May 2013
6 posts
The softness of an ocean.
I’m currently re-reading Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels in sequence, partly as a useless but heartfelt tribute to someone who, sadly, we are about to lose, and partly to make sure there’s nothing too much for my 13 year old (who has just discovered Banks) to encounter in their pages.
The third in the sequence is ‘Use of Weapons’ - the most often recommended starting...
Welcome to English to English
english2english:
Right, then. Prince Harry’s visit to the USA is as good a time as any to point out that the mutual curiosity shared between British and American cultures is as intense as ever. It’s also a good time to launch this Tumblr.
When Winston Churchill coined the phrase “special relationship” to describe the connection between the two nations in 1946, he was describing two countries...
In which Niall Ferguson is revealed to have a bit...
Critics of Niall Ferguson will often offer the caveat, ‘Ah, but ‘The Pity of War’ - that’s a good piece of proper academic work’.
This morning there was a bit of a hoo-ha on Twitter and elsewhere about Niall Ferguson’s comments at a conference, in which it was alleged he linked John Maynard Keynes’ sexuality with Keynes’ economic theories and policy...
From Niall Ferguson's 'The Pity of War' (paperback...
p400
There is, however, no question that a series of meetings with one of the German representatives at Versailles added an emotional dimension to Keynes’ position. Carl Melchior was Max Warburg’s right-hand man (……..) It may be that Keynes’ subsequent declaration that he ‘got to love’ Melchior during the armistice negotiations at Trier and Spa obliquely...
Keynes, Lopokova and the 'little bun'.
From Robert Skidelsky’s one volume biography of John Maynard Keynes, pages 403-4:
It was Keynes’ links with the theatre that brought Cambridge into Lydia’s orbit. Lydia was thirty-five in 1927. She had steered clear of any further ballet engagements in order to have a child. The letters she and Maynard exchanged give only vague hints of what happened. There is some suggestion...
April 2013
3 posts
Thatcher, Mandela, and it's a bit more complicated...
I said I wouldn’t. I promised myself I wouldn’t. Blogging about Thatcher this week if you’re a lefty is like re-inserting a clot into one’s vein post-triple bypass. But. Margaret Thatcher being cast as a lion in the struggle against apartheid? It just won’t wash.
To listen to some people with either short memories or a factual deficit, apartheid was essentially...
This government has a 19th century view of...
A frequent accusation thrown at Iain Duncan Smith is that he has a ‘Victorian attitude towards the poor’.
If only.
One of the problems with throwing the epithet ‘Victorian’ around, is that like the terms ‘God’ or ‘reasonable’ it tends to reflect the beliefs of the person using it, rather than any objective set of social phenomena. In fact, the...
Bankers have no armies.
“My lord,’ he says. “You have said what you have to say. Now listen to me. You are a man whose money is almost spent. I am a man who knows how you have spent it. You are a man who has borrowed all over Europe. I am a man who knows all your creditors. One word from me, and your debts will be called in.’
“Oh and what can they do?” Percy asks. “Bankers...
March 2013
8 posts
April's Cruel Day.
Polly Toynbee has written elsewhere about the cruelties this April will bring to the most vulnerable, ( http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/mar/28/benefit-cuts-monday-defines-government ), but this is specifically about the changes I’ve seen as a volunteer.
The vulnerable people I see are: homeless or precariously housed (sofa-surfing/squatting/about to lose their tenancy); most...
Vignette.
A man bedding down for the night, opposite the High St Job Centre, his eyes as empty & dark as the shut-down shop in whose doorway he sleeps.
This isn't the piece I meant to write
Consider these two facts:
The Labour Party is assisting the government in rushing through emergency retroactive legislation to enable to government to avoid repaying illegally-imposed sanctions on those placed on workfare schemes.
The government is proposing childcare tax breaks for families with joint incomes of < £300,000.
I am, for my many and various sins and those of my forefathers and...
On being ill
I have, as followers of my nonsense on Twitter will already know, Been Ill, with first a sickness bug and now a dreadful cold/flu. Not seriously ill, not requiring a hospital stay or even a GP’s visit, but ill enough to need time off work and volunteering and to leave me feeling grimly frustrated and tearful at my inability to live my life without thinking about it for the last ten days.
...
Δώρια by Ezra Pound
Be in me as the eternal moods
of the bleak wind, and not
As transient things are -
gaiety of flowers.
Have me in the strong loneliness
of sunless cliffs
And of grey waters.
Let the gods speak softly of us
In days hereafter,
The shadowy flowers of Orcus
Remember thee.
February 2013
1 post
shame
/SHām/
Noun
A painful feeling of humiliation or distress caused by the consciousness of wrong or foolish behavior.
Verb
(of a person, action, or situation) Make (someone) feel ashamed: “I shamed him into giving some away”.
Synonyms
noun. disgrace - dishonour - dishonor - ignominy - opprobriumverb. disgrace - abash - dishonour - dishonor
Shame is arguably an emotion without...
January 2013
8 posts
A recurrent criticism of Hilary Mantel’s depiction of Thomas Cromwell is that it is both too modern and too flattering. On this evidence, however, he seems to have had the sort of realistic grasp on Parliamentary politics that contemporary politicians could do well to emulate:
‘I among others have endured a parliament which continued by the space of seventeen whole weeks, where we...
To a Dead Lover by Louise Bogan : Poetry Magazine →
‘And I have life - that old reason to wait for what comes, to leave what is over.’
An old reason, perhaps, but it’s still the best and the only one we humans have…
Re-reading A.N. Wilson’s ‘The Victorians’ (a book deserving of the adjective ‘magisterial’ if ever there was one, in every sense of the term), I came across this rather useful quote from Charles Kingsley, writing to an atheist friend:
“Whatever doubt or doctrinal Atheism you and your friends may have, don’t fall into moral atheism. Don’t forget the...
Pluming forth....(the end of grief).
The day you died, the seed we had meant to plant together in a bright and green bed, open to rinsing sunshine and rain, fell out of my pocket and onto the floor of a dark wood.
Our seed’s first growth was unexceptional: no threat for the looming trunks surrounding it - but in place of its flourishing into a neatly tended garden, all roses & honeysuckle climbing, its nursery was a...
December 2012
4 posts
When it comes to equal marriage, clerics need to...
When clerics talk about marriage being ordained as being between one man and one woman, as though decisions made by people had nothing to do with its becoming the rule, and condemn advocacy of equal marriage as ‘totalitarian’ and lacking a mandate, I can’t help but think of this quote from Wolf Hall:
He never sees More – a star in another firmament, who acknowledges him with a...
“We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the...”
– Viktor Frankl, quoted in The Great Partnership by Jonathan Sacks, p.35. (via johnthelutheran)
November 2012
5 posts
They also serve who only stand for...
I’d like to begin by commending this article by Laura McInerney here (£, but there’s a FREE trial available): http://www.optimus-education.com/school-accountability-are-governors-job .
Laura’s analysis of the issues around governance and its quality chime with my experience of having been a primary school parent-governor. It should go without saying, that what follows are my...
Finance: it's a kind of magic....
From ‘Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell’ (an most excellent novel about two very different magicians):
Often it is hard to decide upon the morality of USKGLASS’s actions because his motives are so obscure. Of all the AUREATE magicians he is the most mysterious. No-one knows why in 1138 he caused the moon to disappear from the sky and made it travel through all the lakes and...
Pseudopodic politics.
Of the things I learned in biology at school, two things have stayed with me; one, that if you are dissecting frogs in a room full of adolescent girls it’s not the ones that scream you have to worry about, it’s the silent pukers, and two, ‘pseudopodia’.
I remember pseudopodia partly because it’s agreatword (its literal meaning is ‘false feet’) but mostly...
10 days that shook my world | Tom Watson MP →
A chilling but necessary read. Please share.
October 2012
8 posts
Why abortion is not like apartheid.
A device increasingly used by those opposed to abortion, is to compare the availability of abortion to an historical event, the more widely accepted as an atrocity the better. I’ve written about this use of the Holocaust here: http://economistadentata.tumblr.com/post/21021104421/holocaust-denial , for example. And today’s comparator is apartheid:...
IDS's sympathetic medicine.
If you had identified a risk factor for a condition which would not only blight one life, but that if left untreated could well prove hereditary, what would you do? Would you prescribe the most recent and effective remedy, or would you return to antediluvian solutions, which by the very existence of the condition you are seeking to treat have been proven ineffective?
Whenever the DWP’s...
10 Answers to '10 Questions a Pro-Choice candidate...
I was asked on Twitter what I made of an article asking why pro-choicers aren’t asked ‘hard questions by the media’ in apparent contrast to pro-lifers. The link to the full article is :
http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/trevinwax/2012/10/24/10-questions-a-pro-choice-candidate-is-never-asked-by-the-media/ but here are the relevant questions:
1. You say you support a...
40 Days of Choice: Anna Hedge →
fortydaysofchoice:
Lessons from across the pond…
The attitude to reproductive rights in the US, (the home of 40 Days for Life) is most accurately reflected by groups who are vehemently opposed to abortion and those groups represent the views of the majority. Right? Wrong. Religious anti-choice groups do not even…
“When you are diagnosed schizophrenic, it’s like being told you are officially...”
– ‘The savagery of schizophrenia’ - Caitlin Moran (via dontbeajerkjessy)
They said it couldn't happen here.
A month ago today, Save the Children UK launched an appeal to raise £500,000 to address the issue of serious child poverty in the UK. The appeal was made in the light of children going without hot meals, warm coats in winter, new shoes as well as ‘luxuries’ like school trips and treats.
The response fell along all-too-familiar lines; liberals appalled that any child in a rich,...
Feminism, the 'real deal'.
Did you know we have a Minister for Women (and Equality)? Course you did, you clever people. But isn’t it great? We’re a thing, like the Environment, or the Treasury orTransport, ummm, Health where the government has decided we deserve a representative to speak up when important decisions are made that impact upon us.
The current incumbent Maria Miller has taken this duty to speak up...
September 2012
1 post
riddlemehiddleston:
i feel like this gif is an accurate representation of most mumford and sons songs
August 2012
3 posts
For Rachel.
This is the image I can’t get out of my head:
A young woman stands in front of a bulldozer. She weighs under 70kg. It weighs about 49 tons. It is no contest, none at all. But still she stands there.
The bulldozer has been sent there to tear down houses. The bulldozer belongs to a regional superpower, supported by the most powerful countries in the world. The houses belong...
Originally, this post was going to make the comparison between the murder of Shafilea Ahmed, and other incidents where a group or an institution as claimed it has the right, or even the duty to ignore, evade or avoid the law. I’m not going to do that, as it would make this post far too long and inflammatory even by my standards. Suffice to say that attitudes towards the law similar to...
June 2012
1 post
April 2012
8 posts
