2 more weeks of term and

I already feel as though I am winding down. This is no good as there are a lot of threads to draw together at the end of term and a lot of targets for the students to achieve. Then there are the exams - some students missed theirs and some messed up, so I need to take steps about that.

I have bought the Bellfields ss a chocolate Santa each, because I have enjoyed teaching them and I think their classes have gone quite well.

So while I am thinking about Monday and Tuesday and trying to achieve, I would like to get on with my work, but my old mum will be hoping that I'll take her out today because it is a lovely day, and I must also do that, slowly and nicely and not trying to rush her along.

Also tomorrow there is a dinner which I said I would cook for: have to buy the ingredients for apple tarts for 16 people.

Also I am not actually finished until 18th December!! But the last week of term should be fairly easy. Here is the poem of the day, which is rather glorious. I do love John Donne.

Death DEATH, be not proud, though some have called thee Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so: For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow Die not, poor Death; nor yet canst thou kill me. From Rest and Sleep, which but thy picture be, Much pleasure, then from thee much more must flow; And soonest our best men with thee do go-- Rest of their bones and souls' delivery! Thou'rt slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men, And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell; And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well And better than thy stroke. Why swell'st thou then?    One short sleep past, we wake eternally,    And Death shall be no more: Death, thou shalt die! John Donne More poems from John Donne

Too much to do

Sometime in the last couple of weeks I started a post with the above words and what do you know, I never completed it. I had too much to do. I was also very nervous about being observed by our manager which even made me slightly paralysed - unable to decide what to do.

Today I was planning a very complicated lesson because I thought I had a volunteer to help me, and I suddenly realised I couldn't really split the group because the volunteer can't come, and actually it makes it all much simpler, because I can only plan what I can manage to oversee myself.

Most of next week is exams, which bring their own problems (the marking) but doing them is slightly easier than teaching.

Another hazard for Cambridge Uni

If it's not MI5 trying to recruit you, it's the local constabulary. Apparently they are keen to find out which members of the student body are joining political groups. This was in the Guardian yesterday. It's amazing because the sort of political activity the police officer is talking about is a campaign against cuts in public spending - a perfectly legitimate political issue. On the Guardian website there are video clips of this police officer telling the student what he is to find out about his follow students, taken by the student he is trying to recruit. My friend who is a lecturer jokes that he has been a police informant for years and gets a preferential rate of £35 for his information. ha ha.

An officer monitoring political campaigners attempted to persuade an activist in his 20s to become an informant and feed him information about students and other protesters in return for money.

But instead the activist wore a hidden camera to record a meeting with the officer and expose the surveillance of undergraduates and others at the 800-year-old institution.

The officer, who is part of a covert unit, is filmed saying the police need informants like him to collect information about student protests as it is "impossible" to infiltrate their own officers into the university.

The Guardian is not disclosing the name of the Cambridgeshire officer and will call him Peter Smith. He asks the man who he is trying to recruit to target "student-union type stuff" and says that would be of interest because "the things they discuss can have an impact on community issues".

here is the link

Documentary on Kennedy's Death

The other night there was a documentary on the death of John F Kennedy. After he died there was a post mortem. The room where this took place was full of secret service agents, some taking notes of what the doctors were doing. There was a photographer taking rolls and rolls of film of the head wound. Afterwards...
the film was not produced for the inquest, neither were the notes and the post mortem report was not complete. Why?

Not only this, but after the P.M. the secret service demanded Kennedy's brain and took that away as well.

Because, apparently, after the two shots from Oswald from the book depository, the security man in the car behind Kennedy's released the safety catch of his gun and in his panic, accidentally shot Kennedy in the back of the head. So the service men had to cover this up, which they did very effectively. This would explain a lot of mysterious circumstances.

 You have to worry about these enemies of truth, because they believe themselves to be above the law.

Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan

I finished this book in about 3 sittings (or lyings) because I really enjoyed it. It is the story of a female, attractive Cambridge graduate who joins the secret service. After I said somewhere in this blog that I don't read books about the secret service .... but this is not about the secret service so much as about deceit and writing. It's a very clever book and you realise how clever it is when you've finished it. It's an onion, like Shrek. it has layers. You do become emotionally engaged with it and it takes you out of yourself. It's quite brilliant.

I went for a run!

I used to do this 2 or 3 times a week and it was nothing - I used to run about 4 miles. But now I am very unfit and I am thrilled with the short run that I did just because I did it, and from time to time I enjoyed it. I always use my iPod to keep me going - can't run without it.

Running songs today,
 It won't be long - The Beatles - I love the Yeahs
I've got a Golden Ticket - Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Have you met Miss Jones? - Robbie Williams version
Thunder Road - Bruce Springsteen - I love the piano in this
Call Me - Franz Ferdinand - brilliant
Whistle for the Choir - Fratellis
Glamourous Indie Rock and Roll - the Killers
Like a Rolling Stone - Green Day - a very good effort by the Famous American Idiots, so beloved of my children

Hoorah for technology! Keeping we older people on the pavements.

The area where I live is really popular for runners. No matter how early you get up or how late you come home, you will always see someone running around the pavements.

The Ashmolean, Oxford

This museum is the oldest in the country and it certainly has plenty of interesting artifacts in it. It was re-built and re-opened in 2009 and now it's rather difficult to navigate but very good looking with bright, glassy spaces as well as the old "palace" style. I enjoyed revising the Anglo Saxon finds that illustrate that part of our history, but most of all I was surprised by the art gallery. Good quality stuff from the Italian renaissance - some really beautiful altarpieces. On the third floor - European art - mainly French and Dutch and modern British, but really lovely things, including some great pre-Raphaelites I had never seen before.

destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah after Patenir

Samuel Palmer

Lucien Pisarro

Singer Sargent

Camille Pisarro

Henri de Toulouse Lautrec

However, the cafe is over-priced, even for a cup of tea. There are plenty of better places to snack in Oxford. There are some great shops too, and there is much of interest to see.

Malcolm Morley

I have never seen work by this artist before. He works in the USA and was the first winner of the Turner prize. His pictures are super-realistic and include pictures of photos of racehorses and cruise ships, and planes blowing up. But here is one that illustrates his skill and humanity. It's great, isn't it?

Malcolm Morley

Interested in soil? BBC programme on new research.

strange illustration, great programme

I hope someone goes to the website and tells me what that nasty looking brown shape is.

I have thin pink worms in the compost bin - not good burrowers apparently.

this is a regular earthworm

Jeremy Paxman and Russell Brand

Jeremy P is often a very lazy interviewer, using his arrogant personality against the weak and hapless, and repeating the same question over and over again, as though the answer to his one question were all-important, when often it isn't. He can be very embarrassing. This week he interviewed Russell Brand and got rather more than he bargained for. Russell Brand is very fearless and articulate. It's quite refreshing to watch (takes 10 minutes) but it makes me wonder what happened afterwards? What was Paxman's response to RB's impassioned tirade? Will we ever know?

Russell Brand on Newsnight

Flight Behaviour

I am really enjoying this book. However, it doesn't seem, yet, to be about climate change and butterflies, and you would think the writer was a sociologist for the way she so carefully places Dellarobia, the heroine, between two worldviews, like a middle class mind in a working class life, subtly judging everyone around her. The character gives the writer (Barbara Kingsolver) such a prime opportunity to look into the business of the poorer end of her neighbourhood and examine it with the exactitude of a dissecting biologist, that I feel slightly squirmy about it. It feels snobby, but it is very well done.

The situation on the Appalachian mountain, where it has been too warm and they have had too much rain, is just like here. In the book, the worry is that the rain is going to cause a landslide. But there are other problems too, the hay the farmers cut goes mouldy, for example, and they have to buy some in from another state, adding to their cash-flow problems. (Here, there are just too many pathogens: mould, growths and fungus. The country won't look the same without the ash trees, but they are not the only plants suffering die back. My brother showed me some old laurels that he had to saw down. the Wisley website reports a list of pathogens which is enough to make your hair curl, there are so many new ones.)

As the story develops there is more to the climate change angle, and one of the characters, a professor from the Caribbean, becomes a mouthpiece for the climate change scientists, and there are whole pages of his explanations of the signs and consequences of climate change. He rather loses his personality and becomes a talking book, in my opinion. But never mind. There is a lovely scene where he is brought face to face with a journalist and lambasts her for not giving priority to the story that is important, the story that will change the world, and instead going for the feelgood story, the soft story, the story they can sex up a bit. Distractions, in other words.

 There is also a cultural rift between the ordinary folk and the scientists that we don't have in the UK. The Appalachian folk believe that God is good and will sort things out for them, and they really have no tradition of a scientific approach to anything. Science goes with expensive things like Goretex jackets and a university education.

The butterflies are extraordinary. They need to hibernate on a cool mountain, in Mexico, but if it's too cool they freeze and die. They wake up in the spring and mate. The female has to lay her eggs on some milkweed. That's the only thing the caterpillars eat. So that's in Texas or somewhere like that. Then that generation of butterflies goes north again. They go to Canada eventually I think they breed again and another generation flies south to Mexico. So the question is, how do they know when to fly and how far, 2,000 miles to a Mexican mountain?

Here is a lovely video showing the problems the butterflies face

The Fifth Estate

We went to see this film last night and it was just as good as I hoped it would be. It refuses to make a villain out of Julian Assange, but it does show that he is a very strange and isolated person, a brilliant and charismatic and damaged person. And a lot of this is down to Benedict Cumberbatch, who not only acted the part with great fidelity, but also asked that information about Assange's background be allowed to come out in dialogue in the film.

 When Cumberbatch first read the script, he worried that it cast Assange as some kind of cartoon baddie. "I think I may get my head bitten off by Disney for saying so, but everyone agreed with that." He immersed himself in research, reading endlessly and interviewing people who knew Assange, and gradually the script evolved into a more nuanced portrayal. His performance draws heavily on his research into Assange's childhood. "I know it's a Freudian cliche to go, 'Oh well, when I was a kid…', but, to be honest, it's so profoundly true with Julian. To have been a child in a single-mother relationship, being pursued around the country by an abusive stepfather who was part of a cult – to be taken out of any context where he could discover who he was in relation to other people – well, to then become a teenage hacktivist, and evolve into a cyber-journalist, to me makes perfect sense. And he's still a runaway today. I find that profoundly moving." Interview here


Other critics have disliked the film because it didn't have a point of view. But for me, that was brilliant. It tried to show more than one point of view by giving scenes of stress and sadness to the government employees who usually have jurisdiction over secrets, in Washington, and it showed how the Wikileaks revelations affected them. It allowed the audience to see that some people are trained and paid to take care of secret material and to be responsible for it and for their fellows. Assange is not responsible enough to do what he has done. Between the actions of the very young and sensitive Chelsea Manning and the furore-loving Wikileaks leader, toxic intelligence was allowed to escape like untreated sewage from a storm drain.


But I also liked the relationship between the two techno-geeks. I could see exactly how they had become obsessed with what they were doing and the cleverness of their encoding. I could see how Assange had his friend Daniel on a string because their joint enterprise was so bold and so successful. They travelled from country to country setting up servers for their connections, and must have sealed their friendship on those long ordinary road journeys. The ups and downs of the relationship were eloquently conveyed and were at the heart of the film - a bromance, if you like the term. I enjoyed this film and I found it gripping, but if you are expecting something in the style of the Bourne films, you will be disappointed, because this is a much more complex film.There is really no hero and no baddie, because that all depends on your attitude to the idea of transparent government.

here for more information

It is a mast year

which means that the oak trees have produced acorns. They land on our roof all night. However, although I am glad for the tree, which I feared had become sterile, I miss the squirrels. They used to go quite mad when there were acorns. All the squirrels have vanished from this corner of the cul-de-sacs. I have looked for news about this and not found any.

lingua franca - another misconception

Lingua franca means a shared language of communication used by people whose main languages are different ; and I always thought the original lingua franca was Latin. But this phrase originally referred to a common language - Frank - consisting of Italian mixed with French, Spanish, Greek, and Arabic that was formerly spoken in Mediterranean ports.

I was a star in a reasonably-priced bra

Yesterday we had a family wedding and I was asked to read a poem - the most personal part of the ceremony - to the congregation. It was not a poem that read well on the page (it's lame, frankly) and it needed some expression and timing (also some editing), but I can report it went down really well, and I was very pleased. (If only the nation was short of people who can read poetry to an audience!! I could be a professional.) In this case, I was glad for my brother and new sister-in-law, because they had given us a lovely party and I helped to make their day a success.

The title is an allusion to Top Gear, a TV programme in which a celebrity drives a car around a track as fast as they can. They seem to love doing this. The feature is called "Star in a reasonably-priced car". I was not just wearing underwear; in fact, I bought a new reasonably-priced dress for the occasion.

Teaching again

It all went pretty well last week but I am worried about Maybury, where I have a class of only 7, and only 3 of them are level 2, and one of the Level 2's is going to struggle horribly with the reading and writing exams. Bellfields, my supposedly disadvantaged class of mums with children in the creche, was popular and fun, and well-attended, I got a good buzz from that class, and I have them again tomorrow. Routes into Work was a small class - a group really - but we had a funny bunch, with M from Turkey who is young, handsome and cheeky, and S from Iran who is older and has strayed from dementia towers without quite knowing why, and 2 ladies from Iran and from Spain who have no particular problems, but must be wondering what on earth they have got into. Luckily I have a volunteer for that class, who really helps me to manage them. My level 2 class is a huge roomful of 18 young adult students who are all (nearly all) very fluent in English and have plenty to say. They can be great fun (they barrack each other) and the thing is to get to know them as individuals (not easy with 18 of them) and at the same time keep the lesson moving along. No volunteer; and I have never taught that kind of group before (3 hours) so I hope to get a bit of advice from my colleague Sue on Tuesday.

Blue Jasmine

This Woody Allen film is not in the least fun. It's interesting and thoughtful, but it's bleak. There are themes: outright dishonesty is one, the murky area of being complicit in dishonesty is another, the shocking behaviour of an unfaithful husband, the anger of a betrayed wife, wealth based on fraud, the relationship between adopted siblings who really have nothing in common, the anger of a child betrayed by both parents. Emotionally it's quite exhausting.

San Francisco looks interesting; it has a completely different feel to it from New York. Cate Blanchett plays a New York woman who is completely out of her milieu, and to some extent she tries to adjust, you can feel sorry for her but at the same time you have to get annoyed with her for her lack of sensitivity to the people around her.

But the men are so much worse than the women.

When I got married

I wanted a deeply traditional wedding. I wanted a church in the country, the prayer book service, (in fact I wanted the very old prayer book service, but the vicar wasn't keen on it) and traditional hymns. I wanted the traditions I had grown up with because I hoped that this would root our marriage in the establishment, and that it would become a grounded old thing like the church, with its pews and stained glass windows and memorials; its very local history, and not some shoddy fashionable thing that comes and goes. My parents' marriage had broken up and I rather felt that this was because divorce had become rather fashionable; yes don't worry everyone is divorced these days; that was not what I wanted at all.

Also the person I married was not so much a person to me as a set of values deeply loved and respected, a set of values and a way of life that I knew would be good for me and for our offspring, if they came along (and I wanted them to come along).

But if I had got married in a registry office, to a different person, and really, if everything had been different, I might have chosen this poem. But I really have never travelled to this place, that seems to be so very beautiful.

Somewhere I have never traveled,
gladly beyond any experience,
your eyes have their silence:
In your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which I cannot touch because they are too near

Your slightest look will easily unclose me
though I have closed myself as fingers,
You open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens,
touching skillfully, mysteriously, her first rose

Or if your wish be to close me,
I and my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility -- whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

I do not know what it is about you that closes and opens
Only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses.
Nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands.

e.e. cummings

Beginning teaching again

I have begun teaching and stopped several times and I'm not scared, but I am nervous and I keep scratching my arm - sign of nerves coming out as eczema.

When I first started teaching the First Certificate Class I had a student who was very noisy and dominant. A dominant student always wants to be a rival to the teacher. The first thing she did that irritated me was her noisy breakfast. She would bring in a can of coke and a pastry from Gregg's for her breakfast and make a great parade of tearing the bag and opening the can, and I asked her to not make such a loud noise with it all. She was not supposed to eat of drink in class at all and eventually I said that she would have to eat her breakfast before she came into the class because it was so disturbing. She acted as though I had infringed her human rights. What a sulk she went into! I ignored it. Then came the day that I criticized her speaking. I told her about mistakes in word order and in omitting articles, and using the wrong prepositions. She just didn't believe me. She was so used to people telling her that she spoke great English, because she was fluent, but there were a lot of mistakes in there and she did not accept that. (She was very proud of the fact that she was engaged to an English man and very excited about her wedding). After that speaking assessment she was even more insulted with me and she decided to talk all the way through all my lessons - I taught that class for three hours a day. She had a pal who was also a big sulker and together they formed a partnership that would not answer any of my questions and behaved as though I wasn't there.

I really couldn't decide what to do. She had paid for the lessons - they all had, and they were preparing for an exam and it was my job to make sure they were ready. For two months I just carried on teaching the ones who were good, marking their homework and so on, and trying to ignore the hostile ones. I used to dread going into work. Then one day I walked in after the break and found that there was a conflict going on. A young Spanish man was telling the noisy girl that she was ruining the class, and after that she left the class and didn't come back until the exam. Phew!

(When she came back for the exam she arrived with the famous fiance. He looked about 15 and was about half her size.)

Anyway I decided I had made the wrong decision with that student, and next time I would nip any such behaviour in the bud as soon as it started. The next class I was assigned was an advanced class and I was rather excited about all the interesting things we could do because of their higher level of English and the fact that they were not an exam class. But on the second or third day a student came in who ignored me completely and talked to the rest of the class as though I wasn't there. She talked throughout the lesson in spite of me asking her direct questions and asking her to listen. So after the class I tackled her and said: why do you come to the lessons if you are just going to talk? She said: "I don't need lessons. I have a job in Boot's! I am only here for the Visa." She was very proud that she had a job in Boot's. (All the students needed to attend classes for 15 hours a week because they were on student Visas.) So I thought about this and how the agony would go on and on if I didn't stop her behaviour. So I went and told the Director of Studies about her. Ida could be lovely but she could put people right down. Ida came and fetched the young woman out of my class the next day. She tore her off a strip and the woman came back in floods of tears. She had clearly been humiliated and she blamed me for this. So Ida put her in another class.

Was the result good? No. The whole class hated me. They sat and stared at me for an hour and half every day and refused to answer any questions. I couldn't make them write, either. After the break they all left except Magda. I ended up just teaching Magda. My life was still horrible, apart from the time the Hungarian came on holiday. He took lessons for 2 weeks as part of his holiday. He loved my lessons and was really enthusiastic. Apart from Magda, that was the only nice part, for three months.

So there you are. What was the better decision? I don't know.

Also, people think that teaching adults is easy. The fact is, they don't always behave like adults.

Commercial bees

There were enough pollinators around for my garden this year, and I enjoyed watching them searching for flowers and doing their job. In fact I wished there were more flowers in the garden throughout the season. However, there are clearly not enough bees around to pollinate all the orchard fruit, for on the TV there is a show called Harvest 2013, which showed boxes of bees being unloaded into the poly tunnels full of cherry trees to do their job. These bees have been laboratory bred and housed in cardboard boxes for the journey from Eastern Europe to the UK. When the blossom opens the bees are released, and they off and do their stuff. But it seems to me that there was no question that these bees would survive in the area long term. They were there solely as pollinators. They were not honey bees but probably a species of Megachilidae.

The Megachilidae Family
These types of bees are extremely efficient pollinators. This family includes mason and leafcutter bees. Some are used in commercial pollination, such as Alfalfa leafcutter bees (Megachile rotundata), and Osmia lignaria (the "Orchard Mason Bee" or "Blue Orchard Bee"), which is especially sold for use in orchard crop pollination. 
According to the U. S. Department of Agriculture researchers, only 250 female blue orchard bees (Osmia lignaria) are required to pollinate an acre of apples - a service equivalent to one or two honey bees hives, each containing 15,000 to 20,000 workers (Bosch and Kemp, 2001). 
It's possible to farm in harmony with nature, attract these bees to the land, which is better for crop yields. More about this shortly. 

This comes from a great website that tells you all about bees. Have a look!

The author is concerned that growers don't care about the ecosystem, and are giving up on attracting native bees to their growing area.

Here is an American website with more reservations about the use of commercial bees in the food industry. They threaten the local bumble bee population.

There are a number of threats facing bumble bees, any of which may be leading to the decline of these species. The major threats to bumble bees include: spread of pests and diseases through commercial bumble bee rearing or other methods, habitat destruction or alteration, pesticides, invasive species, low genetic diversity and climate change.

Commercial bumble bee rearing may be the greatest threat to B. affinis, B. occidentalis, B. terricola, and B. franklini. In North America, two bumble bee species have been commercially reared for pollination of greenhouse tomatoes and other crops: B. occidentalis and B. impatiens. Between 1992 and 1994, queens ofB. occidentalis and B. impatiens were shipped to European rearing facilities, where colonies were produced then shipped back to the U.S. for commercial pollination. Bumble bee expert Robbin Thorp has hypothesized that these bumble bee colonies acquired a disease (probably a virulent strain of the microsporidian Nosema bombi) from a European bee that was in the same rearing facility, the buff-tailed bumble bee (Bombus terrestris). The North American bumble bees would have had no prior resistance to this pathogen. Dr. Thorp hypothesizes that the disease then spread to wild populations of B. occidentalis andB. franklini in the West (from exposure to infected populations of commercially reared B. occidentalis), and B. affinis and B. terricola in the East (from exposure to commercially reared B. impatiens). In the late 1990′s, biologists began to notice that B. affinis, B. occidentalis, B. terricola, and B. franklini were severely declining.

Where these bees were once very common, they were nearly impossible to find. B. impatiens has not shown a dramatic decline; Robbin Thorp hypothesizes that B. impatiens may serve as a carrier of an exotic strain of Nosema bombi, although it may not be as severly affected by the disease as B. affinis, B. occidentalis, B. terricola, and B. franklini. B. affinis, B. occidentalis, B. terricola, and B. franklini are closely related to each other (they all belong to the subgenus Bombus sensu stricto).

This hypothesis was supported by a recent study led by Sydney Cameron, Ph.D., published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They found that the western bumble bee and the American bumble bee had significantly higher infection rates from a fungal parasite than more stable species.  They also found that these two species had lower genetic diversity than species that were not in decline.  Research is currently underway in Dr. Cameron’s lab to determine whether or not this fungal parasite was introduced from Europe via the commercial bumble bee trade. You can read more about their study and its implications here. The Xerces Society is currently working to urge the USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service to regulate the commercial bumble bee trade. You can read a status review that includes more details on this issue and the decline of three bumble bees that was written by Dr. Robbin Thorp and The Xerces Society.

It is tempting to write about current events

But there are already commentators far better informed than myself. Also, if I say one week that I am so glad that Cameron was not given a mandate to support Obama in the move to intervene in Syria, and get on my high horse about interfering in other countries by finding moral grounds to bomb them; the next week all that is irrelevant, because Putin's decision to intervene is so much more interesting and likely to be successful in one way or another. I suppose I am continuing my previous post about the perspective of time. I think it's better to comment after events have run their course.

It is really amazing that Putin decided to publish his arguments in the New York Times, but it is also rather wonderful, because he is taking the debate to the people - although I don't think he encourages this amongst his own electorate. As someone commented in the Guardian website, could Obama address the Russian people in a similar Russian paper? The answer is yes, surprisingly, which shows how I would make a hopeless political commentator.

 you have no IDEA about the extend of freedom of press in Russia - in Russia main TV channels are indeed controlled by Kremlin (though cable TV is not) - but that's all - you can publish in Russian newspapers ANYTHING - read Pravda (which is a media of Communist Party that is opposition to Putin's United Russia party) - they bash Putin on daily basis... The most popular newspapers in Russia are the nationwide tabloid-like daily Komsomolskaya Pravda and Moskovsky Komsomolets - if Obama buys a page for ads and publish his article, then it would be published - but in contrast to USA , nobody in Russia would pay attention to it- Russians simply don't give a hoot about what Obama thinks...

 Putin knew his arguments would not be represented as he wanted them to be represented by any intermediary. The commentators who decode his statement have had a field day - see the Guardian here it is . Putin has perhaps had FUN finding sentiments that his US readers must agree with (or they're UnAmerican) and using them against the US position.

Recently Cameron said, in defense of Putin's belittling of the UK, that we had invented every sport in the world. This is where he clearly needs to take advice before speaking: but I love the idea that we invented sumo wrestling. I don't think we were right in the forefront of skiing or bullfighting, either. Polo was invented out east, somewhere like Mongolia, at around the time when we as a nation were heavily into bear-baiting. Not saying we invented that.

One Hundred Years of Solitude

This is a classic novel which I had never read. I expressed an interest in it and a Spanish student gave it to me as a leaving present. She loved it!

In a way I loved it; it seemed a very encyclopaedic way of looking at life: there are the children, the parents and the grandparents, there is the home town with all that goes on there - industry and businesses that spring up and then fade away, there is the geography of the town - is it on a river or the sea, is it on the road to somewhere? - and then there's the weather that must surely have an effect - what grows? what can be produced?

Then there are the characters: inquisitive or not, industrious or indolent, loving or selfish, lustful and vigorous or not? (in this book they generally are.) Garcia Marquez takes his characters from birth all the way to the grave and shows great understanding of how in the course of a lifetime people change, although the merciless way he tells of his characters' senility, which in some cases goes on for a long time, is hard to bear. There are many small miracles in the book - one day it rains flowers, another character's love attracts butterflies, another character's love affair causes his animals to be prodigiously fertile. At one time it rains without cease for 3 years and everything rots and the animals die - oh the ennui for the poor people of Macondo -, immediately afterwards it is dry for 11 years. There is also a war and a terrible atrocity which is all too believable. Then the truth is all covered up - again, all too believable.

My favourite character is Ursula because she has such energy and foresight, she saves money for future needs, she makes money by selling candy animals, she insists on honesty when the family finds a fortune, and she ensures that her illegitimate grandchildren are baptised. She is rigorous. The importance of the women in the family is huge. Without them there is no family as the men seem so prone to wandering off or hiding away with their own preoccupations.

Sometimes you ask yourself if it is only over a number of generations that an individual's life has meaning.  Maybe you can't understand the significance of your own life from your own perspective.  Some religions encourage their adherents to be present in the moment, to grasp it fully. For some people there is no aspiration for any other perspective beyond the next treat. Some of the characters in the novel are Catholics and see their lives from a long way off - from an idea of eternity.

David Mitchell is very good on the question of perspective - he says that we are too complex a species to live in the moment and not have some kind of narrative in mind, but, if we take the perspective of a hundred years from now, not much matters anyway. I think that because Garcia Marquez takes the perspective of a hundred years, you do end up feeling that the whole saga didn't add up to much in the end.

Here is David Mitchell explaining time perspective. It's brilliant.

My Quiz

This year my quiz was a great improvement on last year's. I think last year's was too hard - there was a Dickens round, a Rivers round, a North Atlantic Challenge round, (2 of the members were rowing across the Atlantic at the time), there was a round on Surrey and one on Lords and Ladies, including Lady Gaga. There was also a Disney round where there were pictures to identify. This time we had more variety! There was a science round, a centenary round, a movies round, but also a round for identifying pictures of everyday items under the microscope, a round for identifying pictures of people who died within the last 12 months, including Hugo Chavez, Neil Armstrong (not wearing a space suit, obs) and Norman Schwartzkopf, the others from popular entertainment. Also 2 music rounds: playing tracks for a minute or so - one on songs from Disney, one mark for the film and one for the character, - one on cover versions: who's doing the cover version, who did it originally?

We also had a round which involved identifying pictures of buildings on our reach and marking them on a map. The problem with this round, first, is that it penalises visitors to the area, and I did warn my collaborator who produced this round that this might be a problem. The other prob was that the pics were quite small and the older people were all complaining they couldn't see them properly. But it really makes a change from writing down an answer.

Rather to my astonishment members of the team that won were closely related to me. (I'm sure that some of my loved ones know about nothing but movies.) This caused some grumbling - not to say barracking- from other teams but there was no collusion. In the end, everyone said it was good fun and that's the main thing. Making a quiz is quite interesting and exercises the judgment, as you have put in something for everyone.

We have a strong-minded old judge who has joined our club; it is rather a challenge teaching her to scull but I love her enthusiasm and tenacity. She is 70 and not very agile moving around the boat.

The biggest collection of clothes pegs in the world

He has 5,000. Presumably all different. The second biggest has only 2,000, which is really quite poor. Note: he doesn't use them to peg the clothes out. His wife does that, with less important clothes pegs. Says it all, really.

The finger op

My daughter had her finger op on Monday. A tendon was removed from the second toe of her Left foot and inserted into the ring finger of her left hand. She is recovering nicely but my day consisted of - 9:30 taking her to have the foot dressed at the local surgery, 10:30, taking her to grandma's, 11:30, taking her home and making her lunch, 12:30, taking her to school (she can't walk there with her foot in a bandage) a distance of about a mile down a narrow lane where you keep needing to reverse, and 2:00, picking her up from school. So I have not achieved anything apart from checking up on Mum and some proof-reading for a friend.

I am glad that the heat has stopped and turned to rain (we need more rain) as the heat made me lazy, and so sleepy in the afternoons that I felt like an indolent person in a South American novel (I am reading 100 years of Solitude).

But it has been a wonderful summer and I have a good crop of tomatoes, which makes me feel very satisfied, and many little apples on the little apple tree, which are lovely to see. The tomatoes we buy in the supermarket have been gassed to ripen them. I know this because I met a girl who had worked for a grower. The ones at home ripen, it seems to me, when there is a great contrast between day/night temperature. They taste amazing.

The ones that ripen naturally have also been gassed - the plant apparently produces ethylene. But now the weather is cooler the toms aren't ripening at all, not even indoors. So the heat has something to do with it.

This term

My line manager sent me a tentative timetable of classes that I would teach, including Weds evening, and it looked pretty daunting. However, we have been having enrolling sessions and it may be that I don't have enough students out in the Community to make a class. You never can tell!

At our enrolling session last evening there was an elderly woman from Nepal - in traditional dress - who came with a very old lady and some children, with a young son to translate for them all, and the lady didn't speak a word of English. There were 5 Spaniards and Portuguese (lots of these at the moment) with low level English, some Pakistanis with quite good English.

I have never taught English from scratch and I don't know how to do this, but I might really enjoy it! I wonder if that will fall to me.

What I really want to do is a Masters degree in Linguistics.

Funeral, and Seamus Heaney

When I was a young person I had a boyfriend, and we went about with his friends, who as a gang were punky and interested in drugs. One of the gang, big Pete, took too many drugs (really a lot) and developed schizophrenia, and after that he was not able to settle to anything. He was also an alcoholic. And after many years, he died of cirrhosis of the liver and heart failure, and yesterday our gang was reunited for his funeral. There were tears; he died young. Pete had written a great many poems (surprisingly religious) and he wanted them published, so we are going to choose some and put them on a website. I am to be helped in this by a Prof of Literature, who did not take too many drugs, thank the Lord.

So yesterday we were protagonists in our own story, and then I came home and in that context we are not the protagonists but really, the scene painters, the back-room boys who pay the tax, the catering people, whilst the young people take the stage; a strange adjustment.

Seamus Heaney has died; I was moved to send one of his poems to my exbf because it was about grief, and he replied that they were fellows of the same college, Magdalene, Cambridge. He did not say anything about the poem, which was a disappointment, but that's not his subject. I am sad that I know only one person who is intelligently interested in poetry.

He was a great poet and Irishman. Very much loved. He wrote this one for his grandsons.

A Kite for Michael and Christopher

All through that Sunday afternoon

A kite flew above Sunday,

A tightened drumhead, an armful of blown chaff.

I’d seen it grey and slippy in the making,

I’d tapped it when it dried out white and stiff,

I’d tied the bows of newspaper

Along its six-foot tail.

But now it was far up like a small black lark

And now it dragged as if the bellied string

Were a wet rope hauled upon

To lift a shoal.

My friend says that the human soul

Is about the weight of a snipe

Yet the soul at anchor there,

The string that sags and ascends,

Weighs like a furrow assumed into the heavens.

Before the kite plunges down into the wood

And this line goes useless

Take it in your two hands, boys, and feel

The strumming, rooted, long-tailed pull of grief.

You were born fit for it.

Stand in here in front of me

And take the strain.

Overly geeky

Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the world wide web, admitted in 2009 that the infuriating double forward slashes that precede every website address were unnecessary and, in hindsight, a mistake. "Really, if you think about it, it doesn't need the //," he told a symposium. "I could have designed it not to have the //."

Old News

My peculiar hobby is cutting things out of newspapers.  I suppose this is a bit like grasping at life as it speeds by, and I don't want to just forget it all, and neither do I want to be ignorant of the world I live in. I have just finished filing these articles.

Category 1 Interesting books - reviews of books I might read
A Possible Life - Faulks
How Much is enough? - Skidelsky
Ancient light - Banville
The Better Angels of Our Nature - Pinker
The Betrayal - Dunmore

et almost infinitum!

Category 2 Current concerns
Junk culture, hacking, antidepressants - do they work? - the growing gender imbalance (Germaine Greer said it would not make women more valuable, only increase sex-trafficking and prostitution), scrap metal stealing, Portugal experiments with decriminalising possession of small amounts of drugs, the great Pacific Garbage patch (a pool of rubbish twice the size of Texas), John Lewis management, how many nuclear warheads there are in the world, the Catholic silence on child abuse, the Royal Mail and how badly it has been managed, tsunamis, running the railways, GM food , libraries, plastic surgery, our dependence on money from Qatar, how to look after people with dementia - a model from the Netherlands, the hunger of the North Koreans, the death of the newspaper, CCTV nation, the scramble for territory in the arctic, is Fairtrade a good idea?, microgeneration of domestic power, the effects of porn.

Category 3 Health and Science.
Roman Britain was warmer, drinking chocolate is good for the memory, domestic cats kill billions of items of wildlife a year, pop music is louder than it used to be, should surgeons take Modafinil?, Calpol is linked to asthma, sperm can be grown in a lab, college kids have less empathy than they used to have, the Nazis gave Pervatin to their troops - now called crystal meth., older parents are happier, aspirin is good for you but not everyone should take it all the time, premmy babies are more likely to develop autism.

Category 4 Politics
A surprising number of my concerns turn out to be American. Working conditions in the iPad factory in China, middle-class tax breaks, slackers, sexual harassment by top men (like Arnie), oil pipeline, Obama loves covert operations, Guantanamo Bay, social mobility is difficult in the US, the corrupt Putin regime, Germany's economy based on mini-jobs; its efforts to boost the fertility rate. In the UK: abortion of girl babies in the UK, fixing the rate of UK gilts so yields are low thus robbing savers of decent interest, Climategate - scientists deleting unwelcome data, Britain's children are unhappy and wallowing in materialism.

Category 5
Human interest stories.

.

Andy Leeks again

I am now on volume 3 of Andy Leeks' commuter diary and gosh, volume 3 is interesting. I can't remember anything that happened in Volume 2. I do remember that it repeated too much of volume 1, especially the musings on Christmas and New Year. But in Volume 3 Andy's wife gets pregnant! They already have a little girl who's clearly adorable, being bright and imaginative, and looking after her takes up much of Andy's spare time. Now they are getting excited about number 2, and then Andy starts to feel a bit down, so he books a holiday to Cyprus; they can go during term time, lucky things. Then, after some difficulties with making the hire car go, they get to the villa and Andy falls down the stairs! Oh my word. Is he terribly injured? I believe there are more shocks in store.

Andy is not unlike Charles Pooter (the Diary of a Nobody) in that his concerns are not large, he rails against the bags-on-wheels movement, for example. Why not just carry your briefcase as people always have? The non-functioning lift is also a target of his sarcasm. However, his jokes are entirely intentional, funny, and often at his own expense, and small snobberies aren't his thing either, so maybe he is entirely unlike Charles Pooter.

See previous post A short, funny read

A good day - London

Stan was at a loose end yesterday and I thought we should go and do something. So we agreed to go to London. Caught train easily, walked over the Hungerford bridge, down escalators to Villiers Street. I really like Villiers street. Went into Gordon's Wine bar which is in a cellar and sells nothing but wine. Obviously I really wanted beer but behind the bar, instead of a range of drinks, there are 4 large barrels of sherry. I do love sherry. We had a glass of water and a schooner of amontillado, which we shared, it was not any more expensive than wine and was really lovely. We sat in a candlelit thieves' den and listened to the trains rumbling. This cellar is quite an institution; Hillaire Belloc and GK Chesterton also drank there. This fact is kind of wasted on Stan as he knows nothing about literature: but he likes looking at people and is brilliant at sizing them up.

For food we went to the Pret near St Martin in the Fields. Then to the National Portrait Gall for the annual portrait exhibition. This is so interesting - so many styles of portraiture - I liked the mass portrait of Yorkshire Hell's angels, the triple portrait of the magician (Drummond Money-Coutts, whose stage presence came across, and the movements of his hands)  and some of the more classically-styled portraits. The winning picture was plain boring. The second placed one was better but not particularly memorable. The one on the poster was brilliant - a man looking in a series of mirrors.

Walked a very strange route to the Tate on Millbank which is being "done up". A good selection of pictures is still on view and we just enjoyed having a good appreciation and discussion of the pictures that took our attention. I tend to be interested most in our wonderful history of crazy artists, and their remarkable visions, e.g. Blake, Dadd, and Spencer. I particularly love Spencer's conviction that heaven is actually Cookham. I sometimes think so myself.

Probably Heaven

Cain and Abel

Dadd, fairyland

Stanley Spencer - the resurrection in Cookham churchyard

A strange film installation was in the main rooms with the most bizarre creepy noises as the soundtrack. Apparently the creepy noises were made by the motor of the camera with which the piece was filmed. It was very interesting. Stan was riveted as he loves film.

He said: "can we go to that little DVD shop?" he meant the shop in the British film Institute. The cinemas and bars and restaurant seemed to have escaped his notice. I like the BFI and one day I will go there and see everything I have missed.

On the way back we tried to take some artistic pictures with Stan's phone, as after looking at art everything looks like art, even the paint on the road.

Edward Snowden's actions

have had some effect.

First of all, his account of government snooping has changed the climate of public opinion and aroused more sympathy for Bradley Manning, whose sentence was (perhaps as a result) not as harsh as originally suggested. But 35 years, according to his lawyer, is longer than child molesters and murderers get. I hope by the time his case comes up for parole the fury has died down.

Secondly, President Obama has said that he will review the huge trawl for information that the NSA is performing at present .Read report here. (The more I read about President Obama the more it seems to me that he is confusing legitimate opposition with security threat. Someone who criticized him on Twitter had a visit from the security services. This is all very McCarthy. There is a libertarian tradition in the US but Obama views it as an enemy.)

Thirdly, the British government has made itself look a bit silly by sending the secret service to the Guardian offices to smash up a couple of computers. http://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/aug/20/guardian-editor-alan-rusbridger-nsa

The British government has made a huge mistake by detaining David Miranda - a journalist not a terrorist, indirectly connected to the Snowden information, and now there is a real row about what the terrorist act is for. All this is shining a light on the darkest, most shameful and most bullying tactics of the government, and I hope it leads to some constraints on their agents' activities. If Nick Clegg condones it his party should sack him. It's against everything liberals stand for.

Stan's collection, Adaptation, Gran Torino

My son collects films - DVDs and Blu-ray. He knows that he doesn't need to do this; he knows that soon nobody will need a hard copy because they can just stream them, but he wants to own the artifacts that he likes the most, and these things are films.

Adaptation is a study in absurdity in that it stops being an examination of how hard it is to create art and becomes a study in how easy it is to undermine a high purpose by adopting a formula, and it is very funny. Nicolas Cage and Meryl Streep play their roles brilliantly, and as for Chris Cooper, you don't know he's acting. I think it should have won a screenwriting Oscar for being original and clever, but having said that, having the writer (Charlie Kaufman) up there talking to himself is not new. Alan Bennett has also done it. He wrote about writing about a tricky subject in "The Lady in the Van", and dramatised his arguments with himself, presumably he had the joy of casting someone who could imitate himself. In this film you have a writer who's writing about another writer's account of her interactions and feelings with a rough diamond orchid stealer. It sounds crazy and in the end it is. But when the writer has got stuck in a hole, his twin brother Donald (who doesn't exist) is there with his worldly advice and by using all the non -respectable schlocky writing tricks in the book, he pulls it all together.

I can't tell you how not interested I am in cars. I had no idea that a Gran Torino is a car. But I gave ten minutes to a film of that name and then I had to watch the whole thing. It's great - a beautifully constructed film with a strong story. The car has practically nothing to do with it - it's a film about poverty of opportunity in the immigrant community, gang culture, and an angry old boy who doesn't give a shit, and then learns to give a shit. It says on the box it's a must-see, and I do agree, for a change. Clint Eastwood; what a guy.

Postscript: The Donald Kaufman character says something wonderful about love. He loved a girl and she laughed at him behind his back. He said he knew she laughed but he loved her and she couldn't take that away from him. Charlie says "but she thought you were pathetic." Donald says "That was her business. You are what you love, not what loves you. That's what I decided a long time ago."

That's for all of us who loved in vain, someone who laughed at us.

Language by Daniel Something

I was reading this book and enjoying it very much for all sorts of reasons when I lost it. I may have left it behind in the Youth Hostel. It is annoying. However, I have found my iPod and may be very happy about that. (It was the daughter's fault all along). The thing about possessions is how wretched you feel when you lose them.

Acquisitions

How strange it is that people can become famous simply for collecting possessions.

For example, Charles Wade, who gave Snowshill Manor to the National Trust. I recommend this page for his life story. He inherited a large amount of money and after fighting in World War I, spent it on a Tudor Manor, which was almost completely decayed. He renovated and extended the house and then started to fill it with beautiful and interesting things, which he bought from house sales and markets in the UK. He liked good craftmanship, evidenced in such things as model sailing ships and particularly, inlaid cabinets. The house contains wonderful examples of these oriental cabinets, and also, interesting early machinery such as spinning wheels, a weaving loom, model farm carts from all counties, a complete set of early bicycles including a hobby horse, and medieval musical instruments.

Quite by chance, he collected about 20 wonderful sets of Samurai armour; each one must be unique.

But nothing is labelled, so you have to ask the volunteers about everything, and there is no context for anything. This is because Charles Wade made the demand of the National Trust that it all be shown as he wanted it kept, and he didn't want it to be like a museum. No. He wanted it personalised. so when you see his collection, you see something of Charles Wade, and thus he achieves immortality.

Another example of this phenomenon is Isabella Stewart Gardener, whose museum in Boston (Massachusetts)  has to be seen to be believed. Another is the Burrell Collection in Edinburgh.

A doorway at the Burrell, very fine, completely out of context.

I'm not sure that the glory of owning things should be a reason for immortality. It is very sad that we don't know who designed and made the superb firescreen inlaid with shell that is in one of the rooms downstairs in Snowshill Manor. That person lived an obscure life, perhaps suffered hardship, and left something amazing behind. Same of the person who carved, out of a single piece of ivory, 3 intricately patterned balls that turn inside each other. How was that done?

I was uncertain about Charles Wade. On one level he was very eccentric. On another, the longing to be famous, to be immortal in human terms, is the most mundane of ambitions.

However, his Manor House gave us a reason to go to a most beautiful part of the country which we would not have otherwise done, and the views are lovely. the dreaming orchard has pears and apples and also hazelnuts ripening, the hum of bees comes from the flowers, and there are doves cooing away in the dovecot.

Post script: During our lives, most of us acquire things we want to pass down, or we have an heirloom from someone with a story attached to it. In our small way, we are all hoping for immortality by way of possessions. My mum wants to give me some small silver items. I said OK, I would have them. But really, my ambition is to have just the things we use and no other things.

On the other hand, my son wants to dress up for a fancy dress party, and suddenly I feel that we should have a larger stock of dressing up clothes. Where is grandpa's Samurai warrior suit when you need it, eh?

Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

This book concerns a very good-natured man called Charlie who has a very low IQ. Not only can he not understand much of what goes on, he also can't remember much. But he does have a very strong desire to learn and so he takes himself to adult education classes to improve his Literacy and there a university department finds him and tests him to assess his suitability for a new treatment. The treatment has never been tested on a human before: it has only been tested on a white mouse called Algernon, who is now a very smart mouse indeed..

The new treatment turns out to be an operation that improves his brain power amazingly. It does not happen overnight and at first Charlie is disappointed, but gradually he realises how much cleverer he is. He becomes more intelligent than his work mates, his teacher and eventually the professor. At the same time, he starts to remember. He remembers why his parents put him in a home and how cruel his mother and his sister were to him - how they lacked any empathy. He realises that his workmates were not as friendly as he thought they were. So as he gets cleverer, he also gets more bitter. Charlie goes on an emotional journey as his memories come back, and one of the amazing things about the book is this: it is all written in the first person. this is a great achievement because Charlie's voice changes a great deal throughout the book.

He wants to confront his mother with the intelligent person he has become. Ironically, he finds his mother has lost her mental ability to dementia - she sweeps up her kitchen floor for comfort just as he used to sweep the bakery. How eloquently this shows us that none of us are can afford to pride ourselves on our mental powers.

Charlie seems to be such a success for the scientists that they want to take him to conferences and show him off. Charlie hates being treated as an object of curiosity, and takes Algernon and runs away. At about this time Algernon starts to lose his intelligence...

This book has some impassioned pleading for treating people of low IQ as sentient human beings and not being ashamed of them. It has a great many lessons to teach us about kindness and tolerance. And it is an excellent, readable book with many subtle parallels and ironies in it.

I live behind a great oak tree

and once again it is barren. I have lived here for 10 years and only known it to have a "mast year" once, with acorns everywhere underfoot and acorns bouncing off the car every few minutes. This year many of the trees are covered in fruit (the limes are messy and the sycamores are going to be a real trial with their random seeding) and the oak tree is doing nothing. I wonder why? Apparently this irregular fruiting pattern is a mystery to science and nothing to do with weather patterns or environmental factors (according to an American website) but if anyone knows better I hope they will tell me.

Michael Hastings - resembles a murder by security forces that have got out of control

Michael Hastings was 33 years old and an investigative journalist. Now he is dead. I am copying an article about his death because it is highly suspicious. Note that Mercedes said their car could not accidentally blow up in the manner that caused this fatal incident. Michael Hastings was so badly burned that he could not be identified for some time.

Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
July 9, 2013

Police and firefighters in Los Angeles have been ordered not to speak to the media about the deadly crash involving Rolling Stone journalist Michael Hastings, fueling speculation that some form of cover-up could be underway.

San Diego 6 journalist Kimberly Dvorak says she was unable to obtain the police report concerning the crash despite the fact that the LAPD already ruled out “foul play” days after the incident.

A gag order has also been placed on cops and firefighters who both responded to and investigated the crash, which occurred in the early hours of June 18 in the Hancock Park neighborhood of Los Angeles.

“When you go to the LA police department and you go to the fire department….they all said they couldn’t comment and some of them said they were told not to comment on this story,” said Dvorak.

The journalist added that she talked to “military personnel” who commented that the inferno which consumed Hastings’ Mercedes was an extremely hot fire that “is not something you normally see with a car like this,” and that Mercedes itself was waiting to hear from the LAPD but has not been contacted.

Dvorak also noted that the engine from Hastings’ vehicle was found 150 feet behind the car, contradicting testimony from two university physics professors who said that “the engine would go with the forward velocity of the (vehicle).”

Highlighting the absence of skid marks on the road, Dvorak said she was inclined to surmise that the car either malfunctioned or “there was something on the car that allowed that to trigger and blow up,” noting that Mercedes denied their vehicle could have exploded in the manner seen in the incident that killed Hastings.

Dvorak also mentioned two separate academic studies out of the University of Washington and the University of California, San Diego which both detail how modern cars can easily be hacked and remote controlled, a premise also raised by former counter-terror czar Richard Clarke, who told the Huffington Post that the fatal crash of Hastings’ Mercedes C250 Coupe was “consistent with a car cyber attack.”

As we previously reported, questions surrounding Hastings’ untimely death have emerged primarily because the journalist was working on “the biggest story yet” about the CIA before he was killed.

The writer also sent out an email 15 hours before his car crash stating he was “onto a big story” and needed “to go off the rada[r] for a bit.”

According to colleagues, Hastings was “incredibly tense and very worried, and was concerned that the government was looking in on his material,” and also a “nervous wreck” in response to the surveillance of journalists revealed by the AP phone tapping scandal and the NSA PRISM scandal.

After Wikileaks reported that Hastings had contacted them a few hours before his death complaining that he was under FBI investigation, other friends confirmed that the journalist was “very paranoid” about the feds watching him.

Another close friend of Hastings, Staff Sergeant Joseph Biggs, told Fox News that Hastings “drove like a grandma” and that it was totally out of character for him to be speeding in the early hours of the morning.

Hastings had made numerous powerful enemies as a result of his exposure of Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal in 2010, receiving several death threats in the process.

Aldous Huxley - the Island

I have been reading this book for about 6 weeks. This is because it isn't a novel, more like a long lecture by someone who considers himself incredibly wise, and you are not allowed to argue (of course!), instead you have a proxy whose name is Will who asks constantly for more information.

Will arrives by accident on an idyllic island where the people are  working towards enlightenment pretty much in the Buddhist tradition, but with Hinduism thrown in, and yoga. They aim to be the most developed humans they can be, fully aware of the oneness of spirituality in the world and in themselves. It's Westernised in that the people speak English and have a certain amount of industry, but no desire for any quantity of material possessions, and they have no aggression, (this is educated out of them) so they can't defend themselves. Will is taken on a tour by various wise people, male and female, who tell him all about their values and their way of life.

Unfortunately, Will has boring sexual guilt and Huxley is probably the only person who can bear him droning on about his experiences with his good wife and his "vulgar" but incredibly sexually skillful girlfriend. Huxley was one of the modernists who was unable to adjust to the rise of the masses, and he tends to contrast his imagined world with the constraints of the social world in which he grew up, which dates his attitudes. The other characters are sketches that give voice to Huxley's ideas and opinions - and their reverse, as counterpoint. So they are not characters in the true sense of the word.

Most of Huxley's ideas are terrific. On the island, there is an openness about family life that allows children to access other parents as well as their own, which lessens the possibility of damage done by family neuroses. People are encouraged to attend to the here and now, and enjoy living in the moment. Everyone has to do manual labour for two hours a day, so they don't become "sitting addicts" like Western people. Overproduction of fresh food is kept in a huge communal freezer. Electricity comes from harnessing the rivers.

But Huxley does advocate eugenics - frozen sperm of talented men (and eggs of women?) are used to create a more talented race - this is encouraged and preferred but not compulsory. Huxley is a gene snob. It does mean that many of the population are closely related, but Huxley doesn't acknowledge this problem.

A difficult personality that doesn't fit in? Huxley divides these into "Muscle Men [and women]" (example: Stalin, has a love of power and domination) and "Peter Pans" (common, but Hitler is the example). These can both be treated by special coaching and become useful and happy members of society. All well and good except where Huxley announces that they can check the diagnosis of "Peter pans" by x-raying the bones of the wrist. Uuuuuhhhh??? Huxley is absolutely sure that there are some physical types that are "potential failures and criminals, potential tyrants and sadists, potential misanthropes and revolutionaries for revolution's sake" and that they need to be pinpointed early and given appropriate treatment.

In fact, the island is a lovely idea except for the lack of individualism in the people. I do agree with him that people should not be either educated to serve the state, or educated to become greedy for gewgaws and novelties, and cogs in capitalist enterprise; and I think that his ideal aim of education, which is to develop as fully rounded and spiritually happy an individual as possible, is a model that is crying out to be tried.

Such a society is not sustainable, and the ending is not a happy one, but it is a likely one.

As a novel it's a chore. I am amazed how many people give it an Amazon score of 5 stars!