Architecture

Charles Jencks claimed that Modern Architecture died in St Louis, Missouri on July 15 1972 at 3.32pm.

The event was the demolition of slab blocks in the Pruitt-Igoe housing scheme in Missouri. The death of so young a patient - the scheme was designed and won prizes only 21 years earlier - was shocking. (Though not as much as the death, 30 years later, of the same architects World Trade Centre). But can it be counted as marking the death of a whole movement?

This patient belonged to a particular category of Modern Architecture which grew out of theories about how to provide modern low cost public housing. When applied in the particular circumstances of reinforcing the black ghetto in mid-century Missouri all the by now well known shortcomings of the theories were exposed: lack of defensible space, maintenance and structural problems, lack of ready and safe access, broken lifts, vandalism, a sense of isolation for law abiding tenants and a gradual sinking into an irretrievable situation. The death of the Pruitt-Igoe scheme provided proof that a subset of modern ideas could not deliver what they promised; in the words of Philip Johnson

We were thoroughly of the opinion that if you had good architecture the lives of the people would be improved, that architecture would improve people, and people improve architecture, until perfectibility would descend on us like the Holy Ghost, and we would be happy for ever after. This did not prove to be the case

Shortcomings were recognised long before 1972 however; as early as 1929 the German architectural journal Deutsche Bauhutte published photographs of a Bauhaus-designed housing project in Dessau showing cracks, peeling paint and rusted fittings, and the Ronan Point disaster of 1968 in England sounded the death-knell for high-rise point blocks as a solution to public sector housing problems. More generally architects had already written about their dissatisfaction with Modernist ideas. Robert Venturi's 1966 book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture had called for architects to stop being intimidated by the puritanical language of orthodox Modern architecture. So July 1972 cannot be accepted as a reliable date for the death of Modernism, if it has died at all.

Jencks of course was not just announcing the death of Modernism but announcing the arrival of a new style using the name Postmodernism. Whether he was the first to use this term in the context of architecture is debatable, but there is no doubt that the term is now widely used, and some buildings which are thus described are distinctly different from others which would be labelled unarguably Modern. The differences are not just observable in the grand architectural projects but in the more mundane features of everyday townscapes. The Modern MacDonalds is built in the style that Rayner Banham called the teenage uniform of white walls and flat roofs and oversize windows, the Postmodern in the neo-vernacular, which picks up on the cupolas of the nearby Georgian church & the Edwardian Carnegie Library. One can easily pick pairs of buildings to show a complete break from Modernism, this would be a biased selection which ignores important trends and links.

Classical Modernism came to the fore in the aftermath of the First World War. The main principles of its early protagonists - the need for purity of form and function, and the need for transparency and honesty in materials - now seem to be almost wholly explicable as a reaction to the carnage and chaos of the war. The early theorists also made much of the need to get away from the over-ornate and heavily decorated styles, both interior and external, of the nineteenth century, which were, ironically in view of current attitudes to Modernism, seen as oppressive and belonging to the rich. Thus Modernism in its early manifestations was also associated with the political ideas, if not necessarily of Communism then with ideals of equality and dignity for the working classes. In the Bauhaus this early Modernism also reflected William Morris-type ideas of respect for craft workers and rather muddled ideas of integrating craft and industrial processes. Other strands of Modernism, especially the Italian Futurists, laid greater stress on the Machine Age, on the speed of the modern era and the need for architecture and building to reflect the new industrial techniques and materials.

The Modernist architectural program depended, aesthetically, on a return to simplicity: Architecture, wrote Le Corbusier, is the masterly, correct and magnificent play of masses brought together in light. This desire to distil the subject to its essentials could be found in other fields at that time, for instance in the formalist project of mathematical philosophers such as Russell to distil arithmetic to its basic premisses. The Cubist experiments might also be seen as distilling art to a few basic forms, though underlying these experiments was the realisation that seeing and perception are complex, many-layered activities.

Thus the Modern movement in architecture could be seen to be related to, to be a part of, wider intellectual movements of the time, to be partaking of the zeitgeist. The problem with this kind of analysis is that it tends to select only those strands of the wider culture which fit the thesis. The painters of the time, apart from the Cubist experiment, were notable for their use of colour in often shockingly new juxtapositions, while the architects emphasised the use of a very restricted palette, white, grey or beige. Perhaps the Modernists were more influenced by the newer arts of photography and film, then purely in black and white.

The Postmodern is similarly seen to be part of the zeitgeist, particularly by Jencks who emphasises the links with the new movements in linguistics and semiotics, and by Venturi who looked to the influence of Pop art. One might also point to the new mathematical theories of chaos, the coming to the fore of biology, especially of molecular genetics, which emphasises diversity and variation as well as continuity, and to the growth of computers, which encourage variety by speeding up the communication of ideas, and allowing the analysis of data in all its variability rather than having to rely on abstractions such as the average man (a very nineteenth century idea which could be said to have influenced Modernist ideas about housing in particular). Colour has been allowed in to Postmodern architecture, reflecting the explosion of colour in film, television and the pigments available for textiles, paint and plastics. All these ideas are now seen as organic rather than abstract, which is another irony since the early Modern architects saw their art as organic rather than overly formal.

Theories however cannot in themselves predict the particular form of building which will take place, or rather the style which will be adopted. Pugin for example had ideas for the redesign of the city which are remarkably similar to Modernist ideas of planning, but his architecture could hardly be more different. Function, form, materials and construction, site and context provide more useful headings for analysing the differences between Modernism and Postmodernism.

Function, (or functionalism) seems to have acquired contradictory meanings. Sullivan said that Form follows function but Klotz expresses a common reaction when he talks about the obtrusive, meaningless uniformity that marks the functionalist boxes and cubes defacing mile upon mile of our environment, that is form regardless of function. The contradiction arises from the confusion between the function of parts (the materials and construction method) and the function of the building as a whole, or rather of its use. Of course the two cannot be wholly separated, but it is function of the whole which is being considered here.

During the 19th century many new functions emerged for which new types of building were needed - factories, railway stations, docks for example. Social changes - the expansion of the middle classes, the need for sanitary housing for workers, universal schooling, hospitals, the rise of huge and increasingly multinational corporations - meant traditional modes of provision needed to be rethought. Behrens, who taught Mies van der Rohe, Corbusier and Gropius, was the architect for AEG, responsible for imaginative early Modern functional solutions to the problems of factory design.

It was not until after World War II that Modernism, however briefly, became widely associated with uniformity. This was partly because of the great amount of reconstruction needed, combined with a belief in the power of planning, allied to the kind of linear mathematics that had worked so well in meeting both civilian and military needs during the war: City planning had become that strange mixture of ineffectual sociological analyses and implacable zoning in the words of Portoghesi. Modernist ideas had also by then become associated with a reaction against Nazism and it seemed as if everyone jumped on the bandwagon of a belief in the rightness of functionalist design. This led to a uniformity of glass and concrete towers (such as the north side of London's Victoria Street) and a confusion as to the function of buildings - Mies Lakeshore apartments with their glass curtain walls look like office blocks.

The desire to reintroduce some 'coding' of function in design is one of the developments that Jencks identifies as Postmodern. However in talking about 'dual coding'- speaking on one level to an elite who care about specifically architectural meanings and on the other to the public at large in their familiar language, he repeats the kind of arrogance of Modernism in presuming that architects are uniquely qualified to interpret the functional needs of others.

Classical Modernism uses a group of forms, mostly cubic and rectangular, but including cylinders and half cylinders, echoing Cézanne's remark that one must detect in Nature the cylinder, sphere and cone. In the case of Mies Barcelona Pavilion these were reduced virtually to planes. However early Modern buildings also referred to other forms, such as Behrens turbine factory in the shape of a rivet, and were not immune to playful conceits such as Loos' design for the Chicago Tribune - ideas now reminiscent of the irony associated with Postmodernism. Other buildings, especially in the 1930's had forms reminiscent of, and clearly influenced by, ocean liners. The forms of Wright's prairie houses, very horizontal and rectangular, have clear associations with vernacular form that is another feature of Postmodern design. Terry Farrel's design for the building now used by MI6, though clearly Postmodern, uses only Modernist rectangles and cylinders without the purity and proportionality of Modernism. Le Corbusier himself made use of the plasticity of concrete in the curved nun-like forms of the roof of the chapel at Ronchamp and even more dramatically at Chandighar. In form therefore there is no marked disjunction between Modernism and Postmodernism, not even in its most jokey manifestations such as hot dog stands in the shape of frankfurters.

In the 19th Century engineers had been responsible for masterpieces of iron construction such as the Crystal Palace, the Eiffel Tower and Paddington Station. These achievements were taken on board by the Modernists, but metal framing for buildings such as tall office blocks ran foul of fire regulations. Truth to materials was a tenet of Modernism honoured as much in the breach - Mies Seagram building uses steel I-beams as external decoration on top of the structural beams encased in concrete to meet the fire regulations. And although, to quote Banham In Paris in the early twenties it was possible to talk as if modern architecture had been caused by reinforced concrete many classics, such as the Villa Savoie, were merely rendered and painted over to look like concrete. Hitchcock however, writing in 1929, foresaw the frank Postmodern use of brick in Modern forms, once their traditional interpretation had been forgotten.

The use of metal and concrete frames allowed Modernists the freedom of non-load-bearing walls; modern types of glass allowed the invention of the picture window and the glass curtain wall and the freedom to construct windows which were integral to the wall, not an interruption to it. That these materials offered the potential for the mass-production of building parts in factories fuelled the dreams of cheap, functional machines for living in which proved so illusory. For a time the Modernists despised the use of expensive bronze and marble, though Mies van der Rohe was never averse to the use of such luxury materials in his projects.

Postmodernism has not been inspired by comparable revolutions in construction methods and materials, except possibly the coloured pipe. Postmodern architects continue to make use of the freedom of frame construction, without feeling the need to express the form, except in playful ways. Flexibility rather than mass production, in modern factory methods means that decorative features can be produced to order to give an individuality to Postmodern buildings which almost recreates what could be achieved by the hand-craftworkers beloved of Morris and the Bauhaus. Pigments for concrete are another method of trying to give a human face to new buildings.

Modern architecture could not have developed features such as large windows without the development of methods of making the internal temperature of buildings less dependent on the external climate. The need for ducting for air conditioning, heating and cabling, together with the lift mechanisms in tall buildings led to the development of another version of Modernist truth to form and function which led ultimately to the placing of these services as a form of skeleton on the outside of the building. High-tech buildings such as the Pompidou Centre are clearly in the Modernist tradition of truth to form, but are Postmodern in the wit and irony of the style.

Corbusier introduced the piloti as a method of integrating the building into the landscape, though when combined with tall buildings in towns this merely had an alienating effect. Modernism in cities is now generally associated with a disregard for the site and surrounding buildings - even whole town centres - and with dominance and oppression. Postmodernism is associated with a desire to respect the existing forms and language of buildings but does not always achieve this.


It is particularly ironic when Postmodern clashes with Modern and a building such as MI6 seems threatening, perhaps because we know its function rather than because of anything to do with its style. The Hindu temple at Neasden would be a perfect postmodern building were it not entirely authentic in purpose, design and mode of construction, everything except context.

So is there really a change from Modernism to Postmodernism? Hitchcock, writing in 1929, seems to have foreseen at least some of the features of Postmodernism, calling them natural developments of what he called the New Pioneers: he foresaw the rapid changes in the needs of large corporations, the change in the treatment of surfaces and the development of new kinds of ornamentation, particularly the use of colour - all except the emergence of neo-classicism. Modernism itself was never the concrete monolith it is now thought of being, and Postmodernism also consists of a plurality of styles: high-tech, neo-vernacular, the classicism of Quinlan Terry and deconstructionism. The buildings of Wright (even the Guggenheim), Lutyens and Mackintosh now seem more Postmodern than Modern. Even Jencks had to invent the term Late Modern to interpose between the two. In effect we cannot know now; the distinctions, if any, will depend upon what comes next, will be clear to those who can look back to Postmodern as well as back to Modern.


BIBLIOGRAPHY

Allsopp,B 1960 A General History of Architecture London,Pitman Publishing

Balcombe,G 1985 History of Building London,Batsford

Banham,R 1975 Age of the Masters London,Architectural Press

Dearstyne,H 1986 Inside the Bauhaus London, Architectural Press

Fry,M 1969 Art in a Machine Age London, Methuen & Co

Hitchcock,H-R 1929 Modern Architecture New York, Payson & Clarke

Hochman,E 1990 Architects of Fortune New York, Fromm International Publishing

Hughes,R 1991 The Shock of the New London, Thames & Hudson

Jencks,C 1984 The Language of Post-Modern Architecture London, Academy Editions

Kidson,P et al 1979 A History of English Architecture London, Penguin

Klotz,H 1988 The History of Postmodern Architecture Cambridge Mass, MIT Press

Kolb,D 1990 Postmodern Sophistications University of Chicago Press

Portoghesi,P 1983 Postmodern New York, Rizzoli

Robinson,C &Herschman,J 1987 Architecture Transformed London,MIT Press

Venturi,R 1977 Complexity & Contradiction in Architecture London, Architectural Press

Zevi 1957 Architecture as Space New York, Horizon Press

"Towards another architecture" series in Architectural Review, July 1976 to May 1977

A Cabinet of all the talents

When Lord Derby found himself - perhaps unexpectedly - forming a Conservative government in 1866, the talent available for a Cabinet was not all that he might have hoped for

Who could be Foreign Secretary? Fill the shoes of the formidable Earl of Clarendon, who had filled the post for the defeated Liberals?

Why not the noble Earl himself?

I forget exactly what the Earl said when declining the offer, but decline it he did

Lord Derby appointed his own son instead

Evolution in all things

Now thought of in relation to life/living things

Inanimate things evolve too - even the watch made by the blind watchmaker.

Examples of things whose evolution has been noticeable in my life time:

Packaging, esp batteries (no bubble packs now) & cans

Cars

Ready meals, esp spag carbonara recipes

Prices - esp supermarkets; a whole new economics here?

Evolution in one area leads to redundancy in another eg cans with ring pulls means no use for can openers

Competition not just in prices but in other aspects of the shopping experience. How to predict which will come to the fore?

Evolution leads sometimes to convergence, sometimes to divergence eg cars are now much more similar to each other than the different models were in 1900; Formula 1 distinguished only by the adverts & colour, not by shape, never mind the mechanics

Partly because 'we' copy good ideas; partly because we think of modifications to 'solve' problems with existing designs. Partly because its easier to conform eg in the standardised dimensions of household appliances to fit into, yet allow diversity in, fitted kitchens

The biological theory of evolution through natural selection, as espoused, tends to confuse change through space & time. Can Einsteins relativity help here?

Was Darwin conscious of the attempt to fuse these two? His early science - geological - involved transects across space to deduce processes through time

He journeyed round the world, marvelling at the differences he saw; his theory coalesced in the Galapagos, isolated in space AND THEREFORE IN TIME? or

Darwin voyaged through space but concluded that the variations he saw were due to voyages through time - the Galapagos were isolated in space  changes took place only in time) ?

Global warming may cause Scottish alpine plants to migrate to higher altitudes rather than adapt their phenotype etc etc. 'It is easy to move, hard to change' (John RG Turner Spectator 29 June 2002 p37)

What does this say about human migration/adaptation? Think about sickle cell/malaria; advantage accrues only to those who stay in malarial areas. And so we come to skin colour?

Not just space v time but also many v one intelligence; focus may be on Bill Gates, Microsoft & Windows but 'he' obviously is just the focus for many many people working on computers & bits of programming, not just at Microsoft, working out what all their various needs have in common & recognising these commonalities, bringing them all together in one system - WINDOWS - which different people with very different aims & objectives can use in myriad ways

This raises the question of whether some centralising force is necessary, or if all these people, beavering away on their own concerns, somehow coalesce in a process not unlike morphic resonance or maybe Adam Smiths hidden hand

'It is almost as bad as the Kentucky State School Board, which a few years ago replaced the word 'evolution' in its biology curriculum with 'change over time'' Antony Beevor Spectator Diary 29 June 2002 p8, complaining about political correctness, but what is wrong with this particular usage?

Compressing the Human Memory File

… the amount of culture to be transmitted orally was beyond the capacity of a small group to achieve even in a long lifetime … Priests by progressive degrees of abstraction & symbolisation … were able to turn the written record into a device for preserving & transmitting ideas & feelings & emotions that had never taken any visible or material form … the development of symbolic methods of storage immensely increased the capacity of the city as container … this condensation & storage, for the purpose enlarging the boundaries of the community in time & space is one of the singular functions performed by the city … "The city" as Emerson observed, "lives by remembering" - Lewis Mumford: The City in History

Anthony Blunt was the worlds expert on Poussin. He carried the details of Poussin pictures in his head because the then available methods of reproduction were primitive - in particular there were few ways of making coloured copies. According to Brian Sewell, Blunt was devastated when, having managed to curate the worlds first exhibition of Poussin (at the Royal Academy?) he realised, on seeing two particular works together in the same room for the first time, that one of them could not be by Poussin - his memory checker was at fault

Training the memory was an important part of education in ancient times. Written sources were scarce or non-existent or hard to come by - memory was the only way of being able to check eg Bible quotations. Even in my own lifetime learning by heart - especially of poetry - was an important skill. Dorothy L Sayers - via Lord Peter Wimsey - made great play of this kind of quotation, & she was not the only one. When did The Times crossword stop regarding quotation as a legitimate form of clueing?

One of my university lecturers comforted me in my inability to remember a statistical formula by pointing out that I need only remember which page of the textbook it was on

My memory has in fact always worked like this, more than as a complete Book of Verse or whatever; I remember that there is a poem about Daffodils & it is on a right hand page somewhere in the middle of the book, which I then need to consult to remind myself of the details of the poem. Or I may remember that Wordsworth wrote a poem about daffodils & use appropriate reference works to track this down

With the arrival of the internet we now are all potential citizens of the virtual city & there are even more ways of checking memory at the click of a button

The computer analogy is useful. We may think that our memories have deteriorated because of our general inability to learn to remember chunks of text. But looked at the other way our capacity for memory has increased exponentially by using a form of compression - we need only remember the keyword to locate & therefore remember - or rather remind ourselves - of the poem

Implications for education? Eg doctors, reputed to learn more new words than an undergraduate learning Russian. Particularly difficult to learn this vocabulary in these days when they have not learned Latin & Greek at school & are therefore unable to make the etymological connections. But why do they need such a large & specialised verbal vocabulary? Now any doctor can have an easily available 'picture book' in which to look up the detailed anatomy of eg the groin to check the specific bit of muscle which may be causing the problem without ever giving it a name. Without such pictures precise recollection of the technical name for that muscle may be, literally, vital

What effect has been made on our brains/memories by the vast number of pictures we all now see - in colour - on a daily basis? (TV, film, magazines) Have they simply replaced our own 'film' of the world around us which we might otherwise be seeing, noting & remembering? Is there any difference arising from the fact that the pictures we see are in 2-dimensions, while the real world is in 3 dimensions? Is this just another form of compression? Do we store our 'real world' pictures in our own version of compression to 2 dimensions? Do we store copies of 2-dimensional photographs together with a code for converting them back to 3 dimensions? Or do we only ever 'see' 2 dimensions with our eyes? Which are somehow converted to 3 by our brain?

God, science & chickens

God doesnt really come into this, but when science is being promoted as the answer to everything, I have another question

Why did the chicken cross the road?

Because his muscles twitched & propelled his legs forwards?

The thing is, times arrow travels in only one direction for science. And so Why tends to mean How & the answer is Because of what went before

So the chickens muscles twitched because ..... because ..., because ...

And ultimately, because a chicken laid an egg

Lighting Up The Brain

We firmly believe that the brain is the organ of thought. We know that because thats what it feels like

We used to know - or at least to think - that the heart is the seat of the emotions - because thats what it feels like: we have all had one of those Moon River moments when our lover comes near. It took science to show us that the heart is nothing more than a muscle & a pump which reacts to feelings only in a mechanical way

Science however supports our opinion about the brain, doesnt it? Through the miracles of modern technology, different bits can be shown to light up depending on what kinds of thoughts or thinking are going on

Wittgenstein once asked a friend why people used to think that the sun goes round the earth. Quick as a flash the friend replied Because thats what it looks like. Long pause, then So what would it have looked like if it looked like the earth goes round the sun ?

Is there another explanation for the way that the brain seems to light up on these scans?

Well, for analogy we can look to the old fashioned technology of the PABX telephone exchange. Bulbs lit up to signal incoming calls, but the bulb was not the call. It was simply a signal, a response to the person making the call which in turn summoned action by the telephonist to connect the line to the recipient. The whole system was there simply to facilitate communication between human beings, it was not responsible for, did not initiate, that communication.

Of course our newer technology does that too but at increasingly many removes. Not too many of us are now fooled into thinking that a voice talking to us necessarily implies the existence, at this very moment, of a real live human at the other end of the line, but we know that at some stage human agency created all those annoying messages

Anyone who has seen a new born baby knows that we come in to this world with certain qualities & characteristics, we are not blank sheets of paper on which our characters & personalities are to be written by upbringing & environment. Conversely, anyone who has seen a newly dead body knows that we are not simply the stuff of which we are made

We think that thought is central to existence - cogito ergo sum. But conversely, precisely because I dont think, all sorts of things go on, just as I expect. Not just those things such as breathing & digestion, but habits & routines such as driving, walking, playing the right notes on the piano. It was the English philosopher Alfred North Whitehead who pointed out that our parents & teachers have it precisely the wrong way round when they exhort us to think about what we are doing at all times, to concentrate. Human life depends on our maximising the number of things that we can do without thinking, so that we can concentrate our thought on learning new things. When something disrupts or interrupts our routine, when we have to think, then we get confused. Exactly where am I? How did the car get here? Why am I lying on my back? Why isnt the coffee jar in its usual place? Why hasnt the kettle boiled even though I switched it on?

We can explain the workings of the telephone exchange in great detail - or of the internet, or of the African drums. We have not in any significant sense explained what is happening to the humans connected to the system. We can have detailed telephone directories to list, or to analyse, the people who are connected to the system (eg Yellow Pages classifies people by whether they are a plumber, a doctor, a library). But this does nothing to explain why Mrs Smith calls Mrs Jones to relay the latest gossip

Have I just ended up in a Kantian position?

But the point I am labouring towards is that, if the brain is not the organ of thought, what is?

The implication must be that somehow its the whole of the body, the whole of our senses (does Roger Penrose, with his Emperors New Mind , bear on this point? Is that what his quantum theory is all about?). So what are the implications eg for brain death? What is life, indeed

And if, in some sense, its the whole of us, all our parts linked together by the telephone exchange of the brain, might our existence (consciousness?) also not depend on our links to others & to our environment? Truly no man is an island but, in Donnes original sense, just a piece of the continent

And when we die our molecules disperse & reassemble (Ilkley Moor ); do they take anything such as knowledge, experience, with them? This seems like one of those daft questions, close to ouija etc. But ouija is a leap from the thought to a certainty of conclusion. How would a scientist approach this kind of question. Might a true 'theory of everything' lead one towards these questions?

Of course, in one sense, this is just an old Greek idea, that common sense is just what the other 5 senses have in common. These days many seem to think that common sense means everything you knew by the age of 16, or those things for which the university of life provides the best education

Wash & squash

Local radio this morning was enjoining us to wash & squash plastic bottles before depositing them in the new recycling facility

Have the waste recycling teams consulted the water industry about this? Arent we supposed to be saving as much water as possible? Not leaving the tap running while soaping our hands, brushing our teeth, or running it off if it has been standing in lead pipes overnight? Giving up power showers & putting the modern equivalent of a brick in the cistern?

Since I wash up the old fashioned way, I dont know if its feasible to put plastic bottles in the dishwasher. Along with all the glass & tins which we are also instructed to wash.

Why are we supposed to do this? To reduce the smell? Ironic, just when they have introduced fortnightly collection of our smelly, non-recyclable waste. Or to reduce contamination in the recycling process? Then Im sure centralised washing by the industry would make a more efficient use of water

Have Defra consulted the water industry? Oh yes, I forgot. They must have done because we have joined up government now

Clinical trials, asparagus & the placebo effect

For a hedgehog (who is really a fox) there is a particular joy in academic journals. It is so easy to be diverted by something which has nothing to do with the subject you are supposed to be researching - at least if you are doing it the old fashioned bound volume way, in a library

And so I once read, in the Proceedings of the Royal Society (I think), of the scientific investigations carried out in London on the original Siamese Twins. As a way of testing whether they had independent digestive systems, investigators fed asparagus to one twin. Then smelt the urine of each. As far as I recall, only one urine sample displayed the characteristic odour which is imparted by the vegetable

On another occasion I read one of those end of term articles which the BMJ used to carry in July & August. A group of SHOs had investigated the prevalence of the asparagus phenomenon, whose very existence was in dispute. They found that some people were indeed affected in this way. But estimates of prevalence were confounded by the fact that the population can also be divided into those who can & those who cant detect the smell with their own olfactory organs

All this by way of another sideways approach to my subject

New research has just been reported - the placebo effect does exist! It has a real biological basis or precursor! Our old friends, endorphins, released when you think something will do you good. From what I read in the press, the question of how that belief is engendered was not addressed in this study

I have long thought that, if there is a placebo effect, there should also be a nocebo effect. If you believe it will do you harm, it will. Or even if you just dont expect it will do you any good, it wont. Presumably with biological bases too

And so, can the population also be divided according to which - placebo or nocebo - they are susceptible to? Optimists or pessimists? Those who believe it only does you good if it tastes nasty, il faut souffrire pour etre belle. And those who believe a spoonful of sugar is required. That comfortable feet do more for your inner beauty than painful killer heels?

The effect on the gold standard for clinical trials could be profound. As I understand it, part of the reason for taking the placebo-controlled, randomised, double blind trial as the gold standard was the observation of a hierarchy of size of effect. Observational trials reported the biggest effect, & so on down to the double blind. So this must be the undisputed effect of the drug, right?

Well, perhaps, But then along comes fully informed consent. Suddenly the patient knows he might be getting only a dummy. This can surely, only increase the size of or even induce the nocebo effect. An otherwise effective drug fails to work its magic

Bompa

Bompa was my baby name for my mothers father. Sometimes still used in later life though usually I called him G'pa

He worked as a cotton dyer & printer. When I was old enough to know about it he was the foreman. On my mothers marriage certificate he is down as a cotton labourer

It used to upset me that, whenever I had a new dress, he would say Come here, change his glasses & examine the skirt. This always included making a small crease on the bias, to examine the quality & do a quick thread count. Usually he would say Yes, a nice piece of cloth that. Sometimes it was hust Hmm

I wanted him to tell me it was pretty

*****

When he was 15 Bompa went off to fight the Kaiser. He never talked to me about his experiences, but he did like to refer - nostalgically & with a chuckle - to Wipers & Galley-Pole-Eye. The latter with a long, falling Derbyshire O in the middle

Ypres & Gallipoli, in other words. I checked with the regiments web site & found that they were at both, so its possible he was there

Parents & children

Until the arrival of the free bus pass I had not truly appreciated the astonishing numbers of people whose children are also entitled to one. And I dont mean student passes

Pensioner children of even more venerable parents

In quite a high proportion of these families the children are providing important elements of care for the parent, including daily visits, doing their shopping etc. So another economic effect of the bus pass has been quite a useful addition to discretionary expenditure in these families, or increased amounts of care, because delivering the care often involves bus trips. Thus relieving social services. Though, in the interests of considering minuses as well as pluses, they may also, by enabling parents to stay in their own home for longer, be contributing to the shortage of supply in the housing market

How to spend my taxes

I visited my GP yesterday. He gave me some advice. In my best interests

He wants me to change my life style.

In a way that will

• 
  
  increase my chances of getting dementia


• 
  
  ditto, cancer


• 
  
  cost the state - me & my fellow tax payers - a fortune

He wants me to stop smoking.

Well I look forward to the continuing pension payments, free travel & prescriptions, winter fuel payments etc etc

The pump

When Christian Barnard carried out the first heart transplant in South Africa there was a degree of alarm in the West Indies. We may have been freed from slavery, but watch out, now they want your organs.

The Mighty Sparrow added a new piece of musical advice to his repertoire. Disguise your heart. Call it a pump.

I left my pump in San Francisco. If I give my pump to you, will you handle it with care? I still have my copy of the LP though unfortunately, not anything to play it on now.

This is a bit of a sideways introduction to a small paean in praise of that unsung technological triumph of our age - the electric pump. Dont know much about the technology involved, to tell the truth, but they are now so small & quiet, yet so much more powerful.

The effect on our landscape - at least the urban one - has gone little remarked. No water towers now, nor huge water tanks on the top of high rise buildings. No loss of pressure when your downstairs neighbour runs a bath.

Have pumps also contributed to the disappearance of gas holders, or is that just the switch to natural gas?

And what a relief to have just small quiet pumps for the central heating in place of one of those alarming clangy things.

But how scary to think of the consequences if the electricity were to go off & we lost all that pumping power. The decay of European cities in C4 & C5 would be minor in comparison.

Link

The Best of the Mighty Sparrow

Great Aunt Adie

Pronounced Addy. She was my grandmothers sister, the only other member of the Irish side of the family I ever knew.

She lived in Glasgow- the widow of a sea captain. She came to visit from time to time.

She seemed extremely old & stately to me. Large, well-corseted, well-dressed, hair done up in some kind of bun. She was an expert knitter - her Christmas present to me was usually a twin-set. I particularly remember one in soft grey with a royal blue zig zag pattern round the necks. They used to arrive carefully wrapped in tissue paper in a cardboard box wrapped up in a brown paper parcel.

I remember her teaching me to play Pelmanism. This is a card game where all the cards are laid out face down. You take it in turns to pick up a pair; if they match you keep them, if not you lay them back down again & try to remember where they are. The one with the biggest pile at the end wins.

When Aunt Adie died - I was 9 - she left my mother a beautiful folding card table. To me she left a piano. Also beautiful - walnut? - with an inlaid pattern of birds & leaves & 2 brass candlesticks which folded back.

I tried hard. But I lacked the co-ordination of ear, hand & brain to be able to play pleasingly or well. So I gave up after Grade 3 or 4.

Well, I had to. We were moving to a smaller house, in the city, & my mother said the piano had to go - there was no room. It was lucky that someone was found to pay me a pound or two for it - by then one normally had to pay someone to take a paino off your hands.

Mind your language

Much fuss about the N-word again

My own absolute hate is for ethnic minority. If someone uses the N-word with malign intent you know they are beneath contempt. Even they usually know they give offence. Thats why they do it

But ethnic minority is racism under the guise of, ever so benign, liberalism. Puts 'them' in their place. Which 'we' demonstrate by acknowledging that 'they' have rights, even if they are in the minority. And, poor things, its not their fault they were born like that. We know white is superior in all sorts of ways - did you see that research about school readiness the other week?

Excuse me, but who really make up the worlds ethnic minority?

Avoid alcohol

If you get medicine on prescription, or even over the counter, the label may say avoid alcohol

Avoid has distinct overtones of try not to take; alternatively it means do not take alcohol under any circumstances while taking this drug

I once saw a poster in a hospital pharmacy explaining that undesirable consequences range from facial flushing to death. So there is a need to explain the strength of this injunction, especially to alcoholics, but even to social drinkers. Or even to consumers of sherry trifle, or salad which may be dressed with wine vinegar

Otherwise people may fail to take a drug which could do them good, even after a single glass of wine

In the 1970s it was popularly believed in some quarters that the combination of port or brandy + stilton could have fatal consequences for those on one type of heart medication

Unless you know why, you cant make a considered judgement about whether to risk - the plus of therapeutic effects against the negative of combination with alcohol

Especially as some drugs which are potentially very dangerous in conjunction with alcohol - perhaps over a longer, chronic time period - eg paracetamol & HRT - carry no warning

Leonard Cohen

People often say that Leonard Cohen is too gloomy & depressing - music to commit suicide by

But the odd thing is, if youre really down, those songs fit the mood &, actually, lift you up

I once tried to convert a friend round to my point of view. He said that, in his opinion, while Cohen might be said to be the poet of our generation, Dylan was its reporter*. And therefore superior


Favourite LP has to be New Skin for the Old Ceremony

*Leonard Cohen is the Samuel Beckett of pop - Stephen Dalton

How old are you?

Simple question - though a peculiarly sensitive one. Especially for ladies - allegedly. Is date of birth still shown on the British Drivers Licence? Such a fuss about it when they were introduced in the 1970s

Historical characters routinely have their age indicated only by their year of birth. Good enough for most purposes, though crucial bits of interpretation can be lost if, for example, you do not know the precise date on which they reached their majority

For those of us still alive, year of birth is good enough for most administrative purposes. Birthdays are of purely personal interest, & also, if we are lucky, important to friends & family

Sometimes, however, they matter in an official world. When, exactly, can you buy cigarettes? Leave school? Fight a war? Get a drivers licence? Or a bus pass

Have sex. Or be forced to retire from work? Sententious points, matters for wider political debate, dragging in issues of gender & sexual orientation as well as just age discrimination

The so-called millennium bug meant that it was not a simple matter to adopt, always & everywhere, the recording of everybodys full date of birth in a computer database. Much ingenuity went in to finding ways of coping with people who were born in 18 hundred & something, or would reach a significant milestone in 2000 & something, without having to use precious computer storage for all those redundant 19s

One of the worst aspects of all the domesday scenarios presented to us as the year 2000 approached was the calumny heaped on those of us who, allegedly, failed to realise that this would happen one day

But having enough computer space for 4-digit years does not solve all problems. I dont mean to be flippant, but there is the 9/11 problem. How strange that the London version should have happened 7/7, thus avoiding some confusion

Im not about to launch in to the realms of numerology. Just to remark that different conventions provide traps for the unwary, with potentially awful consequences when DD/MM is confused with MM/DD

Day of birth matters too. Mondays child etc. And time. Especially if youre a twin. But even as a singleton it somehow seems an essential part of my identity that I was born at 5.40pm on a Sunday

An astrologer would want to know not just exact time & date, but also place of birth

Maybe a judge would too. I cant remember whether the following tale represents an actual case or a purely theoretical legal conundrum

There were 2 cousins. One born December 31, 1905. The other born January 1, 1906

Both were grandsons of a deceased American millionaire. Under the terms of his will, the elder was the heir to a fortune

The problem: one was born in Sydney, Australia, the other in Los Angeles. On any unified, universal time system, such as GMT, the one born in 1906 was older than the one born in 1905

Not as simple to solve as one might think. The implication of using GMT to decide would be that we all might need to change our date of birth when travelling or migrating


The question of a persons age is not just of personal or individual interest. In the field of statistical analysis even more conundrums arise

To be continued

The British Library Catalogue

Since it contains just about every book published in England for at least 200 years, the British Library catalogue is a great way of tracking down a half-remembered title or author, or an incomplete reference. Or checking if there are any books on a particular subject

Some public libraries have only computerised their catalogues for acquisitions in the last 10 years or so. Their card catalogues for older stock are wonderful, but have obvious limitations in this world of search engines. The one in Manchester however has one advantage not afforded by a computer: whole drawerfuls of cards can be date-ranked at a glance, just by the depth of blackness of the dust on their top edges

The tyranny of the paycheck

My grandfather always handed over his unopened wage packet to my grandmother. She gave him his pocket money

My father was paid with 2 bankers drafts. One went straight to my mother who paid it into her Post Office Savings Bank account

As far as I know neither my mother nor my gran was ever required to account in any detail to her husband for how the money was spent

I have always had my own 'pay packet'. I cant really imagine what it must be like to depend on a husband, however generous & relaxed he might be about it

And I wonder how many fathers of daughters today would contemplate with any equanimity the prospect of their daughter being entirely dependent on another man?

And yet

In the 1970s I used to get into trouble with my feminist friends. Although I enjoyed my work, wouldnt have it any other way, most of my friends who were my age did not work. Many wished that they could. But I used to say Whoever thinks that Liberation means being tied to an office from 9 to 5 needs their head examined

Link

The Goat's Lunch Pail: Oddiversary

Pete Sampras

Pete Sampras actually bears a distinct resemblance to my father - even that slightly hang dog look with bottom lip sagging

I had largely lost my teenage love of tennis when he came on the scene. No longer made a point of watching Wimbledon. No more Virginia Wade - who did maths at Sussex University - to inspire me. So I did not see Sampras play all that much

One single shot really did it for me though. High back hand volley. Back to, & close to, the net, within inches of the tramlines. Jumping, arm fully stretched up. Ball landed inches over the net, right by the tramlines on the opposite side of the court

How did he do that?

Babies on buses

The second best thing about Buggy Buses is that they give you an opportunity to be a completely objective observer of babies. Babies with whom you have no emotional connection, who are not interacting with their mum either. Just lying there, on their own

The thing is - they are never, ever, still. Unless zonked out of course

Eyes, head, feet, legs, hands, fingers, toes. A constant interaction with, curiosity about, their world

Seemingly random movements - especially the constant reaching out, touching toes, nose, looking at hands, something that crosses their field of vision. Sometimes having a little conversation with themselves

I interpret this as intensive circuit building. Brain & body. Measuring the world, distinguishing self & non self. Building awareness. Consciousness

An ID that can never be captured by simple biometrics. Or any cultural/ethnic/community label which others may slap on them

It also may provide a partial explanation of why children who suffer serious neglect or abuse at an early age suffer (irreparable?) neurological damage

Eleven +

I passed mine. Mr Slack, our class teacher, gave out the results. I ran, too fast, all the way down the hill to tell my mother. Who took it very matter of factly

Of course I am grateful for all the opportunities it gave me. What on earth would life have been like if I had failed?

But I had friends who did, & didnt deserve to. And what if the tests had been in things I would never be really good at? Singing, ballet, drawing, ball games? No matter how hard I practised

*****

Iwas showered with gifts - which may well have doubled up as presents for my 11th birthday later that summer

My parents gave me a proper grown up office size desk. Bought at auction, polished up & repaired, with new brass handles

A great aunt gave me her ancient Raleigh Ladies Sports bicycle

My grandparents gave me a proper fountain pen, with a gold nib

Another great aunt gave me a ladies wrist watch - small, gold, with 9 diamonds

I felt rather guilty about all this spoiling

Nina Simone

Such a rewarding voice to listen to. Phrasing in the Sinatra class. With rhythm

I played Balm in Gilead over & over when I was having surgery & all those hospital visits. Over 20 years ago now

Baltimore also has a special place in my heart. But really, anything will do

She reminded me a bit of Mrs Gandhi, with those hooded eyes, basilisk stare & stillness. Totally self contained. Seemingly

I was twice present at official functions where Mrs G was guest of honour. Clearly not enjoying herself. I wasnt anywhere near her, nor, thank heavens, required to speak. Scary lady

I treasure the memory of an interview Nina Simone gave to Richard & Judy on their old morning show. She gave absolutely NOTHING, leaving the two of them flustered & flummoxed, casting frantic glances at each other

Mongrel

When I was at Junior school we all wanted to be able to call ourselves a true mongrel

Mongrels were highly desirable. Only effete snobs with more money than sense would want to spend money on a dog for a dog. Certainly not on one that was overbred, inbred & temperamental. Not when there were plenty of dependable, unpretentious, friendly mongrels looking for a good home

In terms of us children, a true mongrel was one who could claim English, Welsh, Scottish & Irish blood. I came close, but nobody in the family could think of any Welsh ancestors

Our family mongrel was called Scrap - a black & white terrier (mostly). For the second half of his life he had to run on only 3 legs because of an accident with a car the week we moved to the city

The speech of Aristophanes

My introduction to Platos Symposium came via a 1960s BBC tv programme with the Beyond The Fringe crew. A bit of a scandal at the time because -sotto voce - it justified homosexuality. Shock, horror.

The programme bored me. Silly, unattractive men dressed up in togas, spouting archly, getting drunk.

It was intriguing though to learn that that deeply serious, academic, intellectual event, the modern symposium, had its origin as a word for a drunken feast.

And I was impressed by the bit about the other half. Zeus chopping us in two for getting uppity. Condemning us to a lifelong search to make ourselves complete, in which some are lucky enough to succeed.

I finally got around to reading it & the speech of Aristophanes is one of those things I go back to again & again.

Its not a justification for either homo- or hetero- sexuality - rather the opposite. Love is just the same for all of us, it just depends on whether your 4-footed original was male, female or hermaphrodite.

Link

BFI Film & TV Database The DRINKING PARTY (1965)

Genetics is a social science

As students we used to spend a lot of time discussing whether social science is a science. Without the rigour, the controlled experiments, how could it ever be?



In my thirties I worked with scientists & medics & started to wonder - Is Science A Science?



In my 40s I started to grapple with trying to understand what the geneticists were up to. Read about the triumph of hard rigorous physics over fuzzy biologists



Then we got a bit of back tracking - of course we meant nature via nurture



Now they seem to have got a bit further, talking several genes interacting with environments



It will be correlation matrices, cluster analysis, Principal Components & hierarchical models next. Mosaic even

Link

Why Human Genetics is a Social Science

The Beatles

The Schotts Miscellany which recorded the Blair years for The Times was my introduction to this admirable mans work. So much must go into boiling down a mass of data so that it is both digestible & revealing

These thoughts prompted by the one on The Beatles in Saturdays Times

The Beatles seem to diffuse the whole of my Sixth Form years. Such excitement

Thing is, Pop Music was for Secondary Modern school children. Grammar school children should be above that, interested in classical. We certainly werent Teddy Boys, into Rock'n'Roll

The few Elvis fans were viewed with alarm. Skiffle was OK. Good, harmless fun. Even Church concerts were enlivened by a skiffle band - washboard, double bass made out of tea chest & broomstick

Trad jazz was also OK. A bit intellectual even. Liked by the younger male teachers. Reminded them of their duffel coated student years

But even prefects liked the Beatles. And it was OK - John & Paul had been to Grammar School!

There was an outbreak of boysspending their lunch hour in the woodwork shop, making guitars under the guidance of a teacher. We had sing songs in the prefects common room. Those who played in the County Youth Orchestra marvelled at the chord progressions

It had not penetrated, until I saw Schotts table, that all this was on the back of just 2 singles

Tip to fainthearted feminist wimps

If ever youre having to deal with 'difficult' men - Im thinking particularly of work - just try imagining them with their trousers down

I mean in the Whitehall farce, Brian Rix kind of way. Revealing ridiculous underpants

Works every time, especially with bombastic bullies. See - they are not so big & clever, or powerful, after all

But do try not to laugh

Title credit

Richard Dawkins IS God

I think Richard Dawkins secretly wishes he were God. Then his word would be Law & people would stop arguing with him

He has already acquired the status of a messiah, or perhaps just John the Baptist, judging by the number of devotional blog posts inspired by his trips to North America. Is it significant that they are overwhelmingly written by young men, of the kind much given to hero worship & causes?

Perhaps Marx would be a better comparator. Then we can look forward to late C21st Dawkinsist schools of history, sociology, economics, philosopohy ...

Kidney donors

Why should it be considered unethical to have a Big Brother type show to decide who should be the lucky recipient of one particular kidney?

OK, the original Big Brother is a tacky waste of time.

But somebody, somewhere, somehow, decides who gets each available kidney. Why is that process superior? How is that person (or committee) better placed to make the decision? Isnt it a Good Thing that ordinary people should have a real taste of what it is like, through their vote, to actually come down in favour of only one candidate?

Radio Vlaanderen

Last September there was a partial eclipse of the moon. Dont know if that affected the ionosphere, but Medium Wave went very funny. Another radio station dropped in where BBC Radio 5 Live should be. Very relaxed, mixed music & speech. Even mixed music & sports commentary - during changes of end at the US Open they played something laid back instead of letting the commentator witter on

From various internal clues, & with the help of Google & a Dutch (!) dictionary, I tracked it down

Now it is my constant companion (provided the headphones have not gone walkabout) as I sit at the computer

Radio Vlaanderen

Mr van der Velde

Everybody always said that Mr van der Velde was Dutch. When & how he came to England I have no idea. Could he have been a 1930s or wartime refugee? His accent seemed very English to me, though his pronunciation was very precise, a bit fussy

He was a small, neat man. White hair, white moustache. He wore round, wire rimmed glasses behind which he blinked owlishly

His wife was English. A large lady, well corseted, with a shelf-like bosom. Whenever you saw them together you got an impression of great devotion

Mr van der Velde was my Latin teacher

I cant imagine what it would be like now never to have learned Latin. But I regret that I did not work harder.

In fact I behaved very badly at times

Thing is, I hated all the declensions of nouns, past tenses of verbs. I also never got the hang of scansion. Why spoil a good poem by struggling to write u - -/ u u - above each line? Who cares about trochees or iambic pentameters anyway?

I loved the sonority, the etymology, the Latin tags. Dum docent discunt

Mr van der Velde always gave us treats in the last week of term. Read us stories. In the Country of the Blind, Saki. Once he dug out some aged philology textbooks from the storeroom. We had great fun learning that CINEMA ought really be pronounced KINEMA

Latin was the worst of my O level results. It was those damn scansions let me down I hadnt prepared whichever verse it was that they gave us. Mr van der Velde wrote noblesse oblige! on my final report, which devastated me because I knew I had let him down

Years later I met someone who reckoned she was the last person to be admitted to medical school without science A levels. She had done classics. She reckoned she had a head start on everybody else because she understood the vocabulary

And at least she would have known that a mere MB BS did not entitle her to the proud honorific Doctor

My idea of heaven

The library at Alexandria

Long, low, colonnaded, airy building

Perpetually sunny (though not too hot) outside

Waves gently lapping on the shore

Every book ever published & full internet/web access

Memory is a private library collected by experience

Ben Macintyre; The Times 6 July 2007

Humankinds desire to quantify information has a long history. Aristotle’s student Demetrius (367-c283 BC) was asked to organise the Library of Alexandria in order to quantify ‘how many thousand books are there’

Martin Hilbert Significance August 2012

Health police

How will the health police reconcile all those DOs & DONTs they bark at pregnant women with the (now scientifically proved) realisation that a womans anxiety has adverse effects on a foetus from an early stage

Living relatives

When I was born I had:

2 parents - not as obvious as it sounds. WWII was not over & my father was in Burma

3 grandparents - my paternal grandfather died from wounds received in WWI when my father was 7 years old

6 great grandparents (one a step). I never heard any stories about the 2 Irish ones, but I believe they were dead

1 great-great-grandmother - b1867, d1970

Numerous great aunts & uncles. The 3 sets of great grandparents had respectively 11,10 & 8 children. There were also at least 4 on the Irish side

But only 3 uncles - no aunts who were blood relatives. A 4th uncle - my mothers beloved brother who was only 1 year younger than she, died, aged 19, in the North Atlantic

My 3 uncles all (eventually) emigrated, to New Zealand, South Africa, Canada

I have 5 first cousins - 2 South Africans & 3 New Zealanders

My daughters father is from the West Indies. My 2 grandsons father is 3rd generation Japanese American

A microcosm of C19 & C20 demography

Minshull Street Courts

Im not a great fan of Victorian architecture - especially not the neo-Gothic. Partly because its just too much - the mind boggles at the thought of architects sitting down & actually drawing all those twiddly bits & curlicues. Nor do I like red brick, or - ugh - glazed terra cotta

But Minshull St is different. Solid, but nicely proportioned. Sensitively extended to accommodate the needs of modern security, but still with Victorian courts & public galleries for lesser, sadder cases, where you can be carried right back in your imagination to the late Victorian years

Its a pity that the new building at the bottom of the station approach - however magnificent - will close off the view of the Courts. Manchester is sadly lacking in vistas

Link

The Crown Court at Minshull Street Manchester (Gargoyle) on Flickr ...

Great grandfather the baker

Just recently I used Ancestry UK to check on this branch of the family

It came as a surprise to find that, in 1901, Great Grandfather was a master wheelwright. Bakery seems like a big change. I guess the bottom dropped out of the market for wooden wheels with the arrival of the new fangled motor cars. But people will always want bread. And cakes.

I cant remember a time when he was not confined to his bed or his chaise longue by the fire in the sitting room behind the shop. The business was in the hands of his wife & 5 of their surviving children. The men did the baking, 3 great aunts served in the shop, under the gimlet eye of great grandma.

I guess grandfather must have had a stroke. Besides the paralysis he dribbled a lot & had difficulty speaking. My father behaved very tenderly towards him. Father figure, I suppose, since his own father had died young. Dad often crouched by his side & they seemed to have little trouble conversing.

Great grandfather died 3 times. The first time the doctor came & pronounced him dead, but he sat up as the undertakers men were carrying him downstairs in his coffin. (Some exaggeration here, surely) . The second time he was discovered when the woman came to lay him out.

He died for the last time when I was 14. My mother & I did not go to the funeral, only my father, wearing an awesomely solemn black tie.

Grandfather was used to being taken out on ceremonial drives by his 2 spinster daughters - the original Sunday drivers. One of these trips was further than usual - they came to our house after I had passed the 11+. I was required to put on my as yet unworn school uniform.

Somewhere there is a photo of the pair of us in the garden, me standing proudly by his side. Him wearing what looks suspiciously like a chortle on his face.

Out of hours GP (3)

What % of GPs are now women?

How much is the reduction in GP 24 hour services a reflection of this? How much due to mothers wanting family friendly hours?

Or, more generally, women not wanting to be out on their own at all hours, heaven knows where?

Out of hours GP (2)

Things have changed an awful lot in 20 years. Then I just wanted the address of a GP surgery in Central Manchester to which I could go should I need antibiotics for a sinus infection. I was working there temporarily, did not need to register permanently

After a while it dawned on me that I had not noticed any surgeries as I walked around. Yellow Pages did not help. So I rang the Family Practitioner Committee. No, we cant give you that information. The place you are staying is outside Manchester proper. What if you needed a doctor in the middle of the night?

It seems unbelievable now that things such as practice leaflets & lists of local doctors were not routinely availabe to the public

[continued]

Toast

I have been a bridesmaid only once. When I was 3

My Nana explained to me about my duties & what to expect of the day

The most exciting prospect was the Wedding Breakfast: And there will be toasts

Well, I loved toast. Especially the way Nana made it for me. Thick slices drenched in Golden Syrup

All I got was measly ham salad with - ugh! - beetroot

Do people call them Wedding Breakfasts anymore?

Out of hours GP

This is not intended to be any kind of criticism of the lady who died despite 8 calls to a GP deputising service. I did not know her, have not read the official report, know only what was in the news headlines



But I am puzzled. Why 8 calls? I think that, after the second, I would either have decided just to wait till I got better, or got myself to A&E - by ambulance if necessary. The alternative seems like banging ones head against a brick wall



At the end of the day the use, or demands, one makes of any medical service depend on a complex interaction. Between your own assessment of your diagnosis. Even more so the prognosis. Your experience & expectations of the services available. And your willingness to make a fuss. The service provider can only, in a sense, react to those

[continued]

No sting

I must have been 2, going on 3, when I saw my first dead (human) body

It was my great grandfather. He was lying in his coffin on the kitchen table. There was a big vase of tulips in the room, so it must have been spring

I was lifted up to look at him. I felt uncomfortable & wriggled to get down, but more because I was too old to be picked up rather than any other kind of distress. He just looked like grandfather to me, in his best black suit

Oddly, in my memory, his skin looks kind of fawny, light tan. Not grey at all

And very peaceful

He had a peaceful death. Chapel in the morning. Sunday dinner over, he took his usual seat in the armchair by the fire. My (step) grandmother went to do the washing up. When she went back in, he was dead

Title credit

Great Uncle Jim

Great Uncle Jim went into hospital when I was about 12. He had had a stroke & was paralysed down one side. My grandfather ( his younger brother) went to visit him every Sunday afternoon, to give him his shave.

I loved Uncle Jim. He was a small, wiry man, always cheerful. He had been the village butcher & usually gave me a piece of suet from the kidneys when we went into his shop. A treat.

Come to think of it, he was the only one of my grandfathers seven siblings that I knew - the rest must have been scattered, dead, or not on speaking terms.

One Sunday after dinner, my Grandpa said to me Come on. Youre coming with me. Uncle Jim wants to see you.

I was terrified. Sat hunched in my seat in the train. They had had to amputate one leg below the knee. Only it hadnt worked properly & theyd had to chop another bit off. I imagined scenes straight out of Grimm.

But as we walked down the ward, seeing Uncle Jim sitting up in bed - in that moment I knew exactly what is meant by The will to live.

A happy memory, after all.

Breast feeding (2)

Back in the late 60s I read, in the course of duty, an FAO pamphlet about breast feeding. True to its time, it focussed on Less Developed Countries, where poor water supply, or incomes insufficient for the purchase of formula or evaporated milk, or outright famine, made bottle feeding an impossibility

One of the extraordinary - to me - sections dealt with the role of grandmothers. Apparently, suckling can re-establish the milk supply of any woman who has borne a child, no matter how many years ago

If this is true, it would offer one solution to the problem of how todays women can combine early return to work with the Governments advice on feeding

Media studies

The Times ran an obituary this week with the headline

Professor Philip Collins: Genial English scholar who helped to make the novels of Charles Dickens a respectable field of study

Bet theyre not being nearly as complimentary on their news & comment pages towards whovever it is today who is performing the same service for Coronation Street

Woe is me, man!

When I was about 9 years old I was to accompany my mother to a meeting in the local Town Hall. Cant remember what it was about now. Think it was probably organised by the Townswomens Guild

When she was telling me about it, my mother said And the Chairman will be Mrs _

But shes a lady said I

Chairman is just a name for someone in charge of a meeting, & theres no reason a woman cant do it just as well as a man

Perhaps that is why I have never had the least trouble with the word Chairman. Feel no woe about it

It is my talisman

Breast feeding

I am extremely glad that the breast feeding fascists are once again clamouring for the 'right' to breast feed in public



Because I cant imagine a better way to send women rushing for the bottle - of formula of course, tho, who knows, maybe the chardonnay too



The idea that one might be expected - even forced - to breast feed in public is guaranteed to turn most people off



Theres no law against it anyway. What they are asking for is a law against my right to object



I have seen many women feeding - with perfect discretion - & probably failed to even notice lots of others. If someone is being very obvious about it theyre just an exhibitionist



And anyway, just where is the evidence that breast is best? Still less that it is a good idea to do it exclusively for 6 months



It cannot possibly exist



It can only, at best, be based on the same sort of small, limited, short term studies which led many to conclude that HRT was good for all post menopausal women



Where are the large samples? The long term longitudinal studies proving that life long benefits are conferred. Suitably controlled for social class etc etc etc



Still less, where are the studies of the benefits conferred by all members of the family being able to join in the joyous experience of feeding a baby - yes, even from a bottle?

I could go on, but thats enough

HIPS

If HIPS are to be compulsory only for houses with 4+ bedrooms, are we going to see a sudden increase in the number of 3-bedroomed houses with study, sewing room, dressing room, play room, rumpus room, home office, box room ...............?

Well, if I plus 1 zillion others (including Iain Duncan-Smith) can spot that snag, how on earth can Government ministers put themselves in such an embarrassing position?

What really concerns me about all this is that, at least in this final stage, it is women ministers involved. And women who have been touted as New Labours brightest intellectual stars, mothers several times over, supreme examples of having it all. R4 could only find Polly Toynbee to come to their aid

Even if you think they have somehow been stitched up, hung out to dry, why were they apparently powerless to stop it?

I think I know where Im going with this, & I dont like it

*****

It is ironic that at the same time the press & airwaves are full of HOUSING CRISIS. Why dont we have enough social housing? Why were Right to Buy receipts not used to build more?

The answer - Housing Investment Programmes

Non-standard deviation

I am not a person who admits to mistakes. The word mistake is not in my vocabulary

No? Then what do you call it?

Deviation. Truth is constant, Chuck. It is only the observation of the truth which is variable. The magnitude of error depends on the difference between the underlying truth & the faithfulness of observation. And so error can only be defined as deviation, not mistake

B***s***, Chuck said, & the other men around the table laughed

Precisely, the deaf man said, laughing along with them. B***s***. Error is simply the amount of b***s*** attached to any true observation

Ed McBain: The Heckler

I love McDonalds

Well 'love' may be a bit strong for this - my heart does not lift when I see the golden arch. Though isnt it interesting that small children get excited by it?

This country is remarkably short of places where anyone can go & feel comfortable on their own. Not an object of curiosity or interest to other customers. Able to get something to eat & drink in clean, safe surroundings. A place to sit down for a bit, especially when its wet, cold or windy outside. From early morning to late at night

And no, its not just sad Billy No Mates. Its busy people, travelling away from home or office

Predictable. (Important when youre in a strange town)

And a very good cup of tea

Dylan at Budokan

Im not a Dylan devotee

But as a child of the Sixties, how could I not hold Like a Rolling Stone in a special place in my heart & memory?

I have been to only 2 pop concerts, or whatever term it is the young people use nowadays. The second was Picnic at Blackbush. A sad disappointment

And just to prove that Im not a purist, my favourite Dylan album is Budokan. I love those rock-y tracks

Favourite track of all - Is your love in vain

I'm going to have a baby?

A wise man once said to me that abortion & the Pill would change womens lives in a way which would be very difficult to cope with

Not because we could avoid unwanted pregnancy. Because we would have to decide when, or whether, to have a baby. Quite separately from deciding whether to have sex or get married

But then of course came a bigger shock for many. A generation brought up to believe that penetration comes with a very high risk of pregnancy, that such myths as not the first time or not if youre standing up were demonstrably untrue, had to grapple with the opposite. And when you started reading up on the causes of infertility, you started to wonder how any of us ever got here at all

You cant decide when to have a baby either - you can only decide when to make the attempt ( or take the risk)

We live in a quantum world. The reproductive process owes more to Einstein than to Newton

Farewell, Tony

I have been trying hard not to give in to the temptation to add another of my twopennorths to the Tony Blair legacy debate. I couldnt resist this little collage


He wanted to be the Prime Minister who reached for the stars - Ann Treneman Times 11 may 2007

He disassociates the unchecked conviction of his actions from their unintended consequences & blames others or circumstances for them

Keith Farman, splendid Letter to The Times 10 May 2007

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No explanation of the failure of his policy could shake his belief in its general excellence - [unknown] biographer of Philip II of Spain

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Such men are dangerous

Feminism trumps equality

Oxbridge & other universities are coming under stick for supposed selection bias towards children from independent schools. Such schools educate only about 7% of children but account for a much larger proportion of university students

This argument would be particularly boring were it not for the allegation that things used to be better, in that a greater per centage of students in, say, the 1930s, 40s & 50s came from the lower social classes via grammar schools

The interesting point is that, judged in this way, Oxbridge has gone backwards. Does this mean that the elite middle classes have reasserted themselves, or that those who managed to heave themselves up through the class system are particularly unlikely to offer a helping hand to those behind them?

Well maybe. But I offer two thoughts which suggest that it is not so much the selection process as the route to Oxbridge that has changed

The first concerns sex discrimination. For example in the early 1970s concern was regularly expressed that the higher civil service was overwhelmingly male, white, public school & Oxbridge. But it seemed to be changing.

In the early/middle 80s however there were regular headlines which announced '1^st woman this' that or the other, particularly in the public services. This was obviously a Good Thing, but I was surprised when I realised that almost all the women promoted were public school/Oxbridge girls - as a grammar school girl myself I believed in the meritocracy & also supported the drive to rid the higher civil service of its earlier elite image. But the drive towards sexual equality hid this backwards slide, & whatever its merits, sexual equality hid the reduction in social class equality

The second important change was the removal of the special status of direct grant grammar schools. Was this a Labour or Conservative initiative? Whoever initiated it, it closed off an important meritocratic route. Manchester Grammar boys are now classified as 'public school' in political or media headlines or Oxbridge entrance statistics, & few, if any, go there without the support of parents who can pay the fees. People like my god-brother or Kenneth Clark (a scholarship boy at Nottingham High School) were deprived of this meritocratic route to advancement, or, if their families made sacrifices to pay the fees, moved from the 'state' to 'independent' category in the statistics of university admissions

Has anyone done an analysis of Oxbridge admissions over time which takes account of these 2 factors as well as the simplistic public school v comprehensive dichotomy?

Birth at night

My daughters birth was exceptional in that she was born at 12.30pm, bang in the middle of lunch. I too was born during daylight hours, at 5.40pm one July Sunday afternoon

Yet most mammalian births happen during the night. Why should this be so?

1. Birth is rather a nasty thing to watch, so potential spectators have to be shielded from it

2. The womb is a dark place. The baby cannot cope with the added trauma of being ejected into a world of bright light

3. Something to do with circadian rhythms which are known to affect hormones

4. Most babies are 'made' at night (the explanation offered by one of my attending midwives)

Could there be an evolutionary explanation for this? Is there a modern conflict between birth in brightly lit hospital rooms, so necessary to enable the medical attendants to see what is going on & to deal with any problems, & the welfare of the child?

A first or a fail?

Its a fail & it must be a fail if theres nothing on the paper or utter gibberish

If theres something on the paper paraphrasing & embroidering the words of the question, that is a clear pass

If they try to unpick the question to see what its after, thats a Lower Second

If they make a stab at answering it with a lot in it you can understand, thats an Upper Second

And if they make a stab at answering it at considerable length with a lot in it you cant understand, thats almost certainly a First

Professor Smellies briefing to new examiners, quoted by Bernard Crick in My LSE

Nowadays 52% of LSE graduates get a 1 or 2.1, or so I read in The Times. In the 1960s there were some years when no Firsts at all were awarded in some subjects

Exams 2: Ask a simple question

One strand of the arguments about standards & exams involves allegations that the questions are getting easier

You see much less discussion of the kind of answers that are required

One of the few jokes which I can remember is the one about the Oxford philosophy exam

The only question was - Why?

The only person to get a First was the one who answered - Because

Are exams getting easier?

Its that time of year again

A levels have been with us since the early 1950s

Suppose it had been decided at the beginning to forego the complicated system of exams for a much simpler test

All children would have their height measured on their 18th birthday. Those over 5'8" would 'pass'. This is a guess, but perhaps the 1950 pass rate would have been 5%

If we still used the same test in 2007 there would not be much room for carping about whether standards had slipped or not. Though there would be interesting scope for, & acres of newsprint on, the relative advantage of being measured early or late in the day, the elasticity of tape measures, how precisely to convert from metric .... And accusations of unfair use of growth hormones, hair thickening agents, or ways of increasing the thickness of skin under your childs heels

The children who passed would be those over 5'8" tall, just as in their parents or grandparents generation. Standards would indubitably have risen, because more children would be passing

But we would not be selecting only the tallest 5% of children. If we wanted to do that, we would have to raise the bar, perhaps to 6 feet

Would height be a more or a less arbitrary test than ability to pass exams?

Well this is only a thought experiment, so we dont need to discuss that

But its interesting to note that the biases in the 2 systems would be remarkably similar. The pass group would include relatively more of the following categories:

boys

higher income/social class

educated parents

southern England

All factors which are in turn correlated with private education

What do you want to be when you grow up?

For much of my early teens I harboured an ambition to be either a famous QC or a forensic pathologist. Ambitions inspired first by disccovering crime fiction & then by numerous biographies of people like Bernard Spilsbury or Marshall Hall

I quickly, though reluctantly, gave up the idea of the law. The prospects of finding anyone who would offer me a pupillage seemed slim, to put it mildly. But even if they did, there was no one who could pay my fees or support me until I actually started to earn money. It is one of the things that intrigues me about Cherie Blair, that only about a decade later she could seriously embark on a career in law. The world had changed a bit

Pathology seemed a real possibility however. Plenty of girls went to medical school. If I worked hard there was a chance I could pass the relevant exams & earn a place myself

There was still the problem that this would mean asking my parents to support me even beyond the 3 years needed for a single bachelor degree. I was lucky that they had instantly said yes when told by my teachers that I showed promise of being able to make it to university. Not all my class mates were so lucky. Boys as well as girls, though boys were not told that there was no point because theyd only get married anyway. I felt pretty confident that they would say yes, if that was what I really wanted, but not at all sure that I could feel comfortable about that kind of sacrifice

There was however one problem which proved insuperable when I really thought it through. I could contemplate, with equanimity the prospect of dissecting - in the interests of science & justice - a corpse. But medical training would rquire - for at least a brief period - having to apply a scalpel to living, albeit anaesthetised, flesh. And that I could not do


Postscript
When Eleanor Platt QC was called to the Bar 47 years ago there were some chambers that would not even contemplate taking on a woman. The members wives would not like it. She secured a place after a word in someones ear by her uncle, a non-practising barrister & a member of Grays Inn. He was in the golfing society & the Masons - The Times: Law 15 May 2007

Another million

This one just tickled my fancy

1 million seconds = 11 1/2 days

1 billion seconds = 32 years

1 trillion seconds = 32,000 years

Whats the point?

At grammar school I took to algebra like a duck to water. But I struggled with geometry for a couple of years

Not that I couldnt understand what we were supposed to be doing. But I wasted a lot of time waiting to find out what these, literally mundane, constructions with pencil, ruler, protractor & compass had to do with the magic-sounding world of true points

These, our teacher had mysteriously warned us at the beginning of lesson 1, had no dimension, they literally did not exist

Things got worse when we got to circles. A locus of points we learned. I thought locus meant place.

Now I had always thought of points as circular things, like the dot you make with your pencil. So it had seemed logical to think of a true, dimensionless point as a circular dot shrunk to the point of invisibility. A circle, therefore must be but a single point magnified up, a kind of uber point, a representation of infinity in the opposite direction, the direction of large

But a place of points?

Does that mean like the home of points? Or a collection of points? Say like one of those diagrams they use to test for colour blindness?

Why one should want to mess around with lines which touched only one of them was beyond me

Light dawned eventually round about theorem 63 when I realised that the circles we were dealing with were just the same sort of thing as the triangles & lines we drew. The proofs were just the same ploughing through if this equals this & that equals that, then one thing leads to another

Just another swizz, really

The magic had died

To see the world in a grain of sand,

And a heaven in a wild flower,

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,

And Eternity in an hour

William Blake

Practice makes perfect

In truth I often find that the best method of learning, for me, is repeated practice or study of a large number of examples. If I attempt to start from first principles, all too often I start to argue with, not from, the assumptions, spluttering But, but, but

When I was about 7 I somehow acquired a treasure. I think it may have come from my maternal G'ma & may have belonged to my grandfather

It was a fat book with a crumply green rexine-type of cover. Proudly stamped on the spine, in gold letters SCHOOL ARITHMETIC. It was published in 1903. So romantic

It contained page after page of sums or problems to be solved. Mostly these were all too recognisable from my 1950s schoolbooks. The method of multiplying by casting out 9s was new to me though. As was the method of finding square roots - we had tables for that. There was even a method for finding cube roots, though if I remember rightly, it was, at best, approximate

I loved that book

A lad of the brainier kind

Had erogenous zones in the mind

He loved the sensations

Of solving equations

(Of course in the end he went blind)

Hymie Sneak

Empty space

This is probably just a very silly question, but it is one that keeps bugging me

If I could put something solid - block of wood, lump of stone - inside a sealed vacuum, would it decay?

And if it did crumble eventually to a little pile of dust on the floor what would have happened to the space in which the particles which constitute its mass used to execute their dizzy dance while still being able to maintain the form of the wood or stone?