lazybeds

Re-reading Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle and am able to clarify for myself what I like about his work. I don't think of it as reading the work of a genius, whatever the blurbs on my edition say. There are many annoying features, such as the sexism and the snobbery, as well as a certain rawness and clumsiness in the narrative. The flaws do not matter, mainly because what counts is the humanity of it all, the richness and honesty of the human description, the ability to make a world for the reader in which you can live. The characters (full of flaws and frailties) become your friends and familiars. You are in a ethos in which weak human beings are valued and accepted, which is not a bad place to be, when you are sixty-one and occasionally prone to looking back.

Sometimes I think we are collectively dafter than a hairbrush. There is a campaign locally to give a certain new (unfinished) bridge a certain name. The bridge will take road traffic across a stretch of the Forth estuary just north of the present Kincardine Bridge and there is a big effort to get it called the Clackmannashire Bridge after the county it will connect to on the north side. It all seems, in a quite literal way, to be a one-sided argument.Supporters of the campaign should be aware that a road into Clackmannanshire is also a road out of it. Even if you granted the to Clackmannanshire the right to call the bridge after itself (as against, say, the Falkirk Bridge, or the Airth Bridge) it would still be loopy, since it implies that the road is only for coming north, or, alternatively, only for Clackmannashire people going either north or south. And that name doesn't even give status to Clackmannanshire, since, if that county had a really good conceit of itself it would want to name it after the place its residents wanted to get to. Chauvinist residents of Skye probably wanted their bridge to be called the Mainland Bridge. There is a way out of this which has a symetrical attraction, though some practical difficulties are attendant, and that is to name the bridge the Clackmannanshire Bridge when southbound and the Falkirk Bridge when northbound.

Ok, I can hear the challenge. What would you call the bloody thing? Obviously, the Fifth Bridge.

It was special yesterday travelling briefly in the car and at the same time listening to someone on Radio 4 explaining something of the biology and chemistry behind the colour of autumn leaves - and all the while these same leaves were gloriously illustrating the points as I sped through Blairlogie. The explanation as inadequate (partly because a radio cannot be interrogated) but there were enough hints to make me want to find out more. This all brings back again the puzzle as to why I seem to be seeing autumn leaves for the first time. Is it because the display is especially vibrant this year or because there is some change in me which has switched on perceptions? Or a combination of both these reasons? I wonder if anyone else shares this?

The other day I heard a chap on the radio say that Muslims worldwide agree that members of the Ahmadiyya movement are not real Muslims. Slight problem here is that the worldwide poll he referred to clearly did not include members of the Ahmadiyya movement who, of course, consider themselves to be Muslims, in spite of the fact that they are hideously persecuted by other people who call themselves Muslims. So who decides? I suggest that it should be the same as names – that it is up to people what they want to call themselves and if we think, for instance, that they are mispronouncing their originally Gaelic name then we should shut up because it is none of our business. So if someone wants to call themselves a Muslim, or a Jew, or a Socialist, or whatever then that should be entirely up to them. It is also irritating when members of a religion or an ideology make sweeping generalisations about their faith. Ann Widdicombe says that Christianity is the gentle religion and Jonathon Sachs says that Judaism is a non-proselytising religion and neither allows for the exceptions (or the rule, as you wish). Of course in my Christian days I was familiar with and shared in the obsession with defining what a real Christian was. What is the motive for this insistence on homogeneity which is so at odds with the facts? I suppose it is mainly control but also may be a need for a workable map and the ability to predict at least the likelihood of the existence of certain beliefs and patterns of behaviour. Certainly as a teacher I have been guilty of it. Muslims pray five times a day, don’t drink alcohol etc. instead of pointing up that these were crude generalisations. So I guess we need less certainty and more humility (which is what you would expect from a real Muslim, Christian, Jew, Socialist . . .)

It’s some months now since I read Jared Diamond’s Collapse but I keep coming back to it. The book looks at why some societies have survived and others have not and he identifies as critical the ability of societies to abandon or change long held values when under environmental stress.

Most arrestingly to someone like me with anarchic tendencies he cites occasions when imposed authoritarian solutions have saved the day – notably the successful response to incipient deforestation by the Tokugawa regime in Japan. It is interesting that today discomfort with top down responses to environmental or health threat is more common outside the anarchic left than in it – witness windfarm protests, resistance to smoking bans and articles like Brendan O’Neill’s in Spiked Online re the recent London Climate Change demo. And of course there are values and values, such as the difference between say, the determination to cling to a cow-based pastoral culture which Diamond says killed off the Viking Greenlanders, or something deeper, such as the decision to go in for population control via infanticide, or the abandonment of the right to decide for yourself. On the latter there are of course grey shades. The acceptance of personal restrictions due to a sense of social responsibility, for instance, or the recognition that the perfect anarchic society is some way off, to put it gently, and that its remoteness requires some present compromise.

Of course Diamond himself leaves one value unexamined –survival itself.

In our yard there is a beech tree which my neighbours wanted to cut down if the Council would have allowed it. Today it stopped me in my tracks for about a minute as it swam and basked in the afternoon light, turning that light on its outer, wasting leaves to a rich warm gold and on the inner ones to a glittering green, so that it seemed not to borrow the light but to be its source – another firework. I felt I should touch my hat to it and perhaps walk away from it backwards.

And where have the mice gone? Because the floor covering in the hall had to come up I took the chance of looking under the boards to see if there were any signs. Not the tiniest turd. This is a bit spooky, given their cheerful resilience for several seasons, their ability to find new ways in, up and around, even after several of them got involuntary retirement. In spite of my admiration I don’t miss them one bit, but what cataclysm has hit them? Could it be catching? First they came for the mice . . . . The said Pastor Niemoller (just imagine the dots) appears in Denis Giardina’s absorbing “Saints and Villains” an imaginative retelling of the story of Dietrich Boenhoffer which I pick up (because it fascinates) and put down again (because it is very disturbing indeed).

Why did this film irritate me so much? The stagey, choreographed smart-alicking? The feeling that here was a club to which I clearly did not belong? The ponderous pace? There is one fine and moving scene where boy and teacher discuss Hardy's poem "Drummer Hodge" and this made it worse in a way since the rest of it fell so far short of that standard. Maybe all of these plus on my part a failure to accept that it was just a film of a stage play with all the conventions that attend that form. This is maybe why it was difficult to suspend disbelief and forget I was just watching some very smart actors. Or maybe it is just very dated. Or maybe I was on my high horse and refusing to be amused.

Anyway I regret now giving my immediate and sour reaction to a friend who liked it. It's not nice to spoil the fun

From where I am standing the GG doesn't really exist anymore, especially in my experience of peace activists. It is of course possible that the yawning divide is still there but is diguised by the tolerance and courtesy of the young. My good experience was again boosted by congenial conversation yesterday and in the past I have been taken by the way younger people straighforwardly share their skills (usually IT)without any hint of impatience or superiority. True,there are rare exceptions on both sides (smart alick tendencies and pompous traits) but gentle peer pressure moderates it quite quickly.

And on Jane Eyre (read again after 40 years or so) the theme that jumped out on me was not the romantic one but how Jane manages to find herself under great pressures to conform - the escape from Rivers is more significant than the run to Rochester.

For my mother and father in their courting days in the middle thirties a special day out was to get the tram from the bottom of Kilbowie Road all the way to Kelvingrove and spend the afternoon there (morning was work), perhaps listening to an organ recital, and certainly having tea and a scone in the douce tea room. As I went into the refurbished gallery for the first time today I wondered what they would have made of it. I guess they might have missed a certain gravitas and the very ordered and sequential presentation of all the items. But I like to think they would have appreciated the change. The ordering of items follows a different logic but one just as valid and the whole affair has a life and colour that easily compensates for the loss of reverential hush. And real hard work has been put in to making it accessible, especially with the language which is used on the labelling. I would nit-pick a little about the content of these labels on the paintings which I found very directive and sometimes questionable in their interpretation. I think we should avoid hampering the response of the viewer by opinionated and oversimplified statements. But all in all a super change! Great to see the old familiar detail - the unique benches and the loo sign "Gentlemen's Lavatory".

The kids from a school in Aarhus in Denmark were on the phone again early this morning in my third interview about nukes and their effects for the school newspaper. They are chirpy, courteous and most of all persistent - refusing to be put off by language problems, reframing the questions time and again until they are satisfied. It was good fun but I shudder to think what I may be quoted as saying. I was stumped by a question about Einstein's role in splitting the atom. They said goodby this morning and I shall miss them. Nordic/Scandinavian manners are refreshing.

Thinking over the business of the responsibility we have for the negative effects of actions we take with good intent - "collateral damage" if you like. Since all actions will have some negative effects it seems sensible to posit a continuum so that, with appropriate awareness, you can work out what is the ethical tipping point. But being a continuum, I suppose it could slide up on you unawares. At one extreme complete inaction (not itself without ill effects) and at the other the insouciance of warmongers who shrug their shoulders and refuse even to count the civilian dead.