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.