Could you explain that again please?

I do agree with one thing Richard Dawkins has said. Though I would put in a claim for having been saying it myself at least since the mid-1960s, his is the more elegant formulation as the Law of the Conservation of Difficulty: Obscurantism in an academic subject expands to fill the vacuum of its intrinsic simplicity

I was reminded of this by the following: She argued that "opening the black box" that the topic of responsibility has largely been in reflection about justice, reveals unsuspected problems for the luck-neutralisation understanding of the basis for egalitarianism

Which just confirms my own conviction that in this country at least academic philosophy long ago disappeared up its own fundament.

This comes, not from a collection of academic papers, but from an obituary in The Times. I am surprised that the editors should approve of the quote marks, the double use of 'that', never mind jargon such as luck-neutralisation

Good Lord, Deliver For Us

Matthew Parris remarked in his Saturday column that Few politicians are interested in government ... sound, capable, efficient public administration.

Yesterday I heard someone on the radio say that Politicians in this government think if theyve announced something, it has happened

I often fear that lawyers have the same sanguine point of view. Last week an Appeal Court Judge said that all should be on the national DNA database - including all 100 million annual visitors to the UK. I thought he might just be being provocative, to make a point. Reductio ad absurdum. But then I heard him being challenged about practicalities & he said But it will happen because it must. So Im not sure now

So much easier just to blame effete civil servants for the failure to deliver. I once heard a very new New Labour apparatchik say that civil servants thought they had delivered the policy on one piece of fruit a day to every school child once they had sent out a circular. No they didnt, but what exactly did the adviser have in mind? A fleet of white vans & early morning trips to Nine Elms?

A consolation

Something else I found amusing at 25:

As a beauty Im not a great star
There are others more handsome by far,
But my face, I dont mind it,
Because Im behind it -
Tis the folks in the front that I jar

Possibly by Miles n'Gopleen?

A yard & a half

A yard and a half of 36

I know exactly what that means

I can feel it, see it, as I hold it up, arm outstretched, & let it unfold - it stops short about a foot from the floor

Whether its a soft wool, polyester jersey, lumpy linen, bog standard cotton, or gorgeous beaded brocade

I know exactly what sort of garment it could make. How it will feel when I wear it. Where it will fit, touch or not touch, my body

We are talking textiles & home dress making

I know, even though I cant remember when I last made myself anything to wear, or even when I last got the sewing machine out

Im making the point that theres an awful lot more to learning than just reading writing & calculating. You learn with your whole body & all senses - just like a baby on a bus

I will never understand metric measurement of cloth in this way

And I am saying that education fails badly if it does not take account of this. Not by dividing children into those who learn best in one way & those who learn best in another way. We all need to learn in all possible ways

Zig zag

Yesterday mid-day I was standing at the bus stop waiting for a bus into town

A young man approached & asked me if I was going far. I didnt know him at all so we fenced a bit - me not prepared to give anything away till I knew what he was after

Turned out he had a Zig Zag to sell - that is, the local version of an all-day bus ticket

Hasnt he heard of the elderly persons bus pass? or did he just think I dont look old enough?

I was surprised. Not by the enterprise as such - common for years in the city - but by the fact that it had arrived in the village

But then, since the last fare increase, a Zig Zag is now cheaper than the standard return fare for even a simple there & back trip to town. For those who have to pay, that is. So anyone who has completed their return journey has a potentially saleable commodity on their hands

I regret now that I said no straight away. I should have found out the price

Lucy Cavendish

A 2-volume edition of her diaries was published in 1927 - now sadly out of print. STOP PRESS: An edition is available in the US

The Dictionary of National Biography confines her to the entry under her husbands name: As a widow, she gave an impression of pious seclusion, declining the mistress-ship of Girton College, Cambridge, in 1884. And for a long time I simply called her by the shorthand form of Lady Fred in my research notes


Light dawned one day however & I realised that the Cambridge college must be named after her.

A talk she gave about education is also available

Lord Lytteltons Daughters by Sheila Fletcher, published in 1997, tells the story of Lucy & her sisters, making use of all their diaries

Dutiful daughter

Another of my nominated favourite books is Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter by Simone de Beauvoir. A must-read for the title alone, I thought. I first read it (in English) when I was about 25, married, a mother, soon to be divorced (a bold step in those days). The following passage seemed suitably angst-ridden at that time

A writer ought to feel he was damned; any kind of success was suspect, & I used to wonder if the very fact of writing something didnt imply failure: only the silence of Valerys M Teste seemed to me to express with dignity humanitys absolute despair



I started a vast novel; the heroine was to live through all my own experiences: she was to be awakened to the meaning of 'the true life', enter into conflict with her environment, then be disillusioned by everything: action, love, knowledge



I didnt even want to write anymore; the horrible vanity of all things had me by the throat again; but I had had enough of suffering & weeping in the past year; I built a new hope for myself



In momets of perfect detachment when the universe seems to be reduced to a set of illusions & in which my own ego was abolished, something took their place; something indestructible, eternal; it seemed to me that my indifference was a negative manifestation of a presence which it was perhaps not impossible to get in touch with

Tales of the ionosphere

Medium wave reception went funny again last night & was still bad this morning. I was just thinking I hadnt noticed a problem for some time, then remembered the last time was in fact exactly a year ago.

No lunar eclipse this time, though the weather is very similar - warm & mostly clear with high pressure sitting just to the west. Is that what does for the ionosphere?

Lady Frederick Cavendish

Lucy Cavendish, born Lucy Lyttelton, was the 2nd daughter of the 4th Baron Lyttelton

Her mother died, from complications of the birth of her 12th child, when Lucy was 16

Lucy married, in what was clearly a love match, Lord Frederick Cavendish, a younger son of the Duke of Devonshire. Before her marriage she had been a maid of honour to Queen Victoria

Her mothers only sister, Aunt Catherine, was the wife of William Gladstone

So she was well placed to observe mid-Victorian society & politics at the highest level

She was not overawed - except by her father-in-law, the formidable 7th Duke - & wrote about it all with wit & liveliness, & with charm, in her private diaries

Her father, who had suffered frequently from bouts of depression, died by throwing himself over the balustrade at his London home & falling to his death 2 floors below

To their great sadness, Lucy & Frederick had no children, but they remained very close

In 1882 Gladstone asked Frederick to join the government of Ireland in an emergency Cabinet reshuffle

Lord Frederick was murdered while taking a stroll in Phoenix Park in Dublin on the afternoon he arrived in the city

Lucy was left a widow at the age of 40

Lady Frederick Cavendish: Some quotations

A wretched new craze called a Telephone
1878


Dr Jenner … horrified me with his ugliness which is something suggestive to me of Voltaire



8 April 1864: … Garibaldi is in England, which fact makes everyone stand on their heads; & I suppose all young ladies will shortly appear in red shirts, which, to my disgust, have come into fashion

Rome 27 November 1867: The wretched Fenians have been condemned to death; & out of the 5, 3 have been executed. It is very sad & terrible, as they are the first who have been executed for a political offence; but it seemed inevitable. There have been deputations & demonstrations against the sentence in London. Foreigners think England must be in danger; somehow one can't feel that a bit. Never did I take in better the immense strength we have in our fearless freedom of press, opinion & discussion, than now, when there are anxieties & disturbances & an impending revolution in national power


There were Dickens & Landseer; neither very pleasant to look at, though one saw wit & genius in Dickens odd eyes



5 May 1864: … a long pull at Mill On Liberty which shakes & bewilders nearly all my opinions, leaving my head in a bag


4 May 1865: Pre-Raphaelism seems, like homeopathy, to be becoming less a school apart & more infused into schools than it was … still some tinny, paper mache, gaudy skies, solid green seas, ugly red haired pink faced women in all colours of the rainbow & cotton velvet grass



The underground from S Kensington to Portland Rd was charming & wonderful & far less underground than I had expected
18 March 1869



… a nice new house near Longstone … [with] some Rosettis, very clever & with wonderful colour, but rather hateful, I think, from self-consciousness & a sort of sensuousness; & I cant see why all his unfortunate damsels should be in such haggard & wasted ill health


… a pretty villa [in Italy] where Morris the decorator-poets wife & daughters are. Mrs Morris might have stept [sic] out of any of Burne-Jones pictures & is in fact the original of the favourite PB [sic] lady (having sat to Rosetti) - haggard & wistful eyed with a heavy bush of black hair penthouse-style over the forehead; certainly handsome
December 1877

Lady Frederick Cavendish had a governess who was 'over-severe & apt to whip me for obstinacy when I was only dense … At Brighton I used to be taken out walking on the parade with my hands tied behind me, terrified out of my wits by Miss Nicholsons declaring it was 10 to 1 we should meet a policeman'
Kathryn Hughes: The Victorian Governess

Can I do you now, Sir?

A while back the BMJ carried a long article on patient dignity. The advice was all a bit too touchy feely for my taste: I would prefer someone speaking in the tones of a bank manager discussing, with a customer of good standing, the available options for a pension. Something equally vital as health for postponing death for as long as possible

Actually I have long thought that the best way to instil respect for patients into medical students would be for them to have to conduct full physical examinations on the Dean, the professors & the consultants

Lady Frederick Cavendish

A mystery blogger seems to be transcribing the contents of one of the books I have listed as a favourite - The Diaries Of Lady Frederick Cavendish

Interesting, cos I am otherwise the only Blogger who has chosen the book

Perhaps the interest will grow & we can get a new edition published

Link:

Dot Wordsworth is over the moon

Romantic books for boys

When I looked at The Dangerous Book For Boys I was instantly transported back to my Junior School days when I understood something which I, & perhaps most of us, have been in danger of squashing & suppressing

Male romanticism

Summed up perfectly in both the title & the content of the book

Male romanticism consists in

• being brave
• fighting evil
• rescuing damsels in distress

There may be faintly, in the background, an awareness that rescuing fair maiden may - aw shucks - bring reward

Oh - & dont forget the magic of machines

Also pretty well summed up, now that I think of it, in the Cadburys Milk Tray ads of a few years back

For girls, the romance lay in the box of chocolates

For boys, romance lay in abseiling down the mountain

And it is a sad but true fact, that boys can sometimes make the same mistake as the hunter tom who proudly lays a dead field mouse or shrew at your feet. In the expectation or receiving your gratitude & admiration for his prowess

Another of lifes mysteries

If sport is so healthy, why do top sportsmen spend so much time at the doctors?

And yet still so often have to retire through injury? Ill-health retirement at what for most of us is the prime of life?

The physics of food trays

One effect of the new rubbish collection regime was that I started to think how to reduce the volume of stuff in the dustbin, now that it only gets emptied once a fortnight

Its amazing how much less space is taken up now that we can recycle plastic bottles & cardboard

Turned out that plastic food trays & pots were the main remaining culprits. You cant stack them one inside the other because of the varying shapes & sizes. They are hard to squash - naturally. Their job is to protect the contents from damage in transit, no use if they collapse at the slightest knock

You can squash even the strongest upmarket trays from Waitrose or M&S if you apply pressure at the right points. Problem is, they tend to spring back again, even after youve jammed them in the bin

The solution came as a surprise to me. I was squashing a ready-meal tray, grungy with gravy, so I used a sheet of newspaper to protect my fingers & just folded it into a parcel. It stayed folded, no sticky-back plastic or knotted string required. The technique works on the strongest trays & on round pots

So my puzzle is - how can something as weak as a single sheet of newspaper keep those forces in check?

Want to see a filthy postcard?

Have you noticed how anti-smoking campaigners are getting just like earnest animal rights protestors?

One clue is in the voice when they are being interviewed. It starts tight & rises higher. Especially if female, they start to sound on the verge of tears. Our premisses are so obviously ones with which all sane people will agree, our logic is impeccable, it is incomprehensible that some people still refuse to stop smoking NOW. Why do you just not get it?

And now, just like animal rights protestors, theyre going to show us nasty pictures. Only not just on street stalls, in their own time, set up by bands of like-minded folk

Link

Smoking: A frontier in the state's battle with the individual

All logic fails

All logic fails when pushed to its logical confusion

Systems fail under the weight of their own contradictions

How long can the NHS continue? Post code lottery v local decision making? Personal treatment choices v target survival rates?

Not bad if you can get it

The current basic single pension is less than £90 a week. My bus pass is worth about £30 a week to me given my current travel patterns

They used to do WHAT?

I am not one of those who wants to live for ever but I should very much like to be able to pop back, say once every 50 years. Just to see what future generations are saying about us

This is prompted by the reactions to the reports that Arthur Miller placed his son into care 40 years ago. And he used to describe him as a mongoloid! How could he?

Well lots of good people thought that way. And I dont believe it happened in the Miller case but there were plenty of medical professionals who believed it unkind to let a mother even see a handicapped baby

It was also perfectly normal to restrict visits to children in hospital to one a week, & to keep you out of the consulting room while a child received treatment - the mothers distress conveys itself to the child, you know. Margaret Drabbles book, The Millstone, conveys some of this very powerfully.

Such a condemnatory attitude towards Miller seems to me particularly ill-behoved in a generation whose medical advisers take it for granted that one of the aims of ante-natal care should be to seek & destroy any foetus suffering from Downs Syndrome

Some current favourites for what our descendants may say about us:

• surgery: You mean to say they used to cut people open?
• fat: They used to think that eating fat was bad for you
• education: They used to herd all children into special buildings where they had to sit down all day & were only allowed to mix with others who were born in the same year as they were

Link

The many lives of Rebecca Miller

Related post

A breath of fresh air

Its a fair cop

Society ultimately has to run on trust. Just look at the promise on a banknote. Without trust it is just a worthless piece of paper

We seem to be living in a society which is less & less prepared to trust. Under a Government which does not want to trust its citizens. Prove you are who you say you are or we will have to assume youre a money launderer or a terrorist. Prove you have no criminal record or we will have to assume you are a paedophile

Squawking at you all the time. Smoking is a criminal (!) offence. Approval needed to buy matches or the Saturday edition of The Times.

All sorts of officials may or may not have the power to fine me for something or the other. Putting an empty sardine can in with the non-recyclable rubbish. Failure to wash my plastic bottles. Who knows - nobody I suspect, with the number of new offences created in recent years

Ignorance of the law may well be no defence, but the citizen ought to have at least a sporting chance of knowing what it is

And with such a proliferation of offences, enforcement must become more random & thus increasingly arbitrary & unfair. This can only add to a general sense of cynicism, among both enforcers & enforcees. It it any wonder we can hardly be bothered to vote? We are just acting like bored & bolshie teenagers - yeah, yeah, whatever

If a (normally) lawabiding old lady can feel like this, its no wonder some just take the attitude - may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb

Famine

So we have had a wet & humid summer. And the potatoes have been struck by blight

Only one year - so far

If it goes on for 3, how long before people make the connection with the Irish Famine? And start questioning the wisdom of decrying food miles & the fad for trying to live only on food grown close to home?

Walls have soul

I think I first started really looking at walls after seeing the Egyptian frescoes in the British Museum. Seeing the effects of weathering & wear over the years. So different from a nice clean postcard

My execution is not up to my imagination when taking photographs, but sometimes I like to try. They make beautiful abstracts. Lichen is good. And dry stone walls

But derelict or semi-demolished urban buildings hold a beauty too.

A wall can be merely a wall, but in some of Cartier-Bressons photographs the walls are painfully human, & live & talk about themselves. There is that vulgar wall behind the man in the brass bed; that great lonesome wall of broken paint & plaster along which some child is wandering; there is a huge sun-bright wall of a prison or an apartment house with a boy who is like a shadow at its base … There is the clash of sun & shadow, like modern music, in a Cartier-Bresson picture

Langston Hughes introduction to catalogue for Mexican exhibition 1935

Urinary continents

The Times yesterday ran a piece by Anjana Ahuja about the analysis of urine in the sewerage of American cities to get a picture of drug usage

This rang a bell & I found this in my Commonplace Book:

If we collect a man's urine during 24 hours & mix all this urine to analyse the average, we get analysis of a urine which simply does not exist; for urine when fasting is different from urine during digestion. A startling instance of this kind was invented by a physiologist who took urine from a railroad station urinal where people of all nations passed, & who believed he could thus present an analysis of an average European urine!

Claude Bernard 1865

.

Of course, in the drugs case they are using the average in a legitimate way, as a preserver of mass

Link

How a wee test can solve a drug problem

Humane rights

I did a course on international law during my first year at university. Among other things, we studied the UN Charter & the Declaration of Human Rights

One of the things which struck me quite forcibly was the contrast between the obvious passion & intellectual force (& rightness) behind the idea of Human Rights & the sheer triteness of much of the result

It often simply seems unfair to enforce someones right at others expense. It seems just unfair, & so it goes against what seems to be the first, earliest moral judgement we any of us make

There seems to me to be a host of good reasons not to send back to Italy the young man who is currently the focus of a media frenzy, & mostly only bad ones for doing so

But to claim that his human rights somehow trump all other arguments adds only to the sum of human grief & anguish & causes irritation & annoyance to neutrals, people who would otherwise accept any decision to let him stay with sadness & equanimity

Letting it all hang out

Michael Goves had an interesting piece in yesterdays Times2 on "the continuing role that nudity plays in male power relations"

He also commented on how semi-naked men occupy more space than if they are clothed. This explains why men who go to supermarkets dressed only in shorts & flipflops are so bloody annoying!

Serendipity proves I exist in a world

I think I really mean coincidence. But there doesnt seem to be a Latin word for that (I dont count concursatio). I was hoping to coin a tag to replace cogito ergo sum which is all very well for sum, but what about sunt, or, even more importantly, es

But serendipity is so much nicer. Especially as it seems now to be emerging from its phase of being a devalued advertisers word. Hopefully

The kind of thing I mean by coincidence is well illustrated by Googling, especially on the blogs.

Even philogamous

Even more powerfully, something you werent even searching for will suddenly pop up out of nowhere to remind you of all the infinite ways we are connected. Not entire unto ourselves. A piece of the continent

Related post: Only connect

Link: The SERENDIP Project

Sex segregation

I was looking at a table of A level results in the paper.

What struck me most about them was the very distinct differences there seem to be in the patterns of subjects studied & the grade distributions of boys & girls. Looks much more subtle & interesting than just Boys do more physics or Girls do better than boys

Must try & get round to doing a more detailed analysis

Meanwhile I am left pondering why CHEMISTRY & HISTORY should be the only 2 subjects with a 50:50 split between boys & girls

ER Braithwaite

I am so glad that ER Braithwaite has been 'rediscovered' by the BBC. I am really looking forward to the programme this Friday on R4 at 11am

I hope they will soon do Reluctant Neighbours too

And that all his books will be republished

Link

BBC - Radio 4 - Factual - To Sir with Love Revisited

Just a little bit pregnant

The average woman in Britain is 1 week pregnant

A back of the envelope calculation. A ball park figure

It goes like this:

• 3/4 million babies born each year
• add 1/4 million for pregnancies which end in abortion (medically induced or spontaneous miscarriage)
• total population 60 million
• so 30 million females
• so 1 in 30 gets pregnant each year
• average length of pregnancy 30 weeks, say, (to allow for premature births & all those which do not result in a live born child)

So, on any given day, any female (of any age) is, on average, 1 week pregnant

We could refine the calculation. Adjust it to apply just to females 'of child bearing age'. Make other adjustments to allow for women who could not possibly be pregnant

Its not a fundamentally silly calculation. Quite useful for thinking about the overall provision of maternal & antenatal services, for example

And vital to bear in mind before you submit any woman to X-ray radiation, or a job involving exposure to substances which may damage a foetus, or prescribing any drugs

But silly if applied unthinkingly to every female, in any circumstances. Cruel, even

The moral of this story is: Statistics apply to populations, they dont apply to individuals

Never mind the debt

For some time I have been wondering who would own all the equity if the UK housing market went seriously sour. This in the wake of all the takeovers, by foreign banks, of what used to be building societies

Interesting that the current panic is largely about who owns all the debt

Even the radio wont be on time

I am worried by the idea that the authorities are contemplating the complete shutdown of analogue radio in this country. And not just because digital uses more electricity

The most intriguing question is : what will it do to time? The time taken to decompress the signal varies from set to set. So Big Ben or the Greenwich time signal pips will no longer be reliable guides

Will this matter? After all, we have only had to work to a standard national time since the coming of the railways. But before that people did at least generally work to a standard local time. With digital you could even have 2 different times in your own home

Good Google words

.

Discombobulate

Conniptions

I am frequently discombobulated by the results of a Google search (especially when it is a Blog search)

The computer, or Google, or I frequently have conniptions about all this

RU 18?

Yesterday I bought a box of Cooks matches in Asda. Went thru the self-service checkout. Was surprised when it squawked Approval Needed at me

I suppose we ought all to think that this new, strict policy of not selling a whole range of goods to people who are LUCKY ENOUGH TO LOOK AS IF THEY ARE UNDER 21 is a GOOD THING

But the policy produces very public social embarrassment for teenagers. Especially when the 16 year-old behind the checkout has to refuse service to someone who is obviously eighteen, maybe even a school or college mate who just doesnt have a proof of age card on them

Just as CCTV gave us hoodies, this well-intentioned policy will probably produce its own dodgy tactics

The turn of the year

On Tuesday evening I was going home on the bus - about 7 o'clock

The light was suddenly just right for me to see that the leaves are beginning to turn

Always a bitter-sweet, elegiac moment

Its still only August

The Christie Tower

The Manchester University erstwhile mathematics building, now demolished.


I used to think that this was a monstrosity. Then I realised it was one of the few landmarks I could see from the train & started to like it some. Then saw it, literally, in a different light, & started to love it.

A fashion item

I wonder what would happen to the hijab/veil argument in this country if the wearing of headscarves generally came back into fashion for the first time really since the 1960s?

These days if you see someone who doesnt look Muslim but who is wearing a scarf, you tend to feel a twinge of sympathy, thinking they must be on chemo. Or the Queen, if theyre on a horse

But if everyone was doing it, & Hermes replaced Burberry as the Chav must-have - ???


Times cryptic crossword clue 2007: What might set off hard faces? (9)

Which twin is the father?

In the late 1960s I heard a radio sermon given by a Catholic priest on the subject of faith

To illustrate the need for faith he used the example of paternity. A woman can always know that she is a mother (though not necessarily with absolute certainty of any particular child). A man can only ever know that he is father through faith

With DNA testing there is now more information available to a man. But even so, there is no absolute, objective certainty - for example if he has an identical twin brother. I dont know how certain one can be if there are other close male relatives in the frame

There has always been a strong presumption in English law that a womans husband is the father of her child - getting a legal ruling that this is not so is still difficult, I believe

If the parents are not married to each other then a simple declaration on the fathers part is sufficient to get his name on the birth certificate. And there are routes for getting a man declared legally responsible if he is unwilling to do so himself

There are new moves to make all women declare the name of her childs father, & to make it compulsory for any donor of gametes to be named on the certificate

I am not directly commenting on these proposals here. What concerns me is whether we are on the way to creating a new underclass of 'bastards'. Those whose mother simply does not know who is the childs father

And what legal responsibilities will married couples have, if one or both of them know that someone other than the husband is or maybe the biological father, purely in the old fashioned way?

I dont in any case understand the argument that a child has a right to know its true genetic inheritance. If you can read anybodys genome, why do you need to know where it came from?

Link

The law of the land collides with the Law of Moses

Oxford snobs

If anybody wants to know why 'state school' children may not actually want to go to Oxbridge could do no better than follow the Times coverage of Jacqui Smiths 'dope taking' confession

How has all this old fashioned English snobbery re-emerged? Doors to manual & all that

Since when has a headmasters daughter been working class? Or the son of a minor literary figure upper class?

Who wants to be at college with such braying unpleasant drunken violent oafs? Even if they have their 'amusing' moments. They are hopeless in bed

Oxbridge clearly is the place to be for a certain kind of learning in a certain range of subjects. But, whatever your class, other universities are streets ahead in their speciality

Problem is, teachers. The best performance indicator for a teacher is to send a pupil to Oxbridge

Words count

Computers count all the time without using words

Vibrations

If you think about it, our bodies are constantly in motion even while we sit or sleep; hearts beat, blood circulates, peristalsis drives waste matter through the gut, molecules penetrate cell membranes, every cell, & even our very DNA, is constantly dividing

Movement means vibration. Vibration can certainly damage structures - think only of the effects of heavy traffic on our roads. How much can changes in bodily movement or vibration cause illness?

Bowel cancer might be connected to the amount of fibre in our diets - but might it not also be related to the ease with which we can empty our bowels whenever we feel the urge? Nowadays we in the West do not generally need to wait hours before we can find a toilet, nor sit in an ice cold privy at the end of the garden. Might not the apparent link between fibre in the African diet & lack of bowel cancer in fact be a link between socially determined ease of evacuation & lack of cancer?

We also feel the need for underwear to control the movement of our bodies; could breast cancer be caused by the restriction of the brassiere - particularly because so many women seem to feel the need to wear one that is several sizes too small?

More fancifully still, how much might we be aware of, respond to, other peoples vibrations? True, we are generally not aware even of our own vibrations, except when something goes wrong & we have palpitations or indigestion. But how much is our skin a membrane designed to damp down vibrations, unlike the skin of a drum which is designed to transmit them?

Might vibrations even decide our love or lust for other people? For what else might transmit these special messages? We are told that it is hormones - but how do these communicate our desires & feelings? Lust in particular is transient

In my schooldays the concepts of highest common factor or lowest common multiple were an important part of arithmetic - common problems required us to calculate when bells in a peal would next chime together. Perhaps then, lust is caused by 2 peoples vibrations moving in to sync, & disappears when their different frequencies, however minute the difference, means that they inevitably move out of tune. Perhaps the kind of enduring love, which some are lucky enough to find replaces lust, is simply a consequence of lower level, more permanent vibrations, in constant harmony

Vibrations after all are known to have important effects on the human body & psyche. Drumming can drive people wild, as can very low frequency hums, which many people cannot even hear, but to which others are hyper-sensitive. The problems with the millennium bridge over the Thames have been attributed to people automatically moving into synchronisation with the sway

This theory of vibrations might also explain how acupuncture works - the insertion of needles ought to damp down the vibration of nerves or muscles (rather like changing the fingering while playing a violin?). After all modern anaesthesia depends in part on the use of muscle relaxants, presumably to damp down all motion or vibration in the muscles, & hence to avert the patients experience of pain

I have just come across a note about something I heard on the radio [in 1999?] about the excess numbers of death from heart failure following the earth tremors in California; in some cases these deaths were attributed to fear, leading to a flood of calcium to the heart, which was then literally turned to stone. But how much might it be the body going out of sync because of the unusual vibration?

Travelling to an even wilder shore, could these kinds of vibration explain morphic resonance?

Physical medicine

As far as our health & medicine are concerned we live in a very chemical world. If we are ill there must be a pill. If there is not a pill then our ill must be caused in some mysterious way by that thing called psychiatry or psychology

True there are some very physical treatments - surgery for example (& isnt it odd that the opposite of surgeon is physician; what could be more physical than the cutting & slicing involved in surgery?). We do have physiotherapists, chiropodists, dentists, occupational therapists, … but nursing as basic physical care is devalued. On the wilder shores we have reflexology, & mystical masseurs, as opposed to the suspect masseuses who deliver mere physical relief

Motion, energy, heat - e=mc² - are considered only in very restricted ways. We put energy into our bodies in chemical form as food; we then burn it off by going to the gym. But we live in very heat controlled environments, going from warm house to car to office. We are even warned about the danger of heart attack if we move too suddenly from cosy to frigid. If we live in a hot climate we cool the environment to a comfortable 60 or 70. Our bodies dont shiver any more, little of the energy input is used to provide heat. We dont even want to get rid of heat by perspiration, except during an hour or so of exercise. Away from the gym or sports field we use chemicals to control our sweat

We worry about the school run; children ought to walk to school, school ought to be within walking distance. But should children walk to school if its freezing cold, through blizzard or through drenching rain? How many children have clothes suitable for all these occasions? How many schools have cloakrooms equipped for drying off, or for storing boots & warm overcoats? If its OK to drive children to school in these adverse weather conditions, thus shortening the journey time & postponing the time at which you have to leave home, how are households supposed to cope with variable timetables? Check the weather forecast the night before & set the alarm accordingly? Life depends so much on routine, but there can be no morning routine where the timetable depends on the weather to dictate how long it takes to dress or to travel to school

In Sartor Resartus Carlyle dwells on the utility of clothes, how they protect us from the elements, keep us warm & dry. Nowadays those of us who use public transport, who dress appropriately for that walk to the station or bus stop, are only too self conscious when we get to town, go round the shops, dressed in boots & overcoats. Even the store detectives are suspicious of those who walk around seeming only too well dressed for concealing what we might have shoplifted. Car travellers are dressed at most in light jackets, suitable attire for dashing from car park to shopping centre.

Clothes have become primarily a way of expressing our personality, not for protecting us from the environment

Romantically, we bemoan the loss of the High Street & the corner shop, but who wants to struggle from shop to shop, in & out of the rain & the warm, coping with umbrella, shopping basket, doors which open only towards you, when the alternative is a nice warm mall, on the level, with no doors or traffic to struggle with

We worry about obesity; statistics show that, on average at least, we are actually eating less. So if we are gaining weight it must be because we exercise less. No doubt this is true, but has any research been done into the reduction in obesity which might be achieved if we turned our thermostats down a few notches?

Physically we walk upright on two very small parts of our body - our feet. What a pounding they take, & yet how little we consider them. I myself have had the experience of thinking that something was going seriously wrong with my body - symptoms of dizziness, backache, all sorts of aches & pains. Two referrals to highly qualified consultants, general worry & concern, no obviously diagnosable neurological condition. But because it became difficult for me to cut my toenails, I decided to indulge in a pedicure. Bingo - falling arches & metatarsal something diagnosed, cured by simple plastic inserts in my shoes. It seems mad to say my life was transformed, but it was

Lies, damn lies & television

I first became aware of the kind of lie that could be told through what you might call the grammar of television about a quarter of a century ago

It was some kind of BBC documentary – we didn’t have reality television then. About teenage problems

A young woman who had been fostered decided to visit her estranged father. We walked with her along the street towards his house, & were told that he did not know she was coming

Next shot – we are inside Dads house, looking towards the front door as a knock comes. Watch as Dad goes to answer it.

Surprise, surprise!

But what did Dad think the camera crew were doing?

A naked exercise of power

The commentators on Alistair Campbells Diaries all refer to the number of occasions in which he was summonsed by a TB who was dressed, at most, in his underpants

How would you feel if summonsed to speak to your boss while they were in a state of undress? It is, almost literally, an exercise of naked power

Even though you can use your imagination to put a fully clothed boss at a disadvantage

A negative attitude to God

I finally stopped believing in the God of my childhood because I am rhesus negative

How could any God design a world in which it is possible for a rhesus negative woman to conceive a child with a rhesus positive man? To so arrange things that her body, while supposedly nurturing new life, is actually killing it off?

Douglas Hodge

First remember him in that tv thing about yuppie city types in the 1980s

Then in that Ruth Rendell thing about the long hot summer of 1976

Middlemarch of course

He has that rare ability, for an English actor, of seeming understated. To the point of near unrecognisability sometimes. I once watched something on Channel 4 (I think) which I would not otherwise have watched, because I saw his name in the cast list. Thought it must be my terrible memory for names when he did not appear. Then I realised that he had - that one who held the eye, but I had failed to recognise

And now Engleby on Radio 4. Completely, chillingly brilliant. Conveying madness just with the way of drawing out or emphasising certain sounds - a long f at the start of a word, or an overemphatic -ing at the end

Build on the green bits, Gordon

England is an overcrowded country, right? The 3rd or 4th or something, most densely populated in the world. After Hong Kong, Barbados, Holland ...

So just get on the train from London to Manchester. See how overcrowded it is? Hardly a square inch not built over

Dont spoil our country. Its meant to be green. Build on the brown bits

Build 3 or 4 storey town houses, in terraces, on any piece of spare land in our villages. Or blocks of flats. Turn them into suburbs

Then just watch how easy it is for families to survive such cramped conditions. Mum & Dad working all hours to pay the mortgage on a box, Especially when its overflowing with teenagers

I am passionate about the Peak District. I was born here, feel safe embraced by the hills. I revel in the walks, the vaulting sky, the limestone scars, the darker grits

But I can see loads of places which would be enhanced by new small towns. Just like the ones they built in the C19th

Leave the old villagers space to breathe

The F Word

It always use to annoy me that people thought that swearing was especially offensive to grannies - as if they hadnt heard it all before

But as I get older I find the F-word is getting progressively more offensive.

I dont think Im getting more prudish. I still think the old joke is funny, the one about it being derived from medieval court clerks shorthand, for unlawful carnal knowledge

I think it must specifically be the sound. It literally makes me flinch.

So maybe its acting in the same way as the music of Cliff Richard, or Mozart, or that special hum, are supposed to act by driving groups of teenagers away from wherever they are wont to hang out

A kind of poetic justice

Link

The connotations of the F-word

When Labour built 1 million homes

When war ended in 1945 over 200,000 homes had been destroyed by enemy action and a quarter of a million more were so badly damaged as to be unliveable in. The immediate problem was to replace these and to provide homes for all the returning troops and their families.

Government was determined that there should be no repeat of the unrest which followed the First World War when 'Homes for Heroes' were slow in coming .Plans had already been made to make a start straight away, despite the shortage of materials, labour and money, by making use of the munitions factories to provide the unconventional temporary bungalows which soon came to be known as prefabs

Despite the plans and preparations the programme was bedevilled by delays. Local authorities were responsible for providing, laying out and servicing the sites, but the Ministry of Works were to be responsible for putting the prefabs up. The small town of Buxton in Derbyshire, for example, had prepared sites for 50 bungalows by June 1 1945 and were promised delivery of the houses by September, but only one had arrived by January 1946; delays were blamed on design changes, and on shortages of paint and internal fittings for the kitchens and bathrooms which were extremely well-equipped for the time. Imports of American prefabs had been halted when they proved unsuitable for the British climate. Councillors in Chapel en le Frith complained about the lack of availability, due to insuperable delays, of prefabs with solid fuel 'equipment'; electricity and gas were thought to be unsuitable and too expensive for their residents

When the first 4 prefabs were eventually completed in Buxton in July 1946 the event made front page news in the local press, with a long article extolling the virtues, (though not the outer walls of unpainted asbestos), of fittings 'on a lavish scale' which included 'numerous fitted-in cupboards', a gas copper for the laundry, 'elaborate electrical fittings' and space 'where a refrigerator will be fixed as soon as supplies are available'. The demand, or need, for rising standards in homes, (whether provided by public authorities or the private sector), over and above the need to demolish and replace the slums, was to be a constant theme of the next 25 years

Altogether about 125,000 temporary bungalows had been put up by the end of 1948 - a small dent in the assessed need for 2 million new dwellings to meet the governments stated aim of 'a home for every family which wants one'. To help fill the gap the government gave special help to encourage factory production of permanent 2-storey houses. About a quarter of a million of these had been built by 1954 using non-traditional materials such as asbestos, aluminium and steel but, most successfully it seemed, concrete

As early as 1942 the Committee of House Construction organised a study of all non-traditional post-1919 houses (most of which had been built in the first years after that war in similar conditions of shortage) and produced a list of recommended methods. System-built houses however were only - at best - no more expensive than brick and already there were doubts about maintenance. Bowley has pointed out that these were only worthwhile in areas where shortages of traditional materials were particularly acute and were especially prevalent in areas dependent on stone for building, or for rural council housing, the reason here being remoteness from pools of skilled construction workers. Bowley also attributed the relative lack of success of system building for houses to the 'pernickity' ideas of local authority architects who wanted to be able to vary internal layouts according to their own preferences. As an economist, she saw this as a sad failure to introduce much needed efficiency gains to the construction industry. Of course, she was writing in the mid-60s, when the scale of the structural problems with system-built houses, which emerged only years later and which led to the need to compensate tenants who had bought them under the Right to Buy, still less those which followed the attempts to use industrialised methods to provide mass housing in high-rise blocks, were yet to be realised

There was much concern that housing should not follow the ribbon pattern development of the 1930s and should not be allowed to take over good agricultural land. With food still short and imports by air from all over the world still a pipe-dream, this was an understandable concern. It was however a concern which conflicted with the traditional English dislike of living in overcrowded cities and with the preference for a more rural idyll. One solution adopted, which owed much to Ebenezer Howards ideas of the Garden City, was to contain development in defined areas. Eleven New Towns were quickly created in England under the New Towns Act of 1946, all but two of which were in the south east near London. The War-time belief in the efficacy of planning was carried over in to the Development Corporations which had wide-ranging powers to acquire land and to provide not just housing but also shops, offices and factories

New Town houses were of generally high quality, laid out at low densities in open plan streets; the cost of maintaining these communal open spaces was often added to the rent. But the low densities in themselves frustrated the idea of building compact, comprehensive communities with work and leisure close to home. Great care was taken in selecting families for the privilege of being removed from overcrowded London - prospective tenants were visited in their homes and poor standards of housekeeping might mark them as unsuitable - but this relative homogeneity may have contributed to New Towns generally acquiring a reputation as boring, lifeless places which reached its apotheosis with Milton Keynes and its concrete cows

New Towns also made only a small dent in the post-war housing problem, providing about 80,000 homes by 1958, but the new Labour Government were in no hurry to encourage the private sector to help fill the gap. A Councillor from Chapel en le Frith was quoted as saying that 'the Government is quite definitely doing all in its power to stop private enterprise building by putting a ceiling price on permanent houses well below the price it was going to charge local authorities for pre-fab houses'. There was a threat to requisition weekend cottages. A delegation had been to meet Aneurin Bevan who, in addition to the National Health Service was also responsible, as Minister for Health, for building the houses of the New Britain. He was reported as having told them that no encouragement would be given to the speculative builders, who built for sale, and that the responsibility would fall on the municipalities since building for rent was the overwhelming priority

Great emphasis was placed on the numbers of houses built - over 1 million in the six years of Labour Government after 1945 (compared with under million after 1918), more than four fifths for public authorities. This emphasis continued when the Conservatives came to power with an election promise of 300,000 houses a year. The 3-bedroomed semi for family occupation continued to be most peoples idea of a house, though economic stringency brought back the terrace and there was a growing tendency to provide 1- or 2-bedroomed maisonettes, particularly to meet the needs of what was by then recognised as a rapidly growing population of elderly households

Flats in general, and in high-rise blocks in particular, formed almost no part of the drive to meet the immediate post-war shortages; high rise had a very short-lived prominence during the sixties after emphasis was once again placed on slum clearance. It is fashionable now to put the blame for this brief-lived 'aberration' on a generation of architects seduced by the ideas of the Modern Movement. But one only has to read, for example, the work of Cleeve Barr, addressed to 'all whose work or interest bring them into touch with public authority housing' to realise the complexities of the problems with which they were grappling. And as modern commentators such as Holmans and Cooney have pointed out, the perceived shortage of land which was a major factor in the belief that we must build up rather than out, was a consequence of the ideas of Town and Country Planning rather than a geographic reality

Nevertheless, the momentum towards building high flats was there, and Englands first tall point block was opened in Harlow New Town in 1947. In 1950 a reorganisation at the London County Council brought a group of architects together who were soon responsible for schemes which were widely admired. From the first however it was not intended that tall blocks should be used for family housing; the new ideal of 'mixed development' together with the developing demographic trends meant that councils wished to provide accommodation for older couples without children, as well as for younger people, including professionals and semi-professionals, who increasingly wished to live independently before marrying and settling down. The old idea of working class estates filled with families with numbers of children had gone - indeed the words 'working class housing' had been dropped from legislation and from the numerous technical advice notes issuing from the housing ministry. It was thought that tall blocks for smaller, childless households would free space in such mixed developments so that some houses with gardens could be built even in the middle of the city

In the early 1950s building high, even in London, was generally limited to 100 feet or 11 storeys, which in itself presented new challenges which the long experience of building 5-storey blocks of 'working class' flats had not solved. At this height a brick cross-wall structure (in itself a replacement for the traditional spine wall method) proved the most economic, though it was not free of problems such as damp penetration. Attempts to introduce new methods involving light-weight steel frames and pre-cast concrete foundered because they generally proved too expensive, partly because of the high cost of providing protection from fire and because it proved difficult to provide adequate sound insulation between flats. Structures such as these were used for office-type buildings, but the experience gained could not easily be transferred to the different requirements of housing - in office buildings light weight, hollow floors provide an ideal space for the complex electrical etc services needed in a commercial building, but do not provide good sound insulation. Bricks could not be used above ? storeys, so reinforced concrete systems were adopted

All the early schemes ran into problems in ensuring that the walls stayed true, and in ensuring that the plaster stayed stuck to the wall panels. Solutions to these problems, involving the use of panels which could be lifted by the new mobile tower cranes, applied only to internal walls; problems remained with external walls and, as Cleeve Barr remarked 'a number of local authorities have learned to their cost [that] first-class workmanship is required if weather penetration is to be avoided at construction joints'. No universally satisfactory or reliable methods had been established when more local authorities became interested in building high after 1956. This was when the emphasis switched once more to slum clearance and the subsidy system changed so that the amount increased with the height of the building. It was also the year in which Duncan Sandys encouraged towns and cities outside London to consider introducing a Green Belt. In these circumstances it is tempting to conclude that virtually every block of flats or maisonettes erected between 1945 and 1970 was an experiment, using at least one untested element in its design or construction which brought in its wake a new problem of maintenance or management

Building high brought all sorts of new challenges to the construction industry, over and above those related purely to design, to do with the organisation and scheduling of the new methods of construction. As one small but telling example, Cleeve Barr quotes the difficulty of serving tea to workmen on the eleventh floor. Cleeve Barr shared Bowleys poor view of standards of training, management and productivity in the building industry. So there can be little doubt that designers, architects and builders did contribute, through the provision of unsatisfactory, damp, noisy or uncomfortable homes, to the social problems which later emerged on council estates

Even if the buildings themselves had been perfectly satisfactory however the types of layout adopted for the new mixed developments would have caused problems. Hindsight can point to the almost complete failure to realise the indispensable part that the car would come to play, even in the lives of council tenants. But the idea of providing 'towers in the park', that municipal housing could harmonise with 'the taste of eighteenth-century gentlemen [which] favoured parklands of wood and grass' as Cooney put it, or of 'LCC Housing and Picturesque Tradition' in the words of the title of an article by Pevsner, backfired. At a time when people were acquiring unprecedented privacy in their domestic lives, through the provision of unshared kitchens, bedrooms, bathrooms and WCs, they were having to learn to live with a new kind of shared external environment which at the least required new customs of courtesy and acceptable behaviour. The 'park' was neither truly public, open to non-residents in the same way as Hyde Park for example, nor truly the responsibility of the residents. Similar difficulties could arise in estates even of conventional house styles where open front gardens were not well delineated from access routes or childrens play areas and where there might be a general procession outside peoples windows. These problems would be exacerbated where developments were away from the city centre, or even in overspill estates far outside the city boundary, when tenants old and young cannot afford to travel to find entertainment. As the car, for those who could afford it, reduced the numbers of people walking about their business the parks became even more lonely and threatening and often windswept even on relatively calm days because of the effect of the tall buildings

With so much emphasis on the need to provide sheer numbers of dwellings, economic pressures inevitably led to cheeseparing in some areas, notably lifts. Lift technology was of course developing all the time, but innovation is expensive and even where adequate numbers of lifts were provided they did not always provide the best service. Some architects even disliked providing lifts because of the unsightly effects on roof top design. Lifts were by far the most expensive service mechanism and some authorities built 10- or 11-storey blocks with only one lift, despite the official recommendation for a minimum of two in buildings of over 6 storeys. Authorities were deterred not only by the capital costs however; servicing and maintenance were expensive too. The effect on the health and spirits of those who had to live in tower blocks with inadequate and often non-existent lift services are not hard to imagine

The problems were not just technical however as is shown by Cleeve Barrs complaint that 'Unattended lifts appear to have an innate capacity for arousing all the most anti-social tendencies in the human beast'; problems such as joy-riding by children, deliberate defacement, and urination were said to be occurring as early as 1958 on even the better-class estates. Some councils removed emergency stop buttons from lifts to prevent courting couples from making use of this facility. Social problems which affected design options were also recognised with more traditional types of housing; for example the back paths which had come to replace tunnel access in terrace housing were difficult to maintain, expensive to light and provided 'cover for bad characters'

The management of council estates often left much to be desired and this only added to the design problems. Housing management never acquired the professional status of architecture or planning, partly because elected councillors liked to play an active role in allocation of tenancies and other matters. There was an uncomfortable mixture of paternalism (even authoritarianism) and poor service, so that it is not surprising if tenants sometimes lost pride in an estate when they had no control even over details such as internal paintwork, still less the colour of the front door, repairs and maintenance or the installation, as time went on, of improvements such as fitted kitchens. Despite the post-war egalitarian ideals the wish to tell people how to live could crop up in surprising places. The Parker Morris report of 1961 set down generous space and heating standards for public authority housing; it also devoted time to discussing whether kitchens should be designed to cope with the distressing working class habit of eating meals there, or whether they should be kept deliberately small to force people into sitting down properly in a dining room. On the other hand an area in which the amount of direction which could be applied was never satisfactorily resolved was the movement of tenants to smaller homes, and the question of under occupation became a concern of the 1970s. It was of course inherent in the idea of mixed development that people should move out of larger houses with gardens once their children had grown up, but it is not surprising that few seriously wanted to follow through on the logic of this. Poor service was shown not just in unattended lifts, but in the gradual withdrawal of on-site staff such as caretakers and even rent collectors as growing street crime made this too perilous an occupation; such developments added to the difficulties of getting speedy repairs and led to a growing feeling of alienation among tenants

The reaction against high rise flats, even from within the architectural profession, was not slow in coming. Nicholas Taylor, in a 1967 article in The Architectural Review predicted that 'More slums are likely to be built in the next five years than in the past twenty' and after quoting D H Lawrence on real freedom and personal fulfilment, observed that 'taps and cupboards are only subsidiary means to this end'. It should be pointed out however that not all local authorities followed the fashion for building high; Manchester and Kensington for example. The former made a policy decision to avoid flats wherever possible because of the impossibility of observing the advice not to use them for families with children. Kensington were, scurrilously, supposed to wish to minimise the number of Labour voters living in their area

The Ronan Point disaster of 1968 is often taken as the beginning of the end of the high rise block, though in fact statistics show that numbers were already in decline. By 1970 less than 2 per cent of council dwellings were in blocks of more than 15 floors, and after 1975 blocks of even 10 floors were statistically invisible. Flats had never been popular in England and the Utopian vision, if such it was, did nothing to change that view. However the argument advanced by critics such as Coleman that the serious social problems which have emerged on some council estates would not have emerged if the design had been 'right' is difficult to sustain when one looks at the history of other areas. For example, Notting Hill which started as a genteel but cheap development in mid-Victorian England declined after 1945 into a byword for social evils; its rise and re-gentrification from the late 1960s onwards was not sufficient to ward off an outbreak of graffiti in the 1980s on what was obviously well-maintained private property. The relationship between built-form and social behaviour is clearly not one of simple determinism

By the 1980s the problems of maintenance and repair had become so overwhelming, on financial if not technical grounds, that blocks began to be demolished less than forty years, or in some cases less than twenty years after they were built. The story of council housing between 1945 and 1970 however is not one of failure only. Over 1 million tenants took advantage of the Right to Buy their home which was introduced in 1980; while some were undoubtedly ill-advised to do so, many acquired a valuable asset as well as freedom from heavy-handed or unresponsive management. Successful solutions to the housing problem were found and standards of housing, even in the worst blocks, are often way above what was offered in the private-rented sector as late as the 1960s. To say, as some have done in this year of celebrating the end of the War, that the prefab represented the ideal combination of factory methods and the traditional English cottage, is to see a cold reality through a rosy glow of nostalgia

The Universe as a bundle of thrums

I dont know if you can still buy bundles of thrums at the Silk Museum in Macclesfield, but you used to be able to. They strike me as a good metaphor for the problems of understanding or analysing the Universe & everything

Thrums are the ends of silk threads left over from or cut off during the weaving process. They drop or are tossed into baskets at the side of the loom, & so fall into tangles

The bundles are objects of beauty in their gleaming piles of tangled-together luminous knotted random threads of different weights & colours. So you could just take one home & arrange it artfully on your coffee table as an objet d'art. Terrible dust trap though. Or you could use it as a source of gorgeous threads for your own embroideries

There are lots of ways you could think of analysing the bundle if you are of a more enquiring frame of mind. You could just observe, describe, record the colours in different kinds of light. You could pick it up & let it fall to see what kinds of different shapes it would make.

There are more scientific methods you could use for analysing the complete structure of the bundle, including perhaps analysis of the silk to pinpoint where the silkworms were bred or where the mulberry leaves that fed them were grown. You could weigh the bundle. You could clip a random sample of threads, weigh & measure them & use the results to estimate the total length of thread in the bundle

Given patience enough & time, you could carefully disentangle all the threads. Lay them out in order of length, colour, thickness. Of course it would no longer be a bundle. But if you had kept meticulous records of the disentangling process you could perhaps put it back together again

Even as a mere human, you stand in relation to the bundle as Godels logician stands outside the system, or Archimedes stands ready to move the world with his lever (a knitting needle would do). Or perhaps as God surveying his universe

But what if you were some microscopic creature living deep inside one of the twists or tangles?

***

There is the material for jokes, once you have decided what’s funny. There is the evidence from which histories can be written, once you’ve decided what’s relevant to a particular interest. Until then there’s just a great undifferentiated, overlapping tangle, without sense or even sequence, waiting for someone to discover a few loose ends & pull out a few usable threads, then to weave them together into a usable fabric - Michael Frayn: The Human Touch

Victorian birth control

The enduring effects of Malthus' original remarks, on lack of moral restraint as the cause of population growth & its consequences, have I think been underestimated & under appreciated. Although Malthus' arguments still underlie, often subconsciously, our modern concerns about global population growth, his effect on sexual behaviour as well as attitudes towards womens role has been, I shall argue, even more profound; Malthusian concerns eventually turned into, by way of justification for the moral restraint which C19th Britain adopted as the favoured method of birth control, the belief that women do not enjoy sex. There is no evidence that this belief, widespread by the centurys end, was at all common in the first half of the C19th. As is often the case, however, the generations born in the early C20th century took the beliefs of their parents as representing what had always been.

Victorian middle classes worried about Malthus at the wider national & social level as well as at the level of the personal & of the family. They realised the importance of education as a means of maintaining economic growth to cope with the unprecedented increase in population, but education was expensive, business often precarious, & there were few sources of secure employment which would provide a guaranteed income for those who did not hold land. Whether as a private family expense or as a public tax burden (to provide for education of the masses), the costs needed to be kept within bounds, & the only obvious way to do this was to limit the number of children requiring to be educated.

Why moral restraint should have been the method adopted for contraception remains a mystery however - physical methods were certainly known about & advocated by Radicals in pre-Victorian times; but Queen Victoria, who was certainly no marital prude & disliked being pregnant only because it interfered with her sex life, who had a scientifically-minded husband & undoubted access to the best advice if required, nevertheless seems not to have even considered the use of contraceptives; she accepted that a large family was the price of self-indulgence.

Evidence that a large family was regarded as a sign of lack of self restraint can be found in the papers of John Bright. This widely travelled orator & MP spent relatively little time with his wife yet still fathered a family of 8. His brother Jacob, father of one, remonstrated with him about this. Of course as the co-owner of the family business, and the one who bore most of the responsibility for its management, Jacobs concern would have been at least as much financial & economic as moral, because of anxiety about how to provide adequate maintenance & inheritance for so many. John Bright relied largely on his income from the family firm, since MPs were unpaid, though he was also the beneficiary of an unusually large number of public testimonials, & he did not always appreciate the need for economy & financial restraint.

Evidence that women were not regarded as straitlaced creatures without sexual appetite is provided in the Diaries of Absalom Watkin, Manchester merchant & radical. In 1827 he & like-minded friends entertained Richard Carlile who had recently been released from a 6-year prison sentence for publishing Tom Paines works & The Republican magazine. Carlile had also written Every Womans Book to promote the contraceptive sponge, already in use by members of the upper classes, such as the duchess who never went out to dinner without carrying one in her reticule.

For Watkin & his friends the insuperable objection to the sponge was that its widespread use of would lead to 'extreme profligacy among unmarried women' & to a lack of fidelity in wives - or at least it would destroy a husbands faith in his wifes fidelity. Watkin does not deal with the problem of a wifes faith in the fidelity of her husband, with or without the availability of contraceptives, so we do not know whether he & his friends were motivated by a mans need for faith that he was a father, or by some misogynistic belief in woman as temptress & devil. Perhaps the concept of moral restraint came to the fore as a solution to this conundrum. What is most interesting however is their clear belief in every womans need for an active sexual life; they believed for example that abstention could lead to death from consumption or other disease, & recognised that their rejection of the contraceptive sponge meant that unmarried women faced an invidious choice between the ill health associated with virginity & the social disgrace of unmarried motherhood.

Evidence that restraint was used to limit family size is found in the life of the painter Edward Burne-Jones. He & his wife, though still in love, deliberately abstained from sexual relations precisely to guard her from any further pregnancies after they had had 3 children; the middle one of which lived only 3 weeks. What spoils this story is that during this separation he was consoled by a mistress, the first of many.

Charles Dickens felt happy with four children; he also felt, as did so many Victorians, overburdened by financial responsibilities, not just toward his own children but to his parents & siblings. He therefore regarded with mixed feelings the birth of a fifth child, but proceeded to father another five in eight years. The need for self-restraint in his case was also eventually expressed in an extraordinary way. Just before Christmas 1857 he moved from the marital bedroom to the adjacent dressing room & arranged to have the communicating door blocked up & covered by a bookcase. Although he expressed his disgust at his wifes increasing fatness & sloppiness, this was the only way to control his own urges, or possibly his wifes demands.

Food phobia

I have just been reading an article in The Times Magazine (16 November 2002)¹ about small children who have eating problems - not anorexia but something more akin to phobias about putting certain kinds of substance into their mouths; some of them have had health problems throughout their lives & may have been fed for long periods through a tube; for others the source of the problem is more mysterious but seems to flow from some traumatic encounter with taste or texture, or a simple lack of learning how to eat at an early age

I think that I have a healthy attitude towards food, a willingness to try almost anything at least once, but in endeavouring to comprehend this problem I was led to remember a not unrelated, moderately traumatic encounter of my own

When I was a toddler in the late 1940s my father was a telephone engineer in rural Derbyshire. As such, a lot of his job involved visiting isolated farms to work out how they might be provided with a land line &, in those days of rationing, it was not unusual for a farmer to express his gratitude with a gift of food

Just before Christmas 1948 - I was 3 years old. Daddy came home one evening, letting a cold blast of air through the kitchen door, & dumped a sack on the floor. As he greeted my mum I, intrigued, approached the sack; despite the joint parental warning 'Not to touch' I thrust my hand inside …

I can still recall the horror of that small hand encountering the warm - throbbing? - feathers of dead poultry

That horror was later reinforced by watching the Young Farmers Wives competing in the poultry dressing competitions at the annual Derbyshire Agricultural Shows - shows to which we had privileged access because my father was responsible for providing the temporary phone lines required

But these traumas never put me off eating chicken, & in adulthood I even learned to cope with poise with the intimate preparation of animals for food, though I would still prefer not to have to pluck feathers, & chicken feet revolt me in a way that blood & intestines do not

I can even prepare liver with equanimity, even though I remember that my mother could hardly bear to touch it when raw, bloody & riddled with gristly blood vessels which need to be scissored out

So what do I conclude? Merely that the link between trauma & effect is not simple …

1 Neill, Fiona 'Eat it all up' pp24-28

Medical complaints department

The practice of medicine could be transformed, if only doctors would expunge the word complain from their vocabulary

Just imagine. Instead of complaining all the time, patients would simply tell them things

Drugs in sport

Steroid hormones: most women in this country are advised, by their medical advisers, to take steroid hormones at some point in their lives - that is, they go on to the pill or to HRT

These drugs are of course made up of 'female' hormones … but they, & their metabolic routes in the body, are closely related to the male steroid hormones such as testosterone

Taken as drugs, both male & female hormones have, or may have, side effects, such as increased risk of cancer or of liver damage, not to mention disruption of whatever it is that makes us essentially male or female. When set against the risks, dangers or discomforts of pregnancy or hot flushes, they are considered acceptable: when set against the disappointment of not making an Olympic final - no … no way … disgraceful

And in the vicious circle of medical ethics, since drugs in sport are unethical, research into the effects of drugs in sport is unethical …

Other drugs But it is not just steroid hormones. We have set up a category performance enhancing drugs which includes simple everyday remedies such as the ephedrine in cough mixture. We also, rather confusedly, extend the category, for sport, to include 'recreational' drugs such as cocaine or marijuana. Why not also include alcohol & tobacco? Are these drugs performance enhancing, or have we mixed up a general concern for health here? Why should we have a particular locus to interfere with the health of sportsmen when we make no such overwhelming claim to interfere directly with the health of the ordinary Joe Smoker?

One minor side question: we hear a lot about contamination of food supplements eg by nandrolone. Is this meant to imply that manufacturers add hormones to the supplements, or could it be that there is something like phyto oestrogens which have the same kind of metabolic effect? Soya seems to be particularly indictable here, since it is thought to be both healthy & is known to have oestrogen like effects. If I eat lots of soya would it show up as oestrogen metabolites in my urine?

Ethics These attitudes depend in part on ideas of fairness, fairness in competition. But why is drug taking more unfair than being, one way or another, wealthy enough to be able to take time to train full time, to not have to work in office or factory to earn ones daily bread?

Why is drug taking more unfair than having access to, & being able to afford, the diet & supplements which meet current nutritional advice on how to perform best?

Why is drug taking more unfair than drawing a winning ticket in the alleged genetic or environmental lottery of life by being born black, white, in the Kenyan highlands …

Why is drug taking more unfair than indulging in strange practices such as ice baths, dedicating ones life to training in an obsessional way, even to the detriment of family life? I for one lack the gene that allows me to admire people such as Steve Redgrave or Paula Radcliffe

Why is drug taking more unfair than having access to the best physiotherapists, visual acuity trainers …

Why is it OK to take pain killers so that one can play through injury?

Why is it OK to set up this demeaning system of urine tests, under the eye of a beholder, any time, any place, anywhere?

The doctrine of absolute liability means that an athlete is guilty of a doping offence if they fail one of these urine tests, even if all who judge are satisfied that there was no guilty intent. One can see why to do otherwise would be problematic, to say the least. But I for one find offensive those who say, smugly, that athletes ought to know what they are taking, to be able to avoid all risk, there is plenty of information out there ...

There is plenty of health, nutrition & ingredient information on food packaging

Suppose I were to be held absolutely liable for the offence of having some metabolite of Vitamin C or one of a long list of other banned substances in my urine? How am I meant to be able to understand whether a ready meal of spaghetti carbonara is safe to eat? Not to mention the way in which supermarkets are always tinkering with the recipes while keeping the packaging ostensibly the same

There is evidence that a life devoted to sport can impose serious health problems in later life any way - problems such as arthritis from excessive strain on joints or brain degeneration caused by heading a football

The question is, as usual, one of balance. There are undoubtedly serious dangers of drugs in sport - something like a dozen cyclists have died in the past year or so of heart problems allegedly caused by EPO. And few would want to justify the kind of doping of young women athletes that took place in East Germany. But nor would one want to justify some of the more brutal but non-chemical training methods, whether imposed on young athletes or self imposed by obsessed adults

The particular demonisation of drugs seems part of a generalised modern demonisation of chemicals & a naïve acceptance of things we think of as natural. What we need is a more balanced attitude, one that would allow sensible, ethical research into the effects of all aspects of sport & training, including 'drugs'