The University of Birmingham

I took my daughter to see this classic redbrick university yesterday and we were impressed. They put on a very good day and we were able to see inside all the departments. Since my time, everything has been smartened up and modernized on the inside of the buildings, in fact, I only recognised the staircases in the Guild building. The Cinderella faculty was the Arts faculty which was awful! Completely the same as it was, which means much, much worse.

The library is apparently about to collapse under the weight of the books - I loved all those books - but now there are hardly any, just computers everywhere. So the university is going to build a lovely new library, and then knock the old one down, so the centre of the campus will be less recognisable. But the university needs to keep improving and it's an exciting place with so much drastic change going on. I met a very nice youngish Prof of Nuclear Physics with whom to discuss the changes.

This is the old library which was a very good library of its type.

I had never been inside the Medical School before and it was great - bright and modern inside an old building, we both really liked it. We went beyond the campus so that we could place it in context and found that Selly Oak has also been changed recently. There is a relief road taking traffic away from the Bristol Road in Selly Oak so the university has been closed off at that side, and a number of buildings have gone completely, including the Gun Barrels, which I'm sure didn't cause much grief. Still plenty of curry houses in S.O.

Last night went for a dinner at the Valley cooked by my own dear brother, and very nice it was too. He came up and went Hurdygurdy, like the Swedish chef from the Muppets. I said, "Are we having meatballs?" I had got it in one -

The men who commute

The men on the train at the end of the day were surprisingly, given that it is a Friday, fresh looking, in well-cut  coloured shirts, no ties, and seemed in good form, unlike the fat and sweaty old stockbrokers that used to frequent these avenues. They carried rucksacks or laptop bags. They cut along from the station very quickly in their brogues. No doubt they were going home to change into their running gear and go out to speed along the pavements to let off steam. Because people of all ages do that all the time around here.

I went to the Kings Road, Chelsea, to meet my friends today, and they were all in fine form, as well they might be because they are slightly younger than me. We had lunch at Medlar, which I recommend highly as it is charming and friendly with excellent food, and not tiny portions either. It is a long way away from Sloane Square though - the other end of King's Road. London was so refreshing - smart people walking, busy with the sales, spirited and fun, with strange sights here and there - a woman with purple dreadlocks, a man on a penny farthing bicycle holding on to a street sign.

My unusual fellow residents

are prone to climb up your legs and bite you. They are large ants peculiar to the Heath, and they were identified by a gentleman called Horace Donisthorpe. I am absolutely tortured by bites (mostly those of  large midges) after going for a walk.Trees and rhododendrons - fab, nice rabbits, insects - torture.

The secret service

Recently I heard Dame Stella Rimington (erstwhile head of MI5) mentioning on the radio (on the show about statistics!) about the Stasi, the E. German secret service, and how they amassed a huge amount of information without much idea about what to do with it.

She seemed to think that the same problem could be encountered today but now with computer data analysis I'm not so sure.

Unfortunately, when people are paid to find the danger within, they find that there is danger within, and they are perfectly prepared to allow circumstantial evidence to override the benefit of the doubt. I have just been reading (in the Lacuna, by Barbara Kingsolver) about McCarthy era America and the ridiculous idea of  Unamerican Activities. The secret service can be bloody dangerous if they decide you are suspicious, and they may be prepared to "fit you up" if there is not enough evidence. They are sometimes a law unto themselves. The Amercians have such a history of internal spying that the idea that they should be free to live without being spied on is seen as Unamerican. Disloyal. You have to feel sympathy for that strange conundrum; all that rhetoric about freedom and at the same time the gvt has a licence to spy on you. You have freedom to be the person the authorities say you can be. That's a strange kind of freedom.

During the 1950s Charlie Chaplin came under suspicion for having liberal opinions (he wasn't a communist) and he was almost forced to lie about his opinions or leave the USA. He left. His autobiography, which I recommend highly, describes the process which encouraged him to leave, hurriedly, because he felt afraid. 

Poor Edward Snowden, he seems very genuinely worried about freedoms, and I guess shortly he will be extradited, tried and imprisoned and have no freedom at all. 

Although I have a degree in Modern History

I know very little about Trotsky. But one fact that everyone knows is that he was murdered, by one of Stalin's agents, with an ice axe in the head. Ridiculously, I had mentally devised a story to explain the ice axe detail. My scenario had Trotsky as a keen amateur mountaineer, wearing his hobnail boots, tweed plus fours and knitted hat, negotiating the very top of a little known peak in Mexico when a Dick Dastardly figure climbed up behind him, wrenched the ice axe out of Trotsky's hand, and smashed it in his head. I thought that Trotsky died instantly and that his trusty friends had to stretcher him down the mountain.

The truth was nothing like that. A man who had sneakily befriended other members of Trotsky's circle over a number of years pestered him for some help with an essay he was writing. Trotsky seems to have been an obliging friend. They went into Trotsky's study (in a specially fortified house in Mexico City) but the enemy had hidden an ice axe in his raincoat, and while Trotsky concentrated his attention on the useless essay, the enemy used it. There was much blood. Trotsky did not die immediately. He gave instructions that his grandson, just home from school, should not see the bloody injury.

Trotsky's death remembered A first-hand account from the Guardian.

The behaviour of the US government at that time was incredible. They considered any open revolutionary, like Trotsky, better dead, and the press almost danced on his grave. This was in 1940. After the US joined the war, Joseph Stalin got a complete whitewash by the US press. It happened so quickly. Only in the pages of 1984 (Orwell) has this been truly noted. Meanwhile, any innocent US resident of Japanese, German or Italian nationality could expect to be reviled, harshly treated or imprisoned.

Stalin not only cheated Trotsky out of a place in Soviet Russia, he also made him an exile and killed nearly all of his family - the grandson being the last survivor. How the exile continued to exude enthusiasm for the workers' revolution is a mystery. He lived in constant fear, surrounded by bodyguards.

I am still reading The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver and have checked several Internet pages to find out where the book and the facts part company. All so interesting. A brilliant book.

Barbara Kingsolver - a biologist writes

The other night I went with Roz to the Southbank, where I have not ventured for some time, due to my difficult job eating up my life, and we ate in the British Film Institute, had some wine and saw Barbara Kingsolver, all of which cheered me up a lot.

BK is so gifted. I won't go through all the books she has written but the most famous is called The Poisonwood Bible, which everyone should read as it asks some very important questions about an extreme clash of cultures, which in this case is placed in the Congo. She wrote this book having actually lived in Africa as a child. Unlike most people, she has first hand experience to share. It's a very disturbing novel and I have not yet fathomed out its implications.

She said that she writes only about places she has been to and experienced. At present, I am reading one of her books, The Lacuna, which is set largely in Mexico, so she has been there, but not in the 1930's, which is when the action is taking place. Never mind, she has entered into the mind of the probably unreliable narrator (a gay man) and created a world for us where Lev Trotsky, exiled and in danger of assassination, with his wife and staff, goes to live with the artists Diego Rivera and Frieda Kahlo. 

The latest book, Flight Behaviour, from which she read, is set in her familiar Kentucky hills and is about love and growth (of course), monarch butterflies and climate change, which is the truth Barbara is commissioned to share. The life cycle of the monarch butterfly is a miraculous thing and the fragility of something beautiful and extraordinary is a perfect example of her message. She is a biologist with a load of qualifications and has some splendid academic colleagues, who, she told us, have read her work for scientific credibility and given it the thumbs up. 

She seems like a very happy person, at home in her life and happy to be feted in London as well as many other cities, I suppose. It bothers me that there were few men in the audience. It was almost 100% women. It is bad that half of a cosmopolitan population is not clued up about  work that is significant thematically, and not just to women. Most of her books are for either sex, but I am not sure that Prodigal Summer would appeal to a man. It's too much like a female fantasy.

Cider with Roadies - Stuart Maconie

Stuart isn't just a keen student of modern music who has become an encyclopaedia of the line-up of the Whatsit band and what their albums were called and when released and which were the best tracks, although you feel he can probably keep up conversations like that for a long, long time. No. He is also comfortably rooted in time and place and wonderful at self-irony. He also has a wider cultural knowledge (note the title), having understood how art arises out of political contexts for his English degree, he applies the same insights to the history of pop/rock. He also taught in a community college in one of the dodgy areas of Liverpool - he taught scallies and single mums English Lit and Sociology. (I'm right there with you Stuart but I bet you were brilliant at it, unlike me.) Because he has had a life outside the world of the NME (a sharply-written music paper called the New Musical Express) and the BBC (where he works now as a presenter) he has an enviable everyman quality. We know in theory that all folks are the same, be they into Wham! and McFly or Kraftwerk and Chic, or Morrissey and Bloc Party, whether gay or straight or northern or southern, but for Stuart I think folks are really pretty much folks, even though he knows exactly how crazy they can be. He is brilliant on the radio, a true enthusiast, can cheerfully talk to anyone, loves a joke and pub banter.

I would recommend this book to anyone over 35 who has ever been a music fan and queued up excitedly for a gig. I especially recommend it to anyone the age of Stuart, who must have been born in 1960. If you were born in or around that year and you spent all, most, or much of your time listening to music, grab a copy and enjoy reading the story of your own life. I haven't been listening to music for a while and I have forgotten that it adds a thoughtful quality to life. I am surprised that I can live without it but I can.

The only down side to this book is that I found it addictive. I wanted it to finish before it did because the narrative gets lost at the end (it's a memoir) and goes all generalised (hotels. planes.), but I just had to finish it. He was great company.

(I even shared the student experiences by reading it to my son, and it cheered him up a lot. Yeah, it's grim being a student and living in a squalid mess. Even Stuart felt down at times.)