The Good and the Bad Pedant

There are two sorts of pedants: those who are aware that they are are pedants, and those that aren’t. The former - the conscious pedant - is a harmless beast. He’s taken on board the essential triviality of his concerns: the world at large is either unaware of the whole issue of ‘correct usage ’ which so exercises him, or knows that there are more important things to worry about. (Or, as emended by the pedant, ‘about which to worry’.) Knowing himself, the conscious pedant uses his foible as a source of mirth. The unconscious pedant, however, is a humourless individual, who uses his knowledge to bolster his feeling of superiority and sense of self-importance, oblivious of the fact that in so doing he only succeeds in making himself look a pretentious tosser.

Today’s Observer contained examples of both sorts of pedantry: a witty article by Euan Ferguson (Man your apostrophes, my friends, and support the pedants' revolt) and a reader’s pompous letter reproduced below:

The big issue: The Kercher murder. The persecution of Amanda Knox goes on

While I share Barbara Ellen's concerns that the murder victim Meredith Kercher seems to have been forgotten by the press reporting of the trial in Perugia ("Meredith, not Knox, deserves our thoughts", Opinion, last week), it is a pity she accuses Amanda Knox of "flowery oratory" in her final statement to the court using a sloppy translation.

"Ho paura di avere una maschera di assassina forzata sulla mia pelle" means she doesn't want to be branded a murderer, not to be "given the mask of the assassin". Having watched the whole speech in which she not only thanked her friends and family for their support but even acknowledged the job her accusers had to do, it certainly did not "sound like some ham mangling Shakespeare".

My impression was of watching an innocent young woman, who'd already spent two long years in a foreign jail, feeling vulnerable but hoping she would receive a fair verdict – and judging from the more balanced reporting elsewhere in your paper, we may yet see the guilty verdict overturned on appeal.

Sue Newte

London SE7

The opening sentence’s subordinate adverbial clause of concession, as we pedants put it, makes one’s hackles rise. Just as one knows ‘While I’m not anti-semitic/homophobic/racist, some of my best friends are Jews/gay/black, but …’ is always the prelude to some disgusting piece of prejudice, what follows the Newte’s opening remark demonstrates that she does not share Barbara Ellen’s concerns at all. Her ‘impression’ that Amanda Knox is innocent outweighs the verdict of the court.

But the real reason for the letter is her desire to demonstrate that her command of Italian is better than Barbara Ellen’s. It is not. ‘Given the mask of the assassin’, one slight quibble aside, is a literal not a ‘sloppy’ translation. Whilst it’s usual to translate assassina as ‘murderess’, a pedant should know that the English word ‘assassin’ simply means ‘murderer’. It’s only contemporary usage - and when has that carried any weight with the stickler for ‘correctness’ - which has conflated its meaning with ‘hired assassin’ - i.e. someone who carries out a killing on behalf of a political or religious idea, or another individual or organisation. As Barbara Ellen says, the translation has preserved the floweriness of the original. A straightforward wish not to be branded might be expressed as: ‘Ho paura d’essere bollata’ or ‘d’essere stigmatizzata’. The same wish expressed figuratively might be ‘Non mi piace aver la parte d’assassina imporre a me’. Only a ‘ham mangling Shakespeare’ would complain of having a murderess’s mask forced upon herself. The Newte is confusing translating the idiom of one language into its equivalent in another (e.g. ‘poppet’ not ‘cauliflower’ when choufleur is used as an endearment) with preserving the original’s register. To translate Knox’s statement as ‘branded as a murderer’ is as inadequate as flatly translating la Serenissima as ‘Venice’, The Smoke as ‘Londra’, or some twerpette writing to the Observer as ‘la signora Newte’.

That’s better: now I’m feeling superior and a lot more self-important - or would be if anyone read this blog!

Darwin and sanctity

I was expelled from the first school I attended. The nuns told my mother that ‘James is a very naughty boy. We’d like you to remove him.’

‘Why don’t you smack him?’

Unusually for the nineteen-forties, and remarkably so in the light of recent revelations about some orders’ behaviour in Ireland, they replied primly: ‘We don’t believe in corporal punishment.’

Being expelled from kindergarten may explain why at my next school, when each child in the class was asked what he or she wanted to be when grown up I replied, ‘A saint.’ An answer greeted by general hilarity. But if one forgets canonisation and thinks instead of managing to grab a priest for the last-rites, followed by an extended stay in purgatory, not an entirely implausible ambition.

I was reminded of my Somerset infant school by an article about Darwin’s legacy I read a couple of days ago. Click here to read it. Although I knew about the Nazis' obsession with the pseudo-science of eugenics, and was vaguely aware that it had had a following in the western democracies, I hadn’t realised how widespread that following was, or how horrific its consequences. The activities of the British Eugenics Society led to ‘to the imprisonment without trial of more than 40,000 people. Many were detained for "moral imbecility" - having children out of wedlock, committing petty crimes, or displaying homosexual inclinations. Some would remain incarcerated for 20 years.’

The real shock, though, came from reading:

‘Darwin's ideas have also fathered some of the most grotesque instances of man's inhumanity to man.
Darwin's decision to represent as a scientific fact that the several races of mankind had travelled different distances down the evolutionary path - that white Europeans were, in short, more highly evolved than Africans or Australian Aborigines - has had appalling consequences. Today, Darwin's supporters frequently make light of his racial views, claiming that he was no more racist than the average upper-middle-class gentlemen of his day, and warning that we should not try to impose the politically correct attitudes of our own times on to the past. But Darwin's racism was very different from that of his contemporaries.

Though any Victorian Englishman might have regarded himself as socially superior to the lawless, savage tribes he encountered throughout the Empire, only Darwin - as the man who discovered evolution by natural selection - could provide an underpinning for racial superiority in biology and evolutionary science. Only Darwin could establish the notion of a hierarchy of races as a scientific orthodoxy that would prevail through much of the following century.

… Darwin's second catastrophic error was to promote the view that the poorest sections of society were genetically inferior to the educated middle class and that most, if not all, the traits that led to pauperism were hereditary. Darwin's analysis generated a fear that if the working class continued to breed faster than the middle class, then the society would continue down a spiral of genetic degeneration.’

Although I knew about Social Darwinism I’d always believed that it was a completely unwarranted distortion of the great man’s teachings rather than an integral part of them. I suppose I shouldn’t really be surprised that the seamy side of Darwin’s theories should have been brushed under the carpet. We all like our saints made of plaster rather than flesh and blood. Think of the Whisky Priest, Graham Greene’s anonymous protagonist in The Power and the Glory. As well as being dependent on alcohol, the priest has an illegitimate daughter. The apostate priest, José, at his wife’s instigation, refuses to administer the last rites to the whisky priest before his execution. So he dies believing he is damned, though the theologically literate reader will know that his final emotion- ‘He felt only an immense disappointment because he had to go to God empty-handed, with nothing done at all’ - is an act of pure contrition which will save him. And the common reader, of any belief or none, will know him to be a good man who, despite his many frailties, did his best to do what he believed to be right. But as soon as he is dead the pious turn him into a plaster saint:

'And that one,' the boy said, 'they shot today. Was he a hero too?'

'Yes.'

'The one who stayed with us that time?'

'Yes. He was one of the martyrs of the Church.'

'He had a funny smell,' one of the little girls said.

'You must never say that again,' the mother said. 'He may be one of the saints.'

'Shall we pray to him then?'

The mother hesitated. 'It would do no harm. Of course, before we know he is a saint, there will have to be miracles ... '

'Did he call "Viva el Cristo Rey"?' the boy asked .. '.

'Yes. He was one of the heroes of the faith.'

'And a handkerchief soaked in blood?' the boy went on, 'Did anyone do that?'

The mother said ponderously, 'I have reason to believe … Señora Jiminez told me … I think if your father will give me a little money, I shall be able to get a relic.'

'Does it cost money?'

'How else could it be managed? Everybody can't have a piece.’

One would have thought that it would be more inspiring to know that greatness or sanctity can be found in someone whose ideas or behaviour are in many respects deplorable. Darwin was wrong to propagate the belief that some groups of people are inherently inferior to others; the Whisky Priest was wrong to break his vow of celibacy. But they are both heroic figures, because of, rather than despite, their frailties.

Substance and Accidents

Read an excellent article by Simon Jenkins in today’s Guardian (click here to read it). Jenkins suggests that what makes a place attractive to us is the network of friends and associations it has for us rather than its objective beauty. I have the good fortune to live in a breathtakingly beautiful place, yet I’m rarely any longer consciously aware of its beauty: it’s simply my home. Something similar can be said of people themselves. It's often struck me that it’s much easier to describe the appearance of those we don’t know very well than that of our close friends and family. Their physical appearance changes over the years but unless we look at an old photograph we’re not conscious of the fact. And although when we have lost contact for years with someone who used to be a close friend we’re immediately struck by their changed appearance when we meet them again the shock soon wears off. Last week I met an old schoolfriend again for the first time for over forty-five years. He now bears a striking resemblance to George Bush senior . However, after a few hours the sexagenarian had melded seamlessly with the bluecoat boy I’d shared a dormitory with for seven years of my life. Not only do the changed accidents seem unimportant one soon ceases to be aware of them - only the substance remains.

  A critic - I think it was Walter Allen - remarked that it was untrue that Dickens created caricatures. What he did was to embody his creations with the vividness of perception which we have as children. Think of those larger than life eccentric masters who dominated your schooldays. If you meet them in later life they seem to be disappointingly normal. Allen suggests that as adults we subconsciously reduce everyone to the norm: we flatten their eccentricities and heighten their ‘normal’ features. We no longer see them as they are but what convention tells us they should be. But Dickens uses accidents to manifest his characters’ substance. However, in our close friends and family substance has no need of accidents: we apprehend their substance in the same way a mystic knows his God.

The Nutty Professor

We’ve always been a credulous species, and I don’t exempt myself. Once a week I watch a man in a frock claim to make the body and blood of a Jewish criminal - executed many years ago by the Roman provincial authorities - appear ‘really and substantially’ on a table. Despite the fact that they look like bread and wine I believe him. Fortunately having been ipso facto excommunicate for over thirty years I escape the attendant cannibalism.

  In the Middle Ages credulity’s chief beneficiary was the organisation set up by the criminal I mentioned earlier. Today it’s the scientist.

  Before going any further, it’s probably as well to make a few things clear. Firstly, I have no doubt at all that Darwin’s theory of evolution fits the facts. Anyone who thinks that Genesis is a scientific treatise is terminally stupid: the book says light was created before the Sun! One would have thought that even the dimmest evangelical would have noticed that there’s a certain causal relationship between the two and that the Bible inverts it. The fact that I smoke doesn’t mean that I’m silly enough to deny the link between tobacco and cancer, simply silly enough to carry on puffing. And I’m sure that human activity contributes to global warming; though, having studied Geology as a subsid, I know that the Earth has gone through frequent dramatic climate changes without any human intervention in the past. They made bugger-all difference to the viability of the planet though they proved very inconvenient for some of its species. So my beef isn’t with science but with our response to it.

  In Chaucer’s day the average layman knew as little about theology as s/he does today about astro-physics. But he knew someone who did: the priest. Accordingly anything an ecclesiastic said was authoritative: he lived on a superior intellectual plane. There’s currently an ad on Italian television in which a scientist from Rome’s Sapienza University scientifically ‘proves’ - using arcane terminology which neither I nor the majority of RAI’s other viewers understand - that Gillette’s deodorant for men is superior to rival products. I’m about as impressed by this claim as I am by Chaucer’s Pardoner’s that:

‘…in his male he hadde a pilwe-​beer,

Which that, he seyde, was our lady veyl:

He seyde, he hadde a gobet of the seyl

That sëynt Peter hadde, whan that he wente

Up-​on the see, til Iesu Crist him hente.’

But advertisers wouldn’t pay a scientist to peddle nonsense if they didn’t think that many people would be taken in by him, just as their mediæval ancestors were by the Pardoner.

  Which brings me to Professor Nutt. The salient point to remember is that scientists are authoritative - unless they’re being paid to betray their calling - only when speaking about the area of their expertise. Outside that area their opinions carry as much or as little weight as that of the man or woman in the street. When I was an undergraduate the Professor of Physics was a leading proponent of evangelical Christianity. Note not Catholicism - which at the time had a certain intellectual rigour - nor Anglicanism - where it’s possible to completely disavow the supernatural - or Quakerism - an eminently sensible sect - but evangelicalism, the refuge of the intellectually confused and sexually deprived. So when the professor spoke about Physics he was authoritative; when he spoke about God he wasn’t. Professor Nutt has gone on record as saying that Ecstasy is intrinsically less dangerous than riding, the implication being that if you allow people to ride to hounds then you should let them take Ecstasy. The fact that, because many more people take Ecstasy than ride horses, the damage done by the former - though statistically less dangerous - is much greater seems a logical step too far for the professor. Semantics don’t seem to be his strong suit either: he seems unable to distinguish between the meaning of the word ‘advisor’ and that of ‘legislator’. As a former English lecturer, speaking within my field of expertise, I can authoritatively state that their meanings differ.

  I would go further than Nutt. I think that the criminalisation of drugs probably does more harm than good. But that is not a point of view that would find much support in the popular press. The same popular press which is intent on turning Nutt into a martyr. The same popular press which loathes Brown and extolls Cameron. Cameron the leader of the Conservative party which solidly backed Johnson’s sacking Nutt. Conclusion? Science like religion is too often twisted to serve unworthy causes by those who have no understanding of or real interest in the thing they pervert.

The Fall of Rome

There wasn’t a wide range of newspapers available to read on the screens (reading stands) at School. The Times sticks in my mind - it introduced me to the word ‘brothel’ and its correspondence columns carried a fascinating exchange about ‘the abominable crime of buggery’. Apparently this had been put on the statute book by Henry VIII’s Reformation Parliament. Under Mary that parliament’s legislation was repealed en bloc, so having the accidental effect of not only removing her father’s anti-papal legislation but also the secular penalties for sodomy. In Elizabeth’s reign parliament restored the status ante quo: sodomy was once more a crime. I think the correspondence was engendered by the imminent publication of the Wolfenden Report. There was, of course, no Daily Mirror let alone the Daily Worker. The only representatives of the popular press were the Daily Express, which fervently espoused Beaverbrook’s ‘dynamic creed of Empire’ and the News Chronicle, a token concession to non-Conservative thinking. On Sundays anyone whose family home was within travelling distance of the school was given an automatic exeat from the end of Chapel to evening prep. Consequently there were no Sunday newspapers.
  In the 1950s Anglicanism and Conservatism were givens at the sort of school I went to; I guess they probably still are. Between leaving school and going up to university I was received into the Catholic Church. University changed my politics. And with that went a change in newspapers. I started reading the [Manchester] Guardian during the week and opted for the Observer on Sundays. Whilst there was no real weekday alternative to the Guardian for an educated leftie, the Sunday Times would have been a possibility for Sundays. This was long before the Dirty Digger got his hands on it: the paper had a tradition of investigative journalism inspired by a strong sense of social justice. I think I went with the Observer because it had been founded in the 18th century - a period to which I’ve long had a romantic - or should that be an augustan - attachment.
  In 410 the world was rocked by Alaric’s sacking Rome. Although the Empire staggered on in the west for another 60 odd years, Augustine of Hippo was right to see it as an event of unparalleled importance. It marked the end of civilisation and the descent of Europe into its present day condition of squabbling Ruritanian statelets which the Americans quite rightly view with an incredulous mixture of amusement and contempt. On the 11th October I knew how St Augustine felt. The Observer published an article whose flouting of that newspaper’s liberal tradition was as violent as Alaric’s rape of Rome. Its headline - ‘I'll only be happy if smoking is banned. We should no longer tolerate the minority threatening the lives of the majority’ - says it all. Augustine wrote the De Civitate Dei in response to the sack of Rome. I wrote a letter to the Editor:

"Sir, Duncan Bannatyne has hit the nail on the head: passive smoking is, at best, a deeply unpleasant experience for the non-smoker, and the evidence that smokers seriously, and often fatally, damage their health is irrefutable. As is the evidence that the internal-combustion engine does enormous damage not only to the health of millions of humans alive today, but to that of generations to come. Damage not only to the human race but to every other species with whom we share this planet. Fortunately we can be sure that Duncan will have kicked the motoring habit. He will be advising the mothers of 12 year would-be athletes to make their sons walk to school thereby avoiding both obesity and poisoning the planet. To assume otherwise would be to accuse Duncan of the rankest hypocrisy: enjoying a feeling of moral superiority from condemning the vices of others whilst continuing to indulge his own."

It wasn’t published. I thought that I’d possibly made a mistake in appearing to attack the motor car. When I was an FE lecturer I found that to do so was a real no-no. Whilst I am sure that students would have quite happily accepted such essay topics as ‘Women are men’s natural inferiors. Discuss’, or ‘Write an essay supporting the idea that anyone with acne should be tortured to death’ - well it’s a view, they would have probably responded - when I set the topic ‘The motor-car is the curse of the twentieth century. Discuss’ they reacted with howls of rage. I was quite clearly mentally deficient.

The Observer did print a letter in response to Bannatyne:

"Perhaps Duncan Bannatyne should be appointed the government's pensions tsar ('I'll only be happy if smoking is banned", Comment). Then he can explain how the baby-boom generation survived in the decades when smoking levels were over 70% and is now causing the government such a headache with their long, healthy lives, despite Prof Gerard Hastings stating that 'few smokers live to collect their pensions'.

Perhaps, too, Mr Bannatyne can work out how to pay for all these pensions. In the old days, the chancellor would have simply whacked up tobacco duties, but not much point in that these days. A hefty tax on health club membership fees might do the trick. Jeff Fendall"

If I were a cynic, I’d imagine it was selected for publication because the weakness of its argument could only provide comfort to the Bannatynians. I therefore made a second attempt to repel Alaric:

"As an occasional smoker, I fear that Jeff Randall’s reply to Duncan Bannatyne’s article will only confirm the anti-smoking brigade’s belief that we are simpletons who need protecting from ourselves. When I was an undergraduate in the early sixties virtually all of my friends smoked; only one still does, the rest gave up decades ago. That is why they have lived to collect their pensions.

  The problem I have with anti-smokers as opposed to non-smokers is their tone of moral superiority. Their pretence that they are motivated by a concern for the public good. If they were they would be campaigning vigorously against the motor-car which by any measure does infinitely more harm to the planet than smoking. But that would mean sacrificing their own pleasure rather than someone else’s. I write as a motorist but not, I hope, as a hypocrite."

Again the letter wasn’t published. So as far as the Observer is concerned John Stuart Mill might as well have never lived. As long as the nauseating Bannatyne is happy the misery of millions of smokers no longer able to enjoy their pleasure in private is of no consequence. And I think the word ‘happy’ is the key to it. Yes smoking is a fairly disgusting habit and the world would be better off without. And the world was probably better off without the murderers on whom Lord Justice Goddard passed the death sentence. But, if his clerk’s account of the state of his lordship’s breeches is to be believed, the pleasure which the eminent judge received had little to do with the administration of justice. Given a choice between breathing a bit of stale tobacco smoke and listening to Bannatyne ejaculate in his trousers, I know which I’d opt for.

Blanket approval

My wife got back from England, yesterday, after a week looking after our grandson. In preparation for her return I tried to get the house looking presentable: hoovering, washing the floors and - finally - changing our bed-linen. The first of these tasks was quite fun: she'd bought a Dyson just before she left in attempt to save money on the exorbitant amount she was being charged for disposable bags for her existing vacuum cleaner - a similar scam to that perpetrated by printer manufacturers, except that the previous machine was very expensive. Dysons look really cool and apart from having to empty them every five minutes are quite efficient to operate. The final task was anything but fun.
Although, unusually for the 16th century, my old school’s charter established it as an academically inclusive institution - … ‘educati et enutriti deinde bonis moribus et litteraturis instituti si eruditioni et litteris [sic] apti fuerint literis [sic] opificiis et mechanicis artibus perite instructi … - by the mid-twentieth century it had long since ceased to teach any non-academic subjects. So for those of us who hadn’t joined the cadet corps and learned to shoot a 303 rifle the only practical skill the school imparted was how to make hospital corners. Beds were inspected every morning by the dormitory monitor and a sloppily made bed was a punishable offence.
I like to think that I’m not a luddite or a technophobe. I’ve cheerfully embraced most advances in technology. Producing lecture notes on a computer and photocopier was so much easier than typing them - with a huge expenditure on correcting fluid - and then running them off on a spirit duplicator. And as for the iPhone - Che farei senza that little Eurydice? But the duvet is a completely different matter. Whatever induced the British people to abandon the crisp sheets and blankets I was brought up with for this Scandinavian monster? For a nurse or a public schoolboy making a bed with hospital corners gave a satisfaction akin to that felt by joiner constructing a dovetail joint. A practical task completed with consummate craftsmanship. But stretching a fitted sheet over a mattress affords little satisfaction. And as for fitting a duvet inside its cover - that’s a labour that would have Sisyphus screaming to have his rock back. The wretched thing has a life of its own fighting back as you struggle to get it to lie flat and rectangular in its cover. Thank God the wife's back and I won’t have to try to cope with this modern ‘advance’ for another few months.

Dinner with the ambassador

Like nearly everyone of modest talents and humble background, my contact with the good and great is virtually non-existent. Apart from a very slight acquaintance with Stephen Fry when he was a student at the College where I taught and attending a party - when I was 19 - at which Dennis Waterman was a fellow guest, there is nothing to tell on a personal level. I suppose I must have shaken Princess Margaret’s hand, or at least bowed to her, when I received my degree - she was Chancellor at the time - though I remember nothing of the occasion, and I have listened to various literary worthies - Antony Thwaite, Beryl Bainbridge, Louis de Bernieres, George Barker and Thomas Blackburn among them - address the English students and staff at the College. But unlike a friend and colleague who unsuccessfully invited Rachel Cusk to spend the night with him in his dormobile, I was merely a face in a crowd.

But although I’m a non-runner in the Drop-a-name Handicap, I know quite a few people who have actually met the good and the great, and the not-so-good. My friend Ed must occupy the number one spot. He was taught by Tom Sharpe at prep-school, introduced to Bobby Kennedy as an undergraduate in South Africa - the great man said ‘Hi, how are ya?’ - had one of the visiting poets - and his inseparable companion, an attache case containing a bottle of gin - to stay, and actually taught Stephen Fry, on the rare occasions when the future luminary could be bothered to attend class. I had a friend at university who’d been to primary school with Christine Keeler and another on my postgrad. cert. ed. course who’d been to secondary school with Mick Jagger. And - prepare to be amazed - for the last 32 years I’ve been married to someone who once shared a doughnut with Vanessa Redgrave! But the jewel of my collection has to be a German mature student when I was an undergraduate at Keele. As a 14 year old leader of the Hitler Youth he’d travelled to Berlin to present Munich’s collection for the Winterhilfe fund to the Führer. The dictator asked him where he came from. ‘Ah my faithful Bavarians,’ he commented on hearing Hans’s reply.

Imagine my delight then, gentle reader, on receiving an invitation to dine with the ambassador.

Perhaps I should explain. Montefalcone is twinned with a village in Moldova and for some reason I can’t quite fathom the Moldovan ambassador to Italy was invited to visit our village, the event culminating in a meal at Lupo’s Locanda. I guess that in most of the places the ambassador visits there is a carefully selected guest list comprising the cream of local society. Montefalcone, though, is very small and cream is in short supply. I guess the town council were worried about having a sufficiently large gathering to meet him. They therefore sent a circular to every inhabitant inviting us to book a seat at the dinner for 16 euros a head. As my wife had gone off to England for a week yesterday to look after our grandson, I thought I’d go - it would save having to cook - always a depressing business when you’re on your own.

In anticipation of the event I googled Moldova. and discovered its chief claim to fame to be trafficking women sex workers to Western Europe. At the dinner, during the course of a very lengthy speech, His Excellency stressed the importance of strengthening commercial ties between the Marche region and his homeland. I hope, but this being Italy cannot be sure, that he only had in mind the wine to which he frequently referred and, even more frequently, imbibed. His speech also made several references to his country’s having once been a part of the Dacian province of the Roman Empire. The romanophile in me wanted to jump up and shout, ‘Civis romanus sum. My country too was once a province of the Empire (if you exclude Ireland and the north of Scotland which the Romans very wisely decided weren’t worth the expense of conquering).’ Fortunately my total lack of Moldovan, and erratic command of Italian restrained me. But the contrast between the two former provinces is, I think, instructive. Moldova is a very poor country and desperately wants to join the EU because it sees membership as a route to once again enjoying the peace and prosperity it had enjoyed under the pax romana. Britain is a country which, once very wealthy, is on an inexorable slide towards economic impotence. But because it was once the most powerful country in the world it imagines that it can still flourish as an ‘independent’ nation and resolutely opposes the greater european integration which could save it. However, if we look fifty years ahead when Moldova flourishes as an integral part of a federal Europe, it will no longer need to rely on its current staple industry. Could be an opportunity for the UK there!

Fictions too far.

My wife returned from England yesterday. Apart from painting shutters, sawing up tree branches and weeding the courtyard I spent my time reading Camilleri’s latest Montalbano novel: La danza del gabbiano [The Dance of the Seagull].
  Camilleri is now well into his eighties and, I fear, his powers are starting to decline like those of so many people at that stage of life. His previous novel, L’età del dubbio [The Age of Doubt], despite being well plotted, had a serious weakness. His protagonist, Montalbano, became involved with a staggeringly beautiful Lieutenant of the Customs Service, Laura Belladonna, more than twenty years his junior. Nothing unusual there as both life and art teach us - though such things usually end in tears: The Merchant’s Prologue and Tale and Paul and Heather McCartney spring to mind. What didn’t ring true was the fact that it was Laura who was obsessed with Montalbano, rather than vice versa, having to struggle to overcome her longing to consummate their relationship. After Montalbano tries unsuccessfully to save her life she dies with his name on her lips. A trip to the beach with my younger daughter a couple of years ago taught me that in real life young women do not find the sight of the semi-naked flesh of the aging male an attractive sight. ‘Oh, Father!’ she exclaimed with disgust as I appeared in my bathing trunks!
  Maybe Camilleri was trying to exorcise some demon in his private life, depicting things as he wished they could have been rather than as they were. Dickens did something similar in Oliver Twist, the young Rose Maylie returning from the brink of death after a sudden illness: his seventeen year old sister-in-law, Mary Hogarth with whom he was in love, had died suddenly and unexpectedly whilst he was writing the novel. And Great Expectations transmutes his troubled relationship with Ellen Ternan, twenty-five years his junior, into that of Pip and Estella, class difference being substituted for age difference. Discrepancy in age is dealt with directly, and given a happy resolution, in the marriage of Jo and Biddy, whilst the revised ‘Bulwer-Lytton’ ending to the novel, with the subdued beauty of its evocation of the closing lines of Paradise Lost, tentatively points to a future together for Pip and Estella. My point, dear reader, is that in Great Expectations, Dickens exemplifies Eliot’s analogy of the creative process being a catalyst:
‘… the mind of the poet is the shred of platinum. It may partly or exclusively operate upon the experience of the man himself; but the more perfect the artist the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material …’
In Oliver Twist, an early work, Dickens did not, and neither has Camilleri.
  The problems with La danza del gabbiano are different. Once again, a young woman features in Montalbano’s life, but he is aware from the beginning that she is a honey-trap and though attracted to her doesn’t suffer from the illusion that the feeling is mutual. What doesn’t gell, though, is the way Montalbano behaves to make Angela confess to her involvement in the plot to entrap him. He puts pressure on her by making her strip naked and pretending he is about to rape her. Perhaps more than most fictional detectives, Montalbano is a thoroughly decent man. In any previous novel, the measures he adopts here - those of the American troops who sexually abused and humiliated their Iraqi captives in an attempt to extract confessions - would have horrified and disgusted him. One can only conclude that Camilleri was writing the scene, with one hand on the keyboard and the other inside his pants, to save the cost of that week’s supply of viagra.
  The other problem is one of form. In Il campo del vasaio [The Potter’s Field] - see my blog dated 4th March - Camilleri has the nice conceit of Montalbano getting the inspiration to solve the crime he is working on from reading one of the author’s historical novels - one which doesn’t feature Montalbano. That worked. In contrast, the opening chapter of La danza del gabbiano has Montalbano avoiding a trip to Val di Noto with his partner, Livia, because they might run into the television crew filming one of Camilleri’s Montalbano’s novels! He even complains that the actor who plays him is bald - and in real life the actor, Zingaretti, is - whilst he himself has plenty of hair. Such dislocations of form rarely work. Even in A Handful of Dust, in many ways a great novel, they don’t. According to his biographer, Sykes, Waugh is trying to make the point that civilisation is a thin layer of ice through which we can easily fall. True, but in Gulliver’s Travels the point is formally embodied with consummate skill; in A Handful of Dust it’s done awkwardly leaving the reader confused. As for Camilleri, I’ve no idea what he’s trying to do. There are references within the novel to Montalbano being a quixotic figure, and in the second part of Don Quixote the protagonist, as the reader will recall, does meet the false Don Quixote from an unauthorised sequel to Part One. But La danza del gabbiano is a detective story, for God’s sake, not a novel by Umberto Eco. The conceit merely undermines the realism essential to that genre without adding any compensatory value.
Apparently Camilleri has written a Montalbano story to be published posthumously. As it was written some time ago, I guess it will be good and I look forward to reading it. But any further stories written between now and the author’s death are likely to be a disappointment

Bloggin' Historians!

Last night I began reading the of fourth of five Roman histories which Pat had bought me for my birthday: The Decline and Fall of Roman Britain by Neil Faulkner. It promises to be an enjoyable read, despite my disagreeing with his fundamental premiss that ‘Rome was a system of robbery with violence … inherently exploitative and oppressive … and doomed to collapse’. The same cannot be said of the three previous texts which seemed to me to belong to the world of blogging rather than books.
  The first of them, Blood of the Caesars by Stephen Dando Collins, was by far the worst. How the book managed to find a publisher defeats me. Its style seemed to be modelled on those ghastly American programmes infesting Sky’s History Channel which assume that the audience has the attention span and retentive powers of an inebriated gnat: some basic fact is repeated every five minutes - ‘Rome capital of the Roman Empire’, for example - in an over-excited North American equivalent of a Birmingham accent. But at least that fact is true - or was so until the founding of Constantinople. Collins’s ‘fact’ is that Seneca secretly murdered Germanicus, an hypothesis as convincingly substantiated as the Scientologists’ belief that we’re descended from Thetans. Like the blog it’s badly written and batters the reader with the author’s private obsession. Unlike the blogger the writer has been paid to produce this garbage.
  The second and third histories were an enormous improvement on Collins, but were still blogs rather than books if for different reasons. Arthur and the Fall of Roman Britain by Edwin Pace argues that Arthur, Vortigern, or the Proud Tyrant, and Riothamus were the same person. The case is argued carefully with a wealth of detailed evidence. And therein lies the problem: ok they’re the same person, now tell me something interesting. For over three hundred pages Pace carries on like the pub bore - ‘and another interesting fact you may not know is …’ - as the reader’s eyes glaze over and he loses the will to live. One of the great joys for the blogger is that he is utterly free of constraints. There is no sub-editor pruning his verbiage, he doesn’t have to attempt to answer objections to the line he’s preaching, he doesn’t have to care whether there is an audience for his ramblings. Pace should have been a blogger.
  Which brings me finally to Britannia the Failed State by Stuart Laycock. The author had spent time in the former Yugoslavia during the Balkans war. This underlay his insight that by basing their units of local government on existing tribal areas the Roman authorities perpetuated existing ethnic tensions. Once the iron hand of Rome - cf. Tito - had been removed ethnic conflict broke out and ripped apart the civilised fabric the Romans has created. I found the idea convincing and, unlike Pace’s Arthurian idea, significant. But, and it’s a very big but, it was a very dull read. The reason? Laycock’s an archaeologist and archaeologists make accountants seem like fun people. Page after page of the distribution of a particular kind of belt buckle is of no interest to anyone but a professional archaeologist. Laycock had an interesting idea: he simply needed to find a way of putting it across which didn’t suck the life out of it. The details about the buckles should have been saved for an academic conference - or a blog!

Parallel Universes?

A few days ago whilst completing a crossword I went into anaphylactic shock. Figuratively so. Or - to adopt current usage which employs the word as an intensifier in contempt or ignorance of its traditional meaning - literally. The answer to the clue was the name of a British bird: sis*i* was as far as I could get, the four letters I’d filled in supplied by the answers to other clues. In despair I showed the puzzle to Pat. ‘Siskin,’ she said, without a moment’s hesitation. Hence the anaphylactic shock. I’d never ever heard or seen the word before. And it wasn’t the name of some exotic species recently discovered in the depths of the Amazon rain forest, but as British as a skinhead throwing a brick through an asian shopkeeper’s window.
I’ve always been fascinated by the notion of parallel universes, a common plot device in science fiction. A story I read many decades ago involved a time travelling tourist momentarily stepping off a bridge of twentieth century time into the world as it was several million years ago. When he returns to his own time he finds the US slightly, but balefully, changed. A right-wing extremist has just won the presidency - before the time-traveller left the Democrat candidate was heading for a landslide victory - and the English language has changed in many though subtle ways. When the time-traveller takes off his shoes he finds a butterfly stuck to one of the soles.
I think I am that time-traveller. It’s not that I’m unaware that language changes as part of the normal course of events, although when I was young I hardly noticed it: ‘wireless’ being replaced by ‘radio’ is an example which springs to mind. And while the almost universal substitution of ‘train station’ for ‘railway station’ irritates me, and even more so when some ignoramus of a scriptwriter has Geraldine McEwan’s Miss Marple employ the term, I know my irritation stems not from a superior moral or intellectual perspective but merely from the horror of change which affects the elderly. No doubt there were old men in the 17th century deploring the vogue for referring to an ewt as a newt, and young people’s habit of using ‘indifferent’ as though it meant ‘uninterested’ rather than ‘impartial’.
But ‘siskin’ is different. I’ve been reading for over sixty years - much of it fiction I admit - but also thousands of articles in newspapers and magazines. And never once have I encountered the word. Pat thinks my ignorance of ornithology is the explanation. I don’t agree. I am deplorably ignorant of a huge range of subjects but I’ve seen the words they use. I’ve no idea what a quasar is, but the word forms part of my mental landscape.
I’m not entirely sure when I stepped on the butterfly. Back in the late seventies or early eighties over a lunchtime pint, a friend, Graham, drew my attention to the word ‘resile’. Neither of us had ever heard it before, but suddenly it was on every politician’s lips. The recent vogue for ‘redact’ and ‘redaction’ is similar, though subtly different. As an English teacher, I was professionally acquainted with the term in relation to editions of books, but I find the expansion of its use utterly confusing.
So I’m going with the parallel universe explanation. It’s not just No Country for Old Men but no Universe either.

The Divine Blogger

Those readers familiar with Catholic exegesis will undoubtedly have been struck by the parallel between the internal workings of the godhead and the relationship of the blogger to his blog.
To quote the theologian F. J. Sheed, the Trinity works as follows:

‘The First Person knows Himself; His act of knowing Himself produces an Idea, a Word; and this Idea, the perfect Image of Himself is the Second Person. The First Person and the Second combine in an act of love - love of one another, love of the glory of the Godhead which is their own; and just as the act of knowing produces an Idea within the Divine Nature, the act of loving produces a state of Lovingness within the Divine Nature … [the] Third Person of the Blessed Trinity … the Holy Ghost …‘

Rather hard going, particularly having to hack through that thicket of capital letters. The idea is put much more vividly by Milton - a covert Unitarian - in describing the relationship between Satan, Sin and Death in a brilliant parody of the doctrine of the Trinity. Satan arrives at the gates of Hell:

… Before the Gates there sat

On either side a formidable shape;

The one seem’d Woman to the waste, and fair,

But ended foul in many a scaly fould

Voluminous and vast, a Serpent arm’d

With mortal sting: about her middle round

A cry of Hell Hounds never ceasing bark’d

With wide Cerberean mouths full loud, and rung

A hideous Peal: yet, when they list, would creep,

If aught disturb’d thir noyse, into her woomb,

And kennel there, yet there still bark’d and howl’d

Within unseen. …
What thing thou art, thus double-form’d, and why

In this infernal Vaile first met thou call’st

Me Father, and that Fantasm call’st my Son?

I know thee not, nor ever saw till now

Sight more detestable then him and thee.
T’whom thus the Portress of Hell Gate reply’d;

Hast thou forgot me then, and do I seem

Now in thine eye so foul, once deemd so fair

In Heav’n, when at th’ Assembly, and in sight

Of all the Seraphim with thee combin’d

In bold conspiracy against Heav’ns King,

All on a sudden miserable pain

Surpris’d thee, dim thine eyes, and dizzie swum

In darkness, while thy head flames thick and fast

Threw forth, till on the left side op’ning wide,

Likest to thee in shape and count’nance bright,

Then shining heav’nly fair, a Goddess arm’d

Out of thy head I sprung; amazement seis’d

All th’ Host of Heav’n; back they recoild affraid

At first, and call’d me Sin, and for a Sign

Portentous held me; but familiar grown,

I pleas’d, and with attractive graces won

The most averse, thee chiefly, who full oft

Thy self in me thy perfect image viewing

Becam’st enamour’d, and such joy thou took’st

With me in secret, that my womb conceiv’d

A growing burden. …
Pensive here I sat
Alone, but long I sat not, till my womb

Pregnant by thee, and now excessive grown

Prodigious motion felt and rueful throes.

At last this odious offspring whom thou seest

Thine own begotten, breaking violent way

Tore through my entrails, that with fear and pain

Distorted, all my nether shape thus grew

Transform’d: but he my inbred enemie

Forth issu’d, brandishing his fatal Dart

Made to destroy: I fled, and cry’d out Death;

Hell trembl’d at the hideous Name, and sigh’d

From all her Caves, and back resounded Death.

I fled, but he pursu’d (though more, it seems,

Inflam’d with lust then rage) and swifter far,

Me overtook his mother all dismaid,

And in embraces forcible and foule

Ingendring with me, of that rape begot

These yelling Monsters that with ceasless cry

Surround me, as thou sawst, hourly conceiv’d

And hourly born, with sorrow infinite

To me, for when they list into the womb

That bred them they return, and howle and gnaw

My Bowels, their repast; then bursting forth

Afresh with conscious terrours vex me round,

That rest or intermission none I find.

Before mine eyes in opposition sits

Grim Death my Son and foe, who sets them on,

And me his Parent would full soon devour

For want of other prey, but that he knows

His end with mine involvd; and knows that

Should prove a bitter Morsel, and his bane,

When ever that shall be;

The blogger, like God before the creation, lives in a solipsistic dream contemplating his own thoughts and deeds. And being narcissistic gives birth to his blog, the distillation of his spirit. Unlike the Deity, though, having created no actual world his blog doesn’t go on to dwell within all people of good-will; both those within the visible structure of Christ’s Church and those - protestants, jews, moslems, buddhists, atheists etc - who through invincible ignorance as it used to be called, or good-faith as it’s more tactfully put these days, have failed to sign up to the Catholic Church.
But it’s fun even though, like the concept of God, utterly irrelevant to the world at large.

The Greatest Loss of the Last Two Centuries?

Returned yesterday evening from a two day trip with my wife to Orvieto and Assisi. Like the rest of humankind we were attempting to lift ourselves out of the slough of despond into which the world was cast on the 26th June - or 6 26 as it will henceforth, no doubt, be called. Matters were made worse for me by the fact that I’d failed to appreciate Michael Jackson’s towering genius whilst the great man was alive. I’d naively dismissed him as a pitifully confused individual with an unfortunate penchant for small children, skin toner and prancing around the stage dressed in garish clothes whilst clutching his crutch and warbling unappealingly in a ridiculous falsetto. Little had I realised that Presley, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, the Beatles, the Stones, and Bob Dylan were musical pygmies in comparison.    
   However, over the ensuing week Sky News’s blanket coverage put me right. I was therefore delighted to read the following letter in today’s Guardian which expressed my feelings so succinctly:

“I thank you from the bottom of my heart for the wonderful coverage of the tragic death of Michael Jackson. He was a genius who could both sing and dance, often at the same time. The fact I could read all about this giant of a human in an adult newspaper like the Guardian, instead of having to buy a trashy red-top, made the painful experience of coming to terms with the loss that much easier. Professor Barry Fantoni”

Unlike the English cathedrals of the Protestant Reformed Religion as Established by Law, entry to the basilica of Saint Francis in Assisi was free. Admittedly there were various little booths where you could make an offering to have various popish rites performed on your behalf. It is saddening, though, that the Church of England once famously described by Charles II as ‘the only religion for a gentleman’ - the second half of his statement ‘but no religion for a christian’ is unaccountably less well-publicised - has now gone into trade. The other building in Assisi which took my fancy was the Temple of Minerva, dating from the reign of Augustus, with a baroque church built in its cella

Sorry Nick

In the heat of the moment I did Nick Griffin a grave injustice yesterday. I suggested that his party might like to adopt the slogan ‘An Anglo-Saxon England for the Anglo-Saxons’. Having read History at Cambridge, Nick will know that the Anglo-Saxons themselves were a bunch of kraut immigrants coming here to sponge off the welfare state. So rather than re-organising the country into the seven Anglo-Saxon kingdoms established when the Romans left we should return the country to the 20 indigenous British tribes - the Iceni, Belgae, Dubunni etc - who lived here before and during the Roman occupation.
I think Nick’s party lacks its leader’s historical expertise, though, when it claims on its web-site: ‘On current demographic trends, we, the native British people, will be an ethnic minority in our own country within sixty years’. I’m afraid they’ve been a minority for the last 1,500 years, ever since those invading Saxons arrived with their innate sense of rhythm and enormous john thomases to seduce our women and produce a nation of half-breeds. There is of course an area of the UK where ‘indigenous folk’ are still a majority. So here’s your new slogan Nick: ‘British jobs for Welsh workers’. Should go down a bomb with the slope-skulls who support you.

P.S. A final word from someone far more eloquent than I, Daniel Defoe:

‘I am far from thinking it is a satire upon the English nation to tell them they are derived from all the nations under heaven—that is, from several nations. Nor is it meant to undervalue the original of the English, for we see no reason to like them the worse, being the relics of Romans, Danes, Saxons, and Normans, than we should have done if they had remained Britons; that is, than if they had been all Welshmen. But the intent of the satire is pointed at the vanity of those who talk of their antiquity and value themselves upon their pedigree, their ancient families, and being true-born; whereas it is impossible we should be true-born, and if we could, should have lost by the bargain.

‘ These are the heroes that …       
rail at new-come foreigners so much,
       Forgetting that themselves are all derived
       From the most scoundrel race that ever lived;
       A horrid crowd of rambling thieves and drones,
       Who ransacked kingdoms and dispeopled towns,
       The Pict and painted Briton, treacherous Scot,
       By hunger, theft, and rapine hither brought;
       Norwegian pirates, buccaneering Danes,
       Whose red-haired offspring everywhere remains,
       Who, joined with Norman-French, compound the breed
       From whence your true-born Englishmen proceed. …

  ‘Thus from a mixture of all kinds began,
       That heterogeneous thing an Englishman;
       In eager rapes and furious lust begot,
       Betwixt a painted Briton and a Scot;
       Whose gendering offspring quickly learned to bow,
       And yoke their heifers to the Roman plough;
       From whence a mongrel half-bred race there came,
       With neither name nor nation, speech nor fame;’

Click here to read the whole of Defoe’s poem The True-Born Englishman.

Bossi by name, nazsty by nature

The campaign for the European election is under way. The poster pictured above, promoting the Northern League led by Margaret Beckett look-a-like Umbert Bossi, was the first to appear. It sent a shiver down my spine. At least in the UK the law prevents scum like the BNP peddling such obnoxious opinions so blatantly. Until comparatively recently Italy was much more relaxed about immigration than the UK: indeed it’s only now that a law is going through parliament making illegal immigration a crime. In other ways Italy has been ‘ahead’ of Britain. In England for most of my life ‘immigrant’ was a euphemism for a black or brown person. In Italy, despite the large numbers of poor souls who arrive by boat on her shores from Africa, the immigrant who bears the brunt of local prejudice is the Romanian or the Albanian. Not helped by the fact that one Italian word for gypsy ‘rom’ easily elides into ‘rumeno’, Romanian. The UK is of course catching up: Wisbech when I first lived in the Fens was inhabited by people who rarely ventured as far as King’s Lynn, 15 miles down the A47, and who had never seen a foreigner or non-white Englishman in the flesh. They had to vent their prejudice on the gypsies who turned up for seasonal work on the local farms, a large number of Fen pubs having ‘No Travellers’ notices displayed on their front doors. Now its market square is thronged with people from eastern Europe, and the locals don’t like it: ‘fucking immigrants’ are no longer just black people from Birmingham but the Poles and Lithuanians who work for local gangmasters at slave wages.
But Bossi is way ahead of the game. It’s not just blacks and eastern Europeans who are despised: it’s anyone hailing from south of the Po. ‘Roma ladra’, thieving Rome, is seen as the chief enemy, taking the North’s wealth to distribute to the ‘nigger’ inhabitants of Campania, Calabria and Sicily. And here of course we see the ultimate absurdity of the racist’s and xenophobe’s position. Following their logic one might well ask why Milan, a wealthy and prosperous city, should be compelled to inhabit the same province as the inhabitants of some impoverished village in its hinterland. And to push it even further why should the inhabitant of a prosperous Milanese district be made to inhabit the same comune, Milan, as those living in its slums?
One of the arguments employed by eurosceptics against the greater fiscal and political integration which might save us from declining into a collection of third world statelets is that economic conditions across the EU are too diverse. Do these prats think that economic conditions are - or ever were - homogenous across the UK. That London and the North-East are economically comparable? So now that Labour, Tory and LibDem MPs have been caught with their hands in the till and Nick Griffin’s opportunity has arisen, here’s a slogan: ‘An Anglo-Saxon England for the Anglo-Saxons’. Mercia for the Mercians, Northumbia for the Northumbrians. Bring back the miserable little squabbling Saxon kingdoms which shared Britain for half a millennium after the legions left!