I also separated the overtly religious ones because while some condemned prisoners develop a strong religious faith many others feel God wasn’t there when they needed him most.

Why have I stopped doing it? The final straw came when I found I had wasted quite a lot of time visiting the same bit of West London twice in bitterly cold weather because someone who was really keen to donate forgot to leave the package out the first time. Just to make things worse, when I sorted them out it turned out that she had written something in around a third of them and then put them back into the pack! This followed being given used ones by those who misunderstood the request. I thought of all the cards I could have bought with the fares I had wasted and felt there must be a better way of doing it.

Why do it in the first place? Sometimes a Christmas card is all that a prisoner can cope with because he or she can’t read. Someone else has to read their mail to them. Apart from that just because I think Christmas is an over-commercialised and shallow event it doesn’t mean it can’t seem a little magical to someone who has very little. When you become involved in prison reform it is the denial and importance of ordinary things in the life of an inmate that tends to strike you. Asking for them was also a way of raising awareness about the issue. Most people have an opinion about it but not much knowledge. There’s often an assumption that everyone given a death sentence has received adequate representation in court - the reality is that it depends on your bank balance. That often determines how good your defence will be. If you are very lucky you will attract the support of a human rights organisation but that tends to happen once the appeals stage is reached. Some of the nicest cards I received came from Yatombi Ikei who was himself poorly represented during his trial and has raised some serious questions about the issue.

Murder and sudden violent death must seem a million miles away from the average person’s experience, the whole subject imbued with a dark glamour. In truth, murder is often mundane, triggered by trivial and ridiculous events. It isn’t generally about gangsters and drug deals. The perpetrator isn’t always the fearsome stranger you bolt your doors against at night. I appreciate that the family of a victim may derive something from the death of the person who killed their loved one but I’ve wondered how it’s supposed to work when both the victim and the condemned are from the same close family circle. Put yourself in the place of Jon Flinner who lost his mother to cancer, his stepmother to murder and then his father to death row for the killing. Raising awareness of their father’s plight is not how most people expect to spend their teenage years but he has done so very successfully via Twitter.

Most of us come no closer to a personal experience of the criminal justice system than a brief contact with the police. Occasionally things go further and this may involve being a juror or giving evidence at a hearing, as I have. I played a very insignificant part in a relatively insignificant case but it was made rather more daunting by the fact that it took place at the Central Criminal Court in the City of London, better known as the Old Bailey. Some of the most serious trials have taken place there, including capital cases when the death penalty was still carried out in the UK.

Seen close up the process of justice was boring and sad. The things that seemed so exotic in court room dramas became ordinary, dulled by the hours of waiting that it involved. Until then I had no idea just how much time police officers are obliged to spend hanging about. It is impossible to forget that you are sharing a waiting room with people who may have seen terrible things. I got used to seeing people drift about in black robes. A barrister’s wig, caught in his fingers under a stack of paperwork, seemed like a small limp animal set aside for lunch.

Waiting to give evidence in those grey green marble halls made me think of being under the surface of a lake, watching the sunlight filter through the drifting weed, glinting on the golden figure of Justice far above me. Considering that witnesses have over the centuries described some of the worst human behaviour on that site the gloom seemed appropriate. And far below me what is left of Newgate Prison was a reminder of all those whose legal defence had not been good enough, many of whom were executed just outside in the street that gives the place its name.

When the moment came it was, as a police officer had said, like theatre but the acting was wooden. There were no Oscar winning performances. The dialogue between a barrister and a witness is somewhere between a pavane and a bull fight. Depending on who you are giving evidence for they’ll either dance with you or spear you and some are better dancers than others. The Old Bailey’s version of Lady Justice is not blind as she stands against the London skyline with her sword and scales and it occurred to me that she probably knows a good barrister when she sees one.

In spite of what goes on there those tasked with the day to day running of the place manage to retain an astonishing degree of humanity. They seemed truly impartial and I was humbled by their cheerful and professional attitude as they guided ordinary and occasionally frightened people through their visit. When I hear someone say that it should be a life for a life I wonder how they would react to what I was told by a member of staff, that for a period it was common for the victims, witnesses and defendants to be so young that their ages were almost in single figures. The notice board full of child art took on a new significance. Drawn by someone’s kid brother or sister, not their kid. One very short life for another.

In the end the experience confirmed what I had already believed for some time, that such life or death decisions should never, never depend on the opinions of fallible human beings. I have never been so glad that all we have left from the bad old days are the wigs but I also feel profoundly sad at the thought that a belief in truth and justice is something you can grow out of, just as I once believed that Jesus was born in a stable and that Santa eats all those mince pies.

A fresh steed for Sir Galahad

2010-12-20T12:45:00.006Z

There have been times when, as the passenger in a car, I have seen some other traveller lurking miserably on the hard shoulder, waiting to be rescued. And I’ve usually said out loud “Poor thing. I’m glad that isn’t me.”

If you travel by car there is always a chance that something will go wrong, in fact your car may still be parked in front of your home when a problem becomes apparent. If you are really unlucky it will happen on a bank holiday, miles from home and in the worst weather.

It happened to us at this time of year, Boxing Day to be precise, crammed into the car with two other people on a visit to relatives. It was maddening, we were almost there when it became clear that something was wrong and my partner pulled over as soon as he could just as the engine gave out. The rest of us sat there while he disappeared into the pouring rain to call for help (this was before mobile phones became widely available), gritting our teeth as every passing car left our own rocking in their wake. Woomph. Woomph woomph. It was more than a little frightening.

After what seemed like an age he squelched back, chilled to the bone and not particularly happy. We had a long wait ahead of us. Along with thousands of other people we had chosen to visit someone else by car and a sizeable proportion of us were in the same situation, waiting to be rescued. All the breakdown services were stretched. It became noticeable that some drivers weren’t put off speeding by the atrocious weather .We felt very vulnerable but there was nowhere else to wait. We were extremely lucky that one mechanic broke off from the job he was tasked with to tow us to a nearby petrol station which was of course closed. There was a pub nearby otherwise things could have become even more unpleasant. The edible goodies that were intended as gifts were consumed and we ran out of things to talk about.

By the time another mechanic arrived to tow us back home we were feeling really desperate. Decorum prevented us from planting big wet kisses on his face and hugging his knees but he could probably tell we were pleased to see him. That tired man had become a knight in shining armour and his truck a white horse.

Since that experience I have become aware of just how big a risk those who repair vehicles at the side of the road really take. That vulnerability applies to anyone who has to rely on one of those glowing jackets and the common sense of passing drivers for their safety - the jackets are usually more apparent than the common sense. A moment’s inattention by a passing motorist or poor travel conditions can leave them injured and fighting for life.

This is what happened to Tyrone Williams in 2000 as he worked on a car parked on the hard shoulder, only it was a lorry that hit the car he was working on. The accident left him with multiple fractures and a number of injuries that were not identified at the time. He is unable to work. Today Ty is trapped at home, missing out on the normal everyday activities that we take for granted.

I have some idea of what that is like as illness has left me stranded indoors and reliant on other people for long periods of time. The chores that others find tedious become the sort of thing you long to do. The weekly shop, the trip to the post office, collecting your kids from school. Miss out on these and you are missing out on life and community. The isolation begins to have a debilitating effect that is a powerful as the physical one of the original injuries.

Ty has used mobility scooters but the severity of his injuries have left his spine in such a delicate state that he is left in agony in spite of pain relief medication. What he really needs is a wheelchair with the degree of suspension that will protect his spine but allow him access to daily life. You won’t be surprised to hear that this is going to be expensive - £3,395 expensive to be precise. Fortunately Ty has an old friend and fellow mechanic to help him out. Corporal Randall-Eyre, known as Bear, has set up a fund in the hope that anyone who has ever been rescued by someone like Ty will remember it and make a donation.

http://tywilliamsfund.wordpress.com/about/

UPDATE: PLEASE NOTE THAT THE MONEY HAS NOW BEEN RAISED AND TY HAS HIS SCOOTER - WELL DONE TO BEAR FOR HIS EFFORTS.

As I write this there are a great many people stranded in cars waiting to be rescued. It may be for mechanical reasons or because of the heavy snow. The person who reaches them will do it on spite of feeling tired and hungry because he is prepared, quite literally, to go the extra mile to keep someone safe. It isn’t just about fixing an engine and getting paid for it. The man who towed us to the petrol station years ago didn’t have to do it but he could see that we were in a precarious situation and he dealt with it. When you curl up under the duvet tonight spare a thought for all those who are just about to go to work in the cold and dark, to get you home for Christmas.

Slobs, snobs and hypocrites

2010-11-11T08:15:00.005Z

“The feckless unemployed will be forced to take part in a punishing U.S.-style ‘workfare’ scheme involving gardening, clearing litter and other menial tasks for just £1 an hour in a new crackdown on scroungers."
"£1 an hour to clear rubbish…new IDS blitz on the workshy” Simon Walters, Mail on Sunday, 7/11/2010

I make a point of checking for little grey yellow blobs and smears in a particular men’s toilet that I have cleaned for the last three years.

Some will know what I’m talking about. For the less switched, on, I am referring to phlegm. The sort you find up your nose. Cleaning the urinals, I can imagine the snot artist digging away at the contents of his nostrils as he empties his bladder, flicking his finds at the porcelain where they cling and harden until I turn up to clean it off. It is unlikely that, having parked his best friend, he washes his hands. So the same finger that has been busy up his nose travels back to the office with its nasty little payload of germs, onto the door handle, the light switch (which he has sometimes embellished with his trophies), the office fruit bowl, that open bag of crisps left unguarded on a desk and eventually to a keyboard shared by any number of his colleagues. All unaware of what they are being exposed to.

This may be the same person who complained because he found some leaves under his car. Obliged to pay the maintenance company even more that year he was really annoyed to see any litter there at all. He called the company and the company called me - it is usually me - to find out what had gone wrong. Nothing, it turned out. Fallen leaves in an outdoor car park are a consequence of having trees around you in autumn. But because this man is hard to please and contracts are hard to come by I was asked politely but firmly to get to work half an hour earlier than usual to sweep away the leaves. I left our dying cat on his own for the twenty minutes until my partner got home from work, and spent money on a fare that I had been saving by walking the three miles to work. And thought about what I would do to the person in question if our beloved moggy died on his own in the meantime.

Personally I don’t have a problem being seen sweeping up litter outside a building but I have found that it has a “Princess and the Pea” effect on colleagues. You’d be surprised at the number of royalty employed in the cleaning industry. I can always tell because when it dawns on them that I wasn’t kidding about clearing litter from the entrance they start to make excuses or just don’t do it. I am now sharing the job with the fifth person in three years. I thought things were going to be better this time until I realised that my new colleague did not want to be seen wearing an overall unless she is cleaning the toilets. Someone might mistake her for a cleaner.

Every time this happens I find myself planning unspeakable fates for the magistrates and judges who use work like this to punish celebrities. There have been a number of Naomi Campbell moments over the last three years as adult women morphed into sulky teenagers for the time it took them to push a brush around a five metre wide space. It doesn’t help that the smokers in the building ignore the “No Smoking” sign at the entrance and drop their cigarette ends there. At least we no longer have to empty out the wall mounted ashtray. I could never hold my breath for long enough to avoid a lungful of the ash that it held and I would stink of it afterwards.

The horrors of the job now lurk indoors, in the toilets. Torn between working quickly to get out of there as soon as possible and trying not to cause splashes, I can’t always avoid being hit on the face by the contents of the bowl. It isn’t the excrement, blood, urine, vomit or mucus that worry me. The boss refers to toilet cleaner as “toilet acid” for a reason.

I sometimes wonder if the people who work in that building realise just how much I know about their guts. The day will come when, having been told yet again that the toilets are not flushing properly, I will stand in the doorway of an office and explain to the occupants that the consumption of junk food/fizzy drinks/eating too quickly/failing to chew results in floaters. I may throw in the fact that by failing to wash their hands after using the toilet they could be treating their colleagues to diarrhoea or flu, that an outbreak of E. coli could, at best, close down their business for weeks. At worst it could kill them. It amazes me that, on a planet where so many people die for the lack of clean drinking water, well educated people fail to use what is freely available to them to wash their hands.

However when I recall the gifts they have left for me in those cubicles I suspect that some of them were raised in a barn before they hit university. Special mention goes to the woman who must have leaned forward during a bowel movement, depositing a broad pile of excrement on the ledge of the toilet bowl, under the seat. By the time I arrived this had hardened and it took me over half an hour to soak it off. Thanks for that, princess. People are particularly thoughtless when it comes to rubbish. A dagger-like piece of broken glass, coated in who knows what, pierced a bag and scored a deep scratch through denim and into my calf when I worked as a caretaker.

You won’t be surprised to learn that I don’t wear couture for the job in fact, even when they have been washed, the worn jeans, tops and fleeces are stored away from the smarter clothes. Count yourself lucky if you wear nice clothes to work. I look like a rough sleeper which may be why I am sometimes spoken to as though I have serious learning difficulties. The worst snobs are not the bosses. It tends to be the underlings who’ve had a hard day that pass on the misery. They look up to their boss because he/she pays them. They look down on me because I clean the office. I know my place.

It’s almost funny that those who have been on benefit for a long time are being threatened with a similar experience at £1 an hour. At £6 an hour (the Mayor of London regards £7.85 per hour as the living wage for my area) it is already a punishment. I don’t know if the proprietors of cleaning companies are rubbing their hands at the prospect of having so many contracts and employees available to them at a discount but I do know that the value of my work has risen over the last three years, even if my pay has not. They are charging even more for the same services and it shows in the way that every failing is now noted and reported. I don’t blame them for asking that they get what they pay for. I just wish they’d realise that I haven’t gained from the increase.

Few seem to understand what life would be like if there was no one to sweep and clean. The kinder ones say things like “I don’t know how you stand it. I couldn’t do it.” But they don’t seem inclined to pay me more for doing it. On the occasions when a colleague failed to turn up for work in an office that my company dealt with there was a degree of panic as they tried to replace a rubbish bag without breaking a fingernail. The sort of fingernail that would pierce the latex gloves I use when fishing out a floater that refuses to be flushed away. Some of them treat you as if you aren’t there which usually brings out the worst in me. Doing my own work as well as that of an unreliable colleague one evening I heard one executive ask another if “they” had shown up yet. “They will get there when they are ready because they only have one pair of hands!” I snapped. I think his mother must have been the last person to have spoken to him in that way because a) I got away with it and b) he left looking rather sheepish. “They” is actually an improvement on “the girl”. Especially as “the girl” is forty-five years old.

The problem I’ve got is that I am lucky to have this part-time work. I need the sort of job where I am left largely to my own devices, away from crowds, because I have panic attacks and suffer from agoraphobia. That makes it hard to find anything better paid that makes use of my skills. I find it irritating that some people think I’ve ended up as a cleaner because I spent my time at school looking out of the window. For this I wrote essays.

I am concerned that those obliged to take part in a “workfare” scheme may find that once involved in unskilled work it is hard to get clear of it. Cleaners in particular find it difficult to find anything other than part-time work, which means they probably won’t notch up National Insurance payments or get sick pay. To make any significant money they have to get several jobs which means spending money on fares and working unsociable hours. There are few opportunities for promotion. Some employers are very cynical about the standard of work and I get angry about the poor reputation that goes ahead of me because some cleaners are so lazy and unreliable. But when you think about how little we are paid for what we are expected to do it isn’t surprising.

The consequence of the low pay and stigma associated with menial work is that it will nearly always be done by the desperate, usually immigrants. Virtually everyone I have come across lately sweeping up litter has belonged in this category. They have travelled halfway around the world only to have others look down on them yet they are grateful for the money. I grew up in tied accommodation in a very affluent part of London, a few doors from a Middle Eastern family who did not let the fact that they lived in a small mews house stop them from having a live-in maid. This qualified teacher had left her child in the Philippines to sleep on a kitchen floor in Knightsbridge and sent all her earnings home. At the time her government took a cut of the money earned by its émigrés.

For a while I cleaned a flat for a Sudanese family whose relative brought her maid with her when she visited. This woman, who was of African rather than Arab descent, never spoke, raised her eyes or looked at anyone directly. Both her employer and mine reminded me of spoilt cats. I once pushed the beds apart in the children’s bedroom and found an upturned plate of food on the floor. She couldn’t be bothered to check if her sons had eaten or to clean up after them, leaving them in front of the television with their meal.

I had hoped to find something better within months of getting my present job but I’m still there. At the moment it is just about worth it but the proposed increase in fares will mean that I am earning money simply to pay the fares. As it is I only use public transport to travel to work and walk for an hour to get home. This costs me a round a tenth of what I earn. I did walk both ways for a while but it almost finished me off. A six mile round trip with a stop to clean fourteen sinks, eleven toilets, six urinals, wash eight floors and/or vacuum and dust a six storey building. I‘m not that good. The really desperate may have to be.

“Our changes will make work pay and create the biggest package of back-to-work support ever seen. Asking someone who has been out of work for a long time to get involved in a programme of work to boost their self esteem is not a recipe for despair, but a way to repair their shattered lives.”
Iain Duncan Smith

Mention the war

2010-09-25T11:04:00.012+01:00

These shoes have been around for as long as I can remember. They have moved from the bottom of one wardrobe to another but they are still with me, a relic of World War Two. Along with a copy of “Make Do and Mend” they are some of the ordinary things I own that are left over from an extraordinary period in Britain’s history.

Recently there has been considerable and deserved mention of the deeds of the RAF during the Battle of Britain. For those who now live in London’s suburbs it is hard to understand the degree of fear and danger experienced by the ordinary people who lived in those houses before we did. Here and there you will find structures, both overgrown and reused, that were built as part of the plan to defend the UK. There are of course memorials to those in uniform but very little remains to remind us of the impact on everyday life.

When I visited Medway Drive in Perivale I could see nothing to indicate that six people were killed and thirty others injured in this quiet street near the A40. I was looking for a gap in the terrace filled by a post war building. Mindful that a surprising number of that generation still live in the houses they were born in I looked for someone in the right age group and struck gold. I was introduced to someone who had lived in the area since 1935 and remembered the incident very clearly. A parachute mine came down here on the night of 25th September 1940 and King George and Queen Elizabeth came to inspect the damage. Photographs taken at the time show them striding up the street in the company of the mayor and local officials. I was amazed to learn that the damage was repaired straight away and found that one of those I was speaking to, a child at the time, had been paid a penny a day to brush clean the salvaged bricks for reuse. The houses in this street were then no more than three years old and I suppose restrictions on the use of building materials were yet to be imposed. It is now impossible to tell that anything so devastating happened here.

Within minutes we were talking about the difference between an Anderson shelter and a Morrison shelter, what it was like to hear a Doodlebug (apparently it was when the whistle stopped that people began to run in all directions) and how one milkman coped during an air raid. They remembered the spivs at the dog track and the people who did not survive. They mentioned the policeman who was not provided with a free shelter (he earned too much) and sent his daughters into the neighbour’s for safety. There were memories of particular raids and of a woman who turned up to work at Sainsbury’s in Greenford with bandaged hands, still trying to work out how they got burned as she rode along on her bicycle.

It was a frightening time. Huge craters were the reminders of near misses. One of my new acquaintances described how he was on a paper round when the warning went out. He rushed under cover only to feel a great weight suddenly crushing him. He thought he had been hurt but in fact a woman had seen him head for shelter and leapt in after him. His friend told me that on hearing a blast and unsure as to what to do he had stood rigid with fear while his sister dived to one side. He had every right to be terrified. Five days after Medway Drive suffered casualties six enemy aircraft dropped bombs in the vicinity of Mornington Road in Greenford, though they were in fact trying to hit RAF Northolt, their gunners taking the opportunity to strafe the ground. A six year old boy called Keith Peters was shot, one of thirty-seven people killed or fatally injured in the daylight attack. His home was damaged beyond repair and then targeted by looters. What must it have been like for his mother who after the war lived in the rebuilt house until her death? It is unlikely that the present occupant of this address is aware of its sad history. On a quiet day in suburbia, almost seventy years after the event, it is difficult to imagine the sudden terror that descended upon the people here.

I used to wonder what these mounds in Hanger Hill Park were all about. Apart from the lumps and bumps there is a concrete block at the end of one and a scattering of concrete squares that seal off the entrances to an air raid shelter. Again there is nothing to tell you that this was the site of several deaths in 1940. It seems that even for those who managed to reach a shelter there was no guarantee that they would make it through a raid. One of the people who died here was known to my friend in Medway Drive, a man who had thrown himself on top of his wife and succeeded in protecting her.

There was a matter of factness and absence of anger in these recollections from two men who would have had every right to feel bitterness towards the enemy. When I hear John Cleese mutter “Don’t mention the war!" and harangue his German guests in an episode of “Fawlty Towers” first broadcast thirty years after the end of the war I still hold my breath, aghast. It was meant to shock and was not aired in Germany when the series was originally shown there but I wonder how it would have gone down in the Britain of the 1940s?

Take a look at the archives of photographs from this period and you will see nothing but smiling faces. Land girls digging up potatoes in Greenford, in fields that have long since been built on. The mayor’s wife collecting clothes for the children of factory workers. A man sitting in the ruins of his house but beaming at the camera as if it was the funniest thing that had ever happened to him. Perhaps he was in shock or just glad to be alive, who knows? It is possible, even probable, that the less positive images were quite deliberately erased from some memories as well as from archives. Like shoes pushed to the back of a wardrobe the bad times were put to one side.

They kept calm and carried on, railwaymen, nurses and doctors, firemen, the WVS, shop workers who swept up the broken glass time after time, the makers of endless cups of tea and strangers who held a hand until the final moment came. Air raid wardens who must have seen things that gave them nightmares, bodies blown to pieces including those of people they knew. This former ARP hut which is at one end of Ealing Village now shelters bicycles.

In 1940 these people had no idea how many weary hungry years of war lay ahead of them. When it was finally over the world had been turned upside down and many saw this as an opportunity to put new ideas into practice. I wonder if we would have had the NHS if it were not for World War II? I hope that in years to come as much will be said about the valiant efforts of those who kept the home fires burning as has been said of those in uniform. It is up to us, the generations who gained from what they did, to recall and applaud their bravery and sacrifice.

For Violet, who drove ambulances during the war and was particularly fond of Marlene Dietrich. Thank you for the shoes.

I am indebted to my long suffering partner, who not only acted as chauffeur and advisor on military stuff but provided me with the excellent “Ealing, Acton and Southall at War” by Dennis Upton (The History Press), in which I found the information about the attack on Mornington Road.

Yellow and white

2010-09-21T09:12:00.002+01:00

I had forgotten the part the Catholic church played in the early years of my life until I watched some of the coverage of the Pope’s visit to the UK. The last time I attended a mass it was a grand affair, a requiem mass for someone I knew, but I did it out of politeness. I am surprised to find that I can still remember the words of the “Our Father” and the “Hail Mary”. Two faded religious pictures, a collection of prayer cards, a rosary and the cross that my Portuguese grandmother gave me are the few things I have left to indicate that I was, and as far as the Vatican is concerned still am, a Catholic.

It is hard to avoid being one if you are at all Portuguese. In the past the church dominated the country and its people, especially the poor of whom there were a great many. When I asked why my aunt had never learned to read my mother said it was because she was too busy doing jobs for the priest. Make of that what you will.

In the last few years the British branch of Vatican Inc. has been sustained by the arrival of Polish believers but before then it was the Portuguese, the Spanish and the Irish who filled the gaps. Catholic rituals such as a First Communion are an excuse for a big party in these countries, a chance to show off. My mother couldn’t quite believe it when she saw that little girls were wearing net curtains as veils for the occasion - she wasn’t sending me out looking like that (I was probably the only little girl at our church who wore a child sized mantilla to mass on Sundays). A ridiculous amount of money was spent on a dress from Portugal, with lots of embroidery and beading, and I stood out from everyone else looking like a mini bride. It was the closest my mother has ever come to seeing me in a wedding dress and she certainly made the most of it. Imagine her relief when she found that the same dress would do for my confirmation (sans veil thank goodness), carried out at a time when little Catholics were processed like sausages in the belief that these ceremonies would keep us in the church.

There wasn’t much point in my case. By the time I was thirteen and attending a Catholic secondary school I was already brave enough to say out loud that I didn’t believe in it. Even being confirmed by Cardinal Hume himself at the grand London Oratory had made no difference. The church had lost me. Having an outspoken Protestant father didn’t help but my experience of Catholicism was for the most part a dark and oppressive one. Father Ted didn’t come into it.

The ritual I dreaded most was Confession. I was a well behaved child and could never think of anything to say. I didn’t enjoy waiting for my turn in the dark box, conscious of the priest just visible through the grille. One afternoon when I was about eight I refused to go and was dragged to church by my mother. I ended up making my Confession on my knees in front of a priest and my outraged parent. Very Edna O’Brien. Before this story confirms the stereotype of a child abuser I should point out that he was probably as embarrassed as I was. I doubt whether anything had prepared him for this, unmarried with no children of his own, living a relatively sheltered life. The villain of the piece was actually my mother who required my absolute humiliation. However the priest need not have colluded with her and I doubt whether she would have got away with it today.

This Papal visit probably had the same impact on Catholic schools this time around that it had on mine in 1982. Personally I was more concerned about what was happening in the Falklands. By this time I was one of a group of girls who contrived to avoid involvement in this or any other religious event and we got away with it because we were reasonably clever. Our A level results counted. Even so we were not the only ones who raised our eyebrows at the sight of a different clique who turned up with yellow and white ribbons in their hair. The ringleader was a recent arrival whose family had converted a few years before. The deputy head mistress was particularly excited and enthusiastic about them. It was all terribly Iris Murdoch. Like all newbies they were really dedicated and involved but one other put them in the shade.

She, along with the rest of her Scottish family, was a member of Opus Dei - Vatican storm troopers. When she discovered that I had a boyfriend she promptly invited me to the OD hostel she was living in while she attended the sixth form at our school. I say “hostel” but this was an elegant Edwardian house near Chelsea Embankment with its own chapel. Most of the others living there were Spanish and probably very well off. Any notion that she had asked me round out of friendship evaporated as one of her fellow tenants explained earnestly and in heavily accented English that she was praying for my soul as my situation had been explained to her. My “friend” then took me off to the chapel where she actually believed I would spend the afternoon helping her polish the altar silver. I’m still not sure whether this was intended as penance or fun. I left fairly quickly after that but not before noticing that the picture of the founder of Opus Dei, Josemaria Escriva, was bigger and more prominent than the one of John Paul II.

Just before I moved in with my partner to our suburban home I bumped into a priest I had known my whole life. I told him that I was moving away and he was polite but clearly shocked that I was going to be living with someone. By this time I hadn’t been to Mass for years. He reminded me that as a little girl I had mended a tear in his jacket, something that came about because my mother had dropped heavy hints about my ability to sew. He seemed very sad. It is men like him that I think of when the issue of child sex abuse is mentioned because they have all, innocent or guilty, been damaged by the failure of the Catholic Church to deal with it honestly and openly. The priests I knew were a very mixed bunch, including at least one eccentric war hero and another younger man who I now realise was an alcoholic. I once saw him cycle past the bus I was on in Fulham Road, red faced and the worse for drink. He was the only one I disliked. Priests and nuns deal regularly with the people our society shuns in a respectful and positive way and for that they deserve respect.

The impression I get is that many of those who could have listened to victims, including priests, lay people and parents, found the whole idea of sexual abuse so repulsive that they pretended it wasn’t happening in the hope it would just go away. Even those who told someone breathed a sigh of relief because having done so they could forget about it. Those who closed their eyes just weren’t brave and unselfish enough to do the right thing.

In my opinion the Vatican took advantage of this failing. An institution that historically wielded enormous political power and influence is now reduced to manipulating the little people who put coins in the collection box. Amongst the many good and helpful Catholics who are involved in education, health care and aid work around the world there are a proportion who have a selfish and damaging need to abuse physically and sexually. The Vatican has a responsibility to weed them out and hand them over to the civil authorities but those who follow Catholic teachings had and continue to have a responsibility to challenge those in the church. If Catholics worldwide had responded to allegations of child abuse in the same way that UK tax payers did to the news of MPs’ expenses, flooding radio phone-ins and newspapers with calls, emails and letters, the Vatican would have had no choice but to put their house in order. If only the bad apples had been tackled with the same ruthlessness exhibited by the Inquisition.

Unfortunately for those who would change it Catholicism holds such a strong appeal for some that it will be around in its present form for a very long time. I’ve got to admit that I find those who were demonstrating about the rights of women and gay people in the church during the Papal visit difficult to understand. Why would anyone want to be a Catholic if they feel this way? I can understand the desire to make the Vatican apologise for homophobic behaviour but I really can‘t work out why a gay man or woman would want to go anywhere near such an institution as a worshipper or priest. I can’t help feeling that it is in part those who continue to long for what they can’t have that keep the juggernaut going.

The issue that really turned me off was the ban on contraception. One afternoon I was out with a school friend when we bumped into a teacher we hadn’t seen for some time. The child she had with her explained the absence and she was speechless with embarrassment when she saw us. A single woman and a convert, she had been kept away from the school by the headmaster while pupils who became pregnant were allowed back. We felt that she was really brave to keep the child and bring it up on her own. It wouldn’t surprise me if she came under pressure to have the child adopted by some worthy Catholic family.

There were some attempts to encourage chastity before marriage including a memorable session with a misguided volunteer who believed she could persuade a group of Sixth Formers that it was worth waiting until we were married before losing it. We sat there fully aware that most of us were on the pill or buying condoms ahead of university. I suppose she was an improvement on a priest. I have always felt that it is unnatural to ask men and women to be celibate but expect them to advise those who are not. Having said that I believe that if being celibate is part of the deal when you are a Catholic priest it’s a bit like having your cake and eating it to be allowed into the priesthood as a married man, something that is on offer to Anglicans.

I have found it impossible to shake off Catholicism completely. Recently it occurred to me that if I came across a dying person who I knew was a Catholic I probably would ask them if they wanted a priest, perhaps even say a prayer with them, because even though I don‘t believe in it myself I recognise that it might be important to them to be able to die in a state of grace. When one of my partner’s relatives was involved in the invasion of Iraq we sent him an Ethiopian silver cross. Had the time been available I would have taken it to a priest to be blessed because that is what most Catholics would have done. An unblessed cross is just a piece of jewellery. I have even been known to light candles for people.

However, I am also an avid reader of horoscopes. I reckon the Vatican storm trooper would have me polishing altar silver from now until Judgement Day to make up for all that astrology. I last heard from her when I received a letter from Rome. I binned it immediately.

Two minute heroes

2010-06-29T10:56:00.006+01:00

I turned up at the war memorial rather too early for the event, in company with a few others. Everyone else around us, apart from a handful who cast a curious glance in our direction, carried on doing all the things they usually do on a Saturday morning. The UK’s second annual Armed Forces Day had not been promoted particularly well in our area.

As someone waiting with me pointed out, it wasn’t for a lack of patriotism. The cross of St. George fluttered past us on cars and vans in the hot June sunshine. The World Cup had the lion’s share of the publicity and it was the three lions on football shirts that preoccupied most people rather than the young ones thousands of miles away under a different, hotter sun.

Perhaps things were not so different in 1921 when the memorial was completed, the money for it raised slowly almost reluctantly by a village that had lost nineteen men to the Great War. Perhaps it was too soon, too painful for some to cope with then, and again in 1945. Following both world wars there could have been very few people who did not know someone who had been in uniform, or recognise a name on a local memorial. These days it is uncommon to have a family member or friend in the armed forces so perhaps it is not surprising that there is a lack of awareness of such events. Most of us are left out of the loop.

Waiting for the parade I wondered how much the area had changed since veterans had first stood there one Sunday in June, 1921, before the plane trees had grown to such a height that they shaded us as we waited. They would have been a small group of local men, perhaps wearing suits made by the local tailor. A generation later that suit would have come from Burton’s, across the road, and after that it may have been a demob effort. The butcher, the baker and, in our case, the farm labourer took off aprons, put down tools and, during that two minutes of silence, became once more the young men that they had been, bound by shared experience, surrounded by the friends who hadn‘t come back. Then back to the Legion for a pint, memories carefully recalled and stored away again between Novembers.

“Ye who live on mid English pastures green,
Remember us, and think what might have been.”
War memorial inscription

Maybe it is because of them that we are so complacent and detached from current events. A lack of desire to brag, a need to return to “normality” as soon as possible in spite of the nightmares, a decision to take advantage of the prosperity that was coming their way and forget what had gone before. The Second World War largely disappeared with the tape that had been on the windows, but lingered on in army surplus and Utility goods which would do until you could afford something better. Perhaps it was both their gift and their fault that in the sixty-five years since the end of World War Two we have lost that everyday connection with the military.

Because when it did arrive that parade was such a grand and alien thing, pounding past the supermarket, the take away, the estate agents. We heard it before we saw it, loud and martial, and by the time it reached us, the glitter and snap of banners dismissing the mediocrity of everything about it, our hearts were probably beating in time with those drums. What a contrast with the slouchers in their football shirts, the girls in their summer clothes. It silenced the drivers stopped by the police and the teenagers on their mobile phones. In a world where we rarely stand up straight these people might have come from another age.

Yet however separate and different they may seem from the rest of us they still attract our support when we are afforded the opportunity to give it. The turnout for the main Armed Forces Day event in Cardiff was impressive and the words “Help for Heroes” are now seen and heard everywhere. A recent link up between a national radio station and the British Forces Broadcasting Service led to the posting of thousands of goodwill messages on their website, more than they could cope with. It isn’t the average person’s fault that this year Armed Forces Day had to compete with the National Squad for the average person’s attention.

Since then En-ger-land have lost a match and are out of the World Cup. Most of the flags will come down, although some will be left to the mercy of the elements. The team will fly back to a less than joyous welcome and scrutiny that will last considerably longer than two minutes. In the meantime, far away and out of sight their less well paid contemporaries will continue to watch dusty children score goals with bundles of carrier bags or plastic containers, as they have on many other postings, and dream of coming home.

http://www.armedforcesday.org.uk/
http://www.warmemorials.org/

The last bad smell

2010-06-22T14:42:00.003+01:00

I’ve been trying to remember when transparent rubbish bags were introduced on London’s transport network. Definitely before the most recent terrorist incidents and therefore a consequence of Irish nationalist activity.

Strange that they were the first things that came to mind at the news that the Saville Inquiry had released its report on the Bloody Sunday incident in 1972 when members of the 1st Battalion The Parachute Regiment opened fire on a civil rights march in Londonderry, in Northern Ireland. They are one of the small things in daily life changed forever by those seeking to unite Ireland through violence. In theory they make it more difficult to hide an explosive device amongst rubbish.

Thirteen people were killed and another thirteen wounded, one of whom died later. The Widgery Report, released eleven weeks after the incident, concluded that the soldiers involved had fired first, believing that they were targeting people who were shooting back at them or handling explosives, and that their orders justified this. The report was regarded as a whitewash by many. Bloody Sunday was rather like a festering bag of rubbish that no one wanted to tackle, a persistent odour clinging to the Parachute Regiment. Thirty-eight years later, and at a cost of over £190 million pounds, those killed and injured have been declared entirely innocent.

It occurred to me that this incident took place when I was six years old and that it has taken most of my life for the arguments over Bloody Sunday to be resolved to the extent that it has. It isn’t over yet. Those who were serving with 1 Para and fired those shots on Sunday 30th January 1972 may be prosecuted over the deaths and injuries. It will come as a surprise to some if the families affected don’t pursue prosecutions and a disappointment to others if they do. The phrase “water under the bridge” has been used more than once which suggests to me that some people have no sense of smell.

The release of the Inquiry’s findings have meant that much of the footage that was recorded by news crews at the time has been replayed over and over again. The same images of a man waving a bloodstained handkerchief as one of the victims is carried past soldiers have been shown on TV every time that the events of that day turn up in the headlines. It takes me all the way back to childhood and the blurry memory of fear that I have, of being dragged out of Marks and Spencer by my mother because of a bomb scare and a cold ride home on a bus afterwards. A fragment of childhood frozen in black and white at a time when everyone seemed to wear roll neck sweaters and needed a haircut.

Over the next decade I became a little more blasé about these things, IRA activities went with the territory if you lived in the capital, at least that was what we told nervous visitors. But there is a limit to just how relaxed you can be when faceless people are trying to kill you. On the 20th July 1982 I was at home, near Hyde Park, when a bomb went off killing two members of the Household Cavalry and injuring twenty-three other people. Which of the seven horses killed or injured beyond recovery had woken us on early mornings with the sound of their hooves in our mews? The house shook just as the ground did when one of the big piebald drum horses stamped past me as I walked to school. You always know when it’s a bomb.

It’s called terrorism for a good reason and fear was certainly in the air following these events but anger came straight in after it. No one was happier than this nine year old when the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four were locked away. As far as I was concerned the police had done their job and they could be relied upon to get it right.

Imagine my anger when some protested that these convictions were unjust, that those accused were innocent. On an anniversary of the Birmingham pub bombings the sister of one of the victims described the impact the event had on her mother, driving her to mental illness, and the anger she felt towards campaigners for the Birmingham Six. Seeing a classmate pale with shock and bearing marks on her face from splinters of glass after the Harrods bombing didn’t help. Another lost a brother to a bomb and the school held a service for him. The irony was, of course, that he had been of Irish descent, as were many of those affected by these incidents.

I didn’t realise, until I discovered the extent of my own Irish ancestry, just how my opinion of Ireland had been skewed by all this. I felt uncomfortable about being that Irish. It came as a shock to realise the impact on me of the years of fear and bitterness worked up by people who had denied me the right to walk freely and without fear in the place I called home. It hasn’t made me a nicer person so it doesn‘t surprise me that some who grew up surrounded by checkpoints and guns in Northern Ireland feel the way they do about the British army and the police.

Over the years I have heard lies told by a number of British policemen being unravelled and shown for what they really were, in relation to a number of miscarriages of justice. To me the greatest betrayals were the wrongful convictions of the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four. One lie after another exposed, undermining the certainty I felt about the justice system -and it hasn‘t made me any less angry about the impact of terrorist activities on my life.

I am lucky not to have lost a relative to a bomb and I cannot imagine what it was like not only to have loved ones killed but to have seen them branded as terrorists when they were entirely innocent. There are those who wince at the cost of the Saville Inquiry and dread the prospect of more time and money spent on prosecutions. It is too much to hope that those involved in the shootings will come forward now and ask a court to decide the truth on way or another but that is what I would like to see. It isn‘t just about the relatives, who have waited such a long time for this outcome and have done so with more grace than the judges, politicians and military in whom I had such trust. I would like to see this last scandal cleared up. If the people of Northern Ireland had allowed the setting up of a truth and reconciliation commission of the kind that helped the people of South Africa comes to terms with their past we might have been spared this lingering embarrassment.

The Parachute Regiment has proved itself since those dark days and continues to do. It was 1 Para that spearheaded a peacekeeping force in Kosovo in 1999. It was 1 Para that took part in a hostage rescue in Sierra Leone in 2000. Those who wear that badge today are very different from the soldiers who shot at those civilians in 1972.

The situation must be resolved in a court of law rather than being left to fester like a rubbish bag on a hot day, surrounded by persistent wasps, with no one prepared to risk the sting of costs and the stink of embarrassment to get rid of it for good. In my experience, rubbish bags leak if they are left too long. It is almost inevitable that those involved will eventually speak about Bloody Sunday and death bed confessions will bring no peace to those whose relatives were frozen in time.

http://www.bloody-sunday-inquiry.org/index.html

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23845703-a-low-point-for-the-paras-but-their-vital-work-must-continue.do

Fallen from grace

2010-06-15T08:03:00.008+01:00

A few nights ago we were woken by the pained screeches and howls of two foxes getting it on somewhere very close to the house, until recently one of the less notable sounds of suburban life. On this occasion I would not be surprised if a few of our neighbours had got up and checked that they had locked the back door and shut all the downstairs windows.

The fox has is no longer seen as the charming redhead that you help out over the winter with the odd bowl of cat food. Tabloid headlines have put Mr. Fox into the same category as the paedophile. He is no longer fantastic. A mother found a fox mauling her twin baby girls in their nursery after it entered her north London home through patio doors left open on a hot night. Since then the local council has set traps in the garden of the house and destroyed three foxes caught there subsequently.

A number of Londoners, among them the mayor, Boris Johnson, have come forward to declare that foxes are vermin, a nuisance and now, a potential danger. The surprising thing is that just as many have stood up for the fox, pointing out that London and its suburbs have become a free food fest for vermin of every kind. It is not just the kind hearted residents of the city who are to blame. Patrons of take away food establishments do not feel the need to dispose of whatever they have left over responsibly, dumping it anywhere; proprietors leave bags of rubbish in the street long before collections are due because the fines are never big enough to put them off. Add to that the introduction of fortnightly rubbish collections for reasons of economy and it is hardly surprising that the fox and the rat have flourished.

In spite of what has happened I am quite happy to see foxes in our garden. If we keep the doors closed on hot evenings it is because we are worried about the two-legged variety of visitor, the burgling kind. I heard the eerie shriek of a fox for the first time in the suburbs, believing at first that it was a woman’s screams. Then it almost sent me into orbit but I now know that one of nature’s charmers is about. And I have been charmed by the fox. The sight of cubs tumbling over each other on the lawn, of an adult sunbathing on the compost bin, of another loping purposefully along the street ahead of me, I still regard these moments as special, magical. If those strange and dangerous eyes have once looked back into yours from a safe distance they are hard to resist. For those as divorced from wild nature as some town dwellers are it must be hard to resist trying to turn such a creature into a friend with the help of frozen chicken.

My perspective had to change once we became cat owners, not actively discouraging them but the occasional bowls of cat food stopped (I once economised by providing cheap dog food and was treated to the sight of a fox having a sniff and then walking away from it. Everything in its demeanour said “You expect me to eat this?”). We do leave out bowls of water, shallow enough to prevent a hedgehog drowning or tilted to allow an easy escape, that double as a lido for young starlings. I began to do this after seeing a desperately hot and exhausted fox take a rest on the patio. It was too frightened to let me put water out for it and ran off.

There was one hairy moment when I glanced out of the kitchen and saw a large fox standing stock still on the lawn with our beloved moggie right next to it. To my amazement the fox ignored Jones as he began to lie down next to it in a submissive gesture, the one that told us that he was due for a tummy rub. By this time my hand had rattled the doorknob and the fox departed in a hurry. Jones didn’t look too unhappy to see me but he didn’t seem frightened either and it has led me to wonder what sort of relationship he had with foxes in his early life as a stray. Most cats don’t win the argument. Nevertheless, when I found three young ones gazing at me expectantly through the French windows one Sunday morning I thought of Jones, at that moment snoring under the duvet, and resisted the temptation to slip them a dish of Felix.

I don’t blame foxes in any way for the problems they cause. They are fulfilling their role in the ecology, scavenging and cleaning up after everyone else and it is not their fault that we provide them with so much work. However I believe that for some the feeding of foxes has more to do with a need to be loved by an outlaw than a genuine desire to help wildlife. We have forgotten that this adaptable survivor has been charming humans for centuries. Very few animals have engaged the attentions of artists, writers and poets in the way that the fox has. Brer Fox, bold Reynard, Disney’s Robin Hood, Beatrix Potter‘s “foxy-whiskered gentleman“ and The Tod in “The Plague Dogs” by Richard Adams, from Aesop’s Fables to Roald Dahl it has been recognised as cunning, sly, deceitful - the Loki of British wildlife. Most recently the fox has been equated with the scheming young women drawn to celebrities in the video for Wiley’s “Wearing my Rolex”.

Perhaps those living within the town walls would be slower to defend the fox if their livelihoods depended on it. The playfulness that leaves our back garden strewn with shoes, rubber ducks and sparkly Christmas baubles is the same as that which leaves a hen coop in a bloody and distressing state. There are those, parents in particular, who have come to understand that a patio covered in faeces is a high price to pay for a glimpse of something wild.

It is time for the authorities, in consultation with local wildlife trusts, to take a rational and sensitive approach to the urban fox, educating the public in the best way to interact with it and acting in all our best interests. A blanket approach which treats all foxes in the same way would be inappropriate, what we need is a fox czar.

The recent incident really worries me. I fear that it will be used by politicians to gain votes by hitting an easy target rather than tackling obvious litter problems and dangerous dogs that Londoners fall victim to every day. Another concern is that the tabloid reaction to it will give permission to thugs to torture and kill foxes. They will use the same dogs that I worry about to carry out this task and then celebrate with a take away. One of the saddest interviews I heard following the attack was with a teenager who described the foxes in her area as scruffy, clearly unaware that sarcoptic mange causes these animals real misery - it isn’t because they are too lazy to groom themselves. Ignorance of this sort leaves the door open to cruelty.

Unfortunately, thugs on the other side of the argument have also made their feelings known online and the family in question have been given police protection. I have no doubts about the truth of what happened and wonder how those who care so passionately about animals in general can be this unfeeling towards the human kind.

I wonder if, by treating the urban fox in this way, we have worn away some of the mystery that drew us to it in the first place. As a result of our affection it has become commonplace and ordinary. We have lost our innocence having denied it the dignity due to it and our fall from grace is all the harder for it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reynard_cycle

http://www.thefoxwebsite.org/index.html

http://www.save-me.org.uk/

Too much of a good thing

2010-01-16T10:43:00.009Z

At last, the thaw. When, unusually, it began to snow before Christmas it added to the festive atmosphere. For once the weather outside matched the images on the cards indoors. It rapidly lost its appeal. London was bored of snow. Every local phone-in show made that very clear.

The problem is that the British don’t have to deal with it very often so we are left in total disorder on these rare occasions. There is a desperate rush to spread grit and salt on main roads (but not residential side roads, leading to many complaints) and panic when they start to run out. This year there was outrage when the snow turned to slush after it was rained on, creating a slippery treacherous mess on station platforms and pavements. It turned out that grit had been spread but the rain had washed it away. The slush then became icy and even more slippery. I saw one man slip over on the steps at North Acton Station before Christmas, hitting his head on the metal edged steps.

Judging by the state of the pavements in West Ealing this week I think I know where most of that grit ended up. A shame that some of it didn’t reach residential Greenford or the business district in central Ealing.

New snow is special. I love the way that it reflects the light and muffles every sound, especially at night. It’s easy to walk in (crunch crunch) and renders everything beautiful. It even managed to lend a quiet beauty to the place where a good man met a violent end a few months ago.

When the snow first hit the UK it was regarded as lovely, if a bit of a nuisance. I was obliged to head out in it and couldn’t help smiling at everyone I encountered. And everyone smiled back. It was a lot less fun hours later when there had been a slight thaw and even worse when it had refrozen. I watched a pensioner pass the house, holding my breath in case he slipped over.

I considered (along with many others according to the media) whether to sweep the pavement in front of the house for the benefit of those passing by. A good citizen would surely do it. My main concern was that I would not clear it well enough to prevent a thin layer of moisture refreezing and leading to the problem I wanted to avoid. In the end I left it as it was because I had found that it was easier to walk on the remaining snow and frozen slush, especially if it snowed again.

Extreme cold (by UK standards) leads to a rush on hats, scarves and gloves in the shops (I’ve made three hats since Christmas), an abandoning of New Year diets in favour of warm comfort food and a rediscovery of things like hot water bottles, and balaclavas. Personally I recommend lemon and ginger tea with honey. It has been difficult for birds, who can’t find food under the snow, and the local foxes were louder than usual and probably very hungry.

An unexpected fall of snow last February led to a small snowman in the front garden complete with carrot nose and apple eyes. This time around I find it hard enough to get to and from work on it to have the energy to play around in it which is a shame because it didn’t snow very often when I was a child and I could do some catching up. I spent many childhood Christmases in the countryside and one year (the forecast promising snow) I was given a plastic sled. The worst present ever as the snow failed to materialise.

Now that things are back to normal it is interesting to note what this episode has revealed about the UK. Many schools remained closed because even though the pupils live in the area, their teachers do not (house prices are often prohibitive). Pensioners will leave the house to go shopping but many of the younger generation will have a duvet day. A lot of people don’t own the right footwear for ice and snow. The news channels are more likely to interview the RSPB about the impact of cold weather on wildlife than Age Concern about its impact on the elderly.

In the meantime, while we’re bothered about snow, on other parts of the planet we call home extreme heat continues to take its toll and one of the terrible natural disasters that always seems to follow Christmas leaves its mark on Haiti. The fun’s over.

http://www.dec.org.uk/donate_now/

For Robert Godrey, in the hope that the sight of all that snow cools things down.

"Made in China" - we helped to build this bloodstained brand

2009-12-30T11:00:00.007Z

Akmal Shaikh was executed on Tuesday 29th December 2009. China defied international opinion by ordering the judicial murder of a man who was clearly mentally ill.

Despite twenty-seven separate approaches by the government of the United Kingdom China decided to pursue without exception its policy of executing those found smuggling drugs. While I condone most strong measures against those who deal, smuggle and use illegal substances (they are beneath my contempt) the case of Akmal Shaikh highlights the fact that a) the imposition of the death penalty does not put people off trying, and b) he was so obviously duped into carrying four kilos of heroin into China that the police would have been better served by getting as much information from him about those who shamelessly manipulated him in this way than by arresting him.

It would appear that mental illness is a foreign disease, the Chinese clearly aren’t afflicted by it because the fact of Akmal Shaikh’s condition played little if any part in his defence. The court officials found his behaviour quite funny. I’m not laughing. China has given no cause for humour for those who suffer at its hands and I believe the time has come to speak plainly about its impact on the world. The time for diplomacy is past.

What do you think of when you hear the term “bear farm”? Allow me to enlighten you. The Chinese have a medieval, no, let’s call it stone age, belief that there is something to be gained by keeping live bears in cages so that they can drain their bile ducts and use it for something allegedly medical (God knows what – keeping a hard on probably). Bears live and die in these disgusting conditions, suffering infections and endless pain and misery. Imagine living your entire life in a cage, unable to move, lying in your own faeces, surrounded by the heartless monsters who get paid for doing this to you. The Chinese fascination with bears leads them to engage in the hunting of the rare Asiatic variety in Russia because in the restaurants back home morons are prepared to flash their cash by paying a small fortune for bear paw soup.

All this is in addition to the suppression of the free press and the ill treatment of those who dissent. As for unwanted female children and those with mental illnesses or learning difficulties, Bryan Woods and Kate Blewett exposed what happens to them in their documentary “The Dying Rooms” (1995). There is a saying in China: “A family’s shame should be kept inside the house”, out of sight, out of mind. The bears should probably count themselves lucky. I have heard some environmentalists praise the efforts that the Chinese government have made to promote sustainable communities. I sometimes wonder if these people are living in an ivory towered development near Shanghai – what about the rest of that great big picture?

For years I have heard diplomats and businessmen describe how difficult it is to deal with China, how cultural differences and a need for extreme sensitivity governs every contact. The strange thing is that, while they have been walking on eggshells around these proud and supposedly dignified people, the Chinese have been filling the shelves of our shops with products made in their own country. Our schoolchildren have been learning Mandarin because China is going to dominate the world stage and we have to be ready. I hate to tell you this folks – I think we’re a bit late.

So far the murderous and arrogant regime in the People’s Republic of China has sucked up the Olympics because they were considered to have changed their ways in relation to human rights. They have attracted companies from around the world who want cheap labour so that they can keep their shareholders happy by increasing the profit margin through the exploitation of dirt cheap labour in China. And we have paid the price.

Across Europe and America workers now face the constant threat that the companies to which they have been loyal for years may decide that they are too expensive, that they would rather ship the whole operation to China. The consumer has been complicit in this process because for a long time we have been enthusiastically buying it cheap.

Can you remember the first time that you saw a t-shirt in a supermarket, price £1? And you thought “Great! I’ll buy one in each colour!” It didn’t matter that they shrank or faded after one wash – you could go back and buy another. The problem is that we have now been conditioned to buying cheap to the point where any similar items that cost what they really should are now considered to be ridiculously expensive. We used to give a damn whether these clothes were cheap because they were made by children – how many of us saw the words “Made in China” on the label and cared?

In the meantime the industries for which the UK was well known have been eroded, eaten away by our desire to pay less. We no longer save up for the good stuff. Instead we thank China for providing what we can afford. When I was a child you bought carefully and less often, you made things last. All those lessons have been forgotten because of an over developed sense of entitlement. We want to save money on the goods we need so that we can spend them on the things we want, things that are also made in China.

A few weeks ago I watched the news reports from Cumbria where floods had devastated lives and the local economy. I was reminded that areas such as this were once the source for some of the best quality wool in the world. I have noticed that many yarn brands that are regarded as British now make their products in China. Small wool producers in the UK barely survive because those who knit and crochet take the easy option and buy what they find on the shelf, wherever it is made (it is time that the Fairtrade logo appeared on British brands of yarn so that producers receive a fair price for what they make in their own country). No effort is made by the UK’s government to encourage the sale of British yarn and other products in its own country over those made in states with poor human rights records.

In the meantime I see no other course but to encourage retailers to stop stocking Chinese made goods. A determined, long term effort on the part of the British consumer would be more effective than the actions of diplomats and politicians. It will be difficult, especially for those on a limited budget because we are reduced to buying cheap Chinese tat. Cheap British tat has been eliminated. It will be even harder because life is about to become more expensive anyway.

I call on anyone who cares to think twice before buying goods made in China. Please go even further and contact large retailers such as Tesco, IKEA, WH Smiths, Next and Marks and Spencer. Tell them of your concerns about China’s record and ask them to stop stocking Chinese made goods. Copy your letters to your Member of Parliament and local councillors. Tell your local newspaper.

It is up to us to vote with our feet, we have left it to the politicians for too long and I believe that they have let us down. Now it’s our turn to let China know just what happens when they break the rules by unjustly punishing the vulnerable.

http://www.hsus.org/wildlife/issues_facing_wildlife/wildlife_trade/the_unbearable_trade_in_bear_parts_and_bile/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/8429708.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/8432212.stm

Be nice to your fireman this Christmas

2009-12-25T01:36:00.001Z

For the last two years I’ve worked in the evening on Christmas Eve or New Year’s Eve and as a gesture of solidarity I’ve dropped off a bag of goodies at the fire station opposite.

The first time I did it I wasn’t prepared for the reaction I got. The man who answered my tap on the door seemed absolutely stunned that I had done this. He said “thank you” so often I started to get embarrassed and walked away feeling a bit tearful. The same thing happened the following year.

What amazes and saddens me about this is that the fire station in question is not stranded on a suburban roundabout. It is right next to homes and offices on a busy street. I can understand that those working in the office buildings aren’t around during the evenings and weekends but they must, as I do, see the engines rush off to a call. The flashing lights, sirens and bells are hard to miss. As for those who live right on the doorstep - if you’re reading this, I hope you’re ashamed of yourselves.

I know that when I spend an evening at work the worst thing that could probably happen to me is that I might trip over the vacuum cleaner cable or get splashed by something unspeakable. The chances of my dying from smoke inhalation are pretty slim (as long as certain people avoid using fire extinguishers as doorstops), as is that of being maimed for life in the course of my shift. However that could happen if it wasn’t for the speedy response of the folks across the road. They take that risk to stop it from happening to me.

Over recent years the emergency services have become the targets of, well, what do I call them? Thugs? Yobs? Uncontrolled, uncontrollable children and teenagers who take pleasure in assaulting the people who go the extra mile to keep us safe. There are places in the UK where starting a fire and calling the fire brigade so that they can lob things at them is entertainment. The same risks are faced by ambulance crews. While the police might to some extent regard this kind of behaviour as going with the territory it is almost beyond belief that anyone should want to target a fireman or a paramedic in this way.

That aside, I think the fact that we do not value those working for the emergency services speaks volumes about the sense of entitlement that has developed in our society. It has taken campaigns and images of amputees and coffins to awaken our respect for the armed services. Perhaps that’s the problem. If firemen, nurses and policemen were dropping like flies on a daily basis the majority might begin to notice their contribution.

Another obstacle to their being looked up to by the community that they serve is that, unless it is a very small one, they do not usually live where they work. In the case of the one that I am familiar with they probably can’t afford to live there. There is a sense of separation and the living breathing humans who do this work are just uniforms rather than recognisable members of the community. I don’t know that we can change that. The development of Safer Communities Teams have certainly helped to give our local police recognisable faces. This Christmas it even meant a home baked cake from me. When I was a child we knew our beat officer so well that when he retired he gave me the metal flower from the top of his helmet as a souvenir. I still have it somewhere. It’s interesting that in the idealised realms of childhood, for example Trumpton, it is taken for granted that there is a local fire brigade and we all know their names.

It isn’t about the food because, let’s be honest, many of us are already sick of mince pies by Christmas Day. It is the gesture that counts and the thought that someone, even if it’s just the eccentric cleaner from the building opposite, has noticed the effort you make when the rest of the world is tucked up safe in bed.

In praise of small dogs

2009-12-15T08:50:00.011Z

Recently I was given the sad news that a four legged acquaintance of mine had lost an argument with a car. Walter the miniature dachsund was a charming little dog, the sort that actually makes you want to own one. Unfortunately he wasn’t built for speed. Slow forward movement seemed to involve a fluid wiggle, anything faster meant a jog trot that required more concentration. If I greeted him as he was on his way past in a hurry he wouldn’t look directly at me but his eye would swivel round with a look that said “Awright? See ya!” With a slightly German accent, obviously.

I like dogs in general but there is something special about the ones that don’t come up to my knee. It isn’t that they are more cute or cuddled more easily, in fact it would be a mistake to assume that they are all sweet natured. I have a childhood memory of the neighbour’s tiny Yorkshire terrier, Percy, chasing two terrified German Shepherds, mother and son, back to their home round the corner (“What the hell was that?” “Who cares, shut up and run!”).

When I deliver leaflets for the local allotment association I always exercise caution at a particular address. I’ve only ever seen this dog from a distance but I’ve felt its hot breath on my fingers as it drags the hapless piece of paper through the letterbox (placed conveniently at ground level) and shreds it for its owner. I persist as there have been a couple of occasions when this hasn’t happened but I‘m glad I‘m not their postman. I’d be surprised if they ever see their birthday cards.

Sometimes I wonder what it must be like to see life at their level, to get a crick in the neck looking up at the person their world revolves around. I once found myself behind a man on a mobile phone, oblivious to the fact that the small dog he was walking (not his I suspect) could not keep up with him. At times he was dragging it along. Hell was made for people like that.

I expect there is also room down there for the idiots who have followed the example of celebrities like Paris Hilton, owner of several “teacup” Chihuahuas. Unfortunately for these airheads the Chihuahua is one of the longest lived of all dog breeds (they last even longer than Louis Vuitton dog carriers) and can develop expensive heath problems. Consequently dog shelters in the USA are now receiving more of these little dogs than they can cope with as many owners discover that they are less disposable than clothes. At least Paris keeps her excess dogs, she has around seventeen.

She is just following in the footsteps of other rich and famous people. Marie Antoinette and Madame de Pompadour owned Papillons, and small dogs often peep out of portraits of royalty and the aristocracy. The tiny dog belonging to Mary Queen of Scots accompanied her to her death, emerging from beneath her skirts following her beheading. Some dogs were designed to be carried, such as the Goh-Khi of Tibet, a “sleeve dog”. For most of its history the Pekingese could only be owned by members of the Chinese Imperial court, the ultimate toy dog.

My personal experience of some of these breeds has not been a happy one, although I’m sure that not all are snappy and irritable. I suspect that, just like humans, they may get a little fed up as they get older. It's allowed. As a small child I played with my grandfather’s lovely Westie (highly appropriate for a Presbyterian minister) whose favourite game involved knocking down a set of plastic skittles. It was probably my grandfather who told me about Greyfriars Bobby, the most faithful of dogs, who stayed at or near, the grave of his master for fourteen years. He was a Skye terrier, a native breed now considered to be at risk.

If I was forced to choose a breed I would probably go for a Jack Russell. On the way home from work I have sometimes found myself behind one on his regular evening stroll and noticed that every few paces he would give a skip. I just had to ask his owner if he always does that and discovered that it is a characteristic of the breed. From behind it is a little like watching Morecambe and Wise dance off into the distance at the end of a show. I take these straightforward little dogs very seriously, having seen them at work killing off rats. It is easy to forget that many of these small breeds once played an important part in agricultural areas, hunting for vermin. So many residents of the White House have owned Scottish terriers (bred to fight badgers) that it is tempting to think of them as being good at herding US presidents. Alas, they cannot stop them from making stupid decisions.

For Raki, as a late birthday present.
My thanks to Alli and the waggylicious Hettie for posing and for not finding me at all weird for asking!

http://www.ericandern.co.uk/pages/songs.asp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greyfriars_Bobby
http://www.dogstrust.org.uk/
http://www.rspca.org.uk/home

Better than the real thing

2009-12-09T08:50:00.007Z

A week or two ago there was a bit of a fuss over Cheryl Cole’s hair. Someone in the media felt it was time to notice the teeny-weeny disclaimer on the ad for the L’Oreal hair product she has been promoting. Those flowing locks in the photos? They aren’t all hers! Shock! Horror! She wears extensions!

This revelation has led to complaints to the Advertising Standards Agency by outraged viewers who believe that Cheryl’s hair only looks that good because of her natural hair extensions. Actually, they aren’t even natural ones. Her stylist says that the glue used on the natural ones was damaging her hair. The complainants include journalist and parent Daisy Goodwin who said that her nine year old daughter had asked her to buy the product because she wanted her hair to be just like Cheryl’s. I guess she wasn’t interested in any of the hundreds of other products pushed at us that have disclaimers for hair extensions or false eyelashes worn by celebrities in these ads.

The fact that Cheryl has managed to get nine year olds pestering their mums to buy a product is a testament to her power as a style icon, although I think much of her appeal lies in the fact that she is a gorgeous version of the girl next door. The girl next door would probably wear extensions if she could afford to maintain them but she has probably blown all her cash on one pair of Chanel earrings, or a high street version of a dress worn by Kate Moss.

Recently I was asked for directions by a young woman who was carrying a very smart Gucci bag. A smart Gucci carrier bag. They carry home evening gowns and handbags worth thousands of pounds and are then sold on by enterprising Ebayers. They are actually worth something in themselves. In Knightsbridge and Mayfair they end up amongst malodorous coffee grounds and vegetable peelings unless they are extracted in time by a maid or housekeeper with an entrepreneurial streak. I’m not proud, I’ve done it myself. They’re great for storing accessories. The best one I’ve bagged came from Miu Miu.

Naomi Klein's "No Logo" revealed the lengths that global brands will go to keep us interested. When I first read it I’m afraid that I was really impressed at how crafty they are. The hold of brands like Adidas is extraordinary, their products are as likely to be worn by those who have no intention of going near a track as those who do. I don’t know when they began designing items that fell entirely into the category of fashion but the dress I spotted in a catalogue shows that their place in the hearts of the fashion conscious is secure. If the girl next door wants to wear that dress (and she does) they’re doing fine.

Unfortunately the credit crunch has meant that funds are even more limited for those with expensive taste but it would appear that some aren’t letting a lack of cash get in their way. Shoplifting has become more common as those who really want something just steal it. The other option is of course the knock off. The local authorities do their best to clamp down on anyone selling this stuff in markets and at car boot sales but I suppose that as long as there is a demand there will be a supply. No thought given to those who make these clothes and accessories, working in sweatshops for little pay.

That also applies to some of the high street stores that produce fashionable but really cheap clothes. Primark seems to go out of its way to be seen as ethical after accusations of the use of child labour. If they are ever be able to control their supply chain to the extent that unacceptable practices of that kind are eradicated no one will be embarrassed to admit that they shop there. At this point I put my hand up and admit that I have come home with a brown paper biodegradable Primark bag full of cheap gloves or socks. And yes, I did feel guilty.

For some years The Attached One worked as a warehouse supervisor for a company that supplied leather clothing to a number of high street stores. This was at around the time when the demand for a constant supply of new designs developed, which meant short runs of a specific design that would hopefully sell out. If that happened the run would be repeated before the taste for it faded.

What amazed me was the disposability of these clothes. I keep clothes for years and make them last. I can’t imagine throwing anything away unless it is in shreds. It turned out that some don’t actually buy and then bin. They buy, wear, find a fault and return it to the shop for a refund. He and his colleagues would spend hours checking and processing returns.

One person at the company was developing the concept of selling designs that were near copies of clothes worn by celebrities or on screen. As Seen On Screen, ASOS, is doing rather well these days. As good as the real thing if not better.

All this makes me even more surprised that anyone was bothered that Cheryl’s hair has had some help. In an era when breast enlargements are something that a man might pay for as a gift for the woman in his life it seems a bit odd that anyone can get worked up over extensions.

Today's non-story

2009-11-09T12:24:00.006Z

It seems that the Prime minister’s hand writing needs work. It would also appear that he sometimes writes letters in a hurry. We learn this courtesy of the Sun newspaper who have filmed the distressed mother of a soldier killed in Afghanistan who received one of his letters (“Exclusive to the Sun”) and plugged it on every news channel.

Jacquie Janes is in the process of grieving for her son, a 20 year old Grenadier Guardsman who died on the 5th of October this year. The Prime Minister sent her a handwritten letter offering his condolences. He spelt her surname incorrectly (“James” instead of “Janes") along with the words “greatest”, “condolences”, “yours” and “colleagues”.

Jacquie is very upset about this. In the Sun’s article she states that she is also upset about the fact that our armed forces are under equipped. This would suggest that she was predisposed to regard Mr. Brown’s condolences as offensive, whatever form they came in. So whether the letter was a calligraphic masterpiece or something cold and formulaic churned out by a flunky on a PC and signed in the PM’s absence by someone we’ve never heard of, the Sun would still have had a story.

In the last few days I have wondered whether it is wise for those bereaved by the present engagement in Afghanistan to allow the press into their lives beyond issuing the most basic statement. This week’s headline in my local paper was “Iceland bans poppy sellers” and the front page features the photograph taken some time ago of a local woman whose son was killed in Iraq. They obviously phoned her for a comment. The thing is, they will now always phone her for a comment. If they don’t she may wonder if they have stopped caring.

It is easy for someone made vulnerable through bereavement to find a journalist (and I use that word loosely where the Sun is concerned) a good listener who can feel their pain, especially if compassion fatigue has set in amongst others of their acquaintance. Journalists know this and use it. Even those we might regard as more reliable and sincere have an eye to their careers and what they will gain from their collaboration with someone like Jacquie Janes. They never forget that they are trying to get and hold an audience. Her sorrow is grist to someone’s mill. In this case it is the Sun who will sell many, many newspapers on the back of this ( yes, they have been fundraising for “our boys“ - it‘s great PR).

The Prime Minister is an extraordinarily busy man. He is blind in one eye and the sight in his other eye is deteriorating. He is running a country and engaging with other powerful people who make decisions that affect the lives of billions of people every day. He found time to write a letter to someone who does not fall into that category. Today, following the fuss over his letter, he telephoned Jacquie. That phone call won’t make any difference because the damage has been done. The story was not about Jacquie, her son or poorly equipped British forces. This was about the Sun’s owner and his politics. However you feel about Gordon Brown don’t lose sight of how the press manipulates the public mood. Don’t fall into the trap.

The PM can write a reasonably tidy letter. How do I know this? I attended an exhibition at the Pitshanger Manor Art Gallery called “Therefore I Am” organised by Breakaway, a charity that supports people with learning disabilities. It offers those visiting the exhibition the opportunity to complete a card that has the words “…therefore I am” in the bottom right hand corner. There are framed cards from Paul Daniels, Lynne Reid Banks and Lynda Bellingham amongst others.

In pride of place is one from Gordon Brown. His hand writing is as untidy as it is in Jacquie’s letter. I can’t remember anything about the standard of spelling. What I do remember is that he went into some detail to describe why he went into politics and his father’s influence on his life. Of course, you could argue that this is great PR, but there has been little publicity about the exhibition which is tucked into a side room at the gallery. I don’t think I would have been able to make that phone call after what has been said about that letter. Gordon Brown is not perfect but I would not be in his shoes for a £45million lottery win.

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/campaigns/our_boys/2720283/Prime-Minister-Gordon-Brown-couldnt-even-get-our-name-right.html

Red for a reason

2009-11-04T12:25:00.006Z

We are a few days away from Remembrance Sunday and Armistice Day. On Saturday we got our poppies from a Royal British Legion collector in Ealing and slotted them in where we could. I have seen them on people I would not have expected to have been wearing them. I have worn one every year since childhood, my mother expected it of me and as I grew older if I hadn’t already bought one myself she would provide it. When the words “Haig Fund” disappeared from the centre I noticed it. If I ended up with one that had a leaf as well as a flower I felt a little smug. For years I’ve wondered why they didn’t make ones with pins.

Papaver rhoeas, the cornfield poppy, grows easily in the disturbed ground of battlefields and it was a common sight to those who took part in the First World War. A Canadian surgeon called John McRae immortalised the image of silky blood red flowers amongst the crosses that, in 1915, were already marking the first of millions of graves in his poem “In Flanders Fields“. Many still lie where they fell, waiting to be discovered by the turn of the plough.

Red poppies were eventually sold as fundraisers by the British Legion which was founded within three years of the end of the Great War to act as a voice for ex-servicemen (it became the Royal British Legion in 1971 following the granting of a Royal Charter). White poppies were first sold in 1933 by the Co-operative Women’s Guild who wanted to support the many disabled veterans and prevent further wars. They are now provided by the Peace Pledge Union.

Over the years I have seen a few white poppies worn by old soldiers in the parade past the Cenotaph in Whitehall but the vast majority wear red ones. I haven’t taken much notice of white poppies or those who wear them until now but they were brought to my attention by someone on Facebook who was encouraging members to join the White Poppy group that has been set up on the site. I followed the link to the official website and ended up feeling quite angry as a consequence. It wasn’t just that they had used the image and story of Harry Patch, the last remaining WW1 veteran, to promote their cause.

I object to the assumption that seems to have been made by some white poppy wearers that those who wear a red one are absolutely in favour of war. If a similar, negative generalisation was made about those who promote the white one there would be an outcry from the media savvy anti-war movement. Old soldiers are usually the first to tell you that war is a terrible thing. They don’t need lessons from a generation saved from conscription by a standing army made up of volunteers.

These volunteers sometimes do what they are ordered to even though they do not have much faith in the politicians who send them to war. They go back into the theatre of operations in spite of a lack of adequate equipment and their own fears. It is the efforts of people like this that has made it possible for others to talk about and live in peace. They don’t just go to kill - they build essential bridges, repair schools and hospitals, train police forces and armies. Sometimes they do it in their free time because they want to help, encouraging their friends and families back home to fundraise for that cause. The five British soldiers whose deaths were announced today died alongside two of the Afghan policemen they were mentoring. They were doing something positive.

On its Facebook page the White Poppy group states that “The White Poppy symbolises the belief that there are better ways to resolve conflicts than killing strangers.” The Peace Pledge Union believes that the solution to situations such as Afghanistan is a UN force. Try telling that to the British soldiers who, under the auspices of the UN, tried and failed to protect people on all sides of the conflict in the former Yugoslavia. Hamstrung by their mandate, they and forces from other countries were obliged to stand back and watch while men, women and children were herded away to their deaths in places whose names have become as familiar to us as the battlefields of the Somme and Ypres were to those fighting in World War One. I’d love to see how those who regard the UN as the cure for all ills would cope with the nightmares that these people still get because they were not allowed to use force.

To make those blue helmets as effective as they should be you first have to sort out the lumbering apparatus that is the UN and that will take some doing. In the meantime are we expected to stand back and watch as another Rwanda, another Bosnia, another Somalia starts up because conflict is a terrible thing? It makes me wonder if those who are against war at any cost have a genuine understanding of the sort of people our forces are up against. How do you reason with those prepared to cut off the purple stained fingers of voters in Afghanistan? How do you talk to men who behead foreign workers because they wanted to feed their families?

Apart from that, I don’t think the efforts of “peacemakers” are always welcomed by those they are trying to help. Live rolling news allowed millions of viewers to see a crude banner made from a painted sheet held up by Iraqis following the fall of Baghdad to US forces. The hotel they were standing in had been a temporary home to foreign peace activists who were hoping to put off air raids. Judging by what it said on the banner the Iraqis they were standing shoulder to shoulder with were pleased to see them go and the cavalry arrive. One of the words rhymed with “bankers”. In 2005 four men, including Norman Kember were kidnapped in Iraq. One of them was shot dead but the rest were eventually rescued by British special forces who had spent weeks looking for them. All those resources used up on peacemakers who should not have put themselves in danger.

I accept that in a democracy we have the right to express an opinion as long as it does not deliberately inspire hate and violence. If a veteran chooses to wear a white poppy I have even more respect for him because he has made his choice based on genuine experience. However those who wear red ones have the right to take pride in their achievements and if that means parading with brass bands then so be it. The guns carried in these parades are for the defence of our country as much as they are for war abroad and I take pride in the men and women who carry them. If it ever became necessary for me to pick up one of those guns myself I hope that I would be able acquit myself as well as they do.

What many of my contemporaries forget or have never learned, cushioned as they are from reality by the freedom made for them from war, is that the true soldier loves peace but it isn’t always an option.

http://www.poppy.org.uk
http://www.poppyscotland.org.uk/
http://www.whitepoppy.org.uk/
http://www.greatwar.co.uk/poems/john-mccrae-in-flanders-fields.htm/
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/ceriradford/3641401/Stop_the_crusades/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4844800.stm

A pumpkin free zone

2009-11-02T11:07:00.001Z

I’ve just finished re-reading “The Green Man” by Kingsley Amis in time for Halloween, a total coincidence but a great antidote to the US style “trick or treating” that seems to have taken over the country, largely encouraged by retailers as a way of getting in some more customers in the run up to Christmas.

Published in 1969, “The Green Man” describes the encounter by Maurice Allington, proprietor of the inn of the same name, with the ghost of Dr. Thomas Underhill. Allington discovers that he has a few things in common with the wicked 17th century parson and this connection is manipulated by Underhill. A womanising, alcoholic rogue, Allington spends as much of his time having affairs as he does running his inn. At the beginning of the book he is trying to set up a threesome with his wife and latest girlfriend and his alcohol intake is such that he cannot tell at first whether the apparition is actually down to booze. By the end we learn whether Allington has redeemed himself and conquered his fear of death. Set in a sweaty English summer at the end of the 1960’s this book will keep the winter away for a while. It is worth reading just for the way it evokes that time. One of my favourite characters is the appalling Reverend Tom Rodney Sonnenschein.

I have wondered whether Halloween evolved as a way to deal with a fear of death, the dark, the unknown. In Mexico, they celebrate the memory of those family members who have died on El Dia de los Muertos (The Day of the Dead), on the 1st and 2nd of November. Although skulls and bones are very much in evidence it isn’t about fear. Halloween seems to have developed differently in Protestant countries. I was taught about it at primary school but don’t remember it having the same impact that it does now. The impression I get is that it was something that was marked in the north of England and Scotland. It only gained popularity throughout the UK as a result of US television programmes and films.

I almost gave in and bought one of the large skulls in the window of a shop around the corner but am now glad that I didn’t as they are probably available at half the price now and do I really want it anyway? Apart from that I am not sure whether I want to give in at all to the plastic Halloween that takes over at least one supermarket aisle in September (alongside Christmas). Our experience of Halloween at our current address means that we now turn off the lights and put up a sign asking trick or treaters to stay away.

Years ago we answered the door to a tiny little girl, whose mother was some way off, and wondered what she could be thinking of to let her fragile child do this. I knew that there were a number of loud (if not dangerous) dogs in the street at the time, owned by nervous pensioners. Just having them bark at you could be frightening for an adult so I can’t imagine how a small child could have coped with it. On another occasion the door was answered to loud and demanding knock. A masked child had the wheel of his bike up against the front door and expected to be welcomed with open arms and, presumably, a bucket full of sweets. I can understand that, in the America depicted in “Desperate Housewives”, children are recognised by neighbours who are prepared for this kind of visitor and meet them with all the confectionary their little teeth can cope with. The problem is that I don’t live in Wisteria Avenue, there are hardly any families with children in the street and I wouldn’t recognise them if I tried.

The local Safer Communities Team has recognised that this tradition is not welcomed by everyone. They have been distributing cards to place on front doors with a polite message to put off unwanted callers. It is sad that well behaved children suffer the same discrimination as the nasty ones but I suspect the fact that we did not get any visitors this year is as much about the credit crunch as it is about good manners. I think that parents have been forced to concentrate on Christmas this year. This time around the pumpkins are for eating.

A pot addict confesses and appeals for help

2009-10-29T13:13:00.015Z

Well, it got your attention didn’t it? Actually, the type of pot I am obsessed with is the kind you look at, fill with pot pourri or soup. Not the kind you smoke.

I haven’t given in to my addiction to things ceramic for a few years but I have just parted with £25 to help out a talented potter called Kirsty Badham. Her kiln came over all chaotic recently and destroyed some pots-in-progress. In an effort to raise the funds to repair it, Kirsty has offered to make a bowl in return for each of the 100 pledges of £25 that she receives through this site:
http://www.pledgeforapot.co.uk/

Now, I am trying to be helpful by doing this but I also see this as an opportunity to buy a unique and lovely thing at a bargain price - I’m not stupid - at a time when things are rather tight (I have yet to break the news to The Attached One that I have taken this course). In fact, if money was no object I know that we would not be able to move for things ceramic. I’m not sure how or when this need to own pots developed, it may have started at the British Museum where I fell in love with ancient pieces such as those made by the Beaker People. I expect Freud and Jung would see connections with wombs or similar but that’s all too complicated for me. I just like pots.

The last investment of this kind was a week’s wages spent on a bowl by Julia Jefferson. I needed a salad bowl and it occurred to me that I could eat from something handmade and beautiful rather than mass produced. It means a lot of careful hand washing but I still love it. When we brought it home I couldn’t stop looking at it and it seems to have been made for blackberries.

When I actually got the chance to make pots myself things just got worse. I don’t want to mislead you, don’t imagine that I am capable of slapping a lump of clay onto a potter’s wheel and turning it into something resembling a bowl. My efforts were restricted to pieces built from slabs or formed in plaster moulds, incorporating leaves and fabric dipped into slip (liquid clay). As far as I was concerned it was choosing the glaze that was the fun part.

Once I left college (and free access to a kiln, clay, glazes and knowledge) I had to buy my pots from other people, often potters who had stalls at festivals and fairs. I went through an unfortunate phase when I bought every chipped and manky piece of 1930’s crockery that I could find for 50p at car boot sales. Most of these are now living in boxes under my work room table. No Clarice Cliff unfortunately.

Some unusual items have made it onto the walls and into a display cabinet. I dream of eating from plates made by Sean Miller, an urban potter based in my area and one day that will happen. Until then I drool as I sit in front of the screen, perusing craftsmen potter sites. It has been a while so I think I deserve one of Kirsty’s bowls. Can’t wait to see it…

A

The Griffin is given wings and claws

2009-10-25T12:41:00.007Z

You are probably wondering what a couple of stone beads have to do with Nick Griffin, leader of the British National Party.

These beads may be thousands of years old. They turn up in the sands of the Sahara and are sold to foreign collectors by the hardy people who live there. A very long time ago someone used very primitive tools to drill holes through two attractive pieces of stone and polish their surfaces. One is probably a piece of agate with some tiny quartz crystals that, even now, sparkle in the light, the other may be a piece of petrified wood. I love them because they are tiny and affordable pieces of ancient history and because they are a connection with my most distant ancestors - Africans.

One of the few intelligent and serious comments made by a member of the studio audience on the BBC’s “Question Time” was in response to the BNP leader’s suggestion that white English people are now aborigines in their own country. She pointed out that, as we are all descended from the first humans who came from Africa, we are all members of minorities now.

I did not plan to watch it. I haven’t in years and I don’t need to see Nick Griffin in person to know that I don’t agree with his views. In the end I watched it online because I had heard so many comments about the programme that I felt I had to see it for myself. Unfortunately my love for the BBC has now cooled a little because what was considered a smart attempt to undermine the BNP‘s growing influence has probably backfired.

Those involved in the decision to invite Griffin to take part in a debate alongside other politicians are clearly out of touch with the sort of people inclined to vote for a party generally regarded as racist and beyond the pale. They made the mistake of treating him differently to any other politician. There was an obvious and open lack of respect from the very beginning. I understand that the audience was carefully selected - I am not sure what criteria were involved in this selection but the impression I was left with was that they chose anyone prepared to boo and shout. The atmosphere was such that I expected to see girls with trays of ice cream (or rotten eggs and tomatoes) wandering up and down the aisles.

Jack Straw has been criticised for his performance on the night. It is easy to forget that, while we often see images of politicians seconds apart on our TV screens, in reality they don’t always meet face to face. It may have been one of the few times that they had been in each other’s presence and Straw was clearly already very angry. Having Griffin raise the fact that his father was a conscientious objector imprisoned during WW2 couldn‘t have helped. It must have taken some guts to do what his father did but Griffin’s comment was a crafty and subliminal message to anyone watching who has sympathy with his views. They won’t remember the fact what his dad did had little or nothing to do with today‘s politics. All they will take in is that, in their opinion, Straw is not made of the right stuff unlike Griffin whose daddy was in the RAF during the war.

The fact is that Nick Griffin came across as a reasonable, well mannered, clearly spoken individual - if you ignore what he was actually saying - compared to the programme’s presenter, most of the panel and the studio audience. What I saw was a gathering of arrogant liberals (with the exception of Bonnie Greer, who I felt was respectful to him) having a night out at the circus, the sort of circus where lions eat people. Griffin has had a lot of practice saying all the things he said on the night. He has said them a hundred times before to television cameras. He would have had a much harder time if he had been asked for his policies on the environment, Afghanistan, Iraq, the postal strike.

More importantly, the people who have some sympathy for his views on immigration and its impact on the availability of resources (as pointed out by Baroness Warsi this, not race, is the issue) will have seen someone they feel represents their views being howled down. It would be an enormous mistake to assume that the average BNP type is still a skin head with a swastika tattooed onto his forehead. It is unlikely that those who make “Question Time” have experienced life in a tower block, waiting years for a transfer to more suitable housing, or been in the queue at the post office watching someone who can’t speak English collect substantial benefits as they wait to get their own meagre pension. I suspect they pay occasional visits to this alternative reality. They don’t have to live there. They can afford to be open minded.

To me the worst thing of all about that broadcast was the complaint made by a woman in the audience at Jack Straw’s repeated use of the term “Afro-Caribbean”. It seems that he should have said “African-Caribbean”. Surely that night of all nights was an occasion for what is a very tiny failure in protocol to be overlooked. A group of people who should have been united against racists have shown themselves to be divided by semantics. I suspect that this woman, who struck me as someone I would like to know in spite of what she said, would regard me with some suspicion for stating my love of things African. Perhaps she would find me patronising. Sometimes you just can’t win but the taste in my mouth is all the more unpleasant for a realisation that the BNP have gained more than they have lost because of the BBC’s lack of judgement.

This Griffin now has wings and claws. The dangerous fantasy of a country run by racists may now become reality. Thanks Auntie Beeb…

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00nft24#synopsis

Not "The X Factor" - an urgent appeal for Akmal Shaikh

2009-10-22T16:00:00.003+01:00

The popularity of talent shows such as “The X Factor” has shown just how many people have the urge to strut their stuff in public and believe that they have what it takes to get to the top. A very small handful of those who expose themselves to potential ridicule in this way actually do make it. As for the rest, their friends and family may regard their desire to become celebrities as a touch of madness.

Akmal Shaikh is not the obvious candidate for a career in the pop industry. Fifty-three years old and father to five children he comes from north London and is a British national. He has shown the signs of serious mental illness for years and it is likely that he is suffering from Bipolar Disorder which used to be known as Manic Depression. This condition can lead the sufferer to behave in ways that the average person would regard as risky or unacceptable. They can run up large credit card debts, shoplift and display all kinds of antisocial behaviour. They often end up in the criminal justice system before their condition is identified. In Akmal’s case it meant that he was living in Poland at the mercy of friends who were in fact members of a criminal gang. They persuaded him that they had contacts in the music industry and that he had a real chance of making it. It would involve his travelling to Kyrgyzstan and then China. Considering his state of mind it is not surprising that he accepted this as the truth and also agreed to take some luggage with him. He trusted them.

Upon the discovery of four kilos of heroin in this luggage Akmal was charged with drug smuggling. He was found guilty and sentenced to death. Now that he has lost all his appeals there is no hope for him other than the pressure that can be placed on the Chinese authorities by people like you and me.

Even if you have never done anything like this before please think about doing it now. All you have to do is add your name and email address to the form but it would be more effective if you thought up your own polite message (even if you don’t feel like being polite - don‘t make things worse by expressing too frank an opinion).

Akmal Shaikh has probably been quite a challenging dad to love but that is because he is a very sick man who needs help. He is not a criminal. His case has the support of Stephen Fry, Amnesty International and Reprieve. Please help Akmal’s family bring him back home to north London.

http://www.amnesty.org.uk/actions_details.asp?ActionID=638%20 http://www.amnesty.org.uk/news_details.asp?NewsID=18460
http://www.reprieve.org.uk/helpakmal
http://www.reprieve.org.uk/stephenfryappeal

Sweet charity

2009-10-21T13:03:00.006+01:00

Last week I dropped off a fat brown envelope at a discreet industrial unit in west London. On the way in I passed a woman who gave me a conspiratorial smile. We had a common cause. We were delivering our little woolly hats.

Since 2003 Innocent, the company that creates fruit and vegetable products, has encouraged those in the UK who knit and crochet to make the small hats that are put on to their smoothie bottles throughout November. Every bottle with a hat that is sold generates a donation for Age Concern/Help the Aged. In 2008, £253,384 was raised as a result of the 506,738 hats that were sent in. Some of those little hats are works of art (subscribers to the Innocent online newsletter get to vote on the “Hat of the Week”) and showcase the creativity and skill of contributors to this cause. And it is addictive. Some have made hundreds and even thousands. Last year I made 40 but this year, in spite of my best intentions, I only managed 27.

I delivered them in person as the possibility of a postal strike meant that they might not have reached Innocent before the 2009 deadline and knew that I was in the right place when I saw the delivery vans covered in plastic turf and purple daisies. I walked out in a bit of a daze as the lovely people at the reception desk, having startled me by offering me a smoothie, filled a little paper bag with five of them and gave them to me. No wonder that woman had been smiling. I was smiling to myself on the way home. And trying to lick strawberry smoothie off the corners of my mouth. If only there were more companies like Innocent, with their unorthodox but effective approach to fundraising.

Crafters are a generous lot. They use up their stashes of yarn, fabric and beads to make the lives of others a little easier and give up hours of their time to do it. For some it is a chance to show off their skills but I cannot be too cynical about this. They don’t have to do it but they still do. Search the internet for knitting and crochet patterns and the word “charity” comes up fairly quickly. Ravelry, the yarn crafts community website, hosts a number of groups that create items for donation. One member is collecting easily laundered scarves to pass on as Christmas presents to homeless women. Others are asking for contributions of yarn to make blankets for animal shelters or offering their free patterns as ways of raising money. Feed the Children has withdrawn their free knitting pattern as they have been sent so many sweaters that they can’t cope with any more for the moment.

Many of us are moved by the loss of a loved one to a preventable illness or risk to raise money for the charity that will stop it happening to anyone else. Sometimes we just want to be kind. Some of the most popular “makes” are chemo caps, made for those who have lost their hair as a result of chemotherapy. Another, sadder cause is the provision of tiny clothes in which to bury the stillborn. There was a time when these babies were not spoken of and an effort made to forget that they had ever existed. Today we know that it is better to acknowledge these events and the crafters who make these clothes help the bereaved in the most practical way.

Dog blankets, prayer shawls, scarves for women in refuges. There is a knitting need out there to suit everyone. At some point I hope to make some teddy bears for children in eastern Europe, Africa and Asia as well as fundraisers for SSAFA and Combat Stress. And little woolly hats of course.

http://www.innocentdrinks.co.uk/thebigknit/

http://www.ravelry.com/

http://www.teddiesfortragedies.org.uk/

http://www.christianhope.org.uk/stitches/index.html

http://www.headhuggers.org/

http://www.cuddles-uk.org/

http://www.bonniebabies.co.uk/

http://www.knitting4charity.org/

http://www.missionstoseafarers.org/

http://www.missionstoseafarers.org/pdfs/knitting%20patterns.pdf

Somewhere else

2009-09-21T13:53:00.008+01:00

When I was a small girl I used to spend Saturdays wandering around London with my father. One of our regular haunts was the Arts Council shop which I seem to remember was in Saville Row. The counter near the front of the shop had a display of postcards in front of it which was at my eyelevel and I remember being entranced by a picture that seemed as real as a photograph. I realised that it couldn’t be a photograph as the people in it were wearing strange old fashioned clothes but even at that age (about five) I knew that my drawings would never be that good. The postcard that I went home with showed William Holman Hunt‘s “The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple” and I still have it, along with many more showing the work of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

I suspect it was the fact that there were grown up ladies dressed as princesses in their paintings without anyone finding it silly that made them interesting as well but even at that age it was impossible to ignore the skill of these artists. The sunlight of Victorian England was trapped in their canvases and the extraordinary jewel like detail of every flower and strand of hair was a shock to my senses. For a child I had spent an unusually large amount of time in front of well known canvases and although I liked some of them I can’t remember feeling the same way about what I had seen before then.

Whatever the reason for my interest the Pre-Raphaelites still have a hold on me and when I saw that Birmingham Art Gallery and Museum were displaying the Burne Jones “Perseus” series (which belongs to Stuttgart’s art gallery) I suggested (without any hope of his agreeing) that Birmingham might be an interesting place to visit. Bearing in mind that he was facing four hours of driving I was a bit surprised when he said “yes”. The car doesn’t get used for much more than the commute to work a few miles away and shopping so this was a real expedition. We checked out parking in Birmingham’s city centre and he set up the sat nav.

I had intended to get up early but managed to oversleep so we set off later than planned. We live in an area where the suburbs start to break up into industrial sites and scrub so it wasn’t long before we were into open farmland. I don’t think the landscape could be described as particularly dramatic but on the way there and back I couldn’t help thinking how lucky I am to live here. Rolling hills, hedgerows and huge old trees. Cows, sheep and the occasional bird of prey, chilling out on a fence post and watching the traffic.

A visit to Birmingham was an opportunity to see my favourite source of quilt making supplies “in the flesh”. The Cotton Patch even provides a few parking spaces. Crammed very neatly into this small shop are fabrics from all over the world, magazines and books, and everything you could possibly need to make the perfect quilt. I have always wanted to buy one of the many Japanese magazines they have available so, head still buzzing from the motorway, I tried to look through them but then just caved in and bought the first one I had seen. I could have bankrupted myself in minutes there so I stuck to the plan and one magazine was my limit.

The sat nav decided to take us through Moseley via Shirley Green which has a lovely red brick Baptist church. We decided that Hall Green was a lot like Edgware and Moseley was definitely like Southall, even down to the traffic. The architecture is largely Victorian red brick and it occurred to me, as it has in the past, that this sort of thing survives when no one can afford to pull it down and rebuild. Lovely small intimate buildings from the late 19th and early 20th century with the occasional 1930’s bit of Art Deco, battered but still in use.

At last we managed to get into the city centre and after a couple of wrong turns we found the chosen car park. It was a short walk to the gallery past some really beautiful and recently cleaned buildings. That part of the city is pedestrianised and we walked through a mall into a large piazza like area with curved steps where people were sitting in the sunshine. Within minutes we were in front of the strange dramatic grey green canvases and drawings produced by Burne Jones in the 1880’s and 1890’s, displayed against rich teal walls. We are so familiar with Pre-Raphaelite art from reproductions in books but there is nothing quite like the real thing. For one thing the images in glossy coffee table books are sometimes larger than the actual painting. Like the teeny weeny “Death of Chatterton” by Henry Wallis. We mused about “Beata Beatrix” and “Proserpine”, made knowing “we used to be art students” type comments about their techniques and then wandered off to see some of the rest of this surprising gallery. There followed the obligatory visit to the shop to buy some postcards and then it was back into the sunshine for something to drink and, alas, back into the car for the long drive.

Home, backs aching and heads spinning, it was hard to get used to the fact that we had been a long way off and back again in the same day. We ought to do it more often, other people would, but I wonder how many would travel that far because of a few old paintings. Still mad for the Pre-Raphaelites after all these years. And still buying postcards.
http://www.bmag.org.uk/

http://www.cottonpatch.co.uk/

http://www.preraphaelites.org

An allotment show in suburbia

2009-09-08T11:11:00.013+01:00

On Saturday I went along to the local allotments and gardens association autumn show and dropped off the albums of photographs that I had taken of earlier events. I felt that these should be archived as the membership of the association gets smaller and gardens in the area disappear under concrete. There were many of the same old faces, the same reliable people who have kept things going through good times and bad. A stall selling local honey, another selling bulbs and plants, and work by a local artist.

There is something about the very ordinary surroundings of the church hall that makes the flowers and vegetables on display look even more extraordinary. Spiky orbs of orange and red chrysanthemums against the long maroon curtains, pale wavy discs of squash against the green baize of the exhibition tables. I expect someone does tidy up before it all gets going but no one seems to mind the stacks of plastic chairs and the odd mix of screens. The produce is what counts.

Admission is free to these shows that take place in the spring, summer and autumn but it is taken as read that you buy a raffle ticket when you go in. Prizes include the usual bottles but we won a walnut tree last time. It will be a decade before we get any walnuts out of it but we were delighted.

Some might feel that our association is in something of a time warp but I find the sameness and regularity of these events reassuring. It is low tech and quiet, relying on face to face, human contact and legwork. There is no website or email address. I suspect that these modern facilities would increase the membership but it would trade a special, indefinable quality for convenience. When I walk into that church hall I know that it probably looked very much the same in 1956, and in 1978. All that has changed is the fashion and hair that has either fallen out or turned grey.

When the association was founded almost eighty years ago the area that I live in was a shiny new suburb, built alongside main roads, a few Victorian buildings and a railway line. Property speculators encouraged the founding of garden associations and front garden competitions because the bare patches in front of the new houses did nothing to enhance the look of the place. By encouraging householders to turn the muddy plots of land around their homes into gardens they knew that they would add value to their development without having to spend any more on it themselves.

Within twenty years of its being founded the gaps had been filled in by Tudorbethan and Art Deco semis and the gardens were being pressed into service to help those on the Home Front. They became a vital resource and garden associations came into their own. Once the Anderson shelter had been built the space around it was used to fill the gaps that rationing had left. Suburbanites who would never have been interested in growing potatoes suddenly wanted the advice of those who had been growing them for years. The allotment society was the best place to ask and many more clubs of this kind were founded.

I find it sad that, at a time when the UK is undergoing such a positive change in attitudes to the environment, these associations are disappearing because no one is prepared to run them. Most of those running the one we belong to are retired or very elderly and are actively seeking new organisers. I play a small part by pushing leaflets through doors three times a year and putting a poster in the window but I can’t help thinking that many people pay lip service to the environmental movement but can’t be bothered to part with the £2 annual membership fee or walk two streets to a church hall where these events take place. These associations usually offer a discount to their members which can mean quite a saving to someone on a tight budget. They are a great example of a local, green, community resource and in spite of a renewed interest in growing vegetables they are literally dying off.

There will be a time, not that far away in the future, when we will have to start growing our own food just as they do in Cuba, where every spare foot of land is being put to use. When that time comes we will need all the good advice of the members of such associations to make every seed and drop of water count. Let’s hope that they are still there to help us out.

http://www.britishpathe.com/record.php?id=82416

　

Forbidden fruit

2009-09-07T11:20:00.005+01:00

The fig tree that belongs to my neighbour is heavy with fruit. I have a fool with a fondness for bonfires to thank for this. Two years ago, whilst in the process of taking in hand the neighbouring rundown property, he began burning bits and pieces one morning and kept this up for five hours. I was a bit concerned that he might set fire to our shed and then, quite possibly, our home. Before I went out I spoke to him just to make sure that he was aware of my concerns, just in time as it turned out. He was about to pull apart the fence panel that we had propped up to cover the gap in the fence (that our neighbour was in fact responsible for) and burn that too.

Most of the stuff on the pyre came from the garden that he had been “tidying up” and I mentioned that as much as I loved their cherry tree I was certain that it was responsible for the cracks in our walls as it was so close to our house. Half of it was leaning over the fence and some of the branches almost touched the walls. He claimed that the roots of a cherry tree never spread that far but the cracks in the concrete on our side of the fence told another story. When I pointed out the sticky cankers all over its trunk he said that it would need some looking after but I was glad to see that within a few days that he had looked after it to the point of cutting it down.

I do miss the cherry blossom and the sherbet scent in the spring. The cherries were nothing special but still edible. Some years ago I got annoyed that the starlings were the only ones getting the benefit of them and actually asked if I could have them. I had found a recipe for pickled cherries and was determined to use them for it. For several weeks I kept running outside to scare off the birds and finally picked as many as I could reach. Then I spent a sticky, juicy hour removing the stones. I didn’t have the right kind of pan for the purpose and used a Le Creuset casserole pan but I did have the right kind of preserving jars.

By the time I got around to cooking them up it was around 11.30 at night. I heated up the vinegar with the brown sugar and brought it to the boil. Unfortunately cast iron retains heat too well to allow it to cool down quickly when needed so the bloody thing boiled over and the boiling hot sugary mess ran all over the hob top. My eyes watered as the kitchen was suddenly filled with acrid fumes. There was just enough left to put the cherries into and I spent some moments holding my breath while handling a very hot glass jar into which I was pouring an equally hot cherry/vinegar/sugar mixture. It didn’t explode so I got something right. The lid went on easily and tightened perfectly as the vacuum was formed. By now it was 1am, the back door was open and the kitchen looked like the site of a dangerous experiment.

The next morning I proudly pointed to my jar full of pickled cherries. “They look like sheep’s eyes” he said and went to work. That jar went onto a high shelf and was eventually binned after living there for quite a few years.

I did make blackberry jam on one occasion and we were both surprised at how purple it was, I’ve always meant to make more. The strange thing is that there don’t seem to have been that many this year in our garden. I try to pick as many as I can because if I don’t the rats and the birds will get them and spread them around the place. As a consequence there are brambles and cherry trees everywhere.

I don’t know if the rest of the country has been affected in the same way but in west London we have been blessed with an abundance of free fruit. There has been enough of the right weather at the right time to leave the trees along the A40 quite literally dripping with fruit in shades of gold and red. I’m not sure what these trees are, damsons probably, but unfortunately their proximity to a road with high pollution levels means that I can never take advantage of that harvest (this doesn’t stop one woman I’ve seen picking and eating berries as she walks along even though I’ve mentioned the risks to her). The pavements alongside it are sticky with rotting pulp and I have to watch my step because their slippery skins and small hard stones can send you skidding, especially after it rains.

One morning I found myself peering out of the window at one of the self sown trees at the wilder (OK, scruffier) end of the garden. At first I wondered why its leaves were turning so early in the year. Then I realised that these autumnal dabs of gold were in fact the same kind of fruit that I had seen at the roadside. I had never seen fruit on it before. Even the ornamental plum, Prunus cerasifera nigra, is strutting its stuff in the fruit department.

Unfortunately there is only one fig tree but as I said I have bonfire man to thank for the abundance of them that now hang on my side of the fence. Once he had hacked down the cherry tree he managed to prune the fig in such way as to leave all the fruit on my side. Thanks to the way the shed and the fence are arranged I can pick all those figs the moment they have ripened. I consider it payment for five smoky hours and summers spent with the windows closed because my neighbour liked his Beethoven loud.

　
　
　

Gone

2009-08-27T13:26:00.004+01:00

Recently I listened to a BBC Radio 4 feature about the increasing number of people in the UK who are found to have died without it being noticed. Their bodies have lain for years in council flats with post, including demands for payment of bills for utilities and letters announcing the termination of their supply, building up against their doors. The pension or benefit that is automatically transferred into their bank accounts pays for the rent that is automatically drawn by direct debit. The silent financial machinery that we have come to take for granted keeps their demise a secret.

The neighbours who said little more than “Hello” in all the time they lived next to them assume that they have moved away or are reclusive and don’t want to be bothered. As this feeling is often mutual the situation continues until a gas meter has to be replaced or essential maintenance has to take place. Someone breaks in and discovers the skeletal remains of someone who once had children, siblings and friends. No one has noticed the space in their midst.

At that point the good people who carried on with their lives unaware of the corpse next door develop a conscience and wonder if they should have been better neighbours. They may even take measures to make sure that the same thing doesn’t happen to them by seeing their family members more often.

Around the world others are disappearing for different and more sinister reasons. In the UK we would expect our police force to investigate a disappearance not instigate it. I can’t imagine what it must be like to live in a place where I had to fear them. The term "to be disappeared" came to be used in relation to those who were taken into custody by security forces in countries such as Argentina where it is thought that between 1976 and 1983 as many as 30,000 people “disappeared”. Although this type of activity is usually associated with dictators and countries with a poor democratic record “the war against terror“ has led to some strange alliances between the UK, the US and countries such as Pakistan, where democracy is in a fragile state.

Masood Janjura and Faisal Faraz were taken into custody on a bus there on the 30th July 2005. They were seen in detention but the authorities deny that they have them in custody. Masood’s wife, Amina, is leading protests in Pakistan demanding that the authorities release such detainees or at least confirm that they are alive. Please watch the “Dateline” video on this link. It is very moving and reminds me how difficult it would be for me to cope if my other half didn’t come home one day. My thoughts are with Amina and her husband who looks the sort of man I would be proud to know. If you feel the same way please take a look at the suggested action on the link.
http://www.amnesty.org.uk/actions_details.asp?ActionID=524

“When people lose their sons and daughter they do everything in their power to find their children.” These are the words of a refugee from Grozny whose son, 29 year old Ibragim Gazdiev, was kidnapped in broad daylight by armed men of Russian appearance in the republic of Ingushetia. Ibragim’s dad probably thought they would be safer there but he is now awaiting news of his son who he is well aware may be enduring torture or who may even be dead. Gazdiev Muhmed Yaponzovich wants to send a wave across the world to let the authorities know that what they are doing is being scrutinised and that light is being cast on their dark activities. He hopes that this will bring his son back to him. Be part of that wave and take a look at the link.
http://www.amnesty.org.uk/actions_details.asp?ActionID=522

Sanjiv Kumar Karna was on a picnic with ten friends in southern Nepal when they were arrested on the 10th October 2003. They were beaten and interrogated and, although six of the group were released, it is not known what happened to Sanjiv and four others. In the past Sanjiv had an opinion and expressed it, he became involved in politics as a student just as many young people do when they attend university or college in the UK. Then, just as many of us do, he stepped away from all that and got on with his life. Unfortunately as far as the Nepalese security forces are concerned once an activist, always an activist. His family have been told that he was killed during “police action” but this has been denied by the police. There is a chance that his body lies with those of his missing friends in Janakpur but even though funds to pay for the cost of exhumation are available and the police have a duty to investigate the claims nothing has been done. Another father, Jai Kishor Labh, waits for news of a son.
http://www.amnesty.org.uk/actions_details.asp?ActionID=349

The thing that strikes me about these missing people is that they are just like us and would not look out of place in my neighbourhood. They are the people we live next to and rarely speak to. They support Fulham and scratch their bums, they don’t like cheese and they will miss “Big Brother”. They are ordinary. They are us. That is why it matters that they have “disappeared”. It is important to notice and speak out for them because things have happened recently in the name of the UK that suggest that next time it really could be you.
　
　
This is dedicated to Patrick, a fellow member of an Amnesty International local group, who died at home following an epileptic fit. He was not found for several days but at his funeral it was clear that he had many friends who loved him and that he had been an active campaigner for human rights and those with disabilities in spite of being disabled himself. I am certain that Patrick would have had a blog if the internet had been available to him at the time. It would have been a more interesting blog than mine.

It's not the job, it's the people...

2009-08-25T14:09:00.001+01:00

I’ve had a part-time cleaning job for two years and can still remember the sense of disbelief that it was in the bag. I thought it would be more difficult. Two and a half years later I have to stop myself snarling “I resign!” down the line to my boss. It isn’t her fault. The problem is the series of lazy idiots that I have been obliged to work with. Or rather, whose work I have had to do. We are told that any job like mine is being chased because the credit crunch has meant that we are all looking for extra income. That should mean that the people doing them are worried about keeping them and work twice as hard. Don‘t you believe it.

My colleague was employed by the company I work for to clean an office in the building where I deal with the communal areas. As soon as she arrived she informed me that she had booked a holiday and would therefore be unavailable for over a week. Fair enough, the holiday was booked before the job turned up. Following this holiday, her absences (often unannounced) became frequent and a nuisance. She finally told me what the problem was and it did seem that a close family member was in a very fragile physical condition. What I couldn’t understand was why she couldn’t explain the problem to our boss who is very understanding and quite capable of seeing things from her perspective. It was as if she was setting herself up to be fired.

When she did let us know that she wouldn’t be there it was at really short notice. I kept getting phone calls five minutes before leaving for work telling me that I would have to provide cover. This was a complete pain because, at the time, I was sharing my job with a person who was also in the habit of taking days off without notice. Apart from that she was absolutely unwilling to work on the premises the other person was responsible for as it meant that the people who worked there could tell if she was cutting corners. So I always had to do it.

This meant that my other colleague was earning twice the pay for providing cover when somehow she managed to finish both her work and mine within the same amount of time it would normally have taken her just to do her own work. In fact she got quicker and quicker at it. Cleaning work like this is usually unsupervised, you have to rely on the honesty of the cleaner and the astuteness of the people using the facilities being cleaned. In the past things had to get really bad before a complaint was made. The rising cost of cleaning and maintenance means that people now expect to get what they pay for. These days if the toilets haven’t been cleaned they say so. And frankly, why shouldn’t they?

The skiver was finally sent on her way after Christmas and I was under the impression that the drama queen who occasionally turned up to clean the office would soon be sent the same way. I was a little surprised to find that, following the termination of her office cleaning contract, she was now to be cleaning the communal areas with me. Especially since the words “I don’t think much of her - I’m going to fire her” had crossed my employer’s lips. A year after the day she first began turning up when she felt like it she is still phoning the office at the last possible moment to say that she won’t be in. At the last minute I am expected to keep things going.

She is the third person to have shared the job with me who has behaved in this way. They have in common the fact that they have been dependent on state benefits for years, in fact the latest one was receiving benefit but neglected to tell our company that or the benefits agency that she had a part-time job. She was good enough to explain to me that I might be getting a visit from the said agency as she had been able to read my name on the paperwork that was on the desk of the person investigating her. It seems that my boss had been asked to provide details of someone who could identify my colleague.

Two of the people I have worked with have raised their children on benefit and have only taken jobs because they were forced to. The third came to the UK as a child refugee in need of medical attention and was brought up by a family member who was already living here. She might as well have been brought up in care as she still speaks broken English in spite of living here for more than a decade and while working with me was only interested in finding out what benefits she could claim now that she was over 18. She was under pressure from a family she barely remembered to get them entry to the UK and a place to live. They seemed to be under the impression that, in a country as wealthy as ours, all it takes is a phone call.

I am left wondering if we have denied a considerable proportion of our population the capacity to think for themselves by making sure they didn’t starve. There was a time when people were embarrassed to claim benefit, it was for emergencies only and not a long term situation. I realise that we are now in a situation where many people have absolutely no choice but to claim but my exposure to three people with a strong sense of entitlement to tax payers’ money makes me think that we have screwed up quite badly somewhere. I think it is absolutely right to make sure that children are fed, clothed and educated but I can’t help feeling that there should be more awareness of where the money comes from on the part of those receiving it. I wonder how many in receipt of benefit understand the mechanism that acquires and provides that money. I don’t expect them to grovel in gratitude for it. What I want is that we end up with fewer people who are good at making excuses and milking the system. I would rather that they used that ability to support themselves.

Once people with that attitude are in the workforce they seem to transfer that sense of entitlement to whatever it is they are doing. They’ve been so well looked after that they seem surprised that they are expected to turn up and actually work. And frankly, why should they?

Nasty boys

2009-08-13T08:47:00.011+01:00

The story of “Baby P”, the child who died following sustained torture and abuse at the hands of the people who were supposed to love and care for him most, has re-entered the news headlines following the disclosure of their identities. A short life, filled with agony, in the company of two violent men and a selfish woman. I doubt that anyone who has heard about the torturing to death of angelic little Peter Connelly can have felt anything but anger and sadness about it. The official disclosure of the names of those responsible for the dreadful cruelty that he endured have not lessened these emotions but they have given us some insight into how the situation unfolded. It is clear that the events that led to it had their roots in abuse and neglect that took place decades ago.

The aspect of this story that lingers in my mind is the phenomenon of violent young men, in this case a pair of brothers, whose anger and aggression to those around them seems to have been left to fester and evolve into the kind of behaviour that I do not recall encountering years ago. There was a time when you would almost expect it of people brought up in the way that Steven Barker and his sibling Jason Evans were. However I have begun to see it all around me and it isn‘t restricted to boys from “sink” estates. Nice boys do it too.

A few years ago I was in a superstore and an incident that most of the other people there would have missed made me look again at a woman who was shopping with two lanky teenage boys who I presume were her sons. Nothing unusual about that on a Saturday. What made them stand out was that one of these boys had moved in a way that had made it seem as though he was about to strike her to the extent that she flinched. And then carried on as though nothing had happened. The meanness of the gesture struck me, particularly as he was grinning. I was left with the impression that he had done this many times before and was delighted that he had managed to make her jump. Years later I still regret that I did not ask her if I could help because I suspect that what I saw in those few seconds in a public place may have been the tip of the iceberg. There may have been a very good explanation for it, he may have had behavioural difficulties or even Tourette Syndrome which means that the sufferer cannot always control their actions, but my instinct was that this was a display of power. I wondered where Dad was and whether he would have allowed this to happen. Perhaps they had picked it up from Dad.

The aggressive “pretend I’m going to hit you” gesture is something that I have seen a number of times in TV footage of binge drinkers, where police are dealing with troublesome crowds outside bars. Women in these situations seem to accept these actions as part of a night out. I can remember when it would have led to the person behaving in this way being punished by her partner or other males because it was no way to treat a woman. Why do women think that being shown a lack of respect is funny? It’s nothing to giggle about. Are they so desperate to keep that relationship that mock violence is to be tolerated?

More recently I was asked to intervene and protect a young woman who approached me in Ealing Broadway one evening. She had crossed the road to speak to me and a man who was standing nearby because she had been on the receiving end of loud and angry abuse from two young men at a bus stop. I had noticed shouting and that the object of this very negative attention had been a woman but even I was shocked at how terrified she was. It seems that she had found a mobile phone on the ground and had not been convinced when one of these men had told her it was his so she had handed it in to the police station nearby. The time spent waiting to prove his ownership had not improved his mood and he had been taking it out on her verbally ever since. She was clearly afraid that the abuse would become physical as she appeared to know these brothers by reputation.

We told them to shut up and that she had done the responsible thing and eventually they backed off. It wasn’t that difficult. In fact they seemed quite keen to explain their side of the story, proving only that she was in the right. The small amount of moral authority that we exercised that night was enough to put them in their place. Two girls who stood on the sidelines but appeared to be with them looked on silently but seemed troubled. I wondered if they would have to act as shock absorbers for the rest of the evening, having witnessed the diminishing of the power of their men folk. Afterwards I wished that I had asked them if their male companions always spoke to women like that, if they thought that they would eventually treat the mothers of their children in the same way.

I wonder if, had someone been firm with Barker and Owen much earlier in their lives when they threw their weight around, they would have been denied the permission they appear to have been granted to torture to death a 17 month old child. If, in the weeks before they tried to force their elderly grandmother to change her will in their favour by shutting her into a wardrobe, they had been seriously scared by her neighbours into leaving her alone and would therefore have been directed away from the path they took. This isn’t just about punishing bad behaviour, it’s about the attitude of young people to those they are in relationships with. It’s about providing them with a template for their future.

Since that moment in the supermarket I have wondered how many middle class women endure what I saw everyday out of the sight of their neighbours and are too ashamed to ask for support in handling their boys. It could be argued that they are in a far more difficult position than a woman in a violent relationship with a sexual partner as they are supposed to be in a nurturing role. It is possible to walk away from a husband/boyfriend but how can you walk out on your child? Or ask them to leave?

Tracey Connelly traded responsibility for her son for a relationship with a violent sadistic man and his equally nasty brother. Perhaps she felt that this was as good as it was going to get. I suspect she isn’t the only woman who has this attitude. Unfortunately her little boy didn’t have a say in the matter.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/nov/11/baby-p-death
Timeline: The short life of Baby P

www.guardian.co.uk/world/deadlineusa/2009/mar/16/rihanna-usa
Survey: Half of Boston teens blame Rihanna for Chris Brown beating

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/jun/27/parental-abuse-domestic-violence?showallcomments=true
The day my daughter hit me

www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/womanshour/2003_07_tue_01.shtml
Woman’s Hour: Hitting home

www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/womanshour/2002_13_tue_03.shtml
Woman’s Hour: Fighting boys

www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/womanshour/2004_10_thu_01.shtml
Woman’s Hour: Explaining sexual violence to boys

A fresh coat of paint

2009-08-05T12:04:00.007+01:00

The blog has been quiet for a while and that is because I have begun redecorating. In the past this has usually been as stressful as actually moving into a different house, probably because I am made uncomfortably aware of just how much stuff I own. The fact that I have to go to the effort of emptying most of the contents of one room into another that is already full thanks very much is bad enough (twenty-six houseplants in one room). I then have to live with the interesting smells, debris and unexpected results that go with the process. On the plus side it does make me more inclined to part with at least a small proportion of the clutter I regarded as too precious to ditch the last time. What a difference seven years makes.

I have learned to treat redecorating as an activity that requires almost military planning (proper preparation and planning prevents poor performance and all that).
1. Clear room.
2. Cover floor and anything not to be painted
3. Fill and sand down where necessary.
4. Wash walls and wood work.
5. Paint ceiling. Twice.
6. Paint walls. Twice.
7. Paint woodwork. Twice if absolutely necessary and completely unavoidable.

Sounds good but in practice it takes longer to move things out than I thought it would and I keep rediscovering magazines and waste time looking at them. In the past I’ve remembered to save up newspapers weeks ahead but somehow I ended up having to look for them and there is always one little bit left uncovered (that is unavoidably on show) that received a fine spray of emulsion when the ceiling was painted. Of course you don’t know this until you put everything back in place.

The Attached One got lots of brownie points for discovering sugar soap in liquid form as something I wasn’t looking forward to was getting the powdered stuff to dissolve. I suspect I ought to wash and rinse one wall at a time rather than work my way around the whole room and then begin rinsing. I must lead a charmed life as, thus far, I have not managed to soak any plug sockets and electrocute myself. I sometimes wonder what would actually happen if I didn’t rinse after using sugar soap, would the walls start to dissolve? Just how dangerous is this stuff? How quickly should I wipe those drips off my arms?

When it came to the actual painting we thought we might save time and effort by acquiring a Dulux Paint Pod, a product that has been heavily promoted on TV. As we are planning to redecorate the whole house we felt it would be a worthwhile investment, even though it was going to restrict us to quite a limited and “safe” range of colours because it requires special packs of paint. Unfortunately it has turned out to be an expensive disappointment.

It comes with a very dinky brush designed for “cutting in” the corners but as the Paint Pod roller can’t go into corners without scraping the paint off the adjoining wall you really need to use a wider brush for that part of the job. The instructions warn you not to press the button too often in case too much paint comes out. In my experience not enough paint came out no matter how often I pressed it so I had to keep pressing it and put up with the really irritating noise that accompanied it. In order to paint the ceiling we also invested in the “extra reach handle” (another £10) but this made it too heavy and unstable for me to use.

In the past I have been able to tackle the painting myself but after a day with the Paint Pod I had to get The Attached One to paint the ceiling and put a second coat on the walls. The whining noise and the weight of the very small roller left me feeling shattered and he wasn’t in much better shape afterwards either. We have now dug out the old fashioned good quality rollers and brushes that we have used many times before and feel that, for the kind of result we expect, that is what is required. The Paint Pod roller is less shaggy than the ones we would normally use, probably to make it easier for the system to clean it but we still had to put it through twice. We also had to pull it apart to get rid of all the water.

I have refused to use it again so he will be painting the bedroom the fetching shade of pale yellow that was intended for the hall/staircase but we just can’t face the prospect of his reaching up that high while on a ladder and avoiding entangling himself with two cables. Especially if he has to keep getting down to reconnect it. Not using the Pod means that we can now use any paint we want in any colour we want so we are going to live dangerously and paint the staircase a golden yellow. I prefer to have the walls and woodwork the same colour but this has not gone down well with my other half. We have a lot of pictures and I don’t want them to have to compete with what is around them, including the patchwork effect of walls one colour, woodwork another.

At the moment I am just pleased that we have agreed on the choice of a colour for one of the rooms downstairs. It opens onto the garden and is quite gloomy, north-facing, so we needed something that would brighten it up. “Melon Sorbet” looks better than it sounds and will act as a good back drop for the pictures we want to put in there. We have been drooling over a new concept in home decor, the photographic wall mural, big enough to fill most of an average wall. We quite fancy the idea of having a window on a forest facing the window on the garden.

I am absolutely determined to get the whole house decorated in one go and reach a level of completion and tidiness that has so far proved a distant dream. Goodbye carpets, hello laminated wood floors. New clean curtains. Actually putting those pictures it cost so much to frame on the walls. In a way it has been another way of saying farewell to our late lamented moggy, whose fur I keep finding on the yellowing tape on cardboard boxes. He wasn’t impressed the last time we did this with the consequence that we never did it again while he was alive. There was a real danger that, having used gloss paint on the woodwork in the hall, he would rub up against it and then try licking it off. That night we shut him and ourselves into the bedroom along with his food bowls and litter tray. And spent all night awake while he ate biscuits noisily and thought about using his litter tray. Noisily.

Hopefully we will be able to avoid having to do this again for some time but it does get a bit easier with experience. I enjoy fantasising about painting a room purple and the choice of colours is far greater than it was when my parents had to opt for magnolia. At least this time I have managed to get started during the summer. The last time I did this there was a breaking news report on the radio about planes crashing into a building in New York and we were obliged to leave the windows open because of the smell, even though it suddenly seemed a bit too cold for September.

A lttle interaction goes a long way

2009-07-01T15:36:00.006+01:00

I spent yesterday afternoon in the company of a BBC radio producer and an expert on the built environment. And then I rushed off to my job as a cleaner. The unusual encounter came about as a result of a comment I made on the BBC’s website, specifically the Radio 4 “iPM” programme’s comment section, regarding CCTV.

Internet access has opened up opportunities for communication that were unheard of just a few years ago. There was a time when you had to rely on the post to get your point of view across to a news programme, which took a while and there was likely to be some editing. Now you can email an opinion and, depending on the time available or the number of emails received, your comment could be aired as soon as it arrives.

The radio phone in show has been a huge success in Iraq, following the fall of Saddam Hussain, Iraqi citizens rushing to exercise their right to express an opinion after years of having to keeping them to themselves. This form of expression seems to have been born in 1940’s America, when some talk show hosts began to take calls from their listeners. Now they take emails and text messages as well.

The BBC has become particularly good at involving their viewers and listeners in programme making. That’s how I came to be standing under a busy flyover on a hot afternoon with two people who were far more confident about what they were doing than I was. We were feet away from the place where a man had died, alone, after being stabbed in a grimy subway. Even before this happened I had felt that this space needed to be used in order to prevent an assault of this nature. The incident had led to calls for CCTV, which I feel would be expensive and pointless, and this was confirmed by Henry, an expert on this kind of problem.

I couldn’t quite believe that I was actually talking to the man whose book I had read in order to give me some plan of action but Chris, the radio producer, had arranged it so that we could discuss the phenomenon of SLOAP (space left over after planning). We hope that the feature about this on a Saturday afternoon radio programme will encourage some debate about the problems caused by these blank underused spaces. They tend to come about when large structures like flyovers are imposed on existing communities by urban planners who don’t go back to see the impact of their creations.

The presence of an expert allowed me to test the ideas that I had for using the space in a positive way. I would probably not have had access to him had I not expressed my opinion in the way I did. Someone at the BBC recognised that my story would have some appeal to other listeners which made it worth their while investigating. Everyone gains.

The Vanessa Feltz Show on BBC Radio London is a very popular call-in, airing between 9am and noon, Monday to Saturday. Charming, funny Vanessa has just won the Sony Radio Academy Speech Radio Personality Award. I think part of her appeal is that she really has been through the mill and isn’t afraid to talk about it. She comes across as someone who gets it when her callers describe their experiences but she isn’t afraid to declare herself if she disagrees with you. Her show is a very good way of gauging the opinion of a cross section of Londoners which is why politicians and other significant public figures are prepared to appear on it and take questions from listeners. The Mayor of London is a regular. Listen online and see if you agree with me.

I hope that my rather rambling comments will lead to a positive outcome in my neighbourhood as a result of my interaction with the media. It was certainly made easy for me by a friendly BBC man with smiley eyes and a man who is (thankfully) obsessed with his subject.

I love the BBC.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0089nbb
http://www.bbc.co.uk/london/radio/presenters/vanessa/index.shtml

Michael, the latest Diana? Err, I don't think so...

2009-06-26T12:57:00.003+01:00

I have taken to listening to the Vanessa Feltz Show, a phone-in, on weekday mornings but today I switched it off before it was over, once I realised that it was to be a wall-to-wall love-in for Michael Jackson fans.

One of my recent posts described the unease I feel, since the child sex abuse allegations made against him, if I happen to watch one of his videos. I needn’t have worried. Since the news of his death it has become clear that the overwhelming majority of those contacting bodies such as the BBC to express their opinions are more interested in his creativity than in whether he was a preferential paedophile.

He was cleared of the allegations and, in his defence, he had a very unusual, troubled childhood and was milked for his talent, whatever the psychological cost to him. I expect columns will be written about the form his strangeness took. Body Dysmorphic Disorder perhaps (think of the surgery he had on his face). I have found myself thinking of the reclusive Howard Hughes who probably had Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and the people who took advantage of it to become his best mates.

I suspect that Jackson was, in his mind, stuck at ten years old and this probably did play a part in his need to be in the presence of younger people. The problem is that anyone else less marketable with this mindset would have been told very firmly by those around them that this would not do but there was too much to be gained by humouring him. He was clearly vulnerable if not actually predatory and I feel that, if anything untoward did take place, those who enabled it are as responsible as he might have been.

There is no doubt that Jackson had at least one or two in his circle who would cater to his every whim in order to skim off some of the wealth he generated. They must be rubbing their hands together at the royalties that are rolling in at this very moment as a result of the many tribute shows being broadcast to mark his death. I was astonished that BBC Radio 4’s “Today” programme felt the need to play exerts of a number of Jackson tracks. It won’t make up for the billions they would have made had he completed the final world tour he was rehearsing for.

The moment I heard the news I felt certain that someone somewhere would allege that he is now in hiding, having faked his own death. Read the message boards across the web and you’ll see that this is already happening. I predict that someone will be selling photos of the corpse before very long. For a profit of course. The circus rolls on.

There have been a number of references to the vast amount if money that he donated to charities and while that is to his credit it I would have thought more of him in this aspect if he had paid his own bills first. As it is he died in considerable debt and I have no doubt that the three children that he somehow produced (please, no details) will suffer for this. I expect that they are being watched like hawks to see if talent is genetically transferred.

Alas, the fuss over Jackson has overshadowed the news of the death of the lovely Farrah Fawcett. I wasn’t really a fan of “Charlie’s Angels” but she was such a star that she was everywhere. My neighbour’s teenage son, Jameel, was a Farrah fan and the image of her in a clingy, revealing top, taped to the wall in his room will always stay with me. She epitomised the ‘70’s beauty and millions must have wanted to look just like her. How sad that a surgically deformed man of dubious reputation has taken some of the remaining glory that she should have been entitled to. Never mind Farrah, you’ll always be fabulous babe.

The Goldfish Liberation Front

2009-06-23T13:28:00.008+01:00

The Attached One had a nasty shock on Sunday morning when he went to feed the goldfish. Vanessa, the pretty one with the gauzy tail, had died during the night. No obvious reason, she had seemed perfectly healthy and was buried in the garden with some ceremony. It left us feeling very sad that she did not get the chance to live in the bigger tank that we were planning to buy for her and her friend Dennis.

The care that we have taken over the two years that Vanessa and Dennis have been with us, to make sure that they have been happy, is in complete contrast to the treatment of the goldfish that are sold every year by an Iranian grocer in west London. In March those passing his shop are treated to a display of all the items needed for the celebration of Nowruz, the Zarathustrian or Persian New Year. These include pots of fragrant hyacinth and sprouted wheat, but it is the glitter and flash amongst them of many small goldfish in tiny bowls of water that draws customers to the shop.

These are very popular with the Iranian expats, who can be seen peering at the pairs of young goldfish in their ornate bowls as they carry them home. What they do not realise is that these fish are being kept in a volume of water that is a tenth of the amount they actually require and that the traditional bowl denies the fish the surface area necessary to give them the oxygen they need to survive. It’s a bit like shutting a toddler into a cupboard where it can only turn round on the spot and putting a plastic bag over its head so that it can’t breathe properly.

I have been told by an RSPCA inspector that they have tried to stop this practice as the fish sit in these tiny bowls until they are sold and who knows what happens to them after Nowruz. I suspect the sewers of West Ealing are alive with goldfish by the end of April, unless of course there are Iranian households with substantial fish tanks. In which case why do they have to buy more each year? The saddest thing about this practice is that goldfish can live for as long as forty years but these die when they are only a few months old.

Most of the Iranians who patronise this shop are likely to be exiles who fled their country after the revolution in 1979. Even so, I always think of those delicate goldfish in their tiny suffocating bowls as a metaphor for the young people of Iran, suffocated by a regime that criminalises homosexuality and executes teenage girls who are themselves victims of rape and abuse. The death of Neda Soltani will make her a symbol of the youth of Iran and their desire to live in a modern democratic environment, but long before this the situation of young Iranian women has been a matter of concern to human rights activists worldwide.

Atefeh Sahaaleh was a sixteen year old girl with mental health problems who was the victim of repeated rape by a former member of the Revolutionary Guard. When she was five years old her mother was killed in a car accident and this drove her father to drug addiction. She was obliged to care for her very elderly grandparents who repaid her by ignoring her. She would wander the streets of her town, prey for older men who would take advantage of her. The penalty for having sex with an unmarried man in Iran is one hundred lashes. She was given this punishment on three separate occasions.

Eventually she was arrested after an unsigned petition describing her as a “bad influence” was presented to the local authorities, asking that action be taken against her. Under torture she confessed to having a sexual relationship with a married man, in other words, he raped her a number of times. Atefeh’s reaction to the sentence of death passed on her led the judge, Haji Rezai, to make a supreme effort to make sure that the sentence was carried out. Documents showed her age as twenty two even though her family can prove that she was sixteen at the time. Rezai himself placed the noose around her neck and it was later discovered that he had been responsible for torturing her. Her family cannot even visit her grave to mourn her as her body was stolen from it within hours of her death.

Young men suffer equally in Iran. In 2005 Mahmoud Asgari and Ayaz Marhoni were executed, convicted of the rape of a thirteen year old boy, although it has been alleged that they died because they were homosexual and that the “rape“ was a consensual act. Their case gained notoriety when photographs taken just before their deaths were published on the internet. Mahmoud was sixteen and Ayaz eighteen. In the UK we worry that our young men are too rowdy, too interested in drugs, too lazy, too inclined to wear hooded tops. What must it be like to be young in a country where you risk a public lashing for engaging in the kind of activity that we regard as part of becoming an adult? How much harder must it be if you are gay?

I have never been to Iran but the knowledge I have of it suggests that it is a place of contrasts. A country where there is torture and executions are carried out but with a long history of creativity. The ceramic and textile art of Iran has attracted and inspired collectors and designers for centuries. Women are obliged to cover their hair in public yet there are female reporters and sportswomen. Homosexuality is banned but Iranian surgeons carry out corrective operations on transgender people every year. Iran’s government has a reputation for cruelty and repression yet its people are some of the kindest and most courteous that I have ever met.

Cruelty and beauty. Goldfish and hyacinths. I hope that the ordinary people of Iran get the democracy that they long for and I hope that shopkeeper sticks to selling flowers next New Year.
　
　
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/5217424.stm　
　
　

Sad and shocking images:

This means war

2009-06-22T09:56:00.006+01:00

I do not cycle. This may be because I grew up in a cobbled mews, the bumpiness put me off although other children living there had bicycles. My lack of cycling experience has not influenced what I am about to say, in fact I have largely ignored bicycles and cyclists. Until now.

My three mile walk home from work between 8pm and 9pm on weekday evenings has brought me into contact with that lower form of life known as the pavement cyclist. I am expected to get out of the way of idiots who, whether they are clad in the most up to date dayglo lycra or ninja black, seem determined to kill me. Trouble is, by that time of day, I am usually too tired to move quickly enough so have to rely on their seeing me in time to stop. On more than one occasion this has been inches away from me.

To be fair, some of them have gone to the effort of attaching what could be referred to as a “bell” to their killing machine but these are usually barely audible and, from my perspective, pointless. The only warning I get is a brief tinkle seconds before one of these morons barrels past me. Sometimes they shout at me before they do this. They rarely shout “thank you” afterwards. The clear message is that they have the right of way and I am a bloody nuisance.

I know that my words will be met with irritation by those who cycle responsibly, the ones who cycle in the road, wearing high visibility arm bands/helmets/flashing lights and actually stop at lights rather than whipping round to the crossing and suddenly becoming a pedestrian. Well, none of you seem to cycle where I walk. So if you expect me to greet with excitement the news that Sky Sports has teamed up with British Cycling to organise “Skyrides” around the UK you will be sorely disappointed. It turns out that the Mayor of London will be leading a Mini Skyride to West London. Oh joy. Boris (who got into trouble for breaking the rules on his way into work on his bike) wants to encourage people to cycle around in large groups, free from the fear of being run down by cars and buses. How about enforcing the law when it comes to cycling on the pavement, Boris? So that I can walk around free from the fear of being scythed down by one of these fools?

The latest incident was on Thursday. I was walking round a blind corner when of these helmeted twits came screeching to a halt right in front of me. I did quite a lot of swearing as he swerved past me and then proceeded to cut straight across a main road, all this in the presence of a police car. I was under the impression that a cyclist could be fined £200 for this kind of offence. The Highway Code says:

145
You MUST NOT drive on or over a pavement, footpath or bridleway except to gain lawful access to property, or in the case of an emergency.
[Laws HA 1835 sect 72 & RTA 1988 sect 34]

Emergencies in most of these cases would appear to be getting home in time for dinner/the football match/a hot date.

I bet this kind of thing would stop if every cyclist was expected to wear an identification number as well as high visibility kit. Some of the people who have almost run into me have been wearing dark clothes and have no lights on their bicycles at night. I’ve seen them swerve on and off pavements, in and out of traffic. Having waited for the lights to change, like a good responsible pedestrian, I was almost run down by a man who thought the traffic lights didn’t apply to him and didn’t even see me. I understand that cyclists find car drivers aggressive and that they are often the victim of accidents themselves (I’ve seen the bloodstains) but I don’t think that this gives them the right to take over pavements. This happens even where there are cycle lanes. The Mayor wants to ensure that there is a network of them across London. Terrific. And are you going to ensure that they are used, Boris? Unlikely.

It has got to the stage where I am fairly sure that one of these days I will be killed or seriously injured by one of these selfish, irresponsible arseholes. Cyclists need to be registered and they need to be regulated. I want to be able to identify the person who has almost killed me. I think that someone who causes injury or death by riding their bicycle should not only be fined but imprisoned and banned from using one ever again. Why should elderly or disabled people be put off walking our streets because they have been frightened by an incident like this?
Please consider signing the petitions to which I have added links.
　
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7498562.stm
www.livingstreets.org.uk/news_and_info/pb9_pavement_cycling.php
petitions.number10.gov.uk/dangerouscycling/
petitions.number10.gov.uk/IDCyclists/
petitions.number10.gov.uk/NightBikes/
petitions.number10.gov.uk/canal-no-bikes/

Fixing the fixers

2009-06-17T14:22:00.002+01:00

On Tuesday and Friday evenings I clean an office after my regular job which means that I’m still in the building after 9pm. The office overlooks a busy main road and there are the usual sounds of sirens and traffic. Last night, at around 9.15 I heard what sounded like a large amount of scrap metal being dropped onto the ground.

Almost. It always take a while for my brain to work out what I can see before me in these situations. It seems that a small black car had pulled out from the car park of the neighbouring building when another, almost identical small black car had swerved to avoid it and had run into a lamp post on my side of the road. By the time I got to the window the first car was in the middle of the road pointing in the opposite direction to the other.

There is a fire station a few yards from where this happened and several firemen were on the scene within seconds. Within minutes two fire engines were blocking the traffic off in one lane while police from a station that is also close by directed it around the damaged cars. The driver of the second car was injured badly enough for it to take half an hour for him to be removed from the vehicle to the waiting ambulance.

This was all dealt with and cleared up within an hour. The two damaged cars were deposited, for the time being, in the car park next door. Sand was spread across the oil spill by the lamppost. Broken bits of car were swept up. What struck me was that I had seen all three emergency services acting in a calm and coordinated manner, comforting uninjured passengers, shepherding pedestrians out of the way, making things safe.

From the fifth floor I had a clear view and felt rather detached after the initial shock, as if I was watching a play. For those directly involved, who had to see and hear the shock and pain close up it must have been very different. It is easy to forget that these men and women often attend situations like this daily, even hourly, and are expected to take it in their stride. The rest of us can walk away and forget about it but it does not surprise me that some in the police, fire and ambulance services crack under the strain or behave in a way that doesn‘t meet our expectations.

Hours before the traffic accident I had watched a video recorded in Nottingham of police officers trying to handcuff a man. A cab driver had begun recording the event because one of the officers had repeatedly tazered the individual even though he was already on the ground and vulnerable. He was simply trying to avoid having his hands cuffed. He was also punched in the head a number of times. This went on in front of a crowd of people who were clearly angry about what was happening but the police concerned carried on regardless of their comments. I suspect that they were unaware of the fact that this was being recorded (which seems a bit naïve these days) and would have stopped it if they had known.

It has raised questions about the use of tazers which were regarded as a non lethal option for subduing potentially dangerous suspects, better than guns. I am more interested in why someone is prepared to obviously and repeatedly inflict pain in a way that seems unnecessary to most of us. Have those involved become so hardened by what they have seen and experienced that they do this sort of thing without thinking twice about it? Did any of them question for a moment what their colleagues were doing and consider stopping them? Was it just the end of a long and difficult shift?

Personally I feel that we expect rather too much of our emergency services. We are not there when a drunk vomits in the van that is carrying him to the police station, we aren’t the ones who have to clean it out. Ambulance personnel increasingly face attacks when they attend a situation and firemen go home to their families and act as if nothing has happened, having seen the consequences of a fire. For the police in particular there are no second chances if they get it wrong.

I am not excusing the behaviour of the police in that video and I have concerns about the way some have dealt with demonstrators over the years. It worries me that they are being deliberately wound up to be more aggressive ahead of these events by some of those responsible for managing them. However I believe that we should become as understanding and respectful towards them as we are now expected to be towards military personnel. It is clear that there is a link between the stress of serving in a war zone and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. We are often shielded from the war zones that some places in our country have become and I think that once the dust of this most recent example of police brutality has settled, we need to look at how we are dealing with the people who clean up the mess so that we don’t have to.

There's no place like home

2009-06-15T14:00:00.006+01:00

Occasionally something happens that makes me feel very protective towards my belongings. Following an attempted break-in I began stashing jewellery out of sight and the threat of a flood had me moving irreplaceable things upstairs. Watching news reports of refugees in the former Yugoslavia during the 1990’s and images of the homes they had left behind I wondered what I regarded as so precious that I would try taking it with me. Money and documents, obviously, valuable jewellery, some photos maybe. Would we have tried to take Jones the cat with us or would we have given him a quick and kind death because we were uncertain about what was ahead of us?

Thus far in my life I have been lucky in that I have not had to make those decisions. I live in a country that has not faced invasion for more than sixty years and, in spite of certain recent events, could still be regarded as a democracy. I don’t have to bribe a councillor to raise an issue of local concern and the police usually turn up when I need them. There is likely to be someone out there to help if I fall on hard times. If I get pregnant the system should kick in to make sure that my child is fed, clothed and housed adequately, if not by me then by the state. Most of the time I take all this for granted.

A couple of things have reminded me that I am unbelievably lucky. One was the news that Madonna had been allowed to adopt a second Malawian child. The other was that Amnesty International has launched the “Demand Dignity” campaign to raise awareness of poverty and the impact it has on human rights. The term that stood out to me when reading about it was “absolute poverty” - according to the world bank that describes the condition of 1.3 billion people. Absolute poverty in 2009. Poverty means no clean water, no adequate sewage, no education, no healthcare, no voice.

It also means no certainty that the ramshackle roof over your head will still be there tomorrow. In the UK I can be certain that, should anyone find that they have the right to turn me out of my home, for whatever reason, I will at least have the chance of appeal and some notice of when I will be expected to leave. This is not the case in places like Kenya’s Deep Sea settlement where private companies are gaining land for development by illegally evicting people who have nowhere else to go. The developers are being supported by the authorities and police so those who had little to begin with are being forced to leave in the middle of the night taking with them only what they can carry. Bulldozers are literally showing up without any warning.

The campaign will also be raising awareness of corporate responsibility and the profound impact business can have on impoverished communities. They are usually powerless to defend themselves when their home is targeted by those with an agenda that does not have their best interests at heart. Native people in Canada have been directly and very badly affected by the construction of a gas plant in their area. No one in a wealthy city would tolerate a birth rate where 19 out of 21 babies were still born, yet this is what they have had to endure as a result of this imposition on what they regard as their ancestral land.

Women and children bear the brunt of this situation and the third focus of the campaign is on maternal mortality. Where I live it is expected that a pregnant woman will put her feet up and be cared for by those around her. She becomes as precious as the child she is carrying. In poor communities ease is not an option for expectant women. The need to continue working, often quite strenuously, creates a greater risk to the unborn child and mother. Add to that the lack of good antenatal and postnatal healthcare and you have the answer to why so many women who are considered to be in a condition of “absolute poverty” die as a result of becoming pregnant.

This brings me to Madonna and her adoption of Mercy, whose biological mother died during childbirth. Try for one moment to forget about the fuss surrounding what should be a private matter between an adopter and those officials concerned in assessing that person’s right to adopt a particular child. Try instead to wonder what it must be like to be born in poverty in a country where your life expectancy is 40 and where you are likely to be orphaned by AIDs. Someone with a lot of money takes an interest in your country and offers to do something about healthcare, education and child care. What would you do if you were a Malawian? If you had any sense you would put your hand up and say “Yes please!”

In my opinion too many people are ready to point a finger at Madonna and say that she has bought this child without caring in the slightest about the others that are left behind in those orphanages. That she has set up her charity, Raising Malawi, as a vehicle for the Kabbalah sect that she follows. That those who run the Kabbalah Centre in the US are looking for a country to take over.

Mmmm. Well, if they are planning to take over Malawi and run it they aren’t particularly good at keeping it a secret. I think someone will notice if that democratic country suddenly becomes a dictatorship run by a particularly pale blonde woman with an American accent. I realise that she sometimes acts as “She Who Must Be Obeyed “ but even she realises that there are limits. For centuries Christians have imposed their religion on hapless orphans throughout Africa, not always kindly, so why is the particular religion an issue?

I had felt for some time that Africa needed Madonna and even though I have some doubts about the Kabbalah Centre I have none about her decision to promote a religion other than Christianity. I believe that Raising Malawi is a genuine attempt on the part of a well informed individual, who has campaigned on the AIDs issue for years, to do something concrete and positive about it. I feel that Madonna is taking seriously the concept of “ubuntu”, a philosophy promoted by Mandela and Tutu. Above all I think that a little girl is going to grow up surrounded by people who genuinely love her and have her best interests at heart. Madonna may not turn out to be the perfect mum but she is doing her best in the only way she knows how.
　
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_(philosophy)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KS6o0jJ_C8

Through a glass, darkly, and whilst wearing dark glasses

2009-06-10T15:32:00.003+01:00

I was channel surfing a few nights ago when I came across a documentary about Eric Gill, the sculptor. As I began to watch it there was something at the back of my mind, a slightly uncomfortable feeling. Eventually I remembered that Eric Gill was thought to have been a child abuser. This was confirmed by a visit to Wikipedia. These weren’t just allegations made against him, he described his activities in his own diaries.

Eric Gill was responsible for monuments, sculptures and plaques all over the country, the work of almost forty years. Much of his work is to be found in churches and he had quite a lot to say about man’s relationship with God. Some may wonder if God has had quite a lot to say to him, if there is an afterlife. As far as I know no one has asked that his work be destroyed or removed, and typefaces that he designed are still in use. Does this mean that the work of a self confessed abuser can be regarded as absolutely separate from the crimes that he has committed? Should I feel bad for liking the work of Eric Gill?

I find it difficult to sit through a Michael Jackson video, even though he was found not guilty on all charges of sexually abusing children in 2005. I wonder how many people in his entourage breathed a sigh of relief when that happened, not because they were concerned about him or believed in his innocence but because it meant that there was nothing to stop his music being played by the respectable and therefore royalties would still roll in. I’m no fan of his later stuff, but if “Don’t stop ‘Til You Get Enough” comes on I’ll watch it, feeling queasy and guilty all the way through it.

When it comes to Gary Glitter that opportunity never arises. His former backing band are till touring but I doubt if he has made much money from royalties lately. I loved Gary Glitter’s music when I was a kid and when the charges against him were first made public I couldn’t believe it. I suppose that by not buying his albums his former fans are punishing him in the only way they can. I suspect this means that the Glitter Band can’t use any material that he wrote and have to come up with their own songs. If I came across an old LP in a charity shop I might even consider buying it (not that I have the equipment to play it on any more) but I probably wouldn’t show it to anyone.

There is just something about a charge of child abuse that leaves a stain that cannot be erased or ignored. It isn’t like any other crime, partly because those who commit this kind of offence tend to keep on doing it or trying to. You can’t help feeling that even when most offenders of this nature are caught out they really don’t believe that they’ve done anything wrong. Society can tolerate a murderer who has done his or her time being amongst them but rarely a proven paedophile. The strange thing is that “Alice In Wonderland” is still a best seller when it must be obvious to anyone with functioning brain cells that its creator, Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson), had an unhealthy interest in photographing little girls. There is no evidence that he took his attentions towards his models any further but I am sure that if Dodgson was alive today he would have taken advantage of the internet in the same way that many paedophiles have.

That looking is considered to be as bad as touching means that the career of an actor like Chris Langham is probably over. He was one of the main characters in “The Thick Of It”, a very popular TV satire of the Blair Government, but since his conviction for downloading child pornography he has not been seen in anything other than vehicles clearly meant to rehabilitate his career. In Langham’s case the images in question went quite a lot further than small girls in tastefully arranged drapery. They included video clips of the most violent kind and extreme kind. The impact on his colleagues must have been devastating. To find that someone who you may have introduced your own children to has tastes of this kind must have been shattering, knowing that your very successful television career may now depend on the amount of distance you can put between him and your next great script must have been almost as unnerving.

I still don’t know how I feel about this. I am thinking of buying a DVD of “The Thick Of It”, even though it features Langham. That Glitter LP might turn up. If it does I’ll keep the volume down.

A bit pork and cheese

2009-06-09T14:48:00.009+01:00

I’m one half foreign and that foreign is Portuguese. It is not that obvious, diluted by the Scots and Ulster on my father’s side and, of course, by the English culture that has surrounded me since birth (if London’s culture can be described as English). It took centuries of poverty and malnourishment to refine my typically short Portuguese body and I have brown eyes and hair.

If you have a foreign parent it is likely that somewhere in the family home there will be some reminder of their origin. In our house every ornament stood on an embroidered doily, there were plates and dishes painted in traditional Portuguese styles and we had the obligatory brightly coloured ceramic cockerel. My mother and her sister worked and lived close by so I heard the language everyday and there was a lot of contact with the members of her family who lived in London. One of my cousins always put on records of traditional music and danced to them. This mainly consisted of swinging to the right and then to the left and it is good to know that others are maintaining this tradition. In Australia. I swear it all sounds like this. Jingle jingle boom.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=g36oefvywtk

Everything my mother cooked, even if it was supposed to be a British dish, tended to be a bit Portuguese which rather annoyed my father. I think she regarded the indigenous cuisine as lacking in flavour. I grew up eating the home cured meat that was brought over from her village, smuggled through customs in suitcases. Sal picao was a favourite, a sausage that was sliced very thinly and eaten with bread. The chewy slices were a dark amber and garnet colour when held up to the light. Most school friends wrinkled their noses when offered it but some took the risk and found that they liked it. The food that had helped my ancestors to survive hungry winters was regarded as a delicacy in the UK.

On special occasions we ate bacalhau, salted cod fish cooked with finely chipped, fried potatoes, scraps of fried egg and olives. If most of the British visitors to the house had seen the cod soaking in buckets of water for days before being cooked they might also have wrinkled their noses, but once it was on their plates it disappeared fairly quickly. Cod was also used to make fish cakes which could be eaten hot or cold. My mother always made a lot of them but there never seemed to be enough.

Caldo verde, a soup made with shredded dark greens, was a challenge. I was never able to eat it without getting my chin slapped by hot potatoey cabbage. Summer meant green bean salad, the beans warm from the pan and thinly sliced onions in an oil and vinegar dressing served with hard boiled eggs. Puddings and desserts usually involved a lot of work so they didn’t come along that often but when they did the smell of cinnamon filled the house.

We didn’t have much to do with the Portuguese community apart from attending occasional events. I think my mother wanted to get more involved but it wasn’t something that interested my father. I wasn’t even expected to attend Portuguese school which seemed to be mandatory for the others of my age from that background. I wouldn’t have managed it and I think common sense was sacrificed to national pride by some Portuguese parents.

The other thing that set us apart was that we didn’t spend six weeks every summer on holiday over there. A great many of my mother’s contemporaries came over in the 1960’s and 1970’s to work hard and earn money, sacrificing much to save up enough to build a dream home to retire to in Portugal. Almost everyone we knew from that community lived in accommodation that came with a housekeeping job, which meant that quite a few people lived in ugly basements with exposed pipe work and were grateful for it.

Looking back, it is hard to believe that such a large population of very foreign people could live in London without being too obvious. I think the reason was that they just kept their heads down and got on with it, looking ahead to a time when they wouldn’t have to be here. Things began to change when some began to buy houses in the suburbs, but even then the plan was still to go home. I knew several people whose parents lived in the UK for decades but never learnt to speak more than a few words of English. At the time there was no need to and the truth was that many could not read in their own language. Education was not a priority in Salazar’s Portugal. Clever people were trouble.

We did visit my mother’s home occasionally. I went from being slightly foreign in the place I was born to being very foreign somewhere else. My grandmother was the typical little old lady in black and I really do remember her with affection. The whole place was so different from London. There was no flushing toilet, you parked your backside on a wooden seat and whatever you produced was composted. How green is that? My cousin used oxen to draw along a piece of agricultural equipment I had seen pictures of in a book on medieval history and I spent an afternoon watching him irrigate a field by using metal plates that he sliced into the ground, cutting off one channel then another, allowing the river water to run between rows of potatoes. I though they were covered in Portuguese ladybirds but they were actually Colorado beetles. I remember the smell of wood smoke, being taken to see some piglets and lots of sticky car rides as my father took advantage of all that history.

We visited every castle and church in the area and then went even further. We saw Alcobaca on a particularly hot day and I remember stepping from burning sunlight into the chill of the shade. The carved stonework looked like lace. My absolute favourite was a castle that had shallow steps wide enough for horses to be taken up them during a siege. I ended up with all the usual souvenirs, a boat and a doll with lots of petticoats from Nazare, hand embroidered aprons and earrings. I had my ears pierced, whether I liked it or not, by having a sterilised needle pushed through my lobes at around the age of three. This is when they discovered just how many rude Portuguese words I had picked up.

Forty years later I’ve forgotten them, along with most of the Portuguese I knew. I don’t regret it but I always mean to brush it up. When I looked around the house for things to photograph I found that there weren’t that many. I am far more English these days. Amongst the good things that I have gained from being a bit pork and cheese are a taste for embroidery and bean salads. I cry when I listen to Amalia Rodrigues even though I don’t understand most of what she is singing about. I have an insight into what it is like for those who come here from somewhere very different to earn what they think is a decent wage. I hope I am just that little bit more interesting because of it.

www.freguesiasdeportugal.com/distritoviana/09/portuzelo/fotos.htm

Ending it all

2009-06-08T13:50:00.005+01:00

September 1976. I am eleven years old, sitting in the front room with a kitchen knife in my hand and I am thinking of ending it all. The reason? I had found the transition from primary school (population approximately 180) to secondary school (population approximately 900) rather hard to take.

This happened every afternoon for a few days and I think what I was doing was telling myself just how bad I felt. I was anxious, frightened and out of my depth, surrounded by people who seemed more confident and trying very hard to grow into a uniform that would probably never fit me. I was mentally and physically exhausted. Quite honestly, I just wanted it to stop. It didn’t go any further but, having watched a documentary about self harm I wonder if I would have done that rather than commit suicide. Perhaps that was what I had in mind but didn’t know that you could do that.

Self harm, in terms of cutting, scratching, etc. is not the same thing as suicide and seems to serve a different purpose. In fact, according to some of the self harmers that Meera Syal spoke to in that documentary, self harming has prevented suicide because it acts as a temporary release. That I didn’t do it has everything to do with the fact that I had never heard of the practice, unlike today’s school children, amongst whom “cutting” seems to have reached epidemic proportions. It has crossed my mind that in attempting to inform and support those who self harm we have in fact spread the word about it and are in danger of making it a part of everyday teenage life.

We seem to find it easier to discuss self harm of this kind than we do its ultimate form - suicide. Yet even though the increase in suicides amongst young men is described as “worrying” the most fuss was made in the media when sixteen young people killed themselves over a relatively short period in the town of Bridgend. There was a suggestion that suicide was being romanticised. Every death of this kind seemed to be marked by tributes on networking sites and there might have been something about being immortalised in this way that appealed to those suffering from undiagnosed clinical depression, so that they went from considering suicide to actually doing it.

The programme was broadcast a few days after the joint suicide of a couple at Beachy Head and an attempt by a woman with MS to clarify the law on assisted suicide. Kazumi and Neil Puttick had nursed their son lovingly following a car accident that had left him needing constant care. His death from meningitis had been more than they could cope with. They fell together with his small body and toys from a place that has become notorious for the number of suicides that take place there. An average of 20 people every year succeed in ending their lives by jumping from the chalk cliffs. The Beachy Head Chaplaincy Team has prevented a number of suicides in recent years by patrolling the area and responding to reports of people acting suspiciously.

I have come to think that this is the answer to suicide prevention. I feel that we have to actively inform the general public that it is possible to prevent many of these deaths by raising awareness of the indicators that someone is considering ending their own life. It astonishes me that even when someone has told another person that he or she has considered doing this, the person they have made the admission to has not acted on the information. To me it would seem that the person making the admission is asking to be talked out of it or even for professional help. We live in an increasingly selfish age and I wonder if there may be a hesitation to get too involved. Apart from that I think that many people are lucky enough never to have felt that low and just can’t take seriously the thought that someone they know would do something of that nature. You have to go through it yourself to really understand that the tipping point can be reached far more easily than is generally supposed.

We are gradually (a little too gradually in my opinion ) getting away from the notion that children do not get depressed unless they have experienced some obvious and significant trauma. Victims of bullying often claim to have been suicidal but policies in schools to tackle bullying seem to vary and I wonder how many of them are in place to keep school inspectors happy when the true attitude of the staff is that it is all part of growing up. We seem to expect so much more of the young in terms of education, and they expect more of each other in terms of their appearance. Why has it got to the stage where children all over the country are slashing and scratching themselves, scarring themselves for life in the process, just so that they can get through the day?
The only kind of suicide that it seems easy to talk about is the right to end a life that is filled with physical pain. Perhaps it is easier to see yourself as suffering from a debilitating condition like Multiple Sclerosis and be able to articulate your wishes to a partner or family member in case it happens to you. Thoughts of suicide are often connected with concerns about those who are left behind. In the case of those who have the kind of condition which they recognise will leave them in a particularly distressing physical state there is what some may regard as a selfish need to put an end to that distress before it becomes unbearable. There is also the concern that by asking their loved ones to take them to a place where that pain could end they will leave them facing a prison sentence. Discussion about this issue seems to be endless yet, when it comes to the quiet, unpublicised misery of the kind of suicide that happens everyday, we are too embarrassed to talk about it.

Perhaps we can’t deal with the sadness and anger of those left behind. Most of us don’t know what to say and if we do know we don’t have the patience to keep on saying it to someone who, in turn, loves and hates the one who has done this. It may seem obvious but I really do feel that we need to increase the funding for mental health services and prevent the suicides that occur because mental health staff are too overworked to notice how far someone in their care has sunk into the depths of despair. I think we absolutely need to raise public awareness of the signs of suicide in the same way that we have promoted stroke awareness. Above all I think we need to relax a little when it comes to our expectations of children in educational terms and recognise that, whatever a child may say to our faces, what they are truly feeling may need a little more investigation.

The thing that I wanted most in September 1976 was someone who would listen to me and hear what I was feeling without making me feel as if I was a nuisance, as if I was just number 900.

http://survive.org.uk/suicide.html
http://www.papyrus-uk.org/
http://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/mentalhealthinformation/mentalhealthproblems/depression/self-harm.aspx
http://www.bbc.co.uk/headroom/newsandevents/programmes/meera_syal.shtml

Remembering

2009-06-06T00:44:00.010+01:00

There has been a fuss over the failure of the French administration to invite a member of the British Royal Family to the commemoration of the 65th anniversary of the D Day landings. If French commentators are to be believed Mr Sarkozy was so keen on a love-in with his new best friend, US President Oabama, that he forgot about asking along the only head of state who took a part in WW2. Mr Obabama’s intervention has meant that Prince Charles will now be attending the event. We will at least be spared the prospect of the Queen’s outfits being compared with those of the elegant clothes horse that is Madame Sarkozy. The true stars of the show are, as ever, being overlooked.

I’m not sure why the memory of a particular D Day veteran makes me well up. We were in the art gallery of the Imperial War Museum in 2004, standing in front of a painting of Arromanches, liberated on the 6th June 1944. A pensioner was standing next to us wearing his beret and medals. He had a huge smile on his face. “I was there,” he said, “Arrowmancheese!” He couldn’t pronounce the name of the place where he might have been killed but in the tradition of Tommies from Wipers to The Sandpit he had made it sound more interesting. He didn’t tell us anything else about himself and we have no idea what he did there but the thought of that encounter still moves me to tears.

I wonder whether most people understand the hurt felt over that delayed invitation by many of those marking the 65th anniversary today. The 60th anniversary of the D Day landings in Normandy was a big occasion. Everyone from the BBC to the Royal Family turned out for events in the UK and France. There seemed to be a sense that this was the last time that so many survivors of the Allied landings would be able to gather at one time, as age and ill health would now begin to take their toll. There were special events, exhibitions, television programmes, in particular there was an attempt to explain to a much younger generation the significance of the event and the role played by their grandfathers and great-grandfathers.

There must have been a time when the Second World War was something that most wanted to forget, especially those on the home front. Victory in Europe meant the removal of tape from windows because there were no more air raids, no more blackouts and nights spent in shelters. Today we make do and mend because we choose to recycle. It is hard to imagine what it was like to long for new clothes. Goodbye Utility, hello Dior. For those who had been away for years, so long in fact that their children did not recognise them, there were different things to forget. The sight of good friends blown to pieces. The fear and hunger of those who were prisoners of war. The terrible recurring memories to be endured in silence. All that misery, anger and pain buried in the work and play of “normal” life.

My great uncle, whose part in “The Great War” ended in a shell hole where he was found with a broken leg by the opposition, rarely talked about what had happened to him. He became a clergyman in the years between the wars and returned to France In 1944 as a chaplain in the Territorial Army. My limited understanding of what he went through comes from Sunday afternoons watching “The World At War” as a child. I remember craning my neck to look at the memorial to the Royal Artillery at Hyde Park Corner when we passed it on the bus because there was something sad and beautiful about those caped figures. I got to know the mock up of a WWI trench at the Imperial War Museum quite well although I have to be honest - this little girl didn’t really get it. Someone I knew loved black and white war films because they reminded her of the exciting and liberated days when she drove an ambulance during air raids. Looking back I realise that references were made constantly to those wars because they had such a profound effect on those who had lived through them but I had no real understanding of that at the time.

Living with someone who spends quite a lot of his time making models of planes, tanks and ships has left me a little more informed about WW2 but it was Northern Ireland and the Falklands that had the most impact on me. I grew up in a city that was under threat from IRA bombs so I couldn’t help but understand some of the fear. I watched the news reports from the Falklands but it took years for me to develop a real understanding of what war can do to those who engage in it. The odd thing is that it was my encounter with someone who didn’t go to the Falklands that stays in my mind.

In 1990 I got talking to an exceptionally tall man who used to hang out in the subway at South Kensington Underground Station. He clearly wasn’t a rough sleeper but he usually had a can in his hand. Eventually he told me that he had been persuaded to join the Welsh Guards by his father, which he could deal with until the Falklands came along. He had not been on the boat when it left and in the course of avoiding the MPs who had come to find him he had jumped from a window causing irreparable damage to his back. The irony was that he had to live with the guilt of avoiding the tragedy of the Sir Galahad and the Sir Tristram because he deserted whilst being on a pension for his disability. In a home of his own but marginalised by society, he felt that he had more in common with homeless alcoholics than the men he had trained with.

He isn’t the only one I have come across who had been talked into a career in the armed forces (usually by a civilian parent) at a time when becoming involved in an something other than a tour of Northern Ireland was unlikely. It was a bit of shock suddenly to find yourself being sent to war. I don’t judge them as I do not know whether I would have the courage to fight if I was told to. It means that I am all the more impressed by those who are joining up now, with a clearer knowledge of the risks they face. They can hardly have escaped the news reports and videos posted on the internet make it difficult to hide the truth. They have something that isn’t often mentioned these days, a sense of duty. I heard that word, duty, used by a member of the Royal British Legion when I stopped by at the local branch to take a photograph. It is that sense of duty that makes someone organise the sale of the poppies that fund the Legion’s work, and keep on doing it for thirty years. I hope that a sense of duty is behind the attendance by Prince Charles at the commemoration in France and any future invitations from Mr. Sarkozy.

“Their lives have ended, but dreams are not yet lost
if you remember in your laugh and song
these boys who do not sing and laughed not long.”

from “The Lost” by Herbert Corby

http://www.britishlegion.org.uk/
http://www.remembering.org.uk/ra_memorial.htm

Enough numbers already

2009-06-05T13:19:00.001+01:00

Last night I was about to leave the building I clean on weekday evenings and found that the door release button had been damaged. I was trapped. We don’t use anything as old fashioned as a key to get in and out, we rely on a door code that is changed from time to time. Having failed to attract the attention of passing pedestrians (there was a car park between me and the street) so that I could tell them the code through the letterbox and have them punch that in I ended up calling The Attached One on my mobile phone. He dropped everything (in this case dinner) to drive over and rescue me.

Pin numbers seem to rule my life. I need them for bank cards, key cupboards, catalogue orders, etc., etc. And that’s apart from having to remember passwords which also have to be changed regularly to keep out all those little monsters who get their fun by invading computers. I don’t know how I manage to remember any of them and there is usually hell to pay if I can’t.

The irony is that although these codes are meant to reduce crime there are those occasions that you read about where someone has been effectively kidnapped, marched to a cash point and been forced to reveal that code. Nothing as old fashioned as stealing the cash you’re carrying, they want to steal your entire bank balance. You even have to be careful that the ATM you are using has not been rigged in some way. “Have you noticed anything unusual about this cash machine?” Well, no. And how come I never come across one that hands out money by accident? “Have a £50 note, no really, have another.” I used to think of cheques quite fondly but they have become a nuisance as they take so long to clear.

Just to make things interesting I sometimes say the number out loud without planning to. I now try to think “one, two three, four, five” as I type in the number and “enter” to override this habit. I remember the amazed look on one man’s face as he waited behind me to use the ATM when this must have happened. Fortunately he wasn’t a mugger.

I was quite a fan of online shopping but I am rather wary of it now. Last year I signed up for a system that checks that your card is being used by the right person (another password) that I came across during a transaction. It meant registering the card I use with that system but it was only after completing the form that I began to wonder whether the bank logo was as I remembered it. I called the bank in a hurry to make sure I hadn’t made a mistake and it turned out that it was OK but the logo they were using was a little different. So far I’ve only come across one other online shop that uses it. So that was worth it.

Occasionally a chip and pin machine isn’t working and I have to provide a signature. Of course it has been so long since I signed anything that it looks as if I’m trying to fake it. I sometimes wonder how anyone with a poor memory manages in these situations but somehow I think it’s going to get worse.
Can’t wait until they introduce iris recognition technology.

Line and iron

2009-06-02T11:59:00.004+01:00

We have had warm weather for several days now. This means ice cream for some but to me it says laundry that smells of sunshine, dried in an hour.

I grew up in a house without a garden and, after moving from the city, discovered that one of the pleasures of having an open space is the chance to line dry clothes rather than baking them in a tumble dryer. Something about the sight of clothes furling and snapping in the breeze kept me at the back door for minutes at a time. I found that if I left things on the line overnight they would acquire a perfume that was better than any synthetic scent that the soap powder manufacturer could come up with. The ”Spring Breeze” that came out of the bottle and had been designed in a lab was replaced with something more subtle.

Once those clothes made it onto the ironing board (along with a few very small spiders) that perfume really made its presence felt, released by the applied heat. It made a pleasure of a chore. Towels that had been folded away after time in the sunshine released it again when I took them out of the drawer.

Of course it isn’t always sunny and it is frustrating in winter to spend cold minutes hanging wet stuff on the line that still won’t be dry by the end of the day. Somehow it is worse to have the same washing hanging on clothes horses in doors, where that synthetic floral odour becomes more intense in a centrally heated atmosphere. I think it has more to do with a dislike of the cold outdoors than a need to dry things quickly inside that makes me do it. I can see why it is regarded as unlucky to hang up washing indoors in some countries - in the past the damp atmosphere must have invited chest infections.

At the time I moved here I had an elderly neighbour who still obeyed the etiquette that had probably been followed by her mother and grandmother. It was regarded as rather slovenly to leave your things on the line overnight but I like to think that I helped to break that trend. After I had done this a few times so did she. I once heard Aggie Mackenzie, co-presenter of “How Clean Is Your House”, talk about this. She said that there was word used in the area she grew up in, ”clarty”, to describe someone who didn’t get the washing in by the end of the day. Clarty - that’s me! I have an ulterior motive, I want my clothes to smell of the morning dew.

It is easy to forget that an earlier generation of women had to spend hours scrubbing those clothes down, their hands cracked and sore and backs aching. Even so I would be surprised if they didn’t stop occasionally, to watch the wind make flags of those sheets and shirts. There is nothing quite like a perfect drying day.

I still have to remind myself to wipe down the line first so that I avoid a grimy mark across the duvet cover, even though I’ve been doing this long enough to have needed new supplies of pegs both wooden and plastic. Some of the wooden ones have taken on the silvery hue of age. We’re not sure where pegs disappear to. Some end up keeping bags of flour safe from invasion. Plastic ones disintegrate with heavy use. Quite a few end up in the lawn. We now have enough experience to seek out more durable pegs in nicer colours.

Occasionally a bird scores a direct hit but it is a small price to pay for the pleasure I get from line drying. If I’m lucky, that mark will be washed off and the item dry again within the hour, courtesy of the sun and wind.

That villainous creature, the teenage mother

2009-05-30T22:39:00.003+01:00

A couple of days ago a discussion about teenage pregnancies took place on the excellent Vanessa Feltz show on BBC Radio London. It turns out that every year around 57,000 teenage girls become pregnant in the London area. Some have protested at the reaction they get from the general public. They aren’t seen as role models.

At my school very few girls fell into this category and those who did were regarded as rather stupid by the ones who had plans for the future. This did not mean that we weren’t having sex. We had taken on board the information provided during sex education lessons and in those pre-HIV days this usually meant taking the contraceptive pill. I wonder how many of those who took this superior attitude now have gone on to have children? I suspect they have left it too late by putting their careers first and discovered that, in spite of what we were led to believe by teachers and parents, it is not possible to have it all.

We are now in a situation where older women are trying to fix the situation that the passing of time has left them in, using fertility treatment to give them the children that come too easily to those who succumb to a persuasive boyfriend in the heat of the moment. It has to be said that in both situations having the ideal father for your child is not likely to be the motivating factor. Older women may have searched in vain for Mr. Right and girls are probably on the receiving end of a good deal of persuasion that they have found him.

The irony is of course that it is the teenager who is at the right age to cope with pregnancy and produce healthy children. It is the mature mother who runs the risk of a child with significant (and expensive) health issues. Midwives will tell you that younger mothers have quicker and relatively trouble free births, whereas older mothers sometimes have a harder time and their children are more likely to need intensive post natal care.

I wonder if there ever was a time when the majority of young women married before becoming pregnant. I suspect that there were far more “unwanted” pregnancies than we will ever really know about and a great many more people “living in sin” than was admitted at the time. The fact is that women were afraid of getting pregnant because childbirth could kill you in an age when midwives were poorly informed. The urge to procreate is a powerful thing and resists all the rules that society thinks it can impose. Some sacrificed their own chance of motherhood to their careers as teachers, nurses and carers for other people’ children. How often were these women sneered at and described as “dry old maids”? How many women committed suicide because they were conscious of the shame of being pregnant but unmarried?

It’s very sad to hear that some teenage mothers have been on the receiving end of abusive comments from some older people. Where this has happened I think it has more to do with the suggestion that they are all living off the state rather than ensuring that they can support themselves and their child before becoming mothers. Times are hard and there is a largely unfounded theory that a teenage mother automatically qualifies for free public housing, unlike the many single men who are the ones most in need of this kind of accommodation. How frustrating it must be for a man who has been on the council waiting list for most of his adult life to see a very young pregnant girl “get” the flat that he has waited years for. Undoubtedly, a small number of young women who, having seen others (in some cases their own mothers) benefit from a system that tries to ensure that every child born in the UK has an adequate roof over its head, deliberately become pregnant in order to benefit from it themselves. However I don’t think it’s that easy for all of those concerned.

Someone usually takes in that teenager, even when she is turned out by an outraged father. This is often the mother of the boyfriend who allowed that underage girl to share a bedroom with her son in the first place. This seems to happen so often now that I can’t help feeling that there is a degree of calculation in all this. They are guaranteed at least one grandchild during their lifetime, unlike the parents whose well-educated, well brought up daughters have left them waiting in vain.

I also feel that we are missing the point when it comes to schoolgirl mums. How often does the person who got her pregnant get punished or even criticised? Unless you have been through it yourself it is hard to describe the pressure that the person you believe that you love at that moment can exert when they want sex. You don’t want to lose them and, for a very young woman who has yet to develop the self-confidence that an older woman searching for the right man has, it may seem as though this is your one and only chance for love.

A few months ago I happened to overhear a discussion between two young men that was mostly about girlfriends and parenthood. It was a fascinating insight into the older teenage mind but it revealed an unsettling degree of confusion. They seemed critical of those of their peers who had become parents but their own physical needs and desires were likely to get in the way of common sense when it came to getting what they wanted. The concerns about HIV and AIDs that dominated my teenage years had passed them by. And so the cycle continues.

One of the things that struck me about the radio discussion was the number of callers who had been teenage (and often schoolgirl) mums but had gone on to gain an education, even a Master’s Degree. One young woman had married the father of her child when she was a few weeks away from giving birth to her child. Her husband was now a plumber and although they were still living with the in-laws she was determined to be part of a self-supporting family.

I still believe that it is preferable that parenthood should be put off until those considering it are in a financial position to fund it. I no longer sneer at young women who want to be wives and mothers rather than having a career. Those who become pregnant when they are going through their education should be given the option of continuing it at some stage but I believe that the interests of the child should come first. Mum should be there until they start school but should expect to start supporting herself or re-enter education at this stage. I think fathers should be on the receiving end of more criticism for their part in getting very young girls pregnant – it’s nothing to be proud of that you’re the absent father to several children by different women, especially if you aren’t paying for them.

Above all I believe that children should never be punished as they once were for being the consequence of a moment of weakness. They should be regarded as a very precious resource whatever the circumstances of their conception.

The Laurence Olivier meltdown and other school trips

2009-05-27T15:40:00.003+01:00

The other day I heard the relatively unusual sound of lots of happy children in my street, looked through the window and saw a crocodile of primary school pupils. They were wearing uniforms and some of the girls even had their hair in pigtails.

I remember being on that sort of trip, snaking our way through the streets on our way somewhere. The earliest memory I have of this sort of occasion was a trip to the Natural History Museum. The school was close enough to it for us to be able to walk there. The trouble was that I lived even closer to the museum than I did to the school. So I walked to school and almost back again before we all returned to school. And then I walked home again.

As I grew older my father seemed to be on a mission to turn me into a museum guide and teachers leading the trip sometimes found that I knew as much, if not more, about the place we were visiting than they did. My father had managed to locate and recce the most obscure collections in London long before the school got anywhere near them. If those teachers had me down as a geeky little know-all they hid it well.

I was at secondary school when we went on a trip to Greenwich. We turned up wearing our own clothes as a special treat, all except one boy. The story was that he had forgotten that he didn’t have to wear his uniform but in truth he couldn’t afford the sort of smart fashionable clothes that everyone else was wearing. I always remember him when the issue of school uniform and its abolition comes up. A uniform evens things out.

The onset of O and A levels gave rise to a different class of school trip. I expect theatres were glad to have the guarantee of bums on seats by putting on something from the latest syllabus. The best performance of this kind that we attended was one of “The Winter’s Tale” at the National Theatre with a cast that included Sheila Hancock. We really were transported to the Edwardian countryside, the chosen setting for this version of the play. There was a ripple of nervous laughter when one of the performers, raising a rifle and aiming it somewhere over our heads, caused most of us to duck instinctively.

The worst performance was probably one of “Waiting For Godot”, put on by the students of a drama school. You either love or hate this challenging play but if your first experience of it was the version we attended it can be reasonably assumed that you wouldn’t choose to see it again. They were pretty bad and I think we were the only people there. We sat through most of it but left before the end (how mean is that!). The most entertaining moment had been when the teacher accompanying us, his very long legs folded up before him like those of a large spider in the cramped seating, had begun snoring. His head was tilted back and he really let rip. It was funny but we couldn’t blame him.

I think it was 1980 when those of us studying “Othello” for O level English Literature trooped into a large cinema in Leicester Square. In company with hundreds of students from schools across London we sat down to watch the film of Laurence Olivier in the role of the Moor. He had famously “blacked up” for the stage play, filmed in 1965. He may have been one of the greatest actors this country has ever produced but that didn’t stop him from getting sweaty. It had been strange enough seeing an obviously white man playing someone who was supposed to be black. There were a great many close-ups, showing us things that a theatre audience would never usually see, and the sight of sweat coursing through the dark greasepaint was more than some of us could cope with. We began to giggle. It was contagious.

The schools sitting alongside us looked on disapprovingly at first but even they gave in and eventually waves of laughter swept the auditorium. Teachers and students curled up as Laurence kept it up, his great performance lost on us. I can’t help wondering if it was my lot that set things off but that might not be the case. If you were there and you remember it you may know the truth. I would love to hear from you.

Vote!

2009-05-25T21:54:00.002+01:00

It is European Parliamentary Election time again and this has meant that assorted “election communications” have come through the letterbox. I send in a postal vote which means that I get some advance notice of those who are standing. I am not left lurking at the polling station, faced with a list of people I have never heard of or from, apart from representatives of the main parties.

This year several independent candidates are standing and, thanks to the scandal of MPs’ expenses, they are likely to get more votes that they bargained for when they opted to become involved in the process. The UK’s electorate are in the mood to punish. The three main parties are likely to feel the full force of the average voter’s anger but smaller parties, some of whom have yet to win seats in the UK’s Parliament, are bound to gain from this situation.

The British National Party has made the most of it and their representatives have been heard and seen on the mainstream broadcast media. They usually shun the BNP but the fact that many people are openly stating that they will vote for a party that claims “It’s not racist to oppose mass immigration and political correctness - it‘s common sense!” means that they have to be seen to be fair and give them some air time. There isn’t a single foreign sounding name on their list of candidates, in contrast to the other parties, and their leaflet only features white faces.

It proclaims a “New Battle of Britain” and to this end includes an image of a Spitfire, the aircraft most associated with the desperate hours of World War 2 when Britain faced invasion from the forces of Nazi Germany. Unfortunately for whoever put the leaflet together the actual Spitfire shown has been identified as that flown by Jan Zumbach, a pilot of the Polish Fighter Squadron. Elsewhere the leaflet includes references to other conflicts in which the UK could not have managed without foreign help, namely D-Day (USA) and the Falklands (the Gurkhas and a number of others from Commonwealth countries who chose to join the UK’s armed forces). They also mention the Somme (to this day no one can be sure who really won) and Dunkirk (a major evacuation by the British). They get it right with Trafalgar but that was over two hundred years ago.

Two other parties fielding candidates focus specifically on the European issue. They are either for democracy and against the EU or for democracy and for the EU. Confused? How do you think I feel? I wonder how many members of the Rail, Maritime and Transport Union (RMT) would prefer it if their leader stuck to union politics rather than dipping his toe into the European variety as well.

The Green Party is also likely to gain from current voter unhappiness. They have sent out a jolly and positive leaflet, printed on recycled paper (of course), featuring children from a range of ethnic backgrounds. It is ironic that the party that was most vocal about recycling has succeeded in getting what many regard as junk mail through the door when the Labour Party has not made that effort so far in my area. I suspect that the Conservatives have had to bin and reprint some of their literature as the item I received mentions “Taking a lead in reforming MEPs’ pay and expenses” (I doubt that they were too worried about that issue before the Telegraph began telling tales on those who claimed, or tried to claim, duck islands and moat clearance as legitimate expenses). I wonder how many will misread that as MPs’ expenses.

I’ve made my choice and sent off my ballot paper. I hope it was the right one. I did have doubts about voting at all because I was so angry that people who claimed to represent me thought that it was acceptable to ask tax payers to pay for things that tax payers could not themselves afford. People who risked serious physical or psychological injury and even death to take part in events such as D-Day now cannot afford to pay for heating and food. Yet there are MPs who expect to be refunded for the confectionary they consume in the course of their strenuous duties. In the end I remembered what a friend pointed out to me many years ago, that women died so that I could vote, and I put my cross in what I believe is the right place. Better a wrong choice than no choice at all.

Bear Grylls - woggled not stirred

2009-05-24T21:11:00.002+01:00

I’d forgotten about my brief career as a Girl Guide until I heard the announcement that Bear Grylls, the dashing adventurer of TV fame, had been appointed Chief Scout. It has led to hundreds of enquiries and applications to join the organisation inspired by Robert Baden Powell’s book, “Scouting For Boys”, which was published in 1908. A century after Baden Powell found that boys were as keen to read his books as the men that they were written for Bear Grylls has also found a following amongst the young.

This revived interest in outdoor team activities by children and teenagers is bound to be welcomed by anyone concerned at rising levels of obesity and the emergence of the “cotton wool kid”. Cynical observers may wonder whether the new generation of Scouts may end up sending out for pizza using their mobiles provided by anxious parents as they sit around the campfire. Will they be allowed to light a fire in the first place? Things have changed since Baden Powell’s first expedition to Brownsea Island which was a deliberate attempt to bring together boys from very different backgrounds to teach them self-reliance and citizenship. Today’s Scouts and Guides are led by people who are carefully screened and conscious of potential risks.

Being a Girl Guide really wasn’t my idea but one of the priests at the local Catholic church persuaded my mother that it would be good for me (what the hell did he know about what’s good for prepubescent girls?). I think it had as much to do with the lack of local recruits as my welfare. My mother definitely has a thing about uniforms and realised that this was the one and only chance she would get to see me in one. The sort of organisation that was the equivalent of the Girl Guides in her own country was probably one step away from the Hitler Youth, at least, that’s the impression I am left with. My father had been in the Boys’ Brigade with his brother but I don’t think they had much choice - their father was the local minister.

This was the latest in a long line of things that had been considered good for me and most of them died the death fairly quickly. In spite of this we visited the Guide shop in Buckingham Palace Road where she bought the uniform, complete with really stupid hat which for some reason smelt of mushrooms. I had to put the damned thing on and show it to assorted people before I‘d done much guiding. The skirt was especially hideous because it was almost rigid, made of a really static nylon fabric.

If I had been a team player it would have done a lot for me but I was more interested in books than other people. I couldn’t see the point in gaining badges, I hated the thought of camping and no one ever took the time to teach me the words to Ging Gang Goolie. They just assumed that I knew them. So much for being prepared. When we spent a couple of hours at a retirement home singing songs to the elderly I just sat there opening and closing my mouth at the right moments. I had absolutely no idea that we were going there in the first place. This happened a lot. I would turn up at the right time and we would do as we were told. On one occasion this meant spending an evening pushing leaflets through doors. I assume that this was in return for some sort of sponsorship for our group but even I thought it a strange activity for a Guide.

For some reason we had to turn up at a Mother’s Union event and were kept supplied from the start of the evening with glasses of punch. As most of us were barely into our teens this had quite an effect and we were some of the most enthusiastic people there. I can’t remember anything else about that night which is hardly surprising. Apart from the occasional church parade I think we were at these does to make up numbers.

The military bits where you had to stand in line and salute or whatever were intriguing for a while but it already felt a bit old fashioned at the time. Being told how wonderful I was for being a Guide probably helped to keep me interested but somehow I got out of it in the end without ever having to endure a camping trip. The uniform was given away and I steered clear of that church hall for a very long time.

I don’t want to be too mean about the people who ran the group of Guides that I was involved with because they were kind and gave up many hours of their time to do it. There were fellow Guides for whom it really was an opportunity to get away from a grim home life for an evening or a weekend. I grew up in an area where the obscenely rich often lived alongside the very poor and the group drew members from both.

Looking back at my experience I don’t like the fact that it was tied in so closely with a Catholic church or the mock military rituals. I hope that things in this area have changed or disappeared altogether. I would also like to think that they make room for the child who is less gregarious than the rest. And I’m really glad that the bloody awful uniform has gone.

The words to “Ging Gang Goolie” - learn them and be prepared.
http://www.djmorton.demon.co.uk/scouting/songs/ginggang.htm

Save the Innocent 3

2009-05-23T02:14:00.002+01:00

Richard Reed, Jon Wright and Adam Balon are, depending on your view point, brave or cunning. They are the founders of Innocent Drinks, the company that sells a range of fruit and vegetable products to those who are prepared to pay a premium for smoothies and veg pots made without additives, flavourings and anything else that might worry the concerned consumer.

Ten years ago they risked £500 of their own cash on fruit which they turned into smoothies, sold at a music festival. They did so well that they packed in their day jobs and set up the company. Their positive, ethical approach to business and their charitable efforts have won them a loyal customer base. However this has now been threatened by the decision to allow Coca Cola, a company that has been the target of fierce criticism by human rights, environmental and anti-globalisation activists, to become a minority shareholder in Innocent.

Recently they invited some of their customers along to an AGM where they explained their reasons for taking the decision. They want to expand into Europe and continue their charitable activities at a time when everyone, including potential investors, is tightening their belts. They felt that Coca Cola offered them the best chance of doing this on their own terms.

I watched their responses to the criticism on YouTube (the meeting was recorded) and have to admit that it brought me back down to earth. These men are running a business and they have marketed it so well that many of its customers have forgotten that this is what they are - customers.

The fact that Innocent donates so much to charity does not mean that we can forget that its main aim is to make money. The reality is that in order to be in the position to be so generous it does have to generate a considerable income. If those who feel that Coca Cola’s dealings around the world are so despicable that they taint everything they touch then they must vote with their feet and go squash their own fruit. If they are that concerned about the environment they would be doing this anyway because, lets face it, it does use up petrol and electricity to make and sell all those bottles with the cute smiley faces on them.

I admire Reed, Wright and Balon because they are very, very good at what they do which is marketing. I am also really impressed that they have given away so much that they could have kept for themselves, including the right to run their own business without the interference of whining customers. Inviting them in through the door at Fruit Towers to ask awkward questions could be part of a cynical marketing ploy but if that is the case more fool them for being suckered. An article in The Independent newspaper makes it clear that Innocent’s founders are not that innocent:

“The reality was rather more businesslike even before Coke came on board. Reed, after reading geography at Cambridge, was working at BMP, the advertising agency whose clients include Barclaycard. Wright, an engineering student, had joined Bain, the big US management consultancy – hence his time in California. The third founder, Adam Balon, used his economics degree to secure a job at rival consultancy McKinsey.”
“Slaughter of the Innocent? Or is Coke the real deal?”, Richard Northedge, Sunday 12 April 2009.

Naomi Klein’s “No Logo” (2000) persuaded many that they should be more discerning about their consumer choices and aware of the impact that they can have on working conditions and pay, but I am sure I am not the only one who was impressed by the cleverness of the campaigns run by some companies. The consumer should learn to keep one foot on the floor when he or she falls in love with a brand. Rushing into a love affair without taking precautions is a mistake whatever the context.

By taking Coca Cola’s money Innocent’s bosses have bought themselves an aspidistra and given their dedicated fans a dose of reality. There was a price to be paid for all the fluffiness. I will continue to crochet little hats for their annual Age Concern fundraiser. Viva the Innocent 3.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBvTI-4AHTQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qp7w7ifIhPc
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/analysis-and-features/slaughter-of-the-innocent-or-is-coke-the-real-deal-1667412.html
http://www.killercoke.org/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/4603511.stm

Goodbye Jones

2009-05-22T10:36:00.005+01:00

Jones the cat (a.k.a. Smelly Bear, Thunderpaws, You With The Fur, Jellybelly, Destructotail, Jonesboy, Gingernuts, Mate, Circus Cat, Moggychops, etc. etc.) ran out of lives on the 9th of September 2008. As today would have been the day we regarded as his birthday, the anniversary of the day we brought him home, it seems an appropriate moment to write his obituary.

I had always wanted a cat but The Attached One wasn’t keen. He had grown up with pets and thought them a lot of effort but it was something I had longed to do. Even so I had been concerned that I wouldn’t get it right so put it off for several years until I saw a mug shot of a worried looking ginger cat called Jasper in the local paper. Cats Protection were looking for a home for him. We had established that the longed for cat had to be anything other than black following an unfortunate mix up involving two of this particular colour. Jasper needed a home with a garden but no children and, as he was anxious, he could not be left alone for long periods of time so someone who worked part time was essential.

The mug shot was shown to The Attached One. I made the phone call. We had a home visit to make sure that we weren’t making fur coats from local moggies and then the moment came. Armed with a larger than average pet carrier (we had been warned about his size) we set off for the cat hostel. We found ourselves in a terrace and, behind the door of a small house, around twenty cats.

When we first saw him he was stretched out on a bench, listless and bored. We were told that he was quite territorial so the shelter was his idea of hell. He had turned up on the doorstep, about a year old and an obvious stray. Twelve months later, unclaimed but housetrained, it was felt that he was ready to move on. He was paler than I though he would be, a creamy sandy colour rather than a marmalade cat. The lady who owned the shelter clearly wanted to make sure that we were the right kind of people and we spent some time getting to know the other tenants but Jasper ignored us until we tried to get him into the carrier. This achieved we said our goodbyes to the shelter owner (she was a little tearful by this stage), got Jasper into the car and The Attached One drove off.

We began to wonder if we were making a mistake. He miaowed loudly and desperately all the way home and when he wasn’t doing that he huffed. We came to know that this was his way of expressing irritation but at the time we were really worried. The Attached One’s knuckles were white for most of the journey as he clutched the steering wheel and tried to ignore all the noise. Once through the front door we explained that he was now called Jones, after the cat in the film “Alien”. Why does every ginger car need to be named after Jasper Carrot?

He worried for two days but I knew things were going to be fine when he began to wash. He had established that he had the house, and us, all to himself. When he insisted on getting into bed with us (so much for the “no pets on the bed” rule: Cats 1 - Humans 0) and let out a deep and contented purr The Attached One said “Well, we must be getting something right.” It didn’t take us long to realise that Jones was quite a special cat. He had a distinct personality, an unusual paw waggling habit and a real need to flump onto our feet. There were now three people in our household.

He had absolutely no difficulty in letting us know what he wanted. I had been out for the evening and when I got back the Attached One said that Jones had cornered him and subjected him to a long rambling miaowed conversation. He had made the right noises when he could get a word in. Jones had clearly wanted to know where I‘d gone. After that there was no stopping him, all you had to do to keep him going was to talk back. Or miaow back. “How do you know what he’s saying?” asked a bemused visitor following one exchange. “I just spend far too much time alone with him…”

And the fact was that I did spend a lot of time with him. Jones came along at the moment when agoraphobia and anxiety were beginning to take a firm and disabling hold on me. For the best part of two years I barely left the house and, until The Attached One came home at night, he was the only one I could talk to. He probably stopped me from going under completely by insisting on tummy rubbing sessions, nagging me for biscuits and providing me with an endless supply of (mostly) live critters that he had found in the garden. This became his territory, guarded fiercely from intruders. His first trophy was a frog. He was really excited and tried to tell me about it but it’s hard to talk with your mouth full of live amphibian. He longed to catch a bird but as far as I know never managed it. He had to make do with swearing at them through a window. “Akakak, huff huff.” He really had it in for pigeons.

Jones remained quite nervous of other people although he did have long chats with our elderly neighbours. At home he ruled the roost, adopting any fleeces and corners that he took a fancy to and largely ignoring the pet beds that we bought him. The Attached One’s desk chair was a favourite even if it was already occupied. I think he felt that if it smelt of us it was probably good, so the bed remained unmade for days and we compromised by flipping the duvet over the footboard to create a Jones cave. For a while he went through a “sleeping on heads” phase - he tried to be fair and share this honour by sleeping on one head and draping his smoke ringed tail across the neighbouring face. He was usually purring when he did this so our heads would be vibrating into the bargain. I spent a great many Sunday mornings curled up with Jones. “You must have been having some strange dreams” said The Attached One. “He was stroking your face with the side of his paw while you were asleep.”

He had found that careful, strategic turning, as well as bracing his legs against The Attached One’s back, would get him more room in bed. He would do this to the point where The Attached One fell out or came close to it. Sunday mornings usually began with his entering the bedroom, tail raised and the tip turned forward like an umbrella handle. It was all we could see of him as he walked around the bed. There would be a scuffling sound as he jumped onto the bedside table and then onto the windowsill where he would sit behind the curtain, his dangling tail flicking and twitching. Security concerns addressed he would then jump from the windowsill onto the bed, usually landing on The Attached One’s delicate bits. This could have quite a dramatic effect, especially if he carried out this manoeuvre at 4am. We came to the conclusion that he sometimes did this on purpose, just to remind us that he was there. If he got it just right The Attached One would even shout out loud.

There were a few things that the Cats Protection lady didn’t warn us about. One evening Jones had been sitting between us on the sofa for quite a while when he suddenly got up and left the room in a hurry. Within a few seconds we realised why. He had released a weapons grade fart. As we rushed to open windows and fan the door we wondered whether we should contact the Ministry of Defence and reveal our weapon of mass destruction. I could picture the scene. A British officer (with a clothes peg on his nose) holding Jones up to the enemy, stripy tail swishing gently from side to side, paws waggling lazily. Afghanistan? No problem. Iraq? Sorted. One sniff would lead to immediate surrender and a plea for gas masks. That boy’s farts were something else.

One night I thought I could hear someone carrying out late night DIY a few doors away. The droning was still going on as I turned off the television and I was a bit surprised to find that it was getting louder as I went up stairs. By the time I got to the bedroom the sound was truly awful and really loud. Jones and The Attached One were fast asleep but snoring. I don’t know how they didn’t wake each other up. Small quick cat snores combined with big slow human ones made a sound not unlike a drill. The neighbours must have been able to hear it through the wall. We found that we could often locate Jones by his snores.

And the fur, he must have shed mountains of it over the years. It turned up everywhere. For a time The Attached One was a warehouse supervisor and he was convinced that it was distributed far and wide, clinging to the polythene bags of clothing that he sent around the country. I found it on the windows I was trying to clean at work. It wove itself into the things I stitched, quilted and crocheted. It drifted onto The Attached One’s carefully painted models just as the paint began to dry. I stopped wearing so much black and resigned myself to the fact that fur probably represented at least 1% of what I was eating. However we would put up with it all over again just to have him back.

It was a shock to be told that he had a health problem because he seemed so fit and healthy. The vet had found a lump during a regular check up and prescribed medication for hyperthyroidism. He was optimistic about it but we knew that Jones would not be with us for much longer. For months we fed him pills and these brought him back from the brink more than once but they were not enough to stop him from slowing down. Over the months he became a dreamy little old man, still climbing into bed with us and lying back with his paws hooked over the edge of the duvet, still sanding my face down when he could reach it, but doing it all much more slowly. We gave him all the treats he wanted and let him sleep where he chose to, including the cool enamel bath in hot weather. We left the lawn uncut so that he could make Jones nests. On the day before he died I took him outside for an hour or so and he wandered about in the sunshine, surrounded by all the familiar noises of suburbia, birdsong, distant traffic, the sounds of everyday life. For a while he was his old confident self, dislodging a cricket from his back with a casual flick, and together we watched the insects and grass swaying in the breeze.

Two days after he died a rubber duck appeared in the middle of the lawn. The local foxes had probably left it there but it was a very Jones thing to have happened. It made us laugh.

We miss him so much. The house is too quiet without him. He was a one off, irreplaceable, and although we know that there are many cats out there looking for a home we can’t help feeling that it would be a betrayal to just slot another cat into his place. So, on his birthday, we want to say thanks mate for nine and a half years of love and friendship. You will always be our boy.

So long, and thanks for all the fleas, farts, shrews, mice, slow worms, frogs, fur…

Jones the cat, 1996ish to 2008.

“The Galloping Cat” by Stevie Smith
http://www.fp.ucalgary.ca/jwhamilt/Smith%20Galloping%20Cat.htm