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."
My laptop continues to languish in laptop hospital. I have odd moments when I get at computers but feel strangely cut-off from cyberworld. Fortunately there are still books - and time to think about writing blog entries.
Like most people, I have a pile of popular fiction for soothing bedtime reading. Recently I've returned to Dorothy L. Sayers.
"But she's a dreadful snob," some people respond. "She's a tory writing about an aristocrat."
There's some truth in that but it's not the whole truth. In the later novels, written in the mid-1930s, she sees Lord Peter Wimsey's class as a problem - at the same time as suggesting it is dangerously attractive. This isn't unusual in the 1930s. Winifred Holtby's South Riding - certainly not a tory novel - makes the same observation and shares Sayers' belief that the power of the aristocracy is doomed.
Most recently I've been reading Gaudy Night and remembered the influence it had over my teenage years. It influenced me in two ways. Like many girls, I grew up in a society that was uncertain of the value of education for girls. I remember debates - even in the 1970s - about whether girls should enter higher education or whether this rendered them unfit for their natural destiny as wives and mothers. Sayers painted such an alluring picture of a women's college in the 1930s that I knew university was for me. At Oxford and later I met other women who chose Oxford because they had read Gaudy Night. I have to thank Dorothy L. Sayers for my three years there.
Gaudy Night - and Oxford - attracted me for another reason. Like many young teenagers. I'd fallen into the habit of convenient, self-protective lies. Suddenly, when I was thirteen, I wanted to change that. I realised that the world was confusing and difficult to understand - and that lies and deceptions made it harder to reach the truth. I made a resolution to stop lying.
In Gaudy Night the values that are repeatedly attached to universities and learning are associated with truth and integrity. The dons may behave badly at times but they value evidence, facts and honesty, even when honesty hurts. The subjects of their research - English prosody, the economics of Tudor England, and so on - may have no immediate relevance to contemporary life but the dons' aim is to uncover the truth in their chosen field. Their integrity is set in opposition to Nazi oppression and the risks women run if they submit to their husbands.
There are, of course, arguments against women's equality and education in the novel. Lord Peter Wimsey is never more admirable in my eyes than when he shows, without question, his support for women at universities and for honesty, whatever the cost. It's undoubtedly an idealised view of university life but there's a lot to be said for ideals.
My latest reading of Gaudy Night set me wondering what Dorothy L Sayers would say to a different Lord Peter: the head of the governments Department of Business and Skills, which also has responsibility for higher education. I must have been at Oxford at the same time as Peter Mandelson but I don't recall him there. As minister in charge of the universities, he doesn't seem to care much for some of the values Sayers cherished. While she foresaw the end of the House of Lords, I don't think it occurred to her that universities would be told to sell their scholarship for economic advantage.
Lord Peter Mandelson doesn't look at universities and see scholars motivated by the search for truth. If he saw that, he would probably think it a bad idea. Instead he sees them as part of the "knowledge economy," and wants them to make money and teach the skill of making money. Universities are instructed to teach their students "business awareness" and to ask business people (bankers, perhaps) to come into universities and design courses which academics will deliver. Educations is now a product consumed by students. But students are also the product of education. They are to be prepared for their consumption by business and government. Research is another product and will be judged not for its truth but for its impact on business, the economy and government policy.
Disagreement with government policy or uncomfortable truths about new products. business and the market are unlikely to have much immediate impact. I wonder what value Lord Peter Mandelson places on academic honesty.
I was lucky enough to hear Tom Leonard read his poems a few weeks ago - the second time I heard him. The reading ending with questions and someone asked what started him off writing poems. I didn't expect him to mention Stephen Spender. But he did. He spoke of finding an exam paper in the school playground when he was 15 or 16 and on that paper he read Spender's poem "The Express." Tom Leonard mentioned that his father worked on the railway so he took an interest in the subject. But I wonder if he'd have been so interested in the poem if he'd encountered it in a classroom or exam.
I had some wonderful teachers who loved poetry and did their best to convey that love. (I also had one dreadful teacher who achieved the remarkable feat of making me dislike Hamlet). I've also tried to teach poetry within the English syllabus. It's an exciting and infuriating task because the teaching of poetry tends to talk round the central questions of what poetry is and what it is for.
If you're studying poetry for an exam, every poem turns from a thing of wonder to an object which must be interpreted, analysed and defined. I recall how, when I was in the the 6th form, my fascination with the poetry of John Donne was overshadowed by the question of what constituted "a conceit" and how I should write about the poetry in an essay. The thrilling oddness of Donne's images was smoothed away by the need to explain them in neat paragraphs about compasses, the opening up of the "new world" and so on. I was lucky that the craft elements of poetry were taught with encouragement to try things out - at least I learnt about metre, rhythm, cadence and form by writing rather than, as so many of today's students do, by a mechanical process of counting syllables and memorising Greek-derived terms.
I wouldn't condemn analysis of imagery, content, politics, craft, etc. - they are all enjoyable parts of the experience of poetry. But they aren't the main part and they don't answer the question of what poetry is for. Academic study of poetry often aims for a total solution - to explain away everything. But I don't believe any poet who has just finished writing a poem thinks, "Oh good! I've just written a wonderful set text" or longs to be set in an exam.
League tables and the need to measure degrees of success can easily limit the way in which poetry is read. "What does that image mean?" students are asked, "Can you identify the metre?" or "What is the poem's political perspective?" While the most sensitive and sophisticated response might confess uncertainty, students learn young that there are right or wrong answers and that a poem, like a quadratic equation, is there to be solved. Its component parts are pegged out and labelled and its political stance is subjected to praise or blame. Any pleasure gained prior to a solution is treated as purely incidental.
In most seminar rooms or classrooms, there's someone who ventures the opinion that a poem means whatever the reader thinks it means. It doesn't, of course. Wordsworth's daffodils remain yellow spring flowers however you happen to see them. The reader who think that daffodils looks like gladioli or Martians is making a serious mistake. And yet that insistence on the importance of the reader does say something important: it resists the stock definition that "solves" the poem and recognizes a transaction between the words on the page and the reader for whom they are meant.
I took a series of seminars and asked students to find poems they liked which puzzled them - poems that resisted an easy analysis or solution. And then I asked the students what they liked about those poems. They were hesitant at first - afraid of giving wrong answers or sounding silly. But as I scribbled their answers down, I realised we were getting closer to the answer of that impossible question "what is poetry?" And the answers were a helpful reminder that poetry isn't there so that people can pass exams - it's there to be enjoyed.
Here are some of the things students liked about poems:
- the sound of poems - the way poems sing - the way poems look on the page - simple images - seeing things in a different way for the first time - playing with words and forms - mystery - the sense that there's a deeper meaning that can't quite be reached - snatches of sense - concentration - weirdness - unfamiliar words - not understanding - the puzzle
Students started to remember the way poetry seemed to them when they were very young. They recalled nursery rhymes, nonsense verses and magical, powerful words that they didn't fully understand - like swearing. We were, at least, on the edge of finding out what poetry was for, even if we couldn't quite define it.
At it's best, for me at least, poetry is to do with lasting wonder and the kind of mystery evoked by W.S. Graham's poems "What is the Language Using Us For?" When I read the first stanza of the first poem while browsing in a bookshop, I knew this was magic. I was swept into the mystery of the words:
What is the language using us for Said Malcolm Mooney moving away Slowly over the white language. Where am I going said Malcolm Mooney.
I don't want to stop and analyse the poems - I want to read and revel in them. An analysis would merely skirt round the edges. I could learn about the W.S. Graham's craft as a poet - and that would be useful - but the mystery would remain. The most apt response isn't an academic essay but closer to "Wow! I want to read that again," or even, "I want to learn that by heart."
Schools and universities are right to teach skills of analysis and puzzle-solving. But they run the risk of being constrained by what is easily tested and measurable. You can't grade students on the enthusiasm with which they say "Wow!" or give them marks for saying that a poem is an insoluble mystery. Yet their sense of awe and mystery may be as close as any of us gets to understanding the nature of poetry.
The criticisms are automatic. Whenever a commentator begins the phrase "useless subjects like ...", I know it's going to end with the words "media studies." Fifty per cent of the time, the commentator will continue by making the observation that media studies graduates aren't guaranteed jobs in the media at the end of their studies, as though the only end of a degreee was a relevant job. Obviously I'm old fashioned. I still believe - against all the declarations of politicians - that study can be an end in itself and that sustained thought on a range of subjects enriches the thinker, society as a whole and the democratic process.
Thirty years ago the phrase "useless subjects like ..." would have ended with the word "sociology." People still think of it as a new discipline - in fact the first university sociology departments were established in the nineteenth century - but at last its debates about society, the family and ways of life are taken for granted.
Eighty years ago English was the typical "useless subject" - so controversial that some Oxford and Cambridge colleges still refused to appoint tutors in English. The subject, which included Anglo-Saxon, history of language, the plays of Shakespeare and the poetry of Milton, was seen as best fitted for women, working-class people and colonial subjects but not a matter of serious scholarship. The subject which needed no justification was Classics - the study of Greek and Latin.
Now it's media studies that's under attack. And I wonder why. Our daily lives are saturated by the media. For the last couple of years I've barely watched TV, although I've managed to see most episodes of Doctor Who. But when I wake up, I turn on the radio. I check the internet so that I can read the papers and my favourite blogs. I notice advertisements on my way to work. Sometimes I go to the cinema. Occasionally I try playing a computer game or hunt for podcasts and video clips. I'm more influenced by the media than the literature I read - and I think that's true of most people. Surely something that influences people so much is worthy of study.
Media studies covers a huge area. It usually begins with thinking about the ways in which various kinds of media are created: what is the structure of a newspaper report, a film, a TV show, an advertisement? It's important to understand that these things are made to set rules and that the way they are shaped may control what they say.
The film-maker Peter Watkins, who is also one of the most acute critics of the media today, writes about what he calls the "monoform" - rules of editing, sound, etc. which are so aggressive and dominant that they deny the viewer or listener space for reflection, criticism or resistance. I once heard Peter Watkins speak to Media Studies students - I slipped in to hear him although I wasn't on the course. He asked the students to time the length of visual clips used in news broadcasts. I think they were about 6 seconds long then. They are shorter now, allowing even less time to reflect and question. But since Peter Watkins' lecture, I've found myself asking key questions: Whose film are we seeing? (Sometimes the film is library stock and not recent footage of the events described.) Does it tell the same story as the sound track? What story is being told by the way the clips are edited together? What stories are not being told? (A story without a useful film-clip is unlikely to make it onto the TV news. And complex stories which take time to understand don't fit the rules of narrative that rule the newsrooms.) Peter Watkins argues that these questions aren't asked enough in departments of media studies. I expect he's right. But outside the world of the media and media studies, these questions aren't asked at all.
I can't outline the huge scope of media studies. There are areas and debates of which I'm barely aware - and probably some I couldn't begin to understand. The practical skills some media students acquire - from storyboarding to sound recording to website design - require a range of abilities. I'm most aware of the work of media studies in film and cinema history. At times - as in studies of the documentary movement - it overlaps with literary, music and art history. And then media students use debates about society - about the treatment of class, race, gender, etc. - and apply them to their analysis.
For instance, in the clip below from Mervyn LeRoy's film, Gold Diggers of 1933, the media studies student would be able to use a range of approaches. It would be possible, using Peter Watkins, to consider how the intensity of the film - its use of music, the Busby Berkeley choreography, and the potency of its visual images and editing - make it hard to disagree with what it says. The power of the song is particularly strange given its place in the film - it is presented as a song in a stage show but it becomes something more powerful and political. An approach looking at the treatment of race and gender might note that something complex is happening. The song is sung by two women - Joan Blondell and Etta Moten. Although Etta Moten has the better, more powerful voice, the central role is given to the white woman, Joan Blondell. Etta Moten's name doesn't even appear in the credits. And while the words of the song say that women are dependent on men, the men's individuality gradually blurs them from objects of admiration and pity into a pattern on a screen. Meanwhile the historical approach would tell how the film picks up a famous speech by Franklin D. Roosevelt and sets its key phrase to music. And the historian might also have something to say about the film's original audience: mostly poor, suffering from the effects of the Depression and entering the luxury of the cinema in search of escape, hope and happy endings.
It's a week since I saw my daughter off to university and I still haven't got used to her absence.
She, of course, is having a lovely time. The first week is full of socialising and she seems to have settled in straight away. But here the house seems a bit empty at times.
These days, children grow up late. My mum started full-time work in a glove factory (five and a half days a week, cutting thumb-pieces) when she was still thirteen. In the 1930s most children left school at the end of the term before their fourteenth birthdays. This began to change with the war, when children were evacuated from the towns and cities. Later, the 1944 Education Act came into force, and 15 became the school leaving age.
My scholarship to boarding school took me away from home at 9 so at 19 I was eager for the freedom of university. I had a grant (my parents paid a little towards it - as much as they could afford) and knew that my fees were paid by the state. I felt independent but of course there were college rules. There were college servants too - an alarming concept but the people who worked as porters, scouts and kitchen staff were comfortingly familiar in many ways. My mother and many of her friends had been cleaners at the local college. In Oxford people doing the same sort of job called me "Miss" which disturbed me.
I had no problem that people served me meals in the college dining hall. I found it very helpful indeed that someone cleaned my room. But when cooks and cleaners called me "Miss", I found it hard to thank them as equals. I was relieved to notice that "Miss" or "Sir" could, on occasion, be said with a sneer. The college servants were not servile. Their thoughts and opinions of us weren't far below their surface deference.
These days students need lifts to university to transport all their luggage. These days most accommodation is self-catering and lists of "items required" include saucepans and crockery. Students are expected to provide duvets as well as sheets - plus books, stationery, computer, clothes - while the boot and shoe collection seems to require a whole suitcase to itself. The car was crammed but somehow my daughter fitted herself into the passenger seat. I stood on the pavement and waved goodbye.
That is, I suppose, what being a parent is all about. Years ago a terrific English teacher called Kathleen Betterton brought a poem by C. Day Lewis into our class. It was called "Walking Away" and, at the time, it wasn't the poem that made an impact on me but Mrs Betterton's feelings for the poem. She talked particularly about the final lines and I realise now that it talked of something she - and all our parents - had experienced. I was too young to get it.
C. Day Lewis wrote the poem about his son Sean's first day at school. It details the child's hesitancy from the point of view of the watching adult and ends with the lines:
"... selfhood begins with a walking away, And love is proved in the letting go."
I was lucky in the other papers in my session at the conference. My paper wasn't a very good fit but the two other papers were ones I would have chosen to hear. I managed to go first - I was anxious about the media files but they played perfectly - and then settled down to listen.
The other papers were on class and Marxism - but not class from a Marxist perspective. One looked at the ways in which Marx was read and understood in the 1880s and 1890s - and how Marxist ideas were interpreted and modified in novels and other writings of the time. I didn't take many notes but I hope the speaker will let me see a copy of her paper. I'd like to consider how interpretations of Marx influenced the slightly later writers Robert Tressell and Ethel Carnie Holdsworth.
The other paper took as its starting point the film of Alan Sillitoe's novella, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. The speaker considered the ways in which Sillitoe's young male heroes asserted their freedom through various acts of resistance, as well as considering the way Arthur Seaton, in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, remains free in his mind while working on the Raleigh production line. This led into a consideration of the way Jean-Paul Sartre interpreted freedom and the suggestion that Sartre saw workers as full human beings, with freedom to think, act and resist. The paper was further enriched by the way the speaker drew on his own experiences from the freedom of a working-class childhood to his sense of not really belonging when he studied for his first degree.
The ideas from those papers haunted me for the rest of the day. At the final panel, a discussion of Shakespeare moved into a more general discussion of Literature, Humanism and universities. I found myself getting annoyed as speakers suggested that academics in literature departments had a particular grasp of ethics because of their subject, and found myself speaking out. I tried to draw the distinction between the responsibility to act ethically, which academics share with all human beings, and the special skill which literature academics have, which is the analysis of literary texts and the construction of arguments. Academics may be ethical but this is part of their responsibility as humans and not related to their skills, qualifications or job.
I found myself talking about Franz Jagerstatter who was executed for refusing to fight for the Third Reich - he was more ethical than any academic I've met but this was because he knew how to act rightly in a crisis. He didn't seek or expect fame and he didn't spend his life reading, analysing and publishing books. I can't remember if I went on to point out that a university's cleaners, porters and cooks may be far more ethical than its academics - I hope I did.
At the reception afterwards I was challenged for some of the comments I had made during the conference, though some people also supported my comments on ethics. A few people were concerned that I didn't reckon the study of English Literature was ethical in itself. Even more were concerned with a quick comment I'd made earlier. When one speaker - an enthusiastic scholar and teacher - suggested that she did her job for love not money, I remarked that I did it in order to be paid. For some reason people find that idea very shocking. Of course I enjoy teaching and reading, thinking and writing. But I'm still an employee. I work for money. I wouldn't do my job if I wasn't paid.
But perhaps I write this blog for love. It costs me nothing except time. And it's free to whoever wants to read it and comment.
Hicham Yezza will not be deported this weekend. Perhaps the Home Office had a change of heart. Perhaps they noticed the letters, e-mails, faxes and stories in the press. Many MPs joined the campaigning students and lecturers at Nottingham University, which may have made a difference. It helps to be well known.
The story isn't over yet. So far as I know, Hich is still in detention. And the debate about academic freedom and the conduct of university and police will continue for some time.
There was one little thing that troubled me. In the anxiety about the hastily-planned deportation, I put it to one side. But now that there's a pause - and hope - I'd like to return to one argument expressed in a number of e-mails sent by academics and others. (Because I saw the argument in emails it's not possible to link to it. Instead I'm linking here to the first story in the Times Higher Education Supplement, noting that representatives of the university have suggested they may have been misreported. The university's position was amended later.)
The argument that worries me is that Hicham Yezza had no reason to look at his friend's research material, because he is currently only a low-grade clerical officer. Research, the argument implies, is only for registered graduate students and people in "proper" academic jobs.
What a load of rubbish. There's a long history of research outside universities - and universities have often disliked this. Victorian botanists - including women and working-class people - taught themselves the Linnaean system and went out to find and classify new plants. The picture shows Thomas Edward, who trained as a cobbler, but gained a reputation as a self-taught naturalist. The Autobiography of Thomas Cooper - another cobbler - gives more insight into the way in which working-class Victorians sought to gain and share knowledge.
People research for all sorts of reasons - not just to give academic papers, write monographs or achieve a successful university career. After she had retired, my mum decided to find out about her family history. She learnt about how records were kept, deciphered old handwriting and made decisions about the relative value of different pieces of evidence. She investigated different kinds of employment in the 19th century. She shared her knowledge with friends and relatives. My mum left school before her 14th birthday but what she did was research and it achieved an addition to knowledge.
Research is too valuable to be left to universities, where methods - however rigorous - can follow the tramlines of previous generations. We also need researchers outside universities, asking new questions. Thought, intelligence and questioning should be everyone's business.
It's particularly shocking that anyone in a university should assume that only academic staff are interested in learning and research. Isn't it likely that an administrator - or a cleaner, or a porter - might choose a job in a university in order to get close to learning, discuss ideas and use the library? Shouldn't a decent university give all its staff the opportunity to research - and listen to their thoughts and discoveries? I suppose it depends on whether a university is really concerned with sharing knowledge and new ideas or if its chief aims are merely recruiting students, fund-raising and self-preservation.
The campus on Nottingham University is a peaceful place. Locals walk there, go boating on the lake, and take their children to play in the playground. It was alarming to hear on national radio of the arrest of two terrorist suspects.
The men weren't terrorists at all. One, Rizwaan Sabir, was a Ph.D. student - a Nottingham local - who had chosen to research Islamic terrorism. It seems a fairly important and relevant topic. I assume his research topic was registered with the university in the usual way - universities are very bureacratic places. It would be natural to list it in the university's submission for the Research Assessment Exercise earlier this year, since universities move up the rankings when they have a high number of research students.
Rizwaan Sabir thought that an Al-Qaeda training manual would be relevant to his research. He didn't download it from any old source. He went to a United States government website and downloaded an edited version, with anything judged to be dangerous edited out. He then contacted a friend, Hicham Yezza, who worked in the university and asked him to print it for him. Students do this kind of thing quite often. So do academics and people with temperamental printers or empty printer cartridges. But someone saw what the student's friend was reading and reported him to the police.
That's when the Counter-Terrorism Unit arrived. Both men were rushed off the jail and held for six days. They were questioned, their families were questioned and their homes were searched. Students at the university, in the middle of their exams, became rather nervous as police swarmed through the familiar buildings. Then, when the truth of the men's story became apparent, they were released.
But Hicham Yezza, a known peace activist from Algeria with a pending application for British citizenship, was immediately re-arrested. Someone had found a problem with his visa. This is very surprising. Universities are scrupulous in checking the immigration status of their students and employees. But I suppose most people make minor mistakes in completing complex forms.
Hicham Yezza - two weeks ago a trusted ex-student and employee of Nottingham University - is now in a detention centre pending deportation. He could be put on a plane and sent out of the country as early as Tuesday - and it's hard to do much on his behalf over a bank holiday weekend.
You may wish to write to your MP, asking him or her to contact Liam Byrne, the Immigration Minister, as a matter of urgency. At the very least, Hicham Yezza needs time to prepare his case. I can't help suspecting that this speed is an attempt to divert attention from two unnecessary arrests and the alarm they caused.
There's a fuller account and more helpful links in a recent post from Beeston Quakers - Beeston is a suburb of Nottingham which borders the Nottingham University campus. The Beeston Quakers post also considers further important questions raised by these events. (And it saves me the time I would usually take in researching and adding links.)
Writer, former Creative Writing tutor who quit in order to write and escape stress. Quaker, concerned with equality and truth. Currently socially distant, usually more approachable.
