Swan’s gone

March 25th, 2009

It was a perfectly normal walk to work yesterday except that as I approached Folly Bridge I saw, lying on a low wall, a swan. A dead swan, its neck elegantly elongated and its feet curled. It didn’t seem at all marked but it was dead all right.

All the way to work I thought about the dead bird and I also thought it should be disposed of properly. Apart from being ringed and the property of the Queen , apart from monitoring dead creatures for avian flu a swan, I can assure you, is a big beast.

So I googled “dead swan” and up popped the Royal Borough of Windsor – “in the unlikely event of you finding a dead swan, phone….” Unfortunately the link didn’t work and anyway, I don’t live in Windsor. But it sounded like the Council is a good place to start. So I called environmental health who said it wasn’t something they dealt with. They debated it a bit and looked on the web. Ah ha they said; it’s Defra, the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

So I called the Defra line and there was an option especially for reporting dead animals. Joyously I pressed number 1 and was answered by a man whose Liverpule accent was so strong that I really did have a bit of trouble understanding him. He told me that Defra weren’t interested in my swan because they only dealt with numbers – 10 or more to be accurate. He asked me who owned the land the swan was lying on. I didn’t know – well I had a pretty good idea but I pretended I didn’t. He said I should find out who owned the land because it was their responsibility.

I asked what one do if the owner didn’t do anything. Or was away or a tiny person who couldn’t pick up the bird. He couldn’t give me an answer. I pointed out in a rather Grande Dame manner that I found it all rather unsatisfactory.

So, I called my local MP’s office and a nice woman called Annabel said she’d see what she could sort out. About three hours later she called me back. She’d had the most frustrating morning she said calling the Council, Defra, the Water authority and the College which owned the land the swan was lying on. No-one would take responsibility. Finally she had persuaded the Council Works department to deal with it. But the best bit was that Defra had told her to tell “the lady” ie me to put the swan in a bag and put it in a bin!

What a wonderful suggestion. Three years ago I listened to a ress briefing in Brussels all about this sort of thing and I wrote a little piece about it. I’m sure they didn’t suggest that citizens should try to stuff a swan in a bag. And anyway, we have recycling here so I wouldn’t even know which bin to put the thing in.

The poor, beautiful creature had gone by the evening, presumably thrown in the back of a lorry. But what I want to know is who is going to tell the Queen that one of her swans is missing?

Off the beaten track

March 18th, 2009

My son’s special girl teaches drama in a part of Birmingham called Dudley. Natives of Dudley have a very particular accent. They pronounce the name of their home something like “dood-lay”. I think it’s probably a Dudley accent that people think of when they say that a Birmingham accent is along with Liverpool, the most disliked in Britain. I would have said the same for decades but since I’ve been going to Birmingham over the past few years I’ve been inclined to hear it as reassuring. It’s familiarity I guess. When I lived in Paris, where everyone had wonderful accents of course, I always felt back at home when I heard someone call me darlin’ and I also love a rich West Indian accent – and that was the South London accent I most missed, I think, when I moved.

S’s SG tells me that her students are sometimes known, by people in the wider city, as “yam yams.” This is because of the locals habit of substituting I am for yam as in “yam going to chippaiy” or, as we might say in Oxford, ” I am going to the chip shop.” Fascinatingly she told me about other vernacular words like “I bist” also meaning I am.

So with my new-found interest in the accents of the West Midlands, an area also known as The Black Country from the great factories and forges that used to colour the landscape I was rather enchanted to come across a translation service .– Good to know that university teachers are still mining those offbeat seams. It’s dirty work but someone has to do it.

Waking up to money

February 8th, 2009

Apart from the snow, the story of the past few days and probably for a few more will be the bonuses that banks are planning to pay their “top” executives. The people whose expertise was such that the banks had to be taken over by the state – virtually nationalized.

For years I Woke up with Money – that is, with the Radio 5 programme of that name which runs from 05.30 to 06.00 each weekday. Often there was news of the bonuses paid to the kings of financial jungle. Huge sums. Many of them earned more in a week than I do in a year and bonuses came in millions of pounds. Sir Fred Goodwin at RBS was “worth” 30 million or more, Andy Hornby “earned” 1.4 million. It was, in the end, rather depressing to hear daily about the rewards of these people whose annual salary alone would be about 20 times the average wage and whose bonuses allowed them to exist in an entirely different universe. Sir Fred apparently had a vicious management style which no-one dared challenge and about which former colleagues will only speak if they aren’t identified. How dangerous. Sir Fred may, in fact, have needed some care but when cushioned by more money than most people earn in a lifetime, I don’t suppose that worried him much.

What has changed of course is that Wake up to Money now reports the sad demise of businesses almost daily with the misery that brings to those involved . And I’ve noticed additions to our vocabulary developing alongside the huge financial slump. The wretched “quantative easing” (printing money) features almost daily – I heard it again this morning on the Andrew Marr show. On the same show I heard for the first time a reference to directors of “rescued institutions”. Rescued Institutions. I loved that. It made me think of rescue pets – poor abandoned creatures, thin and downcast with dirty, rank fur.

Actually, these poor victims of their own hubris and incompetence are far from that. I truly believe that many of the super wealthy still haven’t properly re-entered earth’s atmosphere. Protected as they are from the contempt with which so many people hold them they are still able to believe that they not only have earned these huge sums, eye watering by most people’s standards, but they are actually worth them. And worth even more. A bit more humility from those whose institutions had to be rescued wouldn’t go amiss – and now they might like to start thinking of themselves more as civil servants than the princes of Planet Plenty.

I’m reminded of another bit of financial vocabulary that I like. In the early days of my economics course, we discussed the purpose of business which is primarily to make a profit. Of course, no profit, no business. What about the small business I worked in as a partner when my children were small I asked. Almost no profit at all and only a small wage for my partner Gill and I; but we were able to stay in the workplace and in the market when we had the demands of small children. It allowed us to acquire the technology and marketing experience we could later use and kept us in the world beyond Thomas the Tank Engine, to everyone’s advantage. The sort of business like a corner shop where there is somewhere for the family to live above the shop, a job for the family members, a living wage for all and a place in the community. Yes, said my tutor, “we call it a sufficing business”.

That business was sufficient for Gill and I and an investment in both our futures. As Keynes so succinctly put it, “in the long run, we’re all dead” but maybe if more businesses and people had heard about sufficiency we might all enjoy the long run rather better than we are doing now. Sometimes enough can be enough.

I know it works in practice but does it work in theory?

December 4th, 2008

Look, look. This is me. Read this piece in the Guardian that I found last week.

For more than a year I’ve been feeling an inadequate blogger because although I shout at the radio every morning about some perceived outrage or the other, I then get on and out and off to work and the moment to hammer out three lines of ill-considered annoyance about Peter Mandelson or Oxbridge entrance or bankers has passed.

But some thoughts stay and I mull them over, then try to find a reference if I can. I can’t do the profligate three lines of the most well know bloggers – who seem to have lives that allow them a lot of time to spend at their computers so they can post two or three times a day. I’ve been perfectly happy to have a sporadic readership of about 6 and I thank you for being one of them; now I feel vindicated.

And now I know -not lazy, just slow

Still at it

November 10th, 2008
Letter home

Letter home

It’s the time for remembrance. 90 years since the end of the first war – The Great War as my grandparents and great aunts called it. And they had been through it. I watched the remembrance service and it becomes more poignant each year. The story of the mother and sister of a 20 year old soldier, dead in Afghanistan haunts me. My own sons are of the same age as the youngsters dying there and in Iraq. I found it unbearably sad when she told of the visit from the police and army officer – “please tell me it isn’t Joe.”

My father was a prisoner of war having been picked up by a German patrol in the Libyan desert where he and his navigator had spent days after they were shot down. He was transported up through Alabania and eventually to Stalag Luft VIIB prison camp. That was in 1942 – he had been too young to join up at the start. He spent his 21st birthday shackled to the next prisoner on their way to Silesia. His cards home to his great aunt, censored of course, arrived each month and each says mostly the same thing – “we are pretty A1 here”, “we are getting on well” and always, always, “I expect to be home soon”, “not long now”. All through ’42, ’43 and ’44 – the last card I have was sent in December ‘44. Shortly afterwards he was part of a famous death march out of the camp when many of his friends died. He told my brothers and I of the pathetic effort to take everything they had and he gave us the mental picture of his saxophone lying in the snow when he jettisoned anything which wasn’t absolutely necessary.

On Maundy Thursday 1945, aged 23 he closed his eyes in the camp where they had marched to. Wracked with dysentery he knew he would die and thought only that he would have liked to see his parents and aunt and uncle again and he would have liked to have studied medicine. Oh well.

On Good Friday the Americans arrived, hosed them down, put him and others onto the hospital trains and sent him home to spend 8 months in hospital. He was discharged just before Christmas to go home to his uncomprehending parents in Croydon. On Christmas afternoon he went into bleak, bombed Croydon centre and came across two German prisoners of war waiting for repatriation. He took them home for tea because, as he explained, they were the only people he had met that would really understand what he felt. He left that example, he and my mother employed a German au-pair for us children less than 10 years after the war and he told us “never, ever, forget that what happened in Germany could happen here if we aren’t vigilant.”

Oh, and he did study medicine too.

Those were the days

November 8th, 2008

Gosh, I’m coming all over retro. The pre-recession atmosphere speaks to my waste- not-want- not side; newspaper articles about how home cooking, which I do already, is the new eating out, eschewing plastic bags, which I have done for years, and not flying away for weekend breaks, is the right and also fashionable thing to do are making me feel that I’m back in a mainstream world where I have some remnants of the map from the last time. Also, I’m not so sure as once I was that everyone else is having a great debt fuelled time dining in fabulous restaurants in exotic parts of the world dressed in the latest fashions. So I’m feeling rather cheerier than sometimes and especially so since the Americans have done us all the favour of electing Barack Obama.

And here is a story to appeal to my inner hippy – alright, I know, it was only a phase. It’s about squatters. My first reaction, I must admit, was that of a mother of formerly teenage boys, when surveying their bedrooms. Slight disapproval of the mess in what looks like a rather lovely house. It’s apparently worth over 6 million pounds. Then I read that the business that owns the house, hadn’t even noticed their property had been taken over. So my second reaction reached back a few decades when people squatted houses that had stayed empty – and when friends occupied houses on an official basis before the housing associations transformed them into homes.

I don’t think houses should lie empty as part of an “investment portfolio”. I think they should be homes for people who will form proper communities. My London home was in street full of variety – we were the only English among Irish and Welsh. My neighbours were from St Lucia and from Jamaica and theirs from Barbados and Ireland. There were French and Indian and it was a real London community where we knew one another and thought enough to knock on doors and look out for each other. Sounds so cheesy but it was actually true.

Now those terraced houses, described when they were built at the beginning of the last century for occupation by two “fairly comfortable” families with “good ordinary earnings”, change hands for so much money that I doubt first-time buyers could live there.

So my heart lifted a bit to hear about the artists who have taken over the Mayfair Mansion and I thought I could probably overlook the drawing pins in the wall.

Fizz has left the building

October 30th, 2008

My best cat, Fizz died this week, from kidney failure, the curse of cats. He was born on the sofa in our front room (although not the same sofa as I now have guests will be relieved to know) and effervesced into the world with such vibrancy that we gave him Fizzy as a temporary name until his real owners renamed him. He was a perfect marmalade cat, affectionate and lively and in due course we waved him off to his home in London in the arms of my godson. When, about a year later, Fizz’s family moved abroad to a 4th floor flat high above a busy street in Rome with a broad terrace balcony with low walls, Fizz came back and stayed since.

He was the most affectionate of animals who never lashed out or got tired of attention. He grew large and healthy and as far as a cat can have feelings he cared for us and seemed to know his tribe.

And now he’s lying under a tree in our garden having grown thin and wasted over the past few months, prey to the same problem as his mother who died when she was 6. And the house seems empty. I still open the front door with care, forgetting he’s not behind it, waiting to welcome me home. I close the bedroom door at night, by habit, despite there being no risk of 6kg of affectionate ginger cat landing on my chest in the middle of the night, the heavy, crushing feeling making me fear heart attack. I expect to hear his morning miaow demanding breakfast and of course it doesn’t happen and I expect him to lightly jump onto the sofa beside me to sit close and purr like an idling engine.

I knew I’d miss him when the time came – and by heck I do.

Statistically speaking

September 9th, 2008

My maths is no good – and I’m not proud of it. I failed at O level (twice) and continue to fail to understand mathematical concepts. I scraped a pass in my economics papers and had to be gently taken through my statistics by a patient and gifted medical statistician who I was working with who probably found it light relief after crunching big numbers and many variables in proper, serious work.

However, despite my admitted weaknesses on the maths front, the combined efforts of my tutor, my colleague and my professorial statistician friend (who has breathing difficulties when coming down to my level of ineptness) have meant that I do, at least, take an enquiring approach to statistics. Journalists are often very bad at stats – or possibly willfully negligent. Given how often statistical findings are used as the centre of a story it really isn’t good enough. And anyway there are plenty of people around to help out and to interpret. If a researcher says that the results aren’t statistically significant, really that should mean the story doesn’t run – or at least not as a stats based story.

In 1995 a report on deep vein thrombosis risk associated with the contraceptive pill indictated that there was twice the risk with a certain pill. Which there was. But as the risk was still lower than deep vein thrombosis in pregnancy, the scare that led to unwanted pregnancies and an increase in abortion, actually also increased the risk to women – to say nothing of the long-term effects of pregnancy!

There was once an advertisement for Goodyear tyres which claimed, if I recall (but it was aeons ago) 4 times the holding power and 6 times the strength – a claim that led the front man, a former chief constable to claim “I’m convinced they’re a major contribution to road safety” A comic in a TV programme of the time said that he’d found a tyre that was 145 times stronger and had 750 times the holding power but that as his test piece was a bit of banana skin he doubted the relevance. A pre-stats lesson to ask “times more than what.”

I’m only posting this because I have just found an excellent piece in the BBC magazine, part of a series of six. In an effort to continue to approach news stories with the right level of enquiry I shall certainly be reading all the series.

Post-festival fugue

September 2nd, 2008

This is a dangerous time for me. When I begin to get over the expense of the Edinburgh festival and, in this case, the extreme dampness. When friends ask how it was and I say “great” and when they ask me to let them know when I’m sorting out next year, I don’t say “What!? Are you mad? I have a pension and a cat to consider. Never again.” What I actually say is, ” Sure” and think to myself that maybe, when the time comes to cross that bridge I might well just do it.

The centre of festival is the Royal Mile and here is a video giving a very good feel of the frenetic nature of walking that particular walk each day. Just watching it reminded me of why I like to be there, even if only for a few days. Which can take some organising. Especially this year with the ticketing all over the place. It worked out fine for us but I do think the fringe organisers might like to consider the audiences.

It sometimes seems that the main preoccupation with fringe producers and organisers is internal power play – the Director resigned this year after only a year in the job. There are just so many venues and performances that one needs a native guide and although I’ve been for three years now, I doubt if I count as that although I do my best for friends who are festival “virgins”. It surely is a bit precious to have, in different locations, the Underbelly, The Udderbelly and the Baby Belly. And whilst it might make perfect sense for a group of venues to run as a separate unit as a Comedy Festival, it makes for increasingly complex decisions for the ordinary punter (and not all of us are aspiring, current or failed thesps).

Whatever I may or may not do when, in the middle of winter, the memory of the festival has faded, I have to admit, it’s still the greatest arts festival and Edinburgh is a great place.

For heaven’s sake

September 1st, 2008

Currently having rather more time to sit in front of my computer than normal, I picked up this piece on Sarah Palin, the woman who could be one of the most powerful people on the planet should McCain keel over.

Despite my previous post on women in power vis a vis Hillary and Margaret Thatcher, I thought the adoption of Palin as vice-presidential candidate was bizarre. Whatever I thought about Thatcher, there was no doubting her competence. Apparently, the women who supported Hillary Clinton, a woman who has certainly served her time in the cauldron of politics and a hugely experienced politician with clear views, are so one-dimensional that as long as there’s a woman, any woman, on the ticket they’ll vote for her.

Still, it’s caught me on the hop a bit. I couldn’t vote for this woman under any circumstances (which will never of course be offered) and so I suppose I’ve had to think a bit more about those women who opposed Hillary. Presumably some of them did so on her policies and some were more fired up by Obama and all that he represents.

I was in the US in 2004 not long before the presidential election and was asked by acquaintances of my hosts, who were driving us back to our hotel, what I thought of it all. I stepped with care, have good manners when commenting on another country’s politics, especially when I’m no expert and especially when I’m relying on the questioner not to abandon me in the middle of New York state. I replied that many Europeans were somewhat surprised that Bush had been voted in last time, especially with the questions over the election procedures. My new acquaintance barked a response “you know what’s worse – they’re going to do it again”

The swift boat campaign trashing John Kerry’s Vietnam war record was running at the time. My new friend was outraged that people who had done everything possible to evade service should attack a man who hadn’t ducked the call. His tirade lasted about 12 miles. I was appalled by what seemed such a crude attack, but as we know, it worked.

And that’s what is so worrying. It’s entirely possible that it will happen again and I shall have absolutely no understanding of how it could. It’s not just Sarah Palin’s inexperience that disturbs. It’s the creationism and Christian fundamentalism. I read that she thinks fossils are God’s way of testing faith. Hmm, well I won’t second guess God but apart from the fossils, it’s possible that this woman will be testing my faith in the sense of the voting public of the US