The Moon Under Water

This is the name given by George Orwell to his imagined perfect pub. Ironically, the local Wetherspoon's pub has appropriated the name, though none of the qualities Orwell listed. As the sun's shining and I'm about to head off to a drinking emporium, I thought I'd share his thoughts with you:


Orwell's after a pub on a quiet side street, frequented by a large cast of regulars all keen on conversation. He wants the 'solid, comfortable ugliness of the nineteenth century': not fake beams, but not minimalism either. Fires burn in each of the different rooms - though Orwell rather quaintly insists on a ladies' room and a saloon. No music plays, 'neither a radio nor a piano' (I'd quite like a well-played joanna in the pub, or a crowd gathered round The Archers, though my favourite places tend not to have TVs). 


Orwell's barmaids are matronly types who call you 'dear', though he draws the line at 'ducky', much the same as I hate being called 'buddy' or 'mate' by strangers in shops. Food is simple, hearty and cheap. 

The special pleasure of this lunch is that you can have draught stout with it. I doubt whether as many as 10 per cent of London pubs serve draught stout, but the Moon Under Water is one of them. It is a soft, creamy sort of stout, and it goes better in a pewter pot.

That's one thing that's improved: we're living in a golden age of real ale, though sadly for Orwell, china mugs and glasses with handles are rarely available. 


Orwell insists on a garden, secluded and tree-shadowed.

And if anyone knows of a pub that has draught stout, open fires, cheap meals, a garden, motherly barmaids and no radio, I should be glad to hear of it, even though its name were something as prosaic as the Red Lion or the Railway Arms.

Easy. Tonight's choice is the Newhampton Arms, a classic Black Country Victorian beer palace, complete with bowling green, fine ales and apple trees.  

Welcome to Sheffield

George Orwell called Sheffield 'the ugliest town in the Old World'. It's not now - it's mostly beautiful and the rough bits have charm of their own.

I'm here for the European Fencing Championships and Wheelchair Fencing Championships, as a volunteer. As a special prize, our t-shirts are shocking pink, which clashes rather violently with my pasty Irish skin. Armourers and medics get sharp black, the lucky dogs.

However, I have wifi when I'm not working, so I'll try to get some exciting pictures of fencers - most of them will be at the Olympics next year too.

Meanwhile, it turns out that Plashing Vole was mentioned on Radio 4's You and Yours show yesterday. I didn't hear it, so I've no idea what they said about me. Hopefully it wasn't an item on how to get fired through blogging about work…

Heirs to Orwell

This is lovely. Obama and Co. are wandering round the world proclaiming that they're leaving Afghanistan just in time for the next Presidential elections. 

Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, recently said Washington did not want any "permanent" bases in Afghanistan

but

her phrasing allows a variety of possible arrangements

and 

"There are US troops in various countries for some considerable lengths of time which are not there permanently," a US official told the Guardian.

and

British troops, Nato officials say, will also remain in Afghanistan long past the end of 2014, largely in training or mentoring roles.

which means that

Although they will not be "combat troops" that does not mean they will not take part in combat.

And in the end, 'no permanent troops' comes down to:

American and Afghan officials are locked in increasingly acrimonious secret talks about a long-term security agreement which is likely to see US troops, spies and air power based in the troubled country for decades.

Though not publicised, negotiations have been under way for more than a month to secure a strategic partnership agreement which would include an American presence beyond the end of 2014

And so we reach this stage in the imperialist project. Just as the Americans and British are STILL occupying Germany (they actively helped Nazis back into power, because their prime interests was intimidating the Russians), the Afghans are going to become unwilling hosts of forces engaged in a much wider struggle - against China, Iran, India and Pakistan.  There are about 192 countries in the world: 135 of them have a US military base (according to the US military): so let's not pretend that our countries aren't puppets led by Quisling governments. 


Meanwhile, let's remind ourselves of what Orwell (who was a sneaky nark himself) had to say about politics and language, in Politics and the English Language (1946). It works for Cameron and Miliband too:

In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different. Statements like Marshal Pétain was a true patriot, The Soviet press is the freest in the world, The Catholic Church is opposed to persecution, are almost always made with intent to deceive. Other words used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less dishonestly, are: class, totalitarian, science, progressive, reactionary, bourgeois, equality.

The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestoes, White papers and the speeches of undersecretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, homemade turn of speech. When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases -- bestial atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder -- one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker's spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favorable to political conformity.

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism., question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.

When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics." All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia.  

Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one's own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase -- some jackboot, Achilles' heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse -- into the dustbin, where it belongs. 

Cry, my beloved country

You may know that I am simultaneously sentimental about, and cruel to, Stoke-on-Trent, that poor abused carbuncle, a classic post-industrial city used and abused by government, developers, businesses and politicians, yet still - just - alive and distinctive. 


Dylan Thomas called Swansea and 'ugly, lovely town' (in Reminiscences of Childhood). Going for a walk in the 'un-defiled' country a few miles from that benighted cosmopolis, I was reminded of The Road to Wigan Pier. Here's what George Orwell had to say about Stoke in 1936. The only difference now is the absence of potbanks, more's the pity. 

It is only when you get a little further north, to the pottery towns and beyond, that you begin to encounter the real ugliness of industrialism-- an ugliness so frightful and so arresting that you are obliged, as it were, to come to terms with it… It would probably be quite easy to extract a sort of beauty, as Arnold Bennett did, from the blackness of the industrial towns; one can easily imagine Baudelaire, for instance, writing a poem about a slag-heap.

The best thing one can say for the pottery towns is that they are fairly small and stop abruptly. Less than ten miles away you can stand in un-defiled country, on the almost naked hills, and the pottery towns are only a smudge in the distance.

See you next week

That's it for me, this week. I'm off to Newcastle on Tyne for a UK School Games team managers' orientation meeting, which promises to be enormously debauched. I don't think.

Meanwhile: half my job is in Media/Cultural Studies, and so I'm used to people making snobbish remarks about the subject. I'm bored with pointing out that in an overwhelmingly mediatized culture (could we be anything else?), knowing how the media works on a cultural, political, economic and theoretical level is mighty useful.

So I'll merely point you in the direction of Mr. George Orwell, who points out in the essays 'Good Bad Books' and 'Boys' Weeklies' that popular media can tell you far more about a society than the minutely-selling highbrow literature. They're short and punchily written - enjoy.

Name that Colleague!

This is from George Orwell's 'Clink', a short essay about his failed attempt to be sent to prison for research purposes. He got hammered on whisky and spent a weekend in the cells. Afterwards:

I had only twopence and had had nothing to eat all day except bread and marg., and was damnably hungry; however, as always happens when it is a choice between tobacco and food, I bought tobacco with my twopence.

This exactly describes the situation of one of my colleagues. Any guesses?

PS. Orwell died at 47, of TB. I doubt the smoking helped.

P-P-P-P-Pick up a Penguin!

I'v just received six books from the Penguin Great Ideas series - 80 (so far) short books of essays by prominent intellectuals. I already owned Marcus Aurelius's Meditations in this edition, and I've added Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Orwell's Books v. Cigarettes, Why I Write and Decline of the English Murder, William Morris's Useful Work v. Useless Toil, and Michel Foucault's The Spectacle of the Scaffold.

To be honest, I've got most of these texts in one form or another, and most are available for free on the web (follow the links above). I bought them because these slim volumes are masterpieces of book design. Each one evokes the spirit and sense of the text: the Foucault features repetitive circles representing the atomised individual under the microscope of social institutions.

Why I Write features a spare, plain cover with an austere typeface reflecting Orwell's suspicion of rhetoric.

The Morris merges art and craft in line with his philosophy that anything which is useful is necessarily beautiful (he clearly never worked in the lower reaches of higher education).

The Decline of the English Murder is a deeply embossed tabloid newspaper, complete with adverts,

Books v. Cigarettes has an abstract design which reminds me of ashtrays and Venn diagrams, from the 1950s/1960s designs:

while Benjamin's essay, which is about what happens to our definitions of art when artworks can be reproduced to infinity, features the spine of the book repeated over and over again, which I think is very witty.

Penguins were invented in 1935 by Allen Lane (influenced by various other imprints) to make high quality books available for about the price of a packet of cigarettes. Design and typography were hugely important to the company, for themselves and as a way of distinguishing the texts from other cheap books. You can still buy the originals for pennies everywhere: green for detective novels, blue for biography, orange for fiction and so on. Even if you can't read, they do furnish a room!

Ignorance Is Strength*

You may, if you peruse this electronic ranting regularly, be aware that my institution, having 'mislead' the government on the small matter of how many students completed modules, on which basis funding is provided, faces paying back several million pounds (or, to quote directly, 'misunderstanding of the arcane HEFCE definition' - obviously it's HEFCE's fault for using big words). To pay for this, 250 staff are being sacked, modules are being cut and class sizes increased. There's no sign, of course, of firings, performance-related-pay cuts or apologies from the management.

There is, however, a missive from the rotting head of the fish, an overview of the current state of play. The following words occur frequently:

'colleagues' - ho, ho, ho.

'successes'

'developments'

'excellent' x 2

'highest possible level of commendation'

'good practice'

'improvements'

'good standing'

'extremely good'

'four-star'

'world-leading'

'highest' x 3

'largest'

'leading'

'increase'

'very good'

'top'

'solid base'

'future development'

'outstanding'

'special mention'

'strong role'

'successful'

'improved'

'development'

'redesigning'

'clarifying'

'strengthen'

'appeal in the market place'

'capture student intent'

'cost savings'

'strategic investments'

'savings'

'efficiencies'

So there we have it. Very little to indicate that this is a university and not a double-glazing sales force. No sackings. Everything's brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. And if you don't think so, it's Room 101 for you.

In reality, this place is brilliant at some things. We specialise in mature students without qualifications, in people who've struggled at previous educational establishments, in local, working-class students. We also produce high quality research, despite a teaching workload 3 or, in my case 4, times that of other institutions. BUT: massive classes, less assessment, fewer staff and less contact time with teachers is guaranteed to a) reduce recruitment and b) fail the students who need a lot of guidance and support.

Never mind though - modules students don't like are being abolished, whether they're educationally necessary or not, and everything's coming up rosy. Yes it is. Oh yes. Definitely. Yessiree. Absolutely. No shadow of a doubt. Anyone claiming otherwise is a bitter, twisted naysayer. OK?

*From Orwell's 1984.