On this day:

Happy Birthday Upton Sinclair (1878-1968), muckraking author of early-twentieth century novels exposing the rotten core of American business and politics. He was also a socialist for a period, standing for Congress and the California governorship in that cause, and founded the Helicon Home utopian colony (rather unsuccessfully).

Personal favourites: The Jungle, exposing the squalid, sordid condition of Chicago's meat-packing industries. If you're a fan of Harry Turtledove's slightly odd alternative American history, he was the President of the US from 1920-28.

If your literary tastes stretch from socialist muckraking to jolly-hockey-sticks girls' boarding school japes (and I know at least one comrade to whom this applies), then you'll be sad to learn that September 20th is also the anniversary of Elinor M. Brent-Dyer's death in 1969: author of 60 Chalet School novels. The school itself, under pressure of political events, moved from Austria to Guernsey, thence to two places on the English-Welsh border, then finally to Switzerland. Interesting how many tax havens featured… They're fascinating tales of how rebellious girls have their spirits broken as they learn to conform to the rules of a snobbish, elitist but apparently kind-hearted meritocracy.

Interestingly, there's an unofficial - and rather misanthropist - sequel, The Chalet Girls Grow Up which sounds far more interesting:

A book that updates the stories of The Chalet School Girls into a world of sex, drugs and illegitimate babies bringing characters into the present day with references to Vietnam, Soweto, Greenham Common and the Falklands War.

Poor Elinor must be spinning in her grave.

Update: lo and behold, here's hard-boiled crime writer Val McDermid talking about the Chalet School novels as her inspiration on Radio 4 (brief review here)

Opening up the Labour Party

The latest Labour leadership wheeze is to open important party decisions to non-party members, including the election of party leaders. It's a plot to stop the unions having a strong influence on the results.

I have two problems with this:
1. Affiliated trades unions (of which mine isn't one, thankfully) not only founded the Labour Party, they continue to fund it. Why shouldn't they, as the representatives of a large section of the working population, receive representation in proportion to donation?

(Don't write in: I know the answer. The hysterical, hypocritical baying mob of the collected ranks of the rightwing press. Those newspapers which are all owned by tax-evading, offshore-domiciled Tory donors. I don't think anyone at the top of the Party has ever asked him or herself whether they actually believe anything: they just ask what the Daily Mail will say about it).

2. I just don't think that anyone who wants to have a go deserves to get a vote. Political parties aren't drop-in centres for anyone with a point of view. They're formal organisations to which like-minded people subscribe. I'm a member of the Labour Party, despite being a socialist. I share a high degree of ideological perspectives with my fellow members and I pay to propagate these ideas. The idea that people who are too lazy, indifferent or hostile to my party should be encouraged to affect our internal decisions is offensive.

It implies that the Labour Party hierarchy believes that its own members are too weird to be trusted, too weird to represent the population at large. It also implies that it doesn't believe the general population has the backbone and commitment to join a party.

I have another idea: formulate a decent, coherent set of political positions of which you can be proud. Then go out there and proselytise for them, rather than tremblingly triangulate your every utterance with reference to the worst newspapers on the planet. Let's not cravenly chip away at our core beliefs in deference to a public which has been misled and abused by the right: let's get out there and actually try to persuade them that we're right about things. Is that too revolutionary? It might be difficult, but it's better than surrendering.

The Party conference used to end with a rendition of the Red Flag: let's return to the days of having some backbone. The third verse I quote is particularly relevant to Miliband, Balls and Co.

Then raise the scarlet standard high.Within its shade we'll live and die,Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer,We'll keep the red flag flying here.

It waved above our infant might,When all ahead seemed dark as night;It witnessed many a deed and vow,We must not change its colour now. 

It suits today the weak and base,Whose minds are fixed on pelf and placeTo cringe before the rich man's frown,And haul the sacred emblem down. 

Michael Gove and the Palin Manoeuvre

You may have seen today's newspaper reports that aides to the Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove, deliberately moved sensitive discussions away from official e-mail accounts onto private free ones, such as Gmail. 


On the face of it, this is a security matter: government officials discussing the future of this country using accounts which are frequently hacked. More seriously, this is a deliberate evasion of accountability: private accounts aren't subject to Freedom of Information requests, so any government business conducted this way can never be subject to the scrutiny of the public. 


Sarah Palin did the same thing - which is why some naughty boy hacked and released her emails, and why media outlets in the US took legal action to examine them. At the root of this is actually a serious philosophical question. In an ideal world, our political overlords are in the job to do what they think is best, secure in the knowledge that the electorate has decided to trust their judgement by voting them in. This should give the confidence to do everything in an  open and honest manner. 


However, when you see government officials behaving like this:

The FT reports that Dominic Cummings, Gove's chief political aide, wrote to colleagues shortly after he was appointed stating he "will not answer any further emails to my official DfE account …"

The email continued: "i will only answer things that come from gmail accounts from people who i know who they are. i suggest that you do the same in general but thats obv up to you guys – i can explain in person the reason for this …"

then one has to doubt their commitment to the public good. If they were convinced of their altruistic motives, they wouldn't move discussions into private, unaccountable spaces. It gives me a strong whiff of not quite guilt, but certainly awareness that the kinds of things they're up to - in this particular case inventing a special class of schools run by and for their political and social allies - are not in the best interests of the country, and automatically require evasion and dishonesty to achieve their aims. This isn't corruption in the classical sense of filling one's own bank account, but it's clearly moral and political corruption of the most corrosive kind.


It suggests that they consciously see government as a vehicle for their private interests, a fat cow to be milked for selfish gain rather than used to feed the masses: in a very real sense, this is class warfare from the top. There's no principle involved here: like Palin, they publicly denounce government as an oppressive enemy of individual enterprise, while distorting its authority for their own purposes. They've captured the government and they're going to extract every penny they can for as long as they're there. 


In Kenya, political corruption is so institutionalised that one incoming government minister announced that the new regime merely wanted its own turn at the udders: 'It is our turn to eat', rather than cleaning up the system. I can't see any difference between that and the hole-in-the-corner corruption of the Goves and Palins, other than the Kenyan minister's honesty.

Know your place

I like my job. I like my colleagues and students. I like the wide variety of things I teach and the intellectual enrichment that comes with that. I like teaching as an experience: nothing beats a class in which informed and interesting questions bounce around the room.

I don't like having a job split between two departments, and not having a permanent contract. It feels like being on hold for years on end.

What I'd like is a permanent job which gives the space and time to start writing serious academic work about my specialist subject (Welsh writing in English, since you ask). That dream job came up recently, at my beloved first university, no less. The one with the mountains and sea.

I didn't get an interview. The basic reason was that my publication record was too weak. I'm not exactly surprised at not getting the job, because all university staff are now under huge pressure to produce publications (the money follows research output disproportionately to teaching skill/range etc), but I did hope for an interview. Ah well. In the words of a wise man, 'you can never go home… but I guess you can shop there'.

So the new strategy is to start being a bit more ruthless and selfish about not taking on extra things, and to be a lot more disciplined about writing. Obviously I'm saying this on the first day of the teaching year… Perhaps every time I feel like a blog post, I'll read or write a paragraph.

Are the media hypocrites? The definitive answer

On the left (this is the Daily Star, but it could have been any of them), a picture of an underage girl complete with references to her breasts. On the right, an article lambasting the 'perv' TV bosses who allowed Chris Morris to broadcast a satirical programme attacking hysterical and hypocritical media pedophile scaremongering (click to enlarge):

I'm Eddy, your helpful onboard computer…

A couple of weeks ago, my email stopped working. Despite their help - and with the aid of non-IT colleagues - I got it working again by changing from POP3 to IMAP. Then my email stopped working again today. Oh, they said, open your Web Access mail and delete everything.

So I did.

They didn't mention that under IMAP, that deleted everything from my own computer, my own Mail programme. So now I've deleted several thousand emails that I'd deliberately kept: interesting people, addresses, ideas, things I intended to follow up in the near future… the lot. Gone. Permanently.

In the words of Douglas Adams, I'd like to permanently reprogramme IT Services. With an axe. Much better to watch this (on fullscreen):

Happy Birthday, Hermione Granger

I mean it. I'm well aware of the usual objections to Harry Potter: unoriginal, overly politically-correct, flabby prose, adults who read books for children should be ashamed yada yada yada. But today I'd like to leave the literary debates aside and simply note that Hermione - who should really have been the main character rather than the helper (in structuralist terms) - is a true role-model. She repeatedly saves the world by reading a lot and thinking about things carefully.

Perhaps I'm biased. After all, I read a lot and am supposed to think carefully about things, as a teacher. But there are plenty of 'action' heroes who rely on instinct and brute force: James Bond certainly hasn't got to grips with deconstruction. There aren't enough thinkers in the battle of good versus evil.

A lot of people think Hermione's a stereotypical nerd: certainly other characters find her bossy, interfering and impatient: even Ron and Harry do so at times. This, I think, says more about them than it does about her. It's a way of dividing readers and characters between elementary and intellectual souls.

I certainly don't want to get into any discussion of the film version: try typing 'Hermione' into Youtube and you'll enter an awful world of bitchiness, neo-paedophilia and American teen angst soundtracked by the drippiest of whine-rock.

Any character which promotes reading research and contemplation deserves praise. Here's a line for my new students:

I've learned all the course books by heart of course. I just hope it will be enough.

Unfortunately, she occasionally lets the side down:

 "Books! And cleverness! There are more important things--friendship and bravery…"

Don't listen to her, kids. She doesn't really mean it.

Lessons from Literature

I'm reading Evelyn Waugh's 1928 Decline and Fall at the moment. It starts with a set-piece describing the snobbish, amoral and antisocial antics of an Oxford University drinking club known as the Bollinger (or 'Boller') club:

It is not accurate to call this an annual event, because quite often the Club is suspended for some years after each meeting… At the last dinner, three years ago, a fox had been brought in a cage and stoned to death with champagne bottles. What an evening that had been! … For two days they had been pouring into Oxford: epileptic royalty from their villas of exile; uncouth peers from crumbling country seats; smooth young men of uncertain tastes from embassies and legations; illiterate lairds from wet granite hovel in the Highlands; ambitious young barristers and Conservative candidates torn from the London season and the indelicate advances of debutantes; all that was most sonorous of name and title was there for the beano. 

A shriller note could now be heard rising from Sir Alastair's rooms: any who have heard that sound will shrink at the recollection of it: it is the sound of the English county families baying for broken glass

It was a lovely evening. They broke up Mr. Austen's grand piano, and stamped Lord Rending's cigars into his carpet, and smashed his china, and tore up Mr Partridge's sheets, and threw the Matisse into his water-jug; Mr Sanders had nothing to break except his windows; but they found the manuscript at which he had been working for the Newdigate Prize Poem, and had great fun with that…

No resemblance intended to the snobbish, amoral and antisocial Oxford University drinking club known as the Bullingdon (or 'Buller'), of which David Cameron (2), George Osborne (1) and Boris Johnson (8) are previous members.

And lo, it came to pass that those members of the Bullingdon are now inflicting casual and wanton vandalism on their social inferiors still, only on a national scale. What larks!

It's quiet…too quiet

It's the first day of teaching and the silence is eerie. Like pigeons' magnetic navigation lobes, academics have an inbuilt calendar. I knew teaching started today because I slept badly, and in the few minutes of repose I did snatch, I had a series of anxiety dreams, mostly featuring me being late or underprepared. Oh wait, they weren't dreams. They were memories. Or prophesies.

Stoke City's craven surrender to Sunderland (Sunderland! After beating Liverpool and drawing with Chelsea) didn't add to my good humour, though the All-Ireland final was rather exciting, even as Gaeilge and Ireland's demolition of Australia's rugby union team was highly amusing.

I made a desultory attempt to clean my desk this morning, and came across a colleague's visual explanation of our Myth module. Most of them are far too obscene for publication on a family blog, but here's his depiction of Cassandra.

In which I join the ranks of Satan's minions

Well, according to a church in St. Cloud, Minnesota. Perhaps this Protestant sect doesn't recall that the founders of Protestantism - Luther and Calvin - were considered freethinkers by the Catholic hierarchy.

Sadly back to an earlier age

Today's big media story is the ongoing effort to rescue four Welsh miners: two have definitely died, and the fate of the others is as yet unknown. The mass media and the social networks are keeping a kind of vigil, with individual citizens expressing their concern and sympathy.

In a sense, this outpouring of kindness is symptomatic of how our lives have changed. A hundred years ago, Welsh (and other) mining accidents regularly took the lives of hundreds of men (women and children too). Industrial life, familiar to a far greater proportion of the population then than now, was nasty, dangerous and short. Newspaper coverage presented scenes of mass grief: long lines of coffins, anxious groups of wives and coal-blackened colleagues waiting at the pit-head: the mine disaster is a set-piece in all the Welsh industrial novels I specialise in. Lewis Jones's Cwmardy and We Live depict in shockingly naturalistic fashion the explosion and social destruction which follows: Llewellyn's How Green Was My Valley uses mining accidents to make cheap and dishonest political points.

Bill Brandt's 'Welsh Miners'

Robert Frank, 1950s.

This latest disaster is both similar to, and different from, those previous events. Thankfully we are less ready to accept mass death as a natural feature of work. The mass media both cheapens and heightens our feelings about these men: their small number means that each individual will be afforded greater personal attention. Soon we'll hear about their children, partners, interests and activities. To those capable of empathy, such things will depeen their sorrow. To many - and to the newspapers -  these details are ingredients in the pornography of grief, grist to mill of sales.

This latest accident exists on two planes. On one, some brave men have lost their lives, families have lost loved ones, and more names are mournfully added to the list of those who died for our comfort: the constantly updated story tries - dishonestly, I think - to close the gap between our distant sympathy and the visceral, inconsolable grief of these miners' families and friends.

On the other plane, the events become a narrative, one which is inescapably linked to the New Zealand and Chilean dramas (and for historically-aware working-class and Welsh observers, the hundreds of previous mine collapses): one can sense the journalists' disappointment that the familiar 'grief' story is edging out the excitement and drama of the Chilean 'heroism and triumphant rescue' one, which could have sold newspapers for weeks.

I hope this doesn't sound cynical. The web is full of emotional responses, and I fear that people's understandable outpourings will obscure the complexity of how such things occur (was the mine safe, for instance?), are reported, and felt. I don't want the specific, special horror of this particular event to be swallowed up in the tired, familiar narratives of media reporting.

(Finally, let's not forget that the privatised coal industry is rife with exploitation and recklessness: here's an extract from Seumas Milne's piece about it from 1994):

On Friday nights in the Welsh valleys, miners go from pub to pub hunting for their employers to claim unpaid wages. Pay cheques bounce, mining companies close and re-open under other names, men are sacked for being union members or refusing to work on Christmas Day.
In some pits, miners get no basic minimum and are only paid by the tub of coal produced. Underground, they stand in streams of water, hacking at the face with picks and shovels. Wooden roof props, phased out in publicly owned mines 40 years ago, are standard.
Pit ponies haul rusting carloads of anthracite back and forth from the face. On the surface, there are no showers. The coal owners are back with a vengeance. This is private mining in 1994: the promised future of the British coal industry....
Last year, the fatal accident rate in privately owned mines was 23 times that in British Coal collieries.
Government health and safety officials advise caution when comparing the public and private safety records because the smaller numbers in private mining can lead to sharp fluctuations in the fatality figures. So it seems fair to mention that the death rate in private mines was only seven times as high the year before.
One man who fell victim to the new cost-cutting coal owners was Phillip Rees, a 32-year-old miner electrocuted at the Blaengrennig colliery in the Amman valley just over a year ago.
"The manager called me up and asked if this boy was one of my members," recalls Anthony Jones, the local National Union of Mineworkers official in charge of private mines.
"I said I'd have to look in my records. It's just there's been a bit of an accident, he told me. I said I'd come right over anyway. He was dead when I got there. They didn't even know where he lived."

Ursine defecation news

Well what a shock: students don't want to be taught by computers!

Universities have been warned not to assume that “digital native” students will embrace all e-learning initiatives, or indeed prefer them to traditional forms of education. A report released by the Canadian consulting firm Higher Education Strategy Associates warns that calls for curricula to be “radically overhauled” are sometimes based on evidence that “can sometimes be alarmingly thin”. The authors surveyed nearly 1,300 students to determine views on e-learning, saying that there had previously been “precious little research” done in this area.

You know me. I've embraced technology in teaching and outside it: blogging, Twitter and so on, but I've remained sceptical of the boosters' claims that any new technology is per se better than existing strategies, and that new media should be uncritically adopted, regardless of cultural, educational or ideological concerns - my colleague Ms. E-Mentor shares my worries, and she's won national awards for her use of technology in humanities teaching.

At the heart of my concern is the feeling that technology is pushed not for the benefit of the student, but as a means of reducing staff-student contact time, staffing levels, building provision, all in the name of 'efficiency'. God knows we need to be careful with the institution's money at the present time, but efficiency must contribute to good teaching, not replace it as an establishment's prime directive. 'Efficient' hospitals means no spare nurses to comfort the dying: efficient universities mean linear transmission of facts rather than the intellectual back-and-forth of debate between engaged staff and students. This isn't education: it's a simulation of education which impoverishes all parties.

McLuhan's hackneyed old 'the medium is the message' applies here: there are many creative activities made possible through embracing new technology, as Ms. E-Mentor can show you, but withdrawing personal contact in favour of technology-driven methods will alienate students, place them on a certificate production line, and permanently damage them as individuals and as citizens. What we need are good quality courses designed in such a way that electronic media are harnessed to enhance provision: not to replace awkward and expensive elements.    

Although over a quarter of those surveyed said they believed the quality of learning materials was better in courses with electronic elements, around half said that the quality of education was better when courses were delivered entirely by a lecturer in person. In addition, over two-thirds said that the quality of instructors was best on courses delivered in-person, with the report citing an “enormous desire [among students] to learn directly from a ‘sage on the stage’”.

The authors of the report suggest that the seemingly contradictory messages have to do with convenience: “Students prefer physical texts,” they explain, “but they’d like to have the option of having an e-resource to read it wherever and whenever they need.”

The report concludes that the main problem with e-learning in Canadian institutions is with the quality of resources, with more investment needed in the integration between in-person and online learning. The authors predict that, with the right investment, e-learning resources can become “a technology that actually enhances and is additive to their in-class experience".

An additional attraction of e-learning becomes apparent in another question asked as part of the survey: over half the students surveyed said that they were more likely to skip classes that offered online resources as it would be easier to catch up.

What's shocking about much of the scholarship around e-learning is how uncritical much of it is: blinded by the pressure to be 'modern', they assume that students will be impressed by teachers who know how to use a computer. This is desperately limited: 1980s kids were much more tech-savvy because they learned how to programme BBC Micros and ZX Spectrums. Nowadays, teachers and students are reduced to passivity. A computer is a magic black box to most of us: we learn like monkeys to press the right buttons and persuade ourselves that we are on the cutting edge. None of us are 'digital natives': we're passengers on a bus we can't drive. But you won't find many of the e-learning community making this point.

Why the reference to ursine defecation? Because anyone who actually spends time in classrooms rather than pontificating at a distance about teaching, knows that human contact is  at the heart of successful education. We're always going on about how to stop students dropping out. I'd suggest that talking to them, learning their names and having passionate debates about the subject in hand - rather than restricting them solely to online interaction - might be the way to do it. What do you reckon?

To your Arduino…

One last day of sanity

On Monday, the teaching period starts once more, as does the madness, the pressure and the excitement. No more quiet offices, no more slacking off. But the pleasure of bright-eyed students eager to mull over ideas and discover new texts - one has just called into the office to inquire whether she needs to prepare anything for next week's classes - a question I should perhaps be asking myself!

Which is why I spent most of this morning in sybaritic indulgence. Already shocked to the marrow by Stoke City surrendering its lead over Dynamo Kiev in extra time, I found myself glued to the last 200 pages of Maria Edgeworth's Patronage, and resigned myself to remaining in bed until all the ladies were married and all the gentlemen restored to their ranks and estates. I'm sure you're all as grateful as I am that equilibrium - to use the structuralist term - was duly restored, though at some cost to narrative plausibility.

Your opinion sought

I'm thinking about using some of Iain Sinclair's work on a module which discusses the ways in which we conceptualise the city. Beyond ethnography and anthropology, there's a movement (largely French) which stresses the subjective and almost unanalysable experience of urban existence.

The British wing consists of the psychogeographers, and Sinclair is the foremost of the them all. He looks underneath the 'regenerations' and rebrandings to highlight the psychological aspects of public and private policy. He spots the occult or unconscious motives and expressions manifested by architecture, policing, redevelopments. He cares for the alternative narratives and histories of the city's shifting inhabitants, the kind of stories and discourses entirely obliterated by the oppressive fantasies of the property developers and bureaucrats - his new book, Ghost Milk deconstructs the Olympic Project's determination to obliterate the messy, scruffy, badly-behaved but real communities of Hackney and the other boroughs on which this global fantasy has landed. Let me know what you think.

The final depressing word to freshly-minted graduates

Here's an extract from Arthur Sulzberger's graduation address to students at the State University of New York, in 2006.

It wasn't supposed to be this way. You weren't supposed to be graduating into a world where we are still fighting for fundamental human rights, whether it's the rights of immigrants to start a new life, or the rights of gays to marry, or the rights of women to choose. You weren't supposed to be graduating into a world where oil still drove policy and environmentalists still have to fight relentlessly for every gain. You weren't but you are. And for that, I'm sorry. 

Still, lessons from history, eh? It's so much better now. I mean yes, we're in the depths of the worse recession since 1929. And OK, Japan is a sea of radioactivity. It's true that we're ruled by  a cabal of hereditary multimillionaires who've dismantled welfare, healthcare and higher education in under a year, but at least we've all got iPhones. Right? Right!

(The quotation is from Brooke Gladstone's The Influencing Machine, illustrated by Josh Neufeld).

Dans les voitures…

Here's Manny's sorry Bill Bailey's French cover of Numan's 'Cars', complete with horns and a theremin. It's totally stuck in my head now. Apologies for the advert at the start.



And if you like Bailey AND the comic genius of Kevin Eldon (who also appeared in Black Books with Bailey), you'll love their Kraftwerk-style version of the Okey-Cokey. Also with added theremin:

Happy birthday to a corporate irritant

Sometimes muddleheaded, sometimes just plain wrong, but always on the side of the angels. Happy Birthday, Greenpeace:

How to solve one of the world's most intractable political problems in one short blog post

Obviously, it's impossible. But this week sees the possible request from the Palestinian people for recognition as a full state at the United Nations. 


Normally I steer clear of this one, not because there's too much heat and not enough light in these debates, but because nothing anyone says is ever likely to bring about a solution. However, I do strongly feel that the Palestinian people have been treated appallingly by Israel, Europe, Britain and the US. 


A quick recap: the Jews were a collection of tribes and eventually two states roughly where Israel is now. In the course of their long and eventful history, they discovered monotheism, which united most of the tribes. They were repeatedly invaded, exiled and returned. Then the Romans turned up and suppressed the Jews with a degree of success. A final rebellion particularly annoyed the Romans to the point at which they demolished the Temple and crushed the Jews. However, there were plenty of Jews in other parts of the Empire, not all of whom recognised the spiritual and political authority of those in Palestine. 


When the Jews were expelled from Jerusalem by the Romans, their non-Jewish cousins stuck around - many became Muslim a few hundred years later. This, of course, put them in line for repeated smitings by the Christians, who couldn't abide Jerusalem being a Muslim city (with some Jews and Christians, who seemed to have lived largely unmolested). All this despite the fact that the Christians are so fractious that a Muslim family has held the key to the Holy Sepulchre (built above the supposed site of Jesus' tomb) for 1,300 years because the various Christian sects trust them more than they trust each other.


But let's sprint forwards to the 19th-century. The Jews have been persecuted pretty relentlessly wherever they live: murdered and expelled from Britain (where they were made to  wear the Ten Commandments on their clothes in 1217) repeatedly, subject to murderous rampages all over Eastern Europe. A movement called Zionism appeared: the idea was that as God had promised them Israel, they should return there. Obviously this was music to the ears of Europe's anti-Semites, who saw it as a neat solution for getting rid of people they'd never accepted as a separate religious group, but understood as racially distinct (which the Jews also believed) and inferior. There was a Jewish movement which promoted integration, but it was soon drowned out, though some of the British, who occupied Palestine in the 20th-century, did wonder what would happen when the existing population was asked to accept an influx of immigrants claiming Divine Ownership of the land they'd lived in for thousands of years. But I guess that's what happens when God pokes his nose into demography. 


Anyway, the holocaust ended the debate. Europe certainly owed the Jews and the Zionists became the loudest voice representing them, so the seeds were sown for more generations of misery and conflict. The Palestinians (who 'don't exist', according to the American Christian right) split between secular political opposition and inflamed, bigoted hatred leading to antisemitism and a failure to distinguish between antisemitism and antizionism (much as Israel's political leaders and media cheerleaders scream antisemitism when anyone questions their military or political decisions) and the wars which attempted to strangle Israel at birth. 


So that's where we've left it. The Israelis have illegally occupied more and more of the Palestinians' land, grabbed the essential water supplies and have no intention of leaving. Sponsored, armed and funded by the US, there's no incentive on their behalf to agree a mutually respectable settlement. Most countries, concerned with not appearing antisemitic while keeping oil-rich Saudi Arabia sweet, have decided that turning the Palestinian territories into the world's largest concentration camp, is a small price to pay.


Which brings us to this week: the Palestinian bid to be recognised as a state. Are our political leaders going to discuss the case on its merits? 

Washington is keen to avoid carrying out a threat to veto a Palestinian request for full membership of the UN, a move likely to further damage America's already battered reputation in the Middle East, particularly following its strong backing for moves towards self-determination in the region this year. 

Israeli ministers have threatened retaliatory measures should the Palestinian bid succeed. They include tearing up the Oslo accords, under which the Palestinian Authority was given control of parts of the West Bank and Gaza, annexing the West Bank settlements and withholding tax revenues that Israel collects on behalf of the PA. The US Congress is also threatening to cut off financial aid to the Palestinians.

Strong-arm tactics as usual. Never mind the legitimate aspirations of a people imprisoned, prey to the propaganda of extremists… starve them into submission once more and put off normalising relations between Israel and its neighbours, Jews and Muslims for another generation. I guess what saddens me most, as someone with a little Jewish blood, is that Israel's treatment of the Palestinians echoes Christian nations' treatment of Jews: isolation, vilification, violence, suspicion, hatred and extermination. They say abused children are more likely to abuse others in turn - can it be the same for nations?

Encourage your MP to ask the UK government to vote for Palestinian recognition. Let's afford them the respect due to them as a people, and try once more for a settlement based on mutual respect and equal rights rather than the demands of realpolitik and political donations. It's time to stop treating the Palestinians as supplicants at a rich man's table, expecting them to be grateful for the crumbs we toss them. Treating them like this simply breeds hatred and resentment, and drives them into the arms of the fundamentalists who - like their Jewish equivalents - can never be persuaded of the need for agreement and peace, and who will always frame the argument as a zero-sum fight to the death. Rejecting the religious and racist discourses can only help: time to bring back the politics and ignore the sacred texts.

Say it with flowers…

I'm having enormous fun leafing through (sorry) the Victorian Illuminated Language of Flowers by Jean Marsh and illustrated by Kate Greenaway. They focus on the lovey-dovey stuff, but I'm more interested in the numerous ways you can be spiteful with a bouquet.

Here's the wreath for Paul Uppal's inevitable expulsion from Parliament:
Common Almond: Stupidity, Indiscretion; African Marigold means Vulgar Minds. Dogsbane: Deceit (apple thorns for 'deceitful charms') and Scarlet Auricula for Avarice

Basil for hatred, Belvedere for 'I declare against you'. Bilberry for treachery. Birdsfoot trefoil for revenge. Bramble communicates 'lowliness, envy or remorse', whereas a bud of white rose signifies a heart 'ignorant of love'. Yellow carnations are for disdain while White Catchfly conveys 'betrayed'. Darnel is for vice and dragonswort for horror (also Mandrake). Foxglove for insincerity and Frog Ophrys for Disgust. Hydrangeas go to the boastful while you should send Japan Rose to those with more looks than brain ('beauty is your only attraction') - though if s/he understands the flowers, s/he's not that thick. Lettuce, rather picturesquely, represents coldheartedness. And if anyone sends you any, you can just eat it.

Wild Liquorice is 'I declare against you', and lobelia is for malevolence… there's loads of this stuff.

Did anyone really use these codes, except in drippy poetry and beyond the most obvious flowers? It seems to have been a Victorian parlour game, the kind of activity swept away by the wireless, kinematograph and sending explicit telegrams ('sextographing', as it was known in the yellow press).

Perhaps it's time to revive it. Instead of awarding grades, I'll return essays with flowers pressed between the pages: clematis ('mental beauty'), white mulberry ('wisdom') or Venice Sumach ('intellectual excellence')  for the best work and Fig Marigold ('idleness') for the worst. Ground laurel ('perseverance') for those who put the effort in, common laurel in flower ('perfidy') or mock orange ('counterfeit') for the plagiarists.

Venetian sumach for the clever-clogs

Mock orange for cheating bounders

For my academic career, it has to be meadow saffron ('my happiest days are past').

As to my book-buying problem, the appropriate flower is scarlet poppy ('fantastic extravagance').

Anyway, it's Sweet Pea to you, because I have a train to catch (ten-week stock for promptness) or else I'll be receiving flax-leaved goldy-locks ('tardiness').

Who needs talent, when you've got faith?

With material this good, I might make this a regular feature: BAD CHRISTIAN ART. Stand aside Michelangelo, with your 'perspective' and 'ability'. Jesus directs Stephen Sawyer's paintbrush:

'Through Jesus' Eyes'

'When Angels Wait'

'No appointment necessary'.

The only thing worse than the execution is the stonewashed denim. I know 2000 years is a long time ago, but HELLO? STONEWASH?

Here's one by another artist. It's a humdinger. Now what did Redneck Jesus say about 'turning the other cheek'?

I intend to buy one of these prints and offer it as a prize in the near future.

Perhaps Mr. Sawyer will be offended. But he'll forgive me. That's the rules.