What I have to say ...

Past, Present Future: the Best Is Yet To Be????

Sat, 24 Jul 2010 10:26:26 +0100

My birthday was last week. I am 68.
I've been thinking off and on last week about getting to this point. The point itself is satisfactory. I'd make few changes in the present: have my children live in the same city I do and have a couple of finished novels published rather than sitting in the back of my computer. One might happen, the other probably not.
I'd also like to lose thirty pounds and have the arthritis under control, but those are less matters of wishing than doing. More exercise plus fewer calories would work well enough.
The present is not at all what I expected. My earliest day dreams about the future involved having a house a mile long and a mile wide with furniture filled with air that floated up the ceiling and had ropes attached to pull it down. It made vacuuming very simple.
When I was eighteen, I wanted to travel and read many books. I also wanted to write them, but, at the time, thought writers were different kinds of people - not like me. I thought the same thing about university people. Universities were shining beacons on a hill, full of the wise who were only interested in expanding human knowledge. A PhD was a medal of honor. I was wrong on all counts.
I was much nicer at eighteen than I am at sixty eight. I did travel and read a lot of books, and both were/are as satisfactory as I expected. Universities, on the other hand, are not very pleasant places to work. PhD's show a basic level of intelligence and the willingness to jump through hoops. University lecturers are like people in insurance companies; some, very nice, honest, fascinated by what they do. They'd work in their field without a salary. Others are pompous prats.
When I was twenty-eight, I was teaching in special education, working with the hearing impaired at Montreal Oral School for the Deaf. This is without a doubt the best place I've ever worked. Staff respected each other and respected their students. My ex-husband insisted on moving to Calgary. If I'd stayed in Montreal, I would probably have retired from MOSD with a good pension.
I remember visiting my older half-sister while I was teaching at MOSD. I talked on and on about the job and how much I liked what I was doing. She said, "It's good you like the work since it's low status and low pay."
I was hurt and surprised. Typically lower middle class, I thought teaching was a high status occupation. (The children of the lower middle class disproportionately enter the teaching and security professions; i.e., we become cops and primary school teachers.) My older half sister was/is a mathematician; her class of origin was a little different than mine.
At thirty-eight, I was doing field work in Pakistan. Children and new husband came with... It influenced the children. My daughter majored in comparative lit, specializing in Hindi, at the University of California at Berkeley. My son is an anthropologist who has done field work in Pakistan.
I did my fieldwork in Lahore. Lahore has been called the "Paris of the East". Like Paris, it's a beautiful city and a center of writing, art, dance... It's got some good universities. The subsequent years have not been good to Lahore or Pakistan.
I remember talking to a friend about Iran. "Nothing like Iran could ever happen here," he said. "For us, maulvis are like servants, people that work in the mosque. Nobody does what they say."
He was wrong. And he was right. Pakistan didn't get the Ayatollas; it got the Wahabis from Saudi and that's probably worse. In elections, Pakistanis have never voted in double digits for a religious party. They are not religious fanatics. I would never describe it as a tolerant society, but it always was a rational one, with more pragmatic tolerance than could be expected from rhetoric.
We worked in a lower income, new community on the outskirts of Lahore. A house in one block had prostitutes. The general attitude was that these women had to support their children, what else could they do? (Very true - ways of earning money for women are limited. There's professional jobs - doctor, lawyer - and the segregation of the sexes opens a lot of these up for women. Then there are factory jobs or working as a servant. A girl might work in a factory a few years before marriage to save up for her dowery - it's not a living wage.)
The community dealt with the house of prostitution by discussion. The women asked their clients to come and leave more quietly, to disrupt the neighborhood less.
I was living in Canterbury when I was forty eight. My husband had a permanent job at the University of Kent. We were lucky: one of the two of us had a real job. I picked hops, picked potatoes (worst job I ever had) worked typing in an insurance company and ended up taking one, two and three year research and teaching appointments at different universities in England. I fell in love with Manchester and the Northwest.
At some point around this time, I went to an American Anthropological Association meeting. I met an old friend there. Now she had two Fulbright Hayes Dissertation Abroad awards. (I only had one.) She went from university to university, one year appointments, saving every cent, coming to the AAA meetings to get another one year appointment. Such appointments do not pay moving expenses. Everything she owned would go in the back of an old car, and she'd drive to the next job. (A temp is a temp; type or teach, doesn't matter. Now this really is low status, low pay work.)
She was staying in the local YWCA to save money. We had the special slice of pizza plus salad $3.99 special. She wrapped the pizza in the paper napkin and put it in her purse for dinner.
We caught up on what happened to our cohort. My husband was the only one with a permanent, tenured position. The rest were doing what she was - one year appointments, going from job to job. There are two things to remember here: She was very well qualified, with publications, teaching experience and some prestigious grants in the background. Second, these one year appointments were not simply to replace someone doing fieldwork. In general, there was a long term need for another teacher. Getting lecturers as temps was much cheaper than hiring a new member of staff.
That's when I decided universities were no better as employers than insurance companies.
At fifty-eight, I was considering early retirement. I was tired of going from university to university, doing the academic equivalent of filing in my teaching. I like teaching, but a different topic every year is hard work and makes getting a publication record difficult. Looking back, I explored a lot more areas of anthropology than I would have. I wrote some papers I'm proud of. I never turned out something just for the CV. It was an interesting experience. Most of the time, it was also pleasant and fun.
I still think, in teaching anthropology, that what I did was valuable. I introduced students to another way of understanding themselves and the world around them. Almost none of them became professional anthropologists, but their minds were better furnished. That, rather than career development, is the purpose of a university education.
I'd always wanted to write fiction. It seemed about time to do so. So that's what I'm doing at sixty-eight.
The Future: it's depressing. It's not depressing for personal reasons. My son and son-in-law have reasonably secure jobs. My grandchildren are clever and will be all right. It's very unlikely that any of us will be sleeping under a bridge living out of a stolen grocery shopping cart. (Not impossible, but unlikely.)
It's really not good enough to live a personally pleasant life in a world where there are large numbers of desperate people living very unpleasant lives. Poets express it better than social scientists: "No man is an island..."
To sum up: the present is pleasant, the past was interesting and the future appears dreadful.
It will, dreadful or not, be an interesting next ten years. But I'd much rather say "Oh silly me, to be so wrong," than "I told you so."
Do ostriches really hide their heads in the sand? Metaphorically, it sounds reasonable - they look across the plains with their high necks and see unavoidable disaster coming. Hide from it. Denial. Giraffes, with equally far vision, flee. It's probably better to imitate the giraffe even though a panic stricken giraffe might break a leg. On the other hand, what if the ostrich really is right and whatever is coming is unavoidable?
I talked to a friend a few days ago. Like me, a political junkie, addicted to assorted liberal causes. She confessed since the Con-Dems came into office she couldn’t bear to watch the news. I feel the same way. Jon Snow has been abandoned and I ignore most of the Guardian.
I much prefer happy endings, and shall now retire to read and write fiction.

A Fruit Filled Week, of Varying Fruitfulness

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 06:22:51 +0100

We had pound after pound of cherries this week, all picked from the tree in the back garden. It was supposed to be a dwarf cherry, but isn't. We always have beautiful blossoms, and occasionally cherries. The birds get them all. But this year the birds arrived late, after the tree was full of ripe cherries, and we picked the lower branches. The birds took those in the upper branches - quite reasonable sharing, I think. I have no intention of climbing trees to pick anything. They're eating cherries, not cooking cherries. I gave about half away and tried a couple of recipes - one for cherry muffins. Boring at best. Then one for a cherry crumble, and that was good. My basic crumble mix:
Rub together:
1 cup flour
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup soft butter
Add:
1/2 cup finely chopped walnuts.

Boil the fruit (cherries, in this case) with sugar, about a tablespoon of cornflour, some water - enough to cover the bottom of the pan. Let it come to a boil then simmer until it thickens. Put in ramekins, or a small deep casserole dish. Sprinkle on the crumble mix and bake at about 350F until the crumble topping is light brown.
I pitted four cups of cherries for the first crumble. Then, I had some peaches in the fridge and peeled and sliced those. I didn't bother boiling them, just tossed with mix of sugar and a tablespoon of cornflour. That made two individual sized peach crumbles.
Today, I worked a couple of hours on the allotment and picked red currents. Red currents are tedious to pick and prepare. Tiny berries on an arching stem: pick the stem, then continue picking at home. The birds usually take the red currents as well; this year, they took the top branches but the lower branches are untouched. I got a couple of cups and made another crumble. There are a lot of red currents left to pick. One year, I made jelly. It was beautiful, clear ruby red, shimmering in the jars, and tasted very good.
The raspberries are ready to be picked. I hate picking raspberries and gooseberries thorns. The gooseberry thorns are especially vicious. There are white currents to pick as well - the birds don't want them. They don't like black currents, either. Birds are actually a pretty good indicator of what's tasty.
The courgettes are doing well. The tomatoes plants are full of green tomatoes. pumpkins are small green globes at this point. The onions did miserable. I've turned over a couple of potato plants and they seem small.
Two things on the allotment have done very well: weeds and roses.
I haven't noticed a lot of slug damage - it's been strange weather. A very hot spell, then a very cold spell, with temperature below freezing for several weeks. Then very hot again, and no rain. I had trouble digging with a spade, it was such hard ground, dry to a spade's depth. Then it rained. Very hard rain for several days, and the ground was good to dig and the weeks thrived.
Another kind of crop matured as well. It's university graduation. My husband has gone to Canterbury Cathedral in full academic robes to see his students graduate. One of his students got her PhD Thursday night and there was a dinner at a local Greek restaurant afterwards. I was invited. Her family came over from Greece and her best friends were there. Our group took up one wall. Another group, of Italians, took up the opposite wall. The owner/cook was in and out; he knew the student well. We ended up dancing, just like Zorba the Greek, and the Italians and Greeks combined. Mediterranean peoples know how to have a party. His Greek student had another party Friday night, a barbeque, and there was belly dancing.
My friend Christine went to Norwich to her her son's graduation. She said the ceremony wasn't as impressive as Kent's - they use the auditorium; it's hard to beat the class of a thousand year old cathedral as the location for handing out degrees. But it was more fun. A crowd of Ghanians had come to watch their boy graduate. Afterwards, they danced on the lawn with ulalations and cheering.
Another academic year ends. Last year, two good friends retired. This year, one. I don't know very many people in the Department at Kent anymore.
Allotments and universities have a lot in common. There's a rhythm to both; something appropriate for each season.

1 To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
2 A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
3 A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
4 A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
5 A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
6A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
7A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
8A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.
(Ecclesiastes 3: 1 - 8 - King James Version of the Bible)
I'd heard those eight verses of Ecclesiastes, of course - like every one else. Today I looked it up and read the whole thing - this is a very pessimistic bit of the Bible. Let's read a bit further:

16 And moreover I saw under the sun the place of judgment, that wickedness was there; and the place of righteousness, that iniquity was there.
17 I said in mine heart, God shall judge the righteous and the wicked: for there is a time there for every purpose and for every work.
18 I said in mine heart concerning the estate of the sons of men, that God might manifest them, and that they might see that they themselves are beasts.
19 For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no preeminence above a beast: for all is vanity.
20 All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again.
21 Who knoweth the spirit of man that goeth upward, and the spirit of the beast that goeth downward to the earth?
22 Wherefore I perceive that there is nothing better, than that a man should rejoice in his own works; for that is his portion: for who shall bring him to see what shall be after him?
(Ecclesiastes 3: 16 - 22; King James Version of the Bible)
If I looked at an exegesis, I'm sure I can find a Biblical commentator that puts a spin on this - a nice, happy clappy understanding that emphasizes that the Works of God endure (part of verses 9 - 15 that I didn't copy) and that ignore the question mark after verse 21.
One can cherry pick the Bible and ignore the pits as one does so. One can proceed with a nifty plastic gadget, very cheap, which I bought in California that pits both cherries and olives. One can ignore the distinction between cherries for eating and cherries for cooking and make cherry muffins. One can ignore the odd remaining pit, as long as it does not break a tooth. Frankly, I think that an unbiased, full reading of Chapter Three of Ecclesiastes leads one to conclude "we're screwed." Sort of gather ye cherries while ye may for the birds are soon a'comin'.
There's a pleasant little riddle: What words bring despair at times of joy, joy at times of despair?
This too shall pass.
Enough of the pessimism of an ancient Hebrew poet. Today, I'm going to enjoy my crumbles and the long days full of light. There's another Biblical quote:
"Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. " ~Matthew 6:34
I rather cherry-picked this; the concluding sentence of the verse: "Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof."

Summer holidays...

Sun, 11 Jul 2010 07:47:49 +0100

My husband and I went to Saarbrucken, Germany; he went for a conference, I went for touristing and shopping. Both were excellent. He said the conference was fun, an adjective he's never before used to describe an academic conference, and I liked the town and Villeroy & Boch, who have a factory outlet nearby.
We took the ferry to Dunkirque and drove to Saarbrucken, on the border with France. The ferry was surprisingly empty - this the height of the tourist season. The hotel had a number of empty rooms. Saarbrucken was steel and iron and coal, high industry; now all bought from abroad, cheaper. It's trying to reposition itself as a tourist destination. The "state" of Saar is 63% forest, hilly and the part that's not trees is full of grazing sheep and cattle. I don't know how good it would be for winter trips, but in the summer there's hiking and walking and sitting around eating ice cream. I like the local cuisine - good beer, lager, sausages and potatoes in addition to excellent ice cream. The French influence adds pastries and breads. There's a good university and a couple of Max Planck research institutes.
It's Germany, and things are done well. The signs on the motorway, for example, are clear and easy to follow without speaking German. The motorway signs are the best I've ever seen. (Belgian ones, in contrast, are the worst. They are confusing and they lie. See a sign saying petrol is available; gratefully exit, with the car fuel gage quivering just above empty, and discover that there used to be a petrol station but it closed a long time ago.)
Things well-done: the windows in our room impressed me and I've tried several times in emails to describe them. The room wasn't air conditioned - and it was 95 degrees. But it was comfortable. It was a huge room, with with windows on two walls, allowing cross ventelation plus a door that opened onto a balcony. The windows were almost the width and depth of the room; six wood framed windows, and three opened. There were three settings. I could open the window from the top, open it full to the side or lock it. It was a very clever, well engineered design for a world without air conditioning.
I speak a little German, the result of two years German classes at university over forty years ago. I can ask basic questions, especially if I have time to rehearse them in my mind, but have great trouble in understanding the answers. Someone with the same basic skills in English that I have in German can have satisfactory linguistic interactions; that plus pantomime leaves us both feeling like fine skilled second language users. But my German is essentially useful for the subtext: i.e., I'm a poor witless foreigner in your country and I know I should use your language and I'm very sorry I can't. But Germans (and, really, just about everybody else) are patient. This came in very handy in Saarbrucken.
They did not speak English in the hotel. An elderly man had about as much English as I had German, but we got on fine. When we first came, it was the middle of the night. We followed the signs and GPS. There was forest. (There is forest most places in Saarbrucken.) The GPS told us we were there. We saw nothing but trees. We pulled over and my husband handed me the cell phone. I, after all, was the "German speaker".
In a mixture of German and English, I talked to the old man. He kept saying it was midnight and the doors closed at midnight. I kept saying we are lost. Finally, he said, "You have a GPS?"
"Yes," I said.
"Use it." He hung up.
We tried. We rounded the curve we had stopped before and there, in the middle of the trees, was our hotel and half a dozen other places. The old man was standing in front of the hotel waiting for us. It was five minutes after midnight and he had not yet locked us out.
The next morning we went downstairs. I had seen a bus stop outside the hotel and intended to use public transportation. Husband, too, was going to catch the bus to the university, about 3/4 of a mile away. I was going into town.
There was much conferring at the reception desk when I told them our plans. They were afraid I'd never find my way back. So the receptionist gave me a card advertising the hotel and wrote the number of the bus and where to catch it on a sheet of paper.
I got off at the university, saw where my husband's conference was held, then went to catch a bus to the center of town. I asked the first bus driver if he went to the town center. He thought a minute, nodded yes. We drove through the 'bad' part of town - at least, it looked poor. My fellow passengers were dark. (Pretty good indications of the 'bad part of town'; of course, in places where people don't use public transport, you can ignore skin shades and simply assume anyone on a bus is poor.)
The bus came to its final destination, and it didn't look like any city center I'd seen. It was full of kebab shops, second hand stores and very dark people. I got off. The bus driver motioned, telling me to get on the tram next to the bus. So I caught the tram and found a more city center-ish place.
I had a banana split for lunch and wandered around. I bought a pair of navy linen trousers on sale and a rust coloured blouse to go with it - liked it well enough I bought it even though it wasn't on sale. In Germany, like France and Belgium, there is a more full range of sizes. In England, they cut off at size 16. Anything larger, go to the fat people's shop and buy fat people's clothes. Not the case on the continent: the standard sizes on the racks go up to 20, a US size 18. It is much more satisfying to shop; you not only find nicer stuff you don't go home terminally depressed as a dumpy grandmother sort that ought to be swept in a corner with the rest of the rubbish.
We took two days to drive back to Dunkerque and stopped at Villeroy & Boch's factory outlet, a few miles from Saarbrucken. Now this is a factory town - actually, a factory street. There were places to eat plus factory outlets, most with something from Villeroy and Boch. The actual factory outlet had prices about 30% less than retail. Still, if I'd tripped and knocked over a table, a year's salary would be lost. But there was a room with discontinued lines... I bought some glasses and jam jars and neat ceramic dish for cooking things in the oven with its own stainless steel trivet. There was a V & B museum at the end of the town. There were rooms showing proper table settings from about 1840 on. One was a wedding breakfast, with life size statues of people around a long table, looking very jolly. There were picnics and a 1970's dinner party and a typical farm kitchen. There was a desk with a coffee cup on it. A final large room had samples of ceramics made by V & B. One involved a tea pot, cup and saucer, that looked as if they were in a high wind, sloping backwards. Art met Craft.
Villeroy and Boch is like Wedgewood, in England. Both started in the 1790's, both based on Chinese techniques to produce ceramics; expensive, beautifully made, art and craft objects that were part of the English industrial revolution. Recently, a large US firm took over Wedgewood. I bought a dinner service for six I absolutely did not need - 70% off. I bought it as much because of respect for Wedgewood and what it implied as anything else.
I come back from the holiday feeling rather sad. There is so much that Europe has produced, so much art, craft, even modifying raw materials into things like steel. It seems to me to be disappearing. We've come to rely on tourism and financial services; people can't afford to go on holidays. They probably actually can afford it, today, a lot of them, but they're anxious about the future. Will they have a job in six months? Better to stay home, save the money to cover the mortgage if the worst happens.
Everyone but bankers seems to be accepting a much lower standard of living along with much greater pessimism about the future. Financial services? They brought about the economic crash; the tax payer bailed them out. A trillion pounds, it cost. After the bail out, they're doing very well, with the same practices that required the bail out in the first place. The government tells us that any regulations, any attempt to make them pay a fair share of taxes (that is, the same kind of tax rate as that applied to anyone else) will cause them to leave - desert the country. I don't think we can afford them - let them go.
Empires come and Empires go. The Romans, in terms of influence and longevity, beat the Brits and Americans for efficient empire building and maintenance. I don't want an empire, but I do regret that so much of value seems to be disappearing from the Europe I know. The best of what I've seen in the US as well as Europe seems to be diminishing while the worst is coming to dominate.

Work and Retirement, Tory Style

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 22:47:08 +0100

One of the proposals to get control the UK deficit involves pensions: the age at which the full pension can be collected will be 67, and perhaps later, workers' pension contributions will increase; there will be no automatic age of retirement.
We can't afford pensions as they are, they say, and we all have to make sacrifices.
Let's remember the past for a moment:
(a) The Government, when pension receipts were in excess of pensions collected, put any unspent pension money into the government pot.
(b) In the early nineties, when the pension pot exceeded outgo, the Government gave employers (not employees) a holiday from paying employers' share of the payments.
So Government actions have something to do with the current shortfall.
Next point: retiring at 67. The Government says we all live longer. True, but some live a lot longer, and are in better shape, than others. Hard work is not good for the body. You don't live as long and you have a more painful old age. Working in a construction job at the age of 60 is not at all the same as working as a solicitor. Then there's the length of working life. People in lower paid jobs often start work at the age of 16. Professionals may not begin working life until their mid-twenties.
There's always been this kind of contrast in working life. The working class work longer, work harder, and make less money than professionals. At last they could see an end to it. No longer.
No automatic age of retirement: so there's not a natural stopping place, when the Company can give you your carriage clock and you can look forward to time in the garden or watching afternoon soaps. The Company may still want to get rid of you, but you can't afford to quit. So you continue working. It's not really a matter of choice.
There are new demands in terms of benefits and work. The hardworking working class will no longer see their lazy unemployed neighbors sleeping until noon and spending the day watching tellie. Those in work may feel this resentment until they lose their jobs. Then they'll discover that five people apply for every job available. It is going to get a lot worse. Planned cuts will be translated into lost jobs - more unemployed seeking fewer jobs.
That includes mothers. New requirements oblige a woman to seek work when her youngest child is five years old. There are no accompanying provisions for affordable or free child care. So we have five year old latch-key kids, taking care of themselves or in the care of a ten year old brother: feral children, and it's not their fault.
Seventy-seven percent, according to news reports, comes from cuts in benefits or to public employees. That doesn't sound like sharing the pain to me.
The Con-Dems are gambling that the private sector will employ the people losing jobs due to their cuts. They won't. Losing public sector jobs means losing consumer spending which impacts on the private sector. I think unemployment is a far greater danger than the deficit.
If the deficit is as dangerous as they claim, raise taxes to pay for it. It is more fair to take more money from those in work than those without work. Introduce a new tax rate of 60% on income over £350,000. Tax the banks and the financial services that caused the crash. Capital gains tax was raised to 28%. Why not simply deal with it as income and require all income to be declared and taxed at the appropriate rate?
This Government began with dishonesty. Dishonesty during the campaign, when Gordon Brown was blamed for the condition of the British economy - he had his faults, but the economic conditions in the UK were the result of a world wide crash. Then, the LibDem appeal: vote for us and keep the Tory out. Now the claim that their plans will not lead to greatly increased unemployment, that the private sector will take on new employees. And the biggest lie of all: they will protect the most vulnerable.
I don't know who will win the next election. I can bet on the Big Losers, though. Why vote Liberal Democrat if you like these policies? Just vote Conservative. They won't get any Labour voters supporting a LibDem candidate to keep out the Tory. The left of the LibDems, the voting party members rather than the politicians, will stay at home or vote another party.

Public v Private Selves

Fri, 18 Jun 2010 10:30:12 +0100

A couple of friends and I were discussing the Labour leadership fight. Diane Abbot came up. Diane is a Labour MP, on the left wing of the party. She's black and represents and lives in a Labour run, poor district in London. She sent her son to a private school rather than using the local state run schools.
The Labour left opposes private education; Labour, what ever the wing, considers state run schools a way of leveling the playing field between the elite and the non-elite, offering equal opportunity. Abbot is open to attack: If the schools in the area your party controls aren't good enough for your son, why should we trust you to run the schools for our children?
One friend, who is opposed to private fee paying schools, said she couldn't blame Abbot. A black single parent living in a poor part of London would not want her son exposed to the gang and drug culture that are part of the educational experience of young black males in some parts of London. Abbot had a responsibility to do what was best for her son and that was more important than making a political statement or maintaining political consistency.
Other Labour MPs, including ex-Cabinet members, send their children to private schools. Others, including Blair, send their children to selective state schools - good academic standards, hard to get in, predominately middle-class children. Sometimes, in avoiding the local school, they jump queues to do so. But Abbot is one of two candidates on the left wing of the Party and is more susceptible to such an attack than a New Labour candidate.
In thinking of US politics, I remember Ted Kennedy. He consistently worked for the powerless; supporting causes that were unpopular, year in, year out. In his personal life, he appeared to be rather hedonistic; too much food, alcohol, women. He supported his family right or wrong, most notably in the trial of his nephew accused of rape. I wouldn't want my daughter to marry Ted Kennedy, but I'd vote for him any day of the week. The United States was a better place because he was in the Senate.
A few day ago, the results of an investigation into the Social Services here was televised.
A nine year old girl disappeared. Her mother was on welfare, with seven children by four different fathers. Police and volunteers looked everywhere for the child. Her mother, swollen red eyes, supported by the neighbors, made the usual appeals. There was a large demonstration, demanding the authorities find the child. Then the child was found, in a boarding house, in the room of a male relative, hiding under the bed. Mother and Male Relative had a plan: not a good plan. The child would be found wandering in a local market, tell a tale of being abducted and male relative would collect the reward on offer for the return of the child.
The mother was tried and sentenced to eight years in prison; the male relative got two. The children were taken into care. A commission was convened: lessons to be learned, social workers to be blamed.
So I watched the results of the commission. The journalists were looking for blood; social worker blood.
First objection: only the summary, a long summary, of the commission's reports were distributed. They wanted it all.
Social worker response: Children's privacy needs to be protected. There's a great deal in the report that involves the seven children and there is no public interest argument in making this material available to everyone.
Second objection: Why didn't social services predict this would happen?
Response: This is the first time this has ever happened. It may well be the last. How could we predict it?
Third objection: Why weren't the children taken into care much earlier? It was discussed at social worker meetings. The family has been involved with social services from very early on. The journalist asking the question quoted the report, and I paraphrase: The mother is more concerned with her relationships with the men in her life and put her own self interest above the interests of her children.
Response, from the independent convener of the commission: The mother felt affection for her children; the children felt affection for their mother. Social work involvement and concern centered on things like children being inadequately supervised, dirty, poor nutrition. These do not justify taking children from their homes.
Journalist; But it was discussed, taking them into care.
Response: Social worker meetings discuss a range of possibilities. Everyone at this meeting agreed that taking the children into care was not necessary.
Overall the press interview, there was the general journalist demand, spoken and unspoken, to name, shame, blame and probably fire a social worker.
Social workers hung tough: No way. It was not our fault.
Back to the topic heading, private v professional selves.
The social workers were very professional - short answers, social work speak. The journalists were, themselves, very professional: hectoring and aggressive. Both parties played their roles in this.
I imagine the personal reaction of one of the social workers: Oh for heavens sake. This is a feckless, rather stupid woman. She's unhappy and thinks a True Love will fix it - for her and her kids. She's desperate for money - the State's not very generous in its support. But she loves her kids and her kids love her. Do you really think taking the kids into care, to be shifted every couple of years, with some good foster parents, some bad, is in their interest? The State does not have a very record as an absentee parent...
Such a response would have been a public relations disaster. Much better to put on the public face and give as few hostages to the enemy as possible.
Now the BP business. If Tony what’s-his-name had cried over a pelican and pressed the flesh of a shrimp fisherman and said I feel your pain, would he have come off better? Maybe. Americans are a lot less reserved in the public selves than Brits. Or maybe not. Despite a great deal of evidence to the contrary, Americans are not more stupid than the rest of the world. Crocodile tears are a concept the citizens of the US understand, too.
But British reserve does not play well in the American media, especially tv.
In appearing before at a Congressional hearing, he came across as unwilling to answer the questions. That was probably the case rather than any cultural differences in public v private selves.
Here, there's an objection to the US, especially Obama, and its use of British Petroleum rather than BP. Brit blaming, they see it as. There are frequent references to all those poor American and British pensioners who will be badly affected if BP share prices go down.
Somehow, in the US, Obama was expected to do more. When he did do more, insist BP have an independently administered fund to clean up the oil spill and pay damages to those affected, PLUS not give out dividends this year, since the damages are apparently open ended spatially and temporally, he's attacked as 'socialist'. He's also criticized for a moratorium on off shore drilling while new safety measures are put into place and for insisting the US consider its reliance on oil.
The public position of politicians involves symbolic manipulation of language, the words used to describe events. You make speeches. You offer sound bites. You spin. If you're a social worker or engineer, you're dealing with an actual configuration of events and people and contexts. Words won't fix it. Words can increase the damage.
During the campaign, Obama pointed out that inflating tires to the proper pressure would save more oil than a proposed Alaskan offshore drill would produce. He was laughed at. NASCAR said of course Obama was right. Jimmy Carter lowered the speed limit to 55 miles an hour and saved both oil and lives.
Lovelock, Gaia proponent, says that catastrophe in terms of global warming is inevitable. People are too stupid to deal with the consequences. I think part of this involves our great adaptation as a species: forget opposable thumbs for the moment; we got language, symbolic manipulation of real events, we can LIE!!! We can have public and private selves.
Even when we don't lie, actively, we can persuade ourselves that what we want is the case. The Con-Dem Alliance has announced cuts this morning to assorted schemes to guarantee employment. Thatcher all over - trash manufacturing and assume the financial services will take up the slack. With Thatcher, what took up the slack and paid for all those unemployed was North Sea oil. Income from the oil, as well as the oil, was wasted.
Cameron argues that the private sector will take up the slack, hire all those public sector employees he's causing to be fired. (I know I've droned on and on about this: it's important, damn it, it's considerably increasing human misery as well as destroying the economy.) Cameron is also opposing EU attempts to regulate the financial services. Thatcher looms yet again. She came to tea at Number 10 last week.
So, either Cameron is as dumb and feckless as that welfare mom OR he's decided as long as he and his mates get theirs and have gated communities for the grandchildren they don't care about the rest of the country.
If the first is true, private and public selves coincide. Ethically, perhaps, good but terrifying. We only send in the social workers when they’re poor.
If the second is true, and this is straightforward manipulation of the economy and media for personal and class advantage, and they deserve a lot longer than eight years in prison. Won’t happen; you can always find an economist to say something is/was justifiable.
An interesting problem for the LIberal Democrats: just how far can their public positions of support for the Coalition differ from their earlier, electioneering positions? Public selves in competition; I suppose it depends on those private selves in the back benches. How long will they tell themselves they are preventing the worst excesses of a Thatcherite Britain? Will the Conservatives actually deliver on an electoral system that more nearly reflects the popular vote? How much can the LibDems actually stomach for some political power? Minimal concessions from the Tories: but even that is too much for some. (We won, they say. Not really, let me point out. You got the most MPs. There was no overwhelming mandate for your position.)
Too much, Europe, banking regulation, heart of the party stuff, the public faces of the LibDems and that of the Tories are incompatible. In the next year, we’ll see how much the private selves of the Tory and LibDem back benchers are willing to ignore to keep the coalition together. Unless both sides are actually more whorish than I think, I predict a new election in about a year.

Wanting To Be Wrong

Sun, 13 Jun 2010 09:28:05 +0100

I watch the news with some disbelief. Posh gits come on prating about the deficit and their plans to cut it. Cut public services, mainly by cutting employees. There is no private sector to hire these people - especially older ones. Thus unemployment spirals. With unemployment, we enter an extended much deeper recession than we've had for the past couple of years. Everyone must suffer, they tell us. No alternative. (Actually, there is. Raise taxes.) At this point, it's beyond political partisanship - if I'm right and they're wrong, we're all screwed. I try telling myself that Osborne may be both ignorant and a fool but Vince Cable isn't.
Vince Cable is becoming one of those saplings growing 20 feet below the cliff top, about a mile above the bottom of the canyon, with the heroine desperately hanging on while one little root after the other is pulled out of the soil pocket. I'm trying to believe that Vince Cable is not the little sapling but the rope thrown from above... it's getting harder.
So at this point I sincerely hope I can write next year about what a foolish, ignorant person I was and glory in our new prosperity.
Currently, the masses are distracted by pomp and games. In particular, the World Cup. We really are distracted. Last night, I was in the kitchen finishing cooking. I heard a huge cheer go up through the open back door. I went upstairs and checked: yup, England had scored a goal. Husband, brother in law, brother-in-law's friend were watching (half heartedly) the Big Game: England v US.
I want an African country to win. It would make the whole continent happy. It would increase the world wide happiness quotient considerably more than a win by anyone else. if Spain, the bookies' choice, wins, the Spanish (and maybe the Portuguese) would be happy. The rest would be miserable. Same with most European winners, with the exception of Germany. If they win, the English will be distinctly more unhappy than if anyone else holds up the big cup.
My sister, her husband and a friend are visiting for entirely too short a time. They were on a cruise that docked in Dover yesterday and are leaving Thursday. After hearing about their cruise, my husband said, "We ought to take a cruise."
"What do you do on a cruise?" I asked.
"Eat."
Well, eating, like the World Cup win, is a short term happy maker. There's some long term implications I'd prefer to ignore, but, like Keynes said, in the long term we're dead.
Keynes may not be much good in obesity control, but I do wish the Great and Good currently planning our economy would take a look at him again.

Summer, Fall, Winter, Spring

Fri, 4 Jun 2010 18:03:02 +0100

The last week and a half covered three of the four seasons: Fall was left out. It was close to freezing at night, so I covered my three rows of potatoes with more earth - good for them anyway, encouraging more potatoes. I covered the tomato plants with fleece. Other things: they could live or they could die, up to them.
I had planted seeds in the greenhouse and had little plants: all dead. I went to my favorite garden shop and bought six different kinds of tomatoes, which I put out, and an assortment of squash and pumpkins. They stayed in the greenhouse until yesterday, when I put them out on the allotment.
Suddenly, it’s summer.
I've got a vase full of bearded iris upstairs; a pale mauve iris, not my favorite but I only had two of the purple ones. Several years ago, I had purple, mauve, yellow, white. Somehow, the mauve now dominate.
Raspberries are full of weeks but they can handle it. The onions and shallots are also full of weeds, and they can't.
Along the edges of the allotment and the back garden, I've left blooming wild flowers. For the bees. This includes stinging nettles at one place on the allotment - I hate them but some butterfly or moth requires them. I'm giving away rhubarb; too much for us to eat and I don't have time to cook anyway.
I just watered the back garden. The backgarden is full of things in bloom and bud. One section has one of my favorite roses, a species rose, Rosa Glauca rubrifolia. It has reddish grey stems, small greyish green leaves and star like tiny blossoms. It's grown for its stems - arching, graceful. I've had it years and it's lived in different places, including a pot. Now it's got assorted geraniums - some with small black flowers, others white, around it. The geranium (which is not the perlargonium whose popular name is geranium) are tough shade-tolerant plants that tolerate poor soil, abuse, lack of sun. If they are treated with a modicum of care, they are good ground cover for a shady spot. While I was watering that section of garden, the bit had half a dozen bees, very interested in the geraniums. There are two blooming lilac bushes next to them, and they ignored the lilac. I'd think they'd prefer lilac - so many tiny blooms so close together.
Bees do what bees do.
The cherry tree is full of cherries. So is the area under it. Green, half developed cherries - the birds, I think. Every year, we have two wood doves that live near by. They spend a lot of time visiting my back garden, and the territorial asserting coos of the wood dove is part of the scene. Then the cherries ripen. Masses of starlings swoop in, devour every cherry in an afternoon. The doves complain but numbers defeat mass.
It's very untidy, but I rather like that. I've got one small patch of grass.
If I can figure out how to post pictures, I will.
So it's all a question of priorities, and currently the garden and allotment are demanding. The house is filthy. The floor can be vacuumed tomorrow; the garden won't wait. I'm living on tinned soup for lunch and cold cereal for breakfast. We're having sausages, boiled potatoes and tinned beans for supper. Cooking, too, is a low priority.
It's been a very satisfactory day.

Obama and BP

Fri, 28 May 2010 16:04:17 +0100

The news (CNN, Fox, MNBC) appear to think that the gushing oil well contaminating the Gulf of Mexico and the lands bordering it are a major political disaster for Obama. They say he should do something, should have done something sooner.
This is an enormous environmental disaster and it seems to be viewed primarily as an opportunity for political point scoring. This is being called "Obama's Katrina." There were a number of things Bush could have done as Katrina approached New Orleans. He could have supplied Army trucks to take people out of the area. He could have provided food and shelter for those left in New Orleans after the disaster. He could have helped rebuilding New Orleans after the hurricane and hired workmen from New Orleans to do so. Practical ways of helping the people of New Orleans are fairly obvious.
What should Obama have done that he has not done?
Issued an Executive Order telling the oil to behave?
He's told BP it is their mess, fix it, and pay for the cleanup. There's some squabbling about the different companies involved in the drilling about whose responsibility it actually is to pay for the damages. They can all contribute: there's enough damage to go around. If they attempt, as was done after the Valdez incident, to delay matters using the court system, I think it might be a good idea to suspend all BP drilling rights in the US until the matter is resolved.
BP, with volunteers from other oil companies, are trying to stop the oil. They don't need to be bullied by Congress or the President or the media. They really do want it to stop. The people with the most experience and knowledge of oil wells and drilling are the oil companies. Bring in outside experts to deal with conservation and marine biology issues, but the oil companies are about the best we've got.
The agencies that regulate oil drilling appear to have been lax in issuing permits. Apparently, drilling off the coast of Alaska is still planned. Off shore drilling in Alaska presents even more problems than the Gulf of Mexico: depth plus cold. During the election, Obama said that inflating tires to the proper pressure would, in six months, save as much oil as the Alaskan off shore drilling was expected to produce. When he was mocked for saying this, NASCAR (National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing) said of course he was right.
As long as political point scoring seems the order of the day, Obama should score a few himself -not least to block the Alaska drilling. Will he? No idea.
If people get the government and politicians they deserve, we really must be a low lot.

This Is the Week that Was

Fri, 21 May 2010 05:10:42 +0100

The week that was was not good. Bad Week.
Tooth problems return. Three weeks of dental pain projected before something can be done.
The Con-Dems are more horrid than I thought they'd be, and I wasn't expecting much. Get rid of the EU Bill of Human Rights??? Replace it with one more suitable to the British???? So we're not human now, eh? Just which human rights aren't suitable? Freedom of speech? Banning torture?
The new broom in Number Ten sweeps on: Sell off the Post Office. Turn over the parks and libraries to the councils to run and put a freeze on council rate rises. Get those citizen volunteers in. Run them like the National Trust, the Govt. proposes. None of this has reached the stages of laws in Parliament, so perhaps this is all simply doom and gloom fear mongering.
But the weather the last couple of days has been good. I worked on the allotment this morning, digging. Came home, went to the store to pick up a few things. When I got home, my key stuck in the door. We live in a terrace house 125 years old, with many of the original features, including the front door lock. The key jammed in the door.
I spent 45 minutes trying to get it out, even went into my trunk and got some tools and tried to take the lock apart. I finally gave up and walked to Hinges and Brackets, a store a few blocks away. There were three people working in the store.
I explained the problem and a young man behind the counter said he's see what he could do. So he and I walked back to the house. He mucked about with the key, couldn't do anything. We asked a neighbor if we could go through her house to my back garden - there's a passageway, but it's locked.
We went through. I hoped I'd forgotten to lock the back door. I hadn't. We tried assorted windows and the young man found one he could open and climb through. Interesting: little dogs greeted him with great pleasure and did not offer to tear him to bits. (Scrap fond projection of little Candy's teeth buried in a serial murderer's ankle while Belle Belle hassles out of reach and I beat SM's head with a broom.)
He took the lock off, sat happily in the middle of the hall floor and took it apart. He said a lever had broken and took it back to the shop to repair. He came back thirty minutes later, put it back on and it worked. He said it might work another hundred years or it might not.
I said Let me get my checkbook...
He said, Oh no...
I came back with the check book and he said he couldn't charge me. He wasn't a locksmith, just a guy behind the counter that liked playing with locks. It was nice to get away from the shop. I said I can tip you anyway?
Yes...
I gave him ten pounds.
Locksmiths charge around £65. an hour and he's spent an hour and a half mucking around climbing through windows.
Getting locked out was bad but not having to pay £100+ (what I expected to pay) was such an overwhelmingly relief that it balanced out on the plus side.
Perhaps I should adopt that as a way of dealing with the Con-Dems. Think of what the real crazies in the Conservative Party would like to do. Be grateful for the moderating influence of the Liberal Democrats.
Diane Abbot has decided to run for the Labour Party leader. She's about my fave Labour politician. Unfortunately, she's too female, too black and too fat to get elected. If she looked like Michele Obama, maybe she'd have a chance... but the electorate is too enamored of pretty people. Somebody said politics is acting for ugly people. We seem to have adopted filmi star standards for our politicos. A mistake.
Abbot is very direct, very pragmatic and on the left wing of the party. Labour left is a lot less pretty than Labour right. The Pod People are upon us; if not as your MP then in a constituency near your own. Pretty Pod People. Those who read science fiction during the mid twentieth century are well prepared for today's world.
We went to see Four Lions on my husband's birthday. It's about four British Pakistanis that decide to become suicide bombers in reaction to British involvement in Iraq/Afghanistan. It is, of course, controversial: can terrorist attacks, however bumbling, be the subject of satire? Well, yes, I think it was both funny and sad. The would-be terrorists gradually talk themselves into it. The ending is both predictable and inevitable but still a great shock. Some of the best acting I've seen - and no pretty people at all.

But We Voted LibDem to Keep Out the Tories...

Fri, 14 May 2010 07:04:09 +0100

I feel a bit strange, since most of my readers are Americans, (thanks, Jimmi and other relatives) to devote so many blogs to the UK elections, fearing lack of background information will leave them unintelligible. But Jon Stewart gave segments to the UK elections last week; who am I not to follow the example of the Sainted One? If you foolishly don't watch Jon Stewart or read one of the Better Papers, here's the brief summary: the UK had an election; the results gave no party an overall majority; led to a 'hung Parliament'; the Liberal Democratic Party ("LibDems") gave their support to the Conservative Party, thus giving the Conservatives enough votes in the House of Commons to win any vote.
The LibDems are slightly left of Blair's New Labour. The Conservatives are more than slightly to the right of New Labour. In terms of the election manifestos, Labour had more in common with the Conservatives than the LibDems have. So it's going to be a difficult alliance.
When you have an election, sometimes the party you dislike doesn't win. I've pointed that out before. As long as the election isn't stolen (you know who I mean Mr. Bush) you shrug, decide some section of the electorate are fools and get on with it. The Tories didn't commit voter fraud. No electronic voting devices with perverted code. No police cruisers to intimidate voters. There was enough disingenuousness to leave me feeling more than a little disgruntled.
Major case in point: one of the LibDems' prime appeals to the electorate in swing constituencies is to Labour voters: vote LibDem and keep the Tories out. Some of the LibDem's seats are due to Labour voting tactically. I have friends in Manchester and a couple of other places that voted LibDem for that reason. I didn't - the Tory is not beatable in Canterbury. But I have in the past, hoping to get rid of our MP. I didn't in this election. (Another friend, taking advantage of the True Blue colour of Canterbury, simply votes for the party she like best: Green. There is a kind of giddy freedom in knowing your vote doesn't count for shit.)
I expected the LibDems to come to an arrangement with the Tories when the results of the vote were announced. Doing a deal with Labour, to support them in staying in power, wouldn't have worked. Labour plus LibDem MPs did not have a majority of votes in the House of Commons; they would have been required to put together a majority with other, smaller parties and the majority wouldn't have been workable. But I didn't expect the LibDems to combine so closely with the Conservatives: a commitment to support the Tories for a full five year Parliament, agreement to begin cuts in spending immediately, adoption of the Tory immigration policy, silence on Europe and the EU. In exchange, they got fairy gold.
The LibDem Holy Grail is proportional representation, a system of voting in which the House of Commons reflects the percentage of votes cast for each political party. The LibDems routinely get about 23% of the votes cast but do not get a quarter of seats in the House. In exchange for support, Cameron has offered Clegg a variant on the first past the post system, which we (and the US and Canada and some other countries) use: take more votes in your district than any one else, and you win. The Tories have offered the LibDems a referendum in which voters can choose between the current system and a second preference system - the supplementary vote. Voters select their first choice with a "1" rather than an "x" on the ballot. The voter than puts a "2" next to another candidate - his/her second choice. If a candidate does not obtain 50+% of the vote, the top two candidates are retained and the second choices of voters for other candidates is added to their count. (The Mayor of London is elected using SV. It's very similar to primaries in some places in the US. If no candidate takes over 50% of the vote, a run-off election is held, with only the top two candidates on the ballot. SV is better, I think. It's cheaper: no need to hold a second election and candidates need less money to win.)
This isn't going to help the LibDems get many more seats. It still will not reflect LibDem percentage of the vote. It has some advantages - tactical voting isn't necessary. But even this is not really on offer. The Tories have promised a referendum. They, and a number of Labour politicians, will campaign against it. It may or may not pass. (I doubt Cameron can actually deliver his promised referendum: too many Tory and Labour MP's will vote against it.)
If the LibDems are going to give up a considerable number of their manifesto promises, they at least ought to get a referendum on full PR. Cameron could never have sold full PR to his party. He's having difficulty getting them to accept SV. I suppose, on this issue, Clegg got the best deal on offer.
A friend who voted LibDem tactically, to keep the Tories out, says bitterly she knows what the Liberal Democrats got: seats on the cabinet and the salaries, cars and drivers that go with them. This seems a bit harsh. Clegg is to the right of most of his party, Cameron to the left of most Tories. Perhaps, to the pair of them, the policy changes are not too important. I doubt that's true of Vince Cable or Menzies Campbell. Cable has taken a ministerial post and looks grim. Campbell hasn't been heard from.
Draconian cuts are expected to public services. Tories are reported to be chortling: the cuts can be blamed on the LibDems; if the economy crashes further, that, too, can be blamed on the Liberal Democrats. The LibDems have agreed to support the Tories for a five year term in office. Clegg is gambling on the economy improving considerably by the time the next election rolls round.
Will it last the five years? A bill to require a 55% vote in the House of Commons before a government can be dissolved and new elections called has been proposed. It hasn't passed yet, and may not. Even if Cameron can get the bill through Parliament, the House of Lords, I think, will refuse to pass it. It changes the structure of the British parliamentary system. It was not part of the party manifesto and has not been the subject of a referendum. I don't believe the Lords will support it.
So how long before another election? I'm betting eighteen months. And I’m also betting it will be a cold day in Hell before a Labour supporter votes tactically. In the coming election, when it comes, a loss of fifteen LibDem seats?