This week has been a disaster. I started two pieces and abandoned them because they were going to be way too long(although the part1, part 2 thing is attractive.)
Then I started a third piece - Kerala Backwaters. I pulled up the wikipedia entry on it and began to write a piece that would include some wikipedia stuff (acknowledged of course) but two things happened. First I jammed my
overloaded computor so that I could only save or edit the piece that I had spent two hours on. Only way out was to abandon it too. Second the earache that had been bothering me for a few days turned out to be a middle ear infection so lost most of Friday and all of Saturday toexcruciating pain. Now the antibiotics seem to be winning and the feeling has been reduced to ‘the day after a kick in the ear from a horse.’ (Still, no broken bones.)
But the result is no blog piece for this week - I couldn't even mine my old pieces. I will get a new hard drive of 200g which will release me from the 49g I have now. My back up hard drive melted in India and awaits some action.
Glad you got another Suzuki. I hired a new Toyota Corrolla in Auckland that seemed pretty good. My old comfortable Mercedes is going to last for a while I think (unless Jack wipes it out - if he passes his driving test this week.)
13 years and counting, with only 132,000 on the clock. It did only 2,400 in its first 3 years as it belonged to an eastern suburbs 'walker'.
A walker is a male used by a wealthy woman to accompany her on social outings. This walker received his car as part of the deal but they always used her more expensive Mercedes. When she died he got her car and I got his. Not a bad job if you didn't have a life.
Stephen O’R from Sydney
Photo by Roger Morton
Careful nifty parking in Angouleme - a large nearby town in the Charente, that we are very fond of.
Thursday this week was an important date in the U.K. radio calendar, as the RAJAR (Radio Joint Audience Research) listening figures were published. These covered the last quarter of 2009 - from October to December.
At a time when the future of digital stations is often discussed, it was heartening news for us that the Radio 7 listening figures have increased, and now stand at 931,000. This is up by 48,000 from last quarter, and an increase of 81,000 from this time last year. In the BBC digital radio portfolio, Radio 7 is the most listened-to network.
So, my thanks to all of you who continue to enjoy the station, and to the Radio 7 staff who, within limited resources, put such a lot of effort into bringing you a great schedule.
As a network providing drama and comedy, we don't cover sport events, but in this 5th year of the biennial U.K.event Sport Relief, we're delighted to give some on-air profile to this worthwhile charitable offshoot of Comic Relief.
Be assured that we have no plans to tempt Alex Riley to match Eddie Izzard's recent remarkable achievement of running 43 gruelling marathons in 51 days, neither will we be persuading Jim to don his swimming gear and do a "David Walliams" by taking the plunge and crossing the English Channel in 10 hours, nor will we try to coax Michaela to be the first woman to kayak the Amazon River.
No, our presenters are staying strictly studio-based.
Instead, we've enticed Radio 4 sports presenter, Garry Richardson, to become our Sport Relief Comedy Controller for Saturday 20th March (Sport Relief weekend runs from 19th - 21st March) Garry is a great fan of Radio 7, and is delighted to be able to offer his services for such a laudable cause.
Here's where you come in! There are several archive comedy series which have occasionally included comic sport sketches, for example, one of my favourites is the Radio Active, Wimbledon Special and I know that many of our radio comedy aficionados will remember many more.
What we'd like you to do is e-mail us your requests to hear a comedy programme with a sporting flavour - no matter how tenuous - and then we'll ask Garry to choose the best for his Comedy Controller six-pack.
Send your suggestions, headed Sport Relief Comedy, to us at radio7@bbc.co.uk
We are now in our third continent in the Wonderful New World of Cafe
Latte and chilled Sauvignon Blanc. I am already beginning to think
that all of those Rough Guides and Lonely Planets could be combined
into one thin on-line version covering all of the countries in the
World in one neat file. Gone is the individuality of the Cape Town
docks with their whores and the Navigator's Den - a gloriously low
dive if ever there was one. No more fussing tugs and great grey
cranes unloading hessian sacks by the net-full from the bowels of
rusting cargo carriers from far-away places with strange sounding
names, far over the sea. Now only a vast impersonal container wharf
exists, shielded from thieves and onlookers alike by a huge anti-
terrorist fence topped with razor wire.
Those marvellous old red brick warehouses built to harbour the outbound plunder of Empire and inbound added value production of the Old Country now empty the
pockets of tourists and locals alike at uni-sex hairdressers and
white wine and brunch cafes. Visit a multi-plex cinema and buy a
Louis Vuiton dog collar should the whim take you. And pay, pay, pay
in plastic. Who needs local funny money or to know about exchange
rates when "American Express will do nicely". Where once-upon-time
(now politically incorrect) fleets of tiny black whalers huddled
against the hull of their great blood-stained mother factory ship
there are now tourist boats offering sunset booze cruises and trips to
Robben Island. Not all bad then ... but ... but...
So it is in Fremantle. Take a peek at the buildings above shop-front
level and they are wholly glorious - an almost perfectly preserved
dockside from a maritime past from the days when merchants and
shipping lines carved their names with pride into the stone
and stucco facades of their commercial castles. These are still
there. Shaw-Savill Line. The Wool Exchange. W. D and H.O Wills.
Even tobacco was something to show-off about then. But it is at
pedestrian level it all falls apart. Cheap shoe shops and fried fish
abound. Even trying to buy a T-shirt presented difficulties.
I needed to do this because our luggage was in West Africa not West Australia. But
no way did I want to be branded as 'I love Perth' (which I did not at
that time) or 'Go Aussie Go' was not without complication. Plain
white perhaps? “Sorry Sir, no call for that.”
But wait. It's not all bad. Best Italian meal for many a year last night and off to brunch (yes) with prospect of Aussie Open in real time this afternoon. OK, the tennis will be on TV and brunch will be in an ex-biscuit factory
now pretending to be a Farmer's Market - like they do in Sydney and LA and - hell - just about everywhere else. But maybe the universal Grey Goose martini straight up with a lemon twist will lift the spirits. Worth a shot or two anyway.
Later. We watched that marvellous tennis so frequently interrupted by some pretty brash commercials. What is it about Australians that they have to emphasise the Australian-ness of everything. Australia's biggest, Australia's newest, Australia's tastiest ... methinks they have a complex about making the bottom end of the world, the most
important place on earth.
A million years ago Ava Gardner was here filming the screen version of Nevil Shute's On the Beach - a novel about the end of the world. As Ava was quoted as saying " They sure chose the right place to
shoot it."
Our muso friends Judith and Jim suggested we have a listen to Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu. On 16 December he played a duet on Taratata with Sting. On Friday 9 April he will be playing at Café de la Danse 5, Passage Louis-Philippe, Paris 11. Tickets are 27€50. He will be singing on Arte’s ‘One Shot Not’ on February 25.
He is an indigenous Australian who was born in 1970. He is blind. In 2009, he was the No.1 best-selling world music album in the UK. (Source; Official UK Charts company). He plays guitar and sings and is a member of the Saltwater band. Have a listen.
The Supreme Court ruled that corporations can suddenly run political adverts during an election campaign – and there is absolutely no limit on how many, or how much they can spend. So if you anger the investment bankers by supporting legislation to break up the too-big-to-fail banks, you will smack into a wall of 24/7 ads exposing your every flaw. If you displease oil companies by supporting legislation to deal with global warming, you will now be hit by a tsunami of advertising saying you are opposed to jobs and the American Way.
If you rile the defence contractors by opposing the gargantuan war budget, you will face a smear-campaign calling you Soft on Terror. Representative Alan Grayson says: "It basically institutionalises and legalises bribery on the largest scale imaginable. Corporations will now be able to reward the politicians that play ball with them – and beat to death the politicians that don't... You won't even hear any more about the Senator from Kansas. It'll be the Senator from General Electric or the Senator from Microsoft."
If Americans want a democratic system, they have to pay for it – and that means fair state funding for political candidates. Candidates are essential for the system to work: you may as well begrudge paying for the polling booths, or the lever you pull. At the same time, the Supreme Court needs to be confronted: when the court tried to stymie the new deal, FDR tried to pack it with justices on the side of the people. Obama needs to be pressured.
None of the crises facing us all – from the global banking system to global warming – can be dealt with if a tiny number of super-rich corporations have a veto over every inch of progress. If Obama funks this challenge, he may as well put the US government on e-Bay – and sell it to the highest bidder. How would we spot the difference?
We get born and, if we are in a lucky country, we don't have to start work until we are five or six. Then we are at it in some way or other until we get to 'retirement' at sixty or sixty five. Our time for doing nothing out of 70 or 80
years of life, is five to twenty years, depending on gender, our health, or the warring habits of our neighbours, plus time off work.
Vernon Richards writing in his piece 'Wasted Manpower' (Why Work. Freedom Press, London, 1983)‘that the average person gets 4000 weeks of life.’ He reckons we spend 1000 weeks finding out what life is about, 1000 weeks sleeping, 250 preparing and eating food so that we can live, perhaps 250 washing and grooming, 600 weeks working to pay for all this, 100 weeks getting to and from work, and if we are generous and assume we don't do a lot of overtime we get 900 weeks to live life to the full’ (assuming we live to 70).
When we get to 'retire' in Australia we will find our local councils have recreation officers who will show us videos in whicha denim-suited retired TV personality wanders through the bush introducing us to the world of
Leisure that is available to 'mature' adults. Whether mature means mature enough to understand what my five year old instinctively knew, or whether it is a polite term for old, I leave to you.
When I started my work on this article I came across this notion called ‘The Protestant Work Ethic’ (PWE). In his book The Protestant Work Ethic, the author, Adrian Farnham, quotes Weber ' ... Weber explained that the fact that people pursue wealth and material gain for its own sake, not for necessity was due to Puritan asceticism and the concept of calling for the individual to fulfil his or her duty in this (rather than the other) world.’
I took this to mean that we like to have stuff and will do what's necessary to get it.
Weber maintained that puritans felt obliged to be regarded as chosen by God to perform good works. Success as a ‘calling’ became to be seen as a sign of being the elect. Puritans thus sought to achieve through economic activity. This notion of performing good through work went along nicely with industrialisation and was a major factor to the success of Fordism (the organized process of assembling goods and products ie cars or cigarettes).
Weber understood capitalism as a mass phenomenon: a culturally prescribedway of living, a moral doctrine to advance individuals' material interests. He saw that capitalism went against the traditional sense of effort and
value for work because it replaced the idea of self- sufficiency with accumulation. Weber believed that the desire to acquire is shared by most people; all types & classes ‘ capitalism is identical with the pursuit of profit, and forever renewed profit, by means of continuous, rational, capitalistic enterprise. For which it must be so: that in a wholly capitalistic order and society, an individual capitalist enterprise which did not take opportunities for profit making would be doomed to extinction.’
Given that we in a world that is predominantly a capitalist society (I think only China, Cuba and Vietnam hold out with their own brand of control, communism) WORK is heavily encouraged. (N. Korea? Ed) Ironically it was while I was being paid to work or, in my case wait, or to do nothing, that I began to be attracted to investigating the discourse and culture of NOTHING. I sometimes work as an actor, and a large part of acting in films
involves hours of doing nothing (as does being in prison but of course there is usually choice involved).
I enrolled in a university course after I had been sacked from a position in the Public service. As I was only 'acting ' in the position but had a permanent position at a lower grade, from which it was difficult to sack me, I got to do nothing for a few months. This period of doing nothing gave me the time to think.
So is nothing equal to time?
Weber quotes Benjamin Ferdinand who in 1736 wrote ‘ Necessary hints to those that would be rich’.
'Remember, that time is money. He that can earn ten shillings a day by his labour, and goes abroad, or sits idle, one half that day, though he spends but sixpence during his diversion or idleness, ought not to reckon that the only expense; he has really spent, or rather thrown away, five shillings, besides.’
The PWE combined with capitalism has constructed a world where to do nothing is 'sinful', 'unpatriotic', 'to be a bludger', to have no status, to be pitied, to be object of charitable works, not to be rewarded or publicly rewarded. Reading PWE made me realise how we are constantly and continuously reminded of the values and necessity of hard work.
Adrian Furnham outlines eight attributes of the PWE.
1.People have a normal and religious obligation to fill their lives with heavy physical toil. For some this means that hard work, effort and drudgery are to be valued ; physical pleasures and enjoyments are to be shunned; and an ascetic existence of methodical labour is the only acceptable way to live.
2.Men and women are expected to spend long hours of work with little or no time for personal recreation and leisure.
3.A worker should have a dependable attendance record with low absenteeism and tardiness.
4. Workers should be highly productive and produce a large quantity of goods or service.
5.Workers should take pride in their work and do their jobs well.
6.Employees should be achievemen-orientated and constantly strive for promotions and advancement.
7.High status jobs with prestige and the respect of others are important indicators of a good person.
8.People should acquire wealth through honest labour and retain it through thrift and wise investment. Frugality is desirable; extravagance and waste should be avoided.
Baptised in the icy waters of Calvinist Theology, the business of life once regarded as perilous to the soul, acquired new sanctity.’ Labour is not merely an economic means: it is a spiritual end.’R.H.Tawny
Seest thou a man diligent in his business. He shall stand before the kings. Proverbs XXII, 29
He who neither worketh for himself nor for others, will not receive the reward of God. The Prophet Mohammed
And just as I feel self-congratulatory about my position on this I find myself thinking of my feelings about Kerry Packer and his gambling and the Royal family and it's apparently inane lifestyle.
We have been told to hate yuppies and their conspicuous consumption by a media which is owned by the rich to make money out of making the poor and bored feel better about their not getting enough.
A BMW is crass but a Bright Red Suzuki is more realistic and a 70's Australian six is groovy.
We are reminded in the presentation of mortgage ads that home ownership and all its pragmatic advantages can have a warm and fuzzy side too. (Which Bank is doing it right for you.) Try getting a mortgage without a job even if it is lower than the rent you pay.
‘You can have, but don't you take too much’ (Chicago Transit Authority 1960's pop group.) Cos it's not good for you. Stop it you will go blind.
We developed newer, softer, work ethics. The old rules are re-marketed, even job ads are written in such away that you don't work for, but report to, a higher authority. Your success and your package will depend on how your personality communicates. How are your people skills. Have you commodified yourself well enough. If not do a course; change yourself; marketing yourself is the go. You can achieve with just a little ambition and aggression. Even women can do it now. NEW WORK ETHIC STATEMENTS
I prefer earning less if it affords me more leisure time. Poor people are just as happy as the rich. Most work in this world is dull and lacks human dignity. Why work hard if things are going well without. There are other ways besides working for making one’s living. I would terrified by the idea of working my whole life-time in the
same company. If earning much more money means less leisure time, then I say no. Most jobs are so boring and uninteresting that I feel aversion to working. I'd like to work but not at the cost of losing my independence and
freedom. Anyone who does not work, has as much right to a normal income as those who work. A life without working would be fine. Meaningless work would make me sick.
I took this simple curiosity of how ‘nothing’ is part of our language and because of my desire/need to write something for the blog and it has caused me to do all this work and risk plumbing new depths of pretension.I am have been conditioned by the PWE and therefore no longer accept responsibility for my self. I shall however try to identify its influences (THE PWE) and, avoiding work, do what I can to expunge them from this planet.
Nothing is a natural state out of which spontaneous ideas and actions arise.
The weather last week was dramatic. Thursday we had ice (on which many people slipped and fell.) Friday we had thick blinding fog; Saturday we had snow (see above).Photo: Roger Morton
L'édition 2010 de l'exposition de la Maison des Auteurs ambitionne de montrer plus particulièrement au public les méthodes et secrets de fabrication de créateurs venus de Corée du Sud, d'Inde, du Québec, d'Espagne, d'Italie mais aussi des quatre coins de France. Crayonnés, croquis, découpage, story-board... de la feuille de papier à la palette graphique, les résidents de la Maison des Auteurs, qu'ils soient illustrateurs, auteurs de bande dessinée ou réalisateurs de films d'animation, explorent tous les outils, convoquent toutes les techniques. Une visite instructive et étonnante pour découvrir comment la jeune création graphique internationale travaille, du premier coup de crayon au résultat final.
Auteurs exposés : Marine Blandin, Lorenzo Chiavini, Rachel Deville, Marie-Laure Dougnac, Catherine Ferrier, Elena Forcato, Nicolas Gazeau, Thomas Gosselin, François Henninger, Alexeï Kispredilov, Jung-Hyoun Lee, Lola Lorente, Andréas Marchal, Alban Marilleau, Sylvie-Anne Menard, Eva Montanari, Freddy Nadolny Poustochkine, Ninie (Virginie Perrot), Yoon-Sun Park, Amruta Patil, Valentina Principe, Aude Samama, Anaël Seghezzi, Clara Tanit, Alfonso Zapico.
The Festival International de la Bande Dessine takes place in Angouleme at the end of January, usually spread over 4 days. The TGV runs from Paris to Angouleme, so this makes it very accessible. The first one was in 1974. The last one we went to was very impressive. We queued in the cold alongside dozens of attractive, vibrant looking people. Once inside, we watched the cartoonists work at speed, alongside those dozens of vibrant, exciting people. My memory is that all the cartoonists were men. They all smoked and they all drew with their left hand.
We would have gone again this year if we weren’t having this hiccup with cars and (as it turns out) 7 broken bones between us. Not to mention that today is the main day of the Festival and it has been snowing most of the day and the temperatures have not risen about zero. We are much too snow-shaken and stirred to venture out in these conditions.
One of my favourite winter suppers is a plate of steaming haggis accompanied with ‘champit tatties and bashed neeps’ washed down with a tumbler of whiskey.Yum-yum.
Last Monday evening, 25th January I invited 14 neighbours and friends into my little Tottenham sitting room for such a supper, to celebrate a birthday.
The birthday guest wasn't actually there, though, as he died 214 years ago. He was of course, Robert Burns, Scotland's National Bard, whose birth on the 25th January is celebrated not only in Scotland , but all over the world, with traditional Burns Suppers.
Robert Burns is probably best known as author of the most frequently sung song in the world, Auld Lang Syne, a wonderful homage to friendship - so I can confidently assume that anyone reading this knows at least one of Burn's works.
Burns, often quoted as ‘the ploughman poet’ is also know for his great love of
a) women and b) whiskey.
All true, but there was more, much more to the man than those fleeting pleasures and I'd like to give you some background to this remarkable man, whose birthday is still celebrated every year with a ’supper’.
Robert, Robbie or Rab, as he was known, was born in 1759 in an old clay cottage in Galloway, Ayr, the first of 7 children. It was a wild, wintry night, and a few days after his birth, the storm was so powerful that it blew the cottage apart, and the unconscious baby Rab was carried to the shelter of a neighbour's house.
Many years later, he wrote a poem about the blast of "cauld January wind" that blew him into the world
Rantin Rovin Robin
He’ll hae misfortunes great and sma'
But aye a heart above them a'
He'll be a credit tae us a'
We'll a' be proud o' Robin"
Tragically, Burns only lived for 37 years, but his achievements in that short time were immense. From a young age, he worked as a ploughman, a tenant farmer, dressing flax for the linen trade, and finally a tax collector - a job which he detested - and meant him travelling over 2000 miles a week on horseback to reluctantly collect taxes.
Whilst working long hard hours in the day, most of what spare time he had was spent in writing poetry. He wrote over 2,000 poems and songs, many which still have relevance today.
Now as if all this activity didn't keep him busy enough, he also fathered 8 illegitimate children plus 9 children with his wife Jean Armour (two sets of twins before they married|) and had passionate affairs with many many women - most of whom achieved immortality in his poems: Annie, Jeannie, Mary, Nancy. Nellie, Jessie, Clarinda .. and the list goes on.
Burns wrote his first love poem at the age of 14, when, hormones raging, he fell for ‘young Nellie’ whilst they were harvesting in the fields. Interestingly, even at that age, he recognised that good looks in a lassie were not always quite enough :
Handsome Nell
A bonnie lass I will confess
Is pleasant to the e'e
But without some better qualities
She's no' the lass for me.
Not bad for a 14 year old. The fields proved to be a popular courting ground for Burns:
Corn rigs and barley rigs Corn rigs are bonnie
I'll never forget that happy night
Amongst the rigs wi' Annie.
Apparently every woman in Ayrshire claimed to be the Annie of that song. Rab could certainly attract the ladies, and in the forgotten and hard to come by collection The Bawdy Works of Burns there is a very saucy poem (even includes the "c" word, which of course I won't quote here.)
Nine inch will please a lady
When you read the poem and I hope that you do, you soon grasp that Burns certainly isn’t referring to 9 inches as a man's shoe size!
But wear fa' the laithron doup
And may it ne'er be thriving
It's not the length that makes me loup
But it’s the double driving.
(I asked Mary for a bit of translation here: ‘but wear fa’the laithron doup’ means tired from a lazy backside – actually Mary, I’m none the wiser! ‘loup’ means ‘leap with delight’. Ed)
But Burns' ways with women were not condoned in Presbyterian Scotland, and he spent many a Sunday on the Repentance Stool at the Kirk (the equivalent of Nanny's "Naughty Step") where the minister regaled him as a "a fornicator wha' will roast in Hell!"
One Sunday he was joined by Lizzie Paton, a servant girl who was pregnant with Burn's first illegitimate child. Rab was 26 and proudly took on some of the responsibility, as only he could, by writing some verse:
A Poet's Welcome to his Love-Begotten Bairn
Welcome! My bonnie, sweet wee dochter
Tho' ye come her a wee bit unsought for…
I'll never rue my trouble wi' thee
The cost nor shame o't
But be a loving father to thee
And brag the name o' t
Burns wrote about so many forms of love - passionate love (who could resist these lines?)
My Love Is Like a Red, Red, Rose:
Till a' the seas run dry my dear
And the rocks melt wi' the sun
I will love thee still my dear
Till the sands o life shall run
His love of nature, lovers being parted, love which doesn’t go smoothly and love in old age - all were subjects to write about:
John Anderson my Jo John
John Anderson my Jo John
We climbed the hill thegither
And mony a canty day, Jo
We had wi' one another
Now we must totter doon Jo,
But hand in hand we'll go
We’ll sleep thegither at the foot -
John Anderson my Jo
Probably one of my favourite Burns poems.
Sadly, Burns himself didn't experience love in old age because by his 36th birthday he was seriously ill with rheumatic fever. Unable to work, he was reduced to writing begging letters to friends for a few pounds to save him from the horrors of the debtor's jail… "pale, emaciated, and so feeble as to need help from my chair, my spirit is fled"
In an attempt to treat Burn's fever, his doctor, John Maxwell, sent him off to bathe in the icy cold waters of the Solway Firth - the worst so-called ‘cure’ possible. Burns returned to Dumfries, where his wife, heavily pregnant had brought in a young nurse, Jessie Lewars, to look after him. Even in the throes of death, Burns was compelled to write, and completed his final poem.
It was a poignant and moving work, addressed to young Jessie
Oh Wert Thou in the Cauld Blast Oh wert thou in the cauld blast, on yonder lea, on yonder lea
My plaidie to the angry airt
I'll shelter thee, I'll shelter thee"
Our Bard died on July 21st aged 37.
His funeral, 4 days later was attended by everyone in the town. Except for one - his wife Jean. As Rab was being buried, Jean was giving birth to their last son, whom she named Maxwell, after the doctor who, unwittingly, hastened Burns to his death. Maxwell died when he was three. And Jean?
She outlived all of her children and lived to a ripe old age 38 years after her beloved Rab had died. And so every year we celebrate this man for all moods, for all seasons, for all times and for all people.
I haven’t even touched on his poems about nature and his politics, his sense of fairness and equality for all.
His song: A Man's A Man for A That was chosen as the song to open the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh in 1999, and was also sung at the funeral of the first Scottish Minister, Donald Dewar, who died only a year after Parliament's opening, 2000.
I will end my brief tribute to Robert Burns with an extract from that poem:
Then let us pray that come what may
As come it will, for a' that
That sense and worth o'er a the earth
May bear the gree and a' that
For a' that and a' that
It's coming yet for a' that
That man to man the world ower
Shall brothers be for a' that.
These days I only subscribe to one magazine and it is Telerama. This week’s cover ‘Nous sommes tous demauvais Français’ is particularly contentious. I am in a quandary over the issue of whether or not Muslim women should be forbidden to wear the burqa in France.
I would hate to be made to cover up my body, my hair and most of my face – especially if the menfolk in my life did not have to do it. It would demonstrate much too clearly that they were indeed superior to me because of their gender (as opposed to their intelligence and their experience.) Curiously, as a teenager, I did not mind wearing school uniform. In fact it was a relief. I was late for school often enough – if I had had to plan what I was going to wear each day, that would have been too complicated and I would have missed the school bus even more times than I did. (Mind you, I probably stayed fit by running to school so often.)
I recently read that among the Tuareg of West Africa, women do not traditionally wear the veil, while men do. The men's facial covering originates from the belief that such action wards off evil spirits, but most probably relates to protection against the harsh desert sands as well; in any event, it is a firmly established tradition. Men begin wearing a veil at age 25 which conceals their entire face excluding their eyes. This veil is never removed, even in front of family members.
France says women wearing the burqa contradicts their dictum of Liberté, Egalité. I agree with that, it does. Nonetheless, I do not want an angry situation to blow up in France between Muslim and non-Muslim residents. Especially over something so frivolous as clothes. There are more important issues to worry about – finding work, having enough money to pay one’s winter fuel bills and to feed and warmly clothe one’s children.
I watched a Muslim woman who was wearing the burqa, being interviewed on French television. She said she was French and she objected to the burqa being banned in France. If she wasn’t allowed to wear it, she would go home to her own country...
Conversely, I have always been intrigued by the similarities between the compulsory clothes of Islamic women and those of Catholic nuns. My choice of clothing is weather-dependent (especially at the moment. I wear a veritable mountain of clothing) or dependent on the occasion eg if it is somebody’s wedding or birthday, I like to wear something special or a little glamorous. Why not, life’s so short. Besides which, I am lucky enough to live a life in which I am not bound by ‘rules for rules’ sake.’
However, I do not envy this present French government or future French governments, having to resolve this hot potato. I have a problem with 'identite nationale'. I was born in Edinburgh, so I have British nationality. Until I went to NZ, I had only ever met Scottish people. I was taught to hate English people at school in Scotland and I did. I had never met any. When I went to live in NZ and couldn't get a part in the school production of Macbeth, because nobody could understand my accent, I soon shucked off my Scottish accent. When Roger and I eventually went to live in London, we loved it so much we lived there for 20 years. Most of our close friends are English. We bought a house in France 29 years ago. We have lived here permanently for nearly 8 years. Even if we take out French citizenship, we will never be regarded as French French.
I don't feel Scottish any more. I like London but I'm not English. I've been culturally trashed by NZ and so I'm a NZ cultural refugee. I have NZ citizenship and both my parents are buried in NZ, but I no longer feel like a NZer (I tried hard for a long time..)
So I have a problem with 'identite nationale'. I don't have one - but I feel connected with lots of people in lots of places.
I remember lying on a very beautiful beach north of Auckland, NZ and noticing a large group of burqa-clad people sitting on the sand nearby. The day was hot and I frequently went into the sea for a swim. I loved it. I love swimming and I love the sun and the sand. I didn’t envy those women nearby, clad in what looked like very hot, cumbersome clothing. None of them went for a swim. None of them looked at ease in their skin. Not that I could see any. Mais moi, je me sens bien dans ma peau.
A man was eaten in Africa this week. Nothing unusual in that you might think. But this was in South Africa, a more or less civilised place in spite of its anointed President wallowing between the ample bosoms of no less than six wives.
Not only did this carnivorous event happen in a modern industrialised state but in the soft and gentle Mother City of Cape Town with its Mediterranean climate and laid back LA attitudes. And it was a fish what did it. A 4 meter long Great White Shark to be precise. It’s usually a surfer that gets attacked here but this time it was different. Great Whites live and multiply in False Bay and feed voraciously on seals that share a similar breeding habitat. A man clad in a black neoprene wet suit, flippers and all, looks not unlike a seal. Can't blame the shark then. And anyway mankind kills about a million times more sharks per annum than vice-versa. All that Chinese shark-fin soup, don't you know. The problem with man-eating sharks, I am told, is that every proven theory tends to be disproven by the next behavioural flip. This time all that was found was a pair of swimming goggles. Last fatal attack four years ago, there was only a lady's red bathing cap. A lady-eating shark for a change. New theory - sharks don't like the taste of rubber. Must be OK to swim in a neoprene wet suit again then. Surfers get back in water and wait for the next wave and ... and ... don't go there. Fortunately this sharp end of Africa divides mighty oceans into two - on the right hand the great warm Indian Ocean hits temperatures in the middle to upper twenties - sharks being the cunning beasts they are like that a lot. On our side of Table Mountain - left looking North (everybody here wants a North facing house - Southern Hemisphere get it?) the icy South Atlantic wafts up from the Pole at a testicle shrinking fourteen degrees. Fewer swimmers but zero sharks. Thats another theory. Don't hold your breath. Me, I don't even put a toe in. Too damn cold anyway.
Now we are in the wine country, in Fransch Hoek where the only sharks are be of the human variety , feeding on tourist dollars, pounds, euros and yen. In the bad old days of South Africa before that nice Mr Mandela made it liveable again, all of 16 years ago now, it was a slovenly little dorp. All of the grapes were then gathered together by a mighty state-owned co-operative - the ultra right-wing Nationalist government had some pretty leftish ideas when it came to plundering the economy for personal gain. The fruit was then pulverised and made into some fairly awful wine which was sold off in bulk to any country that had a taste for apartheid-tainted goods.
No longer. This one-time crummy little town is the hottest act on the local stage. Wine farms that could be snapped up for nothing in the declining days of that nasty little shit President Botha change hands for millions and millions of (again) dollars, euros, pounds and yen . Everything here is now pseudo-French . Fransch Hoek was where the early Huguenot Protestant settlers were shipped off to by the inflexibly minded Calvinist Dutch settlers. Racist, they were from an early age. Fransch Hoek - French Corner in kitchen Dutch, ok. So behind mile after mile of parallel rows of hand-clipped vines sleeping in the sun , all with a flowering white rose at the end of each row, lie long low farmhouses built in the weepingly beautiful CapeDutch style. These bare names like La Provence, or Le Bastide or Le Petit Ferme or, or, or, ...
The Quartier Francaise here is judged by the sort of people who judge such matters as among the top 50 restaurants in the world. The wines are cutely labelled, of multi grape varieties (the Nationalists allowed only two - red and white), deliciously priced and taste even better. You get here by super highway from Cape Town which sweeps past the highly gussied up for the World Cup airport and through a mountain pass called Hells Hoogte. The Heights of Hell in English. It was so-named by those early leather faced and bearded settlers who escaped enlightened post-Dutch British rule and trekked with their fecund and bonneted Christian wives and crossed a great mountain range of granite and stone they called the Dragons Teeth.
They did this in covered wagons with great steel rimmed wheels hauled by spanned oxen and doubtless powered by the Grace of their God. No sharks inland , but lions, leopard, elephant buffalo and snakes aplenty. But not now. I am writing this in sight of a vineyard with tasting rooms, a glorious restaurant and view to die for. Its called Dieu Donne. Given by God I guess. And perhaps it is.
This week three more BBC DAB transmitters came on air, in some beautiful parts of the UK, so it's good news for listeners in the following areas:
Cow Hill in the Scottish Highlands, providing a service to FortWilliam and adding 10,500 people to the network coverage.
Windermere in the Lake District, making it our second transmitter in the area, joining Keswick, and adding just over 10,000 people to the coverage.
St Austell in Cornwall, providing coverage to the town and surrounding bay between Mevagissey and Fowey, adding 25,000 people to the coverage area.
Please spread the word about Radio 7 if you've any friends or family living in these areas - so they're not missing out!
As from next Monday, there are changes in our presentation. Rather than hearing several "hello ... goodbyes" from presenters throughout the day, just one presenter will guide you through the programmes, apart from 7th Dimension and Comedy Club. As well as your ‘old favourites’, in the coming weeks you'll also hear some new voices on the network. Phil Williams, a popular presenter who hosts 5Live's Weekend Breakfast, will be bringing you Sunday night Comedy Club and also Comedy Club Catch-up (you can read about Phil on our website) And - here's a real treat for Doctor Who fans - welcome to Nick Briggs (voice of the Daleks and other Who monsters) to take over the 7th Dimension as from this Saturday.
Both of them are thrilled to be joining our team of presenters. This is what Nick Briggs said:
" I'm really excited to have joined the BBC Radio 7 team. I've long been a listener of the 7th Dimension as I'm an avid sci-fi fan What could be better - getting paid to talk about my favourite thing?
What indeed could be better, Nick?
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