We are all Completely Beside Ourselves, by Karen Joy Fowler

it is difficult to write about this book because you really don't want to say too much to anyone who has yet to have the pleasure of reading it, except to say that it is about a family in which the father is an experimental psychologist and the narrator is one of the daughters. The family has fallen apart and the pain of her siblings' disappearance is constantly in the mind of the daughter. But there is great humour and wit in the telling of the story which makes it quite an addictive read. It also has an interesting structure - the narrator starts in the middle and then has to tell the beginning, and as she says, the ending is also a beginning. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize but it didn't win.

To Rise Again at a Decent Hour by Joshua Ferris: funny and serious

From the blurb on the back cover:

"Introducing Paul O'Rourke: New Yorker, dentist and reluctant non-believer. Modern life disappoints him and love never solves any of his problems."

He is 38 years old, he has come to terms with himself and he is doing well, professionally, but he wants more. From the first chapter:

"When the Prozac stopped working and my Spanish stalled, I started going to the gym. My friend McGowan had encouraged it. Together we would lift things and put them down again. That was something that was almost everything for about a month and a half, the gym's racks of shiny weights and promises of sexual prowess, until the dismal lighting got to me and I took up indoor lacrosse."

The dismal lighting! Yes!

"Betsy Convoy was my head hygienist and a devout Roman Catholic. If ever I was tempted to become a Christian, which I never was, but if I was, I thought I would do well to become a Roman Catholic like Mrs Convoy. She attended Mass at Saint Joan of Arc Church in Jackson Heights where she expressed her faith with hand gestures, genuflections, recitations, liturgies, donations, confessions, lit candles, saints' days, and several different call-and-responses. Catholics speak, like baseball players, in the coded language of gesture. Sure the Roman Catholic Church is an abomination to man and a disgrace to God, but it comes with a highly structured Mass, several sacred pilgrimages, the oldest songs, the most impressive architecture, and a whole bunch of things to do whenever you enter the church. Taken all together, they make you one with your brother."

Here you get the general tone of the piece. Paul is flippant (the writing is very funny), gets very angry sometimes, and yet he is serious. He wants to believe but he doesn't and doesn't want to be the sort of person who does believe. He is envious of those who believe, and when he has a Jewish girlfriend, he longs to be part of her family. He longs to be an atheist Jew.

The most unfortunate thing about being an atheist wasn't the loss of God and all the comfort and reassurance of God - no small things - but the loss of a vital human vocabulary. Grace, charity, transcendence: I felt them as surely as any believer, even if we differed on the ultimate cause, and yet I had no right words for them. I had to borrow those words from an old dead order....

So there's the plot, he wants a religion that has all the benefits of religion but he doesn't want to believe. The book is a bit sprawling and many people who write it up on Amazon find the ending very unsatisfactory but in these serious matters of belief, a happy ending is not possible.

Oh woe is me.

I have got a cold. Oh, I am so not well I am writing this from my bed even thought it is a lovely day and I could be doing things in the garden and buying Christmas cards and sending said cards, and it is all because of my nose. My head is fine but not at all sensible. Yesterday in London I kept initiating conversations with complete strangers about their backpacks and their travel plans, or their country of origins (Romanians are begging in hordes in London, just as we had been warned before they joined the EU) or admiring their babies. I had a lovely time with my friend Sarah and fended off the cold with Strepsils and alcohol - a sherry in Gordon's wine bar, a mulled wine on the South Bank and when I got home, another glass of red because it was Friday.

Today I was meant to go to London with Amanda to sing carols and I just couldn't. It's a real shame. Every one has to keep well away from me. They have to keep well, away from me.

Christmas fundraiser for Save the Children

When I started teaching English at the Maybury Community Centre I inherited 2 volunteers from my predecessor. They are both remarkable retired women, had been volunteering for some time and are very helpful. V. continues to help me at Maybury and Ginny (aged 80+) stopped and helped me at Bellfields instead for a while, where I had a large class and needed some support. Then Ginny had an operation on her feet, so couldn't come, and then said her hips hurt so much she couldn't get out of bed. Suddenly her G.P. went into action but the specialists found that Ginny's body is full of cancer and she hasn't got long to live.

Until she got diagnosed, Ginny played the accordion and keyboard in a Barn Dance band, and also looked after their bookings. She had been a primary school teacher - hence she has nice clear writing - and she had 7 children of her own. She was the sort of person you can trust with your worries. I did, anyway.

Now she can't get out much, she is trying to raise money for Save the Children by selling cards. I think you'll like the designs: they are really cheerful. Have a look here! There is also a great picture of Ginny. She is now knitting squares as well. She hates not to be useful.

See Ginny's cards here - it's a website where you can order.

Descriptions and comments: P.D. James, the Murder Room.

p 76 Comments: "Wasn't accidie, that lethargy of the spirit, one of the deadly sins? To the religious there must seem a wilful blasphemy in the rejection of all joy."

p 78 "His sister openly voiced her disparagement of psychiatry. "It isn't even a scientific discipline, just the last resort of the desperate or the indulgence of fashionable neuroses. You can't even describe the difference between mind and brain in any way which makes sense. You've probably done more harm in the last fifty years than any other branch of medicine and you can only help patients today because the neuroscientists and the drug companies have given you the tools. Without their little tablets you would be back where you were twenty years ago."

p 84 "Belief had its social uses. We haven't exactly found an effective substitute. Now we construct our own morality. "What I want is right and I'm entitled to have it." The older generation may still be encumbered by some folk memory of Judeo-Christian guilt, but that will be gone by the next generation."

p160 "Now for the first time she felt a terrible grief. It wasn't that a man was dead and had died horribly. They were, she knew, only partly a reaction to shock and terror. Blinking her eyes and willing herself to calmness, she thought, it's always the same when someone we know dies. We weep a little for ourselves; but this moment of profound sorrow was more than the sad acceptance of her own mortality, it was part of a universal grieving for the beauty, the terror and the cruelty of the world."

p 282 "Love, the satisfaction of being wanted, is always something of a triumph. Very few people mind confessing that they have been desirable. Where sexual mores today are concerned, it isn't adultery that's contemptible."

352 "I said that believers can deal with guilt by confession, but how could those of us without faith find our peace? I remembered some words I'd read by a philosopher, I think Roger Scruton. "The consolation of imaginary things is not imaginary consolation."

Sample description, p 79

 " England had rejoiced in a beautiful October more typical of spring's tender vicissitudes than of the year's slow decline into this multicoloured decrepitude. Now suddenly the sky, which had been an expanse of clear azure blue, was darkened by a rolling cloud as grimy as factory smoke. The first drops of rain fell and he had hardly time to push open his umbrella before he was deluged by a squall. It felt as if the accumulated weight of the cloud's precarious burden had emptied over his head. There was a clump of trees within yards and he took refuge under a horse chestnut, prepared to wait patiently for the sky to clear. Above him the dark sinews of the tree were becoming visible among the yellowing leaves and, looking up, he felt the slow drops falling on his face. He wondered why it was pleasurable to feel these small erratic splashes on skin already drying from the rain's first assault. Perhaps it was no more than the comfort of knowing that he could still take pleasure in the unsolicited benisons of existence. The more intense, the grosser, the urgent physicalities had long lost their edge. Now that appetite had become fastidious and sex rarely urgent, a relief he could provide for himself, at least he could still relish the fall of a raindrop on his cheek."

Big Climate change petition : International

Wherever you come from in the world, please sign this campaign petition to stop climate change.

click here

Even if a small fraction of the Arctic carbon were released to the atmosphere, we’re fucked,” he told me. What alarmed him was that ”the methane bubbles were reaching the surface. That was something new in my survey of methane bubbles,” he said.

“The conventional thought is that the bubbles would be dissolved before they reached the surface and that microorganisms would consume that methane, and that’s normal,” Box went on. But if the plumes are making it to the surface, that’s a brand new source of heat-trapping gases that we need to worry about.

“The Arctic is our most immediate carbon concern,” Box said, referring also to the CH4 escaping from the melting permafrost. But the sentiment can be expanded to all of climate change:

“We’re on a trajectory to an unmanageable heating scenario, and we need to get off it,” he said. “We’re fucked at a certain point, right? It just becomes unmanageable. The climate dragon is being poked, and eventually the dragon becomes pissed off enough to trash the place.”

whole story is here

The Murder Room by P D James

As P D James died 2 days ago and I had admired her sharp mind so much, having seen her on TV and heard her on the radio, I decided to read one of her famous Adam Dalgliesh books. I don't like his name: he sounds like a dour Scot. But I am enjoying this book both for its literary descriptions and its brilliant analyses of what motivates people in living their lives. First she describes the outer appearance of her characters, and later she gets into them and tells you all about their childhood, their disappointed hopes, their careers and their sex lives in an omniscient way that is remarkable and rather disconcerting. How much do people give away to a gimlet eye like PD James's??

Man in corridor

I like going to my college. I'm only teaching part time so it's not too much of a burden - all my colleagues are very competent and friendly.

Yesterday I saw a man in the corridor who looked very preoccupied: he had dark, almost black hair, a black shirt and a familiar look. However, he was not simultaneously arrogant and shambolic, and therefore he wasn't the man I feared.  Now I do find myself missing my hopelessly uncommitted Turkish student, who used to remind me of the man I used to miss!

Addendum

Turkish student has returned, is in Sarah's class, - so nice to see him in the library!  and asked me about improving his handwriting (he used to write from the bottom of the character rather than from the top). Will get him a handwriting copybook.

A Kiss before Dying by Ira Levin

This is a completely brilliant thriller. It is about a psychopath of course - but the brilliant writing has the effect of cheering one up. It was written in the 1950s, which means all the medical forensics we are used to reading about now were not available, and the social mores in the story are also outdated. The pace is fast, but even so, I skipped bits because I couldn't bear the suspense. I thoroughly recommend it!

Grayson Perry:Who Are You?

This art exhibition was also a TV series on Channel 4 looking at how to explore questions of identity in a portrait. The people Grayson chose to explore did not have a straightforward identity, apart from Chris Huhne, the Great White Male, who seemed to Grayson to be incapable of change - unbearable really, so he made his portrait as a pot and then smashed it, mending it with gold. It was to remind Huhne that vulnerability can be an asset.

Grayson has portrayed himself as a map of days - a walled city, with things inside and outside the walls - a map that takes a long time to take in. He has portrayed the British with a huge, brightly coloured comfort blanket, with all the many things we love and identify with on it.

Grayson lived with the Jesus Army for sometime, observing how they have rescued people from their old self-destructive ways or life on the streets, to become a family in a shared house with a shared way of life. They sing in the evenings and instead of watching TV and they also share their money so he made their group portrait in the shape of a money box styled like a reliquary. Rather wittily it has "Jesus Saves" written at the top.

Another person who was going through an identity crisis was a man who was suffering from Alzheimer's disease, and this was also shattering for his wife. All their shared happy memories were disappearing. I loved the pot Grayson made them - the wife's scarf making a protection for them both, her face buried in his chest, perhaps with grief, and his face smiling - but vacantly, not understanding the nature of the problem.

You can see the exhibits here.
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/reviews/grayson-perry-who-are-you-national-portrait-gallery-review-sublimely-beautiful-9820710.html

We could have spent hours looking at this.

This is on at the National Portrait Gallery, where the portraits are mostly rectangular objects with paint on them. But none of Perry's portraits are that. There were a lot of people looking at the Perry exhibits and talking about them with great animation and awe.

Southbank: Turkish film Winter Sleep

This was very interesting. Set in Turkey with fascinating exteriors in a strange, stony, humped landscape with the weather getting colder and the snow coming, and also lovely detailed interiors, it consists mainly of long Chekhovian conversations; people criticising each other and analysing their unhappiness!

The central character is a middle-aged man, and he lives with his sister and his wife. he spends most of his time in his own room: his study, writing a column to the local paper, and criticising his society for its mixture of religion and secularism but without having much desire to change minds or see change. His sister points out his contradictions quite unmercifully.

Meanwhile his marriage is bitterly unhappy and his interaction with his wife is quite destructive. She cries but can't really explain why she feels such intense antipathy for him. It's all a puzzle.

At the end of the story the women don't move on but the man does. Perhaps his sister's misery and pithy comments change his mind, or perhaps it's the long drunken conversation at the end when he realises that everyone's a critic and the more dedicated, the more ridiculous.

It is the kind of long, slow film that you don't often see. Stan and I went to take pot luck and see whatever was on.

Not the blog it was meant to be

When I started to write this blog, it was going to record my down turns as well as the good times: hence the title Ups and Downs. In a way I hoped to make sense of the mood swings. However, I found I didn't want to bring my negative states of mind to the attention of the public. You could call me proud, in that I wanted to keep up a good shop window, but I also know that people were hardly going to want to read those entries. For a while I kept up 2 blogs, the miserable blog and the less miserable one. I got bored with the miserable one after fewer than 10 entries. I wanted to say something about anti-depressants but what is there to say about them, except that they help a bit?

I also thought that my blog pictures would cheer me up - reminders of all the interesting and arresting things there are to find out about. However, when I am in a bad state of mind nothing does that for me, really. I can't settle to anything.

Talk on search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence with Prof Brian Cox and Dr Adam Rutherford and film, Contact, at BFI

I do love our jaunts to the South Bank. I feel like going to lots of literary / cultural history things, but I rarely do, I like to see my literary heroes but I also like to expand my knowledge of what is going on in the world.

Adam Rutherford

Prof Cox didn't seem too lively last night, he said he had recently come back from Australia and his body didn't know what time it was; from my seat near the front clearly he was tired and longing to be at home on the sofa with the kids and the blooming missus. But Dr Rutherford is jolly super! He is a natural -born leader to whom orchestrating a large audience of questioners is a simple joy. He speaks easily and confidently and one judges his brain to be on tip-top form.  He kicked the conversation along and tried to prod old Coxy into wakefulness, and Coxy did his best. Sometimes Brian Cox is best when he is a bit acerbic, as he is with conspiracy theorists. He just cuts them short. I had already heard him say (on Monkey Cage which I have on my iPod) that he thinks intelligent life like us is incredibly rare, even though they have now found 2,000 planets in our galaxy which look good for supporting life, and he said that again, also tried to explain wormholes, and the fact that gravity doesn't exist.

40 years ago we sent a transmission into space, which is called the Arecibo message. Arecibo is in Puerto Rico (very beautiful trees) where the big radio telescope is. Cox and Rutherford explained the origin of the message and what it means.  It sounds a well thought-out message but we only transmitted it for 3 minutes!!

the Arecibo message

They both loved the film they introduced - Contact - with Jodie Foster playing a scientist they both approved of: single-minded, brave, fighting like a lion for funding, being done down by a senior man who wants all the glory after she's done all the work. She is obsessed with listening for a message from space. Other scientists think she's crazy, but the film is called Contact, and the scene where she at last hears something (loud!!!) is very exciting. It's directed by Zemeckis (Forest Gump) who is particularly strong on special effects and it is based on a book by Carl Sagan. Brian Cox seems to have been greatly impressed by Carl Sagan but the counter view seems to be that Carl Sagan was messiahnistic (OK that's not a word, is it?)

The film was 2.5 hours long and I was really uncomfortable in my seat too close to the front and way off to the side (it was cheap) but I was gripped the whole way through. Jodie Foster played a blinder and one felt for her so much.  I recommend this film as a story and a spectacle. I don't feel as though I am now convinced that there is intelligent life elsewhere but it did give me a glimpse into what scientists dream of. They dream of aliens who give them difficult puzzles to solve and behave like father-figures. In spite of the billions of people on our planet they feel lonely and think that there is an answer "out there". 

However, the film does point up the parallels between those who have faith in a God that no one can see or prove the existence of, and those who experience other phenomena ... but I don't want to give the plot away. See the movie !! Recommended by scientists!

Here is a lecture on genetics by Adam Rutherford.

Taking up the poppies at the Tower of London

I enjoyed my morning pulling up poppies. There are armies of volunteers - so we have made a good inroad into the work, and because of the recent heavy rain the moat is becoming very muddy and slippery. The poppies are on metal rods that are starting to rust, and trying to pull off the rubber fixings is slow work. I spent most of the time filling boxes with the ceramic flower heads, which have been sold. We agreed these look more like Tudor roses than poppies, and some of them are a shiny red but most are a rusty red. These are going back to ??Derby to be washed and put in presentation boxes. Some of us had to make up loads of boxes, some had to sort out 3 lengths of metal rod. These had to be bundled, which I think must be the worst job. We were supervised by a young female equivalent of Sergeant Wilson, awfully well-spoken but ... not an organizer by nature, and vague in the extreme. Maybe she has learned by now that every work party finds their own way of doing things and she lets them get on with it.

Some of the poppies have fallen over probably because of the rain and wind and some are damaged, and I think this makes them more moving really, because they are individual and fragile, and they fall down in the mud ... it will be a morass before they are all taken up.

this is what I was doing most of the time

the volunteers were not all English - some were American and I also heard German spoken.  Great, huh?

Scientists on the TV

Scientists on the TV: in my opinion they need to have personality, and if it is a bit eccentric so much the better: a bland personality and a subject like science is going to be a turn off. The late Patrick Moore was great because he was terrifically knowledgeable and a passionate educator. His correspondences with keen schoolboys could be unending as Chris Lintott remembered on the Life Scientific, listen here and he brought many children to astrology by writing books as well as by being a posh uncle figure on T.V.

There are many pictures of Patrick Moore as a fat old dear, when he was young he was rather handsome.

Chris Lintott does the Sky at Night now and he is very good himself. I like his enthusiasm for getting the public involved in classifying stars (and there are lots left to classify!) click here to find the site to start classifying.

Prof Brian Cox is very good because he has an attractive voice and has enough personality without making the show about himself. I used to dislike his crew for making B.C. look gorgeous everywhere he went, bathed in a golden glow from a lovely sunset in the desert/ up a volcano etc. but in his last series they let other human beings have their turn in the golden glow, children, young girls, old men, the lot. In this series BC's thesis seems to be that the whole point of the human journey, from our earliest wrigglings in the primordial soup  is.... space exploration! But I haven't watched the last episode so maybe I have misinterpreted it. It seems ironic that he tells you the meaning of our lives is the ability to explore the universe while the cameraman is shooting National Geographic-style pictures of goat-herders and nomad children who are too busy scratching a living from the dry earth to be interested in space exploration. So what about these people, Brian? No point to their lives?

Now Brian Cox is attractive to look at as long as you don't dwell on his mouth: the rest of him is fine and I like him in jeans and T-shirts. The best thing is that he is really not thinking about what he looks like.

Prof Alice Roberts has been taken on by my University, Birmingham, to spread the word about science to the masses, and I can't get on with her at all. She is too cute for words with her big smiley smile. I love her clothes and jewellery, hate her over-enunciated voice, and find everything she says boring and unclear possibly because if you take her away from anthropology, which is her subject, she isn't that confident. I liked her doing Wild Swimming, but I was already a convert (in theory rather than practice), and I daresay everyone else found it a bit bland. She is a presenter first and a scientist second, sadly.

James Burke (still with us, but not seen on TV) was very good at explaining science and communicating its importance without being a bore. Possibly he was over-exposed in the 1970s and he needed to be saved for short doses. Interestingly, he was at one time a teacher of English as a Foreign Language (like me) and his degree was in Middle English, not science, but he became well-known as a science writer and a consultant to a SETI project. (After years of watching science programmes I know what this means).

Nobody was a better presenter than Jacob Brunowski. His sentences were based on a lot of thought. Jacob Bronowski was a Polish-Jewish British mathematician, biologist, historian of science, theatre author, poet and inventor. Wikipedia

He had a good way of stopping after sentences and waiting for the next one to form in his mind. Not many do that these days, which is a shame. 

I wish we had more ecologists on TV. There was an excellent programme on the global threat to habitats on the radio last night: an entrancing conversation by very committed grownups: sad and serious though. Please try to spare some time to listen : Shared Planet

whoops: forgot to link to a personal review of science progs and science fiction on TV by Brian Cox, with Alice Roberts and Brian Blessed.

Quick: only here for 1 month

Sandham Memorial Chapel: paintings by Stanley Spencer

Sandham Memorial Chapel. Although I am a big Stanley Spencer fan I haven’t seen this before. It is a long way to drive and quite small but the pictures are full of love. They must have been Spencer’s way of coping with his memories of WWI. Although it is ostensibly a memorial to a chap called Sandham who died of disease after fighting in the Macedonian campaign, it doesn't show Sandham's experiences as Spencer could really show only his own memories: he had been a medical orderly in the UK (in Beaufort hospital near Bristol) and then? in Macedonia.

In this picture the orderlies are washing the wooden lockers (open shelves) in the baths and Spencer shows himself finding a moment of peace and calm between the baths, which were magenta in colour, and he liked them.

 He shows views of orderlies making beds, fetching tea urns, sorting the laundry, tending to frostbitten feet – and he shows the soldiers resting on the ground, getting water from a stream and filling their bottles, putting up tents, shaving under mosquito nets. And this being Spencer, there’s also a big picture of the Resurrection of the Soldiers. The soldiers get up and see their plain white crosses and some of them hand them back to Jesus, some just heap them up, the mules (that did all the heavy work) come back to life too, and the soldiers start to roll up their puttees (canvas bandages around their lower legs). For some people, the Great War destroyed their faith (how could a good God allow it to happen?) and for Spencer it was the other way (God must have more in store for us than this mess!)

The pictures of his hospital orderly experiences seem the most calming and organized. He had tried to see his menial daily tasks as a devotion to God and his faith was such that he remembered the time as very spiritual, mentioning “the progress of my soul” in these surroundings. It was very hard work and the shifts were long, between 10 and 14 hours, and he was at the hospital (in Bristol) for three years and was not able to paint in all that time. Obviously, he was unhappy, frustrated and lonely, but he was helped by his religious desire to please God by performing these menial tasks with love.  With Spencer the compositions are very complicated. Individual figures are simplified into curves and straight lines, but the design as a whole is difficult to see, with the eye being led all about the picture.

Stanley Spencer: Oh, how I could paint this feeling I have in me if only there was no war, the feeling of that corridor, the sergeant-major and his dog - anything so long as it gave me the feeling and the circumstance gave me! If I was Deborah, the lunatic who doesn't know there is a war on, I could do it. I envied him the mental agony of being cut off completely from my soul. I thought in agony how marvellously I could paint this moment in the corridor now. And I will paint it, with all the conviction I feel now, in a belief in peace being the essential need for creative work, not a peace that is merely the accidental lapse between wars, but a peace that whether war is on or not is the imperturbable and right state of the human soul.

This picture is called Ablutions. It shows the patients washing themselves and in the middle there's an orderly (prob a self-portrait), with an apron that ties up at the back, painting a man's wounds with iodine. It looks a little like a scene from Christ's life in renaissance painting - the man with the towel could be wearing a toga. The man at the back is pulling up his braces - something most men today have never done. 

In his Beaufort days Stanley had not yet formulated his ideas on the meaning of what he came to know as love, nor were the inspiring mental transformations he later experienced possible in his circumstances then. His current inability to master the significance of the atmospheres he was meeting or to discern the connections in them so vital to his creativity not only alarmed him but turned eventually into a source of desperation for him.
He was so disconnected that he became convinced in later life that the war had damaged beyond repair the cherished pre-war Cookham-feelings which had sourced the pristine glory of his early work. 

the above quotation is from a well-researched website with plenty of interesting thoughts about Stanley Spencer.

In this picture Spencer is on the right front, scraping dead skin off the feet of the man who is suffering from frostbitten feet. Another orderly has round slop pails over his shoulders making him look a little like an angel. There are eggs in nests all over the wallpaper, and this is probably something Spencer remembered as he liked to be precise about details.It is unlikely to be a conscious allusion to sex as this was something Spencer tried not to think about. There is a rare female presence in this picture: the sister right at the back through the doorway.

Stanley Spencer: I would like to explain what was at the back of my mind when I began to want to do these pictures. Well, when I first enlisted I began to feel I was dying of starvation, spiritual starvation, and this feeling intensified my desire for spiritual life, and then suddenly I began to see and catch hold of little particles of this life in the scrubbing of a floor or the making of a bed; and so everything I did meant a spiritual revelation to me. Everything at the hospital became a key to my conception of spiritual life, and so it came about at last that tea urns, bathrooms, beds etc all became symbols of my spiritual thoughts, things sacred to me by association.

when I am seeking the Kingdom of Heaven I shall tell God to take into consideration the number of men I have cleaned and the number of floors I have scrubbed, as well as the excellence of my pictures, so as to let me in.

Griping about the National Trust - again

We went out towards Basingstoke and visited a large woodland with a rather ramshackle house called the Vyne. It is rather lovely in places. But as the Trust tries to be too many things, this property was failing to be anything. First, the volunteers were wrapping up the house for the winter, so many things were covered in white bags. I think we are supposed to be impressed by the thoroughness and care being taken, and it is curmudgeonly of me that I was slightly put out. White bags aren't very interesting to look at.

Secondly, there was to be a Halloween ball, so nearly all the surfaces were covered with tacky Halloween decorations, like, orange cushions with black cats on, spiders, pumpkins faces, orange tinsel etc. it was just horrible. Our guided tour of the tapestries and Tudor carvings and so forth was pretty much ruined by this, because I kept wondering how much they had spent in Wilko's and Claire's Accessories and Tesco's on all this tat. 

Thirdly, the house had been knocked about a bit by every owner it’s had and some of the “improvements” were very cut-price to start with. The Trust is very po-faced and you don't feel as though you are allowed to laugh at the wooden Greek columns. It was raining too much to see the garden which was unfortunate. The flapjacks cost £2.25 which put them beyond our price range, but the tea room was very attractive. 

However, Cliveden was worth visiting and there is a kiosk in the grounds where you can get a reasonably priced cup of coffee and flapjack, and there are many things in the grounds to see. However, we were not able to see the house on the day we were there - it's a hotel, and must be very annoying for the guests to see hordes of holiday-makers peering in at the windows at the smartness and splendour inside.

New ways of doing democracy

Democracy develops. At present it isn't working because people can't see how their votes can make any difference to the capitalist system and its effects. If you are doing well, you will vote to perpetuate it. If you are marginalised and alienated and plain poor, what will you vote for? You know nothing will change. You don't see anyone like yourself to vote for, or anyone who can represent you.

This is what Russell Brand is saying in his new book: Revolution. He is saying: Give us something that addresses the issues of global capitalism, or seeks to change its effects, and we will vote for that! Russell was on Start the Week this week talking about his book, and I think explaining his point of view quite well. He is everywhere at the moment waving a banner and making speeches. He is trying to wake people up!  I think he is making a difference. He has a channel on Youtube: the Trews. Some editions are better than others of course; the major problem is that he can't stop joking about people's names etc. and the jokes just occur to him in the middle of serious points, thus diminishing his arguments.

a recent edition of the 10 minute newsletter

But I'm not saying his jokes aren't funny. "Lord Sugar sounds like Willy Wonka's evil enemy", heehee.

also on Start the Week we had a leader from 38 degrees. This is a directly democratic online organisation. It's a bit like Change. org but unlike Change which runs an online platform for petitions put forward by individuals - I have signed several, mainly on feminist issues - 38 degrees has a central organisation. the idea is that once you have expressed an interest in online democracy by signing a petition you are a member, and then you can decide with everyone else in the membership which issues you will pursue - climate change? the new trade agreement? fracking? so the membership acts like a unit even though it is actually very diverse. But democracy isn't perfect and this new democracy is just developing: these are early days.

Another serious writer against capitalism is Naomi Wolf (whose latest book Russell considers in his book, but renders her thoughts in more accessible language, I believe). He is trying to make politics more accessible to people who feel they aren't knowledgeable enough to talk about politics. He wants them to make their voices heard. Intellectual snobbery would cut him down if he were not so articulate, and this is the danger to all the people he is trying to listen to, inform and engage.

Vivienne Westwood again

Looking fab and wearing a necklace made of conkers "by a student"

The marvellous Viv was on Woman's Hour, facing very lightweight questions from Jeni Murray. I do love Jenni but on this occasion she seemed to be harking back to the punk era all the time instead of asking Vivienne about her activism and about her philosophy of fashion. Vivienne is clearly keen to give others credit for their ideas and input; I see what Andreas means about her honesty. She is generous about Maclaren who was never generous about sharing credit with her, but her relationship with him seems to have been horribly abusive, in that his need of her made him very cruel.

She wants people to know that capitalism is the enemy and that we should go and protest about it on Guy Fawkes night, wearing Guy Fawkes masks (V for Vendetta by Alan Moore: it's a classic graphic novel but I don't like it: have only got halfway through.) we should go and march on the Houses of Parliament.

I went to the website and I found it somewhat disturbing in that the participants are clearly expecting a punch up with the police. Well, overthrowing the capitalist system has got to start somewhere I suppose but this is really very feeble. Russell Brand is also active in anti-capitalism and his daily Trews is brilliant, but although he wants to protest against everything I have no idea what he does want.

He wants to write off consumer debt which is quite good in a way - people in poverty should not have been allowed to borrow in the first place. However, as someone who has been trained to be very careful with money for nearly 30 years, and as a result has come very close to paying off a large mortgage, I feel people need to change their attitude to buying things. That would be far more revolutionary than encouraging them by writing off their debt. And Vivienne W. agrees with me. She says we need to reduce what we use - including clothing - as part of a programme to change the world.

Hoorah for Viv, who wears no knickers!

here is a link to Woman's hour

Another petition - to get the Green party some coverage!

If UKIP gets coverage surely the Green Party should too!
Please look here! for the petition.

The Road to Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead

If you have just finished reading "Middlemarch", this is the book for you.

George Eliot

This is a book that does three things: firstly, it takes you on a guided tour of places associated with George Eliot, and tells you all about her life, and her struggle to escape the limiting parameters she had grown up with. Secondly, it is a considered appreciation of the novel and guides you in your understanding of why this book is rated so highly. Thirdly, the narrative also acts as a kind of autobiography, telling you about the development of Rebecca Mead as a writer and as a woman.

So we have not one but two good writers to enjoy when we take up this book. Eliot is quoted liberally from her letters and novels, and Mead takes the role of a knowledgeable guide to her life and works who is also prepared to open up to the reader and share her personal experiences, some of which are similar to Eliot's.

I have to quote from the book to give you a feeling for how it works, and for me it works beautifully and is a delight to read, but I have had to cut it a lot:

One morning in late spring I caught the train from London to Nuneaton. I'd only been to the Midlands once before, when I was eighteen, on a week-long school trip spent on a barge that wended its way through the area's network of canals.... The journey takes about an hour on the fast train, which further flattens the fields and pastures and turns the canals into leaden streaks alongside its tracks.

The Midlands are lacking in drama, topographically speaking, and George Eliot is the great advocate of the loveliness to be found in their modest plainness. In chapter 12 of Middlemarch, she paints a picture of the land in which she grew up that is as attentive to each facet and flaw of its subject as the portraits by Dutch masters she admired. "Little details gave each field a particular physiognomy, dear to the eyes that have looked on them from childhood," she writes. "The pool in the corner where the grasses were dank and the trees leaned whisperingly; the great oak shadowing a bare place in mid-pasture; the high bank where the ash-trees grew..." 

The countryside I saw through the train window wasn't at all like the coastal English landscape of my youth,... , but the note of nostalgia in Eliot's description resonated with me. It was more than twenty years since I'd lived in England, and returning always induced a melancholy in me... These days when I took the train from London to my hometown I was always struck by the understated beauty of the countryside. I'd failed to appreciate it when I was immersed in it...

I first moved to New York to do a graduate degree in journalism, expecting to return to England after a year... Much of the time I felt like I was wasting time. But I also got a part-time job at a magazine where I did research for writers and answered the phones and even wrote a few short pieces, learning skills and gaining experience that only a real deadline and a real pay cheque could provide....

.....

My train arrived in Nuneaton, a market town ten miles north of Coventry. There's a bronze statue of George Eliot in the centre of town, where she sits on a low wall, awash in long skirts, thick hair resting on her shoulders, eyes cast down, a book at her side. Not far away, past slightly dilapidated chain stores, there's a pub named for her, the George Eliot hotel...

A rather romantic (modern) statue of George Eliot

Also within Riversley Park is the Nuneaton Museum and Art Gallery, which owns a substantial collection of objects related to George Eliot, many of them acquired from local families. When I visited, the gallery in which the collection was usually displayed was being repainted, and Catherine Nesbit, the museum's manager, took me into an upstairs room where the objects were being stored. Wearing latex gloves, she drew items out of boxes one by one and carefully unfolded the tissue paper they had been wrapped in, as if they were the most precious and unexpected of Christmas presents.

.... I thought of a letter George Eliot wrote to Harriet Melusina Fay Peirce, an American activist on behalf of women's welfare... "I was too proud and ambitious to write: I did not believe that I could do anything fine, and I did not choose to do anything of that mediocre sort which I despised when it was done by others," she wrote. I imagined her as a stiff, self-conscious, inhibited girl, warily examining herself for signs of greatness, too proud and too fearful to lay paper to desktop and try.

Griff House, Nuneaton, according to Mead it is impossible to imagine as it was.

As it was when George Eliot grew up there.

A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute

Nearly everyone in the UK who was literate in the 1950s and early 1960s has read this book. This was the generation who knew about the horrors of war, and in an understated way it expresses their frustration with their post-war lives and their hope that Australia would be better. Certainly, that's how it worked upon my mother. who loved romances set in the outback, a genre much favoured by the Woman's Weekly. Shute was a man of his time: he wrote in a dry, controlled way -  a complete contrast to Ruth Park's dancing adjectives. (see previous post).

I re-read this book because I thought the girlie, who is on her travels, should read it to know about how Australia was in the 1950's, and I wanted to remind myself of its flavour. There are 2 parts to it and a frame - a narrator telling the story. He is the elderly solicitor who is executor to a Will - a large sum of money is left in trust to an obscure young typist. But she (Jean Paget) has an extraordinary back story, having been in Malaya when it was overrun by the Japanese army, and having been part of a group of women and children who walked from place to place across Malaya until they died or found a place that would accept them. The English women and children stayed in a village there tending to rice paddies for 3 years.

In her Malayan troubles, Jean met a brave young Australian prisoner called Joe Harman, who suffered horribly for his generosity towards her, and she has never forgotten him. With the money she inherits, she goes back to Malaya to build a well for the village women, and there she is amazed to find that Joe has survived the war. So... she goes to Australia to find him.

The second part of the story takes place in Australia. It is interesting in a completely different way from the first - but they are both linked by the same tribute to the spirit of practicality and resilience that Jean and Joe have.

The problem for me is the narrator. He tells you all about his life and it is screamingly dull, I suppose as a foil to the exciting stories he has to tell. He breakfasts, he goes to work, he dines at his club with other old bufties, he wants to tell you all about trusts and codicils and investments. Wah! The story unfolds in spite of his seemingly endless prevarications and wooden style.

Whatever made Shute decide to tell the story that way? It is so odd. But he must have thought that the decent and prudish old boy added something - and when you step back and think about it, perhaps it does. The commercial world needs someone to be interested in all the dry stuff in small print that keeps money transactions lawful. He represents civil society, maybe, which is the backbone of so much that we value, although Shute also celebrates the spirit of free enterprise and the self-reliance that Jean and Joe display.

So in short, I would still recommend it.

The Frost and the Fire by Ruth Park

I'm so pleased that you can still get hold of this book. The story is set in the New Zealand goldrush of the 1860s, where veterans of the Californian goldrush mix with the Irish and the Scots, and away off on their own part of the goldfield, the Chinese. It's the wild West, but removed to the South, the landscape is mountainous, rocky and deep-gorged, and the climate is intensely hot in the summer and intensely cold in the winter.

Just as the weather can be extreme, so can the characters: the crowds can get stirred into a mob, the Scots who seem so well rooted even in the thin soil of the mountains may have secret uncontrollable longings, and the Irish are sometimes carried away by their passions into complete madness. This is a story in which people have souls, and suffer the pains of love and loss in epic clarity. When you read a modern story it's entertaining enough but there's no feeling that the story matters as our lives are pretty much like those of battery hens. But here people act out of freedom, greed, emotional need, neighbourliness, adventurousness, and as their consciences square with the tenets of their deepest beliefs. There is scope to be noble.

The story is about Currency MacQueen, the washerwoman's girl, and is told by another girl of her own age: Tatty, the midwife's daughter, and it features prospectors and diggers, fools and wise men, priests and dance-hall girls and a waif of a violinist. Tatty is not the star of her own story, and has to suffer this bravely, and all the characters, with their strengths and weaknesses, are dealt with sympathetically.

In my version (you can get an edited version) there was a paragraph of racism which made me recoil in horror, but I didn't want it eradicated because I know it represented racism as it was, callous and casual, and thank God it is no longer like that.

I don't normally read romantic fiction but this was wonderful escapism. I feel better for having been embroiled in it - so emotional, so large and grand, as the world should be. I wrote before about the vast emotional scope that humans are capable of, and how pitiful it is to be a dumbed-down version. I feel myself to be like this, moved only minimally by sport and shopping, and all our "adventures" involve safety harnesses and little effort.

Mr Lynch's Holiday by Catherine O'Flynn

This is a very readable novel which tells a tale of a development in Spain that was half-built and then abandoned with a few residents in place, gives an idea of what life is like for the residents, focuses on a man whose partner leaves him, trapped and self-deluding, in what had been their dream home, and what happens when his old Irish dad comes to visit him for a holiday.

It's a sensitively told story with great understanding and all the characters come to life in interesting ways. It was really enjoyable and rang a good many bells for me. Look out for Catherine O'Flynn. I liked "What was lost" as well but this one is happier.

Scotland

Nearly all my father's family live in Scotland. But they were all 'no' voters, as they work in Edinburgh and have no big issues against England.

I do sympathise with those Scots who argue that the government at Westminster doesn't represent them. I live down in the South East but I don't think it represents me either. But that's our flavour of democracy for you. The UK government doesn't represent most of the people most of the time. Although I see the point of the nationalist movement I really felt quite demonized by their arguments against the English (we speak well of them!) and felt that such passionate nationalism was miles away from any rational picture of the world. Scotland is a very small country with only 2 major cities.

 I'm afraid also that the English would have been angry to have been rejected for speaking in a different accent - (sorry, a large number of different accents) and the vote would have created real ill feeling for the Scots of the kind that was felt for the Irish, after they ejected the English (but we did occupy their country; it was not a Union) but kept coming to England to get work, live, marry - they were our largest immigrant population. We would have started asking "If Scotland is so great, why don't the Scots stay there?"

The media, for example, is full of Scots. There is not enough room in Scotland for all their ambitious and talented people. They do very well out of their union with the rest of Britain.

The Scots send their students to Scottish universities free of charge and the same universities charge £9,000 a year to English students. How is this allowed? The Scots have free prescriptions and we pay £8.00 for each.  - why do they get such benefits? They can hardly say they are badly treated. If I think about this for long I become very angry. As far as I can see there is only one money pot and they take more than their share out of it.

We did discuss F going to live in Scotland for a few years so that she would qualify, as a Scottish resident, for a free place at a Scottish university. It is very nearly worth doing.

I suppose it was a good thing it had to come to a vote in the end - better than a civil war - and I hope that the result will be a change in Scottish home rule that the Scots like and accept, and all the rifts heal. I hope there will be greater fairness for the English as well as the Scots.

P.S. I originally wrote that the Scots pay less than the English for their dental treatment and I was probably wrong about that - but the Welsh do pay less than the English. That makes sense, doesn't it?

About Time: a Richard Curtis film

Time Travel is a great motif in a film. It makes whatever it's about into a fairy tale of transformation and possibility. Supposing your life is privileged but not grand, full of ordinary family happiness, and time travel seems to be giving you the ability to make it even better: and then ... but I don't want to spoil it. Because the theme is love and loss.

It makes London look such fun! And London is fun if you can cope with it, so that's true. We went to our friend Amanda's to watch this film because F is going soon, so Amanda invited us for a bon voyage dinner. My contribution was a Victoria sponge (I'm not very good at them) but I filled it with blackcurrant curd, cream and raspberries. Loulou and Maddie and Stan were there, but A was not there because he was at an AGM. It was a shame that he wasn't there because the film was a bonding experience - S & F wanted to share it - and it was about (to tell the truth) loving one's dad. If you love your dad, it's a must-see. If you're not sure, it's still a must-see.

In Richard Curtis films the pretty girl always seems to be American! Why is this? Are British girls not interesting enough - and what's wrong with European girls, or far Eastern girls, hey?

When we went home A. was in bed but not asleep. I couldn't relax at all and then the storm started! It was the noisiest thunder I have ever heard - it sounded like jet engines and it went on and on, and the rain was fierce. And I left the washing out.

The children said they too couldn't sleep after they first watched this Richard Curtis film. Interesting.

Tim Minchin: great speech: worth watching

I don't always like Tim Minchin. But here he's clever and funny and gives some good advice, - I think...

Vivienne Westwood and Andreas Kronthaler

If it wasn't for this interview in the Times magazine of early June (I wonder where I picked it up?) I would never have known how much I admire Vivienne Westwood.

1. 25 years ago, she  married a man 25 years younger than herself and it doesn't seem like a big deal to either of them. She is 73, he is 49. She says Andreas is much more sociable than she is, but she doesn't mind. "With me being older and everything, and not expecting to have a husband in later life, I'm very tolerant. He doesn't have to do anything as if it is somehow expected of him. Only if he wants."

They work on the designs together.

She often wears clothes that make her look quite ridiculous, but they are at least original

But her designs (like this one) are very beautiful and flattering for the older woman

However, on the day she wore this one she forgot that she was wearing no knickers

2. she is active in saving the honey bee.

3. She lived in a 2-bedroom council flat for 30 years - even after she became successful.

4. She is completely unmaterialistic : "She doesn't care what other people have. She is only curious about what other people know. Their wisdom."

5. She doesn't watch the TV.

6. They went to the Sex and the City film but couldn't sit through it. "It was a terrible film."

7. She reads.

8. She campaigns on the subject of climate change. climaterevolution.co.uk

9. At home, she is very frugal with lights and water.

10. She never lies.

11. She cycles around London. Is that why she has such great legs?

Nuremberg: Germanisches National Museum: Amazing

Before I put my holiday away entirely I recommend this museum. It is a fabulous glass and steel building which shows off all the exhibits - some priceless - in good light, and inside there is a Carthusian church and cloister, and a cloister courtyard, all part of the museum and a fantastic setting to show off the Christian art and statutory.

One of the amazing exhibits is a tall gold "hat" dating from 10th-9th century BCE.

To me, this is clearly part of sun worship - it indicates a very sophisticated level of craftmanship.

You are allowed to take photos in the museum without a flash. This is one of the statues in the church that I particularly liked for its grace.

St Christopher with the weight of the world on his shoulders

There are many beautiful carvings, statues and paintings, also toys, musical instruments, scientific instruments, household goods and even whole rooms. We went to see all the starred items as a quick way of going around the museum.

One of our fellow tourists, from the far East, conscientiously took photos of absolutely everything. He focused, he shot, he moved on to the next item. He took photos of everything and he looked at nothing.

The National Gallery has now allowed photography so I suppose this sort of experience will be commonplace soon. Sarah Crompton in the Telegraph of Aug. 16th deplored this.

By allowing photography, galleries are betraying those who want to reflect rather than glance. Surrounded by the snappers, they may come to think that this is the acceptable way to consume art: constantly grazing, without any real meal.

For centuries art has been a way of making us slow down and take a moment to examine something in detail. This is not a plea for silent of empty galleries, but for more thoughtful ones. 

I do agree - it's so sad that people don't give themselves time to look and consider - even imagine the lives of those who made or used the object.

Aldous Huxley, the Doors of Perception and the Watts Gallery

We went for a walk with S & C on the North Downs Way starting at Compton, near the Watts Gallery, so I suggested a visit to the gallery as well, and also, because they are literary types, a visit to Aldous Huxley's grave. I only heard the other day on the radio that his ashes are buried at Compton. (Eric Blair (George Orwell) is buried at another of my favourite churchyards, Sutton Courtenay near the river Thames at Abingdon.)

Recently a radio programme celebrated 60 years since the publication of "The Doors of Perception", one of Huxley's most remarkable books. The title comes from a line of William Blake's: "If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear as it is: infinite."

Huxley's ambition for his experiment was a personal visionary enlightenment. He had a sense he was missing something. Huxley thought humans would always need "artificial paradises" as their lives are monotonous or painful - and he sensed the "appetite of the soul".

Huxley posited a link between substances like mescaline and the correction of some mental disorders.

He informed himself of primitive man's usage of the natural pharmacopoeia. There is evidence that primitive man explored all kinds of natural stimulant, hallucinogen and stupefacient. When these psychotropic plants were taken early hominids could stay awake longer and forage for longer thus increasing their fitness for  survival. Huxley  took from other societies and from cave painting [haven't heard of this before] the insight that what is visible is to some extent illusory. The psychotropic substances give access to "the essential" and improve the necessary ability to communicate with others. Huxley wasn't interested in dosing to oblivion – he hoped that drug usage would promote understanding  e.g. that with their aid Khrushchev and Kennedy could step out of their world views - that in the political and the personal spheres these drugs would be liberating.

Newly added: For example, scientists have carried out the first controlled trials involving LSD in more than 40 years - and found that the banned hallucinogenic drug could help treat anxiety in people with terminal illnesses. For the small trial in Switzerland, eight terminally ill patients were given a high dose of the drug ... afterwards, patients reported feeling significantly less anxious about dying, an effect that lasted for up to a year, reports The New York Times. One volunteer said: "My LSD experience brought back some lost emotions and ability to trust, lots of psychological insights, and a timeless moments when the universe didn't seem like a trap, but like a revelation of utter beauty." (The week, 22/3/14)

Our ancestors may have used drugs to take the edge off the pain. Opiates, for example, negate the fear that hunting and warfare generate. But it is  important for our survival that we can feel fear. Anger is important – to forcefully pursue your goals. Although we aim for happiness, from an evolutionary point of view there is no point in happiness because it doesn't urge us to do anything at all.

The body naturally tries to regulate itself – it’s called homeostasis, and we mirror this in our behaviour; we self-medicate to regulate ourselves. Exercise is something we use as it’s effective for depression and anxiety. Wine. Coffee. The signals emanate from a core area of the brain, a large system called the striatum. The system that translates motivation into action is responsible for desire, attraction, craving, wanting – that system is important to make us go after goals. The problem with people who are addicted to drugs is that the system is overactive with craving for a particular substance. But without the system itself we would not get stuff done. 

In a previous time if someone improved their "fitness", they would have greater capacity for survival and the body's response made them feel good. Now we can feel good without improving our capacity for survival. Drugs like cocaine  make the user feel good but decrease the fitness. 

(1958 on Brains Trust) Huxley was asked about his attitude to taking drugs to relieve anxiety: he said he did not believe this to be morally wrong. Too much tension is a disease and sometimes too little tension is almost a disease. Tension can be valuable biologically. “Drugs can be a political weapon in the hands of a scientific dictator and there’s no doubt this could be done.”

In Brave New World he claimed the right to be unhappy. In this novel "happy pills" were a tyranny and a part of dumbing down  the population in line with commercial culture. This is contrasted in the novel with the savage's extremes of emotion : for example, guilt, grief, love, adoration, and shame, which are difficult to deal with but these make us fully human. Do we really want to be less?

In BNW revisited, (1958) Huxley conceded that reality was catching up with his fiction faster than he could have imagined. 

As for the future, some philosophers claim that the brain has stopped evolving but we have developed drugs as aspects of our technological extensions to do the evolving for us. These can and will become more subtle and finely tuned in changing the brain's functioning. 

We had a good talk about Huxley and searched for his grave, finding it after some time wandering and reading the inscriptions on the many old and new gravestones near the Watts Cemetery Chapel. We were just amazed by the chapel.

The chapel is very beautiful, designed by Watts' wife Mary in a Celtic/Art Nouveau style, and conceived by her as a community project to involve all the villagers in the production of moulded terracotta tiles, some very ornamental and three dimensional.

Over the doorway

Inside there are many wonderful ornaments designed by Mary, made of gesso and painted. This is an example of her symbolic decoration.

 Everywhere we looked there were more amazing and inventive designs. It is a truly wonderful creation of the early 20th century.

 

I recommend the Harrow at Compton for a lunch. The food is really good - not particularly dear - and the service is prompt and personal.

a pub near the A3 south of Guildford