Life by a Thousand Cuts

I have been musing about the spending cuts recently announced by the UK's coalition government and thinking specifically about whether civil disobedience, as advocated by some extremists can be effective here.

Looking back 20 years to the Poll Tax riots might suggest that disobedience segueing to violence remains a powerful tool in British politics. And I am not certain that times have changed. Even so, the structural difference between refusing to pay money and not being given any is important.

For Poll Tax dissenters, the straightforward approach was not to pay the tax, so in fact, the Trafalgar Square rioters were the tip of the disobedience iceberg. It's hard to see how disobedience could work the other way around.

Could the unemployed return to the concept of the Jarrow Marches? Probably not for the simple reason that - particularly for those on falsely claimed disability benefits - the business of marching to London sort of proves the suspicion that many benefit recipients are physically (if not mentally) able to work.

The whole point of the Jarrow marches was to prove that able bodied men were not being given an opportunity to work - rather a different thing.

However, lest I sound too much like the middle class conservative that I am, there is for me, a key misunderstanding that infects some of the howling about the cuts - for example about outlawing the concept of 'a Council house for life'.

The notion, as I understand it, is that those who have the misfortune to live in council houses will periodically be tested to see whether they are earning too much to remain in said accommodation and whether, in fact, they could be taking their first steps on the housing ladder.

Well it's possible the move from council house to house ownership could be accomplished directly in certain parts of the country (although I doubt it). From where I sit in London, it's risible even to imagine such a direct shift.

But it should not be about the housing ladder nor the Thatcherite mantra of house ownership. There is nothing wrong with renting and a lot that's right. By far the majority of denizens of continental Europen cities do not own properties (at least in the cities). It's a rental culture with proper protections and competition between big, indeed institutional, landlords.

The vast majority of foreign white collar workers in this country rent property. It makes them more flexible/mobile and gives them a chance to see and live in different parts of a city (or, possibly, the country). I fear natural born Brits may have to think in the same terms.

In the future An Englishman's home will be someone else's castle!

WAKE UP, RICHARD, AND SMELL THE INCENSE

You know, if God didn't exist, I suspect Richard Dawkins would have to invent him so that he could stridently shout down that existence.

I have a great deal of time for the Professor although I haven't met him since tutorials in the Zoology Department at Oxford in South Parks Road in the 1970s but I do think that today's contribution to the debate about the Pope's UK 'State Visit' is publicity opportunism - and a bad example of same. And let's remember that the Pope isn't God (not even the Catholics claim this).

"Go home to your Mussolini-concocted principality, and don't come back," says RD in today's (16/9/10) The Times. 'Mussolini-concocted' !?! Oh surely he can rant better than this.

'Concocted' is more cocktail-mixing than religious orthodoxy. I mean the Vatican may be spicing up the communion wine but there are few spirits here (sorry about that).

This surely cannot be the real Dawkins speaking, not the greatest neo-Darwinist of the age, not the writer of The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker.

Perhaps I am guilty of transferring hope to belief here (although there's a lot of this about on the other side of Cardinal Kasper's aggressively atheist divide), but I believe that Prof Dawkins has about him more aggressively atheist advisers than he is and he has tumbled into their way of thinking without fully believing their dialectic. And I have met one such adviser - a meeting that strenghthened, not diminished, this opinion.

You know, I am beginning to wonder whether this is all about Oxford. Pullman whose books are banned to Catholics is Oxford through-and-through and so is Dawkins. Let's remember that Cardinal Newman preached regularly at St Aloysius at the top end of St Giles in Oxford after his 'conversion' and that the Pope has taken up Newman's "Heart shall speak unto Heart" mantra as a theme of his visit.

I don't know what Sebastian's teddy-bear would say!

DECLINE AND FALL IN OUR MUTUAL FRIEND

I have just been reading Dickens - one has to from time to time - and, as luck would have it, picked up 'Our Mutual Friend' in which, Dickens is self-consciously trying to be funny in his descriptions of people and places and, fortunately for moi, succeeds handsomely in this endeavour.

Consider the comment about the cheese in Mr Wilfer's house: "This was a neat and happy turn to give the subject, treats being rare in the Wilfer household, where a monotonous appearance of Dutch-cheese at ten o'clock in the evening had been rather frequently commented on by the dimpled shoulders of Miss Bella. Indeed the modest Dutchman himself seemed conscious of his want of variety, and generally came before the family in a state of nervous perspiration."

Greater, comedy is, however, to be found in the wooden-legged, 'literary' gent, Silas Wegg, who has struck a bargain with the illiterate Mr Boffin to read through the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire which Mr Boffin originally thinks to be the Rooshan Empire. (Mr Wegg explans that the difference between the two empires should be 'dropped' until such time as Mrs Boffin is not present.)

"Then Mr Wegg in a dry unflinching way, entered on his task; going straight across country at everything that came before him; taking all the hard words, biographical and geographical; getting rather shaken by Hadrian, Trajan and the Antonines; stumbling at Polybius (pronounced Polly Beeious, and supposed by Mr Boffin to be a Roman virgin, and by Mrs Boffin to be responsible for dropping it); heavily unseated by Titus Antoninus Pius; up again and galloping smoothly with Augustus; finally, getting over the ground well with Commodus; who, under the appelation of Commodious, was held by Mr Boffin to have been quite unworthy of his English origin, and "not to have acted up to his name" in his government of the Roman people."

And that whole ride in one sentence!

IL PAPA

As I write, Pope Benedict is about to start his state visit of Britain and, in response, various celebrities - a catchall title that includes the likes of Stephen Fry and Philip Pullman - have written to the newspapers condemning said tour.

I hold no candle for the Pope but I do think that there is considerable irony in allowing, indeed encouraging, visits by Heads of State of countries that formally undertake violence against sections of their own population and yet protesting against one who, while he may have committed sins of omission in failing to seek out child abuse and, worse, in attempting to cover it when discovered, cannot be accused of sponsoring such horrific behaviour.

But perhaps the opprobrium should be the greater because Benedict is a spiritual rather than a political leader and there is therefore a sense in which he must be measured more stringently against a moral benchmark. So that would suggest that child abuse in Catholic schools is somehow worse than the mass murder of children at the Haut de la Garenne Orphanage in Jersey or worse than that caning schoolmaster who has recently been brought to book by a group of his formerly striped pupils?

No, despite the sensibilities of some and the (sometimes artificial) outrage of others, the Pope's visit should go ahead and it should do so for a series of pragmatic reasons.

First, a majority of British catholics would like the Pope to visit. Second he is the spiritual leader of something towards a billion and a half people. Third, how would it look to the populations of Brazil, Ireland, Paraguay even Poland (not to mention Italy) if he was blocked access to the UK just as if he was some rabble-rousing Mullah?

And fourth, this country has a long and colourful history of entertaining worse than him.

IN THE NAVY

I picked up a copy of Alec Guinness's autobiography, "Blessings in Disguise", this morning and found myself in the chapter about his time in the navy during the second world war. Like many such books, this one seems to rest on a series of short (occasionally pithy) stories and the one about Guinness's movement towards the RN is, I believe worth retelling here.

The chapter is headed, 'Damage to the Allied Cause' and begins as follows:

"The Colonel stood with his back to the sitting-room fire, warming his shoulders and his behind. He was very small. He wore a hairy tweed suit and, although he was trying to be helpful, he only managed to look rather cross. He was a revered 'uncle', but no relation, of my dear friend Peggy Ashcroft, who had kindly arranged for me to be interviewed by him. This was in 1940.

"'Drive a car?' asked the Colonel.
'I'm afraid not,' I said. The Colonel looked crosser, so I added, 'Sir,' which mollified him slightly.
'Motor bicycle?'
'No, I am afraid I don't do anything like that.'
'Sport? Rugger? Cricket?'
'Absolutely no. Sir.'
'My niece says you act.'
'Yes.'
'Well, that's that. I suggest you offer your services to the Royal Navy. Good afternoon.'"

RUNNING BUT NOT LOSING

About five years later than everyone else, I have just read Ron McLarty's excellent debut novel, "The Memory of Running" about the disfunctional family life but final salvation (via cycling and the love of a crippled neighbour), of one Smithson ('Smithy') Ide: fat, drunken Vietnam vet.

As always, the dust wrapper of this book, carries extensively edited and apparently supportive comments from reviewers including one quote from the Philadelphia Enquirer that gives Mr Ide an honourable inclusion in the list of fictional American losers. (Other names weren't listed by I am sure Updike's Rabbit Angstrom and two or three of John Irving's interchangeable characters would be among that crowd.)

Like others of his fictional ilk, Ide is a lower middle class white-collar worker, in his case with a dead-end job as a quality control superviser in a toy production factory. But his position within society has set me to wondering whether contemporary British literature includes any similar figures.

Of course we have working class heroes and anti-heroes, and earlier writing, for example by Dickens or George and Weedon Grossmith, contains a number semi-respectable individuals who are above labourers in their employment but hardly in any other way.

Some have told me that Ide's equivalent position in today's British literature is almost exclusively occupied by women.

Sad if true.

POETRY IN THE FLESH

Last night, uncharacteristically, I went to a poetry reading given by a new young talent, Adam O'Riordan, who was marking the publication of his first collection of poems, "In the Flesh" at Peter Ho's bookshop, "Clerkenwell Tales" in Exmouth Market, London.

O'Riordan is a serious young man (probably made the more so by a year in Grasmere courtesy of the Wordsworth Trust) who said in answer to my question, that death, preservation, erasure - the subjects or undercurrents of a number of his poems - were often the focus of youth, pointing out that Eliot wrote "Prufrock" when he was only 22. He (O'Riordan) was therefore not drawn by the reiteration of my mother's comment that Wordsworth would have been the best poet in the language had he had the sense to die young!

As I wrote to Peter Ho, directly after the event, I was led to musing about how O'Riordan's father felt (or possible feels) about him. We gathered from the introduction and also from one of the poems in the book, that O'Riordan père was something of a trade unionist - a teacher of shop stewards or some such - whereas his son is an Oxford educated (Brasenose) poet without, at least as far as his writings betray, any strong political leanings.

Anyway, leaving those musings aside, I do commend the book and I'll leave O'Riordan, appropriately, with les derniers mots - here the last two lines of a brief poem about preparing and eating oysters:

I swallow an ocean into silence and peristalsis,
it hangs like a four-letter word in my gullet.