I know Mike did a convincing impression of being a South Londoner. He made a pretty good stab at it. Others will testify to his life as a singer in the Jivin Instructors, devoted follower of Crystal Palace FC, and proud public servant with Southwark Library services.

But for me he was always from the North.  Someone who may have parked his accent, but never lost it. Someone who never stopped loving the open spaces of the Pennine moors that backed on to the towns we grew up in, places you could escape to, and slip the parental knot.

I first met him one December morning when he padded into the kitchen at the hotel I worked in, starting a three-week holiday job. Shoulder-length hair and a droopy moustache. He used to say he saw my books before he saw me, after noticing a copy of Finnegans Wake on the window sill of the chalet I bunked in.  The spines of my library ostentatiously facing out. It was a bare-faced lie.  I would never arrange my shelves that way. But I forgave him for it as I always did – even for more wounding infractions, for he let me down many times over the years. And I was clearly not the only one.

We bonded that winter over music, literature, eccentric village pubs, dirty jokes, bad puns, and other people’s misfortunes. We formed an exclusive club of two he called the Anti-Christmas League and we did to Bing Crosby what the potato peeling machine did to those never-ending bags of KIng Edwards.  And by the time he headed back to his Theatre Studies in Stratford-on-Avon an unmistakeable friendship had taken root.

A few months later I went back to live at home, enduring a series of factory jobs that would pay for shoe-string tours of Europe in between.  But each summer Mike would head north again, like a migrating bird, to shelter me in his wings, as he made Lancashire come alive again, keeping me safe, even while leading me down lengthening avenues of mischief.  Or ‘ginnels’ as we would have enjoying calling them.  Because, wherever we went, something unexpected would always be round the corner, something bizarre, marvelous or hilarious.

It took me a while to realise they didn’t always happen by chance. I had no idea how we ended a long zig-zagging day at the Liberal Club in Summerseat on the wild fringes of Greater Manchester. It seemed just another predictable coincidence when it turned out that the young woman Mike seemed very comfortable with at the bar was his English teacher from school.  We were miles from home and without transport and she offered to put us up for the night. Waking up on the sofa the next morning I was surprised – but enormously impressed – to discover that he had not slept in the spare room.  Evidently Kath had introduced him to more than just Shakespeare.

I don’t know how much he learnt at college.  I’d say he was self-taught, most of his reading being for its own sake, not for some course or other.  He swept up many fragments of science, history, and geography in his net. Some of them still linger in my subconscious: the gregarious habits of the Manx shearwater, the vending machines built for Penguin books, the origin of the phrase ‘as dim as a Toc H lamp.’

I remember the time he stayed at my parents’ holiday cottage in the Lakes, carefully documenting in the Visitors Book our heroic drinking as much as the walks we did.  Some goody two-shoes made me tear out the page before we left – just a little too vernacular for my mum and dad, I thought, but I also obscurely sensed it was worth keeping.  In one entry, he gleefully mocked the pretentious over-wrought lyricism of a previous guest by writing simply, in capital letters, ‘ET IN ARCADIA EGO.’  A Latin phrase I think he picked up from Evelyn Waugh and which – as he delighted in explaining to me – meant that even amid the nymphs and shepherds of an earthly paradise, death is never far away. A memento mori that has extra poignancy now.

And I treasure another riposte of his I’ve kept, this one answering me, after I enthused about a new record I just bought, ‘Looking for the Perfect Beat’ by Afrika Bambaata. Typed on the back of a picture postcard featuring a laughably civic photo of Plymouth city centre, which he carefully defaced with inappropriate stickers, he seeks clarification of our summer plans, and bombards me with the music he’s been listening to: Angela Bofill, Prince Charles and the Beat Band, The SalSoul Orchestra, Steve Arrington, The Jammers, The Chevalier Brothers. ‘You sure you’ve been looking for the perfect beat?’ he asks.  And then, in closing, another rhetorical question: ‘In an imperfect world, can a beat be perfect?’  Something I have pondered many times over the years.

He especially enjoyed springing his erudition on the unwary.  Once, when we were hitch-hiking to Glencoe, drenched to the skin after an hour on the slip road and a sleepless night at a service station, we were picked up by a suit in a posh car. As we bundled ourselves and our rucksacks in the back seat, Mike recognised Beethoven on the radio. In his plummiest voice he boomed, as the Audi rejoined the carriageway, ‘Just in time for the minuet from the 8th symphony!’

It was the Allegretto from the 7th, but I didn’t say anything.  Facts were always secondary to the dramatic effect. And to be sure some of the stories he told were decidedly iffy. Though when I checked them out, even the weirdest ones usually checked out. Approximately. For he had a remarkable memory, when it suited him.  Only a few weeks before he died – which soon seemed like an age ago – he was enthusing about W H Auden, reciting lines, word-perfect, from what he called ‘that triumph of populism’,  The Night Mail.

Speaking at the funeral, I would conclude with a poem. But no, not by Auden, not that one, made famous by John Hannah – but one of Mike’s own, written in the second blush of fatherhood.  It’s called ‘Year Dot (after Sylvia Plath)’.

 

 

 

 

‘Ban under-threes from watching television, says study.’ This is how the Guardian reported the findings of a recent article – ‘Time for a View on Screen Time’ by Aric Sigman – that reviews evidence on the effects on physical and mental health of watching television and using computers.

Articles like this – that grab attention by tickling the guilt to which so many parents are susceptible – always annoy me. It often turns out that the scientific research arrives at much more qualified conclusions than the journalist allows. And in any case the possibility that there might be considerable disagreement on the issue in question – among scientists – is not always made clear.

Here, though, the summary appears to be broadly accurate, helped by the fact that the original paper ends with specific recommendations. Furthermore it quotes Dorothy Bishop, a professor of developmental neuropsychology at Oxford University, who argues that Sigman’s paper is not ‘an impartial expert review of evidence for effects on health and child development’ and points out that Sigman ‘does not appear to have any academic or clinical position, or to have done any original research on this topic.’ Most importantly of all: ‘His comments about impact of screen time on brain development and empathy seem speculative in my opinion, and the arguments that he makes could equally well be used to conclude that children should not read books.’

Some of these remarks are beside the point. The article doesn’t claim to be anything more than a summary of existing research, and the author’s ability to do this is surely not dependent on holding an academic or clinical position. But, as reported, the article does seem insufficiently aware of an obvious objection: we know that long periods of physical inactivity are probably not good for you, especially if it was not accompanied by social interaction. Surely it is this, rather than specifically ‘screen time’, that would help to account for increasing obesity and heart problems in children or their compromised intellectual and emotional development.

But what is also problematic (and this is my main concern here) is the assumption that ‘screen time’ is incompatible with physical activity and social interaction. It seems to me that ‘screen time’ covers a highly diverse range of activities – watching televisio; playing games; solving puzzles; following instructions; listening to music; conducting conversations via text, email, messaging or social media; reading and writing anything from status updates to full-length books; making video calls; editing and mixing sounds and images; and so on.

Furthermore, even the traditionally most passive of these – watching television on your own without the ability to change channels or adjust the volume – is often far from mindless consumption. When I walk in on my five-year-old watching a programme, the chances are that he’s commenting out loud on the action, anticipating dialogue, answering questions, expressing surprise or delight, laughing, belting out a song that is playing or – in the case of Tree Fu Tom – standing up, striking poses and trying out moves in imitation of someone on screen. And once I’ve joined him, he’ll ask me things, or draw my attention to something that is happening or about to happen. Sometimes we’ll laugh together in appreciation or pour scorn on something badly executed.

I was intrigued enough to read Sigman’s original paper. Could it really be so uninterested in the nuances and variety of so-called ‘screen time’? It would appear so. I even checked out two or three primary research papers that he cites, curious about the methods they used. Typically, data about ‘screen time’ seems to be collected by asking individuals (or their parents) to complete diaries or questionnaires indicating the number of hours they spend watching television or using computers each day. Thus:

The average time spent each day (weekdays and weekend days combined) in screen time (TV, video, computer, and video game usage) was assessed from parent-reported values. Time spent watching TV was defined as minutes spent watching TV, videotapes, or DVDs. Computer use was defined as minutes spent using a home computer or video game. Screen time was computed by summing minutes spent in TV viewing and computer use. (‘Associations between sedentary behavior and blood pressure in young children’, p726)

In at least one case this data was derived from devices attached to participants’ televisions and computers which would record when they were in use, together with a programme of incentives to ensure different levels of usage in the groups being compared. This is worth quoting at length, as it requires a degree of domestic surveillance that takes us into the realm of dystopian science fiction:

After completing a telephone screen, families attended an orientation, and, if interested, parents read and signed the informed consent and then completed a questionnaire that assessed the numbers of televisions, television video game units, VCR and DVD players, and computers in the home. Approximately 1 week later, a TV Allowance was attached to each television and computer monitor in the home by a research assistant […] who recorded the numbers of televisions and computers and their locations in the home. The TV Allowance is an automated device that controls and monitors the use of televisions or computer monitors, including television, video game systems, DVD players, VCRs, and computers. The appliance was plugged into the TV Allowance, the plug was locked in, and the device was plugged into the wall. To turn on the television or computer monitor, each family member used an individually selected 4-digit code. To protect against the participating child watching television or playing a computer game on other family members’ time, the participating child was not informed of the codes of other family members. If the child learned the codes of another family member, these codes were changed. The TV Allowance sums the minutes of use for each code to objectively determine use of that device.

Baseline television and computer use was measured during a 3-week period. Seventy families met eligibility criteria and were randomized into intervention and control groups [….] Families were recruited in cohorts, were stratified by child sex, and were randomized by the study statistician […] in blocks of 2 without replacement using a random number generator limited to 2 numbers. Group assignments were provided to the project coordinator [….]

Study staff [… ] set the weekly time budgets for television viewing, computer use, and associated behaviors. Budgets were reduced by 10% of their baseline amount per month for children in the intervention group until the budget was reduced by 50%. When the budget was reached, the television or computer monitor could not be turned on for the remainder of the week. Study staff could set different amounts of time for each child in a household, if desired, to reduce conflict if another child was not on the program. Parents and non-participating family members could use their code to watch television or to use computers without being on a budget.

Children in the intervention group earned $0.25 for each half hour under budget, up to $2.00 per week. Parents were instructed to praise the participating child for reducing television viewing and for engaging in alternative behaviors. Decreases were also reinforced by a star chart. At each home visit, a study staff member reviewed the star chart and praised the child for the number of stickers earned. When the child reached the 50% decrease at 6 months, the star charts were discontinued, and changes were supported through monthly newsletters and by parental praise for behavior change. The intervention group received ideas for alternatives to sedentary behavior, a tailored monthly newsletter with parenting tips to reduce sedentary behavior, and information about how to rearrange the home environment to reduce access to sedentary behavior. Children in the control group were provided free access to television and computers and received $2.00 per week for participating, independent of their behavior change. Control families received a newsletter to provide parenting tips, sample praise statements, and child-appropriate activities and recipes. (‘A randomized trial of the effects of reducing television viewing and computer use on body mass index in young children’, p240).

But as far as I could tell, no tests made any distinctions finer than that between one electronic device and another.

Why collect such bland information? It is as if one set up controlled clinical trials to establish whether eating sandwiches was bad for you, or swallowing pills, or going out at night. It is of course perfectly possible that, after quantifying this data, you find that doing more of one thing was probably doing you more harm than less, and to recommend that we cut down on one or other of them. But – even if we accepted the results of these tests – we might think, before making recommendations, to investigate whether it was certain types of sandwiches (with high levels of salt, sugar or saturated fat, for example) that was the main case of harm and if so it might be more effective to recommend reducing our consumption of these sandwiches rather than others. And of course the dangers of going out at night must depend a great deal on what you do: attend an evening class, cycle on busy roads, play bingo, babysit for a friend, deal drugs, or drink alcohol and smoke solidly for twelve hours.

So why don’t these finer distinctions come into play here? One reason must be that it is much harder to quantify ways of watching television or using computers, as opposed to simply calculating the time spent engaged in these activites. Having resolved to model one’s research on clinical trials, the appropriateness of this mathematical model is taken for granted, even though it just may not be possible to make the distinctions thought necessary.

But another reason must be the fairly widespread – but hardly ‘scientific’ – antipathy towards television and its successors, an antipathy that is directed at an easily identifiable target – a product or an industry – that feeds on a simplistic moral division that sets technology against apparently more wholesome forms of activity such as reading and social interaction, a rhetoric that dominates Sigman’s article. Researchers more wary of this ‘common sense’ might have devised methods that tested these assumptions more thoroughly, and Sigman might have challenged them to do so.

The problem here is that both reading, painting, writing, social interaction are not distinct from ‘screen time’ but overlap with it. Many people now prefer to read ebooks than bound books; a good deal of creative design is now accomplished on a laptop rather than with paper, pens and brushes. Social media are so-called because of the, er, social interaction they permit (and demand certain standards of etiquette), although what they herald is the possibllity of increasingly polyphonic conversations already implicit in email, sms and instant messaging services which were originally largely one-to-one.

Until we can find ways of identifying different ways of engaging with computers and televisions and mapping these against certain standards of physical and mental health, we are not likely to learn very much.

Có a dh’ éireas anns a’ mhadainn
‘s a chì ròs geal am bial an latha?

(Who rises in the morning
and sees a white rose in the mouth of the day?)

Somhairle MacGill-Eain (Sorley MacLean)

Of all our lost times, early mornings are perhaps the most elusive, half-lived in the stupor of reflex. I wonder if we can win them back by trapping something of their singular configurations.

For a long time I went to bed late. That had to stop. I am much more alert in the mornings and – in theory at least – can make better use of my time then. Last night I was up past midnight, so I set my alarm for 6.30 instead of 5.30. Or so I thought, but the referee of habit must have over-ruled the linesman of decision, and I didn’t even realize the mistake until I had already got yanked my legs over the side and made it to the bathroom.

So I shuffled into a dressing gown, made my usual pot of coffee and climbed into the sleeping bag on the sofa, for, like yesterday, there was a tickling chill in the air. It was too dark to read in bed, but here, in the living room, I had a good lamp, and a handy table. Waiting for me, as yet unopened, was Ghost Works by Daphne Marlatt, and I settled down to enjoy the first few chapters.

I bought it last year, after being intrigued by the discussion of it by Justin Edwards and Rune Graulund in their Mobility at Large as an example of an experimental travel narrative. It tells its story almost in slow motion, dwelling on the small details of sensations and thoughts. In the first chapter, the sentences tend be short, but the links between paragraphs – laid out on the page so that each one begins directly below where the last one ends – give it a train-like flow, while in the second, the impressions follow as successions of long clauses, joined with ampersand after ampersand.

My thoughts began to drift. I kept having to go back a few lines and re-read, sometimes aloud, to keep my concentration aloft. Occasionally I looked up to see the outline of the building opposite – chimneys, dormer windows, TV aerials – take shape against the sky, at first a pale grey, and then – suddenly, it seemed, though half an hour had passed – arrogantly blue, embossed with neat strokes of cloud.

Also on the table was a world atlas. It was useful when I was reading the book I just finished – Pankaj Mishra’s Butter Chicken in Ludhiana – because many of the Indian placenames were unfamiliar to me. Now I found myself tracing Marlatt’s journey from Mérida to Progreso.

At around 7 o’clock and on cue the man with Tourette’s – a familiar figure round these parts, unmistakable with his briefcase and signature fedora – became audible, shouting insults and obscenities as he rounded the corner and made his way down the street below my window. ‘Arseholes!’ I heard, just before he merged into the now mezzo-forte rumble of traffic on the main road.

The next time I paused, I realized it had taken me two hours to read 22 pages. Car doors slammed, shutters released, footsteps hocketed on the pavement and on the floorboards above. Water started to gush and squeal in the pipes. He’d be getting up now, I thought. His mum would be making his breakfast and packing his lunch-bag, despairing, perhaps, at the length of time it takes him to get his socks on.

The phone rang. It was not a number I recognised and I didn’t answer it. The caller hung up halfway through the recorded voicemail message. Heaving myself back on the sofa, I knocked over the coffee, and cursed. I wiped up the mess with a discoloured scrunched ball of paper towels still lying nearby from an almost identical accident two days ago.

This time I took it through to the kitchen and disposed of it properly. And while the bath ran I returned to my nest and picked up a philosophy book I borrowed from the university library. It was The Persistence of Subjectivity, a collection of essays by Robert Pippin on post-Kantian philosophy. I began the chapter on ‘Gadamer’s Hegel’, picking up the argument here and there, but much of it sailed past me like a convoy of buses heading back to the depot.

He’d be heading out to the school bus – walking down the hill today, because his scooter was here, ready to assist his more strenuous voyage in tomorrow. Meanwhile the chatter and laughter of schoolgirls began to fill the street as they ambled past reminding me the water must be ready for my dip.

I closed my Pippin, rolled up the sleeping bag, and prepared to make my appearance on the balcony of the day ahead, already planning what I was going to write at the laptop on the table when I emerged from the steam.

My son started school the other week and he’s bring home some unusual words and phrases, seasoning his familiar speech with brògan, dearg, buidhe, uaine, suidh sìos, madainn mhath, tha mi duilich, gabh mo leisgeull, ceart ma-thà. What is going on?

He has, of course, begun his immersion in Gaelic Medium Education, in his case at the Glasgow Gaelic School. We were told that our children would pick up the language very quickly, even if they hadn’t been exposed to it before. The challenge was always going to be for the parents who hadn’t. And they were right, although I hadn’t reckoned on it becoming manifest so soon.

My parents are English, although they did holiday frequently in the Highlands and Islands. I’m told I was named for Sgùrr Alasdair, the highest peak on the Isle of Skye, and the first trip I made that I faintly remember was in a van that famously broke down in Beauly in the early hours of a Sunday morning on what was then a day and half’s drive from Lancashire to Assynt.

My father’s bookshelves amply testify to an interest in Scottish history and topography. He also tried to learn Gaelic, subscribing to the newspaper Sruth for a while, and even took his primitive portable tape recorder (one that looked like this) along when he was invited to spend the evening with Mr McLeod, who lived a few miles down the road from the cottage we used to rent near Achmelvich, delighted to capture a three-way conversation between him, his wife and – unexpectedly dropping in – the postman.

I was introduced to several languages at school – Latin (all but forgotten now), German (surviving at elementary phrase-book level) and French, which I was much more determined to master when I fell in love with Rimbaud and Lautréamont. I’ve continued to read French to the point at which I can get through a novel in less than twice the time it takes to read one in English, though my conversational skills are fairly limited. I can understand instructions and ask for what I want, but I’d be struggling to engage in interesting chat.

For a long time Gaelic didn’t interest me beyond a mild fascination with the way English versions of Gaelic placenames often appeared to be attempts to find English morphemes that vaguely approximated to the Gaelic pronunciation rather than translations. Thus Àisir Mòr became Oldshoremore. But when I started working at the Scottish Music Information Centre in the early 1990s, I found myself having to read out Gaelic titles or names over the phone, and, to avoid embarrasment, began to teach myself the language following a course devised by An Comunn Gàidhealach.

The course was one of my dad’s, consisting of a boxed set of ten LPs with a booklet. According to the date on the records, it was already ancient, but – if the even older language materials passed on to me were any guide – it seemed to differ significantly from the reprints of text books from the turn of the last century: dry, systematic, technical, lacking illustrations, and introducing a vocabulary suggestive of a rural frontier life (man, woman, fire, smoke, wood, saw, cave, hill, cairn, calf, eagle, rat, berry) that has remained locked in time.

In the 1960s, though, change was in the air, and from the first lesson, we are invited into a defiantly suburban home, with a three-piece suite, a standard lamp, a cake stand, a foot-stool, and – most dramatically of all – a telebhisean.

My enthusiasm did not last. Four lessons in as many months and I gave in. Then nearly twenty years later, with a child at an age where decisions had to be made, his mother suggested we put in a placement request for the Gaelic School. I wasn’t keen at first – remembering my eternal disappointment when my own parents shovelled me off to a posh grammar in a neighbouring town rather than the local one where most of my friends went. But I slowly came round to the idea. I attended some evening classes, and though I missed too many of them, I eventually began teaching myself the language again in earnest.

During the summer I found myself advancing on two fronts. On the one hand, there was Gaelic in Twelve Weeks and its accompanying CDs, which I transferred to my smartphone, and I have studiously applied myself to the exercises, refusing to move on to the next lesson until I felt I had truly mastered the previous. On the other, there was a DVD set of the first series of Speaking Our Language, the TV programme that first aired in the late 1990s and the books that went with it, which I watch with Jack several evenings a week.

With the book, I listen to the CDs and follow in the text. Then I try to write down what is being said, without referring to the book. And then I try and translate from Gaelic from the English in the text. In between times, when I’m out and about, I listen to the recordings as many times as it takes for the individual words and phrases to take shape and be recognizable, while repeating them to myself to improve my pronunciation. Only when I feel I can do all this without thinking too much and not making many mistakes do I allow myself to move on to the next lesson. After about four months, I’m about ready to tackle lesson four. So much for twelve weeks.

The television programmes are a gentler way in. We’re three-quarters through the first series on our second run. Programmes are organised around topics (greetings, goodbyes, telling the time, travelling, instructions and orders, and so on) and you learn a series of useful phrases (often in dialogue form) without being required to systematically learn all the forms of a pronoun or preposition or tackle the rules governing lenition. Jack loves watching these programmes, especially the soap opera Aig an Taigh embedded within them. With the help of the books, I jot down some of the key points to help me remember them, and some of them stick, though by the second half of the series, a lot of them just vanish as soon as the credits roll. I think we’ll have to watch some of them yet again, before we get Series Two.

When I think of how long it took me to absorb enough French for me to make a decent stab at writing something like this post in that language – and even now, I’d have to consult a dictionary at least once a sentence – the task ahead is daunting. But each time I feel ready for something new – conjugating verbs, the names of the seasons, another round of prepositional pronouns – a shiver of achievement makes it all worthwhile. One day I might even talk to a stranger.

I have never been greatly interested in the Olympics. It is partly because most of the sports I enjoy watching are either not represented (cricket, at least not since 1900) or peak elsewhere (football, cycling); and partly because of the ways in which the games have been increasingly suffocated by political corruption, commercial sponsorship and militarised security. So I made no special effort to watch the opening ceremony of London 2012 the other week.

But I didn’t miss it completely. On Twitter it was hard to avoid, as several dozen of those accounts I follow commented on the unfolding spectacle on their TV screens. Many of them I expected to be cynical of what was surely going to be a state-sponsored festival of Britishness: monocultural, jingoistic, Conservative. But this was not the case, and no one was more surprised than the tweeters themselves who (rather grudgingly) admitted that the performance delighted them.

That the ceremony found fans as different as Richard Williams in the Guardianand Tim Stanley in the Telegraph suggests that Danny Boyle managed to achieve what many progressive cultural critics have been dreaming of for years: that the Left reclaim Britishness from the Right. Even the notorious tweet by Aidan Burley MP (‘Thank God the athletes have arrived! Now we can move on from leftie multi-cultural crap. Bring back red arrows, Shakespeare and the Stones!’) might have been scripted by Boyle, given the crucial role it played in reinforcing this new consensus. Of course the Daily Mail disagreed – but even they were forced to tone down some of their fanatical remarks.

I’m still not sure, though. I’ve never felt particularly at home with the idea of Britishness. The soundtrack of my childhood was not television but the Third Programme, now Radio Three, BBC’s flagship classical music station. As I absorbed the standard repertoire (all those B’s – Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Berlioz, Bartok, Britten…), it soon became obvious that the British contribution to that canon was modest, to say the least. And maybe that nurtured a cosmopolitan spirit that deepened as I got older.

Of course, there was always the Home Service – later renamed Radio Four – which remains tied to a certain notion (a very English notion much of the time) of Britishness, even while its borders are becoming more elastic. And when I began to buy books and records of my own, there was a pattern that suggests that I was caught in its gravitational pull. I was an avid reader of World War II classics such as Reach for the Sky and enjoyed fiction like Lord of the Rings and Watership Down. The first album I bought was Tubular Bells and Pink Floyd’s Live at Pompeiishaped my adolescence even more than ‘Carry On’ films. (These titles are – like God Save the Queen – all choriambs. I wonder if there is something in that).

But by the time I was doing my ‘O’ Levels in 1975, I was clearly venturing further afield. I had begun working my way through Dante, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy in my dad’s collection of black-spined Penguin Classics (by definition, not originally written in English). I pestered my local bookshop for Ginsberg and Kerouac, and was amazed to find some introductions to Buddhism, and hardback volume of Whitman on the shelves at home. From a lyrical passage in Henry Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn I followed a trail to the early twentieth-century modernisms, especially Dada, which – soon to be revived in the ethos and aesthetics of punk – framed what passed for my intellectual horizons in my last year at school.

This isn’t in itself an argument against the Opening Ceremony. It’s not even saying that embracing Britishness prevents you from appreciating ‘other cultures’. I found my own discomfort liberating: it opened doors, made me more curious to seek out things that teachers and television presenters ignored. But if I’d been more patriotic, would I never have discovered the pleasures of U-Roy or Francis Picabia as a teenager?

I felt Jenny Diski struck a chord when she confessed her lack of enthusiasm for ‘collective joy’. And I shared something of her scepticism towards the Ceremony’s alleged achievement. But despite the criticism of the nostalgic, backward-looking character of the pageant, I got the feeling that she still believed in the possibility of a radical Britishness that really would make a difference. If only it had been a bit more confrontational, visionary, utopian…

And for this she was rebuked by Norman Geras who thought she burdened the event with unrealistic expectations:

It is hard to imagine how an opening ceremony for the London Olympics could, just in itself, have transformed the politics of this country, so that the morning after, all the objectives that Jenny Diski favours would have been hugely assisted or brought forward. This wasn’t, mainly, a political event – a campaign, a set of reforms, a new party programme or movement.

And he detected

a subtext here according to which for people simply to enjoy themselves is somehow not enough if there’s no political payoff. Shall we watch ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ tonight? Ooh, I’m not sure – what would it do for the struggle? Hey, why are you singing a love song? There’s surely still stuff we need to protest about, and songs can do that too, you know. And so on.

But for me the problem is not that the ceremony did too little, but that it did too much. It seems a little disingenuous to compare it to a Hollywood musical. After all, when almost all the commentators felt obliged to read the event as the latest contribution to the century-and-a-half series on ‘the condition of England’, its political implications can hardly be trivial.

The thing about Britishness, though, is that however multicultural, it is still a notion tied to a nation state that goes to great lengths to keep people out. The United Kingdom is not alone in being defended by stringent and discriminatory immigration controls, and excessive powers to detain or expel those defined as outsiders or monitor and restrict the movement and activity of those who even look like outsiders. But ‘Britishness’ must take some responsibility for the way in which the right to belong here and make full use of the opportunities on offer is predicated on a sense of national identity, an allegiance to a required – if heterogenous – set of affective or ideological ties shared with everyone else in the country.

Would radicalising Britishness undermine the racial discriminations on which the kingdom seems to thrive? Would it do anything to stop the most vulnerable and disadvantaged members of society from bearing the brunt of what – in a triumph of spin that masks its fundamental difference from, say, wartime rationing – is blandly called ‘austerity’? Would it even have helped the 182 cyclists who were arrested on the monthly ‘Critical Mass’ ride as they passed close by the Stadium during this apparently ground-breaking ceremony? I doubt it. Whatever its content, ‘Britishness’ is a fungal infection that we ought to stop feeding.

Local and regional identities don’t have anything like the same power to exclude others. They certainly don’t have the same purchase on social policy or the criminal justice system. Being Scouse or Geordie is not about common values or ancestry but something that emerges from the shared experience of inhabiting the same space and perhaps a way of speaking. And even nation-states don’t need their citizens to identify with it in order to function. Look at Scotland. The SNP’s case for independence (such as it is) is being made not on cultural grounds (appealing to those who feel Scottish, think of themselves as Scottish more than anything else) but because an independent scotland would be fairer, more democractic, more accountable, dare I say more modern place to live.

The opening ceremony did not have to be a celebration of ‘Britishness’. It could have simply celebrated sport (perhaps allowing itself a little dig at the Olympic grandees by dwelling on some activities – like rugby or karate or women’s canoeing – it does not yet recognize). (Maybe even a bit of Indian Dancing). Or it could have created a series of tableaux that represented all the previous games – with its controversies (the black power salute in Mexico 1968) and tragedies (the massacre at Munich in 1972) as well as triumphs (Jesse Owens in Berlin 1936). Criticizing that would have been puritanical.

Again: the toddler’s favourite word. For, as Walter Benjamin reminded us, children are much more inclined to repetition than imitation. And so, with little more than a chiastic reversal of the vowel sounds, what would happen if we turned the Arcades Project into the Playparks Project?

Walter Benjamin never visited Scotland. But he was aware of its existence. In his Small History of Photography he applauded the work of David Octavius Hill, who famously depicted the 1843 Disruption of the Church of Scotland. And for one of his radio talks he chose the subject of the Tay Bridge disaster of 1879. Of Glasgow, however, I have found nothing.

Yet my gamble is that if it is possible to shed important light on the 19th Century through a thick description of the shopping arcades of Paris, then why not try to capture the secret of the 21st by dwelling in Glasgow’s playparks?

Part of the attraction of the arcade for Benjamin was its academic marginality: it suited well his belief in the redemptive power of the overlooked and unfashionable. Now that Benjamin is well-known, and has posthumously acquired more than just the academic post that so eluded him during his lifetime, the lowly objects of his study are lowly no more. I’m an arcade, get me out of here, I can almost hear it scream.

So it’s time to upgrade, and set our sights on a phenomenon still neglected by the trendy cultural theorists. Indeed the whole realm of childhood and childcare seems largely to pass them by, happily consigned to psychology and social policy. If it is now permitted for Benjamin’s flâneur to be a woman, we are still waiting for studies of the wandering parent – the prâmeur if you will – who probably botanises the asphalt more than anyone.

While Benjamin may not have been much of a ‘hands on’ dad – and he probably saw even less of his son after his divorce in 1930 when Stefan was twelve – he actually took a keen interest in children. He collected (and wrote essays on) toys and children’s books. He wrote two memoirs of his own early years in Berlin, collected his son’s opinions et pensées in a journal, and his work in general is sprinkled with remarks on the distinctive sensibility of the very young. Gershom Scholem wrote:

It is one of Benjamin’s most important characteristics that throughout his life he was attracted with almost magical force by the child’s world and ways. This world was one of the persistent and recurring themes of his reflections, and, indeed, his writings on this subject are among his most perfect pieces.¹

His radio talks for children have been the subject of a book by Jeffrey Mehlman.²Howard Caygill has suggested that it was Benjamin’s reflections on the child’s experience of colour that prompted him to question Kant’s philosophy and elaborate his own, alternative, speculative critique of experience.³ And, according to Susan Buck-Morss, ‘what Benjamin found in the child’s consciousness, badgered out of existence by bourgeois education and so crucial to redeem (albeit in new form), was precisely the unsevered connection between perception and action that distinguished revolutionary consciousness in adults.’⁴

That’s my excuse anyway for stepping out and daring to offer some dispatches from the ludic archipelago in Scotland’s largest city.

Notes

1. Gershom Scholem, ‘Walter Benjamin’ in On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays, ed. Werner J Dannhauser (New York: Schocken, 1976), p175.
2. Jeffrey Mehlman, Walter Benjamin for Children: An Essay on His Radio Years(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
3. Howard Caygill, Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), pp83-85.
4. Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), p263.

One of the final touches to the flat before flinging it open to the unsuspecting property-vultures was to replace the floor covering in the kitchen closet. This is what was underneath the old linoleum.

These are pages from a newspaper from September 1915, not long after this tenement was built. I don’t suppose whoever put them there intended to let them fester until they resembled a Kurt Schwitters collage, and if they did they left them too long to be able to claim to have invented Dada a year before Hugo Ball and Tristan Tzara got together at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich.

Given the date I was expecting details of a military campaign but instead the news is dominated by the recall of Konstantin Dumba, the last Austro-Hungarian ambassador to the United States, following accusations of espionage.

I was not familiar with this episode of the First World War and had to look it up. I couldn’t find any link between Dumba and Glasgow, but when I told someone the story at work, I was surprised to learn that before the war the Austro-Hungarian empire was represented here by the famous shipping magnate and art collector William Burrell who held the post of consul until 1906, according to the Dictionary of National Biography.

It seems unlikely the two ever met (Dumba was serving as Minister to Serbia at the time) and Burrell’s acquaintance with Central Europe may not have been extensive, if the recollections of an encounter in 1932 are to be believed. This was on the occasion of the first visit to Glasgow by Béla Bartók who was a guest of the Scottish composer Erik Chisholm (himself sometimes compared to Bartók as a modernist who drew extensively on the idioms of his country’s folk and traditional music).

Chisholm’s wife, Diana, recalled:

When we knew Bartók was coming to Glasgow to stay with us, the first thing, which worried us, was – language difficulty. None of us, of course, could speak one word of Hungarian. Would our famous guest be any better with English? I immediately bought an ‘English-cum-Hungarian’ dictionary, (by the time I left Scotland I had entertained so many continental composers, musicians, and singers, that I had a very comprehensive collection of ‘English-cums’). I pictured myself standing on the station platform anxiously scanning the face of every male, who, in my opinion, looked ‘foreign’, and gesticulating wildly with the dictionary. However, I was rescued (or thought I was) from this predicament by the Hungarian Consul in Glasgow, Sir William Burrell, who telephoned me the day before Bartók’s arrival to say that he also would like to come to the station to receive this distinguished visitor from Hungary.

‘Luck’, I thought, ‘this lets me out’. So you can imagine my disappointment, when, on meeting Sir William a few minutes before the train was due to arrive (8.35 p.m. on February 28 1932), he said he hoped that either my husband or I could speak Hungarian because he could not.

‘Well’, I said laughingly, ‘you’re the official representative so you can get on with it.’ But we need not have worried. When the Flying Scotsman arrived and the passengers alighted from the train it was quite simple to recognise him. There was only one Béla Bartók! A small white-haired man, wearing a black Homburg hat, thick black coat with a heavy Astrakhan collar and armed with a music case in one hand and an umbrella in the other. Who I wondered had forewarned him about Glasgow’ s weather?

Sir William went forward at once to greet him, and I swear I saw a look of relief flit across the consul’s face when Bartók said in a softly spoken, broken English accent, ‘Bartók is my name’. After that all went smoothly. Later in the day, my husband and I admitted to each other that we had both felt ashamed that not one of the party who came to receive him could reply to him in his language, least of all the Consul.¹

Whether Sir William was still the Consul at that time I have been unable to confirm. I don’t know a word of Hungarian either, although I did find something else when I was clearing out the flat. I had not opened my copy of Bartók’s 44 Duos for two violins in more than thirty years.

In a fit of insanity I disturbed my violin out of hibernation. The downstairs neighbours must have been grateful the episode was very brief.

Notes

1. Erik Chisholm, ‘Béla Bartók: The Shy Genius’, available for download from the Erik Chisholm website.