Friday 21 December 2012

Monday 17 December 2012

Leap Before You Look


Dear Bell’s Scotch Whisky,

Several times during the build-up to Christmas I've heard your radio advert on Tawk Spawt: "You can raise money for charity by abseiling down a cliff, or bungee jumping off a bridge ... or drinking a glass of Bell's! 10p from every bottle sold goes to Help for Heroes."
You appear heavily to suggest that the last method of raising money is the one we should go for. But something isn't quite right.
Let's say that I could raise £100 (at a very conservative estimate), net of associated outgoings, for taking part in the above-mentioned precipitative activities, with about a month spent fund-raising plus about half a day hanging off Beachy Head.

However, if I'm to follow the fund-raising course you recommend, in order to make the same amount I'd need to drink 1000 bottles of your product at give or take 15 quid a go and at an unredeemable total cost of about £15,000 . If I chose the same period of a month, though on doing the maths I probably wouldn't, I'd need to drink 30 bottles every day.

I mention this because you conclude the advert with a second recommendation: that I enjoy your product responsibly.
I don’t want in any way to suggest that you cynically abuse people's desire to help wounded ex-soldiers and bereaved families so that you can make a quick buck during this season of goodwill, or that you think that we are all stupid.

But others might - if they’re not already pissed.


Yours abstemiously,
Peter Roberts

Tuesday 13 November 2012

On accountability and responsibility


The more the panic at the BBC develops – the Director General resigning after a few weeks in the job, being given twice his contractual pay-off for doing so, and with suspensions and stand-ins all over the place – the more I ask why George Entwistle went in the first place, even after his craven interview with John Humphries on 10th November and his admission that he took insufficient notice of the Newsnight crisis once it had started to develop.

There has been a lot of talk – not least from Entwistle – about his ultimate ‘responsibility’ for what happened. In fact, he is ultimately accountable for what happened. As he noted, the Newsnight programme went through the various checks that existed long before he became Director-General. Both the journalism and those checks were done in a sloppy and unprofessional way and didn’t keep to basic standards, but others were responsible for them.

As a manager, accountability incorporates responsibility if you set up structures and/or procedures that are flawed, fail to reform them when you detect problems - whether inherited or your own, or fail to have sufficient oversight of those that are in place. The first doesn’t apply to Entwistle; the second can’t yet apply as he had only been in the post for a few weeks. The third is more arguable, but I believe a new person in a huge job should be allowed to make errors, if only for the purpose that they learn from and don’t repeat them. Also, in theory a fire could develop anywhere in the BBC’s vast forest, but one cannot expect the DG rather than the system he or she oversees to pick them up.

Finally, with regard to the second point above, accountability is an active thing: it is about putting things right, and the new DG was not been given this chance. If he had been given that chance, and had failed, then we could have started talking about his responsibility.

Meanwhile, let’s panic. What else is there to do?

Monday 12 November 2012

In praise of maps


What wonderful things maps are. No symbol of our loss of innocence is more beautiful.
Maps changed our world - that line of mountains, those headlands at each end of the bay, the horizons beneath which we carried on our lives - and the lands and people beyond it. The world was flat until maps appeared in all their essential flattiness.

Now Mankind could fly without leaving the ground, could burn his wings without crashing to earth. The world became of three dimensions. While always compromised by its curvature, maps are things of revelation. Even the most prescriptively and deliberately drawn leave as much to be imagined as read, while large scale topographical maps are a wealth of the unstated but discernible. And they are never up to date. Maps contain within them the tools with which we can question both what we see and what we understand.

For this reason maps should be treated as kindly as books, and we should resist the shallow, utilitarian prescription of satellite and other devices, for to travel is better than to arrive - whether you think you know where you're going or not.

Saturday 10 November 2012

But would Petraeus betray us?

I hope I'm not alone in thinking it ridiculous that David Petraeus has resigned as head of the CIA because he had an extra-marital affair. That's between him and his wife and family.

It doesn't matter whether he was good or bad at his job, since the 'rule' would apply to the good as well as the bad, and could apply to any organisation or post.

Nor does it say much about the suitability of his character for the high post he occupied, if that is the reason. John F. Kennedy was himself an adulterer, Winston Churchill a drunkard and Adolf Hitler a teetotal vegetarian who wept to music and couldn't abide cruelty to animals (and in that sense he was a man whose time has come, a modern role model if ever there was one).

That Petraeus had it off with his biographer might make people want to read the book with care, but it's not as if he was popping over to Iran to call on Mrs Ahmadinejad and leaving his papers in the wardrobe, is it?

Meanwhile, there is no doubt tumult everywhere in Langley, Virginia, and you don't have to love the CIA to see the danger of following the principle elsewhere.

It's just daft.

Wednesday 24 October 2012

The Meaning of Life


At the end of the day and when all’s said and done,
And the finishing post at the end of life’s run
Can be glimpsed in the distance – just over the hill
That we all one day roll down whatever our will –
We fall to consid’ring the meaning of life,
Its purpose and pity, its trouble and strife.
Thus exercised, surely we can but conclude
With a shrug of the shoulders, a sagging of mood,
That the nearest to knowledge, the furthest from doubt,
The best guess we have as to what it’s about
Is the Hokey-Cokey:
Knees bend,
Arms stretch,
Ra Ra Ra.
That’s what it’s all about.
Yes, that’s what it’s all about.

Tuesday 2 October 2012

Dumbing up, nailing down.


Sinister developments in British higher education: 70-odd of 104 universities (my God, we have 104 universities?  We ARE bright!) have signed up to a scheme that, according to BBC Radio 4, is intended to replace simple degrees over time. This will be an end of course report, written by the institution - of which the degree result will be a part - that details 'other activities' such as volunteering, club and society membership, sporting achievements, roles in the student union and so on.
Designed to "benefit employers, and above all students" (note the order, not the emphasis), in my view this is the logical extension of the patronising and utilitarian straitjacket that increasingly passes for education lower down the brain chain. On being asked rather neatly by the interviewer whether "part of student life is sitting and thinking, sometimes in pubs”, the man (it was 6.40am, I was cuddling my pillow, and I didn’t get his name) simply dodged the question.

If students, who are legally adults whether we like it or not, want to list, promote or fabricate their achievements, they have a mechanism called the curriculum vitae. Universities have no place in either writing it for them or, by so doing, making them mere cogs in a machine that we should continue to kid ourselves they may run one day.

Thursday 9 August 2012

Go away!


I once challenged a Staffordshire Terrier owner whose dog had jumped up at one of my kids at the entrance to a playground. I asked her to control her dog. She said that he was quite friendly and wouldn’t hurt them. I pointed out that, however friendly her dog, my and others' kids might not like it jumping at them in that way. The woman and her male companion’s response was to repeat the words “Go away, go away” again and again in a rising crescendo of anger.

In the end I was grateful for my children’s presence. Not only were my fellow adult citizens public-spirited enough to modify the words “fuck off” which would otherwise have leapt to their lips as their preferred means of continuing the debate, but I didn’t have to take the three of them on armed with nothing but a large cuddly toy. And come to think of it, had my children not been there I wouldn’t even have had that.

There are plans afoot to train UK citizens how to deal with "challenging situations" like this. You know: people who are recreationally damaging things or who can't control their kids in public and - by extension, because these are the ones that are most likely to hospitalise me - people who throw litter everywhere or let their dogs defecate indiscriminately. Among the things to be taught are 'conflict resolution techniques' and 'negotiation skills'.

Leaving aside the question of whether the state should mind its own business, what fascinates me is the fact that we have let individual sovereignty over society go so far that the non-negotiable no longer exists. How many ways are there of negotiating someone out of letting their dog shit where the bus queue stands? You just don't let your dog do it, and you clean it up if it does, and if you can't work that out on your own I am not going to waste my time chewing the fat with you.

I'm going to tell you this just this once.

Sunday 5 August 2012

God Save The Dream

I spent much of yesterday evening and already an hour this morning dabbing my eyes at the joyful and deeply eloquent speechlessness of all of the GB Olympic athletes, rowers and cyclists who did so well yesterday. I am sure this is replicated in the other teams.

Such was the spirit between the heptathletes after Jessica Ennis crossed the final finishing line to win gold that I half expected them all to lift her up and chair her on a lap of honour.

In the end it's only sport, and in the big scheme of things sport is probably rather silly, but to see such distilled human joy amid this gentlest and most generous patriotism transcends that essential daftness, suggests that all is not indeed lost for humanity, and has me reaching for the hankies every time.

Friday 3 August 2012

The Mass Psychology of Fashion or There's No Smoke Without Ire.


Why are smokers folk-devils? Why has an understandable concern about smoking become so personal?

It's one thing to disapprove of smoking. I do myself. I dislike the smell, I wouldn't date a smoker or live with one, and I’d do my best, without being impolite, to get out of accepting a lift from one. I'd hate my kids to take it up . And I admit that my Sunday morning hangover, incurred after consuming large amounts of what, if it were discovered or invented tomorrow, would be designated a Class A drug, is a little more bearable these days because my hair and clothes don't reek of smoke from the pub last night.

But it’s quite another thing for people to jog along behind moralistic state-sponsored banning-and-ostracising campaigns and call it civic virtue while being indifferent or celebratory about God-knows how many human activities that aren’t under the selective gaze of public opprobrium right now.

I know, I know: the passive smoking argument.  But careful: don't take it too far unless you're prepared to allow the state to legislate that any private home with dependant children should be a smoke-free zone. It's curious how people who happily tell adults how to to behave in places where they and others can choose not to go are indifferent to the very people who can't. So what'll it be?

Tolerance requires dislike or disapproval (which is why so many supposedly liberal and ostentatiously non-judgmental people, er, dislike it).  But it allows for the exercise of discrimination, for debate and for compromise. And it doesn't - because it can't - require laws to make it real and active.

On 'plastic Brits'


On the Today Programme this morning there was a dispiriting debate between a Daily Mail journalist and Sunder Katwala, the director of a think tank called 'British Future'. The subject was so-called 'plastic Brits' representing Great Britain at the Olympics.
The Mail man was saying - quite reasonably, I thought - that sporting mercenaries who apply for a UK passport because they wouldn't make the Olympic squad in their own country are not really British.

Katwala, who throughout was less intent on having an intelligent discussion than on attacking the Mail for its hypocrisy given, for example, its campaign to get the white South African Zola Budd a UK passport in time for the 1984 Olympics, said that anyone who gets a UK passport, including people who do so for mercenary reasons, is by legal definition a Brit so we should welcome and get behind them, and there's an end on it.

That bothered me.

Firstly, the Mail’s sins may or may not be real, but they’re irrelevant to the debate: returning to them again and again was a dishonest debating ploy that shed no light on the matter of ‘plastic Brits'.

Secondly, British Future’s website states that it’s keen to “engage those who are anxious about cultural identity”, though to what end it doesn’t say. One of its main aims is "building a modern British identity which helps us to build [two builds there, guys!] an inclusive citizenship, where we can all be confident about who we are, and which recognises the national and local identities we hold in Britain today too." I’d like to know how conflating, as Katwala did, formal legal identity with the deep, complex, shifting, culture- and time-bound elements of personal and collective identities serves either of those purposes.

I don't think it does. British Future could be building not a broad church but a house of straw. Which could burn easily.

Thursday 21 June 2012

By Gove, you're wrong!

When I was 16, Mr Aherne, my school year head, spoke to all 200 boys in my year in a big room. But he mostly spoke to the great majority who were leaving rather than the small number of us going on to the 6th form. "Good luck," he said, "Enjoy your jobs or apprenticeships and don't get anyone pregnant just yet." It still brings a tear to my eye.

Michael Gove is right about one thing. Yes, there is competitive dumbing down. Schools, universities, exam boards and governments are driven to collude by a shared rhetoric that has little to do with education and everything to do with justifying their existence. One - just one - of the awful effects of this is to conflate qualifications with education. For example, in my own organisation, as I noted in a previous post, a promising but by no means academic 19 year-old who has never even wanted to go to university is being pushed through an MA from scratch in two years and will become better qualified and - on paper - more highly esteemed than the head of the organisation, whose only consolation is that she clearly employs such excellent part-time staff. Just think, funders, how good the full-time ones must be!

But rather than return to a hierarchical, two-tier system based on purely academic ability, which is what Gove seems to want, we'd do better to do what the Germans and Dutch have done for years, which is have a dual but parallel system, broadly divided between those whose skills are more academic and those whose skills are more practical, but with every attempt made to ensure a parity of esteem between them. The academic kids are just fine, and the less academic ones know they are getting a real education that will equip them not just with skills but with expertise, and they can use it later in real jobs, because not everyone in Germany and The Netherlands works in a bank or a call centre.

On the whole those countries don't privilege those of academic bent like we do, or write off the less academic like we do, so they don't have to come up with bullshit qualifications with bullshit content to try and pretend that we're all academic when we're not, or that the courses mean something when they don't.

Is it an accident that these are two countries which still make things, whose people don't all spend the day behind computer screens or being icily courteous to enraged phone-callers, which have a higher quality of living and, yes, cultural richness than us, and shared between more people, and - which for me clinches it - whose footballers tend to speak better English than ours do?

I'll bet you this: if British kids thought they would get a good education in practical subjects and that there were a good apprenticeship system waiting for them that led to real jobs that made things, we wouldn't have half the problems in our schools - and beyond - that we do today. And we wouldn't need bogus qualifications to prove it.

Wednesday 18 April 2012

From the crookde tmibres fo hunamtiy nohtnig staightr saw reve dame


I took my work laptop in to be fixed at my employer’s IT department this morning and while I was waiting I spotted this poster very prominently displayed on the office wall.
I asked the guy who was fixing my computer what he thought of it and he made a face to the rendering of which my written skills are unequal, as this sentence clearly demonstrates.

I asked what he thought, for example, of item 7 on the list (“Team members call out one another’s deficiencies and unproductive behaviours”), against which a score of 3.29 (of something) out of 5.00 (of something) had been awarded in March 2012, as against a score of 2.86 (of something) out of 5.00 (of something) in October 2011, a fall of 0.43 (of something). He said nothing - but did so in a way that I also find hard to describe.

I said that this scoring method meant that there must be 500 levels (of whatever that something is) at which “Team members call[ing] out one another’s deficiencies and unproductive behaviours” could be measured, each of which something would have to mean something if the system of measurement being used were to mean anything. He smiled an inscrutable smile and said that this was the boss’s idea and they had had a half day's training on it.

I’m not the best at reading people’s emotions but I had a strong feeling that his answer in fact meant something like “the whole thing is a load of bollocks and we all know it is, and the best way we can live with it is not to give a damn, otherwise we will all go mad.”

So I stuck my neck out and asked if he or anyone else at the training had asked their boss what the hell it was supposed to mean.

He smiled - more intelligibly than his last effort, I thought - and said, “She isn’t here any more.”

Now I ask you: what says more about the human condition – that no one said anything to her then or that she isn’t here now? Is my glass half empty, or half full?

Wednesday 4 April 2012

Another raking from the pig-pen at Folly Farm

Here's one for future history books.

Both the following things have occurred within the organisation I work for in the past few days.
  • Two parents accompanying their respective disabled children and sleeping in separate lockable dormitories were turned away from a residential kids' weekend because they did not have a CRB (police) check in place.
  • A 15 year-old girl going for the first time to Spain as part of a youth group is staying alone with a local family for a week with no police check required.
In both cases my organisation complied fully with the regulations.

I think this is evidence to bear out my suspicion that the purpose of regulations like these and much health and safety legislation is not to protect people but to avoid litigation.

Let's all be open about it.

Monday 2 April 2012

Smarting up? Dumbing down!

One of the people whose youth work I manage is 19. She works 18.5 hours a week planning and delivering work at a youth centre I oversee. She also works another 18.5 hours in another of our teams. Even at this age she's very good at her job and will become even better during the long career she hopefully has ahead of her. She’s bright, honest, hard-working, masters a brief easily, is pleasant to colleagues and young people, uses her initiative and already has a good overall grasp of the job.  I've just done her annual appraisal and marked her very highly.

She’s never been to college and admits she wasn’t that good at school. She’s not yet a qualified youth worker. As of 2010 you have needed a degree to become a full-timer, so my employer has put her on the training route at a university in London that offers the course. In fact they've decided to put her through the MA course, which will require her – alongside her 37 hours a week, a few of which we give her off for college – to study for a total of 2½ years, with one day a week attending the course and five – including Saturdays – working for us.
To summarise: that’s the equivalent of doing a BA and then an MA while working a full week, and in less time than it would normally take a full-time student to do the BA. And she is 19.
Today she came to me in a bit of a panic as she has to write an essay on Pierre Bourdieu and social positioning with reference to Traveller camps by this Thursday.
I asked if they had given her any background in post-modern theory. No. Did she know what post-modernism is? No. Had they given any guides to writing essays or studying more widely? No. But she knew how to use the Harvard referencing system. She was honest enough to say, but not in these words, that she knows, let alone understands, fuck all about the lot of it, and is unlikely to do so even when she has completed the essay. She was quite open about it, and that too is to her credit.
I am sad and I am angry; but more angry than sad. Who are we letting down more: her, for putting her through this and – because they will – making sure she passes; ourselves, for being damned fools who collude in our own emasculation; future employers, who will look at paper qualifications and see that all is well when it isn't; taxpayers, who have to pay for this travesty; young people, who have to pay for our folly; or society as a whole, for our setting the bar so low?
No gags today. Sorry.

Friday 30 March 2012

One is never enough

Am I missing something, in which case I'll take it kindly if you'll put me right?

I'm getting sick of campaigners saying stuff like "just one woman's death during an abortion is one too many" or "just one child put at risk of passive smoking is one too many" or "just one fox that dies a lingering death [death, you will find, has a tendency to linger] at the hands of a pack of hounds is one too many".

It's not just that dogs don't have hands and one can never be too many of anything if there was none of it in the first place. It's also a poor argument for banning the thing they don't like. Emotive yes, but poor. You might as well say that, since some women also die in childbirth, that's a good case for ending the human race. (There are far better ones than that.) More prosaically, at least one cyclist dies on British roads every year after falling off. Should we therefore ban bikes?

It gives liberals, one of whom I am desperately trying to remain, a bad name.

Saturday 17 March 2012

'The Wild Places' by Robert Macfarlane

It is often said that the only true natural wildernesses in Britain are the tundra tops of Scottish mountains and the storm-battered edges of our rocky coasts. Every landscape in between is either man-made or so moulded that our mark is everywhere. Robert Macfarlane's book 'The Wild Places' is a journey; a search for wild landscapes in Britain and Ireland during which his notions of wildness were transformed.

He begins where we are habituated to look for the wild, in the far west and north: the bird and seal island of Enlli (Bardsey) at the tip of the Llŷn peninsula in Wales; the bays and limestone karsts of Atlantic Ireland; in Scotland, Rannoch Moor, the Cuillin of Skye, Cape Wrath and the wilds of Sutherland. These last are the emptiest, least inhabited places in western Europe. As such they come close to what we think the wilds should be. They are our North-West Territories, our Siberia, or as the Readers' Digest once put it without a trace of a smile, our Outback. But dig deeper, as Macfarlane does, and neither the histories nor our perceptions of these places make for such comparisons. The Highlands were cleansed of people for sheep and of predators for game, and much of Ireland by murder, famine, disease and emigration. Enlli was a place of pilgrimage, sought out by men. The high tide mark of even the farthest Hebridean shore is home to the empty Coca Cola bottle and the discarded trawl net.  Beneath and beyond the scenery, these landscapes too are the work of men.

While I sense he may regret this, Macfarlane accepts it and neither laments nor pines. Rather he begins to seek wildness where we have ceased to look for it; as the book progresses, he moves further south and east in search of the pockets of wildness that remain, and those largely manicured or desecrated landcapes in which to our eyes there is none.

In doing so he questions many of our accepted ideas about wildness. Where we have learnt to crave an ideal of distance, emptiness and the undisturbed in juxtaposition to our networked urban lives, he finds wildness in intimacy, profusion and flux: plant colonies bursting with unseen life in a limestone grint on The Burren; the choked and secret hollow ways worn in the soft rocks of south east England; an old garden reclaimed by nature in long-forgotten East Anglian acres just half a mile from a main road; while sheltering with arctic hares in the lee of a Peak District tor of which 30 million people live within two hours' drive.

'The Wild Places' is a work of imagination not a nature book, and is only partly descriptive. Although each chapter has a more or less precise location, it is titled as a type of landscape: 'Beechwood', 'Ridge', 'Cape', 'Saltmarsh'. Macfarlane also sets his thoughts within a number of contexts: history, folklore, religion, the musings of amateur scientists and eccentrics, and the history of cartography. One of the best parts describes the evolution of maps from creative stories of men's passages through a world of endless variety into the modern-day grids that reduce and restrict such terrains to pre-set symbols; less representations of nature than selective products of technology and distilled, timebound utilitarian need.

This, however, I would rather view as a warning about than a criticism of modern maps, which I think are one of mankind's most beautiful and fertile creations. As with books, what can be read between the contour lines of a map is as significant as and often more inspiring than what is printed on the paper. Macfarlane's message for me is that - whether you are high on the moors or reading one on the loo, as I have done for hours daily since boyhood, my poor mother banging on the ceiling below and demanding what the hell I was up to in there - we must learn to look into the nooks and crannies between and within what seems obvious, settled or merely familiar. So it is with nature, and the wild.

Perhaps the selection of locations - admittedly from thousands of possibilities - could have been broader, although Macfarlane makes no claim to be comprehensive. Perhaps I envy many of the good people the author meets, who can afford or have time to be potters, poets, hemp-weavers, lute-tuners and the like (no Irish names among them in Ireland; no Welsh ones in Wales!) - but envy is a nasty emotion of which I need to be more ashamed than I am, and churlishness is not something this invigorating book deserves.

So switch off - no: destroy, publicly - the SatNav, plan an extra day into both ends of your holidays, pack a picnic, muzzle the kids - no: hand them the map - and learn to travel as well as arrive. And read this book while you do.


'The Wild Places' by Robert Macfarlane, Granta Books

Thursday 1 March 2012

'The Report - a novel', by Jessica Francis Kane


‘The Report’ describes and elaborates upon the events and aftermath of the night of 3rd March 1943, when 173 people were crushed to death at the entrance to Bethnal Green tube station. It was the worst British civilian disaster of the Second World War.
The tragedy itself is dealt with briefly. Rather, the novel focuses on its effects on local people connected to it by experience, work or family ties, on the subsequent inquiry led by Lawrence Dunne, and on the attempts some 30 years later of a young film director to make a television documentary about what really happened, what the inquiry said and what it left unsaid. The narrative switches between decades and between people, with the planning, the process and the testimonies of Dunne’s inquiry lacing them together.
Although the book deals with deep emotions it isn‘t sentimental, and although its subject is disaster it isn’t spectacular. It infiltrates rather than seizes the imagination. Above all it is concerned with the feelings and motivations of ordinary, decent people trying to make sense of the incomprehensibility of a domestic tragedy within the wider suffering of war: those who witnessed or survived the crush, a shelter warden, a police constable, the local vicar, local officials; Dunne himself, who is both an establishment figure and close to the people he lives among; and Paul, the film director of 30 years later, who tries to discover and revive what time and forgetting had eroded.
Jessica Francis Kane deftly paints a series of impressions of the wartime East End, its streets, homes and people, that amount to more than their sum. Although there is a quiet significance and nobility in many of the characters, she is not nostalgic: we see that Dunne was challenged not just by the Government’s wish to preserve morale at all costs, but also by his own desire to obscure a detail of the disaster for what he perceived to be a greater good, through suppressing a fact which might have been thought by others to betray a less admirable trait of his community.
This hints at the moral complexities and personal fallibilities with which we all have to deal, and for which we should not be judged too harshly in trying to accommodate. This is not just an evocative book, but a valuable one.


'The Report - a novel', by Jessica Francis Kane, Portobello Books