War between Georgia and Russia

Above: the Daily Mail today relegated the war in Georgia to pages 6 and 7. On the front page was a report about binge drinking (an important subject, but not comparable to a shooting war). Editor of the Daily Mail is Paul Dacre, whose policy is supposedly "Make them laugh, make them cry, or make them angry". Owner of the Daily Mail is Viscount Rothermere who has (according to the Sunday Times) a personal fortune of one billion (an American billion, not an English one). Viscount Rothermere has said: “The Daily Mail supports the middle class of this country” - and undeniably the British middle classes (C1s) are not interested in foreign wars.

Suddenly a war has flared up in a remote part of the world, involving obscure provinces with unpronounceable names.

All I previously knew of the Caucasus was gleaned by reading a Biggles book of short stories dating from the 1940s and passed on to me by my eldest brother (goodness know where he got it from). In The Adventure of the Counterfeit Crusaders Biggles and Ginger fly out to the Caucasus to foil a dastardly German plot. The Caucasus is described as a network of valleys each one of which is inhabited by a different civilisation, including descendants of the medieval crusaders.

Anyway, when the war between Georgia and Russia broke out last Friday I was slightly interested because of the correlation between the communities of this mountainous region and the book of short stories I read when I was an 8-year-old. But after the first twenty-four hours I became bored by the coverage (all through the weekend the news reports just repeated each other, with no analysis or context). Then Newsnight yesterday produced riveting reports from the war zone - some of the best reporting I have ever seen.

After an introduction by Emily Maitlis we saw Andrew North, the BBC’s Iraq correspondent, on the ground in Georgia. Ignoring personal safety he crawled into the wrecked flat of an elderly Georgian woman and showed us her blood spattered on the walls. He went into the local morgue (staff choking with smell of death) and counted the bodies. He showed us exhausted medical staff at the hospital. He interviewed ordinary people in the streets and asked them what they thought of the situation (as if conducting a survey in Oxford Street). He confronted officials and asked them if they had provoked the conflict. All this was done in an modest and unobtrusive way, the disturbing images accompanied by an elegantly spare narrative. It was some of the best reporting I have ever seen. This is how I imagine Alan Moorhead to have worked.

More: http://www.journalisted.com/article?id=741425

Betrayal

Above: extremely blurred photograph I took at Port Sunlight of the William Holman Hunt painting The Scapegoat (the museum didn’t allow you to use a flash, and the only angle I could see the whole painting was from the gallery).

Plotting against Gordon Brown by his own parliamentary colleagues is reported as feverish, although the press has yet to use the word “febrile” (an adjective seemingly reserved for mass hysteria in the House of Commons).

Newsnight yesterday led on the plotting, denials of plotting and incipient betrayal. Pictures in The Times and The Guardian show “Gordon” on holiday in Southwold, looking ill-at-ease in a casual jacket while attempting to converse with normal people, all the time aware of what is being said behind his back. If “Gordon” can be loaded with all the ills of the government (the thinking goes) and then “despatched”, the anger of the people will be assuaged.



Above: Andrew Porter writing in the Daily Telegraph about Gordon Brown’s predicament. He is a very perceptive political writer. Also able to express himself in down to earth concepts.

Sir James Frazer has written in The Golden Bough about the role of the scapegoat in primitive societies, especially those individuals marked as human scapegoats (“…so few sands in the hour glass, slipping so fast away, sufficed for one who had wasted so many precious years”). It is impossible not to feel pity for Gordon Brown, about to be betrayed by his friends. And as a cultural device the idea of the scapegoat is still with us - how many people in our post-industrial, ultra-sophisticated, intelligence-economy environments have not been made scapegoats ourselves, carrying the mistakes of others?

Betrayal is a complex phenomenon. Few people who practice it remain unmarked. A further complication is that Gordon Brown is (so far as we are allowed to see) a genuinely good person trying to do his best - only a paragon will be able to knife him and carry on unscathed.



Above: The V&A had a recent exhibition of theatre set designs - they were fascinating. This one is of Harold Pinter’s 1978 play Betrayal. On the subject of Harold Pinter, his wife Lady Antonia Fraser was featured on Desert Island Discs last week and demonstrated why she is regarded as one of our greatest historians and intellectuals.

More on the Pinter play: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betrayal_(play)

"Gordon" looking very uncomfortable on holiday: http://www.hellomagazine.com/photo-galleries.html?imagen=/royalty/2008/07/28/cameron-brown-hols/imgs/cameron-brown-hol2-a.jpg

An interview

Last night I watched Mark Lawson interview Jonathan Meades (BBC4 very late).

In theory this interrogation between two of television’s most cerebral presenters should have been a memorable event. As if the late Lord Clark had been interviewed by the late Jacob Bronowski. Or Edward Gibbon cross-examined by Adam Smith.

But actually it fell a bit flat.

The two thinking-entities warily looked at each other and exchanged polite opinions. Mark Lawson would hesitate for a few seconds and then ask a tentative question. Jonathan Meades would hesitate for a few seconds and then carefully tell him the answer.

Jonathan Meades had an open, innocent, wide-eyed expression throughout, as if perfectly willing to answer more difficult and probing questions (but at the same time that little furrow on his brow seemed to warn: if you try to make me look silly I will rip your arms and legs off).

Mark Lawson’s questions were oddly truncated, as if edited to remove his characteristic tics and blinks and rapid nodding (these usually make very good television, but in this interview could only be seen obliquely from behind the head, and in half-shadow).

Mostly the questions were about Meades style rather than Meades substance. At one point Jonathan Meades mentioned he had lost seven stone in one year (seven stone - that’s ninety-eight pounds!) and looked as if he might explain more fully how he had done this. But the “how” questions never came.

This was not really an interview. It was more a demonstration of the balance of terror theory. An exposition of the idea behind the deterrent of mutually assured destruction.

More: http://www.jonathanmeades.com/

Magnetic North: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0090bzs

* apologies for getting the weight in pounds wrong - maths was never my strong point.

Spangled with flowers

Sometimes when I go to see my Milbank client I drop into the Tate Gallery. Recently I saw the Return of the Gods exhibition of neo-classical sculpture (and didn’t enjoy it, which doesn’t bode well for my participation in Kim Blacha’s planned trip to the Glyptothek museum in Munich). And last week I went in to see the Burne-Jones painting Sleep of King Arthur in Avalon, which is on loan from Puerto Rico.

The painting was on its own in a fairly dark room. As I expected (from all the news reports) it was enormous. The mood of the painting is very sombre, lightened by a foreground that is spangled with flowers. Arthur sleeps on a bed under a gothic construction that looks like a gigantic oven extractor fan from the 1980s. The Queens wear Saxon regalia. Female “knights”, with elongated supermodel figures, stand around nonchalantly.

The painting is on temporary loan to the Tate while the Museo de Arte de Ponce in Puerto Rico is being renovated. There is an on-going campaign (focussed on the Elgin Marbles) for major museums to “give back” works of art to the cultures that created them. If we ever have to “give back” the Elgin Marbles a compensation will be that we will “get back” the Sleep of King Arthur in Avalon (plus most of the contents of the Metropolitan Museum in New York).



Above: I only had a few minutes to spare in the Tate Gallery, and after the Sleep of King Arthur in Avalon I had a quick look at Leighton’s Flaming June (which I have seen before) then went back to the office. Several thoughts stayed in my mind for hours afterwards - for instance, I learned that Burne-Jones painted his figures naked first, then painted clothes over them (which means they are presumably still naked under the layers of subsequent paint - I don‘t know why this troubled me, but it did). I had also been very impressed with the flowers in the foreground of the King Arthur painting. I remembered I had been impressed by Burne-Jones’s depiction of flowers when I saw the exhibition of his work in Birmingham a few years back. In the Grail tapestries you could recognise blue campanulas, red pieris, hound’s tongue, knapweed, lilium candidum, anemones, oxeye, lilyworts and cornflowers.



Above: regularly in the Country Diary column of the Guardian Paul Evans talks about wild flowers. He is an exceptional writer (one of Rachel’s Boogaloo Dudes). After reading Paul Evans you feel inspired to go and do some field research of your own - except that other things always seem to intervene.



Above: anyway, this afternoon I decided to look at wild flowers. I took along my brother’s Observer’s Book of Wild Flowers. I went into the central hills to a small settlement where the village green is on a steep slope. The top of the slope levels off, and in this area a wild garden has been laid out. There are many wild gardens around the country (the most famous being the Prince of Wales’s garden at Highgrove). This one is fairly small - about half the size of a football pitch.



Above: obviously the flowers are seasonal, but enough of them were in flower to make the trip worthwhile. I thought about taking samples, but if everyone did that there would be no flowers left, so I just photographed them. I had to be careful about the sky - heavy clouds rolled over, but the rain held off.



Above: celendine, violets, wild arum. Celendine has heart shaped leaves. The yellow flowers open when the sun is out.



Above: harebell, flax, field scabious. Field scabious likes dry chalky soils. Slugs can’t stand scabious, so it is useful to grow in the garden.



Above: ladies smock, fritillaria, meadow knapweed. Note the white butterfly on the label - there were many butterflies and other insects in the garden. Meadow knapweed is a sort of thistle - a very tough plant.



Above: tuberous comfrey. The leaves have a velvety feel to them. Comfrey is supposedly good for rheumatism (not scientific confirmation of this).



Above: “area of native flora”. This is my favourite photograph - typical of the hedgerows and roadside verges in the county. Jack-by-the-hedge is a sort of wild garlic with white flowers and bright green leaves.



Above: common restharrow. The leaves have a sticky feel to them. Clusters of pink flowers.



Above: you would be amazed at how many different kinds of ivy there are.



Above: herb robert. A form of geranium. Likes shady areas.



Above: cowslips. Obviously this is a spring flower, but you can see the foliage. A form of primrose, and associated with nightingales (they both like the same habitat).



Above: nettles. They have a nice smell. If you fall in a bed of stinging nettles you won’t easily forget the experience.



Above: docks. Broad leaved docks, curly leaved docks, sorrell docks. A large dock can produce up to sixty thousand seeds per year.



Above: wayside mallow. Bright pink flowers with purple veining. The stripes are nectar guides for bees.



Above: dandelion. Ubiquitous wild herb. The leaves can be eaten in salads and the roots can be made into a ersatz coffee.

More about the painting: http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/CollectionDisplays?roomid=5234

Image of the painting: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/graphics/2008/04/16/batate116.jpg

Russell Jenkins

Interesting article in The Times today by Russell Jenkins about gang culture in Sheffield. It’s one of the few articles (that I have seen) that has looked at the issue from a cultural perspective. It was accompanied by a photograph by Jarek Bogdanowicz (strong horizontal lines punctuated by the corner of a building, contrast between the gaudy colours of the flowers and the muted clothes of the figures, but no sign of the “webbed gloves”).

The article discussed “repping”, gang use of social networking sites such as Bebo, use of guns rather than knives.

According to Journalisted this article is probably the longest piece Russell Jenkins has written for The Times.

Editor of The Times is James Harding (aged 38). Chief Executive of Bebo is Michael Birch (also aged 38). A Google Images search of Jarek Bogdanowicz only produced sport images - a few hockey photographs (one of which is very good) plus one image of “buildering”.

Another article (very different) by Russell Jenkins: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article4183393.ece