Not a nice day

It wasn’t the weather, which has been wet and pre-autumnal in dreary London.

Everything went swimmingly well until mid-afternoon.

The Lady in Malcolm’s Life and the Old Boy himself had the need to collect documents in High Holborn. This, by common and unspoken consent, was the excuse for a liquid lunch.

OK, they got it wrong: the bus turned left out of Gray’s Inn Road into Holborn, when they needed to go right to High Holborn. Eventually, though, the correct location was found, the envelope collected and — by one of those nice happenstances — there was the Cittie of Yorke conveniently ccross the road.

Normally, this post would now become an paeon of praise to one of London’s better watering-holes. Unexceptional, if unexciting pub meals; more than adequate jakes; and Sam Smith’s Old Brewery Bitter (it’s a tied house) at a sensational £1.99 a pint.

What’s to gripe about?

So, all went swimmingly until mid afternoon. The Lady headed home, and Malcolm made an excuse to go the other way.

A couple of unnecessary side-trips and he was at the bottom of the Tottenham Court Road, waiting for a 134 bus. A 24 came along: that would take him half-way, and it was raining. Good enough: he could change at Camden Town.

Suddenly Malcolm was dealing with a soul in need. A heavily-pregnant girl, on all appearances a Roma, was waving a paper into Malcolm’s face. She seemed to want the directions for St Thomas’s Hospital (which is in precisely the other direction). Any reader who already knows what comes next will share Malcolm’s moment of malevolence, to which we shall shortly come.

Sure enough, Malcolm’s wallet had been cleanly picked out of his inside breast pocket by the girl’s accomplice.

For once Malcolm had his mobile phone with him. Within minutes he had called home and told the Lady to stop all debit and credit cards. She went further and put a stop on a couple of those loyalty cards as well. The good news is the last £10 note in that wallet had recently, and to mutual benefit, found its due place in the till of the Cittie of Yorke. So no great damage done, except to Malcolm’s self-esteem and personal convenience.

Now it is only a matter of time awaiting the replacement of those cards, the travel pass, and anything else. There’ll be need to replace the British Library pass, but that comes free with a crime reference number, and doubtless other bureaucracies to be contacted.

Our Malcolm, that most liberal of souls, fully admits it (and here we have that moment of malevolence): he is suffering angry mental flashes involving a Roma girl, a rope and a lamp-post. It’s wrong, wrong, wrong, he fully knows. For once, though, he briefly finds himself in solidarity with your average benighted Daily Mail reader and President Sarkozy.

Perhaps his mood this Thursday night would not be so grim had it not been for the “care-in-the-community” episode on Tuesday. Then, a patient from the nearby hostel accosted Malcolm in the entrance to the local supermarket, came face-to-face, and spluttered a mouthful of some sticky liquid directly into Malcolm’s face.

Do, as Malcolm’s Norfolk-born granny superstitiously asserted, these things always come in threes?

Malcolm doesn’t get it

Once upon a time, when the world was young, o best-beloved, it held winter Saturday mornings, bright, breezy, clear, crisp and — best of all — out of school.

Adrian, Evan and Malcolm (aggregated age of barely three decades) would bicycle down the Beach Road to Wells beach, then along the hard sand towards Holkham Bay.

The high-tide mark was rich in possibilities. Cans from far-away places in alien tongues and alphabets.  Buoys from fishing nets. Broken fish boxes with traders’ names from the whole length of the East Coast. Exotic possibilities for furlong after furlong. Out of that active learning came added dimensions of enjoyment of Robinson Crusoe and Whisky Galore.

[Malcolm delights that his grandsons have already taken to Robin Hood and King Arthur. In short order they are progressing to Treasure Island. Whisky Galore, in dead-tree form, should not be far behind. These are joys that all should relish, especially for the first time.]

Inevitably, a souvenir of useless nature was wrestled home on the crossbar.

Nobody quibbled.

Curiously, even at that age, some concept of legality entered the Young Idea. Beachcombing was an open-entry sport. In general (and despite what appears later in this post), finders keepers. Unless, of course, it was the rotting whale carcass which, mysteriously and noxiously flitted overnight between the jurisdiction of the three local councils.

As Malcolm understands it:

• Flotsam is stuff swept off the deck of ships. That is (or was) free-for-all.
• Jetsam is material deliberately thrown overboard. That, largely, remains the property of the original owner.

Determining which is which hardly crosses the true beachcombers’s conscience.

PC Plod is PC

Last Monday, the Russian cargo-ship Sinegorsk unloaded 1,500 “tonnes” of timber into the English Channel, somewhere off Newhaven. All accounts suggest that it went overboard when the vessel listed in bad weather: by Malcolm’s reckoning that makes it flotsam. It is now washing up between Pegwell Bay and Margate.

After 72 hours in the sea, impregnated with salt water,  the timber is — by general agreement — useless for commercial constructional purposes. It has no realisable monetary value. It would, however, mend holes in garden fences; and build sheds on allotments. Thus it would provide useful leisure activity for many. In any sane society, the authorities would be closing eyes to any technical legal infractions: what was that Malcolm read in his Latin texts about “the law is not concerned with straws”?

So, in this later, degenerated age, we have this:

Kent Police have warned people not to remove any timber from the shoreline but coastguards said there had been reports of people trying to collect the wood.

Alison Kentuck, Receiver of Wreck, said: “The timber is not suitable for building material, it is saturated with salt water.

“The simple message is, it is not a case of finders keepers. The timber does have an owner and that is not likely to be the person picking it up off the beach.

“They must by law report all of their recoveries to the receiver and it is a criminal offence if they fail to do so.”

and

Ch Supt John Molloy said: “We are working with the coastguard and our partner agencies to make the beaches safe.

“I would like to remind people that the shoreline can be a dangerous place, particularly with the current poor weather and people could be putting themselves at unnecessary risk by venturing into the sea to salvage the timber.

“This cargo remains the property of the original owner and to steal it is not only foolhardy, but also a criminal offence.”

Malcolm finds a couple of difficulties relating to that:

• Alison Kentuck would be better occupied receiving wrecks than pontificating on legal ownerships. She could, for example, be having a quiet word with Blasted Boris over his mad notion of building an airport on top of the odd megaton or two of high explosive.
• In any case, scavenging is not illegal:

Salvaging from the beach is perfectly legal as long as people inform the “Receiver of Wreck,” [according to]  a government official.

• Chief Superintendent Molloy is nannyishly over-anxious to warn us that the English Channel in late January is a cold and windy place. He is also cavalier in his use of the word “steal”.

Malcolm assures all-and-sundry that timber recovered from the sea, the more broken and decayed the better, burns with a variety of coloured flames, full of eerie blues and greens. It is enough to inspire a young creative mind, and to linger over five decades later in an older, wiser and less adventurous one.

Who’s Left?

The Telegraph is celebrating the Labour Conference by listing Britain’s 100 most influential Leftwingers.

The first two individuals are Gordon Brown (natch) and Tony Blair. One is a recognition of the reality: the other, the Cheshire cat of British politics, (disappeared except for the rictus grin): a nod at “legacy”. The precedence of one, at least, will be gone in a twelve-month.

The bronze medal spot disturbs Malcolm: Alex Salmond. This takes the Scot Nats on their face value, as a self-declared party of the Left. Malcolm demurs from reciting his numerous objections to Salmond and the Tartan Tories of the SNP being “Left”. If it were so, it would be a world’s first for an oil economist and his paid creature of a major Bank.

After that it’s a beauty parade of Cabinet Ministers, political advisers, union bosses, the usual suspect journos, a couple of Greens, with the odd nod at blue-sky merchants on the way. All the way down to Blasted Pilger as la lanterne rouge.

A real curiosity is Gerry Adams (number 85): that must represent a double mischief, in putting him on a ‘British’ Left-list and so low down, too. Malcolm would have thought that Máirtín Mag Aonghusa deserved at least at much acknowledgement.

And there’s Billy Bragg (number 80) as “one of the party’s elder statesman” [sic]. Bragg’s proposal for sorting the Upper House has some validity. His songs are worth half an ear. Malcolm would suggest that, in the scheme of things outside the Metropolitan bubble, Dick Gaughan has been at least as significant.

Fortunately, these exercises are little more than page-fillers, inflating the vanity of those who need such, but inevitably ignoring claims of many worthier bods. Were they to be taken seriously, as a kind of check-list for precedence on Lenin’s Tomb, that would be a nightmare.

All Malcolm can add is it kept him amused for a few moments, before he returned to real life.

Left!

Far more significant is the issue which prefaced the list, the problem of definition: what is the Left?

Until 20 years ago the answer would have been straightforward – to be on the left meant believing that the state could transform society into a more equal place. Today being on the left cannot be reduced to this formula because many of those who would see themselves as “left” have little time for state intervention, let alone ownership of industry or direct taxation or even equality.

Perhaps the left should be defined as “radical” or “progressive”. But such a definition is hard to sustain in an era in which revolutions have come from the right—the Thatcher revolution or the fall of the Soviet Union for example.

That caused some serious harumphing from Malcolm. He accepts that the term “Left” may be degraded, even over-elastic (as this list proves), but there remains one essential shibboleth: that little word ‘equality’.

Malcolm tends to the antinomial at the best of times, but here his differentiation is precise. The Left/Right thing is not a dead metaphor. Let him recapitulate. The conceit come from the French Revolutionary Convention of 1792-94, and refers to where in the Chamber the factions seated themselves. On the Right were the Girondists. On the Left, the Montagne (named because they occupied the higher benches). A fuller description looks like this:

The Girondists were the party of orderly progress, sweetness and light the men who dreaded all violent, i.e., energetic measures… Such men, however well-intentioned they may be, must always in the long run become the tools of reaction from their timidity and hesitancy. The Girondists desired a doctrinaire republic, led by the professional middle-classes, the lawyers and literateurs. Their main strength lay in the provinces, the name being derived from the department of the Gironde, whence some, of their chief men came…
The Mountainists advocated uncompromising revolutionary principles (besides aiming to some extent, at economic equality) a vigorous policy and strong centralisation in, opposition to the Girondists, who favoured strictly middle-class republicanism, a timid and vacillating policy, and federalisation, or local autonomy. The struggle between the Mountain and the Gironde was in part a struggle for supremacy between Paris and the departments.

So far, so good? Fair enough. That section of Malcolm’s argument is hereby dedicated to Bob Mitchell, distinguished son of Kinnegad, in the County Westmeath, and MA of Trinity College, Dublin, who maintained that, “History began in 1789, and everything earlier was archaeology.” And then went off to study medieval trade routes.

Malcolm now humbly submits that adherence to Liberté, égalité, fraternité is as good a way as any to define a Leftist.

Vorwärts!

Fortunately, the Declaration of the Rights of Man is quite clear about two of these ideals:

• Liberty consists in being able to do anything that does not harm others: thus, the exercise of the natural rights of every man has no bounds other than those that ensure to the other members of society the enjoyment of these same rights. These bounds may be determined only by Law [Article 4].
• The Law is the expression of the general will. All citizens have the right to take part, personally or through their representatives, in its making. It must be the same for all, whether it protects or punishes [Article 6].

The fraternité bit amounts to: Do as you would be done by.

According to wikipedia, the French did not get their motto until later:

it was only in 1848 that Pierre Leroux revived the phrase. Pache, mayor of the commune of Paris, painted the formula “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, ou la mort” on the walls of the commune. It was under the Second Republic that it took on its final form and only under the Third Republic was the motto made official.

There’s something seriously confusing there. Jean-Nicholas Paché was Mayor of Paris in 1793-4 and originally a Girondist. He is not to be confused (as a casual reading of that quotation might do) with the Mayor during the 1871 Commune: Jules Ferry, later twice Prime Minister in the 1880s.

Pierre LeRoux could qualify as the original woolly Christian Socialist. He is often credited for giving the French the word “socialisme” in 1834. English had recognised “socialist” the year before, when it appeared in The Poor Man’s Guardian of 24th August. There are earlier uses of “socialisme” (for example The Globe of 13th February 1832), but there it implies the antithesis to “personnalité”. The Encyclopedia Britannica believes that Robert Owen’s followers were using “socialism” by the later 1830s.

The motto was current in Paris by 1793, and was undoubtedly widely displayed, and painted on walls. It was not original: Fénelon made the connection in the later 17th century. Robespierre was proposing it as a national motto in 1790.

Halt!