About sport

I’ve never really been enthusiastic about sport. Maybe it’s because I’m not particularly competitive by nature, so I’ve never quite got the point of it.

There are of course two kinds of sport: participatory sport and spectator sport.

Let me start with participatory sport.
I was always a pretty weedy kid with minimal hand / foot / eye / ball coordination. As most sports in which I was obliged to participate seemed to involve a ball I was not very good at any of them. Consequently, when it came to picking teams, I was the one who got chosen second to last just before the fat kid with glasses.
“Games” as they were called at school were an exercise in ritual humiliation. They were an opportunity for classmates who were resentful of the fact that I was good at lessons to get their own back.
There was no instruction, you were just expected to get on with it as something natural that boys knew how to do. Nobody even bothered to explain the rules. The idea that with some words of explanation and practical example it might be possible to improve technique, even in an apparently hopeless case, was just alien to those in charge. Most teachers just “took games” on a voluntary basis; they had never actually received training on how to provide physical education. It was something of a bold innovation when my grammar school hired a new master specifically for sport who had actually studied it at teacher training college. His services, however, were mainly dedicated to coaching the school teams. Sport at school was about winning. If you were a loser, you could be dispensed with, but still forced to go through the motions even if largely ignored. It was a non-education.
I particularly loathed rugby - I went to the kind of posh school where boys played rugby during games and football in the playground. I tended to be left at the back, which was a blessing as it meant not having to participate in the scrum, and was expected to stand in the way of someone twice my size thundering down on me with a funny shaped ball under his arm. I soon learned to take evasive action at the last moment having feinted a vague interest in stopping him. Mercifully in third year you could opt out of rugby and do cross-country running instead, which I also hated, but at least it didn’t involve being pushed face first into the mud.
In the sixth form assorted wimps, wusses, intellectuals and obese kids were allowed to spend games inside out of the rain in the gym playing volley ball or anything else they fancied with no supervision at all. This was actually fun. For a start we were all equally bad and many of these kids were my friends, and then there was no quasi-military pressure brought to bear. We had a laugh and enjoyed playing as a team, not that it mattered partciularly who won.

I took up playing squash at university and for a few years after that. I was consistently bad at squash too, but enjoyed it all the same when someone else was happy to give me a thrashing. When my last squash partner did his back in I sort of let it drop; it’s not a particularly healthy form of exercise anyway, it’s far too jerky and abrupt.
I am known to partcipate infrequenty in not too serious scratch games of football, cricket and volley-ball when the opportunity presents itself and I appreciate the aspect of shared activity, but I don’t really seek it out. I guess I was turned off team sports and not properly educated for them as a kid, which is a shame as they perform a great social function I think of that as a failure of my school education, a missed opportunity, though I accept I’m now a bit too old and out of practice anyway for the rough and tumble of many sports.
The long and the short of it is that I exercise a lot but not in the form of what you would term sport. I like to cycle, walk, swim and ski but in a strictly uncompetitive way and more often than not by myself. I don’t even compete against myself. I’m not really interested in how fast I can do something, though I am interested in how far I’ve been and for example will keep a record of how many km I do on my bike. If while out cycling someone else overtakes me I feel no urge to chase them, catch them up and overtake them to prove I’m fitter - partly because I know I just couldn’t catch them if I tried.
I suppose over the years I’ve rationalized my usual tendency to lose at any physical sport into an indifference about the outcome.

I”m not sure whether my lack of interest in spectator sport stems from my lack of interest in participatory sport. There are after all plenty of people who never practise sport themselves yet have a consuming interest in watching other people do it.
This has apparently always been so. Ancient Rome famously kept its people happy by offering them “panem et circenses”, free bread and the circus games, such as gladiatorial fights and chariot races which at that time were popular spectator sport. As a ruse to keep the people sweet, this would not have worked if the people genuninely had not get excited about the games. Come to think of it, in its gory fascination with death, perhaps ancient Roman sport was actually more exciting to watch than snooker is today.

Various psychological, sociological and philosophical explanations can be offered for this constant phenomenon of spectator sport in human history. There is the uncertainty of the outcome during the competition which lends excitement to the watching of it, possibly enhanced by the financial stimulus of betting. There is the impressive display of technical skill by the athletes that commands admiration. There is the identifying with a champion who vicariously fights one’s life battles. There is even the fighting of wars by the proxy of a national team. There is the clarity afterwards of an unambiguous result, a winner and a loser, which is much simpler than in real life.

The key to all of this is the notion of competition. The narrative of capitalist society requires us to see competition per se as a good thing and Darwin is adduced to suggest that it is the mainspring of natural progress. However, many species succeed by dint of cooperation rather than competition among themselves, though species do compete with each other for scarce resources.
The competitive thing has also a strong residual sexual aspect to it, especially in the male, in the sense of competition to secure the best mate. Competitive displays of strength and skill are frequent amongst the animals to this end.
So, some would have it, competition is healthy and exciting, because after all life is about winning and losing. Actually, I don’t really see life in those terms myself and I offer this as a partial explanation as to why, frankly, most spectator sport on the TV, which let’s face it is where most people watch sport, bores me rigid and I’d rather be watching a good film.

My problem is that I don’t really care who wins or loses. Whether England loses again at football or cricket is a matter of profound indifference to me. So as a spectator this leaves me with having to find some interest in the actual sporting action itself.
In many individual sports, where every competitor is pretty well at the same level, you just end up watching the same thing again and again. After the admiration of the athlete’s skill the first three times, the interest becomes whether someone makes a mess of it (as when a slalom skier falls). The Olympics tend to be particularly tedious in this respect. For me the ultimate boring sport to watch, which in my book is not actually a sport at all, is Formula 1 where cars go round and round in circles and someone occasionally crashes.

Like any other field of human activity, I’m sure familiarity with the technicalities enhances the viewer’s experience and what I superficially see as sameness would become infinitely varied. However, I’m really not sufficently attracted to make the effort. Actually one thing I do find quite fascinating is to watch a sport I don’t know the rules of in a language I don’t understand: eg sumo in Japanese or pelota in Basque. It really demonstrates how curious a phenomenon spectator sport is with crowds cheering and commentators getting excited for no obvious reason.

Sports involving opposing teams and individuals potentially make for better viewing as there is the psychological dimension of opposing tactics and the consequent greater scope for variation in action and randomness of outcome.
I admit that football works well in this way and I occasionally watch the odd important game in company as a shared activity. I wouldn’t bother to watch a match by myself though.
In our modern age of politicians who would be a man of the people (and indeed woman in the case of Mrs Merkel) who the people can relate to and want to elect, it is politically correct to like football and make intelligent or witty comments about it. As I work a lot for politicians it is useful for me to be aware of football as of any other current affairs, so I do listen right to the end of the news broadcast and leaf through the last pages of the newpaper for the results, but it’s certainly not the bit I read first.

Another thing which puts me off spectator sport is the obscene amounts of money some of it, especially football, involves - again my parallel with Ancient Rome holds good. There is no justification whatsoever for the salaries of some football-players, nor indeed of certain merchant bankers. In both professions, since the financial interests in winning are now so big it has become acceptable to cheat to get the desired result. But I digress. In sport there are not only incidents of cheating like Thierry’s hand-ball that clinched France’s place in the football World Cup, but there is also the much larger and less obvious area of doping. Doping is rife in all professional sport and shows just how far we have come from original ideals and the setting of good examples for healthy boys and girls.
I did go through a period of watching the Tour de France, being a cyclist myself, though admittedly more for the pretty pictures of the landscape ridden through than any notional “action”. I was naively full of admiration for the superhuman effort of their riding hundreds of km day after day in all conditions. Now I know that they’re all on drugs which has somewhat tainted my admiration for them and I have stopped bothering to follow the Tour.
I’m sure if the truth be told, cheating has always been an integral part of competitive high-level sport, it’s just what happens when the stakes are too high. Most people prefer to ignore it though, unless it is really blatant, as in Thierrry’s hand-ball and then they get really angry about it, because for them it is “more than a game”. I find all this a bit sad myself as ultimately it’s really not that important and utterly ephemeral. I can’t see what people get so excited about, but they do.

So take this in the way of a confession: spectator sport leaves me cold. I am ready to engage in pleasant conversation about it in the way of social nicety, as indeed one might talk about the weather, only I find the weather an intrinsically much more interesting subject as it actually has a bearing on my life.

About novels

What is a novel ? These days I suppose we mean any long prose work of fiction (let’s say longer than 100 pages). Ultimately though a novel is anything the author wishes to call one. There have been plenty of experimental novels over the centuries, but the best loved and most successful novels tend to be straightforward in their story-telling.
The novel is the dominant genre of new fiction, what most people read. I read a lot of novels myself. On a rough estimate, I must have read about 400 novels, which is probably about half the books I have ever read. I read a fair number of recent novels in English so as to stay in touch with present times, but mainly I read the classics.

By classic, I mean a novel which is quite a bit older and has stood the test of time, transcending its immediate contemporary relevance so that it is still read for its enduring quality. This, for want of a better word, we may call its universality. These novels are by common critical and popular consent the best and there is no shortage of them. It seems to me to be a bit of a waste of time, when you can only read so many books in a lifetime, to take the risk of being unsatisfied with something recent and insubstantial when you could be reading a novel that has proven its value and staying power. Since writers willy nilly write within a tradition, it is also not a bad thing to be familiar with the major works of it, if only to catch the references. My preferences also have a lot to do with my having studied literature at university.

But you may ask: “Why bother to read fiction in the first place when there is so much to read about real life ?” The answer is that good fiction is a sublimation of real life. We believe the story because somehow it rings true. This also holds for fantastic and mythological stories that still require some truthful representation of human behaviour and the human psyche if they are going to work for the reader. Even some of the superficially most escapist novels are actually taking us on a journey into rather than away from ourselves.

Whether the account is factual or fictional, what the reader really craves is a good story that is well told. In the end, much biography and history is also the selective telling of a good story. “And what happened next?” is what keeps the reader turning the pages. The essence of a good novel is that it is a good story, most often with an end which is not immediately apparent, or even, in larger works, several good stories interwoven. Without that the reader’s attention will wander and the book will be put down.
Sometimes that story may well not be an exciting ‘adventure’ in the usual sense but rather the story of how a character grows older, how he is affected by life. It’s more a case of “what happened to so and so?” which is again a driving force of human curiosity, namely to see, of all the possible outcomes, how people turn out, what makes us what we are.
The real stuff of a good novel, then, is how the characters are shaped by their lives, their experience and environment, their interaction.
A novel therefore has to take the time to set its characters in context and needs a certain descriptive, material, tangible thickness to it, without which it can seem abstract and insubstantial. This “real” surface is important and attractive. It is the film-like quality that makes books of the film and films of the book so popular. However, it has to be said that the literary genre in many ways best suited to the film adaptation is not the novel but the short story; there is just too much going on in a proper novel to be done justice to in a film. A novel after all takes several hours to read and digest, a film just one or two.
It’s that extra depth behind the surface which gives the novel its added value; in particular the thought processes and motivations of the characters, in whatever way the author or narrator seeks to convey them. This goes so much further than just the dialogue. Dialogue is a crucial part of any novel but represents only the directly mutually perceived and possibly misunderstood tip of the psychological iceberg. “Why did he or she do that?” is a very important part of the story, and perhaps in adult books, the most interesting part.

So what are my favourite novels?

I am an inveterate re-reader of books. It’s not unusual to watch a film a second time, or to see a play or an opera a second time (even in the same performed version) and of course the essence of enjoying music is to hear the same piece several times. It just takes longer to read a novel, so some may baulk at the idea of doing it twice. However, in terms of quality rather than quantity, I believe you get more out of reading the same good book twice than out of reading four indifferent books once. I guess that’s paradoxical when I say elsewhere that one book read is several others you’re never going to get round to, but re-reading remains a valid choice. Also even if the book is the same, we are not, and at intervals of ten, twenty years, we react differently to it in the light of our experience. Many people make the mistake of reading the classics as set books when teenagers, when they are actually too young to grasp them fully, and then don’t bother to re-read them because they “know the story”.
In my own case, it’s odd, but there are so many things cluttering up my brain that frequently I can’t remember the names of the main characters and whole aspects of the plot, but I do remember if I thought it was a good novel. This means that I derive a lot of pleasure from re-reading novels I have previously enjoyed.

In compiling a list of my favourite novels the acid test then has to be “Have I read it twice ?” That gives a starting short list of about 40, from which I have to discard some only read twice for the purpose of study (a few German and French titles here), some read twice because read aloud to my children (eg “Harry Potter”, “Lord of the Rings”) and others that fall short of my 100 pages (notably , “Animal farm”, “The old man and the sea” and “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde”). From the ones remaining I shall choose twelve.

Tolstoy War and peace
Dostoyevski Brothers Karamazov
Dickens Great expectations
Flaubert Mme Bovary
Woolf the Waves
Joyce Ulysses
Garcia Marquez 100 years of solitude
Conrad Heart of Darkness
Orwell 1984
Lawrence Lady Chatterley’s lover
Hardy Mayor of Casterbridge
Bulgakov Master and Margarita

“War and Peace” - can justifiably be claimed to be the greatest novel ever written. This huge and actually un-put-down-able novel is ultimately about how everyone’s lives are shaped by the vast unstoppable sweep of history.

“Brothers Karamazov” - Dostoievsky explores the darker side of the human psyche and belief. He shows us the disturbing truth that man does not pursue happiness alone but demands his share of suffering.

“Great expectations” - Dickens is probably the best novelist in English and this his best book. That’s because compared to his other novels its structure is tighter, its language more direct and the narrator’s, the older Pip’s, take on his own life refeshingly unsentimental for Dickens, as he reveals how his expectations are disappointed.

“Mme Bovary” - is on the face of it an unpromising story of adultery in the French countryside. Yet Flaubert observes everything acutely and weighs every word carefully (he used to shout them down his staircase to check they sounded ok read aloud); So there is a constant tension between the tawdry mediocrity of rural life and the aspiritational, but clichéd dreams of Emma who attempts to escape her surroundings but inevitably cannot.

“the Waves” - is the inner monologues of six childhood friends caught at key moments as they grow older framed in a description of the passing of a day. For me, the poetic beauty of the heightened language of Woolf’s masterpiece makes it endlessly re-readable.

“Ulysses” - Joyce’s book is to be savoured for the wonderful use of language. Every chapter explores a different style. It is a celebration of the everyday and all of life in one day, with Bloom notably attending a funeral and visiting the maternity ward as he navigates Dublin in a modern version of the Odyssey before returning home to Molly.

“100 Years of solitude” - is the great work of magical realism but at the same time it is a distillation of all that is Latin America. Garcia Marquez enthusiastically lets his baroque imagination run riot in a way that is totally engrossing. I love the way the plot finally works out.

“Heart of darkness” - all right, I know this is too short, but it is Conrad’s best and most powerful book, a tale of the sordidness of empire and the futility of some of man’s endeavours.

“1984” - is the greatest novel of science and political fiction, a truly prescient work, whose invention is now so familiar that we too easily take it for granted.

“Lady Chatterley’s lover” - is a much maligned book and is far from being just about sex. I think it’s Lawrence’s best novel as it covers efficiently and directly his favourite themes of the suffocating and dehumanizing nature of modern industrialized society and how it may be possible for the individual to rebel against it.

“Mayor of Caterbridge” - the opening scene where Henchard sells his wife, thereby triggering the whole story, has to be one of the most striking in any novel. The plot is beautifully worked out with a tragic logic in the true sense of the word that it all stems from the hero’s flaws.

“Master and Margarita” - describes a surreal visitation of the Devil to Bulgakov’s contemporary Stalinist Moscow alternating this with a realistic account of what may have been the last days of Christ. It is original, funny and profound.

I’m not making any claim here for this being a list of the greatest works of prose fiction, they are just my personal favourites which given time I would actually read a third time (if I haven’t done so already).

About Mme Jacobs

Madame Jacobs died this week.
She had been working for us for over twenty years.

Jacqueline Hennebert was born in 1928 in Beaumont, a small town in the Belgian Ardennes. During World War II the large family was evacuated for a time to the South of France, but they made their way back as it was easier to find food and work in the rural Belgium they knew. Already at 14 she had a job in a factory. Later, after the war, she came to work in Brussels. She started living with the older Pierre Jacobs whose wife had run away. They helped run the Jacobs family small laundry business together, in the days when the well-to-do would still pay for the service of having their dirty washing collected and brought back clean and ironed. They had two children, Michelle and Jean-Marie. The first was born before they could marry as in those days it was dificult to obtain a divorce. She came in for some unpleasantness on that count which she much resented.
She also worked looking after other people's children and cleaning.
Pierre died in 1979 leaving Mme Jacobs a young widow. Although she had a small widow's pension she preferred to remain active, doing laundry on a smaller scale, child-minding and also for a time managing the stock of a toy importer.

One of the people she worked for was Clara's landlady, on whose recommendation she began to clean for Clara in 1981.
When Clara moved in with me to my rented flat in 1986 one of her conditions was that Mme Jacobs would continue to clean for us. I was initially reluctant as I had always cleaned for myself. However, when I learned that Mme Jacobs would also be doing the ironing, a chore I particularly loathed, this seemed like a good proposition. I was at once pleased with the professional results so there was no looking back.
In 1989 Clara was pregnant and we bought a house of our own in which to start our family life. We were going to need someone to look after the future children once Clara had returned to work. Given our irregular working hours it had to be someone reliable who could be available at all times and who preferably could also do the cleaning of the much bigger house when the children were asleep or, later on, before fetching them from school. However, we didn't really want someone to live in. Mme Jacobs was the perfect choice. She had recently lost some of her regular customers and so was more than pleased to take up the offer of full time employment with us on a regular wage. She helped a lot with the move and setting up home in the new house as I was convalescing from hepatitis at the time and could not do much myself.

So she became very much part of the family in our new house in Ixelles. She was the children's nanny or 'nounou', a constant presence for them and who would become a grandmother figure to them as their real grandparents were too far away to be seen often. She was the one who provided the French speaking part of their upbringing alongside our Italian and English, and satisfied their needs when we could not be there. Julia and Thomas developed a deep affection for her and they in turn were the grandchildren she for so long never had, as Michelle could not have children and Jean-Marie had his very late.

As the years went by and the children needed her less and she became well past the retirement age of most people and gradually frailer, she still wanted to continue coming to work in our home. To a certain extent she needed the money, not so much for herself as for her entourage (of which more later) for who she paid for things she denied herself; but also I think she could not conceive of an idle life for herself and she enjoyed seeing our family and being in the atmosphere of what had become her other home. She used to like coming round to enjoy our garden during our long summer absences.
So there was a tacit agreement that she could continue as long as she felt she could and wanted to.
We took on Nadia, an Algerian lady who was one of Mme Jacobs' many protégés to do the heavier chores, reducing Mme Jacobs' duties to washing and ironing, cooking the odd meal, sewing and other lighter tasks. The transitional process was not easy as Mme Jacobs had become used to organizing all the housework and being in charge. In the end we arranged to have them come at different times to avoid disputes and they became once more on good terms with each other during the shorter periods they coincided. We had never imagined we would have to resolve problems managing our 'staff', but I suppose that is one inevitable aspect of job creation.
By this year she would come three days a week from 11 till 4 and one from 1 till 4. The last time she came was in late September. On our way to Italy with Julia to start her year in Pavia, we dropped her off at Jean-Marie's in the Ardennes as her second grandchild was about to be born. She returned to Brussels ten days later not to her home but to hospital. Old age had finally caught up with her and her body was failing her. Still her end came unexpectedly quickly. We had always thought she would spend her life working till the end, as that was her nature and so it was.

Mme Jacobs had a larger than life personality and (until her last year) a large body to go with it. She had a powerful voice and a strong Walloon accent, she was in a way still the country girl come to the big city. She liked to talk and It was not always easy to get a word in edgeways. She was one of life's optimists and would laugh off difficulties, having seen worse in her time.
For us she came to epitomize Belgium and things Belgian, we certainly enjoyed her Belgian culinary classics such as 'carbonnades', 'chicons braisés' and cakes. She was our finger on the pulse of contemporary Belgian life. She had an abiding suspicion of the Flemings but was unconditionally proud of any Belgian achievement whether by Walloon or Fleming.

She continued to live in the large house in Etterbeek which had once housed the laundry. She kept the first floor to herself. On the ground floor lived her daughter with Mario, her Angolan husband and his much younger brother, Ninho, who acted as a substitute son for the childless marriage. Further up lived a series of tenants, likely as not hard-luck-story foreigners not actually paying rent but enjoying her generous protection. For a time she was also involved in active work for NGO's that looked after foreigners. It's perhaps not surprising that Michelle works for the Petit Château refugee centre and Jean-Marie also married an African. There were always lots of people about in the big house. She would tell horror stories about Mario, true to the classic role of mother-in-law, but was very fond of Amina who was mother of her grand-daughter. We were always kept up to date of recent developments in her family and house. I assume that in turn we were the subject of conversation over the meals which she continued to cook for Michelle and family.

We sometimes felt her good nature and generosity led her to be exploited by those around her, but she didn't see it that way. We thought she should take more time for herself to rest, but she liked to be occupied. For years she would spend her Sundays often in miserable weather selling things from her stall at jumble sale style 'brocantes' to make a bit of money on the side for the family.
For Mme Jacobs it was normal to work hard to help others, which is really what she did right to the end of her life, until her body could take it no more.

She will be missed, especially by Julia and Thomas.
Adieu Nounou.

About politics

Bertrand Russell in his essay “In praise of idleness” schematized the economic organization of society in the following way. There is always a certain amount of real work to be done; it involves changing the position of matter in relation to the earth’s surface. This is what the real workers do. Then there is a whole category of people who plan the work, tell the workers what to do and keep records of it. Sometimes there is a difference of opinion as to what to tell the real workers to do, so a third category of people argue as to whether objets should be moved from A to B or B to A: this is called politics.

Politics is how decisions are reached on the allocation of limited resources within a society and therefore affects us all whether we know it or not, whether we like it or not. Politics should then rightly be of interest to everyone living in a society That it is not always of interest to many has to do with how it is conducted in our modern Western so-called democracies.

I myself as a teenager was not particulalrly interested in politics, which is only natural as I was well catered for and didn’t have to fend for myself. I first became seriously interested in politics as a student when living in Germany (1979-80) as it seemed to be a major social activity amongst the staff of the school I was working in. You weren’t really going to get to know anyone if you weren’t interested in politics. This was because the school, which had been in existence for 10 years, was still officially an experimental comprehensive school (Gesamtschule) to which teachers within the state system were only assigned if they asked to be. So to a man and a woman they were all believers in this great social experiment and all motivated and militant. They were “Alternative”, convinced that personal behaviour could set an example for change. The very idea that change in society might be possible and desirable was something new and exciting to me at the time, I admittedly had not given it that much thought before having been fairly comfortable as I was and surrounded by people in much the same situation.
So as I had plenty of time on my hands I engaged in endless discussions with them and joined them on various demonstrations, against nuclear power (“Atomkraft, nein danke”), unsavoury right-wing candidates for Chancellor (“Stoppt Strauss”) and the like.

A big demonstration is real people politics in action. Being in a big crowd with a shared purpose is an atavistic human experience that is quite uplifting. Demonstrations are ignored by those in power at their peril.
More recently I went on the big anti Iraq war march on a bright but very cold February morning in Brussels where the atmosphere was committed but peaceful in a positive way. On Iraq the views of the people were of course ignored by those in power, but we can now feel ourselves vindicated by how things inevitably turned out and those responsible have been rightly consigned to the dustbin of history.

For it is axiomatic that as Lincoln said, “You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time”. It can take a very long time, but in the end, as happened in Eastern Europe twenty years ago, there is a limit to the amount of wrong and injustice that people are prepared to put up with. I believe that ruling against the will of the people is unsustainable. The advantage of a democracy is that in principle change can come peacefully through the ballot box and will not require violent revolution.

I feel quite strongly about having the vote. I say that because as a United Kingdom citizen who has been living abroad for over twenty years, I am now disenfranchized. Those who fought for American Independence had a point with their claim of “no taxation without representation” (you see we’re back to politics being about the allocation of resources), so you could argue conversely that as I don’t pay tax in the UK, I shouldn’t get to vote there; but then again, I don’t think anyone would argue for disenfranchizing the unemployed or any other category in society who in net terms pay no tax. On the contrary, the vote is a fundamental right for the national of any country and the undemocratic UK is about the only country I’m aware of, certainly in the EU, that denies its expatriates the vote. I’m not saying I have a burning desire to vote for either of the two main parties right now, but it’s the principle that counts and I am after all still a citizen of the country, so I feel I should have a say (however small) in how it is run.

Fortunately, thanks to the European Union, as an EU national resident in Belgium, I can vote in the Belgian local elections and for Belgian members of the European Parliament.
When the right to vote came in about ten years ago I was keen to take it up. My borough, Ixelles, had for a long time had a centre right led coaltion, but partly thanks to the advent of many newly enfranchized EU ex-pat resident (and tax paying) voters it changed to Socialist/Green which has brought about many tangible environmental improvements for example in terms of public green spaces and bicycle-friendliness.
Local politics, because it is closer to the citizens, is doubtless open to more direct influence and has more obvious effects on our daily lives.
I know a lot of EU foreign residents, however, who have not taken up the vote in Belgium. That’s partly because they dislike the idea of voting being compulsory. Yet the notion that some people find having to vote might interfere with their Sunday must appear abhorrent to those in Africa who are prepared to queue for hours to vote because they finally have the opportunity to do so. I think compulsory voting should be the case everywhere as part of the package of a citizen’s rights and obligations (you have to pay your taxes after all). Don’t get me wrong, you’re not compelled to vote for any party, you can go along and register a blank vote as not being content with anything on offer. At least that way you have particiapted. But if you do have any sense you will also have voted one way or another as it is your opportunity to have some influence in the shaping of society.

Voter apathy is the scourge of democracy. It represents the failure to grasp that politics is relevant to everyone who lives in a society. Apathy is, however, wholly understandable because in its practised form, politics, as in parliaments and governments, to many does not appear to deliver the desired outcomes they voted for, so they think “why bother?” Change in a peaceful civilized society can only really be delivered at a glacial pace as it has to be consensual within the context of limited resources and vested interests. But change does happen, and on a major scale, as you will realize merely by looking back over the decades. It happens largely because of the impact of bigger external events which, in what is already a globalized economy but not yet a globalized polity, seem to elude the control of government. However, change also happens because of the persistence of those in government. So elections do matter and though change does not appear to occur in our lives from day to day, it does over time largely because of the maintenance of pressure, including ultimately from voters. Not to vote, then, is to be short-sighted and impatient. In an imperfect world, to vote is the best tool Joe public has to achieve a better world.

Of course a major reason for voter apathy is the politicians themselves.
e.e.cummings neatly expressed the general disgust that “a politician is an arse on which everyone has sat except a man”
Although you and I may argue about politics till the cows come home on the abstract basis of what policies might solve all the world’s woes, in practice, we are stuck with politicians, if policies are ever going to be delivered on. (And so, therefore, realistically, probably not in the near future).

Alongside the more noble Aristotelian definition of “politics”, that is originally how to govern the “polis”, the city state, which I have been using in this discusion so far, politics has come to mean the much dirtier business of politicking and how individual politicians jostle for power. As in “So and so said such and such, but it’s all politics”, it has nothing to do with who believes what but rather with who wants the job. Politics in this sense has little to do with ideas, let alone ideals and everything to do with personalities.
Indeed many voters too are far more swayed by the personality of politicians than by their policies. The media of course feed on this.

For too many politicians the ideas are just hooks on which to hang personal ambition and thirst for power.
This is not new: politics has always existed in this sense, ever since men have competed for each other’s attention and the right to speak on behalf of others in order to defend collective interests. Modern politics is just the latest version of this ancient struggle for leadership. Here the old adage applies that some are born to greatness (there are still plenty of political dynsaties about) some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them.

In the course of my work as an interpreter for the European institutions I have seen an awful lot of politicians at close quarters. However much you may dislike individual politicians, possibly for their beliefs but quite probably just for their characters, you have to recognize that the capable ones would not be where they are if they were not in some way able to appeal, at least initially, to their fellow citizens so as to put their trust in them. They have what people call “charisma”, for want of a better word. In the end these men and women know how to network and how to speak in public to convince. While it is true that modern politics is a media circus in which debate has become reductive in order to accomodate it to the small screen and the small attention span of the sound bite, in the longer run, the politicians who make it to the top and manage to stay there really do have an ability to engage with an audience and to sustain discourse that transcends the poverty and paucity of what often passes for political debate on television, or the vacuity of formal statements required on certain occasions. President Obama has set a great example for the importance of a set piece speech that takes the time to set out policy while remaining inspiring.

Some politicians are of course drawn into politics as a vocation because they are idealists fighting for a cause. I think Obama falls into this category. Others enter politics for utterly selfish reasons even before having the opportunity of being corrupted by power. I think Berlusconi is a clear case here. At an iconographic level in 2009 these two represent the opposite extremes of what makes a politician. In between Obama and Berlusconi there are politicians of every shade, character, motivation and belief. But make no mistake, nobody would be successful in politics without an inflated ego and an ability to charm.
Although there are some altruistic and idealistic ones, it is the majority of self-interested politicians that give the profession its bad name in the public mind. Sadly in these days it really is a profession, a full-time job which people train for (by taking politics and law degrees) and commit to a party machine to succeed in, rather than engage in as a calling that is an adjunct to some other more honourable profession. In some countries, like Italy, being a politician is so highly paid, counting all the fringe benefits, that money is a major reason for being in politics in the first place. Small wonder some people don’t feel like voting for any of them.

Politicians in power of course change over time. We like to think that they at least start as idealists with a cause, enjoying huge public support; but they gradually become too accustomed to power, taking their support for granted while having to compromise more and more with the constraints of the real world; and finally they succumb to the desire to stay in power rather than to do what’s right and in some cases even to the temptation to feather their own nests rather than defend the interests of those who put them there.
By then it is clearly time for a change. If a week is a long time in politics, a term can seem an eternity. At least in a democracy politicians can be voted out of office (or removed by internal putsch when their party feels they will cost them the next election). This is good, there is no point in having the vote if you can’t change your mind and try somebody else.
In fact, there seems to be a limited freshness to politicians in power and they are better changed regularly. The man I admire today, I may well despise tomorrow; Blair has been a case in point.
Still politicians are a necessary evil in politics and there are some I continue to admire and would be ready to vote for - but not to stay in power forever.

The same is true of course of political parties. Let me also say in passing that I dislike the list based electoral system that enables party hacks to be elected without being answerable to any clear constituency. It’s a fine moment in British politics when the local independent defeats the unknown central office nominee in a “safe” seat.
However, in a world where politics is the “art of the possible”, parties, like politicians themselves, are a necessary evil; although the fewer the better if you are going to get anywhere. The history of government by coalition of small parties is not good: it’s one of sharing out the cake rather than building meaningful consensus.
A party is a bit like an organized religion: any thinking man is going to find it hard to accept the entire manifesto. At least in a proper democracy there is room for dissent and debate within a party and an opportunity to change your allegiance if you disgree with too much of the programme.

So what are my own politics ?

Over the years, as is natural in most people, mine have drfited towards the right. I say it is is only natural, as young people tend to be idealistic until their experience of life teaches them what motivates their fellow humans and what they are therefore likely to accept in order to live together peacefully. Also politics is about protecting what you have: the young impoverished student owns nothing and has everything to gain; whereas the middle-aged man has over the years through hard work accumulated much that he is loathe to give away.
Deep down though an individual’s politics are informed by how one sees man and society.

I believe that man is governed by enlightened self-interest, but not as some would have it, solely by the profit motive and that he is by natural disposition at least as co-operative as he is competitive. Life and society cannot be reduced to brute economics, human experience is broader and we should be governed accordingly in an inclusive manner. Even the die-hard capitalist needs to understand that he is not going to make money without a healthy, well educated, socially contented workforce that has sufficient money in its pockets to spend on consuming what he produces.

I would regard myself as centre left on most economic and social issues as I suppose would befit a member of the chattering classes, yet without being a drawing room socialist. I believe that there is an important role for the state in providing everyone with those universal reliable services of good quality which are in the public interest (health care, education, sanitation, water, power, communications, transport, public security - to name the most obvious) and that people should contribute towards them according to their means. Otherwise there is no point in living together in a society. The idea that the free market can somehow deliver these is absolute twaddle, dogma that is manifestly not borne out by reality. Over history provision of public services by the state, through innovation or nationalization, has marked real social progress. Most of the recent exercises in privatization have been to the advantage of a minority and to the detriment of the majority. Subsequently many services have had to be rescued in some way by the state, often at great expense (ultimately to the taxpayer). So why not just keep them in the public hand to begin with, as they are too important to be left to chance.

Likewise major infrastructure projects in the public interest are unlikely to get off the ground without significant funding from the state as the private sector’s interest in immediate profit is too short-sighted. On both counts I have a sneaking admiration for the French model that proudly ignores the Anglo-Saxon way. France has maintained a strong state in order to unify a vast and often rural territory to the benefit of all its citizens. Notably France was the first country to build a high speed railway network. Sarkozy, though he wishes to modernize his country, is not about to diminish the role of the state: witness his idea of raising a very large loan to boost the economy. Keynes is not dead: In the present financial and economic crisis the state has been called to the rescue. The state, and therefore we as taxpayers, must foot the bill for that huge cash injection for generations to come, so it is not inappropriate that regulation should now be set in place so as to avoid in the future excesses of what basically is plain old greed on the part of a few that got the many of us into the mess we’re in now.

When it comes to law and order, I find my views are much more right-wing. While poverty, deprivation and marginalization can explain crime they offer no justification for it. People have a free will and must assume responsibility for their actions. That after all is the principle on which our justice systems are based. A society that tolerates crime and is indulgent towards criminals does itself no favours. They should be seen to be punished to act as a deterrent to others.

Actually, it is not unusual for what are conventionally held to be left-wing or right-wing views to cohabit in the same invidual. Political correctness is an obstacle to freedom of thought and expression and to real political debate. It is always refreshing to hear an intelligent politician speak his mind. It nearly always turns out that the truth of a situation is far more complex than can be expressed in vote-winning political slogans. Real problems in society cannot be addressed without being frank about their real causes. A proper political debate about policy that takes into account the complexity of a situation and the finely balanced opposing interests behind it is genuinely stimulating, enjoyable and essential. More time needs to be taken to hold it so that people become as interested in politics as they should be for the general good of society.

About summer

Summer is a time to relax.

Summer offcially lasts from late June to late September but I can’t help associating it in my mind with my long summer holidays which last from mid July to the end of August. I am fortunate enough to be able to take a month of unpaid leave and with my regular two weeks of annual leave on top of that I stop working for six and a half weeks in the summer. This long period of leisure is for me the characteristic feel of summer. This soon disappears once I get back into the swing of things in September, even if in a lucky year there may still be plenty of fine weather yet.

Over the summer I slow down to a different routine and find plenty of time to exercise, walking, cycling and swimming. With the long days and warmth, summer is the time for living outside, for getting closer to nature. There’s time too just to sit and contemplate, even get the water-colours out for a sketch to absorb the scene.
With the heat and the freedom the siesta also becomes a regular feature of the day as the healthy urge to sleep off lunch need no longer be disobeyed.

I don’t miss work. I’m not short of things to do. In fact during a good summer I don’t get round to reading half the books I take with me.

Summer is the time for summer clothes, not having to wear a tie, living in shorts, wearing sandals, feeling light.

Most of our summers follow a similar pattern, some time in the Alps, some in my wife’s home town in Italy and some time by the sea. Summer also means a long time away from home then, with the necessary changes to habit which that brings.

Summer is a special time in the mountains when the snow is at its least extent making it possible to climb many peaks merely by following paths. The flowers are in profusion, the weather relatively clement and the vistas smiling. Gera in the Dolomites is our usual stomping ground (see “About mountains”). It is a simple place at once beautiful and peaceful where my body and mind immediately feel at ease. Somehow familiarity doesn’t breed a blasé feeling but one of receptive appreciation.

Summer is also the time of year when it becomes possible to swim in the sea for a long time and it is not unusual for me to stay in the water for up to an hour.
Our destination of choice for enjoying crystal clear warm water over recent years has been the Croatian coast and in particular the island of Hvar (see “About the seaside”).

The downside of spending the summer in the South of Europe, though, is that it actually gets too hot. August in Monfalcone can be insufferable. In principle it would be great to get up really early and do things before the temperature gets back above 30°, around 10 am. Only in practice, having gone to bed late, because finally the cool of the evening offers pleasant relief to be enjoyed to the most, and then having nonetheless slept badly through the night as it is too hot, getting up early becomes difficult. There are days when merely sitting still I start to sweat. I am left gasping waiting for the next dip in the sea or the arrival of a cooling thunderstorm - oh the joy of rain! This heat tends to sap away my desire to do anything. In practice the hours of 12 to 4 pm have to be written off, spent in the shade and siesta. Some say that in countries like England the rain prevents you from doing certain outdoor activities, well the same is true for me of the sun in the South. I feel a certain frustration at losing a large chunk out of every day. Blue skies and soaring temperatures are much over-rated in my opinion. As an escape an outing to the Julian Alps offers a nice alternative to periodically jumping in the sea.
I keep saying I should spend more of the summer in the Notrth and perhaps next year I will, I certainly enjoyed my brief and, yes, wet spell in Scotland this year.

But wherever I spend it, as long as it continues to be long, summer will be the special time to recharge my batteries and rediscover myself, above all to live a more outdoor and less hurried life. Every season has its charms but summer, perhaps for the change in routine it brings, more than others.

About rock concerts

When you go to a classical music concert, you know what you are going to get. You know from the programme what pieces are going to be played. If it’s a piece you’re familiar with from a recording you will hear all the same notes, as the whole point is that the composer wrote them all down for the performers to play them all back to you. You know what the instruments will sound like, as their sound reaches you directly without having to be amplified and mixed. Performances do actually differ at the margins on points of interpretation, intonation, timing etc. In the main you get the music you expected only it sounds better than on the recording because it is fuller in the flesh and certainly with an orchestra you hear more detail.

When you go to a rock concert, you don’t know what you wil get. You’re gambling on the set-list being a reasonable choice of material you’re going to recognize. Then you don’t know what version it will be served up in, even if you do know it. I appreciate that with studio multi-track recording techniques often quite simply there are not enough musicians on stage to reproduce all the sounds you’re familiar with from the recorded version. Let me reassure you: I am quite happy to enjoy a simplified, indeed different version of a song that still gives you its essence with perhaps a few good solos added. Indeed, a degree of improvisation and spontaneity is the soul of this kind of music. Sadly though, to be frank, the musicianship of some bands is rather aproximative, the ability of certain stars actually to sing in tune limited and the sound engineers’ idea of what is a balanced mix frequently deficient, with the interesting instruments and voices drowned out by over-miked drum-kits.

Musically then, a rock concert is a bit of a pig in a poke, and often a very expensive one. Incidentally, quite why it shoud cost more to see a handful of musicians in a huge crowd than to see a hundred playing a symphony to a smaller audience has always mystified me. Maybe the electricity bill is big; or maybe some of these guys are just overpaid for what they actually do. I suppose in the end, it’s all about supply and demand and what the punters are ready to pay for. I have read that in this age of cheap or (illegally) free downloads of music off the internet, rock musicians now have to make their real money by touring. That can only be good news, as music is really about performing not recording. However, I suspect that most people go to a concert because they like the recorded music, not because they know the band plays well live.

I guess the reason I continue to go occasionally to big rock concerts is curiosity to see what the great and good are up to live: can they (still) cut it ? Ultimately it’s worth it because I believe that live music has always got something over recorded music: you go for the excitement of the direct human contact, albeit mediated by huge amplification systems and, in the worst extreme of stadium concerts, cinema size TV screens, but you’re still participating in a transient shared event, and that is an essential dimension to music that you ignore at your peril. It’s the encouragement of the audience that makes the musicians want to play better and put more into their music, which in turn leads the appreciative crowd to encourage them more, and so on in a virtuous circle So it may be rough and ready, but it grabs you and thrills you. However, if it is rough and ready and doesn’t actually move you, then it makes for a pretty boring evening, where the only plus point is the kudos of being able to say “yeah, I saw so and so the other night”.

We went to see Bob Dylan the other week.  It must be thirty years since I saw him last.  We were somewhat disappointed, not least because of the sound mix.  I go to a Dylan concert to listen to the words, and if I can't hear them that rather diminishes the experience, because to be honest instrumentally there are better rock bands out there.  Still one goes to pay homage to the great man, and I suppose at his age, pace Johnson, it's not that he does it well but that he does it at all.  
Having said that, two years ago, at the first night of their tour concert at Werchter, I thought the Rolling Stones really rocked, and last year Paul Simon produced a really entertaining evening, whereas old Bob was strictly average.  So we played spot the song, and without the benefits of the occasionally recognizable lyrics we certainly wouldn’t have realized it was "It's all over now Baby Blue" or "Blowing in the wind" from the tune (?) actually you get the melody more from the harmonica than the voice.  I guess I'm not helped by being unfamiliar with his more recent material.  Still if I could have made out the words I might have warmed to it.  Interestingly enough he did four songs from "Highway 61" which in a way I personally regard as his best album.

So whose concerts have I rated over the years?

The first rock concert I went to was by Pink Floyd in about 1974. It was in a theatre in Liverpool and I had to persuade my parents to drive me there and back. In a first set they played previously unheard work-in-progress that would eventually emerge on “Animals”, in a second set all of “Dark Side of the Moon” with accompanying images and in an encore the whole of “Echoes” which in many ways is my favourite piece by them and in which they ingeniously used Dick Parry’s saxophone to do one of the solos which is done on the record by double tracking the guitar. It was generous and good and in the first set was still in keeping with their early method of working out pieces live before recording them.

In the sixth form I often went to see bands at Leeds University Students’ Union and remember enjoying the Electric Light Orchestra complete with electric violins.
I’m not sure if it counts strictly as a rock concert , but the best concert I saw as a student in Oxford was by Weather Report, which featured several quite outstanding jazz musicians (Joe Zawinul, Wayne Shorter, Jaco Pastorius) playing accessible music you could bop to.
During my year off in Germany I managed to see Bob Marley in a large hall in Dortmund: a really feel good concert, where given the amount of weed being smoked even passive smokers were high.
In Cologne I saw an amazing doube bill of Santana and then Frank Zappa. Santana was a bit hit and miss, whereas Zappa was immensely professional as a musician; his band was so tight. But he did a cruel thing: he got his band to play a typical Santana two chord riff and then parodied a Santana solo before doing his own take on it which just blew Santana away. For all his quirky sense of humour, Zappa was an incredibly good guitarist and a total musician.

As my interest in music turned more to classical music, I didn’t go to any rock concerts by famous names for years. It was when Julia and Thomas were teenagers and needed accompanying/driving to them that I started to go again.
The thing that struck me most was that in 25 years or so nothing had really changed. The essence was still lead and rhythm guitar, bass and drums playing in 4/4 rhythm very loud with distortion through variations on the twelve bar blues. I think we can speak of an art form which has as many conventions as classical sonata form or Indian ragas. So I actually found a lot of what they wanted to go and listen to perfectly accessible and, as always, found that some bands played really well live while others were rather average.
The one act I saw twice with them that I would really rate is the Red Hot Chilli Peppers. They are mainly in their 40’s with a lot of experience and are very good musicians. They record their music in a fairly simple way which transfers well to live performance, and they play well live, so you really get good rock stripped down to its essence.

In many ways, as rock (however we define the contemporary popular music of the West) is a relatively simple form of music that can be mastered easily by amateurs, many of the most enjoyable rock concerts I have been to have been by unknown bands in bars. Being close up to musicians who play well and are clearly enjoying themselves and generating energy that you want to get up and move to, is really what it’s all about. In this way, over recent years I have always enjoyed the concerts given by my friend Alex and his band About Time Two.
This kind of rock concert is a direct, pretension-free, low-expectation but high-satisfaction happening that probably will never be repeated: a far cry from the experience at a distance which is the famous band in a stadium circus that so often disappoints. I should also mention here the three gigs given by my children’s now defunct band, Mostly Harmless.
I often find that non-commercial rock music for fun is just more rewarding as a musical and human experience.

Having said that, we really enjoyed a great entertaining evening of music by Crosby, Stills and Nash this week. Yet another outing of past it sixty-year-olds you may have thought, but no actually it was an unpretentious concert by experienced professional musicians. We were fairly close to the stage and didn’t need binoculars to see them. The sound mix was ideal: you could hear first and foremost the voices and guitars of the three, with the backing musicians precisely that - discreet in the background. They played two sets in the old way, with a proper break for a beer and a pee in the middle. The first set was more acoustic, the second more electric. Their harmony singing is still exquisite and guitar playing excellent. There were plenty of familiar songs including some by others (eg “Ruby Tueday”), and the audience was even invited to join in (eg on “Teach your children”). There was constant variety in pace and instrumentation that kept you interested. After all, big name rock concerts can be good in the right circumstances.

In short this is all you want from a rock concert: good live music in a good atmosphere.

ps 18.12.2009

I saw Paul McCartney last week. He was on stage for two and a half hours with a small tight band who played well and could all sing harmony. He played 35 songs, 22 of which were old Beatles numbers. I guess that's the closest you can get to hearing the Beatles live these days, and let's not forget that they never performed their late material live. So I must admit that hearing McCartney sing these songs that I know and love so well (partly from playing them myself) was a really moving experience for me.

About Vietnam

I have recently returned from a trip for work (and pleasure) to Vietnam and Cambodia. I have been to South East Asia before but this was my first time in these two countries.
I shall write this time about Vietnam, where I spent eight days.

I was working in the capital, Hanoi and apart from there visited only one other place, the ravishingly beautiful natural site of Halong Bay. As I did not have too much free time, it was a deliberate decision of mine to concentrate on only these two places. As I get older I prefer to dawdle and soak up impressions rather than to rush around: quality rather than quantity. My visit fell into three parts: a pure tourist visiting one of the most popular locations in the country for three days; a visiting teacher training young Vietnamese interpreters and in turn being their guest for three days; and a visiting official come to interpret at a high level international meeting for two days.

In such a short time I wouldn’t claim to have won any deep insights into the country, but would like to share with you some initial impressions.

Halong Bay is quite simply one of the great natural wonders of the world. Hundreds of Karst limestone small islands jut up out of the calm waters of the bay, covered in lush vegetation, worn away into strange shapes, providing constantly changing scenery as you cruise among them, in all their myriad colours of grey, sometimes black stained rock, the many shades of the greenery creeping over them, the turquoise sea, the never ending receeding fading green-blue silhouettes of distant islets, while In amongst small fishing boats are rowed by locals in conical hats. You couldn’t devise anything more picturesque.
As this is what everyone wants to see, the tourist industry has geared up to meet the demand so there are numerous boats, some quite luxurious, to take the punters cruising; and let’s face it, it’s the only way you’re going to get to see something. When I was there it was low season so many boats were moored up, but I could imagine it getting very busy. I opted for an up-market “junk” with twenty-eight berths, though not all full, operated by Indochina Sails and I found myself in good company and well looked after by a very pleasant and efficient crew. The whole operation ran like clockwork without seeming rushed.

On the middle day, as I had chosen the longer two nights aboard option, just three of us transfered to a smaller boat from which we were later able to do some kayaking. This was for me the highlight as we slipped away from the chugging of the engines and were able to paddle through caves into hidden lagoons, over which echoed birdsong and shrieks of monkeys. It was quite majestic. There are also plenty of caves with stalactite formations, though the smaller ones you explore with a torch in hand squeezing through narrow passages are more exciting. than the larger floodlit ones.

Quite a few fishing families live in the bay, not on the islands but in floating villages, one of which we visited as locals rowed up offering us sea-shells for sale. Our guide was keen to show us a floating school, to demonstrate that the villagers were being well treated by the government. Ho Chi Minh smiled out from over the blackboard.

With all the tourists and boats there are some parts of the bay where the water has washed floating rubbish together in an unseemly reminder that man has the capacity to mar any earthly paradise. The Vietnamese need to be careful that over-exploitation doesn’t spoil this world heritage site. One of my students in Hanoi also remarked that twenty years ago it was much quieter and the water was much cleaner. I didn’t go in the sea to swim nearly as much as I would elsewhere - there were also some mean looking small jellyfish. So instead I sat on the deck admiring and painting the scenery.

It’s a three hour white-knuckle minibus ride back to Hanoi from Halong Bay. I’m not surprised that it’s illegal for foreigners to rent a car in Vietnam: I certainly couldn’t cope. On the two lane main road, there are push-bikes and motor-bikes everywhere on both sides in both directions and slow moving lorries are overtaken in the face of oncoming traffic in a game of brinkmanship . It’s better to look out of the side window at the passing paddy fields worked by hand, with Asian cows and buffalo standing around.

And so I returned to Hanoi which I had left early in the morning three days before for the peace of Halong Bay, jet-lagged and without really having seen it on arrival. The capital of Vietnam has officially 3.4 million inhabitants but probably anything up to nearly twice that. It’s a big sprawling bustling modern Asian city.
I had chosen to treat myself to the old French colonial grandeur of the Hotel Metropole which is conveniently located near the central Hoan Kiem lake.
I checked in and then sauntered out, crossing a square pausing to watch some men playing a version of badminton where the shuttlecock is kicked, teenagers practising dance moves to a ghetto-blaster and children playing while their parents chatted on benches. I then wanted to cross over the road to the lakeside.
As a Westerner the first thing that strikes you about Hanoi is the sheer profusion of motorbikes. There are not many private cars, but most people have graduated from push bikes, so that what you have is a sea of countless small motorbikes carrying anything from one to four people and loads of all shapes and sizes. They come in a constant stream; it’s pointless waiting for a break in the traffic: you just have to take your courage in your hands and set off undaunted across the street at a steady predictable pace. Miraculously they see you and avoid you, though it’s a little unnerving at first. In fact the amazing thing in this fluid anarchy is that there appear to be no accidents and no one loses their temper. We in the West could all learn a thing or two from the Vietnamese about how to keep cool in traffic.
After this initial excitement a contemplative sit at the Ngoc Son temple on an island in the lake seemed appropriate, acquainting myself with the omnipresent fragrant “frangipanier” tree which the French brought from the West Indies and watching old men playing Chinese chequers.

Hanoi is actually quite a pleasant city once you get used to the motorbike traffic. There are lots of trees, lakes and parks, with people strolling about, though shops and eateries spilling out onto the pavements sometimes make it difficult to get by.
The old town is quite fascinating. I was initially disappointed at its tattiness and lack of interesting historic architecture, but it more than makes up for that in its liveliness. Every street has its own particular trade and once you get beyond those catering for tourists hunting for souvenirs and cheap clothes, you stumble into a genuine oriental world of thriving enterprise and craftsmanship. I particularly liked the street of lamps at night and by day the street of bamboo canes and ladders, of metal workers with fancy bird-cages aloft, of florists, of dried food shops, to mention but a few as any merchandise you can think of seems to have a dedicated street. This is also the case further out where more modern shops vie with each other selling the same wares side by side all displayed outside - fans, sinks, televisions, shop-window dummies etc.

In the evening I took in the entertaining show at the national water puppet theatre. The beautifully made wooden puppets appear to glide across the surface of a water “stage” and are in fact operated by long underwater poles moved by the puppeteers who stand behind the curtain in the water. A series of short vignettes accompanied by live traditional music illustrate everyday scenes of rural life and legends.

Then in the morning it was time for work. First though I had breakfast across the street as it wasn’t included at the hotel. This took the form of “pho”. “Pho”, or noodle soup, is the national dish and it comes mainly in beef or chicken versions. The taste is in the stock of course and you can put in extra fresh flavourings such as coriander, lemon grass and spring onion. Pho is simple, tasty and nourishing giving you plenty of liquid which you need in the heat: it makes for a great breakfast.
The other ubiquitous dish is “nem” or spring rolls, both fried and fresh with a variety of fillings and sauces to dip in. In Brussels, especially in my neighbourhood, there are a lot of Vietnamese restaurants, but as always once you’re in the country the food is not quite the same. Most of the food I had in Vietnam was simple and enjoyable, but for gourmet treats it was necessary to move up market to more fancy restaurants, which I guess is the same in most countries.

A driver then picked me up to take me to the Vietnamese Diplomatic Academy which is where the new interpreting course is run. The SCIC has in the past trained Vietnamese interpreters in Brussels, but now they have people who have been trained they are running their own course in Hanoi. Since I was going to be working in a meeting in Hanoi and I do quite a bit of teaching in European schools of interpreting, I had been asked to visit the school in Hanoi for two days.
There are eight students on the course, seven women and one man, who has since married one of the women! The students are all civil servants in their twenties who work in various ministries and government offices and are released a few half days a week to attend the course. They then have to do their regular job on top of that. I had at first been taken aback at having to work on the Saturday, but it was the only way they could fit in the extra hours while I was there.
In the end it was a hugely positive experience as they were all hard-working and enthusiastic. It was interesting for me to have to adapt my speech material to make sure it wasn’t too euro-centric and accessible to people from a significantly different cultural background. Of course, I don’t know any Vietnamese, so we mainly worked by sending one student out during the original speech by me in English, who would then come back in to listen to the Vietnamese consecutive interpretation and then put that back into English for my benefit. We could then analyse together with some amusement how far we had come from the original by the second version and what the causes of deviation were. It’s a surprisingly effective way of teaching.

For lunch we walked along to a buffet at a nearby hotel (I declined a ride postillion on the teacher’s motorbike) after which I was in serious need of a coffee.
One thing I hadn’t expected about Vietnam is that you can get a really good cup of coffee there. Vietnam is in fact the world’s second biggest coffee producer after Brazil, though most of it is robusta not arabica. It is served in dinky little aluminium filters over your cup and you wait for it to drip through. The result is a very strong espresso which has a full earthy taste and a kick like a mule.
As for Vietnamese tea, I found it too strong unless drunk iced diluted and unsweetened - when it is very refreshing. The Vietnamese also drink plenty of beer, spelled “bia”, some of which is bottled and some a light draught ale from small breweries called “bia hoi”. It’s made from rice but you wouldn’t know from the taste.
It was after several beers by the lake next to the academy after our final class on the second day, that four of my students decided what they would do with my Sunday.

First I was taken by Trang to the Temple of Literature which is not only Hanoi’s prettiest old monument but actually also a place where locals go of a Sunday. As its name suggests it was not only a temple but as it were Hanoi’s first university from the 11th century where would-be mandarins were schooled in Confucianism. So today it is a place where students go to pray for good luck in their exams and classes of schoolchildren come for end of year ceremonies. It was very busy and there were many activities going on including Chinese caligraphy on red good luck scrolls and demonstrations of traditional music. I was quite fascinated by one instrument, the single string monochord which is played with one hand plucking with a plectrum and the other operating a lever which is like the whammy-bar on a Fender electric guitar varying the tension on the string. The resulting eerie wailing is not dissimilar.
We then met up with Duc who had brought along her six year old son who was interested in many things and especially the big ceremonial bell you could stand inside.
We progressed to near the immaculately kept Ho Chi Minh mausoleum which we merely observed from afar sipping fresh sugar cane juice, and thence at my request to the One Pillar Pagoda, another popular shrine with locals.
We were joined by Vinh and Phuong, the married couple, for fast pho and a welcome cool sit inside.
In the afternoon we went to a silk village some way out of the centre where we looked at some silk-worms and looms before browsing the shops. I was the only foreigner here among Vietnamese shopping for clothes.
It was a lovely day out doing the kinds of things those who live in Hanoi might do on a weekend. It was nice to have the little boy along too; he gave the proceedings a family outing kind of feel. I felt there had been an exchange between us which gave my visit a much deeper human dimension than that of the mere tourist buying a service. By teaching them for two days I had given them something and in return they had shown me something of their city and way of life. Everywhere around us people seemed friendly, relaxed, talkative and to be enjoying the simple pleasures of life on a sunny Sunday.

That evening it was back into official work mode. First I had to transfer out of the centre to the more anonymous Intercontinetal hotel. My three colleagues and I learned at a late evening briefing the good news that we would not have to work until the next afternoon and the bad news that we would be taken early in the morning to sort out our tickets for the onward government charter flight to Phnom Penh, which we discovered we now had to pay for by ourselves. This involved being taken to the Viet Com Bank (!) to make a transfer and on to the Vietnam Airlines office in the centre. At least once that was done I was free to resume strolling around the lake and into the old town, for once during the hours of daylight when the central market was also open.

We were duly ferried in the afternoon to the National Convention Centre along streets lined with police, for once disciplining the unruly motorbikes, so that official motorcades could pass unimpeded. The NCC is a vast recent modern building which due to its size had to be built miles from anywhere. Its scale can only be described as pharaonic, though it is not unattractive. The government here is seeking in classic state socialist mode to impress the visiting foreigner. It certainly is impressive, but also quite impersonal. There was no chance here of getting a good Vietnamese bar coffee. The air-conditioning in the well appointed but windowless office we had been given was positively icy.
This was the stuff of big international meetings: men in suits delivered to enormous out of town AC conference centres in AC limousines from AC 5 star hotels; barely coming into contact with the local weather, let alone the local people. It's all very polite and efficient but as I say quite impersonal.
There was one nice moment when one of the students, Anh, who works for the Foreign Ministry sought me out and we had our picture taken in our smart clothes in the main meeting room standing in front of the 46 flags and the grand inscription "ASEM 9th Foreign Ministers Meeting".
The Asia Europe Meeting brings together the EU countries and all the major Asian countries.
The meeting itself was quite fun as these things go, what with North Korea having tested a nuclear weapon that very morning and Burma having put on trial Aung San Suu Kyi to the general embarrassment of its neighbours.
When it was all over at the press conference on the second day, I was struck by the total absence of any prying questions from the media – a far cry from what we're used to in Europe.
For all its economic vibrancy and contented population, Vietnam remains a single party state. I guess in many ways it is not unlike its huge neighbour China in granting much economic but little political freedom to its people.

The country is clearly dynamic and going places. The Vietnamese seem busy and purposeful, but not aggressive. Things work and run on time, there are no apparent shortages of anything. There are already 84 million Vietnamese and the population is young and growing fast. Vietnam is definitely a member of the South East Asian tigers club and on the way up.
People ask if I noticed any sign of the war. The answer is no: that's all a long time ago, most people were born well after it. You get the impression that it's a peaceful, hard-working country where people are quietly proud of their recent history: they threw out two colonial powers, France and the USA, beating their superior forces by their patience, ingenuity and resorcefulness. The Vietnamese have a certain can-do, stand-alone dignity, glad to help if asked, but not there to beg.

So from this brief visit to the capital and one of their places of great natural beauty, I am left keen to return to Vietnam.
Above all, I am glad to have met and spent time with my young Vietnamese colleagues.

About Tuscany

Tuscany is quintessential Italy.
“And where is there, other than Italy ?” - to quote a friend.

Tuscany is where Italian was born as a language, in the sense that of the many Italian successor dialects to Latin, Tuscan was the one that came to impose itself as standard Italian not least because the great city states were Tuscan.
Dante, the greatest Italian poet was, after all, Tuscan.

Tuscany is perhaps the Italian region with the greatest wealth of historic artistic towns and cities, Florence, Siena, Pisa, Lucca, Arezzo - to mention the most obvious. It also has some of Italy’s most striking landscapes, the beautiful hills often topped with old villages and castles, the characteristic tall cypress trees punctuating the vista, a landscape shaped by man over millenia, yet still with wild wooded areas. Tuscany also boasts excellent food and fine wines such as Chianti or Brunello di Montalcino.
Tuscany deserves its reputation as one of the best regions of Italy to visit.

I first explored Tuscany in the summer of 1977 when, while hitch-hiking, I was fortunate enough to fall in with a young man from Antibes as I was trying to get from Pisa to San Gimignano. He was also there to explore but had wheels in the form of a Renault 4 and he had a tent. As we were both glad of a travelling companion we ended up staying together for five days. This was when with his help I first started to learn some Italian.
You really need a vehicle of your own to make the most of Tuscany and get to some of the places off the beaten track.
Clara and I took my parents on a week’s driving tour of Tuscany over twenty years ago, that time staying one night in San Gimignano in style in a fine hotel on the main square, not to mention also Siena and Bagno Vignoni.

My oldest Italian friend, Umberto Cini, who I did my interpreter training with, is a Tuscan from Livorno.
His sister-in-law runs an agriturismo, that is farm-based holiday rooms and flats with food if required, near Volterra. So this seemed a natural choice for a destination, when my father asked me a couple of years ago to come up with a place for a gîte-style holiday for my parents, brother and sister and partners. The project took some time to come to fruition but was finally realized last week.

The farm at Statiano turned out to be in the deepest and most picturesque countryside. Everything is still lush and green at this time of year with a profusion of wild flowers. The buildings are very tastefully renovated and comfortable while preserving their rustic character. Our host Tina was very helpful with advice on excursions and, when we ate in, the local home-cooking food and the farm’s wine were of high quality, including even wild boar one evening.

Sadly the weather wasn’t up to much, confirming that even in the Mediterranean one should “ne’er cast a clouth before April’s out”. It rained at some point every day except Friday when we could finally do some serious sitting about outside in the sun in the grounds around the house admiring, and in my case painting the views. Even so, with the exception of a planned evening stroll around Volterra where we ended up sheltering in a café from a grim 9°C downpour, the weather didn’t prevent us from getting out and about.

Driving up from Pisa airport on the Saturday we struck lucky at a roadside bar/family restaurant in the countryside which hadn’t really intended to serve any customers but did the eight of us proud at a table parallel to their own family’s with a lunch of local prosciutto, wild boar salami, their own pecorino cheese, pickled wild mushrooms, shell your own fresh beans and other delicacies. This rather set the tone for a week of gastronomic Tuscan eating. After arriving at the farm and sleeping all of this off, we took a walk to explore the immediate vicinity, seeing a wealth of cyclamens and finding porcupine spines, though the animal itself was to elude us all week.

Umberto and Silvia (Tina’s sister) came up from Livorno to see us on the Sunday. Umberto, ever a mine of local information, showed us the nearby hill villages of Micciano and Montegemoli, where another ourstanding lunch was had and we later strolled ourselves around Montecatini VC. In a way being off the tourist track seeing these delightful villages is every bit as satisfying as visiting the more famous, and objectively more beautiful, yet in practice overcrowded Tuscan destinations.

This proved to be the case on Monday when we revisited Volterra (where twenty years ago we had seen the square occupied by colourful flag throwers and thunderous drummers) in the morning and San Gimignano in the afternoon. San Gimignano with its elegant towers is still as pretty as always but it has really got very busy.

So instead on Tuesday we did a bit of a Carducci trail to the 4km long avenue of old cypress trees leading up to Bolgheri and the hill town of Castagneto where it was very quiet and also very wet, so we sheltered in a wine bar to sample some local products. Later down at the coast where we had a light fish lunch in a place overlooking the sea, it stopped raining and we visited Populonia climbing the fortress tower for the view towards Elba and up the coast., before a brief look over the fence at the Etruscan burial mounds down by the sea.

Wednesday saw the younger generation more active on a beautiful 8km walk along the track that mainly follows the ridge from Micciano to Querceto where we had left a vehicle to get us back to the farm. It was easy going with some great views. The highlight was an astonishing encounter with a heavily pregnant semi-wild pig that wandered up the track towards us where we stood stock still for ten minutes, as she approached us, sniffed us and then decided it was safe enough to walk past us.

On Thursday we took quite a long drive to revisit Siena. While just strolling about the large old town is rewarding in itself, as too the experience of a leisurely lunch on a terrace in the glorious PIazza del Campo, some of Siena’s geatest glories are indoors in the many renaissance frescoes in the Palazzo Pubblico, the Cathedral and the Ospedale Santa Maria della Scala.

On the finally warm and sunny Friday the younger ones strolled around the hill village of Libbiano, which while appearing to be a stone’s throw across the valley from Micciano is actually a 12km tortuous drive from it, before doing a three hour walk along the track into the Monterufoli nature reserve, though sadly no wild animals bigger than squirrels were forthcoming this time.

And so all too quickly a varied and enjoyable week in rural Tuscany was at an end, leaving only a desire for more in better weather.

But as with any holiday, what really counted was the company and it was a great experience to have the whole family together for a week in such a pleasant and amicable atmosphere.

About history

History may at first seem a strange subject for “about being here” which seeks to describe and interpret here and now. However, our present is infomed by our past. We are what we were; the sum total of our experience. Regular readers of “about being here” will have noticed how I often give a brief history or biography of my past life in leading up to describe my present one.
Likewise our society is the sum total of its past. To understand where we are today it is helpful to know where we came from. So history is a valuable subject.

I have been prompted to write about history by having just read Graham Swift’s exccellent novel “Waterland”. Its main charcter, Tom Crick, is a history teacher struggling to come to terms with his own past and at the same time puzzling about the very nature of history. One of the root meanings of “history” he says is “an inquiry” (as in “natural history”): we delve into the past seeking explanations. At the same time history as we like it presented is a “story” (the same word etymologically) a narrative that takes us from A to B. History is one way of satisfying our craving for stories - and what happened next?
In Alan Bennett’s “History Boys” there is a memorable moment in a mock Oxbridge entrance interview where the student is asked “What is history?” and gives the answer of unintended profundity: “It’s just one f***ing thing after another”.

All history is related with the benefit of hindsight and from the point of view of the victor or survivor. Today, for example, post cold war, the narrative of the Western world describes Communism as a failed experiment. All societies devise their own more or less official history to explain why they are where they are and to justify themselves, looking backwards from a very specific point in time. So the Communist sates’ history described in Marxist terms how human progress inevitably led to their ideal society. Often societies then indeed prescribe the teaching of that history to their schoolchildren so that they will fit into that society. Even if in our “western democratic society” the teaching of history is less prescriptive, it still embodies a consensual view of our present society’s interpretation and explanation of its origins.

History is by its very nature selective. The historian selects the facts that best explain where he is now. E.H. Carr’s “What is history?” is very good on what is a historical fact. Every day there are countless events but only some will later turn out to have had relevance in deciding the future. Obviously, our own lives are just the same, at one and the same time routine and utterly chaotic, it is only many years down the line that we can attribute importance to an event: I met so-and-so, who later became my wife, as opposed to I met so-and-so whom I never saw again. A logical order is only read into what happened afterwards. Our own invented biography and society’s invented history represent an attempt to make something meaningful out of life. The exercise is at once artificial and reassuring. Above all it tells the story which we like to hear.

History was my third subject at A-level at school. Actually I had wanted to do Art, for which I like to think I have a certain flair, but it was deemed to be not academic enough for a boy aiming to get into Oxford. At our first A-level lesson our teacher, Mr Kilty (who was later to appear on Mastermind on the TV, special subject hagiography), gave us the good news that “history is a slog subject”. There would be mountains of books to read. And so it turned out: I think I spent the same amount of time working on history as on French and German put together. In class we were given the factual outline and then encouraged to read widely. We soon found out that different historians had different views, explanations and interpretations of the same facts. Some of their names I can still remember: A.J.P. Taylor, E. Hobsbawm, E. Thompson, J.H. Plumb,, A. Cobham, R. Blake, to name a few. It was a good education because we were taught to analyse, compare and take what was useful to write an essay.
History like many other subjects is vast and boundless, so you have to specialize. We did 18th and 19th century British and European, (usefully supplemented by the American Revolution), stopping at the causes of World War I and the Russian Revolution. In retrospect it was a very useful area as it immediately preceded what was on our general knowledge radar about the twentieth century. It is a period that covers the building of the modern nation state and I have found that very useful as a background to working in contemporary European politics. I certainly feel that I could not do my job safely without an awareness of history and consequent sensitivities.

I went on to study literature at university, which is now predominantly what I read, but I still enjoy the occasional history book.

I think my favourite is Gibbon’s “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”. I hasten to add that so far I have read only the first three of the six volumes and even then some of the chapters in abridgement. The point is that Gibbon’s massive opus takes us from the apogee of the Roman Empire, as he saw it, at the time of Augustus all the way through to the fall of Constantinople, or the Empire in the East, in 1453. Writing as a European in the late 18thC, that is for his time almost a universal history. Gibbon is to be relished for his Augustan English prose, which is an absolute delight. He is also very funny in his irony. The historian is always present and we learn as much about Gibbon and his Enlightenment age as we do about his subject. I think that is fine as it is clear that it is his view, something which some historians try to avoid, dressing up their account as the only objective version. Gibbon also has an over-arching vision, he knows where he is going. His is the story of a gradual undermining of the old Roman civic virtues, not least by the introduction of Christianity. I like my essayist to have a clear argument, I can always disagree with him if I want to.
Above all, Gibbon has the good historian’s knack of telling a good story, with an eye for the kind of detail that captures the reader’s attention, the anecdotal and outrageous that illustrate character. He is good at what all readers of history relish alongside the story, that is information that gives some insight into daily life, the human element.
As the title tells us “Decline and Fall” is a story of decay, human failings, baddies. This is the kind of thing that readers of history (and literature) are really interested in.

The kind of history that would have us believe in relentless progress towards an ever better society is a bore and rings false. Life just isn’t like that. Things go round in cycles. Mankind does not really progress. We don’t actually learn from history. We make the same mistakes, because each generation has to learn from experience for itself. History repeats itself; some say, first as tragedy, then as farce. It’s recognizing ourselves in the recurrent cycles that brings history to life for us.

History tells us how we got where we are, but at the same time that we have not really come that far.