An Honourable Deception? New Labour, Iraq, and the misuse of power by Clare Short Part 1

I seem to have had this book on my shelf for ever. The fact is, if I have bought a book second -hand  (- I bought this second-hand) I don't feel any rush to read it. Something about the price.

The beginning is pretty boring. Clare has no snappy turns of phrase. Her prose plods along. She gives us a potted history of her early life at home and in the Labour party, and also explains what it was like to be a serious-minded woman in a parliament where men such as Alan Clarke, an appalling old misogynist, turned up drunk and played for laughs. "I objected and told the Speaker I knew we weren't allowed to say another member was drunk [why on earth not?] but there did seem to be a problem." The papers all reported that she had wrongly accused the minister of being drunk.

"I remember being horrified at the fawning attitude Tory M.P.s adopted to their ministers and particularly to the Prime Minister."[Mrs Thatcher. The Tory Party constitution is very hierarchicial and the M.P.s are forced to toady if they want to get promotion. Everything depends on what he/she thinks of them. Mostly it works as it suits the Tory personality, but recently, under Mr Johnson, it does not work as his behaviour in sacking 21 democratically elected M.P.s is not acceptable or precedented, and yet they dare not call him out.]

She was clearly a very dedicated constituency M.P., trying her best to ease a way through the problems of the people who come for her help. During this time, in 1983, Mrs Thatcher's divisive politics meant that there was high unemployment and deep divisions. Like all Labour politicians then, Clare had a passionate commitment to equality of opportunity and ending race and sex discrimination which was opposed by the Tories at the time. She points out also that Labour has a strong libertarian tradition - they are not communists - they believe in free elections and the rule of law. They did not want to nationalise all the industries either, but thought it right that the utilities - gas, electricity, telephones and water - should be in public ownership becaue they are crucial to basic wellbeing. The model is called "the mixed economy".

But back in 1983 the party was being torn assunder by the Trotskyist "militant tendency". Clare was probably quite tolerant of the zealots. She thought of the Labour party as a broad church, but gradually the membership moved against the extremists and most of the Labour M.P.s began to understand that the church had to have walls. The miners' strike from 1984-85 was a bitter dispute that caused a great deal of suffering and pitted the Southern police against the Northern miners in pitched battles. Clare read about the mining industry and realised that change must come to it as they used antique pits and methods, but judged that the change was being managed brutally by the government. Then came the print unions' dispute with the Murdoch newspaper offices' move to Wapping, an equally brutal and mismanaged change.

[All this happened when I was in my early 20's and I knew a tough young Met policeman who liked the action up in Yorkshire, fighting the miners. I was against it because I know the North and the South are one nation. I was brought up to admire the laconic grit of the North. The odd thing is that the awful divisions were just as shocking as things are now, if not more so, but when you are young I suppose it doesn't depress you quite as much. I was depressed in my 20s but I thought it was because of personal things that had happened in the past, which was probably partly true. I wasn't brought up to have a strong psyche, but I guess I was also depressed by all the events reported on the news and in the papers. It seemed that there would be no end to it all.]

The Labour Party had to change and Clare was elected to the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party. This body supervised the development of policy and the administration of the Labour Party and in the ten years that Clare served, and they reformed all the old policies and had the necessary task of expelling the Militant M.P.s from the Labour Party. They supported Neil Kinnock and John Smith, successive leaders, in making the party electable. The most contentious item was Unilateral Nuclear Disarmament. When Neil Kinnock went to see Ronald Reagan to demonstrate that he could be treated as a future Prime Minister, he was snubbed over unilateralism. Policy was changed. Labour stayed with its commitment to nuclear disarmament but gave up the unilateralist element  - they would barter the weapons in order to secure disarmament from others.

Clare was hounded and bullied by the Sun newspaper for opposing their printing daily pictures of naked women (some very young) on page 3. She found it coarsening and degrading to society as a whole.

Mrs T was forced out of office in 1990 after the mistakes of the Poll Tax policy and the resignation of Geoffrey Howe. The next election was in 1992 and by then Labour was in a much better shape to present a credible opposition. Clare resigned from the Shadow front bench because she wanted to speak against the first Gulf War, whereas the Labour Leader, Neil Kinnock, wanted her to be silent. She resigned in order to say that after Saddam Hussein had been driven out of Kuwait we "should seek the removal of all non-conventional weapons - nuclear, chemical and biological - from Israel, Syria and Iraq. She said we should also settle the Palestinian issue by giving the Palestinians their state based on the West Bank and Gaza".  She was clear that Saddam Hussein must be made to withdraw from Kuwait, but wanted to speak about foreign policy throughout the Middle East.

Clare resigned from the Labour front bench three times but each time the Leaders understood that she was defending her principles and were not slow in promoting her again.

In the 1992 election Labour won a larger share of the vote but the Tories won with a reduced majority. One of the features was the large Labour rallies where members were bussed in to "adore" the Leader. Clare did not attend these rallies. She spent her time contacting voters in her own city of Birmingham. On the day of the election the Sun's headline ran: If Neil Kinnock wins today, would the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights? On the next day it published the headline It was the Sun wot won it. Clare Short believed that these headlines caused the soon-to-be leader of the Labour Party, Tony Blair, to court the Sun and give its owner, Rupert Murdoch, access and political favours, although she did not believe the Sun's actual influence was as great as Blair thought.

The News of the World smeared Clare because she had campaigned for justice and against corruption in the West Midlands Serious Crimes Squad. She complained to the Press Complaints Commission and the scandal-sheet was forced to print the adjudication in a full page. At the same time Clare's husband was dying of early onset dementia - eventually failing to recognise her. His illness began in 1980 and progressed into strange and inexplicable behaviour, then a sad decline, and he died in 1993.

Before Tony Blair, the Leader was John Smith, a popular and beloved Labour politician. He asked Clare to work on women's representation in the Labour party. Clare tried to build a party that was more women-friendly, and this seemed to her to make the whole organisation more open and enabling. She knew that fewer people than ever before were willing to involve themselves in party politics and that the quality of local councillors and M.P.s was deteriorating. Led by the NEC, Labour worked hard to draw a much wider range of people into the party and to offer political education and training in how to chair meetings, speak and organise. They wanted to renew the party and make it a means of empowering local people to become active politically and improve their community.

John Smith died in 1994 much to the sadness of the Parliamentary Labour Party. He was a team player and also won the confidence of the electorate, according to polls.

His deputy, Margaret Beckett stood for leader and Clare supported her and helped with her campaign. Other runners were Tony Blair and John Prescott. Clare did not believe that Blair had real Labour values at heart, but knew that most of the cabinet would vote for him because they felt his was the face that could win Labour an election. John Prescott was voted Deputy Leader because the Party believed that his strong Labour values would anchor Tony Blair. Gordon Brown and Tony Blair were both "Modernisers" and decided amongst themselves that Blair would stand as leader. He won with 57 per cent of the vote.

Blair immediately decided to rewrite Clause 4 of the Party's Constitution which stated the Party was committed to the public ownership of industries. Clare helped with some amendments to the redraft and argued the case for change at the NEC. Blair sent her a handwritten thank you note.

She was elected to the Shadow cabinet and Blair gave her the brief for transport. She did the necessary research and worked for a year preparing a considered and serious transport policy. Rail privatisation was very unpopular in the country but Blair and Brown did not want to commit to renationalisation. All the work Clare did was pushed to one side and Blair offered her a job in Overseas Development instead.

As well as the shift to a media-dominated system of decision-making, Blair moved rapidly away from Labour's tradition of collective policy-making. Policy had been made by sub-committees of the NEC, was considered by the NEC who put it forward to Conference. It was therefore thoroughly thrashed out at every stage. Under Blair, Labour moved to policy being decided by the leader and his entourage, collective decision-making being marginalised, but an expectation of total loyalty to the line laid down. This must have been an endless torture to Clare, She had worked on the NEC, examining and making policy for many years, long enough to know a sound policy from a faulty one. She had become something of an expert in collaborating intelligently. Suddenly she was expected to seem enthusiastic about policy that had not come through the proper channels, which had been dictated in a hurry by an inexperienced pair of men who were interested mainly in how the story would play in the press, and which she had no faith in.

She was lucky to get the International Development brief because Blair didn't take much interest in it. In 1997 Labour won the election and I will report on the Iraq part of the story in Part 2

I don't bother

Yesterday a woman called Pat tried to be friendly to me at coffee by telling me how it was possible to misjudge people when you first meet them. This lady Pat and I have history.

This is because I did misjudge her when first met her. She came in a large group of new starters and she was the one who engaged the others in conversation when she should have been helping to move the boat. The boats are heavy and we all help to lift them. I thought of her as "the woman who thinks everyone else should carry the boat for her". Anyway, it turned out she had all sorts of things wrong with her and she was medically unable to move the boat. (She was able to row it though, after a fashion.) As time has gone on, there are more members who are not well enough to lift the boat because they have problems you can't see, like osteoporosis. When they play a part in the club you forgive them for the things they can't do, and admire them for the things they do do, or you think about how lucky you, personally, are, that anno domini hasn't caught up with you yet.

On another occasion she decided to obliquely "tell me off" by talking about people at the club who weren't friendly to her when she first came along and how certain other people her had come to her rescue when she was going to give up. I could tell by her look that she meant me amongst the "bad" club members. I didn't really care. It seemed to me then that the club, which is a sports club, was getting very full of people who don't really do the sport. Now I am more appreciative of people who just like to come along.

Anyway, she was charming and tried to engage me on this subject, obviously expecting that I should share a confidence with her. I said "I am a very bad judge of people. I nearly always misjudge them." and I thought of friends that I had lost because they were the wrong friends, who didn't value me at all. I could have told her about these friends whom I knew when I was young but I think it is still too personal to share. I keep myself to myself. And I thought about what I was trying to write about and how damaged I am and how you can't exchange that in a coffee and chat session. Pointless. But I also thought about how often thoughts are too complicated to share with other people.

When my children were under 10 I used to tell them all my complicated thoughts. We lived in the country and I had no friends I could talk to.  Once F said to me: "Mummy you're talking to me like I'm a MUCH OLDER CHILD!" "Oh, am I?" I said. I tried to work out if I was doing her any harm, if the subject matter wasn't suitable. I thought whatever I was talking about wouldn't do her any harm, and then I carried on regardless.

Italian holiday

This year we had an interesting time in Umbria and Tuscany. I didn't take many pictures because I have a new phone - a Huwai Honor and it is all very well, except for the camera. The camera makes everything dull and grey. I have to edit every pic to turn up the brightness and the colour, and even then the pics are not nearly as good as they used to be on the Samsung. Now I find that I could have used the Samsung as just a camera but I can't find it so I must have taken it to the recycling centre. I can't believe I did that.

Anyway, here are some pics showing metalwork in some of the towns we went to - like Cortana. I let the others take pics of the views and so forth because their cameras are better.

Caged windows

I think this might be Perugia

This is definitely Siena

Siena - a hook in the form of a sheep

You can see that the Italians have a fine tradition of metalwork being decorative as well as functional and they still have that. Nearly every apartment we stayed in had something interesting in its fittings that you wouldn't have found in the UK.

These are things that I valued about Italy:

1. No Starbucks or Kentucky Fried chicken or any other familiar tackiness. I think they have McDonald's but not in the historical towns we visited.
2. The other side of the coin - the cafe/bars we visited were individual businesses.
3. Plenty of parking on the edge of towns or under the cities - some with escalators into town.
4. Pedestrianised town centres - these places were built long before the car and it is a good idea to keep cars out - with the exception of Florence. We caught buses into Florence. 
5. Recycling receptacles everywhere.
6. Valiant bicycling in the face of many dangers.
7. No Brexit.
8. Good quality buildings in the traditional designs with good materials, warm colours - ochre, terracotta, sienna!
9. Ironwork - doorcovers very elaborate
10. Artisans making goods in their workshops. We saw a man making a mosaic picture from polished stone - which turned out to be way above our price range. Lovely, though.

The name of the wind

Last week I went (rather weakly, because I had a feverish cold) to my exercise class, and some way through the class, which is held in a studio with a river view, the door suddenly blew open, nearly crashing into the woman next to me. Luckily she moved quickly out of the way, and we closed it again.  Our instructor Holly, having moved herself into the place in front of the door to hold it shut, continued to lead us in our exertions. Then she said: "I thought we'd seen the last of Gareth".
I looked around the room to try to figure out who Gareth might be. Why did she want to not see Gareth again? It wasn't like Holly to give voice to strong negative opinions.
And then I remembered that now the winds have names! And this one is called Gareth!
Later still I found myself singing: "They call the wind Mariah" a song from Paint Your Wagon, that goes:

Away out here they've got a name /For rain and wind and fire /The rain is Tess, The fire's Joe

And they call the wind Mariah

A lot of tosh, of course, but if you call the wind Mariah, habitually, then that is the name of the wind, but if you suddenly decide that the wind is called Gareth this week, and Hannah next week, nobody knows what you're talking about. The wind is still blowing hard enough to make it quite unpleasant outside, (not much allotment digging for me) and it might be Gareth out there and it might be Hannah, and is it worth keeping up with the changing name of the March winds?

Research into soil. BBC Shared Planet programme October 2013

A healthy soil is critical for all terrestrial life. It is the source of all our food, regulates flooding and water storage: soil organisms regulate nutrients as well as recycle waste, and it's a major storage organ of carbon dioxide. But for all that we know very little about it.

The pressures on the world's soils to deliver more and more food is making them increasingly vulnerable to degradation. Soil is linked to our survival. Kelvin Bood, the regular scientist on Shared Planet, said, "There are about 50,000 different types of soil across the world. It's the organic material in the soil that holds it together. We know little about soil but we do know that a healthy soil contains around a third of all living organisms. It seems that the activities of humans that lead to the degradation of the soil led to the collapse of the Mayan civilisation, among others. Soil forms very slowly. Estimates vary, but a layer of soil 2 cm thick can take a thousand years to accumulate, but the rate of soil loss globally is 10 times the rate of accumulation. We might be able to replace the soil physically but we can't replicate it biologically - we can't replace the life in the soil that makes it what it is. Some people estimate that we will run out of soil in decades."

There are 25 species of earthworm in Britain, and 3,000 species world wide. By and large they all perform the same function and they are critical to the health of the planet's soils.

Professor Karl Ritz and Dr Tom Sizmur of Rothamsted are researching into soil. "In a handful of soil there are a hundred billion bacteria, hundreds of kilometres of fungal threads such as what grows on your bread, tens of thousands of other tiny organisms. The soil biota is the engine of the earth, driving the key processes such as carbon recycling and making nutrients available. An engine needs fuel and the fuel is organic matter derived from plants.

The largest animal in the soil is the earthworm. There are three groups of these.
1. Those that are predominantly surface-dwelling - they eat the litter and straw on the surface and they are very weak burrowers.
2. There are those that live in vertical persistent burrows down to several metres in depth. These produce worm casts. They are borers and pull the nutrients down.
3. The third group lives within the soil matrix and these mix up the organic material and move it around.

The vertical burrowing earthworms can move about 30 times their own body weight a day. If you scale that up that is several hundred tons of soil being moved per hectare per annum.

Tom Sizmur, studying soil at Reading University, counts worms as a general index of the health of the soil. "The hypothesis is the more carbon you add the more worms you get and the more work is down by the whole biology of the system. "

The scientists explore the soil to a depth of 20 centimetres. When you harvest a crop you are removing material from the field, that material came from the soil. Heavy cropping without paying back into the soil with organic material is a kind of mining.

Scientists look to see how natural systems keep soils functioning healthily. "They tend to be founded on great diversity, which is well-adapted to the local circumstance. If we used that information we could generate much greater sustainability in our systems."

The data globally is that soils are being impoverished. Because it takes so long to produce new soil scientists suggest we regard them as non-renewable resources. We are heading for a peak soil scenario. Then the amount of soil runs down.

Conserving our planet's soil is one of the most important of our conservation needs. In the UK we have leading soil scientists. Prof Wilfred Otten of Abertay University said, "We are working on developing techniques to enable us to look at soil structure.  In the past we broke the soil up into pieces before studying it, which is like looking at the rubble after blowing up a building. We need to look at it intact. We use X-ray tomography which allows us to look inside soil. The soil has a lot of air space in it, and water. That area of soil with the air and water flowing through is what is making life possible."

"The size of the pores defines the structure of the soil. These create a network. (a road map or computer network). Soil must have good structure as well as good components. There are phenomenal numbers of organisms in soil but they are a very small percentage. Only one per cent of the solids of soil are occupied by life.  What limits growth? is it the amount of organic material in the soil or the access organisms have to soil? Access to the soil is partly regulated by the structure. The structure of soils can be very different but still have functioning ecosystems which shows how well soil adapts to the way we use it.

"In part the adaptation is self-regulating. On a microscopic level, bacteria can play an important role - they emit compounds which act as a glue and cement the soil together."

"World wide we are losing soils for productivity rapidly through erosion -  one short heavy rainfall can take away soil that will take twenty years to replace. How can we slow down this decline? A good way of doing that is to replace the organic matter in soil. Not using fertilisers to produce food but organic matter to produce soil."

Is anything being done to conserve soil? Yes: an intergovernmental technical panel of 27 experts has been set up to provide knowledge and technical advice on soils to governments at United Nations level. This panel will raise awareness of the global problem and help governments decide where to prioritise action on soil. There is very little legislation on soil or legal protection of soil.

http://www.fao.org/globalsoilpartnership/intergovernmental-technical-panel-on-soils/en/

Water companies spend billions of pounds a year cleaning up our water supplies. Sediment, nitrogen and phosphorus are all coming into our water from the soil and need to be taken out before water can be used to drinking or industry. We also need the soil to regulate the amount of carbon in soils relative to in the atmosphere. There is roughly 10 times as much carbon in the world's soils as in the world's forests, but we lose carbon into the atmosphere every time we till the soil.

In general soils are resilient when it comes to growing plants, but we have ignored their multifunctional aspect, for example, how they operate as a drain for water in a water catchment area, or sustain bio-diversity. The benefits of managing the soil is probably not going to be apparent to those who manage it.

Governments have so many other priorities. But we are beginning to have better information about the cost of not managing soils.

Soil-less agriculture is possible - the use of coir, liquid growing media - hydroponics. It seems only possible for high value luxury crops - not wheat for example. If we have to use fossil fuels to generate electricity to power lights to grow crops in artificial conditions the overall environmental costs will be too high.

There is more recent research in a subsequent programme. Work in progress.

What Good are the Arts?

This book is a consideration of whether the arts improve people, and if so, in what way? It is useful to consider this when you consider the government's grants of funding towards the arts, and private investors make charitable donations of artworks and funding; what good do they think they are doing?

I was disappointed to find that I was persuaded by John Carey's arguments. I had hoped that viewing great works of art does benefit the viewer in some way: perhaps spiritually, perhaps lifting the level of the internal discourse? I wasn't sure but I would have asserted that I felt something more than mere enjoyment or pleasure when I looked at great pictures. I didn't feel that I was in some way superior to others for my liking to visit say, the old Tate Gallery (now Tate Britain). I felt a thirst to see the pictures of William Blake, a longing to see more of them. As I became more knowledgeable about art I discovered there were more artists whose work I craved to see (hello Matisse. Hello Rodin.) Now I'm quite an old hand at the kind of pictures I like and understand quite a lot about them.

Blake said the human body could express everything he needed to say
A kind of choreographer, I think

*****

First of all Carey examines what an artwork is. He looks at various definitions of art. An important and lasting one was provided by Kant. "For Kant beauty was.. essentially connected with moral goodness. All aesthetic judgements are, consequently, ethical as well. "Now I say the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good, and that it is only in this respect", Kant admonished, "that it gives pleasure." (You can tell it is truly beautiful because you realise that it is good.)

Immanual Kant

Kant believed that creators of great art are geniuses, the special property of genius being that it allows access to the supersensible region.

Carey calls this "a farrago of superstition and unsubstantiated assertion".

"Schopenhauer, another beneficiary of Kant's theories, made further additions to the West's notions of high art.  In pure contemplation of the aesthetic object, he claimed, the observer would entirely escape his own personality and become "a clear mirror of the inner nature of the world." By letting "his whole consciousness be filled with quiet contemplation" the observer will cease to be himself and become indistinguishable from the object. What the viewer will see is no longer the object but the Platonic object.  But this revelation was not available to everyone. Schopenhauer believed that the common person was "a blind, striving creature whose pole or focus lies in the genital organs". Those being who can attain a vision of the Platonic ideas in pure contemplation are artistic geniuses. They can be recognised by their "keen and steady glance", whereas the glance of the common mortal is "stupid and vacant"."

Schopenhauer

The idea of art as something that separates the commoner from the elite continues to have some currency. "Though generally reinforced with abstruse phraseology, their definitions are invariably reducible to the statement that works of art are things recognised as works of art by the right people, or that they are things that have the effects that works of art should rightly have."

Hmmmm.

Then, as a part of the movement or pop art in the 20th century, Andy Warhol exhibited sculptures made of Brillo Boxes. ..."They showed that a work of art need have no special quality discernible by the senses. Its status as a work of art does not depend on how it looks, or on any physical qualities whatsoever. Arthur C. Danto, concluded from these that anything could be a work of art. He might have drawn the same conclusion from Marcel Duchamp's "fountain" 1917, (a urinal). Danto decided that ordinary objects could be works of art only if they were so in the opinion of the experts and critics who make up the art-world. He adds another criterion - that the artist must have had the intention of creating an artwork i.e. art can't be a child's scribble.

But what about popular culture? Suppose you really like this picture?

And I am feeling particularly highbrow, and suspect that the pleasure you get from this picture is not the same pleasure I get from this picture.

Albrecht Durer

John Carey would say that what I am saying, when I am saying that I think this the more beautiful- "What I feel is more valuable than what you feel." "We can see now that such a claim is nonsense psychologically, because other people's feelings cannot be accessed. But even if they could be, would it be meaningful to assert that your experiences were more valuable than someone else's?"

John Carey argues that there are no rational grounds for thinking there is such a thing as "high art" which is better than "popular art".

Ellen Dissanayake, in her book, "What is art for?" approaches the question by asking what art has contributed to natural selection. She looks at a range of artistic practises from skin-painting to weapon decoration traceable in early human societies. All these early art forms, who observes, were communal, reinforcing the group's cohesion and helping to assure its survival. The divisive tendencies of high art are alien to them.

The behavioural tendency that Dissanayake suggests lies behind them all is "making special". Making  special is not confined to humans- think of the bower bird. "Dissanayake thinks that communities that made things special survived better than those that did not, because the fact of taking pains convinced others as well as themselves that the activity - tool manufacture, say - was worth doing. So art's function was to render socially-important activities gratifying, physically and emotionally, and that is how it played a part in natural selection. "

Primarily, for Dissanayake, we are lonely. Whereas hunter-gatherer man lived from birth to death in a tight-knit group, modern man is born into a diverse, stratified society of strangers, and this is something quite new in the human repertoire. Popular art , not high art, is receptive and accessible and emphasises belonging so restores the cohesion of the hunter-gatherer group. Its pre-occupation with romantic/sexual love is unprecedented in other societies and Dissanayake believes that this is a response to the loneliness of the modern condition.

We seek intense emotions, because the purpose of emotion, in evolutionary terms, is to give focus and direction to our activities. Cognition is freewheeling until emotion (fear, desire, anger) gives it something to home in on. Mass art displays violence and sensationalism. For intellectuals in the  early 20th century these reveal its lowness and proves "the debased nature of its adherents".

Carey discusses art as a form of escapism. He argues that escapism, like violence and sensationalism, seems to be a human necessity.

Dissanayake argues that decoration of the self and the home is in line with high-art practices across times and cultures. Gardening also is a making-special and ranks as an art.

Carey undermines Iris Murdoch's claims to know the difference between good art and bad art. "Good art shows us how difficult it is to be objective by showing us how differently the world looks to an objective vision." she has written somewhere. "OBJECTIVE" is of course completely meaningless as artists' visions are nothing if not subjective.

Here is a passage which comes from the Afterword, where Carey answers his critics, and one of them is most definitely Jeanette Winterson. "Winterson believes that art, like religion, makes you a better person. "Like religion, art offers an alternative value system, it asks us to see differently, think differently, challenging ourselves and the way we live." (she says). "Challenging herself is not something we see Winterson doing, however, nor even allowing herself  a moment of self-doubt. In reality a religion such as Christianity, with its strict ethical code and its insistence on the subjugation of the self, is entirely unlike art, which has no unified ethic, and which often generates not self-abasement but self-esteem, ..." Carey rejoins.

It is as though art enables us to look in a very flattering mirror. When I stand in the gallery watching people, their thoughts about the paintings allow them to stand more erect and in a manner which shows that they feel more self-worth. They feel special, confident.

Anyway, what really convinced me that high art encourages self-admiring delusions are the accounts of Hitler's obsession with ownership of the "sacred" objects, and his theft of such a huge collection of high art,  and J Paul Getty's belief that his art collection made him a significantly superior human being. After this, there were accounts of the wonders that prison drama groups and prison reading groups can do for people's self-worth - these are really worth sponsoring as they can change lives.

Pictures in galleries - they are relaxing to look at and sometimes encourage deep reflection. They exhibit profoundly interesting qualities in artists: their honesty, humility, compassion and courage. Sometimes only one quality, sometimes two or three, rarely all four. Carey makes you think though, that maybe the money spent on art galleries would be better spent on community art projects. 

And then he goes into literature which he values very much as a kind of ongoing argument about ways of seeing life and the self: rational, romantic, or as detached or scornful, but anyway useful as a long, wide range of discourse about the human condition.

My sense of smell has gone

I used to have a keen sense of smell - I could smell gas, burning, scents - I had confidence knowing that I could detect a clean smell from a dangerous or dirty one.

Since last spring I have a very little sense of smell. I can't smell burning, gas or bleach. I can't smell most herbs, or any flower scents, not even strong ones.I really miss the scents of toiletries: shampoo, body lotion, perfume. I used to love that.

I can't smell baking or bread or doughnuts, none of those things. Luckily I can still taste food from my taste buds.

My doctor referred me to a specialist. ENT. But she wanted to put a camera up my nose and into my sinuses and down the back of my throat. I said no. I was terrified by the look of the tube - it hardly looked flexible.I guess there is nothing to be done now. I just have to get used to life as it will be. I have still many sources of pleasure. Sad face.

My daughter told her friends about my sense of smell, and she was surprised to find that a few of them said - "My mother's sense of smell has gone too." I said to her "Do they do their own cleaning?" "Why?" she asked. I told her that the GP had asked me if I used strong chemicals for my work. Well, cleaning uses strong chemicals in that hardly a week goes by when I don't use bleach for something. But I don't use these chemicals all day every day. Frances reported a mixed result. Some friends mums clean, some employ a cleaner. But it is likely that they all use some bleach-based cleaning spray.

I can still smell onions (a chemical smell) celery (very strongly) and garlic (ugh!) and all these smells have lost their scent and only have their chemical underlay. My own smell is strongly of celery.

Recently I thought my sense of smell was coming back. I could smell bleach and coffee. A couple of days later it had gone again.

What happened next

Resemblances - My father and Churchill

Especially when Churchill was a youngish man, he looked like my father. My father also looked like Peter Ustinov, and had the same kind of voice. But the Churchill thing is the strangest - they also had exactly the same handwriting. I saw Churchill's writing in the War Cabinet Rooms and could hardly believe the close resemblance.

Sometimes they dredge up a new old pic of Churchill and I have the odd feeling I am looking at my father - or even my brother. There is the same moody intelligence, an abstracted look. I know him so well I almost am the same person - that's how I felt about my father, sometimes.

My father could make you believe he was an amazing, wonderful man, and he traded on this ability, without actually being in any way amazing or wonderful, but he was competent and intelligent, a professional engineer. It was a pity he wanted so much to be more than that, and messed up in business, losing all his money. That was not his only problem. He also like to charm women and to have their admiration. He liked making them laugh. Women of his own class tended to see through him and find him lacking in substance - and he hated their low opinion, so he always went for women of a lower social strata. He used to say he hated "school marms" (educated middle-class women) and refused to come to Parents' evenings. My mother used to ask me with an imploring face if she had to go? I said she had to. The "school marms" intimidated her and she had no idea what to ask them. I advised her to "ask Jackie's mum what she asks". But really, the other mums mostly gave her that excluded feeling too.

A man not unlike my father 

I read something recently about Churchill's relationship with his brother - he tended to bask in the public gaze himself, and not wish his brother to gain the limelight at all. I suppose as children they were in competition for limited parental attention, and that formed Churchill's personality. It must have been very strange to know that your mother is the King's mistress. All the rejection that Churchill suffered in his childhood later came out as depression. But he had a very brave, buoyant personality.

Like Churchill, my father went to boarding school at the age of 7, and was part of that system. He didn't look back at his schooldays with much affection. You wonder if it was emotionally damaging. The only things it gave him were a sense of superiority and the door to Cambridge University. He used to mention Cambridge a lot - but he said , when my mother criticised him for showing off, that going to Cambridge is something worth showing off about.!!

Misleading critics - Mary Poppins

If I wrote a piece every time a critic was misleading I would be very communicative, But here is a common error - blaming the actor/crediting the actor for something not in their power.

We went to see "Mary Poppins" when we were away in the Quantocks, and had different reactions to it. S. thought it was far too like the original. He spotted that the writers had used the old film as a blueprint and traced slightly different variations on top, which was, in his opinion, uncreative. I liked it a lot. I never liked Julie Andrews voice - she sounded inauthentic, like the product of intensive elocution lessons; and I feared that she had somehow lost her true self in the process. (She looked warm and kind and sympathetic when she dealt with the children, which was a plus.) But I preferred this new overly posh Mary Poppins (Emily Blunt) because I felt she had something genuine about her - poise and a genuine confidence around children. And in the song and dance routine she lost her posh voice and sounded cockney, and I'm pretty sure that was what she was like in the books. A cockney with a veneer of put-on genteel. I vaguely remember that she was a real disappointment in the books because she was not Disney sweet, not at all.

This is the comment from the misleading critic (Vulture.com) "Whishaw's bereavement is so pained, it casts a pall over his scenes." This reads as though Ben Whishaw were at fault. He was simply acting the lines that were written, in the manner the director approved. Yes, he was brilliant at making you feel his intense pain, and that's because he is a really good actor! If the screenwriter hadn't written the scenes where he shows grief he wouldn't have done so. Bad marks for the writer - but in this case the writer decided to throw in a bit of creativity in the form of a problem that Mary Poppins cannot solve. Nothing can make poor dead mother come back. Mary P can only advise the family on how to come to terms with their loss. It is a very emotional centre to a pretty spectacle.

The critic says "only Mortimer brings the requisite lightness to her role." Yes, she played Jane Banks, sister of Whishaw's Michael. She wasn't bereaved in the story, and furthermore, she had an eye for a handsome lamplighter, and romance came her way, which generally is a cause for cheerfulness. The script did not require her to grieve.

So, misleading critic, don't blame the actor for the way the film is constructed and written.