Mealymouth

You may remember that recent remarks of Irish MP Iris Robinson, in which she claimed that homosexuality was slightly worse than child sex abuse and murder, prompted a petition to the British government, asking that it reprimand the woman. If you signed it, you'll already have received an email from the government, explaining why it has no intention of reprimanding her, or indeed taking any action at all. If you didn't, and haven't, this is what it says:

There is no constitutional role for the Prime Minister to reprimand individual Members of Parliament who are accountable to their electorate for their own comments.

The Government is committed to strong equality legislation in Northern Ireland and citizens in Northern Ireland are protected against discrimination on grounds of race, religious belief or political opinion, gender, sexual orientation, age or because of a disability. If anyone in Northern Ireland believes that they have been discriminated against on any of these grounds they may be able to bring a complaint to a tribunal or to a county court. Further details are available from the Equality Commission whose website is at www.equalityni.org.

In respect of sexual orientation specifically, the Employment Equality (Sexual Orientation) Regulations (Northern Ireland) 2003 make it unlawful for employers and others to discriminate on grounds of sexual orientation in the areas of employment, vocational training and further and higher education. The Equality Act (Sexual Orientation) Regulations (NI) 2006 extend the protection against discrimination to the provision of goods, facilities and services, the management and disposal of land or premises and the provision of education in schools.

In addition, section 75 of the Northern Ireland Act 1998 requires designated public authorities to have due regard to the need to promote equality of opportunity between 9 different groups: religious belief; political opinion; race or ethnic group; age; marital status; sexual orientation; gender; disability; and persons with dependants.

The Government’s vision is an equal, inclusive society in Northern Ireland, where everyone is treated with respect and where opportunity for all remains a priority.

Wanwood leafmeal

Bushbury Crematorium and Cemetery are situated on a hill not far from the end of the 511 bus route, which is how we get there. We used to be able to see the hill from the top floor of our house, some miles away, a long whale's back of green rising from acres of low-cost suburban housing, with what looked like a single line of trees along the spine. My sister remembers three, I'm not so sure. The place was pointed out to us by our parents, perhaps by our aunt, who lived in that room in a bedsit designed for her by my father - her final refuge, as things turned out. Now that we're here again, and walking round, it's clear that what seemed a single file of pines, top-tufted like the maritime pines along the consular roads out of Rome, is a number of carefully spaced out woods, the trees planted in lines in a grid-like arrangement, leaving space for the odd memorial bench or upstanding plaque.

The cemetery has grown with time, the oldest deaths at the centre, more recent ones spiralling out like an image of a newly-born galaxy, a swirl of marble slabs placed one against the other, shoulder to shoulder, each with its name and date and motto, each with its container for flowers. Some of these have a sort of metal top, like a waffle, with holes for the stalks. Other slabs, either older or more modest, have improvised vases, the most common being Steradent tubes, the perfect size for a single rose. Generally, the outer slabs are in better shape than the ones at the heart, the deaths still recent enough to warrant weekly visits, fresh bouquets. A spray of yellow roses has been pushed into the earth at a short distance from the path, it's not clear for whom. The roses are artificial. My sister wipes my father's stone clean. We haven't brought flowers because we don't want to think of them dying; we talked with our mother about the virtues of artificial flowers, but decided, in the end, to do without. The stone wiped clean, my sister darts off towards one of the trees, returning with a sprig of oak leaves.

Coming down one side of the hill is a swathe of stones laid so tightly against one another that the impression they give is of a wide grey road, an uninterrupted sweep of paving slabs. It's hard to see how people can visit their dead without treading on others'. Yet somehow they manage, performing a jittery respectful dance between one stone and the next, leaving their elderly relatives at the kerb or alone, in parked cars, as close as they can drive. On the other side of the cemetery, as we leave for home, are the graves of children. These are decorated as if for a party, with massive paper flowers and grinning dolls that come up to my waist and rain-sodden teddy bears. The impression they make is undeniably poignant, but also creepy, as though the bereaved one's attempt to recall the innocence, the playfulness, of the child had been subverted into schlock.

As I close the door behind me...

...I just wanted to alert you to a review of Little Monsters.It's by Rob Spence on his blog Topsyturvydom, which, I'm pleased to see, has a link to Ben Goldacre. And to me.

And now I really must go.

But, really, before I go... Patty Pravo

But before I go.. Barbara

A few days off

I'll be leaving the insufferable heat of central Italy tomorrow for a week in the more temperate climes of the English Midlands. I can't wait. The blissful vacancy of travel. M&S duck à l'orange and Jeremy Kyle (my guilty secret, alas no longer), Thornton's chocolate gingers, traditional pork pie from Kirk's, my mother's (and her mother's) favourite butcher's, the Guardian and the Independent actually printed on paper, my favourite Chinese all-you-can-eat-for-£4.99 buffet on School Street. Yes. Yes.

And you know what? I'm worth it.

RIP Simon Gray

I was sad to see that Simon Gray had died. I started reading him when an extract from the first of his diaries to be published - The Smoking Diaries - appeared in Granta some years ago, and I've been buying each new instalment as it came out, in hardback, unusually for me, because I couldn't wait. I remember reading the first volume at more or less the same time as an edition of the journals Christopher Isherwood kept when he was living in Los Angeles in the late 50s-early 60s and coming to the conclusion, with a heavy heart, that I preferred the stubborn, tetchy, doubt-ridden, heterosexual, pet-loving, regretful, easily irritated playwright to the vacuous bed-hopping star-fucking campy pseudo-Quaker that Isherwood had become. Both men wrote their journals to be read, Isherwood presumably - and wisely - after his death, Gray as soon as possible, and there's a wonderful feeling in the latter's diaries of a very public confession going on, of an opening out. I'm not a theatre-goer, and I've never seen any of his plays, I'm not even sure that I want to, but his diaries were a source of great and constant pleasure to me. He wrote about animals as well as he did about himself and other people; at one point he wonderfully describes the 'dainty waddle' of a cat. There is, apparently, a final volume waiting to be published, and that's it.

Little Monsters review

Scott Pack has written an excellent review of Little Monsters. I'm particularly fond of this bit (you can probably guess why):

The way Lambert handles relationships, and how small betrayals and minor secrets can divert their course, reminded me of Milan Kundera...

You can find the rest of it here.

A-Z

Once again, you have Maud Newton to thank for pointing me to this.

High

Following the recent mountaineering deaths on K2 I've been thinking about the way we react, or we're supposed to react, to this kind of disaster. A bunch of people push their bodies to the limit to achieve a sort of temporary exaltation, of no real value other than as an entirely personal experience, of no earthly use to anyone else. They spend substantial amounts of money, their own or that of others (sponsors), ignoring any claims their families and loved ones may have on them in pursuit of this elusive satisfaction. When anything goes wrong, as it often does, dozens of other people are obliged to risk their lives to rescue them. Yet everyone seems to agree that the death of a mountaineer is a tragedy, on a par with that of a fire-fighter, soldier, etc. Pages of newspapers, hours of television are devoted to glorifying the noble aspects of their lives and deaths. They're seen as heroes dying heroes' deaths.

Well, I don't get it. I don't say people shouldn't climb mountains, any more than that they shouldn't dive from high places or wrestle big cats in Las Vegas. I'm sure these are all pretty exciting ways to pass the time. But I don't see the intrinsic difference between using a lump of snow-covered rock to get high and using a rock of crack or a line of snow to achieve the same effect. Let's face it. They're dragging their expensively kitted bodies up the side of Everest, or wherever, for the kick. They're not doing it for anyone else's good. In human terms, Reinhold Messner and Amy Winehouse are each worth as much as the other, except that Amy Winehouse is also a genius, and Messner just climbs things.

It's as though physical exercise were, in itself, ennobling. It's rather like the shocked reaction to these new drugs that may induce fitness in - horror of horrors- people who don't deserve it. Why not? Because they just sit around thinking, or reading, or watching TV, instead of running in endless circles or lifting weights. Well, good for them. Pass me the pills while I read Omega Minor.

Interestingly, the only time I remember seeing a climber criticised for failing to consider the social fallout their addictive and selfish activities might have on someone else was when the climber in question was - wait for it - a mother. A woman's place is clearly not up the Eiger. Leave that to the (sponsored) boys.

Head and neck should be opened

This image comes from a site called Face Analyst: A New Approach to the Old Puzzle. It's written in what reads like an unholy marriage between machine translation and psychobabble. The text beside it goes like this:

The classical type of the “castrating woman" leaving man with an inferiority complex, represents a combination of high parameters of authoritativeness, rivalries and criticalities of thinking.

If you'd like to know more, or think you recognise this woman (try imagining hair) and are feeling low-level anxiety, go straight to the site in question, where you will find this kind of crystalline explanation:

The principle of reverse afferentation (the mechanism of reverse connection) gives an opportunity to influence on the specified basic psychological feature by conscious activation (or relaxation) of correlating mimic elements. Training techniques created on the basis of Autogenic Training by J.Shultz and regulating mental processes, connected with emotional conditions, by a muscular relaxation, optimize the general emotional state of the person. The proposed technique (STEMA) allows selectively influence on concrete psychological features directly in a phase of the daily activity of the person, depending on requirements of an environment, or the certain professional specificity.

Should you feel the need for a bit of extra STEMA, you can ask the site directly for counselling. All you have to do is send a photograph. Here are the instructions:

The person on video / photo image should behave naturally (not to sit with the frozen face, as on documents), head and neck should be opened.

Bare naked homophobia

Jesus' General is one of my favourite blogs pretty much all the time, but his latest post is particularly wonderful. Read it here. The illustration comes from it.

I love you I hate you

I was talking to a friend last night about what it might mean to have an inferiority complex. In one sense the term's an oxymoron. The moment you understand your inferiority is a complex rather than a simple fact about you, you're no longer inferior. You're actually sharper than those glittering automata who think they're so special, and aren't, and don't even know it. Damn them.

Given this irony - which is reassuring but, well, insufficient - we started to wonder about whether the mixture of envy and admiration that accounts for a good part of one's feeling inferior is a quality that might be useful, even indispensable, in a writer. Feeling inferior sharpens the eye wonderfully. You watch the others, the superior ones, with the attention of a fearing and doting child, but also with that of a servant, whose service is bought at the cost of his contempt; and finally with that of a dog, alert to whatever might fall from the table. Aren't these Proustian characteristics? Isn't this what Thackeray did? And Waugh? And Genet? How often the narrator's eye seems both pitiless and enamoured.

And then there are the others. Dickens, Penelope Fitzgerald, Rohinton Mistry...

"a sense today"

An illuminating post from Lally's Alley, with extracts from work by Nathan Kernan and Bill Corbett that do exactly what extracts should do: make you want to read the rest. The title to this post comes from one of them.

Translation

The best way to confirm that translation isn't just shifting sense from one word to another but wrestling with, and reflecting, cultures is to take a look at packaging. We've just picked up two fabulous new Bialetti pans from our local supermarket - yes, we collect the points - and I was reading the instructions. They're what you'd expect. Prepare the cookware, cook over moderate heat, etc. There are seven of them and they're presented in seven languages: Italian, English, French, German, Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese. Looking at them it's clear that what we do with our cookware in all these countries is pretty much the same. With two exceptions, both of which appear in the English version.

The first, small but significant, is the instruction: DO NOT USE UNDER BROILER. This one isn't that hard to explain, although there may be British cookware users who don't know that grill and a broiler are the same thing. But it's interesting that this should be the only instruction in CAPITAL LETTERS, as though English-speaking readers needed that kind of emphasis to grasp an essential point.

But the really interesting difference comes at the end of the English text. It starts CAUTION (also in CAPS) and continues: For safety, please keep pet birds out of the kitchen. Birds' respiratory systems are sensitive to many kinds of household fumes, including the fumes from extremely overheated non-stick pans. This appears only in English. What can it mean? That allowing pet birds into a kitchen filled with excessively overheated non-stick pans is a practice so quintessentially English that the information needn't be given in any other language? Who else but a Brit would have parakeets among the pots and pans? Or is it that the budgie lobby in Britain and the States is so powerful that Bialetti is obliged to add this warning?

PS The sad-looking bird in the picture won the Wet Budgie Contest. I know no more.

PPS I can't not italicise cookware. I'm sorry.

Wakey wakey

My thanks to Katia and Susanna for this. I don't know who did it. If you do, let me know.

Orwell blogs

George Orwell's diaries are about to be posted, exactly seventy years after they were written, in blog form, starting in August. My thanks to Maud Newton for pointing me to the site.

Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain: Wuthering Heights

If you've never heard these people , as I hadn't before today, go straight to Youtube - and I mean this very minute - and see what else they've done. They're fantastic. And if you have heard them, why didn't you tell me? What kind of friend are you?
And here's a picture of them. And if you want to know more, go here. This is what friends are for.

Rule of thump

A misprint I came across in a report I'm editing today, about banana cultivation in atoll islands. It's talking about how often banana plants should be fed with organic matter and suggests once a month as a rule of thump. Maybe I'm tired and bored (OK, I am tired and bored), but this has tickled me no end. It's like a homelier more approximate version of the law of the jungle. The rule of thump. Let's see if we can introduce into everyday speech. We could start with political discourse. As in: Gordon Brown KO'd by rule of thump.

"Alight with interest"

A lovely - and loving - essay by Julian Barnes on Penelope Fitzgerald in today's Guardian. It's fascinating to see how casually she was treated by the literary world, as though she were the writing equivalent of Grandma Moses rather than the most astute, technically audacious and wide-ranging English novelist of the past fifty years. I think Barnes is mistaken to dismiss The Bookshop as one of the minor novels before the big four, but the essay is a pleasure to read and a useful amuse-bouche as we wait for the letters.

The photograph is by Jane Bown.