His audience then were the academics, the teachers, the lecturers and the professors who would opine on his laboured thoughts, and respond with a simple — usually disappointing — grade and a cryptic — usually demoralising — comment.
The strategy Malcolm evolved (and he boasts it was self-devised and taught by nobody) amounted to:
having an eye-opener opener, which could be reprised in the closing sentence or two;
which opener would employ a knowing literary animadversion (though Robert E. Howard’s pulp fiction, or Robert A. Heinlein, both as above, would neither be a good choice, at least for that audience);
a use of well-chosen, precise and extended vocabulary, though not so much to be pretentious;
marshalling expression as tri-partite Ciceronian expressions;
deliberately opposing constructions, by use of colons, by antitheses and by jarring shifts of style.
That’ll do for the time being.
Some of those techniques may persist in his writing to his present senility.
James Kirkup, with his politics blog for the Telegraph, is up to similar tricks.
It’s either touching or cloying, depending on your perspective, but either way, it touches on an essential truth of politics: to govern is to make enemies. For better or for worse, the exercise of power is almost always a zero-sum game. Every choice you make will make someone happy and someone else unhappy.
Any friend of Josh is invited to be a friend of Malcolm.
The rest of Kirkup’s neat little essay has some nice throw-aways:
… Gordon Brown, a man who could write several books about political feuds and political enemies. Mr Brown’s view of political dissent was formed in the unforgiving world of Scottish Labour, whose culture was once described as “Dog eat dog, and vice versa.” Despite the odd appeal to the punters, the Brown approach to enemies was built on machine politics and sheer aggression, a willingness to demolish utterly those who stood in his way.
Sometimes, to speak to Team Brown was to be put in mind of a line from Conan the Barbarian, when Conan is asked: “What is good in life?”
Kirkup, a bit naughtily Malcolm feels, is citing the film there, not the text.
Is that admiration or criticism, young James?
Let us trip lightly over Kirkup on the (ambiguous?) motives of Tim Loughton and his civil-partnership amendment. In the context, clearly Kirkup sees a malevolence here.
Instead let us relish Kirkup’s closure:
Anyone in power for any time will find themselves, like Josh, talking about enemies. Mr Cameron and his friends need to do more than talk. They need to think of something to do about those enemies, and soon.
Hug them close. Bribe them. Charm them. Go over their heads. Kill them all and plough their fields with salt. What’s the best choice? It’s not clear. But one thing is clear: ignoring your enemies won’t make them go away.
In any political generation there may be just the singular political spadassinicide [woo ! woo! Sabatini gets a look in! Change of genre, Malcolm!]. One who could be wholly ruthless, as alien as a Martian … as real as taxes but he was a race of one[which gets back to the Heinlein: sneaky, huh? And you were expecting Conan].
Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help.
His breath goeth forth, he returneth to his earth; in that very day his thoughts perish.
Psalm 146, a chorister’s favourite (it has just ten verses — and that could be one of few verifiable truths in this post).
Wells had spotted an oddity in the ICM/Guardian poll:
More unexpectedly the ICM poll also found a jump in support for the BNP, up to 4%, the highest any poll has had then at for years. This is strange. The BNP have certainly not had any great publicity boost, at the local elections they seemed essentially moribund. It may just be an odd sample, or perhaps as Tom Clark suggests it is just a case of confusion amongst respondents, with some people getting the names of the BNP and UKIP mixed up.
ICM also asked about voting intention in an EU referendum, finding voting intention fairly evenly balanced – 40% would vote to stay in (22% definitely, 18% probably), 43% would vote to leave (32% definitely, 11% probably).
UPDATE: ICM tabs are up here. Topline figures without reallocation of don’t knows would have been CON 27%, LAB 35%, LDEM 9%, UKIP 19%, BNP 5%.
That strange boost of support for the BNP is almost wholly amongst women, almost wholly amongst C2s, almost wholly amongst over 65s and almost wholly in Wales. The unweighted number of 2010 BNP voters in the sample was 1, increased to 18 by weighting. What that strongly suggests to me is that there was one little old C2 BNP-voting Welsh lady who got a very high weighting factor, and probably makes up almost all of that 4%! Such things happen sometimes, but it means the BNP blip is probably just a data artifact that can be ignored.
A euphemism newly minted
Now, there’s a nice one: “just a data artifact”. Try typing that, and most spell-check utilities flag up an error. That’s because the preferred version is subtly different, another form of “truth”.
It’s also a prime example of word-drift. Once upon a time there was:
artefact:An object made or modified by human workmanship, as opposed to one formed by natural processes.
At some point the alternative spelling seemed to be the norm for an alternative signification:
artifact:Science. A spurious result, effect, or finding in a scientific experiment or investigation, esp. one created by the experimental technique or procedure itself. Also as a mass noun: such effects collectively.
As a point of fact, Mr Chairman, the entire public opinion polling business is based on such “data artifacts”. Notice, even in what Wells says there, how an eight-point Labour lead (35-27) is manipulated down to just six points (34-28) for a headline figure.
Today there are two types of truth …
That’s the start of page 40 of the current Private Eye (#1340, 17th-30th May, so verifiable, if not a “truth”). It becomes an exposé of a criminal Yorkshire property developer who is running the usual rings around the Serious Fraud Office, but begins with a telling generalisation:
Today there are two types of truth. Electronic truth — provided via the ever expanding knowledge universes of the internet. And historic truth — provided by those facts not yet or no longer recorded on easily searchable internet databases.
An American truth
There is a poem by the American romantic, Professor John Russell Lowell, which Malcolm has always assumed to be essentially anti-slavery and pro-”freedom”. Its best-known snippet is the eighth stanza:
Careless seems the great Avenger; history’s pages but record One death-grapple in the darkness ‘twixt old systems and the Word; Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne, Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.
A bit too theist for Malcolm, but he appreciates the sense and sensibility.
[For the record, Lowell was President Chester Arthur's appointee as US Ambassador in London. Here he was a literary lion, running Henry James around the Bloomsbury salons, and becoming Virginia Woolf's god-father.]
Trussed truths
Electronic “truth” contains too many “data artifacts” for comfort. Pseudo-statistics (those perpetrated by serial-offending politicians as much as by their natural allies, the opinion-pollsters) are just one source of this creeping corruption.
Psalm 146, of course, prefers the eternal (and unprovable, and frequently controvertible) truths:
Happy is he that hath the God of Jacob for his help, whose hope is in the LORD his God: Which made heaven, and earth, the sea, and all that therein is: which keepeth truth for ever: Which executeth judgment for the oppressed: which giveth food to the hungry. The LORD looseth the prisoners: The LORD openeth the eyes of the blind: the LORD raiseth them that are bowed down: the LORD loveth the righteous: The LORD preserveth the strangers; he relieveth the fatherless and widow: but the way of the wicked he turneth upside down.
Therein you may find your “truth”. If so, it is where you find all you need to know about:
how Huhne was released after 62 days of an eight-month incarceration (and there are still many of us wondering why Vicky had to go down, too),
Malcolm spent yesterday afternoon at the British Museum form the Pompeii and Herculaneum exhibition. This being about Roman domesticity, penises form a large — nay, grotesquely inflated — part of the show.
… beyond a cluster fuck, worse than a FUBAR. Continued attempts to correct the situation only make the situation worse and more embarrassing.
This is La Treneman at her brightest and best, doing a delicious vamp:
Welcome to Eurovision, Westminster style. I had no idea when I went along to the Private Member’s Bill ballot yesterday that it was going to be so much fun. For this is not a ballot at all. It’s more a raffle, with a bit of bingo thrown in and also darts, as in when they bellow “One Hundred and Eighty!”
Our Master of Ceremonies was Lindsay Hoyle, the Deputy Speaker whose sense of fun and Lancashire accent are proving a huge hit these days. He had a glamorous assistant, of course. Tall, thin, dressed as a penguin with a white bow-tie, his real name was David Natzler and he was Clerk of Legislation but, of course, we started to call him Debbie.
She concludes:
“Shake ’em up!” cried Lindsay as the big moment arrived. “The winner of the day is … ”
“One hundred and ninety-nine,” announced Debbie.
“Oooohhhhh!” cried the audience.
Lindsay flipped through his list. “James Wharton!”
We looked at each other. Who? Still, within minutes, we were being flooded with information about Mr Wharton. He was the young (aged 29) Tory from Stockton and a Eurosceptic. His majority was tiny (332) and he had made the news for being linked with a company that sells stone statues of giant penises.
Sorry, but it’s true. It may not be in the best taste but, then, this IS Eurovision.
Two after-shocks:
1. Malcolm’s classical eddikashun makes him want to prefer the plural form as penes. It is also the Oxford Dictionary‘s preferred plural form, where penises is dismissed as Brit. Curiously, penes is also the term used to mean “in the possession of …” or “in the hands of …” One hits upon it occasionally in footnotes and bibliophile commentaries. Logically penises are commonly “in the hands of …”, but there is no direct etymological link.
2.Then there’s the business of It may not be in the best taste but …
Forty years ago there was a previous Pompeii exhibition in London. As Malcolm recalls, it was sponsored by the Daily Telegraph. An acquaintance of the Lady in Malcolm’s Life was commissioned to produce the educational poster to accompany the show. The artist’s proclivities were well enough known for the instruction to include “and definitely no penises”.
This became a challenge. Sure enough, there is at least one member, suitably disguised, included. Malcolm still has the mounted (ahem!) item in the Redfellow Hovel attic.
The writer Neal Stephenson, in response to a question about his own fame or lack of it, came up with a usefully precise and clarifying answer:
It helps to put this in perspective by likening me to the mayor of Des Moines, Iowa. It’s true of both the mayor of Des Moines and of me that, out of the world’s population of some six billion people, there are a few hundred thousand who consider us important, and who recognise us by name. In the case of the mayor of Des Moines, that is simply the population of the Des Moines metropolitan area. In my case, it is the approximate number of people who are avid readers of my books. In addition, there might be as many as a million or two who would find my name vaguely familiar if they saw it; the same is probably true of the mayor of Des Moines.
The crucial contributing factor to this condition, which involves being both incredibly, outlandishly famous by serious-writer standards while also being unknown to the general reader, is the fact that Stephenson works in the area of SF and fantasy writing. For reasons I’ve never seen explained or even thoroughly engaged with, there seems to be an unbridgeable crevasse between the SF/fantasy audience and the wider literate public. People who don’t usually read, say, thrillers or military history or popular science will read, say, Gone Girl or Berlin or Bad Pharma. But people who don’t read fantasy just simply, permanently, 100 per cent don’t read fantasy.
Let us meditate thereon.
First of all, there is, at least in Malcolm’s mind, an unbridgeable crevasse between SF and fantasy. They tend to arrive on the same book-stack in many, less salubrious bookshops (who don’t know better). And there is a certain amount of overlap. The differences and distinctions, though, are huge.
Above all, too much ‘fantasy’ is prolix in the extreme. Martin’s ever-expanding saga is currently up to seven tomes, and — probably — as many thousand pages. Life is just too short, unless one is a nerd stuck in a garret with no other time-displacements. On which note, Harry Venning’s ever-pertinent, and delightfully-concise Clare in the Community strip:
Then, of course, fantasy tends to the dystopian. And that’s where Malcolm is heading away from here.
At its best, SF is precisely-focused. As an exemplar — and in the same context as Neal Stephenson (as will become clearer in a moment) — Malcolm was reminded of Robert A Heinlein’s story, Requiem. This was (as far as Malcolm can see) the third published effort of Heinlein, in Astounding Science Fiction in January 1940. [Wikipedia has a synopsis for newbies.] It is, above all, a statement on what makes us, and our individual existence and its inevitable termination, worthwhile:
This be the verse you grave for me: Here he lies where he longed to be; Home is the sailor, home from the sea, And the hunter home from the hill.
Out of Requiem developed the entire Future History sequence. The schema for this was seemingly established by early 1941. The Second Unpleasantness intervened, and Heinlein (with Annapolis and some UCLA education) spent the war working on naval aeronautics — and also recruiting/conscripting Asimov and Lymon Sprague de Camp. What ensued is quite intriguing. Heinlein (along with his third wife, Ginny) was a committed ‘liberal’ and was taking his writing into ‘social’ SF, and into something more sophisticated than the ‘pulps’ where the genre was born.
What squares the circle here is Stephenson’s involvement with Hieroglyph. Malcolm came across this through a recent article on Slate:
What should we expect from science fiction? In a recent Smithsonian article by IO9’s Annalee Newitz, author Neal Stephenson criticized the dystopian cynicism that currently pervades the genre. Instead he calls a more optimistic, realistic approach—fewer zombies and man’s folly-style catastrophes, more creative inventions and solutions. In the spirit of being constructive, he’s also taking action. The first step is an anthology of optimistic, near-term science fiction, forthcoming from William Morrow in 2014, that will tackle this challenge head-on. Smithsoniandescribes the project, Hieroglyph, as a plan “to rally writers to infuse science fiction with the kind of optimism that could inspire a new generation to, as he puts it, ‘get big stuff done.’ ”
The seed for Hieroglyph was planted at a Future Tense event in 2011, where Stephenson’s lament about the cynicism of contemporary science fiction drew some fire from Arizona State University president Michael Crow. (ASU is a partner in Future Tense with Slate and the New America Foundation.) “You’re the ones who have been slacking off,” Crow responded, leading to a conversation about how to inspire more constructive writing and thinking about the future.
The upshot was Hieroglyph, as well as an evolving partnership with Arizona State. Full disclosure: I’m working with Stephenson to implement this idea on an institutional level at ASU, where we have unusual opportunities to connect creative thinkers and researchers with cutting-edge work across almost every scientific and humanistic discipline.
This takes us to the heart of what good SF should be — and frequently is. So, let’s have the obvious examples:
Arthur C. Clarke
Arthur C Clarke, as a young RAF radar technician, wrote a letter to Wireless World (which had to pass through RAF scrutiny and censorship) mainly about the future of rocketry, but including a speculation about a world-wide stationary-satellite system. That wasn’t an original idea: Herman Potočnik had published as early as 1928, but Clarke gave it the ‘oxygen of publicity’ — and the idea was realised through the work of American scientists such as John Robinson Pierce.
Today the ‘Clarke belt’ is getting crowded with something like 200 geostationary satellites.
My life span encompasses the era when the United States of America was capable of launching human beings into space. Some of my earliest memories are of sitting on a braided rug before a hulking black-and-white television, watching the early Gemini missions. At the age of 51—not even old!—I watched on a flat-panel screen as the last Space Shuttle lifted off the pad. I have followed the dwindling of the space program with sadness, even bitterness. Where’s my orbiting, donut-shaped space station? Where’s my fleet of colossal Nova rockets? Where’s my ticket to Mars?
But until recently I have kept my feelings to myself. Who cares that an otherwise fortunate nerd has not lived to see his boyhood fantasies fulfilled?
Nonetheless, I’ve had a vague feeling of disquiet that our inability to match the achievements of the 1960s space program might be symptomatic of a general inability of our society to do Get Big Stuff Done. Those feelings were crystallized by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010 and the Fukushima meltdowns of 2011. We’re better than this, people.
Which seems as good an approach — to science, to literature, to the Big World we are trashing — as we are likely to get.
There where it is we do not need the wall: He is all pine and I am apple orchard. My apple trees will never get across And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him. He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors’.
Love your neighbor; yet don’t pull down your hedge.
Clearly it was a well-worn axiom, even then.
Or, as Dominic Behan — ambiguously — had it:
The sea, oh the sea is the gradh geal mo croide Long may it stay between England and me It’s a sure guarantee that some hour we’ll be free Oh! thank God we’re surrounded by water.
Somehow that was transported (like much else) to Newfoundland, where Joan Morrissey gave it new life:
The whole point of the relationship of the Celt and the Saxon is mutual incomprehension. It is a gaping chasm dividing the nearest of neighbours. A couple of the Great Moments of Anglo-Irish history were:
Queen Elizabeth I being verbally lambasted (in Irish) by Shane O’Neill (6th January 1562):
John Onell the Frenshman who had don much myschief the sommer past in Ireland cometh by save condytt into England and was receved gentelly in the courte in his saffron shorte the twelveth day at night. He accuseth the erle of Sussex of great crymes, crueltie, breache of promyse, putting to death of divers contrary to promyse and saue conduytt, pilling and polling etc.
O’Neill and his party were the subject of much chatter at Court. They were so unlike us, my dear. The version given on electricscotland.com is strong on romantic imagination, if nothing else:
Few scenes could be more picturesque than this visit of the great Ulster chieftain to the capital of his unknown sovereign. As he came striding down the streets of London on his way to the Palace, attended by his train of gallowglasse armed with the battleaxe, his was indeed a figure to strike the imagination. Like the great golden eagle from far-off Donegal, when seen among homely surroundings, Shane the Proud impressed those who gazed at him as being indeed a king of men. He stalked into the Court, his saffron mantle sweeping round and round him, his hair curling on his back and clipped short below the eyes, which gleamed from under it with a grey lustre. Behind him followed his gallowglasse, their heads bare, their fair hair flowing on their shoulders, their linen vests dyed with saffron, with long and open sleeves, surcharged with shirts of mail which reached to their knees, a wolf-skin flung across their shoulders, and short, broad battle-axes in their hands.
The redoubtable chief had no reason to be dissatisfied with his reception. The Council, the peers, bishops, aldermen, dignitaries of all kinds, were present in state, and the assembly included ambassadors from the King of Sweden and the Duke of Savoy.
O’Neill, later that same year, sweetened the occasion by sending Elizabeth, through Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, a present of two horses, two hawks, and two Irish wolfdogs.
Then early in September 1593, Gráinne Ní Mháille (a.k.a. Grace O’Malley), de facto (leaving aside any legalistic details) lord of Umhall Uachtarach, came to Greenwich to make her complaints.
On her husband’s death, O’Malley, according to her own account, ‘gathered together all her own followers and with 1000 head of cows and mares’ went to live in Carraighowley Castle, co. Mayo, on part of her late husband’s territory, where she continued to ‘maintain herself and her people by sea and land’ . She may initially have established friendly relations with the new president of Connaught, Sir Richard Bingham, but she and her sons soon fell out with his regime. Owen was killed by the president’s brother George Bingham in 1586 and O’Malley was imprisoned and threatened with death. Theobald was maintained in the president’s household for some time as a pledge.
O’Malley was implicated in the Burke rebellions of 1586 and 1588 by Sir Richard Bingham, who accused her of drawing Scottish mercenary soldiers into co. Mayo. Her actions suggest, however, that she was primarily concerned to protect the interests of her immediate family and particularly those of Theobald. By 1591 Theobald had emerged as the leading Burke and the strongest contender for the position of MacWilliam but despite submitting to the government he was still regarded with suspicion. Her son’s arrest precipitated O’Malley’s visit to Elizabeth I in the summer of 1593. A remarkable aspect of O’Malley’s petitions was that she acted as spokesperson for the men in her family. She asked the queen for the release of her son and of her brother, who had also been arrested by Bingham. She also requested that her two sons and two other male members of the Burke family be given letters patent for their lands. As a widow under English common law, O’Malley also laid claim to dower from the land of the O’Malleys and of the O’Flahertys. In a much quoted passage she explained that a widow under Gaelic law had no right to her husband’s land. The royal visit was a success from O’Malley’s point of view. Bingham was ordered by Elizabeth to release Theobald and to grant O’Malley maintenance from her husbands’ lands. As a demonstration of loyalty, O’Malley claimed that she had ‘procured all her sons, cousins and followers of the O’Malleys’, with a number of galleys (some newly built on her return from London) to assist the Elizabethan forces in the Mayo area . The Irish administration was, none the less, slow to implement the queen’s instructions and in 1595 O’Malley made another visit to London, renewing her requests for herself and her male relatives.
There are umpteen accounts of the meeting of O’Malley and Elizabeth — the number of them alone testifies to the strangeness of the occasion, of two worlds colliding. Here is E. Owens Blackburne, doing one of those mid-Victorian (1877) shelf-fillers, in Illustrious Irishwomen: Being Memoirs of Some of the Most Noted Irishwomen:
Tradition says that Grainne O’Mailly and her retinue performed the entire journey by sea, and sailed up the Thames to the Tower Gate. In this case tradition does not seem to be far wrong, for her little son, Theobald, or Toby, who was born during the journey, was called, Tioboid-na-Lung, or “Theobald of the Ship.”
The meeting of the two royal ladies must have been a strange sight, — the light-haired, light-eyed, fair-faced and rather shrewish-looking Elizabeth, and the swarthy, black-eyed, and black-haired Queen of Connaught. That the latter and her retainers were not attired in the then prevailing mode is pretty certain; but it may also be positively stated that, whatever was the fashion of their habiliments, the texture and workmanship would have borne comparison with any to be found at the Court. For in Ireland, from the earliest ages, skilled needlework was held in the highest esteem.
There are many traditional accounts of this memorable interview, but the chief and best result of it was that it consolidated the treaty already made between Grainne and Elizabeth. At the same time the Irish chieftainess although expressing herself grateful for the protection afforded by the English Government did not cede one inch of her royal dignity. The English Queen offered to create her a countess ; to which Grainne replied that she could not do so, as they were both equal in rank. But she said she would accept a title for her little son Toby, who had been born on the passage from Ireland. Accordingly, the infant was brought into Court, and then and there created Viscount Mayo ; from whom the present noble family of the Earls of Mayo is descended.
When the Irish chieftainess arrived at the English Court, she described herself as “Grainne O’Mailly, daughter of Doodarro O’Mailly, sometime chief of the country called Upper Owle O’Mailly, now called the Barony of Murasky.” This statement rather puzzled Elizabeth, who knew that Grainne was a married woman, until it was explained to her that it was customary amongst the Irish for the women to retain their maiden names after marriage.
They haven’t gone away, you know
The cultural differences extend well into the 21st century. Hence the Celt (who has a more intimate experience of the pained relationship) views the Saxon with amused contempt; while the return glance — when it is deigned to be afforded — remains devoid of real understanding.
Given Cameron’s role in this affair, it’s difficult for an Irish person not to take some unwonted pride in a recent speech by much-maligned Irish poet-president Michael D Higgins; Joyce, Beckett, Marx, Sartre, de Beauvoir were all name-checked by a career politician who has read their works.
The eschatological summary which speaks of the “four last things” (death, judgment, heaven, and hell) is popular rather than scientific.
Then proceeds to prove we can’t be so determinist or simplistic.
Just as Malcolm was seen visibly to blanch when the Head-teacher of a failing school informed him she ran “English A-level for fun”, the Economist feels no qualms about being populist, and gives us a daily chart:
A look at papal terms since 32AD
THE post of Bishop of Rome is considered to be a life-long commitment. And with only a handful of exceptions, it has been. Nearly all 266 popes have served until their death. But that does not mean that they were in the job for long. Rather, as our charts below show, popes tend to have a short shelf-life. Over half of all papal terms have lasted between two weeks and five years. Part of this is the result of age: the average age at time of election between 1500 and 2005 was 64. Pope Benedict XVI, who announced his resignation on February 11th, was, at 78, one of the oldest to be elected. His seven-and-a-half years put him in good company: 62 others served between six and ten years. The shortest-serving pope was Urban VII, who survived just 13 days in office in September 1590. Pius IX was the longest-serving elected pope, holding on for 32 years. Popes who left their stamp on the office include Innocent III, who served for 18 years from 1198, and launched Christianity’s fourth Crusade; and Leo XIII, who used his quarter of a century from 1878 to grapple with how the church should respond to industrialisation and trade unions.
Hmm … four named popes over two millennia. Hardly a great hit-rate.
Gives a good graphic, though:
For all kinds of reasons, we shouldn’t take the earlier history as “gospel” — John Julius Norwich, setting out on his history of The Popes, does a fair deconstruction of St Peter, and then this:
Although St Irenaeus of Lyons gives us the list of the first thirteen ‘popes’, from St Peter down to his friend Eleutherius (c. 175-89), it is important to remember that until the ninth century the title of Pope (which derives from the Greek papas, ‘little father’) was applied generally to any senior member of the community — Rome was far from being a diocese as we understand the word today. Nor was the Roman Catholic church, such as it was, generally accepted, or even respected.
Even as late as the ninth century, the precise succession of the popes may be in doubt — consider, for example, (again Viscount Norwich) how:
… the legend of Pope Joan, who is said to have reigned from 855 to 857, between Leo IV and Benedict II (855-8), has become one of the hoariest canards in papal history.
As a faithful son of Mother Church, Norwich then dismantles—conclusively and effectively — this “canard” over the whole of his Chapter VI, but with a caveat:
During the middle of the ninth century, Rome, sacked by the Saracens in 846, was still going through her Dark Ages. All was confusion, records were few and untrustworthy, and the notion of a woman Pope was, perhaps, just conceivable.
That leaves hanging the small matter: even if we discount Johannes VIII, Foemina de Anglia, how can we authenticate others of this period when records were few and untrustworthy?
As for all 266 popes, there are are a further 38 “anti-popes” — listed by Norwich — to be taken into consideration.
There was an uptick on Malcolm’s visit-stats for a post from May 2010. These things come and go, but they do tickle the wondering-buds: why?
Well, today’s Times bricks and mortar (the Friday property porn supplement, and on page 3, too) supplies a likely cause:
Stiffkey, Norfolk, NR23
Detached period cottage
What you get Two bedrooms, bathroom, study (or third bedroom), kitchen, sitting room, former wash-house and gardens.
Where is it? In the village of Stiffkey, a mile from the North Norfolk coast.
Upside The cottage, which was owned by the author Henry Williamson in the 1930s, has a garden that goes down to the river and is thought to have inspired his book Tarka the Otter.
Local residents remember Williamson using the wash-house for writing.
The cottage has a light, modern feel and some pretty period features.
Downside Only two bedrooms upstairs but there is scope to extend the house with planning permission. The house backs on to the coast road, which can be busy.
Note the missing detail about the back wall, which runs alongside the A149 coast road.
As for the Local residents who, so clearly, remember Williamson using the wash-house for writing, they’d need to be in their eighties.
Whatever Williamson was writing, holed up in his wash-house, was more likely to be columns for Oswald Mosley’s fascist rag, Action, than about any otter.
Tarka the Otter(which is firmly rooted in North Devon, not North Norfolk) was published in 1927, well before 1936 when Williamson bought Old Hall Farm in Stiffkey.
As it so often says on estate agents’ publications:
Reasonable endeavours have been made to ensure that the information given in these particulars is materially correct but any intending purchaser or lessee should satisfy themself by inspection, searches, enquiries and survey as to the correctness of each statement.
While Malcolm was swanning around Berlin, the Guardian seems to have expanded the Westminster digested column to a full G2 page. Somehow, too, John Crace’s by-line goes missing this week — though, not for the on-line version.
Crace on top form, then:
Cameron: … Now I suppose I’d better do something about my own party. Any thoughts on a bill that would show the country the Tories are totally united?
Theresa May: Gay weddings. We need to send out a strong message that the Conservatives are no longer the nasty party.
Cameron: Great plan. Sam’s very keen on it, too. Though we must leave plenty of opt out clauses for religions that don’t like gays so they don’t have to marry them if they don’t want to. If you know what I mean.
May: Of course. It would be remarkably intolerant of us to ask the church to treat gays equally.
Sir Roger Gale MP: That’s absolutely outrageous. May I just remind the House that I have been married three times, so no one is better qualified to speak on the sanctity of marriage than me. And quite frankly it is absurd to think that anyone other than a man and a woman should be granted such an honour.
Another traditionalist: Hear, hear! Adultery is an holy estate and not something that should be made available to a bunch of same-sex perverts.
Gale: Indeed, if we open marriage up to practising homosexualists then we might as well tear up the Bible completely and let every Tom, Dick or Harry marry his dog.
Yet another traditionalist: Steady on old boy! You’re losing some of the Tories from the shires here. They’re very fond of their labradors.
Gale: Or worse still, a member of their own family.
The Queen: Shut up, you horrible little man. There’s nothing wrong with marrying one of your relatives.
… if the Government are serious about this measure, they should withdraw the Bill, abolish the Civil Partnership Act 2004, abolish civil marriage and create a civil union Bill that applies to all people, irrespective of their sexuality or relationship. That means that brothers and brothers, sisters and sisters and brothers and sisters would be included as well. That would be a way forward. This is not.
Jump across the staple from that Crace to Stephen Moss, on Revenge is rarely sweet. Another tea-time treat, listing the betrayed wives who have done so much to enliven social discourse:
There are dozens of examples of women in the public eye, or whose partners are in the public eye, who seek revenge. When Robin Cook left his wife, Margaret,she wrote a book detailing his alleged infidelities and heavy drinking. When the then Lib Dem MP Lembit Opik split with his weather-presenter fiancee Siân Lloyd in 2006 and succumbed to the charms of Cheeky Girl Gabriela Irimia – he called it a “meeting of minds” – Lloyd wasted little time in rubbishing Opik. “I regard our break-up as my lucky escape,” she said. “It is just a huge relief to be out of that relationship. He’s a fool when he’s in love and totally oblivious to the damage he is doing to his reputation.”
Journalist Maria Shriver reportedly took revenge on her former husband Arnold Schwarzenegger by leaking material on his infidelity and the child he had fathered with his mistress. Lady Sarah Moon avenged herself on her straying husband by cutting up his designer suits, covering his car with paint, and leaving much-prized bottles from his wine cellar on their neighbours’ doorsteps. Princess Diana exacted her revenge for her failed marriage in a gripping TV interview watched by 15 million people. More stomach-churningly, there are those stories that periodically appear about women who cut off the penises of their unfaithful husbands, which is taking an eye for an eye to extremes.
All of which, over 1100 words, is put in the literary contexts of Aeschylus, Shakespeare, and particularly Francis Bacon’s 1625 essay, On Revenge. That last one is pungent, moral, uplifting, pertinent — and all in fewer than 450 words. Irish Leaving Certificate English introduced Malcolm to Bacon; and it’s a delight which has lasted over half-a-century. Ten minutes with Bacon can occupy the mind for hours thereafter, relishing the words, weighing the eternal truths. In the case of On Revenge, however, Malcolm guesses Bacon was building on the bare dozen or so words of the fifth maxim of the sixth book of Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.
In the matter of Vicky Pryce seeing off Huhne, though, let’s hear it from Niccolò Machiavelli (The Prince, chapter III):
… one has to remark that men ought either to be well treated or crushed, because they can avenge themselves of lighter injuries, of more serious ones they cannot; therefore the injury that is to be done to a man ought to be of such a kind that one does not stand in fear of revenge.
“Do you remember the Shire, Mr. Frodo? It’ll be spring soon. And the orchards will be in blossom. And the birds will be nesting in the hazel thicket. And they’ll be sowing the summer barley in the lower fields… and eating the first of the strawberries with cream. Do you remember the taste of strawberries?”
Now, tell, Malcolm: what was it, in the following, that nudged your memory of that, when you read this:
My old friend Bruce Anderson has penned what sounds like an extraordinary piece for this week’s issue of The Spectator. He has attacked a Conservative leader, and seemingly in strong terms. “Never has a government been better at exasperating its own supporters; rarely has a government been so politically inept,” he writes. Bruce is a friend of the Prime Minister’s. It will be interesting to see if he has used any caveats later in the piece, such as saying that it is not Cameron’s fault or emphasising that it can all be turned around. We’ll see.
It should worry Cameron that such a loyalist and good friend holds that view, as he is someone who has supported Cameron from even before the days when his leadership campaign consisted of David and Samantha Cameron, the Goves and three other people. While Bruce has some modernising friends, he often has good instincts for what the wider Tory tribe will tolerate. He understands Tory history and the shires.
That’s Iain Martin, a young’un, but already a doyen of the Telegraph. Any other mental disturbance, such as the title of that piece, In the Tory modernising bunker it’s all getting a bit Berlin, April 1945, is entirely your own problem.
On Malcolm’s second thoughts, it’s obviously that final word: shires.
There’s the problem!
The Tory Party has entrenched itself in the green suburbs and the counties of old England. It’s been a long process;, but it was John Major — MP for Huntingdon, not surprisingly — who put it in to words:
A country of long shadows on county cricket grounds, warm beer, green suburbs, dog lovers, and old maids cycling to holy communion through the morning mist.
A Malcolmian humilation
Aw, shucks! Malcolm remembers it well!
Look at those surnames. You could make the register of Malcolm’s primary school there.
The Sea Scouts lined up at Wells War Memorial, to be inspected by the Earl of Leicester, with his Home Guard medal. The Great Man doing the proper thing, stopping half-way down the line, to address a whippersnapper (who promptly saluted, on instruction, and responded, again as instructed): “Yes, y’r Lordship!”.
Thereafter followed, not contempt, but a kind of Hummph! from his Dear Old Dad.
Sadly for Malcolm’s self-esteem, Dear Old Dad, one generation from the 1912 Yorkshire miners’ strike, and despite being an inveterate reader of the Beaverbrook press, held no admiration for those as has dominance o’er us. A Dear Old Dad, who, moreover, had done his bit up in the Mediterranean and up the Aegean in an MTB, while other didn’t.
Moving on
Does this really need explaining?
The Tories remain a party which believes the fox-hunters deserve priority, while suburbanites are wakened, once a year in the early hours, by the urban vixen in orgasmic howl, and marvel they are still so close to nature.
The Tories remain a party where half the parliamentary vote goes against single-sex marriage, while most of us either are or live alongside, by the standards of Mother Church, irregular liaisons.
The Tories remains party where Euroscepticism is the norm, while most of us work for multi-nationals, take our holidays in EU countries, and actually enjoy an evening at the local Spanish, Greek or Italian restaurant.
Why fixed terms parliaments are a nightmare for leaders and a gift for rebel MPs
Our Chief Political Commentator says that Conservative MPs can plot and stir because the next election is still years away
Hold on! Surely that’s what a true Independent would wish? And … err … yes, it somehow reminds Malcolm of …. Ah, yes! —
Certainly, gentlemen, it ought to be the happiness and glory of a representative to live in the strictest union, the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents. Their wishes ought to have great weight with him; their opinion, high respect; their business, unremitted attention. It is his duty to sacrifice his repose, his pleasures, his satisfactions, to theirs; and above all, ever, and in all cases, to prefer their interest to his own. But his unbiased opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living. These he does not derive from your pleasure; no, nor from the law and the constitution. They are a trust from Providence, for the abuse of which he is deeply answerable. Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion…
If government were a matter of will upon any side, yours, without question, ought to be superior. But government and legislation are matters of reason and judgment, and not of inclination; and what sort of reason is that, in which the determination precedes the discussion; in which one set of men deliberate, and another decide; and where those who form the conclusion are perhaps three hundred miles distant from those who hear the arguments?
The current parliament is already nearing the end of its natural life. Symptoms of mortality take many forms. In terms of policy Cameron has made waves recently with two big announcements. Both apply to the next parliament and not this one. His proposals for a referendum on Europe and high speed rail take effect after the next election. The more immediate agenda in the Commons is of little significance compared with those post-election policies and the near revolutionary measures placed before MPs in the Coalition’s early unprecedented flurry of reforming zeal.
In other words, the health of the body politic depends on a renewal of the parliamentary mandate in the short term, not in May 2015.
Yet, as he makes clear, with little to do, and at a time when MPs should be honing their knives for re-election, it’s all gone deadly, flatly dull. The death of the Bill to change boundaries was the last straw, which is why (even after Clegg slit its throat) the Bill was kept in suspended animation while all kinds of pressures were brought to bear:
Over the weekend, were the DUP really told they could exempt Northern Ireland, if only …
Why does James Kirkup (who should know better) and other susceptible post-adolescents keep afloat the notion that the Bill can be revived?
And, for the Satan’s Blood (“800,000 Scoville units”) in your political chilli, muse on what MPs get up to, when otherwise not exerted. Why, they plot, of course! Or, as Richards renders it:
There will be no election in 2014. After the next 12 months there will be another whole year before the election moves fully into view. There is still plenty of time to be disloyal, to speak up for principled conviction, to plot and plan against a leader. This has some danger for Clegg. But Cameron is the main victim as news surfaces of a plot to install a successor … if he loses the election. Such plots happen for many reasons. One is that Conservative MPs have time on their hands, lots of it. They will rally round next year, but not this. The fixed-term has made prime ministerial life less secure rather than more.
Even so, Malcolm has another gripe with Richards’ piece, particularly so in the rest of that final paragraph:
Constitutional reform only happens if it suits the interests of those implementing it. Presumably Cameron thought that in the unusual circumstances of a Coalition a fixed-term would bring stability. But most fixed-terms in other countries last a maximum of four years. Five years is far too long. And of those five this is much the most dangerous for leaders hoping to flourish when the still distant election finally arrives.
As Malcolm recalls, the LibDems, suspicious that Cameron and Osborne would dump them were an electoral opportunity to open, inserted the time element in the coalition agreement. Now, what could possibly have provoked that partisan fear into the pre-nup?
Second, Richards is absolutely correct. Five years was, is and always will be too long. Malcolm’s Pert Young Piece had considerable difficulty in explicating the five-year term, at the Anzac Cove gathering, 2012, to a band of highly-dubious antipodean democrats. It’s also been commonly accepted, nearer home, ever since the Fixed Term Parliaments Bill was first out there in the wild. Anyway, consider:
The “ones-we’re-bound to lose” (Macmillan-Home in 1959-64; Wilson-Callaghan in 1974-79, Major in 1992-97; Blair-Brown in 2005-10) went into a fifth year;
To which might be added the “one we miraculously didn’t lose” (Major, 1992) which also went to the wire.
Versus:
the ones “we can win” (Thatcher in 1983, 1987; Blair in 2001, 2005) which took advantage of the opportunistic electoral windows.
On that basis alone, the 2010-15 government had given away its main electoral advantage: the chance for any prime minister to exploit a particular moment, one when the economic and electoral cycles could be matched. So, a Malcolmian prediction, when the next parliament assembles, if there’s a majority government, the 2011 Act will be repealed in short order and shall hear no more of fixed -terms.
In short, there’s that gross misunderstanding: in the unusual circumstances of a Coalition a fixed-term would bring stability. Richards, wisely predicates that with the weaselly “presumably”. Consider the normality of UK politics: in the forty years from Wilson to Cameron we will have had just three governments defenestrated — in 1979, 1997 and 2010. The success of Gordon Brown was that the expected Tory take-over didn’t happen (and, in Malcolm’s book, history will be very much kinder to Brown than current poison has it).
Burke, whom we had above, had the Fixed Term Parliaments Act bang to rights, and as far back as 1780:
Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny. In such a country as this they are of all bad things the worst, worse by far than anywhere else; and they derive a particular malignity even from the wisdom and soundness of the rest of our institutions
… because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.
which opener would employ a knowing literary animadversion (though Robert E. Howard’s pulp fiction, or Robert A. Heinlein, both as above, would neither be a good choice, at least for that audience);
In any political generation there may be just the singular political spadassinicide [woo ! woo! Sabatini gets a look in! Change of genre, Malcolm!]. One who could be wholly ruthless, as alien as a Martian … as real as taxes but he was a race of one [which gets back to the Heinlein: sneaky, huh? And you were expecting Conan].
