An opening

Cynic though I sometimes am, I warmed to the Olympics opening ceremony.   Yes, I know it cost a lot and I know the performers were volunteers and that there are numerous problems with corporate sponsors and the treatment of dissent.  I might not have watched the ceremony had my daughter not been one of the volunteers but, once I'd got used to the style, I found a great deal to love.

It's easy to be critical of the account of history, especially since there was so little time and so much was going on.  I glimpsed the suffragettes but only learned later that the Jarrow marchers were also present.  Perhaps the Chartists were somewhere around though I don't think the Tolpuddle martyrs or the Diggers were included.  They didn't represent the the Commonwealth either - perhaps the execution of Charles I was judged unsuitable for all sorts of reasons - and Britain's uncomfortable colonial history was omitted.  But Blake's "Jerusalem" made a good starting point and the complexity of the Industrial Revolution - with its excitement, achievement and damage - was stupendous.  I'm still thinking about the implications of conflating Shakespeare's Caliban with Isambard Kingdom Brunel.  Perhaps because it appeals so strongly to my imagination, it's made a slight adjustment to my views of the 19th century.


I expect most viewers took what they wanted from the ceremony.  Some of my friends lauded J.K. Rowling. There was great enthusiasm for James Bond, the Queen and the corgis.  Mr Bean had even more fans than Simon Rattle.  I was thrilled to see a huge CND symbol in the arena, even though I understand that it was there as part of the history of Britain in the late twentieth ceremony.  But a huge number of people were excited when the letters "NHS" appeared.  Most people in Britain still agree that being able to go to the doctor and be treated in hospital when necessary without worrying about money is one of the great achievements of Britain's welfare state.  As the story of the health service was entangled with children's books, it wasn't surprising that villains from children's literature appeared to attack children in hospital nor that nurses and a number of Mary Poppinses finally defeated Lord Voldemort.


But perhaps the best thing about the opening ceremony was that it showed so many people what they love about Britain: its countryside, its industrial achievement; its literature;  its music; and above all the huge mixture of ordinary people who mostly live happily together, enjoy life and like one another.  It was an optimistic and hopeful picture of life here today, appropriate for the short period in which, in theory, there should be an Olympic peace.  I liked the way the peacemakers handed the Olympic flag to representatives of the armed forces, because, if we're ever to build peace, we'd be wise to involve armies in the movement away from violence.  


The parade of the athletes, many grinning broadly as they entered the stadium, fitted well with the show as a whole.  I know it's not always like this but I'd like to think of the Olympics as somewhere in which competitors form friendships across national boundaries and despite suspicion and conflict.  I'm also happy to celebrate the huge variety of people who take part in sports for love of it and who often aren't very well-known.  Since I joined a fencing club, I've learned about the amount of dedication shown by people in "minority" sports.  At my fencing club the coaches are unpaid (but qualified) volunteers and members of the committee donate their skills in such roles as web-designer, accountant, social secretary and armourer so that the club can keep its fees down and welcome members of the basis of interest.  It's given me a great respect for people involved in sport.

It seems that Danny Boyle's vision is one of peace, freedom and equality - one in which the contributions of all people are valued.  It's a fantasy, of course, and I see the strength of the objections.  People say it all costs too much in an age of austerity,  that it's a bit unreal and that sport isn't for everyone.  People quote Juvenal and talk about "bread and circuses" - some of them go on to ask "where's the bread?"  I can see their point.  They see sport and the arts as an extravagance when we need to to campaign once more: for the health service, for workers' rights, for food for the hungry, for an end to torture and oppression, for the welfare state, for equality, for freedom. I want all those things but I want circuses as well.  

Juvenal saw bread and circuses as something that distracted the people from Rome's serious political purposes.  He didn't like the people much.  For him they were the enemy of political decency - and he didn't reckon he belonged among them.  But I am happy to be one of "the people."  For me there's a different way of expressing what I want.  Just over a hundred years ago a poem declared that a life devoted to work and survival was not enough.  Two lines have often been repeated:

 Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes;

 Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses!

 I want a world in which people experience delight as well as having enough to eat.  I don't think art and sport necessarily turn us into passive consumers of whatever the government says.  They can bring people together and widen their knowledge and understanding of the world.  They can set the imagination and intelligence alight, and bring people who would not normally encounter one another the joy of engaging in a shared activity.  They can give us some idea of how much better the world might be, even though they leave us with the task of achieving it.  

Photo by Nick Webb, courtesy of wikimedia commons.

A touch of class

I haven't read Shades of Grey.  Having seen numerous blogs and articles about the book, I used Amazon's "look inside" feature to get some idea about it - and I peeked inside a copy in Waterstone's.  At my age, I don't need to worry what other people think of me, and I expect fellow travellers assume I'm reading erotica when they see me with my kobo.  (At the moment I have James Joyce's Ulysses open and Zola's L'Argent - both pretty dodgy books in their way and immensely enjoyable.)

However the fuss about Shades of Grey has led me to think about the kind of book it is.  It's fanfic, obviously - and because it's Twilight fanfic it's not much to my taste.  It's porn so not rooted in realism or good writing.  And it's also romance with all the usual baggage that entails.  Its heroine is young, innocent and adoring while the hero is enormously rich, terrifically sexy, and enormously damaged.  Her role is to rescue and adore him.  His role is to give her extravagant presents, including - and this is where I'm almost hooked - a valuable first edition.

Romance is an odd genre with a curious descent.  Part of it is a male genre - it comes from the seduction narratives of courtly romance.  In these the woman are praised for their exceptional beauty and virtue.  There are traces of this in Elizabethan sonnet sequences.  Shakepseare's sonnets reverse some of the usual conventions; the fair youth is praised for beauty and virtue while the dark lady is seen as both desirable and dangerous.  This enables Shakespeare to emphasise another aspect of this kind of romance: the suffering endured by the male lover. 

Romance also has roots in the spiritual journals often kept by Puritans.  This may sound unlikely but, because they were concerned with the soul and the interior life, spiritual journals naturally recorded emotions.  Samuel Richardson's 18th-century novel Pamela, which is clearly a fore-runner of today's romantic novels, comes out of that tradition, with its focus on the struggles of a very young maidservant to retain her virtue as he male employer makes repeated attempts to seduce and rape her.  In the end her virtue and beauty win him over.  Richardson was an influence on Jane Austen, who turned his third novel, Sir Charles Grandison, into a play, and I think it likely that the plots of his novels, if not the novels themselves, influenced Charlotte and Anne Bronte.

It's also common to find the roots of contemporary romantic fiction in fairy tales, particularly those written or adapted by Perrault, such as "Cinderella" and "Sleeping Beauty".  But although the structure of these stories is quite like contemporary romantic fiction, the stories themselves lack two aspects that are key to romance as written today.  They don't have an interior narrative and the women tend to be curiously passive in terms of the romance plot.  The heroines marry princes because that is expected of them and not because they love or desire princes.  Fairy stories of this era are largely concerned with actions and appearances.  The feelings of the character are irrelevant.

Contemporary romance has quite a lot going for it.  It values women's feelings and says that their desires are important.  It also suggests that the choice of a partner is both difficult and important.  However, there are also shortcomings to the form.  It tends to treat the achievement of a partnership or marriage as the culmination of women's lives, though sometimes there is a brief epilogue, usually involving pregnancy or the birth of a child.  Plainly this ignores most of women's lives and relationships.

Heterosexual romantic fiction (the vast majority) has another worrying aspect.  The hero is typically richer, more powerful, older and taller than the heroine - and usually of a higher social class.  The attraction of the heroine is almost always based on a combination of innocence (not necessarily virginity but relative inexperience), modesty (she doesn't realise how attractive she is) and adoration of the hero despite his flaws.  But while the heroine looks up to the hero, she is often also a mother-substitute who tends to some hidden anguish or moral flaw - she has to heal him while she adores him.  The heroine is permitted some liveliness of speech - today she is often characterised as "feisty" - and she is allowed a character and a career.  But the only model for romance that women are offered involved both admiring and tending to the hero.

There's nothing wrong with admiring some aspects of a partner.  Indeed, it's pretty normal given that adults prefer partners of whom they think well.  And there's certainly nothing wrong with caring for a partner who is in need of care.  But there's something wrong with the kind of transaction romance offers if on one side the man provides money and power while the woman offers adoration and nurturing.  It's not an equal relationship - and surely all of us, men and women, want more than that, even in our fantasies.

It was reasonable for Elizabeth Bennett to fall in love with Mr Darcy when she saw what a big house he owned.  In the early 19th century a woman of her class without much money was much better off if she could marry a fortune.  In the mid 19th century, Jane Eyre followed the conventions of her time by insisting on legal marriage, although her inherited wealth would have passed to Mr Rochester when that marriage took place.  Perhaps it was as well that, when they finally married, he was maimed and even less attractive than before.

But isn't it time for a different kind of romance in which the partners share what money they have - and it may not be much - and help and nurture one another?  I recall the ideal of a loving, equal comradeship, which was not unknown when I was younger.  It's present even in some unexpected 19th century novels.Perhaps the most unexpected is Dickens' Little Dorrit, with its conclusion of a marriage in which both partners together "Went down into a modest life of usefulness and happiness", without the corruption of great wealth.  Although the novel ends with marriage, it doesn't treat that marriage as the culmination of the characters' lives.  Instead it indicated that they have a future.  

The final sentence is one of my favourite endings of any novel: 

"They went quietly down into the roaring streets, inseparable and blessed; and as they passed along in sunshine and shade, the noisy and the eager, and the arrogant and the froward and the vain, fretted and chafed, and made their usual uproar." 

That's the kind of partnership in which I'd like to believe - and it may be a more enjoyable and plausible one to imagine in these difficult times.

Property and private lives

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.

Democratic duties

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.”