Digitation

Wurds

2011-12-09T13:22:00.001Z

I wrote the following in response to a colleague hearing myvoice in my written words

I enjoy the harmonies and dissonances ofthe relationship between what is spoken and what is written. I buy dictionaries,and have many in my library. However, unlike most people, I am rarely perturbedby poor spelling. I enjoy the multitude of spellings to produce the same sound(to, too, two, tu), and the multitude of sounds permitted from the same spelling(tough, cough, dough, plough). I enjoy the subtleties (as well as its near anagram:subtitles) of nuance between practice and practise (spelt differently butpronounced the same), advice and advise (spelt and pronounced differently), alternate[to take turns] and alternate [a substitute] (spelt the same but pronounceddifferently). I love fora, formulae, concerti, tableaux and majors general. Ilove ‘erb tea, bayzle, oreggano, rowt and vayze. I have a strong preference forMunchen, Nurnberg and Koln; for Addawa (Ottawa), DC (Washington DC) andManhattan (New York City), because these are the names used by the people who liveand work in those cities..

In my experience, what is said is ofteneasier to understand if it falls into the natural cadences of spoken English.Of course, William Shakespeare recognised this with his iambic pentameters. Inmy experience, what is written may also be easier to understand if it fallsinto the natural cadences of spoken English. What I write is often crafted tosound like how I speak. Perhaps almost equally, what I say is often sufficientlywell considered that it sounds like what I would write.

However, I am aware that many people typicallyspeak in stumbling, incomplete and sometimes only semi-coherent clauses. This isgiven the illusion of a single train of thought or narrative by face-to-faceengagement, in much the same way that film creates from a sequence of photographsthe illusion of continuous movement. Therefore, to be comprehensible, theremust also be formality in what is written.

For this purpose, I sometimes use formulae.For example, in recognising that the Canadian postal coding system [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_codes_in_Canada] (for example, K1A 0B1) is less prone to transcription errors compared to thatused in the UK (for example, DH1 2PZ; W1A 4WW) because the six charactersalternate sequentially between letters and numbers, I present times/dates notas spoken but in a consistent formula: 12:34 Friday 12 February 1554. (However,in dating computer files I use the Japanese system: 15540212.)

Surprisingly, perhaps, I welcome the use ofclichés in speech when their purpose is to aid intelligibility: allowing quick links to what is already knownand understood, but also listen for their use as a substitute for thought andopinion (sales patter).

My ‘natural’ way of speaking is elaborated code that incorporates myclassical and scientific formal education, my experience of travel throughoutEurope and North America as well as to Japan, and my familiarity with many culturesthrough my love of literature and movies. When I feel refreshed I am usually ableto speak from the restricted code of theperson with whom I am interacting. However, when I am tired I revert to speakingfrom within my comfort zone involving words of many syllables and that may beunfamiliar to many of the people with whom I work; a consequence of which isthat I inadvertently distance people.

I have loved word play from my earliestyears, and enjoy subtle puns. Careful attention to nuanced and multiplemeanings is also the domain of poetry, where apposition is currency. Of course,for the Mersey poets (Adrian Henri, Roger McGough, Brian Patten: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Penguin-Modern-Poets-Mersey-McGough/dp/0140421033/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1323435629&sr=8-1)poetry involved play. Although I havewritten poetry with which I am satisfied, it has rarely arrived by FedEx orDHL, but by scooping ripped-up photographs from beneath Parisian photo booths.Sadly, my tendency towards obsession with minutiae does not serve me well regardingstyle. Attention to style is required to write extended prose that is worthreading (Dickens, Hardy). Instead, I am left fretting about the inappropriateness of a full stopin a heading, the mosquito bite of a supermarket queue’s limitation to nineitems or less, and my Lynne Truss-like frustration with incorrectly-sitedapostrophe’s (sic).

I wonder whether the voice audible in the above is that with which people who know me are familiar [implied question mark].

Tories announce bad ideas

2011-10-02T00:06:00.001+01:00

Yesterday, just ahead of the Conservative Party Annual Conference, Eric Pickles announced that £250 million had been found to enable local councils to re-instate weekly refuse collections. This is a terrible idea. Weekly bin collections encourage people to throw away things that could be recycled.Our bin is emptied two or three times each year, simply because we re-use or recycle everything else.It is not difficult, although clearly the commitment to recycle is beyond many people.

Also yesterday, Philip Hammond, Minister for Transport, announced an intention to raise speed limits on motorways to 80 mph. This is a bad idea not only because the number of accidents will increase and the intensity of the damage to life, limb and vehicles, but also because petrol consumption will worsen, thus increasing CO2 emissions.

Nation, identity and government

2011-04-15T09:36:00.002+01:00

Surely the term 'nation' is used for mythological purposes. The term is tied up with a sense of identity. It invites citizens to identify with, and to strengthen their sense of belonging. The mythology points towards (apparent) genetic and cultural similarity, and so is often used to distance "people who are not like us", whether brown-skinned versus white-skinned, culturally Christian versus culturally Muslim, and even genetically-Norse versus genetically Saxon (here in the North East of England there is a strong desire to claim Viking genes, thus differentiating people in the North East from people in southern England). I say that it is a myth because it represents a story that I choose. I could choose a different story. An obvious example of this mythologising is the frequently-used term "this island nation" used by many British people to differentiate themselves from people of continental Europe, and to disclaim the validity of 'supranational' government from Strasbourg / Brussels. A second example is the US attempt to forge one nation out of disparate peoples, that is, to invite them to believe that they are one people.

The myth of the nation is powerful because it helps to determine perceived political legitimacy. In Belgium the myth of a Belgian nation appears to be stretched near to breaking point. The myth of a Macedonian nation straddling Greece and Macedonia terrifies the Greek government. The myth of a Kurdish nation has been perpetually squashed by Turkey, Iraq and Russia.

I believe that the term 'nation' is also increasingly in crisis because of the eagerness of many people to embrace dual (multiple) identities: African American, Asian British, Polish British, French Muslim, Galician Spanish (there appears to be a Celtic identity seeking to create unity between Galicia, Brittany, Cornwall, Wales and Ireland).

Cherry blossom petals

2011-03-16T18:42:00.002Z

I arrived at this movie from several places: some familiarity with animé, including the entire R2 Studio Ghibli collection; some familiarity with Japanese cinema, past and present; a visit to Tokyo and Kyoto several years ago.

Five Centimetres Per Second [DVD] [2007], like Still Walking [DVD] [2008], is unadulterated Japan in several respects. The characters behave in a restrained and understated manner. Cherry blossoms (but not cherries) and railways (but not the grease and technology of trains and rails) are important. The voice acting, especially the two female leads, is superior in the original Japanese.

The movie consists of three episodes. In each there is a pervading sense of sadness, loneliness and unresolvedness. The first episode has the most satisfactory story. Although the director, Makoto Shinkai, in interview states that the theme of the movie is the rate at which things happen (blossoms drift to the ground, a train journey takes many hours, a rocket suddenly blasts off [presumably from Korou] into space), it is the exquisite and pervasive sadness infusing the movie that lingers, as in Grave Of The Fireflies [DVD] [1988].

One of the wonderful features of Five Centimetres Per Second is that it bases itself in the real world, with real, recognisable places, such as in Tokyo, and realistic activities and motivations. In this respect, the movie resembles movies such as Only Yesterday [DVD] [1991] (as well as aspects of Whisper Of The Heart [DVD], Grave Of The Fireflies [DVD] [1988], The Girl Who Leapt Through Time [DVD] and Ocean Waves [DVD] [1993]).

Just as in most Studio Ghibli movies, some of the backgrounds in Five Centimetres Per Second are sumptuous. The attention to small details is gorgeous, for example, the articulating footplates between carriages on the train. Moreover, the 'camera angles' in Five Centimetres Per Second feel fresh and alive - although I suspect that this feature may be drawn from more traditional manga animé. The main characters in Five Centimetres Per Second, with their doe eyes and pointed noses, are pure animé. In contrast, the main characters in Studio Ghibli movies are drawn to appear more realistic. An aspect I find appealing about Studio Ghibli movies is that there can be many objects that are animated simultaneously. (The Ghibli museum in Mitaka screens, amongst other shorts, Water Spider Monmon, which is alive with movement.) In contrast, I found the staticness of characters and objects in Five Centimetres Per Second, which at times appeared like a sequence of still pictures, disappointing and mildly irritating.

The movie is paced appropriately to the subject material: slow and quiet. However, the final section of the movie transforms into a kind of pop-music video, which may be indicative of some kind of emotional resolution, but if so it went over my head. The music was okay, but not haunting as in Spirited Away [DVD].

The English subtitles of the Japanese soundtrack are perfectly reasonable, despite some typographical errors. However, each subtitle quickly vanished, and occasionally I had to replay some dialogue in order to read what was said.

The extras on the DVD are the usual.

Overall, I have absolutely no reservations about watching the movie, nor about buying it. It will undoubtedly appeal to people who enjoy feel-sad movies, as well as students of animé and animation. I am comfortable with the 4* rating I have given it.

My cultured father

2011-01-01T21:05:00.001Z

Sunrise at 08:29 this Minimal cloud cover should mean that the south eastern sky will start lightening at about 07:00. Sunset at 15:48 means that the day is two minutes longer than yesterday.

Today is the 75th anniversary of my father's birth. However, he died nearly 19 years ago. I feel sure that he would have lived-to-the-full all the years he was denied by his early and untimely death. He would have continued to rejoice in the natural landscape of his adopted Cornwall. He would have continued to enjoy music, the arts, crafts and the social activities that characterised the final ten or so years of his life, some of which were interests developed from boyhood with the encouragement of his mother, and that in turn he passed on to me. (I remember that he had two vinyl LPs (long-playing records): Tchaikovsky's "1812" and "March Slav" that I got to know well, and a jazz record called "How Hi the Fi" (that I have just checked out as being recorded by Buck Clayton and Woody Herman in 1954) but I cannot remember ever having heard it. I now quite often listen to jazz on BBC Radio 3, along with acres of 'classical' music. I think that my father was quite satisfied about me becoming a 'Prommer' (i.e. attending the Henry Wood / BBC promenade concerts every summer evening for three months, mostly in the Royal Albert Hall in London). I am uncertain about whether he ever attended a Prom concert. However, he took my brother and me to a concert of Harrison Birtwhistle music at the Royal Festival Hall in London sometime in the late 1960s or early 1970s, and it is obvious that he was familiar with this concert venue. This was the venue for one of the all-time greatest performances of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, in mid-November 1957, of which I have a recording. It is possible that my father attended the concert..I like to imagine that as a 21 year old young man, recently returned to London winter smogs after National Service in sunny Cyprus, he was trying hard to ignore the coughing and to concentrate on the performance.

Happy new year

2011-01-01T08:29:00.004Z

Happy new year. Welcome to 2011 (not that numbers make much difference to reality). I hope that this year will be peaceful, prosperous, fulfilling, satisfying and above all happy.

Durham UK is 54.8 degrees north, and 1.6 degrees west. This means that sunrise and sunset are later than London UK in the winter. It also means that, living closr to the Arctic, the weather in Durham is mostly a good deal more miserable than the south east of England. Hmm!

Sunrise today at 08:30, although the total cloud cover, gloom and rain means that no-one on the ground will have noticed. Would that I were seated in a jetliner heading for New York City. Sunset today at 15:47. I am looking forward to longer daylight hours, sunshine, warmth.

The snow has now all-but gone, although there remain heaps of dark, mucky, frozen slush heaped up out of the way: one heap I saw yesterday was at least 2 metres high. Although wintry showers are forecast over the next week, and plenty of overnight sub-zero temperatures, it does not look like a return to Siberia is imminent.

Movie review: Still Walking, directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda

2010-12-15T16:29:00.006Z

It is interesting reading other reviews for this movie, which demonstrate the possibility of experiencing the same thing so differently. Still Walking is 'a comedy of manners', reminiscent of the movies of Eric Rohmer. (Comedy as distinct from tragedy, not in the sense of being humorous.) Like a haiku, nothing is brightly coloured, overstated, or has the impoliteness to stand out in some way. Typical of Japanese etiquette, the characters rarely say or act on what they really mean, and this is revealed only as the story unfolds. Characterisation is superbly handled through script, direction and acting. Unlike in western movies, there are neither heroes/saints, nor dastards/demons. It would be too easy to watch this movie through western eyes and miss the subtle, the nuanced, and the quiet reversals that culminate in overall balance. In western culture it is held that the more deeply an emotion is felt, the more extremely it is expressed. However, the expression of emotions addressed in this Japanese drama is muted: it is possible to arrive by another route at a sense of how deeply those emotions are felt. The movie is perfectly paced for its material (not the high-octane outbursts of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, or of Look Back in Anger), but may be considered intolerably slow by people who enjoy thrillers, adventure movies and rom coms. (Instead, think Tarkovsky.) Unlike a Woody Allen movie, Still Walking is not an easy watch, requiring concentration and attention, although neither is it especially difficult: the plot, such as it is, is interesting enough for me not to require it to entertain me cheaply (even though I enjoy the jokes in Wasabi). There is no feel-good pay-off at the end. There is no 'the end' (c.f. Lost in Translation). I do not know the other work of director Hirokazu Kore-eda, but I now feel motivated to find out more.

2001: A Space Oddysey

2010-11-26T18:26:00.001Z

I wrote the text below in response to a thread of comments regarding a brief, critical user review of the DVD 2001: A Space Oddysey.

I think that Anthony Costine's Rothko observation is valuable: for me, Mark Rothko's huge, nearly-formless canvases serve as the closest fine art is able to approach to a spiritual gateway - his works present me with the opportunity safely to stand on the threshold between life and death. The Clarke / Kubrick novel / screenplay (they wrote them together) considers the breathtaking enormity of the leaps made by humankind from our genetic divergence away from other primates. We are not really being invited to consider the detail of each technological development and innovation, but to gulp at the height of the cliff edge on which we now perch. The story then moves on to consider ways in which humankind may further develop, perhaps in ways that will seem god-like to the just-beyond-savages who we are today. 2001 is intended neither to be an intellectual movie, nor a thrill ride, nor a drama, no more than were one standing on the brink of the Grand Canyon, or sitting in front of a Mark Rothko painting, or watching a movie (such as Stalker) by Andrei Tarkovsky. Perhaps the 'mistake' is to consider it (along with Solaris by Andrei Tarkovsky) primarily as work of science fiction. Maybe the fact that Clarke was a science fiction writer, and the movie was marketed as science fiction misdirects how the movie can most engagingly be viewed.

2010 August 05 Thursday

2010-09-18T00:41:00.003+01:00

We drove south from Durham, and installed ourselves at the Marriott hotel in Slough: it calls itself the the Heathrow/Windsor Marriott despite being some miles from either place. We have stayed in better Marriotts. However, the quick dip in the pool was a refreshing pick-me-up before meeting my relatives in a pub restaurant the other side of Madenhead (nothing vegan for me.)

2010 August 07 Saturday

2010-08-07T23:32:00.001+01:00

We drove from the Marriott hotel in Slough ("Windsor - Heathrow") to the Channel Tunnel. We had time to stop at Sainsbury's in Ashford, Kent, to buy groceries. Once through the tunnel, we drove to Antwerp. Not one of the three vegetarian restaurants we found was open. The rain was torrential, and very wet we returned to our hotel - the Raddisson Blu Park - where we had a suite with a kitchen. I cooked a meal using food I brought for cooking in Berlin.

On Saturday morning we drove to Ashford in Kent, where there is a decent Sainsbury's and I was able to shop. From Ashford it is only 25 minutes to the Channel Tunnel. The tunnel was very busy, and we were pulled out, once again, for a terrorist check - I have been subjected to many times more than my fair proportion of these. We arrived in Antwerp yesterday evening after a highly unpleasant drive from Calais. It rained constantly, sometimes torrentially, and the spray from the other vehicles on the motorways reduced visibility at times to below 50 metres. The Radisson Blu hotel in which we are staying is gorgeous, and we are sad that our visit is for only one night. Having got ourselves settled, we walked out in the pouring rain to find something to eat, but each of the three vegetarian eating places we could find turned out to be closed for August. Antwerp is the same size as Liverpool, so my wife and daughter could have found a pizzereria or something. However, our room at the hotel includes simple cooking facilities, so we decided to return to the hotel to cook a meal there. Ever one to be prepared, I cooked some spaghetti, and fried mushrooms, tomatoes and onions. I had chosen to bring dried basil, ground black pepper and vegetable stock powder from home, and with the unfiltered extra virgin olive oil I had bought from Sainsbury's, the meal was especially tasty. The only thing missing was a candle for the table.

2010 August 06 Friday

2010-08-06T23:27:00.001+01:00

My sister and her partner, Janine, were married this afternoon in a civil partnership ceremony held in Maidenhead, Berkshire, UK. Family and friends were in attendance. Later, a reception dinner was held on Queen's Eyot, a small island in the River Thames, near Bray. The occasion was a delight.

We attended a civil partnership ceremony for my sister and her partner of several years. The occasion was a delight, for not only did we meet up with my two and a half sisters and their families, but we also met some of my new Canadian relatives-in-law, with whom we got on very well. Although the ceremony itself took place in Maidenhead, the reception was held on a little island in the middle of the River Thames, requiring a boat trip each way.

Climate change mitigation versus democracy?

2010-05-24T23:19:00.006+01:00

Following a broadcast on the BBC Radio 4 Analysis programme (20:30 Monday 24 May 2010) presented by Justin Rowlatt (the BBC's 'Ethical Man'), I posted the following text on the BBC's Ethical Man weblog:

"I listened to the radio programme with much anticipation. I was pleased that the issue was taken seriously in terms both of the science and the politics. There were various aspects with which I variously wholeheartedly agreed or disagreed. Three aspects, however, that I considered to be very weak were: 1) democracy is not one thing; democracy means different things to different people in different places; the UK has a system of representative democracy (hence no capital punishment despite the untested preference of the electorate). 2) Much of what is already taking place (erection of wind turbines, replacement of incandescent light bulbs, new hybrid and electric vehicles) is happening between government and industry, not by popular choice at the retail level (we will buy whatever is available)- this is about the relationship between government and corporations in which the electorate never get any say anyway. 3) Too often "the expressed will of the people" has more to do with the relationship between government and the popular press - were the red-tops to champion major lifestyle changes to ameliorate climate change, their readership would almost inevitably follow."

I wish to develop these ideas further, although this weblog is not the place where I intend to leave the text. The issues belong on my Green website.

The radio programme is reported to be currently available on the BBC iPlayer.

1. Democracy under threat?
The term 'democratic' seems to be used frequently in a wide variety of circumstances to indicate that something is politically good in some way. It seems obvious to most people who choose to live in economically-developed western countries that even the most imperfect of democracies are superior, say, to the society portrayed by George Orwell in 1984. If nothing else, this points to democracies that fall short of some notional democractic ideal. A democracy probably requires regular, popular elections (as distinct from elections by a small minority) and a voting system that delivers an outcome readily acceptable to the electorate. In the US it is considered democratic to vote for a variety of public officials beyond politicians, e.g. police chiefs. In the UK such an election is viewed with suspicion, believing that public officials should be impartial. In the UK, the rights of trades unions to require their members to withdraw their labour are enshrined in law - trades unions being seen as an example of dispersed democracy. Winston Churchill saw the dispersal of democracy amongst the institutions of a country as a process of democratisation. It is not clear to me what aspects and features of democracy would have to be suspended to effect a political programme to counter AGW (anthropogenic global warming). It is, however, clear to me that to suspend all that we call democracy would so fundamentally change the nature and fabric of contemporary UK society that inentional suspension would be beyond contemplation. More realistically, the suspension of certain aspects of the democratic political process could happen, as it did during the second world war. This does not have to be a slippery slope towards totalitarianism.

UK General Election

2010-04-26T08:49:00.000+01:00

This short animation is excellent:

http://tinyurl.com/32cg2q3

UK General Election 2010: 27 days to go

2010-04-09T06:30:00.001+01:00

I was out yesterday evening delivering LibDem leaflets through local letterboxes. I wonder if people really read the leaflets. I know that they moan about feeling ignored if they don't receive leaflets. "I shan't vote for X because they didn't bother to canvas my vote." I do look at the leaflets I deliver, but rarely consider them of interest. They are usually full of platitudes, with attention being given to knocking one or other rival parties / rival party leaders / rival candidates.

I live in a constituency where the LibDems are contending with Labour who are long-standing incumbents. The City of Durham constituency, in the heart of a former heavy industry region, and until recently one of Labour's safest seats, and at which the Conservative candidate used to poll the second largest number of votes, has gradually become a marginal seat at which the Conservative candidate now risks losing their deposit. The presence of Durham University means that there are undoubtedly some people who hold Liberal Democrat values. However, there is no way on Earth that half the voters are Liberal Democrats at heart. The only way in which the LibDems can hope to have their candidate elected is to persuade would-be Conservative voters to vote LibDem instead. This is done by emphasising that the Conservative candidate has no chance of winning, and that the best way to avoid returning the Labour candidate, the incumbent MP, to Westminster, is to vote LibDem. Would this not be a dishonest distortion of the political complexion of the constituency? For in reality the constituency is about 50% Labour, 25% LibDem and 25% Conservative. Surely the votes cast should reflect these proportions? However, underlying the attempt at distortion is the antiquated, unsophisticated, first-past-the-post voting system. Other elected governmental bodies in the UK use a form of proportional representation to elect their representatives, resulting in a more honest picture of the political complexion of the electorate. I should much prefer an immediate switch to a voting system that is better than that which encourages local parties and voters into a kind of dishonesty. I am enthusiastic to be part of the democratic process, even if it is merely delivering leaflets, but I am not comfortable being part of a system that attempts to persuade people who hold Conservative values to vote LibDem simply to prevent the Labour candidate from winning. My political philosophy, although most closely expressed in party political terms by the Liberal Democrats, is still much closer to that of the Labour Party than that of the Conservative Party.

UK General Election 2010: 28 days to go

2010-04-08T06:45:00.001+01:00

One of the less seemly aspects about the run-up to a general election is that politicians of one or other persuasion will offer tempting words that seem to contradict what they have spent the previous 4 or 5 years asserting. Whilst I can remember back into the 1970s talking enthusiastically about exchanging the still-current unrepresentative first-past-the-post system voting system for some form of proportional representation, the issue remains a long-standing Liberal Democrat policy. However, there is a significant credibility gap when Johnny-come-lately Labour Party politicians (such as Ben Bradshaw on last night's edition of BBC 2's Newsnight programme) bob their heads above the parapet and state that they too have long been staunchly supportive of proportional representation. There is an equally yawning credibility gap when Conservative politicians propose wacky populist ideas such as the direct petitioning of parliament for debate, as though they, the Conservative Party, have forever championed the wishes and rights of poor and ordinary people.

Although the attention being given to whether National Insurance tax (paid by employers as well as employees, as distinct from income tax which is paid only by employees) should be raised feels like phoney sparring, the issue has drawn out into the open the Conservative sympathy towards business leaders: should the cost of repairing the economy be borne by the little people, in the form of reduced public services, or shared between the people and business, in the form of a tax? Public engagement in the election will begin in earnest when the politicians begin talking about migrant workers, immigration and the EU. I regret that the somewhat nationalistic prejudices (about which they feel proud) and mildly xenophobic attitudes (which they deny, but cannot refute) of many white British people makes it difficult for them to listen to fact, reason and rationality. Were the Conservative Party to propose strict limitations on 'foreigners' taking work in the UK, I believe that the Conservatives would easily win an outright majority. Were the Conservatives also to have the courage of their deep-seated convictions and offer the electorate the tantalising possibility of somehow distancing the UK from the EU, the Conservatives would win a landslide victory. I do not understand the Liberal Democrat enthusiasm for a referendum on Britain's engagement with continental Europe - turkey's voting for Christmas is a phrase that comes to mind. I believe that these are the issues that many people would prefer the electioneering politicians to be addressing.

UK General Election 2010: 29 days to go

2010-04-07T10:04:00.008+01:00

It is with a sense of relief that I greeted yesterday's announcement by Gordon Brown about the date of the next UK general election. The coming four weeks will be reminiscent of that passage in George Orwell's 1984 when Winston Smith and his colleagues are frantically busy with Party activity. In contrast to the UK system of government, elections are held on a regular, cyclic basis in France and the US. I wonder what things would be like were the UK to hold general elections on a regular, say, five year cycle.

Although I am not a member of a political party, I have a deep prejudice towards participatory democracy. Accordingly I am a volunteer, posting political leaflets through letterboxes in some of the streets close to my house.

I find it interesting how I have constructed my voting preference:
1. partly on how I have voted in the past (a kind of inertia - I am the opposite of a floating voter);
2. partly on a comparison between my political values and those of party policies (I have already visited Party websites and downloaded/read some of their policy statements);
3. partly on who I see supporting each party (am I ever likely to vote for a party that draws its support from men who vie with Yakuza to cover themselves in body art?);
4. and partly on how 'attractive' I find the political leaders and their team (on this basis, I should prefer to have voted for Ted Heath over Margaret Thatcher; for Michael Foot over Tony Blair; Tony Blair over Gordon Brown; and Paddy Ashdown over Charles Kennedy or Nick Clegg). Were I given the choice, I should rather vote for Barack Obama, who I consider to belong to a class above most British politicians.

My Predictions
The Labour vote will reduce by 5% (77 seats) some votes going to the Liberal Democrats, some votes going to the UKIP/BNP, some votes going to the Conservatives, and some Labour voters choosing not to vote. This desertion will be more pronounced in the Home Counties, Midlands and East Anglia, where there will be the greatest number of seats changing from Labour to Conservative. In the north of England the Labour vote will decline, although by not as much, and it will have less impact on the seats held. Total number of seats: 272

The Conservative vote will increase by 5% (79 seats), some votes coming from Labour, some from the Liberal Democrats, and the rest coming from people who did not vote at the 2005 general election. The Conservatives will lose some votes to UKIP/BNP. The greatest number of newly-won Conservative seats will come from London, the Home Counties and the Midlands. Total number of seats: 289

The Liberal Democrats will neither gain nor lose total votes, being a beneficiary of deserting votes from Labour, but losing votes to the Conservatives. However, as a result they will lose four marginal seats. Total number of seats: 58

UKIP will do well in the south of England, and the BNP will do well in London, possibly East Anglia and parts of the north of England, but will not have any seats in the House of Commons.

The Scottish Nationalists will gain some votes from Labour, but lose some to the Conservatives. The situation in Scotland will remain mostly unchanged.

Plaid Cymru will lose votes to the Conservatives. On the other hand, if they can gain some votes from Labour, the Labour marginal at Arfon might give them a further seat at Westminster (from 2 to 3)

The situation in Northern Ireland will remain largely unchanged. Most of their MPs will vote with the Conservatives, but this will be insufficient for the Conservatives to secure a working majority.

Result: a 'hung parliament' at Westminster. A coalition government will not be formed. Instead, the Conservatives will enter a working agreement with the Liberal Democrats (as happened with the former Lib-Lab pact). There will be a further general election in March 2011.

At one with the world

2010-04-01T18:44:00.005+01:00

The traffic in New York City is impatient, and pedestrians are jostling at road junctions. A Buddhist monk had been meditating in Central Park, listening to the song birds and the rhythm of the city. He is now walking serenely down Broadway and starts to feel a little peckish. As he nears Times Square the aroma of fried onions and hotdogs wafts past him. Approaching the hotdog vendor’s cart, he sees that the vendor is reading a newspaper. The monk says to the vendor “Excuse me, could you make me one with everything, please” and smiles to himself at the pun.

The sour-faced vendor, saying nothing, throws a steaming hotdog sausage into a bun, slaps some onions on top, squirts a line each of mustard and tomato sauce, and hands the completed hotdog to the monk. The monk pays with a ten dollar bill, and then waits patiently for his change. The vendor, having returned to reading his newspaper, ignores the monk. After a little while, tomato sauce already dripping onto the sidewalk, the monk asks the vendor, “Excuse me, but where’s my change?” The vendor growls, “Change comes from within.”

Journalism 2: functions of journalism in a democracy

2010-02-04T06:00:00.001Z

I guess that I ought to read a journalism text book. All the same, it seems to me that journalism has several important functions in a democracy.

To inform
Journalists report what happens. To be precise, they report on some of what happens. Without journalism, I would know little about what goes on beyond my immediate activities. Were I not to know, then I could not adequately participate in local, regional, national or supra-national decision-making. How else could I be informed? I could read Hansard to know what has been happening in Parliament (I have in the past). I could access the websites of politicians in order to read their speeches (I do). I could data-mine the website of the Office of National Statistics (I do). I could manage without journalism, but getting at the information would require more effort. On the other hand, I would be reading information that I chose, rather than have someone else choose for me.

To witness
In times and places in which the journalism is weaker, more happens that ought not to go on. Would the atrocities of Srebriniza, or the human rights violations of Abu Graib, have occurred had journalists been present to witness what took place? What would I do if I had a journalist shadowing me? Anyone can witness, but journalists are professional witnesses.

To whistleblow
I enjoyed watching the movie All The President's Men, starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman. I often watch The Pelican Brief. Both movies involve journalists digging up the truth. It would be optimistic to suppose that many news organisations spent much of their time researching activities on which a whistle needs to be blown.

To hold senior people to account
I can listen neither to Jeremy Paxman on BBC 2 television's Newsnight current affairs programme, nor John Humphries on BBC Radio 4's Today programme. The interviewing style of both is not only far too abrasive for my taste, and almost perpetually sneering, but also rooted in the kind of conservatism that rejoices in its philistinism. However, what they also represent is the aspect of journalism that can hold to account politicians, business leaders, trades union leaders, and their like.

... more?

Journalism 1: fleas on the back of democracy

2010-02-03T23:00:00.003Z

It can be argued, and often is, that free and open journalism is a key function for the effective working of a democracy. News of national and international political and economic affairs is presented by journalists as a truth lieing somewhere between contextualised fact and informed opinion.

It is a disappointment, therefore, the underwhelmingly poor quality of popular (as distinct from specialist) journalism in the UK makes it easy to assess as very poor value - a high price to be paid in public attention (as well as the invasion of privacy) for such insubstantial fare. The focus on sport, celebrity, royalty, reality television shows and soap operas is bad enough. However, the self-satisfied - sometimes self-congratulatory , insular - sometimes jingoistic, ill-educated - sometimes mocking the mre highly educated, illiberal - sometimes sneering at those who try to understand people who transgress social norms, grub dollopped into porcelain and melamine dishes alike, makes it all-too-clear why "Support our Boys" and "Help for Heroes" have become national slogans regardless of the immorality, the geopolitical stupidity, and the financial burden of stationing trained killers and their support staff in a far away country called Afghanistan.

Prize-winning US journalist, writer and philosopher, on the other hand, "held no assumption of news and truth being synonymous. For him the “function of news is to signalize an event, the function of truth is to bring to light the hidden facts, to set them in relation with each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act.” A journalist’s version of the truth is subjective and limited to how he constructs his reality. The news, therefore, is “imperfectly recorded” and too fragile to bear the charge as “an organ of direct democracy.”

'Public confidence' is a euphemism for the opinion of journalists, fat cat editors, advertisers, and phalanxes of well-funded lobbyists. Public confidence in science and scientists is not a direct response to scientific findings, but is directed by journalists / lobbyists.

My comments above are (reworked Twitter) responses to the following Twitter posting that refers to a BBC so-called-news item: "Does the world of climate science need a radical rethink? Susan Watts reports on IPCC blunders: http://tiny.cc/WuwiS "

The entire article appears to me to be scurrilous, intending to create and foment the doubt it purports to report. My 'evidence' is an extended interview given by Sir David King and broadcast on Night Waves, BBC Radio 3, on the evening of Tuesday 26 January 2010. Here is the programme blurb:

"As part of the BBC Year of Science, Radio 3's Night Waves is running a special series of extended interviews with leading scientists from Britain and the rest of the world. Each month a complete 45 minute edition will be dedicated to a single scientific figure talking to him or her about their research specialism, their wider scientific views, their personal background and their involvement with broader cultural and political questions.

"In the first interview Anne McElvoy talks to David King, the UK government's chief scientific officer from 2000 to 2007 - a job which put him at the heart of one of the burning issues of our time: the relationship between scientists, the government and the general public. On his watch David King faced foot and mouth, the GM foods debate, the ratification of the Kyoto protocol and the Stern Report.

"South African born and a physical chemist by training, David King arguably did more than any other scientist to put the issue of Climate Change onto the UK's public and political map. Anne gauges his opinions on the failure of the Copenhagen summit and asks about the nature of scientific orthodoxy after the furore over the climate change emails from the University of East Anglia, where he used to work.

"And what does he think about the status of scientific knowledge in the political process, an issue brought sharply into focus by the recent resignation of David Nutt, the chairman of the government's Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs?

"David King is a self confessed optimist, his personal style is that of the quietly spoken diplomat but he is no stranger to controversy. He publicly criticised the Bush administration over its environmental policies and has himself been declared an embarrassment by those with different opinions over climate change."

I was fascinated to listen to the interview. I studied the history and philosophy of science at university, and still often read popular science and science history books. Therefore it was good to hear a scientist talking meaningfully about the business of doing science, the philosophy behind and theory of the scientific method, and what it was like to interface with politicians (and journalists) who had little understanding of, and even less sympathy for, the on-the-ground realities of science.

In stark contrast to my comfort with the feet-on-the-ground reasonableness of what David King had to say, I experienced the interviewer, Executive Editor of the (London) Evening Standard, Anne McElvoy, to be extremely irritating in the perpetual slant of her questions. I was unclear whether she had a specific agenda (probably partly to do with David Nutt's recent falling out with the government, but also to assert the role of journalists in the debate about climate change); was trying repeatedly to goad him (which succeeded on several occasions, and I also noted that the interview simply stopped - it did not come to an end), or was just plain ignorant (both meanings of the word). I dislike it when an interviewer is not actually interested in the answer given by the interviewee.

In one section of the interview, David King gave a clear message, supported by clear examples, that the pressure from climate change skeptics is extremely well organised, extremely well funded, and has an unswerving aim of derailing political attempts to limit climate change. There is no respect in which it would be possible to suggest that the man is paranoid. His observations, explanations and arguments were persuasive beyond assailability - which is why I wondered if the journalist was simply stupid (which she cannot possibly be) when she refused to acknowledge the absurdity of some of the positions she took.

All that said, the interview was well worth listening to, and I am disappointed that it is not available online. In contrast, Susan Watts' piece (linked above) is mere scurrilous junk!

The execution of Ali Hassan al-Majeed

2010-01-27T08:56:00.005Z

From the news BBC radio reports that I have heard, and the BBC website reports I have read, Ali Hassan al-Majeed, popularly known in the West as 'Chemical Ali', was a man with brutal values who acted on those values, resulting in the death of many thousands of people. In particular, he directed the persecution of Kurdish population in northern Iraq, the most celebrated attack being at Halabja in which 5,000 people died from the mustard gas attack he ordered. He also organised the crushing of Shi'ite communities after Iraq's war with Iran, and again after the First Gulf War (George Bush senior). For these war crimes he was sentenced to death on four counts. In addition, he co-ordinated the killing of less-than-loyal members of Saddam Husein's immediate family, of which he was also a member. It is difficult to imagine a man who, in the eyes of the world, more deserved to be executed for his crimes. Ali Hassan al-Majeed was executed by Iraqi authorities on Monday 25 January 2010.

I remain resolute in my belief that killing is wrong. The execution of this man not only enacts the belief that some people do not deserve to live, but also that I have - someone has - the moral right to determine the ending of a person's life. I do not have that right, and no-one should have that right other than the person themselves. I believe that, in its pre-meditation, execution is a morally worse act than accidental killing, say, in the commission of a robbery.

War: skillful tactic or utter disaster?

2010-01-22T18:23:00.001Z

War destroys. War destroys people, communities, culture and infrastructure. War only ever destroys. It is the process of rebuilding that picks up the pieces and rebuilds. Warfare always represents failure.

In her fascinating article, Diana Francis debunks the popular myth that war can be for good.

http://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/diana-francis/war-justifiable-or-simply-catastrophic

If death and destruction are to be reduced, warfare must stop. No exceptions. No excuses.
...

Eric Blair: 25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950

2010-01-21T10:43:00.008Z

From what I have read about him, Eric Blair was not an easy person to get along with, and enjoyed challenging the status quo. He had strongly-held political opinions and was reluctant to be silenced. He resigned from his job with the BBC because he opposed censorship. His family supported the British establishment, but he came to oppose it. Blair was a proponent of a federal socialist Europe, a position outlined in his 1947 essay Toward European Unity. He was left-wing in his politics, but was also highly critical of the left. He hated anything politically authoritarian, which is how he came to write Nineteen Eighty Four. In Why I Write (1946) he wrote "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it."

Ranking the movies I have watched

2010-01-19T19:49:00.000Z

I suspect that this is the start of a long posting that will take me an indefinite time to complete.

I joined criticker.com. This was in response to several Facebook Friends using a disappointingly shallow movie compatibility Facebook widget. Whilst I found Criticker through Facebook, I registered independently, and then created a link from my Criticker profile to my Facebook profile.

To date, I have ranked 208 movies, and listed them clumsily here below.

My Score
Film Name
Date Ranked
Comments
100
Amélie
Mar 08 2008, 20:00
100
Stalker
Mar 08 2008, 13:52
99
Rashomon
Mar 08 2008, 19:58
99
Shakespeare in Love
Mar 08 2008, 08:31
98
Drowning by Numbers
Mar 08 2008, 13:55
98
Much Ado About Nothing
Mar 13 2008, 00:25
98
Shirley Valentine
Mar 08 2008, 13:53
98
Solaris
Mar 08 2008, 13:54
97
The Lives of Others
Mar 13 2008, 00:21
97
Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
Mar 08 2008, 08:27
97
Spirited Away
Mar 08 2008, 13:57
96
12 Monkeys
Mar 07 2008, 01:13
96
O Brother, Where Art Thou?
Mar 08 2008, 00:10
96
Delicatessen
Jul 06 2009, 21:47
96
Princess Mononoke
Mar 08 2008, 12:25
96
Ran
Mar 08 2008, 08:24
95
Cinema Paradiso
Mar 08 2008, 14:04
95
I Heart Huckabees
Mar 07 2008, 01:13
95
Jurassic Park
Mar 07 2008, 01:13
95
Jurassic Park III
Mar 07 2008, 01:13
95
Memento
Mar 07 2008, 01:13
95
Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring
Mar 08 2008, 08:33
95
Witness
Mar 13 2008, 00:27
94
Contact
Mar 08 2008, 00:14
94
Grave of the Fireflies
Mar 08 2008, 13:58
94
Howl's Moving Castle
Jul 12 2008, 08:20
This anime is Miyazaki on top form. It is creative and imaginative. It moves along at a fast pace. The way that the character of Howl is only slowly revealed is masterful. Equally, we are left wondering throughout the movie whether Sophie is able to break the spell. It is wonderful to see a movie that really detests warfare.
94
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
Mar 07 2008, 01:13
94
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
Mar 07 2008, 01:13
94
Lost in Translation
Mar 08 2008, 12:30
94
Pan's Labyrinth
Jul 12 2008, 08:15
Although dark in subject matter, tone and lighting, this remains a magical movie. It feels to me to have a gritty existential feel to it, despite its exploration of magical realism. The military tension of just-post-Civil War Spain is well captured (also see El Espiritu de la Colmena). The acting of the central characters is good.
94
Whisper of the Heart
Mar 08 2008, 14:00
93
The English Patient
Mar 08 2008, 12:26
93
Manon of the Spring
Mar 08 2008, 13:50
93
Trainspotting
Mar 07 2008, 01:13
93
Twister
Mar 08 2008, 08:27
92
2001: A Space Odyssey
Mar 08 2008, 12:28
92
Blood Simple
Mar 08 2008, 09:25
92
Chicken Run
Mar 07 2008, 01:13
92
Death In Venice
Aug 16 2009, 16:08
92
Pitch Black
Mar 08 2008, 12:30
91
The Abyss
Mar 08 2008, 09:23
91
Bringing Out the Dead
Mar 08 2008, 09:22
91
Fargo
Jul 12 2008, 08:28
91
Fiddler on the Roof
Mar 08 2008, 20:02
91
The Lion in Winter
Aug 16 2009, 15:53
91
Smoke
Mar 07 2008, 01:13
90
The Bourne Identity
Mar 08 2008, 08:19
90
The Bourne Supremacy
Mar 08 2008, 12:31
90
The Fifth Element
Mar 08 2008, 20:03
90
Independence Day
Jul 06 2009, 21:46
90
The Lost World: Jurassic Park
Mar 08 2008, 12:33
90
Minority Report
Mar 07 2008, 01:13
90
Sideways
Mar 07 2008, 17:34
90
Stargate
Mar 08 2008, 12:27
89
The African Queen
Aug 16 2009, 15:55
89
The Chronicles of Riddick
Mar 08 2008, 14:05
89
Dune
Mar 08 2008, 08:23
89
Enemy of the State
Mar 08 2008, 09:25
89
Pulp Fiction
Mar 08 2008, 00:20
89
Sneakers
Mar 13 2008, 00:32
88
The Blues Brothers
Mar 08 2008, 00:16
88
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
Jul 06 2009, 21:48
88
The Thomas Crown Affair
Mar 08 2008, 08:34
88
Titanic
Mar 08 2008, 00:18
88
Working Girl
Mar 08 2008, 14:02
87
Ferris Bueller's Day Off
Mar 08 2008, 00:12
87
Groundhog Day
Mar 08 2008, 09:24
87
Lost in Space
Mar 07 2008, 01:13
87
Mission to Mars
Mar 08 2008, 12:34
87
Phone Booth
Mar 08 2008, 08:25
87
Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back
Mar 08 2008, 12:26
86
American Beauty
Mar 07 2008, 01:13
86
Educating Rita
Mar 08 2008, 14:01
86
The Full Monty
Mar 08 2008, 00:19
86
Mercury Rising
Mar 08 2008, 12:32
86
The Thomas Crown Affair
Aug 16 2009, 16:10
85
War of the Worlds
Mar 08 2008, 00:10
84
Cast Away
Mar 08 2008, 12:29
84
Four Weddings and a Funeral
Mar 07 2008, 01:13
84
The Sixth Sense
Mar 07 2008, 01:13
83
Die Hard
Mar 08 2008, 00:11
83
Die Hard 2
Mar 08 2008, 12:25
83
Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope
Mar 08 2008, 00:08
83
The Transporter
Mar 08 2008, 00:13
83
Wasabi
Jul 12 2008, 08:29
82
Gone in 60 Seconds
Mar 08 2008, 08:35
82
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner
Aug 16 2009, 15:54
82
Jean de Florette
Mar 09 2008, 00:12
81
Beverly Hills Cop II
Mar 08 2008, 12:32
81
Event Horizon
Mar 08 2008, 08:25
81
The Hours
Mar 08 2008, 00:21
81
I, Robot
Mar 07 2008, 01:13
81
Resident Evil
Mar 08 2008, 08:24
81
Sleepy Hollow
Mar 08 2008, 08:37
80
Citizen Kane
Mar 08 2008, 12:28
80
The Day After Tomorrow
Jul 06 2009, 21:44
80
Grosse Pointe Blank
Mar 08 2008, 00:08
80
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
Jul 15 2008, 21:15
80
Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace
Mar 08 2008, 08:20
80
Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones
Mar 08 2008, 00:11
80
Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith
Mar 08 2008, 00:09
80
Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi
Mar 07 2008, 01:13
79
Alfie
Jul 15 2008, 21:16
79
The Big Lebowski
Mar 07 2008, 01:13
79
The Castle in the Sky
May 02 2009, 21:58
79
Kundun
Mar 08 2008, 08:36
79
Manhattan
Mar 08 2008, 12:33
79
Psycho
Mar 07 2008, 01:13
78
K-PAX
Mar 08 2008, 00:18
78
Patriot Games
Mar 08 2008, 12:26
78
The Philadelphia Story
Aug 16 2009, 15:56
78
Terminator 2: Judgment Day
Mar 07 2008, 01:13
77
Deep Impact
Mar 08 2008, 08:27
77
Gladiator
Mar 08 2008, 08:34
76
An American Werewolf in London
Mar 08 2008, 08:31
76
Beetlejuice
Mar 08 2008, 12:29
76
One Hour Photo
Mar 08 2008, 12:30
76
When the Wind Blows
Mar 08 2008, 14:00
75
Being John Malkovich
Mar 08 2008, 08:26
74
The French Connection
Mar 08 2008, 08:36
74
Mad Max
Mar 08 2008, 08:27
74
Ocean's Eleven
Mar 08 2008, 08:32
74
Speed
Mar 08 2008, 08:22
73
The Hunt for Red October
Mar 08 2008, 00:13
73
Training Day
Mar 08 2008, 12:29
72
Ghostbusters
Jul 06 2009, 21:42
72
K-19: The Widowmaker
Mar 08 2008, 19:57
72
Signs
Mar 07 2008, 01:13
72
The Terminator
Mar 08 2008, 08:37
71
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Mar 08 2008, 08:37
71
Midnight Run
Mar 07 2008, 01:13
70
Tron
Jul 06 2009, 21:42
69
Kill Bill: Volume 1
Mar 08 2008, 09:25
68
Casino Royale
Mar 08 2008, 09:22
67
Analyze This
Mar 08 2008, 08:33
67
A Beautiful Mind
Mar 08 2008, 08:36
66
Murder by Numbers
Mar 08 2008, 08:18
66
Pleasantville
Mar 08 2008, 12:34
66
Radio Days
Mar 09 2008, 00:07
66
Speed 2: Cruise Control
Mar 08 2008, 12:34
65
Crocodile Dundee
Mar 08 2008, 12:30
65
Van Helsing
Mar 08 2008, 00:10
64
Jaws
Mar 08 2008, 08:32
64
The Mask of Zorro
Mar 08 2008, 08:31
63
Hudson Hawk
Mar 08 2008, 12:27
62
Grease
Mar 08 2008, 08:32
61
Notting Hill
Mar 07 2008, 01:13
60
Armageddon
Mar 08 2008, 12:25
60
Duel
Mar 08 2008, 00:15
60
The Matrix
Mar 07 2008, 01:13
60
North by Northwest
Mar 08 2008, 12:27
58
The Wicker Man
May 02 2009, 21:55
57
The Da Vinci Code
Jul 12 2008, 08:10
This movie is pulp with little style, although much of that is down to Dan Brown's pulp novel: the conspiracy is simply not much of a deal (cf. Enemy of the State). Was Tom Hanks on holiday when he acted in this movie - he remained unbelievable throughout. Audrey Tautou seemed out-of-genre. The only role I enjoyed was Ian McKellen when he was camping it up on his first appearance. Few of the sets are especially attractive, but I do not know whether this was due to the dark, muddy palette.
57
Men in Black II
Jul 06 2009, 21:46
56
Mary Reilly
Mar 08 2008, 09:24
55
Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
May 02 2009, 21:57
54
The Terminal
Mar 08 2008, 00:15
53
Kill Bill: Volume 2
Mar 07 2008, 01:13
52
Maid in Manhattan
Mar 07 2008, 01:13
51
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Mar 08 2008, 09:24
51
Fahrenheit 451
Jul 06 2009, 21:44
51
Firefox
Mar 08 2008, 08:30
51
Men in Black
Mar 07 2008, 17:34
51
Robocop
Mar 08 2008, 08:38
50
Demolition Man
Mar 08 2008, 08:19
50
Mr. and Mrs. Smith
Mar 08 2008, 00:17
50
Saving Private Ryan
Mar 08 2008, 00:17
50
Ten
Mar 08 2008, 12:29
49
Lethal Weapon
Mar 07 2008, 01:13
49
Look Who's Talking
Mar 08 2008, 12:27
49
Mrs. Doubtfire
Mar 08 2008, 08:22
49
The Sting
Mar 08 2008, 08:37
49
Thunderball
Mar 08 2008, 12:32
48
Analyze That
Mar 08 2008, 00:16
48
Flight of the Navigator
Jul 06 2009, 21:43
48
Young Frankenstein
Mar 08 2008, 08:22
46
Singin' in the Rain
Mar 08 2008, 08:35
45
Back to the Future
Mar 07 2008, 01:13
45
Back to the Future Part III
Mar 07 2008, 01:13
45
The Breakfast Club
Mar 08 2008, 08:21
44
The Railway Children
Mar 09 2008, 00:10
42
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
Mar 08 2008, 12:32
42
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
Aug 16 2009, 16:06
42
Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory
Mar 08 2008, 09:23
41
As Good As It Gets
Mar 08 2008, 00:18
39
Predator
Mar 08 2008, 00:21
38
Goldfinger
Mar 08 2008, 00:16
37
Babe
Mar 07 2008, 01:13
36
Finding Nemo
Aug 16 2009, 16:06
36
Ice Age
Mar 08 2008, 08:23
36
Monsters, Inc.
Mar 08 2008, 08:20
36
Shrek
Mar 07 2008, 01:13
36
Toy Story
Mar 08 2008, 08:21
35
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
Mar 08 2008, 00:20
35
Stuart Little
Mar 08 2008, 12:31
34
101 Dalmatians
Mar 07 2008, 01:13
34
The Lion King
Mar 08 2008, 08:22
34
Pinocchio
Mar 08 2008, 08:26
33
The Golden Child
Mar 08 2008, 08:36
33
The Neverending Story
Mar 08 2008, 08:31
32
Babe: Pig in the City
Mar 08 2008, 08:23
30
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
May 02 2009, 22:08
25
Bridget Jones's Diary
Mar 07 2008, 01:13
20
Dr. Dolittle
Mar 08 2008, 00:07
18
Robin Hood
Mar 08 2008, 08:33
12
All Dogs Go to Heaven
Mar 08 2008, 00:12
9
Scooby-Doo
Mar 08 2008, 08:19
1
Ace Ventura: Pet Detective
Mar 07 2008, 01:13

Halcyon day

2010-01-16T17:53:00.000Z

Trudging once again the footpath that follows the icy riverbanks into Durham City this morning, approaching the Maiden Castle footbridge, I was blessed with the electric-turquoise streak of a kingfisher.

Misdirection

2010-01-10T07:01:00.003Z

I remember with some affection an old Quaker man named Bill. We served together on a committee, and talked on many occasions. In particular, I have never forgotten him telling me that for the first forty years of his life his mind was incredibly active, "like a steam train", but then he slowed down - as though he had run out of steam. He died some years ago, I think in his 80s, having been unwell for a short time. He died because he was old and tired, and his body found a way for him to let go. The focus of attention in the talk around his death, however, was directed towards the possibly-hospital-acquired-infection that killed him. Such talk was innocent, and understandable in the context of someone precious whose presence was missed.

An online article published on the BBC news website: http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8448000/8448807.stm
discusses a recently published report of research undertaken concerning the impact of grey squirrels on UK bird populations. The premise for the research was that various rarer species of bird are in decline because of predation by grey squirrels. The research, however, demonstrated that despite both red and grey squirrels helping themselves to the occasional nest egg, and snacking on unfortunate fledgelings, there is little if any evidence even to suggest, never mind show, that grey squirrels adversely affect any species of bird. Interestingly, the two bird species that suffer the greatest squirrel (both red and grey) predation are blackbirds and collared doves. Interesting, because those are the two bird species that are most in evidence in the village where I live, and there are letters in the local newspaper bemoaning the amount of noise made by the collared doves. It seems that, in line with the national population of collared doves, the number of local collared doves has increased. Significantly, this increase has been at a time when my sightings of grey squirrels, which were barely in evidence at all in Durham when I arrived in 1976, have become more frequent. It is not grey squirrels that are the predation threat to local avian life, it is domestic cats (including my own). Other research some years ago showed that domestic cat populations represent a significant threat to local populations of garden birds.

So why was this research on the impact of grey squirrels considered necessary? Supported by Charles Windsor, an outspoken voice for conservatism and rural autonomy, there have for a number of years been loud calls for the slaughter of grey squirrels 'to protect populations of indigenous red squirrels'. I remember in my childhood there were stories about the invasive North American grey squirrel driving Tufty to the edge of extinction. There was anecdotal evidence that grey squirrels, being larger, would beat up the red squirrels. (Would this have anything to do with the Second World War?) Squirrels fight, whether red or grey; I know because I have watched them. However, again, research undertaken thirty years ago showed that the decline in red squirrel populations tended to precede contact between the two populations: where Tufty had moved out leaving an ecological vacuum, the grey squirrel moved in. The anti-grey squirrel lobby countered with evidence showing that the red squirrel has no immunity to a virus (the parapox virus) to which the grey squirrel is immune. However, because the two squirrel populations have little contact, it is not principally the virus that has the red squirrel population in decline.

The main reason for the steady decline in the number of red squirrels in the British Isles is habitat degradation: the impact of people, industry and agricultural practices. Whilst grey squirrels are happy to live in Regent's Park, London, red squirrels cannot cope with people. Every area of the UK where red squirrel populations are hanging on is an area with a low human population density - this can been most clearly seen in Scotland where there are red squirrel populations either side of the Forth-Clyde corridor. There are few red squirrels in England.

It may be too late to preserve any natural populations of red squirrels in England. Their only chance may be managed reserves from which all environmental pressures have been removed. However, Tufty's fate is like that of the caged canary taken down a coal mine. The red squirrel lives or dies according to the ecological appropriateness of their habitat. The industrialisation of agriculture, including the use of herbicides, pesticides and genetically-modified crops; the 'management' of forests; the encroachment of industrial estates, trading estates and housing estates; the transformation of wildernesses into playgrounds for quad-biking, paint-balling, shooting hand-reared game birds (which seems all-pervasive around Durham): have together devoured the barely-touched and the out-of-the-way places. Wilderness has become urban hinterland, suburb, or an agribusiness resource. That is why the red squirrel has all-but-vanished from England. Yet, rather than challenge our own understanding of British society, and give thought to how it could and should be, well-resourced vested interest groups instead shout noisily about the cast of usual suspects, once again directing our attention to the grey squirrel.

Nationhood (2): thoughts out loud

2009-08-14T22:30:00.000+01:00

This posting is an edited version of a timed and dated journal entry written in Caffe Nero, Silver Street, Durham City UK. This version was first written on 17 July 2008, and has since been updated several times.

I want to look again at issues of nationality, not least because I am aware that some of my thoughts have moved on in response to attempting to resolve some cognitive dissonance on the matter.

(10 August 2008: it is not clear to me whether the people of South Ossetia simply wish not to be governed by Georgia, or if they wish to form their own independent government, or if they wish to form an independent government with the people of North Ossetia, or if they wish to be under Russian (military) protection.)

I believe that people should be free to govern themselves, to form their own government, and should not have to be subject to government by another people. Despite the apparent reported despotism of the Mugabe regime, I believe that the people of Zimbabwe (as Rhodesia, a former British colonial possession) should be free to govern themselves, as should the people of Algeria (a former French colonial possession), Burundi (a former Belgian colonial possession), Poland (a former Russian Soviet client state), Latvia (a state formerly occupied by the Soviet Union) and Tibet (occupied since 1960 by the People's Republic of China). What about Ireland? Scotland? Wales? Cornwall? Brittany? Flemish Belgium? Quebec? Lombardy? Greek Macedonia? Turkish Cyprus? Kurdistan? How is the geographical area of self-government to be determined? What about the European micro-states of Andorra? Monaco? Vatican City? San Marino? Lichtenstein? How self-governing are the Channel Isles (Jersey, Guernsey, Sark) and the Isle of Man? Where do micro-colonies fit in, such as Gibraltar? Ceuta?

Beyond consideration of geographical area, there is for me also uncertainty about what I mean by government. At a simple level, the Westminster government is sovereign. However, federal government in Washington DC is not legally competent over every aspect of legal process in the US. In Germany, the lande possess legal competence not shared by the federal government in Berlin. In the UK, the Westminster government devolved some of its power to the Scottish Parliament, and the Welsh and Northern Ireland Assemblies. Further, although under ultimate control by Westminster, city- and shire-based local authorities wield considerable power through their budgets, as do devolved institutions such as the National Health Service, the national rail network, and a plethora of quasi-non-governmental organisations. However, at an international level much of the legislation enacted by the UK government must conform with legislation enacted by, and directives from, the European Union; with the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade; with NATO; and with the United Nations. There are probably any number of international organisations about which I know little or nothing that have specific competence regarding areas of UK governance, and this is to ignore bilateral agreements and understandings, such as the recent military adventures undertaken by the US and UK in Iraq (seen, perhaps erroneously, by many people in the UK as the Westminster government acquiescing to the expectations of the US White House). Whilst pariah states (e.g. Burma and North Korea) and states under siege can run against the pack, at least for a period of time, states central to major world institutions, such as the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Japan either lead the world or else conform - mostly the latter. The exceptions seem to be the superpowers of the US and China, and formerly the Soviet Union, but even these states are under considerable international pressure to conform, as evidenced by the reluctant progress of the Bush administration to acknowledge the human contribution to global warming. So whilst there is a fiction of national sovereignty, there is also an actual dispersal of powers to international organisations. Significantly this de facto ceding of power is not to a world government, but largely to organisations competent in one realm, such as GATT, the World Bank, the IMF, NATO. The major exception to this is the United Nations. However, the UN achieves its authority only from the Assembly of national governments, not from some superior, independent organisation. The European Union, which is an attempt at pan-European government, uses a hybrid version with a combination of pooled national state authority, and trans-European democratic authority. Sadly, the popular democratic aspects of the EU are both weak and undermining of the enterprise. The UN, EU and NATO also make extensive use of experts.

A further international-scale blurring of the sovereignty of nation states is the power wielded by trans-national corporations in every field of finance, commerce and trade.

The foregoing also presupposes that national governments, as though by divine right, have always had sovereignty. A different reality is that they busily acquire power. In part, national governments have acquired authority in novel fields, such as the regulation of television (and thereby, in the UK, the opportunity to tax viewers) and radio communication (and thereby, in the UK, to sell bandwidth to cellphone companies). In part, national governments have acquired authority from other bodies: in (part-)nationalising some UK banks, the Westminster government has also bought itself an important voice in the UK banking industry. In part, national governments have acquired authority by removing the legal competence of autonomous bodies to regulate themselves. (The HPC [Health Professions Council, a UK government body], has recently regulated all psychologists in the UK, despite there being a pre-existing competent body. The HPC has now turned its attention to counsellors and psychotherapists, despite the BACP [British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy] having an effective accreditation scheme.)

To be continued ...

Shrinking U.S. Cities Find Splendor in Green

2009-07-21T13:54:00.005+01:00

The article below is one of several I have seen recently along the same lines:

World Environment News - Some Shrinking U.S. Cities Find Splendor in Green - Planet Ark

I am aware that there are many millions of people, particularly in South America, Africa and parts of Asia, who would experience a vast improvement in their quality of life were they to be given the opportunity to live in these abandoned neighbourhoods. Is it ethically more sound to raze the houses to make green space, or to provide shelter for people who have none?

I am slowly but increasingly persuaded that no-one should be given the right to exclude other people from land that is not theirs: Israelis should have no right to exclude Palestinians from living in Israel; nor supporters of the British National Party [Front Nationale, Vlaams Blok/Belang] to prevent people with darker-coloured skin from living in western Europe. I guess that there are residents of Flint, Michigan, who would object to people from elsewhere in the world (such as refugees, asylum seekers and economic migrants) taking up residence in abandoned neighbourhoods.

A related, though separate, issue concerns social welfare. Were familes say, from Timbuktu, to relocate to Flint, Michigan, or to Pennywell, Sunderland, who would be responsible for their social welfare?

[To be continued ...]

Inauguration of a president

2009-01-25T14:21:00.008Z

The United States has a new president. The world has a new leader. Arguably the single most powerful person on this planet is attempting to change the key in which the superpower, of which he is head of state and commander-in-chief, is humming to itself and singing to the rest of the world.

As I watched the inauguration, I realised that at any other enthronement present would have been presidents, other heads of state and prime ministers from around the world. The government of the US is so significant to the rest of the world that it could be reasonably, if light-heartedly, suggested that everyone in the world should be entitled to vote in the US presidential election.

One part of the world where engagement by the US is of utmost significance is the Middle East. Human rights and justice appear to be under attack from all sides. If ever there were a region crying out for wise, confident, informed, understanding and compassionate leadership, it is the Middle East. I hope that President Obama, Hilary Clinton, George Mitchell and their team are able and willing. Conflict de-escalation and depolarisation would seem to first steps. One group pleading for these is Jewish Voice for Peace:

Were Obama, Clinton and Mitchell to achieve nothing else but to restore hope, justice and human rights to all people in the Middle East, their legacy would be of historic proportions.

Come and See

2008-12-15T13:12:00.003Z

I wrote the following in comment to a review on Amazon.co.uk regarding the Russian movie by Elem Klimov called Idi i smotri (Come and See). I have posted the comment here because I wish to develop a few ideas from it.

"Whilst what you have written may well be true, fair and balanced, Klimov's movie is intended only as true - it is you who place on it the burden of being fair and balanced. Whilst some art clearly does attempt to achieve balance, I am not sure that a painting such as 'Guernica' would be improved were it to attempt a panoptic perspective. Maybe a BBC documentary about the Second World War in Byelorussia would feel more satisfactory as accurate reporting and fair analysis."

The US Presidential election

2008-11-05T19:55:00.008Z

1. When I was in the US during August, it was already absolutely clear to me that John McCain would win the election.

2. Subsequent to my return home, the appointment of Sarah Palin as McCain's running mate, whilst considered inexplicable from the perspective of European commentators, finally brought fully on board the rednecks, the gun lobby and the evangelicals, all of whom had viewed McCain with suspicion as being somewhat liberal. Whilst it still shocks me that there are Christian people in Britain who would have voted for McCain simply because of his Christian beliefs, I know that the same is much more intensely true in the US.

3. During August I saw John McCain start to change his presentation from being the obviously polite, considerate man that he is, to being a person with clear-cut, no-nonsense, straight-down the line answers to any and all questions. I watched the man transform his presentation from appealing pleasantly to conservative people to appealing to rednecks, pro-lifers and evangelicals. Had he been elected to the White House, it is not him about whom I would have felt concern, but all the lobbies to which he owed allegiance.

4. One of the catch-phrases in the movie Sliding Doors, and I think probably from Monty Python before that, is "No-one expects the Spanish Inquisition". The so-called credit crunch began in September. President Bush, and by implication, the Republicans in general are seen as having handled the US economy badly, whereas Bill Clinton is seen (perhaps fairly, perhaps not) as having handled the US economy remarkably well. I feel certain that Barack Obama has benefited from this perception without having earned that trust.

5. Prior to September, John McCain was doing well in the polls because of his military background. On the other hand, Barack Obama was seen as weak and flaky, as too understanding, as "nuanced". The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are not viewed by people in the US as anything like the liability that they are seen by almost everyone in Europe. The credit crunch turned an important issue into a very minor issue.

6. When I was in the US, I was struck by how similar Barack Obama is to how Tony Blair was back in 1997. To many, Tony Blair turned out to be a Tory in Labour livery. On the other hand, Hillary Clinton has a Senate track record of attempting to push through liberal welfare reforms. I believe that had Hillary Clinton been chosen as the Democratic Party nominee, she may well have won the election had the credit crunch not happened. I still rue the fact that she was not selected.

7. Since its much-celebrated birth, the United States has been a nation comprised almost entirely of immigrants from all over the world. Moreover, the overwhelming majority of the people were the poor and dispossessed: displaced native Americans, slaves of African ethnicity, and peasants from Europe, from Asia and from Latin America. Having visited Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Florida and Chicago, I know that white-skinned people are a minority in the US, and will soon not even be the largest minority. White-skinned male patricians do not outnumber other groups in the US, yet this is the category of people from which the two political parties have typically selected their candidates. Martin Luther King's dream was 40 years ago. There is part of me that is appalled that "the world and her lovers" are rejoicing about the skin colour of the person elected to be the next US President. Is it really true that these times are still so benighted?

8. The excitement and razzmatazz around Obama has enthused many people, and raised expectations into geostationary orbit. I wonder how long he will be given before people realise that he is merely the Commander in Chief of the US military, and not Superman, Father Christmas, the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny and Jesus Christ merged into one super-hero.

9. I hope and believe that the world is much safer for having a Democrat, rather than a Republican, White House.

10. Had I been able to vote at a Democratic primary, I would have voted for Hillary Clinton. Had I had a vote in the US Presidential election, I would, without a shadow of a doubt, have voted for Barack Obama.

Postscript (18 July 2009)

My overall, if no-longer well-informed, sense is that Barack Obama has done a stirling job during the first six months of his office. In comparison, the UK government under Gordon Brown appears to have stumbled from crisis to crisis in remorseless succession. Whilst Obama's administration inspires hope for the future, the UK is sinking ever deeper into the mire. I should find it much easier to be proud to be American than proud to be British.

Was this evil?

2008-09-27T06:19:00.003+01:00

The following story is edited from the BBC News website

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/wales/7631234.stm: 2008/09/23 14:33:28 GMT

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/wales/7631734.stm: 2008/09/23 15:55:25 GMT

A 32-year-old woman has been found guilty of murdering her four-year-old disabled daughter.

Joanne Hill, from Connah's Quay, in Flintshire, had admitted drowning Naomi in the bath last year but denied murder due to diminished responsibility. Hill was jailed for life with a minimum term of 15 years. Chester Crown Court was told she had been unable to cope with Naomi's mild cerebral palsy.

Naomi's father Simon Hill described his wife's actions as "evil".

During the two-week trial, the jury heard hard-drinking Hill was ashamed of Naomi's condition, which meant the little girl had to use callipers to help her walk.

Judge Elgan Edwards told Hill there was no excuse for what she did. He said the aggravating features in the case were the vulnerability of Naomi and the breach of trust between a mother and daughter. He said: "You killed your own daughter because you could not cope with her disability. You had other pressures upon you, a disintegrating marriage and you decided to kill your own daughter by drowning her."

Because of the murder conviction Hill will not return to a secure unit but go straight to prison, the judge said. He commented on Hill's "sad" history of mental health problems and said he hoped she would be transferred back to hospital very soon. He added: "This has been a very sad case. Sad for you, for your husband, for the child you killed. "There can be no excuse for what you did."

On 26 November, 2007, Hill collected Naomi from a child-minder and took her home. The court heard how Hill had run a bath, adding bubble bath and came down for a glass of wine. When the bath was full, Hill put her daughter in the bath and drowned her by holding her head under the water for up to 10 minutes. The post-mortem examination found Naomi had died by drowning and also found facial haemorrhages which pointed to the girl's head being forcibly held under water with her face against the surface of the bath. Hill then dressed the little girl and put her in her car together with a bottle of wine before her husband returned home from work. She then drove around for eight hours.

The following day, Hill arrived at the Countess of Chester Hospital with her dead daughter in her arms, shouting for help.

The court heard how it was unclear what Hill was doing in the eight hours leading up to her arrival at hospital with Naomi dead in her arms. Police established she visited a petrol station at about 2330 BST that night and the jury were shown CCTV footage of her smiling and joking with the sales assistant.

Speaking after Hill was convicted by a unanimous jury, her husband Simon said: "Joanne is a non-swimmer with a fear of water. To be held under water is her biggest fear. "What she did to my princess Naomi was evil. There's not a minute that goes by without me wishing that [Naomi] was still here. She was my constant companion, she was my best friend, she was my little princess."

Hill's mental health issues first became apparent in the early 1990s when, aged 17, she saw a child psychiatrist for anxiety and repetitive thoughts. In 2000, she attempted suicide and throughout the year she was prescribed a medication for anxiety, depression and sleeplessness. In January 2003, shortly before Naomi was born, Hill was diagnosed with chronic anxiety and immediately afterwards, suffered a severe form of post-natal depression.

In a statement North Wales NHS Trust said a full review was to be conducted under the control of the Flintshire Local Safeguarding Children's Board. "Until these formal processes have concluded it would be inappropriate for the trust to make any detailed comment and the trust is also bound by the rules of patient confidentiality," the statement read.

A spokeswoman for the disability charity Scope, which focuses on people with cerebral palsy, said they were "saddened and appalled by this case". "Naomi's death is a tragedy," Alice Maynard said. "However, this case raises the wider issue of how many disabled parents still don't get the support they need in bringing up children and how society continues to portray disability in a negative light, creating shame and stigma around impairment. "Tragically, in this instance, this combination of factors proved lethal."

The jury in the trial of Joanne Hill, who has been convicted of murdering her disabled daughter, had a crucial decision to make about the 32-year-old's state of mind.

Hill, of Connah's Quay, Flintshire had killed four-year-old Naomi but the jury had to decide whether she was ill on the day she killed her daughter.

The defence case rested on proving that Hill, who had a history of mental health problems, was suffering "an abnormality of mind" when she drowned Naomi in the bath.

But Michael Chambers QC, for the prosecution, said Mrs Hill's behaviour in the months and days leading up to the killing had been considered normal and rational.

He said Hill should be found guilty of murder, rather than manslaughter by reason of diminished responsibility, because she had made a "deliberate and conscious" decision to kill her daughter.

Naomi was disabled, having mild cerebral palsy, and Hill could not cope with it, claimed the prosecution.

But deciding whether somebody is mentally ill at a particular time is a complex task.

During the trial at Chester Crown Court, Dr Aideen O'Halloran, a consultant forensic psychiatrist, said Hill's behaviour in the weeks leading up to Naomi's death indicated she was having a relapse of her mental health condition.

The court was told Hill had a history of mental health problems which first became apparent in the early 1990s when she was 17 years old and saw a child psychiatrist for anxiety and repetitive thoughts.

In 2000, Hill twice attempted suicide and throughout the year she was prescribed medication for anxiety, depression and sleeplessness.

In January 2003, shortly before the birth of Naomi, Hill was diagnosed with chronic anxiety and the following April, she had a "hypermanic" episode.

After Naomi was born ten weeks prematurely in a "difficult" birth, Hill suffered a severe form of postnatal depression, although she did respond to treatment.

On Boxing Day 2006 she suffered a severe relapse and left the family home to be cared for by her parents.

Once again Hill recovered, returning to work part-time in the March and full-time a month later.

In June, doctors decided there was no need for further involvement by her local Mental Health Team and in August her case was closed, although she remained under the care of her GP and on several types of medication.

In November, it was recorded that she was drinking heavily, increasing the risk of depression and the likelihood that she would stop taking her medicine.

Later that month she killed Naomi.

Dr O'Halloran concluded that Hill was suffering from depression and was able to "disassociate" her feelings, a combination that was "an abnormality of the mind" in her view.

But Dr Paul Chesterman, a consultant forensic psychiatrist, told the jury Hill's actions had not suggested a mental disorder at the time of the killing last year.

Hill had enjoyed a night out and had sex with a workmate on the Thursday before Naomi was killed, behaviour that Dr Chesterman said was "incompatible" with clinical depression.

Away from the trial, Gordon Huntley from the charity Wrexham Mind office sympathised with the jury's difficult task.

"When it comes to mental health it's far more difficult. When it's a physical illness, it's quite visible," he said.

"With mental health it's not quite so easy because the person doesn't necessarily understand what's going on themselves.

"It can be really difficult for jurors to come to any sort of understanding, let alone decision, about why somebody might want to do something like that."

And the complexity of the issue can lead to very different conclusions, even from experts, about a person's state of mind.

"I don't always agree with some of my colleagues in health on occasions," said Mr Huntley.

"I work closely with them and I'm quite friendly with a number but they do face quite difficult decisions in terms of what is happening to an individual.

"'What diagnosis do I give them and therefore what treatment can I give them or is available, is it the right one?'

"It's quite difficult and can be quite a lonely position for them to carry that burden."

Mr Huntley said it was also incredibly difficult to predict whether somebody with a history of serious mental health problems was likely to commit an extreme act.

"The stigma that people face with mental health issues is significant but it's not warranted, but unfortunately there are incidents that lead to tragic circumstances," he said.

"While for the vast majority, that's not the case, there are some of those events and sometimes people fall through the gaps."

European invasion of the Americas (1)

2008-09-15T15:09:00.005+01:00

My two visits to the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian, Washington DC, prompted me to consider the ethics of the European invasion of the Americas from 1492 onwards. I have been journalling about this issue in detail on paper , but have been reluctant to date to commit any of my thoughts to publicly-accessible electronic form. However, having just read the article reproduced below, I thought that it would make a good start to the process of placing my thoughts about the issue in the public domain. The article is in Planet Ark, world environment news, which I believe to be a subsidiary of Reuters.

***

BRASILIA - Isolated native Indians in the Amazon forest of Brazil and Peru remain threatened by advancing loggers despite growing international attention to their plight, a senior Brazilian official said on Thursday.

"Pressure from Peruvian loggers continues, it's a concern," Marcio Meira, head of the government's Indian affairs agency, Funai, told the foreign press association in Brasilia.

Brazil's Acre state along the border with Peru is one of the world's last refuges for such groups, but increasing activity by wildcat miners and loggers puts them at risk.

Dramatic pictures of pigment-covered Indians from the region threatening the photographer's aircraft with bows and arrows were carried in May by media worldwide.

The Peruvian ambassador to Brazil subsequently told Meira his government was concerned about the issue and preparing measures, without detailing what these were.

Brazil has 26 confirmed native Indian tribes that live with little or no contact with the outside world. There are unconfirmed reports of an additional 35 such groups.

Many of them live in the forest like their forefathers did centuries ago, hunting and gathering.

More than three months after the photographs sparked an international media frenzy, Funai officials continue to witness logging activity in the region. "There is evidence. We see timber floating down the river which originates in Peru," said Meira.

Survival International, a group that campaigns for tribal peoples' rights, said last week that the Peruvian government had not lived up to its promise of publishing an investigation into accusations of illegal logging.

"The Peruvian government must not be allowed to bury this issue, or to turn their backs on the uncontacted tribes," said Survival's director, Stephen Corry.

The issue will be discussed at an international conference on native Indians in Georgetown, Guyana, later this month, Meira said.

Advancing loggers also threaten isolated tribes in Brazil's northern Mato Gross state and along the upper Xingu river in Para state, Meira said.

(Reporting by Raymond Colitt, editing by Ross Colvin)

Story Date: 15/9/2008

***

New camcorder: review

2008-07-18T06:47:00.000+01:00

This is the review I have written for Amazon about the new little camcorder I bought for my daughter to use.

***

I already have three camcorders of different ages, as well as a video recording function on my SE P990i, and I should like to buy an HD camcorder: I am not a novice.

The Busbi Video Plus Camcorder is a kind of 'Amstrad' camcorder - unadorned with bells and whistles, but extremely easy to use, and represents good value for money. It feels like using a cellphone to record video, but the resulting images are far superior. The control buttons are completely intuitive: we have not yet opened the instruction manual. My wife and my daughter's care worker have also been using the camcorder to make short videos without instruction.

The picture quality is fine and stable, although the picture becomes grainy in poor light. The colours are good. The 2x zoom is useful for framing, although being digital not optical results in some loss of image quality. The sound recording from the internal microphone is impressive.

Linking the camcorder's bundled short USB cable to a digital photoframe, we were able to watch our video clips with ease. Connecting the camcorder's bundled video cable to the television was equally straightforward and satisfactory.

I used the camcorder's USB port and the camcorder's own (presumably flash-loaded) excellent software to download the 11 video clips we have made: amazingly straightforward. The camcorder creates .AVI files, at about 20 MB / minute when set on HQ (high quality). I bought a 2GB flash memory card to support the camcorder's onboard 500 MB. The one clunkiness is that video clips are not automatically saved onto the flash card. Just to complete the process, I intend this weekend to edit and upload onto my YouTube channel a short movie based on some of the clips.

Reservations:
1) There is no lens cover.
2) The monitor screen swivels only around one axis - for example, to record oneself, and not around two axes - useful, for example when filming over the heads of people, or when shooting from close to the floor.

Uncertainties:
1) How long will the batteries last? I shall be happy if they can do a day's tourist filming.
2) How long will the camcorder continue to function? I shall be happy provided it lasts a full 12 months.
3) How robust is the camcorder? After all, most of us have dropped a cellphone at least once

For the time being, we are very happy with the Busbi Video Plus Camcorder. Should things start to go wrong, I shall write another posting to set the record straight. I award it five stars not because it boasts a high specification, but because it is highly functional, easy to use, and at GBP70 (now reduced to GBP65) it represents very good value for money.

Having visited Auschwitz-Birkenau

2008-07-16T12:30:00.014+01:00

One of my sisters recently visited Auschwitz-Birkenau. I have never had the courage to visit that grim place, and I respect her for doing so. In response to her visit she found herself asking versions of the primary questions listed below that she was kind enough to e-mail me. I have added some searching, self-reflective supplementary questions because that is my nature. It is not my intention to remove anything from her experience by developing her material in this way. Rather, my purpose is to engage with her material in ways that are relevant to my process. As recorded elsewhere, I am currently active in considering a new non-religious ethical framework for society. It is in this context that my supplementary questions can best be read.

Q1. What is the character of someone who believes that other people are a sub-species and unworthy of life? Are there occasions when I treat someone, or some group of people, with less than the full respect that belongs to humanity?

Q2. What possible ethical framework could permit medical doctors to perform "experiments" on living people, and subsequently kill those people with phenol injections? In what ways do I behave unethically towards people, even if those people live in a different continent? I buy electronic goods that I suspect were manufactured in Chinese sweat-shops; I buy food staples that may have been grown and harvested by poor and oppressed people working the farms and estates of trans-national corporations.

Q3. What did the recipients of second-hand clothes / false limbs/ glasses / suitcases / etc., believe about their provenance? Do I always enquire about the provenance of the clothes I wear and the food I eat?

Q4. How could anyone feel okay about making cloth from the hair, and lampshades from the skin, of people for whom they have contempt, and what kind of person would want to possess objects made from those materials? What will people of the future think about the choices I have been making during my life?

Q5. Why did the Nazi machine go to the lengths of transporting Jewish people from places as far away as Greece and Portugal (taking up to 10 days in freight trains) to Birkenau, only then to murder them?

Q6. How did the tens, or even hundreds, of thousands of people who were involved at some level in the premeditated murder of Jewish, Roma, gay and disabled people across Europe, subsequently reconcile themselves with the wickedness in which they had participated, or at least with which they had colluded? How do I reconcile myself with knowledge of the hurt and pain I have caused people during my life?

Q7. Why didn't the Hungarian 'underground resistance' disseminate the news from escapees about what was happening in Birkenau, and thus prevent half a million Jewish people from being transported there in 1944? How guilty am I for allowing people to believe what I have known not to be true.

Q8. To what extent did the UK and US governments keep quiet about Auschwitz-Birkenau? Why do I stand by without complaint and permit the UK government to deport from the UK refugees from strife-torn parts of the world?

Q9. Are the Italian authorities currently dehumanising the Roma people, and thereby moving in the same direction as the Nazis? Is my conscience as squeaky clean as I should like people to believe?

Q10. By what signs could I recognise that the people around me have gone a step too far? Would I be prepared to recognise that a line had been crossed? What would I do about it were I to see it happening?

***

The following poem is widely attributed to Pastor Martin Niemöller (1892–1984) about the inactivity of German intellectuals following the Nazi rise to power and the purging of their chosen targets, group after group.

Original	Translation
Als die Nazis die Kommunisten holten, habe ich geschwiegen; ich war ja kein Kommunist. Als sie die Sozialdemokraten einsperrten, habe ich geschwiegen; ich war ja kein Sozialdemokrat. Als sie die Gewerkschafter holten, habe ich nicht protestiert; ich war ja kein Gewerkschafter. Als sie die Juden holten, habe ich geschwiegen; ich war ja kein Jude. Als sie mich holten, gab es keinen mehr, der protestieren konnte.	When the Nazis came for the communists, I remained silent; I was not a communist. When they locked up the social democrats, I remained silent; I was not a social democrat. When they came for the trade unionists, I did not speak out; I was not a trade unionist. When they came for the Jews, I remained silent; I wasn't a Jew. When they came for me, there was no one left to speak out.

Original

Translation

Als die Nazis die Kommunisten holten,
habe ich geschwiegen;
ich war ja kein Kommunist.

Als sie die Sozialdemokraten einsperrten,
habe ich geschwiegen;
ich war ja kein Sozialdemokrat.

Als sie die Gewerkschafter holten,
habe ich nicht protestiert;
ich war ja kein Gewerkschafter.

Als sie die Juden holten,
habe ich geschwiegen;
ich war ja kein Jude.

Als sie mich holten,
gab es keinen mehr, der protestieren konnte.

When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.

When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for the Jews,
I remained silent;
I wasn't a Jew.

When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.

***

In 2003, American punk rock band NoFX paraphased the poem in the song "Re-gaining Unconsciousness" on the album War on Errorism

First they put away the dealers,

keep our kids safe and off the street.

Then they put away the prostitutes,

keep married men cloistered at home.

Then they shooed away the bums,

then they beat and bashed the queers,

turned away asylum-seekers,

fed us suspicions and fears.

We didn't raise our voice,

we didn't make a fuss.

It's funny there was no one left to notice

when they came for us.

***

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil, is for good men to do nothing." (frequently misattributed to Edmund Burke.)

***

14:50 Wednesday 16 July 2008, Cafe, Murray Library, Sunderland

My sister visited Auschwitz-Birkenau last weekend. I am filled with tears simply imagining the experience. I wish never to visit the place which is as close to hell as I ever need to hear about. Besides, my credentials go a long way to excusing me the ordeal. As a lifelong pacifist, a Quaker for 25 years and a vegan for nearly 15 years, it would be difficult to mistake where I stand on issues relating to the wickednesses perpetrated in that evil place. On most of the occasions when I have visited Amsterdam I have been in the Anne Frank House, which I have also browsed online. I have visited the holocaust memorials in both Paris (several times) and in Berlin (where I should also like to visit the new memorial to the gay people who were murdered by the Nazi regime). Also in Berlin I have twice visited the harrowing Topography of Terror exhibition next to the Martin Gropius House. In both Sunderland (Crowtree Centre) and Newcastle (a gallery off Pilgrim Street) I have attended holocaust exhibitions. I have not only attended the anti-apartheid demonstration outside the South African Embassy in London when white-skinned people ruled South Africa, but I have also picketed Barclays Bank in Durham for its collusion with the apartheid regime. Perhaps more controversially, I make a point of reading the website of the far right British National Party in order to understand their poison. I have attended anti-racist training workshops, although I have never led any. However, I have led gay-awareness and mental health awareness workshops. My daughter has multiple disabilities, and as one response, I use British Sign Language. During the first five years of my life I was brought up in close proximity to a Jewish family (Marion and David Bernard and their three children) in north-west London. As a counsellor I have examined in detailed, and hold up for ongoing examination, my opinions, attitudes and thoughts. As a Quaker, my beliefs are subject to perpetual examination. Superficially, then, my credentials appear kosher. However, I have written almost nothing about any of this in a way that positions me in relation to other people - I rarely stand up to be counted. I am, in fact, indistinguishable from the narrator or Niemöller's poem. Neither do I do much that makes a practical, positive difference. It is not sufficient that I have a preference for the light of truth and love, and that I reject the darkness of ignorance, fear and hatred. I have lost sight of the fact that it is my duty to be creating light, and my responsibility to be shining as a beacon against the darkness of falsehood and hypocrisy. Compared to the bleak days of the 1930s and 1940s, I live in blessed times. Compared to the darkness that enshrouds the populations of Zimbabwe, Burma and North Korea, the UK is "summertime, and the living is easy" ... but I have, for too long, chosen to sit on my hands. My comfortably-won credentials do not, in fact, excuse me from visiting Auschwitz-Birkenau. The first question for me to ask now is whether I am able to stir myself into action before making that grim pilgrimage.

An existential morality

2008-05-17T08:47:00.002+01:00

From the material below I shall create a new weblog posting.

To the extent of my privilege I am existentially obliged to live not only true to my nature and values, but also to improve the world. Why? Because my existence exacts a significant price on the world. Unless I mitigate my existence, I shall leave the world a worse place.

I do not believe that I am privileged to be alive: I had no choice in the decision (or 'mistake') that brought me into existence; I choose not to end my life just yet. I am privileged in that I live in the 21st century AD not BC; that I live in the UK where I have many freedoms, including that of speech, and not in Myanmar, North Korea, Zimbabwe or Colombia; that I live in the economically-developed western world, not in the economically developing world; that I have climbed out of an economically-impoverished and socially-marginalised community in Brent into a professional, intellectual, middle-class life-style. I have no doubt that I am privileged, as are many other people. My privilege gives me power that I can choose to use as I wish. A person with less privilege may have little if any power at their disposal.

My existentialism demands that I live my life true to my own nature. I believe that many people internalise values that are not their own, fail to examine those internalised values, and live their lives at variance from their true nature.

Rights belong to formal or informal legislative frameworks. There is nothing inherent about human rights, consumer rights or birthrights. God-given rights are only for those who believe in a god, which I do not. I claim no rights, although the law of the state and the framework of the community and society in which I live grant me rights. I am granted the right to life until that right is withdrawn (for example, were I to be found guilty of a capital offence).

One of my values is respect for life. I live this in that I am a full pacifist, I oppose capital punishment around the world, and I am a strict vegan. I also respect a person's desire to die.

I recognise that my continued existence is costly. The world is a worse place for my continued existence: my carbon footprint being a topical example; I consume resources such as copper in the cables that power this computer; people feed me by sowing, reaping and processing soya beans; my GP prescribes me blood pressure medication; my daughter is taught at school. Being a westerner, I consume much more than the average person. Being a westerner, and therefore have privilege, I command more power than a refugee in Africa or south-east Asia. Whether I like it or not, the west rests on the bounty of the Earth and on the backs of the world's poor. I feel obligated to mitigate those burdens in the ways that are in my power and that I choose.

Some thoughts about a non-religious ethical framework

2008-05-12T01:00:00.013+01:00

This post is in the process of being moved to its own website:

http://www.newethicalframework.googlepages.com/home

Some thoughts about a non-religious ethical framework

Introduction

It is my fantasy that in times long past, when life for most people was uneducated, tough and frighteningly easy to lose, the various Christian churches played an important role in developing an ‘ethical framework’ that has led to what is currently the aging ‘ethical scaffolding’ of UK and western society. However, despite their former value to society, the role of churches passed its sell-by date at least a century or two ago. Our world is not the simple, fixed world of Genesis, although there are many in different churches who would have it otherwise. Our complex world is the creation of Copernicus, Galileo, da Vinci, Newton, Lavoisier, Priestley, Lyall, Hume, Watt, Stephenson, Armstrong, Darwin, Curie, Rutherford, Einstein, Marconi, Freud, Crick, Watson, Pauling, Sagan, Hawking, Berners-Lee, Gates and ten thousand others.

The vacuum left by the departure of the churches from the centre ground of social existence has long now been occupied by a consumerist materialism (including the use of legal and illegal stimulants), the consumption of passive and voyeuristic entertainment (Hello-style journalism and television), and an obsession with glamour and celebrity (including royalty), sport and get-rich-quick competition. I believe that the ethical values to which these concerns point serve well the organisations that profit from them, and serve poorly the needs of ordinary people to negotiate the hurdles, perils and disappointments of life, and to live satisfying and fulfilling lives.

It is also possible to hear much criticism of some churches for providing too little public steer on issues of the day, and yet encounter other churches (e.g. fundamentalist Right and the conservative Amish in the US; Jehovah's Witnesses in the UK), and religious sects (e.g. the Taleban in Afghanistan; radical Madrassas in Pakistan) that insist on such a rigid steer that individual people are granted little freedom, and non-followers may be at risk (e.g. attacks on doctors who run abortion clinics in the US; Islamic terrorism). A new ethical framework would encourage searching for information and understanding when considering contemporary issues, would prize compassion, and would provide the principles for addressing the issues.

Although a non-religious ethical framework would in time replace past religious ethical structures, it would also build on many aspects of their insights, ideas and philosophy. For example, the Mosaic 'commandments' and the Christian 'beatitudes', although expressed in a manner unattractive to many people, address a wealth of important ideas such as respect for self, for family members, for community, for people who are disempowered or powerless, for strangers. Lifting rocks that now overlie the variously-identified virtues and vices (for example, the 'seven deadly sins' and their complementary virtues), long-mocked because of the sham and hypocritical authority to which people were made accountable, reveals a treasure trove of personal values. Buddhism is built on an impressive foundation of ideas and values. However, this is not to suggest that a non-religious ethical framework would be merely an eclectic hotch-potch of recycled ideas. It is important that the framework would be underpinned both by a deep existential philosophy, and some congruent theoretical principles.

Sin

Within a new ethical framework there would be only a weak concept of sin. Instead there would be both the recognition that most people most of the time are doing what they think best. If they are acting in ways that others consider to be wrong, there is likely to be a reason for it. However, the person who is acting in a manner than meets with the opprobrium of others may be acting out of a lack of compassion for other people. One of the central tenets of a new ethical framework would be the explicit balancing of looking after self with compassion for other people: neither total selfishness nor total selflessness are sufficient. Therefore the concept of sin would be largely relegated to a need for a rebalancing. Similarly, a new ethical framework would avoid generating a sense of guilt. Not only would there be no concept of original sin, but the entire framework would try to avoid opportunities for feelings of guilt. A new ethical framework would be tolerant of personal weakness (e.g. transgression and superstition).

Law

A new ethical framework for society would not replace legislation. This is important for several reasons. First, legislation is usually about requirements and prohibitions, whereas a new ethical framework would attempt to be empowering. Second, legislation is mostly made at the national, regional and local levels, often reflecting the will of the people, whereas a new ethical framework would attempt to be universal. Third, most legislation is about protecting other people (recognising that to eveyone else, I am also 'other people'), whereas a new ethical framework would focus on self , and would almost certainly propose much higher standards of conduct than is usually required under legislation. It might be hoped that a new ethical framework would, in time, influence legislation.

Texts

A new ethical framework would not be a code, or rule, by which to live. It is important that the spirit of the framework, not the words used to describe it, is what is prized. Therefore, there would not be one text alone that defined the ethical framework. Indeed, in a general sense, every text ever written, every image ever created, every movie ever made, would contribute to the understanding of the framework. For example, the written works of Adolf Hitler show us something about what can go so badly wrong, how people can so easily be scapegoated, and how easy it can be to slip into that way of being. The 'Godfather' movies may show us that a thoroughly despicable ordering of society offers attractions that may beguile. However, much more specifically there would need to be some comprehensive texts that outlined, explained and described the framework. Like some temples and shrines in Japan, and like many dictionaries, these texts would be extended, revised and updated with regularity and frequency. These texts would be publicly available online. There may need to be simple texts for people with little education, whether young or not, texts aimed at educated adults, and texts for more academic people, as well as co-ordination between the texts. There would also need to be a vast, annotated 'reading' list pointing people to existing works that could help to explore specific issues. Included in this list would be the religious texts of the major religions the world over: the Tao Teh Ching, the Baghavad Gita, the Bible, the Koran, the later Sikh Gurus, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and so on. Each annotation would caution against revering individuals in such a way as to sanctify, or worse, deify, them.

Values

I should like to contribute to the development of a new, positive, dynamic, responsive ethical framework, wrested from the clutches of institutions such as the church, state and corporate capitalism. This new ethical framework would be based on the altruistic values of charities, the internationalism of NGOs, the work values of trusts and co-operatives, the environmental values of Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, the relationship values of person-centred counselling, the social awareness values of minority cohesion groups, the justice values of community action groups, the self-improvement values of the WEA and the Open University, spiced with a celebration of craft and artistic endeavours of all kinds.

Putting together the above, how is it to be presented? The written and oral traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, condensed into rigid canons, have become weapons with which to defend and attack. That is a bad model. Deification of a person or a cabal is an even worse idea. The new ethical framework would need to be flexible enough to be expanded/contracted and changed to respond adequately to circumstances. It would be in the hands of many, and not merely an elite, but neither would it be merely populist (no 'beauty-contest' cell-phone voting).

Some words describing the ethos of the ethical framework

Harmony, resonance, spiritual, inspiration, aspiration

Compassion, love, truth, authenticity

Diversity, heterogeneity, pluralism

Path, way, journey

An ethical framework for the everyday and for seeking deeper meaning

One of the faults of much organised religion is that it attributes greater significance to people who are able to engage more fully in religious activities and who are able to run the organisation: popes and bishops, imams and rabbis, priests and monks. A new ethical framework would not focus on the individual but on processes. A person might involve themselves for much of the time at an everyday level of ethical awareness, for example taking decisions informed by their ethical principles. That same individual might spend some time seeking after deeper meaning. On other occasions that some person might lead others in their exploration. Although many religious clergy might claim that they are no more special than any member of their congregation, that is not how most people view them. The new ethical framework, in focusing on processes, would refuse role titles, and would only describe processes. These processes would include:

everyday functioning

seeking truth / meaning

leading others in their search for truth / meaning

Person and self

A deep respect for self would be good, so that self-aggrandisement at the expense of other becomes no longer necessary. Self-development would become a permanent aspiration, and counselling would be seen as a valuable activity in which to participate. The material, emotional, intellectual and spiritual needs (Maslow) of each person would be elevated. Without safety, food and a place to live, a person has little opportunity to achieve their full potential.

Relationship to others

To replace the sneering, contemptuous, cynical, exploitative attitude that appears to pervade public discourse worldwide, a new ethical framework would focus on one's relationships with family, community and society, alongside a deep respect for people. Courtesy and politness, as found in Japan, would be prized. Fundamentally permissive, a new ethical framework would prize social diversity, and would consider social conformity to be unnecessary and often unhelpful. Nationalism in any form would not be encouraged at the everyday level of processing, and at other levels of processing would be discouraged.

A respect that acknowledges their experience, their story, their aspirations, their reality. The Kantian ethical principles of beneficence, non-maleficence and justice would serve well, providing a framework for looking after family, neighbour, community, society, the world community and the natural environment. Attitudes of self-respect, humility and giving dignity could replace the Pop Idol -type aspirations that has come to infect the 21st century West.

Relationship with the natural environment

There would also be a deep respect for the natural world, including land, sea and air, animals and plants. To pollute would be as though to soil one's own home. To treat living things callously would be as though to treat one's parents, siblings and children with contempt.

Spiritual dimension

Esteemed places are already reserved for wonder, awe and mystery. Superstition, however, will play no part in this new, humanist ethic, neither pagan astrology nor theistic beliefs. Souls, an after-life and reincarnation will be acknowledged as concepts that distract and make truth more elusive. From dust my body was formed, and to dust it will return. From oblivion I was created, nurtured into awareness, until I am annihilated. De facto, I live the interval between oblivion and annihilation in a spirit shaped by interaction. Like piano strings resonating to sounds in the environment, my spirit resonates with the spirits of others, and maybe in turn causes the spirits of yet others to resonate. Spirit may live on, through dance, images, music, words, and for a short while in memory. However, at death my life is over: there is no longer an 'I', no 'me', no awareness. No place for the concept of an immortal soul.

Nor is there any requirement for a god. The concept of a deity is unhelpful as it turns away from the spirit. Therefore there would be no need for mediators of religion in the form of priests, bishops or popes. However, a new ethical framework would be permissive, for whilst not requiring theistic and other religious beliefs, neither would it exclude the believer. A new ethical framework would also permit a personal morality to sit within the framework.

Creativity bubble

2008-05-05T09:16:00.005+01:00

I have been experimenting using Bubbl.us. It is an online mind mapping program, currently free of charge. I find it intuitively easy to use. It allows printing, import and export, pasting onto web pages and weblogs (see below), and aspects of the appearance are customisable. I have created four bubbles to date, including the bubble reproduced below. Looking at the embedding coding, the program uses Shockwave, so if you cannot see the bubble sheet below, it might be because the computer on which the bubble is being viewed does not have Shockwave loaded.

I have been using Bubbl.us with the Firefox browser, and have found that the program keeps eating RAM without releasing any (I tracked memory usage using Windows Task Manager). This has resulted in my laptop running so slowly as to require exiting Firefox after a while. I do not know whether this glitch belongs to Firefox or to Bubbl.us. (Later: I am convincing myself that the problem is Firefox-related.)

Whilst I appreciate many art-forms such as painting, sculpture, photography, movies, theatre, opera, ballet and dance, I am not a creatively artistic person, as I cannot draw, paint, sculpt, act or dance. I do not consider myself to be especially creative, although I enjoy being creative.

I used Bubbl.us to create the following bubble about my creativity. The image is live, and using the controls in the top left hand corner, can be scaled and re-centred. Also, by holding down the left-mouse button while the cursor is over the image, it is possible to move the sheet around.

How vegan is vegan?

2008-05-02T05:51:00.009+01:00

These thoughts have been coalescing in my mind for the past year or two. One of the reasons that I have not until now committed fingertips to keyboard keys is that the ideas seem to me to be somewhat obsessive. However, a recent unpleasant experience of what should have been an unremarkable meal, albeit kindly prepared and served with enthusiasm and goodwill, resulted in a bad stomach for several weeks. I was hurt because someone got some things badly wrong. My way of coping has been to commit my obsessions to print.

When I first encountered the term 'vegan' early in 1981, I assumed that most people already knew what the term meant. However, having travelled widely throughout western Europe; around Florida, to DC, Manhattan, Boston and Chicago; around Quebec, Ontario, Alberta and BC; and to Tokyo, Kyoto and Nara, I have come to accept that, the world over, the term 'vegan', even in locations where it is known at all, is unfamiliar to the overwhelming majority of people. Moreover, not all people who have encountered the term understand its meaning. Further, few people who are familiar with the term understand it other than as a broad concept.

There are probably many reasons why the term 'vegan', and its equivalents in other languages (vegetalien, veganisch) is barely known, although the broad concept is simple and has a religious pedigree stretching back millennia. Probably the most important reason why the term is neither known nor understood is that few people consciously adopt a vegan diet. However, an other reason for this lack of understanding is variation in the use of the word, both by people who are not vegan, and by people who are vegan. My particular variation is that, confronted with the unarticulated uncertainty of shop, restaurant or hotel staff, I typically qualify what I write or say about myself: that I am 'strictly vegan'. Although relative to the weak understanding of most people the qualification 'strictly' it ought to be a tautology, my intention is to imply a tighter set of standards than merely 'vegan'. One of my friends who is vegan conforms to looser vegan standards than me.

There is also variation in the way food and medication manufacturers use the term 'vegan'. For example, are all food manufacturers certain that the sugar that they add to sweeten a confection or a bottled sauce that is labelled 'suitable for vegans' has been refined without the use of animal-derived charcoal? In contrast, some food manufacturers avoid using the term 'vegan' in circumstances about which some or many vegans might otherwise be comfortable, which can be almost as unhelpful. Examples of the latter include the brewery Bateman's not labelling a bottled beer as suitable for vegans because of the animal-derivation of the glue on the bottle label (I am with Bateman's on that); and one of the vegan paté manufacturers not labelling their paté as suitable for vegans because of being required by the Health & Safety Executive to use rat poison around their factory (whilst I use humane mouse traps at home, I am less clear that an entire food-production environment needs to be vegan - but then I would say that, as I live with two people who are vegetarian).

A second complicating factor is that people get distracted by other issues that use terms such as 'vegetarian', 'organic' and 'cruelty-free'. In the UK, almost any food product that is labelled 'vegan' or 'suitable for vegans' is also labelled 'vegetarian' or 'suitable for vegetarians'. The logical, if incorrect, implication of this dual labeling is that a product that is vegan might not be vegetarian. However, my assumption is that food manufacturers believe that few people who are merely vegetarian are sufficiently well informed about a vegan diet / lifestyle to be confident that a food labelled as vegan necessarily means that the food is vegetarian.

UK Government discussions a few years ago with representatives from across the food and hospitality industries revealed alarming variation in use of the term 'vegetarian'. Whilst those discussions concluded that the term 'vegan' is more tightly defined than the term 'vegetarian', the implied definition of 'vegan' is much weaker (less strict) than my own use expectations of the term.

In response, I have, on many occasions, considered creating a vegan scale, ranging, say from 1 to 10, with clear definitions regarding each point on the scale, 1 being a minimum set of standards, and 10 being much tighter. (Sophistications of this scale might also include 0 for (lacto-ovo) vegetarian and minus numbers for animal-eating.) Two important difficulties presented themselves. First, that whilst there is sense in the idea of something being more vegan or less vegan, there are different ways in which something can be more vegan or less vegan - the issue is not simply linear, but multi-dimensional. Second, inviting widespread adoption of a numbered (or letter-coded) scale, particularly amongst sceptical groups such as food manufacturers, food retailers and the hospitality industry, could be like trying to invite unyeasted bread to rise.

Instead, I have collated a set of fairly transparent terms that can be used with relative ease by vegan people and non-vegan people alike.

Non-vegan terms
Cannibal: a person who eats parts of other people.
Carnivore: a person who eats animal, particularly mammal, flesh; an animal that eats other animals.
Omnivore: a person who eats anything, including animal flesh; an animal that eats vegetation and other animals such as insects, birds' eggs, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish, small mammals, carrion.
Pescatarian: a person who eats a variety of foods, is unlikely to be concerned about consuming animal-flesh-derivatives, but the principal animal flesh consumed is from fish / shell-fish.
Meat-free: food that does not contain animal flesh, but might contain animal-flesh derivatives
Vegetarian / suitable for vegetarians: food unlikely to be based on animal flesh, although the variation in what is excluded is alarmingly wide - some restaurateurs include animal flesh from fish / shell-fish, and it is a commonplace in some countries to consider stock made from animal flesh to be acceptable.
Lacto-ovo vegetarian: a person who eats a variety of foods, including birds' eggs and mammary-gland fluids, but excluding animal flesh. Lacto-ovo vegetarians may or may not be concerned about the presence of animal-flesh derivatives in their food.
Lacto-vegetarian (Indian vegetarian): eats a variety of foods, including mammary-gland fluids, but excluding animal flesh and bird's eggs. Lacto-vegetarians may or may not be concerned about the presence of animal-flesh derivatives in their food.

Sub-vegan terms
Animal-free
Pure vegetarian: although British Airways use this term in preference to vegan (I do not know why), I understand that in India the term can include the use of dairy products

Vegan terms
I propose the abandonment of the term vegan to refer to a person. Instead, the term should be used as an adjective, like the term Kosher. To emphasise this point, I propose the adoption of a new general designation: vegan standard. This could be abbreviated to VS.
Vegan standard ingredients: the (main) ingredients are not animals-derived (this is not watertight because, whereas in the UK neither honey nor casein, both being animal-derived, are widely considered not to be vegan, in the US the situation is not as resolved).
Vegan standard additives and processing: nothing that has gone into the production of the food or meal is animal-derived, and every aspect has been checked (for example, if the food has been sweetened with sugar then the sugar is certified as vegan; this term does address the issue of UK beer being fined with fish guts).
Vegan standard handling: care has been taken to eliminate cross-contamination with non-vegan and sub-vegan food (for example, vegan food that is stored, prepared and served in a separate place, using separate utensils and crockery (analogous to the definition of Kosher; in factories, vegan food is never processed on lines that may also be used for non-vegan food).
Vegan standard environment: no aspect of the food production or preparation could be compromised (which is why, when I have a meal out, I prefer to eat in a vegan restaurant). In this context, the term 'cruelty-free' is important regarding medications, cosmetics and hygiene products (such as soap, toothpaste and washing powder)

This posting is not finished. Once I have completed it, I intend to move it to my website, as I should welcome some serious debate (particularly from vegans) on the issues.

Kaos (2): response and review

2008-04-20T12:30:00.003+01:00

Superb. A masterpiece. A masterclass in arthouse movie making.

(There is so much to write that it will take me weeks to construct this weblog posting.)

Kaos is the name the Taviani brothers gave to this movie homage to the writings of Luigi Pirandello, partly because a corruption of the word is the name of the place where Pirandello was born, partly because chaos is what Pirandello feared: the void, the abyss, nothingness, desolation. The movie exudes nothingness in which the characters and actions exist. The nothingness is as tangible as the stones in the barren fields, and the rock on which the houses precariously perch. The roaring silence and blank canvas give a perspective that is almost intolerable in the twenty-first century. People are leaving for the United States every week because of the grinding poverty and the emptyness.

The movie is made up of several short stories, linked by landscape and culture. Reading some of Pirandello's short stories, it is easy to recognise that the Taviani brothers have translated them well from page to screen. The movie starts with a prologue that makes little cognitive sense, but introduces themes important to the movie, such as landscape, human purpose, narrative, the brutality of life, transcendence. The crow of this prologue, a bell round its neck, flies over the landscape between stories, providing a visual and auditory connection between episodes. The movie ends with a Pirandello short story about being called home to talk to his long-dead mother.

Little happens in any of the stories: Kaos is not an action movie. Neither is it a drama, or any other obvious and popular genre. However, tension does find resolution. Kaos reminds me of Tarkovsky's Stalker, and Kurosawa's Rashamon. The style of acting does not belong to Hollywood, it is much more theatrical (like Fiddler on the Roof), which seems fitting as Pirandello is best known as a playwright.

Kaos (1): in anticipation

2008-04-19T07:46:00.003+01:00

Kaos, produced and directed by the Taviani brothers, was released onto the theatrical art-house movie circuit in 1984. It was screened at the Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle, UK, in 1985, the single occasion when I watched the movie. It left such a deep and lasting impression that I have been searching for a copy of the movie since I bought my television and VCR in 1992. Over the years I have come across several copies of the VHS video for sale, but they have been in US television format (why does the US have to set every standard differently from the rest of the world? - for another posting) and extremely expensive. Being dogged, I have persisted in checking every few months (since about 1995) to discover whether any movie distribution companies had released Kaos for the British / European market, initially on VHS and more recently on DVD. Cliche warning: imagine my surprise a couple of weeks ago when a soon-to-be-released DVD suddenly appeared on the lists of several DVD suppliers. I was so taken aback that I wondered whether it was a scam. My copy was sent from White Rock, Arkansas, US. Excited to receive it as a child with a new toy, I shall watch it this evening.

In telling my story to people I know, few seem as surprised as I am not that the movie should be released on DVD, but that in the face of steadfast evidence to the contrary, I should continue to stand sentinel for the release of this movie on DVD. Thirteen years is a long time to wait. Only a few people know that I waited a long time for Godfrey Regio's Koyaanisqatsi trilogy to be released on DVD. Even fewer know that I am still waiting for Steppenwolf (based on the novel by Hermann Hesse) and Le Grandes Meulnes (based on the novel by Alain Fournier) to be released on DVD. In telling my story, I am saying something important about who I am.

Instead, what almost everyone I have told has focused on is how I shall react watching a movie for only the second time in 23 years, and in particular a movie I have built up in my mind as being so special that it was worth checking the listings of newly-released videos every few months. In part, I have felt mildly irritated that the focus of my story, about dogged, optimistic persistence, has been dismissed and replaced with a focus on whether the movie will live up to my expectations. In part, I have felt disappointed that the people who I have told (all British) assume that I may feel disappointed with the movie. I have also felt a little sad that no-one much has expressed any interest in watching the movie - I know only one or two people who come anywhere near matching my movie taste.

What will it be like? There are scenes and aspects from the movie that I recall vividly: bandits playing boules with the severed heads of their victims; a man howling at moon as he believes he is transformed into a werewolf; an urn-mender who realises that he is trapped in the urn he has just mended; the absence of someone who has recently died. The movie works at a visceral level that I would term expressionist. The issues addressed are profound and concern existence, and I would term this existentialist. The movies that I know which address such issues belong to such directors as Andrei Tarkovsky, Akira Kurosawa, Ingmar Bergman and Peter Greenaway.

What will it be like? I shall watch the movie with a more experienced eye, mind and heart than before. Half my life has passed since I first watched the movie. I have changed in many ways, and expect that the movie, as though a mirror, will reflect an image of my young adult self. Will the middle-aged adult I have become respond to and appreciate the movie as fully as the young adult I was? Who knows? I shall have to find out, and accept what I experience.

What will it be like? I have written elsewhere about having an interest only in those movies that are worth watching at least several times. I trust that Kaos is a movie so rich in difficult ideas that I shall watch it many times. I already know that its initial heady flavours of wormwood and jasmine, citrus and woodsmoke, give way to a complex aftertaste that lingers for decades. I am looking forward to seeing masters of cinema at work.

That's another fine weblog you've got me into

2008-04-10T12:39:00.004+01:00

A new weblog, Kind Vices, has been set up for me and my colleagues at work. Its address is:

http://myblogs.sunderland.ac.uk/blogs/kindvices/

Who knows what opportunities it will offer. I hope that my colleagues will be willing to use it, not least because I do not have experience of a team weblog (Sound Signs is for my family)

My first posting there, as usual, is about weblogs. This seems to have become a standard way for me to begin. ("I shall begin at the beginning" said Alice.) I am aware of how much I have come to understand since I first began weblogging: one of my initial purposes. I also enjoy the way in which I weblog.

Antibiotic resistance: culprit identified

2008-04-07T12:50:00.004+01:00

A news story supplied by Reuters at:

http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/47795/story.htm

highlights the danger to human health perpetrated by the dairy industry.

In a nutshell, the antibiotics that are fed to cows remain active in bovine manure. Germs and microbes in the soil become resistant to the antibiotics. As a result, the current array of antibiotics becomes progressively less effective. In the United States, during 2005, 19,000 people died of MRSA. In the UK, MRSA has been instrumental in testing to breaking point the effectiveness of the National Health Service and the credibility of the government.

Were the dairy industry to be wound down, the rate at which antibiotic-resistant germs evolve will slow down.

Geology versus new creationism

2008-04-03T17:06:00.007+01:00

I recently received the following e-mail. The e-mail was unsolicited, from someone who does not know me and about whom I know nothing. No explanation was offered as to the reason why the e-mail was being sent to me, nor what prompted its dispatch.

***

Hello,

I wish to inform you that the so-called "biblical calculations" of the age of the Earth at 6009 years old is grossly inaccurate and compiled by dubious scholars. The bible's literal time frame allows perfectly for a very old world.

Very few people realize that the creation of the cosmos and the reordering of the world in seven days are two different events. Genesis 1:2 should actually be translated "the earth became formless and void," not "the earth was formless and void." The author of Genesis did not have all the different states of being in the past tense that we do today. English has evolved such that we have "was," "had been," "were being," "became," "had become," "were becoming." Moses (assuming his was the author) used the same word, sometimes rendered "was", sometimes rendered "became."

The creation of the world is Genesis 1:1. It was written very tersely and briefly; Moses, insprired by God, felt no need to get into detail about it. There was a fall in this created world, and it descended into chaos in 1:2 (we don't know exactly what caused the fall, but it may indeed have been Lucifer's (Satan's) rebellion against God). The seven days, which many people inproperly refer to as "the Creation," was God's restoration of the world into what we know it as, with plants and animals, periods of the Sun and Moon, humankind etc.

Thus there is an indefinite time specified between the Creation and the restoration of six days. The harmonists that try to argue that God may have created the world to appear old in every way against science to test our faith should stop wasting their time. The need look no further than Genesis 1:1-2 to see that God created the world an unspecified time before the six days of restoration. If today's science says the Earth is 4.6 billion years old, which they have to in order for Darwinian evolution to have had enough time, then that massive amount of time in human terms would be mostly before the 6 days of restoration.

Lastly, this doesn't mean that from restoration onward there have been 6009 years. (By the way, the 6009 years was counted many years ago, so it should be several decades higher now.) This time frame was mostly derived from adding the years of Adam to Abraham, Abraham to Jacob, Jacob to Jesus to attain the years of the ancient world. As recorded by Matthew, often unimportant generations are skipped. He wrote in three sets of 14 generations. However, comparing it to Luke's astonishingly historically accurate gospel, we realize that Matthew indeed skipped generations unimportant to achieve his literary form of 3 times 14 (Luke skipped one or two from Matthew's as well). This is fine, because "son of" actually is considered to be "descendant of," as in Jesus the Son of Adam or Jesus the Son of David. In sum, don't use archeaology's established views of 10000 years of human civilization to disprove the 6000 years in the bible that some oddball scholars decided to enumerate.

Thanks.

***

I can only imagine that the person, whose e-mail address suggested that the author is based in western Canada (a gorgeous part of the world that I look forward to returning to some day), has read some of my weblog postings in which I include minor geological references.

I studied geology for three years at university, and recently read the history of the drawing of the first geological map of Great Britain. I live on the site of a Victorian coal mine. I take an interest in geology wherever I go, including examining the stone facias of buildings, and (much to the resigned boredom of my wife and daughter) watch every geology programme that is broadcast on UK television (including the repeats). I am fascinated with the European, Russian, Japanese and American space programmes, closely following each mission on the internet (and for recreation, using Google Earth, I sometimes locate the International Space Station), because I have an interest in lunar and planetary geology.

The Big Bang occurred 13,700 million years ago, creating the universe and all matter within it. Red shift in the spectra of the most distant objects, and residual microwave cosmic radiation shows us the age of the universe (since the Big Bang). Many galaxies and stars are much younger than the age of the universe. Our solar system, the Sun, its planets and dwarf planets, their moons, the asteroids and comets, were all formed out of stellar dust only 4,600 million years ago. Radioactive decay paths and rates show us (for example the half-life of uranium-238 decaying to thorium-234 is 4,500 million years) that many of the rocks in orbit around the Sun date from the time of formation of the solar system: some of them have landed on Earth and on the Moon as meteorites and can be seen on display in museums.

Planet Earth initially coalesced from the solar cloud of stellar dust and debris 4,540 million years ago. Early in its life, when only 10 million years old, proto-Earth, the planet that became Earth, was struck by another small planet (often called Theia). The result was the Earth we know today, made of the two previous planets, and the separation of Earth and the Moon. The Moon, being significantly smaller, cooled rapidly and lost its geological processes, so the Moon we know today has remained utterly unchanged in most respects for billions of years. Earth, on the other hand, being so larger, cooled more slowly, and thermal processes in the core and mantle keep the surface of the Earth geologically active - witness the Boxing Day tsunami. When I studied geology at university in the 1970s, plate tectonics was still new, and still being discovered and proved. I could have applied to work a stint on one of the ships that was still mapping the mid-Atlantic Ridge (the constructive boundary between the European and North American sides of the Atlantic Ocean).

Also back in the 1970s, it was generally held that life really got going on Earth about 500 million years ago, everything before that being termed Pre-Cambrian. I recall being taken to see the Durness Limestone, a rock formation in northern Scotland where there is evidence of Pre-Cambrian unicelluar organisms. At the time this was interesting, and slightly worrying. However, it is now recognised that unicellular life actually got going about 3,500 million years ago, that is, only a billion years or so after the formation of the solar system, and possibly only half a billion years after the planetary collision that formed the Earth and Moon. It was in fact multi-cellular life that got going 500 million years ago, including, for example, the fascinating trilobites. The animals that are everyone's favourite, the dinosaurs, appeared about 135 million years ago, flourished for 60 million years, and then progressively disappeared until finally vanishing altogether (other than those that evolved into birds) with the Yucatan asteroid 65 million years ago. Whilst mammals existed before the dinosaurs, they did not flourish until the dinosaurs had left the stage.

The primate pre-cursor to humankind diverged from ancestral gorillas about 8 million years ago, and from ancestral chimpanzees, about 5 million years ago. Several different human species evolved, including Neanderthal humans who existed from 350,000 years ago to 30,000 years ago. Over the past 100 thousand years modern humans (like ourselves) and Neanderthal humans coexisted for a while, of which there is recently-discovered evidence in southern Spain / Gibraltar. However, the most recent ice age finished off the Neanderthal humans, leaving us to piece together the story, and sadly to vandalise the Earth.

The astronomical and geological story of the universe, our galaxy, our solar system, our home planet, and life, is one of surprising twists and turns, full of wonder and seeming miracle. I find it fascinating and deeply inspiring. What is more, I am not required to suspend my disbelief, nor to believe any person or text, neither am I required to hold articles of faith. The evidence is in the rock, and I can search it out for myself. The proof of the geological history of Earth, and of the development of life, is not in words, in a book, but beneath my feet.

I recognise the poetry of Genesis 1, and resonate with the reverence for Earth and life that it evokes. I wish that many more people shared that reverence. However, there is little value to be gained in attempting to wring scientific precision from the passage, for that would be to mistake Genesis 1 for scientific reality. It would be like wondering whether the toilets on the starship Enterprise are water flush or vacuum and disinfectant: Star Trek is a fine drama but it is not a documentary.

I do not know why the author of the unsolicited e-mail chooses to fret about misunderstandings, mistranslations and misreadings of Genesis 1; and to be insistent that creation happened in more than a single period of six days; and was concerned to let me know. I imagine that they wish to promote a marginally more credible Creation story. As far as I am concerned, the astronomical, geological, palaeontological and archaeological stories that I have come to know are far more awe-inspiring that any text. In this context, what the books of the Pentateuch teaches us is how Iron Age people in the Middle East conceptualised the natural world in which they lived. The value of scriptural texts is not in the realms of science, but as a dialogue about human values and spirituality. Asteroids and granite are unable to speak to me about meaning, mercy or compassion, whereas with the Bible, Koran and the Tao Teh Ching, I am able to have a conversation about how I might live my life, the choices I make, and how I might interact with other people. Ecclesiastes 3 says little of geological value (the reference to gathering and scattering stones relates to home-making and moving on), but says much about accepting the just-is-ness of existence. Job 28 does address geology, and whilst the purpose of the passage is to emphasise the unfathomableness of the wisdom of God, the value of the passage lies in the awe that it inspires for our planet, not because the passage is of scientific value. Genesis 1 belongs in this latter category.

Thoughts about a comment

2008-04-02T22:55:00.004+01:00

I received the following e-mail from Blogger:

earnest has left a new comment on your post "The Death Clock is ticking":

your fuckin retarted, death clock .com is not real,

Posted by earnest to Digitation at 26 March, 2008 22:25

I found the comment in response to my posting about the Death Clock (which I have since reread, and found straightforward) unhelpful and unenlightening. Apart from intending to be offensive and insulting, I was and remain puzzled about the purpose of the comment. Why go to the trouble of posting a comment that is neither supportive, nor constructive, nor positional?

I am also unclear how the commenter came to be reading the weblog posting. The time stamp says 22:25, which suggests recreational browsing. (I also note from the time stamp that program writers in the US find it nearly impossible to set out the time and date in a rational fashion. What is wrong with logical, rational, well-punctuated, elegant and unambiguous European time and date format: 22:25 Wednesday 26 March 2008?)

I checked the identity of the person who made the comment, 'earnest', but they have made their profile invisible, a practice discouraged but not forbidden by Blogger. Interesting choice of name: not Ernest, but earnest, and with the e.e.cummings lower case initial 'e'. For someone with that choice of screen name, the comment itself seemed incongruent: my posting about the Death Clock is quite earnest.

The facts that the comment starts with a lower case 'y'; the first three words are misspelled, the name Death Clock or deathclock.com is handled uncomfortably, and the comment ends with a comma, all point to someone whose first language is not English, or else whose English is limited to a vernacular restricted code.

I am perplexed by the idea that the Death Clock "is not real". In context, it is quite complex to identify what is meant by the term "real". Of course, the most obvious answer is that the Death Clock does not possess some kind of supernatural prescience, but as I acknowledge and explore the issue in my posting, that answer makes little sense.

The emotional power packed into the comment suggests extreme contempt. I had two thoughts about this. First, that 'earnest' had seen the Death Clock and been seriously spooked by it. By rejecting my posting about the Death Clock, he was attempting to regain a sense of control. Second, as 'earnest' is obviously a Blogger member, he has read my Profile and disliked what he saw. I am aware from having read material placed by the British National Party (a largely English extreme right-wing, ultra-nationalist political movement) on their own website, that as an educated, liberal, middle-class pluralist, I could be seen as a traitor to white-skinned people, and undoubtedly represent the values they most detest. I am not trying to suggest that 'earnest' is sympathetic to the aims of any particular political movement. Instead, I am suggesting that some people do take offence to who I am, and maybe 'earnest' is one such.

A final, and perhaps the most important, point. I find it hard to understand why so many people use as terms of abuse language relating to learning disability. At the end of 101 Dalmatians, Cruella de Vil calls her henchmen, Jasper and Horace, morons and imbeciles. What makes is acceptable to use these terms, along with the terms 'retard' and 'retarded', as insults. Surely the people to whom they should correctly refer deserve our respect and compassion. For many people with a learning disability life is already hard enough without people stigmatising their disability.

I have no way of knowing whether my musings about 'earnest's' comment approached any truths. However, I have done what I can with the comment. I might write another Death Clock posting, as it is a while since I wrote the first one.

Book Review: The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell

2008-03-24T07:32:00.010Z

The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell, Abacus, London, 2001
(ppb., 279 pp., 11 pp. endnotes/references, indexed, first published by Little, Brown, 2000)

It is not often that book titles manage to raise themselves out of the dust thrown up by the noise of everyday life: Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, Richard Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker, Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series. The term used by Gladwell in the title to his first book The Tipping Point has now achieved common currency. The relevance to climate change and global warming could lead one to wonder, in all seriousness, whether the concept of the 'tipping point' was itself at a tipping point, ready to tip. For many years we had been either 'on the threshold' (in control) or 'teetering on the brink' (not in control). Tipping points may be less obvious, and inferred only by subsequent analysis. Why did crime in New York City plummet in the 1980s? This is one of the examples Gladwell considers in detail, identifying that a particular set of circumstances were at a sensitive 'tipping point', and a small, highly targetted effort was able to make a massive difference. An example Gladwell does not consider concerns marine clathrates - methane hydrate held in huge volumes in ocean sediments. A small rise in global temperatures currently will do little to these clathrates. However, with global temperatures predicted to rise by four or five degrees over the next forty years, even a miniscule temperature elevation could then release vast quantities of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, setting off a rapid escalation of further, potentially catastrophic, global warming. The ocean temperature at which methane is released from clathrates is a tipping point in terms of climate change.
Most of Gladwell's examples of tipping points are focused around human behaviour. It is easy to see why the same term is used both for physical and social processes. When a transmissible disease starts to spread, the rate of social transmission is likely to change in response to a variety of social factors, such as changes in seasonal behaviour. A viral epidemic, such as seasonal 'flu, may well pass through a tipping point, both on its way up and on its way down. At the time of writing, the much-expected pandemic 'flu epidemic based on the H5N1 bird 'flu virus has not reached a tipping point, although it is understood what that tipping point would be: the point at which the virus mutates to permit efficient human-human transmission. Gladwell considers the fashion industry and how there are tipping points in the sale of particular fashion items. He also considers Paul Revere's ride that led to the American War of Independence, analysing what what made the ride a tipping point.
Gladwell identifies both that the context must be right and that the 'contagion' is contagious, 'sticky'. He also considers that three roles are necessary for a social tipping point: connectors, mavens and salesmen. The designations are supeficially attractive and may contain more than simply a kernel of truth. However, in my view, Gladwell fails to take account of the effectiveness of the vested interests of international commerce and national politics in controlling what we buy, what we watch/read, and what we think. Indeed, his message looks as though it will be attractive to a popular culture that prizes individualism: if you are smart in some way, you can make a difference. Maybe you know lots of people (connectors), maybe you are obsessed with footware or gizmos or supermarket prices (mavens), maybe you can sell beachwear to people living in Greenland (salesmen). I thought time and again: Gladwell knows the culture for which he is writing. A society in which intellect is not fully trusted, but in which people dream of escaping both from the vista of complexity revealed by science, and from the daily tedium of humdrum graft to 'stars in their eyes' silver-bullet breakthroughs.
It is valuable that Gladwell offers plenty of evidence to support his assertions. In popular social science style, the text is made up of one anecdote after another, and includes several well-worked-through examples, albeit largely from the United States. The text is well-supported (11 pages of endnotes and references) with many references to academic books and academic papers, as well as newspaper and magazine articles, albeit largely written by Americans in the United States. This US focus should be surprising as Gladwell was born in the UK and raised in Ontario. The parochialism started to irritate me, not because I hold any anti-American prejudices, but because I started to doubt that his thesis would hold as true for other societies around the world. He does offer a Polynesian example of teenage suicide. However, by this point in the book I had started to become suspicious. How much does Gladwell know about Polynesian society? How much does he understand about suicidal ideation and pyschotherapy? Again, this should be surprising because Gladwell's mother was a Jamaican psychotherapist. Although the precise example of Polynesian teenage suicide may well be valid, I was equally sure that Gladwell was well beyond his home turf.
Academic writing does not make claims beyond those that it can defend. Academic writing considers short-comings, objections and alternative interpretations. Gladwell should be familiar with academic writing because his father, Graham, is emeritus professor of civil engineering at Canada's leading University of Waterloo, Ontario. What is absent from Gladwell's book is anything critical of his thesis, anything that may refute his ideas. At two points (crime reduction in New York City, and the spread of syphilis in Baltimore) Gladwell does rehearse alternative suggestions for what took place, but only as a rhetorical backdrop for his 'white knight' tipping point solution. It is as though, for Gladwell, there is a silver bullet to be found, a tipping point that will make all the difference. The Tipping Point is a text written to persuade and convince. Gladwell is acting as maven and salesman for his own ideas. The example he cites at which he appears to me to be weakest is when considering tobacco smoking reduction behaviour. He fails to acknowledge the emotional complexity of smoking, its multitude of meanings, the meanings associated with quitting, and the fact that much smoking reduction advertising is aimed at adults. Having a degree in history, it is far from obvious that issues of suicide and addictions are areas of Gladwell's strength. Happily, however, his text appears to be much more persuasive when it comes to the commercial advertising of fashion items to a segmented US market. About this he writes well. Indeed, his entire text is written in a style that justifiably belongs to a staff writer for the New Yorker magazine.
It would seem that Gladwell applied to his book, the sub-title of which is How little things can make a big difference, the lessons that constitute his chapters. I bought the book because I had heard of it many times and was interested to learn. The book's advertising puff reads: "The International No. 1 Bestseller", a message advertising how contagious the book is.
The concept of tipping points is important, and deserves to be explored, understood and explained more fully, and above all more rigorously. Maybe is is me who at fault in hoping for a modicum of academic scepticism and balance in a popular social science text. When all is said and done, Gladwell's book is an enthusiastic and encouraging introduction to tipping points.

***

Gladwell biographical information drawn from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_Gladwell accessed 24 March 2008

Green: traffic speed and climate change

2008-03-14T12:43:00.010Z

When a motor vehicle (car, van, lorry) is travelling steadily at its optimum speed for minimising fuel consumption (usually between 25 mph and 50 mph), its fuel consumption is very much lower than when it is travelling fast or changing speed. I now know this for sure because my replacement car has a fuel consumption computer. I am able to see in numerical terms, the effect on my car's fuel consumption of driving style choices that I make.

During the mid-1970s, in response to massive increases in the price of crude oil imposed by the OPEC countries (and therefore causing a significant shift in the balance of trade), the UK national speed limit was reduced in order to reduce national fuel consumption. From Wikipedia: "It was reduced to 50 mph (80 km/h) in response to the 1973 oil crisis, and restored to 70 mph (112 km/h) in 1974."

In relation to the US, I found the following paragraph here:

"In the midst of an energy crisis touched off by conflict in the Middle East (see October 17, 1973), President Richard Nixon signs the Emergency Highway Energy Conservation Act, establishing a maximum national speed limit. No highway projects may be approved in any State having a maximum speed limit over 55 m.p.h. The Act, part of a nationwide effort to save oil, is a result of an oil embargo imposed by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries that forced Americans into long lines at gas stations. President Nixon estimates the new speed limit can save nearly 200,000 barrels of fuel a day."

Were the UK national speed limit to be reduced again to 50 mph, the consequence would be a significant reduction in greenhouse gases produced by motor vehicles. Additionally, motorists would save money because they would need to buy less fuel. Lower road speeds would permit roads to carry denser traffic, thus, perhaps counter-intuitively, reducing some congestion. Further, according to the police, excessive speed is indicated in a majority of road traffic accidents. Limiting speed to 50 mph has the chance, therefore, of reducing the number of accidents, their severity and the number of casualties. (I read somewhere that reduction in the number of casualties of road traffic accidents had plateaued, and that further measures were going to be required if the numbers were to be reduced further.) Longer journey times for lengthy journeys might mean that more journeys would be undertaken using public transport, and there might be a long-overdue increase in the use of video-conferencing, and thus a reduction in the number of journeys undertaken.

To my knowledge, no-one is talking about this proposal as an option to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from transport. Is there a reason for this? Am I missing something? As a first step, it would seem like an obvious and relatively cheap and pain-free adjustment that could be made.

Some further thoughts:

1. The speedometer in most UK cars runs up to 160 mph. This is bizarre because the national speed limit in the UK is 70 mph, and (with the exception of Lower Saxony) nowhere else in Europe exceeds 130 kph. The unnecessary range of the speedometer dial achieves two things: I am less clear about my precise speed because the reading is always limited to a small proportion of the speedometer dial; I am always given the sense that I am driving slowly compared with the apparent potential of the car.

2. My car has the potential to travel much faster than I shall ever be legally allowed to drive it.

3. Every morning when I commute to work, an overwhelming majority of the traffic noticeably exceeds the speed limit for substantial portions of the journey.

4. Despite huge negative attention devoted by UK motorists and news media to speed cameras on UK roads, the reality is that the number of speed cameras relative to the extent of roads on which speeding takes place is pitiful.

5. Few UK cars are fitted with cruise control. The price for retrofitting cruise control is prohibitively high. Cruise control could help motorists to observe speed limits.

6. The overwhelming majority of car advertisements in the UK emphasise using cars for fun and excitement. This is not a message that is compatible with attempting to reduce CO2 emissions and traffic. Resolving issues related to climate change requires that people stop seeing their car as a form of recreation.

7. The points I have made above impact on the daily lives of ordinary people. I suspect that many people are willing to make token efforts to mitigate climate change, provided that they are not required to change how they live their life. I believe that climate change is orders of magnitude bigger than the majority of people are appreciating. Token efforts sound to me like rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic. Until people realise that real change needs to take place, across a range of lifestyle issues, such as the speed at which they drive their cars, CO2 emissions are not going to fall.

Beatrice 16 May, 2008 15:11 commented...

Yes, you're absolutely right about deckcahairs on the Titanic. I think people just cannot cope with the enormity of the implications of runaway climate change and so refuse to accept it is real. There are some interesting articles about on the psychology of climate change denial eg this one by George Marshall:http://www.ecoglobe.ch/motivation/e/clim2922.htm

Postscript
Whilst what I have written above sounds a little like pious polemic, I believe it sufficiently both to have reduced my driving speed to 50 mph where the speed limit is 70 mph, and to have changed my driving style so that I accelerate only slowly and, within the limits of safety, brake as little as possible. It has taken a while to drive more sedately, detaching myself from the frantic impatience of other motorists. I sometimes resort to singing "I feel pretty" - it helps.

Why I do not call myself a conservative

2008-03-12T00:41:00.011Z

I describe myself as a liberal person. I am happy to be described as very liberal. I was recently challenged to be clear about what I mean by liberal in contrast with conservative.

Phenomenology
As a counsellor, I recognise that everyone constructs their world, the world, in their own, unique way. I do not believe that there is a correct way to understand the world. I am happy to admit that there are more and less functional ways to understand the world. For example, to believe that the moon is made of cheese may be imaginative, but is probably inaccurate. If, like Wallace and Grommit, one were to visit the moon in the hope of finding hunks of Wensleydale cheese lying around, the chances of coming away disappointed are high. I believe that many people are ignorant about many aspects of the world about which they hold views, and just as many people make only pitiable attempts (if any) to find out the facts. In this sense, therefore, the uniqueness of their construct is based on ignorance and prejudice. However, even were this not the case, every person would still have a different life story, a different set of experiences, a different collection of interests, giving them a different way of describing the world: a childless couple who are career-focused is likely to describe the world differently from a single-mother with five children; a white, male, middle-aged Surrey stockbroker is likely to describe the world differently from a young North African woman living in the banlieux of Paris; a dairy farmer in New Hampshire is likely to describe the world differently from a personal escort in Tokyo. As a counsellor, I would be unable to make a value judgment about the relative superiority of any description of the world. I believe that this position marks me out as liberal. To me, a conservative person is someone who considers either that there is a correct view of the world, or considers that their own view of the world has greater validity than the views of other people.

Family
In the UK, the Conservative Party identifies itself as party that upholds family values. What this position refers to, however, is a narrow view of family: a man, married to a woman, with a number of children born within that marriage. Ideally there will also be grandparents, uncles and aunts, cousins and nieces in an extended family. There is something very 'blood' about this. There is also an 'ideal', from which many depart.

I am not an uncritical fan of the family. My family of origin fitted this narrow, 'ideal', view, and was dysfunctional and abusive. Dysfunctionality and abuse are also significant aspects of the family experience of many people who I have counselled. I have a preference for a Lilo and Stitch view of family: "Family means nobody gets left behind" even when the family consists of two sisters and an alien. For me, family consists of the people we live amongst, the people who frequent (albeit 'virtually' in some cases) our lives, the people we choose. Within my own extended family there are half-people, step-people, adopted people. There are marriages, divorces, second marriages, and cohabitees. There are 'aunties' and 'uncles'. There are straight people and gay people. There are Canadian, French, Monagesque, German and English/Welsh people. I celebrate this diversity, and reject the notion of an 'ideal'. I guess that on a significant plank of Conservative Party policy, I fall well outside the boundaries of their core support.

Nationalism
It is usually the case that conservative people feel and express a sense of national pride. In the context of a world of nation states, this national pride often expresses itself as nationalism (pledging allegiance to the flag, singing Rule Britannia or La Marseillaise) or nationalistic aspirations (the separatist/secessionist agendas of the Scottish National Party [Scotland], the Vlaams Blok/Belang [Flanders], Lega Nord [northern Italy]).

More liberal people, on the other hand, appear typically at least more skeptical about, and often even hostile towards, expressions of nationalism. In the UK at least, liberal views and politics are more likely to be associated with internationalism and expressions of support for supranational organisations such as the United Nations, the European Union, the European Court of Justice, the Council of Europe, the European Court of Human Rights. In Israel, as I understand it, the conservative people are keen to strengthen the borders they have delineated, whereas the more liberal people tend to look towards dialogue with the Palestinians and neighbouring states (although I am sure that the situation is much more complex than I am suggesting here). In the United States, as presented on news and current affairs programmes on television and the radio in the UK, the 'Neo-Cons' do not trust the United Nations, dislike the idea of US military personnel being tried in an international court, and appear to be indifferent about the effect of the US economy on global warming and climate change (that is impacting on the entire world); whereas "Since leaving office, Clinton has been involved in public speaking and humanitarian work. He created the William J. Clinton Foundation to promote and address international causes, such as treatment and prevention of HIV/AIDS and global warming." (Wikipedia: Bill Clinton), and Al Gore has become internationally famous for the high profile movie he presented against cavalier industrialisation at the expense of the world's climate An Inconvenient Truth.
... (to be continued)

Immigration
Conservative people typically have such a strong sense of belonging to a land that they usually appear to believe they have a right to exclude others. It is not hard to find conservative people talking about 'foreigners' who 'take our jobs and houses', and call for elected representatives to enact exclusionist immigration policies. Although at the extreme end of conservatism racist and xenophobic sentiments are easy to encounter, such attitudes do not characterise conservatism, which instead typically prefers that people 'live where they belong'. When conservative people have gone to live in a different country it has traditionally been as colonial superiors. Of the 270,000 'Brits' (hideous term) who live in Spain (as of January 2006), many make little attempt to integrate far into Spanish culture, perhaps not even learning more than the basics of the language, but instead choose to live in British enclaves in Alicante, Malaga, Murcia and Almeria, with their shops retailing British brands.

Liberal people, in contrast, tend to thrive in diverse, multi-cultural, multi-ethnic environments, grasp the necessity, for themselves and others, of economic transhumance, migration and emigration, recognise the necessity of accepting refugees and asylum seekers into more stable society, and value the resulting infusion of cultural energy.

Law and Order
Conservative people typically believe that there has been a decline in moral values leading to tensions in society - views expressed eloquently in the UK during the 18th (e.g. Hogarth), 19th (Victorians), 20th (the courtroom trial of Lady Chatterly's Lover, Mary Whitehouse, 'Back to Basics' [a Conservative Party campaign]) and now 21st centuries. A decline over the past three centuries should now have us in hell! Which, of course, is the picture that the conservative UK press would have us believe. For conservative people, the remedy is that there should be more police officers to enforce civil order and that punishment for transgression of civil order should be more severe (e.g. Conservative Party 'Short Sharp Shock' policy).

Liberal people tend to desire the liberalisation of society and its values so that fewer people are seen as being close to, at, or beyond the margins. The Liberal reforms of the early 20th century, under Campbell-Bannerman and Lloyd George (the foundations of the welfare state in the UK), and the introduction by Leo Abse (Labour) in 1967 of legislation to decriminalise homosexual acts between consenting men, are examples of this liberalisation. During the 1992 Labour Party conference, Tony Blair attempted to appeal to both the liberal and conservative wings of potential Labour Party voters by using the slogan "Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime" Liberal people are more likely to be interested in restorative, rather than retributive, justice, and are more likely to recognise the faults of imprisonment.

Money, wealth and property
That there is a divide between conservative and liberal people regarding attitudes towards money, wealth and property appears to be both self-evident and complex. The much misquoted biblical aphorism that the love of money is the root of all evil might offer a signpost. It is hard to imagine that many of the people who work in the upper levels of the banking, insurance and finance sectors of the City of London, or hew at the rockface of the Manhattan "goldmines", celebrate the same socio-economic analysis as the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Examining the Times 'rich list' for 2006 regarding personal donations to political parties, of the top 31 most generous donors, 24 donated to the Conservative Party (approximately £7,000,000), 5 donated to the Labour Party (£1,455,000), 1 donated to the Liberal Democrats (£129,798), and 1 donated to the Scottish National Party (£100,000). The list also shows loans to political parties - Conservatives: £12,650,000; Labour £7,800,000. From these figures it is easy to conclude that the people with a considerable amount of money are more likely to donate some of it in support of Conservative/conservative values.

Monarchy, aristocracy, nobility, honours and hierarchy
Conservative people in the UK tend to be in favour of the British monarchy, whereas liberal people are less predictable about the extent to which they take an interest in and support the British monarchy. I have been a lifelong republican (not in the US sense of Republican), and dislike any attention being given to the Windsor family or the ceremonial roles carried out by an hereditary head of state. Several countries (Ireland, Germany, Greece and Israel) manage to elect a non-executive head of state, just as all UK universities manage to appoint a Chancellor.

Titles and hereditary peerages belong to a world of long ago. Although still important in the seventeenth century, the world of being born into a social station in life was already starting to dissolve, in part hurried along by the Civil War, but also ironically by the enclosures, which moved farm hands off the traditional pastures, and into the more egalitarian towns and cities. Whilst it is still required that commoners bow/curtsy to the aristocracy, about which conservative people are likely to be happy, compared to 350 years ago, Britain is a much more egalitarian country, about which liberal people are likely to be happy.

Relation to land

... (to be continued)

Gambling and share trading

2008-02-17T23:48:00.003Z

I do not own company shares. I have never owned company shares. I have no wish to own company shares.

During my teenage years I was enthusiastic for all commerce to be managed by the people for the benefit of the people. I applauded when companies were taken into state ownership, and felt betrayed when state-owned industries were thrown into the ravening maws of fat-cat capitalists: British Gas ("Tell Sid") and British Telecom ("It's good to talk") ("Phone home" was from E.T.). During my twenties I realised a) that state-owned businesses were not as wonderful for their workforce as I had imagined (television images of grateful coal miners in 1947 when the National Coal Board took over the running of coal mines in the UK; of beaming nurses and relieved patients when in 1948 the National Health Service took over the running of hospitals, clinics and surgeries in the UK); b) that some companies could be ethical in their practice, for example Anita Roddick's The Body Shop; c) that there were better, less-hierarchical models for the structure of a business, such as charities, trusts (for example, The Guardian newspaper), collectives and co-operatives (such as Scott-Bader). I liked the idea of businesses being run by the workers for the benefit of the workers. I became a member of a co-operative (Earthcare, in Durham, UK), and was instrumental in forming a collective (Dragon Wholefoods Collective). I was also heavily involved with all manner of charitable / not-for-profit activities, projects and ventures (such as Durham City Centre Youth Project, outreach, chaplaincy). My CV from that time runs to pages. However, it was often my experience that I wanted to give greater commitment to these activities than many of the other people involved. In my late twenties, therefore, with many misgivings, I set up my own small business: Alpha Word Power. After a while, I began to employ people, initially part-time, and then full-time as well. It seemed that I was betraying my teenage roots. However, I never owned any company shares. While Margaret Thatcher's cellphone-toting, greed-motivated yuppies made their millions on the London stock exchange, I believed that share-ownership was immoral, that it was wrong. What I objected to fundamentally, and I also had further objections, was the idea that owning sufficient company shares gave someone the right dictate strategic policy. I have, to a small extent mellowed from this position. For example, I recognise the all-round benefit of John Lewis staff owning shares in the company for which they work [note to myself: this is not accurate - the business is technically a co-operative that is held in trust, all employees are Partners, have a substantive voice in the running of the business, and receive an annual bonus proportionate to their salary]. I believe that Google does the same. I am still on board, although rather less comfortable, with the idea of buying and owning shares in small, ecological ventures, for example building wind turbines and the like. To my way of thinking this really amounts to giving money to a cause in which one believes, with little expectation of the money being returned. The line gets crossed where the money is invested to make a profit. I can understand why it needs to happen: why businesses need capital, and people (and other businesses) with money are willing to buy shares. When I think of the money as a loan, then I can cope. However, when I think about people buying shares in order to profit from riding on the backs of the people who do the work (shop floor workers and managers) then I know that share ownership is immoral. However, it gets worse. As I understand it, much share trading is speculative about the price of the shares. When profiting from changes to the value of shares becomes the main purpose of share trading then it seems obvious to me that the plot has been lost. To me, this kind of financial speculation is little, if at all, different from gambling, and is therefore immoral.

Gaming and gambling

2008-02-16T08:15:00.012Z

Gaming gambling, like buying sex, is immoral. Since childhood, I have believed gaming gambling to be immoral. In the early 1980s I formally opposed the Betting, Gaming and Lotteries (Amendment) Act 1984 that was enacted by the Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher to liberalise laws around gambling in the UK. I wrote to each member of the parliamentary Committee, chaired by Sir Ian Gilmour, expressing my unhappiness with the proposed legislation. Clement Freud, a Liberal MP who was a member of the committee, referred to me and people like me as "killjoys" (see Hansard).

During my teens I became aware that some poor, working class men would gamble away their wages, further impoverishing wife and children, sometimes condemning the entire family to a life of destitution. More recently I learned that some poor, working class women (for example in Sunderland) would feed the entire week's housekeeping money into gambling machines, getting themselves into debt and becoming prey to loan sharks. In using the word 'some', I do not know how many people, nor how widespread these behaviours are. However, I do know that gambling in the UK is so widespread that it is practically universal, and debt (resulting from consumption and gambling) in the UK currently exceeds GDP. (One of the features of writing weblog postings about issues that concern me is that I confront myself to produce evidence that supports or refutes my beliefs.) Online gambling (poker, for example) appears to be huge. In June 2005: "According to research group Forrester, 76% of the UK's 29 million adult internet users admit to regularly placing a bet either online or offline."

I have always considered succumbing to gaming gambling as evidence of personal weakness, making innocent people vulnerable to scams (the medieval 'three-cup trick'), confidence tricks ('get-rich-quick' schemes)and dishonesty (The Sting). When I was a child I felt disgusted when I learned that gambling machines and casinos pay out less than they receive. I considered their behaviour unfair, because I did not understand that they are businesses. When I was a child, I became gently enthralled both by the idea of 'breaking the bank' (restorative justice) and by the masculine courage of James Bond at the roulette wheel. (On a recent flight from Narita to Schipol I watched the Daniel Craig outing of a James Bond movie, and could not resolve the conflict for me that a character who is supposed to be the ultimate in 'cool' should behave in so pathetic a manner as to have to gamble on the gaming tables.)

In full respect of confidentiality, I can state clearly that there are many people in the UK who have a gambling addiction, and that this addiction, effectively indistinguishable from a chemical addiction, has been extremely problematic in their lives. I have met such people.

Of course gaming is business: it is part of the entertainment industry, as evidenced by the plethora of gaming shows on television. The gambling aspect of gaming has also attracted organised crime (e.g. Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels) and shows gaming, like drugs- and people-trafficking, to be a lucrative, but also unsavoury and seedy business. I do not know what proportion of gaming / gambling in the UK is infected with organised crime, and I may well be guilty of watching too many movies. I imagine that only a small proportion is significantly criminal; that a somewhat larger proportion, whilst legal, has criminal links / associations; and that much of what remains is legal, but may either be tainted or at risk. I believe that most people in the UK who gamble fail to, or refuse to, consider and address this issue; whereas for some the possibility of links to organised crime may add an attractive frisson.

I do not respect the motivation or activity of seeking to acquire wealth without earning it. This places gambling very close to robbery and theft, although in the case of gambling, each party is trying to rob the other. I confess to a strong Protestant work ethic. (When my father died it did not concern me that he left me nothing in his will. In contrast, I am challenged by the fact that my daughter will have little if any opportunity to earn her way through life, and will be dependent on whatever my wife and I can leave her when we die.)

Gaming positions itself within the entertainment industry, and I find it hard to respect resources being spent on activities that make no attempt to improve the world. I also find it challenging to respect money being spent on activities that make no attempt to improve the sum total of happiness in the world, and gaming creates many more losers than winners. This sets gambling in the same category as the military-industrial complex. Gaming is far from the worthy activities of education, scientific exploration, health research, health (physical, mental, emotional) support, charitable giving, economic development (whether in the the economically-developed or -developing world), environmental improvement, and artisitic and cultural expression.

I do not respect games of chance. The UK national obsession with horse racing, and the local enthusiasm for greyhound racing, are not only perversions in their exploitation of animals, but socially-accepted excuses for people to avoid working, looking after their families, and helping to improve the world. When I was a child, millions of people in the UK gambled every week on the outcomes of football (soccer) matches. The national lottery (begun under the Thatcher government) has to a significant extent replaced the 'football pools'. An effect of this has been that charitable giving by individuals in the UK has declined. (I shall check the figures.)

In 1979/80 I lived in Coxhoe, County Durham, UK. I was told by local people about how, during the 1920s and 1930s, large gatherings would be held for illegal gambling in West Cornforth woods, only a handful of miles from where I now live. Children would be posted at the edge of the wood to warn of any approach by the police ('polliss'). Only a mile from where I live are the remains of a grandstand that was built in the 1920s for a horse-racing track. The racing track was closed at the outbreak of the second world war, and the grandstand fell into disrepair. In the local pubs it used to be, and still is for all I know, a commonplace that a large platter of uncooked cuts of dead animals would be raffled. In Quarrington Hill, a village close to Coxhoe, the police raided a regular dog-fighting match. Every village around here has at least a little brick bookmaker's cabin. I have met local people (men) who are private bookmakers - taking bets on all manner of events. A short series of formal presentations, exploring some serious staff-focused activities at the university where I work, had to have a raffle that was drawn at the close of the event. At my daughter's school open day they have a tombola. How many times have I heard "I like to have a little flutter" - on the Derby, on the Grand National, on the pools, on the lottery, on the Thunderball - as though provided they do only a little bit of gambling it is respectable. Like some sap-poison in a tree, gambling seems to infect every vein of British society. However, the poison spreads far beyond the UK. News programmes often report match-fixing allegations in relation to one sport or another around the world. In Tokyo and Kyoto, I saw huge, barn-like shops, 'pachinko parlours', with seried ranks of glaze-faced men and women feeding ball bearings into machines, as though characters from Fritz Lang's Metropolis. When I eventually get to holiday in Arizona, in order to see the Grand Canyon, I shall fly in to Phoenix even though it would be cheaper and easier to fly in to Las Vegas, where, as CSI shows, there are gaming tables and gambling machines as far as the eye can see: a vision of hell that so many delude themselves into believing is a vision of heaven.

Why do people gamble? As evidenced by what I have written above, the answer I see most obviously is that a person hopes to gain from a gambling transaction. However, there are also many other answers. For some, the gambling in which they indulge is about the social activity, whether being seen in their flamboyant hats at Ascot horse-racing track, or dibbing numbers with their sisters and aunties at the local bingo hall. For others, it is about self-indulgence, and they will put five pounds, or fifty euros, or five hundred dollars, in their pocket for an evening's entertainment at the casino, amusement arcade or pachinko parlour - they hope that the money does not run out too quickly. For yet others it is about distraction, either from a demanding job or from problems that are difficult to resolve. For some it is about seeking self-esteem by trouncing other people - the so-called 'competitive spirit'. For others it is about thrill seeking - they enjoy the risk: it is almost that they enjoy losing a game because it heightens the tension for the next game. Perhaps these latter are the people who are also at risk of developing a gambling addiction. For many, their engagement in gambling is probably a response to some combination of each of the above. For each, however, gambling has meaning in their life. Remove gambling from the lives of most people, and their lives become impoverished to the extent of the meaning of gambling to them. This is why it can be so hard for a person with a gambling addiction, for whom gambling has come to mean more than almost anything else in their life, to relinquish the activity.

The Fragile Encounter

2008-01-02T07:10:00.000Z

I have been developing material about fragile encounter. This material can be found on my Subceptions weblog at:

http://myblogs.sunderland.ac.uk/blogs/blog-259/2007/11/the_fragile_encounter.html

Green: my new website

2008-01-01T10:00:00.000Z

For some months I was writing about green issues in my weblog postings: articles that attempted to define my position. In wishing to make more of what I have written, I have moved the postings onto a sole-issue website called Green. The material remains at an early stage of development, and awaits further editing and extending.

A Twentieth Century man

2007-12-31T13:47:00.000Z

I have several dictionaries. Working as a counsellor, words and language mean much to me. William Shakespeare is my hero: I watched my first Shakespeare play (Twelfth Night) when I was ten years old. I have four generations of Chambers dictionaries: from the 1950s (Chambers 20th Century Dictionary, recently acquired second hand), 1972 (Chambers 20th Century Dictionary, a Christmas present), 1988 (Chambers English Dictionary, my own choice) and 2003 (Chambers Dictionary, also my own choice). I prefer Chambers because its definitions tend to be more liberal-minded, less conservative, less reactionary than other dictionaries. However, I have an extreme objection to Chambers' progressive acceptance and incorporation of the '-ize' suffix, an appendage that, in spite of my Classical education (I studied Latin for five years, Classical Greek for two years, and some years ago made a serious attempt to teach myself Biblical Greek), I consider to be affected (as in an affectation, used by someone who wishes to puff up their language, making themselves sound clever and important, like people using the word 'whilst' when they mean 'while') and/or elitist (its 'correct' use - to use it incorrectly flagrantly demonstrates 'ignorance' - is only when the word's root is from Classical Greek, and who but a Classics scholar is likely to remember which English words have a Classical Greek root?), and gratuitously unnecessary. Use of the '-ize' suffix sneers at both ignorance and dyslexia: it is anti-language. In contrast, use of the '-ise' suffix is universally applicable, and to be favoured by the proles, the hoi poloi, the sans culottes - the people who make a reality of democracy and democratic language.

I have a reverse dictionary that has been useful only very occasionally. I have a dictionary of words first used in the twentieth century. This latter, although of little practical use, is interesting. I have a much-used Roget's thesaurus, and much-less used Brewer's dictionary of phrase and fable, Brewer's concise dictionary of phrase and fable, and Brewer's twentieth century dictionary of phrase and fable. There are also the Oxford dictionary of quotations, and Oxford companions to both the English language and English literature. Beyond English alone, there are dictionaries of signing (BSL) and of other European languages. Were I to be required to shelve all these dictionaries in an attic, I should probably guess that they weighed in at about 50 kg. So why is my first port of call always the internet? Reading The Wisdom of Crowds, recently, I came across the word 'fungible'. The context in which the word was being used offered few clues about its meaning. I checked it out on the internet. As well as definitions, I read the Wikipedia entry. I felt enlightened. I then checked Chambers. The definition was clear and concise, just as I should expect. Yet had I not also read more widely, including the Wikipedia entry, my understanding would have been as thin as gravy made only with a vegetable stock cube.

The words and phrases that I use, and the thoughts that inspire my articulations, belong to the twentieth century. I was born in the middle, the heart, of the twentieth century, the century that provided the context and backdrop for everything I thought and said and did. I learned to speak and think twentieth century, and I have twentieth century preoccupations, such as a concern for technology, for communication, for identity, for democracy, for equality, for spirituality freed from the shackles of traditional religion. Whilst it could easily be shown that none of these is unique to the twentieth century, their assemblage certainly is. It is true that being born and raised in Western Europe, and in Britain in particular, I also became, and continue to become, progressively more aware of previous centuries; but this itself is the root and relativism of post-modernism, a philosophical framework that belongs to the second half of the twentieth century. Simply by being brought up in the second half of the twentieth century, without the requirement of an elite education, I have the capacity to identify with the industrial entrepreneurs of the nineteenth century, the enlightened free-thinkers of the eighteenth century, the radical Commonwealth republicans of the seventeenth century, and so on.

What of the twenty-first century? I am not sure. If the twentieth century could be characterised as a battle between the old and the new, between empire and new democracy, between generations, between the sexes, between enforced adherence to stereotype and searching for new identities, then to a large extent we won. At the start of the twenty-first century, Britain is much closer to France than to Britain at the start of the twentieth century. However, now those battles are over, apathy appears to have set in. Politicians bemoan the public's lack of interest in politics, whereas people vote in their millions for ghastly television trash such as Big Brother and the X-Factor. (Whilst Marx's aphorism about religion is widely misunderstood as a criticism of religion, when he was observing the solace that drown-trodden workers were able to find in it, his 'misquotation' could more aptly be applied to the early twenty-first century addiction to television soap operas.) People no longer appear to have much interest in raw spirituality, and the church pews tend to be occupied by people who have chosen to leave elsewhere and make Britain their home. Concern by adults and children alike for technology seems to focus on games consoles, and battles and wars that are fought look increasingly like computer games and disaster movies. Royal Mail, the UK postal delivery organisation is close to collapse because no-one writes letters any more - it is not that I am knocking e-mail, it is my sadness that the text-message culture hardly favours deep and careful thought.

What of the twenty-first century? The battles having been fought, apathy and lethargy won. I think that ordinary, everyday, twenty-first century Britain lacks a sense of direction, purpose and aspiration. Maybe that is one of the reasons I remain a twentieth century man.

Spreading germs

2007-12-30T23:20:00.000Z

I am in bed with a cold. Nothing more than a cold, but a miserable cold: sore throat, coughing, sneezing, headache, aching joints, lethargy, dyspraxia, poor concentration and a profound loss of charitable sentiment. It is not 'flu, and I have not been in bed all day. I have, however, felt lousy all day, and for the past few days. I have been unproductive in terms of my paid work, and have done none of the household jobs I had lined up for the Christmas / New Year break. Plans to take my family out on a trip have had to be cancelled. This cold has been 'expensive'.

I was 'given' the cold. It was passed on to me by someone who had been suffering a heavy cold. They knew they were infectious, and they did little to avoid infecting me.

On the streets of Tokyo, we saw people wearing cotton face masks. From a UK perspective one could easily assume that these people were fearful about catching an infection. However, these were people with respiratory infections who wished to avoid spreading their germs. I find their considerate behaviour easy to respect. In Britain it is not acceptable to wear a cotton face mask except in hospital. If I were to wear one to the supermarket tomorrow, I would be stared at, and it would be assumed that I was unhappy about the hygiene of the shop, its staff or its customers. At work, several weeks ago, I asked whether I might discourage counselling clients who were suffering from a heavy cold or seasonal 'flu from attending counselling, risking the counsellor being off work sick for a few days and thereby denying counselling to other clients. I was informed that it was not policy to discourage clients, infectious or otherwise, from attending counselling. I have never contracted mumps. Being the age I am, the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccination was way after my time. I am, therefore, at risk of being infected with mumps by anyone who, wittingly or otherwise, exposes me to the disease. I do not understand why it is permissible for my health to be put at risk by people who are unwilling to take responsibility for not spreading infection. (In the spring of 2007, students at Dalhousie University, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, irresponsibly spread mumps across the breadth of Canada because they knowingly ignored quarantine restrictions.) For some reason, spreading germs in the UK is not something about which one takes personal responsibility. As my counselling supervisor recently said about contracting diseases carried by clients: "It's just one of those things." I am permitted to spread almost any germs, including STDs, I wish with impunity. Although there may be some exceptions, such as typhoid and its celebrated carrier, Mary Mallon, according to a Wikipedia article on quarantine: "The last federal order of involuntary quarantine, prior to the 2007 tuberculosis scare, was issued in 1963." Of course, the one virus of which so many people in Britain are fearful to the point of discriminatory prejudice is HIV, transmission of which is largely limited to sexual contact, blood transfusions and needle-stick injuries. In contrast, earlier in the year I read the statistics about food poisoning from ready-prepared food, such as in cafes, restaurants and the chiller cabinets of shops and supermarkets: they are horrific. Many of these infections are personal hygiene related, are easily preventable, and can be fatal. The term 'caveat emptor' (let the buyer beware: the buyer takes all the risks) appears to be applied in Britain a good deal more widely than simply buying things.

Although the threat of an H5N1-based 'flu pandemic seems to have passed, at least for the time being, the level of personal danger posed by the virus would have driven many people in Britain to the extremity of wearing cotton face masks. It goes without saying that it would be the healthy who would be wearing them.

Were the situation to be different, I should prefer the social ethic to be that anyone who was infectious did, as a matter of course, whatever was necessary to prevent the spread of their infection, isolating themselves if necessary. This would inevitably involve hand-washing, and the widespread use of disinfectant hand gels. It may involve the public use of cotton face masks, like in Japan.

Nationhood (1): Fiddler on the Roof

2007-12-29T10:31:00.001Z

I recently watched a television broadcast of Norman Jewison's 1971 movie Fiddler on the Roof. I have the VHS video, which I have watched several times, and I am wondering whether to buy the DVD. I often watch on television movies that I have on video. Not only is the quality of the broadcast picture superior - we have a Freeview digibox (digital television signal) box - but the inability to pause and rewind, which I do a lot in order to reflect on what I am watching, much to the mounting annoyance of my wife and daughter - we do not have TiVo - gives the viewing experience an edginess that whilst usually less intellectually satisfying, with the inevitable risk of disengagement between awareness and an integrated cognitive/conative/affective and imaginal response, can be emotionally more gratifying.

I was concerned, having watched the movie for the nth time, to discover what some of the critics have written about it. Roger Ebert was mildly scathing, whereas others have been more generous, although generous is probably what they intended. I find it helpful to read critics' reviews because they inevitably confirm some of my own thoughts and responses, and suggest others that had not occurred to me. I do not fully trust my own judgment. Most obviously for me, a good movie is one that I wish to watch many times. I feel cheated if the movie is not worth watching more than once. For this reason I rarely watch made-for-television movies. I am also likely to feel cheated if the only differences between the first and second viewings are that I know the plot twists and the denouement. On this basis I have learned that I have little interest in watching Ocean's Xteen. I was intrigued to find out whether I would find watching Memento as satisfying for the second time. The jury is still out on whether I should buy the DVD (the issue of memory is important to me). At the other end of the spectrum, the movies I like best are one's that, every time, take me on a journey, if I am up for it, into an even deeper understanding of what it is for me to be human in this world. This is what makes the movies of Andrei Tarkovsky, Akira Kurosawa, Peter Greenaway and Godfrey Regio so compelling for me, and also why I have a fascination for dystopias. In a 'good movie' there will always be the opportunity to discover more. Sometimes this involves seeing/hearing more clearly. My best analogue for this concerns a CD of music by Peter Maxwell Davies. I did not 'understand' what I was listening to the first time I heard it. The dissonances sounded like a cacophony, and the broken rhythms sounded like chaos. Only from many repeated playings have I come to hear the beauty and poise, accompanied by a progressive appreciation of his music. I care what critics write about Peter Maxwell Davies, or about Tarkovsky, Kurosawa, Greenaway or Regio, because I wish to 'understand' more. I am not required to agree with the evaluations of critics. A case in point is the movie I Heart Huckabees. I took the movie at face value albeit on three levels: 1) the level of plot / story / entertainment, etc.; 2) the movie-making level - script, acting, characterisation, filming, editing, etc.; 3) a philosophical level. On the first two of these levels the movie is terrible, and nothing on earth would induce me to watch it again. However, on the philosophical level the movie has something to say, and I shall watch it again. Naturally the critics slammed the movie. I also discovered from the reviews is that the movie is considered to be a spoof, the director intentionally mocking intellectual movies. Maybe, therefore, unlike the Peter Maxwell Davies CD, the movie has little so say - a second viewing and I shall be done with it - maybe. The idea of an existential detective agency interests me, even if the director intended it as a joke.

What does Fiddler on the Roof offer me in repeated viewings? There are major issues of personal, social and national identity, of cultural tradition ("Tradition"), and of spirituality. During the most recent viewing I felt challenged by the concept of personal, cultural and spiritual identity determining national identity. I like the globalised world in which we now live, and the breakdown of a one-to-one mapping between cultural and spiritual identity on the one hand and nationality (whether it be where I live or what is written in my passport) on the other. Whilst I understand something about Israel and about Kosovo, I also understand something about early twentieth century Japan, about Nazi Germany, about Afghanistan's Taleban, about aspects of Putin's Russia. I applaud the European Union both for its programme of smudging the statehood of nations, and for its support of cultural and spiritual diversity. These kinds of articulated insights are gold dust. I wonder what Fiddler on the Roof will offer me next time.

My Tripadvisor travel map

2007-12-27T05:43:00.000Z

Dystopias

2007-11-13T06:48:00.000Z

Dystopias are usually dark images presented as what may be to come, or what could have been, often in order to comment on the present and current trends. What follows below is a list of writers and their works exploring variously the predicted future, or imagined futures, or imagined pasts, or imagined presents. I do not know whether the focus is merely mine, but technology and stage of technological development seem to play a significant role, whether through science fiction or through fantasy. An issue faced by all dystopic works is how to separate the dystopia from the real world. One method is to set the dystopia in the past. More commonly, the dystopia is set in the future, sometimes post-apocalyptically. A second method is to invent a fantasy world (Gormenghast, Middle Earth). A third is to place the dystopia on an island.

Early Works
Although I feel reluctant to include here The Revelation of St. John, canonically the final book of the New Testament, it purports to consider the future. Indeed, it is an eschatological work, that expresses the fears and hopes of the writer. There is no sense of a different technology, merely the destruction of society, maybe on moral grounds.
In total contrast, some of the writings and drawings of Galileo Galilei focus on moving technology forwards so as to better the lot of people in contemporary society.
Thomas More wrote a utopia, a pastoral idyll that I guess (for I have not read it) to be a kind of correction to all that was wrong with Elizabethan England. As I understand it, his writing was not about the future.
Nostradamus purported to predict the future. No doubt he had an agenda that was more financial and less mystical than popular imagination would care to believe. However, for people who take him seriously, the future was his to observe, not to control or judge. Why are people fascinated with his writing? What sort of people are fascinated with his writing?

Island Dystopias
Published in 1719, Daniel Defoe's novel about Robinson Crusoe, was based on the true story of Alexander Selkirk. Selkirk was shipwrecked, and for four years lived on an island off the coast of Chile. This was at a time when Britain was developing its empire. Selkirk and Crusoe had access only to pre-Iron Age technology, and the island represented regression.
The issue of regression, but much more explicitly regarding human nature, was explored by William Golding in The Lord of the Flies. In this 1950s novel, the aeroplane crash lands on a desert island, and the only survivors are children. The atavism that lies at the root of what it is to be human is progressively exposed by the island, leading to the savage murders of both Simon and Piggy.
In 1980, Lucy Irvine agreed with Gerald Kingsland to be Castaway (book, and movie starring Oliver Reed, 1986) on a desert island (Tuin Island in the Torres Straight, off the northern coast of Australia), as were both Joanna Lumley in Girl Friday (1994), and Tom Hanks, albeit fictionally, in Cast Away (2000).
Islas Sorna and Nublar constitute a different kind of island dystopia, inhabited by dinosaurs. These are largely closed worlds in which technology has been or becomes destroyed. It is ironic that it is only the most advanced technology that has permitted the re-creation of the archaic animal (and plant) life, whereas the dinosaurs themselves have the effect of destroying all technology. There is an obvious sense of disclocated time: 65 million years ago, a kind of present day, a near future in which such technology would be possible. There is also the observation in each movie that our society is fixated with entertainment I: theme park, II: safari, III: extreme sports / personal recreation.

Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Europe
During the height of the industrial revolution, with new sources of energy and new forms of power, the promise and threat of modern technology began to be explored.
In France, Jules Verne was writing exciting adventure stories, such as Journey to the Centre of the Earth, with exploration at their heart and new understandings of science and technology to add spice and suspend disbelief.
H.G.Wells wrote about possible futures. In The Time Machine, his protagonist is an observer; however, the tension between the Eloi and the Morlocks suggests a moral dimension that accords with Wells' eugenicist leanings. In both War of the Worlds and The Shape of Things to Come, Wells focuses on England in the future, although he gives a sense of life beyond Britain.
Fritz Lang's Metropolis is distinctly set in a future. It is not comforting.
Aldous Huxley set Brave New World in the future of the 26th century. It is a utopia in that it is a place of order, but it is a dystopia in that to a contemporary person there is no freedom. Huxley was extrapolating from what he knew of social (rise of Nazism and Stalinism) and technological developments (eugenics and the steadily increasing mechanisation of society).
Tolkein's response to what was happening in the world was to regress into the early medieval times of Middle Earth. In his highly moral tales, social relationships are rigid, and there is an absence of technology beyond the Iron Age. Middle Earth includes England (The Shire), but also includes dangerous places that are far away.
C.S.Lewis, in his writings, also explored a moral (Christian) past in Narnia (some of which resembles the medieval England of Robin Hood tales). However, Lewis also looked into the future, albeit with moral foreboding (Voyage to Venus, Out of the Silent Planet, That Hideous Strength).
Mervyn Peake also apparently retreated into a kind of Gothic (perhaps early 19th century) English past in his Gormenghast trilogy. However, his work is also more obviously a comment on what he was experiencing in mid-20th century England.
Written in 1947, and also commenting on post-war England, albeit set in the near future, is Orwell/Blair's 1984. There is technology, but no science. There is no freedom. For faithful party worker Winston Smith, the bad dream turns into a nightmare when he transgresses. There is for me an irony that whilst Orwell/Blair wrote that Big Brother is watching us, and therefore we must not transgress, in early twenty-first century, everyone is watching Big Brother, and has little time to transgress. With the exception, perhaps, of Monaco and Singapore, metropolitan Britain is probably one of the most observed places in the world, with webcams, cellphone cameras and closed-circuit television cameras beyond count. However, it is also clear from incidents such as the terrorist bombings in London on 7 July 2005, that despite hugely more advanced technology to the British state than was available in 1947 Britain, or to Airstrip One in 1984, it was not possible to prevent the bombings: the sense of being watched is more in the mind than in reality.
In Brazil, Terry Gilliam reworks 1984 into a darkly humourous absurdity. Whilst the location of the drama is a city in an economically-developed state, the place is more obviously New York than London.
In Escape from New York, John Carpenter takes the New York dystopia almost to its logical conclusion: the city as a prison from which there is no escape.
On the other hand, although A Clockwork Orange, is set both in place (southern England) and time (1960s), Anthony Burgess and Stanley Kubrick, in their dystopia, consider the breakdown of morals.
In John Wyndham's novels, there is a breakdown in society, usually precipitated by the desire for dangerous (scientific) knowledge: The Day of the Triffids, The Chrysalids, The Midwich Cuckoos (Village of the Damned: John Carpenter), The Kraken Wakes.
On the other hand, Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick see progressive and evolutionary development of human awareness both as co-dependent on technological development, and also continuing into the future, as shown in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Similar ideas are developed more dystopically in Minority Report (starring Tom Cruise)
In I, Robot, Isaac Asimov develops a future in which the distinction between humankind and our technological creations become indistinguishable.

Post-Apocalyptic Visions of the Future
In The Postman, Kevin Costner plays the part of a drifter in a post-apocalyptic future in which society and civilised values and morals have been all-but destroyed. The stage of technological development is a mixture of early-Iron Age (I think that there is a blacksmith) and legacy industrial. Although the movie is critically held as flawed, it raises some interesting issues, for instance about what it is that we carry into the future. A hope for their future lies in rebuilding their civilisation, initially focused around the US Mail (c.f. the role of the Post Office in Die Blechtrommel).
In Waterworld, Kevin Costner plays the part of a drifter in a post-apocalyptic future in which society and civilised values and morals have been all-but destroyed. The stage of technological development is a mixture of pre-Iron Age and legacy industrial. The movie questions what will be left of our civilisation in centuries to come. A hope for the future, which becomes realised in the movie, is finding and re-inhabiting dry land.
In the Mad Max series, Mel Gibson plays the part of a drifter in a post-apocalyptic future in which society and civilised values and morals have been all-but destroyed. There is no hope for the future, and all hope has been destroyed.

The UK Immigration Debate

2007-11-08T18:26:00.001Z

This post is based partly on two postings I made on the weblog of BBC television's flagship current affairs programme: Newsnight. During late October and early November 2007 the print and broadcast media have been making much of announcements made by the UK government about the number of people without British nationality who are living in the UK. I have been very unhappy about the tone of the discourse, the tenor of which is to wish to reduce or relegate the validity of people not born in the UK to live and/or work in the UK. The pronouns most frequently used are "we" (referring to people born in the UK, with the strong implication that these people are white-skinned and speak English as a first language) and "them" (referring to people not born in the UK, with the strong implication that these people may or may not be white-skinned, but do not speak English as a first language). I do not wish to be categorised as part of the "we". I should much rather that the focus were on 'people living and/or working in the UK'.

I am fed up with hearing commentators endlessly repeat immigration statistics. I would much rather listen to an informed and intelligent discussion about the changing demographics of ecomically-developed and -developing states, about the desirability or otherwise of doing anything about the changing demographics, about an ethical analysis of migration (refugees, asylum seekers, poor people wanting a better life), about the pros and cons of classic nationhood in this
globalised world, and about the ways in which the news media and political parties address, or fail to address, these issues.

Myth-buster 1:
Britain is not a small island. Britain is huge: not only are there are vast, unpopulated tracts, there are many towns and cities in northern England that are under-populated with stagnant local economies awaiting revitalisation. Britain is far from the most densely populated economically-developed country. Greater Tokyo, Hong Kong, New York City, Monaco and the Netherlands, for example, are more densely populated than the supposedly over-populated south east of England, and they are social and economic powerhouses for that.

Myth-buster 2:
Indigenous culture is a determinant only for people who wish to make it so. Contemporary Britain has more in common with most of the economically-developed world than it does with Britain a century ago ("The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." Hartley, L.P., London, 1953) The culture of a country is whatever the people who happen to live in that place make it to be, not what it used to be. Christianity was once alien to the islands now called Britain. Happily, few of the world's major cultures are now strangers to each other here in Britain.

Myth-buster 3:
I have neither a legal nor a moral right to determine who lives in my street. I do have a right to choose in which street I live. Many Britons choose to exercise that right by migrating to France, Spain, Italy, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the United States and so on. I am happy that people from all around the globe choose to exercise their legal right to migrate to Britain. Rather than tightened, as the current political rhetoric would have, I should prefer that legal restrictions on migration were eased.

Listening to an edition of Newsnight broadcast on the evening of Thursday 8 November 2007, during which telephone callers were invited to offer their opinions, it became clear that few if any of the callers were interested in generalisable facts and statistics. They did little to demonstrate that their minds were open to rational argument. Instead they used slogans such as "Britain is a small island", and "We are an island nation", "Our country has been flooded with immigrants" and "We have become an ethnic minority". It was, at the same time, clear that many of the callers, speaking from their own experience, perceived no benefit to themselves from the presence of people who they considered to be from elsewhere ("foreign", "immigrant"). Whilst I am enthusiastic to live in a modern, multi-cultural, multi-ethnic country, many people born in the UK would prefer to live in a society made up of English-speaking, white-skinned, anglo-saxons. Their intentions, as they so readily (too readily, perhaps) stated, are not (strongly) racist. However, they directly experience the discomfort of social change, including dislocation, but perceive themselves as receiving none of the benefits. Arguments such as "The NHS/London Transport/fruit picking would collapse without the work of people from overseas" are weak in their eyes for two reasons: many of the jobs undertaken by unskilled people from overseas are low status jobs, and are invisible in the way that homeless people on the street tend to be looked through (and being poorly recognised quite how many jobs of this kind there are, there is little sense of how vulnerable to collapse these sections of the UK economy may be); there are white British people who are unemployed who should be doing such jobs (with little attention being given to the location of the people versus jobs, and the health status of many unemployed people in relation to physically demanding jobs).

Migrant Workers

Some of the UK public debate about immigration focuses on the perceived value to the UK economy of people from other countries. The argument is that the British economy benefits from both the specialist skills, and also the lower wage expectations, of people from other countries. The debate revolves around the concept of migrant workers. The term is used largely to refer to people who are undertaking low-skilled, poorly-paid jobs such as fruit picking and other agricultural work, office and hospital cleaning, and low status care roles. At the high-status end of the spectrum, it would be unusual for a Chicago-born Managing Director of the UK office of a transnational corporation, or a young, Hong-Kong-born international banker working for a few years in the City, or a partly Frankfurt-based Commodities and Futures Manager who commutes to London for three days each week, to be referred to as 'migrant workers'. Perhaps intermediate in status are the specialist skills of a computer software engineer from, say, Bangalore, who takes a well-paid job in Bristol, Birmingham or Manchester, sending much of his salary to his family in India; or a dentist who has let her flat in Warsaw so that she can live and work in Nottingham for a few years, earning enough money to be able to buy a house in the southern mountains of Poland.

I am unhappy that people from other countries are being seen in terms of their economic worth to the British economy. To me, this view approaches the attitude of seeing people primarily, or even merely, as units of production. Ultimately this is the attitude that permitted (and in some cases still permits) the slave trade. People are, first and foremost, human beings.

Asylum Seekers and Bogus Asylum Seekers and Refugees

I am certain, although I cannot prove it, that in the minds of many people in the UK there is no distinction between the categories of refugee and asylum seeker, and there is an elision between the categories of asylum seeker and migrant worker (who in this context is more typically referred to as an economic migrant, which is considered synonymous with 'someone who is out for whatever they can get'). I am equally certain that, whilst there are occasions when the overall tenor of public discourse leads to more overt expressions of compassion for people fleeing disasters such as drought, flood, famine and wars, the duration of the compassion rarely extends to an enthusiasm to rehouse the victims of such circumstances in the UK. For example, when a volcanic eruption devastated the Caribbean island of Monserrat, there was a national failure in Britain to understand why the displaced people had to come to the UK. "Why can't they go elsewhere?" It was the same with refugees from the war in Bosnia. There appears both to be an unwillingness to accept that, along with every other country with UN membership, the UK has international legal obligations, and also a belief that Britain already does more than its fair share. There is also the perception, expressed most vocally in the 'red-top' press, that people claiming a fear of persecution as the reason for their need to leave their home country, are either lying or exaggerating, and are principally motivated by the simple desire for a better life. These so-called "bogus asylum seekers" are most charitably described as economic migrants, and much resentment is expressed by white British people who would like a better life for themselves. The fact that it may be very hard to leave the country in which one has always lived, the country in which one's relatives and friends (those that remain alive) still live, a country in which one fears that the police (e.g. Jack Mapange) or the military (e.g. asylum seekers from Rwanda and Burundi) or the death squads, will be watching the ports, and also that it is remarkably difficult to arrive in, and gain admittance to (see The Terminal starring Tom Hanks), the UK, is considered to be of little relevance. In The Net, the character played by Sandra Bullock expects to get her life back, which she does in the end, as do the characters played by Harrison Ford in The Fugitive, and by Will Smith in Enemy of the State. Life on the run in one's own country is lonely and miserable, and played by Gene Hackman in Enemy of the State.

Edinburgh: the best place to live in the UK

2007-11-06T20:30:00.000Z

Edinburgh (population 430,082) is considered to be the best place to live in the UK.

It is easy to offer reasons for Edinburgh's status. The city has shops: (inter)national chain and independent, and the reputation of Princess Street extends beyond the UK. There are restaurants (including several vegetarian restaurants) offering a wide range of cuisines at a range of prices. Tripadvisor lists 194 hotels, 219 B&Bs and inns, and 45 speciality lodgings. There are cinemas, theatres and art galleries that are swept up in an internationally-renowned summer arts festival. Murrayfield is well known to sports fans, and there are golf courses around the city. Encircling the southern half of the city is a near-motorway by-pass, and there is a well-used local bus network, a local rail network, and construction of a tram network is underway. The local economy is thriving, boosted by tourism. The presence of the Scottish parliament is a vote of confidence in the city.

The building that houses the Scottish parliament is a wonderful construction. Although much criticised, and unjustly mocked, it is highly original in design, in excellent taste, apparently fit for purpose (although I should want to hear the opinions of MSPs before firming up on that statement), and an impressive intertwining of contemporary and historical.

Middlesbrough: the worst place to live in the UK

2007-11-05T09:40:00.000Z

In a recent popular UK television property programme (Location, Location, Location) focusing on the best and worst places to live in the UK, it was announced that Middlesbrough is the worst to live in 2007. The programme-makers compiled and analysed what they implied were vast quantities of statistical data about the areas defined by each local government authority in the UK. The data for Middlesbrough are depressingly clear: poor diet leading to high levels of obesity; heavy use of tobacco leading to poor health; high levels of crime, especially violent crime; high levels of prostitution and illicit drug use; poor quality housing; and poor educational achievement. According to the Office for National Statistics, the population around the docks have the poorest life-expectancy in the UK. Hartlepool, Hull and Grimsby also fared badly for similar reasons. All four are North Sea coast industrial towns that thrived during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but are now stuggling to find new twenty-first century roles, and some kind of post-industrial purpose in life.

When interviewed, people in Middlesbrough expressed unhappiness about the designation. It is not that they expressed any (misplaced, perhaps) sense of responsibility. Some of these people identify with the town, and in a love-me-love-my-dog kind of a way, take the label as a personal criticism: criticise my town and you criticise me. Some denied the designation, claiming that the programme researchers were in error. Although approximations and judgments will have been made, and mistakes are possible, it seems unlikely that the four North Sea coast industrial towns should in truth be designated as deeply desirable places in which to live. The long-held British penchant for empiricism over abstract theory is not lightly to be dumped by denying the data. Some people denied the designation, claiming a southern conspiracy. However, the purpose and motivation for such a conspiracy are unclear.

It would be easy to understand were the people of Middlesbrough to express anger that they are ill-served by the statutory services of local government, the police and the National Health Service, for it is the authorities and the statutory services that are failing the people. However, Ray Mallon, the mayor of Middlesbrough, and its former police chief, rather than committing himself and his office to social improvement, chose to express dissatisfaction with the designation. It is not my intention to criticise the work of any individual, as I am certain that there are many people working in the statutory or voluntary sectors who are performing sterling work under difficult circumstances. However, there is a responsibility for the people who lead and manage these services to be in possession of an analysis and a vision that can lead Middlesbrough, and its people, away from its current status.

Another comment I have heard in this context is that it is unhelpful to kick a dog when it is down. However, Middlesbrough is not a dog, it is a town on some 142,691 people who deserve better services than they are receiving from the organisations with responsibility to serve them. Better a bleak, stark picture that tells the truth, even if it is only a snapshot, than a comforting chocolate box image that glosses over what should be unacceptable.

Diet and health

2007-10-31T20:19:00.000Z

Of course I am what I eat. If I eat junk then my bodily functions get junked. If I eat poisons my body gets poisoned. If I drink carcinogens I get cancer. This is not rocket science. It is, however, experienced as extremely challenging to people who, wedded to unhealthy habits, deny evidence that demonstrates their habits to be unhealthy. Under the hot African sun an ostrich may be wise to bury its head for a while in the sand. To leave its head buried indefinitely, however, leads inevitably to death. The British news media exist not even in a parallel universe, but in a universe that at times appears to be perpendicular to reality. In keeping with "Up Yours, Delors", "Gotcha" and "Freddy Starr Ate My Hamster", the British news media can be relied on to deride any suggestion that might enpale the deepest ultramarine of political, cultural, social and scientific status quos. (When Murdoch supported Blair in 1997, Murdoch already knew what most of us then did not.) "Bonkers nanny state claims Earth is round" "Boffins claim phlogiston does not exist" "Pinko bishops say Earth goes round sun" If alcohol is a mild carcinogen, then alcohol is a mild carcinogen. If eating mammals too often leads to a variety of cancers and to heart disease, then it probably makes good sense not to eat mammals very often, or even not at all. As I understand it, Canute/Knut did not believe that he would stop the tide: he was demonstrating that not even he could stop the tide. Third, the food, drink and drugs manufacturers. "Would you like to try this lead-based make-up?" "How about this mercury-based medicine?" "Smoking tobacco will improve both your health and your image."
I am happy that money raised from taxes should be spent on promoting healthy living. I do not understand why money raised from taxes is used to promote healthy living at the same time as money is spent promoting those same products. This is like permitting an arsonist to continue to spray petrol onto a fire that firefighters are trying to extinguish.
Manifesto for immediate action:
1. ban all advertising (including sponsorship) of food related to mammals
2. ban all advertising (including sponsorship) of alcohol
3. ban any retail outlet (including supermarkets) from selling alcohol for consumption off the premises, with the exception of licensed, sole-purpose premises (off-licenses), and prohibiting the sale from those licensed, sole-purpose premises of anything that is not explicitly identified in legislation as alcohol-consumption-related (specifically: confectionery, snack foods and soft drinks)
4. ban any retail outlet from selling tobacco with the exception of licensed, sole-purpose premises (tobacconists), and prohibiting the sale of anything that is not explicitly identified in legislation as smoking-related (specifically: confectionery, snack foods, soft drinks, newspapers and magazines)
5. require anyone importing alcohol into the UK, or entering the UK with alcohol (no exceptions) to be in possession of a wholesale or retail license to sell alcohol
6. require anyone importing tobacco into the UK, or entering the UK with tobacco (no exceptions) to be in possession of a wholesale or retail license to sell tobacco.

In case the above appears extreme, it is worth noting that there are places in the world where the sale of alcohol is either banned (such as in some Musim countries) or restricted in a manner similar to that described above (such as in Scandanavia and parts of Canada). There is legislation in most countries about which drugs may be retailed, and control of the way in which those drugs are advertised and retailed. There is legislation in many countries restricting the import without an appropriate license of any quantity whatsoever of a wide variety of foodstuffs (try taking a sandwich into the US through JFK).

There are many people employed in industries relating to the production and distribution of tobacco, alcohol and food derived from mammals. These people will lose their jobs. New jobs must be found for them. Part of the UK, EU and world economies are based around these products, and there will be a reduction in economic activity. New opportunities must be found and exploited. There is very much to be done in the world: spreading education; building developing economies out of their poverty; improving the natural environment; developing and exploiting energy sources that are less destructive of the natural environment; finding ways to rescue archaeology, cultures and languages that are being eclipsed by the modern world; seeking out new ways and places to live; seeking out new pharmaceutical products; improving the quality of the housing in which people live; spreading and embedding new technology; helping people to get fit and lead healthier lives.

Were western societies to progress in the simple ways described above, the move would represent further steps towards a more wholesome existence.

On making fun of disability

2007-10-08T18:28:00.000+01:00

At the end of the daily electronic newsletter of the BBC's flagship current affairs programme, Newsnight, some weeks ago, was printed a 'joke' about Van Gogh having severed his ear. I found the 'joke' to be in very poor taste, for the reasons set out below, and wrote the following in the Newsnight weblog feedback.

I found the Van Gogh 'joke' offensive: it colludes with people who laugh at my uncle as "foot-loose" because his foot was amputated as a result of advanced diabetes; with the people who laugh at injured war veterans being "legless" or "'armless "; with people who mock the spasms associated with cerebral palsy; with people who laugh at the disturbing effects of mental health problems. Making these circumstances into 'jokes' might relieve tension in those not directly impacted by disability, but it also brazenly stigmatises. There is so much in life at which to laugh without any need to descend to stigmatising.

I recently read a report on a BBC news webpage 'Humour comes from testosterone' about some research recently carried out that concluded that much humour is sublimated aggression.

Japan 2: some differences between Sunderland and Tokyo

2007-09-25T23:14:00.000+01:00

Sunderland has churches made of honey-coloured sandstone. Outside each church may be the street, or maybe a path through a graveyard. Tokyo, Kyoto and Nara have Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines made of wood painted black or white or tomato red. Each temple and shrine has a tori or a gatehouse. The place of worship is hidden behind a wall that encloses an open area. However, the open area is not a graveyard, although it is a place of peace.

When greeting a person, or acknowledging them, or thanking them, or when saying goodbye, Japanese people bow to each other. This action demonstrates respect, and when performed by both (or more) parties, shows mutual respect. How the people of Sunderland communicate respect is not obvious to me.

Pedestrians in Japan tend to obey road crossing signals. However, unlike in Germany where it is usual to encounter a group of people standing beside an empty road waiting for the green man to tell them that they may cross, in Japan (Tokyo, Kyoto and Nara to be precise) they would cross the road if it made no sense to wait. In Sunderland it is a commonplace that pedestrians ignore road crossing signals, endangering themselves and road users.

In Tokyo, and particularly in Kyoto, cyclists ignore instructions and park their bicycles anywhere. Teams of municipal workers make monthly raids to clear the footpaths of illegally-parked bicycles. The bicycles are not locked because it is not expected that anyone would steal them. In Durham a cyclist is likely to be careful where they park and chain their bicycle so as to avoid it being stolen. Few people cycle in central Sunderland.

In Tokyo and Kyoto, the streets are clean because people rarely drop litter. In Sunderland and Durham the streets are clean because gangs of street sweepers remove on a daily, sometimes hourly, basis the litter that people toss onto the ground.

In Tokyo and Kyoto it seemed to be a matter of great personal importance to people whose job it is to serve that they give excellent service. Staffing levels are high. In North East England it is rare to encounter anyone in the service sector who is eager to deliver excellence with enthusiasm. The exceptions are noteworthy, such as a waitress at El Piano in York, and a young man at the Jorvik Viking Centre. Overall, staffing levels are low. This may be significant.

Japan has a massive railway system, with frequent trains that run on time to the second. Staffing levels are high, and the officials take their job very seriously. The North East of England has four railway lines, with infrequent train services that are often unreliable. Railway officials are little in evidence, and not known for their customer service.

In Tokyo (and Kyoto) supermarkets typically carry little fresh fruit, it is very expensive, and is often ready-basketed as a gift. In North East England almost every supermarket carries some fresh fruit, often a very wide range, mostly quite cheap, and ready for eating not gifting.

In Sunderland people visit the bookmakers, the casino, the slot-machine shops, the bingo and buy lottery tickets. In Tokyo and Kyoto, we saw people sitting feeding metal to metal, glaze-eyed as though zombies, in the pachinko parlours.

Japan 1: transport

2007-09-24T22:39:00.000+01:00

I visited Japan for the first time in August 2007. Flying from Newcastle (NCL) via Schipol (AMS) to Narita (NRT), and back, the long flights over Asia were painful and long-as-a-lifetime. However, KLM was good, and avoided adding extra pain.
Taking the Narita express was the least problematic means of travelling the fifty or so miles from the airport into central Tokyo. Returning to Narita at the end of the holiday it was a mistake to take the stopping train, for although the ticket was cheaper, the train was crowded for much of the journey, which was also substantially longer.
Japan has many railway companies, some of which belong to the Japan Rail Group. Trains belonging to different companies may run on the same lines, or on different lines; may stop at the same stations, or at different stations; may start and terminate at the same place or different places. Inevitably there are different running frequencies, different travel times and different fare structures. Working out how best to travel by train from, for instance, Tokyo to Nikko, is as complicated as working out how best to travel by train from Durham to Newcastle is easy. Within Tokyo, the subway system has a tendency to shadow the suburban railway system. Not forgetting the limited-stop, deep-underground suburban railway system. Whether Japanese people are so used to these multi-layered options that they negotiate them without effort, or like unsuspecting visitors from overseas they quail at the thought, I have no idea. Their ability to read modern Japanese script, which, true to form, uses four different character sets (kanji, hiragana, katakana and roman), delivers a profound advantage when buying a rail ticket from machine, for although the machine offers instructions in English, the same courtesy is not extended to the names of stations, which are written in kanji.

Lila, by Robert Pirsig

2007-04-16T23:01:00.000+01:00

There are few people who have not read Robert Pirsig's principal claim to fame: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. That I have read the book twice is not saying much. Even if some people have a copy on their bookshelves only for show, never having read the novel, that proportion must be small compared with the number of people who posess a copy of A Brief History of Time by Professor Stephen Hawking, although the pages of the book are as yet uncut. I doubt, however, that there is kudos associated with either owning or reading a copy of Pirsig's Lila, a sequel in several senses to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Lila uses a similar formula to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: a 'road trip' story interspersed with the advancement of a philosophical model of human experience.

On the positive side I found many valuable insights in Pirsig's text, the most illuminating being:

"If objects are the ultimate reality then there's only one true intellectual construction of things: that which corresponds to the objective world. But if truth is defined as a high-quality set of intellectual value patterns, then insanity can be defined as just a low quality set of intellectual value patterns, and you get a whole different picture of it.
"When the culture asks, 'Why doesn't this person see things the way we do?' you can answer that he doesn't see them because he doesn't value them. He's gone into illegal value patterns because the illegal patterns resolve value conflicts that the culture's unable to handle. The causes of insanity may be all kinds of things, from chemical imbalances to social conflicts. But insanity has solved these conflicts with illegal patterns which appear to be of a higher quality."

However, I feel suspicious about philosophy being presented inj the format of a novel. Despite the existentialists, such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Friedrich Durenmat having presented and explored, or at least illustrated, their ideas in a fictional format (novels, novellas, short stories and theatrical plays), and probably being most popularly known for this, I question why someone who purports to have something new and substantial to say would choose a medium that requires the suspension of disbelief and literary sleights of hand, and would risk the message being ignored or thrown out because the literary quality of the work may be considered to be poor. The literary works of Sartre, Camus and Durenmat may not all be masterpieces, but they can be read at least adequately, and in many cases exceptionally well, without being required to engage with the philosophical exposition. Susan Hill's novels, such as In the Springtime of the Year, The Bird of Night, and I'm the King of the Castle, are typically each important psychological explorations that work well as novels. In none is Hill breaking new and contentious ground, and with each it would be possible to visit source material, for example with the novels listed: respectively bereavement, psychotic breakdown and sibling rivalry. I would feel uneasy were I to find that Hill was, in fact, presenting new, unsupported ideas about psychology and psychiatry through the medium of a novel.

[to be continued...]

Green issues 9: media discussion of green issues

2007-04-14T10:35:00.000+01:00

Why does every other comment in the UK media regarding global warming appear to criticise either air travel or 4 x 4s, the so-called 'Chelsea tractors'? I think that reason might involve the fact that they are, for several reasons, popular targets, and also that these targets serve to distract from addressing more sensitive issues.

[To be continued...]

Faith in geological processes

2007-03-30T21:38:00.000+01:00

Too many geologists appear to have lost faith in geological processes. Instead they call upon 'satan ex machina', as explored entertainingly in the movie The Fifth Element. The dinosaurs were not hit on the head by an asteroid (or even two). If someone as much as sneezes these so-called geologists invoke a killer asteroid. Have more faith in your training! Geology happens because of geological processes. Volcanic eruptions, lava flows, plate tectonics and salt domes are examples of what is perfectly good enough to explain much of what happens here on Earth - after all, look at Venus. The latest examples of asteroid-mania is the claim by UK geologists who, feeling left out of the limelight, are insisting that fomer salt dome structures in the North Sea are the UK's own meteor impact craters. What is wrong with these people? I am starting to wonder if they have been 'got at' by Creationists.

In contrast, methane hydrates represent a real tipping point ready to topple. Global warming threatens to release these extensive greenhouse deposits, as happened at the end of the Permian, roasting the Earth for hundreds of thousands of years. This is a bona fide, if catastrophic, geological process that has rapid and far-reaching consequences. (I consider this issue in greater detail in my website: Green.)

Subceptions: counselling weblog

2007-03-29T18:21:00.000+01:00

I have started a new weblog, Subceptions, which can be found at:

http://myblogs.sunderland.ac.uk/blogs/blog-259/

The purpose of this weblog is to explore counselling-related issues.

Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art: MIMA

2007-03-26T11:08:00.000+01:00

Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (MIMA) is a new art gallery housed in a recently-completed building set in a magnificent square in the heart of Middlebrough town centre. The gallery cost £14.1 million, and the square £5.5 million. These are signiifcant sums of money for a town that carries an unremitting industrial reputation to spend on fine art and architecture.

I visited the gallery on a cold, breezy day in March, bright with sunlight, and was able to photograph both the gallery itself and some of the other buildings around the square. Photography of the inside of the building is permitted, but not of exhibitions. To view my photographs, follow this link:

Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art

From the outside, and contrasted with the other buildings in the square, this grand building looks fittingly like a modern art gallery. Its box-like structure, somewhat reminiscent of Walsall's new art gallery, feels modern and contructed. Whilst the two side walls and the back wall are made of a glowing white material that could be limestone, conrete or rendered breeze blocks, the wall overlooking the square is mostly an immense expanse of glass recessed behind vertical steel cables. The main entrance is at the front of the building towards the right. Beside the main entrance, part of the wall is built from am ordered chaos of limestone blocks with all manner of different dressings. From this I took a message that paying attention to detail will yield results. This wall departed from the concept of minimal decoration and large flat areas. It also appeared immediately obvious that thought and attention have been given to the materials of which the building is made.

With its grand atrium from which all floors are visible but activities are hidden. the inside of the building feels a little like the inside of the Sage in Gateshead. The dark stone tiled floor feels pleasingly lavish. To the immediate right of the main entrance a tasteful cafe/restaurant occupies the right end of the ground floor. A staircase with wooden (oak?) bannister climbs diagonally from left to right in a barely-broken run from ground floor to third floor.

[Give details of the gallery spaces.]

On the day of my visit there was an exhibition of drawings in a variety of media. Most notable was the fact that there were a few works by some big names: Picasso, Pollock. The value of the exhibition, however, was the work of less-well-known artists [give details]. Perhaps one of my shortgcomings is that I value examining the drawings of an artist only once I am familiar with their work. I was disappointed not to view some of the paintings in the gallery's permanent collection. With this purpose in mind I intend to visit the gallery again soon.

[Give details of the square]

[Upload photographs of the square]

In summary, I visited Middlesbrough in order to see, examine and photograph a building, and also to view an exhibition. Although the exhibition did little for me, the building is very obviously a significant and valuable addition to the architecture of Middlesbrough town centre.

Postmodern Pantheon

2007-03-25T07:36:00.000+01:00

This posting has been growing for over six months.

There are people, chosen by me to a greater or lesser extent, who have influenced the thoughts, beliefs, attitudes, feelings and behaviour of the person I was and the person I have become. I have decided to identify them. These are my pantheon.

However, the task is too difficult, too risky, too suspect simply to present the results. The task must be examined, analysed, critiqued and developed

However, to present their names here is little more than a game, not to be taken seriously, as I consider celebrity to be an ugly aspect of contemporary western culture. With some obvious exceptions, such as Isherwood and Frank, I know little about the domestic circumstances of most of these people, and I may, for all I know, be inadvertently acclaiming a racist, homophobic, wife-beating paedophile. Few of these people were, or are, vegetarian, let alone vegan, which anyone who has encountered me knows is an essential part of who I am.

There are some, such as William Shakespeare, who have influenced me directly for much of my life (I saw my first Shakespeare play - Twelfth Night - when I was ten years old), and indirectly all my life because of the culture in which I have been raised and live. There are others whose influence has been fleeting, or more recent. There are some whose influence has been mediated through only one literary work, such as Lao Tse and Anne Frank, whereas regarding others, such as Hesse, Isherwood and Golding, it is the broad range of their literary output rather than one work in particular, that has been influential. There are those to whose vision (most of the artists) and ideas I am attracted, and there are others regarding whom it is their ideas and the way in which they lived them (such as Gandhi and King) that stand out for me.

I have focused on the people who have influenced me positively, rather than concerning myself with those from whom I have learned by rejection of some key aspect(s) of their legacy (Confucius, Plato, Jesus of Nazareth, Paul of Tarsus, the Prophet Mohammed, Chartles Stewart, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Senator MCarthy, Richard Nixon, Ayotollah Khomeni, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Osama bin Laden - who did you expect? I am politically liberal, of course I am going to reject icons of political conservatism).

Preparing a list such as mine below is nearly impossible because much of what has influenced me is hidden to me. I live in an economically-developed country, with piped drinking water, sewage treatment, elecricity for lighting, fuel for heating and cooking, an abundance of food in the shops, an albeit somewhat creaky national health service (partly free at the point of delivery), a comprehensive social wefare system, a wealth of information services (including broadband internet), and access to more technology than I have any hope of imagining. The countless thousansds of people who have been instrumental in constructing this western society to date are at least as influential on who I am as anyone I might place in a list. For me, this highlights the point that my 'list', my pantheon, is of people who distinguish me from others, people who define the colour of my livery.

Observers of the psyche
William Shakespeare
Herman Hesse
Carl Rogers
Eric Ericsson
Christopher Isherwood (who introduced me to interiority, and gave me permission to write in the first person)
William Golding
Susan Hill
John Rowan

Observers of history
Thomas Hardy
Christopher Isherwood
Anne Frank
Simon Schama
Norman Davies

Explorers of culture
Alan Watts
Andrei Tarkovsky
Akira Kurosawa
Peter Greenaway
Woody Allen (because I, too, love New York City)
Pieter Breughel, the elder
Pieter Breughel, the younger
Hieronymous Bosch
Rembrandt
William Morris
Modigliani
Claude Monet
Vincent Van Gogh
Jackson Pollock
Mark Rothko
Edgar Degas (his sculptures more than his paintings)
Henry Moore
Barbara Hepworth
Frank Lloyd Wright
Mies van der Rohe
Gaudi
James Stirling
Norman Foster
Richard Rogers
Antonin Vivaldi
Ludwig van Beethoven
Gustav Mahler
Sibelius
Gustav Holst
Ralph Vaughan Williams
George Gershwin
Aaron Copeland
Janecek
Bela Bartok (who prepared me for being able to hear Toru Takemitsu)
Toru Takemitsu
Arvo Part
Peter Maxwell-Davies
Van Morrison
Dave Cousins
Martin Carthy (who keeps me in love with both the countryside and with vernacular history)
Sandy Denny (who keeps me in touch with melancholy)
Jon Anderson (who keeps me in touch with dreams)
Phil Collins (who keeps me in touch with ebullience)
W.H. Auden
Roger McGough
Brian Patten
Adrian Henry
Jon Silkin
D.H. Lawrence
Thomas Hardy

Observers of spirituality
Lao Tse
Buddha
George Fox
Alan Watts

Players on the world stage
Oliver Cromwell
Mahatma Ghandi
Martin Luther King

Engineers and entrepreneurs
George Stephenson
Isambard Kingdom Brunel
Bill Gates
Steve Jobs
Tim Berners-Lee (because you co-invented the internet)
Clive Sinclair
Richard Branson
Anita Roddick

Scientists and technologists
Pythagoras [~ 580 / 572 BC – ~ 500 / 490 BC]
Aristotle [384 BC – 322 BC]
Roger Bacon [c. 1214 – 1294]
Leonardo da Vinci [15 April 1452 – 2 May 1519
Isaac Newton [4 January 1643 – 31 March 1727]
Humphrey Davy [17 December 1778 – 29 May 1829]
Michael Faraday [22 September 1791 – 25 August 1867]
Charles Darwin [12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882]
Marie and Pierre Curie [7 November 1867 – 4 July 1934 & 15 May 1859 – 19 April 1906]
Albert Einstein [14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955]
Carl Sagan [9 November 1934 – 20 December 1996](for popularising science, and believing in space)
Richard Dawkins [26 March 1941 to date](for his rational, fearless defence of atheism, and steadfast rejection of anti-science)
Stephen Hawking [8 January 1942 to date](for developing his astrophysical theories despite his deteriorating physical condition)

More YouTube movies

2007-01-06T01:37:00.000Z

I have uploaded more short movies onto YouTube. With each new movie I am shuffling up the learning curve. By the time I have uploaded several dozen movies, I hope that they will be much more accomplished than my current efforts.

Here are the latest URLs:

1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzrZ0OyGmC8

2. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSNN-PzSYP4

3. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeyzKcYb4GE

4. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrI3TtdCPUI

5. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyR2U_tyJVg

6. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QU1K0U0aoE

Movies 1 through 3 show my recording of animals at the Smithsonian National Zoo in Washington DC. I recorded footage of many different animals there, including Tai Shan (coming soon by popular request from my daughter), the baby panda bear. As I progressively edit this material, I intend to upload it onto YouTube. In particular, I am concerned to ensure that no images of my daughter appear in a form that is capturable by people with malign intent. As she is, naturally, an important aspect of a 'home movie' of 'our holiday', I currently find the craft of editing a movie to be dauntingly demanding.

Movie 4 is my narration of verse by A.A. Milne. I was experimenting with using my webcam, but the video quality is not great. I have also been trying to work out how to construct something that approximates to an autocue so that I can look at the camera while speaking. Despite the fact that wielding a camcorder is remarkably easy, filming a performance while performing is rather more demanding.

Movie 5 is a collection of photographs of Boston, Massachusetts.

Movie 6 is a collection of photographs I have taken of Van Gogh paintings in the Smithsonian National Art Gallery, Washington DC; MoMA, New York; and the Musee d'Orsay, Paris.

I am at a loss about how to give my movies a musical soundtrack without contravening copyright.

Executing people

2006-12-25T13:48:00.000Z

The BBC News website announced today that four prisoners on 'death row' in Japan have just been executed. In Libya, several health workers accused and convicted of spreading HIV / AIDS, from which children have died, are now sentenced to death. I have little hesitation in condemning without reservation these barbarities. Killing is wrong. It is as though a blood sacrifice is required to restore the balance of justice. In the Libyan case, the people found guilty are patently innocent of the crimes, but the local people (according to the BBC News website) want someone to 'pay the price' for their children being infected. Whether or not the Japanese prisoners were in fact guilty of the crimes for which they were convicted and sentenced to death I have no idea, and would make no difference. The only spirit served by executing them is brutality, thus increasing the sum of violence in the world. People throughout the world are in desperate need of less, not more, barbarity. As wars, and police death squads, and vigilante groups, and terrorist cells should become only of the past, so should executing people. Abolish the death penalty!

Wikipedia article about High Shincliffe

2006-12-24T16:57:00.000Z

I have been busy: writing an article about the village in which I live. I have uploaded the article onto Wikipedia at the following address:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Shincliffe

Gifting

2006-12-22T13:57:00.000Z

This weblog posting is, as many of my weblogs postings are, incomplete.

As Christmas 2006 nears, gifting becomes for me the source of considerable, increasing and unnecessary anxiety. I also feel apprehensive about being corralled into a ritual of elevated expectations awaiting the inevitable anticlimax and disappointment. It all feels like humbug to me. Yet gifting can be such a wonderful transaction that strengthens and deepens a relationship.

I am a hypocrite. The views I express here are those to which I aspire, not those I uphold in practice. As a result of writing this weblog posting, I intend to try to live more closely to my aspirations.

I have many things. If I desire some thing - food, an item of clothing, toiletries, a book, a DVD - I buy it. In both contemporary and historical contexts I am wealthy enough. I no longer require charity.

There are times in the year, such as Christmas, my birthday, and on your return from holiday, when I might receive a gift from you. It is kind that you should think of me. I do not require a gift from you at those times, although those are the occasions when a gift may be less unexpected. I like it best when I receive a gift unprompted by events or dates.

I have no right to receive a gift from you. Should I receive a gift from you, then I receive your gift to me as a mark of your caring for me. Should I receive no gift from you on a day when a gift might be less unexpected, then I am no worse off than on the day before. However, I might occasionally reflect on the quality of our relating.

I like it best when your gift to me shows that you know who I am, that you care who I am, and that you care for me.

I cannot dictate your gift to me, for to do so would seem to miss the point. I am aware, however, of my reaction to your gift. If you gave me money when I was poor, I was intensely grateful; but were you to give me money now, I would be left wondering how much you wish to know about me. Should you give me aftershave, I would be left wondering whether you notice that I have worn a beard for thirty years. Should you give me a silk tie, a leather wallet, a box of milk chocolates, or a book about football or about non-vegan cuisine, I would be left wondering whether you have heard me saying who I am. Sometimes I am left wondering whether your gifting might represent a ritual rather more than kindness, and I can find it easier to cope with you not giving me a gift.

Occasionally I wonder whether your gift might be more about you than it is about me. If you want something, then why not obtain it for yourself? If you want to give to charity, then give to charity - there is nothing for us in you gifting to charity. If you want something from me, then why not ask me for it. Even though I might refuse, and our relationship would be hurt a little, the honesty involved should stand us in good stead for the future.

There are occasions when I give you a gift, mostly to show my caring for you. I like best to give gifts when least expected of me, not least because then you can be certain that the gift and gifting were intended.

I like best to give a gift that speaks of my knowledge of you. However, I might not always get this right because my knowledge may be insufficient: I rarely buy clothes as gifts because I have little confidence that I know your taste well enough; I rarely buy books as gifts because I am unlikely to know whether you already have that book; I rarely buy wine for friends who know wine well because I have little confidence that I could distinguish between a good wine and a mediocre wine.

I try never to give a gift that might offend in some way, such as a book about how to manage your life better, or a bottle of whiskey if you are a recovering alcoholic, or confectionery if you have eating / weight issues. I try never to give gifts that might contravene your political / ethical / moral / spiritual sensitivities, such as a book about Islam if you are a devout Christian, or food that is not clearly labeled as Kosher if you are Jewish, or a T-shirt produced in a 'developing economy' sweat shop if I know you to be enthusiastic about Fair Trade. I risk getting this wrong, and however painful it might be for both of us, I should rather know that I had made a mistake.

In gifting to you, I am unlikely to contravene my own morality. For example, I would neither gift you animal flesh, nor a compendium of 'Irish jokes', nor items that result from the proceeds of crime or fund terrorism (state-sponsored or otherwise). This does not imply, however, that I would intend to promote my own political / ethical / moral / spiritual preferences, nor my own taste. I am unlikely to give you recipes for a vegan cuisine, unless I knew that you too are a vegan; I am unlikely to give you tickets for a Van Morrison concert unless I knew that you too especially enjoy his music. I am unlikely to gift you a subscription to an environmental magazine unless I knew that you too are enthusiastic about green issues. I am unlikely to gift you my donation to the RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds), although I am a member, because there is nothing of you, or for you, in that transaction. There are many gifts in the world awaiting my gifting to you about which we can both feel entirely comfortable.

One respect in which I am lately no longer a hypocrite is that my gifting is no longer ritualistic. However, I do not yet feel comfortable in my newly-attained position, and still feel a heavy social pull towards the ritual of gifting.

As a postscript in December 2007, I found this on the BBC News website:

To be continued ...

Oh My Newsnight

2006-12-05T02:58:00.000Z

I have uploaded a short movie onto the YouTube website. The current address of the movie is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0XqoOZ4vik

The movie has many technological flaws, including a two or three second sound drop-out, that I wish to remedy. Each time I upload an amended version of the movie, I shall update this weblink.

The movie script is my posting in this weblog entitled Green Issues of 4 November 2006. I anticipate leaving the movie text unamended, because I intend to make several more short movies looking in greater depth at a wider range of green issues.

Cathy Come Home

2006-11-27T19:46:00.000Z

I watched 'Cathy Come Home' on UK television yesterday (Sunday 26 November 2006) evening. On each occasion, including the first, I have watched Ken Loach's 'Wednesday Play' several times over the past 30 years I have felt a great reluctance to put myself through the unswerving inevitability (listen to Ravel's 'Bolero', or read the description by Simone de Beauvoir of Jean-Paul Sartre and herself watching US 'western' movies) and the mounting agony of the simple plot. On each occasion, however, I am enticed and drawn into the movie by Loach's unsentimental, unsensationalised docudrama treatment (contrast with the recent BBC 'Horizon' docudrama on pandemic 'flu).

Loach's characters are Everyman and his Wife, who we are not invited to love, interacting with characterisations of people employed to run 'the system', who we are not invited to despise. Both the subject matter and the acting seem to belong to unexceptional BBC television drama/soap. However, the camera-work and editing are much less languid than a contemporary soap such as Coronation Street. I love the devices of having the voice of Cathy looking back to provide a commentary; and of providing factual information about homelessness in various parts of the UK (as Manuel Pueg does about homosexuality in his novel 'Kiss of the Spiderwoman', and John Fowles does about prostitution in Victorian London in 'The French Lieutenant's Woman').

The movie rehearses a range of myths about the apparent fecklessness of people who become homeless, unostentatiously exposing the patent fallacy of such myths. The movie shows how easily (and even arbitrarily) people can be knocked out of society into an effectively disenfranchised underclass. The movie shows how a couple of ordinary people, with ordinary aspirations, can be driven to shout at (i.e. to behave impolitely towards) officials of 'the system' who fail to hear (won't or can't?) the increasingly desperate plight of Cathy and her family. On several occasions during the movie (such as at the meeting of the householders who live near the caravan site, and the subsequent arson attack on the caravans; and when the baliff comes to evict them from the squat), the hypocrisy of the characters is suggested, although the scene is never devoid of sympathy for them.

... to be continued ...

Infanticide (de facto)

2006-11-20T22:14:00.000Z

Guidance recently issued to hospital paediatric units by the BMA (British Medical Association) upset me. It is proposed that UK babies born at 22 weeks or earlier should not be resuscitated because their chances of survival are only one per cent, and the likelihood of a surviving child being disabled is high.

Had I only a one per cent chance of living, I would take it without hesitation. I find it hard to believe that few people would say differently. If my daughter had a one per cent chance of survival, I would do all in my power to provide her with that chance.

It would appear obvious, therefore, that the issue for the BMA is not about the chances of survival but that the cost of intensive neonatal medical care is considered too high to make the expense worthwhile. I accept that there are prices that may not be worth paying for a human life, or even the chance of a human life: the sacrificial death of other people; a Chernobyl-scale environmental disaster; or the destruction of a national art gallery or national cultural / world heritage site. However, people, companies and governments the world over spend millions of pounds, euros, dollars and yen on armaments, on base entertainment and on conspicuous consumption. Whilst it would be fair to argue over the merits or otherwise of goods and services bought and sold the world over, a medical policy of refusing to save the life of a prematurely-born child in order to economise on resources seems to be turning medical ethics upside down.

I do not believe that whether a child is likely to be born disabled should be a consideration regarding whether to save the child's life. If the issue is about cost, the financial expense of caring for that child through life would be a drop in the ocean compared to building and launching a military satellite, making a blockbuster movie, or a constructing a cruise liner. However, maybe there is an implicit belief that the life of a disabled child is a life blighted. ("The child would be sensorily impaired, be in constant pain, and have a poor quality of life. We'd be doing it a favour, putting it out of its misery. Were it a dog we'd have little hesitation about putting it down.") It would be interesting to find out the differential suicide rates for disabled and able-bodied people: I doubt that there is much difference (I am ready to be corrected). Maybe the BMA's concern is for the inconvenience to blameless parents of being saddled with a child requiring medication several times each day; additional attention to needs; specialist care, equipment and schooling.

I have a strong belief that societies the world over are better, richer, more humane societies because of the engagement required of them to care for children and young people, older people, people with a learning disability, physically disabled people, people whose health is frail, emotionally vulnerable people, people who live on the edge. Societies that most of all prize and reward strength and excellence, and strive towards conceptual ideals and ideas of perfection, risk losing touch with warm humanity. It seems to me that the UK is already quite some way along that cold path.

I recognise that for many people the term 'family' is problematic, perhaps because of abuses that have taken place within their family. However, I like the term when used more broadly to refer to a group of people who struggle together to make life work. To quote from Lilo and Stich: "Family means no-one gets left behind." For me, that means no-one.

Killing Saddam Hussein

2006-11-06T18:50:00.000Z

I permit no-one to take life in my name, for killing is wrong. Whether perpetrated by tyrants or democratically-elected governments, killing is wrong. Regardless of purpose, motivation or mitigation, killing is wrong. Whether executed as a crime in passion, in time of war, or judicially in cold blood, killing is always wrong.

Some cities in the US

2006-08-22T11:14:00.000+01:00

Mahattan is the capital city of high culture; the most vibrant of cities in which to shop, eat and be entertained; and simply the centre of the world. The terrorist attack of 11 September 2001 prompted me to visit - four times to date. Were a year's job-swap ever possible, I should find it impossible to resist. In the meantime my next visit is being plotted.

DC, with its Smithsonians, its grand architecture, and the charming politeness of many of the people who live there, make it a worthy tourist city. Its pleasant weather, reasonably accessible public transport system, and several vegetarian eating places (all of which had vegan dishes) made the four days I spent there all too brief, and I should have preferred to have spent four weeks. DC is high on my list of cities to revisit.

Boston, on the other hand, is significantly over-rated as a tourist destination, and is worth avoiding until even Washington (Tyne & Wear, UK), Peterlee (County Durham, UK) and Harlow (Essex, UK) have been exhausted. Whereas it likes to trade under the name of 'Beantown', Boston's historical sites are few, poorly presented, and offensively partisan. Many of the people who inhabit central Boston behave coldly at best, some might say rudely. There is virtually no vegan food to be had anywhere near central Boston. On the other hand, Cambridge was pleasant in a very, very low key way, but nothing to Oxford (UK), Cambridge (UK) or ever Dublin (Eire).

Chicago has wonderful architecture stretching back to the nineteenth century. As well as the grand buildings, such as the Institute of Art, and the fascinating 1920s' skyscrapers (such as the Union Carbide building), and the imposing late twentieth century skyscrapers (such as the Sears Tower), Frank Lloyd Wright left his mark, several in fact, at Oak Park - essential viewing for anyone interested in architecture. A boat trip is an excellent way to view the architecture of downtown Chicago. The Instiute of Art, so lovingly featured in John Hughes' movie Ferris Bueller's Day Off, is world class, and is essential viewing. Several recent movies use the ambience of Chicago as though a chartacter: Fugitive, starring Harrison Ford, and While You Were Sleeping, starring Sandra Bullock. The public zoo is set in parkland on the lakeshore. There is vegetarian food in Chicago, including in the gay, bohemian suburb of North Halstead.

To be continued ...

The media mainstreaming of the language of the BNP

2006-05-27T08:13:00.000+01:00

The political agenda of the UK appears no longer to be driven by elected representatives, but is being determined by the reationary politics promoted by News International (News Corporation) and the commercial imperative of the purveyors of what the news media chose to define as news. It used to be the case that although the national newspapers were politically partisan, political action took place in the political arena: Westminster, the soapbox and demonstrations. In May 1997 the news media wrested from the UK Consertvative Party the mantle of quasi-formal opposition to the newly-elected Blair government. I am unsure about precisely when the Blair government lost control of the agenda, possibly in the run-up to the most recent (5 May 2005) general election. Maybe control of the political agenda has been ebbing away from Westminster over a period of years. This current period reminds me of the time between Tony Blair's election to leadership of the UK Labour Party (21 July 1994) and his defeat of Conservative John Major (2 May 1997), except that it is now Rupert Murdoch for whom we are waiting to move into 10 Downing Street.

Current so-called revelations about the UK Home Office appear largely driven by an agenda of xenophobia. The rehtoric focuses on the deportation of foreign nationals, 'bogus' asylum seekers, 'economic' migrants, refugees and people trafficking. For reasons I find it difficult to understand many people in Britain have become addicted to this unpleasant, bunker propaganda that should be the sole preserve of Nick Griffin's British National Party, the Front National of Jean-Marie Le Pen, and paranoic, white-supremicist, North American redneck militias. (The one difference is that the UK media appear to be anti-Arab rather than anti-Jewish.)

The phrase that prompts my wry smile is "this island nation of ours". The UK is neither the most densely populated country in the world, nor the most densely populated country in Europe. The UK ranks 33 in the world league table, next to Germany, whereas the Netherlands (15) and Belgium (17) have considerably higher population densities. I am unfamiliar with people complaining about living in Jersey, Guernsey or Barbados: real islands with much higher population densities; and even London ranks well down the list in the world and in Europe.

I am not claiming that what is being stated in the headlines is necessarily factually inaccurate, but that it is being given a maliciously-twisted relevance.

... to be continued ...

However, vox pop suggests that not only is the UK population buying into this de facto deceit, but also appear immune to the facts and their significance. To illustrate this point, regarding law and order, to anyone in the UK it is self-evident both that there are fewer police officers and that crime is all but out of control - whereas despite better recording, recorded crime has been on the decline for the past 15 or more years, and there are more police officers, as well as civilians working for the police, than ever before. Regarding health, the UK public focuses on the fact there are one-third fewer hospital beds than at some point in the past, rather than the relevant facts that life expectancy has risen so much that there is a major crisis in pension savings; or that the rate at which new drugs to address this or that illness or condition are being introduced appears to be accelerating; or, perhaps most significantly, that medical procedures have advanced sufficiently that the need for lengthy stays in hospital has thankfully been signifiantly reduced. Regarding tobacco smoking, the UK public demand a right to damage the health of allcomers (smokers and non-smokers alike), whingeing plaintively about hospitals that ban smoking, and confetti-ing with cigartette butts the entrance to public buildings, when all the evidence for decades has unequivocally, adequately and graphically illustrated that smoking should be stopped immediately; as well as buying from the informal economy significant quantities of cigarettes on which no duty has been paid (are these the same people who buy newspapers that peddle myths about crime being out of control?).

... to be continued ...

Satisfaction: pleasure versus fulfilment

2006-05-05T23:08:00.000+01:00

In pursuing thoughts about happiness from an earlier posting, I got to thinking that I am seeking to earn myself a sense of satisfaction by means of pleasure. I feel satisfied when I pleasure myself by listening to Vivaldi ('Four Seasons), Sandy Denny ('Who Knows Where the Time Goes?' or Van Morrison ('Madame George'). I feel satisfied when I pleasure myself by watching 'Spirited Away', 'Amelie' or 'Koyaanisqatsi'. I feel satisfied when I pleasure myself with a well-prepared Indian, Thai or Chinese meal. I feel satisfied when I pleasure myself with Monet's water lilies, Van Gogh's Provencal scenes, or Pollock's swirling rhythms. And what if I spent my life engaged only in consuming? As vital as each source of pleasure is to me (other than in matters of taste and preference, little different from football and soaps), and I should dearly love to have more of every source of pleasure-induced satisfaction in my life, something would be missing.

I have spent a significant part of my life volunteering, and continue to volunteer in one respect or another. The paid work that I now do is about helping people, which makes my work much more satisfying to me than were people not helped as a result. It is important to me that my work (whether voluntary or paid) is meaningful in some way, so that while I am engaged in it, and also when I have completed a task, I enjoy a sense of fulfilment, and consequently satisfaction. Visiting cities overseas can be remarkably hard work, due to my travel sickness, difficulties in locating vegan-suitable food, and ensuring adequate wheelchair access to museums (I telephoned the Musee Marmottan in Paris, and was assured that access was no problem as there is a stair-lift at the entrance, but when we arrived the stair-lift was not only out of order, but looked as though it had been out of order for a long time), to hotels (I have discovered that the doors to most bedrooms in Holiday Inn hotels are too narrow to admit a wheelchair) and onto public transport (on each wheelchair-accessible bus for La Guardia that arrived over a 90 minute period the wheelchair lift was non-functional, generating considerable anxiety that we might miss our flight to DC). Perhaps because of having to overcome such difficulties, I can achieve a considerable sense of fulfilment, as well as pleasure, from visiting cities such as Paris, Berlin and Venice, New York, Washington and Vancouver, contributing to my overall sense of satisfaction with the experience. Constructing my website, or developing my photographic skills, or improving my ability to communicate in some other language, is often demanding in one way or another, and consequently offers the satisfaction of fulfilment, especially on those occasions when the discpline involved fails to generate pleasure in the experience.

In conclusion, I guess that I am motivated to achieve an only-occasionally fully-satisfied sense of satisfaction (who else but the Rolling Stones?), in part through pleasure, and in part through fulfilment, neither of which alone is sufficient, but in combination and balance can offer considerable satisfaction for a while.

Happiness and satisfaction

2006-05-04T10:09:00.000+01:00

I read, today, on the BBC news website, that happiness is in decline in the UK. According to the report, compared with fifty years ago, significantly fewer people in the UK are very happy. Over the same time period, wealth in the UK has increased three-fold. A question was implied: being so much better off now, why are people in the UK less happy? A second, more explicit, question was asked: should government focus either on creating happiness or on creating wealth?

I feel uncertain about several points: what is happiness? is happiness made up from component parts, such as contentment, satisfaction and joy? does happiness exist other than as a generalised concept? how can blunt, ticky-box social surveys hope to understand the delicacy how each individual makes sense of their ever-changing human emotions? how can anyone imagine that it should be the business of government to attend to, and respond to, how people feel?

According to the BBC news website, it has long been recognised that it was many years ago that the US population ceased getting happier with increasing wealth. Whilst I understand what is intended by this statement, I also have many doubts about it. For example, apart from not knowing what happiness is, and what exactly was being measured, I have no knowledge of which social, demographic and geographical factors were correlated; nor of how much account was taken of wealth differentials (compared with wealth in the US and the UK, wealth in Scandanavia is more evenly distributed across the population). Were it the case that wealthy people get happier, poorer people become less happy, and wealth differentials have increased, then maybe there is nothing suprising to be discussed.

It has become a commonplace in the UK that winning millions of pounds (GBP) from the national lottery is more likely to result in a reduction in happiness. Yet the hope and belief of many people is that to become wealthy, or at least significantly wealthier, is sufficiently desirable that, for every child, woman and man in the UK, 75 GBP each year is handed over to Camelot (the company that runs the UK lottery). Accordingly to a Camelot press release from March 2005, weekly takings are between GBP 85,000,000 and GBP 90,000,000.

What is not a commonplace is that, over the past fifty years, the expectations of people in the UK have skyrocketed. Most people in the UK expect to be able to travel with ease at speed around the UK, probably in our own car; many people expect to be able to travel cheaply by air to tourist destinations throughout western Europe; it has become imaginable and feasible for many people to travel around the world. By contrast, the UK of Brief Encounter, shows a very different world. Regarding food, entertainment and recreation, expectations have changed out of all recognition. Regarding health, we have come to expect specialised medication (regardless of how expensive) as our right, and have become impatient for new techniques and cures. Regarding technology, we are so sophisticated that a cellphone without texting capability, a television incapable of receiving digital pictures, a laptop computer without wi-fi, would feel like a medieval throw-back. Regarding communication, we expect to be able to sit on a beach in Margate, Marbella or Miami, and call home, text our friends, maybe send a e-photograph or e-video; to find a means to post a weblog of our travels; to have booked our holiday on-line; to have e-mailed our pillow preferences to the hotel; and to have checked out the websites of cafes / bars / restaurants that serve food suitable for vegans or vegetarians, or food that is kosher or wheat-free or nut-free.

Were it the case that our expectations were being met faster than our expectations were being raised, life would feel more satisfying and we would become happier. However, the dual-fuel engine for the satisfactio of our expectations is powered by money and further-elevated expectations. Paradoxically, therefore, in a market-driven capitalist society the more we seek to have our expectations satisfied, the further out in front of satisfaction our expectations will streak. In western society, it is only by reining-in, or even reducing, expectations could satisfaction increase. In the later 1950s, a British prime minister, Harold Macmillan, famously told the British electorate that they had "never had it so good", reminding them of post-war shortages, rationing and inflation. However, the purpose of his message was for people to rein in their expectations about rising wages (http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/july/20/newsid_3728000/3728225.stm). Successive UK governments have attempted to deliver a message of wage restraint, and suffered for their pains at subsequent elections. Living in a globalised world, in which people in Connecticut, Chad and China are able to converse together in a chat-room, it would be barely possible for a country to attempt, unliaterally, to reduce the life expectations of its people - to my understanding, the Taliban regime attempted this in Afghanistan.

I am likely to feel happier when the bad things that have been going on in my life are being relegated to the past. This is about transition. Ironically, I may feel happier while recovering from a serious illness than when I am ordinarily healthy; when my bank balance is nearing solvency after a period of debt than when I have been sitting on comfortable financial cushion for some time; when the sun breaks through after a week of perpetual drizzle than when yet another day dawns with a clear blue sky.

Talking with a colleague, Jo, reminded me that when I have a self-imposed goal, the attainment of which would give me satisfaction, I tend to feel a contented anticipation. Simple examples of this include planning a holiday abroad; learning sufficient tourist language to get by in a non-anglophone country; re-organising and redecorating a room; and slimming.

How happy I feel may also concern the absence of bad things going on in my life. When I am healthy, feel safe at home, feel financially secure in my job, and feel supported by family and friends, I am less likely to feel unhappy. However, I may be bored and doubt where I am going in life, and consequently not feel happy.

I recognise different qualities of happiness. For example, I recall something of the overwhelming excitement and joy I experienced when I first attended a Promenade concert at the Royal Albert Hall in London; when I first piloted a Piper Tomahawk; and when I stepped out onto the observation deck of the Empire State Building in Manhattan. I recall something of the serene joy I felt when crossing by jetfoil from Vancouver to Victoria, on sighting a pod of orca whales. I recall something of the awe I felt, surrounded by the Canadian Rockies, witnessing the Perseid meteor shower (13 August 1993); and surrounded by darkness on the hard shoulder of a French motorway witnessing the totality of a solar eclipse (11 August 2000). I recall something of my intensely moving joy when my daughter was born.

To be continued ...

Death of a former counselling client

2005-12-10T23:45:00.000Z

(I am mindful of confidentiality.) A former counselling client died a few days ago. I feel sad. Our formal relationship ended a year ago, so I have had plenty of time to break the bonds of attachment that had held the relationship together. I do not feel distraught or disturbed, but some quiet pity for the waste of the years that will not be lived, and sadness that the client's life was never easy.

I feel bad that I shall not go to the funeral. Were I to attend, my presence, if understood, would compromise relatives because of what I know about them. My presence would offer them no comfort, and I fear that my involvement would be seen as having contributed to the problems the client experienced. I said my goodbyes a year ago and have no need to perform the public ritual at the local crematorium. Instead, I shall hold the client's life in my thoughts periodically.

Two years later: I find myself often thinking of the client. I think about our work together; the compromises we each made; my care and compassion for you; and your likely respect for me. I often wonder what it was like to live your life, and to endure your pain, loneliness and suffering. In truth, I frequently wonder what it is like to live the life of many of the people I see for counselling. As a counsellor, I probably understand more about some aspects of a person's life than anyone else they know, and yet I am humbled by how little I know or understand about them. From Ginza to Grainger Town, we are each a mystery to each other, and often even to ourselves.

I hope that you felt supported and encouraged by me. I hope that, although I could not possibly understand you better than yourself, I helped you to understand yourself better.

Respecting the speed limit

2005-11-25T19:00:00.000Z

During my drive to work this morning, no differently from any of the mornings this week, this month, this ..., I watched the tail lights fading from view of almost every previously following vehicle. I drive at the speed limit.

A rational part of me tries hard to tell me that, provided that I am not affected by the behaviour of other car drivers, then their business is none of my own. However, this morning I was affected: a big waggon bore down on my car, tailgated with blazing headlights, overtook within a hair's breadth of my driver's door mirror, pulling back into the inside lane just as the road incline steepened, and the waggon slowed to a crawl up the hill.

A less rational part of me feels cheated: obeying the speed limit costs me time - time that I should prefer to spend at home, or at work, or shopping for Christmas presents. Whilst I resent paying in the currency of time, I should resent it less if most people also paid. ("Why pay the full amount when you can receive a discount?")

A moody part of me grumbled about drivers not observing the legal requirements - which is retrospectively hypocritical considering the speeds at which I have travelled on the motorways of continental Europe and North America. A slight rationalisation creeps in at this point: I admired the road signs along the Florida Keys warning that fines for speeding through roadworks would double during periods while operatives were at work - the cars and waggons on the motorway this morning were speeding through roadworks at which operatives were busy working. However, I did start fantasising about the retrofitting of tachographs in all private vehicles (electronic, with a transponder that downloaded driver and driving details to roadside receivers).

A highly rational part of me cautioned that it is generally safest to travel at the same speed as the rest of the traffic. I guess that I believe that driving in a manner significantly out of conformity with the expectations of other drivers is more dangerous than travelling at speed. When in doubt, I would prefer to 'go with the flow'. However, this part of me is easily intimidated by the law. This morning I felt resentful both towards most of the other drivers on the motorway, and also towards the speed restrictions, for placing me in a quandry about how best to drive: safely or legally?

However, the greater part of me knows that, whilst byways might be fine for milk floats and moggie thousands (Morris 1000), highways, particularly motorways, are for drivers with confidence. To drive in a manner that suggests a lack of confidence reduces the validity of my presence. Being overtaken by every car and waggon on the road was flaunting my unfitness for motorway driving. This attitude is strengthened by my awareness of the celebration in western culture of moving forward, of getting ahead, of striving. Lack of commitment demonstrates insufficiency.

I believe that vehicles travelling along roads represent a significant danger to life, limb and property. Had I the authority to do so, I would summarily reduce the blood-alcohol limit from 80 mg/litre to 0 mg/litre. Suggesting and imposing speed limits plays a key role in reducing the danger of roads. However, there is little evidence of public recognition regarding the plethora of emotional reverberations associated with attempting to drive to the speed limit.

Bridges

2005-11-23T07:00:00.000Z

I have just read an article about bridges on the BBC News website: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4450264.stm
I have for ever given importance to bridges. My first bridge was that in the tale: Three Billy Goats Gruff, in which a troll or an ogre hid under the bridge and menaced each of the goats as they attempted to cross the bridge. Bridges harboured hidden dangers. My second bridge was more friendly: that from which Pooh, Piglet and friends threw sticks into the stream, thus creating the game of 'pooh sticks'. As a young adult, I painted a picture of this scene, and felt proud of my portrayal of the wooden construction of the bridge. For a number of years, I used the poem by William Wordsworth, On Westminster Bridge, as the de facto home page for my website.

Many people contemplate taking their life by leaping from a bridge. In this respect, the Clifton Suspension Bridge (Bristol, UK) has a gruesome reputation. The Tyne Bridge (Newcastle, UK) and the Wearmouth Bridge (Sunderland, UK) also have something of a bad reputation regarding suicidal people, not least because of the resulting substantial traffic hold-ups. Recently, I was driving over the Redheugh Bridge (Newcastle, UK) when I was held up for an hour by police officers who were trying to 'talk down' a "jumper" (their term).

Walking across, or at least onto, bridges is an activity that I have always found disproportionately meaningful. Crossing from one place to another, from Buda to Pest, from Newcastle to Gateshead, from Manhattan to Queens or to Brooklyn, from Westminster to Southwark, from Denmark to Sweden, feels like a change of state, of manner, or expectations. Driving over the bridge is second best, but preferable to not engaging with the bridge at all. I love naughtiness of the scene in the otherwise lacklustre movie Anger Management in which Dr. Buddy Rydell, the character played by Jack Nicholson, demands that Dave Buznik, the character played by Adam Sandler, stops the car he is driving during the rush hour over the Williamsburg Bridge.

When I, eventually, visit Sydney (Australia), I intend to take the guided tour of the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

In Manhattan (New York, USA) it was a reverential moment when I set foot for the first time on Brooklyn Bridge. I have many photographs of the occasion. Walking across the Queensboro Bridge from Manhattan to Queens was demanding, but I am glad to have done it. I shall not feel as though I have visited San Franciso until I have walk across the Golden Gate Bridge.

In France, I have visited the Pont du Gard at Nimes, and the Pont Vieux in Avignon. It was wonderful to stand on the medieval bridge over the River Agout in Brassac (Tarn, France). However, of greater familiarity and significance are the various bridges across the River Seine in Paris. Their variety echo the vartiety of bridges across the River Thames in London (UK).

In Italy, it was important for me to walk cross the River Tiber, although I did not consider the bridges in Rome to be as inspirational as I had hoped. It goes without saying that I ache to walk on the Ponte Vecchio when I visit Firenze (Florence) for the first time. Of greatest Italian significance, however, are the bridges of Venezia (Venice). The vaporetto tannoy announcement "Rialto!" still rings in my ears. Despite their wheelchair unfriendliness, I love the bridges that cross the Canal Grande, as well as many of the smaller, less ostentatious bridges over obscure backwater Venetian canals.

In Germany I have walked across bridges in most of the cities I have visited, starting in the early 1970s with the Rein (River Rhine) in Koln (Cologne), and most recently the Spree in Berlin. I regret to holding a prejudice that German bridges are less singular and less romantic than they could be.

In Belgium, the canals of Brugge and Gent provide the opportunities for bridges, although it is the canals, rather than the bridges that I find attractive. In Amsterdam (Nederlands), though, the balance between canals and bridges feels a little more even. However, it is not easy to loiter on bridges in Amsterdam, for fear of being squashed by cyclists.

In Scotland in the late 1960s I crossed the River Tay, walking from Dundee and back again across the Tay Road Bridge. I had been driven in a coach across the Forth Road Bridge. It was only many years later that I drove my car across the Forth Road Bridge on my way from Edinburgh to Dunfirmline. However, on this latter occasion we stopped, parked the car, and walked onto the bridge, taking photographs of it, and its sibling bridge, the Forth Rail Bridge. I may, in fact, never have crossed the Forth Rail Bridge, other than in my imagination watching the movie The Thirty Nine Steps.

Driving south from Durham to Dover necessitates the uplifting experience of the Dartford Crossing (driving back north involves the Dartford Tunnel instead). Driving between Gloucestershire and South Wales is made special by crossing one or other of the now two Severn Bridges. When ploughing the Lancashire/Cheshire stretch of the M6, driving over the famous Thelwell Viaduct is a marvellous experience. I have never had occasion to cross the Humber, although I was excited to spy the Humber Bridge while overflying it en route from Newcastle to Amsterdam.

It gives me great satisfaction to walk from the Palace of Westminster across the River Thames. To me, Westminster Bridge is one (of several) centre of the world (Times Square in New York City is another). I ache to walk across the Millennium Bridge from Tate Modern to St Paul's Cathedral. It thrills me every time drive over Tower Bridge.

In Chester (Cheshire, UK) the Grosvenor Bridge is impressive-looking, but not very exciting to walk over. On the other hand, Handbridge, the medieval bridge, gives a sense of involvement with the River Dee. The suspension footbridge that spans the river from Grosvenor Park and the Groves to Queens Park and the Meadows is a holiday to walk across. Also in Chester are gates in the Roman and medieval city walls. As in York, these gates to the city are also bridges for pedestrians circumnavigating the city walls. Eastgate, with its world-famous clock, is a most pleasureable to stand and watch life pass beneath, up and down Eastgate Street and Foregate Street.

In York (Yorkshire, UK), my favourite bridges across the River Ouse are Lendal Bridge and the Ouse Bridge. In Sunderland (Tyne and Wear, UK) I have stood many a time on the Wearmouth Bridge looking downriver to the sea. In Newcastle I have sat eating my lunchtime sandwich on the Gateshead Millennium Bridge, driven many hundreds of times across the Tyne Bridge, made myself late by choosing to drive over the Swing Bridge, spontaneously ducked when driving over the High Level Bridge (with the East Coast Main (railway) Line on the upper deck), sped (in my car) across the Redheugh Bridge, and crawled (in trains) across the other rail bridge.

In Durham (Co. Durham, UK) I cross each of the bridges on foot, and some by car, with some frequency. Elvet Bridge and Framwellgate Bridge are medieval, both largely pedestrianised. Prebends Bridge is a formal, stylish, eighteenth century bridge in a wonderful woodland setting. Kingsgate Bridge (designed and built by Ove Arup) and the new Pennyfeather Bridge are both footbridges that are lovely to cross. Baths Bridge is the least interesting of the three footbridges. There are two road bridges: New Elvet Bridge and Milburngate Bridge. Of these two, the latter has the more interesting views being sited between two weirs.

A mile south of Durham are the outskirts of Shincliffe, the extended village in which I live. Built in seventeenth century, Shincliffe Bridge elegantly crosses the River Wear on the site of a former medieval bridge. Some hundred metres upstream is the site of a Roman bridge.

(More ...)

Political correctness

2005-11-01T14:26:00.000Z

I have moved this lengthy posting onto its own web page:

http://www.btinternet.com/~p.g.h/counselling_personal_development_political_correctness.htm

4 March 2006

National Geographical article on longevity

2005-10-30T09:39:00.000Z

Some people appear to consider long life to be a significant virtue. I consider long life to be a weak virtue, inasmuch as I can be of value to people who need me. Compared to a shorter life, a longer life, to me, principally provides greater opportunity to engage in whatever I consider to be virtuous. The people featured in the National Geographical article (November 2005) are leading lives that I would consider unspeakably boring: a shepherd in Sardinia, a woman living in some non-entity place in Japan, a Seventh Day Adventist woman in California. The lives of the people are characterised by a cultural conservatism circumscribed by a narrow geographical range. Whilst the article makes something of the diets of each of the people, contrasting it with a fast-food lifestyle, the message I take from it is about avoiding living life to the full. If travel and meeting a wide range of people shortens my life a little, I am willing to accept that cost, for the alternative would feel much more costly to me.