-3.6 Celsius in the summerhouse this morning. I even had trouble getting in since the bolt on the door was frozen solid. Slowly it is warming up. The iced spider web above really stands out against the ivy and the fence – I much prefer this weather to the grey, rainy gloom of yesterday. The light on a crisp, bright day like this is beyond wonderful.
It’s now the morning after the above and we are back to relentless rain …
In the news, almost two thirds of MPS voted for the criminalisation of any kind of protest near any site where animal experiments take place. It has to go through the Lords before becoming law but it is truly shocking, even terrifying, that so many MPS have voted against the democratic system which put them into power.
You can send an e-mail opposing this here: Oppose plans to designate “life sciences” as Key National Infrastructure – Protect the Wild
The Bayeux Tapestry
I noticed that there are plans for the Bayeux Tapestry to be loaned to the British Museum in return for some Sutton Hoo treasures and other items. I immediately thought this was a terrible idea. It made me think of the time I was interrogated by a government export committee, trying to get a licence for a bound manuscript to go to an American library which already had others by the same author. Using advanced technology allowing them to make a copy without opening the book flat out they guaranteed to send ir to the British Library but one of the ‘experts’ would rather I tried to copy it myself, risking damaging the very tight, contemporary binding, irretrievably. Fortunately I won my case (for more detail see the September part of my centenary reminscences).
The Bayeux Tapestry is believed to date to the eleventh century and is extremely fragile. The risks are many and potentially devastating. I was therefore pleased to see this article by the great David Hockney:
David Hockney: Why it’s madness to move the Bayeux Tapestry to Britain | The Independent
Name-drop alert – I have met Hockney a couple of times and he was utterly charming. I love his work in all its forms and he was a friend of the late director of my bookshop George Lawson, whose portrait he painted. My brother was at a Hockney exhibition at the Tate Gallery and the two of them took a cigarette break together outside on the steps (I wholeheartedly concur with Hockney’s insistence on the freedom to smoke and antipathy to state intervention and bossiness in such matters). Amusingly, a coachload of Japanese tourists pulled up and they all came out to take photos of them. I can’t imagine who they might have thought my brother was.
I am lucky enough to have seen the tapestry during a cycling holiday in Normandy when I was about sixteen years old. If someone from the UK wants to see it, it really isn’t that difficult a journey. By car, for instance, you just need to drive to Portsmouth, take the ferry to Cherbourg , whence it’s about an hour and twenty minutes to Bayeux. I could do the whole thing from here in six to eight hours. To cite my daughter’s universities, it takes me six hours to drive to Edinburgh and it’s around four and a half hours by train to Liverpool. There are public transport options for Bayeux of course as well. But some would rather risk the destruction of it, so that no one could see it at all.
There is nothing like the real thing, but there are a number of excellent replicas including an extraordinarily accurate mid-nineteenth century full-size version at Reading Museum.
AI and Only Connect
A wonderful edition of the quiz programme Only Connect this week which had me laughing out loud several times. One of the team captains seems to know everything about everything and I think could probably win the final on his own. He also does a note perfect impression of Michael McIntyre. One connection between “four seemingly unrelated clues” was that they were all discovered by AI. They were new antibiotics, recent craters on Mars, untaxed French swimming pools and, most interestingly to me, levels of biodiversity along UK railway tracks. AI has the capacity to analyse mountains of data from cameras and acoustic monitoring with great efficiency, identifying everything without the need for ground surveyors. At least it is doing some good. “Only Connect” was also the answer to a crossword clue this morning. I have often suspected that some of the questions on the show are written by crossword setters.
George Monbiot
Returning to George Monbiot’s How Did We Get Into This Mess?: Politics, Equality, Nature, Verso, 2016, part II, ‘Lost Youth’, begins with ‘Rewild the Child’ in which he makes a powerful case for getting urban schoolchildren out of the classroom and into the natural world. I couldn’t agree more that our education system provides an absurdly narrow set of skills and this has surely got worse since the essay was written in 2013.
“When children are demonised by the newspapers, they are often described as feral. But feral is what children should be: it means released from captivity or domestication. Those who live in crowded flats, surrounded by concrete, mown grass and other people’s property, cannot escape their captivity without breaking the law. Games and explorations that are seen as healthy in the countryside are criminalised in the cities. Children who have never visited the countryside – 50 per cent in the UK according to WideHorizons – live under constant restraint.”
I remember the group of American tourists marvelling at the sight of sheep when I last visited Avebury, as though they had never seen one before. Perhaps they hadn’t.
What Monbiot suggests is good not just for the children but for the environment too if they are encouraged to love, respect and be fascinated by it.
‘The Child Inside’ excoriates joyless planners, the giant house building firms, who give no thought to the welfare of children, the spaces they need to play, whatsoever. I suppose that for me Monbiot is almost always preaching to the converted.
‘Amputating Life Close to its Base’ addresses the pointlessness and destructiveness of so many jobs such as “Finance, management consultancy, advertising, public relations, lobbying … ” The senior management in place when I was at Sotheby’s never seemed to do very much except attend endless, futile meetings. Like Monbiot I saw this path followed by many of my peers. Bookselling is at least harmless. But big corporations offer more money.
GM is never one to mince his words: “As far as self-direction, autonomy and social utility are concerned, many of those who enter these industries and never re-emerge might as well have dropped dead at graduation.”
Talking of amputations, and I approach this topic with extreme trepidation (it is not addressed in this book), the CPS has drafted a document in which male circumcision is classified as a form of child abuse. FGM is abhorred by most, but the male equivalent has never seemed to have had the same scrutiny. For Muslims and Jews it is an important, symbolic sacrifice and elsewhere it has been undertaken for supposed but non-existent health and hygiene reasons. But what a profoundly weird thing to do to a small child without, obviously, their consent. There have been a number of deaths but even without those it seems to me utterly unjustifiable. I once attended a circumcision or at least the celebration which followed it in Malaysia. The pain and misery etched onto the small boy’s face as he lay under a bloody sheet said it all. Making the procedure safer and more regulated is a laudable aim but is really quite beside the point,
‘Bug Splats’ holds Barack Obama to account, generally loath though I am to criticise him myself. But is hard to disagree with the case that it is all very well mourning the killings of twenty children by a deranged individual in Connecticut in 2012, but how are they qualitatively different from the deaths of hundred of civilians in Pakistan including 64 children by means of CIA drone strikes? George W. Bush did even worse. These deaths may have been accidental but they were almost inevitable because of the means used and it is not good enough to write them off as collateral damage.
The other pieces in this section deal with same-sex marriage, pointing out that the idealised nuclear family is very much a Victorian construct, systematic injustice towards children, citing the Magdalene laundries and the British habit of sending children away to boarding school as young as seven or eight commonly leading to irreparable psychological damage (I am not sure why these people have children at all), and the culpability of the Catholic church for high abortion rates.
Some might find Monbiot a rather humourless writer. Not so. ‘A Modest Proposal for Tackling Youth’ made me laugh out loud several times. He pretends to take the view that young people should be treated as criminals by default.
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