About my reading in 2009

It’s time for my annual stock-taking of last year’s reading.

I have finally found a translation of Dante I can get on with by Allen Mandelbaum. Thus equipped I embarked on “la Divina commedia” the Italian of which is far too difficult for me, so I need my Virgil to guide me through its circles. My game plan was to read the translation of each canto and then read the Italian knowing what it was going to mean. This worked well for “Hell” which is absolutely wonderful and one of the greatest works ever written. The reputation of the whole of the Divine Comedy rather rests on this ‘tour de force’, for to be honest “Purgatory” and “Paradise” are really to be admired rather than enjoyed. So I gave up on the Italian for the second and third books.

Mandelbaum has also written a fine translation of Virgil’s “Aeneid”, so it seemed appropriate to read that too. I did a hundred lines or so of it in Latin at school but had never read the whole thing. Again it ended up being something of a labour of love as the whole work’s reputation in this case too rests on the better known parts of it, in particular the Fall of Troy, Dido and Aeneas, and the descent into Hades. Much of the second half, when Aeneas gets to Italy, is frankly tedious.

While on the works of the Ancient World, let me mention some more of Plutarch’s lives in the Penguin collection “Fall of the Roman Republic”, notably that of Caesar.
Then I had a go at Plato. I’m a great believer in actually reading authors whose names are often bandied about by people who have never read a word by them. “Republic” is a fascinating book with parts that are inspirational and others frankly odd and definitely no longer on the political agenda. Like any attempt at constructing a “utopia” it at some stage rather parts company with human reality. Still it contains some of Plato’s most important ideas in particular on “forms”. “Symposium” is less weighty and a bit tricky for a modern reader to get on with as the “love” it discusses is homosexual to begin with before getting onto “love” of philosophical truth. Plato is surprisingly enjoyable to read as the “dialogue” is a lively and endearing way of presenting ideas, with some scene-setting, questions and answers, and points of view set up to be knocked down.

Moving on to more modern essays, I read Thoreau’s iconic “Walden” on his life as a recluse in the forest by Walden pond. It really is rather fine as a mixture of practicality and philosophical musing with some nice lyrical descriptions of nature.
Virginia Woolf’s short auto-biographical pieces collected in “Moments of being” give an insight into the author’s odd upbringing and how it influenced her view of life.

One of the best things I read this year was Primo Levi”s “I sommersi e i salvati”. Levi’s “If this is a man” is one of the essential works of the 20thC, describing in a dispassionately objective way how he survived incarceration at Ausschwitz. 40 years later in “The drowned and the saved” he revisits the experience and writes a grippingly sincere analysis of human behaviour, what actually motivates people, the nature of weakness and pointless violence, how memory works, what it is to be a survivor and much more, in a deeply honest, human and moral work, that gives us his interpretation of what happened to him which he arrived at after much consideration. Anyone moved by “Se questo è un uomo” should also read this.

However, I spent most of my time in 2009 reading novels.

In the area of recent English novels there was Coe’s “The rain before it falls”, for once not a comic novel and quite moving, and Rushdie’s “The Enchantress of Florence”, in the historic, magical and funny vein he mines so well.
Julia had wanted me to read Graham Swift’s “Waterland” which she had studied for her bac. I enjoyed it as a well constructed family saga set in the Fens that muses on the nature of history. Even better, though different in its style as it imitates the vernacular, but not in its technique of gradually revealing hidden truths from the past, is Swift’s “Last Orders” (of which a good film was made a few years ago with the cream of British actors).

I read two early Graham Greene novels, “A Gun for sale” and “It's a battlefield”. Both are set in gritty 1930’s England. I continue to enjoy Greene’s eye for sordid everyday detail, dialogue and motives. It makes his efficiently written thrillers with their unexpected twists and ironies among the finest in the genre.

I’m not really a habitual reader of thrillers, but at Clara’s encouragement I succumbed to the international publishing phenomenon which is Stieg Larsson’s Millenium trilogy and read the first two volumes “the Girl with the dragon tatoo” and “The Girl who played with fire”. I enjoyed the first one immensely; the second I found a bit thin at times, as in stretched too far. Still he writes a gripping story with some good characterization that keeps you turning the pages. At the same time he takes the lid off Sweden which is often too goody-goody in its presentation of itself to the outside world and we discover a country as corrupt and seamy as anywhere else.

At the lighter end of my reading list from last year there was another of McCaul Smith’s Lady Detectives’ series set in Botswana “Happiness and blue shoes” - as always a guaranteed feel-good read.

This year’s new Dickens for me was “Little Dorritt”. I liked the BBC adaptation in 2008 and perhaps it was still too vivid in my mind colouring my mental images as I read, not that this is necessarily bad, I was just aware of it. “Little Dorritt” is one of Dicken’s most satisfying novels, though I won’t attempt to summarize it here.

In the thick novels department, I’d never read any Henry James before, so I had a go at “The Portrait of a Lady” which some regard as his best and the much shorter “The Turn of the screw” whose story I am familiar with through Britten’s opera. In both cases I found myself repeatedly thinking “get on with it man”. James suffers from chronic long-windedness, he seems permanently self-conscious of being a “master of style”. This initially felt like a good thing for about forty pages but then it got on my nerves. Nonetheless, I did stick with “Portrait” to the end and it becomes worth it when things start to go wrong for the heroine and nastiness comes to the fore. Another odd thing about James is that there are pages and pages which are too divorced from the physical world, he is altogether too prissy and intellectual for my taste.

Proust is also a long-winded master of style, but he is infinitely fascinated by how we perceive the tangible world and how that influences our thought processes. Over the summer I read Alain De Botton’s “How Proust can change your life” and that decided me to start a serious attempt on “A la recherche du temps perdu”. I re-read “Du côté de chez Swann” which I enjoyed much more the second time around, but then slowed down considerably as I proceeded through “A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs” and started “Le côté de Guermantes”. So I am now 1000 pages into it with a mere 2300 left to go. Proust is not an easy read and is best taken in small doses, digested and reflected on. It’s not unlike doing a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle: images start to emerge slowly and fit together into a greater picture, but sometimes you just sit staring at the same piece for ages (that is in itself a Proustian metaphor by the way).

If you have read “About novels” you will have seen my list of 12 favourite novels. I re-read three of them last year, and thoroughly enjoyed them again: Lawrence’s “Lady Chatterley’s lover” (I also read “The Virgin and the gypsy”); Dicken’s “Great Expectations”; and Hardy’s “The Mayor of Casterbridge”. You can check out my comments on them in that blog posting.

In the re-reading department was also Stendhal’s “Le Rouge et le noir”, which I see now is the quickly flung off inspiration of a young man; Rabelais’ “Gargantua” and “Pantagruel” which have some genuinely laugh out loud passages, belying the works’ seriousness (their “substantfique moelle”); and Mann’s “Death in Venice”. The last was my gesture towards German: the first chapter is virtually unreadable, but I think it’s intended as a parody of von Aschenbach’s constipated style, as Mann’s own is much more accessible afterwards. Spanish is represented in 2009 by Garcia Marquez’ “La Increible y triste historia de la candida Erendira y de su abuela desalmada” (the title is a programme in itself) one of his lesser but still enjoyable works.

Finally as I didn’t know it and was going to see it performed in Dutch with English surtitles (!) I read Shakespeare’s “Titus Andronicus”. It’s a play that is rarely put on and you can see why: it’s early and full of over the top violence (rape, murder, mutilation, canibalism), but it nonetheless somehow hits the spot in Shakespeare’s unerring sense of what works dramatically.

So that is a quick romp through over thirty titles I read last year, not a bad crop but there’s till so much to be harvested.

About "About being here" (3)

Dear Reader,

We are about to start a third season of pieces on this blog “About being here”.
If you’re still reading them, I guess it’s because you’re still enjoying them and I am certainly still enjoying writing them.
I shall be aiming to equal last year’s total of fourteen pieces while maintaining variety.
Thank-you for following me.

ABH

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.