Best Blessings of Existence 52

In which things look up for Emma B, but marital tennis is not played well.

Littlebury always got a good write up in the Best Places to Live features favoured by journalists (alongside items about celebrities with cellulite) in the August news graveyard. It won points for being quiet; unspoilt; surrounded by stunning scenery and at the same time thirty minutes from London on a fast train.

Local pubs and restaurants had character; the village green sported a charming duck pond that dried up in summer ,and Littlebury School enjoyed a national and international reputation.

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.

John of Gaunt would have approved.

It was just the place to retire, acquire an education, or spend your husband’s money and as she fell into none of these categories, it was prison. Gridchester, by contrast, (and especially when memories were fuelled by a second glass of amaretto) became her Atlantis; a land of milk, honey, opportunity and like that island – utterly mythical.

But there was an element of truth.

Since graduating, her experience had been that when sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions but as1988 began, good fortune, unlike lightning, struck twice.

At GC, she found herself the unexpected beneficiary of Selma Blaine’s breast cancer and early retirement.

The Principal; a skinflint of repute, calculated that it would make financial sense to pay her the extra allowance to lead Humanities. The Department would be one lecturer short – but no matter – they could all teach extra classes!

And I think you’ll find, said Alec Coverley, offering her the job, that everyone will be happy!

They weren’t; but after a month of wildcat strikes when she had to cross a makeshift picket line to get to her office, everything returned to normal; except that the extra money and additional responsibility was not normal at all.

It was utterly abnormal and she had never been happier. Perhaps she was a contender at last!

Paul’s enthusiasm was muted.

I worry, he confided to her mother, between mouthfuls of Victoria sandwich, that it’s going to be too much. She gets terribly tired as it is – isn’t that true Darling? The place is virtually a reformatory – VERY difficult kids – and then all that politicking in the evenings – something’s got to give and I fear (shooting her mother a doleful glance) that it’s going to be our two. Only yesterday Ness Ness said that she never sees Mummy (ruffling his daughter’s hair).

Oh dear, fretted her mother.

Now I don’t like the sound of that at all. No wonder Richie’s having so many tantrums. You’re never at home with him. I think you ought to work part time – at least until he starts school. Well, Paul – what about a jam tart?

This was rich coming from her mother; a woman who had returned to work as soon as was humanly possible, putting her only daughter into nursery a full term before the legal age. But Mother had morphed into Grandma and her ambition for that daughter had died with the birth of Vanessa.

She eyed the Victoria sandwich; stifling a desire to remove it from its cut glass cake stand and deposit it firmly in the middle of her husband’s face.

Her father cleared his throat and stood up from the table, brushing cake crumbs from his lap.

Very nice Flo – cake perfectly risen, eh Paul? And as for the job, let her take it (giving her a wink). At least there’s a salary – not like all that free teaching she did to help you out at Chudleigh! Now... just in time for A Question of Sport!

And he switched on the television; having launched a custard pie of the metaphorical variety at Paul and rescued the Victoria sandwich from possible annihilation. She helped her mother to wash up.

Paul did not like her new job; but apart from a few scathing comments to his family and the Nuttalls, could say little against it. Family finances were healthier; she paid a couple of the domestic bills and he had more money to squander in second hand bookshops and The Duke.

A holiday that was not to be endured in the company of mice and unspeakable insects in a French gite became a distinct possibility.

Her political fortunes likewise, were in the ascendant.

Following her letter to Duncan Musgrave, expressing serious concerns about the conduct of the Beech family, she was invited to attend for interview at The St John’s Ambulance hut.

Musgrave, flanked by two male assistants, similarly booted and suited, was an impassive figure with a hint of menace.

With no good reason, she formed the view that he disliked her and plunged into a stumbling (and she feared, unconvincing) account of Beech perfidy; the treatment of Clare Butcher – thus spawning a Tory MP in the making; the abusive drunken lunge in The Duke; the suspected black market trading and wheedling money from members to finance the nefarious operations of Red Heart.

As she was making these allegations, staring fixedly at a cracked window pane and avoiding the penetrating Musgrave stare, she became uncomfortably aware that apart from the treatment of Clare Butcher and aggression towards herself, it was just a jumble of supposition and conjecture that would never have withstood scrutiny in a court of law.

But this was not a court of law; it was a kangaroo court and her instinct was to destroy Lester Beech before he destroyed her.

Musgrave was non-committal; posed a few questions as to the precise location of the collection tin and the identity of the persons in closest proximity to it, thanked her for attending and then, by turning away and signalling to his colleagues, indicated that the interview was over.

It had been profoundly disconcerting and she reflected that on balance, writing the letter had been a mistake.

A Party meeting at The Duke was to prove pivotal.

She arrived with Gail, minus Hazel (whose attendance had declined since her separation from Martin) and Sylvia who, with husband Shaun, was suffering from shingles.

Perhaps they’re re-bonding after that Pelleroe business? suggested Gail optimistically.

She could not see that being confined to barracks, scratching sporadically next to a similarly afflicted spouse was the ideal new start for Sylvia and her husband, but nodded assent as they took their seats at a corner table.

The atmosphere matched landlady Pat’s funereal back room décor, and she noted that Duncan Musgrave was sitting at the top table, flanked by one of his Team inquisitors and a nervously twitching Fred Hoy.

A male voice bellowing swear words was audible from the main bar and she wondered which of the pub regulars had gone on a bender. Could it be Fatty? She fervently hoped that he would be banned.

It was not Fatty.

Duncan Musgrave apologised for the fact that Lester Beech had created a disturbance after being refused entrance. The assistance of the police had been necessary but (opening the door and peering round tentatively) he could say that the matter had now been dealt with.

After all, the Beech family were no longer members of the Party and could not be allowed to attend meetings.

He trusted that business would now be conducted in an open and transparent manner, after a successful Inquiry that had rooted out the rotten apples in Gridchester and elsewhere. Members who had assisted this process had performed a great service to the Party and their contribution to our politics would not be forgotten.

Fancy – Chair of the Party! enthused Sylvia.

And Gail the proper Secretary instead of pencil-sharpening for Peabody. This is a feminist revolution!

They were waiting to be served in the new vegetarian restaurant at The Jasmine Bay hotel after an invigorating sauna in the adjoining health club. The Malmsey Head evenings had been replaced by more varied pursuits at Hazel’s insistence; swimming; the odd yoga class (a disaster – whatever the lotus position was, it was a stretch too far); a women only book club at the cooperative, and now this.

Hazel had purchased tickets for next month’s all – female production of Macbeth (from a radical lesbian perspective) and everything was very different and uniquely dull. Since dispensing with Martin, the fish and the weight, she had become a fully paid up member of the Health Police and their outings had turned into a contest to see who could manage to sneak an extra glass of wine without incurring a disapproving lecture.

As Sylvia said:

Hazel was more fun when she was fat.

The strictures of Hazel Sweet (now Kendall; Hazel had reverted to her maiden name) notwithstanding; her own new role as Chair of the Gridchester North Party had come as a fait accompli.

After the Beech purges, Fred Hoy resigned and Duncan Musgrave gave a strong hint that the local Party (as evinced by the shocking abuse of Clare Butcher) was less than woman-friendly.

As Musgrave stressed ( tapping a flip chart by way of illustration), the socio economic priorities of Gridchester Girl were the key to electoral success; but the female component of the Gridchester Party was decidedly out of sync with the voting sisters.

This was a firm steer to elect a woman Chair; but the entrenched Party culture had attracted involvement from the wrong sort of women.

Maureen Booth and Cheryl Smithers were more suited to parties of the Tupperware variety and when Sian Norfolk (a student at GC) proposed her as Chair, there were no objections. Gail became Secretary; Hazel; Women’s Officer and Laurence Fernyclough Treasurer and token male.

The flower of manhood had been vanquished by the petticoat revolution

Not with a bang but with a whimper.

Paul greeted her elevated status with the usual irony and took to dubbing her Madame Mao; but many a true word is spoken in jest and the next six months ushered in a cultural revolution for the Gridchester Party.

We must start as we mean to go on!

pronounced Hazel, opening her briefcase and propping up the menu with a filofax.

And I’d recommend the falafel and adzuki bean salad – filling but not fattening if you get my drift!

Unfortunately, they did; exchanging glances and yearning for The Balti Bowl and its pickle tray. Freed from the shackles of pandering to Martin’s limited palate, Hazel might have been expected to embark upon a gastronomic splurge of gargantuan proportions – but had merely replaced the austerity of corned beef and tinned vegetables with dried pulses and all things wholemeal.

She had ordered a new range of vegetarian cookery books for the cooperative and the collected works of Rose Elliot had replaced the familiar tomes of Linda McCartney with their trademark vegetarian sausages. It was all very worthy and Hazel certainly looked good on it, but her heart was with Sylvia who commented trenchantly:

Life is too short to soak a chickpea; anything longer than five minutes under the grill and the kids create mayhem.

There was nothing for it but a secret binge on Geppetto’s pasta Alfredo with extra cream when Hazel left for work at the bookshop. The consumption of a second plate of garlic bread induced predictable feelings of guilt and when they left (after a very decent Chianti) each was a passionate advocate of The Kendall Plan to re-shape the Gridchester Party.

Paul initially balked at her proposed financial outlay on a word processor and answerphone and, not for the first time, she resented their joint bank account.

The necessity of destroying the monthly statement before her husband could deplore her regular expenditure at Next, Laura Ashley and Benetton was wearing – especially when such strictures did not apply to his own indulgence at antiquarian bookshops and visits to the Oxbridge colleges.

She also resented the expenditure from pooled finances that did not appear in any official document – on his secret stash – purchased from some source in Fairway and indulged, like a Victorian with snuff; at the end of an evening.

It was time to resort to desperate measures via a quick revision of The Joy of Sex by Alex Comfort, but reprieve came in the unexpected form of her father in law.

Eric had signed a lucrative contract to write for The Gas; a sell-out paper, known contemptuously as The Comic by everyone from its Editor to the tea lady.

However, despite a decided aversion to words of more than one syllable, The Gas demanded a phenomenal work rate and Deirdre’s daisy-wheel typewriter was no longer fit for purpose.

So Eric embraced the technological revolution and became, at the age of 69, the proud possessor of a word processor and a cordless telephone system with separate answering machine.

Paul followed suit a week later.

Persuading the comrades to relinquish the St John’s Ambulance hut and The Duke for the women and children friendly environs of the Gridchester Community Centre was more difficult.

The union contingent – and even Shaun Mills and Ned Pitt - craved their pint in The Duke – and the proximity of The Duke for their pint - after meetings in the hut.

Neither was there a general clamour for the gender balanced child minding rota to enable women to attend meetings; or the insistence that crèche facilities be a pre-requisite of any venue booked for a special event.

But by far the most venom was directed at the new Women’s Society hosted by Hazel in her flat above the cooperative bookshop. Here, women members met to devise women-friendly policies; support potential women candidates for Party positions and local elections and recruit more women members.

It was a far remove from the Tupperware culture.

Duncan Musgrave was a fan.

The other men were not – including her husband.

Paul was not a Party member, but he was Chair, Secretary and Treasurer of the Lord and Master Federation - an organisation that required wives to grace the bedroom, kitchen and nursery instead of abandoning the hearth in favour of numerous meetings both professional and personal.

Matters came to a head in March 1989 when a week dominated by evening GC Management meetings concluded with a Saturday Women’s Training Conference at the Community Centre, addressed by Shadow Minister Alma Blenkinsopp and the ubiquitous Duncan Musgrave from the Sectional Team.

As she walked up the pathway to her house, her approach heralded as usual by a yapping Splosh, she reflected that they had pulled it off – just. The Conference was the first real test for the new women leadership team and had been dogged by difficulties from the outset.

Firstly, they had been forced to compromise over the crèche; due to male Party members (whose numbers included Ned Pit and Shaun Mills) discovering that previous engagements prevented them from staffing the rota.

Women’s Officer, Hazel was adamant that no female member should be deprived of even a minute of the programme because of the burden of childcare:

(They like the fun of MAKING them and that’s about the sum of it!)

but the men voted with their feet and they were forced to engage the services of a childcare agency worker at an exorbitant cost.

Secondly, the speaker, Alma Blenkinsopp MP was a less than ideal choice for such a groundbreaking occasion.

At 65, Mrs Blenkinsopp was coming to the end of her tenure in frontline politics; had supported local residents in their campaign to evict the Greenham women on grounds of poor hygiene and general rowdiness, and had opposed the national Party campaign against sexist language:

(I am a Chairwoman – not a CHAIR).

But beggars could not be choosers, and only Alma Blenkinsopp had agreed to waste a Saturday in a Tory stronghold – on the understanding that there would be full press coverage, including television.

The attendance register was similarly underwhelming. Female members of the Booth / Smithers variety, trickled in, and Mrs Blenkinsopp’s irritation at spreading her pearls before a sprinkling of 20

(I thought we’d have to haul them in off the streets!)

was considerably augmented as the scheduled press conference came and went without a single representative from the Third Estate crossing the threshold.

But then the hand of fate intervened by way of a horrific crash involving a black saloon car and two motorbikes 100 yards from the Community Centre. The media then miraculously emerged – as did Alma Blenkinsopp who secured her television coverage; bewailing the dangers of Tory city traffic management and pledging to raise the issue in the House.

So it had been a success - of sorts - but not in the way envisaged.

As she entered the hallway, a familiar, sweet smell assailed her nostrils, and her ears were assaulted by the mingled wailing of Richard, Vanessa and Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.

Paul and Martin Sweet were listening to the latter; Richard and Vanessa were squabbling over the contents of the Fisher Price house and the source of the smell was unmistakable.

Paul, and Hazel’s ex husband, were indulging in the secret stash at 6pm in full view of her children, who were tired, hungry and fractious. She scooped them up and shooed them into the dining room where she fed them pizza slices and a tray of oven chips.

The fall-out, later that evening, with the children in bed and her lounge finally free of a worse-for wear Martin Sweet, was predictable.

She had accused Paul of corrupting their children by exposing them to illegal drugs:

Vanessa’s seven – not seven months.

He had countered with charges of child neglect:

Why did you want kids if you didn’t want to look after them? Out FOUR times this week and the whole of Saturday!

She had attacked the Nuttalls; he had vilified Hazel:

Poor bloody Mart! Letting his hair down for the first time in years! Granny fed him on corned beef and potato salad – no wonder he needs a joint though you can see he’s not used to it – stoned on the first puff!

Love fifteen. Fifteen all. Fifteen thirty. The tennis match of their marriage.

Still later, when Paul had retired to bed, she finished off the dregs of a bottle of un-chilled Sancerre whilst watching the regional television news; shots of the crash and Alma Blenkinsopp speaking to camera. At the side of the screen, she caught a glimpse of herself in her grey linen skirt suit; clutching her new business briefcase- all buckles and gilt. She looked porky beside the diminutive Blenkinsopp and Hazel, whiplash thin in a trouser suit and brogues.

Hazel – who phoned excitedly – how fantastic was that?!

Not especially, against the backdrop of domestic mayhem; to include tending to Richard who had woken from a nightmare – and had covered his Batman duvet with vomit

A passive victim of secret stash fumes?

She did not tell Hazel about Martin. Hazel had sloughed off the domestic coil and it was fairer not to.

At the end of that year, in Littlebury; the warm glow attendant upon a third glass of amaretto did not shield her from the fact that she had certainly not shaken off hers. 

Polanski and her

When significant other goes to the UK, which he does far more often than I do, he often brings me back magazines he has read and thinks might interest me. A while ago he brought a magazine from The Times. I subscribe to the Times on line, but I don't take the time to read everything in it. When you read on a device you click or tap on what looks interesting. When you read in print you turn the pages over and may stop to read something whose title wasn't necessarily eye-catching but which draws your attention in other ways. My attention was drawn, as they say, to an interview with one Samantha Geimer, who was being interviewed to promote her book about what happened between her and Roman Polanski when he was 44 and she was 13. It was rape, she says. Because she didn't want to do it, and said no. But she says that she wasn't as naive as all that. She knew better than to have the champagne and pills he gave her, but she took them anyway, and couldn't do much in the way of resistance after that. Not the first 13-year-old to do something silly and regret it, and she won't be the last. She now seems to see herself as an ally of Polanski's, and think they have both been treated unfairly - she feels she is obliged to be seen as either the pathetic victim or the lying little whore. She says she was neither, and surely she is right. She says she wishes her mother had not called the police, and she is right about that too.

In the 1970s Jodie Foster played a 12-year-old prostitute in Taxi Driver, and nobody moralised. Roman Polanski himself had been going out at the time with Nastassja Kinski, who was 15. Woody Allen was dating a schoolgirl in Manhattan. I had a 22-year-old boyfriend when I was 15. OK, that may not be quite in the same league, but nobody, including my parents, thought it was child abuse. Parents probably would now. Then it was called "having an older boyfriend". The same is true of some of the prosecutions for "historical offences" against people like Dave Lee Travis and, probably, Rolf Harris. They weren't child abuse, and they probably weren't rape or sexual assault other than in a legalistic sense. Those men had young groupies come on to them and they didn't ask their ages. Most men would be more careful now. but a lot wouldn't. It's just that most men are not public figures.

Norm - the Times obituary

Here is the obituary of Professor Norman Geras, known as Norm, published in The Times today (£). I think it's fair, though it does not mention his humour and gentleness, nor his liking for country music, jazz, Jane Austen and lists. Two writers he introduced me to are Belinda McKeon and the late John Williams. I publish it here because since I posted about him when he died less than two weeks ago some readers have said they didn't know about him or his work.

Thanks for everything Norm. I miss you.

Norman Geras was a penetrating political theorist who found fame in retirement as a pioneering blogger.

In his scholarly work he made substantial contributions to the study of Marxism and of international ethics. He served his entire academic career at the University of Manchester, where he was head of the Department of Government from 1998 till 2002, and ended as Professor Emeritus of Politics.

He then made skilful use of the new medium of the internet to inform and entertain a much wider audience. In dismay at what he considered their failure to defend Western democratic values against totalitarianism, he broke with many of his former comrades on the Left.

His acute insights and coolly analytical style of argument were admired by columnists across the political spectrum, who grew accustomed to checking their opinions on topical issues by considering what he had to say.

Norman Geras was born in Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), in 1943. He arrived at Pembroke College, Oxford, in 1962 to read Law. On his first day he met a friend who was to read Philosophy, Politics & Economics (PPE); Geras had been unaware of the existence of this celebrated degree course and instantly switched to it. He graduated in 1965 with a first.

At Oxford he met his future wife, ­Adèle, who was studying Modern Languages at St Hilda’s College. She was to become an eminent and prolific novelist for children and young adults. They married in 1967 and moved to Manchester, where Geras took up his first academic appointment. He remained in the same department till his retirement in 2003.

His academic specialism was the ­theory of Marxism. He was steeped in its literature and contributed to it some notable and original studies. A forbiddingly abstruse type of Marxism associated with the French communist ­intellectual Louis Althusser became popular with European radicals in the 1970s. It stressed the purportedly scientific character of Marxist analysis. Geras was highly critical of this school and sought in his book Marx and Human Nature: Refutation of a Legend (1983) to establish a humanistic type of Marxism, which took seriously human nat­ure and its capacity to develop and change.

Geras also wrote a study of the thought of Rosa Luxemburg, the chief theorist of the German far Left, who was murdered during the crushing of the revolutionary uprising of 1919. She had been prescient in her warnings of the dictatorial character of Leninist rule in the nascent Soviet Union.

Geras was at the time of publication associated with a Trotskyist organisation called the International Marxist Group. He set out to defend (as he would then have seen it) Luxemburg’s Marxist orthodoxy. It may seem perverse to Geras’s later admirers across the political divide that he would then have regarded this as a point in Luxemburg’s favour, but the quality of his scholarship was undeniable. He showed that Luxemburg had largely shared Lenin’s own pre-1917 analysis of the revolutionaries’ task.

Though Geras never ceased to ­regard himself as a Marxist, his political interests were wider and his views ­always more heterodox than the doctrinal rigidities characteristic of that school of thought.

In The Contract of Mutual Indifference: Political Philosophy After the Holocaust (1998), he turned his attention to the great humanitarian evils of the modern age. He asked why such catastrophes as the Ethiopian famine of the 1980s or the ferocious xenophobic persecutions in Bosnia in the 1990s produced the phenomenon of bystanders — those who know that something terrible is happening yet are locked in a pattern of indifference. He proposed that the first task of politics was the “moral necessity [of] mutual human support and aid, the universal responsibility for the safety and wellbeing of others”. Any politics that excluded this primary duty to give aid and support was inadequate.

This conviction explains much of Geras’s post-retirement life, in which he became known to a far wider audience than he had enjoyed in the academy. In the digital age, political commentary could be instantaneous. Geras read some of the earliest political blogs and decided to start his own, called Normblog. He launched it in 2003 and for the next ten years posted to it almost daily. His principal interest was the ­humanitarian theme of his political philosophy: that bonds of human obligation do not stop at national boundaries. It led him to conclusions radically different from those of his former allies on the Left.

Geras had been a prominent member of the editorial board of New Left ­Review, the radical theoretical journal, from 1976 to 1992. He was appalled, however, by the attitude of much of the Left to the attacks of 9/11. While former comrades had typically interpreted these atrocities as a response, however brutal, to Western imperialism, Geras saw in Islamist extremism everything he reviled. Believing in liberal democratic rights, female emancipation and secularism, he supported the interventionist policies of Tony Blair.

He was one of a small group of left-wing commentators to support military action to overthrow Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq. 

A secular Jew, Geras was also distur­bed by an increasing tendency in Western commentary, not only on the Left, to smuggle the premises and language of anti-Semitism into ostensible concern for the just cause of Palestinian statehood.

A great deal of his polemical and ­intellectual effort was devoted to ­exposing the moral confusions of those who looked at the imperfections of democratic societies and fastidiously saw little to choose between them and anti-Western dictatorships. He helped to draft a statement known as the ­Euston Manifesto in 2006, setting out a set of principles from the Left that uncompromisingly attacked ideological apologetics for tyranny and terrorism.

Geras had prostate cancer diagnosed in 2003. It did not prevent him pursuing his interests and enthusiasms, which he rarely did in moderation. His remorseless blogging influenced and informed commentators who were close to his way of thinking, such as Christopher Hitchens (obituary, December 17, 2011 ), and many more.

He also used the medium as an outlet for other enthusiasms, among which sport was prominent.

He had run two London marathons and was a cricket fanatic who amassed a library of some 2,100 books on the subject. Having resolved in his youth that he could not give support to South Africa in Test match cricket, owing to his revulsion at apartheid, he gave it instead to Australia in preference to the old colonial power. His interest in games extended to devising his own board games, including one involving Marxists called (invoking a dictum of Marx’s) “The Point is to Change It”.

Geras and his wife moved to Cambridge in 2010 to be closer to family. His cancer returned this year. He is survived by his wife and their two daughters.

Norman Geras, political philosopher, was born on August 25, 1943. He died on October 18, 2013, aged 70

Solitude

Zolitude is a place in Riga, Latvia

This year I have spent a great deal of time alone. I have never minded my own company, and over the years have been happy, for instance, to go to the cinema alone if I couldn't find anyone else who wanted to see the film I had chosen. I don't feel lonely doing that. When I was young I didn't have much understanding of or sympathy with girls who said "I can't go to that, I've got no one to go with". But of course, solitude and loneliness are not the same thing.

I have almost never lived alone in my life. I left home at 18 and went to university, where I lived in halls ("living in college" as we called it then where I went, in Durham). Just before I finished university my father died suddenly and unexpectedly, and I went "home" for the summer. And then got married, as did my two siblings soon afterwards. There's bound to have been a connection, but none of us has felt like exploring it over the years. We had two children each. My marriage and my sister's ended after some years (we did try), and my brother's has lasted, with some hiccups. Then I did live alone for a little while, but not exactly. My son lived with me, and by the time he went back to his father, at fifteen, significant other and I were setting up home together. We have lived together ever since, and have been married for 14 years. Now, significant other works in the UK every summer (we live in France) and this year was away for nearly three months. He is away again, for only ten days this time, teaching a half-term intensive course. And yes, I have been lonely. What to do about it? Not turn down invitations to go out, is most of the answer. I have been doing that too often in recent times, because I am usually happy at home in the evenings, reading and writing and so on. Today I am going to the cinema with a new friend, and this is a Good Thing.

Loneliness among old people is a great problem, at least in this Western world. I know old people who are cheerful, friendly and sociable. But they are in the minority. Health problems may cause some of them to be negative, but talk of symptoms can be a kind of hobby too, and one that does no good. My uncle, in his eighties, has hobbies, such as model plane flying - he used to go fishing too and he was part of a dance club, all people of similar age. He has had some quite serious health problems recently, but has remained positive and cheerful. I saw him two weeks ago at a family wedding, that of his grandson, and he was very much the laughing raconteur - he had his moment on the dance floor too. My mother, on the other hand, whose health is not bad, is relentlessly negative - but let's not go there.

Most of us don't have to be lonely. Some old people say they are lonely because their families never visit them. I say to them - maybe your family would visit you more if you were more positive when you did see them.

Let's think about preventing loneliness. Human beings are designed to live in groups. The others in those groups may not these days share our actual household, but we need the contact they give us. If we don't have it, we are likely to become bitter and negative. Don't let it happen to you, as I am determined it will not happen to me.

Norm again

This morning the Twittersphere and all the other 'spheres have had plenty to say about the late Norman Geras. I can't say as much or as well as they did, but I have my own tribute to pay.

Almost certainly without knowing it, Norm helped me to have the courage to speak up for what I believe to be right, even when everyone around me, Guardian-readers all, believed something different, and were incredulous or (often) malevolent if they heard a different view. As examples, the belief that human rights are universal, that differing cultural norms do not excuse, for instance, the mutilating of women and girls, that the deliberate killing of civilians is always a war crime. Most of the people around me for most of my adult life (I worked for the BBC for 13 years, was in Labour politics for 20, and now work for an international institution dedicated to democracy, human rights and the rule of law) consider themselves to be liberal, "good" people. But these same people, and you only have to read the letters and comments in the Guardian to see it, support evil and barbaric regimes and practices around the world that they would never tolerate where they live. Some of them marched in 2003 waving Saddam Hussein's flag. Some of them spoke up for the Taliban and the killing of Americans - even though they expected their own daughters to go to school. Many of them use Jew-hating language about the state of Israel. I don't presume to repeat the expression of Norm's views here - he is gone and we will not hear from him again, but his writing lives on. I can only say that when I knew that there were others out there who believed as I do that some things are just wrong, and who could express those beliefs with intellectual coherence and clarity - well, I managed to be a bit braver.

Norm was passionate about cricket, which I am not. He was a Marxist, which I am not. He loved Jane Austen's works, which I did not until something he wrote got me to see what she was about. He loved country and western music, and Western films, both of which I learned to appreciate (up to a point) from him. From time to time he recommended books, and I quickly learned that anything he thought would be a good read always was. He once had a competition on his blog, which was won by my significant other, to whom Norm sent a book token. I met him only once, at a Euston Manifesto event  in 2007. He wouldn't have remembered me, but I will never forget  him.

My heart goes out to Norm's widow Adele, whom I do not know, but who once took the trouble to recommend a hair product to me when I was Tweeting in rather tedious and querulous fashion about a trichological issue. The writer Sophie Hannah is their daughter.

Goodbye, Norm. Thank you.

Update: The Filth has published an excellent obituary here. Thanks to H for pointing it out. I would normally never go near that odious rag, but speak as I find.

Norman Geras

Very sad, and bereft (or bereaved) that Norman Geras has died, from prostate cancer at the age of only 70. He and I met through the Euston Manifesto in 2007, and it was to his blog and other writings that I looked for sanity, wisdom and rationality, and I found them there. I'll post again about him when I am a little less tearful. Just a thought though - now that most of us have contacts we follow on Twitter and are friends with on Facebook, but never or rarely meet in person, perhaps we are going to have more people to mourn.

Damian McBride, 'Power Trip'

Many pages have been blackened in recent weeks with remarks about this book. It seemed important to me to read it, as I spent eight years surrounded by the dark arts of spin, smear and briefing, scarcely engaging in any of them myself. My thoughts turned at the time to murder rather than character assassination, but I managed to restrain myself from that too. Such is politics. I confess myself a Blairite, which I was not when Tony became leader in 1994, nor when the Labour Government was formed in 1997, which election saw me into Parliament, one of precisely six Labour women not selected from an all-woman shortlist, though that is by the by. So the cohort around Gordon Brown during the decade covered by this book, 1999-2009, was unknown to me, both personally and in their various doings. No, comrades, I became a Blairite because of the Labour Government, and not the other way round. And especially because of the Chicago Doctrine after 1999, though again it took me a while, as a backbencher far from the inner circles of government, to understand the implications of that doctrine for both UK foreign policy and the world. But that again is another story, and not one McBride concerns himself with here.

The book is well written, and approximately the first two-thirds of it are utterly fascinating in terms of what they reveal about spin, smear and the dark arts in general. Not who was smeared, who briefed against and so on - anyone in politics who read the papers in those days could see in any story who was being briefed against and approximately by whom. Of course it’s different now, and in many ways more transparent, as we don’t have to wait for the next morning’s papers or that day’s Evening Standard to see the stories and the briefings and the latest poison in the diary columns - they get Tweeted in our faces every minute.

McBride explains himself very clearly at the very start of the book. He could not abide defeat. Not at all. If he couldn’t win by fair means, in college football or in anything else, he would win by foul. That tells you what you need to know about his tactics and attitude. It is clearly combined with immense energy (an underrated quality in politics: there are many who have failed for lack of it) and huge talent for dealing with information. I started my (so-called) career as a civil servant, not, obviously,  in the fast stream as McBride did, but as a translator in the intelligence services, and the obstacles to promotion for anyone who was not exactly like their boss and their boss’s boss, then as now, were almost insurmountable. But McBride came through that. And then let himself be politicised, while remaining a civil servant. And was brought down by Guido, says Guido. I think Dolly Draper had a hand in it, but hey, what do the details matter at this late stage. You could argue that the politicisation was not his call, but Gordon Brown’s. Maybe. But by their works shall ye know them.

I enjoyed the book greatly, especially for the honesty (a rarity in any memoir of a life in politics) and self-deprecation (ditto) and the wit. He says of one candidate that his political views in relation to same-sex relationships were “closer to Leviticus than Liberace”. I loved that. He exposes, intentionally or not, the Ed Balls doublethink: in 2000, when truckers were blockading Britain in search of greater subsidies for polluters, McBride quotes Balls as saying “We’re cutting duty … because it’s the right thing to do and it’s good for the environment”.

McBride sounds a little quaint sometimes when writing about those times, or perhaps in bad faith, depending how charitable you are minded to be. When little Fraser Brown was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis, he says “a spin doctor today would say there was no public interest and demand an injunction”. He says “These tactics were largely unknown back in 2006”. Were they? Hmmm.

“The number of voters in their constituencies and councils who would never vote Labour again as long as George W. Bush’s wingman remained in Downing Street.” Oh, right. And the 2005 election? After Iraq? With Tony as leader? Eh, Damian? *sound of tumbleweed*

“Gordon … got [Tony] his final year in power … the unceremonious immediate ousting of Labour’s most successful leader [Harold Wilson won more elections. Ed.] would have been a terrible scar for the party to bear, in the same way that Margaret Thatcher’s removal affected the Tories for years afterwards.” No. The situation, and the parties, were different. What happened when Tony was removed was that there was no longer a Labour Government after the next election. Obviously. And that a lot of Blairite former ministers and henchpeople were cast into the outer darkness. And that the barking mad Cuba-loving Saddam Hussein fans in the Labour General Committees up and down the land felt happy and safe, in opposition once again. That’s it.

I didn’t know Gordon said this, according to McBride: “The truth might hurt you, but it’s the lie that kills you.” Ain’t that the truth.

Gordon as PM: “Gordon’s previous reliance on set-piece moments like the Budget [normally listened to in silence, Ed.], and the drawn-out decision-making that led up to them, was fundamentally unsuited to the fast-paced and usually random nature of events in No. 10”.

Bob Shrum, when Gordon was deciding not to go to the country in 2007, told the meeting, “Well, if the worst comes to the worst and you only get three more years, there’s a lot you can do in three years. Jack Kennedy only had three years.” Which, McBride seems to say, clinched the issue, and “Gordon walked out of the room and didn’t look back. And that was that.”

Hilarious too on Gordon’s general personal and especially sartorial ineptitude. Terrifying on the Milibands. Given that Ed looks likely at the time of writing to be the next Prime Minister. Be afraid. Be very afraid,

Thanks, Damian (we have never met, readers) for this book. Keep the royalties, and move on.