Kathz's Blog

Bringing home the Ashes

2011-09-07T08:08:00.005+01:00

They made me play cricket at school. Looking back, I approve. Cricket was widely seen as a boys' game and it was good to have the opportunity. I didn't even mind too much at the time.

Like every sport, cricket had its dangers. There was the hard ball hurtling in my direction and the scorn of the games mistress - and fellow players - every time I ducked or missed a catch. But I soon developed a strategy that made the game a source of pleasure. I made sure I had a book in my pocket and volunteered to field on the boundary line. Very few teenage players - boys or girls - can hit a cricket ball to the boundary and there was a convenient hedge nearby. I and my book would adjourn to the other side of the hedge where I would read in the sunshine. Books I enjoyed at the time included Dorothy L. Sayers' Murder Must Advertise. I quite like fictional cricket matches.

This probably doesn't make me the ideal audience for Michael Pinchbeck's new play, The Ashes, which I saw at its final preview performance - it runs till late September. I wasn't really in the mood for theatre when I headed to Nottingham Playhouse. It didn't help that the lovely Cast bar, where, as a Backstage Pass member I have a discount, told me there was a 45-minute wait for food - even cold nibbles. It was only 50 minutes to curtain up. I settled down with a beer and surveyed the crowds. They were mainly male, which had a definite and unusual advantage - no queue for the ladies' loo.

It looks as though The Ashes will be a popular play. Harold Larwood, the cricketer at its centre was a Nottinghamshire lad who played for the county. The crowds in the bar included more cricketers and cricket fans than I usually observe at the theatre - but perhaps I was just more aware of conversations about cricket. It could be a tricky audience, I reflected, picking out flaws in details or cricketing stance. Looking at the length of the two parts of the play, I was further concerned. The first half was a mere 45 minutes and the second 75 - against the usual logic which makes the second act shorter than the first. I was full of doubts as I settled down to watch.

I already knew something of the subject of the play. The Bodyline tour, as the 1932-3 Ashes tour of Australia is known, is still discussed, often in relation to class as well as sporting ethics. In the 1930s the distinction between "gentlemen" (upper-class amateurs) and "players" (working-class professionals) remained an important one, although the national team drew from both groups. Discussions of the bodyline strategy, in which batsmen risked serious injury from fast bowling, often focus on the contrast between the public-school and Oxford-educated team captain, Douglas Jardine, and the two Nottinghamshire ex-miners, Harold Larwood and Bill Voce. This, as a friend pointed out, set up the risk that the play would be worthy and obvious. I settled in my seat without great hopes.

Within the first five minutes I realised that the play was going to work. It doesn't aim at naturalism - just as well, since the Playhouse stage isn't big enough for a cricket pitch - so all the actors, including the leads, took other roles as required, changing both attitudes and accents. However the actors convinced within each role they took. The cricketers in the audience plainly approved too. They were quickly receptive to references I found obscure and their appreciative laughter made the theatre a comfortable place. It was plain that the play was not going to be dully worthy.

Pinchbeck's play places the emphasis precisely where it needs to be: on character and events. There are ethical dilemmas but they are explored through the complex characters at the centre of the drama: Harold Larwood, played by Karl Haynes and Douglas Jardine played by Jamie de Courcey. The performances in these roles were stunning, even within an excellent ensemble cast. When I think of Larwood and Jardine in future, I suspect they'll always be embodied by Hayes' slight and determined figure and de Courcey's humourless intensity. Class mattered, of course, but these characters weren't cardboard cut-outs but people for whom class was one part of their complex individual experiences. The only slight problem came from the inevitable passivity of Lois Larwood (Sarah Churm) whose role was largely limited to staying in Mansfield, following the match at the cinema and expressing an admiration for Gracie Fields. But her final speech conveyed a depth of feeling that went far beyond the words she was given to say.

As a viewer, I was caught up in the English team's determination to win at all costs. This tour came, after all, in the wake of the Great War and members of the team must have spent part of their youth anticipating battle for king and country. But I winced when I saw film footage from the tour, showing the impact of bodyline (or "leg theory") bowling on the batsmen. And the longer part of the play didn't seem long at all as I was riveted by the tensions within the story.

I emerged from the play with a much greater respect for cricketers. As I stood in the bus queue afterwards, some of the cricketers from the audience were still discussing the ethics of bodyline as well as explaining theories of bowling or small aspects of the story omitted from the play. And that, I think, is how it should be.

Please note that the play has an undeservedly short run - you need to see it before 17th September. And apologies for my long absence from blogging. I was simply tired and needed a break. I'm back now.

Bread and circuses

2011-06-04T12:59:00.011+01:00

After a busy period at work when I haven't found time to blog, I'm experiencing the delights of bread and circuses.

The bread is literally bread. I've finally explored one of the Polish shops near work and discovered a range of central European breads: heavy rye bread, bread with sunflower seeds and so on, reflecting the cuisine of various countries - not just Poland but also Latvia and Lithuania. They seem to me better than the supermarket "specialty" brands - and cheaper too.

I went to a circus as well - the Moscow State Circus which was touring near me on the day of the Royal Wedding. It was a good counter-balance to that other circus. It had a story too. If I grasped the moral correctly, it was something about taking money from the rich and spending it sensibly so that everyone could enjoy the arts. Just now that seems a pretty good idea.

All round me there's anxiety. Friends find their jobs at risk. (I seem to be safe - at least till next year, and that's ages in the present economic climate.) Health and social care are in the news. The Financial Times has picked up a story about health authorities and hospitals at risk. In many cases the risk has been caused or worsened by the involvement of private companies, who were quick to enter into Private Finance Initiative agreements that safeguarded profits at the expense of the ill, the injured and the dying. Meanwhile the big companies that make money out of caring for frail elderly people and those with disabilities have in their turn been brought close to collapse by private equity companies. From the point of view of profiteers, it seemed a neat arrangement: sell the homes to other companies, agree an ever-rising rent, trust the market - and get out quickly when the economy falters.

Obviously I should have arranged a better pension for myself, according to the right-wingers. That's the same right-wingers who object that my public-sector pension will be too generous (if I ever get there) and who tell me I should find ever more to spend on my children, my parents and every cause and charity near to my heart. But if I do my best, it's never quite enough. According to them, I should also spend more on insurance and save more - but in the present economic climate insurance companies can go bust. Even banks, which may be bailed out, seem a bit of a gamble. They depend on the markets, which depend on an ever-increasing chain of gambles and exploitation.

So besides bread, I comfort myself with circuses. I may have visited only one actual circus in the past month, but I've been making up for it by enjoying other activities which give me pleasure. They remind me that life is more than a dragged-out existence. Life isn't just about duty - we need pleasure too. For some people that means getting out into a new place, whether it's roaming the countryside or strolling through towns. Others enjoy dancing or sport - and my regular experience of wielding an epée makes me understand that these can be sources of intense pleasure. For other people it's watching sport going to gigs that's important. My circuses involve engagement with the arts.

I headed to London to see my parents, travelling as lightly as I could so that I could sandwich my visit with artistic pleasures. I was a groundling for a matinée of All's Well That Ends Well at the Globe - a difficult play that's rarely performed. It's not just its unfamiliarity that makes it one of my favourites. There's a pair of determined, assertive young women - even though the times mean that the best either can hope is an attractive, wealthy husband to lord it over them.

I've seen All's Well twice before - and in both productions the focus was on the central relationship between Helena and Bertram. The comedy was played either as abstruse courtly wit, at a distance from the audience, or a cue for over-emphasis with lots of "isn't this funny?" expressions in the hope that the audience would laugh. The revelation of this production was that, for the groundlings at least, the comedy worked and was genuinely funny. It comes, I think, from the shape of the theatre which encourages the actors to establish a relationship with the audience. Comic lines were played with the clarity of the successful stand-up - and were irresistible. I engaged with the play as a whole - how could I do otherwise with my forearms leaning on the front of the stage? - and, when the final scene of reconciliation came, my eyes filled with unexpected tears.

I stayed overnight with my parents, still in their own flat so less immediately threatened by the private profits of the market. We had supper and a quiet evening. In the morning I left with them when they headed out to the shops but my aim was a further exploration of London.

I was unsure of my destination but eventually decided on the Guildhall Museum, which I hadn't visited before, followed by the London Museum, which I hadn't seen for many years. Walking between and around the two, I found myself in a many-layered city, where modern structures of glass and metal loomed high above small Wren churches. There are traces of an even older city. I glimpsed the old London Wall through a museum window and saw what's left of the Roman amphitheatre in the Guildhall Museum basement.

That's the kind of structure Juvenal meant when he talked about bread and circuses: a place where shows of all kinds were put on, including gladiatorial combat and public execution. Being in some ways a typical Roman of his class, I don't suppose he minded the gladiators or the executions. But he was concerned that the citizens of Rome, once the source of democratic power, had been diverted from their proper concerns for the state to making demands for bread and circuses.

I agree with Juvenal that people should recognize and exert their democratic power. But I think he's wrong to dismiss bread and circuses. We all need food to live - not just food for the body but something that nourishes the imagination and tells us that life is worthwhile. It's also the circuses, whether we find them in physical activity, travel, music or the arts, that open us to a wider imaginative understanding of the world. They nourish curiosity and sympathy. They offer laughter, tears and reconciliation.

Yes, Juvenal - I want democratic involvement and responsibility. But I'll take the bread and circuses as well.

Hidden stories and imagined worlds

2011-05-30T09:43:00.008+01:00

It seems that there are demonstrations and protests in several European countries. Every so often there's a brief mention in the press - but it's usually an aside or footnote to another story. A fellow-blogger, travelling to Madrid on business was startled to find every square in the city under occupation by protesters - and it seems that other Spanish cities have been occupied as well. The Barcelona occupation did get a mention in the British press - in the football reports. Apparently there were fears that Barca would be unable to celebrate in the usual square, as it was occupied. A search on the internet quickly brought up video of the Spanish police trying to disperse the protesters with considerable force.

It seems that Greece has large protests too. Syntagma Square in Athens may still be under occupation and I found mention (in Greek papers in English) of further protests in Thessaloniki and Patra. Then there were references to protests and occupations in France - not just in the Place de la Bastille in Paris but in other cities as well. Struggling through information from a variety of courses and a variety of languages, I discovered that people in each square came from a variety of political and non-political background - but were almost always outside the mainstream - and that they worked co-operatively and consensually to write their own agendas for change.

This may all fade away. People may just accept the poverty and exploitation which comes with finding their country "bailed out" from a crisis caused by their government, bankers, and multi-national countries. But I find it far more interesting than the sex-life of bankers or the dresses worn by the wives of a president, a prime minister and the heir to the heir to the throne. And I wonder why the British press is ignoring it while similar actions in some Middle Eastern countries merit front page coverage. I have, however, noted that protests in some Middle Eastern countries get more publicity than others - the press now has little to say about Syria, Tunisia, Morocco Bahrain - and last Friday's protests in Egypt were barely mentioned.

When so much is happening abroad - and when there are plenty of political struggles at home - it seems slightly bizarre to spend time at a theatre festival. But NEAT11, Nottingham's new international arts and theatre festival is practically on my doorstep. If I wished, I could walk to some of the events. And while some are rather expensive (Opera North still offers too few cheap tickets), others are cheap or even free. I made a few extravagant bookings and promised myself hours of indulgence away from the anxieties of the Age of Austerity.

It didn't quite work out like that. Who would have thought that Henrik Ibsen wasn't always a gloomy Scandinavian but a writer of political comedy? The League of Youth, receiving its professional premiere in Britain nearly 150 years after it was written, was one of Ibsen's most popular plays in his native Norway, at least during his lifetime. And, more surprisingly, it turns out to be a satire on Nick Clegg. I came away from the Playhouse both cheered and musing on the effects empty rhetoric still has on voters who are fed up with the current system and desperate for something better - and a chance to be heard. The League of Youth runs till Wednesday so there's still a chance to get tickets.

I also made it to a free play-reading of Anna Yablonskaya's play The Irons. Yabolnskaya is one of two people associated with NEAT11 to be killed in an act of terrorism this year. (The other is Juliano Mer Khamis.) She was killed in a random and barely-explained bombing at Moscow's Domodedovo airport. I thought the knowledge of her death might affect my response to the reading but it was so complex, even in a semi-staged reading, that I was caught up in the characters and events. But again it led me back to the world of politics. At the centre of the play was a young man collecting irons and ironing the flags of countries that no longer exist - and this wasn't just some intellectual metaphor but part of the characters' experience, reflecting a world that was both known and imaginary.

The reading I attended was a shortened version of the full play (which is being read in full next week) and was followed by a discussion of theatre in Central Europe, with representatives of a Hungarian theatre company, a Kosovan theatre festival and Natalia Koliada of the Free Theatre of Belarus. While theatre in Hungary has experienced cuts and press attacks - and may suffer in the future under a recent Media Law - it is in a far stronger position than Kosovan theatre, which is desperately under-funded and suffering the effects of war, poverty and unemployment. But the problems in Belarus made others seem insignificant.

Natalia Koliada is living in exile; she has been warned not to return since her arrest and imprisonment last year. Her country is a dictatorship, torture is routine and her theatre company is prevented from giving public performances. Requests to perform plays by British playwrights including Sarah Kane, Mark Ravenhill and Edward Bond were turned down. One of the reasons given was that the plays show homosexuality, suicide and mental illness, which "don't exist in Belarus". So I was back to politics again, marvelling at the power of the arts and fictional worlds to upset those who rule and administer totalitarian regimes. I marvelled too at the courage of those who continue to make art in difficult circumstances, finding something within them that will not bow to the demands of authority.

These theatrical experiences were shared with other members of the audience and quite easy to discuss. I also chose two solitary theatre experiences. For one I had to download tracks to my MP3 player; for the other I was provided with a mobile phone.

Threads by Andy Barrett is the more conventional drama. It's also free for anyone with access to a computer and MP3 player. In a way, following Threads round Nottingham's Lacemarket is like listening to a radio play. But there's something different about following a play which asks you to look intently at your surroundings while listening - it requires an acuteness of visual observation and risks being interrupted by external factors such as a crowd of clubbers or loud conversation in a bar. While the events of the play are fairly slight, it's the accompanying visual intensity that stays with me - and the play itself demands that the listener look at people and places anew.

More disturbing is Ulrike and Eamon Compliant which was devised for Venice but has been rethought for Nottingham. As the solitary audience member, I picked up a mobile phone, turned it on and listened attentively. I was asked to choose one of two identities from the real (historical) terrorists Ulrike Meinhof and Eamon Collins. Clutching the phone to my ear I walked through streets that were suddenly unfamiliar, made choices, followed orders and heard snatches of Ulrike Meinhof's experience until my identity began to blur into hers. I did not entirely stop being myself and a pacifist but for half an hour or so I saw Nottingham - and the wider world - as a terrorist might see it: angry at the injustice and cruelty of the world, prepared to sacrifice myself and others for the dream of a better world.

Sometimes - often at its best - theatre challenges its audiences to imagine things they do not want to understand. I felt at times that being Ulrike, even for half an hour, had messed up my brain and my identity. But I also knew that I undertook the experience voluntarily - and paid for it too. In a world as complex as ours it may help to understand. Just at the moment, theatre seems closer to world events and dilemmas than anything I find in the British press.

As I made my way to the bus-stop after a day of theatre, I passed the Old Market Square. No-one was demonstrating. If anything it seemed slightly emptier than usual at that time of night. But suppose it had been occupied by a peaceful protest camp of people wanting to change the world, I wondered if I'd have been able to read about it in the next day's papers. I'm glad I don't live under the kind of totalitarian regime that people experience in Belarus. But perhaps in Britain too there are some things that aren't mentioned in the press because they don't happen here. And who knows what anger that press silence would evoke?

Pina and the stereoscope

2011-04-26T16:21:00.004+01:00

I decided to give myself an Easter treat. Having found suitable eggs for my parents, who like milk chocolate; my son, who is a vegan and my daughter, who doesn't like chocolate very much, it seemed time to give myself a present. I determined on an Easter Day trip to the cinema and resolutely ignored the demands of house, garden and work.

My first idea was to see the film Oranges and Sunshine by Jim Loach. I still hope to see that some time. The scandal of children shipped from Britain to Australia, where many were abused and exploited, has particular resonance in the East Midlands, where the story was first brought to public attention. Jim Loach's film, which tells that story, is well-cast and has received excellent reviews. But I wasn't sure I wanted to be distressed on Easter Sunday, which is supposed to be a day of rejoicing.

A glimpse of a good review turned my attention to Wim Wenders' film, Pina. My daughter studied Pina Bausch's work at university and her views shifted from mild dislike to enthusiastic appreciation. It isn't easy to shift my daughter's views and I thought I would like to learn more about the choreographer who achieved that. While dance isn't one of my greatest interests, every so often a dance work does excite me and Pina Bausch, who used the term Tanztheater (dance-theatre) for her work, seemed the kind of creator who would at least be interesting. And when I heard of Wim Wenders' enthusiasm for 3D, my choice was settled.

I've never taken 3D cinema seriously before. I've enjoyed a couple of 3D cinema experiences – at least, I think I have – but while they were probably exciting at the time they had the quality of theme-park rides: intense at the time but ultimately unmemorable. Yet 3D is a logical development of cinema which includes the stereoscope among its origins.

I like stereoscopes. I've peered through them in museums and seen two similar, apparently-faded sepia prints spring into something resembling solidity. They recapture an unalterable past and give it a brief air of tangibility. The images shimmer into solidity before my uncertain gaze. I wasn't sure how 3D would work for dance but it seemed an appropriately elegaic mode for this subject – Pina Bausch died just as Wenders was starting work on a film about her.

The film Wenders has made is an elegy. Dancers' words recalling Pina are heard as they gaze silently into camera. There are also clips which show Pina dancing. These are, of course, in 2D but the stereoscopic effect is achieved by the use of an on-screen audience, reminding us that what we watch belongs to the past and cannot be recreated. The inclusion of 2D footage also has the effect of ensuring that the 3D effects remain vivid and startling – the brain isn't allowed to become acclimatised to the novelty of the experience.

I'm not sure I understand Pina Bausch's work. Even if I did, it resists being put into words. As she says during the film (so far as I can recollect), dance is an ideal medium for things which can be hinted but not spoken directly. Once I start describing what the dancers do and how they move, I know I'm diminishing their work. More than for most art-forms, the meaning of dance is unsayable.

Moreover the dances Pina Bausch created work, like most dance, by repetition of movement. A sequence which is initially startling – often because of the skill employed by the dancers – ceases to astonish and appeals to the emotions as it is performed again and again. My brain can't unscramble the effects but I can feel them.

At times, of course, my concentration flagged. Sometimes all I saw were the startling 3D effects as dancers moved towards me and away. That may have been because I was tired, because I'm insufficiently familiar with the vocabulary of dance or even because Wim Wenders is not yet sufficiently in command of 3D cinema and its effects. But my interest never fell away and I emerged from the darkened cinema feeling that I'd seen something that isn't usually available away from the screen.

“After all,” I reflected on the train home, “3D is never quite so intensive and exciting in the real world. The 3D of reality is flatter than that.” And then, when I left the station, I looked up and was suddenly aware of distance – between sky, houses, trees, road and lamp-posts. It seems that the film has re-educated my brain. The world I see now has sprung back into its real, 3D perspective.

Enduring freedom

2011-04-25T10:23:00.005+01:00

I took another look at the peace-camp on Saturday. It's been shifted to the pavement in Parliament Square while the grass, which London mayor Boris Johnson said he wanted to preserve for the people of London, is closed off with tall fences and patrolled by security guards.

The peace-campers' tents are neat and there's plenty of space for pedestrians on the pavement. I was one of many people visiting to read the banners. But it's still hard to reach the traffic island – I've yet to find a set of traffic lights that enable the public to reach the island. I had to employ my usual technique of a quick dash as the third lane of traffic slowed.

I suspect there will be an attempt, on some pretext or other, to remove the peace-campers before Friday's Royal Wedding, even though they offer no more risk than a fairly quiet protest on a range of issues, most – but not all – related to war. One man's banners announce that he is undertaking a hunger strike because he has been unjustly imprisoned. If he were in Tripoli the British press would probably declare him a hero. As it was, none of the campers even offered me a leaflet. I read their hand-made banners without interruption. Theirs is a quiet, enduring protest.

If the peace-camp is cleared, it will make the streets more home-like and welcoming for the despots and their representatives who are attending Prince William's wedding. The Crown Prince of Bahrain has finally pulled out, citing troubles at home – these could include the brutality his own and Saudi troops are showing to unarmed demonstrators and the doctors who treat them. But London and the Royal Family will still welcome representatives of Saudi Arabia, Zimbabwe and Swaziland.

Looking at summaries of the Guantanamo files, I can't help thinking that these tyrants have much in common with our other allies – and perhaps with our own, more secretive activities elsewhere in the world. Apparently the United States military didn't just take people to Guantanamo because they thought they were terrorists. They also kidnapped and imprisoned people who they thought might have useful information. A taxi-driver, for instance, was reckoned to have good knowledge of a particular region because his work took him through it. One man – a British citizen – was held because he had been imprisoned by the Taliban and was therefore likely to have good knowledge of their interrogation techniques. A 14-year-old who had been kidnapped and was known to be innocent of all terrorist activities was kidnapped again – this time by the Americans – because he might have knowledge of the Taliban and local leaders.

As for evidence of terrorist activities – the U.S. military didn't need much ground for arrest, deportation and torture. Visiting Afghanistan after 9/11 was enough. So was possession of a Casio watch, although the models the U.S. found suspicious are cheap and widely available.

I expect the United States ambassador will be at the Royal Wedding. After all, the North Korean ambassador has been invited – as have kings, queens, princes and princesses from several countries that have been republics for a long time. I hope that none of them – and none of the “ordinary” people invited – are wearing Casio watches. That could set off some serious security alarms.

More than that, I hope the peace-camp survives Will and Kate's special day. It would be good to think there's still a small patch of pavement in London where freedom survives, despite the actions of the state.

The Harrods of the ancient world

2011-04-04T17:16:00.003+01:00

How could something so fragile last so long?

I gazed at the remains of brittle gold bowls and goblets. I could see where the stem of the goblet should be. The amazing thing is not that it has vanished but the thin, ridged bowl should have survived. I peered closer to make out the outlines of bulls on part of a bowl. A craftsman scored them gently into the gold around four thousand years ago. They are evidence of a vanished civilization of which little else is known. They come from Afghanistan.

I was hesitant about visiting the Afghan Treasures exhibition at the British Museum. I thought uncomfortably of conquerors, loot and triumphal processions. Exhibitions often arrive with an agenda, especially when they have been negotiated by diplomats. But this exhibition seems to have a gentler and more laudable cause. The British Museum has been restoring ivories that were stolen in the looting of Kabul Museum and recovered by an unnamed philanthropists. The British Museum staff have been working with the staff of Kabul Museum and the exhibition, however dependent on diplomatic goodwill and corporate sponsors, comes out of their joint work. The exhibition tells another story too – of museum staff who hid the treasures so that the history of their country could be preserved.

The history of Afghanistan is not well known. There is much that has not yet been recovered or understood. Western history books have tended to simplify the region as a place of romantic barbarism which briefly encountered civilization with the arrival of Alexander the Great. Alexander the Great, who married an Afghan wife and adopted local customs, may have viewed it differently.

So far as I can gather and recollect, the region had two reasons for importance in the world. It was a source of lapis lazuli, which was rare and much in demand. And although its terrain is difficult by contemporary vehicles, it stood on major trade routes, bordering India, China and the Persian Empire. Traders went as far as Greece and Rome, although the journey each way would have taken a year. The treasures they brought back, particularly to Begram, are protected in glass cases in the exhibition.

Captions show the uncertainty of the curators about the exhibits on view. There is a head of Silenus, clearly recognizable, but did the Afghans really know who Silenus was? Its unclear whether the owners of valuable items purchased deities or just attractive statues – rather as a modern mantlepiece may bear statues of Ganesh or the Buddha without necessarily demonstrating any religious allegiance or knowledge.

There's glass, too – Roman glass most probably or perhaps made in Egypt - the curators cannot be sure how it reached Begram from Rome since the way was blocked by war with Parthia. One piece is enamelled with full-length figures which even I can see are Roman in style. Another's delicately ornamented with vines made from the glass itself. But beside these are statues carved in turned ivory – chair-legs, the inscription suggests – each with a swaying female figure in what seems to me an Indian style. There are glass fish, a face that resembles a Greek or Chinese theatrical mask. There are Corinthian columns and finials. Some items must have been made in Afghanistan by craftsmen who had learnt skills from crafts practised elsewhere. But many items are imports, suggesting a place like Britain today where beautiful objects from all over the world can be prized and owned.

Half-way round the exhibition, I realised something else that was troubling me, though it's not unusual. I had little sense of the lives of the people who owned these objects, other than that they were very rich and could afford goods imported from far-off places. It was as if, one day far in the future, someone were to excavate Harrods and, finding only a few of the goods on show, tried to understand life today on that basis. Perhaps that is what has survived. Perhaps these expensive, traded goods represent the Harrods of the ancient world.

As I wandered through the exhibition, the past seemed both more distant and more familiar. I couldn't grasp past Afghan cultures but then, if asked, I couldn't give a simple account that took in the whole of west European culture today. Artefacts left by Afghan trading centres, which drew goods and influence from across the world, speak of a complex, varied society. This shouldn't be surprising or unusual. But I began to realise that many exhibitions treat the past as a collection of small, separate societies. They don't just assume that societies are culturally pure – they often treat cultural purity as something good in itself. The textbooks I studied at school were wary of cultural mixing. Rome's interest in things Greek was regarded with disdain although the Renaissance interest in Greek art and sculpture was excused as a means of regaining artistic purity after the confused muddle of the Middle Ages.

Looking at the wide range of objects on display and marvelling at their variety, I realised how much ancient history has been filtered through subjective and questionable value judgements. I suppose curators have to simplify – just as their displays provide the kind of neat, comforting pattern humans are trained to prefer. But in real life I like variety and complexity – and am glad that human existence resists a neatly moral narrative arc.

At last I neared the object I recognized from the posters for the exhibition: the gold crown once worn, so the captions assured me, by a nomad princess. I expected something bright and golden but I hadn't realised the tiny golden discs would tremble continuously, as though there were a breeze or breath inside the glass case. I read that the crown could be packed away and folded – and that all the nomad treasures, buried two thousand years ago, could be carried easily on horseback. In my imagination an Afghan princess rode through wild landscapes, the trembling crown on her head and a gold-studded cloak behind her. It's an improbable fantasy. I have no idea what the concept “princess” means in terms of nomadic people two thousand years ago - I wonder if the women were princesses in any way we can understand.

Little seems to be known of Afghan nomadic life beyond the six graves in Tilya Tepe. But the adornments found in the tombs of five women and one man link the items closely to the humans who wore them. It's not just the photos showing how the bodies lay when the tombs were opened or the glass case where the golden items mark out the shape of a human form. It's more to do with the sense that these items once touched living flesh and the the gold was caught on wisps of cloth the tombs were found. I peered as directed to see that the bracelets show signs of wear – in contact with an arm over time, gold diminishes.

The exhibition isn't big or cheap (I got in for half price – £5 – with my Art Fund membership). Space inside is limited because items are small and, when I visited on Saturday, that meant queuing briefly before reaching most cabinets. I haven't carried away a neat package of knowledge about an obscure culture. Instead I have grounds for wonder and wondering – more than enough.

Berkoff and Dionysos

2011-03-30T16:42:00.003+01:00

Last week, I realised I'd never seen Sophocles' King Oedipus on stage.

Few people would be surprised by that, but I was. These days I don't get to the theatre as often as I'd like but I still think of myself as a theatre-goer. In the past, I've sought out obscure productions of Greek plays – in Greek as well as in English – because of the challenge they pose to today's theatre.

I'm not an expert but, when I struggled through two happy years to achieve a weak pass in Greek A-level, I supplemented my tussles with verbs and syntax with reading everything I could find on Greek history and culture. According to the curriculum, my school didn't offer Greek. Greek, like writing Latin verse, tended to be the preserve of boys' grammar and public schools. But somehow I wangled my way into Greek A-level, which was taught intensively from scratch in the Latin teacher's spare time. I've been grateful to her ever since. I was an unpromising prospect with nothing except a desire to learn to recommend me. There must have been considerable doubt whether I would pass. But the teacher – her name was Miss Blench – did her very best for me, setting plenty of work and urging me to read as much as I could. I think there were four shelves of books about Ancient and Classical Greece in the school library. I probably read every one.

I don't suppose any school would let a pupil take that risk nowadays, what with league tables and so on. But I'm more proud of the grade D I attained (a clear pass!) than any other academic achievement.

My teenage passion for things Greek has subsided now but I still turn to Greek texts from time to time – often in translation with the original Greek beside me, if I can find it, so that I can have some idea of the sound and the way meaning is made. But heading to Steven Berkoff's production of Oedipus at Nottingham Playhouse, I couldn't find a Greek text. I had to make do with a few extracts in The Oxford Book of Greek Verse, which were far too difficult for me.

Instead I thought of the problems posed by staging Greek tragedy today. It's never going to be the same for us as the Greeks. A director could offer a singing, dancing chorus and principle actors in masks and elevated shoes, but it wouldn't have the same effect. The Greeks were as familiar with that convention as we are with drawing-room comedies or Shakespeare framed by a proscenium arch.

Nor does theatre have the same role in society. These days there's a debate about the purpose of theatre and whether it should be funded. There's always someone to say it's superfluous and that, if people want theatre, they should pay for it, however high the prices and however limited their means. The defenders of theatre talk of heritage and culture. They even act like economists and produce charts showing how much money theatres bring into their towns and cities. Meanwhile the government imposes cuts which are made at one remove, leaving the lovers of theatre and custodians of culture to decide whose potential will be stifled and whose lives they will impoverish

None of that would have made sense in Athens, when Sophocles' play was first produced at the Great Dionysia. Performing plays and going to the theatre was a religious duty. Citizens attended to honour the god Dionysos. There was a fund to ensure that those who couldn't afford the tickets could still join the audience. And it was an honour to be the wealthy citizen who sponsored a playwright's work.

As I remember – it's a long time since I worked through those books – the Great Dionysia was also a theatrical competition. A small jury would vote for the best set of plays (three from each playwright and a satyr play). However not all the votes were counted, giving the god a chance to intervene. And the plays were all on familiar topics so the question was not what the story was but always how it was told – and how it honoured the god - in the vast Athenian auditorium.

There was no way Steve Berkoff could offer that experience for an audience seeing a single play from the comfortable seats of the Playhouse. I did wonder whether he would try to bring the audience to a state of catharsis – the state of purification from emotions which King Oedipus achieves, according to Aristotle. But I'm not convinced such a state is possible today. We see the world differently.

One of the main differences is the set of questions we can't help asking about Oedipus: what did he do wrong? what could he have done differently? does he deserve his punishment? But these aren't, I think, the questions Sophocles' original audience would have askes. (These aren't my own ideas. I'm following classical scholars. I don't have my books to hand but I believe I encountered the arguments in essays by E.R. Dodds and Erich Segal.)

Sophocles' first audience believed in curses and prophecies. They probably didn't think about it all the time but the question could even enter politics. When things were going badly, citizens would mutter that there was a curse on the family of Pericles and Alcibiades – not because they thought there must be but because the curse was a matter of historical fact. Electing a leader from a cursed family could cause problems for the city as a whole.

The baby Oedipus was no more than three days old when the prophecy was pronounced – and it derived from a curse on his family. From the time of his birth it was inevitable that he would kill his father and marry his mother. The Christian idea of sin doesn't come into it because his fate was always inescapable. So is the punishment he and his family must endure for his actions – not because Oedipus has committed any conscious or willed wrong but because father-murder and incest are punished by divine law, even if they occur accidentally. What the play shows is not the way we should live but the way the power of the gods and prophecies work out. If it has a moral – and I think it does – it is simply that humans should believe in oracles and honour the gods.

I can see those views at a distance and understand logically that people held them but, like most people, I'm too wrapped up in a world that believes in personal guilt, human responsibility and the innocence of babies to feel what such views mean. Although people today often suffer for the actions of their rulers, few would find it just that a whole city should suffer from plague because its king has acted in the way the gods or Fate ordained. Because our understanding of the world has changed, ideas like this don't work in the theatre of today. Actors need characters they can inhabit and audiences need to sense a world that isn't too distant from their own.

In Steven Berkoff's production (after Oedipus rather than an exact translation) it's surprising how little this difference matters and how much of Sophocles' play survives. Berkoff may have created an Oedipus who is something of a mobster or mafioso rather than a king but Stephen Merrells' arrogant boss fits the play – he is the sort of man who, unfortunately for him, is bound to attract the notice of the gods.

I admired Louise Jameson's Jocasta too. She seemed softer than I would have expected – sympathetic and believable. I don't shudder in the way the original audience would have done when she repeatedly denies the power of oracles – to the watching Athenians this was the kind of blasphemy that could threaten the city as well as the speaker. For a modern audience this is more understandable. She's a mother who has lost her child and her husband and whose love for Oedipus is, in consequence, tender and protective.

What interested me above all was how the play itself would work. After all, telling a well-known story can mean there's little suspense. But just as children like to repeat the same suspense-filled journey, grown-ups can be interested in how a familiar story is told – and knowing the ending doesn't necessarily spoil the excitement.

I was surprised how well the tension builds. As members of the audience we observe the unfolding of events, alert to every little irony and clue. When Oedipus promises, with an oath as binding as an oracle, that he will punish the murderer of Laius with exile, we already know that he is promising to punish himself. And when we're told of his similarity to Laius, we know this is because he is Laius's son. Yet the inevitability enthralls the audience, as I suppose it enthralls the audience of a slasher-movie. And I found that, whereas I would watch Hamlet, which I've seen many times, for how the play is staged and acted, with Oedipus most of my attentions was given to the way in which the story unfolds. I suppose in that respect the modern audience is very like the Greek audience, who would have seen a number of plays on the Oedipus theme.

There were two points where I was less certain of the production, though this may suggest I'm something of a purist when it comes to Greek theatre. While at times the stylised mime of the chorus worked well – when performing clear emotions or recognizable actions, as, for instance, when a member of the ensemble suddenly became a horseback messenger – at other times I found the movements too vague in intent, though performed with complete conviction. But what a pleasure it was to see such a range of faces. Each chorus-member was both part of an ensemble and a human individual, whose face could at times be transformed into the fixed pain and astonishment of a Greek tragedian's mask.

For me one of the highlights of Greek or French classical drama is the messenger's speech when an actor tells the story of horrors that happen offstage. I'll never forget Robert Edison in the Phedre of Racine, holding a full theatre still and on edge as his mellifluous voice painted a succession of cruel catastrophes. The horror that occurs in my imagination is always more terrible than any that can be shown on stage.

I was unhappy, therefore, at the decision to show Jocasta's suicide and Oedipus's eye-gouging on stage. Even a simple dumb-show distracts from the power of language to shock. The conclusion did allow a moment that moved me deeply: when Oedipus gently embraced and kissed his dead mother-wife. But that gentleness somehow made the ending less bleak and powerful. The play moved me but not to the extent that I felt purged and purified by having seen it. Good as the production was, it offered me no catharsis.

But then, I didn't go to Nottingham Playhouse to worship Dionysos. I'm not sure I believe in him.

Against the dark times

2011-03-15T22:00:00.007Z

I have succumbed to temptation again.

The Flying Goose café hosted one of its regular poetry readings and I returned with books by the three poets who read - Ann Atkinson, Alan Baker and Wayne Burrows - as well as books by the Australian Andrew Sant and the Dutch poet and children's writer Toon Tellegen.

As I carried my shiny treasures home I reflected that these are not the kind of books you see in Waterstone's. They come from small presses - Shoestring, Skysill and Smith/Doorstop - and are, like so many books from small presses, lovingly made. While mass market paperbacks can seem impersonal - made to fit in with a marketing officer's idea of what "brand" each book fits - small press books often show the personal care of the tiny teams that put them together. The smallest presses are run by people who make no money from them but work for pay elsewhere. The books small presses produce have a personality which seems to come from their close link with both publisher and author.

These carefully-crafted books and the skilfully-managed poems within them cannot compensate for the horrors on the news. The optimistic and peaceful protests in the Middle East seem to be ending in bloody repression and torture by regimes to whom the British government has been - and in most cases still is - selling military equipment. The threats and massacres that silence dissent have been knocked off the front page by the pain of Japan for which I have no words.

I can't look at the television for long - it's not just the sense of helplessness I experience that prevents me but the fear that if I look too long I'll be a mere voyeur - or worse, be hardened to ignore the devastation and anguish of others.

But literature (and art and music and many other sources of beauty and pleasure) still have their place in the world. I was reminded of this by a short blog message to her Japanese readers from the science fiction writer Ursula Le Guin, who posted at the request of her translator and friend. Reading this - and the first comment that followed - made me feel reassured that there is nothing wrong in the refuge I seek in words, art and music. These have many roles. They deepen understanding and cause us to question. They also nourish and console, in part because of the care with which they are wrought.

So I feel less bad about the joy I take in music on Radio 3, in sunshine, in books, in poetry. These good things exist in the same world in which humans and nature cause great damage. I'll campaign and write letters and even march against great wrongs. I'll try to work out how the world might be better and say what I think. I'll never have most of the answers but can try to contribute to debate and trains of thought - the more people share ideas and work together, the better hope for humanity. And I'll pay attention to things that are quite small and made with love.

This Saturday Leicester hosts States of Independence II, an independent press fair where small and independent publishers will display their wares and writers will read, talk and answer questions. It's a free, all-day event to which members of the public are welcome. It's a chance to celebrate words and the makers of books. However dark the world, these remain worthy of celebration.

The problem with patrons

2011-03-06T16:25:00.007Z

I was almost impossibly tired when I arrived at the National Gallery. I'd had a good but busy week and was still recovering from the amazing and absorbing experience of hearing Alan Moore, the Magus of Northampton, read aloud from his novel-in-process. [Note to anyone who hasn't come across Alan Moore: he is not only a remarkable writer but also one of the kindest and most courteous authors I have encountered. His reading held everyone in a huge lecture theatre spellbound for nearly an hour and he spent a further hour and a half speaking to everyone who had queued to have their books signed.]

The day after Alan Moore, I was on my way to visit my parents, unsure I was sufficiently awake to take in the Gossaert exhibition but knowing that I was unlikely to find another opportunity to see it. I also had my new Art Fund card with me - at last I've fulfilled my resolution to join, not just for the very welcome benefits but also because I have benefited from the Art Fund through a lifetime of gallery visits.

The route to the exhibition took me past many familiar paintings. On one side I spotted a favourite Titian. Through the entrance to another room I thought I glimpsed a Vermeer. There was Murillo, staring out of his frame like a competent marketer of his own paintings.

In my susceptible state of mind, even Rubens seemed set to lure me from my path toward Gossaert. After all, Rubens was not only free but there were comfortable padded benches from which his work could be admired. (I don't usually admire Rubens that much.)

I forced myself to make the long trek to the basement of the Sainsbury wing where the Gossaerts were displayed. It was worth it. I realised that I had seen and admired individual paintings by Gossaert in the past but I'd never seen them in relation to one another before. I hadn't even registered the artist's name.

There are six rooms in the exhibition. Gossaert's drawings and paintings are complemented by the work of artists who influenced him - a startling range from Northern European artists like Durer to the classical tradition of the Italian Renaissance. Although he's only mentioned in the timeline at the start of this exhibition, it's easy to see Holbein as the heir of this remarkable combination of influences.

There's more to Gossaert than his portraits but these are the most obviously remarkable part of his work. The people he paints in portraits convince as human beings, simultaneously familiar and unknowable. This isn't just true of his secular portraits. There's a lavishly clad Mary Magdalen with sly glance and dirty fingernails. But he also paints relationships, including erotic relationships. There are various works showing Adam and Eve, including some copies of lost originals, but all convey an astonishing blend of tenderness and desire.

The work that stunned me most - and nearly moved me to tears - was a painting of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane. It's a dark painting - even the red robes of the flying angel and the sleeping St John are barely lit. An elderly figure - St Peter, perhaps, lies on his back, asleep in the foreground. He has the pallor of exhaustion. But at the centre is the kneeling figure of a youthful Christ, beardless, confused and close to despair. It's not an attractive figure but terrifyingly recognizable. It's the expression of any child confronting an incomprehensible horror. It could be Libya or Afghanistan - or, too often, the U.K.

At the end of the exhibition I couldn't give an account of Gossaert. I had no sense of the man who painted the pictures, except that he could see and reproduce with pencil on paper or paint on canvas. He had, it seems, some human understanding that didn't take a verbal form. And he had the luck to be taken up by a succession of patrons who took him within reach of the influences he needed to develop his art.

It was luck. That's the problem with patrons. While Gossaert had the right patrons for his development as an artist, he was limited to painting what they required: a portrait of a marriageable daughter, erotic works for a private collection, an altar piece, a sketch for a tomb. There is no way of knowing what Gossaert would have liked to paint. It's lucky that some of his patrons' requirements suited a style that we can now appreciate.

It's luck too that has made me so familiar with the works in the National Gallery - the luck of living near a free art gallery and being encouraged by my parents to look inside. I was brought up to take advantage of free and cheap culture - to see culture as a good that should be shared.

It was shocking, therefore, to read, the day after my visit to the National Gallery, of a Labour MP calling for the introduction of admission charges to London's museums. He's not just any Labour MP. The Hon. Tristram Hunt, son of a life peer and a historian with a proclaimed interest in radicalism and the working class, has written an introduction to a recent edition of Robert Tressell's The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists. In this book, Robert Tressell, through his main socialist characters, argues that culture is one of the necessities of life and should be available to all. I assume Tristram Hunt read the book before writing the introduction. It's a shame he didn't take in its arguments.

It's fair to say that Tristram Hunt wants free admission to the museums in his own constituency of Stoke-on-Trent and, by extension, to other regional museums. I think they should be free too. But I don't think the country's great art galleries and museums should become the preserve of the wealthy. And I'm not interested in any party that can consider excluding the poor from culture, which is not just an education but a means to nourish imagination.

Had there been a charge for the National Gallery, I might have visited once or twice when I was growing up. I know I wouldn't have gone there often - and I wouldn't have learnt much about the history of art. I remember when Mrs Thatcher introduced admission charges for museums and galleries in the 1980s. I was poor then and on many occasions I was stuck outside, wishing I could afford to go in.

Now I've joined the Art Fund. I make donations because museums and galleries were free in my childhood and it's time to say thank-you. If there had been a charge, I wouldn't have bothered. I'd have known museums and galleries weren't for the likes of me.

Banishing the mouse

2011-03-04T11:52:00.004Z

I'm in danger of succumbing to a new addiction. In the past few weeks I don't just come downstairs desperate to ignite the gas beneath the espresso-maker. I also tune feverishly to Radio 3.

It began with Buchner. I read his plays years ago and have twice seen excellent productions of Berg's opera Wozzeck. But I've never seen the original plays performed. So when, by chance, I noticed that Danton's Death was being broadcast on Radio 3, I tuned to the station - and didn't tune away.

In the past Radio 4 has been my default station. But the new and views have weighed on me, as has the immense wordiness of it all. I spend so much of my life with words that every so often, I need a break - and the music on Radio 3, at its best, provides that.

But this week started unfortunately. Paul Dukas is composer of the week - and that should have been excellent, because I know so little about him or his work. It was a shame that, early on, the compiler of the programmes felt compelled to play his most famous work, "The Sorcerer's Apprentice." I'd have liked to consider it in relation to the Goethe poem on which it was based but I couldn't. I've seen Fantasia. My mind was flooded with images of Mickey Mouse.

It was a relief, therefore, to find a piece of music which I could experience simply as music - which didn't crowd my mind with words and images but existed in sound and space, on its own terms.

I was at De Montfort University's Cultural eXchanges festival - an annual event that offers a range of cultural events, talks and debates - mostly for free - to locals in Leicester and the wider East Midlands. I've managed to attend a number of sessions but the one that stands out for me is the one that's hardest to describe and explain. Its resistance to description and explanation is one of the things I liked best about it.

Simon Emmerson's Memory Machine is an installation. I didn't know what to expect. What I found was a darkened studio - there were coloured lights and bean-bags. We entered in small groups, advised to walk carefully andlet our eyes adjust. Some people chose to sit or lie on the floor. I remained standing and, from time to time, walked around. My interest was in the sound.

When sound doesn't conform to the normal expectations of music - when it isn't in a definable strict form and doesn't include words - the only thing to do is to experience it and either succumb or not succumb. There were occasional sounds that seemed familiar - the fall of water, for instance - that conjured up ideas and past experiences. But other sounds I seemed to feel physically - in my body as much as through my ears. The sound came from different directions at once - the balance changed as I moved (as quietly as I could) across the studio. I felt at times excited - and at others intensely relaxed.

I couldn't stay as long as I wished. Perhaps that is as well. If I'd stayed too long I might have felt I was floating. As it was I had found, briefly, something I craved - a way of being that was neither speech nor image.

I suppose some people would dismiss such work as "avant-garde" or label it "difficult." I found it neither - but I know little about music. All I know is that sometimes, when I choose to experience a new work and am ready to accept what it has to offer, I discover new and unexpected sources of delight.

Note: The photograph is not associated with Simon Emmerson's composition. It was taken during a performance of Ligeti's Poeme Symphonique for a hundred metronomes at Covent Garden last year.

Freakshow frolics

2011-02-26T15:09:00.002Z

I haven't quite given up watching TV but I'm nearly there.

It wasn't something I planned to do. Given the right mood, I can enjoy an evening with the television. I don't just watch serious shows. I can sink into programmes that are merely pleasant and those that counterfeit an undemanding friendship between presenter and viewer. When real friends aren't on hand, fakery will do.

These days, while I still sit down to enjoy the occasional film or music programme, I try to avoid much of what TV offers. That skews my criticism - I ought to know more about the subjects of my discomfort. But there's a limit on how long I can endure some of the latest trends. Sometimes that limit allows me to watch for two or three minutes. Occasionally I last nearly half an hour. Often I reach for the remote or the off switch in a matter of seconds.

My discomfort began many years ago. The council estate on which I grew up was a popular haunt for TV documentary-makers, eager to present all of us who lived there as feral creatures, alienated from society by whatever the bogey-man of the moment was, from modern architecture to the innate stupidity and violence of the working classes. We gradually learned their methods. They would move in smilingly, ingratiating themselves with the locals, praising anyone who would embody the director's views in a speech direct to camera.

There's always someone who wants to be TV. It's easy to find someone with a grievance – or genuine anguish – who can be treated as typical of a whole community. Teenage youths with a sense of bravado are prepared to declare their involvement in gangs, threats, mugging – anything the pretty young interviewer wants – because it's better to gain her smiling approval than to admit the uncomfortable truth that they're only 12 or 14 and their mum won't let them out after 7.00 p.m.

Television lies. It doesn't often tell direct untruths but it lies by selection and omission, by choosing a single person, a small group or a set of episodes to stand for a class, a racial group or a community. This is not governed by the laws of libel – and TV companies usually know how to stay within the guidelines laid down by those who control broadcast media.

Besides, TV offers what the audience and the tabloids demand. It feeds into prejudice, hatred and contempt. I can't talk with authority about My Big Fat Gipsy Wedding because I knew from the advance publicity that the programmes would drip with contempt for the people they persuaded to take part – and that it would add to the daily contempt and hatred which too many members of the Romany and Traveller communities have to endure. I didn't watch. After transmission I listened to anguished voices of a number of intelligent travelling people and their descendants. I noted that they didn't even sound angry – the misrepresentation and the attitudes that programme-makers encouraged in the viewers were too familiar to cause anything but resignation to pain.

Freakshows used to be a staple of travelling fairs but they're dying out now. I've mixed feelings about them. No-one wants to be defined as a freak but the people who toured the country, exhibiting themselves in booths, seem to have found some kind of camaraderie as well as a regular income. Some – like the fat man Daniel Lambert – achieved respect for their courtesy and intelligence. It's hard to think that the freakshows on television offer such an opportunity.

TV freakshows want two things: outlandishness and suffering. The ideal freak-star should have an agonising past with a few ex-friends or embarrassing relations who are prepared to sell their stories to the tabloids. It helps if the freak-star is working-class and lacks the means or confidence to question or challenge the freakshow system. Then the freak-star should have outbursts of unacceptable behaviour – the sort of outbursts any of us might have if watched round the clock and required to perform for cameras that follow every move. The more polite freak-star will recognize the outburst as misconduct, subside into tears and apologise. The badly-behaved freak-star defends her or his conduct and can be held up for further contempt.

Any freak-star who attacks the system is blamed. Good, pliant, commendable freak-stars talks of their “journey” and praise the system. The reward is more TV exposure. Occasionally the freak-star achieves financial gain, though this is usually short-term.

Sometimes a freak-star tries to trick the system – or is incited to trick the system – by falsely representing a past as tragic or impoverished. You can't become a freak-star without overcoming illness, grief, abuse or addiction. You have to make your exploiters cry for the cameras – so long as they don't smudge their carefully-applied make-up.

But if you lie to elicit those much-needed tears, the tabloids and public will turn on you. They want authentic suffering, a real journey – and you mustn't deceive them. If you do, they'll turn away from you at once. There's always another outlandish figure or group to hate, despise or pity. The trickster who tries to exploit the freakshow system is condemned to isolation. The TV companies and their bosses rake in their millions.

And the audience stays smug in a contempt which provides warm insulation from most of the pain in the world.

Imagined journeys

2011-02-25T21:52:00.002Z

I'm not really about to travel on the trans-Siberian railway - or even on the Moscow metro. But when I attend my weekly Russian class, the tutor assumes we will all go to Russia one day.

She seems rather worried about this, especially as most of us fail to make the rapid progress she would like. My studies are hampered by my failure to find sufficient time for homework and my inability to pronounce words with long strings of consonants.

I've spent some time this evening writing out numbers, days and months in my neatest Russian script in the hope that I'll start to remember them. But somehow they fail to lodge properly in my brain. I really need 20 or 30 minutes a night on Russian to make any progress - an hour or so at the weekend, when lucky, doesn't have the same effect. So when the next lesson comes round, I'll feel like a dunce again.

But when I look back, I have made some small progress. I no longer struggle with Cyrillic script and have acquired a few useful phrases: I can say извините (excuse me) я не знаю (I don't know) and employ the useful word можно (our tutor's very keen on можно) which means something like "May I ...?" and can be used in a variety of situations.

At times we enact situations. Some are guided by the text book while others are invented by the tutor. The text book has a fine sense of exotic scenarios. I particularly enjoyed the conversation between the delegates to a conference for amateur accordianists, who enthusiastically introduced themselves to one another, giving details of their nationality and job - in Russian of course.

Then there was the keen but inexpert student of Russian (always asking Russian friends to speak slowly until they pronounced the words one careful syllable at a time). His evident lack of competence didn't stop him heading for a large bookshop (дом книги) where he asked the assistant for the book of his choice - not a simple reader or a Chekhov short story but Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. Later he set out to buy a balalaika as well - there's an enthusiasm for music running through the text book.

But we move away from the book to practise other scenarios. We have arrived at customs and are interrogated by an official who demands to see passport and visa, asks questions about nationality and profession and which bag belongs to which traveller. We buy tickets for the train at the main rail station (a word derived from Vauxhall, after the much-admired London station), and enquire about train times (numbers again). We learn how to navigate the metro in Moscow or Novosibirsk.

But again our tutor is anxious. "Don't go to Russia alone. You should go in a group or with a guide - unless you know Russian people." She's worried we'll be mugged or cheated - that we won't be able to cope with crowds or pickpockets. She also warns us about the high prices in Moscow and the risk of taking an unlicensed taxi. At the same time she wants us to understand that Russian people are hospitable and good friends who will, when we know them, welcome us into their homes.

I suspect she would be a little less worried were we more competent in the language. I would worry about any friend who arrived in London alone with little English and attempted to navigate the city. But the language, while fascinating, remains strange.

Of course, it's the strangeness that attracts me. I've reached the stage where I can notice the way Russian words have different boundaries to English words. For instance, there are different words for going somewhere on foot and going somewhere in a vehicle. There are other oddities. Numbers ending in 2-4 take the genitive singular while higher numbers that don't end in 2-4 take the genitive plural. And the sane word means both "world" and "peace".

That, for me, is one of the most exciting things about learning a language. As I discover the different concepts that are taken for granted in other languages, I feel my mind expanding to accommodate additional possibilities. At the same time, certainties I'd taken for granted become unstable. It's worth struggling with the numbers and the strings of consonants for that alone.

Of course, I'd rather become so expert that I could read Pushkin or Akhmatova in the original. It doesn't seem likely. Next week we learn how to book hotel rooms. I expect we'll be asking questions about bedding, showers and when breakfast is served. It's not quite the vocabulary of Eugene Onegin.

I don't suppose I'll even get to Moscow either, so I shan't use my expert knowledge on travelling by Metro or booking a hard or soft seat to Novosibirsk. I'd rather like to cross Russia alone, for all my tutor's anxieties. Perhaps, if I did, I'd find myself managing the language a little better.

But that's enough reflection. It's time to return to my Russian homework. I have to work out how to buy a samovar and some Russian chocolate. I might buy a bottle of vodka as well and a few postcards - or even a large, red piano. It doesn't really matter what I buy since I won't really be paying for it or bringing it home.

Chaplin's world

2011-02-20T18:32:00.007Z

I've almost lost count of the number of times I've planned - and failed - to get to a "coffee-time" concert at St Peter's church in Nottingham. I almost always see the notice at the wrong time or discover the concert I'd like has been scheduled for a weekend when I have other plans.

I nearly forgot the Chaplin/Keaton double bill with live organ accompaniment. But I saw the sign again as I paid a brief visit to Light Night and determined not to miss the concert. The sound tracks added later to accompany silent movies leave them seeming incomplete. A live accompaniment, whether by soloist or full orchestra, brings early films to life - somehow when the music is live it more than takes the place of speech.

The concert offered two films: Charlie Chaplin in Easy Street and Buster Keaton in One Week. Donald MacKenzie, the organist, announced his preference for Keaton but I can't agree with him. Keaton may be as physically brilliant as Chaplin - even as good an actor - but I never care about his characters as I do about the various manifestations of the Little Tramp. Keaton's character seems all about expressionless cleverness - although it masquerades as incompetence - and I'm never convinced he really belongs to the societies which provide a backdrop for his escapades.

But I can't help believing in Charlie Chaplin's world. He inhabits the fringes of a complex, recognizable society. Work is possible but gruellingly difficult - bosses employ and sack people for no evident reason. Some people exploit or tyrannise over others. Worklessness, hunger and beggary are regular dangers. This world offers no consistent reward for virtue or hard work but luck and optimism may just pay off. Charlie copes with a mixture of slyness and sympathy. He is also capable of imitating the ruling classes, even in an ill-fitting suit and big shoes.

I find Charlie's imitations of the aristocracy and those in power particularly attractive. They suggest that the easy confidence of the wealthy is no more than a mannerism which can be acquired. It has nothing to do with class superiority. In these days when too many of our rulers are graduates of the Bullingdon Club, this is something worth remembering.

Easy Street isn't my favourite early Chaplin but I like the way it both records working-class life and parodies the contradictory middle-class views of the "dangerous" working class. There are bullies, thieves, families with too many children and - a staple of the time - a drug den supplied by an evil foreigner. Charlie, by the beautiful young woman at the Hope Mission, gives up his life as a tramp and petty thief and volunteers for the police force. But he continues to behave in his familiar way, avoiding bullies unless compelled to fight and easily swayed by sympathy for the poor, pretty and desperate. He may have joined the police but the audience knows that he's not really an agent of the law. He's taken the job and the uniform for the pay and so that he can get the girl.

As a character, Charlie never sets out to change the world. Any difference he makes it accidental. (The real Charlie Chaplin was more politically engaged and kept under surveillance by J. Edgar Hoover's agents at the FBI.) But Chaplin's films remind me constantly that I live in an unjust society where worklessness and desperation still lurk threateningly for many people.
At the end of the screening I suddenly remembered I'd meant to attend a rally and march against the privatisation of the Post Office. My mood plummeted as I decided I'd probably missed it. I went to another short concert (by the pianist Alexandra Diarescu, including an outstanding performance of Ravel's "Ondine") and did some shopping before heading for the railway station.

As I got off the train I could hear drums and whistles in the distance. After what seemed a long time I saw the marchers, banners held high. The front of the march passed me and I still couldn't see where it ended. Laden with shopping as I was, I slipped into the march and headed onward. After a while my son greeted me and friends called "hello." "How many do you think there are?" one asked. "I thought there would only be twenty or thirty. I couldn't offer a guess. Later the local paper estimated the turn-out at a thousand - not bad for a suburban town.

I didn't walk far - just as well given the cans of baked beans in my shopping bag. It was plain there wouldn't be room for everyone in the hall booked for the rally. I left the marchers who had walked the whole distance to the chairs provided and headed home. My back hurt and I wanted to sit in a comfortable chair. But I was cheered by the combination of Charlie Chaplin, Ravel and a community of marchers prepared to carry banners on a cold, grey day to defend something of value.

Mud and fog

2011-01-23T21:32:00.005Z

It took a long while to recover from the ice. Gradually I noticed that the cold had become less acute, the pavements were mostly safe to walk on and that muddly brown and a dull, dark green had been added to the dominant outdoor colours of grey and white. There's still mud in the garden where there should be a small patch of lawn. Every so often obscurity returned.

The fog seemed to echo a more general confusion. I don't know how to protest at the cuts with sufficient force. It's not just the loss of public services that puzzles me but the government's willingness to borrow more money so that services can be cut. Raising tuition fees will cost £13 billion in extra government debt - but apparently that goes in a special column in the accounts so no-one need worry. The re-organisation of the health service will cost £1 billion in redundancy payments. Every so often I hear a government spokesman explaining that there won't be any savings till 2015. I thought the economic crisis was supposed to be an emergency.

Meanwhile uncertainty stalks many of us who are neither millionaires nor members of the government. Some people are doing well. The luxury goods market is flourishing. Tesco continues its expansion; its vast retail hangars are no longer consigned to waste land but are intruding in city centres and suburban high streets. Small outposts of supermarkets move into once-friendly streets and undercut the local traders. I'm used to empty shops and office spaces now. Every so often I try to remember what used to be behind the blank glass or below the "To Let" sign but the memory seems to have moved on with the prosperity or extravagances of past times.

I went to rejoin my local library. I haven't been a member for years. Demands of work left me paying too much in fines. I tried using a library near my office instead - I liked the elegant curves of the walls and the helpful librarians ordered books from the County Reserve. But they're turning the building into a Job Centre, cramming the collection into another building and selling off all the books they can't fit neatly onto the public shelves - that includes the entire County Reserve.

Across the country libraries are being closed. Our local library is merely threatened with cuts in hours - and I think it's large and popular enough to avoid the most drastic cuts, at least this year. I missed the campaign meeting so I don't know all the details. But I know the cuts in opening hours, mobile library services and librarians risk won't just wreck a service - they'll wreck lives.

Council spokesmen, whatever their original allegiance, have become passionate advocates of the cuts. Every so often they take a step backward and insist that they don't want to do this - they are acting this way because the government makes them. Every council is fulfilling the government's demands - none is prepared to emulate the councillors of Poplar in the 1920s or Clay Cross in the 1970s and resist and risk imprisonment or bankruptcy. Instead they ask protesters "Do you want us to cut social services instead? Should we take money from children or the elderly to pay for libraries?"

It's not easy to answer those questions - until you look at the children, elderly people and social services who also depend on their local libraries. A library isn't just a place for borrowing books. The crude calculation which assesses the cost of a library at so much per book borrowed ignores the library's full value.

When I consult books in a library I don't always take them away with me. Quite often I look for ideas or information in several books and then return them to their shelves. I use the library as a source of local knowledge. I can consult maps and directories there, find out about clubs and evening classes, see what is happening, enjoy whatever exhibition is on at the time (I particularly like the work of local artists), use a computer if my internet connection is down. Members don't just arrive, choose a few books and then leave. Schoolchildren use the library for homework or just to sit and read for a while. Many locals settle in a comfortable chair for a quiet time with a book or journal. Parents and carers bring their children to special events - storytime for the very young is a particular favourite. I've been to talks, poetry readings, book launches and evening classes in my library - and that's only part of what happens there.

I suppose those who don't use libraries can't imagine that a quiet place with large quantities of books could be at the heart of a community. And those who want measurable results for statistical analysis won't find what they want in by counting loans and library users. Nonetheless public libraries seem as precise an image as I can achieve of what is good and valuable in our culture. They represent what I understand by the word "civilisation."

I'm not a councillor. If I were, I don't know whether I'd have the nerve to face prison or bankruptcy. But the defence of Britain's public libraries, from which I gained so much as a child, is pretty high on my list of priorities - and I'll do what I can to save them. In this government's age of austerity we need our libraries more than ever.

Svengali and strawberry cremes

2010-12-22T15:37:00.004Z

I have seen Svengali and I was afraid.

I could just about cope with seeing him on stage, though in the small space of the Finborough that meant that, at times, I could have reached out to touch him – but who would dare to touch Svengali? But seeing Svengali in the bar afterwards, drinking Leffe and smiling in my direction …. that was scary.

I treated myself to two shows in London – an afternoon and evening out while visiting my parents. The first I booked for was Trilby. It's a long time since I read the novel but the thought of a late Victorian melodrama for Christmas was enticing. I enjoy shows that provoke thought and reflection but I also love to be caught up in events, to laugh and to feel a shiver down my spine.

On one level, it's impossible to take Trilby seriously. It purports to reinforce the virtues of manly Englishness but, although the actors deliver lines like “You must bear it like a man” with the necessary conviction, the audience can't take them quite seriously. The three would-be artists who share a Paris studio are endearing and appeal, like the cultural references, to the audience's sense of superiority. But the studio setting, however comic and delightful, is merely the background against which the relationship between Trilby, the artists' model, and Svengali, the dangerous oustider, is played out.

In theory, the story of Svengali and Trilby should be regarded with caution. Trilby is poor, charming and generous – her only ambition is to care for Little Billee, the diminutive artist whose respectable family warn her that their marriage represents ruin. As for Svengali, the East European Jew who craves power, wealth and adoration, and achieves all three through his mesmeric powers – he could easily seem no more than an anti-semitic fantasy.

But in David Cottis's production, the audience falls victim to the fascination of both Rebecca Brewer's delightfully Bohemian Trilby and the unblinking stare of Jack Klaff's Svengali, who in one instant assumes the fawning posture of a beggar only to dismiss his landlady and generous neighbours as “pig-dogs” in a venemously angry aside. The artists, whose English sense of superiority includes contemptuous xenophobia, are never as interesting as the man they despise. They are also little more than tourists in the Latin Quarter where Trilby and Svengali are so engagingly at home. The production also includes a brief scene in which Svengali, fearing death, identifies himself as a bad Jew, atypical of his race and religion.

The cast worked so well together that it's hard to single out any of the other actors. However I liked Jon Shaw's concerned and loyal Taffy and laughed a great deal at the prurience of Christopher Morgan's Rev. Bagot, justifying his pleasure in the nude drawings in the studio as specimens of “the antique.” Congratulations are also due to the artist whose work decorated the set.

It should have been enough to see Trilby but I reasoned that I could have a whole day at the theatre and see Quality Street as well. I couldn't resist seeing the play that inspired the chocolates, even though I've boycotted Nestlé for years.

This is the fifth play by J.M. Barrie I've seen. I've observed that they shine in performance. I'm also fascinated by his treatment of class (mostly servants) and how this is connected with ideas of self-deception and masquerade.

Quality Street seems to be about the virtues of ladylike behaviour and women's quiet strength and endurance. But other questions keep surfacing: the double standards applied to the behaviour or mistress and servant; the barely-suppressed desires of women for men and the financial stability they represent; the bad behaviour of English soldiers in war; and the maimed men who return home. Phoebe (charmingly played by Claire Redcliffe) may be the play's embodiment of strong and long-suffering female virtue but she is implicated in dishonesty from the first scene of the play. First she pretends to exert power over her servant and then, in a telling exchange with the Recruiting Sergeant, refuses to accept that English soldiers join the army to sack, to loot and even, it is implied, to rape.

Patty, the servant, wonderfully played by Catherine Harvey, seems to know all this. She is the real power in the household, though she too would like to escape into the security of marriage, reasoning that her chance may come with the returning soldiers who will need wives to take off and put on their wooden legs.

Louise Hill's delightful production sensibly plays down these elements, allowing the audience to revel in the comedy and frothy sweetness. The play is superficially reassuring, suggesting that England is at its best as a place of ladylike deception. But Quality Street has the synthetic sweetness of strawberry cremes – delicious at first but with a disturbingly metallic aftertaste.

I recommend the Finborough to everyone but hope that there isn't too big a rush to this tiny theatre -I'd hate to find a show sold out next time I try to book.

A white duvet

2010-12-18T15:19:00.002Z

As the train passes the nature reserve, I can't tell whether the huddled ducks are floating on water or held fast in the ice by their legs. The train's speed doesn't give me a moment to work out whether the ducks are living or, as I briefly fear, a pattern of compact corpses against the white-grey landscape. The cold has returned.

I wasn't quite housebound in the first winter freeze. The cold tore at my throat when I left home and my calves felt weak after the morning and evening expeditions to work. The walk to the station, which I can usually do in five minutes if I must, needed twenty as I balanced on the ridged ice and compacted snow which formed the new surface of our suburban streets and pavements.

Like many people, I developed a cold and fierce, hacking cough but I was lucky. Services and deliveries halted but I had food in store and my son was prepared to venture to the corner shop – and further – in temperatures ten degrees below zero. The cold sapped my appetite but there was food and drink when I needed it. I missed one Russian class and two evenings of fencing but reached work on time every day.

The Russian tutor, from Novosibirsk, found the winter mild and flourished in the cold. Our shivering must have amused her but she smiled sympathetically. My desire to visit Russia – or anywhere – diminished. But walking back from the class, teeth chattering despite the layers of warmth in which I'd swathed myself, I caught sight of a duvet in a doorway.

It seemed to be a clean duvet, without a cover. I was struck by its whiteness compared to the grubby pavement-surface of trodden ice and frost. Heaped snow quickly acquires the colour and texture of charcoal when it's near a busy road.

I wondered if I should inspect the duvet. There were a couple of bags close by which suggested that this was someone's night-time home. The temperature was minus seven, and falling. I didn't want to take a step more than necessary in case I fell. I was a couple of yards from the doorway and did my best to inspect the duvet from a distance. I was almost sure there was no-one huddled inside it. I walked on down the hill, my feet searching for secure footholds, wondering if I should have done more.

If I had seen the resident of the doorway, I would have had to stop. At least, I think I would. No-one should sleep in a doorway on such a night. If I couldn't find a hostel place – and I wouldn't know where to start – surely at least I could buy a rough sleeper a cup of coffee, a meal or a night in a hotel. But there's nothing to be done about an empty duvet, whose owner was, I hope, warm somewhere else.

Days later, I mentioned my dilemma. “No-one will be sleeping out in this,” one friend declared. I knew, because I'd checked, that there were emergency hostel places and was briefly reassured. But then another friend spoke of going out with the soup run. In the English midlands, in the twenty-first century, human beings are finding what shelter they can in doorways, cardboard boxes and caves. They are queuing for soup in the coldest winter for more than forty years, just as cuts and economic anxiety leads charities to plead for more donations.

The latest snowfall hasn't been so bad here. From a distance it looks like a thick scatter of icing sugar on earth, grass, leaves and cars. Close to, it's evident that the snow is hard and sharp as tempered steel.

Next year our local council is cutting 200 hostel places for homeless people. I'm saving for loft insulation and double glazing. On my few daytime expeditions, I see beggars crouching in doorways. None of them haunts me as much as the memory of that white duvet next to the blackened snow and white-grey ice.

Problems in Pangbourne

2010-11-13T11:25:00.004Z

Many years ago, I went to the National Theatre to see Coriolanus. It was a preview, so I had no idea what to expect from the production. Unusually, I was going with friends who had taken the opportunity to book low-priced “stage seats,” with no idea what this might mean.

We arrived in our smart work clothes and were ushered onto the stage. At once our role became clear. I remember Peter declaring loudly, “I can't be mob in this tie” as he undid his tie and stuffed it in his suit pocket.

We were indeed cast as mob. From where we sat, stood or at times, were herded round the stage, we fell into the role quite easily. As Coriolanus, Ian McKellen unleashed his venomous contempt in our direction. At times we felt vulnerable, particularly when swords were unsheathed. But we were happy to join in the calls of our leaders: “The people are the city.” From where we stood or sat it seemed like a call for justice and democracy – and Coriolanus hated it.

The rest of the audience hated it too. The people in stalls and circle of the Olivier Theatre were on Coriolanus's side. Often, when you're on a stage, the emotions of the audience are palpable. It was like that then, even though we weren't really members of the cast. I felt a great wave of anger and hatred rolling towards us from the body of the auditorium. We were in a Shakespeare play, we were audience but we were getting it wrong – this play wasn't intended for the angry, demanding mob.

I was reminded of that experience as I reflected on my reaction to Amy's View at Nottingham Playhouse. I've been hesitant about describing this because the play provided so much that I want from the theatre. It was excellently acted and I don't think it could have been better directed. Everything was right from the pictures on the walls of the set to the piano music between scenes - I wish I knew what it was. It was a play by a living playwright who did his best to take women's lives seriously. At its centre were questions about culture, politics and economics.

And yet … though I laughed in all the right places, the play didn't speak to me. Most of the theatre-goers were having a lovely time. I felt like an intruder from the wrong background. I didn't belong in the posh house in Pangbourne where most of the debates took place. Had I been there, I'd have been working in the pub (offstage) or hanging out with the cleaners and gardeners who must have been employed to keep the rich people's rooms in pristine order. I started wondering where ordinary people lived and realised that, for the playwright and most of the audience, the people on stage were ordinary.

There was something odd about the on-stage discussions. The play involves long and often funny debates about the merits of theatre (good) versus film and TV (bad). It's plain which side the audience is supposed to be on. The representative of modernity is a dodgy young man who doesn't go to the theatre. He's a bastard in both the literal and metaphorical sense and this is plainly supposed undermine the views he expresses. He's also the only character on stage with a regional accent.

The young man insists theatre is dead and that the masses – or the mob – are on his side. Theatre-goers are hardly likely to agree. But at times the argument and scenario are so heavily skewed against him that I wanted to offer my support. In that setting I might even have cheered Kelvin McKenzie or Rupert Murdoch. I'd have felt I had more in common with them than the secure and unworried defenders of theatre.

Of course, worries do intrude. Since the days of Aeschylus drama has demanded reversals of fortune. But I was untouched by the characters' miseries. Certainly bad things happened to them but it was always plain that someone would provide food, home and subsistence. Even massive catastrophe doesn't mean destitution. The sort of disasters that threaten most people are a good deal worse than that.

On one level it was a good evening at the theatre, if a strangely isolating one. I always like watching good acting and laughing at well-timed jokes. But it's odd to feel alienated by a defence of live theatre, which I've loved for as long as I can remember. I wanted something wilder, more connected with a world I recognize as mine – perhaps something as angry as the plays of Peter Barnes or Edward Bond. I'd have liked excitement – the kind of confused physical and intellectual response I had to a student production of Sergeant Musgrave's Dance when the gun was trained on the audience. Perhaps a production of Blasted would have reminded me of the strengths of live theatre. I don't know. Productions of Sarah Kane have yet to reach the East Midlands.

Watching Amy's View gave me a sense of exclusion. Theatre tickets used to say on the back “The management reserves the right to refuse admission.” Sometimes, when I was young, I would worry that a theatrical management would tell me to go away because I didn't belong – that I'd dressed wrong, didn't understand the ways of theatre-goers, that theatres weren't meant for working-class children like me. Of course it never happened. By now I know I look and sound as if I belong.

The ever-hospitable staff at Nottingham Playhouse took my money, helped me choose the best available seat at the price I selected and treated me like a guest. The actors performed well in the play which David Hare wrote. It was the play itself which refused me admission.

I may be a theatre-lover but I know my place. I'm mob.

"The pity of war"

2010-11-13T00:05:00.002Z

Shakespeare's Othello is a soldier. He had killed his opponents in face-to-face combat and ordered others to kill. This is what gives him value in Venice. He is defined as a Moor and, while it's not clear quite what Shakespeare meant by this in terms of race, it makes one thing plain: away from his military role, Othello is an outsider. His family comes from elsewhere. He has one memento of his mother: a handkerchief embroidered with strawberries – and he has given this to Desdemona, the woman he loves and his new wife. Apart from that, he is as absorbed as he can be by his military role – until his meeting with Desdemona, the army has taken the place of family affections and loyalties. Of course he trusts his comrades in arms but he is their general. He is unprepared for their jealousy or scheming.

Often in Shakespeare's plays I find a single repeated word that seems to provide a guide to one of the themes of the play. In Othello, that word is pity. Speaking of his growing love for Desdemona as he recognized her love for him, Othello declares that he perceived her growing love when she heard the tale of his life and found it “wondrous pitiful.” He continues: “She loved me for the dangers I had passed/ And I loved her that she did pity them.”

Pity returns with renewed force when Othello is finally, wrongly convinced of Desdemona's infidelity. He cries out to the soldier who has deceived him, “But yet, the pity of it, Iago! O Iago, the pity of it ...” At the end of the play, Othello, seeing Desdemona asleep in the bed where he will strangle her, is almost overcome by pity. But instead he does what he believes his honour requires – he strangles her. Then, realising too late that he was deceived, he kills himself.

I wonder if Wilfred Owen had that famous cry of Othello in mind when he coined his famous phrase “the pity of war.” He used it twice: in his poem “Strange Meeting” and in the roughly-drafted preface he sketched out for a collection of poems. He listed the topics that his poems would avoid – they include, heroes, glory and honour. Instead he states baldly: “My subject is War, and the pity of War.”

Wilfred Owen's attitude to war was inconsistent. At times he enjoyed battle – he wrote of one conflict “I lost my earthly faculties and fought like an angel.” He collected at least one souvenir from a dead German: a blood-spattered handkerchief which he sent as a present to his young brother. Yet he also wrote “I am a conscientious objector with a very seared conscience.”

Owen's attitude was typical of many soldiers in the First World War and later conflicts. Sometimes they were frightened, sometimes they suffered, sometimes they killed and sometimes they exulted in the sufferings of others. The same men who performed heroic actions could abuse prisoners, enjoy slaughter and then endure acute pain stoically. Soldiers, like Othello, need pity. So do the civilians and the friends and families of soldiers.

I'm uncomfortable about war memorials which urge us to honour “our glorious dead.” War isn't about glory. It's about people who are trained to kill carrying out orders. Sometimes they are killed. Plenty of civilians – including children – are killed and maimed by soldiers every year. The soldiers who survive have to live with what they did and what was done to them.

First World War soldiers often found a strange dissonance between the experience of trench warfare and the myth of heroism, honour and glory to which they returned on leave. We seem to be creating similar myths. “I don't care how you wear your poppy, so long as you wear your poppy with pride,” the British Legion's representative declared on TV. Soldiers – all soldiers – are routinely referred to as “heroes.” It's seen as bad taste to mention episodes of warfare that aren't heroic. Whatever horrors are committed by other countries' soldiers, we're supposed to believe that British soldiers never, ever behave like that.

It's strange. There's little support for this centuries' wars but the public tends to support the army and cheers the homecoming soldiers as heroes. Every so often we're asked to feel sorry for the soldiers and how they suffer – and I do pity them.

But soldiers are more than suffering heroes. They have inner lives and consciences. They are also trained killers and, although it's not often mentioned, many of them kill people. The people they kill are not always soldiers.

I've no wish to condemn the soldiers. I don't wish to be in their position – and, if I were, I expect that, for all my pacifism, I would end by acting in much the same way but with less efficiency. Soldiers deserve something more honest than a myth of heroism and glory.

Another brave soldier-poet, Keith Douglas, who fought in the Battle of El Alamein, looked coolly at himself as a killer and at the corpses of those he killed. In his poem “Vergissmeinicht” (Forget-me-not) he returns to the scene of a tank battle three weeks afterwards and finds the dead body of a soldier he killed. The emotions of the British soldiers are not pleasant; they see the abused and decaying body “almost with content.” But the discovery of a picture of the dead man's girlfriend reminds the poet that the dead man was not only a killer. The poem ends:

For here the lover and killer are mingled
who had one body and one heart.
And death who had the soldier singled
has done the lover mortal hurt.

The pity of war indeed. The pity of it.

Transit camps for the poor

2010-11-02T19:59:00.006Z

Growing up in our block of flats, there were always small tasks for children. I had slim, flexible wrists and was in demand whenever a neighbour accidentally let the front door slam behind her and found that she was locked out. I could slide my fore-arm through the letter-box and, using a hooked kitchen utensil, pull the inside door handle down until the door opened again. Sometimes I'd be offered sixpence as a reward but I was sufficiently well-schooled by my parents to refuse it, unless the neighbour was particularly existence. Helping out was a way of life.

Often someone would run out of a basic food. I would be given a cup to ask the neighbours if we could borrow flour or sugar, with the promise to return it the next day. Back then, the shops shut at 5.30 and shopping was a daily activity. Best of all was running out of milk. Only one of our neighbours had a fridge and borrowing milk meant drinking milk that was icy instead of room temperature or, in a hot summer – and despite our efforts to cool by evaporation in a sink full of water – not far from going off.

I don't recall envying the wealthier neighbours. I enjoyed the excitement of rummaging through jumble sales for books, ornaments and clothes (my order of priorities). I would have liked a holiday and wished my mother could have better shoes – but she insisted her canvas plimsoles were comfortable and children are apt to take parents' reassurances at face value. Mum did her best to convince us that holidays were boring, though Butlin's sounded terrifically exciting. Instead we had Sunday school outings and days out roaming Putney Heath, Richmond Park and Wimbledon Common. Sometimes we walked as far as Kew Gardens or took advantage of our cheap tube fares to explore London's (mostly free) sights and museums. There were always books, libraries and sometimes theatre trips to Shakespeare in the parks or plays, musicals and ballet from the gods of the nearby theatres.

As a small child I observed and marvelled at all kinds of glamour: I remember golden beehive hairstyles, possibly tinted by the hairdresser, and stiletto heels. One neighbour invited us for drinks at Christmas and we sat nervously in her pristine living room where she offered a choice of tea, squash and Bristol cream. (Mum disapproved of the sherry - she thought it the first step to alcoholism). Usefully, one neighbour acquired a telephone and gave us all his number for use in emergency. We were instructed in the routine of the phone box – when to press button A and button B – and learnt to deliver a quick message in ten seconds should we depend on the return of twopence for the bus fare home. The telephone and fridge-owner even had a small car. He worked as a chauffeur and once, resplendent in his chauffeur's uniform, gave me a lift into central London. I'll never forget how he stood and saluted as I emerged from his small grey morris minor.

I suppose we were still in the post-war atmosphere and believed we were “all in it together,” whatever “it” was. Linked by our need for council houses, we were a surprising jumble of people: young couples with children, older people, respectable types who had lost homes in the war, ex-servicemen and women, refugees (some with numerical tattoos we didn't mention), people with shady pasts. There was a loving father who occasionally vanished into jail for a few months. One glamorous woman was said to be “on the game” but “a very good mother..” There were loving marriages and couples who fought. Being a child, I probably missed a great deal – it was more exciting to explore “the woods,” “the bomb-site,” to “go trespassing” and to dream of the big adventure of going down the steps of the underground air-raid shelter. I needed occasional risks - children do when they feel secure.

I still visit my parents in the council estate where I grew up. I don't get there often enough and these days I feel like an outsider. The atmosphere has changed – we're no longer in the post-war world, in which progress was taken for granted. At some point during my childhood a council house ceased to be a badge of respectability and “council tenant” became a term of abuse. Perhaps the upper middle classes needed someone new to fear and despise. Or perhaps they always did fear and despise people like me and I didn't know it. I remember the rants in the press about the evils of tower blocks - I loved and still love the high-rise block in which I lived – and the new acquaintances who examined me for evidence of neurosis or criminality, if they didn't (as some did) cut me dead on discovering where I lived. At around that time, people on the estate seemed to lose a certain self-confidence. It didn't help to know that an address might disqualify you for a desired job. I was assured, by people who didn't know my background, that council tenants were stupid, ignorant and never read books, went to museums or walked in London parks. I was told that people like me were vandals, racists, criminals and scroungers who didn't care to know right from wrong. The transition from home to wider society was uneasy. I learnt to keep quiet about my background and to mimic the nonchalance of the rich.

There was a shortage of council homes in London. For a while councils bought up big houses in wealthy areas and converted them into flats. Then the policy changed. Under Mrs Thatcher, tenants were encouraged to buy, at a substantial discount, and councils were not allowed to spend the proceeds on further council homes. We were to become a home-owning society. My parents, who had paid more than the value of their flat to the council in thirty years of renting, took advantage of the discount and used Dad's redundancy pay to buy their flat. While the policy as a whole seemed dodgy, I was glad for them. There were voices on the extreme right of the tory party suggesting that tenants with spare rooms should be moved. After bringing up a son and a daughter in a 2-bedroom flat, Mum and Dad finally had a little extra space – a room where their children and, eventually, their grandchildren, could bed down for the night.

There's more to that flat than extra space. Mum and Dad, who are still there and approaching their nineties, know the neighbours. They visit a familiar GP and are greeted by adults who remember Mum from the days she worked as an infant helper at the local primary school. The bus drivers recognize and lower the platform on the bus so that Mum can get on without difficulty. The views are the familiar views of Richmond Park. It's changed a little from my childhood by storms and the fall of trees. There are no longer sheep in the park and I don't know if the parrots who arrived in the 1980s survived the last harsh winter. But you can still hear the bark of foxes at night and the rough call of rutting stags. Sometimes you can look down on a hawk as it stoops for prey. When I stay there in summer I'm often woken by the rowdy clamour of the dawn chorus. It all brings back memories – memories cherished by my parents who have now lived there more than fifty years.

The sale of council houses brought changes, of course. Flats were the least popular part of the council's housing stock. It wasn't just the contempt in which tower-block dwellers are held which caused that. Anyone buying a flat has to contribute to maintenance, repairs, renovations and upgrades for the block as a whole – my parents had to put money aside for bills which can run into thousands or tens of thousands. So far they've managed. They are secure in their home with their memories.

Other neighbours bought, then sold and moved away. Tenants died and were replaced with new tenants. Suddenly individual and families on the council house waiting list needed more than inadequate housing to qualify and reach the head of the list. Desperation helped. So did illness or personal disaster. The shortage of council houses made it harder for relatives to live near one another – grown-up sons and daughters sometimes stayed as tenants or carers but many found themselves driven from London. I have a four-hour journey each way when visiting my parents and that's not unusual. I still feel comfortable on the estate. The sight of library, maisonettes and tower blocks among the trees tells me I'm coming home.

Now even faster change is arriving. It sounds as though the Big Society will mean higher rents, lower income for people on housing benefit (some of whom work at several jobs for low wages) and insecure tenancies. People who can't find work for a year will be punished by a cut in housing benefit, although their housing will be no cheaper. Rents are set to rise to 80% of the private equivalent rent – and in London that will be high if the housing shortage continues to contribute to landlords' profiteering.

It all worries me but it's the insecurity that nags at me most. If council houses are allotted only for a short period and, as has been suggested, those who are luckier with pay or promotion are rewarded with eviction, there will be no chance for a mixed community to grow. At the same time, the jobless – and the latest projections suggest unemployment is about to rise by 1.6 million – may also be punished by eviction as their housing benefit falls. Will they join the council outposts in Slough or Hastings, where cheaper landlords are said to be offering bulk bed-and-breakfast accommodation for the needy and homeless?

If all this happens, children growing up now on the council estate where I lived will never have the secure childhood I had. Their parents will take less pride in their homes as they wait to be moved on. If they are cautious and anxious they will save any spare pennies and pounds for the cost of the move and the demands of the next home. They will hesitate to root themselves in a community of temporary dwellers. Schools and doctors will see pupils and patients who pass through and never settle for education or care.

I'm concerned for all who live on the estate where I was so happy. I fear that these policies will swell a tide of anger and despair, leading at times to wide, directionless anger. I know how I feel when my security is threatened – and how my anger is trebled when those I love are at risk.

I fear that my parents, who still take pride in their flat and its views, will wake one morning to find themselves marooned in a transit camp for the poor.

Seeing the naked youth

2010-10-26T14:29:00.003+01:00

Just as I succumbed to a horror of a cold – combined, inevitably, with a busy period at work – the East Midlands offered a cultural cornucopia of events. I missed too many, some because they clashed with work or other events and some because I feared to interrupt a reading or performance with a hacking cough. At least I made it to a recital by Trevor Pinnock, which included works by Couperin, Bach and Elizabeth Jacquet de la Guerre and to a range of poetry events including a small but well-attended celebration of National Poetry Day in Leicester and the first reading in the Nottingham Poetry Series.

I also attended a reading at the first Beeston International Poetry Festival. I hope it's the first of many. The festival, organised by poet, professor and jazz-man John Lucas, offers bargain-price (£3!) and free events at small venues including shops, libraries and the splendid Flying Goose café which also hosts a series of literary events through the year. I hope to attend further Beeston poetry events and will blog about them later. This paragraph should be seen as a taster and an advertisement for the rest of the festival – details can be found by clicking here.

However the major event of the cultural calendar – at least as far as the national press is concerned – must be the arrival of the British Art Show, In The Days of the Comet. It's a quinquennial event and this year it opened in Nottingham, taking over four venues: Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham Castle, the New Art Exchange and One Thoresby Street. By luck, I found myself invited to the preview and finally well enough to take advantage of the invitation.

Previews are strange events, half party and half excitable tour of art. There are speeches too and, as I walked up the stairs towards the Long Gallery at Nottingham Castle I realised that listening to speeches would be the first part of my duty. At first the combination of microphone and echo so distorted the sound that I was reminded of the opening of Chaplin's City Lights. Perhaps they aren't speeches at all but an installation, I reflected. But they were speeches and, as I moved round the gallery, the sound became clearer. There were several references to the cuts and quite a few to “bonking bunnies”. “In the Days of the Comet” seemed an apt title for the show – if the Comet was a metaphorical reference to George Osborne's hacksaw.

There was something strange about the roughness of the art in the 19th century grandeur of Nottingham Castle. But hints of destruction also seemed apt both for the castle's past - the locals set it alight and watched it burn in the Reform Bill riots of 1831 - and for current anxieties. "It feels like the end of days," a colleague remarked a week or so ago, and her words chimed so well with my own feelings that they have haunted me ever since.

While some works were carefully wrought - sometimes for wealthy patrons - others spoke of change, anger and destruction. I couldn't see all the art clearly for the crowds at the preview and have decided to go back and see the exhibitions again when they were less crowded. I certainly couldn't give the video installations the time they demanded. But I was mesmerised by a mysterious monochrome work with people and peacocks that turned out by a tapestry. And I gazed at what appeared to be a cross between a bombed and deserted house and the kind of cart tugged through battlefields by Mother Courage. It was fragile, dilapidated and strangely beautiful.

Downstairs in the castle café there was free champagne, provided by the exhibition's sponsors, for any visitor with the patience to get through the crush. I met my friend Katie there and we savoured a moment of cool luxury on the castle balcony before returning to look once more at the art.

We were both tired - Katie had come straight from teaching - so decided to leave our visit to the New Art Exchange for another day. Instead we made our way to the Nottingham Contemporary which was also so packed that it was sometimes hard to view the exhibits. I was pleased to find work by the remarkable Alasdair Gray on show - I'm so fond of his fiction that I often forget that he's an artist and designer as well. I hoped to spot him among the hordes but, if he was there, I didn't see him.

Tiredness induced frivolity. Katie looked at what appeared to be a giant teddy-bear's head made out of canvas and wondered if it would be possible to use it for camping. We inspected the guy ropes and looked for tent flaps before sadly concluding that there was no useful entrance to the main space. Then I saw the fire.

It was plainly meant to be there. As I approached I could see that the flame occupied part of a metal park bench. Perched next to it was an extraordinarily accurate life-size model of a bearded young man wearing only a pair of blue y-fronts. As I got closer, I realised that it was not a model at all but a young man, sitting very still and gazing at the flame beside him. There's something strange about being invited to stare at a semi-nude man in an art gallery. I became aware of textures, flesh tones, the unnevenness of toes, softness, imperfection, vulnerability.

Katie and I read the notice together. It informed us that the flame would be lit once a day and that, once a week, it would be tended by "a naked youth." "But he isn't naked," I whispered to Katie. She instantly urged me to complain. But how could I complain to a still youth who was involved in a work of art?

Katie considered other grounds for complaint. He wasn't tending the flame, merely watching it. As if to reinforce her comments, the flame extinguished itself and went out. We wandered back in the direction of the youth, who had started engaging in conversation with visitors. But we were too late. Just as we arrived at his bench, a curator appeared holding a dressing gown which the youth put on before departing round a corner.

We saw the youth later, in the bar. By this time he was wearing a check shirt and looking cheerful. Frivolity was taking over. Katie drew my attention to the visitors' shoes and fashion sense. Then she suggested we were too tired for more art - and indeed we were. We headed, briefly, to a cocktail bar before going home.

It's comforting to know that the exhibitions continue till January. That should give me the opportunity for several visits. I may even attempt a more serious review. In the meantime, the first newspaper reviews are being published, and they're good.

Dolly in the downturn

2010-10-13T21:05:00.005+01:00

Wherever I go, I find myself wondering what will survive. Announcements of cuts have speeded up and I feel battered already, though the axe is still poised to fall. These months are a reversal of the norm, as if convalescence came before serious illness. Everyone seems to be waiting for things to get much, much worse.

It's hard to make culture a priority when so much else is under threat. How can I value a trip to the theatre or art gallery – even a book borrowed from a library – above the local day centre for people with mental health problems (under threat of closure)? Yet I notice that many of the activities offered by that day centre depend on what are broadly termed "the arts". The people whose lives are improved by help and friendship at the day centre also improve their lives by sculpting, painting, writing and singing. They share their skills with one another – and arrange local trips to take in the exhibitions which I also enjoy.

Millionaires never have to do without the arts. As patrons they commanded poets, painters, sculptors and musicians - they could buy whatever entertainment they fancied. I'll always be grateful to those millionaires who gave money to build theatres and public libraries. But my sympathies are with those who lived on the fringes of culture, grabbing whatever they saw and desired, without any sense of entitlement. I've always grabbed at culture.

Now the wealthy men in our government are snatching back. Education in arts and humanities will be restricted to the very rich and those prepared to embrace enormous debt. Were I young now, I'd have to give up my dreams of a good education. Meanwhile opportunities for self-education are being snatched away. Library hours are being cut. Soon galleries and concert halls will close and theatres will darken – though I suppose millionaires will continue to enjoy their holidays abroad and whatever command performances they choose to buy.

Until then, I'm grabbing as much culture as I can fit round work and a heavy cold. I've seen two shows at Nottingham Playhouse (She Stoops to Conquer and Twelfth Night – both excellent fun) and, most recently, a new play, Dolly by Andy Barrett, which is touring the region. I caught it at the Darwin Rooms in Derby.

The Darwin Rooms aren't a typical venue for New Perspectives, the theatre company behind the production. It's one of those small, regional touring companies which rarely get noticed in the national press touring the region. Mostly performances are in village halls and sports centres - the actors move around the region, setting up temporary stages, lighting rigs and sound systems for a night at the time.

I haven't seen the company before but they seem to take rural settings as their starting point. This play was set in Rosslyn near Edinburgh - according to the play a small farming community where any outsider was instantly identified as a visitor to the research laboratory. It picked up themes of ambition, success and failure. Farmer's daughter, Bettina, longed to be a country and western singer like her idol Dolly Parton. Her story was told in parallel to the story of the first cloned sheep, created at the Rosslyn Institute.

To my surprise, I found myself warming to the enthusiasm of the researchers as they explained what they were doing and why it was so difficult. Ethical questions lurked in the background - as did the desire of mourners to use cloning to bring back the dead. But the playwright and production trusted the audience to think through the questions - they weren't hammered out but left for thought and discussion later. The play was more interested in celebrating human achievement, whether the success of scientists in an improbable project or the ability of Dolly Parton to write and sing songs about triumph in the face of difficulty.

When I say that my favourite performer was Dolly the sheep, this is not a criticism of the cast. They almost convinced me that the two puppets - Dolly the new-born lamb and Dolly the adult sheep - were real and I held my breath for a moment when Dolly was born and presented to the waiting scientists. It still seems unlikely that messing around with theories, formulae and test tubes can produce a warm and breathing creature, let alone a sheep of character.

But even if ambitious and imaginative scientific research escapes, I don't suppose the idea of science will warm people through the cold isolation of the cuts. Dolly Parton, for all her artifice, may be a better source of warmth. She can, on occasion, be very funny - and she has a clear sense of what it's like to go without.

No to the Kindle

2010-10-07T08:00:00.004+01:00

British friends have occasionally asked me why I visit Paris in August. “There's no-one there,” they assure me. “The real Parisiens are all on holiday and everything's shut.”

It's a simplification. Some Parisiens – those who can afford it – try to take holidays in August. Some shops, businesses – even museums – are closed. Last year I was sorry to miss the municipal museum of Montreuil, which I still hope to visit one day. The Comedie Francaise and the Paris Opera are on holiday. Friends I would have liked to see were away – as was the owner of the splendid apartment I sublet.

Yet I enjoy Paris in August. It has a leisurely air. The discovery that a local shop or restaurant is shut for “les vacances” is not a disaster. It's a reminder that workers need holidays and there's more to life than making money.

In previous Augusts I did little to look for live events in Paris. Paris Plage was fun – and full of locals – but I missed it by a day this year. I wondered if my British friends were right in saying nothing else was on. I decided to investigate. I paused at a kiosk and invested in a copy of Pariscope – not a huge gamble at 40 eurocents – to see what was going on. Leafing through the pages I read of theatres, cinemas, concerts, spectacles and markets.

At first I was baffled by the choice, then began to make decisions. The Lucernaire looked worth a visit, and quite near where I was staying. The second and third Millennium films were showing at the Cinema Chaplin, not too far away. There was a fund-raising piano festival at the Armenian Cathedral in the Marais – and much more.

I began at the Lucernaire. The list of theatre shows made me hesitate. I'd missed Cooking with Elvis at the local amateur theatre and was prepared to miss the French version as well. But I wondered about a one-man show of Oscar Wilde's De Profundis, well-reviewed in a number of French national papers. The price – 22 euros – is more than I usually pay for theatre tickets. But when I thought about seeing Wilde in French, there was a pleasant logic too it. De Profundis is Wilde's long letter to his young lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, written from Reading Gaol. Some years ago I would have said I knew the English text reasonably well, although it has faded in my mind since. I recalled that, after leaving prison, Wilde went to Paris, where he died, and was buried in Pere Lachaise cemetery. And while I hesitated about seeing a work in translation, I recalled that I had twice seen Wilde's play Salomé, which he wrote in French for Sarah Bernhardt, in the translation by Lord Alfred Douglas. The idea of Wilde in French translation was almost symmetrical. I bought my ticket.

The set up at the Lucernaire wasn't quite like a theatre in England. Notices on the wall told us that the “ouvrieuses” (specifically female workers) showing us to our seats were unpaid and dependent on tips. The ouvrieuses were charming and had a neat way of sliding the proffered tips into a purse – but I felt uncomfortable about the procedure. Workers are often required to display charm as part of their jobs but I didn't want to measure and reward that charm directly with a tip – it felt too intimate a purchase. However as they were, according to the notices, dependent on the audience's generosity, it was plain that generosity was my responsibility. I handed over the tip as I was shown to my seat and wondered if I'd bought the bright smile that followed.

The theatre was small – a studio space without the formal grandeur of a proscenium arch. The actor playing Wilde was already on the stage, perched on a step-ladder and half-covered by a blanket. The audience leaned forward expectantly, displaying a quality of intense concentration that is rare in English theatre audiences – and this continued throughout the performance.

Occasionally I found the use of French distancing and at times my understanding flickered out - I probably grasped 80 to 85% of the text. Despite the strangeness, a French Wilde seemed a convincing possibility. I even found his mispronunciation of Reading (to resemble the activity rather than the town ir the gaol – endearing). It was an intense and moving performance. I was surprised to find that, towards the end, I felt sympathy not just for Wilde but also for Lord Alfred Douglas – Bosie. De Profundis chronicles instances of Bosie's selfishness but, listed by Wilde, they seem like the follies of a very young man faced by an adoration he could not quite reciprocate and an intelligence he could not match. Even his cruel statements seemed like a dull attempt to match Wilde's wit while his neglect of Wilde's feelings could be forgiven as the uncertainty of a young man suffering from an appalling upbringing and unsure how to respond across the barriers of age and c lass. The young often do run from suffering – and how was Bosie to respond to Wilde's imprisonment and agony? Biographies suggest that Bosie was unpleasant throughout his long life but the pictures reveal a startling beauty which may also have been a disadvantage.

A week was not enough for all the events listed in Pariscope. I saw Millennium 2 – subtitled in French, which I find far easier than dubbing – and enjoyed a riveting performance of piano music by Chopin and Rachmaninov. That was as much cultural performance as I could take. I also haunted the bookshops, trying to add to my small collection of books in French.

There were two books I aimed to buy: Victor Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris and Eugene Sue's Les Mysteres de Paris. Both have been on my list of books I need to read for some time. But I was confronted by something unfamiliar from my life in the East Midlands – a wealth of bookshops. There were big shops like the many branches of Gibert Joseph in the Boul' Mich and the art chain Mona Lisait. Then there were many small independent shops – far more than in London, I think – where the stock seemed to reflect either the manager's taste or the surprises that often delight and infuriate in secondhand volumes.

I browsed contentedly and puzzled over what to buy. I find nineteenth century French literature easier to read than modern light fiction; lengthy paragraphs allow unfamiliar words to become clear from the context and puzzles can be resolved with the aid of a dictionary. Recent thrillers, for all their popular appeal, are harder because they use so much contemporary slang. I have a further interest. I've noticed that, for generations, working-class readers in particular were absorbed by popular French fiction from the mid-19th century. Stories like The Count of Monte Cristo and Les Miserables are mentioned in working-class writing from the 1850s to the 1950s. And I knew that writers for the working class drew on French writers. For instance, G.W.M. Reynolds' terrific and popular serial, The Mysteries of London – which makes Dickens seem restrained in style and detail – was directly influenced by Sue's Mysteries of Paris. So far as I can see, no-one has gone into much detail chronicling this influence. While the effort necessary for a wide-ranging survey is beyond me – I imagine I'd need a year or so in French archives with no guarantee of success as well as another year combing comparable English publications - I could at least see what popular fiction of the period was available in paperback.

One of the joys of reading in French is the vast and largely unknown library of possible titles which spreads before me. Looking at Paul Feval's Le Bossu – which was the source for a couple of terrific swashbuckling films - I discovered that the same author had written his own Mysteres de Londres – quite different from Reynolds' serial. I haven't read it yet but, according to the back of the book jacket, it tells the story of an Irish plot against the British government and is set in exotically English locations. I had to buy a copy. There was a fine multi-volume edition of Les Mysteres de Paris, with illustrations, but in the end I concluded that it was too heavy.

I was also tempted by Eugene Sue's last book, Les Mysteres du Peuple, apparently a fictional account of working-class revolution from the time of Jesus to the era of Napoleon III. I wondered why so startling a book was so little known. Until I stumbled across a copy in Gibert Joseph, I hadn't heard of its existence. I nearly bought it but once again I hesitated, feeling the weight of the book. I could delay, I thought, and order it from amazon.fr when I had time to read it.

In the end, I succumbed to ten or twelve books, including a fine hardback edition of Notre Dame de Paris from one of the second hand shops set up by Abbé Pierre's Emmaus charity. A friend tipped me off that these were a great place for bargains and the shop I visited gave me an excuse for travel on the voguéo - I find it hard to resist river travel. My reading of French is still slow and I have less free time than I would like so my purchases will last me a long time. But I still regret the two books by Sue – perhaps I need to go to Paris again, very soon.

The chief problem was one of space – and what I reckoned I could carry home in my suitcase. Eurostar may not have a weight allowance but travellers still have to heave their cases onto the conveyor belt for scanning and manoeuvre them into the luggage areas of trains.

Briefly I thought of the solution suggested by a couple of friends: if I purchased a kindle or e-reader I could carry a whole library with me, unworried by weight. But I like the weight of books. I like the smell and texture of paper, the designs of covers. I like turning the pages with my fingers. I love the sensation of opening a new book for the first time – and I adore books with history, which carry a sense of their past readers. I can see the logic of an electronic reader but not the pleasure.

Nor would there be opportunities for communication. I discovered the novels of Michael Chabon after seeing a taxi driver was reading one. It was the beginning of a good conversation about books, which would never have been sparked by the anonymous cover of an e-reader. I like seeing what my fellow travellers are reading.

Then think of the hazards. I couldn't read an e-book in the bath – at least not safely. Amazon has been known to withdraw a text from the kindle, regardless of readers who were half-way through. An equipment failure or expired battery could put an entire library beyond my reach.

My books may occupy too much space. It's also true I don't always know where a particular title is. But I know my books by their shape, size, colours and texture. I could never gain so much affection for an electronic index. Perhaps this simply marks me as a member of a dying generation, to be as much pitied or mocked as those who could not adjust from the scroll to the book. Wandering through the market of old and antique books in the Parc Georges Brassens (on the site of a former abattoir), I was unable to imagine surrendering my love for the book in favour of a screen called into grey and white life at the flick of a button.

Mind you, I didn't buy any of the book on sale in the Parc George Brassens. It was the last day of my holiday – and another book would have made my suitcase too heavy.

Balzac's cafetiere

2010-09-16T14:56:00.004+01:00

Much as I love Victor Hugo, I can't commend his taste in interior design. The intricate elaborations and extravagances that delight me in his prose style seem heavy and unnecessary when used to decorate a room. The reconstruction of the sitting room he designed for Juliette Drouet in Guernsey – moved to the Maison Victor Hugo on the place des Vosges – leaves me filled with admiration for Juliette's patient and tolerant love. I hope for her sake that Hugo's wife had more of a say on domestic interiors.

I returned to the Hugo house and the Musée Carnavalet, wondering if I would view them in a new way after reading Hugo novels and histories of Paris. Although I saw them with greater knowledge, it was the same things that struck me. In the Hugo house I lingered over his drawings, letters and the display connected with the death of his daughter, drowned when travelling with his new husband. I noticed a poem about her which I hadn't observed before, written for the fifth anniversary of her death – and, because such things trouble me, I wondered how I might translate it, given that the final stanza sets an impossible task. The rhymes give way to exact repetition: “tombe” is used first in its more usual sense of “fall” and then with the meaning of “tomb” while the second rhyme, which matches the place, Harfleur, with “fleur,” the word for “flower,” ends the poem on a lighter syllable than any English equivalent I can imagine. I suspect I'll keep returning to this poem for many years, as I do to Callimachus's recollection of Heracleitus and Catullus's early declaration of passion for Lesbia. I don't expect to solve the problem.

In the Carnavalet it was again the section on Revolution and war that held my attention longest. I noticed how the thoughtful declarations of rights gave way to the rigid imposition of a military discipline which forbade all question. The words “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité” seemed out of place on a soldier's drum. Once again I admired the souvenirs made from the stone of the demolished Bastille, especially the doll's-house-sized solid model of the Bastille itself. But I wanted more – Paris deserves a bigger museum, though none would be sufficiently complex to do justice to the city's history and people.

But revisiting museums wasn't enough for me. With my urge for self-education, I looked at the list of Paris Museums and settled on Balzac's house. My reading of Hazan's book on Paris (not yet finished) has made me guiltily aware of how little French literature I have read. Although names from Balzac's fiction lurk at the fringes of my awareness, I don't think I've ever read any Balzac novel. His name and the titles of his books are heavily forbidding as were the pictures on the covers of the black-backed Penguin classics editions. I assumed the house would be a similarly forbidding presence but found a simple bus route with the aid of my Indispensable.

The street was steep, lined with tall and heavy houses, dating, I would guess from the late 19th century. There was nothing of the lightness of the Montparnasse apartment blocks. I counted my way by house numbers. The quiet in the street was almost oppressive – evidently there was no rush of devoted Balzac enthusiasts.

I passed a striking and very heavy 19th century building and then, just as the numbers told me I was reaching Balzac's house, there was a gap in the buildings, a garden and a small, light, white building with a grey roof and green window-frames and shutters. It looked like a bungalow and, compared to the heavy surrounding buildings, could have been an elaborate shed. The garden was small but delightfully leafy with archways and paths. Sitting there you would believe yourself far from the city, until you looked up to see the Eiffel Tower.

A few steep steps took me into the Balzac house and an interior as quiet and calm as the garden. It seems that Balzac liked quiet. His house was simple – not a bungalow, as I first thought: the uneven terrain meant that the main living quarters were on the upper floor, which led to the garden, but there was also an airy lower storey below. I decided that I would have liked to live in Balzac's house. He had a fine desk and chair. I could imagine myself sitting there and getting things done.

I found his method of working sympathetic too. He would start writing at midnight when the city was cool and quiet, and work through till 8 in the morning, fuelled by coffee from his personal cafetiere. I admired the cafetiere. It's now kept in a glass case, which makes it hard to photograph. I'm not entirely sure Balzac should have added his initials. Perhaps he wanted to make sure no-one walked off with his coffee-making equipment. I can understand that. Anyone would feel possessive about so fine a cafetiere.

As an additional and unexpected treat, the house offered the screening of a complete Japanese “ganime” version of Balzac's early novella “La Grenadiere” directed by Koji Fukada. I was charmed and moved by the fusion of pictures, music, Japanese voices and French subtitles. I'd love to find a copy for myself so that I can share it with friends. At the moment all I can locate is the trailer on youtube.

After leaving the Balzac house, I sat in the garden for a while, enjoying the light breeze and soft fragrances. Eventually I left, walked up the road past the late 19th century apartment blocks and caught a bus that would take me across the Seine and towards the Eiffel Tower. As I walked, I resolved to buy and read something by Balzac. I doubt it will surprise and delight me quite as much as his house.

The patron saint of smoking

2010-09-11T09:51:00.005+01:00

I was looking for Samuel Beckett. He was hard to find. Instead I stumbled across Serge Gainsbourg.

I'm never sure what to make of Gainsbourg. The recent film, which didn't aim at accuracy, deepened my ambivalence - and reminded me how erotic "Je t'aime ... moi non plus" is. So I stopped at Gainsbourg's grave.

I was in the Montparnasse cemetery. I hadn't meant to visit but, as I drifted round the 14th, that was where my feet took me.

The Cimetiere de Montparnasse not a tourist haunt in the way Pere Lachaise is. No-one was hawking pictures of the graves or plans of the cemetery. However there were casual and dedicated strollers as well as the mourners who came to place flowers on family graves. I was pleased to find a helpful plan of which graves were where although that didn't always make them easy to find.

Gainsbourg's grave was plainly a place of pilgrimage. There were flowers, photos, a packet of Gitanes and a colourful selection of cigarette lighters. As I watched, a young couple standing by the grave rolled cigarettes in silence and solemnly lit up. Whatever else he may have been, Gainsbourg has become the patron saint of smokers.

I've been anti-smoking for as long as I can remember. I recall my father's serious illness when I was six. As he was too ill to be moved, hospital staff brought equipment - including, I think, a portable x-ray machine - to the flat where we lived. As he recovered he was warned to give up smoking and struggled for years to overcome the addiction. Now, in his late 80s, he can't stand the stench of cigarette smoke.

But when I watched the young couple, I saw their cigarettes as a form of protest against a controlling state - and that too seemed admirable. France has a history of resistance which is the ground of the national belief in liberty, equality and fraternity. That belief is at the heart of protests from left and right against the forced deportations of "les Roms", the Roma who have travelled from eastern and central Europe, as allowed by law. Some deportations have been stopped by the courts - the grounds can be as slender as finding smoking in public which is not, the tribunal found, a serious public order offence - but many families, seeing their children scared by early-morning police raids, have simply agreed to leave, taking the very small amount of money the French state will pay as inducement or compensation.

It's easy to look away when a small group is under attack. Paris has numerous plaques to remind residents and visitors of the round-ups and deportations carried out by French police during the Occupation - and these are often cited as a reason to oppose the deportation of "les Roms". There's even a plaque commemorating the 1961 police massacre of Algerian protesters, although the French seem less comfortable considering the implications of that episode.

As a tourist I was observing and doing nothing. I strolled round the cemetery contemplating past injustice and resistance.

I chanced on the grave of Dreyfus, who sparked Zola's famous letter "J'accuse" and a huge campaign of resistance. I saw where Sartre and de Beauvoir were together in death, though forced to occupy separate hotel rooms in life, as a plaque on the Hotel Mistral recounts. They were forced by events to make difficult choices and their messy, muddled lives remind me that political involvement can't be limited to those whose lives are above reproach.

As the cemetery was closing, I made another attempt to find Beckett, who chose to stay in occupied France (though he could have escaped to neutral Ireland) and was awarded the Médaille de la Résistance and the Croix de Guerre for his activities. He didn't talk much about what he did but I wanted to pay tribute to his courage and reported kindness as well as his plays.

At last I found the grave, thanks to a shabbily-dressed and unshaven man who stood contemplating it. As I paused, the man turned to me. "Samuel Beckett," he said. "En attendant Godot."

I made a slightly stumbling attempt to explain why I thought Beckett a great man, trying to recall the French titles he gave his works when he first wrote them. But the man wasn't listening. "En attendant Godot," he repeated. "Samuel Beckett. En attendant Godot."

Then he bent down and began to clear the blossoms which had obscured the names of Beckett and his partner Suzanne.

I'm not sure what he meant to say. Was he just naming Beckett's most famous work? Was he telling me that in death too Beckett was "waiting for Godot." Or was he himself Godot, arrived too late and tenderly clearing the playwright's tomb?

In praise of Alphand

2010-09-10T21:32:00.003+01:00

Paris again, and luck brought me to a quiet apartment in the 14th. I looked it up in my history of Paris and found familiar names: Denfert-Rochereau, Raspail, Montparnasse. I knew them from books and metro maps - it wasn't an area I knew at all and had no idea what to expect. All I knew was that I was very tired and it was time to take things easily.

I'm also trying to budget carefully without being absurdly stingy. Like so many people, I'm anxious about what George Osborne's statement of cuts on the 20th October will bring. Every time I hear him there seems to be an additional note of relish in his tones. As the millionaire heir to a baronetcy he's cushioned from any temptation to join the "welfare-scroungers" he condemns. I remember interrogations by job centre staff in the 1980s; they made it plain that my pregnancy was proof of my feckless laziness and told me off severely for wanting to breast-feed my baby. However much I wanted to escape from memories and fears, they were bound to gang up on me. Sleep wasn't easy; three nights in a row I was carried back to England in vivid nightmares.

Days were for calm wandering. Last year I visited a wealth of museums and monuments. This year I looked for the free Paris city museums and wandered vaguely, sometimes taking buses with only a vague idea of their destination. Suddenly I came across the rue Soufflot, which leads up to the Panthéon. But I turned, strolled in the opposite direction and found myself at an entrance to the Luxembourg gardens where Parisiens strolled, watched their children and sat, in considerable numbers, on the white metal chairs provided. Some ate picnics but more had brought books and enjoyed the sun and the calm as they read.

As I strolled, I seemed to have found an August Paris that was in holiday mood and not over-run by tourists. I gazed at the pond and the palace which houses the Senate, reflecting that no government building in London is so lightly protected - but the people seem to have a sense that they own the gardens and the city.

I decided that this week in Paris would include time spent wandering in gardens, partly in tribute the engineer Alphand who decided that a city needed parks as a body needs lungs. The Park of Montsouris was one of his creations and only a short bus-ride or long stroll from the wonderful boulangerie where I could enjoy an espresso with mini-croissant or brioche for a delicious and leisurely breakfast.

Montsouris is made for slow wandering, though excellent small playgrounds allow parents to rest can watch their energetic children. There's a lake, trees and curving paths. It's easy to get lost, so I did. Gradually the gardens of Paris unpicked the nightmares and brought me back to calm. I knew it wouldn't last - and much as I love Paris, it has its own anxieties - but Alphand's gardens gave me the breathing space I needed.

Myths of work and money

2010-08-21T15:40:00.002+01:00

I can't recall exactly where in our flat the saying was. I think there was a paperweight – perhaps in a multi-sided geometrical shape – with a number of catch-phrases and sayings. When I first read it, I was too young to work out what it meant. I spent ages puzzling over the words: “Work is the curse of the drinking class.” Apparently it was a joke that I couldn't understand.

I suppose the joke played on too many assumptions: that work is a good thing, that the working class are seen (especially by the rich) as idlers, that drunkenness is a working-class problem and that the working class live feckless lives dedicated to the pursuit of pleasure. If someone had explained all that to me then, I'd have been politely incredulous. I could see that my parents worked hard and that they put the interests of others (including their children) first. They didn't even drink. My mother was fearful of pubs and drinkers and, although my father enjoyed beer, he gave it up for years for my mother's sake and, even now, finds a single can of lager turns a meal or an evening into a special occasion.

But there's one way in which the group of assumptions did chime with my parents' attitudes. They worked hard at their jobs and often found them rewarding. But they hadn't fallen for the idea so ingrained into many middle-class minds: that work is what gives meaning to people's lives. My parents put other things first: family, friends, neighbours, duty, social responsibility – and pleasure. They handed those values on to me.

Quite a lot came under that heading of “pleasure.” It could be a walk in Richmond Park, a trip to the theatre, a jazz concert, a TV programme, drawing, a maths puzzle, a cryptic crossword, a visit to a museum or a good book. We didn't make the usual distinction between high-brow and low-brow. I watched the London Transport Players perform Ivor Novello or Rogers & Hammerstein in a “proper” theatre and amateur Shakespeare in the London parks. I picked up whatever reading material was lying around: Tit-Bits magazine with its intriguing advertisements for Joan the Wad, poetry anthologies, Plato in translation. I learnt by watching that the aim of work was to live a good and enjoyable life.

My parents encouraged us to work hard at school but they didn't pretend that the aim of education was a career. Education was a means of expanding opportunities for pleasure – and might give us the chance to choose a job that was more enjoyable than those our parents did. I could see the point of that. In my early years my mum was a cleaner and a kitchen assistant. I didn't think I'd be much good at either and, given my incompetence in tidying my room, I didn't think I'd be much good at being a cleaner. I liked reading books and learning poems and plays by heart but I wasn't sure that many jobs would draw upon those skills. And I realised that I might want money so that I could buy books, travel to museums, go to the theatre and so on.

There's nothing in my parents' approach that seems wrong. The idea of devoting a life to work for its own sake seems ungenerous and mean-spirited. I'm lucky enough to enjoy much of my work – but not the bits involving form-filling, managerial jargon, the distress of others, or tidying my office. It's a good job but does it really shock you to learn that I do it for the money? After I've paid for the usual necessities of life, I spend that money on family, friends, duty, responsibility and – of course – on pleasure.

Groundling afternoon

2010-08-14T19:47:00.004+01:00

I knew my place. I learned to love theatre from the gods. I can still conjure up the smell of those side entrances to theatres and the plain, uncarpeted stairways that seemed to go on for ever. My early theatrical experiences included a panoramic view of the more-expensively seated audience, comfortable on red plush. But my favourite performers seemed to reach over the permed and lacquered hair of the wealthy to speak directly to the longing, needy hearts of the poor on their benches. I was convinced that shows were aimed directly at the inhabitants of the gods. The rich clapped politely but we yearned, cried, gasped and almost swooned in rapture. How could the actors not love us?

Later I began to criticise and analyse. But I still cherished the moments of awe and hope before the play began, as members of the audience shuffled into their seats, waiting for the lights to dim. The audience – at least, its richer members – was part of the spectacle and the actors shouted or whispered their words over the heads of the rich.

Of course, I knew that things had once been different. It was, I think, the Victorians who placed a distance between the actors and the poorer members of the audience. It's hard to generalise - I don't know enough about the difference between patent houses (the few theatres permitted by law to perform the plays of Shakespeare) and minor theatres (the home of musical theatre and burlesque), let alone the details of such wonderfully-named popular theatres as the blood-tubs and the penny gaffs. I suspect it was the posh theatres that pushed the poor up the bleak side stairs to the gods and turned the rich theatre-goers into part of the spectacle. There have probably always been small theatres charging a single price for all tickets. It took me a while to discover the joys of what were, in my youth, called “studio theatres.” I've been to many and enjoyed their intimacy.

But, having finally visited the reconstructed Globe, I realise that I'd never really imagined what it would have been like to attend an Elizabethan or Jacobean theatre – or to be part of what Alexander Pope calls, with contempt, “the many-headed monster of the pit.” Of course, I had to be a groundling - I didn't feel I'd belong in any other part of the theatre. So, clutching my £5 ticket, I joined the groundlings' queue – a friend had advised me to arrive early to be sure of a good space.

I'd always planned to see Shakespeare at the Globe – it seemed an obvious decision. But it had taken me so many years to organise a ticket and an afternoon that I ended up booking for a new play with an early Tudor setting – Howard Brenton's Anne Boleyn. I was a little embarrassed about this until a fellow groundling pointed out the sense of my decision – the original Globe had, after all, been a place where new plays had been performed.

My fellow groundlings were a welcoming crowd. I've always found a great deal of comradeship among people who queue for cheap seats at plays, operas and concerts. I was lucky to be among regulars, who assured me that watching as a groundling was the best experience the theatre had to offer. They also compared experiences of bad weather. The worst had been a hailstorm during a performance of Macbeth – groundlings are hardy folk and few left. The play also achieved more humour than is customary as the playgoers roared their approval at the repeated greeting “All hail.”

As advised, I found myself a space near the stage – something to lean on should I need it and a good opportunity to be close to the action – and the actors' feet. This could have been disconcerting but the play was written for the Globe and the actors knew how to use the theatre. Before the show started, some of them knelt down to engage the groundlings in conversation. Then, as the play started, in broad daylight (as in Shakespeare's time), the actors ensured that the audience was involved, sometimes pausing to share a joke or addressing us directly. While I didn't suspend my critical faculties (and it would be hard to do so from such a position) I also knew that I was part of the experience – even part of the performance.

At the same time, the play was literally over my head. While the audience seated in the stalls of a modern theatre occupy a position of power, much like the interviewer who sits watching the performance of a succession of nervous candidates, the groundlings stand at the feet of the actors and below the level of the audience in the galleries behind them. While I followed the plot with interest, particularly enjoying the discussion of Tyndale's theology and the problems of Bible translation from the Greek, I had a sneaking suspicion that I was not supposed to follow this from where I was standing – that the theatre building itself assumed my ignorance and inferiority.

Looking back, I'm surprised that I didn't mind this. But I slipped more happily into the role of poor, ignorant theatre-goer than I would have expected. I didn't feel half the discomfort I still experience when, by chance or luck, I find myself in the posh seats surrounded by people who seem to take wealth and privilege. I belong with the groundlings.

And I really liked the play.

In black and white

2010-07-30T15:01:00.003+01:00

Looking back, I think my first encounter with the photos of Diane Arbus must have been in one of the glossy Sunday supplements – the sort with shiny paper that makes everything ravishing, even grief and poverty.

I don't know if the glossiness conditioned my response to Arbus, whether I was influenced by the accompanying text or whether it was the work itself that upset me. Her stark, black and white photos of poor people and people with disabilities – people who would never buy a glossy Sunday supplement – seemed to have the glamour and allure of a freak-show. I shuddered and looked away.

News of a forthcoming Diane Arbus exhibition at Nottingham Contemporary disappointed me. It seemed less interesting than the accompanying, more recent work by the Tobias twins. The brochure, with colour pictures of Tobias paintings, also suggested they might have more to offer although the one Arbus reproduction, of twin girls, haunted my imagination.

Accompanied by a friend, I looked at the Tobias works with curiosity and baffled amusement, which may be the response the brothers hoped to evoke. Many seem like a cross between a kitsch version of folk art and a Gothic, Transylvanian Disney. My strongest emotion in their presence was an amused affection. I drifted on to the Arbus rooms and was transfixed by something I hadn't noticed in that early encounter with her work: tenderness.

It wasn't in all the photos. Some, especially those of over-dressed rich women, seemed to expose their subjects to ridicule. I thought I glimpsed cruelty in the curve of the lips of a masked man. But in other pictures there seemed more gentleness and respect than I expected. I noticed how one of two drag queens, dressing or undressing for their act, seemed to reassure the other with a touch. I saw the dignified melancholy of a tattooed man, gazing into the distance beyond the camera. The albino girl, arms outstretched and head back as she swallowed a sword, seemed in control of her pose as she mirrored a crucifixion. So many of the subjects, often strange to the viewer or on the fringes of society, seemed to convey an inexplicable depth. Even the photographs of nudists seemed about much more than the nakedness of the subjects.

Some photographs still disturbed. I worried that the children might have disliked their portrayal – who would want to be shown in a gallery as “fat girl laughing” or to be famous as a skinny, laughing boy clutching a toy hand grenade? The extreme close-ups of babies' faces turned them into dolls or death masks. But when I came to the photos of people with disabilities which had so disturbed my teenage self, I began to ask other questions.

The subjects I'd characterised as a “freak show” looked out at me with self-confidence. They seemed as happy as any of the sitters to be recorded. So what exactly had disturbed me? Did I really think that photography was only for the beautiful, the confident or the normal (whatever that was) unless it had a proclaimed manifesto to change the world? These people just were – and were recorded.

This took me back to the photographs of August Sander and the records he made of Germany in the 1920s and 30s. Before Arbus, he had photographed people in fairgrounds and institutions, apparently letting them arrange their own poses before the camera. It was impossible to look at his photographs without the knowledge Sander lacked. I wondered how many of the people he recorded had been imprisoned, abused and killed in the Nazi regime's euthanasia programme, in concentration camps and in the bureaucratically-ordered extermination of those in the “wrong” racial groups.

My sense of recording and the influence of Sander became even stronger when I returned to the gallery for a guided tour by Alexander Nemerov, Arbus's nephew. He talked about her focus on the subjects of her portraits and the way she documented them as though in the face of impending catastrophe. I reflected later that Arbus looked more for a variety of individuals in every setting while Sander, though recording individuals, saw them more as representatives of types.

There are still problems with photography and the act of recording. For many people, the fact of being recorded and visible places them at risk. I can't help wondering whether any harm came to the subjects of Arbus's photos. It wasn't easy, in the 1960s, to be a mixed race couple, even in New York – and Arbus's caption makes it clear that the couple are married and the wife is pregnant. I wondered if the transsexuals and transvestites later regretted giving so much away or whether the disabled people in the institution suffered discomfort from the response to the publication of the photos. A photographer can try to achieve neutrality and simply observe, understandingly, a range of subjects. But as soon as the photographs are on display they enter an environment that is not neutral and which is all too eager to judge and condemn the lives of others.

Too many people still face a choice between vulnerability and invisibility. On any day I can say, without hesitation, which I would choose – but my answer isn't always the same.

Waiting for the end

2010-07-18T09:47:00.004+01:00

After the tame bribes of the election campaign, we're preparing for disaster.

The strange thing is that, long before the election campaign, we knew there would be cuts and that they would be severe. In the debate of the three prospective chancellors, all three agreed that the new government would impose cuts that were deeper than those made by Thatcher. But when the election campaign proper started, the candidates and parties slipped into the conventional mode of offering little inducements to voters: funding for this and that project, the promise that some groups of people would be better off. It was as though the entire country colluded with the leaders and candidates in an act of voluntary amnesia so that we could all enjoy the spectacle of the election campaign and participate in a limited political debate without considering the future.

On one level there was a serious public debate. For the first time in years people seemed to be taking their power seriously. Wherever I went – on the train, in the pub, in corridors at work – people were discussing the election and agonising how to cast their vote. I was agonising too. But there was a sense in which the major debates of the last few years had been forgotten. We seemed to have stepped back in time so that the parties could posture in their familiar roles rather than addressing the current crisis. A great deal was made of family values and immigration. The NHS was defended and “welfare scroungers” attacked. There were occasional mentions of Europe and Britain's need to defend itself. I was struck by how little was said on civil liberties and Afghanistan – and how all parties offered to spend more money on pet projects rather than talking about what they would cut. Meanwhile the newspapers assessed parties as much on the power to spin and present themselves as on any substantial policies. Looking good on TV or choosing the right poster designs was treated as a vital qualification for office.

On the day of the election, I heard several people remark that now the difficult times would begin. And then we held our breaths for a few days as though hoping that the failure to hand any party an overall majority would mean that the economic crisis would go away and we could all sit securely in our jobs, if we had them, and rely on the frayed safety net the welfare state continued to provide.

There was never going to be a happy ending. Even if a Labour -Lib Dem-Nationalist-Green coalition had been formed (and the arithmetic was against it), we all knew the cuts were coming. The only remaining question was where they would fall – and that had hardly been discussed in the election campaign. No party wants to threaten the jobs and income of voters. The coalition cabinet looked like a parody of the new parliament: overwhelmingly male, white, public-school educated, Oxbridge graduates, mostly millionaires, distinguished by the kind of overweening self-confidence and self-righteousness that politicians and the press sometimes praise as “leadership.” No-one speaks of followership, that quality of subservience that all strong leaders require.

I haven't been surprised by any of the proposed cuts – and I don't think they're different from anything the relaxed-about-the filthy-rich, market-driven New Labour party would have required. Perhaps Labour would have delayed for a year but perhaps not – politicians were never going to be good about keeping their election promises. I am shocked by how much the Liberal Democrats conceded, and how quickly. Abstentions on tuition fees, Trident renewal and nuclear power ensure they will pass. If abstention is a fig-leaf, it's transparent. They may be working toward an end to the detention of children but they have hooked up with a party happy to deport asylum seekers – including unaccompanied children – to Afghanistan, apparently on the grounds that they will be safe there. Documents exposing the previous government's enthusiastic involvement in extraordinary rendition and torture have been published but that was as a result of a court judgment – our new, human-rights loving government was just as keen as its predecessors on a cover-up. It's the same with the treatment of children in privatised jails; brutality was authorised by New Labour but the coalition government sought to keep the evidence secret – and, so far as I can see, advice on how to hurt and injure children in prison has not yet been withdrawn. Every so often a cabinet member says something on human rights or civil liberties that I applaud but I don't trust them a bit. And I note that the Labour Party, while opposing cuts in a half-hearted sort of way, has stepped up the kind of rhetoric that prevents me from voting for its candidates. Labour assumes its potential working-class voters are fearful racists, who cannot see beyond narrow self-interest. No, they are not. They insist civil liberties and human rights are a middle class concern. No, they are not.

I support moves towards greater equality. I am not “relaxed about people getting filthy rich” when the evidence of poverty is clear. I want to a society that combines concern for individual freedom with a belief in equality, that welcomes internationalism at a human level rather than supporting uncontrolled corporate globalisation, in which companies are more powerful than countries or their citizens. There is no major party in England that promotes these views, though I know plenty of people who share them.

Meanwhile, I wonder what the government's rush to cut and privatise means for my neighbourhood and for me. I'm angry at local cuts that don't affect me directly; the county council plans to close centres which support people with mental health problems – people who are unlikely to campaign on their own behalf. The theatres, galleries, libraries and arts projects which I love must be at risk – the benefits supplied by free or very cheap access to culture cannot be quantified easily in a balance sheet. Given my age and my work in the public sector – combined with the level of projected cuts - I should probably prepare to face unemployment. Every so often the polite millionaires who rule us remember to say that public employees are valued and that the contribution they're cutting has been provided with care and dedication. As they cut contractual rights and sell the welfare state's fixtures and fittings to the private sector, they assure us we're “all in it together” and that “everyone has to make sacrifices.” But there's another aspect of their rhetoric which has been picked up by the screaming editorials of the right-wing press. They insist I do a “non-job” and look forward to a “gold-plated pension.” I'm luckier than most. I simply wonder if I'll be able to pay off the rest of the mortgage, how I can help my children and what I can do if my elderly parents need help.

I'm trying to be positive about the possibility of unemployment. I'm planning a T-shirt for the day I sign on. It will feature the words “WELFARE SCROUNGER” in big letters. Meanwhile I'll make the most of my free time to enjoy free culture, write like mad and campaign against the government for a better, kinder world.

Fox

2010-06-26T13:48:00.002+01:00

I thought I liked foxes.

I spent childhood Saturdays at the Natural History Museum Club. One week someone came in with a pair of soft grey fox-cubs, rescued from their den after their mother had been killed. Their protector brought them back, week after week. They were bottle-fed at first, then weaned onto raw meat as their grey down gave way to red and their faces acquired an adult point. I think there was a plan to release them back into to the wild but I never heard the ending of the story.

Most of the animals I admire are predators. I love the swoop of falcons and eagles – growing up on the ninth floor of a towerblock, I sometimes watched the stoop of sparrowhawks from above in the expanse of sky above Richmond Park. I never feared the coil of a snake and would willingly handle boas and pythons when the animal-man brought them to school. I saw the young foxes grow strong on bloody meat and never doubted their violence.

Encounters with foxes were rarities. I remember deer, rabbits, and badgers in the park – we made special trips to watch them at dawn and dusk – but I think I was an adult when I first sighted a fox in the wild.

“The wild” is an inexact description. It was an urban fox – nervous at night – running across a road. It was hard to be sure it was a fox and not a cat. It was small and some way off. I was enchanted, even though the fox was probably on its way to raid a bin filled with remnants of Kentucky Fried Chicken. The encounter - like many later ones – fulfilled my affection for the untamed. I like the word “feral.”

In the past two months, I've seen several foxes, and begun to wonder if I still like them as much as I did. Urban foxes stroll the pavements of our quiet suburban street in daylight – they sometimes turn to glare. Usually I see just one at a time but there are more than one – a friend, giving me a lift home, caught sight of two outside the gates of different houses. I found one in the garden, two yards away. It lifted its head and looked at me without anxiety. I clapped my hands and shouted until finally it turned and slowly made its way through a gap in the hedge. The foxes seem larger than any I've previously seen in town.

There are stories in the local press about foxes attacking cats – we haven't yet had local stories about foxes attacking children but there have been some in the national papers. Something seems to have changed in the balance of species - I don't know if the new conditions have been created by the hard winter or infrequent bin collections or some other factor. I don't think it's related to the hunting ban – we're a very long way from the nearest hunt and no-one is going to suggest pursuing foxes through tarmac streets crowded with houses and people. Perhaps it's a side-effect of new building developments – could this be another reason to blame Tesco whose vast building site scars our town and whose placards promise an unwanted superstore?

I worry about my cat Joe, who arches his back and prepares to defend his territory when he sees a fox (or dog). I want to keep him in the house but he has his own streak of wildness and needs the outdoors. Like the fox, he's a hunter. He wears a collar with bell - I don't want him to attack – but not all the birds he brings home survive, though my son does his best to rescue and revive them.

The watchers

2010-06-09T23:52:00.004+01:00

There's a right length of time for looking at a picture. Some demand lengthy, careful views. The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb in Ghent Cathedral rewards slow appreciation. It's worth sitting before Rembrandt's The Night Watch in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam or standing for a long while before the Breughels in Brussels' Musée des Beaux Arts or the classical scenes by Claude Lorrain in the Louvre.

Even some portraits are made for time-consuming adoration. These are usually pictures of the powerful, commissioned to demonstrate their finery as well as their faces. But the poor as well as the rich can seem in control of their images. Murillo's street urchins often display the confidence of the young and free. Even Goya's Maja, clothed or naked, seems in control of how we see her – as does Lucian Freud's model Sue Tilley, the Benefits Supervisor.

Elsewhere the subjects of paintings see less happy with the viewer's gaze. There are nudes by Titian whose lowered or averted eyes can cause discomfort. And I can never look at portraits or even staged domestic interiors by Vermeer for long. The framing of the paintings always brings me slightly too close – I'm forced into the scene like an intruder, as I am.

This history of looking was at the back of my mind as I dithered in the entrance hall of Tate Modern. I couldn't make up my mind about the new exhibition. Not only was the entrance ticket £10 – very high by East Midlands standards, especially for a show of photographs and videos – but the subject itself made me wonder whether I ought to look. The exhibition is called Exposed and the material it shows is grouped around themes of voyeurism and surveillance.

At first I decided I wouldn't look. I'd taken the long escalator to the third floor when I changed my mind and returned to the entrance. The escalator journey felt too much like running away.

There was, of course, something uncomfortable about so many photos grouped around such a theme. Few of them on their own would have sparked such concern even though some areas were banned to under-eighteens because of their sexual subject.

But sex and violence are too familiar to shock. Even the napalm picture, with the running, naked girl (her clothes burnt off) in a world beyond fear and pain, has been reproduced so often that I'm now immune to the horror. I was more moved by the photo of Jackie Kennedy with the new president Johnson and his wife. She seemed numbly vulnerable as she took on the unfamiliar role of presidential widow – beyond comfort and open to the camera's exploitation.

Elsewhere too the camera's glance was surreptitiously controlling. I was disturbed by Walker Evans' pictures of travellers on the New York subway, some tired at the end of the day and enjoying private rest in the carriage's public space. The photos were taken, before the Second World War, with a camera concealed in a coat-sleeve so that no-one could object. All the subjects must be dead by now. For all I know they would have liked the idea that gallery visitors would pay the unbelievable sum of £10 to see their faces – it's a kind of immortality.

Having seen the subway photos, I was initially suspicious of the work of August Sander as he posed and classified “types” - by profession, disability, social status – in his project to document the layers of German society. But as I looked at the individuals he photographed with such care, I warmed to him. The pictures seemed to be the product of a kind of negotiation between photographer and subject. Most of them gazed back at the photographer with the confidence of people who had chosen their pose. There were exceptions of course: the boy labelled “idiot” or the blind girls, sitting together at a school desk. They were photographed in the mid 1920s and despite the labels the children appeared individuals. I wondered what happened to them after the Nazis came to power. Sander's sympathetic categorisation reminded me of the Nazis' brutal hierarchy of types. Yet the Nazis disapproved of Sander's project. His son Erich, a socialist, was imprisoned in the early days of the Nazi regime. After many years, Erich died in prison. Sander photographed his son's death mask.

Of course the exhibition disturbed – it was meant to. But it was far less disturbing than the film I saw two days before, Renzo Martens' Episode 3: Enjoy Poverty.

Martens' film explores poverty in the Congo – the sort of daily, agonising poverty that causes children to die painfully of slow starvation. But it's not like the kind of TV documentary that ends with an appeal to send money, offering the comforting, self-congratulatory reflection that we in the west are nice, charitable people. This begins with a man in the Congo complaining about poverty as he works and angrily showing his small daughter's sores – a result of malnutrition.

At first the film seems a tourist's journey through poverty in which Martens' occasional efforts to understand what he sees don't measure up to the reality. He seems too innocent, too polite. But the guns of the U.N. peacekeepers disturb as do the sharp suits of the wealthy.

But it's easier to look at the powerful than the underpaid workers whose children die so that people like me can buy goods cheaply. And then there's the war and the photo-journalists who follow war and starvation, looking for a scoop. They cluster together with their expensive, heavy cameras, each trying to find the best lighting and angle for a picture of a corpse. The going rate for a publishable picture is $50, on top of the travel and expenses already paid to the photographers. Martens, playing the innocent, asks a photographer a series of questions. Who owns the picture? Do the people in it – or the relatives of the corpse - earn money from it? What pictures sell?

Of course, it's the photographer who profits. The poor children, who aid workers strip and arrange for the camera, get nothing. So Martens reaches his conclusion. Congo has few assets apart from poverty. If the people of Congo are to profit, they must learn to exploit their own poverty. He finds two Congolese photographers, making a small living from pictures of festivals, birthdays and weddings, and urges them to change their subject, telling them that the highest profits come from photographing the dead and injured, raped women and starving children. I'm used to seeing such pictures but I've never before had to sit uncomfortably still while the subject's pose is adjusted and the photographer closes in for the most affecting and aesthetic angle.

There were questions and answers after the film. Martens insisted his work changed nothing – it was art, not politics. But he made a telling comparison with Jonathan Swift's “Modest Proposal,” identifying the film as satire based on a horrible truth. And he said there would be no change because there was no will to change. The people in Congo thought that if those on the outside saw what was happening, they would act – they would not allow such suffering to continue. But there is no outside – we're all in the same world and those of us with power to act do nothing because we benefit from the same system.

Meanwhile, for reasons we cannot bring ourselves to comprehend, pictures of pain and suffering are bought in the west as though they were things of beauty. And the sufferers get nothing for them.

Eliza and the Court of Miracles

2010-06-03T13:53:00.003+01:00

In 1885 a tall, red-headed Irishman stood on a street corner in London selling copies of the Pall Mall Gazette. His name was George Bernard Shaw and he was one of many volunteers selling a newspaper publicising a story so scandalous that the usual distributors refused to stock the paper.

The story was headlined “THE MAIDEN TRIBUTE OF MODERN BABYLON” and it told the story of how W.T. Stead, the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, had joined forces with the repentant madam of a brothel to purchase a girl of thirteen from her father. He didn't intend any harm to the child. He simply wanted to prove the truth of tales he had heard: that, in the poorer parts of London, parents sold their virgin daughters into prostitution. The response of the authorities was swift; Stead and his assistant were arrested and sentenced to terms of imprisonment for assault and child-abduction. But the scandal brought about the result Stead desired. It drew attention to the existence of child prostitution in Britain – and parliament passed an Act which raised the age of consent from thirteen to sixteen.

Of course, it wasn't as simple as that. The Act expressed all kinds of moral prejudices of the time – and it was the same Act that made homosexuality illegal. Ten years later, Shaw's fellow Irishman and playwright, Oscar Wilde, was sentenced to two years' imprisonment with hard labour under its provisions.

Even the case of the child sold into prostitution may not have been as simple as it seems – journalists (and many others) have been known to distort and exaggerate facts in order to prove something they “know to be true.” Shaw may have come to this conclusion himself by the time he wrote Pygmalion in which the entirely willing Eliza, who shares a name with the child in the “Maiden Tribute” case, is sold to Professor Higgins by her father for five pounds. These are his “rights as a father,” Alfred Doolittle insists. Five pounds is exactly what Stead paid for the earlier Eliza.

There are numerous myths about what Shaw calls, in the Victorian phrase, “the undeserving poor.” These myths both console and terrify the better off. The idea that the poor are feckless and immoral, prepared to sell their own children at a fiver a time, suggests that charity is always misguided, equality a dream and that what is needed is containment and control.

Paris has another myth (though it isn't limited to Paris): the myth of the Court of Miracles. Colin Jones' history of Paris considers the potency of this myth in the seventeenth century. It tells of a dangerous alternative society thriving in Paris since the Middle Ages – a society of beggars and gypsies who adopted disguises – false wounds, apparent blindness – to exploit the charity of the hard-working bourgeoisie. The Court of Miracles was supposed to have its own king and laws governing this exploitation – and the so-called beggars were not poor and maimed, as they appeared, but living a life of luxurious indolence.

The myth falls apart as soon as it's examined. The beggars are supposed to be simultaneously disciplined and hard-working (as the rules of the Court of Miracles demand) and fecklessly lazy. As Colin Jones points out, the Court of Miracles never existed – though some beggars may have been fakes and liars. But the myth gave Louis XIV the excuse he wanted to round up paupers, beggars, the sick and corral them into hospitals. His main concern was making the streets safe for kings and their courtiers. As the French Revolution shows, this wasn't a complete success.

There are similar myths elsewhere. In the 18th century John Gay's The Beggar's Opera picked up the idea of the Court of Miracles and sets it in London – and Bertolt Brecht's Threepenny Opera gave the story new, even more richly parodic life. The thieves and beggars in Gay and Brecht don't inhabit a space as large as the Court of Miracles but they still combine idleness with industrious trickery. They seem to live outside the law – but at the same time they obey a different, equally strict code. They sing and dance too – it's a fine life being a thief and a beggar.

The myth of the Court of Miracles still flourishes. There are undoubtedly crooks and con-artists among beggars and the poor – just as the rich have their tricksters, whose deceptions are coming to light with the collapse of the markets. As a story, it's a delight – the fortunate who are neither poor nor beggars revel in its freedom - but it's also a dangerous excuse for repression, and for failure to see an equal humanity in the faces of the unlucky who need help and justice.

The story W.T. Stead tells in “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon” cannot help relying on the myth of the dangerous poor – the myth is too potent to avoid and the poor know it as well as the rich. His newspaper article is a rich mix – it starts with a lengthy and richly imagined account of the labyrinth in Crete and ends with the scream of a child. He insists that he doesn't oppose the freedom of the libertine rich, so long as the vulnerable poor are protected. He insists that the rich who prey on the young are his main target. Yet his account of the disorderly poor, who know just where to sell their daughters and whose profit is governed by a parody of market forces, recalls the Court of Miracles' parody of the establishment of its day.

Stead believed his own story and undoubtedly there were cases of child abuse, then as now. He served three months in jail for abducting Eliza – the repentant brothel-keeper who helped him served six months. I don't know what happened to her after that. Stead's fame as an editor was secured until his death brought him another kind of fame – he was drowned when the Titanic went down. As for Eliza – not Shaw's Eliza but the original girl – Stead gave her to the Salvation Army for safe keeping. They eventually returned her to her parents, judging that she was not at risk from them. I don't know what happened to her after that.

Property and private lives

2010-05-29T13:45:00.007+01:00

I never wanted to be someone's property. Human beings shouldn't own one another. . For women in Britain, the Married Woman's Property Act of 1882 was the first step in a vital succession of laws freeing women from forced dependency on - and subjection to - their husbands.

Laws and regulations have never been good at dealing with the complicated intimacies of human lives. It seems wrong to me that a man or woman claiming benefits who embarks on a sexual relationship is often expected to demand money from his or her sexual partner. It looks like charging for sexual favours. It turns the relationship from one of potential equality into something close to prostitution.

Many relationships aren't easy to define or regulate. They can be fragile and new. They can be an extension of friendship. They can be more casual than the law would like - and, unless we want the state to be the guardian of our personal morality, we should be very careful about how we allow it to legislate against pleasure.

The case of David Laws falls into this difficult area. He says that he never considered his relationship a partnership: it wasn't public, it didn't involve sharing bills or even a shared social life. That sounds convincing to me, even though it's evident the relationship was important to him. Not all relationships are partnerships. I'm also old enough to remember that anti-gay prejudice and persecution continued long after consensual acts between adult males were legalised. I can understand why someone of his generation - even though he's a little younger than me - might choose not to turn a relationship into something as public as a partnership. Privacy can become a habit. Not everyone wishes to share details of a relationship with friends, let alone the broadsheet and tabloid press.

I'm no fan of David Laws. I don't like the economic policies he has outlined in the Orange Book - and I don't suppose I'll like the cuts he's eager to impose. But it would be unjust to condemn him when I wouldn't condemn a benefits claimant in a similar situation.

I'd rather save my opposition for the economic policies he represents.

Robin in Nottingham

2010-05-21T20:09:00.006+01:00

There are mild grumbles in Nottingham about the new Robin Hood film. Nottingham can live with an Australian playing the outlaw, a newish story and even the usual dodgy accents – outsiders tend to be uncertain how Nottingham people speak. But word has got round that the character played by Russell Crowe – Robin Longstride – is a Yorkshireman.

Reviews of the new film were lukewarm. Nonetheless, Nottingham has declared that May is Robin Hood Month. There's an exhibition (costumes and set, I think) at the Castle and I've seen signs of other events in the area.

I hadn't expected the mediaeval market. I came across it on my way to Nottingham Contemporary, paying my second visit to the Uneven Geographies exhibition. While I hate shops, with few exceptions, I find it hard to resist a market and began to explore the stalls.

I watched a man making a thick leather tankard. I hadn't heard of leather tankards before but the procedure looked convincingly mediaeval. Opposite was a stall selling sausages and another offering Transylvanian glass – nothing to do with Dracula but delicate and glowing. There were stalls selling food, jewellery, carvings – all sorts of delights. It wasn't until I reached the stall selling baseball caps made of panels cut from tin-cans that my lazy, sun-soaked mind began to wonder about the label “mediaeval.” Still, the Heineken cans are a pleasing shade of green though the Coca-Cola logo might look out of place in the greenwood.

I started spotting other inconsistencies – a sausage stall, staffed by two smiling men in Robin Hood hats, was named after “King Tut” - much earlier, I think, and unremembered in mediaeval times. I know the Crusades saw returning soldiers bringing all kind of new goods to England - but would they have brought smiling Buddhas fashioned from resin? Did they eat ostrich burgers in baguettes in Sherwood Forest? I couldn't rule it out but kangaroo meat is totally implausible. Wodwos carved from wood seemed more authentic.

For a few minutes I counted inconsistencies. Then I began to delight in them. I love the Robin Hood legend but I've never insisted on historical accuracy – it's a baggy myth which is refashioned with every telling and imagining. Robin probably didn't wear tights, despite Douglas Fairbanks, Errol Flynn and Richard Greene – and at the same time he did, because imagination makes it so.

My Robin Hood isn't Robin of Locksley, returning nobleman, but the outlaw beyond class who sees an unfair society and acts for liberty and justice. His greenwood is a place of freedom and equality – and women are equal there, because that's how I've imagined it.

I began to wonder how my Robin would be today. He might be with the migrants who live outside the law in our cities, aiming at invisibility but too often exploited. Or perhaps he'd be an eco-warrior, defending the wild places and remaining greenwood from those who exploit them for cash. Either would be a more uncomfortable Robin than any Hollywood has produced. Only the TV series of my childhood really engaged with contemporary politics.

But Nottingham's mediaeval market didn't seem entirely out of place in the Robin Hood myth. People who'd come to Nottingham for all sorts of reasons mingled at the stalls. There were Goths, political protesters, parents whose children wanted to splash in the fountain – all assembling in the Old Market Square and strolling round the stalls. They moved easily from demonstrations of weaving and wood-turning to chat with the vendors of amber, carved elephants and eco-clothing.

Myths update themselves all the time. No single version can hold them.

Border police

2010-05-15T23:56:00.005+01:00

From England, borders seem simple. There's sea. Motorway signs proclaim “Welcome to Scotland!” and “Croeso y Gymru” but passing these isn't a serious matter – even in Orkney or on Anglesey we're still in the United Kingdom.

Hadrian's Wall is a reminder of what a boundary might be but its watch-towers and forts have crumbled. Walking the path of Roman border patrols has become a challenge or delightful ramble. Sheep graze nearby and children scramble across what is left of the frontier. Like so many monuments built to control the neighbourhood, it's been reclaimed by the locals for tourism and play.

Maps tell another story. Boundaries are clear-cut – black lines that separate pink from green and yellow are as obvious as a railway track. There are even lines parcelling up the sea and white wildernesses governed by penguins and polar bears. In maps, boundaries are as unavoidable as the kiosks in which uniformed guards check and scan the passports of tourists.

Of course, I knew it was more complicated than that – just I knew there were nomadic people and people whose sense of nation and community crossed arbitrary frontiers. For years I've been fascinated by Auden's poem about the partition of India. The older Auden isn't often thought of as a radical poet but that poem is as critical as any I know about the cowardly bureaucracy of colonialism.

But I hadn't really thought about the no-man's-land crossed by migrants and patrolled by bored armed guards until I saw Ursula Biemann's video installation at Uneven Geographies, the latest exhibition at Nottingham Contemporary. Watching the guards in a nearly featureless desert, I suddenly saw the world from a perspective much closer to the migrants'.

The guards knew where the border was. There was a pile of stones here, the remnants of a building there and a railway line dividing to cross two indistinguishable pieces of ground. Sometimes the guards watched. They moved through crumbling buildings. At other times they just stood. One held a bunch of keys close to his waist. One drank water from a bottle. Dust and discarded plastic blew past them. They waited for the migrants to arrive.

The story was told of a Dutch tourist who found himself on the wrong side of the border. He was arrested and held for ten days. His belongings were confiscated. He never saw his car again. The story was routine – worth telling only because the man was an accidental migrant and a European. For those who cross frontiers these are everyday hazards.

Hunger and thirst don't stop the travellers. In another video, an imprisoned migrant told, without surprise, that ten men in his group of seventy had died of thirst when crossing the desert. The men who survived drank their own urine. They arrived and were imprisoned. They waited to be sent back – and to set out again.

Ursula Biemann's videos focus on the sub-Saharan area where the nomadic routes of the Tuareg have become the paths which migrants travel. She shows the practical demands of migrant life and the optimistic determination of travellers who are convinced life has more than poverty to offer.

Near the videos there's a series of photos of Tangier by Yto Barrada. One shows a football game on a run-down hard pitch in Tangier. The pitch is surrounded by torn wire. In the foreground a boy is making his way through a hole in the wire towards the players – it's another permeable boundary.

Between the photo and the videos, I began to see boundaries in a different way. I thought of the times when, as a child, I saw a boundary as a challenge. When my brother and I were small we liked to “go trespassing,” which meant entering any area where signs said we were forbidden. Building sites and college grounds were alluring. Most fascinating of all was an old air-raid shelter which I think we entered once – but I dreamt of it so often that dreams have obscured the reality. I can't recall exactly where the air-raid shelter was.

I still want to travel and see new places. Work and family detain me in Britain but I'm not rooted here. The film of the border guard awoke my migrant self. I realised that there aren't so many differences between me and the Africans setting out on their risky journey. I have some luck: the security provided by my red British passport and respectable appearance. I can book my journey on the internet or ask a travel agency to find me a tour and a guide.

The exhibition Uneven Geographies was worth visiting for the way it exposed and displaced my assumptions about boundaries. There's more to the exhibition than that. Delicate diagrams sketch out webs of financial power – webs so complicated it seems impossible to break free of them. The webs date back to the 1970s – it's all so much more complicated now. There are installations, photographs, displays. So many achieved a small adjustment in my way of seeing the world that, by the time I emerged, I was reeling.

Behind all the works is the net of global economic interests which holds us all. The exhibition lays bare the ways in which the rich west depends on people in other continents and the devastation of the earth. I'm haunted by new ways of seeing, in which the west is no longer central. I feel displaced from my safe, convenient way of life.

That doesn't mean I see a way out of the net. Neither vision nor analysis shows a way of adjusting the huge imbalance of power. But seeing differently still feels right and worthwhile. This is the first exhibition at Nottingham Contemporary that has changed my ideas.

Tea for one

2010-05-08T12:40:00.003+01:00

I'm fussy about tea. I like it in large quantities. If it's ordinary tea in a market or transport café, I like a half-pint mug. If I go to a café or tea-room - or if I drink tea at home - I expect to pour my tea from a pot.

Just lately, tea-drinking at home has improved, thanks to my daughter. She never got round to sending her mother's day present but brought it with her when she visited for Easter. She knows I enjoy tea and presented me with an elaborately-wrapped wooden tea-box with tea pigs inside. I think they're called tea pigs. They are exotic, silky tea bags which feel as though they've been hand-crafted. The tea is delicious, worthy of my best Chinese tea-pot, which I bought as a treat for myself in my student days. It makes tea-drinking even more of a special occasion.

I felt the contrast when I made a journey to a good, free exhibition at a local art gallery. I'd decided the whole outing could be a special treat and that I'd round it off with tea and cake in the café. There was carrot cake - in the kind of big, chunky slices that require tea in a pot, ideally with a pot of hot water on the side to keep tea at the proper strength.

I chose my cake and asked for a pot of tea for one. "You can't have that," the young woman at the counter said. "You have to have a cup of tea. We only do pots of tea for two."

I smiled and asked whether I could just have one tea bag in a large pot. "Yes, but we'd have to charge you for a pot of tea for two."

I gave up. I was feeling embarrassed. Plainly there was something odd and awkward about the idea that someone should sit in a café alone and enjoy tea and cake. I was given a cup of tea, which consisted of a tea-bag floating in hot water. The tea was stewed before I paid for it and cold before I'd finished my cake. It wasn't much of a treat.

I wrote it off as a solitary episode. But the following week I went to the theatre. I decided to order an interval drink: nothing exciting - just a half of cider. "Just ONE drink?" the young woman serving me asked. She was polite and friendly. I explained that I had gone to the theatre alone - as I've been doing since my teens - and wondered if she pitied me. Or perhaps women on their own are expected to have ice cream in the interval rather than alcohol.

At this point I was feeling fed up. I tweeted about the theatre and, to my surprise, got a polite and friendly tweet in reply from the theatre. I felt better. I finally sent a message to the café and got a reply from them too, telling me their cups are big (yes, they may be, but they don't keep the tea warm and there's something depressing about a teabag floating in a cup) and that, if I asked, staff would provide tea for one in a pot at a reasonable price. I may try again, when I'm feeling tougher.

I'm beginning to notice a world increasingly geared for pairs and couples. Even the café of Nottingham Contemporary, one of my favourite places, has an evening menu based around "sharing platters." When I'm alone I can order "nibbles" but that's all. I like olives but sometimes I want bread and cheese. Sometimes I want to feel it's OK for a single, middle-aged woman to venture out alone. There's lots going on in the world and I'd like to enjoy it.

Wanting a word

2010-05-03T14:00:00.005+01:00

"Can I have a word?"

It was early evening and I was walking down Leicester's New Walk. I looked at the young man who had accosted me. He was polite, hesitant, holding a clip-board and pen.

"I'd like a word," he said. "Just one. Any word you like."

This was difficult. There are so many words. I paused for a few moments and thought.

"Insubstantial," I offered.

He looked hesitant, then held out his clip-board. "Would you write it down, please?"

I wrote it as clearly as I could, in capital letters, at the bottom of his word-crammed page.

"Thank you," he said as I handed back the clip-board.

I smiled, wished him a good evening, and walked on.

When I tell friends about the encounter, they assume I'm making it up. I don't know why. I often want a word. Asking people for words seems an altogether sensible endeavour. I did my best to respond with a good one - I wouldn't have wanted to fob the young man off with something like "nice" or "tomato." And I didn't want to ask why he wanted a word. That was his own business - a question would have seemed too intrusive and familiar. It would have wasted his time. After all, there are lots of words out there and he needed the time to track as many as he could. I hope he made good use of them.

I thought of that young man again when I headed to the Turkey Café for an evening of poetry. I'd been looking forward to the launch of Cleaves Magazine's East Midlands section. But it had been a long day and I wondered if I was tired enough to concentrate on an evening of difficult poetry. At the bar I was persuaded to try a Cosmopolitan cocktail - it didn't take much persuasion and was worth it for the sight of flaming orange peel alone.

Poetry seems to pull in the punters in the East Midlands. As soon as the doors were opened, there was a dash for the chairs. The young were asked to sit on the floor instead - but soon the floor was full too. Late-comers stood by the door. Dazed by heat, crowds, tiredness and a cocktail, perched on a high stool in a hot room, cocktail in hand, I wondered if I'd be able to concentrate.

That's when I remembered the young man making his assiduous collection of words. I didn't have to take in every poem in all its complexity - as if this could ever be achieved when hearing a poem for the first time. This was a poetry reading, not an exam, and it was up to me how I enjoyed it. If all I could take in was a few words and the curving melody of a rhythm, that would be enough.

I settled down as comfortably as I could, and listened without straining. If I wanted, I could find the poems elsewhere and read them.

Readers performed in alphabetical order. Jennifer Cooke offered harsh words and disturbing images, pushing the boundaries of a sonnet. Kerry Featherstone offered English and French words; they almost mirrored each other but not quite - there are no exact translations. Mark Goodwin offered a kingfisher and the mountainous slopes of Ullswater.

There was an interval. Then Daniel O'Donnell-Smith offered modern technology and loss. I love his poems. They move reader or hearer without the easy tricks of modern sentimentality. Finally, as I was tiring, Simon Perril read and summoned up werewolves.

I was unsurprised to see clouds streaking a full moon as I left - an image from silent cinema, I thought.

I ran. Words from the reading clattered and echoed in my brain.

The battle of the banners

2010-05-01T14:27:00.010+01:00

Political conversations are everywhere.

Not all elections are like this. The last election was marked by apathy and the sense that, when it was over, the New Labour regime would continue. I heard discussions of how to vote that were marked by a sense of guilt and despair – we hadn't stopped the war in Iraq and the war-mongers were about to claim their electoral victory as popular endorsement. Thatcher's dreadful phrase “There is no alternative” hung over us.

I assumed this election would be similarly despairing. After the chancellors' debate on TV, when Darling. Osborne and Cable agreed that, whoever got in, the cuts would be deeper and more painful than under Thatcher, I settled into the gloomy certainty that the next five years would mean the rapid unravelling of everything I value in the hard-won welfare state. Worries about my parents and my children broke into my sleep and woke me in the middle of the night.

I'm still worried. But there's a new thrill in the air. Many young people who never voted before seem to have infected the public debate with their excitement and conviction that change and hope are possible. They aren't agreeing with one another and many are still uncertain how to vote, but they want to listen to the arguments and join in the debates. The power of a single vote makes them feel like citizens.

I was in Leicester yesterday when Nick Clegg visited. I've seen visiting politicians before and remember how, when Tony Blair came to Leicester in 1997, everything was stage-managed and spun to ensure good camera angles. Blair's campaign team provided the crowds with flags to wave, played music (D-ream) interminably and swept dissenters aside.

Nick Clegg's visit wasn't like that. Students, enjoying the sunshine and their last day of term, came to join the crowds and see what Clegg had to say. Most banners were home-made though a couple of Labour supporters brought their own banners to wave. Plainly Clegg's team was taken aback by the hundreds of people. I heard them on mobile phones: “Yes, there really are that many.” Then the battle bus arrived.

A narrow pathway meant that Clegg could get through the crowd, preceded by photographers and cameramen who found it hard to get the pictures they wanted. Clegg stopped as he walked to answer questions – a socialist friend of mine who came at my suggestion managed to ask him about students and bankers. She got an answer though I couldn't hear it.

There was a speech with questions and applause but I was too far away to hear. Instead of trying to break into the crowds I started taking photographs of the posters. The pair produced by the Politics and Pints society cheered me, though Clegg didn't accept their invitation to the pub.

There were more banners today at Nottingham's all-purpose, leftish-to-revolutionary May Day march. The organisers couldn't afford the marches usual base near the castle so had booked Victoria Park instead, to remind locals of the recent closure of the Victoria Baths nearby. The weather forecast threatened rain and gloom and I packed a waterproof jacket. I didn't need it.

There were fewer people than in previous years. With only five days till the election, some of the regulars may have been out campaigning. But there was still a good range of stalls including one celebrating Nottingham's radical history in which a loaf on a stick, decorated with a black ribbon, had served as an incitement to riot. Of course, someone was carrying a loaf on a stick. I couldn't resist a badge with the words “TO THE CASTLE”, recalling the burning of Nottingham Castle in the 1831 riot in support of the Great Reform Bill. I hope no-one arrests me for incitement to violence. I'm still a Quaker and a pacifist – but I can't help wanting to celebrate Britain's radical past and the workers who demanded that their voice be heard.

Women dancers, energetic and costumed as if for an extravagantly-pagan Morris, led the march. Various factions of the left chanted their competing slogans without getting further than detailed debates. Home-made banners greeted the shoppers of Nottingham, mostly with thoughtful, witty and challenging slogans that might make people think. (I was a little uncertain about the demand for “revolutionary praxis now” - the word“praxis” is underused in most conversations I have.) A gorilla danced and handed out leaflets for Greenpeace. I wondered where to fit into the march and found a place with CND and near Friends of the Earth.

Behind me two socialists had a lengthy discussion about how to vote. One argued that a Labour defeat was the only hope for radical elements in the Labour Party. I didn't catch the response. I wondered whether competing groups urging people not to vote, on the grounds that direct action is needed, were debating the best way not to put a ballot paper in the ballot box.

We walked, sang, chanted and danced past the derelict wreck of a business which still proclaimed in large, wrought-iron letters "PALMER & SON LTD. BYRON WORKS." I thought we made a cheerful display and was pleased to see answering smiles from some of the shoppers. There were cheerful displays everywhere. Outside the glossy new pawnbrokers with its shiny blue fascia, smiling young women handed out white and blue balloons.

It wasn't a long walk to Nottingham's speaker's corner, by the Brian Clough statue. The Clarion Choir were there to greet us. So was Robin Hood in a home-made and decorated banner-gown. I stayed for a while to listen to the songs and speeches, marvelling at how harmonious and tolerant Nottingham radicals can be on such occasions. I'd have liked to go back to Victoria Park with the march but my back was hurting. I slipped away and decided to blog about the march instead.

Georges and dragons

2010-04-25T21:23:00.004+01:00

I missed St. George's Day itself. I was too busy with work to head to Leicester Market for the traditional dragon-slaying and distribution of red roses. But Leicester has never been content with small festivals. St. George's Day has spilled over to become a three-day event, involving more than any individual could fit into the time available.

I scanned the programme in amazement. Everyone was getting in on the act. There were morris dances, a maypole, church services and a beer festival. There was face-painting and dragon-making and a choice between Shakespeare, poetry readings outdoors and prose and poetry indoors. Some of the events had a rather slight connection to St. George, unless there's something I missed - there wasn't any flamenco dancing in any version of the story I knew. But why not? It all sounded like great fun. I determined to attend on Saturday and take lots of pictures.

Plans don't always work. My back, still painful after my fall on the ice in January, was hurting more than usual. I left home late with my camera in my bag. Photogenic sights abounded. I saw the bunting first - I wonder if the council will leave it up for the World Cup. Two minutes later I spotted my first St George, accompanied by his maiden. They posed for a photo and smiled. I framed the picture, clicked - and the resulting image was flooded with light. I thought I'd messed up the settings, tried to check them, wished I had an instruction book. I tried new settings, more pictures. No luck - and they would have been such good pictures too. The ones that get away are always the best.

I listened to some readings. They were good but, worried about the camera and other matters, I could give then only half my concentration. I wriggled in my seat, trying to make my back comfortable. I failed and headed out into the sun.

Leicester was flooded with St. Georges, all much better-looking than the slightly sad specimen escorting Nick Griffin at the BNP manifesto launch. (I wonder if Nick Griffin knows how multi-cultural Leicester celebrates St. George's Day - and how pathetic his own attempt looks by comparison.) I think there was even a St. George on stilts but I was too far away to check the identification. I was happily impressed by the George and Dragon cupcakes.

I headed to the station via my favourite camera shop. The staff inspected my camera, checked the programming and eventually diagnosed the problem - serious and expensive. "It would cost a lot to mend it," one said. They didn't need to spell it out - I knew it would cost more than the camera itself. "Which is your cheapest camera?" I asked, and got out my credit card.

By the time I reached Nottingham St. George's Day celebrations were winding down - they had lasted a mere two days. Here England's special days involved William Booth and Feargus O'Connor as well as more markets, Georges and dragons. Shoppers, children, Goths and football supporters ambled in the sunny Market Square.

I didn't pause for long. My destination was the Playhouse and a play about another George. I read Julian Barnes' novel Arthur and George a couple of years ago and was curious to see what sort of play David Edgar would make of it. It didn't seem a natural choice for a drama - the novel goes back and forth in time and deals with complex questions of law and evidence. But David Edgar's a confident, experienced playwright who knows how to move characters and keep the audience interested. He's not to reshape a novel to ensure it works as a play.

In a way, Arthur and George is a play about Englishness, although Edgar doesn't labour the point. George Edalji, a vicar's son and solicitor, sees himself as an Englishman. His passions are railways and English law - he likes to see the world as an orderly place. Chris Nayak, in an entirely convincing performance, brought out the character's slight strangeness which the play relates in part to a protective and defensive family and in part to George's extreme short-sightedness and consequent focus on details.

At the beginning of the 20th century George takes his isolated life and its oddities for granted. When he comes under suspicion for horrific crimes - maiming horses and leaving them to bleed to death - he limits his consideration of the case to matters of evidence, law and courtroom practice. He never mentions the virulent racial hatred that condemns him because he is the product of a mixed marriage - his father is Indian and his mother Scottish. Eventually, when his life has been shattered, he turns for help to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Arthur - famous, admired but also an outsider - looks at the larger picture and is determined to secure justice, compensation and public vindication for George. Adrian Lukis's performance shows the bluff, hearty persona Arthur presents to the world but there's also a hint of vulnerability - Arthur is uneasy with his fame and the complications of his own personal life. George's case provides Arthur with an escape from guilt and worry as well as a cause to fight. One of the enjoyable aspects of the play is the way in which George and Arthur, who, with little in common, treat each other with careful respect and do their best to see one another's point of view.

It's an delightful play. The two major characters are complex and layered. Actors in the other roles take the opportunity to hint at complexity on occasion. While racism is uncovered - the kind of racism that was written into British text books at the time - it's not the only factor working against George. Ideas of manliness play part and so do networks of unspoken loyalty. George is a very convenient scapegoat.

Watching the play was entirely pleasurable. It helped that pain-killers, combined with rather good cider, banished my back-pain for a a few hours. Comfortable seats at the Playhouse helped too.

George Edalji probably contributed more to Britain than the historical St. George - or even the legendary dragon-killer. George Edlaji's case - and Arthur's defence of George - was a major factor in creating the Court of Appeal.

Democratic duties

2010-04-22T09:40:00.004+01:00

I last went to a candidates' meeting in 1997, uncertain how to vote. Part of me desperately wanted an excuse to vote Labour so that I could be part of the overthrow of Thatcherism and be sure that things could only get better. There was only one meeting. I sat on a hard pew in the packed local Baptist church, surrounded by hopeful voters, and wished that I shared their optimism.

This year, there's a choice of candidates' meetings: five, I think, in our part of the constituency. The local newspaper has got involved and is sponsoring debates. I wondered how many people would attend the meeting I'd selected. It was in a local school and clashed with the beginning of the first party leaders' debate on TV. Once again, I wasn't keen but I accompanied my son who's thinking hard about how to use his first ever vote.

We were ten minutes early. The organisers must have been pessimistic about attendance as there were only eight or ten rows – mostly full. We found two seats together in the second row – apparently no-one wanted to be too near the candidates. As the hall filled, more chairs were found until the rows stretched to the back of the hall. Then I settled down to watch.

The meeting was more carefully managed than some, perhaps influenced by the rules for the leaders' meetings on TV. Members of the audience weren't even expected to ask their own question – instead questions were written down and handed to a steward who would pass them to the chair who relayed them to the candidates. Whole areas of policy, including education and civil liberties, were ignored except when a candidate mentioned a single measure in passing.

I'm not sure how clear an idea it gave me of the candidates. I didn't get any sense of the BNP man, since he chose not to turn up. I wasn't going to vote for him anyway. Personal impressions counted for a great deal.

The UKIP man was surprisingly likeable - I didn't agree with him but he listened to people, answered clearly and seemed straightforward. He seemed the sort of man who would be a good friend, colleague or boss – and probably a good conversationalist over a coffee, beer or wine.

I wanted to be impressed by the Green candidate. Every survey I take tells me I'm more aligned to the Green policies than those of any other party. Again the candidate seemed personally likeable and his experience – as a self-employed craftsman and school governor – is just the kind of experience that's needed in the House of Commons. But he was unclear on policies – actually unsure what they were or how big questions could be addressed – and plainly unready for parliament. With six months of hard work he might become a decent candidate but he's not ready yet. It's a shame.

The Liberal Democrat is a sitting councillor. He was confident on local issues and broad policy areas and was probably the best speaker of the evening. He had a couple of good soundbites - “We were right on Iraq and right on the economy” and “Charlie Kennedy was drunk and he was still right on Iraq” - and spoke particularly well on the need for international aid, drawing on experience of life in Malawi. Apart from that, I was worried that his strengths were local rather than national – an MP has to deal with national questions.

There was only one woman among the candidates – the conservative. I’m far from being a tory supporter but I’ve seen some good tory initiatives such as David Davies’ support for civil liberties. I’ve also had enough experience of being the only woman in a male environment to know it’s difficult so I tried, at least, to like the candidate. I couldn’t. She seemed like a lacquered version of Margaret Thatcher without the smiles. There was no pretence at liking the audience or the other candidates, just an array of facial expressions that ranged from the sneer to eye-rolling incredulity. Her manner as a speaker shifted between the deliberately informal to the rehearsed speech with hand gestures, reminding me that she had been a broadcaster and was now a barrister. Some of the things she said were good – she asserted that she had opposed the war in Iraq and favoured international aid – but she also declared that she agreed with every word in the tory manifesto.

The Labour candidate had all the advantage of 13 years as the constituency MP. He was familiar with the major political questions as well as local concerns so his answers were thoughtful and knowledgeable. He was polite to his opponents and took the audience seriously. He even said he’d been wrong to vote for the war in Iraq and that he now opposed ID cards because they would cost too much. This was quite a U-turn – he used to be a keen defender of government policy and took personal credit for advancing the proposal for ID cards. His line was the hackneyed one that people who had nothing to hide have nothing to fear – perhaps he’s the only person in the country to reckon he’s lived an entirely blameless life. He also spoke against government policy on asylum seekers on the grounds that it was too harsh – but I don’t think he’s ever voted against it.

I like the Labour candidate. I think he’s an honest man who honestly convinces himself that, in most circumstances, his government and party is absolutely right. I live in a Labour-Tory marginal and, if I don’t want a tory government, which I don’t, logic demands I should vote Labour. I won’t do it.

Labour is better on some issues. There’s a historic link with socialism and, although it’s frayed almost to breaking during New Labour days, it probably still means that the cuts which the new government will impose will hurt the poor less under Labour. But this government has supported war and opposed civil liberties to an extent that has made me fearful. The Serious Organised Crime and Police Act is one among many dangerous pieces of legislation. I used to think of myself of law-abiding. Now I take it for granted that, if the government wanted, they could find some law that I’ve broken and use it to imprison me. There’s a certain perverse freedom in that. I no longer worry much about what the law says.

New Labour has also supported mistreatment and torture of prisoners, including prisoners who haven’t been found guilty of any offence. These range from asylum seekers and their children – some very young indeed – to suspects who were kidnapped by the Americans, bundled into planes and transported overseas to be questioned under torture. It’s called “extraordinary rendition” and the Americans have now admitted that it happened. I wrote to my nice, tolerant Labour MP about this in January 2005, when the evidence was mounting up. There were witnesses who had seen what was happening, records of flights tallied and companies were named. My MP responded that the evidence was “thinly-based,” that the British government couldn’t be expected to ban flights from stopovers or subject them to scrutiny. He added, “If there was a specific allegation that a prisoner was being held captive in a plane … I’d take a different view and I’d think his lawyers would have a strong case for asylum.” The idea that someone who has just been kidnapped by the CIA will have access to lawyers us so ludicrous that it suggests my MP lives on a different planet.

When I think about the war, civil liberties and government attitudes to torture, I know I can’t vote Labour, even though I dread a tory government. I suppose it will have to be Lib Dem. I don’t feel happy about it. But at least it will annoy the press, which is on the attack. The Daily Mail this morning misrepresented a fine article Nick Clegg wrote as “Clegg’s Nazi slur”. I firmly expect an eve-of-poll headline saying “Nick Clegg will eat your babies.”

Letting the audience think

2010-04-19T11:26:00.005+01:00

I didn't plan a trip to the cinema. I just popped in to use the loo. Then, out of curiosity, I looked at the board to see what was on. The screening of Lourdes started in two minutes. I'd read a good review the day before and reasoned that it might improve my French. I bought a ticket, handed it to the usher and settled down to watch.

I wasn't in the mood for a film. The advertisements and trailers, which can amuse me if I'm in the right mood, annoyed me with their bright, rapid, manipulative images. Within five minutes of taking my seat, I was regretting my decision. Then the film started.

In less than a minute, I'd relaxed. The opening sequence - people entering a hotel dining room - was sufficient to tell me that I was in the hands of an expert film maker. I don't know quite what it was: the balance of colours, the composition of the frame, the camera angle, the movements of the actors - probably a mixture of all these but more as well. Lourdes isn't a film that offers obvious thrills and dramatic scenery - it's focus is on a small place, a short time-span and a small group of characters. But what is most startling about the film is what it doesn't tell the audience.

Standard Hollywood films construct neat "backstories" for all the characters, which are quickly revealed to the audience. I'm sure the actors in Lourdes knew what their backstories were, but they didn't bother to tell us. We had to observe them in the present tense and make our own guesses and judgements - just as we do when meeting people in real life. There were plenty of questions and mysteries about the characters, who had as much depth as any human beings, but their complexity meant that the puzzles we had couldn't be resolved in the short timespan of a film. I left the cinema still wondering about them.

As director, Jessica Hausner did something unusual - at least in relation to most of the films in British cinemas: she left members of the audience to make up their own minds. And we were left to think on the usual human basis of not knowing everything. I made judgements during the film, because that's what humans do, but I was uneasily aware of how little I knew. Every so often a new fact would be disclosed and I'd be forced to adjust my previous judgement. Most films simplify but Lourdes indicated a complexity that couldn't be resolved prettily in the course of a film.

The setting of the film had been one reason for my hesitation. I've never felt comfortable with the idea of religions offering mass healing to the sick, disabled and unhappy. I worry about those who go and are not healed - some must feel guilty, judged and self-critical because they were not thought worthy of healing. I may be wrong, of course - this is guesswork and imagination. I've also felt uneasy about films of such places and events - I don't want to be a voyeur of other people's hope and misery. Perhaps I'm evading something. It was certainly good to see what a pilgrimage offered to the central character, Christine. Dependent on the help of others, she'd become a connoisseur of pilgrimages, which were her best chance to see the world though, as she explained, she preferred cultural trips.

There were moments when the film did, quite rightly, make me feel uncomfortably voyeuristic. Pain and unhappiness are intimate subjects and the film was so close to life that I felt uneasy at seeing so much. But at times I also saw the pilgrimage from Christine's level, though not through her eyes, and became aware of the discomfort of forced dependency and casual, thoughtless cruelties.

The film has, I discovered later, divided audiences. Some think it favours religion while others condemn it as atheistic propaganda. I don't think it sets out change people's views but it might uncover their doubts. It seems to me that it's a grown-up film that expects an audience of thoughtful adults - it explores a situation without telling people what to think. As a result, I've been thinking about it ever since.

Coffee at the Grand

2010-04-07T11:21:00.006+01:00

Every so often, I like a taste of luxury. It was years since I'd last hidden in the Grand Hotel but I wanted a morning away from the office. Sometimes that's the only way to get things done. At the same time, I needed to keep in touch. The Grand wasn't far off my route. I checked the sign in the window: "free wi-fi." It would do.

Coffee at the Grand is good but expensive, even by the standards of frothy coffee bars. I usually make my own coffee or head for a small, independently-run coffee bar. There's an Italian coffee stall in Nottingham's Victoria Centre market which may just offer the best coffee in the East Midlands - and I can practise my Italian too. But I can't linger too long in an independent coffee shop - I know the manager needs my table and the profits from a continuous line of customers. The Grand Hotel is big and wealthy enough not to disturb me. It also has the benefits of comfortable sofas and piped music that is quiet enough not to disturb. The loos are luxurious too. And the woman who brings my cafetiere is quietly welcoming.

I used to be afraid of grand hotels. I thought they were meant only for the rich, that they had strange dress-codes and obscure rituals I wouldn't understand. I thought the well-dressed porters and waitresses would laugh, refuse to serve me and throw me out. Luckily, in my late teens, I encountered fellow teenagers who thought nothing of ordering coffee in a posh hotel - and it would have been more embarrassing to confess my fears than to join them.

I wouldn't want coffee at the Grand to be a regular experience. I like my luxuries to seem special. Perhaps I've already been too over-indulgent lately. As well as coffee in the Grand, I experienced another quiet luxury - first class rail travel.

I was booking on-line for a journey to see my parents. I was fairly flexible about times and looking for the best deal - a complex process that probably merits a higher-level GCSE. Then I saw that the cheapest single price on one train - the best deal going! - was the same for first or standard class. I booked it at once and then found a first class ticket back at only £5 more than the cheapest journey. It seemed worthwhile - even with a seat booked in advance, I've found myself standing for part of the journey lately and first class would surely guarantee a seat.

I was startled by the quiet spaciousness of first class travel. I think the thick carpets help. On the way back the carriage was full so there were the usual interruptions of mobile phone-calls and eager children. Neither were more interesting than fellow travellers in standard class and I didn't manage any more work or reading than usual. Instead I spent my time marvelling at the way the carriage seemed to soak up the sound and wondering whether the views were just slightly different from first class carriage windows. I didn't reach a conclusion. I was simply grateful for the quiet and the chance to rest my back. I think I could have gone to the buffet and collected a free coffee too, just by showing my ticket. But I fear that railway coffee doesn't reach the high standards achieved by the Grand Hotel. I did without.

Going slow

2010-04-03T21:44:00.003+01:00

“Productivity” is one of the ways in which our work and lives are measured. It's an idea from time-and-motion studies and is allied to another word: “output.” Lately they've been linked to other words, like “targets” and “league tables.” Underlying these is the notion that speed and quantity are always valuable.

Speed and quantity have their uses. Nobody would suggest putting out a fire slowly or labouring for a week to produce the single, perfect baked bean. But somewhere in the rush to achieve meet targets and achieve maximum productivity, important qualities are lost.

I began thinking about this when I heard Will Self talking on the radio about the experience of walking to the airport. I was mostly concentrating on making coffee but, in my usual quest for maximum productivity, I was listening to the radio as well. The coffee was fine but I caught only a few sentences from Will Self. He pointed out that, in people's haste to reach an exotic destination, they neglected the places in between. Huge suburbs were diminished to places which are crossed as quickly as possible by travellers who want to be somewhere else. Walking to an airport might be one way of regaining an older, more leisurely experience of travel.

I liked this idea of slow travel. I've been toying with the idea of a walking holiday. Perhaps my inspiration was the opening of Dorothy L. Sayers' Have His Carcase, though I don't expect to meet Lord Peter Wimsey and could do without the discovery of a corpse. But I think women – even women of my age – are less inclined to solitary walking than they were in the 1930s and, even if I could handle the necessary luggage, I've a feeling my conduct would seem eccentric. Still, I'd love a slow holiday – slow, at least, by modern standards – taking trains, boats and buses as well as strolling by rivers and lounging in bars and cafés. I've been glancing at holiday brochures and they all seem rather intense.

Going slow shouldn't just be a treat for holiday times. There are moments when work is better for going slow. Not all tasks are best done at speed. I prefer the carpenter who works carefully to the hasty worker with an eye on the clock. I think workers who pause occasionally to talk to one another may find they enjoy their work more than those who are harried into silent, urgent speed. The shop assistant who asks after the health of an elderly woman customer may hold up the queue for half a minute, but she's doing a good job.

Teachers have to account for every minute of classroom time under national strategies. They don't have enough time to listen to pupils, go over ideas or even meander slightly from the point, seeing where a thought or a new idea might take them. Children are educated to make every minute “productive” until they're afraid of the kind of day-dreaming in which genuine inspiration strikes. No wonder so many young people see leisure as a time for binge-drinking. An approach to leisure governed by productivity and target-setting is bound to ask “how much can you drink in the time?” and “how quickly can you achieve drunkenness?”

This focus on productivity doesn't seem to have much to do with the way humans deal well with one another. It comes from business. Schools and public services are still being told to model themselves on business, as though no business could ever fail. It comes from the desire to compete and make maximum profits. The demand for high productivity can be found in a number of industries where firms compete with one another for work. Robert Tressell's The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists describes the house-painters' unwillingness to skimp work in a competitive system which drives down prices and therefore wages. It was heightened by mass-production, in which people serve machines.

The Ford factories of the 1920s and 1930s moved from the craft of car-making, in which workers served an apprenticeship and learnt to make a car as a whole, to machine-tenders who did one simple, easily-learnt task. Initially, the machine-tenders were well paid, although they could easily be laid off or replaced. High productivity lowered prices. This made goods and leisure more widely available in a hugely unequal society. Perhaps it also reduced the demand for greater equality and a fairer distribution of wealth.

I have a taste for things that are produced slowly and with care. I like the idea that someone took trouble and that an item suits me rather than my “demographic.” I like wine, beer, bread and cheeses that are made by people who aim at the best taste they can rather than a neatly-packaged and predictable uniformity. I enjoy books that are a pleasure to touch as well as to read, with elegant type and clear design. I like ideas that have taken years to mature, ideas that are still being made, thought through and tested – ideas too lengthy to be one of five points on a small card and far too rich and complex ever to be shrunk into the neatness of a soundbite.

What did you get?

2010-03-20T07:19:00.005Z

Each workplace has its ritual conversations. There are the standard grumbles: “Seems like a long day,” “Feels like Friday,” “Wish I’d stayed in bed.” – even, “I think I’ll throw a sickie tomorrow.” They don’t mean quite what they say. The colleague who speaks most fiercely of gloom will smile encouragingly as soon as the first problem of the day arises. The colleague who threatens to “throw a sickie” never fakes illness and struggles in, a few days later, taking paracetemol to quell a burning head and aching limbs.

Most workplace conversations are like talking to neighbours about the weather. They imply that, however bad things get – and all workplaces are bad from time to time – we’re in it together and can sympathise with one another’s experiences.

Other conversations are less pleasant. Fellow workers jockey for superiority, find ways to imply “I’m more important than you.” The workers who play these games are usually those who never question their employer’s changing values – or, if they do, keep their doubts to the privacy of home. I suppose this lack of thought and adventure will increase as the recession continues – and that workplaces will be filled with a new competitive passivity as workers insist on their importance to the employer. In the new fear, anger and fear will burst out as strikes, usually on the wrong issues and expressing grievances in ways that the – public – especially the fearful and newly-unemployed public - won’t understand.

Not all workplace conversations are about work. There’s “Did you do anything nice at the weekend?”, “Got any plans?” – the conversations that look back and forward to times of leisure if not of liberty. Too often the answer is: “The house needed work,” “The children were ill,” or, simply, “I caught up on sleep.” But they're a chance to remember that work does not define us - we are more than that.

In the past few years, a new question has crept in after fetes and festivals. I was quite shocked when first I heard it, one year after Chrsitmas. A colleague turned to me and said, "What did you get?", following it up with, "Did you get anything nice?"

"It's childish," I thought, recalling on that urge to fierce for possession and experience that adults learn to quell. And it seemed so materialistic - not "did you have a nice time?" but "what did you get?" as though life was no more than a competition about who owned the flashiest possessions. It didn't help that the question came from a colleague who I didn't expect to view the world in that way.

Now it seems as though that was the first time I noticed a change in how people viewed the world. I've got used to the question. I hear them everywhere: at work, on the train, from friends and acquaintances: "What did you get for Christmas?", "for your birthday?", "for Valentine's Day?", "for Mother's Day?" It's a horror. What do people say when the answer is "nothing"? When did intimate family festivals turn into a public parade of acquisition and consumption? I never thought money or posessions a fair measure of value - or love.

Sometimes I think I'll feel more comfortable in an economic downturn.

Late for the punk revolution

2010-03-10T09:35:00.005Z

I missed the punk revolution the first time round.

Of course, I was aware of punk rock - it was impossible to miss the shock-and-horror news stories or the deliberately outrageous album covers - but I never paused to listen to the music. Looking back, this seems startling, especially since I headed to Anti-Nazi League festivals - I think I may have heard The Clash play live in Victoria Park without noticing.

It's hard to be sure why I missed out. In part I was busy discovering other aspects of music. I was prepared to travel a long way for a Monteverdi opera and to sit through an otherwise dull concert for a spectacularly good performance of Villa-Lobos's Bachianas Brasileiras number 5.

I first encountered punk through an Oxford filter, which didn't help. Punk was greeted enthusiastically by mostly well-off students - the students who would soon vote Thatcher into power. They loved the excuse to dress down. My sense of punk in those early years is crystallised by watching a gang of twenty or thirty Oxford undergraduates dressed in carefully-styled binbags with imitation safety pins stuck to their faces. They were on their way to a fancy-dress party. I hated the aura of condescending fakery and avoided the whole movement.

It was a long time later that my son started listening to punk as well as metal, folk and other genres. I began hearing snatches of his albums an realising that I'd missed something exciting, angry and thoughtful. A friend who was much more open to a wide range of music educated me further with recommendations of bands beyond my experience.

Sadly, I didn't follow up all his recommendations as he gave them - I tended to listen to a clip or watch a youtube video and mentally file it for later reference. It was only when he died at the end of last year that I re-read his emails and returned to his recommendations. One band cropped up again and again: the Yorkshire-based Sex Patels. I started visiting their myspace page to hear the few tracks there. I watched all the youtube videos I could find. Eventually I managed to acquire their rare and wonderful CD (I shan't say how I did this - I'll just thank the people who helped) and have been listening to it ever since.

I don't know if I'll ever get to see the Sex Patels perform live. I don't know where they would be - and I feel a little uneasy at the idea of going to a gig alone, especially at my age. I fear I've missed something tremendous - a mixture of celebration, anger and fun that fuses punk classics with bhangra .

I'm a little sad that Jacqui Wicks has left the band - she has such a terrific voice. I'm sure her new work will be successful but, just at the moment, I'm sticking with the Sex Patels - and I've a feeling I'll be playing that CD for ever.

Falling in love with books

2010-03-07T22:19:00.010Z

What is happening to books?

Even the most committed and enthusiastic writers and publishers have scare stories. On World Book Day I listened to a talk by Chris Hamilton-Emery of independent publisher Salt. He's gambled his own and his family's livelihood on the idea that books - including books of short stories and poetry - have a future.

My first job, for four months before university, was at Foyle's bookshop in London. The manager was said to believe all staff were potential thieves. He certainly acted that way. New staff members were kept away from departments in which they had any interest, so that members of the public tended to be served by ill-informed shop assistants. Our bags were searched from time to time, in case we were stealing the stock.

As a book-lover, I was placed in an office that was little more than a cupboard safely away from temptation and provided with a candle in a bottle. It was the three-day week and the candle meant I could work through power-cuts. In front of me was a large book with a list of the names and addresses of publishers, a stack of envelopes and a huge, unsorted heap of flimsy order-forms. My task was to reduce the backlog, place orders in the correct pigeon-holes and then, if they weren't collected, send them out in envelopes which I had to address. I felt a little like the would-be princess in the story of Rumplestiltskin. No-one from the shop had sorted the orders for the past six weeks - they had simply piled up waiting for someone to do something.

My allies were the publishers' representatives, who would find their way to my cubby-hole and help me to rummage. They showed me how to find my way round the pigeon-holes, which required expert knowledge about which publishers had merged and which clubbed together to share a rep. The reps also told me about their glossy new books and grumbled when the manager of Foyle's failed to see their sales potential. Occasionally they offered me free books from their back catalogues. Gifts included some lovely Loeb parallel texts, a hardback of Women in Love and a slim Samuel Beckett volume. There were lots of reps, mostly enthusiastic and never seriously in competition with one another. There were many bookshops and many buyers.

Those of us who worked there - mostly on insecure, temporary contracts - sometimes wondered how long Foyle's could survive on the strength of its famous name. We muttered among ourselves that it had lost touch with books and book-lovers - that its concern with making money was driving customers away and even encouraging them to shoplift, though the two store-detectives regularly hauled suspects to the manager's office.

Somehow Foyle's re-invented itself and survived - there's even a small, helpful branch at St. Pancras. Instead the small shops - small rooms in paradise to their devotees - quietly crumpled and vanished. Chains are collapsing too. Waterstone's survives but it's no longer the treasure-house Tim Waterstone created. Now any branch in any city is much any other. Bestsellers are piled high and 3 for 2 offers abound. Display space and promotions are paid for by publishers and it shows. I don't browse there often - what's the point? There's little chance of being surprised into a purchase or of falling in love with a hitherto-unknown book.

Bookshops and publishers always needed to make money. I'm sure that most of the people who start work in the book trade choose their career out of love. But something seems to have gone wrong. As modest publishing houses are swept up by conglomerates, I have to look very hard to find the books I like. Some authors - established, prize-winning authors - find that publishers won't take a risk on their work. Joolz Denby, who was recently short-listed for the Orange prize, is offering her novel free to readers as an email attachment. While publishers praise her writing, they're no longer willing to take a risk on a book that doesn't fit neatly into a marketable genre.

At least there are still independent publishing houses, like Chris Hamilton-Emery's Salt, though it's hard to find the books the smaller houses publish in Waterstone's, or W.H. Smith's (or Tesco). When I want to recapture the thrill of the bookshop, I have to head to London or Cromford - or go to one of the one-day-only independent press fairs where smaller, keener publishers who really care about books can display and sell their wares.

Shopping and space

2010-02-27T17:01:00.004Z

I bribed myself to go shopping. If I forced myself into clothes shops, tried on jeans and actually purchased a pair, I would allow myself to revisit Nottingham Contemporary's current exhibition, Star City: The Future under Communism.

Even with the bribe, it was difficult. However I suddenly found two pairs of trousers that would do. My mood lightened as I climbed the short hill to the gallery.

It wasn't my first visit to Star City. I popped in on Light Night, the very first day it was opening, but didn't stay long. I wanted a range of Light Night experiences - and found them in the jitterbugging skeletons, a candlelit church, a free Schumann recital, giant insects in the castle grounds and fencers in the Long Gallery of the castle itself. Most of the Light Night events were for one night only. I knew I could return to Nottingham Contemporary.

The exhibition itself is a puzzle. Perhaps this is as it should be since many people of my generation and older are puzzled by their own reaction to the loss of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin wall. We knew a great deal was wrong with the Soviet Union - I grew up aware of the show trials, the events in Hungary and saw the first black-and-white footage of Soviet tanks arriving in Prague. I haven't forgotten the name of Jan Palach.

Yet while the the smart-suited bureaucrats and party officials made speeches that betrayed their followers' ideals and their own lack of conviction, there seemed to be another Soviet Union composed of the dreams of many who wanted a different, better life. Those dreams - of comradeship, freedom from want, real involvement in the government of a country, hope for the future - still seem worth preserving. I don't believe that I live in the best system there will ever be, nor that freedom to shop is a major test of liberty.

A couple of the more recent works at the gallery seemed to equate consumerism with democracy. I wasn't sure what point Diango Hernandez was making by using elderly kitchen appliances to vibrate to a speech by Castro in morse code. I had a slight suspicion that my reaction - "I like the look of that blender" - wasn't quite what the artist hoped. But other exhibits let me remember and reflect.

The Soviet posters of the space age recalled the excitement I felt on hearing that Yuri Gagarin had become the first man in space and the thrill in learning just two years later that a woman, Valentina Tereshkova, had also become an astronaut. I didn't particularly want to travel in space when I grew up but I liked the sense that it was possible. The posters had the bright excitement of Janet and John books or Sunday school displays, infused with the glamour of space and Cyrillic script.

It was disappointing, therefore, to find that the Light Night opening featured two pretend Soviet astronauts at the entrance to the gallery. They played at space walks, called everyone "comrade" with exaggerated accents and treated the whole thing as a grand joke, as though going into space was nothing and seeking comradeship an absurd archaism. I wasn't angry but something inside me was hurt. Perhaps I still cherish a lost dream after all.

Elsewhere the exhibition was more complex and harder to put in words. I was reminded of Leon Rosselson's song "Wo sind die Elefanten?" which can convey its sense of loss only through an absurd sentence from a German language course. The gallery had several huge exhibits but I spent most time with a series of small illustrations by Ilya Kabakov, produced in the late Soviet era and called "The Flying Komarov." These pictures, which started in a cupboard and moved on to a world in which most people flew, seem to speak of hope for liberty and the importance of dreams. They allow space for the viewer too - not outer space but inner space to interpret and question.

I haven't given Star City all the time it needs. I'll be there again, wondering what to make of it all. I can drop in again and again - that's the benefit of a free gallery.

I'll go on thinking of the dreams we build about other countries and our own. It's not the dreams that are wrong. But across the world there are leaders and would-be leaders who twist those dreams to a hateful shape for the sake of riches and power.

The limits of language

2010-02-20T18:40:00.004Z

I once heard Harold Pinter read. It must have been in the early 1980s. The occasion was a CND benefit and it took place, I think, in Kensington Town Hall. Numerous poets were reading and Harold Pinter's name came some way down the list. However, as soon as I entered the hall I realised that the Longford clan was out in support. I wasn't sure whether they were backing CND or their new son-in-law but they were very noticeable, perhaps because of the aristocratic confidence with which they took possession of their area of the hall. I watched with curiosity. I didn't recognize Pinter himself. I rather expected him to look and sound like a character in one of his plays - perhaps Aston in The Caretaker.

Plenty of poets read before Pinter. It was a difficult audience - more interested in nuclear disarmament than in poetry - and the hall itself made it hard to achieve intimate effects, though Ivor Cutler drew the audience together with his surreal wit. By the time Pinter's turn came, about half the audience were sneaking glances at their watches.

I hadn't realised Pinter had been an actor but he knew how to command an audience. His voice surprised me with its richness and I was startled by his choice of reading. After a number of poets reading their own work, Pinter chose to introduce and read John Donne's "Nocturnal upon St. Lucie's Day." I think it may be the best reading of a poem I have ever heard. It also changed my view of Harold Pinter. I realised that this playwright, most famous for his pauses, had a deep love and understanding of the music and meaning of language.

I haven't seen many Pinter plays so when the opportunity came, through this blog, to see A Pair of Pinters at the Guildhall in Derby, I couldn't resist the opportunity. I had two worries: were my expectations too high? and would my back injury prevent me from concentrating? I chose a matinée perfomance as the discomfort worsens in the evening.

I knew I was right to attend before a word was spoken. I was not just comfortable in my seat - and that's become an important consideration in the past five weeks. I felt the kind of comfort that comes from seeing actors who are secure in their roles, the production and with one another - and who communnicate that security to the audience. I sat back in my chair and prepared to be unsettled.

Two men talked, joked, and argued while waiting for a message from a third, who did not appear. The echoes of Waiting for Godot were unmissable at first - The Dumb Waiter was written two years after the London premiere of Beckett's play - but Pinter's characters have less freedom than Beckett's. Ben and Gus are enclosed in a windowless room. They may be disturbed by the series of jobs they are required to perform but they never question the obedience required. At most Gus (James Holmes) complains and Ben (Joe Tucker) betrays his anxiety by threatening Gus. It would be possible to suggest that the play means more than it says or shows but I think the best way of enjoying it is to enter the world of the play, laugh at the jokes and to let the memory of it resonate later.

After the interval comes the much later play, A Kind of Alaska, set in another enclosed room. There are no mirrors and presumably, once again, no windows since Deborah, the central character, cannot see her reflection. But while the characters in The Dumb Waiter inhabit a violent world, kindness and love cause pain in the later play. Deborah has woken after a 29-year sleep - she suffers from Encephalitis. In her mind she hovers between childhood and adolescence but and cannot quite understand that her younger sister is suddenly middle-aged. Julia Tarnoky is luminous and heart-breaking as Deborah, stretching out urgent, awkward hands and evoking the lost promise of her teenage years. Simon Molloy and Eunice Roberts as Hornby and Pauline are gently self-controlled as they try to work out how much reality the newly-woken Deborah can bear.

I was struck in these plays by the small range of language with which Pinter does so much. Every word counts and repeated words and phrases add depth and complexity. But both plays also reach through language to areas for which there are no words, for which the immediate human response may be a prickle on the spine or the ache behind the eyes when tears are unshed.

Thank you, Esther Richardson, for posting on my blog to offer tickets - and for directing these plays.

The purpose of the Pantheon

2010-02-15T11:22:00.010Z

For six weeks I've been too busy to blog. I've a number of excuses: work took over my life, my computer keyboard started playing tricks on me, and I slipped on black ice causing painful damage to my back.

Perhaps these are merely excuses. I may not have blogged but I found time - even when I should have slept - to keep reading Les Misérables. It gripped me in the way books caught and held me in my teens. As I neared the end of the final volume, I wasn't merely reading it on trains and buses, and in bed at night. I was reading while cooking and even while walking down the road. On one occasion I was so caught up in the story that I left a suitcase on a train. (Fortunately the helpful station staff ensured that the suitcase and I were reunited.)

I'm not sure what was so gripping about Les Misérables. A few years ago I tried to re-read it in the old translation I'd read in my early teens and was soon bogged down in the heavy prose. Reading in French should have been harder but I followed the advice to stay away from dictionaries and the story came to life through Hugo's words. Of course, every so often I would check a tricky word or phrase - but how bland the English seemed next to the French, and how untranslateable. A neatly-turned phrase loses so much in translation. There's no equivalent for "amourette pour lui, passion pour elle" or "Parfois insurrection, c'est résurrection" that echoes and dances as the original does.

Of course, reading in French demanded an unfamiliar level of concentration. My French O-level of many years ago didn't demand so high a level of expertise, although we were expected to read Camus's L'Etranger and easy extracts from older works. But the language alone wouldn't have held me for through three volumes and more than 1500 pages. And I already knew the story from that first reading and various film and TV versions. But I had missed so much.

In French, Hugo is sometimes funny, sometimes angry, and frequently moves me to tears. There was much I'd missed on that early reading: the chapter in praise of "le mot de Cambronne", for instance. The word attributed to Cambronne, spoken as he was taken prisoner at the end of the gruelling battle of Waterloo, is "merde". (The nearest English equivalent would be "shit.") Hugo dedicates a whole chapter to fulsome praise of the acuity and rhetorical brilliance of this word. My Victorian translation was too delicate to tell me what the word was, offering a myserious dash instead. Moreover, as a teenager I was insufficiently used to 19th century novels to realise how different French and British attitudes were. Hugo thinks it necessary to explain - at length - just why Cosette and Marius (aged 16 and 21) haven't had sex, even though they have met one another every evening for a whole six weeks without a chaperone.

Cosette and Marius are young, silly and more conventional than they realise. Hugo knows that and at times he invites the reader to laugh at them. I never found them as interesting as the wilder characters, Eponine and Gavroche, nor as sympathetic as the numerous elderly characters who are frequently at the centre of the story. Perhaps my age is showing.

What startled me most was Hugo the revolutionary. I remembered the depiction of the failed rising of 5th- 6th June, 1832 from film versions. It was exciting but not particularly important - part of the lead-up to the journey through the Paris sewers. But Hugo takes the rising seriously and asks the readers to consider both why it was necessary and why it failed.

Hugo believed in revolutions - not all revolutions but those on the side of progress. He discusses when revolutions are necessary. His characters tear up paving stones, seize vehicles, grab weapons and barricades the streets of Paris. Hugo may like individual kings and royalists - as human beings - but he believes a republic is necessary and that the royalist cause must, for the sake of freedom and justice, end in defeat. He is furious - far angrier than Dickens - at the ill-treatment of children who are left to roam the streets and starve. He sees that the poor are suffering. He's appalled by inhumanity. He wants a better world and understands why sometimes people might decide to die or kill so that the future can be happier and more just.

Les Misérables is also a love letter to the lost streets of Paris. Hugo wrote most of Les Misérables from exile. He knew that the dangerous, dirty and loveable Paris he described was being ripped apart by Napoléon III and his architect Haussmann. In place of the familiar mediaeval mazes, whose squalor Hugo condemned, they constructed new, broad boulevards that welcomed shoppers and armies and were harder to barricade.

Hugo wrote most of his novel during his 19-year exile from France. He didn't return until six years after the first (Belgian) publication of Les Misérables. His return was greeted by celebrations in the streets. He was now a Parisien. He died in Paris at the age of 83. His will set out his wishes for his funeral. His body was to be carried to Pere Lachaise on a pauper's hearse and buried in the part of the cemetery reserved for paupers. The government decided otherwise. The church of Saint Genevieve, otherwise known as the Panthéon, was restored to its revolutionary secular state so that Hugo could be buried there. Hugo's body lay in state under the Arc de Triomphe and the pauper's hearse was escorted down the new, broad streets by senators, academicians and a military procession. Most of Paris seems to have turned out to watch. There were no riots - the spectacle of Hugo's funeral was carefully ordered.

The account of Hugo's funeral, which I discovered in Colin Jones' biography of Paris, has made me reconsider the Panthéon - a place that has puzzled me since my second visit last year. There's something odd about this commemoration of greatness. Even revolution is solidified into marble. The Panthéon seems to offer the rulers of France a means in which they can attempt to curb dissent. The belated reburial of the elder Alexandre Dumas, like the recent memorial to Toussaint l'Ouverture, insists that France has recovered from the racism and cruelties of its colonial past - but I'm not sure that all French citizens would agree.

Recently President Sarkozy has attempted to move the remains of Camus to the Panthéon. The account of Hugo's funeral has set me wondering what Sarkozy's agenda is - and why the demand to own the bones of the great persists. I can show my love of Victor Hugo by reading his books (Quatre-Vingt Treize and L'Homme Qui Rit) come next. And perhaps, if I'm lucky, I'll go back to Paris soon to explore what is left of the Paris of Les Misérables: not that cold monument the Panthéon but the lively warmth of the nearby rue Mouffetard.

But before I start on another Hugo volume, I'm back to blogging. And, in an attempt to improve my inadequate Italian, I've started on Pinocchio, that cruel and painful book for children which is quite unlike the cute neatness of the Disney film.

Snow

2010-01-07T09:02:00.002Z

In the end, snow replaced the ice. For a day or so, the temperature rose to freezing - or higher - and I watched the flakes and remembered past winters.

Once snow mesmerised me as I sat in an exam room. For forty minutes I watched the snowfall through the window, past the faded print of a blue and gold nativity that hung above the teacher's desk. Suddenly I saw the clock and realised I should have been writing but ink on paper in a test of skill seemed less important than a snowfall.

When I was small, there was a harsh winter when snowdrifts were taller than me. I was eight and one morning, before breakfast, my 5-year-old brother and I dressed ourselves, left a note and went out to play in the snow while our mother slept. We found big boys on the slope behind the library, sailing downhill on torn pieces of cardboard boxes. They let us join them. The speed and thrill must have warmed us for, when we returned to the flat, we weren't cold at all. It's only Mum's concern that remind me that we'd gone out dressed in shorts and T-shirts.

The snow is compacting now and turning to thick ice on the pavements and pathways. Soon I'll head to the station, kitted for a trek instead of the usual stroll. I'm still staying in when I can, wishing I could curl with the cat in front of the fire. But two days ago, when I had to leave the house, snow lay newly bright on paths, leaves and branches and diamonds of ice sparkled from the pavement. Even in my tame suburb, sheltered from the worst of winter, I felt for a few moments an old delight in the fierce beauty of the world.

Goodbye to Christmas

2010-01-01T16:07:00.004Z

For the moment, the artificial Christmas tree is aglow with white lights. Their fragile sparkle blurs across tinsel and imitation pine needles. The gold pear shines and there's a sheen of gold on the baubles made years back by my niece and nephew. There's even a brief warmth on the blank face of the wicker angel. But when I've finished writing this post, I'll turn off the lights, take down the decorations, dismantle the tree and put it away until next Christmas. I no longer wish to celebrate.

News of a friend's death reached me yesterday afternoon. It was sudden - he was on his way home from Skye where he's spent Christmas with his wife and a friend when illness and death overtook him. The day after he died I'd been wondering when he'd be home and online again - I didn't know that the answer was "never." There will be no more emails, no more poems, no more comments urging the value of liberty and the human spirit.

For me, 2009 has been a year of loss. The absence of friends marks this new year more than the uncertainties of the present.

I'm looking forward without much confidence. My vision for the future is a gloomy one: greater poverty and greater hatred - politicians and the press urging us to a frenzy of self-interest. I see thought discouraged, freedom curtailed, fear proclaimed as a sacred cause and armies sent abroad with bombs in the name of "peace". I fear for the language. I fear for the earth and all its people. It is not a future I wish to share.

Yet, in the early hours I had a dream. I thought I was awake. I lay in bed and there was a constriction about my chest, as though it was bound tight. My friends who had died were close and asked, "Do you want to join us?" I could see only faint reasons to say "no" - death seemed safer and friendlier than this perilous world. I thought of my responsibilities and paused. There are people I love who would grieve at my death, I think, as I grieve for the deaths of friends. Still the company of the dead seemed warm and pleasant. There would be stories to tell and laughter, I thought, and an end to struggle and worry. Yet despite that warmth I felt a small, dull urge to remain on earth and knew, reluctantly, that my place was still with the living.

I slid back from my dream into sleep. When I woke, hours later, it was daylight.

Millennium dreams

2009-12-31T09:08:00.006Z

The children stayed up to mark the moment when 1999 slipped into 2000. I think we toasted the new millennium. There was a crash of fireworks and a splatter of colour in the sky. Then came the sound of people laughing and singing. I opened the door and saw a dancing procession of neighbours and friends doing the conga round our cul-de-sac. We left the door open and joined in. Suddenly it seemed that the future could be filled with trust and friendship.

Before that, we'd been watching the celebrations from the new Millennium Dome and flashes from around the world. I recall Tuvalu, Sydney and Paris. I remember little of Britain's Millennium celebration. Tony Blair and his family were there, still glossy with the people's love and trust. I noted that, of all the celebrations shown from all over the world, ours was the only one with a guest list and entrance fee - others were free and open to the public. George Carey as archbishop of Canterbury had insisted on a Christian element to the event. He was a late addition to the programme and was squeezed in long before midnight. He stood in the centre of the vast dome and the words of the Lord's prayer echoed emptily. The audience seemed rightly embarrassed - religion was out of place in this monument to commercial sponsorship.

At some point before going to bed, I rang my brother in Canada. "This is the voice of the next millennium," I declared. Looking back on the 20th century, it seemed possible that I'd reached a better time. The Berlin Wall had come down, apartheid had ended and it still seemed possible that the divisiveness and hatreds of Thatcherism would be pushed back. The afterglow of the 1997 election still shed a little light, even though I hadn't brought myself to vote New Labour. I mistrusted the surface shimmer and worried about the number of times Blair urged the voters, "Trust me." Honest people rarely insist that they tell the truth - they simply speak.

On the morning of 1st January 2000, hope persisted. Nations and people could work together. If we couldn't save Tuvalu from global warming, surely we'd welcome its dispossessed people. Perhaps as a world we could learn to love the stranger, just as the dancers in the streets welcomed all comers, regardless of origin or ability. I chose to take the conga as my symbol of the millennium rather than that exclusive, expensive party in London which I'd watched at a distance through the glass of my TV screen.

I don't know when hope dispersed.

I'm not sure it's possible to recover that hope. But the people I meet are so much better than party politicians, gearing up for the election, suggest. There's much more to human beings than the hatred of strangers and blind pursuit of personal profit.

I don't think I'll be able to celebrate the new decade. But, when midnight tolls, if I'm still up, I'll toast it with a small glass of Jura malt, hoping for hope in 2010.

Surveillance in the snow

2009-12-22T22:46:00.006Z

Snow isn't a problem here - we could cope with a few more inches. The problem is the cold. As people walk in the snow, or as cars drive on the less-travelled roads, the snow turns to slush. Then it refreezes. I don't need to head to an ice-rink for thrills - between home and the station I slide precariously every few yards. My new technique for walking involves checking for crisp, snowy patches and cluching at walls, fences, lamp-posts and railings. What was usually a walk of less than ten minutes required concentration. balance and quick reactions. As my feet slid away from me, I bent my legs and caught hold of the railing, pleased to have avoided a serious tumble.

I was determined to have a day out. I'd booked leave - I'd told my friends I would do something special, even if my ambition had shrunk to a china boot filled with gluhwein and a visit to the exhibition at Nottingham Castle. I was feeling good about it. If nothing else worked out, I could always settle down in a warm café with Les Misérables.

I rang the castle in advance. The man who answered assured me that it was open and, more importantly, that the steep path up Castle Mound was well-gritted. He didn't mention that the steep pavements in the way to Castle Mound were glazed with ice and compacted snow. I staggered and slithered uphill, looking anxiously at the other tottering pedestrians who seemed more practised at walking on ice. Somehow I didn't topple down the slope but, carefully taking small steps, passed the Robin Hood statue and reached the castle gate. At last there were clear paths. I walked up the slope, delighting in the sight of the black branches above the snowy bandstand; the small, cold Christmas tree and even two or three warmly-wrapped children playing in chill of the white playground.

Perhaps an exhibition of art inspired by prisons and surveillance wouldn't have been everyone's choice for a day out but it suited my mood - and my sense of questions that matter in Britain today. I walked up the stairs inside the castle and into the exhibition. The first two exhibits are probably the ones that will stay longest with me. Louise Bourgeois's "Cell (Eyes and Mirrors)" may not comment on wider social and political questions in any obvious ways but it evokes the horror of being imprisoned and watched. It seems right that this horror should provide the basis of any political consideration of prison and surveillance - surely horror is the natural reaction to both.

I don't always spend long in video installations but I caught Manu Luksch's Faceless shortly after it had started and stayed nearly fifty minutes till the end. The film consists entirely of CCTV images, following rules set out in a manifesto. CCTV has also inspired the story of the film, which is told in a voice-over by Tilda Swinton. Again, the film isn't a direct comment on contemporary life - it's set in a future envisioned according to the CCTV trail each of us leaves every day. I emerged disturbed and impressed by the way blurrily familiar CCTV film had been turned into narrative with actors and choreographed dancers performing amid passers by for the mechanical gaze of the cameras.

I blinked as I emerged from the viewing booth and caught sight of the "Millbank Penitentiary" a model by Langlands and Bell of a now-demolished panoptical prison. The idea of the pantopticon was originated by Jeremy Bentham. It envisaged prisoners kept in separate cells, never seeing their fellow inmates but believing that they were watched at all times. A modified version has influenced prison design for many years. Bentham thought up the design as a benevolent model that would achieve reform of the prisoners. When developed to the extremes of Bentham's vision, many prisoners went mad.

I wandered into the next room. The gallery was empty apart from me, the attendant and a man leaning over a computer at a desk. I smiled at the attendant as I passed him and began to concentrate on the exhibits.

First I gazed at a history of imprisonment and death in Nottingham Castle. The past seemed to blend into present as I saw the orange jumpsuits in a nearby photo.

Then my attention was caught by what looked like Lego boxes opened up and spread out on the wall. Looking closely, I realised the scenes involved black-clad armed guards herding, beating and executing white skeletons. The notice beside gave the title and artist: "Concentration Camp Series" by Zbigniew Libera. I gazed some more.

They had captured my attention more than the flayed man in the Marc Quinn sculpture though pictures of Quinn's work had drawn me to the exhibition. Christine Borland's "Air Heads" were similarly powerful but I was following a different trail of thought. I looked at the words projected on the wall ahead of me.

"LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS," I read. "The lady with the LROB bag looks at the Lego posters." I paused and checked my bag. It's my favourite fabric bag from the London Review of Books. I was being watched and my actions were being described in large letters on the wall.

I looked round. The attendant was still sitting in the corner. The man with a computer on his desk was typing. I read an earlier entry projected on the wall. It referred to "desk man." Desk man was watching me.

I tried to forget the presence of desk man and gazed at an exhibit which invited members of the public to operate a surveillance camera. But the exhibit was enclosed in plastic - I couldn't see how this should be done and wasn't sure I wished to watch anything like that, not even plastic trees and houses. I moved on, out of sight of desk man. Looking up at the wall I saw that my uncertainty about the exhibit was now described for new visitors. I moved into a corner where I felt sure I'd be out of sight. Then I saw the joystick to move the CCTV camera. I touched it tentatively and moved it just slightly, catching a plastic house and tree in a dark noose of shadow.

A few minutes later the words on the wall said that I had touched the joystick but hadn't moved it. I stayed out of sight and was glad when a family came into the gallery. Desk man shifted his attention to them and I sidled out into a suddenly sinister collection of Victorian paintings. Every model seemed to be a victim of the artist's gaze.

I made my way down the stairs, uncertain whether desk man - or some CCTV operator - was watching my back. Then I paused in the café for an excellent macchiato and mince pie. I took out my copy of Les Misérables. Jean Valjean has eluded Javert again and is carefully staying out of sight. Reassured by a fictional past, I headed out of the castle to meet my children and enjoy a celebratory gluhwein in the Old Market Square.

Blue tinsel

2009-12-19T18:50:00.004Z

Perhaps it's the bitter cold or the recession. Perhaps I've missed - or avoided - most of the good Christmas displays. But Christmas decorations seem a little sparse this year.

I don't mind a lack of decoration - it makes the good displays I discover more delightful. I was cheered to find that this year's moving displays in Town Hall Square, Leicester show Paddington Bear and friends and a lively Christmas scene from Wind in the Willows where even the stoats and weasels are having a happy, if malevolent, time. There's the usual nativity tableau as well. Outsiders sometimes assume that Leicester downplays the religious elements of Christmas but posters advertise both the religious festival and the secular feast. Even Advent celebrations (at the cathedral, I think) were proclaimed on official posters.

I don't remember any decorations at Nottingham Contemporary when I made a return visit but there were real carol-singers: the choir of St. Mary's in the Lacemarket. They were dressed in everyday clothes and standing in the gift shop, books of music on the floor before them. I came upon them as they were half-way through "Silent Night" inGerman. It's not my favourite carol but the beauty of the voices held me. I stood to hear a succession of traditional carols from "Hark the herald angels" with descant to "Adam lay y-bounden." As they finished and I went out into the winter dark, I felt more in tune with Christmas than I have for many years.

The memory of the carols helped me through the crowded shops. The queues haven't been long this year - I hardly had to wait in the Post Office when I took my parcels to be weighed and stamped. Perhaps that's why I didn't pause to observe the decorations.

But I have noticed one trend - or perhaps it's a trend from previous years that I didn't notice before. Every so often I encounter blue decorations: blue trees, blue fairy lights and blue tinsel. Gardens that were once bright with white or coloured fairy lights now glow ominously in the falling snow. Walking through streets, I find I'm watching out for faint blue sparkles rather than the old-fashioned red and green. Perhaps blue is supposed to be tasteful. I prefer cheerful vulgarity.

I haven't seen many Christmas tree lights shining through house windows. This strikes me as strange - but that's absurd. As usual, I'm late with decorations. Our decorations are still in the roof and I'm unlikely to get the tree sorted before Christmas Eve.

I'll get the cards up soon. I've enjoyed opening Christmas cards this year. I like seeing the designs friends have chosen or created, reading the messages and hearing snippets of news from the past year. I wish I'd written more in the cards I sent and that my handwriting was better.

Perhaps I should buy some new tinsel for the tree and even a couple of new decorations. I hope I can find things in red, green and gold for my slightly tatty dark-green artificial tree. It won't be tasteful at all but it might be quite cheerful. It may even remind me of my childhood and add some extra comfort as I continue reading Les Misérables.