Worth A Look

Shackleton's Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914 failed when his ship was caught and crushed in pack ice. The ensuing escape of the main party, with no loss of life, including the voyage in a tiny whaler from Elephant Island to South Georgia, is an epic of endurance. The photographs of the expedition's ship, aptly named Endurance, have an eerie beauty.

A Grammarian's Funeral

From yesterday's Herald:


"Teaching does not attract the best staff because most potential candidates believe it lacks the high status, glamour and drama of careers such as medicine or law, according to think tank Policy Exchange. Its report also says that poor pay is a major deterrent."


It's hard to know where to start here but in response to the last sentence, surely 'Bears discovered to defecate in afforested areas' might be about right. Apart from that there are questions to be asked about the rest of it. First up, what do they mean 'the best staff'? I'd have serious doubts about anyone coming into almost any job who was attracted by 'glamour' and 'high status.' It needn't be pious to say that a lot of jobs, teaching among them, are vocations, callings which require certain attitudes to life as well as qualifications beyond those on crested vellum. Unbounded enthusiasm for your subject, a real concern for your pupils/students as people, an ability to communicate in a clear and lively way: all these are a start. If you are thinking about what you can give rather than what you can get then you are on the right lines. You'll find, too, that 'drama' of various sorts will not be in short supply. Nor, sadly, will an all-encompassing, oppressive and philistine managerialism and as it is this which has driven out many fine, experienced teachers in recent years it is hardly likely to form a major attraction for potential candidates for the profession. A former colleague, in his leaving speech, described it thus: 'a vast and ever-expanding intrusive bureaucracy, most of which has nothing to do with the imparting of knowledge' and everything to do with 'appraisals, annual reviews, risk assessment, key stages, targets, marks, grades, grade-boundaries, tables, spreadsheets, national literacy strategies' and which uses a robotic jargon to numb the mind: 'A level essays should be written in assessable elements suitable for the marking scheme and demonstrate effectively marshalled material, accuracy of the target language, imaginative use of stimulus, range and appropriateness of lexis and ability to substantiate points.'
The renaissance humanist who is the subject of the Browning poem from which this post takes its title, who 'settled Hoti's business' and 'gave us the doctrine of the enclitic De', was described as 'dead from the waist down.' The technicians of the audit culture in modern education are dead from the neck up.

These Are My Mountains?

On our current dig we were all ten of us shovelling dirt back into the trial trenches on a site that is in full view of one of the local 'big hooses'. As we sweated and grunted in good chain-gang fashion we could see and hear, not too far away, a garden party in full cry: popping corks from champagne bottles, tinkling laughter, elegant music etc. Of course, we knew we were only sweating our butts off as volunteers for a limited period and unlike, say, our predecessors in the 18th century and beyond, we could go back to hot baths, good food and improving books. What we were busting a gut on, in short, was very far from our lasting condition. But we felt a sharp discomfort. Not envy, which suggests we wanted to be swilling the Widow with the toffs because we all knew we'd hate it, but, in my case at any rate, an awareness that while we were not, perhaps, the ones who should feel resentment, given our ability to return to comfortable circumstances, there were vast numbers in this country and abroad who did not have that option and whose circumstances were such that what was going on in the manicured gardens of the ex-laird's Scottish Baronial mansion was an insult. Anent which there's this:

"People still pass from village to village, guidebook in hand, to see the next and yet the next example of the extended manors and the neo-classical mansions, to look at the stones and the furniture. But stand at any point and look at the land, look at what those fields, those streams, those woods even today produce. Think it through as labour, and see how long and systematic the exploitation and seizure must have been to rear that many houses on that scale. See by contrast what any ancient isolated farm in uncounted generations has managed to become by the efforts of any single real family, however prolonged. And then turn and look at what these other 'families', these systematic owners, have accumulated and arrogantly declared. It isn't only that you know looking at the land and then at the houses how much robbery and fraud there must have been for so long to produce that degree of disparity, that barbarous disproportion of scale. The working farms are so small beside them, what men really raised by their own efforts or by such a portion as is left to them, in the ordinary scale of human achievement. What these 'great' houses do is break the scale by an act of will corresponding to their real and systematic exploitation of others.... To stand in that shadow even today is to learn what many generations of countrymen bitterly learned and were consciously taught: that these were the families, this the shape of society."

'Wonderful Things'

Sweating in the perfect heat of July days, grateful for shade from strategically placed mature woodland and the occasional wall, even more grateful for the breeze off the firth, and eternally grateful for tea-breaks and lunch, to say nothing of lousing time. Only yesterday I found myself not wanting to stop the stoop labour so absorbed was I in what we are finding. It doesn't match what Howard Carter found but for me it's the best yet in terms of structure and extrapolation therefrom. More on all of that when we finish; not being coy but prudent because there's still a good few days left of digging and who knows what will be revealed. As it is, I get to burn up lots of calories using a number of implements (today involved a bill-hook, shovel, mattock, trowel and much pushing of a wheelbarrow), I'm learning all the time, there is copious fresh air, glorious views, buzzards circling lazily in the clear blue sky in fair numbers, and the company of my fellow-howkers, a glorious social mix and all of them fantastic fun to work with. Who could ask for more? And don't believe all you see on Time Team and nothing you see on Bonekickers (which was greeted with universal derision on yesterday's dig from those who had watched it): most archaeology is upmarket navvying. Today, for example, we spent much of the afternoon back-filling a couple of trial trenches in oppressive heat, because assorted walls cut us off from the reviving breezes, and assaulted by midges, flies, clegs and wasps. But the banter is excellent and we got it done and returned cheerfully to back-breaking work of a different order. After which a fish supper from the excellent local chippie and a bottle of the Coapy's Oz chardonnay went down a treat.

A Neat Summation

From Ian Bell, a journalist I admire, in today's Herald:

"I thought New Labour was a crock long before 1997. Which is to say incoherent. Which is to say little more than redundant managerialism, fancy book-keeping, equivocation, punitive moralising, ethical relativism -- and advertising."

How We Were

Like most late-middle-aged folk in this country and beyond I've done a lot of family research, especially over the past five years. What you might expect: nothing reliable before about 1750 and what there is after that tells the usual story of agricultural labourers becoming the alienated and immiserated proletariat (apart from one line who remained tied to the land up to their demise from typhoid in the early 1860s in a rural slum in Airth). There's a line of miners who were down the pit for at least three centuries, the earliest of them, pre-1799, being serfs, bought and sold with the mines they worked in, the last generation of them starting at the coal face aged 14. There are some interesting nautical types over in Alloa in the 19th century, ship's carpenters, rope and sail makers, a pilot, stokers; but mostly they are iron moulders, iron dressers and foundry labourers (and one labourer in the local brewery in the mid 19th century, a place I remember and whose beer I just about managed to taste: 'Strength Behind Bars' as it was advertised, with a tiger, of course, whose stripes spelled out the name of the ale). The census returns show them living in the abysmal conditions that the ruling class were quite happy to have continue until the ILP's Wheatley did something about it after the First World War, twelve in two rooms and sharing a WC in 1891. (And in 1949 I was born into a room and kitchen with shared WC, in which several ancestors had lived in the 19th century, but born, thanks to socialism, in a newly nationalised hospital). I had thought the Dostoievskian depths had been plumbed by the great-great-great grandmother who went to a pauper's grave in Sighthill cemetery from the Barnhill Poor House, the two great-great uncles who died in the local Poor House here, the two great-aunts who died of cirhossis, the great-uncle and great-aunt who topped themselves in the Forth and the canal, respectively, but, no. Recently, doing some local history research in the files of the town's newspaper I found a great-uncle who had been sent in 1886 by the local sheriff court to the 'Industrial Training Ship' Cumberland, moored in the Clyde, for a three year stretch. He was not quite twelve, his father had died three years prior to this and his younger brother a year before. His eleven other siblings were either dead, in domestic service, married or in work elsewhere. Nowadays a kindly social worker would be to hand. I've no idea what became of him, no trace in the census returns or death records in Scotland or England and Wales. He might have gone to sea and flourished or he might have perished in some wreck. You can only imagine what it must have been like on board an ex-Royal Navy 70-gun frigate, built in 1842, with 360 other boys under naval discipline [see illustration], what physical and sexual abuse he might have been exposed to. It says something that the vessel was destroyed by fire, apparently arson, in 1889. For all the difference between my lot (classical education, eight years at three universities, a relatively well-paid career in teaching) and theirs, I feel them constantly shoulder to shoulder with me, the Gaelic-speaking sailor, and, later, herbalist, on Mull, and the ten year old girl down the Kinnaird pit, and the wee boy, whose forename I bear, taken to that reformatory vessel, all that suffering humanity, flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone, and I am very, very angry with the rotten system that flourished then and flourishes still.

Pointless Exercise

For aficionados of the dark and bitter irony that was the stock in trade of Dr Jonathan Swift the Glasgow East by-election campaign has been almost in the world class. Leaving aside the collapse of the pre-arranged Labour 'selection' panel with its passing over of the two make-weights on the short list in favour of the parachuted-in candidate of choice and consequent exposure of the fakery behind the whole process, to say nothing of the 'dog-that-did-not-bark-in-the-night' matter of the umquhile MP for the constituency who seems to have been removed from the campaign with an air-brush of Stalinesque proportions, and the playing of the 'religious' card by several political parties, there is the business of promising the New Jerusalem to people who have been complacently ignored as reliable ballot-box fodder for as long as most can remember. Forget the whole odious apparatus of top-down government that leaves people as powerless recipients of whatever crumbs are dropped from the tables of the masters and look at the fact that while all sorts of sunlit uplands are being promised to Shettleston Man and Woman the news breaks that Glasgow East will be the testing ground for the new Labour 'benefits-to-work programme', lifted from the Tories, of course. This is designed to force those on incapacity benefit to work for their pennies, effectively treating them like criminals who are set to do community service, only the criminals get off after their sentence is up. Combining the worst of Gradgrind and Pecksniff, the new plan ignores not only social justice (and what else did we expect?) but even basic common humanity and decency. The fact that they failed to keep quiet about it until after the election argues either gross incompetence or breathtaking arrogance. Anyway, the illustration says it all.

Utah Phillips on the Role of the Media

Too tired to blog straight, even after 11 hours of sleep last night. Here is the late Utah Phillips, song-writer, singer, story-teller, Wobbly, one of the last to ride the freights, who flagged the westbound, aged 73, at the end of May this year. I've never shot a TV myself but, like him, I don't have one of those foolish things in the house.

Letting His Hair Down

I first heard klezmer music at a North London batmitzvah party about ten years ago and it was love at first hearing. Here is Itzhak Perlman jamming with some klezmer bands. Enjoy!

The Testimony of the Spade

Glyn Daniels and Sir Mortimer Wheeler were the precursors of Time Team in my childhood and, ever since reading about Howard Carter's great discovery, I always wanted to be an archaeologist. Forty five years later I sort of am; at least I'm a volunteer who helps out on digs. And I'm learning new things all the time. And I really value that. And I'm happily wabbit, now.

Earth-moving Experience

Digging. On a Roman site. For the next ten days at least. Cream-crackered. Posts as and when. Now time for hot bath....

Something For Everyone

Part of the research into local industrial history involves trawling through the microfilm archives of the local newspaper. It is extremely productive, not only of material for that history but also of assorted out of the way facts and events, so much so that there is a serious risk of being side-tracked by the Sheriff Court reports, for example. This week I discovered that someone living in this village would have had a choice of a night out on the 24th November, 1886. Walking three miles in one direction would have taken him to the town hall of a neighbouring burgh where a travelling theatrical troupe were putting on Uncle Tom's Cabin. Walking the same distance in a different direction would have brought him to the town hall of another small burgh where he could have heard 'Prince Kropotkin, the celebrated Russian Anarchist' give a lecture on "The moral effect of Prisons on Prisoners". The report of Kropotkin's talk is markedly balanced and thoughtful, referring to the lecturer's three years in the Peter & Paul fortress prison in St Petersburg but making no mention of his escape from its dungeons. The account was given an added edge by the discovery, the week before last, of a short report in the columns of the same paper for the same year which informed me that my great uncle Hughie had been sent for three years by the Sheriff Court to the reformatory training ship Cumberland, in the Clyde, aged twelve. Whatever misdemeanour merited this was not stated. I've no idea, either, of the moral effect it had upon him though I did find out that the ship was destroyed by fire, supposedly arson, in 1889.

In Context

Haywire Mac sings his own song in the context of contemporary photographs. Very moving, I think.

Uncle Mac and Haywire Mac

Listening to Haywire Mac McClintock singing The Big Rock Candy Mountain, I was reminded how popular the sanitised Burl Ives version was on Uncle Mac's Children's Favourites. As older readers will recall, this brightened up Saturday mornings on the wireless in the 1950s with such delights as Nellie the Elephant and The Three Billygoats Gruff (a song, I now realise, about the perils of blogging). What Uncle Mac didn't tell the children was that the writer of Big Rock Candy Mountain (and Hallelujah, I'm a Bum) had organized in Portland, Oregon with Joe Hill in 1910 (where Haywire Mac was the first to sing The Preacher & The Slave in public) and been involved in the Tucker, Utah, strike of 1913. He had also been branch secretary of the IWW in Spokane, Washington at one time. I can just imagine Uncle Mac's cosy tones: 'And now a request from Spartaka MacLean, aged 10 of Bo'ness. She has asked for the original version of Big Rock Candy Mountain and wants it played in memory of Joe Hill and all other union organisers murdered by capitalist reactionaries. I'm afraid we don't have a gramophone record of this song at the BBC but here for Spartaka and the other Wobblies in West Lothian, is Pete Seeger singing Which Side Are You On?' Maybe not.

Flyting

A guid Scots word for a rammy between usually literary antagonists, it came up in the letters of Hamish Henderson (pictured) which I'm re-reading at the moment. The stushie in question was between himself and his old friend Hugh MacDiarmid and it centred on the conflict between 'high art' and the 'folk tradition.' MacDiarmid was a card-carrying élitist (as well as being a man who had been expelled from the precursor of the SNP for Communism and from the CPGB for nationalist deviationism, though he rejoined the latter after the tanks had rolled into Budapest in 1956); Henderson had been an Intelligence Corps officer in the Western Desert and fought with the partigiani in the Italian campaign and had translated the prison letters of Gramsci; he was also working on collecting folk songs and stories for the School of Scottish Studies in Edinburgh. The argument was carried out in the letters columns of The Scotsman in 1959-60 and again four years later. MacDiarmid, coming over as cold, pompous and arrogant, distinguished himself by his abuse of the folk tradition in literature: 'I do not believe that the salvation of literature will be secured by a fresh wallowing in a mud-bath of ignorance', 'the outpourings of illiterate and backward peasants' and so on. He also claimed that 'all values are being swamped under the rising tide of subhumanity and [interest in literature and the arts] is not to be looked for among the hordes of football enthusiasts, readers of the big circulation press, patrons of rock 'n' roll and all the rest.' Henderson fought back, quoting Gramsci as a 'thinker, man of action and Socialist martyr' who 'was always ready to learn from, and appreciate popular culture' and produced 'some of the most perceptive remarks about folksong in modern European criticism.' Perhaps his best and most palpable hit was when he quoted MacDiarmid, at his most atrocious in an article dating from 1946:
"After referring to [Lewis Grassic] Gibbon's expulsion from the Communist Party, Mr MacDiarmid proceeds: 'As I have said, I on the other hand would sacrifice a million people any day for one immortal lyric. I am a scientific Socialist. I have no use whatever for emotional humanism.' (The reader will note that Mr MacDiarmid has unaccountably omitted the operative words from the above passage. They should be inserted after 'any day,' and read: 'before breakfast.')"

I Have Not Made This Up

Writing in The Church Times some while back the Revd Miranda Threlfall-Holmes, who appeared a few posts ago expressing her unhappiness that unelected female clergy couldn't join unelected male clergy of the C of E in the House of Lords, suggested some ideas for making Easter more fun. One of them was the substitution of champagne for the usual dire Vino Sacro at communion. I'm afraid she was beaten to it some time ago by Cardinal de Bernis (pictured: not one of nature's ascetics, I fear) who always used Meursault when celebrating mass as he did not wish 'to face God with a grimace.' How little things change, sadly.

'Mon Semblable...'

Of course Gordon Brown isn't remotely like Heathcliff. More like Captain Ahab.

Corrieneuchin

Writing in a collection of essays on Burns published in 1975, David Murison, then editor of the Scottish National Dictionary, stated that Burns in his complete works 'employs over 2,000 peculiarly Scots words (the average Scots speaker today would have about 500 at the most).' Would that have been a bit of a generous assessment of the word-hoard of the 'average Scots speaker' (where? how old?) even thirty odd years ago? I'm not about to waste an afternoon thumbing through Jamieson to see how many I recognise but it would be interesting to have some reliable statistics on this one.

More Than Furnishing A Room

Books, that is, which more than furnish rooms, as you can, of course, read them, again and again. Possibly growing up in a household with no books of its own (but which used the local library avidly) led to a later compulsive habit of book-buying which only tailed off recently when the money began to run out. I was put in mind of all this by looking on the shelves here at the holdings of Tacitus, the subject of Melvyn Bragg's programme on Thursday, with a view to possibly re-reading some. They represent a miniature history of forty years' haunting of bookshops. The earliest examples, by date of purchase, are the translations: the Michael Grant translation of the Annals of Imperial Rome is the 1964 Penguin, cost 6/-, bought in about 1965 or 1966 when I was doing Highers in Latin and Greek (the only person on my council scheme to be sitting in his kitchen, by the warmth of a paraffin heater, translating Herodotus while the rest of the family were in the living room with its coal fire, watching TV). Next up are the Agricola and the Germania, both in Church & Brodribb's edition for schools and bought in February, 1973. These bring back memories of the time I spent in Edinburgh, most of the 1970s, when practically every Saturday was spent walking around the city from second hand bookshop to second hand bookshop. There were lots of them, and most of them were dirt cheap, even for their time. After a day of happy striding from Broughton St to Causewayside and back I'd gloat over the purchases while having my tea and then head up the hill to the Oxford Bar for an evening of stimulating drinking and conversation. As a last link to Edinburgh there's an Oxford Classical Texts edition of the Annales, dating from 1921 but purchased sometime in the late 1990s on a visit to the Broughton Bookshop, a wonderful establishment which folded only a year or so ago and which I'd been frequenting for 35 years. I have very fond memories of its gas fire cosiness and the classical music that the owner played, generally on vinyl, and the many, many purchases made there over the years, including much of the Tusitala Edition of Stevenson, at never more than £3 a volume. Last but not least, the purchases made six or so years ago when I was still working and able to use the internet to find bargains, relatively speaking, in earlier printed books. There's a 1768 edition of the first six books of the Annals, translated into French by the Abbé de la Blétterie and printed at Paris by L'Imprimerie Royale. Finally, there's the complete works in one tiny volume, the Elzevier printed at Amsterdam in 1678. The Elzeviers were turning out cheap editions of classical writers, the 17th century equivalent of the old Everyman's Library, I suppose, so they're far from rare, with a few exceptions, and were by no means expensive when purchased by me. Now I very rarely buy anything and have come full circle, living on a council scheme and making as much use as possible of the excellent local library, the same one in which I developed the book habit over half a century ago. I couldn't, sadly, translate a page of Herodotus now to save my life, and, anyway, I don't have a paraffin heater.....

Terra Sigillata

More Latin (what have the Romans ever done for us?), this time related to the neat, almost complete little example of Déchelette 67 that we put together today. Astonishing that the Roman Army up here on the Forth-Clyde isthmus imported the pottery used by its élite all the way from France, much of it from the area of the Lot and Tarn. The ordinary squaddies among the auxiliary units based on the Wall were using much cruder vessels and the natives were probably, in the terms of the Python sketch, drinking out of the second century equivalent of a rolled up newspaper. Astonishing, too, that after all these centuries under the earth it now sits silently, beautiful even in its fractured state, admired by people who go home and write it up on the worldwide web (or tela totius terrae, as the users of the wee jar would have called it had they known about it).

Ubi Solitudinem Faciunt, Pacem Appellant

The local paper leads with the news of World Heritage Site status for the Antonine Wall, some good news for a change, on the same day as the last of Radio 4's current In Our Time series looked at the historian, Tacitus, a neat coincidence as it was his father-in-law, Agricola, who established the first line of forts across the Forth-Clyde isthmus, the precursor of the Wall. So an accident of history, the desire for some eye-catching military initiative with which the emperor, Antoninus Pius, could be associated, led to a brief, twenty years or so, Roman occupation of this area, including the construction of a state-of-the-art frontier system whose remains are with us still, some of the more obvious ones being a fifteen minute walk from this house. It's hard to say what those two decades or so meant for the locals; we don't know if the words Tacitus put in the mouth of Calgacus, quoted in the heading of this post, could describe their experience as we don't have any of their history in written form. Their attitude to the Wall and its garrison of auxiliaries might well have been similar to that of the spokespersons for the local council quoted in today's paper: it represented a source of income, from tourism today, from servicing the military in the second century. In fact this wee neck of the Caledonian woods might have been a bustling souk (with mist and rain as opposed to North African sunshine). It will be nice if we get some better signposting and protection for what remains but regardless of the new designation the business of exploring the Wall and its forts will go on as before, adding constantly to our knowledge of this truly astonishing piece of civil engineering, the greatest feat in that sphere in Scotland until the Forth & Clyde Canal was built at the end of the 18th century.

Gie's A Break!

How's this for short-sighted thinking? Anent the stushie, soon to be stair-heid rammy, over women bishops in the C of E, there is this statement from the Revd Miranda Threlfall-Holmes (not, it seems, a creation of the late P.G. Wodehouse, appearances to the contrary):

"It's important for the whole country because bishops sit in the House of Lords...and there's currently a group of people within the legislature of the country which is closed at the moment to women, which is wrong."

Aye, right, very good. Or you might say that an unelected group of men in frocks sits among a larger group of unelected men and women in ermine who pick up handsome attendance allowances and assorted other perks, such as miscellaneous directorships, while legislating for people who wouldn't vote for them even if given the chance. Which is wrong.

Behind The Fair

News that, far from stopping or curtailing the nationwide free bus travel for the over sixties (a category I join all too soon), the Scottish government is to extend the privilege to those who have been injured or disabled in action. Instant flashback to first journeys on SNCF trains about forty years back and the seats that were reserved for mutilés de guerre. Better late than never for the best wee overweight country in the world. The buses here are a lifeline for many who take them the two or three miles into the nearest town. With or without wounded veterans they provide a great example of mobile democracy: here, at any rate, is the community the estate agents talk about, a wide cross section of ages from weans in push-chairs to grannies on zimmers, but pretty consistently working class as far as social status goes. People talk to one another, indiscriminately and cheerily, a stark contrast to the Trappist vows taken by most commuters on the London Underground. It means you get to hear what people are doing and where they're going and how their grandchildren are getting on and so on. And forty years ago I was a bus conductor for the precursors of the present company, an occupation, which, like the crossing sweeper or the food-taster, has disappeared entirely it would seem. Unfortunately the bus company has just hiked the fares up again and it is now cheaper and quicker to go by train....but far less conducive to chat.

Non-Expense Account Living

John McNair on James Maxton and his fellow ILP MPs in London in the early 1920s:

"When the Clydeside contingent arrived in London the first time they were faced with the difficult problem of accommodation. They were all poor men, the cost of living was very high in London, and most of them had to provide for their families in the provinces. ....Principally on grounds of economy Maxton and his friend Campbell Stephen decided to take lodgings together at Pimlico. Later they decided on a small flat and would do their own work and housekeeping. As George Buchanan was at a loose end he decided to come in with them. They were a queerly assorted trio. Maxton, friendly, easy-going, tolerant; Campbell Stephen, the austere, rigid politico-theologian, and Geordie Buchanan, straight out of proletarian Glasgow, with a wide range of picturesque expletives. ...They seemed to manage fairly well and certainly solved the problem of living cheaply and comfortably in London. Their wants were few. They took their main meals either at a well-known Scottish tea-room in the Strand or in the House. We learn that the interesting work of stocking the somewhat spartan larder was carried on by Maxton and most of the household work was carried on by Campbell Stephen, who sought penance in even scrubbing the floors from time to time. George, the youngest of the three, was the energetic factotum....When they got home after a session the kettle was put on, the tea and toast were made, and they could sit back in friendly comfort and yarn..."

How different, how very different from the home lives of our current lot at Westminster, voting to retain their perks for purchased, lavishly furnished 'second homes.' But, of course, there was also this about the ILPers:

"They had come to London, not to hob-nob with the governing class, but to fight them to the bitter end until the workers obtained all their rights..."

An Unbelievable Guddle

No sooner had it been suggested here that the way forward for the punters in Glasgow East was for them to take direct control of their lives, where they live and where they work, than the Labour Party in Scotland demonstrated why that might be a really useful idea. Calling a bye-election at short notice and then not coming up with a candidate, then phoning around the usual suspects in desperation and getting more than the customary share of knockbacks, represents a study in ineptitude that calls for the voice of Sybil Fawlty: 'I've seen more intelligent things lying on their backs at the bottom of ponds, I've seen better organised things running round farmyards with their heads cut off.' Schadenfreude can only be taken so far, however: for one thing, the whole business simply exacerbates the Wee Eck smirk-factor and that is not a good thing, aesthetically or politically. And then we are right back with the starting point of this post: it's time to let people represent themselves, vote with their body every day not just when the system deigns to let them choose one of its carefully selected favourites.

On The Margins

The Joseph Rowntree Trust calculates that nowadays a single working-age person requires £158 per week (excluding household costs) to live any decent sort of life. It's a pretty accurate assessment, as I should know: my income has been fixed at £150 a week for the past two or three years now and I have to find Council Tax out of that. Still leaves me better off than a lot of people in this country (and you soon get used to haunting the 'almost-past-the-sell-by-date' section of the local Coapera'ive) to say nothing of many millions more elsewhere in the world who are starving as a result of reckless gambling by disgustingly wealthy 'commodities' dealers in the developed world pushing up the price of their staple diet. One answer, making for a more sane and humane world where social justice is not an empty term touted by prospective MPs, lies in this man's The Conquest of Bread.

An Untried Recipe

Private Eye has a feature, 'From the Message-Boards', which unmercifully rips the piss from blog message-boards. Something of its flavour can be found at the BBC Scottish News one, though it is far from the worst excesses of stupidity. A recent thread was the upcoming by-election at Glasgow East. The squads of Nats were to the fore in vast numbers, very few Labour voices (I wonder why?) and the token patronising commenter advertising his supposedly superior education to the masses. All were agreed that half a century and more of Labour had done nothing for Shettleston Man, most were critical of 'benefit culture', but none advocated a radical change in the way things are done. Yeats came to mind:

Parnell came down the road, he said to a cheering man:
'Ireland shall get her freedom and you still break stone.'

An independent Scotland that still believed in a governing élite who handed down socio-economic
'solutions' to the expectant throng would be no advance on what we have. Giving people direct control over their own lives and the places where they live and work, an untried recipe here, must be the answer.

Call It Kennaquhair

Sarah Orne Jewett, a minor but pleasing 19th century American writer, produced a novel set on the coast of Maine called The Country of the Pointed Firs. Anyone setting a book here would have to call it something like The Country of the Added-on Conservatory. What the plethora of conservatories are added on to are 'executive homes', little boxes made of ticky-tacky, that sprang up over the past three decades, clustering around the excellent communications 'hub' that links us to Edinburgh and Glasgow. That's not an entirely fair description of what at worst is just another unimaginative dormitory dorp in the Central Belt. There's a fine parish kirk set beside the ivy-mantled ruin of its predecessor in a particularly fine kirkyard. There are historical traces of the Romans and the Industrial Revolution in its most benign aspect (a canal). There are fine views of the hills across the Forth. And it's not all middle-management housing: this blog comes to you from a wee hoose on the council scheme that lies to the west of what estate agents insist on calling 'the village.' In the five years I've lived here, however, I have failed to find the 'community' that they talk about. The infrastructure is fine and works well but I know only four of my neighbours to pass the time of day with and that is that. Perhaps it would be different if I belonged to a church or a political group but I doubt it; there is no such thing as a thriving civic society here just as it is absent from so many other places. There are the small platoons in church halls and so on but they have a marked demographic that does nothing for their appeal...to me at any rate [they return one of the tiny number of Tory councillors in the area]. It would be wrong to say that I don't enjoy living here: it is handy for travel, close to some good shops, truly semi-rural (in ten minutes on foot I can be well into open country) and, of course, fairly quiet. I'd like to see it reflect a different social structure, of course, but that's not going to happen any time soon......

'Deictic, fiducial stones'

Launching a blog into cyberspace from a raised beach on the same estuary as in the picture because it's the start of a new month and a personal anniversary of some note and because I feel like memorialising the quotidian doings of this airt from my own perspective. What they are and what that is will become clear as time passes.