Voice Mobility

The other day, I recorded my first podcast. Since I had not been in a recording studio for many years, the sound engineer suggested that I make a sample recording - just a few minutes long - and then listen to the playback before returning to my soundproof booth to do the real thing.

I sat down with the engineer and he pressed Play on my sample. What do you think? he asked at the end. I sound a bit posh is what came out, immediately. He was surprised (maybe he had heard no poshness) and puzzled, Is that a bad thing?

Well, yes and no. Yes, because it may give listeners the wrong idea about me. I didn’t start life with a posh voice; I acquired one as a result of succeeding educationally and thereby becoming socially mobile. But I’ve always liked to think that my voice has not been quite so mobile. I still recall once meeting a university acquaintance from a similar background but a decade after we had both left Oxford. I was appalled by his accent, Oxford and affected. But it probably wasn’t affected at all; it’s likely that he had just assimilated more easily.

Now here am I, someone who hasn’t taught a university seminar or been to a middle class dinner party for twenty years, placing myself in front of a microphone and immediately, to my own ear, sounding posh. Maybe the subject matter explains it: I was reading something I had written about Milan Kundera’s theory of the novel. Maybe if I had been talking in a less scripted way about my childhood or a pet hate I would have sounded different.

I had other criticisms of my first attempt. My voice was too high pitched - first night nerves; I spoke too slowly - I was afraid of stumbling over words, an age-related hazard. And when I listened to the final product, I thought I sounded a bit camp. The editor of Booklaunch (Stephen Games) who had requested the podcast picked up on the last two aspects, asking that in any future recording I should be a bit faster (but not less dramatic). 

But there is a case to be made for the poshness. The voice in which I read my piece about the novel was appropriate to the subject matter. It was full of words I never learnt as a child, only much later from teachers and friends. If I had read it in my original accent, it would have sounded false because a listener would realise that those words being spoken in an identifiably lower class accent would never have been spoken in a lower class home. That falseness would have been more distracting than the poshness. In contrast, if someone who had grown up speaking with a Scottish or West Indian accent had read my piece for me, it would be less distracting or not distracting at all because those accents are not in themselves class-related. In middle and upper class Scots and West Indian homes, one also talks about the novel.

To hear the finished podcast, go to

https://www.booklaunch.london/spring-2019-page-13

Memory meets De tre vise men of Dalarna

Click on Image to Enlarge

Like death and taxes, memory losses are inevitable. We may swear to ourselves or to someone else that this moment will never be forgotten but it will, even before old age or worse sets in. As psychologists keep trying to tell us, to little effect, our minds constantly reorganise our memories: deleting, mislaying, editing, revising, inventing. Our memory is a bit like Microsoft run amok, improving or weeding to its own satisfaction yesterday’s Word docs while we sleep.

There are things I would like to write about but when I sit down to it, I promptly discover that I remember no more than the file name. Oh, they are splendid file names but standalone they do not make a splendid story.

The objects which pass through our hands perhaps have a bit more success in being there when we want them. It’s true that we lose things, bin them, give them away, forget where we have put them but, still, some survive and often for much longer than the memories which we may hope to find still attached - but don’t.

Today I come across this charming card which has managed to accompany me through many house moves since it was purchased in 1964 - fifty five years ago! The summer of that year - I had just turned seventeen -  I organised for myself a holiday job in Sweden, working in the Hotel Siljansborg situated beside Lake Siljan in the province of Dalarna.

Everyone is familiar with one Dalarna thing: those simple, chunky carved wooden horses painted in bright colours (traditionally red) with simple floral decorations in green, white, blue and yellow - the last two the colours of Sweden’s flag. When I came to the end of my time at the Hotel Siljansborg, I was given one as a leaving present and I still have it.

The carved horses were a portable part of a larger tradition of visual folk art, centred in Dalarna, which flourished in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and which produced painted furniture and wall decorations in which the floral motifs ( the technical name is Kurbits and I was able to google it because I still remembered the word) are always present.

My card has pin holes in the top corners so at one time I must have displayed it. A horizontal banner across the top spells out what the original depicts: De Tre wise man matthei 21 Cap Malat ar 1841 an A L S  ( The Three Wise Men Matthew chap[ter] 21 Painted [in the] year 1841 by A L S ).

Aren’t they splendid? Not a whiff of the Middle East. No donkeys or camels to bring them to the stable, just fine Dalarna horses. The three kneeling figures who could have been modelled on the local priest or lawyer - maybe they were; a rather patrician Joseph and a matronly Mary, her black leather shoes peeking out from under her full skirts. It looks as if having babies is something she takes in her stride.

We are very familiar with the idea that human beings fashion God in their own image; in Dalarna, they imagined the Nativity as something which happened not so long ago and just down the road. But I suspect that their religious beliefs were at least as robust as those of people who were brought up on donkeys, flowing robes, and sandals. But either way, the Dalarna folk artists were thinking rather like those who re-thought Shakespeare as West Side Story.

On the back of the card, the work is titled De tre vise men (modernising the spelling) and given as originating from the small town of Rättvik which provided the postal address for my hotel. Then it gives the current location of the work as the Zornmuseet. That opens a file: one day, during hours off work, I walked to the Anders Zorn museum in Mora. It googles and I am immediately offered a portrait of the artist (1860-1920) which I recognise as one of which I took away a postcard. But though I can google as much of his work as I want, I can’t see the folk art which must also have been in the museum.

I  google a bit more. It is out of the question that I walked. Mora is 37.8 kilometers from Rättvik!

The World Memory finds and opens its files for me in half a second and, once again, forces me to revise my own memory.

*

I write more about that summer in Sweden in my memoir of childhood, I Have Done This In Secret (degree zero 2018)

Do The Dead Have Any Rights?

Whatever rights the dead may have, they are secured for them by the living. A man writes a will disinheriting his children; they go to court to have the will set aside and a living judge decides the matter. Another man writes a will endowing a fund out of which lawyers can be paid to defend his reputation against all-comers. But in a jurisdiction where English law prevails, that would be pointless: there is no offence of libelling the dead. Only the living can be libelled. In France, the dead are protected too.

The living grant rights to the dead, no doubt guided very much by what rights they themselves would like to be accorded when they die. Rights for the dead are about anticipation, not retrospection. So in most cultures, maybe all, there are protocols for handling a dead body and disposing of it. Failure to observe those protocols is both shocking and probably a sign of some breakdown of the social order. If the protocols dictate at least a shroud and an individual grave, then something has gone very wrong if naked bodies are tipped into common graves, as often they are in times of plague and war. 

But does it make sense to say that the rights of the dead have been violated in such circumstances? After all, they know nothing of what is going on. And we can understand and criticise what is happening without invoking the language of rights. So, for example, we could say that if we don’t show respect towards the dead, we will soon cease to show respect to the living, to each other. And that is not going to be good news. This argument is a cautionary, prudential one rather than a rights-based one.

It is also the case that the language of rights seems inappropriate where there is constant flux in the protocols which set out the rights of the dead. It is only very recently in my culture that burning bodies has been accepted as an alternative to burying them; even more recently that it has been thought acceptable to harvest vital organs - with or without explicit consent -  from those who may have died only minutes beforehand. It doesn’t seem that “rights” come into it. It looks more like “needs must”.

Nonetheless, we do accord rights to the dead which are quite extensive and sometimes not always explicitly reflected upon. Most of these rights relate to property and reputation. Some deserve to be challenged.

An elderly widow with no children and a great deal of inherited wealth writes a will leaving the whole lot to a donkey sanctuary. She has every right to do so. There is no Public Advocate enabled to go before a judge and argue that the will should be set aside. There is no one who can stand up to say: Your Honour, the reality is that we have far too many donkey sanctuaries; donkeys are being bred to populate them; the sanctuaries are not much more than a lucrative scam for those who promote them. I urge you to divert the late widow’s wealth to the oncology department of her local hospital where, at public expense, she received extensive treatment for several years. It would be right for her estate to be put back into the community from which she took so much. Ditch the fake donkeys, Your Honour!

It would require a revolution in our thinking to find that argument compelling. I would welcome such a revolution, but as things stand, the imagined Public Advocate’s argument is nothing more than an open threat to property rights which - in our minds - are inextricably linked to the idea that those are things which can be passed on. Quite cursory analysis would show that there is really not much of a link between the idea of a property right and the idea of an indefinitely and indefeasibly transmissible property right. A practical demonstration of the distinction between property right and transfer right was once provided in traditional gypsy cultures where both the caravan and its contents were burnt on the death of its owner. But woe betide anyone who had thought to steal from the caravan during the lifetime of its occupant.

So much for property. What about reputation? Here there is a cluster of protocols which create or enshrine rights to externalised memory, to memorials. Someone dies, they are buried, and their grave marked with a tombstone giving name, dates, some personal details and maybe a Commendation, “A Kind Father to all His Children”; “She Loved the Donkeys”. All this involves several financial transactions, none of which guarantee that tombstone in perpetuity. In practice, grave furniture is quickly neglected by those who have paid for it; the weather takes its toll on soft stone; the graveyard fills up - and eventually everything is bulldozed to make way for new graves or simply public green space. The dead are forgotten. No one much minds because the protocol has allowed memory to be gradually, not abruptly, extinguished. Those who mourn have been given their time.

In contrast, when a memorial - a monument - to a dead person is erected in public space, whether at government expense or funded by public subscription, it seems to be some kind of assumption that they thereby acquire a right to stand or sit there, in stone or bronze, in perpetuity. There is no protocol for taking these things down, no equivalent to the protocol which allows graveyards to be cleared out. In the context of lively conflict over statues of controversial figures, it would actually be helpful to develop some kind of intellectual framework which would aid us in deciding when a statue’s lease on public space has run out. 

One criterion might be whether we still remember the name and history of a person memorialised, regardless of whether the memory is fond or hostile. Yes, for most of us, it’s still Nelson on top of the column in Trafalgar Square. But who are those characters who occupy the surrounding plinths? If you can’t so much as name them, why would you want them to remain there, in perpetuity? It’s not as if the hack work of monumental sculpture ever has any artistic interest and only rarely can it claim architectural merit. Without a protocol for removing the upright monumental dead, our urban public spaces are simply doomed to become more and more cluttered by forlorn figures, very rapidly forgotten by us and attracting the interest only of dogs - the reason for plinths in part to protect trouser legs - and pigeons.

The Bank Note Problem (Second Attempt)

For First Attempt, scroll down to 17 July 2019

In Ruritania, there are four denominations of banknotes. The Ruritanian National Bank issues them in unequal quantities, according to perceived need, and on a rotating basis changes the designs to make forgery more difficult and less remunerative. One design is changed every three years, and once changed the old notes for that denomination cease to be valid. So each design has a life of twelve years.

In the past, the designs comprised abstract and complicated backgrounds (so-called guilloché or burelage ) combined with unique fonts in mostly calligraphic styles, all designed to defeat attempts at forgery. But at the urging of a modernising Ruritanian government, some decades ago now, the bank changed its policy and all new designs have represented dead people who are remembered for their achievements. The modernising government wanted to see different kinds of people and different kinds of achievement represented, but did not bind the bank to any particular formula.

This posed the bank a problem. How many different kinds of people are there? How many kinds of achievement? Without answers to those prior questions it was very hard to know how to proceed. The Bank did not at first identify this problem and started out without any clear answers, rather hoping that “obvious” cases would present themselves, as indeed they did ; Mr Shakespeare, Ruritania’s most famous and acclaimed dead playwright, had his image uncontroversially placed on a twenty pounds sterling banknote in 1970. It was true but irrelevant that there have always been doubts about whether images of Mr Shakespeare look at all like the man they purport to represent.

The lack of clear principles of choice immediately encouraged subjects of Ruritania to come forward with humble petitions addressed to the Governor of the Bank proposing that such and such a person, or group of persons, or achievement, or group of achievements, should be represented on the next banknote scheduled for replacement. In the common parlance of the United States, these humble petitions - however worded in terms of justice, fairness and representation not to mention Greatness - were necessarily instances of log rolling.

That posed the Bank a problem. Should it respond to the biggest logs rolled its way or should it seek to establish some principles of fair representation? The Governor decided that Principles should be sought. A committee was formed to find them.

After the usual lengthy deliberations, the committee proposed that two categories of person should be recognised (Male and Female) and four categories of achievement (Arts, Science, Politics, War). The committee pointed out that these numbers had been arrived at having regard to the reality of four bank note combinations. All eight possible combinations of the categories (which they summarised as MA, MS, MP, MW; FA, FS, FP, FW) could be represented on four notes in just two complete banknote cycles. There would be no awkward remainders to deal with.

As for the actual personages to be represented, the committee concluded that (a) that they all be dead - there was no disagreement about that - and (b) that it was up to the Governor to decide between several possible selection procedures enumerated as follows:

·         a committee of experts and / or the Great & the Good to pick the person to be featured in any of the eight categories;

·         a simple lottery the tickets for which would bear names selected by some method or other;

·         a weighted lottery with the number of tickets for each name equal to the number of signatures on humble petitions submitted in favour of that name - this was seen as a concession to log rolling;

The committee also felt that a further accommodation of the public was possible:

·         A list of names selected by the Bank’s own committee could be submitted to public vote according to one of the recognised procedures (first past the post, and so on).  

This last procedure had built into it a guarantee against any possibility of an overwhelming public vote in favour of Banky McBankface.

The committee did identify one unresolved problem. Since banknotes of the four denominations are issued in unequal quantities, it might be thought that the representational value of the image on them should be weighted according to the number of banknotes on which that image would appear. The committee noted that this would remove an element of simplicity from its proposals and would require assistance from someone able to do advanced mathematics and not just simple sums.

The committee then took cover. 

When it learned of the committee’s recommendations, the government of Ruritania was appalled. There were far too few categories of person and it was not sure that “War” was any longer a category of achievement. What about “Entertainment” or “Sport” - perhaps these could be combined into “Culture”?  If “War” was then added to “Politics”, that would preserve the four categories of achievement. A neat counter-proposal.

But as for categories of person, the government felt it had a duty of special care for the Ruritanian Minorities of which thirty nine were currently recognised. How did the Bank propose to ensure that those minorities featured appropriately on the four denominations with only its Male and Female categories available?

The Bank replied humbly that it thought that it could cope with the increased complexity demanded by the government but would need a few extra mathematicians, a new computer, and an answer from the government to two remaining questions: Are the thirty nine minorities to be represented equally within the Person categories or in weighted form according to the number of persons identified as being members of those minorities? And if the latter, should the number be those actually living or the number who have ever lived within the borders of Ruritania? The second question was given its point by the twin facts that all Persons had to be dead in order to qualify and that today’s Ruritanian Minorities were not distributed in the same proportions or same aggregate numbers as the Minorities of yesteryear.

The government appointed a small committee of mathematicians to come up with its reply to these two supplementary questions and it is hoped that a Nobel Prize (possibly for Mathematics but preferably for Peace) will result.

Boys from Slade Green are Under-represented in Hollywood films

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I was born in Dartford’s West Hill hospital, which provided maternity facilities a few miles away from where my parents lived in Slade Green. Slade Green was an area sandwiched between Erith (which was a Borough) and Crayford (which was an Urban District), both within the county of Kent.  But by the time I was born, this part of north-west Kent was really part of south-east London and is now legally so - Slade Green is within the Northend ward of the London Borough of Bexley. In other words, I lived in a place which had no real identity or boundaries.

I lived in Slade Green from birth until the age of eight when we moved to Dartford. So you might say that I passed half of my boyhood there, not quite a tenth of my life.  I could claim to be from Slade Green which I tend also to think of as some kind of outgrowth of Erith rather than of Crayford.  The postal address was “Slade Green, Erith, Kent” and the nearest town for shopping was Erith.

Google can’t find me many people who claim to be or have been from Slade Green; Jade Anouka (1990 - ) was born there and that’s the only notable name I can find. For Erith as a whole, there are notable people who were born there including the humanist and socialist comedian and writer Linda Smith (1958-2006) who joked that Erith isn't twinned with anywhere but it does have a suicide pact with Dagenham [ which it faces across the river Thames]. And another one: 

Erith is in Kent - the "Garden of England" - I can only assume Erith is the outside toilet because it is a shit house.

A 2014 post on Reddit in answer to a question from someone thinking to move to my hometown has this to say:

“Erith is crime central, and Slade Green has absolutely NOTHING going for it.”

That’s not untypical of what I can find and I doubt it’s untrue.

Now to the point. Would it make sense to say in any context that people from Slade Green are underepresented in any context? If you enlarged it a bit, would Erith or Crayford or even north-west Kent make sense as things which could be underepresented? I suspect not, because there are thousands of Slade Greens in the United Kingdom, thousands of places with nothing going for them but with no special claim to be represented somewhere else. If someone from Slade Green became a Hollywood film actor ( Jade Anouka might) the fortuitous fact of coming from Slade Green would be of no relevance. If Jade Anouka got a part, no one would be asking the question, Are Slade Green actors under-represented (or over-represented) in Hollywood movies?

And yet if we generalise a bit more the question no longer looks absurd. I borrow a sociological category from Trump, D. 2018 and put it this way, Are actors from shithole places under-represented (or over-represented) in Hollywood films? Cleaned up to meet Sunday School sensibilities, the question becomes, Are actors from under-privileged backgrounds …?

I don’t know the answer to that question for Hollywood, but do know that it is reckoned to make sense in many other contexts and that the answer is that those from under-privileged / deprived / poor backgrounds are often under-represented. Bankers, lawyers, politicians, museum directors …. well, they don’t come from Slade Green-like places.

Knowing that as I do, I confess that I sometimes wonder if I was the first / only boy from Slade Green to go to Oxford, get a doctorate … etc and I have Googled on occasion to see if I can make any progress in answering those questions. There must have been more than one by now, maybe lots more than one. But it's irrelevant for the reasons I have already given.

My country has a state broadcaster which now has a website where every day there are feelgood stories of the form “ So-and-so becomes first X in Y” or (less satisfactorily) “first openly X in Y” and “first X in Y since …” . These stories often irritate me because so many assumptions are quietly smuggled in with the story. Why is it a good thing that the Church of England now has its first black female bishop? 

The Church of England is, from where I stand, a small but extremely wealthy (the bishops all live in what are called Palaces) religious organisation which attends to the needs of the highest in the land for infant baptisms (a reprehensible practice), weddings and funerals. And that’s about it. It has little to commend it. What is a black woman doing selling her soul to this organisation, I wonder? Why isn’t she - let’s say - a Quaker? [ Incidentally, the BBC website does not recognise the existence of any Christian churches other than the Anglican and Catholic (it prefers the latter). Please tell me if you can find a BBC website story about Baptists, Congregationalists, Methodists, Quakers …].

The BBC would not feature a piece claiming “First woman to head the Institute for Torturing Political Prisoners” because it gets the point that torturing people is not very nice. The Church of England is not very nice, but it doesn’t get that.

You can experiment with variants: Cardinals elect first gay / first openly gay/ first…. since 1555 Pope”. I headed to Wikipedia for the 1555 date:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sexually_active_popes

The context in which I am writing this is one in which there is endless chatter about representation, under-representation, diversity and so on but in which there seems to be very little thought about the categories X and Y which matter and what in the end counts as a satisfactory result. 

Even at the apparently simple level of male:female representation, there has to be some thinking about what counts as “gender balance” [ I prefer “sex balance” since gender is a complicating factor].

Fifty:Fifty looks like the right answer. But for a large organisation which has to deal with changes in the available labour force, the legacy of past training practices and so on, fifty: fifty is not a reasonable target. It would force employers to take on less qualified candidates just to keep the balance at a point in time. What might be a reasonable expectation and aim would be to keep variation in, say, the 45 - 55 range, either way, over a period of time. Affirmative action is then required if the actual figures gravitate to the outer limits of the range but otherwise everyone can just get on with their regular work.

Even then, there are difficult cases to consider. I offer just three: midwives, coal miners, primary school teachers.

Credit for the Linda Smith jokes:
Source: https://www.chortle.co.uk/features/2019/01/29/42176/remembering_linda_smith

Alan Turing and the Banknote Problem

In a long tradition, a moral claim is only sound when it is universalisable. Morally, policy or decision X can only be good for the goose if it is also good for the gander. What I wish for myself I must be willing to wish for anyone else similarly situated. Any other form of a wish is discrimination, usually in its own favour. Log rolling campaigns aim to get X for me but not for you. So there are people who are unhappy with the decision to put Alan Turing on the new £50 note. For example, they thought it was time for a black person.

Suppose there are seven colours of the rainbow and four banknote denominations. Suppose a rule says that only one colour can appear on a banknote denomination besides black and white. (I will leave this rule unchallenged for purposes of the argument; Coca Cola advertisements challenge it).

A first task now is to find a rule for securing “fair representation” of all rainbow colours, a rule which is universalisable. There are a couple of obvious possibilities: rotate colours through time or pick colours by repeated  lotteries. These are non-discriminatory methods or algorithms.

Now suppose that bank notes of different denominations are issued in unequal quantities. This then seems to require that to secure overall fairness in colour distribution, any appearance of a colour should be weighted by the number of banknotes issued in that colour. Otherwise, some colour could be left languishing on a denomination banknote that very few people ever see (like the 500€ note).

But suppose that the colours of this metaphorical rainbow do not occur with equal real-world frequency. So to measure for fairness, we now have to weight for colour frequency and also be prepared for those frequencies to change. Unlike the colours of the real rainbow, the distribution of colours in the social rainbow change through time.

A mathematically minded reader might like to keep going and try to produce the decision-making algorithms which would secure fair representation through time. Can lotteries achieve it?Can rotation achieve it?

However, there was a prior question to which an answer was simply assumed. There are seven colours of the real rainbow. How many colours of the metaphorical rainbow? In other words, how many categories exist which require representation?

As far as I can see, when you get past two (male and female the obvious ones), the going very quickly gets very hard. Are blind people and deaf people one category or two? Are cyclists and pedestrians one or two? How many categories is BAME? How many categories is LGBTQ+  ? (For human resources managers tasked with achieving diversity, the gay black woman is a gift from heaven since she occupies three categories at once. When does that become an unfair advantage, a sort of new Eton and Oxford and male? And is it an unfair disadvantage that old and male and pale also occupies three categories not one?).

Unless there is an agreed answer to the How many categories? question,  we will never be able to satisfy all of the people all of the time. Instead, we will continue to live in a world of serial log-rolling campaigns But social justice always used to be envisaged as an alternative to log-rolling, not its justification.

Book Learning

How many books have you read? I count in books per week rather than day or month and I reckon that my average must be about two a week and that average probably holds up over sixty years now. 

Reckon a year at 50 weeks (easier math), then that’s three thousand weeks and so, six thousand books. I don’t count books which I skim or abandon early on and, in any case, I tend to be a dutiful reader who once started keeps going to the often bitter end.

Anyway, six thousand. A very small number. The best-selling among my own books in the Amazon ranking is currently in position 560 353. Lot of books out there, most of them desperately seeking readers.

Six thousand. If you locked me in a room for a week, instructed to write out the authors and titles, I would struggle. How many could I actually recall even at the entry level of author plus title? Maybe I could make a start with the books read in other languages which I am sure would number no more than a few hundred, nearly all in French. I have (for example) only ever read two books in Spanish, both by Eugenio Coseriu and in historical linguistics - easy enough to understand since all  the technical vocabulary could be guessed via the very similar French.

Those six thousand books have left me in possession of a great deal of book learning, though they have not made me learned because I have never been much concerned to achieve “chapter and verse” recall. I have never read biblically, and can’t quote you Shakespeare or Marx or Virginia Woolf, let alone the Bible. I don’t think of books as monuments onto which memorable inscriptions have been carved, but rather as things which develop or express ideas and feelings which can be put to use without it being necessary to recall the exact words used. Sometimes the exact words matter, but not often. I’m an active reader, but not a faithful one. 

All this book learning goes towards making me an educated person, and all this book learning dies with me, if not before - I think it is already slipping away. It can only exercise its effects in my conversation, in what I write, in how I conduct my life. And then it ceases to exist at all.

Will the young people in the street now permanently attached to smartphones eventually turn to books and catch up with my kind of score, a score which must surely be common among older people?

A Niqab and a Panama hat

This week I was in Germany for a couple of days in a city very familiar to me. I was working but in my lunch breaks  and evenings, I did my usual things. I like to stroll, taking in the people. On a lunch break promenade in a pedestrianised shopping area,  a woman appeared coming towards me out of the crowd: tall, slender and dressed in an immaculately well-cut and seemingly brand new niqab, the first I had seen on this visit. When I see a niqab, my habit is to look at the male who will be walking alongside the female and, yes, he was there: rather shorter, hunched a bit over his smartphone, and dressed according to the regulations: a bit of stubble, tee-shirt, jeans, and trainers. My rapid visual profiling didn’t manage to take in the logo on the trainers so I don’t know what brand he favoured.

It’s very decent of God to permit young men to dress in ways which are practical for life in any European city. It means they can run after a bus, vault a barrier to cross a road. They can pick up children with ease, put them on their shoulders and, perhaps most importantly, kick a ball around and  outrun their own children.

I just wish God was a bit more thoughtful about female dress. The niqab can look very stylish; so too can high heels. But both are impractical. I guess the niqab can be very hot inside on a climate warming summer day. More importantly, it is isolating. I will come to that.

I glance back at the woman. She is staring at me, intensely, her eyes a perfect study in black and white, because those eyes are picked out with some expertly applied kohl. 

But I can’t decode the look as angry or friendly or just inquisitive - there is no mouth gesture to help out. I’m stumped to understand why I should be worth a very frank stare. The stare is  made possible, I guess, by the fact that I’m wearing sun glasses (advised for cataracts) and so, from her point of view, there is no eye contact.

Then, as we pass each other, a penny drops and I laugh. I’m old and male and pale and I’m wearing a Panama hat, a proper one with a broad black band. Hitherto, I have understood the Panama as standard issue for bald-headed elderly gentlemen on sunny days. But I realise that on my stroll today I haven’t actually seen another Panama - I would notice. So maybe a Panama is not a German thing, even for elderly bald heads. So it’s like this now: she is my first niqab of the day and I am her first Panama. I think it's the hat which caused the stare.

People do sometimes call out to me when I’m wearing a hat. Later, in the central park, a young woman on a bench with a boyfriend called out  Bonjour though I was too slow to turn, lift my hat, and reply Bonjour, Mam’selle. Anyway, it shows that there’s at least one person in the city who reckons a Panama a French thing.

That brings me to me to the point I skipped over. We are often led to believe that in modern urban environments, people walk around as if no one else exists, isolated monads who don’t interact. That is false. A lot goes on, an awful lot. I give one example relevant to what I want to say.

If in the street I see a child behaving in a way which is charming or delightful or just funny, I will almost certainly smile at whichever person is doing the parenting. I think that is the norm rather than an elderly eccentric exception. It is also the case that the parent will acknowledge the compliment about the child which the smile implies - they will smile back. Some who are more bold will end up exchanging a few words, not quite “passing the time of day” but about things specific to the child, like the child’s age or name. If I smile at a parent who happens to be wearing a hijab, as I do, she will also smile back.

When women wearing the hijab first began to appear at shop tills in London and then where I live, I acted in a correct but very restrained manner, as if attending a vicarage tea party. I didn’t engage because I imagined that it might be unwelcome. Now I will pass the time of day, sometimes crack a joke, encouraged by the fact that there is usually a smile on offer and even a joke.  I now wonder whether in national and local contexts which are not always friendly, it is really quite nice when old white males in panama hats behave as if they were ordinary human beings.

The woman in the niqab is pretty much excluded from this small change of everyday life. It really makes a very big difference that you can’t see a face and from the face gauge whether a compliment or a joke would be appreciated or has gone down well. Leave aside that the man in tee-shirt, jeans and trainers might not approve. Leave aside that she is not going to initiate any exchange anyway. The face covering inhibits any exchange. I suppose that is its purpose.

The exclusion is not total: if there are women wearing hijab on the streets, they do engage with women wearing the niqab and vice versa. (I’ve been watching this on my strolls elsewhere). Perhaps the best hope for the future is that the women who wear headscarves enable the women in the niqabs to change their style, at least for everyday street life. Maybe the niqab would then become something reserved for special days, a reminder of the past, like the traditional dress that jeans and trainers males put on for formal occasions. It would cease to be a burdensome obligation of everyday life. 

In the same way, though I can't understand why anyone would want to wear impractical high heels for shopping or work - and most certainly should not be obliged to do so - I can understand why someone might want to wear them for special occasions, even if they often end up being kicked off and abandoned.

Later in that lunch break stroll, a group of teenagers wearing hijab passed me. One has combined her hijab with bright yellow stiletto heels. I think that's another story for another day.

Girl or Young Woman With a Rose: A Nineteenth Century Painting from Finland

Click on Image to Magnify

I bought the painting recently, bidding online in a Finnish auction on the basis of how it looked on screen. Now it hangs to the side of the desk where I am typing this. When shipping costs were added, it still cost me under two hundred euros. Those who viewed it in the actual sale room would have seen that it is damaged - the line which runs horizontally across the painting starting from the girl’s elbow marks a repair.

On the back, a very recent label reads “Luultavasti Aino Aalto” - “Probably Aino Aalto”. That proves to be unhelpful. The most famous “Aino Aalto” was a Finnish architect and designer, born 1894, died 1949. Google not only knows all about her work and illustrates it profusely; it also reckons there is no other Aino Aalto worth knowing about. All I get from Google is the new knowledge that Aino is a first name for a female.

The label is ambiguous. It most likely assigns a probable painter but could assign a name to the sitter. From the style of the painting, the fairly crude wooden stretcher, the style of the gilt frame, the dress and hair of the sitter - well, I think this painting dates from before the advent of portrait photography, from the first half of the nineteenth century. 

I guess the age of the sitter at between thirteen and nineteen. She’s not displaying a ring but then it’s only her right hand that you can see. The rose is probably a conventional symbol - the bloom of youth, romance - but one should remember that portrait painters (and subsequently photographers) got sitters to hold things simply to stop them fidgeting with their hands. The painter has solved the problem of the other hand by simply chopping it off.

Aino is a Finnish name. There were women painters in nineteenth century Finland, so there is no obstacle to the painter being the Aino and a label on a painting for auction is more likely to attempt to name the painter than the sitter.

In the nineteenth century, someone who was Swedish-speaking was more likely to have been able to afford a portrait in oils. That I infer from my general knowledge, not from Google, though that probabilistic knowledge certainly does not exclude that the sitter was Finnish-speaking.  Likewise, from general knowledge and from the sitter’s hair, dress and facial features, I infer that this is not a girl from the Russian governing population - the Grand Duchy of Finland passed from Swedish to Russian control in 1809. Her religion will be Protestant.

To my eye, the portrait is not in any way cute. Though she has been made to hold a rose, the girl in the portrait looks seriously at the painter, with eyes which are unwavering. If she is nearer to thirteen than nineteen, she may just be uncertain about herself. Nearer to nineteen, then she is a determined young woman.

I can think of no way of finding her name, her date of birth, details of her life, the date of her death. It’s possible that no one anywhere now knows those details, or how to retrieve them. It’s also possible that she figures in some family genealogy, but that the link between the person in the genealogy and the person in the portrait has been lost. After all, this nice portrait ended up in a public auction. 

I do think it’s a portrait, not a genre painting for which some temporarily anonymous model has been paid to sit. The idea of the “genre” painting is very convenient for art museums; it saves them from a great deal of homework, and in this case would result in the title, Girl  With A Rose or Young Woman With A Rose, depending on how you resolve her age. 

And without a name for her, that generic title cannot be improved.

Motorway Service Stations: A Model for Universities?

This post from 6 January 2013 had a large number of readers; I'm not sure why. Maybe visitors who were looking for information on Brighton's club scene.

This week, The Economist has a very good piece about UK motorway service stations (5th January 2013, "Serviceable", page 21). If you want to open one, government regulations require you to keep it open 24/7/365 (and 366 in Leap Years). This seems like commonsense: people are on the move 24/7/365 and if they are on a motorway journey, they will need to stop for petrol, food, drink and the loo - and the loos (says the government) must also be open 24/7/365 and  free of charge.

Of course, motorway service station workers don't work 24/7/365. Staff work rotas.

The other day, someone reminded me of a truth I used to know very well: at weekends, my local university campuses (there are two: Brighton, Sussex) are deserted and most of their services closed down. This ought to strike us as strange. Reading, writing, thinking, experimenting are 24/7/365 things. People's brains are on the move all the time. And since universities are supposed to be connected with - and supportive of  - brains on the move you would expect this to be reflected in their opening hours. Universities are places where the lights should burn long into the night and all through the weekend.

Instead, the lights are burning in Brighton & Hove, the large town (or small city) which neighbours the university campuses. The pubs, the clubs, the cafes, the restaurants, the shops - some are open almost 24/7/365 but especially at weekends when Brighton fills up with students and other visitors arriving (often in tens of thousands) to sample its weekend delights (basically music, alcohol, drugs and maybe some sex though probably the alcohol and drugs are incompatible with much of that).

The only people missing from the Brighton late night and weekend scene are the majority of University staff, teachers and administrators who are busy doing Middling England kind of things: decorating the house, going for walks, giving dinner parties.

Innocent enough but the overall effect is to routinise intellectual life into some nine to five Monday to Friday office schedule.

Students - whatever they may think they are doing - are already living the kind of On / Off life their Middling England parents live - there's just more Off to it.

Academics have settled for attending their committees and meeting their Research Output quotas rather than pursuing the life of the mind which was once (perhaps) the vocation associated with their salary.

The life of the mind can of course be a troubling thing. Even what's left of my mind can have me sitting here banging away at the keyboard from 8 34 to 9 05 on a Sunday morning - almost a definition of Off time. But then I was always a bit defiant.

But I have learnt to compromise; the computer will go to Off and I will  take a walk along the seafront.

Walking in Port Meadow, Oxford, May 2019

https://greenwire.greenpeace.org/uk/en-gb/events/laws-nature-campaign-port-meadow-oxford

Oxford is one of those places which has big open green spaces very close to the city centre. On a recent visit and taking advantage of a sunny morning, I started my day with a walk into Port Meadow, an extensive area of low-lying flood plain which has been common land for centuries. But such walks always cause me a bit of anxiety. I make them without any props and I often find myself the only person out and about who hasn’t got the kind of excuse which a prop indicates; I am just a solitary walker, without even the cover which coupledom provides.

The dog-dependent are out at this time of day, their presence in the meadow justified by the dog. After all, what are green spaces if not dog toilets? A notice at the entrance to the meadow tells me that to reduce the risk of dog faeces spreading parasitic infections to animals grazing in the meadow, those faeces must be gathered up and disposed of into a bin. In addition, a single person may not bring more than four dogs into the meadow, perhaps to discourage those who depend on dog walking for their livelihood and for whom the meadow would be a convenient, unpoliced shittery. A more prominent notice tells me that one of the horses which graze in the meadow has recently died in a savage dog attack and the Meadow custodians would like to know whose dog.

This makes me a bit anxious and I guess does the same for the joggers and runners who are out, mostly young women dressed in clothes which indicate their seriousness of purpose. I think of their clothes also as props, means by which someone can justify their presence in the open air on a sunny morning: I am here because I am keeping fit, though I rather anxiously hope that my sprinting legs do not attract the attention of a savage dog.

Then there are lots of cyclists, most heading south towards the city centre and most, I guess, with the practical aim of getting to work or to class. They look rather intense, as if they might be late for an important date. But the bicycle is the prop which legitimates their rapidly passing presence.

A few of the joggers and the cyclists greet me but, of course, there is no reason for them to stop and pass a time of day in which I would  tell them that I have been watching a pair of young goldfinches, feeding on dandelion clocks.

There was a time when, in response to my anxieties about walking alone, I used to carry a stick - a sort of indication that I was a serious walker, up there with the serious jogger or cyclist. But I could never bring myself to don the expensive garments which signify someone as a Rambler, garments made all the more signifying by their binary contrast with the Naked version. Eventually, and despite the fact that I am getting older, I gave up the stick and now present myself, albeit uncomfortably, as that species of solitary walker who pays some attention to what can be seen and what can be heard around them, but with no real excuse for being out in a meadow on a morning.

*

Later, I walked down to the city centre, a world crowded with young people and, of course, seething with props: smartphones with their own human beings permanently attached. Where are the flâneurs and the flâneuses, I asked myself? Surely there must be other people nearby, strolling and trying to pay attention to the viewscape and the soundscape. But I don’t see many. 

As for the smartphones, their human dependents would be so full of the beauty of youth if they would but detach themselves, look up, look around, pay attention, stroll or strut their stuff. This, after all, is Oxford and the young people I see clearly have the benefit of good diet, good dentistry, and effortless taste in the way they dress. They are quite unlike the young people I see each day in the decayed south coast resort where I live. But, fortunate or not, both rich and poor all now have in common that they are not looking at the world around them, or listening to it. Especially, it seems, when crossing a road.

But then I said to myself, In my day surely we must have had our own props; and then I thought, yes, the smartphone has replaced the cigarette. Back then, it was a cigarette which solved the problem of what to do with your hands, or at least, one hand. The cigarette gave you an excuse for your existence and a prop to navigate social life. If not a cigarette, then maybe a handbag or even just a rolled up newspaper (the latter a common sight in the past).

Human beings are natural fidgets; so many of our problems stem from our inability to sit, stand or walk quietly, without a prop to soothe. In the days of portraits in oils, it was a big problem for the painter who partly solved it by equipping the sitter with a fan, a flower, a book, a riding crop. Next to my computer, I have hung a nineteenth century portrait of a young woman who is equipped with a rose in her right hand. The painter has quietly solved the problem of her left hand by allowing it to disappear under the gilt frame, bottom right corner.

*

I walk back to my guest house. A woman approaches me, perhaps a grandmother, pushing a buggy and addressing soothing words to its occupant. She passes and I half turn to look at the baby, big-eyed, big-eyelashed, and wide-open mouthed:  an old-fashioned pink plastic doll.