lost in...

following a recent recommendation in The Times' Books section I downloaded David Bellos "Is That A Fish In Your Ear", about translation.  I found it quite fascinating.  I am not  a translator, though I worked as one (from Russian and Japanese to English) in my younger days, but I am interested in language, and anyone who is even remotely interested would find something of interest in this book.  Bellos  points out that to engage with all but a tiny fraction of people in the world, you definitely do not need to learn all of their first languages.  You need to know their vehicular languages, languages learned by non-native speakers for the purpose of communicating with  native speakers of a third tongue.  These languages are, in order of the number of speakers they have, Chinese, Hindi, Arabic, Spanish, Russian, Urdu, French, Japanese, and English.  At this point he refers to "the unfortunate but widespread idea that English is simpler than other languages".  I'll pick out some interesting snippets from this book, and paraphrase some of the rest of it, in the hope that others will read it and maybe comment and discuss.  I think these matters (especially translation and the role of English in it in the world) have not been sufficiently discussed.

The ancient Greeks thought all foreign languages sounded like "va-va-va" and so they called foreigners "varvaros", which became the word "barbarian".

"...the mother tongue that is supplanted by a learned language for higher-level activities remains only 'mother's tongue', used exclusively for interaction with the older generation".  This is precisely the situation of Alsatian, the regional language in this part of France (and across the Rhine in Germany, with variations).  When you ask someone if they speak that language they say no, but their granny does, and they sometimes speak it with her.

I have no time for Chomsky politically, but I did respect him as a linguist in former times.  His sentence "Colourless green ideas sleep furiously" was meant to show that a perfectly grammatical sentence can be meaningless - so students promptly began constructing scenarios in which that sentence had a meaning.  The author contends, further, that "no grammatical sentence, in any language, can be constructed such that it can never have a context of utterance in which it is meaningful."

"Thesaurus" means "treasure" in Greek.

The perils of online searching: in April 2010 a search for pages in English quoting "poetry is what is lost in translation" gave 15,100 results.  Almost all of them attributed the adage to Robert Frost.  But nobody has ever been able to find Frost saying anything like it in his works, letters, interviews or reported sayings.

Left dislocation (in French "moi, je veux une glace")occurs very frequently indeed in corpuses of language written originally in French, but quite rarely in translations into French of similar vintage.  This can be called a third code.  It occurs almost certainly because French grammars, and the teaching of French in francophone environments, characterise left dislocation as typical of spoken language.  So translators tend to "normalise" and write more "correctly", thus using less left dislocation than authors do.  With translation into English this work is more likely to be done by copy editors, and in both cases the author describes the task as taking the register and level of naturally written prose up a notch or two.

Recent figures, though they vary, show that in literary translation about 8 per cent of the work done in the world is into English, and that less than one per cent of all translations are into Chinese, although Chinese speakers are a quarter of the world's population.  English however is the medium as source or target of over 75 per cent of all translations, according to UNESCO.  Basically English is being translated out of and not into, and this trend is likely to expand.  Don't go into translation into English, there's no future in it.

This displays my ignorance, but I only recently discovered that Google Translate does not actually translate anything, but searches rapidly for examples of the word or phrase entered in parallel with the target language sought.  So largely it is searching existing translations.  I use Google Translate quite often at work, to check whether something already translated is fairly accurate.  But I know better than to seek a word or phrase in a language I do not know at all.  I use it to check translations into English or into one of the other languages of which I have a reasonable level of knowledge.  This book notes that English-language detective novels are quite likely to have been translated into Icelandic and other Scandinavian languages, and Harry Potter books into both Hebrew and Chinese.  It follows from this that these bodies of work have made a much greater contribution to the quality of Google and other computer translations than any of the great classics have.  The exception of course is the Bible.  The great classics are much more likely to have been translated by way of a pivot language such as English, French or German, rather than directly from say Hebrew into Farsi.

Literary translation into English is done by amateurs.  There is no money in it.  But in other countries there is.  Even in France people make money doing it, though they usually have a day job as well.  In Japan literary translators are celebrities (Motoyuki Shibata being the best known), and there are sections in bookshops devoted to their translations into Japanese.

Freud's complete works, written of course in German, have been translated only into English, Italian, Spanish and Japanese.  A number of words, such as "superego", "empathy" and "displacement" have come into English from the translation of Freud by James Strachey, which is still controversial - some say it is a betrayal of Freud's legacy - because Strachey treats Freud as a purely scientific writer.

Success in learning a foreign tongue comes at the moment when, at least in your head, you leave translation behind and begin to think in the original.  And so translation is routinely disparaged (I do this too) as no other field of endeavour is.

I thought this was interesting: "There is no form of language in the world that is ever spoken aloud without accompanying hand movements."  Interpreters gesticulate, even though nobody is supposed to be looking at them.  I remember, when I was interpreting from Japanese into English (and Japanese people are notoriously physically undemonstrative, even when drunk) how hard I worked to keep my hands from moving about while I was speaking.  As if it mattered.  Televison newsreaders don't move their hands, until they do the shuffle of papers or tap on the keyboard at the end that everyone waits for, because they are only pretending to talk to you, but are in fact reading words from a teleprompter.  A lecturer in a university who moves his hands is therefore ad-libbing, and one who is reading lecture notes aloud characteristically keeps his hands to his side or on the desk.  This also works the other way round.  Most people move their mouths when doing a complex or difficult tasks with their hands, such as threading a needle.

I was glad too to see the Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax exposed again.  It has been done many times, but the belief persists in too many quarters that Inuit people have 20, or 40, or 50 words for snow.  Even the great Kate Bush's new album is called "50 Words For Snow".  No, they don't.  Inuit languages are agglutinative and add suffixes and prefixes to the stem word, so it's as pointless to say an Inuit language has 20 words for snow as to say that Russian, which does its verbs in similar fashion, has 10 words for football, even though Russian has at least 10 ways of saying that someone is playing football.

A thoughtful book, and one with which I took issue a number of times, but readable.  If you translate, or if you edit, or if you ever read anything in translation, read this book.  It will help.  And if you persist in believing what you may have been told at school, that "a translation is a poor substitute for the original", then think again.  The original language and text of the Bible no longer exist, so it has to be read in translation.  Stieg Larsson has been read by millions more people than there are Swedish speakers alive on the planet.  Is this a bad thing?

a fine body of women

allegedly they are dressed in 1950s costumes.  I can just remember the late 1950s, and a lot of women dressed that way well into the 60s, and they were all better turned out than this.  Being well turned out was rather the point.

and Hartley heads for the hills

Afraid of the Greens in Park ward? I wouldn't be.

Tony's on spin cycle

Tony Jones (for it is he) informs us that erstwhile Tory group leader in Reading Cllr Andrew Cumpsty is standing down from the council next May as well as relinquishing the leadership. Tony claims to be aware of the identity of Cumpsty's successor, which he does not share with us, although he does, apropos of not very much, post positively about Cllr Tim Harris

http://jonesindep.blogspot.com/2011/11/richard-davies-one-to-watch-in.html

who is a councillor for the Tory increasingly-marginal Church ward and who is allegedly going to chicken-run north across the Thames. Well, possibly. But hang on. Why would he do that? He's not up for re-election and doesn't have to make that decision for at least a year. Tony also informs us that Tory councillor for Caversham Dave Luckett may stand down - also possibly true, but for which Tony offers no evidence - and that therefore one Richard Davies is lIkely to take Caversham for Labour. Mr Davies, whom I do not know, has not at the time of writing been selected as a candidate.

So, Tony, what is your game? Trying to run the agenda from your blog, are you? Well, I can sort of see your point. Over the past few years certain bloggers have been WAY more influential on the Reading political scene than most elected councillors have.

Tony reminds us at it is "not that long" since Caversham had Labour councillors. Depends what you call "not long". A few years, it is. And even then at least two of them were actively committed to securing Tory representation in Reading East. Bye, Ms Dysfunctional Kathryn Peak. Toodle-oo, Steve "never worked in his life" Waite.

Oh and Tony - cast your mind back those few years to when Caversham did still have a Labour councillor or two, and remember that you yourself were Mr Salter's favoured candidate for Reading East in 2005, nobly standing down in favour of Cllr Tony Page. So that went well then. (Sorry I spoiled your keynote speech opportunity by turning up at that Caversham curry house *tries to keep straight face*). Following which you were Martin Salter's favoured successor in Reading West. Until Mr S (of whom more later, bet you can't wait) thought maybe Reading West could be held after all and tried to un-stand down and get the dingbat Naz Sarkar deselected. Leaving poor Tone a'cold.

Never mind chaps, just try and keep the noise down a bit over there, won't you?

Best Blessings of Existence 24

In which Emma B treats of poor dead creatures - and those who survive.

She did not embrace her new role of deserted wife; that would have meant acceptance and she did not accept it.

The immediate task was survival.

After her initial visit to The Falcon, she closed the door and hunkered down as day became night became day; punctuated by a rattling letterbox at one end and the beam from a streetlight at the other.

Six days passed like this.

On the seventh, she showered; emptied ashtrays and opened windows before collecting the post from her doormat.

A world was outside.

She was not interested in it.

The items were various: a notice from The Department of Education and Science confirming the fact that she had passed her Probationary Year and was now a fully qualified teacher; a final demand gas bill (she put that to one side), and a postcard from Lynne. The latter was an especially garish depiction of a souk in Marrakesh with the comment: Wish you were here instead of me. S is unbearable, in Lynne’s elegant hand. Well, of course, if Lynne had been stupid enough to embark upon a package tour to Morocco with Sandra Milford, she must expect the consequences…

Stupid maybe --- but not as stupid as shacking up with someone who was virtually a stranger barely a month after meeting them; rejecting a highly prized PHD placement at York with foreign travel guaranteed – for the joys of a dead end job as a teacher; a gloomy part-furnished flat and marriage to a man with three children who treated her like something his cat had brought in when a mouse was unavailable………..

The telephone rang:

Hello – Paul here.

This was the first time he had called since decamping with a woman eighteen years her senior who favoured faux Jackie Kennedy sling-backed shoes and a French pleat up do.

If he assumed he could waltz back into her life and recline in the wheel-backed chair with a Jamieson’s, after disporting with someone who was nothing but a superannuated tart then he could think again….

He didn’t.

He wanted to arrange a time when she would be out to collect his books and records; he wouldn’t bother with the furniture – it was pretty tatty after all. Would Thursday at 2pm suit?

For a moment she wondered if she would ever, again, be capable of speech.

And then she remembered the gas bill.

It was a final demand and it was enormous. Could he please pay it?

Ah ha, he was coming to that!

Frances had made the very sensible suggestion that he should just contact all the utilities – and the telephone company -- and the landlord, of course, and transfer everything into her name. After all, he had moved out and wouldn’t be availing himself of anything. He’d thought he might pop round to see the landlord on Thursday …. Save her the bother! And now he really must dash -- sorry it hadn’t worked out; but then he had never wanted to remarry and better now than later, so to speak……….

There was nothing to do but cry.

Since Paul had left, she had been in a state of continual panic, neither eating nor sleeping and now she was ambushed by wracking sobs as she paced the lounge, leaving a trail of destruction in her wake.

The pleasure derived from mutilating the Cantos of Ezra Pound; Bartok’s String Quartet No 2; Art and Illusion by Gombrich and The Collected Works of Basil Bunting was ephemeral and did not answer the real question:

What was wrong with her?

Why had she been ditched after 13 months, when Philippa Truscott; Dorian Chase and even Betty Glenn had notched up a combined total of 36 years’ wedded bliss?

Well, perhaps not bliss exactly. Roy Truscott was a drunk; David was dull and the thought of a naked Chester Chase was frankly obscene – but at least they had stayed with their spouses. As had Donald, despite a wife whose raison d’être was not keeping up with the Joneses but annihilating them beneath the two inch heel of a sensible Clark’s court shoe ( double E fitting).

Frances Hunt was so old that her powder had settled into the fine furrows that ran from nose to mouth like the tracing on an iced cake. Was the pleasure of dining with Aiden Cleghorn really worth the pain of sexual relations with a grandmother?

The bell rang and she opened the door upon Percy bearing gifts.

He was holding white roses and swept a fedora hat from his head before walking into the room and sitting down in the wheel backed chair.

I think, he said, that I am going to take you to see the doctor.

The fact that she had existed for seven days in a foetid sty amidst torn books; smashed records; empty bottles and crumpled cigarette packets, without eating, sleeping or changing her clothes, rendered protest superfluous and she didn’t.

Two hours later, she returned with a small packet of tranquillisers; took two and slept for seven hours.

After that, things got better.

She was still hurt, angry and vengeful but at least those feelings were now directed outwards – at Paul and Frances Hunt – rather than inwards towards herself. The tranquillisers helped her to sleep – and after three nights she discovered that she could manage without them and threw away the packet.

Mistakes were made – such as the late night call to Nicola after a bottle of wine, when she pledged to continue visiting the children in Paul’s absence. Nicola was polite but bemused, and thirty years’ later, she still winced at the manner in which she had fawned over a woman whose marriage she had prized at the value of a discarded sweet wrapper.

Paul removed his books and she rearranged the lounge; stacking the makeshift shelves in the spare bedroom. Her father paid the gas bill, accompanying his largesse with an excoriating enunciation of all Paul’s faults and her own purblind stupidity. She inspected a few smaller rental properties – nothing suitable; but it was a start.

Shall I at least set my lands in order?

And she accepted a social invitation.

Following their marriage, the Kerridges had moved to a luxury apartment half way between Dorlich and Fernboughton.

This was a surprise; Lionel’s well appointed flat was ideally situated for his post at Dorlich University and everyone assumed that this would become the marital home.

However, Araminta insisted upon a new pad to go with my new man. It was the ideal opportunity for a display of fatherly munificence, and Major Bellwether obliged with the purchase of 39, Coverley Court; a ground floor apartment in a converted 18^th century mansion. It was situated at the heart of Oakshire; ten miles from the nearest village and the decorative grounds boasted an ornamental lake and well stocked orchards.

After a month’s absence, Mr and Mrs Kerridge announced themselves to be

At Home to chosen guests via white-wove board invitations with a silver bevel edge and charcoal grey ink.

She accepted Percy’s offer of a lift in the TR7.

Deciding what to wear had been tricky. It was not a black tie invitation, but such an address merited more effort than jeans. In any case, she had lost so much weight that had the wearing of jeans been de rigueur, hers would have resembled outsize oilskin waders.

After much thought, she unearthed a duck-egg blue suede skirt with a buckle belt. It was practically vintage, but a penchant for open sandwiches, lager and lime and cheesecake in her student days had rendered it off limits since her first term as an undergraduate.

Now it looked decidedly on trend when teamed with a slim-fitting black lace shirt and patent heels - proving that the desertion diet beat Scarsdale hands down – and cost absolutely nothing except grief, misery and humiliation.

Percy arrived and surpassed expectations in a grey hounds ooth double breasted suit complete with black and white spats, boater and carnation. He had packed six bottles of Bourgogne Aligote (Best Man’s present) in the boot and they set off at top speed.

Coverley Court was an impressive address by anyone’s standards and as they purred up the gravelled drive, she felt sure that even Araminta’s social ambitions could not fail to be satisfied. The lush grounds and understated elegance of Pemberley came to mind:

I expect you feel like Elizabeth Bennet, she remarked, as Araminta ushered them, via an enormous drawing room, to a terrace leading on from the splendid oak French windows. About twenty people were already in situ, enjoying appropriate refreshment. The woodland vista; cultivated shrubs, trees and an ornamental lake with a splashing water cascade, was so charming that she initially failed to register Araminta’s surly rejoinder

Who’s she? or the fact that the hostess, now tripping back into the apartment – had seemed less than sanguine. Lionel, who joined them, seemed to be rivalling her own weight loss and had developed a sort of behavioural tic; craning his head in the direction of the drawing room and addressing the tops of his guests’ heads instead of their faces.

Percy presented the wine:

Hope you’ll accept this old chap; meant to wet the bride’s head but better late than never!

Has she seen it?

said Lionel, eyes trained towards the drawing room.

Seen what?

Percy was genuinely bemused.

The wine. Because if she hasn’t, can you please take it back to the car? I’m trying to keep her off it you see.

The difficult of keeping the hostess off the wine at her own drinks party must have struck even the commentator. Lionel elaborated.

I’m trying to contain it. I thought if we had it here, there would be some measure of control but even here ( voice breaking ) - even HERE , she is AT IT; she’s brought those vile animals from Bunters and The Falcon and they’re here ALL THE TIME and I can’t read or work or BREATHE and sometimes I think Garfield Proudie had the right idea!

A cursory glance at the guests revealed a notable absence (with the exception of Romaine Hince and Lester Frogatt), of anyone remotely connected with academia.

It was an uncomfortable assemblage of all the hardened drinkers on the margins of Dorlich respectability; the type of people who would make Philippa Truscott seem like Mother Theresa.

Its all day every day, hissed Lionel. The honeymoon was bad enough. The fact that MY WIFE appreciated the hotel wine waiter more than the mosaics at the Cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta should have told me SOMETHING - but since we’ve been back it’s been like living in the Inferno! I thought that we’d have a chance to GROW as a couple – its ten miles to the nearest pub – but she’s simply brought them all here – and there’s this horrible big television and they watch something called TISWAS and sing THE BUCKET OF WATER SONG……………….

AND I WISH I WAS DEAD!

It was difficult to know what to say to this; and completely impossible to request a glass of wine in the circumstances. She looked at the ornamental lake.

It’s the STYX!!!

said Lionel, appropriating the wine.

If the coast’s clear, we can take it to the car without her noticing……….

She looked at Percy and they decided that there was nothing for it but to follow their host, via the French windows, to the drawing room and thence the entrance – hoping to appropriate a drink en route. On closer inspection, the décor of the drawing room was peculiar; Lionel’s tasteful dark wood tables, chairs and draped burgundy velvet floor length curtains were offset by an enormous television encased in a vulgar Spanish-style mock–wood cabinet with a maple grain finish. Four youngish men wearing jeans with a distinctly rakish aspect were sitting in front of it as if at a shrine, flicking through the channels with a remote control. At this point, Araminta swept into view from the adjoining open plan kitchen.

Her face was puffy; her jade satin cocktail dress and sequinned stilettos had seen better days, but her eyesight was in perfectly good order. She demanded to inspect the contents of the bag.

Aligote – oh you are such a DARLING!!! (kissing Percy full on the lips). Now run off to the kitchen LILO and get the opener! We’ve got so much to catch up on!

Araminta was clearly more than a little the worse for wear – but was still in the euphoric stage of intoxication. It would have been perfectly possible to distract her with a glass of something cheap and cheerful from the kitchen, whilst secreting the Aligote in the car boot – but maybe the public airing of a ridiculous nickname was a humiliation too far for Lionel. He snatched the remote control from the television - watching party; appropriated the carrier bag and addressed his wife.

I’m sorry, Araminta – but you are quite clearly extremely drunk; Percy’s expensive present would be wasted on you and there is Methylated Spirit in the cupboard. If you want that – then you’re quite welcome. And (pointing to the television watchers) Get these louts OUT OF HERE!

If Araminta was euphoric before, she was vituperative now and only Percy’s prompt action prevented her seizing, and in all probability, dropping, the bag with a consequent breakage of glass and spillage of wine. She rounded upon Lionel with a vengeance.

He was a loser; useless in the sack; a miserable miser who had married her for her money; was keeping her prisoner in this Godforsaken DUMP; she hated all his geriatric friends; and she wished he’d go and top himself like that OLD QUEEN PROUDIE. On second thoughts, what was her life worth? Answer, NOTHING!!!

And she ran into the kitchen; emerged brandishing a Sabatier carving knife, last seen as part of a wedding present boxed set – and locked herself in the bathroom.

There was an embarrassed silence, during which time Romaine Hince and Lester Frogatt had joined them in the drawing room and the television-watching party had left it. Lionel announced that marriage to Araminta had wrecked his health, sanity and if it continued, a career ( for which he had sacrificed the normal pleasures of a healthy male), would be as toast. He would therefore be most grateful for a lift back to Dorlich (looking at Percy).

Fortuitously, he had kept his old apartment (indeed, it still contained most of his books) and could move straight back. He would arrange for everything else to be collected later – and – no time like the present – why didn’t they just make a move now?

Percy cleared his throat.

Well, he was very sad to hear all this; very sad indeed – and such a lovely apartment too – quite delightful…….. And, of course, it was certainly possible to stump up with a lift – the TR7 was a tourer with four seats after all, but wasn’t Lionel forgetting something fairly crucial?

Araminta was in the bathroom with a carving knife.

Pause.

Lester Frogatt, a reticent PHD student, specialising in the lais of Marie de France, volunteered to investigate.

A preliminary tap on the bathroom door elicited no response; neither did another – or subsequent bangs and kicks. There was a frosted bathroom window visible from the exterior; it was a ground floor apartment and the logical thing was for Lester to take a peek from the outside – which he did.

It was hard to see anything; very fuzzy really – but he could certainly see a kind of lump in the region of the bath. Although what it was, he really couldn’t say……….

There was nothing for it but to break the door down.

On the drive back to Dorlich – minus Lionel – she discussed the Kerridge

At Home with Percy.

Firstly there had been very little of ‘home’ about it; both Lionel and Araminta from their different perspectives, seemed to detest in equal measure, one of the most delightful residences she had ever seen.

It was completely was wasted upon this ill-matched couple and Lionel for one, had determined to vacate the premises as soon as possible.

At the third heave, Percy had conquered the bathroom lock and the door had given wa, to reveal Araminta lying on her back on the linoleum.

Her legs resembled the stiff twin compasses of John Donne’s A Valediction Forbidding Mourning; she was cradling the Sabatier knife like a nursing mother and not crooning but snoring. She had not cut herself or anything else.

Having ascertained that his wife was drunk rather than dead, Lionel repeated his request for a lift back to Dorlich – to no avail. Percy was adamant:

I say, Lionel – I’ve only just officiated at your wedding! I’ve no idea what’s gone on between you and your good lady, but I am not going to arrive as your guest with your marriage intact and then spirit away the groom leaving a damsel in distress! It was my fault – I shouldn’t have tempted her with the wine – like Eve and the apple!! Early to bed – early to rise and tomorrow’s a new day!

And that, despite Lionel’s anguished pleas, had been that.

The fact that Lionel Kerridge had married Araminta Bellwether in the first instance was the stuff of a rather poor Whitehall Farce, minus Brian Rix, with or without trousers, but the news about Mr Proudie was a tragedy indeed.

This kind, elderly scholar, who had taught palaeography to her MA group, had recently committed suicide by plunging to his death from the top of Persimann’s Folly – a medieval tower house on the edge of the university complex.

He had been a courteous, witty man who had lived for many years with his aged mother until her death after a long battle with Parkinson’s disease the previous summer. Despite Araminta’s cruel jibe, she hhad ad no idea about Garfield Proudie’s sexuality and cared less.

The important fact was that he would be remembered by generations of Dorlich students for his brilliant commentary on the Gawain poet; his lively rendition of the Robin Hood ballads and most of all, his enjoyable tours of medieval Dorlich, always concluding with a lavish repast in Lucy’s Tea Room, with extra cream for the ladies.

Do you know, said Percy, as he dropped her off at Conyham Crescent after what had been, to say the least, an eventful outing: You haven’t mentioned Paul once.

It was true; she hadn’t.

There is a world elsewhere, she decided on her return to life as a woman without a man.

Perhaps she had begun to find it.

let's hear it for...

Cllr Hartley, who has been kind enough to send me the following email:

Dear Resident
 
I'm writing to remind you that the Council is hosting the Working Better with You community event at the Town Hall on the 24th November at 5.30pm. We would like as many residents to come along and hear the views the programme has gathered so far as well as helping to develop ways that the Council and its staff and members can work better with you in the future.
 
Attached is a copy of the original invite, but if you would like to attend and have yet to register please contact us using the following link On-line booking form, by calling us on 0118 937 2098 or email us at communications@reading.gov.uk.
 
Yours sincerely,

 
Jon Hartley
Lead Councillor, Service Delivery and Improvement
 

Sorry Jon, I'm having a bikini wax that day.

cholera and polio

In the past I have occasionally been asked who my heroes are. I have usually mentioned in this context Dr. John Snow. He it was, I have said, who persuaded the authorities of the time to remove the pump handle of the Broad Street well in Soho, London, thus bringing to an end the cholera epidemic of 1854 and convincing the authorities of the time that the cholera bacterium lives in water contaminated with fecal matter. Well, it wasn't quite like that. But it was because of Snow's work, though not only his, that there have only very rarely been cholera outbreaks in England since 1854. I recommend a book called "Ghost Map" by Steven Johnson, which tells this story. He tells it as an adventure, and that is what it is. Epidemics happen, and people die. But often the cause is not known. Why do some people die and not others? Why did those who worked in the sewers of London, in close contact with fecal matter every day, usually live to healthy old ages? Can one person, by their actions or their simple presence in a place and at a time, be responsible for an outbreak and for the deaths of people? If so, and if they know it, what does that do to them? A very interesting theme of this book was that "everyone" knew at the time what caused epidemics. Bad air, bad smells, bad living conditions. Well, no, actually. And I wondered while reading, what today does "everyone" know, which someone with the vision of Dr Snow will one day make us see is wrong beyond imagining, and that people have died as a result of our wrong imaginings?

I first found out about Dr Snow when my children were at the excellent E.P. Collier primary school in Reading, and they studied public health and water supply. No such important or imaginative things were on the curriculum when I was going to school. "Ghost Map" is a fast-moving read, though there were times I had to stop reading while I was eating (description of cholera symptoms, anyone?), and highly thought-provoking. We don't eat or drink things that smell bad. People used the Broad Street well because the water tasted good. Cholera bacteria don't have a taste.

Go to Soho now and you will find that Broad Street no longer exists. Where it was, approximately, is a street called Broadwick. All but one of the buildings which housed the crowded population of Soho in the mid-19th century are no more. This has a lot more to do with the Luftwaffe than with cholera. However, the pub on the corner still stands (brewery and pub workers by and large did not get cholera, because they drank beer and not water). It has a new name. The John Snow. Next time I am in London I shall go and have a drink there and raise a glass to Dr. Snow's memory.

Totally by coincidence, the next book of the collection of e-books (Kindle for iPad, vg) I had bought and downloaded to read while travelling in Australia this month was the latest Philip Roth, "Nemesis". It is about another epidemic, of polio in 1940s Newark, New Jersey, and what that epidemic does to the individuals it touches. The themes are the same. I found the Roth shocking. A story of a young man, with hopes and dreams, things are looking good for him. And then... All through the book I was waiting for the next thing to happen, the next episode in the story of Bucky (a real jock name that, not a nerdy Jewish boy's name) Cantor, and what polio does to his Jewish neighbourhood. One reviewer of this book said Roth's humour in later life (he is 77) is black bile where it has been choler. Yes. Black, dark, and utterly compelling.

I was born in 1954, the first year that universal polio vaccination was available to babies in the UK. I was vaccinated, although my mother wondered briefly whether injecting polio into a baby was a good idea. People I knew as I grew up, only a few years older than me, had often had polio, or been affected by it in some way. Part of the reason I did not learn to swim until I was 11 was a generalised fear in working-class communities of "catching polio" from public swimming pools. Ignorance. Which now manifests itself in fear of mobile-phone masts, in belief in the nonsense that the MMR vaccine causes autism, and in homeopathy. Among other things.

Because we know we are right. Don't we?

occupy the central aisle

Thanks to the Normster (the excellent Norman Geras) for what is below, and I ask his forgiveness for reproducing it in full. He titles it "Me and my left knee".

We were on the train last night coming back from London to Cambridge when WotN pointed out that I was sitting with my left knee jutting out into the corridor, where it might obstruct people. My immediate thought was to pull my knee in and so remove the potential obstacle, but I hesitated. Should I treat my knee as a simple adjunct of myself and deny it any autonomy? Perhaps it had decided to join the Occupy movement and Occupy the Corridor. If it had, I felt bound to take its concerns seriously. It could be protesting against unacceptable levels of inequality in our society and wanting attention drawn to the size of bankers' bonuses or the latest figures for youth unemployment. But then what if my knee was amongst those benighted knees that closed their eyes (well, you know what I mean) to the good reasons for Nato's interventions in Afghanistan and Libya? I thought I should give my knee the benefit of the doubt. Autonomous as may be, the knee is, after all, my knee, and through long years of contiguity and even attachment could be expected to be wanting to Occupy the Corridor for good reasons rather than bad.

I was veering towards letting it be, therefore, sticking out like that into the corridor, when it occurred to me that it could make its points effectively - whatever they were - without getting in anybody's way, by holding up a placard with those points clearly inscribed upon it. On the other hand, people might not look at a placard if the knee holding it up wasn't jutting out. The placard might not be prominent enough. I had to think hard. In the end I came to the conclusion that my knee should be withdrawn from the corridor, though it could continue to register its protest in other spaces and venues.

Did I, then, force my knee back into the bay where we were sitting? Of course not. I persuaded it by gentle reasoning and some relevant reminiscence about the past.

Posted by Norm at 12:56 PM | Permalink

Best Blessings of Existence 23

in which Emma B. feels that she is slipping from the margins of her own life...


She was woken by the unforgiving bell of the telephone.
It was 10.30 am; she took the call.
 
Philippa here – so he’s done a runner! POOR YOU.
We’re all ROOTING FOR YOU.
Come for a pow wow – The Falcon at 1 – much, much love and CHIN UP!
 
Replacing the receiver, it occurred to her that a new and rather unwelcome pattern was emerging; people talking to her and making decisions about her without requiring her involvement
 
Chester Chase last night; Philippa Truscott today.
Had she become a cipher in her own life?
 
Good question, but she could not supply the answer from her immediate position; standing in the hall in last night’s party dress.
 
The dress itself was ruined; burnt in three places at the hem, and marked by red wine on a sleeve. Another stain adorned the bodice and a visit to the bathroom confirmed the fact that she had been sick just about everywhere except the ceiling.
 
After showering, she put the dress in a bag prior to disposal and surveyed the apartment.
 
The former marital home.
 
Although the only appropriate word in that sentence was former.
The whole place seemed temporary from the furniture (largely inherited from the previous tenants), to the make - shift brick and plank bookshelves and the David and Marilyn posters from her student house.
 
Apart from a green corduroy floor cushion and a pottery lamp, there was not one item of furniture or décor that they had added as a married couple.
She did not count the wheel- backed chair, pine table and Welsh dresser – they were throw-backs to the Nicola marriage and about as ephemeral as Perdita the cat who came and went as she chose – much like Paul.
 
Who had certainly gone now – abandoning her without even the courtesy of an explanation.
She had not seen it coming; she had seen nothing coming from the moment she had met him in Bunters to the moment he had returned to her from France; to the moment he had flounced off to somewhere in Staveley Forest with Frances Hunt.
 
And where had she been while all this was going on?
 
Chester Chase and Philppa Truscott were on to something.
 
She was slipping from the margins of her own life.
 
A sudden panic arose – swiftly allayed when she realised that she had not missed work – it was the first day of the vacation.
But there were things to be done and people to tell.
Things had to be done and things would be done.
 
What she could not do was to think about any of it.
 
For the next couple of hours, she occupied herself with mechanical actions; removing   upturned ashtrays and empty bottles; discarding the Blondie record that had stuck in a groove and had been playing since the previous night; scrubbing the bathroom.
 
The telephone; calls to be made.
 
First Nicola; they wouldn’t be having the children that afternoon because Paul had gone. No, not gone out. Gone.
 
Then her parents; Paul had left. With another woman and had gone somewhere. No she wasn’t imagining it (to her mother).
 
When her father came onto the line, she held the receiver away because he was saying what he had wanted to say for the past twelve months.
 
Paul was a scoundrel; she should have seen it coming; Paul  had done the dirty on one woman and was not to be trusted; he looked down on everybody and had invited Eric, his own father, to the Christmas Carol concert in the Chudleigh Chapel, but not her parents – they weren’t good enough; she would have been paying for the upkeep of another woman’s’ children all her life; Paul couldn’t even give her a decent home, the apartment was disgusting; she had been a bloody fool and should now see sense and get a divorce.
 
And it was all because she had crammed her head with such damn silly ideas since going to Dorlich. She’d have done better to go to a university nearer home where they called a spade a spade.
 
Quite possibly… and Dorlich as the fount of all evil was to become her comfort blanket of choice over the years…
 
 
Then Gillian had called, scarcely troubling to suppress her contempt.
 
Yes she had heard; from Paul, as it happened – and she felt obliged to make just one point clear to avoid misunderstandings – it wasn’t a surprise.
 
Paul had not got over Nicola – not by a long chalk and yes, she was perfectly aware that Paul had ended that marriage – but he had been given a lot of encouragement, hadn’t he?
 
Of course  she knew that Paul had left Nicola a couple of times before the final break – indeed, she and Donald had intervened on at least one occasion, but again, she felt compelled to be honest – they would be taking a back seat this time.
 
This was going to be hurtful but ---- there was no kind way to say this --- she was sure it was all for the best.
 
Such different backgrounds; Nicola got on so well with Eric and then there were the kiddies.
 
This Hunt business was a fling; it would burn itself out and then - who knew what would happen?
But she would like to say that both she and Donald had enjoyed meeting her and wished her the very best of luck for the future….. Click.
 
Well, fuck off to you too, Gillian…………….
 
 
She opened the curtains and looked through the window at the ornamental stone lions; the grubby lions, in Verity’s words, at the entrance to Conyham Crescent.
The day stretched ahead and had to be filled.
She walked into the kitchen.  
 
It had emerged relatively unscathed from the events of the previous night, but she considered, as if seeing it afresh, that it was really rather nasty; nothing more than a scullery, with a rusty water geyser above the sink.
 
How it had functioned as the seat of operations for the gourmet dinners she had devised for Paul and his horrible friends was nothing short of miraculous.
 
Back in the mists of history – 24 hours ago……….
 
There was food in the fridge but she couldn’t eat.
She needed a drink, but there was no wine - in the kitchen; the bedroom; the living room...
 
Or anywhere else for that matter.
 
A rummage amidst Paul’s favourite hiding places – even behind the backs of the nine volume set of Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time failed to uncover even a miniature brandy.
 
 
If she went to The Falcon to meet Philippa Truscott, somebody would buy her a drink.
So that is what she would do…
 
 
It was virtually empty, because everybody was at work except students, lecturers and teachers like herself who had supposedly begun their summer vacations.
She thanked God for the absence of anybody remotely connected with Chudleigh and joined the Truscotts and Percy at the settle table.
 
Philippa in particular, seemed animated by something other than the large glass of dry white wine that she was consuming with her customary diligence.
 
Frances Hunt.
 
The woman was akin to a cat burglar; breaking and entering into the homes and wedding receptions of others and leaving havoc in her wake.
 
Her hand was imprisoned between Philippa’s distastefully damp palms as the latter elucidated the catalogue of the Hunt crimes, concluding with the infamous theft of the final piece of prawn quiche at her anniversary party.
 
She was not deceived.
 
Philippa’s anger and distress at the conduct of Frances Hunt was undoubtedly genuine. The heaving bosom, slightly reddened eyes and breathy delivery were testament to that.
But she did not for one moment, believe that such emotions had been roused by the fact that Paul had abandoned his young wife after scarcely a year of marriage.
 
Philippa Truscott, who had devoted that same year to fawning over Paul at every available opportunity, was devastated for one reason and one reason only.
 
He had absconded with the wrong woman. Or, to paraphrase Gladys Knight
It should have been her!
 
Roy moved to the bar and ordered more drinks.
 
Percy transferred his weight from left to right buttock.
 
He felt terrible about it; absolutely terrible. He had known her and her delightful friend, Lynne, for some time hadn’t he, and he did hope that they both considered him to be a trustworthy person? He would never have introduced Frances into anybody’s home if he had the slightest inkling that she would avail herself of the host as well as the quiche, so to speak…
 
In fact, he had been completely in the dark from start to finish!
How was he to know that when Frances phoned to say that she had been summoned to assist at the sickbed of her aged aunt in Portland Bissett that she had been romping with Paul at a love nest in Stavely Forest?
 
He had arrived home yesterday, expecting to escort Frances to the Vice Chancellor’s
Summer Revel, to discover a garbled note on the table, beside his panama hat.
.
It was a mixture of something and nothing to the effect that there had been a meating of minds (or other parts; Frances was hardly an intellectual as demonstrated by the spelling of meeting); thanks for the dinners and regards to his mother.
And mention of a chap called Hornblower who seemed to have got himself somehow mixed up in it all.
 
Cleghorn, she said. Aiden Cleghorn….
 
There was more in the same style; she drank from the consecutive glasses placed before her and said very little.
 
It did not seem to matter. For the second time in 24 hours, she was forced to admit that the effect she had been having upon the people whom she had encountered several times a week for the past year could be summed up in one word.
 
Negligible.
 
Everyone seemed more than happy to chat amongst themselves around her and about her; proffering drinks and cigarettes at decent intervals and otherwise ignoring her existence.
 
Fine by her. She would rest her larynx.      
 
Scanning the room, she noticed that Robbie Nantwich, Sarah Cassidy, Lucinda Prynne and Hamish Underhill had come in and were drinking champagne at the bar.
Prynne and Underhill were two of the elite who had reigned at 14a, Wellington Parade as students, but were now pursuing glamorous advertising and publishing careers in London.
 
They must be visiting Nantwich and Cassidy. Robbie Nantwich had joined BBC Dorlich as a graduate trainee As far as she knew, he still lived in Palisade Gardens   with his girlfriend, Sarah Cassidy, a junior production assistant at the Theatre Royal.
 
They were laughing and braying and Robbie’s hand was tweaking Sarah’s breast inside her maroon silk shirt.
He looked in her direction and betrayed not a flicker of recognition.
 
Robbie Nantwich – or rather, his decision to sleep with Sarah at the student conference, had been the sole reason for her night with Derek Kingsmill – and, (unbeknownst to them both), Sandra Milford.
 
She had rectified the situation, finally spending two nights with Robbie; one at the end of another conference, and the other in celebration of a successful  
rent strike sit in at a neighbouring university.
 
Both trysts had gone relatively well, as far as she could remember, after the enormous amount of alcohol she had drunk to engineer the encounters. Robbie had been charming, and amicable – but had not needed to say that he had no intention of changing his domestic situation.
 
Not for her, anyway.
 
Sarah, with her limpid blue eyes and Penelope Tree hair, was there to stay – and stay, as it turned out, she did, whilst Robbie rose through the ranks at the BBC eventually scaling the heights as the station’s foremost political interviewer.
 
She bumped into him as their paths crossed in later years, and once he was even to interview her on his edgy ratings-busting show, Parliamentary People.
But, in common with his old friend and contemporary, Derek Kingsmill (who had taken the political rather than the media route), any experience at Dorlich that had been shared with her   was not the elephant in the room – or even the ant in the kitchen -- it had been airbrushed out of history.
 
And she discovered that you could do that if you liked. Refuse to accept that you had known people – and then you hadn’t!
 
It was remarkably easy. More people should try it…
 
For now, the contrast between the simpering, anodyne Sarah Cassidy, having buckets of fun (and champagne), with one of the sexiest men in Dorlich – and herself, deserted after twelve months of marriage and reliant upon the likes of the Truscotts and Percy, was grotesque.
 
She finished her drink; said her farewells on the off-chance that someone might be listening, and left. Her companions would doubtless discuss her in her absence but they would not be alone in that.
 
She, however, would be alone in the apartment in Conyham Crescent and had better start getting used to it - one way or another.
 
There was a supermarket on the way home; she bought four bottles of wine, three packets of cigarettes and no food.
 
That could wait.
 
   
 
   
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
   
 
 
 
 
 

the top of the bottom of the world

is what Tasmania is. We sailed in on the Spirit of Tasmania overnight Thursday-Friday, and commenced our campervan adventure. I have never done this before. I thought you had to be Dutch to holiday in a campervan, I sometimes think there is no-one left in the Netherlands, because everywhere you go in the world there is a Dutch family in a campervan. Anyway, it is fine, although our vehicle is not the most stylish, nor the most luxurious, it does what it should do, which is both convey and accommodate us. I would love to own one of these things, I now discover, even though I have no driving licence. I like the small space and the discipline of putting everything away all the time. sig other does not. He has a tendency to bellow with rage when things are not where he thinks he left them - which is usually on the floor. Neither acceptable nor possible in a campervan. We don't cook much in the vehicle, just make tea etc in the morning, and either eat picnic food or eat out. But Australian caravan and camp grounds are great - they are the only ones I know so far - you just roll up and say you want a powered site, then drive on to it and plug in your cable and you have power. We need it only to boil a kettle and charge our devices (mobile devices and cameras) otherwise would not need to go on to a site. But being on site means we can use their other facilities and so are not limited to the not exactly spacious loo and shower in the vehicle. The one we are in tonight even has a heated pool (necessary in Tasmania) and they mostly have a barbecue and camp kitchen.

The heavy rain that began soon after we arrived in Tasmania yesterday morning stopped around the middle of today, and we have had sunshine this afternoon and a perfect pink and peach sunset. And how cool is it to eat local strawberries, in season, in November? Tasmania is green and gentle, rather like the English west country, and makes cool-weather wines such as the Rieslings and sparkling Chardonnays we are used to in Alsace. And have been sampling here. The little towns are boring, and perhaps a little depressing, but the landscape and the history make up for that. Settled very early by Europeans, the place has mostly Cornish and Devonian place names. I don't think anything very exciting ever happens here, but Tassie, as they call it, is none the worse for that.

hacksville - the story continues

anyone interested in integrity In British journalism might care to have a read of this (paste the link, sorry)

http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=1&storycode=48263&c=1

travelling

sig other and I are spending the month of November in Australia, mostly travelling. Australia is, er, pretty big. We are trying to see a good selection of the bottom right-hand corner, and a month is not really enough for that. However we have spent time with family on the northern edge of Sydney, had a look round central Sydney - I maintain my view from a visit 10 years ago that Sydney is too spread-out and too car-based to be a city I can really like - flew to Adelaide where I caught up with old friends and we had some beach and pool time, did a tour along the Great Ocean Road, which involved walking up and down some steep places, temperate rain forests, koalas, kangaroos (one of which we ate, a very tasty bolognese) and king
parrots and cockatoos, the latter of which are the coolest birds around, and the former - well, someone went crazy with the paintbox when they got their colours. Then we got to Melbourne for phase 4 of the trip, Australian urban culture. Melbourne is a terrific place to be, one day I would like to live here. The trip is less stressful than many, in that this is an English-speaking country. Since leaving Adelaide we have been staying in backpacker hostels ("hostel" is pronounced by Australians with the stress on the second syllable, which makes the person saying it sound effete to my ears, who knew?) which is a new experience for me, and naturally enough most of the others staying there are about 40 years younger than me. But it's all good. On the tour we shared chores, cooking barbecue lunch, clearing up and washing up and so on. Except of course for two 18-year-old German princesses, who apparently believed that rule did not apply to them. We are now finishing phase 4 in the Greenhouse Backpackers in central Melbourne, in the same building as the police station, which is a big hostel, very well run and organised and friendly, and superbly located. Recommended for anyone, of any age, who is planning a trip. I like backpacker life. You are free to do and dress as you like, and have company if you want it, or not, as you choose. I'll be doing some more of this. Phase 5 begins later today, when we board the Spirit of Tasmania for - you guessed it.

Australians in their middle years and older travel ALL THE TIME. I am told that a middle-aged couple selling their home and going on the road has even been a storyline in Neighbours. In the rain forest we met a family group in their sixties, who said they were from New South Wales, but "We live on the road now. We're travelling.". I cannot imagine a British couple doing this. They would be too interested in the equity in their house. Before I came here a colleague lent me (thanks Gillian) a book called "In The Land Of Oz" by Howard Jacobson, a writer I have never been sure about, which remains my position. This book was published in 1987, when what was then called Native Land Rights was fairly new. It is dated in the ways you might expect. Jacobson and his (Australian) wife go to places visitors do not go, opal mining towns and such like. Everywhere they go they encounter these older travelling couples, and I can vouch that a new generation of them is still doing it. Jacobson's theory about this phenomenon is that with increasing focus on the custodianship of the Australian land, these people, whose parents may have been immigrants to Australia, are staking their own claim to the land, as their title to it is increasingly in question. Well, maybe. An interesting idea, and not one I think I have the courage to ask Australians about.

Alan Keen RIP

Very sad to hear of the death of Alan Keen, MP for Feltham and Heston, at the age of only 73. I agree with a correspondent, who described Alan as a "solid, quiet and pleasant Blairite MP" and not with the Filth which, haters that they are, have chosen his sadly early death to lambast his entire career and sneer at his memory. Bastards. And all of you, teachers and lecturers, Labour Party members, sitting in your comfortable rooms in leafy neighbourhoods and putting up resolutions to your GCs about what a wonderful place Cuba is, reading your Guardian and sneering likewise at a man who worked hard for his often low-paid and often Asian constituents, and who cared about football and about the Labour Party more than he did about Guardian readers, shame on you.

http://www.google.com.au/imgres?q=alan+keen+mp&hl=en&tbo=d&gbv=2&tbm=isch&tbnid=wEgz5i2eDHfTRM:&imgrefurl=http://www.alankeen.com/photo_gallery%3FGalleryPage%3D3&docid=1k2EBUMtiQiZbM&imgurl=http://www.alankeen.com/uploads/e32446d6-21f3-c644-6908-21dd96ef4668.jpg&w=2560&h=1920&ei=TZXBTouWNYqEmQXs8smqBg&zoom=1&biw=1024&bih=672

Paste the link above and you will see Alan in some very dubious company indeed. But most of he time he chose his friends and associates well. Not for him the showy, crowd-pleasing demagoguery beloved of some.

My favorite memory of Alan comes from 1999. During the summer and autumn of that year I was being savagely bullied by Martin Salter and by the then chair of Reading Labour Party, Mike Price, who made persistent late-night calls to me at home in Reading, in the case of Price while drunk. It wasn't an easy time, and while I didn't whine about it, Salter bragged that year around Westminster about the deselection he was organising in Reading East, and that the new candidate would be John Howarth. But that is long ago. Alan Keen got wind of it, and came up to me on the Terrace one day, while Salter and others were there, and while coincidentally I had in my hand one of several poison-pen letters I had received from Salter's ex-partner Christine Howell, who went in for these in between rather tedious suicide attempts. Alan tried to sit down at the table I was at, but Salter told him he wasn't welcome. Alan said later that he had hoped to be able to offer me some support against Salter's bullying. He and others in the Feltham and Heston Labour Party had been on the receiving end of it when Salter had made his unsuccessful attempt to be selected as the candidate there in 1992. The dirtiest campaign he had ever seen, I was told.

Alan Keen didn't go in for dirty play. I doubt that a man like him would get a look in in today's opposition-happy Mili-E Labour Party. More's the pity. I imagine his widow Ann will get the selection for the by-election, now that she has lost the neighbouring seat of Brentford and Isleworth to the Tories. Or, even worse, one of the Establishment offspring (what the French call contemptuously "fille de papa") such as Georgia Gould in memory of Dead Dad.

Rest in peace Alan. It's over for you now. But you are not gone so long as your friends remember you. Pity we can't count on that from the Labour Party.

watching Watson

Tom Watson MP appeared to have a knockout blow in that he reportedly met Neville Thurlbeck, former chief reporter of the late News of the World, to be told that there was evidence of widespread phone hacking that the company's management should have known about. But he spoiled it all by making a cheap jibe about the mafia, just for headlines. Guido is suitably contemptuous, and is on his case about nocturnal activities too.

http://order-order.com/2011/11/10/guido-is-getting-under-watsons-skin/

Potty? But where is Potty Mouth?

Her Majesty's Independent says something in the Reading air turns its politicians funny. This is what they say:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/diary/diary-something-in-the-reading-air-makes-its-politicians-go-potty-6259620.html

They have taken this from His Master's Voice, one supposes, which ran the story yesterday (paste the link if you want, I'm not putting chapter and verse here). But it does not read like Labour spin. And the local Tories are not talking, sensible fellows one and all.

So - cui bono?

playing the media for fools?

Anne Penketh in the Independent (yes I know, not my normal reading) says the following about Iran's alleged military nuclear capability

http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2011/11/10/media-were-played-for-fools-on-iran/

and sorry about current inability to post hyperlinks, do not know why. In essence she says that the media (by which I assume she means the dead trees and their online avatars) have been played for fools re Iran's alleged impending nuclear weapons capability. Well, maybe, but to be played for a fool you have to actually be a fool, at least in the context of the play. The writer says that there was spin, and there were leaks, and there were unattributed briefings. All of which led "us" (who? the people who go to her dinner parties in Notting Hill?) to believe that Iran would have the bomb within weeks if not days, and that Israel was planning to take out its bomb. Or maybe the US was. Or something. And it was All Wrong. Well, der. If you are a journalist, then should you not be checking your sources? Not publishing unattributed items unless you know that they are, er, true? Oh, what a silly old Hector I am.

In the same context, a young person of my acquaintance, who works as a journalist for the Filth, stated very recently on her Facebook page that she was "writing press releases". She does not say why, or about what, or give any other context. She goes on to say that maybe she has thereby joined what she calls the "dark side". I suspect semi-ironically. But, excuse me? What is "dark" about press releases? In my quaint way I thought they had gone out with buying journalists a pint. Clearly not. But a press release is from a person or group or enterprise, setting out its position and offering information, of its choosing. What is "dark" about that? A journalist can ignore it, think about it, follow it up, or copy it out as if true.

Oh, I see.

Oh dear.

The Slap

I have posted before about 'The Slap' by Christos Tsiolkas, a brilliant example of new Australian writing. TV viewers in Australia and now the UK will know that it has since been made into a TV series, now being shown as I understand it in both countries - I watched episode 6 of it last Thursday while with family on the northern edge of Sydney. The following link takes you to a review of that episode from a site called Pedestrian which deals with Australian media and at which I sometimes look. href="http://http://www.pedestrian.tv/entertainment/news/the-slap-recap-rosie/57600.htm"> and is worth reading too. I was most entertained to be told there that all Australian dramas contain a woman with red-wine-stained teeth who is wearing a cardigan and who is foul-mouthed and shouting. In episode 6 the beautiful Rosie becomes that woman. Leaving aside the general unlikeableness of the characters (after all, that quality has never dimmed the popularity of The Archers for Brit audiences, has it?) the TV show, as well as the book, is complex and subtle, and sometimes enigmatic. The top performances added to my experience of the book. I'll be watching the rest.

Best Blessings of Existence 22

The train snaked away, gathering pace for the journey to London. She peered through the window from her seat in a Standard Class compartment.
 
Fengrove Central had a dingy waiting room, miserable shop and a café that closed at the unconscionable time of 6pm.
The memory of two excruciating hours on its platform, battling elements and constituents with Health Secretary, Ainsley Beadle, still rankled although that was eight years ago and Mrs Beadle had long since repaired to the Lords.
 
Ainsley Beadle unanimously regarded as a ‘safe pair of hands’ was enjoying the final Cabinet posting of a distinguished career.
 
She had held three of the Great Offices of State and a leadership challenge in the early nineties had garnered support from all sections of the Party. Hers was an influential voice in many Ministerial appointments; it was a real coup to have attracted her to open the new Foundation Hospital.
 
This achievement was not appreciated by the Fengrove Constituency Party and she had accompanied the Secretary of State to greet the Head of Clinical Practice at the new hospital only to be faced with the Party Chair, heading a demonstration and wielding a placard.
 
A horrendous turn of events was not lost upon the journalist from The Fengrove Gazette who tapped Edgar Smith for a ready stream of bile directed at the NHS reforms; the Runcible Government and a local MP who was an out and out class traitor. Mrs Beadle then remembered an urgent appointment in Whitehall and after an excruciating hour of a severely truncated visit, they returned to the station to find that the café had closed, the toilet was out of order and the train had been ‘indefinitely delayed’.
 
Ainsley Beadle – one of the Government’s more recognisable figures, was then duly recognised and lambasted by complete strangers for the inadequacies of the transport system, the collapse of the economy and the overall relegation of the nation to Third World status.
Her own flickering hopes of a Ministerial career departed with Mrs Beadle, two hours later.
 
As the train passed the halfway point between Fengrove and London she reflected, (whilst scraping some chewing gum from the seat of her skirt), that her former constituents were quite right about the rail service.
 
It was rotten from top to toe – from the price of the tickets to the behaviour of officials who fawned over First Class passengers whilst treating the unfortunates in Standard with a casual contempt bordering upon insolence.
 
Of course, she had formerly been of the elite, nibbling complimentary shortcake, sipping a chilled glass of chardonnay and luxuriating on a capacious cushioned seat – courtesy of a free return rail warrant from Westminster to Fengrove.
 
Today, she had forked out eighty pounds for the pleasure of being squashed between the window and a woman who was chewing something stinking of onions, with nowhere to place her bag or her paper because the table was strewn with plastic bottles and cardboard cartons.
And then in London, she would have to use a crowded Tube at exactly the wrong time of day - because she couldn’t afford a taxi to whisk her to a restaurant to meet people she didn’t want to see for a lunch she didn’t want to eat.
 
It was all quite loathsome.
 
Her week had got off to a poor start with bad news from the estate agent.
An ‘opening gambit’ from a potential buyer had turned out to be a ‘take it or leave it’ final offer. She left it and was now back to square one.
 
Then Vanessa had driven up in her new Mini Cooper en route to Beldringham where she was designing sets at The Exchange Theatre for the Orton Festival.
 
Maybe it was the weather – maybe it was the prospect of a month spent Entertaining Mr Sloane – but she was positively taciturn and every conversational opening led to an inexorable dead end.
 
Until she announced, before opening the car door and screeching off  at top speed, that she had been invited to attend the reading of Paul’s Will at the end of the month…….
 
This revelation had poisoned the day and was now permeating the entire week. As Paul always did - despite the fact that he would, in reality, be gently decomposing in his burial plot next to the fence in St Saviour’s churchyard.
 
She had felt unable to discuss him with Vanessa – and was no nearer an understanding of either her singular behaviour at the sickbed; or determination (seemingly fuelled by aggression towards herself) to attend this ghoulish assemblage of Paul’s nearest and dearest.
 
The trouble with the past was that it was not a foreign country and that the things they did there were purposefully designed to destroy the present.
 
Such as today’s gathering.
 
The Fifth Column was neither restaurant nor club; it was a slightly unpleasant hybrid and an inappropriate venue for what was bound to be an awkward   lunch.
As she opened a door upon the warren of rooms leading from reception, she could not imagine what had possessed her to choose such a place.
 
Habit.
At a safe remove from Westminster, The Fifth Column was an established hideaway for politicians engaged in traitorous briefings with journalists and a top choice for couples indulging in illicit liaisons.
 
The fact that it was a by-word for such practices should have made it completely off limits for individuals wishing to retain any semblance of anonymity – but it also carried a certain social cachet.
 
If you were going to be caught in a honey trap by a tabloid; or snorting cocaine in a toilet – or at the centre of a drunken debauch – then it had better be in The Fifth Column. A certain type of person did that there and then continued as normal.
Such behaviour anywhere else would consign the perpetrator to social and career annihilation.
 
She had arrived early to bone up on the papers; an essential of the First Class compartment experience – but completely impossible in Standard where the rudimentary twitch of an arm or leg required Olympian endeavour.
As usual, she had bought The Sentinel and The Crier and turned immediately
to The Crier for a salacious hit to accompany her vodka and tonic.
 
It did not disappoint.
 
Ponia Tindall led from the front with a full page spectacular entitled
 
Snuffed Out
 
This noxious piece detailed the spectacular fall from grace of her old Westminster friend, Gissy Wicks and the likely replacement of the latter by Party stooge Valerie Pringle at the forthcoming General Election.
 
Gissy was facing a constituency vote of confidence, following a sensational altercation in the back room of The Jolly Roger; the regular haunt of her local Party. During the course of a tempestuous evening, her police officer lover was removed from the site by a posse from the local constabulary, following a frenzied attack  upon Constituency Secretary, Niall Bluestone whom he had handcuffed using implements from the Westminster Estate.
 
Questions were asked when police officer Pete accompanied Gissy to the monthly meeting. He was not a Party member and the fact that he was at least twenty years her junior had been the subject of ribald commentary in national newspapers as well as the main thrust of a programme entitled The Modern Gigolo in Radio 4’s series Women Today.
 
Gissy had arrived to find colleagues studying specially collated packs containing every item of adverse journalism concerning her that had ever reached the public domain.
 
These aide memoirs came courtesy of Secretary Bluestone, who opened proceedings with an emergency topic: Conduct in public life in place of Gissy’s Westminster Report.
Pete caught a mention of old slapper; raced to the front, applied the handcuffs and knocked Bluestone from his stool, before crashing into a full drinks table.
Ensuing mayhem was exacerbated by shattering glass, spilled drinks and a bellowing Bluestone. The landlord was left with no choice but to summon the police.
 
As a consequence, Pete was charged with assault; the Party was permanently barred from The Jolly Roger and Gissy was to face a vote of confidence for bringing the Party into disrepute.
The outcome was likely to be the long-overdue de-selection of a thoroughly disreputable MP and her replacement as the Party’s candidate by Valerie Pringle, a popular and clean living local councillor.
 
The article then concluded with 10 Things You Didn’t Know About Gissy Wicks
including the fact that she had topped a National Opinion Poll in the categories of
 
MP you would most like to visit your dying grandmother
 
and  
 
MP you would most like to join you on a drinking binge in Ayia Napa.
 
She had also frolicked naked in a mud bath with Tory grandee
Sir Romilly Peabody during a Foreign Affairs Select Committee trip to Turkey.
 
It was a nasty piece and Ponia Tindall was a contemptible cow, but Gissy’s demeanour at last week’s lunch indicated that there must be some truth in it.
 
Page ten of The Sentinel settled the question. Police had turned up at The Jolly Roger after an anonymous complaint, but had taken no further action. Gissy was due to face questions at a de-selection conference and her demand for the suspension of the local Party had been rejected. There was no mention of Pete.
 
She was in the process of texting Gissy when she observed Ponia Tindall and Jessica Trotter easing themselves into seats at a window table just as Lynne and Sandra advanced towards her from reception.
 
It was now essential that the lunch would be short and she hoped (eyeing Tindall and Trotter) that the fall-out would be neither nasty nor brutish.
 
She hailed a waiter and negotiated a change from their original table (behind Tindall and Trotter) to one in a corner, obscured by a decorative pillar.
She sat down and poured a glass of water.
 
Lynne emerged, practically leading Sandra by the hand. She was in a foul mood.
 
The traffic was appalling and The Fifth Column was a seedy dump. The fact that they had been assigned such an inferior table was proof positive.
 
When she had worked at the Department, they had avoided the place because the food was, frankly, second rate and if you were a woman over thirty, you’d get better service in a pizza parlour.
 
It was simply outrageous that highly qualified, professional women who just happened to be of mature years had been stuck in a corner behind a pillar and would have to stand up and do a striptease to catch a waiter’s eye – when those two tarts who were wearing no clothes as far as she could see and were twenty six at most were queening it by the window; the best spot in the restaurant.
 
In fact, there was a perfectly acceptable table right behind them …..
 
Only a lie about the inferior quality of reception for mobile phones at window tables stopped Lynne in her tracks and a waiter appeared with some menus.
 
A glimpse of their group reflection in a wall mirror was not salutary.
 
From a side angle, she had a definite turkey neck and how could she have thought that those wispy gray strands resembled intricate highlights?
She was thinner – but if the only benefit was a smoother fit to the navy suit with white piping, then bring on the trifle!
 
The 1970s air-hostess look might have suited the 1970s – but not The Fifth Column in 2011, where Ponia and Jessica posed in leather dresses and fur trimmed jeans.
 
Lynne, neat in beige linen trousers, resembled the headmistress of an exclusive girl’s school.  
 
Sandra looked awful.
 
Over the years she had disregarded physical changes in Lynne because they met up relatively regularly.
Sightings of Sandra had been infrequent.
 
At Dorlich, she had favoured a brown needle cord skirt, cinched at the waist and flared from knee to toe, teamed with an off white cheesecloth shirt.
 
For parties, she looped her light brown hair into an up do, with corkscrew side curls and dangly hoop ear rings. Her halter-neck Laura Ashley sprigged maxi dress was backless. She didn’t wear a bra; didn’t need to…..
White patent sling backed platforms finished the look which was really rather funky.
 
They next met by chance at the 1985 Chilton Conference Weekend
 
She was the Gridchester North delegate. The Miners’ Strike had collapsed and the Conference theme was Energy Post-Coal.
 
It was her first weekend away since Richard’s birth and she had felt as giddy as a kid at Christmas - without Santa unfortunately, because the mood was funereal. Delegates had supported the miners and resented a sell-out by the national leadership.
 
She had anticipated a stimulating Solar Energy workshop featuring the Deputy Leader, but he had cancelled and her second preference was situated out of town at the Winthrop Hotel.
It was too far to walk, so her goal was a free drink at the nearest venue.      
 
Refreshments at the Fuel for the Future forum were excellent, but the meeting itself was atrocious.
 
The key speaker was Bill Cornish, a reticent MP from the 1983 intake, who had stepped in at the eleventh hour after Shadow Energy Minister, Del Kemp had cried off with mumps. Bill lacked Kemp’s charisma and was hampered by low grade heckling and deplorable acoustics.
 
A lack-lustre speech brought polite applause and a standing ovation from a woman at the front – his wife, Sandra Milford.
 
When she had recovered from a disconcerting sensation that 1970s Dorlich had risen from the grave, she realised that of course it had not.
Apart from the Marty Feldman eyes, there was little of Sandra Milford circa ‘76 in the new Mrs Cornish.
 
In physical terms…
 
Bill was not Prince Charles, but Sandra could have deputised for Diana in her penny loafers, pleated skirt, Peter Pan collar and feathered hair.
 
But her personality was unchanged and she pounced on the opportunity of gloating to an old friend.
 
Sandra had married the boss – her supervisor in Quality Testing to be precise.
 
His election to Parliament was a conduit to greatness and there were echoes of Potts idolatry as every sentence in the space of five minutes contained the phrase Bill says.    
 
Since then Mrs Cornish had been a political wife par excellence. Peter Pan collars and shoulder pads were followed by the skirt suit, the coat suit and now…
 
The ditched doormat look.
 
There was no other way of putting it.
 
Earlier that month she had glowed whilst pruning buddleia in the photo shoot accompanying
At Home with Sandra Cornish by Jessica Trotter
 
But now, like the Cheshire cat, little remained except poached egg eyes and a hand that grasped a glass so tightly that the veins seemed ready to burst from the skin.
They ordered Waldorf salads and filet mignon, but food was a backdrop for a woman who had abandoned the last vestige of decorum.
 
A waiter asked if everything was quite in order when Sandra lurched towards the toilet, spilling a carafe of wine en route.
 
I think she’s gone to throw up hissed Lynne.
This was a ridiculous idea! We could have contained her in Surrey!
Now she’s going mad in the middle of Soho; anybody could come in from the Department and how the hell would I explain it?
 
She did not mention the fact that two of the nastiest journalists in the country were dining in the same place and thanked God for the pillar as Sandra returned with a second bottle of Muscadet.
 
Sandra claimed that Cliff Morledge (who had worked in Lynne’s Department before his posting with Bill), had a lapsed conviction for cottaging and had devised the entire blackmail trap in order to steal her husband and destroy the marriage.
 
It was a ridiculous delusion.
 
Clifford Morledge was a practising Quaker. There was no reason to suppose that he had even pilfered a sweet.
 
Sandra wanted Lynne to infiltrate Personnel and appropriate the Morledge file so that the depraved monster could be publicly exposed.
 
Morledge was a dirty beast, a pervert, he ought to be locked up; he ought to be killed.
 
What if they had done it in the house when the children were there?
 
And how had they done it?
 
 
Like dogs?
 
Lynne shook Sandra’s shoulders.
 
You can’t say those things, Sandra. You just can’t! Pull yourself together!
 
Sandra was half crying, half laughing and tapping the table. 
 
Was it her fault? Did she bring it out in them? Did she turn men gay? Look at Leslie Potts! On the sofa! With Derek Kingsmill!  
 
Unlikely, but terrible coincidence notwithstanding, Sandra was probably the type of woman to attract a man of indefinite sexuality...
She was emaciated now but had never been voluptuous.
 
Would she be sexually assertive? And the lack of interest in anyone but herself – the inability to even see anybody else – except in terms of her own self-importance…..
 
It was obvious.
 
She would not see the signs because she was incapable of seeing them.
 
Hence the hounding of Leslie Potts in the bars and parties of Dorlich – even though he had told her that it was over – and why it was over.
 
Belinda Briscoe’s comment about Dr Mengele in the Sentinel was cruel – but there was something inhuman about a person who refused to recognise others for what they were - and not only refused to accept them but tried to force them to change……
 
If only Bill would come back, I could help him! In the States they have cures! A woman was interviewed on television and she holds aversion classes in Bambrook! I could take him! We could go together!
 
It was a chilling resurgence of the offer to accompany Leslie Potts to the Student Medical Centre and she shrank as Sandra clutched her sleeve, pleading for contacts in the press.
Quite apart from the sheer stupidity, she was enraged by the selfishness of Sandra.
 
Paul had absconded two weeks after her own election to Parliament. What help had she received from Sandra Milford?
 
None
 
Sandra had spread spiteful gossip about drinking and wild sex with men at Conferences when we were students.
 
Lynne paid the bill.
 
She looked at Sandra who was crying, slumped at the table on her own.
 
She was a miserable mess.
 
The fact that she was unhappy did not make her a nice person.  
 
 
Walking towards the door, she glanced at the window and the upturned face of Ponia Tindall.
 
The sky was grey and it was raining. Time to go home. Wherever.
 
 
 
 The train snaked away, gathering pace for the journey to London. She peered through the window from her seat in a Standard Class compartment.
 
Fengrove Central had a dingy waiting room, miserable shop and a café that closed at the unconscionable time of 6pm.
The memory of two excruciating hours on its platform, battling elements and constituents with Health Secretary, Ainsley Beadle, still rankled although that was eight years ago and Mrs Beadle had long since repaired to the Lords.
 
Ainsley Beadle unanimously regarded as a ‘safe pair of hands’ was enjoying the final Cabinet posting of a distinguished career.
 
She had held three of the Great Offices of State and a leadership challenge in the early nineties had garnered support from all sections of the Party. Hers was an influential voice in many Ministerial appointments; it was a real coup to have attracted her to open the new Foundation Hospital.
 
This achievement was not appreciated by the Fengrove Constituency Party and she had accompanied the Secretary of State to greet the Head of Clinical Practice at the new hospital only to be faced with the Party Chair, heading a demonstration and wielding a placard.
 
A horrendous turn of events was not lost upon the journalist from The Fengrove Gazette who tapped Edgar Smith for a ready stream of bile directed at the NHS reforms; the Runcible Government and a local MP who was an out and out class traitor. Mrs Beadle then remembered an urgent appointment in Whitehall and after an excruciating hour of a severely truncated visit, they returned to the station to find that the café had closed, the toilet was out of order and the train had been ‘indefinitely delayed’.
 
Ainsley Beadle – one of the Government’s more recognisable figures, was then duly recognised and lambasted by complete strangers for the inadequacies of the transport system, the collapse of the economy and the overall relegation of the nation to Third World status.
Her own flickering hopes of a Ministerial career departed with Mrs Beadle, two hours later.
 
As the train passed the halfway point between Fengrove and London she reflected, (whilst scraping some chewing gum from the seat of her skirt), that her former constituents were quite right about the rail service.
 
It was rotten from top to toe – from the price of the tickets to the behaviour of officials who fawned over First Class passengers whilst treating the unfortunates in Standard with a casual contempt bordering upon insolence.
 
Of course, she had formerly been of the elite, nibbling complimentary shortcake, sipping a chilled glass of chardonnay and luxuriating on a capacious cushioned seat – courtesy of a free return rail warrant from Westminster to Fengrove.
 
Today, she had forked out eighty pounds for the pleasure of being squashed between the window and a woman who was chewing something stinking of onions, with nowhere to place her bag or her paper because the table was strewn with plastic bottles and cardboard cartons.
And then in London, she would have to use a crowded Tube at exactly the wrong time of day - because she couldn’t afford a taxi to whisk her to a restaurant to meet people she didn’t want to see for a lunch she didn’t want to eat.
 
It was all quite loathsome.
 
Her week had got off to a poor start with bad news from the estate agent.
An ‘opening gambit’ from a potential buyer had turned out to be a ‘take it or leave it’ final offer. She left it and was now back to square one.
 
Then Vanessa had driven up in her new Mini Cooper en route to Beldringham where she was designing sets at The Exchange Theatre for the Orton Festival.
 
Maybe it was the weather – maybe it was the prospect of a month spent Entertaining Mr Sloane – but she was positively taciturn and every conversational opening led to an inexorable dead end.
 
Until she announced, before opening the car door and screeching off  at top speed, that she had been invited to attend the reading of Paul’s Will at the end of the month…….
 
This revelation had poisoned the day and was now permeating the entire week. As Paul always did - despite the fact that he would, in reality, be gently decomposing in his burial plot next to the fence in St Saviour’s churchyard.
 
She had felt unable to discuss him with Vanessa – and was no nearer an understanding of either her singular behaviour at the sickbed; or determination (seemingly fuelled by aggression towards herself) to attend this ghoulish assemblage of Paul’s nearest and dearest.
 
The trouble with the past was that it was not a foreign country and that the things they did there were purposefully designed to destroy the present.
 
Such as today’s gathering.
 
The Fifth Column was neither restaurant nor club; it was a slightly unpleasant hybrid and an inappropriate venue for what was bound to be an awkward   lunch.
As she opened a door upon the warren of rooms leading from reception, she could not imagine what had possessed her to choose such a place.
 
Habit.
At a safe remove from Westminster, The Fifth Column was an established hideaway for politicians engaged in traitorous briefings with journalists and a top choice for couples indulging in illicit liaisons.
 
The fact that it was a by-word for such practices should have made it completely off limits for individuals wishing to retain any semblance of anonymity – but it also carried a certain social cachet.
 
If you were going to be caught in a honey trap by a tabloid; or snorting cocaine in a toilet – or at the centre of a drunken debauch – then it had better be in The Fifth Column. A certain type of person did that there and then continued as normal.
Such behaviour anywhere else would consign the perpetrator to social and career annihilation.
 
She had arrived early to bone up on the papers; an essential of the First Class compartment experience – but completely impossible in Standard where the rudimentary twitch of an arm or leg required Olympian endeavour.
As usual, she had bought The Sentinel and The Crier and turned immediately
to The Crier for a salacious hit to accompany her vodka and tonic.
 
It did not disappoint.
 
Ponia Tindall led from the front with a full page spectacular entitled
 
Snuffed Out
 
This noxious piece detailed the spectacular fall from grace of her old Westminster friend, Gissy Wicks and the likely replacement of the latter by Party stooge Valerie Pringle at the forthcoming General Election.
 
Gissy was facing a constituency vote of confidence, following a sensational altercation in the back room of The Jolly Roger; the regular haunt of her local Party. During the course of a tempestuous evening, her police officer lover was removed from the site by a posse from the local constabulary, following a frenzied attack  upon Constituency Secretary, Niall Bluestone whom he had handcuffed using implements from the Westminster Estate.
 
Questions were asked when police officer Pete accompanied Gissy to the monthly meeting. He was not a Party member and the fact that he was at least twenty years her junior had been the subject of ribald commentary in national newspapers as well as the main thrust of a programme entitled The Modern Gigolo in Radio 4’s series Women Today.
 
Gissy had arrived to find colleagues studying specially collated packs containing every item of adverse journalism concerning her that had ever reached the public domain.
 
These aide memoirs came courtesy of Secretary Bluestone, who opened proceedings with an emergency topic: Conduct in public life in place of Gissy’s Westminster Report.
Pete caught a mention of old slapper; raced to the front, applied the handcuffs and knocked Bluestone from his stool, before crashing into a full drinks table.
Ensuing mayhem was exacerbated by shattering glass, spilled drinks and a bellowing Bluestone. The landlord was left with no choice but to summon the police.
 
As a consequence, Pete was charged with assault; the Party was permanently barred from The Jolly Roger and Gissy was to face a vote of confidence for bringing the Party into disrepute.
The outcome was likely to be the long-overdue de-selection of a thoroughly disreputable MP and her replacement as the Party’s candidate by Valerie Pringle, a popular and clean living local councillor.
 
The article then concluded with 10 Things You Didn’t Know About Gissy Wicks
including the fact that she had topped a National Opinion Poll in the categories of
 
MP you would most like to visit your dying grandmother
 
and  
 
MP you would most like to join you on a drinking binge in Ayia Napa.
 
She had also frolicked naked in a mud bath with Tory grandee
Sir Romilly Peabody during a Foreign Affairs Select Committee trip to Turkey.
 
It was a nasty piece and Ponia Tindall was a contemptible cow, but Gissy’s demeanour at last week’s lunch indicated that there must be some truth in it.
 
Page ten of The Sentinel settled the question. Police had turned up at The Jolly Roger after an anonymous complaint, but had taken no further action. Gissy was due to face questions at a de-selection conference and her demand for the suspension of the local Party had been rejected. There was no mention of Pete.
 
She was in the process of texting Gissy when she observed Ponia Tindall and Jessica Trotter easing themselves into seats at a window table just as Lynne and Sandra advanced towards her from reception.
 
It was now essential that the lunch would be short and she hoped (eyeing Tindall and Trotter) that the fall-out would be neither nasty nor brutish.
 
She hailed a waiter and negotiated a change from their original table (behind Tindall and Trotter) to one in a corner, obscured by a decorative pillar.
She sat down and poured a glass of water.
 
Lynne emerged, practically leading Sandra by the hand. She was in a foul mood.
 
The traffic was appalling and The Fifth Column was a seedy dump. The fact that they had been assigned such an inferior table was proof positive.
 
When she had worked at the Department, they had avoided the place because the food was, frankly, second rate and if you were a woman over thirty, you’d get better service in a pizza parlour.
 
It was simply outrageous that highly qualified, professional women who just happened to be of mature years had been stuck in a corner behind a pillar and would have to stand up and do a striptease to catch a waiter’s eye – when those two tarts who were wearing no clothes as far as she could see and were twenty six at most were queening it by the window; the best spot in the restaurant.
 
In fact, there was a perfectly acceptable table right behind them …..
 
Only a lie about the inferior quality of reception for mobile phones at window tables stopped Lynne in her tracks and a waiter appeared with some menus.
 
A glimpse of their group reflection in a wall mirror was not salutary.
 
From a side angle, she had a definite turkey neck and how could she have thought that those wispy gray strands resembled intricate highlights?
She was thinner – but if the only benefit was a smoother fit to the navy suit with white piping, then bring on the trifle!
 
The 1970s air-hostess look might have suited the 1970s – but not The Fifth Column in 2011, where Ponia and Jessica posed in leather dresses and fur trimmed jeans.
 
Lynne, neat in beige linen trousers, resembled the headmistress of an exclusive girl’s school.  
 
Sandra looked awful.
 
Over the years she had disregarded physical changes in Lynne because they met up relatively regularly.
Sightings of Sandra had been infrequent.
 
At Dorlich, she had favoured a brown needle cord skirt, cinched at the waist and flared from knee to toe, teamed with an off white cheesecloth shirt.
 
For parties, she looped her light brown hair into an up do, with corkscrew side curls and dangly hoop ear rings. Her halter-neck Laura Ashley sprigged maxi dress was backless. She didn’t wear a bra; didn’t need to…..
White patent sling backed platforms finished the look which was really rather funky.
 
They next met by chance at the 1985 Chilton Conference Weekend
 
She was the Gridchester North delegate. The Miners’ Strike had collapsed and the Conference theme was Energy Post-Coal.
 
It was her first weekend away since Richard’s birth and she had felt as giddy as a kid at Christmas - without Santa unfortunately, because the mood was funereal. Delegates had supported the miners and resented a sell-out by the national leadership.
 
She had anticipated a stimulating Solar Energy workshop featuring the Deputy Leader, but he had cancelled and her second preference was situated out of town at the Winthrop Hotel.
It was too far to walk, so her goal was a free drink at the nearest venue.      
 
Refreshments at the Fuel for the Future forum were excellent, but the meeting itself was atrocious.
 
The key speaker was Bill Cornish, a reticent MP from the 1983 intake, who had stepped in at the eleventh hour after Shadow Energy Minister, Del Kemp had cried off with mumps. Bill lacked Kemp’s charisma and was hampered by low grade heckling and deplorable acoustics.
 
A lack-lustre speech brought polite applause and a standing ovation from a woman at the front – his wife, Sandra Milford.
 
When she had recovered from a disconcerting sensation that 1970s Dorlich had risen from the grave, she realised that of course it had not.
Apart from the Marty Feldman eyes, there was little of Sandra Milford circa ‘76 in the new Mrs Cornish.
 
In physical terms…
 
Bill was not Prince Charles, but Sandra could have deputised for Diana in her penny loafers, pleated skirt, Peter Pan collar and feathered hair.
 
But her personality was unchanged and she pounced on the opportunity of gloating to an old friend.
 
Sandra had married the boss – her supervisor in Quality Testing to be precise.
 
His election to Parliament was a conduit to greatness and there were echoes of Potts idolatry as every sentence in the space of five minutes contained the phrase Bill says.    
 
Since then Mrs Cornish had been a political wife par excellence. Peter Pan collars and shoulder pads were followed by the skirt suit, the coat suit and now…
 
The ditched doormat look.
 
There was no other way of putting it.
 
Earlier that month she had glowed whilst pruning buddleia in the photo shoot accompanying
At Home with Sandra Cornish by Jessica Trotter
 
But now, like the Cheshire cat, little remained except poached egg eyes and a hand that grasped a glass so tightly that the veins seemed ready to burst from the skin.
They ordered Waldorf salads and filet mignon, but food was a backdrop for a woman who had abandoned the last vestige of decorum.
 
A waiter asked if everything was quite in order when Sandra lurched towards the toilet, spilling a carafe of wine en route.
 
I think she’s gone to throw up hissed Lynne.
This was a ridiculous idea! We could have contained her in Surrey!
Now she’s going mad in the middle of Soho; anybody could come in from the Department and how the hell would I explain it?
 
She did not mention the fact that two of the nastiest journalists in the country were dining in the same place and thanked God for the pillar as Sandra returned with a second bottle of Muscadet.
 
Sandra claimed that Cliff Morledge (who had worked in Lynne’s Department before his posting with Bill), had a lapsed conviction for cottaging and had devised the entire blackmail trap in order to steal her husband and destroy the marriage.
 
It was a ridiculous delusion.
 
Clifford Morledge was a practising Quaker. There was no reason to suppose that he had even pilfered a sweet.
 
Sandra wanted Lynne to infiltrate Personnel and appropriate the Morledge file so that the depraved monster could be publicly exposed.
 
Morledge was a dirty beast, a pervert, he ought to be locked up; he ought to be killed.
 
What if they had done it in the house when the children were there?
 
And how had they done it?
 
 
Like dogs?
 
Lynne shook Sandra’s shoulders.
 
You can’t say those things, Sandra. You just can’t! Pull yourself together!
 
Sandra was half crying, half laughing and tapping the table. 
 
Was it her fault? Did she bring it out in them? Did she turn men gay? Look at Leslie Potts! On the sofa! With Derek Kingsmill!  
 
Unlikely, but terrible coincidence notwithstanding, Sandra was probably the type of woman to attract a man of indefinite sexuality...
She was emaciated now but had never been voluptuous.
 
Would she be sexually assertive? And the lack of interest in anyone but herself – the inability to even see anybody else – except in terms of her own self-importance…..
 
It was obvious.
 
She would not see the signs because she was incapable of seeing them.
 
Hence the hounding of Leslie Potts in the bars and parties of Dorlich – even though he had told her that it was over – and why it was over.
 
Belinda Briscoe’s comment about Dr Mengele in the Sentinel was cruel – but there was something inhuman about a person who refused to recognise others for what they were - and not only refused to accept them but tried to force them to change……
 
If only Bill would come back, I could help him! In the States they have cures! A woman was interviewed on television and she holds aversion classes in Bambrook! I could take him! We could go together!
 
It was a chilling resurgence of the offer to accompany Leslie Potts to the Student Medical Centre and she shrank as Sandra clutched her sleeve, pleading for contacts in the press.
Quite apart from the sheer stupidity, she was enraged by the selfishness of Sandra.
 
Paul had absconded two weeks after her own election to Parliament. What help had she received from Sandra Milford?
 
None
 
Sandra had spread spiteful gossip about drinking and wild sex with men at Conferences when we were students.
 
Lynne paid the bill.
 
She looked at Sandra who was crying, slumped at the table on her own.
 
She was a miserable mess.
 
The fact that she was unhappy did not make her a nice person.  
 
 
Walking towards the door, she glanced at the window and the upturned face of Ponia Tindall.
 
The sky was grey and it was raining. Time to go home. Wherever.