RosieBell

Hearing books

If I had been a rich Victorian lady I would have had a paid companion, preferably a good mimic, to read to me. I do love audio books. I am a skimmer and skipper of non-fiction – history, politics, ecology - and find that listening makes me concentrate better. Also, you can do housework or gardening while you listen, or play endless games of Spider Solitaire.

A housebound friend guided me to LibriVox for books out of copyright. It is really quite astonishing the number of volunteers willing to read out Middlemarch or the lesser known works of E M Delafield. Astonishing too in their quality – many read excellently, can do a good range of different voices, and if most are American, so you get English regional dialects transposed into what I guess is Appalachian or Southern States American instead of George Eliot’s Midlander yokels and horse dealers, that has a charm as well. 

I have read a lot of nineteenth century English novels, some favourite authors (George Eliot, Jane Austen) many times. I like to dip into favourite scenes, favourite characters. Having them read aloud amplifies the wit, irony, view of humanity, and occasional lumpish moralising or absurd plots. For such a realistic and intellectual novelist, Eliot did rely a lot on the novelistic conventions of her day - discovered documents, unlikely co-incidences, revealed identities, and sudden fortunes.

You can find books in copyright on OverDrive, which is run by the libraries, so you borrow books on your library card. However their stock is small, and mostly not to my taste. If you are wanting to listen to a well-reviewed popular work of non fiction eg Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Thomas Cromwell: A Life (raised to the main stage by Hilary Mantel’s headline act trilogy on Thomas Cromwell ) you have to go to Audible, i.e. Amazon. Diarmaid MacCulloch’s biography is a detailed and well-told account of Cromwell and the English Reformation but a book I would normally borrow rather than own. If I wanted a book to refer to later I would look for something I can hold in my hands with an index.

However Audible has a monopoly on audio books, forcing ownership. We poor consumers have to make our way through the compromise and devil-dealing of Amazonworld when we are looking for a connector, charger or some other gadget. I do try not to buy those monopolistic mistreaters of their workforce, but it is too damned easy when the item you are searching for turns up on their site. Thus I have my subscription with Amazon’s Audible.

Amazon holds 90% of the audio book market and will not licence to libraries, which means authors cannot collect their Public Lending Rights and listening readers cannot borrow. Listening readers take out a subscription rather than purchase the books at £15-£30 – which, given that there is no actual physical book or distribution, seems very steep. Meanwhile Amazon can gouge the authors and publishers and the books are not available on any other platform except their own.

Someone taking on Amazon is Cory Doctorow, a popular author who has refused to have his publishers sell his books to Audible. He’s a big enough author to call the shots in that way and is now working on producing his own audio books and distributing them on an independent platform. That does take some organisation on his part, and not many authors would have the energy or knowledge. A writer with a medium audience must find it a fillip to be on Audible and leave the rest to their publishers. But Doctorow may start a new platform to rival Amazon’s monopoly or possibly create some other form of distribution and licensing of audio books, with lending rights sold to libraries.

He compares Amazon’s control of audio books to the poultry industry in the USA – supposedly independent chicken farmers are in fact serfs for a large corporation who control every aspect of their chicken raising. Amazon can’t actually control its writers to that degree, forcing everyone to write like J K Rowling or whoever their big sellers are. However it will be interesting to see if writers did shape their books for the Amazon market, as they did for the great lending libraries of the past, which had particular standards of propriety for their authors, whose fortunes they controlled.

 

Brightness falls into the air

The most famous verse about plague is Thomas Nashe’s In Time of Pestilence. 

Brightness falls from the air;
Queens have died young and fair;
Dust hath closed Helen’s eye;
I am sick, I must die –
Lord, have mercy on us!

Metaphorically, darkness has fallen in a time of anxiety. Literally, the air has never looked brighter and clearer. In a fine Spring the colours of flowers and young foliage are intense and the air is clean. In the highly polluted parts of the world eg Delhi they have seen blue skies; in China the smog has cleared from their mega-cities and they can see the stars.

It’s as if the world has been newly washed.

The pandemic’s impact on the environment has been staggering. Carbon emissions from the burning of fossil fuels are heading for a record 5.5-5.7% annual drop. From mid-January to mid-February, China’s carbon emissions fell by around 25%. In Delhi, a city with often the worst air quality in the world, pollution caused by PM2.5s reduced by roughly 75% as traffic congestion dropped by 59%. A 70% reduction in toxic nitrogen oxides was reported in Paris, while satellite imagery showed nitrogen dioxide levels in Milan fell by about 40%. In the UK, road travel has decreased by as much as 73% and in London, toxic emissions at major roads and junctions fell by almost 50%.

In my city the air pollution has fallen by 50%.

You can see it; you can smell it. The car-farting that was part of the background of getting round the city suddenly becomes noticeable from one individual vehicle.

There is plenty of evidence that polluted air exacerbates the chance of dying of Covid-19.

researchers in the US are building a case that suggests air pollution has significantly worsened the Covid-19 outbreak and led to more deaths than if pollution-free skies were the norm. As well as predisposing the people who have lived with polluted air for decades, scientists have also suggested that air pollution particles may be acting as vehicles for viral transmission.

I like to imagine that citizens will demand clean air as being essential as clean water and clean disposal of sewage – that is, that an aberration will only be tolerated if it is temporary.

What else has changed is the use of urban space. A pretty, cherry-tree lined street near me which was once a challenge to cross now has joggers running down the centre white line. On other streets children play. On the arterial route where we have had a long, exhausting campaign to get a mile of cycle lane, there are now children cycling and the Council is considering emergency measures to build a far longer cycle lane instead of the convoluted compromise that we had battled for (see an account of this here). 

The shared walking and cycling paths have been crammed; people are therefore using the streets as they should be used. They are looking at the masses of tarmac that had been taken over by single-occupancy cars and wondering why they couldn’t walk or cycle safely. And so the demand has come for more space, instead of pedestrians and cyclists being jammed at the edges for the convenience of the motor vehicles.

The bike shops have been selling out, my bike repair guy was working until 11pm to fix the bikes that had been rusting in garages, and the docking stations for hire bikes have become empty.

To accommodate streets now busier with bikes, as well as facilitate social distancing, some places have installed temporary cycle lanes or closed streets to cars. Pop-up bike lanes have appeared in cities including Berlin, Budapest, Mexico City, New York, Dublin and Bogotá. Governments from New Zealand to Scotland have made funding available for temporary cycle lanes and walkways amid the pandemic. In Brussels, the entire city core will become a priority zone for cyclists and pedestrians from early May for the foreseeable future. Meanwhile, temporary street closures to cars have taken place in Brighton, Bogotá, Cologne, Vancouver and Sydney as well as multiple US cities including Boston, Denver and Oakland. In England, restrictions have been lifted to enable and encourage councils to more quickly close streets to cars.

Large areas of London are to be made car free. The Council in my city has been closing off some streets for use on foot and cycle and are in the process of repurposing more. Emergency powers are being employed to take measures which used to grind through the laborious planning process. The UK government is pushing councils to produce pop up lanes and urging commuters to commute by cycle.

Active travel campaigners are dazed. The dream we have been chasing for decades suddenly materialises at the bidding of unlikely politicians - the wider pavements; filtered residential areas; cycle lanes on arterial routes; slow car speeds - anything that removes the domination of the car and making exercise as part of getting about instead of something done in gyms. If you want to see a crowd of slimmish, healthy people, go to a cycle demonstration. (Obesity is another condition that makes you more vulnerable to Covid-19.) This is our big break that has arrived after years of toil. But we may of course lose this opportunity as we return to some kind of normality and people hop back into their cars again, in fear of public transport.

Chris Boardman, the former Olympic champion and Greater Manchester’s first Cycling and Walking Commissioner, says that the 1950s level of traffic has made a nice environment, but that can only be continued by a change of transport policy.

we are at a crossroads and we could go either way, and I don’t know which way it is. For the first time we genuinely have a real choice, we could change our transport culture, the way we use our streets.

The pandemic has upended our society, as a war would, and after a war revolutions come. 1945 brought in a Labour government and the welfare state, which had been proposed for decades and demonstrated in other countries eg Michael Savage’s New Zealand of the late 30s. 

Of course we all hope for a future that resembles our desires. Socialists point to the rise in estimation of obviously useful jobs like nurses, cleaners, carers and bin collectors along with the general co-operation as proof of the desire for a better, more sharing society. A libertarian Facebook friend extols the local delivery of various goods like meat and vegetables instead of the supply chain, with a whiff of caveat emptor for hygiene control. A Conservative predicts the end of the expansion of universities and media and gender studies degrees. George Monbiot suggests changing to an eco-education.  And John Gray, ever the happy pessimist, looks forward to a time like Russia’s civil war with cannibalism on the table (so to speak).

I have modest visions. I have to say I would quite like to get back to my normality which includes my workplace village of office gossip, a coffee machine and two big screens instead of a poxy little laptop for working from home. With the addition – that commutes will be short; workplaces scattered; shopping more local; streets far more free of cars and every damned front garden space paved over for car storage dug up and used what it was intended for – flowers and vegetables.

VE Day

I found this terribly moving:-

The last recorded message to be intercepted from a German military communications network at the end of the Second World War has been revealed to the public for the first time.

It shows that Britain’s Bletchley Park code breakers carried on working in the dying days of the war to ensure there would be no final stand by the Nazis, according to GCHQ historian Tony Comer.

Mr Comer added the message, released to mark the 75th anniversary of VE Day, gives “a small insight into the real people behind the machinery of war”.

With the Allies closing in and the network having retreated to the German town of Cuxhaven, a messenger who is identified only as Lieutenant Kunkel sent out a statement.

The intercepted message, which was sent as he signed off on 7 May 1945 at 7.35am, said: “British troops entered Cuxhaven at 1400 on 6 May – from now on all radio traffic will cease – wishing you all the best. Lt Kunkel”.

Strange days of taboo and ritual

It’s so strange, so weird, so unprecedented. That’s what we say to each other, as we stay at home except for the walk in the streets where hardly a car moves, and then when one comes along it sounds extraordinarily loud. You step off the pavement and walk on the carriageway when you see someone approaching. In my neighbourhood it’s as if we were all having feuds, or had been scabs/strikers during the miners’ strike, or were members of an unpopular ethnic minority. (In the high bourgeois Edinburgh where I take my airings social distancing comes more naturally than to most.)

The air is much cleaner; here in Edinburgh we’re just coming to an end of weeks of bright spring days with a chilly east wind. With blossoms and bulbs and the trees with fresh leaves, it is the most spectacular time of year. I am enjoying the lovely quiet streets then catch a glimpse of something familiar - what is that golden palace – oh one of the private schools - I've not seen it from that angle before. In these days of disorientation they seem fragile, as if they may become ruins soon. Charles Jencks’ installation in the grounds of the Modern Art Gallery looks like a fortification from an archaeological dig in a thousand years’ time.

A school at an unexpected angle

What is strangest to me – and I hope anthropologists are studying this – is how quickly taboos have been established. I eye with shock someone in the supermarket riffling through packets of apples or courgettes before deciding on one. Don’t they know you don’t touch anything unless you are going to buy it? Also, when in the narrow little fish shop, after I’d waited to go in when it was empty of customers, the shop assistant brushed past me to get to the back of the shop. I reacted like a high-caste Brahmin being slapped by an untouchable.

Charles Jencks installation

As you can get up riots and murders in Pakistan by saying the someone is a blasphemer, I await denunciations of those who have had friends around for a visit, or have tripled their daily exercise quota, with crowds turning up shouting, a pitchfork distance between each member. That ancient gentleman walking very slowly up a steep hill in Edinburgh’s Newtown – he is well past eighty, let alone seventy. He should be at home! I admire the old gent’s spirit – this might be his last glimpse of sunshine.

On a holiday in Bulgaria once we were at a street market and were gob-smacked to see a stall selling Nazi memorabilia. My companion picked up a hip flask and found she had touched a swastika stamped on it. She immediately wiped her hands with a tissue, so taboo is that symbol in our culture. She also wiped the hip flask so her fingerprints would leave no trace.

Superstition – well that is from fear. In times of insecurity you look for omens; see patterns which are unrelated to anything that could possibly happen to you or your community. If you’re an Aztec, you make human sacrifices to placate the gods; if a Roman examine the entrails; if you’re a Christian you cross yourself. Life for most human beings as been a fairly insecure thing, and superstition and ritual are one way of coping with it.

So I follow that video that a load of people posted about how to unpack your shopping, quarantining non perishables for three days in the shed; taking the courgettes and apples from their plastic bags packaging (which might have been touched by that vile blasphemer with unclean hands in the supermarket) and pouring the contents (untouched by dangerous human hands) into the chill bin or bowls. I have a special part of my work surface, soaked in disinfectant, where the unpacking and sorting is done. There are several washing of hands episodes during this whole process. Another rule is to leave all the doors in the flat open so that when I return from the dangerous outside world, I can walk straight to the bathroom and do the hand-washing without touching any door handles.

This may be a woefully wrong way of protecting myself from the virus, however it’s a ritual, so if I leave it undone I become very uneasy. I used to be fairly careless about hygiene, now I’m a neurotic.

The result is that the outside world, the one with other human beings, is a zone of danger, and home the only safe place.

We are under orders, both from the government and our employers, and there is nothing much else we can do. Our culture exalts the maverick, the policeman who takes short cuts and gets results, obstructed by his superior who goes by the book; the free spirit; - that is the individual that advertising panders to. Now we have gone collective and people are highly judgmental about neighbours not following the rules. We’re as far from the sixties let it all hang out spirit that upended our culture as we can be. We are all dutiful now. 

But this is the phony war of course. We don’t know how long it will last; whether it will affect the supplies of food, let alone the luxuries. The bizarreness is of how the World War II spirit is evoked when many of us are complaining about how to get that particular type of coffee or sourdough that that little shop (now closed) provided, with the rider that we know we shouldn’t complain, plenty have it worse.

Kicked off

The National - here with breaking news. Always up to the minute. Today’s front page. The Declaration of Arbroath.

After all, it's not as if any other significant news broke in Scotland yesterday.

But the Nationalist paper aka as the Newsletter for the Bannockburn Re-enactment Society has to beat an ancient drum.

For those who are ignoring/don't give a toss about Scottish politics, the Chief Medical Officer in Scotland, who was ordering us not to travel except out of necessity, has spent her last two weekends with her family in their holiday home in Earlsferry on the Fife coast, about 40 miles from Edinburgh. This has filled the news bulletins, UK as well as Scottish. She might have got away with one visit, but two?

I've seen Scottish Nationalists wanting to close the border at Gretna Green, since they think only the English head to holiday homes in Scotland. Alas, it's a Central Belt habit, driving to the second home to the north. Fife though… There are plenty of jokes going round about that.

My own take is that a grovelling apology would have been enough, because in this unprecedented time decision-makers are under huge stress and should be cut a lot of slack. I can’t stand Sturgeon but everyone says she is sounding as if she’s in control of the situation, which is an important talent in frightening times. If the Chief Medical Officer is otherwise good at her job, leave her there. I don’t like the snitching and clyping and general self-righteous snooping that’s taken over the country. 

However much of the Scottish public were furious, as many have been not visiting aged parents and grown up children, which has caused considerable anxiety and heart break. Someone who couldn’t attend a funeral because of the No travel edict is not going to take a kind view of the Chief Medical Officer walking on the beach with her family.

Sturgeon handled this very badly, hauling Calderwood in front of a painful press conference for her to apologise, saying she would be keeping Calderwood on, and then overnight Calderwood resigned. Evidently Sturgeon was dithering – wanting to hang on to her friend and adviser, then realising from the general public anger that she couldn’t. Calderwood’s public mea culpa was an unnecessary humiliation. Though I think the public mood would now exile her to a factory in Leven (a nasty part of Fife) to sew face-masks.

We Happy Few, We Band of Brothers

Varda’s presentation about discoveries in a National Car Park– “Very interesting talk on a fascinating hoard, and as ever with such things it throws up more questions than it answers. I mean, why were so many Cycling Proficiency Badges buried together?”

From Detectorists. And this cracks me up with laughter. It’s from Episode 3, Series 3, and the speaker is Terry, former policeman and the Chairman of the Danebury Metal Detecting Club (DMDC) and author of Common Buttons of North-West Essex. “Any questions for Varda before she rests her voice? She must be hoarse after that marathon.”

Poor Varda is normally snubbed, and barely speaks. She’s part of a Lesbian couple, the only women detectorists, because detectorism is a mostly male pursuit, like train-spotting.

Danebury is a pretty small town in north Essex. Essex is normally a punchline for jokes about crude materialism, heavy drinking and vulgarity however, it has miles of the rolling tree-clumped English prettiness and the sense of peace and safety of the best English countryside. The DMDC meet in Danebury scout hall, hung with Union flags, where Terry’s wife, the ever smiling glammed up Sheila hands out refreshments, of varied quality.

I have come late to the series. I caught a couple of episodes by accident and I read reviews, saying much about the “quiet desperation” of the two main characters Lance (Toby Jones, brilliant as ever) and Andy, (Mackenzie Crook, best known as the creepy toadeater Gareth in The Office). These two nerdish mates go metal detecting together, and their dialogue is catch phrases, running jokes and detectorist jargon. Their lives seem to be hardly quietly desperate at all, but fulfilled since they have the refuge and focus of a harmless obsession – something we should all pray for.

Lance and Andy, scruffy and gadgetty, walk with bent heads about gentle Essex waiting for signals from the past, even from a 1980s ring-pull. Occasionally there’s a glimpse of a priest burying Anglo-Saxon jewels during a Viking raid or a Roman girl holding a pot of coins in a funeral ceremony. Their chief griefs are a rival Detectorist gang, the Dirt Sharks, troubles getting “permissions” to detect on farms and inane questions from invading tribes of Ramblers. This is Orwell’s England of eccentric hobbies and pubs, the pubs now offering open mics and pub quizzes.

The result is a great feeling of warmth towards the soulmates Andy and Lance, as they play Kerplunk together in a tent while they watch over a potential hoard threatened by thieves. Lance tells Andy that there are Kerplunks in every charity shop in the country and that Sue Ryder has a notice saying No more Kerplunks. Meanwhile the magpies watch them mockingly from their nest in a great old oak. “A lot of sunlight wasted on a tree” says the contractor who is about to knock down the great old oak to install a solar panel farm.

Their private lives can be difficult, partly because of their habit of lying to their womenfolk, however the girlfriend/wife/daughter are mostly lovely in their different ways, even Andy’s mother-in-law, Diana Rigg, a long way from Emma Peel, is kind and understanding, if ruefully realistic about her son-in-law’s short-comings.

I get fed up with the domination of comedy and comedians. Radio 4 is awash with mediocre monologuists, guffawing gagsters, woeful one-liners; there are more comedians working than engineers (I haven’t looked that up) and they aren’t funny. It’s mostly smart-arsery and tribal in-jokes. Detectorists is a comedy that I laugh at and that makes me feel happy. Also very English, like Shaun of the Dead, where Simon Pegg after a long battle against zombies, ends up in an English heaven of the Sunday papers, a roast dinner at the pub and a computer game with his zombie best mate, who he keeps in the Englishman’s haven, the garden shed.

Sisterhood and its discontents

The latest film version of Little Women directed by Greta Gerwig is a hit which has been nominated for six Oscars. A film with so many women in the main roles is rare, and here are four individual March sisters, their saintly mother and their curmudgeonly aunt. I liked it well enough. The acting is good, it is calendar pretty and I could see the point of the framing device, with the time scheme changed so it is adult Jo, a grown-up writer looking back her girlhood. Of course I have read the books. Others were puzzled and got lost with a character one minute at a debutante dance, the next married and sad, the next skipping about. Also, the scenes were short and choppy so that events like Amy nearly drowning under the ice weren’t built up properly, and it was busy, with the girls constantly hugging or prodding each other. That is meant to be a sisterly dynamic but the determined exuberance got very wearying.

Little Women has been loved by little and large women ever since it was published in 1868. Women writers love Jo, turning out stories, plays and poems and uninterested in the feminine world. Simone de Beauvoir loved the book because Alcott was on Jo’s side, and Jo was an intellectual and destined to have an unusual life (self-identification there!). Jo sits in trees reading books, she detests the “ladylike” cage and she has a wonderful friendship with a boy her own age, Laurie. The tomboyish Jo, the future writer, and sensitive Laurie, the future musician, are a terrific pair. Their friendship is joyful - skating together; running together; laughing, plotting, confiding – and is far better than any love story.

De Beauvoir:-

the relationship between Jo and Laurie touched me to the heart. Later, I had no doubt, they would marry one another; so it was possible for maturity to bring the promises made in childhood to fruition instead of denying them; the thought filled me with renewed hope.
(From Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter)

Like most of its readers, de Beauvoir was disappointed that Jo and Laurie did not marry in the end. The magical pair grow up, he proposes marriage and she turns him down because she is not in love with him. Laurie fails as a musician and to the consternation and disappointment and even fury of many readers, he marries Jo’s younger sister, the insufferable brat, Amy, who had once burned her sister’s manuscript in a spoiled child’s tantrum.

Ursula Le Guin thought Alcott treated this appalling crime against a writer rather lightly.

We first meet Jo as a writer when sister Amy vengefully burns her manuscript, ‘the loving work of several years. It seemed a small loss to others, but to Jo it was a dreadful calamity’. How could a book, a several years’ work, be ‘a small loss’ to anyone? That horrified me. How could they ask Jo to forgive Amy? At least she nearly drowns her in a frozen lake before forgiving her.
(The Fisherwoman’s Story)

In the USA Little Women is one volume. In the UK Little Women splits in two, the second book, Good Wives, following the sisters’ story 3 years on. I first read Little Women when I was about 12 and assumed that Jo would marry Laurie. My own sister plot-spoiled saying no, he married Amy. I was surprised - didn’t the heroine always marry the hero?

Amy has never been forgiven. She has committed terrible sins – of being a snob, a social climber, a failed artist (many women writers regard being a Creative as the only satisfactory destiny) and for marrying the ideal chap, the handsome and sensitive (and rich!) one, who adores you however untidy and vociferous you are, that we all deserve.

Gerwig tries to round out Amy in the 2019 film version, giving her an unlikely speech. Amy does mean to make a mercenary marriage* but no young woman of her time would have been so explicit and aware.

And as a woman, there’s no way for me to make my own money. Not enough to earn a living or to support my family, and if I had my own money, which I don’t, that money would belong to my husband the moment we got married. And if we had children, they would be his, not mine. They would be his property, so don’t sit there and tell me that marriage isn’t an economic proposition, because it is. It may not be for you, but it most certainly is for me.

That’s making Amy a modern woman for a 2019 audience and it jars. (Here’s a clever and fun video of various interpretations of Little Women reflecting the attitudes of the times.)

Hadley Freeman, hat-pin sharp as usual, didn’t much care for the film. 

… imposing modern attitudes on canonical characters in the belief they must be relatable is just lazy. This happens a lot with the Bennet sisters in Pride And Prejudice, and here with the March sisters. A good literary adaptation brings us to the characters, not the other way round; in Emma Thompson’s Sense And Sensibility, Thompson and Kate Winslet don’t wang on about “the marriage economy”, as Gerwig’s Little Women do. Instead, we see how we would have thought in the 19th century. Because it’s one thing to fantasise that we are Jo, and quite another to fantasise that Jo is us. This tendency to overrelate to any fictional character, whether it’s Jo or Fleabag, is less about art and more about narcissism. We don’t have to make everything about ourselves.

I myself eventually thought that the Amy/Laurie marriage made sense. Laurie loves the whole March family, who warmed up his chilly and lonely life when he was a lad. Laurie is a musician manqué, Amy an artist ditto, (she is not a “genius”, she declares), they are a handsome, well-mannered pair who shine in high society and resolve that they will share their wealth as philanthropists and arts patrons – a perfectly decent ambition. Jo tells Laurie when she turns him down that he would eventually hate her graceless manners, her Bohemianism, her eccentricity, her scribbling in attics, and she’s quite right.

Alcott takes some pains in Good Wives to show Amy maturing and gaining depth. I always enjoyed the Amy parts – her humiliations at the hands of richer girls, her entry into high society via her beauty, charm and talent, her glamorous European travels and her refurbishing her clothes and prinking to shine at a ball. I was sorry that the film didn’t include the proposal scene, when Amy and Laurie agree that they will continuing rowing in the same boat. (I’m not the only Amyist).

Meanwhile the Jo parts were much duller. She allows herself to be moralised at by tedious Professor Bhaer for writing pot boilers and for taking an interest in anti-Christian intellectual society. Gerwig got round the awfulness of Bhaer by turning him from an ugly German professor into a gorgeous French critic to be Jo’s unconvincing love interest. She does this in a “meta” way. Jo is the author of the story and her publisher is demanding a happy ending, so Gerwig makes this lovely chap someone Jo has conjured up for the conventional reading public. That’s a slight joke on Gerwig herself when you come to think of it, as she has conjured up an anachronistic Amy to please and flatter the equally conventional film-going public.

*Amy is accepting the attentions of a rich Englishman – how would his family have regarded him marrying a penniless American? American girls were only acceptable wives to the Upper Ten Thousand if they were rich. .

THE BANNOCKBURN RE-ENACTMENT SOCIETY

I haven’t written this blog for a while as I mostly do cycle campaigning these days. But I was moved to write about Scottish nationalism, since it had gone from the constant murmur to a loud scream after the General Election.

That made me look at the sites mentioned in the post below along with the comments. The same kind of people who would have called for a proper socialist state established by revolution are now calling for an independent state after a UDI. There is the same sense of entitlement, the same resentment of the monstrous injustice that they are being denied what is their right by the majority who didn’t vote for it, the same longing for actual physical confrontation to prove their point of the totally oppressive nature of the British state, the same list of examples to follow but instead of Nicaragua, Cuba or Venezuela it’s Catalonia, Slovenia, Slovakia, the Balkan states generally and the Baltic states. And the same declarations to campaign and campaign for ever. And to work out constitutions. And do a lot of other pointless political work for a fantasy nation state.

Mike Small at Bella Caledonia does squash some of these mismatched exemplars and he himself is involved in a bread and butter campaign Citizen, to prevent Edinburgh being bought and sold for commercial and tourist gold, which I could get behind.

But how wearisome the combination of the Bannockburn Re-Enactment Society and Sim City are. And what a waste of political time and energy, not to mention money as there’s always crowd-funding for yet another poll, or court case, or to drop into buckets at All Under One Banner marches to be pocketed by a grifter. 

The Auld Sang

Well, that’s her telt. I wonder who wrote Boris Johnson’s letter to Nicola Sturgeon ? I don’t think Johnson is particularly well-acquainted with Scotland, but he closed the right holes on the chanter with this, at least for Unionists. Actually, it’s what I would have dictated to him.

1. Keep it short – don’t offer any concessions like Cameron did after the last indyref with transferring of more powers. It doesn’t matter what you give them – it’s indy, indy all the way.
2. Quote the “once in the generation” declaration by Salmond and Sturgeon. Nationalists hate it, but it was on their campaign literature as well as in their mouths, and it was part of their blueprint for independence, the White Paper.
3. Say that you will uphold the democratic decision of the people of Scotland.
4. Point out that the constant campaigning for independence has been bad for Scotland “Get back to the day job” is a constant jibe against Sturgeon as she pretends to be Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition.

Sturgeon didn’t want another indyref anyway. The numbers aren’t with her and there are still details to be worked out like currency and the economic situation. As the GERS (Government Expenditure and Revenue in Scotland) figures don’t make independence look good our Finance Secretary of Scotland, Derek Mackay, is working on some pretendy figures instead because Nationalists are “frustrated” by the actual ones. All this is busy work to keep the faithful stoked, and appease those saltire wavers who turn out in atrocious weather to march through Glasgow.

Indy supporters are not happy about Johnson's letter and many are snarling about Sturgeon and the SNP. Stuart Campbell aka Wings over Scotland, a prominent writer during the 2014 shindig who hates the SNP, has been telling his followers that they weren’t going to get the promised Indyref in 2020 and is now gloating with a Cassandra’s satisfaction at being proved right. I won’t link to the horrible sod – you can google and read the comments if you want to see Nationalists in all their mad Braveheart glory.

Craig “Conspiracy” Murray, who also has a huge following, now has a cunning plan for a UDI and a referendum afterwards, but we must be prepared to face the British Army – and his own army of followers are warmly in support of this. Because Scotland v Britain is of course like Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia v the USSR. Those who don’t wave Union flags are doing forced labour in gulags.

There’s a strain of nationalist thinking which really wants to be Ireland in 1916; or Hungary in 1956.

Mike Small, at Bella Caledonia, is a far saner voice. He knows that the indy side haven’t got the numbers and that Craig Murray’s plan is pants, so his solution is more campaigning. One of his commenters suggests bussing Scots down to London to do a giant moon at Westminster Palace. That show of white Scots arses will certainly strike the MPs blind.

This letter of Johnson's will be spun as Scotland insulted, and Sturgeon not taking lectures from a lying Tory. "Not take lectures from" is Sturgeon's usual response to any criticism. My own thought - really wish - is that all except do and die-hards are sick to death of referendums and constitutional issues, and when looking at Brexit, conclude that chasing indy now is jumping from the frying pan into the fire.

There was a time when Sturgeon said it was “disrespectful and wrong” to keep banging on about independence while the numbers weren’t with her, but there’s too much pressure from the hardliners for her to shut up about it, and as she hasn’t got any other political ideas and her government’s record on ordinary issues (transport, education, health) is no great thing, this is her only recourse. Expect her to call for yet another vote in Holyrood, declare she has a mandate, and for the saltires to keep waving in the streets.

To the tune of First We Take Manhattan:-

They sentenced us to endless referendums,
This year next year oh weill some time soon,
Never mind we havena got the numbers.
First we take Clackmannan, then we take Dunoon.

(Duncan Hothersall’s twitter feed about the so-called democratic deficit and “mandate” that the SNP are now claiming.)

Everyone's gone to the moon

Fifty years, half a century, as long ago as that, since the first moon landing. The BBC has done a couple of excellent programmes, one, Moon, on Radio 4, a low-key dramatization of the Apollo 11 journey, the dialogue being the transcript of the astronauts and the Control Centre at Houston. How gripping is the laconic technical speech in flat military American with occasional banter and then the sudden burst of poetry of the Eagle has wings, the Eagle has landed. You of course know how it turns out but are thrilled. It is the thrill of ritual, like the Nativity story or the Christian burial service, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. You can see that the kind of suspense a thriller tries to build with the unknown and shocking here is done with the known, the expected, the ever repeated.  You echo the breath of relief the control centre gives when the ship comes back into signal again. 

Channel 4 did a good 2 parter, Moon Landing Live, following the media coverage at the time. There's an interview with Armstrong's parents where the interviewer asks what Armstrong had to say about it, and his dad says it’s hard to get anything out of him at any time. A quiet boy. And his mother couldn’t remember his stilted One Small Step line.  It was a little like Monty Python’s Life of Brian when the spectators garble the Sermon on the Mount.

BBC4’s Chasing the Moon is beyond praise, quite brilliant, the footage beautifully put together and with some great voices including Sergei Kruschev, Nikolita Kruschev’s son. Von Braun, the handsome, charismatic ex-Nazi as project manager who wowed the politicians. The competition between the two super-powers, the ambition and vision of Kennedy.  A lot of the workings were fairly inglorious. The astronauts had to be turned into superstars and do a lot of publicity, which they all hated. Congressmen had to like shaking their hands.  There were pork-barrel politics. Not a pretty sight a lot of it, but what great enterprise has never had this? The medieval cathedrals which were built for the glory of God and now overwhelm us had the same driving  motives of showing-off by kings, bishops and lords, and their craftsmen after years of training and learning, died in the working out of their schemes, as the astronauts died in Apollo 1.

I’ve only got to the end of Episode 4, to Apollo 8, and we have finally left Earth’s gravitational field and are now orbiting the moon. I say “we” as when it was declared this was for all mankind, enough 100s of millions shared that sense, as a grand city is for all who see it and visit it. Earthrise has now been broadcast to give us a wondrous view of our little planet.

I wasn’t so full of wonder at the time. I do remember the moon landing and I think my parents were awestruck. My mother said how brave the astronauts were. I said I thought Captain Cook was braver, as the Endeavour sailed out for years into totally unknown territory and was out of contact, whereas these astronauts were in constant communication and looked after.  My mother got annoyed, as she always did at any intellectual opposition and us throwing cold water over her enthusiasms, poor woman. About 30 years later my sister reported she had had exactly the same conversation.  I have a sense that the young were more cynical than the old, and muttered about wasting money.

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:

I am more thrilled now, that I lived in a time when this happened; I am more thrilled when NASA sends us pictures of Saturn; and think sometimes, why aren’t we in a state of unrelenting amazement that our species is capable of producing such wonders among the waste and rubbish.

So I’m seeing it as an aesthetic rather than a scientific achievement, since the science and technology are beyond me. This is at a time when visual artists don’t seem concerned with beauty but are supposedly meant to outrage or disturb us – they don’t aim for the sublime. Others will be excited by the physics or the machines. Matthew Walter’s article chimed with me.

The primarily aesthetic nature of the first Apollo mission becomes clearer when one considers it from the perspective of both the participants and the spectators. The lunar landing was not a scientific announcement or a political press conference; it was a performance, a literal space opera, a Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk that brought together the efforts of more than 400,000 people, performed before an audience of some 650 million. It was a victory, as Armstrong immediately recognized, not of Western democratic capitalism over Soviet tyranny, or of America over the rest of the world, but for humanity. It belongs to the United States no more than Michelangelo does to Italy or Machu Picchu to Peru. "Gladly, like His suns fly / Through the heavens' grand plan / Go on, brothers, your way, / Joyful, like a hero to victory," Schiller begged over Beethoven's trumpets. The entire world saw three men obey.

He s sees the moon landing as a great work of art, and we can gasp at it as at great works of art, and view it over and over again even though we know the ending. The men walked on the moon and came back, the module clicking into place, and their cocoon capsule splashing safely in to our first home, the sea.